Wow! That was hard work - sorry for the wait. This fic is harder to write than I thought it would be... I've also watched Age of Ultron again since I wrote the last chapter and have come to terms a little more with what Joss did with Natasha, so maybe she a little bit softer in this chapter than I originally planned. She's a tough gal to write!

Chapter 3

-o-

"Hey, Hey! You can't go in there!" the blue scrubbed nurse yells as Tony walks past him wearing the War Machine armour, and when he doesn't stop, the nurse hits an alarm button on the wall beside the desk.

"I have a pass." Tony tells him, priming the suit's shoulder canons. "And I have a friend back there who's waiting on an urgent delivery. Well, I say friend, but I mean, well, we don't really hang out or anything... Come to think of it, I don't think he really likes me all that much."

The nurse doesn't reply, he's too busy staring at War Machine's weapon array, and a moment later, the double doors open and Tony is greeted by half a dozen armed MPs, all grim faced, their rifles aimed at his head. Obviously, they would be no match for War Machine, but he's not here to fight anyone, he's only here to help.

"Stand down, guys. I come in peace." Tony tells them, holstering the weapons again, and he puts his hands up in a gesture of surrender and opens the faceplate.

"Mr Stark?" One of the MPs says in surprise, tentatively lowering his weapon.

"Guilty." Tony replies, flashing his most winning smile. "Now I'd love to stay and shoot the breeze with you fine upstanding patriots, but I really do have to give something to someone. Have you seen a seven foot tall blond-haired boy-scout, or a scary little red-head, about yay high, skulking about in the shadows back there?"

The MPs look at each other, unsure what to do. It was Tony Stark, National Hero, standing before them, and to top that, he was wearing the Iron Patriot suit. But after what had happened, they were taking no chances. S.H.I.E.L.D was no more. Maybe S.H.I.E.L.D had never really been. H.Y.D.R.A agents were everywhere.

"We can't let you through, Mr Stark. We have orders."

"Fine." Tony replies with a shrug, and walking back to the reception desk, he wheels the nurse and his chair out of the way and pushes the intercom button. "Paging Dr. Romanoff. Paging Dr. Romanoff..."

The MPs look at each other uncertainly and Tony takes their hesitance as a sign they aren't going to try to shoot him. Bending down, he speaks into the intercom again. "Will Natalia Romanova come to the front desk, her pizza is here."

Just as he takes his finger off of the button, the doors open again and a furious and very dishevelled looking Black Widow pushes her way through the MPs. Natasha looks terrible. She's filthy, covered in mud and soot and what looks suspiciously like fresh blood, and Tony swallows the complaint about his welcoming committee that was about to spill from his lips.

"Stand down. You can see who it is," she snaps at the guards, then her stony glare is turned on him. "What are you doing here, Stark?"

Tony looks around theatrically and whispers, "I heard there's some shit that needs avenging."

Natasha doesn't respond in any way, not even with the dismissive eye-rolling that usually comes after every word he ever says to her, so he gestures to the corridor behind. "I just watched three S.H.I.E.L.D Helicarriers shoot each other out of the sky, Romanoff. I think we need to talk."

Natasha peers up at him and he can almost see the conflict in her as she decides whether to trust him or turn him away. He knows she's never been his number one fan, and he's okay with that, mostly okay, but this is important and he hopes that when it comes to the important things in life, people do actually take him seriously. If they don't, he has a suit full of weapons to convince them just how serious he can be.

Had... He keeps forgetting. He had a suit full of weapons. Had forty-three of them to be precise, which, he will admit, was a little excessive. But now all he has, despite working flat out for two days straight, is a barely functioning prototype and this loaner.

"Fine." Natasha sighs, and she turns on her heels and heads back into the corridor, gesturing for Tony to follow her.

"Excuse me, boys." Tony says, pushing the MPs aside as carefully as he can, giving them a little salute as he leaves them behind and follows Natasha around the corner into the hospital corridors. When they are mostly out of earshot, he stops and waits for her to notice he's not actually following behind her any more. It might have all been japes a moment ago, but nothing that has happened over the past few days is even remotely funny. He needs answers and he needs them now.

When she finally stops and turns back to look at him, Tony waves an all-encompassing arm in the air. "What the actual FUCK, Romanoff?"

"I know. But not now, Stark." Natasha sighs.

