Chapter Text
It doesn’t go bad right away.
Hawkeye and the Hulk are waiting in the parking garage that Iron Man chases or maybe lures the giant killer robot into, how’s that for strategy--the Mark VII can turn on a dime, on a fucking dime, like momentum's not even a thing any more, and he laughs into the comm on the sheer exhilaration of it because he just played patty-cakes with this fucker all the way down 5th Ave with zero civilian casualties despite the bot's clear preference for soft targets--and then, because he's gracious like that, he lets the bot get one good smack in for verisimilitude. It sends him spinning into a nicely distant family sedan.
The killerbot follows but hesitates on the downramp, cameras swiveling, so Tony peels himself out of glass and steel and fakes damage to the boot jets, trying to take off and flipping over instead. The bot flexes its crushers and gnashes its mandibles and comes for him in its terrifyingly fast sideways lope.
He waits til it’s almost on him, fully committed to its next stride, and fires the boot jets to scoot between two of its legs, striking sparks like a comet run aground. There goes the paint job, and here comes the Hulk.
The bot sprouts two arrows before a big green uppercut smashes it into the concrete ceiling, and a third one as it falls back down. The Hulk is relentless, smashing it again before it can find its balance, and Tony has a hard time keeping a clear line-of-sight long enough to get a target lock. When he releases them, though, the little missiles do exactly what they were made to do and pierce through the armor on the bot’s joints, then slag them cherry-red, fueling and extending their thermite reaction with the bot’s own alloy. The bot screams as two of its legs crumple and lashes out, catching Iron Man in the side and swatting him into the ground. Then Hawkeye completes his setup and all his arrows explode at once, blowing the bot’s chassis into two big pieces and a lot of smaller ones.
The leg Tony is pinned under flexes, digging into the concrete, then locks dead. The power sources in the other pieces are going dark one by one, so Tony lays his head back down and just...enjoys having nothing to do for a minute.
A shadow falls on him and Clint crouches down. “Hey,” Clint says, knocking on the helmet. “You awake in there? Need a hand?”
“What? No, I’m fine, it’s just...” Tony pops the faceplate and wishes, irritably, that he could run a hand through his hair. “This is what, number eight?” The serrations on the bot’s leg are streaked with dark red-brown, now smoking and charring, and yeah, he doesn’t want to be under here any more. He pulls out a laser to cut the weakened joint, which is still glowing hotter than anything outside of a foundry and only barely holding its shape. The leg itself isn’t glowing, but even so it’s too hot for anyone but Iron Man to touch.
He flubs the first cut, arm unsteady, and lines up to try again. He can’t keep the cut straight, he’s just making a mess. Is the angle that bad? He turns off the laser and brings his hand up to his face to check the lens port for damage.
The gauntlet whines, repulsor charging up. He feels his fingers holding down the studs inside. He jerks in reflex, angling the blast up over his head; Clint jumps back and the armor’s faceplate snaps down automatically, triggered by the near miss.
Heart hammering, Tony grabs the bot’s leg and pushes. He wants out from under this thing right now. Both his hands spasm inside the gauntlets and the repulsors go to alternating fire, shifting him on pure recoil. Clint is yelling something into the comm and edging forward again when Tony slithers free and stands up shakily, taking one step, then another.
Tony isn’t doing that. This isn’t a panic attack. Something is walking him.
He takes a huge breath and it strangles in his throat, warning silenced. “Sir,” JARVIS says, “your readings--”
His arm lifts, palm out, pointing at Clint. Oh god, not happening, not happening, not happening--he can’t hear anything but the charging whine--
The world skips a second and he’s in a crack pattern several meters up the wall, head ringing from some enormous noise. “JARVIS, cut power,” he gasps. The Hulk is really not happy with him. He can’t see Clint anywhere.
“--backplate, cuirass linkages, left shoulder vernier--Sir, I strongly recommend--that command requires--”
The jetboots engage and both his arms raise. He fires on the Hulk. This is officially the worst day ever. The Hulk roars in shock and anger and bats him back into the wall.
“Cutting all targeting and powered assist,” JARVIS says crisply. The armor falls like a rock.
