Characters Tony Stark and Bucky Barnes Fandoms: MCU Summary: AU of Civil War. Tony's tasked with fixing the Winter Soldier and keeping custody of him at the same time.
The Winter Soldier wouldn’t know what good coffee tastes like. If Stark says it’s good, it probably is.
It smells different, better, somehow, than what he’d picked up in HYDRA. Those stolen snatches of scent he wasn’t supposed to register and file away because they’re irrelevant to assignments or maintenance. Even so, the taste feels familiar as it floods across his tongue, the mug warm against his hand. Even the steam curling up feels…
It’s enough that when Tony comes up to him - close, maybe too close considering how poorly yesterday started out - the Soldier doesn’t step back, shoot a flat-eyed stare or shove him so he’ll have more clearance. There’s a moment where he stiffens at the sudden touch…but it’s slow, not too bad, a brush of the shoulders that almost feels as familiar as the taste of coffee warming his body. A difference in body size: the man he’d leaned up again was bigger than Stark, broader.
The Soldier doesn’t jerk away.
In fact, he stands right where he is, seemingly allowing (or, at least, tolerating), Tony’s presence. Maybe it’s because he’s not chattering up a storm, overwhelming him with new ideas about the arm improvements or going on about this man he’s supposed to be, this “Bucky Barnes”. He isn’t even making him struggle his way through a simple decision like what body wash to use of a choice from several. They’re just existing in close proximity.
In this crowded, messy workroom without guards or handlers or even the cries of prisoners echoing down concrete halls and the Soldier’s startled to realize this isn’t…bad.
He doesn’t bump back, exactly. But as he steals another sip of coffee, a part of him still surprised he’s allowed a cup of his own, he’ll let Stark lean against him all he wants. He’ll even let the other man rest his head against his shoulder.
They’ll stand there for awhile, silent, and the Soldier’s almost done with his coffee, glancing down at its reduced levels with dull alarm.
“...can I have more?” he surprises himself by daring to ask. An asset shouldn’t ask for anything, he knows that’s standard protocol. His voice still creaks out, his head tilting a little so he can glance down at Stark’s dark head resting against his shoulder.
"Mmmhm. As much as you want," he says, mostly into Soldier's shoulder. At face value, those words could sound dismissive, but in reality, his tone makes the sentence much more gentle. Contented, a little sleepy. Tony takes one last sip, then, "Was just about to top up myself."
Pulling away is hard, because Tony knows once he does, he won't be able to cozy back up again. And, lo and behold, stepping away breaks the little safety bubble that had formed around them.
(But better sooner rather than later, ripping off the bandaid and all that. It's not like he could stay there forever.)
Tony takes the mug from Soldier with a smile (which, unbeknownst to him, comes off much more gentle than intended-- he'd wanted to break any potential awkwardness by being his usual lighthearted I-don't-take-things-too-seriously self). Now that he can see Soldier again, the guy seems... a little less tense, maybe? It's difficult for Tony to pinpoint exactly, but there is definitely a small improvement from yesterday.
If this whole situation had a progress bar, they'd maybe ticked up to 1%. Which doesn't sound encouraging, but even the slowest of processes eventually got there in the end.
By the time the second round of coffee is ready, FRIDAY is done with the scans. (She probably finished them a while ago, but Tony's glad she had the tact not to interrupt the... moment? Was it a moment? That they were having. ((Plus, his AI learning what tact is!)) Tony hands Soldier his mug before re-situating back at the workbench.
"M'kay, let's see what we've got here--"
Any ease and/or good mood Tony has evaporates the second he sets his eyes on Soldier's scans.
It's... bad. Bad doesn't even begin to describe it. So monumentally bad that even Tony has to take at least ten minutes cataloging each and every problem.
"I..." Tony wipes a tired and disbelieving hand over his mouth. (What has his face even been doing this whole time? Hopefully nothing that makes Soldier pull away again. They'd only just started making progress.) "I'm shocked this thing even works at all."
If FRIDAY weren't there to assist him, who knows how long it would've taken him to decipher the tangled maze of the wiring. Sorting through all of it is going to be a nightmare. But it has to be done. He can't leave wiring that looks like this in-- frayed and split and rusting, there's so much rust in this arm that Tony could swim in it. Some of the wiring is knotted and tied around other wires, too. There's no way any of it can be salvaged. If only it could be as easy as ripping it all out, but that's the downside when it comes to prosthetics with a neural link-- you have to tread carefully.
