Chapter 1
The Soldier’s insertion and extraction team drops him off a few miles away from the target. The Soldier straps his rifle on his back and set off through the rocks and dust with an easy lope that chews up the miles; it is a beautiful night, clear and cold with a bright moon that lit up the desert in shades of silver.
Then the silence and darkness is shattered by an explosion about half a mile ahead, right at the target’s location. The initial detonation triggers a chain reaction of the munitions being stored at the target’s location, and the ensuing explosions send out a wave of heat and light that made the Soldier shield his face. He approaches more slowly and hears the rat-tat-tat of a rifle set on three round bursts.
By the time he reaches the location, however, the gunfire has gone silent and he only sees one man standing and watching the flames with grim satisfaction on his face. He is pale and slightly haggard, with the long hair and overgrown beard of a man kept in captivity for a few months. Piled carelessly around him are pieces of metal, dented and scorched and purpose unclear. Now that he was close, the Soldier could smell the scent of burning human flesh, but the man in front of him doesn’t seem to mind.
“Who are you?” The Soldier asks finally, and the man jumps, bringing up the rifle that had been hanging carefully down at his side.
“Who are you?” The man asks suspiciously, backing up. “You don’t look like a member of the Ten Rings.”
“I’m not,” the Soldier says shortly. “You can call me the Winter Soldier.”
“Yeah?” When the soldier makes no move to attack, the man lowers the weapon. “You can call me…the Man of Steel,” the man says. “Wait, no, that’s Superman. Man of Iron? Iron Man?” He looks at the flames, a thoughtful look on his face. “Not as cool as Winter Soldier, but I think it’ll grow on me.”
The Soldier finds his lips twitching and presses them together. “Why are you here, Iron Man?”
“Turns out I was just leaving,” he says. “These terrorists were kind enough to let me stay here for a few months, but I think I overstayed my welcome, so.” He gestures to the fire. “I thought I might clean up a bit before I go.” Given that there were still probably a great deal of unexploded munitions, they were probably standing entirely too close, the Soldier muses, but it is a nice night for a fire. “Why are you here?”
The Soldier studies the man, seeing the too bright smile, the sweat at his temples, the fine tremors wracking the man’s body despite the warmth of the fire. His hands were shoved into his pockets, but they were probably shaking. Clear signs of shock and an adrenaline crash, which probably explained why the man didn’t run away screaming when the Soldier appeared beside him.
Then again, the Soldier thought as he stared at the remains of the terrorist encampment, perhaps this man had just been pushed past the point of being afraid anymore. There was a freedom and a strength in that, the Soldier knew. “I was sent here to kill a man.”
The other man stiffens and puts a hand back on the rifle but leaves it at his side. “Yeah? Who?”
“A spoiled rich man being held captive, with soft hands who spends most of his time spending money, who knows how to build weapons but not use them. Someone wants to make sure he doesn’t make it out of the desert alive.” The soldier thinks about the mission briefing while the man watches him warily. The photos had been of a man with carefully manicured hair and beard, dressed in an expensive suit, and then of him, bleeding and half dead with terrified brown eyes. He will be in a cave somewhere in the complex, his handler had said. There will likely be a number of enemy combatants guarding him. The soldier looks at the deserted camp, enemy combatants dead or fled, and then at the man beside him, who had neither expensive clothes nor terror in his eyes. Instead there was a challenge there in that dark gaze and his hand was still on the rifle and the Soldier knew the man did not plan on going down without a fight. “I think, however,” the Soldier says carefully, “that man is already dead.”
The other man laughs in surprise and takes his hand off the rifle. “Yeah, that man died a few months ago,” he says with a pained look on his face, staring down at his feet. “So what now?”
The Soldier thinks about the team waiting for him a few miles away, and then the chair waiting for him after that. “I don’t know,” he says finally. He knows what he wants to happen, but suddenly he feels an uncharacteristic pang of terror at the thought of it. Fear of the unknown, fear of the punishment should he fail. So he just stands there, pulse pounding as they watch the fire together.
“Well, I’m done with those guys, I think,” the man says, jerking his head towards the entrance of the cave just barely visible through the flames. “But I’m still a long way from home. You look like a guy who is good in, ah, tense situations. Want a new job, since your assassination gig turned out to be a bust?”
The Soldier weighs the risks versus the potential reward. It would be a gamble, but this man did just defeat a whole camp full of terrorists using just what he could build in a cave. The Soldier found himself respecting that kind of ingenuity. “I’m interested but there may be an issue with my former employers,” he says after a moment.
“Possessive types, are they?” The Soldier gestures towards the former encampment expressively, and the man’s eyes are drawn to the gleam of fire on metal. “How long do we have until they show up looking for you?”
The Soldier makes his decision and takes his rifle off his shoulder, propping it up against a rock, and starts unstrapping his body armor. “Long enough to take out the tracking devices,” he says, and hands the man a knife.
