bakerstreet | [ hey, i brought you this soulmate ]

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[meme] shipping

[ hey, i brought you this soulmate ]

soulmate meme ;
▸ post your character ◂
▸ you're now in a universe where destined soul mates exist! ◂
▸ rng for the type of au and for the ~situation~ ◂
▸ tag around ♥ ◂

type of au;

1. tats, your character has a tattoo of the first words the love of their life will say to them
2. familiars, your character has an animal tattoo representing their soul mate on them
3. glow, the first time your character sees their soul mate, their chests glow!
4. world in color, life is literally black and white, until you see your soul mate for the first time
5. choose your own, i'm definitely missing a milly because i'm lazy, pick your own

situation;

1. first meeting, you've never met this person before.
2. childhood mates, you've always known this person -- but on one particular birthday, everything changes.
3. together, you've been in a relationship for awhile now! happily wed or not, you decide.
4. not together, you've known you're soul mates for a long time, and yet have avoided a relationship.
5. choose your own, self explanatory c:

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Taking the time to sort it out and put the pieces together is a luxury that Tony honestly doesn’t have at the moment. Behind the mask, his eyes narrow. The expression doesn’t translate to the faceplate. He can’t do a wide variety of calculations in his head. His mind is compartmentalized to an incredible degree, enough that his on again, off again alcohol abuse has never once done anything to diminish his mental capacity save for allowing it to slow down from time to time.

Vienna doesn’t entirely matter right now. That Wilson and Rogers are nearby doesn’t matter either. He’s got his mental processors working on the tattoo he’s had around his upper left arm that had faded into view sometime between Christmas break (spent at boarding school rather than at home) and the phone call his mother made to him on New Year’s Day, just before his fourteenth birthday.

It looked like a ragged scar more than anything else, like his left arm had been ripped from his shoulder just below the cuff and then stuck back on.

He’s spent his life alternating between thinking it was cool and wondering when the one armed woman would walk into his life so he could fix her. She hasn’t yet, but he also hasn’t really looked. Evidently, he’s never had to. Mister metal arm over there had been waiting in the wing for nearly five decades, waiting to swoop in.

Tony is not impressed.

“What do you want me to do about it? This is more your old war pal’s scene.”

"Steve can't pull off the things you can," He answers, knowing what little he knows about the political sway Stark has compared to his best friend. Steve may be the symbol of America, but with his heels digging into the dirt and his rebellious attitude there's no damn way a single person with authority is going to be willing to consider his opinion on the matter. Steve takes his authority with brute force and deals with the consequences afterward. That won't work here.

Tony's in talks with Ross, along with a handful of other people who are beholden to the tech and economic sway Tony brings to the table.

Believe it or not, though, this isn't about him - not... completely. "The guy who did it, who made it look like me, he's about to do something worse. The longer you spend your time trying to drag me in, the more likely it is he's gonna pull it off."

Carefully, those legs start moving again - carrying him step by tentative, boot-thudding step to stand face to face with a suit of armor. Impersonal, cold, he can't even see the expression in Tony's eyes through the face plate.

It means he's throwing all of this out here based on nothing. Not a single measure of comfort. Just riding entirely on god damn faith.

Close as he is and as powerful as that suit is, Tony could easily have him down and out before Steve could make it in. Two feet of distance, eye to eye, he says, "I guess I'm just asking you to trust me."

A complete stranger. Worse than a complete stranger, a known entity with a wrap sheet and eye-witness accounts of domestic terrorism. Tony'd have to be out of his god damned mind.

There's a subtle air to his expression that suggests he realizes as much.

It's just that he's always believed in these tattoos from the moment he learned about them. Didn't put faith in God or the church or the government, but for some reason the notion of these? His young mind adopted it with total conviction, and threads of that linger still.

“I’ve given out off my daily allotment of trust today.”

Though he’s never been a coward, quite the opposite honestly, Tony has to clench his teeth (and his fingers in his gauntlets) to keep from stepping back. There’s an obvious shift of the weight of the armor to one foot, however, indicative of a man keeping his flight options open. At least he doesn’t immediately raise his hand, or charge up the repulser beam in his chest. He’s not interested in harming Barnes and at this point, he has a good idea that it will be impossible for him to anyway.