Designing better functioning parts was going to be the easiest part, honestly. And seeing some of the, frankly, painful looking mechanisms that make up this arm? Yeah, uh... Pretty much anything else would be an improvement (both for function and comfort).
"Do you, uh-- do you want me to tell you everything that's wrong, or should I just... go ahead and fix it?"
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.
Maybe Tony is a bad man after all, because Soldier's refusal to hear the details only fills him with relief. The world has let this man down time and time again (be it as Bucky Barnes, The Soldier, or whomever he'll be in the aftermath of all of this), and to Tony, delivering that news again, in this way, is just... it feels unbearable, and he hasn't even done it.
Engineering and robotics and inventing and everything in between is Tony's... is there even a word for it? The fact that you can't think of any of those things without thinking of him (or the Stark name in general), says a lot more than a word probably could. Anyway, it's Tony's life and livelihood, it's his hobby and special interest-- you could even go as far as saying it's his everything. So of course, as irrational as it may be, he can't help but feel like this is somehow his fault. Like he's somehow letting Soldier down. Tony wasn't even alive when Bucky Barnes was presumed dead, for fuck's sake! It's ridiculous! But just saying so doesn't automatically make the feeling go poof!
It's fine. He'll fix this. Soldier will be as good as new. Tony will give him an arm so good that it'll never let him down again.
"Fix it, it is," Tony says. Like usual, and especially right now, he shoves that world weary feeling down as far as it'll go. At the very least, sinking his teeth in deep into a new project feels like coming home.
First tackling everything that can be done before he needs to drag Soldier in for the hands on treatment seems like the smartest idea, so that's where Tony starts. It's the usual blur of time, orders to FRIDAY, back and forth discussions and calculations with her, holograph blueprints and tinkering, soldering irons and clanging metal. Oh, and of course, Tony's usual taste in music. He's not blaring it quite as loud as he usually does (and it's definitely not for Soldier's sake, pfft, that would be ridiculous), but it's enough, and it all helps him sink into that headspace where hours feel like seconds.
Tony isn't worried about Soldier's wellbeing-- he already made sure FRIDAY would supply him with enough food and/or takeout suited for his metabolism, and DUM-E should certainly adore having a patron he can supply bottomless coffee to. (Tony would be jealous of the all you can drink coffee buffet, but he sort of enjoys things like being alive and his heart not jackrabbiting out of his ribcage, so.) He's plenty free to dive deep.
An indeterminable amount of time later, Tony snaps back into present awareness. Like a bubble that's been blown into the air, and it finally makes contact with the asphalt, a large and jarring, but silent, pop. All Tony can do is stare and blink owlishly for a beat, then two. It's sort of like watching a movie where the visuals and audio are out of sync-- it's hard for his brain to process the rushing back of all physical (and emotional) sensation, like hunger and exhaustion and pain (oh, right, stab wound in the thigh).
Usually FRIDAY is the one who snaps him out of an engineering binge, but Tony doesn't hear her telling him things like the date and time or how many emails he needs to respond to.
Oh. To his right is... another mug. A warm mug. And food. Tony swallows thickly, and it's not because of a sixth sense awareness pinging him about a certain new resident assassin looming directly behind him.
(There was a time, when this tower was what you would call a home. Tony would come up from his binges to meals and leftovers waiting for him, or sometimes to the people who came to deliver them. Bruce's shy and rueful smiles, Clint's endless supply of pizza boxes and, dare Tony say, mother henning. Natasha cared too, in her own way, and so did Thor when he was around to. Steve... Tony tries especially not to think about Steve, but at least the food offerings from him were easy to stomach. It's hard to feel like you're being pitied when it's from a man who grew up during the Depression.)
And here, now, Soldier is unintentionally following in their footsteps. Or maybe FRIDAY told him to do it, but even then-- scraps are better than nothing.
Thunking his head backwards against Soldier's sturdy torso, Tony sighs. He rubs at his face and just hides in his hands for a long few moments. It's absolutely necessary, or else he'd be liable to lashing out or, God forbid, crying.
For a guy called the 'Winter' Soldier, he's shockingly warm, Tony's traitorous brain supplies. Thankfully he does not say that out loud.
