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The bruises on his face and neck were nothing compared to the ones that ringed his biceps and laced his chest from the fabric snapping taut against his skin. The armor had aborted its attempt to catch him and was now hovering above the pair. As usual, Tony would have survived, the armor taking the brunt of the fall, but FRIDAY was waiting for another directive now that her job had been completed by another. The AI, because Tony had built her that way, wondered to herself in silence how it was she had to look after Tony Stark, a man-child who was not, in fact, suicidal no matter how many safety protocols he completely ignored over and over and over again.

Struggling to catch his breath, Tony gripped Bucky’s shoulder and cranes his neck upwards. There were still sounds of fighting above him. Evidently Rogers stopped Black Panther from coming after him or Black Panther was keeping Rogers too busy to break away.

“Report!”

“You’re a bit of an idiot, Boss, but Captain Rogers and Black Panther are currently still engaged in combat. Would you like to put on the armor now?”

“Yes, yes— We won’t need to run if I can fly,” he said, and FRIDAY scooped him up a moment later. As the eyes in the face plate glowed, Iron Man turned back to his Nanny. “Let me help you.” You know. Instead of going up to help Steve.

Fuck Steve.

Maybe they had been so busy fighting one another that neither of the men still up in the hotel room had noticed Bucky at all. That would be ideal, if they just thought that Stark had fallen and managed to get to his armour, it would keep him out of this whole mess as much as he could. Which probably wouldn't last long.

"No. I go with you, they both know that you have a connection to me."

Even if it's not one that could be exploited. The Wakandan King would likely still try and torture it out of him, and Rogers would be so disappointed that Tony had lied that it might cause a permanent rift between them. He didn't want that. He didn't want to keep destroying everything he came in contact with.

He took a step backwards, eyes fixed up on the broken window up above.

"I have to go."

Iron Man made a sort of half saluting, signing off gesture and used bus repulsors to clear himself from the alley. He was no longer useless in this fight and as he hovered in the window, about to make some famous, witty quip to stop the action and bring attention back to himself, a veritable fleet of quintets descended from the sky and agents filled the only exit points. Tony’s stomach sank and he zoomed in with the HUD through the metal to ID various men and women from government and law enforcement entities. Rhodey had gotten him. His arrogance had gotten him. He didn’t know who they had been tracking, himself or the Wakandan super or Rogers, but it was bad news. They were all heavily armed. Though the damage so far was only to one hotel room, which worked in their favor for once, there was no guarantee that it would stay that way.

“Iron Man. Captain America. Two unknowns. Stand down,” a loud speakered and oddly gender neutral voice called, blasting over at least a half a mile radius in the city. “Hands up, weapons down. Come quietly.”

Tony could have jetted away, but both Rogers and Cat Woman were at the window, and neither of them seemed to be putting up a fight. Below, Bucky was surrounded by agents with guns. Tony rolled his eyes finally, which did actually hurt, and he lowered himself back to the street, stepping out of his suit neatly. “Fellas, put the guns away.”

No no no no NO!

This couldn't be happening to him, Bucky was so careful and so attuned to what was happening in each city. He knew how to track radio frequencies, how to map the movements of both private and government militia, and somehow he had become surrounded without even knowing they were moving in.

His gaze darted wildly, desperation and panic clear at the forefront, like a cornered and feral animal. He glanced across at Stark and then, briefly, up at the window to meet blue eyes that he hadn't properly looked into since he had been trying to kill him above the Potomac.

He genuinely considered fighting. They'd cut him down with that many guns, but he'd take out a lot of them before he went down, and he wouldn't be captured at the end of it. But he didn't, nor did he go down on his knees, he just stood rigid without knowing which way to turn.

“I’m going to handle this.” He couldn’t just have his armor fly Bucky away, he couldn’t claim to have anything to do with the Winter Soldier or this just wouldn’t work. So he kept his voice down and his hands out. “Just don’t talk. You’re good at that,” he continued under his breath before he stepped forward and grinned at the closest man. Woman? He couldn’t tell under the body armor or the helmet. “Is this some new homeless round up?” he asked, looking unimpressed, until he was literally manhandled down to his knees.

Usually the bad guys did that. They underestimated him, they made him seem weak, and then he blew them up. But these were the good guys. These guys were on his side. And they were taking him into custody without any due process.

Thankfully, the Black Panther’s big reveal and Steve Rogers’ homegrown charm had everyone on egg shells enough to offer the three a conditional release. No more going off board. No more going out of the margin of the book the rules were written on.

