fossilised | it's a new plot!

"I don't know."

Bucky's jaw tightened and he looked up at Stark as if he might have the answers. He somehow remembered more of the time he had spent looking after him as a boy, and that made him ache. It made him trust the man more than he would have been inclined to before, and he was too raw to hide things at the moment.

"He made me a weapon again in less than a minute, I thought-- I've been fighting so hard, and I'm still a threat. I don't know if I can keep doing this."

There weren't many reasons that he hadn't just eaten a bullet since he found his way back to himself, and those reasons were being chipped away at one at a time.

“But you’re going to because now you have me. You came to me asking for help and somehow you keep coming back like a stray. So now that I know you’ve saved my life a bunch of times, I still have some debt to worry about.” He sounded like Romanoff but he needed to right now. He felt the weight and the guilt of his past self constantly pressing down on him and there was always relief when he did some good. Even if that good was rarely fully good. He was constantly punished. Damned if he did. Damned if he didn’t. “He cut the sound. Whatever he said to you.... I don’t know the words. And I’m not going to ask you for them. But it’s a mix of conditioning and hardwiring. I can help with that part. Hate to say this but Rogers can probably help with the first—. Woah. Not saying he knows you’re here. He doesn’t know that I know you’re here either. And this time, I made sure that Wakandan jerk off doesn’t know either.”

He picked up a cookie from the plate, smelled it, and then pushed half into his mouth. The Swiss knew their chocolate. Even if it was just packaged cookies dipped in the stuff.

“I’m not trying to pat my own back but you’re probably safer here than you are anywhere else. So try to relax a little.” He shrugged and finished off the treat before he crossed one leg over the other and leaned back, arms lightly crossed. “For uh... listen, you didn’t have to stay. You didn’t have to try to protect me. You could have escaped.”

That was true, he could have slipped away without either of them noticing and probably have been long gone before the authorities arrived. He would never have been triggered, he never would have hurt innocent people, but Tony would probably have died or at least been severely injured falling to the ground before the armour could catch him.

Was Tony's life worth the other lives lost today?

"Why are you trying so hard to help me? I'm dangerous, you've seen it, and you don't owe me anything. If Steve finds out that you've been hiding me then he'll never talk to you again, if the authorities find out then you'll be arrested. I'm not worth that."

He doesn't understand, why would Tony Stark stick out his neck for Bucky?

“They’re not going to arrest me and if Rogers stops talking to me, that would be a big plus,” Tony quipped. “Some people might try to kill me, but people have been trying to kill me somewhat consistently for the last few years. I’ve gotten very used to it,” he pointed out, but didn’t elaborate on why losing Steve as a friend wasn’t a big deal. The truth was, losing Steve as a friend might end up being s big deal and he didn’t want to acknowledge that. They rarely saw eye to eye and Rogers didn’t really hang around much anymore since he lived in DC and Tony was a jet setter... but he had so few friends. And though he only wanted to see those friends on his own terms, he relished the idea of them. He loved it when Rhodey said that they mentioned him. Tony was eccentric and a loner but he was still that lonely little boy who wanted so desperately to be well liked and to have a lot of friends that appreciated him.

But Bucky was his first friend. He might have been an emotionless drone who did almost everything Tony commanded, he probably taught him exactly how not to treat friends, but he was the most constant and present person in Tony’s life for a decade.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, especially because I only just learned that you’re besties with Rogers and I’m still feeling some sort of way about that, but you used to be important to me.” He rolled his eyes, almost foppish in his round-worsted gesture. “Not you-you, sure, but that’s semantics. You took care of me. Against your will. And I guess that I appreciate that enough to risk being a fugitive.”

It was pointless trying to explain that he wasn't best friends with Steve Rogers, a dead man was best friends with Steve Rogers. It was like Stark didn't have any sort of comprehension on how Bucky and the Soldier and whoever the hell he was now were separate people, like he could just interchange between all of them and it wasn't a mess inside his head that even the most qualified psychiatrist would have issues sorting out.

"I remember more about you."

Maybe it had been the fact that Stark had been there when he knocked himself out, or maybe it was just random chance, but there was something more that had come back. It was no longer a blank nothingness.