"If FRI is making you do nanny duty, I must've been out of it for a while." He stifles a yawn into his fist. "You've got the time, Soldier? If it's even still the same day."
The tower would take a few days to map out manually.
Under normal circumstances it would, except FRIDAY provides him with a map shortly after Stark settles down to work on the prosthetic arm. Or, more precisely, the AI sends one of Stark’s low-tech drones to roll up with a tablet clenched in its manipulator claw, beeping, and then settling for bodily poking the Winter Soldier in the hip until he takes it. The uploaded map’s probably edited knowing he’ll be looking at it. Flicking through it, learning how to use the tablet, and it confirms what he already knows: the tower is a maze and there’s no feasible escape without FRIDAY knowing about it.
Aside from that, no new orders.
Unsure what to do without those, the Soldier wanders. A few times he makes it back to Stark’s workshop and while the…mess is still there, all the trip hazards that are probably more dangerous to the man than his scalpel ever was, the music volume blaring through the speakers is noticeably lower than before, just loud instead of bone-shaking, head-pounding loud. Even at a lower, more reasonable volume the music’s still somehow grating, the Soldier slipping out after a few minutes, unaware that he might just be missing something more sedate like the Andrew Sisters or the Ink Spots instead of another round of A/C’s guitar riffs.
But Stark holes up in his workshop long enough that the Soldier returns, back music or no music, because standing orders were to assist him and he can’t assist him if the man worked himself into a coma because he forgot about eating and drinking. He isn’t sure where the food comes from - delivery again, maybe - but FRIDAY’s voice had filtered through the walls, through everywhere, seemingly without a source, and the AI had requested that he make sure Stark ate. Not exactly an order.
Might as well be.
It’s easy to sneak up on Stark, like every other time. The Soldier walks in with the delivery, has time to set it down and retrieve a streaming mug from DUM-E and there's time to set that down too. In fact, he can stand right behind Stark’s chair, easily within arm’s reach that he could’ve snapped his neck or slipped a knife between his ribs, and still Stark doesn’t seem to register he’s there.
The Soldier doesn’t move when Stark’s head shifts and then bumps into the firm planes of his stomach.
“It’s 2:34 pm,” the Soldier says quietly. “Over twenty four hours. You should take a break.”
He doesn’t move away. Not at first. Leaning over and minding Stark’s head, the Soldier reaches for the mug and then maneuvers it into Stark’s hands with surprisingly gentle care, his palms briefly fitting over the back of the other man’s hands.
“Drink. Then eat. You can give a status report while you’re doing that.”
It's not until Solider says that it's been twenty four hours that Tony really feels it.
('It' being that he's been going the whole time, non stop, with no sleep, no food or water, no breaks, the whole shebang.)
Funny how that works, huh? Tony had been just fine mere seconds ago. Apparently all it takes is a swift kick to his brain and a, hey, remember to do your fucking job! to get it to function like everyone else's on the planet. Who knew?
There's a non insignificant part of Tony that knows that even if he had been aware of the passage of time or his body's needs, it wouldn't have stopped him. Some of it is the love of the game, sure. The rest is what his therapist would describe as feelings of inadequacy.
There will always be that voice in the back of his subconscious that sounds suspiciously like Howard, telling Tony that it's not good enough. That he's not good enough. Plus the reminder that, "few sons are like their fathers; most are worse, few better," though Tony will admit that Howard probably said that in an attempt to inspire him to want to be better, it instead left him feeling like he had to. Anyway, his dad had always been disappointed when Tony did anything other than something engineering or science related, so it's not hard to see how that disappointment and Tony's need for approval and Daddy issues twisted and warped and corrupted into the backwards logic he has today. What was once probably just a, "you're too old for toys, you should be focusing on your work," turns into, "I, and by extension, my inventions, have no worth when I'm not working."
Perfectionism is a hell of a drug. You could almost call it a compulsion, really. Even when you know the logic, the logic doesn't win out against the sheer itch. Or it doesn't in Tony's case, but his impulse control is less than stellar.
Soldier stopping him and making him take a break is, frankly, absolution. He's handing Tony the permission to stop on a silver platter.
(This is about when his subconscious starts to sound distinctly Pepper-like. "You're no use to your company, or anyone, if you're dead, Tony!" she had yelled at him, once. Most people would probably need it to be framed more tactfully, but not Tony. It had felt like a slap to the face, but an eye-opening one.
