Vital Communication Chapter 16
Sorry I'm late - bad weekend for me, between migraines and wrapping up Christmas stuff.
Disclaimer – we're still in that section of TRIGGER WARNINGS. Violence, gore, blood in this one. Please proceed with caution! Also, warnings for curse words. I may have forgotten that in the past.
Glass showered down onto the concrete floor, surprising Betty, Leeds and the three silent guards. They stood in the main room of the warehouse, working on coordinating a pickup from the Hulkbusters.
One of the guards dropped from an arrow to the neck. Leeds screamed, his voice high pitched in shock. He hit the floor, freaked out of his mind. Hawkeye and Widow immediately discounted him, from the fight.
The rolling door caved in under two of Captain America's shield strikes, allowing Iron Man to rip it away and stomp in, repulsors whirring and aiming for threats.
Betty Ross pulled a gun from under her lab coat and started firing. She was a wild shot at best.
"Watch it! Dr Ross can't aim!", cried Cap.
"Where's Banner?", demanded Iron Man. The remaining two guards fought with Cap, refusing to close with him. Gunshots echoed in the warehouse, ricochets flying everywhere and making every bullet a potential killer.
Black Widow took out one of Cap's opponents. Cap took care of his last opponent, using the shield as a bludgeon to knock the brute unconscious.
Iron Man moved forward on Betty. "Where. Is. Banner?", he snarled, each word emphasized as he clunked closer, a repulsor menacing her.
"The monster? Worthless trash," she spit, holding the .22 on him, uselessly, "In there. Don't know what Daddy saw in him. Don't know what I saw in him before." A single gun shot rang out then, and Betty screamed, collapsing to the floor. Blood spurted from a thigh wound. The gun clattered to the floor.
"Hawkeye, fly down here and help me find Banner!", Iron Man called.
"On it!" came the reply. The two SHIELD agents left their perches and made their way to the warehouse floor.
Natasha pulled zip ties from one of her belt pouches to use as cuffs on the prisoners and took delight in securing each of them. She used Betty's lab coat to create a makeshift bandage for the thigh wound. Her handling was not gentle. Leeds remained unresponsive, having gone catatonic at the start of the firefight. She tied him up anyway. The surviving guard was out cold, but again, Tasha took no chances and hog tied the man. She fleeced each prisoner, checking for hidden weapons anywhere it was possible to hide something without resorting to a strip search. Cap came to stand an uneasy watch as Widow finished up. She hadn't turned up any hidden weapons, which relaxed her minutely.
"Iron Man called SHIELD," he informed her.
"Good, they can handle this мусор*," she spat, very angry. Betrayal had been normal in her old life, but since coming to SHIELD, it was something she despised. Brainwashing was worse in her book, since finding trust and love in Clint and Phil. Her early years in the Red Room were the stuff of horror stories and nightmares, and she preferred to keep the monsters at a distance.
Hawkeye and Iron Man crossed the warehouse, the armor's boots drawing sparks off the concrete. The smaller, walled off section had a padlocked door that Clint took time to pick. He addressed Tony while he did so.
"Tony, you need to be prepared for what's on the other side of this door," he started, thin picks gently teasing the tumbler of the lock.
"Look," Tony tried to break in.
"No, you look. I know about Afghanistan. But that happened to you. Now you care about someone else. It's different. VERY different, this time. Banner's going to be fucked up from this, and it may take all of us to bring him back. You WILL tell us if you need help, get me?", Clint spoke from experience, and knew that torture changed people. Some SHIELD agents never came back from their own personal hells. He was lucky, and knew it.
The padlock sprung open, and Clint quickly removed it. Before he opened the door, he glanced at Tony in the armor. "I'm going to suggest you get out of that. If the Hulk hasn't made an appearance by now, he's not going to. Get in there, and start helping Bruce to come home," he said, twisting the doorknob and pushing the door open.
"We've got eyes on Banner. If SHIELD's coming, best they bring medical along, he needs it," Hawkeye made a simple report.
Tony shed the suit, letting it collapse on itself as he stepped out of the legs.
"Oh God, Bruce, I'm here. You need to let the Hulk out," he began talking as soon as he hit the door. Bruce was cuffed naked to a metal chair situated over a grate in the floor. His arms and legs were bloody from the skinning; the bloody rents of flesh laying in heaps on a table beside the man. Both Clint and Tony ignored the gristly chunks and used tools to focus on the imprisoned physicist before them. Tony didn't run to him, not wanting to startle him, but moved quickly to his friend's side. Clint quietly moved around to one side to work on freeing Bruce.
