Chapter 3

Sitting in a hard wooden chair for a month, Tony decides, is extremely uncomfortable. Add a shit-ton of various injuries that hurt like a bitch and an annoying dumbass prattling in your ear at all hours of the day and he is just about ready to kill himself. Seriously. Somebody shut that idiot up. And Tony thought he'd been bad the last time they'd met. Oh no. At least last time he'd been able to get and walk away. Walking at all seems pretty questionable at the moment.

Tony can't help but think back to what had happened the day that they took him. Maybe there's something he could've done, some different action he could've taken that wouldn't have resulted in this shit storm.

…

The damn Audi's engine is on the fritz—the exhaust is coming out this weird blue-ish color and the acceleration isn't as fast as it should be—and it's well past time for a tune-up, anyway. So Tony heads down to the shop and starts doing what he always used to love doing—working. Not on Iron Man, though that's fun too, it's just that he's missed working on his car for the sake of working on his car and making it go faster. He has Jarvis crank up the classic rock and gets to work.

Twenty minutes later he's covered in grease and oil and he knows what's wrong with the engine. The head gasket's blown—that's why the damn thing hadn't been working right, no wonder! He walks over to one of the many supply-slash-tool cabinets and opens the door, and a rather large monkey wrench falls off one of the shelves right onto his left big toe.

"Shit! Ow, fuck, Butterfingers! I swear, if you don't stop booby-trapping my shelves I will strip you down and donate you to the lowest-ranking community college I can find! Jarvis, I know I had an extra head gasket around here somewhere, where the hell is it?"

"Two shelves above eye level, sir, next to the soldering iron."

"What—oh, got it, thanks Jarv."

"My pleasure, sir. Would like an ice pack for your toe?"

"Nah, it's fine."

"Very well, sir."

He walks back over to the Audi with a slight limp, still muttering something about clumsy robots and donations to a daycare, and he's about to start installing the new gasket when the door to the shop shatter behind him. He whirls around and yells for Jarvis, but the whole shop just went dark, Jarvis is down, just who the hell do these people think they are? Nobody breaks into Tony Stark's house—but then he can't move and there's that sound and it's just like the last time and Obadiah's going to take the reactor—but no, Obadiah's dead, Tony killed him! But his eyes are wide and staring and there's a man coming towards him and he's got a needle and Tony needs to get away but, fuck, he still can't move! He feels the needle prick his skin just below the inside of his elbow and then he feels tired and right before he goes unconscious, he hears a voice say, "Nighty-night, Mr. Stark!" And it makes his blood run cold because it's just that creepy and then everything goes black.

…

They all blanch at what Steve just said. Nobody wants to be the one to tell Pepper what had happened, nobody wanted to have to tell her that yes, Tony's been taken, again, and he looks like shit and they have less than twenty-four hours to find him or else he's going to die! So Steve, being the all-American goody two-shoes that he is, volunteers to call her. Sometimes it sucks being the nice guy.

Steve has only met Pepper a few times, mostly when Tony had gotten hurt and was staying in the helicarrier's infirmary. He didn't know much about their relationship, but he remembers the look on Tony's face when he woke up after being unconscious for two days(this involved Dr. Doom and what looked like giant peanuts, but that's a different story), and Pepper's face was the first thing he saw. His eyes had lit up, and he got this huge, sappy grin on his face, and for the first time since he'd met Tony, Steve thought he looked truly happy. Pepper's expression was a mirror of his.

So telling her that the man that inspired this expression on her face had been taken and that there was a distinct possibility that he might be dead soon really wasn't something that Steve wanted to do. But he does, and because he's new to the whole cell phone thing still, he doesn't have his phone on him, so he uses the house landline, and really wishes he hadn't when Pepper answers.

"Tony! Why, oh, why didn't you show up to the meeting this morning, and—"

"Ms. Potts, it's Captain Rogers."

"Captain? Oh, hi. Where's Tony? You're calling from the house phone…is he alright?" Pepper's voice starts to sound apprehensive, and Steve has to swallow and take a deep breath before he can speak.

"Um, no, Ms. Potts, he's not."

"What? What happened, Captain? Where is he?"

"He's been taken, Ms. Potts, kidnapped. When we got here, the door to the shop was broken and all the electronics were down; they've had him for a month."

"But—but that's not possible, I just talked to him yesterday!"

"Whoever took him, they set up this program, I don't have clue how it works, but it—it talks like Tony, it uses his voice, and none of us noticed, it was that good. They left a picture of him, and it looks bad, Ms. Potts."

In New York, Pepper has to sit down. She can't believe it; why him, why now? And how the hell had she not noticed that she'd been talking to a computer? Shaking her head, she asks Steve, "Bad how, Captain?"

"Well, he's all beat up and bloody, and there was a phone number on the back and Natasha called it. The guy said he knew her, and that if we don't hand over SHIELD secrets they're going to kill Tony."

Pepper is quiet for a moment, then she makes a decision. "I'm going to come out there. I don't have anything else I need to do today, I'll be there in a few hours."

"…Okay, Ms. Potts. I'm pretty sure the helicarrier is going to stay around this area. I'll let you know if we move."

"Thank, you Captain. Goodbye."

…

The average top speed of a commercial airliner is just around 650 miles an hour. But the plane that Pepper is flying in is not a commercial airliner; it's owned by Tony Stark, and Tony Stark doesn't do average. Tony also likes doing experiments, and the result of one that involved using arc reactors and improved engines is his private jet that flies at comfortable cruising speed of around mach 2, twice the speed of sound, or about 1,500 miles an hour. Keeping this in mind, you realize that what is usually a six hour flight takes Pepper approximately three hours, and she's on board the helicarrier within four hours of having spoken to Steve.

While she is in the air, however, there's really nothing productive happening in Malibu. Fury comes down with the investigative crew, and hears the same story that he'd heard from Clint. Natasha, with the helpful feature that SHIELD-issued phones have of recording all calls, plays back the conversation between herself and Tony's captor. The voice, whoever it is, is even more familiar to her the second time she hears it, and it infuriates her to no end that she can't place where she's heard it before.

Finding nothing useful at the scene, Fury and the remaining Avengers return to the helicarrier to plan out their next move. Bruce takes with him a tablet that's connected to Jarvis so they can know when the A.I. locates the arc, and hopefully Tony along with it.

When they arrive, Pepper is there already. She looks awkward, out of place, like she doesn't know what to do with herself. It makes sense; the only other times she's ever been there, Tony was with her. She greets them when they walk into the conference room, and asks to see the photo that Steve had mentioned to her. Fury hesitates for a moment, then hands it to her. They watch her face carefully as she studies the piece of paper in her hands, and her she goes pale, the blood leeching out of her face, and her eyes start to water. She puts the photo on the table in front of her and looks away, then takes a deep breath.

"What are you planning to do next, Director Fury, if I may ask?" she says, looking over to the man.

"We're waiting for Jarvis to finish tracing the arc reactor's location at this point. I'm going to try to call this guy back and see if we can get anything useful out of him," the director says, and starts dialing on the speaker phone in the center of the table.

A/N: This didn't go exactly as I'd planned; I was going to officially reveal the bad guy, but then this chpater was getting really long. It's longer than usual, but as a downside, I'm going to be late on my next update because I need to work on crocheting a baby blanket for my new cousin (It's a boy!). On another note, I'm watching Eureka and the main character lives in a house with it's own version of Jarvis, called Sarah, and there's a really rich handsome smart guy named Nathan STARK. Coincidince? I think not!