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The man without a name, he really should choose one for himself just to get used to thinking of himself with an identity that was human, watched Stark and his obvious unease with confusion. Why should it matter so much that he had forgotten yet another person, when he had forgotten so many? It hadn't been a choice, all of those memories had been ripped out of his head time and again in order to create a blank slate for missions.

Was he personally offended? Hurt? As if he somehow should have resisted the effects of the wipe when nobody else had, not even his supposed best friend. It was extremely confusing and led to him frowning over at the adult Stark working on him, rather than the photographs flickering in front of them.

"I don't understand."

His words were soft and genuinely lost.

"Why do you want to be remembered? Why does it matter when I carried you or why? That was the mission, that mission is complete, I have been wiped since then."

"Yeah, cool, stop saying that. It's gross," Tony said, a very, very weak stretch of his ability for annoyingly effective quips. His mind was unfocused, and as much as he would like to blame that on the alcohol, it usually had a different, calming sort of way with him. Scotch, his best friend, had failed him, no matter how much he offered it worship and constant companionship. Rhodey would not approve, but he wasn't around enough to decide if his approval was something he really wanted to start earning or to put off again for next quarter's conscience earned value meeting.

He moved his hands apart to blow up the image and poked the men in suits. There had never been in a time in all of Tony's sometimes faulty memory where his father had anything to do with him. So why was the Winter Soldier carrying him along like that, towards a distant helicopter?

Tony recognized the lawn, recognized the carriage house in the distance and the back of a fence where his mother's gardeners grew her roses. This was the house in Long Island. The one he said he grew up in but had very few memories of until he left school and started crashing on the living room couch of.

There were other questions now, like who would take a photo of this anyway, and who were these men? Why would his dad want him along for any of his shady dealings?

A white flash behind his eyes left him momentarily out of breath. He knew at once what it was, the first caresses of a panic attack, and so Tony waved his hand over the image until it faded into light and distant memories.

"Everyone wants to be remembered. Even you. Maybe. Probably. Jesus, this is a mess. But whatever. Same shit, different day. I can't fix the nerve connection, but I have something that can. Fair warning, I made a murderbot baby with a deadbeat co-parent who never pays childsupport with it so... Mileage may vary."

"I don't want to be remembered."

He would like to remember, he would like to remember everything that he had ever done or said, he would like to know who he was as a person and move on with his damn life. He would like to know if he could ever be an actual person again, or if he had been hollowed out so completely that there was nothing left.

"When people remember me, they remember a lie and they expect me to be that lie. You're doing it now. You're hurt that I'm not the same silent Soldier you remember, and it bothers you that I don't remember whatever relationship you had with something that was just a hollow machine following orders. Ste-- Captain America does it, he calls me Bucky and looks at me like I'm all of his hopes at once. You all remember me as something that I'm not."

It was the longest speech that he had made in about seventy years and his voice was raspy by the time he was done, but it had come with surprising passion. He didn't want people that told him that he was a bodyguard or a best friend, he wanted space and someone who would let him figure out who the hell he was supposed to be now. Someone who might get to know that person and not expect someone else.

"Forget it, I can live with the damage."

All of a sudden he was on his feet and heading back for the door of the lab.

It took a long moment between sitting back down and watching Bucky stalk towards the glass doors that would take him up the stairs and back towards the elevator our of the building for Tony to open his mouth. "You were just there." His Nanny had never been much of anything. He wasn't a conversationalist. He wasn't a companion in the true meaning of the word. He wasn't the first mate to Tony's pirate captain or a joint explorer on a mission to Mars.

Bucky had been a blank doll, a projector screen, and nothing else. Well, no that wasn't always true, was it?

"Mostly, you were as good as furniture." He let the tool go and spun it around on his desk. It was a complicated game of spin the bottle, without anyone around him to land on for a kiss. When it stopped spinning, it landed on empty air and Tony thought that was fitting. "But sometimes you were more than that. You had... I don't know. Moments. Like when you trashed all of my Captain America stuff. Understandable, now, he's an asshole. Or when you snatched me out of bed and carried me to Brooklyn in my pajamas-- Makes sense now, I guess. You had clarity and dad decided to wipe you. So thanks for the attempt to save me a few times. RIP Captain America action figures. Good luck with....whatever."

He stood to fetch the bottle, neatly twisting open the cap with just the edge of his thumb, and wondering what silence about this would do to those insistent, buzzing voices in his head, the ones that reminded him that there was as many moments in his life that he didn't remember as the ones he did.

