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If Peter were conscious, it was in name only.

If he were alive, it was due only in part to the machines crowding him.

Nothing mattered to Tony in that moment.

Exhaustion flooded his bones with a pain that snaked through his every nerve, throbbing in places that begged for rest. Screamed for reprieve. He didn’t grant them a second of mercy.

“You’re stronger than this, Spider-Man.” Tony cupped Peter’s face against the splay of his palm, choking out each word with a dry rasp that fell wet at the end. “Got that? You’re stronger than this.”

The doctors rushed around him, drowning themselves in a tightly contained chaos that was a far contrast from Peter’s current state. Their presence filled the room to the brim, barking orders in a foreign language that only added to the tension. Each working quickly under alarming pressure.

None of it mattered.

“Spider-Man’s got this.” Tony’s face crumbled as he fought back the growing lump in his throat. The painfully bright fluorescent lights from above only highlighted the gloss that burned in his eyes. “He’s better than all of us, right? You’ll be back to saving cats from trees in no time.”

There wasn’t a response.

Not from Peter.

Upright only by the aid of the bed, Peter stared ahead, his eyes glazed over and dull. He laid there, boneless, like someone relaxing into the contentedness of a warm couch before an open fire. There wasn’t a shred of tension in his muscles.

The only sign of life came from the machines.

Tony could feel someone standing behind him, approaching with small, cautious steps. One of the few who weren’t racing the walls of the room; the doctors showing panic that was controlled, but still panic nonetheless.

The person remained quiet, as if they were waiting for him to notice their presence.

He did. He just didn’t care.

“You got this, Underoo’s.” Tony's hand gripped the guard rail as the other pressed harder against Peter’s cheek, desperate for what little warmth still flowed through his skin. A sign of life that he couldn’t get elsewhere. “Hear me?”

The heat was diminishing even with his touch, a coldness that brought goosebumps to his arms. Creating a deeper ache to the bruises that painted his body purple and blue.

“He is in a...deep, vegetative state.” The voice came from behind, thick in its Wakandian accent; coming from the doctor who had stopped to take pity on him. Tony didn’t turn to face her, even as she kept talking. “It is...highly unlikely he will be hearing…anything you are saying.”

From the corner of Peter’s mouth, a thin line of saliva trickled out. Slipping between the dry cracks of his lip, trailing down his skin and along his jawline.

Tony gave broad strokes of his thumb across it, cleaning the mess to the best of his ability. Ignoring how his thumb trembled with each move he made.

“How long until you can get him out of it?” He was shocked by the sound of his own voice, hoarse and unrecognizable to his ears. The lump in his throat had grown too large, nearly barricading him from speaking.

His eyes briefly flickered away, finding a tile on the ceiling to focus on as he swallowed frantically to free his windpipe of emotion.

“I…he...” The doctor stammered wordlessly, her face twisting with contrition. “There are...very few sections of his cerebrum that have not been...taken over. His brain is...even if he were to…”

She left the unspoken hanging far too long.

Shoes hammered on the ground as the doctors hurried by, overtaking the sound of machines that spoke far louder than their conversation.

When Tony finally craned his head over to her, she almost didn’t speak again.

“I’m afraid…” the words were barely a whisper. “...we can only prolong the inevitable.”

There was a brief silence as he tried — and failed — to process that.

Tony tried nodding, tried to silently acknowledge her bleak but well educated prognosis. He barely managed a couple bobs of his head before suddenly, his neck was too heavy to hold the weight of it all.

His head dropped, eyes clenching shut until he could feel the moisture from behind closed lids soak through his eyelashes.

They leaked soundlessly on the wool blanket covering Peter.

“What if we —” Tony’s knee buckled and his grip on the guardrail suddenly tightened, the skin of his bruised knuckles growing pale.

A hand pressed firmly on the small of his back as the doctor took his side.

“You are very tired,” she stated matter-of-factly. Her hand shook as his back trembled, each inhale through his lungs as unsteady as his legs. “Please, go. Rest.”

Tony gave a minuscule shake of his head, barely able to compose himself through the seething anguish as he watched, helplessly, while Peter’s vitality ebbed away.

No, there would be no sleep.

Not for any of them.

Down the hall and to the left, matters weren’t any different.

Steve wasn’t sure the last time he felt this tired. Or this beaten down.

If he had to take a guess, it was more than a handful of years ago. Back when the Winter Soldier almost ended his life on a crashing Hellicarrier, leaving him washed up along the shore of the Potomac River; waiting for a rescue that barely came to him in time.

Sam had been at his bedside when he’d woken up.

Steve held back a sigh as he looked down at the man below. It was only right he try to do the same.

The hissing of a ventilator barely pierced through the air. The commotion around them was too loud to hear it, but the tube snaking down Sam’s throat was plenty enough for Steve.

“They’ve put him in a medically induced coma for now,” Steve didn’t have much tone in his voice when he spoke. Dry and clinical, void completely of the emotion that ran rampant inside of him. “The fall caused internal damage to his lungs. The fluid build up was almost fatal. They say he’d be dead if he’d gone up any higher.”

Clint didn’t respond when spoken to. Like Steve, he hovered over Sam’s hospital bed, opposite of where the soldier stood. Stoic, without a twitch of expression pulling at his scraped and scratched-up face.

Steve folded his arms across his chest, wincing slightly along the way.

“Doctors say he’ll be fully recovered in a few days.” Tucking his hands under his armpits, a brief chill struck his bare arms, goosing the hair on his skin. Of his entire uniform, only his cargo pants remained. The top had been discarded, with nothing more than a sleeveless shirt underneath. It hid the dressing of his broken ribs, wrapped snugly around his midsection. “Their technology’s advance. Hopefully it’ll get him right again.”

Wakanda was proving to be nothing short of a miracle in their time of crisis, and far beyond any comprehension Steve could have. He was told — countless times upon him asking — that their Vibranium would heal even the most fatal of wounds.

He didn’t understand how, but he’d take their word for it.

After all, his team was in shambles. They needed whatever recovery could be offered to them.

Looking up, Steve felt a frown pulling at the nineteen butterfly stitches across his hairline.

Clint was one of the many who’d been wounded in action. There was a thin, almost mesh-looking cast that covered his right arm, all the way from the shoulder down to his wrist. Kinetic skeleton, as Shuri called it. The broken limb pressed securely to his chest, held in a sling that wouldn’t move no matter how hard he tried.

His face didn’t fare much better than Steve’s; a split lip that bruised at the edges and mud that caked into his hair, turning it more brown than it was dirty blonde.

His face remained hardened, speaking volumes to the anger he didn’t let show.

The never-ending throb along Steve’s shoulder suddenly felt trivial in comparison. Thrown a thousand feet through the jungle like a rag-doll, it was no surprise when the doctors told him he should be dead. He, at least, had the super-soldier serum pumping through his veins to survive the impact.

The same wouldn’t go for Sam. Or Clint, or anyone else more human than they were hero.

It left an unsettling feeling in Steve’s gut. The playing field was uneven, and he’d put Sam at risk with his order to give aerial intel.

He wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

Taking a glance around the large room, he silently numbered everyone who mattered, steering clear of doctors and marking attendance for the faces he recognized.

“Have you seen Wanda?” Steve asked, the question more curious than it was a demand. He was far too tired for demands.

At first, Clint didn’t answer. His gaze stayed firmly locked on Sam, so callous it created new stress lines along his face.

“Not since they wrapped her fingers,” he finally said, without ever looking Steve’s way.

Steve sighed, his shoulders dropping down to his boots where mud from the jungle tracked in and stained the floors.

Eight broken fingers, some with multiple fractures — nothing but strings of cries escaped her mouth on their way back to the Citadel. Steve knew, deep down inside, that her injuries had little to do with that.

And now she wasn’t here.

It wasn’t that Wanda was a problem — no, he’d never say that about the young girl. Troubled, sure, but not problematic. She was just different from the rest of them.

And it wasn’t her powers that did it.

Despite the tragedy that lined the layers of her life, Wanda was full of emotion. Tremendous emotion, both good and bad. Her connection to Peter had become most apparent, and all that unfolded in the jungle reminded him too much of that devastating afternoon in Sokovia — just a few years behind them.

Steve only knew one other person who was closest to her. Someone she considered a father in the absence of family.

Steve lowered his head, just by a fraction. “Is she okay?”

Again, Clint didn’t answer.

Suddenly, the hissing of the ventilator was audible. Even through the hustle of activity in the large med room, within a much larger Citadel.

Clint was angry. Steve knew that; he didn’t need to be told. He also knew the man wasn’t angry at anyone in the room — or those outside of it, like down the hall where Tony and Peter resided. Knowing what he knew about Clint, Steve could tell he was angry at himself more than anything.

Angry that all this was happening. Angry that he couldn’t stop it.

Angry that those closest to him were getting hurt because of it.

Steve raised an eyebrow ever so slightly.

“Are you okay?”

What followed was a look from Clint that could’ve scared the entirety of Wakanda’s population, and then-some. He looked up with only his eyes, a darkness crossing his features that was rarely ever seen.

Steve knew him well.

He knew better than to push it.

The exam table across the room was far enough away that Steve was able to recoup his thoughts by the time he approached Natasha. His morale, however, remained rattled at best.

Her legs hung over the table carelessly, her back hunched as a doctor wearing a lab coat worked slowly on her injuries.

“How you holding up?” It was the stupidest thing that he could’ve asked, and yet it was all Steve could come up with.

The look Natasha gave said it all. Her left eye, no longer swollen shut thanks only to their technology, nearly took the breath straight out of his chest.

The blood had been cleaned up and stitches had since sown the skin back together, but all it did was unveil the grisly damage underneath. A broken cheekbone swelled and puffed the surrounding area of her eye, and the blistering bruise that covered half her face paled her skin to a crisp, colorless white.

Steve had seen more than his fair share of gruesome wounds in his lifetime. Years of war, both decades ago and present time, had forged his composure into steel. There was little that turned his stomach.

Still, there was something about the marred portion of Natasha’s face that left him feeling queasy.

The doctor worked delicately as he peeled away pieces of static mesh from a tray nearby, his gloved hands slowly pressing the material against her face.

“Status update,” Natasha’s voice croaked like sand had lodged in her throat, and she looked up at Steve, facing him head-on. Damaged eye and all. The entire sclera was gone — long past bloodshot. Every vessel inside had popped, bursting open with blood. Every bit of white replaced with a bright, vivid red.

Steve briefly looked away, though at nothing in particular. His eyes scanned the room, watching as the doctors tended to his team. They tried their damnedest to repair the damage he knew would linger long after Wakanda’s technology healed their wounds.

“Doesn’t matter,” Steve’s words almost came out as a whisper. He wasn’t sure he could conjure the force to speak any louder if he’d wanted to.

Natasha threw him an incredulous look, going so far as to push the doctor away when he tried to continue his work.

