gunning out of this place in a bullet's embrace - bootlessbodkin (2024)

Chapter 1: easy come, easy go

Chapter Text

1973

“Papa?” The boy- no more than three years of age- rubs his eyes and stares balefully up at the man, yawning open-mouthed and unabashedly in the way only a toddler can. “You’re not papa. Do you work here?”

The man hesitates for a moment.

“If you don’t work here you can’t be here,” The boy says plainly. “And I’ll have to scream, and security will kick you out.”

“I work here,” The man says quietly. He had a thick, Slavic accent, and it’s familiar to the young boy. Maybe he’d met this man before, though he could not remember when. “Come with me.” He holds out his hand for the boy.

“Did papa ask you to bring me to him?” The boy takes his hand, and the man leads him out of the lab, down the dark halls of the office building.

“Yes,” The man says as they reach a bank of elevators. “He had to leave suddenly, and wanted me to take you back to your lodgings.”

“He does this a lot,” The boy says softly. “Did he fly home?”

The man hesitates again. “Yes. But he’ll be back soon, so you do not need to.”

The boy shrugs glumly.

“That’s what he always says,” He says.

_______

The place the man takes Anthony to is strange, certainly not the fancy hotel he had been staying with his father in since their arrival in Moscow. Even just this factor alone would be enough to discomfort the boy, but it had been a week since the lab, now. Anthony was keeping track. He had found a loose nail his first night in the strange place, and he had been using it to carve a little tick-mark into the baseboard every time he was put to bed. Perhaps another three-year-old wouldn’t have been so suspicious, and certainly wouldn’t be familiar enough with counting to bother tracking the days past, but his parents had always said he was precocious. It was one of the few things they could agree on.

Anthony often thinks of saying something to the man, asking when he would see his father again, but the man drank an amber liquid the little boy is all too familiar with, an amber liquid he had long ago learned to associate with punishment. Much like Anthony’s father, the man grew sullen and angry when he drank; unlike his father, that anger turned to violence. At first only against the man’s son, Ivan, who is a few years older than Anthony, and then, as the days grow in number, to the boy himself.

It had taken mere hours for Anthony to learn that the man’s name was Anton (strange, how close it was to his own name, he thought), but it was easier to think of him as ‘the man’, to add a layer of distance from him.

_______

Thirteen days after his kidnapping (that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Ivan had said as much, in his limited English, and Ivan was a Big Kid, so he must know) the man takes Anthony on a long car ride. It’s boring, and he sleeps through most of it, making him unsure of how far they had traveled when he finally wakes up as they pull to a stop in front of a tall building in an unfamiliar city. Not that Anthony is terribly familiar with Russian cities, anyway.

Anton leads Anthony into the building, a rough hand clenched in the young boy’s dirty t-shirt as they march up several flights of stairs. They meet an older woman in an office and Anton has a hurried conversation with her in Russian while Anthony tunes them out and stares dully around the room. It wasn’t a large room, and there’s only one small window on the far wall, and even that’s shuttered tightly with wooden blinds. The woman sits behind a heavy-looking desk— not as fine a desk as Anthony’s father’s, but a fine one all the same— and two men in plain black suits stand on either side of her, hands folded together. Anthony smiles cautiously at one, who returns the gesture with a blank stare.

He decides the office is more boring than the conversation he can’t understand.

Eventually, Anton leaves the room with a paper bag in hand and without so much as a backward glance at his former charge. The woman stands and steps around the desk to kneel in front of Anthony, meeting his gaze.

“What is your name, little one?” She asks. Her accent is strange, not like Anton’s, but not like the ones Anthony was accustomed to back in America.

“Where are you from?” The words blurt out of his mouth before he can stop them; in the past two weeks at the Vanko’s house he’d done his best to learn to hold his tongue to avoid repercussions, but his parents had always encouraged his questions before (up to a point, he could remember several occasions when his father had thrown him out of the study for his ‘incessant badgering’, whatever that meant).

The woman smiles coolly. “I asked you a question, young man,” She says. It was better than being hit, but the words still stung.

“Anthony Stark,” He says quietly. “Sorry. Are you going to take me to my papa? Mr. Vanko said he would take me, but it’s been ages.”

“Perhaps,” She says. “For now, you will come to my school. Don’t you want to learn?”

“Mama says I’m too young for school,” He frowns. “Even though I’m smart. Did Papa tell you to teach me?” There had been a big fight a few months ago about whether or not to enroll him in preschool, Mama had insisted he was too young to leave home and Papa had called her small-minded. Mama had taken Anthony to Grandma’s house for a few days after that, and only gone back when Papa sent her the biggest teddy bear Anthony had ever seen.

“It’s a very special school,” She smiles, like there was some kind of joke he was missing out on. Adults seemed to do that a lot, he’d noticed. “Most of my students start even younger than you.”

He considers this for a long moment. “I guess that’s okay,” He says.

“Smart boy,” She says, smoothing his jet-black hair to his forehead. Her smile falters slightly when it springs back into its usual mess, but only for so brief a moment that he finds himself wondering if he’d imagined it. “While you are here, we will call you Anton. Anthony is not a Russian name, and our teachers will not be familiar with it.”

“But that’s not my name,” He whines. “That’s that man’s name. And he’s mean!”

“Now it is your name, and you will do better than him,” She says firmly. “We do not look kindly on men like him at my school.”

Anthony decides this school can’t be so bad if they don’t like mean men who leave nasty bruises on little children.

_______

Madame B- the woman who ran the school- says that Anthony (now Anton, though he hated the name) had to go to their doctor. He's an older man named Dr. Zola, and he looks very much like a pig. He hadn't liked it when Anton told him so.

Dr. Zola says Anton has to have a procedure to be healthy enough to join the school. He seems very happy about this, and it scares Anton enough that he bursts into tears. An orderly slaps him for this, and it shocks him enough that he doesn’t notice the needle in his arm until his vision has already started to fade.

1987

Anton is one of the best candidates the Wolf Spider program has ever seen, his teachers have told him as much, and praise is rare in the Red Room. Even so, he’s made a name for himself in the years since his arrival as temperamental and hard to control; so much so that he’s been put in cryostasis enough times that he’s only aged to around thirteen years old. He’s not quite sure when he was brought to the facility, they’d removed that from his memory (it wasn’t necessary for his training. They’d taken a lot of unnecessary memories over the years, according to the other children), but he’s pretty sure he should be older than that.

For example, Saoirse had once been younger than him, and now her body is sprawled on the floor of the workshop, and she looks at least fifteen. Looked fifteen. Did you stop counting how old a person was the second they died, or did that stop sometime later? It was questions like this that often got him in trouble when he wasn’t directly disobeying orders to do something a better way. He didn’t see why he had to learn to snap necks when there were dozens of knives at his disposal, but that was why he was so behind on his training.

None of that changed the fact that there was a dead teenager cluttering the workshop floor, or that he had been assigned to clean it up.

Failure in the Red Room didn’t mean you got an F on your report card, one of the techs had said (Anton didn’t know what that meant, he’d never heard of report cards, and he didn't know why English letters would be put on them), it meant expulsion, and expulsion meant a bullet to the back of the head. Saoirse had failed her mission, left the family of her target alive when she was told to raze the building and everyone inside it. Anton knows this, so why, he wonders, does his heart feel so hollow as he stoops down to bind her wrists and ankles together? Why do tears threaten to spill from his eyes as he fills a bucket with hot, soapy water?

He sets the bucket next to the body and sets about dragging it towards the incinerator. He breathes in sharply as he hoists it up by the underarms and catches a whiff of some familiar, floral scent as her red ringlets of hair brush his face. The smell tugs at something deep in the recesses of his memory; not something the Red Room took away, he knows how those lost memories feel when they resurface, but something from before he enrolled. Something they hadn’t deemed important enough to scrub away. He closes his eyes, and an image of an elegant woman with dark hair flashes briefly in his mind. Her face is fuzzy with the murkiness of memory, but his heart tugs painfully all the same. When he opens his eyes again his cheeks are wet with tears. He sets the body down and scrubs them away hastily. Weakness of any kind was punished with extreme prejudice, and he was already in trouble with his teachers for doodling schematics during a lecture on the history of neurotoxins.

“Toshenka,” A voice comes from the shadows, making the young boy jump and curse quietly— how had he missed that he was being watched? The answer to his question comes when the speaker steps into the light. Yakov, his favorite teacher. One on loan from Hydra. “I apologize, you were close?” He indicates the body with a tilt of his head.

“No,” Anton shakes his head. “Or if we were, I do not remember.” He bites the inside of his cheek, wondering if he should ask the question bouncing around his head. Yakov will not be angry, but he could let it slip to another of the teachers, or, worse, to a master. Anton loves his teacher, but he is still a superior, and duty-bound to report the failings of his pupils.

Yakov nods sympathetically. He’s had his memory wiped more than anyone in the Red Room, according to Natalia, one of the older girls in the Black Widow program. She knows everything about everyone, and she’s at the top of her class. Anton knows this isn’t a coincidence. Information is everything when you’re being trained as a world-class assassin and spy. He just wishes he knew why she told him everything. She says it’s because he’s her equivalent in the Wolf Spider program, but he’s not so sure. Plus, she’s obviously far closer to Yelena, and she never tells Yelena anything.

“Do you need help?” Yakov asks, watching as Anton resumes his struggle to drag the body to the incinerator.

“I’m not allowed,” Anton grunts as the body slips in his grasp and he has to stop to readjust. The floral scent fills his nose again, but this time he doesn’t process it, just keeps moving. “I’m being punished for my lack of attention.”

Yakov laughs. It’s one of the reasons Anton likes him so much, he’s one of the few teachers that laughs, and he’s the only teacher who laughs out of kindness rather than malice. “Head in the clouds again, Toshenka?”

“I wasn’t even off-topic this time,” He complains, finally reaching the mouth of the incinerator and tipping the body in. He turns back to his teacher, proud for completing one part of his task, only to deflate slightly at the sight of all the blood he’s tracked through the workshop. Damn. Maybe he did have a problem with attention. “It was a lecture on neurotoxins, and I was working out the composition of a lipstick that contained it without being deadly to the wearer.”

“Ah, you know how they are,” Yakov shook his head slightly, his chin-length brown hair jostling at the movement. Anton’s always been a bit jealous of Yakov’s hair, all the Wolf Spider candidates have to wear theirs shaved until graduation. “Anyway, I came here to tell you, we have a mission tomorrow. Just the two of us, a special lesson.”

Anton lights up at this. The last time Yakov had given him a special lesson he had learned to shoot a sniper rifle. And the older man had given him a metal compass, standard issue to American troops during the second world war.

“For good luck,” He had said, pressing it into the boy’s hand as they walked towards the extraction point. “Put it in your pocket. They won’t take it when they put you back in cryo, don’t worry. You’ll be able to get it when you graduate.”

Anton hadn’t asked where Yakov had gotten it. Asking questions like that was a good way to get presents taken back.

“Meet me outside, 0400,” Yakov calls over his shoulder as he leaves the workshop. Anton waves to him, and he waves back with a silver hand that sends a thrill of excitement up the boy’s spine. One day, he’ll get to take it apart and figure out how it works.

_______

It’s two months before they take Anton out of cryostasis again, wipe him of all but his training and language, and send him into training. His teacher has him fight a boy named Josef, and when he wins, she gives him the signal to snap his neck. Anton is used to it, by now. He’s more than used to classmates falling under his skilled hands, others disappearing from the lunch table to never be heard from again. There are whispers that some have escaped, but Anton knows better.

Yasha once showed him a way to escape the facility, and Anton remembers how difficult it had been, even with his mentor by his side. He doesn’t know why the lab agents haven’t removed that memory, but he thinks it might have to do with the fact that that day had been one of his best training days, and they have trouble removing moments rather than whole days at a time. Only the best lab agents can do it, and only on Yasha.

Yasha doesn’t remember anything most of the time. They strip everything from him, making sure only the basics are left. Kill this one, be kind to these ones, be wary of her, worship him. Anton is very glad he’s never been wiped from Yasha’s mind, he’s lucky.

_______

He thinks it’s been another four months since he was last thawed out. This time he speaks with a man named Ivan who is on parole. Ivan gives him blueprints that he’s not allowed to tell anyone he has. The blueprints have a Stark logo on them. Anton knows they are bad, he’s been taught all his life that Stark works only for the death of soviet culture, but he keeps them hidden and on his person anyways. Ivan scared him, but was the first to respect him in all thirteen years of his life.

1992

Anton is almost old enough to graduate from the Red Room. He knows that he’s just shy of 17 years old, according to the lab techs. He’s not sure how old he’s supposed to be, but he’s done the math with the years that he remembers and he’s pretty sure he should be older. He’s not too worried about the missing time, though- most of his fellow students had experienced the same. One of them said she had come to the Red Room in the 1960’s, and she was younger than him. One of his former classmates had gone missing for three years and then reappeared, still twelve years old. He didn’t bother himself with questions like how they prevented ageing in cryostasis, that wasn’t his place. He’d had that kind of curiosity beaten out long ago. He just keeps to his training and designed the odd weapon here or there.

Anyways, he’s almost old enough to graduate, so the masters send him on his first solo mission. His target is a man just four years his senior, an enemy of the state.

It’s a cold, December night in Belarus, or as his mentor would’ve said, it’s a night in Belarus. He’s sat outside a bar on the snowy curb, smoking a cigarette and waiting for his target. He’s got an I.D. that says he’s 22, so he could go inside if he wanted, but he’s enjoying this small amount of time by himself. The Red Room is crowded- not as crowded as it once was, but crowded. He also rarely gets a moment to himself these days thanks to increased training since he’s so close to graduation. He’s the only Wolf Spider candidate left, and thus the only boy left in the Red Room, so expectations are high, and as much as he would never admit it for fear of punishment, the pressure is getting to him.

He leans back against the wall of the bar as he smokes and stares up at the stars.

“That is Orion,” Yakov says. “See the three diagonal stars? That is his belt. He was a great hunter, and the Gods sent him to the stars when he died, so that he could live on forever.”

“And that one?” Anton moves his pointing arm to a further cluster of stars.

“Pegasus. Perseus’s trusted steed,” Yakov hums. “A winged horse born when the blood of the gorgon Medusa hit sea foam.”

“We’re supposed to be watching the apartment,” Natalia complains, though she has a slight smile about her eyes as she does. “How did you learn so much about stars, Yasha?”

Yakov frowns. “As a child,” He says after a long stretch of silence. “I read a book. The city was too bright to stargaze.”

Ever since he was a little boy, he’s wanted to see what’s up among the stars. Not that he’d ever mention it to the masters (or even to Yakov; or Natalia), but he dreams of escaping to space one day. He likes to think he’d be free there.

The Red Room is fine and all, he at least gets three square meals and all the training he could ask for (and more, a nasty voice in his head whispers. This voice is the same one that gets him in trouble with the masters), but sometimes he wonders. He knows his childhood hasn’t exactly been typical- just one glance at any child outside of the Red Room tells him that- but he’s not sure exactly how.

He shakes off these dangerous thoughts and flicks the ash off the end of his cigarette. It won’t do to dwell on the insane. He’s belonged to the Red Room- to Russia- since before he can remember. He owes his life to them, and the least he can do is repay that debt with the skills they’ve given him.

Speaking of repayment- his target sits down on the curb next to him.

“Spare a cig?” He asks brightly. He has a kind face, with dark hair and dark eyes, and cheeks spattered with freckles. His file had said he was of Italian descent, and it shows in the tone of his skin and the way his hands never stop moving as he talks.

“Sure,” Anton smiles and extended the pack. The target takes a single cigarette and pulls a lighter out of his pocket. The glow of the flame illuminates his face enough that Anton’s finally able to see the distinctive scar across his lips that confirms he’s who Anton’s been waiting for. “How’s your day been?”

“Oh, can’t complain,” The man’s eyes twinkle with mirth as he takes a drag off the borrowed smoke. “Not legally, anyways.”

Anton snorts at that. His target works as a snitch for the CIA now, he’s more than well acquainted with breaking his silence.

“I’m Benicio, but you can call me Ben,” The target says. “How ‘bout you?”

“Dmitri,” Anton lies. “It’s good to meet you, Ben.”

_______

Two hours later, and Benicio Kuznetsov is dead. He doesn’t go down without a fight, however, and Anton winds up at the extraction point holding his stomach to keep his insides from literally falling out.

Ben had been crafty, it seems.

It takes far too long for his transport to arrive after he activates his tracker, and by the time the van pulls into the alley, he’s blacking out.

_______

The good news is, he’s ready for graduation.

The bad news is, it’s an incredibly dangerous procedure, few who make it to graduation make it past graduation. He’s seen the bodies from the failed procedures since they got ahold of a new serum last year. He thinks they might be the demons Isobel used to tell him about, before they stopped letting students have religion.

The even worse news is, if he refuses, he’ll die for sure.

He nods sharply, and a mask is lowered over his face.

_______

Nine targets, three nights. They never stood a chance.

The first night is entirely gunfire. He snipes four men from the roof of a meat-packing warehouse in New York City, and shoots another in the alley two stories down.

The second night he seduces the son of his sixth mark, luring him to bed as though he’s much older. As soon as the son loosens the zipper of his slacks, he’s dead. A knife to his jugular. A message.

The third night, he carves the seventh, poisons the eighth, and then. And then.

The ninth target is a soviet defector. She used to work for the Red Room, but escaped with information. Anton remembers her. She gave him candy, once.

She dies pitifully, blood gurgling between her lips as she takes her final breath.

2005

The first thing Anton knows is the cold, the unyielding freezing cold as he defrosts manually for the first time, cryofluid pooled at his knees where he’s kneeling on the hard floor. There’s glass, and cuts on his arms and legs, a nasty one on his foot, but Natalia is ushering him up and out, through the path Yasha had evidently shown her as well.

“What is my mission?” Anton asks numbly, not fully aware of his surroundings yet. He knows there are alarms blaring, but that’s not new. Someone’s probably mucked up a mission. Probably Benjamin, it’s a wonder that boy hasn’t been terminated yet.

“Follow me,” Natalia grits, pulling Anton close to her by his shirt front. “And when we get to a room, I’m going to open a locker. I want you to open yours, you’ll know which one, and take everything inside. I will give you a bag.”

“Yes ma’am.” Anton nods, still shivering. He thinks he’ll never be warm again, the cold is so deep in his bones now.

They enter a locker room, and Anton finds himself opening a locker without thinking, surprised to find every outfit he’s ever worn when going back into cryostasis packed into the small cubicle. Natalia throws him a bag, and he automatically pushes everything inside. He recognizes the shirt and jeans he’d hidden the Stark plans in, his boots from his first assassination. They still have blood on the ends. He can still feel the blood on his skin, if he closes his eyes.

There isn’t time for reminiscing though, and before he knows it, Natalia’s dragging him through the halls, not even stopping to let him dress. She’s wearing a blouse and jeans, ballet flats and a wool coat. Without even checking, he can tell it’s not thick enough for the Russian winter no doubt awaiting them outside the doors.

They run for what feels like hours, Anton shivering violently in his undershirt and boxers, wincing every time his injured foot touches dirt, or a tree whips his face and creates another cut there. Soon, a plane comes into view, and Natalia stops him.

“Wait here, Toshenka,” She says quietly. “I’ll come right back.”

He nods, still disoriented from the lack of reprogramming. He’s always wiped before being frozen, they always take the specifics from him so he can’t reveal too much if he’s kidnapped by the enemy, but they usually reprogram him with information when he wakes up. He wonders why Natalia hasn’t hooked him up to a machine yet, why he wasn’t given a chance to change, or to eat. He hasn’t eaten in weeks at the very least, years at the most. He’s weak, frozen in his place, and confused beyond reason.

“Come,” Natalia says, returning to his hiding place a few minutes later, wrapping a blanket over his shoulders. “Close your eyes. It’s going to be very bright.”

He nods again, and does as he’s told, allowing her to steer him towards the plane. It is very bright, he can tell even without cracking his eyes to check. Everything else had been so dark, it must have been night, and very late at that.

He falls asleep on the plane, his head on Natalia’s shoulder, her hand clasped firmly in his. She looks scared, but he’s too exhausted to wonder why.

_______

Anton wakes up in a cold room, small and windowless. A prison cell. It’s cleaner than he was accustomed to cells being, not that he’d ever been arrested himself. Red Room operatives were too well trained to be captured. You either completed your mission without detection, or you became someone else’s mission.

The room is otherwise unremarkable, with only a cot in one corner, a toilet in another with a sink next to it, and a table in the center with chairs on either side. He’s sitting in one, handcuffed to the table. There is a man in a suit sitting in the other, flipping idly through a manila folder. He doesn’t look up as Anton stirs, rolling his shoulder to soothe an ever-present ache from too many dislocations over the years.

The man across from him is perhaps in his late thirties, early forties at the oldest, and balding slightly. He wears a cheap black suit, comically ill-tailored in a deliberate fashion that reminds Anton of the old soviet spies he had hunted down, who pretended to be bumbling bureaucrats to evade detection. The biggest difference he can see in this man is a ‘fun’ tie which has been loosened slightly, as if the man has been there a while, waiting for Anton to wake. The tie is patterned with a red sports car, and the knot is lopsided. He wonders if the tying was intentional too.

“Welcome to SHIELD,” The man says a few moments later, in perfect Russian, still not looking up from the file. “Anton, I presume?”

Anton stares at the man. The man looks up and his lips quirk into a kind of a smile at the lack of expression on the boy’s face.

“My Russian isn’t so good, forgive me if I mess up,” He continues, closing the file and leaning back in his chair. Anton snorts. The man is clearly fluent, though he does oddly have a slight Swedish accent. Perhaps he’d learnt from a swede. Perhaps he’s f*cking with Anton on purpose. “Your partner has fully surrendered, and we’re hoping you’ll do the same.”

They sit in silence for several minutes, and the man nods, a tightness around his mouth that hadn’t been there before.

“She didn’t tell you where she was taking you, did she?” He asks. “Did she.” He raps the table with his knuckles, staring into space.

Anton takes the silence to think about his course of action. Sure, he hadn’t been the biggest fan of the Red Room, but was SHIELD any better? Would they just force him to work for them, or would he be allowed to figure out something else to do with his life? What would he do with his life, if not what he had been trained to do? He’d never had the chance to consider it.

Would it be so bad to work against the Red Room?

Natalia had seemed sure. How much does he trust her?

“I surrender,” He says in clear English.

The man blinks, clearly surprised.

“What, just like that?” He asks, switching to his clearly native language. “Don’t you have conditions?”

“Same as Natalia’s,” He shrugs. “If she had any.”

“She requested your security, that’s all,” The man says. “So, are you asking for your security, or hers?”

“Hers,” Anton says without a thought. He frowns, wondering what he had done to earn such care from her. Sure, they’d been as close as two people could be in the Red Room, but that wasn’t saying much. He supposes that, given the chance to defect, he would’ve taken her with him as well. He wonders why he’s so sure of this. “What is to happen to us?”

“It’s not entirely up to me,” The man says, waving a hand dismissively. “But if it were, I’d offer her a job, send you to school.”

“I can work,” Anton protests, pulling at the handcuffs. The man glances nervously at them, as if they might break. Surely the man knew who he was dealing with, had put him in properly reinforced cuffs? Anton studied them carefully. Huh. Plain steel.

“Having read your file, I can’t help but agree that you’d be a fine asset, on our side,” The man concedes, regaining his composure. “However, you are seventeen, correct?”

“I don’t know,” Anton says honestly. “Probably.”

“Probably,” The man repeats incredulously. “Why does that surprise me? Jesus. Okay, well, you seem seventeen. And in the eyes of the United States government, seventeen is under the age of majority, and therefore, SHIELD cannot employ you.”

“Can you prove I’m not older?” Anton challenges, enjoying testing the limits of his freedom. In the Red Room he would’ve been punished just for protesting the man’s decision. He wonders how far he can push the people at SHIELD. “I could be older than you, you know.”

“How so?” The man asks, seemingly against his own better judgement. He glances back towards the manila folder. Anton’s file?

“I knew teenagers who had been in the program since the forties,” Anton hides a smile at the man’s obvious discomfort. He wonders how unusual cryogenics are outside of the Red Room and Hydra— he’d never exactly had occasion to learn, but he’d always assumed it was rare. Even the teachers in the Red Room didn’t seem to be subjected to it. He’d even had a few die from old age while he was frozen. “When were you born?”

“1964,” The man says cautiously. “You?”

“Ah,” Anton shrugs. “I don’t know. I think I remember the early 70’s, but it’s hard to tell.”

The man studies him for a long while, maybe trying to tell if Anton’s just f*cking with him, assessing how much of what he’s said is true. Anton almost wishes he were just f*cking with him. Then again, it’s hard to tell how unusual things were growing up when you’ve only ever known one way of life. If it weren’t for the reactions of people outside his cohort, like that of the man in the suit, he wouldn’t have any way to know what he had experienced was strange.

“We’ll have medical determine your physical age,” The man says finally, taking the file in his hands and pushing back from the table as he stands up. “I’ll speak to the director about your prospects. Until then, enjoy your lodgings.”

The man is already halfway out the door when Anton speaks again.

“You forgot to unlock me,” He says, holding his shackled wrists up for the man to see.

The man glances over his shoulder. “I expect you’ll figure out a way around that,” He shoots Anton a friendly grin, and the door closes behind him.

_______

It takes fourteen days, five hours, and twenty-three minutes for SHIELD to be convinced of his and Natalia’s genuine desire to leave the Red Room behind forever. In that time, neither of them sees the other. Frankly, Anton had entertained the possibility that Natalia had been dead the whole time, in the dark hours of the night. He’s relieved beyond belief when they finally allow them to visit one another.

It’s a supervised visit in a training room somewhere on the levels of the compound above where they’ve been keeping Anton, and it also serves as their audition for SHIELD.

“You look well,” Natalia says as they wait for their restraints to be removed, standing in the middle of the modified gym. On one far end of the room stands a row of targets, including several that look capable of movement, and an array of ranged weaponry sits on a table in front of them. Including, strangely, a recurve bow and quiver of arrows. Anton had had basic training with the weapon, but it certainly wasn’t his first choice. Besides, there was too much room for error in bows; if your target wasn’t dead the first time you shot him, you’d already failed in the Red Room’s eyes.

“As do you,” He says. An agent dressed entirely in tac-gear points a remote control at them from several feet away and the shackles fall off their wrists and ankles. He rubs the thin sliver of scar tissue on his wrists, marks left over from the restraints placed on young Red Room initiates as they slept so as to prevent them from sneaking out or sleepwalking. According to Natalia, when the two of them had been around nine years old, there had once been an incident where a student killed four of her classmates while dead asleep.

He notices Natalia doing the same.

They approach the table of weaponry together, noting the tension evident in their babysitter, his hand flicking towards a handgun holstered on his belt. It’s almost cute, how they think one agent could neutralize the two of them if they decided to attempt an escape. Anton choses a sniper rifle and scans the room for perches. A grin spreads across his face when he sees a catwalk high above, with a handy ladder leading up to it on the wall farthest from the targets. Natalia choses a simple handgun, and he wonders if he’s already made a mistake, wanting to show off. Too late now, though. He scales the ladder and assumes position.

The first shot misses the mark by three feet. He frowns and inspects the gun, adjusts the sights. Aims again. Misses, again by three feet.

“Rusty, Toshenka?” Natalia jeers from below, still standing at the table. She aims her gun and fires off three shots. All of them miss.

“Not as rusty as you, Natka,” He laughs. Alright, a test, then. Not the test they had been expecting, though. It seems as if the weapons they’ve been provided have been tampered with. He aims again, this time three feet in the opposite direction of his target.

Bullseye.

“Seems a bit childish, seeing how we’d react to defective guns,” She says once he’s returned to the ground floor. In the time it had taken for him to evacuate his sniper’s nest, she’s emptied her clip into the center of four targets, including one moving rapidly from side to side. “I think I was actually a child, last time I had that tested.”

He hums in agreement, setting the gun down before turning to their chaperone. “That good enough for you?” He asks.

The agent nods. “Please proceed to the ring,” He gestures to a boxing ring on the other side of the room. “Your proctors will arrive shortly. You are to incapacitate them as quickly as possible without killing them or incurring grievous bodily injury.”

“Ten,” Natalia murmurs as they walk together, perfectly in sync.

He remembered that lesson. Natalia had been ten, yes, and Anton had been eleven. She was twenty-one now, and him seventeen. He almost missed being her elder. Not that she’d ever deferred to him, she was better trained, and she knew it. Anyway, Natalia had wiped the floor with him and he’d resigned himself to his fate; losing a sparring match meant death, usually, but something had been different that day. Maybe it was because Yasha was the one leading the lesson, or maybe it was because there were so few Wolf Spider candidates left. Whatever the cause, Anton had just been glad to see the next sunrise.

The door to the gym opens as they enter the ring, revealing two figures, both much larger than the two of them. Natalia grins wolfishly at him.

It takes less than two minutes.

Chapter 2: in the line of fire

Chapter Text

According to the papers SHIELD had fashioned him with, Anton Romanov was an orphan from Kiev who had emigrated to the US with his cousin, Natasha in the spring of 2005. He was the youngest student MIT had ever seen, enrolling at the alleged age of fifteen, but he was probably the least documented student they’d ever had. Coulson had had to procure a lot of falsified transcripts to even get the application together, and five years later, he’s still complaining about it. Luckily he’d aced every exam he’d sat, which made the school more willing to look past his lack of a history. Turns out they didn’t care so much about the truth when you got perfect SAT scores.

At first he had protested at being given a cover identity so young, certainly younger than his true physical age, but he’s discovered in the years since that he ages much slower than the average human, probably something to do with the Red Room’s graduation procedures, or maybe something to do with the constant experimentation. He wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out cryogenics had something to do with it, too. Anyway, it’s come in handy. He can pass for a twenty-year old, but twenty-two might be a stretch, if the reaction of bouncers to his fake IDs is anything to judge by. Though that might have to do with his chronic inability to grow facial hair and his predilection for stupid graphic t-shirts which work in tandem to make him look permanently twelve.

But five years of college later and he’s up a bachelor’s degree, a doctorate, and about a dozen patents for defense and weaponry tech. Not to mention a handful of research papers, mostly on the long-term effects of chemical weaponry. He’d spent a very memorable summer in Vietnam while on a mission for SHIELD, and unfortunately gotten enough data for a lifetime. SHIELD had classified the papers before he’d had the chance to even think about publishing them. It’s probably for the best.

All that schooling, and he’s still just working for SHIELD. He often spends sleepless nights wondering if it was worth it to defect if he was just going to wind up doing the same things he’d been trained for, even if it was for better people. Morals were subjective, in the intelligence game. No one was truly good, everyone had some amount of red in their ledger. It was just a matter of what shades of red you were willing to accept.

In 2006 a scientist at Culver University had tried to reverse-engineer the serum that created Captain America nearly a century ago. In 2006, a scientist at Culver University had accidentally turned himself into an enormous green rage monster, but, lucky him, retained the ability to turn back into a human, given the right conditions. He’s the lucky guy that gets assigned to tracking Banner down. It’s not hard, not for him, anyways. He’d mostly killed defectors for the Red Room, had to track them down after years of building up new lives. Compared to that, an introverted scientist who turns into the not-so-jolly green giant is pretty easy to track. What surprises him, however, is that SHIELD just wants to keep an eye on him. They don’t want to kill him, to bring him in, even to speak to him. They just need someone to follow him.

Anton goes to Canada first, then Peru, Bolivia, Romania, Greece. It’s Afghanistan where he slips up. It’s not hard to tail Banner, all he has to do is plant a few bugs in his homes, slip some trackers into his shoes, and rent out a building across the street. It’s not hard, but he becomes too complacent. He forgets that he made a name for himself in college, and that people might want an inventor either dead or on their side.

He gets caught while following Banner from his home to a tiny village called Gulmira. Banner keeps going on his merry little way, while a Stark Industries missile finds its way through the side of Anton’s jeep. He jumps out of the moving vehicle, rolling into a ditch on the side of the road. And, just because the universe really wants to drive the point home that Anton screwed up, another missile lands right next to him, logo facing him. Taunting him. It explodes, and for a second he thinks his kevlar vest has saved him, but no dice. Blood is seeping through both his tank top and his shirt, and the pain is making the world go white. He grits his teeth and struggles with the shirts, and then the vest. Some shrapnel comes out as the vest comes off, but there’s still several pieces of jagged black metal sticking out of his chest. He’s got one out, cutting his hand in the process, when two men come up to him. They shout at him in Urdu, demanding he put his hands on his head. Instead, he grabs his gun, and shoots one in the leg.

There’s a sharp pinch of a needle in his neck, and the world fades out completely.

He wakes calmly, an ache in his chest and a scratch in his throat. There’s gauze-y bandage covering his chest, two wires coming from a cavity in the middle of his sternum, bandaging on his hands.

He rubs at the thin white scars around his wrists, hidden as they are beneath the gauze, agitatedly, thinking longingly of home. This gives him pause. What is home? The Red Room is not a home, it’s a workplace. He’s never had a home, just work. Weapons don’t need to have a home.

“Ah, you are awake,” The man across the room says. He speaks in thickly accented English, and moves nervously as he speaks. Anton’s vision is still too blurry to make out any more detail than the fact that the man wears glasses, and has some grey in his beard. “I was starting to worry, the first twenty-four hours are always the hardest.”

“What’s this?” Anton asks, pointing at the cavity, the wires, the car battery they lead to. He’d feel faint, if he weren’t so used to waking up with something horribly wrong with him. Horribly different? He doesn’t really care what the right terminology would be.

“An electromagnet,” The man throws a tube at Anton, and he catches it swiftly. It makes a faint clinking noise as Anton holds it up to the light. Metal. “A little souvenir for you trip, no? I got what I could out of your heart, but the electromagnet is keeping the rest out.”

Anton considers this. He considers the car battery, how much it would hinder him in a fight. He puts his hands in his pockets, and they brush against a folded, crumpled piece of paper. He pulls it out and smooths it out against his thigh.

Stark Industries plans, faded with age, but still clearly readable. An arc reactor… Yes, that could work. There’s cramped handwriting in the margins that looks like calculations for miniaturizing the massive machine. It looks like his handwriting. He doesn't remember writing it. He doesn’t remember whatever had landed him in this strange place, either, but neither of these worries him. He wonders if this is a punishment, or a test.

Men with guns stream into the room and shout at them in Urdu to get down and put their hands on their heads. He watches the other man carefully and follows his lead in complying. They’re led outside, down a hallway, and out of an opening that makes him realize they had been kept in a cave, of all places.

Outside is bright, and hot. His arms twinge from carrying the car battery. They lead him to a tent several hundred yards from the mouth of the cave and present him with surveillance footage of some Stark Industries missile test.

“They are asking if you can build it for them,” The man, his fellow prisoner, translates unnecessarily.

“No, they’re telling me to build it,” Anton corrects him, in English, hoping their captors do not speak the language. He could use any advantage he can get. “They say my masters have sent me here to help them.”

“Yes,” The man says uneasily, regarding the younger man with newfound apprehension as their captors list off all the ways they expect Anton to ‘help’. “I am not sure how you are expected to perform these duties in your current state.” He laughs uncomfortably. Anton doesn’t smile.

“Tell them I will comply,” Anton says once the leader of their captors has stopped speaking. “But that I will need to focus most of my energy on their missile, and that I need full access to any materials I ask for.”

His fellow prisoner repeats this. Their captor nods. The two of them are lead back to their cell.

“My name is Ho Yinsen, I apologize for not introducing myself earlier, but, you understand,” Yinsen says once the door has closed and the lock has slid into place. He turns to Anton, fear evident in his eyes. “Is it true, what they said about you?”

“Yes,” Anton says. “It is.”

“What is your name?” Yinsen asks.

“Does it matter?” Anton retorts, turning away from the older man and digging the plans back out. He glances around the room. There should be enough material to build a prototype, he thinks. He’ll have to crack open a few missile heads and harvest the palladium within, but that won’t be too hard. Not any harder than some of his previous missions, anyways.

“Careful,” Yasha chides. Something clicks horribly in his hand. It’s horrible to look at the inside of this prosthesis—crudely and cruelly designed, wires forming a highway of artificial nerves. Yasha says they feel pain. One wrong move, and his mentor could be permanently paralyzed, or worse. He wonders what idiot designed this.

Anton doesn’t want to think about what will happen to him if he destroys Hydra’s best asset.

“They didn’t care about your name,” Yinsen says, a strange edge in his voice. “They acted like you were a pet, an attack dog.”

“Close enough,” Anton shrugs. He looks up from the plans and catches the man’s gaze. A strange impulse to comfort him overtakes him. “Anton. They call me Anton, sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” Yinsen repeats faintly, like he might be sick. “How old are you, Anton?”

“I don’t know,” He says truthfully. “It doesn’t matter. I graduated, they don’t keep track anymore.”

Yinsen is quiet for a long time, and Anton takes this time to begin his work collecting materials for the reactor. He’s just extracted around a half gram of palladium from a missile head when Yinsen speaks again.

“Do you have a family?” He asks.

Anton hesitates. “No,” He says. “Sort of. The Red Room doesn’t allow for attachments, but I suppose I must have come from somewhere. And Natalia says I’m her brother, but I don’t think she’s being serious.”

“I have a wife and two daughters in Gulmira,” Yinsen says softly. “And when I leave here, I am going to see them again. That is why I must get out of here.”

