Chapter Text
“We’re live on CNN with breaking news. Several worrying developments from across the world have turned into events with the potential to become major catastrophes. Threats and bombings from the terrorist organization have culminated in the bombing of Tony Stark’s home in Malibu, California, after he threatened its leader, the Mandarin, to a group of reporters earlier today. Stark, better known as Iron Man and as one of the Avengers, is missing and presumed dead.
“In Washington DC, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, and Clint Barton, better known respectively as Captain America, Black Widow, and Hawkeye, also members of the Avengers, were seen at SHIELD headquarters in the Triskelion with a few other unidentified individuals. Shots are being fired, and neither the Secret Service nor the National Guard have commented on the President’s fate. President Ellis is believed to be on Air Force One at this time and accompanied by Colonel James Rhodes, better known as the rebranded Iron Patriot.
“Across the ocean in Europe, an unidentified ship has crashed in Greenwich. Civilian casualties are unclear at this time. Thor, the Asgardian who joined the Avengers in defeating Loki last year, has been sighted at the scene. So far, all of these individual battles would have the potential to be catastrophic. With them all happening at the same time, there’s no telling how damaging these battles could be. More on these stories as they develop.”
“Steve,” Tony called cheerily, pressing the trigger to inject another one of his nanites into his forearm. “Ow! Um, be a dear and please take that smoothie from DUM-E before he creams me with it.”
“Maybe you’d absorb it and finally get some healthy food into you,” Steve countered even as he went to relinquish the suspicious mix from DUM-E’s clutches.
Tony let out a faux-offended gasp, setting the injector aside and flicking up a schematic for the not-yet-built Mark 43. “Captain America! Are you insulting my self-care habits—whoa, how did I manage to plan out how to fit an entire ice-cream maker into the suit? This doesn’t even make sense, this is like something Clint would demand that I build into his quiver and then decide that it was too bulky and then I’d have to give him back his old one and he wouldn’t notice, JARVIS, who approved this?”
“That would be you, sir,” JARVIS responded dryly.
Tony snapped his fingers. “The sass. I didn’t—did I program that? I feel like I would have remembered doing that.”
“The notion escapes me, sir.”
Tony spun around his chair and noticed that Steve was sitting down now, bowed over on the table, smoothie in one hand, his head in the other. “Hey, did I already break you? Or did you drink out of that smoothie, because I’m ninety percent sure that DUM-E put more motor oil in that than actual smoothie ingredients—”
“Coolant, sir.”
“—Coolant, even better. Steve?”
“Fine,” Steve said, his voice a little strained. “I’m fine.”
“Oookay,” Tony said, snatching the injector back up. “J, where was I?”
“Forty-five. Three inches below your elbow joint—”
“Yeah, whatever.” Tony lined up the injector as best he could with the patience he had, which was an impressive second and a half. He pressed down and bit back a yelp, shaking his hand out in a futile attempt to get rid of the pain.
“Forty-six. Sir, please may I request just a few hours to calibrate—”
“No,” Tony interjected briefly, and pressed down again.
“Forty-seven.”
“Tony,” Steve chided, looking far more composed than he had a minute earlier.
“Steve.” Tony looked him straight in the eye as he pressed down the injector one more time. He hissed and picked up a tissue to dab away the blood on his arms. “Micro-repeater implanting sequence complete.”
“As you wish, sir. I’ve also prepared a safety briefing for you to entirely ignore.”
“Which I will,” Tony responded easily.
“You’re incorrigible,” Steve told him, but his lips were twitching.
“And you love me for it,” Tony said without thinking, then froze. He felt his cheeks heat up, but Steve didn’t seem to notice. He just said, “Yeah, yeah,” and went back to playing keep-away with DUM-E.
“Okay, let’s do this,” Tony squeaked out, and even though his voice was not strangled, thank you very much, U and Butterfingers still swiveled to stare at him for a moment. “DUM-E. Hi, DUM-E.” The bot half-swiveled to face Tony, momentarily forgetting his game. The dunce cap had become lopsided sometime during the past few hours. “How did you get that cap on your head? You earned it.”