Edited 2017-10-25 14:20 (UTC)

He doesn't know if it's a comfort that he had experienced moments of almost clarity before he saw Steve on the bridge, or if it just makes it worse that he kept coming close to freedom before he was dragged right back under. Did that mean that the other Bucky was so strong that he couldn't be fully wiped away? If so, where was he now? What stopped him coming back now?

He didn't even pause before he got back on the elevator and then disappeared.

It would be another three months before he showed up again, though he had been monitoring the situation to see if Stark would tell Steve that he had found the man he was tearing the whole goddamn world apart trying to find. When he did show up it would be when Stark was in his lab again, and all of a sudden there would be a man behind him.

"Intruder detected," FRIDAY said helpfully, about ten seconds too late.

"Is she pretty? Or at least an eight?" Tony didn't look up. If there was an intruder alert without a flickering of a screen showing exactly where the intruder supposedly was, that meant that there was someone much too close for comfort. He'd been prepared for that, and was wearing the watch now that could be used as a way to grip a gun and stop it from killing him. "And does Happy know? Because the last time I checked, he's fine and well and sitting downstairs eating Cheetos out of the Family Size bag. What do I pay people for?"

He had been thinking about Bucky, though not exactly Bucky and more about that particular time in his life. He'd uncovered far too much lately, had more or less withdrawn from the Avenging he kept saying he was retired from despite his frequent dabbling, and had several generals and senators on constant hold these days until he needed them to shed some light on the information he was siphoning from their databases.

Sure, SHIELD (what was left of it), was likely monitoring him. Natasha had been by a few times to ask him to stop. And he assumed it was she who was in the room right now.

FRIDAY was up on her game to detect her, though.

Tony glanced up from the file he was flicking through, basically Winter Soldier 101, all in Russian and culled from some abandoned Siberian base no one really remembered existed from the Cold War, to his glass to catch the redhead's reflection in the curved scotch--

Not seeing her caused him to stand and turn abruptly, eyes wide, until he recognized the dull eyes staring at him.

"Jesus Christ. Are you trying to kill me? Actual question, not hyperbole."

If Tony had been delving into HYDRA files about the Winter Soldier, he would find that they were unpleasant reading. They were put together like a manual for how to take care of and maintain a machine, there was nothing in the language that even indicated this was a living and breathing person. It was full of phrases like 'disciplinary maintenance' and 'Asset familiarity'.

FRIDAY, in an effort to keep him from completely shutting himself off, had made sure to give updates on all the other Avengers at regular intervals. Well-- except for Bruce who seemed to have fallen off the face of the earth, and Thor who had gone back to Asgard after his disturbing visions when fighting Wanda. Steve was looking for Bucky, Sam was helping, the others were training and kept wanting him back.

Bucky had got past them all to get in.

"No," he answered, voice low, not offended by the question. "I came to see you, I'm malfunctioning and you're the only technician I have left."

Not his arm, but his head. Fractures of time and memory that were giving him fierce headaches from the scarring on his brain, just another one of HYDRA's legacies for him.

It was Rhodey that managed to keep Tony from sinking into a fog of his own genius, War Machine's objectives and loyalty to the new Avenger team did not keep him from his friend's side. He'd been here more often than not, asking for upgrades, and Tony had obliged. He had no intention of having one of his fugues this time around (they were always so messy and Pepper wasn't around to snap him out of it). He was just busy. Mysteries did not solve themselves.

Though he had no reason to believe a damned thing Bucky said, Tony lowered his defensively postured arms from in front of his face and sat back on the desk.

"You're not a machine," he said immediately. His schematics for DUM-E were far more humanizing than the manuals he'd been reading. He never even called DUM-E an it, the way that these assholes did. He crossed his arms and looked up at Bucky as he stood there, perpetual frown on a face that didn't really suit it. "And I told you. I'm a doctor. But I can fix that seam without the use of good Doctor Cho's device. I figured out a biological polymer. I dabble in biology now, thanks to you."

Bruce would be so pleased. Or afraid. Everytime Tony picked up a new hobby, it meant people died.

"I'm not here about my arm."

His advanced healing had taken care of that. He had wrenched the panels out of the flesh of his shoulder far enough to let the bone and skin heal by themselves. It was still painful and he didn't have full range of motion, but it was good enough to live by. He had an extremely high pain tolerance, after all.

"The malfunction is in my head," he continued, not really knowing what other term to use. He had found himself more human, but he was still struggling with it. Was that so surprising, though, for a man who had been nothing but a machine for literal decades? "Debilitating pain and occasional loss of vision."

It was a good thing that Tony was currently seated because he was fairly certain that he would have needed to otherwise. His face morphed from annoyed to curious to blank. How do you deal with a guy who is so unaware of himself that memory makes him think he's malfunctioning?

