Brock Rumlow stands over Tony Stark, or what used to be him before Zola had them run their new and improved programs on his mind. Barnes, so Brock has been told, hadn’t been particularly difficult to brainwash but Zola had informed them that he was certain that Tony’s mind wouldn’t be as easy to break. Zola’s reasoning rested on a few things: one, Barnes already had solider training and a soldier’s mentality- the army basically primed him for brainwashing techniques. Group Think is a big thing there, and individuality is easily lost in the sea of camo and the dead. Two, Stark is a naturally rebellious person quite like their only half successful remaining Winter Soldiers. They don’t deploy them often because they’re hard, unlike Barnes, to wrangle again.
The most pressing reason Zola had though is that Tony Stark is intelligent beyond almost anyone in the world. That kind of intelligence, Zola reasoned, would make conditioning hard to stick. Not because smart people are less likely to be brainwashed, its not as if Barnes was stupid by any stretch, but Tony in particular, unlike most people of intelligence, thinks in wildly different ways than the norm. Its natural and normal for him to slip past typical patterns that people fall into and think beyond them. Zola had noted that he thought in similar ways and long wondered if brain patterns like his would be able to be harnessed the way they’d done with Barnes and others. Though none quite as successful as Barnes.
They might have been pissed off at Steve Rogers for taking Barnes from them, but he’d left Tony Stark behind and he’d even injured him and his suit enough to bring him in. Granted it still hadn’t been easy, and a few of his men and one rather tenacious woman wanted to kill him outright, but Brock hadn’t wanted to injure what could be a great asset. Imagine their surprise, too, when they discovered Tony had a low grade level of enhancement as well. Once they looked into it it turns out that Howard Stark, upon running experiments on Steve’s blood, had tested his formula on his kid. Even Brock finds that a bit repugnant, its not like children have a use to even bother experimenting on them, but it does explain how the man is consistently so hard to kill.
Doesn’t mean its a good enough transformation so they give him more of the serum, modified thanks to blood found from both Rogers and Barnes in that bunker. That’s when they begin their experiments in earnest and, as Zola predicted, it wasn’t easy. Stark’s mind is resistant, and unlike Barnes it feels like everything around him is a trigger to remember something so that’s when Zola recommends removing all but the necessary technology from the room. He’d wondered, and was later proved at least somewhat correct that Stark’s mind had been extrapolating data from the technology in the room and because of it the conditioning wasn’t working as well. When they remove all but what’s necessary things go smoother.
Of course that didn’t mean Stark’s mind didn’t rebel in other ways, it felt like every time one thing stuck fifty more things fell apart. In the end it took nearly a year to finish their project, four times longer than anyone else they’ve worked on, but by the time the year is out they’re ready to send him out on his first mission.
That’s about when they run into their second major problem. Of course Rhodes had been looking for Stark before, they’d expected that after Afghanistan. Granted they expected him to give up after a few months, they estimated double the time he’d had when Stark went missing the first time, but that hadn’t happened. Instead he’d gone looking for every and any scrap of evidence of Stark’s continued existence that he could, not finding much obviously, until they’d released Stark again. When the news of the break in at Pym Labs broke out Rhodes had quickly come to the correct conclusion that the only person who could have pulled off a break in like that is Tony Stark.
It now means they have to be careful to ensure they don’t run into each other because Zola is sure that Stark’s mind is still pushing the boundaries like it always does, and that if he hits the right one he might knock a few things loose the way Barnes did. They figure his lover would be a heavy reminder of who he used to be.
They do, however, gather their data on how he works in the field. “Amazing,” Zola says over the computer monitor. “He ignored almost all our protocol but increased the efficiency of our plans by four hundred percent.”
Brock nods, “made it in and out faster than he thought he would too. Combat hadn’t been an issue the way we thought it would be.” They’re still training him for that, though they’re discovering he has a great capacity to learn when his brain isn’t actively trying to reject the lesson.
“Excellent. When will he be deployed again? I’d like to see if these results will keep up,” Zola says. They hadn’t planned on releasing him again so soon but Zola makes a point about testing how efficient he is, and how well their conditioning stuck outside of the labs.