“You could get killed, talking like that,” Anton says. It’s true, but it clearly brings the man no comfort. He wonders why he wants to comfort him. “I’ll see what I can do.”

Late that night Anton finds himself unable to sleep, staring up at the cave ceiling, hand on his chest, gently tracing the electromagnet. The only thing standing between him and certain death. He’s always lived close to death, but he’s never had a physical reminder of it before. It’s strange, how it doesn’t bother him. He can’t decide why he finds it strange.

“Nice shot, kid!” A blond man whoops. The two of them are sprinting at full-tilt towards a black car, Natalia is sitting in the driver’s seat, peering anxiously towards them. To their rear is an extremely angry private security team, hell-bent on recovering the data disc Anton has clutched in one hand. The blond man fires at them with a recurve bow, arrow heads opening mid-flight to scatter caltrops at their pursuers’ feet.

He wonders who the blond man is in this memory. He seems so familiar, but the harder he searches for a name, a connection, the further from his grasp it seems. He sits up and shoves his hands into his jacket pockets, seeking reprieve from the frigid night air that has made its way into their prison, well-protected as it is. One hand closes on a scrap of paper, and he pulls it out to inspect it.

It’s a photograph. It’s a photograph of him, Natalia, the blond man, and another man, older and balding, wearing a cheap suit. The four of them are seated on a couch somewhere, the cheap kind of couch rarely found outside of government office breakrooms. They look happy. Natalia has her legs sprawled across Anton’s lap and an arm thrown over the blond man’s shoulders. The balding man in the cheap suit looks exasperated with them, but there’s a fondness around the edges of his mouth, in the wrinkles around his eyes.

He flips the photograph over. Scrawled on the back, in his neat, cramped handwriting, it reads:

Strike Team Delta

Anton, Natasha, Clint, Phil

2008

In Natalia’s handwriting, underneath, there’s a scribbled message.

Your family loves you.

He bites his lip, rolling the phrase over in his mind. Family. Your family loves you. Clint. Phil. Natasha.

Anton.

It’s slow going, but his memory starts to return as the days pass. He defected from the Red Room with Natalia (she goes by Natasha now, he reminds himself) five years ago. He went to MIT. He got a degree in electrical engineering, and a doctorate in organic chemistry. He’d wanted to get another doctorate in applied physics, but SHIELD had denied him funding, they’d said one PhD was more than enough, and they wanted him back in the field. Needed him back in the field. He’s supposed to be tailing Dr. Robert Banner, goes by Bruce. Someone had attacked him while he was working. Someone wants him to think he never left the Red Room. Someone had known how to trigger his programming.

Hydra had taught the Red Room many things, one of them being the implantation of code words in operatives’ brains. He’s always suspected he’d had some of these programmed in, but there hadn’t been a way to check. He knows there are some that restored you to your mental state at graduation, some that allowed the user to direct you at a victim of their choice, some that made you destroy yourself. He supposes he’s glad it wasn’t one of those.

He tells Yinsen about this five weeks after first waking up in the cave. He figures that if the man can trust him after all their captors had said about Anton that first day, he owes him an explanation.

They sit in silence for a long time once Anton finishes his explanation.

“They really did this, to children?” Yinsen asks, face pale. Anton had left out a lot of things in his explanation, but there was only so much you could leave out and still give the full picture.

“There’s nothing you can do now, Yinsen,” Anton assures him. “The Red Room was destroyed years ago. What’s in the past is in the past. The only thing that matters right now is that these people somehow knew who I was and how to control me, and that for whatever reason, they didn’t just want me to kill someone for them. Would’ve made things a lot easier.”

Yinsen swallows heavily and scrubs a hand across his face. “Yes, I suppose we had best be pragmatic,” He says. “So, you will not build them their missile?”

“Oh, that was never the plan,” Anton chuckles. “But now I know what I want to do instead. Have you ever heard of power armor?”

The suit is a technical mess. The suit is beautiful. The suit is barely in the prototype stage. The suit is finished.

Yinsen dies to give Anton enough time to finish the suit, dies in Anton’s arms as he curses the old man for running off like that to be a martyr. He says his family was killed by the Ten Rings, that he had never planned to make it out alive. This is why Anton hates compartmentalizing, if no one is on the same page, there are unnecessary casualties.

The suit crashes ten miles out from the compound, and Anton lays in the sand for almost a whole day before moving. The first few hours, it’s just because his bones need time to reknit, after that, though, he’s just soaking up as much sunshine as he can get. For the first time since Natasha broke him free of the Red Room’s grasp, he feels warm.

A dark-skinned man named Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes is the one that finds him. It is exactly three months, one week, and six days since his capture. It is exactly four days, two hours, fifty-seven minutes since his escape. He’s dehydrated, starving, weak, sunburnt. He looks like hell, between the chronic malnutrition of the past few months and the patchy beard taking over his usually smooth face. Lieutenant Colonel Rhodes gives him a bottle of water and a protein bar on their way to base, and makes him sit down for the entirety of the plane ride to the military base.

“You’re probably not allowed to tell me, but what were you doing that far out in the desert?” Rhodes asks as they board the plane together. “And that glowing thing in your chest, what is it?”

Anton grins at him. He loves people who aren’t afraid to ask questions. “You’d make a great scientist, Lieutenant Colonel,” He says, his voice hoarse from both misuse and dehydration alike. “Can’t tell you how, but I got captured by the Ten Rings. Glowing thing is keeping my heart from giving out.” He digs in his pockets for a second before pulling out a fistful of sand, and the tattered remains of his Arc Reactor plans.

“Where’d you get classified Stark Industries blueprints?” Rhodes closes off instantly, and Anton falters. “These went missing in the mid-seventies, same time as Anthony Stark.”

“Who?” Anton’s brow knits together.

Rhodes gives him an incredulous look. “Agent Romanov, you can’t be serious,” Anton just frowns harder. “Oh my God, you are. Listen, Anthony was Howard Stark’s son, he went missing in early ’73, when he was only two, maybe three years old. He was on a trip with his parents in Moscow, and a young lab tech was supposed to be watching him while Maria and Howard went to a meeting. They come back, lab’s been ransacked, tech is dead on the floor. The Arc Reactor plans and Anthony were the only things missing, and Anthony was pronounced legally dead in ’96 when they found substantial amounts of his blood in some small town in Belarus. Never found a body, but he more than likely died there.”

Anton’s throat tightens. 1996- Belarus.

“Gorki?” He asks quietly, hoping-

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

His stomach sinks. Anthony Stark would’ve been 26 that year, around the right age for his mission target. There had been so much blood. He’d had to get up close to the target, pretended to be a lost kid in need of help, and then eviscerated him. The target had fought back, and nearly done the same to him. Anton had been lucky to escape alive.

“How’d you know?” Rhodes asks.

“Came back to me, can’t believe I forgot about it,” Anton lies quickly, laughing at his false stupidity. “I got the prints off an old mentor of mine in the nineties, he never told me how he got them, just that I should guard them with my life, and they might save it one day.”

“Guess he was right,” Rhodes offers a small smile. “So, SHIELD? How’d you swing that at your age?”

“How old do you think I am?” Anton asks.

“You can’t be older than, I dunno, sixteen? Seventeen?” Rhodes laughs as Anton squawks with indignation.

“I’m almost twenty-one!” He cries. “I am an adult!”

After he gets back stateside everything devolves into a whirlwind of debriefings, meetings, psychological evaluations, physical evaluations, interrogations. By the end of the week he’s got a stack of paperwork taller than him excusing him from duty for the foreseeable future. Phil says they’ll bring him back when the Ten Rings have been neutralized, Anton’s not so sure. He’s not even sure he wants to go back.

He can’t sleep anymore. Hasn’t been able to since he realized what had been done to him. How can he ever be sure his mind is his own, when other people spent so much time rooting around in there? What else was put in his head without his consent?

Natasha brings him scrap metal to his apartment. Clint brings him busted appliances to fix, and truly broken ones to salvage parts from. Phil brings him breakfast once a week.

It's been two weeks of this when a stranger appears at his door; a red-haired woman in a sharp suit jacket and matching pencil skirt, holding a padfolio in one hand. She introduces herself as Pepper Potts.

“I work for Stark Industries, Mr. Romanov,” She says, fidgeting where she stands in his doorway. She doesn’t peer around his shoulder into the apartment, which he appreciates. Not that there’s much to look at, his door opens into a hallway, and he hasn’t bothered decorating it. “As Obidiah Stane’s PA. He runs the company, you see, and he came across some of your patents and he wants to interview you for a position in research and development.”

Stark Industries. He’d seen an awful lot of their work lately. He considers slamming the door in her face, but decides it won’t achieve anything.

He’d wanted to get out of intelligence, hadn’t he?

“When?” He asks.

Obidiah Stane is your typical all-American CEO and war profiteer. He’s loud and friendly, and he insists on interviewing Anton himself. They meet in Stane’s office.

“I’ll be honest, Mr. Romanov, it wasn’t your patents that piqued my interest in you,” He says once they’ve sat down on either side of Stane’s heavy oak desk. It’s intricately carved, and looks old, but well cared for. Anton notes the full dry bar behind Stane’s left shoulder. And the ash tray on his desk, elegantly cluttered with a handful of cigar nubs, like someone had arranged them that way. “I have friends in SHIELD, you see. Stark Industries has always enjoyed a great friendship with the organization. Howie, our late founder, he helped found SHIELD too, you know? Anyway, one of my friends told me about that power armor you built in Afghanistan. Nasty business, that incident, but I thought, well, we could use a mind like that. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that you modified one of Howie’s old inventions! We’ve been trying to figure out practical applications for that old thing for decades, but besides a great tourist attraction and cheap power for our factories, nothing’s panned out. So what do you say?”

“You haven’t told me what I’d be doing for you, sir,” Anton says dryly. Something about the office is tripping a memory buried deep in the recesses of his brain, but no matter how hard he tries, nothing comes to him. “And the last time I checked, the information about what happened in Afghanistan was highly classified. Technically I don’t even have the clearance to know about it, and it happened to me.”

Stane laughs and waves a hand, as if he could swat away the words. “What are a few state secrets between friends, huh?” He jokes. “Now, as for what you’d be doing, well, I feel it best to leave the specifics to your department head, but, well, that’d be you. If you take the job. Plain and simple, son, I want you to make me some of those machines you’ve been making since college. Something flashy that’ll impress the board wouldn’t hurt, they’re about ready to bite my head off for firing our old R&D leader.” He leans back in his chair and lights a cigar with a gold lighter. Anton wouldn’t be surprised to find out it was real gold.

“Well, when you put it like that,” He says, grinning to hide his discomfort. It doesn’t sit right with him that someone, probably at the top of their field, was fired just because he built one interesting thing. And there’s no way in hell that he’s making any weapons for Stark Industries until he finds out who was selling them to the Ten Rings. He’s pretty sure they’re not allowed to do that, given that they have an exclusive contract with the U.S. Military.

But how better to learn their secrets than by infiltrating their ranks?

Besides, the pay is damn good. He might even be able to afford a car.

Or ten.

The day after he accepts the job, Stane (“Obie”, he insists Anton call him) sends a moving crew to Anton’s apartment. In less than an hour, everything he owns has been packed up in a few dozen cardboard boxes and loaded onto a truck, headed God knew where. He stands in the middle of his empty apartment, dumbfounded. How the hell is he going to get out of his lease? I mean, it’s not as if he can’t afford to keep paying the rent, depending on how expensive the new place is, but. Well, it would’ve been nice if he’d been consulted on the new place.

Pepper Potts enters as the moving truck pulls away from the building. He watches through the window in what had once been his kitchen.

“Mr. Romanov,” She says quietly. “I’m very sorry about how sudden this all is. I tried to warn Mr. Stane that it wasn’t the best idea, but he’s sort of hard to redirect once he’s decided on a course of action.”

“I’ve noticed,” Anton says. “Any idea where they’re taking my stuff?”

She extends one expertly manicured hand towards him, a brass key held tightly. He takes it. “If you’ll come with me, I’ve been sent to take you there now,” She says. “The car is waiting downstairs.”

He follows her, not bothering to close the door behind him. It’s not the best neighborhood (SHIELD was a government job and thus didn’t pay that well, it was what he could afford), so there’s always the risk that someone tries to rip the copper wiring out of the walls, but he figures that’s a problem for his landlord. He’d never liked the man, he cared far too much about his tenants’ personal lives, and he hadn’t bought Anton’s story that he worked an office job. Maybe it was the blood stains he’d left in the kitchen.

A man who introduces himself as Happy Hogan drives them out of LA. It’s a hell of a task, in the morning rush-hour traffic, but they make it into Malibu in a little under an hour and a half, and pull to a stop in front of a small house, really no more than a cottage. It’s unassuming in the way that truly expensive things often are, and it sits at the top of a cliff overlooking the beach. He shudders at the thought of the property taxes.

“Mr. Stane owns the property,” Pepper explains as they climb out of the car. “He says he can’t think of a better use for it than housing his new star employee.”

“Right,” Anton says. More likely, he can’t think of a better way to keep an eye on Anton while making him feel indebted to his new boss. “How much is rent?”

“Rent is covered by the company as long as you remain an employee,” She says. Great, they’ll hold the threat of eviction over his head if he doesn’t perform to their standards. “Utilities as well. The house also comes with two cars which you are free to use as you please, and a workshop in the basem*nt Mr. Stane encourages you to familiarize yourself with. He apologizes for his absence, but something came up requiring his full attention.”

“Thank you, Miss Potts,” He says, because it’s what’s polite.

The movers arrive soon after, and Pepper takes her leave once she’s satisfied that everything is going smoothly, saying that she has a list a mile long of errands to run before the end of the day.

Once the movers finish setting the boxes down (they offer to put everything away, but he declines. He’s had enough denial of autonomy for one day) and drive away he tries to make sense of his morning. Ten o’clock, and he’s already been spirited away to a strange house, had all of his belongings manhandled, and been put at a severe disadvantage to his new employer. Not exactly the plans he’d made upon waking up.

With nothing better to do, he makes his way down a flight of stairs in the living room to the workshop. He expects a garage, maybe with a workbench, if he’s lucky. What he finds instead is a state-of-the-art laboratory slash auto shop slash everything he has ever dreamed for. He feels like a kid in a candy store as he runs from work station to work station, examining the plethora of tools and materials at hand.

He notes a system of security cameras positioned across the ceiling, and resolves to find out where the feed is being directed. He’s not unaccustomed to being watched at all times, but he likes to know who’s doing the watching so he knows what to hide, or if he needs to disable their ability to spy on him. The cameras aren’t especially fancy, in fact, he’s pretty sure SHIELD has better ones in their lowest clearance areas. He’s pretty sure his local coffee shop has better ones. Then again, they’ve been robbed in the middle of the night like, five times. They kind of needed the extra protection.

He spends so long in the workshop, fiddling with this and that and another thing, that by the time he pulls himself away, the sun is starting to set. He checks his phone— a Motorola razr, several years out of date; Clint had found it in a dumpster in Bed-Stuy last month and insisted he keep it for emergencies— nine missed calls, three from Nat. He presses the redial button.

“Where the hell are you?” She demands, picking up after the second ring. There’s a wall of noise in the background, loud music and louder conversations. “I went to your apartment, what happened? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Natka,” He assures her, glad just to hear her voice. No matter how often they talk these days he’s always happy just to hear her voice. Being locked in a cave made you appreciate the people in your life. “Stane decided he wants to keep a closer eye on me, I got moved to a place in Malibu.”

“Creep,” She mutters. He laughs in agreement. “Phil’s gone off the deep end trying to figure out what happened. Have you told him you accepted the Stark Industries job?”

“No,” He admits. There’s no point in lying to Nat, she’s good at telling what the truth is, even with him. “You know how he gets, I didn’t want him telling me I was making a bad choice.”

She hums softly. Phil’s become something like a parent to them both, though he is their handler. Unlike their old handlers, though, he actually cares about them. This just means that it hurts emotionally instead of physically when they disappoint him.

Anton has a habit of disappointing him.

“I’m not fighting your fires for you,” She says. “You’ll have to tell him sooner or later. It’ll be easier if you do it before he figures it out for himself.”

“I doubt he hasn’t already,” He says. “But you’re right. I’ll call him.”

“I’m always right,” She says.

It turns out that the cameras in the workshop lead to a closed-circuit security system that looks like it was installed in the 70’s. It records straight to VHS. He scrubs through the footage from the past year, the extent of the backlogs, and discovers the place has been vacant the entire time. Then he takes a magnet and wipes every last tape, and dismantles the system. He doesn’t need cameras; if someone wants to break into his house, they’ll have to deal with him. He figures that’s protection enough.

Phil takes his new career direction well enough, though he reminds Anton to be careful. He can’t forget that the Ten Rings had been well-supplied by the company, either. Anton tells him he’s always careful, and Phil laughs so hard he gives himself a coughing fit. Phil says he’s always got a job back at SHIELD, once everything’s sorted out. Phil says they don’t have any new leads on the Ten Rings, but he’ll keep Anton updated.

Clint shows up unannounced the next morning with a busted espresso machine under one arm, a housewarming gift. Anton really has no idea where he keeps finding broken appliances, but considering the number of times he’s had to fish his coworker (his friend) out of dumpsters, he’s not all that surprised. Clint sticks around for only an hour before SHIELD calls him back to work, but he manages to make a substantial dent in Anton’s coffee supply in that time, which is saying something, given Anton’s own caffeine addiction.

He hasn’t slept. He feels exhausted, and yet wide awake.

A car shows up at ten-thirty to drive him to Stark Industries. Happy Hogan is driving it.

“I don’t mean to offend,” Happy says as they pull away from the house. “But you look terrible, kid. House not suiting you?”

Anton shakes his head. “I just don’t sleep much,” He says. He catches a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. His hair is even more wild than usual (he hasn’t gotten around to getting a haircut since he got back, and the ends are just reaching his chin), and more than a little greasy. He tries to remember the last time he showered. His eyes have large, purple bags underneath them. He’s clean-shaven. “The house is lovely.”

“It used to belong to Mr. Stark,” Happy says. “Mr. Stane’s mostly left it alone, except to update the workshop every so often. He told me it was part of Mr. Stark’s will to keep it up-to-date, bit weird, huh? I’m no billionaire inventor, but I wouldn’t worry so much about the usefulness of my stuff once I’m dead.”

“Bit weird,” Anton echoes, staring out the window.

The rest of the drive is uneventful, and he thanks Happy when they arrive at the lab.

A woman he doesn’t know greets him at the front desk and hands him a keycard before directing him to his new office. It’s not as nice as Stane’s office at headquarters downtown, but it’s still nice. It’s decorated differently, too, all modern glass and steel, with a wall of windows overlooking the city. There’s a sticky note on the laptop on the desk, presumably from Stane, as it reads “Something flashy!”. He leaves the office and winds his way through the halls to a lab where all the technicians avoid him, clumping together when they think he isn’t looking to whisper.

At the end of the day he packs up a prototype, a projection shield made of refracted light (and lasers, because that always impresses people) he calls P.R.I.S.M. (Pointed Refracted Image Shield Mechanism), and has it sent to Stane’s office with detailed instructions on how to use it. It’s nothing new, he’s been working on something like it since he was a teenager, but it’s the first version of it he’s made that doesn’t blind the user. He includes a warning not to look directly into the projector until he can work out the last few details.

Happy drives him home.

“We think Stane might be the one who authorized the sales,” Clint says, pointedly not looking at Anton in favor of the paper napkin he’s been slowly shredding for the past few minutes. The two of them had met for breakfast at Randy’s Donuts, Clint’s favorite place in LA. Clint had ordered their largest drip coffee and a dozen pink iced donuts with sprinkles. Anton had ordered the same coffee, but a single apple fritter. Clint is halfway through his box of donuts already, and is working on his second coffee. Anton hasn’t eaten a bite, but he’s on his third coffee. He keeps falling asleep when he blinks. He hasn’t slept in four days.

Anton considers what Clint has said as he takes a long swig of his coffee. He pours more sugar into it. He takes another swig.

“Okay,” He says finally. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Clint asks, gaze shooting up at his young friend. Anton’s not sure exactly how old Clint is, just that he’s older than Natasha and younger than Phil. Anton’s the youngest person he knows, but he doesn’t exactly know a lot of people. Actually, he thinks Clint’s niece might be a few years younger than him, but they’d only met for a few minutes once, several years ago. She might be older than him, now, thanks to the f*cked way he ages. “Anton, he recruited you. Doesn’t that make you suspicious?”

“It made me suspicious even before I knew if he was involved,” Anton says. “I’m not an idiot, Clint. My patents were for robotic arm servos and an improved integrated circuit. There’s no reason for the world’s leading weapons developer to be interested in that, let alone interested enough to replace the lead of R&D.”

“Didn’t you say he’d heard about the suit?” Clint asks after a long pause. “sh*t, he’s got friends in SHIELD. Do you think he knows-?” He glances over his shoulder. The place is mostly empty, but the cashier is staring fixedly at the clock in a way that makes Anton think she’s been eavesdropping.

“Maybe,” Anton says carefully. “C’mon, let’s go to my place, I’ve got something to show you.”

Clint drives like a maniac, but for once, Anton’s glad of it. It keeps him awake, for the most part. He drifts off slightly when they first merge onto the highway, but the way he wakes up, violent and panicked, makes Clint ensure they don’t dip below the speed limit the entire rest of the drive.

“How’ve you been sleeping?” Clint asks once they’ve set up in Anton’s kitchen, a pot of coffee brewing on one counter while Anton pulls espresso shots on another. Luckily, Clint’s housewarming gift had just needed a new seal. It was a travesty, how unwilling people were to put in any effort to fix the things they already had.

Anton levels his friend with a glare. “Every time I close my eyes I think I’m going to forget who I am again,” He says. The espresso machine hisses loudly, spitting steam in his face.

“Up!” A man shouts in Russian, dragging Anton out of his cot, down the corridor out of his cell, into the blinding light of the desert. He pulls a bag over Anton’s head and guides him into the backseat of a car. They drive for hours.

Anton’s hood is removed after a long, confusing walk through a labyrinth of hallways. They’re in a different compound, this one outfitted in cool steel. They’ve deposited him into a cell with a man he’s never seen before. A man, a different one from the one who loaded Anton into the car, but clearly a member of the Ten Rings, gives him a knife.

“Get him to talk,” He says.

“Until I find out how they knew how to f*ck with me, how to make me work for them, I can’t rest,” He says softly. Clint nods sharply. He doesn’t know what it’s like, not like Natasha knows, but he understands how important autonomy has become to Anton. They remain silent until both are clutching mugs of hot coffee, drip for Clint, about five shots of espresso for Anton. He leads Clint down to the workshop.

“Hello, Anton,” A male voice filters down from the speakers Anton’s hidden in the ceiling, making Clint jump slightly. “And guest. How may I help you today?”

“This is YASHA,” Anton explains. “He’s an AI I built, stands for Yet Another Security and Home Assistant. YASHA, bring up project 50208.”

In the center of the room, a pedestal raises from the floor, a suit of armor standing proud atop it. It’s much sleeker than the one he built in Afghanistan, painted a matte black with silvery accents (there had been an issue with fabrication at first, and he’d liked the look too much to fix it in subsequent versions).

Clint takes a long sip of his coffee.

“You realize I’m going to have to report this, right?” He jokes. Clint’s never filed a report in his life.

“While you’re here,” Anton says. “I need a favor. The arc reactor I built in the cave is fine, but it can’t sustain the armor very long. Will you help me swap it out?”

“You sure you don't want Natasha to do it?” Clint eyes the circle of light beneath Anton’s shirt warily. “She has smaller hands than me.”

“You’ll do fine,” Anton says.

A minor cardiac event, a few screams of panic, and a broken mug later, and Anton’s got a new reactor, plus a neat paperweight.

Anton takes the suit for a test run two days later, after Natasha slipped a couple sleeping pills in his coffee while he ranted at her about the efficacy of retro-reflection panels on moving objects. He’s not as mad as he should be. Sure, the nightmares had been unbearable, but Natasha had stayed the entire sixteen hours and helped him prove he still had his memory when he’d finally awoken. She’d also made him shower. Twice.

He takes the suit on a test run to a town near Gulmira, tracking a Ten Rings convoy. He ambushes them in the town and rescues most of the villagers. They’d already shot several of the men before he arrived. He’ll spend a lot of time wondering if he could’ve gotten there faster.

In the trucks, he finds something. Weapons. Not Stark Industries weapons. Hydra tech.

Now he knows how they had known his trigger words.

He makes it back to the states without any fuss, but it’s back in the relative safety of his own workshop that that changes.

“Oh my god,” Pepper says, stopping dead in her tracks. He’s about halfway out of the suit, the robot arms he’d built in college (Butterfingers and Dum-E, bless their circuit boards) ‘helping’ with the process, dropping pieces everywhere. “Are those bullet holes?”

“Only in the armor,” He says, pulling his leg free of the last section of armor and hopping down from the pedestal. He runs about a million different things to say to her through his head. None of the excuses sound believable. He decides on the truth.

It takes three hours and a bottle of very expensive wine (it had come with the house, he hasn’t bothered to go to the store yet) to calm her down, though she protests at drinking at first (“Aren’t you a little young for that?” “It’s only illegal for me to buy it. Besides, I’m only a year off.”).

“So,” She says. They’ve taken to sitting on the plush rug in the living room, couch cushions strewn about them where Clint had tossed them last time he visited. “So, Stane’s been dealing under the table?”

He nods. “I could use your help,” He says. “He trusts you. You could get the files off his computer.”

“What if he catches me?” She asks.

“He won’t,” He says. “All you have to do is take this,” He holds out a smartphone, one he’d been given during his first week at the company. He’d wiped the spyware off of it in a few minutes. “And stand near his computer for fifteen seconds. My program will do the rest.”

She takes the smartphone and turns it over and over in her hands, thinking.

“I just,” She sighs. “I never liked him, but it’s a little hard to believe he would betray his country like this.”

“People will do anything for money,” He says. She nods sadly.

Three days later, Anton has every file on Stane’s computer. Including something he hadn’t been expecting. Plans for a suit of power armor, based off the one he’d left in ruins in the desert. He drops the phone, with all the files on it, at SHIELD and rushes back to his workshop to collect the armor.

Stane’s waiting for him.

“You’re clever, Anton,” He says, a smile playing around his lips. “Quite clever of you to dismantle all the security in the workshop. But not clever enough. You were so worried about me watching you that you never stopped to ask if I’d extended the same precautions to Miss Potts. It’s remarkably easy to turn a phone into a one-way radio, did you know that?”

Before Anton can cross the room and attack him, Stane’s closed the distance. Before Anton can react, Stane sticks a metal disc to Anton’s arm and every muscle in his body seizes. He drops to the floor like a marionette with its strings cut. Stane kneels beside him.

“Nasty piece of work, that,” He says. “Never made it to production. Something about ethics, I think. The US Government isn’t the biggest fan of paralytics.”

He reaches his hand down, pulls Anton’s shirt up, pulls the arc reactor out his chest. Pain stabs through his body as the shrapnel resumes its descent. Stane inspects the reactor lazily.

“Pity we couldn’t figure out how you did this,” He says. “I was hoping you’d present it to the board, save me some trouble, but I suppose this works, too. It was nice knowing you, Anton.”

He kicks Anton in the stomach as he leaves. The one mercy of this is that it loosens the metal disc. It still takes Anton five full minutes to regain enough control of his body to begin the crawl down the stairs into his workshop.

“YASHA,” He gasps, curling into a ball at the base of the steps. “YASHA, where’s the old reactor?”

“DUM-E is bringing it to you now,” YASHA replies. The little robot zips across the floor, reactor clutched in its claw. It screeches to a halt at Anton’s feet and gently places the reactor in his hand. He takes a moment to pat DUM-E’s wheels affectionately before reinstalling the reactor.

He has to move quickly.

Pepper’s the one who pulls the trigger, in the end. Not literally, he’s fairly certain she’s never even seen a gun before, but she’s the one who bypasses the power dump on the arc reactor fueling the factory, frying Stane in his armor like a lobster in its shell. Anton, still suited, rushes to her.

“Oh thank God,” She weeps, throwing herself into his arms. “I thought I’d killed you too!”

“You can be thankful later,” Anton says. “I’ve got to get you out of here before the cops arrive. And we’ve got to move before my reactor gives out; I’ve got maybe ten minutes left before the armor drains it. Come on.” He holds her tightly and flies them out of the ruined factory.

“Critical power failure in thirty-five seconds,” YASHA says.

“f*ck,” Anton hisses. He makes an emergency landing on the roof of a building a little over a mile from the factory, sets Pepper down gently, steps back, and disengages the armor with extreme prejudice. It clatters into a heap at his feet and he falls to his knees, breathing heavily.

He starts at a hand pressed to his shoulder. Pepper.

“I should be the one comforting you,” He laughs. She helps him to his feet. “Are you okay? Look, no one has to know what you did. I’ll make sure of it.”

She nods, jaw clenched, tears welling in her eyes. He pulls her into a hug and she dissolves into tears.

“Thank you,” He says once the sobs have subsided. “I would be dead if you hadn’t intervened.”

“Mr. Stane is dead,” She murmurs into his shoulder, still holding him painfully tight. “I killed him.”

“Stane was a terrorist, and he would’ve killed you after he was done with me,” He says carefully. “It was self-defense. Like I said, no one has to know.”

“But I know,” She whispers, pulling herself away and wrapping her arms around herself. Her mascara has stained her flush cheeks, making her look not unlike a raccoon. He decides not to mention it. It’s not like it matters, anyway. Plus, he’d learned the hard way that it wasn’t polite to comment on someone’s appearance when Nat had tasered him for telling her she looked like she’d stuck a fork in an electrical socket after a small mishap on a mission. She’d tasered Clint for agreeing.

He wonders what the right thing to say would be, the perfect way to comfort her. He wishes he knew how normal people worked.

SHIELD decides the best course of action is first to leak the evidence of Stane’s double-dealing, and then to convince the board of directors at Stark Industries to make Anton CEO. He’s not sure how they do it, as far as he’s aware he’s not the best candidate to run a company, considering he’s never done it before. And, oh yeah, he’s only twenty, according to his papers. The media lose their minds for a full forty-eight hours before getting distracted by Anton’s decision to close the weapons sector of the company (fully backed by the board, they want to distance themselves from Stane as much as possible to avoid the ire of the military), and then someone leaks the footage of the fight with Stane at the factory, and all of a sudden everyone’s obsessed with the ‘Iron Man’ who took down the former CEO. Anton has to hold a press conference.

He tells them it’s a robot he built to serve as a bodyguard after his imprisonment with the Ten Rings. SHIELD had decided to leak a heavily-censored report of that incident to help explain why Stane had been so obsessed with Anton in the first place. According to this version of things, Anton had been kidnapped on Stane’s personal orders— he’s not sure how much of a fabrication that is, he never got a chance to properly dive into Stane’s files before delivering them to SHIELD— because he’d developed a homing device better than the Jericho missile’s and was planning on selling it to Hammer Industries, Stark Industries’ biggest competitor. As far as he’s concerned, it’s a weak story, and a lot of conspiracy message boards agree, but it’s good enough for most of the world.

He gets a lot of questions about why he feels he has the right to create a heavily armored robot when he insisted on shutting down weapons manufacturing at Stark Industries.

He hates press conferences.

Chapter 3: down, down, down we go

Chapter Text

Being CEO of Stark Industries isn’t so bad, he thinks. Then again, Pepper does most of the heavy lifting. Turns out that the person who’d shadowed the former CEO for five years is better at the job than the fresh-faced college grad with no experience in the field. Shocker!

The main thing he retains control of is the Stark Expo. The board decides shortly after his takeover that it’d be a great way to distract the media from the clusterf*ck with Stane, and while he doesn’t know much about PR, he can’t ignore that it seems to be working. He hasn’t even had a reporter demand he talk about the ‘Iron Man robot’ since the news broke, which is refreshing. Somehow they haven’t figured out he still runs missions for SHIELD on occasion, though the missions are becoming fewer and further between as time passes, until they stop entirely the week after the announcement of the Stark Expo. Coulson won’t tell him why and keeps saying they just think his plate is too full at the moment, and Clint and Nat genuinely don’t know either.

The most recent Stark Expo was the year after Anthony’s disappearance, 1974. It’s hard to slog through the press release videos produced by Howard to advertise it; the man was clearly barely keeping it together, and his heart just isn’t in it as he describes the various pavilions. Anton stops watching the videos pretty quickly.

The biggest change he makes to the Expo is a shift in focus to clean energy, based around the arc reactor and his gradual improvements of the design over the months since his employment began. The board also schedules presentations on new medical equipment he’s designed, lightweight armor they’d insisted upon once they found out about the Iron Man to placate the shareholders (and the military), and about a thousand presentations from other companies.

Thanks to Anton’s house technically being owned by Stark Industries, and not Stane, they had moved to allow him to remain there, for the time being. He’s been working on plans for a new house since the takeover, though. It’s hard to live in a place with such a conflicted personal history attached to it. He hasn’t been spending a lot of time there lately anyway, preferring to work in the Stark Industries labs. He’s moved YASHA, Butterfingers, and Dum-E there and carved himself out an entire wing to himself. He keeps YASHA hooked up to the workshop at the house, though. And the Iron Man suit stays there, he can't trust that someone at the company wouldn't decide to snoop around. None of the other people working in the building seem to want to get to know him, which is fine by him, it gives him more time to work.

When he’s not working, which is rare, he haunts Nat’s apartment. It’s a lovely studio in a high-rise in downtown LA, with great views of the city. They spend a lot of time on the roof of the building smoking, drinking, and talking sh*t about their coworkers, like normal twenty-somethings. His 21^st birthday isn’t for another month now, but they’d agreed to operate by European standards of drinking age. Besides, it’s not like they can really put any moral judgement on law-breaking, especially when it’s not even a felony. Clint joins them sometimes, but his home base is New York, and SHIELD has him off on solo assignments more often than not these days. Strike Team Delta feels like a thing of the past.

It’s probably for the best, given what happened in Budapest.

The 2011 Stark Expo opens on February 1^st, twelve days before Anton’s birthday. Well, he still doesn’t know when his birthday is, but he’s taken to celebrating it on the anniversary of his defection. Natasha’s been a bit luckier, the files that had been recovered from the Red Room after its razing had included a birthdate, April 10^th. They hadn’t bothered to record Anton’s, if they ever knew it at all.

A few days ago, he noticed strange green track marks extending from the cavity that hosts his arc reactor. He’s been running test after test trying to figure out what it is. He’s about to step on stage when he gets a notification from the lab via an app he’d written for his phone that connects him to YASHA.

Palladium poisoning. Unusual, but not altogether that unexpected; while it’s been considered a relatively non-toxic element, it’s also not absorbed very effectively by the human body, and most people aren’t exposed to high enough quantities of it for it to absorb at all, let alone at toxic levels.

Most people don’t have a giant cartridge of it in their chest that has to be replaced every few weeks due to degradation.

The next day the board of directors sends him and Pepper to some race they’re sponsoring a car in. He spends the flight to Monaco trying to work out a suitable replacement for the palladium, then, when that fails, considering his options.

He wonders if he should tell someone, but decides against it. It’s not like they could do anything for him, and he hates the idea of being treated like a terminal patient (even though he is, he reminds himself). There’s no use in worrying the people he cares about, who care about him, when there’s nothing to be done. It’s better, he thinks, if it comes as a surprise.

He’s come to this grim conclusion when Pepper finally wakes from her deep sleep, having taken several Xanax before their departure, claiming severe takeoff anxiety. She rubs her eyes and smiles at him sleepily.

“Sleep well?” He asks, envious. He still doesn’t sleep, when he can avoid it. Natasha’s been drugging him a lot, lately. Watches over him and wakes him when the nightmares force screams from his throat. Goes over a list of touchstone memories with him to make sure he still knows who he is. Still, he mostly sleeps in bursts of two to four hours. He gets full nights of sleep maybe once a week, at best. Less, when SHIELD sends her off to the far corners of the globe.

“No,” She says, still smiling faintly. “But it’s okay.”

He forgets, he thinks, that he’s not the only one with nightmares.

He wants to tell her he understands, but the words seem hollow. His entire life has been a nightmare, and it often feels ridiculous that a brief stint in a cave had been enough to change everything about his ability to live life. She’s lived a more or less normal life, and it makes sense that the night at the factory still haunts her.

“We’ll be landing soon,” He says instead.

He’s not really sure what had come over him when he decided to swap in as the Stark Industries driver, but he’s glad it wasn’t a civilian in the driver’s seat when a maniac storms the racetrack with what look like taser whips hooked up to a rudimentary miniature arc reactor. Somehow, it's the arc reactor that bothers him most. No one should know how to make those, outside of the company, and Stark Industries takes its secrecy seriously.

He avoids a crash with the barest margin of error and bails out of the car just as one of the whips cuts through the chassis. A second later, and he would’ve been dead. He rolls out of the way of another lash and springs to his feet. He looks around desperately, hoping for something he can use as a weapon, or at least defense against the whips. He ducks behind an open car door as the man lashes again, severing it from the hinge.

Car door shield? Good enough, he supposes.

He holds his rudimentary shield by the interior handle and advances on his opponent. The man laughs and strikes his whips around in a flourish not unlike a child playing jump-rope. Anton takes the opening to tackle him and there’s a whirlwind of movement for what feels like eternity. He finally pins the man long enough to rip out the arc reactor, but not without the man biting his arm, through the jumpsuit.