Tony stares at her incredulously. "Not now?... Not NOW? I think now is pretty much the perfect time to tell me just what the hell is going on, Natasha. I found the data."

"What data?"

"When you first took me to the Helicarrier, back before New York, I put bugs on every damn computer I could. And you know what I found?"

"H.Y.D.R.A?" Natasha replies, and Tony nods.

"Dammit, Natasha. I found it. I found everything. All the dirty, dark little secrets H.Y.D.R.A had tried so hard to keep."

Natasha shrugs. "Yeah, well you're about three days too late to do anything with it." And she turns to carry on down the corridor, but Tony grabs her arm, ignoring the flash of murder in her eyes.

"You don't get to look at me like that, Romanoff." Tony snaps. For once, none of this is his fault and he's getting pretty tired of all this top secret spy shit. They're meant to be on the same team, a team that she helped drag him into, and the fact that neither she, nor Steve for that matter, thought to ask him for help with what is turning out to be a pretty dark hour of need, stings a little.

"Nat, I've been going out of my goddamn mind trying to find some way to stop all this. As soon as I found the data I tried to contact you and Rogers. I know I can trust Cap, and out of everyone, I knew you would know what to do with what I found, but by then, you two had fallen off the grid. Then I tried to get hold of Barton, but he's nowhere to be found. Thor's been off world for months. Bruce is in a jungle in India healing the sick or something. Then the next thing I hear is that Fury has been murdered in Cap's apartment by some crazy Soviet relic with a metal arm- "

"He's not Soviet." Natasha interrupts. "He was trained in Siberia, but he's not Russian. The people I deal with, they call him the Winter Soldier, but his real name is Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes."

Tony stops his rant for a moment as his sleep-deprived, adrenaline soaked brain tries to remember why he should know that name. And then he remembers. "Sergeant Barnes?... Bucky Barnes? As in Steve's Bucky?"

Natasha smiles bitterly. "Not anymore."

That little revelation takes some of the wind out of his sails as he tries to figure out how a long-dead war hero could have been responsible for Fury's murder, but decides that question can go to the back of the long queue of questions, including the one he'd been desperate to ask since he'd first turned up at the hospital. The one he wasn't sure he wanted the answer to.

"Is he okay, Romanoff?"

"Who?" Natasha replies, staring blankly at him and Tony groans through gritted teeth and fights the urge punch a hole through the wall next to him. And then maybe throw her through it too.

"Rogers, Natasha." He yells at her. "Is Rogers okay?" And when she flinches at his sudden fury, it suddenly dawns on Tony that she's not being her usual deliberately oblique self, skirting around questions to confuse and befuddle. She's actually in shock.

Now he's up close, he can see the tight lines of exhaustion and pain etched into her beautiful, stern face, and his anger deflates like a popped balloon as her eyes fill with tears. He knows her story, as much as anyone really knew Black Widow's story, and what he knows is that since leaving the KGB, S.H.I.E.L.D had been her whole life, her whole reason for being, and he also knows exactly how much it sucked when the people you thought were family pretty much just wanted you dead.

Tony finds himself reaching out to her with some sort of awkward reassuring gesture, which is as much of a surprise to him as it is to her, but she glares at him, wiping her eyes quickly with the backs of her hands, and his reaching hand immediately drops back to his side. Tony is not a hugger, and neither, he supposes, is the Black Widow, but she sure looked like she needed a hug right now, or a drink - or both. It wasn't even lunch time, but he could definitely use a drink.

Ignoring the momentary weirdness between them, Natasha sits down heavily on one of the orange plastic chairs that line the corridor. "Steve's back there," she sighs, gesturing towards the doors marked EMERGANCY. She doesn't look where she points, her gaze remains firmly glued to the floor tile by her feet like it's suddenly become the most interesting floor tile in the world. "He was on the last carrier when it went down. He gave Hill the order to fire himself."

With those words, Tony feels everything inside him constrict into a hard, icy little ball of terror and if he hadn't been wearing War Machine, he's not sure his legs would still be holding him upright. He had watched the news footage of the body falling hundreds of feet from the flaming airship into the river, watched it a hundred times until Pepper made him stop, and yet had still managed to convince himself that it wasn't Rogers. Because, how could it be? – Sure, Steve had that whole history of heroic self-sacrifice. Going down in a blaze glory seemed to be his thing, but still?

