fossilised | it's a new plot!

This couldn’t be like all of the calls, the ones spent in silence. He couldn’t watch Steve’s heartbreak and stand there with a box of pizza and a six pack. He couldn’t turn and run, he couldn’t crack a joke. He felt paralyzed, just the same.

And then the words just all came out. Mister Perfect might consider himself to be, but he was a paragon of caring and virtue and a weirdly impressive truth serum. All he had to do was look up at a guilty conscious with those liquid blue eyes—

There was a reason Tony had loved him, been in love with him, many, many times. And he felt the weight of that love, filtered through his malfunctioning mind, as he stood there. His grip on the box of pizza caused the cardboard to bite into his fingers.

“Dad was HYDRA. It’s not... I buried it when I found out about it a few months ago. Barnes came to me when he didn’t remember who he was. He needed to be repaired. He thought I was dad, I guess. And he was the one who told me about his... affiliation. I scrubbed all the records clean of it. And I found a lot of records.” Tony pressed his lips together for a moment and then dropped the pizza and beer onto a nearby table so he could properly pace. He didn’t want to look at Steve at all right now. “I didn’t put two and two together. The whole time we were looking for him, the whole time we were in Siberia watching that footage of the Soldier killing my parents... I didn’t recognize him. Not until he was standing in my study about to die from a blood clot in his brain. He was my bodyguard when I was a kid. He was my Nanny for ten years of my life. So when he asked for me to help him while he tried to get his life together— You understand that I had to do it. And to keep it from you. From everyone. He’s not the same person. He’s not my Nanny and he’s not Bucky. And you can’t call him that. His name is James. And it’s what he’s chosen for himself and I can’t believe I’m even saying this to you but the guy needs to be allowed to do what he wants to do. He’s wrecked, Cap, and he knows it. And you know it too. Do you have to be willing to back off because we will lose him if we get too emotionally attached right now.”

People sometimes thought that because Steve tried to give people the benefit of the doubt that he was somehow stupid or naive. He wasn't. Although he wanted to believe in all of the people that he had fought with and liked in the past, he had sometimes wondered how many of them had skeletons in their closets that he wouldn't want to find out about. This... well, this answered that question.

It made some sort of hollow sense. He knew that HYDRA had grown inside SHIELD, so to have had one of the founders and leaders of SHIELD being HYDRA would have made that easier. But to get the implication that Howard had worked on Bucky, had fitted him out with that arm and helped make him the Soldier, it made him want to punch something really hard.

"Thank you," it sounded more like a snap than a genuine thanks, though it actually was genuine. "I mean-- I mean thank you." A bit softer this time. "That must have been hard to find out and harder still to take in someone you knew had killed your parents, no matter what Howard had done, and I won't forget that. I won't-- I won't go near the Tower, but has Buc-- James, has James said anything about me?"

He was trying so hard to do the right thing and be the bigger man here, but god it hurt so damn much to have him near and not be available, to agree to stay away from him.

Tony felt hollow himself. He hadn’t really come to terms with his father. The man had been abusive in life and he still managed to be in death too. It hurt. It hurt a shocking amount to simply have Steve know and he understood everything James said about not wanting to let the guy down. Tony really did feel like he had. He could feel it in his bones, like he had just kicked a dog that hadn’t been trying to hurt him. He let Steve down, though it was through no fault of his own save his attempt to keep it private.

And maybe he should have done that. Maybe he should have kept everything to himself and kept on lying.

Tony shoved his hands into his pockets and kept his chin and his eyes down. He wasn’t ready to own most of this and so it was with a great guilty conscience that he spilled his guts to the one guy on the planet he didn’t want to disappoint and yet had already done so.

