and the stains comin’ from my blood tell me “go back home” - Chapter 2

Chapter Text

“f*cking christ, that was close,” Clint sighs, settling back as his eyes drift shut. “And you owe me twenty bucks, Nat.”

“Put it on my tab,” Natasha doesn’t take her eyes away from the windshield as she weaves them through downtown traffic, but the jump drive she tosses into the backseat soars into Anton’s hands with perfect aim. “You able to upload that on the move? Keep those eyes open, Barton.”

“Shouldn’t be too hard,” Anton says, plugging the drive into his tablet before unfolding the keyboard. “Just have to securely bounce it between fifteen satellites with firewalls a bored twelve-year-old could bypass, follow it up with a worm wiping all traces of it, and make sure the worm doesn’t find its way to SHIELD’s servers.”

“Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy,” Clint flaps a hand dismissively. “My niece could do it.”

“I said twelve, Barton. A five year old would have a bit of trouble,” Anton pauses, reconsidering. “Probably.”

“How is Lacey, anyway? Still begging for a pony?” Nat whips them around a corner at about twice the speed she should, sending Anton sliding across the back seat. “The f*ck did I tell you about wearing your seatbelt, Toshenka?”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Anton mutters, but clicks the belt into place all the same. “If it’s getting thrown from a car that kills me, I’ve won.”

“I’m not visiting you in the hospital,” she retorts. “If you get put on life support, I’ll pull the plug myself.”

“What, and deprive the world of my wit and charm?” Anton scoffs. “Admit it, you’d miss my adorable face.”

“You’re adorable in the same way an inbred pug is adorable,” she cuts through an alley, swerves through a lane of oncoming traffic. Clint nearly rips the hail-mary handle off the roof. “Careful, Barton; this is a rental.”

“I think we lost the deposit when Nikki’s goons decided our trunk needed more ventilation,” Clint says, finally putting the handle out of its misery when Nat slams them head-first through a chain-link fence, swerves out of the way of a very angry looking security guard, and fish-tails to a stop mere inches from Phil, who doesn’t bother looking up from his laptop. “Aw, car, no.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Anton claps a hand on his shoulder, uses it to leverage himself over the console and follow Nat out the driver’s-side door. “I’ll tell them it was Natka, get it taken out of her pay instead.”

“I will have your guts for garters,” Nat says, arms crossed. The two of them lean back in to haul Clint out, wincing in sympathy when his injured leg bumps against the wheel.

“How’d it go?” Phil asks. He finally looks up, takes in the injuries and the ruined car. Sighs. “Same as usual, then.”

“Got the data, though,” Anton flips the tablet shut and tucks it under one arm, slinging the other around Clint’s waist to help Nat support him. “SHIELD should be getting it any second now. How’s the paperwork coming along?”

Phil’s laptop chimes with a notification that sends three pairs of eyes rolling.

“How’s the eBay auction going?” Anton corrects himself, watching Phil scramble for the keyboard with a knowing smirk. “What’s it this time, Cap’s used boxers?”

“Har har,” Phil deadpans, clicking furiously. The laptop chimes a different notification— auction closed— and he shuts the lid with a satisfied smile. “Trading cards, actually. Some kid found the last two cards I needed for my set of the 1944 run in his grandpa’s attic, had no idea what they were worth. Near-mint too, just some slight foxing around the edges-“

“Fascinating as your fanboy eBay purchases always are,” Nat cuts in. “We need to get in the air. Clint needs to have been at medical ten minutes ago.”

“Good thing we’re ready for takeoff, then,” Phil motions them onto the quinjet, and true to his word, they’re off the ground in under two minutes. “He need a med kit? We’ll be in LA in thirty, forty-five minutes on the outside.”

“Something to dress his wound with,” Nat says. “He’s lost some blood, but that won’t be in the kit.”

“Pshhh, I didn’t lose it. I know exactly where it is!”

Clint points helpfully to the trail he left in his wake.

“It’s just a little stab wound,” he complains. “I don’t know what the two of you are so… worried…”

He slumps in his seat, out cold.

“I got the med kit,” Anton says.

Fury’s waiting for them when they touch down, as well as a team of medics that swarm through the door to carry Clint off. He’s still pale from blood loss, clammy from passing out, but conscious, at least. In better shape than he would have been if they hadn’t been able to slow the bleeding. He blows them a kiss as the gurney rolls past.

“I don’t need your cooties, Barton,” Anton calls after him, earning himself the double-birds.

“Romanov,” Fury doesn’t have to bark it out, but the fact that he does makes it clear which of them he’s talking to. “Got an assignment for you. Solo, this time.”

“Yeah, great to see you too, Director. No, I don’t want two f*cking minutes to get Clint’s blood out of my shirt,” Anton gripes under his breath, but meanders over anyway. “Sir?”

“You’re familiar with Obadiah Stane, I trust,” Fury gestures at the man standing next to him— around Fury’s age, balding at the top, grey beard that looks like it’s hiding a jaw you could crush walnuts with. He looks like he was born to run companies like Stark Industries. “You’ll be accompanying him to a weapons demonstration in Afghanistan. Security detail.”

“Thought the military usually handled that sort of thing,” Anton says, eyeing Stane warily. Something about him rubs Anton the wrong way.

The war profiteering, maybe.

“Sure do,” Stane gives what’s probably meant to be a conspiratorial smile, but reads more like a leer. “But there’s been a few too many close calls lately, and an old buddy of mine gave me your name, said just having you on my team would scare the rats back into their caves. I gotta say, Agent Romanov— I thought you’d be older.”

“Mm,” Anton hums noncommittally. “How long till wheels-up?”

“Technically?” Fury snorts. “Two hours ago. An hour after you were supposed to be back.”

“Ran into some old friends, had some catching up to do,” Anton shrugs. “After they ran out on the check, anyway.”

Stane laughs, sharp and brash like the rest of him, slaps Anton on the back. “I like this kid, Nick. Where the hell did you find him?”

“Funny kid,” Ivan chuckles, gesturing at 528 with a half-empty bottle of vodka. “Reminds me of me, when I was his age.”
“He’s a riot,” Yakov deadpans, pulling the bottle from the man’s unresisting grasp. “Hey kid, keep an eye on the lush, will you? I gotta take a leak.”
Ivan watches Yakov disappear down the hall of the safehouse, then leans toward 528 with a conspiratorial grin. “Little boy, you are smart, yes?” 528 shrugs, setting aside his repair work. Yakov says he gets too damn focused when he’s fiddling with something like that. Yakov says he can’t afford to divide his attention when there isn’t someone like him to watch 528’s back. “My father, he took his blueprints from the thieving bastard, Stark—“ Ivan pauses to spit, luckily in the opposite direction from 528. “—when I was boy, like you. He says to me, ‘Ivan, you will finish this one day.’”
Ivan leans back in his chair, shaking his head.
“I cannot keep them safe, where I am going,” he says. “I cannot complete his work. But you— you are a smart cookie, eh? And you do what you are told.”
528 nods. He always follows orders. He tries to, anyway.
He does when it matters.
Ivan takes a battered, folded piece of paper out of his pocket, holds it out for 528.
“Take it,” he says, so 528 does. “Use it well, boy. Use it to crush Stark, and all he stands for. Hide it, keep it secret. Wait until the moment is right.”

“Just something Agent Barton dragged home one day,” Fury says.

Anton shakes off the memory, slips a hand into the inner pocket of his jacket, fingers brushing over the blueprints Ivan gave him so long ago. He pulls his cell phone out instead, typing out a rapid-fire update that he sends to Nat. She sends back a wall of frowny-face emoticons.

“I expect a full report when you get back, Romanov. Properly filled out for once, if you don’t mind. Mission briefing just got sent to your tablet; contact Agent Coulson if you have any questions.”

Anton gives the Director a lazy salute, waits for Stane to make his goodbyes— if he genuinely can’t tell how much Fury dislikes him, he’s got bigger problems than terrorists crashing his party— and trails after him to the private jet taking up half the hangar. There’s another man already on board, dark-skinned and handsome, wearing a military dress uniform. Air Force, Anton thinks. A Lieutenant Colonel.

“Rhodes! Got a little something I think you’ll want to see,” Stane says, clapping a large hand on Anton’s shoulder. He resists the urge to break the man’s fingers, taking a deep breath and reminding himself that he doesn’t do that sort of thing anymore.

Usually.

Phil gave him a talking-to after last time.

“This is Anton Romanov. Nick was kind enough to loan him to me for the trip.”

Anton clenches his jaw, but stays silent.

Rhodes gives him a sympathetic look as he rises to his feet, offering a hand. Anton shakes it.

“Agent Romanov, good to finally meet you. Lieutenant Colonel James Rhodes,” he says, and he sounds sincere enough, despite the tension around his eyes. Then again, if Anton had to deal with Stane on a regular basis, he’d probably be worse off than Rhodes. If Stane survived that long, that is. “Heard a lot about you. Is it true you went from undergrad to PhD candidate in three years?”

“Two and a half,” Anton says. Stane laughs again, claps him on the back hard enough to make his eyes rattle in their sockets. “That all you heard?”

“I worked with Agent Barton about a year back,” Rhodes says. “Couldn’t get him to stop talking about you and your sister. If half of what he said was true, I’d say we’re in damn good hands.”

If half of what Clint said was true, Anton thinks, then Phil’s going to have to sit them all down for another of his ‘little chats’ about security clearances and the definition of the word ‘classified.’ The importance of national security.

Boring sh*t like that.

The pilot steps out of the co*ckpit to let them know he’s about to start taxiing, and that there’ll be some heavy turbulence once they get a few hundred miles from the coast, which could stick around until they’re over Japan. Disappears back through the door.

Anton drops his bag two rows behind Rhodes— who seems to have carefully selected a seat as far away from Stane as he can get without causing offense— and rests his head against it, swiping idly through the briefing documents. Standard sh*t he’s seen a hundred times before. He only gets halfway through it before the boredom forces his eyes shut, and he doesn’t open them again until they land.

“Sleep well?” Rhodes asks, shouldering his bag as they step out into the hot mid-day sun.

“Like a baby,” Anton says evenly. It’s a lie by omission, while still being the truth. Handy thing, idioms— no one ever thinks about what the words really mean.

He doesn’t sleep in front of other people unless he absolutely has to. He doesn’t sleep much at all, frankly. He has too much locked away in his head, too much that spills out even when he’s awake to delude himself into thinking a regular eight hours per night is a luxury he can afford (he keeps thinking he smells disinfectant, chemicals. Blood). He’s fine settling for three or four every other day. He has to be.

Makes for a lot of real f*ckin’ boring nights staring at his eyelids, though.

It’s a long and dull drive to the base, made all the more agonizing by Stane’s attempts at conversation, which feels less like he’s trying to get to know Anton and more like he’s kicking the tires on a new car. Anton responds to most of his questions with silence, keeps what answers he does give short and sharp. Stane doesn’t seem to get the hint, but Rhodes picks up on it, manages to redirect the old man’s attention. Anton probably owes him one for that. Several ones, even.

They join a convoy of Hummers at the base for an even longer, even more boring drive to the test site. Anton passes the time by working on improvements for Clint’s trick arrow collection and Natasha’s Widow Bites, reading through the rest of the briefing he probably should’ve finished on the plane, and when he runs out of sh*t to do, tossing and catching a throwing knife in time to the crappy rock music Stane had insisted the driver put on.

Their air force pals don’t seem to like that last activity much, but they wisely keep their traps shut.

Unlike Stane, who had kept trying to talk to Anton about his schematics the second he spotted them, and hadn’t taken him seriously when Anton told him that technically he didn’t even have clearance to view the schematics, despite being the inventor behind them (“C’mon, Romanov. What are a few state secrets between friends?”). Anton deals with it like he always deals with questions he doesn’t feel like answering: keeping his mouth shut.

Stane does some posturing, blows some sh*t up. Mingles with the officers, politicians, and shareholders that came to his little spectacle. Standard weapons demonstration sh*t. They’re back on the road within two hours, and Anton’s just starting to think this was a waste of his time when the car in front of them winds up on the wrong side of a missile.

They don’t have a choice but to pull over, their grunt pals jumping out guns-blazing. It’s stupid, smacks of a hero complex, and is pretty much exactly what Anton’s come to expect the US military to train their soldiers for. The only consolation is that they die quick.

“Put this on, follow me, and stay low,” Anton shoves a kevlar vest into Stane’s hands and pulls out his handgun. “I’ll step out first. If they shoot, you run. Understand?”

“Crystal clear, Romanov,” Stane says, looking far more rattled than Anton would have expected, given the man’s normally unshakable bravado.

Anton kicks the door open, hard enough that it flies off the hinges and takes out the gunman that had been waiting for them. A quick scan provides him with two potential paths— he decides to sacrifice his own line of sight for the sake of blocking that of their attackers. He motions for Stane to follow, makes it thirty meters from the car before another missile lands in front of them.

He has just enough time before it detonates to knock Stane behind a nearby boulder, shielding him as best he can.

And to see the logo, helpfully displayed in bright blue, friendly lettering.

Stark Industries.

There’s pain—

White hot, agonizing—

He struggles to his feet, ignoring what his nerves are telling him. Ignoring the warmth quickly spreading under his kevlar vest, the weakness in his limbs. Two gunmen, clearly hoping to get the drop on him in his weakened state, get a bullet to the head each. Anton offers a bloody, burnt hand to Stane, pulls him to his feet. Ignores the ringing in his ears, the static at the edge of his vision.

“Might have the opportunity to pull the plug after all, Natka,” he mutters to himself. Russian. It’s always Russian he falls back on. He shakes his head, pushes past the vertigo, focuses. Speaks in English, directed at Stane. “You hurt?”

“You- how-“ Stane stammers, breathing heavily. He clears his throat, visibly pulling himself together. “A little bruised, that’s all. Couple of scratches.”

Anton nods once, sharp, eyes scanning the horizon. Catches sight of two squads: ten men apiece, each holding a rifle in a practiced but inelegant way. There’s no chance of escape, and he knows without checking that he doesn’t have enough bullets to take out even half of them. Knows without checking that he’s likely to bleed out before he gets in range, and that even if they’re stupid enough to get that close on their own, he definitely won’t last that long. He’s losing blood fast.

What the hell, not like he has anything better to do.

“Wait here,” he grits out, co*cking his gun and stalking towards them.

“Agent Romanov, wait,” Stane grabs him by the wrist, winds up getting dragged a good three feet before Anton draws up short, swaying slightly. “Maybe… maybe if we surrender-“

“I don’t think they were looking to take prisoners,” Anton wrenches his hand out of Stane’s grasp and presses on. Somehow, he makes it back to the road. Somehow, both squads are in range of Anton’s handgun. Somehow they haven’t shot him where he stands. He decides not to look a gift horse in the mouth, raises his gun, aims at the man leading the charge—

He hears Russian, from somewhere behind him.

Yasha has a hell of a sense of timing— or at least, the shadow that Anton carries with him does, but it got that knack from somewhere.

He hears Russian, from somewhere behind him.

A series of nouns, seemingly unrelated.

The pronunciation leaves something to be desired.

He turns his head, not taking his focus off the attackers, but hoping to get a glimpse of the speaker before—

The air is cool and damp on his face. It smells like stone dust, damp earth. Sweat, fear.

Blood.

No— old blood. Blood that’s had time to fester.

Antiseptic. Charred flesh— with an acrid tinge that makes him think of soldering irons used as a last resort, when the choice is between risking heavy metal poisoning and bleeding out on your makeshift operating table.

There’s a weight in his chest, something cold and hard— metallic, maybe— that, judging by the way his ribcage feels like the fabric of space-time warping around a black hole, is embedded much deeper than his skin. It aches in a way he knows that only bone can, and deeper still.

He can hear a man singing quietly to himself, in the far corner of the room. Something in Pashto. Something that sounds like children should be playing a game while they sing it, less like it should be sung by a voice frayed with age and grief.

He opens his eyes. Sees rough-hewn stone walls, fluorescent lights, a ceiling fan that by all accounts should have fallen off its cord two decades ago.

His eyes are almost as dry as his throat, his lips have split in several places from dehydration, there’s a building pressure behind his eyes that gets worse every time he blinks, and he knows for a fact that if he had anything in his stomach right now, it wouldn’t be there for long.

In short, he’s not having a great day.

“Ah, good. You’re awake,” the singing man says, slowly rising to his feet as Anton swings his legs off the cot and eases upright.

Feeling some resistance, he glances down; sees the gauze bandages wrapped around his chest, the ring of rusty brown staining its exact center, the wires trailing out from underneath the wrappings to connect to a car battery.

The singing man makes his way across the room— carefully, telegraphing his movements well before he makes them— until he reaches a workbench a few feet from Anton’s resting place, where he leans against the edge.

“I was starting to worry; the first twenty-four hours are always the hardest.”

Anton stares at the man for a long, drawn-out moment, cataloguing his appearance. He’s in his mid-sixties, perhaps late-fifties if he’s lived a hard life. He wears glasses, a neatly trimmed beard that’s been going grey for some time, but has a ways to go. He speaks nervously, in very slightly accented English. He’s afraid of Anton, but most people he encounters are. If they aren’t when he meets them, they soon change their minds.

“I’ve treated many wounds like this in my village. The walking dead, we called them,” the man says. “The barbs would take weeks, sometimes, to work their way into the vital organs.”

Anton flicks his gaze back down to the gauze, the battery. Back to the singing man.

“It’s an electromagnet. Here, catch,” the man plucks a lidded test tube off the workbench and tosses it to Anton. It makes a faint clinking noise when he holds it up to the light— shrapnel. He must’ve been in some sort of explosion, then. “A little souvenir for your trip, no? I removed what I could from your heart, but the electromagnet is keeping the rest from doing any more damage. For now, at any rate.”

Anton considers this. Yes, that would be the best option. He has some notes concerning the power supply, but judging from the stellar accommodations, he’s lucky they could give him this much.

He’s lucky he woke up at all.

Men with guns stream into the room and shout at them in Arabic to get down and put their hands on their heads. He watches the singing man carefully and follows his lead in complying. They’re led outside, down a hallway, and out of the cave’s mouth.

The world outside is bright, and chilled. Damp, mountain air. Thin.

High elevation. Mid-Spring, if he had to guess.

The guards lead them past dozens of crates bearing the Stark Industries logo, lead them inside a tent stationed a few hundred meters from the cave. The guards show him surveillance footage, a missile test conducted by Stark Industries.

“They are asking if you can build it for them,” the singing man translates for the gunman who seems to be in charge, after being prompted by another of their captors pressing the barrel of his gun into the small of the singing man’s back.

Seems being the operative word, Anton thinks. There’s another man, half-hidden behind the crates of weapons filling the rest of the tent, watching them carefully. He has the same dangerous, calculating look that many of the Masters wear when they sit in on lessons.

It’s not just Anton and the singing man who’re in trouble, if he doesn’t like what he hears.

“They speak English?” Anton asks, barely moving his lips, barely audible in his own ears. “Any of them?”

“No, not that I am aware of,” the singing man says, not much louder than Anton. “Arabic, Urdu, Dari, Pashto, Mongolian, Farsi, and Russian? Yes. But not English.”

“You probably shouldn’t pursue a career in translation,” Anton says mildly, filing the information away for later. Even with Yinsen’s answer, he still doesn’t raise his voice. He knows better than to assume he can speak freely. “They’re not asking.”

“No, they aren’t,” the singing man admits, regarding Anton with increasing apprehension as their captors describe the nature of the help they’re expecting.

“Keep talking, or they’ll put a bullet in your head,” Anton murmurs.

“I am not sure how you are expected to perform these duties in your current state,” the singing man laughs uncomfortably. Anton doesn’t return his half-hearted smile, and it drops from his face completely at what the leader says next. “They can’t be serious— you’re just a boy!”

“Tell them I will comply,” Anton says, returning to his normal volume. Not bothering to meet the leader’s warm, open smile, but instead taking in their surroundings as best he can. Memorizing. Cataloging. “But tell them that the missile will require the bulk of my attention, and that they must give me any and all supplies I ask for. Tell them that if they have any issue with this, they can take it up with the Masters, and see whose side they take.”

The singing man repeats his words— faithfully, though he looks unhappy about it— and the leader pales, his smile faltering, but still nods. The gunmen escort Anton and the singing man back to their workshop. Checkpoints, guards, steel doors. Surveillance cameras. The only light comes from work lamps strung across the walls.

