Tony sat in the cushy chair in the Avengers facility common area, swilling fine scotch in a tumbler and staring at an empty TV screen.

We all need family. The Avengers are yours.

Well, Cap hadn't been wrong about the first part. It was only the second part, the part where the Avengers wanted anything to do with him at all, that was utter bullshit.

He drained his glass and poured another. Vision was off somewhere discovering humanity or something. Rhodey was still sleeping about 16 hours a day, when he wasn't at physical therapy or trying out whatever new device Tony forced on him that week (he claimed he was grateful, but still. Tony knew what he was doing). That left… no one. Bruce was in the wind, had been for years. Pepper was gone.

That last glass of scotch was gone too, and Tony looked into the cup, a little bemused. It didn't really make him feel better, per se, but it was—

His phone was ringing.

He let his last train of thought dissipate (dwelling on his feelings was never good, had never been good, but was especially not good now). He fumbled for his phone, because there were so damn few people who would call him on this phone, his personal phone, that it had to be something important. (Not like anyone would call just to say hi, or ask how he was dealing with the crushing loneliness and guilt.) Dusk had fallen since he'd settled into the chair and he squinted at the StarkPhone's too-bright screen.

Withheld.

Weird. Nobody had this number except Vision and Rhodey and Pepper and… and Steve.

At some point, his heart had started pounding in his chest, beating against the scar tissue where the arc reactor used to be.

He thumbed the icon to pick up, barely daring to breathe. There was no picture but the voice came through clear.

"Stark?"

It wasn't Steve's voice. Tony shifted in his seat and tried to pretend to himself that a devastating sense of disappointment hadn't just descended over him. He was drunk enough that he could almost do it.

"Who's this?" he returned in a sharp voice. The voice sounded extremely familiar, and kicked up a wave of anxiety he didn't entirely understand, but he didn't recognize it at first.

"Bucky."

"Bucky," Tony repeated, because maybe he'd lost his mind after all, or someone had slipped something in his scotch and now he was having wacky hallucinations. It was Bucky, Bucky who had killed his parents, Bucky who Tony had tried to murder in cold blood just two months ago. Of course it was Bucky.

"Yeah. I need your help."

Tony snorted. He started babbling before his brain had really caught up with the idea that Barnes was on the other end of the phone. "What's this, a practical joke? Did Barton put you up to this? Nah, he hates my guts now, he only reserves practical joking for friends and acquaintances. Was it—"

"Shut up, Stark."

Bucky's tone was so flat and serious that Tony actually did as he was told. For a moment, because it was really all he could think, he considered interjecting, I'm sorry I tried to kill you.

Bucky went on, "I'm going to send you a file. Watch it."

The holographic screen flared to light before he could protest. The picture was oddly grainy, like it had been shot by a security camera or something of the sort. At first it was too dim to make out the picture, but Tony's gut clenched as the brightness rose and he could make out the outline of a familiar tall, muscular figure pressed against a wall, arms outstretched like they were being held up by chains. There was a hood over his face.

"Fuck," Tony muttered.

Four blurry figures entered the frame. The man in chains—Steve, it was obviously Steve—bucked and tore at the chains, the muscles in his arms cording. It didn't work. One of the figures slammed a heavy bat into his ribcage and he jerked violently. Silently, in bad black and white, each of the figures took turns laying down a beating, for what felt like hours thought it could only have been minutes, until even through the bad quality Tony could see bruises and blood covering his frien—covering Steve's body. All throughout the beating Steve had remained taut, fists clenched above him.

The video cut out.

"You still there?" Tony asked Barnes hoarsely. He'd been able to hold his liquor pretty well since he was 15 but his stomach was roiling now.

"Yes," Bucky said.

"All right, then, why did you call me?" Tony asked, his mouth still moving too fast because this was too damn much to process and he was at least half a bottle deep at this point. "You've got a whole cadre of super friends living in a Wakandan mansion with you if the rumors are true. I must be bottom of your list, why did you call me?"

"Because I need your help," Bucky said again, patient as only an ex-assassin can be. His tone was as unreadable. "The file is heavily encoded. King T'Challa tried breaking it. No one else has anything close to your technical skills and resources." He paused a moment. "Will you help?"

"Of course," Tony said, because really it should have been obvious. "For Cap? Yeah. Of course. I'll get on it. Right away."

"I'm coming to you," Bucky said.

"To me," Tony repeated, wondering vaguely if his spiked scotch was making him hallucinate again. "As in, to the Avengers facility in a country where you are probably a… triply wanted man, or something."

"Yes," Bucky said.

"Of course you are," Tony said. The thought of facing Barnes, in person, after what had gone down in Siberia made his balls want to shrivel up and return to his body, but for Steve, honestly, he would face a number of even more ball-shrivelingly terrifying things. When it came down to it, joining forces with the man he'd recently tried to murder for the mind-controlled killing of his own parents was really on the not-so-bad end of the list of things he would do for Steve.