“His memory from before the war isn’t great. He doesn’t talk about it. He just says that he’s not ready to talk to you. He wants to— I’m not here to spare your feelings by lying, Rogers, all right? He wants to but he spent a long time being a thing and not a person and it’s hard for him to talk to you. Me.. that doesn’t matter. I was a snot nosed kid that made him help me build machines when I was ten. But you’re something else and he’s got this messed up idea that he deserved what happened to him. He needs some space. And I’ve been shitty at giving it to him lately. The bastard was more worried that we stopped being friends than himself anyway. I have a really bad habit of destroying things. Ask FRIDAY. I ignore my own safety protocols. But he... James was my only friend for most of my life and I owe him. You of all people can get behind that.”

Tony really needed to listen to what other people were saying to him, because Steve was the opposite of disappointed in him. He was sad that Bucky didn't want to see him - no... No, James, not Bucky. He needed to get used to that because he deserved to have any choice of his honoured - but he didn't blame either of them for that. He was proud and pleased that Tony was helping by giving him a safe space to stay.

"Everyone always ends up owing him."

His smile was sad and fond at the same time, wistful as if he could picture being sat in the Tower and having a conversation that didn't immediately end in James fleeing from him.

"He's-- I won't try and make him see me, and I won't even mention him to you, but... but just once, could you pass on a message? Tell him that he didn't deserve what happened to him and no matter what, whether he's the man I knew or a whole different person to get to know, he could never disappoint me."

Tony had a momentary ‘I wish you were my dad’ moment, that deepened into a need to treat Steve as one does not treat their parents before he nodded and picked up the beer again. “Got it,” he said, tossing the other man a can. He knew it wouldn’t do much for Steve and he never drank the swill (plus, he wasn’t allowed to be drinking anyway). It was just something you did with old fogeys. Pizza and beer, Brooklyn style get togethers.

Dinner was surreal, awkward, and left a lot to be desired. The topics ranged from what Steve thought of the food in different countries he visited and how Wakanda was for an extended visit. It was the only place in the world that Tony had never been. He’d never been invited and the reclusive nation didn’t make it easy to just fly over.

Not even as Iron Man.

What he brought away from the meeting was two things. The first was that he was questioning his sexuality pretty damned hard again and the second was that he still didn’t know how he felt about Steve. He was perfect in every stupid way and Tony both hated and admired that. When he finally made it back home to Barnes, it was well after midnight. Tony had sat with Peter for awhile, and left him a little something to prove he was there…and that Tony was feeling pretty guilty over everything. He had another pizza on his shoulder, though, when he asked FRIDAY if James was in. He wanted to show him something.

Obviously, he’d recorded Steve’s message for the other man. He thought James would want to hear it in that soft, familiar tone.

James almost made himself a liar and fled the moment that Tony was no longer there and the crushing realisation of what he had done sunk in. He had messed up big time by going to that fight and letting them see him, he had compromised his security, and he had no idea how effective Tony would be at reinforcing that security.

He also almost followed. It would have been easy to track and spy on the meeting, the security at the compound was no better than the security at the Tower (he had scoped it out before). But, in the end, he did neither of these things. He forced himself to work out in the gym that Tony said he could use, shower, dress in some of the fresh clothing that had been delivered by friendly Amazon drivers to reception and then sent up in the elevator, and then wait.

FRIDAY informed Tony that James could be found in the lab, sitting on one of his workbenches, knitting.

Knitting.

Tony actually understood that one. It was on the literature from the war, a way to get soldiers to do something eith their hands, to keep them occupied. Steve told him once that he did it too, sometimes for hours on end. He had some pretty impressive chains going, which he usually unraveled. No need to waste the yarn. Wasn’t surprised, therefore, when he slipped into his lab with as much noise as he could muster. James would have heard him downstairs no doubt but Tony wanted to be obvious, to give James no reason not to know he was coming.

He put the pizza down, dropped his keys, and stood with his hip jutting out for a moment to watch the other man masterfully chain together his yarn before he offered out a memory stick.

“Got a message for you,” he said, trying not to seem too pleased that James was still here. “And a pizza. I’m taking out stock in pizza, by the way, so eat up.”

