Chapter Text
Stark Industries Arcology, Seattle Freestate
“Tony, no,” Pepper said, hands on her hips. “You most certainly cannot go with them.”
Tony didn’t look up from the building’s matrix, even if he didn’t need to be looking at it. Data streamed directly into his brain from JARVIS by way of the dataports just behind his ear. Renraku’s arcology blueprints were far from complete, although no one had ever penetrated as far as Coulson, and Tony spared a moment to flatten his lips, mourning the loss of his best decker. The black ICE, L.O.W.key, had taken Coulson out after Stark Industries had launched a counter-attack last quarter. They’d been successful, in the end, taking minimal casualties, but Coulson had been one of them.
“I’m sorry, Pepper, I must have heard you incorrectly,” Tony said, softly. “Are you telling me that the War Machine is a loss I should just accept?”
“No, Tony,” she sighed. “Just hire the ‘runners. Johnson them, if you don’t trust them, but please, I am asking you this time. Do not risk the Iron Man tech and, I might add, your genius brain, and go to war directly -- physically -- with Renraku yourself. Tony, if we lose you, we lose the corp. We all lose.”
“Pep, it has to be me. It’s personal,” Tony said. “Rhodey wouldn’t leave me there. Besides, I’m the best chance we’ve got to get the prototype back. You can Johnson, you’re so much better at it than I am.”
“That is because,” she said, “I have better negotiating skills. Against everyone but you.”
***
Club Penumbra, Seattle Freestate
Tony was late to the meet. He liked to pretend that was on purpose, but it wasn’t. The group of shadowrunners was assembled; most of them had worked together before, so when he entered the private room, he was treated to a series of glares from the others.
The leader of the street-team, a blond physical adept, street name; Captain America, glowered impressively. “Glad you could join us, chummer,” he said. “For the getaway driver, you don’t exactly inspire confidence.”
“Bad traffic,” Tony deadpanned, then took a seat. One of the hostesses brought him an elaborate bar concoction, and Tony used the opportunity of drinking it to look around at the ‘runners. He knew Hulk; a troll decker, probably Coulson’s equal, but he’d refused at least four offers of Tony’s to come work for Stark Industries directly. Had to be Hulk, there was no way Tony could trust another decker not to hack Tony’s own file and dish to the others on who street-named Iron Man really was.
On the Captain’s left was the legendary street-mage assassin, the Black Widow. She was all but asleep, leaning against the man on her left, but Tony wasn’t fooled. She was top-notch, trained by Hydra as a battle-mage. She was probably observing the group and the club in the astral plain, which meant if she was as good as her rep, she was looking at Tony’s astral mask right now. Wanda, one of his corporate mages, had anchored it to him earlier that night; the mask hid Tony’s enhancements, his rigger control wires, datajack, and internal skillsofts. If she was as professional as her rep, she wouldn’t try to shatter his mask. Rumor had it, she and her brother had been personally responsible for Hydra’s downfall, a few years back. That was a corp that Tony had been happy to see go bankrupt. Hydra made Aztech look cuddlesome.
The man on Widow’s left was Widow’s brother, a razor-boi street samurai with delta-ware biomodifications and a silver cyberware arm; the Winter Soldier. Winter turned stormcloud blue eyes on Tony, the overly-smooth movements and speed hinting at wired reflexes and other enhancements. He was as beautiful and deadly as a monofilament whip. He held himself with unnatural stillness, observing, the laughed, spoke with his sister in Russian. “I like this one,” he said. “Look how pretty he is, solnyshka, little sun.”
“After the run, Yasha,” she said in return, “I give you leave to flirt with whoever you want. Nuyen first, fun later.”
Now, Tony decided, was probably not the best time to let them know he spoke Russian. (Well, factually, he didn’t, but he’d installed the skillsoft for multiple languages. As the head of Stark Industries, being able to understand most of the world’s languages was essential, even if he pretended to hire translators for the formalities.)
Beyond them, in the corner, was Hawkeye, an elf from Tir Tairngire, whose specialties were stealth and cover-fire. Hawkeye was a wetworks specialist, and Stark Industries noted in his file that he’d completed two very successful corporate assassinations for them, two years ago, and had been well-paid for both his skill and discretion. Even Aries Corp didn’t know who’d been hired to take out Aldrich Killian. The man had been in the middle of a teleconf with three other corps, ready to reveal the prototype he’d stolen from SI when he’d sprouted a feathered shaft between his eyes. Hawkeye had managed the kill, publicly, and gotten away clean.