It takes a good few moments before he can work up enough spit in his suddenly desert-dry mouth to enable him to say anything, and when he can, all he can manage is a wheezy stutter. "Is he... Is..."

"He's still alive, Tony. Just about." Natasha replies and he ejects breathlessly from War Machine, leaving the armour standing over them like a star-spangled sentinel. It's easier to suck in some air out of the suit, but not much, and unsure how long his legs will hold him upright, he drops down beside her in the neighbouring chair. Steve Rogers was as tough as they came, both physically and mentally, but at the end of the day, for all his grit, determination and good old-fashioned star-spangled heroism, he wasn't a god or an indestructible rage monster. Steve was just a guy.

"How bad are we talking here?" Tony asks.

"Umm, pretty bad." Natasha replies, still not looking up from the floor. "He had to go through Barnes to take the Helicarriers down. Barnes didn't go down easy."

"Sonovabitch." Tony murmurs.

"That's not the worst of it." Natasha continues and Tony can't help but let out a bitter little laugh. Of course there was more. Rogers never did anything by half.

"Barnes shot him four times. One of the rounds went right through him. Hit his liver or spleen or something else that bleeds a lot. He needs surgery. There's too much damage for him to heal on his own, but they don't have drugs strong enough to knock out Captain America. The doctors have flat out said they won't operate on him while he's conscious, but they need to get in there to stop the bleeding. They've given him massive doses of everything they have and it's barely even touching him. His body is on over-drive right now, he's just burning though it all."

It's only then that her voice breaks and when she finally looks up at him, he can see the defeat in her eyes. Tony is taken aback. He wasn't sure that the Black Widow was even capable of tears, yet here she was, about to lose her shit in public. "Steve's so strong, Tony, but even he can't take that much pain."

Tony takes a deep breath and straightens up. "It'll be okay. I can fix this," he tells her, and getting to his feet, he reaches over and opens the panel in War Machine where the vial of Bruce's dendrotoxin was stashed and hands it to her. There was a problem, and he had the solution. Fixing things is what he did.

Natasha just stares at the vial of purple liquid in her hand. "What is this?"

"It's dendrotoxin B. Bruce's dendrotoxin" He tells her and when he realises that she probably still has no idea what he was talking about, he elaborates. "It's like Hulk roofies. If anything can knock Cap out, this will. Bruce and I have been working on this for a while now, you know, just in case Mr Green ever overstays his welcome. Bruce thought there was a chance it could come in handy one day for Rogers."

He and Bruce had both realised a while back that along with booze, threats, most form of coercion, bribery and just plain teasing, painkillers didn't seem to have much effect on Steve Rogers. The Avengers hadn't assembled many times, but when they did, it was for something either ridiculously big or incredibly bad, and even thought their team was made up of a real-life, practically Immortal God, a giant green monster and a couple of Black-Op assassins, they didn't always come out completely unscathed. Especially Steve, who seemed to feel the need to literally throw himself into the crosshairs of every big bad they came across.

"I read all my dad's old files on Project Rebirth, a dozen times over, and Bruce practically knows them all off by heart. Fascinating work. I think Doctor Erskine was probably even smarter than my old man... But the thing is, after Erskine's death, no-one really seemed to think about the fact that they had created a front-line soldier, a damn human shield, who was impervious to anaesthetics. I'm mean, what if he'd had a leg blown off in occupied France or something? They couldn't have even given him booze to dull the pain."

Natasha nods. "Fury understood that it might be a problem. He had people working on it."

"Oh really? What people might they be? And were they working on it whilst Rogers was out in the field again, risking life and limb running morally ambiguous S.T.R.I.K.E missions with you and Barton?"

"No-one forced him to join the S.T.R.I.K.E team, Stark. He volunteered."

"Well that sounds like a familiar story, doesn't it? Young Steve Rogers risks his life signing up for a top-secret mission? All you people keep doing is enabling his death wish."

"Steve doesn't have a death wish."

"No?" Tony replies and Natasha opens her mouth to argue, then shuts it again. Steve Rogers was the most reckless person she had ever worked with when it came to his own safety, and the fact that his default facial expression these days seemed to fall somewhere between kicked puppy and I want to step in front of a bus didn't help her argument.