*
Pym Labs had obviously been Tony, Rhodey knows it, but there’s no real evidence of that. Anything tech that could have left a trail is whipped clean and any idiot who knows anything knows there aren’t many people in the world who can do that. Ivan Vankov might be able to pull it off, but he’s in the maximum security prison he found himself in after that whole fiasco at Stark Expo and then some. Shuri would absolutely be able to pull something like this off but she’s way beyond shrinky particles and suits that harness them so she’s got no motivation plus she’s straight up got better things to do. Wakanda is a political mess post- Erik Killmonger and Rhodey doesn’t know the details but he does know that even if, by chance, Shuri did have a motivation to bust into Pym Labs she has no time to do it at the moment.
That’s it, that’s the short list without Tony on it of who could have pulled something like that off. Given the forensic evidence of the fight and Natasha’s assessments she had noted that the assailant was small, probably around her height and a little more than her weight. Which matches Tony’s description even if it doesn’t match his skill level. But Tony didn’t just disappear in Siberia, something happened to him especially given that his suit hadn’t returned either, and Rhodey is sure this is him back from the dead.
“But why?” Pepper asks, noting the golden question and not one Rhodey has an answer to.
“I don’t know, but if HYDRA got ahold of him they have reasons,” he points out. They’ve been trying to get into Pym Labs for years, Cross almost managed harnessing the Pym Particle and weaponizing it with plans to sell it to HYDRA but hadn’t managed. So it stands to reason that maybe they’d send Tony in to do what no one else has been able to do before.
Pepper sighs and rests her hand on his arm. “Honey, I know you want to believe he’s out there but you sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist who’s pulling the barest of evidence out of almost nowhere. He’s dead, Rhodey, probably of exposure somewhere in Siberia.”
He shakes his head immediately because yeah okay, sure, his evidence isn’t that good and he knows that. “But where’s his suit? FRIDAY can’t track it, no one has found it, and its not exactly a small thing to lose plus its brightly colored. You’re telling me no one managed to find at least that in the search efforts? Losing a human body I understand. Losing a giant ass piece of ostentatiously colored technology? That’s stretching my suspension of disbelief here.” Humans are easy to lose, and even with the suit one hundred percent shut down with no chance of returning to life Tony ensured it could be found in case he ever went missing like this so they could recover that tech before the wrong people found it and learned too much. It makes no sense that no one can find it now, not when Rhodey has intimate knowledge of Tony’s systems and his thought process. This isn’t supposed to be possible.
She sighs, “maybe something broke. Technology is finicky, you know that.”
True, and Tony’s tech isn’t always an exception. Software problems happen even to the best of people, but not like this and its the hardware that would need to break. Steve gave him a play by play of what happened in that bunker after a good amount of threats of violence but nothing that would have bee broke would have damaged a tiny component buried on the sole of Tony’s left boot. “That tracker was meant to withstand tougher things than the Siberian winter, Pep. You know how protective Tony is over that suit, not being able to tack it in any capacity makes no sense, nor does being totally unable to find it. You know this,” he says, pleads almost. He knows Pepper has hope, knows that she’s only trying to hide it because she doesn’t want to hold on to false hope and he gets that he does. But Tony Stark is not the kind of man to disappear without any kind of a trace.
There was nothing in that bunker, not even the supposed Winter Soldiers that Zemo apparently shot. Shit, if Steve weren’t Steve no one even would have believed his story at all even with T’Challa’s backup. If he were anyone else he’d be called a liar and grilled on where Tony was but no, since he’s apparently a good person who occasionally lies about people’s dead parents and gets pissed off when said person who’s been lied to gets understandably upset about it and proceeds to beat the living shit out of him because of his own damn mistakes he guesses that makes him a trustworthy person. But it sure as hell doesn’t to Rhodey and no evidence in that bunker damn well suggests some kind of foul play. Someone cleaned house and he wants to know who.