“That’s mean,” Steve chided, but Tony waved it away, focusing on U instead.
“Sir, might I remind you that you’ve been awake for nearly seventy-two hours?” JARVIS’s voice rang through the room.
Steve made a choked sputtering sound, but Tony entirely ignored both of them, instead focusing on the camera that U was holding. “Start tight and then go wide. Stamp date and time. Oh, Butterfingers, do we have, um, get Steve a helmet, do we have helmets down here?”
“Due to your apparent hatred of proper safety procedures, we do not have proper protective equipment down in the lab. However, your welding mask is on the table behind you, sir.”
“Tony,” Steve chastised halfheartedly. Tony ignored him, and Butterfingers handed Steve the makeshift helmet. “Thank you, Butterfingers.”
“Steve, stand back, yeah?” Steve didn’t look convinced, but he obligingly moved away. “Mark 42. Autonomous prehensile propulsion suit test.”
Tony flicked his fingers in the pattern that he’d designed to turn on the pieces of the suit, and sure enough, the jets on the various fragments powered up. “Initialize sequence.”
He stuck his arm out in the movement that he’d programmed to summon the Iron Man suit.
Nothing happened.
Exasperated, Tony dropped his arms, then jerked them forwards again. Nothing.
“Crap,” he muttered, smacking at where the implants were, and Steve flipped his visor up, smirking. Tony jabbed a finger at him. “Don’t you say it—”
His gauntlet activated and wrapped itself around Tony’s arm, and Tony whooped. Steve started for a moment, wide-eyed, before the shoulder plate nearly took his head off and he ducked away, the visor flipping back down.
Tony stuck his other arm out and the other gauntlet shot out to close over Tony’s wrist. He felt a swell of victory and a slight urge to say I told you so to Steve, and he laughed. “All right, I think we got this. Send them all.”
“Uh, Tony,” Steve began, but he didn’t have a chance to finish. One leg wrapped around him no problem, but the next part shot past their heads too fast and Tony just barely dodged it. It crashed through the display case of the Mark 27 and Tony sighed, but then barely deflected another poorly-aimed piece that flung itself into a light fixture, sending sparks flying everywhere.
“Probably a little fast. Slow it down. Slow it down just a…” he made a time-out gesture and narrowly deflected another flying piece. “little bit.”
Another went flying past his head and broke off some of the piping running up the wall. Steve yelped and ducked another, half-hiding behind the table. Tony retrieved another leg before the back piece sent him stumbling off of the raised platform he was standing on. He narrowly activated his repulsors, snapping out, “Cool it, will you JARVIS?” before the rest of the pieces assembled together.
The faceplate knocked into the back of Steve’s head, sending him stumbling to the floor, before it slammed into Tony’s face.
“I’m the best,” Tony announced as the HUD lit up. He licked away the blood on his lip and decided that he wouldn’t gloat too badly.
“I have to go to DC,” Steve said, and in Tony’s distraction, the stray piece of armor embedded in the Mark 27 shot out and knocked Tony over. He felt the armor’s integrity collapse and the pieces scatter everywhere, and he groaned.
“As always, a pleasure watching you work, sir.” JARVIS told him dryly, and Tony resisted the urge to flip the camera off.
“Tony!” Steve exclaimed, as though he hadn’t been the one to distract Tony.
“I hate you,” Tony said dully. “What was that about DC?”
Steve pulled the helmet off and studied his face for a moment. He wiped the trail of blood off Tony’s mouth with a thumb, and Tony’s heart rate stuttered for a moment.
“I have to go help Natasha with Hydra,” Steve said softly, and Tony blinked.
“The tone that you said that in did not match what you just said,” Tony informed him.
Steve rolled to his feet. “She, Fury, and Hill have had a hell of a time exposing and uprooting a lot of the agents, especially in STRIKE, but Natasha worded it as… she needs someone who radiates patriotism and America to root out the evil fuckers.”
“And that,” Tony said, flopping onto his back. “is why I give her the fun toys. Also, language, seriously, you’re supposed to be the embodiment of patriotism and chastity. What’s the other reason?”
