Chapter Text
”Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves." Confucius
He had been keeping a close eye on SHIELD for awhile now. There were signs of corruption that Fury either didn’t notice or wasn’t concerned with, but SHIELD knew far too much about him for Tony to be comfortable with them slipping on down the morality scale. So he took to hacking them every couple of months or so, just to make sure there wasn’t anything concerning.
One time he found the video of his parents’ murder.
It was buried beneath a hundred other insignificant files, all of them quarantined from the rest of the SHIELD servers. The information had been downloaded from an enemy base, and he doubted even SHIELD knew about it yet. Then again, he wouldn’t put it past them to have known all along and kept it from him.
Tony’s had a lot of worst moments in his life. There was the phone call about the crash. There was waking up in a dark cave with a battery rigged up to his chest. There was Obadiah’s parting grin as he turned away with Tony’s heart in his hands. There was falling through a hole in the sky, sure he would be dead before he even hit the ground.
This would be added to the list, somewhere in the middle. He had just sat there, not understanding what he was seeing, as the killer ran them off the road, beat his father, and then calmly strangled his mother, before shooting out the camera.
Then Tony saw red.
He didn’t sleep for nearly a week, searching through every last piece of data, calling in every favor he had. He was even desperate enough to reach out to Natasha Romanoff, but she didn’t know much. She did give him a name: The Winter Soldier. She said he was a ghost story. But she’d seen him, once. He was the only one to ever shoot her, which is terrifying enough.
The strangest part was that he had assassinations attributed to him throughout fifty years, but the description of Natasha’s shooter from 2008 perfectly matched the man he’d seen from 1991.
The search led him down the rabbit hole.
The corruption he’d been tracking in SHIELD seemed to come to a head, like the entire organization was wound through with a poisonous thread. They had connections to assassinations attributed to the Winter Soldier, and they had benefited from his father’s death. He found snippets of information that seemed to imply the man was kept in cyrostasis, which explained his lack of aging.
Then there was Hydra.
The first time he found the reference to Hydra, he dismissed it. But it kept coming back to them, and they didn’t seem to be the footnote in history that everyone thought they were.
Eventually, he slept. Then he woke up, and started again. It took him two months, all in all, to track Hydra activity and power usage through the entire United States and finally pinpoint where the Winter Soldier was likely being held.
He didn’t ask for back up, because he didn’t want anyone to try and stop him from what he planned to do.
This was personal, anyway, and he didn’t want anyone to interfere. As satisfying as it might have been to shoot his way through the base, he couldn’t risk drawing the attention. So he rigged up knockout gas to their ventilation system, waited ten minutes, and then went in through the front doors.
Everyone was passed out wherever they had been standing. They wouldn’t wake up for hours.
Tony pulled his tablet from his suit, and pulled up Jarvis. “Where is he?” he demanded.
“Based on the power grid, there is a room two floors down using an inordinate amount of energy,” Jarvis said calmly. “Certainly enough to power a cyrostasis chamber, Sir.”
Tony nodded, heading to the elevator and then door, following the energy signal into the room. It was large, with a huge clear cylinder sat center stage. A man was inside of it, frozen still, with brown hair to his shoulders and a metal arm. Tony clenched his hands into fists, and forced himself to step closer.
He could shut the power down. He could fire a bullet straight through the glass. He could make sure that the man that killed his parents never woke up.
But with that mask on, he couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that he had the right man—and it felt a little too much like it would be murder, if the man wasn’t able to fight back.
“Gotta wake him up,” Tony decided, heading towards the controls.
“Is that wise, Sir?” Jarvis asked, in a tone of voice conveying quite clearly how unwise he thought it was.
"Almost definitely not," Tony said. “I’m going to do it anyway."
He started the sequence to wake up the soldier, and the glass rose up with an ominous hiss. Tony backed up, watching as the man was revealed without any barrier between him. His eyes were still closed, but he was clothed in a thick, black jumpsuit, with no sleeves so his metal arm was in full view. The mask covered almost half of his face and lent him a sinister look.
Tony swallowed and waited for him to wake up, raised a hand to keep his repulser at the ready.
Then the soldier opened his eyes. He blinked them open suddenly, glancing to the side in confusion, and then he pushed himself forward and collapsed into a heap on the floor.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Tony decided. The man had fallen forward and caught himself on his arms, and he seemed too unsteady to raise himself back up. “This is so awkward. Am I seriously going to have to wait for you to fully defrost before we can fight to the death?”
There was no response, and Tony frowned as he looked at the mask he was wearing. It seemed more like a muzzle than anything. He wondered if he could even speak with it on.
“Hey, take off the mask," Tony told him harshly.
He didn't expect the man to listen, but he immediately lifted his shaking hands to undo the straps and allowed the mask to drop to the floor between them.
He hadn't been wearing the mask when he killed his parents, so he recognized his face at once and knew he had the right guy—but there was something off. The blank emotionless stare he had seen in the surveillance video was replaced by a look of confusion and pain.
"Are you my new handler?" he asked. He spoke with perfect diction and no trace of an accent, despite the fact that all the intelligence he had received indicated the Winter Soldier was Russian.
But then one could never tell when it came to assassins and spies. Natasha only ever had an accent when she wanted to, and she had plenty to choose from.
“I’m not your handler,” Tony snapped, and crouched down to meet him in the eyes. “You killed my parents, asshole. You killed my mom.”