"I remember trying to take you to Brooklyn. You got cold and cried and asked me to take you home, so I took you to an apartment building you didn't recognise. They found us. They wiped me six times in the next four weeks because I kept trying to take you again."

Tony was morbidly curious about everything that Bucky remembered about him, though the actuality of it was horrifying. The details made him pause mid-chew of a second cookie, saliva dampening the sweet as it crumbled on his tongue. He inhaled and breathed in the crumbs, leading to a coughing fit that caused him to stand. And then pace.

“I remember that. We always got pizza on the way.” And it had become his favorite pizza. He used to fly it in when he was living in California. Tony pressed his forefinger and thumb to the top of his lip, stroking the neatly groomed mustache that rested there. “Not the wiping. You would go away for a day and then you’d come back different. It pissed me off... it really did. It was like I had to start all over with you. You forgot all about the projects we were working on—. I used to think you were messing with me. Like I did something wrong.” He smirked. “But they were torturing you.”

That was the worst part of all of this. He’d held so much emotion, bad with the good, for his Nanny and it wasn’t his fault.

Tony would find it heartbreaking that it was easier for Bucky to think of himself as the Soldier, easier to remember him because he was a zombie in his presence, than his old life. Not because Bucky deserved better, but because it was just another stain on his already fucked up childhood.

He hadn’t remembered yet why Bucky had come into his life in the first place, his own trigger moment, but at this rate it was bound to come out and shatter him as easily as Bucky himself was shattered.

“Guess I started being a bad guy from the start. Doesn’t fall far from the tree, huh?”

Bucky had no idea why he had been called in to protect a child, when usually the Soldier wasn't used for anything so mundane as personal protection detail, it hadn't been his job to ask questions or demand explanations. He had only done what he was told, and so he had no idea what the trigger for needing such protection had been.

He shifted so that he was sitting on the bed with his legs crossed and his useless left arm hung across his lap to keep the weight from being too uncomfortable to bear. It always seemed heavier when he couldn't move it, somehow, the drag on his spine one that ached even with the serum.

"I don't understand."

He frowned in confusion. He wasn't trying to be comforting, he didn't have enough of himself left yet for that sort of kind lie, so Tony should take comfort in the fact that everything he said was the truth. Hurtful or kind.

"You didn't know, and you didn't do it yourself, why would that make you a bad guy?"

“Do you know what I’ve learned?” He watched the way Bucky handled that arm. He’d lessened the weight a little but he didn’t want to go too far in a rehaul without the subject being awake. He did have a few new, lighter and more durable parts that would help Bucky in the long run... if he chose that route. He’d been murmuring in his sleep. Tony hadn’t liked even half of what he heard. “I learned that it doesn’t matter if you are aware of what’s wrong. If you do nothing, it’s still your fault.”

The newspapers had labeled him all sorts of foul things but that didn’t bother him as much as the truth did.

He knew they were right. Complacency was as bad as pulling the trigger.

“Do you not like chocolate or something?”

Tony stood in front of a window, crumbs in his beard, eyes too large for a man his age, and the white, snowy alps behind him. There was frost on the windows and snow on the sill. It was warm inside the chalet though. It was warm in here but so very cold out there. And how surreal this was, to be with a man he knew only as a boy and who looked far too much like one of the men that hurt him so much along the way.

"You're wrong."

Bucky couldn't accept that line of reasoning because, if he did, then he would have to give up the last shreds of believing that he could have some innocence in what the Soldier had done.

"If you knew it was wrong and you did nothing, then you're to blame. If you don't know, how are you supposed to act?"

It was different from what Stark felt about his own business. He had known, objectively, that building weapons meant that he was killing people, he had just chosen never to look too closely at it. That wasn't inaction, that was wilful ignorance. But he hadn't known that his Nanny had been helpless, he wasn't to blame there. Bucky looked down into the mug of hot chocolate and then put it off to one side.

"You drink it."

Tony ignored the hot chocolate. He didn’t usually want such rich things. He didn’t know how it would taste with the scotch he’d been dosing himself with for the last day and a half anyway. Probably not great.