Knitting was still used with soldiers to this day. It had been the data gathered from men of James' generation that had given them the links between knitting and a lessening of stress from symptoms of PTSD. James didn't know about that particular addition that could help him, but the needles and yarn had been in one of the boxes that had come for him and so he had got started.

He looked up as soon as Tony walked in and felt his shoulders relax a bit. He didn't look like a man who had either just lost a friend or who might be besieged by a friend any time now, though he did look at the memory stick as though it were a snake and didn't deign to take it.

"Thanks. You're gonna have to give me a job, I've already spent way too much of your money. Sixteen boxes arrived for me while you were out."

“Well, I know you’re still good at being a bodyguard. My last one is too busy making sure people wear badges and sign in when they enter the buildings. And since we have Asgardians and the Hulk running around, I could use you.” James could order anything he wanted from Amazon, then. It wasn’t like tony was hurting for money and the other man probably enjoyed ripping open tape and seeing what was inside. It was like a present you buy for yourself. Tony was already fairly amused by the sheer amount of cardboard was collecting upstairs.

He slipped the memory stick on the table and tapped it.

“You don’t have to listen right now but you do have to listen. I promised, and you’re going to feel better once you hear it,” Tony said. He didn’t touch the pizza. He’d been having too much of it lately anyway. Up went his feet onto the nearest surface and he leaned back, watching James. “Can I ask you something. You can’t get mad at me.”

That was a dangerous way to start a sentence.

“Is it normal to be attracted to a bunch of people all at once, and all of a sudden?”

Obviously Tony had to know that James wasn't nearly stable enough to be anyone's bodyguard right then, he barely wanted to leave the few rooms of this locked down floor that he had been allowed to live in. He had thought more something like... cleaning the place? He didn't know.

But then that all went out of his head.

He might have been offended considering what they had talked about before, and how his own confession about the people that he had been attracted to hadn't been taken as seriously as it should have been, but the absurdity of Tony asking him just made him bark out a hollow laugh.

"You're asking me what's normal to feel?"

“You were a lady’s man, back in the day,” Tony said, obviously not thinking through anything he was saying. The guy was so scattered lately that he’d actually thought about running for office a few days ago. The voices in his head weren’t as bad as they had been at points in his life, but the hallucinations he was having were starting to get bad. It was hard trying to pull out reality from this augmented, alternative reality he kept finding himself blinking into.

Hearing whispers.... That he could get medication for (and had from time to time). But what did a person do when they started to remember two conversely different moments, at the same time, while living something else?

He’d been medicating with alcohol for so, so long that he wasn’t equipped with dealing with this.

“I’m not going to lie to you, I’ve been interested in and fucked my fair share of people. Sometimes gender didn’t matter, usually when I was very drunk,” or very lonely. “But I’ve never really.... just today I’ve been daydreaming above chest hair and licking abs. And thats fine. I’m fine with that side of myself. But it feels like I could be in relationships with half a dozen people. All of whom are my former teammates. I think it was premature to stop drinking, James. So stop laughing and be my friend here.”

Tony didn't have to worry about James laughing, he had stopped the moment that he had been called a ladies man and his expression had only soured further and further as Tony kept speaking. That was a cruel sort of advice to ask him, and the cruelty just differed whether he was being serious or mocking at what James had told him before. Either he cared so little about James' feelings and how he struggled with this as to dump it on him, or he really thought it was a thing for fun.

His jaw tightened, hurt in his eyes, but other than that he didn't show it. He set his needles down before he replied, words very level.

"If you want to pursue those relationships and the world really doesn't care about that now, then do whatever you want."

Selfish asshole.

“It’s not me,” Tony said, gritting his teeth. “I keep seeing things. Things that haven’t happened. Not to me. This me. Shit, like your surgery? I already knew what to do when I opened your brain up. Like I’d done it before.”