Steve didn’t look at Natasha when he spoke again. “You’re out.”

“What the hell do you mean —” Natasha hissed as the doctor firmly pressed against her eye. She almost slapped him away. “I can still run the field. I can still —”

“You’re temporarily blind until the kinetic mesh takes effect.” Steve pulled his eyes away from the others in the room, turning back to Natasha with cold, straightforward facts. “Even then, we don’t know the percentage of sight you’ll get back.”

“One hundred percent will return,” the doctor calmly, and concisely, stated.

Natasha quirked an eyebrow at Steve — on the good side of her face. Somehow, the expression made her blood-red eye stand out all the more.

“Status. Update.”

Steve’s hesitation was brief, but unmistakable. He worked his jaw before answering.

“Status update is that you’re out.”

“Bullshit,” Natasha scowled, almost jumping off the exam table had the doctor not push her back down. Her next words would’ve held firmer had she not been too weak to stand up. “I’m conscious, I’m coherent —”

Steve shook his head. “Natasha —”

“I’ve got two working legs and two working arms —”

“Natasha —”

“Clint will be my eyes.” She wasn’t arguing, she was bargaining. Steve could feel her desperation, her own exhaustion too strong to conceal her emotions. “We’ve done it before — Congo, Malaysia, Guatemala — we can do it again.”

Steve’s hand fell on his hip as his head dropped to the floor, each steady breath he forced causing an ache in his battered bones.

“Clint has five fractures in his left humerus and two in his ulna, with a shattered clavicle,” Steve stoically explained. He barely hauled his head around to look at the archer, still hovering over Sam’s bedside. Still pissed as he was before. “He can’t even pull his bow.”

Wakanda’s technology wasn’t the only saving grace they’d encountered. Steve didn't dare consider what would’ve happened without Clint's final shot. His arm had taken the entire impact of the symbiote’s throw, falling in the swamp that barely cushioned the rest of his body. The sheer luck in how he landed was the only thing that saved him from a watery death.

Seven broken bones in his arm and he managed not one, but two pulls of his bow before an arrow finally latched onto Peter.

Adrenaline was a hell of a thing, and the field agent was no exception to its influence. Steve made note to thank the man when the time was right.

If the time ever was right again.

Still, Steve was almost positive that Clint’s hail-marry efforts wouldn’t change Natasha’s mind.

“You can’t bench me without cause,” she insisted, further confirming Steve’s suspicions.

As Steve spoke again, he was still looking at the mud drying over the steel toes of his boots.

“You could’ve died, Nat.”

Something clenched at his stomach, but this time it wasn’t the grisly sight of Natasha’s wounds.

The reality of their situation seemed to dwell in the air for too long.

“You’re out. Both of you,” Steve finally broke the silence with a command that felt far too weak leaving his lips. “That’s an order.”

Steve didn’t give Natasha the chance to argue before he walked away. It didn’t feel right, but he knew the alternative was far worse.

Lingering around her, even for a second more, meant the chance that she’d find a way to change his mind. Convince him that she could stay in the fight, despite what he knew better.

For better or worse, he knew his team well.

A hollow feeling carved through the gaps of his broken ribs, threatening to make its way up to his heart. With every ounce of strength he could muster up, Steve pushed it aside, forcing his legs to take him where they needed to be.

He didn’t hear the conversation taking place until he got close enough to the exam table. By then, he could also smell the lingering burn of metal that tainted the sterile air of the medical bay.

“Perhaps we should have secured it better…” Shuri trailed off, a deep look of startled astonishment furrowing her brows. She watched closely as the nearby technician wrapped the visible skin on Bucky’s left shoulder.

What little was there, anyhow.

Bucky shook his head, not bothering to watch the same work take place.

“Nah, kids just that strong,” he muttered, barely acknowledging Steve as he approached. “Tenfold with that shit in him.”

If the technician had a comment to say, she kept it to herself. With a final wrap, she had the socket to his shoulder covered and hidden from view. The bruises that colored Bucky’s neck nearly matched the dark fabric hiding the electrical cavity that once contained his arm. It seemed all the more noticeable in the thin tank-top he wore.

The metal arm — what little remained of it — laid discarded on a nearby tray.

Steve titled his head to the side, enough that the overhead lights no longer brought a glare to the mangled piece of Vibranium. The red star was barely discernible, only two sharp points still visible from where the rest had been crushed and torn off.

Of everything in the room that could be repaired, there was no doubt this one was out of the question.

Noticing what had caught Steve’s attention, Bucky’s eyes followed suit, lingering on the tray with a hard-to-interpret expression.

“Punk wasn’t lying when he said he’d win an arm wrestling contest…”

Bucky’s murmur was just loud enough that Steve heard. He looked up and over, his brows snapping together with confusion.

With his only hand, Bucky waved him off. A casual, albeit forced, ‘story for another time’ sort of wave that nearly brought a smirk to Steve’s mouth. As it was, the small twitch to his lips was downright painful. Unwarranted in a time like this.

He wasn’t the only one to feel that way. Reading the room, Bucky hauled his head over to Shuri.

“You said you had designs,” he mentioned, earning a look from the young girl. “How long before you can finally get me that new arm?”

The question wasn’t asked like it had been before, not even a few hours prior. Time had changed that.

Before the fight, Bucky wanted nothing more than to rid himself of the damn piece of metal that served only as a reminder of his past. A haunting of what he’d done, what he’d been forced to do. Memories that he spent nearly a year in Wakanda trying to recover from. He let them reattach it only to serve a purpose; a fight he knew he needed to undertake.

That fight was still raging on. Without that arm — without an arm — he knew he’d be more hindrance than good.

It wasn’t a question asked out of bitter resentment. It was desperation.

Shuri glanced down at the butchered remains of Vibranium, a sadness crossing her face that rivaled any emotion they’d seen from her so.

“The designs are...merely designs,” she sadly admitted. Her own exhaustion seemed to come forth in the shadows under her eyes, highlighted under the unflattering lights. “And I’m afraid it is not on my list of priorities at the moment.”

Steve had noticably turned to look at the surrounding room when she spoke, if only briefly.

“Yeah...” Bucky nodded, reluctantly looking to the empty place on his body. It wasn’t abnormal to him — he’d been without an arm since Siberia, since Wakanda took him under their wing and removed it during his rehabilitation. It wasn’t the lack of a limb that bothered him.

It was in the inability to fight.

“Can’t really argue that, can I," he sighed, working his jaw in two different directions before looking away from the concealed cavity of his shoulder.

Shuri managed a twisted mix of a smile and a bleak grimace before turning away, her shoes tapping along the floors as she made a hasty, although tired, exit. There was simply too much work to do for her to stand around and talk. No one would insist she stick around.

Steve stood idle, his head so low to his chest that his chin almost grazed the cotton of his tank-top. He was lost so deep in his thoughts that it was a feat he hadn’t checked out all together.

Bucky noticed.

“I’m sorry, Steve.”

Steve shot his head up at the sudden sound of Bucky’s voice. It was laced with so much guilt and pain that it could’ve been mistaken for his own.

“Sorry—?” Steve parroted back, confused.

“I had Peter by the ropes.” Bucky leaned back on the exam table, resting his one hand behind him to take pressure of his back. Absentmindedly, he looked to his bare shoulder again. “Now...looks like I’m out for the count, huh.”

Steve had no say in the smile that crossed his face, though in reality it was too small to earn such a name. It tugged just slightly at his cheeks, and nearly caused his eyes to well up with the emotion he buried deep in his chest.

“Buck…” Steve reached out, placing a firm hand on Bucky’s shoulder. His fingers gripped until his nails pressed down onto the rough skin beneath his palm. “You got through to him. You did good.”

Bucky nodded, but it was obvious he didn’t fully buy it. Steve knew that for Bucky, near failures were almost always still failures. He was like that — always had been. Getting through to Peter may have been a success, but losing his arm wasn’t.

Losing the team, more-so.

They didn’t win the fight. If anything, it was a tie. And that showed in Bucky’s eyes, in the eagerness to get back out there. And the despair that he couldn’t.

Steve wished he had more time to tell Bucky about Queens, about how truly monumental it was for him to break Peter through the symbiote. He wished he had more time to hear about whatever had been going on the last few weeks, to hear about the solace he’d found with the kid. And what seemed to be mutual.

He just wished they had more time.

“So what now?” Bucky broke the silence with a question that felt wrong leaving his mouth. The uncertainty had taken the edge off of his usually sharp and sarcastic tongue. It only made things feel all the more off.

Steve looked around the room one more time, eyeing those who were still there and thinking about those who weren’t. Not even the years of leadership under his belt had prepared him for fight like this. He could’ve been torn piece to piece until every limb was ripped off his body, could’ve lost both eyes, mouth and ears — could’ve been crushed until oxygen was nothing but a long lost friend that rotted his brain to dust and ash.

None of it would compare to the pain that he felt now.

His eyes slowly found their way to the doors of the med room, where two large glass panels divided them from the rest of the Citadel. There was no one in front of the doors, not even nearby. And yet he couldn’t look away.

The only response he could offer was a sigh.

“I don’t know,” he finally admitted.

Bucky was silent for a moment, processing Steve’s words.

Finally, he spoke up.

“No…” Bucky shook his head, looking towards the same exit that had captivated Steve’s attention. It wasn’t the doors he’d been looking at. It was what he knew awaited him outside. “I think you do.”

Steve didn’t need to acknowledge Bucky for them both to know he was right.

It was strange, an almost foreign feeling. Steve took pride in knowing his team well.

He’d forgotten what it was like when someone could say the same about him.

 

 

 

It wasn’t until sunrise that Steve came across Tony.

The doors nearly closed in on him when he stood stunned at the entrance. He hadn’t even been looking for the man. He’d thought it was safe to assume Tony was shackled to Peter's bedside in such a way that not even the Dora Milaje could remove him.

But there Tony was.

And he looked like he’d been through war.

“What’s going on?” Steve took slow steps inside the lab, partly out of confusion, partly out of the growing ache in his side. If some part of that was also due to the overwhelming exhaustion that almost caused him to trip over his own feet, he refused to acknowledge it.

Now wasn’t the time for rest.

Tony seemed to share that sentiment. A speeding tap of his fingers brought up images on the holographic table below him, and he pushed them away as quickly as they appeared.

“We’ve repaired the frequency mesh back to full capacity.”

It wasn’t Tony who answered Steve’s question. He craned his head around, watching Shuri step out from the corner of the lab. She barely acknowledged him as she moved toward the table Tony was at, his back hunched over like a spoon.

“That’s good.” Steve tried to inject as much confidence into his voice as he could. Yet even as the sun began to rise outside, he couldn’t keep the night from leaking into his words. “That’s progress, right?”

The look Shuri offered him said it all.

Still, she tried. “Yes. It is progress.”

She was scurrying to the other side of the lab no sooner than the words left her mouth, disappearing behind a wall pillar.

Tony didn’t look up from his work.

