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Tony sets them up in a warehouse that the asset hasn’t been in before. He’s unsurprised to note that it’s remote, plain, unobtrusive. He’s even less surprised that the heavy form slung over his metal shoulder is the first one to be brought here.
He isn’t aware of the details of Tony’s plan yet, but he knows that this will get messy. In his other hand, he carries a duffel bag with contents specific to a list he’d been given. Metals, tools, drugs. The drugs are strong enough to knock him out. Tony had been very clear about that requirement.
He hadn’t asked why; it wasn’t his place, but he knows now. That information is fed to the part of him that is still aware that he’s not in control. It threatens to flood him with rage, but nothing comes as he drops the duffel and the body. He watches Steve hit the floor with a blank expression, hears Tony come up to his side.
“I see he put up a fight,” Tony comments, crouching down to turn Steve’s face one way, then the other. His nose is busted, his left eye swollen shut.
“No,” the asset corrects flatly, “he didn’t.”
Tony glances up at him with an emotion in his eyes that the asset can’t decipher. It’s gone after a brief moment, and he does recognize that it was a slip.
“Get him up there,” Tony instructs shortly, pushing to his feet by bracing his hands on his knees. He indicates the set of hooks suspended from the ceiling. They’re on cabling not quite as strong as Steve’s shield, but Tony had tested them with one of his suits. They held.
“Vy khotite ispol'zovat' naruchniki?” he asks, and receives only an absent nod as Tony strides over to the window across from where Steve will hang.
“When you’re finished there, your first gift is in the other room,” Tony says, and the way he says gift almost makes the asset’s skin crawl. He responds with a grunt and loses time to hanging Steve up by his wrists and ankles. Steve remains unconscious through the first death. Tony allows it to be fairly quick; perhaps to avoid allowing her to get in their heads.
Later, Tony will add further restraints, including the substances, that will keep Steve from being too coordinated. That won’t happen until the asset’s second gift. Clint hadn’t screamed, but he’d sworn and cursed until the asset had taken his tongue. Tony, on the other side of the wall, had laughed as it’d silenced the archer’s words. It was edged and hysterical, and Steve had struggled against the hooks holding him up, making the restraints creak in warning.
Clint had died before Tony’s laughter. It had taken the asset two days to fully clean the room, and the whole while, Tony had watched the stages of Steve’s grief and anger closely. He traced the tears with his fingers, let Steve break one with his teeth when he didn’t move his hand away quick enough. Steve continued to struggle, tearing in vain at his own body until he was a bloody, exhausted mess, left to heal overnight.
It goes on this way through the rest. Each death is methodical, calculated, and effective, breaking Steve over and over until even the asset feels it behind his ribcage. But this morning…
This morning, the asset knows that this is the beginning of the end. He can taste it in the air, see it in the slump of Tony’s shoulders before Tony realizes and tries to hide it. They’re both aware of the one they brought in last night. He hands the asset a set of instructions.
“Let’s not waste time,” Tony says, and the asset realizes that Tony has broken himself too. His handler is weak, so it’s only fitting that this be the end. Deep down, as the asset reads over his final mission, that awareness inside of him breathes a sigh of relief. He burns the instructions and enters the room.
There's a memory just below the surface of the asset’s thoughts. It sits just out of reach as he moves around the kneeling figure to stand behind her. Red is spilling, falling, curtain-like down her back. She clutches a simple arrow necklace in one of her fists, her hands bound behind her.
The sun had been warm despite the crisp air whispering against their skin. She’d wrapped her arms around his waist and given a husky murmur, amused.
The room is quiet; their breathing is calm. There are no tears, no begging. Their eyes do not meet, and he is not made to endure pleading glances. The part of him that is aware of what is happening is grateful.
"You'll be free of this someday, vozylublennaya," he had said, sliding his hand along her arm until he could hold her hand. The silver of his fingers had contrasted the ivory of her own. They were both stained red.
"Together," she’d responded, and neither of them had voiced how unlikely that had seemed.
He steps up behind her, and she remains still. Her gaze doesn't stray from the wall in front of her.
