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Tony woke up slowly.
That was never a good sign.
Especially when he couldn’t feel his hands, and his legs were bound.
Oh, and the knife at his throat probably wasn’t great either.
“Oh, put the knife down, he’s out for a while.” Tony couldn’t place the voice. “We have to move him to the wall, remember?”
“He’s twitching.” A deeper voice, right in his ear. Keeping his breathing as steady as he could, Tony took stock of the room with his eyes closed. At least two guys holding him captive. Given the echo, it was a small room, he was likely in the center.
“It’s fine. PTSD, remember? Nightmares.” The guy actually snorted. Tony would’ve thought it funny if he wasn’t kidnapped. The guy with the knife grunted and moved away. Tony barely kept himself from flinching as the knife cut through whatever was binding his hands and legs.
“See? He’s out. I’ll get the chains out.”
“Do ya know what Boss wants with him?”
“Who knows, Boss is weird. And we’re not here to ask questions.” Tony was lifted up roughly, arms pulled above his head and cuffed there, his feet just touching the floor.
It was a good thing he’d worn his taller lifts today.
“He’s not going anywhere, let’s get lunch.” The door, directly across from him, opened with a squeak and closed with a bang.
So it might be designed to be loud on purpose, which would make getting out of here harder.
Not to mention he had no idea if anyone was outside that door.
Finally opening his eyes, Tony looked around. It was a standard basement room, if small, and without windows. No clues as to where he was, but that was typical. Hopefully still New York.
His arms had already started to ache, and this position was pulling on his chest.
Even if he got out of these chains within an hour, he'd be in bed for at least a day.
They'd taken his watch, of course, but not his cufflinks.
Fiddling with them proved fruitful.
It took a few minutes, but Tony managed to free his right arm, before grabbing the chain to his left and pulling himself eye level.
It went faster this time, and Tony dropped to the ground lightly. The guy had taken his knife with him, but the chair and the ties were still there.
The chair was wooden.
Should he risk the noise breaking a leg or two to have a weapon?
Tony decided to. He needed to escape, after all, and it had sounded like those were the only two guarding him.
But breaking the chair legs off, over his knee, brought his attention to the heavy bruising on his wrists and arms.
Then he broke them off, and he was aware of sharp pain in his leg, pain that couldn't be explained away as an effect of breaking the chair.
Tony woke up, the back of his head aching like he’d been hit.
Given that he was chained to a wall with the broken chair on the floor, that seemed to be the case.
Who had taken him this time?
Better yet—why?
Tony thought he recognized this room, small and windowless as it was. Something about the chair and these chains seemed familiar.
Well, they hadn’t taken his cuff links.
Tony woke up, chest burning. He’d been hanging here for a while, then.
There was no one in the room with him.
That would give him time to escape, to rig something up. He could use the chair. Two of the legs were already broken off, but he could still swing it at someone.
And that’s what he did, when a guy with a knife came in. Hit him hard enough to take the knife and run. It got him out the door, down the hall, to a control room.
(farther than he’d gotten before.
but he didn’t know that.)
He scanned the monitors quickly—didn’t look like anyone was coming this way.
Tony rigged the room to explode. The walls were all steel, so it might not do much damage, but it was a distraction.
It was odd, how empty the place was.
Normally there were a lot of guards when he got kidnapped.
At least three.
But Tony didn’t have time to think about that. He ached all over, sharp pain in (far too many) places, and he didn’t know anything: Where he was, why he was here, or who took him.
Each one had the potential to complicate this situation further.
(he’d been wrong, after all. he wasn’t in a basement. he was on the top floor of an empty house, in northern Montana.
it turned out not to matter anyway.)
When Tony got outside it became apparent why he’d had no guards.
Fury and that old missing friend of his, Carol, were standing there, looking deeply unimpressed.
“Tony, I know you get kidnapped a lot, but can’t your kidnappers be competent?” Carol complained, a laugh in her voice.
