Chapter 102: I'm Getting That Body and God Himself Can't Stop Me
Tony had made a decision.
He'd made it somewhere between reading the SHIELD archive footage and arriving at the Triskelion, and it had the quality of a decision made so completely that further deliberation seemed like a waste of time. Bucky Barnes's body contained evidence. Evidence of HYDRA's operational methodology, forensic traces that JARVIS could use to map the organization's structure and reach, and — Tony didn't let himself think about this too carefully yet — physical confirmation of things he wasn't ready to fully articulate.
He needed the body.
Steve Rogers not understanding why was a communication problem, not an obstacle.
"Move," Tony said.
Steve didn't move.
Tony looked at the math. A building full of SHIELD agents who were technically his adversaries in this situation. Steve Rogers between him and the entrance. The armor waiting on his command.
"Last chance to do this the easy way," Tony said.
"I told you," Steve said, "walk away."
Tony called the suit.
It wasn't his best — he'd come here expecting a conversation, not a fight — but it was sufficient. The pieces came from where they'd been staged in the car, assembly taking four seconds, and then he was in it and looking at Steve through the faceplate and thinking: this is not how today was supposed to go.
He fired a repulsor.
Not to hit — a warning, angled wide. The pavement cracked. Steve moved out of the way with the speed of someone whose reflexes had been calibrated by a decade of actual combat, and came up in a stance that said he'd been in fights before where the other person was technically superior and had won anyway.
"I'm not stopping," Tony said.
Steve threw the shield.
It was, objectively, a very good throw. The arc was precisely calculated, the rotation controlled, the angle such that the edge caught Tony's chest piece at exactly the point that would disrupt his flight trajectory without punching through the armor.
Tony went down hard.
He bounced. Got up.
Looked at Steve.
"You want to tell me why," Steve said, "a man who's never met Bucky needs his body badly enough to—"
"Because he killed my parents."
The sentence landed in the air between them.
Steve went very still.
Tony's breathing was audible through the suit's external mics. He hadn't meant to say it that way — not as a declaration, not standing on the Triskelion steps in front of a growing crowd of SHIELD agents who were pretending very hard to be doing other things.
"What," Steve said.
"Howard Stark. Maria Stark. November 1991." Tony's voice had flattened out — the specific flatness of a man maintaining control through sheer effort. "It wasn't a car accident. I have the footage. JARVIS spent the last hour pulling it from the SHIELD archive." He looked at Steve. "Your friend killed my parents on HYDRA's orders. And I have been walking around for twenty-five years thinking it was ice and bad luck."
Steve's face did several things in sequence, none of them simple.
He knew Bucky. He knew what Bucky had been capable of. He knew — in the abstract, terrible way you know things about someone you love — that HYDRA had had decades to use him for exactly the kind of work that didn't leave witnesses.
He'd hoped they hadn't.
"I didn't know," Steve said.
"I believe you," Tony said, and meant it, mostly. "That's not why I need the body. I need it because his systems — the arm, the neural conditioning, the operational records — they're going to tell me everything about HYDRA's infrastructure. Where they're embedded, what they're running, who gave the order." His voice was very controlled now. "I'm not going to do anything to him. I'm going to learn from him. And then I'm going to bury what he was made into, and I'm going to go after the people who did it."
Steve stood on the steps and looked at the man in the iron suit and thought about the gap between the weapon and the person and how much HYDRA had bet on no one being able to see that gap clearly.
"I need to come with you," Steve said.
Tony considered this for a long moment.
"Fine," he said.
Inside the building, a SHIELD agent was already in the elevator, phone out, heading upward.
On the steps, approximately forty agents had found extremely important things to attend to that didn't require them to intervene in whatever was happening between the man in the iron suit and the man with the star on his chest.
"You think Cap can take Iron Man?" one of them murmured.
"I think neither of them is going to be walking funny tomorrow."
"Fury's coming down."
"Then they've got about ninety seconds to finish whatever that was."
The elevator doors opened.
Fury walked out with the specific energy of a man who had received a report that two of his assets were conducting an unauthorized conflict in his building's entrance plaza and had decided to treat this as a scheduling inconvenience rather than a crisis.
He took in the scene. Tony in partial armor, the suit already standing down. Steve with his shield back. The particular body language of two people who had moved from conflict to conversation without anyone explaining why.
"Problem?" Fury said.
"Not anymore," Tony said. He looked at Fury with an expression that was not quite accusatory and not quite a warning and was something that said I know what I found in your archive, and I know you know, and we're going to have that conversation later but not here. "I need the Winter Soldier's body released to my custody for forensic analysis. I'll return it when I'm done."
"That's not standard—"
"I'll return it," Tony said again. "You know why I want it. You know I'm going to find what I find. The question is whether you want me finding it in a SHIELD facility where you can manage the output, or in mine, where you can't."
Fury looked at him for a long time.
"Six hours," he said.
"Twenty-four."
"Twelve."
"Done," Tony said.
He looked at Steve. Steve looked back at him.
"We should talk," Steve said.
"Yeah," Tony said. "We should."
They walked away from the building together, not quite side by side, not quite apart, while Fury watched them go and thought about how many variables were now in motion simultaneously and which ones he could still predict.
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