He visits the man in his cell. Ivan Vanko, the cops tell him. In the light of the prison, he realizes that this is the same Ivan who had given him the arc reactor plans, all those years ago.

“I knew it was you,” Ivan laughs. He’s much older than Anton remembers, but clearly the same man. He has the same stringy hair, the same scars on his face. The same prison tattoos, as well as a few new ones. “The little boy I gave the blueprints to. Shame you turned on Russia. You had such promise.”

Anton remembers how bright-eyed he’d been at their first meeting, how eager to please his masters. Meeting Ivan had been a coincidence, a lucky happenstance during one of his first solo missions. Ivan was a trusted friend of the Red Room, and Anton had needed a place to lie low as he planned his infiltration of a government facility. They had talked about their home country, what they owed to it.

“I wasn’t sure that it was you at first,” He continues, rolling his neck as he speaks, the vertebrae popping out of sync. He continues to eye Anton with a mixture of mirth and contempt. “You seemed too young to be the same, but is hard to argue with facts.” He jerks his chin at the soft blue light of the arc reactor. Anton’s hand flutters to cover it unconsciously.

“How did you know how to miniaturize the reactor?” Anton asks, the entire point of his visit. Pepper had told him not to go, but his curiosity had gotten the better of him. It usually did.

Ivan shrugs. “Was easy,” He says. “Once I saw your little, how you say? Pacemaker?”

The press conferences, they’d been televised, hadn’t they? Anton hated the press conferences.

“My father was who invented the reactor,” Ivan adds when Anton moves to leave. “Stark stole from him. I cannot sit by while his company profits from Vanko inventions.”

When Anton sets foot back on American soil he’s greeted with an official summons from the Senate to discuss the incident at the racetrack, so he gets back on the plane, and flies to D.C..

It starts out as a fairly boring debriefing, and then they start calling people to testify. Including ex-intelligence officers. Each of them adds to a damning pile of evidence with their dissection of his actions at the race track, his fighting methods. By the end of the hour, it’s impossible for him to pretend he hasn’t been trained for black ops. They bring in Jasper Sitwell, a SHIELD agent he’s vaguely familiar with.

“Agent Sitwell, is it true that Mr. Romanov used to work for SHIELD?” Senator Stern asks. He’s an unpleasant man, with a constituency in Pennsylvania. Anton doesn’t like Pennsylvania much. He’s been shot there a few too many times to harbor much good will towards the state.

“As the documents submitted to the committee as requested by the subpoena state, yes,” Sitwell answers, shifting uneasily in his seat. “And, as they state, technically Mr. Romanov is still employed by the agency.”

“Mr. Romanov, have your ties to SHIELD influenced your career in any way?” Stern asks.

Anton wonders what SHIELD wants him to say. Technically, he’s not supposed to lie, he is under oath. But technically, his entire life rests upon their good opinion of him and the benefits of his continued existence in the country outweighing the risks. He thinks of the palladium in his blood. Toxicity had been at 25% this morning.

“I don’t know the extent of their influence,” He says cautiously. “But the board of directors seemed to think I was qualified enough to run the company for the time being.”

“Mr. Romanov, given your ties to the intelligence community, how can we trust that you did not leak information pertaining to the Iron Man robot and arc reactor to Ivan Vanko?” The television displaying relevant evidence to the hearing switches to a still taken from the broadcast of the Monaco Grand Prix. Ivan’s strange harness and whip combination on full display. “You have claimed before us on a previous occasion that no-one else is capable of such technology, including presenting your own evidence of Hammer Industries’ failed attempts, but this clearly contradicts your statement.”

“I hardly think that that is equivalent to the Iron Man,” Anton snaps. “I will say, I found it troubling that Vanko had the arc reactor technology, but,” He pulls out his phone and hijacks the screen, switching it to a document he had unearthed from the Stark Industries archive. The board is not going to be happy with him for this, but it’s the best idea he has. “As you can clearly see, the original blueprints for the arc reactor credit not only Howard Stark, but Anton Vanko as well. Ivan’s father. I find it hard to believe that when Vanko was deported he didn’t take a copy of his work with him. Ivan has proven himself a remarkable inventor, no matter how you view the ethics of his inventions, and I do not find it difficult to believe that he came to similar conclusions as I did regarding the miniaturization of the reactor.”

After the Senate hearing, Anton figures it’s best to make his exit from Stark Industries. The board agrees, though they insist he stay on in the position Stane had originally hired him for after he steps down as CEO. Pepper is promoted after he convinces them that she had been doing most of the work, anyway. He wonders if he should’ve asked her before convincing the board. She accepts their offer, but he can’t help but feel it might have meant more if it had come from him.

The next time he sees her is in his lab a few days later to finalize some paperwork.

“I’ve been trying to get ahold of you for days, Mr. Romanov,” She says frigidly, stalking in unannounced. The click of her heels on the tile floor echoes around Anton’s skull. He’d had a late night, and then another, and then drunk himself into a stupor just to get a few hours of sleep, and it’s all adding up to a migraine he can’t seem to outrun. He doesn’t look up from his work.

“Sorry, Miss Potts,” He says. If she’s going to act like they haven’t become friends in the past few months, he’ll follow suit. Maybe it’ll make his death easier on her if she thinks he hates her. If she hates him. “I’ve been busy.”

A second set of footsteps makes him look up.

Natasha.

“This is my assistant, Miss-“ Pepper begins.

“Natalie Rushman,” Natasha says, extending a hand. Anton looks at it, but doesn’t take it. SHIELD must have decided Pepper needed a bodyguard, then. Good. She probably did.

“I need you to sign this,” Pepper says, taking a clipboard from Natasha and tossing it in front of Anton. “Do that, and I’m out of your hair. Transfer of power is over, and you don’t have to see me again.”

He scribbles his signature on the line and hands the clipboard to Natasha.

“I’m glad you accepted the position,” He says to Pepper, though he glances at Natasha too, hoping she gets the message. He means it equally to both of them, he can’t think of anyone he’d rather have in either of their jobs. “Will I see you at the party next week?”

“Party?” Pepper repeats, dumbfounded. “Since when do you throw parties?”

“My PR manager says it’ll help distract from the Senate hearings, maybe get some heat off of you,” He says. “I’ll be twenty-one. There’s an open bar.”

“I’ll see if I can’t fit it in my schedule,” She says.

Anton’s phone buzzes, flashing a reminder to check his blood tox levels, and he snatches it up before anyone can see. Natasha eyes him warily, and he wonders how well he’s managed it.

“What’s that about?” Pepper asks. “That cousin of yours texting again?”

“No, just a reminder I set for myself,” He says. Natasha hides a smile well, but he knows her well enough to recognize the mirth in her eyes. She’d ruined many a board meeting by blowing his phone up with all sorts of nonsense. Usually walls of emojis interspersed with actual messages, just buried enough that he has to dig through the endless rows of sunglass-wearing smileys to get mission details, or to find out what kind of cereal she wants him to pick up on his way over. “Just an experiment that finished. If you’ll excuse me?”

Pepper nods, a tight smile on her face as she makes her leave, Natasha in tow.

He waits five minutes before checking his tox levels.

40%.

The week leading up to his party is sort of a blur. He stops going to Natasha’s apartment, stops responding to her texts. Clint texts him to say she’s annoyed, but figures he’s just trying to maintain her cover. Anton doesn’t reply to this either. Phil calls a few times, but he never leaves a voicemail, and Anton never picks up. He keeps telling himself it’ll be easier for them when he goes if they don’t like him anymore.

He spends his days in the lab, and Happy drives him to his house at night. He doesn’t sleep much. He drinks. A lot. The palladium track-marks are starting to creep up his chest, towards his neck. He doesn’t know how much longer he’ll be able to hide them. He drinks more. The only time his head quiets long enough to let him sleep is when he drinks, and even then it’s only for a few hours at a time. He’s still better-rested than he has been in months.

Thanks to the serum he’d been given at graduation, it takes a lot more to get him drunk than the normal person, and by the time the day of the party rolls around he’s made a significant dent in the bar that had come with the house. Good thing he can finally buy his own booze, he guesses. Not that he needs to for the party, the catering company is supplying the bar.

A few months ago he’d been looking forward to the freedom of being able to buy his own liquor, not having to rely on the stock in his house (mostly fancy wine that he can’t differentiate from two-buck-chuck and vintage scotch) and Natasha’s preference (plain vodka in the highest proof she can legally buy, she has the same issues as him with inebriation). Now that he’s dying, it doesn’t matter quite as much that he never got to try gin, or whiskey.

He drags himself off the couch that morning and stumbles into a hot shower. After Afghanistan, the cold had returned to his bones. His skin is bright pink by the time he towels off, but he still feels the chill.

He shaves his patchy stubble. He brushes his teeth. He flosses. He finally looks in the mirror.

His hair is fairly short, some trendy cut his PR manager had directed him towards that makes him hard to distinguish from the constant stream of celebrities that grace magazine covers. The bags under his eyes seem a permanent staple these days, though he thinks they’re a little paler than normal. It could be his imagination, or a result of the cool-toned lighting in the bathroom. His skin is pale from spending so much time indoors, not to mention the weak winter sun, even here in California.

The palladium tracks have spiderwebbed their way up to his collar-bone, just reaching the very base of his neck. Nothing a dress shirt won’t cover for the night, but he wonders if he’ll have to start covering it with makeup. If he even can. He wishes he could ask Natasha about brands of concealer, she’s always been a dab hand at covering up injuries. Or faking them, if the mission required it. He remembers a mission in Santa Fe where she’d improvised a fake gash in her arm to get a med evac to cause a distraction while he corrupted a hard drive.

He leaves the bathroom. He gets dressed for the party. The catering company arrives and the rest of his afternoon is consumed by the minutia of party planning.

He’s two vodka sodas in when guests start arriving. Four when Pepper shows up, a beautifully wrapped gift in hand.

“Natalie helped me pick it out,” She says. He opens it, unsure of what to expect. It’s a wristwatch, matte black with silver accents, like the Iron Man armor. The inside plate is engraved with something, but it’s too dark at the party to make it out. Frankly, if it weren’t for his enhanced vision, he likely wouldn’t have noticed it at all. “I wanted to get you something more personal, but,” She sips a martini (extra dry, extra olives). “You’re not exactly the personal type, are you?”

“What do you mean?” He flashes her a smile that he hopes is convincing as he slides the watch onto his wrist. He supposes their friendship has been mostly based on their working relationship, with a few personal anecdotes from her. He knows she likes modern art, she’s allergic to strawberries, and she’s a vegetarian. She knows he has a cousin, and she’s met Clint, thanks to the older man’s habit of tailing Anton around while he’s in town. He struggles to think what else she knows about him, besides being one of the few people who knows Iron Man isn’t just a robot.

She scoffs. “Oh, don’t pretend! You didn’t even tell me that you and Natalie went to school together,” She shakes her head at him. He wonders what Natasha’s angle is, telling Pepper that. She could get pulled from that assignment if the wrong people find out about their connection, no matter how obfuscated the truth is. “I can’t stay long, but, happy birthday, Anton.” She sets her empty glass on a passing waiter’s tray and presses a kiss to Anton’s cheek before disappearing into the crowd.

He drinks seven more vodka sodas before the end of the night. He doesn’t remember what happens after eleven o’clock, but when he wakes up the next morning, the house is pretty trashed. Like, hole in the wall of the living room, trashed. The door to his workshop is ajar, and his stomach plummets. He scrambles down the stairs to find the place in disarray, though thankfully, the Iron Man armor remains locked in its case.

Unfortunately, the more heavily armed prototype he’s been tinkering with is missing.

“YASHA, what happened last night?” He croaks, hardly daring to breathe.

“Lieutenant-Colonel Rhodes was sent to confiscate the Iron Man armor on orders from the US Senate,” YASHA reports. “You fought. He took the prototype, thinking it was the original. I thought it best to conceal it for the time being.”

Anton sinks to the floor in disbelief. His tox screen reminder beeps. He pulls the testing device out of his suit jacket pocket.

89%.

He flies the Iron Man armor to Randy’s Donuts. Why not? Everything else in his life is out of control, and it’s not as if he’s going to be around much longer to deal with it. Just to be safe, though, he keeps the faceplate closed when he orders. He’s just about to flip it open as he sits in the center of the donut sign when a familiar voice floats towards him.

“Sir! Please exit the donut!”

SHIELD clears out the shop in less than a minute flat, allowing Anton to remove the armor and sit in a vinyl booth across from Nick Fury, director of SHIELD. And Natasha. She looks ready to kill him.

“Palladium poisoning,” Fury clicks his tongue at him, eyeing the sickly green-grey pattern that’s creeping above Anton’s collar. Natasha stabs him with something that looks almost like an epi-pen, and something of the slight feverishness he’s been feeling for the past few days subsides. He glares at her. She glares back. “You could have mentioned you were dying, you know.”

“There’s nothing to be done,” Anton says flatly, redirecting his attention to Fury. “I ran through every element, every combination of every element. I’m a dead man walking. You know, I could do without getting injected with mystery substances. I’m pretty sure I put that in my rider when I defected.”

“It’s Lithium Dioxide,” Fury says. “It’ll manage your symptoms until you figure out a permanent fix. What happened with Rhodes, last night?”

Anton sighs and takes a sip of coffee. He wonders if Fury will yell at him if he takes out a cigarette. Probably. He doesn’t take out a cigarette. He takes another sip of coffee.

“I don’t remember, I had a few drinks,” He says, avoiding Nat’s gaze more than before. “My security system says he confiscated a prototype of the Iron Man suit I’ve been working on, on orders from the Senate.”

“Makes sense that they’d send Rhodes,” Natasha interjects. “He’s Stark Industries’ military liaison. I’m surprised you’ve never worked with him. He’s met with Ms. Potts four times in the past week.”

“Yeah, she usually handles that sort of thing,” He says. He glances at Nat. Are his eyes deceiving him, or does she look like she’s been crying? He’s never seen her cry. It unsettles him. “Look, what do you want from me? I already told you there’s nothing anyone can do to fix what’s wrong with me, so why are you trying to drag it out? I’m sure it’ll be much easier to sort this whole mess out after I’m dead, anyway.”

Nat stands up suddenly and storms out of the shop, clipping his shoulder as she passes. He stares after her, speechless.

“That’s part of why I’m here, Agent Romanov,” Fury says. “You haven’t tried every element.”

Fury doesn’t say anything more until he’s escorted Anton back to his house, no matter how many questions the young man asks. He should know better, the director is notoriously cagey, but he’s at the end of his rope, and he hates not knowing what he’s missed. He prides himself in being thorough. You can’t pride yourself in that when someone notices your failures.

When they arrive the house is swarming with SHIELD agents, a cleaning crew sweeping up the rubble and a security detail sweeping the perimeter. Fury sits on the couch. Anton flops down on the plush rug next to it, staring up at the ceiling.

“I was friends with Howard Stark,” Fury begins. “Or as close to friends as you could get with him. He trusted me enough to talk about his inventions, though, and he told me he had big plans for the arc reactor. Never finished it before his death.”

“It was finished,” Anton corrects him. “All I did was scale it down, tweak a few things. Remarkable piece of technology, for something created in the 70’s.”

Fury laughs at this. “No, no, see, he thought he was really onto something with the reactor, but he knew it was just a step in the right direction, not the final product. Said he was going to make nuclear reactors look like a triple-A battery,” He chuckles to himself. “Howard wanted to change the world, and Vanko just wanted to get rich. They fought a lot, and then Vanko got caught trying to sell Stark Industries trade secrets to the KGB, so they sent him back to Russia. When he couldn’t make the reactor work for them, they blacklisted him. Spent the rest of his life drinking away what little money he still had.”

Anton doesn’t mention that he remembers. One of the few bits of his history SHIELD isn’t intimately familiar with is what happened to him before the Red Room. To be fair, he’s not exactly all that familiar with it himself, he was only a toddler at the time, after all. But he remembers Anton Vanko. He wonders if Ivan remembers, though of course, he wouldn’t know it was Anton. It would’ve been around ’74, that was when his file in the Red Room began.

“After his son vanished, the reactor took a bit of a backseat,” Fury continues. “He always said he’d started it for Anthony to finish, that he’d hoped his son would do better than him.” He gives Anton a meaningful look, though he can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be conveying. Did Fury know Anton had killed Anthony?

“Tragic, but I don’t see how this has anything to do with my little problem,” Anton taps the reactor. “What did you mean, I hadn’t tried every element?”

Two agents set a crate on his coffee table and Fury stands up. Anton scrambles to his feet.

“I’ve got a 2-o’clock,” Fury says, glancing at a watch on his wrist. “You’ve got this, right?” He gestures to the crate.

“Got what?” Anton snaps. “I don’t understand-“

“Natasha will remain as Miss Potts’ PA for the time being with her cover intact,” Fury turns away and begins walking to the door. Once he reaches the entryway, he turns back. “Agent Coulson will be keeping an eye on you for me.”

And with that, he’s gone.

Coulson walks through the door a few minutes later.

“Would’ve been nice to get a heads-up from you about the whole death’s door thing,” He says calmly. Anton stares at him. “People care about you, Anton. We would’ve liked to know.”

“I didn’t want to stress you out,” He looks away, ashamed. “I thought it would be easier if it came as a surprise.”

“Not to enable you, but it would’ve been harder to figure it out if you hadn’t started spiraling,” Coulson says. “Tends to raise flags when you start pushing your family away.”

“I’m sorry,” He says.

“I’m not the one you need to apologize to,” Phil says it softly, but it hurts just as bad as if he had screamed it.

The crate turns out to be full of Howard Stark’s stuff. Blueprints for prototypes of the arc reactor, newspaper clippings about Vanko’s deportation, a couple reels of film, and a journal. Anton loads the films into a projector pointed at the wall of his workshop and lets them play while he flips through the notebook, which turns out to be full of calculations and notes on the arc reactor project. The films are outtakes from advertisem*nts for the ’74 expo.

It’s hard to watch, frankly. Half the takes look like Stark had been hitting the bottle pretty hard beforehand— Anton wants a drink just watching him, but he needs to stay focused— and the rest of them are just hard to watch in the way that bad acting is always hard to watch. The notes end halfway through the journal, the rest of the pages infuriatingly blank. He throws it across the room in frustration.

“Tony,” The recording of Stark says. Anton’s heart tightens as he turns to the film. “Tony, when I get you back, I- all of this is for you, buddy. All of my work, it’s all been for you to have something to build off of. I built all of this for you,” He gestures to the model of the Stark Expo space in Flushing Meadows, New York. Anton’s seen the model before. He’d studied it fairly extensively when working on the new Expo, and he’s pretty sure it’s collecting dust in the corner of Pepper’s new office. The new Expo space is built in the same place, with the same layout. It had felt like the right thing to do, at the time. “Someday you’ll realize it means a lot more than just a bunch of people’s inventions. You’re a bright little boy, Tony, I know you’ll grow up to surpass me.”

The camera cuts and pans around the model, zooming in on various parts of it while Howard continues to talk.

“I’m limited by what we can do with the technology we have now,” His attention returns to Stark’s monologue. “But one day you’ll figure this out, and you’ll change the world. Just remember, what is and always will be my greatest creation, is you.”

It’s easier to sneak out of the house the next day than he had been expecting. He just waits until Phil sits down to watch Super Nanny, and slips out the back. He takes a motorcycle from the garage, but waits to start it until he’s wheeled it about a quarter of a mile from the house. He drives to Stark Industries. He stops on the way there to grab breakfast for Pepper and Natasha from a quaint diner just off the 101. He checks his tox levels. 65%. He checks it again. 66%. So, the Lithium Dioxide had flushed his system a little bit, but it isn’t even slowing the reabsorption. He checks his watch.

He remembers the inscription he’d noticed during the party.

He takes off the watch.

for my favorite pain in the neck

He wonders which of the women had written that.

Pepper doesn’t object to him taking the model, but she does chew him out for losing the suit to Rhodes and tells him that she’s been trying to get it back all morning. She says some of the paperwork seems a bit fishy, there might be a chance to get it back. She says there’s been a lot of questions about who Iron Man is, now that the military knows it isn’t a robot, but that it’s being kept quiet, for now. She says Justin Hammer has a presentation at the Expo tomorrow. He’s suspicious of that, Hammer isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, but that’s sort of on the backburner for now.

“Wheels up in twenty-five minutes,” Natasha says to Pepper, giving Anton a dirty glare when she enters the office. “And there’s a reporter from Vanity Fair who wants a quick interview, if you don’t mind. I’ve left you her number.”

“Thank you, Miss Rushman,” Pepper says. Happy enters the room and taps his watch. Pepper stands and makes for the door. She turns back to Anton. “Try to stay out of trouble, Anton?”

He gives her a thumbs-up and she rolls her eyes before leaving. She takes the box of scrambled eggs and fruit that he’d given her.

“You’re going to be in trouble for breaking lockdown,” Natasha says once they’re alone, her voice even and detached from emotion. She doesn’t look at him, instead sorting a pile of paperwork on Pepper’s desk. “Fury was very clear that you weren’t supposed to leave the house.”

“I had some stuff to collect,” He gestures at the model. “Speaking of, I’m going to need a car to crate this stuff back, does Stark Industries have any loaners-?”

“As head of R&D you have full access to the fleet,” She snaps. “Which you might know if you actually talked to anybody.”

“Nat-“ He begins. Stops. Considers what he needs to say. She looks up at him. “I brought you breakfast.” He hands her a takeout box. Pancakes with blueberry syrup. Extra syrup on the side, like she always asks for.

She takes the box.

Having a lot of money has its perks, like getting the materials for an atomic supercollider delivered in less than ten hours.

“Natasha told me you broke perimeter,” Phil says, examining the supercollider with deep suspicion. Anton hasn’t seen him for hours, he’d been missing from the living room when he got back. “You realize this part isn’t level?”

“Ancient history, where have you been?” Anton scoffs, glancing around the workshop for something he hasn’t already employed in leveling the tubing. His eyes land on a half-deconstructed shield of some kind, with a tacky star in the center.

“There’s been some trouble in New Mexico, Fury wants me to relocate,” Phil says. “Do you know what that is?” He points to the tacky star shield in Anton’s hands.

“Yeah, it’s exactly what I need to make this damn thing work,” He says. “New Mexico, huh? Isn’t that where Clint is? He okay?”

“Clint’s fine,” Phil says, a pained expression on his face as Anton crams the shield underneath the irregular coil. Anton steps back, then places a level on top to check his work. Perfect. “The situation down there is just getting a little… strange. I’ll be back before you know it.”

Phil turns to leave, and Anton calls after him, “Hey, if I- Look, I’m smart, I think I know what I’m doing here, but if I don’t-“ He swallows thickly. “I don't know if what I'm doing here is going to pan out. I don't have much of a margin for error. If I don’t make it, I just want to say-“

“You’ll make it,” Phil says it with such conviction that for a half a moment, Anton almost believes it too. “Tell me when I get back.”

Ivan calls from a blocked number after the new reactor core is synthesized. Ivan had supposedly died last week in the prison in Monaco. YASHA traces the call to New York City, but that’s the most specific it gets before the line disconnects.

Pepper’s in New York City. Natasha, too.

Hammer’s presentation starts in forty minutes. Ivan had said something about payback in forty minutes.

Anton takes the suit.

Ivan had made for Hammer what the world believed the Iron Man armor was— a fleet of battle-ready robots. Rhodes shows up to the presentation too, in his stolen armor, and Hammer boasts that they’ll be manufacturing more within the calendar year. Hammer claims that Rhodes’ suit is 100% Hammer Industries technology. From the looks of it, all Hammer had done to it is slap some of his own weaponry on it. Anton’s pretty sure all that’s accomplished is making it less useful.

Ivan hijacks the presentation, the robots, Rhodes’ suit. Anton forces a restart on Rhodes’ suit and establishes a comm link.

“Colonel Rhodes, glad to have you with us,” He says, and nods at the man. Rhodes stands up shakily. “I’m guessing we have about two minutes before we have Hammer’s entire fleet on top of us. You ready to fight?”

“Rich of you to ask that, Romanov,” Rhodes says. “When you’re halfway across the country.”

Anton flips the faceplate of his suit open. Even with the mask lowered over Rhodes’ face, he looks taken aback. He lowers the faceplate again.

“What, you thought only your version was manned?” He laughs. He considers the possible ramifications of what he’s just revealed. “Hey, don’t tell anybody, alright? It’s bad enough they got their mitts on that suit.”

“We get out of here alive, I’ll keep any damn secrets you want,” Rhodes says, shaking his head.

There’s a hell of a lot to sort out in the aftermath.

Ivan’s dead (it’s not the first time Anton’s had to kill an old mentor, but it is the first time he’s chosen to do it), Hammer’s in jail, and Rhodes returned the suit (“More trouble than it’s worth, keeping that around” “Aren’t your superiors going to be pissed at you?” “Maybe. But this shouldn’t be in the wrong hands.” “How do you know I’m the right hands?” “I don’t, but I owe you. Don’t make me regret that decision.”). Half of Flushing Meadows is in ruins thanks to the remote detonation of the Hammer-bots after Ivan’s death. Anton takes the funds he’s set aside for building his new house and donates every red cent to the rebuilding efforts.

Stark Industries wants him to oversee a new building in Manhattan, which will include residential areas in the top half. SHIELD’s putting a lot of funding into it, he wonders why they’re so interested in ultra-secure housing with Stark Industries, why they aren’t just building their own facility.

He’s demoted from head of R&D, and that’s more than fine by him. He’s not been the best about keeping up with paperwork, or management duties. Technically he’s only a consultant for Stark Industries now, and SHIELD has bumped him back up to active duty. They make him take a psychological evaluation for the first time since Afghanistan.

They demote him from active duty and assign him an on-staff therapist. Nat says they’ll put him back on missions when he stops drinking. His therapist says they'll let him come back once he's "better". He trusts Nat's judgement more.

“So the nightmares are fine, but they draw the line at self-medication?” He asks bitterly. They’re sitting on the roof of her new apartment building in New York. She’d decided to move with him; Clint’s already based here, and SHIELD’s HQ is downtown, so it makes sense. She’s still working on her exit from Stark Industries, though. She spends a lot of time in LA.

She takes a drag off a cigarette before answering. She passes the cigarette to him. There’s no vodka, tonight. She threw it all out before she moved.

“There’s a difference between medication and poison,” She says. He doesn’t point out the hypocrisy of her saying this when they’ve already worked their way through half a pack of Marlboros tonight. “And the therapy is supposed to help the nightmares.”

“It's just-” He takes a drag. The smoke burns the back of his throat in a comforting way. He exhales. “I was worse off before I started drinking, and they never cared about that.”

“You weren’t visibly impaired before,” She says uncomfortably. “If you hadn’t been good at hiding how exhausted you were, I don’t think they would’ve cleared you for duty.”

He mulls this over the rest of the night.

Anton’s been sober for two months, five days, thirteen hours, and seven minutes. He sleeps for two hours, fifteen minutes. Natasha has stopped helping him sleep. She looks uncomfortable when he asks, so he doesn’t push it.

In the morning, they break into Clint’s apartment and make him breakfast.

Chapter 4: ALIENS in NEW YORK

Chapter Text

“Barton’s been compromised,” The words take an eternity to push past the fog in his brain, longer to mean anything to him. He’s lying on the floor of his lab in the newly-finished Stark Tower, cellphone pressed to his ear. If he concentrates, he can remember that the caller ID had said Natasha.

If he concentrates, he can’t remember why he’s lying on the floor.

“Are you there?”

“Maybe,” He says. He lifts a hand above his face and stares at it like it might give him answers. There’s a reminder sharpied on the back of it: buy more coffee. “What happened?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Something to do with the tesseract,” She says. “Have you been drinking?”

“No,” He says. It’s the truth, he thinks. Not that he feels terribly clear-headed, either way. “Send me the details. I’ll be there.”

She hangs up. He sets the phone screen-down on his chest. It clinks against the arc reactor.

“YASHA, status report,” He says.

“You had been awake for fifty-four hours and decided to go to sleep two hours and seven minutes ago,” YASHA says. A wireframe display hovers above Anton’s face, showing him his vitals. He doesn’t like what it tells him. He waves a hand through it and it disappears. “I recommend sleeping for at least another-“

“Can’t,” He says, sitting up. The phone clatters to the floor. He ignores it and stands. Stretches. Curses his past self for sleeping in such an uncomfortable place. But now that he’s awake and his brain has had time to adjust, there’s a horrible energy coursing through his veins. If he stands still for too long he starts feeling queasy. “What time is it?”

The sun is up, filtering through the windows, but he can’t tell if it’s early morning or dusk.

“Six-oh-five AM,” YASHA says. “You have a call from SHIELD, shall I patch it through?”

“Go ahead,” Anton says.

A heads-up-display pops up over one of the work tables with a video-feed of Phil.

“Anton, I assume you’ve heard about Clint,” He says, ignoring casual niceties in favor of getting to the point. Anton appreciates this about him, small talk has never been his thing, and honestly he just doesn’t get it. He wishes everyone would just cut to the point. “We’re sending transport to you now. Be on the helipad in ten minutes, and bring the suit.”

“Is this an op, or am I just being put under surveillance so whatever happened to him doesn’t happen to me?” Anton asks.

“You’ve been cleared for duty, temporarily,” Phil says. He doesn’t look like he agrees with the decision, studying Anton’s face carefully. Looking for what, he doesn't know. “If we send you an energy signature, can you track it?”

“Jesus, Phil, who do you take me for?” He laughs.

It’s kind of weird, meeting the guy he spent the better part of a year following around the globe. It’s also weird when said following was what had put him in the path of the people who kidnapped him and stole every last shred of his autonomy. Which he had only escaped thanks to the incredibly lucky placement of a memento, the kindness of a stranger, and sheer spite.

It’s also really f*cking weird meeting a long-dead super soldier and cultural icon. He’s got a weird love/hate relationship with the concept of Captain America, thanks to years of being told that everything American was pure evil, and then rebelling against that upbringing in every way possible, eventually landing on the concept that America sucks, actually, but so does Russia, and America at the very least didn’t kidnap and brainwash him, so.

Politics are a goddamn nightmare.

“I’ve been following your work,” Banner says. The two of them have been delegated to a lab to track down this guy, Loki, who had brainwashed Clint, and some scientist named Selvig. It’s a little cruel, but Anton can’t find much energy to care about Selvig. “It’s pretty impressive, the stuff that isn’t censored beyond recognition.”

“Yeah, SHIELD likes protecting its secrets,” Anton says bitterly. He’s already worked out an algorithm to trace spikes in gamma radiation matching the signature of the readings taken from the compromised lab before its explosion, all there’s left to do is wait. He figures talking to Banner is as good a way as any to stay awake until the results come back. “Like why they called both of us in to track this thing when just one of us would’ve been perfectly capable.”

“Oh, I’m sure they want me for something else,” Banner says darkly.

“Right, the green guy,” Anton says. Banner smiles uncomfortably. “Don’t bother worrying about my reaction, Dr. Banner. If I were scared of the Hulk, I would’ve been out of a job years ago.”

“What do you mean?” Banner asks.

“SHIELD’s been keeping tabs on you a long time,” Anton says. Banner doesn’t look entirely comforted by this, but Anton’s too damn tired to care about feelings, or state secrets. “I was your tail for a while. Until Afghanistan.”

“Jesus,” Banner says, suddenly pale. “I- that’s what you were doing there? I read about what happened, after it leaked. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t,” Anton sighs. He crosses the room, picks up a few odds and ends and starts tinkering. He speaks again a few minutes later, when he has something approaching a listening device in his hands. He wonders what he’ll use it for. He becomes painfully aware that Banner is still waiting for him to finish his thought. “I knew the risks associated with joining SHIELD. The benefits outweighed them. I would’ve wound up in a similar situation eventually, I’m sure.”

“You’re just a kid,” Banner spits. For a half a moment, his skin tinges green. It’s gone before Anton can consider how to respond to it.

Was I ever just a kid? He wonders.

The algorithm tracks Loki to a museum in Stuttgart, Germany. They send Nat and Steve, the once-frozen captain. They want Anton to stay behind like a good boy. He sneaks out in the suit, starting a fire in a trash can on the main deck for a distraction, hoping it’ll keep them from noticing the blip on the radar when he takes off.

He arrives in time to see Steve facing off with Loki. Nat’s trying to give air support in the quinjet, but they’re fighting in too close of quarters to give her a clear shot. He calculates his options.

Ah, f*ck it, he’s used a distraction once already today, what’s another one?

He taps the comms frequency.

“Heads up, Natka,” He says before taking control of the ship’s speaker. He picks the loudest song on his iPod. Something screechy, with a lot of electric guitar and a sweet bass line.

It distracts Loki long enough for Steve to knock him back, and he takes the opening to zip in and tase the… what was he again? Alien? God? Whatever he is, he isn’t immune to a good old-fashioned electric shock.

Once everyone’s loaded into the quinjet and the bay doors are closed, he takes off the suit and collapses it into a more portable form. He doesn’t like spending more time in the suit than necessary, the climate-control that keeps him from sweating his ass off also has the nasty side effect of reminding him of cryo, especially when combined with the claustrophobia of the suit in general.

“Any sign of him?” He asks Nat. She shakes her head.

“Fury know you’re here?” She asks, barely hiding a smile, though there’s something fragile about it.

“If he doesn’t by now, the World Security Council might want to think about replacing him,” He jokes. Then, more quietly, “We’ll find him.”

“I know,” She says sharply. Her copilot pretends not to have heard their exchange.

Anton sits down across the cargo hold from where Loki’s been seated and scrubs a hand across his face.

“I thought the Iron Man was a robot,” Steve says, eyeing Anton warily.

“It’s easier to get away with having a robo-bodyguard than it is to have a weaponized set of armor at your disposal, weirdly,” Anton says by way of explanation.

Steve co*cks an eyebrow at this, but Anton’s spared from elaborating when Loki’s brother decides it’s a grand time for a family reunion.

“Hey, sparky,” Anton calls, ripping his parachute off and aiming his gun steadily. “SHIELD might not be too happy that you just stole their prisoner.”

“I apologize, but Loki must come with me. He’s to face justice on Asgard,” The man says, holding his unoccupied hand up placatingly while keeping his hammer trained on Loki. “Send my regards to the Son of Coul.”

“I’m afraid I can’t let you do that,” Anton adjusts his grip slightly, not wanting to shoot, but keeping his finger near the trigger in case. “He’s not going anywhere without taking us to the Tesseract and undoing his damages first.”

“He does not have the Tesseract with him?” The hammer-wielding man seems genuinely surprised, and his steady hand falters for a moment.

“No, and he compromised one of ours,” Anton spits. He takes a breath. He can’t afford to lose his temper, not here, not now, not when a stranger is literally holding the key to Clint’s safety. “We need him to tell us where he put him, and where the cube is. You can come with us, make sure he’s secured, or whatever, but you can’t take him yet.”

“No, I cannot,” The man agrees. “I need the Tesseract to bring him home. Let us see if Midgardian cages can hold him.”

Anton lowers his gun and presses the signal in his pocket, calling the jet to his location. Steve catches up to them just as they’re loading Thor and Loki onto the jet.

“I expected more of a fight,” Steve says once they’re all situated. “Your file makes it sound like you’re a bit of a hot head.”

“You have one little downward spiral a full year ago, and all of a sudden it’s the only thing anyone can talk about,” Anton grumbles, sitting down heavily on the floor of the jet, his back against a wall. The seats are too comfortable and he’s too tired for him not to fall asleep, and he needs to stay alert, at least until they get Loki into custody. It’s basic logic, and it has nothing to do with the fact that he’s terrified of closing his eyes, or the fact that he’s out of his mind worrying about Clint.

If Anton had reacted so negatively to a little mind control after spending most of his life under such circ*mstances, how is Clint going to react? Will his friend ever be the same again? Anton wouldn’t wish what he lives with on his worst enemy.

Well, maybe he would. He does f*ckin’ hate the Red Room, and there were a few techs who escaped when the place was leveled. He regrets not going on that mission, but he and Natasha had been specifically barred from it. Something about it being too emotionally volatile. Maybe it would’ve been, but he feels he deserves a little payback at this point. He and Natasha have talked about it a few times, back when they still drank together.

“And you’re not in the middle of another one?” Steve asks, eyeing Anton’s ‘I need a six-month vacation twice a year’ t-shirt. Clint had bought it for him. Clint had bought him most of his terrible T-shirts, and Anton cherishes every last one of them, but it makes it hard for people to take him seriously. The obnoxiously orange Hawaiian shirt he’s wearing over it can’t be helping, either.

“It’s called fashion, Rogers, look it up,” Anton says, eyes already drifting shut.

No one mentions it when he snaps back awake a few minutes later, breathing heavily. He wonders if it would be better if they did.

He’s finally worn himself out enough to sleep (in a chair in the lab, facing the door, back to a corner) when something hits the helicarrier. Later, he’ll find out he somehow slept through one hell of an argument with his new teammates, but for right now, all he knows is that there’s a hole in the floor and one of the engines is down. He and Steve head for it.

He puts on the suit. They get the engine back up and running. Anton nearly gets turned into a smoothie. He really wishes he could avoid a near-death experience for more than a few hours at a time.

They walk back to the main deck, teasing each other and laughing. Fury intercepts them. He’s not laughing.

“Agent Coulson is dead,” He says. He hands Steve a set of trading cards with his likeness on them. There’s blood on the edges. “Thor and Banner are missing.”

