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“Back to HYDRA then? Yep okay. You do need some maintenance.” He kept his hands in his pockets as he approached, fearless and non threatening, and circled the younger man part of the way before his head tilted. “I don’t have all of my tools so you’re going to have to give me a run down.” He didn’t want to treat Bucky like a machine but in this fragile state, Bucky probably felt better being treated at least partially like one. Tony was doing his best just to be polite, and to make sure he wasn’t attacked. His armor was close but not close enough. His wrist watch was reset but it could only do so much. It was mostly meant to stop ballistics. Not a a hulking arm.

And yes. He had disabled it, but if Bucky used any momentum st all, he could swing it right into him with the force of a Mack truck and lay him out. Easy peasy.

He wasn’t interested in figuring out what that felt like.

“What’s wrong beside the arm? I’ll have to get you to the lab for that one.” He wasn’t lying. Tony was going to have to get him hooked up to a program to get those neurocircuits back into tip top shape.

"All malfunctions are within my arm, it's ceased functioning completely and I have no feeling or control."

It might surprise Tony to know that Bucky had feeling in his metal arm, or maybe it wouldn't depending on how deeply he had looked into the schematics for it. The operatives had wanted him to be able to sense pressure in order to more accurately perform delicate tasks, and also pain to be able to sense if there was any damage that needed to be fixed. An added cruelty, considering that the arm itself caused pain for how it was wired directly into the skeleton and the weight of it always dragging him down.

"I have orders to remain outside until further commands come, I cannot return with you for maintenance yet."

Not unless he had overriding commands, which was a possibility.

At least he wasn't outwardly hostile towards Stark, his muddled mind having placed him firmly in the HYDRA technician camp in his head.

“Then I guess we wait.” Tony had no where else to be. All right, that was a lie. He had everywhere else to be but he didn’t want to be found right now. He had no intention of answering any more questions. It was lucky that the World Protection Agency hadn’t slapped then with further citations, Steve would never let him live it down. Tony was pretty sure that the truth of the matter was in time spent anyway here. Bucky would gradually come off of this sort of triggering drug and when he did, he might need someone to hold his hair back while he vomited. Tony knew all about crashes. Of every variety.

Sitting, however, would not be an option. There wasn’t enough sanitizer in the world for this mess and he didn’t need to trigger any of his germaphobia either. Pepper had done wonders to help with that, but she was no longer in the picture and his hold on the realization that a little dirt wouldn’t kill him was slipping.

“What was the initial order? I’m going to guess it was something along the lines of wreck havoc because you pretty much beelined on out of there. It was impressive. Any headaches? Vision issues?” Tony flitted from topic to topic, mostly to combat his own boredom.

"My orders were only to escape at any cost and remain undetected by enemy forces, I am to await further contact from my handler."

It wouldn't be as easy as Bucky just coming down from a trigger word high, he would need to be, in the words of Clint Barton, given cognitive recalibration. He'd need to be knocked clean out to give his brain the chance to reset itself and break out of the programming again.

"There are intermittent vision issues, but nothing substantial enough to cause a lack of function during battle."

“Yeah. Well. We wouldn’t want that.” Tony paced for a little while, arms crossed or swinging in a variety of patterns as he went. Time passed, but it was slow, even going by his wrist watch. He huffed a little, imagining that he was completely full of human waste brought about by the mass consumption of sausages and sauerkraut (or whatever Germans ate) and shuffled his feet around patches of wetness before he stopped in front of Bucky.

From the manual, a trigger slowly lost its hold on the subject, though a mission could and usually did prolong its effects. He was not currently on a mission though, he had just finished one—. Or was he still waiting for those final orders to bring it to a halt? Tony frowned, the lines around his eyes deepening.

“This is taking too long and we have both been out in the open a lot longer than planned,” he said, still trying to play along. “I need you to get us both back to a safe house. Your arm does need to be fixed. It’s a liability. No one is coming. You have to have some back up orders, right?”