The sun peaked through the large windows behind them, orange and pink shades casting across every stress line etched deep into Tony’s face. Steve noticed the colors managed to highlight the five o’clock shadow that darkened the lower half of his jaw, aging him easily by ten years. His hair was a wild, tangled mess, and he was swaying on his feet, barely holding himself up.

If there was ever a time he looked to be a shell of himself, it was now.

They were the only two occupying the room — the three of them, now, as Steve slowly began his approach.

“Where’s Rhodey?” Steve asked. It wasn’t that Tony’s outward appearance didn’t spark concern in him — it did, growing with each buckle of Tony’s knee that he could see at arms distance. But he’d taken to getting a full head-count of every team member.

So far, Rhodey and Wanda were the only two he couldn’t locate.

“Past his sell-by-date,” Tony answered, his voice tight. His eyes didn’t so much as flicker away from the holo-table. “Sent him back upstate where he’s safe.”

Steve’s brows furrowed. “Is he okay?”

“Shell-shocked, but fine.” Tony’s voice was tense and terse, his hands still flying over the holographic images. “Just don’t have time to fix his suit and mine. Got him the hell outta dodge while we still could.”

Steve scanned the room, his head swiveling to each corner. Despite his scrambling knowledge, it was hard to tell exactly what the two geniuses were doing. The computers were humming with life and activity, and there wasn’t a single monitor that didn’t display something about the symbiote. The entire room was dedicated to its research.

It was in the furthest corner that Steve located Tony’s suit. To say it had seen better days would’ve been an understatement. The entire right side was crushed in like a soda can, the left only in tact thanks to nanotech reconstruction. The miniature bots surrounding it worked chaotically but efficiently, the metal circuitry inside sparking with the sizzle of electricity.

Until now, Steve hadn’t seen the damage Tony endured in the fight. He didn’t want to think about what things looked like before the repairs.

“Do you even have time to fix your suit?”

“FRIDAY’s doing the repairs,” Tony’s assurance fell flat on his tongue, lacking the usual confidence that laced his voice. He brought his arm up, eyeing the inside of his wrist where his watch told him the time. “Should get it back up and running in….”

she supplied, sounding from the suit all the way across the room. Steve even looked towards it as she spoke.

“Shit.” Tony tapped his knuckles against the table, chewing on his bottom lip in thought. “How long?”

“Do it,” Tony didn’t hesitate, his voice clipped as his fingers danced across the table. One tap of his thumb and the images vanished, clearing the holograms away completely. “I need everything that suits got, and then some.”

Tony pushed away from the table as he stood up straight, one arm clutching firmly at his ribs. A restrained wince crinkled the skin at his forehead, but he kept it tightly concealed in his throat.

Steve noticed. His head cocked to the side as he took long steps forward.

“Tony…” Steve’s brows roughly snapped together as he reached Tony’s side. “You’re not planning to fight that thing again, are you?”

“Planning? Not a chance in hell,” Tony said, swallowing hard. He tried to take a deep breath, but it caught in his throat. “Prepared to? You bet your ass I am.”

His knuckles paled as he used the table to get across the room, gripping the edges like a guardrail until he made it to the nearest computer. He was limping, favoring his right side, and he had a wild look in his eye that Steve had only seen once before.

That wasn’t a time Steve cared to think about.

It was once Tony arrived at his destination, albeit slower than he wanted to, that Steve noticed what he was reaching for.

“Is that Peter’s suit?”

Tony’s grip on the red and blue represented much more optimism than what either of them could muster. The bright colors stood out in the sterile, clinical atmosphere of the lab, seeming as if they didn’t belong there. Steve swore his heart skipped a couple beats when he saw it.

“Indeed,” Shuri answered evenly, speaking up from the furthest corner. “It was Stark's idea.”

Steve watched patiently as Tony returned. “Idea —?”

“The symbiote broke through the frequency mesh once already.” Tony threw the suit down on the table, hunching over. His hand wrapped around his side and stayed there. “We know that it worked — worked well — it just couldn’t maintain steady pressure on the epidermis of the skin.”

Steve frowned as Tony turned away from them, his back noticeably trembling as he forced a deep breath. It was undeniable that his skin had grown pale since the last time he saw the man — hours before they left into the jungle. The fact he hadn’t collapsed yet was a testament to his desperation.

“It could’ve stayed on,” Tony continued, squaring his shoulders. “The data retrieved from its black box proved it held on til the last damn millisecond. All it needed was some extra hands to help it along. Some..super glue instead of duct tape."

“And...the super glue is Peter’s suit?” Steve’s eyes flickered down to the table, where the red and blue suit sprawled out along the smooth, glass surface.

“It is now.” Tony huffed a breath, scrubbing a hand over his face. “It’s a long shot, but we merged the frequency mesh inside the inner layers of the spider-suit. Trapping it there under a backdoor protocol that I was already working on. We get the suit on Peter and maybe...maybe it’ll buy us some time. Restrain the symbiote until we can extract the damn thing for good.”

Steve nodded slowly. “Okay...where do we stand with getting the symbiote removed?”

The question received an answer of silence. Steve looked between the two — Shuri with her back towards him, Tony with his head low to the table. Neither were eager to respond.

Slowly, Shuri turned around, the clacking of her keyboard coming to a halt.

“I’m not sure that’s the concern at this point,” she hesitatingly admitted.

Steve wasn’t sure if his confusion came from his concussion, or if things had taken that far of a turn in his absence.

“What do you mean?” he dared to ask.

“She means that right now,” Tony said, his grip on the tables edge tightening, “we gotta keep the sucker inside while we can. Algorithms aren’t exactly giving us results of puppies and cotton candy for the next time.”

“There is no next time,” Shuri curtly corrected, a bite to her words stripping her tone of the usual spark it contained. “The symbiote has gained enough life-force with its last emergence. It will no longer use Peter as a vessel, it will use him as a conduit — it cannot surface again.”

There was something in the way Shuri spoke that caused Steve to grab the edge of the holo-table nearly as hard as Tony. The finality in her voice was a cold weight in his stomach. He turned towards her, working his throat to regain the voice he didn’t realize he’d lost.

“What will happen if it does?”

Tony all but slammed his hand down on the table, spawning a 3D picture to life. The harsh black and white image bled through the pastel shades of the window, mixing ugly colors with the sunrise.

Various schematics and blueprints could be seen beneath it, a vivid outline laying over top the numbers and calculations. None of it caught Steve’s attention. The only thing his eyes could focus on was the detailed imagery ahead. Similar to what they saw not even a day ago, in a lab not much different than this one.

Its eyes were large and white — nothing but white, enormous and all consuming. Making each ounce of black oozing off its face all the more foreboding. Its mouth had more teeth than every single wild animal in Wakanda, bones upon bones layering against each other with sharp edges that mimicked the tip of a knife.

It was the monster they were afraid of.

The monster they knew, if born, would be unstoppable.

“Any further questions, Cap?” Tony stabbed a finger through the hologram, straight dab in the middle of the white eyes that threatened them. “Or you gunna leave us to work?”

Steve never got a chance to answer. The doors off to the side parted open, a gush of fresh air entering the room along with its occupant.

“Brother!” Shuri exclaimed, dropping everything she was doing in favor of rushing to the entrance. “You should not be up! You should—!”

She stopped abruptly as T’Challa lifted a hand in the air.

“Please,” he started, his voice gentle yet weak at the edges. “I am fine.”

The restrained grunt that stayed behind sealed lips betrayed T’Challa’s words.

Shuri noticed, but gave no more than a stern look his way.

“Stark…” T’Challa turned towards Tony, straightening his back to the best of his ability. The hunch in his posture didn’t go unnoticed. “We must speak.”

The doors parted again, this time with the presence of a single woman dressed in a long, white lab coat. She was barely inside when Tony locked eyes on her.

“Good!” He snapped his fingers too many times to count, his other hand grabbing the spider-suit and clenching it in his fist. “You — get this on the kid, pronto.”

T’Challa shook his head. “Please, there is something she must address first.”

Tony marched across the room — more stumble in his step than fortitude. A forceful shove put the suit against the doctors chest, leaving both of them stumbling backward.

“Every second we stand around having tea time is a second we’re risking that thing,” Tony pointed to the hologram behind them, “coming out to play. Your call, your majesty.”

If the doctor was perturbed, she didn’t let it show. Not in a way that Tony outright noticed, anyhow. A slight huff was the most she vocalized before turning to T’Challa, laying a soft hand across his forearm; hidden beneath the thick layers of his tunic.

“My King.” She bowed her head and stepped back, the suit held tightly in both her hands. “I trust you will tell them all that matters. I will return after.”

T’Challa let his hand rest on hers before they both let go, and a firm nod of his head granted her a departure.

“And please,” she stopped short of the doors, her hand hovering over the wall panel to allow an exit. “As your sister is correct...you must rest.”

T’Challa managed a small smile her way. “When the time is right.”

She inclined her head before disappearing behind the doors.

The silence that followed in the room was heavy, oppressive. Steve could feel its weight, making the air ten times thicker and difficult to swallow.

“Are you okay?” Steve finally broke the quiescence with a soft question, nearly inaudible to his own ears.

Still, T’Challa heard. He made slow steps towards the man, eyeing him up and down, as if to ask the same question himself. Although they had all taken a beating in the jungle, the two of them only survived thanks to their deep-seated powers, coursing through every cell in their body.

For someone who’d been impaled just a few hours ago, T’Challa didn’t look nearly as bad as Steve imagined.

“I will be fine,” T’Challa answered, a hand resting weakly along his stomach. “I thank the ancestors that my wounds were treatable through our means. The same could not be said for many of our men.”

Distress didn’t just lace his words, it drowned each one. Suddenly, the King looked years younger than what Steve remembered. No longer holding the image of stern royalty. But a young boy lost amidst the chaos brought into his own country.

“How many did you lose?” Steve was tired of asking questions he didn’t want the answer to.

T’Challa seemed to understand.

“Thirteen,” he regretfully answered, casting his eyes to the windows ahead. “Though as the sun rises, the Border Tribe continue to find bodies.”

Steve’s eyes felt too heavy to keep open. His head fell as if someone snapped the cable to his neck, his chin pressing against the material of the thin jacket covering his bare arms. It did nothing to stop the chill that ran through his bones.

“It won’t happen again,” Steve promised, his voice nothing more than a throaty rumble.

“No, I’m afraid it will not.” T’Challa’s eyes slid towards Tony, the man already standing back at the holo-table. This time, the billionaire met his gaze. “That is what I must speak to you about.”

The next silence was longer. Harder. Tony didn’t dare blink as he locked eyes with T’Challa. It felt like three decades had passed before he shook his head, faster with the passing seconds.

“Save it.” The words that left his mouth were as callous as the skin on his fingertips, already back to work at the transparent keyboard.

“Tony —” Steve warned.

T’Challa lifted his palm towards Steve.

