Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Marvel Studios, Disney, and/or their otherwise respective owners.
Author's Notes: Hi, everyone! I know it's been a while – life has been hectic for me over the past several months and this chapter was really hard to get to a spot that I liked for some reason, hence why I didn't update over the summer. But I'm back to this story now, and hopefully for a while. :)
Chapter title comes from Leather and Lace by Stevie Nicks and Don Henley.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Until the next chapter,
~TGWSI/Selene Borealis
~the heavy souls 'verse~
~life in technicolor ii~
~chapter 14: leather and lace~
A couple days after Harley's birthday, the Avengers received their first major mission ever since they had all signed the Accords.
The mission, on paper, was simple. The Argentinian government had discovered what they believed to be an abandoned HYDRA base that hadn't been in the records Natasha had dumped for whatever reason, and they wanted the Avengers to go through it and make sure that there weren't any booby-traps or explosives that would risk their people and that any devices or equipment that would be too dangerous for them to handle would be gotten rid of. Tony was almost impressed at that latter part for the maturity of it on face value, but he knew what it really was: a test. If they left pretty much everything for the Argentinian government to go through, then that meant that they trusted them. If they didn't, however, and took things that the Argentinian government would argue that they could handle...
Yep, that was politics for you. Always a complicated, complicated mess.
But, that was fine. He was able to deal with that part.
What was much more difficult to deal with was who the Argentinian government wanted to go on the mission: Iron Man, Black Widow, the Falcon, and...Captain America. Steve.
He understood it, of course. They wanted three of the original Avengers on the team, plus the newer one that had helped reveal HYDRA's continued existence to the world and take them down from the inside out of SHIELD. Still, that didn't mean he had to like it – and that was one of his mantras as of late, wasn't it?
He'd wanted the Avengers back for Penny. He was putting up with Steve for Penny. Fighting alongside him again after everything he'd done...he'd do it for her, but there was no way that he would trust the blonde with his life again. No way.
(Can't breathe can't breathe can't – )
Of course, the real icing on the cake was that these thoughts of his couldn't go unnoticed. Natasha caught up to him when he left the conference room after the briefing, his thermos of coffee clenched tightly in his left hand. "Are you alright with this?" she asked him.
"Alright with what?"
She flicked him on the arm. "Don't play dumb with me," she warned. "You know, it's okay not to be alright with it. If you really don't want to be out on the field with him again, I'm sure that – "
"Let's not go down that route. I don't want to deal with the fallout of people realizing that some of the Avengers aren't as buddy-buddy as what we've been trying to portray," he deadpanned. And yes, by "some," he meant exclusively him and Steve. The others were all meshing together well. The only ones who were having problems were them. "It'll be fine, Natashalie. Fine."
She gave him a look that told him how much she didn't believe his bullshit. "Yeah, keep telling yourself that."
He would. For his daughter's sake, he didn't have another choice.
Speaking of Penny, she took the news of him having to leave her this summer again well. "Just as long as you'll be back for my birthday, it's fine," she teased him. But she did add on to that, "You'll be safe, right?"
"As safe as we can be," he promised her.
He made sure before they left that Matt would keep an eye on her the couple of days that they were gone. She wasn't supposed to go off on patrol without him, because her track record as of late hadn't been the best and Tony wanted to make sure that she didn't get injured or need help when he wasn't there to so much as send a suit. There wasn't going to be much internet access in the middle of the jungle, which was where they were going to be, even with the usage of his satellites. Not even he could connect to the internet from the most remote of places on Earth.
The night of the 27th, they headed off in the morning for Argentina, taking one of the quinjets. "I call pilot," he said when they got on the aircraft. He didn't want to fall asleep and needed something to focus on besides his own thoughts, autopilot or not.
Sam grinned. "Only if I can be copilot."
"Sounds alright to me."
"I think I'm going to get some shut-eye," Natasha said, staying in the back and sitting on one of the beds. "If one of you want to switch, just wake me up and let me know."
"Same goes for me," Steve tacked on.
They didn't. The entire nine hours it took for them to get to Argentina, Tony was awake, constantly sipping at his coffee. Sam took a nap about halfway through. They didn't really talk that much, outside of the initial conversation that they had after Nat and Steve had fallen asleep, but the silence was companionable, not stiff or anything.