Beyond Hawkeye was Bruce -- street-named Hulk. A towering, nine-foot, green-skinned troll, Bruce looked too big and too clumsy to maneuver around inside the Matrix as a decker, but the ports behind his ear and the keyboard tucked under his arm said differently. Tony’d worked with him several times before, both directly and otherwise. The bonus of Hulk having said no to direct employment by SI is that he’d done a few runs with the Captain, and therefore could vouch for Tony (Iron Man) as a reliable hire. Cap, the Russians, and Hawkeye were a long established team and they seldom needed to work with others, but their own rigger/getaway driver, Thor, was out following a spectacular helicopter crash. Thus, why they also needed the run desperately; SI was paying top nuyen, and the team needed to rebuild their ride.
Pepper came in, finally, looking every inch the Mr. Johnson, with Happy and Wanda flanking her as professional bookends. “Well, now that we are all arrived,” she said, with an especial glare at Tony that clearly won her points with the Captain, “let’s see how we can be of mutual use to the other.”
***
Renraku Arcology, Seattle Freestate
The mission had turned into a heatwave at the last second. They’d gotten in clean, all the way into R&D where they’d found both Rhodey and the suitcase with astonishing ease. Hulk opened the doors for them, shut down video surveillance. They’d intercepted one security team, and the Russians had easily eliminated them, between Widow’s stinging mana bites and the Winter Soldier’s monofilament sword, they’d managed the whole thing with a minimum of noise, too. Between making salsa of the security team, Winter had continued to describe to his sister, in vividly erotic Russian, all the things he wanted to do to Tony, as soon as the run was over. Tony had managed to disguise one body-cramping bout of searing lust brought on by the man’s descriptions as a check for low-level hidden cameras. Talk about awkward erections, Tony grumbled to himself, triggering his biofeedback mods to keep from blushing.
Then the L.O.W.key ICe system had dumped Hulk out and given him a fragging bad case of dumpshock, sounding the alarms. Black Widow had cast a spell on the downed decker to lighten the load, which meant the Captain could carry him, but then they’d gotten separated; Tony, Winter, and an unconscious Rhodey, along with the paydata to one side, and the Captain, Hawkeye, and Black Widow, with the injured Hulk to the other.
“I’ll get him out,” Tony promised over coms, just before L.O.W.key found their backdoor hub and shut the coms out, “meet back at Grac…” The coms went dead.
“Slot and run, rigger,” Winter said in a low growl behind him. He shifted Rhodey on his shoulder with one hand, firing his Vindicator minigun with the cyber arm. Most breeders wouldn’t have even been able to handle the Vindicator with both hands without a securing harness, the recoil from that thing was intense. Tony engaged his sound dampners again as Winter pulled the trigger, filling the corridor with thunder.
Tony used his smaller guns, the Ares Predator, to clear a path toward the outer wall; R&D was almost half a mile inside the arcology, but they’d been driven out. He reloaded, sighed, an unloaded into yet another team of Renraku corpsec. At this rate, they were going to be out of bullets before they were out of enemy combatants.
Corpsec backed them into a dead end, a small T juncture. According to Tony’s internal map, they were less than twenty feet from open air, on the ninetieth floor, admittedly, but hey… Winter eased Rhodey to the floor and took up a covered position. He bared his teeth at Tony, beautiful eyes wide with panic. “Now would be a good time for a fragging backup plan,” Winter said. “Or we’re gonna have our last stand right here, chummer. And I will never get to taste that beautiful mouth of yours.”
“Give me three minutes,” Tony said. He thumbed the biometric lock on the securecase and it whined as it opened.
“We don’t have three minutes, Iron Man,” Winter snapped. Winter held corpsec off through gunfire and swear words and Rhodey was finally stirring at Tony’s feet.
“Do you trust me?” Tony said, pulling out the red and gold gauntlet from the case and letting it crawl over his forearm, the system shooting hotlinks into his rigger control. The head’s up display clicked in place in his cybereyes, giving him the building schematics. He was right, they were up against the wall.
“Do I have a choice?” Winter replied.
“Probably not,” Tony said, “but it’ll be easier if you don’t struggle.”
“So ka,” Winter said, street Japanese for I understand.
“You speak Japanese, too,” Tony said, rolling his eyes.
“I have a very talented tongue,” Winter said, switching back to Russian.
Tony put his back to the wall, aiming the repulsor at the outside wall. “So I’ve noticed,” Tony said, in Russian. “Now kiss me, and let’s get out of here.”
To give the Winter Soldier some credit, he barely blinked as Tony switched into his dialect. “I have been wanting to, all night,” he said. And before Tony could make another remark, Winter had his mouth on Tony’s, licking, biting, tasting, drawing out his tongue and swallowing him whole. Tony had had kisses before, but nothing like this sweet, drugging sensation that left him shivering.
“Right,” Tony said, panting for breath. “Right. Good data set. We’ll have to explore further along those lines later.”