He impacts feet first but has no chance of staying there; the suit’s weight and momentum buckle his knees and send him crashing down, though its failsafe systems spread and absorb the force and protect his joints from taking too much torque in any direction. It still feels like being hit by the third car in thirty seconds. He lies there, stunned and beginning to get that floaty disassociated feeling.
Something jostles him--the external feeds go green, then black, and the armor groans around him as the Hulk wraps a massive fist around his head and upper body and picks him up like a child with a doll. He panics for a second, head twisted awkwardly and pressure warnings popping up on the HUD, then goes limp again when he realizes the Hulk isn’t squeezing or smashing, just carrying.
The comm is going crazy but it might as well be white noise; he can’t follow any of it. He’s going into shock. He aimed at Clint, might have shot Clint--did shoot the Hulk--did someone hack the armor? Mind control?
He can fight in shock, up to a point; he’s done it before when blood loss was involved. He disassociates in battle all the time, little chunks of a few seconds here and there when he falls or sees a hit coming or knows someone's life is riding on his snap decision. He deals with it later. He's known how to do that since the first time he flew an ultralight.
This, his body not under his control, is new. There's no sense of intrusion in his mind, just--signals not getting through. Replaced by different signals. It's a goddamn man-in-the-middle attack. A dozen experiments flit through his head, pointing to half a dozen possible countermeasures. Too bad he's muted right now, and has been since those words to JARVIS; he can’t even slow down his breathing.
Observations. He’s blinking and swallowing when he needs to, but he can’t do it on command. He thinks, very deliberately, about yawning. A few seconds later, he does yawn; he can’t help it. Okay, good data point, on a scale of one to full motor control this is about point-two-five, but at least he can deliberately influence something.
Big green fingers uncurl and the Hulk drops him as gently as one can be dropped on an--an overturned SUV. They're back outside in the street. The Hulk leans very close, peering at him.
Tony’s arm rises, shoulder straining under the dead weight of the armor, and tries to fire again. Click. He tells it to lower. It doesn’t.
The Hulk rears back, face twisting. "TIN MAN BROKEN," he yells, punching the street with both hands, then shields his face and looks back at Tony, touching the armor's palm with one enormous fingertip. "SORRY," he whispers, and shuffles away, speeding up until he leaps twenty stories and vanishes around a corner, moving as fast as a Hulk can go.
It's going to be a pain locating Bruce after this.
Tony would be happy to just make friends with this SUV, but his arms and legs have other ideas and they start pushing, grabbing parts of the suspension, trying to lever the armor upright. He takes an inordinate amount of satisfaction in the fact that the Mark VII is heavy. Not as heavy as VI, but still, without power assist and feedforward he can just barely walk it along from a standing start. He's never tried to--ow, ribs--sit up in it unassisted.
For all it's coming in handy now, it's a pretty big oversight. He really ought to add a full set of unpowered movement tests to future suits. Or, wait, add powered sit-up stand-up sequences to safe boot mode. Oh, that could work.
After flailing for a bit his traitorous body ends up just sliding down the SUV, pushing off it to get mostly vertical, and the bruises on his upper back strenuously object to the way his arms are braced. It's hard work and his breathing has gotten harsher, echoing over the now-suspiciously quiet and open comm.
Captain America comes around the corner at a dead run and skids to slow down, staring at him. Tony’s body wrenches away from the SUV and steps forward, arms raising; with no pause at all, Cap rolls into cover behind a taxi and then sprints to the next abandoned vehicle, dodging and weaving and working his way closer in furious silence.
Tony really hopes Steve has a plan, because his repulsors are disabled but the armor still has missiles. Perhaps he shouldn’t be thinking that too loudly.
His arms lower. Shit.
His finger twitches up the HUD menu. Shit!
But JARVIS disabled all targeting. Most of the options are grayed out. If it was him, he thinks loudly, trapped in a powered-down suit with no targeting, he’d have already jimmied one of the missile ports open and be setting up to throw a few like grenades.
