#battleworlds

There were a few things Tony Stark hated more than being hungover, and they included such things as not being nearly drunk enough, an empty bottle, sunlight, and being kidnapped.

This was shaping up to be a terrible morning, since he was coping with all four at the moment. And having absolutely no fucking clue where he was, on top of that.

He’d woken up with a fucking bag over his head, and who the hell was in charge of that kidnapping, because that was just bad planning, that’s what that was. He could have died, he could have suffocated, he could have--

“Good morning, Mr. Stark.”

“That’s either optimism, sarcasm, or deliberate cruelty, and fuck you while I make up my mind,” Tony snapped back. He wasn’t even in a room; he was in a hole. A fucking hole. Open at the top, but the top was so damn far away that there was probably no way he could climb it. Which meant, logically speaking, since he was absolutely taking a bath in the poisonous rays of the hell star above him, it was probably closer to noon than morning, and now the guy was just being downright evil.

“My name is Abu Bakaar, and you, Mr. Stark, are being honored.”

“Funny way to show it,” Tony said. There was nothing in the hole with him but a bucket (that he could easily guess the purpose for and it was not pleasant) a few blankets, and rather a lot of dirt.

“We can do this hard, or we can do this easy,” Bakaar said. “You will not like hard.”

“I’m sure I won’t,” Tony replied. “What is it you want?”

“I have here many dozens of Stark Repeating Rifles,” Bakaar said. “They are no longer functional. Because of you, Mr. Stark. I went to a great deal of trouble to steal them, only to find that you had all the guns sold to Union forces recovered, and ruined. You will do as I ask. You will repair these guns. Or, you will die.”

“Yeah,” Stark said. “This is a nice hole. Just go ahead and cover it up, okay? I don’t need a coffin, but say some nice words at the funeral, would you?” He’d promised himself that he’d die before he worked on weapons again, and that was a promise he’d meant to keep. Starving to death was slow and painful, but he could probably die of thirst within two or three days at most; he was already in need of water just from last night’s drinking.

It would be over soon enough, and he’d stop having nightmares of that afternoon. At least that much. Might be a blessing in disguise, really.

Tracing Stark’s kidnappers back to their hideout had been both harder and easier than Steve was expecting. Easier, because the bastards didn’t bother to cover their tracks. They’d scooped Stark up, carried him on horseback for a few miles before throwing him in a wagon or coach.

Following the trail was easy, but damn, they’d taken him quite a ways. Steve was getting concerned that even if he could catch up, that Stark would be dead before he got there. Of course, if they were going to kill him, they probably could have done that in town, right? Right.

He didn’t have time -- urgency was hitting him every time the sun moved more than a fist across the sky -- to turn around, get back to town, and round up a posse, so he was just going to have to hope that there weren’t that many of them. And he was hoping that he found Stark relatively quickly.

It took three days to track him down to a series of rude-pitch houses and tents.

...There were a lot of them.

And after a few days of trekking across the plains, Steve wasn’t in the best shape to be observant.

Which meant it took them somewhat less than a quarter hour to discover him sneaking around their compound and get the drop on him.

Holding a gun to his head, they forced him to kneel on the edge of the pit in the middle of the compound.

“Mr. Stark, we have a visitor for you,” the leader of the outlaws said. “You will find it not so easy, now, to refuse our hospitality. You will do as we say, or we will shoot this man. And then we will throw him down in the hole that you might watch him bleed to death. Or get the gangrene and die. You will prefer this method?”

“Oh, great,” Stark said. “You couldn’t just stay home, could you, Rogers?”

“I was trying to save you!”

“Oh, well, who’s gonna save you?”

“Is everything a joke to you?”

“Funny things are,” Stark said, snapping his fingers.

“You will come up now, Mr. Stark,” the leader said. “And you will work. Or you will see what horrors we can perform on this man, who does not need unbroken fingers and working eyes to make weapons.”

They hauled Stark out of the pit with a rope, and then a moment later, Steve was cursing and rolling in the dirt at the bottom; having been shoved in. He didn’t think he broke anything in the fall, but all the air was knocked out of him.

Several very long, boring hours later, Stark was lowered back down into the pit. “Hey, Sheriff,” he said. He looked wrung out, exhausted, and wet. Wet? “Look, I got food for us, good deal, right?” 

“What are you up to, Stark?”

“You assume I’m up to something. That’s cute,” Stark said. He gave Steve a wink and double-finger guns. “I like the way you think. We might just be able to make a go of it.”

“What happened to your face?” Steve asked. Stark was peppered with little, painful-seeming red sores across his cheeks, forehead, throat, and hands.

“Burning sand,” Stark said, twitching. His voice was darkly bitter, for all that it was matter of fact. “Least they threw a pair of goggles down for me, before they dumped it on my head. Can’t work for them if I can’t see, right?”

Stark unpacked the bag he was carrying over his shoulder; two plates, a wrapped loaf of bread, some jerky, a bottle of whiskey -- “Don’t touch that, that’s mine, I had to talk extra hard to get my hands on it.” -- and a couple of molasses biscuits.