Steve sighed and sat down next to him. “You’ve had facial recognition running for Bucky for nearly a year now. Still no results. If I’m dealing with Hydra in DC…”
“You might find him,” Tony concluded. “I mean, I’m not going to stop you. I’m moving out of here soon anyway. This area of the house is the only one not full of boxes. You can come back to the Tower once we’re all over and done, no hard feelings.”
“I don’t…” Steve trailed off, shifting around in his seat.
“Don’t what?”
“I don’t want you to feel like I’m ditching you—um, and the Avengers—for Bucky,” Steve got out in a rush. “It’s just…”
“Steve,” Tony said, sitting up. “I swear to God, don’t worry about it. You’re not ditching anyone. You’re helping Natasha, and trust me, I would not disobey her. She jabbed me in the neck with a needle while I was near-death, who does that?”
Steve smiled, although he looked vaguely alarmed by the near-death aspect of that sentence. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Tony’s body betrayed him. He yawned hugely.
Steve smiled at him, and it was warm, huge, and happy. Tony basked in that warmth for a moment before Steve said, “You’re going to bed.”
“No, I’m not.”
There was stardust in Tony’s lungs, even though he wasn’t breathing.
Space opened vast above him, an empty cavern with no beginning, no end, just the empty stars and the empty space in-between and the empty air with no real molecules and the spaceship far above him.
there was nothing
Terrible, horrible light, a mushroom cloud that Tony had known how to build since he was thirteen, but he had never appreciated nor hated the breadth of its destruction to the extent that Tony did now. He hated it so much he couldn’t breathe, which was odd, because he wasn’t breathing anyway.
Nebulae winked in the distance, and there was a voice insisting that he wake up, which didn’t make sense because Pepper hadn’t picked up her phone and JARVIS had lost signal and the portal was far far far below him and he was going to die out here and he realized that maybe he wanted to live—
“Tony!” A voice insisted, and Tony shot awake just in time to see the Mark 42 come silently behind Steve, who was crouched in front of Tony, shaking his shoulder, and reach for him.
“Power down!” Tony yelled out, breath too fast too fast too fast. His sheets were damp. Tony wasn’t sure why it was bothering him so much, but he felt the moisture stick to his skin and felt like he might vomit.
“I must have called it in my sleep,” Tony said, pulling excuses out of thin air. Steve smiled at him, and he kept doing that and Tony wasn’t sure why.
“No worries,” Steve said easily, rising to his feet. “Nightmares?”
None of your business was on the tip of Tony’s tongue, but for some reason, what came out was a small, “Yeah.”
“Me too,” Steve admitted. “Do you want to talk about it—?”
“No,” Tony interrupted quickly, then amended himself. “Sorry, Steve, just… maybe another time.”
Steve looked like he wanted to argue, but instead, he smiled again. “Don’t worry about it, Tony. I’m leaving in about an hour. I heard Miss Potts come in, but I can hold off on telling her that you’re awake if…”
“Fine, it’s fine,” Tony breathed, running a hand through his sweaty hair. “I’m just going to shower.”
Steve made an abortive move to step forward, but seemed to decide against it halfway through. “I’ll see you when I get back, Tony,” he said softly, and it sounded like it wasn’t what he had wanted to say.
The door closed with a soft click, and while the Mark 42 lorded dispassionately over him, Tony buried his face in his hands and tried desperately not to cry.
The conversation with Pepper wasn’t particularly enlightening. She could obviously tell that Tony hadn’t slept much, demonstrated by her lack of paperwork presented for him to sign despite the stuffed briefcase she was carrying. She just asked him if he was still up for dinner—strictly as friends, dating never would’ve worked for them anyway—and he said yes.
Pepper was one of his best friends. He loved her, and Rhodey, and—
Bad brain. Stop thinking about Steve.
He knew, obviously, that it was possible that he and Steve could be an item. Their future selves had dated each other, broken up, and then gotten back together. It was obviously feasible, but future Thor had warned that their timeline had already branched off into an alternate universe. While it was good that the space-time continuum hadn’t been destroyed, it also meant that there was no guarantee that they would get together at all.