“No…” he trailed off, his eyes still looking at Tony, even with the man having diverted his attention to his work. “He knows.”

The lack of an answer from Tony said more than any words ever could.

With neither man talking, Steve’s confusion only deepened. His eyes bounced between them both, slow to draw to conclusion. Or perhaps he was simply in denial.

When he realized exactly what was being implied, he couldn’t hold back the sound that leaked from his mouth. The weight of it — unspoken but unequivocal — was almost unbearable.

A shaky sigh got caught in his throat, blasting through his nostrils instead.

T’Challa turned to him, removing the hand from his stomach and placing it gently across Steve’s arm.

“Please understand,” T’Challa started. He didn’t continue until Steve looked at him, tired eyes and all. “It is with nothing more than a heavy heart that I must tell you this.”

“You’re not going to tell me anything.” Tony snapped his head up, the threat clear in his voice.

Frustrated, Steve spun around. “Tony —!”

“He’s not dead yet, Rogers!” Tony snapped, his hands coming to a stop as he glared at T’Challa. “And wasting what little time we have talking up the possibility isn’t doing him any good.”

T’Challa didn’t appear to be in the place for argument. Though he continued to watch Tony work, there was something in his stance that seemed off. Tired, but not in the same way as those around him. It wasn’t a feeling he outwardly showed, not in his eyes nor his posture. Rather one that showed with each breath parting from his body.

It was the first time Steve had ever seen the man — the King — look hopeless.

“If we can manage to remove the symbiote…” Steve started to say, unsure of exactly where he was going with the question. All he knew was they needed to try something — he needed to try something. “What are his chances then? If Shuri and Tony can extract it from his DNA, will he be able to recover?”

All that sounded was the frantic tapping of hypnotic keys across the holo-table. Tony kept working, and T’Challa didn’t answer.

“All this,” Steve started without preamble, swiveling his head around the room, gesturing wordlessly to the technology surrounding them. “The way you’re able to heal us, heal yourself. Can it —”

“No,” T’Challa finally answered. He could hear just how heavy Steve’s voice was, the weight of the world bearing down on his weakened shoulders. It was the reason for his hesitance in what followed. “I have made it my personal responsibility to seek answers from every doctor and scientist in Wakanda. The answer they give remains the same. He is...virtually catatonic. Unrecoverable from the depths of the symbiote’s sovereignty. The child is...too far gone.”

The words hung in the air like a guillotine, waiting to fall. Steve could feel his heart racing, could feel the blood pounding in his temples. It was all he could do to keep himself together.

His hand fell on his hip as he turned away, lowering his face where it couldn’t be seen.

At the same time, Tony pushed away from the table, not bothering to restrain the painful grunt that followed.

“Okay, we…” Tony snapped his fingers frantically as his shoes wore a hole in the floors, pacing the length of the room with a slight limp in each step he took. “We – we – we – we —” A final snap. He turned to T’Challa. “That’s it. We put him in the cryotank.”

Shuri looked up from her corner of the room, forehead creased deep.

“The cryotank will merit Peter only,” she explained, shaking her head. “The symbiote will feel none of its effects.”

Tony pointed his finger at her. “Exactly, it’ll preserve Peter.”

“The symbiote is what leaches his life-force. If it feels none of the cryotanks effects, it will do us no good. It will continue to consume him even in stasis," Shuri corrected him, shaking her head even harder.

The slight tremble in Tony’s hand became noticeable as he ran his fingers through his goatee, rubbing harshly against the dark stubble that gathered on the rest of his face. His feet came to a halt, rooting in place. His eyes bounced around in deep thought.

Then, his head shot up. “The herb.”

Steve frowned. “The what?”

Tony ignored him. His fingers snapped in Shuri’s direction. “What about the herb?”

Shuri raised her brows, casting a look of disbelief towards T’Challa — like she couldn’t possibly believe what was being suggested.

“Impossible!” Shuri exclaimed, her voice squeaking in pitch. “For starters, I have yet to even finish formulating the synthetic version —”

“You said you were nearly done before we crashed your party,” Tony interrupted. He stumbled towards her, his hand wrapped snugly around his waist. “How long would it take you?”

Shuri scoffed. “I am only one person capable of one thing at a time!”

“Hold on, hold on.” Steve held his hand out, as if the weak gesture was enough to stop the two from arguing. “What is this herb? What does it do?”

The question lingered, going unanswered for so long that Steve started to wonder if anyone even heard him speak.

“The heart-shaped herb,” T'Challa finally joined in. A deep breath followed his next words. “It’s origin is merely legend, dating back to the birth of Wakanda itself. Native only to our country, permeated only in our soil. Vibranium weaved throughout the inner most depths of our land, bearing a plant that our ancestors called...the heart-shaped herb.”

Slowly, T’Challa clasped his hands in front of him. Making sure to cast his gaze directly on Steve, and not flickering his eyes anywhere but.

“It is what gives a warrior the powers of the Black Panther.”

Steve’s back straightened, and he looked to all three occupants — more than once.

“You want to give this to Peter?” he asked skeptically.

“We can’t.” Shuri met his gaze, the finality in her voice indisputable. “It’s all gone.”

“The synthetic version,” Tony stressed, louder than before. “How long until you can —”

“Days! Weeks! It is just a formula, there’s no telling if it’ll even work!” Shuri bit back. For the first time since arriving, the exhaustion that bled into her voice was apparent. Her tone was shrill and her eyes were narrowed, but it wasn’t a young girls attitude that cast off her words. It was frustration — a sense of inadequacy. “Even if I do finish the formula, it could kill him no different than the symbiote!”

“Or it could restore him back to health.” Tony returned her look with his own. “You said that yourself. Verbatim.”

Shuri paused, her eyes steady on Tony’s. For what could’ve been an eternity, they didn’t look away from each other.

“Fifty-fifty and you want to flip the coin?” There was an unnerving edge to her tone. Incredulity masking poorly concealed horror.

Sometimes, no answer was an answer within itself. Steve heard the unspoken yes in Tony’s silence. It was desperation reaching harrowing heights.

Within seconds he returned to the holo-table.

“If you could finish it…” Steve began after a long beat, earning a look from Shuri. “What if we gave it to Peter now? Will it get him well enough to buy us some time? Not fully healed — but enough that we…— can it buy us some time?”

Shuri looked at Steve for so long, the passing seconds gave light to what he didn’t ask out loud. Slowly, her hands came up to rub at her temples.

“Men in the most pristine conditions have suffered greatly when consuming the heart-shaped herb. Its powers are great, but to receive it…” Shuri trailed off, before her hands dropped from her temples. “He would not survive.”

“He would not,” T’Challa confirmed. Unlike Shuri, he ensured he was looking at both men when he spoke. Even if he didn’t want to. “And you do not have the time.”

Steve’s grip on the table’s edge tightened — so tight that it had to be serving a serious risk to the structures integrity.

The way Tony kept working next to him, steeled focus on the task at hand, made him wonder if the entire table could shatter and he wouldn’t notice.

T’Challa’s eyes turned away for the briefest moment before he looked back to Steve.

“The child has hours to live,” he said, before casting his gaze to Tony. “Even less if the frequency mesh is removed from his body.”

Tony snapped his head to T’Challa, his eyes narrowing.

“What do you mean less?” His spine stiffened, bringing him ramrod straight despite the clear pain it brought on.

It was the smallest sound Shuri had made yet.

“Oh.”

It barely sounded from her corner of the room, a stark contrast to her normally boisterous, energetic voice. It sounded painful, jarring – as if she were forcing tljer voice out of a throat that refused to cooperate.

When all three men turned to her, she almost seemed shy; pressing her back against the console to make herself smaller.

“The symbiote is,..it's the only thing keeping him alive,” Shuri quietly concluded. Her eyes bounced around similar to Tony’s when he was thinking, little ping-pongs that rolled around with each passing thought sparking inside her head. “It needs Peter’s body for fuel. Without fuel, without Peter’s body, it knows it cannot survive. Not without full consumption. So it must keep its host alive for the same purpose of its own. If we cause it to go dormant…”

Steve knew he wasn’t nearly as smart of any of the geniuses around him. Still, he knew enough that it didn’t take a scientist to figure out what Shuri was implying.

The symbiote was taking Peter’s life as much as it was persevering it.

They’d be accelerating his death by using the frequency mesh.

“What happens if he…” Steve didn’t want to finish that thought. It made him sick to his stomach. “If Peter’s no longer alive, what happens to the symbiote?”

Shuri gave a long pause before shrugging. “Theoretically, if the symbiote fails to emerge before Peter’s death, then it will die with him. In fact...it...may be the only way to eliminate the symbiote entirely.”

Steve shook his head, though he didn’t intend to. The idea was too brutal to entertain.

“And if the symbiote emerges again? While he’s still alive?” Steve tried to keep his voice steady, but even he couldn’t stop the shake of emotions he wasn’t ready to deal with. “Is there any chance we can get through to him like before?”

“I’m afraid he will be gone by the time that is possible,” T’Challa explained, his head falling low. “Not even a young warrior of his strength would survive its last feeding. As it has been explained to me, the symbiote will merely use his body as a host from that point forward. Shedding it only once decay takes place.”

The fear that had been steadily building in Steve’s chest — fear that Wakanda couldn’t help them, fear of losing somebody he’d promised to protect — it finally bubbled over.

There wouldn’t be any coming back from this.

Not this time.

When Steve cast a sharp look Tony’s way, he was shocked to see the man unfazed. Unnaturally still, his hands still hovering over the holo-table despite doing no work.

It disturbed him all the more.

“Our doctors are doing everything in their power to make his last hours comfortable,” T’Challa said, a firmness to his voice bringing back the grit and spirit Steve knew well in the man. He brought a closed fist to rest across his chest. “I do believe, so long as breath enters his lungs, there is still a chance for him. But even I must admit that chance is slim.”

When T’Challa turned to Tony, Steve turned away. It was naive to think looking elsewhere could stop his ears from hearing what came next. But still, he tried.

“With the frequency mesh in use, the doctors do not expect him to survive past another nightfall.” T’Challa tilted his chin low, his eyes locking on Tony’s. “Perhaps...at this stage, it would be wise to use your time for comfort...rather than control.”

If Tony had anything to say, he kept it to himself.

Shuri noticeably swallowed, pushing herself away from the console with the strength of a newborn. Her steps were all the weaker as she made way to the exit.

“I’m going to…” Her mouth opened and closed a few times, but for a long moment, no words came out. It wasn’t until the doors swished open at her presence that she spoke again. “I’ll ensure the suit functions...with the frequency mesh. As intended.”

There was no argument made. The unspoken was loud and clear — even from Tony, though the look on his face said otherwise. It didn’t matter what the risks were. The mesh needed to stay on.

For their safety. For everyone’s safety.

Regardless of how little time it gave them.

Steve honestly didn’t know how to respond. So he didn’t.