Tony wasn’t keen on any of the rules but he did help write them and he was trying to be less of a hypocrite lately. Trying to distance himself from his father had never been more important.

Sam and Rhodey met the three in Germany after Tony charmed the numbers from some of the ladies in an attempt to have FRIDAY copy cellphones and bounce interference off of the jet carrying the cage Bucky was being transported in. He had a plan. No one was going to be thrilled with it, not even himself, but he was short on time and notice. He had to do what he could with what he had.

Tony led the way into the office building, arms pumping as he tried to keep ahead of the others. He wanted to take a look at the control room. He wanted to see where they were taking Bucky before Steve could worm his way in and talk to the guy. He managed it, managed to try to make some meaningful connection so he wasn’t asked awkward questions.

But then all hell broke lose. He had no idea that someone might have the missing, elusive trigger book. He’d had no idea at all.

It was Stark that stopped him from fighting.

As the other man murmured that he would handle all of this in an undertone, he would see a flash of deep blue eyes that were desperately afraid before Bucky lowered himself to his knees and let them cuff him. Not just cuff him, he was forced into a cage and strapped down, restrained from all sides because of how dangerous he was. He would place his trust in Stark this time to make sure nothing happened.

He heard Steve's voice calling out to him in anguish, but he didn't look in that direction. He feared falling apart if he had to confront Steve now, and so the other man would have to be content with the sight of him restrained and taken away as his first glimpse in over a year.

And then--

God, he screamed, he fought, but it wasn't enough. The security feed would show the sheer strength of him, proving that the restraints were ineffective if he really chose to get free, the metal buckling and the bullet proof glass shattering as he slammed his way out. But then all of that energy was coiled inwards, trapped behind the veneer of the Soldier.

He had his orders, nothing else mattered.

Though Steve told him to stay put, Tony had no intention of doing so. He didn’t have anything on himself to contact FRIDAY and have his armor delivered, and while it would have been smarter to hack into the computer system in the room to get himself some protection and fighting power, he cut down the back stairs as everyone else went to try and stop the triggered Soldier.

He didn’t know what his orders were. The feed from the warehouse that they had been holding Bucky in had been looped. It was going to take some time to unravel all of that and time was not something that Tony had.

As he dashed out of the stairwell, Steve was being hurdled back against a wall, making the whole thing buckle. Tony ducked his head to avoid plaster from the ceiling cutting him up too badly as he zig zagged towards the atrium.

People, ordinary citizens were going to die today. Tony couldn’t help them. He needed to get down to where they were holding his armor and he needed to do it before they lost sight of Barnes so he could follow him.

He heard Widow taking a beating as he ran, and while he didn’t feel too hero like going away from the action, he rarely made anyone promises and he needed to keep this one. His Nanny was going to need him when he fought this thing off.

He just had to do that first. And that would mean finding a way to make that arm of his a non-issue.

It was a good thing that Tony had access to electromagnets. And that he knew how to fine tune them to vibranium.

The Soldier had the most dangerous of orders.

He was at his least lethal when he had set orders - find this one target and neutralise them - but he had just been told to escape no matter the cost and await further instructions. That gave him permission to be as destructive and as public as he wanted to be.

The man on him with the colourful shield was a hard opponent, but the Soldier had the edge when it came to fighting. His strength and his skill was the best in the world, that's what he had been made for. So it probably wasn't any surprise that he made it right out of the building and into the street, three people dead just for being in his way, before his arm went very suddenly dead.

He had evaded capture thus far, so he ripped up a sewer grate with his flesh hand and dropped down, a good place to hide and evaluate.

It took time to do this and Tony Stark was not a traditionally patient man. He cut corners whenever he could, took hard lefts through gaps in traffic to make a light and rarely used the speed limit as a safety precaution. Wishing he had some liquid courage to help him pass the time, though he wasn’t too afraid of anything other than the affable Steve Rogers joining him as he waited for Bucky to be Bucky again, Tony watched the light on his HUD move around the sewers for awhile until it went still. Only then did he report back to the Avengers that he had finished his sweep and verbally agreed to get some medical attention for the whole being choked out and punched and threatened with claws issues he’d been managing through just fine without any help over the last few hours.

It gave him the excuse he wanted to head down to where Bucky was hiding.

“I don’t think this is a good idea, Boss,” FRIDAY said as Tony stepped out of the armor.