"The kid lost both his parents, then signed up for World War Two, which would pretty much be enough on its own. But then his best friend falls to his death right in front of him, and after sacrificing himself to save millions, he wakes up to this crapsack world where everything he sacrificed himself for is on the brink of happening again and everything and everyone he ever knew and loved is gone. And he can't even drown his sorrows with a bottle of something old and expensive like the rest of us. Believe me, Romanoff, Rogers has a death wish and then some."

Natasha looks up at him and Tony knows he's hit a nerve when her face reverts to its normal, passively blank Black Widow gives nothing away stare. "We all have our issues, Tony."

"Sure, it's what makes such a great team, right?"

"Right!" Natasha replies, the faintest hint of a smile on her lips, which disappears quickly as she holds the vial of toxin up to the light, as if that would somehow help her see its magical healing properties.

"You're not a doctor, Stark." She says. "Do you know what to do with this stuff?"

"Umm, what part of genius do you people still not understand? Of course I do." Tony replies, which isn't a complete lie. He has a pretty good idea of how much it would take to drop the Hulk. He and Bruce had already whiled away countless hours in the lab refining and distilling the effects of the drug, just in case. So in theory, he knows. He can calculate correct dosage to anesthetise a 6ft 2inch, 240lb Super Soldier with roughly four times the strength, stamina and metabolism of a regular human without stopping his heart, but it's only a theory. In practise, he has no idea if it will work. But he can't think like that. His team needs him. Rogers needs him, and he's not going to lose another good man. He let Yinsen die, and Coulson... It flat out wasn't happening again.

"So are we going to do this, Romanoff?" Tony asks, getting to his feet, and Natasha nods.

Putting the vial in one of the pockets of her suit, she takes a deep breath and makes an attempt to get back to her feet, but the combination of exhaustion, blood loss and pain from the bullet wound in her shoulder makes that simple thing an almost Herculean task and sighing heavily, she holds her arm out for Tony to help her up.

Surprised, Tony takes her hand, steadying her. He's never seen her like this. Natasha Romanoff was a consummate professional - in every sense of the word, and through everything they have been through, even their darkest hours, she's never shown him the slightest hint of weakness, fear or doubt. She was competitive with Thor, gentle with Bruce and along with Clint, mercilessly teased Rogers at every opportunity - but with him, it was all business. Tony always had the feeling that deep down, she didn't really think much of him and was only tolerating his presence at best. This was probably due to the fact that in her initial assessment of his entry into the Avengers Initiative, Natasha had categorically stated that he didn't belong in the team, and he wasn't so great with rejection, whatever form it came in.

Of course, he would never tell her any of this, never mention how her frostiness gnawed at his edges. Why should he care if a sneaky little trickster like Natasha Romanoff didn't like him much? He was Iron Man, for Christ's sake. But he wasn't so good at lying to himself any more. Too much had happened. He did care. He cared deeply about all of them. Even her. It had been a long time since he'd anything in his life that felt like family, he'd almost forgotten what the word meant, but now he had them, the idea that he could lose them again was a terrifying one.

"You okay?" he asks her, pulling a small leaf from her snarled up hair, and licking his thumb, he rubs a small smudge of blood from her chin. A smudge that could easily be a bloody fingerprint, but he decides to bypass that little detail, for a while, anyway - he knows it'll all come flooding back in glorious technicolour the second he closes his eyes and tries to sleep tonight. What he does he notice instead is the edge of a bandage poking out the neck of her combat suit. "What happened here?" he asks her, pointing to her shoulder.

"The Winter Soldier happened." She replies, waving him off. "Its fine. It was high velocity round - it went right through."

"Jesus Christ, Natasha..."

"Don't worry about it, Stark, I've had worse. Although I think my bikini wearing days are now well and truly over."

"Yeah, I bet you'd look terrible in a bikini now." Tony replies, letting his brain slip back into default dark-snark mode for its own protection - it was that or the Blue Screen of Death and none of them had time for that.

Natasha smiles thinly. "That's exactly what Steve said when I showed him where Barnes shot me the last time."

"Yeah, well Law of Averages and all that. I guess me and Rogers have to agree sometimes."

They look at each other for a moment, all their unspoken fears suddenly hanging in the air between them.

"Everything's going to be okay, Nat... We're always okay. Right?"

Natasha nods. It's not much to hang on to, but it's all that he can give her and right then, it seems to be enough.

"You're just going to leave that there?" Natasha asks, gesturing towards War Machine as they walk past the armour, and Tony shrugs. "Sure, it might brighten the place up a little."