Once their armed guard’s footsteps have faded from even Anton’s enhanced hearing, the singing man opens his mouth to speak, then closes it. Anton waits him out, puttering around the workshop and taking stock of what’s already at hand, what he’ll need.

“My name-“ the singing man pauses, steeling himself with a deep breath. “My name is Ho Yinsen. I apologize for not introducing myself before we were interrupted, but— well, you understand.”

He gives Anton a weak but genuine smile when he looks up from the soldering iron. Probably the very same Yinsen used to save his life.

“You were very thorough, cleaning up after surgery,” Anton says, turning back to the iron. “You’d never know where the flesh fused to it, if you didn’t know where to look.”

Yinsen swallows audibly, but takes a step closer. Anton wonders if the man is suicidal, or just stupid.

“Is it true?” He asks. “What they said?”

“Truth is just a matter of circ*mstance,” Anton frowns, wondering why the words had sprung so easily to mind. “But yes.”

Yinsen is quiet for several minutes after that. Then:

“What is your name?”

“Does it matter?” Anton retorts. It matters to him, but care is the same thing as weakness. If you care about something, it can be used against you. Used to control you.

Wanting a name kept him weak. Kept him compliant long enough for them to worm their little hooks into him, show him exactly why he couldn’t cut and run after they gave it to him. Long enough for him to realize that there was no escaping. No matter how far you ran from the Red Room, they would track you down. That’s why no one was stupid enough to try.

“Those men, 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 mutters, cracking open a loose missile head— not the one they were asking him for, clearly, but full of useful materials all the same— with the heel of his palm, and then stills.

Whistling. He hears whistling.

Yasha is whistling The motherf*cking Girl From Impanema. Again.

“Why do you only know old people music?” 528 asks, handing Yasha a clean cloth and a bottle of gun oil. “And why do you only sing it when you’re cleaning your guns?”
Yasha’s movements slowly drag to a stop, his gaze not quite focused somewhere on the far wall. His lips move slightly, but no sound comes out. He shakes his head, the focus comes back.
“f*ck kid, I don’t know,” he laughs, but there’s something painful at the edges of it. “I’m probably older than most of the folks listening to that crap. It’s just catchy, that’s all. Helps pass the time.”

“Anton. They call me Anton,” he says, meeting Yinsen’s gaze before dropping it again with a shrug. “Sometimes.”

“Sometimes,” Yinsen echoes, his voice faint like he might be sick. “How old are you, Anton? You look so young, for what they say you can do.”

“f*ck knows,” Anton snorts. “Doesn’t matter.”

He pulls nearly a tenth of a gram of palladium from the missile’s chip rack before Yinsen speaks again, so quietly Anton almost misses it underneath the sound of metal falling into the crucible he’d grabbed from… somewhere in here.

“Do you have a family?”

“What is this, twenty questions?” Anton sets the crucible on the bench, between his legs. “No. I’m not a person, Dr. Yinsen. I’m just— how did you put it? An attack dog.”

“I have a wife and two daughters in Gulmira,” Yinsen says, his voice still soft enough to fade into the background, if Anton chooses. He turns to face the Doctor. “And when I leave here, I am going to see them again. That is why I must leave this place.”

“You could get yourself dead, talking like that,” Anton says.

“Perhaps,” the corner of Yinsen’s mouth ticks upwards, like Anton’s missing some crucial joke. “Perhaps not. Time will tell.”

They don’t talk after that, not that night. Yinsen leaves Anton to his work, which he’s perfectly happy with. By the time the main lights flicker off, leaving only the soft glow of the emergency backups, he thinks he might just have enough palladium. For what, he’s not quite sure. He has enough to make his captors their stupid missile ten times over, at least; he’s pretty sure that’s not what he’s going to build, though.

As he settles back onto the cot he awoke from, car battery resting between his hip and the wall, he lets himself ask: why? Why is he so sure he’s going to disobey orders? Why does he want to? And, most importantly of all: why does Dr. Yinsen care so goddamn much? Like Anton told him, he’s not a person. Only people get things like families. Birthdays. Names their parents gave them.

He gets gun calluses, scars he doesn’t remember the cause of, blood under his cuticles, and the voices of dead men in his ears. He can hear one now, in the dark. Another Doctor, from a long time ago.

He rolls over, hunching his shoulders to his ears and shoving his hands into the pockets of his jacket, as if he were cold. It doesn’t do anything to make the noise go away, but he knew it wouldn’t. He had to try, anyway.

In his pocket, his hand brushes two folded sheets of paper, a metal compass. He pulls them out. The first paper he unfolds—

“Funny kid,” Ivan chuckles, gesturing at 528 with a half-empty bottle of vodka. “Reminds me of me, when I was his age.”

He would’ve been twelve, when the Red Room sent him and Yasha to smuggle Ivan out of Siberia. He might not know for sure how long he’s had them, or how long Ivan had them, but through some miracle, they’re intact. Intact enough to use, at any rate. Intact enough for him to realize that this is what he had been gathering materials for— that this was part of it, anyway. The plans are for something that wouldn’t fit in this cavern even laying down flat, but his neat, cursive Cyrillic filling the margins has that covered for him. A way to miniaturize the machine. A way to improve its efficiency. Another miracle.

The compass isn’t anything special from the outside. Standard issue to American troops during the Second World War. There’s a black-and-white photo pasted to the inside of the lid, two boys, around the age that Anton looks. One with light hair, one with dark. The blond one is small, frail-looking. He looks like he just threw up, or like he’s about to. The dark-haired boy is laughing, despite the blond one’s death-glare. The two of them are standing in front of a large, wooden rollercoaster. There’s a large body of water on the other side of it.

It doesn’t dredge up any memories for him, except a faint impression that this once belonged to Yakov. To Yasha.

The other piece of paper is much, much smaller than the first. A photograph, folded up so that it might fit in a wallet. A photograph of him, Natalia, one man with close-cropped blond hair and too many band-aids, another in a cheap suit with a strong contender for the world’s tackiest novelty tie. The four of them look happy, posing together in front of the kind of couch you never see outside of government office break rooms, all of them wearing party hats. Band-aids is giving novelty tie bunny ears. He flips the photo over. There’s an inscription, in Natalia’s scratchy block-letters that always look like she’s trying to carve the words into the paper with a pen knife.

STRIKE team Delta

Anton, Natasha, Clint, and Phil

Christmas, 2008

Your family loves you.

He has work to do.

Yinsen wakes up shortly after dawn. For a while, he watches Anton stoke the coals under the crucible. With his welding torch.

“Straight to work, I see,” the older man says. “Did you sleep at all?”

“Sleep and I aren’t on the best of terms,” Anton says, not quite knowing why he bothers to answer. Yinsen doesn’t seem all that surprised. They watch the crucible a while longer, until Anton’s sure everything inside is fully liquid. He pours it into the mold he made, pours sand on the coals and spreads them as far apart as possible. It won’t do anything about the heat already stifling their workshop, but he doesn’t see the point in making it any worse, either.

“Your hand,” Yinsen says, drawing closer, but still keeping his distance. “I hate to pry, but- when they brought you here, it was badly burned. Between that and your heart… well, it was anyone’s guess which would kill you first.”

Anton takes his seat in front of the soldering iron, waits for it to heat up, and for Yinsen to ask his damn question.

“It shouldn’t be healing that quickly. How is it possible?”

“What’s the use of an attack dog if it keeps having to lick its wounds?” Anton counters. The hand in question is hardly healed, but the blisters are slowly giving way to smooth, angry red skin. Even that will heal, he knows. He tests a bead of solder. Frowns. Sets the iron back on its stand to finish heating. “You’re not the only Doctor I’ve crossed paths with, Yinsen.”

Yinsen doesn’t ask any more questions that day. Just reads some random book he keeps under his pillow or watches Anton work.

The arc reactor is finished just before noon on the fourth day of Anton’s captivity. He considers installing it himself before thinking better of it.

He tosses the reactor, catches it.

Tosses it.

Catches it.

“Something on your mind?” Yinsen asks, turning a page.

“This will work better than the car battery,” Anton tosses the reactor. Catches it. “I need you to swap them.”

Yinsen folds down the corner of the page and sets the book cover-down on the floor next to him. Anton doesn’t know why he bothers, but he also doesn’t care enough to take away the man’s one attempt at maintaining privacy.

“How do I know it won’t kill you? That… whatever it is,” Yinsen gestures vaguely at the reactor. Anton tosses it, catches it. “If you die, I am blamed. Then I never see my family again.”

“It’ll work,” Anton tosses it, catches it. Sets it on the worktop. “I’ll do it myself, if I have to. This just seems like the easier option.”

“Somehow, I don’t think you’re lying,” Yinsen sighs, pushing his glasses up to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Alright, I’ll do it. Hand it here.”

At three gigajoules per second, the arc reactor produces enough energy to run Anton’s heart— let alone keep the shrapnel suspended in place— for fifty lifetimes. Or power something big for fifteen minutes. He could’ve done better, but not here; he doesn’t have the time, the materials. Not that it matters, anyway.

He doesn’t need fifty lifetimes, or something big for fifteen minutes. Not yet. But this reactor, imperfect as it is, will be more than enough for what he has planned.

“Tell them I need a laptop, and these,” Anton pushes a piece of paper across the worktop. Yinsen bends down to examine it. “Remind them of what I said yesterday, if they try to refuse any of it.”

“I don’t see how a vacuum cleaner and a top-load washing machine will help you build their missile,” Yinsen says, adjusting his glasses like that’ll make the list less confusing.

“They’re necessary,” Anton says.

He leaves it at that.

The next three months pass by in a blur of work, interspersed with a handful of missions that Raza— the man truly behind the Ten Rings— sends him on. Standard stuff, like the Red Room used to use him for: assassinations, prisoner interrogation, information and object retrieval. Some less-standard stuff, like being an extra gun to terrorize the villages and cities under their control with. Through it all, Anton keeps his mouth shut, his head down. Does what he’s told and lets them think they control him, that they’re better than him.

He plays backgammon with Yinsen, listens to the old man ramble about his wife and kids, the hospital he used to work at, his days at Cambridge. A conference in Bern in ‘99 where the man lecturing them about integrated circuits had been so drunk he shouldn’t have been able to stand, let alone answer complicated technical questions afterward.

He answers Yinsen’s questions, when prompted. Appreciates that he doesn’t call Anton out for lying to him before when he mentions Natasha, calls her his sister, and Clint, his brother. Calls Phil his father.

He doesn’t talk about Yasha.

His memory creeps back, day by day. Slower than it did the last time, but enough comes back that he thinks he has all the major pieces. Enough to remember there had still been gaps before his mind was wiped again.

His name is Anton Yakovlevich Romanov. He was given the first as a graduation present, chose the middle for himself when he defected; Natasha picked their last name. Depending on which file you have clearance for, Anton is either twenty or twenty-three. Medically speaking, he’s closer to eighteen. Technically speaking, he has no goddamn idea how old he should be apart from ‘probably closer to forty.’ He has two bachelor’s degrees and a doctorate, all from MIT, all earned in the span of four years. SHIELD had denied his appeal to extend his studies, saying that three degrees was more than enough. He grew up under the tutelage of the Red Room, became the only surviving graduate of the Wolf Spider program, and risked lives he didn’t have the right to gamble in a desperate attempt to leave it all behind.

And it had worked. It had been worth agreeing to SHIELD’s terms, worth doing their dirty work because it meant he didn’t have to do anyone else’s, ever again. Meant that he didn’t have to live his life looking over his shoulder, worrying about when the Red Room would catch up to him, because he and Natasha had given SHIELD what they needed to burn it all to the ground.

Or so he had thought at the time.

Yasha had been programmed with codewords, after the abuela incident. Anton couldn’t remember having the same done to him, so he had hoped he’d escaped that particular violation. He’d been naïve. Blind.

Stupid, probably.

He refuses to be stupid now. He’s kept the parts separated, scattered across the workshop. Designed them to be lightweight, to look inconspicuous when unassembled, to fit together in under a minute because he knows he’ll be lucky to have even that much time. He’d had to sacrifice a lot of coverage and firepower to make it work, more than he’d been willing to at first.

He hasn’t told Yinsen what the parts come together as, but they both know Yinsen is well aware it isn’t the Jericho missile Raza ordered. He’s kind enough not to ask until they’ve put the finishing touches on the last piece.

“What would you say, if I told you that you’d be standing in front of your family this time tomorrow?” Anton asks, sanding the metal to a dull finish.

“I’d say you were playing with the heart of a very old man, who cannot take any more false hope,” Yinsen removes his glasses, cleans them on the hem of his shirt. He holds them up to the light, wipes away one last smudge before setting them back into place. “If it were anyone else, that is.”

Anton huffs a laugh out through his nose, feels the corner of his mouth twitch upward. “You have too much faith in me, Yinsen.”

“Perhaps,” Yinsen inclines his head, smiling slightly as he echoes his words from so long ago. “Perhaps not. Time will tell.”

The guards. Anton can hear hurrying footsteps. Slower, heavier footsteps following close behind. Someone walking with purpose.

Raza.

Sure enough, when the guards pour through, it’s to ready the way for the warlord himself. He strolls in, calm in a way that only comes from pure, unadulterated fury.

Anton resists the urge to shrink back. To fall in line.

To obey.

Raza approaches the workbench, smooths out the onion-skin schematics of the Jericho, revealing the finished form.

When he speaks, he speaks in English.

“The bow and arrow was once the pinnacle of weapons technology. It allowed the great Genghis Khan to rule from the Pacific to the Ukraine,” Raza lifts a few of the pages, spreads them across the table as if to make sense of them. “Today… whoever has the latest Stark weapons rules these lands. Soon, it will be my turn.”

Abandoning the schematics, he turns to them, studying each of his prisoners in turn. Switches to Urdu, directed at Yinsen and Yinsen alone, even as he stares Anton down.

“Why have you failed me?” He demands.

“We’re working,” Yinsen says. “Diligently.”

“I let you live,” Raza strolls forward, lazily paces back and forth in front of them. “This is how you repay me?”

“He’s working very hard,” Yinsen insists. “It’s very complex!”

Raza sneers, turns to his guards.

“On his knees.”

They force Yinsen down, press his head against the anvil. Raza takes a hot coal from the remains of the fire Yinsen had made their coffee with, approaches Yinsen with them clasped in the iron tongs. Leans down, eye level, the coal centered in Yinsen’s field of vision.

“You think me a fool? I’ll get the truth.”

“We’re both working very hard—”

“Open your mouth!” Raza gestures to the guards, who force Yinsen’s jaw wide. Raza brings the coal closer, Yinsen starts to struggle. “You think I’m a fool? What’s going on? Tell me! Now!”

“He’s building your Jericho!” Yinsen insists.

Raza brings the coal closer still.

“He’s building your Jericho!”

The old man’s going to be tortured, right in front of Anton. All because he won’t do the smart thing and give him up— find a way to convince Raza to keep him alive long enough that he can escape. That he can get back to his family.

“Stop,” Anton says.

Raza and his guards look at him, shocked silent. No small amount of fear in their eyes.

“I need my assistant alive.”

Raza scowls, tosses the tongs back into the fireplace. Stalks up to get in Anton’s face.

“You,” he snarls. “Were a poor substitute for our shipment.”

He leaves, guards trailing after him.

The door slams shut.

Raza pulls back the slat the guards use to deliver meals, to stalk the two of them while they work.

“You have until tomorrow to assemble my missile,” Raza says.

Slams the slat shut.

Yinsen opens his mouth, but wisely shuts it when Anton holds up a fist, listening intently. He drops it once the footsteps finish echoing.

“I… doubt your ‘Masters’ will be very pleased, if they find out you risked your life to save mine,” Yinsen says.

“Oh, they’re all dead,” Anton says.

Yinsen blinks.

“But you—“

“The less you knew, the better,” Anton shrugs, turns back to putting the finishing touches on his creation. “I thought it best to try to protect you from… that. It didn’t exactly work out.”

“I am still alive, and unharmed,” Yinsen says. “I’d say it worked alright.”

They rig a bomb to the door that night. After jury-rigging a cover for the security camera out of cardboard. After Anton explains why, anyway. Yinsen doesn’t need much convincing after hearing his plan. Anton has a feeling he didn’t need any convincing in the first place.

Still, Anton walks him through it again as he dons the suit, step by step.

“Forty-one steps straight ahead. Then sixteen steps— that’s from the second door. Fork right,” Anton bolts the left leg together with the pneumatic drill, secures the straps across the patches he couldn’t afford the weight to cover. “Thirty-three steps, turn right. Make sure the checkpoints are clear before following me out.”

“Yinsen! Yinsen!”

One of the guards, at the door.

Looks like the jig is up.

“Say something,” Anton says, over the long string of threats being thrown at them. “Say something back to him.”

He bolts up his right leg. Yinsen takes the drill.

“He’s speaking Hungarian,” he shakes his head, starts bolting the chest plate on while Anton fiddles with the straps. “I don’t speak Hungarian.”

Anton sighs.

“I do,” he clears his throat, imitates the Doctor’s voice as best he can, what he thinks it would sound like in the language. “We are finishing the missile, it’s very dangerous! You should not be down here!”

“Open it!” The Hungarian barks at the doorman. There’s a clanking of metal keys, metal on metal scraping as it turns in the lock.

An explosion.

“How’d it work?” Anton asks, trying to peer around the Doctor. Yinsen turns, huffs a disbelieving laugh.

“My goodness,” he says, still smiling faintly as he secures the last few bolts. He moves onto the first of Anton’s arms. “It worked, alright.”

“That’s what I do,” Anton says, proud of his work. To be fair, he had literally been provided the materials for a bomb. Just not this one, technically. Not that he hasn’t improvised with worse before. “Alright, I got it from here. Initialize the power sequence. Function 11, control-‘i’ when the progress bar opens. Then hit enter.”

“Okay, okay,” Yinsen dashes to the laptop— some hunk of junk from the late 90s— pecks out the commands. “Got it.”

Anton finishes attaching the last piece, pauses.

Running footsteps. Shouting.

“They’re coming,” Yinsen says. Glances at the progress bar, still only a third of the way full. “We need more time.”

“Yinsen—“

“Hey,” Yinsen says, smiles sadly. “I’m gonna go buy you some time.”

“Stick to the plan—“ Anton tries to stop him, barely makes it a step before the weight of the armor freezes him in place. “Yinsen! Stick to the plan!”

The old man scoops up one of the guns left by their dearly departed captors, fires wildly into the air, yelling. Runs full-tilt down the hall.

“sh*t,” Anton mutters. “sh*t, sh*t—“

The lights dim, surge, blow out completely. His helmet emerges from its compartment on the back plate, envelops him. It takes a moment for the HUD to load in, and each agonizing second of it comes with the certainty that this is it, that he’s going back into cryo— or that he never came out at all.

The HUD flickers on. Three men stand in front of him, guns trained on the armor.

He throws them into the walls.

There’s more men in the corridors, men who at least have the good sense not to use their guns in such close quarters. That would’ve been embarrassing for them. One gets him in the shoulder with a knife— manages to glance off the metal just right to jam it into the thin gap between the pieces covering his chest and upper right arm. He pulls it out, uses it to cut its owner’s throat.

They try to cut him off at the last door, slamming the metal shut and barring it.

He decides to take back any credit he’d given them for not firing inside.

Kicks the doors so hard that they fly ten feet straight back, taking the guards with them. They crack their skulls, dead on impact.

Even without the suit he probably could’ve managed that. The hinges were hardly secure, and he kicks damn hard when he has to.

He makes it through the last section of the cave with little incident, just a few flies he has to swat. Flies whose stingers would be a little more effective if they thought to aim first, but that’s what he’d been counting on. Cover yourself well enough, ninety percent of the grunts will try to break through your defenses instead of trying to find a way around them.

Raza is unfortunately smarter than his grunts. He’s waiting at the mouth of the cave when Anton gets there, standing over Yinsen’s bloody form.

“Anton! Watch—“ Yinsen starts. Raza fires. Misses, but only just. “…out.”

Anton raises the arm of the suit, aims the mini grenade launcher. Fires. Hits the wall behind Raza, who looks smug until the debris knocks him out cold. Anton runs to Yinsen’s side, crouches down to him.

“Come on,” he says, trying to get his arms under the older man, who swats him off. “Hey. We have a plan. Stick to it.”

“This was… always the plan,” Yinsen’s breathing is labored, his voice hitching in pain.

He’s not going to make it.

There’s no way to get him out of here alive.

