fossilised | For Steve

"Grant. Not Steve Rogers. Seriously. I am not fond of the bigger version," Tony said, knowing it was a long shot to get the guy on their side who had managed to break Bucky down as he had. But she hadn't said no either. And she was open to renegotiations.

Tony stepped down from the platform, around the chair, and held out his hand towards the woman before he pulled it back ever so slightly.

"Coffee. And a name. If you have one. I want to know who I'm suppose to see when I get pissy about the continued issue of the lack of coffee in this place." Tony wasn't even much of a coffee drinker but sometimes it stuck in his crawl when he wasn't given what he asked for. He wasn't used to that.

Working for the enemy was something he was more suited to than being denied in any way, shape or form.

Once she offered him assurance of a drink and her name, Tony would offer his hand again. "You drive a hard bargain when your potential business partners don't have a whole lot of say in the matter."

The name she offered him was Charlotte, likely not her real name, and the coffee she had brought to him was mediocre. Not fresh beans, just out of a standard instant coffee tin such as might be found in any work office. HYDRA might have a lot of funding, perhaps even as much as Stark Industries, but they made sure it all went to important causes. The comfort and pleasure of their staff was not an important cause.

He would be shown where the laboratory was, utilitarian space but with excellent equipment (though none of the computers would access the internet), and a small room would be set up adjacent to it for him to use as a bedroom from then on in order to keep him from wandering the facility at large.

It wouldn't be long before he was left alone with the tools to start creating an arc reactor, and a silent bodyguard in the corner.

Just how many times was he going to have to build an arc reactor from subpar construction material? Honestly, it was a massive pain in the ass. HYDRA really wasn't that interested in having him do anything at the moment other than make a power supply and he could seriously just do that in his sleep.

Though there was no way he was giving them what they wanted out of his own chest, or the element that made it so much more efficient than palladium had ever been, he did insist on being given back his suit of armor to cannibalize some of the materials from it.

Bucky generally ran his errands for him and Tony kept calling him Bucky. He kept asking him about Steve Rogers too, and when not asking questions, he apoke about the blond almost incessantly. Rarely were the stories good but he was trying to get something more than blankness out of this guy.

It didn't seem to be working. What broke Bucky the last time was Steve himself. Face to face. Not the name.

Damn.

"I'm never going to find out if he's a good kisser now. You're dashing my dreams, Barnes. Okay. I need a better tool. I need to make my own. And more coffee. Get me some nanite Carbon tubing and you might want to put sugar in this cup because damn it's bad."

The Soldier isn't like a real person, he doesn't care how often he's talked to or what name he's referred to as, none of it is relevant to him. All he will do is follow any orders given to him, silent and efficient, and then go back to standing at his place at the door. He fetches parts, he fetches coffee, and he listens to Tony Stark talk nonsense until precisely nine pm.

Then he steps forwards and intercepts Tony with whatever he's doing, voice low and eyes suddenly intense on his.

"They change the watch at nine, we have thirty seconds."

They trained him, after all. They trained him to be their perfect little Soldier, and they trained him how to infiltrate any organisation in the world. How arrogant to assume that he couldn't infiltrate theirs.

"Tell me what you can make with the materials here."

Tony took exactly two of those seconds to nod and smile at Bucky. All right then. This would work or it would backfire horribly and he would be screwed. Either way, he liked these odds and he let them bathe over him before he glanced around the room. "Timed explosives. Remote detonators. EMP charges. I can make a GPS satellite link up to Veronica too but I have no way of plugging it in. It can transmit its location and the door code. Oh right. And I can make a code scrambler to get the code."

That was a lot of talking for twenty-eight seconds. But Tony was a fast talker and be he was quick to get out only the pertinents. He could build a better coffee pot too but he let that slide. For now.

Tony returned to his seat at the work bench.

"So what's for dinner tonight? What time is it anyway?" He already knew what to build and in what order. And this time he had to do it smarter. They'd be checking. HYDRA had to know how he got away from the kidnappers that started this crazy journey by now, right?

So decoder first. Then transmitter. Then EMP explosive. Bucky would have to do the whole hard part.

The moment that thirty seconds is over, Bucky returns to his upright posture with a blankness returning to his expression that seemed complete. He wouldn't be speaking to Stark again that evening. He knew that they were not an ideal team, the man hated him for what he had done to his parents and for leaving when Grant and Steve needed him, but they were all one another had for the moment.

He just had to protect Stark long enough for him to make what they both needed. Because it did need both of them to get free.

Only another two hours passed before the door opened and a young man in uniform stepped in, offering Tony a small smile and standing just close enough to the Soldier to make it seem as if he were comfortable with him, but just far enough away to broadcast clearly that he was as scared as if he were in a room with a rabid dog.

