Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There’d been an irritatingly familiar itching, restless sensation building in Clint for the last few weeks. He’d experienced it enough times by now that he ought to be used to it, but for some reason, this time it just wouldn’t go away. He’d tried going down to the range and absolutely obliterating some practice targets, both as mindless blank marks and with the imagined faces of his worst personal enemies on them. He’d tried sitting down and talking to Nat, but that got him nowhere; same with calling Laura, not that she was as willing to listen to him these days as she used to be, and it wasn’t like he could talk to his kids about the regrets of his professional career and the lives on his hands.

At least, those were the things that used to bother him. And it was easier, then, to deal with them. He could find catharsis in archery, in honing himself into an even more precise and deadly weapon. That helped him deal with missed calls, with bad missions and deadly situations gone awry. It helped a bit after New York and Loki, too, working harder than ever to be sure he could control every aspect of his body. He’d taken a page out of Banner’s book and tried tea and meditation, too, which actually helped a bit—the patience of a sniper made him a decent candidate for quiet, still activities—and, as much as he might not have wanted to admit it at the time, talking to the therapist SHIELD had gotten him had helped too. So had talking to Nat, and Laura.

But Nat was harder to talk to these days. With everything that had happened to them, between them, they’d been driven apart just a tiny bit. He’d still trust her with his life and he knew she’d do the same with him, but they just didn’t connect the way they used to. Part of it was his own problems with everything that had happened with the Avengers, and part of it was hers. They just couldn’t talk about the heavy subjects anymore without being weighed down by their own guilt and regrets.

And Laura wasn’t as easy an option now, not since he’d walked out on them again after promising he was done. As he’d come to realize, he wasn’t done, even if he’d tried to hang it up and walk away. He went so readily at Cap’s call because he was desperate for action, because the decision to retire had been hasty and badly timed. It wasn’t that he loved Laura or the kids any less, but trying to just quit the life of an agent and Avenger cold turkey had been a mistake.

Laura understood that, after some long talks and well-deserved anger. The kids did too, for the most part. They were pretty much back to where they had been before, with Clint working with the Avengers and visiting when he could. The kids treated him pretty much like before, Laura was a little frostier. She hadn’t divorced him, but it had been a near thing. In the end, they’d agreed that it was best for the kids that they stay together and make it work like before. He still loved her with everything he had and he knew she still loved him too, but it just… wasn’t the same. She didn’t hold the same playful spark around him, she didn’t greet him with quite as much enthusiasm, and she didn’t care to hear about the difficulties of his job, not when it was clear he’d chosen it over his family.

That was what his life had come to now; a series of bad decisions and regrets. As much as it was nearly impossible to just put away his bow and retire completely, it was also harder than it should have been to integrate back into the Avengers. Part of it was their broken team dynamics and the gaping wounds they were all trying studiously to ignore, but part of it was just him.

He’d spent the first part of his exile in Wakanda ranting and raving about Stark, convinced by both his own blindness and Steve and Wanda’s anger that Stark was responsible for breaking up the team and forcing them into hiding, keeping Clint from his family. But it hadn’t taken long for that to dissipate. It had only taken one pointed, pissed off letter from his wife, delivered reluctantly by one of T’Challa’s people via Tony Stark—making it clear that Stark knew exactly where they were and had just chosen to ignore them—for Clint to lock himself in his room for three days, reevaluating everything about himself.

It wasn’t Stark’s—Tony’s—fault he was here. Maybe Steve felt that way, maybe Wanda too, and maybe they had a point, the two of them. But Clint hadn’t been involved at all. He’d gone with Steve not because he believed in his cause, but because he needed to be useful again, desperately wanted to be back in the field. If Tony had called first, Clint would have joined his side in a heartbeat, and then he might have been back at home, cursing Cap’s name for abandoning them—or maybe not. Despite his attitude to the press and the public, despite all their comments about his ego and his need to be at the top, Tony was never as quick to point out faults in any of them as they were to point out his. If he’d joined Tony’s side, maybe he’d just be back at home, safe with his family—because no one could ever say that Tony didn’t go all out to take care of the people he trusted, the people who trusted him—and shaking his head at the others who so blindly followed Steve into exile.

After reading Laura’s letter, cursing his name and his lies, his broken promises, telling him about his crying daughter asking her when he’d be coming home, and about how Tony Stark had shown up just half an hour ahead of Ross’s agents—and several dozen HYDRA agents on their tail who’d hacked their records—to escort them to safety, it was hard for Clint to hold onto any anger. He’d abandoned his own family, left them vulnerable, and Tony had taken up the slack despite not having any obligation to them. Tony had stuck his neck out to defend the family of a man who’d just fought against him, who’d blamed him for being locked up for his own crimes and whose parting remark had been a hit way below the belt and just an absolutely shitty thing to say.

He’d had enough injured friends and partners in the field, some of them by his own hands. It was an unfortunate inevitability of his line of work, and the number one thing everyone needed to remember in those situations was not to blame each other. Clint had been a wreck in the aftermath of Loki and Tony had helped him in any small way he could, never held it against him, and Clint threw his best friend’s injury in his face without a second thought.

He’d tried to apologize for that since coming back. They’d only been in Wakanda for a few months before they were sent back home, pardons pushed through faster than they’d thought thanks to Tony’s influence. Along with a heavily revised version of the Accords, which Cap signed readily as soon as he was sure that Barnes would be pardoned too and brought back with them. If Clint needed any more proof that the whole thing had always been about Barnes, not really about the Accords, that was it.

One of the first things he did after coming home was find Laura, and then sit and be yelled at for at least an hour. All of which he deserved, and he was sent back to the Compound that night with his tail between his legs, carrying the bag Laura had packed for him and coldly shoved in his face, telling him that the Avengers were clearly where he actually belonged and that he should go and rejoin them.

After that, he’d tracked Tony down to try to apologize. Laura’s letter and her words after he’d come back—plus the fact that Tony had brought them back at all, after everything, let them back in the Compound and been the first one to offer an apology when they’d come through the doors, even if it was obviously forced—had made it obvious to him that he owed the apology to Tony. But as soon as he’d even started on the topic of what he’d said about Rhodes, Tony became stiff and uncomfortable, made some flippant and obviously insincere remark about everything being forgiven—refusing to make eye contact the entire time—and had practically run from the room. Clint had only tried again once since then, with the same results.

And it was frustrating him. He used to have a friendship with Tony, or so he’d thought, and it seemed that was ruined permanently now. He wasn’t the only one; the relationship between every one of Cap’s team and every one of Tony’s was more strained than ever, for all of their feeble attempts to rebuild what they once had.

They’d all made mistakes; they’d all apologized for them. But it was clear that that wasn’t enough. Sam still didn’t trust Tony. Wanda still hated him. Tony didn’t trust a single one of them, and Rhodes hated every one of them in return, too. Vision completely ignored Wanda, which only made her angrier at Tony, for some reason, as though Tony was capable of making decisions for an android powered by an Infinity Stone.

Things got a little easier when she was sent away, Clint had to admit. He’d latched onto her like a daughter in Wakanda, and even before that, but he knew now that that wasn’t a good thing. She was disturbed, she was volatile and violent and not good for him. He’d treated her like his own out of guilt over what happened to her brother, but she was manipulative. He’d had an inkling of that even before her little outburst; it was only proven when that new magic user, Strange, came to train with them one day and pronounced her unstable and dangerous. She’d thrown a fit and tried to attack him. Once he’d bound her powers with a complex spell and shipped her off to some kind of training facility, he’d gone over each of them and done something that made red tendrils leak from their heads. He’d said he was removing traces of her influence from their minds, and Clint believed him when after the spell was complete, he suddenly ached for his family—his real family—more than he had in years, and he didn’t find himself excusing everything Wanda had ever done without a second thought anymore.

Strange said she hadn’t actually done most of it on purpose, that it had been her lack of training and her unwillingness to even try to control herself that had made her subtly influence them over time. There were some exceptions to that, most notably an attempted influence on Barnes—which made him flee from the room, eyes wide and muttering in Russian about HYDRA—and several malicious attacks on Tony. It took Strange longer to extract a swirling, angry-looking mass of red magic from Tony’s head than any of the others, and Tony practically collapsed when it was done. It just drove that wedge of guilt deeper into Clint, that he’d ignored how much Wanda had clearly hated Tony, that he’d thought Tony was being childish and selfish not to want Wanda on the team after Ultron. Tony’s shaky glance full of anger and resentment wasn’t directed at anyone but Steve, though.

It wasn’t like Steve didn’t have legitimate grievances with Tony, of course. They’d butted heads all the time before, and Steve as leader of the team had had a hell of a time dealing with Tony sometimes, who’d seemed to make it a personal mission to fuck with Steve as much as possible, to ignore his orders whenever he could, and generally to be a pain in the ass. Then to drop the Accords on them the way he did—at least, how Steve described it to Clint—and make things more difficult when Steve went after Barnes. The kicker, of course, was whatever had happened in Siberia. Steve was vague about it, never liked to talk about it and never told them any details, but Barnes showed up missing an arm and both he and Steve were bruised and bloody. Steve had said Tony played right into Zemo’s hands and attacked them, and they’d had to fight back to defend themselves, had to disable Tony’s suit so he’d stop trying to kill them.

Clint wasn’t an idiot. He knew there was more to it than that. Whatever Steve was being vague about was something that wouldn’t look good for him if the truth came out, because despite the golden boy reputation and the aw-shucks demeanor, Steve was just as capable of being a manipulative, selfish liar as the rest of them. But Tony seemed just as reluctant to talk about it. Whatever it was, it must not have looked good for Tony either, otherwise he’d surely be throwing it in their faces.

And Tony was making an effort. He’d made Barnes a new arm, beautifully crafted, and Barnes actually reported that it was lighter and better than the old arm, looking marginally close to happy as he said it, which was a big step for him. Steve seemed to take that as an apology to both of them, which didn’t surprise Clint, since it seemed that all Steve cared about now was Barnes.

But Clint could see what Steve, apparently, couldn’t. The way Tony subtly backed up when they came near him—any of them, but especially Steve—and how he flinched away from raised voices or physical contact. How he stayed close to doors and counted exits and tried to keep a counter or a desk between him and any of the pardoned Avengers. Maybe Barnes had had his arm blown off and Steve had his face punched a few good times, but Tony was afraid of them. Mostly Steve, in fact, which just made the slimy feeling inside Clint even worse. What had Steve done to him that he wouldn’t tell any of the others about?

All of it just made for a shitty environment. Everyone was on edge, just enough to matter, even after Wanda was gone and her negative influences removed. Tony was back to making gear for them and they fought alongside each other in the field with no problem. They were polite when any of them crossed paths around the Compound. But there was no banter over the comms during fights. Tony upgraded their gear constantly, but he didn’t randomly spring “gifts” on them like in the old days. He practically lived in his lab, which wasn’t new, but when he came out he snuck around like he was worried about intruding into their space, and he ignored their attempts at conversation or their invitations to movie nights and team bonding exercises. The vents were open for Clint to move around the Compound, but he couldn’t get anywhere near Tony’s room or his lab spaces. The few times Steve had tried to bring food to Tony in the lab, he was denied entry.

