Merchant

"What." Tony stared, not quite sure he'd actually heard Fury right over the sound of the blood rushing in his ears, even if he probably should have expected this months ago.

"I said you're off the team, Iron Man."

"The hell I am!" Tony exclaimed, at the same time that Rogers broke in with "That seems a little excessive, doesn't it Director? I suggested benching him until he can straighten up and fly right, not forcing him to leave the Avengers. Iron Man is a valuable asset."

"Exactly. Iron Man is valuable, certainly, but Stark is too volatile, and there are others who can wear the armor. In any case, Stark was on his last chance, and he quite thoroughly blew it, as Agent Barton can attest to." Fury nodded at the still fuming Clint, who had been relying on Tony to catch him. The fact that Tony himself had been distracted trying to keep a steel girder lifted enough to rescue the civilians under it had not been remarked upon, as Rogers hadn't stopped reprimanding Tony long enough to hear the explanation.

"Sir, what if there's urgent need? We may have to have air support, and there wouldn't be time to train someone else to use the armor in a crisis."

"As it so happens, we have been in contact with War Machine, who is an Air Force colonel and fully trained with his flight suit, should you need an eye in the sky. We can also always send SHIELD reinforcements."

Tony fumed in silence as the team lead and the director decided his fate for him, whiskey-golden eyes flitting back and forth like he was watching a goddamned tennis match. Since when had Fury been in contact with Rhodey, though? And since when would Rhodey help SHIELD?

"—the decision is not up to you, Captain," Fury was saying when Tony tuned back in, and Rogers promptly subsided, bowing to his 'superior officer'. At that, Tony got up, armor creaking with the strain (the battle had definitely damaged his suit; he'd have to do upgrades tonight, maybe hammer out some of the dents) and started to make his way towards the door, one clanging step at a time.

"Ok then," he announced, flipping the faceplate back down as he went (Jarvis would scrub any anger and hurt from the suit speakers, and while he could keep up an impeccable mask even hungover or with broken ribs he didn't have the energy to playact tonight). He'd reached the door now, one gauntlet closing around the doorknob. Behind him, an array of faces, from mildly frustrated (Cap) to glad (Barton) stared back at him. "If that's all, I've got things to do. Don't call me, I'll call you."

"Not so fast. You may no longer be an Avenger, but I know you. This doesn't mean that you can just go back to flying around without oversight, especially with your blatant disregard of international borders. It has been…strongly suggested by Secretary Pierce that you refrain from vigilante activities, or risk disciplinary action both from SHIELD and, potentially, from the law itself."

Tony did not like the sound of that. Anything that a shady government organization comfortable with tasing people in their own homes considered 'discipline' would not be pretty, after all, and why the hell was SHIELD's frankly negligent and negligible 'oversight' and 'damage control' any better than his own resources and contacts? "Whoa whoa whoa hold up!" he burst out, one hand still frozen on the door handle. "I get that you want me off the Avengers, but did you literally just tell me I'm not allowed to be Iron Man? And what might 'disciplinary action' entail?"

"It has been considered too dangerous to have a so-called 'superhero' flying around causing political and international messes and property damage," Fury returned, without really answering his question. "In fact…I'd rather take that off the table right now. Protocol 'Rusted', permissions C49T6β," he said, waving what seemed to be a 3D print of a finger in the suit's general direction.

The doorknob exploded in Tony's gauntleted hand with a crunch of cheap glass. Alarms went off in his suit as JARVIS stuttered a frantic "Sir, I can't—I-I-I…" just before the HUD went dead, and sparks spurted merrily from the suit's joints before they too froze up. Half a mile away in Stark Tower, another five suits in various stages of production, from the battered Mark II to a new prototype which Tony hadn't even named, all blew out. In a corner of the same cluttered lab, the robots DumE and Butterfingers beeped frantically as an automated arm wrenched open a safe, blasting its contents with fire, and slammed it shut. Several million dollars were shunted into other accounts, and, across the globe, seven separate safe houses went into lockdown. And in that same score of seconds, while Tony was still furiously fumbling for the manual release (inconvenient to get to so that enemies couldn't remove it in battle, but, by the same token, near impossible to reach blind) every last copy of the armor blueprints, from paper to files hidden behind firewalls on Tony's own servers, were systematically destroyed.

