Chapter 8: Red Dot Blue Dot
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Tony woke up abruptly, and not gently. Clint's snarling and swearing got his attention first, but the hands pinning his shoulders down kept it.
He came up swinging, or at least he tried to. He managed to get his shoulders a few inches off the ground before he was pressed back down, and he opened his eyes to see two big men looming over him, each of them with a hand on his chest, and another over his wrists. Clint was still yelling angrily in the background, and Tony tried to look over his shoulder to make sure he was okay. He was standing pressed to the glass, hands hammering against it, but none of that sound was transferring to Tony. Just his voice.
"Why don't you go stick your tongue up a dog's-"
"This will only take a moment, Mr. Stark," a voice much closer overlapped Clint's and stole Tony's attention. He twisted to look back just as he felt a sharp prick in his arm.
"Get off me!" he hissed through clenched teeth and struggled to twist away on the ground, but the guards barely budged. Tony kicked his legs and bashed his toe on the glass. He squirmed in the other direction and smacked his knee on the base of the solid metal cot, and then he was released. He looked up, fully prepared to attack, and found a baton hovering inches over his chest, tiny blue electric currents zigging in and out at its tip. He took a steadying breath and held very still.
"Now that wasn't so bad, was it," the calm, almost amused voice said. Tony looked over to where Blue was standing outside his cage. A vial filled with what Tony assumed was his blood, was held carefully between forefinger and thumb. He passed the vial off to one of the lab coat guys. This time it was platinum blonde one with matching beard. He looked ridiculous with the white lab coat and hair so white it occasionally looked icy-blue. He took it without word and walked to the other side of the room to meet Red.
Tony looked back to Blue as the guards backed out of his cage and it sealed once more, leaving him trapped behind the barrier. At least he was alone. He rolled his shoulder as he sat up, and looked where his arm had been jabbed with the hypodermic. There was a small bruise forming and a small speck of red.
"You could have just asked." Tony smiled darkly, and Blue heard the lie. He should have, because Tony was making an effort for it to be recognized.
"I don't need to ask, Mr. Stark. I thought you would have realized this by now. Try to get some rest, we're going to run some more tests in a few hours and you might be more comfortable if you're relaxed."
Tony pushed to his feet, ready to get closer for this conversation, but Blue was walking away dismissively and the guards had disappeared as soon as his cell was secured.
"Tony?" Clint asked, and Tony took a deep, calming breath, willing his hands to stop shaking. He turned to the teen, who was still pressed against the glass, one hand splayed wide and the other in a fist. "You good?"
"Yeah, I'm good," he answered, and looked his young friend over. There didn't seem to be any new bruises, though the original ones had darkened to vivid reds and purples around his wrists. The shiner around his eyes was particularly impressive. Every time Tony looked at Clint he wanted to punch someone in the throat. "Did they come at you?" he settled on asking instead.
"Nah," Clint waved off dismissively, and pushed away to sit on the bench. He stayed pressed to the glass though, pulling his knees up to his chest, and Tony would be jealous at the easy flexibility of youth, but he knew for a fact that Older Barton was just as bendy. Tony slowly sat on the bench closest to the glass as well, and moved until his back hit the cool wall. There was barely five inches separating them. It was fucking frustrating. "They just wanted your blood. That's it. They didn't even look at your glowing chest magnet."
"It's an arc reactor, and it's a little more complicated than that," Tony protested, and Clint snorted.
"Whatever."
They didn't say anything for a while after that. Tony was still trying to shake off the grogginess of whatever they were intermittently gassing him with. They both kept their eyes on the three scientists moving about in the lab. Occasionally they could hear snatches of conversation, but nothing interesting or useful.
"I need to get a pair of those contacts," Tony finally muttered to himself, and rubbed at his neck to try and relieve the tension.
"Contacts?" Clint asked, and Tony tilted his head to look at him.
"You don't know what-"
"I know what they are," Clint interrupted him with a huff. "I just didn't realize they were wearing them."
"Yeah," Tony waved briefly at the glass in front of them. "I need them to be able to see the touchpad on the glass. If I can see it, I might be able to figure out how it works." Clint looked at where he'd gestured, back to Tony, and then back at the glass again.
"It moves," he offered after a long pause and Tony looked at him with a frown. "The key pad," Clint explained, tone indicating he thought Tony might be an idiot after all.
"How do you know?" Tony demanded, and Clint hesitated, he clearly hesitated, before he shrugged with his answer.
"I- I watched them tap on it. It moved up and over from the first time, but they used the same pattern."
"They've only accessed yours once," Tony didn't bother hiding the accusation in his tone. He hated being lied to, and after a moment Clint's shoulders slumped.
"So, they might have taken some blood from me again, before they went to you."