*
He knows they don’t think he remembers but he does, in snatches and moments. None of his memories make sense, not really, except for one. “Did you know?” He remembers the look on the man’s face, the man he’s come to know as Captain America, otherwise known as Steve Rogers. He’d known right away that he was lying when he claimed he didn’t, remembers the rage burning boldly in the pit of his stomach as he asked again only to get the honest answer. He doesn’t remember what happened after that, doesn’t even remember what Rogers was lying about, but he knows that anger, the rage. It is, he thinks, what HYDRA wanted to foster out of him. Their experiments often make no sense and are sometimes contradictory, he can’t figure out proper rhyme and reason. He remembers the scientific method, suspects he used to be a scientist because of it, but HYDRA doesn’t care for science. They like pain.
Their missions are easy even if their instructions are inefficient. He ignores most of them, formulating his own plan as he goes along, properly adjusting his plans with the information that HYDRA gives him and the information that he gathers in the field. He’d expect proper recourse for disobedience but discovers quickly that disobedience is fine as long as HYDRA gets what they want in a timely manner. In fact, they encourage his lack of obedience if they believe its benefitting them. That’s a mistake. He doesn’t like being a blunt instrument, he likes running the show, and every time he gets the opportunity to change the plans he’s given he does. Sometimes just for fun. HYDRA is a bunch of fools if they think pain will make him compliant. He’s discovered he has a very high pain tolerance.
Sometimes it brings out other memories of a cave, of the pain he felt there. Sometimes he feels like his head is underwater but he remembers the white hot rage he felt there too, the way he felt it even through the pain of his chest being ripped apart. He doesn’t remember anything about himself, not beyond knowing there is something to remember, but he knows that pain has never been a motivation for him to stop. Its a vague thread, one that connects every one of the lingering memories he has. People have always caused him pain, but he knows that none of them have every managed to control him with it.
*
Its a complete fluke that Rhodey happens to be there but someone had to take up Tony’s mantle and after adjusting the suit to his legs he managed to make it functional even with the disability. Pepper isn’t happy about it, but she knows better than to say anything now and it’d been something to focus on that isn’t Tony so she didn’t dare disrupt it just in case he let Tony go somewhere in the process of building. He didn’t, he never will, not until he has real proof Tony is dead. Right now what he has is speculation of his death, and sure maybe he’s only speculating Tony being alive, but at the end of the day he finds it irritating that only he’s being told he has no evidence when, in fact, no one does.
But that’s not his focus when he finds himself in the Pentagon after a reported break in. Its a set up from the start, Rhodey knows this because Tony hacks into all kinds of government systems frequently and never leaves a trace. Including the Pentagon, which he’s been able to do since he was a kid. Landed himself on house arrest for a summer because of it. Lucky him, most people who pulled stunts like that flat out disappeared into places no one ever wants to find themselves. Not that any kind of prison would hold Tony long.
“Rhodes, what’s going on?” Steve asks in his ear and he’s real tempted to tell him to shove it up his ass but he’s got better things to do here. The hack pattern matches Tony’s almost exactly, he’s here somewhere and Rhodey is going to find him. He makes his way through the fallen guards, all of them alive because none of these suspicious break ins leave anyone dead minus one woman, whom Rhodey later found out was rather repugnant on a number of different levels, so that’s not unusual either.
“Rhodes,” Steve says again and Rhodey glares at nothing instead of Steve given that he’s not right in front of him.
“I haven’t seen anything yet and when I will I’ll let you know so fuck off,” he snaps, continuing forward. The place appears abandoned and that... doesn’t sit well with him at all. Something is up here. Whatever the plan is its not completed and he suspects it involves the Avengers being here somehow. The silence is unnerving.
“Nanotech, I like it,” an unmistakable voice says from behind him and he turns, but Tony is already gone. He opens his mouth to say something but he thinks better of it. He can’t tell people he’s hearing a dead man’s voice, and Tony didn’t stick around long enough to tell him he designed the nanos, at least the original design. Rhodey improved the mini bots, recoded them to work with his needs, but the tech is built of Tony’s mind.