Clint had tried, he really had. He’d managed to find Tony a few times, on his own or with Rhodes or Vision there—the addition of one or both of them seemed to put Tony a little more at ease and Clint was fine with that. He’d gone to apologize again for fighting against him, for what he’d said on the Raft. He’d tried to thank Tony with every ounce of sincerity in his body for keeping his family safe. Occasionally, he’d just tried to strike up a conversation. Every time, Tony looked supremely uncomfortable. He shrugged off Clint’s apologies and just offered his own in return. He awkwardly accepted Clint’s thanks, mumbling about how he wouldn’t have let Clint’s family be hurt no matter what had happened. He responded to Clint’s attempts at conversation, but it couldn’t have been clearer that he wanted to be anywhere but there.

Clint was getting desperate. Even if Tony hadn’t been completely innocent in the whole thing, Clint knew their broken friendship was mostly his own fault. Along with his marriage and his team dynamics. Nothing was the same, and Clint was starting to feel depressed, and he hadn’t realized how much he’d miss Tony—not Tony’s money or tech or connections, but the man himself—until there was this gaping chasm between them.

Since apologies and conversation didn’t work, and Clint wasn’t exactly known for his people skills, he decided to take a different route. He and Tony, back when they were friends, had sometimes found a sense of camaraderie in a shared, half-faked tendency to be an asshole. They’d started a few epic prank wars that had eventually been banned from the Tower by both Potts and Steve—though that hadn’t stopped them from continuing them in secret. Maybe it wasn’t the best idea, but their pathetic attempts at conversation had gotten them nowhere, and Clint really wanted that friendship back. Maybe a physical jolt back into it would help.

So on a morning when he knew Tony had actually gone to bed the night before, and would therefore be getting up soon and wanting breakfast, Clint came into the kitchen early to tamper with the toaster.

He didn’t have malicious intent, but he knew the AI probably wouldn’t think so. But Wanda had thrown a fit when they came back, talking about Ultron and saying that she didn’t need any of Starks’s tech spying on her all the time. Steve had made some speech about Barnes and his privacy, and Tony had agreed to remove the AI from the Compound everywhere except his labs. Even though Wanda had left less than a week later, the AI was still gone. Really, it was more of an inconvenience to them to have it gone than to have it there, but it worked for this, that it wouldn’t be reporting his activity to Tony. Back when JARVIS was around, so long as nothing had the potential to seriously injure anyone, the AI hadn’t blabbed to either of them about their pranks. Now, he wasn’t so sure about the new one, so it was probably better that it wasn’t watching at all.

Nat, Sam, and Steve were all up before he was done messing with the toaster. Nat pretty much ignored him and Sam just gave him an annoyed look, untoasted bread in hand, but Steve demanded to know what he was doing. When he paused and mumbled something about pranking Stark, Steve’s eyebrows rose. “You really think that’s a good idea?” he said, as though he had any ground to stand on when it came to reaching out to Tony. At least when Clint tried to start a conversation, even if Tony fidgeted like he wanted to leave the room, he didn’t flinch away.

Clint muttered something about acting like a team meaning acting like children again, too engrossed in his work to really pay attention to what was coming out of his mouth. Steve stood there frowning for a few minutes, but eventually went about making himself breakfast.

Clint got the toaster put back together and tested the minor shock on himself, making sure it was as harmless as he’d intended. Tony didn’t have the arc reactor in his chest anymore—and he’d made sure that something like a simple electric shock couldn’t have just wrecked it on the spot—but he still had lingering heart problems, and Clint didn’t want to actually injure him. Just shock him awake a little, hopefully share a good-natured laugh and maybe get a promise of retribution. Just like old times.

It was about fifteen minutes later, just before Tony came in—Barnes and Lang having joined them, being cautioned not to touch the toaster—that Clint started having serious doubts. Maybe this wasn’t the right way to go about this at all. If even so much as talking to Tony made him want to run away, what would this do? Maybe Clint meant it as a harmless prank, but what would Tony think, alone in a room full of people he didn’t trust, laughing at his pain, no matter how momentary?

It was when Clint was sitting there, paralyzed with indecision and on the verge of just getting up and getting rid of the damn thing himself, that Tony shuffled in. He looked like he usually did after an unexpectedly long night of sleep; rumpled, hair sticking up, bleary-eyed enough that he didn’t seem to care that he was the only one in the room on “his side.” (Because no matter how many uncomfortable handshakes and mostly-sincere apologies were made, that’s what they still were: two teams, on opposite sides. Broken trust and betrayed friendships, and Clint had probably been stupid to think a dumb prank would help any of that.)

But some small part of him still held out hope that this could help. A selfish part, maybe, because he knew that even if by some miracle this helped make he and Tony friends again, it wouldn’t do anything for the others’ relationships with Tony, and Clint was okay with that. He wanted his friend back, even if it was only him. So he stayed silent and watched out of the corner of his eye as Tony clumsily started the coffeemaker, then grabbed two slices of bread and shuffled over to the toaster to put them in.

The moment his right hand made contact, Clint could just barely see the tiny jolt that went through his arm, causing it to twitch slightly. Tony jumped not half a second later, entire body jerking back with the unexpected shock, eyes suddenly wide and cleared of their sleepiness. He whirled to face the table, eyes narrowing, and immediately glared at Clint.

Clint tried—and most likely failed—to force a playful smirk onto his face. “Gotcha,” he said, aware of how feeble it sounded and cringing internally. Everyone else in the room was staring between him and Tony, and though Tony had immediately zeroed in on him as the obvious source of the shock, Clint couldn’t be sure whether his glare was one of fraternal-type annoyance or one of genuine distrust and hurt.

Tony just stared at him for a few long, highly uncomfortable seconds. Clint couldn’t parse out his expression—he was never quite as good at reading people as Nat—but he thought, maybe, Tony himself was trying to decide whether the whole situation was malicious or not. Finally, after an agonizing silence, Tony shook out his right arm, features pinching just slightly.

“You’d better not have fried anything,” he said to Clint, then turned his attention to his own arm. The lack of a tacked-on nickname meant it wasn’t entirely friendly, but his body language wasn’t as stiff as it could have been, and there was no immediate, personal insult, Tony’s usual go-to when he felt alone and attacked. Clint wasn’t sure whether to take it as a win, but at least it wasn’t a worst-case scenario.

He registered the odd comment a second later, wondering whether it was a joke. “What, like your brain cells?” It didn’t seem appropriate, yet, to try to make a joke himself. It could be too easily taken as a real insult, and god knew Clint wasn’t exactly tactful in the best of circumstances.

Tony ignored him, though, wrapping his left hand around his right elbow and doing something weird with his fingers. Clint frowned; there was no way that shock had actually caused him lingering pain, but they weren’t friendly enough for Tony to be dramatically faking an injury. He had no idea what was going on.

The kitchen erupted in the next moment, when Tony made an unnatural twisting motion with his hand and pulled off his own arm at the elbow. Clint, Sam, Steve, and Scott all exclaimed loudly; Sam spilled his juice all over the table and Scott actually jumped up out of his chair. Only Nat and Barnes didn’t react out loud, though Nat’s eyebrows had twitched upward and Barnes’s face was possibly more blank than usual.

Tony glanced up just once to give them all an irritated look. He turned and placed his own arm on the counter next to him, which was fucked up, but Clint was more interested in the glimpse he got of the stump of Tony’s arm, which ended just above the elbow, and the mechanical-looking plate set into it. The plate where, apparently, his prosthetic arm connected. It was obvious now that the arm he’d just pulled off wasn’t a flesh part of his body, but Clint’s heart hadn’t gotten the memo, still racing from the unexpected and viscerally disturbing sight.

Tony pulled his phone out with his left hand, expertly thumbing across the screen and typing with just one hand until a blue scanning beam of some kind came from one side, which he ran slowly over the arm on the counter. The splutters and exclamations had died out at that point, but everyone was still staring with wide eyes.

Clint was the first to recover his voice, though not the most eloquent, with his loud “what the fuck is that?”

Tony rolled his eyes at that, but snarked back, “what’s it look like? Never seen a prosthetic before?”

At the tone of his voice, Clint felt a spark of hope. He still didn’t know what was going on, but he thought the possibility of friendship and reconciliation was still there in Tony’s words. His hopes were dashed a moment later, though, when Steve’s voice came from behind him, incredulous and just a pinch suspicious. “You don’t have a prosthetic arm.”

Tony’s face went blank, his eyes and voice icy, and Clint’s heart sank. “You’re right,” he said coldly, “I don’t have a prosthetic arm. I’ve got two.” He raised his left hand and wiggled his fingers, then glanced down at his feet and shrugged. “And only five total toes.”

Clint stared hard at Tony’s left arm, looking for the seam where the prosthetic met the rest of Tony’s arm, but for the life of him, he couldn’t find it. He also couldn’t see anything mechanical in the movements of the fingers. Naturally, if Tony designed his own prosthetics, they’d be seamless and near-perfect replicas of the real thing.

It was obviously a touchy subject, going by the way Tony was glaring at Steve. “I don’t—what happened?” Steve asked, and Tony scoffed, expression mostly anger and disgust.

“The fuck do you think happened, Rogers? Incredible as it might sound, caving someone’s chest in and then leaving them immobile in fucking Siberia isn’t good for things like keeping your extremities warm and well-perfused.”

Clint could practically feel the shattering of his hopes of reconciliation with Tony. There was a rushing in his ears as he understood, suddenly, the past few weeks. Why Tony avoided all of them, why he flinched away from Steve, why his every interaction with them reeked of nothing but forced, cool professionalism. Any serious injury was bad enough, but to have his hands taken from him… the fact that he’d clearly managed to create incredible prosthetics that let him have—Clint assumed—full functionality back didn’t matter. It was the principle of the thing, the loss of an engineer and inventor’s most important tools. It was the fact that Steve, a supposed friend, had done it to him, and then had the audacity to come back and act like they could just go right back to being friends again. Clint understood, with a sinking feeling, why his efforts to bridge the gap between him and Tony were pointless.

Steve was looking horrified and vaguely sick, and Clint wasn’t sure whether to be irritated by that or not. Maybe he really hadn’t realized the damage he’d done to Tony. On the other hand, he’d lied to all of them, told them he’d done nothing but disable Tony’s suit in Siberia so he’d stop attacking. How could he injure someone badly enough that they lost their arms and genuinely believe they were fine?

Tony was speaking some more, still spitting the words out like venom, more emotion than he’d shown any of them since they’d come back, and Clint shook himself into focusing on what he was saying. “—out, broken ribs and a cracked sternum make it hard to breathe. My already-shitty heart couldn’t keep up. Not enough oxygen to the extremities, plus about seventeen hours of cold injury. They amputated both forearms as soon as Vision got me to the hospital. Took a few toes shortly after that.”

Clint had to swallow hard at that. He’d been uncharitably thinking, even once they got back thanks to Tony, that Tony had more or less “won” in Siberia, taking Barnes’s arm off and beating Steve down. He’d been thinking Tony somehow owed them something for what happened. Now, he wasn’t sure what exactly he thought that would be. An eye for an eye? If that was the case, it looked like Steve owed Tony back another arm. Plus a few toes. God, Clint wished he could take back his dark thoughts from before. He didn’t want to see a teammate permanently injured, mutilated.

