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“Agent Romanoff is here to see you, boss.”
A soft huff of breath slipped past his lips as the elevator doors closed and he leaned heavily against the wall, staring at his admittedly haggard face in the mirror opposite. “What does she want?"
“I’m afraid she’s not responding to my queries as to such.”
“Hm. Where is she?”
“Penthouse, boss.”
“Jesus, Friday, just let her in why don’t you?”
The AI actually sounded offended at his presumption. “I experienced a programming malfunction lasting approximately twenty-six seconds, during which time Agent Romanoff gained access to your private quarters, boss.”
He just shook his head, resigned. “Well, that’s convenient.” The doors opened on the penthouse at the top of the tower. The space felt just as large and empty as the only other time he’d been back to Manhattan since returning to the facility upstate three months ago, and the sassy redhead perched on the arm of the sofa wasn’t exactly the one he wanted to see. “No, please,” he swept his arm out before him in faux-courtesy, “do come in, Agent Romanoff.”
“How’s Rhodey?”
“Recovering nicely from his third surgery three floors down, I’m sure he’d love to see you.”
“I’ll drop in before I go, then.”
Not in the mood for banter, he decided, Natasha carried a look surprisingly close to trepidation, and he mulled its possible causes on his way to the bar across the room. “Drink?” She glanced pointedly down at the coffee table as she turned to follow him with her intent gaze. “Ah. Is that water or, well… Russian water?”
She just answered with a smirk and a long, slow sip.
He was still pondering her reasons for being there as he crossed back across towards the chair opposite her, drink in hand, when she blindsided him with a quiet, “Bruce says hi."
“Jesus Christ, you have been busy.” His eyes finally fell on a black backpack sitting on the couch next to the arm where she still perched, and she gracefully slid over it to fall into the middle seat as Tony lowered himself cautiously into his chair. “What’s going on, Natasha? Why the cloak and dagger? For that matter, it’s not like we’ve erased your access to the facility, you know, you could have just walked in and said hi.”
“Hi.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Eyes upstate, you know that, Tony. Ross is livid, ever since Steve’s little stunt at the Raft, he’ll take any opportunity to get his hands on any and all of us that have slipped his web.”
Her choice of phrasing took a moment to process. “I figured you helped him with that little stunt."
“Nope, we haven’t been in touch.”
His brows shot straight up towards his hairline at that. “But you know where they are.”
“What do you take me for?”
He chuckled, but quickly tapered off and eyed her over the top of his glass. “But you wouldn’t tell me.” It wasn’t phrased as a question.
She shrugged easily though. “Guess it would depend why you wanted to know.”
The next minute passed in something verging on uncomfortable silence, until he cleared his throat awkwardly and nodded at the pack sitting beside her. “What’s in the bag? Human head?”
“Sort of,” she admitted, and he unconsciously scooted back further in his chair. “Relax.” She peeled open the smallest zipper pocket and produced a flash drive, which she set carefully on the table next to her glass. “Wait,” she commanded when he made to grab it, and then pulled the top zipper. From within, she produced two stacks of spiral-bound notebooks which were laid next to the flash drive. “I need to ask you something before I explain.”
“Fire away.”
“You, ah… you didn’t kill him, did you? Barnes?”
“What?” he started and frowned. “No. Not for lack of trying though,” he muttered as an afterthought. “I thought you had eyes on them.”
“I said I know where they are,” she corrected. “And from the occasional eyes I do get, he’s not there, and from the occasional ears, anytime someone brings him up to Steve, he gets all awkward and cagey and morose and won’t actually tell anyone what happened to him.”
Tony snorted. “And what? You thought I killed him, and Cap wanted to spare his fugitive friends the knowledge of what a monster I am?”
Natasha actually flinched, and then fixed him with a steely glare. “You acted outside the Accords when you followed them to Siberia, no matter how you justified it to Ross later.” He ran an anxious hand over his face. “You don’t get to demean all of us like that. Not now, not anymore.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” A deep breath did little to calm his frazzled nerves. “And no, I don’t think I caused him any lasting damage, save perhaps an equilibrium problem.” She frowned and cocked her head sideways. “Blew his metal arm to kingdom come,” he muttered, and she started in surprise. “Guess they should’a used vibranium.”
“That’s…” she let out a slow, steadying breath. “Huh. Okay.”
“Don’t even start with the -”
“No,” she waved him off, “not that. I just…can’t believe Steve left his side again, with a weakness like that. The world knows his face now.”
“Yeah, but they know his face alongside a scary-ass metal arm. Guy with one arm gets remembered for different reasons, and they probably aren’t really noticing his face.”
The shift of her expression from contemplative to shrewdly calculating set his teeth on edge, and he realized her next question just before she asked it. “And you never told Ross his search parameters changed so drastically. Why?”
