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veldeiaTitle: Iron & Irony: Second Encounters
Author: Veldeia
Fandom: Iron Man/House MD
Series: Sequel to Iron & Irony. (Has nothing whatsoever to do with Malt & Mockery.)
Spoilers: Late season 4 for House, but before the finale, so nothing big. Spoils all of Iron Man and Iron & Irony, of course.
Pairings: Tony/Pepper
Rating: PG-13
Beta:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
btsxbeta <3
Disclaimer: I own no one and nothing, except for a messed up mind that likes playing with other people's characters and universes.
Summary: "I never knew getting kidnapped would be this boring." -Gregory House
--- "You don't know anything about Tony! I would give my life for him if I had to - but I won't. He's going to get us out of here." -Pepper Potts
--- "Okay, this could be a problem." -Tony Stark
7. "What's this? A rescue attempt?"
Even though things had started off looking ridiculously easy, it didn't last long. Rhodey advanced quickly, going through corridor after corridor, seeing no obvious signs of Pepper or House and meeting only light resistance. He walked on, took a turn to the right - and suddenly there was a deafening bang, and the corridor around him exploded in flames.
He backed away quickly. There'd been no serious damage to his suit, but he didn't think he could take many hits like that. On the other hand, he wasn't sure the corridor could, either. These goons had to be out of their minds to use weaponry as heavy as that inside their own base. He wondered how well-reinforced the metallic walls of the corridor were. So far, there were no signs of them collapsing, but he sure wouldn't want to put any more strain on them.
Rhodey looked around the corner again and shot a few quick blasts with his palm repulsors, trying to get some idea of what he was up against. He saw nothing but an empty, battered corridor, with water spraying from sprinklers. By the looks of it, the bad guys were hiding behind a corner, too.
He took a moment to consider his options. If there were heavily armed people there, the chances were that he was approaching something important. Then again, he might need to use heavy weapons himself to get through them, and he didn't want to, it was way too risky in here.
He was still pondering what to do when his radio came to life. "I've found them, and I'm going to hit the whole goddamn mountain with an EMP. You suit's not shielded. Get out of here and fast," Tony shouted urgently.
An electromagnetic pulse. Yeah, that made sense. It'd not only help the sick captives, but also seriously impair their enemies. Now that Rhodey thought about it, it was probably the thing Tony had been working on so intently during the last day or so. He just hadn't bothered to mention it to Rhodey. Typical. Maybe he'd forgotten - but more likely he hadn't told Rhodey because it was potentially dangerous in some way or the other, and telling him would've meant that he would've argued against it. It was obviously too late to do that now.
Making a mental note to talk about this to Tony once they were all safely out of here, he ignited his thrusters and took off. He flew through the narrow corridors at breakneck speed, the slightly clumsy suit only just managing the tight turns he put it through.
He could see the exit - he was out in the dark night air - and zap. His suit went dead.
Without his thrusters, War Machine fell like a ton of bricks.
The fall wasn't a very long one. He had been just outside the exit, near to the side of the mountain, so he hit the rock almost instantly, and slid down the steep slope, seeing nothing but black, hearing the metal of his suit screech against stone like nails on a blackboard - until he came to an abrupt stop. He passed out before he'd even felt the impact.
"House? Come on!" Potts whispered from where their cell's door was. The sound of gunfire had ceased, as had the echo of Iron Man's footfalls.
House struggled to his feet, leaning first on the bunk, then against the wall. Just staying upright was the challenge of a lifetime. The room was swaying like the deck of a ship. What wouldn't he give for some extra oxygen and a few Vicodin - but oh no, things were never that easy for him. Even if the EMP Stark had hit them with had killed the nanovirus, it would take hours before the symptoms began to ease off.
Following the wall, he made his way to the door in the dark room. Potts was apparently leaning on the door frame on the other side. House peeked out. The corridor was pitch-dark and perfectly silent.