Its a loud yelp in the comm that tips him off that something is going on. “Rogers, you better not have fallen off something or some other dumb shit,” he snaps when someone else yelps too, and that line goes silent. Shit, he doesn’t even know who that was.
“What the fuck,” Steve breathes out and okay, must be serious if Mr. Perfect has debased himself by swearing. He can hear a response low in the background but he can’t make out the words.
“FIRDAY, focus on that second voice in Steve’s comm,” he tells the AI. He doesn’t often need her, not like Tony did given that he’s not an experienced pilot the way Rhodey is, and Rhodey is the better pilot too, but occasionally he finds use for the AI.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” Steve says.
“Doesn’t matter what I’m supposed to be. Incidentally, dead is what you’re about to be,” Tony says, Rhodey damn well knows its him.
“FRIDAY, visuals on Steve now. Record anything you can and save it in the lab,” he tells the AI as he takes off out of the building.
*
HYDRA doesn’t like him going off script this time, but doesn’t know what to do with his new found goal of killing Steve Rogers because they want him dead too. He can hear Zola and Rumlow talking. “-just about succeeded too. Rhodes got in the way.”
“What happened?” Zola asks, curiosity high in his tone.
“Rhodes just about had him trapped but he escaped, came back here,” Rumlow tells him.
“Interesting. No other interaction? No inquiries?” Zola asks. No need, he thinks, because he knows he knows the man in that suit. The voice is familiar but he can’t place a name or face to it. He doesn’t need to to accomplish his goal- the man in the nanotech suit is irrelevant to him.
“Nothing, no recognition at all,” Rumlow reports.
“Excellent,” Zola says. “Perhaps we improved our conditioning techniques.”
Stupid men, he thinks, assuming he hadn’t recognized the man in the nanotech suit simply because he hadn’t asked about him.
*
Pepper stares at the screen for a long time, hands pressed together in front of her face as silent tears fall down her cheeks. Rhodey has moved past grief by now and into revenge and recover mode. Its clear that his theory about HYDRA was right, Tony has that ugly ass octopus on his arm, but why they’d send him to kill Steve Rogers he has no idea. What’s weirder is that U.S military data was stolen, a whole bunch of it, but Tony never needed to break into the Pentagon to take it.
“Pep,” Rhodey murmurs, “he’s still in there.”
She turns finally, giving him a horrified look. “He tried to kill Steve Rogers and almost managed it,” she whispers. “How the hell could you think that’s him?”
He sighs, “look, I don’t know the specifics but I’ve been right so far. Plus that data he stole wasn’t something he needed the Pentagon for, which means he set this up. It was a trap for Steve and I don’t know why but I don’t think HYDRA told him to do it.” It wouldn’t make any sense even considering DC. They’d been planning on terminating Bucky according to Bucky- this was his last mission. He’d been a hassle to keep up with conditioning-wise and too old to test anything new on.
Rhodey doesn’t think it has to do with age so much as not being a clean slate to test new conditioning methods on- it wouldn’t be all that scientific to test your theories on a tainted source. What they needed was a blank slate and apparently that ended up being Tony. He doesn’t let his stomach twist at that, at what he must have gone through, because he doesn’t have time for it at the moment. His focus is on getting Tony out.
Pepper shakes her head, “none of that makes sense, why would he break orders to draw attention to himself and then try to kill Steve?” she asks.
Because Tony wouldn’t ever take well to conditioning. He’d break, even the best men would, but Tony’s brain was never meant to think in the kind of patterns required for another Bucky. Its always detecting patterns, finding the inefficiencies in them, and then breaking the patterns to form new ones. Whatever they tried on him will only work as much as the way he thinks will allow. And clearly HYDRA’s goals only half melded. Rhodey is sure Tony has no memory of who he is, but he’s pretty sure he remembers something about Steve not telling him about his parents and right, that’d be a good motivation.
“I think he remembers his parents,” he says eventually, “that Steve lied about them. He tried to kill Steve once,” he points out. “And drawing attention to himself, well. He’s Tony Stark.”
It earns a half a laugh out of Pepper but something occurs to her. “Or maybe he didn’t grab attention just because he’s always liked being at the center of it. Maybe somewhere in there he’s asking for help.”