"Compliments of the evening, Mr. Stark, but as a reward for your hard work a movie night has been set up for you to enjoy over dinner. Please follow me."

"I really hope it's either The Little Mermaid or Jaws. Ooh, or the fourth Star Trek movie. The one with the whales. Do I get to pick or are we regulated to whatever Putin things the Siberians are allowed to watch? And popcorn-- Bucky, get me some popcorn? Extra partially hydrogenated soybean oil. I'm really craving some saturated fat with my fake butter flavor tonight."

Tony put down his tools and used the hand sanitizer he had insisted on yesterday before he followed the agent out of the room. His smile was a little awkward, but that was only because he hated the smell of the generic gel in his hands. Really. HYDRA needed to step up to brand names. They were brand names for a reason. The extra fifty cents was worth it.

But try telling Charlotte that!

The woman barely let him get away with the extra sugar!

So he thought nothing of the little trip through the facility. Or the leather chair in the center of the room. "Looks like you're standing. Try not to sing Under The Sea too loudly," he tlold Bucky and took a seat.

It was not, at least, the conditioning chamber. There were no electronic parts to whirr into position and begin to wipe him clean off all he had been, but there was restraints that came up and out of the arms and legs and fasten him in place.

Bucky left to fulfil his orders, to find popcorn in the exact variety that his current handler had told him to do, leaving Stark to it. He knew that what was coming would not be pleasant, but he couldn't shield the other man from every pain in this place. They would both have to endure in order to survive.

The entire wall in front of Tony became a screen, a projection appearing on it in large detail. CCTV cameras over a country lane, a car being driven off the road by a motorcycle, an efficient killer literally beating a man to death and then putting him in his car so carefully, emotionless eyes as he then strangled the passenger. And then the final shot, the barrel of a gun, before the feed went dead.

And then it started over again. And again.

So far, he'd done literally everything required of him. He was working in the reactor. He slept and he ate and he kept himself healthy. He was pleasant. Maybe he'd trusted Bucky too much? Those twenty or so seconds had condemned him. Tony exhaled as the first viewing ended and the next began. No. They didn't know. This was punishment for calling Bucky by his name, an attempt to decondition him. Tony had to believe that or he would give the rest away.

The fourth take, he spoke up. "You know that I know he did it, right? You have access to my security footage. You know he broke into the Tower and told me all about this." A lie. Bucky told him at the compound but he was hoping that, maybe, they would take the time to correct hi. So he would know if the compound was compromised too.

But there was nothing. No acknowledgement. No response.

Seven times did not desensitize him. Nine made him angry. Thirteen finally had him in tears, raging against the cuffs he had been held so gently with. He'd bruise. "Enough! Jesus Christ, enough!"

By this time Bucky was back in the room. He saw what was playing on the far wall and he didn't react at all, he merely stepped up to the chair and put the bucket of popcorn down on Tony's lap even if he couldn't possibly reach it with his bound arms or even if he wouldn't want to eat it. He saw the tears, the distress, and he did nothing but take up a stance at Tony's shoulder.

And the movie played again.

It played twenty six times in total before the scene shifted to something else. A man with a metal arm sitting in a cell, hair short, naked. He was bruised, but he was grinning up at the camera as if to grin was defiance in itself.

"This arm is pretty nice kit," Bucky drawled on the black and white reel. "But it ain't mine, and I don't think I want it much. Still, it'll act as a good beacon to tell Cap where I'm at. He's coming for me."

"No. He isn't." Tony's voice was hollow and his head was bowed. He didn't really feel like watching this anymore. He didn't feel the need to see more of these videos. "He thought you were dead. And he thinks I've run off to be a petulant brat." Tony wasn't that defeated. He knew Steve would be looking for Bucky whenever he had downtime. And he was with Bucky. He just needed to get that signal to him.

But he was hurt. And bruised. He was aching inside and out and most of that wasn't S for show as he would have liked it to be.

Tony closed his eyes and he set his head back against the headrest. He did not turn his head towards Bucky. He really didn't care right now to acknowledge him at all. Tony had seen people tortured before. Hell. He'd seen Barnes tortured before.

There were hours of footage.

"This pretty much makes me want to stop production. Good job assholes."

They show him hours more.

Footage he hasn't seen before, footage from when Bucky had still been mostly Bucky. When he had fought back, when he had cried out, when he had screamed. They show Tony the worst of what they have from those early days. They show him awake as the remnants of his arm are cut away and his new one fitted, they show him starved until he's near collapse and then forced to stand to attention while others eat a feast, they show him beaten, they show him waterboarded, and they show him raped every night to keep him from sleeping.