"Let's go," Potts said, and House heard and felt her leave the room. By the sound of her footsteps, she was heading to the right from their door.
"You're going the wrong way!" House hissed after her.
"I won't abandon Tony," she replied.
He could hardly believe his ears. She wanted to follow Stark, when he'd most likely been taken hostage? That was completely insane. "There's nothing - we can do!" he told her. "I'm leaving."
House pushed himself through the doorway, and stepped to the left, his weight on his good leg and the wall next to him. He started making his slow, shuffling way along the corridor. Potts wasn't following him. She was still going in the other direction.
"Potts, you idiot!" he whispered sharply.
"We need to - find out what's - happened to him," she answered.
House had never been one for heroics. He was as rational as a man could be. The only sensible course of action here was to follow Stark's plan and get out if only they could. Even that wasn't an easy task, because not only were they nearly unable to walk, it was also entirely possible that they'd run into guards while trying to escape.
Still, considering the situation, she was sort-of doing the right thing. After all, wasn't it the job of the hero's sidekicks to do their best to help when the hero was in trouble, even if it was desperate and completely irrational? Obviously, they couldn't know whether Stark was in trouble without checking.
How many times in his life was House going to be in a situation like this? Most likely never again. If he did the rational thing and escaped, while Potts heroically went to Stark, and if they all lived to tell the tale, he'd feel like a complete loser and a wimp afterwards.
Cursing himself for being such a sucker for cool stories, he turned around and followed Potts.
It took them ages just to reach the end of the corridor where their cell was. They looked in both directions, but there was nothing but darkness. Luckily, all the bad guys seemed to be entirely tied up with the armored superheroes, so there was no one patrolling the place.
"We'll turn right," House whispered. "To Liu." That was, after all, where the cronies were most likely to take Stark, if they'd managed to capture him. Considering how silent it had been since the sounds of gunfire had stopped, Stark most likely hadn't regained his suit's functions yet.
"Right," Potts repeated, and stumbled forwards.
Liu's room wasn't far from their cell, just a few more turns. Soon, they could hear his all-too-familiar, falsely polite voice echo in the empty passageways. When they reached the corridor where his room was, they saw light flowing through the open door. To their amazement, there were no guards outside it. Warily, they inched closer.
House peered in. Liu had had the armchairs moved aside, leaving a wide empty space. He was standing in front of the desk, leaning on it with one hand in a casual posture, gesturing with the other as he spoke. In front of him, on the huge, expensive-looking oriental carpet, lay Iron Man, his armor clearly worse for wear. He was bound with his feet together and his arms at his sides. There were at least twenty goons in the room, and they all had guns pointed at him.
This wasn't exactly how Tony had expected the operation to go.
He'd known that the EMP would cause the suit systems to crash. It had been unavoidable - he hadn't had time to design new shielding, he'd had no choice but to make do with what he'd already had. Hopefully, it had kept the suit tech from getting entirely fried. Unless something had gone seriously wrong, the systems should restart in less than an hour. If they didn't, he'd have to come up with an alternative course of action. The most important thing was that the EMP had worked, and it should stop Pepper and House from getting any worse than they already were.
Of course, the details about Tony's suit also applied to Rhodey's suit, the basics were all the same. Tony had told a little white lie when he'd said that it wasn't shielded, to get Rhodey out of here. He needed Rhodey as back-up, with a fully functional suit, and he was pretty sure Rhodey would have refused to leave Tony alone in here if he had known that their suits had similar shielding, or lack thereof. Now, if everything had gone like Tony had planned, Rhodey would be outside, with perfectly working armor, maybe already on his way back to the base, to help Pepper and House.
What Tony hadn't planned for was that their enemies had kept their calm even though they were faced with a base-wide blackout. Hence the fact that he was now marching towards a merry little band of them, which was probably not the smartest possible move he could've made. Lifting the suit's boots off the floor to step forwards took almost all his strength. There was no way he was going to be able to fight in it without power.