"Why didn't you just tell me that in the first place?" Tony asked, worried, worried, worried. He hadn't been this worried the last time he and Clint had been captured together, and both of them had had the shit kicked out of them that time. Just…Clint was just so young now.
"Because I didn't want you to freak out, okay? It was just a bit of blood."
He was younger, but he was just as stubborn.
"We are going to work on your idea of appropriate responses to potentially traumatizing events," Tony muttered, feeling uneasy in his bones, and maybe a little, tiny bit hypocritical.
"You think bleeding is traumatizing? At least it wasn't because of a knife," Clint scoffed.
"Jesus," Tony muttered with feeling and rubbed at his eyes. He was never having kids if this is what it felt like just listening to their casual disregard. Bravado or not, Clint was speaking from experience.
They fell silent after that, only speaking when Clint's superior eyesight spotted something interesting he felt Tony should know about. Seriously, Tony had known the man could see well at a distance, but to be able to easily read the computer screens from across the room…that was just ludicrous. It was also telling that their captors, who Tony knew could hear everything said between himself and Clint, were completely unconcerned with this information sharing.
Every time one of the white coat scientists passed by he would glance at them. Tony had felt less like an animal on display during press conferences.
It was concerning.
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The next time the scientists approached, hours after the last blood drawing, they stood outside Clint's cage and watched him.
"We should test the blocker out," Red said, hands behind his back as he stared at Clint. Clint had adopted that unnatural stillness of prey trying to remain inconspicuous in the sight of a larger predator. They were both still pressed into their corners, inches from one another. Tony wanted Clint behind him, out of their fucking view.
"Not yet," Blue said, and Red's lips pursed.
"We need to know if it's going to work. We thought the initial de-aging would wipe memory away but clearly he's still accessing his adult experiences. If the blocker successfully removes access to the memories he'll be much easier to control."
"I said not yet," Blue responded inflexibly, no anger present but enough bite that Red shut up about it. Tony had an icy feeling in his gut.
"He's right," Beard agreed with Blue, still scrutinizing Clint. "If we're planning on testing if the age reversal is possible, using the memory blocker before the reversal could cause severe developmental issues in adult form. It could damage him permanently." He speculated, thumb and forefinger rubbing thoughtfully along his jaw.
"So?" Red dismissed. "He wasn't the initial target, what does it matter if he's damaged?"
"Losing his kind of potential because of impatience would not make our employer happy. Barton might not have been in the plan," Blue dismissed, and turned to walk away, "but waste not want not."
Red looked irritated.
"Don't worry," Beard consoled with a modicum of sympathy. "We already know that we can reduce them in years. If the reversal is successful, we'll just reduce his age again and you can test the blocker then. It will be interesting to see how the divisions between declarative and procedural memory will be affected. You know he'll want it confirmed before trying it on Stark anyway."
"Yeah," Red sighed, and they turned to walk away. "Probably best to wait anyway, after what happened to the first subject."
There was a long heavy silence.
"Told you it was all about you," Clint said after a while, seemingly glib.
"Usually people are after my money, not my adoption papers," Tony frowned.
"It's a smart plan," Clint shrugged, and Tony gaped at him.
"Are you serious? Shooting someone with experimental tech is never a good plan!"
"Whatever, I've seen the video of your trial runs with the Ironman suit; not like this is that different. Besides, it sort of is about money." After a moment Tony lost the will to be pissed. He was just tired.
"Yeah," he agreed with Clint, because it was true. If they de-aged Tony and then 'took him in' and earned his loyalty…he would probably make anything they asked for. Hell, he knew he would, especially if they showed him a bit of attention and care. They wouldn't need his company's money if they could just patent his new designs. He'd done exactly that for Obadiah, before the man betrayed him for power. These guys were playing the long game. "Crap."
"Don't worry, I won't let them fuck you up that way," Clint vowed and Tony…he just didn't have experience to deal with shit like this.
"You will let them do whatever the hell they want to me, you idiot." Tony snapped. "You will focus on protecting yourself."
"No shit I'll protect myself," Clint sneered belligerently, but ruined the effect as he curled in on himself a little more, which Tony hadn't thought was possible with how tightly he was packed in the corner already.
"See that you do," Tony ordered, and they fell into silence.
They both understood exactly how much trouble they were in.
Since it was now pretty damn clear these were the ones responsible for Clint's condition in the first place, Tony wanted to know who they were. Maybe he could work that into an escape plan.
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It had been thirty-one hours total since Tony and Clint had been taken, and Bruce was sitting quietly in his lab, going over SHIELD's best engineers work in association with Clint's condition.
