fossilised | It's AU time

Bruce allowed himself to be dragged. Even if his heart broke at the idea of leaving anyone, and that poor woman would haunt his dreams forever, he was still a doctor and he knew when he had to go to a patient more likely to make it for the greater good. He had no idea what would happen here, but he thought a lot of people would die tonight and in the following days. If this really was an invasion from another planet, that was the end of civilisation as they knew it. Hospitals would hardly be running.

He crouched beside Loren and carefully got him to sit up a bit further and peeled his arms away from his stomach, brow furrowing in concern when he saw the large shard of metal embedded in his stomach. Pale skin, sweating, probably hypertensive.

"Alright, Loren, can you look at me? Good-- very good, what I need you to do is focus on Tony for a while. My name is Dr. Banner and I'm going to try and help you, but it's going to hurt, so try to keep as focused on Tony as possible."

"Anthony," Loren said, small smile at his lips as he reached a hand out for his boyfriend. "I tried to call you, I found... found a collection of engineering magazines from the fifties, did you want them? What-- what are you doing here?"

Getting seriously hurt had never been an issue for him. Tony took care of Tony and sometimes that meant not taking care of him. He'd not had anyone care for him since his parents and so he never thought of the consequences of getting hurt and how that would affect someone else. Now he knew why Loren hadn't spoken to him for a week after his accident. This feeling of potential loss was the worst feeling he'd ever had. It was worse than actual loss. There was nothing to do about that. This waiting was worse.

"Yeah baby, of course I want those mags to see if my dad's in any of them. We can burn them together," he teased, taking Loren's hand before he kissed the back of it and then warmed it up under his own hands. "And didn't I promise to come and get you for dinner tonight? Sorry I'm a little late, but the restaurant closed early too. I'm gonna write them a bad review on Yelp anyway."

"Good, no business should close early when they have pre-booked patrons to take care o--ah! AH!"

Loren's words cut off into a wet shout, blood staining his lips as Bruce made the executive decision to bind his stomach with the piece of metal still embedded in there, pressing on it to keep it in place.

"Alright, Loren, you're doing really well," soothed Bruce, voice dropping as he looked over his patient to Tony. "He needs a hospital and surgery immediately, but I'm not sure how feasible that is and how widespread this panic is."

Tony let Loren squeeze his hand until he felt all circulation cut off. He felt responsible for this pain, which was ridiculous because he neither booked Loren a ticket or told him about the convention or insisted that he go either. It was just hard to be in love and realize that the person that you were in love with was very likely going to die because there wasn't anything you could do to help.

Bruce's words sliced right into him and Tony found himself gritting his teeth as if he was the one sporting the impressive new body piercing. He smoothed his hand over Loren's hair to sooth him.

"Hey doc, in case you didn't know, we have a slight potential alien invasion happening right now. Not that I've seen any of the aliens... But I've seen a man get shot in the head tonight, though, so maybe this is a whole lesson on fearing ourselves more than we fear the Other. I don't know. I've really gotten away from Star Trek since they rebooted it--" Loren groaned and Tony actually felt himself shatter. It was painless but absolute, like he was empty now.

He couldn't let this be the end, though. Wet eyes drifted to the convention center. There would be a medical station in there. Likely close to the front doors. Sure. It was on fire. But they didn't have much of a choice.

"Tell me the stuff you're going to need. I'll get it and... Well look, no one's bothered to break into that rat infested McDonald's across the street, not that I blame them, so you can take him there and... I'll get whatever you need. Okay? Please?" He was already on his feet after missing Loren's hand. "You go with the Doctor, sweetheart. I'll be back. I promise. I'll be right back!"

Bruce had always quite liked Tony as a patient, but he had seemed like the selfish sort, not the type to run himself into a burning building to save someone else. This Loren must really be important to him, and so he couldn't tell him no. Even if it was stupid, even if it was potentially suicidal, he knew that he would have run through hundreds of burning buildings to save his Betty before she had passed away.

"I need antiseptic, gloves, something to stitch with, a scalpel if they have it, a knife or scissors if they don't. I need gauze, and any painkillers you can find."

He didn't think a convention centre medical room would have all of that, but it was best to give the full list to Tony and maybe he'd be able to find some of it and some substitutions that would work as well. "Take off your jacket, wet it, tie it over your face. Keep low."