"You son of a bitch!" Tony had finally managed to find the manual release with his gauntleted hand (it was supposed to be there so that his friends or bots could help him out of it, not so that he could try to get it off himself), and was now peeling bits and pieces of useless armor off of himself. How the hell had Fury even known that protocol? Tony had developed it himself and put about a hundred fail safes in place, up to and including the biometric data required to make it work (had Fury literally made a cast of Pepper's thumbprint?!) and he'd only even told Pepper, Rhodey, and Happy, who had stood by him through literally everything and had never sold him out. It was also supposed to be a complete last-resort thing, only meant to be used in the unlikely scenario he was brainwashed or turned supervillain. It wasn't supposed to be used for this. Had his friends sold him out? Had Fury's little pets been paying more attention than he'd thought? Did they have way better surveillance than he'd expected? "Right. Effective immediately, I'm cutting all contact with SHIELD; that includes you, Natashalie. All of you have twenty-four hours to collect all of your things from the tower, and if you leave anything or you stay, security will take it or you out of the building. Fury, if you so much as call me, you will not like the consequences."

"Wha—" began Rogers, but Tony had already turned away, ramming open the door and limping down the hallway, with dysfunctional scraps of armor still hanging off of him.

"Send me the bill for the damage!" he added over his shoulder as he stomped down to the hanger, waving off a SHIELD agent who thankfully hadn't yet gotten the memo that he was persona non grata. And then, a moment later, he was speeding away in one of the quinjets he'd designed, still partially stuck in broken fragments of his armor.

Tony allowed himself just one night to get drunk and maudlin, locking himself up in his workshop and (ignoring JARVIS's protests) turning up the AC/DC so high it rattled the blacked-out windows, but in the morning he rolled off of his ancient sofa, his aching body and pounding head reminding him that he was too damn old to be drinking that much $65,000 scotch in one night, and went right to work. He didn't want to leave the workshop, not wanting to think about the emptiness of the once-bustling Stark Tower, but Pepper had a protocol with JARVIS that if he was on a drunken bender for more than two days in a row his wet bar would lock itself up, so in the absence of more alcohol to shut his brain off, he occupied it with projects. And projects. And projects. Within a week, SI boasted seven new products, a new prosthetics division, and four new apps (a fifth—a drawing app—had to be abandoned because every line of code he wrote reminded him of Rogers) and Pepper had actually initiated a bewildered and worried video call when every last document which had been reposing in boxes and databases for weeks came back signed and marked with little smiley faces. Before long, the stocks were up higher than they had ever been, and there was literally nothing more that he had to do, except attend the occasional meeting and sign the occasional paper and put the fear of Tony Stark into the Board. And that was that.

It was almost painful how little he had to do once he looked at his schedule. Without his Avenging duties, he didn't have to do any armor repair (not that there was anything to repair, really, considering that the innards of literally all his Iron Man armors had been melted to slag by Protocol Rusted) and he did not have any of his teammates gear to attend to either. SHIELD had given up on trying to get him to "consult" after he had progressed from ignoring their emails and charging them ridiculous amounts of money for every call to throwing Pepper and her lawyers at them to hacking into the Helicarrier and blasting the Mission Impossible theme song while changing every lock screen in the damn place to display Director Fury in just his eyepatch and a pair of pink lacy panties, and he didn't have to handle PR, either; it wasn't any of his damn business anymore.

So with all the company projects finished, he started his own, beginning with starting to try to recreate the Iron Man armors (without a prototype or his blueprints, seeing as those had all been destroyed when Protocol Rusted took affect) and getting more strange and sometimes absurd from there. The staff were nearly in tears when the laundry room came alive (he had invented a new AI, incidentally named 'SCRUB' to supervise the laundry) and Pepper threatened to do something anatomically inadvisable to him with one of her stiletto heels if he kept reprogramming the toaster in the SI R&D Dept. to burn the words "Fury Sucks" on everything except bagels, which were just plain burnt, but hey, at least he knew he was coping….

