Thanks to equalopportunityobsessor for betaing this chapter!
Same thing as last time, if you see something wrong, please just let me know...
Merry Christmas everyone!
"Hi, Robocop," Tony grunted, waking up in much the same way as he had the day before.
He was provided a meager breakfast, was directed to put the gray clothes on, and was marched back to the room with the chair. Apparently, this was going to be his life now. He wondered how often he would be allowed to shower: the day before, it hadn't been on the menu.
He had studied the blueprints of the chair for hours already, and while the idea filled him with distaste, he knew that he now had to start working on it or his babysitters would get suspicious. After all, it was a pretty simple mechanism: the structure was fine, and the part that was damaged was only a rotating piece supporting a batch of electrodes, that incidentally had exactly the right shape to clamp around someone's skull.
Tony decided to start with the mobile part. He had no intention of actually repairing the thing, but maybe, if he had a day or two, he could think of something?
He took a screwdriver and climbed on the chair. After five seconds of staring, he knew what was wrong and that less than an hour would be required to fix the part. Another ten seconds later, he had also found nine ways to slow his progress, which should give him a two-days respite. It was supposed to be very precise, after all.
"Hey, Yins-" he started before stilling, berating himself. That was stupid, he knew where he was, and he definitely didn't need to appear weaker. But the silence was gnawing at his already wavering sanity...
"Hey, Terminator, pass me the blueprints, please?"
The man didn't react to the nickname, but after a few seconds during which Tony thought that he was going to be ignored, he obeyed.
Well, he could work with that. The guy definitely lacked conversation skills, but apart from that – and the fact that he couldn't run complex calculations, but at the moment that wasn't really a concern – he would be an acceptable assistant. Maybe he could even be convinced to do some heavy lifting.
It wouldn't be like Yinsen, of course. He was more likely to break his neck if he caught Tony trying to escape, for one. But he didn't really look tech-savvy or interested by Tony's progress enough to discover his stalling, so as long as Tony at least looked like he was working, the man definitely wouldn't give him more to worry about than the cameras he could see in the corners.
A few minutes later, he stopped working, frowning. The thing was heavy, and he couldn't hold it and work on its underside at the same time. He glanced at the soldier's impressive musculature from the corner of his eyes.
"I could use a hand here, Darth Vader," he said, the metal awkwardly held up by his shoulder, digging painfully in his skin.
The man didn't take the cue and kept watching him coldly. Tony frowned.
"Come on, I can't do this all day, jerk!" he growled, because damn his shoulder was sore, and it shouldn't even be a problem except that he was not nearly as fit as he had been a few weeks ago, what with the whole being starved thing, and that asshole was just looking at him as if he didn't understand.
The soldier's brow pinched slightly, and for a moment his eyes darted to the side, his focused expression turning almost lost. He stepped closer and opened his mouth, licking his lips.
Then he slammed violently into the engineer, his left shoulder first, sending Tony crashing to the ground with his charge so hard that his vision briefly blacked out. The man was kneeling on him, metal hand pushing down on the arc reactor.
"Do not try to distract me," he growled, "you won't escape."
"Wasn't trying to..." the prisoner wheezed, stunned. He could already feel his jaw swelling and it hurt and what the hell is wrong with this guy?
But then he noticed the soldier's expression. He didn't look angry, like his tone of voice seemed to imply, but rather scared, his eyes unfocused, as if he was watching something happening far behind Tony. Or inside his own head.
The genius stayed as still as he could while his guard breathed heavily. After a few moments, the pressure on his chest eased and the soldier rocked back on his heels, allowing him to scramble back and rise up on his elbow.
That had been unexpected. And terrifying. He had absolutely no idea what had just happened.
The guard was back to his usual impassiveness. He got up, and, as if nothing had happened, lifted the part he had been asked to.
What the fuck was that all about?
He woke up in the middle of the night, and, for once, it wasn't because of his nightmares.
The key word in this sentence being "his".
The soldier, who was still sitting in his chair, was twitching and muffling small, broken sounds in the heel of his flesh hand. It took Tony a few moments to realize that his eyes were closed: he was still asleep. It was the first time he could see him less than perfectly watchful.
Careful not to make too much noise, the engineer got out of his bed. In the three days he had already been in this place, during which he had been continuously shadowed by the soldier, it was only the second time he had seen the man look human, and he still didn't know what had warranted the first one. What was he dreaming about?
Tony had a thought for his own nightmares, the ones filled with young soldiers and explosions, with stale, icy water and cruel eyes. He reached for the sleeping man.
A fluid motion later, he was thrown against the far wall and slid to the floor, the soldier looming angrily above him. He gasped for air and raised his hands.
"Wow, sorry! I won't do that again!" he cried out, stunned.