He hoped so or else they were stuck in smelly hell forever.

This was one of the situations that the Soldier did have a little autonomy. It was minimal, but he always had back up options in case his original orders would fall through, or license to improvise on a mission if the situation required it. In this case, returning to a safe house for repairs while he awaited further orders would not be out of the realms of possibility.

He considered it for a moment, before he just turned and started to walk down one of the dark tunnels, his footsteps barely audible even though the floor was very hard to avoid making noise on.

"There is a safe house in Dusseldorf, I can requisition a car and take us there, that would be acceptable."

As much as Tony just loved to traipse through the sewers, he was pretty sure that waltzing into a HYDRA base was going to be somewhat unfortunate should HYDRA still be using it. Given that Bucky was still in operation up to last year, chances were pretty good. Tony almost balked, almost declined, because if HYDRA came, they would get their favorite weapon back and he’d have to play along unless he wanted to die.

And they would kill him. He’d been on that list in the database for target practice.

Begrudgingly, Tony rolled his eyes at himself and headed off after Bucky, geography failing him on how far of a walk it would be.

The answer came as no real surprise…it was far. Very far. His feet ached, and his knees and hips hurt like the old man he was becoming as he climbed final ladder back to the surface. Bucky never showed his impatience, which made Tony nervous because if he didn’t snap out of it soon, he was going to have to take matters into his hands. And that would get to be quickly unpleasant.

“I hope this safehouse has scotch.”

"I don't know, the last time I visited this safe house was in 1965."

But he knew where it was. Whatever else got deleted from the Soldier, they made sure that they never touched important things like the locations of weapons caches, safe houses, or the HYDRA operatives that he was supposed to obey at that current point in his operations.

He waited patiently for Stark to get out of the sewers and then replaced the manhole cover to hide the fact that anyone had exited there. By the time his companion had properly got himself sorted, the Soldier was already scanning the surroundings for a suitable car to steal.

Lucky for both of them, he was an expert in that sort of thing, and had the door to a nondescript Ford unlocked and the engine hotwired in under a minute.

Since stealing a car was the least of their troubles, and Tony would just have money eventually sent to the person whose truck they were lifting, he didn’t think twice about climbing into the car with Bucky. It was the words that troubled him, still, as he sat looking at the side view mirror, half expecting a motorcycle riding Captain America to begin gaining on them. He hadn’t been born yet. His father was supposedly setting up SHIELD in tribute for fallen friends. He was probably out killing people.

For once, he was quiet as they carefully merged into traffic and then out of it again, skirting historic streets and more modern buildings for twenty or thirty minutes until they arrived at the safehouse. It looked like it had seen better days, nestled in between warehouses and shipping docks on the Rhine. He made a snarky remark about the smell and then shrugged it off as probably being him anyway as Bucky ditched the car and walked them the last few blocks towards a retinal scan. He knew that HYDRA had always been technologically advanced, but this seemed a bit much, even for them, considering that Bucky had been here over fifty years before.

A green light flashed and a door became briefly visible from the darkness of the grating on the wall, allowing them to push inside.

Lights blinked on and the HVAC system started up, evidently on motion sensors. Stale air and dust were drawn out of the fairly comfortable room, leading further into what would be a ten room complex that might rival a nice hotel. Minus the weapons locker. That was all HYDRA.

Even though the safe house hadn't been visited by the Soldier since the sixties, there was evidence that other HYDRA operatives had used it more frequently and more recently than that. Though the air was stale and there was dust on the surface, at least proving that nobody was about to jump out at them right now or that they hadn't interrupted a current meeting of HYDRA soldiers, the carpets were in a modern style and there was a flat-screen TV in one of the rooms.

They hadn't got more than four steps into the main lobby before a loud automated beep echoed in three distinct chimes. The Soldier halted immediately and said something in Russian, another beep followed and a soft American accented mechanical voice spoke up from all around. Obviously an AI, but one not nearly as advanced as FRIDAY.

