Chapter 6
The last month had been an exercise in patience for Steve and company. With Scott and Clint back with their families, and Bucky staying at Wakanda, Sam, Steve, Wanda and Natasha had had to face the weight of the public’s scorn by themselves.
During the last couple of weeks several governments had made public a long list of charges against the rogues, with many of them issuing international arrest warrants, trying to enforce them at all cost, getting dangerously close to overstepping on their way the United States government. These countries were accusing the latter of keeping the rogues hidden, causing an extremely tense political atmosphere that had every politician in a fit. The videos that had been released of the Avenger's fight in the Leipzig airport, as well as the tunnel collapse in Bucharest and the explosion in Lagos had placed the rogues in a very bad light amongst the public, with many of them wondering if the rogues had any connection with Iron Man´s disappearance.
With the authorities doubling their efforts to capture them, and the general public condemning them, the rogues had been having a hard time keeping hidden from the outside world. So far, they had managed to keep themselves off the radar, but Steve was not sure how long that would last.
Their situation was turning dire, especially for Wanda. The rest of the team had started noticing her growing restless; she would often refuse to participate on the team’s missions, especially if they involved investigating the whereabouts of Tony Stark. She was also cooperating less and less with the simple choirs they each had as a way to keep their living quarters habitable, and even going as far as openly challenging all of Steve’s and Natasha’s decisions regarding the team. She had even had an argument with Sam, where the witch had used her powers against her teammate.
Steve wanted to believe this was a rebellious phase all young people went through, but Natasha had dissuaded him from this notion. Wanda was no child, and even if she was a young woman, the behavior she depicted could in no way be attributed to her age. To put it simply, the woman had issues, and she was having a hard time finding a healthy coupling mechanism for her compulsive behavior.
Natasha also attributed Wanda’s sudden lack of self-control to the fact that the woman had recently re-established her contact with Vision. She behaved like a love-sick teenager, blaming the entire world for keeping her and her lover apart. Although Natasha had notice that Wanda and the android seemed to have a connection beyond that of a simple physical attraction. She had long suspected Vision’s gemstone, which was the source of Wanda’s powers, was the real reason they both had such a strong pull on each other.
Either way, they had tolerated the witches’ behavior, until they had woken up one morning to find the woman had taken her leave. Steve had been beyond himself with worry, fearing something had happened to Wanda during the night. Natasha had had to remind him that the woman was one of the most powerful beings on the planet, if anyone could take care of themselves, it was definitely her.
To Steve’s dismay, Sam and Natasha had agreed they needed to change locations, considering Wanda’s desertion a risk for themselves, and after some debating, Steve had agreed. That same day they had changed their hiding place.
Natasha, Sam and Steve had relocated into a small abandoned warehouse outside the city's outskirts. The place lacked any real accommodations, but it had a couple of beds and a portable stove, alongside a small working bathroom, for which Steve had been grateful.
Steve had taken advantage of the place’s isolation to start up an exercise routine. He ran a couple of kilometers each day before dawn, enjoying the peace of mind the exertion gave him. He had been under a lot of pressure lately. His mind wouldn't stop thinking over the many mistakes he had made during the last couple of months, going over them in and endless loop, his thoughts keeping him awake at night, making it almost impossible to concentrate on his daily tasks.
He stepped back into the warehouse just as the sun was starting to illuminate the vast expanse of field, only to find Sam and Natasha were already awake and making some breakfast. As he stepped closer to them, he noticed they were listening intently to a small radio they had picked up along the way.
“What’s going on?"
“They’re announcing an SI subsidiary is closing off” said Sam whilst placing a pot of coffee over a small table they had improvised.
“What? Why?”
“Apparently, they’re claiming some new strategy that involves cutting back on the company’s expenses"
"I can't believe they're already making changes to Tony's company! The man has only been gone for a month!" said Steve angrily, he felt it like a personal affront, how dared those bastards take advantage of Tony's absence to touch the man's company?!
“That's what I was just saying. I’m telling you all, it’s starting, whoever is in charge of SI now, they will revert all the work Stark did on his clean energy policy. I can bet you anything you want that next we’ll hear, they’ll announce SI is back to manufacturing weapons”
“Pepper wouldn’t allow that” Steve said with a frown. There was no way Pepper would let any shareholder make that call.
