Tony was jolted awake by a fresh agony.
The scavenger who had captured him, a creature named Mitchell, threw him roughly onto the rocky ground. The uneven stones pressed into his broken arm, which now looked less like a limb and more like a snapped branch held together by a few stubborn threads of skin and sinew.
A cold sweat beaded on his forehead as he ground his teeth together to stifle a scream. The dust on the ground immediately caked to his damp face. The sharp, searing pain gradually gave way to a terrifying numbness, as if his left hand had ceased to exist, replaced by a heavy, lifeless weight hanging from his shoulder. He glanced down and saw that the entire arm had turned a sickening shade of black, swollen with necrotic blood. The sight made his head spin.
Even in his delirious state, Tony knew with absolute clarity that if he didn't get help, the limb was lost. His life would likely follow soon after.
He tried to call for help, but his eyes swam, only focusing on a pair of feet that had stopped before him. A Sakaaran with blue-gray skin looked down at him, then glared at the scavengers with undisguised dissatisfaction.
"Mitchell, what is this garbage you've brought me?"
Even after Sakaar entered its new era under Ben's rule, the scavenger trade persisted. The planet's vast junkyards were still there, filled with both trash and treasure. A lucky find, turned over to the imperial capital, could make one rich overnight. But by any standard, past or present, a creature like Tony Stark was worthless. He had no obvious special abilities and a crippled arm. He was useless for the arena and even more useless for the mines. No one would buy him.
A year or two ago, he might have had some value. He could have been butchered and served up as a rare meal to break the monotony of the local diet. But now, the Plumbers' laws governed Sakaar. Any creature with demonstrable intelligence was strictly off the menu. Besides, life had improved. Even scavengers ate well now; with the planet revitalized, grain and livestock were plentiful. No one would risk eating an unknown alien. Who knew what diseases it might carry, or if its flesh was toxic? This soft, pale creature looked like it had been pumped full of chemicals anyway.
"You've wasted a trip! I'm not spending a single credit on a cripple!" the mine owner, a Sakaaran named Baker, declared. He shook his head coldly, his eyes sweeping over Tony without a shred of mercy. "This one can't work, and I'd still have to feed him. It's a complete waste! The prisoners I have are ten times stronger. You shouldn't have bothered bringing him here."
"You can't say that, Baker," Mitchell whined, scratching at his messy hair, which looked as if it were teeming with lice. "I was already out there, couldn't come back with nothing… Look, I'm already here… How about this? Forget the credits. Just give me a bag of Amber Oki fruit. A straight trade." He looked desperate. "If not, we can just feed him to the slag-worms. He fell out of a wormhole anyway. If he dies, he dies."
"A bag of Amber Oki fruit…" The gray-skinned Sakaaran pinched his chin, feigning reluctance. "Fine. But Mitchell, next time you find someone with some muscle, you bring them to me first."
"Of course, of course…"
Tony heard their voices through a haze of pain. His vision was still blurry, but he understood enough. His life, for the moment, had been saved. He lifted his head as their footsteps approached. Mitchell the scavenger and Baker the mine owner. This, he realized, was the man he would be working for.
No matter what he paid, now that he's bought me, he won't let me die, Tony reasoned, a sliver of his old confidence returning. This is my chance. Demonstrate my value. Get an equal dialogue.
His intelligence, his true talent, would not betray him. He would find a way out. He just needed to seize this opportunity, and maybe, just maybe, he could use their power to contact the Plumbers, contact Ben, and save the Earth. His mind felt increasingly foggy, but his thoughts remained sharp.
As the two aliens loomed over him, he opened his mouth, his voice weak and hoarse. "Help me… I can help you… I am an engineer…"
He was cut off before he could finish.
Baker's foot shot out, kicking Tony squarely in the left shoulder. The impact sent him rolling across the ground like a discarded toy. He came to a stop sprawled out like a dead dog, his mangled left arm twisted at an unnatural angle. Then, Baker picked up a huge, rust-pitted axe, raising it high above his head. The shadow of the blade fell across Tony's pain-wracked face.
"You already work for me," Baker sneered. "You are my property!"
He swung the axe down.
Dirty blood erupted. A mangled thing, no better than a twist of dough, flew through the air. An all-consuming agony exploded from Tony's shoulder and spread through his entire body. He curled into a ball, his right hand instinctively reaching for the wound, only to find nothing there. There was only a torrent of blood, instantly soaking his tattered shirt red. A raw, broken scream tore from his throat.