"So, how are you holding up?" Sam asked him then.
"Oh, alright," he said noncommittally. "You?"
"Happy to get out of NYC," was Sam's cheerful response. "Don't get me wrong, it's nice to be back at the Tower, but after a year of traveling everywhere and going on missions all the time, I'm ready for some action, you know?"
Tony didn't, but he acted like he did. "Yeah. What was your favorite of those missions, by the way."
"Oh, hands down, Iran," Sam said without a beat. "We took down a terrorist cell there, which we did a lot of, but it was how we did it that was so damn funny..."
They got to where they needed to be right after six in the morning, the quinjet landing about a half-mile away from the base in the dense and thick jungle. They all suited up before they left – no one was sticking behind in the quinjet this time, as 1) there wasn't supposed to be anybody here in the jungle except for them (of course, that didn't mean that would actually be the case, he realized that), 2) Shuri had made the quinjets so that they would only open for somebody with their biometrics, and 3) the person who had usually stayed behind during their missions was Bruce, and that was enough said there.
"It sure is hot," Steve commented, panting.
"It's the humidity," Natasha responded. "Come on, let's get going."
They made their way through the jungle, Tony and Sam included. There were no paths, because the HYDRA base had been abandoned long enough that if there had been one, the jungle had grown over it – not that it would have taken that long for it to happen. He used his repulsers and Natasha used a sword she'd brought along just for this purpose to clear the brush, but it still felt like an eternity had passed until they came upon the base.
The base looked like it was an older building, built in the '50s or '60s, made of a dark rock that looked a lot like concrete but obviously had to be something a lot more durable, given the state that the structure was in. Vines and other sorts of plants had grown over it, but the entrance was still obvious with the thickest archway surrounding the door.
"Does this building have power still?" he wondered out loud, noticing the passcode box by the door. It was eroded to the point that the buttons were all stuck together, but if they (read: he) took off the panel he could probably get them in regardless by hooking his suit up to the building's wires and entering the code from the keyboard on his arm. But, now that he mentioned it... "Do we even have a code?"
"The Argentinian government is pretty sure of what it is," Natasha supplied.
"'Pretty sure,'" he quoted. "Great."
He activated the torch in the right index finger of his suit to cut out both the passcode box and some of the metal panel surrounding it, revealing the wires behind them. "There is power," he said, telling the others what FRIDAY was showing him. "Alright, girl, help me get us in."
"On it, Boss."
Once he was hooked up to the building, Natasha read him off the code. Knowing their luck, he half-expected it to be wrong and everything to explode in his face, but instead the door gave a great big shudder as it opened. He stepped back with the others to see what was inside, but all they could see was a dark grey hallway with metal flooring. There were no lights on inside.
Sam sighed. "That's reassuring."
Steve cocked his head. "They weren't sure of when this building was abandoned. The lights could just be off because it's been too long since it's been taken care of." He didn't sound like he entirely believed his own words.
"That's the spirit, Cap," Tony said. "Don't worry, I'll lead the way."
He turned on the lights on the shoulders of his suit as Natasha took a flashlight out of her tool belt and handed it to Steve. The captain took up the rear, Natasha in front of him and Sam squeezed in between her and Tony.
There were no signs of any foul play in the main hallway. No blood or decayed body parts or anything, just general signs of disrepair from neglect over a long period of time.
The first room that they came upon was the surveillance room. The timeline for when the building had at the very least been abandoned was bumped up a little bit, because the room had computer monitors that were hooked up to the camera screens and the earliest computer monitor had been built in 1973. None of the devices worked they tried to turn them on. A quick look at the wires revealed why, outside of the simple fact that everything was thirty to forty years old: the wires had been chewed through, presumably by rats.
Natasha made a face. "Nice."
"Is there anything that we need to remind ourselves to take from this room later?" Steve asked, hanging in the doorway warily.
"...No, I don't think so," Tony answered, looking around. There were bulky computers to go along with the monitors, but they were huge and wouldn't be able to be carried out unless by him or the captain, which would be in multiple trips even with them working together, and he wasn't sure if they would be worth it anyways. There wasn't really anything about HYDRA that they didn't already know, abandoned bases not included in the records notwithstanding. "Let's keep on going."