“Eh, guy’s a dick, he threw all my friends in prison.”
“Tony.”
“I don’t know, alright?” he snapped. “Some days, because I want him to disappear back into the world and never see or hear anything of him again, and others because I want to be the one to catch up with him eventually and finish what we started in Siberia. And now I know he’s not got Cap at his six so, thanks for that intel.”
She continued to surprise him by just nodding heavily, resignedly, and turning her attention to the bag at her side, the contents of which were still sitting undisturbed on the table between them. “Did you read the report from Bucharest?”
“What, Barnes’s bolt hole?”
“It wasn’t a bolt hole,” she informed him softly. “They interviewed people in the building, in the market. He’d been living there almost a year. Bought a newspaper from the same little shop stall daily, fruit from another. Just trying to carve out a quiet, simple place in the world where he could exist in peace.”
He could feel the color rising in his cheeks. “That doesn’t change the fact that -!”
“I know it doesn’t, Tony. I’m trying to explain the bag.”
His gaze fell to it immediately with a trepidation so strong that she may as well have just told him it was a bomb. “That’s Barnes’s?”
“I stole it from Ross on my way out of town. Sharon said they almost blew it up for fear it was booby-trapped and stuffed full of weapons.”
“College-ruled assault rifles,” he quipped absently, still eyeing the stacks of notebooks. “Sorry, Natasha, I’m just a little lost on the point you’re heading towards here. Is there even one?”
“They tore the place apart and couldn’t find a weapon more deadly than a steak knife. That was hidden under the floorboards, and that’s what he took with him to run. His only possession worth anything to him.” She reached out and gently slid the top notebook on the left stack towards him.
Tony looked over the cracking blue cover, and did not touch it.
“That’s the first one,” she continued quietly once it became apparent that Tony wasn’t ready yet. “It’s… disjointed. Confused. After that, he seems to have split his memories apart.” She gestured at the left stack. “Brooklyn. The war. Steve.” And the right. “Hydra. His capture, conditioning. His missions. It took me a long time to get through those. Lot of stuff never made it into the official file. Bruce read a page and almost went green.”
Still eyeing it warily, Tony finally took the proffered book between his fingertips and gingerly flipped it to the first page. Taped to the center of the page was a brochure cover from a Smithsonian exhibit on Captain America, and chaotic writing in English and Cyrillic was scrawled haphazardly around it, save a phrase along the top margin that had obviously been gone over again and again, standing out harsh and bold amongst the rest.
I’m with you til the end of the line
Captain Am Steven Grant Rogers the man on the bridge… died? 1945? Your friend you’re my mission is dead, see, we brought you the newspaper – crashed a plane into the ocean – time to stop fighting, pet, your Steve is never coming to save you. Steve? I knew him You know me your name is James Buchanan Barnes
Bucky?
Who the hell
You have no name, a weapon does not need a name. A weapon probably needs all its limbs. Insubordination 50 lashes, 5 simulated drownings, 3 days total sensory deprivation Are you ready to cooperate, Soldier? I’m a sergeant, jerk Defiance 3 hours --
Barnes, Sergeant, 3-2-5-5-7-2-4-1
I thought you were dead I thought you were smaller
Steve?
Wipe him and start over.
The rest of the page was either written in Cyrillic or too smudged to be legible. Tony snapped the book shut again and pushed it two inches back towards the center of the table. “Why,” he stated flatly.
“I’m not trying to question or invalidate your anger and pain about your parents,” she said softly. “I’m really not. But now that you’re a few months’ removed from the shock and betrayal of it all -”
“Get the hell out of here, Natasha.”
“No.”
“Goddammit, Romanoff -!”
“No. Stop, Tony. I want you to understand. You were kidnapped and tortured, too.”
“I didn’t go around strangling helpless, bleeding women because of it!”
A flash of pain crossed Natasha’s face. “That’s right. You didn’t. Because they only had you for three months, and they knew that however much they hurt you, they needed to keep your mind intact and your body decently functional, to give them what they wanted. They needed you, Tony Stark, so you could build a weapon. Barnes was the weapon, they didn’t need his mind, didn’t want his mind. He had the serum and they had all the time in the world, so the condition of his body didn’t much matter to them either.” Tony ground his jaw down in frustration. “It was never a matter of if they could break him, pull him apart and remake him to suit their ends – it was a matter of how long. Do you know how long they had him before they deemed him useful enough, broken enough, to move him to the storage facility in Siberia?”
He just stared dully.
“Three and a half years, Tony. Years.”
