What Wicked Lurks Within (Avengers x Reader)

Chapter 5

Tony decided on a room and immediately regretted it. It was the furthest from the bathroom, had no windows and to top it all off, had a painting hanging close to the ceiling which was horrifying in every sense of the word.

It featured a decrepit blasphemy with hollow eyes. Whatever had once constituted said eyes flowed down its face in blood and grume. Tony observed, accompanied by numbness in fingertips, that the hollow orbs seemed to follow him as he moved. "What kind of psychopaths lived here?" Restlessness rising in his being, Tony left the room to be literally anywhere else.

He strolled down the stairs and entered the first room he saw lit. 'Even  Jamie Lanister gets a window.' Tony despised the man, his room and his goddamn window, "You got a decent room. At least has a window, mine has none." Bucky turned around with such intensity, one would have assumed his life had been threatened. "Yeah, it's paradise." He paused for a second, collecting himself. "Do we...is there anything to eat?"

Bucky's wavering tone got Tony a little worried. "Yeah, there's food in the hall." He intended to ask more, anything along the lines of whether or not his teammate was feeling well. 'You look like you have seen a ghost.' But his thoughts were interrupted by a ringing scream. "HE'S NOT HERE! YOU SAID HE WOULD BE HERE!"

"Is that..." Bucky started a sentence that Tony completed, "Wanda? Yep, I'm gonna see what's up with her." Following the scream, he bolted back upstairs, battle strategies and evacuation plans running through his head with equal efficiency. What he saw was beyond anything his mind was willing to take in. The trail ended in the very corridor where he  had seen that thing; the thing that made itself look like his daughter. The daughter who had not even been granted life yet.

Then there was Wanda - crying and shaking, screaming at the wind. "Hey, hey, hey. What's wrong? Who are you yelling at?" He caught her in his arms just as she hit the floor, softening her fall. "Tony, this house..." Wanda failed at being coherent, "We can't..." Her eyes focused somewhere behind him and the words died with a whimper.

"Honey, you are running a fever. It's a miracle all that sweat isn't boiling off of you." Tony stood up with Wanda in his arms. If he wasn't in a blind panic himself, he would have noticed the sheer terror on the girl's face. "Alright, let's put some food in you and get you into bed."

Having cared for Wanda, Tony had to go back to his room. Something was out of place. The painting, the abhorrent one - the thing in it had moved. Ever so slightly, as if it had left it's position in his absence and taken it back before he returned. It's hollow eyes still seemed to follow him as he paced back and forth.

He wished he could leave, but where would he go in the middle of the night? Something must have heard his prayer, something cruel, because he did get to leave the room for the reason that Natasha had smashed Steve's head with a poker.

-

When Tony awoke from a void-like dreamless sleep, the day had descended well into the afternoon. The first inconsistency to catch his notice as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes was a window very high up on the wall, close to the ceiling.

Tony bolted up. In his perspective, everything else was absorbed into the background, all that existed was him and the window - the God forsaken window. There was no doubt in his mind that the window was not there yesterday. That was not even the worst part. The worst part was when his brain processed the input and screamed,  'There was never a painting, you idiot! It was always a window and something was peeping through!'

He finally had an explanation as to why the painting made him feel so uneasy. An explanation he did not want. With a shaky heart and equally as shaky limbs, Tony dragged a table under the window and perched himself on it. Looking through the opening in partial darkness, his eyes made out a room, a large one, but nothing else. His face scrunched up in several lines. "What?"

Confusion reigned over Tony psyche. There seemed to be no point of entry or exit to the ginormous room he was seeing, maybe except the window he was looking through. He also circled around outside, only to come across solid, sound walls. The mysterious room was not supposed to be there, the anatomy of the house did not allow it. Lest the house was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. That made no sense.

"Fuck it." Tony gave up on everyone and everything all at once, hoisted himself up by the windowframe and wiggled over to the flipside. He landed abruptly, barely preserving his head. As soon as he was up on his own two feet, an unequivocal sense of foreboding seized him. Something was ever-present - something ominous, something up to no good.

He craned his head to look back at the window. Climbing up from this side was indubitably not an option, so Tony did what he always did - he sought for a different way. In this particular case, a different way out. He scanned the room that was not supposed to be there. It was twice, possibly thrice the size of the hall downstairs. "Man, this house is weird." His breath came out in a puff of mist.

Hollow eyes followed his every move and it was only a matter of time before Tony could hear it breathe. Long, deep, sinister breaths. It was behind him now, he could feel it. Every inch of his body froze in fear. Despite all prudence, he turned around with all the swiftness of a rusty screw and found himself staring into two red voids spewing out blood and flesh.

Tony felt a sudden drop in temperature of his wrist, more than before, to the effect of being dipped in liquid nitrogen. The skin felt like it would burn. He looked down and a scream died in his throat. The thing had wrapped its freezing, decomposed fingers around his wrist and was tugging. He ripped his hand from the demonic grip and ran. Deep down, he knew it was fruitless, but the thirst for survival vetoed prudence.

Devoid of any and all sense of direction, he ran until his foot caught on something and he landed flat on the floor. The fall had little to do with the tripping and more with the absolute fear coursing through him. Tony groaned as he sat up, mildly relieved, for the thing following him was no longer in sight. Curiously, he turned to find out what had caused his fall and the fresh-felt relief abandoned him.

There, on the floor, lay Wanda - pale and cold. Her neck was sliced clean more than halfway through, leaving no question about her life. Her hand, the hand that was bloody, tightly clasped a razor blade. Tony's entire being stiffened. An awry tear slipped out of his eye. Grief was an emotion the house allowed ancillary to fright. Fear was second to none.

Wanda's almost decapitated head open its eyes. They were hollow, like the thing he had been seeing, blood seeping as tears. It opened its mouth and let out the most macabre screech, worse than any sound imaginable.

Tony squeezed is his eyes shut, covered his ears and screamed. He screamed because he was afraid, harrowed by mortal fear. He screamed in the hopes of blocking out the shrill, demonic screech. He screamed so someone would hear him and come for rescue. He screamed, because he had finally found his voice.

When the screeching ceased and Tony's ears no longer threatened to bleed, he lowered his hands. His eyes apprehensively opened to register the fact that he was no longer present in the large, ominous room. He was sprawled, along with Wanda's lifeless body, in the corridor where had seen her last night. Also where he had seen the thing that wanted him to believe it was his child.

"Tony, it's alright. I'm here!" Steve arrived, shield at the ready, followed by everybody else. Relief washed over Tony with such vehemence that he let himself go, leaning heavily against the wall as his lungs made up for all the lost breath. Sam lowered himself to the floor, appalled eyes transfixed on Wanda's mutilated form. "What the hell?"

"She killed herself, just like Rose George." The conclusion was largely based on the soft, delicate rose pendant looped around the stub that used to be Wanda's neck and your voice would not even have been audible if it wasn't for the wretched silence reigning the air.

Natasha's voice wavered as a leaf does in merciless winds. "She wasn't offered a choice."