Chapter 101: Cap vs. Iron Man
The table took the first strike.
Steve's fist came down and the solid wood split — not cracked, split, the way things split when the man hitting them has been enhanced to the absolute limit of human physiology and is not thinking clearly about material properties.
The room went very still.
Steve turned to Fury. His eyes had the quality of a man who had just been handed a loss he'd been carrying for seventy years and didn't know what to do with it yet.
"Tell me who that is."
Fury looked at the screen. Looked at the video they'd just watched — the diamond-armored figure, Bucky airborne, the sequence that ended with a very specific absence of footage where the crucial moment should have been.
Edited, Fury thought. Someone pulled the audio. And the cut at the end is deliberate.
He'd spent forty years being the most suspicious person in every room he occupied, and suspicious people recognized the work of other suspicious people. This had the fingerprints of a setup — not crude enough to be obvious, but not quite clean enough to be invisible.
But that's a problem for after I find out what Steve's going to do.
"Calm down," Fury said. "This may be more complicated than—"
"Tell me."
Steve had his hand on Fury's collar. The other Avengers were already moving — Natasha's hand on Steve's arm, Clint stepping in from the other side, the specific choreography of people who had seen high-functioning individuals in crisis before.
Clint looked at the screen. Looked at Steve. Made a decision.
"His name is Wilson Fisk," he said. "He's based in Hell's Kitchen."
Natasha's eyes went to Clint with the expression of someone who had strong opinions about that choice and was saving them for later.
"Hell's—"
"Steve—" Natasha started.
But Steve had already processed the relevant information and was moving toward the door.
The room watched him go.
Fury stood in the middle of it and thought about Carol Danvers and how long it would take to reach her from wherever she currently was.
From the corner of the room, Reed Richards watched Steve leave with the expression of a man cataloguing information.
Beside him, Susan leaned close.
"You saw it," she said, quietly.
"The edit points," Reed confirmed. "The audio removal. The cut before the resolution of the confrontation." He thought about it. "Someone is using this organization's response capabilities to remove a problem they couldn't address directly."
"And you're not going to say anything."
Reed smiled with the patience of a man who had decided that patience was currently the correct strategy. "We've been members for approximately six hours. Any observation I make will be treated as the opinion of a newcomer with an interest in complicating the situation." He watched Fury's profile across the room — the calculation happening behind that single eye. "Fury already knows. He'll sort out what's useful to him and act accordingly."
"So we wait."
"We wait," Reed agreed. "And we see what Hell's Kitchen is actually capable of."
Across the room, Ben Grimm was still looking at the screen where the diamond figure had been. His expression, which was limited in its range by structural necessity, was nevertheless doing something identifiable.
"That guy," he said, mostly to himself. "Diamond form."
No one responded. He didn't seem to require it.
The Triskelion's main entrance.
Tony came up the steps with the particular energy of a man who had found the SHIELD archive footage, verified its contents, processed them on the drive over, and arrived at the building in a state that was very close to the edge of his operational control.
Steve Rogers came out the door.
They nearly collided.
Tony looked at Steve. Steve looked at Tony.
Tony hit him.
It wasn't a clean punch — he wasn't in the armor — but Tony Stark had been training since his arc reactor surgery and the anger behind it made up for the technique. Steve went sideways, caught the railing, looked at Tony with the expression of someone who had just been surprised by something he didn't expect.
"The body," Tony said. His voice had a quality to it that wasn't quite grief and wasn't quite rage and was somewhere more uncomfortable than either. "Bucky's body. SHIELD has it. I want it."
Steve straightened.
"Why do you—"
"Because I have things I need to run." Tony's jaw was set. "Forensic things. Things that are going to confirm what I've been looking at for the past hour and what your people in there don't want confirmed."
Steve looked at him.
He didn't understand yet. That was visible — he was processing the anger without the context for it, trying to figure out why Tony Stark, of all people, would be here, now, demanding access to Bucky's remains with that particular quality in his voice.
"I'm not giving you Bucky," Steve said. Steady. "I don't know what your interest is, but—"
"My interest," Tony said, "is that the man in that body spent the last thirty years as a weapon. And one of the things that weapon was aimed at—" He stopped. Recalibrated. "I'm not here to hurt him, Rogers. I'm not here to dishonor him. I need what his body can tell me about who was running him, and what they did, and I need it before the people who arranged for that video to land on Fury's desk can clean up their evidence."
Steve was very still.
"What video," he said.
"The one where your friend is killed by a man who was protecting his family from a HYDRA assassination operation." Tony watched Steve's face. "That's what the edit removed. The context. Why it happened. Who sent the Winter Soldier there in the first place."
The word HYDRA hit Steve's face the way it hit everyone's face who had been at war with HYDRA and then been told HYDRA was gone.
"What are you saying."
"I'm saying someone built this whole thing to point you at Hell's Kitchen," Tony said. "And I'm saying I have evidence that the same organization that sent the Winter Soldier to kill Wilson Fisk also sent the Winter Soldier to—" He stopped again. Something tightened in his expression. "Come with me. I'll show you what I have."
Steve looked at him for a long moment.
"I'll get Bucky's body released," he said. "And then you're going to show me everything."
"Everything," Tony agreed.
They stood on the Triskelion steps in the morning light, two men who had come to this building with entirely different purposes and were now, temporarily, aligned around the same piece of information.
"Your father," Steve said, slowly. "Is that what this is about."
Tony didn't answer immediately.
"Come with me," he said again.
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