nightcathedral | Put one foot wrong and I'm gonna fall...

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Put one foot wrong and I'm gonna fall...

It's nearly three in the morning when Olivia slips out of her room and heads down to the lab where Tony Stark had a sensory deprivation tank set up for her. She moves quickly and quietly, and doesn't bother switching on the lights when she enters the lab, leaving the blue glow of the monitors around the room to light her way - she's hoping that the less she does, the less JARVIS will take notice of her, and maybe he won't wake anyone to tell them what she's doing before it's too late. There are letters on her bed to Steve, to Jane, to Tony and Bruce, and between that and her absence, and whatever security cameras she's sure are monitoring this room, that'll have to do to explain where she's gone.

She eases the door quietly shut behind her, and crosses the room to the bright steel table where the syringes full of Cortexiphan Dr. Banner managed to synthesize are already laid out. Olivia picks one up, grimaces a little, and slides the needle into the big veins just below her wrist. Maybe this is what went wrong the last time. Maybe she needs a dose of the drug to get her to the right place. She's praying that's what it is, because otherwise, she's running out of ideas or other plans.

The empty syringe makes a soft ringing sound as she tosses it back into the tray. Olivia's already all but running up the stairs to access the tank. There's a breathing apparatus dangling over the top, just like in Walternate's lab. She grabs it, fits it into her mouth and takes a breath, and slides into the water with hardly a ripple.

For a minute, nothing happens. Olivia floats in the tank, eyes closed, just breathing and thinking of letting the universe pass through her, just like Walter told her the first time. Thinking of home.

Between one breath and the next, she vanishes, with only a swirling disturbance in the water of the tank to mark that she was there at all. The room stays silent, the tank empty, for another minute or two.

Then the tank explodes in a roar of heat and light, a ring of fire spreading outward and taking hold anywhere it can, blackening what it can't. Olivia tumbles out of the tank along with the water and lands with a crunch in the shattered glass from the tank, choking and gasping while the fire that wasn't put out by the flood dances up the walls.

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Steve isn't asleep when JARVIS quietly alerts him that Olivia has gone down to the lab. There are nights when sleep just isn't an option, when he lays down and waits for explosions to send dust from the ceiling and into his eyes, when he's straining at the silence for the sound of gunshots in the distance. When he replays the faces of the men he's killed and the ways they died and wonders what it must have felt like, that moment of severance.

So he isn't asleep when JARVIS tells him that Olivia is in the lab, and he's half-way downstairs the thump of an explosion hits from several floors away and then he's running.

Steve slams inside, barely registering the heat of the door before he's in the middle of the inferno. Something glass bursts to his left and sends bits of molten glass and flaming liquid spattering across the floor.

Steve flinches back, sweat pouring down his face already along with the water pouring from sprinklers overhead. The burning chemicals blaze on and the computers blast sparks from their stations and over the noise of the fire Steve can barely hear the scream of an alarm.

"Agent Dunham!" He ducks low, his throat burning, and darts deeper in to the mess of smoke and light and heat, feeling like for all the noise he should be hearing more, but he knows that feeling well - the roar of flame and gunfire so loud it becomes its own kind of silence. "Olivia!"

And there she is, on her knees in the midst of broken glass. He can feel his shirt burning, the flesh on his back searing - something must have landed on him. His bare feet add their own kind of scream to the disaster. Steve wraps one arm around her and hauls her clear of the mess, cradling the woman in his grip and running for the door. He checks once, scrambling right as a metal table crumples under the heat of burning chemicals.

Three feet from the door, Steve wraps himself around Olivia as best he can and dives for it. No sooner do they hit the ground than a thick, clear panel slams down in the doorway and the smoke - and air - inside the room start to get sucked out through vents set high on the walls. Slowly, the fire starts to die.

Once Steve is sure the mansion isn't going to burn down - and his shirt isn't burning any more - he looks down at the woman hugged close against him. He tries to speak once and turns his head away, hacking until he tastes blood. At least he knows enough to spit out the gluey black goo he coughed up, even if it's rude. "Excuse me," he manages to whisper. "Are you all right?"