The man didn't answer, but he stayed still for long enough that Tony started to tense, expecting a blow that didn't come. Instead, he blinked slowly and went back to the blank indifference that seemed to be his default expression.
"You're an idiot," he finally said with a small frown. "You'll get yourself killed."
And for a minute the genius was speechless, because the man's voice had changed, and it wasn't neutral, it was exasperated and fond. And his accent, which until now had been mostly unrecognizable but maybe hinting slightly toward Eastern Europe, was now marked enough for Tony to recognize it as American, likely from New York. As if the soldier had taken someone else's voice and words. And for the first time, the engineer wondered whose they were, and who they were addressed to, because it was certainly not him.
Actually, it raised a lot of new questions: the soldier seemed young, not older than thirty, if you forgot about the dark circles under his eyes. He couldn't have been with HYDRA for very long. Who had he been, before? Where did he come from? Eastern Europe or America? How did he lose his arm?
Of course, Tony had already wondered about his loyalty to HYDRA when he first started working on the chair, and later when it became obvious that its function was to deliver a strong electrical current through someone's brain. He wasn't sure about it, because despite being a genius he still didn't like biology, but he was at least half certain that the part it was meant to target was the hippocampus, and he thought he remembered reading something about the role it played with memory.
So there was definitely a chance that he could get the man to help him if the device didn't work correctly. Which was nice, because it meant that this could actually serve him, even if he still never would have voluntarily repaired what was so obviously a torture instrument.
Of course, there was also the possibility that the HYDRA scientists would know what he was doing, and in that case he was setting himself up for a world of hurt, but he refused to consider it. If they needed him to repair the damages – and they did, no matter what they said – it was highly plausible that he was the only competent engineer they had at hand.
"Go back to bed," the now-back-to-impassiveness soldier said, interrupting his thoughts.
Nodding, he rose gingerly, mindful of the new bruises he could feel on his back – because after last time that was exactly what he needed... – and laid down under the cover, knowing well that he wouldn't be able to fall back asleep for a long time.
The following morning, he was taken aback by the arrival of a dozen guards in his little room as soon as he finished his breakfast. Their weapons were drawn, if pointed down.
"Stand down!" the leader barked, raising slightly his rifle.
Tony stayed still, keeping carefully his hands in sight of the newcomers. Eight of them circled the Winter Soldier, who stood up and followed them outside of the room. The engineer sighed internally: apparently, this wasn't about him. Which was probably good news, but he had hoped that maybe the change in routine meant that he would be allowed to take a shower: he hadn't had one since his first day there and he was beginning to stink.
But the remaining soldiers, who looked much more relaxed since the others departure, only brought him to the same room as usual, where the man who had shown him the chair in the first place – and who seemed to be running the place, so Tony had taken to calling him "the director" in his head – was waiting for him. Tony steeled himself for an unpleasant conversation at first, but had to hold back a smile when he noticed how uncomfortable the man looked. Was he scared?
"Good morning, Mr. Stark," he started, probably unaware of how obvious his discomfort was. "How are the repair going?"
So that's what this is about, the genius thought. A timeline. And he would bet his considerable fortune on this sudden urgency being related to the Winter Soldier's strange behavior of late.
"Well, if nothing go wrong I should be done in five days," he answered with a forced smile.
The man scowled. "I am sure that you could go faster if properly motivated. You will be done in three days, and then you'll be allowed to shower," he answered with probably as much authority as he could muster, which didn't really impress Tony. He was used to dealing with impossible deadlines set by generals, and knew the value of wildly overestimating how much time he needed. He could do it in three days, but if he had said that in the first place, they would probably have demanded that he be done for the next day.
The prospect of a shower was a nice one, too. He had been expecting threats rather than bribery, to be honest. Tony nodded, conscious that his well-being still heavily depended on his compliance, and was relieved when the man, apparently deciding that he was obedient enough, left him with two guards without another word. Ignoring their silent presence in his back, he went back to his work.
It was high time to start repairing the electrodes. It wasn't as if he really needed to put it off any longer: he had convinced a bunch of (uneducated, but that was a minor detail) terrorists that he was building missiles instead of a giant suite of armor; he could rewire the thing discretely. It would hurt like a son of a bitch for anyone unlucky enough to get the thing around their head, but hey, thousands of volts through the cluster of nerves in their nape would still be better than thousands of volts frying their brain... hopefully.
A few hours later, he was surprised by the return of the Winter Soldier, who posted himself in a corner, staring intently at the engineer and ignoring the other guards who seemed to be somewhere between awed and terrified by him and left immediately. His movements were back to the focused efficiency he had displayed during their first meeting, in the desert, an eternity ago.
"Back so soon, sweetheart?" he said with a cheeky smile. "Did you miss me that much?"
