The Soldier will still be puzzling over what “as much as you want” actually means - naturally, an asset doesn’t (shouldn’t) want anything - even when Stark hands him his second cup of coffee and they’ve migrated back to the workbench.
A silence falls over the lab. The Soldier settles down where there’s just enough space in the junk and half-finished projects that he can wedge himself down and sit. For a while he retreats into the heady smell of the coffee cupped in his hands, a part of him feeling like he’s somehow stealing these snatches of scent and taste to file away in a secret place in his mind, just in case, in the event they’re taken from him. Maybe not by Stark, given how he’s acted so far, but there’s always the possibility a HYDRA retrieval squad comes.
Stark could still get caught by surprise if he’s out of the Iron Man suit, after all. The robots like DUM-E hardly seem combat capable. The only question would be how effective FRIDAY is at fortification.
The Soldier’s almost finished with his second cup, resorting to rationing out those last sips out of habit, when Stark speaks up again.
“Fix it,” the Soldier says, simply, still gazing into his dwindling coffee cup, more concerned with that than the metal arm bolted to his shoulder, the pain he’s grown used to as a kind of constant. “I’m not involved in maintenance, so it would be a waste of both our time to go into additional detail.”
There’s basic field repairs and then there’s the real maintenance, the kind that would take several teams multiple shifts over multiple days. Then again, none of them were Tony Stark.
Productive results matter and the Winter Soldier’s been trained to be primarily goal-oriented. In short, Stark going onto the nitty gritty details of what, exactly, is wrong with HYDRA’s titanium prosthesis - both a marvel of engineering and held together with duct tape and Soviet prayers from the 1970s - will just fall on deaf ears. The Soldier wouldn’t understand what he’s talking about, anyway.
no subject
A silence falls over the lab. The Soldier settles down where there’s just enough space in the junk and half-finished projects that he can wedge himself down and sit. For a while he retreats into the heady smell of the coffee cupped in his hands, a part of him feeling like he’s somehow stealing these snatches of scent and taste to file away in a secret place in his mind, just in case, in the event they’re taken from him. Maybe not by Stark, given how he’s acted so far, but there’s always the possibility a HYDRA retrieval squad comes.
Stark could still get caught by surprise if he’s out of the Iron Man suit, after all. The robots like DUM-E hardly seem combat capable. The only question would be how effective FRIDAY is at fortification.
The Soldier’s almost finished with his second cup, resorting to rationing out those last sips out of habit, when Stark speaks up again.
“Fix it,” the Soldier says, simply, still gazing into his dwindling coffee cup, more concerned with that than the metal arm bolted to his shoulder, the pain he’s grown used to as a kind of constant. “I’m not involved in maintenance, so it would be a waste of both our time to go into additional detail.”
There’s basic field repairs and then there’s the real maintenance, the kind that would take several teams multiple shifts over multiple days. Then again, none of them were Tony Stark.
Productive results matter and the Winter Soldier’s been trained to be primarily goal-oriented. In short, Stark going onto the nitty gritty details of what, exactly, is wrong with HYDRA’s titanium prosthesis - both a marvel of engineering and held together with duct tape and Soviet prayers from the 1970s - will just fall on deaf ears. The Soldier wouldn’t understand what he’s talking about, anyway.