FIC: when the dust settles... (MCU, Tony Stark/Bucky Barnes, R)

[carlyinrome]

TITLE: when the dust settles (when the ice melts)
RATING: R
FANDOM: Marvel Cinematic Universe
PAIRINGS: Tony Stark/James “Bucky” Buchanan Barnes, Natasha Romanoff/Bruce Banner, Tony Stark & Natasha Romanoff, Tony Stark & Bruce Banner
SUMMARY: After the fallout from the Accords, Tony and Bucky are both trying to reassemble their lives, but this is complicated by Hydra, who want their asset back and the Avengers dead.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for the Iron Man Big Bang. Takes place after Civil War, with liberties taken with Civil War’s ending and Thor: Ragnarok completely ignored.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Gorgeous art by trashcanikan.




Prologue

all night i catalog
the old aches
count the new ones

my body a map
to tell me lately i am
more wars than
skin

every disaster is another flora is
another forest
coiled outside another
and after
will there be places left to kiss?
      - Jinan Safko, “Wars & Flowers”


Part One: Three Minutes

Tony wakes up in Siberia, and the first thing he sees is Natasha. She is crouched beside him in black and silver fox fur, her red hair swaying over him. She has her fingers on his throat, and finally, through what feels like a thousand hangovers, he realizes she is taking his pulse.

“Good morning, gorgeous,” she says. She comes up from her knees, extends a hand. “Can you stand?”

Tony lets her help him to his feet, and when the armor is too heavy for him and won't slip off at a command, she helps him pry off the dented pieces.

“What are you doing here?” he rasps.

“I’m your wake up call,” she says. There is blood pooling around her fingernails, but she just wipes her hands on her pants and thrusts them back into her gloves. He wants more, but her face is earnest and gentle, and her hands are soft on his body as she helps him limp to the chopper, so he just leans on her and stops asking questions. He picks up the shield on the way out.

His father made it. Natasha looks at it, but says nothing but, “Easy. Easy.”

***

The shield rests on the exam table in the infirmary. Tony is in the bed, taped up and being pumped full of fluids. Natasha is beside him, the furs draped over the back of her chair. Romanoff was the name of the Russian royal family before they were violently uprooted; he’s wondered before if she came by the name honestly, and looking at her now he can believe it.

“What are you doing here?” he asks again.

She is looking at him still. “I followed up on your transport,” she says. “You’ve been missing for three days, Tony. You were out for three days.”

She pauses, her lips pinching briefly. “Steve broke the others out of the Raft. I assume Barnes is with him; I don't know. Clint took a deal with the State Department to send him home, and everyone else is in the wind. I called in reinforcements, but you’re down, Rhodes is down. I’m all that's left.”

Tony looks at her. Something about her wavers, and he wonders, for the very first time, how young she is. He nods. Reaches out a bandaged hand, the IV land trailing. Rests his hand on hers. She looks surprised, but more composed, and she doesn't pull away.

“Thank you,” he says.

She smiles, just a little. “Get some rest.”

Tony sleeps.

***

When he wakes, the sky is a different color. Natasha’s furs are still draped over the chair beside the bed, but the chair is empty. He scans the room slowly, painfully. The shield is still on the exam table, and Natasha is in the doorway, back to him, speaking softly with someone in the doorway, dressed darkly, his head bent toward hers, his hand on her arm.

“Bruce?”

Natasha and Bruce both start, turn toward him. Bruce makes his way to the bedside, grasping the bed rail. Tony’s chart is in his hand, and he looks worried and tired.

“Tony,” he says, and Tony laughs and laughs.

“I knew she knew how to find you.”

***

Bruce would explain everything if Tony asked, but he doesn't. He just says, “It’s good to see you,” and then lets his morphine soaked neurons bob along the mellifluous tide of Bruce and Natasha speaking back and forth. Soon, he sleeps, and dreams of ice storms. The frost covers his skin, and he feels himself harden. He is awake, but frozen, unable to move.

