Disclaimer: I don't own Iron Man or Nine Inch Nails. I just banged the two together until they made sparks. I still need to buy a fire extinguisher, or maybe a flame retardant suit.
Chapter 4: Backs Against the Wall Part 1
Nine Inch Nails- We're In This Together
Tony didn't remember being snatched from the desert floor after the blast. His last image from before the cave was of the robin's-egg-blue sky above him before he slowly faded out.
When he came to again he was being half carried, half dragged, with a bag over his face. The toes of his shoes skimmed against something hard, causing his feet to bounce limply. A sharp, burrowing pain had settled into his chest, and with each rapid breath his lungs seemed to squeeze his heart.
Abruptly he was spun and shoved into a seat. The bag was yanked off his head and he blinked, squinting at the blinding light in front of him. Around him were several armed men of Arabic descent. When his eyes adjusted more to the brightness, he noticed the camera in front of him. Tony felt his stomach drop in terror.
A man near him faced forward and began reading a prepared script, but Tony didn't understand the language. He recognized when they said his name though. Everything about the situation told him he was a terrorist hostage. A part of his mind wondered if they were the types of terrorists who hung people over fires or just shot them in the head.
There were guns shoved into his neck and he was forced to remain stationary during the man's prepared speech. A few moments later he was manhandled back to his feet and marched along a corridor. His head swam and his chest clenched in pain. During one of the times his consciousness faded back in Tony had the time to notice the hasty bandages across his torso.
'That's right,' he remembered. They'd been under fire and he'd run from the humvee. Angela had been right behind him. Then the missile had landed next to him in the sand. Tony had the time to recognize it while he bolted away from it in fear. He should be dead. That payload should have killed him. It had probably killed Angela. For a merciful moment he faded out again.
When he swam to consciousness again it was to pain. Blinding, searing, pain ripped through his chest. An involuntary cry bubbled up from his throat and spilled out of his mouth. He struggled against the many sets of hands holding him down. There were people around him talking and the bright lights seared his eyes.
They were cutting into his chest, over and over again. He couldn't get away. He couldn't fight them off. Underneath the disorientation and the pain was the vague idea they were skinning him alive, snipping away his muscle until he was hollow.
Agony raced through him again. The world went white, black, then shades of pink. It seemed like it would never end, and Tony thought he was in hell. He thought that he was already dead. He was dead, and Rhodey was dead, and Angela was dead.
After what seemed like an eternity, someone pressed a foul smelling cloth to his face and he reached for the darkness.
…...
There was no fading for Angela. One moment she was laying on her side in the desert sand, able to see her boss's torso but not his face, then nothing.
She was jolted back into consciousness by someone shouting 'Ma'am.' It took a long time for her to connect the mode of address to herself. A flash went off in her mind of a young, nervous man. But it was a disconnected memory.
Her eyes cracked open and her gaze focused on the tan ground before her. Around her she could still hear an occasional burst of noise, but it seemed much quieter.
Someone in army gear had their hands on her. She could just make out the desert camo on their arms. Her mind whispered that the man was a combat medic and she was still on the side of the road. Angela tried to flex her fingers and toes, but a jagged bolt of pain shot up her extremities. She moaned. When she attempted to roll over despite the pain, the man above her held her in place.
"Ma'am, you need to remain still," the medic cautioned. She felt him gently shifting her clothing before he suddenly barked, "Seebarth, get over here."
Through the ground her body rested on she could feel the impact of hurried footsteps coming closer, then a thud. Another pair of hands joined the first. The two men were talking back and forth in quick truncated words, but she couldn't process them. Things started to sound slow and distorted. She knew they were occasionally asking her questions, but she couldn't make sense of the words.
Pain lanced through her chest and sides. Angela heard a thin, breathless scream and realized belatedly that it was coming from her. The man above her repeatedly ordered her to stay awake, and then there was nothing.
…...
It seemed that it had been a moment, and yet a life time since he'd opened his eyes. He huffed a breath, his chest feeling heavy and sore. It was cold wherever he was, and dimly lit. The air smelled dank.
A few seconds after regaining consciousness Tony realized he was free, but weak. He moved his jaw slightly, feeling his lips pull apart reluctantly. His mouth was so dry his tongue felt thick and swollen. His lips cracked and burned.
Blearily he noticed the movement had pulled on something in his nose. He reached a hand down to his face. Fumbling fingers ran across a string or a tube of some sort, and it took far longer than it should have for him to realize that it ran into his nose. Disoriented, he started to pull it out, slow at first and then faster. He could feel it sliding up the back of his throat and down his nose. Tony moaned in disgust, ripping the last bit out and peeling the tape from his nostril.