Tony wasn't a psychiatrist. He did the talking. The world revolved around him and when it decided not to, he tried to force it back on track. Helping other people was typically conducted through several channels such as Throw Money At It to Throw The Legion At It to Throw Iron Man At It. None of Tony's methods could be of any help in this situation and he wasn't a calm, empathic, emotional creature that could heal through love and understanding either.

Wariness filled his dark eyes as he lightly scratched the underside of his chin.

"So your malfunction? That's not physical." He reached beside him for the tablet computer he had been reading up classified information on, flicking his index finger over the screen. His Russian had improved remarkably since he'd last seen Bucky and he addressed him in Russian now, reading from the source material. "If there is deviation from standard programming or a degradation in the adherence to protocol, wipe the Asset immediately." Tony tossed the computer back onto the desk. "I don't think that's a good idea. But I'll tell you what? I also suffer from debilitating pain and occasional loss of vision from time to time. It's called high anxiety disorder. You're having panic attacks."

And he knew all about what fractured bits of repressed memory (or in his case, hearing voices telling him things he either shouldn't know or hadn't happened) did to a person revolved around his frequent abuse of alcohol. Too bad Bucky couldn't get drunk.

"Let me guess...your memories are popping back up?"

As soon as Stark addressed him in Russian and read words clearly from the manual on his own care, he stiffened up and very nearly went for him. He had said that he wasn't HYDRA, but that didn't mean that he had been telling the truth. People rarely told truths when they belonged to an organisation like that, and why else would he have that particular document to hand?

"I'm not the Asset, and if you try and wipe me then I'll kill you." The threat was probably more effective because he didn't give it in a snap or aggressive tone of voice, just a casual neutral tone like he was just giving his opinion on the weather. It's sunny today and I might kill you.

It wasn't panic.

He was relatively sure that it wasn't panic. He would know, he would be able to recognise that sort of intense fear, he had felt it at other points. He had woken up terrified and drenched in sweat and panting, but this was different. This was the white hot pain of a migraine and blacked out vision. This was the blood vessels in his brain under pressure, the scarification that HYDRA had etched in there no longer properly maintained. He had pieces of metal in his brain to work with the reprogramming machine, he should be dead but skilled doctors and engineers working together had maintained him.

Now he was a dead man walking.

"Did you miss the part where I said that wasn't a good idea?" Tony grunted. "You need to stop threatening me. I had to do all sorts of things to explain away those bruises you left the last time." He hadn't, actually, no one wanted to know about them. No one ever looked at him that closely anymore. And Rhodey knew better than to question him about anything personal. He never liked the answers. "And I don't appreciate it."

He doubted that his bodyguard with this new, unstable personality actually cared, though. He also doubted that these were posturing words to leverage help. He would kill him. It was written all over his face.

"Aside from an inability to understand when I'm reading and when I'm actually addressing you, you're going to have to be about ten times more specific about what your problem is. Don't just make impressively aggressive faces at me. You came to me. Again, I might add."

He gestured absently to the furniture for Bucky to have a seat before he used the heel of his boot to situate his stool back under himself and transferred his now distracted rear from the desk to it. He leaned his elbow on the table and spent another minute or two flicking through digital files before the slow process annoyed him enough.

"FRIDAY, full scan. Let's see what we've got to work with here."

"I don't know why I've come to you."

It was a quiet admission and sounded much more human than anything else he had said. He didn't know why, much like the Soldier hadn't known why he had destroyed Tony's Captain America model collection. It was instinct, something deeper than memory that recalled that Tony hadn't treated him unkindly and could be trusted. But if he had to give voice to that, then he had no idea.

It only took a fraction of a second for FRIDAY to finish the full body scan and put it up on the screen. Aside from the the damage to Bucky's shoulder that was already known about, he had a fractured left leg and two broken ribs. But it was the scan of his brain that would be the most worrying, there were so many dead sections and scars that it should be a literal impossibility that Bucky were even alive at all. Bits of metal showed up white on the scan, and no less than four blood clots were already forming where maintenance hadn't been performed in too long.

Bucky sat still while this was going on, though he watched Stark the whole time out of intensely focused eyes.

Watching the failures with Bucky's body was like watching a diagnostic of a crashing system. Parts were highlighted in brilliant scarlet, words of warning flashed. FRIDAY suggested calling the hospital for emergency transport, and one of the smaller voices that often plagued him whispered that fixing him would be a piece of cake.

