Chapter 30 – Building A Suit

A/n: Have an announcement guys. I'm near 300 reviews so my 300th reviewer whoever that may be can ask me to write a story in this verse of their choosing (if it's Thor heavy/centric it may not be too good as I don't feel I write him well).

Post U Later: Toni may be strong but looking strong and feeling it are different things and I wanted to emphasise that with that scene. It was mainly just a random pick of one of the other characters.

Lovergirl24: Her ending up with Piper is a plot point I need to avoid a plot hole so you can count on that.

XxxBellaBellaxxX: Finally, the Steve angst is itching to be written over those details.

paisley15: Yeah that's another one of my headcanons. Plus the fact that the one Rhodey takes is the Mark II where the display is shown to be much simpler. And poor Steve didn't even know that the systems of the suit were complicated until he watched the Avengers movie. Plus he doesn't know that the comparatively simpler Mark I is a) unusable and b) a piece of junk compared to the others. Yeah, I wish I could write more Phil but his character wants to stay IC so I can't :D I'll try and give you some of his thoughts when I feel I can.

youwannabekate: Yeah, the chapter was actually going to be longer but wouldn't have been up yesterday. I guess I have twisted perceptions because I update every day /lol/ Feel free to add all the French you liked because they are sadistic bastards so /shrugs/ Of course it's badass. It's Toni!

Stiles Holmes: You're very welcome :) I'm glad you love it

ShouldBeAsleep: Loving the guest username :D I'm really glad you love this story and thank you for your praise.

LaNaturalBreezeOf-Books: Yep, it baffles me how the Avengers seem to forget that more often than not. This is a new one; a new laptop so I knew it was a program and I hope the one I deleted and rebooted was the right one.

Dragones: I'm glad that seeing an update makes your mornings brighter :) And don't worry about the plugging. I used to plug my stories as much as possible.

ReadPaxJoy: I'm really pleased you think so highly of this story and that while it didn't make you cry it was still good.

Shinigami92 and Harm Marie: I'm glad :)

nessa11997: You're welcome.

ladynarutochan: Just bow to Toni's awesomeness and stop stalking me

"From now on I'm suspending all replies to comments along the lines of how incredibly impossible and amazing it was that I managed to build the first Arc Reactor and the first Iron Man suit in a cave," Toni said in a biting tone, "because I basically end up replying in the same way every time and it gets ridiculously tiring."

"Impressive," Yinsen exclaimed not having anything else to say. A brief exterior shot showed that outside the cave the bitter cold of an Afghanistan night was setting in.

"It was already winter there," Steve said shocked that Toni could have been in captivity for so long.

"Not necessarily," Bruce informed him, "during the day Afghanistan is one of the hottest countries on Earth but at night it's absolutely freezing. The temperature variation is among the widest in the world in that area."

Watched through one of the video cameras Yinsen could be seen installing the newly created arc reactor into the hole in Toni's chest.

"That must have been uncomfortable no matter how necessary it was," Natasha said wincing.

"I had no choice so I didn't let it bother me," Toni stated although it was clear that she was still trying to convince herself of that.

Toni quickly sat up and threw a tank top on over the arc reactor as fast as she could before Yinsen pulled her to her feet. Through the camera you could clearly see a blue circle of light shining through the tank top but the terrorists appeared not to realise its importance.

"You were right," Clint told Toni, "they should have realised what you were doing much earlier."

"I think they assumed that the light was some sort of torch I was carrying," Toni scoffed, "but they really should have checked especially when it never switched off."

The next shot was of the kidnapped pair playing a board game as Toni muttered quietly to Yinsen in Arabic so any people guarding the door didn't overhear her knowledge of the language. "Good," Yinsen chuckled appreciatively upon seeing the dice roll, "good roll. Good roll."

"Yinsen needed the breaks," Toni explained to all those wondering why the woman who could work through a week without any sleep on some occasions was taking a break in her escape preparations to play a board game, "plus by keeping my sleeping habits on the down low I could pass off any excess work as adrenaline and that meant they kept on underestimating me."

"You still haven't told me where you're from," Toni pointed out as she took the lid off of the teapot that sat next to her elbow.

"I'm from a small town named Gulmira," Yinsen answered, "It's actually a nice place."

"Isn't that the place that Christine Everhart found…?" Natasha began but didn't need to go any further in her inquiry for Toni's eyes had taken on a sort of dead look as she heard this question and she knew she was right. Why was it that whenever she was right about something during this film she sincerely wished that she had actually been wrong all along?And how on Earth had Amora believed that the contents of this movie would turn them against Toni when all they had been doing was showing that all the assumptions they had made about Toni were irrevocably wrong. It was actually fixing some things as some of those assumptions had been the cause of lingering resentment for her friend. Mind you Amora was of a different world so maybe in some way these events were repulsive to her? But Thor seemed just as appalled by them as the others were and while he had spent more time on Earth than any other resident of Asgard he still hadn't been there quite long enough to absorb their system of moral values.