"T'Challa thought the message came from the United States," Bucky offered. "I don't want you decrypting it, trying to do something on your own, and ruining everything while we're overseas."

"Oh. Well. Okay. Makes sense then," Tony said, but Bucky had already cut the connection.

Bucky arrived six hours later in what looked like a refurbished Quinjet. By that time, Tony was about sixteen cups of coffee deep into his efforts to crack the location the video had been sent from and making good progress.

He extracted himself from the holographic screen he'd been glued to and went to meet the man at the door leading to the helipad. He forced himself not to scuff his feet and stare at the floor like an awkward teen trying to ask someone to prom.

Bucky hopped out of the Quinjet, jaw set, long hair swinging around his face. His missing arm was obvious in the deflated sleeve of his coat, sending yet another jolt of guilt through Tony's gut.

"Uh, hi," Tony said, giving him a small wave.

"Have you found the location yet?" Bucky asked bluntly. Ever the conversationalist.

"No," Tony admitted. "But I'm getting there. Hydra—you're sure it's Hydra, right? I'm, like, at least 98.9 percent sure it's Hydra, anyway, based on the electronic signatures—they must have known I'd end up taking a crack at it. It's got defenses that look like they were specifically designed to stop FRIDAY from getting in."

"Get on with it then," Bucky said stiffly.

"Uh, right now? Actually, I thought we should chat a while. Really get to know each other, you know, maybe make some daisy chains and talk about our feelings-does anyone even do daisy chains these days?" Tony said.

Barnes did not look amused. The wind cutting across the helipad (nothing like the wind at the top of the Tower where the old helipad had been, but strong enough) whipped his hair around his face dramatically, making him look perhaps even less amused than he would have otherwise. Or maybe not.

Tony hastily appended, "…and I've got FRIDAY running algorithms as we speak. Nothing for me to do at the moment."

Bucky just pushed past him and walked through the open door into the compound.

Tony turned on his heel and followed him, muttering to himself, "Well, this is going to be fun."

It was dark and chilly and Steve's body ached. His wrists were raw in the chains and the hot drip of blood down his raised arms was just persistent enough to be annoying despite the pain. His chest was a mess—broken ribs and deep bruises and long lacerations where the nails hammered through a two-by-four had torn into his skin. His right ankle was broken, a souvenir of his capture, which forced him to balance on his left leg to keep the pressure off his arms. He was thirsty.

None of it mattered, because his friends were in danger.

Hydra, in true supervillain-wannabe fashion, had told him some of their plan, after they'd chained him to the wall but before they'd beaten the stuffing out of him. A video that only Tony Stark could decrypt. A ruse to force Steve's friends to come out of hiding and join forces to save him. It got a little fuzzier from there. But whether they were planning to bring them all down together, or use Stark to fracture the budding superhero community further, it wasn't clear.

"Or maybe," the agent had told him in a smug German lilt, "We're just going to blow them all up."

Whatever the specifics, people that Steve cared about were in need of his help, and that meant he had to do something.

No. He was going to do something. It didn't matter that he was alone and injured and drugged with something that made his muscles weak—and meant that despite having been held for almost half a day, his ankle hadn't started knitting back together.

He was going to save them.

Tony had done all he could. Well, that sounded dramatic. He'd put in place all of the decrypting algorithms that he needed to trace the source of the video, and unless something went wrong, that meant all there was to do was wait. For another two hours or so. With Barnes.

Not going to be awkward at all.

Of course, Bucky had already spent all of the last seventeen hours sitting about three feet away from Tony in a faux-relaxed slouch, watching him with a completely unreadable (aside from the fact that it was definitely Not Friendly) expression. But during those seventeen hours Tony had been extremely busy, checking and double-checking the code and trying out new decryption tactics and generally having enough on his mind to distract him from the one man in the world who seemed to have even less of a sense of humor than Steve.

"You, uh, hungry?" he asked Bucky. He'd ordered in Thai…at some point, but it had been light out then and it had been dark for a while, so he figured it had been several hours.

"Yes," Bucky said.

Tony sighed at the monosyllabic response, already keying in an order into the Starkphone app. "Well, there's nothing to do now but wait. I'm going to take a shower in my suite, which you are not invited to, but you are welcome—nay, encouraged—to go to your own suite and do the same." He'd had FRIDAY set up a guest suite for the former assassin as soon as he'd hung up the night before. "Pizza'll be here soon."

"I'll stay here," Barnes grunted, indicating the console Tony was abandoning with a jerk of his chin.

It occurred to Tony for the first time that maybe he wasn't being an absurd shadow to Tony because he didn't trust him to stay on task, or to inform him when he finally cracked the encryption, or because he thought Tony would stab him as soon as he had his back turned. It had to be that Bucky didn't want to miss the moment when Steve's location finally popped up.

Tony's tone softened a little at the realization. "It's not going to happen before the pizza gets here. I promise."