Loren let out a sound that was half keen and half groan when Anthony pulled away, but when he tried to speak it was just more blood that dribbled down his chin. He did manage a scream, though, when Bruce bodily picked him up, thus jostling his wounds, and began to run for the McDonald's.

It took an agonizing twenty minutes for a slightly singed and more than slightly smoke logged Tony Stark to pull himself into the chain burger restaurant. The streets were a lot more quiet now with the time rounding two in the morning. It would be daylight soon. People that had the option to be somewhere, if they were thinking clearly of course, were somewhere. Those that didn’t-- well many of them were already dead. The news media would do its best to downplay that in the weeks ahead, of course, and just like the 9/11 attacks, individual stories of heroism would trump the big picture until it was all conspiracy theory and after school specials.

Tony dropped his soaking wet coat in the doorway and rushed across to where Loren was propped up in a molded plastic booth. “I got…” He paused to caught into his own shoulder, “almost everything. No scalpels.”

But considering that this was New York and every New Yorker old enough to remember any of the building collapses, terrorist or otherwise, he’d been able to get almost everything else. Even if the only painkillers were aspirin and the only antiseptic was rubbing alcohol. It would just have to do.

He started to unpack his pockets and the emergency heart defibrillator case he’d snatched from the wall when he coughed again and spit up black soot.

“But there should be some good knives here…maybe. Hopefully. I’ll go look.”

By the time that Tony got back to the fast food chain, Loren was completely unconscious and pale as death. Only the slight stuttering of his breathing indicated that he was still hanging on at all, something that Bruce was doing his best to help out by keeping his airways clear and as much pressure around the wound as possible.

"Run," he advised Tony, and whether he came back with no knives or a meat knife or anything in between, he'd have his sleeves rolled up and Loren's blood soaked t-shirt and jacket peeled off. "I need you to help me. I'm going to pull this out, you need to hold your fingers here-- see, on the pulse, and tell me what happens. I'm expecting it to increase, but I need a running commentary anyway, can you do that?"

His voice and manner were still, somehow, calm. He had worked as a doctor in war zones before, he knew how to keep calm under immense pressure and work with people who might not be trained medics.

"Okay, we're going to do this on three. Tony, look at me, you did really good and this is his best shot, I need you to focus. One... two..."

This was a machine. Loren was not a body, he was the personality that the body contained. Tony had gutted plenty of cars before, rusted junkers and road boats, new sports cars and souped up sweet rides lovingly cobbled together from spare parts into a masterpiece. Inside, they were all basically the same. Tony smelled of grease and sweat on a good day at work, when his job was rewarding and he got into the trenches with the men and women that worked for him. So how was this so different? In the darkness, the blood could be motor oil.

Running commentary was something that Tony was fantastic at, thankfully. He was hardly the most careful with his words and so he could easily fill Bruce in on everything from how he and Loren first met to the texture and ferocity of the blood pouring from his boyfriend’s stomach.

At least he’d gotten Bruce something to cut with. Sharp and thin. It was used to cut apart boxes and now it was being used to cut the mess out of Loren’s abdomen. Tony wished there was a little irony in that, something witty he could quip about, but he had nothing.

“ah, doc, it’s pulsing now. I think there was a nicked artery. That’s what happens right? Well at least that means his heart’s still going,” Tony offered, though that was no consolation to anyone.

Bruce didn't once tell Tony to shut up, even when his commentary became about useless information, because he didn't want the poor guy to go into shock before this was done and Bruce could focus on him. He honestly didn't think Loren would make it, there was evidence that perhaps this debris had done damage to the spine with how deeply it had gone through, but there was no way to tell.

It took five hours for him to get done, but at the end of it Loren was somehow still breathing, and Bruce had managed to sew up the wound and pack it with gauze so that it wouldn't bleed any more.

"Okay-- okay, that's all we can do now without a hospital. Good job, Tony, really good job. Sit back, take a breath."

He fished his cell phone out of his pocket at the same time, checking to see if any signal had come back.

While there would be no signal for Bruce to latch onto and Tony was a nervous wreck of a man who had never had to care so much about someone in his whole life and was likely on the verge of losing them anyway, the sun had risen during Bruce’s makeshift surgery and whatever the news had reported on and more than a million people had seen first hand for themselves in the sky overhead had disappeared. In other parts of the country, reports were coming in of the massive amount of damage that New York had caused to herself. Footage of the alien crafts in the sky and buzzing across the city were played ad nauseum, commentators reporting different angles for hours on end. The world was talking but the government was slow to provide relief. There were too many unknowns to put real boots on the ground and so Manhattan was silent and left silenced until that afternoon.