Suddenly, Clint could clearly picture Tony in the hospital after Siberia, and he felt bile crawl up his throat. He and Tony had been friends before everything went to hell, close enough for at least a brief time that Tony had felt comfortable one night telling him about Afghanistan. About being awake in the middle of open heart surgery, delirious and in excruciating pain. About finally passing out, only to wake up with his body changed against his will, a hole carved in his chest and an electromagnet sitting where his sternum should have been, a heavy weight that made it hard to breathe, that hurt him constantly. Clint could suddenly see the awful parallel, Tony waking up again after a fight only to be told they were going to cut some more parts off for his own good.

He could see that Steve was gearing up to argue. Because Steve was nothing if not stubborn and self-righteous, that and devoted to Barnes. Barnes, interestingly, was staring hard at the table, hunched down like the guilt of knowing what they’d done to Tony was too much to bear. Steve, on the other hand, was standing taller, pulling his shoulders back like he was prepared, in the face of Tony standing there with one arm off and laying out his sins, to tell Tony to his face that he’d deserved what had happened to him; maybe not in those words, but “I had to do it” meant just the same thing and only Steve seemed to not see that.

Clint couldn’t stop Steve from thinking Barnes was worth it. He couldn’t stop Steve and Tony from butting heads, never had been able to; the difference was that before, it was nothing but harmless sniping, or so he’d thought. Maybe he should have paid more attention, maybe he should have reported all of it to Fury. Because their clashing personalities and their constant disagreements must have contributed to the lack of trust between them, which was a large part of where the entire Accords and Siberia clusterfuck came from.

Clint couldn’t change the past. But, seeing that the conversation was building up to something potentially explosive and painful, he did what he could. He rose from his seat, planted himself firmly between Steve and Tony, and told Tony once more, to his face, “I’m sorry.”

He could see Tony’s eyes flick over his shoulder, attention still on Steve, so he plowed on. “I didn’t know about… this. I wouldn’t have messed with electricity if I had. I’m sorry.”

That succeeded in distracting Tony from Steve. His expression didn’t really soften when he focused on Clint, but some of the rage in his eyes faded. Obviously, his anger over the whole thing was focused on Steve, not the rest of them. Still, there was a hint of mistrust there, Tony clearly wondering what Clint was playing at, getting in the middle of this argument.

He could practically see the walls go up as Tony forced his casual Tony Stark smirk onto his face and glanced down at his phone. “Yeah, well, you’re lucky my work is too good to be damaged by a jury-rigged kitchen appliance, Charles Strite. Toaster’s coming out of your paycheck, though.”

He picked up the prosthetic from the table and reattached it to his arm, treating Clint to a close-up view of the artificial skin melding seamlessly with Tony’s above his elbow, knitting itself in with some kind of nanotech that Clint couldn’t begin to understand, probably. Tony wiggled the fingers and rotated the wrist; then, apparently satisfied with the feel of it, snatched his phone off the counter and left the room, thoroughly ignoring Steve calling after him.

After a second of indecision, Clint followed him into the hallway. When they were far enough from the kitchen that they wouldn’t be overheard, Clint called his name and he turned.

The indulgent, inquisitive expression he used to wear when Clint talked to him was gone, and Clint was realizing that it would never come back. Still, the betrayed anger that Tony had in his eyes when he spoke to Steve wasn’t there either, so Clint felt comfortable enough trying to apologize one last time. “I’m sorry,” he said, then swallowed hard, and he knew Tony understood that he meant for more than the toaster incident.

Tony looked at him blankly. “You didn’t do it,” he offered, but it was flat and it was clear he didn’t really mean it.

“I didn’t know, either. I mean, Steve never told us… but that’s not an excuse. I’m just… I’m sorry. For a lot.”

Tony sighed. “Doesn’t really matter now. You’re back. We’re all together, we’re a team again like the world needs.” The words weren’t as bitter as Clint would have expected, just tired, and somehow that hurt worse than anger. Like Tony wasn’t upset about the injustice of what was done to him, he’d just accepted that Steve and his team being back would make him miserable and there was nothing he could do about it, because the world needed the Avengers to be strong and united.

“Are we really a team?” Clint said, and then cringed, realizing how that sounded. Tony’s expression told him that he hadn’t taken it as an accusation, though.

“I can work with you. I can have your back in the field, I can stand side by side with Rogers and Barnes and blast aliens in the face all day long if I need to.”

“But you’re never going to trust us again, are you?” Clint asked, and it was resigned, sad. He knew the answer already.

Tony smiled wryly. “No, I won’t.”

And Tony turned and walked away, leaving Clint adrift.

Chapter Text

Alarms blaring. The sound jerked Steve awake, and he sat bolt upright in bed, eyes already wide. One of the many advantages of the serum was the lack of early-morning grogginess. Still, it took a few moments for him to recognize that this wasn’t the alarm to assemble.

“FRIDAY? What’s going on?” he asked, pulling the covers back and climbing out of bed. There was no answer; he worried for a moment, sure that someone had shut the AI down, then remembered that it was no longer installed in any of their rooms or common areas, even for “emergency situations,” as Stark had put it. Steve himself had fought for that, thinking Bucky would be uncomfortable knowing there was something watching him all the time.

Whatever the alarm was, it couldn’t be good. Steve strode toward the closet, intending to grab some of the gear he kept there and go out into the main areas, looking for the others or the source of the alarm, whichever he found first.

He got halfway there before an explosion rocked the building. The vibrations set him stumbling, and before he could regain his balance, the entire floor cracked with a sound like a gunshot, and tilted downwards alarmingly fast. Steve couldn’t do anything to stop himself from sliding into the hole in the floor, down to the next level.

He threw his arms out to the sides, feeling his hands scrape and slide along the smooth floors as he tried to slow his descent. The floor was still cracking and crumbling, and dust was already heavy enough in the air that he couldn’t see what he was sliding into, which was dangerous.

His worry was proven right, if unhelpful, a moment later. He tensed as he slid down into the wreckage of the next level, trying to land on his feet and in a fighting stance, but what he landed on was an uneven pile of debris that sent him stumbling to the side. Before he even got the chance to plant his feet and push himself up, there was a sudden, sharp pain in his side, and an arm appeared out of the dust in the air to wrap around his neck.

Immediately shifting into battle mode, Steve threw his weight backwards, sending whoever was trying to choke him out toppling over with Steve’s weight on top of them. When they landed hard on the floor, the arm loosened enough for him to grab it and wrench it to the side, eliciting a yell from whoever it was.

He flipped them, still holding onto the arm and putting a knee on the person’s back as he turned them over, ducking down as he did in case there were any more enemies right there. He couldn’t hear much through the continuous rumbling, scraping, cracking sounds of pieces of the building crumbling around him, and he couldn’t see more than a few feet with all the dust in the air.

Still cautiously crouching down, he turned his attention to the man he had pinned. Black tactical gear, covered head to toe, heavily armed. The man was squirming under Steve, trying to reach for one of his weapons with his free arm, so Steve sent a heavy punch to the back of his head, putting him out. He rolled the man back to his front and felt a rush of adrenaline when he saw the HYDRA logo. They weren’t just being attacked, they were being attacked by HYDRA. This was bad, and it would require everything he had.

His immediate thought was Bucky. They must have been coming after Bucky, trying to get their Winter Soldier back, especially now that he was the last one, after Zemo had killed all the others in Siberia. Bucky slept in the next room over from Steve’s, but now Steve was stuck on the next level down, and the floor was too unstable and cracked to climb back up. Plus, the thought was nagging at him that Bucky could have left his room when the alarm sounded, or fallen through a hole of his own; he could be anywhere in the Compound.

Steve would just have to push forward and hope to find him. He had other teammates here too, other people he needed to defend. He knew the Compound had its own defense systems, but he couldn’t count on them to take care of HYDRA—they hadn’t prevented them from infiltrating, after all.

He grabbed the handgun from the agent he’d taken out, quickly checking the clip, and also the stun gun from the agent’s belt. He left the heavier guns and the unfamiliar weapons; he’d be moving through a Compound that contained friends as well as foes, and he couldn’t risk firing automatic weapons or unknown, possibly alien tech off where it might injure someone who wasn’t HYDRA.

When he twisted to tuck the stun gun into his pants, cursing the unprotected and far from battle-ready state of himself in his sleep clothes, he felt a sharp pain spike in his side. Looking down, he found a spreading red stain and a small hole—right, there’d been the sharp pain of a gunshot just as he first encountered the agent before. He must not have heard the actual shot in all of the background noise. There was nothing to be done about it now; he needed to move forward, so he stood, gritting his teeth and resolving to ignore the pain. The constant movement for however long it took to get to safety wouldn’t be good for the wound, but he could deal with a lot more blood loss than a normal person. Finding Bucky, and the rest of his team, was more important.

He crept forward through the gloom, trying to keep his footsteps quiet—the rumbling sounds of the collapsing building were dying down, and he wanted to be able to hear voices if there were any to hear. He made it over to the closest wall, realizing that he was in one of the common areas on the main floor, just below most of their rooms. If he could get across it, there was a stairwell at the other end that was hopefully intact, and a possible way to get up to Bucky.

The cloud of dust from the collapsed floor thinned a little near the open archway into one of the next rooms. Steve pressed himself up against the wall, taking a breath and then quickly turning to scan what he could see of the room beyond. He led with the gun he’d stolen from the HYDRA agent, thankfully for him, because there were three more agents in the kitchen adjacent. He managed to hit two of them before they started shooting in return; he sheltered back beyond the edge of the wall until the spray of bullets from the last one halted, then rolled to the other side of the archway, shooting as he went. He heard the grunt that meant he’d hit his target and internally cheered.

Still, he took a moment to move into the kitchen and check the three agents, both to make sure they were down and to scan them for any additional useful items. They all carried the same standard weapons, so he left them alone after accepting that he didn’t have anywhere on him to store additional guns.

He moved back into the lounge and the more obscured view, senses on high alert. Expecting to sneak along the wall until he reached the opposite end of the room and could find the stairs, he nearly stumbled in surprise when he encountered more rubble and almost stepped out into nothing.

His heart sank as he crouched down to survey what he could through the suddenly thicker dust in the air. The floor was collapsed here, too, tilting down into the next level down. Steve moved across the cracked edge of the floor, hoping for a way around, but the collapsed portion extended across the entire room. If he wanted to get across to where the stairs to the upper level were, he’d have to go down.

But there was more than one way up to the upper levels. If he went back, through the kitchen he’d just been in, and around the long way, there was another way upstairs at the other end of the building. It was longer, but potentially safer, barring hordes of HYDRA agents. But it would also mean leaving the cover of the dust clouds, and there was also the matter of potential injuries to be dealt with. The collapsing floors could have affected any of his teammates, someone might be trapped or hurt and need his help. And there was his own gunshot wound to consider. Already, rolling around and shooting more people had aggravated it, the bleeding barely slowing despite his usual healing rate.

