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Teddy sees Billy going down as if in slow motion. He can’t make his throat work out a scream.
He’s at Billy’s side in seconds, lifting a limp hand in his, so so carefully enfolding it; his other hand hovers over Billy’s chest. He can see the soft way it goes up and down, and he’s so relieved, so relieved he could crumble right there, but he wants to touch. And he can’t. Because there’s no time.
Cloak’s down too. They’re down their two emergency exit plans. This was a trap. Of course it was a trap. And now they’re surrounded, and Billy’s lying there, knocked out and Teddy wants to tear things apart.
“What the hell have they done to them, cap? They’re out cold!”
He listens to his own voice, and it’s startling how put together he sounds, all things considered.
You can’t slip now, Teddy, he tells himself, you have to get Billy out of this.
Leaving Billy’s side is the hardest thing he’s ever done, but he can’t afford to lose it over Billy being unconscious.
Unless he wants Billy to end up worse.
The Thing won’t stop fighting him, all the while trying to convince him about the registration act being the right thing, about not wanting to do this so could Teddy just stop. He doesn’t pull his punches, however. And neither does Teddy.
Thor rains thunder upon them, and everyone stills. Everyone but Goliath.
And Thor puts Mjolnir through his chest for it.
Somebody pushes him closer to Eli and Kate, closer to where Cable is with Cloak, and suddenly Sue Richards is protecting them with a force field, and they are transporting themselves away. Away from where Goliath lies, dead and broken. Away from Thor’s murderous rage.
Away from Billy.
“Teddy, are you--?”
“I’m fine, Kate.”
Kate curls her lips into an undefined grimace that could have turned easily into a sneer, but then she just gets a tired look around her, and puts one of her hands on Teddy’s shoulder.
“We’re breaking him out.”
Teddy nods.
Cassie’s out.
Teddy should feel something about that.
He can’t.
Cap singles him out after a meeting; he’s healed fine. There’s still some purpling skin under his eye, but other than that he looks mint condition. Like nobody ever laid a hand on him. Teddy knows he looks the same. He just feels like he’s taken the beating of a lifetime and showing the aftereffects for everyone to see.
“I’m sorry, son.” He puts a hand on Teddy’s shoulder, strong, firm. Meant to be reassuring and kind. Teddy would’ve probably had a fangasm over that simple gesture a few months ago. Right now he just feels coiled and angry and resentful, and it’s close enough to the surface that he has to actively fight the ugliness, purse his lips. “We’re breaking him out. Stark isn’t getting away with this.”
When Teddy talks back, his voice is icy enough that it sounds foreign to his own ears, cold and distant and dangerous.
“Neither of you will, if we don’t get him out.”
Cap’s eyes go wide at his words, then they narrow, and finally he runs a hand through his hair with a resigned air and nods at him.
Teddy nods back and walks away.
It only registers that he’s actually threatened Captain America when he’s in his temporary living quarters, undressing for bed.
He isn’t nearly as worried as he thinks he should be as he slips under the covers.
He thinks about dreaming of Billy, of holding him, of holding on to him, this war gone and just them, reading comic books and trading lazy kisses. He thinks I am going to tear everything apart until I get you back by my side, and then he shuts his eyes.
The days blur together: meetings, heroics, fights, people getting on their side, people defecting.
Teddy is focused on every single task that is thrown at him, thinks everything is a step closer to Billy, and takes out the bursts of brilliant, burning, all-consuming rage on the bad guys stupid enough to cross their path.
Kate has to pull him away from someone once, looks at him and hisses Young Avengers don’t kill, shakes him a little, but then she goes tight around her mouth and throws her arms around him.
“Please, Teddy, we need you here, okay? All the way here. We can’t do this without you.”
Teddy hugs her back.
He doesn’t bother making promises he knows he can’t keep.
Teddy doesn’t know Tommy’s officially on their side until his door’s slamming closed and the guy is plopping on a chair next to his bed.
There’s a smile on his face that’s all angles and sharpness. There’s shadows under his eyes that Teddy could use to measure time.
He looks like hell. Teddy figures he’d look that way too if he wasn’t so used to shifting everything unpleasant away.
“Fuck them,” is the first thing Tommy says, and it’s heartfelt and rough and dark, “fuck all of them. Every single last one of them. All they care about is covering their own asses, and they are going to drag all of us down with them.”
Teddy can’t do this. He can’t.
“Why are you here, Tommy?”
Tommy sneers at him.
“You know damn well why I am here, Altman. I am getting my little brother the fuck out.”
“So now he’s your brother, huh?”
Tommy’s hand is at his throat fast enough that he can’t blink between between moments, much less attempt to shift and fight back.
“Whatever, Altman, fuck you. You don’t know how it feels. Billy might be your boyfriend, but he’s my twin. And not even my biological twin, but my, like, soul twin. I was thousands of miles away and still knew the moment something was wrong. You’ll never know how that feels. You’ll never have to rearrange your existence around something like this, so cut me some fucking slack.”
Teddy raises his eyebrows at him, lips set in a sardonic smirk, and this is the most lively he’s felt in days, this itching for a fight that isn’t just crush, smash, break until Billy is safe under my arm again.
Tommy rolls his eyes at him.
“Boo hoo, Altman. I have a sob story too,” he snaps, but still takes his hand away from Teddy, walks back to his chair and plops down on it with an almost deflated air.
Tommy starts bouncing his leg up and down instantly, and it takes him a few moments of silence till he speaks again.
“The things that happened to me?” His voice shakes a little on the last word, and he squares his shoulders and looks up at Teddy, eyes burning with determination, “That shit can’t happen to Billy. It can’t. I’m not gonna let it.”
Teddy’s blood runs cold. He’d never--
“Stark wouldn’t,” he tries. But it sounds feeble even to himself.
Tommy snorts, and he looks derisive and cynical and everything Billy’s not and it hurts, just as it fills him slowly with dread and renewed fear.
“You sure about that? Everyone heard about Goliath, you know? It was all over the news. Nobody’s saying how it happened in the media, but people talk.
“And you know Billy is different from all of us. You know he’s this weird powerhouse thing. You really think they’ll resist the temptation? That they won’t crack him open just so they can, I don’t know, put a leash on him? Or make a few hundred more like him? Juice him until there’s nothing left to squeeze out?”
Teddy feels the seams from his shirt rip, feels his heartbeat skyrocketing. It takes him a minute or two to get himself under control, and even then he can’t make his hands stop shaking, can’t make the cold feeling in his gut, heavy like a stone, go.
Tommy just looks at him, like he knows what Teddy’s going through right now, but can’t or won’t, or maybe doesn’t know how, to do something to help him through it. There’s just minutes upon minutes filled with silence and them, falling apart on their own, feet away from each other.
Tommy gets up from the chair at some point and starts walking away, back straight, steps sure.
He turns around and looks at Teddy when his hand’s on the knob, and he says, “you and I? We aren’t that different.” He gives him a smile that’s full of teeth, then, like a shark only twice as deadly, “We are getting him back.”
He’s out, then.
And Teddy… Teddy feels relieved. Those words out of everyone else’s mouth sounded like platitudes, like emptiness wrapped in gift paper. From Tommy?
They sound like a certainty.
Kate’s voice rings inside of him, warning: Young avengers don’t kill.
Teddy can’t tell if they’re the Young Avengers anymore, though.