Chapter 18: Chapter 18: Confrontation

A/N: Tony deals with his impromptu kidnapping victim the best way he can at this point in time. Natasha makes her move.

-x-X-x-

Capturing the Winter Soldier in 2009 was the first major event Tony had done since coming back in time that he didn’t intend to do. Everything else he’d changed so far had all been according to plan. But perhaps it was a little silly to think that everything would always go as he planned it.

Had Natasha faced down the Winter Soldier this early in the original timeline and Tony had simply never heard about it? Or had the changes he’d made led her to that car wreck outside of Odessa, dealing with HYDRA’s legendary assassin? Tony honestly didn’t know… nor did he care. Letting Natasha die this early simply wasn’t in the cards. And once he’d beaten Barnes into unconsciousness, it wasn’t like he could very well leave him there to be picked up by SHIELD or HYDRA.

Besides… just because Tony hadn’t intended to kidnap Barnes this early, didn’t mean that Tony wasn’t prepared for dealing with HYDRA’s secret weapon now that the time had come.

“Longing. Rusted. Seventeen. Daybreak. Furnace. Nine. Benign. Homecoming. One. Freight Car."

…

“… Ready to comply.”

Yes, Tony had dug deep into the brainwashing behind the creation of the Winter Soldier. After Siberia, he’d even memorized the words that Zemo had used to bring Barnes under his control back at the UN. He’d never used them of course, but to be fair… he’d never had the chance. Until now.

Staring into the blank, brainwashed eyes of the assassin who killed his mom and dad, Tony can’t help offering a crooked smile. After a moment, he sighs and runs a hand down his face.

“Right. Orders are simple, Soldier. Stay put. Sit tight. Obey nobody except for me, due no permanent harm without my say so. And if it’ll help… try and remember. Try and remember who you were before.”

“Orders received.”

He really should leave it at that. But Tony can’t help rambling just a little bit.

“… Maybe we see if your programming breaks down the longer you aren’t on ice. Unfortunately I don’t have the technology to remove brainwashing completely… yet. And I’m pretty sure Wakanda doesn’t either just yet. Their little generational genius is still under ten, after all.”

Tony’s crooked smile drops and he grows more solemn as he looks James Buchanan Barnes in his dead, vacant eyes.

“Not to worry. I’m over the whole ‘wanting to kill you’ thing. Have been for quite some time. Still pretty irritated over what you and Steve did to me in Siberia, but then… that wasn’t really you, nor was it the Steve of this timeline. You’re just a weapon, Barnes. And now you’re a weapon I’m locking away in a safe where my enemies can’t get to it. I’m going to destroy HYDRA. And one day, we’ll see about getting you back to normal.”

With his piece said and it abundantly clear that Barnes isn’t in any state to respond, Tony rises to his feet and heads for the door. He’s set the Winter Soldier up in a nice little gilded cage. Its an inescapable prison, but also pretty well furnished. As he is now, the assassin won’t be able to enjoy the creature comforts Tony is giving him, but Barnes started to break out of the conditioning once before. Maybe this time it would be even easier given the orders Tony had given him.

Ultimately though, it was out of Tony’s hands. Literally, because…

“Take care of him JARVIS. And alert me to any changes.”

“Of course, Sir.”

Tony couldn’t trust himself to be Barnes’ primary caretaker. Too much bad blood, even if he’d told himself again and again that he’d forgiven the other man for killing his parents. But JARVIS was the perfect intermediary. The AI could handle watching over Barnes alongside everything else he was already doing and he wouldn’t be any more stretched thin as a result. It was the perfect imperfect solution to the mess Tony had made.

Well, it was a solution for HALF of the mess Tony had made.

“Status update on Romanoff, JARVIS?”

“There’s been an interesting development there, Sir. You’ll want to see this.”

Tony watches what JARVIS sends him in silence. At the end, he huffs.