“Just order me replacement shoes if you’re so worried about my health. Actually. Order me replacement shoes even if you aren’t.” This was pretty awful. He tried not to think about Germany sewerage engineering as he headed towards where he’d seen Bucky come to rest. It was brighter than he’d thought it would be, but his footfalls on slimy brick and concrete were deafening. St least he wouldn’t be sneaking up on the man.

He paused in the opening of a grand junction. Light poured down from above, punching through the grating like spotlights, pinpricking across Bucky’s skin.

“Do you know me?”

The sewers were comforting. The smell didn't matter, he had suffered through much worse than a few bad smells; but they were dark and branched off in many different directions which would make it easy for him to evade capture. He knew how to move to avoid making a lot of noise... which obviously the other person down here really didn't.

It was only due to the fact that he was Howard Stark's son and looked a bit like him that saved Tony from attack, because Bucky registered him as a HYDRA technician and he knew that his orders weren't to attack any other operatives. Though the eyes that looked at him were blank and emotionless.

"Maintenance required."

That wasn't an answer to the question, but at the same time... it sort of was. He wasn't himself yet, he had been ripped away again by words implanted so deeply that he might never be free of them.

“Back to HYDRA then? Yep okay. You do need some maintenance.” He kept his hands in his pockets as he approached, fearless and non threatening, and circled the younger man part of the way before his head tilted. “I don’t have all of my tools so you’re going to have to give me a run down.” He didn’t want to treat Bucky like a machine but in this fragile state, Bucky probably felt better being treated at least partially like one. Tony was doing his best just to be polite, and to make sure he wasn’t attacked. His armor was close but not close enough. His wrist watch was reset but it could only do so much. It was mostly meant to stop ballistics. Not a a hulking arm.

And yes. He had disabled it, but if Bucky used any momentum st all, he could swing it right into him with the force of a Mack truck and lay him out. Easy peasy.

He wasn’t interested in figuring out what that felt like.

“What’s wrong beside the arm? I’ll have to get you to the lab for that one.” He wasn’t lying. Tony was going to have to get him hooked up to a program to get those neurocircuits back into tip top shape.

"All malfunctions are within my arm, it's ceased functioning completely and I have no feeling or control."

It might surprise Tony to know that Bucky had feeling in his metal arm, or maybe it wouldn't depending on how deeply he had looked into the schematics for it. The operatives had wanted him to be able to sense pressure in order to more accurately perform delicate tasks, and also pain to be able to sense if there was any damage that needed to be fixed. An added cruelty, considering that the arm itself caused pain for how it was wired directly into the skeleton and the weight of it always dragging him down.

"I have orders to remain outside until further commands come, I cannot return with you for maintenance yet."

Not unless he had overriding commands, which was a possibility.

At least he wasn't outwardly hostile towards Stark, his muddled mind having placed him firmly in the HYDRA technician camp in his head.

“Then I guess we wait.” Tony had no where else to be. All right, that was a lie. He had everywhere else to be but he didn’t want to be found right now. He had no intention of answering any more questions. It was lucky that the World Protection Agency hadn’t slapped then with further citations, Steve would never let him live it down. Tony was pretty sure that the truth of the matter was in time spent anyway here. Bucky would gradually come off of this sort of triggering drug and when he did, he might need someone to hold his hair back while he vomited. Tony knew all about crashes. Of every variety.

Sitting, however, would not be an option. There wasn’t enough sanitizer in the world for this mess and he didn’t need to trigger any of his germaphobia either. Pepper had done wonders to help with that, but she was no longer in the picture and his hold on the realization that a little dirt wouldn’t kill him was slipping.

“What was the initial order? I’m going to guess it was something along the lines of wreck havoc because you pretty much beelined on out of there. It was impressive. Any headaches? Vision issues?” Tony flitted from topic to topic, mostly to combat his own boredom.

"My orders were only to escape at any cost and remain undetected by enemy forces, I am to await further contact from my handler."

It wouldn't be as easy as Bucky just coming down from a trigger word high, he would need to be, in the words of Clint Barton, given cognitive recalibration. He'd need to be knocked clean out to give his brain the chance to reset itself and break out of the programming again.

"There are intermittent vision issues, but nothing substantial enough to cause a lack of function during battle."