Piece of cake?! He wasn't quite panicked, mostly incredulous, but there went his heart rate again, pulsing and pounding in his ears. It didn't drown out the sound or the surety he felt, despite having just broken one of his cardinal rules about never, ever, acknowledging those voices.

He pressed a hand to his forehead and shook his head.

"You're getting in Cho's machine. I'm not a brain surgeon. I don't want to learn to become one either and I don't think you have a whole lot of time. I can fix you, and that bed is going to keep you alive while I do it."

What was the worst thing that could happen?

Bucky could die? He certainly wasn't living right now, that was for sure.

He could see the scan results as well and hear what FRIDAY said about emergency hospital relocation, but it was what Stark said that scared him the most. For the first time since he had shown up months ago, his expression changed from the stoic and neutral mask that the Soldier had been trained into, and became genuine fear.

"I'm not-- no."

He wasn't going to go into any sort of machine. Especially not one that would mess around with his brain, he couldn't do that again, he couldn't lose what precious tiny sense of self he had managed to get back.

"It's not that bad, I can handle it."

Fine. If it was a choice between the malfunctions and submitting to a machine again, he would take the headaches and the loss of vision. He had handled worse.

Tony knew exactly what caused the sudden burst of emotion and he understood why Bucky thought it was better to live with crazy brain hemorrhage’s than to let Tony help him. He gave Bucky some side eyes and put his hands on his hips. “You’re not going to be wiped. You might die, but my brain is pretty insistent that you won’t. I like those odds and you should too. Listen to me. You won’t be restrained. I mean, I probably should since I need to cut your head open and all but all you’re going to do is lie back on a bed and look at up my gorgeous face for about—“ four hours, “—four hours. I don’t have the trigger words.”

That last sentence might be what Bucky needed to hear most of all.

“I looked for them to make sure I don’t accidentally ever say the sequence in front of you but they’re missing. They were stolen and no one made a digital copy of them. So you’re safe. You’re safe with me.”

Tony never waxed so poetic, he never said the words that made people look up at him like a hero, but his Nanny was dying right in front of him. Tony had to try to help, even if it was doubtful if he could.

"I don't know if I can."

That wasn't even getting into the thorny situation of if he would, but he didn't know if he were physically capable of remaining still while someone cut into his head and not falling back on every instinct that would tell him to defend himself and slaughter the person touching him.

"It can't be that bad of a malfunction, I don't need anyone to cut into my head. I just need some painkillers, that's all, I won't bother you again."

He was obviously getting more frightened now, his body language completely rigid and his breathing coming in a bit faster. He needed to get out of here, he needed to not be in a place where someone was trying to cut into his damn head.

"I want to believe you, but I can't do that."

“Do you want me to bring it up again? FRIDAY?” Tony’s voice lifted and the scan of how disastrous Bucky currently was popped up against the wall. “You’re not dead because of the serum. But that is going to change real fast if you don’t let me in there.”

He wasn’t sure why he was pushing for this. It would be better if Bucky just left, if he called Rogers and had someone else deal with this. No one knew about the relationship he had to the blank, stoic bodyguard. No one knew about his dad.

And he wanted it to stay like that.

Tony sucked on his teeth and frowned. He couldn’t let his Nanny die. Not with everything he knew now.

“FRIDAY, run the Captain Berserkica protocol,” he said, slipping his hands into his pockets as FRIDAY complied. Tony always had ways of protecting himself against his friends. The armor that collected around Bucky would, likely, keep him still if not quite as it dragged him back at Tony’s request towards that bio bed. “You can’t learn to trust me. After I save your life.”

The second that the armour closed around him, he fought. Not just with the strength of a super soldier, but with the furious desperation of a man who never wanted to be trapped again, and the expert knowledge of the Soldier. He wasn't a match for a fully mechanised suit of Iron Man armour, but he did manage to buckle some of the metal plates and even ripped one of the arms clean off before he found himself strapped into the bio bed.

His teeth were bared in a snarl, he looked less like a man and more like a feral animal being captured. Terrified. Utterly and completely terrified.

He lost all sense of language, merely spat out threats in about two dozen languages. But he couldn't fight this. Just like Tony would find that he couldn't fight the damage done to Bucky's brain, not completely. Anything he did would be a stop-gap, would need constant maintenance and vigilance, seventy years of being fucked up wouldn't be that simple to fix.