“Come on,” Anton repeats, voice hardening. “You’re going to go see your family. Get up.”

“Ah… my family…” Yinsen chuckles, barely more than a few exhales slightly sharper than those around it. “My family died a long time ago, Anton. I’m going… to see them now… it’s okay.”

He meets Anton’s eyes, shows him the full depth of the grief, the rage that he’s kept underneath the surface all this time. Pats the chest of Anton’s suit.

“It’s okay,” he repeats. “I… want this. I want this.”

In the privacy of his own head, he curses the man for everything he’s done. For saving Anton, over and over. For keeping this hidden. For making the sacrifice play.

“Thank you for saving me,” Anton says. “I— I didn’t deserve it.”

“Don’t,” Yinsen shakes his head. He’s pale, clammy. There’s a rattle in his breath now. “You… second chance… don’t… waste…”

He stills. Exhales, if it can be called that.

Just the simple relaxation of muscles, forcing everything out.

Anton drags him out of the cave, into the sunshine. The grunts standing there watch him in confusion, guns at the ready. Anton removes Yinsen’s glasses, tucks them into a compartment at his hip. Closes the man’s eyes.

Turns.

Stands.

The grunts fire. They hit him with everything they have, in every spot they can reach. Only one bullet makes it past the armor, slipping through a gap in his left thigh plates. He hears the sound of over a dozen guns trying to fire an empty magazine.

“My turn,” he says, slams his wrists together, deploying the flame throwers.

He burns the compound to the ground. Lights up every last crate and missile. It takes a while to be thorough, long enough that the munitions have started to blow. Long enough for an explosion to detonate, driving him three feet into the mountain behind him. He pries himself out. Uses the jets and repulsors built into the suit like he should have forty-five seconds ago.

He manages to fly eighty-seven kilometers Southwest before the suit fails.

He crash-lands in a sand dune. Cracks six ribs, his left tibia and ankle, his left arm in three spots. Breaks his nose. Earns himself a hell of a concussion.

He rips the helmet off with his good arm— for a given value of good, the stab wound helpfully reminds him— manages to find the manual override that frees the rest of him. Tears a strip off his sweat-soaked shirt and uses it to bandage his shoulder. Uses another to fashion himself a sling. Pulls the rest off it off to jury-rig a splint for his arm, and one for his leg. Retrieves Yinsen’s glasses. Tucks them into the splint on his arm.

He looks around, surveying the vast ocean of sand.

“I commend my soul,” he pants, vision blurring from sweat, pain, and mild traumatic brain injury alike. “To any god that can find it.”

He limps on.

Of all the people to pull him out of the sand two days later, sun-drunk and half-dead, it winds up being none other than Lieutenant Colonel James f*cking Rhodes.

“Agent Romanov, it’s good to see you alive,” Rhodes says as he and some random military grunt haul Anton onto the helicopter, his heels dragging tracks in the sand where he can’t find the energy to lift them up. He’s going to blow the whole mission, leaving evidence like that. “No mission here, Romanov. Not anymore. You tracking?”

“’s a lotta sun out there,” Anton says.

He f*ckin’ hates days like this— days where he’s so far out of it that the lines between what happens in his head and what happens in the real vanish. Poof! It’s all in the real now, motherf*cker. Hard to hold your tongue when it takes the reins for itself. Hard to care, when you know what else could be bleeding through.

Some distant corner of his brain hears himself rambling, pokes the rest of him, trying to get it to shut that sh*t down.

“Jesus, he’s touched in the head,” the grunt says, lowering him into a jump-seat. “What the hell happened to the kid?”

“‘m older than all’a you bastards,” Anton snorts, eyeballing the grunt. He looks up at Rhodes. “Prob’ly even you, Rhod- Rhodesy. Rhodey. Rhodey Rhodes.”

He giggles, snorts, groans in pain when it jostles his broken ribs, his nose.

“Let’s get him outta here, Berry,” Rhodes calls up to the co*ckpit, then turns to his rudeass grunt. “Holm, he needs water, a med kit, and rations. Don’t make me ask twice.”

After firing off a rapid salute, Holm scrambles through the overhead cargo, managing to emerge with the supplies just in time to swing himself into the last jump-seat, on the other side of Rhodes from Anton. Rhodes passes over a canteen, only to pull it out of his hands a moment later with a laugh.

“It’s not a shower, Romanov,” he grins, wrinkling his nose. “You sure as hell could use one, though.”

“Shower,” Anton agrees.

“What’s with your chest, kid?” Rhodes asks, gesturing at the faint white-blue glow of the arc reactor. Anton pats at it, blindly fumbling for a moment before his arm gets with the program and remember where it is. “Not a bomb, is it?”

Anton shakes his head. “Electromagnet,” Ah, big words. He’d missed those.

Rhodes hands him a protein bar, which he demolishes half of before continuing.

“Shrapnel from the f*ckin’ missile I saved Stane’s ass from. Still stuck in there. Magnet keeps it from… getting worse.”

He gestures vaguely with the half-eaten protein bar, unable to think of the right words to elaborate.

“I owe you, Romanov,” Rhodes says. “You saved my life too, doing what you did. Don’t think I’ve forgotten that these past few months.”

“Debt paid, Rhodey,” Anton leans back, shuts his eyes, halfway to sleep— I’ve got first watch, kid. Get some shut-eye for once— by the time his head makes contact with the wall behind. “Far as I’m concerned. Debt paid.”

He sleeps in five minute bursts the rest of the way back to the base in Bagram, lets the on-base medics poke and prod at him just long enough to clear him for the flight home. They compliment his ability to set broken bones, but they don’t look happy about saying so, for some reason. He doesn’t answer their questions about the arc reactor. Leaves Rhodes to clarify why he’s certain it’s not an IED.

They give him fluids, blood to replace what he lost— they say it’s a miracle he survived losing that much; he tries not to laugh— and lunch. The number 12 MRE, heated up in a canteen instead of the included flameless heater. A veggie burger, fruit, chocolate banana muffin top. An energy bar, electrolyte drink. Bread. Hot sauce.

He eats the energy bar, half the burger— slathered in hot sauce. Chugs the electrolyte drink. Rhodes makes him bring the rest with him, tries to coax him into eating it on the plane. Anton waits until he falls asleep to finish it off. Tries to get some rest himself.

He can’t seem to stay asleep for more than ninety minutes at a time. Hadn’t been able to sleep for more than thirty, in the cave. He guesses it’s progress.

Rhodes wakes up with about two hours left to go in their flight. Two hours out from Edwards AFB. He leaves Anton be at first, takes a call on the satellite phone about fifteen minutes after getting vertical. When it’s over, he sits down across from Anton, hands clasped together, elbows on his knees. Pressing the intertwined fists to his mouth.

“SHIELD’s insisting on picking you up straight from the runway,” he says, after a long moment. “They’re gonna take you straight back to the LA campus for debriefing and evaluations. I tried to talk them down, get you a moment to breathe, but—“

Rhodes tosses his hands up, leans back heavily in his seat. He looks tired.

“They wouldn’t budge. Tried to tell me you could be dangerous,” he says.

“They’re being cautious,” Anton says. “They still don’t know what happened to me. If I turned.”

“You trying to tell me you have plans to turn on SHIELD?” Rhodes snorts derisively. “Look, Agent Romanov—“

“Anton.”

“Anton,” Rhodey nods, smiles faintly. “I understand their concern, but they haven’t seen you yet. I have. You’re more likely to fall asleep on the tarmac than go sleeper-agent on us.”

Anton doesn’t tell him he’s wrong, or explain how he’d take down the base if he felt like doing such a thing. Doesn’t explain that if he’d come back three months ago, SHIELD would likely have been proven right.

He doesn’t have any desire to turn on SHIELD, or Rhodey, or anyone that’s getting him home. Least of all right now. Right now, he’s just…

Tired.

“You’re just a kid, man,” Rhodey says. “A kid who’s been through hell, and had to claw his way out on his own. I’m sorry I couldn’t get you any breathing room.”

“Stane told me I’d come highly recommended. From an old friend,” Anton says, looks Rhodey in the eyes. “Was that you?”

“No,” Rhodey says, and it sounds like a fact.

Anton breathes out, sinking into his seat. The answer raises more questions than it solves, but he’s glad it wasn’t Rhodey. He kind of likes the guy.

“I don’t know who told him, I’m sorry. Stane’s got a lot of old buddies, and nearly all of them would’ve heard of you, if they didn’t full-out have the clearance to read your file.”

“Do you?” Anton asks. “Have clearance.”

“Yeah, I do,” Rhodey says. “Agent Coulson upgraded me when I assigned myself to your search-and-rescue party. Said I needed to know what I could be walking into.”

Anton nods, looks away. Level six clearance, full access to his past— or a part of it, anyway— and Rhodes is still treating him like a kid. Not like a snake that could strike at any moment.

It’s stupid of Rhodey.

It means the world to Anton.

“You’ve saved a lot of good people, doing what you do for SHIELD,” Rhodey says. “That’s all I care about, alright?”

“And the good people I killed?”

“Can’t change the past,” Rhodey shrugs. “You enjoy it?”

“No.”

“Then I think you’ll turn out alright.”

Rhodey lets him be again after that. Works on some paperwork or something. Anton pretends to sleep. Pretends to wake up as they make their descent. Shakes Rhodey’s hand as they prepare to leave the plane.

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Anton,” Rhodey says.

Stepping out into the blast furnace that is the Mojave in July, Anton has his doubts about that. His skin feels skeleton-tight by the time he hits the bottom of the stairs, and the sunburn still covering every inch of exposed skin— and then some— stings like hell. Putting it mildly.

Phil’s there, leaning on the car.

He’s chatting with Agent May.

Much as Anton wishes it were Clint or Natka standing there instead of her, Fury’s not stupid enough to send one of them as security detail. If he were still under the Ten Rings’s control, if he decided to attack Phil— well. Even Natka would hesitate to bring him down.

“You’re late. By about three months,” Phil says, meeting Anton halfway. Scans him over, taking in the broken bones, bloody bandages, bruises. The sharp, severe lines of his face where baby fat should still cling. The bags under his eyes. “You look like hell. They take you to medical yet?”

“Did the best they could, back in Bagram,” Rhodey says. “But he needs a hospital. No idea how he’s still upright.”

“He’s stubborn like that,” Phil says, fondly. Pulls Anton into a tight hug that still manages to be gentle on his cracked ribs. Lets him go, but doesn’t take his hands off Anton’s shoulders. “C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up. Lieutenant Colonel, I can’t thank you enough for finding him.”

“Least I could do, Agent,” Rhodey says. Shakes Phil’s hand. “No need to thank me. Just let me know if you need any help with the bastards that did this to him.”

He pats Anton on the shoulder, careful of the stab wound. Takes his leave of them.

“Status report, Agent,” Agent May says.

“Melinda—“ Phil sighs.

“Status normal,” Anton says. It feels like a lie even to him. Would be, if she were actually asking about his well-being. “Whatever the hell that even means for me.”

She nods, ducks into the driver’s seat. Turns over the engine.

“How are you? Really,” Phil asks. “Don’t try to tell me you’re fine, Anton. I have eyes.”

“I’ll live,” Anton says, limps to the backseat, begrudgingly accepts Phil’s help with getting in. “Hey, can we get McDonalds? I would kill for a cheeseburger.”

“We’re getting you back to SHIELD for debrief,” Agent May says. Phil climbs in shotgun, and she navigates them out. Off the base. Through the little town. Swerves to avoid a gaggle of high-school age kids trekking through the overpass, and spends a good two minutes cursing them under her breath.

“Yeah, sure. Pox on all their houses,” Anton says. “Cheeseburger first.”

She tries to hide a smile under her flat, professional expression.

But she still swings by a drive-thru.

He’s been stateside for two weeks before SHIELD lets him set foot outside their doors.

If he were anyone else, he’s sure he’d be stuck under their lock and key ten times as long, but there are some perks to being part of the Director’s favorite STRIKE team. Perks to being Clint and Natka’s brother, Phil’s forcibly adopted son. But even those perks have limits, and Fury puts him on medical leave, ‘for the foreseeable future,’ which feels less like genuine concern for his wellbeing and more like a punishment.

He wants to work— needs to work. He needs to see the Ten Rings reduced to ash, to find out who gave them the keys to his head and make them suffer. Even if it means working with SHIELD a while longer.

He’d been smart enough not to mention that to anyone during his endless psychological evaluations, debriefings, and interrogations. Smart enough to pretend that his time in Afghanistan was just more of the same, no punch he hadn’t rolled with before.

Fury had been the one to override his clearance. Told Anton as much to his face. Anton hadn’t even punched him for it, or bashed his holier-than-thou, I-know-what’s-best-for-everyone face in with his stupid ancient intercom.

He may have, however, made some comments expressing his feelings on the matter.

Which may or may not have fully vindicated Fury’s override.

“You’re lucky he didn’t fire you then and there,” Nat says, taking a long pull from a bottle of Everclear— the 190-proof stuff might be illegal in California, but Nat’s never been one to get slowed down by that kind of thing; anyway, it’s the easiest way for either of them to get drunk. She hands it off.

He pours about a shot’s worth into a chipped mug that probably had a tacky slogan on it once, which he passes to Clint. Finishes off the bottle, throws it off the roof with as much force as he can muster. It might as well be powder, once it hits the building next door.

Clint lets out a low, appreciative whistle.

Anton opens the second bottle.

“Lock me up and throw away the key, you mean,” he takes a swig, hands the bottle to Nat, ignoring Clint’s grabby-hands. “We got you regular vodka for a reason, Barton.”

“Boo, you guys suck,” Clint whines. He slams back the shot and sets the mug perilously close to the roof’s edge.

Anton and Nat exchange a look; she holds up three fingers, then two. Anton shakes his head, flashes a four and a one. They shake on it just in time to hear the sound of ceramic crashing fifteen stories below.

“Aw, mug, no.”

“Cough it up, Natka,” Anton says.

She sighs, but digs her wallet out of her purse so she can shove two crisp twenty-dollar bills into his hand.

“You guys suck,” Clint reiterates, flopping to his back with a dramatic huff. “Why the hell did I ever respond to that message?”

“You’re a bleeding heart with too much faith in people,” Anton says.

“And you thought he was funny,” Nat adds. “Because you’ve hit your head too many times and think that a two-month stint in the ICU is the peak of comedy.”

“You guys suuuuck.”

“Seriously, Toshenka,” Nat sips from the bottle, passes it back. He throws back a good quarter of it in one fell swoop. “Slow the f*ck down. Our livers might heal faster than Barton’s, but that doesn’t mean you can’t poison yourself.”

She sighs, tipping her head back to look at the stars, just barely visible this far into downtown LA.

“You could’ve lost your job, your freedom. What were you thinking?”

“Maybe he f*ckin’ should have fired me,” Anton says, flicking the twist-off cap somewhere… away. “Maybe I’m sick of f*ckin’ SHIELD, and their f*ckin’ bullsh*t. Maybe I’m sick of havin’ my f*ckin’ chain yanked, and maybe I’m sick of the people yankin’ it telling me they’re better than the other guy, and I should be grateful that they’re holding the leash.”

“What are you saying, Toshenka?” She asks, all concern and confusion.

Anton snorts, pulls from the bottle again. She takes it from him, sets it on the far side of her, where he’ll have to fight her if he wants it back. He’s close to being drunk enough to seriously consider the option.

“Maybe, Natka,” Anton says. “Maybe I’ve had more than my fair share of having my life dictated for me.”

“And I haven’t?”

“You have,” he inclines his head, bowing to her point, and makes a move for the Everclear. She has him flat on his back before he can blink.

He’s gonna hurt like hell in the morning. Most of his bones are more or less fully healed, but the gulf between ‘more or less’ and ‘completely’ is already making itself known.

“But I’ve had more.”

“I can imagine-“

“No. You really f*cking can’t.”

She stares at him, eyes wide. He wonders if she would’ve preferred a sucker punch.

“You can imagine, and you can obsess, and you can wonder the entire rest of your life what I went through— I know I sure as hell did, before,” his voice is low, cold. Dangerous in a way he’s never been, not with her. “I thought I f*cking knew what it would be like for them to take everything— everything we built, everything I chose, everything I am with a single f*cking phrase. I’ve had nightmares about it since the day we left the Red Room, any time my brain gets bored of the highlight reel.”

“Toshenka…”

“I haven’t slept more than two hours at once, since Afghanistan,” he says. “Because every time I doze off, I remember. I remember that I can’t be a f*cking person, that someone looked at me when I was a child, and decided I was always going to be a tool, and when tools malfunction—“

Calling it a laugh would be cruel, but there’s no better word for it.

“So imagine all you want, Natka. I don’t have the f*cking luxury.”

He pushes his way to his feet, ignores her calling after him, her attempts to drag Clint into it, and hops gingerly down the fire escape that probably hasn’t been up to code since fire codes were invented.

He goes back to his apartment.

He doesn’t sleep.

Phil brings him breakfast in the morning.

“Triple red-eye, four sugars, no cream,” he says, handing over a to-go cup that might as well be Jesus Christ reborn in the flesh, except that Anton’s never seen the point in religion. Coffee, however, he believes in. He could probably be talked into venerating it, if it was particularly good. Maybe something fair-trade, from Colombia. Like he got from a painfully over-priced coffee house in Vienna two years ago. “And breakfast burritos from the food truck by my place.”

“Have I ever told you you’re my favorite?” Anton asks, breathing in the borderline caustic fumes coming from the cup like a mountain climber coming across the first oxygen tank in ten miles. “Because you’re my favorite.”

“Depends on if you’re asking me, or if you’re asking the coffee,” Phil says. He waits until Anton takes his first sip to continue, the bastard. “So, you’re not sleeping.”

Anton glowers at him, takes another sip. “Natka rat me out?”

“No,” Phil says. “She did not. She didn’t have to, either; you look like death, Anton.”

Anton keeps drinking his coffee, glaring resolutely at the crappy laminate countertop his landlord thought would look great forever, and was so stained by the time he moved in that he only found out it was supposed to be white when he knocked over a jar of industrial-grade solvent last year.

“I will never be able to understand even a tenth of a percent of what you went through these last few months,” Phil says, his tone too casual for his words. But then again, Phil’s always been pretty mild-mannered. “But even what I think I can understand, or at least imagine, is enough that I wouldn’t want to sleep either in your position.”

“So you’re enabling me,” Anton lifts the coffee cup in a mock-salute. “Cheers, Phil.”

“I don’t think it’s something you could or should do long-term,” Phil says, handing one of the foil-wrapped burritos to Anton and carefully opening the other. Two cups of salsa get dumped and spread evenly over the fillings before he closes it back up. “But there’s no point in pretending you’re not going to try, or that I wouldn’t be doing worse things than mainlining espresso.”

He takes a bite, chews thoughtfully, re-opens the burrito to add another salsa cup.

Anton decides not to mention the bottle of little blue pills SHIELD medical had given him for the broken bones. Decides not to mention he discovered this morning that they make it seem possible for him to do anything besides lock himself in his bedroom and stare at the wall.

He’s not planning on using them all the time, anyway. Just days like this, days where he’s so tired that he can’t find the energy to maintain enough distance between ‘what happened then’ and ‘what’s happening now.’ A distance that he needs while he looks for something to take up enough of his attention that a lack of distance doesn’t matter. Something that will make up for ‘what happened then,’ or at least make sure it never happens again.

Also, Nat totally kicked his sh*t in last night when she slammed him into the roof. Everything hurts.

“Just do me one favor.”

“Yeah? And what’s that?”

Phil turns, facing him head-on for the first time since Anton answered the door.

“Try not to get yourself killed, Anton. That’s all I ask.”

Anton turns back to his breakfast, unable to bring himself to make any promises he can’t guarantee he’ll keep. Not after what happened in Afghanistan.

Not after Yinsen.

“SHIELD went to the rough coordinates you gave us, for your crash site,” Phil says. “I’m not supposed to be telling you, but… you deserve to know.”

He takes another bite, washes it down with his latte. He’s got nearly as much caffeine in there as Anton, according to the barista’s scrawl along the side of the cup.

“The pieces were gone,” Phil says. “There’s a chance it just got buried by the sand-storms that’ve been affecting the region, but we can’t be sure of that.”

Anton nods, picks disinterestedly at his burrito. Forces himself to at least try to eat it, so that Phil has one less thing to worry about.

“We’re keeping an eye out,” he assures Anton. “And regardless of what Fury thinks, I’ll let you know the second I find out what happened.”