By the time he'd progressed to repeatedly taking apart and rebuilding kitchen appliances and picking the americium buttons out of all the smoke detectors in the tower he'd finally given up pretending, but that was also about the time that Pepper dragged him out of his workshop (literally; she could be scary when she wanted to) and made him face the music. With the recent shocker headlines of his leaving the Avengers, all the tabloids were blaring lurid pieces picking apart every little thing he'd done since he was old enough to walk, proclaiming that no one had ever expected him to make it as an Avenger, or trying to figure out whether he'd resigned or been fired, or doing 'exposes' on dirty secrets that really weren't all that secret, or picking over and examining all his character flaws, or declaring that he was delusional or suffering from PTSD or any number of other things. The usual fare.

"You need to put in a public appearance," Pepper was saying. "And definitely a statement. And for the love of god, don't pull another 'I am Iron Man' expose. We've got to spin this the best possible way, and this is not a good place to start from. Lisa—you know Lisa, she's our PR head—suggested spinning it that SHIELD was making unreasonable demands, and that you had to take a step back so that you could focus on your company and personal projects. A little more responsible that might have been believable a few decades ago, but I think you could pull it off and if SHIELD tries to defend themselves they would have to both expose the incredible amount of work they were having you do and the fact that they were the ones to break it off, which will not look good for them. If they try to use the angle that you were never an Avenger in the first place it would be political suicide."

Tony gave the closest thing to a smile he could muster for her. "Yeah. I've got to get back in the game. Show up at some galas and charity balls, do some interviews, kiss some babies. I'm ahead on all my projects, anyway. Plus I'm not going to stand for what SHIELD did."

"Which was?" Pepper asked, suddenly intent. "I'm guessing it's more than just the Iron Man thing, or you'd be flying around blowing up terrorists and causing property damage and minor scandals right now…"

"They used 'Protocol Rusted,'" Tony told her numbly. "All my suits are slag and the schematics are locked up, and since I specifically designed that protocol to be unbreakable and unhackable…It's all gone. And Fury told me they'd take 'disciplinary action' if I tried to make more suits or play Iron Man."

Pepper stared at him. "They what. How did they even have that? I thought you only ever told me and Rhodes!"

"I did. I can only assume Fury had some sort of undetectable bugs in place, or maybe a spider," he added bitterly, as that occurred to him. "Romanoff probably would have gone straight to SHIELD with anything she heard, since she was a spy first before she was a friend."

"Right." Pepper straightened, pulling out a pad of yellow paper. "First of all, that is definitely enough to bring charges against them, and in fact we probably should. It will be fairly easy to get them on threats of physical harm, destruction of personal property, and invasion of privacy, seeing as they should not have had that information, and we can also turn the media against them; they definitely have dirty secrets which can both be brought up in court and leaked."

"JARVIS is on that," Tony butted in.

"Right. Hopefully we can get evidence which will stand up in court rather than things that were illicitly copied off of SHIELD servers, but it's a good start. And public opinion—"

"Sir!"

Tony jerked his head up at the sound of JARVIS's voice emanating from Pepper's computer. "Hang on Pep; what is it, J?"

JARVIS's electronic voice sounded as shaken as it could be when he finally replied. "Sir. I have obtained footage meant for SHIELD that may be of interest to you, and it would be inadvisable to watch it alone."

"Does it have to happen now?"

"It would be best not to wait."

Tony blinked a few times, then looked over at Pepper, whose face was splashed with resignation. "If J says I have to take this..."

"You have to take this, I know. But we're not done here, Mr. Stark."

"Never said we were." Tony turned towards Pepper's computer, where JARVIS would doubtless show the footage. "Lay it on me, JARVIS."

The screen flickered, and then abruptly became filled with motion, all dark and blurring with constant motion. At last the camera seemed to settle, and Tony froze. It was in some sort of warehouse or back room, with the floor paved with concrete, but the more significant matter was the fact that said concrete floor was slicked with blood. Fresh blood, glistening in the half-light. And his erstwhile team were slumped against one of the walls, bound securely and looking miserable and (though most would not have been able to catch their tells) definitely afraid. Thor in particular seemed to have sustained several broken bones, his arm at an odd angle from his body, and Romanoff looked roughed up, possibly even raped judging by the tears in her SHIELD tracksuit and bruises on her pale throat. Bruce, closest to the camera, seemed to have been drugged fairly heavily to prevent his hulking out, his eyes worryingly vacant, and Rogers was soaking wet and tied to a chair. Just out of view, a shadow moved, and he could hear the scuff of shoes on concrete and heavy breathing.