He isn’t sure how right that is, but it doesn’t really sound wrong either. Rhodey hopes she’s right.
*
Task: kill Captain America. Not hard when the only thing that stopped him last time was the man in the grey and black suit. He’s already committed the patterns of his movement to memory in case he shows up again but for now he has other things on his plate. Like the suit in front of him. Ostentatious in color- red and gold- and rudimentary compared to the nanotech. He pulls it apart anyways, examining the way its built but he finds flaws. A lot of them.
He also finds a tracker in the left boot that’s been turned off and he turns it back on, curious to see who will show up. He suspects this suit previously belonged to the man with the black and grey suit- a nice change on color pace given that the less bold colors are much better for blending into things rather than standing out the way this does, and he’d been with Steve Rogers. Maybe they’ll show up together. He has little interest in the man in the suit, but he does have the task of killing Captain America and if he shows up too wonderful, he barely even had to do work.
While he waits he designs- Zola gave him full access to a lab. Supervised of course, but he doesn’t mind the sentries at the door so long as they stay out of his work. If they don’t, well, he’s trained to kill.
They don’t though; enter his space, so he continues building his designs while running algorithm tests on Steve’s movements. Its useful to have a full set of data on how your opponent moves before walking into a fight not that he hadn’t gathered a lot from the last time they ran into each other.
*
FRIDAY wakes Rhodey up at nearly four in the morning with news that the tracker in Tony’s suit turned back on and he tries to fly into motion, forgetting briefly that his legs don’t work they way they used to anymore. He’s got some movement back, but nothing substantial so he shakes Pepper awake. “Pep, Pepper, Tony’s suit’s tracker is back online,” he tells her. She makes an irritated noise because she hates early rising almost more than Tony while Rhodey is used to it thanks to his time in the military before blinking her way into consciousness.
“How do you know this isn’t some kind of fluke?” she mumbles.
“The tracker only turns on and off with manual assistance,” FRIDAY tells her. “HYDRA doesn’t seem to have any substantial motivation for wanting it on,” she adds.
The AI is learning, there’s that. JARVIS, before his untimely death, had been pretty human sounding and good at pulling human motivations out of human actions. FRIDAY isn’t nearly as practiced and rarely offers input but here she’s right. There’s no reason HYDRA would turn the tracker on. “And if this is some kind of trap?” Pepper murmurs.
Reasonable assumption. “Then I don’t think it’d be for me. Tony had been damn focused on Steve, maybe he thinks this will somehow lure him back.”
“But the suit is his,” Pepper points out.
“Yeah, but we don’t know if he knows that and the only similar suit he’s seen lately is mine. Unless he does remember something, but I didn’t see any kind of recognition the last time we ran into each other.” Not outside of a simple note of appreciation, which wouldn’t be unusual for Tony anyway, even in whatever mental state he’s in he guesses.
“Take Steve,” Pepper tells him. “If you want to bring him in you don’t want him trying to fight you specifically. I watched those videos again, its clear HYDRA gave him better combat training than what he had before and given that he held his own against Steve even without the suit they must have given him some kind of enhancement. Easier to bring him in when he’s focused on a different goal entirely,” she reasons.
Rhodey frowns because it’s the first sort-of indication that Pepper holds any kind of emotions towards Steve any which way and its not positive. But then Pepper is good at holding her cards close, sometimes a little too close, so he probably wouldn’t know what she’s thinking anyway. Tony has always been better at reading Pepper’s particular brand of emotional patterns and without him, well, Rhodey’s mostly taking a shot in the dark. “And if he kills Steve?” he asks, figuring this might be a good way to gauge how she feels in earnest. She’d been pretty horrified that Tony tried to kill Steve before.