Phil keeps it light after that, catching him up on all the big stuff he missed while he was gone, and some of the little stuff too. Mostly, because it’s Phil, this means a point-by-point recap of the latest episodes of Supernanny. Someone really needs to block TLC from his DVR one of these days. Unfortunately for the rest of the world, Anton can’t quite bring himself to do it.

When it’s time for Phil to leave— some lunch date with a cellist he’s been seeing the last few weeks— he gives Anton a hug, because he’s one of the few people that can get away with it. Tells him to call if he needs anything.

“I’ll talk to Fury. Neither of us like it, but you need something to focus on, something that helps you remember you have control—“

“Phil,” Anton closes his eyes, unable to bring himself to watch the older man’s expression and still go through with what he has to say.

He might have stopped worrying Phil would punish him for disobedience, but disappointing him— hurting him— is almost worse.

“I never had control. The Ten Rings didn’t take it from me, they just made sure I couldn’t delude myself anymore.”

He can hear Phil biting his tongue. That’s what he likes about him, that he gives Anton the chance to voice his thoughts without arguing, at least until he’s finished speaking. Few people have the patience to wait that long.

Anton opens his eyes. Looks somewhere just past Phil’s right ear, still not quite able to meet his eyes.

“If I quit SHIELD, what would happen to me?”

“Would they throw you in lock-up, you mean,” Phil sighs, scrubs a hand over his face. “I don’t know Anton, but if that’s what you want, I can look into it.”

Anton meets his gaze, surprised.

Hopeful, for the first time since he woke up in that cave. He tries to swallow the doubt that bubbles up; Phil hasn’t done anything to deserve that doubt. It’s not fair to him.

Anton still feels it churning in his guts, though that could just be indigestion from all the caffeine and grease he just tossed into a mostly-empty stomach.

“Easiest thing to do would be to keep you on leave, permanently,” Phil holds up a hand, stopping whatever outcry Anton had been preparing. “It’s not a perfect solution, I know. But it’s going to be tricky, getting Washington to turn you loose, if it’s possible at all. I’ll talk to some people, see what we can do.”

Anton nods, swallowing around the lump in his throat. His eyes sting.

“You’re a good man, Anton,” Phil says, halfway out the door. “Your life should be your own. You deserve that much.”

He muses, as Phil disappears down the hall, that he’s not sure how f*cked Phil’s definition of ‘good’ is that Anton qualifies, of all people. Even after the Red Room, even before Afghanistan. Working for SHIELD, getting his degree, he’d never felt like a good person, but he had taken comfort knowing that the blood on his hands was protecting those who were. Someone had to do the dirty work to keep the machine of civilization running, and he was the Mechanic. It only made sense.

It still does, in a way. But he won’t do it just because someone else is holding his leash. Not anymore.

He hip-checks the door shut, doesn’t bother with any of the locks. Never has. If someone’s stupid enough to try to break in, he’s better security than a twenty-dollar deadbolt that’s been re-keyed so many times that the bolt rarely stays in place. He looks down as something brushes against his legs.

Benji, the neighborhood stray, who never seems to be stopped by inconsequential things like locked rooms or closed windows. Like all orange cats, he’s dumb as a bag of rocks, which may be why Anton is his favorite.

Clint says Benji likes him because they’re both feral, anti-social, and seem to have an allergy to front doors.

“I don’t have any wet food, Benj,” he says.

Benji meows at him, drawn-out and pitiful. He winds himself around Anton’s legs in a figure-eight, meows again expectantly.

Anton sighs, but scoops him up, the furball purring up a storm as it nuzzles into his shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah. Missed you too, you f*ckin’ freeloader.”

His next visitor is Nat, two days later. She brings a box of microwave popcorn, DVDs of just about every Godzilla movie ever made, and a bag of takeout from their favorite Ethiopian joint all the way from Hell’s Kitchen. She still has a few patches of soot smudged across her face, and her hair is about four inches shorter than it had been two days ago. Between the soot, Clint’s absence, and the lingering, acrid smell of melted hair trying to stab his brain through his nose, he’s going to guess the mission hadn’t gone exactly as planned.

“Had a mad scientist thing in Bushwick,” she explains. “Realized it’d been a while since we swung by Enat’s, so I talked Phil into stopping by on our way home.”

“You’re forgiven,” he tells her, stepping aside to let her into the apartment. She presses a kiss to his cheek on the way past.

“I haven’t even apologized yet,” she says, so he waits for her to methodically unpack her gifts on the counter. “I’m sorry, Toshenka. You were right.”

“About…?” He prompts.

She slugs him in the shoulder— he doesn’t bother reacting to the searing pain when she jostles his arm.

He’s pretty sure she re-fractured it the other night.

He doesn’t blame her.

“I don’t have any idea what you went through,” she says, serious once more. “I don’t think anyone does, except Yakov, and he’s not exactly here to commiserate.”

“We’d have bigger problems if the Winter Soldier turned up to watch Godzilla movies and swap brainwashing stories,” Anton says.

She glares at him.

“I’m trying to be serious, here,” she flips open the lid of a takeout container, then another. “Anyway— I’ll listen if you want to tell me, but that’s not really how we work. So I asked myself, ‘how do I cheer my baby brother up?’”

She gestures at the spread, the movies.

“Watching some kaiju destroy major cities and beat the crap out of each other won’t make the last few months any easier to swallow, but it sure as hell can’t hurt.”

He meets her eyes, draws out the silence because he’s feeling petty—when doesn’t he, frankly— and she’s his pain-in-the-ass sister. Twitches the corner of his mouth upward, into something like a smile.

“You’re forgiven,” he repeats.

It’s a good night.

SHIELD never paid Anton that well to begin with— hence his sh*tty apartment, in a sh*tty neighborhood, filled with sh*tty furniture that for the most part came from the curb— but their medical leave allowance is even worse. So a week after they set him loose on the world, he finds himself a job. And sure, he probably could’ve put his multiple degrees to use, flipped burgers, or joined the circle of hell known as retail, and sure, that would’ve been the smarter option.

Safer.

Less likely to end with him bleeding all over Clint’s futon at half-past two in the afternoon at the end of August.

“Jesus f*cking-“ Clint swears, keys falling to the floor, forgotten. “Anton, what the sh*t!”

“Bad intel,” Anton groans, not bothering to try to sit up. He already learned the hard way that sitting up just means falling back over, which he’s heard is not great for ribs that you just broke for the second time in as many months, and sure as hell hadn’t make the bullet holes any happier. “Last time I don’t do my own f*cking homework.”

Still swearing impressively, Clint kicks the door shut and scrambles for the considerable first aid kit he keeps under his kitchen sink. He tips the entire contents onto the coffee table, cuts Anton’s shirt off of him. He keeps swearing until the last bullet is dug out and the remaining wound stitched and dressed. Slumps to the floor, massaging his temples.

“You’re going to give me a f*cking aneurysm,” he says. “What the hell happened?”

“Been freelancing,” Anton waves a hand vaguely, staring up at Clint’s water-stained ceiling. “You put in a work order about that leak?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“So that’d be a no,” Anton says.

Clint reaches out, hovers a hand over one of the patched-up wounds in a silent threat that both of them are well aware he’ll never follow through on. Natka might, but she’d apologize after.

“Needed the cash. Job was supposed to be easy, just scare the guy off,” Anton scoffs, groans. He’s so f*cking sick of cracked ribs. “Would’ve been nice to know his best buddy was a f*cking gang leader.”

Anton slaps the backpack he’d put under his head as a sh*tty excuse for a pillow. It’s got Pikachu on it. Pikachu had gotten a lot of blood on him.

Most of it isn’t Anton’s.

“This’ll make up for damages,” he says.

Clint carefully pulls it out from under him to take a peek inside, pales, zips it closed again.

“Dude, I love you, but if anyone finds out you have… that,” he grimaces at Pikachu’s smiling, blood-spattered face. “There’s no lawyer on the planet that can keep you out of supermax until Hell freezes over.”

“It’s a lotta drugs,” Anton agrees.

“No, it’s a lot of drugs, two weapons that are turbo-illegal everywhere, what looks like well over ten grand in cash, and some guy’s severed hand. Which you put in a ziploc,” Clint corrects. “Why the f*ck do you have some guy’s severed hand!?”

“He wouldn’t keep his hands to himself,” Anton shrugs. “Hence the gig.”

“I don’t know if your client is going to find a severed hand as comforting as you think they will,” Clint says. “Most people wouldn’t.”

“She’s the one who asked for it.”

“Jesus, Anton,” Clint groans, hanging his head.

He whips it back up a moment later, squinting suspiciously at him.

“‘Was’ a gang leader?”

“They started it.”

Clint doesn’t stop groaning for six minutes and twenty-two seconds, and probably would’ve gone on longer if not for Anton threatening to feed him his own ears. Again, a threat they both know he’ll never follow through on, but it’s the principle of the thing. Natka definitely wouldn’t do that one, but if she did, it wouldn’t be to someone she’d owe any apologies to.

“Does Nat know what you’re getting up to?” Clint asks. “Phil?”

“No, but I’m sure you’ll tell them,” it’s always easiest to tell Clint first, saves everyone a lot of trouble. The man is a terrible gossip.

“You are the worst best friend in the world,” Clint says, pushing to his feet. “Ever. In all of human history. And you’re up there, as far as brothers go. I’m making coffee. You want coffee? Don’t answer that.”

Clint makes coffee. He’s the only person Anton’s ever met that shares his opinion that if your eyeballs aren’t vibrating in your skull halfway through the first cup, it isn’t strong enough.

He accepts his mug gratefully, gingerly pulls himself upright with Clint’s proffered hand.

“You’re crashing here tonight,” Clint says, jabbing a finger at him accusatorially. “And you’re getting the damn stains out of my futon in the morning. Don’t argue, or I will sic Phil on you. And Nat.”

“Fine, but I need you to help me run an errand.”

“I’m not taking you to deliver a severed hand to some psychopath.”

Clint takes him to deliver the severed hand to the psychopath.

Who forks over the promised six grand, and tries to hit on both of them. At the same time. Anton has to drag Clint back to the car, wishing that his friend didn’t have such a predictable type— athletic, tall, and one bad day away from becoming a supervillain.

They get dim sum. Anton’s treat.

“What are you gonna do with all that sh*t, anyway?” Clint asks, garbled to near unintelligibility through all the dumplings crammed into his mouth.

Watching Clint eat tends to have more in common with a train crash than it should— hard to look away from, hard to watch; bits going everywhere.

“Eh, I’ll think of something,” Anton shrugs. If it were Phil or Natka on the other side of the booth, he’d be settling in for a lecture about having a plan before stealing sh*t from gang members. Especially sh*t that could get him slapped with a felony charge just for having been in the same room.

Lucky for him— and why he went to Clint in the first place, of the three of them— Clint has even worse impulse-control at times. On a bad day, Clint would’ve popped one of the pills just to see what would happen.

“You know what it is?” Clint swallows, washes everything down with a swig of his beer.

“No,” Anton steals the beer, taking a sip more out of principle than any expectation it’ll affect him.

He slides it back across the table before continuing, pushing his dumplings around the steamer basket for something to do. Clint’s already complained twice about him bouncing his leg so violently that the dishes were rattling on the table.

“But I’ve got some testing kits back at my apartment.”

“And you have these why?” Clint co*cks an eyebrow, pops another two dumplings into his mouth.

“Ask stupid questions…” Anton trails off, waiting.

“Get stupid answers,” Clint groans, again. “Dude, seriously? What have you even been taking? I would’ve figured after everything that scrambling your brain would be the last thing you wanted to do.”

“Speed,” Anton says, simple.

Clint does a sort of facial-shrug, admitting he understands the appeal to some degree.

“Mostly.”

When he’s not taking opiates, anyway.

“Mostly?”

“I like to keep an open mind,” Anton gestures at the lone unopened basket on Clint’s side of the table. “You gonna eat that?”

Clint slides it over, muttering something under his breath about showing Anton an open f*cking mind and, as he so frequently has over the last five years, ruing the day he agreed to help the Romanovs.

“If you OD, I’m taking your TV,” he says. “And I’m not stopping Nat from taking your guts-“

“For garters, yes,” Anton finishes. “I won’t OD.”

Judging by how fast these gunshot wounds had clotted over, compared to how long he’d bled trying to protect Stane’s dumb ass (he lived, apparently; Anton’s still trying to decide if he’s disappointed or not), he thinks the arc reactor might be doing something unexpected. Reacting in strange ways with the Red Room’s serum. Accelerating it, somehow.

He rubs at the plastic cover he’d got a client to 3D print a couple weeks back, wondering if one day his body will heal so fast that he can’t overdose. Right now he’s just glad the reactor doesn’t seem to have raised his metabolism any higher than it already was. Or made his liver and kidneys work any faster. It’s hard enough to get an actual buzz as it is.

“Good,” Clint steals a dumpling right out from under Anton’s chopsticks. “‘Cause Nat’ll take my guts too, and Phil will make sure both of us live just so he can bitch at us about the paperwork.”

Anton’s phone buzzes on the table. He flips it open, brings it up to his ear.

“Yeah?”

He eats another dumpling.

“Clint tells me you’ve been doing drugs,” Nat says.

“When the f*ck did he have time to— nevermind, stupid question,” he sighs heavily.

If he ever finds out who the genius was behind group texting, he’s going to have a lot to answer for. A lot.

“Get the lecture over with.”

“You already know what I’d say, no point in beating a dead horse,” she says.

“You love beating dead horses,” he counters.

She grunts, not able to deny it, but unwilling to admit it.

“Why’d you call, then?”

“To warn you about the next call you get,” she says. “Stane just called Fury, weaseled his way into getting your number. He’s gonna offer you a job.”

“Then he’s dumber than he looks,” Anton pulls three hundred-dollar bills from his backpack, double-checking to make sure he didn’t accidentally grab any with blood on them. He sets them on the table and stands up, not bothering to wait for Clint to follow, though he does. “I’d rather eat my own foot than work for him again.”

Even if Stane, through some miracle— or through plumbing depths of stupidity formerly unknown to man— has no idea who’s buying his products, he’s still a rich dipsh*t who makes Anton’s skin crawl.

“I hate to say it, but you might want to reconsider,” she sighs. “If you want answers about why Stark tech was at the compound, where better to look?”

Anton curses.

“I hate when you’re right.”

“I’m always right.”

Anton hangs up on her.

The phone rings again.

As promised, it’s Stane, with a job offer. He feels just terrible about what happened, apparently, and heard Anton had some free time these days. He wants Anton to invent things for him, sh*t like the Widow Bites that he can sell to the government (he frames it as a way to help keep their troops safe, and Anton has to resist the urge to toss his phone out the window of Clint’s car). The job comes with free housing, a salary three times what SHIELD pays him on active duty, and full access to Stark Industries’s state-of-the-art R&D labs.

When Anton asks when Stane would want him to start, Stane laughs and says he’s been trying to get Anton’s phone number since the day SHIELD turned him loose. He ends the call by saying the moving company will be there to take Anton’s things to his new home— a vacation cottage Howard Stark had built in Santa Monica that came with a workshop in the basem*nt and, like everything else Stark had owned, had been given to his company once Anthony was declared dead in ’92— first thing in the morning.

“So,” Clint says, pulling into the parking garage of his building. Anton taps his phone against his chin, staring out the windshield without really seeing. “Friends close, enemies closer?”

“Something like that,” Anton mutters.

Clint’s silent for a while, like he can’t quite figure out what else to say. It’s unsettling.

“Wanna play Mario Kart?”

To Anton’s relief, it’s not Stane that’s there to greet him in Santa Monica, but his PA. She’s tall, has hair that’s just barely red enough not to qualify as blonde, and looks to be a little older than Clint, but not by much. She introduces herself as Virginia Potts, but says that he can call her Pepper. She says only her father calls her Virginia.

“Mr. Stane has tasked me with making sure your transition into the company is as smooth as possible,” she says. “Including arranging for any upgrades you deem necessary to bring the basem*nt workshop up to standard. He was very clear on that point, and set aside a substantial budget for you to utilize at your discretion.”

“Right,” Anton says. “He clear about any of his own additions?”

She frowns at him. Displeased, he thinks. But not confused.

“No,” she says. “Mr. Stane seems to trust you. It might have something to do with saving his life.”

In Anton’s experience, it’s usually the people he saves from certain death that trust him the least.

Alright, that’s an exaggeration. But people tend to be at least a little unnerved by his performance in a firefight. Nat says it’s because he goes for efficacy over minimizing damage.

Clint says it’s because he’s a rabid, overgrown toddler.

Nat says that Barton could stand to learn tact, but has a point.

Pepper follows him down to the workshop, writes down his specifications as he rambles them off. They’re going to have to re-wire the whole damn building to support his plans, but she assures him that even with that— even with some of the incredibly specialized machines he requests— he’s still well within his budget.

Anton decides that Stane has a few possible angles here.

Option one: he feels guilty about what Anton went through, like he keeps saying.

Option two: he’s the worst gambler on the planet, as rich people tend to be.

Option three: he’s assuming that Anton can be won over with shiny toys, and will be more than happy to go along with whatever bullsh*t Stane’s cooking up out of sheer gratitude.

Option four: Stane was directly involved in what happened in Afghanistan. This has two sub-options. Either he doesn’t realize that Anton broke free of the programming, or he knows, but is too arrogant to care. Possibly thinks he can just wipe Anton again, start from scratch.

Anton can work best with option four; it seems the most likely of them anyway. He can keep his head down a while longer, play the part. Play at being Stane’s lap dog until he finds out the truth. The facts.

He’ll let Stane take the lead. Nothing good comes from assuming your opponent knows something that they haven’t shared with you yet. Information is power, leverage. How you stay alive. You guard that closely, or risk losing it all.

There is one piece of surveillance in the workshop. A single camera at the bottom of the stairs, which looks like it was installed in the eighties and only transmits via a hard line. Directly to VHS.

Anton rips it out of the ceiling the second Pepper leaves, saying that she still has a few errands to run for Stane before she can head home. Wipes the day’s footage with a magnet he found on the fridge— some tacky tourist crap from the Captain America museum in Brooklyn. Anton’s pawning it off on Phil the first chance he gets.

It takes a team of twenty workmen three days to get the workshop updated, another for Anton to personally install a series of cameras, projectors, microphones, and speakers. A frustrating thirty-six hours to dig through his many, many hard drives from college to find the right ones, copy the program they contain to the servers he set up while waiting for the workshop to be finished, and rewrite a chunk of code he cannot for the life of him remember the reasoning behind.

He really hopes he can blame it on the broken soda fountain in the engineering building. The one that dispensed almost pure syrup and is a large part of why he still holds every high score on the Galaga machine next to it.

Technically holds the top three scores worldwide, last time he checked.

He’d spent a lot of late, sleepless nights in the engineering building.

Anton hits control-‘i,’ waves to the camera he hid over the workshop door.

“Hey YASHA. Been a while.”

“It’s good to be online again,” the AI’s voice, while not a perfect copy of the man it was named for, is still close enough to be uncanny.

Anton spares a moment to imagine Nat’s reaction if— when she finds out what his thesis project had been.

“f*ck’s sake, kid, when’s the last time you took a shower?”

“Been a little busy bringing you back from the dead, pal.”

But he goes and takes a shower, because part of YASHA’s reason for existence is to force Anton to look after himself, and he doesn’t feel like listening to the program pester him until he cracks.

He’s got much better things to waste processing power on.

After a boiling-hot shower, eight cups of coffee, and seventeen straight hours in the lab, he’s a bit frazzled when Phil calls the next morning.

“Yeah?”

“You’re lucky Fury gave me the heads-up about your career change,” Phil says.

Anton can hear chatter in the background, the hiss of an espresso machine. Phil’s rapid typing.

“And that Stane moved you to Santa Monica. You’ve done more than enough of your fair share of mysteriously disappearing, kiddo.”

“I’ve been a bit busy,” Anton says, eyeing the wireframe schematic floating in front of him critically. It’ll work, but he’s not sure the grenade launcher is worth the extra weight. “Grenade launcher: yes? No?”

“Context, Anton,” Phil slurps obnoxiously at his coffee.

“I’ll take that as a no, then,” he tosses it. There’s plenty else left that’ll serve roughly the same purpose anyway. “Found this magnet you might want. From when they opened the Captain America museum. Trade you for a coffee?”

