Avengers: Search for the Winter Soldier, Chapter 28
Title: Whatever It Takes
Summary: Tony's study of the Winter Soldier's uniform and weapons brings him to an astonishing conclusion. Nick Fury makes contact with the team with some unwelcome information.
Steve stared at the man on the bed who'd just made it clear that he hated Hydra just as much as he hated the team holding him now. The two men stared at each other as Steve found it difficult to pull his gaze away from the solid hatred he could read in those deep blue eyes. He had never, ever experienced his friend displaying true hatred; Bucky simply didn't hate. He never showed anger or hatred toward the bullies from whom he always had to save Steve, even after he took the beating meant for Rogers. Even after he'd been originally rescued from Zola's lab, he never expressed hatred over what they'd done to him in that camp or toward the people who did it to him. Sgt. Barnes simply recovered his health and went back to work with the Howlers on missions. Yes, they destroyed many Hydra bases but Bucky had never given any impression that he held a grudge. To him, it seemed that he understood it was just part of war and nothing personal. 'But then again, that had been a brief capture compared to seventy years of torture and abuse,' he realized. That could change a man inside… and now it looked to Rogers that it had changed his friend.
Tony and Sam, with help from Clint, had informed Natasha of the issue with the flashback the Soldier had experienced. Now that she was brought up to date, Tony wanted to get back to his work on the suit and weapons they'd removed from the Winter Soldier after he'd been captured and brought back to the Avengers' compound. The study of these items had taken so much of Stark's focus that he'd been essentially absent from the Soldier's team and when Sam had come to him asking to take his position on the team Tony was more than willing to be removed so he could focus on his passion – high tech weapons and suits.
He'd finished with the weapons a few days ago. He had spent days on those, using Butterfingers and the other robotic arms in his lab. With the mechanical arms to handle objects of unknown origins, his life had been saved more times than he could count and this time was no different.
He'd seen video footage of the Winter Soldier in action on different missions. He wasn't entirely sure who had taken the video footage but was quite certain it was a Hydra operative… probably in position long before the Soldier showed up to complete his missions in order to gather a library of video footage for Hydra to study or to just see how their 'mindless assassin' worked toward successfully completing his missions.
Tony found that term mindless assassin to be an ironic one. Watching the video footage made it crystal clear to Stark that although the assassin was subjected to memory wipes and was being controlled using brainwashing methods… he was hardly mindless. He often had to think fast on his feet and sometimes he would disappear from sight and the camera operator appeared to have to scramble to find him again.
Tony watched various videos that showed the Soldier needing to calculate risks-versus-rewards in nano-seconds; sometimes altering his plans and other times staying put and following through with his original plan. He proved to be quite brilliant and – dare he say it – a tactical and strategic genius.
There was footage that clearly showed him set up in position as a sniper – a skill for which Sgt. Barnes was well-known and probably one of the reasons Hydra chose him to begin experiments on back in the war. The footage often had to be fast-forwarded because he'd sit or lie down hidden for hours staring in a singular direction. Daylight footage showed him with full mask and goggles and night time footage showed him wearing the mask but no goggles, instead it appeared that Hydra – or perhaps he did it himself – utilized black face paint found in a military camouflage paint kit to smear his eyes in what amounted to painted-on-goggles. The black around his eyes still served to hide his features without having to try to find his target through dark lenses in the night.
Tony made a personal note to himself that the smeared on black paint actually unnerved him more than the goggles did. He wasn't entirely certain why at first, but then it became clear to him later on, that it was the manner in which the paint was simply smeared over his eyes – with no care or professional mindset. One thing Tony knew from his years working closely with the military; selling them his weapons designs and often accompanying them on deployments; was that military soldiers who use the paints on missions often took their time covering their hands and faces with specific designs and a mix of colors of black, green and brown. They used mirrors in the field to apply their colors in specific designs and they felt a sense of pride in their personalized "war paint".
This assassin didn't show that kind of personal care or pride when applying his war paint on missions. The smeared blackened eyes seemed to reflect the chaos and disorganized mindset of this operative's mental state. Tony found himself on more than one occasion staring into those blackened blue eyes and having to consciously pull himself away with a shudder racing down his spine.