From then on, when she'd tell him to stop, he'd listen. Tony had expected it to be a hardship, but it really wasn't. Maybe he'd be crabby if he were in the middle of a bout of inspiration, but mostly it was just... relief.)
One warm flesh hand, one metal and mug warmed, caress Tony's worn ones. A firm, solid body weight behind him. When Soldier leans down, Tony feels his hair brush against his.
Soldier's softness reminds Tony of brand new shoes that you bought years ago that have just been collecting dust in your closet. It's awkward, definitely not well worn or broken in, but it's more comforting to him that it isn't.
In this moment, the Winter Soldier is so unbearably, unabashedly human.
He has none of the charm that Steve said Bucky Barnes had. Instead, Soldier is stilted and awkward, and Tony thinks it's lovely shockingly genuine, but it looks good on him. Soldier's not boyish, he's not-- well, Tony could see Solider being quick witted and 'bratty' (for lack of a better word), but he certainly isn't right now, and Tony has a feeling it would be vastly different than Bucky's brand of it. Tony would describe Soldier as rugged and mature, and while lived experience probably contributes to it, it's definitely not the whole story. Soldier is more reserved, he's quieter... if a little monotone. Some of that will probably go with more time away from HYDRA, but what remains, Tony can imagine being cutefuck, uh--delightfuldamn it-- ...quaint. ...close enough.
Tony expected, and planned for, a lot-- hating Bucky (be it jealousy or envy or just plain 'we don't click' annoyance), begrudgingly liking him... really, any number of things.
Tony did not plan for Soldier.
Tony did not plan to like him so goddamn much.
This one is mine, Steve, Tony thinks, somewhat hysterically. I won't let you have him. I won't let you make him pretend to be a ghost.
It's definitely the sleep deprivation and dehydration and starvation. Yep. Totally. Uh-huh.
"You're annoyingly reasonable, Soldier," Tony says, halfway into his mug. He doesn't actually sound that put out about it, and he is still laying against Soldier's body. "Okay, uh--"
With one hand, Tony eats. With the other, he gestures. And drinks. Some coffee might slosh onto Tony's arm a few times, but it's a necessary sacrifice (and a familiar one).
"The stuff I didn't need to repurpose was the easy part-- okay, well, I'm not, like, totally done, but it's mostly there," The new outer components of Soldier's arm get waved to, and as promised they look pretty much identical, but much more streamlined and of astoundingly better quality. Vibranium, for one, which Pepper can't even be mad at Tony for, because it's not company expenses nor does it need to be affordable for mass production. Tony is absolutely going to bring up a prosthesis division at the next board meeting, and has learned a ton already from this project, but that's brain space he's allocated for future Tony, not current Tony.
"What won't be so easy is everything on the inside-- less so because of my capabilities, mind you," (it's phrased like the most egotistical thing you've ever heard, but Tony has an ease of speaking about his talents that make it sound like a simple fact-- and in a way it is, but he digresses), "but I imagine it's never pleasant to have someone digging around in there. I have stuff to make it not hurt or entirely numb, your choice, so it definitely won't be unbearable... but uh, yeah. Sorry. Promise it'll be worth it."
As an example (of what Tony means by 'worth it'), he goes on to explain his theory about Soldier's healing.
"It's like-- wait, you probably don't know much about computers, uh... okay, it's like, imagine if you had something stuck in the slide of a handgun. It-- miraculously, for the sake of this analogy-- works fine, but you know it could be more efficient if it didn't have that stuff in there. And then you're thinking about it all the time and it'll be on your mind every time you shoot and reload, like, oh, is this finally going to be the time it fucks up on me? And that's stuff that you wouldn't be thinking about if the issue wasn't there at all. It's sort of like that?"
"I have a hunch: your arm has all this rust and crap that is not supposed to be in there, right? And without the serum's healing, who knows what state you'd be in! I should know, I had palladium poisoning-- wait, not the point. Your body only has so much healing to go around. So when you get injured, your body has, say, 70% of its healing resources going towards the bullet wound you got, or whatever, because that other 30% is permanently stuck on keeping rust out of your bloodstream or other places it shouldn't be. I also assume some of your healing is fighting off pain and scar tissue and other complications at the connection site, so that might be even more shit that's compromising your efficiency. It'll probably feel pretty fucking awesome to not deal with chronic pain, but I figured you'd care more about your capabilities."
