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Stephen was dreaming.
By the Vishanti he hoped he was dreaming.
He was walking through the Compound. Room by room he went.
Empty.
Empty.
Empt-wait.
There was someone in the room, sitting on the couch that faced away from him, a glowing screen on the wall in front of the couch displayed a nature documentary judging from the sound of a bird screeching. He entered the room, slowing as he saw the screen was filled with static, and rounded the couch to find it held a skeleton with a hawk of some kind trapped within its ribs and screaming for all it was worth. He walked timidly closer, leaning forward a bit to get a better look at the bird.
The skeleton, its head still bearing a full mop of dark hair, turned suddenly to look at him sending him skittering back into the TV which began to play a song.
whatcha gonna do,
whatcha gonna do,
when they come for you,
bad boy,
bad boy…
“You’ve been a bad boy, Stephen Strange.” The TV’s sound faded to the back of his brain at the familiar voice, though the echo had not been there the last time he had heard it. “You’ve been a bad boy, Stephen Strange.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bad boy,
bad boy,
bad boy”
With each repetition Sam stepped closer, and Stephen realized that the voice came from the hawk; he hadn’t even noticed the screeching stop. When the man, skeleton?, finally stood barely a step away Stephen held out a hand to Falcon, inaudibly imploring the ghastly figure to keep his distance. He didn’t and Stephen’s hand touched the rib cage for a split second before he violently ripped his hand away as the hawk bit into him viciously. He turned and ran, only just seeing his follower and thinking to slam the door shut behind him. He held it closed tightly with both trembling hands, but there was not a sound from the room.
He let go.
The doorknob was still.
He didn’t dare open the door again and instead turned to face the hallway.
The hallway seemed much longer than before. He looked back the way he had come originally and found himself looking at the end of the corridor, where a wall table stood holding a vase of lilies. He swallowed loudly and turned around, facing the long corridor and began walking. This time he did not open any of the doors. Instead peering into the rooms left open and seeing no one.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
Empty.
He stopped as music began to play from the room he had just determined to be empty. It was a light foxtrot and he gulped down some courage before he turned back to look in again.
Two figures were now doing a two-step in the middle of the room. They wore their uniforms, making it easy for Stephen to identify Steve and Bucky, though the uniforms hung from their frames. Skeletal frames. He began to back out of the room but ran into something.
He turned slowly, his blood cold in his veins. He didn’t know who this skeletal woman was; she wore a large red hat and was in formal military dress.
“Private, you had best clean that uniform.”
The British tones were haughty as the woman gestured sharply to his clothes and he looked down slowly. Crying out, he saw that he was now drenched in blood, not a bit of his blue tunic to be seen. He touched it delicately with a gloved hand and froze in horror as it came away with gore dripping from his fingers. He clenched his eyes shut; reminding himself that he was a doctor. He could handle a bit of blood, so this was more than a little bit, but still the principal of the thing was there. When he finally opened his eyes again his hand was clean. The room empty aside from the victrola still spinning slowly until it reached the end of the record and turned itself off smartly.
He left the room, closing the door behind himself.
He turned to continue down the hall, seeing that it turned a corner only a few more doors down. But he had barely taken a step before a low rumbling growl filled his ears. His head seemed to swivel without his direction to see a skeleton now lying on the floor three doors down.
Utterly clean, it was laying face down on the hallway floor but not for long.
The bones rose of their own accord and fit themselves into a shape not at all human, the skull breaking into pieces and resetting into that of some predator, the teeth growling longer as he gasped in terror. It curved its back and lowered its jaw as though to direct a roar towards him. But Stephen was tripping over his feet to get away before the roar had even begun to shake the very building around him.
The sound of its claws skittering over the tile behind him was almost comical, if one could ignore that blood-thirsty roar as it pursued him. His feet slid out from underneath him as he tried to take a turn too sharply and his hip slammed painfully against the tile. He scrambled to his feet as the skeletal cat geared up to pounce and launched itself down the corridor. It hit the wall behind him, a sound like bowling pins and scrabble tiles, and a femur slid past his flailing feet. He whirled about to see a scattering of bones at the turn of the corridor and held his breath.
Waiting to see if it would reform.
