#cntw

Tony can no longer fantasize about a first time with Steve, so he fabricates Steves. He is obsessed with their skin, with the way they style their hair, with all the things that differentiate them from K’arr’n. The false axis of K’arr’n-Steve. The way Steve is when America is absent from him.

The rancid thrill of knowing that Steve has mastered his study of all structural defects in Tony’s chassis.

Steve would not be precious about putting his hands in Tony’s body. Tony doesn’t allow him a great deal of time to explore. He is thrilled at Steve’s initiative, his fingers are deft and sure and careful, like a mechanic. Steve can be a mechanic. Tony is in his office, maybe, an office, all of them run together, he could kneel on the floor -

Steve comes by after an Avengers meeting. They are in the West Coast office, because he and Steve were never there together, so it is untouched imaginary ground. Steve isn’t wearing his gloves and he has the top two clasps on the scale undone. He has his arms crossed, he’s at the window. He’s unhappy about something. Walk with me, Shellhead, Steve says, and they walk into Iron Man’s bungalow which is Steve’s bungalow because Tony’s chest aches less when he cedes everything he has to Steve.

Steve locks the door behind them and crowds Tony up against the wall facing the pool. The amber glass wall, where anyone could look in and see. Sun-warm. There was no sun in New York after the weird particulate cloud went up-

Tony, are you paying attention? Steve touches Tony’s bottom lip with his thumb and Tony goes still and wonders if he will ever feel fear and shame and arousal as separate items ever again and Steve pushes his hand into Tony’s mouth, up to the big joint in his thumb, and Steve looks at Tony’s eyes very seriously and waits to see if Tony’s response will be appropriate and Tony sucks on Steve’s big thumb that tastes like leather.

Why don’t you fix it, Shellhead, Steve says, and he pulls out with a gossamer string of Tony’s saliva and wipes his hand on Tony’s cheek. It’s going to be flaking off his stubble all day.

Keep up, Steve says, and he pushes Tony down with one hand and undoes his belt with the other.

Steve rubs his cock over Tony’s face, just slides it over his slightly parted lips, against his nose. Accept it, Tony thinks. Wear it. Your job is to wear it.

Steve grabs his chin, clamps two fingers on either side of Tony’s jaw like he is prepared to break it. Open, he hisses, and Tony does. Steve spits in his mouth. Coffee, mint. Show me, he says, like it’s come, like it’s an audition. The carpet presses marks into Tony’s knees and Tony thinks Steve could come on the floor and tell Tony to clean it up with his mouth and he would, he would hold Steve’s balls in his mouth for hours if he asked for it, he sticks out his tongue and lets himself drool and he thinks about how fucking hungry he is and how thoroughly he will beg when instructed.

I don’t think you want it, Steve tells him, and green runs up his hand to curl around his bare bicep.

Tony pulls his hand out of his briefs. Barely a trickle. He wipes it on his pubes, then on his stomach, under his shirt. He hurts. Not even hard, not even for a moment. His muscles spasm. His balls are a dull mass of pain. He forces his body to uncurl.

He is so tired of smelling stale, of the cast of arousal. He is so tired of trying to outrun the fucking damage.

His vitakinetis was telling him that his lung was ruptured, that blood was pouring in and drowning him because there was a hole – laceration or several, in fact – destroying the inner equilibrium of his body and turning it in on itself.  There was another gash across his thigh, nicking but not tearing his femoral artery.  He wished it was deeper; femoral arterial bleeds killed quickly.

Will was dying slowly.

He couldn’t move.  His body was strewn like a ragdoll across the protruding roots of a tree, crumpled like a discarded toy – and that was what he was, to the monster that had caught him unawares while he’d been alone, on his way back to camp after visiting Mom for a while.  It hadn’t even bothered to finish him off, just cast him aside and loped away.

Will hadn’t even been able to stick it with an arrow, and his little knife – not a scalpel, scalpels were for saving lives, not taking them, but similar in size and shape because that was the weapon he had the best affinity for – had done little more than score a line of shallow ichor.  There hadn’t been so much as a speck of dust during their short scuffle. It was still at large, still prowling around for demigods to ambush, and part of Will hoped that there weren’t any others nearby.

That part of him was drowned out by the white noise of terror clouding his mind.

He was dying.  He knew he was dying, his powers were not-so-helpfully telling him he was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it. His powers rather helpfully didn’t work on himself; he naturally healed faster than most, but nowhere near fast enough to survive something like this.

He was dying, and his chest was heaving with sharp, vicious sobs that drove broken ribs – all three of them – further and further into his tattered lung.  Pain didn’t even begin to describe the feeling.  On a scale of one to ten it was starting at fifty and jumping up with every spasm but he couldn’t stop it any more than he could hold in the tears that overflowed from his eyes and flooded down his face in saltwater cascades, finding their way into every orifice they could reach.

Blood and tears mingled on his tongue, the mixture choking him as it tried to slide back down his throat even as more blood erupted from his windpipe in weak spurts, driven from his torn lung by the very same heaving sobs.  He couldn’t move to dislodge it, couldn’t even turn his head so that gravity helped the thick liquid leave his throat and pour onto the ground like a neat fountain, rather than the sporadic eruptions that splattered everything from his face and eyes to the ground around him.

Worst of all was the way he could feel his life draining away.  It wasn’t dramatic, not like the bloody show he was putting on, but oh so slow, taking its time and dawdling its way out of his body.  Each sob was only minutely weaker than the last, not noticeable at all if not for Will’s accursed vitakinesis, constantly feeding him information that he couldn’t bear to hear.