“Come here and cuddle with me, would you?” Stark was shivering. As soon as the sun had gone down, their little hole was freezing, like the air always was in the plains at night.

Steve heaved a great sigh and moved closer, letting Stark curl up against his side, sharing body heat. He’d never had someone so close to him before that he wasn’t stealing kisses from. Tony smelled of sweat and machinery, iron and ash. His skin, against Steve’s, was distracting. Steve could hear his heartbeat, feel the tickle of Stark’s breath against his cheek.

Despite his grabby hands, Stark didn’t break the seal on that bottle of whiskey, just kept it tucked up near the crook of his elbow. He divided up the bread and the jerky, and when Steve noticed that Stark had handed over the larger portion to Steve, Stark just glared.

“Eat it, big boy,” Stark said. “Gonna need your strength, tomorrow.” The cuddling had one huge benefit, aside from the shared heat; Stark could talk directly into Steve’s ear, the sound barely passing the circle of the bottom of the hole.

“What happens tomorrow?”

“Well, they wrote it in their ledger that they’re going to kill you, but I’m… not so much on that plan, really.”

“What do they have you doing up there?”

“Building weapons,” Stark said. He shivered and Steve ended up sliding an arm around him. Everyone knew Stark’s official story; that he’d invented some of the worst, most vicious, lethal weapons known to man. What most people didn’t know was that Stark had never intended for those weapons to be used to mow down Confederate troops; he’d meant them to be used as a cautionary, to force the South to the peace table.

It hadn’t worked, and while the Stark Repeating Rifles were indeed as lethal as advertised, the South had only fought back harder, the massacre a rallying cry. The war had dragged on another bloody two years after that treachery. Most people -- including Tony Stark -- blamed Tony Stark.

As they were sitting there, Stark started pulling sections of metal tube from his clothes; he’d stashed half a dozen inside his boots, a few in the lining of his trousers, in the sleeves of his coat. “What are you doing?”

“Getting us out of here,” Stark said.

“How do you reckon you’re going to do that?”

“Contrary to popular belief,” Stark said, snippy, “I know exactly what I’m doing. Give me your shirt.”

“My shirt? Why?”

“Because if I go up there tomorrow sans a piece of clothing, they’re going to notice that,” Stark said. “You can keep your jacket on, they won’t see anything from up there. Now, gimme.”

Steve sighed and stripped.

“Wow,” Stark said, eying him. “Even in bad light, you are a big boy.”

“Shut up, Stark.”

“You know, you’re mostly naked in front of me, I think you can call me Tony.”

“You look terrible,” Steve said, peering at him in the dim morning light.

“Thanks, big guy, you flatter me,” Tony said. He knew what he looked like, or he could guess at any rate. The burning sand trick had been pretty damn nasty; nothing big enough to kill him, just tiny biting searing pain. The back of his near was the worst, but even the faintest air motion of shifting had stirred the sand again; every bit of skin that was uncovered had been scoured by it.

He hadn’t been able to decide if he was lucky that he’d managed to get his shirt up over his nose before he breathing in any of that burning sand (at the cost of a nasty strip of seared skin along his belly) or unlucky, because he’d lived. And the longer he lived, the more they could hurt him.

Right up until they’d captured Steve and he’d made a plan.

The rope came down for him and Tony knew he was putting his life in Steve’s hands. As well as Steve putting his life in Tony’s hands. “Kiss for luck?”

Tony expected Steve to brush him off, or to look horrified, or disgusted. What he didn’t expect was for Steve to step right up to him, gingerly put an arm around his waist and draw Tony in for a kiss.

It hurt.

God fucking damn it, kissing Steve hurt. His mouth was chapped and sore and bleeding in places from the elements and the burning sand. His face ached where they’d punched him. His chest hurt where they’d held his face down in the water and near-drowned him. Tony Stark was, for the first time in his life, in absolutely no shape to be kissing anyone.

Much less the man he’d been secretly in love with for most of his life.

But he was doing it anyway. He gave himself over to Steve’s mouth and his hands and his tongue -- saints and sinners, but the man could kiss -- despite all the pain. Despite the fact that he could taste blood, and under that the taste of Steve Rogers.

“Oh my god,” Tony managed, when they finally broke apart. Fuck the suicide plan, I’m gonna live, he promised himself.

“Come back to me,” Steve said.

Tony licked his lip, nodded. “I’ll see you again.”

He let Ten Rings take him to their smithy, started working. He just had to live until noon, maybe a little later. And hope it didn’t rain.

Tony had handed over the tube with its precious lenses. “This is part of the reason that the Stark repeater is such a terrible weapon. With this, a man can be well outside of returning fire range for the enemy and still fire at a vastly increased rate.” He’d kept his voice low, whispering in Steve’s ear, each breath sending shivers down Steve’s spine.