“Natasha?” Anton asks, barely daring to breathe.

“She recovered Agent Barton. They’re in-“ Fury begins, but Anton takes off down the halls, heart pounding in his chest.

He feels sick, sicker than usual. He can’t stop to process any of what’s happened, he has to focus on Nat and Clint and-

He doesn’t know how he finds the room they’ve holed themselves up in. He bursts in, and then falters. What can he even say?

“Hey, now we’ve all had someone mess with our brains!” Clint says brightly. His smile is a little fragile around the edges, and both he and Nat have tear-tracks down their cheeks, but they’re alive.

And Phil is dead.

“We have to stop Loki,” Anton says. Did he say it? The words seem distant and far-removed.

Nat closes the gap between them and steers him over to Clint’s bedside, and then she does something he never would’ve expected in a million years.

She pulls the two of them into a crushing hug. It’s warm, and comforting, and the three of them are shaking and crying and it’s gross, how wet it is, but it soothes the terrible gaping hole in his chest. Well, one of them, anyway.

They release each other from the hug slowly, none of them really wanting to let go, but knowing they have work to do. Clint stares at Anton for a long moment.

“Are you wearing the shirt I gave you in Budapest?” He asks.

Anton’s always wanted to go to space.

He tries to remind himself of this while he watches the missile vaporize the alien fleet. While his suit powers down. While he plummets towards the portal at terminal velocity, passing out before he crosses the threshold back into the air above Manhattan.

His last thought as he stares up at the stars is wondering if it would be so bad to die, up here.

He wakes up in a crater in the pavement, the faceplate of his suit ripped off (man, that’s going to be annoying to replace later), his fellow Avengers standing over him, their faces pale and drawn.

“Hey, do you think I can get a punch on my near-death experiences rewards card?” He jokes. He’s not totally convinced he’s alive, yet, but he’s pretty sure the afterlife wouldn’t be this weird. Then again, what does he know about theology? “Three more and I get a free soda.”

Steve’s the first to laugh. It’s a beautiful sound, and his eyes crinkle charmingly and god dammit. Anton is not getting a crush on the pinnacle of American military culture. He’s got enough to deal with as it is.

Natasha punches him fondly, not that he can feel it through the armor, but. Clint just shakes his head, a dopey smile on his tired face. The Hulk lets out an excited roar. Even Thor looks glad for Anton’s survival, though the two of them haven’t had much of a chance to chat since their first meeting.

A wave of nausea rolls over him and he’s barely out of the suit when he vomits on the asphalt. It splashes on his ratty tennis shoes. They were the first pair of shoes he bought after defecting, and the soles are wearing thin around the ball of the foot, and there’s holes in the canvas, and he’s pretty sure there’s at least one blood stain on them, but. It splashes on his ratty tennis shoes.

He’s sort of aware of a hand on his back, and of distant, tinny voices talking to him, but he’s a little busy with emptying the contents of his stomach (coffee, a protein bar, half a ham sandwich Phil had forced him to eat when he arrived on the helicarrier yesterday morning) to focus on what they’re saying. Finally, once all that’s left is bile (and a little of that comes up, too), and his breathing steadies, he can afford to let in the world around him.

Clint and Natasha are kneeling in front of him, just far enough away to avoid the pool of vomit between them. Steve stands to the side awkwardly, fiddling with his shield like he doesn’t know what else to do. Thor’s staring up at Stark Tower with a distant expression. The Hulk is nowhere in sight. Anton turns his head, blinking away the wetness in his eyes.

“You okay?” Banner asks. He’s not wearing a shirt, and his pants are barely on. He’s bunched the waist up in the hand that isn’t on Anton’s back. “We’ll get you some food once we finish this.”

Anton nods, incapable of speech for the time being. His limbs are shaking and the fog in his brain is back. He sees stars when he blinks. Alien ships exploding in a wave of nuclear fireworks.

Banner helps Anton to his feet and slings one arm over his shoulder as the six of them make their way to the tower, which is already crawling with SHIELD agents. Jesus, not ten minutes ago (how long had it actually been? Anton doesn’t know. He forgot to put his watch on after his last shower), the World Security Council had doomed Manhattan to nuclear fallout, and now the place is teeming with life again. Still teeming with life? He knows not many people had been evacuated, he’d helped direct some of them into the subway tunnels. He hopes they’re okay.

They take the elevator up to his floor.

Why had Loki chosen his floor to open a portal on? dickhe*d.

It’s a whirlwind after the elevator. At some point Bruce leads him to the couch and they sit together in silence while everyone else deals with… everything. Eventually the others trickle in and flop down next to them.

“Hey,” Natasha snaps at a passing junior agent, who jumps out of his skin. “Get us some water, huh?” He nods and scurries off for a few minutes, then returns with six bottles of water. Natasha passes them out.

Anton holds his in his hands, staring vacantly at it. He wonders when the punishment is going to come for his weakness. His public weakness in front of his team, half of which don’t even respect him because of how young he looks. A pit gnaws at his insides. His stomach growls.

“What should we do for lunch?” Clint asks. He’s sat down next to Anton, Natasha on his other side. She doesn’t look thrilled, being so close to Bruce, but she doesn’t say anything about it, either.

Anton continues to stare at the bottle. He thinks he might throw up again.

“I know a good shawarma place in midtown,” Clint continues. “Think they’ll be open?”

“Probably not,” Natasha says. She leans around Clint and snatches the bottle from Anton’s hands, opens it, and hands it back to him. She keeps the cap.

He takes a sip. He feels a little better, maybe.

“What is ‘shawarma’?” Thor asks.

“Middle Eastern sandwich,” Steve says. Anton’s surprised, he’d figured a guy straight out of the great depression would only be familiar with boiled cabbage and beans on toast. Or whatever they ate back then. He hadn’t exactly gotten the best history classes growing up. “It’s like a gyro.”

“What’s a ‘gyro’?” Thor’s frown deepens. “I’m afraid I am not the most familiar with Midgardian cuisine.”

“Greek sandwich,” Steve says. “It’s uh, roasted meat on pita bread with veggies and yogurt sauce.”

“Pita’s a type of unleavened bread,” Clint supplies helpfully.

The conversation feels to bizarre to be real, right now. They just saved the world from an alien invasion, and they’re trying to tell another alien about Middle Eastern street food.

“I can call for delivery,” Clint offers, then looks around at the destruction. There had barely been enough space on the couches between the debris and dust for them all to sit. Thor had had to move a chunk of drywall off his seat. “Or we can go out.”

Anton takes another sip of water.

“Let’s get breakfast for dinner,” He says. They all turn to him, varying degrees of worry evident on their faces. Nat and Clint hide it best, but he knows they’re the most on edge. Nat hasn’t taken her hand off Clint’s arm since they sat down, except to open Anton’s water for him.

“Okay, breakfast for dinner,” Bruce says cheerfully. “Anyone know a good place?”

By the time they’ve sat down and ordered enough food to feed a small army (honestly unsurprising, most of their little team either aren’t human or have been modified past recognition. Now that he thinks about it, Clint might be the only true human at the table), Anton’s starting to feel a lot better. Almost back to normal. Well, his normal. Which is to say, he feels like he’s been hit by a truck, sleep is calling his name with its sweet siren’s song, and it hurts to blink. Emotionally as well as physically.

“Hey,” Nat begins. Her eyes dart around the table. Steve’s asleep with his face propped up in one hand, and Clint’s well on his way there, but the rest of them are all wide-awake and buzzing with nervous energy. It makes sense, the four of them are the only ones with any battle experience as far as Anton’s aware, and he never sleeps anyway, and Nat. Hm. He’s not sure why she’s still so awake. She speaks again, this time in Russian. “Toshenka, how are you holding up?”

“I’ll be fine,” He replies, matching the language. He doesn’t think Bruce knows it, but he watches the scientist warily just in case. If he does speak Russian, he doesn’t show it. Anton plows on. “I’ve been worse. How are you?”

“That isn’t saying much,” She kicks him under the table, a fond smile on her face. The smile fades quickly. “I don’t know. I’m worried about him,” She tilts her head towards Clint almost imperceptibly. “I don’t know how well I shook off the control, and, well.”

“He doesn’t have the experience that we do,” He finishes. He takes a sip of his coffee. She sips her iced tea. “What are we going to do without Phil?”

She laughs, but it’s one of those laughs that isn’t so far removed from a sob. “We’ll carry on, somehow,” She says. “We have to.”

“’s rude to talk about people in front of them, you know,” Clint murmurs, his eyes still closed where he’s dozing on Nat’s shoulder. He speaks in English, and it catches their teammates attentions. Anton and Nat freeze slightly, waiting with baited breath for the reactions. “I’m fine. We’ll be fine. Sleep now, worry later. Pass me a pancake.”

Natasha drops a pancake into Clint’s open mouth. He eats it without opening his eyes, or really moving all that much at all. It’s kind of disgusting, but fascinating at the same time.

“How long have you three known each other?” Steve asks, having awoken from his nap at some point during the conversation. Anton wonders how much he’s heard. If he understood any of it. He curses himself for forgetting the cardinal rule of foreign language: always assume someone around you can understand what you’re saying. He’d abused how often people forgot that rule a lot, when he worked for the Red Room. And in Afghanistan.

“Anton and I grew up together,” Nat says. “We were in the same school, you could say. We met Clint when we came to SHIELD about seven years ago. And… and Phil.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says. It doesn’t sound as hollow as it does from other people, like he knows how stupid the words are, but he’s saying them anyway because there’s no alternative. “He was a good man.”

“Yeah,” Anton says. “He was.”

It’s been three days since the Battle of New York, as the press is calling it, and two days since Thor flew off with Loki back to their home planet or dimension or whatever it is. Bruce somehow slips away (though Anton knows Fury’s keeping tabs on him, Fury’s always keeping tabs on him) without saying goodbye once Loki and Thor and the Tesseract are no more than an imprint of a flash of light on the inside of their eyelids. Anton sort of wishes he had been able to offer the man a job at Stark Industries, though he’s not exactly sure what he could’ve done that wouldn’t be twisted by the corporation into some nasty little device. He’s starting to get sick of it.

He quits.

They let him take his things, and then he goes to the helicarrier to collect a few bits and pieces he’d left in the lab there. He’s about to make his exit when he hears hushed voices from outside— Clint and Natasha.

“-Hydra weapons?!” Clint hisses. “Nat, come on, he needs to know!”

“He’ll assume the worst,” She whispers back, all calm and collected. “And he’ll lose every last bit of faith he still has in SHIELD. Did you know he quit Stark Industries this morning? He’ll be a leaf in the wind before we know it.”

“It’s not like SHIELD is keeping him active-duty anyway,” Clint replies. “I mean, if they’re bumping me down-“

“I can’t lose more people, Barton,” She says. The argument is over. She’s won with that dirty little jab. Clint cares too much about them to keep fighting, it’s one of his biggest faults. Or it would be, if you ascribed to the Red Room’s point of view. Anton’s trying not to, and it’s getting easier every day, but there’s only so much you can do to fight against your upbringing.

The doors open and he continues to stuff things in a plastic tub some junior agent had handed him. He’d packed up the last of his things within thirty seconds of getting in the lab, and at this point he’s just seeing how much he can get away with stealing. He’s got a decent savings account, but now that he doesn’t have access to Stark Industries’ labs, he’ll be needing a lot of new material for any projects he comes up with. He’s already working on a better version of Nat’s widow bites, and a few new trick arrowheads for Clint. Just last night he’d scribbled down an idea for a return mechanism for Steve’s shield; he’d noticed a few times during the battle that the old captain had had to chase it down after throwing it like a frisbee.

“Toshenka,” Nat says warmly, like the conversation outside hadn’t happened.

“I’m quitting,” He says. It’s true, he’d handed in his resignation to Fury personally. The director had warned him to keep his nose clean or he’d be back at SHIELD before he knew it. This time back in the cells. He’s not under any illusions that they won’t be sending someone to watch him.

“In that case,” Clint says, and has to duck when Nat swings a fist at him. “He deserves to know!”

“Know what?” Anton asks. Hydra weapons. What had Clint meant by Hydra weapons?

Nat storms out of the lab, her fire-red hair swirling around her head like a bloody halo.

Clint waits for the doors to close before speaking again.

“I just found out,” He starts. “The thing Steve was so pissed about when- When I took out the engine,” He swallows, looks away, a pained expression on his face.

“Loki made you,” Anton says firmly. He crosses the distance between them and places a hand on Clint’s shoulder. The older man looks up, pleading, anguished. “Clint, jesus, if anyone understands-“

“I know,” Clint says miserably. He shakes Anton’s hand off and steps away. Runs a hand through his short blond hair. He paces around the room for a few minutes before speaking again. “Steve was pissed because Fury’s been using the Tesseract to recreate Hydra weapons, and they had a stash of the old ones in the vault. On this.” He gestures to the helicarrier around them vaguely.

“Where did they get them?” The words are out of his mouth before he can stop them, and his heart is pounding so hard in his chest that he thinks it’s a wonder no one else can hear it.

“I don’t know,” Clint says. “Nat doesn’t either. She didn’t want to tell you because, well, you know.”

“Yeah,” Anton spits. “I know.”

Every day for the past two and a half years he’s wondered how the Ten Rings had gotten their hands on Hydra tech, how they had gotten the information they needed to dig around in his skull and activate his programming. He doesn’t want to think it could be SHIELD’s fault, but what other shadowy organization does he know of with such a direct link to Hydra? To him?

“I need a ride,” He says.

Chapter 5: the past always comes back to haunt you

Chapter Text

It’s been a long and lonely two years since New York. He’d sold most of his possessions and emptied his bank account a week after quitting SHIELD and set off to Europe, determined to hunt down the few Red Room agents they hadn’t already dealt with. At first he’d thought he needed to find out who the leak was in SHIELD— clearly, if they had Hydra weapons, they had to have been the ones to give the Ten Rings the information they needed to utilize his programming, but he’d realized during his flight from New York to London that that wasn’t the only way things could’ve shook out. Whatever the truth is, he’s been searching for it since. Not that it’s gotten him anywhere.

He hasn’t spoken to anyone since the day he quit, not even Natasha. Sometimes, when he’s sitting on the roof of a building, watching the sun rise, he wonders if he made the right decision. She had only been trying to protect him. But after everything they’d been through, and she didn’t trust him not to overreact to the news that SHIELD had a connection, tenuous as it was, to Hydra? Well, considering his reaction, maybe she hadn’t been so far off the mark. He’s still annoyed though, and it’s been so long that he doesn’t know how to go about making amends. He’s never been the best at apologizing, but he’s never had much reason to practice, either. The people he wrongs tend not to be the ones he cares about the opinion of, and more often than not find themselves facing the muzzle of his gun.

The guilt starts to eat at him more and more as the anniversary of the battle draws closer, and without fully registering it, he finds himself tracking down Natasha (and Steve; oddly enough, he’s living not far from her) and booking a plane ticket to D.C.. It’s a risk being so close to SHIELD HQ when he’s spent the past twenty-three months running around half the world, participating in less-than-legal activities and hunting down ex-KGB operatives, but he can’t stand it anymore, and he doesn’t trust phones. It’s unsettling, how the entire world carries a tracking device in their pocket, and how they pay for the privilege. Maybe he’s just paranoid, but it’s for good reason. Does it count as paranoid when the threat is real? He’ll have to look that up later.

Once he’s in D.C. the doubt starts to eclipse the guilt, and he spends several days trying to track Clint down instead, figuring he would be more receptive to reconciliation, soft bastard that he is, but no dice. He must be on a pretty intense mission if even Anton can’t track him down, but such is the life of a spy. Instead, he breaks into Steve’s apartment one night.

Except, someone else is there, too. There’s loud music playing from an old turntable in a corner of the living room, some old wartime number that’s almost too much of a cliché to really be a record Steve owns. He can’t be sure that the intruder doesn’t notice him before he finds a hiding place of his own, but the guy doesn’t call him out, at least.

Steve gets home not soon after Anton’s arrival and strikes up a weird, stilted conversation with the intruder, who turns out to be Director Fury. Fury says something about his wife kicking him out and needing a place to crash, something about just the two of them knowing about his ‘wife’.

Three shots cut through the wall and Anton springs out of his hiding place, gun in hand. Fury says something to Steve, too quiet for Anton to hear. Steve stares at him for a half of a moment, and then they’re both breaking through the window and sprinting after the sniper. Steve goes through the building, Anton climbs it. They reach the sniper at the same time.

Anton watches in horror when a silver hand shoots out to catch Steve’s shield, a feat no one has ever managed, according to Anton’s excessive review of videos of Steve fighting (at first it had been to work out the design on that shield-return mechanism he’d been thinking about, and then it had sort of devolved into a twisted way of keeping himself company on long, quiet nights). It’s hard to see the sniper’s face in the dark, not that it matters, half of it is covered by a mask. Even so, Anton would be able to identify him blind. The silver arm is a nice giveaway, but you don’t follow a man around your entire childhood without becoming at least a little familiar with how to identify him.

Yasha jumps off the roof after throwing Steve’s shield back, and the two of them rush to the edge to see where he’s gone. There’s no sign he was ever there, there never is.

“What were you doing in my apartment?” Steve asks.

“I wanted to say hi,” Anton says. He holsters the gun. “Why was Fury in your apartment?”

Steve looks nervous. “We’d better get him to a hospital,” He says instead.

Anton doesn’t go in. There’s too many SHIELD agents swarming around and he’s lucky enough as it is that they haven’t found out he’s back in town. And there’s a lot to think about, now that he knows Yasha is running around D.C.. Wherever Yasha is, Hydra is never far behind, even when he was with the Red Room there were always at least three Hydra agents on staff at all times.

He wonders if Yasha had recognized him, if he’ll report Anton’s presence to his handlers, and how long it will take for Hydra to be breathing down his neck. It’s bad enough he’s been seen with Steve, but if they figure out who he is he’ll have a target on his back the size of Long Island. They don’t take kindly to people who know any of their secrets, let alone as many as Anton does, and he doesn’t have SHIELD’s protection anymore. He wonders if that was ever enough, or if Hydra had just decided he wasn’t worth the trouble. He’d never spoken to anyone about their involvement in the Red Room, and as far as he’s aware, most people think Hydra died with Johann Schmidt. Or in the years after the war, when Peggy Carter and the Howling Commandos set about burning down every last nest they could find.

He wonders if they’ll send Yasha after him. They might, they have a penchant for the dramatics, but he’s not sure he’s made himself enough of an issue to warrant the use of their precious Asset.

If he had stayed with the Red Room, would he have become another of their assets? They were always having trouble with Yasha because he’d been an adult when they got their claws in him, would he have replaced his mentor?

He tails Steve back to SHIELD HQ, and he’s glad for it when the guy leaps out of a glass building and gets chased down by a sleek new quinjet model. It’s nice, except for the fact that it’s currently trying to fill his friend with enough holes to make swiss cheese jealous. Steve somehow takes the damn thing down, but not without wrecking the motorbike he’d stolen from the garage.

Anton wishes he still had the Iron Man armor, but he’d had to scrap it when he left. It’s a little hard to vanish off the face of the earth when you use such an identifiable weapon. In any case, he pulls up alongside Steve on a bike of his own, mask and goggles on to try to avoid being identified.

“Need a ride?” He asks. Steve grins and shakes his head a little, but hops on.

Steve directs him first to his apartment, despite Anton’s protests that that’d be the first place SHIELD will look for him, changes into civvies, and then directs him to the hospital from earlier. The hospital Fury had died in, according to a light bit of hacking Anton had managed while waiting at HQ. Steve leads him down the hallways to a vending machine, and stares in shock at an empty slot.

Natasha cracks her bubblegum behind them and they whirl around to stare at her. Steve grabs her by the arm and pushes her into an empty room. Anton glances down the hallway in either direction before following them.

Steve’s practically frothing at the mouth about some thing or another that he’d stashed in the vending machine. Anton’s not paying too much attention, a little more focused on securing the room. They won’t have long. Between Steve’s stunt at HQ (The STRIKE team had turned on him after a meeting with Alexander Pierce, apparently) and Anton’s appearance on the bridge, he knows they’ll be on high alert. He wonders if he did the right thing, giving Steve a ride. He’s sure they don’t know exactly who he is, given that he’s fitted the arc reactor with a plastic cover, but between his mask and the way his hair has grown out over the years… Well, if someone decided to accuse him of being the Winter Soldier, he couldn’t be too surprised. And there’s no way that would smooth things over for Steve.

“I know who killed Fury,” Nat says. Anton meets her eyes over Steve’s shoulder. “Anton does too.”

Steve lets her go and turns to Anton. “Why didn’t you say anything?” He asks.

“He’s a ghost story,” Anton says uncomfortably. Natasha nods, encouraging this version of the truth. “Most people in intelligence don’t even believe he exists.”

“Those that do call him the Winter Soldier,” Natasha continues. “He’s supposedly killed over two dozen people in the last five decades.”

Supposedly, Anton had been with him for at least five of them.

She tells him a story about an engineer in Odessa. Anton doesn’t know how true the story is, but the scar is real. She shows it to them, a knot of tissue just above her hip.

“Well, let’s find out what this ghost wants,” Steve says eventually.

“We have nine minutes before SHIELD gets here,” Nat says, plugging the drive into one of the dozens of laptops in the Apple store. They had argued over which of them would open it. Steve had been on Anton’s side, knowing he’d worked with computers before, but they’d settled it the old-fashioned way.

They’d flipped a coin.

“There’s some kind of AI rewriting the code,” Nat says a few moments later. “Anton, can you-?”

He pushes her aside gently and taps at the keys for a few horrible moments.

“Whoever wrote this is even better than me,” He laughs quietly. There’s no humor in his voice. “I can try and figure out where the code’s coming from, but that’s it.”

“Can I help you guys with anything?” A helpful Apple employee swoops in, all phony smiles and minimum-wage dread.

“Oh, no, my fiancé and I were just looking at some honeymoon destinations,” Nat says, squeezing Steve’s shoulders.

“Right, we’re getting married,” Steve says, shooting Anton a panicked look.

“My baby brother here’s better with computers than us, you know how teens are” Nat laughs. “He’s handling all the details, we’re just here to pick.”

Anton shoots her a glare, baby brother? Teens? Is he really still that juvenile looking? He gets back to work tracing the program. The employee wanders off moments before he gets a location: Wheaton, New Jersey.

“Know it?” He asks Steve, who’s frowning at the display.

“I used to,” Steve says. He rips the drive from the USB port. “C’mon, we need to go.”

“Meet me on the second floor of the parking garage outside Macy’s,” Anton says, swiping the drive from Steve’s palm. He looks ready to protest, but Nat’s already dragging him away.

They leave the store separately. Nat and Steve go right, Anton goes left. There’s at least one tac team prowling the mall, but they all seem focused on Nat and Steve. He considers making a distraction, but he knows Nat. He trusts her to get Steve out safe, and even if he didn’t trust her to follow his instructions, he’s got the drive. It’s not the best security, but he knows she hates not knowing things, and the drive hasn’t given up all its secrets just yet.

“Where did Captain America learn to steal a car?” Nat teases. She’d called shotgun and Anton hadn’t really cared enough to contest it. He’d been planning on getting some shut-eye in the backseat, but it had proved a fruitless endeavor.

“Nazi Germany,” Steve says. “And we’re borrowing. Take your feet off the dash.”

“Alright, I have a question for you, which you do not have to answer,” She says. She’s rattling on like Anton does when he’s nervous. He cracks open an eye. From what he can see of her, she looks nervous. “Though if you don’t, you kind of are answering it-“

“What?” Steve asks exasperatedly.

“Was that your first kiss since 1945?” Nat teases. Ah. So that had been part of their distraction. So that was why Steve had been so pink around the ears when they met in the garage.

Anton can’t help but feel a little jealous of Nat. He’d worked past his little crush months ago, but that doesn’t change the fact that Steve is damn easy on the eyes and one of the kindest people Anton’s ever met. The last piece of mail he’d received before leaving the country had been a letter from Steve, apologizing for Phil’s death and wishing him the best in his new career path. It was also the only actual handwritten letter he’s ever received, but he hadn’t had the heart to tell Rogers everyone just emailed or texted these days.

He misses most of the rest of the banter, caught up in the fact that Phil’s been dead and gone two years now. He doesn’t like this train of thought. He sits up.

“The truth is a matter of circ*mstance,” Nat’s saying. “It’s not all things to all people all the time. Neither am I.”

Anton lets out a little snort at this, it’s the understatement of the year. There’s no one in the world who knows Nat like he does, and even then he knows she has secrets. Like Odessa. Like whatever she’s been up to the past two years, though he’s not exactly one to talk. Trust is a two-way street, and it’s hard to build it when you vanish without a word.

“That’s a tough way to live,” Steve says, glancing at Anton in the rearview mirror.

“It’s a good way not to die, though,” Nat says. She doesn’t look at Anton.

“You know, it’s kinda hard to trust someone when you don’t know who that person really is,” Steve says, still looking at Anton, though he glances back to Natasha when he finishes saying it.

“Who do you want me to be?” Natasha asks, a coy smile on her face.

“How about a friend?” Steve says resignedly.

“There’s a chance you went into the wrong business, Rogers,” Anton says.

They pull up to the gates of Camp Lehigh at dusk. It doesn’t look like much, the gates are just rusted chain-link and the paint is peeling off the guardhouse.

“Files came from these coordinates,” Anton says, slamming the car door shut behind him.

“So did I,” Steve says.

They scale the chain-link easily. Anton’s a little disappointed in the lack of security, there’s not even any barbed wire at the top. The empty army camp is creepy at night, with all its empty buildings and overgrown grass. It reminds Anton of the ruins of the Red Room. He’d visited them, last February. It had been almost a full decade since his defection and its fall, and he had wanted to mark the occasion somehow. He’d been surprised it hadn’t turned into an ambush; if he were the KGB, he would’ve set up something. But from what he’s read in the files he’s pilfered during his adventures, the rest of the KGB has either tried to sweep the Red Room under the carpet or never knew about it in the first place. He thinks it's a sign you might have too many secrets if your secret agency has a secret agency inside it.

They’re not there twenty minutes before Steve notices that one of the munitions buildings is too close to the barracks. It’s kind of impressive that he even bothered to learn such regulations. Anton can’t think of any practical application, outside of this specific circ*mstance. He wonders if other people decide what’s worth learning by practical application, or if they just absorb information where they can.

He supposes he knows a lot more about Galaga than is necessary for survival, so who is he to judge? Man, sometimes he really misses those late nights at the arcade, looking for something to do while his peers all drank themselves sick. College hadn’t been the most social of times for him.

The munitions building turns out to be the rotted old corpse of an early SHIELD base. There’s a wall with pictures of the founders: Peggy Carter, Chester Philips, and Howard Stark.

“You look an awful lot like him,” Steve says, gesturing to Stark’s photo. “Or you would, if you got a haircut.” He smiles, letting Anton know he’s just teasing.

“I’ve been a little busy for haircuts,” Anton says, brushing the offending mane behind his ear. He catches Natasha eyeing him appraisingly out of the corner of his vision, and wonders if she’s made the connection to Yasha. Years ago, they’d gotten fairly drunk and he’d told her he’d always wanted to grow his hair out like his old mentor. He hadn’t done it intentionally, though, and it’s starting to bite him in the ass.

They find a bookshelf with a gust of wind coming from behind it and Steve forces it away from the wall to reveal a hidden elevator. Anton uses a program on his phone (well, not really a phone. In fact, the major difference between it and your run-of-the-mill smartphone is that it doesn’t work as a phone. Plus all his fun little apps that would get taken off the app store by homeland security in a heartbeat) to reveal the keycode, and they make their descent.

“This can’t be the data point, this technology is ancient,” Natasha says, running her hand through a film of dust on the cold-war era control board. Anton’s eyes catch on a USB port just as hers do. She extends a hand to him. He places the drive in her outstretched palm. She plugs it in.

The computer whirrs to life around them.

“Shall we play a game?” Natasha grins, turning to Anton and Steve. “It’s from-“

“War Games, yeah, I know,” Steve says. “I saw it.”

A face appears in the screen, obscured and distorted as it is by the ASCII console, and a horrible, familiar voice comes out of the speakers.

“Rogers, Steven. Born 1918,” It says. The camera atop the screen turns to Natasha. “Romanov, Natalia Alianovna. Born… 1984.”

The camera turns to Anton.

“Romanov, Anton Antonovich. Born 1990, or is it 1970? My, my, it’s so hard to tell with all these different files,” The voice laughs.

“Some kind of recording,” Natasha breathes.

“I am no recording, fraulein,” The voice says. “I may not be the man I was when the captain took me prisoner in 1945, but I am.”

Another screen flickers on, this one displaying a black and white mugshot of a cruel looking man with co*ke-bottle glasses.

“Zola,” Anton whispers.

There are machines on either side of Anton’s hospital bed, and they’re all beeping asynchronously. Each blip echoes around his skull and pings off his nerves. He’s been in the medical wing of the compound for a week now, he thinks. It’s hard to keep track of time here. His mouth feels like it’s filled with cotton, and there’s a harsh plastic tube down his throat.

His arms ache and burn, like he’d overextended himself in training again. He hasn’t been to training in a while.

There’s a CRT monitor next to his bed and it flickers to life when he opens his eyes.

“Good,” Zola says, the strange version of his face contorting into something like a smile. “I knew you were stronger than they said you were. The other subjects, not so much. You will not disappoint me like them, will you?”

All he remembers between that moment and his next stint out of cryo is how much he’d wished the screaming would stop. He can’t remember who had been screaming, but his throat had been sore when they unfroze him.

When he comes to, the three of them are surrounded by rubble and fire.

“We need to move,” Steve says. Natasha’s in his arms. There are quinjets flying towards them, search beams on high. Anton nods and gets to his feet. They run for it.

They don’t talk during the drive back to D.C.. They don’t talk, except to bring Anton up to speed on what he’d missed after blacking out, until they arrive on the doorstep of a guy Anton’s never met before, looking like they’ve been dragged through literal hell.

For whatever reason, he lets them in and shows them to a guest room with a bathroom and introduces himself as Sam Wilson. Anton decides he likes Sam Wilson. He’s either going to sell them out, or he’s their only friend in the world right now. He hopes it’s the latter, depressing as it is.

“You get cleaned up,” Natasha says to Steve. He looks ready to argue with her, but seems to think better of it, glancing back at Anton. He shuts the door behind him. Natasha wheels around, murder on her face. “Where have you been? It’s been two years and I don’t hear a word from you, and then everything goes to sh*t, and Fury’s dead, and-“ She takes a deep breath, steadying herself.

“I’m sorry,” He says it clumsily, the syllables unfamiliar in his mouth. He’s apologized to other people, sure, but he’s never meant it this much. He’s never said it to her before. She stares at him, shocked. “I was trying to find answers about Afghanistan, and I was mad at you for treating me like a kid, and it was just easier to be on my own.”

She punches him, hard enough that he falls to the floor.

He looks up at her, clutching his cheek. A trickle of blood brushes his fingertips.

“You’re such an idiot,” She hisses through clenched teeth. Something flickers across her face; guilt, maybe? “I was trying to protect you.”

“I know,” He stands slowly, grimacing as his joints click and pop as he moves. Repeated soft tissue injuries leave their mark, no matter how quickly you heal from them. Honestly, the healing speed has probably f*cked him over in the long run, leaving less time to re-set bones or move ligaments back into place.

Steve opens the bathroom door and looks around wildly. “I heard a thud,” He says.

“It’s fine,” Natasha snaps. He frowns, but closes the door, leaving them alone again.

“You never asked if I wanted your protection,” Anton says. “I wanted a friend, Nat. Someone I could trust.”

The ice in her eyes thaws a little, her clenched jaw relaxes slightly, and she looks away.

“After everything?” She spits. “After we defected, after we worked together, after all that, you couldn’t figure out if you could trust me?”

He doesn’t say anything. There’s no version of the truth that will make her happy, and he’s so, so tired of lying.

“We were all we had, Toshenka,” She says sadly. “What happened to us?”

“You started taking SHIELD’s side over mine,” He says. “You stopped being my friend and started acting like my handler.”

Steve comes out of the bathroom, looking much cleaner, though his undershirt is still a bit ashy. He looks tired, and still concerned after the commotion.

“How did you know Zola?” He points an accusing finger at Anton. “And why did he say there was more than one file on you?”

Anton raises an eyebrow at Natasha. She shakes her head almost imperceptibly.

“It’s not only my story to tell,” Anton says carefully, looking back at Steve. “If it were, I wouldn’t hesitate to tell it.”

Steve turns on Natasha, an expectant look on his face.

“The school Anton and I went to was a training hub for KGB assassins,” She says. “Trained from childhood. We were experiments, Zola was the scientist who oversaw procedures.”

“So you knew about Hydra?” Steve asks. “Is that why you joined SHIELD, just a department transfer?”

“We didn’t know Hydra was in SHIELD,” She says, making a face. “We thought we were joining the good guys, I swear.”

“And the files?” He turns back to Anton.

Anton shrugs. “SHIELD had to give me a whole new identity when we joined so they could ship me off to MIT for a few years. They didn’t want a kid on their payroll, but I couldn’t pass for an adult, and I was too smart to shove in a high school,” He frowns. “I didn’t know they’d found out my real birthday, though. Phil promised he’d tell me if they ever did, but. I guess it’s hard to do that when you’re dead.”

Steve sits down heavily on the end of the guest bed.

“The experiments, they kept you from aging?” He asks.

“No, that was mostly getting shoved in a freezer tube for years at a time,” Anton says. He keeps his voice disaffected and tries to distance himself from the words. If he doesn't think too hard about it, he can explain without shutting down. If he doesn’t think about the cold, and the claustrophobia. If he doesn’t let the terror claw its way out of his throat. “I was a little insubordinate, and they didn’t like it much.”

“He was in and out more times than I care to put a number to, probably more before I even arrived. I only ever got put in cryo twice,” Natasha says. “Once when I bit a teacher, and once when an outbreak of pneumonia hit the school. They put everyone they could in cryo for that.”

“They left me out,” Anton says. He remembers how sick he’d gotten. It’s the only time he’s been sick in his life. “Zola wanted to test something, I think.”

Steve looks like he might be sick himself.

Sam appears in the doorway.

“I made breakfast,” He says. “If you people eat that sort of thing.”

Anton volunteers to take Sam to get his wings. Steve protests at first, but Anton points out he is the only one of them who’s been breaking in and out of government facilities without being noticed for the past two years. Besides, he really wants a closer look at the Falcon wings.

It’s on the car ride back that Sam finally tries to get to know him.

“So,” He says, feet on the dashboard of a ‘borrowed’ sedan. He’s only looking a little worse for wear after their infiltration, a few scrapes on his face from the brambles around the storage building. Anton had been surprised he hadn’t had to drug any guards during their escapades, Sam was a natural at stealth. “How’d you meet Steve? You’re not another of his jogging buddies, are you?”

Anton gives him a confused look. “No, I used to work for SHIELD,” He says.

“Used to?” Sam arches an eyebrow.

“I needed a career change,” Anton says vaguely. “It didn’t stick.”

Sam laughs at that, dimples forming at the edge of his bright smile. “I’ll say,” He chuckles, shaking his head. “So besides breaking into top-secret government facilities, how do you spend your time?”

“Engineering, programming,” Anton struggles to think of anything else. “I ran a company for a few months, but they figured out I was bad at it pretty quick.”

“Right, that’s where I know you from,” Sam snaps his fingers. “You made the Iron Man robot, right? Didn’t you used to have some glowing thing in your chest?”

Anton taps the plastic cover of the arc reactor through his shirt. “I had to cover it up, too identifiable,” He says. He’d used duct tape at first, but the adhesive had made him itch and it sort of… accumulated smell after a few days. He’d broken into a university somewhere in Norway and 3D printed a cover not long after this discovery. “And it was armor, actually. I took it apart for scrap after New York. Too expensive to keep it working, and too identifiable.”

“Y’know, I was pretty surprised when they let you keep the thing after that thing with Hammer Industries,” Sam says. “And the senate hearings.”

“You and me both,” Anton chuckles. “I always thought it must’ve had something to do with SHIELD having my back, but I never thought about it too hard. Figured it was probably better if I didn’t know what they wanted me to have it for.”

He should’ve known it had been too easy, kidnapping Sitwell. He should’ve known Hydra would track them easily once they were out in the open, D.C. is one of the most heavily surveilled cities in the world, and it doesn’t hurt that damn near everyone carries an easily hacked camera in their pocket these days.

He can’t help but notice that the mask he uses to hide his face looks uncomfortably close to the mask Yasha wears. The muzzle. It makes an unfortunate amount of sense, given that he’d stolen it from the husk of a former Hydra cell in, what was it? Dublin?

Natasha follows Steve when he falls off the bridge, Yasha follows her, as do most of his backup team. Sam takes out one of the stragglers and Anton makes sure to grab one of his sidearms before he falls off the rail.

“Trade you,” Sam says, tossing Anton the rifle. Anton tosses him the handgun and tries to line up a clear shot at the men below. Sam takes out one, Steve another, and Anton clears the rest of them. It doesn’t even their odds at all, since he can’t get a clear bead on Yasha, but it helps all the same. There’s only so many bullets you can take, scientific augmentation or not.

“Meet me down there,” Anton calls, already rappelling down one of the ropes their attackers had left, rifle still in hand. He chases after Steve, then runs past him, catching a glimmer of metal in the distance.