Tony leaned forward and whispered harshly in her face. “And you spent your entire life getting spoon-fed lies on behalf of the motherland or whatever, and you tossed it all away for what? A pretty face? He knew Howard! It wasn’t just some random hit!”
“Fuck you,” Natasha returned mildly. “Would you like to see the file S.H.I.E.L.D kept on me before Clint brought me in? The one with the big shoot-on-sight authorization stamped on the top? I can’t believe you haven’t read it, all the horrible shit I’ve done. Have you seen the arrest warrant the World Security Council put out for Clint, after New York, before Nick told them to go fuck themselves?”
“It’s not the same!”
Tony found himself on his feet, eyes wide and breathing heavily as he stared down on her, no clear memory of how he got there.
She just smiled sadly. “I know it’s not. Because neither of us killed your parents. And maybe that sounds condescending – I don’t mean it to be. Clint’s actions got Phil Coulson killed, that was personal for you… but he didn’t drive the blade into his chest, and it still doesn’t measure up to twenty-five years of a lie about your mom. I know that.”
“And how long have you known?” he murmured quietly, defeated, slumping back down into his seat and putting his head in his hand, elbow propped on the arm of the chair.
“I found out when Steve did, just before a missile nearly buried us in a bunker in New Jersey.”
“Jesus Christ.”
She gave him a few minutes; to process that, he supposed.
“So what,” he said at last, tone flat. “You expect me to make nice with the assassin who strangled my mother?”
“No,” she shrugged. “I don’t even expect you to forgive him.”
“Then why are you-?”
“Tony,” she implored. “I’m asking… begging… that you see if you can’t find a way to make peace with what happened in a way that doesn’t involve hunting him down and killing him. Please.”
It was perhaps the most open and earnest he had ever seen her. Her emotions broadcast for miles, full of pain and conflict and desperation, and he almost wanted to look away, like he was intruding on something private, even if it was directed at him.
He tapped at the cover of the notebook idly, but stopped short of opening it again. “Why? Why is he so important to you?”
“Him?” His gaze snapped back up at her incredulity. “Tony, if you kill him, the only question about Steve putting a bullet in his own brain is whether he puts it off long enough to kill you first, too.”
She wiped at her eyes angrily, and he did look away then, seeing the Black Widow cry. He wanted to accuse her of manipulating him, using emotional blackmail to get what she wanted, but he recognized something in it, something he’d felt as he’d watched Pepper fall hundreds of feet to a certain, fiery death, a desperate grief in the face of losing everything in his life that mattered.
This was what mattered to Natasha. The team. The closest thing she had left to any semblance of friends or family, the only certainty in her moral compass since the fall of S.H.I.E.L.D and the terrible truth about its corruption laid bare.
He thought about Cap watching Barnes plummet hundreds of feet into the icy depths of a ravine, and felt a glimmer of reluctant empathy at the parallel. Except Pepper had come back minutes later. Not seventy years later. Her body had come back different and, frankly, a little scary, but she’d still come back… his Pepper.
Barnes came back with a scary body and a twisted mind that was still susceptible to snapping back into full-fledged killing machine mode.
And he’d killed Howard and Maria Stark.
“The notebooks have all been scanned and placed on the drive,” Natasha told him after a long pause. “And there’s a… a video. I’m going to make contact with Steve, get the bag to him and maybe he can get it back to Barnes.” She gathered the books back up and placed them carefully back in the backpack, slid the last one slowly out from under Tony’s frozen hand. “I just… maybe this was stupid. Pointless. But the things they did-”
Her voice broke a bit. He grabbed the thumb drive and turned it around in his hand, staring unseeingly. “I can’t promise it’ll change anything.”
“I know.” She rounded the coffee table, looked for a moment like she might lean in to kiss his cheek, thought better of it, and put a hand gently on his shoulder instead. “I’m sorry, Tony. Truly. To learn the truth how you did, when you did…” She drew a shuddering breath. “But if you can find any measure of peace that allows him to try to find some as well…” She nodded down at the drive clasped in his hand. “You might even come to think he deserves it.”
Natasha vanished quickly and silently after that, leaving Tony sitting and staring blankly until the setting sun cast long shadows through the room and then disappeared behind the surrounding skyscrapers. The sudden darkness – Friday apparently took the initiative to decide not to turn the lights on per usual – jolted him back to the present, and he wondered idly if Natasha had checked in on Rhodey after all. Maybe she suggested his friend leave him alone for the rest of the night.
Smart woman, Agent Romanoff.
“Friday,” he grunted at last, and a console rose out of the center of the coffee table. He leaned forward and inserted the drive, then watched as a series of files arranged themselves chronologically in front of him, hovering six inches above the tabletop.
He flipped through the numbered notebook files and came to rest on the sole video.