They were getting closer to figuring out how Clint had been turned into a teenager. It had taken some pretty absurd research and very, very off the wall thinking by their best, and maybe the inclusion of a few not so terrestrial influences, but they were learning how it had happened. Everything was just sitting in front of Bruce, waiting for him to make the final connections. But he couldn't. He wasn't an engineer, not really. He had always expected to put the final piece of the puzzle together with Tony. Between them, after all, they theoretically had expertise to pull this off, but Bruce's main knowledge was in radiation and chemical processes and particulate theories. He understood everything he was looking at here, just…
"Arrrgh!" he yelled in irritation and smacked the cup of coffee resting by his hand away. It fell to the ground with a satisfying crash, and the octa-roomba that had been following him around since he got back to the tower practically pounced on it. He ran his fingers through his hair, and clutched at the short strands, before letting out a deep sigh and dragging his hands down to push his glasses out of the way and rub at his eyes. He took a few deep breaths to calm himself. He was nowhere close to losing control of the Other guy, but that didn't make the frustration any easier to deal with.
An abrupt, staccato crunch by his feet demanded his attention, and he let his glasses fall back into place as he peered down to the ground. Two of the vacuum-bots multiple arms were dragging on the ground, their mouths bumping into each other as it tried to forcefully suck up pottery shards that were clearly too large. It was apparently determined to do its job though, as it shimmied until the shard was pulled into one of the hoses to be pulverized internally. The crunching sounds were loud in the otherwise silent lab. Bruce pulled his feet from the floor to rest on the bottom rung of his stool to keep out of its way. It was almost sadly predictable when, a moment later, the bot made a distressed whine, and sort of spazzed into stillness.
Apparently the mug had been too much. With a sigh Bruce bent down and scooped it up; he needed a distraction from his work anyway. It was short work to expose the innards, especially as he'd watched Clint do it several times in the last week, and he immediately saw that the cooling fan was fried. He could fix that.
He was about to gather his tools when something odd caught his attention. He looked more closely at a tiny black disk that didn't seem to belong inside the simplistic robot (simplistic by Tony's standards), or at least Bruce thought it didn't belong there. Bruce knew what he thought it looked like, and he hoped he was wrong, otherwise Tony would have some very serious explaining to do when they got him back.
"Jarvis," he asked and, with a very small pair of needle nose pliers he carefully plucked the tiny black disk from where it was stuck just inside the bot's shell. It came off easily. "Can you confirm what this is, please?"
"It is an audio transferring device. Stock number seventeen." There was a pause, which was unusual, but not unheard of for Jarvis, before the AI continued. "It is supposed to be in the storage room in Tony's lab. Inventory scans indicate that five more are missing."
"Did Tony put them in here?" Bruce asked, confused.
"No, he did not." Jarvis confirmed, and Bruce frowned, but before he could ask about his next suspicion Jarvis spoke up again. "All six devices are synched with one hearing-piece. Its current location is in Clint Barton's quarters."
Bruce took a moment to absorb that, and then left his lab.
He went directly to media room. Steve and Natasha were hovering at opposite ends of a large circular table in the center of the space, each deftly manipulating the table screen and the projected 3D images.
"Clint planted bugs in the cleaning bots," he announced, and Steve looked up with a puzzled frown, eyeing the dime-sized disk Bruce laid out on the table.
"He can do that? He's just a kid."
"It would appear we didn't watch him closely enough," Bruce was a little incredulous himself, but he remembered all too well how Natasha had used a six year old to get his attention in India. Clint was far from six, and apparently far sharper than he generally let on, though his blatant repair work on the bots had been a pretty big tell.
"Or he just never trusted us," Steve sighed, and yeah, that was likely as well. Bruce would like to say he was surprised, but Bruce had been around the block a few times himself and not much surprised him anymore. "You don't seem shocked by this," Steve looked to Natasha, and Bruce turned to observe where she was intent on her screens.
"It's not about trust. It's about survival," she said without looking up.
"So you knew about the bugs?" Bruce asked.
"No, but I knew Clint wasn't settled. The bugs explain why he chose yesterday to leave. He must have overheard the conversation about the Council, and decided it was time to leave for real."
"For real? So the first few attempts were just test runs?" Steve shook his head, some of the despair Bruce was feeling was visible in the Captain's eyes.
"Not the first one," Natasha disagreed, and then finally looked between them. "He wouldn't expect us to keep protecting him, and he's always been good at waiting for the right moment to strike."
"But we know he was getting comfortable here. We knew he wanted to stay," Steve sighed, but it was clear he just felt the need to voice his concerns, not that he didn't understand. Bruce resisted the urge to pinch where his glasses generally rested on his nose in frustration.
"Survival is about letting go of the things you want the most," Bruce replied, and then looked back at the bug to avoid Steve's assessing gaze.
"I might have something," Natasha announced, and thank god because Bruce was ready for a conversation change, big time. A vertical list emerged from the middle of the table and Bruce started reading immediately.
"What are these locations?" Steve asked, all business again as he looked over the addresses.