Taking a few moments to calm down, he finally turned his head to the side and saw the cup sitting on the table even with him. Tony flexed his hands. They were freezing and slightly numb, but he made a grab for the cup anyway. In his haste he misjudged the distance and knocked it from the table. It clanged noisily to the floor, rolling away from him. The effort he expended made him cough harshly but it also drew his attention to the nearby canteen.
Before he could make up his mind to go for that he was distracted by the movement of a man across the room. The man was shaving while looking into a tiny hand mirror mounted on a pillar, and dressed in a pin stripe suit.
The need for water pulled Tony's attention away from the puzzle of the man and back to the canteen. He heaved himself to his side, trying to grasp it, before a loud clank sounded.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," the shaving man said in an accent Tony couldn't identify.
Feeling a vague pull in his chest, Tony looked down, spotting the wires attached to him. Slowly he rolled back over, trying to find what he was tethered to. His eyes landed on the squat, black cube of a car battery and he froze. Disbelief and fear slid through him. Jerkily Tony gripped at the cables, willing them to be a hallucination. His numb fingers grasped at the cold rubber wires and then followed them to his chest. He scrunched his chin down and grunted.
What he saw couldn't be real. He couldn't be hooked up to a car battery. Things like that didn't happen to people. He pawed at the bandages over his chest with dumb fingers as his mind gibbered in horror.
There was a solid object underneath the dressings. He patted at the hard spot before digging his blunted nails in and tearing at the bandages. Vaguely he was aware of the trapped animal noises he was making, but his focus was on the need to see his chest.
With a final vicious pull, he ripped through the last of the wrapping and looked down. From the bottom of his vision he could see there was something large, circular, and metal embedded in his sternum. Shock speared him and his head dropped back to the table. He stared up at the shadowed ceiling blankly for several moments, wondering what the hell had they done to him.
…...
The first time she came to full consciousness it was the beeping that made her open her eyes. It seemed to take a long time for the ceiling and upper corner of the room to come into focus. A part of Angela's mind noted that the light coming in through the window was a vibrant orange. A square of it shone on the wall further along and it looked like a pane of fire.
She drew in a slightly deeper breath and froze. Pain. Burning, clenching pain took over her world. For a moment her vision flashed white. Vaguely she was aware that another, louder alarm started going off.
The door to her room opened and a woman walked in. Angela was too busy trying to ground herself against the waves of agony to pay attention to the woman's words or what she was doing. There was a click, and then the woman next to her head was reassuring her that the morphine would kick in soon. Angela struggled to stay conscious.
Long moments passed as, one by one, she was able to uncoil her muscles. Both beeping noises stopped and there was more clicking. She had a fuzzy notion that the nurse was asking for someone to be paged. But her focus remained on her breathing and the patch of sunlight on the wall.
Finally, Angela's wobbly vision firmed again and the claws that tore into her chest were blunted. A dragging lethargy and soreness took their place. She slid her tongue out to wet her lips futilely. "Water." Her voice was a bare raspy whisper.
There was a low hum beneath her, and then the bed was shifting her further upright. A straw was placed to her lips and Angela gave a weak pull at it. The water was tepid but such a relief to her that she didn't care.
More time was spent sipping the water and organizing her thoughts. The nurse was also speaking to her, telling her some things she knew and some she didn't.
She was in a hospital. She was in an air force hospital in Italy. She'd had surgery. More would be explained about the surgery by a doctor later. It was Tuesday evening. Angela was given the date and realized that she'd been in Afghanistan two days before. She had a broken pinky, broken foot, contusions, and lacerations. And she shouldn't have woken up yet.
There was a moment when Angela put together the desert, the explosion, and her list of injuries, with the fact that the nurse didn't say she was lucky. Jim came in after that and Angela allowed her mind to be sidetracked.
"Hi," Jim was dressed in fatigues instead of his blues.
Angela's eyes tracked over him slowly. He had a split lip and a butterfly bandage on his eyebrow. "Hey, Jim." This time her voice was stronger, but not by much.
The Colonel gave her a tight smile. "Glad you woke up. I'm just about to head back."
Back? Angela wondered. Back where? But she found she already knew the answer to that so instead she asked, "Why?" Her thoughts where a little muzzy around the edges still.
She noticed some tension between him and the nurse before he spoke again. "Tony's missing."