Edited 2011-10-10 02:33 (UTC)

Olivia wasn't expecting anyone to come. Disoriented as she is, with the smoke and fire, the shrieking alarms and the sprinklers and the confusion and exhaustion that always comes when she crosses over, she's not even sure what universe she's in, if there's anyone to come or if they'd be on her side if they did.

But she knows better than to fight when someone does come running through the flames and pulls her into his arms. She's not sure she could make it out on her own if she tried, so she simply curls into herself, and turns her face in toward his chest so she's not inhaling quite as much smoke.

Once they're out, and they stop moving, Olivia lifts her head to actually get a look at her rescuer - and she's not sure if she's relieved or disappointed that it's Steve. Some part of her already knew she hadn't made it home, but that confirmation hits her in the gut, and would have knocked the breath from her if she weren't still struggling to breathe already. She failed.

She lets out a harsh, wheezing laugh at Steve's question, and tries to twist away just to see if she can get up. Her hands, arms and knees are all bloodied from the glass, and she doesn't want to examine them any more closely than that at the moment. Her eyes and lungs and throat burn, she's shaking from exhaustion, and she's not sure she could list off the number of ways she hurts right now, in minor, mostly ignorable ways that nonetheless add up... but she seems to be more or less whole.

"No," she croaks, shaking her head. "But I'll live."

He nods, and doesn't ask what she was doing. Steve is pretty sure he knows - besides, she's going to have to explain to several parties, and making her repeat it yet again won't do her any favors. He starts to get up, and then hisses and stays down on his knees. His feet must have been burned worse than he thought - maybe he stepped in something. He can't really remember. All he knows for sure is that breathing hurts and his back feels like it's had the flesh stripped from it, which in truth is quite possible.

Steve is about to ask JARVIS to call help when help arrives in the form of Jane and Tony and a gaggle of medical staff that look like they were supplied by SHIELD. Steve sits down, relieved, and blinks up at their aid feeling a little bemused. Jane is dusted with crumbs and wearing a bathrobe, and Tony looks like he was working on something greasy either in his shop or the garage. "Does anyone sleep in this place?" Steve says, and it has that distant quality to it that tells him the burns are probably driving him into shock.

Well goodness. It has been a while.

"Jumproping Jesus," Tony whispers, and he's standing back and pacing while the medical staff move in. Steve starts to wave them off, to tell them to look after Olivia first, but Tony points at him like his index finger may in fact be loaded and ready to fire.

"Shut it, Rogers, and take your babying like a man."

Jane, for her part is hovering over Olivia. "What happened? Did you- were you- You know you can't really create a successful test scenario without setting up the test, I thought we talked about this, about you, about making sure there were, were, contingencies in place in case something- Not that I really expected things to explode, how did that happen exactly?"

The last part is more curious than worried.

Olivia's watching Steve in concern, taking note of all the injuries she can see, worrying about what she can't, and feeling guilty that it's her fault he's in this state. She looks up at Jane with a start as the other woman addresses her, and just stands there and watches in mild bemusement while she talks, waiting until she seems like she's actually going to wait for an answer.

She shakes her head a little, lifting a hand to push her wet hair out of her face, and then stops and blinks at the blood coating her palm. After a moment, she lowers her hand slowly and focuses on Dr. Foster again.

"I don't know. That doesn't usually..." She has to pause and muffle a cough in the crook of her elbow, and shakes her head as she goes on. "I've never done that before, not that I remember. Not since I was a child." Defenseless, alone, and terrified... Walter seemed to think she wasn't capable of the kind of fear required for that anymore. So much for that.

"Steve," she says, looking back toward him, "I'm sorry, if I had any idea that would happen, that there was a chance someone would get hurt, I never would have..." Well. She probably still would have done it, and probably would have tried to do it alone too... but she would have found a way to make sure no one else would be putting themselves in danger on her account.

"I'm sorry," she repeats, glancing to Jane and Tony as she does. They might not have gotten hurt because of her, but she did kind of blow up their lab.

"I'm fine," he says at once, and tries to prove it by getting up again, but Tony and several others force him to stay put. He sighs. The blazes of pain from whatever they're doing to his feet and back are simultaneously making it harder to focus and keeping him from losing focus completely. "Really, I'll be fine. It's all right."

Steve eyes her, his worry showing clearly. "You're not."