Offline or not, the armor still protected him well from the bullets that kept hitting it. As he got closer to his enemies, the shots grew sparser. The cronies pointed at him with flashlights, and talked in low voices, in a language - or languages - that Tony didn't know. Maybe a few words of Chinese in there, and some Russian.
They had probably figured out by now that he was defenseless.
A few brave thugs approached him slowly, pointing their rifles at him. They were so near that they might actually damage his suit - then again, if they shot from this close a range, they'd put themselves at risk, too.
Tony tried to lift his hand, hoping he could at least throw a punch at them, but the movement was so sluggish that it was no good. The cronies looked at each other with wicked grins on their faces, stepped closer, braced their palms against his shoulders and pushed.
There was nothing he could do. He fell and landed flat on his back. The baddies pinned him to the floor, making him as helpless as a turtle that'd been turned over.
Some more bad guys appeared by his sides, and tied him up with a thick metallic cable. Had his suit been online, it would've been no problem at all for him to break the chains, but now, they left him with absolutely zero mobility.
The cronies grabbed his suit's legs and heaved. It took about four of them to move his metallic bulk.
"Hey, guys, come on, I could just walk on my own, it's not like I could run away even if I wanted to," he tried, but it was no good.
They started dragging him through the corridors in what was about the most humiliating manner he could imagine. The only good thing was that it was a pretty short distance.
He was hauled through a doorway into a large, almost hall-like room that was lit by a collection of lanterns, candles and lamps. Compared to the complete darkness everywhere else, it looked very bright. The eyeholes of the mask gave Tony a rather narrow field of vision, but he thought he could see porcelain vases, antique items and sculptures placed on pedestals and tables. By the feel of the floor under him, he could guess it was covered with a rug of some sort. The thugs left him in the middle of the room and retreated just far enough that he could see them at the edges of his vision, their guns still trained on him.
A face emerged above him, a round, bald face, with a vaguely Asian appearance.
"Anthony Stark. How wonderful to finally meet you. Your attempt to attack us was quite entertaining, but as you can see, it was merely a minor setback to us, and we now have you exactly where we wanted to. My name is Liu. You may have heard of me," the man introduced himself, and flashed him a smile that was anything but friendly.
"Yeah. You're the sorry bastard who already tried to kill me once and failed. What makes you think you'll do any better this time?"
"Actually, this time, it is not my task to kill you. On the contrary, my master would be quite angry if I were to rob him of the pleasure. However, I have been given the challenging task of prying you out of your metal shell, and if I must harm you to achieve that goal, I doubt he will mind."
Okay, that was a slightly disturbing thought. The armor was good, but it wasn't impenetrable, and there were quite a few ways to hurt Tony even when he was still in it. Especially now that everything was offline, they could just toast him with a flamethrower for a while and cook him like a lobster. Not a very encouraging thought. Better try and keep Liu talking before he got to actually doing anything.
Tony needed to buy the time it took for his suit to restart, or for Rhodey to show up and bust him out of here. Besides, he might be able to get some useful information, like more insight about who these Ten Rings guys were and who their mysterious leader was.
"Your master. So, you're just a hireling. Who's the real number one?" he asked Liu.
"Patience, Iron Man! He will introduce himself once he decides to grace us with his presence, but that won't happen until the situation here has, ah, stabilized somewhat."
"Seriously, am I supposed to be afraid of you guys? Your boss is obviously an even bigger coward than you are. And luring me away from home to kidnap my defenseless employees - that was just sad. Do you go around snatching candy from babies in your spare time?"
"Actually, my pastimes consist of a combination of torture, art collecting, golf, and human experimentation, and today, I shall have all but one of those," Liu answered, sounding pretty pleased with his wit.
"You're going to skip golf because you're afraid you'd lose?"
Liu ignored Tony's comment. "We shall begin with the last of the list." He lifted a container of some sort into Tony's view - it looked like a spray can, made of white plastic.