He only got to hover in indecision for a moment longer. There was a sound behind him, and he ducked reflexively just before several bullets flew through where his head had been a moment before. Glancing back, he saw at least seven agents storming the room, likely drawn by the sound of the gunfire from a few minutes ago. He was in the open, exposed, and he couldn’t fight them all before being taken down himself, so he took the only available option.

He threw himself into a less-than-graceful sideways roll down the incline of the collapsed portion of the floor, down onto the next level. As he impacted the tilted portion of the floor, he felt it crack beneath his body weight and knew it would crumble behind him. That partially solved the problem of the agents behind him—it would certainly make it harder for them to follow him down without putting them in an exposed, dangerous position—but it also meant he would be stuck down on the basement level below. If the stairs weren’t intact, or the path to them was blocked, he could find himself trapped.

There was nothing to be done about it now. He tried to twist as he rolled down the ramp, send himself feet first down the incline rather than impacting debris with his injured side or unprotected arms. His feet were bare too, but at least his feet and knees could take the impact better than his gunshot side. When his feet finally hit the floor of the next level down, he immediately twisted to send several shots up into the gloom above him; he couldn’t actually see over the floor of the level above any longer, but if any of the HYDRA agents had moved forward to look for him, hopefully he’d hit them, or at least scare them off for a few moments.

He moved swiftly away from the hole in the ceiling, just in case the agents above decided to try the same tactic and fire blindly down at him. Crawling through the dust and debris, it took him a minute to realize he was down in Tony’s lab spaces. More accurately, he was standing in one of the hallways between the labs, but the explosion had apparently taken down several of the walls in the halls, leaving one large, open space. He couldn’t see beyond the dust behind where the upper level had collapsed in behind him. There was a similar cloud of dust a little farther down, where it looked like another collapse had happened. He headed for that one, heart in his throat, hoping no one was injured over there.

When he reached the pile of debris, he first looked up, wary of any enemies above. It was difficult to see through the dust and occasional still-falling chunks of flooring and other bits of the Compound structure, but Steve didn’t detect any movement above. After a moment of squinting, he could make out the shape of the floor above—and the ragged hole in the ceiling there, too. This floor collapse had gone straight through two floors, unlike in his own room—and two floors above this was someone else’s room.

It was hard to tell, even with his excellent memory, where exactly he was in relation to the third floor, and whether the room above was occupied or not. He resigned himself to searching through the pile of debris to be sure, his side already aching at the thought of shifting heavy pieces of rubble around.

Still, he forced himself to do it. He thought about calling out, trying to see if anyone responded, but he had no way of knowing how close any HYDRA agents could be, and he’d rather not alert them to his position. Tony’s lab spaces were not only on the basement levels, but were also more heavily protected than any other space in the Compound, so unless they’d come down through the holes in the floor like Steve had, there shouldn’t be any agents popping in on them quite yet. It was only a matter of time before they forced themselves through the doors or stairwells, though, particularly since it seemed they were packing explosives and didn’t care about causing damage to the building.

He only had to shift a few chunks of concrete—though that alone made the wound in his side bleed all the worse and he was starting to feel the tiniest bit dizzy from straining to move a heavy piece on top of all the previous activity—before he uncovered a pajama-clad knee. Too small to be Bucky’s, and he wasn’t sure if that was a relief or not. Swiftly clearing what he could upwards of the knee, he got a glimpse of a now-dusty t-shirt and Tony’s messy dark hair.

Tony was twisted uncomfortably, face down from the waist up but with his hips twisted to the side toward Steve. One of his arms was hidden beneath his body, curled underneath him, and the other was stretched out to the side, away from Steve and obscured underneath more pieces of the floor of his room. Steve could only see the side of his face, but there was a bleeding gash near his hairline and he looked to be thoroughly unconscious.

Steve tapped the side of his face anyway, eliciting a soft groan and a slight stirring. Steve wanted to be worried about spinal injuries and first aid that would have told him not to move Tony, but HYDRA could be coming in any second and they really needed to move somewhere safer. Tony groaned again, louder, and started to shift, half pushing himself up. Wanting to help pull him from the pile of rubble, Steve got his hands around the upper half of the arm trapped under Tony’s body and pulled it out, trying to get hold of his hand for leverage.

What he pulled from beneath Tony’s body instead was just half an arm, and he couldn’t stop himself from letting out a yelp, letting go of the arm as if it had burned him and falling back on his heels for a second. Heart racing, eyes wide, he stared at the stump of Tony’s arm where it ended just before the elbow while Tony coughed himself fully awake.

“Wha’happened?” Tony slurred, shaking his head and coughing some more. He groaned again, then pulled his other arm out of the debris to wriggle his way up to his knees. Steve just sat in stunned silence, seeing that his other arm also ended at a stump above the elbow.

Steve swallowed hard when Tony turned his head, blinking rapidly like he was dizzy, and spotted Steve sitting there, throwing him a questioning look. “HYDRA’s attacking. They set off an explosion, compromised the building structure. We’ve had a few collapses.” Steve explained.

“Shit,” Tony said, craning his neck to look up and then around the lab.

“Tony,” Steve managed to croak out, “what happened to your arms?”

Tony looked down at the stumps of his arms like he was seeing them for the first time. “Shit,” he said again, then shook his head with an exasperated noise, dropping his voice to a mutter. “Can’t even take them off for one night. Christ. I’m going to start wearing the damn things to bed.”

He managed to get himself into a standing position using just his legs—impressive for someone with a head wound who was unconscious just moments ago and likely had a concussion—but immediately wobbled like he was going to fall over. Seeing it, Steve leapt to his feet and grabbed Tony’s shoulders to steady him.

Tony flinched back from the contact, which hurt, but Steve didn’t let go, afraid of letting Tony fall. Tony’s brows furrowed like he couldn’t figure out why he was so dizzy; Steve mentally added another piece of evidence to the ‘probable concussion’ checklist, but then Tony glanced down at his feet and sighed. “Shit,” he said yet again, resigned this time.

Steve looked down as well and felt his heart give another uncomfortable lurch in his chest. Tony was barefoot, having been in bed just like Steve, and he was missing three toes on his right foot, two on the left. Suddenly his balance issues made sense in a different light than a head injury.

Steve realized he was staring, horrified, at Tony’s feet for too long when Tony tried ineffectively to shrug out of his grip, wriggling his shoulders. “Admiring your handiwork?” Tony said, tone snarky but with an undercurrent of something tense and angry. Before Steve could even begin to decipher that statement, Tony said, “Let me go,” and it was clearly an order. Steve let him go.

He stayed upright on his own that time, sidestepping Steve and moving over to one of the lab tables. He limped badly on his mangled feet, but he didn’t seem to be in any immediate danger of falling over. “Fri? You here?” he called out into the room, voice hushed, clearly also wary of attracting unwanted attention.

There was an answering crackle of something like static, then a distorted squeal of a female voice. “—ystems compromised, Boss, I—full functionality.” The voice of the AI was broken up by bursts of some kind of crackling interference, and Tony swore again.

“Okay, baby girl, just do what you can. Don’t be afraid to get to the Panic Room if you have to. Have you got a connection to any of the suits?”

“Not fully, Boss. I—beyond this room. Signal has be—evice. Reading signal from detached Mark 48 prototype piec—configure—minimal control.”

Steve didn’t understand most of that, but Tony clearly knew what the AI was talking about. “Okay. I can work with that. Don’t have any of my arms down here by chance, do I? Damn.”

He mostly muttered that last bit to himself, but the AI responded anyway. “You still—five in storage B.”

Tony hummed at that. “Prototype five. Glitchy left pinky finger. Trigger happy, didn’t mesh well with the suit. Oh well. Glitchy arm’s better than no arms.”

Just as he spoke, there was a crash from across the room. Steve grabbed Tony by the arm and yanked him down into a crouch behind a desk just as more bullets sprayed out over their heads. Ignoring Tony’s curse next to him, Steve pulled out his gun and stuck it over the top of the desk, firing several blind shots in the direction the gunfire had come from. His gun clicked empty and he swore under his breath, tossing it aside and diving for the next closest cover, a hunk of some kind of machinery.

He managed to make his way across the room, ducking between covers while Tony made just enough noise to keep the shooter’s attention focused on him, giving Steve the chance to get behind them. Steve felt, as always these days, a heavy, bittersweet ache at the evidence of how well they worked together without even having to discuss a plan. It had been like that ever since they’d come back from Wakanda: they worked together so well in the field, but when they got back, Tony avoided Steve and his team, treated them like nothing more than acquaintances at best.

Steve had been trying for more than a month to reach out and close that distance, but nothing he’d done had worked. It wasn’t like Tony was actively pushing back; he’d made Bucky a new arm almost immediately, delivering it with a sincere apology for attacking him in Siberia. Steve knew he’d been part of Bucky’s treatment, too. He was polite when he talked to every one of Steve’s team, he was respectful, he was professional. But he wasn’t himself, and it hurt to see.

It bothered Steve to admit to himself that what was missing in Tony these days was the quirks and the sarcasm and all the personality traits that Steve had always been annoyed by, in the past. All the things he’d privately wished Tony would drop in favor of acting like an adult. Now that he had, Steve found that he wasn’t the same person without them, and Steve didn’t like it.

He made it around the room in a wide arc and ended up behind the shooter—singular, just one agent, still turned away from him and sneaking closer to the desk Tony was crouched behind. It was easy to sneak up behind him and sweep his legs, get hold of his gun and rip it out of his hands while simultaneously throwing a sharp elbow into the back of the agent’s neck, causing him to yell out and go all the way down. Steve threw the automatic weapon aside, but pulled the handgun from the agent’s belt to replace the one he’d emptied.

Tony came out from behind the desk as soon as the gunfire stopped, right at the moment a spike of pain tore through Steve’s injured side, causing him to double over for a second with a quiet gasp.

When he gritted his teeth and forced himself to straighten, Tony was eyeing his side critically. “You still good to go? I’m a damsel in distress here, thanks to you,” he held out the stumps of his arms, “so if you want me to make it to any of my armor and be the least bit useful, you’re going to need to be the bodyguard.”

The lack of real concern for his injuries might have hurt if Steve wasn’t so focused on the rest. “What do you mean, ‘thanks to me?’” he said indignantly.

Tony gave him a frosty glare. “Where exactly do you think I got my limbs taken off? Let’s go,” he said impatiently, turning to stride—as fast as he could at least, with his limp—across the lab. He navigated it easily, even in the wreckage, moving with purpose.

Steve trailed behind him, on the lookout for HYDRA but distracted by trying to understand what Tony had said. His steps faltered when it finally clicked. His mouth opened on a horrified question, but it never came. His throat worked for a moment as he followed Tony in silence, before a denial finally managed to work its way out. “All I did was disable your suit.” It came out weaker than he’d intended, and the way Tony’s shoulders tensed made him cringe.

“By caving my chest in,” Tony ground out, not turning to look at him, still picking his way through the lab. “Then you left me there, stuck in a suit with no power, in that frozen fucking hell, for nearly an entire day until someone came for me. You might have been able to survive going into the ice and bounce right back, but my fragile little body couldn’t.”