“Oh, you know they can’t, Carol, where would the fun in that be?” Tony let her wrap an arm around his shoulders—he was less steady than he was letting on. “Also, I rigged their control room to explode, so we better leave.”
“Of course you did. The Tower or SHIELD medical?”
“Nice of you to ask, Fury. I think I’ll deal with SHIELD just this once.” Tony leaned on Carol further, knowing they both realized he was hurt by now. “When did you get back, Carol?”
“When Nick called me and told me the Avengers didn’t know you had disappeared, even when the Tony Stark they have currently is clearly not you.”
“They’ve known me for what? All of three weeks? They can’t tell.”
“Yeah, well, we’re getting the whole team checked out.” Fury said. “Coulson and Maria are handling it, Coulson from the shadows, of course.”
Tony hummed in response. Behind them, the building blew up, and Tony couldn’t bring himself to care.
“Where are we, anyway?”
“Montana.”
“What? Why Montana? Of all the places to be kidnapped to, they picked Montana?” Carol snorted. “Don’t laugh at me, Danvers, I would have preferred to be kidnapped closer to home.”
“Of course, of course.”
Tony woke up, slowly.
That was never a good sign.
Or it wasn’t, until he saw Carol sitting by his bed, Fury pacing the other end of the room.
If Carol was sitting and the worst Fury was doing was pacing, and he was in bed, then it couldn’t be too bad.
“Do you know who took you, Tony?” Carol asked, quietly. Like she was afraid of the answer.
“No. Nothing I could identify, anyway, and they didn’t talk to me.”
“Not at all, in three weeks?” Tony nodded, then paused.
“I think they might have, actually. I got the standard drug tests done, right? Cause I remember waking up there three times, and every time I thought it was the first.” Fury turned sharply to look at him.
“You’re saying something caused holes in your memory?” He growled.
“Looks like it. As far as I know, they only kept me in that room.” Now that he was thinking about it, he couldn’t remember interacting with anyone but the two guys from the first day, assuming it had been the first day, and then no one else until he escaped.
“I tried to escape every time I woke up, only got past the hallway the last time. That might have something to do with it. I only saw two guys, and they talked about a boss the first time I woke.” Tony told them, and something in Fury’s shoulders relaxed.
“Good.”
“Do you know who it was?” Tony asked him, moving to sit up.
“We think it was AIM. The first drug tests we did came back with known AIM substances. We don’t know what for, though.” Carol told him, still softly.
“Why are you being so gentle, Carol?” Even when he’d been a dumbass fourteen year old in college, she’d never been gentle. Nice, sure, and she’d helped him out a few tight spots, but she’d never spoken to him like this.
“Tony, look at yourself.” He finally did.
Both wrists bandaged, left arm in a cast. Leg propped up in pillows, also in a cast.
He’d had worse injuries as a kid.
“He can’t see his face, Carol.” Fury was also quiet, now, and wow that was something he hadn’t been with Tony for years.
“Right.” Carol grabbed a mirror from the side table.
His goatee was gone, and someone had shaved his head. There weren’t any bandages, but he could see the marks of dissolved stitches and a new scar forming on his face, from his left temple across the bridge of his nose to the right edge of his jaw.
He had no memory of getting that.
“Don’t remember it?” Carol was teasing, now. “We didn’t know it was there until they washed your face. Turns out someone covered it and then put makeup on you to hide it. They were probably going to try for ransom.”
“Or they planted the decoy and planned to switch us back. Having me roughed up would be better for ransom.”
“...that’s a good point.” Tony couldn’t believe either of them hadn’t thought of it.
“If I may, Director Fury, I can tell the Avengers there is a containment in the Tower and bring them in for that,” JARVIS said.
“Do it. We can capture the fake Tony and speak with the Avengers at the same time.” Fury pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is getting more and more complicated.”
“Go back to sleep, Tony, we’ll handle it.”
You know what? Tony really didn’t want to deal with this today.
So he listened to Carol, didn’t even bother trying to take out his IV or complain, and closed his eyes.
The last thing he heard before he went to sleep was: “Wow, I didn’t think it’d be that easy.”