Chapter 9
"The whole time," Tony opens with, as soon as he comes to in his proper time, even though he's sure he's covered at least some of this before, in the time after losing Clint, "we've been finding Clint under a fucking railway line and like idiots, we followed the evidence they peeled off his hair and assumed that's where we should be looking."
Steve gives him a look, but Tony's too wired to decide if it means I already know this or are you sure you're okay.
"What we needed," Tony goes on, ignoring it, "was more reckless leaps of logic. Or reckless leaps of intuition, I guess. I made the horrible mistake of trying to be cautious and responsible."
Steve smiles. This time, they're the ones who are used to the loss, and Tony the raw nerve. They've had more than a week, and he's had desperation and then blankness.
"The fiber from Clint's hair," Tony explains, "was post mortem. They moved the body in a train."
"You said he died in a shipping container."
"He did," Tony says, and follows it with, "JARVIS, get me the director. Why isn't he already here? He was here last time." There's no way for anyone to have an explanation for the discrepancy, even JARVIS, so Tony doesn't follow up, and paces while the call connects. "Nick."
"This isn't a secure line, Stark."
"It is now. Wanna come over for drinks and gossip? Can you be here in two seconds?"
There's a click. Fury turning on his own security measures, no doubt. "Is this about our agreement?" There's just the barest pause before agreement. For code, it's terrible. Vague and obvious at the same time. Fury either has great security, or trusts Tony's.
"I don't know what that is, but I'm going to say 'yes'. Also, did you by any chance leave us your shoebox of secret index cards to rifle through while we wait?"
-----
The time machine is still spitting its portal onto his lab ceiling, but Tony's pretty sure that climbing through it will deliver him to a time after Clint's death. There's not much he can do with it other than stare up at the pool of light and tinker and pace. Creating an even greater temporal distance between him and a time where Clint's still breathing.
"Pretty, right?" he asks Natasha, when she comes in after him. The babysitting is familiar now, and almost comfortable. The portal to the past an eerie, troubling thing, now that he's sitting still long enough to really consider it.
"Beats lava lamps," Natasha says, "but a bit big for most apartments. What's going on?"
"I thought you'd never ask."
Natasha gives him a once-over, followed by a fishy look, then turns back to the light pooling on his ceiling. Her hair is a muddy plum in the blue glow, her face washed out to an unpleasant, too-pale color. "What happened to out of time?"
"Times," he corrects, "And I'm hoping Bruce and missing-week-me came up with something good. I'm hoping we're as clever as we think we are. And if we are, then I think with our powers combined, us and the tiny parts of SHIELD that don't want to kill us, can figure out where Clint is. So where's Bruce?"
-----
Bruce, it turns out, is no longer in New York, and that's all anyone knows. For about five seconds, Tony's sure he'd given under the strain of loss and failure and headed out to live alone in the wilderness, but as he's reconsidering the likelihood, Fury arrives and says, "Facility in Maine with Hill."
"You have a facility in Maine? What kind of place is that for a spy homebase?"
"It's R&D," Fury says, bland. Ignoring the raised eyebrow Tony gives him.
"I didn't think you were seeing other R&D. I thought it was just us. You and me and SHIELD, with some Avengers stuff on the side that we agreed to not let come between us."
"We have," Fury says, "the rest of Eric Selvig's research. What we've dug out of PEGASUS so far."
And had charged with tesseract energy. It's so obvious it's painful. He'd forgotten all about that part of their first group misadventure. Hadn't, maybe, ever been that focused on the parts that predated his own involvement. "I could kiss you, but I think I'll wait for Maria and try her instead. No offense."
"There's not much," Fury warns, "A lot of the research is still underground and there wasn't much power moved around to begin with, but Banner thinks there's enough there to give you a chance."