"Well go on, Captain," he said, and Rogers stiffened. "Tell us the codes." Whoever it was who was talking had an odd, bubbling, rasping sort of quality to his voice that might have been significant in Tony's mind if it were not already going into overdrive.

"Don't worry about me!" broke in Barton's voice, off-screen. "It won't make anything easier if you give—" he broke off, probably due to a hand or gag shoved over his mouth, and Roger's eyes became more pained.

The villain gave a low, horrible sound that might have been a chuckle. "I'm waiting. Every minute you delay I am going to break another finger. He'll never be able to handle a bow again when I'm done with him. Or maybe I should blind him, see if he can still be a good shot with his eyes torn out. The Amazing Hawkeye…"

Tony was on his feet before he even realized that he was moving. "How the hell is this happening?! Where's SHIELD? Who was even able to get ahold of them in the first place!" he shouted, while JARVIS paused the video and Pepper stared at the screen with minutely widened eyes.

"The Avengers were taken prisoner this afternoon by use of a particularly powerful narcotic gas, by the followers of one Chris "Heart Attack" Gallows, a genetically altered metahuman whose goal is to destroy those who are more than human, finally concluding with his own suicide. He is attempting to force Rogers to reveal where SHIELD secrets such as the location of the files of all known active metahumans and lists of all mutant and altered children. SHIELD is at the moment trying to deal with a HYDRA infestation within their own ranks, and their few loyal agents are spread too thin. Help would arrive an estimated 72 minutes too late for the Widow and 62 minutes too late for the Archer at this rate, and Dr. Banner might well die due to the concentrations of sleeping agent necessary to keep his alter ego from emerging."

Tony paled. Just because he had been angry at the Avengers didn't mean that he wanted them dead, and after seeing that…he wouldn't wish that on anyone, even Justin Hammer. Besides, he cared about them, always had, even if Barton had a tendency to hide in the vents and hit him with nerf arrows and Cap snapped at him in the mornings and Romanoff threatened both to castrate him and to surgically remove all of his toes with a rusty knife if he drank the last cup of coffee. He'd fed them, he'd housed them, he'd made all of their gear...why the hell wouldn't he defend them? They were his team, even if he wasn't actually one of their teammates, and no one had ever said that Tony wasn't a possessive bastard... "Where are they? Give me directions."

"Sir!" "Tony!" JARVIS and Pepper exclaimed at the same time, but Tony was already on his feet, yanking out his phone. "Happy, I need you to be ready to rock and roll in 20 minutes; JARVIS will give you the coordinates." And then he was bolting from the conference room, dodging shocked PR workers and stuffy, affronted Board members, who were all unused to see their boss running this fast, because even if he didn't not normally act 'mature', he did at conferences and meetings (as best he could) and it wasn't like he was around very often anyway. Besides, anyone would be shocked to see the owner of their company almost crash into a wall. "Give me the rest of the data," he added to JARVIS, taking the stairs at a run.

"Gallows has a criminal record, but it was buried by his lawyer and girlfriend Sasha Whiting. He was the product of a laboratory experiment involving the genetic material of marine iguanas, and thus has some of their characteristics, including the ability to stop his own heart and spray salt into the eyes of those he's fighting from glands on his face."

Tony might have considered that both disgusting and intriguing if he were not hyper-focused on the faint gleam of tears lingering in Natasha's eyes and the way Rogers' jaw had clenched with a futile resistance. The only thing he cared about right now was what he would need to stop them. "Go on. What'll I be facing?"

"Gallows has faked his own death a total of four times, and showed up in different countries with falsified papers and prototype holostatic veils stolen from a secure facility, always with a different backstory; he is currently posing as a moderate to wealthy club owner in downtown Manhattan, at a place called 'The Throne Room' It is well guarded by mercenaries who pose as bouncers and clients, and you will likely not get far with visible weapons."