It's near dawn when the film finally finishes and the young agent returns, the bindings finally falling away from Tony in the chair.

"Madame Charlotte wishes you to know that this movie night was a reminder of why you should not humanise your tools, and she hopes you will not need a second one. Now please return to your work."

It was more mentally exhausting, listening to a man scream and beg, than anything else. Tony had dehydrated himself with tears and he had screamed his throat raw. He barely remembered either show he'd delivered when he couldn't take any more and figures and sums in his head couldn't fully compartmentalize what he was feeling. He barely remembered anything of his part in it, he just knew that when he stood, his knees gave out and the agent had to catch him before he fell over himself.

One might have thought that the tortures had been done to Tony himself with the way he was acting. It was almost as if he was more empathic than he had realized.

Tony was led away over the crunch of spilled and uneaten popcorn. Everywhere he looked, he saw Bucky projected on the wall. In his head, he heard him call out his military serial number or for Steve. Or worse, he heard the grunts of those men brutalizing him. Every night. Every single night. Even when he bled. Even when he stopped fighting and just let them do it.

Tony didn't think he was ever going to sleep again.

He was shaking as he entered his workshop and tried to rub the ache from his burning eyes. "I need a shower," he said as if Bucky hadnt just been forced to watch and relive his tortufe. Tony didn't know how he managed not to go insane himself.

All he knew was that he was finishing the decoder today if it killed him.

Bucky hadn't moved the whole time. He had remained standing at Tony's shoulder in the same attention position that he had taken up when he had finished delivering the popcorn. He hadn't moved a muscle, hadn't flickered even once, had just stared at the unfolding horror and listened to the man next to him scream as if it didn't affect him at all. As if he had been looking at nothing.

When the two of them were alone again, he broadly took that statement as an order simply because it hadn't been phrased as a question and moved to the little bathroom to get the water started. He kept his voice oh-so-low, barely above a murmur. He didn't move his lips when he spoke, nor did he look at Tony. They were being observed, but hopefully the sound of running water would conceal the quietest of whispers.

"Remember that you hate me."

It's the best advice that he has to give. They need Tony to get through this, and if he can remember that he hates the man they're brutalising on screen, then maybe it'll be easier for him to compartmentalise.

"They're trying to break you down. You have to focus."

Strange that having a mission, even one as nebulous as 'take care of Stark', helped him stay focused himself.

Bucky was wrong about the approach. Hating Bucky wasn't going to get them out of here. Tony had focused only on himself the last time he was in this situations and Yinsen had died for it. He wasn't going to be so blind this time. Bucky was not going to be left here. He just wasn't. Tony didn't look at him as he started the shower. He didn't look at him as he spoke.

"I'm not taking a shower with you standing here like a god damned machine," Tony spat. He didn't even have to force himself to say those words. He was angry still at Bucky for being so... Whatever he was. He was angry that he cared to begin with. "Wait outside."

Let them watch him under the water. Let them watch him scrub himself clean and then dry off and take too many painkillers. It didn't matter to him. Their watchful eye was nothing to him right now. Not when he had a purpose and a mission of his own.

Ten hours later, without sleep for over a day, Tony finished the first component of the reactor casing and the decoder. The latter looked like scrap metal or one of the tools he was constantly crafting for himself to do one task or another. He slept for three hours until the nightmares hit him. He ate. He slept again and then he started on the filament and finished seven hours after that, but kept fiddling with it for another six until he finished the GPS transister.

"I need you to get Charlotte for me. I need to try to reactor in the composit interface. Don't take no for an answer," he told Bucky. "And clear off my work station. It's too cluttered and I can't think."

The spat orders and the vitriol in Tony's voice make Bucky believe that his words have been heeded. He is hated for what he has done, and for what he let others make him do, and that's good. It's right, and it'll help Tony stay focused to get himself out of here and back where he belongs. Maybe he will even carry an apology to Steve and Grant for him, Grant especially. He promised and he broke it. He's a fucking monster.

He doesn't sleep either, he just watches over the almost manic work, utterly lost as to what it's all for. One thing that the Soldier was never trained in was this sort of electronics, it had no bearing on his missions. He could fix basic faults with most vehicles, but that was about it when it came to hands-on engineering.

The desk was cleared first, everything removed and placed carefully to one side, before he leaves the room. The only one allowed to leave without escort. It doesn't take long for him to return with Charlotte in tow. She tries to look composed, but she's eager, has he figured it out already?

"The Soldier has told me that you already have a prototype?"