Whatever. Tony didn’t need Steve. He didn’t need anyone.
Then there was that horrible broadcast; the Mandarin hijacked the signal of broadcast TV and took responsibility for bombings that Tony hadn’t even heard about. Rhodey told him about the nine attacks over lunch: no remains of any bomb casings, no witnesses, a heat signature of 3000 degrees Fahrenheit.
The crayon snapped in half, he broke the crayon he broke everything, and Tony was stumbling, running to the door, to his suit. The palladium poisoning that had been running through his blood not so long ago forced itself to the forefront of his brain, and he stammered out something about poison and to check his brain before JARVIS’s filtered voice told him that he’d had a major anxiety attack.
“Me?" Tony asked, his voice small. But he felt the terror, the panic, rising in his throat and his stomach, and he knew it was true.
Rhodey knocked on the faceplate of the suit, looking worried (terrified), and Tony wasn’t even sure what he said to his best friend before the suit shot away. Shit. He’d apologize later.
He hid himself away in the workshop, in his suits, until Happy called him with some vague concern about a meeting that Pepper was having with someone named Aldrich Killian. Tony wasn’t sure why he was supposed to be worried about someone with the name Aldrich, but he was quite insistent that Tony be worried that Killian was showing her his big brain.
Happy couldn’t figure out how to flip the screen despite being the former chauffeur and bodyguard of one of the foremost tech designers in the world, and Tony left his phone in the wine cooler.
Then there was another Mandarin bombing, and goddamn, terrorists knew how to make it personal, Happy was in the hospital, in a coma, Downton Abbey playing on the screen for no goddamn reason, Happy was in a coma and Tony was just sitting there watching the faux-elegant, melodramatic episode play out. He was avoiding the flashing lights and the news trucks of the paparazzi. He’d been shoving cameras out of his face since he was two, smiling for the vultures since he was five, but it was so much more personal now, his soul was raw and bleeding and white-hot, burning with anger.
He grabbed some poor reporter’s phone and told the Mandarin exactly what he was feeling, and listed his address and that he’d leave the door open. He smashed the phone and drove away, cold.
He was shattered glass and jagged metal, and he was a broken suit falling through empty space, watching the sky explode above him and trying to breathe through empty lungs.
what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie;
Two hours after Steve landed in Washington DC, Steve was in a combat suit, his shield painted black, on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic.
He still wasn’t sure what exactly was going on: something about a man named Batroc, data files implicating more Hydra agents still hiding inside of SHIELD, and Agent Sitwell. Natasha had caught him jogging around the reflecting pool, teasing a pararescue vet named Sam Wilson, and dragged him along with her.
“So, you and Stark still orbiting each other, or are you finally going to make a move?” she asked, buckling her parachute into place. “When we were living in the Tower, you blushed every time Stark came within a five-foot radius.” Clint snorted a laugh behind her, his quiver already slotted in place below the chute.
“In your dreams, Nat.”
“You are going to owe me so much money, Clint. Don’t kid yourself.”
“Oh, yeah, probably,” the archer agreed amicably. “But Steve loses either way.”
“Why would I be losing?” Steve asked wryly, slinging his shield over his back.
Clint opened his mouth to reply, thought for a moment, and then closed it.
“In position, Cap,” Maria Hill called from the cockpit. Steve pulled a face at Clint from over his shoulder before he stepped off of the plane’s ramp into the open air.
“You forgot your goddamn parachute, moron!” Clint yelled after him in revenge. Steve heard Hill start to berate Clint about professionalism, Barton, Jesus Christ as the junior agents began to freak out on board. Natasha called for silence, and Steve tucked his body into a diving position as he plummeted towards the water.
He took one guard down with a stranglehold, two more with his shield, threw another over the side, and lost track. Natasha was supposed to get to the engine room, and Clint would stick to the high ground, working with the other SHIELD agents to take out the guards around the prisoners: most importantly Sitwell, who was almost certainly Hydra. Steve was aiming for Batroc.