"Tony, please." The entreaty is strained, desperate. The man behind it is bound and useless, hanging from the adamantium shackles like a particularly gruesome pinata. Blood drips down to join the puddle on the floor. The drug in his veins weighs him down too heavily to burn out quickly. "Not her. Not like this."
She’d been assigned another mission, and he’d been slotted for cryo again. He had considered fighting it, like usual, but in the end, he’d go back in, like usual. And, like usual, he’d be forced to forget when he was thawed out, and he’d struggle to remember. But remember he would, he would always remember her in the end.
His hand comes around her throat; her pulse jumps against the flesh of his fingers. He knows he is not to do this with the cold metal of his prosthetic. He is meant to feel this, as he felt it years ago. He does. Her blood pumps quickly to flood around the pressure points of his fingers as he squeezes.
“I love you, James Buchanan Barnes."
Beyond the wall, Steve is screaming, his throat shredded. He makes himself bleed as he struggles, and Tony casts an absent gaze back at him.
Steve freezes, expression abject horror, and Tony turns back around to watch Natasha's body slump to the floor. They both watch Bucky step back once, then once more.
This was neither the beginning nor the end, the asset remembers. His instructions are clear.
"I will see you on the other side, Natalia Alianovna Romanova."
~~
The silence that follows is deafening. It's a rush in Steve's ears that accompanies the pounding of his heart. He can't look away from Natasha's body lying prone in the other room. He can't get to her, he knows that well. He couldn't save her, couldn't save any of them. He’s fought, fought until his bones were broken, ligaments torn in the effort to get out of Tony's restraints.
It has all been in vain. One by one, he has watched his teammates, his friends, die under Bucky's hands. No, not really Bucky. Steve struggles to remember that. He stares as Natasha is carried out of the room, out of sight. He manages to catch sight of Bucky one last time, and the blank expression shakes Steve further to his core, as it always does.
The room beyond the glass is now empty, and Steve can't hold himself up anymore. His body sags, the weight of it pulling him towards the floor. He's been injured for too long to put up much of a fight for long. He's fought and struggled, begged and offered Tony everything in his power to give, and it, all of it, has been rejected. One after the other, until all that Steve had had left was himself.
He'd offered himself up to Tony, tried for low and inviting while Sam had choked on the blood brought up from the metal fist in his gut. Tears streaking down his face, Steve had begged Tony to take him, use him however he'd like, just - "Please. Please, stop. No more."
But now, it feels like there is no one left. Steve thinks he prefers it that way.
“Why them?” he whispers, eyes burning from the raw, putrid emotion stripping him down to nothing. “Why them and not us?”
Tony stiffens and smoothes his hands down his slacks before he turns to face Steve. The ever-present gauntlet on his hand flexes metallic like Bucky’s arm. It’s a bit crusted where Steve’s blood has dried. “You read his file, didn’t you? You saw how he was wiped away, programmed. You saw what they did to him. You know what they did to me. You try so hard, all the time, Steve. You tried to fix us, tried to fix me, but all you did… All you did was hand me—us—back over to them on the silver lining of your precious shield.
“I want you to know, though, that I never broke. When you brought me in, and you strapped me to a bed in that room, and you battered at my programming, hammering it with the people that loved me. The hell you put them through so that you could assuage your guilt, it never broke me. I gave you what you wanted. I let you see when you were blinded to anything else. I was going to take Barnes and leave you all behind. That was all I needed, because I didn’t want to hurt you, Steve. I didn’t want you to get in the way. You were my friend, and I loved you. But you, you broke that. You broke it so completely, because you let him… You let him…
"He dared... He touched me with the hands that killed my mother. He dared to touch me with the hands that caved my father's face in and pulled the goddamn trigger against his head. And you were happy." Tony slinks into Steve's space, movements manic, tone wet and hollow with suppressed rage. Steve can't speak; his tongue is too thick, his throat too raw.
"It was never about Barnes," Tony continues, and he touches Steve's chin, creates a new path for the blood. It trickles down his wrist. "He'll pay for what he became, just as I will before I'm through. But you, Steve..."
Steve feels his breath catch at the mournful sigh of his name. The sound rattles around punctured lungs.
"Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you. And you will remember every agonizing second of betrayal long after I'm gone, and you will know what it is to truly feel the weight of your failure."