Other footage, clearly shot by someone moving along with him with a hand-held video camera, showed him displaying skills of a highly focused man-hunter. Unlike a sniper who lay in wait and was singularly focused on a specific area and would spend hours or days staring down that one spot, the hunter moved swiftly with speed and grace that belied the disorganized mind within. His eyes scanned entire areas as he moved forward and he would sometimes stop and freeze, using his other senses to determine if his prey was close by as he listened with extreme focus. Watching him actively hunting his target was more unsettling to Tony Stark than watching him snipe some unsuspecting target and then disappearing.
In the footage taken when the Soldier's mission was to take out Cap and Romanoff, the Winter Soldier was seen accompanied by an entourage of soldiers and handlers who had gotten him into position by driving him to his target. Tony had picked up on the fact that as often as the team that surrounded him would also fire on defending law enforcement or multiple targets as if assisting the Soldier on his mission and providing him cover as he focused on the mission; there were many times that Stark noticed a team member picking up a specific weapon and handing it to the Soldier for him to use instead of just using it themselves.
He also noted that when they handed him those particular weapons they kept their hands completely clear of the trigger and hand grips. So that made him curious- and he'd been correct. All of the Soldier's weapons; pistols, rifles, knives and explosives, were biometrically controlled and were now locked up in a special weapons safe inside the compound's armory so no one mistakenly picked one up out of curiosity. The biometrics involved in the Soldier's personal armaments meant that they would explode if anyone else's hands were detected on the weapons controls. These controls would assure that if his weapons were dropped or taken from him, they couldn't be used against him.
Once he'd completed his studies of the Soldier's weapons he turned his attention to the man's suit. There had to be something about it; although its appearance was somewhat nostalgic in that the style of the leather jacket, he learned from researching the internet, was designed to resemble a lunatic's straight jacket right out of East Germany in… you got it… the 1940s. The mask he was forced to wear also resembled the muzzle a violent mental patient would be forced to wear while being moved from one secure room to another. Tony wasn't sure though if the mask was specifically intended to be used as a muzzle or if it was a way to dehumanize him – to himself and to those who might look upon him - or if it was used to simply keep his identity unknown.
As much as the Winter Soldier had been considered by many in the intelligence community to be nothing more than a psychotic puppet; mostly by Tony himself, he was proving to be so much more than that. Tony Stark was starting to become extremely fascinated in all the things that wrapped the Soldier in a very pretty package, by scientific standards, that is. He pushed a button on his console and the images of the individual pieces of the uniform that hung in the air above him on a holograph screen shrank back down and tucked into the monitor screen and blinked off. It was time to tell the team what he'd learned.
He stepped out of his lab and headed toward the elevator. Tapping his earpiece he contacted Sam. "Where are you right now?"
The elevator doors opened and he was face to face with Sam and Clint. "Right here," he said with a smile. "What's up?"
"I have some really interesting stuff to share," Tony told them. "Glad you're here too," he said to Clint as he stepped inside the lift. "I won't have to repeat it. Going down?" he asked and pushed the button for the sub-level.
The Soldier's angry expression faltered as he lowered his gaze and dropped his head forward. Steve's attention was pulled to the hands on the bed rails as the fingers tightened and the muscles of his right arm bulged. He hadn't attempted to pull himself forward again though and Steve watched him closely, noticing now that the man was breathing heavily.
Natasha noticed the tension in the man's posture as he froze in that position. She stepped closer carefully, leaning down as she tried to see his face through the curtain of hair. She angled herself just right and noticed he was grimacing as if in extreme pain. There was something strange about his appearance and she tried to figure out what it was when a drop of blood fell onto the front of his hospital gown. Reflexively, without thinking, she reached for his head with both hands; her left hand held the back of his head and the right cupped his chin. She carefully pulled his head up so she could see his face and the blood streamed out of his nose.
"Bruce!" she alerted him as she held the Soldier's head in a neutral position.
Dr. Banner looked up from his equipment to see the pained expression on the Soldier's face and the blood now streaming down his chin, over Natasha's hand and onto his clean gown.
"Steve, wet cloth," Bruce requested. As Rogers moved to get the wash cloth, he moved quickly to the Soldier's bedside and pressed his fingers to the man's neck, checking his pulse. "Pulse is rapid… give me the monitor… leads."
Natasha let go of the Soldier's head and reached out to push the monitor around the back of the bed toward Bruce. As he grabbed the monitor pole and pulled it closer, Natasha had grabbed the leads hanging from the pole and held them out to him over the Soldier's head. Bruce grabbed them from her and began quickly attaching them to the man's torso and right arm. Not being able to get a read from the left side was really throwing Bruce off his game. Even the leads he attached to the left side of the Soldier's torso didn't give back readings and he didn't know why. He now wondered if that metal appendage extended further into his body than to just his shoulder. He knew he should have taken X-rays a week ago but it wasn't an urgent need at the time; but a curiosity and curiosity could wait.
