Radioactive | Bucky Barnes

IRON MAN 3: CHAPTER SEVEN

Rhiley hadn't gotten the chance to talk to Tony that morning. He'd rushed out after a phone call—urgent, grim, and gone before she could say a word.

Now, she was watching him on TV.

"We're awaiting the arrival of Tony Stark. We're hoping to get his reaction to the latest attack," the reporter announced, her voice sharp, chasing headlines as she and others swarmed Tony outside the hospital.

"Mr. Stark! Mr. Stark! Our sources say this is another Mandarin attack—anything else you can tell us?"

Tony didn't respond. He kept walking toward his car.

"Hey, Mr. Stark! When's somebody gonna kill this guy? Just sayin'."

Tony stopped. He turned to the reporter with a look that made Rhiley sit up a little straighter.

"This what you want?" Tony said. "Here's a little holiday greeting I've been wanting to send to the Mandarin. Just didn't know how to phrase it—until now."

He pulled off his sunglasses, stared directly into the phone camera.

"My name is Tony Stark, and I'm not afraid of you. I know you're a coward. So I've decided..." He paused. His eyes burned. "You just died, pal. I'm gonna come get the body. No politics here. No Pentagon. Just you and me. And on the off chance you're a man, here's my home address: 10-8-80 Malibu Point, 90265. I'll leave the door unlocked."

He tossed the phone against the wall.

Rhiley stared at the screen, stunned. "Did he just give his home address to a terrorist?"

Then it hit her.

She was sitting at that address.

"Jarvis—"

"Yes, Rhiley?"

"How bad do you think things are about to get?"

"I'll run some tests—"

"That's not—" She shook her head, already on her feet, grabbing the remote and switching off the TV. "Tony needs to be grounded. He just gave a supervillain our address."

"You are his aunt," Jarvis reminded her.

She glared at the ceiling. "I'm not arguing with a robot today."

"How's Happy?"

"He's stable. Still unconscious, but the doctors are hopeful."

Rhiley lingered in the doorway a beat too long. Her instincts screamed to move—to act—but something in her gut twisted.

"Jarvis," she said, voice steady despite the tension building in her chest. "How soon can you reinforce the perimeter systems?"

"I can begin immediately. However, Mr. Stark's override from earlier today has left several vulnerabilities—"

"Then fix them. Now. Lock this place down like we're under siege."

"Consider it done."

She moved through the house in swift, purposeful strides. Her boots echoed against the sleek floors, and her fingers already flicked through a small, metal case tucked beneath the coffee table. It didn't hold weapons in the traditional sense—no guns, no blades—just flameproof gloves, a handful of stabilizers, and a compressed suit reinforced to handle combustion spikes.

She didn't need a firearm. She was the weapon.

"This is why you don't provoke terrorists on live television," she muttered, slipping on the gloves and flexing her fingers. "Especially when your house is made of windows."

"Would you like me to alert Director Fury?" Jarvis asked.

"No. Not yet." She paused, glancing out the window at the ocean—a glimmering sheet of false calm.  "Continue reinforcing the place I need to go somewhere." 

"Is this about Dylan?" 

Rhiley sighed, "I need you to stop that." She didn't like how much this robot knew about her. 

-

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-

Rhiley didn't tell anyone she was leaving.

especially not Tony.

This wasn't something she could explain. Not without raising alarms. Not without inviting questions she wasn't ready to answer. Her connection to Dylan was buried too deep, tangled in a past she'd tried for decades to forget.

She drove away from Malibu Point without looking back.

The city blurred past her in shadows and streetlight. She didn't head toward SHIELD. She didn't follow the Mandarin trail. Instead, she slipped into the underground—the quiet, pulsing web of people who moved in whispers, who remembered too much and spoke even less.

She followed rumors. Obscure names tied to Cold War experiments. Hidden facilities lost to history. A Russian contact who owed her a favor. A dead drop in a cracked brick wall in Echo Park.

Every piece of intel was a flicker—brief, faint, almost too subtle to matter.

Except one.

A coded phrase scribbled on the edge of a bar napkin, slipped into her hand by a man who never looked her in the eye: "The Phoenix rises where the ash never settled."

Her stomach turned.

Then there was the fear behind people's eyes that made her double-take. Dylan had hurt a lot of people. Rhiley already knew that. She didn't expect him to be directly responsible for creating an assassin that moved like a ghost. 

She never heard of 'The Winter Soldier' until she went digging into Dylan. When he suddenly was 'alive' again, and turned up now. Why now? Why was he showing himself now? 

"He's dangerous."  They would say, and this time it wasn't about Dylan, but the assassin. 

Rhiley would only shrug. "I doubt it." Oh, how she would regret those words.