Steve lifts his gaze to Tony’s; his eyes are dull, the lines around them deep and craggy. Tony’s eyes are empty, as if the genius had vacated long ago and left the husk of himself walking around to be controlled.
Because that’s what Steve still believes. He has to. This shell before him can’t truly be the genius and hero, Tony Stark. This can’t be the man Steve had come to… He doesn’t let the word form. He can’t confirm what Tony already knows about him. He just meets that empty gaze with his own, and the words come on their own, dredged up in defense and morbid curiosity.
“And Pepper? Rhodey? Are they your failures, Tony?”
~~
Twenty Days Earlier
The klaxon alarm is loud, ringing out above the music of the Christmas party before the jovial atmosphere disappears almost instantly. Shutters are already falling down over the Tower windows as the Iron Legion appears on the communal floor to begin escorting the civilians to safety.
The Avengers are startled for a moment, but then they’re jerking into motion to suit up and face the threat. Hydra has finally come to them.
“Safety Protocol 44 has been activated,” Friday announces, and Steve is instantly frozen.
“Where?!”
“He is on the helipad, Captain Rogers. Sir is with him.”
Steve’s heart thuds once before he’s jolting forward, vaulting over the furniture to scramble his way up and out to the landing site. He makes it out into the snow-filled air just in time to see Tony disappear over the edge. Bucky stands with his hand stretched out from where he’d pushed Tony.
“Tony!”
Bucky doesn’t tense; he looks over his shoulder at Steve before he jumps over the edge after Tony. Steve throws himself to the edge of the pad, scrambling back as a silver and red Iron Man suit shoots past the building towards the street far below. It’s slimmer than Tony’s, and Steve knows that Pepper is piloting.
Tony is nowhere to be seen.
A few moment later, Sam drops Steve’s shield and a comm into Steve’s waiting hands as he lands.
“It’s not good, Cap,” Sam says lowly. “Buck’s… Bucky’s gone, but so is Tony.”
“What?” Steve doesn’t understand. “Did he take T-”
“Steve,” Sam grasps Steve’s arm, expression grim, “They’re fighting Rhodey and Clint. Nat’s trying to power down Buck’s arm while Pepper distracts Tony from getting his suit.”
“Tony’s… No, he was fixed. He was… His therapy’s been going well. The reports… He and Bucky have…” Steve’s heart clenches, jealousy and guilt twisting together, then a clear, dawning understanding. “Oh my god, they planned it. He came for Bucky...”
“There are too many Hydra agents to take this slow. We have to drop them, Cap,” Sam says, and his voice is thick. Steve’s expression dims and turns just as grim as Sam’s.
“Avengers, power down and detain,” Steve orders through his com. There are varying degrees of responses.
There isn’t much interaction Steve can parse through after that. The heroes are all too busy. The fight is brutal, expansive. Bucky and Steve are locked in hand-to-hand combat until Steve is distracted by a light as bright as he’d expect a supernova to be. Long before the cause is visible, Steve is deafened to everything but a high-pitched whistle before he sees Tony slam into the ground atop Carol. The force of it, aided by Captain Marvel’s power and Iron Man’s repulsors, craters the ground out around them, taking out the street and the buildings to their left.
One building crumbles quickly, trapping Ms. Marvel and several agents--Hydra and SHIELD alike-- under the brownstone. The concrete and broken pieces of Iron Man’s suit act as debris and scatter at bullet speed, some of it disintegrating before it goes too far, but Clint is caught in a shower of it, shielding another agent until they can get to safety.
Steve’s distraction costs him the footing he’d made with Bucky, and he’s thrown two blocks away with the concussive force of the impact. He loses sight of Bucky. Clint loses an eye and two of his fingers, but he’s still standing between Rhodey’s broken suit and Tony as he crawls out of the hole. The arrow that’s notched is covered in blood, and Clint’s aim is steady.
“One step closer, and this EMP goes right between your eyes,” Clint warns. The warning is useless as Bucky tackles him out of nowhere. The sound Clint’s head makes against the pavement echoes sickeningly. His struggling is weaker for it, and Tony is mostly forgotten as their fight drags them around the street. Steve can’t find Sam.