He swallows hard and then tilts his helmeted head. In the armor, he’s taller than Barnes. In reality, they are likely more or less the same height, though Barnes has a wider stances and his shoulders are much more broad. This gives Tony, despite being in his suit, more of an air of safety. He knows the damage Barnes had done more more than half a day ago and while he is likely capable of defeating him, that calculating mind of his tells him it will be very, painfully, close.

“Tell me what he’s doing and where he is.” Tony can take care of the guy, he figures. He’s been through a lot more with a lot less. One hacker capable of blowing up a building and framing someone is right in his baddie wheelhouse.

He has no intentions of helping Barnes any other way. He might play nice with the Avengers but Barnes is public enemy number one. Or maybe two, depending on Rogers’ current state of affairs. It’s so hard to keep tabs of Cap’s status these days.

That's fair. He's burned through it probably just getting Tony to meet him here at all, let alone without a strike force and air support. Particularly after seeing Bucky dismantle a room full of specially trained operatives, Tony included. It was a big ask, and it isn't fair to push for more.

As though mirroring his posture, Barnes also shifts a step back - just to make room, to alleviate any sense of pressure he's putting off. Standing down because he's not the dominant party here. He's got no qualms about conceding it.

"I don't know how much you know," He starts, eyes finally flickering down from Tony's face plate and out to the side. "How much Steve's told you about it, but I'm-- I'm not the only weapon Hydra built."

Forged out of steel and glass and a pumpkin scooper with which to rip his memories out like guts before carving into him.

He figures the abridged version's the best start. Short and sweet, and if it catches Tony's attention enough he'll dig into more.

"He wants to find them. Take over their minds, use them- I don't know why, just that if he gets them he could take down... anything he puts his mind to. Last we heard he's headed for Siberia, the place where they're stored."

Despite likening himself to God or some King on High more times than most people would find comfortable, there is a surprising amount of information that Tony doesn't know. He and Steve aren't exactly besties. The blond has his own life, his own little Avengers side label that he makes music with, and given how polar opposite their ideologies can be, they don't often check in with each other unless absolutely necessary.

Tony's not been the same man since he tried to play Hero of the World and save humanity by carrying a nuclear weapon into space. The mistakes he made on the Ultron project cost him more than he'd imagined to be possible. He has a hard time living with himself, and that guilt has translated into effectively attempting trying to handcuff himself, and everyone like him, from causing more damage than they have done for the last few years.

So...Barnes... Tony tends to be on a need to know basis when it comes to Rogers' scheming.

He's about to rattle off all of the things they'd discovered HYDRA attempting to do when the other man clarifies what he means about 'weapon.' There are more super soldiers under HYDRA control...in Siberia.

"An army of super soldiers? Typical Monday morning around here," he snarks. Great. "Do you have coordinates? Or is this little revelation party just supposed to get me to agree to running interference for my new found soulmate who just so happened to kill a lot of people while escaping jail in order to get a group of old ex militarily buddies together to save the day? It's not a good look. Even my legal team would have a hard time putting a spin on it."

An army might be a little too big of a word for five people, but Barnes doesn't try and correct it. For all intents and purposes it's close enough, particularly when one of them can handle ten or twenty people at a time in the right circumstances. The snark, the anger, all of it seems to coast right off of Bucky without so much as a falter in his expression. Immune, like Steve's shield is vibration free, projectiles frozen in the air and dropped away.

He slips a hand into his back pocket, fingers curling around a scrap of paper with scratchy handwriting in a series of numbers.

He offers it over.

"I don't care how we do it. If you wanna be there, if you don't. If you wanna go alone, or if you wanna take us with you - these are the coordinates. I don't think he could be there already, but I don't know." He chews his lip, biting at chapped skin that will heal before the day is out. A bad habit, and it's only because of his blood that he doesn't have self-inflicted gnaw sores on the insides of his cheeks. "What I can tell you is if he's found them, if he used the words to control them, you're not gonna wanna be there by yourself."