"Well, good luck with that. Shouldn't you be getting me out of the suit first? It's going to be sort of hard to, say, infect me with anything when I'm perfectly protected." Of course, that was a blatant lie - his suit wasn't sealed at the moment - but Liu wouldn't know that.
"I wouldn't try the same trick twice, that would be much too unimaginative. No, this isn't a virus, it's an entirely new creation from my ingenious nanotechnologists. It shouldn't harm living tissue - I'm using the conditional here, as it hasn't been extensively tested yet. On the other hand, our tests have proven that it's detrimental to most metals."
Liu put the canister right in front of Tony's face, so that it was pretty much the only thing he could see. He heard the hiss as a fine mist was sprayed over his mask, and then lower, over the rest of his suit. He couldn't feel it, and he had no idea whether he should be worried about this or not. Maybe he should - if this stuff was even half as nasty as the nanovirus, he might be in serious trouble soon. Since Liu didn't know about the arc reactor, he probably had no idea that a metal-eating thing that didn't harm living tissue might be life-threatening to Tony.
"It will take some time before the effects begin to show up, but don't worry, we won't get bored. I'm convinced we can come up with plenty of other, fun experiments to try while we wait," Liu said, grinning maliciously.
Things had turned completely upside down. Pepper had been desperately waiting for Tony to come and save them, but now that he'd finally arrived, she was free, while he was a captive at Liu's mercy. If she hadn't taken a look into Liu's room and seen him lying on the floor, she might not have believed it.
Pepper and House retreated to a safe distance from the open doorway, and slumped to the floor in the dark corridor.
"We've - got to do something, they're going to - torture and kill him!" she whispered urgently.
"In that suit, he's safer - than we are," House replied, managing to sound sarcastic even though he was whispering and out of breath.
"He's helpless! We need to - buy him more time."
"What do you - propose we do?"
"Talk, we could always talk," she said quickly, because that was the obvious thing to do.
Before House had time to answer her, her breath caught in her throat, and she knew she was going to cough - which would reveal them to Liu instantly, whether they wanted it to or not. She put a hand over her mouth and tried to muffle it the best she could, but the echo sounded horribly loud in the empty corridor.
The fit passed, leaving her feeling drained. They waited in silence. She still held a hand over her mouth, but now out of anxiety. There was no way that could've gone unnoticed.
Maybe a minute passed, and nothing happened. Then, she could hear Liu's voice, and Tony's answer. She could breathe again - except that she couldn't. Well, at least she could start trying again.
"So," House picked up the conversation. "If we turn ourselves in, we'll - have to make Liu think - that we don't know - about the EMP."
She hadn't even thought about that, so she was glad House had. "Yes! Tell him - that we're still desperate - to get the cure," she completed the idea. They could feed him more lies about Tony's suit, so that they'd not only buy time, but might even be able to stop him from trying anything actually harmful - it really could work.
"I would - never consider this - if I had any common sense left - but the virus must've - taken it all," House said.
"So, you're with me?"
"I'm more amazed - about it - than you are."
"Let's go, then."
"If we get killed - I'm so blaming you."
Her back against the wall, Pepper braced her heels to the floor and struggled up, slowly, to keep herself from blacking out. They covered the few yards to the doorway, and stumbled in. The moment she let go of the supporting wall, she lost her balance. She landed on the fluffy rug, not far from Liu, who was standing over Tony, holding what looked like a spray canister.
Instantly, there were a dozen guns pointed at her and House. They raised their hands in surrender.
"Hm, what's this? A rescue attempt? How cute," Liu jeered, and motioned at his guards to move closer and keep an eye on the the two of them.
"We're just attempting - to rescue ourselves," House answered him.
"We promised to cooperate - and we're still - willing to do it," Pepper added.
Pepper could hear Tony's gasp of disbelief at their words even through his helmet. She tried to wink at him, to make him understand that this was a ploy, but she was afraid he couldn't see it.
