we have nothing but our winter (1/4)
stevetony | after the events of catws, hydra brainwashes steve and sends him back to kill the avengers.
⚠️canon-typical violence
ao3
Steve has been gone for three months, and Tony is restless.
“Three months is a long time,” Fury says. “You should know SHIELD is ready to publicly declare him dead. We haven’t heard from him since he took down Project Insight.”
“I was in Afghanistan for three months,” Tony rapid-fires. “He’s still alive. I know he is, and he’s waiting for us to find him. If he hasn’t turned up for three months, that means we’re all he has. I’m going to find him.”
Tony starts to understand why Howard had been so hellbent on unearthing Steve. Everyone who meets Steve Rogers falls for him in one way or another, and losing him is like never knowing loss before. It feels like the loss of all hope and good.
Tony wants to die when he thinks about Steve locked up somewhere with no one and nothing, being tortured or humiliated or broken down. He wonders if he’s hungry, or thirsty, if they’re letting him sleep, if they’re ripping his body open and scarring him in ways that will never really heal. Sometimes, when Tony’s alone, he can almost feel Steve’s pain under his own skin. He can hear Steve screaming.
He’s still determined to find Steve, even if it’s in pieces.
Natasha has taken to sleeping with Tony in his bed, some nights, so that she can catch him when he wakes up in the middle of the night or tosses and turns until he gives up on sleep, tries to slip back down to his workshop. He’s tried more than once and she catches him every time.
“You have the night vision of a fucking cat, anybody ever tell you that?”
“You need to sleep, Tony,” she says, green eyes bright in the dark even though she sounds drowsy. “You know what sleep deprivation does to you, I know you do. Lie back down and I’ll help you tomorrow.”
“You’ll help me find him?” Tony asks.
“I will.” Her hand, soft and rough at the same time, finds his. “I’ve been tracing informant networks underground and I think he’s alive.”
Natasha told Tony everything about Project Insight and the Winter Soldier the day Steve disappeared, and Tony can tell she misses him, blames herself for not doing more. He wants to tell her that it isn’t her fault, but that would be hypocritical of him because he blames himself for not being there, too.
Tony knows almost everyone else thinks Steve is dead and has been helping only to humour him, but hearing Natasha say I think he’s alive soothes Tony enough for him to sleep through the night. He only dreams for a few seconds in the early hours of the morning, a glimpse of blue eyes and a sweet smile, shining like the sun.
-
“What’s this?” Tony asks, pulling Bruce over by the arm and blowing up a constellation of blinking points on the satellite feed. They have tried calibrating Bruce’s tracking algorithm for every abnormality on the planet for the past three months and turned up nothing, but this is new.
“This is—Tony, this is HYDRA.” Tony’s heart stops and Bruce starts talking a mile a minute. “It has to be. I can’t think of anybody else with access to this much concentrated energy. Gamma rays, vita radiation, an enormous amount of nitramine, it’s everything we’ve been looking for.”
“He’s right,” Natasha says from her spot next to Tony. She double-checks the emittance data. “I don’t know what they plan on doing with this much energy or why they took this long to coalesce, but we have to—”
“Suit up,” Tony says. “We’re getting him out.”
They hash out a plan on the Quinjet, but none of this is ideal. Ideally, they would have more time to come up with a plan. Ideally, Thor wouldn’t be on Asgard and Clint wouldn’t be retired, and SHIELD would be in on the rescue, and Sam and Rhodey would be coordinating military backup. Then again, ideally, Steve wouldn’t be trapped in a HYDRA facility.
It was mostly that Tony couldn’t wait one second longer to get to Steve.
When they can see the HYDRA site under them, an unsuspecting, sad-looking concrete building with miles of advanced facility underground, Bruce reads heat signatures for about fifty people. Tony launches a missile that opens up the top of the building, drawing enough agents out.
Tony flies Bruce out of the Quinjet and drops off the Hulk. Natasha stays in the air.
-
Brock Rumlow is waiting, his face burnt and scarred from the collapse of the Triskelion Tony had seen on the news.
“You know why I’m here,” Tony says, and all he can think is that he’s so close to Steve now, so close.
“Looking for your Captain?” Rumlow asks, in no rush to engage. He nods over at a screen, cooperating too easily, like he knows Tony won’t let him get out of this alive either way. “There he is.”
Tony’s gaze locks onto the live feed and it takes everything in him not to fall to his knees.
Steve is heaving, straining against the metal bars holding him down, head lolling to one side. For the first time, Tony hates the enhanced vision he’s built into the armour because he sees Steve’s blond hair sticks to his forehead with sweat, every burn and bruise and flesh wound on Steve’s exposed skin.
“I want my ma,” Steve chokes out, and Tony damn near loses his mind. What the hell did they do to take the fight out of Steve Rogers?
Tony tries to clear his head and catch his breath even though he wants to rip out the throats of every HYDRA agent in the facility with his bare hands, but Rumlow’s next words make Tony’s blood boil.
