Chapter Text
"Please," Steve had said through the bars on his cell: the first words he'd spoken to Tony since this whole clusterfuck began, which was, huh, three whole months ago now. "You don't," Steve had stopped, taken a steadying breath, continued: "You don't know what they might be doing to him."
Tony had turned away – it figured that Steve's first words had been about Barnes, damn him – ignoring the dull ache of pain at the feel of the eyes of his team – former team – tracking him as he left the Raft's central block without looking back.
And yet something about Steve's words had stayed with him, rattling around in his head like a bolt had come loose. Now here he was, five hours and seven--eight? he'd lost count--tequilas later, in one of the smaller labs of Stark Tower, trying to track Barnes down.
After he'd been captured in Berlin alongside the rest of what the Internet was calling 'Team Cap', Ross had had Barnes separated from the others and transferred to a high-security facility where he would be unable to hurt anyone else and any intel on what he knew about HYDRA's operations could be extracted.
At least, that was what Tony had been told. After Zemo--who'd since vanished in the wind--had dropped the grainy, 144p bombshell that the Winter Soldier had murdered Maria and Howard Stark in cold blood, Tony hadn't trusted himself not to return the favour if he and Barnes were ever face-to-face again, and besides, he'd been a little bit distracted by the fact that his best friend's spine had been partially shattered and would mostly likely leave him permanently paralysed, on top of trying to un-fuck the clusterfuck that had badly damaged two government buildings and an airport, set Ross and the UN on the anti-super warpath, and left the Avengers down four members.
And so Tony would've been perfectly content to continue keeping Barnes out of sight and out mind---if not for the fact that according to the surveillance footage contained within Ross's files (that Tony had kindly helped himself to; better to ask for forgiveness than for permission), Barnes was being held in a facility on the East coast. Yet according to FRIDAY's scans, not only was that facility sans the Winter Soldier, it was entirely devoid of anyone at all. Hm.
It took a few more hours of digging--and some legally questionable access to some legally questionable files--to track Barnes' location to a pair of coordinates seemingly in the middle of nowhere on the West Coast; whatever the base was, it wasn't in the files. By the time FRIDAY had found a way in, Tony almost felt sober.
"What's the deal with this place?" he asked, gesturing at the HUD panel beamed above the table in front of him.
"It's small," FRIDAY answered. "Only a dozen personnel. Barnes is on the lower level." A 3D map of the base appeared on the hologram in front of Tony, zooming in to focus on the room where Barnes was being held. "No surveillance on the inside, but the men have earpieces."
"Can you pick up their feeds?"
"Working on it. You thinking what I'm thinking?"
Tony shrugged. "Let's test it out."
The thing in question was a program he'd been tinkering around with for the last few months, at least until the events in Romania and everything that happened thereafter. Using multiple audio feeds streamed from the same location, the program was able to reconstruct a visual image--albeit basic--of what was happening, in place of a missing video feed. It hadn't been taken further than the early testing stages before Tony'd had bigger things to put his mind to.
“FRIDAY, you got that audio?” he asked, after a few more minutes of radio-silence.
There was a long pause, far longer than it usually took FRIDAY to respond.
When she finally did, her voice had an oddly brittle edge to it; she sounded shaken.
“Tony,” she began, uncharacteristically hesitant, “I don’t think--”
Tony waved her off; he’d already prepared himself for the possibility of Barnes being subjected to what could, by certain definitions, be considered torture. After a few seconds of silence, he heard a quiet click in his ear followed by a burst of static as FRIDAY began transmitting the feed.
“---would they think of you, if they saw you like this,” a man was saying. His voice was clear and calm, the words interspersed with some indecipherable rhythmic background noise that sounded vaguely familiar in a way that Tony couldn’t place. Tony flicked his fingers, signalling for FRIDAY to begin analyzing the audio for visual reconstruction.
A different man spoke next. “We read the notebooks. They used to do this to you. You used to like it.” The underlying noise stopped, replaced by the faint scrape against concrete as someone - more than one person - shifted against the floor, the noise sounding oddly wet. “Clearly you still do.”
The rhythmic noise resumed, followed by a choked inhale, sounding oddly muffled in comparison to the clarity of the other voices. The sudden sound of a scuffle drowned out the background noise, cut short by what sounded like the crack of metal striking flesh, which was repeated twice more. Someone breathed raggedly and then fell silent.
"FRIDAY, progress?" Tony murmured in the quiet that followed, glancing at the progress bar in the HUD’s bottom left corner; he'd underestimated how difficult it would be to tell what was happening without visuals.
"67 percent," FRIDAY responded. "Another thirty seconds and I'll have it."
Tony opened his mouth to reply, stopping short as a new sound came through the line: the sharp crackle of electricity. A stun baton, maybe.
“Thought we’d been over this," said yet another voice. "Fighting us only makes it worse for your friends."
In retaliation someone must have brushed the edge of the baton over Barnes' skin, judging by the resulting ragged half-groan and the sharp crack of flesh hitting concrete as Barnes flinched away; Tony was beginning to be able to picture it now.
In the following quiet the buzz of electricity grew louder, took on a harsher edge. It sounded---Tony knew that noise. He'd heard it a hundred times over, in the hours spent with Rhodey in the labs developing something new for War Machine. Something hand-held, they'd both agreed. Powerful enough to take down a super. Non-lethal. No permanent damage. They'd gone through dozens of prototypes adjusting the power levels to fit that last criteria. This sounded a lot closer to the early models than the final product.
Through the roar of blood in his ears Tony felt the next quiet words washing over him in slow, sickening waves.
"Next time it won’t just be Wilson’s face. And Cap would be an interesting challenge, I’m sure. Or maybe we’ll go for Barton - he has a family, you know: wife, kids - or the little Maximoff girl. They’ve got her so drugged up she wouldn’t even resist--”
The man’s voice disintegrated into a yell of pain and the sound of a commotion as the rest of the men fought to subdue Barnes.
“Motherfucker bit me,” the man snarled a few minutes later, once Barnes had been made still again.
For a few moments the only noise Tony heard over the rapid pounding of his own heartbeat was the fierce crackle of the baton as it was flicked to its highest setting.
Two things happened in the following instant: Barnes started screaming, a raw, inhuman sound that went on and on and on, endless in its agony; and the result of FRIDAY's analysis flickered into life before Tony's eyes, showing the scene with brutal, devastating clarity.
There were eight shapeless-featured men in the room: two at the walls, three standing over Barnes' thrashing figure where he lay restrained on his front, his remaining arm--his left was missing--cuffed behind his back to his waist and his head covered by some kind of hood.The remaining three men were crouched down behind Barnes, two of them pinning down the ends of something that was keeping his legs in place while the third knelt between them, his arm pumping as he moved the baton, pressing it against; no, into---
Tony stood, the motion of his fingers automatic: within seconds the suit was growing from his wrist and ankles, encasing him. Even in miniature on the HUD inside his helmet, the image was impossible to look away from: this wasn't torture. This was something else entirely.
With growing horror Tony tore his eyes away, powering up the suit and taking flight. Without prompting, FRIDAY displayed the base's co-ordinates, along with a breakdown of the best options for an aerial entrance. Neither of them spoke.
The thirty-six minutes that followed felt like the longest of Tony's life. Barnes stopped screaming after four.