fossilised | For Steve

"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."

Even if Tony didn't know exactly what he was doing, and even if he still hated Bucky for everything the Soldier had done, he wouldn't be able to miss how much this course of action deeply affected the man. He looked beyond terrified as the words came, his metal hand digging so deeply into the floor of the cave that he left genuine gouges in the rock, and the last word was accompanied by a scream of desperation, raw and terrible.

And then all of a sudden he was nothing, he was blank, he was obedient.

His handler told him to not let them be captured, and so he obeyed. Tony would get to see the Winter Soldier at work, what would happen if all of Cap's natural serum abilities was honed into decades of training, ferocity, and utter ruthlessness. The Soldier killed the full pack of dogs with his bare hands in a little under sixty seconds before he turned back to his handler and picked him up with care.

Then he began to run.

Not the running he had been doing before, where he fought through the snow with desperation, but a flat out sprint where he simply didn't let the depth of the snow or the rough terrain slow him down for a second. His legs got cut up, his ankle twisted on uneven ground and the crunching sound of bone was audible, and yet still he ran. The Soldier could run on a broken ankle, the pain was nothing, irrelevant.

He saw the quinjet and he banked to the left. Don't let them capture us pertained to everybody, after all.

There was, Tony was now sure, no greater evil than torturing s person. He would never forget the things he had seen on that screen and he was still not sure how to live with himself after making Bucky go through this. It didn't matter that he had been asked to. It didn't matter at all. The sounds of everything happening to him from being lifted out of a cave mouth whose snow covering was covered in gore from dogs and from men to the moment he saw the quinjet would not leave him. Not ever.

"Rendevous," he whispered, arms clutching Bucky so he didn't get dropped. "That's our extraction. No one is inside is to be hurt. They're... Allies." The ramp to the quinjet was already lowering anyway and Tony was never so happy in his life to see Steve Rogers.

"Buck-- Tony--?" The blond was shocked. Understandably, so. Tony motioned for him to get out of the way.

"Start us up! We need to get out of here immediately!" Sam was on point for that and confirmed as Bucky ran on his broken ankle up the ramp to the cargo hold. "Shit. Down. Put me down. And you sit." Bucky would t do it on his own without orders.

The Soldier didn't need the added explanation of them being allies. He had his orders not to hurt anyone inside the quinjet and so he wouldn't raise a hand to them even if they beat him to death. He was utterly blank eyed as he got them up the ramp, looking through Steve as though he didn't even exist, something that stole the breath from Steve's lungs in one painful rasp.

Tony was put down as the quinjet lifted off and Sam took them back into the air, and the Soldier simply sat down on the floor the second he was ordered to. Straight backed, eyes only on his handler, waiting for the next order.

"Buck--" Steve looked like he was going to try, voice hoarse and hesitant. "Buck... Buck, look at me. Tony, what-- what happened to you both?"

The Soldier didn't glance at Steve even once. He was buried under layers of obedience, nothing existed for him except the mission and his orders. Even his ankle, obviously broken for the splinter of bone poking through the skin, didn't get any of his attention.

It was too much. Tony didn't want to talk. These details were pointless, like oil being added to a lamp you were trying to extinguish. He held up his hand, the bloody one, to Steve, and dropped into the jumpseat beside Bucky. The Soldier's head was just above his knee and Tony could reach out and ruffle his hair if he wanted to. He didn't.

"He needs medical attention," Tony told Steve. "And someone needs to get back there and clean out that silo. Their portal technology is in there." Tony looked pretty bad too, shivering in his tshirt, cuts on his face from falling debris, and the extra damp side where blood had seeped into the black material of the shirt. He really wasn't interested in being poked and prodded at right now though. Not when Bucky was suffering under all of those layers of forced upon blankness. If the man remembered all of his victims, it meant that he would remember all of this too.

And Tony wanted him comforted.

He took a few breaths and then looked up at Steve. "He's not Bucky right now. I triggered the Soldier."

One of Steve's worst nightmares since he had found out what happened to Bucky, was that he lost the man to HYDRA again. It was the fear of being unable to protect him again, of failing to live up to the amount of times that Bucky had been there for him all those years, and it seemed that was coming true. But when Tony said that he triggered the Soldier... not that he had been triggered, but I triggered...

Everything happened so fast.

Steve was moving to try and pin Tony and punch him without even thinking, but he found himself flat on his back with a metal hand around his throat. Bucky hadn't even stood up, he had been ordered to sit down after all and he hadn't been given leave to stand again, and so that made it a little more difficult to protect his handler. Still, a hand to the attacker's ankle and a sharp pull, followed by fingers at his throat should do it.

"Заказы, сэр?"

Tony had dodged a big blond bullet for that one. Steve had reacted without thinking, because if he had thought for a moment, he would understand that Tony hadnt know. The trigger words. No one on the team did. So for Tony to encite the Soldier, he either had to have been forced to by HYDRA or Bucky had told him how.

Tony slid back down to his seat as Bucky impassively held Steve down. He would have to wait for orders for another few minutes before Tony responded in Russian. "Отпусти его." His wound in his side had opened a little further and he clamped a hand to it quickly, breathing out as his eyes closed and his head hit the back of the hull. "You can get your kicks in later, Cap. How's your battlefield triage? He needs his ankle set. He was running on that."

Bucky might be blank but he was still a person to Tony. And tony would not let him suffer.

Steve genuinely couldn't imagine a situation in which things would be so hopeless that Bucky would give someone the keys to triggering him. He didn't relaunch himself at Tony when the Soldier obediently let him go, but the set of his shoulders and the way he trembled from head to foot said that he was angrier than he had ever been before. Bucky was his sticking point, Bucky was his everything.

"...make it stop, Tony."

Steve's voice was utterly broken, cracked and brittle. He moved to crouch beside his friend, but god the idea of causing him even more pain by snapping a broken bone around made it impossible for him to touch. Surely it was better to leave it, let him rest it, until they could get him to a hospital with painkillers and anaesthesia.

"Let him go, make him Bucky again, give him back his freedom."

The Soldier watched this exchange with no outward expression, though he did tilt his face to his handler after a moment or two.

"Могу ли я двигаться?"

It had been the wrong move to look at Steve while he spoke. Funny. Steve looked exactly how Tony felt right now. He lowered his eyes, not wanting to look the blond directly in the face any longer. The truth was, he had no idea how to free Bucky. He had no idea what he was doing at all right now except calling up to Sam to get Bruce in the line to talk him through an ankle set since Steve was being no help.

To Bucky's question, Tony agreed that he could move if he wanted to. "Преуспевать," the word came out easily enough followed by a suggestion (which would likely turn into an order in Barnes' mind) to stay seated so he could look at his injuries. Let Rogers loom above them.

Tony didn't have a proper answer for him anyway.

Not until it dawned on him that he could query Bucky the way he could check the source code of a machine he was hacking. Tony frowned. "Есть ли способ, чтобы дать вам свободу?"

Those were conflicting orders. To be allowed to move and told to stay seated, but the Soldier was resourceful and he would not allow himself to fail at either order. So he shifted along the floor without getting up in order to get closer to his handler, and then turned to face him. He took off his shirt and began to tear it into strips, before he began trying to roughly bind the worst of his handler's wounds by stretching up as far as he could.

The question caught him by complete surprise. It wasn't a mission report request, or a demand for information that he knew. How to give him freedom? The concept was such an alien one to the Soldier, freedom wasn't something applied to tools.

"Разве я не свободен?"

No, stupid question, of course he mustn't be if the question was being asked. He frowned, and then gave the only answer he could think of, fairly certain it must be the wrong one.

"Убей меня."

At least Bruce came on the line pretty quickly, voice sounding loud over the speakers in the quinjet, relief evident in his voice. "Tony, there you are, thought you'd run out on us for good... you okay?"

"Don't be insane," Tony snapped, pushing Bucky's hands away. "I'm fine and-- Никто не собирается вас убить." No more killing. No more pain and suffering. "Stop asking me, all right? And we are done with Russian. Shit. Everything I say you're going to take as an order--" This was all bullshit. "One minute, Banner. I'll be right with you," he grumbled. He couldn't stand this, but Steve was useless and Sam was... Sam. Good in a pinch, currently flying. Didn't matter. Sam was ignorable.

Tony hiked up Bucky's pant leg and another vomitted to see the state of his ankle. The bone bad poked clear through and wasn't even bloody at the tip. That was disturbing.

"Just... Stop needing orders. Do whatever you want as long as you don't actively try to hurt someone and we'll go from there, all right?" he snapped at Bucky before he sucked in a breath and tried to clear his dizziness. "Now. Banner. I have a wound here with bond literally protruding out of the ankle. I need immediate triage before I puke all over everything. And then I need back to back vacations without any of you getting me kidnapped."

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