"They are a mix of SHIELD and WSC sites," Sitwell clarified. Bruce turned to see him marching through the door. "Jarvis, if you could pull up a map with the relevant data please." He stopped right beside Bruce.
"Of course," Jarvis agreed even as the list transformed to a large map of the world, with red and blue location dots scattered over it. "The blue indicators are SHIELD operated, the red are the World Security Council."
"Remove all sites that are not based in the North and South American continents," Natasha ordered, and the majority of the map fell away, leaving just the requested locations. They all looked at it for a long moment in silence.
"They would still be in North America. Maybe Mexico, but I don't think they would have made it to South America. It would have left them exposed for too long and we would have been able to spot the extraction team's retreat." Sitwell explained. Natasha agreed, and the dots in South America disappeared from the map.
"Why are we looking at SHIELD facility locations?" Steve asked. Bruce was pretty sure he was committing each location to memory.
"Because some SHIELD locations are WSC funded, and some are completely WSC controlled but using SHIELD as a cover," Natasha explained.
"Don't worry," Sitwell said, seemingly unconcerned, "we have SHIELD bases completely off the radar to WSC, and beyond their reach. We play ball because we have to, but we keep the best pitchers for ourselves." A smirk touched his lips. "And the best catchers, outfielders, short stops and first bases."
"Not second or third?" Steve asked, not overly amused.
"Them too, but we like to let the Council think that they at least have one or two of the prime picks." Sitwell stood back and eyed the map. "Remove the bases from Austin, Flagstaff, and Fort Wayne," he ordered, and the dots disappeared. The agent frowned at what was left. Bruce could understand why, because there were still at least thirty locations left on the map.
"How do we narrow it down?" he asked. Sitwell smiled grimly.
"Jarvis, can you hack into each location's sign-in logs? I want to know which facility Rafat and Samuels visited most over the last five months. We'll narrow it down from there."
"As you request," Jarvis confirmed instantly. They were getting somewhere. Finally.
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They came for Tony next.
He didn't protest, didn't resist, and did exactly as they asked.
His instincts screamed at him to fight, to take them down. He had a fairly decent chance at winning too; he'd been training with Happy for years, and more recently with his team. One did not spar with master assassins and Captain America and not pick up a few skills.
They were smart though: they put a guard in Clint's cage. The guard had some kind of stun baton and she didn't hesitate to smack Clint with it. He went down with a startled cry, and she dragged him to his knees with a hand tightly gripping his unkempt blonde hair and steadied the baton inches from his temple. Clint held very still, but apparently did not feel the need to keep quiet.
"What are you going to do? Leave him the fuck alone!" The teen's voice shook as he protested. Red seemed amused by this as he patted the silver examination table that was parked in the middle of the room, showing Tony where he wanted him. The sterile table was surrounded by intrusive-looking tools, with a large machine overhead that could've been anything from a diagnostic machine to surgical laser.
Tony calmly (holy shit was he ever not calm; there was nothing calming about this) slid onto the table and allowed them to bind his wrists and ankles. If he turned his head to the left he had a clear view of Clint. The guard had left the cell, and the kid was plastered to the front of it, looking pale and skinny and terrified. Tony winked at him. Like magic, the kid's fear fled, replaced by a harsh, angry look. Good. Tony would take anger over fear. At the very least it helped him feel calmer.
The table was like ice under his back.
"You can't just turn him into a kid!" Clint yelled, his words slightly muffled from the distance. He bounced behind the glass, moving back and forth with frantic energy. "He's got a giant hunk of metal in his chest! It's not going to just shrink with him! It's going to rip him open! Or crush his lungs or something!" Yeah…Clint gets a fail for comforting techniques. Apparently that's something that doesn't change with age either. "He's not much use to you dead!" Clint rapidly banged the glass with a concentrated look, and then frustration took over and he threw himself at it instead, full body attacks that didn't even make the glass shake.
He was going to hurt himself. More.
Above Tony, Red and Beard paused and shared a look. Tony's calm façade broke a little.
"Are you seriously implying you didn't consider this fact before?!" he gaped, because holy fuck Clint was right: Tony was going to die. "You needed a ten year old to point this out to you! I'm revoking your evil scientist cards. Consider them revoked, permanently." Holy fuck, he was going to die.
Red shrugged above him. His lips twitched a little like he thought this was funny, before he looked directly at Tony.
"This is just a preliminary examination. We have plans to remove the infamous pieces of shrapnel before we proceed. Then we will remove the reactor. We have considered the importance of your surviving, considering the lengths we've gone to acquire you in the first place."
"Yeah?" Tony grumbled, twisting his wrists in the cuffs. The material was soft but had no give. "Did you think about that before you tried to shoot me the first time?" There was another pause.
"Of course we did, now remain still for these tests. We would rather not sedate you."
Shit.
Things were not looking up.