(If Soldier tries going back to HYRDA after this-- or, God forbid, succeeds-- Tony will be so pissed. Not at him-- can't exactly blame the brainwashed guy-- but at HYDRA. They don't deserve this man's loyalty, they don't deserve getting their 'toy' back all shiny and new, when they're the ones that fucked Soldier up in the first place, and didn't take proper care of him. He's a human being, for one, but even if he wasn't, Tony can't even fathom not taking good care of your things. Things you create, too.)
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It smells different, better, somehow, than what he’d picked up in HYDRA. Those stolen snatches of scent he wasn’t supposed to register and file away because they’re irrelevant to assignments or maintenance. Even so, the taste feels familiar as it floods across his tongue, the mug warm against his hand. Even the steam curling up feels…
It’s enough that when Tony comes up to him - close, maybe too close considering how poorly yesterday started out - the Soldier doesn’t step back, shoot a flat-eyed stare or shove him so he’ll have more clearance. There’s a moment where he stiffens at the sudden touch…but it’s slow, not too bad, a brush of the shoulders that almost feels as familiar as the taste of coffee warming his body. A difference in body size: the man he’d leaned up again was bigger than Stark, broader.
The Soldier doesn’t jerk away.
In fact, he stands right where he is, seemingly allowing (or, at least, tolerating), Tony’s presence. Maybe it’s because he’s not chattering up a storm, overwhelming him with new ideas about the arm improvements or going on about this man he’s supposed to be, this “Bucky Barnes”. He isn’t even making him struggle his way through a simple decision like what body wash to use of a choice from several. They’re just existing in close proximity.
In this crowded, messy workroom without guards or handlers or even the cries of prisoners echoing down concrete halls and the Soldier’s startled to realize this isn’t…bad.
He doesn’t bump back, exactly. But as he steals another sip of coffee, a part of him still surprised he’s allowed a cup of his own, he’ll let Stark lean against him all he wants. He’ll even let the other man rest his head against his shoulder.
They’ll stand there for awhile, silent, and the Soldier’s almost done with his coffee, glancing down at its reduced levels with dull alarm.
“...can I have more?” he surprises himself by daring to ask. An asset shouldn’t ask for anything, he knows that’s standard protocol. His voice still creaks out, his head tilting a little so he can glance down at Stark’s dark head resting against his shoulder.
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Pulling away is hard, because Tony knows once he does, he won't be able to cozy back up again. And, lo and behold, stepping away breaks the little safety bubble that had formed around them.
(But better sooner rather than later, ripping off the bandaid and all that. It's not like he could stay there forever.)
Tony takes the mug from Soldier with a smile (which, unbeknownst to him, comes off much more gentle than intended-- he'd wanted to break any potential awkwardness by being his usual lighthearted I-don't-take-things-too-seriously self). Now that he can see Soldier again, the guy seems... a little less tense, maybe? It's difficult for Tony to pinpoint exactly, but there is definitely a small improvement from yesterday.
If this whole situation had a progress bar, they'd maybe ticked up to 1%. Which doesn't sound encouraging, but even the slowest of processes eventually got there in the end.
By the time the second round of coffee is ready, FRIDAY is done with the scans. (She probably finished them a while ago, but Tony's glad she had the tact not to interrupt the... moment? Was it a moment? That they were having. ((Plus, his AI learning what tact is!)) Tony hands Soldier his mug before re-situating back at the workbench.
"M'kay, let's see what we've got here--"
Any ease and/or good mood Tony has evaporates the second he sets his eyes on Soldier's scans.
It's... bad. Bad doesn't even begin to describe it. So monumentally bad that even Tony has to take at least ten minutes cataloging each and every problem.
"I..." Tony wipes a tired and disbelieving hand over his mouth. (What has his face even been doing this whole time? Hopefully nothing that makes Soldier pull away again. They'd only just started making progress.) "I'm shocked this thing even works at all."
If FRIDAY weren't there to assist him, who knows how long it would've taken him to decipher the tangled maze of the wiring. Sorting through all of it is going to be a nightmare. But it has to be done. He can't leave wiring that looks like this in-- frayed and split and rusting, there's so much rust in this arm that Tony could swim in it. Some of the wiring is knotted and tied around other wires, too. There's no way any of it can be salvaged. If only it could be as easy as ripping it all out, but that's the downside when it comes to prosthetics with a neural link-- you have to tread carefully.