The scene opened into what was unmistakably a bank vault, but at first glance could have been taken for a torture chamber. The metal chair, restraints, medical equipment all spoke to ominous purpose, but when the shirtless figure – Barnes – was deposited in the seat, he was unconfined, simply sat staring into the middle distance while a technician worked to repair his arm.
He twitched oddly once or twice before lashing out at the tech, and was almost immediately surrounded by a dozen assault rifles.
Tony wondered if it would have been enough, had Barnes decided to keep resisting. He’d seen the man fight his way past Cap, Wilson, Carter, Natasha, T’Challa, and himself while barely taking more than a glancing hit.
It’s not until Alexander Pierce himself showed up and waved off the strike team that he thought to look at the date stamp in the corner of the image, and realized it was the night before the helicarriers went down in D.C.
“Mission report… Mission report, now,” and the ensuing crack of a hand across the oblivious assassin’s face made Tony start.
“The man on the bridge… who was he?”
He climbed to his feet and paced anxiously as the scene played out, stopping twice at the bar for refills in the few short minutes of the video.
By the time Barnes’s screams subsided, to a steady flow of Russian words which Friday translated and displayed at the bottom of the video projection, but meant nothing at all to Tony and seemed to be complete nonsense, he was startled to find that he had the cellphone enclosed with Cap’s letter clutched in his hand like a security blanket.
“Ready to comply.”
He stared at the single number pre-programmed into the phone for close to ten minutes before letting out a furious, agonized scream and throwing it across the room.
Tony stays up all night reading, aided by the translations provided by Friday of the non-English scrawl. There’s a lot of Russian in the early books, some German. The pages are dutifully dated, and he sometimes goes days or weeks in one language, followed by a mess of Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, warring scripts dancing across the page, and then he’ll settle on English for a few days.
At one point, he writes for a full two months in Romanian, and Tony supposes that’s when Barnes carved out his space in Bucharest. Practicing the language, perhaps.
He gets three pages into the first notebook about his time with Hydra, throws up the liquor that’s been sitting uneasy in his stomach for some time, and collapses into a fitful sleep on the sofa with the phone clutched back in his grip. It only suffered a small scratch from its sudden flight across the penthouse.
Before he can think about it too hard when he wakes, he’s stabbing at the screen, half-blind as he blinks sleep out of his eyes, and lifts it to his ear as it starts ringing.
The answer comes before the first full ring is out.
“…Tony? What… Is everything…?”
“Where is he?”
There’s a terse silence, and Cap sounds a mix of disappointed and sad as he answers, “You know I can’t… won’t… tell you that.”
“And the next time some guy looking to settle a score, or some Hydra bigwig that slipped the net, starts murmuring sweet, nonsensical nothings into his ear? That’s on you, Cap. The people he kills… that’ll be on you.”
The speed and honesty of the reply catches him off guard. “I know. But… we did our best. He should be safe. From others and… to others.”
They’re both quiet for a long minute after that. Tony finally confesses, “I didn’t tell Ross. That he’s not looking for the metal arm, anymore.”
“I figured. They never updated the warrant.” He hesitates, then offers a cautious, “Thank you, Tony.”
“I never want to see him again. Ever. I can’t promise…”
“But you won’t go looking for him?”
An even longer silence passes, and Tony puts his head in his hand and blinks back the hot prickling in the corner of his eyes, all the anger and grief and revenge that have been consuming him rearing their ugly heads, questioning him, his head warring with his heart and his most base instincts screaming from where he’s pushed them into the back of his mind.
And he thinks of a man carved into a weapon, bristling with deadly purpose, reduced to a lost look, confused and sad, earnest yet resigned: But I knew him.
“No. I won’t go looking.”
The relief is palpable. “Thank you, Tony. That…well. I don’t know what to-”
“Thank Natasha,” he cuts off any further output of sappy Cap emotions. “She seems to be headed your way.”
And he hangs up before he does something stupid like ask Cap to just bring the team home, or tell him where they are so he can join them. He’s not done here. Has to do right by Rhodey. Needs to help Vision regain his self-assurance. Promised Peter some new tech and a visit upstate.
He tucks the phone away in his desk and locks the drawer. Because whether or not Secretary Ross believes or admits it… they’ll need them again one day. All of them.
He’s on his way out the door to go down and check on Rhodey when a glint of metal catches his eye. He stands and stares for a minute, sighs, and retrieves the shield from where he tossed it angrily into a corner – denting the wall in the process – on his first trip back to the tower after the events in Siberia.
Taking down one of the pictures Pepper had hung, something undoubtedly expensive and sophisticated and appropriately feng-shui’d into place, he mounts the shield in its stead. The afternoon sun catches on, bounces off the silver star at its center, and the room is a little bit brighter.