He tried to rub his temples, but the whispers were just a buzz and the rubbing wasn’t helping this new problem that he was having. He stopped almost immediately to lean forward, feet on the floor and knees spread as he rested his elbows on his lower thighs.

“It was never this bad before you showed up, James. Like... seeing you? Seeing you somehow just ripped this interdimensional portal open in my brain—“

And that was when he caught the look.

Tony stood, shrugging it off. “You know what? It’s probably the withdraw. I’m a functioning alcoholic so I need that alcohol to function, right? Jesus what did I agree to? Forget I said anything. Blame it on the typical mania.”

Actually, no. He blamed James for all of that. Especially when he looked at him so blankly, just a crackle of hurt in his eyes. He just didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Rhodey was in DC and Banner was back to being green.

“I’m going to bed.”

This was a mess.

At least James didn't think that Tony was mocking him any more, but he also had no idea what to say in order to make this better, and no idea if he even wanted to. Apparently it was his presence that had fucked with his head to begin with, so that was horrifying... he didn't want to hurt anyone else again, and it turned out he was ripping apart the first friend he'd had in decades.

He didn't try and stop Tony from going to bed, he just paced the goddamn room ripping holes in his neatly knitted lines for hours.

It would be about four am when FRIDAY spoke up, quietly even though she knew her Boss wasn't sleeping. "Boss, are you awake? I have a message for you."

“It’s from James, isn’t it,” Tony said flatly. He’d been laying awake long enough to go over what he’d said and he knew he’d blown it. Every time he opened his mouth, it was always worst case scenario. It had been so much better when none of it mattered because he had no desire to be with anyone. Or when he was with Pepper or Bruce and they wrote off his idiocy as just that.

What he’d said had probably sent the other man away. He’d blamed him, off handedly, for what was happening to him when the reality of the situation was that he was suffering from what all genius level minds tended to. Mental illness. If he was the smartest man on the planet (and he truthfully thought he was), then the he was just having it all catch up to him. That was how brains worked. If they overloaded a cortex, the rest had to suffer for it.

Tony rolled over onto his side, holding his pillow against his chest. “Can you tell me if he’s still in the Tower before you play it?”

"James is no longer on my sensors, Boss, but data suggests that this does not mean conclusively that he has left the Tower."

Just a little nudge about upgrading those security systems, unless he actually liked leaving back doors open for ex-assassins to break into his multi-billion dollar tower where he lived and, on the lower floors, a hell of a lot of people worked.

There was a moment's pause and then James' voice through the room on the recording. He sounded husky, a little like a man who might have been crying if he hadn't forgotten how to do that a long time ago.

"I know you're going to think that I abandoned you, because I don't like you or because I like someone else better, because despite being smart you're really goddamn dumb. So I'm telling you outright that I'm going because I can't hurt you like this, I don't want to be the cause of your mind pulling itself apart. You're the first friend that I've had in a long time, and being around you was reminding me of all of the human pieces that I thought I lost. So-- thank you for that. I'm sorry for what I did. I didn't have the right to tell you to stop drinking like I have my own life together, but I just didn't want to see someone so great trapped by something like alcohol. I hope you get help in a better way, and I hope you let yourself know that it's okay to need the friends you have in the Avengers."

There was a pause, before his voice and FRIDAY's in a lower tone, because he hadn't remembered to tell her to stop the recording.

"...I don't want to go."

"Then might I suggest not leaving, James?"

"I've gotta, you heard what he said, it's me-- I'm the one hurting him. He's too important to do that. It's-- it's okay, I've spent a long time without a home, I can do it again. Just make sure you give him that message, okay?"

Whatever James thought he was doing, what he was actually doing was the exact opposite. He hurt. He was in an incredible amount of pain, enough to make it feel like his chest would crack if he breathed in too deeply. He laid there for a moment, feeling sorry for himself as he always did, before it occurred to him that he needed to stop putting in stopgaps and actually get to work. He’d done it before when he was poisoning himself with palladium. Or when he let the UN’s forces give him intel about Barnes even when he ought to have done the work himself.