The soldier caught himself on his hands again as he lost his balance. The strange suit he was wearing rippling with the movement. He looked up, his hair falling into his eyes, and watched Tony curiously.
"Your parents were targets?" he asked, before nodding vaguely. “Then you require a mission report?"
"No! God, fuck, no, I know what happened, caught the live and in color recording,” Tony snarled, his heart stuttering at the thought of hearing this murderer recount the details once again. “Do the names Howard and Maria Stark mean anything to you?"
"Are they my targets?" he asked, looking up at him with confusion.
Tony sat back on heels, staring at him in disbelief. "You're a few Fudgsicles short of a well-stocked popsicle cart, aren't you?"
The soldier watched him blankly. "I do not understand your commands. Please restate."
"I'm here to kill you, Terminator," Tony said slowly, "does that compute?"
The soldier looked up at him with wide blue eyes and no expression. "Okay."
Tony froze. "Okay," he echoed. "I tell you I came here to kill you and your response is 'okay'?"
"I am being decommissioned," the soldier said, and for one horrible moment Tony thought he actually seemed relieved. "I understand. I will comply."
Tony stumbled to his feet and backed away from him, his heart pounding with dread, as it truly began to sink in that there was something terribly wrong with all of this. "Hold that thought," he told him.
He set his tablet atop the Hydra computer so Jarvis could begin accessing them remotely.
"Jarvis, search for their files on the Winter Soldier," he said, keeping one eye on the guy, even though he was still shivering and looked more like a wet and miserable kitten than a threat. "This guy is supposed to be the most dangerous assassin alive, find out what the hell's wrong with him."
“There are no records referencing the Winter Soldier, Sir,” Jarvis reported after a brief pause. “However, based on available information, I am able to extrapolate that he is the man they refer to as the Asset. He was captured, not recruited, and has been a prisoner of war since at least some time in the 1960s. He withstood torture and conditioning attempts for a number of years before they decided they would need to erase his memories in order to implant proper conditioning. It appears that even then their methods were not permanent, so they added an additional layer of control by embedding him with activation trigger words, and began to wipe his mind before and after missions before returning him to stasis."
Jarvis had called up a number of archive recordings on the monitors, mostly of the soldier being strapped to a chair and then subjected to some bastardized version of electroshock therapy. There was no sound, but he could tell he was screaming every single time. “Jesus, stop,” he said. “Jarvis, stop it.”
The videos all blinked out at once. Tony's hands had started to shake, and he felt like all the air had left his lungs. He glanced back at the soldier, but he showed no reaction to Jarvis’s words. They might as well have been discussing the weather.
"He isn't what we thought, sir," Jarvis said, his own voice vibrating with every bit of emotion he was capable of. "He is not a willing participant nor a supporter of Hydra's ideology. From what I can gather, he fought against them every chance he had...the mission, with your parents, the trigger words were used. It is unlikely he had any real understanding of what he was doing."
Tony caught himself on the console, trying to steady his breathing, before he glanced back at the Winter Soldier. He was still shivering, and hadn't moved. He looked lost and resigned, apparently just sitting there waiting for Tony to murder him. Tony was pretty sure he was going to throw up.
"How sure are you, Jarvis?” Tony asked.
"There isn't any doubt, sir," Jarvis said. "Their records are quite...extensive, and highly disturbing in detail. I'm afraid we've yet to find the person truly responsible for your parents' murder."
Tony laughed brokenly, letting his head fall against the console. "It can never be simple, can it?" he asked, before steeling himself for what he knew he had to do. "Make a copy of their database and then wipe it."
"Sir, SHIELD will likely wish—“ Jarvis began.
"SHIELD didn't get here first,” Tony said. “Finders Keepers, Jarvis, them's the rules."
"Sir?" Jarvis said hesitantly. "Surely you are not considering—“
"We can't trust SHIELD. We've known that for awhile," Tony said, running a hand down his face. "Trust me, if there was someone else I could pawn him off on, I'd be doing it."
“It may be that what happened to him is through no fault of his own," Jarvis said hesitantly, "but that makes him no less dangerous. We are not equipped to give him the care that he needs."
"We're talking about a man that's been a prisoner or war, brainwashed and tortured, for fifty years at least,” Tony said. “Who's equipped for that?"
"You do make a valid point, sir," Jarvis agreed reluctantly.
Tony snorted, picking up his tablet, and folding it back into his suit. “Once we’re clear, call SHIELD to come do clean up,” Tony said. “We’re gonna blow this room though.”
“Do you think that’s prudent, Sir?” Jarvis asked.
“Yeah, I actually do,” Tony said. He stepped passed the Winter Soldier, who followed him only with his eyes, without moving another muscle. He slapped a detonator onto the stasis pod. “We can’t be sure SHIELD didn’t know about this place. This may buy us some time.”
The solider looked up at him with a furrowed brow, considering him, and Tony wondered how much of this he actually understood.
"Okay, new plan," Tony said, kneeling back down in front of him. "I don't really get my jollies from murdering brainwashed torture victims. So, you know, no decommissioning for you."
The soldier pressed his eyes shut for just a moment, sucking in a shaky breath before he forced them open again. Rather than looking relieved, he looked almost terrified. "What is my mission?" he asked, and his steady voice did not reflect any of the emotions Tony could see racing through his eyes.
"We're going to get you the hell out of here,” Tony told him firmly. "That's the mission."