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It shouldn't have been anything to worry about; after all, Tony had been the victim of kidnapping attempts since approximately age fifteen, and after becoming Iron Man, it had all basically become an exercise in futility for the kidnappers. Sure, maybe it took him an hour or two to work loose from whatever Midas or the Controller or the Mandarin had him tied up in, but after that he was, more or less, home free.
So he hadn't been worried, per se, when, after the end of a presentation he'd been asked to give about Resilient in some nameless corporate boardroom, the door had opened again while he'd been standing there putting his briefcase away. He hadn't even turned around.
Then he felt the sting of a hypodermic needle in his neck and his last thought was I hope I don't need to cancel those dinner reservations.
He was Iron Man, after all. He wore his suit in his bones now. There was no way anyone could hold him back.
When he woke up he was on a steel table, shackled, spread-eagled. Someone had pulled off his tie and undone his shirt, but left the rest of his clothes intact. His shirt gaped all the way down. The walls were metal, too; the RT reflected off them, endless mirrors of blue-white light, dazzling him.
He couldn't think. God, he couldn't think.
It was no problem. He was Iron Man. He'd just call the suit, will Bleeding Edge into existence, let it seep out of his bones and through his skin--
The commands weren't there.
He felt like he was trying to come out of anesthesia and someone was holding him down in it, metaphorical mask still pressed over his mouth. It was like his awful, treasured memories of drunkenness, but there was nothing good about losing himself here. He couldn't keep track of his brain from one thought to the next.
He stared at the lights on the wall again. His head swam, dizzily.
"Whatever you want me for," Tony said, thickly, and then he stopped for a good twenty seconds because his brain hadn't figured out how to finish the sentence. "Whatever you want me for, you're going to want me to be able to think straight. Asshole."
An insult. He was proud of himself for thinking of that. That was a good, solid insult.
They knew he was Tony Stark, so they always wanted him for his genius. They wanted the weapons he'd stopped making years ago. Of course they did.
An intercom clicked. "That's where you're wrong, Stark," a man's voice said. Tony didn't recognize it. To be fair, he was high enough right now that he didn't think he'd have recognized his own mother's voice. "You see, what I'm actually interested in is Resilient's energy program. We could use power sources like you have."
Tony breathed in and out heavily. The air smelled funny. "Have you considered applying through our official channels?" he managed to ask.
The man laughed. "You're the one walking around with near-infinite energy in your chest, Stark. I was thinking about cutting in line and... mmm... just cutting it out of you?"
God. That was a new threat, wasn't it?
"I'm going to have to decline," Tony said, thickly.
The air seemed to smell more strongly. There was probably something pumped in through the vents. More sedatives. Tony let his head loll back. High on the wall above him was a window, and a shadowy figure was watching him through it. That was probably who Tony was talking to.
"I'm going to have you prepared for surgery now," the man said.
The horror of it all was beginning to filter into Tony's mind. "That'll kill me."
"Mmm," the man said. "Not my problem."
The Avengers always rescued him in the end, didn't they? The Avengers were going to find him. The Avengers--
--didn't even know where he was. Shit. Without the armor response, he couldn't put out a tracking beacon.
This was going to be bad.
It was kind of poetic, when he considered it. Iron Man had come into the world when a fistful of shrapnel had landed in his chest a decade ago, and he was going to go out of it when some two-bit villain decided to rip the RT node out of his chest and destroy all his higher brain function.
Then several things happened in quick succession, so fast that Tony's mind gave up on making sense of them after the first one.
There were a series of heavy thuds from high above him, and then a cracking noise. He tilted his head back to watch glass fall out of the window above him, a window that was rapidly splintering in little spiderwebbing shards, and then a figure -- presumably the man Tony had been talking to -- fell through the window and landed hard on the floor next to him. He was wearing a bright yellow biohazard suit, complete with facemask. Dimly, Tony thought he ought to remember what that meant, but nothing was coming to him.
The man didn't move.
There was more movement from above, as another figure leaped down. This man wasn't in a biohazard suit -- he was wearing a navy-blue uniform with leather boots and gloves, his fingers exposed -- and he landed nimbly on his feet, with the poise of an athlete, and he ran to Tony's side.
His hair caught in the light from the room above, shining golden, and then he turned, face in profile, then full-on, pale blue eyes roving over Tony's body, and something in Tony's drug-addled mind finally clicked.
"Steve?" Tony croaked. "What-- why-- how-- what are you doing here?" His voice was slurred. He barely sounded like himself.
You don't even like me anymore.
Steve regarded Tony's face critically, putting one thumb on Tony's eyebrow and pulling his eye a little wider, squinting at him in the light. "I'd tell you not to breathe in any of this shit," he said, hoarsely, "but it looks like AIM got you pretty good already."
"AIM?"
Steve looked at the guy in the yellow suit on the floor, then back up at Tony. "Jesus," he said, his voice rough and somehow impressed, "you really are drugged to the gills, aren't you?"
"They had to." Tony had figured out this much, even if this whole AIM thing was still lurking somewhere in the foggy parts of his brain. "Didn't-- didn't want me using the suit. Wanted the RT."