The vast majority of cells in Tony's body want the moment to linger. He's had everything in the world that money could buy him since he was a child, but he's only had brief tastes of the thing he has wanted more than anything in his life. This dangling of that very thing, much like the paper held out to him, seems so very, very cruel.

Tony forces himself to close his eyes and to count slowly backwards from ten. He hasn't moved in an annoyingly long stretch of time but he must collect himself before he lets his face plate and helmet peel back from his face.

He and Barnes had been very close for all of fifteen seconds not more than a few hours ago. The man had a gun in his face, sure, but if Tony thinks back about it, he had felt something underlying the fear of it all.

He feels it now, too. It's...nostalgia. Tony can't find any other word for it. Amber eyes fixate ones the color of a stormy ocean.

"Might need the whole gang," he says, though his throat feels dry. He doesn't want to discuss anything else right now.

Save the world first.

Figure out why this is happening to him of all people of all times, later.

James Barnes has developed - quite against his own will - a rigid system of self-containment. He's got coping mechanisms that force him to live in the moment, to sift all emotion and personal feelings to the background in favor of completing the mission. There are very few things that shake him enough to throw that off, although this is coming very, very close.

Distantly, were he to step outside himself and observe his mind-state holistically, he'd be forced to acknowledge that he's been subtly buzzing since Tony touched down.

And then the face plate comes off, and suddenly he's looking the man in the eyes, and something clicks into place in his mind so strongly it feels like a gravitational shift in the world.

There's only one other person in the world that he locked eyes with and then just knew throughout every piece of him that they were tethered. Only one other person with a sense of unshakable, familial belonging. It took a while for Steve to become the latter to him, but like he's been harpooned in the god damn chest it suddenly is for Tony Stark.

There's an intense and stretching silence that follows Tony's words, a product of Barnes stuck in a certain limbo - a different plane of existence, an out of body experience, just tracking the look in Tony's eyes and adjusting to this new and sudden shift.

His chest aches with the feeling of something hollow, or perhaps something so dense it has its own gravitational pull.

"You're gonna trust me," he says, though it's like someone else stole his voice to say it. He feels the words escape without remembering making the decision to say them. "Not today. But you will."

If he has a single god damn thing to say about it.

And that's it, that's all he's got. He peels back, ripping himself away like tearing off a band-aid to go get the whole gang. At least, the only two people he knows are actually in the gang.

Edited 2020-03-30 18:55 (UTC)

That seems more like an inevitability than a challenge, but Tony is entirely too stubborn to give in. Though biology might well force the issue, Tony Stark likes to think that he has dominion over that too. One mission to go and Bucky Barnes can go the way of the dodo. He barely sees Rogers, so why would he have to harbor a need to see Barnes too?

He can feel his heart pounding as Barnes leaves and he locks his knees inside of the armor so that he doesn't follow him. He's destroyed the little slip of paper he'd been handed, the joints of the gauntlet tearing at it as he flexes his fingers inward.

Maybe he'll turn this bit of carbon into a diamond with the way his anxiety has rises into his throat just at watching someone walk away from him.

Jesus, this is bad.

The armor is left in sentry mode in the center of the room and Tony has taken his leave down the hall at what looks to be a defunct nurse's station. He perches on the desk, back to the armor and to the only way in. He's on the phone, arguing over who knows what, the edge of his foot kicking visible over the corner of the the counter.

Steve and Sam are with Bucky, and FRIDAY whispers in Tony's earpiece that the others are back. He partially shoos her off like a fly and then hangs up on his call and slips the phone into his back pocket.

"Called in the Calvary," he announces, eyes once more fixated on Barnes rather than Rogers. It's annoying. He's annoying himself.

The conversation is brief because they've got no time - how'd it go? Better than expected, but not great. Steve calls in Wilson because Barnes doesn't have an earpiece, probably something that frustrates his best friend who'd have had a passing interest in listening in.