Once he’d gotten into Bucky’s head, through an all too convenient plate expertly hidden along folds of skin and in hair, Tony thought about mocking the voices that had assured him that he would be able to fix the man. But how do you fix the biology? He could replace wires and he could upgrade the small chips making the Soldier capable of functioning, but this was just a mess. He worked quickly, glad that the brain didn’t have nerve endings and so his patient wasn’t feeling any of the proddings he was doing. Tony worked as quickly as he could, scanning and relaying information through FRIDAY’s databanks, until he was about as confident as he could be that Bucky would not have an more debilitating pain or losses of vision. For now. But it was truly a stop gap and one he would likely need to research before he attempted.

If Bucky has passed out at all, he would find Tony sitting next to him, the suit off, the bed he was laying in beeping softly from time to time. He’d be eating pizza, lounging back into a well upholstered chair, the corners of his mouth twitching in thought.

If Bucky hadn’t worked himself to passing out, Tony would still be eating pizza, but the armor would be on Bucky still, at least until he managed to be able to use his words again.

“How’re you feeling? Your eyesight should be better.”

Bucky had passed out during the surgery. Not through pain, he felt almost nothing bar the odd tugging sensation within his skull, but out of sheer terror. He knew what was coming, he would find himself altered again when this was over with new and terrible things inside his head. He had made a mistake in coming here.

Any residual trust that Stark had enjoyed was snuffed out in that moment.

It didn't matter how damaged he had been, or even if he had been about to die, the choice still should have been left in his hands. He shouldn't have been forced to live, forced to undergo surgery, if he didn't want to. Which was why, as soon as he woke up, he was up and off the bed in mere seconds. Ignoring the slight swim of his vision for moving so fast after brain surgery, he shot Tony a look of genuine and complete betrayal before he ran.

No words, no nothing. Just fleeing.

Tony just chewed what was in his mouth after pausing to watch Bucky rush towards the exit. He wasn’t the kind of guy to ask permission or to give people choices, and besides, he’d actually done a little bit of good here. He didn’t know if Bucky would be back to kill him but that didn’t matter to him either. He focused on his pizza and on a job well done before he had DUM-E clean up the mess he’d made of his lab and went to bed.

The voices and whispers were quiet and for once, let him sleep. He got himself a full seven hours before FRIDAY told him that Rhodey was on his way over. Tony rolled over into his stomach and tried to ignore her, but she was terrible about that stuff.

He shaved and dressed and greeted his oldest friend, who had brought more pizza over, and tried not to be so distracted as Rhodey filled him in on how close Steve was getting to finding Bucky.

Tony couldn’t help but smirk at that.

“So they think he’s in Romania?” Yeah right.

If Tony ever wanted to build a rapport with the man he thought of as his Nanny, then he'd have to learn that choice was a huge deal to him. He couldn't be treated as if he had no choice, or as if his permission didn't matter, or he'd end up being driven away for good or worse, he'd end up killing the one who forced him.

Rhodey had no idea of the magnitude of what Tony had found out regarding his past and his father, only that he had been drunk more often and withdrew from the friends that he did have. Not good.

"Yeah-- Steve has asked a few times if you'll come and help. He said you helped track down Bruce, you'd be invaluable, and he's really worried about his missing friend."

“The guy is a terrorist. They have video of it. You know as well as I do that the moment anyone finds him, he’s going to prison. Do you really think Rogers is going to let that happen? And do you really want to deal with two super soldiers?” Tony knew that he actually should be looking for Barnes. He should be working with Ross, who was still on hold from two days ago, to get him the updated spy satellite network he used to track Banner—

But he wanted Bucky to have his freedom. He was probably able to think and to breathe for the first time in a long time, finally able to exist without a lot of pain thanks to that surgery. Tony wanted him to have that.

He wanted to give him what HYDRA and his dad refused. Sure. He did it his way but the result was life for Bucky instead of a slow, painful death as those electrodes and chips corroded against his brain.

It was worth it.

“All you ever do is try to guilt trip me, Rhodes. I’m good. I retired. Hung up the red gloves. Let the younger men look for the terrorists now.”

Sometimes Rhodey wondered if his life would have been easier if he were deployed to an active war zone, because sometimes dealing with Tony Stark felt every bit as emotionally and physically exhausting as being in a battle could.

"You're not retired, three satellites saw the Iron Man suit out for a spin just last week." Just because he hadn't got into any fights (that they knew of) it didn't mean that he bought that Tony was living the quiet life from now on. He knew the other man too well for that. "And everybody keeps asking about you."

Well-- maybe not everyone. But some of them.

"Steve thinks that he could get Barnes acquitted based on the strength of the HYDRA files Natasha released to the public domain, a lot of them are really damning. He thinks he could get Barnes an acquittal and pardon under prisoner of war rules, clear his name properly. But we have to find him first."

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at work now <3

Re: at work now <3

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