***

When he wakes, Bruce is dozing in the chair beside him, his head lolling against Natasha’s furs. She’s sitting on the foot of Tony’s bed, frowning at the television mounted on the wall. Some bloated blowhard is on CNN; the noise on the TV is cranked down low, but the runner at the bottom of the screen informs Tony that the man is denouncing Captain America as a war criminal and stressing the need for legal action to be taken against him.

Now I’ve seen everything, he thinks.

The newscast goes on to say that Steve Rogers’s whereabouts are presently unknown, and Tony finds that he’s actually relieved to hear it.

“I don’t suppose you know where he is, too, do you?” he asks Natasha.

She frowns. “I told you I don’t. But I’m wondering if we should try to find him.”

“Before SEAL Team Six does?” Tony asks. “Get real.”

She shakes her head. “No,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Her face remains pinched in concern.

There’s a knock on the door, and a nurse enters.

“Good morning, Mr. Stark,” she says.

Natasha leaves the foot of the bed, coming to her feet, coming between Tony and the nurse.

“Shift change?” she asks.

The nurse pauses. “Just doing my rounds,” she says, and approaches Tony’s IV. She reaches for the buttons of the machine controlling Tony’s morphine, but Natasha steps between her, arrests her movement, a hand on her wrist.

“I think he’s had enough,” Natasha says.

The nurse smiles, but it’s cold, and Tony rips the IV from his arm just as the nurse pulls a syringe from her pocket. Natasha grabs that hand by the wrist, and the nurse headbutts her. There’s blood, hard to tell whose. Tony tries to climb out of bed, but the drugs in his system are too strong; he feels Bruce grab him from behind, haul him back into the bed, keep him from falling. The nurse is aiming the syringe at Natasha’s neck, and Natasha kicks her hard in the stomach; the nurse crashes into the door, the syringe falling away, and somewhere in the hospital an alarm sounds.


Natasha lunges for the syringe, but the nurse grabs it first, aims it at a vein in her own arm. Natasha stops.

“Don’t,” she says. Tony feels Bruce go tense, the pressure in his hands increasing; he clenches.

“This would have been a kind end,” the nurse says. “Now expect pain.” She sinks the syringe into her vein, pushes the plunger. Tony can see the drug darken her veins as it’s pumped to her heart.

“Hail Hydra,” she says, and falls still.

***

Tony is up and dressed in scrubs Natasha acquired somewhere in the hospital. She is pacing, tense; Bruce intervenes occasionally, arresting her movements with gentle hands, but it doesn’t help. She isn’t scared; she’s a gun with the bolt back and no target.

“I called Clint,” she says. “Told him what happened, told him to be ready. There are federal agents keeping an eye on him and his family, and he can handle himself. They’ll be okay.”

“Good,” Tony says.

“Steve is waiting for the government to come down on him,” she says. “He doesn’t know to look for this.”

“He can handle himself, too,” Bruce says.

“Maybe they’ve already—” She shakes her head. “We need to find him.”

Tony remembers the feeling in his chest as Steve brought his shield down on his arc reactor. He remembers not being able to breathe, the pain crushing down on him.

Then he remembers the relief he felt seeing the newscast tell that no one knew where Steve was. That the people hunting for him didn’t know where to find him.

He sighs. “How?”
Natasha stops pacing. “I have an idea.”

***

Ten hours later, they are in Wakanda. Tony doesn't ask Natasha what kind of apology she had to make to T'Challa, but when he asks, she looks surprised and says, “None at all.”

The king meets them when their plane touches down. He is flanked by female bodyguards, one at each shoulder. They keep close watch on Natasha as she approaches T'Challa. The king takes her hand in both of his, bows his head slightly.

“Miss Romanoff, welcome.”

Natasha smiles. “Thank you for having us. This is Dr. Banner. You've already met Mr. Stark.”

T'Challa shakes both their hands. “Gentlemen. I have invited you here today because I believe in peace. I believe that is something we all want, isn't that so?”

“Uh, yes, of course,” Bruce says.

“Then let us keep the peace,” T'Challa says. “As my guests, you are welcome anywhere in this country, including anywhere within the palace grounds.” He nods to the impressive building behind him, and then begins leading them inside. “If you decide to break the peace, you will no longer be welcome.”