That, more than anything, made Steve’s chest ache with guilt. Because he hadn’t just ‘bounced right back.’ He still had nightmares, still woke up shivering and unable to shake the bone-deep cold. He still bundled up more than his serum-enhanced body really needed on winter days. The cold was an unforgiving enemy, and to think that he’d forced Tony to experience that too…

He couldn’t regret defending Bucky. But he’d thought… he’d been sure that Tony had help coming soon. He’d been talking when they’d left, and Steve hadn’t been focused on anything but getting Bucky out of there. He could barely make himself look at Tony, feeling less the betrayal of the attack and more the guilt of knowing that he should have told Tony so much sooner. He’d been sure that Tony would have someone there within the hour, at the very longest. He hadn’t thought that destroying the reactor, cutting off the suit’s power, would mean that Tony would be stuck in the suit. He hadn’t thought that Tony really had come alone, that backup was far enough away that he’d sustained irreversible injuries by the time they got there.

And he hadn’t thought he’d actually injured Tony when he’d wrecked the suit. But he should have. He knew how tight fitting the suit was, had seen for himself how closely the pieces fit to Tony’s body, and the damage that could be done to the man inside when the suit itself took too hard a hit. He just hadn’t thought about it in Siberia; that or he hadn’t cared, which was so much worse.

He was so distracted by the morose thoughts that he didn’t see the attackers approaching until Tony went down with a cry in front of him, and Steve felt a body crash into his own at the same time. He went down in a tangle of limbs, confused by the sudden appearance of the agents. He swung his newly acquired gun around, but didn’t want to risk hitting Tony, and as soon as he got his feet under him, he was nearly bowled over again.

They were coming from above, he realized. He and Tony had walked underneath another open part of the ceiling, and HYDRA agents were swinging down into the lab space, dropping on them from above. Steve managed to disentangle himself well enough to shoot two of them, though a sharp pain in his thigh told him he’d probably been hit again. He whipped around to find Tony on the floor, kicking out at one of the agents while trying to twist out of range of the gun pointed at him.

Steve made to lunge for them, but before he could get there, someone else did. An arm came out of nowhere, swinging down on the agent’s outstretched gun arm with enough force that Steve heard it crack. The agent’s cry was cut off a second later when a metal-armed punch sent him flying across the room. He landed heavily and didn’t get up again.

Bucky, also clad in sleep pants and a soft t-shirt but with a black tactical belt around his waist holding several weapons, turned and quickly dispatched the remaining two agents behind Steve with ruthless efficiency. It always made Steve’s insides squirm just a bit to see Bucky in action now—he fought with a cold sort of violence that reminded Steve just a bit too much of the Winter Soldier—but he was nothing but grateful for it now. As soon as all the agents were taken care of, Bucky pulled a grenade from his belt, yanked out the pin, and tossed it up onto the upper floor where the agents had come from. The hissing sound from above gave it away as a gas grenade of some kind.

Bucky glanced at Steve, eyes traveling over him for a moment, briefly pausing at the bullet wounds. “You okay?” he asked gruffly, and Steve nodded.

Without a second glance at Steve, Bucky turned to where Tony was on the floor, bending down to grasp Tony under the arms and gently pull him up. Tony was panting, but he nodded his thanks at the action. The tiniest pang of jealousy hit Steve as he noted that Tony didn’t flinch or pull away from Bucky’s touch like he had Steve’s, but it was eclipsed by his relief to see Bucky, there and apparently unharmed.

“What do you know?” Tony asked Bucky, who shook his head.

“Not much. A squad made it into my room, but I don’t think they know whose room is whose. They came here to take someone, but I couldn’t tell you who. Best guess is either me or you.”

Tony nodded his agreement with that assessment. “Well, I’ve got some parts at the other end of the lab that will help with getting them the hell out. I am forced to admit they did their homework in taking FRIDAY mostly out, but they can’t compete with Iron Man.”

“Speaking of, I brought you some gifts,” Bucky said, shrugging a small pack Steve hadn’t noticed off his shoulder and opening it. He pulled out what looked like a strangely-shaped pair of shoes, and Tony exclaimed.

“Remind me to kiss you later, Sputnik.” Bucky actually smiled as he set the things down on the floor and Tony slipped his feet into them. When he went to move again, his stride was smooth, the same confident walk he’d always had, and that Steve had seen every day since they’d come back.

Steve hurried to catch up to them as they began walking away, not looking back at him. “You knew, about…?” Steve asked Bucky, referring to Tony’s injuries but having trouble actually saying it out loud.

Bucky just raised an eyebrow, looking back over his shoulder at Steve. “How d’you think he made my arm?” he said, raising up his left arm, metal glinting in the lights of the lab. It didn’t look much different from the HYDRA version, but Bucky had told Steve it was lighter, stronger, and didn’t ache constantly like the other one had. It also apparently had several useful—and some less useful but more unique, typical of Tony—features built in.

“Learned just about everything I needed when I made my own prosthetics,” Tony said, and his voice was tight and angry again, and he refused to look back at Steve. “Barnes here declined the realistic-flesh option, but the inner workings are pretty much the same. Plus the little bonuses I couldn’t put in my own, not if I wanted to keep up appearances.”

“Creeps me out,” Bucky said, but there was a teasing tone in his voice.

“Now, is that any way to talk to the guy who maintains your arm—oh, sweet child, come to Papa.” Tony had spotted a workbench on which was sitting an open Iron Man gauntlet. He hurried over to it, Bucky and Steve rushing after him, guns up and flanking him as his attention clearly diverted entirely to the gauntlet.

“Rest of the suit?” Bucky asked, eyes scanning what he could see of their surroundings through the dust and debris.

Tony shook his head. “FRIDAY can’t bring it, the bastards interrupted her connections to it. All the ones locked up in the walls are off limits as long as they’ve got their filthy hands in the system. I’ve got one downstairs that’s disconnected from all the systems for diagnostics—incidentally, down near where my backup hands are. We’ll have to get to it, but in the meantime… this’ll have to do. Fri, my girl, you have any connection to this gauntlet?”

“Some, Boss,” the AI replied. “—necting now.”

Tony scrutinized the gauntlet and his missing arms for a second, and Steve saw Bucky frown. “You’re not gonna—” Bucky started, but Tony was already reaching for it with his right arm.

“FRIDAY, can you get into the emergency DRO port?”

“You got it,” the AI said, and the gauntlet lit up on its own, pieces at the end shifting out to reveal exposed wiring.

Bucky threw a concerned glance over his shoulder at Tony. “Isn’t that like the sensory testing—”

“Yeah,” Tony interrupted, features pinched, “but I need the hand.”

Steve had no idea what they were talking about, but when Tony slid his arm forward to connect with some of the wiring of the gauntlet, he thought he understood Bucky’s concern. Tony let out a gasp of obvious pain, clenching his teeth and squeezing his eyes shut as the independent parts of the gauntlet crawled up his arm to cover it up to mid-biceps. The repulsor in the palm glowed and the fingers curled into a fist.

Tony took a deep breath, swallowing another sound of pain, and unclenched the fist. He wiggled the fingers of the gauntlet, frowning at it, then gave a half-shrug. “Good enough. That’s about all the precision control I can get out of one of these.”

“What did you do?” Steve asked, frowning at the gauntlet, not liking the lines around Tony’s eyes that said he was still in pain.

“I opened one of the conduction ports that my prosthetics usually connect to for feedback. –I connected the gauntlet directly to my nervous system,” he added at Steve’s confused expression, which switched over to horrified at the words. “Not exactly fun, the gauntlet’s a machine, not a prosthetic, it doesn’t have sensors tuned to the kinds of things skin is meant to sense so the feedback is… a lot. Movement is jerky and it’s painful and it fucking sucks, but it’s a weapon and at least now I’ve got some working fingers, even if they’re a little clumsy.”

Steve tried to reach out in sympathy, to put a hand on Tony’s shoulder, but Tony sidestepped, turning away from him and heading further into the lab, toward the stairs at the other end with another terse “let’s go.” Bucky gave Steve a brief look before following him, something like a reprimand. The churning mix of confusion, concern, guilt, and annoyance in Steve’s gut just increased at the look. He didn’t know how to fix what was broken between him and Tony—more broken than he’d realized before just minutes ago—and he didn’t know how to feel about the fact that Bucky had apparently bridged that gap without Steve knowing, while Steve still floundered.

As they got closer to the stairwell, they encountered a few more stray agents, then a group of them. Evidently the stairs had been breached. Tony was moving smoothly now that Bucky had brought his foot supports, and his repulsor did a lot of damage, even more than Steve or Bucky’s guns could. They found themselves acting mostly as backup as Tony moved through and defended his own lab, his own home. Steve felt like he was rushing along, just trying to keep up with Tony, only to be perpetually behind. It wasn’t exactly a new feeling, but that didn’t make it any less unpleasant.

They made it to the stairs, and though a part of Steve wanted to go up and look for the rest of their team, he knew getting Tony downstairs and into the suit was important if they wanted to take care of the rest of the HYDRA infiltration. He also knew there’d be no dissuading Tony, so he just silently followed Tony and Bucky down, away from the rest of their friends and into the depths of the second lab level.

None of the floors had collapsed into the lowest level, which was the most reinforced. The glass wall of the main lab was bulletproof and apparently even fortified against explosives, because the crowd of HYDRA agents outside the doors hadn’t had any luck getting inside. They immediately turned weapons on Steve, Bucky, and Tony when they came down the stairs, but between the three of them, they dispatched them all with relative ease, even despite Steve’s injuries and Tony having only one working repulsor.

Without the debris and clouded air of the upper levels slowing them down, they moved fast through the lower level. Steve hadn’t been down here in a long time, and he found himself surreptitiously looking around at the subtle changes. There were Iron Man armors in alcoves along the walls, like always, though he noticed the one Tony had been wearing in Siberia was nowhere to be seen. The newest models all had multiple glowing reactor nodules; backup power sources in case the main reactor was taken out. Smashed beneath a vibranium shield, for instance, which was a heavy thought that settled somewhere around Steve’s stomach.

He didn’t see his shield hanging anywhere. He wasn’t honestly sure what had happened to it. Tony had said, when they first came home and Steve asked for it back, that the vibranium was stolen from Wakanda and had been returned to its rightful owners. Steve hadn’t believed him, thinking Tony was just angry and didn’t want to give it back. He wasn’t sure what he thought now. After what had happened to him, he couldn’t imagine Tony wanted to have to look at the shield any more, on or off the field. Thinking about that, about what he’d done to Tony with it, Steve wasn’t honestly sure whether he wanted it back now.

There was a suit in the middle of the lab, pieces all detached and spread apart over some kind of mechanical pad. Tony hurried past it, however, to a door off to one side labeled ‘Storage B.’ He instructed Bucky to type in a code, then leaned forward for a scanner to run over one of his eyes. There was a hiss and a click as the door unlocked, and Tony yanked open the handle with his gauntlet. “Sorry, no one but me allowed inside,” he told them, though his eyes were only on Bucky. “Stand watch, I’ll just be a minute. I promise to return fully armed.”