Pepper shakes her head though. “He lied about Tony’s parents, he abandoned him for HYDRA, whatever has happened to Tony since then is hisfault. I’m tired of defending him when he ruinedTony’s life after everything Tony has done for him in such an… invasiveway. Tony gave him everything, including his fucking mind in the end. Who cares if he dies,” she snaps, apparently hitting the anger stage of grief. Rhodey can’t say he blames her for it even if he’s already past that. But Pepper feels things slower than he does, her fuse is a lot harder to light. Frankly that Steve even managed impresses Rhodey when Pepper is the most unflappable person he’s ever met- technically she’s taken out more villains than Tony given that she tends to save his ass regularly if Rhodey isn’t doing it. Or if Tony hasn’t managed himself.
“You still have that suit?” he asks. Her anger will be useful, and he knows she’ll listen to whatever orders he doles out because she trusts him enough to listen.
She gives him a strange look, “I thought you disagreed with Tony even making me one,” she says.
On account that she’s a civilian, yeah. But when he made that suit she’d already killed Obadiah Stane, and shortly after Tony made it she got injected with a highly experimental serum that could have blown her up and she still managed to dearly die like five times before climbing her ass back up to where Tony was and killing Killian too. “I underestimated you. And I know he taught you how to use it.”
“When do we leave?”
*
Natasha knows this is going to go all kinds of bad pretty much right away but when they get to the bunker in rural Iowa she wonders how bad things will get exactly. Surprisingly its Pepper who manages to get them in, recognizing how one of the security systems works because Tony had made something similar years before and she happened to know more about it than Rhodey. Strange, given that he’s better with technology and also a genius, but Pepper knows her tech specs and they get in eventually so that’s all that matters. Clint needs to take out a few guards to avoid being busted to early but hey, par for the course.
Its when they get inside that things go haywire and fast. Its not as if Tony is hard to locate- the man doesn’t know subtly even brainwashed, but he shows almost no interest in any of them until Steve shows up and that’s when shit hits the fan. Rhodey side steps Tony completely, letting him go after Steve in favor of decking a HYDRA agent by the door who barely had time to spring into action before Rhodey gets to him. Clint tries to hold Tony back and gets tossed into a HYDRA agent for his efforts, Pepper manages to take out the third HYDRA agent in the room, and Steve doesn’t seem to know how to deal with Tony when he’s on equal footing outside the suit.
There’s no tricks, no extra gadgets to help Tony out, nothing but his body and intellect and it becomes clear to her that, talented as Steve is at strategy, he might not actually out do Tony. It shouldn’t surprise her, she supposes, given that once he absorbs information he doesn’t tend to forget it, and he’s formidable in a fight because of it. But HYDRA obviously taught him more about combat and strategy because he wasn’t this good before he’d been kidnapped.
Eventually, it becomes clear that its Steve or Tony and Natasha decides to do what she’s done with every other brainwashed assassin she’s dealt with before. She grabs the nearest heavy object and cracks Tony over the head with it.
Cognitive recalibration- the human version of ‘turn it on and off again’ except deadly and also it wont fix the brainwashed problem.
*
He knows better than to try and escape, for now, with the man in the grey and black suit in front of him. There’s something in the back of his mind lingering, some hint of recognition but all its telling him is that this isn’t an opponent he’s going to want to deal with. “Tony,” he says, a flicker of emotions going across his features and he frowns.
“I don’t know who that is,” he says bluntly. He doesn’t care who that is either.
“That’s you,” the man in the suit says. “You’reTony. Tony Stark. Do you remember me?”
“No. I don’t care about you either.” Why would he? There’s nothing here, no reason to invest in the man standing in front of him. There are no memories, just vague feelings that are fee floating and unconnected to anything substantial. Not like Steve, he knows Steve. Knows he did something to betray him, something he should be killed for. He tried it once, before.
Hurt, he decides, is probably the most relevant emotion that lands on the other guy’s face. He doesn’t know why that is either but eventually the other guy sighs. “I’m Rhodey. We’ve… we’ve known each other for longer than we haven’t. No one knows you better than I do.”
He tilts his head to the side, “you don’t know anything about me,” he says with certainty.