“Apparently, Pepper hasn’t been all that involved in the company these past couple of weeks” said Natasha from behind a steaming cup of coffee. She seemed rather pensive over the news.
The other two stayed silent, they knew Pepper must have taken a pretty hard blow with Tony's disappearance, it wouldn't be too farfetched to think the woman needed some time to sort herself out after something like that.
“And what branch are they closing? Was it something big?” Steve asked, trying very hard not to think of Pepper, and the guilt he felt thinking of what she must be going through with Tony's absence.
“It was actually a small subsidiary called innovative research, with only about 20 people working there”
“That few? Doesn’t sound too important then”
“They were all specialized researchers. Tony had gathered there half of the most brilliant minds the medical and biochemical industry had to offer”
Sam let out a low whistle, whatever Tony had going on there, it must have been something pretty big but, he guessed, they'd probably never know about it now.
After a week of not hearing from Wanda, the rogues had been in shock to see the woman walking down the dirt road that lead to the old warehouse they had been staying at. After questioning her about her whereabouts and how she had found them, all she had let on was that she had ‘needed some space’ and that she ‘just knew where to find them’.
Natasha hadn’t let on how unnerved she was with the woman, but she decided they needed to keep her in check, after all, Wanda had made it perfectly evident she was not someone they wanted as an enemy.
A couple of days later, Steve found the woman sitting in the back of the warehouse playing with her magic, making a couple of leaves float in a circular pattern around her hands.
“Hey Wanda, you’ve got a minute?”
“Sure Steve, what is it?” She said without breaking eye contact with the leaves. The gesture irked Steve for a reason, but he tried to keep himself calm, he needed to ask the woman a favor after all. With a mental sigh he sat down next to her.
“Wanda, have you been able to talk to Vision? Has he told you anything about Tony? If he’s alive?”
“No” said the woman a bit too fast, the insincerity in her voice evident to both.
Steve couldn’t suppress the annoyance from his face this time, but Wanda leveled him with a sour glance of her own. And to her credit, she wasn’t exactly telling a lie. After all, Vision had told her nothing about the missing man. The fact that she hadn’t deemed it worthy of her time to inquire about Stark in the first place was another matter completely. The way she saw it, she wasn’t about to sacrifice the precious little time she had with Vision discussing unpleasant things.
“Ok. Then tell me, how did you find us Wanda? Do you think you could find someone if you tried?”
Steve’s hopeful face only served to annoy the woman further. She would never use her powers to find Stark, and Steve was a fool for even suggesting it.
“I told you, I don’t know how I found you, I can’t control it at will” she said evasively, she had no desire to discuss this with the man.
Steve sat there in silence, a disappointed glare directed at her, but she didn’t care. She knew she could do pretty much anything she wanted, and the Captain would always relent to her wishes.
With a sigh, Steve stood up from the ground, making his way back to the warehouse without saying another word.
“FRIDAY has gone offline”
The news had come as a shock to Steve “What?! Are you sure?”
Natasha nodded from her place in front of her laptop “Yes, it is protocol after all. Without Stark around, after an extended period of inactivity all of his AI’s are to go into hibernation mode”
Steve’s disheartened face filled her with pity. The man was becoming obsessed with the billionaire’s disappearance she knew, but a part of her also wanted to know what had happened to Tony. Even though she would never admit it, she still felt guilty for having turned her back on the man.
“I also intercepted a couple of messages Friday sent before going silent” She continued with a neutral face. The fact that she hadn’t been able to crack them still annoyed her.
“What were they? What did they say?” he said with renewed interest.
“They were heavily encrypted, I couldn’t crack them, but one of the messages was sent to Peter Parker”
“Who is Peter Parker?” asked Sam as he made his way to the other two.
“We met him in Germany, spider-man, remember?” Natasha said, looking through the files on her computer and showing both men Peter’s picture.
“That was him? He’s just a kid!” came Steve’s startled response. He had known spider-man had been young, but he couldn’t believe Tony had taken a kid into their fight.
“That kid had the strength to go toe to toe with you Steve” said Natasha with an unreadable face.