Steve had seen rifle scopes before; they increased a little bit of magnification, giving a good shooter an extra twenty feet, sometimes more. “So?” Steve had said. “‘Case you ain’t noticed, I don’t have a gun.” And he couldn’t shoot straight up anyway, without risking the bullets coming right back down on him if he missed.

“You ever see a boy fry ants with a magnifying glass?”

Steve had shuddered. Everyone had seen that; it always seemed a pointless cruelty. “I don’t like bullies,” he had said.

“Well, we’re going to apply that principle to lighting fuses,” Tony had said. “Use the scope -- around noon the sun will be directly overhead. You won’t have much time; I’ve made up these tube-explosives with different length wicks. Light them all at once, throw them in order. That’ll distract them long enough for me to trigger my big surprise up top.”

“You think it’ll work?” Steve had said.

“If you don’t throw badly and kill yourself,” Tony had returned. “We might not live, but I will take out this camp and their stash of weapons.”

Steve stared up when they took Tony away. He touched his jacket where all his precious weapons were stored, hoping that they’d let him live long enough to put Tony’s plan into action.

“Please, Tony,” Steve said, still staring at the empty circle, the top of the hole. “Come back to me.”

Waiting until noon was torture; each time the guard walked over -- like, what the hell was Steve going to do, fly out of this damn hole? -- was nerve wracking. How far would Tony have to get on the weapons restoration before they decided they didn’t need Steve alive anymore? Would they kill him just for fun?

He was haunted by Tony’s few sentences about the burning sand; would they do something like that to Steve? If they did, would it set off the explosives that Tony had smuggled in and built by feel in the darkness.

Tony had done some impressive craftsmanship before, but Steve was awed at him being able to construct these -- hand bombs -- in blackness. An invention, made up on the spot when Tony knew he’d have a second pair of hands to assist. Steve had never met anyone like Tony. Smart, brutal, and efficient, and yet so desperately wanting to preserve the innocent. He’d met so many men who’d just made their money and never counted the cost in blood and tears.

How could Steve help but want him? How could he help but love Tony?

It was damn hard to count time when he couldn’t see the sun.

A fingernail of light crept into the hole. Steve got out the hand-bombs, laid them out in order from shortest fuse to longest. Light them, count to ten, throw, count to ten, throw, he repeated Tony’s instructions.

We probably won’t live through it. There was time for regret. There was time to worry. Time to think of all the things that could go wrong.

The sun crept overhead like a snail. Slow, calm. The sun didn’t have any regrets.

Steve lined up the rifle scope until the sunlight filtered through the high-powered lenses, shone a tiny beam of white light onto the ground. Steve moved the light carefully, touching the fuses, made from Steve’s shirt and soaked with the whiskey Tony had bargained out of the Ten Rings bandits.

For a long time nothing happened.

Was it not working?

Steve chewed his lip, glanced up. There wasn’t much time before the sun was out of the direct path again.

The fuses ignited with a suddenness that took Steve almost completely by surprise. He almost panicked, almost threw right away.

Count to ten!

He counted. Stood up and threw.

A moment later, there was a heavy, muffled explosion. Dirt fell into Steve’s hole. He counted, threw again.

Screams. More explosions. More than just the ones he’d tossed up. Tony must have started his part of the plan. Steve didn’t know anything about that, not how much risk Tony was taking, nothing. Tony’d said nothing about it, only that the weapons would be destroyed.

Counted.

Threw.

Two more left.

Threw.

Another explosion. A scream that cut itself off in a choke.

A shadow over the hole. A man holding a pistol, aimed directly at Steve’s head.

“Catch, asshole,” Steve said, holding the last hand-bomb a few extra seconds and then threw it. It exploded just as it reached the lip of the hole, knocking the dead man into the hole.

Steve pressed himself up against the wall, avoiding the body. He was drenched in blood and charred bits of skin and hair.

Steve scrambled for the man’s weapons, yanked the ammo belts off, hissing in pain when the metal buckle was too hot to grab.

At least he had a pistol. At least he could take some of these assholes with him.

At least he could shoot himself before he starved to death.

He didn’t know how much time passed, and then a shadow dragged itself up to the lip of the hole. “Sheriff?”

“Still here,” Steve said. “Wanna come down, have a drink?”

“Not really, no,” Tony said. He shoved and the rope fell down into the hole. “I hope you can climb, ‘cause I don’t think I can haul you up.”

It took longer than Steve would have liked, and his hands were slick with blood by the time he made his way to the top, but he was out. They were free.

“Don’t look,” Tony pleaded as Steve sat up. “Let me lead you out of this, an’ just… don’t look. Don’t look at what I did.”

“I’m looking at the only thing I want to see,” Steve said, touching Tony’s face. “When we get back to Timely, we need to talk.”

“Yeah, Sheriff, we do,” Tony said. “A lot of things to do involving our mouths. Talk is just one of those things.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “You’ve had your tongue in my mouth, Tony. I think you can call me Steve.”