Tony kind of expected this to be straightforward. They were just mobile suits, after all; how hard could it be? Compared to the Chitauri or Loki?
He might have misjudged how hard it would be, by maybe a lot. When Duo said "go for the heads," he thought it would be a no-brainer. Eight suits, eight shots, done.
Not done. Either the pilots of the suits were better than anticipated or Duo underestimated them, but actually getting to those heads was not easy, the suits were good at protecting them, and the heads were better reinforced than Duo led them to believe.
Even worse, either someone taught these pilots to deal with small, individual targets or they were just that good, because Tony, Cap, and Peter had all been thrown around a fair amount. His armor was holding up okay, for now, but Tony was getting real tired of being knocked about like an obnoxious fly.
"Duo, these suits are taking an awful lot more damage than you told us they would," Cap's voice came over the comm.
"Yeah, well, I don't usually deal with suits without a suit myself—that's just stupid. I thought you guys were tougher than—" He cursed and cut out for a moment. "Fuck! Viz! Keep 'em offa me!"
"I am doing my best, Duo," Vision replied calmly, though there was a slight undertone of irritation in his voice. "They are being very persistent."
"Fuck this," Duo growled. The comm muffled the sound of gunshots, but Tony could still hear them, and he flew up to catch a Spider-kid.
"Thanks, Mr. Stark."
His heart was still in his throat while he waited for Duo to say something else. "If you just fucking kill them, they won't get back up."
"These are people too, Duo. We try not to use lethal force—" Cap began.
Duo interrupted him. "Yeah, yeah, save it for the Ethics Committee. They're all going to fucking die if I don't knock out the self-destruct anyway. Fucking idiots." The last was muttered more under his breath and not necessarily for them, but he didn't seem to be picky under the circumstances.
"How much time do we got?" Wilson asked.
Tony glanced at the countdown in his HUD. "T-minus five minutes and some change."
"You gonna make it, Duo?" Wilson asked again.
A stream of something that could only be some Chinese language and emphatic curses at that came over the comm. "If I stop getting interrupted!" Another gunshot. "Viz, really?"
"I do not think killing is necessary."
"It's practical," Duo retorted.
"Even so, I do not think we need to kill in order to overcome."
"For fuck's sake."
Tony was going to have to unpack all of his feelings about Duo's attitude toward killing his enemies later, because right now, he was a little busy with these fucking mobile suits. Tony targeted the neck joint of one and finally got a hit through, taking out the head. That left them with eight—they had started with eight, three more had come out of the cave, bringing them up to eleven, but now they were back down to eight.
"Anytime now, Duo," Wilson said, sounding impatient as he knocked out another head. Seven.
"I'm in!" Duo said, triumphantly. "Viz, get out there and help them. I'm in, but I still need to unlock everything. No one's getting to me in here."
"Agreed," Vision replied.
Spider-kid tried to wrap his webbing around the legs of a suit, only to be snatched out of the air. "A little help here!" Before Tony could make a move, Redwing seared off the hand of the suit, and Wilson caught Peter on the way down, getting another relieved "Thanks," in return.
Cap's shield got jammed in the neck join of another suit, hindering it, but not taking it out.
"These are really annoying!" Tony yelled, trying to get close to dislodge the shield, only to get swatted at again.
"You dealt with the giant alien things," Duo replied dryly. "What are a few suits compared to that?"
"We had a Hulk!" Tony snaps back.
Duo chuckles softly and replies, "I'm almost in. Gimme another two."
"Another two might be all we can spare—" Wilson said, swooping in and managing to dislodge Cap's shield, throwing it down to him, only to get swatted like a bug.
"Sam!" Cap yelled. Tony watched as Wilson's wing ripped free, and he spun away into freefall, memories of watching Rhodey fall overlapping with Tony too far away to do anything.
"Got him!" Spider-kid yelled, shooting webbing to break his fall, but Wilson did nothing to protect himself or ease the landing, which was not a good sign.
Vision flew over to pick him up from the webbing before a suit could step on him.
"Sam!" Cap called again.
"He is unconscious, Captain," Vision informed.
"Careful with him then!" Tony snapped back.
Not someone else, he thought desperately. He didn't particularly like Wilson—he was all Cap's man—but he didn't ever want to see anyone that was still somehow his get hurt like that again.
"I will retreat with Staff Sergeant Wilson," Vision said.
"Do that," Tony said as Spider-kid webbed around a suit, trying to tie it up. He didn't do a good enough job of it because it brought out a beam saber, and apparently, Spider-kid's webbing was not beam-saber-proof. "Peter! Get out of there!"
"Getting gone!" Peter replied, zooming away from the sword's arc.
Cap stopped by his side. "I guess they are really not playing anymore," he said, sounding somewhere between annoyed and resigned.