Missing? Angela's stomach gave a foul swoop and the alarm from earlier went off again. Not dead though. He had been right in front of her. "He was right in front of me." Upon speaking her thoughts aloud she realized she was more out of it than she had thought. From the corner of her gaze she saw the nurse shoot Jim a glare.
Jim's facial expression didn't change. "Yeah. We thought so. Found his phone over there with a bunch of footprints, but by the time we could look he was gone and we had wounded." He explained.
She was one of them. Others never made it off the sand. It hit her anew then, that the soldiers who were traveling with them were dead. That young man who had called her Ma'am, Jimmy, was dead. Before she could travel down that road of thought further Jim spoke again.
"Pepper contacted your relatives. You're step-brother, Mike, should be here soon." He reached out and carefully took a hold of her hand. At the idea her brother would be with her Angela felt herself calm some. The annoying beeping stopped again.
When Angela curled her fingers, she wrinkled her nose at the feeling of the IV taped to the back of it. She'd always hated IVs. No matter what they told her she could feel the needle in her vein. The clip on the finger of her other hand was uncomfortable as well. And she didn't even want to think about the length of tubing she could feel against her thigh.
"I've got to get going. There's been search parties out but I wanted to bring you back here first. You needed the best." His voice was grim and mournful.
Angela blinked up at the Colonel, still trying to wade through the morass of information. She understood he needed to leave though. "Thank you, Jim." She watched his eyes pinch around the edges. "Good luck."
He released her hand with a pat. "Bye, Angela." With a quick motion, he turned away. She kept her eyes on his back as he walked through the door, and then spent a few moments staring into the hall after him.
Memories engulfed her, flashes of the soldiers as they went down. Then clear and so real it was like reliving it, the image of Tony Stark scrambling out from behind a boulder. In the sand across from him was a Stark Industries FGM-96 Reaper. Angela felt her breathing shorten and the alarm, that she could now connect to a cardiac monitor, went off for a third time.
"Miss. Harper, I know this must be a trying day, but we need you to try to calm down," the nurse intoned soothingly.
Angela looked at the woman as if the nurse had lost her mind. Calm down? She designed the Reaper. She knew what it did. Anger washed through her towing terror in its wake. The nurse had said something about surgery. Okay, maybe Angela did need to calm down. She didn't have all the information yet.
Falling back into old familiar habits Angela tried to distance her mind from the issues, to insert a glass wall between her and her annoyance. It wasn't working and only served to increase her agitation. "I'd like to speak with my Doctor now," she tried to keep the demand polite.
"We'd like you to have some more rest, and your family here," the nurse informed.
Angela cut the prevaricating nurse off with a glare, even though it hurt. It did make the heart rate alert cease though. "I want information about the surgery you performed on me and I want it now," she bit out coldly.
The tidy brunette nurse blinked at her a few times, taken aback by Angela's forcefulness. Angela just kept up the glare she used with developers who were under performing because they were lazy. It was a steely feeling, that did not smother her other emotions like usual.
When the woman continued to stand there Angela finally sniped, "As I was the one who designed the weapon that injured me, I believe I can say with authority that this case may be time sensitive." The nurse jolted and then nodded. "Then my Doctor? Now, please." Angela gritted the repeated request out from between her teeth.
As she watched the woman leave the room Angela counted her breaths. She knew, in the same way that she'd known it was bad when the nurse didn't say she was lucky, and when Jim had said goodbye, that those same breaths were numbered.
…...
By the time Tony was able to sit up on his bed the shaving man had become the cooking man. The man whistled as he prepared something in a pan over the fire.
"What the hell did you do to me?" Tony asked when he finally found his voice. It came out as more of a whisper than he wanted.
The man across from him seemed unperturbed. "What I did?" He sat down the pan he was using and looked over at Tony. The lenses of his glasses flashed in the low light. "What I did is to save your life. I removed all the shrapnel I could." The man crossed the cave, pulled the mirror from the pillar and handed it to Tony. Once the man moved back to the fire, Tony angled the glass down so he could see the thing in his chest. "But there's a lot left," the elder man continued. "And it's headed into your atrial septum."
The shrapnel was moving into his heart, Tony realized. Before he could fully process that thought the man spoke again.
"Here, want to see?" The man asked lightly, and then reached over and plucked a small glass bottle from a nearby table. He held it up, giving it a brief shake. Something inside it jingled pleasantly against the glass. "I have a souvenir. Take a look." The man casually tossed the vial to him.
Tony caught it one handed. But instead of examining it immediately he continued watching the older man in the glasses, trying to figure out who he was and if he was dangerous.