Bucky snorted and Tony disappeared into the room. It took Steve a second to understand the pun, and he spent the rest of the brief time Tony was in the room dwelling on his reactions to Tony’s personality and his choices. Steve’s immediate thought, hearing that in another time and place, would have been irritation that Tony wasn’t taking the situation more seriously. But how could a man missing his arms, his home and friends and life in danger, be anything but serious about this? Tony had always used humor to deflect and distract, and Steve had never appreciated it. Bucky’s reaction told Steve that he did, and Steve couldn’t help but wonder if that was a part of why Tony was apparently willing to try to reconcile with Bucky but not with Steve. If it all came down to differences in personality, or if it was really about lack of trust. Steve had broken something in Siberia, something more than Tony’s physical body, and he had no idea how to even begin to put it back together. Or whether it was even possible at all.

Tony came back out quickly, gauntlet abandoned and sporting two complete, absolutely realistic-looking arms. If Steve hadn’t just seen him without them, he’d never have known that they were prosthetics. Tony jogged over to the disassembled suit. He picked the helmet up and slid it onto his head, which must have activated the rest of it, because the other pieces immediately came to life and attached themselves to his body, crawling over his skin and melding together in a display of technical genius that never failed to amaze Steve.

From there, it wasn’t long before they’d cleared the rest of the building. Tony, through the suit, was able to hack back into the Compound systems and get FRIDAY and the building’s intrinsic defenses back up and running, as well as disrupt the HYDRA communications system. He gave the locations of the remaining agents, plus the rest of the Avengers, to Steve and Bucky, then made his way out of the underground flight tunnel and to the surface to destroy the stealth vehicles the agents had arrived in. Steve and Bucky made quick work of the rest of the agents, joined by the others as they made their way back up to the main floor.

It was hours after the end of the fight, when all of them had finished giving their reports to the Accords people and cleaning up anything HYDRA had left behind, that Steve finally got near Tony again. Tony was the busiest of all of them, rapidly going back and forth between talking to construction people who would need to come in and repair the extensive damage to the Compound, Compound employees who’d need overtime or time off or new offices, SI and media people who were already hounding him about what had happened and how it would affect his work and the Avengers, and an endless parade of others whose roles Steve didn’t even know.

Rhodes, who lived at the Compound now but had been away for the last week, was hovering protectively around Tony, helping to keep everyone at bay and relatively organized. Tony was out of his pajamas and into a suit—a normal one, not a metal one—and keeping up a professional air, but Steve knew he was probably tired and aching, plus he’d been grazed at least once by gunshots, and still might have a slight concussion from the original fall out of his room.

Rhodes had been hovering around Tony a lot since Steve and his team came back, and he’d been one of the main barriers to Steve trying to get Tony on his own to talk. Rhodes was always glaring in Steve’s direction; while he acted professionally on the field, it couldn’t have been clearer outside of it that he wanted nothing to do with Steve—or more accurately, he wanted Steve to have nothing to do with Tony. Now Steve understood why.

But he had to talk to Tony. Now that he knew the truth about what had happened, he couldn’t just keep avoiding Tony, couldn’t let Tony think he wasn’t sorry. When Rhodes was called away for a few minutes by one of the endless people demanding their attention, Steve took the chance to get close to Tony, inserting himself into his space as soon as he saw Tony shake the hand of the person he was talking with and dismiss them.

“Tony,” he said, and tried not to be hurt at the way Tony’s expression didn’t change at all from the coolly professional front he put up for outsiders.

“Need something?” Tony said.

“To talk. Tony, look, I had no idea…” he trailed off, but Tony clearly knew what he was talking about, expression turning frosty.

“You didn’t know? Or you didn’t care?”

That stung. “Of course I care, Tony. I wouldn’t—” but Tony held up a hand—a fake hand—to stop him.

“Save it, Rogers. I’m perfectly aware of your position.”

Steve flinched back at that. When they’d come back, even when they’d offered apologies to each other and Tony had presented Bucky with his arm, Steve had told him the same thing he had in the letter he’d sent: that he’d had to defend Bucky, that he hoped Tony understood why. Tony had given him a pained and entirely false smile and said he understood perfectly. Now Steve’s justifications seemed empty, even cruel. He’d seen the offered arm as a payment for what Tony had done to Bucky in Siberia, but now that he knew what he’d taken from Tony, what did he have to offer in return?

Nothing but more words. “Tony, I’m so sorry,” he said, and his throat was tight with the realization that he hadn’t been so sincere in the past when he’d said the same thing. “Please, I really didn’t… didn’t know what happened to you. What I did to you. I never meant for any of that, for you to be there so long, I… I’m sorry.”

Tony just shook his head. “Why? Because you suddenly found out what I lost? Why should that change anything, or does what you did only matter if there were permanent consequences? You weren’t sorry before today.” Tony gave him an empty smile. “You didn’t give a shit about me before, so why should you now?” There was an air of finality to the words. “Excuse me,” Tony said, clearly dismissing him, and turned to speak to another officer who’d approached them.

Steve closed his eyes, the disappointment and guilt in his chest turning to grief. He’d wondered, before, whether what was broken between him and Tony could be fixed, or if it was permanent. Well, he thought bitterly, he had his answer.

Chapter Text

Sam woke slowly, his body feeling heavy, head dizzy and groggy. His mind was sluggish, thoughts drifting along without really catching and forming completely. He wondered if he’d been drinking last night, but as far as he remembered, he hadn’t been out drinking in at least a year.

Senses came back slowly and his fuzzy brain catalogued them lazily, disconnected thoughts still vague, unconcerned. He was lying on something hard and cold. Floor. Not entirely surprising if he had been out drinking. Something smelled stale and musty and damp around him, which was strange, the Compound was usually pristinely clean and even the wildest party wouldn’t change the smell overnight. Unless he was somewhere other than the Compound.

Memories filtered back in: training at the Compound, yesterday. He had an afternoon workout session with Steve after group training. He’d gone down to Stark’s lab, gotten an upgrade to the Falcon wings, went to bed thinking about getting up early to test them out the next morning. No drinking involved, huh. But there was a flash of something… an alarm, bright flashes, a hissing noise and a feeling of choking that he hadn’t been entirely sure wasn’t a dream.

Dull aches made themselves known in his body as those memories became clear and he jerked awake, eyes snapping open immediately. They’d been attacked in the Compound, taken out before they could even fight back by some kind of gas. Shit.

He was staring up at a blank gray ceiling. There was a nasty taste in his mouth, tongue feeling dry and fuzzy and enlarged; the aftereffects of whatever drug was used to put him out. He groaned quietly as he shifted his limbs to try and sit up, suddenly aware of a pounding pain in his head and a stiff, aching feeling in all of his limbs. Maybe from the drugs, just as likely from being roughly handled while unconscious.

“Sam?” Steve’s voice came from beside him and he jerked again in surprise, turning his head to look over. Steve was there, sure enough, wearing nothing but his sleep clothes and looking supremely pissed off, but not physically injured. Steve scooted closer when he saw that Sam was awake and slid an arm under his shoulders, helping him to sit up.

“Thanks,” Sam croaked out once he was upright, swallowing with a grimace at his dry throat and cracking voice. “What happened?”

As he said it, he looked around. They were in a large room—a cell—with gray concrete walls, blank except for a heavy metal door set into one of them. No windows, nothing to give them a hint of where they were, what time it was, or who had taken them. The cell was maybe twenty feet square, plenty large enough for all of them. Natasha was also awake, and helping a groggy Clint to sit up across the room. Scott and Wanda were still slumped on the floor.

He didn’t see any of the others, and spared a thought to wonder where they were, belatedly remembering that Vision and Rhodes were off on a week-long classified mission somewhere halfway across the world, with no contact allowed back home. That might have been deliberate; the gas attack on the Compound had obviously been planned so that their attackers wouldn’t have to deal with the likes of the armed and angry Avengers on their home turf. But it was doubtful that Vision would be vulnerable to such an attack, so it might have been done purposely when the android was away.

It was possible Rhodes and Vision’s mission would be interrupted by news of the attack on the Compound, but even if it was, it would take a while for them to get back, find out what had happened, and hopefully come to the rescue. Sam’s more immediate hope was Stark, who was conspicuously missing from the room, though Sam was sure he’d been at the Compound last night. Hopefully he’d escaped the attack and would be coming for them.

The only other person Sam didn’t see in the room was Barnes, which would certainly explain the pinched look on Steve’s face. That wasn’t a nice thought, and Sam tried to banish it, but it was hard. Ever since they’d come back from Wakanda, Sam had slowly been losing some of his faith in and admiration of Steve. When they’d fought against the other Avengers, Sam had thought it was about the Accords, which he didn’t trust (and stood against because Steve had too). But as soon as news came back of their pardons and Steve knew Barnes would be safe, he’d signed them without a second thought.

Add to that the way Steve treated Barnes, and it was hard not to feel like the second-choice friend. Not that Sam was looking for preferential treatment by Steve, but these days Steve didn’t really seem concerned with anyone but Barnes. They’d been given a second chance that, after a hell of a lot of introspection, Sam understood they were lucky to be getting. They’d come back thanks to Tony Stark, who’d offered them apologies (apologies Sam wasn’t sure they deserved) the moment they’d walked in the door. Yet Steve was still parading around like they’d done the right thing, firm in his beliefs so long as Barnes was okay.

Sam understood the importance of making peace. He also understood that it would never happen within their team again, at least not with the way things were currently. Something had happened when Stark had gone to Siberia to “help” Steve and Barnes, something more than just Barnes losing an arm and Steve hauling him back to Wakanda bruised and bloody and claiming Stark had attacked them. Stark had made Barnes a new arm, a better one, and delivered it with an apology for said attack. And Barnes—and Steve—had accepted it, and acted like that was the end of it.

But Stark still avoided them. Sam saw the way he looked at Steve: the way a man with PTSD looks at the ghosts that haunt him. Something bad, something more than any of them were saying, had happened over there. That much was obvious even without seeing the way Stark avoided them, never turned his back to Steve, snuck out of rooms when more than one or two of Steve’s team were there with him.

Sam had seen that there was more to it even before they came back, once he had time to calm down. He’d been blinded at first, by the evidence of the beaten soldiers and his own anger at Stark betraying his word. But when he’d had time to calm down and actually think, he knew that what little Steve had said couldn’t have been the whole story. Steve was acting strange, not talking about what had happened despite his usually open manner, and it was clear he was lying about something. And Stark wouldn’t have just attacked them out of the blue. Even in Germany, Stark had given them a chance to talk. And if he’d really gone there with the intention of betraying them, why go alone, like he’d promised? Why not take a whole squad of Ross’s goons with him? No, something had happened in Siberia to make Stark turn on them, and it wasn’t good.

The worst part was that Steve didn’t seem to care. In their private time at the Compound, he complained about the distance between Stark and the rest of the team, but he didn’t do anything about it. He’d offered his own token apologies in return to Stark when they’d come back, but that’s just what they were: token. It couldn’t be clearer that as long as Barnes was safe and by his side, Steve just didn’t give a shit if the team was really cohesive, or if one of its members flinched every time he spoke and the rest of them felt unwelcome in their own home.