The steep verity handed to them was suffocating. He felt like a child again, unable to breathe as asthma wrecked havoc on his lungs. Subconsciously, his hand grazed along his sternum to rub away the feeling.

When T’Challa laid a firm but gentle hand on his shoulder, and squeezed in a way that offered silent comfort, Steve stayed quiet. When he departed through the same doors as Shuri, with no further words to declare his departure, Steve didn’t say anything.

The silence lay like a heavy blanket over the room. It was a wonder Tony or Steve could breathe. It was more than an absence of sound; it was a living, permeating thing, a tension clouding the air.

So it was all the more startling when Tony broke it.

“Okay!” Tony clapped his hands before rubbing them together, so fast he could’ve started a fire. His voice sounded painfully loud in the break of silence. “We take him elsewhere.”

Steve shot his head around.

“What —?”

“I have doctors in Singapore,” Tony rattled off, nodding so quickly that it had to be making him dizzy. “I can get them briefed in the next twenty minutes —”

Steve closed his eyes. “Tony —”

“We need to get moving fast, though. Get all the data from here sent to them, grab what we need and leave the rest —”

“Tony!”

The shout was loud enough to make both their ears ring.

Tony spun around, facing Steve head-on for possibly the first time since he’d arrived. His dismantled appearance looked all the worse in the stages of reckless denial.

There was a beat of silence as the weight of everything sunk in.

It was like an anchor, hitting the floor of the sea with frightening speed. Once there, it didn’t budge.

Tony shook his head, slow at first. Faster with realization.

“No.”

Steve frowned. “We don’t have a choice.”

“No!”

“You heard T’Challa —”

“I heard Strange, too!” Tony yelled, each word a croak out of his mouth. A stern, rigid finger pointed to the door. “They tried to write him off back at the compound, and look at all we’ve done since!”

Steve grounded his jaw. “And look at how much the symbiote’s taken from him.”

“Exactly!” Tony’s shout resounded in the room, rolling off the walls like thunder. His eyes were bright and feverish with rage, and there was a shake in his arms that couldn’t be contained. “Look at him! What more can it take from him!?”

Steve reached the opposite side of the holo-table, his hands resting palms down on the glass surface. The glow it emitted put a spotlight on the caked blood underneath his fingernails.

“That’s what I’m worried about,” he said, the lines of his face tightening under the heat of the hologram between them. “It’s already taken so much...it won’t need much more.”

Separating them was a single image, generated with technology far beyond Steve’s comprehension. But technology he knew better than to doubt. Through the soulless, white eyes of a monster bred to be born, they could see each other’s faces.

Tony threw his hand up, raking it through his hair. His eyes burned fiercely with unshed tears, brightening the red spider-cracks that laced throughout.

“We can stop it from emerging again,” he insisted, a tightness in his jaw that belied his words. “We can...— or we can take it on, again, if we have to. We managed before —”

“Tony, that thing can tear through Vibranium. It isn’t what we fought in Queens. Next time, it won’t even be what we fought in the jungle.” Steve wondered just how desperate Tony was for the man not to draw to that conclusion on his own. “It will kill us. All of us.”

The emphasis put into his last words, drawing up more strength than what even his shield contained, seemed to finally stir something in Tony.

Steve knew he should say something. Anything. He watched, wordlessly, as Tony turned around, his hands clasping behind his head with dirty fingers that dug through the tuft of his crown.

If the man yanked at his hair any harder, he’d be pulling out patches in handfuls.

“I know Peter,” Steve softly insisted, walking around the table to Tony’s side. For every step he limped, Steve took two forward. “If he knew it was down to him or the symbiote —”

“Peter’s not here to make that choice!” Tony spun on his heels, barely managing to keep himself upright as he did.

Steve paused. A hard swallow shook the nodule of his throat.

“So you need to make it for him,” he said, the words a little stronger, but not without clear effort. “What would he want? What would he think is best?”

“It doesn’t matter what he’d want — he’s a kid!” Tony’s voice was ragged, as if his throat had been scorched by the sparks of burning electricity taking place near his suit. Small machines worked quickly to repair the damage, their efforts only fixing material items. They did nothing for Tony, and the damage wreaking havoc inside of him. “He’s just...he’s just a kid. Who got in way over his head. Who...who should be going off to college in a few years, not wasting away in some remote, backwoods hospital in Wakanda!”

Tony’s hands fell from the back of his head and instead clasped at his neck, squeezing until his hands went white. He tried to pace, but the limp in his step failed him of even that much comfort. When his knee buckled again, he reached for the table, gripping the edge tight.

So did Steve.

“That’s your problem,” Steve preempted, cautiously stepping forward, “you’re incapable of seeing what he is now —”

“I know damn well what he is now, Rogers!” Tony’s shout came deep from within his chest. Fear was encroaching on his face, and when he shot his head towards Steve, the soldier found himself feeling ill at the sight. “And you’re sorely mistaken if you think I won’t do everything in my power—”

“This isn’t in your control—”

“I just need more time!”

Tony slammed his hand down on the table, a weak effort at exhausting his anger. The hologram fritzed with static before flickering away. The sound it made blended with the heavy breaths coming from Tony; throaty rasps that hunched his back further and further, until he was practically slumped all the way over the table.

For a while, Steve just watched him.

“We don’t have time,” Steve finally said, despising the words even as he spoke them. “Peter doesn’t have time.”

Pain be damned, Tony pushed himself away from the table with one laborious grunt. His anger didn’t get him far, but it created enough space between him and Steve. Enough that by the time he spun around again, his finger was pointing sternly in mid-air.

“You agreed we weren’t going to resort to this.” It was hard to tell where the tremble in his voice came from — anger or despair. “You said it yourself — we fight. We keep fighting!”

“And how many more lives will be lost while we fight?” Steve didn’t let up his gaze on Tony, even when the man was too emotional to hold it. “Is fourteen not enough? Men have died since we came here. Innocent men, all for a fight that wasn’t theirs in the first place.”

Exhaustion had never felt as strong as it did in that moment. It nearly capsized Steve where he stood, and it had little to do with the toll taken on his body.

Grief was always strongest when first planted. A seed that would grow through the soils no different than the Vibranium that birthed an herb of mystical powers.

“I’m sorry, Tony.” Steve turned at the hip to look at him. “I can’t stand by and allow countless people to suffer at our hands.”

“It isn’t our hands!” Tony shot him a caustic glare as he froze in place. “It’s Osborn’s! It’s him who did this — this isn’t our damn fault!”

The gap between Tony and Steve suddenly felt far more than what it actually was. As if the length that separated them did the same for their command, putting a divide where they should’ve been joined.

It wasn’t uncommon for both to find themselves on opposite sides of the playing field; hell, that had been their disposition since the dawn of their alliance. Most days it was what fused them together so well, what kept the team strong and concatenated.

Yet there was no denying that in times like these, it was the very thing that threatened to tear them apart.

“You’re right...” Steve wanted to offer Tony a consoling touch, as T’Challa had for him. He couldn’t find it in him to walk away from the table. “But it’s our responsibility to stop it.”

“Oh, get off your high-horse, Rogers!” Tony stormed forward, barely stopping an inch away from him. “If this was Barnes —!”

“I made that mistake before —” Steve barely got the words out.

“Exactly! You made it, you took on that decision!” Tony jabbed a finger directly against Steve’s chest, pushing harder and harder — harder with each word he shouted. “And now he’s here, one room over, because you put countless lives on the line for him —!”

“And look at what it nearly cost me!” Steve grabbed Tony’s hand. Firm at first, only for the anger to recede as soon as it came. He slowly pushed Tony’s arm away, until eventually it came to rest on the edge of the table. “I was selfish once. I saw what that can do. If I could go back and do it all over again...I’m not sure I’d make the same decision twice. I can’t let you do the same. Not if it means other people get hurt.”

Words that weren’t shouted had never seemed so loud before.

Tony nodded, but not in agreement.

“So...so that’s how this is going to be, then,” he scoffed and sniffed, looking away only for a moment. When he turned back to Steve, the resentment written across his face was startling. “The great Captain America only makes the hard decisions when it matters to him. Everything else is just...it’s just a Hobson’s choice.”

Something thickened in Steve’s chest.

Disbelief.

“You think this isn’t a hard decision for me?” he asked so softly, it was a wonder he spoke at all.

Tony exhaled, hard. “Let’s just say you looked a lot more torn up at the Leipzig Airport.”

The words hit Steve like a physical blow, knocking the breath from his lungs and sending a wave of dizziness crashing over him. He staggered back a step, barely registering when Tony spoke again.

“I’m not letting Peter die,” Tony warned, the energy of heedless obsession pouring from him in palpable waves. “I don’t care how many times that symbiote —”

Steve’s hand clenched into a fist.

“The symbiote will kill again —”

“The kid comes first!”

"DAMN IT, TONY!" "DAMN IT, TONY!" "DAMN IT, TONY!" "DAMN IT, TONY!"

Steve screamed.

It wasn’t a yell. It wasn’t a shout. He screamed — because his fist slamming down on the table below wasn’t enough.

The holo-table shattered under his strength. Glass fractured, crumbling to the floor. Raining down like little pieces of hail that scattered along the mud on his boots.

Tony’s eyes widened, and he instinctively took a step back.

“You think this is easy for me!?” Steve’s voiced roared out so loudly that it was a wonder the very foundations of the Citadel didn’t shake. Tony found himself taking more steps back. “You think I want this!?”

Tony stared at the broken table beside them, his eyes still fearfully wide, the glass still sprinkling down what remnants remained.

He had to focus on his breathing before he could respond.

“Then why?” Tony’s voice was vehement, his face taking on a rictus of pain. Distress so intense it clamped hard into his jaw. “Why condemn him to death instead of finding a way, any other way —!”

“I didn’t ask for this! I didn’t ask for any of this!” Steve shouted, his hand wildly gesturing to nothing, exerting the hold of emotion he could feel slipping away. “I crashed a plane off the coast of Greenland and woke up seventy years later forced into this! And now I have to stand here and tell you that a sixteen-year-old child has to die for the betterment of man kind — PETER PETER PETER PETER has to die — of all people I have to tell YOU YOU YOU YOU that...you think that’s EASY FOR ME!?" EASY FOR ME!?" EASY FOR ME!?" THAT’S EASY FOR ME!?"

Tony swallowed, hard. With a twisted fascination, he found himself unable to look away from Steve, even as his heart pulsed a thousand beats in his chest.

He never saw anger like this, not from Rogers. Not Loki, not Ultron — machine and creators.

Not Zemo.

Not even Siberia.

Steve didn’t get angry. That was a liberty he kept under lock and key. Anything of conflict remained camouflaged by professionalism, by the urge to lead. The willpower to keep his team — their team — in tact.

The way he stared at Tony now, swallowing harshly and looking sick, was not a sight ever seen before.

It was unbridled rage.