"Emily," Bruce addressed her as he finished attaching leads. "Can you get the portable EEG in my lab, please?" he asked her as Steve came out of the bathroom with the wet cloth that was requested.
Dr. Golden left the room moving quickly and returned a few minutes later with the monitor. She helped Dr. Banner get it connected to the Soldier's head. Once the EEG monitor was set up he turned it on and checked the read outs. "I'm seeing no signs of stroke," he announced, which made everyone in the room relax a little. He took the wet cloth from Steve and began mopping up the blood that had run down his patient's mouth and chin, clearing the fluid from his lips so he could breathe without aspirating it. "Are you in pain?" he asked, noticing the grimace on the man's face.
Natasha's hand was still cradling the Soldier's chin and he began to rock back and forth with his eyes squeezed shut. She simply followed the motion, holding his face up.
"Can you hear me?" Banner asked him. "Are you in pain? Does your head hurt?" He asked again and the Soldier gave a quick nod. "I need you to breathe, okay? Breathe through it." Bruce told him as the monitor showed him an elevated heart rate and lowered respirations. His oxygen stats were going down as he held his breath, depriving himself of the oxygen his brain really needed right now. "Come on, breathe… in… out, nice and slow." He got most of the blood cleaned up, enough so the man could breathe without having to swallow any of it. "The bleeding is already stopped. I'm not seeing anything indicating a stroke… but the headache and spontaneous nose bleed tells me it's most likely from severe stress and anxiety. He's got a lot happening inside his brain right now too, so I'm sure the combination of physical and psychological…" He trailed off as Natasha took the wet bloody cloth from his hand and continued to gently wipe the remnants of blood off the Soldier's face and chin where Bruce had missed.
Steve offered her a clean wet cloth soaked with warm water. Natasha hadn't even noticed he'd left the bedside. She swapped out the two cloths and gave his face a full wash and his head tilted toward her as she washed his face. His eyes were still closed but the intensity of his grimace had faded. She suspected the head pain was receding by the change in his expression and his posture had relaxed. His hands had eased their grip on the rails and his breathing was returning to normal. She guided his head back to rest against the pillow and removed her hand from his chin. She used the cloth to clean off the excess blood from her hand and then tossed it into the laundry bin.
The Soldier sank heavily into the mattress and fell asleep. Or at least Steve thought he had fallen asleep, it was hard to tell – he may be just resting. Steve felt so bad. He couldn't help but wonder again if all they were putting him through was any better or worse than what Hydra had subjected him too. All Captain Rogers knew was that the man had had enough of all of it. It just wasn't fair. He wanted his friend back but he didn't know if putting him through all of this was for Bucky's own good or if they were putting him through all of this for Steve's own selfish desire to have his friend back.
"It's stealth!"
The words suddenly shouted out of nowhere startled the four people standing around the bed and they turned in unison to see Stark walk in followed by Clint and Sam.
"What?" Steve asked, not understanding the statement.
Tony halted a few feet into the room, now aware that he must have interrupted something. He brought both hands held up as if he was surrendering. "Are we interrupting?" he asked,
"Yes," Steve stated unequivocally.
"Sorry," Tony replied, dropping his hands he shoved them into his pants pockets.
"What did you say?" Natasha asked him, turning slightly so her attention could be split between Stark and the Soldier's needs.
"It's stealth," he repeated. The four people in the room continued to stare at him, waiting for more information as to what it is. "His uniform," Tony specified and pulled his hands out of his pockets to point as if out of the room. "That god-awful outfit Hydra makes him wear… it's stealth tech, all of it. That's why our targeting optics, radar, and thermal imaging detection systems weren't registering him on our systems," he explained, pointing at Sam to include the Falcon's technology. "It's what makes him a ghost… literally. He's invisible to all known technology as long as he has that entire outfit on… including the mask. We couldn't detect his presence on that rooftop, because his uniform makes him invisible to all known tech."
"He's cloaked?" Sam asked.
"Nope," Tony answered, pointing an index finger in the air. "Not cloaked... simply invisible."
"What's the difference?" Sam asked, flipping his hands out in a questioning manner.