After a moment of hesitation, the man takes it. “Alright, let’s do it, hot stuff.” The Soldier can feel the man watching him as he strips efficiently; the tracking device had been placed under his shoulder blade to ensure that the Soldier couldn’t remove it himself. “But if we’re going to start taking off our clothes, I feel like you should call me Tony.”
***
“Gimme all your money,” a voice barks out in gruff Tajik street slang. Tony holds his hands up and starts babbling in English, playing the poor lost tourist with perfection until the Soldier knocks the would-be mugger out with a precise blow to the temple. Tony watches, hands in his pockets, as the Soldier rifles through the man’s clothes.
“Do we have enough now?” Tony asks tiredly. This is the fourth such encounter since they reached Dushanbe early this morning, and he has already grown tired of being the bait. After Tony had dug out the tracking device in the Soldier’s shoulder, grimacing the entire time but not complaining, the blood hadn’t even dried before the Solder was hotwiring an abandoned vehicle, loading up every gas can they could find and convincing Tony to drive to Tajikistan instead of heading to the closest American military base. Considering that the Soldier had no name, no identity, and a confusing jumble of memories, he naturally shied away from Tony’s plan to get out of Afghanistan by way of the American military.
“Thank God,” Tony says fervently. “I am almost ready to kill someone for a shower and a real bed.” The Soldier has to agree. He finds them a hotel near the train station that takes cash and doesn’t ask any questions and lets Tony have the shower first, taking the time to find them some new clothes.
“Well, there’s no hot water but at this point I don’t even care,” Tony announces half an hour later as he dries his hair. “Your turn, hot stuff.”
Once clean, the Soldier lingers in front of the mirror before taking his sharpest knife and trying to scrape away the weeks of beard growth on his cheeks. Raking his wet hair back behind his ears he finally joins Tony in the bedroom, where he is sprawled on the bed like a starfish, trying to cool off in the stale air of the room. In the center of his chest a blue light glows with a low hum.
“Holy shit,” Tony blurts out when the Soldier comes into his view. The Soldier follows Tony’s eyes to his shoulder, the raised mass of scars where metal and flesh met. Then Tony looks at his face and looks even more surprised. “You clean up nice,” he says eventually, and, to the Soldier’s surprise, doesn’t say anything about his arm even though he continues to sneak glances at it. The Soldier politely returns the favor by not asking about the device in his chest.
After night falls the Soldier leaves Tony in the relative safety of the hotel room and manages to buy himself an identity under the alias Andrei Williams, a dual citizen of Russia and America, former police officer currently working as an independent contractor throughout Central Asia. Tony still calls him Hot Stuff. The Soldier notices that Tony’s gaze lingers an average of 2.5 seconds longer on him as they board a flight to Ankara, and the realization makes him grow warm inside. He looks back when Tony is busy, eyes lingering on the quirk of Tony’s lips as he flips through the in-flight magazine, and the light in his eyes when he smiles at the flight attendant.
***
Tony loses count of how many lies they told and crimes they commit to get back to what Tony considers civilization, but the media circus that erupts when he walked into Stark Industries headquarters in London was everything he could have hoped for. The lie counter goes through the roof after that, as he spins out the carefully crafted story that he and Hot Stuff put together until even the media outlets are tired of hearing the same thing over and over. A profile shot of Hot Stuff draws Hydra’s attention and they try to storm the high-rise hotel where they were staying. The team lead gets halfway through the Soldier’s trigger words when Tony kills him with a butter knife, stabbing into the suprasternal notch at the base of the man’s throat where the body armor doesn’t quite reach. The Soldier kills the rest and kisses Tony clumsily, blood still drying on their hands.
The shout of police just before they break down the door to their hotel room shatters the moment and they spend the rest of the night answering questions until they are released. Tony wastes no time hustling them onto his private jet, and they hadn’t even reached cruising altitude before he was pulling the Soldier out of his seat and into the bedroom at the back of the plane. The Soldier discovers a previously unknown cache of memories and the eleven hour plane ride goes by in sex-induced haze.
By the time they reach LA the news had spread and their plane was greeted by a small army of reporters. The Soldier slides his sunglasses onto the top of his head and the look in his grey eyes part the crowd and they make it to Tony’s home without further hassle. That’s where they learn, thanks to JARVIS’s facial recognition software, that the Soldier aka Hot Stuff is actually James Buchanan Barnes, MIA since World War II. That information triggers a seizure; the Soldier’s eyes roll back in his head and he drops like a puppet with its strings cut.
When he wakes up almost a full day later, with Tony by his side the entire time, the first thing he says, “If you call me Jimmy, I’ll never talk to you again.”
“Whatever you say, hot stuff,” Tony says with a blinding smile.