A quiet murmur about what they're gonna do after once Zemo's apprehended and his plan stopped. Whether Bucky will need to slip out as soon as there's downtime before anyone thinks to throw cuffs on him, despite being proven innocent for the UN eventually. It won't matter, they've got the Winter Soldier file on him and all of the crimes he committed during it that's more than enough to warrant a life sentence -- which is an optimistic ending. More likely, he thinks, is that someone with an agenda will push to have him locked up, then in a few months he'll go missing just to wind up in another freezer with another handler using the words to send him out for their own agenda all over again.

It's not just about his freedom. He can't let that happen.

(He'd rather get a little alone time with a gun and swallow the bullet than become that again. He would honest to god rather die.)

There's no time to hash all that out right now, and they step cautiously back into the room where Stark's taken the liberty of calling a few shots. There's a tension between Steve and Tony, he can feel it, but their interpersonal issues aren't exactly high on his priorities list.

"We should go now," He says, calm but firm, meeting Tony's eye and feeling some keen sense of attentiveness to them. Hyper-aware, drawn to acknowledge only one person in the room right now. "Stop giving him a chance to get in."

“Rhodey is on his way there,” Tony says with a lack of emotion affecting in his voice. FRIDAY had managed to read and scan the paper before Tony completely crushed it and his best friend has already been rerouted towards Siberia. Tony has also called Ross and lied his ass off, and while that gave him profound amounts of pleasure, he doesn’t bother to tell the others. There’s no need to act against his character here.

Tony has no intention of really thinking about the after either. It will be messy. He is going to have to do things he doesn’t like to do (which is practically everything) and he just can’t deal with it. He can’t deal with it to the point that he is losing himself in Barnes’ eyes as if the answer can be found there, as if those eyes alone hold the key to the universe.

And maybe they do, but Stark doesn’t want to find out. He’s too old for this soulmate bullshit.

“And I have a jet to borrow so how about you three pack a lunch and meet me on the roof in twenty minutes?” Talking his way out of this one is higher on his list of really fun things to do than spending more time alone with Bucky.

In theory.

The thing is, it feels like he's reading those questions and doing his best to answer them without saying a single goddamn word. He's got a lot to account for, he knows - a lot of things that make him a less than desirable partner. Truth be told, he actually feels bad for Tony. Of all the people in the entire world he could be saddled with...

He gets it.

Tony deserves better.

But here they are, and he's always had an intense kind of loyalty. The tendency to protect. The need to prove himself. It's surging forth over every other possible take he could have on this situation.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to convey all of that through looks alone, and so his gentle and compliant nod might seem underwhelming. Not good enough.

Steve takes up the forefront as he is wont to do, muttering to Sam about the things they need to get ready for this. Bucky fades into the background, quiet and studious, casting his last flickering observations over Tony before slipping out to head to the roof by himself.

This whole thing, this meeting, it doesn't supplant the urgency and fear he feels over what might come. What Zemo's capable of. What he might do if there's even more sudden visibility on project: Winter Soldier, and what people in charge are capable of gaining if they learn those words.

He wants this done, gone, buried before anyone else finds out.

Being Tony Stark gets you a lot of leeway. Yes, people constantly watch you and they’re always trying to take photos of you. Sure, most people think you’re a pompous asshole and don’t always expect you to be doing everything on the up and up. But no one really stops you either. And, most importantly, no one questions why you stride into a SHIELD controlled disaster area on partial lockdown due to the Winter Soldier’s triggering event, walk right into the belly of an open quinjet and take off.

It probably has something to do with the swagger.

Tony puts FRIDAY on task of politely ignoring anyone trying to reach him by comms as he installs a program to fully clock his flight plan. It’s easy. He designed the plane for SHIELD in the first place.

Ten minutes after take off, Tony does one last sweep of the radar and then lands the quinjet a few meters away from the loan figure on the roof.

He can’t help but frown at the other man, unsure if Barnes can see him through the glass at that distance. The thought causes a tick at the corner of his lips and he finds himself leaning back in the jumpseat. If Barnes can see him, or feel him, or whatever else ends up being true about the bond soulmates share, he has a feeling he won’t be alone in the jet for too much longer. Tony’s chronic loneliness craves the company.

Hopefully Rogers and Wilson are close by.