“There’s no way she doesn’t think this was me. Even if they don’t know about the Arc Reactor, even if they don’t know about how I escaped Afghanistan… it just has my fingers all over it. She definitely has suspicions if nothing else. The fact that she went into my planner and scheduled a meeting between the two of us for first thing after she gets back from her ‘vacation’ only proves it.”

“I would tend to agree, sir.”

Eyes narrowing, Tony tilts his head to the side.

“Then why not tell Fury? Why keep her suspicions so close to her chest?”

“… She is a spy, Sir. They tend to be paranoid by nature.”

Tony raises an eyebrow.

“Oh? You think she saw through your charade, J?”

“No Sir. All signs point to both Natasha Romanoff and Nick Fury being completely fooled. However, she may have other reasons for wanting to hide her thoughts from the Director of SHIELD.”

That gets a bark of laughter from Tony.

“What, you think she’s fallen in love with me or something?”

JARVIS’ response is as dry and witty as ever.

“Far more likely that she fell in love with Ms. Potts, Sir.”

Tony snorts derisively at that. Well, one way or another, they’d find out soon enough.

-x-X-x-

If Natasha’s suspicions were correct, then Stark already knew why she’d arranged this meeting. Even still, there’s a degree of doubt that she can’t quite shake as she sits there in her stereotypical white blouse and black pencil skirt, one leg crossed over the other. Once more feigning being Natalie Rushman… but perhaps not for much longer.

The door opens and Tony steps into his barely used office wordlessly, stalking over to the desk he’s almost never actually behind and sitting down in his chair. He looks at her and raises an eyebrow.

“Enjoy your vacation?”

In that moment, Natasha throws her plans out the window. They’d called for a whole lot of subterfuge, word games, and making absolutely sure that Stark knew exactly who she was before she blew her cover. But staring into the man’s eyes, Natasha realizes she doesn’t need any of that. She already has her answer. She just has to trust her gut.

“Got shot at a few more times than I would have liked, but what can you do?”

She sheds Natalie Rushman like a snake skin, allowing herself to lean back a little bit and her face to turn a form of sardonic that she’d never shown while playing the role of ‘eager-to-please’ PA. Tony Stark doesn’t even bat an eyelash at the transformation though, chuckling at her words as he leans back in his chair as well.

“Indeed, what can you do? Perils of your line of work I suppose, Agent Romanoff.”

And there it was. Confirmation. Natasha can’t help it… her breath hitches for just a moment. Tony Stark knows who she is. No… more than that. He’s always known who she is.

“SHIELD didn’t get one over on you when they slipped me into this position, did they? You just let them think they did.”

Tony raises an eyebrow again, but his grin makes it clear she’s right on the money. Natasha’s heart rate increases for a moment before she calms herself back down. She’s not in danger here… probably. After all…

“Why did you expose yourself like that just to save me? I presume the robot was piloted by JARVIS.”

Tony hums and inclines his head in easy agreement but otherwise doesn’t say a word. Natasha narrows her eyes.

“Sentiment, perhaps? You’ve known all along that Natalie Rushman didn’t exist. And yet, you let yourself get attached to me anyways. And… you’re deep in SHIELD’s servers, so when you found out I was on mission, you kept an eye on me and-!”

“Ah, let me stop you right there. While you’re about ninety percent correct, the last ten percent is pretty important. While it’s true that J was keeping an eye on you, it wasn’t that close of an eye. The only reason we knew to come to your aid was because we’re not just in SHIELD’s servers. We knew the moment that the Winter Soldier’s handlers activated him and sent him after you.”

Natasha’s eyes widen in disbelief at that.

“You know who’s behind the Winter Soldier?”

“HYDRA, yes.”

He just… he just goes and says it. Hands curling around the armrests of her chair, Natasha feels like a spring being tensely coiled. HYDRA. But that…

“And yes, let’s skip past the disbelief and incredulity please. HYDRA is still very active. Who else would have the Winter Soldier as their secret attack dog? Who else would have been giving him missions for these last sixty years?”