He aimed the gauntlet and opened fire at the outside wall, blasting a hole large enough for two men to run through.
“Nice weapon,” Winter said, tossing his last grenade down the corridor.
“Thanks,” Tony said. “Grab Rhodey and jump.”
“We’re a hundred storeys up!”
“You said you trusted me,” Tony reminded him. “I got this. Just go.”
“You’re out of your fragging mind,” Winter said, nonetheless, he was pulling Rhodey over his shoulder.
“Yep,” Tony affirmed. “But even if you splatter, it’s better than being taken prisoner by Renraku. Jump, go, go, go!”
Winter Soldier tightened his hold on Rhodey, took three running steps and vanished out the gaping hole in the side of the building. He didn’t scream. Tony was a step behind him. “JARVIS systems online,” he said, grabbing the case and leaping out into the black. Around him, the prototype Iron Man combat armor assembled around him and repulsors whined as he took control of the fall.
Descending sharply, he snagged the Winter Soldier, wobbling for a bit as the extra weight joggled his flight trajectory. Fortunately, Winter kept a tight grip on Rhodey with his cyber arm.
“You crazy bastard,” Winter shouted, staring up at the red and gold armor, wonder and terror warring for supremacy in his stormcloud eyes. “You couldn’t start flying before we jumped off a building?”
“Didn’t want internal cameras to get a close up,” Tony said, his voice modulated by the suit’s speaker system. “This is a prototype. And that’s my pilot you’re carrying, so don’t drop him.”
Tony couldn’t go supersonic with unarmored companions -- no one needed ruptured eyeballs -- so he was forced into some pretty wild in-flight maneuvers to dodge the two combat VTOLS they sent after him, along with two score of gundrones. Shooting gallery time; Tony flipped, reversed, fired on the turrets, dropping the drones from the sky with ease.
“On your left,” Winter screamed as the second VTOL dropped in to play.
Instead of firing at it, Tony banked hard, came in along the other side and threw; tossing the Winter Soldier and his precious cargo into the VTOL’s open gunbay. Winter threw the two gunners out before the pilot even thought to react, and by then it was too late. Tony touched down inside and used the dataport in his palm to take over the VTOL, flying by wire. He turned, punched the pilot in the face with one armor clad and rocket-assisted fist. The man didn’t move again. Tony flew without touching the stick, his rigging wires and brain faster and better than any manual pilot. Hell, he could have flown a simple craft like this in his sleep.
“Welcome to the unfriendly skies,” Tony said as Winter shot the co-pilot and sat down in the vacated, bloody chair. He kicked his boots up onto the control panel and leaned back with casual arrogance.
“You’re not a ‘runner,” Winter said. “You’re a suit.”
“I beg your pardon,” Tony said, heart sinking but keeping it out of his voice. “Did you miss the highly successful run we just pulled?”
“It will be more successful if my sister and the rest of my crew made it out,” Winter said. “But you are no mere rigger. You’re Tony Stark.”
“You’re not supposed to know that, Vatjob,” Tony said, sighing.
“You gonna clean me for figuring it out?” Winter said. The man didn’t go for his weapons, didn’t do anything but sat there and looked at Tony while Tony argued with himself. Really, for the good of his company, he should shoot the Winter Soldier. There was no one to tell the story differently; Winter Soldier could have been mowed down by corpsec, or fallen out of the VTOL, for that matter.
“I should,” Tony said. “Rumor can’t get around that the owner/op of Stark Industries got personally involved in a counter-recruiting mission. Quasi-legal applies only to SINless. I could be arrested and extradited under corp-law.”
“So ka,” Winter said. “You do what you gotta do, Shaikujin.”
Tony bit his lip. Pepper was going to kill him, risking everything for a hot razor-boi and a kiss that probably didn’t mean anything. “I’m not an honest citizen,” he corrected. “I’m a shadowrunner.”
And with that, he kissed Winter again and the man leaned into it with gusto, taking everything Tony had to offer and demanding more. The kiss went beyond tongue and teeth and lips, made promises that Tony wanted to keep, and sang along his nerves like the mechanical engine roar of a Eurocar Westwind sportscar on the straight roads without Lone Star in sight. He disengaged the armor with a thought and it folded down around him, returning to its suitcase form, letting him press his body closer to the Winter Soldier, feeling the heat of the man through his clothes.
“Don’t you need a hand on the stick, to fly this thing?” Winter asked when they separated.
“Might need a hand on your stick,” Tony snarked back. He slid a hand down Winter’s chest and fetched up near his belt when Rhodey groaned from the back of the VTOL.
“Tones,” Rhodey said, “so help me, if you got me drunk and we’re on another one of your mile-high orgies, I am going to beat you stupid.”