Chapter Text
The ground drops and Tony feels himself fall for only a split second before his back collides with the floor and he slides down, digging his feet into the ground to stop his descent.
The floor - and the entire maze with it - has tilted sideways, like a table not completely level. The slope isn’t too large, but it’s not small either. Tony could probably try to climb back up if he was willing to fall back down a couple times. “What the fuck was that?”
There’s a noise of disapproval instead of an answer, and Tony’s heard that disapproval directed at him too many times to not realize that the noise is coming from Rogers, who, of course, he had to get stuck with in this hellish maze. It’s not bad enough that he and the kid got separated - the kid he was supposed to be protecting for God’s sake - but he’s also stuck with the absolute last person he’d like to be stuck with right now, and that includes fucking Dumbledore or whatever the hell his name is.
He really, really can’t catch a break.
That doesn’t even mention the fact that they’re even here in the first place. Here to suffer for his crimes? Really? He thinks that he’s suffered enough, what with the nuke into space thing, and the constant nightmares, and the nights after nights doing nothing but building gadgets to help the team, and being tortured in a cave, and the chronic pain from the arc reactor, and the loss of JARVIS, and Obie’s betrayal, and more than that besides.
And that’s just him, who knows how much trauma everyone in this room has combined?
So yes, he does think it’s just a little unfair that they’ve been put here to just to be hurt considering they’ve already been hurt far too much.
When does he ever get what he wants, though? He has to keep pushing, to find a way out, if not for him, then for Peter. It’s with this in mind that he attempts to push himself to his feet and fails. He curses under his breath and moves to try again when-
“Tony,” his beautiful, beautiful, amazing, stupendous Rhodey says, stretching out a hand to pull him to his feet. He and his mechanical, finally fully functional, feet are already standing, and there’s nothing more comforting right now than seeing his platypus standing protectively in front of Tony, blocking him from Rogers’s view (and Rogers from Tony’s).
He takes the hand and pulls him up, squeezing it gratefully in lieu of thanks. Rhodey, as always, as always, gets it, and smiles back. He doesn’t move from his spot directly between Rogers and Tony.
“Does anyone else hear that?” Peter’s voice says from far away - further away from where he was last time, and there’s a panicked feeling in his chest that says he needs to get up and find Peter in this maze right now, who knows what might happen with Tony not there to protect him?
“No?” a second voice comes from next to Peter. Strange. Tony might not like the guy, might not trust him with Peter (I will not hesitate to let either of you die), but he’s also seen how powerful he is firsthand, and now that there isn’t a Time Stone to protect, he feels a bit better knowing that someone powerful will be there to protect Peter (what else could the ”he’s with me, Stark,” mean, especially in that oddly reassuring tone?)
“It’s like . . . something’s rolling?”
“I can hear it too,” Barnes says, just barely loud enough for Tony to hear him, somewhere across the room from Peter. And while Tony would much rather be in a group with Barnes than with Rogers - he’s come to terms with Barnes killing his parents, knows it’s not his fault, even if it took a while. Strangely enough, looking at the man who (unwillingly) killed his parents is much easier than the man that kept it from him while living under his roof and (willingly) almost killed him later. He’s pretty sure it should be the other way around, but he’s already so fucked up that this really is nothing compared to, well, everything else - he’s also glad that Peter isn’t in a group with Barnes. There’s no telling what will happen to them in here, and the chances of Barnes being hypnotized again are just a little too much for him to be comfortable with.
Tony strains his ears to hear what Barnes and Peter are hearing - he always listens to the hints Peter’s enhanced hearing bring, they’ve almost never been wrong - and everyone else who is at least somewhat aware of either Barnes’s or Peter’s enhancements also fall silent. The rest of the group follows along, and there’s dead silence in the room for a minute before everyone who isn’t enhanced can also hear the odd rolling sound, exactly how Peter described.
The ground tilts again, this time to the opposite side, and Tony lurches to the side, except this time the floor doesn’t stop tilting, angling this way and that like those small plastic maze games he used to keep himself entertained with during particularly boring classes-
It hits him a second before he sees it: they are in the maze.
He steadies himself with a hand on the wall, standing up just in time to see the top of a supersized marble, probably larger than the Hulk, pass by them, rolling on the other side of the wall he’s leaning on, a wall which very conveniently is hiding-
“Fuck! Fuck, shit, dammit!” It’s the raccoon-esque creature that Tony had seen Quill and the rest of his space idiots speaking to before, well, this.
“Is this some sort of game?” Thor’s voice comes, although instead of staying fixed in one place as it was last time, it’s clear that he’s running, if the patter of footsteps is any indication.
