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Steve wishes he hadn’t expected the battle to come. Instead, seconds before the first blow arrives, he senses it, like the tingle of static before lightning, allowing him a half moment of panicked recognition before it hits.
Boom.
The sky rips open, and the bats arrive.
“Holy shit! Shit! Damn it! Fucking hell!”
There’s shouting, but Steve cannot decipher who it’s from above the screaming, the chorus of bats above him.
This isn’t good. This is not good.
The lighting flashes across the sky, lighting up Robin and Mike, who are close to him, in a deep blood red before plunging them back into temporary darkness, surrounding them with the horrible movement of bats and soldiers and bodies.
Boom. The sound of machine guns, the sound of ear-splitting lighting.
Steve flinches back for a moment, readying his weapon, and he’s not sure if its out of fear or anticipation.
And he’s in it, but he’s not. There, but not. The swing of his bat is instinctual now, the smell of blood and sludge and carnage is familiar, so much so that he can nearly tune it out. He is running purely on practice, on the well-oiled machine, too attuned to fighting. For a split second, as the world spits and spins and whirls around him, he feels like a basketball player again, dodging and aiming, as he hears the sweet thunk of his weapon hitting a target.
Thwack. BOOM.
The sky is alight.
The storm worsens. Explodes. There are explosions.
Is this what it’s like to be at war? Years gone by and the never-ending shelling of grenades and the steady flashes of ammo and lightning and shouting shouting shouting—
“STEVE!”
He hears his name and whips around, waving the bat around with the hope to clear his vision. His stupor ends when he spots Robin, wedged tightly and hiding between two boulders, closer to him than he would have expected, cradling her arm.
There is so much blood. If the world were a better place, he’d be able to say he’d never seen more blood, but that isn’t true.
More thunder crashes… And the world seems to pause, the sight of Robin with her hair sticky with blood and sweat and her jacket shredded leaving him faint.
“Holy shit, Robin,” he says. “Shit. Holy shit!”
He waves his bat around as he runs her direction, trying to clear a path free of bats. Within seconds, her arm is wrapped tightly in some cloth—he doesn’t remember where he got it—and they’re running somewhere—where are they running?—and he barely knows what’s happening at all.
“—and I’m so sorry, I know you’re needed out there, I shouldn’t have called you over, really, but I started thinking about how quickly someone could die out here if you don’t have any arms to defend yourself with, and I was tallying up how many arms I could use, and the odds were really not looking that good, only half in my favor really, if even that, and that got me thinking about amputation and what it would be like to live without Armanda—that’s her name, by the way, my right arm—and I couldn’t really bear thinking about it, since we’ve lived so long together, and I just—”
Steve is glancing from the emergency exit way across the field to Robin, back and forth, watching her slowly grow paler, and he grows paler, himself.
When she faints, Steve curses to himself, to the world. Shit.
…
Beyond just fading in and out, Robin is out for several hours. By now, the fighting is long over, leaving fires and scars along the earth's ribcage. Miraculously, nobody else acquired much more than bruises or scratches, so all that’s left is to wait for Robin to wake. It’s Steve’s turn waiting, as the others grab dinner and clean up.
Steve’s stomach has been churning, his mind a whirl. God, what if she doesn’t wake up for real?
...Holy shit. He rests his chin in his hands. Shit. What if she doesn’t wake up?
He can feel something inside him trying to escape—some energy, some monster—crawling throughout his insides and pressing on his bouncing knees, and in his forehead as it creases. Shit. He feels ill.
There’s too much time to think about a Robin-less world, where work is wrong, and free time is wrong, and friendships are all wrong. There’s too much time to think about words and expressions, about the world stripped of “dingus’s” or trumpet jokes or silliness.
He’s definitely fallen under the impression that he’s had too much time to ruminate on his failures by the time he hears a sudden rustling from Robin’s side of the room. A pause.
“Steve?”
Steve lifts his head, seeing Robin sitting up on her bed a few meters away.
“Steve, I barely recognized you with your hair like that.”
He shakes his hair out. She’s right—it’s matted with too much sweat and blood and monster goo to feel like normal. There’s the urge to laugh, to agree, and say something funny and brush off the past several hours, but something catches in his throat as he looks at Robin, his best friend, and he cannot bring himself to say it.
There is time, too, to explain all the ways in which she matters to him, this pull towards her company, always. To explain how wrong it all would be without her, how big every little bit is, to him… but to do that would mean processing it all. It is too big for him to truly put in words.
“I thought you might—I was worried you would…” Steve starts, unsure for once of any good words to say. He does not cry, but he could have. Robin understands.
He sits there, and they look at each other, and they say nothing—as rare as it is, the two of them silent—and they let the moment absorb them, let themselves absorb the moment. Stillness, for just a wink.
Then Robin rustles in her bed, and Steve stands, and the moment quietly passes.
At some point, Robin starts going off on a tangent, with quick, breathless rambles about this or that, and Steve paces next to her bed, only half listening, mostly just relieved.
He is just sad, and happy, and tired.
When her tangent reaches its natural end, he sits on the bed, facing her, wrapping an arm around her in a tight hug. Despite his dirtiness, she wraps her left arm around him in return, holding him tight.
“...Love you, Rob,” Steve whispers into her ear, feeling a fleeting sorrow swell in his chest.
“Aw, Steve, you dork, I love you, too.”