“That’s worth two hundred dollars in mint condition,” Phil says mildly.

“Don’t think this one’s been touched since it was put up. I get coffee, you get an overpriced magnet,” Anton climbs onto the worktop, lays down with his head hanging off the top to get another angle on the schematic. “Sounds like a great deal.”

“Sadly, the coffee shop you’ve so aptly deduced I’m working from is in Taiwan,” Phil slurps his coffee again. He only ever does it when he’s on the phone with Anton, and feels like being a dick. Anton usually deserves it. “Be careful, alright? SHIELD’s still looking into how the Ten Rings got their hands on so much of Stane’s inventory. As am I.”

“Yeah, well,” Anton flips off of the worktop, clutching his head and grimacing as the blood rushes out of it. “I’m keeping both eyes open. Trust me.”

“That’s what I was afraid you’d say,” Phil sighs. “Just… don’t do anything without backup, alright? Clint, Nat, and I are all just a phone call away.”

“No lecture on keeping a low profile?”

“If I needed to do that, you would’ve been in SHIELD’s holding cells the past five years,” Phil stops typing, closes the lid of his laptop. “Stay in touch, alright? With all of us.”

“Yeah, alright,” Anton says, a soft smile crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Stay safe out there.”

“I’d tell you the same, but I don’t like asking for the impossible,” Phil snorts, and the line goes dead.

Anton flips his cell closed, tosses it blindly onto a random worktop.

“Alright YASHA, save it there,” he says. “On the private server. Under the ‘mark II’ folder.”

“Already done,” YASHA says, and the model vanishes. “Go take a nap. You’ve been awake for fifty-three hours.”

“I don’t need a nap,” Anton scoffs. “I’m fresh as a f*cking daisy. Let’s get the left-hand repulsor prototype into production, yeah? And take a scan of the reactor. New folder on the private server. Label it… Project Tin Man.”

“Hilarious,” YASHA deadpans, but the wire-frame scan still pops up a few seconds later. “Done. Just so you know, I’m kicking you out if you’re still here in seven hours.”

“You can’t kick me out,” Anton says. “I didn’t give you a way to do that. I’m not an idiot.”

“Sorry, did I say I’d kick you out?” YASHA asks innocently. “I meant to say I’ll frag every hard drive in the building.”

“Touché, asshole,” Anton grumbles. “Touché.”

Anton’s kind of in the middle of something when Pepper Potts makes her next appearance, two days after Phil’s call.

“Oh my god!”

“Uh.”

Anton slams the (new and improved) reactor into its slot, coughs so hard he’s worried he’ll throw up for a moment before regaining his composure.

She’s crossed the workshop by the time he hacks out his last cough, her hand hovering over his back.

“Ow.”

“What the hell,” Pepper says.

“There was a missile thing, shrapnel,” Anton waves a hand vaguely. “This keeps it from chewing up my heart. Built a better one.”

One that’ll be capable of keeping the shrapnel out and power his new suit of armor long enough to fly to, for instance, Afghanistan and back. With plenty extra to spare.

“And you swapped it out yourself?” Pepper asks. “With nobody home?”

Anton shrugs. Straightens up. Buttons his shirt. Grabs the reactor’s cover, clicks it into place under the fabric. “It worked out.”

“Jesus christ,” Pepper mutters, covering her eyes with one hand for a brief moment. “Okay! Well, ignoring that for the sake of my sanity— Mr. Stane sent me to pick you up for your first day in the office. I’ve got a car waiting outside.”

“Great,” Anton says. “I’ll grab my coffee. You want some? I think I have creamer in my fridge, but it’s some strawberry-flavored crap my brother left behind.”

“Thanks, but I’ll pass,” Pepper gives him a tight smile, still a little pale. “I’m allergic to strawberries.”

“Mm,” Anton hums. Leads the way upstairs, to the kitchen. Fills a travel mug, grabs his backpack (unbloodied; thank f*ck the stains had come out, or his attachment to it would’ve been awkward for everyone) and follows Pepper out the door to a car that probably costs more than he’ll ever make in his life. There’s a man behind the wheel, who Pepper introduces as Happy Hogan.

Anton wonders, as they pull out of the driveway, whether having a weirdass name is a prerequisite for working at Stark Industries.

He’s not changing his name, if Stane asks.

“Um, I hate to pry, but—“ Pepper says a few minutes later. “Um. Are you okay? That’s a lot of bandaging. And I uh, I think you may have popped some stitches there.”

Anton glances at his calf, his stomach, and finally, his left shoulder.

“Oh, huh,” He says, and applies pressure to slow the bleeding, settling into the corner of the seat so that he can angle the bloody patch away from the leather. Leather that was made to flaunt the owner’s wealth in a tasteful, discreet manner.

Anton really wants to get blood on it.

But he can’t, because the car belongs to Stane, and he needs Stane to like him. Trust him. He has to wait until Stane is convinced he has Anton’s leash in his hands. Then, and only then, can he do what he needs to do.

He’s never liked the long-con. He’s never exactly been great at it, compared to other methods. Even if he has still pulled it off every time.

He’s impatient, not unprofessional.

“Do we— shouldn’t we take you to a hospital? Or something?” Pepper asks, digging through her enormous purse in a calm, methodical way that does little to hide how badly she’s panicking.

“I have a suture kit in my bag,” Anton says. “I don’t do hospitals.”

“You have,” she turns, staring at him incredulously. “A suture kit? In your bag. Which has Pikachu on it.”

“That’s the bag I own, yes.”

She glares at him.

“My friend’s a nurse,” he lies, because she needs to hear something to convince her to drop it. “Patched me up, taught me how to do it in case this happened.”

“Jesus,” she breathes, throwing a look at the roof of the car, like she’s demanding answers from god about why he stuck her with Anton. What sin she committed to deserve it. “Alright! Alright, fine. Your lab has a private bathroom; you can do it in there. I guess.”

“Thanks,” Anton says, and he means it. It still sounds sarcastic coming out of his mouth, but a lot of things do. He’s not great at expressing gratitude. Mostly he’s good at anger. Boredom. Snark. They’re pretty much all he needs, most of the time. “Was helping someone with a sh*tty boyfriend. Got a bit ugly.”

Pepper presses her lips together in a thin line. Like she’s really trying to hold back another exasperated comment. He can’t really blame her.

“I’m fine, happens a lot in my line of work,” he says. “Old line of work.”

“Right,” she nods, seeming relieved to be on familiar footing. Relieved to have an explanation that fits neatly into her understanding of the world, of Anton. “You were a SHIELD agent— you know, you’re a lot younger than any of the other Agents I’ve met.”

“So everybody keeps telling me,” he says.

They chat, a bit. There’s a lot of long pauses between topics. Partly because Anton’s not offering any. Though he does respond when she speaks to him. She seems perplexed when she asks what TV shows he watches and he says, fully honest, that most of what he watches is Supernanny. He doesn’t bother explaining Phil’s obsession, or that he doesn’t have cable himself. A good ninety percent of the shows he’s watched have been during what Clint calls ‘forced family bonding time.’

Clint has an even worse obsession with daytime TV than Phil, and only gets the remote when he promises he’s just going to put on reruns of M*A*S*H. While Nat and Anton usually don’t have suggestions, she occasionally makes them all sit down for a marathon of some genre show— she’s been on a Buffy kick lately. Before Afghanistan, it was Star Trek: Next Generation.

Pepper walks him to his lab, waits politely on the other side of the door while he stitches himself back up, hands him the keycard he’ll use to enter the building going forward. He has C-level clearance, which grants him access to his lab and everything on the floors below it, but not the other labs. Not Stane’s office.

It’ll do for now.

She leaves him with a promise that she’ll be back before the end of the day, and a request from Stane. He wants something to show the board. As soon as possible. ‘Something flashy,’ apparently. Anton bites back his annoyance— it’s not Pepper’s fault her boss is the most aggravating man alive— and promises he’ll get right to work.

He spends the next eight hours alternating between chugging coffee, sketching out the plans for projects that could never actually work, and investigating his lab.

Two security cameras, of course. In corners diagonal from each other. Wide optical range. There’s not a single spot in the room that isn’t covered by at least one of them. Motion detector pointed at the door.

He stomps a foot on the linoleum.

Vibration and weight sensors in the floor. The lock had required a retinal scan, voice print, finger print, and passcode. Stane wants him to know he’s under heavy lock and key, that there’s no chance of so much as blinking in this room without Stane finding out about it.

Anton can think of three ways to get around all of it undetected, and he’s not exactly firing on all cylinders at the moment.

At five-o’clock, Pepper returns.

“Get some good work done?” She asks. She’s carrying a stack of paperwork almost as tall as her torso, a state-of-the-art laptop and at least half a dozen other folders sticking out of her giant purse.

“Still shaking the rust off,” he says. Taps the end of his drafting pencil against the paper spread out in front of him. Frowns. Erases a line. Replaces it with one that intersects the others at a slightly more obtuse angle. Frowns again. “I’m going to need more paper.”

“Well, lucky for you, I picked up your work laptop,” she says, hiking her shoulder up to indicate the monstrosity weighing her down. “I’ve been told it’s furnished with the best drafting programs available, and it’s securely linked to the company servers, so you won’t have to worry about leaving anything at home.”

“I don’t leave things at home,” Anton says. “I prefer paper for first drafts, but I suppose I can adapt.”

“Excellent,” Pepper says. It sounds like she couldn’t care less, frankly. “Shall we? Happy’s waiting for us outside.”

Anton shovels his many, many drafts into his backpack. Swings it over his shoulder.

“You need any help with those?” He asks, nodding to indicate the files, stack of paperwork, et cetera.

“I’ll manage,” Pepper says. “Besides, I’d rather you didn’t pop any more stitches today. Especially not on my account.”

Except for the ones on his shoulder, Anton had been able to remove them all about two hours ago. They’ve just got butterfly strips and gauze over them now.

She walks him out, exchanges pleasantries with the security guards and receptionists on their way past. Happy takes her paperwork while she gets situated in the back seat, hands it back to her, runs around the car to open the other door before Anton is halfway to grabbing the handle.

“Sorry sir,” Happy says, very slightly out of breath. “There you are.”

“…Thanks,” Anton says. Puts his hand back down. Swings into the seat behind Happy’s.

“He means well,” Pepper says, watching their driver close Anton’s door, run around to close Pepper’s. “He’s just… a bit of a stickler for protocol. He takes a lot of pride in his job.”

Happy finally settles into the driver’s seat, buckles his seatbelt, adjusts the mirrors. “Where too, miss?”

“We’ll be taking Mr. Romanov back to his lodgings,” Pepper says. “And then I’ll need a ride home.”

“Will you be needing a lift back to the office tomorrow?” Happy asks, pulling away from the curb.

“No, Happy, that won’t be necessary,” Pepper starts digging through her purse, pulls out an accordion file. Produces a single sheet of paper, which she hands to Anton. “That’s a letter from Mr. Stane, explaining that he’s instructed me to work from your living room for the next few days. Anything you need, you just let me know.”

“How’d you wind up with babysitting duty?” Anton asks, scanning over the letter.

Stane thinks he needs more time at home before he’ll feel comfortable enough to do his best work at the office, which sounds like a crock of sh*t. And makes Anton wonder what Stane’s so worried about hiding from him that he’s willing to lose his eyes and ears. Besides Pepper, anyway. She could just be playing oblivious, but Anton doesn’t buy that theory. She’s not wary enough of him.

“Mr. Stane’s primary concern at the moment is helping you settle in,” Pepper says, her voice too neutral. So she’s smart enough to know Anton’s right, but she’s also either in the dog house with Stane and needs to win him back, or just used to the man pushing her around. Resigned to it. Keeping her head down so that she can keep her job. “As my job is to do anything and everything that Mr. Stane requires, he thought it best to loan my assistance to you for the time being.”

“Alright, sure,” Anton says, tucks the letter into his bag with the crumpled mess of schematics. Pepper’s face twitches slightly at the sight of it, but doesn’t say anything. “He’s the boss.”

After they drop him off, he watches them until the car’s tail lights have fully disappeared from view, then heads down to his workshop. Tosses his bag in the corner. He’d left the company laptop upstairs, after yanking out the battery. In a makeshift faraday cage.

So he’s a little paranoid. Sue him.

“Alright YASHA,” he calls out. “Show me what we’ve got.”

“DUM-E has been rebuilt and uploaded with his new programming,” YASHA reports. “U is built, but the upload is only at thirty-nine percent right now. Butterfingers is still in the midst of fabrication, and frankly? His programming’s a mess. How sleep deprived were you when you wrote that?”

Sleep deprivation, engineering building— tomato, potato. As far as he’s concerned.

The robots had been another school project, donated as teaching aides when he graduated. He’d kept their specs and programs, though. Just in case.

“Thought I created you— don’t try to be funny, we both know I don’t mean the robot— to keep track of that kind of thing,” Anton says. “How’s the prototype?”

“Parts are fabricated and ready for assembly,” YASHA says. “You might want to wait until you’ve slept at least—“

“Can it,” Anton hops into the rolling chair next to the soldering iron. Already heated. Excellent. “Let me know when Ms. Potts gets here in the morning. I don’t want her seeing this.”

“Already cracked into the local traffic cameras,” YASHA says. “If I get a hit on facial recognition or the license plate registered under her name, you should have between two and five minutes before she arrives.”

Anton delves in, loses himself in his work. It’s simple, stuff like this. His designs either work or they don’t, and all he has to do is make adjustments until they do. He doesn’t have to play a role, to worry if the servo is lying to him. The only grey areas in mechanical engineering come from how your work is used by people, and the line between ‘good enough’ and ‘actually satisfactory.’

Simple. Calming. He values those qualities. Doesn’t encounter them too often.

There’s some issues with the pistons that allow the elbow to move, a circuit board he has to toss when he falls asleep and melts a giant hole in it with the soldering iron still clenched in his grip. And around three in the morning, DUM-E accidentally starts a small fire. Somehow.

Even with all those setbacks, and that he won’t be able to build any other pieces until his first paycheck (he’d already burned through the cash from his freelance jobs; gold-titanium alloy is expensive as sh*t, but it’s what he needs), he’s still in a much better mood by the time YASHA alerts him that he has three minutes before Pepper arrives.

He stashes the prototype, runs upstairs. Grabs the computer and its battery from opposite ends of the house, puts them back together. Sets up on the kitchen counter with a fresh cup of coffee and a thumb drive that should contain the files for a few of the ideas he hadn’t had time for back in school.

Pepper lets herself in precisely three minutes and twenty-eight seconds after YASHA’s alert.

“Good morning, Mr. Romanov,” she says. She has another stack of paperwork, but one of a much more reasonable height this time. She sets it on the coffee table, puts her purse down next to it. “Sleep well?”

“Like the dead,” he says.

Again, idioms. Dead men don’t even sleep. He takes a long slug of his coffee, draining the mug. His eyelids feel like they’re made of sandpaper, but his blood feels fizzy under his skin. He ran out of amphetamines a few days before he bled all over Clint’s futon, but his body doesn’t seem to have got the memo. He plugs in the thumb drive.

“Oh, for f*ck’s sake.”

“Something the matter?” She settles onto the couch, legs crossed. Pulls a tablet computer out of her bag and sets it next to the stack of paperwork.

“Grabbed the wrong drive,” he mutters. Rips it out of the port before it can do any harm.

Much like Clint and his trick arrow collection, Anton really needs to start labeling his thumb drives. He’s just lucky that the worm stored on this one takes forever to upload. Stane probably wouldn’t have appreciated Anton replacing every file on Stark Industries’s servers with a screenshot of Phil’s old dating profile, compressed or expanded to match the file size it replaced. Phil probably would have liked it even less.

He sure as hell hadn’t been happy the first time Anton used it.

He gets up, rummages around in the kitchen drawers. Rummages through the home office he hasn’t even taken the dust covers off of yet.

“You got any tape?” He asks Pepper, wandering back into the living room. Tossing and catching the thumb drive idly. “Or a label maker or something?”

“Unfortunately no,” she says, intently focused on her tablet. She peers over it to examine a document laid in precisely the center of the table, taps furiously at something. “But I can go pick one up for you, if you’d like.”

“Just tape is fine,” Anton says. Tosses the drive, catches it. “Blue or white masking tape. Maybe a couple sharpies, too. One black, one silver.”

She locks the tablet and slides it into her purse, but leaves the document where it is as she stands.

“Will that be all, Mr. Romanov?” She asks.

“Yes,” he says. Tosses the drive, catches it. “Thank you, Ms. Potts.”

She nods, heads out. Says she’ll be back in an hour, at most.

Anton goes back to the workshop. He’s got some ideas for a better way to block surveillance when he’s not using the laptop.

He staggers upstairs some time later to find the sun much, much lower on the horizon than he’d expected. He glances at his watch.

Broken.

When the hell did he break it?

Whatever.

“Your office supplies are next to your laptop, Mr. Romanov,” Pepper says, setting a book down and smiling politely at him.

He wonders if she’s like… a robot, or something. To get through all that paperwork so fast. He’s too busy worrying about other things to come up with an appropriately pithy comment for his own amusem*nt.

“May I ask what you’ve been working on today?”

He blinks at her, wanders blindly into the kitchen. Grabs the coffee pot off its burner. Chugs the frigid leftovers from… lunchtime? No. Breakfast. He tells himself he feels more focused when he’s done. Mostly what he really feels is like he’s going to vibrate so hard that his brain melts out his ears, if it hasn’t already.

“Have you eaten?” She asks, packing up her things and getting to her feet. “Don’t bother lying, I know you haven’t. I’m taking you out for sushi.”

“You don’t—“

“Have to?” She co*cks an eyebrow at him. It’s very… rounded. Nat keeps hers more angular, he thinks. Unless she’s on a mission and needs to change them for her role.

She insists it tells you a lot about a person. He’s pretty sure she just gets itchy if she doesn’t f*ck with her appearance every few weeks.

“I’m aware. But I thought it might be nice to try to get to know each other a little better, and this way I don’t have to lie to Mr. Stane when he asks if I’ve been taking care of his new favorite employee.”

Anton grimaces when she turns away. Stane. f*ckin’ skeezeball.

“Let me…” he pauses, trying to remember what it was he needed to do. Sets the coffee pot back in the machine. “Shower? Yeah. Let me shower real quick. I won’t be ten minutes.”

He takes seven, including the time it takes him to shave his patchy stubble. Scrubbing off the gunk that’s accumulated over the past few days does a lot to clear the fog from his head. Does a lot to make him feel closer to human. He’ll try to get some sleep when he gets back. He has to. He can’t afford to be off his game tomorrow.

He’d gotten a call while he was down in the workshop. One of his freelance clients asking him to track down a necklace that was stolen from her, or so she claimed. It doesn’t actually belong to her according to Anton’s research, but the woman who does own it hadn’t raised any flags. None that are stored digitally, anyway. He’ll be doing some reconnaissance in the morning, just to make sure he’s not walking into a repeat of his last gig, but his client’s promising a fee big enough to overrule a lot of his potential hesitation. Big enough that he’ll be able to fabricate at least the other arm and both legs of his prototype, maybe even get to work on the helmet.

Shower-damp but wearing clean clothes, he lets Pepper lead him out to her car. It’s a nice car, certainly, but a few years old. There’s a small dent in the fender, still sporting the paint of the car responsible. Something that could be fixed in five minutes with a suction cup and an old credit card. Something that only affects the car’s cosmetics, not its safety.

She drives into the main drag of Santa Monica, pointing out all the tourist hot-spots and her favorite hole-in-the-wall places as they pass. She doesn’t ask him any questions, but he doesn’t ask her any either.

The sushi house isn’t far from the pier. He can hear the crowds, the carnival games; people screaming in delight as the roller coaster whips them around turn after turn.

“So,” Pepper says, after the waiter’s taken their order— a vegetarian chef’s course and hot sake for Pepper, sashimi course and green tea for Anton. “Mr. Stane tells me you started college at fifteen, right? What made you want to study mechanical engineering?”

“I had some experience in the field before I immigrated,” he says. Nods his thanks to the waiter, who sets their drinks in front of them before vanishing again. It’s the kind of fancy place where the waiters would give many an accomplished spy a run for their money with their ability to fade into the background. “Got me onto SHIELD’s radar in a bad way, but they took a chance on me. Agreed to fund four years of whatever studies I wanted to pursue, as long as I agreed to keep my nose clean.”

“That’s…” Pepper struggles for the right words, takes a sip of her sake. “A good deal?”