“I can’t believe we’re having a discussion about blame and guilt and I can’t believe you’re winning,” he said, gripping the back of the chair to tug it around to the other side of the bed where he could sit near that arm. He had to do something with himself or he’d just go nuts. Tony had more emotions than he knew what to do with in all honesty and as crazy (and perverse) as it sounded, he just wanted to touch Bucky, to be reassured that he was real. No one, not even Tony himself, would believe that a guy so generally against being touched, could want to be so tactile too.

He wrung his hands in his lap, safely, instead, one hand fisted over the thumb of another.

“Listen, I don’t have the answers here. You made it pretty clear that you’re not the guy Rogers grew up with and you’re not the guy I grew up with. I’m not trying to rekindle my childhood with you. I just want to fix you up and send you off. You can be whoever you want to be with all the baggage you need. But come on, I made that drink for you. And it’s not mud or motor oil. If you want to be a rude guest, that’s on you.”

He didn’t know why he was so fixated on that drink, but maybe it was like Bucky accepting his help?

For once Tony had said the right thing. He might be able to tell from the subtle changes in Bucky's posture when he reassured him that he knew he wasn't Sergeant Barnes and he wasn't the man who had bodyguarded him. Just the most minor relaxing of the muscles. He still didn't know who he was, but at least he wasn't being pressured into being someone else while he figured it out.

"I don't remember if I like it."

It was a low sort of admission. He was sort of scared to try it because he remembered eating chocolate as a soldier, it got sent to the front lines a lot to boost morale, but he honestly couldn't remember the taste of if he had enjoyed it.

"...but thank you."

For the offer of help, for the safe place even if it was temporary, if not for anything else.

Tony snorted, draping his arm over the back of the chair. “Isn’t that sort of the point of being someone knew? How are you going to know if you, this new guy, like hot chocolate or spaghetti or pizza or caviar unless you, uh, yanno, try it?” He’d eaten most of the cookies, but the Soldier could try that too. Tony had a very well stocked kitchen and freezer because the chances of being snowed in were more than a possibility. He had no intention of starving and the owners of this particular chalet, old and Swiss and about as authentically cute as possible, didn’t really want to have a dead American on their hands either.

He didn’t know what to do with the thanks, so he just shrugged it off. It was easier to ignore whatever made him uncomfortable. Being rich allowed him to do that for years and his own personality, cultivated out of loneliness and genius, just carried it through to adulthood. It didn’t matter that he was technically a superhero. He could still be an asshole.

“Well anyway, I have some new schematics for you to look at. I have redesigned some new, lighter parts for that arm. You’ve got a lot of redundancies and a whole lot of ionized steel in there. I can fabricate better. A whole lot better. I just need a few days.”

Bucky stared at Tony for a moment as if he were speaking a foreign language, before all of a sudden his lips tweaked upwards into a surprise and rare smile. Not for long, it was gone in another second, but it had been there all the same. Because he was right. It didn't matter if he remembered it, he was making new memories, and that did mean not being scared to try things.

So he picked up the hot chocolate again, cradling the mug carefully in his only working hand, and lifted it to his lips. The taste was... incredible. Thick and sticky on his tongue, nearly scalding the back of his throat, with just a hint of bitterness at the end from the rich Swiss chocolate.

"I don't want you to touch my arm," he said, between further mouthfuls of the hot chocolate. He'd see if Tony actually paid attention to his wishes this time. "I don't want to be worked on again."

That smile, warm and bright, was like a punch to the gut. Tony felt his eyes widening and his palms start to sweat. It was nothing he’d not seen before. People smiled at him constantly…but never that genuinely. His heart felt like it was in a vice grip and he pushed the chair back with his legs, feet flat on the floor and now unbent, as if it was safer to be at a full leg’s length distance from the guy that made him feel something like that.

When you’re used to being given into or schmoozed, you just don’t know how to react to something beautiful like that. Tony pressed his index finger under his nose and made a show of trying to comb the cookie crumbs from his beard so that he didn’t stare at Bucky’s joy at tasting hot chocolate. Tony had been proud of that, sure, but he didn’t need to go into an overload of feelings over a smile and a pleasured look of delight.

Was he fourteen again? No he was not. He was a grown adult. This shouldn’t get to him so much.