A dark chuckle sounded through their comms, and it took Tony a moment to place it. "Duo?" he asked. He didn't get an answer, and when he glanced at Cap, he could see stress lines around his eyes. "Duo?" he asked again.
There were explosions from inside the rock formation, then something green and fast flew out of the hole where Duo and Vision had originally disappeared into, nailing a suit in the chest. A line of red connected it to what must be the Gundam still inside the cave.
Then the Gundam was there. Its ornamentation reminded Tony of a dragon, and it was certainly as terrifying as one, especially when it pulled out the beam trident. Even moving quickly, Tony could immediately see why the Hydra agents couldn't get it out of that crevice without it being active; it was just too big.
Tony had watched countless hours of Gundam battles while trying to make sense of them. He knew all the data, knew how superior they were, hypothesized how superior their pilots were. He had all the math that told him why the Gundams had been such terrifying opponents.
In Sokovia, the Gundams had dealt with Ultron-bots that had been little more than a nuisance before focusing on keeping the entire city from falling out of the sky and setting off a nuclear winter.
The numbers and videos and Tony's limited experience in no way conveyed a Gundam's true destructive capacity on a battlefield.
In the videos, the opposing suits seemed slow and clumsy. In reality, they were fast—the Gundam was just that much faster. Tony knew, had done the calculations, that told him that the pilots had to pull major g's to move like that, but seeing it in person? In person, it looked effortless. It was a professional dancer moving among people whose feet had fallen asleep.
Three more Hydra suits were downed before they even realized they had a new opponent to deal with, and from there, they quickly regrouped and tried to target the Gundam, utterly disregarding the Avengers.
Peter landed where Tony and Steve stood, trying to get out of the suit's way.
"Whoa," he said in a voice that spoke of both awe and shock.
For a few heartbeats, the remaining Hydra suits panicked. They no longer cared about the destruction they were causing and turned their biggest weapons on the Gundam. Too little. Too late. Tony didn't think it would have made a difference if they had been ready and expecting the Gundam. The beam trident tore through suits like a scythe through grain. Worse, it wasn't just disabling the suits; it targeted the cockpits.
Duo targeted the cockpits.
The last suit exploded from the cockpit and went still, and the Gundam did so as well.
"FRI—time from the Gundam entering the battle?" Tony asked, voice dry.
"One minute and twenty-eight seconds, Boss," she replied.
A minute and a half to wipe out eight suits.
"Patch me through, FRI. Duo?" he asked.
Nothing. No heavy breathing. No laughter. No response.
"If I go quiet or start laughing, stay away from me."
The Gundam straightened, and its head turned until it found them. Tony suddenly wished that Vision hadn't left with Wilson.
"Duo?" Tony tried, to no response.
"Maxwell," Cap tried.
Hill's face popped up on his HUD as something about the Gundam's posture turned menacing.
"Hill, we're a little busy," Tony told her even as they all braced to deal with an attack.
"I've got Chang on the line. Patch us through to the Gundam," she told him.
Tony didn't question the command.
"You heard the lady, FRI."
"Maxwell!" a voice came over the line, and something in the Gundam's posture changed, as if it were listening. There was a quick curse that Tony didn't catch but probably wasn't English anyway. "02, stand down."
The Gundam twirled the trident as easily as if a real person were handling it, and there was something lazy, almost taunting about the motion. Tony realized that they must have also given Chang visual, because he reacted to the body language.
"Damn it, Duo. Stand. Down."
A soft, menacing laugh that seemed to start in the belly and work its way out echoed through Tony's helmet, and he was definitely going to have nightmares featuring that laugh.
"If you use my Nataku to harm innocents, I will never forgive!"
"Innocents?" Duo asked, and there was something cold and inhuman in his voice when he asked it. Tony had heard that tone before, though not from Duo. He'd heard it from villains who thought humans were lesser things. He did not like hearing it from his son.
"Certainly more innocent than us," Chang replied, sounding weary.
The beam trident powered down, and Cap and Peter both audibly sighed in relief next to him.
"Killjoy," Duo said, but he sounded more like himself. Or, at least, more like Tony was used to hearing him.
He thought he heard Chang sigh softly too. "Adrenaline junkie," he replied, a little teasing, a little uneasy.
The silence that followed had Tony wondering if he needed to do something, but Duo put the trident away.
"I'll get these cleaned up and destroyed. The Chinese government isn't going to want pieces of mobile suits cluttering up their national park," Duo said. "Where're Vision and Sam?"
"Vision took him to get medical attention," Cap said, a thread of unease in his voice. "Are you okay?"
"A little keyed up, but fine."
"Maxwell," Chang's voice came over the line, censuring.
"Really, Wuffles—"
"Wufei."
"I'm fine. Your baby's a pretty sweet ride. Not my buddy, but better than fucking Wing."