"Voice scan and password accepted. Winter Soldier: verified. Security systems disabling."

The Soldier finally moved again to head straight for the weapons locker. If Stark wanted to take him out, the time before he armed himself to the teeth would probably be his best bet for survival.

Taking out his former Nanny was just one of those things that wasn’t exactly an option. Tony’s stomach hurt, listening to the moniker be used, and watching the man stalk away from him with such an intense purpose. “Soldier!” He wasn’t going to use the man’s name because right now, he wasn’t Bucky Barnes. He was the Asset, he was a tool. But there was something inside of him that should be able to recall who he was and if Tony was strategic about pushing the right buttons, he’d be able to force it out of him.

Or they could just wait. But waiting was very, very dangerous.

“I need you to let me check your arm. We’re safe here,” he said, quickly moving after him with pumping arms. He ignored the bathroom (a shower would be nice) and the deluxe coffee maker with the espresso attachment and the milk foamer (later), and reached out to put a hand on the Soldier’s shoulder. “Remember your orders. Escape at all cost. Well you’ve escaped. Mission accomplished. Now you have to let me conclude my mission.”

C’mon, Buck. Tony needed you to work with him here.

The look that the Soldier gave Tony would probably be familiar. It was the same stoic and blank eyed look that the Soldier had always given him when he was a kid, the one that he never realised meant that he was looking at a slave without autonomy and just assumed made him badass and cool.

"Yes, sir."

Everyone outranked the Soldier, after all, even the technicians. The only time he had command over other people was out in the field on occasion, when more than just him on his own would be needed to complete a mission, then he might be given command of other soldiers to direct their movements.

He still moved to the weapons cache to take a gun and a knife out, it made sense to be armed and ready even while he was being worked on.

“Stark,” he corrected immediately. “My dad expected the ‘sir’ but I hate it.” And maybe that name would jog the memory of more than just a technician. Maybe it would cause Bucky to remember a lonely little boy that used to make him help to weld metal or to boost him up into trees so he could attach antennas to the furthest branches or get a good clearance for an invention. He wasn’t too pleased to see the new weapons, but Bucky was deadly with just his fists. Tony didn’t fear the gun and knife any more than he did what he was already presented with.

The workshop in the safehouse was high tech enough to dampen Tony’s ability to contact FRIDAY, but she’d have his position up until they entered this building to go on at least so he didn’t feel so alone…just a little blind.

He fiddled around, subversively, just to see what they were dealing with, before Bucky was settled on a stool beside a spotlight workstation covered in glossy black tools. He wandered back over himself, slowly, and carefully dragged over a comfortable looking stool with a swiveling back. Whatever you had to say about HYDRA, they knew how to trick it out.

“Let’s work backwards with your memory…see what you do remember…and I’ll work on this.”

There was not much wrong with his arm other than the devices that Tony himself had put in there in order to make sure it could be killed if it ever needed to be, at least he'd have the satisfaction of knowing that his own technology worked as required and was more powerful than HYDRA tech when it was installed correctly.

The Soldier came to sit in the seat obviously meant for him. The surroundings were familiar, right down to the lack of any kind of anaesthetics or numbing agents. One didn't bother with the pain levels of a weapon, after all, one just took it apart and put it back together again as needed.

"Memory? What report do you want, Stark?"

There wasn’t anything Tony could do about the way HYDRA had their lab set up, but he could knock out the pain receptors as he worked on the arm. Right now, it was numb anyway and he hoped to use it to stall to get Bucky talking. He opened the control panel through a button between the last two fingers and scooted around toward the underside of the bicep to work on the wiring. Since he knew Bucky couldn’t feel anything, except perhaps for pressure as he moved things around, Tony mostly just tugged on connections in a faux diagnostic.

“I want you to start back from when I located you at the initial rendezvous point in the sewer. You said your arm went dead. Describe exactly what happened and what you were doing.”