When his breath calmed and there was still no movement from the pile, he turned to keep going.
And stopped abruptly.
A translucent figure had picked up the femur that had slid by him and appeared to be examining it. Was that Vision? It was hard to tell as the person flickered like a bad render as he turned to look at Stephen.
“You should not be here,” Vision said.
“Oh? And why not?” Vison’s bad resolution made his transition from where he crouched by the bone to standing in front of Stephen both comical and terrifying as first just his legs appeared right in front of him before the rest of him caught up, leaving Stephen staring into two black holes where Vision’s eyes should have been. Drops of blood from where the stone was missing on his forehead trickled down into those empty eye sockets and Stephen could see brain matter in the gap where it should have been. He could not tear his eyes away from that pulsating organ.
Vision shook him suddenly, rattling his own brain within his skull and forcing Stephen’s eyes away.
“You don’t belong here.”
“Be-because I’ve been a bad boy?”
“Yyyeeeesssss.”
It was barely a breath, and one Stephen felt wafting across his face.
The feeling was so nauseating that he gagged, eyes closing as he jerked back and out of the robotic grip to fold over and heave. But what he brought up was a mess of circuitry and wire that clattered to the floor in front of him. He reached up a hand to wipe a keyboard key from the corner of his mouth. He stared at the V he held and looked up to find Vision gone. He spared a glance at the pile of tech he had produced and walked carefully around it to continue on.
He just had to find Tony.
That would fix all of this.
Whatever this was.
He didn’t know why or how but he would.
He could do this.
For Tony.
He continued down the corridor, finally passing the discarded femur and passed a closed door.
And another,
and another,
and another,
but this one opened.
He stopped, almost calm in his terror, as it creaked open behind him.
He went in and stopped in the doorway.
The entire room was covered in spider webs. Not the usual coverings of ages past, no, these were large cords of white silk spanning from wall to wall. From one curved tunnel of white webbing he could see eyes. He counted them with each beat of his heart.
One-two,
three-four,
five-six,
seven-eight,
nine-ten,
eleven-twelve,
thirteen-fourteen,
fifteen-sixteen.
Sixteen eyes stared out from the heart of the web and started inching forward. The deep red of Natasha’s lipstick stood out from her now blackened skin and her multiple eyes blinked warily at him. On her hip, there was a smaller, brown form, with multiple sets of eyes peering through pairs of goggles and clad in a yellow suit jacket. This must be that Peter, the Spider-man Tony had been going on about. He wondered absently when Tony had mentioned a yellow suit, but lost his thought as Natasha spoke, her voice like the skitter of legs down his spine.
“You cannot be here.”
“Well, I am. So if you can tell me...”
“I will tell you nothing. You will tell me why you have come. Why you have been such a bad boy coming here?”
“Why is it so bad for me to be here?”
“No, can’t tell. Will never tell. Secrets must not be spoken.
Not spoken.
Not spoken.
Not…” The repetition faded as the human spiders backed up into their cocoon and disappeared from sight. He left the room.
That wasn’t so bad. He continued walking.
Closed.
Closed.
Closed.
Open.
He paused, just before he could get a glimpse into the room, and listened hard. He could hear a voice pleading within. Please, please, please, get out, let me be free. He leaned forward to peer around the doorway and saw Bruce. The scientist seemed frantic as he knelt in the center of the room; he was doing something with his hands and Stephen crept closer trying to see what he was struggling with. It was a magic lamp, like the type depicted in stories about Aladdin and Bruce was rubbing it in fast jerky motions as he continued to plead. Please, come out, come out, please, free me.
He reached forward a hand to place it on Bruce’s shoulder, but a cloud of green plumed suddenly from the lamp. It stretched toward the ceiling, billowing out to form a large, recognizable figure. The Hulk. He had only just thought the name when the cloud enveloped Bruce; a trail of the vapor reaching out for him, making him back quickly towards the still open doorway. As suddenly as it had appeared the cloud retreated, flowing effortlessly in reverse back into the lamp and leaving behind only an empty set of clothes where Bruce had been.
He left quickly,slamming the door behind him and trying to think of a sealing spell, but his mind was blank. He settled for bracing it with a chair from beside the door. A chair that had not been there when he entered.