At half past twelve, the military arrived to the city, moving across the Hudson by boat because of how jammed up the bridges and the tunnels were. Reporters came with them, everyone scrambling for a story, an explanation as to what had happened.

There would be no answers for the attacks, and luckily, it wasn’t important to the vast majority of Americans. The politicians and the upper brass military could do all of the worrying for now, but the police and the armed forces needed to retake New York.

Thankfully, being right on the river, the McDonalds that Loren laid in and Tony was stoically watching over was entered almost immediately by shouting men commanding anyone inside to show themselves. Tony didn’t get angry, though it was pretty rude to treat them as aggressors when they were victims. He was cold to the bone and shivering but he directed the men to Loren. “He needs a hospital.”

The hospitals in the surrounding areas were already jammed full of victims, and many existing patients had already begun to be transferred out of state in order to make room for the vast influx of emergency cases. Luckily, because they were on the outskirts of the disaster zone, Loren was able to be taken to a hospital pretty quickly without panic of overcrowding. Tony and Bruce were taken along too, checked on the ride for smoke inhalation and small injuries.

Over with Bucky and Steve, as the night wore on, the devolution into flashbacks and fear only heightened. He managed to get a short way back towards their apartment with Steve on his back, before they came across a gunfight happening outside a bank being looted. That triggered the last of his impulses and something went off in his head. He ended up storming the bank in an almost berserk rage, viciously fighting down anyone who was hurting someone else. He seemed to have a clear picture in his mind of who the enemy were, and more than a few people tried to thank him only to have him run off again with poor Steve clinging to him.

By the time dawn came, he had huddled them down in a subway entrance that had half collapsed, getting Steve and a small group of teenagers who had been on a school trip settled in behind him. He levelled the gun over the side when the military finally appeared, calling out loudly.

"No closer, or I shoot!"

Steve was scared. He’d been scared plenty of times in his life, but never quite like this. His vision had only gotten better to a point and any attempt to really focus on an object just left him with a really bad headache and a case of nausea. That was from the head injury. When he was younger, he’d heard that you weren’t supposed to sleep with a concussion. Now, they were saying that people with concussions should be allowed to sleep but his mind wasn’t on whether he should rest and more on whether he could.

Bucky had gone off the deep end. He knew he was living in a hallucinatory hell right now, but that didn’t make him any less dangerous to himself and to other people.

He probably thought he was in combat-- No. No, Steve was certain that Bucky thought he was in combat or at least in the field. Perhaps he was reliving his torture. Perhaps in his mind he was trying to escape that torture. He couldn’t be certain.

The teenagers that had bunked down with them started to call for the soldiers to rescue them but Bucky, armed, was making that difficult at best.

He needed to do something here. “Stand down, Sargent. That’s our rendezvous.” No. That wasn’t the term. “That’s our extraction team. They’re on our side, Buck!”

The teenagers had been really grateful to Steve and Bucky before that moment, Bucky had pulled them out of a half collapsed building and kept them safe from various looters before they reached the subway entrance, but they just wanted to be rescued and so they kept calling out to the soldiers.

Bucky didn't move, his entire body tense. The soldiers surrounding their area took point with guns out too, now that they'd found a potential hostile, at least seven military men and women all with high powered handguns trained on the subway entrance.

"Come out with your hands on your heads, do it now!"

"They're not-- they're not our extraction. They're here to catch us."

"I said get out here right now!"

One of the teenagers, a fifteen year old girl called Sandy who had bonded with Steve over asthma, suddenly made a break for the entrance to try and run to safety.

“No one’s here to capture us, now stand down,” Steve said, perhaps a little too harshly, but he couldn’t help it. If Bucky killed any of these kids-- It was over. It was over and his perfect, beautiful Bucky was going to be taken away where he would never, never be able to recover again.

So he put himself in the way of the gun in his hand. He pressed himself right up against the barrel as the girl took off, hands on her head as if it was meant to be an order for her and not for Bucky.