They went deeper into the base. There were other rooms, but they didn't spend as much time in those due to realizing one thing based on the layout of the building: it had been one of HYDRA's human experimentation facilities.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Images flashed through his mind: the cells Pietro and Wanda had been imprisoned in during their time under HYDRA, Wanda's downcast eyes as she'd told them what the HYDRA soldiers had done to her while clutching Pietro's hand tightly in her own, golden-green eyes and a smirk framed by curly brown hair that were lit only by the light of a table lamp...
There were no life-signs in the entire building besides their own, and yet still they went to where they knew the cells that had housed the victims of HYDRA's degeneracy would be. There were no lights that came on here, just as there had been no lights to come on in the rest of the building because of the neglect, in spite of there being some level of power in the building. But with the lights of his suit and Steve's borrowed flashlight, they had no problems at all in seeing the evidence of depravity. Tony's stomach rolled with it.
"Oh God," Sam muttered, having a similar reaction.
The first cell they came upon had their first human remains inside of it in the form of a skeleton, all that was left after the rats had presumably eaten everything that they could before they'd converged on the wires and decades more of decay on top of that. It was hard to tell what exactly had happened to the unknown victim, what all they had been put through until HTDRA had left them here to die (presuming they hadn't killed them before they'd left), but there were claw marks in the glass door of the cell. Deep gouges that were proof of the inhumane pain and suffering.
Out of the eight cells, three more had human remains in them. Two of them had no obvious signs of experimentation or torture. The last skeleton, though, had an extra set of what looked to be shoulder blades, with two sets of long and longer bones resting near it. Wings, he assumed.
This skeleton looked to be far younger than any of the others, too. Like they had been the same age as Penny when she'd disappeared, if not younger.
"Poor kid," he whispered, his throat tightening.
It hadn't been so long ago that he'd thought this could've been Penny's fate. Maybe not the outright experimented on by HYDRA part – although, who was he kidding? It had definitely been a concern, just one he'd tried not to think about.
They made their way down the hallway of the cells, which fed into another hallway that they weren't really sure where it went yet. It was time for them to find out.
They didn't realize their mistake, not until they were all in the new hallway. Because then, with a horrible, nails-on-chalkboard type groan that sent the hairs on the back of his neck on end like Penny's sixth sense, the door to the doorway they'd just passed through shut. In the background, there sounded like multiple echoes of that noise, letting them know that this most likely wasn't the only door to have closed.
"What the hell?" Steve said, turning around, only to be met with the solid metal door directly in front of his face.
Tony had such an ominous feeling, he didn't even comment on the language, even though he would've in spite of the emotional chasm between them.
Natasha took out her gun from its holster, as previously she'd just kept her hand near it. She cocked it. "That kind of attitude only brews for disaster. We've been through worse," she murmured. "And as much as I'd like to break down that door, we do need to see if there's another exit in the building."
Which meant they had to go down the hallway, heading deeper inside.
Great. Just fucking great.
While the cells for the victims of the human experimentation had been relatively easy to find, the hallways that they had access to were a labyrinth. There were more doors, but all of them were closed. Tony thought about trying to see if he could cut through them using his lasers or torch, or just trying to see if a plan old repulser would work, but the readings FRIDAY was giving him were not promising. "It seems like the metal used to build the doors is made with some sort of tungsten alloy. That means it probably doesn't have as high of a melting point as the metal in its pure form – "
"I know what it means, FRI," he muttered under his breath.
She ignored him. "But it would still take a lot of heat. And I can't see what's on the other side."
Translation: no heat signs indicating life didn't mean the rooms on the other sides of those doors were any less dangerous.
They reached the end of one hallway with no exit in sight; it was an apparent dead end. So they circled back, took a different path.
This time, they had more luck. They came upon a large room, almost like a gymnasium in size, but with no physical equipment. There were no windows in this room either, leaving them in the dark besides their own lights.
Until the room's lights came on, that is.