Natasha frowns. “We have no intentions of—”

“I am telling you this, Miss Romanoff,” T'Challa says, “because I was not entirely honest with you when you called.”

They stop in a great banquet room. There are dozens of very long tables made of a beautiful, dark wood. Sitting at the table closest to the door, eating from an array of foods, are Captain Rogers and Wanda. They see the group with the king and stop eating, stand. Tony looks into the cool blue of Cap's eyes and remembers looking into them when he asked, “Did you know? Did you know he killed my parents?” Tony loses his breath. Natasha's fingers circle his wrist, and he's not sure if it's meant to comfort him, or tether him. He doesn't move.

Cap does. He takes a step forward. “Tony.”

Tony's head is swimming. He feels like he felt on the morphine drip, except there is pain, like when his heart was full of shrapnel. He remembers the shield slamming down on the arc reactor in his suit, how his ribs rattled, how it pushed the breath out of his lungs. His mind replays the moment over and over again, and he has to remind himself that it's over, he lived through it. He lived through it to get to this moment.

“You're in danger, Steve,” he says. “We all are.”

Wanda's jaw steels. “From you?”

“Hydra,” Natasha says. “They paid us a visit. They're gunning for all of us.”

“Barnes, too, if I had to bet,” Tony says. “Is he here with you?”

“He's around,” Steve says. “Tell me what happened.”

So they do.

***

Natasha wants to start formulating an offensive, and it's odd to Tony that her first impulse isn't to go underground. And then he realizes: it's because of them. She wants to stand and fight for them. Beside them.

All of them.

Together, as Cap had said, and God but that feels like another lifetime. Tony wonders if he died in Siberia. Did Natasha have to breathe life back into him? She hasn't said.

Cap is lining out a plan: batten down the hatches, close ranks, stay strong. It all depends on them trusting each other with their lives. Steve hadn't even trusted him with a secret. Tony closes his eyes. There's a terrible headache pounding at his temples. He wants to wake up and have it be a week ago.

***

The room T'Challa has given Tony to stay in is magnificent. The mattress is soft as a cloud, covered in indulgent silks.

He can't sleep, even there.

Tony walks through the halls of the palace, trying to clear his head. The luxury all around him quickly turns the castle into a maze: it isn't that each room is the same; they're varied, but all beautiful. It's that there's nothing that stands out to Tony. Nothing until he passes an open door shining blue light out into the marble corridor. Tony enters, and finds himself in Tony Stark heaven. Floor to ceiling centrifuges and chromatography, computers and tool racks, clear boards with equations and schematics.

There's a girl in the lab, fifteen, sixteen. She is standing before one of the boards, frowning over an equation until she sees Tony behind the numbers.

“Princess Shuri,” he says. “Forgive my intrusion. Your brother told me I was welcome anywhere on the grounds; I didn't realize this was your lab.”

“I'm not just a pretty face, Mr. Stark.”

“Me neither,” he says, and she smiles.

Tony comes around to the other side of the board. “May I?”

“Please.”

He studies the equation for a moment, then fills in the variable she missed. She laughs, pleased. “I feel like I've been looking at it forever.”

“I enjoy your work, Princess. You designed your brother's suit, didn't you?”

“I did. And the upgrade, which I don't believe you've seen yet.”

“Hopefully I won't have the occasion, but I'm sorry to say we did not come here just to visit.”

“Why did you come here?”

“Hydra made an attempt on my life. We came to warn Steve and his crew.”

Shuri is quiet for long enough that Tony begins to worry he's frightened her. Before he can speak to reassure her, she looks him in the eye and says, “I should show you something.”

She leads him through the lab, past more boards and machines, until they come to a seven foot tall tube covered with knobs and buttons and Cyrillic script. There's a frosty window, and behind it is Barnes, face placid in cryogenic sleep.

Tony looks at him there, the frost covering his skin, making him look at once harder than flesh and more breakable. In a chemistry class once, Tony watched his professor dip an iris into liquid nitrogen and then drop it; the flower shattered as it hit the ground. Tony imagines hitting Barnes in his frozen state and watching him crumble to dust. He imagines wrapping his hands around his frozen throat, pressing his thumbs in until something vital snaps.