Steve nodded like this made sense to him, and then he stepped back, hit something on the back of his glove, and let the hard-light shield materialize into being. It was a well-choreographed move; he didn't wait for the shield to finish forming up before he was already bringing it down onto the bonds that were anchoring Tony to the table. A half-second later and it would have passed through them, but Steve's timing was perfect. Wrist, wrist, ankle, ankle, and then Tony was free.
"Can you walk?"
Tony flopped his head to the side and looked over at his hand. It looked like it belonged to someone else. One finger twitched feebly when he tried to raise his arm.
"Okay, no," Steve said. "This is going to be a little undignified, then, sorry."
Then Steve was hoisting him over his shoulders like a sack of flour. He stretched Tony across himself, Tony's whole torso balanced all along Steve's shoulders, with his legs dangling down one of Steve's arms and his face pressed into the star of the uniform on Steve's upper arm, his own arms dangling one on either side of Steve's body. Steve grabbed the arm that was on his front with the hand that had been bracing Tony's knees, pulling them together so that he was, more or less, holding Tony's hand across his own body. Steve's fingers were scraped and the leather of the gloves was rough. It was weirdly intimate.
The last time Steve had touched Tony was a friendly clap to the shoulder, when he'd told him he hadn't wanted to be an Avenger like he'd expected Tony to be happy about it.
That had been two months ago.
Tony wondered what it said about him that he still remembered that.
After that, things were chaotic and Tony, still drugged, was content to let them happen. Steve kicked the nearest door down without losing his grip on Tony, and then barreled down a corridor and up two flights of stairs. Lights flashed red, a klaxon began to sound, and from his upside-down vantage point Tony saw more yellow-suited scientists running toward them.
He waited for Steve to flick the shield on again but instead Steve unholstered a gun.
"Sorry about the noise," Steve said, and then he emptied a clip into four different beekeepers, who lay groaning on the floor in agony.
Steve ran past them.
"You hate guns," Tony said. He thought maybe more of his memory was coming back.
Steve grunted as he wedged the fingers of his free hand between the halves of a sliding door and started to force it open. "I also hate you being in mortal peril," he gritted out. "Guess which one wins."
The door opened, and there was sunlight on the other side.
"Are the rest of the Avengers here?" Tony panted. "Your team? Who did you bring? Where the hell am I?"
Steve carried him over a little rise and there was the Quincarrier, just sitting right there. "Just me," Steve said, "and you're in Madripoor."
"Fucking Madripoor," Tony said, with all the heartfelt emotion he was currently capable of, and then he passed out.
When he woke up, his mouth tasted like cotton, Steve had strapped him into the co-pilot seat, and there were blue skies around him. Experimentally, he reached for Bleeding Edge in the back of his mind, and found it sluggish but responsive. He could call the armor if he needed it.
"Blech ugh mmf," Tony said, and he would have spat but it probably wasn't the best idea in a cockpit.
"You're welcome," Steve said, dryly.
When Tony glanced over, Steve was very carefully not looking at him, eyes trained on the instrumentation. So much for Steve being his friend again, he supposed.
"How the hell did you find me?" Tony asked. "The suit was disabled. I couldn't put out an active ping for assistance."
That got Steve's attention. He turned his head and squinted, like he thought maybe Tony was still drugged. "Don't you remember, Tony? You insisted you were going to implant yourself with a subcutaneous chip, while you were making this suit. I did pay attention."
"Yeah, but that's passive," Tony retorted. "To pick it up, you'd have to actively be monitoring for it and looking for my position, and you'd never--"
"And I'd never what?" Steve said, his nostrils flaring, and for an instant it seemed like Steve wanted to punch him or kiss him and couldn't decide which. Which was ridiculous, because Steve didn't even swing that way.
"You've been monitoring me for two months?" Tony demanded. "Why?"
"Why wouldn't I?"
"Because you don't care about me now!" Tony blurted out. "Because you're not an Avenger. Because you'll never forgive me for-- for everything I don't remember doing."
"I forgave you!" Steve snapped back, in a tone that suggested the exact opposite.
"Oh yeah?"
There was silence in the Quincarrier for a few long seconds, and Steve's voice, when it finally came, was subdued. "I know I don't do well with feelings," Steve said, quietly, anguished, staring off into the skies. "But I forgave you. I forgive you now. And I want-- I want-- you mean the world to me, Tony. Even if sometimes I do a piss-poor job of showing it."
Tony turned Steve's statement over in his head like code he was trying to reverse-engineer. Picked at it. Took a leap.
"What do you want, Steve?"
"It doesn't matter," Steve said, softly.
"Yeah, it does," Tony said.
If he was wrong, he was going to feel supremely stupid. But he didn't think he was wrong.
"It doesn't matter," Steve repeated. "I can't have it."
"Put the Quincarrier on autopilot," Tony said, and he watched as Steve did it, unhesitatingly, "and we're going to have a talk about what you can and can't have."
Steve shut his eyes like he was waiting for his own execution.
Slowly, carefully, Tony reached out with two fingers and traced Steve's jawline. "You can have this," he said, and Steve shivered under him like the day they'd pulled him out of the ice.
"There's so much," Steve said, shakily. "We've made so many mistakes."
"And I don't know the half of them, I know," Tony acknowledged. "But we did so many good things, too. Maybe that evens it out. Clean slate. A brand new day."
"A brand new day," Steve echoed, and he reached up and took Tony's hand in his and, yeah, Tony could live with that.