"I've seen many wounds like that in my village." The man began to explain nonchalantly. At his words Tony held the bottle up against the light, turning it so he could see the tiny barbs inside. "We call them the walking dead because it takes about a week for the barbs to reach the vital organs."
Design specs flashed through Tony's memory. The Stark Industries Reaper was an individually fired fragmenting missile designed for surface attack where a maximum number of casualties was desired. It was Angela's design. Tony was already dead, he was just waiting for it to catch up with him.
There was a flash of anger, but it fizzled when he remembered the absolute horror in her eyes when she'd looked from the bomb to him. He remembered that she had been only feet from him at the time and still running towards him. In a muffled way he wondered if she was already dead. Judging by the amount of hair he could feel on his face, he should already be dead.
Tony glanced back down at the thing in his chest. "What is this?" He asked. His patience was slipping away from him.
The man had moved back to cooking but turned to look over his shoulder at Tony. "That is an electromagnet, hooked up to a car battery, and it's keeping the shrapnel from entering your heart." The man watched Tony's face through his explanation and hummed to himself at the end.
Tony dropped his gaze for a moment as his mind spun through the implications. An electromagnet would work, so long as the battery did. If it died, he died. He cracked his neck in discomfort at his vulnerability and zipped his jacket up to cover the magnet. His eyes drifted up, catching on the camera set into the wall at the corner. Dread stilled his body. The man at the fire noticed his stiff posture and smiled easily.
"That's right. Smile." Tony noted the man said it with a fatalistic humor in his voice. "We met once, you know, at a technical conference in Bern."
"I don't remember," Tony mumbled distractedly. He started looking around the small dark room he was being kept in. He needed to get out. Whatever was going on at the moment could only be bad and Tony needed to escape before it got worse.
"No, you wouldn't." The man continued voice faintly reproving. "If I had been that drunk, I wouldn't have been able to stand, much less give a lecture on integrated circuits." The man said the last part with a bit of hesitation, as if he was reaching into his memory for the detail.
Tony glanced around once more before asking. "Where are we?"
Before the suited man could answer there was a clang from the doors across the room. A harsh male voice speaking a foreign language followed. Tony could tell the voice was calling something into the room's occupants, orders most likely.
The suited man crossed quickly to Tony and grabbed his arm, guiding him off the bed. Tony startled. He wasn't used to being manhandled.
"Come on, stand up. Stand up!" The man commanded. He leaned in urgently toward Tony. "Just do as I do." He put his hands up over his head. "Come on, put your hands up," he urged.
Tony took in the earnest energy radiating from the man and slowly raised his hands to rest his palms on his head. A moment later the heavy metal door of their cell opened and men came into the room. They were carrying weapons he recognized.
"Those are my guns. How did they get my guns?" He asked in confusion, slightly dropping his arms. A dim section of his mind remembered Angela's show and tell from the plane. Was this a part of that?
"Do you understand me?" The suited man questioned him sternly. "Do as I do."
Tony readjusted his hands on his head and shut up.
In front of them a short heavy set man with a beard took center place in the room. He held his hands out and called out what sounded like a greeting. The man seemed exuberant as he walked down a few steps into the room.
Tony could pick up his name again, and glanced unsurely at the suited man next to him. The people holding them knew exactly who he was then. That was very bad. And they had spent the effort to keep him alive. Tony wondered if it was just for ransom.
The man with the beard continued speaking as he crossed to only a few feet in front of them. When he seemed to finish he made an expectant gesture to the man next to Tony.
"He says, 'Welcome, Tony Stark, the most famous mass murderer in the history of America.'" The suited man, his apparent fellow prisoner, intoned gravely.
Tony guy churned in apprehension. The bearded man in front of him began to speak again.
"He is honored," the elder man added.
His heavy bearded captor continued talking. Tony caught the word Jericho and felt all the moisture, again, leave his mouth. He swallowed roughly.
"He wants you to build the missile," the man next to him continued. Tony already knew what they wanted with just that sentence. Again the heavy set man spoke and the suited man translated. "The Jericho missile that you demonstrated."
'No,' Tony thought. There was no way he could build that kind of destructive tech for terrorists. A small part of him was glad Angela wasn't there with him. At least, and horror spread through him but it was twisted with anger, he didn't think so. She was a weapons designer. They could have taken her too. It would have been a matter of only a few steps down the hill.
The heavy set man held out a picture to the suited man. His cell mate took it and then held it out to Tony. "This one," he said quietly.
Tony's eyes flicked from the expectant group of terrorists in front of him to the nervous man beside him, and knew there was only one answer he could give. Anger and defiance rose up within him. "I refuse."