And for a fleeting moment, the pain Tony felt was for him. Not for the wars he fought over time, but rather the wars raged within himself.

“So don’t,” Tony begged, a choking quality to his voice creating a guttural with each quiver of his lips. “Don’t do this.”

Steve looked to the ceiling, focusing on breathing slow and shallow. The cords in his neck began to shrink, the red tint to his skin growing pale. For a passing second, his face twisted into a grimace. A cry he held back with a strength that had nothing to do with the serum in his blood.

“...I have to,” he forced out in a low, broken tone, his expression so steely it could break bones, “...because I know you won’t.”

Steve didn’t know how long he stood there, steeping in the gravity of what he’d said. Time wasn’t a construct when mourning.

“And if this decision haunts me for another seventy years...I can survive that, too.” Steve pushed himself away from the table and turned his back, the sound of broken glass crushing underneath his boots. “So long as it means you don’t have to bear that burden.”

It was a while before he looked at Tony again. Steve wasn’t surprised to see the wetness across his cheeks, draining from blood-shot eyes that failed to keep the dam in tact.

He wasn’t surprised. But he knew it was an image he’d never be able to forget.

The lump in Tony’s throat swelled, choking off his airway. Obstructing his windpipe and making it impossible to speak.

He shook his head, mutely begging Steve to change his mind.

Steve looked away, trying to ignore the prickling sensation behind his eyes.

“You have the rest of the day to figure something out…” Steve quietly spoke, his eyes sliding shut. No longer capable of looking at Tony, even in this peripheral. With a deep breath, he cleared his throat of the tears he wasn’t privileged to shed. “I’d take T’Challa’s advice, if I were you. Go be with Peter...while you still can.”

With a shaking hand ghosting over his face, a futile attempt to scrub away the sorrow, Steve left Tony be — standing lonesome, one loose arm wrapped around his rib-cage. He didn’t dare look back as the doors closed behind him.

He knew better than to take the risk.

The lab fell silent.

For a long time, Tony didn’t move. His eyes darted around, catching empty corners and monitors that had fallen idle. But his body stayed frozen — stuck in place. A statue in the otherwise empty room; ensconced only with himself, and the beast of consequences bearing down upon him.

When he finally shifted weight on his feet, the sound of glass crunched beneath his shoes.

A stuttering breath caught in place.

Viciously, Tony scraped the heels of his hands over his face, gouging a path through the wetness. Pain was tearing through his chest, muscles screaming and broken ribs rubbing up against one another.

His next breath stuttered again, and again after that, and suddenly he couldn’t breathe in at all —

This wasn’t happening.

Tony could feel the room spinning around him, the floor tilting precariously beneath his feet.

This wasn’t —

He closed his eyes, trying to will the vertigo away. His legs were shaking, scarcely wanting to support him, and each breath was snipped — quick and fast, with nausea thick in his belly.

Every inhale was cut short.

This wasn’t happening.

“GODdamn—!”

Tony’s heart sank to his feet, before he sank down himself; falling to his knees in a tangled mess on the floor. Shards of glass pressed into his palms as he tried to catch himself, slicing through the delicate skin of his hands — he didn’t care.

Nothing hurt nearly as much as the weight on his chest, his entire world crashing down on already broken bones. Sitting on him, crushing him, taking what little air he could suck through quivering lungs.

Suddenly, his skin felt cold, his heart-rate fast and thready. His hands — both too heavy, and too light to keep from shaking — curled inwards and over his head.

Tony buried his head down into his chest, curling tighter against himself.

“This isn’t —” A silent sob rocked him and it was everything he could do to keep from splintering. “This isn’t happening—”

His hand strangled over his mouth — strangling his grief; glass mingling with the shadow of a beard he hadn’t found time to shave.

With effort, he lifted his head, drawing in shuddery breaths. Trying to compose himself. Struggling in wordless derailment to maintain composure — maintain any composure — starving for air that wouldn’t come — every trace of his momentum abandoning him like a coward when he needed it, he goddamn needed it, he needed time, he needed a solution, he needed Pet —

Thick, wrecked, sobs filled the room.

Tony buckled, caving in on himself as deep, irrepressible cries arched through his spine. Tearing through his throat like a wounded, feral animal. Wailing outright, the noise that ripped from his mouth a force of dolor that wracked his body to shreds.

His throat screamed, his chest screamed — his sobs screamed the words he couldn’t.

With everyone surrounding him — friends and strangers alike — with the entire support of his team and the nation of Wakanda at his side, Tony had never felt more alone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunrise turned into sunset, and not long after nightfall.

Tony took the advice given to him — spend time with Peter. He didn't leave the room, barricading himself inside. And he wasn’t alone. Three dry erase boards were brought with him, along with two other occupants that only left to fetch coffee and caffeine when needed.

If Bruce or Shuri had anything to say about the dangerous game of desperation he was playing, they didn’t dare say it aloud.

“What about the regeneration cradle?”

Tony tapped—tapped—tapped the dry erase marker against the board, smearing through what was already written there. Its sound was the loudest thing his ears had heard for hours. The eerie, quiet atmosphere surrounding them felt all too similar to the calm before a storm.

So Tony tapped the marker, filling the dead air with anything that could make a noise.

Tap—tap—tap...

The Citadel hummed with muted activity, most of its occupants finding rest where they could. Some took to bed.

Some, like Clint and Natasha, didn’t give up vigil.

Crickets and frogs sang in the night's silence through the walls surrounding them. They both stayed at Sam’s side, camped out on the large windowsill across from his hospital bed. Even as the crowd of doctors dwindled away, they stayed. Sitting back-to-back, using each other for support — as they did in more ways than just one.

A light snore could be heard emanating from Clint’s parted lips as he dozed off, exhaustion finding the upper hand. His chin rested on his chest, and even in sleep his forehead creased deeply.

Natasha stayed awake. Staring off with one eye only, the other covered with a patch. The mesh material hid half her face as she stared at nothing. Long since abandoning the structure of reality for whatever troubles brewed in her head.

Tap—tap—tap--tap-tap.

“Wouldn’t work,” Bruce concisely answered, shaking his head as he paced the length of the room. “Cho’s never even started working on the blueprints for a redesign —”

“What about the old designs?” Tony turned around to face Bruce, his eyes ping-ponging with the scientists erratic pacing. “She still got the original concept laying around? We don’t need a shiny new toy, her old model work just fine —”

“It would take months, Tony.” Bruce stopped at the foot of Peter’s bed, roughly scrubbing his eyes beneath his glasses. They nearly fell off his face before he shoved them back in place. “And there’s no telling what sort of regenerative sources it would give to the symbiote. We could be super-charging that thing while barely getting Peter on the mend.”

Tony shut his eyes to help himself breathe deeply and block out the noise around him. The machines were persistent, beeping and chirping that grew harder to tune out the more he grew unbearably exhausted. It took every ounce of his quickly fleeting strength not to be overcome by the sight of Peter, laying a mere few feet away from him.

The suit only added insult to injury.

The red and blue lit up the room with vibrant colors that should’ve told a story of heroism, of bravery and greatness. Now, it was the very thing pushing Peter towards an end. Keeping the symbiote dormant while letting his body succumb to its mutilation.

Tap—tap—tap — he was raring to hear anything else — tap—tap—tap.

He’d seen the kid on the brink of death before. Back when miracle rescued them from the flooding waters of an undersea bunker. Tony didn't understand how it was possible, but he swore the boy had more life back then, than he did now.

The sound of the machines was life — he kept reminding himself that. So long as the machines sounded, there was life.

Where there was life, there was time.

Tap—tap-tap-tap—tap.

For Steve, time only dragged on. Each second ripped into his heart, clenching his chest until he could scarcely breathe. He couldn’t shut himself off, no matter how desperate he was to grow numb. The pain stayed, strengthened with each agonizing tick on the clock.

The window outside Sam’s room offered him his own vigil. Even behind closed doors, he stood at a distance. Far enough away that he didn’t have to see his reflection in the glass, to ashamed to look at the man staring back at him.

His shield hung heavy on his back, slumping his posture and adding a weight to his already burdened shoulders.

Steve stared inside, but like Natasha, his eyes fixated on nothing he saw. Lost in the sea of his own mind, drowning with each crashing wave that threatened to take him under.

If he went under now, he wouldn’t resurface.

Tap — tap — tap — tap.

The smell of marker flooded his nostrils as Tony struck it against his mouth. The plastic was cold against his skin, the sound of the pen echoing in the silence.

“Wakanda got anything similar?” Tony turned sharply on his heels, quick to face Shuri.

Looking up from her own dry-erase board, Shuri lifted an eyebrow high, nearly reaching the braids on her forehead.

“Yes...Vibranium,” Shuri unnecessarily stressed. “And we’ve established even at its utmost healing capabilities —”

Bruce’s answer was instant. And firm.

“It’s not going to matter if we don’t remove it.” Bruce’s pacing stopped at Peter’s bedside, and a weary sigh broke through his frustration as he began to fiddle with the few wires and tubes that he was familiar with.

“It is mutated to his DNA.” Shuri’s frustration was clear in the way she tossed her marker across the room, letting the pen roll carelessly across the floor. “Removing it is no different than removing individual cells of one’s genetic makeup – it is impossible!”

“CRISPR,” Tony argued, shaking his head without hesitance. “It’s not impossible, it’s just…”

The silence that trailed off his words was deafening.

The tip of his mark slammed harder with each passing second.

Tap—tap—tap—tap—tap.

Six rooms down, and Bucky wasn’t much different than the others. The room was kept quiet, and he kept it dark. The bed offered to him remained untouched, its sheets still tucked firmly underneath the mattress. Though rest was tempting, the buzz of danger kept him awake, regardless of what he could and couldn’t do in a fight.

The remains of a metal arm laid in front of him, casting a sheen from the moonlight shining through the curtains. Bucky stayed seat where he was, the hair that fell into his face nearly blocking his view. Yet his eyes were attached to the object, as it had once been attached to him.

Tap—tap— TAP.

“Impossible,” Bruce finished for Tony, his voice heavy with defeat.

“Untested,” Tony corrected, tap-tap-tapping away against the board. “We know that Norman was working on it with Oz —”

Bruce’s scoff nearly blew the room apart.

“Oz is self-proclaimed disease immunity. It’s – it’s immortality!” It didn’t sound like Bruce was yelling, but Tony could tell from the way his voice amplified that he wasn’t far from it. They were all quickly approaching their breaking points. Some more than others. “Even if we were able to find Oz — something you’ve been spending all summer trying to do —”

“Now we have his formula,” Tony cut him off. “We know what he’s up to —”

“— and give Peter Oz,” Bruce continued on as if he’d never been interrupted, “there’s no telling what sort of effects it would produce—”

“Come on!” Tony kept tapping the marker against the board — slamming it by now, pummeling the tip until it left nothing but black smudge marks across worthless equations that added up to nothing. “This room is full of the smartest people on earth and none of you have any suggestions!?”