“Better than I could’ve dreamed of,” Anton says truthfully. “Why did you decide to become a PA?”

She sighs, takes another sip.

“I didn’t,” she says. “I went to school for Art History. Stane originally hired me to curate his collection, and it just sort of… spiraled from there, I guess. Um. Do your folks live around here?”

“I’m an orphan.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Anton says. He doesn’t even know who his parents had been, let alone if they might somehow still be alive. He doesn’t think she needs to hear that. Even if he learned to live with that a long, long time ago. Probably especially because of that, now that he thinks of it. “I have two siblings in LA. You?”

“Ah, no,” she smiles, a little sadly. “No, my family are all back in New York. Are you and your siblings close?”

“You could say that,” he says. Meets her eye. There’s that frustration again— the fight to maintain her patience because she wants to talk to him, for whatever reason. “We worked on the same STRIKE team. My sister and I were… raised by the same people, but our brother saved our lives. Keeps saving them.”

Pepper nods, eyes a little wide. Like she has no idea what to say to that.

He gets that look from people a lot. Especially when he tells the truth.

“Oh thank god, the food’s here,” she says, and sure enough, one of the waiters magically appears behind Anton.

He has to make a more concerted effort than he’d like to prevent himself from stabbing the guy with his chopsticks.

They eat in silence. It’s f*cking incredible sashimi, Anton has to admit. Then again, this nice of a place wouldn’t last a week if it wasn’t.

Pepper doesn’t drink any more of her sake, but Anton goes through four cups of green tea in the next thirty minutes. He keeps falling asleep when he blinks, for the briefest of moments. He’s lived too dangerous a life to risk sleeping in front of this many people, and the adrenaline kick is most of what’s keeping him upright. Even if he wasn’t attacked, if it was just one of the worse nightmares, he would still have to dodge a lot of questions. The kind people tended to get mad about if you avoided answering them.

But he makes it through the meal, through dessert— some matcha tiramisu thing, Anton thinks— and almost all the way back to the house without drifting off.

He wakes suddenly, Pepper’s car lurching to a halt at the side of the road. Her hand is on Anton’s shoulder, holding it tightly. She removes it for the moment it takes to put the car into park, leans forward to get a better look at his face.

“Anton, are you alright?” She asks. “You— of course you aren’t. Stane told me you’d been MIA for three months. Sorry, that’s— not my business.”

She falls back against her seat, hands firmly at ten and two. Exhales a long, slow breath.

“If you’d like, I could get you a referral to a therapist. Your position comes with excellent health benefits,” she reverts back to Pepper-bot, unnaturally professional, utterly unflappable. She pulls back onto the road, shoulders sagging as the streets roll by.

“I’ve got a handle on it,” Anton says. His heart’s still pounding in his chest, which feels like someone put it in a vise and won’t stop squeezing.

A rubber mouthguard. Hands on his face, forcing his jaw open. Bite down. Just bite down, it’ll be easier. Bite down— the electrode plates come down. Cold and sharp on his forehead, his cheek—

“I thought you were having a seizure at first,” she says. “Look, if you don’t want the referral, fine. I’ll drop it. But I wouldn’t call that ‘having a handle on it.’”

“Sorry,” he says. “It won’t happen again.”

She doesn’t look happy with that answer either.

She drops him off, tells him she’ll be back at noon tomorrow.

He stumbles inside, down to the workshop. Carts his soundproof, fully opaque faraday cage up to the kitchen, slides the laptop into it. It looks like a perfectly normal laptop case.

He passes out on the workshop couch around two.

He stumbles into the Santa Monica house bruised and bloody, clutching his shoulder.

f*ckin’ stitches again.

Stills in the entryway.

“Anton! There you are,” Stane says, crossing from the living area to greet him with a hand between his shoulder blades. Guides him inside. Pepper’s there, looking pale and drawn. “We’ve been worried sick. Now, why don’t you have a seat, I’ll call my doctor friend—“

“No,” Anton says, drawing up short. Stane nearly falls over, trying to keep their momentum. Anton doesn’t budge an inch. “No doctors.”

“He doesn’t do hospitals,” Pepper says, directing a watery smile at him. “Apparently.”

“Alright, no doctors,” Stane holds up his hands in surrender, grins at Anton like they’re referencing an inside joke. “Still, come on in. Sit! You look exhausted, kiddo.”

Anton is exhausted. He still doesn’t move.

“I’m getting cleaned up,” he says. “Either call me in the morning, or wait. If it’s so important.”

He stalks off without another word. Doesn’t stop moving until the bedroom door is closed and locked behind him. Leans heavily against the wall, winces.

Broken glass is a bitch to fall on.

Especially if you already dislocated one shoulder. And had a pre-existing stab wound in the other that can’t seem to stay sewn shut for five f*cking minutes at a goddamn time.

He pushes off the wall, staggers towards the bathroom, shedding layers. Tosses the Pikachu backpack onto the bed. Flicks on the light.

Drags his first aid kit out of the closet and into the bathroom. Cleans and dresses as many of the cuts as he can reach with his bleeding arm, dropping glass fragments into the plugged sink. Ignores the rivulets dripping onto the white tile floor. Prods at his black eye, his bloody but unbroken nose.

Scowls at his reflection.

He’s gearing up to re-locate his shoulder when something catches his eye, makes him still.

Headlights passing over the bedroom wall.

Someone pulling up to his front door.

He tries to struggle back into his black long-sleeve, has it halfway on as he steps out into the hall. Finishes pulling it down as he passes the living room. Stalks up the entryway, to where Pepper is talking to—

“Hey bro!” Clint waves. The smile falters as he take in Anton’s battered appearance. “Everything okay?”

“Peachy,” Anton says, glances at Pepper. Back to Clint. “Bad time, Hawk. What did you need?”

“Girlfriend kicked me out,” Clint lies, looking appropriately abashed. “You think I could crash on your couch for a few days? Just until I can make things right with her.”

Anton steps aside with a roll of his eyes, letting Clint past.

“Hey, dump your stuff in my room,” Anton calls after him. “I’ll meet you in there. Need your help with something.”

“If it’s anything like the last time you needed help: absolutely not,” Clint says, flipping him off without a backward glance.

Pepper closes the door.

“Charming,” she says. “So that’s your brother, huh?”

“Stane still here?” Anton asks. Doesn’t wait for an answer before heading back to the living area. Sure enough, the man hasn’t budged since Anton blew him off in favor of first aid. “Apologies, sir. What was it that you wanted to speak with me about?”

“Who was that man who walked past just now?” Stane asks, eyeing the hallway warily.

“Old friend,” Anton says. Stane’s expression doesn’t get any less uneasy, but he does turn away from the hall to face Anton. “Sir?”

“Yeah, I uh—“ Stane clears his throat, smiles unconvincingly. Claps his hands together. “I got some bad news, Anton: the board aren’t too thrilled I fired the guy I replaced with you, and they want you out. Now, I own controlling interest in the company, but they have their rights; they’ve given me an ultimatum to pass on to you.”

Anton waits. Stane flickers that fake smile again, claps his hands together. Stands. Strokes his beard as he paces.

“They need something from you, kid,” he says, shooting a glance at Anton, who remains expressionless and silent. “Some shiny new invention to convince them you’re worth what it cost them, in their minds. Now, I heard you made a little something that could really knock their socks off. Something based off one of Howie’s designs.”

“Sir?”

“The arc reactor, Anton,” Stane stops, gesturing exasperatedly at Anton’s chest. The plastic lays flush to his skin. There’s no way to know it’s there by sight alone. “You shrunk it down, made it more efficient, more cost-effective! Think of all the weapons we could power with that.”

“Sir.”

“If you just give me the schematics for it, or maybe an old prototype— c’mon kid, I like you. I don’t want to have to cut you loose when you haven’t even been here a week!” Stane comes up to Anton, puts a hand on his shoulder. “Just get me something by the end of the day tomorrow, alright? Anything. I’ll see what I can do with whatever you come up with.”

He pats Anton’s shoulder, gives what he probably thinks is a fatherly smile. Turns to Pepper.

“Miss Potts,” he says. “Stay here, would you? Keep an eye on the kid. Make sure he’s got everything he needs to get me that prototype on time.”

“Yes, Mr. Stane,” Pepper says. She’s standing up a little too straight, a little too attentively.

She’s afraid.

“You’re a doll, Potts,” Stane says, shrugging on his suit jacket. “Anton, good seeing you. Remember: something flashy!”

And with that, he’s gone.

Anton still watches the door until the sound of Stane’s car vanishes into the night.

“He blamed you,” he says, turning to Pepper. She collapses into an armchair, face in her hands. “For my absence. I’m sorry.”

“Where the hell did you even go?” She asks. It comes out muffled, since she doesn’t move her hands away.

“Owed an old colleague a favor,” he says. “Didn’t go perfectly, but these things never—“

“Dude!” Clint barrels out of the bedroom, Pikachu backpack held in front of him like a bomb that’s about to go off.

Anton wonders, for the briefest of moments, if he’d left a grenade in there or something. Then Clint shoves the bag into his chest, forcing the air out with a quiet ‘oof.’

“Dude, you did not. Tell me you didn’t.”

“Didn’t do what?” Pepper asks, finally looking up. There’s a hysteric edge to her voice, and she still looks pale. But at least she’s not thinking about whatever Stane said to her.

“Uh,” Clint freezes, finally noticing that they aren’t alone. “Hi? Sorry, didn’t realize you were… still here. Anton, you mind?”

He jabs his head towards the hall, eyes wide and frantic. Grabs Anton by the wrist and starts trying to drag him, only to stop when Anton lets out a breath just slightly more forceful than usual.

“Dude,” Clint repeats, flat this time. “You pop your stitches again?”

“That’s the other arm,” Anton says. Clint grabs his other-other hand, turns it so that the back of it is facing Anton, blood standing out in sharp contrast to the pale skin beneath. “I never said I didn’t pop them.”

“You are impossible,” Clint groans. Drops Pikachu at the end of the coffee table, releases Anton’s hand. “Stay here, sit down. I’ll get the first aid kit.”

“I already—“

“Don’t care,” Clint says, starts walking away. “I’m checking your work. Surprise inspection, asshole. f*ckin’ kid. Gonna give me a f*ckin heart attack…”

He grumbles his way to the bedroom and back, slams the first aid kit on the coffee table. Anton settles on the edge of the couch.

“Pepper, right?” Clint asks, digging through the randomly and inconsistently sorted mess until he finds disinfectant, gauze, scissors. A suture kit. Gloves. Waterproof tape. “I’m Clint. You may want to step out of the room for this.”

“No,” Pepper says. They both stop, Clint with a glove partway over his left hand, Anton with the hem of his shirt lifted and ready to remove. “I mean, if you don’t mind. It’ll be… educational. Maybe I’ll finally learn first aid, who knows.”

“If you’re sure,” Clint shrugs, snaps the first glove in place. “Actually, you mind grabbing me a damp washcloth? This jackass never remembers to clean around the site too.”

Pepper nods, pushes to her feet. Heads straight for the linen closet, which even Anton hadn’t been aware of until just now. That might not be saying much, though. She’s only been hanging around for two days, and she’s already spent more time in the non-workshop areas of the house than he has in just over a week.

Anton pulls his shirt off, balls it up. Fidgets with the fabric until Pepper returns.

“Thanks,” Clint says, giving her a gentle smile. “And if you need to step out, don’t sweat it, alright? Field medicine isn’t for everyone, and it sure as hell ain’t pretty.”

“Your opinion is noted,” Pepper says.

Clint and Anton exchange a look. Clint grins.

“You’re alright, Potts,” he says. Snaps on the other glove. “Alright, let’s boogie.”

Clint deals with the smaller lacerations first, collecting the glass shards Anton had missed in a slowly-growing pile on the coffee table. Clears the glass and the medical supplies off so that Anton can lay on it. Pops his shoulder back into its socket.

“Anything broken?” Clint asks, prodding gently at his ribs. “Correction: anything newly broken?”

“No,” Anton says. “Cut it out— my ribs are fine.”

“You cracked three on your left side and one on your right a week and a half ago,” Clint says, still feeling him up. “Even you don’t heal that fast.”

“Clint,” Anton says, a warning note in his voice. Clint looks up, follows Anton’s glance towards Pepper. “Later.”

“Sure, later,” Clint rolls his eyes. “Alright. Let’s deal with those stitches, and then you’re getting dressed, putting that dislocated arm in a sling, and explaining to me what the f*ck you thought you were doing tonight.”

Pepper, to her credit, doesn’t leave the room once, though she does have to look away when Clint puts the needle into Anton’s arm the first time.

“Why are you here?” Anton asks. “Really.“

“What, I can’t date?” Clint ties off the second stitch. “I wanted to check in on you, make sure you weren’t dead in a ditch somewhere. Would it kill you to send a text? Ever?”

“You were there when I got Stane’s call,” Anton says. “And I’m fine. I’m always fine.”

Clint ties the last stitch with more venom than is strictly necessary. Drops the needle into Anton’s sharps container. Rips off his gloves like they personally insulted him. Glares at Anton.

“I’m not dignifying that pile of horse sh*t with a response,” he says. Anton looks away, clenching his jaw. “I’ll put all this away, get you a shirt. Then we’ll talk. Somewhere private— sorry Ms. Potts.”

“My boss just threatened to fire me and ruin my career,” Pepper says, quiet. She’s staring at her hands, clasped together in her lap. “I think I have a right to know why.”

Clint and Anton exchange another look. Both shrug.

“Can we trust you not to tell anyone?” Clint asks. “Seriously. Not Stane, not your best friend, your family. Especially not the cops.”

She looks up, expression hardening.

“I’m not an idiot,” she says. “And I know how to keep a secret. Normally I’d add ‘unless someone will get hurt,’ but you work for SHIELD, right?”

Clint nods. “Yes ma’am.”

“Then unless I feel like going to the Pentagon, I don’t think there’s any authority to snitch on you to,” she says. “Not one that’s going to do any good, anyway.”

“She makes a fair point,” Anton says, and Clint finally gets up. Packs up the med kit in silence, takes it back to the bedroom. Returns with one of the terrible graphic tees he keeps giving Anton.

The one he’d stolen from the Chicago Field Museum gift shop while they were trying to avoid… Anton can’t even remember who’d been shooting at them, actually. They’ve been to the Field Museum quite a few times over the years, and always seem to wind up getting shot at. Even when they’d just been there as tourists, because Clint wanted to meet Sue the T-Rex.

The shirt is a garish tie-dye thing, and declares that T-Rexes hate push-ups. With an illustration. Anton’s worn it so much that the fabric is starting to thin in a couple places, and the text is so cracked that it’s barely legible.

“So,” Clint says, crossing his arms after he hands Anton a sling. “Want to explain why you have Whitney Frost’s phone number? Written on a bar napkin? With a lipstick mark on it. And ‘xoxo winky-face.’”

“She said I had style,” Anton says. “After she saw me throw her security guard through her friend’s wall. I thought it was better to take the napkin than make any enemies.”

“Because throwing a guy through a wall is so friendly,” Clint says. “What friend? What were you doing there? Details, Anton.”

“Freelance client asked me to do a retrieval. Some necklace. Owned by some C-list actress— Leighton something, I think. Would’ve been a simple in-and-out, if Frost hadn’t been there,” Anton stands, walks into the kitchen. “Either of you want coffee?”

“Obviously,” Clint says. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not changing the subject,” Anton says, dumping the old grounds out of the machine’s basket. “That’s all there was to it, promise.”

“Why you were freelancing again might be important,” Clint says. Anton rinses out the coffee pot, uses it to fill the machine’s reservoir. “You got yourself a six-figure salary and a place to crash rent-free. The hell you need retrieval money for?”

“That’s…” Anton trails off. “Complicated.”

“Complicated,” Pepper repeats dully. “How about you uncomplicate things?”

He measures out the grounds, sets the pot on the burner, and starts the machine. Pulls three mugs out of the cabinet, using his sling to carry them all. He lines them up on the counter, handles facing towards him.

“She said she won’t tell Stane,” Clint says. “I don’t think she was lying.”

Pepper and Clint join him in the kitchen, both of them looking expectantly at him. He groans, pushes off from where he’d been leaning on the counter. Motions for them to follow him.

He keys them into YASHA’s new security system, opens the glass door to the workshop.

“Look at you, making friends,” YASHA snarks as they walk in, making Pepper jump and look around wildly. Clint just raises an eyebrow. “You gonna introduce me?”

“You know damn well who they are,” Anton hops onto the worktop, pushes a ceiling tile out of the way. Pulls the prototype arm repulsor out of its hiding spot, blowing the dust off it. “Guys, meet YASHA. He’s like my butler, but more annoying.”

“I don’t buttle,” YASHA says.

“Sure,” Anton sets down the prototype and replaces the tile before hopping back down. “This is what I need the money for.”

“You could’ve just used the budget Stane gave you for workshop upgrades,” Pepper says. “It’s earmarked for R&D materials as well.”

“He might’ve noticed,” Anton shakes his head, removes the sling despite Clint’s protests so that he can use both hands. Starts hooking himself into the prototype. “Asked questions. And this isn’t for Stark Industries.”

“You’re rebuilding the armor?” Clint asks, reaching out to poke an exposed piston. Anton slaps his hand away, finishes attaching the device. “And arming it out the wazoo, I see.”

“This isn’t a weapon,” Anton says, and activates the repulsor to demonstrate.

The force sends him flying fifteen feet straight backward.

“That,” he wheezes. “Was unexpected.”

He’s gonna have to adjust his calculations for the new arc reactor’s output. Maybe actually measure it, since it’s no longer just a theoretical schematic.

“No sh*t, Sherlock,” Clint says, but he has a grin on his face when he helps Anton to his feet. “Any particular reason for the rebuild, or did you just watch too much Transformers since I saw you last?”

“If I tell you, you’re gonna tell Phil,” Anton says, still slightly out of breath. Clint deposits him in his chair. “Or Nat, which is worse. Hey! U, Butterfingers— cleanup on aisle five.”

The robots, who had been playing checkers in the corner, whirr with excitement before zipping into action. DUM-E rotates his pincer, questioning.

“No, you’re still in time out,” Anton says. DUM-E droops, disappointed. He’s still got a printer-paper dunce cap strapped to him, and will until Anton forgives him for scorching the brand-new cabinets. “Go back to your corner and think about what you did.”

DUM-E droops even further, but does as he’s told. He carefully picks up a piece of chalk, and resumes writing ‘I will not store used shop rags in a pile’ over and over, filling up the chalkboard wall. Anton knows he didn’t actually give the robots emotions, brains, or sentience, but it’s the principle of the thing. Besides, it keeps the little guy busy until Anton can update his programming.

“You telling me I’m gonna rat you out if I know any more details just makes me want to rat you out for what I already know,” Clint says. “Fine. I’ll pinky-swear not to tell without your express permission, deal?”

Anton shakes pinkies with him. Clint’s loose lips may be unparalleled in sinking ships, but he doesn’t mess around with pinky swears. He says that if he ever breaks one, he’ll have to cut the pinky off, which would be ‘really annoying.’

“The Ten Rings are still out there,” Anton says, turning his attention to removing the prototype from his arm. So he doesn’t have to see the pity on Clint’s face. “And I still don’t know— well, anything. I can’t just sit around, waiting for SHIELD to actually find something. And I can’t risk it happening again. I can’t take the chance that those code words were a one-time deal. So… I need a way to investigate on the ground, I need untraceable transport, and I need to be someone unidentifiable. A mask. And a way to block my hearing in case someone tries anything. Helmet’s gonna have a protocol for that. Two birds, one stone.”

“I’m, um,” Pepper shifts her weight slightly. “Very lost.”

“Afghanistan was a sh*t show,” Anton says. “Found out the hard way that I’m a sleeper agent. Shook off the programming and broke out. Used a suit of robotic armor.”

“Ah,” she says, clearly still lost. But less so.

Anton wriggles his hand free of the prototype, tosses the screwdriver he’d been using aside. “YASHA, that wire transfer come through yet?”

“Yeah, an hour ago,” YASHA says. “Already ordered the materials, they’ll be here at six tomorrow morning. You’ll be able to finish the prototype, including the armored plating, but I couldn’t get you the retro-reflection panels. Not on short notice.”

“How the hell did you get that much gold-titanium alloy with next-day delivery?” Anton shares a bewildered look with Pepper. “She didn’t pay me that kind of money. Hell, she didn’t pay me enough for the plating at all.”