Natasha mulls over all of that in her head for a long moment, a little surprised when Tony just stays quiet and lets her parse it all out.

“… So you have both SHIELD and HYDRA hacked. You knew I was given a mission, and you knew the Winter Soldier had been sent to kill my mark. You sent JARVIS to save me. Why?”

Tilting his head to the side, Tony offers Natasha a rather wry grin.

“Perhaps it wasn’t about saving you. Perhaps it was simply about securing the Soldier for my own purposes.”

That sends a fresh jolt of adrenaline through Natasha’s body. She inwardly curses herself for not really clocking that until now. It’s embarrassing, to say the least. But he’s right. Tony Stark has the Winter Soldier now. The Merchant of Death has secured the most deadly assassin of the twentieth century for his own personal use.

Except…

“No. You just admitted to having direct access to all of HYDRA’s systems. Meaning, you could have retrieve the Winter Soldier at any time on any of his missions. You could have even taken him from wherever they were keeping him and they would have been none the wiser. After all, that robot you sent after me is invisible to all forms of digital detection, apparently.”

Tony tilts his head again, choosing once more not to respond. Natasha’s eyes narrow into full blown slits as she fully processes it all.

“… You had no desire to capture the Winter Soldier because you’ve been lying low and flying under the radar. Even now, you weren’t truly that interested in blowing your cover. If HYDRA really did have the Soldier, then they’ll be hunting for you now even if they don’t know that it’s you yet. They’re going to want their pet assassin back.”

And if that was the case, that meant her initial assumption was right.

“You risked everything you’ve been building right under SHIELD’s nose to save my life. Why?”

Smiling, Tony does something that irritates Natasha like nothing else. He answers her question with another question. To be fair, it’s a tactic she employs all the time so it’s rather hypocritical for her to be upset when it’s used against her. Call her a hypocrite then, because she’s still annoyed.

“Why didn’t you tell Fury that you thought the robot was me? Why come back here to have this conversation with me when neither Fury nor Coulson are properly informed enough to be able to back you up?”

Unfortunately, Stark has all the power in this situation. And besides, he’s been giving her plenty of answers already. Natasha knows how the game is played and she knows better than to get tight lipped now. Doesn’t mean she’s going to be completely honest with him though.

“… Would it have mattered? I still told Fury about the robot and the Winter Soldier. He didn’t believe me. Thought it was my concussion talking.”

Suddenly, Tony looks beyond pleased with himself. And perhaps just a little apologetic.

“No you didn’t. And no, he didn’t.”

Wait, what? Natasha can’t help but be confused, her brow furrowing as Tony suddenly taps his desk and the seemingly wooden surface splits open to reveal a projection device. A holographic interface pops up and Tony does something that makes it swivel around to face her. Then, all of the sudden, Natasha is watching both sides of her and Fury debriefing after the mission in Odessa.

Except… except it’s not her and Fury. Oh sure, it certainly looks like her. Talks like her. Acts like her. But the words out of her lips are not the words Natasha spoke, not the words she remembers.

In the video call, the fake Natasha outlines how the mission went to Fury, and everything is as it should be right up until her tires got shot out and they were sent over the cliff. Here, the fake Natasha doesn’t say a word about the matte black robot or the Winter Soldier.

Instead, she tells Fury a tale of how some opportunistic modern day highwaymen who’d clocked her and her mark in Odessa had followed them and set up an ambush, shooting out her wheels. The fake Natasha then goes on to explain how after the crash she’d returned fire and that had sent them running off allowing her and the scientist to make it to the extraction point.

Fury seems to believe it, hook, line and sinker. Even thanks her for her hard work. As the video call ends, Tony peers at her through the holographic display.

“That’s what Fury experienced on his end. And of course, here’s what you experienced on your end.”

The debriefing that Natasha actually remembers plays next. With Natasha telling Fury about the matte black robot and the Winter Soldier but not her suspicions about Stark, and Fury promising to look into it but also none-too-subtly making it clear she thought she’d just been hallucinating things.