Designing better functioning parts was going to be the easiest part, honestly. And seeing some of the, frankly, painful looking mechanisms that make up this arm? Yeah, uh... Pretty much anything else would be an improvement (both for function and comfort).
"Do you, uh-- do you want me to tell you everything that's wrong, or should I just... go ahead and fix it?"
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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.
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Engineering and robotics and inventing and everything in between is Tony's... is there even a word for it? The fact that you can't think of any of those things without thinking of him (or the Stark name in general), says a lot more than a word probably could. Anyway, it's Tony's life and livelihood, it's his hobby and special interest-- you could even go as far as saying it's his everything. So of course, as irrational as it may be, he can't help but feel like this is somehow his fault. Like he's somehow letting Soldier down. Tony wasn't even alive when Bucky Barnes was presumed dead, for fuck's sake! It's ridiculous! But just saying so doesn't automatically make the feeling go poof!
It's fine. He'll fix this. Soldier will be as good as new. Tony will give him an arm so good that it'll never let him down again.
"Fix it, it is," Tony says. Like usual, and especially right now, he shoves that world weary feeling down as far as it'll go. At the very least, sinking his teeth in deep into a new project feels like coming home.
First tackling everything that can be done before he needs to drag Soldier in for the hands on treatment seems like the smartest idea, so that's where Tony starts. It's the usual blur of time, orders to FRIDAY, back and forth discussions and calculations with her, holograph blueprints and tinkering, soldering irons and clanging metal. Oh, and of course, Tony's usual taste in music. He's not blaring it quite as loud as he usually does (and it's definitely not for Soldier's sake, pfft, that would be ridiculous), but it's enough, and it all helps him sink into that headspace where hours feel like seconds.
Tony isn't worried about Soldier's wellbeing-- he already made sure FRIDAY would supply him with enough food and/or takeout suited for his metabolism, and DUM-E should certainly adore having a patron he can supply bottomless coffee to. (Tony would be jealous of the all you can drink coffee buffet, but he sort of enjoys things like being alive and his heart not jackrabbiting out of his ribcage, so.) He's plenty free to dive deep.
An indeterminable amount of time later, Tony snaps back into present awareness. Like a bubble that's been blown into the air, and it finally makes contact with the asphalt, a large and jarring, but silent, pop. All Tony can do is stare and blink owlishly for a beat, then two. It's sort of like watching a movie where the visuals and audio are out of sync-- it's hard for his brain to process the rushing back of all physical (and emotional) sensation, like hunger and exhaustion and pain (oh, right, stab wound in the thigh).
Usually FRIDAY is the one who snaps him out of an engineering binge, but Tony doesn't hear her telling him things like the date and time or how many emails he needs to respond to.
Oh. To his right is... another mug. A warm mug. And food. Tony swallows thickly, and it's not because of a sixth sense awareness pinging him about a certain new resident assassin looming directly behind him.
(There was a time, when this tower was what you would call a home. Tony would come up from his binges to meals and leftovers waiting for him, or sometimes to the people who came to deliver them. Bruce's shy and rueful smiles, Clint's endless supply of pizza boxes and, dare Tony say, mother henning. Natasha cared too, in her own way, and so did Thor when he was around to. Steve... Tony tries especially not to think about Steve, but at least the food offerings from him were easy to stomach. It's hard to feel like you're being pitied when it's from a man who grew up during the Depression.)
And here, now, Soldier is unintentionally following in their footsteps. Or maybe FRIDAY told him to do it, but even then-- scraps are better than nothing.
Thunking his head backwards against Soldier's sturdy torso, Tony sighs. He rubs at his face and just hides in his hands for a long few moments. It's absolutely necessary, or else he'd be liable to lashing out or, God forbid, crying.
For a guy called the 'Winter' Soldier, he's shockingly warm, Tony's traitorous brain supplies. Thankfully he does not say that out loud.
"If FRI is making you do nanny duty, I must've been out of it for a while." He stifles a yawn into his fist. "You've got the time, Soldier? If it's even still the same day."
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Under normal circumstances it would, except FRIDAY provides him with a map shortly after Stark settles down to work on the prosthetic arm. Or, more precisely, the AI sends one of Stark’s low-tech drones to roll up with a tablet clenched in its manipulator claw, beeping, and then settling for bodily poking the Winter Soldier in the hip until he takes it. The uploaded map’s probably edited knowing he’ll be looking at it. Flicking through it, learning how to use the tablet, and it confirms what he already knows: the tower is a maze and there’s no feasible escape without FRIDAY knowing about it.