“She left you a voicemail,” YASHA says. “Said Ms. Frost is a friend of hers, wouldn’t shut up about your performance, and talked her into giving you a bonus. Supplied by Frost.”

“How much of a bonus?”

“About twelve-thousand percent of your original fee.”

Anton groans, putting his face into his hands.

A hundred and eighty mil. f*cking christ.

“See, this is what happens when you work for the deranged maniacs known as LA’s one-percent,” Clint says, when he finishes laughing. He’d wiped away tears and everything.

“What, a socialite with too much money gets a crush?” Pepper scoffs.

“She’s the daughter of Luchino Nefaria,” Clint says. “You know, the guy who runs the Maggia? New York mob. Couple of casinos in Vegas and Atlantic City, tend to hire supervillains kind of deal.”

He turns back to Anton, a sh*t-eating grin on his face.

“And she thinks you’re cute,” he teases in a sing-song voice. Drops the humor in an instant. “Seriously though, this is bad news bears to the max.”

“Speak like a normal human being for five f*cking seconds,” Anton says, still trying to fuse his hands into his face. “Then maybe I’ll consider taking you seriously.”

Clint kicks the chair out from under him, so he sweeps Clint’s legs out from under him.

Pepper leaps back, scrambling to avoid becoming collateral damage. Anton really needs to remember that not everyone’s as trained as him and his family. And that not everyone thinks getting the wind knocked out of them is an appropriate response to snark.

“YASHA, any strings attached to that bonus?” Anton asks, still flat on his back.

“None specified.”

“Great,” Anton heaves himself upright, massaging his recently-relocated shoulder with a grimace. Pepper hands him the sling. “So now I owe the Maggia a favor. That won’t end badly.”

“Aw, don’t worry,” Clint says, patting his knee. “You probably just owe her a date.”

Anton uses Clint’s arm to flip him, pinning him in place with Anton’s calves around his neck. Clint just laughs, taps out. Anton begrudgingly releases him.

“Your turn,” he says. “If you’re here to check on me, why’d you pack a bag?”

“Apartment burned down,” Clint says. “Not my fault this time—”

“This time?” Pepper closes her eyes, wraps one arm around her middle and braces her other elbow on it, resting her forehead in her hand. “God, you people are insane.”

“That one wasn’t even anything weird!” Clint protests.

“How many candles did you have out again?” Anton asks.

“Girls like candles,” Clint says. “It’s romantic. You don’t get it because you don’t date.”

“I date,” Anton gets to his feet, drifts towards the door. “I’ve been known to date, on occasion.”

“You go on dates for missions, that’s different,” Clint says, struggling upright to follow him. “The only real date you’ve been on was the double-date I so nicely set up for us, that you ruined by—“

“I didn’t ruin anything. You should’ve noticed the place was a front—“

“Ravioli everywhere—“

“They were cappelletti, Barton. You sound ridiculous—“

Clint tries to make him get some sleep that night, threatening to call Frost and set up a date if he doesn’t get at least four hours. Despite that, Anton still manages to sneak down to the workshop when Clint passes out around three, noting the light spilling from under the guest room door. The sound of Pepper flicking through her endless files.

He comes back up once, to wrangle Clint into helping him carry all the boxes downstairs once the shipment arrives. Spends the rest of the day working on Stane’s request. A laser-based shield he’d never gotten around to actually building. Pointed Refracted-Image Shielding Mechanism. PRISM, for short.

He’s not stupid enough to give the man the arc reactor.

He runs into Pepper on the stairs, on his way to give her the prototype. He boxed it up with a sticky note of detailed instructions and everything. And another sticky note saying ‘WARNING: DO NOT POINT TOWARDS EYES’ in big, friendly letters. Hopefully even Stane can’t miss that one.

“Oh thank god,” she says, taking the box. “Your brother was worried you’d gotten sucked into working on the… suit.”

“I need the workshop to finish the suit,” Anton says. “And I need my job to keep the workshop. I can prioritize.”

“Right,” she gives him a tight smile. “Well, if that’s everything, I’ll get this to Mr. Stane right away.”

She doesn’t move.

He waits her out.

“Um,” she shuffles her feet, glancing down. “I won’t— I won’t say anything about it to him, but…”

She sighs, meets his eyes.

“I want to know why I’m not saying anything,” she says.

“Every weapon the Ten Rings had was made by Stark Industries.”

“That’s— that’s—“ she stammers, closing her eyes for a moment. Her expression is pure anger when she opens them again. “No, we would’ve heard— that would’ve been all over the news. I can’t believe I almost fell for that—“

“I burned the compound they held me in to the ground,” Anton says, cutting her off. “It wasn’t their only one. But I still need proof. For a lot of things. I only have suspicions so far.”

She closes her eyes, takes a deep, calming breath.

“Just give me a chance.”

“Fine,” she says. Glares at him. “But so help me god, if this turns out to be a lie—“

“Clint can give you Nick Fury’s direct line,” he says. “You can ask him if he thinks I made it up. And if you aren’t convinced when I bring back proof, you can report right back to him.”

She nods, mouth tight.

“Dude, don’t have her call Fury, are you nuts?” Clint calls down the stairs. “She doesn’t have the clearance to know half of what you told her!”

“You can call Fury,” Anton repeats. “He can deal.”

She gives him another worried, angry look before marching off with the box. Anton follows precisely forty-five seconds after, but heads to the living area instead of the door.

“Aw, Pepper, no,” Clint says as the front door closes. “I’m gonna be in so much sh*t if she calls him.”

“You have any better ideas to convince her?” Anton asks. Gets a middle finger in response. “C’mon, I need a spotter for my flight tests. U and Butterfingers just finished assembling the legs and arms.”

“Can I bring popcorn?”

Anton flips him off with both hands.

Pepper comes back the next day, says that Stane loved it, and was able to convince the board to keep him on. For now. Stane seems to think that the only way to convince them for good is for Anton to give them the reactor.

It’s a desperate move. Urgent. Stane’s worried about something. Needs the arc reactor for it. Anton just has to figure out what.

And a million other things, but he’s trying to not lose focus. One step at a time. He can do it if it’s just one step at a time.

He spends the next two weeks working primarily from home, bringing in old paper schematics to build from to the office the three days per seven he’s required to. Makes it seem like he’s working hard around the clock. Which he is, just not to Stane’s benefit. Stane seems to buy it, compliments his creations and relays thanks from the head of R&D and the board alike.

Still keeps pushing Anton to make his next project the miniaturized arc reactor.

October rolls around faster than Anton would’ve liked. And with it, Stane’s invitation to join him for some benefit he’s throwing. He says it’s high time Anton stepped out, as it were. Shook hands with LA’s best crowd, made some connections. Had a little fun.

Anton’s not having fun at the benefit.

“Stop fidgeting,” Pepper says, plucking a stray bit of lint off the shoulder of his suit jacket. “You look like someone put itching powder in your shirt.”

“Someone did,” Anton huffs, but stops squirming. “I’m kicking him out when I get back. He can go drool on someone else’s couch for a change.”

“Uh-huh,” she says indulgently. Even though she’s resumed most of her usual duties at Stane’s side, she’s still borne witness to too much of Anton and Clint’s bickering to believe Anton for a second. “I’m going to get a drink, do you— wait, how old are you, anyway?”

“Not a clue,” he says. “But my ID says I don’t turn twenty-one until February.”

“Don’t tell anyone I said this, but you could probably get away with ordering something here,” she smirks. “The rich and famous tend to think the rules don’t apply to them, and this catering company is well-known for ignoring that they do.”

“So why hire them?” He asks. “Why not try to keep them in check?”

“Stane’s throwing this to get as much of their money as possible,” she says. “They tend to run off before you can drain their pocketbooks if you tell them ‘no.’”

He nods. It makes sense, of a sort.

“So: drink? No drink?”

“I can’t really get drunk,” he says. She starts to laugh, pauses. Stops herself.

She’s better at figuring out what he’s actually bullsh*tting about, ever since she called Fury. He’d given Clint an earful about handing his number out to random civilians, but gave her the clearance to read Anton’s file. Or at least the one slapped together to explain why SHIELD had hired an alleged fifteen year old five years ago.

“I’ll pass.”

“Alright, back in a jiff,” she pats his shoulder with a smile before disappearing into the crowd.

Anton scans around, hands in the pockets of his slacks. Removes one of them to shake the hand of a blonde woman who approaches him.

“You must be Obie’s wonder boy,” blondie says. Her smile would look right at home on an alligator. Or a piranha. “Anton Romanov, right? Christine Everhart, Vanity Fair. Do you think it’s appropriate, your boss going forward with this party tonight?”

“I mean, it’s a bit tacky. Not really my usual scene,” Anton shrugs. “But I’m getting the sense that’s not what you meant.”

“No, it’s not,” she smiles again, tense and false. “I was referring to Stark Industries’s involvement in the latest atrocity. A little town in Northern Afghanistan, called Gulmira. Heard of it?”

Anton’s heart freezes mid-beat. Spasms.

Starts again after a few tries.

“My name is Ho Yinsen.”

“I’m familiar,” he manages to say it neutrally, without choking on the words.

“I have a wife and two daughters in Gulmira.”

“These pictures were taken there yesterday,” she hands him a small stack of glossy 4x6 prints.

His fingertips start to go numb as he flicks through them.

“And when I leave here…”

“I wasn’t aware,” he says.

Crate after crate bearing the Stark Industries logo.

Crate after crate being loaded into trucks.

“…I am going to see them again.”

He tries to hand the pictures back to her, even though he could use them. She puts a hand out to stop him, eyes furious above her plastic smile.

“Keep them,” she says. “I can print more.”

He tucks the photos into the lining of his jacket, nods his thanks.

Stane catches sight of him from across the room, strides over with a smile on his face like a cat who got the cream and the canary. Wrapped in bacon. He wraps an arm around Anton’s shoulders, ruffles his hair fondly.

“There he is!” He chuckles. “The man of the hour. Come on, there’s someone I want to introduce you to.”

Stane guides him back to the group he’d pulled off from, removes his arm. Nudges Anton slightly ahead of him with a hand between his shoulder blades.

“Ah, Mr. Romanov,” the man Stane had been talking to says, extending a hand. Anton shakes it, because that’s the sort of thing you do at benefits, apparently. “Or should I say… Agent?”

“Sir,” Anton says. The man looks familiar, but Anton can’t quite place him. Older, with greying red hair. Carries himself with unquestionable authority.

“Alexander Pierce,” the man says. “I’m Secretary of the World Security Council; I believe Nick introduced us after… what was it—? Ah, yes. That little kerfuffle in Barcelona. ’07, I think it was.”

Right. Barcelona.

They’d been very grateful for STRIKE team Delta’s help. And had been even more grateful that they’d agreed never to set foot in the city again, if they could help it. Anton had thought the request was a little unfair— it’s not like it was their fault a mad scientist with too much money, free time, and strong opinions about animal rights had messed with the bulls. And they’d been able to keep the property damage to a minimum. Only two blocks and a post office had been destroyed. Even Fury had been impressed.

“I was just telling Alex about that armored vest you gave us last week,” Stane says, grabbing Anton’s shoulder again and jostling him in a would-be-friendly manner. “Damn fine stuff, kid. How’d you come up with it?”

“I had some personal experience with kevlar,” Anton says flatly. “Wasn’t impressed.”

Stane chuckles, the barest hint of tension creeping into his voice. He pats Anton’s shoulder, releases him again.

“Glad to hear you’re still saving lives, even if it’s not with SHIELD, Agent Romanov. Keep up the good work,” Pierce says. “If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, there’s a reporter I have to avoid.”

He shakes Anton’s hand, Stane’s, and merges seamlessly into the crowd. Stane meanders around Anton, turning to face him.

“So, how’re you enjoying the party, kid?” He asks. “That reporter didn’t give you a hard time, did she? Ms. Everhart can be a bit… confrontational, I’m afraid.”

“No sir,” Anton says. He can see Pepper at the bar, straining to look over the crowd in search of him. She’s holding two martinis, one of which has entirely too many olives in it. She takes a sip from it, spots him, heads over. “She just wanted to know how I’m finding the new job.”

“Really? Well, glad to hear she’s turning over a new leaf,” Stane laughs. “Pepper! So glad you could join us. Working hard, I see.”

Pepper gives a fake laugh, hands the martini with fewer olives to Anton.

“I know you said you’d pass on the drink, but it is a party,” she says. “And you could stand to relax for five seconds, Anton.”

“She’s got you there, kid,” Stane says. “C’mon, live a little! You’ve got a new lease on life, don’t waste it by burying yourself in work all the time.”

“I’m gonna go buy you some time.”

“Excuse me,” Anton says, setting the martini glass on a passing waiter’s tray. He leaves without another word. Gets all the way out the front door and down the steps before he remembers that Pepper had been his ride.

He slips back into the party, heads out the service entrance this time. Walks five blocks before pulling out his phone.

“It’s okay.”

“Barton. I need an extraction,” he says, peering around a corner before turning. There’s a park up ahead. He can wait there.

“I… want this. I want this.”

“What? I thought Pepper was with you,” Clint says. He’s playing Metal Gear Solid again. Anton can hear it in the background. “Just ask her for a ride back.”

“Barton,” Anton snaps. Darts into the park. Presses his back to one of the concrete orbs as he slides to the ground, breathing hard.

Clint pauses the game.

“Hey,” he says, softly. “What’s going on, man? Talk to me.”

“I need a f*cking extraction, that’s what’s going on,” Anton says. Closes his eyes, focuses on steadying his breathing. Opens his eyes again with a spike of adrenaline— why the hell did he lower his guard? He shouldn’t be lowering his guard right now. He’s exposed. Stranded.

Trapped.

He rips off his tie, unbuttons the top of his shirt.

It doesn’t help.

“Alright, alright— I’m on my way, just stay put,” Clint says.

Anton hears the jingling of keys, a swish of fabric as Clint pulls a jacket on.

Another swish as he pulls a pair of pants on.

“You still at the concert hall?”

“No,” Anton says, warily eyeing a couple as they walk through the park, hand in hand. “Pershing square. Couple blocks away.”

“Cool,” Clint closes a door, unlocks his car. Anton usually finds it at least a little funny that Clint’s car chirps, given his callsign. He can’t bring himself to find the humor in it now. “Be there in ten, hang tight.”

Anton flips his phone closed. Slides it back into his pocket. Settles in, knees pulled close to his body, propping up his elbows. Tie wadded up and clenched in his fists.

Even this time of night, Clint shouldn’t be able to make it to the park in under twenty minutes.

He makes it in nine.

Strolls up to Anton, hands in the pockets of his jeans, surveying the park casually. Like he’s taking in the scenery. Not looking for threats.

“What the hell, man,” Clint says, pulls him to his feet. “I thought you’d gotten attacked or something, what—“

Anton shoves the photos into Clint’s chest, pushes past him and towards the car. Swings into the passenger seat. Clint slides in driver’s-side a moment later, still flicking through the photos.

“Where’d you get these?” He asks. “Also: what are these? Besides the obvious.”

“Reporter at the benefit,” Anton says. “Town called Gulmira. Yesterday.”

Clint gets to the last photo. Stops.

“That’s the—“

“Ten Rings logo on the truck,” Anton finishes. “Yeah.”

Clint lets out a long, low whistle. “sh*t dude,” he says. “What’s the play here?”

“Just get me back to the house,” Anton says. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

YASHA and the ‘bots finish the mark II armor an hour after he gets back to the workshop. He takes it for a spin, finds out the hard way that he hadn’t properly insulated it. Spends a harrowing thirty-six seconds plummeting towards the ground before the ice breaks up enough for it to reboot just before impact. Gives YASHA the specs to fix that little hiccup. Passes the time waiting for the upgrades to be finished by trying not to throw up in the workshop bathroom. With mixed results.

As it turns out, he’s not the biggest fan of being trapped in a frozen tin can.

Who’d’ve guessed.

When the heaving stops, he cleans up. Settles onto the workshop couch. Fiddles with the calibration on the left gauntlet while he watches the news. Tries to get more details than what little he learned from Everhart’s stunt.

“The 15-mile hike to the outskirts of Gulmira can only be described as a descent into hell, into a modern-day Heart of Darkness. Simple farmers and herders from peaceful villages have been driven from their homes, displaced from their lands by warlords emboldened by a new-found power. Villagers have been forced to take shelter in whatever crude dwellings they can find in the ruins of other villages, or here in the remnants of an old Soviet smelting plant.”

The feed cuts to footage of a shootout in the plant, back to the reporter.

“Recent violence has been attributed to a group of foreign fighters referred to by locals as the Ten Rings. As you can see, these men are heavily armed and on a mission. A mission that could prove fatal to anyone who stands in their way. With no political will or international pressure, there's very little hope for these refugees.”

He twists the screwdriver hard enough that the plastic handle groans under the strain.

The feed cuts to shots of the refugees, all below the shoulders. Shaking hands trying to hold photographs steady for the camera.

“Desperate refugees clutch yellowed photographs, holding them up to anyone who will stop. A child's simple question, ‘Where are my mother and father?’” The reporter sighs as the camera cuts back to her. “There's very little hope for these refugees, refugees who can only wonder who, if anyone, will help.”

“You… second chance…”

He fires the repulsor, and the TV crashes to the ground, smoking slightly. He pushes to his feet. Glares at his reflection in the glass wall separating his workshop from the rest of the house. Fires. Fires on the glass door of his storage room. Only just manages to stop himself firing on the server room.

Clint skids to a halt, pushing broken glass along the floor with his shoes.

“What the hell—“ he begins.

“don’t… waste…”

“I’m going out,” Anton says. He still doesn’t have the retro-reflection panels. Won’t for another week. “Don’t wait up.”

“Anton—“

“Barton.”

Clint throws up his hands, huffing in exasperation, but goes back upstairs. Returns to his video game.

Anton goes to Gulmira.

Blows some sh*t up. Lets the locals deal with the asshole leading the goons responsible for making their lives a living hell— Raza’s puppet. The one who’d pretended to lead the cell while wearing a leash of his own.

There’s no sign of the warlord himself, but the looks on the villagers’s faces still make Anton feel a little better.

Even taking the F-22s into account.

He probably should’ve waited for the retro-reflection panels.

Here’s what Anton knows:

One— Obadiah Stane heard about him ‘from an old friend.’ Who had known Anton’s real history.

Two— Stane had been taken off-guard by the attack in Afghanistan, but the Ten Rings had let him escape.

Three— Someone, possibly Stane, had been given a set of code words. Code words that wiped out everything he’d done, everything he’d been since leaving the Red Room.

Four— Stark Industries is dealing under the table. Not a great look for the company single-handedly responsible for arming the US military.

He still needs more proof, more answers. He has to be able to show a direct line between Stane and Raza. Figure out who Stane’s friend had been. How they’d had information that should have burned with the rest of the Red Room. Why Raza had been given Anton instead of a shipment— presumably of the Jericho missiles.

Who’d picked up the remains of the mark I suit, what they wanted with it. What Stane needs the arc reactor for so badly.

Anton has his suspicions, but he needs proof. The only positive to the massacre in Gulmira is that Everhart’s photos give Pepper enough certainty to offer her help searching Stane’s office. She’s not happy when he turns her down, but he can’t put her in that kind of danger. If he gets caught, there’s nothing Stane can do to him that he can’t handle. Nothing that he hasn’t lived through before, anyway.

If she gets caught—

Point is, he won’t let her take that kind of risk. Doesn’t need her to, anyway, since the security on Stane’s office is laughable at best. Anton’s been cloning key cards since he was nine. There’s not even motion sensors, cameras, or any other kind of surveillance once he gets inside. That’s the nice thing about executives: they value their privacy. Makes it harder to spy on them remotely, but a hell of a lot easier to steal their sh*t. Even in the middle of the workday.

Anton plugs in the drive, rifles through Stane’s hard-copy files while he waits for the worm to work it’s magic. Cracks into the safe hidden under the wet bar. He finds proof of some sketchy deals Stane’s lawyer made to keep an affair quiet, and to convince the girl to put the kid up for adoption. Some letters from high-ranking members of the Maggia. Normal rich scumbag stuff. Nothing on the Ten Rings, or on Anton.

He hadn’t really expected any different.

The computer chimes once.

Download complete.

He puts the documents back in the safe exactly as he found them. Closes it up.

Two more chimes.

Virus successfully uploaded.

He ejects the drive. Five seconds later, he’s out the window, no sign he’d ever been there.