Ok, so this was going to be more delicate then he'd thought. There was no time to finish fabrication of his newest armor prototype, but what few knew was that Tony Stark did not need his suit to fight. Sure, he was much squishier without it, but he would not have survived his first few kidnappings if Aunt Peggy and Ana Jarvis hadn't taught him to fight, considering that a seven year old, even a seven year old genius, cannot be expected to build weapons on demand, and Howard Stark had long had a policy of refusing to pay ransoms. Not to mention that he had always tried out his weapons by hand before actually taking patents out and putting them into production. He honestly probably didn't even need weapons at all, considering how good he was at weaponizing literally anything, but it would be downright stupid not to be as prepared as it was possible to be.

Thus he'd been assuming he was just going to drive in, maybe use some small grenades and a sniper rifle to smash his way through the villain's henchmen and hopefully team up with those of his team (like Cap and Thor) who were probably still in a well enough condition to fight but there was no way he would be able to sneak into a club with an M40 and a handful of grenades, and it would also likely result in civilian damage, as the staff and guests of the club might not even know about the shady backroom dealings. But blunt force was not always the only approach available, and Tony was just as comfortable…and just as dangerous…in a smoky club as he was on the battlefield.

He just required a different sort of armor.

He'd finally made it to the penthouse, and was now in his own dressing room, while JARVIS kept up a running commentary about how many thugs and mercenaries he would be facing and probable plans of attack—he'd chose which plan and put the finishing touches on it once he was in the car and he could pull up the actual floor-plan of said club. He looked through his older suits now, the ones that he'd stopped wearing since they'd reminded him of the old days. Now he would usually wear either black or something so wild and bright it was sure to turn heads, but then he had a taste for dark refinement. It was only moments before he'd found a three piece suit in all black and red and gold. He slipped on a padded vest that he had invented himself before putting on the pale golden shirt and the black and gold vest and trousers, before adding a tie, barely more than a slash of blood-red silk. The accessories were chosen just as carefully. Nothing was for sheer visual interest but his red shades; his cufflinks each contained a single near-lethal electric charge, the array of gaudy ruby and gold rings were practically a set of brass knuckles, with their weight and sharp edges, while the designer shoes that he had chosen had been cobbled in such a manner that they contained a sheath for a hidden knife.

From there, he slipped a pistol into the specially designed belt (it was one of the guns he'd designed, the one he called the Sidewinder, because it was small and nearly invisible except to the trained eye, seeming almost to conform to one's body) and tucked some first aid supplies into various pockets.

This time he rode the elevator, if only so as not to rumple his clothes too much. He jumped out as soon as it opened, piling into the waiting limo and letting JARVIS handle Happy's orders (he'd apologize for the rudeness later, when his team was safe). Meanwhile, he poured over maps and schematics (take that, Cap, he could totally prepare adequately for a mission when he cared to) making note of all the routes he could take to the makeshift prison somewhere in the facility and coming up with various strategies and a set of plans from B to H concerning what to do if anything fell through.

And in less than half an hour—it felt like a year or perhaps no time at all—he had arrived at The Throne Room.

It was definitely a place where one expected some kind of shady dealing to be going on in the back, albeit more ones having to do with drug deals or prostitution than holding international heroes captive. It was almost too lux to be real, like Vegas, a cavernous place characterized by lush deep purple velvet and green and yellow parrots and white tigers prowling in faux-gilded cages, with scantily clad servers and dancers, something like a cross between a gentleman's parlor and a strip club.

Tony, especially this version of him, dressed to the nines and wielding lazy smiles and drawling flirtation as easily as one of his own guns, fit right in. The men at the door looked at him suspiciously for a moment, until they recognized who he was beneath his shades, and then the doors slid silently open without him even having to flash a card—there were certain perks to being both a known billionaire and a known playboy—and just like that, he was inside.

From there, it was even easier. He took a drink from one of the server's trays and held it as a foil, watching the dancers for a little and making meaningless small talk with a few of his acquaintances, while actually focusing his attention on getting a feel for the actual place itself and counting the exits, plotting paths and strategically placed tables and potted palms he could use for cover if and when it all went up in flames (in every place, there are always some things the schematics just don't show). When JARVIS gave him the signal (a quiet, musical chime that might easily be missed by anyone who was not actually wearing a high-tech earpiece directly connected to the AI) he asked the nearest server where the restroom was.