“Relax, Steve,” Natasha chided, as though sensing his train of thought through the comms. “Fury hired these pirates. They’re on strictly no-kill orders.”
“I’m not really getting that impression.” Steve grunted as he ducked another bullet and knocked another goon out with his shield. He hurled the shield at one more pirate and then paused for a moment as another came up behind him with a machine gun pointed at his torso. An arrow came out of nowhere and caught the man right through the throat.
“Hawkeye,” Steve chided halfheartedly, but he scooped up the shield and kept moving.
“Seriously, Steve,” Natasha said, pacing beside him as she unbuckled her parachute. “If you asked him, he’d probably say yes. He let you in his workshop, and trust me, no one gets in that workshop.”
“Secure the engine room, then get me a date,” Steve told her, and was rewarded with an “ I’m multitasking!” as she hopped over the rail and out of sight.
“Two on your six, Cap,” Clint told him. Steve knocked one out with the shield, and an arrow punctured the other before Steve could blink.
“Clint, I distinctly recall Fury saying no killing,” Steve said.
Simultaneously, Natasha and Clint recited, “Teammate in danger of lethal and possible fatal injury.”
“What?”
“That’s the rule that overrides a no-kill order,” Clint informed him gleefully.
“Great, assassins who are also lawyers,” Steve said dryly.
“Are you close, Widow?” Hill chimed in, not commenting on the assassin duo’s banter.
Steve lost himself in the rhythm of punch, dodge, throw, and did his best to not think too much. Natasha recited an affirmative, and then comms went silent.
Steve reached the command room, nodding briefly at Clint, who was perched on top. The bug that Hawkeye had secured to the window alerted him to the attempt to start the engines, but then violence over Natasha’s comms quickly dispelled that worry.
“Snipers in position,” Clint said. “I’ve got eyes.”
“Natasha, what’s your status?” Steve hissed, lowering himself to have a clear view of Batroc. When he didn’t receive a response, he repeated, “Status, Natasha.”
“Hang on!” she barked, then, a minute later, “Engine room secure.”
“Get to the file room,” he said briefly. “Hawkeye, on my mark.”
He heard the rapid bangs of the snipers working their ways through the guards, and then he hurled his shield through the window of the control tower. He ducked through the gap a moment later, and Batroc kicked him square in the chest and bolted.
Steve chased after, of course. The pirate (maximum casualties, Maria Hill’s voice whispered, and Steve felt a tingle of disgust) spat hatred at him in French and indulged in a series of flips before Steve knocked them both straight through the door of the file room. He raised his fist and left Batroc’s body where it lay.
“Well, this is awkward,” Natasha said wryly, glancing up from the computers.
“How close are you?” Steve asked. “Extraction is T-minus two minutes. Clint already has Sitwell in custody.”
“Thirty seconds, tops—” Natasha began, then froze. Steve spun just in time to see Batroc hurl a grenade and bolt out the door.
He and Natasha moved in sync: she shot the glass of the adjacent room and he grabbed her and hurled them both through it just as the bomb detonated.
Natasha huffed. “I’ll make do.”
When Steve arrived back at SHIELD headquarters, there were junior agents all over the ground floor, staring at Natasha, Clint, and especially Steve and whispering. Natasha pretended not to notice, and Clint glared at them, but Steve was just wondering why.
When they got up to Fury’s office, it became extremely clear why.
The TV in Fury’s office was on to the BBC. There was a reporter with a picture of Tony up on the screen, as well as a caption screaming TONY STARK THREATENS TERRORIST, GIVES HOME ADDRESS.
“You,” Steve said, radiating absolute calm, “have got to be shitting me.”
“Unfortunately, I’m not,” Fury said, muting it. “How long have you been away from Stark, again?”
“Less than twelve hours,” Steve muttered.
“Right,” Fury said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“I’m calling him,” declared Steve, pulling out his phone from a side pocket. “If he’s still in his house, I’m going to—”
“Steve!” Tony’s voice said brightly over the speakerphone. “What can I do for you, my good Captain?”