It was an uncharitable thought and Sam didn’t like it. God knew Steve had plenty of shit to work through, and Sam could hardly blame him for being protective of the best friend who was his only remaining link to the past and the life he’d had before being unceremoniously thrust into the future. Sam was a counselor, he knew issues like the ones Steve surely had were deep and difficult and all in all, Steve was coping incredibly well. But Sam had tried to offer him help, some kind of therapy or counseling or just a friendly ear to vent to, and Steve had rejected every offer. It was hard not to be frustrated at Steve’s refusal to see his own need for help.

That pinched look became even more pronounced as Steve looked around the room as well. “We were attacked at the Compound. Some kind of gas. The alarms woke me up right as it was filling all the rooms. It took longer to affect me, I think, I stayed up for long enough to fight a few of them. HYDRA,” he confirmed with a grimace, “but eventually it took me down too. I woke up here, just a few minutes ago.”

Across the room, Clint swore as Natasha helped him sit up. “They were thorough,” Natasha said, glancing over at Steve and Sam. “Took everything off me, even the hairpins.” Specially designed by Stark, who’d called them “spy chic” and launched into an exhaustive explanation of the frankly unbelievable number of sabotage features packed into such tiny things.

Scott stirred with his own groan, and Sam immediately got up to go and help him up, catch him up on the situation. As he was helping Scott to sit, however, Wanda also woke up, and before Steve could even get to her, she bolted upright with her hands around her neck—covering the collar Sam hadn’t noticed before, no doubt blocking her powers like the one on the Raft—and let out a piercing scream.

Sam cringed as the sound echoed around the room, barely repressing the urge to clap his hands over his ears.

“Wanda! It’s okay, calm down!” Steve shouted over her screech, which quickly dissolved into hysterical sobs. Barely even forming full words, she wailed about being locked up, about killing whoever had done it to her, and Sam thought maybe he caught Stark’s name in there somewhere. Steve tried to get her to calm down with little success.

Sam helped Scott the rest of the way up, no longer managing to contain the roll of his eyes when he saw Scott do the same. They were in a crisis and it must be awful to have her powers contained, have that collar on her like an animal, but she was acting like a child. Screaming and crying wouldn’t help anything. Not for the first time, Sam felt incredibly uncomfortable at the thought of someone with such tenuous control over their emotions having such strong, volatile powers.

Natasha and Clint, obviously also deciding to leave dealing with Wanda to Steve, came over to join Sam and Scott. “Anyone looked at the door?” Scott asked, and Natasha nodded.

“Solid steel, reinforced, bolted electronically from the other side, with solid security, I’m sure. We can’t get through it from this side. We could try to jump any guards that come in, but no way they’re dumb enough not to come in armed and ready for us to try. This was a well-executed operation. They wouldn’t have kept us all together if they weren’t sure they could keep us contained.”

“So what do we do?” Sam asked, not liking the sound of her analysis.

“Either bide our time and wait for rescue, or hope they separate us and try to jump them when we’re on our own and not guarded as well,” Clint said, and Natasha nodded.

“Wait for rescue? Are you kidding?” Scott’s expression told them exactly what he thought of that plan.

“I haven’t seen Stark, he might not have been taken,” Sam offered.

“Or he’s already dead,” Clint said darkly.

“There’s always Rhodes and Vision,” Natasha said. “They’ll be called off their mission when they get the news of the attack. There’s no love lost between us, I know, but they’re professional, they’ll put everything they’ve got into getting their teammates back. And if Tony’s here too, no way Rhodes doesn’t track him down.”

She said it with enough confidence that Sam had a hard time doubting her. The only problem was that they had no idea what HYDRA was planning to do with them. Waiting for rescue was a viable option if they were sure they’d be alive and in one piece when that rescue came, but…

Steve came over to join them, giving a helpless shrug when they looked toward Wanda. She’d quieted down, at least, but it looked like she was going to be no help at all. She’d pressed herself into a corner of the room, arms around her knees and head down, rocking slightly back and forth. Not that she was much use without her powers anyway. She didn’t do much physical training with the rest of them, insisting that she didn’t need to with her abilities. That had always irritated Sam, but Steve had let it go, and Sam figured it wasn’t his job to worry about it. He wondered if Steve was regretting it now.

There wasn’t much more planning to be done. They spent the next however long—maybe half an hour or so, but it was hard to have a sense of time in the dimly lit, monotonous cell—trying to come up with plans for what to do if they managed to take any of the guards by surprise, or find an escape route out of the room, but they were mostly going around in circles.

Eventually, the door was opened. All of them except Wanda jumped to their feet and moved toward it, but the barrels of several guns preceded the entry of the guards, who ordered them to step back. When Steve tried to move forward anyway, they hit him without hesitation with some kind of electric shock that made him seize up and fall to the floor. The shock didn’t last long and Steve was back on his feet within a few seconds, but he’d clearly learned his lesson.

As much as Sam wasn’t looking forward to whatever their captors had planned, he hoped for the chance to be taken out of the room, to look for weaknesses, opportunities to attack the guards, hints as to their location, anything. But the guards weren’t there to take any of them; just the opposite. After making sure the Avengers were backed up several feet, the men in the doorway parted to allow two more to come forward, dragging a body heavily between them, which they tossed unceremoniously into the room.

Steve and Clint rushed forward to catch Barnes beneath the arms—arm, Sam saw with a sickening churning in his gut—and the guards retreated and slammed the door shut before Barnes had stopped falling, never saying a word.

“Bucky!” Steve said, maneuvering Barnes’s heavy body around so he was lying on the floor with Steve hovering over him. The metal arm had been torn off, no other word for it. Every part of it was gone, even the plates that covered his shoulder and attached the arm to his body, leaving behind nothing but a disturbing, bloody hole.

They should be thankful for the serum enhancing Barnes, Sam thought as he watched Steve tear off his shirt to apply pressure to the bleeding stump of Barnes’s shoulder. Though the wound was old and highly scarred, there was still a significant amount of blood where the plates had been torn away, and that kind of wound might kill any other man. As it was, Barnes would probably survive this… though for how long, Sam couldn’t say. Clearly HYDRA didn’t have any qualms about injuring them.

Barnes stirred a while later. Steve had managed to staunch the flow of blood from his shoulder, but from the extent of the damage, not to mention the look on his face, it had to hurt like hell. “Easy, Bucky,” Steve said, soothing in a way Sam rarely heard, “you’re okay. Just stay still.”

“Fuck,” was Barnes’s reply, as he squeezed his eyes shut against the pain, then forced them open and turned his head to look over at the missing arm. His voice was hoarse and rough like he’d been screaming, and Sam wondered if he’d been awake when they’d ripped his arm off. Bastards.

“What happened? What did you see?” Natasha asked, right to the point, ignoring Steve’s reproachful look. They didn’t have time to baby Barnes, they needed out of there.

Barnes shook his head. “Not much. Woke up strapped down in a fucking chair.” Steve paled at that, obviously knowing something Sam didn’t about Barnes, though Sam could guess it had to do with his history with HYDRA. “They were saying something about it not working.”

“You mean the trigger words?” Sam asked.

Barnes nodded. “Think so. Guess that therapy really worked wonders, but it sure pissed them off. Said since they couldn’t use me, they shouldn’t leave me with a weapon, and they took the damn arm.”

Barnes shivered at that and Steve squeezed his good shoulder in sympathy, face a mask of horror and pain. “Didn’t see anything but that room,” Barnes continued, “and I passed out just about the time they got the arm off. Sorry.” He gave a one-armed shrug, then grimaced, clearly regretting the movement.

Steve stayed with Barnes for the next hour or so, back to the monotony of nothing but anxious waiting. Wanda stayed in her corner, ignoring the rest of them, who sat scattered around the room, absorbed in their own thoughts. They didn’t bother to repeat any more plans to each other, and Steve was occupied with Barnes, anyway.

When the door opened again, none of them were stupid enough to try to get too close. Steve stayed on the floor with Barnes, leaving Sam and Scott to run forward to catch the next body they tossed in—Stark. Sam’s heart sank at the sight, knowing Stark was here and hadn’t escaped the attack on the Compound, meaning their only hope of rescue was Vision and Rhodes, who might not even be aware of the situation yet.

Sam thought his heart might actually stop a moment later when he registered what he was seeing on Stark. Stark’s hands were gone, his arms taken completely off to the elbows. Scott noticed it just about the same time Sam did, and fumbled, almost dropping Stark. He looked like he might vomit, and Sam felt the same way.

“Oh God,” Scott said as they set Stark down and Sam stripped off his own shirt, tearing it in half to use as two separate bandages for the freely bleeding stumps of Stark’s arms. “Oh shit, oh fuck.” Scott took one half of Sam’s shirt and efficiently wrapped one of Stark’s arms with it, pulling it tight and trying to put pressure on it with his hands, but he looked like he’d rather go and throw up in a corner.

His rambling attracted the attention of the others—with the exception of Wanda, who was still curled in her corner—and they came over to investigate, Steve carefully leaning Barnes against the wall to rest first. All of them let out various exclamations and gasps at seeing Stark’s arms. Frantic with his efforts to wrap the arm and stop the bleeding, Sam couldn’t focus enough to put his finger on what it was that was bothering him about it.

Less than a minute into their ministrations, Stark groaned and turned his head, wincing with his eyes still closed. Sam gestured to Scott to let up the pressure on the arm he had hold of, and was relieved to see that blood didn’t seem to be soaking through the cloth tied around the stump. He turned to wave the others back. “Give him some space, guys, okay?” he said softly. Bad enough for the man to wake up in pain in an unfamiliar place and surrounded by people he wasn’t entirely comfortable with. For Sam to have to break the news about his hands…

Stark opened his eyes, gaze sharpening immediately as it landed on Sam. “Wilson,” he said, and though his voice was a little hoarse, he wasn’t slurring or confused, which was a good sign. “Were we attacked?”

“Yeah, St—Tony.” He could at least call the man by his first name if he had to break this news. “HYDRA hit the Compound, took all of us. We just woke up here. They got you too, and, uh…”

Stark’s brow furrowed as he caught sight of Sam’s expression. “What?”

“Tony, your arms, I’m sorry, but…”

Stark frowned and raised his left arm, the one Scott had let go of, up in front of his face. His eyes widened when they landed on the stump of the arm, but Sam, who was preparing to lean forward and hold Stark’s shoulders down against the inevitable panic attack at the injury, was confused by his reaction. “Ugh,” Stark said, grimacing at the injury. “No finesse at all, goddamn that hurts. What a mess.”

That wasn’t anywhere near the reaction Sam was expecting, and he had a sinking feeling that Stark just wasn’t processing it. Sam rushed to slide his hands behind Stark’s shoulders as he pushed himself upright, grunting with the pain of putting pressure on his amputated arms. He looked down at his arms critically and sighed. “Well, can’t say they weren’t thorough. That’s going to make things harder.”

Sam gripped Stark’s shoulder tightly, trying to get in front of him, to take his gaze away from his mangled limbs. “Listen, Tony, just breathe, okay? You’re in shock. Just take a deep breath.”

Stark threw him an incredulous look, shrugging off the hand on his shoulder. “Get off me, Wilson, I’m not in shock. Just pissed off.” He paused to look around at all of them, at the shocked horror on their faces, and rolled his eyes. “They’re prosthetics, okay? I was already missing my arms. HYDRA didn’t chop them off, they just ripped off the damn prosthetics. Sloppily, I might add,” he said with another grimace, holding up the bloody, hastily wrapped stumps. “Mangling my beautiful work.”