"The Avengers are being held prisoner in one of the back rooms, Sir," JARVIS told him as soon as he had reached a spot where he could safely listen. "And it would be best to hurry if you do not want Agent Barton to suffer permanent damage."

Fuck. "Where are they, J?"

"Follow this hallway to the third door on the right, the one that says 'employees only'. Go through that and through the wine cellar and you will see a door with 'meeting in progress' on it. That is where they are being kept, and, at the moment, interrogated."

He was going to get them back safe. Failure wasn't an option. He hurried as fast as he dared, which for him, and in this place, was a smooth, loping stride not unreminiscent of a tiger's, and got as far as the lounge before anyone even thought to try to raise an alarm. A quick blow with the back of his bejeweled hand was enough to stun the one startled man who noticed he was beyond the main portion of the club before he could say more than "What are you doing here" though, and then Tony was in the wine cellar and through it, and he yanked the 'meeting' room door wide.

It was worse in person, as he'd known it would be. The air was thick with the indescribable smell that comes of trying to elicit as much suffering as possible (blood and something else, something heavy and coppery and practically primal) and Heart Attack and the four goons standing around had done that much more damage while Tony had been trying to make his way through the club as discretely as possible. Barton was actually crying now, in quick, noiseless bursts, and Bruce's eyes had slipped shut, his face pale as cracked ice, while Romanoff sat in stoic silence and Rogers yanked fruitlessly at his bonds, all his supersoldier strength not enough to break them. Thor had what seemed to be a shock collar around his neck.

Tony's smile was cold and deadly, like that of a panther seeing its prey just in range, and had anyone been watching him at that moment, they would have immediately seen in that savage face why he'd been known as 'the merchant of death'. And he took a step forward, just as one of Heart Attack's thugs wrenched Thor's shoulder out of its socket, eliciting a hoarse scream from the god. He might even have said something, if one of the thugs hadn't noticed him and shouted an alarm.

Heart Attack whirled around. "Stark," he stated, in that bubbling, rasping voice that Tony had first taken note of in the video. "How good of you to come. Now I have the full set. After all these years—"

"Why don't we skip the evil monologue part and move on to the part where I kill you, huh?" Tony shot back, pulling out his Sidewinder. "I'm not interested in what's going on in the heads of two-bit villains."

Heart Attack yanked one of his minions in front of him as a human shield, shouting at the others to stay at their posts. Tony lunged forward to hit said minion with one of his electrified cufflinks, and the man crumpled, spasming, forcing Heart Attack to drop him, and then they were fighting. It was a hell of a good fight, too, Tony would later reminisce, but for now he was just focusing on avenging his team.

It seemed that Heart Attack could indeed shoot salt and toxins from glands in his face, which struck Tony as quite unsanitary, not that it mattered. His defense, however, consisted mostly of ducking behind his minions, and Tony was able to take the rest of them down (one with the other cufflink and two with his knife, as he didn't have any shots to spare) before Heart Attack sounded the alarm and Tony knew they'd be swamped in minutes. And so he lunged, trapping the villain up against the opposite wall, sidewinder still raised. Heart Attack pressed back against the wall, seeming almost afraid beneath the veil.

Tony raised the pistol, and Heart Attack flinched. "You're a hero! You can't do—"

A perfectly round hole appeared in the center of Heart Attack's forehead, disrupting the veil and replacing the image of a balding Asian gentleman with a horrible ruined wreck of a face that made Tony almost sorry for him, partially reptilian and partially human, with something like terror glinting in bloodshot yellow eyes. The other face, superimposed over it, shimmered in and out like a badly edited horror flick, but Tony was no longer paying attention as he whirled to attend to his team.