TAP—TAP— TAP!

The throne room was empty, as was the throne.

T’Challa, like the others he welcomed to his homeland, found comfort where he could. Time didn’t offer him much, the consolance he sought was barely a blip in the hours that passed by. He wouldn’t dare be greedy for more though, not when he could see the trouble awaiting them.

Both hands clasped tightly together as he kneeled on the stairs nearby, his chin laying on his knuckles. The hands that rested across his shoulders was nothing more than firm pressure that kept him grounded.

In his moment of weakness, he was sure his mother’s touch was the only thing holding him together.

“ Izandla zethu mazincede abasweleyo …” Ramonda spoke soft words in her native tongue, so quiet that T’Challa was sure they were for herself more than him. “ Yaye ngamana kwa ezo zandla zingasikhusela ekwenzakaleni. ”

T’Challa prayed, not to one God in particular — but rather any spirit that would take his plea.

The tapping of the pen became excruciatingly overwhelming — taptaptap taptapTAP!TAP!TAP! — before Tony joined Shuri in tossing the godforsaken useless thing across the room.

It was all useless.

“Goddamnit!”

The marker hit the wall and bounced to the ground. Stopping only once rolling to the foot of Peter’s bed, disappearing somewhere underneath where it couldn’t be seen.

Tony dropped his head, scrubbing his hand into his hair until his scalp felt raw.

No one spoke, the fire that lit their brainstorming long since ebbing into embers.

Suddenly, his hands felt empty without the distraction in his grip.

Suddenly, it was quiet.

In the absence of his tapping, there was silence.

Not even the machines made a sound.

Tony’s head couldn’t have shot up faster if he had the super-soldier serum flowing through him.

“Bruce,” he choked out.

The words barely had time to leave his throat when the shrill beep of a heart monitor blew through the room. So loud, Tony thought it was just his ears ringing.

A burning, catastrophic sense of dread swept through him as he saw Bruce scramble to the head of Peter’s bed. He watched, barren of breath in his lungs, as Bruce pressed two fingers so firmly into the crook of Peter’s neck that it brought a smear of pink back to the pallor of his skin.

“Oh, no,” Bruce muttered, his head whipping up, his eyes frantically looking to the machines crowding them.

Not a second later and the room was instantly filled with people — too many people, too many to count. All flooding in at once.

They knocked into Tony as they stampeded inside, no different than wild horses set free from their restraints.

“Bruce,” Tony helplessly repeated, the strain in his voice swallowed whole in the chaos that encapsulated the room.

Bruce shot his head around to Tony. His eyes were wide — impossibly wide.

And then he bolted for the door, pushing past the mob of doctors that got in his way. Parting through them like Moses to the red sea.

“Move, move!” Bruce lost his glasses amidst the crowd, knocking into bodies that proceeded to knock into him. He didn’t stop to retrieve them. Not even as they were kicked under the bed, sliding to a stop right next to the discarded marker.

Tony watched as he disappeared out the room.

“Bruce!” He was sure he yelled out for him — there was no way he didn’t. But his voice was a ghost in the pandemonium. Not heard even to his own ears.

Tony was across the room in a single stride. He couldn’t push back the doctors who were in his way — the doctors who were in his goddamn way, the doctors who weren’t doing anything —

“Move!” He was saying it himself now, with far less intensity to his voice than what Bruce had. It was a feat he could talk at all. “Move—get out of the wa— move! ”

The crowd had thinned out considerably in just a minutes time, and yet he still couldn’t see Peter.

He needed to see Peter.

“Kid!”

It didn’t make sense why Bruce left.

It didn’t make sense that the doctors weren’t doing anything to stop the high-pitch, continuous beep of a flat-line that jarred his eardrums nearly deaf.

And it didn’t matter.

None of it mattered.

Only with the departure of the many people, faces he never knew the names of, did he finally reach Peter. Pushing forward, one agonizing step after another, jaw clenched so tightly it hurt.

Tony stopped just inches from the bed, the soles of his shoes practically burning to a halt.

It was at that same time someone turned off the heart monitor. Cutting off the continuous beep with a single flip of a switch.

No noise filled its place.

“Kid?” Tony breathed out a whisper — the breath that left his lungs failing to enter Peter’s.

His chest was still — alarmingly still. The spider emblem didn’t lift upwards, as it had before. As if it were frozen, void of life that gave it movement.

And Peter’s eyes were closed.

The people cleared away, not one-by-one, but in large groups of numbers. Abandoning the room almost as quickly as they arrived, a heaviness in their steps that could’ve shook the floors apart.

It was one solitary doctor who remained, standing at Peter’s bedside. She leaned over the guardrail, her stethoscope tucked neatly in her ears and the bell pressed gently against Peter’s chest.

It covered the emblem, only for a minute. And then she retreated the device, gently swinging the stethoscope across her neck with a look on her face that Tony couldn’t pin down.

“I am terribly sorry for your loss,” she quietly said, her accent nearly stealing her words.

Tony’s head snapped towards her. The floor dropped out beneath him.

“What?” he croaked, staring at the doctor like she’d spoken in her native tongue, and not words that he could understand.

Only he couldn’t — he couldn’t understand any of it.

None of it made sense.

The machines made no noise, there was no one speaking. There was no sound. And yet Tony’s ears roared with the surge of his own blood, coursing through his veins with each hammer of his pulse. He couldn’t hear anything but it.

He didn’t even hear the footsteps that came barreling into the room, one mans feet hitting the ground so hard it could’ve been an army charging inside.

“Oh, god.” Steve came running in from the hallway, needing to grab the door frame to keep himself from falling over. “Tony —”

“No, no —” Tony didn’t acknowledge him, keeping his eyes strictly on the doctor ahead. “No, you said we had hours.”

His voice shook with tremors, and she looked stunned, gripping both ends of her stethoscope with a deep frown.

“I’m sorry, I…” she trailed off as her voice grew small.

Tony didn’t notice the presence that joined at his side. It wasn’t until the young girl pushed past him, jostling him to the side, that he finally looked away from the doctor.

Shuri bent down low, right until her forehead rested gently on Peter’s, and one hand laid softly across his cheek.

“Perhaps, in another life,” Shuri whispered quietly, closing her eyes for a moment before removing her palm. “I will get to know you better. My friend.”

“Stop that,” Tony’s bite came without a second of thought. “Don’t talk like he’s —” His head shot back to the doctor, so fast that his neck screamed with whiplash. “You said hours!”

Shuri shook her head, the sadness in her features sinking deep into her movements. She retreated as quietly as she came, slipping past the others as she made her way to the door.

Steve watched her leave, watched as she didn’t grant him a single look on her way out. Her eyes locked to the floor and stayed there, even as she departed down the halls. His brows furrowed so tight he could barely see, his throat so swollen that he wasn’t sure he could speak.

His gaze didn’t linger on her, quick to turn his attention back to the center of the room.

“Tony —” Steve failed to be heard.

“It has been nearly a day,” the doctor tried to reason, her feet moving backwards with cautious steps. As she neared the exit, Steve was quick to bring himself forward. “We predicted he would not survive past nightfall. The boy fought far longer than we —”

“No! You said hours,” Tony emphasized, his voice cracking — cracking like the hole in his chest, a cave in his heart deeper than the cave that sheltered him from the Afghanistan sun. 

“It was merely an estimate of time,” the doctor argued, going to stand behind Steve as the soldier stepped forward. Undeniably protective of her. “We did our best —”

“Tony,” Steve tried to intervene, his hand outstretched. “Let’s go outside —”

“I need those hours!” Tony’s voice was laced with hysteria as he stumbled forward, his fist clenching at the air that he couldn’t seem to get into his lungs. Suddenly, the room had no oxygen. “I need that time!”

He spun around to the machines, pressing buttons and turning on switches that had no meaning to him outside of make things better and fix this, for the love of god fix it!

“Tony, stop!” Steve’s voice thundered over the roar of Tony’s pulse. Even then, the words were wasted away, garbled like he was shouting underwater. “Listen to me! This isn’t —!”

“We need that time!” Tony was hysteric. He knew he was hysteric. It didn’t stop him from activating every switch, every button, every wire in his line of vision — vision that was already dangerously tunneled with a spiking blood pressure that made him dizzy. When the machines failed to start up, he turned back to the doctor, the veins in his neck bulging. “Do something already!”

Steve grabbed Tony’s arm, pulling it towards him.

“Tony, come with me.”

Tony wildly shook his head. “We just need time! We just need —!”

Without hesitance, Steve wrapped both his arms around Tony, hauling him to the door — kicking and screaming. Using more force than he thought would ever be necessary.

“Get the hell awa— STOP! STOP! STOP! STOP! ” Tony jabbed his elbows and kicked at Steve’s shins, fighting all the way into the hallway. “ LET ME GO, LET ME GO, LET ME GO, LET ME GO, let me!— GODDAMNIT, ROGERS! GODDAMNIT, ROGERS! GODDAMNIT, ROGERS! GODDAMNIT, ROGERS! You wanted me in here! You wanted me— GET OFF ME! GET OFF ME! GET OFF ME! GET OFF ME! ”

It wasn’t until they were six doors down and a corner away that Steve finally released his hold on Tony — and he stumbled back with the knee to the gut that could’ve left him breathless, if breathing was a privilege that grief hadn’t already stolen from him.

Steve was still doubled over when Tony pushed him away, escaping his grasp entirely.

He was making a dash down the hall when Steve lunged forward, still bent over, grabbing Tony’s arm and yanking him back in one forceful tug.

“Tony — TONY!” Steve paid no mind as Tony’s body collided into his. He used it to his advantage, locking both his hands on Tony’s bicep and holding him in place. “Stop – STOP IT, Tony! He’s gone, he’s —!”

Catching sight of Bruce running down the hallway, Steve tried twisting Tony around. He was too late — Tony had already seen the man.

And judging by the way his body froze, he also noticed the syringe Bruce was carrying.

Tony immediately reached for his watch, tapping four times on the small device before clawing his fingers down and bringing the nanites to life.

The repulsor glove wrapped around his hand seamlessly, and no sooner than it did, he aimed his palm at Bruce.

“Come one step closer and not even the big guy will be able to protect you,” Tony warned, his voice low. Dangerously low.

Bruce didn’t move.

“Tony, listen to me.” Steve swallowed, hard, but stood tall. Unwavering, even with the glow of a repulsor lighting up the hallway. “You’re —”

“Let me go,” Tony demanded, his teeth barred as he stared down at the hands holding his arm. He could feel Steve’s heart pounding against his back, threatening to explode out of the mud-covered star that lined the chest of his uniform. It beat nearly as hard as Tony’s.

Steve shook his head.

“You aren’t thinking straight.” Steve held his grip tighter on Tony when the man tried to jerk away. Any tighter and he feared snapping the bones in half. “You’re becoming a threat to yourself and oth—”

The heat of the repulsor brimmed hot against Steve’s skin as Tony whipped his arm around, barely holding it back from burning the mans face into ash and soot.