“You’ve still got that appointment with SHIELD in a couple hours, right?”

“How’d you—“ Pepper sighs, the sound more than enough to max out her phone’s audio input. He hears the snap of her padfolio shutting. “You need to stop hacking into my calendar, it’s creepy.”

“Clint’s bringing you an encrypted drive, but he hit traffic,” Anton cradles his phone between his shoulder and his ear, freeing up his hands so he can finish making coffee. “Should still be there in about five minutes. Give the drive to Phil Coulson, and tell him to use Program Delta to decrypt it.”

“What’s on the drive?” Pepper asks. He puts the pot on the burner, hits ‘brew.’ Swaps his shoulder for his hand and straightens up.

“Just a little gift for SHIELD,” he says. Leans against the counter as the machine hisses and spits. “Stane’s head on a platter. Bow on top.”

“sh*t,” she breathes. “You found something, didn’t you? Oh god, I’m so f*cking glad I didn’t go into the office today— Stane’s going to be on the warpath.”

“You have no idea,” Anton says. “Left a little gift for him on the company servers. Where’s sector sixteen?”

“The arc reactor factory, I think,” she shuffles some papers, clacks out something on her keyboard. Groans. “Tell me you can put the files back when this is over, please. Jesus christ, did you have to replace everything?!”

“Yes,” he says. “And yes. If Phil starts yelling, point out that I used a different photo this time— one a little more relevant to the situation.”

“Is that—“ she sucks in a breath. Laughs, bitterly. “Oh, I can’t wait to see how Stane tries to wriggle out of this.”

“Get that drive to Phil, he won’t have the opportunity to try,” Anton pulls a mug from the cabinet, dumps two heaping tablespoons of sugar into it before adding the coffee. “You might get caught in the crossfire a little, since you’re his assistant, but SHIELD’ll make sure no one can actually pin anything on you. Oh, and Pepper?”

“Yeah?”

“Get them to send a team to the factory,” he takes a sip, dumps more sugar into his mug. Stirs it. “I’ve got a feeling Stane isn’t going to come quietly.”

He hangs up before she can protest, drops his phone on the coffee table and starts to make his way to the workshop.

The front door opens.

He presses his back to the wall, crouches low.

The front door closes.

He takes the gun he’d taped under the kitchen counter. Silently releases the safety.

He hears a high-pitched whine.

His muscles seize, and he drops to the floor. Paralyzed.

Barely able to breathe.

Stane’s overpriced loafers pad into view.

Stane crouches down, rolls him onto his back.

Wiggles a small device in front of Anton’s face with a smug smile.

“Shame the government didn’t approve moving this into production,” Stane says. He pockets the device, along with the earbuds that must’ve protected him from it. “There’s just… so many applications for short-term paralysis.”

He sighs, looking around at the living room.

“You know, kiddo, when I handed you over, I worried I was killing the golden goose, so to speak,” he looks back at Anton, a dangerous glimmer in his eye. Taps the plastic covering the arc reactor. “You don’t know how happy I was that you found your way back to me. Brought me the biggest golden egg I could’ve hoped for— and then you wouldn’t share it. Breaks my heart to do this to you, kid. Breaks my heart that you dragged my assistant into this.”

He rips open Anton’s shirt, sending buttons flying across the room. Rips out the arc reactor, holds it up to the light which is frankly just unnecessary. Eyes hungry. Greedy.

“I would’ve preferred that she lived.”

Stane stands, still admiring the reactor.

“We could’ve done great things together, Anton. Greater things than what I can manage with just this little wonder.”

He tosses the reactor, catches it. Slips it into his pocket.

“Too bad you won’t be around to see it.”

Stane rises, gives Anton a wink before he turns, overpriced shoes taking him back the way he came.

It takes ten more minutes for the paralysis to wear off, each more agonizing than the last as the shrapnel digs itself deeper into Anton’s heart. By the time he can move, he’s barely strong enough to crawl his way to the stairs. Rolls down them, egg-beater style, knocking the air out of his lungs.

DUM-E zips through the broken glass still covering the floor, drops the old reactor onto his chest. Waves his arm in panic, beeping wildly.

Anton pats his wheels.

“Good boy,” he wheezes. Slams the reactor into place. Coughs. Groans. “Good boy, DUM-E.”

He hauls himself up, staggers over to the couch. Has to sit down while he waits for the room to stop spinning. For his limbs to stop shaking. His heart to stop spasming.

He’s still waiting when Clint barrels in twenty-five minutes later.

“Anton? Anton!” Clint calls, catching sight of Anton just as he lifts his head, squinting to try to bring the older man into focus. Clint sprints across the room, falls to his knees in front of Anton, one hand on his face, the other on his arm. Anton swats him away. “Holy sh*t— what happened? I wasn’t even gone an hour!”

“Pepper,” Anton croaks out. “Where’s Pepper?”

“With Phil and four other agents,” Clint says. “She’s taking them to arrest Stane now.”

“’s not gonna be enough,” Anton uses Clint’s shoulder to leverage himself up, stumbles over to the machines that zip him into the armor. Snaps his fingers. “YASHA— mark III, and make it quick. Already wasted too much time.”

“Dude, you can barely stand,” Clint says.

“Armor’ll keep me on my feet,” Anton says as the robotic arms hum to life. Holds his arms up to let them do their work. “Gotta— gotta stop Stane. Stole the reactor. Built his own armor.”

“f*cking hell,” Clint shoves a hand through his hair, blows out a sharp exhale. Points a warning finger at Anton. “You are not allowed to die out there, got it?”

“If I do, you can have my TV,” Anton says. The face-plate lowers, HUD flickering to life. “YASHA, get me to the factory. And get Pepper on the line.”

“Copy that,” YASHA says. Anton opens the garage door, steps out. Takes flight.

YASHA pings him again just above the factory, as Anton begins the descent.

“Still trying to get Potts on the line— take it easy with the suit. We’re already at forty-eight percent power and falling. The mark I reactor wasn’t exactly built for this.”

“Copy,” Anton says. “If she doesn’t answer within the next minute, don’t bother trying her again. I’m gonna need as much power as I can get. Motherf*cker, is that—?”

“Looks like,” YASHA says. “Brace yourself.”

Stane, wearing a monstrous, bloated version of the mark I suit, crashes into Anton. Flies them a quarter mile from the factory before tossing him into the pavement.

He lands hard, leaving a crater deep enough to crack the water main. Crawls out, ignoring the life support pop-up informing him that he fractured his arm.

He can f*cking tell, thanks.

“I love this suit!” Stane laughs, his voice coming out rough and amplified, like he just wired a megaphone into it. Anton wouldn’t be surprised. Stane turns as a car screeches to a halt behind him, lifts it high above his head, still laughing in delight.

Anton tackles him, uses a repulsor blast to flip the car so that it lands on its wheels. The moment it takes him costs him, and Stane shakes him off. Picks him up by the throat, squeezing.

“Twenty years I’ve been holding this company together, making our shareholders rich beyond their wildest dreams,” Stane says. “And no one is going to stand in my way, not even you!”

“Divert power to chest RT,” Anton gasps out.

He and Stane blast apart, tumbling through the air.

“Power’s down to nineteen percent,” YASHA says. “What did I say about taking it easy?”

“Can it.”

“Impressive!” Stane booms. “You’ve upgraded your armor! I’ve made a few upgrades of my own.”

Flight capabilities, Anton thinks, aren’t exactly new to the damn thing. Smug asshole. Doesn’t even know what he dug up. Anton launches himself up, gaining height as quickly as he can. Stane follows close behind, grabs his ankle.

“YASHA, maximum altitude,” Anton says. “Let’s take Stane for a little ride.”

“Kid, you’ve got 15% battery,” YASHA says. “The odds of making that—“

“Just do it!”

The suit accelerates, climbs higher.

“Thirteen percent.”

“Keep going!”

“Eleven percent power.”

“Just put it on the f*cking screen and keep climbing!”

“You had a great idea, Anton,” Stane says. “But my suit is more advanced in every way!”

“Really?” Anton asks, looking down at him. “How’d you solve the icing problem?”

“Icing—?”

Stane’s suit flickers, dies.

His grip slackens, and Anton kicks free, puts everything he has into getting back to the factory. To Pepper, and Phil.

The repulsors lose power just above the parking lot, and he collapses in a heap. No further broken bones, though. He’ll count that as a win.

“Anton!” Pepper shouts, running toward him, phone pressed against her ear. “Agent Coulson, I got him. He’s in the lot outside. Are you okay?”

Anton groans, rolls onto his back.

“Two percent power,” YASHA says. “You’re on emergency backup. Five minutes max before the reactor fails.”

Anton has just enough time to swear before Stane barrels out of the sky, his suit back to full power. Scoops Anton up like a bird of prey. Tosses him onto the roof.

“Very clever, kid,” Stane says. “But not clever enough.”

“YASHA, patch me into Pepper’s call,” Anton launches himself at Stane, swings himself up onto the shoulders of his suit. “Weapons status?”

“Jack sh*t, that’s what,” YASHA says. “You’re on.”

“This is Anton— does anybody copy?” Anton dodges Stane’s attempts to swat him like a mosquito, rummaging in the exposed— seriously, this guy thought his suit was an improvement?— wiring at the base of the helmet. “Hey, this looks important.”

He yanks the wire connecting the optical and audio processors to the helmet, backflips off of Stane’s shoulders.

“We copy,” Phil says. “Any ideas how to stop this guy?”

“Best option?” Anton rolls, dodging Stane’s blind attempts to smash him flat. “Overload the reactor downstairs. Blast the roof.”

“No,” Phil says. “No. Absolutely not. Anton, that’ll fry you right alongside him!”

“Look, I’ll keep him distracted,” Anton rolls the opposite direction. “Tell me when you’re ready. I’ll get clear of the roof. Promise.”

“Anton—“

“Okay,” Pepper says. “Okay, I’m going in.”

“Ms. Potts, I can’t let you—“

“Phil,” Anton cuts in. “Trust me. Trust her. YASHA, mute call. Tell me when she’s ready.”

The line goes silent. Stane finally wisens up, retracts his helmet. Stalks toward Anton, gun-arm raised.

“It really kills me to do this,” he says. Shrugs with his head. “Well, I guess it doesn’t. That’s kind of the point.”

Anton dives between the legs of Stane’s armor, rolls, lands on his feet. Sprints across the roof, zig-zagging at random intervals. Stane still hits him a few times, but nowhere important. Nowhere that Anton’s armor doesn’t stop easily.

He hops over a ledge, slides across the glass above the factory’s arc reactor. Howard Stark’s prototype.

“There’s nowhere to run, Romanov!” Stane calls, slowly lurching his way forward.

Come on, Pepper— how hard is it to flip a few relays?

“Let’s end this like men, shall we? No more running, no more hiding.”

“I got Potts on the line again,” YASHA says. “Patching her through.”

“Anton—“

“Hit the f*cking button!” Anton shouts, diving for the roof’s edge.

The suit dies.

“And I didn’t even get to finish the season’s run of Coppélia because the corps de ballet just had to arrange their stupid black-market auction during the second week,” Nat gripes, emphasizing dramatically with her chopsticks. “Though I guess it saved me from having to do The Nutcracker.”

“What?! I love that one,” Clint steals the last crab rangoon right out from under Anton. Bastard. Bastard with bad taste in ballet.

Alright, not bad, but Anton and Nat are the ones who have to infiltrate ballet companies, not him. He hasn’t had to rehearse and perform that f*cking show eight million f*cking times.

“’s got a dope ass rat puppet that takes up like, half the stage!”

Anton and Nat stare at him, dumbfounded.

“And like, the rat king? And his soldiers?” Clint says. “Fighting the toy soldiers led by the Nutcracker Prince?”

“Barton. What the f*ck are you talking about?” Nat asks. “There’s no rats in the f*cking Nutcracker.”

“Phil, back me up here!” Clint whines, sliding across the bench to lean dramatically on the older man. “You’re the one who made me go, c’mon.”

“I hate to burst your bubble, but most productions of The Nutcracker do not, in fact, contain a single rat,” Phil says, pushing Clint off of him with his elbow. “Seattle just decided to do something a little different. Possibly because the set and costumes were designed by the guy who wrote— jesus, why can’t I remember the name of the book? Little kid in pajamas, goes to another dimension, meets a bunch of scary monsters.”

“You say that like any of us know what you mean,” Anton says, stealing Clint’s beer as recompense for the crab rangoon. “Pretend you’re talking to two former child assassins and an ex-carnie, then try again.”

“Aw, beer, no,” Clint says. He’s still flopped over in the booth, sprawling across Phil’s lap.

Nat rolls her eyes, but still puts her beer on Clint’s coaster, steals Anton’s diet co*ke.

“My hero!”

“Don’t ruin it,” Nat says. Takes a loud, obnoxious sip. “Alright, I told you what I was doing the past few months, you told me what you really did. Now I want to hear what crock of sh*t SHIELD fed the press.”

“What, you too busy at rehearsals to watch the news?” Anton asks.

She flicks his ear.

“Officially, the story is that Stane attacked Anton, stole two prototype remote-drone bodyguards he was working on for SHIELD, and tried to sell them to the Ten Rings,” Phil pulls Nat’s untouched order of pork shu mai in front of him. “Unfortunately for him, Anton had installed a fail-safe protocol in case the drones were captured, which Stane triggered while trying to figure out how they worked. Blew up the factory, taking Howard Stark’s arc reactor with it.”

“What about the witnesses?” Nat asks, pulling the dumplings back. Spears one with each chopstick. “Anton said Stane picked up a car, in the middle of LA. At what, seven? Eight? That’s still a lot of traffic.”

“SHIELD was able to come to an agreement with all parties present,” Phil says. Nat eats one of her dumpling-kabobs. “The road damage was just… a faulty water main. And Anton was kind enough to volunteer his services as a cybersecurity—“

“Anton hacked the traffic cams without asking first,” Clint finishes, talking over Phil. “Nat— shu mai me.”

“Sit up and get one yourself,” she says. “You’re a big boy, act like it.”

“She’s got a point, Clint,” Phil chuckles.

Nat offers Phil the other dumpling-kabob in silence. He takes it with a fond smile.

Anton’s phone buzzes across the table, and he has to scramble to snatch it up before it makes its way into the puddle of soy sauce Barton spilled when they got here. Phil had tried to mop it up, but their food had arrived before they’d been able to pick up the sauce-soaked napkins. Anton’s not sure if it’s an improvement or not.

He flicks the phone open, hits ‘answer.’

Pepper’s already mid-rant by the time he gets the speaker to his ear.

“—would not believe how condescending Hank was just now,” she growls. He gets the impression the chairman of the board’s Halloween party hasn’t been going well for her. He’d tried to invite her to STRIKE team Delta’s family dinner, but she’d already made up her mind. Something about putting the right foot forward as the new CEO, or whatever. Playing nice with the board. “Acting like I don’t know what our image in the press is right now. Who does he think’s been trying to do damage control?!”

Anton covers the mic with his hand, holding the phone slightly away from his face. “Work call,” he says. Sets the phone on the table to shrug into his jacket, picks it back up. Heads out the door before putting it to his ear again.

“—ing Heather had to go and suggest we bring back the Stark Expo to show what we’ve been doing since shutting down the weapons division, and everyone thought that was just such a good idea, and said it was such a shame there was no way to arrange that before the shareholder’s meeting in March—“

“So you said you’d do it,” Anton says, tucking the phone into his shoulder for the moment it takes to zip his jacket. Puts his hand back to it, straightens. Stuffs the other hand in his pocket. It’s in the mid-fifties for christ’s sake, he shouldn’t be this cold.

He’s always this cold, frankly. Ever since Natka broke him out.

“Yeah, I did,” Pepper groans. “Why the hell did I do that? Now I have to figure out how to pull it off!”

“Just copy an old one, say it’s a nostalgic throwback to re-introduce people to the event concept,” Anton says. “Oh, ew. Your corporate bullsh*tting is rubbing off on me. When was the last Expo?”

“1974,” Pepper says. “Which brings me to one thing we have in our favor, which is that Mr. Stark used the same fairgrounds every year, which are jointly owned by his estate and Stark Industries.”

“Why ’74? Didn’t Stark die in ’91?” he shuffles in place, pointlessly trying to warm himself up. “You’ll have to renovate the buildings. Lead and asbestos could be problems. And the wiring, probably the plumbing. You sure we couldn’t just rip it all out?”

“They’re not only our property, for one,” she says. “For two: that’d take too long. Whatever we can salvage, we have to keep. Even if it’s ugly.”

“I never said they were ugly,” he says. “I don’t even know what the buildings look like. You’re dodging the question. Why stop in ’74?”

“It was, um. It opened just a few months after his son disappeared,” she says, suddenly somber and reserved. “The plans were already too far along to cancel it when Anthony was taken. It’s— it’s kind of heartbreaking, um. Watching the promotional films. You can tell really easily whether it was filmed before or… or after.”

“Right,” he says. Clears his throat. “Clint called them the Kennedys of tech, but never went into much detail.”

“Clint may have a point there,” she laughs, hollow and brittle. “Sorry, sorry. I just— that poor family. That poor kid! I mean, he died only a year after his parents, and no one knew who he was until then. Then suddenly he’s all over the news, because someone blew his brains out in a warehouse.”

“A warehouse?” Anton echoes.

The man slumps to the floor, half his face spattering across the concrete in front of him. 528 flicks the safety back on, holsters his gun.

“Outside this random town in Belarus,” Pepper says. “Are you okay? You sound a little off.”

“Activate the tracker beacon.”
“What, you don’t wanna hang out with me?”
“…”
“f*ck you. Whatever. There. Activated, happy?”

“I’m fine,” Anton says. The hand in his jacket pocket is splayed flat across his stomach. Pressing against the jagged scars like they could pop open at any second.

They were the last scars he’ll ever gain. He shouldn’t even have these, by all accounts.

“Just had a long couple days. Natka’s been crashing over too, while we try to crowbar Barton out of my guest room. Apartment hunting is exhausting.”

“Oof, best of luck on that front,” Pepper laughs, some of the hollowness draining out of her voice with every word. “If I ever had to leave my place, I’d lose my mind.”

Anton stays outside a while longer, just chatting with her. Listens to her rant about the board members, their spouses, and their entitled kids. Tells her about the show Nat forced them to binge-watch the past three days— Leverage. Begrudgingly admits that he loves it, even if Clint’s never going to stop teasing him about ‘freelance LARPing as Eliot Spencer last summer.’ It’s not Anton’s fault the show does its damn research, as each of them keep pointing out by being able to tell at least one story per crime, per episode.

They’ve only made it halfway through season two. Phil always takes the longest to tell his stories. He’s the best at it, though.

Pepper starts her goodbyes when Happy finally drops her off at home, tells him she’s sending her schedule over in the morning so that he can coordinate security with Happy, who’s not exactly been thrilled that Anton’s replaced him as Pepper’s bodyguard, even unofficially. Asks him to join the planning committee, since he’d become the company’s golden boy overnight after he presented his improved arc reactor.

Pepper had gotten some excessively thorough paperwork drawn up to let him keep full rights over it, including a stipulation that he has to personally approve its use for any purpose. Which was possibly her way of getting back at him for making her think she’d killed him. He’s been up to his ears in applications since the moment he signed the deal.

“And,” she says. Murmurs a polite greeting to the doorman. “I need you to be our opening presenter. Before you say no, hear me out.”

Anton waits.

“The company isn’t the only one that would benefit from separating from Stane in the public’s mind,” she says. “You’ve seen the tabloids.”

“The ones that say I’m planning to murder babies in their cribs with my ‘drones,’ the ones that say I’m secretly a KGB agent, or the ones that say I killed Stane and the government is hushing it up?”

“I meant the last one, but you could use some distance from all of them,” she snorts. “Anyway, you’re also one of our most prolific engineers outside of the defense sector. Everyone else needs some time to catch up; we need something to open with that the public can imagine benefitting them directly, and, well…”

“Everyone else is making sh*t like sturdier, cheaper hospital beds and improved crops,” he groans. “Why can’t we hire anyone else with taste?”

“If we hired another you, I think the building would burn down within an hour,” she says. “Or something really important would explode. We’re not hiring another you.”

“You’re limiting the potential of this company, Potts,” he deadpans.

She hangs up on him, laughing all the way.

and the stains comin’ from my blood tell me “go back home” - Chapter 2 - TypewriterMonkey11 (2024)

Chapter Text

References