Now that she’s seen both sides, Natasha feels like an idiot. Nicholas J. Fury had to be one of the most paranoid men she knew. And he was never close-minded. The idea that he would listen to one of his best operatives tell a story about a metal robot disabling and capturing the Winter Soldier right in front of her eyes and then decide she was talking nonsense was… well, it was ridiculous. She’d been an idiot for believing it for even a second.

And yet… and yet…

“Good, huh? JARVIS does excellent work. All in real time as well. You two thought you were talking to each other while in reality, you were talking to facsimiles of one another while JARVIS played intermediary. And no one was any the wiser.”

Tony swipes away the holographic monitor and smiles at Natasha from across the desk.

“So you see, you didn’t tell Fury about my ‘robot’, nor did you tell him about the Winter Soldier. At least, as far as he’s concerned. My secrets remain safe, Natasha Romanoff.”

Natasha tenses at that and prepares to spring into action.

“So long as you silence me, you mean.”

But far from attacking her or having someone else attack her, Tony just rolls his eyes at her.

“If I wanted you dead, you’d already be dead Natasha. If I wanted you silenced, you’d already be silenced. I saved your life, didn’t I? That has to count for something.”

Natasha remains tense, her lips pressed tightly together as awkward silence reigns between them. Finally, Tony huffs.

“At least answer the question. Why didn’t you try to tell SHIELD about your suspicions? Sentiment, perhaps?”

At having her own word thrown back in her face, Natasha’s eyes narrow. In the end, she decides she might as well tell some semblance of the truth. After all, he already knew everything there was to know about her, apparently. But Stark clearly wasn’t going to stop until he heard it right from her lips.

“SHIELD recruited me with a smile and a gun, as you almost certainly already know from their file on me. They offered me a job with lots of strings attached, and I’ll be honest… I’m glad I took it. But they also didn’t really give me much of a choice. If I had declined, I would be dead right now.”

Tony bobs his head in easy agreement before gesturing silently for her to go on.

“… I’ve done things I’m not particularly proud of. Have a lot of red in my ledger. I imagine you know something about that, don’t you Stark?”

The Merchant of Death smiles at her. It’s not a nice smile.

“Perhaps.”

Mm, pissing him off is probably not a good idea right now, Natasha decides.

“… Well, I want to try and get some of it out. SHIELD seemed like the best option for me to do that. But… now I owe you one. I owe you my life. So I figured I owed you at least the chance to explain before I did anything I couldn’t take back.”

Of course, now that she knew what he was truly capable of, Natasha realized there wasn’t much she could have done. Honestly, she’s left wondering just how this conversation would have gone if she HAD tried to tell the fake Fury of her suspicions regarding Stark, instead of just telling him about the Winter Soldier and the robot.

“Explain, huh? Sure, I’ve got an explanation for you, Natasha. Do you want to know how I got into HYDRA’s servers? Do you want to know how I found out they were still alive after all this time?”

Natasha can’t help but perk up a little at that. It sounds like Tony is going to tell her either way, but that doesn’t change the fact that she does indeed want to know very much. Of course, she never could have expected Stark’s punchline. Not in a million years.

“Simple, really. Because when JARVIS and I hacked into SHIELD’s systems, we found HYDRA already there. Nestled in deep. Here’s the truth, Agent Romanoff. HYDRA isn’t just still around. HYDRA is SHIELD.”

What? No. That wasn’t possible.

“They’ve hollowed out the organization my father and aunt Peggy built. The organization you’ve entrusted to get the red out of your ledger. They’ve made their home in its rotting guts. And nobody has a single clue.”

-x-X-x-

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A/N: Poor SHIELD. Dealing with AI-generated real-time deepfakes in 2009. They just can't keep up with JARVIS or Tony.

Meanwhile, Natasha gets the truth shoved in her face. Now all that's left to see is how she's going to react to this bombshell~