Bucky's eyes were steely. As usual. "You don't know everything."

It was something about the way he said it, little knowing curl of his lips, the slight smugness to his tone, that made every bit of sympathy Tony had started to feel freeze up in an instant, like it'd been dipped in liquid nitrogen. The words he'd shouted at Steve hadn't stopped echoing through his head for weeks (Did you know? DID YOU KNOW?) and here was Bucky telling him he didn't know anything.

He felt guilty for having snapped and gone after Bucky when he'd seen the video. He knew intellectually that Bucky had been under someone else's control just as Barton had been under Loki's control before New York. But that didn't change the fact that it was his hands who had snuffed the life out of Howard and Maria Stark so many years ago, his hands that had sent Tony into an alcohol-fueled tailspin that nearly cost him the company he hadn't even inherited yet and had let Obie step in and hey, look at that, another whole swathe of his life he had no desire to think about ever again. Fine. In his head he didn't blame Bucky anymore, hadn't really since he'd come home beaten and tired and finally slept long enough to realize he'd been acting exactly like the kind of revenge-crazed lunatics the Avengers were sworn to put down. But that didn't change what had happened and he wasn't going to let himself be mocked.

"Look," Tony snapped at him, standing up because he hated that even sitting, Barnes towered over him. "I'm here because Steve needs me. Steve. You and I—we don't have to get along, as long as we get him back. But you do not get to talk to me like that."

"Like what?" Bucky said, and it took everything Tony had to take a step back rather than forward to punch him in his smug face.

And then it occurred to him that maybe Bucky hadn't meant anything by it, maybe it had been an innocuous bit of phrasing that Tony had interpreted wrongly because he was wrapped up in his own problems and fears and pain. All Bucky had said was that he didn't know everything, which was absolutely true in this case. Tony had heard the one word and assumed Bucky had gone in for the heart and reacted, without thinking, again.

"Pizza'll be here soon," Tony mumbled, spun around, and left. He turned the shower to boiling hot and stood under the spray, wondering how the fuck he was going to do this.

Steve's hands were numb. It wasn't surprising, really, since they'd been chained above his head, suspending a part of his weight, for more than a day now. Still, once the thought had occurred to him it was hard not to notice. His wrists, on the other hand, were raw and painful and sticky from the chains. The good news was that his healing factor seemed to be picking up again. The bruises on his chest were already turning yellow and green and the more minor cuts had already faded to white lines that would disappear before long. His ankle no longer ached as fiercely as it had, but it had never been set, and he had a sinking feeling that it was knitting back together crooked, his foot over-pronated so that the sole of his foot faced inward just a bit too much. It still hurt to put any weight on it and it would be a bitch (pardon his language) to reset later, but he was still in better shape than before. Of course, with the healing came ravenous hunger and an increasingly uncomfortable thirst, but it was a worthwhile tradeoff. Soon, he'd be ready to make his escape.

The leader of the Hydra cell who'd caught him was back. To gloat, of course.

"They'll have found your location by now," he said. Steve still didn't know his name. It was driving him a little crazy at this point. The man had a long, pointed face and pale skin. Pointy Face, then. "Or perhaps it will take a few more minutes. I may have overestimated Stark's abilities. He and your friends will all be on their way soon, I imagine."

"And you think you stand a chance?" Steve asked. His mouth was so dry that it came out as more of a croak than anything.

"I think we are well-prepared for the Avengers' assault on… well, that would be giving it away, wouldn't it?" Pointy Face smirked.

"Where are you sending them," Steve said in as commanding a voice as he could manage.

Pointy Face just kept smiling. "I should like you to ponder that question a little longer. To wonder what will become of them."

Steve set his jaw and glared at him with all of the righteousness he could muster.

Unfazed, Pointy Face gestured for two hulking guards to step closer. "Of course, I can't have you growing too strong while you wait," he said. "My…associates here will see to it that you remain, how shall I say, malleable."

One of the guards was holding a heavy bat. The other had a knife. Steve tried not to sag in disappointment—it would be far harder to escape and save his friends in time if he were given another beating like the last one.

But then, that was the point.

Pointy Face stepped back, a sadistic look of pleasure painting his face as Guard #1 smashed his bat directly into Steve's damaged ribs. He screamed through clenched teeth at the loud pop of bone and panted through the pain—until the guard swung again, the bat hitting with a wet crunch and leaving a section of his bare chest horrifically concave. Steve suppressed a cry, and tasted blood on his lips.

Then Guard #2 was beside Steve, his knife glinting in the dim overhead lights of the basement they were keeping him in. Even steeling himself for pain, he wasn't prepared for the utter agony of the sharp blade driving into the meat of his bicep all the way up to the hilt. Then twisting. Steve screamed.

At least his hands were numb.

Still, with every cut and blow, he reminded himself of the only thing that mattered. Getting free, and making sure Hydra didn't hurt anyone else on his account. He just had to hold out and wait for his moment. It was all that mattered.