*
Pepper always knew it’d be her to bring Tony back. Rhodey, she loves him but like Tony he feels so strongly and she… its not that her emotions aren’t strong, but unlike Tony and Rhodey she’s always had to keep a harsh control on them. A woman in business- show a hint of emotion and you’ll never be taken seriously again. She’s seen it happen to hundreds of her colleagues and she’d not been intent on having it happen to her. Rhodey might be able to keep a straight face most of the time, but in a situation like this? He’s never been good at keeping it together with matters involving Tony.
She, on the other hand, is something of an expert at it. It helps, she thinks, that they have a business side to their relationship that’s never existed with Rhodey. He and Tony had been friends, best friends, then lovers. She and Tony started as a business transaction and there’s a large portion of their relationship that’s still that. She’s seen Tony at his best, his worst, and now his brainwashed. If anyone can handle this its her, she knows, on account of being the only other person in the world to know Tony very well aside from Rhodey and also because he’d probably find a way to escape to kill anyone else. She’s been watching him bide his time.
“It’ll take you roughly ten minutes to escape, if you run, though it might not be pleasant to have a bunch of agents take off after you,” she tells him, voice cool and controlled. There’s a million things she wants to feel but she allows herself to feel none of them. Not right now, not when its not convenient.
“Why tell me that?” Tony asks in a voice that barely resembles what Pepper is used to. None of the usual warmth and love is there; none of the usual emotion periodis there.
“Because I know you’ve been planning a way out. Your escape won’t be an easy one though, and rest assured Rhodey will do everything in his power to bring you back here- he’s found you alive, risen from the ashes of certain death more times than any of us would like.” Death doesn’t stick well to Tony, Rhodey had said once, and Pepper had ignored it then. Yes, he’s reckless and often gets into risky situations but if he runs his life the way he runs his business he’s simply running on math people can’t see. So on the outside his risks looks needless, seemingly for fun. But in actuality Tony’s risks are highly calculated and he’s gone with the plan with the best potential success rate. So the fact that he hasn’t died yet is something Pepper attributed to his intelligence.
But now… its not as if Tony has lost that intelligence, but effectually he has lost everything that makes him him. Maybe Rhodey had a point in saying Tony is damn lucky, though she isn’t sure that’s the right way to put it. First he’s kidnapped by terrorists and goes through a violent surgery that he hadn’t consented to that left him with a massive hunk of metal in his chest. Now he’s been violently tortured so badly that he isn’t even a person anymore, not really. She’s not so sure she’d want to be alive in his position.
“Found me before? At the Pentagon?” Tony asks, brows furrowing a little like he’s trying to connect dots he doesn’t have. Which, she supposes, he is.
“No. You were kidnapped once before, by a terrorist organization called The Ten Rings. They wanted you to build a missile for them but you duped them into thinking you were building the bomb when you actually built a suit of armor you used to escape. For three months you were gone and Rhodey didn’t stop looking for you. Didn’t stop looking for you after you disappeared from Siberia either,” she tells him. It’d been hard for her to have any hope at that point, but Rhodey is much better at clinging to small bits of hope than she is. Turns out he’d been right to.
“Siberia…” Tony murmurs, frowning.
“Where you tried to kill Steve the first time. He’d… kept something from you, an important piece of information. Obviously that stuck through HYDRA’s conditioning.” Of all the things that could have lingered in Tony’s mind of course it had to be a painful life event. How very Tony.
He considers her for a long moment. It’d be more unnerving if she weren’t expecting the blank expression devoid of most everything except a vague curiosity. Its not surprising to her that that’s the only trait of Tony’s that seems to have stuck around. His curiosity will probably always be too great to eliminate totally, even if it’s hard to look at right now. “He lied to you about your parents. Their deaths had a profound affect on you, I don’t think you ever got over what happened to them if you even allowed yourself to feel their deaths at all. But you thought they died in a car crash and they didn’t- they were murdered by the Winter Soldier- Bucky- and Steve knew about it for years and didn’t tell you. He tried to deny it when you found out too, after you spent nearly three days chasing his tail trying to avoid both him and Barnes from being arrested. You snapped.”