He's not wrong. He isn't alone for another minute before Barnes boards, thick boots deliberately audible to announce his presence and telegraph his movements, because he's incredibly aware of his reputation. About the fear people might have over what he'll do, and the absolute fairness that they feel that way.

He can feel something. It's small and it's new, alien, unfamiliar, foreign, and as such it's beyond his conscious mind to accept. It's up to that deep core in him, which is adamantly blocking outside intrusions. Refusing to allow through any kind of bond out of self-preservation, because the things that have invaded him in the past have dug their grubby fingers into the meat of his brain and started tearing out chunks of him without empathy.

The only thing Tony might get back is a subtle fear, and the corresponding rigid refusal to link.

He continues his short reputation of being an utter disappointment by sitting in the seat directly behind Stark, and not saying a single god damn word. Just chewing his lips, turning over his thoughts.

How do you fix something this big?
How do you make yourself worth someone's while after what he did?
Most of all, how do you do it when they don't trust you as far as they can throw the building you're in?

The answer, like Barnes, is silent.

Tony can probably feel the eyes on the back of his head, practically drilling holes trying to see through.

Though textbooks and documentaries would have a person believe that soul bonding is not a completely biological decision (which wars with the more romantic notion of soulmates meeting and bonding on the spot as a fulfillment of the so called love at first sight phenomenon), Tony’s hedonistic but scientific mind is still afraid that turning his chair towards the other man will turn their mission into a figurative shit show. Unfortunately, he can’t just sit there with silent, stoic eyes prying open the back of his neck like that either.

As Tony turns the chair around, he strategically lowers his eyes. It’s not like him, not when he’s known for smiling as he stares down the opposition. This is not a boardroom drama, however, and Bucky is not a shareholder in his company.

“So question.” The silence is unbearable. Tony can’t even work in silence. He usually blares music to force himself to focus on just a few strands of the thousands of thoughts he has each minute. “When did that show up?” He points at Barnes’ chest like he’s pointing a gun at the man. “Before you spent two years running away from the Man with a Plan? Sometime during the whole brainwashed soldier for hire?” That’s not accurate. The Winter Soldier had never been for hire but Tony isn’t as quick with the quips today. “Because mine showed up sometime after your sixty-seventh birthday.”

Tony turns around, Bucky seems unresponsive - but that's only on the surface. Tony wears a suit made of iron to protect him from the world, Bucky wears a mask made of iron to protect his mind from people who punish individual thought. Inverse but proportional. Complimentary angles, maybe.

Question.

Sure.

Sixty-seventh birthday; where was he then? In the 80s, when Tony Stark blossomed into an adult and the universe stamped scar tissue onto him? Beirut, maybe Lebanon. Somewhere in the middle east, sowing seeds of destruction and causing one country to believe it was another, whatever suited Hydra needs at the time with no true loyalty to any one place.

He breathes in. He breathes out.

Shifts his mind back farther, which is harder to do - but it's there, in the compartment he keeps the man he was.

"Before you were born," He answers tonelessly, distant, thinking back. "I was sixteen. Nobody had a god damn clue what it was. Usually if you can't recognize it, it means..."

You're never gonna find them. Too hard to look for something like that, too hard to describe it in the classified ads of the newspaper. Hell of a lot harder before the internet.

Tony can almost taste the hopelessness in Bucky’s voice. He doesn’t have the statistics of what the chances of meeting your soulmate had been back at the start of last century or if most people just went about their business and fell in love with a person and not a cosmic matchmaker’s selection. He doesn’t know if people had soulbonds. He hadn’t believed those things could even exist until he’d found himself staring at Bucky’s chest half an hour ago.

HYDRA had to have known. Maybe it would have been part of their long con or maybe they were less skeptical about the whole thing and knew Stark would immediately see through any ruse if they put their brainwashed weapon into play with him.

Maybe that’s why he’d been on the destroy list of the helicarrier two years ago.

That had been right after he did the interview about the scar around his left shoulder, wasn’t it?

Tony feels his stomach sloshing around and threatening to pull itself and all the rest of his innards with it into his throat. He lifts a hand to his mouth, briefly, to try to keep it all in. To cover for himself, he plays his forefinger and thumb along his facial hair, as if pondering the next move.