And that was always it. He needed to get over his own issues and just work through it.

Tony threw off the blanket and went immediately down to his lab. There were holes in his security and he’d been lax in fixing them, allowing James to do simple exploits. He was always very, very capable of tracking people down, especially people with signature devices in their skulls registered to his system that couldn’t just be removed.

So it came right down to doing what James had never wanted before. He worked through the remains of the night backing up all of his potential loops, finding ones he didn’t even think he had, and putting FRIDAY on APB Barnes.

Even if he wasn’t in the building anymore, Tony was going to find him.

Yes, there were Asgardians in a ship over his head. Loki was back. Peter was injured. Banner was non-existant. But they didn’t matter as much as his Nanny did. And no matter what was going on with his brain, Tony knew that much.

If Jarvis, the real one, could have seen him then he would have been proud. It was something he had tried to instil during what time he had, that there had to be a balance between focusing on your own problems and the problems of others. It hadn't been a lesson that stuck all too well, Tony was too good at getting stuck inside his head and making excuses as to why people kept abandoning him, but this was a big step in a better direction.

It took thirty six hours to find Barnes.

That was a testament both to how good James was at hiding, to evade someone who could track something inside his goddamn head for that long; and at how talented Tony was, that he could find someone in three days that the whole world looked for for years and didn't even catch a sniff of.

Eventually the signal would even out heading across the border into Canada, moving fast enough to probably be on a train.

What moved faster than a speeding train? Iron Man did, of course. He landed effortlessly on the top of the box car, thankfully not zip lining like Bucky had done the day he lost himself. The armor pressed itself to the hatch and Tony slipped through it without much more effort than climbing down a ladder. He was wearing his gray suit, Black T-shirt beneath it, and a pair of rose colored spectacles that he grinned over when passing waitstaff in their way back to the dining car from the lounge.

He spoke an easy French to them, given their location in northern Quebec, and let himself into the bar car where he stopped for soda water and lime.

Peter had gone home without getting to meet aliens. Loki had never come back after promising to find James and bring him to justice. Banner was still gone. Steve was making the rounds now that the Accords has been officially repealed further investigation as to HYDRA tampering. And, therefore, all Tony had to worry about was a man in a ball cap in the front of the train holding onto a leather duffel bag trying to keep to himself.

Tony figured that James would know he arrived the moment he stepped into the car. And he was prepared to give chase as he approached with his drink a few minutes later.

After having been in the weapons industry for a long time, and after being the sort of billionaire personality that people had strong opinions about, it probably wouldn't be the first time that Tony had seen fear on someone's face when they looked in his direction. But it might be the first time that he saw fear combined with intense longing, before James did the very thing that he thought he might do... and ran.

He didn't just run.

He wasn't an idiot, and he knew what he was doing. He slammed his gloved left hand right through the reinforced glass of the train window and vaulted up and out, leaving behind screams and confusion as he sprinted the length of the train from the front to the back.

While everyone rushed away from the broken window and to others on that side of the train to see where the man had gone, Tony told FRIDAY to cut the wifi to the train and stop anyone from taking video. He finished his drink, poor excuse for a cocktail that it was, and headed towards the connecting doors between cars. His armor pried the doors open for him and Tony stepped into it almost gracefully before he freefell towards the snow and blasted off when he was a safe distance away. Despite the snow, the world was dark outside and he spiraled through a drift before banking sharply. FRIDAY already had James’ location on the HUD and Tony followed where he could, down the side of the rocky hill towards the ravine. Water rushed below and the train, long gone over the tressle bridge above, still made the structure shake in it’s wake.

They were alone, he and James, but if the other man wanted to run for awhile, Tony would let him. There were several cities within a good dash distance, however, so this little chase couldn’t left to carry on for so long. He shot through a space between two steel beams and banked sharply to cut James off.