Aside from that, no new orders.
Unsure what to do without those, the Soldier wanders. A few times he makes it back to Stark’s workshop and while the…mess is still there, all the trip hazards that are probably more dangerous to the man than his scalpel ever was, the music volume blaring through the speakers is noticeably lower than before, just loud instead of bone-shaking, head-pounding loud. Even at a lower, more reasonable volume the music’s still somehow grating, the Soldier slipping out after a few minutes, unaware that he might just be missing something more sedate like the Andrew Sisters or the Ink Spots instead of another round of A/C’s guitar riffs.
But Stark holes up in his workshop long enough that the Soldier returns, back music or no music, because standing orders were to assist him and he can’t assist him if the man worked himself into a coma because he forgot about eating and drinking. He isn’t sure where the food comes from - delivery again, maybe - but FRIDAY’s voice had filtered through the walls, through everywhere, seemingly without a source, and the AI had requested that he make sure Stark ate. Not exactly an order.
Might as well be.
It’s easy to sneak up on Stark, like every other time. The Soldier walks in with the delivery, has time to set it down and retrieve a streaming mug from DUM-E and there's time to set that down too. In fact, he can stand right behind Stark’s chair, easily within arm’s reach that he could’ve snapped his neck or slipped a knife between his ribs, and still Stark doesn’t seem to register he’s there.
The Soldier doesn’t move when Stark’s head shifts and then bumps into the firm planes of his stomach.
“It’s 2:34 pm,” the Soldier says quietly. “Over twenty four hours. You should take a break.”
He doesn’t move away. Not at first. Leaning over and minding Stark’s head, the Soldier reaches for the mug and then maneuvers it into Stark’s hands with surprisingly gentle care, his palms briefly fitting over the back of the other man’s hands.
“Drink. Then eat. You can give a status report while you’re doing that.”
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('It' being that he's been going the whole time, non stop, with no sleep, no food or water, no breaks, the whole shebang.)
Funny how that works, huh? Tony had been just fine mere seconds ago. Apparently all it takes is a swift kick to his brain and a, hey, remember to do your fucking job! to get it to function like everyone else's on the planet. Who knew?
There's a non insignificant part of Tony that knows that even if he had been aware of the passage of time or his body's needs, it wouldn't have stopped him. Some of it is the love of the game, sure. The rest is what his therapist would describe as feelings of inadequacy.
There will always be that voice in the back of his subconscious that sounds suspiciously like Howard, telling Tony that it's not good enough. That he's not good enough. Plus the reminder that, "few sons are like their fathers; most are worse, few better," though Tony will admit that Howard probably said that in an attempt to inspire him to want to be better, it instead left him feeling like he had to. Anyway, his dad had always been disappointed when Tony did anything other than something engineering or science related, so it's not hard to see how that disappointment and Tony's need for approval and Daddy issues twisted and warped and corrupted into the backwards logic he has today. What was once probably just a, "you're too old for toys, you should be focusing on your work," turns into, "I, and by extension, my inventions, have no worth when I'm not working."
Perfectionism is a hell of a drug. You could almost call it a compulsion, really. Even when you know the logic, the logic doesn't win out against the sheer itch. Or it doesn't in Tony's case, but his impulse control is less than stellar.
Soldier stopping him and making him take a break is, frankly, absolution. He's handing Tony the permission to stop on a silver platter.
(This is about when his subconscious starts to sound distinctly Pepper-like. "You're no use to your company, or anyone, if you're dead, Tony!" she had yelled at him, once. Most people would probably need it to be framed more tactfully, but not Tony. It had felt like a slap to the face, but an eye-opening one.
From then on, when she'd tell him to stop, he'd listen. Tony had expected it to be a hardship, but it really wasn't. Maybe he'd be crabby if he were in the middle of a bout of inspiration, but mostly it was just... relief.)
One warm flesh hand, one metal and mug warmed, caress Tony's worn ones. A firm, solid body weight behind him. When Soldier leans down, Tony feels his hair brush against his.
Soldier's softness reminds Tony of brand new shoes that you bought years ago that have just been collecting dust in your closet. It's awkward, definitely not well worn or broken in, but it's more comforting to him that it isn't.