Actually, the hall was lined with chairs now. Some empty. Some, not.
He looked down the crowded hall, recognizing quite a few of the new chair’s occupants, though some were just from the paper, such as the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen who was seated on the other side of the door. He stepped past the devil and cringed as the figure abruptly crumbled to dust.
He stepped past another and Moon Knight crumbled away.
He started running.
Dust clouding the air with a sound like a windstorm.
He could barely see,
arms thrown up to protect his eyes,
and slammed into a wall.
…
…
…
...
He came too some time later, there was not a speck of dust in the hall and no trace of the many chairs. He looked at the wall, or rather the elevator, he had slammed into. The doors shone under the fluorescent lights and he pressed the button to call a car. He stood next to the doors, not wanting to be directly in front of them.
Bing .
The doors swooshed open near soundless.
Nothing.
The doors closed.
He pressed the button again.
Bing .
The doors opened and this time he quickly looked over, a hand placed to prevent the doors from closing.
The car was empty.
He sighed in relief and stepped in. He pressed the button at the bottom labeled ‘Lab’ and watched the doors close, only to freeze in place as the interior of those doors was revealed to be a layer glass. And within the glass he could see a tiny body splayed out like a frog in science class, the various organs lined up beside it and neatly labeled. He pressed his back against the far wall of the elevator and tried not to look at the gruesome display or the empty space on the other door.
Bing
The doors slid open on an empty floor and Stephen released the breath he had unknowingly held. He jumped out quickly, not wanting to stay in the car with its eternal passenger. He walked through the floor, every step cautious as he listened.
The barest hint of movement had him jerking back just in time as an arrow embedded itself in the wall where his head had been. He looked for the archer and balked at the sight of Hawkeye perched on the back of a couch. The archer’s eyes had been replaced with those of a hawk and blood dripped from the jagged, ill-fitting sockets. The crimson droplets landed on the couch and trickled down the leather past the open eyes and stretched face of the Scarlet Witch. Stephen clamped a hand over his mouth, feeling his skin crawl and ran down the stairs into the little antechamber of Tony’s lab.
At last, he had made it.
He could feel his eyes prickling with tears of relief at just the thought of finding his husband. He walked up to the door, doing his best to calm himself and smooth his clothes as he punched in his code and entered the lab. Tony stood with his back to the door at one of his work tables. To one side stood a silver iron man suit he had never seen before. It looked off somehow though. The place where the arc reactor had been moved down and the shape had changed. Looking rather like an anatomical negative of a heart.
“Tony.” The name was a balm in itself to his shaking soul. “What is going on?” He walked up behind Tony, putting his arms around the smaller man and burying his face in the fluffy brown hair he so adored.
Tony smelled like home. Iron and grease and sweat and courage all at once.
“Hey babe.” Tony turned in his arms, hugging him back and rubbing a hand on his back. He was safe. “I’m glad you’re here Wizard of Oz. I need a heart.”
Ice flooded his soul and mind as the loving arms tighten painfully, pushing the air from his lungs. He looked up into Tony’s eyes, watching as they changed, the devilish grin growing as those gorgeous brown eyes turned a vibrant Tesseract blue. A sound started up behind him as he began to struggle, it was one he recognized, from a tool he had used often.
A bone saw.
He opened his mouth to scream….
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!”
He jerked up from the bed.
Scrambling without purpose for the long minute it took him to recognize his bedroom. His chest heaved as he took in the empty spot on other side of the bed. His eyes darted about the room and the light shining from the bathroom had him sighing with relief.
Thank the Vishanti, it had been a dream.
Getting up he could hear the shower running and rubbed a hand over his eyes as he entered the bathroom. He blindly went to the sink, splashing cool water on his face and saying aloud to the figure behind the curtain, “God, Tony. I had the worst dream just now.” as the water sluiced off his face between his shaking hands. He grabbed the towel from the counter and pressed it to his face as he straightened up.
Then he looked in the mirror.
The solid silver Iron Man suit was standing behind him.
He barely had time to turn around before the suit was on him, cold metal hands tightening quickly about his throat and as his vision turned black he saw human eyes peering through the suit’s visor, boring into his soul with their glowing blue stare.