Chapter 8.
Author: Veldeia
Fandom: Iron Man/House MD
Series: Sequel to Iron & Irony. (Has nothing whatsoever to do with Malt & Mockery.)
Spoilers: Late season 4 for House, but before the finale, so nothing big. Spoils all of Iron Man and Iron & Irony, of course.
Pairings: Tony/Pepper
Rating: PG-13
Beta:
btsxbeta <3Disclaimer: I own no one and nothing, except for a messed up mind that likes playing with other people's characters and universes.
Summary: "I never knew getting kidnapped would be this boring." -Gregory House
--- "You don't know anything about Tony! I would give my life for him if I had to - but I won't. He's going to get us out of here." -Pepper Potts
--- "Okay, this could be a problem." -Tony Stark
7. "What's this? A rescue attempt?"
Even though things had started off looking ridiculously easy, it didn't last long. Rhodey advanced quickly, going through corridor after corridor, seeing no obvious signs of Pepper or House and meeting only light resistance. He walked on, took a turn to the right - and suddenly there was a deafening bang, and the corridor around him exploded in flames.
He backed away quickly. There'd been no serious damage to his suit, but he didn't think he could take many hits like that. On the other hand, he wasn't sure the corridor could, either. These goons had to be out of their minds to use weaponry as heavy as that inside their own base. He wondered how well-reinforced the metallic walls of the corridor were. So far, there were no signs of them collapsing, but he sure wouldn't want to put any more strain on them.
Rhodey looked around the corner again and shot a few quick blasts with his palm repulsors, trying to get some idea of what he was up against. He saw nothing but an empty, battered corridor, with water spraying from sprinklers. By the looks of it, the bad guys were hiding behind a corner, too.
He took a moment to consider his options. If there were heavily armed people there, the chances were that he was approaching something important. Then again, he might need to use heavy weapons himself to get through them, and he didn't want to, it was way too risky in here.
He was still pondering what to do when his radio came to life. "I've found them, and I'm going to hit the whole goddamn mountain with an EMP. You suit's not shielded. Get out of here and fast," Tony shouted urgently.
An electromagnetic pulse. Yeah, that made sense. It'd not only help the sick captives, but also seriously impair their enemies. Now that Rhodey thought about it, it was probably the thing Tony had been working on so intently during the last day or so. He just hadn't bothered to mention it to Rhodey. Typical. Maybe he'd forgotten - but more likely he hadn't told Rhodey because it was potentially dangerous in some way or the other, and telling him would've meant that he would've argued against it. It was obviously too late to do that now.
Making a mental note to talk about this to Tony once they were all safely out of here, he ignited his thrusters and took off. He flew through the narrow corridors at breakneck speed, the slightly clumsy suit only just managing the tight turns he put it through.
He could see the exit - he was out in the dark night air - and zap. His suit went dead.
Without his thrusters, War Machine fell like a ton of bricks.
The fall wasn't a very long one. He had been just outside the exit, near to the side of the mountain, so he hit the rock almost instantly, and slid down the steep slope, seeing nothing but black, hearing the metal of his suit screech against stone like nails on a blackboard - until he came to an abrupt stop. He passed out before he'd even felt the impact.
"House? Come on!" Potts whispered from where their cell's door was. The sound of gunfire had ceased, as had the echo of Iron Man's footfalls.
House struggled to his feet, leaning first on the bunk, then against the wall. Just staying upright was the challenge of a lifetime. The room was swaying like the deck of a ship. What wouldn't he give for some extra oxygen and a few Vicodin - but oh no, things were never that easy for him. Even if the EMP Stark had hit them with had killed the nanovirus, it would take hours before the symptoms began to ease off.
Following the wall, he made his way to the door in the dark room. Potts was apparently leaning on the door frame on the other side. House peeked out. The corridor was pitch-dark and perfectly silent.
"Let's go," Potts said, and House heard and felt her leave the room. By the sound of her footsteps, she was heading to the right from their door.