“So… I’ll just make the parts and you can upgrade them yourself.” Tony wanted to work on that arm. He wanted to make it better, lighter, more comfortable. He wanted to take out the HYDRA and replace it with… Well. Stark. It was selfish and it was weird but Tony always embraced eccentricities. “Or figure out how to regrow a limb. Huh. That could be useful actually.”

"I said no."

Bucky's refusal was firm but not aggressive. Tony wasn't trying to force him into it or take his choice away at the moment, but he needed to understand that there was a level of pushing where it would become uncomfortable and he had to stop. He didn't want the arm worked on or his old one regrown, not for a long time and maybe not ever. It made him feel like a lab rat again, an experiment, and he'd rather keep the pain and weight than go through that.

"But this place-- it's so calm. I don't remember the last time I sat in a house and didn't wonder if someone was about to come through the door. Just for a couple of days, can I stay?"

Though Tony might be pouting at all of his beautiful masterpieces going unused, his attention was drawn away from that almost immediately when Bucky didn’t immediately jump up, find his pants, and bust out of the side of the chalet. The older man blinked slowly, as if he wasn’t prepared for this sort of response, and then nodded. “Uh-- Yeah. Stay as long as you want. Doubt Rogers wants to risk another deep freeze incident so you won’t be bothered.” Itchy fingers, still a little clammy, were wiped from thigh to knee before Tony stood up. “Help yourself, there’s food in the kitchen.”

Alcohol was once again on his mind as he left Bucky alone in the beautiful, dark room with the bright white snow visible through the windows. If it was calming for a guy who had probably never felt safe over the course of the last few decades to just hang out awhile, looking at the mountains, Tony wouldn’t stop him.

He poured himself something to drink, pulled on a parka, and went to stand out on the deck. There wasn’t much of a wind so the air was relatively warm. He left the coat open, sipping on the scotch in his glass, and watched the edges of the sky. Part of him expected to see a lone figure trudging through the snow, but there was no one and nothing save for some trees that weren’t completely covered in white, a snow mobile under a tarp, and a bit of an orange glow at his periphery from the fire that had been lit for him when he arrived that morning.

He kicked at the snow that had drifted onto the porch and then leaned against the wooden support beam. He’d probably go back home tonight and let Bucky enjoy the place on his own for awhile. Rhodey would probably wonder where he was after too long anyway.

Although Bucky had been the one to ask to stay for a couple of days, it likely wouldn't work out that way. He would be calm for the first few hours and then he'd start feeling like a target was painted on him for every extra hour that he stayed still. He would start to wonder when the Avengers might show up, or how long it would be before he got tracked down by SHIELD and what remained of HYDRA.

It was those thoughts that, a few hours later, led him to walk up behind Tony.

He hadn't meant to sneak, but his training and reflexes automatically made him as silent as a cat, an assassin couldn't afford to make a lot of noise. He had bare feet which curled against the decking, though he still wore all the other clothes that were his, a bit grimy and tattered.

"...you put something in my arm to let you find me."

There was no other explanation.

Tony had been back and forth. More alcohol, then more warmth. A snack. A trip to the hot tub (which he decided against because he didn’t bring a suit and he wasn’t really prepared for that sort of post-hot tub shrinkage). Back outside. He dropped his glass and turned to shield himself with his hand when Bucky started to speak, before he wilted against the heavy beam and put a hand over his heart. It was shaking. He had considerable tolerance for thrills but lately, even that was too much.

“Jesus—” He had to catch his breath. “I appreciate that you’re a reformed assassin but that doesn’t mean that you need to practice your craft. I’m putting a bell on you.” Somehow, he was pretty sure that even that wouldn’t do much to keep Bucky from surprising him in the future. He needed a personal proximity alarm or something!

When he was able to think again, and after briefly lamenting the loss of his scotch, Tony glanced back up into almost frantic blue eyes.

“Not your arm. Gotta turn that back on again….I’ll do it before I leave.” He wasn’t stalling, he just tended to have a verbal stream of consciousness. “The wires in your head. I replaced them. Everything I make has a signature that FRIDAY can track. Don’t do anything stupid like trying to dig it out. I’m not going to tell Cap or anyone else.”