He catches up to Natasha at the same time as one of Yasha’s bullets does. He leaves Yasha for Steve to deal with and rushes to her side, already removing his jacket and tearing it to make some kind of bandaging.

“Toshenka,” She chokes through the pain as he fumbles with the jacket. She grabs his arm and he stills. “Protect Steve.”

He hands her the makeshift bandage and stands slowly. Luckily, Yasha seems pretty preoccupied, and he makes use of this to tackle him.

There’s a whirl of activity and Anton can’t quite make heads or tails of what’s going on, just that if he stops moving he’ll be dead, and then all of a sudden he’s dangling by his throat from Yasha’s metal hand and he’s squeezing and his vision is getting spots and-

Steve bashes his shield against Yasha’s head and he lets go, dazed for a few critical seconds. Anton scrambles away, behind a car and catches his breath.

There’s a knife in his side.

He thinks it might be his own knife at first, the handle looks familiar, but upon closer inspection it’s just another of the standard issue knives from the Red Room. Like Anton’s, except this one doesn’t have ‘bury me face-down so the whole world can kiss my ass’ carved into the handle. He weighs his options. He can remove it, and risk cutting something vital, or he can leave it, and risk it cutting something vital when he moves. He considers the number of times he’s been faced with this exact situation, and decides to yank it out.

Holding one hand to his stomach and the knife in the other, he staggers to his feet.

“Bucky?” Steve cries.

Yasha’s mask is off. He looks wild and terrified and more than a little dirty, just the way Anton remembers.

“Who the hell is Bucky?” He asks, taking a step towards Steve and raising a gun.

Sam descends on him, Falcon wings outstretched, and knocks him to the ground. He lands next to Anton, stumbling with the momentum.

Yasha clambers to his feet and aims the gun again. A projectile of some kind roars past Steve’s shoulder and Anton glances back to see Natasha, panting heavily and holding a grenade launcher, the makeshift bandage tied around her shoulder.

When the smoke clears, Yasha is nowhere to be seen, and half a dozen unmarked patrol cars scream to a halt on all sides.

The four of them are loaded into the back of an armored truck and fitted with sturdy handcuffs, the kind that even the Hulk wouldn’t be able to break through. Anton thinks back to the first time SHIELD had cuffed him and wonders when they’d learned their lesson.

There are two guards in the back with them, both wearing full tac-gear and clearly armed. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, between him and Natasha, but the bonds are secure and both of them are in the process of slowly bleeding out. Anton a little quicker than her, judging by the spread of wetness on his black muscle shirt. He muses vaguely that he’ll probably get one hell of an infection from all the grime on it. It wasn’t the shirt he’d been wearing at Camp Lehigh— he’d swung by his safehouse on the way back from picking up the Falcon wings and grabbed a change of clothes— but he hasn’t exactly been the biggest stickler of hygiene lately.

He realizes he probably won’t live long enough for an infection to be an issue.

“It was him,” Steve says miserably, staring at the cold steel floor. “He looked right at me, and he didn’t even know me.”

Anton and Natasha exchange a look.

“How’s that even possible, that was, what, seventy years ago?” Sam asks.

“Zola,” Steve spits. “Bucky’s whole unit was captured in ’43, and Zola experimented on him. Whatever he did must’ve kept Bucky alive after the fall. They must’ve found him and-”

“None of that’s your fault, Steve,” Natasha slurs. The blood loss is starting to get to her, too.

“Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky,” Steve says.

Anton can’t bear the anguish on Steve’s face, so he looks away, staring resolutely at a spot on the wall somewhere above Sam’s left shoulder. He wishes he could think of something to say, but words are too hard right now, and he’s sort of out of practice at comforting people.

“We need to get a doctor here,” Sam says to their guards, eyeing the blood on Nat’s jacket, the blood seeping its way through Anton’s shirt. “If we don’t put pressure on those wounds they’re gonna bleed out here in the truck.”

The guard closest to him leans forward, activating some kind of taser-stick. To Anton’s surprise, they turn it on their partner, who slumps in their seat, and then they kick the guy in the head. He falls to the floor, unconscious.

The guard takes off their helmet and grins.

“That thing was squeezing my brain,” Maria Hill, Fury’s second-in-command says. She stares at Sam for a moment. “Who’s this guy?”

Hill takes them to an abandoned water-treatment plant, and to Fury. Who’s somehow still alive.

Anton nearly falls over when Natasha pulls away from him to rush to Fury’s side, but Steve catches him in time.

“Thanks,” He murmurs, and then limps his way to Fury’s bed. He’s too woozy to make much sense of the conversation that follows, but the doctor hooks him up to an IV with blood and scans him with something that looks pretty similar to a tricorder from Star Trek.

“You’re very lucky,” The doctor says. “No internal bleeding. Who took the knife out?”

“I did,” Anton says. The doctor looks almost impressed. “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

He gets stitched up then and there. There’s no anesthetic, but Hill offers him a bottle of something amber, and he takes a swig. Whiskey. Natasha eyes him carefully.

“I’m fine, Natka,” He says. “I know how to enjoy things in moderation.”

She rolls her eyes, but doesn’t say anything.

“Does that help?” Sam asks. “I’ve never tried drinking for pain.”

“No,” Anton says. “But it makes you care less about it. I’m fine, I’ve endured worse.”

“Like the stab wound?” Sam asks.

“Like the electroshock they’ve been using to make Bucky forget him,” He points to Steve, bottle still in hand. He takes another swig before handing it back to Hill. “You wanted to know why he didn’t remember you? It’s because they’re very good at scrubbing through your memories with hundreds of volts of electricity until all you know anymore is what they want you to know.”

“Toshenka, that’s enough,” Natasha snaps.

“Jesus,” Sam says.

“Anton, how do you know what they did to Bucky?” Steve asks slowly. Natasha opens her mouth to speak, but closes it again when he shoots her a glare.

“When I met him they called him Yakov. I called him Yasha, Russian nicknames, you know,” Anton says. “Hydra loaned him to the Red Room as a mentor for the program I was in, the Wolf Spiders. Augmented male assassins who could be controlled entirely. They were having issues with disobedience with older candidates, so they tried training kids.”

“How did you break out of the programming?” Steve asks desperately. “Was Bucky one of the disobedient ones?”

“When they left him out of cryo long enough, yeah,” Anton shrugs, then winces when it pulls at his stitches. “Or when it was long enough since the last electroshock session. They tended to do those before shoving you back in the freezer, though. Made things easier when you woke up.”

“How did you break out?” Steve repeats. Desperate doesn’t begin to cover the way he sounds now, eyes wide and pleading.

“Natka here busted open my freezer tube one night,” He pats Natasha’s unwounded arm fondly. She glares at him and he takes his hand away. “It took a little time at SHIELD to realize I was actually free, and then my memories started coming back bit by bit,” He pauses, thinking what to say. “I don’t know who I was before the Red Room, Steve. I don’t know how that would’ve changed things. And I was never wiped as many times as Yasha. There’s only so much you can do to a person’s brain before it won’t go back the way it was, and I think he crossed that threshold a long time ago.”

“I understand,” Steve says, but there’s a defiant, perhaps hopeful, glimmer in his eye.

Natasha’s in the World Security Council meeting, Hill’s in the comms room, and Sam and Steve are switching out the tracking chips in the helicarriers. Anton had tried to insist he should take one of them, there are three after all, but Steve said he was their last line of defense.

His job is to crack Zola’s algorithm if it comes down to it. He’s been up all night working on it. He wishes he hadn’t dismantled YASHA when he left Stark Industries, the ability to run multiple variations of code would’ve been useful. Hindsight is 20/20, though, and at the time he’d been paranoid of possible security breaches in his code. He’s a damn good programmer, but it’s only a fool who doesn’t expect weak points. He’s gotten into a lot of supposedly ‘uncrackable’ programs that way.

There are a lot of fools in security programming.

He monitors Sam and Steve’s comms as he works. The timing is getting pretty tight, and then Steve goes dark. Anton taps the comm line.

“Sam, you got eyes on him?” He asks. There’s not much more for him to do with Zola’s program. Either his battering ram works, or it doesn’t. Either Steve replaces the last targeting chip, or he doesn’t.

“No, and I’m grounded,” Sam says. “Barnes tore one of my wings off.”

“See if you can’t find it and I’ll reattach it for you later,” Anton says. He sets the laptop aside and holds binoculars up, staring at the helicarriers from his perch in a tree on the other side of the river. “Which carrier is he on?”

“Charlie,” Sam says. “The Southern-most one. Can you get there in time?”

“We’ll find out,” Anton mutters.

He jumps from the tree, rolling where he lands, and digs in his pockets, hoping he’d remembered- yes. His hand closes around the propulsors and he pulls them out, quickly attaching them to either hand and the soles of his boots. They’d been the only thing he’d kept from the old armor, and the wiring’s in such a state of disrepair that it’ll be a miracle if it works long enough for him to find Steve, let alone support the weight of them both, but he has to try.

He takes off and heads for the last helicarrier, praying under his breath that Steve-

Steve’s falling from the carrier. He crashes into the river. Another figure falls after him. The carriers are exploding and it’s hard to see through the fire and smoke, but Anton does his best to fly around the falling debris, scanning the water.

There. On the bank of the river. Someone’s pulling Steve out of the water.

He lands ten feet away, hopefully enough distance that he isn’t in any immediate danger from the man while being close enough to act if things go South.

“Yakov,” He says. He removes his mask. “Do you remember me? Do you remember him?” He nods towards Steve’s prone form. He looks beat to hell, and Anton knows at least some of that is Yakov-Bucky-whoever-he-is’ fault.

“You’re Anton,” Yakov says quietly. “I trained you.”

“And him?” Anton repeats.

“Steve,” Yakov says. “Are you going to capture me now?”

“No, I don’t think I am,” Anton says after a long moment of consideration. “He’ll want us to find you, later. Do your best to be someone worth finding.”

Yakov nods, though he doesn’t look like he fully understands.

And then he’s gone, vanished into the trees with little more than a rustle or a footstep. Anton stoops down and finds Steve’s comm. It’s a little waterlogged, but it should still work. He powers it on.

“I’ve got Steve,” He says. “He’s alive, but he needs medical attention.”

“What’s your position, Romanov?” Fury asks.

“Far bank of the Potomac, next to the very patriotic corpse-looking thing,” Anton says. “Jeez, this thing’s barely armor. They really let him run around in this during the war?”

“Anton,” Natasha groans, though there’s a hint of relief in her voice.

“On our way to you now,” Hill says.

It doesn’t take Anton long to find all the information SHIELD and Hydra had on him, and it only takes the news a little longer than that.

He had been born Anthony Edward Stark on May 29, 1970 to Howard Stark and Maria Collins Carbonell. He was their only child. Anton Vanko had kidnapped him three years later and sold him to the Red Room, where he had been trained in the Wolf Spider program and experimented extensively on. Howard and Maria had been killed on December 17, 1991 in a car crash caused by the Winter Soldier. He had taken a serum Howard had developed from the trunk of the car, a recreation of the super soldier serum given to Steve Rogers in 1943.

Anton had been given that serum as part of the graduation procedure. He can still remember the way it had burned in his veins. He remembers the tests he’d been put through, after. The riots the older candidates had started, earning them all a one-way trip to cryostasis, presumably to rot. He’d been the only one they ever defrosted.

He and Natasha were two of four to escape the Red Room. He is the only Wolf Spider to do so.

The man he had assumed was Anthony all those years ago in Gorki had, in fact, been the troublesome journalist the Red Room had told him he was. He’s not sure how comforted he is by the fact that the Red Room hadn’t bothered to lie about the identities of his targets.

It’s not as hard to hide in plain sight as people think it is, especially when you have a well-documented attribute (such as a permanently glowing arc reactor in your sternum). All you have to do is change that, and suddenly no one knows who you are.

For good measure, he gets a haircut. Nothing fancy, something right off a magazine cover he’d found in the waiting area. He’d debated it, given that he was pretty sure people were expecting him to look like he did when he ran Stark Industries, but then footage of him hauling Steve’s body into the helicopter had surfaced. A few conspiracy boards had decided the man with the long hair was, in fact, a defecting Winter Soldier, and he figured he didn’t want that kind of scrutiny either. Better to be identified for who he really is than as the world’s most wanted assassin. Though there has been some talk about bringing him in for questioning about some unsolved murders. He probably should’ve expected that, but it had sort of fallen through the cracks, what with one thing and another.

Howard Stark’s lawyer is the first one to track him down in his sh*tty apartment in Boston. How, he’s not sure, but it’s not like it matters because one day he comes back from buying groceries and there’s a man in a suit who doesn’t look unlike he’s been sent through a taffy puller sitting on his doorstep, briefcase in hand.

“Mr. Stark,” The man nods his head at Anton. Anton’s fist tightens painfully around his keyring. He knows who the man is, he’d done a cursory search after he’d finished reading his own file. It was a bad idea to be unfamiliar with all the people who would be after you, even when you haven’t just taken down one of the largest intelligence agencies in the world.

“Can I help you?” Anton asks blithely, walking past the man and putting his key in the lock.

“Perhaps not, but I think I can help you,” The man says. “I’m Theodore Cobb. I was your father’s attorney and as such I am the executor of his will. He left quite a lot of his estate to you, you know.”

“I was legally declared dead in ’96,” Anton says. He turns the key.

“And yet here you are, and there are extremely compelling documents vouching for your authenticity,” Cobb says. He stands slowly and pulls a business card from his suit pocket, extending it to Anton between two slender fingers. “Ten years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of taking your case to court, but these are strange times we live in, Mr. Stark.”

Anton pauses, one hand on the doorknob, the other holding his bag of groceries. His very light bag of groceries. The bag of groceries almost entirely consisting of ramen and coffee, plus a packet of gum because he’d needed to push the total over the debit card minimum at the bodega.

The only reason he can even afford rent here is because he’d skimmed a little off the top of every known Hydra agent’s bank accounts in a fit of rage, and even then he’d had to keep the total amount small enough to bounce through half a dozen accounts before landing in his without setting off any alarms.

“How much are you charging for your services?” He asks carefully.

“Howard was a dear friend of mine,” Cobb says. “And his greatest wish was for you to return home safely. I wouldn’t dream of charging you a single red cent.”

“How much did he pay you before he kicked the bucket?” Anton turns the doorknob. The door sticks, damned humidity. He knees it open with such force that it bounces off the wall, shuddering on its return to the jamb. He stops it from closing again with his foot.

“Quite the pragmatist, I see,” Cobb sighs. “A tidy sum, but that does not change the fact that I have no interest in your contributions to my financial security. Howard wanted you home, and I finally have the ability to send you there. Will you accept my offer?”

Anton sets the paper bag down just inside the doorway. He takes the card.

“I’ll think about it,” He says, and steps inside, closing the door behind him.

Chapter 6: have yourself a merry little christmas

Chapter Text

Howard Stark had been the kind of rich where, even after death, you just keep getting richer. Anton can’t begin to untangle all the problems he has with this concept, but it had made claiming his inheritance a lot easier, since there was still an inheritance to claim.

He’d been expecting, at most, something approaching a year’s worth of his salary as CEO of Stark Industries, but now he has more money than God, and no matter how much of it he funnels into charities and people’s personal fundraisers, there always seems to be more of it in his bank account. And the charities always want his opinion on how to spend the money, as if he knows better than the people trained to run the organizations. He has to hire an assistant specifically to talk some of the more persistent orgs out of naming things after him; the entire world already knows his name, why would he want it on a new wing of a hospital? God, he hates rich-people culture.

Another piece of his inheritance had been controlling stock in Stark Industries. He’d tried to refuse it at first, but Cobb had assured him that it didn’t mean he actually ran the company, which was fine by him. He’d done a sh*tty enough job of it the first time around, and Pepper’s doing great. Even better than he’d expected, actually. S.I. is now the leading innovator in clean energy and medical technology. He’d taken a look at some of the blueprints on file one afternoon and sent the designers some editorial notes on improvements, but it doesn’t look like anyone had taken his suggestions seriously. He doesn’t fault them, he probably wouldn’t take well to someone trying to tell him what to change on any of his projects.

He moves into the Stark mansion in Malibu once the dust has settled after everything with the courts (technically he’s still fighting at least ten cases, some related to his activities with the Red Room, some about whether or not he was really who he said he was, despite the fact that DNA evidence had clearly proven it), sells the cottage Stane had moved him into when he first joined S.I., and gets to work rebuilding the Iron Man suit, and YASHA. He feels a little weird, having an AI patterned after Yasha (Bucky?), but he can’t think of a better name for the program, so the name stays, for now.

He’d debated whether or not to rebuild the Iron Man suit, but considering that he’s, according to Fury and Hill, a high-priority target of half a dozen intelligence agencies, he figures it's better security than money can buy, so he might as well. He’s got a few ideas for improvements, too. Some inspired by Sam’s Falcon wings, some by Natasha’s widow bites, and just some general comfort upgrades. If he’s going to need to use it, he might as well make it feel a little less like his old cryo-chamber.

He hasn’t seen any of his friends since the fall of SHIELD. Sam and Steve had set off to try and track Bucky the second the hospital released Steve, Natasha had disappeared to search for Clint, and, well, he hasn’t heard so much as a whisper about Bruce’s whereabouts since New York.

It takes about an hour after he finishes moving into the Stark mansion for Pepper to call.

“I cannot believe you!” She shrieks so loud that he has to hold the receiver about a foot from his ear. “Two and a half years, and not a word? I thought you were dead! And I had to find out you were the missing Stark kid from the news? You could’ve called!”

“Oh, yeah,” Anton says dumbly. “Uh, I haven’t really used phones in a while. I forgot about them. Sorry?”

“Forgot about them,” She huffs. He imagines he can hear her shaking her head. “Well, you and I are going to get a very expensive dinner tonight. You’re paying, and you’re going to explain what you were doing that kept you from picking up a phone for two and a half years.”

“It was all over the news,” He says. “I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines about the charges filed against me.”

“And the headlines about you winning the cases, yes,” She says. “But I want to hear it from you. Make a reservation for seven, I’ll have Happy pick you up at six.”

With that, she hangs up, leaving him to wonder how he, a widely-feared former assassin, had been bullied into an expensive night out with the CEO of the company he owns, someone who, by all accounts, should technically defer to him. Not that Pepper has ever deferred to him, which is for the best. He’s not exactly a great decision-maker.

He takes his time researching the top restaurants in LA, checking the menu for vegetarian options, examining the sight-lines to and from the buildings with google street-view, researching good wines and comparing them with the ones offered at each establishment, judging escape routes. He settles on a Japanese place with a specific vegetarian tasting course, books a reservation, and starts searching for a suit. He owned several, at one point, but he can’t for the life of him remember what he did with them when he left the country. It’s approaching two in the afternoon when he finally concludes he must’ve either sold them, donated them, or thrown them out. It’s not like he’d had much use for them while hunting Hydra, and he hadn’t bothered to dress up for his court appearances, much to his lawyers’ chagrin.

He starts digging through the closets in the mansion, and eventually finds several suits, carefully packaged into dust-proof bags. There’s even a few dress shirts, ties, and about two dozen pairs of identical dress shoes. None of it quite fits right, though. He takes a dark red suit and black shirt to a tailor a few miles away and presses a truly ridiculous amount of cash into the shop owner’s hand, begging him to do his best. While he waits for the outfit to be altered, he makes his way to a shoe store.

It’s overwhelming. Stores are always overwhelming to him. There’s just too many damn choices, and clothing stores are even worse because there are about a million fashion rules that he’s never bothered to learn. He considers how angry Pepper would be if he showed up wearing his combat boots. Or his ratty sneakers. He buys a pair of dress boots with a price tag that makes him feel faint. They look like a nightmare to run in, but still better than the usual dress shoe, which he remembers from Stark Industries functions tend to give him blisters around his ankles.

The tailor does a fine job of making the suit fit Anton, and he thanks the man profusely as he rushes back to the mansion.

He’s barely done getting dressed when Happy pulls up in a sleek black car, Pepper sitting patiently in the backseat. She looks as elegant as ever, in a blue dress, her strawberry blonde hair pulled into an updo that he suspects is bristling with enough bobby pins to make a beauty supply store jealous. He checks his watch. Six o’clock, on the dot.

He gives Happy the restaurant’s address and slides into the backseat, nervously fiddling with his cufflinks. Pepper gives him a warm smile.

“You look good,” She says. “Better than the last time I saw you.”

“I got a couple good nights of sleep,” He jokes, only sort of lying. She snorts with laughter. He touches the bruised and scuffed knuckles on his hands absent-mindedly. Brushes over an errant burn here and there. Proof that he’s been busy in his workshop. He doesn’t actually remember when he last slept, maybe yesterday. Maybe two days ago. “I like the dress, it suits you.”

“My sister gave it to me,” She says, sighing. “It’s one of her designs.”

“She’s very talented,” He says, hoping it’s true. Judging by Pepper’s pleased expression, it is.

Even with Happy’s skills as a driver, traffic keeps them from arriving until nearly an hour after their reservation. Luckily, though Anton feels uncomfortable about the whole thing, the hostess (Maître d’? He’s not sure at what level of ‘fancy’ the change in title occurs, or if it matters, especially in LA) has been keeping their table for them. He gives an apologetic smile to the few groups clearly waiting to be seated as they pass.

They both order the vegetarian course. Pepper also orders the drink pairing course, and with some hesitation, Anton does as well. He’s never ascribed to the ‘not one drop’ method in regards to addiction, and most research is on his side, but it still feels a bit dangerous every time he drinks. Like if he doesn’t hold on tight enough to his resolve, he’ll eventually just revert back to the scared kid who couldn’t sleep unless he was blacked out. He calms himself, reminding himself that he probably won’t even get tipsy until the end of their meal, if at all. This isn’t Natasha’s 192-proof Polish vodka, after all.

Their first ‘course’ of tastings has been set in front of them before Pepper broaches the topic of the evening.

“So, what was so important that you couldn’t pick up a phone for almost three years?” She asks coolly, sipping her green tea co*cktail with an expression that makes it clear that she won’t be taking any excuses. Not that he has any.

“How much of the SHIELD leaks did you get around to reading?” He asks. He takes a sip of his drink and grimaces. He’s never been the biggest fan of green tea, let alone matcha, and pairing it with alcohol does nothing to improve the taste.

“Not much,” She says. “I wanted to hear it from you. Besides, the things I did try to access were pretty heavily censored.”

He nods. There had been such a huge volume of files dumped at the time that even now, six months after the fact, there are entire terabytes of data surfacing for the first time. The only reason everyone knows his story (or some amount of it) was because of the interest in the Anthony Stark cold case. His cold case, though it still feels odd to think of himself as Anthony Stark.

He explains the basics of his childhood, that he’d been trained by the KGB and experimented on, that he and Natasha had defected in 2005. They finish the first course.

The second course arrives while he’s explaining the Battle of New York. He explains his motivations for leaving the country, why he had felt the need to vanish, how he had spent the two years searching for answers about what had happened in Afghanistan, but found none. How the pieces had started to come together once he went to DC, once he had discovered Hydra had infiltrated SHIELD from the beginning.

Pepper’s quiet for a long, long time once he finishes his story. She pushes an avocado roll around on her plate with her chopsticks, staring vacantly at it, not really seeing.

“Did you know you were Anthony Stark?” She asks eventually. “Before SHIELD fell, did you know?”

“I thought I’d killed him,” He says. “When they found his- my blood in Belarus, I’d been sent there to kill a journalist. I thought the journalist must’ve been Anthony, but I was injured that night too.”

“I remember when that happened,” She says quietly. “They said no one could’ve lost that much blood and lived.”

“No one human,” He says. “I’m not sure I’ve been fully human since I was a kid. I think I’m something different now.” He shows her his hands, now immaculate, save for a few spots of dried blood.

“They were all cut up when we picked you up,” She says, setting down the chopsticks and taking one of his hands in hers, turning it around and examining it.

“You should’ve seen them yesterday,” He laughs softly. “Even Steve Rogers doesn’t heal as fast as I do,” He frowns, thinking. “I don’t think I used to heal this fast, either.”

Pepper looks so distraught at this that he spends the rest of the night doing his best to distract her and cheer her up. By the time she drops him off at home, there’s almost a shadow of a smile on her face. He wonders what parts of his tale he should’ve toned down, if there was a palatable way to explain everything that had happened to him.

Pepper hires him a PA a few days later.

“I can take care of myself,” He protests when she tells him over the phone. “I’m perfectly capable.”

“Anton, you don’t answer the phone over half the time,” She says. “People are starting to call me to get ahold of you.”

The PA is a young man, around Anton’s physical age, and he introduces himself as Ford.

“Ford?” Anton asks. “Just the one name?”

“Do I need more than one?” Ford replies.

Ford is a bit taller than Anton, with short-cropped curly dark hair and an olive-toned but pale complexion, like he doesn’t spend much time outdoors. He doesn’t seem to ascribe to the same levels of formality that Anton’s seen in other PAs, dressing in worn out t-shirts and ripped jeans, but what he lacks in physical formality he more than makes up for with his stone-faced serious demeanor. Anton spends the first week of his employment cracking terrible jokes one after the other, but Ford never even cracks a smile. It’s infuriating.

But despite the slight conflict of personality, Ford is a terrifyingly competent PA. Every morning, he hands Anton a candy-colored schedule for the day, and no matter how consumed Anton gets by a project, Ford somehow manages to drag him out of the workshop and to his next appointment with time to spare.

Anton meets with a never-ending parade of rich bastards, half of which want him to sell Stark Industries to them. The other half vary from wanting to buy some of his designs to produce for their own companies, to outright and unabashedly flirting with him. And then he meets with Aldrich Killian, founder of Advanced Idea Mechanics.

“Mr. Stark, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” Killian offers Anton his hand to shake. Anton stares blankly at him. He’s never enjoyed the weird posturing people do with handshakes, trying to prove their confidence with a sturdy grip. It’s stupid. Handshakes don’t prove anything about a person, except that they’re aware of the hyper-specific etiquette surrounding the practice.

Killian drops his hand, but his warm smile doesn’t waver. He’s handsome, Anton supposes, in the way that rich people in LA always are. Having money to throw around means you have the time to care for yourself, access to healthier food, and the ability to avoid the kind of labor that has any impact on your body. But there’s something else, too. Something more that Anton can’t quite put his finger on, something that sets his teeth on edge.

“I’ve been following your work since you first joined Stark Industries,” Killian says. “I have to say, it was quite clever of you to pretend you weren’t Howard’s son, though I can’t say I understand why.”

“If you had followed the recent court cases you would know I didn’t know who I was,” Anton says carefully. “In fact, I think the internet knew who I was for almost a full day before I found out.”

“My apologies,” Killian inclines his head slightly. “I didn’t mean to offend. How is your new life treating you, by the way?”

“It’s nice to not have to eat ramen every night,” Anton says dully. He still eats ramen most nights, but now it’s a choice rather than a necessity. And now he buys the slightly nicer packs, the ones that come with freeze-dried vegetables and have their own bowls. Sometimes he even cracks an egg over it before cooking.

Killian laughs a little.

“I remember living like that,” He says. His voice is light and almost fond, but there’s a dark edge to the look in his eyes. “I ate nothing but ramen and fast-food until AIM started to really take off.”

“I hate to be rude,” Anton loves being rude to rich people. “But why exactly did you want to meet? I’ve got quite a few projects to get back to.”

“Straight to the point,” Killian nods. He takes out a business card from the interior pocket of his suit jacket and hands it to Anton. “When you get tired of puttering around in your basem*nt, give me a call. I’ve got a project that I could use your skills on.”

Anton pockets the card without looking at it.

He’d forgotten how boring civilian life is.

He feels adrift in a vast ocean with no land in sight, no goal to strive towards.

The nightmares are back. They never fully went away, but for a while they’d been less pervasive, less constant. He’d been able to get a few full nights of sleep each week. Now, he’s lucky if he gets more than a few hours.

He doesn’t drink. Ford had taken all of Howard’s long-abandoned liquor collection to a storage facility somewhere a few days after he started work. Not that Anton really wants to drink, anyway. Sure, it’d be nice to get to sleep for more than a couple hours at a time, but the sheer volume of alcohol required to get him to that point takes more effort than he’s really willing to put in. Especially when he thinks about what Natasha would say if she found out he’d started drinking again.

He’s up late (early? he’d slept, but awoken after a particularly nasty dream) one night, and out of a need for something to do, he drives into town. He parks the car and wanders, not paying much attention to where his feet carry him. It’s a pleasant night, not terribly cold- it’s never cold in LA, just a bit chilly at times; he almost misses Russia in the winter, the piles of snow. He walks past a few bars, bustling with life either despite or because of the odd hour, past corner shops and twenty-four-hour restaurants crammed with young adults barely able to walk.

Eventually his mind starts to wander in unpleasant directions, so he pulls out his compass (the compass Yasha had given him. There’s a black-and-white picture tucked into the lid of two young boys, one with dark hair and the other blond. Anton had always wondered who they were, but now he’s pretty sure it’s Steve and Bucky) and tries to remember where he’d parked. Usually he’s able to figure it out using the constellations, recalling which one he’d walked towards or away from at any given point during his journey, but the sky is cloudy, and LA is so bright that it wouldn’t matter anyway. He thinks he’s just about figured it out when he hears the screams.

He flips the compass closed and stuffs it in his jacket pocket, already running towards the sound.

There’s a man standing in front of the Chinese Theater, and his skin is glowing. Not in the hyperbolic way, but actually glowing from the inside like the glowing embers of a log in a fire that just went out. Anton pushes through the terrified crowd. The glowing grows and grows until the light is painful to look at, and just as Anton reaches the front of the crowd, the man explodes.

The concussive force knocks him out for a few moments, and when he comes to, he blacks out again from the pain.

Beeping. The hiss of a ventilator. Quiet chatter down the hall.

He feels detached from his body, like his consciousness is just a few inches to the left. He cracks open his eyes.

He’s in a hospital bed, an intubation tube down his throat and bandages covering every inch of skin. He doesn’t feel any injuries that would warrant them, though. On a chair in the corner sits a pile of charred cloth. There’s a gigantic floral arrangement on his bedside table, a purple envelope propped against the vase.

He waits. A nurse enters a few minutes later.

“Oh! Mr. Stark, I didn’t- um. Let me get the doctor,” She says, backing slowly out of the room. She sprints down the hall once she crosses the threshold.

Two hours later, and he has his discharge papers in hand. They give him a thin pair of pajama pants, a white cotton t-shirt, and a pair of slippers to wear as his clothes are barely more than a lump of charcoal. Somehow, his compass had survived the explosion. He wraps it in the shreds of fabric that had once been his jacket. He’d liked that jacket. It’s not like he can’t afford a new one, but he’d bought that one at a secondhand shop in France last year, and he isn’t sure where to find another like it.

He tears open the purple envelope. Inside is a run-of-the-mill greeting card, telling him to ‘get well soon!’. The only thing written inside are the letters AK. He crumples the card and the envelope and stuffs them in the trash can next to the nurses’ station.

He calls Ford, who picks him up ten minutes later in a nondescript sedan, something a few decades old and looking slightly worse for wear. He wonders if it’s Ford’s personal car.

“What happened?” Ford asks as they peel out of the hospital parking lot. He doesn’t look away from the road, which is likely for the best as his approach to driving is very close to Clint’s.

“I don’t know,” Anton frowns, staring out the passenger side window as the world zips by. “How long was I at the hospital?”

“Less than a day,” Ford weaves through traffic, nearly clipping a dozen bumpers as he does. “I only just got to work when you called.”

Anton’s frown deepens.

“They’re saying on the news that the Mandarin was behind the bombing at the theater last night,” Ford says. “You said on the phone that there had been an explosion? Is that where you were?”

“It wasn’t a bombing,” Anton murmurs. “Not a traditional one. Who’s the Mandarin?”

“Here,” Ford hands him a smartphone. “Google will explain it better than I can. You should keep up with the news, you know.”

“Probably,” Anton agrees. He unlocks the phone and starts a cursory search.

Several bombings across the world over the past few years, most concentrated in the United States. No explosive devices ever found. Victims vaporized in an instant. A man calling himself ‘the Mandarin’ behind each attack, hijacking TV broadcasts to gloat.

When they arrive at the mansion, a familiar face is waiting for him.

“Colonel Rhodes,” Anton says, surprised. “Can I help you with something?”

“Maybe,” Rhodes says. “We’d better talk inside.”

He’s kind enough to let Anton shower and change before their conversation, not that the younger man would’ve taken ‘no’ for an answer; he needs to scrub the hospital off him. Even if he didn’t have an entire luggage store’s worth of baggage when it came to medical settings, he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t like hospitals much.

He doesn’t linger in the shower. It’s too strange to see perfectly unmarred skin when, by all accounts, he shouldn’t be more than a pile of ash. He shaves, brushes his teeth, gets dressed. Wanders back into the living area and pours himself a cup of lukewarm coffee from the machine he’d set next to the TV.

“I’d offer you a cup,” He tells Rhodes. “But I don’t actually remember when I made this.”

Rhodes makes a disgusted face as Anton slams down three cups.

“So, how can I help you?” Anton asks, setting down the mug and sitting down in an overstuffed armchair across the coffee table from Rhodes.

“I’m investigating the Mandarin attacks,” Rhodes says. “And I was told you saw the attack last night. Can you tell me what you saw?”

Anton hesitates for a moment. “It was weird,” He warns. Rhodes’ expression doesn’t change. “There was a man at the theater, and he looked like he was burning from the inside out. All of a sudden, he just… exploded, I guess. I’ve never seen an explosion that intense.”

Rhodes nods, clearly lost in thought. Anton can almost imagine the sound of gears whirring in his head.

“How far were you from the blast?” He asks.

“Maybe five feet?” Anton shrugs. Rhodes looks dumbfounded. “I know, I should be a smoking pile of ash. I don’t get it either. I mean, I heal fast, but this is new. You can ask the staff at LA Mercy, I was basically one giant blister when I got there this morning.”

“And you didn’t see an explosive device or anything?” Rhodes presses.

“I think the guy was the explosive device,” Anton says. “It’d explain why you never find device remnants at the scene, right? I know it’s out there, but we live in a world where a guy turns into the jolly green giant when he’s pissed, and Norse Gods are running around befriending astrophysicists.”

“Fair enough,” Rhodes stands. “Thank you, Anton. Listen, if you remember anything else, don’t hesitate to call, alright?” He hands Anton a slip of paper with a phone number scrawled across it. Frankly, after all the business cards he’s had pressed into his hands over the past few weeks, Anton’s glad for the casualness of it. He takes the paper.

“It was good to see you, Rhodes,” Anton says as Rhodes makes for the door.

“Stay safe,” Rhodes says.

Word spreads fast about his presence at the theater that night, and he gets accosted by a horde of paparazzi during a grocery run.

“Mr. Stark! Do you have anything to say to the Mandarin?” One yells.

“Go to hell,” Anton says, flipping the guy off and climbing into his car.

When he gets back to the mansion, Ford hands him a phone, open to a tabloid website.

Stark Tells Mandarin: ‘Go to hell’!

“For the record,” Anton sighs. “I was talking to the idiot with the camera.”

“You have to be careful what you say around them,” Ford says, taking the phone back. “They’ll do anything for a story, no matter how untrue it is.”

“Right,” Anton says, turning back to unpacking his groceries. He stops, carton of rice milk in hand, and turns to Ford. “Look, I’ve got a big enough target on my back as it is, and apparently I’ve just pissed off a terrorist. You might want to take the rest of the week off.”

“Miss Potts hired me to assist in any way I can,” Ford says. “And that includes protecting you.”

“I don’t need protection,” Anton grumbles, waving the rice milk emphatically. He goes back to the groceries. “Apparently I can’t f*ckin’ die, anyway. You, on the other hand-“

He’s interrupted by the sound of rapidly approaching helicopter blades. An explosion rocks the mansion, the roof collapsing over the living area and shattering the glass coffee table.

“Man, I really liked that coffee table,” He complains, setting down the box of pasta he’d been putting away. “Get down!”

He vaults over the counter and tackles Ford as something- a grenade, maybe?- drops from the hole in the ceiling. He braces for the explosion, but still winces when shards of furniture pelt him from all sides. He stands slowly, putting himself between the hole and Ford.

“You still want to stick around?” He asks. “Go! I’ll be fine. Anyone asks, you were never here, okay?”

Ford nods, his mouth set in a grim line as he scrambles to his feet and runs for the door.

Anton approaches the living area cautiously. There’s a hole in the floor that leads straight to the workshop. If he can get down there, he can get the Iron Man suit and-

Gunfire snaps him out of his thoughts. He looks up to see two machine guns pointed towards him, the bullets’ paths edging closer to him the longer he stays still. He jumps through the hole.

“YASHA, get my suit!” He shouts.

A bullet- maybe more than one, he can’t be sure- rips through his shoulder. Something drops from above, something a lot bigger than a grenade, and his world goes white.

It’s the crash-landing that wakes him. He opens his eyes with a herculean effort to see the HUD flickering wildly, cutting in and out and just generally glitching to all hell.

“YASHA, talk to me,” He groans.

“You are currently in Rose Hill, Tennessee,” YASHA says, though the voice is garbled and cuts in and out seemingly at random. ‘Rose Hill’ is the clearest part, but Anton can sort of piece together the rest. “I tried to fly the suit according to the most recent flight plan, to former SHIELD HQ, but the suit was badly damaged. Loss of power in twenty-“ The screen powers off.