“Yeah. Well. We wouldn’t want that.” Tony paced for a little while, arms crossed or swinging in a variety of patterns as he went. Time passed, but it was slow, even going by his wrist watch. He huffed a little, imagining that he was completely full of human waste brought about by the mass consumption of sausages and sauerkraut (or whatever Germans ate) and shuffled his feet around patches of wetness before he stopped in front of Bucky.

From the manual, a trigger slowly lost its hold on the subject, though a mission could and usually did prolong its effects. He was not currently on a mission though, he had just finished one—. Or was he still waiting for those final orders to bring it to a halt? Tony frowned, the lines around his eyes deepening.

“This is taking too long and we have both been out in the open a lot longer than planned,” he said, still trying to play along. “I need you to get us both back to a safe house. Your arm does need to be fixed. It’s a liability. No one is coming. You have to have some back up orders, right?”

He hoped so or else they were stuck in smelly hell forever.

This was one of the situations that the Soldier did have a little autonomy. It was minimal, but he always had back up options in case his original orders would fall through, or license to improvise on a mission if the situation required it. In this case, returning to a safe house for repairs while he awaited further orders would not be out of the realms of possibility.

He considered it for a moment, before he just turned and started to walk down one of the dark tunnels, his footsteps barely audible even though the floor was very hard to avoid making noise on.

"There is a safe house in Dusseldorf, I can requisition a car and take us there, that would be acceptable."

As much as Tony just loved to traipse through the sewers, he was pretty sure that waltzing into a HYDRA base was going to be somewhat unfortunate should HYDRA still be using it. Given that Bucky was still in operation up to last year, chances were pretty good. Tony almost balked, almost declined, because if HYDRA came, they would get their favorite weapon back and he’d have to play along unless he wanted to die.

And they would kill him. He’d been on that list in the database for target practice.

Begrudgingly, Tony rolled his eyes at himself and headed off after Bucky, geography failing him on how far of a walk it would be.

The answer came as no real surprise…it was far. Very far. His feet ached, and his knees and hips hurt like the old man he was becoming as he climbed final ladder back to the surface. Bucky never showed his impatience, which made Tony nervous because if he didn’t snap out of it soon, he was going to have to take matters into his hands. And that would get to be quickly unpleasant.

“I hope this safehouse has scotch.”

"I don't know, the last time I visited this safe house was in 1965."

But he knew where it was. Whatever else got deleted from the Soldier, they made sure that they never touched important things like the locations of weapons caches, safe houses, or the HYDRA operatives that he was supposed to obey at that current point in his operations.

He waited patiently for Stark to get out of the sewers and then replaced the manhole cover to hide the fact that anyone had exited there. By the time his companion had properly got himself sorted, the Soldier was already scanning the surroundings for a suitable car to steal.

Lucky for both of them, he was an expert in that sort of thing, and had the door to a nondescript Ford unlocked and the engine hotwired in under a minute.

Since stealing a car was the least of their troubles, and Tony would just have money eventually sent to the person whose truck they were lifting, he didn’t think twice about climbing into the car with Bucky. It was the words that troubled him, still, as he sat looking at the side view mirror, half expecting a motorcycle riding Captain America to begin gaining on them. He hadn’t been born yet. His father was supposedly setting up SHIELD in tribute for fallen friends. He was probably out killing people.

For once, he was quiet as they carefully merged into traffic and then out of it again, skirting historic streets and more modern buildings for twenty or thirty minutes until they arrived at the safehouse. It looked like it had seen better days, nestled in between warehouses and shipping docks on the Rhine. He made a snarky remark about the smell and then shrugged it off as probably being him anyway as Bucky ditched the car and walked them the last few blocks towards a retinal scan. He knew that HYDRA had always been technologically advanced, but this seemed a bit much, even for them, considering that Bucky had been here over fifty years before.

A green light flashed and a door became briefly visible from the darkness of the grating on the wall, allowing them to push inside.

Lights blinked on and the HVAC system started up, evidently on motion sensors. Stale air and dust were drawn out of the fairly comfortable room, leading further into what would be a ten room complex that might rival a nice hotel. Minus the weapons locker. That was all HYDRA.

Even though the safe house hadn't been visited by the Soldier since the sixties, there was evidence that other HYDRA operatives had used it more frequently and more recently than that. Though the air was stale and there was dust on the surface, at least proving that nobody was about to jump out at them right now or that they hadn't interrupted a current meeting of HYDRA soldiers, the carpets were in a modern style and there was a flat-screen TV in one of the rooms.