If doubt had a sound, Tony heard it in Chang's silence, even as Peter asked, "Should he have told us that?"
"Stark already knew I was yelling at 'Fei about the Gundam. He already put it together. Sort of stupid to pretend he didn't."
Chang sighed audibly. "Discretion—"
"Yeah, yeah." Duo waved him off. "This is Stark we're talking about. He's not stupid—he's kind of known for how stupid he's not. I'm going to clean up this hot mess. FRIDAY, can you loop me in with some of the locals so I can figure out where they want these disposed at?"
"They may want to recover the bodies in the suits," Cap pointed out.
It was Chang who snorted at that. "Trust me, there's no body to recover after Maxwell's been through with them."
"We've already got agents on the ground to recover and identify any Hydra bodies we can," Hill interrupted. "We're coordinating with the government and should have a disposal site for the Leos shortly."
Annoyed, Tony said, "I'd ask if you need any help getting into those systems, but I don't think there's enough systems left to get into."
"Kinda not," Duo agreed, oddly cheerful. It made a lump settle in Tony's stomach. He knew the relief that came after a battle, the adrenaline rush, but he hadn't heard Duo sound that upbeat before, and hearing him be so upbeat about just killing a bunch of Hydra agents made his stomach churn.
"Why don't we go find where Vision took Sam and check in on him?" Cap suggested.
"That'd be great," Duo said.
"Aren't you worried about him at all?" Cap demanded, his patience with Duo apparently done.
"Of course I am, but I'm not a doctor, and I can't help him," Duo replied in an even, almost conciliatory tone.
Tony watched the agitation on Cap's face, watched him visibly calm himself, which was something that in Tony's experience, Cap didn't really do. And yet he'd done it twice. Today. Instead of jumping down Duo's throat, he'd backed down. Twice.
"Are you feeling all right?" he asked, suddenly unnerved.
Cap's mouth turned down in a frown. "Other than upset about Sam, I'm fine," he said. "Is everyone else okay?"
"Yeah," Tony said. "I'm fine. Spider-kid?" he asked, looking behind Cap.
"I'm good!" he said. "A couple bruises, maybe, but okay."
"I'm on my way back around," Hill said in the comm, reminding Tony that she was there. "My ETA with the actual slow down this time is probably about ten minutes."
"Did you pick up Sam and Vision?" Cap asked.
"I didn't pick them up. Should I?" she asked.
Vision's voice picked up on the comm. "I am nearly to the hospital," he informed. "Please pick up the others. I am sending you the hospital coordinates."
"I can get there faster," Tony said, but he couldn't take both Cap and Spider-kid together.
He didn't know if Duo picked up on his frustration or not, but he said, "I could use the Spider-kid to help round up some of this crap. His webbing will be useful, if you and Rogers want to head off to check on Sam."
"No," Cap said emphatically. He couldn't see Duo's face, but he could effectively hear his eyeroll.
"I'll make sure he stays safe. He's at least as durable as the two of you," Duo said calmly.
"We're not leaving Spider-Man here," Cap said.
The Gundam shrugged, which Tony didn't realize it could do. "Whatever. I can clean this up myself."
"You don't have to do everything alone," Tony felt the need to say as the Gundam bent down and disarmed the nearest mobile suit of its beam saber.
Duo's silence was loud despite the noise of the Gundam moving around. "Maybe I don't," he said after far too long. "But in my experience, far fewer people get hurt when I do."
Tony knew something about doing things alone because he didn't want to be hurt. He wasn't usually concerned about hurting others nearly as much, but he wondered if Duo wasn't the same.
"ETA seven minutes," Hill said. "If you can just hold tight, we can all head to the hospital together. The Quinjet can land on the helipad."
"Thanks, Hill," Duo said. "Go ahead and take everyone else back. Let me know how Sam is, will ya?"
"Maxwell," Chang spoke up, reminding Tony that he hadn't signed off either.
"Yeah, 'Fei?"
"I'm on the next shuttle down. ETA four hours."
"You know where to find me," Duo replied. "Even if the circumstances suck, it'll be nice to see you."
Chang said something that FRIDAY scrambled to translate, but it looked like something about Nataku, whatever that was. Duo snorted, then replied in the same language.
"Sorry, Boss. Duo's accent is interfering with the tones, and I can't translate it."
"Thank you for your help," Chang said more to the general team.
"I expect to get to meet you in person this time," Tony said.
Chang was quiet for a moment. "Of course." His line went dead.
The roar of the Quinjet got close enough to hear as it slowed.
"Guess your ride's here," Duo said.
"I don't like leaving you here alone," Cap said.
"I'm in a Gundam," Duo pointed out an echo of a laugh in his voice. "I think if anything can get to me in here, we have bigger problems on our hands. Keep me in the loop with Sam, please?"
"Yeah, kid," Tony said with a sigh. "We will."