Tony takes a breath, a deep one, feeling the air fill his lungs. He looks at the cryogenic chamber, the buttons and knobs labeled in Russian. He activates the HUD on his glasses, waits a second for the translations to load. STOP. START. RE-ENGAGE. He presses the button labeled INITIATE THAW. A quiet, mechanical whisper begins somewhere in the machine, and the light above Barnes turns green.

A countdown clock comes up, red numbers on black. Three minutes. Tony has three minutes to decide whether to kill him in his sleep.

Tony watches the numbers tick down. He watches a process like spring blooming in a sped up nature video: The frost melts. The color returns to Barnes’s face. He begins to breathe, his chest rising and falling.

Finally, the machine makes a sound like a great beast taking in a gulp of air. The clock hits zero without any fanfare.

Barnes opens his eyes.


Part Two: Safe

“Have you come to kill me?” Barnes asks, and Shuri looks worried.

Tony shakes his head. “No. But Hydra may be. They tried to kill me, and smart money says I'm not the only one they want dead.”

Barnes frowns. He pushes the hair out of his face, fingertips pressing at what appears to be a perpetual furrow in his brow. “I guess that shouldn't be a surprise.”

Tony looks at his face. He looks so young. He's not, Tony knows, but it's disarming. “We could use all hands on deck.”

“I've only got one,” Barnes says.

Shuri's face lights up. “I have a solution to that. Perhaps Mr. Stark will help me.”

Ten minutes later, Barnes is sitting on a lab table while Tony and Shuri install the arm Shuri has built him. It's made of unpolished vibranium, and therefore is a deep, gunmetal grey, almost black. Tony marvels at the girl's craftsmanship, the clever little tricks she's sewn in. He wants to collaborate with her in the worst way. He wants to buy her lunch and talk shop with her for hours. He's thinking of inviting her to Malibu, if they all survive this.

Barnes is patient and stoic while they marry his flesh to the machine. Tony imagines he's used to sitting through tortures of all kinds. When you tell an attack dog “sit, stay,” you mean it.

Barnes moves the vibranium fingers slowly. He stretches his palm, balls his fingers into a fist, stretches again.

“It's very responsive,” he says. “Thank you, Princess.” He swallows. “And for your help, Mr. Stark.”

Shuri babbles on about the arm's features. Tony just nods, trying to tear his eyes from Barnes's face, and failing. It was the last thing his mother saw.

***

The next morning, they gather around one of the banquet tables. The table is laid out with an array of delectable fruits and breads, but no one’s eating much. Steve sees Barnes up and around, and glares at Tony.

“Are you out of your mind?” Steve asks. “He shouldn’t be out of cryo. There’s too much—”

“I thought he deserved to know there was a target on his head,” Tony said. “Anyway, we’ve got to move.”

“I’m fine, Stevie,” Barnes says. “Even got some new hardware.” He flexes the fingers of the vibranium arm. Steve does not look convinced.

“Why do we have to move?” Wanda asks. “It’s safe here.”

“For now,” Tony says. “For us. We shouldn’t be putting these people in danger.” He thinks of Shuri, and sighs.

“I want to extend my hospitality,” T’Challa says, “but Mr. Stark is right. I cannot allow you to lure hostile forces into Wakanda, and we have some internal logistics to sort out. My father was killed. There is the matter of ascension.”

“Anyway, the best way to stay safe and off the grid is to keep moving,” Natasha says.

“We don’t all have to go together,” Bruce says, “but I think it would be better if we did.”

“You’ve missed some things,” Steve says.

“The team isn’t much of a team at the moment,” Sam adds.

“No?” Bruce asks. “I don’t know what happened. Natasha’s filled me in, but I wasn’t there. But I have some advice. For the sake of all of our lives: Get over it.”

***

An hour later, they’re in the air. The beautiful country of Wakanda is hidden beneath lush canopies, completely hidden from view. It’s for the best, Tony thinks, and tries to focus on piloting. It’s not his favorite way to fly, but there’s something almost soothing about it. It puts his mind on autopilot, and it’s nice not to think.