“Get out of the country, for starters,” Steve snapped. Natasha and Clint were both smirking, and Steve jerked his hand over his throat in the universal shut up gesture. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I was thinking,” Tony declared imperiously, “that I’m not letting anyone else get hurt. The Mandarin can attack me, or come for Chinese, I don’t really care. You hear that, Pepper?” Tony had obviously moved the phone away from his face, yelling at Pepper, who had to be some distance away. Steve faintly heard a reply, most likely something snappy, and Tony sighed.
“Look, Steve, I’m sorry,” he began, but Clint suddenly stiffened beside him.
“Stark,” he snapped. “Grab Pepper and get out now.”
“What?”
“Now!”
Steve turned to look at the TV. There was live footage projected up on the screen from a news helicopter. The cameraman was good: he had a perfect angle of the series of missiles shooting straight for Tony’s home.
“Oh, my God,” Natasha said. Fury was watching the screen, lips parted, and Clint started pacing the length of the room like a caged animal.
“Tony—!” Steve started, but there was an enormous explosion on the other line just as the house was struck by the round of missiles on the television.
“Tony?” Steve asked desperately. The phone groaned as he clutched it so hard he feared it would snap. “Tony, answer me.”
A beat of silence. Two. Then—
“We’re good,” Tony said on the other end of the line, his voice a bit strangled. “Um, relatively speaking. Pepper, you’ve got to get her out of here. I’ll be fine.”
“No, you will not be fine,” Steve said fiercely into the phone. Three military-grade helicopters were entering the frame, in perfect formation, approaching the house. “There are more coming, you have to—”
There was a horrific screeching, then the line clicked and disconnected.
Steve stared at the phone for one long moment, CALL FAILED blinking on the screen, then he numbly returned his attention to the TV.
There was a blur from outside of the building, and Steve recognized the jets of the fragments of the Mark 42. He breathed a sigh of relief as one helicopter tipped on its side and careened downwards toward the ocean after a piano came hurtling out from the wreckage. Another helicopter was blown from the sky, and for a moment, Steve felt hope—Tony could manage these helicopters no problem.
The helicopter plowed straight into the western edge of the building, and the house crumbled and collapsed into the Pacific.
The noise that Steve’s phone made when it crumpled in his fist made him think of how the Iron Man suit must have crumpled under all of that wreckage.
Clint snarled a curse, and Natasha was already on the phone, speaking a language that Steve didn’t even recognize. Fury was watching Steve, his lone eye glinting.
Steve had been gone for less than twelve hours. He hadn’t even said a proper goodbye. And Tony was—
(Their future selves had made it past 2013 intact. Why was this timeline so different?)
When Steve had been small and scrappy and stupid, he’d stuffed pilfered oranges into his pockets and picked fights he could never win, just to feel some semblance of control. He had been grasping at straws, snarling at Bucky through bloody teeth and defending some broken sense of honor that was more of an excuse than a moral code. He volunteered for an experiment in a Brooklyn basement and crashed a plane into the Arctic chasing that control, but whether he was slipping oranges into his pockets or upsetting plans to tear down democracy, Steve never felt like he was making his own choices.
He had never felt as helpless as he did now.
Later, he would hear of the broken plating and the bruises of an iron cable around the neck, the fear of being dragged to the bottom of the ocean, crushed by concrete, trapped in a metal coffin. Later, he would listen to a desperate voicemail, a stolen poncho and a malfunctioning suit, but now, he stared at the smoldering wreckage and the watery grave of Tony Stark, and his hands shook.
“Who did this?” he said softly, his voice shaking as much as his hands.
“The Mandarin,” Natasha put in, putting a hand over her phone. “No other parties involved, as far as I’ve heard."
“While this is all well and good,” Fury interrupted, rising to his feet. “I believe we had an infestation to clear out.”
“I think this takes precedence, sir,” Clint said hotly, but Fury held up a hand.
“Agent Barton, do you think SHIELD has even a chance of safely interfering in Malibu with Hydra still within our ranks? We need to move on the data files that Agent Romanoff collected.”
Pilfered oranges and back-alley fights rang in Steve’s head. His throat was numb with the screams that he was swallowing. His eyes stayed dry.
