Margaret "Peggy" Carter (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
warsoutthere) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
clandestinement2023-07-02 12:36 am
warsoutthere) wrote in clandestinement2023-07-02 12:36 am
End of the world - for @worthallthis
For a moment, it had almost seemed like they'd won.
Won at great cost, because the thing that had swarmed out of the portal deep in the Wetterstein mountains had been all razored tentacles and venom-tipped fangs in too many mouths, and it had gone through the village surrounding the keep like a hot knife through butter, leaving those who weren't just torn apart rotting on their feet. Not the walking dead, but the tortured dying.
It had gone through half their strike team, too, before they finally forced it back into the portal, and shattered the strange, writhing statues that had kept it open.
For a moment, it had almost seemed like they'd won. But the creature wasn't a weapon, as they'd assumed, meant to slaughter HYDRA's enemies, along with anyone else within tentacle's reach. It was a vessel.
And all that suffering, all that death, concentrated in one boiling mass of mouths and limbs and hate, was the key to a door that had never been meant to be opened.
Ninety seconds for relief. And then the horrid buzzing had sounded from the bowels of the keep, burrowing into the minds of the remaining members of the strike force, turning them on one another in pain and terror.
She and Barnes had been immune.
They'd been immune, too, to the wave of sickly, gangrenous light that had errupted in the wake of the sound, twisting flesh and liquefying bone and folding stone and metal and wood at impossible angles. When they'd finally made it out of the keep, they'd found the mountains folded around them, strange curving arches and spires forming a maze of razor-edged rock. It had taken four days to escape.
It's been nearly a month now, and they've yet to find anywhere untouched. The wave of chaos had lessened as it sped away from the keep, but it had still taken the better part of two weeks before they found the first survivor whose mind was intact enough to merit being referred to as such.
They've collected others since, and their small band is now huddled for the day in a collection of buildings that had once formed what Peggy is certain was a charming high street. It's rather less charming now, walls scorched and windows boarded, letting in as little light as possible. It's daylight that's dangerous now, as though the sun itself has been infected, and though the transformations are slower, the madness creeping, exposure is cumulative.
Peggy's still immune. And so she's retreated up to the rooftop of one of the occupied buildings, to what had once been a rooftop garden and is now a tangle of vines the colour of rotting blood that seem to shift in her peripheral vision, though whenever she looks at them head-on, they're in the same position as they had been the last time. A dull yellow mist chokes the streets, obscuring the view she'd hoped to get of the town; that it doesn't rise above the second storey of the buildings is disconcerting. Somewhere in the mist, several streets over, something howls, the sound rising at the end in something that sounds half like laughter, and half like screaming.
Won at great cost, because the thing that had swarmed out of the portal deep in the Wetterstein mountains had been all razored tentacles and venom-tipped fangs in too many mouths, and it had gone through the village surrounding the keep like a hot knife through butter, leaving those who weren't just torn apart rotting on their feet. Not the walking dead, but the tortured dying.
It had gone through half their strike team, too, before they finally forced it back into the portal, and shattered the strange, writhing statues that had kept it open.
For a moment, it had almost seemed like they'd won. But the creature wasn't a weapon, as they'd assumed, meant to slaughter HYDRA's enemies, along with anyone else within tentacle's reach. It was a vessel.
And all that suffering, all that death, concentrated in one boiling mass of mouths and limbs and hate, was the key to a door that had never been meant to be opened.
Ninety seconds for relief. And then the horrid buzzing had sounded from the bowels of the keep, burrowing into the minds of the remaining members of the strike force, turning them on one another in pain and terror.
She and Barnes had been immune.
They'd been immune, too, to the wave of sickly, gangrenous light that had errupted in the wake of the sound, twisting flesh and liquefying bone and folding stone and metal and wood at impossible angles. When they'd finally made it out of the keep, they'd found the mountains folded around them, strange curving arches and spires forming a maze of razor-edged rock. It had taken four days to escape.
It's been nearly a month now, and they've yet to find anywhere untouched. The wave of chaos had lessened as it sped away from the keep, but it had still taken the better part of two weeks before they found the first survivor whose mind was intact enough to merit being referred to as such.
They've collected others since, and their small band is now huddled for the day in a collection of buildings that had once formed what Peggy is certain was a charming high street. It's rather less charming now, walls scorched and windows boarded, letting in as little light as possible. It's daylight that's dangerous now, as though the sun itself has been infected, and though the transformations are slower, the madness creeping, exposure is cumulative.
Peggy's still immune. And so she's retreated up to the rooftop of one of the occupied buildings, to what had once been a rooftop garden and is now a tangle of vines the colour of rotting blood that seem to shift in her peripheral vision, though whenever she looks at them head-on, they're in the same position as they had been the last time. A dull yellow mist chokes the streets, obscuring the view she'd hoped to get of the town; that it doesn't rise above the second storey of the buildings is disconcerting. Somewhere in the mist, several streets over, something howls, the sound rising at the end in something that sounds half like laughter, and half like screaming.
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"Scratch that," she says, voice gone a little bit thin. The thing that hauls itself out from beneath the car is - looks - like several people fused together; she counts at least three heads, and far too many limbs, all pitted with sores where droplets of the venom had landed.
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