Several people break off and come over to tend to Olivia now that it's clear Steve's not going to pass out right away or try to get up. They work on her hands, pulling out slivers of glass and cleaning off the blood. Jane has gone quiet, apparently remembering that injuries need to be seen to before people can be properly interrogated.

Tony doesn't share her patience. He stands over Olivia, arms crossed, cold. "What would you never have done?"

"Compared to you..." she protests, but doesn't bother waving off the medical staff. She winces a little, holds her hands out for them, and pointedly doesn't look at what they're doing. She's never made a very good patient, but she doesn't really have the option of being difficult right now - in any case, Steve's demonstrated just how effective it would be if she tried.

Olivia's almost grateful for Tony interrogating her - it gives her something else to focus on. She is, however, a little surprised he even bothered to ask that particular question. The answer seems more or less obvious.

"I tried to cross over. To go back to my original universe." She looks up to meet his eyes - her tone is flat, expression blank as she can make it except for a bitter smile. "It was obviously unsuccessful."

Tony isn't a trusting person at the best of times. When people -his people - are put in harm's way, that carefully maintained facade of easygoing friendliness drops like the Mark I from the sky. Toss in the fact that she just went into a lab in his mansion without permission and just blew up, apparently with her brain, his tech, Tony Stark is not a happy camper.

And, he might be coerced into admitting, a part of his anger is disappointment. He doesn't think there's a person in the mansion who didn't hold out some hope that those ridiculous articles (CAPTAIN AMERICA'S SECRET LOVER REVEALED!) carried some fragment of truth. Since their interdimensional, -universal, -whateveral visitor showed up, Steve has been something Tony doesn't think he's ever really seen from the kid. Happy. Yes, it's irritating that this woman can illicit that particular response from Steve when the rest of the team, after a year, apparently hasn't cut it. Even if she's not romantically involved with the Cap, she's made a difference. That she'd try to duck away in the middle of the night is the worst part.

Tony carefully ignores the fact that he'd do it the same way.

"Clearly," he says, scathing enough to scrape bone. He's drawing breath to let his temper loose on her when Steve, predictably enough, interrupts.

"Don't be angry with her, Tony," Steve says. He sounds like he's falling asleep, and Tony turns to see the med staff packing up a syringe that looks big enough to administer medication to an elephant. The Captain closes his eyes, still talking. "She gave you something to fix."

Tony glares, but it's half-hearted. When he looks back down at Olivia, it's to take her arm and stand her up enough that he can slip an arm under her and lift her up against his chest.

"JARVIS, damage assessment and full model rendered to scale. Download them to my work room."

"Of course, sir," the AI says.

"Attaboy," Steve slurs, consenting to being shifted into a wheelchair with much grunting and struggling from the medics. "You need to relax."

"Shut up, Rogers."

Olivia wasn't willing to argue with the medical staff. Tony Stark is a different matter. She doesn't exactly fight as he pulls her up and lifts her, but she does grimace and tense, twisting a little to try to get to the floor again.

"I can walk," she mutters in annoyance. Sure, she hasn't actually tried it, but she's positive she could manage if he'd just put her back on her feet.

"Do you want him trying to get up again?" It's cross and implacable and they're half-way to the infirmary already, so there.

Steve gets put under as soon as they get there, stripped down to his boxers, his wounds cleaned and bandaged but otherwise left alone. His cellular functions are still enough of a study that seeing him recover and taking data on it is more important than the guesswork of helping him heal. Tony leaves as soon as Olivia has been tended to and thoroughly questioned - and instructed not to leave the room without permission. The doors get locked behind the last person to leave, aka a very reluctant Jane Foster, but the monitors on the walls keep a steady stream of information logged from the various bracelets and monitoring plugs affixed to the patients' skin.

About fifteen minutes after the room empties, Steve wakes up. He's aching all over in that distant way that promises far greater pain once he's fully aware. The ceiling takes a few seconds for him to place. "Oh," he says. It's still a little muzzy.

"Hi," he tells the ceiling. "Been a while."

He glances down at himself, clad in the white nighty of a hospital stay under the sheets with a thread count higher than most five-star hotels. He tries to sit up, feels fresh blazes of pain from his injuries and thinks maybe he'll stay put instead.