“It means,” he decides to finish Bucky’s phrase, “that you had to wait for me.” And in turn, Tony had to wait for Bucky too.

The universe is shit.

His eyes had tracked away sometime during his quiet, succinct answer. They'd settled somewhere in the middle distance, looking inward rather than outward. They flit back to Tony at the conclusion he draws, and something in his stomach twists.

When he was seventeen, he'd been impatient. When he was 20, he'd been hopeful. Optimistic, a bit of a dreamer. At 24 he'd enlisted, and he'd given up hope. He was off to join the war, off to die for his country, he doubted he'd ever make it back let alone fall in love. In a way, it made things easier - knowing no girl or guy he left behind could have been the one for him. No what if.

And then he'd had his everything erased, and after that, it just... wasn't a possibility. Laying low, staying off the grid, hiding in Romania away from all American news and any potential eye. Even if he'd somehow found out, the thought of dragging a civilian into his life and the risk it'd put them at?

The truth is, a better term might be outright given up.

"To be fair," he starts, dark, faintly bitter, and a lot resigned, dropping his eyes to Tony's chest. "I spent most of it not knowing I was waiting."

And Tony’s spent his youth waiting to be rescued from his own loneliness until his parents died. And then alcohol did the trick where his fame and brilliance couldn’t. He feels himself trying to leave a gaze with Bucky before the other isn’t giving in this time. Tony’s own gaze shifts fo about where the ramp meets the floor behind the scrim seat Barnes is sitting in.

“To be fair,” Tony replies in a childish need to one up the other, “I didn’t believe you existed anyway.” Either time, he wants to say, but Ghost jokes probably would be too soon.

Soulmates are fairytales. They’re not promises. They’re a lottery. A pipe dream.

Bucky’s truth is Tony’s truth. He’s not given up so much as let apathy take him.

“I—“ Tony doesn’t finish and rolls his eyes as two shadows show up to ruin the party. He turns back around in his seat and starts the takeoff checklist. “Everyone strap in. I’m not as bad as Rogers is at this but safety first.”

Is it strange to be faintly amused at the attempt to win at being jaded? He's not sure which one of the two of them would come out on top of that particular contest, they've both got their fair share of demons. Fortunately, they don't get the chance to try.

Steve's steps are impossible not to place, the sure and confident gait of them as though he's Taking Charge of the walkway itself. He doesn't seem to present any qualms about Tony piloting, though, nor pitch any fits that he's going. It's not about him, and it's not about a control thing - it's just his best friend and potentially the world at stake. He's all business.

Barnes straps in, with only the faintest huff of a laugh maybe for the first time since he woke up. Steve casts a sideways look at him, as though stunned to hear it.

He might be, too.

There's no denying that Tony's resources - more specifically, Tony's jet is better than anything a singular operative like Zemo is able to get his hands on. They make good time on him, but when they land the place has already been cracked open.

They'll arrive just in time to see Zemo unfrosting his second toy soldier, but before he can put a bullet in its brain.

A single syllable of half hearted laughter shouldn’t spark the way it does, but Tony is harboring a small, persistent flame in his belly by the time the come upon the villain of this scenario. He wants to switch off his mind to Barnes and focus on dressing down the idiot in front of them, but he can’t. Nothing witty comes to mind and frankly, this is all a big waste of his time here. He’s not in the mood to play when they have a window of opportunity here to stop Zemo and then make sure Bucky doesn’t have to go away for life...or worse.

Cap is on point, somewhere in the middle of his first sentence of what will surely be a resounding speech, but Tony is a loose canon much of the time and he shoots a blast from his repulser at Zemo instead.

The man ducks behind the super soldier, who falls even as she absorbs the blow. It won’t kill her, and thanks fo programming that isn’t entirely functional or fully triggered, she still staggers back to her feet. That would be muscle memory there, taught by pain and reinforced through terror.

Iron Man doesn’t back down and his shoulder blade compartments open to reveal a line of missile charges. War Machine follows his friend’s lead even as Rogers calls their names.