“You want a threat, Rogers,” he sneered, “I’ll give you a damn threat.”

Any other day, and Steve might’ve lashed out. He would’ve had Tony’s repulsor smashed into pieces before anyone could blink, would’ve had Tony out cold before he could make another move.

The glow of the repulsor died out as time went on. For that time, the only response Steve gave was silence.

By no means was he a little man, not since that fateful day in 1943. And yet in that moment, he seemed as small and breakable as Tony. Like someone could reach out and crush him into pieces, if they really wanted to.

Tony’s arm dropped listlessly to his side. As if coming to that realization all at once.

Suddenly, he was dizzy. Far dizzier than before, his knees buckling rapidly as Steve tightened his grip, this time to help him stay on his feet.

“Tony...he’s gone,” Steve finally managed, his words weakening alongside his hold on Tony. He let go, though his hands still hovered cautiously in place. “We can’t change that. We can’t —”

It took Tony a minute to get his brain to catch up. When it did, the light in his eyes shined brighter than the glow of his repulsor.

“Yes, I can.”

Steve knew the moment he saw the spark in Tony’s eyes. He knew, just knew —

Tony tried to turn away and Steve clawed for his arm back, grabbing his sleeve and yanking desperately.

“You can’t remove the frequency mesh, Tony!” His shout echoed the halls, bouncing and ringing with thunderous volume.

“Watch me!” Tony turned to face him, shaking — full body spasms that seemed to be threatening his ability to stay standing — but his voice was frighteningly steady. Dead set and determined. “If you don’t let me go this fucking second —”

“It won’t save Peter!” Steve coldly reminded him. Reality was reproachful, and it was grabbing him by the back of the neck and shaking him hard. Screaming the words that needed to be said. “It’ll only allow the symbiote to consume him!”

Tony’s eyes grew untamed. “And that symbiote has his life force!”

“Exactly!” Steve shouted through his teeth — sounding almost breathless. “It has enough life to —” Steve’s arm was tugged forward as Tony tried to make a run for it. “Tony!”

Tony spun around, his repulsor-gloved fist landing squarely in Steve’s jaw.

The impact was enough to send Steve stumbling back.

Tony didn’t look back at the damage he’d cause. Not even as Steve smeared the back of his hand against the blood that stained his lips.

He made it five long strides down the hall before Bruce purposefully stepped in his way.

“Tony,” Bruce started, both hands outright — the syringe stayed tucked in his shirt pocket. Tony looked at him as if he’d lost his goddamn mind. “You need to calm down —”

“Sedate yourself, Banner,” Tony murmured, pushing him aside — and using little to no effort to do so. “I’m getting my kid back.”

Suddenly, two hands clawed at the back of his shirt. Tony cursed as Steve spun him around for the umpteenth goddamn time, nearly ripping his shirt right off.

“It won’t be Peter, Tony!” Steve stressed, clenching the material of his shirt against his shoulders, desperate to ground him back to reality. “You know that! You know that thing will kill everyone — you know Peter wouldn’t want that!”

There was something raw in his voice that took Tony’s breath away. Steve’s eyes were locked on his, fiercely unmoving.

The blue in them was burning.

“He’s gone, Tony,” Steve stressed, hands still grasping the front of his shirt, using it to shake Tony hard enough to rattle his teeth. “He’s gon—!”

Alarms blared, sounding from down the hall.

Steve’s grip loosened as he turned towards the noise, Tony stumbling back as he did the same. As if the corner that blocked the way didn’t keep them from seeing the source of their trouble.

They didn’t need to.

They knew.

They both looked back at each other, for half a second — if that.

And then they were running.

Tony and Steve bolted full-tilt down the hallway, arms swinging, legs bounding — they both needed to clutch the doorway as they came tumbling into the room, so fast that the turn inside nearly took them over sideways.

They skidded to a halt — Steve staggering to the side before he caught himself, Tony slamming into the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of him.

“Oh, God, no,” Steve felt the words come without his bidding, his legs suddenly freezing in place. Not daring to take another step further. His eyes were horrifically wide — his hands grabbing the door-frame so tight that it splintered beneath his fingers.

Tony heard the crack it made. Still, he couldn’t look away.

Not with what they saw.

“Maximoff…” Tony wheezed the name with exhausted lungs. The blood rushed from his head all at once, migrating straight to his heart — beating so fast, it was screaming.

He couldn’t look away.

Wanda’s hand trembled fiercely as it stayed firmly against Peter’s chest, her palm flat against the emblem, her fingers spread wide. Fingers that were wrapped in a kinetic skeleton, shaking so hard that they brought a rustle to the fabric of the suit beneath her.

Fabric of the sui—Tony’s eyes fell to the emblem, to the relaxed suit that no longer held a bond to Peter.

Deactivated. With a single press of the black spider across his chest.

Just like that.

Tony’s eyes shot back to Wanda, taking on the same look as Steve. Horrifically wide.

Horrified.

“I am sorry,” Wanda croaked out, her voice drenched with the tears that had long since been shed, soaking her cheeks wet. She shook her head, apologetic — but unremorseful. “I cannot lose him. I will not lose any more family.”

Steve finally found his footing, pushing past Tony as he stumbled head-first into the room.

“What did you do?” he barely managed a whisper when it needed to be a shout.

The alarms continue to blare, a screaming warning that only grew louder. Tony’s head swiveled around the room, looking at the machines that all sprung to life — uncontrollably sprung back to life.

The monitors lit up with numbers that increased — higher, higher, higher — inhumanely higher.

Steve shot his head around, watching the screens with a deep crease in his brow. Lines of code and warnings scrolled across, faster than either of them could read.

Then, one by one, they fritzed with broken electricity. Sparking with flames of fire. Unable to retain the pressure of data that overworked them to a final demise.

Footsteps came stampeding from outside. Neither Tony or Steve turned to see who came barreling inside the room, both men unable to tear their gaze away.

“Oh, my…” Metal screeched across the floor as Okoye came to a stop by only the aid of her staff. She froze so suddenly, T’Challa nearly crashed into her. He grabbed her for support, his body nearly failing him — but he never once looked her way.

T’Challa stared at the scene ahead of him, eyes blown wide. His breath came in short gasps that didn’t fully form. The sounds of shock he made were inaudible, swallowed whole by the hissing of boiling oil.

So loud it began to overtake the alarms.

So loud that Tony could hear the sounds of the symbiote birth to life, each sizzle and crackle breaking through the soft tissue of Peter’s skin.

Peter — his Peter, his kid. Laying motionless, the symbiote pouring out his body like a flood of water; spasming ooze that leaked through the static material of the frequency mesh.

No longer held with a barrier to keep it in place.

Steve covered his face as miniature explosions erupted from the machines, the fires they created activating more alarms, sounding from above.

“ Esi sisiphelo …” Okoye gripped her staff as the blood drained from her face. “Spirits help us.”

Red and blue of the spider-suit lost its vibrancy, eaten away tendril by tendril. Submerged in the outpour of black, a torrent of oil that burned through the fabric — the fumes were thick in the air, cloying and heavy. Making it hard to breathe.

Tony tried not to gag as the stretch filled the room.

He ducked low as the machines continued to explode, set off like fire-works that lit the room ablaze.

One after another.

“Evacuate the city!” T’Challa choked out, narrowly dodging the sparks that blew from a nearby machine. “Engage all defenses!”

Okoye fled the room before he’d even finished shouting.

Tony couldn’t get his body to obey the same order.

He couldn’t look away.

“Wanda…” Steve whipped his head up towards her, terror washing over him all at once. “What did you do?!”

A howling scream pierced through the air. Ear-splitting, reaching a crescendo that overtook the alarms with its cadence — so high-pitched that no single occupant was immune to its deafening drone.

Tony immediately slapped his hands over his ears, his eyes squeezed shut as the noise vibrated the very insides of his skull.

“͆̈́̍We͆ͯẽe͗ͪee ́̔̏are͑̓ ͪ͂ͭi̾n ̑ͩc͆̊c̽CͩCͬoNͤͮ̄NTrr̽̉̒r̗͚̒͌r̻̫̺̊ͬ̐O̲̯ͅLḺ̟̎̀L̡̗̈́!̶”

Tony realized he was making a harsh, discordant sound in his throat. A pit started to claw its way into his stomach as he shot his head back to Wanda, his hands just barely pulling away from his ears.

He could see his fear reflecting back on her.

Even grief was afraid, fleeing them both.

“Weeͦe̐̔e͒E̓̐Eͮ̍͌EE….!”

“Wanda!” Steve screamed over the noise, ripping the shield off his back. “Now!”

Wanda’s hands shot out as she released a cry of anguish, forcing magic to flow through injured fingers that trembled fiercely.

The barricade of crimson rained down on Peter’s body, energy pouring off her in waves. Casting a barricade over the black tendrils that began to seep through his skin — out of his skin.

It emerged from within.

“͂̓̏Arͩ͛̆ree̽ͮͫeͬͥe…͂.̄!̉̑ͪ”

Each tendril overlapped the magic. Breaking it, cracking it apart.

Rupturing straight through it.

An explosion of red drowned out Wanda’s scream, an overwhelming blast of her own magic sending her flying back.

She bashed into the wall with a head-crushing crack, slumping down to the floor. Limbs slack and akimbo.

“̉̑̃He̾̈̍e̎̀rrre̓e̊èeͧ̌́e!̉̐͒”

Tony whipped his head to where she fell, eyes wide enough to burst out of the sockets. Just as quickly, he turned back to Peter —

Gone.

No face, no eyes, no —

Gone.

Black matter fused together, coalesced to shape, growing larger as it took form.

 

Larger.

 

Larger.

 

Tony gulped, eyes drifting to the ceiling as it towered over them.

 

Larger.

 

Steve raised his shield as the room grew impossibly dark. Shadows crept over the large star, eclipsing the insignia. Obscuring it from view.

Its face formed, birthing to life two white eyes. Each larger than both men combined.

“̥͊Ẁ̪̻ͮe͆ͭe͇̋eEͪ̌Ẻ̪͚͆EE̜ͭee͎ee….̆̑”

A mouth forged with hundreds of teeth, bearing down, sharp edges that glistened underneath the shine of oozing oil.

“̖͓Aạ͓ͅaaaR̉ͥ̓r͑rř̩ṞR̳̪̈͌R̖̙̩EEE͆̉E̖͓͖ͬ̓̃E̟͆….̾̽”

Tony’s heart stopped.

It smiled.

A face of a monster that smoldered with a smile.

 

 

“ V̾ENO̟̮̱̠͕̬ͧ̇̍́̄̈M̬͉̤̻̥̫̆̄ͯͥ͆̑!̅ͭͮ͆ͦͪ ! ”

 

The last thing Tony saw was black. A paroxysm of tendrils heading straight for him.

And then, his vision whited out.