"You're going the wrong way!" House hissed after her.
"I won't abandon Tony," she replied.
He could hardly believe his ears. She wanted to follow Stark, when he'd most likely been taken hostage? That was completely insane. "There's nothing - we can do!" he told her. "I'm leaving."
House pushed himself through the doorway, and stepped to the left, his weight on his good leg and the wall next to him. He started making his slow, shuffling way along the corridor. Potts wasn't following him. She was still going in the other direction.
"Potts, you idiot!" he whispered sharply.
"We need to - find out what's - happened to him," she answered.
House had never been one for heroics. He was as rational as a man could be. The only sensible course of action here was to follow Stark's plan and get out if only they could. Even that wasn't an easy task, because not only were they nearly unable to walk, it was also entirely possible that they'd run into guards while trying to escape.
Still, considering the situation, she was sort-of doing the right thing. After all, wasn't it the job of the hero's sidekicks to do their best to help when the hero was in trouble, even if it was desperate and completely irrational? Obviously, they couldn't know whether Stark was in trouble without checking.
How many times in his life was House going to be in a situation like this? Most likely never again. If he did the rational thing and escaped, while Potts heroically went to Stark, and if they all lived to tell the tale, he'd feel like a complete loser and a wimp afterwards.
Cursing himself for being such a sucker for cool stories, he turned around and followed Potts.
It took them ages just to reach the end of the corridor where their cell was. They looked in both directions, but there was nothing but darkness. Luckily, all the bad guys seemed to be entirely tied up with the armored superheroes, so there was no one patrolling the place.
"We'll turn right," House whispered. "To Liu." That was, after all, where the cronies were most likely to take Stark, if they'd managed to capture him. Considering how silent it had been since the sounds of gunfire had stopped, Stark most likely hadn't regained his suit's functions yet.
"Right," Potts repeated, and stumbled forwards.
Liu's room wasn't far from their cell, just a few more turns. Soon, they could hear his all-too-familiar, falsely polite voice echo in the empty passageways. When they reached the corridor where his room was, they saw light flowing through the open door. To their amazement, there were no guards outside it. Warily, they inched closer.
House peered in. Liu had had the armchairs moved aside, leaving a wide empty space. He was standing in front of the desk, leaning on it with one hand in a casual posture, gesturing with the other as he spoke. In front of him, on the huge, expensive-looking oriental carpet, lay Iron Man, his armor clearly worse for wear. He was bound with his feet together and his arms at his sides. There were at least twenty goons in the room, and they all had guns pointed at him.
This wasn't exactly how Tony had expected the operation to go.
He'd known that the EMP would cause the suit systems to crash. It had been unavoidable - he hadn't had time to design new shielding, he'd had no choice but to make do with what he'd already had. Hopefully, it had kept the suit tech from getting entirely fried. Unless something had gone seriously wrong, the systems should restart in less than an hour. If they didn't, he'd have to come up with an alternative course of action. The most important thing was that the EMP had worked, and it should stop Pepper and House from getting any worse than they already were.
Of course, the details about Tony's suit also applied to Rhodey's suit, the basics were all the same. Tony had told a little white lie when he'd said that it wasn't shielded, to get Rhodey out of here. He needed Rhodey as back-up, with a fully functional suit, and he was pretty sure Rhodey would have refused to leave Tony alone in here if he had known that their suits had similar shielding, or lack thereof. Now, if everything had gone like Tony had planned, Rhodey would be outside, with perfectly working armor, maybe already on his way back to the base, to help Pepper and House.
What Tony hadn't planned for was that their enemies had kept their calm even though they were faced with a base-wide blackout. Hence the fact that he was now marching towards a merry little band of them, which was probably not the smartest possible move he could've made. Lifting the suit's boots off the floor to step forwards took almost all his strength. There was no way he was going to be able to fight in it without power.