His breath quickens. All he can see is darkness. All he can feel is the cold.

He has to get out-

He has to find the emergency release-

He has to-

“Please,” He’s sobbing, choking on his own tears and snot. He can’t breathe. He can’t think. “Please, I’ll be good!”

“You disobeyed direct orders,” The technician says calmly. Disaffected. Detached. This is just a job to her. Anton is just a minor inconvenience, a malfunctioning piece of equipment she has to recalibrate. “You endangered the school. You’re lucky you’re too important to terminate.”

He doesn’t feel lucky when they press the electrodes to his scalp. When they force the bite plate between his teeth. When his nerves are set aflame until he doesn’t remember a thing.

He wonders why his last thought before the chamber freezes is that he doesn’t feel lucky at all.

His fingers find the release lever and he springs out of the suit, shaking violently. He falls to his knees and digs his nails into the palms of his hands. He focuses on the pain to ground himself. This is real. This is what’s happening. He’s kneeling in a snowbank. The Red Room was almost a decade ago.

He leaps almost a meter in the air when a voice comes from behind him.

“Hey, calm down!” The kid says. He’s young, and small. Something tells Anton he’s small for his age, though given his lack of knowledge about children, he can’t really be sure. He can’t even quite tell how old the kid is, maybe around… twelve? Thirteen?

Anton tries to slow his breathing, his traitorous heart thundering in his chest, the arc reactor humming quietly with the strain.

“Who are you, and what are you doing in my backyard?” The kid asks. “Is that your robot? Why did you crash your robot in my yard? Did you come from space? Did you build your robot yourself? Did-“

“Stop,” Anton says quietly. The kid shuts his mouth.

The kid has what looks like a potato gun in his hands, built from those plastic tubes people buy for hamsters or something. Anton’s not actually sure people really do that, but he’s seen the kits at enough pet stores that there must be a market for them.

The kid peers around Anton at the armor.

“Is that… Iron Man?” He asks.

Anton glares at the broken armor. He kicks it.

“Yeah,” He says. “Guess I didn’t make it as battle-proof as I thought.”

“Then you must be Anthony Stark,” The kid’s eyes widen. “Oh man. Here, look.”

He hands Anton a newspaper.

Mandarin Strikes Again: Stark Presumed Dead

“You would think they’d have a little more faith in me, given my track record,” Anton sighs. He hands the newspaper back. “Is-“

“Is anyone else home?” The kid finishes for him. “No. Mom left for the diner, and Suzie’s at the Jacksons’ for a sleepover.”

“Do you have a workshop I could borrow?” Anton asks.

The workshop isn’t anything fancy, just your run-of-the-mill garage with a few interesting bits and pieces scattered around that serve little function but to prove that Harley, the kid, knows a bit about engineering.

“What do you need to get Iron Man working again, Mr. Stark?” Harley asks, running a finger over one of the gashes running through the armor.

“Don’t call me that,” Anton snaps. Harley flinches a little at his tone, and he takes a deep breath. “Sorry, it’s just- my name is Anton.”

“I thought it was Anthony,” Harley says coyly, like he’s caught Anton in a lie.

“I guess,” Anton makes a face. “I haven’t been that person since I was a toddler. Frankly I don’t like ‘Anton’ much better, but you’ve got to pick your battles.”

“What about a different name?” Harley raises an eyebrow. “Like a nickname.”

“Whatever,” Anton shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. I know who I am, and that’s what matters.”

Does he know who he is? If someone asked him that a year ago, he would’ve laughed them off. Now he’s not so sure. Between what happened at SHIELD, finding out who he was before the Red Room, and the whole business with his healing, it’s hard to make sense of anything.

“Okay, who are you then?” Harley asks.

Anton curses quietly. Why do kids have such a knack for asking the hard questions? Maybe they just go for the obvious questions, and adults are too caught up in trying not to offend anyone.

“I’m the mechanic,” He says finally. “I build things, and I fix them.”

Harley seems satisfied by this answer, turning back to inspecting the damage to the Iron Man armor.

“I need to borrow a computer, a cell phone, and a digital watch,” Anton says.

It’s pure luck that he’s watching the TV when the Mandarin hijacks it next. Except he flashes the Ten Rings’ logo on the screen first, and-

Anton’s head is filled with a ringing noise. He can’t breathe. His nails dig into the palms of his hands so hard that blood trickles out of his fists. He can’t breathe.

“Hey!” Harley shouts, and suddenly the rest of the world filters back in.

He’s sitting at a workbench, laptop open in front of him. He had been establishing a connection to YASHA. Harley had been watching some kids show. YASHA had connected to the laptop.

“What did he say?” He asks Harley. “What did I miss?”

“He shot a guy,” Harley says quietly. “He told the President that if he didn’t call he was going to shoot a guy, and the President called, but he shot him anyway.”

“Oh,” Anton says. The ringing quiets a little.

“I took the initiative to trace the broadcast signal,” YASHA says through the armor’s speaker system. That’s right, he’d managed to power it on. He’d had to de-ice some of the circuitry, but it should work fine. Once it charges. If he were in his own workshop, the suit would be done by now, but there’s only so much that can be done with two car batteries, even with all his knowledge.

“Where’s this guy located, YASHA? Europe? Middle East? Asia?” He asks.

“Miami, Florida,” YASHA pulls up a map on the laptop, zooming in on a compound just outside Miami.

“Are you going to stop him?” Harley asks.

“Yes,” Anton says. He doesn’t need to think about it. He might’ve hesitated, before the broadcast, but now… He can’t ignore the connection to the Ten Rings. He thought he’d stamped them out, but if there’s even a chance that they’re still out there, he has to do something. He still needs answers.

Plus, it’s the right thing to do, isn’t it?

Is it still the right thing to do if you’re only doing it for selfish reasons?

“Have you ever soldered anything before?” He asks.

He steals a car and heads to Florida. He stops in Georgia to swap cars. He gathers supplies. He builds weapons. He watches the compound, plotting out the guards’ movements. He strikes.

It’s all going so well, and then he gets to the Mandarin’s room, and the Mandarin isn’t the Mandarin, he’s a British actor named Trevor Slattery, and someone tazes him and he wakes up zip-tied to a bed frame, Aldrich Killian sitting in front of him.

“Good, you’re awake,” Killian smiles, but there’s none of the warmth that he had shown before. “I was a little worried we’d overdone it, but then, you’re used to electricity, aren’t you?”

Anton could break out of his bonds easily. He could snap the neck of everyone in this room before they knew what had hit them. But he still needs answers. There’s still too much he doesn’t understand.

“The Ten Rings,” He says. “Was that just part of the theatrics?”

“We had to get your attention somehow,” Killian shrugs. “I would’ve thought attacking your home would be enough, but I guess I overestimated you. You’re even more of a coward than your father.”

“Yeah, big shocker, I don’t care enough about some flashy house I moved into less than a month ago compared to the possibility of finding out what happened when I was kidnapped,” Anton spits. “Why haven’t you just killed me? Everyone already thinks I’m dead.”

“I told you when we first met, don’t you remember?” Killian stands and begins pacing the room slowly. “I’ve been working on the Extremis program since I was in grad school. Caught the attention of your father, actually. He scolded me, told me I was playing with forces I didn’t fully understand, that if I succeeded it would be used for more harm than good,” He stops and turns to Anton. “But he took something when he left. Notes that a late colleague of mine had given me to stabilize the serum. At the time, I just thought he wanted to stop me, but now I know the truth. He used it to produce his own serum.”

“I’m sorry my dad was a dick and a hypocrite, but I really don’t see what this has to do with me,” Anton says. He strains to look at the Dora watch Harley had given him. Good, he hadn’t slept through the alarm.

“Somewhere you need to be?” Killian chuckles. “See, Anton, I’ve done a fair amount of research on you. You’re the lone surviving recipient of your father’s serum. Now, I can take a blood sample and work it out myself, but I think you’re more than capable. Why get my hands dirty?”

“Right, ‘cause I have so much experience in the medical field,” Anton rolls his eyes. “Even if I could help, why would I? You’re a terrorist. I make a point not to work with those.”

Killian’s smile takes on a nasty edge. “I thought you might say that,” He snaps his fingers and one of the guards hands him a tablet computer. He taps the screen a few times and turns it to Anton.

Ford, strapped to a gurney, an IV in his arm. Glowing.

“The Extremis serum has a fairly low success rate,” Killian explains. “But it takes a while to settle in, so to speak. You might just have enough time to fix it before things start going wrong,” He glances at his own watch. “I’ll be back in an hour for your answer. I trust you’ll make the right decision.”

Ten minutes before Killian’s due to return, the alarm goes off.

“Shut that off,” The guard snaps, not looking up from his magazine.

“Can’t, my hands are tied,” Anton says. The guard groans and sets down the magazine, getting slowly to his feet. He stomps over to Anton and pulls his sleeve down to get at the watch.

Anton headbutts the guard with as much force as he can muster and rips his hands from the bonds. The zip ties stay around his wrists, but the iron bed frame buckles and snaps under the strain, allowing him to get free. He flips open a pocket knife (what kind of idiots didn’t search their prisoners for weapons before tying them up?) and cuts off the ties before finally silencing the alarm. He takes out the borrowed cell phone and dials.

“Ready?” He asks.

“Suit is on the way,” Harley chirps. “Hey, do you really know Captain America? I mean, I know you’re an Avenger, but-“

“Yeah, I helped him destroy SHIELD last spring,” Anton says. The armor busts through the window, sending glass shards cascading around him.

“Cool,” Harley says. “Can you get his autograph for me?”

“Sure, kid,” Anton sets the phone on the ground and braces himself as the suit envelops him. It’s not as bad as he’d feared, but it does still send a chill down his spine. He picks the phone back up. “Thank you, Harley. Seriously.”

The kid is quiet for such a long moment that he almost thinks the call has dropped, or something is wrong with the suit and he can’t hear the outside world.

“Um, do you think- it’s just that-“ Harley huffs. “Will you come to my sister’s birthday party next week? She doesn’t believe that I really met Iron Man, and neither does mom, and the kids at school are making fun of me-“

“I’ll be there,” Anton says, smiling slightly. “YASHA should still be connected to that computer, so just give him the details, okay?”

“Okay,” Harley says. “Be safe?”

“I’ll see you at the party,” He says before hanging up.

He flies through the now open window and makes it about twelve yards from the building when the propulsors fail. Luckily he’s not too high up, so the landing isn’t bad, but it still isn’t good news.

“Dammit,” He breathes. “YASHA, what’s the charge at?”

“Ten percent battery,” YASHA replies. “There is a car parked twenty-four yards to your left. If you connect the battery to the suit, it should charge quickly.”

Anton disengages the suit and collapses it into storage mode, turning it into the world’s heaviest drink coaster. It’s light enough to carry in a pocket, but only just. He steals the car battery and sets to work connecting it to the suit. Once it’s done, he takes a moment to try to collect his thoughts.

Step one, he needs to find Ford.

Step two, he needs to figure out what Killian’s next move is; the Mandarin had said in his last broadcast that there was just one ‘lesson’ left, according to the transcript he’d read.

Step three, he needs to figure out how to save Ford from whatever it is that makes Extremis so volatile.

Carrying the battery and suit, he makes his way through the compound, taking out the guards as needed, until he finally makes it back to Slattery’s room. The man is passed out in an easy chair, a half-empty beer in his hands, and a football match playing on the flat-screen TV. Anton dumps him out of the chair.

“I’m up! I’m up!” Slattery cries, wiping beer off his face. “Oh, it’s you. You’re not going to arrest me, are you? Because I’ve got a lot of people to turn in-“

“I’m not a cop, idiot,” Anton says. “Where’s Ford?”

“In the garage, I’d expect,” Slattery giggles nervously, though the humor drops from his face when Anton levels a gun at him. “Look, they don’t tell me much, alright? Erm, I do know what the next lesson is, though. Something big, off the coast, in a really big boat.”

“Can you be more specific?” Anton growls, adjusting his grip.

Slattery swallows thickly.

Ford hadn’t been at the compound, and he’d wasted precious time looking for him. No matter how hard he pushes the engine on Slattery’s speedboat, there’s no way he’s going to make it in time, and the suit is still too underpowered for a rescue mission.

He calls Rhodes.

“Look, I know you said the suit was more trouble than it’s worth, but I need some backup,” He rattles off the information Slattery had given him, about Killian’s plan to kidnap and kill the President, the location for the final broadcast.

“Can’t you just grab him before Killian gets there?” Rhodes asks.

“My suit’s busted,” Anton grumbles. “Long story. Just, try to get there, okay? I’m following the flight path, but I can’t do much more right now.”

“Okay,” Rhodes says finally. “You know they’re going to throw a fit about you rebuilding the suits, right?”

“I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it,” Anton says. Rhodes hangs up.

The suit’s at 81% when he catches up with air force one, just in time to see it taking a nosedive. Cursing, he puts on the suit and zips towards the plane.

There’s no sign of Rhodes, or the President, but the door to the conference room is melted shut, and people are screaming behind it.

“Step back!” He shouts. The pounding on the door stops, he waits a few seconds just to be sure, and then blasts it open. Inside are around a dozen passengers and crewmembers, cowering in fear. “YASHA, how many people can I carry?”

“Four, at most,” YASHA says. “There are thirteen-“

“Got it,” He snaps. “Everyone! I need you to follow my instructions very carefully, and we just might make it out of here alive. Do you understand?”

It takes some doing, but he gets them to jump from the emergency exit, all holding tightly to each other. He jumps after them and grabs hold of two of them, straining the propulsors in an attempt to slow the fall. They’re still going about fifty miles an hour when they hit the surface of the water, but no one passes out or dies on impact, so he’s willing to call it a win.

“Alright, good job you guys!” He calls out. “Coast guard should be here soon, try not to drown before then?”

Several of them give him a thumbs-up, so he flies off.

“YASHA, get me Rhodes’ location,” He says. A radar pops up on the HUD, indicating Rhodes is on-route to the freighter Slattery had told him about. “Alright old pal, things are gonna get a little messy.”

“What else is new?” YASHA snarks.

While Rhodes clears the terminal and deals with rescuing the President, Anton has YASHA scan for Ford. It doesn’t take long to locate him, but he has Killian to contend with once he gets there.

“You’re trickier than you look,” Killian says, eyeing the Iron Man armor. “I heard you’d dismantled that old thing. Too scared to fight me unarmed?”

“Oh, I’ve killed scarier things than you,” Anton says. “I just like to make things a little easier on myself.”

He glances towards Ford. He looks paler than usual, maybe a little sweaty, but otherwise not too bad. He has a grim look on his face, but that’s not especially different than his usual expression.

Killian makes the first move. It turns out that besides exploding violently, Extremis also gives the recipient the power to breathe fire, and, as he finds out when he slices off Killian’s arm, the ability to regrow limbs. Great.

Something hits the building and the floor collapses out from under them; Ford vanishes beneath the rubble, but there’s no time to worry about him because Killian’s back on his feet and superheating the suit to the point that it’s starting to melt. He fires the chest cannon, and that, combined with another explosion from outside that tears the wall apart, sends Killian hurtling into the darkness below.

He takes off the suit. It’s mangled beyond use, but he collapses it anyway and stuffs it in his pocket.

“Ford!” He shouts.

“Over here,” Comes a faint voice from across the room, near the gaping hole where the wall used to be.

Anton rushes over to find Ford dangling from a jagged edge of the metal subfloor, fingers slick with blood from some unseen injury. He leans over the edge and reaches out, grasping desperately-

Something hits the building again, shaking it with enough force that Anton falls, though he catches himself on a cross-beam just a few hundred feet below.

Ford isn’t so lucky. Something explodes close to the ground, and before Anton can react, the fireball engulfs Ford.

Anton gets to his feet, hands shaking. He climbs carefully onto one of the metal walkways crisscrossing the terminal. Killian stands before him.

“Shame,” Killian says, staring at the burning wreckage below. “He seemed nice.”

The heat and the fire that Killian dishes out with extreme prejudice is harder to withstand without several inches of titanium alloy protecting him, but he hardly feels it as they fight. It starts out dignified and cinematic, but just a few moments later Anton’s clawing and biting and kicking wildly. He can’t explain the incandescent rage building within him, but it bubbles furiously beneath his skin and makes it hard to see straight. If it weren’t for his implicit training, he doubts he would still be alive.

They roll off the walkway, plunging to certain doom below, and even as they fall Anton’s doing his best to beat the living hell out of Killian’s stupid LA-handsome face. The impact sends them flying apart, and he has to take a moment to catch his breath through the blinding pain.

And then the pain is gone.

Gingerly, he gets to his feet. Nothing seems broken, or even bruised. He stalks towards Killian’s prone form.

Killian sweeps his legs out from under him, and he hits his head on the rubble, leaving him dazed for a few seconds. But that’s all Killian needs to get the upper hand. He rises, skin glowing like a supernova, and tosses his head back, laughing.

THUNK

Killian falls forwards, a stunned expression on his face.

Behind him stands Ford, skin aflame.

Holding a pipe that’s as wide as Anton’s torso, breathing heavily.

“f*cker,” He spits. The glow dims, until he’s back to normal. Normal, completely human Ford. Well, maybe not completely human anymore, but that’s an issue for later.

Anton rushes him and pulls him into a rib-crushing hug.

“This is highly inappropriate behavior in an employee-boss relationship,” Ford says drily, though he returns the hug. “You okay, Mr. Stark?”

Anton pulls away slightly and scans over Ford, double-checking for any sign of injury or adverse reaction to Extremis. “I’m fine. Like I said, I can protect myself,” He says. “Jesus, where did Pepper find you, huh? How did you lift that pipe? I didn’t think that was one of the effects-“

“It’s not,” Ford steps back and looks away awkwardly, scratching the back of his head. “I’m sort of, I dunno, strong?”

“No sh*t,” Anton laughs, borderline hysterical.

Ford makes an annoyed sort of expression and drops his hand limply at his side. “Before you ask, yes I’ve always been this way, and no, I don’t know why,” He looks back at Anton, worried. “Am I going to explode like those other guys? They kept telling me I might.”

“I’m not going to let that happen,” Anton says firmly. “And you made it this far, which is a really good sign, I think. I’m not totally sure it’s ever fully stable, but you seem as close to it as it gets.”

“Cool,” Ford says, a little distantly, like the events of the past day are finally catching up to him. “Did I just kill a guy?”

“Duck!” Rhodes shouts, barreling towards them at full-speed, one propulsor raised and the mini-missile launcher on his shoulder activating. Anton whips around to see Killian stumble to his feet, and dives to cover Ford.

Anton’s had enough explosions for one week.

It’s easier than expected to stabilize Extremis, not least of all because he finds the exact instructions while picking through the remains of the Stark mansion. Turns out Howard really had stolen it, and lucky for Anton, had held onto the paper, stashing it in a wonderfully explosion-proof safe.

He decides to sell the mansion. Or, the land, anyway. He doesn’t need the money from the sale, but it’s not like he’s going to do anything with the lot, so he offloads it as quickly as possible.

“I’m moving to New York,” He tells Ford. It’s the last day before the sale of the lot goes through, so the two of them are sitting in the ruins, looking out over the ocean. “I wanted to thank you for the work you’ve done, and apologize for putting you in harm’s way.”

“So I’m fired?” Ford asks bluntly.

“No, I-“ Anton scowls. “I can’t ask you to move across the country just to babysit me.”

Ford stares at the horizon as he speaks, voice never wavering.

“I was living in Detroit when I was recruited,” He says. “I needed money, and I thought you were just going to be another trust-fund kid I had to follow around and drag out of bar fights. I didn’t have anything keeping me there, and I don’t have anything here, either,” He turns to Anton, a strange smile on his face, like he’s out of practice. “But you make life interesting.”

“I’ve got nothing to do with it,” Anton says, looking away quickly, his cheeks burning slightly. “Well, nothing to do with 80% of it. Maybe 75.”

“Besides,” Ford says some time later, long enough after his last comment that it startles Anton. “You’re not my boss, you don’t have the authority to fire me.”

He stands up and walks towards his car, hands in the pockets of his ripped and fraying jeans.

“Wait, what?” Anton leaps to his feet and rushes after his PA. “What do you mean I’m not your boss? Who do you work for, then?”

“She’ll be in touch soon,” Ford says, climbing in to the driver’s seat. “Sooner than you’d expect.”

He peels away, tires screeching.

Anton’s phone rings.

“You’ve been busy, Stark,” Hill says.

Chapter 7: it can only go up from here, right?

Chapter Text

He’s getting sick of waking up to someone breaking down his door.

At least they’d given up on trying to assassinate him, though that might have more to do with the sheer volume of Hydra assassins now in the custody of new-SHIELD than with anything he himself has done.

He pulls the gun from under his pillow and takes out several kneecaps, then opens his eyes. Four-man tac-team, two down, the others trying to shove past them. One aims a rifle at him and he rolls off the bed. Three new holes appear in his headboard, joining about a half-dozen from the attempt on his life last night. He’d given up on replacing furniture about a month in.

Ford appears in the doorway, stun-gun in hand, and somewhere in the space of a blink, the remaining attackers join their brethren on the floor, groaning.

“I’ll get Maria on the phone,” Ford says before vanishing once more.

Anton gets to his feet and stretches, yawning widely. He takes the team’s weapons and stacks them on his dresser, next to the now framed picture of Strike Team Delta. He’d still been carrying it in his pocket, in case Afghanistan happened again, but Ford had eventually convinced him it was getting too fragile for that. Frankly, the creases where it had been folded are so tattered it’s a miracle it didn’t disintegrate years ago.

He stomps on the hand of one of his attackers, who had been reaching for something on their belt. It makes a sickening crunch, and the goon lets out a pitiful whimper of pain.

Ford returns a few moments later with several hand and ankle restraints, and the two of them make short work of securing the team. The ones Ford had taken out still twitch slightly every few moments, but seem otherwise unharmed. Probably for the best, he supposes, since Hill’s been getting on him for ‘excessive force’. She probably won’t be happy about the gunshot wounds, but he figures he’s entitled to a little retribution, given that they’re not exactly here to invite him to tea.

“Might be time to go pre-emptive,” Ford says, the two of them dragging the bound goons down the hall to the entryway for easier extraction. “They need to be taken out anyway, right?”

“I could do with a little revenge, too,” Anton muses. He pulls his cargo around the corner perhaps a little harder than necessary, slamming their head into the frame of the bathroom door. “Can’t really do it by myself, though.”

“What about the Avengers?” Ford asks. “Couldn’t you ask them?”

Anton makes a face. “Thor’s probably off in space or whatever, and I doubt he’d want to bother with something this small. And I’ve no idea where Nat, Clint, or Bruce are, Steve’s off looking for Yasha… I mean, this is kind of exactly his type of thing, but I don’t know if he’d want to put the search on hold,” He shrugs. “Besides, always felt a little weird they put me on a superhero team. I’m not exactly, well, hero material.”

Ford looks like he wants to say something about that, but is interrupted by Hill marching into the apartment, with around a dozen fully kitted-out agents streaming in behind her.

“This everyone?” She asks Ford. He nods, and several agents carry the goons out the door. “Weapons?”

“On my dresser,” Anton says. Her eyes flicker towards him briefly, then back to Ford. The rest of her entourage head for Anton’s room.

She’s got her foot out the door when she turns back to him, her expression unusually soft.

“Barton and Romanov just got in a few hours ago,” She says. A junior agent hands Anton a plastic keycard. “They’ll be in medical for at least a day, if you want to visit them.”

She resumes her exit, and he has to call after her.

“Where’s medical? New SHIELD?” He asks.

“You’re the one who owns the building, Stark,” She calls over her shoulder.

“I am?” He asks Ford. The front door clicks shut, and it’s just the two of them again.

“Director Hill took over Stark Tower’s lower floors about a month ago,” Ford says. “You signed off on the lease, but I don’t seem to remember you taking the time to read it.”

“Hm,” Anton grunts. He’s signed a lot of paperwork lately, but he usually at least skims it.

“You were in the middle of an experiment, if I remember correctly,” Ford adds. Ah, that’d explain it, then. He’s also been causing a lot of explosions in his lab lately, and his focus tends to get away from him.

“Want coffee?” Anton asks, making for the kitchen. He glances up at the green glow of the microwave’s clock. Far too early for a regular person to be getting up for the day, but he won’t be getting back to sleep any time soon. Well, he probably could, if he actually tried, but traps don’t build themselves, especially when you have to synthesize an extremely volatile chemical compound for a component. He’s been trying to get it right for weeks, hence the frequent explosions.

“I’m going to try to get my eight hours for once,” Ford says, and gives him a small wave and the slightest of smiles as he walks down the hall to his room.

“Night!” Anton calls. The door clicks shut, and he can’t help but feel a little disappointed. He likes the late nights and early mornings they spend in the lab; Ford almost acts like a person then, instead of some kind of schedule-obsessed workerbot.

His disappointment curdles into guilt when he remembers why their time in the lab is so frequent these days. Between what happened at Christmas and his secondary job as Anton’s bodyguard-slash-handler, Ford hasn’t been sleeping well. Anton has no way of knowing what his sleep habits had been like before they’d moved to New York, before Hill had insisted on Ford moving in with him after the third attempted assassination, but the man looks more run-down.

Not as badly as Anton, but few people do.

He fills a thermos with coffee and heads down to the lab. The apartment rests above a café Anton is very careful to make sure is always closed when he’s attacked (luckily, Hydra hasn’t seemed fond of the idea of murdering him in broad daylight; it’s almost considerate of them), and below that is a damp cellar he’s converted into a state-of-the-art chemistry lab and workshop. He powers everything with an arc-reactor, which had sparked (ha-ha) one hell of a legal battle with ConEdison that had finally been resolved by converting the entire building to arc-reactor energy and disconnecting it from the grid. They hadn’t been happy about that either, but legally they can’t do anything about it.

He flicks on the overheads, takes a long swig from the thermos, and gets to work.

Some time later (hours? days? He really needs to find his watch, or put a clock down here), Ford comes down, the keycard Hill had given Anton in his hand.

“Should we bring them lunch?” Ford asks, snapping Anton’s attention away from his soldering just long enough to melt a solid four centimeters of solder onto his hand. Cursing, he drops the circuit board and sets the iron on its stand. He rips the now-hardened metal off without so much as a yelp. “Sorry! Oh my god, are you okay? Do we need them to treat you while we’re there?”

“It’s fine,” Anton croaks out, cradling the burned hand to his chest. It’s not the worst he’s ever had, by far, but no matter how much pain you’ve experienced, it’s never fun. He takes a steadying breath. “It’s fine.”

Ford, unconvinced, gently takes the injured hand in both of his own, turning it around as he inspects the wound. Anton thinks it could be a lot worse, hell, he’s surprised it isn’t, but his PA (bodyguard? minder? …friend?) certainly seems to think it’s bad enough.

“We’ll have them take a look at it while we’re there,” He says firmly, with no room for argument. Not that Anton would, he disappoints Ford too much on accident to want to do it on purpose. “What should we get for lunch?”

“YASHA, place the usual order at Enat’s, would you?” Anton says. He very suddenly realizes that Ford’s still holding his injured hand, and doesn’t exactly snatch it back, but… well, he snatches it back, cheeks coloring slightly as he looks away.

“Pick-up or delivery?” YASHA asks.

“What’s the address?” Anton asks Ford, who sighs, but rattles off new-SHIELD’s address.

“Hill won’t be happy you’re giving that out to delivery drivers,” He complains, following Anton out of the lab and up the stairs. They both offer a friendly wave to the girl behind the counter at the café before ducking out onto the street.

“Ah, but you gave out the address,” Anton corrects, but backs down at the cool stare this earns him. “YASHA’s protocols have him instruct delivery drivers to wait outside, two doors down. For all the Enat’s guy knows, he’s catering a business meeting.”

It’s a bit of a long walk to Stark Tower from Anton’s building, but he doesn’t relish the idea of cramming into a subway car with his deep-fried hand, and, as he rationalizes to Ford, the delivery order will take a while anyway. So they walk, more or less silently (Ford follows him like a shadow, but even his quiet footsteps aren’t as soft as Anton’s), and the delivery driver hasn’t been there more than two minutes by the time they arrive. Anton tips handsomely, out of habit as well as a healthy dose of guilt- the last time he’d taken Strike Team Delta to Enat’s, a squad of AIM goons (hold on- was AIM the same as Killian’s Advanced Idea Mechanics? He’ll have to look into that) had crashed the party.

The plastic card in Ford’s hand takes them through a mostly empty lobby and up a cold steel elevator. The doors open on a white, gleaming tiled hall leading to a receptionist, who eyes their armfuls of takeout suspiciously.

“Name?” She asks, pulling a clip board towards her.

“Anton Ro-“ He starts, then shakes his head, correcting himself. “Anthony Stark.” He grimaces at the name, still strange in his mouth even a full year after learning it belongs to him.

The receptionist scans the list, and crosses off a line before handing him a laminated ‘visitor’ badge.

“And him?” She points her pen at Ford.

“Oh, that’s Ford,” Anton says. “My plus one, bodyguard, whatever you want to call him.”

“I don’t have a ‘Ford’ on my list,” She says, not taking her eyes off the offending guest. “I need a full name.”

Ford, struggling with one of the overfull plastic bags, manages to extract an ID card out of his pocket, hand conveniently covering all but his picture as he hands it to the receptionist, who brightens as she looks it over.

“Oh! Agent, my apologies-“ She starts, her dark cheeks tingeing pink with embarrassment. She clears her throat and hands the card back to him. “Romanov and Barton are in room 36C, just down that hall and to the left. Third door on your right.”

“What was that about?” Anton murmurs as they made their way to the ward.

Ford shakes his head, an uncomfortable expression on his face. “I think Hill might be giving me all the credit for capturing your would-be-assassins,” He grimaces.

They stop in front of the door to 36C, and Anton raises a hand to knock before pausing.

“What about the-“ He mimes shooting a gun. “Excessive force?”

“I don’t know,” Ford says. “No one seems to be mad at me about it.”

Anton nods, and raps his knuckles on the door twice before entering.

“Hey, wasn’t that the hand you-“ Ford begins, but is drowned out by Clint’s delighted whoop as he vaults over Nat’s hospital bed to tackle Anton.

“Look at you!” Clint laughs, squeezing Anton in a truly crushing hug and spinning around. Finally, he pulls away, hands still firm on Anton’s shoulders, and notices the bags of takeout. “Have I told you how much I love you?”

Anton laughs and hands him two of the bags, then takes the other two from Ford and sets them on a table between the two beds.

“Is that Ethiopian?” Nat asks, closing the book she had been reading and setting it on the table next to the bags. Anton leans over to her and she kisses his cheek. She certainly looks worse off than Clint, but not too bad, and that’s really the most he can ask for.

“Yeah, I got our usual order,” He says, handing her a container, which she happily digs into. “So, it’s been a while.”

Clint snorts into his food.

“You could say that,” He says. “Hey, who’s the new guy? Nat, you totally owe me ten-“

“Agent Ford,” Ford says quickly. Then, glancing between the three of them, “I’ll let you catch up. Mr. Stark, don’t forget we have to be in Midtown at two.”

“Yeah, sure,” Anton blinks at Ford’s retreating form, frowning when the door clicks behind him.

“Agent Ford?” Nat elbows him in the ribs.

“Just Ford,” Anton says, still frowning. “He’s my… bodyguard? PA? Handler? Y’know, I’m not actually all that clear on his job description, I really ought to ask Hill about that-“

“Why would Hill know?” Clint asks. “Didn’t you quit? Like, spectacularly?”

He tries to explain Christmas, and the frankly disturbing call Hill had given him after the dust had settled.

“You hired someone to spy on me?” He asks, wishing he could find the energy to be surprised, or even angry.

“Part of his job is reporting your activities to me, yes,” Hill’s voice is tinny over the phone, unsurprising given it had been the cheapest one he could find. The speaker probably isn’t much better than the headphones that had come with the discman he’d bought back in college. “He’s also extra protection. You have more than a few enemies, Anton.”

“No kidding,” He snorts. “And I can more than protect myself, you should know that. You assigned me to at least half the missions I ran for SHIELD. Besides, I have Iron Man for that.”

“He’s not just protection for you,” She says calmly.

He lets the words sink in, turning them over in his head.

“You think I could- that Afghanistan could happen again?” He chokes on the words.

“It’s a possibility, yes,” She says. “And one I would like to be prepared for if it ever happens.”

“That’s sensible,” Nat says at the same time that Clint says “That’s awful!”

He turns to glare at her.

“Nat’s right,” Anton shrugs. “I would do the same, in her position.”

He pokes at his food, not as hungry as he had been when he’d first arrived.

“Anyway, we’ve been staying in Bushwick, above this café with honestly pretty awful coffee,” He continues, not looking at either of his friends. “Hydra keeps sending little hit squads after me, but.” He shrugs.

“Hydra’s after you?” Nat asks sharply. He looks up at her and gives a small nod.

“Aren’t they after you, too?” He asks. “I mean, we sort of did run away from them, in a way. And we definitely helped drag them into the spotlight.”

She shakes her head, lips pursed. “Anton, they’ve pretty much left me alone,” Her frown deepens. “Hold on, you said you were five feet from the blast at the Chinese Theater?”

“Yeah, I was lucky I didn’t get converted to ash,” He laughs.

“And you said you checked out of the hospital later that morning,” She presses.

“Yeah,” He says, then finally understands what she’s getting at. “Oh! Right, yeah. Uh, I sort of heal super fast now?”

“No kidding,” Clint snorts. “How fast?”

“Well,” Anton holds up his hand, now unblemished. “I melted a bunch of solder on this maybe two hours ago? I ran some tests back in February, and I think the healing rate corresponds with my adrenaline levels.”

“You ran some tests,” Nat says, a dangerous undercurrent running through her words.

“I didn’t injure myself on purpose, if that’s what you’re worried about,” He rolls his eyes. Frankly, he’d considered it, but the multiple attempts on his life had rendered it unnecessary. “Hydra got a few lucky shots in, I used the opportunity to do a bit of research.”

The three of them sit in silence for a few long moments, idly poking at food that none of them find much interest in.

“Do you think they’re after you because they’ve figured out you heal faster now?” Nat asks quietly.

He sighs.

“The thought had crossed my mind,” He admits. “I mean, they seem a bit more intent on killing me rather than capturing, but, well, I’ve never been the best judge of their intentions.”

“Bit hard to figure out a shadowy evil organization intent on world destruction,” Clint offers helpfully. Anton laughs at that, and even Nat gives a small chuckle.

“Tell me what you’ve been up to since…” He trails off, not sure where they need to pick up from.

“How about since you left SHIELD?” Clint smiles before launching into a (possibly exaggerated) tale of several missions, a forced vacation after an injury that had ended with him running afoul of a ‘track suit mafia’, the permanent damage to his hearing, reuniting with his brother, and the year after SHIELD fell, which he had spent bouncing around Europe until Nat finally tracked him down.

Summer is in full swing when a particularly nasty attempt on his life sends Director Hill on an hour-long rant that ends with her demanding that he move into Stark Tower so that SHIELD can keep a closer eye on him.

“What? Hey, no, I’m fine out here, really!” He splutters, launching himself out of the (half-exploded, thanks to a few bullet holes) armchair and down the hall as she marches towards the front door. “Right, Ford?”

Ford looks hesitant. “It would be a lot easier to protect you if we had the full forces of SHIELD on hand,” He says, though Anton’s almost sure he doesn’t look happy about it.

Anton deflates, wondering distantly if he’ll ever get out from under Hydra’s thumb; in one way or another, they always seem to have a say in how he lives his life. And if he’s at SHIELD, how long will it take for them to pressure him into running missions for them again? Will he be able to say no? He thinks that even if they say he could, there’ll be some kind of catch. They’ll do something to keep him caged, whether implicit or explicit.

But he doesn’t have much of a choice, does he? Hill’s right, Ford’s right, he’ll be safer in Stark Tower. The people living around and in this building will be safer with him at Stark Tower. God knows how many times he’s nearly ruined the café with his experiments— 19^th century foundations can only take so much seismic activity, manmade or not.

“As owner of the Tower, you have full control over development of the remaining sections,” Hill says, stopping at the door to talk to him. “The lower twenty and two of the sub-floors are leased to SHIELD, and about five floors are dedicated to Stark Industries operations, but the remaining space is yours to deal with.”

“Right,” He shifts uneasily under her steely gaze.

“However,” She says, and he braces for the bad news. “I think it might be a good idea to rebrand. Just moving you into Stark Tower might be suspicious, given how vocal you’ve been about distancing yourself from the company.”

He blinks at her, mind whirring as he tries to understand.

“Avengers Tower has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?” She quirks an eyebrow at him, a satisfied smirk on her face.

“Nat and Clint are the only other Avengers we even have a location for,” He says slowly. “Wouldn’t that just add to any theories that SHIELD is housed in the tower?”

“Romanov and Barton are the only Avengers you have a location for,” She corrects. “Ford, I want this to be your top priority. Reschedule any other meetings Stark has until this is dealt with. I trust you can handle this?”

“Yes Ma’am,” Ford says quickly. She gives a sharp nod and disappears beyond the door.

Anton stands in the hallway, clenching and unclenching his fists, feeling distinctly off-balance.

“Why do I feel like Hill has more say in my finances than I do?” He knows it sounds whiny, he knows he’s never really cared about what happened to his family fortune before, he knows no person, no matter how extravagantly they lived, could ever spend it all.