Can't get drunk, can't use painkillers. Sometimes this super soldier thing isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Olivia settles back onto her bed with a frustrated sigh after Jane leaves, staring at the ceiling and trying to figure out what she's supposed to do next. Trying again seems too much like bashing her head against the same brick wall - she could try that until it kills her and probably still never get anywhere. She's not exactly coming up with any other brilliant ideas, but she doubts she'll be sleeping any time soon, so turning the problem over in her head seems like the only option.

She's more than a little relieved when she hears Steve waking up, both for the confirmation that he's more or less alright and the fact that it gives her something else to focus on. She shifts to sit up and turns to face him, legs folded underneath her under her sheets.

"Hey," she says, soft and low like she's trying not to startle him. "How're you feeling?"

He moves again and pain rips down his back, so he stops.

"Crispy," he says, then winces. "Sorry - I'm not... I know it wasn't your fault, I wasn't trying to make you feel guilty."

Steve sighs, deciding to try just turning his head and seeing how that goes. No excruciating pain, which is good, and at least now he can see her. "What about you?"

For some reason his focus skitters away from her when he says, "I'm sorry. That is didn't work the way you wanted."

Olivia winces a little at his first response too - he might not have been trying to make her feel guilty, but he didn't really need to. Olivia's pretty talented at finding reasons to blame herself all on her own, but she doesn't think Steve's going to agree with any of those reasons, so it doesn't seem worth pointing them out.

"I'm fine. Tired. A few cuts and bruises, a little bit scorched... nothing to worry about." Nothing she doesn't deserve - and painkillers work on her, so she's got nothing to complain about.

She huffs a soft sigh, ducks her head and closes her eyes at his apology, silent until she's sure her voice won't waver when she answers. She manages a smile when she looks up again, though it's forced and doesn't really do anything to hide her disappointment.

"It's..." She can't say it's fine. It's not. "Thank you. I'm sorry I didn't say anything to you before. I've just... never been good at..." She sighs and shakes her head. "It was a mistake." In so many ways, apparently.

He closes his eyes, hearing Peggy's voice with perfect clarity. Don't you dare be late. "Me either."

Steve clears his throat and opens one eye. "Could you help me sit up? Well, wait, don't move if you're not up to it- I just..."

He doesn't like feeling helpless. Specifically, he doesn't like feeling he can't move. It's one of the few things that can really get under his skin, really and truly scare him. The idea of being trapped. Steve shivers and wishes the sheets were warmer. "It wasn't a mistake," he says, in part to distract himself. "It was a choice. It didn't work the way you thought it would, but that doesn't mean it was the wrong choice."

Olivia unfolds her legs and slides off the bed before he even gets to 'if you're not up to it'. She's never been fond of sitting still either, especially in hospital rooms - her time in that cell on Liberty Island and the knowledge that she's actually locked in this room certainly isn't helping the feeling, and she'll take any excuse to move around even a little.

"I'm not so sure about that," she answers as she reaches the side of his bed and offers him a hand to pull himself up with. "I think when a plan literally explodes in your face, that's kind of an indication that it was a bad idea."

Steve grits his teeth and forces himself upright, trying to put as little weight on her as possible and ignoring the way his vision goes slightly white around the edges from pain.

"Maybe," he says, and it comes out strained. He holds onto her until his vision starts going back to normal and he's sure he's not going to fall over or pass out. "Or maybe you just don't know what you learned from it yet."

Even though he's not using her for support, he doesn't let go of her hand. "Say goodbye next time," he says. "Maybe you need to. For luck."

Olivia has to brace herself a little, drawing a slow, hissing breath between her teeth, as he pulls himself up. Even with the painkillers, she's pretty sure putting a lot of pressure on her hands isn't a good idea, the way they've been sliced up, but it's only for a moment, and then the pain goes back to a dull throb she can shove to the back of her mind.

She tries for a moment to find a way to argue with him, and finds she can't. Finally, she just smiles faintly and nods. "Well, if I figure it out, I promise I'll let you know." Olivia kind of thinks the lesson might be 'figure out how to not set the room on fire before attempting any other Cortexiphan-fueled stunts', but she's not sure how well she's going to manage that.

She blinks, and looks up to meet his eyes. She'd squeeze his hand if she weren't conscious of how much that would hurt. "Maybe I do. Next time I will. I promise."