Offline or not, the armor still protected him well from the bullets that kept hitting it. As he got closer to his enemies, the shots grew sparser. The cronies pointed at him with flashlights, and talked in low voices, in a language - or languages - that Tony didn't know. Maybe a few words of Chinese in there, and some Russian.
They had probably figured out by now that he was defenseless.
A few brave thugs approached him slowly, pointing their rifles at him. They were so near that they might actually damage his suit - then again, if they shot from this close a range, they'd put themselves at risk, too.
Tony tried to lift his hand, hoping he could at least throw a punch at them, but the movement was so sluggish that it was no good. The cronies looked at each other with wicked grins on their faces, stepped closer, braced their palms against his shoulders and pushed.
There was nothing he could do. He fell and landed flat on his back. The baddies pinned him to the floor, making him as helpless as a turtle that'd been turned over.
Some more bad guys appeared by his sides, and tied him up with a thick metallic cable. Had his suit been online, it would've been no problem at all for him to break the chains, but now, they left him with absolutely zero mobility.
The cronies grabbed his suit's legs and heaved. It took about four of them to move his metallic bulk.
"Hey, guys, come on, I could just walk on my own, it's not like I could run away even if I wanted to," he tried, but it was no good.
They started dragging him through the corridors in what was about the most humiliating manner he could imagine. The only good thing was that it was a pretty short distance.
He was hauled through a doorway into a large, almost hall-like room that was lit by a collection of lanterns, candles and lamps. Compared to the complete darkness everywhere else, it looked very bright. The eyeholes of the mask gave Tony a rather narrow field of vision, but he thought he could see porcelain vases, antique items and sculptures placed on pedestals and tables. By the feel of the floor under him, he could guess it was covered with a rug of some sort. The thugs left him in the middle of the room and retreated just far enough that he could see them at the edges of his vision, their guns still trained on him.
A face emerged above him, a round, bald face, with a vaguely Asian appearance.
"Anthony Stark. How wonderful to finally meet you. Your attempt to attack us was quite entertaining, but as you can see, it was merely a minor setback to us, and we now have you exactly where we wanted to. My name is Liu. You may have heard of me," the man introduced himself, and flashed him a smile that was anything but friendly.
"Yeah. You're the sorry bastard who already tried to kill me once and failed. What makes you think you'll do any better this time?"
"Actually, this time, it is not my task to kill you. On the contrary, my master would be quite angry if I were to rob him of the pleasure. However, I have been given the challenging task of prying you out of your metal shell, and if I must harm you to achieve that goal, I doubt he will mind."
Okay, that was a slightly disturbing thought. The armor was good, but it wasn't impenetrable, and there were quite a few ways to hurt Tony even when he was still in it. Especially now that everything was offline, they could just toast him with a flamethrower for a while and cook him like a lobster. Not a very encouraging thought. Better try and keep Liu talking before he got to actually doing anything.
Tony needed to buy the time it took for his suit to restart, or for Rhodey to show up and bust him out of here. Besides, he might be able to get some useful information, like more insight about who these Ten Rings guys were and who their mysterious leader was.
"Your master. So, you're just a hireling. Who's the real number one?" he asked Liu.
"Patience, Iron Man! He will introduce himself once he decides to grace us with his presence, but that won't happen until the situation here has, ah, stabilized somewhat."
"Seriously, am I supposed to be afraid of you guys? Your boss is obviously an even bigger coward than you are. And luring me away from home to kidnap my defenseless employees - that was just sad. Do you go around snatching candy from babies in your spare time?"
"Actually, my pastimes consist of a combination of torture, art collecting, golf, and human experimentation, and today, I shall have all but one of those," Liu answered, sounding pretty pleased with his wit.
"You're going to skip golf because you're afraid you'd lose?"
Liu ignored Tony's comment. "We shall begin with the last of the list." He lifted a container of some sort into Tony's view - it looked like a spray can, made of white plastic.