He turned sharply from the TV screen and said, “Natasha, where do those files take us?”
Tony woke to a blaring alarm, a malfunctioning HUD, and a suit steadily approaching a snowy road. He felt a headache pounding at his skull and the swelling at his neck from the iron cable that had dragged him to the bottom of the Pacific, his suit filling with water, gasping for air—
When Tony crash-landed in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee, he left two voicemails. The first was to Pepper, confirming that he was alive and apologizing for putting her in harm’s way.
As for the second.... well, Tony was a little disappointed that Steve didn’t pick up his phone, but there was at least a 50% chance that he’d shattered it after the call had disconnected.
“Steve, I gotta say it up front… I dunno what I’m doing here. Oh, um, yeah, I’m alive. Sorry about the whole… phone call thing, I wasn’t really expecting it to go down like that. But really. I don’t—um. This is a mess.
“I’m in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee, my suit’s broken, JARVIS is broken, I just had to take a poncho off of a wooden Indian, and I’ve been doing nothing but freaking out this whole trip. I’m in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee, I mean, really.”
Tony slid to his knees in a phone booth in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee, and his lungs felt so tight he worried the arc reactor would combust.
“But, I, um,” Tony continued, his voice impossibly strangled. “Those weeks with you, out in Malibu, they were… great. They were really great. And I know that you want me to come back, I want to come back to you, and I know you’re looking for Bucky and I really, really want you to find him. So… don’t come looking for me. I mean, you won’t be able to find me, because I’m in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee, but, well. Don’t try.”
The Iron Man armor scraped along the pavement, and Tony tried his best to keep it safe in the snow. It felt like saying goodbye to an old friend, an aching old wound and an old shoebox full of photographs. The line beeped when it disconnected.
The garage he broke into was apparently the domain of an angry chipmunk named Harley, and Tony asked for a watch and a tuna fish sandwich when all he wanted was to go home. He got a limited edition Dora the Explorer watch and no sandwich, instead, which wasn’t bad for the middle of nowhere in Tennessee.
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
When Steve reached Camp Lehigh and saw his ghosts running rampant among the crumbled facades and wrecked bunkers, he had two SHIELD assassins at his sides and his shield at his back. Memories screamed in his face, pounded at the back of his mind: Peggy, shouting at the recruits who had decided to think with the piece of flesh between their legs instead of between their ears; Bucky’s smile, which was already beginning to fade from his memory; Howard Stark’s manic rambling that reminded him, now, of Tony.
(they were both dead now)
Clint’s fingers twitched at his bow, and he seemed to be restraining himself from finding high ground. Natasha pressed a hand to Steve’s shoulder, her steady eyes framed by the straight waves of her hair. “You up for this?”
Steve dipped his head, breathed through Bucky’s smile, Tony’s smile, the way he flicked through his holograms while verbally sparring with JARVIS, the way he lit up when talking about Iron Man.
he won’t do that anymore, a cruel voice in the back of his head whispered. he can’t do anything anymore. he’s dead dead dead deaddeaddeaddeaddead DEAD.
No. A Stark hadn’t given up on Steve after seventy years. Steve wouldn’t give up on another Stark after less than a day.
“Yeah,” Steve said in answer to Natasha’s question. “Yeah, I’m good.”
Steve knocked the lock free of the door, and knocked the lock free of the secrets that had been hiding in this warehouse for seventy years. Arnim Zola flickered to life on the screens, greeting them smugly by their real names. He hadn’t known Natasha’s birth name was Natalia; he had known that Clint’s was Clinton. He was surprised the archer didn’t shoot the screen on principle.
He spoke smugly of subterfuge and illness, of a terror group so cleverly hidden by an American intelligence organization. SHIELD had been infected the whole time, blah, blah, blah.
Howard Stark’s face flickered on screen, his features crossed out and the word DECEASED printed across the file. Blueprints of the helicarriers, marked TERMINATED, briefly showed before they were abandoned, replaced by a picture of Fury, reading PENDING.