He wasn’t sure how far this fantasy had ingrained itself into Bucky’s head so Steve just went for it, winging it. “I outrank you, Sargent!” he barked, relying on what he knew about his dad, who had been a Captain when he died. A field officer. Steve was scrawny and his voice was softer than he wanted it to be right now, but in the darkness of the tunnel with flashlights aimed at them, he could play this part. He had to. “Weapons down, that’s an order. These are our men and our mission is to get these civilians to safety.”

Bucky could still shoot him. He knew his finger was on that hair trigger.

Edited 2017-04-07 14:04 (UTC)

Bucky didn't know much except that they were surrounded and that Steve was-- he wasn't really sure. Some part of him knew this was his boyfriend, but that didn't make sense as to why he was in a war zone and so a superior officer or a comrade in arms was an easy enough substitution to make.

"Sir-- yes, sir."

He made as if to lower his weapon, but then everything went wrong. One of the other teenagers saw he was going to lower the gun and decided to try and be a hero and tackle him. The hit to his legs caused Bucky to fire, the bullet going straight through Steve's shoulder and ricocheting down the tunnel, though thankfully nobody else was hurt.

Staring in horror at what he had done, thinking Steve dead rather than knocked back with a shoulder wound, Bucky took off running down the tunnel to the sound of a hail of bullets at his back.

The hit was hard. Steve didn’t feel anything, just the blow, and it knocked out his breath. There were screams and shots and the ringing in his ears just got worse until that was all he heard. It left him feeling really insular, like his world existed only in the space between his two ears. He was yelling, but he couldn’t hear himself, begging Bucky to come back, begging everyone to stop shooting… And they did. But only because gunshots in such a confined space were detrimental to everyone’s hearing.

They dragged him out easily, though. He was light, he had a head injury and now his shoulder felt useless. He wasn’t awake for the rest, taken right passed where Tony was sitting at Loren’s bedside.

Bruce would be the one to take care of the bullet in his shoulder – he was a surgeon and they needed him so right to work he went – but after that, Steve was left alone. His world was silent and so he didn’t hear anyone calling his name as he left the hospital in the gown and his jeans. It was all too easy to slip into the crowd of people requiring aid or wanting to give it.

Much too easy.

Steve was shocked at the state of the city. Everything was a miserable mess. Everything was in ruin. There were still dead on the streets, covered in scratchy white blankets, waiting to be picked up.

He went down into the subway, alone. Bucky had come for him. He had to return the favor, huddled up in a borrowed (all right, stolen) coat. No one stopped him. The subway system had not been cleared, not yet, but there was a lot more infrastructure work to worry about before anyone swept the tunnels. “Bucky?”

His voice was thin and high. He was drugged up and freezing and in pain. He couldn’t hear himself. He had no idea that he was just basically whispering.

It was a terrible idea for Steve to be down here alone when he was in such bad shape. He could collapse, he could get confused, he couldn't hear anything. Though hopefully that last ailment was temporary and would fade away in time thanks to the loudness of the bullets that had gone through the tunnels.

He would be down there for about forty five minutes before a light appeared in the darkness, a bobbing torch and a man running up to him wearing army fatigues looking concerned.

He said something to Steve, and then realised he couldn't be hurt and grabbed a definitely non-standard issue phone out of his pocket and typed on the screen as fast as he could.

Sir, you can't be down here, the structure isn't safe. Let me take you back up to the surface, okay? My name is Private Timothy Dugan."

The light of the cell phone and the words themselves were a comfort that Steve wasn't sure he wanted. "Thank you," he said, only feeling his mouth move and hearing the voice in his head barely beneath the ringing vibration from the damage done to his ears. He hoped he was speaking loud enough and not shouting. "I am looking for a man down here. Sargent James Barnes. Lost him yesterday afternoon when they saved us... He suffers from PTSD."

It was the best way he could put it and he looked up at this man with hopeful, sorrowful blue eyes. He just wanted some good news for once.

"Did you find him?" Was he safe? He'd vouch for Bucky... And he'd never tell him that he was the one that shot him. His arm would be fine. They told him so. He just need half a year of rest and recovery.

This was the guy that had been with Bucky when he had flipped out? Dum-Dum hadn't been down here at the time, but he had heard about the incident from some of the other men and he knew immediately who they were talking about. It's why he came down here, he owed the Sergeant a hell of a lot more than just looking for him down some subway tunnels.

It took a moment for him to erase the message and then type over again, holding it up for Steve to see.