There are cries for clarification from the others before they are introduced to their very own problems, and Tony’s group is no exception. The floor keeps twisting different angles, and Tony skids on the floor and almost directly into Rogers no less than three times as their group - consisting of Rogers, a strangely quiet Quill, Tony’s wonderful Snugglebear, Mantis (is that her name?), and himself - runs from their very own supersized marble.
Tony’s mind has narrowed down as it normally does during any sort of battle. He doesn’t have his suit - it looks like the nanites have been removed from the piece of plastic on his chest, which is unnerving and leaves him feeling uncomfortably exposed - but he still has his brain, and he uses it to try and think of any way they could stop this, any way they could maybe make it out of this alive and okay and victorious-
“There has to be a way out of this maze!” Quill says, panting, next to him, full speed ahead only to slow down as the ground below them tilts forward. The ball behind them speeds up.
“No, we need to find the others,” Rogers disagrees, the opposite of Quill, looking for all the world like he’s walking through the compound for a snack. He barely reacts as the ground tilts with the curve of the wall, while Tony and Rhodey, and Quill and Mantis steady each other before running on.
“What? While running for our lives? Are you insane?” Rhodey snaps from his other side, the same time that Mantis says,
“We will not be able to find them while we are being chased!”
“We can’t leave anyone behind!” Rogers says, stupid no man left behind policy kicking in (where was it when he was alone and dying by his hand in Siberia?)
“Look, we’re not leaving anyone behind,” Tony snaps. “No one is alone. Everyone’s with some sort of group. Our group needs to find a way to survive this challenge so we can survive all of this shit!”
Rogers still looks like someone forced him to swallow a lemon. Tony rolls his eyes, about to snap some more vitriol at Rogers, only for Quill to step in.
“Everyone else is fine, but we’re not about to be!”
“Through here!” Rhodey says suddenly, turning sharply right just as the floor tilts left. He practically throws himself into the path on the right while the ball rolls left, and Tony promptly follows suit. Quill and Rogers do the same, and Mantis lands on Tony, attempting to pick himself up, as she jumps. Rogers, of course, lands on his feet.
“There has to be a way out,” Mantis says, her panicked tone in her dreamy voice so starkly wrong. She’s looking at mostly Quill as she speaks, and Quill steps immediately into the role of leader at Mantis’s urging.
“We should go to the center. That’s the point of a maze, right?” The maze lurches to the left again, and Tony grabs on to the edge of the end of the wall closest to him as everyone else braces their feet against the angle.
Rogers, apparently, is still trying to figure out a way to get their large group back together. Tony might be a little tempted to agree with him - he might be glad for Strange’s help, but he’d certainly rather protect Peter himself - if he didn’t know that there was no way they’d be able to find each other in the maze and escape being run over by the oversized marbles chasing them, all with no method of communication or way to know if everyone else had the same goal as they did. “We should try to find everyone else. We take this on as a group.”
Tony sends him his very best annoyed look, which is very good, after years and years of practicing it (usually to use on Rhodey, honestly, he had his press face for everyone else). “What is this, then, if not a group?”
“Look, we might find everyone else at the center, okay?” Quill says, frustrated, obviously not knowing what he’s getting into as he disagrees with Captain America himself. “There’s no way of knowing if we’ll find everyone else in this maze, anyway.”
Rogers narrows his eyes. “But we need to take that chance. Who knows what trouble the others will be in without us to help him - them - out?”
Him. Of course, the elder wants to find his fellow elder, Barnes.
“I don’t think they’ll absolutely need Captain America’s help getting themselves out of trouble,” Rhodey says dryly. “They’re not helpless.”
Quill and Rogers look like they’re about to really start arguing, so Tony cuts in, to make everything worse, of course. The floor lurches again as he begins to speak, and he tries his hardest to stay steady as he makes his point.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go to the center at all,” he says, and both Quill and Rogers immediately try to interject, but Rhodey always has his back, and glares them both into submission (he’s doing a better job at remaining steady, too, somehow, which makes him look much more intimidating.) “If this is a game, why would they make the win that obvious and easy? ‘Reach the middle’?”
“Easy?” Quill says incredulously. “This is easy?” As if to prove his point, the floor jerks violently, and this time Tony stumbles straight into the wall.
“The solution is obvious, I mean!” he says as he peels himself off. “What if it’s a trap, reaching the center? We should go to the end, there’s bound to be some sort of exit there, right?”