“Hey, douchebag, shut up, we know,” Clint interrupted, looking an inch from shooting the screen. “Whee, Winter Soldier, Project Insight, yahoo.” He waved his hands around unenthusiastically in the universal gesture for hooray. “Why do you think like half of your troops have gone dark?”
Even pixelated, Zola’s face still managed to display a proper amount of shock.
Clint was right. None of the information that Zola had so far divulged wasn’t anything new. The problem that they were supposed to be solving was that they didn’t know what Project Insight was. Old files spoke of plans for helicarriers equipped with firepower to wipe out anyone who stood in Hydra’s way. Helicarriers that were equipped with repulsor technology— Stark repulsor technology. That hadn’t gotten off the ground after the visit from their future selves had warned them of SHIELD’s more tentacle-y dark side, as Tony had so eloquently put it.
That project would never get off the ground now, Hydra or no. The thought made Steve nauseous.
Natasha’s jaw was set, and Clint was balanced on the balls of his feet. Guns at Natasha’s hips, bow at Clint’s back. It made Steve feel a little better.
“Then you must know what is coming,” Zola said smugly, regaining some of his composure. “Why do you sit idly here whilst the Soldier has already been activated and our project has reached completion?”
Bucky was Steve’s first thought. Project? was his second.
“Project?” Natasha repeated, apparently following his line of thought. “You mean Project Insight? The helicarriers? Those were scrapped—and besides, Tony Stark is dead.”
Zola tittered, the speakers echoing his amusement in a hissing, staticy parody of a laugh. “You are slipping, my dear Natalia,” he said, and Natasha clenched her fists like she was considering putting a hole in the screen. “Hydra has evolved. Project Insight was pushed forwards. We have moved beyond the prototype… superior in some ways, of course, but there is freedom in a lack of liability.”
“The helicarriers,” Natasha breathed, looking at Clint. “The files that Fury couldn’t access. Pierce met with the WSC after Fury terminated Insight. What if…”
“He could have reactivated the project,” Clint agreed, his hand clenching tight on his bow. “But without Fury finding out… that would be impossible.”
Clint was right. Fury missing something that important was as likely as the sun not rising in the morning.
“Nothing is impossible,” Zola sneered. “Especially for Hydra.”
Clint didn’t seem too preoccupied with that, instead demanding, “What’s on the drive?”
“Project Insight requires… insight,” Zola snapped. “So I wrote an algorithm.”
“What kind of algorithm—what does it do?” Natasha asked, her voice needle-sharp. The soft edges of the striped hoodie that she wore belied the harsh lines of her shoulders, her neck.
“The answer to your question is fascinating. Unfortunately,” here Zola paused, indulging in a blurry, pixelated smirk, “you shall be too dead to hear it.”
Blast doors rumbled to life, shutting them into the decrepit warehouse. Steve flung his shield desperately at the rapidly-closing gap, but too late. Clint already had an arrow fully nocked, but he didn’t let fly. Natasha had her phone out, her eyebrows forming a hard line of tension. “Guys, we got a bogey. Short-range ballistic. 30 seconds tops.”
“Who fired it?” Steve demanded.
Natasha tilted her head wryly. “SHIELD.”
“I am afraid I have been stalling, Captain.”
“There,” Clint pointed out, gesturing at a grate built into the concrete. The beeping from Natasha’s phone grew louder, more frantic, as her gaze caught on one of the monitors. “Hop in.”
“Admit it, it’s better this way.”
Natasha leapt into the narrow gap. Clint stared wide-eyed at a flickering image of Coulson’s face, reading NEUTRALIZED.
“Barton!” Steve snapped. Clint seemed to shake off the daze that he’d fallen into, and he made to join them before he whipped his gaze back to the computers.
The drive was still in the port.
“You and I are both…”
Clint dove.
Steve screamed his name again.
“Out of time.”
Steve was out of time. He dove for the grate, covering Natasha with his body and then his shield. Even though the roar of the missile, he heard Clint’s boots skid on the concrete as he hopefully dove for cover.
“Clint!” he heard Natasha scream, and then it all went blank.