He feels a little pinch of relief and sadness, and is immediately distracted by the bandages on her palms. "You are hurt."

Steve turns her hand over in his, worry clear. "Actually hurt, not just scraped up. I wonder..."

He looks at the floor. Steve knows full well how much it would hurt to try and put weight on his feet right now. They'll be well on their way to healed by morning, if he just keeps still, but... "If we can track Thor down, he might have these... There are these stones, I guess, that can heal people. I don't know that Odin let him take any when he left Asgard. We can ask at least."

"It's not as bad as it looks," she protests, though she's getting the feeling by now that she's not going to be winning any arguments here, at least not tonight. She still feels like she has to try. He can barely sit up and he's worried about her.

"And that's... going to have to wait, at least for a little while. They locked us in when they left - I assume that's more about me than you."

He startles at that, and then scowls. "If they really thought you could hurt anything, they wouldn't have left you here with me. If they really didn't trust you."

Or they knew how badly he'd react to finding out they actually locked her up. That thought is extremely discomfiting.

It's about then that he realizes he's still holding her hand and he lets go like it suddenly caught fire itself. "Sorry."

"It's fine."

It's difficult to tell if she means the hand holding or the fact that they're locked in. She pulls her hand back and folds both arms around herself - carefully, to avoid pulling on the bandages on her hands and arms - and glances to the door before she says anything more.

"I can't blame them. In their situation, I'd lock the door too." That's the least she'd do - far less than what they did with every case of someone with abilities they couldn't control. How is she any different, any less dangerous than Nick or James or Sally or any of the others?

"You're my guest," he says. "And it was an accident. Agent Dunham-" He hesitates. "Olivia. You think anyone on the Avengers Initiative would have done differently, in your situation? Hey."

Steve reaches out to touch her arm gently, both because he wants to and because she looks like she needs comforting. He's not sure how much he's allowed to give. "They'll calm down. And when they do, they'll see you were just trying to do what you thought was the right thing."

The touch takes her off guard, and she looks up at him with a flicker of momentary surprise that leaves her expression unguarded, all her careful neutrality vanishing for just an instant. The defenses all go back up a moment later, but not entirely, and she doesn't pull away from the contact.

"Maybe. You'd know better than I would. I'm just not sure that..." She stops, and glances away again, lips pressed together while she wrestles with how to say this - or whether to say it at all. He did save her life, and she knows he's ready to defend her to the others - specifically Stark - as soon as he gets a chance. He probably deserves a little honesty right now.

"The others from the Cortexiphan trial," she says finally. "We only found them because their abilities were... out of their control. No one had ever explained to them what happened, or why these things were happening to them, and... They killed people. All of them, horribly, and mostly by accident. The last time I saw them..."

Olivia pauses and grimaces a little. Before they died. Because she asked them to risk their lives for her, and for the man who'd ruined all their lives in the first place. She sighs and pushes on.

"They'd learned to control it. I never could. I've tried, but it's all tied into feeling and emotion, and I'm..."

Her throat closes for a second, choking off whatever she'd been about to say. She swallows hard, staring at the floor. If she looks at Steve now, he's going to see how scared she is of herself, of what she could do, that she might never go back...

Olivia shakes her head and repeats simply, "I can't control it. And it was one thing when I was just seeing things, or crossing over, because at least then I couldn't hurt anyone but myself. But this..."

He shifts around very slowly, so he's sitting with his feet dangling just off the floor and can take her elbows very gently in his hands as she hugs herself, if only so she knows he's not afraid of her.

"You can," he says. "If they could, you can. I don't doubt it for a second."

More hesitation. Steve finally lets go, his tone gently amused. "Besides, even if you couldn't - which you will - everyone here has been through a much worse than a little fire. We hold up pretty well."

Edited 2011-10-19 21:43 (UTC)

Olivia feels like she might have had this talk before. Peter, Walter, Bell, even Jones... They had faith in her, like Steve does now. She only wishes she could share it.

That last comment gets a soft laugh out of her, though, and she glances up again with a slow smile. "Are you always this optimistic, or is it just for my benefit?"

He has to think about that one. Is he optimistic? If she's mentioning it, he must be. "I don't... give up. I'm not sure I even know how any more."

Steve shrugs, flashing that crooked little grin. "So I guess always."

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