Tony doesn’t usually listen to the blond, though, and now is not the time to change that habit. He has a fiercely protective need setting fire to his belly. Barnes is in danger. And if Zemo is given the chance to open his mouth, everyone else will be in danger too.

Zemo makes for the only play he knows in the heat of the moment - ducking around a console and keying as quickly as he can while out of any immediate line of fire. Around them one by one, the remaining three cryogenic freezers begin to open.

They won't be programmed, they won't be reset. They're going to be wildly unpredictable, and if Bucky had to hazard a guess they'll do exactly what they've been influenced to - kill on site until there are no more targets, then report themselves to one of the closest ingrained coordinates to wait until they're picked up and processed.

The missiles do a good job of taking out their target. By the time they finish blasting her body into pieces and painting the console in front of Zemo, the other three have recovered and Zemo bolts up to make a break for the nearest exit.

Tony's the most obvious target in the room with his ostentatious armor, though War Machine is a close second. Two go for him, one for Rhodey, and so he yells out, "Steve, Zemo-" before launching himself at the first bastard bolting toward a red and gold suit.

Steve goes for the target.

Bucky slams into his, and they roll end over end before spring-boarding to their feet in the same artful, efficient way.

He recognizes this one. It says, "ты предатель своего народа."

Bucky answers, "They're not my people."

Those are the only words that are said before he's dodging blows and throwing himself into the defensive.

Fighting these super soldiers is like fighting a miniature Hulk. They are relentless and ruthless, violent in nature in the way Barnes had been under the influence of the trigger words. Tony, thankfully, does not have any numbing flashbacks of Bucky, face blank, lifting that gun to his face. He doesn't need the distraction.

The blows that fall on the armor are hard enough to crush it on impact, something Tony had not been prepared for. War Machine is fairing better, but Rhodey's armor is more heavy duty than his own and made to withstand more than Iron Man at the cost of being somewhat less nimble. War Machine, for all it's brutal strength and resilience, finds himself on his back a moment later.

Sam joins in the fight just after that, taking to the air only to drop and attempt to rip away one of the super soldiers. It's a standard bird of prey tactic, and given the lack of space on the horizontal plane, it's one that seems like it will prove effective as Falcon climbs several stories with the wriggling soldier in his grasp.

The fall doesn't do as much damage as one might suspect, however.

"Stand back," Iron Man bellows through the external speakers on the armor, charging up the central pulse weapon at the reactor site. Overload is always a possibility here, but the frenzied soldiers are just about two much. Without Cap's shield to play deflector dish, the blast from the reactor will be brutal and unpredictable. He uses it anyway.

Can't exactly stand back when one of them's got him by the throat, though he does grab onto wrist and do an interesting little maneuver where he slams both his feet into the guy's chest. It gets him down onto his back, gets his assailant staggered away by two or three feet, but it doesn't get him out of the way of pulse. Impact's minimized at least, so that he only goes rolling a few feet with his elbows up near his ears and gripping tightly at his head.

It's effective. The three others stagger with the onslaught, temporarily thrown out of balance - enough, at least, for Barnes to roll over on his back and shoot cleanly through one of their heads from his place on the ground.

The other two rip their eyes to him, incredulously dumbfounded that their third was dropped so easily.

"What? We're soldiers, not god damn vampires," he manages, only to go wide-eyed a second later when they both break toward him in a staggered pulse-injured sprint.

Time to go--

Tony might have made a comment about any of this being easy right now. He's got a lot of pressure around his right elbow and a substantial loss of feeling in his fingers because of it. FRIDAY has a warning up about the limb, but he doesn't take the time to see if he's bleeding or if there's more damage than that. The way that the armor is will keep him together until he can get into triage.

And it will take a lot more than a potentially broken arm to put him down.

Taking off to go after than, not quite as stabilized as he would be with two working gauntlet repulsers, Iron Man banks hard against the wall. In response, the whole silo shudders. The cold has taken it's toll on the place and it's more than willing to crack under the pressure of a heavy object smashing against it.

It really is time to go after that. The silo coming down on them isn't something anyone wants to attempt to survive.

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