As stalling tactics went, it wasn’t so bad really. Tony would theoretically need to know the outlying issues but he was hoping to roll that into what Bucky had been doing up to the and then beyond the trigger sequence.

He wanted to know if Bucky knew the guy that did the triggering. And if so…? Tony was going to kick his teeth in.

The Soldier didn't know enough about the technical inner workings of his arm to know if what was being done was good work or not, and even if he did he didn't have the authority to question what a technician was doing. Once a technician had deliberately rigged him with an explosive, and he had just sat there and compliantly let them do it.

"The arm lost all power approximately thirty six minutes after escaping the German consulate prison. No warning and no indicators of why, it simply ceased. Prior to this, all movements were designed to evade and escape the previously mentioned building and its occupants."

Nothing particularly interesting, at least from his point of view.

"My handler remained behind at his request."

An inside job? He wasn’t sure what the point of that would be, other than the fact that HYDRA’s agendas so rarely made any effort at sense anyway. Their MO was to conceal and to disrupt, usually in that order, and maybe a little dash of world domination spice just to make it fun was thrown in from time to time. Other than that, Tony had no idea what it was that they actually wanted to do with their lives. Kill. Mayhem. Not really his cup of tea in his messy but still well ordered world.

He didn’t ask the name of the operative that had awakened Bucky, he just pressed for something deeper as he switched around some wires and worked to actually alleviate some of the dead weight by taking out unnecessary components. Some of this was obsolete. Some of this could be made of lighter material, which he would look into when he could get his hands on it. The vibranium itself was extremely light and sturdy by why weren’t the pistons cast in vibranium too?

Evidently, they thought of the more-as-more approach. A heavier weight at the end of a swing would do more damage…in theory. Finesse, however, would always do the best damage and Bucky would be more dangerous with a lightening of the load.

He could also extend the attaching point further down-- But now he was just getting ahead of himself.

“Do you remember why you were in the cell? How you got there?”

This time there was no response for a good five whole minutes, the silence stretching uncomfortably out as Stark worked on his arm. It wasn't that he wanted to be disrespectful to someone who was currently his superior, or even that the answer was uncomfortable, it was that he didn't know the answer.

The Soldier's brow furrowed as he tried to sort through the tangled patch of briars that his memory always was. It never usually bothered him, a tool didn't need memories except to know the objective and the parameters for achieving the objective, everything else was pointless. But now he was being asked to remember and he couldn't. His whole world was pain and fear, a wordless blur, and then he was just stood in front of his most current handler.

"--No, sir. Stark. I don't remember."

Would he be punished for that now?

Damn it. He was about to open his mouth when he saw the way that Bucky’s forehead was actually creasing in thought. Or maybe that was worry? He actually couldn’t tell at this point, but he looked away from the reflection in the highly polished surface and finished pulling out redundancies.

As he closed Bucky’s arm back up, Tony leaned forward, elbow on the desk, and looked at the young, dark blue eyes that refused to make eyecontact as if he were nothing but a doll. It was an appearance he was extremely familiar with, one that had bothered him so much as a kid sometimes that he used to tell his Nanny to stand facing the corner.

He felt almost like telling him to do that now…but he didn’t.

“What do you know about James Barnes? His friends used to call him Bucky.”

That name made him flinch.

Not because he remembered who the man was, but because it came with a sudden image of desperate blue eyes that were full of pain and guilt and affection. It made him both want to run as fast as he could out of the door and punch whatever was closest. The strength of that emotion was so surreal, the Soldier didn't generally have extremes of any emotion, that had been forced out of him years ago.

"...I think there is an additional malfunction."

It had to be.

It couldn't be the memory of those eyes.

