Tell Me When You Know

The Maximoffs

The mission had flubbed. Botched. A train wreck of epic proportions. Really, Tony could go on about it all day without running out of descriptions.

Sure, they'd confiscated the sceptre, and considering that had been their primary objective, some might argue that the Avengers had returned to the States with success in their bag. Of course, they'd be wrong, but that was largely beside the point.

Apparently, Adina had reversed one of Rogers' decisions on the field — Tony wasn't sure what that was about, he hadn't been paying more than half his attention to them at the moment, what with uploading JARVIS into HYDRA's servers that were a hundred times more secure than S.H.I.E.L.D.'s, and this, he said from personal experience — and Capsicle wasn't too happy about it. Which made sense, yes, and was probably justified, but then again, Adina had gone on pretty much every mission with them in the past three months they had been raiding HYDRA's bases all around the globe, and never once had she pulled the "I'm your superior, you listen to me" card so he was a little more inclined to reserve his judgement until he had additional data on hand.

Speaking of hurt egos, Barton got physically injured in the mission, returning home with a puncture in his stomach and having left behind a concerning amount of blood back in Sokovia as memorabilia for the locals. How touching. But he'd be fine, as good as new, if Doctor Cho's assurances were to go by, so there was that, at least.

Natasha, like the scary lady that she was, refused to leave Barton's convalescing ass alone and glared at anybody (read: Rogers) who tried to get her to rest. Adina had stopped by the archer's bedside once, at the very beginning, listening intently as Doctor Cho recounted her observations and then, had bent down to be at eye level with a seated Natasha, and had softly whispered, "He'd be fine." Tony heard it because he had been just behind her, arranging smoothies on the table for his team. Natasha had given her a grateful smile, and Adina had responded by squeezing the spy's shoulder. It was a scene Tony never wanted to see again, and he would be bleaching his brain and eyes the first chance he got.

However, while he was on the topic, Adina wasn't fine. She was working herself, and everybody on her intelligence team, to the bone. She never did that unless they were in the middle of an emergency, that if not handled carefully and swiftly would result in a triple-digit death count, or it had something to do with Tony. Or both.

The last time he had seen her this harried had been right after the data dump when food and rest had become two foreign concepts to her, and her office and funerals had turned into her best friends.

Tony would have offered to help her in whatever way she needed, but unfortunately, he'd been forbidden from entering his own lab. Apparently, unlike Barton who came back with a physical injury, Tony returned with a mental one.

He couldn't remember his time in HYDRA's underground basement with a whole lot of clarity — which, admittedly, did not extend any more comfort to him than large water bodies did since Afghanistan — but he recalled seeing the sceptre.

And the vision.

Which turned out not to be a vision, but a nightmare crafted by one of the enhanced. Wanda Maximoff. Adina had gritted her name out with a special brand of hatred that she mostly reserved for genocidal maniacs and her deceased husband.

Tony would argue that it wasn't a woman-made bad dream, that it was his legacy, that somewhere deep within his heart, he could feel it was real, but that was also what a brainwashed person would say as per Adina. And hell, she had never let him down before.

Hence, going against every nagging little corner of his brain that insisted, screamed, screeched, scratched at him to create, to protect, to defend, to wrap the world in a suit of armour, to ensure that the next time the invaders reared their ugly faces, that they wouldn't be able to get past the bouncers, he listened.