"It'll work," Tony says, more hopeful than sure. "It's Bruce and me. It'll work." He's already thinking it out. Considering risks and options and trying to calculate how much energy might be left in the machine and how much time that might buy, when he'd been close to losing almost whole days off his jump, at the end. "But before I get to work, I'm going to need you to help me narrow some things down."
"Way ahead of you," Fury says, and that has to be his missing week in play, because as wily as Nick Fury might be, there's no way he's cleared a whole SHIELD facility and resorted their information without Tony's input or Avenger help. Tony must have had a hand in acquiring the files that appear out of Fury's coat, but there's no hint of it on the man's face. "Try to keep up, Stark."
-----
"Clint," Tony says, climbing into the past on what turns out to be late afternoon on Clint's last Thursday, his time loss reduced to hours, even after what they'd spent calculating and adjusting calculations and not accidentally sending the tower into orbit. "Isn't at a train station, loading yard, whatever train thing we were thinking. They moved his body in a train. Or along the tracks, anyway. Probably rolled it in commuter car carpet or something to move. We need to be looking at boats. Barges. Ones where someone can transfer a dead body from a container to a railcar without anyone around to see. Someplace under SHIELD control, but tiny. Someplace a small team could secure."
There's silence on the comms, for long seconds before Steve says, "Go ahead, Tony."
"They have him at a safehouse. Near water. Near rails, but probably not a stop. Maybe a short drive away. Probably they have a third car we didn't track. Clint's still missing, and they're still missing, so they don't know we're onto them. They're going to be someplace out of the way, but active."
Natasha says something questioning in the background, that Steve stops to listen to, then he asks, "How are we going to find that?"
"Because we know when Clint dies and how long travel takes and Fury knows all the top secret, not-on-digital-file hideaways. And because they think SHIELD's safe. Because they think they're hidden inside the machine."
Steve doesn't answer. In the background, he can hear Natasha calling Bruce and Thor and telling them to stand by.
"They're an active status team and we've had this coming week at least twice now. That's enough time to narrow the possibilities." Steve wouldn't remember, but Fury working on notes from himself means that there's probably bodies already stacking up somewhere, but also cleared agents flushing out the infiltration, uncovering a missing paper-trail, a chain of unmade reports, and dead-ended acquisitions, with no clear end recipient. The shadow shape he'd been looking for, and needed Fury and Hill to fully uncover and interpret.
"In the right radius," Tony says, "and at that level of security, there's three safehouses that fit the parameters." Supported with supplies and energy and updated security measures, but unused. Invisible in all other ways. "Two in Germany, and one in Belgium."
"Belgium?" Steve echoes.
"And call it a hunch, but I bet that's where he is. I'm getting the satellite-eye's view, and if it has a big metal box outside--" He's sure it does. It feels right, and if he leaves now, he can be touching down in time to pull someone limb from limb. Or do something slower, and more meticulous. He's constructed enough violent fantasies that he's going to have to spend his flight picking favorites and eliminating options.
"Tony?"
It's Natasha. There's an edge of tension in her voice that hadn't been there when they'd been chasing Clint's death all over France with nothing to go on but a list of obsolete depots. He's probably infecting them with his jitters.
"They're not on satellite."
"They're hidden," Natasha says, "We're on the right track."
"JARVIS is breaking into SHIELD's mapping to confirm." Tony doesn't need the confirmation. He's sure they're right. They've got it. He's out of leads and possibilities, and everything he's cut off, every guess he's eliminated, leaves this and two back-up maybes in Germany, where Clint's team had been moving away from.
"Contact Bruce and Thor and go," he says, even before JARVIS chirps an alert at him, "I'm sending you the coordinates."
There's no time for any kind of preparation, outside of just getting there. JARVIS's report follows him into the elevator and upstairs, speakers activating to keep pace as he heads through the penthouse and out to the roof.
He takes the launch ramp at as close to a run as the dressing arms will allow, leaping off the end and banking hard, hurtling towards open water and Clint in as direct a line as possible, letting JARVIS correct for wind and air traffic, and the curve of the planet.