Chapter Text
91
“Avengers, I have an offer for you. A trade, rather. One million dollars and an arc reactor, and I’ll trade you this,” the man brought up what looked to be a small child, possibly a teenager, beaten to absolute shit, by the front of his shirt. The boy’s head lolled back but they could see his busted lip and cut cheek, not to mention a scary amount of blood that trailed down his face and had since dried, trailing down his throat, through the hollow between his collarbones, and continued to stain his shirt. The boy made a small, agonized noise and the man shook him aggressively.
All the Avengers were paying attention now, wondering who the kid was and why he was such an apparently strong bargaining tool for the man.
“This boy is a very important person to New York, and holds some very important information for SHIELD, and especially you superheroes. He was very hard to get a hold of, had to hack so many cameras and have so many people follow him, even that barely worked… had to kill his last family member, even… she was pretty.”
The boy let out a wailing noise, and the man let him, smirking.
Bruce left the room.
“Now,” the man said, “you don’t have a time limit to send me my demands, but… the longer you take, the worse treatment this little bug gets.” He paused, and started grinning. “And… Stark… he’s going to love getting waterboarded. Didn’t you?”
The screen went dark.
Tony stiffened and the team looked at him pityingly.
“Right,” he spoke, his voice cracking slightly, “We better get to finding out where this kid is and go get him. I’ll be in my lab.”
they all split off to go get as much information as they could.
Tony, to his lab as he said, to scan the video for clues to whereabouts, who the kid was, who the kidnapper was.
pepper went to go set up a room for the poor boy. no doubt he would be rescued soon, and would stay at the tower for at least a little while.
Nat went to go ask around SHIELD HQ if anyone had seen this kid before, if he was employed there as an intern or anything.
Steve went to go check his gear was all ready. he knew it would probably be a quick, little-to-no-notice thing.
Bucky stayed there, fiddling with the remote. He turned the video back on and stared at the kid. He swore he knew that voice.
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91
“They’ll come for me soon,” Peter rasped from the floor.
His captor scoffed. “They don’t even know who you are.”
“Mr. Stark has state of the art, secret technology. He’ll, like, scan the video and find me based off my face. And he’ll track the origin of the video-“
“Stark will soon find out, then, that I went across the entire internet for every inch of information about you, about your family, read it, and deleted it. All of it. It’s the digital version of the Nazi book burnings, kid. You don’t even exist anymore. And you’re beaten to shit, you wouldn’t be recognizable anyway, idiot. And the origin of the video is in Iceland,” he cackled.
“Is that where we are?” Peter whispered.
“Maybe!” The man picked up pliers, walking towards Peter with a grin on his face. “Sooner you tell me what I need to know, the sooner you stop hurting.”
A nearly silent whimper.
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91
Tony groaned in frustration, shutting down his holograms. “I can’t fucking find anything.”
“There has to be something,” Steve said helplessly, staring at the giant screen spanning the width of the wall.
“I’ve searched quite literally every inch of the internet, Cap. There’s nothing about that kid, and I can’t really do anything without a name either. I tried the kidnapper too, fucking nothing.”
“You can track the… the address of the video, where it came from, right?”
“The IP address, yeah, but it’s in the middle of nowhere in goddamn Iceland. He’s trying to throw us off. This dude knows what he’s doing.” Tony put his head in his hands.
“We’ll figure it out, Tony.”