"Got a family?" Toni asked not quite able to meet Yinsen's eyes when she asked.

"Yes," Yinsen told her, "and I will see them when I leave here."

"I still can't believe they told us the World War was over when there were still millions of people out there who are willing to kidnap men with families and women who've done nothing wrong and subject them to torture and humiliation just because they can," Steve muttered into his hands.

"It's not a perfect world," Toni said quoting her words from earlier on in this very film, "but it's the only one we've got. That's still true in this context as much as it was when I said it back then."

"And you Stark?" Yinsen asked.

Toni seemed to think over her response for a while probably deciding whether she should lie to him or not but then obviously decided on the truth, "No."

"Toni," Bruce said sadly but refrained from continuing when he got a glare from the woman in question.

"No?" Yinsen questioned sadly, "So you're a woman who has everything and nothing." Toni's lip quirked up a little at this statement but she didn't say anything further on the subject.

"What about your friends Piper and Rhodey?" Thor asked, "In your culture aren't close friends often considered part of a family?"

"That's true Thor but the problem is back then I wasn't really all that close to either of them," Toni sighed sensing she wouldn't get out of this conversation, "Piper and I had to keep things entirely professional, well as professional as we could get with each other, and as such we couldn't be friends. And Rhodey and I may have met at MIT but his first loyalty is to the military. I've never truly trusted the military as a whole and even less so after I went to Afghanistan."

In the passageway through the cave the spokesman indicated that the group he was with should progress as silently as possible and looked through the hatch in the door but as Yinsen was whittling away at something and Toni was using a circular saw he didn't think there was anything suspicious going on.

"How did you always know when they were coming so you would do something that wasn't incriminating?" Clint inquired.

"The standard of the cameras weren't very high so I guessed that some of our actions would be seen as making what they wanted under the angles I calculated they were showing. Anything particularly incriminating that would have blown the plan was done in a blind spot for the camera," Toni explained, "you could time them down to the second for the times when they decided vague actions were no longer enough to be sure that I was working and like clockwork they would show up every time. At those times of the day we would be working on things that were still crucial for the suit but that would be crucial for the construction of a missile too."

"The best ways to hide something are always those when you trick your opponents into thinking it was what they wanted all along," Phil chipped in.

Satisfied with what he had seen the group walked away again. Strewn across the tables of the lab were the mechanisms of bombs, welded sections of metal such as what appeared to be a breastplate along with boxes and boxes of high precision tools. At the very end of this table Toni was wielding a welder to create another piece of the suit and neatly connected up a gas canister.

"I see you've got rudimentary weapons hooked up," Natasha said impressed.

Back in the observation room the kidnappers were beginning to get suspicious as they compared the picture of the missile to what the kidnapped pair was creating.

"Is this when they figure it out?" Bruce asked nervously.

"No," Toni stated simply leaving Bruce wondering how on Earth they hadn't figured it out then if they had a photograph for comparison readily available. How idiotic were these people and how did they expect to compete with someone as intelligent as Toni Stark? How did they ever think they'd come out on top in that situation?

"It doesn't look anything like the picture," the spokesman pointed out.

"Maybe it's been modified," another reasoned.

"The tail is wrong," the spokesman insisted but this was countered with a quick, "it's just backwards."

"The things people will believe when they truly want to," Toni laughed, "they were always going to get suspicious and Raza caught on eventually but the fact that it was later rather than sooner and he didn't catch on to the whole plan bought me the time I needed."

"How long did this take?" Steve asked worried about how long Toni had been subjected to torture by the hands of these murderers.

"It'll probably come up later," Toni said cutting off Natasha who had been about to speak, "there's no point in telling you now. The deal stands. If it doesn't come up I will tell you when this movie ends."

In his personal hut Raza was observing Toni on his own personal set of cameras and it showed that Toni had been forced to throw caution to the wind to test out the smoothness of the movements of the leg of the suit.

"That's what you were referring to with Raza catching on," Bruce speculated, "I'm assuming that's Raza."

"Yes," Toni said, "but he only knew I was working on something that wasn't related to his missile so he attempted to make me drop my extra project and focus on what he wanted. He didn't realise how close that extra project was to being completed at that stage. I got it done within the conditions he set because I wasn't attempting to make the Jericho missile at all."

"He underestimated you," Phil concluded, "as many of us, including I'm afraid me, have been prone to do in the past. You're a very talented engineer Toni; you're just as good at acting and I'm glad in a way that Howard was more focused on keeping you in society or you'd have been put through SHIELD training the minute that you hit 16. But you couldn't vanish from MIT and the minute you graduated and would have been free game for Fury your parents died and you dropped completely off the grid until you turned twenty-one and took over as CEO of Stark Industries and at that point you were once again too public to remove. I'm assuming that you did that on purpose."

The hatch on the door was slid open once again and Arabic was shouted through it. Toni looked up startled that someone was coming in although she luckily wasn't doing anything incriminating.

"You were surprised because of the regular schedule you mentioned," Bruce hypothesised, "they just broke the pattern didn't they?"