"Not really," Tony shrugged. "I don't do prototypes. It will work but I don't know what I'm plugging into so right now it just powers the computer and the nightlight," Tony said, the circles under his eyes hardly needing to be faked.

He hoped that Bucky had figured out what item to place where or would before too long because Tony could not stay here. He just couldn't. He was having trouble not kicking this woman in her stupid face. The only reason he wasn't trying to was because he might have to run and he didn't want to pull a groin muscle.

"I need to do real time calibrations. I don't have JARVIS and he's usually scanning my work the whole time. It could short out the system so I need you to make sure all of the backups are in place. You do have backups right? Because I'm not building you a whole new set. Oh. And we need fire retardant. I'm prone to exploding."

He might still be talking fast, but there was very little of the usual charm, or emotion, in his voice. He handed over the reactor.

"Have one of your goons plug that in. They're more expendable than I am and I need to run the diagnostics." He was being up front so she wouldn't suspect him of trying to escape if anything did go wrong. It probably would.

No. It definitely would. He needed the power to burp for three tenths of a second so that his devices could get their signals out.

Bucky hoped that he had the order correct because their freedom may well depend on it, Tony's freedom depends on it. It's not even that he knows Tony all that well or even likes him that much, it's that he's an innocent and Bucky has already robbed him of so much. It's stupid, but he feels a little like if he saves him then he might have achieved something good here. For once.

He was left behind in the lab as Charlotte escorted Tony to the main chamber.

Her excitement was almost palpable, she knew what a genius he was and all the tapes seem to show that he had been making an arc reactor. The specifications match, the behaviour patterns were manic but not shifty. And so she instructs one of her agents to take the device and plug it in. The lights flicker for perhaps half a second, before everything rights itself again.

"Well?" She asks. "Did it work?"

Did it work? He fucking hope it worked because he was not spending another week in this shit hole. Tony held up a finger towards the woman and typed at the keyboard. The diagnostics on this thing were so slow without a voice command. He hated them. "Uh. Yeah. Sort of. I know the direction at least," Tony said, rubbing his hand against his eyelid. "Your dimensional rift? Why are you running it on alternating current like we're stuck with an elephant we're trying to execute? Ours uses a plasma filter-- I'm guessing you decided to bypass the theory and went right for the practical? Okay, the reactor can't hold a load like this. It will power the damned thing but your capacitor isn't nearly powerful enough to deal with the feed back. I'm surprised we didn't all blow up. Give me the reactor back. I'll tweak it. I need another half ounce of platinum carbonate and some silicate threading. Or just the silicate and a kiln. I'll do the threading myself."

He didn't wait to be told to leave, he just headed back to the workshop. They'd deliver him his supplies. But first he really did need to lay down. His teeth felt like they were buzzing.

That would be his reactor reacting to the burst of signal for the last time before it fizzled out and became useless.

He just hoped someone had been listening because at this rate, he'd give HYDRA the ability to keep portals open indefinitely by the end of the month. Not his idea of winning at life.

It sort of worked.

It didn't call Veronica or send a signal out for JARVIS to pick up, or any of the things that it had been intended to do. What it did do was set off a delay launch of some powerful missiles that were hidden in the basement levels of this base. Tony would just make it back to the workshop before a boom sounded, the world shook, and he would find himself being grabbed and shielded by the body of a large super soldier.

The whole place seemed to be falling on on itself in a maelstrom of debris and sirens, of people shouting and even gunfire.

"What the hell did you do?"

This was not sort of working. This was creating a distraction so they could escape, which was not s great idea considering that they were in Siberia in an old missile silo. Tony wasn't going to chance it, though. They were going to move. "There must have been more shielding than i expected," he explained, though the truth of the matter was that his signal had gotten bounced off of the sensors beneath them before they could make the journey into space. Veronica would likely get the signal, but now it would be effected by the following blast wave and ultimately corrupted.

He hadn't thought to ask if Russia was keeping live warheads down here. He really should have known better.

"I have no idea what the radius of the blast is or how much time we have so I suggest a whole lot of running," he shouted over the continual collapse of the structure around them. He wished he had working armor but Charlotte kept him locked out, so he wished instead for her to have been buried somewhere under the rubble from the initial blast. That would be just perfect.

On the other side of the world, Grant picked up the missile launch and the strange beep that followed it. Militaries all over the world were already focusing on what had happened, staying clear so as to not cause trouble but still attempting to gather intelligence. And they had missed the obvious. But Grant, who had mostly recovered by then, was doing what Steve had asked him to do and pay attention to the sat scans. He frowned at the blip and brought it in to where Banner was checking on the debugging program they were running on JARVIS (thanks for taking your ball and leaving Tony) and smiled at the kindly old Doctor as he handed him the tablet.