Behind him, he hears Natasha and Bruce speaking quietly back and forth. Wanda and Sam are playing some sort of card game. It’s easy to forget for a moment, and believe this was just a few months ago. Another team, another world. Another life.

Maybe things aren’t as broken as they seem.

***

SHIELD had an old safe house outside Milan. Maybe it's not SHIELD anymore, but they figure it's still safe. Natasha picks the locks, and they find the place clean but vacant, with fresh sheets on every bed and only non-perishable food items in the cupboards, the way you'd leave your summer place once the season is over.

“Home sweet safe house,” Sam says.

Natasha nods. “It'll do.”

***

Tony can't sleep. He leaves the bed, wanders into the kitchen. He craves coffee, but he should at least attempt sleep again before morning. He paws through the cabinets until he finds a box of cookies, and then he goes to sit at the table. He stops two feet away, catching the silhouette of a figure at the table.

His heart rate shoots up, and then the figure shifts enough for some of the darkness to fall off him. Barnes. Tony sighs, and goes to sit down across from him.

“Can't sleep?” he asks, crunching into a cookie.

“It's… hard… after the freeze.”

“Okay,” Tony says. He turns the open mouth of the box to Barnes. “Cookie?”

Barnes wrinkles his brow, but after a moment, he reaches into the box and pulls out a couple cookies. He bites into one, chewing contemplatively.

“They're good,” he says, then lowers his eyes. “Look, Stark—”

Tony doesn't want to hear him apologize. He speaks over him.

“I was kidnapped once,” Tony says. “I don’t know if you knew that. My captors, they tortured me. They wanted me to build something for them. Something horrible.”

Barnes’s gaze is steady, but his soft voice breaks a bit, splitting timbres. “What did they do with it?”

“Nothing. They, uh, died at the other end of it. Instead of building the weapon they wanted, I built something else. The first Iron Man suit. Mark one.”

Barnes doesn't say anything. Tony does.

“I don't forgive you,” he says, “because I know it wasn't your fault. You were… you were just the weapon they aimed, no different than a gun. What they did to you—it wasn't your fault.”

“I've got blood on my hands,” Barnes says.

“I know what that's like, too. The question is: What are you going to do about it?”

***

Everyone wakes too early. Bruce and Tony find some computer equipment in one of the closets, and begin configuring it to locate Hydra operatives. Steve, Sam, and Wanda are mostly keeping to themselves, but Natasha recruits Barnes to help her take physical measures to safeguard the safe house. After they get the computer up and running, there's nothing to do but wait, so Tony and Bruce help Natasha make booby traps for doorways and windows. Later she briefs everyone, tells them which entrances are safe to use and how to activate the traps in case they need to.

Bruce isn't a bad cook, and he cobbles together some of the items in the cabinets to make a dinner that everyone can eat without griping.

“Someone's going to have to go into town for supplies soon,” Bruce says as they eat.

Sam volunteers, but he doesn't speak Italian. Natasha and Tony are both fluent, but Natasha defers, saying, “Take Barnes with you, Tony. Make him carry the heavy stuff.”

Tony thinks he catches the hint of a smile on her face as she says it, but when he looks again, it's gone.

***

They walk through the market with caps pulled low, speaking quietly in English when they're out of earshot.

“You didn't have to take me with you,” Barnes says, myopically examining a selection of salad dressings.

Tony shrugs. “If you're on the team, we have to learn to work together. This is a good dry run. Lower stakes than a firefight.”

Barnes puts a bottle in the cart. “You should hate me.”

“Look, I told you—”

“—but you're the only one acting like they can stand to be around me. Like anything about this could be normal.”

“What about Steve?”

“He wanted me in cryo. I don't blame him; it was my idea. Shuri's done a lot to stabilize me, but I was dangerous. But he treats me like he's the only one who's changed. Like he has to hide and protect me. Like I can't take care of myself, like everything can just go back to how it was.”

“Some people can't deal with trauma. Theirs or anyone else's.”

“It's sweet, I guess, his optimism about me,” Barnes says, "but it's not what I need.”

“Yeah,” Tony says. “Yeah, I get that.”