There were many times that the people Tony Stark was with weren’t thinking about him. He was a selfish man that required extensive mental and emotional stimulation and most of the time, the people he kept company with generally wished that they were other places or with other people. Sometimes, Tony was certain that they were just putting together grocery lists or maybe thinking that this could secure them a legacy (especially if he happened across gushing, overly affectionate fans that all wanted a piece of him just to claim ownership to that piece.

His Nanny had never once looked like he wanted to be anywhere else, no matter how annoying Tony was being. And he never looked like he wished he was with anyone else, even when Tony was making him stand in the corner or requiring a piggy back ride up a steep hill. His Nanny, technically, never actually wanted anything, but that was beside the point.

Tony still felt the sting of knowing he was imagining someone else and he bit the inside of his lip until the aching from that overtook everything else.

“You’re not having a malfunction this time. Tell me what’s happening and we can puzzle it out.”

If it took some of the sting away, Tony should take comfort in the fact that Bucky was not at all wishing he was somewhere else. He wasn't hoping to be with Steve, he didn't think that Tony was worse company than Steve. Those blue eyes weren't a comforting memory, they were a terror that tore at his soul and threatened to consume him, they started a pounding pain behind his eyes.

"I don't know."

His heart rate picked up, his breathing quickened, and his hands balled into fists. Even if the Soldier had no words for it, he was obviously entering a panic attack.

"I don't know. What am I malfunctioning?! What's happening?!"

Much too selfish to take comfort in anything, even the fact that Bucky thought his former best friend and Tony’s one-sided nemesis was currently the object of loathing and not never-ending devotion, Tony forced himself to stay seated, hands on his knees. Whatever Bucky was feeling now, Tony had felt it before too. And worse. This was something new to Bucky, though, and he could read the panic plain as day in his face. It was both marvelous and worrisome at the same time. A breakthrough on Bucky’s end could turn to a break off of something Tony would probably need or want in the future.

“It’s not a malfunction,” Tony said again, breathing through his nose as he watched Bucky with wary brown eyes. If he started to pace, if he grew manic, Tony was prepared to back off. He didn’t want to leave Bucky alone, he really didn’t, he remembered the man had always been there for him when the nightmares were the worst, but he couldn’t survive a full blown panic attack if Bucky ended up lashing out. “This is actually normal. You’re starting to remember and it’s all right.”

He’d done his best to do repair work to his brain. He’d removed some of the things that were done to make him docile. But it wasn’t perfect.

And the conditioning he’d probably underwent could outdo anything physical anyway.

“Tell me about it. Tell me about Bucky Barnes.”

It was that name again.

Something about it put hooks into his brain and dug down until it hurt. He had never experienced anything like it, even the trigger words didn't hurt that much, but surely that was what they were. This name was some kind of new trigger phrase, but he had no idea what it was supposed to be doing to him.

He was on his feet abruptly, without even realising why he got up.

"Stop. Stop. Stop."

The one word became a mantra that shifted into a plea, first in English and then into Russian. He was scared, terrified, and it felt like the threat was inside him. He had no idea how to fight it, and so he just started slamming his own head against the wall in desperation.

So this didn’t go as planned.

Tony was on his feet, though he did manage to remember to keep a respectable distance away from the easily murderous and ten times as strong as him man. There was blood, for a super soldier was not immune to being damaged, and there was a whole lot of noise, and in Tony’s book, that was never a good sign.

“Sit down! You did fine, that’s all for now! You’re going to hurt yourself-- Further!” He was really bad at this. He couldn’t just put the Soldier into time out. He couldn’t wait for him to come back to himself. And all he was doing was making things worse. He didn’t like to see Bucky so gung ho to do this much damage, but he had absolutely nothing else up his sleeves unless—

If Bucky didn’t stop, Tony would race towards the HYDRA panel and start to remove wires from behind it. He could at the very least create a stasis field to electro-magnetically pin Bucky to the floor or maybe the wall if it had enough current by his arm. He already knew the proper frequency for vibranium so why not go this method? At least he could keep Bucky from tantruming himself into oblivion.

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