He didn't get an answer, but he wasn't really expecting one. He had spent the last few days with the man and had yet to find a way to rile him up. Except for that weird bit when he had asked for his help for the first time, and the previous night, of course. But Tony's chatter and nicknames didn't seem to faze him. The genius took full advantage of it, happy to be able to run his mouth as he pleased without the expectation of a beating when it slipped.
He then noticed the tray the soldier had been carrying and grinned. Food. He started digging in gleefully: they apparently still thought that they didn't need to starve him to force him to comply. As if threats could break me...
But after a few mouthfuls, his thoughts took a sudden dark turn: he cringed when he remembered that the only reason why he was currently working and being fed enough, and not curled up in a too cold room like a few days earlier – or worse, because he doubted that he had seen the worst of it – was because of the attack on the base he had been kept in. He wasn't broken, that was a given, but he could have been.
His appetite gone, he pushed the tray away. He had to find a way to get out of there, and soon. His captors resources were low enough that they needed him to work for them; it would probably not last, and if he waited too long, he would be utterly screwed.
At some point, they would ask him for something he wouldn't be willing to provide, and seeing how willing to hurt him they had already been, he really didn't want to know how they would convince him.
On the other hand, giving them the Jericho sounded even worse than giving it to the Ten Rings.
He shuddered and went back to his work, trying to fill his mind with formulas and schematics instead of cold water and car batteries.
Two days later, Tony nervously connected the last wire. He wasn't scared that he would fail. If anything, it was the most confident he had been for months: unlike the armor he had built in the cave, this was not even a technical challenge. But the previous few days had worn him out. The Winter Soldier behavior had been... erratic, to say the least.
Most of the time, he had been the perfect guard, never letting Tony out of his sight, to the point where Tony wondered whether the soldier had eaten at all during the last week. He probably slept, but apart from that first nightmare, Tony hadn't been able to catch him at it. He never acknowledged the engineer's attempts to talk to him, but was also never really violent, which made for a welcome change. He hadn't spoken for any other reason than to give him orders since the nightmare, and there was no hint in his voice of the American he had sounded like at the time.
But at times, he would stare into the empty space. Tony suspected that he didn't really know the extent of it: he only noticed it when he moved out of his previous line of sight and the man didn't react. And he would knit his brow in an expression that only reminded Tony of a lost child, which was completely stupid since he was well aware how dangerous and utterly terrifying the Winter Soldier could be. Maybe that was Stockholm syndrome finally kicking in...
And on two occasion, the engineer had tried handing him things while he was in this state. He had crushed them when he had jerked back to himself. Literally crushed them, including a steel screwdriver. He tried not to think what would happen if his hand got in the way in this kind of situation.
Regardless, the genius tried very hard to remember that the man was not actually on his side, but between his lack of brutality and the suspicion that he was not the one in control at all, he had a strong tendency to see him as a potential ally. Especially if the chair worked (or in this case didn't) like he hoped it would.
Breathing slowly and hoping that his jumpiness wasn't too apparent, or that it wouldn't seem out of place, he straightened and brushed his hands on his shirt.
"I'm done," he declared.
A few minutes later, ten guards and the director appeared in the room. They trained their weapons on him at once and Tony raised his hands before being forcefully shoved to his knees.
"I hope for your sake that it works, Mr. Stark," the director said, a mix of anticipation and nervousness obvious on his face.
The engineer didn't answer, more interested in the arrival of three men in white coats, obviously technicians or doctors, who made a beeline for the chair and started pushing buttons. Blinking lights started to appear and one of them waved his hand, which made the hands that were painfully digging in Tony's shoulders relax fractionally. His repairs looked genuine enough to fool them, then.
"Sir, it is ready for the asset," one of the technicians said.
"Very well. Wipe him!" the director barked in answer.
Tony turned his eyes in time to see the Winter Soldier – did they really call him "the asset"? – undress with military efficiency, leaving him bare-chested. One of the guards shoved him forward and he stumbled to the chair before sitting in it, face blank.
It was something to suspect who the chair was made for, and another to actually see him in it. Tony felt nauseous. He hadn't thought that they would let him watch, and that wasn't a pleasant surprise.
One of the men in white placed a small piece of rubber in front of the soldier's face, and he took it in his mouth before being shoved backward. He tensed up; the restrains slowly closed around his arms.
As the top started moving, Tony could see the soldier's chest rising and falling more and more quickly. Fascinated and disgusted in equal parts, he saw the electrodes he had been working on a few minutes earlier close around his skull.
For several long moments, it was silent. Too silent. Tony sucked in a breath, about to sigh in relief, thinking maybe he had been wrong, maybe his calculations had been off, maybe the chair wasn't meant to hurt at all -
Then the Winter Soldier screamed.