"There's something strange here."

Tony was not going to be happy that his so called friends thought he'd bugged his own AI at the end of this. Not at all.

Bruce wasn't so sure that Tony would bug his own AI, but they had to examine all possibilities, and Tony had been in a very strange, savage, and slightly self destructive mood before he had disappeared with one of his suits and left JARVIS unresponsive. It was hardly looking good for him.

He had no idea that even now that same poor man was being scooped up by the scruff of his neck and pulled along. Tony had said now was the time to run, and so running was what the Soldier would do. Gunfire chased them, one bullet would nick through Tony's side but not cause major damage, it would still hurt like fuck though.

The base was a mess, however, and so they did manage to make it out into the snow. Bucky hoisted Tony higher onto his shoulder so that he wasn't dragging through the deep drifts and kept moving, voice low.

"See if you can locate east, we need to go east."

Though he was pretty sure he was going to die, Tony adopted a keep swimming or sink mentality that so far was keeping his legs moving despite the pain he was in or the bright blooms of red he was leaving behind whenever Bucky decided it was a good idea to haul him around. He groaned at each step and tried to hold on and shield his eyes at the same time so he didn't get snowblindness from trying to late the sun.

"Course correct four degrees that way," he murmured, because yes he really was capable of precise navigation that way, able to do the complex math in his head without really trying, his measurement skills when eye balling it almost insanity.

For the moment; they weren't being followed. That was likely because it would be easy to locate them after they dug their equipment out of the rubble. Or after they froze to death.

"Still pretty much hate your guts," Tony groaned as Bucky half lifted and half threw him over a snow bank and down a rocky hill.

Grant and Bruce ended up calling Steve, who was with Sam in St. Petersburg trying to track down a location of another HYDRA base in one of the neighboring countries that used to be part of the USSR. They weren't sure where it was but they were trying not to disturb the locals by staying up north. Sam took the call and glanced at his friend as he sipped thick coffee from under a baseball hat.

"Hey, missile launch in Siberia with a bounce off code to one of Stark's sats. We might want to check it out. It could be our missing base."

Steve had his game face on already and stepped up to grab his shield. Siberia was a way north of St. Petersburg, but at least they were in the right country and should be able to make quick time there in the quinjet they had brought. It had been a tense few days, which Steve had attempted to alleviate by teaching himself Russian. He wanted to know, he wanted to know what Bucky sometimes said if he ever found him again. He had no idea that either Bucky or Tony were where they were heading.

"Yeah, well, you should. I hate me too."

It was Bucky's only slightly muttered response as he jumped down the rocky hill and picked up Stark once more to keep going. Another twenty minutes took them to a small cave system that he knew was there from his initial training in Siberia, finally stopping and putting Tony against the wall. It wasn't much warmer in here, but it was concealed, and there was something they had to do.

"I can get you out of here, but you have to do something for me. They're coming, and they're going to know I defected, so they're going to be sending-- you have to trigger me."

It nearly made him sick to say that, bile touching the back of his throat, but he had retreated so far inside himself to avoid the pain and degradation that it was almost like asking for it to be done to someone else.

"I can tell you the words. You have to repeat them. If you don't do it, they will, and you'll be dead. You can hand me over to the authorities or whatever you want, just-- please let me save you."

Let him save one person instead of killing.

"I love that we have this in common," Tony said with a deadpan truthfulness, though he was quiet even when he was leaned against the curving cave wall like a bundle of firewood. He took the time to touch his side, coming away with a handful of blood and a sting that told him nothing vital had been hit and the bullet had either gone through him or grazed him. Lack of feeling would have worried him more.

He was just about to sit and let the snow clinging to his body melt and freeze him solid from the moisture when Bucky kept talking. Tony only vaguely understood what he meant, mind on items to build a fire or some sort of Kirk against the Gorn canon... He wasn't exactly McGuyver and there wasn't any chewing gum around anyway.

So by the time they Bucky begged him to let him save him, Tony was only just mildly aware of what this would entail and looked up sharply at Bucky.

"I'm getting too good at being the villain," Tony said, but nodded. Bucky wouldn't have to repeat the words too many times at least. Tony knew Russian fairly well, just like he knew Mandarin and French and a few other languages. That didn't mean he didnt hesitate repeating them back again until he heard the sound of dogs barking and men approach. "Damn it."

Unlike most of Bucky's handlers, Tony didn't take his time. He didn't stretch out the space between the words. He didn't make Bucky suffer knowing what was coming. He raced through them like he did with everything he said and finished just as the first dog appeared in cave mouth.

"Don't let them capture us."

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