He dropped to his knees beside Barton first, taking in the face thankfully marked only with tears and the broken fingers, and (ignoring the blood soaking into million-dollar trousers) beginning to bandage his ravaged hands. Then he snipped his bonds with a wirecutter, and moved on to Thor, yanking his dislocated arm into place (he'd had to do the same to Rhodey after the arson incident of '91 that would never be mentioned) and tearing strips off of his vest with the little knife to bandage the great weeping wound in his chest and to help splint his other arm. He moved to Natasha, wordlessly asking if she could help, but she took the scraps of silk and packet of wound cream from him and turned towards the wall to do it herself while he finished clipping her bonds, trying not to look at her partially naked body. Cap only shook his he when he walked over with the first aid supplies, but Tony ignored his mute protest when he saw the cut that ran all the way down his face, wiping off the blood to see how bad it was; it already looked a week old under the black crust, what with the supersoldier healing factor, and Tony didn't see anything else major while he was releasing him.

It was Bruce was in the worst way. Bruce, his science bro, the only one of them who had always been his friend from the start of this whole fiasco, was lying motionless, and when Tony nudged his head, it rolled to one side and then back, eyes slitting open just a little, enough to see the bluish glaze in them, before he muttered something about Betty and they shut again. Tony couldn't actually see any wounds, but upon a cursory examination he saw the IV feeding what must have been a sedative into his arm, and (as carefully as he could manage) yanked it out.

What the hell was he going to do now, if half of his teammates couldn't stand?

His answer came along with the goons breaking down the door. Tony shoved the supplies (all of them, this time) at Romanoff and lunged at the men cornering them, emptying the last of the cartridges in his sidewinder pistol and then pulling out all the stops in Ana's training. Quick blocks to protect his face were turned just as quickly into brutal reinforced strikes and elbows to the face, and lightning-fast kicks knocked another two goons out of commission. Yet another was downed with a mata-leon, one bronzed arm cutting off his breathing before the man even thought to struggle. A makeshift bomb, made of a firework and a pocket-sized bottle of hand sanitizer, injured three more and startled yet another of them to shoot himself hi the groin.

And then a canister fell in the middle of the room, releasing an ominous hissing sound, accompanied by lavender gas that smelled faintly floral, and Tony knew he had to end it soon; he'd never been able to hold his breath on the best of days, and that had been before the arc reactor had displaced a good two thirds of his lungs. So he kicked the grenade in the goons general direction, kneed the one which had just been trying to attack him in the stomach, and grabbed the other one (who'd been trying to sneak past him) in order to twist the gun out of his hand. Then Tony (still pointing the gun in the direction of the remaining goons) walked back over to his team.

"Thor, big guy, can you stand?" he asked shakily, making his way to the god as smoke began to create a hazy veil between him and his attackers. Thor got up, stumbling, and nearly pitched to the ground again, then steadied himself on the back wall.

"Yes, Antony, although I may not be able to fight."

Well damn. Tony was really unlikely to be able to get them out without help. He moved over to Natasha, who seemed to have been in the middle of treating Barton when she'd collapsed on his thigh, first aid supplies slipping from her nerveless fingers. She didn't move when he tried to nudge her, or even when he shook her.

Which left one option.

"Don't kill me for this Natashalie," he muttered, heaving her into his arms. She was definitely heavy, but less so than say…Thor, and Tony was certainly fit considering that he'd spent years making his own inventions and hammering out the flaws in his own armor, the same 240 pound armor he walked and flew in. Beside him, Barton staggered to his feet, followed by a still-dazed Cap, and then, finally, by Bruce, who had somewhat regained his faculties now that he was not being dosed with a constant sedative cocktail.

"The room has an emergency exit, blocked by a stack of boxes," JARVIS supplied in his ear, and his arms tightened just a little more around Romanoff with the surprise.

"Right. Let's blow this popsicle stand."

"Where'we goin'?" Rogers slurred from behind him, and, for a moment, something indefinable tightened within him. The man looked exhausted and worn even without the torture and the drugs he must have endured, and he seemed so damn young in the aftermath of it all. He was, after all, only in his twenties despite his chronological age; so very young to be expected to lead a team on his own or to withstand interrogation and torture. And the last vestiges of anger Tony had been nursing at him and at the Avengers drained away.

"We're going home, Rogers," he returned softly, and set a now conscious and feebly stirring Romanoff carefully back on her feet so that he could knock aside the crates and boxes blocking the exit before the room was uninhabitable. SHIELD, the media, the police…all of that could wait.