"Yes," Toni confirmed, "they weren't due in the room for another hour after that. I figured they'd seen the practice I was doing with the leg mechanism for the suit and was just relying on their obliviousness up to that point to keep me safe from being shot right then and there for disobeying them which I wouldn't have put past them. They were terrorists after all."

The spokesman was the first to enter the room accompanied by a massive armed guard as Toni and Yinsen both lifted up their arms so they were behind their heads. At the end of this procession Raza walked forward through the guards and into the room.

"Relax," he said speaking English unlike anyone else in the caves obviously noticing the arc reactor shining through Toni's t-shirt.

"This had better end on a more positive note than my thoughts because I don't even want to think about something like that happening," Clint said feeling like he wanted to throw up despite his training from some of the macabre thoughts he had just come up with. At least he knew they didn't manage to kill or cripple Toni so some of his even more macabre ideas were plain ridiculous and didn't fit the facts. He wished that stopped them from being disturbing.

Toni and Yinsen lowered their hands slowly knowing it was best to do what the man in charge was telling them to even if it didn't make sense. Although they knew that in a way it did because he knew that neither of them could truly attack him in this situation without coming under heavy fire. Sure, one of them might kill him in the struggle but they weren't that desperate yet.

Raza walked over to Toni and pushed the material of the blouse she was wearing away slightly so he could see the arc reactor clearly.

Natasha snarled at the action but refrained from speaking again. If Toni's plan went the way she thought it might have done then those men were already long dead and there was nothing else she could do to them.

"The bow and arrow," Raza began, "once was the pinnacle of weapons technology."

"What do you mean once you creep?" Clint muttered. The slight at this weapon of choice had pushed him an inch closer to blowing up at an image on a television screen that couldn't even hear him. It didn't help that he had always been ridiculed for his choice of weapon within SHIELD as he fought his way up the ranks. Once the other Agents saw him become one of SHIELD's two top operatives who actually did field missions more than bureaucratic ones along with Natasha they finally stopped making fun of his weapon but that didn't stop him being overly protective of his choice to this day. Toni had once joked that she wasn't sure who Clint loved more Natasha or his arrows. Clint had informed her that the arrows won because he was just friends with Natasha. For some reason she had almost descended into a manic coughing fit from all the laughing she did upon hearing that statement.

He walked away from Toni as he continued with his monologue, "It allowed the great Genghis Khan to rule from the Pacific to the Ukraine," here he paused to examine one of the disassembled missiles, "An empire twice the size of Alexander the Great and four times the size of the Roman empire," he made his way over to the work station and picked up the four sheets of paper that formed the plan for the suit.

"Thank god you thought to make sure the full thing couldn't be viewed except under certain conditions," Steve said relieved. If he hadn't known that Toni had drawn up that plan in such a complicated way he would have been worried sick at this point. This allowed him to focus on another aspect of this scene. Toni could draw and she could draw well at least as far as technical specs went. It was something that they had in common and Toni had never brought it up with him. And he knew that she knew he loved to draw because she had bought him the high end art equipment he now owned and was constantly updating his sketchpads when he ran out of room in them. He had often wondered why she didn't try to get him to draw on a tablet instead once he had mastered their use and now he knew why. Because she understood that the feeling of seeing the product come together wasn't the same on a touch screen.

"But today," he continued not seeing the plans for what they really were, "whoever holds the latest Stark weapons rules these lands. And soon, it will be my turn," he said giving Toni a dark look as he said this.

He walked over to face Toni but began to speak in Urdu instead of English and as he was unaware that Toni could understand him he was directing this part of the speech to Yinsen, "why have you failed me?"

"We're working," Yinsen replied nervously, "Diligently."

Clint, Natasha and Phil had all seen things like this before but they still dreaded what might happen to the man who had helped Toni so much at this point in his capture. It was a common tactic. Use the surplus captive as leverage up to a point and when he proves more of a nuisance than a help kill him so that the other hostage gets the message that you are willing to kill them if you don't follow through on your side of the bargain.

"I let you live," Raza said turning to walk towards Yinsen, "This is how you repay me?"

"It's very complex," Yinsen continued desperately trying to save his own skin.

"Deflection doesn't usually work," Toni said quietly.

"She's trying very hard," he finished.

"On his knees," Raza ordered and two of the guards grabbed Yinsen and forced him down onto the ground, "you think I'm a fool?" Raza was now chuckling at the notion, "I'll get the truth."

"We're both working," Yinsen attempted again.

"I was wondering why you weren't speaking," Bruce told Toni privately, "but then I realised that you're keeping the attention away from yourself until you either had to intervene or it was the best possible moment. Whichever happened to come up prior to the other."

Raza blew gently on a boiling hot coal that he had removed from the smelter with a pair of tongs and ordered, "Open your mouth."

A/n: And it's getting really late so I have to leave it there I'm afraid. I think this one seems more like a cliffie than the others and again another short chapter but I have to split the captivity scenes up quite equally before we get back to scenes where the commentary can go back to a more complex rate.