T’Challa described a fight to the death, nearly, given that he’d been almost certain that Steve was going to kill Tony and for that Pepper has decided to hate him. She can understand, however little she wants to, the rest of his actions. The lying, the intentional using Tony for his resources, trying to deny both of those things, but almost killing Tony for his mistakes? That’s not something she’ll ever be able to forgive. Not when his mistakes went one step further and left Tony with something worse than death.
“My parents…” Tony murmurs and Pepper nods.
“Maria and Howard Stark. You hated Howard, but I think you loved your mother,” she says softly.
Tony frowns, “I would nearly kill someone over a person you onlythinkI loved?” he asks, confused.
“You never talked about her Tony, I don’t think you wanted to feel her loss. The pain must have been profound- you’ve always been empathetic.” Too empathetic sometimes, contrary to popular belief. Its just that he gets stuck in bubbles sometimes and needs to be pulled out of them if he doesn’t manage to crawl out of them himself.
“You care about me,” he says, gazing at her almost softly. It doesn’t look quite right on his face still, like he’s behind an emotional wall, but its something.
“I love you Tony, I always have.” For a long time she denied herself that, god knows she had no interest in being a bad movie trope about the boss dating the secretary. She resented being stuck in that position but Tony had never really treated her like a secretary even when she ran around doing menial things. Probably because he has the good sense to know without her he’d be screwed. God knows the man can’t organize his own life, he barely remembered to feed the cat he had when she was first hired daily.
“Rhodey seems to feel the same way,” he says and Pepper laughs.
“Oh, that is a long and sordid tale that involves far too much alcohol and a court case,” she says, shaking her head. She’d felt like death after being awake so long, Tony had the beginnings of the flu, and Rhodey was only back for a weekend but the man knows how to make his presence count. By the time the weekend was out they found themselves in an unconventional relationship they had no idea what to do with. They figured it out though, because if nothing else the three of them are proficient at adjusting to new circumstances fast and they’re all talented at it.
*
Tony, that’s his name though he feels no real attachment to it, thinks his home is rather nice. He doesn’t know why he’s been released given his crimes though he supposes he ison house arrest. Same for Barnes given that he’s committed similar crimes while HYDRA falls under investigation again. The space here is open, too open, and he doesn’t like it.
“You aren’t going to find somewhere without windows. You liked the light and the view,” someone says and Tony turns to find Rhodey standing behind him looking tense. He gets a small flash of something then, Rhodey laughing covered in toilet paper of all things. But everything else around them is covered in toilet paper too so maybe that has something to do with it. He shakes his head slightly to rid himself of it. He doesn’t like when that happens. He glances back at the windows and decides he’ll have to do a risk assessment later and wanders off to explore the rest of the space. Might as well know what he’s working with.
By the time he comes back and settles on a couch by one of the large windows he can smell Rhodey making something in the kitchen. He mostly ignores that in favor of the view he supposedly enjoyed, before all this. Its overcast, foggy, and he decides the view isn’t bad but its not quite interesting enough to have a huge amount of windows of it either. Beside him, the couch dips and he looks over to find Rhodey holding a cup. He holds it out to Tony and he frowns, taking it mostly out of confusion. The liquid is dark and it smells nice. “Coffee. You used to live off that,” Rhodey tells him. He stares into the liquid for a long moment before taking a small sip, figuring Rhodey is unlikely to poison him. The liquid has a strong, bitter flavor but he immediately takes to it, drinking some more and Rhodey laughs. “Guess some things never change,” he murmurs.
The spot on his other side sinks a little as Pepper sits on his other side and smiles. “Your favorite meal,” she tells him. She holds out the plate and Rhodey pulls the cup from his hands so he can take it.
“This is a fucked up situation,” Rhodey murmurs. “But this, knowing all the things you like and reintroducing you to them, that’ll be nice.” He looks over to Pepper and she smiles softly too.
“I know you don’t really know who you are. But you will, we’ll help you get there,” she tells him softly. “We’ll always be here for you.” He considers that, and the food, for a moment before relaxing some for the first time in what feels like his whole life. Maybe this will turn out okay even if he never remembers who he is, or was more accurately. Its clear these two love him regardless of that anyway.