“You’re not messing me up,” Tony called through the grating of the speakers in his helmet. “I’m messing myself up. And you left me when you said you wouldn’t. So guess what, I’m going to follow you until you decide to come home. I’m not letting people just leave anymore, not if I can help it!” Yeah, that made him still selfish, but he could only do so much personal growth at a time.

At least they had already passed over the bridge, otherwise the residual memory of falling likely would have frozen James solid rather than letting him keep running. As it was, he banked sideways when suddenly the Iron Man suit appeared, apparently not listening to anything being said.

He jumped from the train, and the only reason he didn't die outright was the serum in his veins. He still wrenched a hell of a lot of muscles and broke his right arm, not that it stopped him struggling up to his feet to try and keep running.

Unfortunately, even a super soldier wasn't faster than Iron Man, especially running through snow that was almost chest height. So eventually he came to a stop, shivering and with a hollow look in his eyes as if he'd genuinely failed at his last mission and was shutting down completely.

“No-- No, you don’t get to do that,” Tony said as the mask flew up and he strode towards James as fast as he could in titanium gold. He shook open the whole top half of the armor and reached out with bare, warm hands to grip James firmly by frigid cheeks and to wrap his fingers around the back of his head. He hadn’t exactly intended on embracing James, but he pulled him into his arms just the same as the quinjet silently landed behind the man a hundred or so feet away.

Wind caught in James’ hair and Tony ignored the way it whipped against him as he exhaled on cold skin.

“I can’t lose you, even if you’re hellbent on losing yourself. Thirty years… Okay, I get that it wasn’t you, but sometimes it was. You made me feel safe. You protected me. And that wasn’t all the soldier… Let’s go somewhere warm, is that okay?”

James genuinely felt as if he had failed the first mission he had given himself, one that was a choice and not an order, and it was seriously fucking with his head. The touch of surprisingly warm fingers on his cheek and then the sensation of being pulled into someone's arms at least jolted him to life enough to speak.

"I hate the cold."

His voice was quiet, as if he were telling Tony another secret. Because even though it was a statement a lot of people might say, to James it was a reveal of one of his bigger vulnerabilities.

"I remember watching Steve struggle while we could both see our own breath in the apartment because we couldn't afford the heat, I remember fighting a battle where it was so cold that the blood froze to the snow, and I remember Siberia-- but it was when they put me under. It's a cold that should kill you and it doesn't, but all there ever was is darkness and cold and cold and cold that never ends. I hate it, I'm scared of it."

So yes, going somewhere warm would be okay.

With his eyes closed against the other’s neck, Tony nodded. He could see it, the way James painted all of it. The breath, the feel of a cheerful, but sickly man huddled beside him trying to keep your spirits up even when they themselves felt like they’d be going to meet God soon, likely, and maybe even tonight. And he could feel the loss of heat from the contact of the blood to the snow, the sizzle turned to a clink. He remembered Siberia. He had seen that place for himself, the dead soldiers, frozen, waiting to be revived. And he wasn’t even going to try to convey what he felt to think of himself being frozen into a block of ice.

Tony’s arms didn’t constrict so much as loosen, not to pull away, but to allow him to get James ot the quinjet. It only had seating for one, but he made it work.

The closest Stark property this far north was in New England, a research facility his father had used in Maine that Tony had never gotten rid of. FRIDAY had the place cleaned out ahead of his arrival and the two men landed in the back yard, facing nothing but three fingers of ocean all around them. It lapped, bitter cold, at the rocks but the mansion itself was warm, with wide windows that made the stormy sea actually look like something cozy instead of frightening.

“If it’s one thing I can attempt to deliver on, James, it’s that I can keep you warm.” It sounded cheesy and lame, but Tony Stark was a little beyond worrying about that right now. When he spoke with his heart, it was still full of innuendo, sure, but it was without the callousness he usually had.

Edited 2017-11-28 19:59 (UTC)

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