Whatever is in control of his body ignores this decoy plan, which is a shame since it would have taken at least two or three minutes to force open a missile port. The HUD menu is navigated by gaze tracking and gestures; it is extremely disconcerting to not be able to look away or close his eyes to slow himself down, and--aw fuck, it’s as he thought, the purely defensive weapons are still accessible. Tony thinks desperately about the mother of all yawns and manages to achieve it, halting gaze tracking for several seconds.
The HUD picks up a sweep of purposeful motion; from the depths of the menu tree, Tony catches it in the corner of his eye. About time.
Cap’s shield catches him under the chin and lifts the armor right off its feet, then shoves forward into the hardest, fastest takedown Tony’s ever seen, much less experienced. He’s still drawing a reflexive, shocked gasp as Cap, not satisfied with gravity, accelerates the armor down faster, driving it into the ground and knocking the breath out of him again. The helmet and shoulders take the impact, with a horrible screechy crunch from the armor’s throat under the edge of the shield.
Steve puts his other hand under the shield and rolls it away, then slams it edge-on into the asphalt between Tony's arm and body, right up under his armpit. Tony flinches, not entirely sure his arm is still connected for a second, but no, he can still feel it fine. His other arm is caught up under his back, palm-down, stuck and kept there by Steve's knee. His body arches and twists but Steve weighs a hell of a lot more than Tony can shift from this position, and he's centered right where Tony has the least leverage.
And oh shit, Tony must still have been tripping from that impact because Cap's hand is on his throat, and Cap doesn't flail, Cap knows what he's doing and what he is doing is wedging his fingers up between the under-chin plate and the neck. There's a seam there where the two plates slide against each other--machined to micrometer tolerances of course--and covered by a flexible seal in the armor's second layer, but Cap's shield strike has actually crumpled both plates by more than a little and opened a gap between them. The bent edges dig into Tony's neck and jaw uncomfortably, thankfully not cutting off his air.
Tony hears a clanging, a huge resounding noise with familiar bell-like overtones. After a moment he realizes it's his free hand, beating against the other side of the shield, nearly drowning out the click-click-click-click of its repulsor mechanism triggering over and over. Then Steve gets his thumb past the cables, through the undersuit and all the way to the wild pulse hammering just under Tony's jaw, and really starts bearing down. Tony gapes inside the helmet, frantically tries to hunch up but Cap has a good grip on the helmet's chin and no way is it going anywhere, and then he starts panicking because Cap is serious, he's not letting up, not-- He arches, scrabbling and scratching the gauntlet's fingertips across the shield with a scree he can barely hear over the roaring in his ears while black whorls cover his vision and--
--and he's back to a stabbing pain in his head, tingling lips and fuzzy gray swathes replacing the black. He thinks he's lying absolutely still. Same position, only choked out for a few seconds. "JARVIS," he hears Steve say in his ultra-calm Situation FUBAR voice, "open the faceplate for me." It pops open and the fuzzy gray gets a lot brighter and acquires colors and an indistinct blob that might be Steve's face very close. "Steve," Tony tries to say, but a strangled cough comes out instead and yeah, the suit has taken a lot of damage to the throat area and his voice might be wrecked for a while.
And then he feels his arm rise and start beating against the shield again.
Steve must be able to read the horror on his face this time, because he leans in. "Tony, you're being controlled? If you can respond, blink twice."
Tony tries, he tries, but the best he can manage is a sort of flutter. So reflexes and some involuntary actions can get through, but voluntary ones are still no, unless he's dazed and reeling or--not fully conscious, interesting, the odds that this was a rogue telepath just went way up, and dammit that still did not really distract him from this situation, because Cap is speaking again. "We need to get the armor off. I don't want to keep choking him out. Or-- Nat, do you have anything?"
Her voice comes from somewhere out of his line of sight. "The only aerosols I have are Hulkbuster, they'd kill him. I have a couple normal tranks but they need to be injected into muscle. His face would not work. Sadly."
"Captain," JARVIS speaks up, tinny and tiny from the helmet's internal speakers, but from the tensing of Steve's legs he’s audible to supersoldier ears even over the clanging that still will not stop, Jesus, why can't this telepath realize they're beat--but no, wait, scratch that, a smart telepath would have made it look like Tony had control and gotten Steve to loosen his hold. So, yay? Fuck fuck fuck. Yay.