Ford pats his shoulder gently before making his way back to the ruined living room.

“I expected it to be a bit harder to get into your lab,” Bruce says, hovering in the doorway. “Y’know, a few biometrics, even a security camera or two?”

“There’s plenty of cameras,” Anton says, batting a test tube around on his worktop. “I just tend to hide them better than most people.”

“Right,” Bruce says. “And the rest?”

“Biometrics are a disgusting violation of privacy,” Anton says, still not looking up. “Besides, enough organizations have my data that it wouldn’t actually secure anything. This may be the most secure building in New York, but there are other ways to go about that.”

“You figure that a half-dozen superheroes are a good enough crime deterrent,” Bruce says. Anton glances at him in time to catch a fleeting half-smile.

“Pretty much,” Anton grins, finally turning his full attention to the doctor. “How’ve you been? How’s move-in going?”

“Move-in’s pretty straightforward when all you’ve got fits in a backpack,” Bruce says it like it’s a joke, but he doesn’t laugh. He’s still hovering in the doorway, like he’s afraid to come any closer. Anton wonders if the man is afraid of him, or if he’s afraid of himself. “Apartment’s a lot nicer than pretty much anywhere I’ve ever lived, but that’s not exactly a high bar.”

Anton shrugs, unfamiliar with the specifics of Bruce’s former accommodations, but not with the lifestyle he’s led.

“So, you’re the Stark kid then?” Bruce asks, shooting him another half-smile before looking away, glancing around the lab. “Bet that was one hell of a shock.”

Anton laughs bitterly. “You could say that, yeah,” He nods. He starts fiddling with a petri dish, unable to stay still for too long. He can’t even remember what he’d meant to do with it, before Bruce arrived. He’s sure he’d had a reason, but no matter how hard he tries to grasp for it the memory remains out of reach. That’s what he gets for staying up for thirty-eight hours. He hasn’t been sleeping well since moving back into the tower. Every time he closes his eyes, he expects to be woken up with the news that Clint was taken— with Phil’s call, asking him to help.

He wonders if Phil knew who Anton really was, all along. He certainly had been one of the few SHIELD agents with high enough clearance to access the file (the others were Fury, Hill, and Alexander Pierce. Former head of Hydra. He tries not to think about that too much).

“I read your files, when the news broke,” Bruce says, snapping Anton’s attention back to the present. “I’m sorry about that. I wanted to wait, hear it from you, but…” He shrugs.

“But you’re a scientist first,” Anton says, mouth twitching into something almost like a smile. He knows the relentless burn of curiosity better than anyone, the need to know. “I’m surprised you still came, knowing what you know. About me, I mean.”

“Well, you didn’t seem to mind me being the Hulk,” Bruce shrugs. “And you were nice enough, last time.”

“I am known for my deception,” Anton deadpans, thinking of a few choice tabloids that had claimed he was trying to pull one over on the public. If any of his life had a chance of remaining private, that chance had died the second he set foot in court. The only way to acquit him of his (many) crimes was to really push the tragedy of the situation, emphasize how he quite literally never had a choice (he always had a choice, he could’ve disobeyed; sure, he would’ve been killed, and his targets would’ve been eliminated anyway, but he didn’t have to do what they said). He’s made a point not to check the news since then. It’s bit him in the ass a few times (hello, Mandarin), but these days Ford tends to keep him up to speed.

“Somehow I get the impression that if you were going to kill me, it would’ve been a long time ago,” Bruce shakes his head. “You don’t seem like the long-con type of guy.”

“What makes you say that?” Anton says, almost offended.

Bruce points to the mess of servos and batteries in Anton’s hands.

“Because when I came in, you were playing with a test tube, and then you jumped to a petri dish, and then,” He chuckles. “Well, I’m not really the robotics type, so I can’t tell you exactly what that is.”

Anton rolls his eyes. “Basing your faith in my inability to con you on my hyperactivity seems a little thin,” He says. “I could be conning you now.”

“You could be,” Bruce agrees, but he doesn’t leave the lab.

Eventually, Anton ropes him into a few projects he’s been stuck on for a while, and they work together, only setting the fire suppression system off once before Anton finally falls asleep on the futon at the back of the lab.

Thor, surprisingly enough, is on-planet and in need of a place to stay. Apparently, Dr. Foster had finally had enough of his lengthy absences. Just days after Thor’s arrival, Steve skulks in, looking like he’s been at the end of his rope for a few weeks. Anton quickly finds out the only reason he’s agreed to even take a break from his search for Bucky (Yasha? Anton really needs to clarify which his old mentor prefers) is that Hill is prepping them all to take down Hydra.

“I mean, I’m not complaining,” He says, interrupting the briefing. They’re on one of SHIELD’s floors, in some crappy conference room, and there’s an untouched platter of distinctly depressing sandwiches sitting in the middle of the formica table. “They’ve been a little too friendly lately, and I’ve got more than a few words I’d like to have with them. But is this really an Avengers problem? Isn’t this just like, a normal SHIELD thing?”

“Over half of you have personal motivations for Hydra’s destruction,” Hill says. “SHIELD isn’t ready to go public yet, and we’re not strong enough to take down Hydra ourselves. But we still need them gone, and I wouldn’t mind taking a look at their files.”

“So we go in, make a big fuss, and you come in later to clean up,” Steve clarifies. Hill gives him an appreciative look, like she hadn’t expected him to understand. “This is the exact same approach the SSR took during the war.”

“Won’t they see it coming, then?” Clint chimes in, eyeing the sandwich platter warily. Had they looked even a fraction of a percent more appetizing, Anton’s sure there would already be a significant dent in them.

“I swear we’re the only normal ones on the team,” Phil complains to Nat, watching Clint and Anton decimate a platter of sandwiches meant for a group of ten with an almost horrified expression on his face.

“I’m a growing boy,” Anton protests.

“Then what’s his excuse?” Nat raises an eyebrow, flicking her eyes towards Clint, who currently has an entire sandwich half stuffed in his mouth.

Clint tries to defend himself, but only manages to spray crumbs over the table.

“The SSR’s operation files were destroyed during a fire in ’48,” Hill says. “If we didn’t have Rogers, I wouldn’t have ever found out. So unless Hydra has their own living fossil-“

“They have Zola,” Anton spits.

“Zola was destroyed in the missile blast at Fort Lehigh,” Nat says softly, like she’s trying to explain something to a child.

“We don’t know that,” Steve says. “I thought he was dead before, and look how that turned out. They could have a backup somewhere.”

“They brought him to the Red Room somehow,” Anton points out. “And I know he didn’t take up an entire room back then.”

Nat nods, uneasy.

“We’ll play it safe, then,” Hill says. “You lot will be responsible for data recovery until we can confirm Arnim Zola’s status.”

She dismisses them, but not before handing each of them a thick file to read over before their first mission the next morning. He almost laughs at how old-fashioned it is, before remembering that there’s a reason he doesn’t trust data security. A reason they don’t, either. Fury has to be even more paranoid than before, after the fall of original SHIELD.

Anton just hopes he’s learned his lesson about building weapons of mass destruction in the name of protection.

“I want to make sure they aren’t keeping things from us before I go handing off their information,” He says once the six of them have piled into an elevator headed for the common floor of the living space.

“You think they wouldn’t tell us something important?” Bruce asks.

“They didn’t tell anyone they knew who Anton was,” Clint says. “They knew that as long as he didn’t know his identity, he would always come back to them.”

“Yeah, look how well that worked out,” Anton grumbles. “I get away from them for a few years, and then all of a sudden they’re breathing down my neck.”

“You could tell them to f*ck off,” Clint says cheerfully. “You’re definitely rich enough to get away with it.”

“They’re right that they’re my best chance for protection until Hydra’s done with,” Anton says. “I just wish they weren’t so damn happy about it.”

“And they’re getting you to run missions for them in the meantime,” Nat sighs. “Even if they are mutually beneficial.”

“Do you think…” Steve begins, trailing off mid-thought, a concerned expression on his face.

“We might find information we don’t want,” Anton says carefully. “The files about the Winter Soldier-“

“Bucky,” Steve corrects.

“The files about Bucky,” Anton agrees. “That leaked weren’t the whole story. Hydra was a little smarter than SHIELD, didn’t keep all their eggs in one data basket. We might find something that’ll help you find him, or we might find things you would rather we hadn’t.”

“Anton and I will look through them,” Nat announces. The elevator doors open and they shuffle towards the communal kitchen, somehow still hungry even after seeing that horrible sandwich platter. “It’s nothing we can’t guess.”

“It’s nothing you haven’t been through,” Steve gives her a pained smile.

She nods, a distant look in her eye that only goes away when Clint wraps an arm around her shoulders and leads her to sit at the counter. The two break into a whispered conversation almost immediately, and what little Anton can pick up seems to be in Italian, one of the few European languages the Red Room had never bothered to teach him.

Frowning slightly, he follows Thor to the refrigerator and the two of them scrounge up a decent lunch for the team. Anton, mercifully, has been banned from using any heating element after a memorable incident with popcorn two days prior, so everything turns out edible.

After the Battle of New York, the ultra-secure residential section of Stark Tower (now Avengers Tower as Hill had suggested) had remained empty. The tower had only just been completed when the battle happened, and so Anton had been the only occupant at the time, which worked out pretty well when Loki used Anton’s floor to open the portal.

Anton doesn’t live on that floor now. During the move, he’d redesignated the floor as a common space and converted the lone bedroom into storage. Not that he’s bothered putting anything in there yet. He doesn’t have a lot of items to store.

It’s a late night that finds him sitting at the bar on said floor, eyeing a glass of bourbon.

He seems to be having more of those, lately. Late nights that stretch into days without sleep, stumbling around like a zombie until he blacks out somewhere that leaves his roommates unsettled or concerned. Two days ago, it had been wedged into a linen cupboard on the floor that houses Thor and Bruce’s apartments. He’d snagged a solid twenty minutes— his longest in the almost two weeks since the move— before waking up, screaming, stuck in a nightmare he couldn’t remember just two minutes later when Thor managed to snap him out of it.

He doesn’t even like bourbon. He doesn’t know why he’d picked that bottle over any of the dozens of others in the well-stocked bar.

He’s just. So tired. So, so tired. Even with the constant threat on his life, he’d been getting better rest at his old place. In fact, he’d barely had any nightmares since Christmas. Until he moved back into the tower. Now, every time he drifts off, he’s haunted by visions of— well, of damn near every godforsaken thing that’s happened in his life. Except, weirdly, his confrontation with Ivan at the Stark Expo. He figures betrayal and attempts on his life from former mentors is pretty much par for the course in his life, so his brain probably doesn’t even register it as different enough to torment him with it.

He picks up the glass. He just wants one good night of sleep. Just one, then he’ll be fine.

Who had stocked the bar, anyway? Hell, who had added it in the first place? It certainly hadn’t been part of his old apartment. Although, then again, he hadn’t actually spent all that much time there when he lived here, preferring to busy himself with his work and catching most of his sleep on Nat or Clint’s couch when they were in town.

He doesn’t think Ford would have chanced it, given Anton’s… history; Nat might, she more or less trusts him to look after himself these days (and look what I’m doing with that trust, he thinks bitterly), but he hadn’t seen any of her brands of choice. Thor doesn’t seem to know enough about Earth to care about alcohol brands, and this is all either top-shelf or mid-range at worst, which also rules out Clint, who Anton knows for a fact won’t drink anything that doesn’t come from a plastic handle or the back of a bodega fridge. Steve literally can’t get drunk, and Bruce says he can’t risk losing control of the other guy. The only thing thinking things through seems to have accomplished is giving him a headache and more questions than he started with.

He closes his eyes and slams back the glass, grimacing as the taste hits him.

He opens his eyes, pours another drink.

It takes just over a full bottle, but by the time the sky’s just starting to lighten, he’s got a good buzz going. All the guilt he’d felt at the start has long since been pushed to the far corners of his consciousness, unable to compete with the floaty, enjoyable haze filling his limbs.

The couch looks awfully comfortable.

He takes the second bottle with him as he stumbles his way to the inviting cushions. Halfway there, he changes course, aiming for the TV remote. He’s still a little too aware of himself to sleep successfully, that much he remembers from back when he used to do this nearly every night.

He zones out watching some awful reality show, sat on the plush rug between the couch and the coffee table, taking the occasional sip from his bottle.

He wakes sometime in the early afternoon, reasonably well rested and nursing only a minor headache. It’s the best he’s felt in weeks, until he spots the mostly-empty bottle next to him, and remembers what he’s done. But as quickly as the guilt washes over him, it’s gone again; he can’t quite bring himself to agonize over his decision when the results are so clearly positive.

The only lingering doubt he has is that if Ford or, god forbid, Nat, find out, he’ll be in so much sh*t. But, he reasons, there’s no reason for them to find out. The bar is a common area, so they won’t be suspicious of bottles disappearing from time to time, and it’s not like he’s planning on making a habit of this anyway.

His one good night of sleep gets him through a few days, supplemented with a few power-naps here and there that end much the same way as all his other attempts at sleep. This time, though, he manages to at least sequester himself to his actual bedroom.

‘Just one time’ turns into twice, a week after. A third time, the night before their first mission. He can’t afford to be operating at less than full capacity, or at least that’s how he justifies it to himself.

The mission is straightforward, nothing he hasn’t done before, and he revels in the nostalgia of it as he, Clint, and Nat move in. He hasn’t bothered with Iron Man, having never quite finished repairing it after Christmas, though he has adapted the repulsors into a portable version in case of emergency. He hasn’t worked out all the kinks yet, so they’re really no more than an absolute hail Mary, and he’s been relegated to infiltration and chaos. Just like old times.

Between Strike Team Delta’s precision and Thor, Steve, and the Hulk’s sheer brute force, Hydra doesn’t stand a chance. or at least, with the element of surprise on their side, this cell in Lithuania doesn’t stand a chance.

Had he been in charge of planning, he would’ve chosen a cell in a more notable location, but Hill had been adamant, saying that if they failed, this one posed the lowest risk of civilian injury of the known cells.

It’s all going so well, he’s almost suspicious.

And then the Hulk won’t cede control. Somehow, Anton winds up on damage control, while Nat copies hard drives, Thor deals with stragglers, Steve hunts for physical files, and Clint maintains perimeter. He almost understands why, given Nat’s abject terror concerning the jolly green giant, but a petty compartment of his psyche screams that he’s the best of them with technology.

He sits with the Hulk outside the compound.

“Hulk chilly,” Hulk complains. Anton’s inclined to agree. Despite the oppressive summer heat that’s been smothering New York, the forest North of Anyksciai doesn’t seem to have gotten the message. Despite the thickness of his tac-gear, the coolness of the day and the bitter wind accompanying it bite his skin.

“If you went back to being Bruce, I could get you a jacket,” He says instead. Then, at the growl of protest from his companion, “Yeah, I know. Not being in control sucks. Bruce thinks so too, and I know it’s not fair to ask you to give up the reins when you’re just as scared as him.”

“Hulk not scared,” Hulk grunts, though he’s very pointedly looking away from Anton.

“Yeah, you and me both,” Anton says, looking away himself.

When he looks back, Bruce is back, shivering in over-stretched sweatpants.

That night he dreams of Afghanistan.

When he wakes, Ford is poking his head through the doorway. The sight alone is almost enough to remind him of the half-decade since. Almost.

“I heard yelling,” Ford says. “I thought- no-one else is here, right?”

Anton doesn’t reply, instead sitting fully upright and running a shaking hand over his face.

“You have been asleep for one hour and three minutes,” YASHA’s voice filters in from above. “Today is July twentieth, twenty-fifteen, and the time is a quarter past three in the morning. This puts your current sleep total for the week at-“

“Mute,” Anton croaks, unable to bear the cold data any longer. He’d added the protocol hoping it would help him re-orient himself, and while it does help, it’s also a little… impersonal for his tastes. Real conversations with real people are too personal, though, so he’s stuck at a sort of unhappy medium.

He startles when the door clicks shut, and he looks up to see that Ford has left.

He pretends he feels fine about it.

Missions continue in the same fashion as the weeks tick by. He and Nat work together on data retrieval most times, the Hulk having gotten better about relinquishing control, but sometimes she helps Steve instead.

It’s during one of these occasions that Nat finds a file of interest.

“You never-“ She hisses, pulling him away from the others before he can board the quinjet. “Toshenka, you never told me how bad it was.”

“You’ll have to be more specific than that,” He laughs. She doesn’t look amused.

She hands him a journal with a cracked leather cover and yellowing pages, and his stomach drops, though he’s not quite sure why until he flips it open.

Scientific findings of Dr. Arnim Zola, 1973-1977

He has to resist the urge to toss the book into the underbrush, or to pull out his lighter and convert the damned thing into ash, and his hands shake with the effort. Or is it the terror clawing its way up his throat?

Nat takes it back, and it vanishes into an unseen pocket inside her jacket.

“He tortured you,” She says accusingly. Like he had anything to say about the matter.

“You knew that,” He scoffs, trying to control his heartbeat, or even his breaths, traitorously coming in sharp gasps. He feels far too warm, even for costal Spain, and there’s an uncomfortable pressure behind his eyes. He thinks he might throw up.

She stares at him, searching his expression. For what, he isn’t sure, but given the firm press of her lips, she doesn’t find it.

“In an abstract way,” She says finally. “I knew what he’d done to me, and I suppose I thought you’d got the same, just more of it. I’m sorry.”

“You couldn’t have done anything about it,” He says, looking away from her intense expression to instead focus on the cluster of their teammates, just a few hundred yards away from their hushed conversation. He wonders with a sick jolt of his stomach how much Nat shared with Steve. If she’d mentioned it to anyone else, either. How much this gaggle of superhumans can hear, even at this distance (at least he knows their conversation is safe from Clint for the time being— while his hearing aids are better than most, they don’t even quite approach normal hearing. He feels guilty for this thought, and for the relief it brings him).

“No, but I underestimated what had happened, and so I minimized what you’d been through,” She says. He resists the urge to whip around to stare at her.

“Natalia, a genuine apology?” He gasps dramatically, turning back to her slowly with a hand pressed to his chest. “Well, I never thought I’d see the day. I’d ask if you’d seen any pigs flying lately, but I’m pretty sure Dr. Doom managed that last month.”

She scowls at him.

“I thought you grew up while you were gone,” She says. “You’re an adult, you could at least pretend to act like one.”

With that, she stalks past him, clipping his shoulder as she goes. He watches as she reaches the group and she and Clint board the plane. Clint says something and pats her shoulder reassuringly, but she yanks it away before leaving him behind, too. Anton joins them soon after to find she’s claimed the pilot’s seat, Thor joining her.

He settles on the floor, his back against a crate of files. He wonders if there are any more of Zola’s journals in it, if he’d somehow overlooked computerized notes during his data transfer. It’s fully possible, given the non-descriptive file names often used. He tries to figure out how he feels about that.

It’s far too easy to steal the journal after Nat turns it over to SHIELD.

He wishes it wasn’t.

Wishes he’d listened to the rational part of his brain that knew this was a bad idea, that reading it would only make him feel worse. Bring up memories he’d long thought were lost to the passage of time. Hoped, really.

The journal ends just after his chronologically seventh birthday, but according to the notes within, he was still not even six. However disobedient he’d been in his early teens, it was nothing compared to him as a child.

At the time (and for far too long after; until now, really), he’d just accepted that he’d deserved the punishments thrown his way. He’d disobeyed orders, and you were punished for that. It was simple. Easy to understand.

He wonders just how different Nat had had things, if she was horrified by this.

Sure, with the benefit of a full decade of freedom, he knows how f*cked his treatment at the hands of the Red Room was, but he’d always assumed it was like that for all of their students (victims). He ponders how much of his trust in Nat in those early days, before and right after their escape, had been based on that assumption. Wonders if, knowing what he knows now, he would’ve awarded her that same trust.

He wishes he could say yes.

It’s not that he’s hallucinating.

He knows what hallucinations are like. He’s had a fair few from sleeplessness or dehydration, over the years.

But this is different.

It’s like there are two realities he can see. Hear. What’s really happening in the present melts together with the past, and what’s worse is that he knows it’s happening and he can’t make it stop.

He’s shooting a lookout between the eyes. Dr. Zola is praising him for his remarkable durability. The lookout slumps at her post. He can feel the burn of the IV drip. His hands twitch from the last round of shock. He can’t move. If he moves, Zola will know he’s awake, and this will never end. Someone is trying to get his attention. If he lies here, limp, unresponsive no matter what, he might get to sleep, finally. He can’t remember how long he’s been awake.

Steve’s dragging him away from his post at the sniper’s nest, supporting his weight. The prep room for his chamber is so cold— why can’t they afford him one last moment of warmth? Clint takes Anton’s rifle and shoots the pair of them a worried look as they board the quinjet. Anton’s had a cough for almost two weeks now, the kind that feels like it’s going to split his chest open. Steve guides him to a seat. There’s too much blood. He sits down heavily, bile rising in his throat. Yakov had told Anton he was sorry when he left; Anton hadn’t understood why. Steve is saying something, why can’t he hear him? Two days is far too long in Siberia alone, with no shelter. Steve is looking at him, waiting for an answer to a question that never made it past his ears. He turned ten yesterday,

He hates this, knows how weak he looks to them right now.

“Your durability in the face of such punishment is remarkable, number fifteen,”

He glares at his trembling hands and bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood.

“Why do you cry for your mother, number fifteen? Do you think she will take you away? Do you remember her face?”

The trembling doesn’t stop.

“-remarkable, number fifteen,”

He bites harder, staring vacantly ahead.

“Do you remember-“

He doesn’t know how much time has passed, but now they’re off the quinjet, and Steve is leading him to the common floor—

“I’m sorry, Toshenka.”

Steve presses something— a glass— into Anton’s hand, and some base instinct takes over and raises it to his lips. The burn down his throat shocks him fully into the present.

“You alright?” Steve asks cautiously. Anton glances down at the glass— gin, maybe? He can’t remember the taste— his surroundings— the bar on his old floor, only the two of them in sight. “Sorry. That’s a stupid question, I know.”

Anton drains the glass— definitely gin, given how it reminds him of bug spray— before answering.

“Oh, right as rain,” He flashes Steve what he hopes is a convincing smile, though those hopes are quickly dashed as the captain’s frown deepens. Anton pours himself another drink, figuring Steve must not know his history, if a glass of liquor had been his go-to answer for… whatever that had been. He drains it.

“If you want to distance yourself from the missions, we’d understand,” Steve says. “Natasha-“

“Spilled all my little secrets, did she?” Anton snaps.

“Didn’t specify,” Steve corrects. “But she said it was bad.”

They stand there in silence a long moment as Anton mulls this over.

“I-“ Steve stops himself, clearly struggling with what he wants to say. “That happened to Buck, a few times. During the war, I mean.”

Anton pauses, holding back the snide comment he’d been preparing for once someone had brought up… whatever that was. He thinks of a few times when he’d caught Yasha staring into space, pale as a sheet. Yasha had always been back to himself within a few moments, though. He’d never compromised a mission. Never endangered his team.

“He was never the same after Zola got to him,” Steve continues, either oblivious to or kindly ignoring Anton’s twitch at the name. “I’m sure it only got worse, later. But- I don’t want to say I fully understand, because you know I don’t, I just-“

He sighs, running a hand through closely-cropped blond hair.

“Sometimes, when I get on a plane, I feel like I’m drowning again,” He says quietly. Anton studies the side of his face from the corner of his eye, not daring to look nay harder. For fear of what, he’s not sure. But he is afraid. “I see… well, what I saw. And it’s all I can do not to suffocate.”

Anton pours himself another drink and downs it.

They sit together in the wake of this confession for a long while before the sun sets and Steve excuses himself to call Sam.

The memories start finding him when he’s at the tower, too. He wonders if it’s his nightmares catching up with him, since he doesn’t sleep sober enough for them anymore.

After nearly burning down his lab twice if not for Dum-E, nearly requiring a chemical evacuation if not for Butterfingers, and several instances of Ford having to break down his bathroom door because he’d been in the shower for nearly three hours, he decides he can’t let this continue. He tells himself he’ll figure out a better solution, eventually, but for now he knows alcohol helps. The ‘episodes’, as Ford calls them, don’t stop, but he’s able to push through them. The past isn’t overriding the present, just coexisting.

At least, that’s the case at the level he allows himself to drink when he isn’t trying to crash. It’s a careful balance he strikes between being sober enough that his reflexes aren’t impaired, and just intoxicated enough to get the benefits. Thank god for his healing factor, really, or he’d have to work around a building tolerance, too.

He starts buying his own booze. Both out of the building guilt of his regular theft, and his creeping paranoia that someone will find out, and make him stop. A part of him is fully aware of how much of a problem he has. The rest of him just wants to be able to function, no matter how he gets that. If he can call this functioning, the rational part of his brain snarks. The rational part of his brain is a bitch.

It’s hard to tell why things have gotten so bad lately. At first he’d thought it was the downtime one the tower had been completed, but the nightmares had continued once missions started. Nat finding Zola’s book certainly hadn’t helped matters, but most of the memories he has to escape are from after the Red Room. Afghanistan, Stane leaving him for dead on his floor, how the stars had looked before the G-forces and lack of oxygen knocked him out.

Maybe it was the damn tower. He’d been fine at the old place. Sure, he’d been under constant threat of attack, but at least he’d only had a normal amount of nightmares. And they’d never woken him up screaming, unaware of his surroundings.

The worst part of that kind of nightmare is that he can’t even remember what they were about. If he could, maybe he’d be able to work through whatever trauma was causing them. That was how well-adjusted people did things, right? That was what his SHIELD therapist had tried to get him to do. It had helped, a bit. Not as much as he would like.

He wishes he could just reset his brain to factory settings like a computer. Start over.

He’s been in the shower too long, if he’s having thoughts like that.

He fumbles for the knob and turns it off, shivering in the sudden cold of the air-conditioned bathroom. One nice little thing he’d added to every floor was constantly-refilling water heaters, so even if he takes five hours (he had, last week; Ford had been asleep at the time), the jet of water would still be hot enough to turn his skin bright pink.

He steps out of the stall, towels off, puts on the same sweatpants from earlier— he really needs to do laundry— and is just hanging the towel back up when the door opens to reveal Ford, who had insisted on removing the lock after the last episode.

“Oh, good,” He says, clearly surprised. “Sorry, YASHA just gave me the two-hour alert, so I thought I’d check in-“

“I’m fine,” Anton assures him with a soft smile. He needs another drink, and fast. Part of him is quickly becoming convinced he’s working on the first arc reactor, back in the cave.

“You seem like you’re doing better,” Ford says, almost relieved? Normally Anton might tease him for caring so much, but he can almost hear the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead, smell the damp earth and lingering fumes from smelting the palladium.

“Right,” Anton agrees, running his hand through damp hair. Focusing on the sensation to ground himself. “If you don’t mind-?” He gestures towards the hallway, past Ford, who quickly steps aside.

“Sorry,” He mutters as Anton brushes past. “Oh, hey, Clint wanted me to tell you they’re setting up a movie night on his floor. Said you’d get first call on the movie if you brought pizza.”

Anton pauses outside his bedroom, hand hovering over the doorknob. He’s not sure he can deal with his teammates right now, but he’s been avoiding them, and it’s a wonder they haven’t gotten suspicious already. Maybe they have, it’s not like he’d know.

“Can you order for me?” He asks, sighing as the words come out before he’s really made up his mind on the matter. “Two with everything, three cheese, and one anchovy mushroom.”

“You got it,” Ford says.

“And get whatever you want,” Anton calls after him as the man starts off down the hall. This makes him pause, but he doesn’t turn around or come to a complete stop, just makes him shake his head slightly and bounce his shoulders in an unvoiced laugh. Anton wonders what’s so funny.

Ford, who had been strangely absent since their move into the tower, begins cropping up at every turn. Anton knows it’s the guy’s actual job to essentially stalk him, but it’s getting to be a bit much. He’s used to a certain amount of invisibility, of complete privacy and solitude. For one, he’s had to get more creative about how he maintains his buzz, usually by spiking one of the energy drinks he carries around.

Then Ford starts coming on missions.

“I don’t mean to be impolite,” Steve says when Ford follows Anton onto the quinjet. “But how exactly are you supposed to help us?”

Ford holds up a glowing hand, making it burn hot enough that Anton can feel it even with the few feet between the two of them. “I’m the only surviving recipient of Extremis, and I’ve got super strength,” Ford says calmly. He lets the fire under his skin subside. “And Director Hill requested my presence after what happened last time.”

Anton twitches at the sideways mention of his breakdown. He’s fine now. Maybe he hasn’t had the opportunity to prove it yet, but they haven’t exactly been throwing them at him. While everyone else on the team has been tackling some minor side missions for SHIELD during their downtime, he’s practically been under house arrest. Allegedly to focus on upgrades to equipment, but even Bruce, who would be of great assistance at least on the chemical side of things, has been off running errands. Something to do with tracking down someone who was trying to revive his old research.

The Hydra base they’re hitting today is in Essex. Colchester, specifically, if memory serves. The building had once been a medieval fort or castle (he’s not clear on the difference; someone had told him once that they were effectively the same), and of course some goon had gotten the bright idea to retrofit it into an evil lair. It’s almost painfully cliché.

What’s also painfully cliché is how every little thing seems to be going wrong. First the Hulk won’t come out, then Steve loses his shield somewhere in the middle of the battle, Clint runs out of arrows, and Anton gets separated from the group. Someone has the wonderful idea to use this moment to start throwing grenades, and he falls through the cobblestone floor.

Groaning, he pushes himself into a sitting position. The floor beneath his hands is made of stone, though it’s much smoother than the base above. There’s also a thick layer of dust that makes his eyes water and his throat itch. He sneezes.

Wherever he is, it’s dark. The only light filtering down from above, limited to brief flashes from explosions as the battle rages on. He stands carefully, holding his arms out to hopefully encounter any obstacles before his foot does. He takes a step and stubs his toe.

Cursing, he reaches down and searches for the offending object before remembering that he’s an idiot, actually, and taking the pen light from his belt. He clicks it on.

He’s standing on the lid a marble tomb, a jagged crack running from where he had landed on it. Either he weighs a hell of a lot more than he remembers, or he’d landed precisely on a fault. He’d stubbed his toe where the stone buckled.

He hops down to the floor (the same cobblestone as above, he notes) and glances around for some kind of exit. He’s just drawing the conclusion that the only way out is the way he came in when he becomes aware of a faint golden glow emanating from the tomb.

Curiosity gets one over on him before he can prepare himself for the assault, and he pushes the lid with all the strength he can muster. It slides away easily, dropping to the floor with a deafening crack as it splits into further pieces.

The glowing thing inside is a woman. A perfectly healthy, black-haired and pale-skinned woman, perhaps around Bruce’s age from the faint grey threading through her hair and the slight wrinkling of her relaxed face. Her eyes open, and the glow dissipates, leaving Anton’s pen light as the only source of light once more.

The fort shudders, sending debris and dust cascading into the chamber. He pulls the woman out of the casket just in time to avoid getting brained by a chunk of flooring.

“Are you okay?” He asks. She looks at him with a blank but pleasant look on her face.

“Have you seen my brother?” She asks, looking around like he might be hiding a man somewhere. “We had a disagreement, but I think he’s ready to apologize now.”

“What were you doing in here?” He asks, flicking the light over her. She’s wearing simple but strange clothing— long sleeves under what almost looks like a second dress, a belt around her waist, from which hangs a collection of small objects he can’t get a good look at.

The building shakes again, and he decides he needs to get them out of there before their escape route closes. He digs the repulsors out of his pocket and attaches them to his hands and feet.

“Hold onto me, tightly,” He tells her. Hesitantly, she wraps her arms around his torso, and he takes off, ignoring her shriek as they leave the ground. They zip through the hole in the ceiling, weave through the battle as he searches for a safe place to set her down. The decision is made for him when the left foot repulsor sputters out, sending them into a slight tailspin until he touches down. “Sorry. Look, try to take cover, okay? We’ll come get you when it’s safe.”

He doesn’t wait for a reply before darting back into the thick of things, hoping that if he can find the explosion-happy goon, things might clear up a bit. Every time he thinks he’s found his man, another explosion from across the courtyard or room catches his attention, and he’s starting to feel like he’s running in circles when that same golden glow from the tomb catches his eye.

He spins around to see the woman, calmly marching through the battle, throwing bolts of the light at Hydra agents. Bullets don’t seem to hit her; explosions don’t make her so much as stumble. And through it all, she wears that same blank-yet-pleasant expression, as if she’s simply waiting for this to be over.

Slowly, with her help, they neutralize the rest of the forces, and the six of them (Bruce had retreated to the quinjet to offer tactical support once it had been made clear that the Hulk wasn’t coming to the party) cluster around the woman, unsure about what to do.

“Where did she come from?” Nat mutters, sidling up to Anton.

“Found her in a tomb under the fort,” He replies, brushing crumbled bits of stone out of his hair. “I didn’t know she was magic, but that does explain why she wasn’t, like, super dead.”

“She wears Asgardian clothing,” Thor says, a deep frown creasing the space between his eyebrows. “And she uses sorcery much like my brother, and my mother.”

“You from Asgard?” Clint asks the woman, who laughs pleasantly.

“I’m afraid I don’t know of any place called Asgard,” She speaks with an odd accent; not dissimilar to Welsh, though not entirely the same, either. “I was born here, on Albion.”

“The f*ck’s an ‘Albion’?” Clint mutters, sharing a bewildered look with Anton.

“It’s an old name for England,” Steve says suddenly, a strange, disbelieving look on his face. Like he’s already put the pieces together, but doesn’t like the picture it makes. “Ma’am, what’s your name? What were you doing in a tomb?”

“My brother and I didn’t see eye-to-eye,” She says in a sort of sing-song tone before bursting into laughter. It isn’t as pleasant this time. “He said I was too powerful for my own good, that it was driving me mad! Where is he? I want to discuss my imprisonment.”

“We can’t help you unless we know who you or your brother are,” Nat says.

Ford slides up to Anton’s other side and hands him a data pad displaying energy readings.

“These are from the past fifty years, pretty much since SHIELD started monitoring energy signatures in England,” Ford explains as the woman sings out another answer, this one equally as unhelpful as the last, judging by the building frustration on Clint’s face. “The one on the right is the readings we got from her during the battle. She’s been putting out a low-level of weirdness for at least half a century, maybe more.”

Anton drags the newer readings over the old and scales them down. Sure enough, whatever had been leeching into the area over the decades was just a scaled down version of this lady’s… what had Ford called it, weirdness? That seems about right.

“Don’t you know your own king?” The woman cries, pulling his attention away from the pad. Ford takes it from him and tucks it under his arm.

“England hasn’t had a king since the fifties,” Clint groans. “Frankly, I’m shocked they still have a monarchy. Anyway, we’re not English, lady.”

“Impossible!” She shrieks. “Arthur can’t die. He’s so insufferable about it, too.”

“You’re Morgan Le Fay,” Steve says flatly, and the picture snaps into place for Anton to see.

King Arthur’s sister. Powerful enchantress.

He’d only read the legend of King Arthur because he’d had to for class, back in college. And then he’d gotten really into Tolkien for a hot minute and wound up leafing through Sir Gawain And The Green Knight.

“You’re a myth,” Anton protests weakly. Scientific weirdness he can deal with. Medical experimentation? Sure, he’s been subjected to enough of it. Genetic mutations leading to superpowers? Why not. Alien princes falling out of the sky in New Mexico eventually leading to the invasion of New York City by said alien prince’s evil adopted brother? Fair enough.

He draws the line at magic, though.

You’ve got to pick your line in the sand, draw it, and tell the universe to f*ck off. His line is magic. f*ck the C.S. Lewis quote about magic just being science or whatever. He can ignore Loki’s magic as just alien weirdness, but Le Fay seems human— then again, Loki and Thor look perfectly human (looked, in Loki’s case. Anton can’t say he was too torn up about the guy’s death).

His internal spiral as the world refuses to align itself with what he allows himself to accept makes him miss whatever Le Fay says next, which is unfortunate because that little bit of extra focus might have helped him stop her before she vanishes in a burst of that golden light (magic).

“I’ll call it in,” Ford says while the rest of them are still frozen, trying to comprehend the mess they’ve just unleashed upon the world. “See what the Director wants us to do. I’ll meet you back on the quinjet.”

He pats Anton’s shoulder as he passes, a tight smile on his face for a half a moment before his expression snaps back to neutral.

Anton stumbles blindly back to the plane, his brain still too fried to worry about things like tripping over debris, or putting up appearances for his clearly already worried teammates, and chugs half the energy drink he’d brought. The caffeine restarts his brain, which starts whirring at a million miles a second, and the vodka he’d dumped in there (three? maybe four shots? he can’t remember, he’d already dosed himself for sleeping on the flight across the Atlantic) mutes the terror to manageable levels. He stashes the can somewhere safe before darting back down the ramp to join Ford, hoping someone has a goddamned clue about how to deal with this.

“I’ll have to call Nick,” Hill’s saying, her face over the video feed only a little choppy thanks to the network hotspot she makes Ford carry with him. “He’s got some contacts he won’t even tell me about-“

“Surprise of all surprises, the paranoid bastard won’t put all his eggs in one basket,” Anton says, voice dripping with sarcasm as he props his arm on Ford’s shoulder and leans into frame. “What the hell, Maria. Don’t you think you could’ve mentioned the weird energy readings?”