He claps a hand on Barnes's shoulder. After a moment, he relaxes, accepts the touch.

***

Another sleepless night. Tony wanders through the safe house, pausing by the bedroom doors to listen to his teammates' quiet snoring, checking on the computer screen to see the program still searching for Hydra. He walks into the kitchen, thinking of prosciutto and fresh tomatoes, even though he isn't really hungry. There's a form silhouetted by the window, back to him, a form he recognizes as Barnes's.

“It's snowing,” Barnes says when he hears Tony and enter, and Tony walks to the window to see. Swirls of white flakes spinning through the dark night. It's beautiful and intensely, painfully isolating.

“I hate the snow,” Tony says, and turns away.

He hears Barnes behind him, then feels Barnes's flesh hand on his shoulder. He turns.

“Sorry,” Tony says. “I didn't mean—”

“It makes you feel alone,” Barnes says.

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

Tony shakes his head. “James. You're not.”

Barnes takes him by the shoulders, his grip hard, and Tony does some quick mental math, the force Shuri's arm could generate. Easily enough to break any bone in his body, to crush his windpipe… Barnes pushes him against the wall, and holds him there, for a moment, and Tony is feeling a lot of things, but he's not feeling the impetus to fight back, and he's imagining dying like his mother, his last breath stolen by the Winter Soldier, when he catches the look in Barnes's eye. And then the Winter Soldier does steal his breath, pressing his mouth over Tony's with the same brute force and lack of finesse as his hands pushing him to the wall. The kiss is blunt, and needful, and Tony is lightheaded from lack of air, but he finds himself kissing back.

Barnes is taller than him, and so solid, planted like a mountain before him, and he holds Tony in place but moves a leg between Tony's so Tony has something to rut up on. Tony grinds against Barnes's leg as Barnes bites his throat, pushes him so hard against the wall that he's afraid, for a moment, that he'll go through it.

“Am I hurting you?” Barnes rasps.

Tony pants out a breath. “Yes. Don't stop.”

And he doesn't.

***

The days pass. They all grow restless. They don't have a plan except to wait, but none of them are built for inaction, and it grates. Wanda and Sam want to leave, but Natasha argues against it.

“Things don't go so well when we break apart,” she says.

Bruce and Tony configure and reconfigure the computer. No results. Natasha checks her booby traps every morning and every night. She listens to the news on the radio until the hours of flat inflection get to her, and then she turns to a music station. She dances by herself at first, then with Sam, Barnes. Then Tony.

“I don't know how you got put in charge of team morale,” Tony says, "but I like your approach.”

“Movement helps,” she says. “They taught us to dance first, you know.”

He's seen the files. He dips her, and when she comes back up, she murmurs against his ear, low enough that no one but Tony will hear her over the music. “Is what you're doing with Barnes helping your morale, Tony?”

Of course she knows. “I don't know. Yes? Yes. I think it is. Should I feel guilty about that?”

“In my experience,” Natasha says, “guilt isn't good for much.” She smiles. “Spin me, Shellhead. Put your back into it.”

***

Tony is in bed not sleeping. It's probably past night and into early morning, but sleep isn't coming. Without warning, the door opens, just enough for a body to slip through. He can't quite make out whose, even with his eyes adjusted for the dark, so he keeps still and he keeps his eyes open as the door closes, as the figure pads silently toward the bed.

The moon glints off the unpolished vibranium of Barnes's arm, and Tony relaxes.

“Get lost on the way back from the bathroom?” he asks.

Barnes crawls over him. He outweighs Tony by twenty pounds, maybe, twenty pounds of hard packed muscle, and Tony finds he likes the weight of him pinning him to the bed. Tony slips his fingers through Barnes's hair, uses the hold to bring Barnes's face down to kiss him. Barnes kisses him roughly, but his hands are on him, too, and the touch is gentle. He has one hand under Tony's shirt, tickling his ribs, fingers circling the scars from the arc reactor, his heart surgeries. The other slips beneath the waistband of Tony's boxers, tracing the line of his cock until Tony whines and squirms, then taking it into his hand with a good grip.

“I've got you,” he rumbles, stubble scraping Tony's cheek, his chest.