I don’t want to die. The thought kept circling around in his mind, overlapping with itself hysterically until the words themselves jumbled into something that ought to be unrecognisable, but Will knew what it was anyway.  I don’t want to die.

He certainly didn’t want to die alone.  He’d always known it was likely – he wasn’t a warrior, his life expectancy had never been high as a battlefield medic, barely proficient with a weapon but scurrying around on the frontlines regardless to keep alive the ones who could fight – but that just made it all the more terrifying.  Ideally, he’d always wanted Nico to be with him, to reassure him and guide him through the transition, because it wouldn’t have been so bad if he could just relax into the experience of the so of Hades, but anyone would have done, really.

Anyone to move his unresponsive, dying body into a position resembling comfort, to ease the pain as much as possible so he didn’t die in agony – so he didn’t die like this, choking on his own rasping breaths as each one pulled him closer and closer to Thanatos in a torture that felt like it would never end.  Anyone to hold his hand, or stroke his hair, or provide any comfort at all against the looming presence.

Usually, Thanatos came quickly.  Too quickly, when Will was trying to save a life and ended up in a tug of war with a god over their soul.  It was typical that when it came to him, Thanatos would dawdle along and take his own, sweet time.  Maybe it was payback for all the times Will had turned him away.  Maybe he’d made an enemy of death and now his adversary’s time to retaliate had come in the cruellest way possible.

I don’t want to die.

Please, just let it end.

Contradicting thoughts, reverberating across each other like a discordant harmony but stemming from the same origin.

His chest was heaving but he wasn’t breathing.  He was choking, crying ugly tears and gasping for air that couldn’t make it into his lungs because blood had nearly filled the space to capacity, and part of him thought that he should have suffocated to death by now.

Help me, he thought wildly at the cosmos.  The words couldn’t make it into existence, throttled into submission by the breathless and flooded gasps he could feel but couldn’t hear.  Not that it mattered when there was no-one to hear, because he was alone and dying and not even the monster had cared enough to stick around or put him out of his misery.  Somebody, anybody, please.  Help me.  I don’t want to die.  Please, just let it end.  Let it be over.

The cosmos didn’t answer. Of course it didn’t.  Why would it?  Why would anything care about a single demigod who couldn’t even defend himself from one monster and turned into a weeping, appalling mess at the prospect of his own death?

His vision was the first thing to leave him, colour fading in extended increments of time until the only thing left was grey, which itself hazed over like waves encroaching on the Sound at Camp Half-Blood, taking their time to ebb ever closer and consume the sand in taunting washes.  One sense down gave the other four permission to sharpen, and what had been the faint tang of copper and salt in his mouth became rusted metal that had never managed to escape the ocean.  The hazy, too-familiar scent of blood became an overpowering stench.  His body reached a hundred out of ten, and somehow still found the space to focus on the way the roots of the tree were digging in awkwardly, lumps of stubborn nature that wouldn’t move for anything, and certainly not a dying demigod.  Rasping breaths ending in suffocating gurgles as air met blood and neither willingly gave ground on the battlefield of Will’s throat grew clearer even though each encounter was a little less powerful, a little more waned as his strength faded.

Nico, he thought desperately, but neither of them were telepathic and the cry never left the confines of his mind.  Why wasn’t his boyfriend with him?  Nico had felt Jason’s death, surely – surely – he’d feel Will’s?  Why wasn’t he there, making sure that Will’s final journey to the Underworld went smoothly, and not like this?  Nico, please.

Nico didn’t come. No-one came.

He was alone.  He was dying alone, draining away agonisingly slowly with no agency to accelerate or prevent it, and he needed someone.  Anyone.

Mom, he whimpered in his mind, knowing that she wouldn’t know what had happened, would assume that he was safely on his way back to Camp and not a shattered mess of flesh, bones and blood barely an hour away from her.  Mom.  And then, because he was scared, because he wasn’t thinking straight because if he had been he’d have known it was a terrible idea, Dad.

He was alone.  He knew he was alone, no matter the wishful thinking and desperate begging that couldn’t even escape the confines of his mind to reach the ears he wished were in earshot.  His vision was gone, all grey and black and no coherency to any shapes that blossomed beyond them, but he knew he was alone, dying alone.

The touches on his body were trembling, so feather-light he was certain his mind was playing tricks on himself, frantically trying to fake someone else’s presence.  It was a deception he was desperate to believe, a lie to himself right at the end, but Will had never been good at lying and couldn’t quite let himself fall into the fantasy no matter how much he ached to.

The murmuring sounded familiar, but it wasn’t murmuring at all.  Just the breeze passing through the leaves of the tree whose roots he was crumpled upon, making them dance and whisper to each other.

Weightlessness finally set in, his soul detaching from the mortal form that had housed it for so long and escaping gravity’s unrelenting grasp at last.  It felt like he was being buoyed up, carried in a cradle of warmth as the pain ebbed away, unable to follow him when he no longer had nerves to be lit on fire.  In the distance, he could hear songs, like the choirs of heaven Christians insisted existed, even though the dead went down below – or at least the demigod dead did, Will on the last crest before joining that number.  The music was soft, the tune familiar and inviting. Soothing.

Borne in a swathe of warmth, serenaded by a melody that promised everything would be okay, that he didn’t have to be scared anymore, comforts that he clung to and tried so desperately to believe, Will faded.