~~
Tony stalks forward towards the downed War Machine. Friday’s voice is a steady stream in his ear, unable to shut down his suit, unable to hinder his progress. Steve is swarmed by agents.
“Colonel Rhodes, you must get up.” Her voice echoes through all of their comms, whether the wearers are still conscious or not. Rhodey makes it as far as his knees before his strength gives out, and he’s left relying on the suit and his braces to keep his legs locked in place.
He can’t even take off the helmet and he doesn’t know if he wants to. There’s a pit in his stomach that tells him he won’t want to face this.
“I gave you the chance to leave,” Tony says as he stops a few feet away.
“Yeah? You gonna take the suit off and come with me?” Rhodey asks, and wonders to himself how much longer until they can get Tony’s suit powered down. The reactor is beyond them according to Friday. It no longer runs parallel with her systems.
There’s a moment of silence, and Rhodey watches Tony look around the destruction of their fight. Bucky is pushing to his feet over a prone Clint, tossing an arrow to the ground, too far away now to be an immediate concern. Natasha’s yell is audible even without comms. Rhodey’s stomach churns violently, fear quaking down his spine.
“Tony, please,” Rhodey says, dragging tired arms up to his helmet and ripping the faceplate off. He looks at Tony’s impassive, iron face and tries to pour all of his emotions for the man before him into his expression, his voice. “Please, at least let me see you.”
“You should have left,” Tony answers, and he lifts his hand, the gauntlet already powering up. Rhodey closes his eyes and waits, but Pepper drops down heavily just as the beam fires. She blocks it with her own, the intensity pushing her back along the concrete and into Rhodey.
Tony makes a noise of frustrated disgust and finally opens his faceplate. He’s scowling through a head wound that pours into his eyes. “It seems I made your suit a little too well.”
Rescue straightens, her head coming up, determined, to face Tony. “You don’t want to do this.”
“You’re right,” Tony says, but both gauntlets are up and firing. Rhodey catches Pepper’s hand, and Steve knocks two agents away from him. He twists and throws the shield as hard as he can. It slams into Tony’s arms, knocking off his trajectory. The beams go wide as Tony staggers. The shield continues on, jackknifing from the impact.
It happens quickly. There’s a flash of silver as Bucky’s arm cuts through the air, a sharp, crystal-clear clang as he strikes the edge of the shield almost perfectly, and then the shield is shuddering to stop, finding purchase in the upper body of Rhodey’s suit.
Time comes to a standstill. Rhodey doesn’t blink, but his mouth moves silently as Pepper frantically retracts her helmet and begins prying at the shield in panic. Blood wells up around where the edges of the damaged suit slice into Rhodey’s throat. Rhodey doesn’t want Pepper to cry. He lifts a hand towards her. The suit is heavy.
“Run,” he thinks he says, but the world is already falling away, and he hopes that he gets to see Carol again when this is all over. He thinks he could really love that woman for the rest of his life. He thinks of the ring on the dresser in his apartment, hidden there because Carol stays in his room at the Tower. He thinks of his last year at MIT and how he and Tony had promised to marry each other when he was fifty and inevitably still single.
He never did get a chance to ask Tony to be his best man. He’ll have to remember to do that when he wakes up, make the time. He should…
The War Machine goes dark, leaning back as the vital signs fail and the locks are released. Pepper is frozen in shock, dangerously unguarded, and Steve can’t process anything that’s beyond kick-punch-move as he struggles to get to Pepper and Rhodey. But he sees Bucky isn’t coming their way. He’s standing off to the side, seemingly taking his cues from Tony who is still standing a few feet away, watching Pepper break down over Rhodey. Sam’s damaged wings are signalling his position on a rooftop where he’s firing back at the agents closing in on Clint.
Steve skids to a stop, hoping their reprieve is long enough that he can assess the situation. It’s a bad as he’d feared, and all he can do is try to gently, so gently, ease the shield out of Rhodey’s suit. He closes Rhodey’s eyes, trembling and afraid and furious. He can hear Pepper falling apart and the confusion blaring across the comms. Natasha is now at Clint’s side, but her comm goes silent as she folds over him. Carol hasn’t regained consciousness yet, unmoving in the crater. Bucky remains still.