Rogers and Quill both look at him doubtfully, but Rhodey nods slowly, face screwed up as he thinks. “Normally your ideas aren’t the best-” Tony scoffs. He knows that what Rhodey says is the least of his worries when right now they’re facing what is probably going to eventually be certain death, but the sense of normalcy is comforting. “-that makes sense.”
Quill turns to Mantis, presumably to ask her to back him up, only for her eyes to be fixed on a point around the wall that Tony can’t see. Then she screams, “It’s coming!”
Tony knows what it is immediately and so does everyone else, so everyone is quick to follow Mantis on her heels as she runs. This time, she leads the way, pressing on to the right no matter where they go and where the marble follows them (it seems hell-bent on following them now, Tony wonders if that means Thanos successfully ran over whoever he was chasing last time).
Quill is back to panting as he asks, “Wait - where are we going?”
“To the outer ring!” Mantis says over her shoulder.
Quill looks at her back, scandalised. “Mantis! I thought we were going to the middle?! Because you’re supposed to back me up?!”
“But heading to the outer ring is the better option!”
“Suck it, Quill," Tony says quietly, and is surprised but not upset (is actually quite pleased) when Quill hears and looks at him, offended, and mutters in an equally quiet voice.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Wait,” Rogers cuts in before Tony can retaliate. “Can you guys hear that?”
The only thing Tony can hear is the sound of the marble gaining on them, his heart pounding in his ears, and the skid of his feet every time the floor shifts angles. Slowly, though, he can hear a group of footsteps that aren’t any of theirs, and then shouting:
“Move faster, it’s gaining!”
“I’m moving as fast as I can your highness, we’re not all supersoldiers-”
“Jesus fuck-”
Tony realizes who it is a second before Steve calls out, “Bucky?!”
“Steve?” he says over the wall of the maze the two groups are running against.
“Yeah, and Sam Wilson, remember me?” comes the second voice.
Rogers starts to yell something else over the wall - another thing Tony is stupidly jealous of, he can’t imagine yelling anything right now, a little bit too busy trying to breathe as he runs - but T’Challa’s smoothly accented voice overpowers whatever he was about to say. “This way!”
Their footsteps fade away, and Rogers is left yelling, “Bucky? Bucky!”
Tony honestly can’t believe the amount of times in the short amount of time they’ve been here he’s wanted to smack the captain, but thankfully, Rhodey cuts in before he can completely ruin Rogers with his words. “Guys, we kinda need to move a lot faster.”
And it’s true. The slope is tilted downwards the direction they’re running, and as they run forward, the slope tilts forward even more causing the ball to go faster, but them to go slower, lest they fall down the rapidly steeping slope.
“Look, there is an exit!” Mantis says, pointing down the aisle they’re about to be crushed flat in.
At the end of the hall they’re in, there’s a dead end, but a small gap at the bottom of it, big enough to slide through if Tony was on his stomach, although it wouldn’t be too tight of a squeeze for him - maybe for Rogers, though.
Quill looks forward at the gap, then back at the ball which is nearly on top of them by now, before yelling, “Slide!” at them, and throwing himself on his stomach. The slope is still getting steeper, so he slides down easily, despite the friction.
Rogers lets out a resigned sigh, before copying Quill’s movement. He looks ridiculous, and so do Rhodey and Mantis when they follow suit. Tony’s not doing that (he wants to say it’s because Tony Stark has a better sense of style than that, but it’s really because the arc reactor, although now nothing but a nano particle housing unit, could still cause some damage to his fragile chest). Instead, he leans himself down on his back and pushes himself forward, and he slides down easily as the slope is almost vertical now, as if whoever is controlling this damn maze is willing the ball to move faster before they disappear out of it’s reach (that’s likely exactly what is happening.)
Being round, the marble would have gotten to them already had the distance between the marble and them not been so large, and safety not been so close. Quill and Rogers have already disappeared (Rogers with a bit of struggle, Tony noted with some amount of satisfaction). Rhodey and Mantis disappear as he watches, and seconds after he slips through the exit himself, the ball collides with the wall with a thud!
Tony assumes that the maze recalibrates itself to go chase someone else, but he can’t say for sure, because the exit has deposited them on a much lower, but thankfully 100% horizontal surface. Tony peels himself off the floor, thankful he hadn’t crushed anyone under him (he can’t say the same for Mantis, fall pillowed by the glorious Captain America).
The room they’re in is completely bare except for a single lightbulb hanging down from the ceiling, and a door on the wall opposite the one they had entered from - although, now that Tony looks back on it, the small gap through which they had fallen is sealed. No going back.