"Well, good luck with that. Shouldn't you be getting me out of the suit first? It's going to be sort of hard to, say, infect me with anything when I'm perfectly protected." Of course, that was a blatant lie - his suit wasn't sealed at the moment - but Liu wouldn't know that.
"I wouldn't try the same trick twice, that would be much too unimaginative. No, this isn't a virus, it's an entirely new creation from my ingenious nanotechnologists. It shouldn't harm living tissue - I'm using the conditional here, as it hasn't been extensively tested yet. On the other hand, our tests have proven that it's detrimental to most metals."
Liu put the canister right in front of Tony's face, so that it was pretty much the only thing he could see. He heard the hiss as a fine mist was sprayed over his mask, and then lower, over the rest of his suit. He couldn't feel it, and he had no idea whether he should be worried about this or not. Maybe he should - if this stuff was even half as nasty as the nanovirus, he might be in serious trouble soon. Since Liu didn't know about the arc reactor, he probably had no idea that a metal-eating thing that didn't harm living tissue might be life-threatening to Tony.
"It will take some time before the effects begin to show up, but don't worry, we won't get bored. I'm convinced we can come up with plenty of other, fun experiments to try while we wait," Liu said, grinning maliciously.
Things had turned completely upside down. Pepper had been desperately waiting for Tony to come and save them, but now that he'd finally arrived, she was free, while he was a captive at Liu's mercy. If she hadn't taken a look into Liu's room and seen him lying on the floor, she might not have believed it.
Pepper and House retreated to a safe distance from the open doorway, and slumped to the floor in the dark corridor.
"We've - got to do something, they're going to - torture and kill him!" she whispered urgently.
"In that suit, he's safer - than we are," House replied, managing to sound sarcastic even though he was whispering and out of breath.
"He's helpless! We need to - buy him more time."
"What do you - propose we do?"
"Talk, we could always talk," she said quickly, because that was the obvious thing to do.
Before House had time to answer her, her breath caught in her throat, and she knew she was going to cough - which would reveal them to Liu instantly, whether they wanted it to or not. She put a hand over her mouth and tried to muffle it the best she could, but the echo sounded horribly loud in the empty corridor.
The fit passed, leaving her feeling drained. They waited in silence. She still held a hand over her mouth, but now out of anxiety. There was no way that could've gone unnoticed.
Maybe a minute passed, and nothing happened. Then, she could hear Liu's voice, and Tony's answer. She could breathe again - except that she couldn't. Well, at least she could start trying again.
"So," House picked up the conversation. "If we turn ourselves in, we'll - have to make Liu think - that we don't know - about the EMP."
She hadn't even thought about that, so she was glad House had. "Yes! Tell him - that we're still desperate - to get the cure," she completed the idea. They could feed him more lies about Tony's suit, so that they'd not only buy time, but might even be able to stop him from trying anything actually harmful - it really could work.
"I would - never consider this - if I had any common sense left - but the virus must've - taken it all," House said.
"So, you're with me?"
"I'm more amazed - about it - than you are."
"Let's go, then."
"If we get killed - I'm so blaming you."
Her back against the wall, Pepper braced her heels to the floor and struggled up, slowly, to keep herself from blacking out. They covered the few yards to the doorway, and stumbled in. The moment she let go of the supporting wall, she lost her balance. She landed on the fluffy rug, not far from Liu, who was standing over Tony, holding what looked like a spray canister.
Instantly, there were a dozen guns pointed at her and House. They raised their hands in surrender.
"Hm, what's this? A rescue attempt? How cute," Liu jeered, and motioned at his guards to move closer and keep an eye on the the two of them.
"We're just attempting - to rescue ourselves," House answered him.
"We promised to cooperate - and we're still - willing to do it," Pepper added.
Pepper could hear Tony's gasp of disbelief at their words even through his helmet. She tried to wink at him, to make him understand that this was a ploy, but she was afraid he couldn't see it.
Chapter 8.