I'm looking for him. Me and some others, but I'm not going to hand him over. I know the Sarge, we served together, he saved my life out there. You a friend of his?

"How did-- How did you know he was down here?" Steve didn't mean to be skeptical but he was just really worried that this could be a ploy to get him out of the tunnels. Then again, he should t be here anyway. Bucky might have recovered enough to seek him out.

Or go home.

As the private started to type on his phone, Steve reached out to put a hand over the device and to lower it down again, a shake to his head. It didn't matter.

If this man said he was only looking for Bucky for the right reasons, Steve had to trust him. They couldn't waste time arguing through texts.

It would be okay for Steve to trust Timothy Dugan, he was a good man and he wasn't lying. Though the other members of his team had been sent here to find and arrest Bucky, even if they only had a description rather than a name, he was down here to find and smuggle him out. It broke his heart that the Sergeant maybe hadn't been getting the help he needed after being discharged.

But Steve couldn't be down here.

Even if he wasn't a civilian, he was obviously injured and needed to be in bed. Hell, he probably shouldn't even be out of hospital. So he gently started to shoo him back towards the subway entrance, one hand typing out a quick message.

You still can't be here, sir. Go home, or go back to the hospital.

It was easy to shoo him away, Steve wasn't physically capable of stopping himself from being moved along even when he was healthy, but he reached out to a railing along the wall with his good hand and tried to dig his feet in. His voice rose to a shout in his struggle. "He needs someone that can talk him down!" Steve said, sounding self righteous even if he was mostly just worried about the state Bucky was in. "He was in his head for too long. He was having a flash back and when you guys showed up, everything went from bad to worse--"

Bucky had killed a lot of people yesterday. It wasn't Steve's job to decide if they deserved it or not, though.

"What does it matter if I stay? We can cover more ground-- hey! Stop pushing me! You know I'm not going anywhere!" The morphine was wearing off. His shoulder would be in agony soon. But Steve was too tenacious to give up.

Even if it was the best thing for him.

It was really goddamn hard to have an argument with someone who couldn't even hear what you were saying, but Dugan wasn't about to give up easily either. He knew that Bucky had killed people, he had seen the CCTV footage before he got down here, but he also knew that Bucky had fired in defence of himself, and of the people around him, killing looters, thieves, and people trying to assault others. That didn't mitigate that killing was way too far an escalation for that, but he had been in a flashback and thought he was in a warzone, it made it understandable and he refused to believe that Barnes was a bad person.

Which was why this was so important. He typed furiously on his phone, planting his muscled body in the way to keep Steve from getting further in again while he did.

Because you're a civilian and this area is restricted. If I find him, I'm already risking arrest by cutting him loose when orders are to arrest him. I can't have a civilian along for the ride too. Go home, sir, you're doing more harm than good if you stay.

If there was one way to call off the dogs with Steve, it was to point out that he might be doing damage instead of helping. The blond's eyes softened. He didn't want to give up but he also didn't want to hurt Bucky through being stubborn.

"Find him." He snatched the phone from the soldier's hand and typed in his address. Technically Bucky was just upstairs from him but he didn't want the man to go there. Hopefully none of this would come out considering the waste land that Manhattan had become in less than forty-eight hours.

Steve shoved the phone back at the man and mouthed a thank you before he headed back to the street surface where it had just started to snow.

The streets were mostly empty. Cars were still being cleared. The dead were being cleared. Steve had no choice but to head home.

Thankfully it would not be too long of a walk. The hospital he had been taken to was close to Brooklyn and Steve was not too far over the bridge.

Steve wouldn't get more than a step into his building before he was being accosted by a bullet with long red hair and eyes that were swollen from crying. Too upset to see the brace and sling that Steve wore over one arm to keep his shoulder still, Natalia barrelled into him at top speed to hug the shit out of him.

"I have been calling you and calling you, and where have you been? I am thinking you are one of the dead and someone will be calling to tell me that my best friend is never coming home again."

Her voice was a wobbly mess for once. Usually so composed and calm, even in the most serious of situations, she had truly feared for Steve and she didn't know what she'd do if she lost him.

"I have been trying to call Thor. He has been working non-stop, and he needs to know. Hospital have called here, Loren has been found and is maybe going to die. Thor does not know his brother was even in Manhattan, none of us knew." Except Tony, Tony had known, because the two of them shared nearly everything. "Steven Grant Rogers, you never do that to me again."

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