Suddenly, they were shrouded in green lights that didn't do anything except make him feel like something even more foreboding on its way. There was the sound like a speaker clicking. Except, when it came on, besides the absolutely reassuring statement of, "Eindringlinge" (German for "intruders"), there was nothing except static noise. That's what he and Sam heard, anyways.
Steve and Natasha, on the other hand, both groaned and squeezed their eyes shut. There had to be a high-pitched noise coming from the speakers that only they could hear because they were enhanced but he and Sam couldn't.
Tony swiveled his head, looking around the room. Seeing one of the speakers towards the ceiling, he aimed his repulser and fired at it. The speaker exploded in a shower of sparks.
Just like that, the static noise stopped.
Sam went over to Natasha, helping her to her feet. "You alright?" he asked.
She gasped shallowly. "Fine." Her gun was on the floor. With a shaking hand, she picked it up, but didn't tighten her hold on it to aim the weapon, much less fire it. "Just wasn't expecting that."
"Cap?" Tony prodded gently to the blonde.
The captain grunted, getting to his feet as well. "Gonna have tinnitus for a couple of hours," he said, before repeating, "What the hell was that?"
Nobody got a chance to answer him.
Like the other doors, the door to this room came sliding shut – probably as intended. Whoever had installed the booby-trap procedures for this base, they had definitely counted on enhanced people (he would place his bets they had counted on Steve specifically, due to him being in the ice for so long) coming here to check things out and for the non-enhanced people to be so distracted by their companions' suffering that they didn't get them all the fuck out, the warning of them being "intruders" or not. And like idiots, they'd fallen into those plans perfectly.
As if things couldn't get worse, a hissing noise came from the vents. They all froze. "What's that?" Natasha asked.
"FRI?" Tony demanded.
"I'm detecting some kind of gas...analyzing...turning on filtration protocols..."
The good news about that: whatever was coming into the room through the vents, he wasn't going to breathe it in. Nothing could get past his suit's filtration systems.
The bad news: the same couldn't be said for Steve, Nat, and Sam.
Sam was the one to start coughing first as the faint cloud descended upon them. Tony stared at him, horror overtaking his entire being. "FRI, finish that analysis, now."
They never should have come here. Logically, he knew that they'd had to, that this was what came with being a superhero and all that jazz, but –
"The gas is a compound we've never seen before. The elements that I can detect suggest it is not immediately fatal, but in high enough doses – "
Shit.
Sam fell to the floor, still coughing. Natasha's gun clattered to the ground as she clasped her left hand on her knee, clutching her right on her throat. "Tony..." she panted. "You're gonna have to...get us out of here..."
Steve wasn't faring much better than either of them. He wasn't coughing, not yet like Natasha was beginning to, but his face was turning red. The same color of red that Tony had always imagined his had that day, when the terror had been coursing through his veins so bad it had constricted his airways and prevented him from doing the very thing that he should've done.
(Was that why he felt so frozen right now, now that he was seeing the same happen to his friends, to his ex-fiancé in real time, even though their inability to breathe was being caused by a chemical and not by psychosomatics?
Or was it because he knew it should've occurred to him that something like this would happen? They'd come across HYDRA bases, abandoned and not, that had used chemical agents in their defense systems. The last time they'd come across one of those was before Ultron, yes, but he was Tony Stark. Clint had jested when he'd gone to them in the Raft, but he was supposed to see all. He had to protect everybody from – )
"Tony."
He blinked.
He'd only been frozen for a couple of seconds, even though those seconds had felt like a lifetime. Steve was staring at him with those blue, blue eyes of his. "Tony, Natasha's right," he said, his voice already rubbed raw from the gas. "You need...to get us...out. I know...you can do it. I believe you."
Just like that, his brain came back online. He'd frozen up a couple of times during a battle before, all of them had, they weren't perfect, but the captain had always been able to pull him out of it.
Tony didn't trust Steve with his life, but that didn't mean Tony was going to let any harm come to him.
Without further ado, he activated his repulsers, a fire burning in his bones. He didn't care that FRIDAY had already told him how hard it would be to get through the metal of the base.
He was going to blow a hole in its fucking wall and get his friends – his family – out of here.
Word Count: 3,601
Next Chapter Title: helena beat