Worse than the physical torment was the psychological shock. In that single, brutal moment, he had lost his arm. Forever.
"Annoying thing," Baker spat in disgust. He pulled out a bottle that looked like an insecticide canister and sprayed a stream of cold, white mist onto the stump. The bleeding stopped instantly. He turned and barked an order to his men. "Get him an arm from the scrap heap, then throw him in the mine!"
He kicked Tony's severed arm aside with a disgusted "tsk." From the shadows, a creature like a hyena lunged forward, its mouth full of fangs. It snapped up the arm and devoured it, bone and all, in a few gruesome bites.
Tony could only watch, helpless, as his own hand disappeared down the creature's gullet.
Several red-skinned Sakaarans grabbed him by the legs and dragged him away. He couldn't even form a complete sentence, but the look of pure, undiluted hatred he gave Baker needed no translation.
He was thrown into a cold, damp cell in the mine, crowded with other prisoners. There were no beds, only a layer of straw spread across the floor like a pigsty. A rusty, scavenged arm had been crudely bolted to his left shoulder, making him look like a low-budget version of the Winter Soldier.
His body was on fire. He didn't know if it was an immune response, tetanus from the rust, or just a massive infection, but a searing pain consumed the left side of his body. He wished he could pass out, but the agony and the burning hatred kept his mind terrifyingly clear. How could he, Tony Stark, have ever suffered such a humiliation? Even the terrorists in the Middle East had treated him with a modicum of value. This gray-skinned brute treated him like a slave from centuries past.
Of course, a rational part of Tony's brain knew that by cutting off the arm, Baker had probably saved his life. The infection would have killed him. But the arm could have been healed. To have it so brutally and casually hacked off… it was a descent from hope to despair so rapid he couldn't process it.
He leaned against the corner of the cell, paralyzed by pain, watching the other prisoners from the corner of his eye. As Tony observed his new life, the images were being synchronized back on Earth.
Seeing Tony Stark tortured, maimed, and thrown into a squalid pit, the world's hatred began to wane. The prisons on Earth, for all their faults, had balanced meals and regulated hours. Tony's situation was infinitely worse. Pepper's desperate plea to Ben suddenly made perfect sense. She was terrified he would die on Sakaar, and now, the rest of the world was beginning to share that fear.
With Ultron gone, order was being restored. Wanda had used her powers to discreetly erase her and Pietro's involvement from the minds of their former allies, ensuring no damaging rumors could be traced back to Primus or the Plumbers. So far, no one had noticed, not even a certain demoted god.
Thor had adapted to life on Earth. He had put aside his divine arrogance and, with Jane Foster's help, slowly embraced a mortal life. He knew what email was. He used the salary from his security job at Primus to buy a phone and a computer. After work, he would drink a cold beer with Jane, sit on the sofa, and watch football.
Lately, however, he had been glued to the live broadcast from Sakaar.
"Watching Tony again?" Jane asked, seeing the worried look on his face.
Thor nodded, drained a large can of beer in one go, then crushed it in his fist and tossed it into a bin already overflowing with similarly flattened cans.
"If you keep drinking like that, you're going to gain weight," Jane teased, sitting on the arm of the sofa and ruffling his short, blond hair. "I'm starting to wonder if you have beer or blood in your veins."
"I just think… he's a bit like me," Thor sighed.
"In a way, that's true," Jane agreed. "You were both royalty. You, a prince of Asgard, heir to the throne. Him, the heir to the Stark fortune, one of the richest men on Earth. Now you're exiled here, and he… he's exiled to the far end of the universe."
Seeing Tony suffer stirred a deep sympathy in him. But then, Thor smiled bitterly and shook his head. He took Jane's hand, pressing it to his cheek. "But his situation is much worse than mine," he said, his voice soft. "At least I found you. That was the most fortunate thing that could have ever happened to me." The muscular god uttered the cheesy words with complete sincerity. "Besides, I know Asgard is safe. Loki may have given up the throne, but he can still lift Mjolnir. He can protect our home."
Thor had no more worries. He had accepted his fate. As long as his family was safe, he was content to stay right where he was.
But fate, it seemed, had other plans.