Bruce Banner has gone off the radar, Tony Stark has retired to the country with Pepper, Thor has returned to Asgard, Clint Barton has retreated back to his family and the world believes that they are safe once more. But where peace reigns, chaos is...
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Steve awoke to the beating drums, screaming and the muffled, echoed, rushing sensation of being underwater. It took him longer than he cared to admit to figure out that the percussion resonating through his body was his heartbeat and that the feeling of being underwater was caused by his blood streaming through his veins. Or maybe it's something else in my veins. The moment he realised that it was his own body making the sounds, they subsided to only gentle murmurs at the edge of his consciousness. But the screaming was another matter. Considering everything though, he had woken up to worse.
He sat up slowly, a slight pain in his temple but nothing he hadn't dealt with before, and gingerly set his feet onto the ground. There was no one in the room with him. He looked down at himself, checking to see if the son of a gun Montgomery had done anything to him. After about a minute of inspection, Steve concluded that apart from being undressed while unconscious, nothing else had happened to him. Whoever had handled him after they knocked him out had changed him into a hospital gown and brought him into the surgically white room he was in now.
Natasha.
His head snapped up and his gaze automatically swept across the room again even though he'd already scouted it out.
Where are you?
Suddenly, there was a clamour of some sort. He couldn't pinpoint exactly where it was but his senses told him it was forward and to the right. He walked towards the direction of the sound. There was no door so he planned on just punching the wall until the hole he made was big enough for him to walk through. Without hesitating, Steve planted his feet, squared his shoulders and punched. The wall crumbled as if it were nothing. He stepped over the rubble without giving it more than a passing frown and then continued down the now cleared hallway. The closer he got, the more obvious the commotion became until finally he rounded a corner and came face to face with one of the worst things that could have caused the noise.
It was Bruce, fully hulked out, and tearing apart a door that Steve could see led to a room full of people. Steve ran forward, ready to do whatever it took to bring his angry team mate down. Just as he yelled out, Banner turned around and Steve's feet and sequence of thought stuttered to a stop. Whenever Bruce got angry, his eyes acquired a green tint but this Hulk had perfectly calm, deep brown eyes. What did they do to you, Bruce? Steve knew the saying of gift horses and mouths but he was still suspicious. Nothing good ever came out of experiments where one tried to improve oneself. Steve forgot to factor his own transformation into this conclusion.
"Banner, can you hear me?"
In response, the Hulk roared and tore another wall down. When the dust cleared, Steve could see the people's faces outlined in dust. Now that there was nothing between them, he realised that they weren't scientists either – they seemed more like prisoners. Human experimentation. The thought leapt to mind unbidden but the thought had come and so there it stayed. He didn't know how he knew, maybe it was the fear in their eyes when Banner had been breaking the wall down, maybe it was the sheer number of them in their small, bare beds or maybe it was the dim flicker of hope in their eyes, but Steve felt the familiar surge of protectiveness he always felt when defending civilians.