"Bruce, c'mon, do you hear me? It's okay. I'm here. I think you need to let the Hulk out, to start healing this up. We have work to do back at the Tower. Or we can book out to the mountains to let Big Green play for awhile. You wanted to start that series to learn more about him, right?" Tony rambled. He wished for medical supplies right then. He shrugged out of his shirt and started ripping it up. The sound made Bruce jump and groan from the pain as he jerked against his restraints. Clint patiently waited for his chance to get to the cuffs and unlock them.
Tony slowly bent down to tend to Bruce's wounds. "Let's let Clint get you out of these cuffs, Big Guy, then we'll stabilize you before going home, all right?", he spoke as if to a small child, or terrified animal. Neither creature he had experience with. But in this, he had to try. Bruce was worth any and all effort. Bruce's head lolled to the right, his eyes fluttering as he tried to focus on Tony. Those eyes faded between brown and green in an odd, flickering pattern.
"To?" Bruce's voice was practically non-existant, he only managed the first syllable of Tony's name. Clint got one cuff undone and Bruce half sobbed in relief as his arm came free from its cocked position behind his back. Tony carefully caught that hand and gently touched a scrap of torn tee to the forearm. Bruce grunted, flinching.
"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I want to help. Please, can I help you?", Tony murmured, having gone still.
Clint freed Bruce's other arm, but gently rotated back into its proper place. He quietly left the pair alone to check if anyone from SHIELD had yet arrived.
Bruce's eyes found Tony's face, the odd color flickering continuing as he tried to focus. "Tony," he grunted.
"Yeah buddy, I'm right here. We'll get through this together, okay? I promise. I will be right with you," Tony swore to the physicist.
Clint found a med team out in the main part of the warehouse. Sitwell had brought the proverbial cavalry, putting a pair of choppers on nearby roofs. He was being briefed by Tasha and Steve when Clint grabbed up the EMT agents.
"You two with me. We have a situation in this other room. Torture, victim was skinned over 70% of his body. There is also a radiation warning. This is Dr. Banner, so proceed accordingly. Iron Man is with him. Full recovery protocols. Treat this as if he were one of us, got it?", Clint was harsh, promising without words, dire things if more harm came to the gentle doctor.
The quad of people reached the room, and found Tony on his knees before Bruce, still trying to use the tattered shirt as a means of stopping the oozing blood all over the man's body.
"Tony, I've got medical here. Stay there, give Bruce something to focus on, okay?", Clint called, before letting the 3 agents into the room. Tony nodded, a short, sharp jerking of his head, his voice a soft murmur to those in the doorway. Bruce twitched, trying to shrink in on himself. A gentle touch from Tony stopped him.
The medically trained SHIELD agents moved forward, slow and obvious in all their movements. They used large, thin sheets to control the loss of fluids, wrapping Bruce's limbs up as though they were mummifying him. They gently taped the ends down, trying not to use too much pressure. One found a place high on Bruce's chest, near the left clavicle to insert a PICC line and hook up antibiotics and fluids to further stabilize him.
"We need a gurney in here," one told the two Avengers. Clint nodded and called Natasha via the comms. She brought the gurney and made no other comment as to the state of affairs before her. Tony and Clint were the ones to get Bruce loaded onto the gurney, as he flinched and shook every time one of the medics got within a foot of him after wrapping his limbs. Tony kept up a steady stream of chatter, reciting algorithms that made up the programs for the armor.
Tasha grabbed the Mark 5 armor when she left, telling Steve they needed to get to the New York facility. Sitwell had the prisoners bundled onto one helicopter and away from the warehouse before the others emerged from the smaller room.
Only the SHIELD members were truly prepared for the sight of the marks on Bruce's face, the only part of him still visible as they wheeled him out. The medics had managed to wrap enough gauze around his torso to limit the blood loss, and a blanket provided cover from further exposure.
Steve had seen photos from the end of World War 2, including the liberations of the concentration camps, but hadn't seen anything yet on Korea or Vietnam, which had been much uglier conflicts. No one had yet had the heart to put him through his own torture training, though several in SHIELD expected it would come. Seeing Bruce though, Steve turned white as the star on his chest, but he did not shrink from his teammate. He would never.
No, Captain Steve Rogers, US Army, moved forward, stopping the gurney briefly. "Bruce, I'm sorry it took us so long to find you. You'll be good as new in no time," he told his friend and teammate. Bruce's heterochromic eyes caught his blue ones and the doctor and gamma creature just blinked in silent acceptance. Tony went with the SHIELD medics on the second chopper. Sitwell stayed with the rest of the Avengers in the warehouse.
"All right, Romanov and Rogers have briefed me. Barton, what can you provide?", he ordered.
Clint gave him everything he had seen in the other room.
"Sounds like we need a forensic team down here as well. All right, report to the Hudson facility and get your reports on my desk by tomorrow," he told the team, dismissing them.
* - Russian for refuse, trash.