Steve remembered the fight. He suddenly felt bad for not holding his punches against a kid, and an unreasonable anger against Tony filled him up. He knew Natasha was right, the youngster had been on par with him on strength, but he couldn’t believe Tony had been so irresponsible.
“Still, I can’t believe Tony would involve a kid in all this!”
Natasha levelled him with a piercing gaze “Steve, I was there, Tony brought the kid as backup, he kept telling us he did not want to escalate the fight. I hardly think he was planning on the kid to get into a fight with you of all people”
Steve pondered over this for a moment. Looking back, he realized how hasty he had been to get into a fight with Tony, how he hadn’t really considered the consequences it had brought them all.
“From what I’ve gathered, Tony was very close to the kid, maybe he left a final message for him” she said, redirecting the conversation back to the messages at hand. She skipped through her files, showing them several pictures of Tony and Peter together. Both seemed rather happy in them, Sam could almost feel the father-son relationship there, and it suddenly made him realize he had known next to nothing about Stark’s personal life.
“Who were the other messages for?” he asked, trying to change the subject of Stark’s protegee.
“Happy Hogan, Pepper Potts, James Rhodes and a Stephen Strange” Natasha read the complete list.
“Hold up, Stephen Strange? Who is that?” asked Sam while glancing at the screen. The name rang a bell, but he wasn't sure where he had heard the name before.
“He was a famous neuroscientist that got into a car accident a couple of years ago. He disappeared from the medical scene and joined a cult of some sort in Nepal, but that’s about all the information I’ve got on him”
A cult? That didn’t sound good to Steve, but then again, he knew Tony was known for having some very questionable connections “What relationship did he have with Tony?” he asked as an afterthought.
“Well, FRIDAY sent messages only to those closest to Tony, so it is safe to deduce the man had a close association with him, personal or professional is yet to be seen”
Steve felt an unexpected bout of guilt and shame at those words. Learning that FRIDAY had contacted Tony’s closest friends, and that he had been nowhere on that list made him sad. The fact that he was partly responsible for Tony’s absence did not register on his mind in that moment, he only felt the pang of regret for not having dedicated enough of his time to getting to know and understand the man.
Things with Wanda and the rogues was still rocky. The woman had started to disappear for days at a time without telling them where she went, but one thing was certain, the woman always found them wherever they relocated to. It was during one of these disappearances that Natasha had finally had a breakthrough in their investigation regarding Tony’s fate.
During her spare time, she had been working on tracing the bunker videos back to their source. It had taken her relatively little time to locate where the videos were being stored. It had taken her proportionately more time to crack into the system to access them. Once again, she cursed her current lack of any sophisticated tools to do her job, but her feelings of remorse, even if she didn’t want to acknowledge them as such, where what had kept her working hard to accomplish the task.
With a sigh of relief, she let her eyes close. She had finally retrieved the videos and had secured them on her own computer, deciding to review them before letting Steve know of her findings. It would be better to know what had happened to Tony beforehand, so she could anticipate how Steve would react.
Natasha had been mentally prepared for what she would find in those videos, but what she saw had made her heart skip a beat regardless. What she found had filled her with a cold rage she had not felt in a long time. She felt angry at Steve, for letting his heart get in the way of his duty, but most importantly, she felt angry at herself. Closing her laptop with a snap, she chastised herself once again for letting Steve make the call on when to tell Tony about those damn videos, this could have been avoided if Steve had trusted Tony with that information in the first place.
But the time for regrets had long passed, she had chosen Steve over Stark, and even though she still believed it had been for the best, she couldn’t help but feel sickened by how Tony had so blatantly been discarded in favor of Steve’s friend. She tried very hard not to listen to that small part of herself that told her that it could have been her, that she could have been as easily discarded by Steve as Tony had been if she had remained opposed to the captain, and she heated how weak she was for being so sentimental. She had tasted what being part of a family felt like, and she wasn’t sure she could ever go back to being alone ever again.
But for the most part, she was annoyed and perplexed at the videos themselves. She had no more idea of what had happened to Tony now that she had seen the recordings than she had had before looking at them.
With a heavy sigh she decided to take a break before looking for Steve and Sam. She would definitely need all the help she could get to crack this mystery down the middle, but it would serve no one if she did so whilst still reeling from what she had discovered.