Bucky had to realize that. Tony had let himself get beaten up, a fact still visible on his face, rather than give Bucky away.

There was a difference between holding up under one round of beatings, and the level of torture that someone could apply to a man, he knew that first hand. Even without torture, his most dangerous enemy was friendship. Tony might start to feel guilty for keeping this from Steve, might be unable to hold up seeing him worry in silence, and end up caving. It wasn't about a lack of trust, it was about experience.

But he didn't say that.

He just lifted his right hand and threaded it into his hair, feeling the thinner spots underneath where Tony had had to shave bits off to operate on his brain. He'd been good, even managed to make it not obvious to anyone not looking for it, but there were still effective ways to track him down in his head.

"You said it was a stop gap, I'd have to have it done again if I didn't want to die."

Not just once, over and over every few months to stop the build up of a clot around the scarified areas and deal with problems that could happen in such delicate wiring.

"How long do I have?"

More worried about the corrosion than the clots, mostly because the corrosion was what would cause the clots despite using fiber optics where he could, he felt almost unable to affect his usual nonchalance when questioned. He wasn’t just cobbling together tin foil and chewing gum here. He had operated on a living, breathing human being. He’d had his fill of god-complexes, however, and being knuckle deep in someone’s skull hadn’t done anything to his ego but make him feel pretty damned awful. If he thought too hard about it, his heart might shrivel up further than it already had been.

He straightened, jaw set, and refused to look away from his Nanny. It didn’t matter how much he tried to separate that mindless drone from the man in front of him now, he couldn’t quite manage it.

“Preferably, every six months. You might be able to stretch it. If you get a real neurosurgeon in on a consult, you could probably go for a year or two. That device that I used to stitch your skull and skin back together over the panel? It’s only good for that. Skin. Bone…blood vessels. Your brain though? I don’t know. That’s more than just skin. You have implants that take up the majority of your frontal lobe and circuitry that is imbedded in your occipital bone and along your sphenoid. The serum is doing the majority of keeping you alive but metal and tissue don’t really work together and your brain tissue more or less can’t regrow around the splits in the wiring. The little leaks are leading to fluid build up and clots.”

Science was cold and hard. They were standing out in the snow, Bucky in bare feet. But Tony’s gut just kept clenching. He hated being forced to care. The scotch wasn’t doing it’s job.

The names of all the different parts of the brain meant nothing to Bucky. Even though he had been trained in a lot of areas as the Soldier, including some basic field medicine in case he ever became wounded enough to need care before he could reach the technicians, nothing had ever gone beyond a simple how to splint a bone. He hadn't even known that the brain had different bits, and wasn't just one complete mass.

It didn't matter if he didn't understand the technical aspects, because he understood the time frame he was given and the ultimate consequences of not getting the help that he needed on that time scale. He should not, he could almost feel that Tony was desperate for him to give reassurance that he'd find that help every six months, but he couldn't do it.

He didn't know if he'd want it.

So he just nodded and took a half step backwards. "I'll contact you before April 19th," exactly six months away, "if I need you. If I don't contact you by then, tell Steve on April 20th that I'm sorry."

That was a hell of a weight to put onto Tony's shoulders, but it was also a gesture and offering of trust. He was extending this secret to Tony, a chance to prove himself as someone that Bucky could put in his corner.

That wasn’t fair.

Tell Steve I’m sorry. Bucky would come to him for help and if he decided not to, or if something stopped him from doing it, then Steve would be able to get some closure. But Tony? Once again he felt like that fourteen year old kid who, on the eve of his fifteenth birthday, was told that his Nanny was being reassigned and if he needed anything, he should call on Edwin Jarvis. He hadn’t understood, exactly, what to do with the feeling of being left then, but Tony was better at it now.

“You could try writing a letter,” he said, not exactly brushing Bucky off, but he felt stunted, like he’d just been stomped all over and left to pick himself up.

Bucky had told him twice now that he was tired of always being used. Tony could commiserate. Need money? Get Stark involved. Need upgrading? Get Stark involved. Have a problem that your other geniuses on tap can’t figure out? Get Stark involved.