“You need to leave,” Steve says to Pepper.
“I can’t,” Pepper says, despairing and heartbroken, and she begins tugging at War Machine, as if she could gather him into her arms. “I can’t leave him. I can’t leave either of them. Rhodey… Tony would never forgive me for abandoning Rhodey.”
Shock is powerful thing, Steve knows, but his gaze goes over her shoulder. Tony approaches, helmet under his arm. His expression is drawn, pale. For a moment, Steve feels hope -bittersweet- that maybe the shock of Rhodey’s death has snapped Tony out of his brainwashing.
“Tony, we n-” Steve is cut off by the cocking of a gun behind him. The barrel of it presses to the back of his head, and Tony meets his gaze with a tilt of his head.
“It’s too quick” Tony says, tone vacant and absently thoughtful, but it’s not to Steve. It’s to Bucky behind Steve. The gun doesn’t move. “On mne nuzhen.”
“Ostavit' yego zhivym bylo by oshibkoy,” the asset responds. “I yeye?”
“Net,” Tony says, and Pepper twists around, shooting up to her feet to face Tony.
“Pepper!” Steve barely gets her name out before another gun goes off.
Tony doesn’t flinch, but his face is covered in Pepper’s blood as the bullet tears through her and cuts across his cheek before it disappears into the night.
Steve’s heart stops, and he can’t hear anything else but Pepper and the suit crumpling. Just like that, Tony’s entire world is gone. Later, Steve will wonder if Tony realizes the significance of what’s happened. He will wonder if Tony ever let himself mourn their passing. He reaches for Pepper’s body as it falls, but before he catches her, Bucky’s metal fist connects with his temple and the world goes dark.
Deep down, he hopes he doesn’t wake up.
~~
Present
Tony peers at Steve. “Yes,” he answers simply, then drops Steve’s chin and powers down the room. He leaves Steve hanging there, the silence deafening in his departure.
Steadily, Steve’s dripping blood counts down the end of the day; the end of another one in a month of nightmares.
There are three days left, but Steve knows it doesn't matter anymore. He can see the end coming a mile away, and he’s powerless to stop it. After all the deaths he’s borne witness to, he doesn’t want to stop it. He blinks blearily at the floor then closes his eyes. There is no need to, no need to sleep. He has no will to fight, so rest is pointless, but his body decides otherwise and drags him into sleep.
When he wakes next, he’s no longer hanging from the shackles. He’s strapped to a table inside a tube, and Tony is watching him again. Beyond Tony, Bucky is slumped on the floor, breath fogging along the cold concrete. Steve can barely think through the fog of drugs in his system.
“Steve,” Tony murmurs.
Steve hears him just fine, though. He hears the wealth of unsaid words in the depth of his name, ugly and beautiful all at once. His head is strapped down; he can’t turn it to look more clearly at Tony. Paralyzing terror grips at him as he realizes where they are, what’s going to happen.
“Not this, not ice,” Steve whispers, throat threatening to collapse around his fear. “Tony, any-anything but this.”
“It has to be this,” Tony replies, running a hand over the console attached to Steve’s chamber, “Do me a favor when you wake up.”
“Tony, please.” Steve’s voice is barely audible, and he thinks he might just die from fear alone before the process starts. He feels guilt as he thinks the others’ deaths had been easier. Mercies.
“Make sure Pepper and Rhodey have nice memorials.” Tony looks over as Bucky stirs, and he drops his head once with an unsteady breath out. “‘You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.’ Isn’t that what they say?”
Bucky drags himself upright, and there’s a gun in his hand. Tony punches in a code, and the chamber begins to fill with a cryogenic solution. Steve can’t hold his breath, can’t do anything but let it happen as Tony uses a small adhesive disk to destroy the buttons of the console.
He turns to Bucky.
“Vy znayete parametry svoyey missii.”
“I'm with you to the end of the line.”
“A week, next Saturday at the Stork Club.”
Steve hadn’t thought he was capable of screaming anymore. As Tony falls first and Bucky turns the gun on himself, Steve is still screaming as the cryostasis completes and the ice takes him away from it all.
“So was I.”