“You should’ve seen him,” Rumlow says, and he looks almost proud. “Your Steve, your Cap, he put up such a fight. We thought our Winter Soldier was resistant to conditioning, but his pal Steve Rogers fought through two months of torture, conditioning, limbic hijacking, the kind the United fuckin’ Nations would keep six feet under. Two months before we even got inside his head.”
“I’m going to kill all of you,” Tony says through gritted teeth, raising one arm and lighting up the repulsor on his palm. He doesn’t need Rumlow to tell him that Steve hadn’t gone down without a fight, wouldn’t stay down within an inch of his life.
“What about Bucky?”
“Barnes?” Tony’s repulsor falters and powers down. “You have him?”
“Who do you think’s been doing the torturing?”
Tony puts two and two together in a second, and he kills Rumlow on the spot.
His dying words are he was a means to an end, and Tony would kill him a second time if he could. He drops Rumlow’s body and rips the facility apart, killing every last person who stands in his way, and finally, he finds Steve in that horrible metal chair. Tony doesn’t feel relieved or victorious. He feels sick to his stomach.
He can’t imagine the living hell Steve has been through.
“I found him,” Tony says to Natasha through his communicator. “If you’re good out there, it’s time for a lullaby. We’re coming, but he’s not in good shape.”
Steve looks up at the sound of Tony’s voice, and Tony finds that everything in those azure eyes that he used to find solace in has died. There is no hope, no light, no fight, only the reflection of red and gold armour, too flashy in the dull room, in the face of Steve’s pain.
Tony has nothing to say. He helps Steve out of the chair and right before he blows everything in the room to hell, Steve pulls himself back together enough to say, “Get Buck.”
“What?”
“Bucky. He’s here.”
Tony hesitates, but then Steve says can’t leave him, and Tony relents. How could he deny Steve anything right now? How could anyone?
They find Bucky sitting in a cell-like room down the hall, and Tony has a hard time reconciling the young, laughing, bright-eyed soldier from Steve’s old photos with this haunted wreck of a man.
“Can you walk?” Tony asks him, and he nods. “Good. Let’s go.”
There is no happy reunion when they surface and board the Quinjet, where Bruce is recovering and Natasha is waiting in the pilot’s seat. Natasha tells him two HYDRA jets left with most of the nitramene and radioactive substances, and she was only able to take one of them down.
The best Tony can do is wrap a thermal blanket around Steve’s shoulders and strap Bucky into the seat furthest from him. Tony doesn't trust the Winter Soldier around Steve, even if he doesn’t seem dangerous right now.
Tony can’t be rational when Steve is hurt this badly.
“We’re going to medical,” Tony tells Steve softly as the Quinjet rises, leaving the HYDRA facility a heap of debris and rubble collapsing in on itself. “We’ll get you cleaned up, alright? You need water? You hungry?”
Steve stares up at him helplessly. Tony swallows around the lump in his throat and fixes the blanket around him a little more securely, reaching for a bottle of water for him.
“You’re Tony,” Bucky says out of the blue. Tony turns around to look at him and finds his dark eyes trained on Steve. “He said your name a lot.”
“When you were torturing him?”
“Tony,” Natasha says warningly, and Tony places the water in Steve’s lap before slipping into the copilot’s seat. Her voice drops so that only he can hear. “You know what HYDRA did to him. You can’t hold what he did while he was brainwashed against him. Steve doesn’t.”
"Yeah, well, maybe I'm not as good as Steve," Tony says under his breath.
Bruce has recovered enough by the time they land at Quinjet to call Shuri, because if there’s one place on Earth that can rehabilitate the Winter Soldier, it’s Wakanda. Tony rushes Steve to medical and Natasha gets in touch with Sam and Rhodey, but relief never comes to Tony, even as he watches SHIELD’s medics work swiftly over Steve’s damaged body.
It bothers him how easy it was, busting Steve out, and they still have no clue what HYDRA was doing with all of that contained energy. Rumlow said something about conditioning and limbic hijacking, and oddly enough, Tony doesn’t think he lied.
He puts all those thoughts on hold for now, though, because everyone is alive. Steve is alive.
-
“Tony,” Steve says that night, nervous and uncertain as Bruce and Natasha head back to their living quarters to sleep. “Is Bucky safe? I didn’t say bye.”
“He’s safe,” Tony says. He almost doesn’t recognise Steve anymore, with how cautious and insecure he is about his surroundings, as if he doesn’t trust what he sees. He wants to comfort Steve. “He’s with the Wakandans. They said they’re putting him in cryostasis until they figure something out, but he’s safe.”
“Are we safe?”
“We’re safe.” Tony pauses. “Did you—well, did you want someone to sleep with? You can sleep in my bed. I won’t let anything happen to you on my watch.”
Tony's too tired to read into the strange flicker across Steve’s expression, especially because Steve looks relieved a second later, a genuine little smile on his face for the first time all day, and Tony smiles back.