"The difference is… if he was cloaked, we wouldn't be able to see him… at all. Not cloaked… just invisible to tech." He grinned at everyone looking back at him. "Get it?" he asked them and looked at each person for a reaction. "It's how he can move around undetected… by anyone."
"That's how he was able to walk away from Hydra," Steve suggested as the meaning of what Stark was saying finally dawned on him. "They made him invisible…"
"- even to their own tech," Tony grinned, nodding.
"He just didn't know that," Steve added, looking down at the man, resting in front of him; suggesting the Soldier had simply taken the chance to escape but didn't know he was undetectable.
"Are you sure?" Tony asked, still grinning.
Steve looked up again and pinned Stark with a stare. "What are you saying? He walked away from Hydra knowing he was invisible to them?"
Tony tilted his head slightly, hinting a shrug and moved further into the room, followed by Sam and Clint who now spread out to join the group. "It's a possibility," Tony offered. "He's not stupid."
"We know he's not stupid, Tony," Steve said, admonishing Stark for the implication.
"No, what I mean… sorry… is that he might be a brainwashed assassin and he might have had most of his marbles shaken up and maybe even lost some of them thanks to their mind wipe machine… but he's not mindless."
"We know that," Steve told him.
"Oh, well… I didn't," Tony told him.
"Well, maybe you should spend more time with him."
"Well, maybe I will," Tony replied.
"Are you two finished?" Sam asked. Everyone looked at him. Sam gestured at the man on the bed whose gown was still showing a large patch of fresh blood. "You want to tell us what happened here?" he asked.
"Nose bleed," Dr. Golden explained. "Just a response to severe stress and anxiety," she assured them. "He'll be fine."
"Anxiety can make you bleed?" he asked incredulously.
"Yes, with chronic severe stress, it can," she told him.
"Well, I guess we can call what he's been through chronic and severe," Sam concurred and took a seat. "I've never seen that though."
"It happens," she told him.
Sam considered that as he looked at the Soldier now sleeping. Steve looked from Sam back to the Soldier. Natasha had done a good job cleaning the blood from his face but the gown had to be changed again. He reached behind the man's neck and pulled the ties to loosen them and began to pull the gown down the metal arm. Natasha helped him from the right side and once he was free of the gown, Steve handed it to her and she dropped it in the bin nearby. Instead of dressing him again though, Steve simply pulled the blanket higher to cover him. He lowered the head slightly so he could cover him without the blanket sliding back down to his waist.
Everyone in the room was silent as Steve and Nat tended to the Soldier. A soft melodic sound began to repeat and everyone looked at Tony. He reached into his pocket to retrieve his phone. He checked to see who was calling and he glanced at the group.
"This might be interesting," he told them and tapped the answer button. He tapped the button a second time and it projected a holographic face into the empty space amongst the gathered team. "Hey, Nick, what's new?" Tony asked as the Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. appeared.
"We've got a problem," Fury told them.
"Just one?" Tony asked, flippantly.
"Word has it that there's a surviving Hydra cell headquartered in Pennsylvania. Our operatives are trying to sniff them out," Nick told them.
"Hydra's destroyed," Steve said with a certainty that belied his fear.
"Cut off one head," Fury reminded him.
"Two more will take its place…" he finished.
"How is it our problem?" Tony asked trying to sound casual about the news.
"They know he's in New York…" Fury told him. "When he didn't return from his mission in Latvia, they sent out their feelers. There were plenty of people who saw the Avengers take him down and walk away with him. Hydra knows where the Avengers live…"
"We have a problem," Tony stated.
"Like I said…" Nick remarked.
"What do we do?" Steve asked.
"Well, we're hoping you won't have to do anything," Nick told him. "Whatever you're doing there, keep on doing it. S.H.I.E.L.D. is deployed and we're hoping to interfere with their search for the Soldier. I'll keep you in the loop."
Steve nodded and looked at the sleeping Soldier. He couldn't let them find him. Not again. There was no way in hell he was going to let Hydra get their hands on his friend again.
"Speaking of loops," Tony directed at Fury. "I've got some information you might like to see."
"Understood. I'll be there at 0900," Nick told him.
"We'll be here," Tony replied and hung up at the same time Nick did.
Everyone in the room remained silent, taking in the news that Fury just dumped on them. Natasha and Steve looked at one another and they both looked at the Soldier.
"What do we do?" she asked quietly.
"Whatever it takes," Steve whispered back.