His eyelids lowered and he looked away, pushing off from the beam to step over his fallen glass and step towards the house.

“You might want to think about popping over before the 19th. I can’t exactly put you on my calendar and who knows what mess I’ll have gotten into by then. Use the chalet as long as you want. See you in April.”

Perhaps it seemed like he was being used to Tony, but to Bucky he was putting a whole lot of trust in Stark. He could go to Steve, he could go to anyone before that timeline ran out and get help, but the only person he even semi-trusted to get back inside his head was the man stood in front of him now.

He didn't have the words or the eloquence to say that, so he ended up just standing and watching the other man go. When he did speak, it was when Tony was almost out of earshot, but he would probably hear it, because it would be the first time that Bucky had called him anything but 'Stark' since they had seen each other as Soldier and boy.

"Tony," he said, voice a low and genuine rasp. "Thank you."

Tony paused and lifted his head. It wasn’t that he was in love with the sound of his name, it usually was said as more of a sigh anyway. He didn’t even care that it was Bucky that said his name. He’d been thanked already. It was worthy of nothing more than a shrug. But the younger man was trying. People didn’t tend to go to such lengths with him. So he glanced over his shoulder and smirked, even if he was feeling slighted and stepped on. Neither were mindreaders, after all, and intentions were so often misconstrued. “Yeah, no problem,” he said, before he went to pack.

Back in New York, it was business as usual. Steve was more fixed now than ever on finding Bucky. Tony helped out here or there, not in the manhunt so much as he was curious to find out which inside man happened to trigger him. Bucky was on the news for awhile…and then he wasn’t. The cycle turned over so fast that there was just no room to talk about him.

Eventually, they did find out who it was that had caused the trouble. Tony tried to stay out of Steve’s personal circle as much as possible, but he ended up heading with Captain America to Siberia. Tony knew all about this place. He’d found the notes about it months ago. He’d come to grips with his HYDRA roots somewhat along the way and was ready, with Black Panther, to capture Helmut Zemo and bring him to justice for using a man like a weapon to distrupt…what exactly? That, Tony hadn’t bothered to delve into.

As Iron Man led the way into the old training center, only to be confronted not by awoken Super Soldiers modeled off of the Winter Soldier, but by their dead bodies, he was not and could never be prepared to watch a video queued up specifically for him.

Watching his father die stung, though he knew Howard deserved it many times over. What he didn’t know, and had never uncovered, was if his mother had deserved her death too. Was she HYDRA or was her business with her husband accidental? Could she had been kept in the dark for so long?

This was a woman that had protected him from drunken rages, had visited him during holidays, had made sure he always had a place to stay at the Long Island mansion…

And he wasn’t ready, twenty years later, to see her killed by his Nanny. He flew into a rage that only Steve Rogers could finally stop…but not before they had ruined their friendship for forever. Helpless, armor ruined, Tony wanted Steve go, watched him throw down the shield…and blurted out something that he just couldn’t help.

“This is probably why your friend wants nothing to do with you. You’re a liar!”

Steve hesitated in his weary stride out of the Siberian base, back rigid, as he took Tony's words like blows to the back. But he didn't think that it meant Tony had spoken to Bucky, just that he was trying to get out some barbs, to hurt him. It did hurt. It made his heart heavy when he had to fight a friend, and it killed him inside to have to walk away from the Avengers and from what the shield represented.

He hadn't even found Bucky here.

All he had found was pain and sorrow, the long rusted evidence of the sort of terrible things that they had done to his best friend. It tore him up inside in the way that no bullet ever could, to know that he had failed to look after Bucky even after all that Bucky had done for him in the past. That was, and always would be, the closest thing to a brother that he'd ever have.

He didn't respond to Tony, he just walked away. But a few days later he made sure to ship him a phone and a letter, an apology for the lies he told and an offer to rebuild their friendship if Tony could ever forgive him and would ever want to do that again. And then he just walked away.

Further weeks past, and whether Tony noticed it or not, April 19th arrived without any sign of Bucky. In fact, it was only five minutes before the deadline of midnight when FRIDAY spoke to him, either to wake him up or to interrupt whatever he had been doing at the time.

"Sir, there is an intruder one floor above you."

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject