fossilised | it's a new plot!

James went silent for a few moments. It was still strange to him to see people look up to Steve in this way as if he were a paragon capable of doing no wrong. That wasn't what he meant when he said he wouldn't be good enough; not 'good' in the good and evil sense, just not what Steve wanted and needed. After a moment or two he spoke up again, voice a quiet rasp in the gloom.

"I remember him double daring me to take off all my clothes and go skinny dipping in the Hudson. Little punk stole all my clothes while I was in there, I came out almost blue all over and had to run home in nothing. Nearly got arrested three times. He had an asthma attack from laughing so hard."

That was the guy that everyone looked up to.

"But I don't remember laughing too, though I know I did. I don't remember how I got him back, I'm not what he thinks I am, and that's why I'd let him down. You are who you are, you're only gonna let him down if you're too scared to let him in."

“You gotta remember it’s not the 40s. People these days don’t let other people in platonically most of the time. We live screens apart. You should check out Tinder. Or Grindr. I’m not the judging sort.” Even if Tony absolutely was, silently, amusingly, one eye brow perpetually arched. “And now you’re doing it. Pawning him off on me. I’ve never been all that interested in his friendship. And I don’t need it either. I’ve got you back.”

And he was just fine with that, even if Bucky probably wasn’t going to approve.

“And I have Rhodey too. And Happy. And Dum-E and FRIDAY. My dance card is full.”

Tony stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles.

“Just me on my side. And I’ll be on yours.” He wasn’t pleading, not exactly, but he wanted Bucky to know where his current loyalties laid. Steve had hurt him. But James had only ever been James. Silent, but there for him. Now he could be annoyingly chatty but still there, right?

"I don't know why you think that you can't have one friend and then have another one too."

That wasn't something that he remembered from the Tony he used to take care of, it must have developed later. But it was incredibly immature, this idea that someone had to pick a side, and it's what had almost driven him away because Tony seemed to be pushing the idea that James would have to go back to Steve and that would be the end of their friendship.

"And your bullshit isn't fooling me."

Of course he cared what Steve thought, and of course he was interested in Steve's friendship.

“Can’t two people just be so ideologically opposed that the world would implode if they suddenly became some sort of real life buddy cop drama? Rogers isn’t hurting for friends. He’s on his way back and he’s going to feel obligated to force me to do things he thinks I want. That’s bad enough. I don’t need you ganging up on me too. In fact, however about we drop our Captain America conversations down to five percent from the seventy-five we are currently enjoying?”

He didn’t know why James was so hung up on this. All Tony wanted to do was have some fun with a guy that looked like he and Sheryl Crowe met in a bar facing a giant carwash once.

“Let’s just agree that a Cap neutral zone, for the next day at least, has been declared over the entire Tower. Good? Thought so,” he muttered and climbed off of the floor. He paused where James sat on the counter and leaned towards him, a hand on the stainless steel. “So what do you know about Xbox?”

He still thought that Tony was talking a lot of bullshit, but he could respect there being things that he didn't want to talk about and he was still too new to friendship again to know where the boundary lines should be drawn. Besides, he had spent the last few hours in the air ducts considering whether to run away again.

"Nothing, is it a type of weapon system?"

He had been up to date on pretty much all weapons and vehicles, but he had let that lapse a little since he had broken free of being the Soldier. It could have been something recently developed.

Thinking about it for a moment, Tony’s lips turned up and he couldn’t help but nod. “Sort of, in a way. But no one stays dead.” He nodded for James to follow him, it to his lab or his office but to what looked like a giant, personal movie theater. Tony plopped in an over stuffed leather recliner, in the middle of the first row, and told FRIDAY to drop the screen. There were controllers in the arm rests and as Left 4 Dead loaded, Tony handed one to James. “None of this is real. You use this to move your guy around, this to jump, this to run and this one to shoot. I don’t know how healthy your brain is so if you start getting hot flashes or sweats or nervous or whatever, you tell me and we’ll switch to something else. We’re going to kill monsters. Zombies. And if you can handle this, we’ll move onto my favorite game.”

Maybe Black Ops wasn’t the right sort of game to play with a physically and mentally abused war vet from the 1940s so he didn’t start off with that.

“Okay, pick your person... they have different specialties. I’m on the left. You’re on the right. There’s such a thing as friendly fire, so don’t shoot anyone that isn’t going to mess us up. Got it?”

When was the last time he had someone to play games with?

Tony couldn’t even remember. Happy didn’t even have time for him anymore.

That was... really goddamn weird.

He knew that movies and technology had come a long way, but the graphics on this thing made him have to look three times closely to make certain that they weren't actually some real people that Stark had hired to run around at his command just because he was super rich and thought it might be fun.

Lucky for him, the Soldier had been taught to assimilate technological information quickly in case he came across something on a mission and needed to use it. So it only took him about five minutes of concentrated study to get the controls down and then it was just a case of super soldier reflexes.

Tony might not want to play with him for long once they kicked in and he started racking up all the points.

"This is what people do for entertainment these days?"

There was a reason that Tony picked a co-op game. Because yeah. James had some amazing reflexes and there was no way his thumbs could keep up, even with modified hair trigger controllers. Tony enjoyed the first few levels though, he enjoyed mucking around in the swamps and the mall, he enjoyed watching his friend scout ahead to investigate the sound of a crying woman without telling him how Banshees worked and how immediately deadly they were if they provoked.

He felt like a kid again, and while it could be easily argued that Tony never grew up, he also ended up growing up way too fast.

“Some people like doing this, yeah. Some people couldn’t care less. It lets you blow off steam. Get our aggression. I mean, technically I could put my armor on and fly over the the Middle East and rescue some villages from being burned and raped but... this works too. And no one actually gets hurt this way.”

It was sticky, all the things he couldn’t help but feel about the Accords, even now that they were done and being slowly dismantled as the hours and days went on.

“Okay that guy there? Stay away from him. He explodes. We have to snipe him from up on that Tower.”

Things like this didn't scare James, it took a different type of imagery or experience to trigger flashbacks in him, but he also wasn't sure that he understood the appeal of blasting virtual monsters with fake guns while sitting still on a couch. Why not work out aggression and pent up energy by learning something physical, it's why he had always enjoyed boxing.

He did as Tony told him for the rest of the level, the two of them ending up decimating the whole thing with a combination of James' reflexes and Tony's experience making them damn near unstoppable. He tilted his head to Tony when the level ended, eyebrows raised in mild confusion.

"I don't know if I get it."

He didn't hear how much of an old man from the forties he sounded there.

"What's the point?"

“Wasting time thinking about something that isn’t part of you and can never happen to you,” Tony theorized, dropping the controller back into the armrest. “If you can just blow sway virtual monsters and use your brain to come up with strategies, you don’t have to think about anything else that might be bugging you.” Like Steve Rogers, just for example. Or his much he wanted a drink even if the whispers weren’t bother him right now. His body just craved it.

He shrugged and the lights in the room sparked back to life, the screen going black.

“What have you been doing all of this time when you’re alone and you don’t want to focus on reality? Something old fashioned like reading?” Tony made the idea sound horribly undesirable. “Or I dunno. Sixty years of sports reruns?”

"Why wouldn't I want to focus on reality?"

The question was so genuinely confused that there was no malice behind it, not disdain, just absolute bafflement.

"HYDRA took away what was reality for me for seventy years, I have a lot to catch up on. I've been trying to remember who I am, I've been researching the Avengers, researching the world."

He hasn't exactly had a lot of time for hobbies and things that served no purpose other than enjoyment.

“Wow okay, so you’re a bad example,” Tony said, not quite rolling his eyes. “Lets just say that you’re interested in scholarly pursuits in your free time. So let’s do something you want to do, okay? Who or what do you want to research?”

He had a feeling that it would be Steve, but he was hopeful that James would remember the tone it down when it comes to Rogers rule that Tony had enacted. He himself knew everything about Cap’s childhood. He’d been obsessed with him until he came to hate him, after all.

Maybe the obsession caused the hate? It was hard to say.

“We don’t even have to go anywhere. We can spy on people from right here.”

James hesitated for a moment, the little book that he used to do his research and record the pieces of memory that came back to him was very private. He had so little of who he was before the Soldier that he guarded any fragment as fiercely as a dragon might do with their hoard of gold.

But Tony was trying to help, and he had proven himself trustworthy.

After a moment or two, he rose and silently walked away without explanation. He wouldn't be gone long, just ten minutes or so, before he returned with a worn backpack that Tony likely had never seen before, but had always been hidden in his house. From inside it, he pulled out a book that was about half full of neat handwriting and cut out pictures from papers or magazines. There were pages on Steve, on Tony, on Sam, on Natasha, and on Clint. There were also little pages with snippets of memory written on them, just simple but heartfelt things like: The smell of Ma's split pea soup or My eldest sister was called Rebecca.

He handed it over.

"What do you think should be next?"

Tony took the book without reverence until he really started reading the pages. He skipped everything on Steve just out of general principal and because he didn’t care about Sam, he skipped that too. There was decidedly little on Rhodey, boring. Natasha’s life was an open book already. Clint— three kids. Hm. James was a better spy than most. Tony was impressed.

It was the sections about him that really stuck, though. And sure. That probably sounded conceited, but James remembered a lot of things from his childhood. Just little moments.

And that made Tony, for the first time since he’d been with the Soldier before, feel important. And even well looked after. He’d been cared for as a child. Even if his mother and father was absent and his father was abusive, James had really cared.

Right down to noting his favorite lunches and how he liked his sandwiches.

He skipped a few pages until he found the last few years of his life and grimaced. “Well I think you’re really good on me. Jeez. Some of these newspaper clippings are really unflattering—. What about we start with the things you remember liking... before or during lucid moments. And we can see what’s up with them these days? Like for split pea soup? Still gross. What about your sister? Did she get married?”

James' fingers itched to take the book back as soon as he handed it over, especially with how irreverently Tony treated it, but he kept his hands by his sides. His eyes, though, they stayed focused like laser focused sniper rifles on the pages to make sure that nothing got damaged.

"What?"

He had more meant which Avenger should he be researching next. The pieces of himself were intensely private and, even if he trusted Tony, he didn't know if he wanted to share them with the other man. He wasn't exactly the most respectful, and he didn't know if he could handle having important and tiny moments trampled on like that.

"...I meant-- my research isn't complete, which Avenger is the most important one to research next."

“James Barnes,” Tony said, just trying to gauge what James would do when he brought up the idea that he could and probably should be an Avenger. He deserved it more than Tony, who didn’t even want it. He didn’t want the responsibility and he most certainly didn’t want to have to see Steve Rogers all the time. He kept rounded back to that. It was as if his mind looped when he didn’t have enough filler.

Given how unimpressed James looked, eyes too blue behind strands of dark hair that Tony thought about reminding him to wash in a few days after his scalp had fully healed from the invasive surgery.

“Or okay, jeez, don’t jump down my throat. How about we get some more dirt on Rhodes? He knows way more about me than I know about him.” Poor Rhodey. The guy just tried his best to keep Tony on track.

He settled back into his arm chair.

“How about—. FRIDAY, do we have a social security number on file for James Rhodes?”

There was a pause before FRIDAY said that they did. “But it’s not a good idea to mess with your friends, Boss.”

It was probably sensible that Tony moved on from calling James a potential Avenger before he commented on it, because he was not happy about the implication. Whatever he might be in the future, an Avenger would never be on that list. The people who protected the world were heroes, and he counted Tony among that, and he was not and could never be a hero. Maybe he had been once, when he had been a Howling Commando, but he had far too much blood on his hands now.

So he allowed the change of topic to Rhodes with only a glare in Tony's direction, before he sat down on the arm of the chair, his shoulder brushing against Tony's cheek without care for the close proximity.

"He's only part time, right? Isn't he in the army?"

“Air Force. He started off as my handler I guess. My liaison for my defense contract with the military. It’s not complicated. I string him around saying I’ll go where his bosses need me to go or do what his bosses need me to do, and then I ignore it. I know he was raised in West Philadelphia. Two sisters, one who died when they were young. She was shot.”

And that really was about the only things he knew about lieutenant colonel Rhodes.

For someone who spent a lot of his free time coming to support him, especially now that Pepper was out of his life, he probably was his primary friend. His only friend, after Happy Hogan, but how much could you call a person a friend if you signed their paychecks to look out for you?

Tony crossed his arms over his chest.

“Let’s not do Rhodes.” He felt like he owed the man more than spy games. “Let’s see what Pepper is up to.”

"She's not an Avenger, my research on her only labels her as your previous girlfriend and the CEO of Stark Industries. She's not relevant to my files."

Not unless Tony was about to tell him about Extremis and how Pepper actually had a whole lot more under her skin than they were letting on, and how she could be dangerous to even someone like the Winter Soldier if she ever really learned how to harness the crap that had happened to her.

"I'm not just spying on people for fun, stay focused."

Either that, or he would take his book back and not share this sort of thing with Tony in the future.

With a huff, Tony turned back to James and arched one eyebrow. He just looked st him for a awhile before his hands folded against his knee and he leaned in towards the other man. “Question. Why are you gathering intelligence on the Avengers?”

On Steve, he understood. On himself, he understood that too. Bucky had had dealings with them both across the span of years. But that did not extend to the rest.

So he tried playing detective here. Sam Wilson and Natasha Romanoff were Steve’s current best friends. Sam and Steve acted like they had known each other for a long time and he suspected that Steve was into Natasha the way that all meat headed body builders were into the cute, ass kicking redhead.

He lifted one arm to set his elbow on the arm rest and set his chin in his palm. There was an amused smirk on his lips as he waited for an answer.

"You're my biggest threat."

James answered without any hint of shame or hesitation. It was all a matter of keeping himself safe and free, with free being the most important point on any list of what he wanted his life to be.

"The world governments don't have the resources that you do, SHIELD and HYDRA are both still scrambling to recover from the Washington D.C. incident, which means that the Avengers are my biggest threat to remaining free."

More so because Steve would pursue him with a single minded determination that literally nobody else would, and he had enough clout over his friends to drag them into the search too.

“You know that none of us want to see you hurt though, right? Even before the data leak? You were my childhood friend. And you were Steve’s friend. And okay, sometimes friends stab you in the back but that doesn’t mean we want to hurt them. The Avengers aren’t your biggest threat any more. You’re your own biggest threat.”

Tony didn’t mince words here. He tapped his own forehead as if to prove it.

“You’re worried about what will happen. You’re afraid of disappointing him. You’re afraid of rejection. And you’re afraid that someone is going to lock you up and experiment on you. Take away your choices. So what do you do? You wait until you’re nearly dead before you get some help. And now you’re denying yourself the people that can help you the most. Rogers is only looking for your because he wants to help. And he’s afraid that someone else might find you first and he’ll let you down again. You did the research. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Of course he's not wrong.

But James is far too scared to let Steve back into his life. The man had been like a brother, closer even, and he only remembered pieces of that. Even the bits that he remembered told him that he wasn't that Bucky any more, the one who always had an easy smile for the dames or a kind word when it was needed. He was quiet, taciturn, and more than a little paranoid.

His brow furrowed and he glared at Tony with annoyance.

"So, what? You think that I should talk to him? I thought you put a Rogers ban on our conversations, Tony."

“I don’t think you should do anything and I did put him on a ban.” Tony leaned back, not quite sullen but certainly trying to act that way. Rogers would immediately seduce James away. That was a given. And James might come back to hang out sometimes, and to get his arm and brain fixed, but most people would never choose him over Rogers.

Except Banner. But Banner chose a stealth mode quintet over him so maybe not even Banner.

“All I’m saying is that you shouldn’t hide in the air ducts and threaten to leave when it’s dark enough. It’s never dark enough around the Tower by the way. We are a 24-7 operation. You trusted me once not to turn on you. I know the magazines would never believe it but I’m a loyal guy. I never cheated on Pepper. I never even lied to her. Do your research on her and then decide to stay. Here. With me. Or just by yourself, I won’t bother you. But stop kidding yourself that the Avengers, that I, am a threat to you.”

"I think that I'm scared."

Maybe this was James' way of trying to show Tony that he did trust him. Him, not necessarily the rest of the Avengers, but definitely him. He wouldn't be here if he didn't, but apparently that was too subtle of a clue for Tony Stark.

"The way the internet is looking now-- they're gonna pardon me. I won't be a wanted man, and that takes away a huge reason to stay in hiding. But I don't know if I'm ready to come out of hiding yet, and I sure don't know if I trust myself living with another person in the same space. I'm dangerous, often at times I don't mean to be, and I'm not a good houseguest."

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