In this moment, the Winter Soldier is so unbearably, unabashedly human.
He has none of the charm that Steve said Bucky Barnes had. Instead, Soldier is stilted and
awkward, and Tony thinks it's
lovelyshockingly genuine, but it looks good on him. Soldier's not boyish, he's not-- well, Tony could see Solider being quick witted and 'bratty' (for lack of a better word), but he certainly isn't right now, and Tony has a feeling it would be vastly different than Bucky's brand of it. Tony would describe Soldier as rugged and mature, and while lived experience probably contributes to it, it's definitely not the whole story. Soldier is more reserved, he's quieter... if a little monotone. Some of that will probably go with more time away from HYDRA, but what remains, Tony can imagine beingcutefuck, uh--delightfuldamn it-- ...quaint. ...close enough.Tony expected, and planned for, a lot-- hating Bucky (be it jealousy or envy or just plain 'we don't click' annoyance), begrudgingly liking him... really, any number of things.
Tony did not plan for Soldier.
Tony did not plan to like him so goddamn much.
This one is mine, Steve, Tony thinks, somewhat hysterically. I won't let you have him. I won't let you make him pretend to be a ghost.
It's definitely the sleep deprivation and dehydration and starvation. Yep. Totally. Uh-huh.
"You're annoyingly reasonable, Soldier," Tony says, halfway into his mug. He doesn't actually sound that put out about it, and he is still laying against Soldier's body. "Okay, uh--"
With one hand, Tony eats. With the other, he gestures. And drinks. Some coffee might slosh onto Tony's arm a few times, but it's a necessary sacrifice (and a familiar one).
"The stuff I didn't need to repurpose was the easy part-- okay, well, I'm not, like, totally done, but it's mostly there," The new outer components of Soldier's arm get waved to, and as promised they look pretty much identical, but much more streamlined and of astoundingly better quality. Vibranium, for one, which Pepper can't even be mad at Tony for, because it's not company expenses nor does it need to be affordable for mass production. Tony is absolutely going to bring up a prosthesis division at the next board meeting, and has learned a ton already from this project, but that's brain space he's allocated for future Tony, not current Tony.
"What won't be so easy is everything on the inside-- less so because of my capabilities, mind you," (it's phrased like the most egotistical thing you've ever heard, but Tony has an ease of speaking about his talents that make it sound like a simple fact-- and in a way it is, but he digresses), "but I imagine it's never pleasant to have someone digging around in there. I have stuff to make it not hurt or entirely numb, your choice, so it definitely won't be unbearable... but uh, yeah. Sorry. Promise it'll be worth it."
As an example (of what Tony means by 'worth it'), he goes on to explain his theory about Soldier's healing.
"It's like-- wait, you probably don't know much about computers, uh... okay, it's like, imagine if you had something stuck in the slide of a handgun. It-- miraculously, for the sake of this analogy-- works fine, but you know it could be more efficient if it didn't have that stuff in there. And then you're thinking about it all the time and it'll be on your mind every time you shoot and reload, like, oh, is this finally going to be the time it fucks up on me? And that's stuff that you wouldn't be thinking about if the issue wasn't there at all. It's sort of like that?"
"I have a hunch: your arm has all this rust and crap that is not supposed to be in there, right? And without the serum's healing, who knows what state you'd be in! I should know, I had palladium poisoning-- wait, not the point. Your body only has so much healing to go around. So when you get injured, your body has, say, 70% of its healing resources going towards the bullet wound you got, or whatever, because that other 30% is permanently stuck on keeping rust out of your bloodstream or other places it shouldn't be. I also assume some of your healing is fighting off pain and scar tissue and other complications at the connection site, so that might be even more shit that's compromising your efficiency. It'll probably feel pretty fucking awesome to not deal with chronic pain, but I figured you'd care more about your capabilities."
(If Soldier tries going back to HYRDA after this-- or, God forbid, succeeds-- Tony will be so pissed. Not at him-- can't exactly blame the brainwashed guy-- but at HYDRA. They don't deserve this man's loyalty, they don't deserve getting their 'toy' back all shiny and new, when they're the ones that fucked Soldier up in the first place, and didn't take proper care of him. He's a human being, for one, but even if he wasn't, Tony can't even fathom not taking good care of your things. Things you create, too.)