Tony exhales. He closes his eyes. “Come on. Come on.”

***

Wanda finds some old board games in a closet, and they play Monopoly on a board with all the words written in Italian. Everyone who can't speak the language has trouble with the money and the cards, but it's competitive enough that everyone stops thinking and just plays. They fall into a comfortable patter, one that Tony remembers from not so long ago, one that he's sorely missed.

It's competitive until Natasha puts a hotel on Parco della Vittoria, and it's over pretty quickly.

“Non passare Via,” she says silkily. “Non raccoglieri duecento dollari.”

“Next time we play Twister,” Sam says, and everyone groans.

***

The house is sleeping. Tony is not. He and Barnes are in the kitchen with the last of the cookies, playing an ancient copy of Mille Bornes.

“I've had more flat tires than there are tires on my car,” Barnes complained. “Where the hell did I buy this piece of junk?”

Tony chuckles. “Sounds like you could use a good mechanic.”

Barnes looks at him in a leisurely, not entirely harmless way. “I dunno,” he says. “I've got you.”

Before Tony can respond, all hell breaks loose. At first, there's a high, repetitive noise from another room. An alarm. It takes Tony a minute to place it.

“Shit,” he says. “The computer.”

He gets up to check on it, and then he hears screams from outside the safe house. This time, he knows the source instantly: Natasha's booby traps. Someone has sprung her traps. Someone is trying to break in.

“We've got guests,” Barnes says. He walks to the knife block and pulls a blade into each hand.

“Start waking everybody up,” Tony says, motioning with his arms to call the suit with the sensors lying under his skin.

There isn't time. The words leave his mouth, and there's an explosion of glass as someone hurtles through the window where Tony and Barnes had stood and watched it snow. The suit is half built around him, and Tony fires a repulsor from his palm into the center of the black-clad figure brushing glass shards off his fatigues as he stands. The blast knocks the man into the wall, and he slumps to the ground.

But there are more. They are pouring in every door and every window. Tony worries about the others, asleep in their beds, but then he hears the staccato grunts that mean Natasha is kicking someone's ass, and he hears Sam and Steve call back and forth to each other, and he figures they've heeded the wakeup call.

Tony blasts another few intruders. A man rushes him, and he grabs the idiot by the arm and hurls him into several incoming. He looks back for a moment to see Barnes going head to head with three at once. His fighting style is brutal and efficient. Bones crack as he twists joints past their breaking points, as he slams bodies into kitchen appliances. The knives cut through tac suits and sink into vital organs.

Tony realizes this is the worst for him. Hydra was his captor for seventy years. Tony knows what he would do to escape captivity, to keep from going back to the Ten Rings. He's done it. Anything Barnes does now… Tony can't really fault him for.

A Hydra operative crashes through the wall separating the kitchen from the hallway leading to the bedrooms. The Hulk roars. Red wisps of energy snake down the hallway and grab several operatives, flinging them like rag dolls. The melee rages on around them, but Tony can tell Hydra's numbers are dwindling. The Avengers are fighting, and they are doing it together.

Behind the faceplate, bathed in the HUD's blue light, Tony laughs.


Epilogue: Time

Interpol comes to arrest the Hydra operatives that are still alive, and to cart off the dead. Any Avengers they might feel like arresting have already gone.

“You'll probably want to hit the road before the Federales get here, Cap,” Tony says.

“I'm not going to get used to this wanted man shtick,” Steve says.

“We'll work something out with the UN,” Tony says. “Just give it some time.”

He extends his hand, and Steve shakes it.

“Take care of yourself, Tony.”

“Yeah. You too.”

Wanda and Sam follow him. Barnes lingers, watching Tony with his cool, light eyes, his wary silence.

“Not going with them?” Tony asks.

“Thought I might take a different road,” he says.

“Oh yeah? Which one?”

“I don't know,” Barnes says. “Which way you headed?”

Tony smiles. Barnes steps toward him, takes him by the hips, pulls him flush. Meets his eyes.

“That okay with you, doll?”

Tony kisses him. It's slower, easier than they usually manage. This could take some time to get right.

That's okay. Tony's got time.