They hadn't got more than four steps into the main lobby before a loud automated beep echoed in three distinct chimes. The Soldier halted immediately and said something in Russian, another beep followed and a soft American accented mechanical voice spoke up from all around. Obviously an AI, but one not nearly as advanced as FRIDAY.

"Voice scan and password accepted. Winter Soldier: verified. Security systems disabling."

The Soldier finally moved again to head straight for the weapons locker. If Stark wanted to take him out, the time before he armed himself to the teeth would probably be his best bet for survival.

Taking out his former Nanny was just one of those things that wasn’t exactly an option. Tony’s stomach hurt, listening to the moniker be used, and watching the man stalk away from him with such an intense purpose. “Soldier!” He wasn’t going to use the man’s name because right now, he wasn’t Bucky Barnes. He was the Asset, he was a tool. But there was something inside of him that should be able to recall who he was and if Tony was strategic about pushing the right buttons, he’d be able to force it out of him.

Or they could just wait. But waiting was very, very dangerous.

“I need you to let me check your arm. We’re safe here,” he said, quickly moving after him with pumping arms. He ignored the bathroom (a shower would be nice) and the deluxe coffee maker with the espresso attachment and the milk foamer (later), and reached out to put a hand on the Soldier’s shoulder. “Remember your orders. Escape at all cost. Well you’ve escaped. Mission accomplished. Now you have to let me conclude my mission.”

C’mon, Buck. Tony needed you to work with him here.

The look that the Soldier gave Tony would probably be familiar. It was the same stoic and blank eyed look that the Soldier had always given him when he was a kid, the one that he never realised meant that he was looking at a slave without autonomy and just assumed made him badass and cool.

"Yes, sir."

Everyone outranked the Soldier, after all, even the technicians. The only time he had command over other people was out in the field on occasion, when more than just him on his own would be needed to complete a mission, then he might be given command of other soldiers to direct their movements.

He still moved to the weapons cache to take a gun and a knife out, it made sense to be armed and ready even while he was being worked on.

“Stark,” he corrected immediately. “My dad expected the ‘sir’ but I hate it.” And maybe that name would jog the memory of more than just a technician. Maybe it would cause Bucky to remember a lonely little boy that used to make him help to weld metal or to boost him up into trees so he could attach antennas to the furthest branches or get a good clearance for an invention. He wasn’t too pleased to see the new weapons, but Bucky was deadly with just his fists. Tony didn’t fear the gun and knife any more than he did what he was already presented with.

The workshop in the safehouse was high tech enough to dampen Tony’s ability to contact FRIDAY, but she’d have his position up until they entered this building to go on at least so he didn’t feel so alone…just a little blind.

He fiddled around, subversively, just to see what they were dealing with, before Bucky was settled on a stool beside a spotlight workstation covered in glossy black tools. He wandered back over himself, slowly, and carefully dragged over a comfortable looking stool with a swiveling back. Whatever you had to say about HYDRA, they knew how to trick it out.

“Let’s work backwards with your memory…see what you do remember…and I’ll work on this.”

There was not much wrong with his arm other than the devices that Tony himself had put in there in order to make sure it could be killed if it ever needed to be, at least he'd have the satisfaction of knowing that his own technology worked as required and was more powerful than HYDRA tech when it was installed correctly.

The Soldier came to sit in the seat obviously meant for him. The surroundings were familiar, right down to the lack of any kind of anaesthetics or numbing agents. One didn't bother with the pain levels of a weapon, after all, one just took it apart and put it back together again as needed.

"Memory? What report do you want, Stark?"

There wasn’t anything Tony could do about the way HYDRA had their lab set up, but he could knock out the pain receptors as he worked on the arm. Right now, it was numb anyway and he hoped to use it to stall to get Bucky talking. He opened the control panel through a button between the last two fingers and scooted around toward the underside of the bicep to work on the wiring. Since he knew Bucky couldn’t feel anything, except perhaps for pressure as he moved things around, Tony mostly just tugged on connections in a faux diagnostic.

“I want you to start back from when I located you at the initial rendezvous point in the sewer. You said your arm went dead. Describe exactly what happened and what you were doing.”

As stalling tactics went, it wasn’t so bad really. Tony would theoretically need to know the outlying issues but he was hoping to roll that into what Bucky had been doing up to the and then beyond the trigger sequence.

He wanted to know if Bucky knew the guy that did the triggering. And if so…? Tony was going to kick his teeth in.

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