“Our analysts ruled that it was harmless,” She makes an irritated face at his appearance and shoots a glare at Ford, who wilts slightly. Anton frowns, studying his bodyguard-friend-PA’s face carefully. Sure, Hill’s his boss, but-

Right. Other people actually worry about their superiors even when they won’t kill or torture them for insubordination.

“Yeah, well,” He flicks dust off his shoulder. “Might wanna look into checking their qualifications.”

“I’ll have Fury call you with the information you need. Stay put until then,” She says, ignoring him and turning back to Ford. The video blinks out without so much as a goodbye.

“Rude,” Anton snorts.

“There was no reason to think the readings meant anything,” Ford says quietly, ostensibly looking at his data pad, though he hasn’t touched the screen since the call ended. “There was no measurable effect until today.”

“Doesn’t mean it wasn’t important information to have,” Anton gripes. He takes his arm off Ford’s shoulder and stretches. “I mean, would I have known they meant there was a crazy witch under the base? No. Would I have been more cautious about said crazy witch once I had found her, knowing that there was some weird sh*t going on?”

“Absolutely not,” Ford laughs, finally meeting his eyes. He’s not smiling in an obvious or usual way, but the corners of his eyes are all crinkled up, and unless Anton’s eyes are very much deceiving him (more than usual, anyway), there’s the slightest of upturns to the corners of his mouth. All his smiles are like this, and it makes Anton wonder how many of them he had missed, back when they first met.

“Maybe not,” Anton admits, rolling his eyes. “But I would’ve thought about it.”

“Sure you would have,” Ford says indulgently.

The sort-of-smile is still there, and a selfish part of Anton is glad he’s the only one who knows how to see it, that he gets this to himself. He wonders where that thought came from.

“We should update them,” Ford jerks his head in the direction of the quinjet, but makes no move towards it. Anton looks away, unable to bear the eye contact any longer.

“Yeah,” He agrees with a sigh, swinging himself around and trudging back the way he’d come. Ford follows, like always.

It takes Fury two hours to call them back, which is enough time for Anton to need to finish the rest of his drink, and more than enough for him to realize he’d forgotten to bring more. sh*t. And there’s no way in hell that he’ll be able to give the team the slip for a quick jaunt to a pub or a liquor store, even if they weren’t all on high alert.

He hadn’t brought his wallet, anyway. It’s not like he often needs to buy things while they’re kicking ass and taking files, and Clint had learned the hard way several years back that it was entirely too easy to lose valuables in firefights.

Wallets made for pretty damning evidence. If you get Clint drunk enough, he still complains about jail in Baton Rouge. Or he did a few years ago; Anton had lost the right to drink with other people, after all.

Anyway, Fury. Anton doesn’t join Ford for the call this time, but Ford’s quick run-down goes like this: Fury had known about magic on Earth for years (decades?), there are sorcerers (plural!) in New York, and one of them is coming to help try to track Le Fay. And to get them back to the tower so Anton and Bruce can work out something with the energy readings, if all else fails.

“Why didn’t they help with the invasion if they were there the whole time?” Steve frowns, making a frankly excellent point.

“And how the f*ck did they keep a low enough profile that no-one knew they existed?” Anton adds. “Barring Fury, of course, but he doesn’t count.”

“Maybe they have mind-wiping powers,” Bruce suggests half-heartedly. Like Anton, he seems to be struggling with the concept of magic being real.

“If it works anything like the sorcery of Asgard, illusions are easy enough,” Thor says. “My brother favored them over battle-magic.”

“They might’ve helped and we just didn’t notice,” Nat says. “We were pretty busy, at the time. Frankly I was surprised the damage wasn’t worse, after, and that might go a long way towards explaining why.”

“Do you think they ever get bored and pose as street performers?” Clint asks. Nat glares at him, but Anton lets out a loud laugh that fills the cramped ship. “Seriously! Have you guys ever watched some of them? There’s gotta be at least one that actually-“

A swirling portal of that same golden light opens at the bottom of the ramp, and Anton reaches for his gun, relaxing only minutely when the figure that steps through it clearly isn’t Le Fay, back to finish them off. Or something. He’s not sure why he’d thought she’d come back.

The man is dressed in extremely old-fashioned clothes, though not as old-fashioned as Le Fay, and they certainly don’t look European. He has dark hair and dark eyes and light brown skin, and-

Is he wearing a f*cking cape?

“Doctor Stephen Strange, at your service,” He says, extending a hand. Only Steve shakes it, though that might just be out of reflex, because he looks about as dumbfounded as the rest of them. Well, Thor seems to think all of this is completely normal, but Thor also doesn’t really understand the whole shaking-hands thing, which Anton can appreciate.

Anton eyes the man’s truly impressive goatee with barely-suppressed envy. He can sort of grow more-or-less not-patchy stubble now, but that’s about it. Maybe sideburns, but the jury’s still out on whether or not he should. Anyway, the goatee rules, is the point. Why does everyone get awesome facial hair but him?

“You’ll find the New York Sanctum on the other side of this portal, if you’d be so kind as to follow me,” Strange says curtly. Anton almost giggles thinking about how apt his surname is. He wonders if it’s the alcohol making him think like this, or if he’s finally, completely lost it.

Jury’s out on that one, too.

“What about the quinjet?” Nat asks, eyebrow co*cked, stance defensive. He feels better, knowing she’s just as on edge as him.

“I’ll be able to take you back here when this is all over,” Strange says it like they’re all idiots holding him back, even rolling his eyes.

“And in the meantime?” She growls. “This is SHIELD property, we can’t let it fall into the wrong-“

“I can conceal it easily enough, but not until you all exit,” He cuts her off, gesturing emphatically to the portal. There’s something strangely… alive about the way the edges of it spin and spit threads of the light, always vanishing before they can hit the ground.

Anton, figuring he’s hit his threshold of weird for the decade, shrugs and heads for the portal, Ford close behind. Nat grumbles, but she and Clint join as well, Thor on their heels. Bruce hesitates, but steps through after Steve says something, hopefully reassuring, to him.

Strange takes only a few moments before joining them in the old house, and true to his word, the quinjet vanishes into thin air before he shuts the portal. Nat only looks somewhat mollified.

Anton only takes the most cursory of glances around— exit, exit, lots of things to hide behind, potential exit depending on his desire to cause property damage— before clapping his hands together, startling everyone else out of their wide-eyed gaping at their surroundings.

“Well, this is lovely, but we should really get to my lab and start cracking on those energy signatures,” He says, grabbing Bruce’s arm and making for what he hopes is the front door.

“Not so fast, which of you spent the most time with Le Fay?” Strange calls after him.

“Anton,” Comes the chorus of his teammates ratting him out. He just knows this is going to take forever.

“I just need this-“ Strange yanks a single hair from Anton’s head, who glares at the older (depending on how you counted it) man. “Alright, you can go. All of you. I’ll contact you once I get the results back from my spellwork. Though, I really don’t think your little lab tests will be of any use.”

“Whatever,” Anton waves a dismissive hand at him and starts for the door again, this time joined by the remainder of the team.

Of all the places Anton would’ve expected the epicenter of sorcery in New York, a historic mansion in the Village hadn’t been his first guess. It probably wouldn't have even made the top ten most likely places, had he thought to make a list.

“Okay, we’re like, what, three miles from the tower?” He says, straining to see over rooftops and for once glad for the way the building sticks out like a sore thumb above the skyline.

“We could ask for a portal back,” Clint says blithely.

“That guy’s an asshole,” Steve says. “I don’t want to ask for any more favors than we already have.”

“Hear hear,” Nat mutters.

“We could call for a ride,” Ford suggests. “They’d be here in… maybe fifteen minutes?”

“I’m not standing on the doorstep for that long,” Anton shakes his head. “No one has their subway card, do they?”

This is met with a chorus of ‘no’s, which really, makes sense. Hadn’t he just been lamenting his lack of a wallet?

The seven of them, kitted up for a mission, including Steve and Thor’s frankly ridiculous armor choices, have already started to draw a bit of attention, which is impressive for good old NYC, even this far from Times Square. One of the best things about cities is how badly you can stick out while still blending in, but apparently these people haven’t got the message.

“Let’s just start walking,” Bruce says uneasily, gently pulling himself out of Anton’s loose grip and starting down the street. For lack of a better option, they follow.

The walk is passed in relative silence, only broken up by the occasional anecdote from Clint or Steve (“I got beat up in that alley once,” “That gyro place is amazing,”), and they arrive at the tower only an hour later.

Anton’s been a bit twitchy for the past few minutes.

“I’ll meet you in the lab,” He tells Bruce, breezing past the elevator to the stairs. “I want to get a quick shower, I feel nasty.”

“Sure,” Bruce says, looking a bit confused. Which, yeah, sure, Anton’s been pushing pretty hard to get to the lab as quickly as possible, but his brain is playing the greatest hits: trauma edition, and he needs to be able to focus on literally anything else to focus on… well. Anything else.

He darts up twenty-nine floors, barely out of breath as he unlocks his apartment and makes a beeline for the freezer and his sweet, sweet stash of-

His vodka is gone.

Okay, maybe he just forgot finishing it, that’s happened before, no need to freak out. He’ll just grab the rum from under his bed and-

There’s nothing there but an empty spot where dust hasn’t collected. The only proof the bottle had been there at all.

His breathing starts to pick up as he scrambles around the apartment, checking every last stash, every one turning up empty. He’s almost certain he went to the bodega two days ago, he can’t have burnt through it all already. Can he?

The elevator doors open with a faint ding, audible through the walls that separate his living space from the hallway connecting it to Ford’s. The door opens.

“I thought you were taking a shower,” Ford says, clearly never having believed anything of the sort.

Anton laughs, a fragile sound as he slumps against the wall in the living room. His place is a mess, cabinets open all over, books pushed off of shelves. The couch overturned with the flap of fabric covering the inner workings pulled back, revealing a distinct lack of booze.

“When did you figure it out?” He asks, picking at his nails and resolutely not looking at Ford as he slides down to the floor.

“When bottles started going missing from your father’s bar,” Ford says. Anton looks up sharply, mind struggling to focus.

His hands are shaking slightly.

“That was months ago,” Anton says slowly. So that was what Ford had done with the bar in the old mansion. Maybe he’d thought it would be safe, here. All the way across the country from Anton, in a building he had no interest in returning to.

“I thought it was just the team, at first,” Ford sits down next to him, pressing his leg to Anton’s. The feeling is reassuring, grounding. A little distracting. “Then they just stopped vanishing all of a sudden, and you started sleeping through the night more, and YASHA said you were sneaking out.”

“Rat,” Anton snorts, unable to conjure up the betrayal he thinks he ought to feel about this. His hands are shaking slightly. YASHA is only a program, after all. And part of him had wanted this, hadn’t it? Wanted the drinking, the sneaking around to stop?

Not like this, though. He’d never wanted anyone to know. Never wanted anyone else to see just how weak he really was, not even able to control his own brain.

“Clint helped me find your stash while the rest of you were loading up the plane,” Ford continues. “He- I’m sorry I told him, I know that was a breach of trust- Well, I’m not sorry, actually. He’s worried sick about you, you know.”

“What’s there to worry about?” Anton says hysterically. Ford takes his hand between both of his own and steadies it.

“You’re allowed to ask for help,” He says softly. “People care about you. If you need to take a break from missions-“

“It’s not that,” Anton snaps, snatching his hand away and jumping to his feet, pacing the room. Squeezing his eyes shut, hoping that he can push away the memories that make his vision look like a double-exposed photograph (they don’t, really. He can’t actually see anything that isn’t there. The remembering is just so strong that he might as well be seeing it) for just a little longer. Just long enough to finish this and run up to the bar before Ford can stop him-

They probably cleared out the bar, too. That’s what people do, when they stage an intervention.

“Then what is it?” Ford asks, and Anton really can’t stand how earnest he looks right now, how much he looks like he actually wants to help, because this isn’t something anyone else can fix for him. He’s not even sure he can fix it.

Instead of answering, he takes the framed, battered photo of his family, and tosses it at Ford. To his credit, he catches it before it can hit the floor. Anton’s not sure what he would do if the glass broke.

“I don’t understand,” Ford says, and Anton lets out a frustrated groan, scrubbing his hands over his face.

“Every day I’m here is a reminder,” He tries. Judging by Ford’s expression, this is even less explanatory than the photo, so he tries again. “I- I wasn’t fine with what happened to me in Afghanistan, but I-“ He wants to scream; why can’t he just get the damn words out? “Clint never should’ve gone through that, he didn’t have any way to prepare for it, he wasn’t used to it- And Phil-“

His hands are shaking again.

“I’ve never had to go back to where something happened before,” He says. There’s about a million gaps in what little he’s managed to say, a million pieces of the puzzle left in the box, but he thinks he’s managed to at least get the edge pieces out.

“I still don’t think I understand completely,” Ford says, and puts up a hand when Anton opens his mouth to try to clarify, desperate to make himself clear. He hadn’t wanted anyone to know, before, but now that the dam’s been broken- “But I don’t think I need to. At least not to get that this place is basically your own personal hell.”

“This isn’t even close,” Anton snorts derisively.

“Maybe,” Ford concedes. “Look, once this Le Fay thing is sorted out, we’ll get you out of here. I promise.”

“It’s not going to magically cure me,” God, he wishes it would.

“No, but it’ll help,” Ford says. “I mean, maybe. Probably, right? f*ck.” He sighs and rests the back of his head against the wall.

“Sorry,” Anton looks away, all of the guilt and shame he’s been pushing to the back of his mind for the past few months rushing in and drowning him all at once, and he can’t f*cking breathe under the weight of it, and it’s a miracle he’s still standing, and-

“You didn’t choose this,” Ford says.

“Neither did you,” Anton retorts. “So, yeah. Sorry you got stuck babysitting me.”

The silence draws out for a long, suffocating moment, competing with his whirlwind of emotions for the privilege of giving him hypoxia.

“I could’ve left at any time, Anton,” Ford says quietly.

Anton doesn’t know what to say to that.

Ford makes him take that shower he’d lied about wanting, and gently reminds him an hour into it that he should probably get out now.

He puts on a clean set of gear. Ford seems to think he should still try to help solve the Le Fay problem. They go down to the lab, where Bruce has half-heartedly started the search, and Anton fiddles with the equations and the algorithms until they run just right, and Ford gives him an aspirin when he starts squinting through the headache, and some water, and Bruce doesn’t ask about it.

He wonders if Steve will feel guilty about those drinks after last mission, if he finds out. There was no way he could’ve known, at the time. Well. Nat had said something when Hill had given him whiskey during that slapdash surgery, but that was a year ago. There had been other things going on. Steve isn’t his keeper.

They let the algorithm run and Ford takes him to Clint’s apartment and pushes a plate of food in front of him as the three of them sit at the kitchen island.

“We haven’t mentioned to anyone else,” Clint says, answering his unvoiced question. He’s not sure he’s ever seen his friend so anxious before.

“Nat’s going to kill me,” He says miserably. Because Nat had promised to feed his intestines to him if she ever caught him f*cking up like this again. Because that was the only way she could communicate to him that she cared.

“Hey, at least then you won’t have to go through withdrawal!” Clint says with false cheer, earning himself a weak smile from Anton and a slight glare from Ford.

“What he means is,” Ford says. “No-one will be mad at you. Not really. And you have a lot of people who care and will want to help you.”

“But you don’t have to tell anyone if you don’t want,” Clint says hurriedly.

After the year he’s had, Anton’s almost overwhelmed by the option of the smallest bit of privacy. He’s tried to pretend that it’s fine that everyone knows everything about him these days (not everything, but enough that no-one really seems to like him), but he misses being nobody. Having secrets.

But he also doesn’t love dealing with everything himself. But he’s always dealt with everything himself. He doesn’t have the faintest idea of where to start asking for help.

He pushes his food around the plate, not even registering what it is. Expired C-rations, instant ramen, steak that has no business costing this much- He puts down his fork.

“I need to think about it,” He can hear himself saying the words, but they seem far away. He can’t remember deciding to say them.

Clint gives him an encouraging smile, but doesn’t speak again during their meal. Anton doesn’t take a single bite, but he thanks Clint anyway when they leave to return to the lab.

Strange, instead of calling on the phone like a normal goddamn person, opens a portal into the lab to inform Anton, Bruce, and Ford via weird magic-y facetime that his spells have turned up nothing.

“I wouldn’t put any hope into your search either,” Strange says, clearly agitated. He doesn’t seem to be doing well with failure, and Anton can’t help but feel a little smug about it. The guy clearly needs to be taken down a peg. “I’ll have the other sorcerers keep an eye out, and I’ll call again if anything turns up.”

“Yeah, we’ll let you know if we find anything too,” Bruce assures him, making a face at Anton out of sight of the portal that conveys that he would rather tell anyone else in the entire world.

The portal closes after a stilted exchange of goodbyes.

“You should get some sleep, you look exhausted,” Bruce tells him. And sure, he’s emotionally wrung out, but he’d got a cool seven hours on the plane last night, and there’s no way in hell he’s going to close his eyes for more than a few moments when he’s this sober. Not if he can help it.

He’s not even fully sober yet, which is completely unfair, because withdrawal has started to kick in. His head hurts, his hands shake, he feels entirely too warm, his heart feels like it’s going to jump into his throat every other beat, but he’s fine, really.

“Aw, thanks,” He says sarcastically, turning to an abandoned stack of servos that might have once been an upgrade for Dum-E, but have since been repurposed mainly as paperweights. He really owes that robot a new pincer hand, though.

“You really should,” Ford says.

“f*ck off,” Anton snaps, suddenly extremely over this whole ‘being cared for’ thing. He’s an adult, and he thinks he probably knows what he needs a little better than the guy who’s, frankly, been pretty f*cking scarce these past few weeks. Months. The anger quickly turns back to guilt, though, when he remembers exactly what it is he thinks he needs, and his shoulders slump. “Sorry. I- I’m just not tired, okay?”

He sets the servos down again and pushes away from the table, making for the door. Ford starts to follow him, and he stops, one hand on the handle.

“I’m going up to the roof for a smoke,” He says. “Alone.”

“I’m not sure that’s-“ Ford starts.

“You can check with YASHA if you want, but if you follow me up there, I will push you off,” He doesn’t mean it, not really. He doesn’t think he has it in him to hurt Ford on purpose.

“Okay,” Ford nods, though he looks like he’d rather chew off his own foot than leave Anton alone.

He takes the elevator.

God. He just— it’s not that he doesn’t appreciate Ford’s concern, or Clint’s. He’s not sure he’s ever been quite so aware of someone actually caring about him— Phil had made sure Anton always knew, hadn’t he— and he’s completely out of his depth with how to handle it. He just needs a few minutes alone to… to process. That’s it.

“You’re injured,” Coulson frowns at Anton, who shrinks inwards on himself. He hadn’t meant to get injured, he shouldn’t have gotten injured. He’s better than this. His opponent had been so sloppy, so undertrained. There’s no excuse for this, and he knows what to expect now. He’s failed them, even if in a minor way.

He knows what to expect.

“Let’s get you to the infirmary,” Coulson says, and guides him by the elbow down the hall. Anton doesn’t struggle, even though he knows what to expect. Fighting it will just make it worse. It’s better if he complies.

The nurse sets his wrist and puts it in a splint. He stands there, waiting.

“Well?” Coulson pokes his head around the curtain. “You gonna stand there all day, or are we going to meet Natasha for sushi?”

“I failed,” Anton says, puzzled. He thought he knew what to expect. Why hasn’t he been punished yet?

“A broken wrist is hardly a failure,” Coulson snorts. He studies Anton’s face for a long moment. “Oh. Hey, kiddo, seriously, it’s no big deal.”

“I failed,” Anton repeats.

“No, you really didn’t,” Coulson says calmly, but there’s a simmering rage just beneath the surface. He takes a few steps towards Anton, who flinches back. The older man’s face falls. “I’m not going to hurt you, Anton.”

“Why?” The question is out of his mouth before he can stop it, and he flinches at a raised hand that isn’t there.

“Because,” Coulson takes a deep breath and seems to consider what to say. “First of all, accidents happen. Secondly, you’re just a kid, no matter how well trained you are-“

“I’m nineteen, legally,” Anton interrupts. Flinches again.

“And I’m over forty, so you’re still a kid to me,” Coulson says it without malice, and while Anton normally hates people pointing out how young he is, this doesn’t hurt. “Thirdly, and most importantly, Anton: I care about you. I care about when you get hurt, and I don’t want it to happen.”

There’s a strange feeling in Anton’s chest, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. If he’s meant to do anything with it. He’s felt it towards Natasha, he thinks. Yakov. He’ll feel it towards Clint soon, too.

The sound of the elevator opening jars him out of the memory and he steps on to the roof, digs a half-empty pack out of his jacket pocket, a lighter out of the other. It sparks pitifully almost a dozen times before finally catching. That’s what he gets for picking up lighters he finds on the ground.

He hasn’t had a cigarette in almost two years. It’s stale as sh*t, but he’s glad he never could quite shake the habit of carrying them around.

He sits on the edge of the roof and looks out over the city. He thinks about how much he wants a f*cking drink. He looks over the edge and wonders if it’d be worth it to jump down to the helipad (thirteen stories below), wait for his injuries to heal (would intoxication slow them down? He never checked), jump past that to the street (twenty-seven stories from there), and make his way to the nearest bodega. He still doesn’t have his wallet, but Kenny knows him well enough. He might be willing to extend a line of credit. Jason won’t, though. Jason’s a dick.

He takes a long drag. Thirteen stories is survivable, but he’d break something, if not more than just something. Broken bones could take hours to heal. Twenty-seven stories is- well, he’d read somewhere that it took twenty stories to cause fatal injury. He’s already come back from the dead once, doesn’t feel like pushing his luck. Nat would be so pissed if she had to scrape his sorry ass off the pavement.

He exhales, watching the cloud of smoke vanish as the wind tears it apart, scattering the particulates to the corners of the globe. What a stupid turn of phrase that is, anyway. There aren’t corners on a globe. That’s why it’s a f*cking globe and not a prism.

He’s two-thirds of the way through the last cigarette in the carton when his phone buzzes with a text from Nat.

found wckd wtch B) B) B) <3 meet dwnstrs, brng keys B)

He stubs out the cigarette, swings by his apartment for a couple sets of car keys, and heads to the garage, where the rest of the team is waiting for him. And Ford. He suppresses a groan, knowing he really should’ve expected this. He tosses a set of keys to Nat and clicks the fob on his own, searching the sea of cars for flashing lights. He probably should’ve, like, checked which cars he was getting. Lucky him, both cars have enough seats between them to transport them all, though he’s still not quite sure where they’re going until they’ve all buckled in (Clint steals the keys from him and pushes him into the passenger seat, which, okay, fair, but still).

“We’re getting transport from Strange,” Clint explains as the engine roars to life, shooting Anton a worried glance as he flinches at the noise. Glancing in the rearview mirror at Thor and Bruce, Anton gives Clint a miniscule shake of the head, which he thankfully seems to interpret correctly.

He’s not quite sure why Ford isn’t with them. Hadn’t he been right behind Anton?

They zip through Manhattan with Clint’s usual level of observance of safety laws, and by the time they arrive, Bruce has ripped the hail-Mary-handle off the roof. He looks only the slightest bit green around the edges.

“Sorry,” Anton winces as they exit the car, Bruce stumbling slightly, the cracked plastic still firmly in his hand. “I probably should’ve warned you about him.”

“Hey! I’m a wonderful driver,” Clint pouts.

“You’ve had your license suspended in five countries and thirteen states,” Nat says dryly, exiting her car. There’s a flicker of something in her expression as her eyes fall on Anton, but it’s gone before she looks away. He wonders when his eyes are going to stop playing tricks on him, or if this is just his new normal.

He wonders vaguely, as Ford and Steve step onto the sidewalk, if he’ll have hallucinations or seizures as part of his withdrawals. He doesn’t think he’s quite that dependent, but that’d be just his luck.

He glances down the block, eyeing a bar, and the expression on Ford’s face when he looks back isn’t one he can miss.

f*ck, this is getting old fast.

They shuffle awkwardly into the Sanctum, and Anton definitely does not wince at the slam of the heavy oak doors falling shut behind them. Definitely. Ford hands him another aspirin, which he dry-swallows.

“Finally,” Strange sweeps into the room, stupid red cape and all. “Where are we headed, then?”

“Glastonbury Tor,” Bruce supplies. “Top of the hill.”

Ford taps something onto his data pad and lets out a humorless huff of laughter.

“’Thought to be the burial site of King Arthur by some scholars’,” He reads off. “The hill also experiences an optical illusion called, and you’ll never believe this, Fata Morgana, which also happens to be Le Fay’s name in Italian.”

Strange does some complicated, flashy thing with his hands, and a portal opens up on a grassy field blanketed in pitch-black, only illuminated by the blessedly full moon.

“Three AM there,” Nat says with a grin. “Witching hour.”

Anton groans, and Clint cackles gleefully as Bruce and Steve shake their heads, exasperated. Thor just looks pleasantly confused, as he usually does when it comes to Earth pop culture and folklore. They really need to get better about explaining sh*t to him, but now doesn’t really seem like the time. Plus, Anton really doesn’t know why it’s called that in the first place.

They shuffle through the portal, which closes once Strange steps through.

“Alright, we’ll fan out and search for her. If anyone finds her, try not to be seen and come round up the others,” Steve says quietly, earning six simultaneous nods, one slightly delayed one (Ford), and one dismissive scoff (Strange).

“Do you have a better idea?” Anton grits out.

“It doesn’t matter if we’re seen,” Strange sighs, like Anton’s three and it’s the most obvious thing in the world. It's all Anton can do not to punch him. More specifically, it’s all Ford can do to stop Anton from punching him, as he tackles Anton to the ground mid-swing.

“Now is not the time,” Ford says, keeping Anton pinned for a few moments more than necessary (oh god why is his face so warm- f*ck f*ck f*ck Nat’s giving him that look what the hell does it mean) before letting him up. Shaking himself off, he fixes a scowl on his face before turning back to Strange.

“Care to elaborate, Harry Potter?” He snaps. He feels like a damned teenager. He’s usually so much better at just stuffing down his anger, being f*cking civil. Maybe Strange is just that annoying.

Maybe he’s just detoxing.

He pushes away the memories of what happened when he lashed out as an actual teenager, to only mild success, and it takes an enormous effort to focus on what Strange says next.

“She already knows we’re here,” Strange has the decency to at least look a little cowed by Anton’s outburst, which has a nasty surge of pride and smugness rising in his chest and twitching his mouth into a cruel smirk until the words actually set in.

“I’m surprised you figured that much out, given how weak that locator charm was,” Le Fay says, stepping through the mist.

Before Anton can draw his gun, three bolts of golden light shoot towards them. He takes one to the chest, and an eerie sense of calm washes over him. His shoulders relax, his hands stop shaking (as much), and his headache eases.

My, my, aren’t you a little mess, a voice in his ear (head?) whispers. It sounds an awful lot like Le Fay, and he knows he should be freaked out, really he does, but he’s just basking in the ability to focus fully on the world around him. The only bit of his brain focused on what’s going on inside is the bit that’s listening to the voice’s soothing words. Keep them busy.

He raises his gun and levels it at someone. He doesn’t recognize anyone around him. There’s a lot of yelling that he doesn’t care for. His headache might be less of an issue than it was a few moments ago, but really, the noise isn’t helping. The gun is pointing at a man’s chest. He pulls the trigger, jerking the gun to the side. The man falls to the ground, clutching at the wound. A woman with red hair is hitting him, wrestling the gun out of his grip, but he has knives. He gets in a few slashes before a tall man with long, blond hair wraps his arms around him and squeezes-

He can’t breathe. His vision is greying out. He thinks he’s supposed to feel… something about that.

He wakes up in medical at SHIELD, shivering and sweating, with a pounding headache and a wave of nausea that sends him diving for the trash can.

Not all of it makes it in.

He’s going to need to do laundry, later.

The strange, coppery taste fills his mouth again and he hunches over, too busy to notice the sound of the door opening, of hurried footfalls, until there’s a hand on his back. He jerks up, vomit not quite finished dripping from his mouth, coming face-to-face with Nat. He spits into the trash can before speaking.

“What happened?” He croaks.

“What do you remember?” She counters. He thinks she might be sitting in some of the vomit that didn’t make it into the can. She doesn’t seem to care, rubbing small circles on his back until he stops retching long enough to answer.

“Portal,” He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to think. f*cking hell, he’s exhausted. He hasn’t been this exhausted in years. He opens his eyes again. Blinks as the room spins slightly, throws up again. “Punched Harry Potter.”

Nat laughs, a little hysterically.

“You tried to,” She corrects. “Ford had to tackle you.” Something about the way she says his handler-bodyguard-friend’s name seems teasing, but he either doesn’t remember enough to know why or just. Doesn’t know why. He hates not knowing things. He tells her as much, and she throws back her head, laughing.

“Where is he?” He frowns, grasping at a vague something that seems like it might be useful. His head hurts.

Her smile fades instantly and the pit at the bottom of his stomach opens up, ready to give his heart a freefall.

“You shot him,” She says uncertainly. “Or- I guess you didn’t, but-“

He can feel the color draining from his face and he bites down on the inside of his cheek, hard. He can’t pass out he can’t-

“Is he okay?” His voice sounds so small and pitiful. It’s disgusting.

“Just in the arm,” She assures him. “He’s fine. It’s- Don’t worry about it.”

“Can I see him?” He hates to ask it, knows he doesn’t deserve to, that Ford won’t want to see him. Ford either hates him or is afraid of him now, and he’s not sure which is worse.

“He’s coming to visit in a few hours,” She assures him.

He celebrates by throwing up again.

They sit there, at the side of his bed, for a long time. The silence punctuated by his intermittent need to be sick, her call to a nurse for a bucket once the trash can is full, and her steady stream of assurances that everyone is okay, Le Fay is gone, and he’ll be alright.

He believes one of the three. Which one fluctuates over the hour or so she spends with him, but it’s never the last one. He didn’t know a person could throw up this much.

“What’s wrong with me,” He moans, face pressed into the hard plastic edge of the bucket. It smells terrible, but he’s smelled worse, and he just can’t quite work up the energy to do anything about it.

“Well,” She says carefully. “You got mind-controlled in a fun, new, and interesting way. And Thor choked you out, and Steve had to knock you back out a while after that.”

He nods, not opening his eyes.

“And you’re about three days into a pretty severe detox,” She adds quietly. He groans.

“I thought you didn’t know,” He says finally.

“I didn't, until just now,” She says. His eyes snap open and he turns his head to glare at her. Predictably, she has an incredibly smug look on her face. He groans again at the sudden exposure to light, and shuts his eyes once more. “Why didn’t you tell me, Toshenka?”

“…rip my intestines out,” He half-mutters into the bucket. He can trust the bucket with his secrets. The bucket won’t judge him, it’s already seen him at his lowest.

“I didn’t mean that literally,” Nat says, absolutely exasperated.

“I know,” He says.

“Then why?” She presses.

He considers this for a long time. Whether it's the concussion, the withdrawal, or out of an actual desire to be honest for once in his life (probably not that one, actually), he tells her.

“I didn’t want you to be disappointed in me,” He says. “And I didn’t want you to worry.”

“Too bad,” She says. “I always worry.”

“And you’re always disappointed?” He asks, knowing the answer.

“I’m never disappointed in you,” She says.

Huh.

That hadn’t been the answer he knew.

Ford isn’t mad. Ford says this is literally what he signed up for. Ford is an idiot, but Anton’s not going to be the one to break the news to him.

According to Ford, Anton hadn’t been the only one under Le Fay’s control, which explains the other two bolts of light he vaguely remembers seeing. One had hit Thor, but it hadn’t taken. The running theory was that it had something to do with Asgardian physiology being wildly different from Human, but apparently he had seen something troubling. A vision, he’d said. He’d left as soon as the dust settled, promising to be back soon. It’s been five weeks now.

The other had hit Bruce, who had, predictably, Hulked out, and somehow that had shaken off the control. It had, however, confused him greatly, and there had been something with the ship— Anton isn’t too clear on that one, he’s pretty sure Glastonbury and Colchester are on opposite ends of the island from each other, but maybe Strange had brought the ship there somehow?— and so Hulk had stolen a quinjet and f*cked off to space, the GPS failing somewhere around the Kármán line, which means they’re totally boned if they want to scrounge up some kind of search party, because no-one has jurisdiction. Yet.

Anton really, really hopes Bruce (and Hulk) are okay. He’s pretty sure they aren’t, though. Quinjets don’t seem exactly space-worthy, and there have to be limits to Hulk’s invulnerability. He still needs to breathe, probably. But he clings onto that desperate hope, because he’s pretty sure if he gets one more piece of bad news, he’s going to throw his forced sobriety out the window, consequences be damned.

He nearly has, a few times. The only reason he hasn’t is because Ford made good on his promise to get Anton out of the tower, and they’ve got this great little building in Hell’s Kitchen that doesn’t have a café in it or anything. And the foundations are reinforced, so Anton’s basem*nt lab and all the explosions his lack of chemistry expertise entails (and occasional electronics and explosives mishaps) are less structural-integrity threatening and more relationship-with-neighbors threatening. He’s made sure their foundations are good, too, so he doesn’t see what the problem is. Ford’s tried to explain it to him, but he just doesn’t get why people would keep useless, breakable stuff around. Especially on precarious things like shelves and hanging from nails. Just seems like begging for disaster. Ford says he lived in California too long. Anton says it’s just common sense, and he’s always been like this thank you very much.

Anyway, he’s still sober. Between Ford’s constant mother-henning— even with his arm in a sling and a hole in his arm— the move out of the tower, and the constant stream of distractions that are his lab, the missions, and his friends, he hasn’t had the opportunity. Or really the desire.

Most of the time.

He still wakes up screaming most times, but it’s getting better. He still has trouble pulling himself out of the past every now and then, but he can, and that’s better. Really, it’s great. He’s fine now, no need to worry about little old him. Top shape, back to normal, et cetera.

It’s half past two and he’s at a bar.

It’s one of those rare nights where the ghosts haunting him are more actual ghosts than usual. He doesn’t really think about his body count, usually. It’s something he made peace with long ago. He hadn’t been raised to feel bad about killing, but he still had, for a while. Then he’d gotten used to it, rationalized it (they’ll kill me if I fail and I’ll make it quick, painless). Somewhere along the line it had just become what he did. Who he was. Then he’d gone to college, and Nat had to inform him over the phone (coached by Phil, as he later found out) that killing his professor was probably a bad idea, even if he was an unfair grader. Some switch in the back of his head had flipped back on, and he hasn’t killed since leaving the Red Room. Well. Except aliens, and evil CEOs, and ex-mentors, and Hydra agents, and-

He’s killed a lot of people (creatures, his mind helpfully corrects, dragging up the image of splattered blue something on the concrete) is the point. So he’s at a bar, and he’s had way too much to drink, even for him, and he’s trying to think through the haze about how he’s going to sneak back into his room like some rowdy teenager in a sitcom.

And Clint sits down on the stool next to him.

“Nice place,” He says, eyeing the brawl being fought next to them. It’s been going on a while. Anton’s been carefully ignoring it. Not his circus, not his… elephants?

“Are you mad?” He slurs out. He knows how he looks, slumped over around a whiskey glass (there’s a specific word for those, f*ck, why can’t he remember it?), a mostly-empty bottle next to him. This is the fifth bar he’s been to tonight. This is his sixth bottle he’s begged out of a bartender’s hands, usually only relinquished with a healthy tip. Not here, though. The bartender here was nice and had been all too happy to let Anton serve himself. The bartender is hitting someone with a pool cue somewhere behind Anton’s left shoulder.

“I’m not mad,” Clint says.

“Just disappointed?” Anton raises an eyebrow.

“No, not disappointed,” Clint gives him a sad smile. “My dad drank a lot, did I ever tell you that?”

Anton looks at him in surprise, and something like guilt and fear curdles in his stomach. Has he been reminding Clint of his father this whole time? Harold Barton hadn’t exactly been a good parent, and that was coming from Anton, whose first positive parental figure had been a SHIELD handler in a cheap suit, thirty-five years after his birth. Well, maybe Yasha counted (definitely counted), but Yasha also did teach him how to kill a man in about a hundred different ways.

“He tried to quit a few times, towards the end,” Clint continues. “Liver failure, by the way. Shocker! Anyway, well. I did say a few times.”

“Did he ever manage it?” Anton asks.

“No,” Clint shakes his head, the smile turning bitter. “He died with a six pack next to him and a bottle of rye in his hand.”

“I’ll do better than him,” Anton promises. “Shouldn’t be too hard, righ’? He set th’ bar pre’y low.” Consonants are so much work right now. He just wants to lay his head on the countertop and sleep.

“Yeah, you will,” Clint agrees.

Clint’s dragging him off the bar stool and towards the door before he can really ready himself for movement, and he feels about as graceful as a newborn giraffe.

He tells Clint, who laughs, loud and bright, and maybe things won’t be so bad, if he has someone like this.

Chapter 8: Update: June 12, 2024

Chapter Text

Hey! Long time no see.

I just wanted to post this here, in case anyone's still checking for updates-- I'm excited to say that I decided this needed another rewrite last month, and I've finally finished and edited enough to start publishing!

I'll be posting the prelude in just a little bit here, and I hope you all like it. I'm much, much happier with how this version is turning out, and I hope you all do too :)

Cheers!

- Jamie