"...I can release the armor at a voice command from Mr. Stark. I recommend that be tried before attempting to disassemble or pry it apart with the tools at your disposal." Namely, the shield. Yeah. Horrifyingly effective, maybe, but Tony does not want to be on the inside of that experiment.
"JARVIS, you think he can speak?"
"After the Hulk threw him into the parking garage wall, he ordered me to cut all power to the armor."
"I saw that," Steve says. "He fell out of the air before he recovered from the impact. I thought he'd been knocked unconscious."
"After he bounced off a concrete wall," Natasha says thoughtfully. "And after you choked him, he tried to talk." She walks into view and Cap and Black Widow peer down at him. Tony really, really wishes the clanging would stop. It's just awkward. Also, it's pretty loud with his helmet open and his headache is bad enough already.
"Right," Steve says. Shit! Tony would like to say he really does not approve of this method, but oh right he can't, so thumb on carotid artery, check, pressure, check, cue up even more awkward involuntary gasping and struggling, second verse same as the first--
--and it's uh, he's uh, oh god his head hurts.
He gasps, coughs, gasps, double-blinks his streaming eyes and rasps "JARVIS, armor sesame." The armor powers up briefly, just long enough to disengage the mechanical locks with a series of pings--Steve's hand tenses--and then the pieces start to loosen, fold up into each other and fall off, while Tony carries on double-blinking madly. He counts seven sets of double blinks before his body stops responding to him and instead starts squirming under Steve, trying again to get out of the hold with the bulky armor mostly out of the way. Thankfully Steve is having none of it, although he does reach over and pin Tony's arm. Tony is not sure, at the moment, whether he appreciates this more because the telepath won't break his now-unprotected human hand on the shield or because the clanging won't start again.
Regardless, he's never been happier to see Natasha coming for him with a needle, although he can't actually see it because Steve's in the way. It stings, going in a few inches above his knee, but he can feel it working after just a minute. He relaxes, body heavy and cold, and at long last manages another double blink. And another, and another.
"Steve," Tony slurs, "don' choke me again. Everybody okay?"
"They're okay," Steve says. He's turned his face half-away and the cowl blocks Tony from seeing his eyes, but his mouth is in the grip of some powerful emotion.
"Clint?"
"He's fine, just spooked. What happened?"
"Telepath. I think. Keyed to me, still trying, goddamn motherfucking bastard, Jesus, shit! JARVIS, thank you, JARVIS, thank you," Tony says. He's feeling heavy-eyed but he has quite a tolerance for depressants so he's gonna pass along as much info as he can. "You knew jus' what I meant..."
"I am sorry I could not do more, sir," JARVIS says solemnly, and Tony knows he's blaming himself for having no protocol, for not anticipating this somehow.
"No buddy, we got a date okay? Won't be sorry next time." They are going to put their heads together and Tony is going to kick and scream all the way, but JARVIS is going to get some autonomy over the suit, because this was not okay. It's just implementation, just the problem of how to do it securely, but that's a problem they can solve. "Cap," Tony goes on, "thank you, oh god you're terrifying, I won't ever make fun of you again today."
"Anytime," Steve says, and has the effrontery to grin down at Tony before slowly, watchfully, removing his grip on Tony's throat.
"Careful," Tony mumbles, "bastard still has hooks in me. Can only talk...because I'm tranked to the gills."
"Most people would be out cold," Natasha remarks.
"It's 'cause...I get drunk...all the time," Tony says, caught between pure glee that alcohol finally did him some good and resigned horror that people he respects are seeing him like this. Though nowhere, nowhere near the horror of seeing his repulsors pointing at Clint.
"We know," Steve says. "But Tony, you can clock out. We'll find the telepath."
"Yeah?"
"Thor and Clint are looking. Natasha will go too, as soon as you’re out."
"Yeah?" Tony considers. "Yeah. Okay. Get all the armor. Don't leave any pieces."
"I'll count, sir."
"JARVIS will keep us honest. And I'll keep an eye on you."
Tony closes his eyes just for a second, and sighs, and the next thing he remembers--