Sam realized then what he’d been too worried before to notice, what had been bothering him about the injuries. Though they’d been bleeding freely and heavily, it wasn’t arterial spray; it wasn’t nearly heavy enough to be from fresh amputations. But having ripped off well-integrated prosthetics, that made sense. The injury was similar to Barnes’s.

A sneaking suspicion, a bad one, wormed its way into Sam’s mind and wouldn’t let go. An answer, if Stark had had prosthetics long enough to be this nonchalant about them, to why he still avoided them, why he acted like he’d never trust any of them again. The answer to what Steve was hiding about what had happened in Siberia. “Tony,” he said, and his voice rang out in the quiet room, “how long have you had prosthetic arms?”

Stark looked right at him, expression flat and cold, and Sam knew the answer with a piercing clarity before he gave it. “Six months.” Six months since Siberia. Two months since Sam and the others had returned thanks to not much but Stark’s goodwill, even after Steve had crippled him. After Sam had, however inadvertently, put his best friend in a wheelchair. The braces Rhodes now wore, the prosthetics Stark had surely designed for himself, didn’t factor into the equation. They didn’t erase what their stupid fight had taken from them.

A sudden, overwhelming tide of anger for Steve flowed through Sam at the words. He turned sharply to face Steve, who wouldn’t meet his eyes, which just enraged him even more. “What the fuck, Steve?” He meant a hundred things. What had happened in Siberia? What could Stark possibly have done to justify injuring him like that? Why had Steve lied about it, told all of them that he’d done nothing but disable Stark’s suit, that there had been help on the way and Stark was fine? Why had Steve let them all come back believing a lie, believing that Stark had been the one to wrong them, when if anything, it was the other way around?

Stark shook his head and levered himself up onto his knees, then his feet. Sam got to his feet to help steady him when he wobbled; looking down, he felt the helpless rage grow at the sight of Stark’s bare feet, missing half his toes. No doubt that had been a result of Siberia, too. Fuck.

“You can deal with that later,” Stark said sagely, too calm for the boiling rage inside Sam, nodding toward the door. “You want to live to exchange bedtime stories, we need to focus on getting the hell out of here.”

Sam had to gulp in several deep breaths, but he forced himself to steady his shaking hands and nod his assent. Stark was right; he could demand answers out of Steve later, when they were out and safe. With Stark on their side, even if he was trapped there with them, they might have a chance at getting out on their own.

Sam moved over to the wall where Stark indicated, next to the door. “Look close,” he instructed, gesturing with his head for the others to come over and help the search. “There should be an access panel somewhere in the wall near the door. It’ll blend in well, we’ll have to force it open.”

Natasha and Clint joined Sam in searching for the panel; the others stayed back, not wanting to crowd them. “I was half-awake when they dragged me back,” Stark said as they searched, “the guards outside the door were on rotations. If we’re lucky, we can get the door open while they’re away, get out into the hallways and take a few down, get hold of their weapons. They must have a communication center or something with tech, get me in there and I can get us out.” He said it with just enough bravado that Sam believed him. After all, he’d heard the stories. He knew Stark could do it.

“Got it,” Natasha said a moment later, and Sam felt a flare of real hope. If they could actually do this…

But he should have known better. Natasha pried the panel off the wall, pulling it back for Stark, who moved forward, but he took one look at the open hole in the wall and let out a displeased noise. Moving forward, Sam saw why. There were a few wires trailing up into the wall, but nothing was exposed right in front of the hole. “Shit,” Stark said. “Fuck. I can’t…” he lifted the stumps of his arms helplessly. “If I can’t see it—”

“Let us help,” Sam said, striding forward. This was not going to stop them. Their own mistakes, what they’d done to Stark, couldn’t be what took them down.

Stark looked apprehensive, but he stepped back to let Sam stick his hand into the hole. “Hurry,” Natasha said from behind them, sending a spike of unhelpful anxiety through Sam. “They might know what we’re doing.”

Sam followed the wires upward until his hand encountered a tangle of protruding clasps, more wires, and knobs up above. He had his arm twisted at the elbow at an unnatural angle just to feel it, and it was already starting to ache.

“Describe it to me,” Stark demanded, but Sam faltered.

“Uh… lots of wires. I don’t… what do you need to know?” he asked helplessly. This plan was going up in flames. Stark would know what to do in an instant, he was sure, if only he had a hand to put in the wall himself. But Sam had no idea what he was doing, how to even begin to describe what he was feeling.

“Count them. Left to right, tell me what you feel,” Stark said, hurried, as Natasha made another impatient noise behind them.

Sam took a deep breath. If Stark could keep his cool, he could too. “Um. Okay, left to right. There’s a… knob? Then…. Four wires, last one thicker than the others. Then, I don’t know, a whole bundle of them. Not sure how many. Another… feels like a knob? I can turn it, I think…”

“Where’s the bundle connect to?”

Sam strained, trying to follow it up. “I don’t know. Some of them split off, go through a hole, or a… something hard, I’m not sure what that is, shit, I’m sorry, I—”

He didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence. The door slid open—not because of anything Sam did—and several guards stormed in, wielding the same stun guns they’d used on Steve earlier, along with real guns. The fight, if it could even be called that, was over embarrassingly fast. Natasha and Clint, standing closest to the door, were taken down by the stun guns. Scott backed up fast, hands up, not wanting to meet the same fate. Steve tried to go for the guards, but he was hit with one of the stun guns as well as clubbed over the head with one of their actual guns. Sam was grabbed by the shoulders and hauled away from the door panel, scraping his arm raw against the edges on its way out, then hit over the head as well.

His vision blurred at the edges for a second, long enough that he lost track of the fight. When he was able to blink the spots out of his eyes, he found himself on the floor a little ways from Clint and Natasha. Steve had been tossed further back, and Scott was back near Wanda’s corner. Wanda was still curled into the corner, and Barnes, one-armed and in considerable pain, had just been sitting silently, propped against the wall, since Stark had been brought back in.

The agents standing by the door were smiling down at them, and Sam’s stomach clenched at the look in their eyes. That, and the grip one of them had on Stark’s hair. Stark was looking dazed—he’d likely been hit during the confrontation—and though he squirmed in their grip, with his hands missing, there was pretty much nothing he could do about it.

“Look at this, the mighty Avengers,” the man holding Stark by the hair sneered. “Apparently, they’re nothing once you take away Tony Stark’s hands. Can’t even manage to get a door open without him.”

Sam swallowed at the insult. In other circumstances he might have been goaded into speech, but he knew that would only bring him more pain and humiliation here. He was too busy tracking the expressions of cruel excitement on the goons’ faces to worry about his pride. Those looks couldn’t mean anything good.

“Let him go,” Steve said authoritatively; he’d climbed back to his feet, but he didn’t make another move toward the agents, eyeing their weapons.

The one holding Stark chuckled. “Oh, I don’t think so. We still have a use for him.” He shook Stark just a little.

Stark winced, but set his jaw, his expression changing to something darker than Sam had ever seen. “And here I thought you guys were supposed to be smart,” Stark said, sarcasm nearly hidden beneath the growl in his voice. “I’ll never do anything for you. Recall what happened to the last people who thought torture would get me to do what they wanted?”

The man holding Stark, the talker and obviously the leader, gave him a mockingly sweet smile. “Oh, we’re well aware, Mr. Stark. No one with half a brain in their head would put you anywhere near any kind of technology. Not even our very… delicate methods of persuasion,” here he glanced at Barnes, “would be enough to convince me to let you touch anything you might use against us. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t be useful, if only as a bargaining chip.”

The man loosened his grip on Stark and gestured sharply to two of the other guards, who hauled Stark up by the arms—what there was of them—and pressed one gun to his temple and one to his back. “After all, the world will give up a lot to have Tony Stark back, particularly once he’s one of the last remaining Avengers,” the leader said sweetly.

Sam’s stomach flipped, bile crawling up his throat. Stark’s eyes widened just slightly and he twitched like he was planning to make a move, but before he could, the guard holding the gun to his head slugged him with it, causing him to drop like his strings had been cut. The second guard caught him, hauled him up over his shoulder, and turned to leave the room at another gesture from the leader.

The leader turned to follow him, but stopped at the door to look back at the prisoners, eyes lingering on Barnes. “It’s too bad you had to go and so thoroughly ruin the Winter Soldier. We’d have loved to have our Asset back,” he said, and Steve growled. Barnes just stared at the opposite wall, blank-faced. “Ah, well, sacrifices must be made when your ambitions are as expansive as HYDRA’s.”

“You’ll never win,” Steve said, and his voice was confident, but Sam couldn’t find comfort in it behind his growing despair.

“Oh, we will,” the man said, smiling at Steve. “We’d prefer to take the big players off the board, but in chess, you must take out the pawns before you go for the king. It pains us to let Tony Stark go free, but we need the distraction. It will be well worth it to have the rest of you gone, and your team looking for vengeance instead of focusing in other areas. HYDRA is well-versed in going underground. We know how to disappear, how to infiltrate so thoroughly that no one could ever know we are there. And above all, we are patient. Everything is going according to plan, and we will wait.”

He stood back to survey everyone in the cell once more, then nodded at the guards still in the room. “Execute them.”

He turned and left the room, heavy door slamming behind him. Desperation laced Steve, Clint, and Natasha’s movements as they went for the guards, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The guards didn’t even break a sweat, stunning them again and sending them back to the floor. Sam was too numb to move, even as the guards drew their real guns on each of the Avengers.

Sam was facing toward the door, away from the corner where Wanda sat—she still hadn’t moved, maybe hadn’t even been listening to any of it—and where Scott had backed into. While guards on the other side of the room subdued Clint, Natasha, and Steve, one stomped into the corner behind Sam. Two gunshots rang out, loud in the room, then the heavy, dull thumps of falling bodies, but Sam didn’t look. His gaze fell to the floor, numb and panicked and shaking.

Heavy black boots stepped into his view, and he raised his eyes to the barrel of the gun in his face. Not because he wanted to, or because he truly felt that it made a difference, but because he was supposed to. Look death in the eyes, keep up a brave face to the very end. It didn’t make him feel any better.

His life didn’t flash before his eyes. He didn’t have a wife or a child whose face he could picture perfectly, or some incredible, poignant memory to get lost in during his final moments. His brain did seem to be in overdrive, processing the last few seconds of his life as though they were minutes or hours long. It couldn’t have been more than two seconds since he’d looked up, but he separated and noted the thumping sounds of the stun guns being used on Natasha and Steve, something hard hitting flesh, probably Barton, then another shot—maybe Barnes, but it really didn’t matter, did it?

His last thought, useless as it was, was of Steve, and Stark. The injuries they’d just found out about not an hour before, that Steve had hidden, that had doomed them all. He’d blindly trusted Steve and it had brought him to death. Maybe Stark, too; whatever the head goon had said, there was no way they could trust that they’d let Stark go at all, much less let him go in one piece.

There were three more shots behind him; the grunting sounds of the others’ struggles had disappeared.

He closed his eyes.