Reckless
Bruce was pretty used to weird things happening to him, when one lived with Tony Stark it was a regular part of life, also Clint and Natasha. Especially Clint. And Natasha. However the last thing he expected when he walked into his lab was to hear sniffles in the corner of the room, and he definitely didn’t expect to find a crying alpha in that corner sniffling. “Are you crying?” he asks Coulson, he was fairly sure that was his name, he’d been a little preoccupied with his lab lately and frankly he didn’t really care about the alphas hanging around. It wasn’t like they were a threat to him, if anything he was a threat to them.
Coulson looks up with red rimmed eyes, “no, you’re crying,” he says, sniffling loudly.
Bruce frowns, “what? That doesn’t even make sense,” he says, “why are you crying?” he asks because he wasn’t going to be able to focus with Coulson sniffling in the corner. Maybe if he fixed it or at least made him feel better he’d leave Bruce in peace.
Coulson slumps in his spot and looks at the ground, “sad Captain America fan theories,” he says quietly, “don’t tell Clint, he’ll make fun of me,” he says.
Bruce resists the urge to throw Coulson out of his lab and walks over to his phone, picking it up and dialing Clint’s number. “Hey, Brucie, Bruster, Bruuuuuce,” Clint answers and Bruce immediately regrets calling him, this shit happened every time he made that damn mistake.
“Your boyfriend is crying over Captain America in my lab, get him out,” he says bluntly and hangs up.
Coulson starts crying harder, “he can never go home,” he says through thick tears before he blubbers unintelligibly, presumably more about how sad Captain America was.
“Oh for god sakes, he’s a fictional character, go cry about him elsewhere and kindly remove yourself from my lab. And don’t touch anything on your way out either,” he says, making shooing motions at Coulson. Coulson continues to sniffle for a solid ten minutes before Clint comes barging in with Natasha on his back, letting out a loud battle cry before losing his grip on Nat and dropping her.
Nat kicks the back of his knee and Clint goes down, barely catching himself before he ate shit, “you fucker, I can’t believe you dropped me!” she says, outraged.
“It was an accident!” he protests, holding out a hand to help her up. She smacks his hand away playfully and picks herself up before going over to Bruce and jumping on his back.
He catches her and sighs, “why must you two always do this?” he asks, shifting so that Natasha was more comfortable.
“Because we are adorable and you love us,” she says, pressing her face to the back of his head.
“You are adorable, Clint is questionable, and I love you when you are not interrupting my science, kindly remove the crying alpha and shoo,” he says, full well knowing Natasha is not done irritating the hell out of him. Truthfully he wouldn’t have it any other way and as much as having Natasha messing up his lab space annoyed him he secretly enjoyed their ritual. Besides, she was an amazing organizer and she always cleaned up her mess better than he ever could, including colour coded labels for everything. If only Tony would take note and do the same but alas the man loved organized chaos and it showed very much in his work. Granted that’s what worked for Tony but Bruce liked lists, notes, organization, and order in his work, like Fitzsimmons though none of them managed to get their beloved order. At least he had Natasha to clean up his messes, poor Fitzsimmons were forever cleaning up after Tony, who rummaged through their work and left sticky notes all over their designs for ‘improvements’ or so he thought.
Coulson looked betrayed that Bruce would sell him out to Clint so fast and Clint looked amused, “crying over Captain America? Really? You’re an embarrassment,” he says playfully and holds out his hand to Coulson to help him up. Bruce watches the interaction with interest because something was different about the way the two interacted that intrigued him, and Natasha, they both thought Clint and Coulson would make an adorable couple but they were pretty sure that the two of them would be too damn stubborn to initiate anything. Natasha seemed to think that was a license to meddle, it’s science Bruce! But he thought they should let Clint and Coulson work it out themselves, like they had though Natasha seemed to think Tony and Loki meddling was what pushed them together. He respectfully disagreed, mostly because he didn’t want to give Loki and Tony credit for all their hard work.
Coulson takes Clint’s hand and lets Clint help him up, still sniffling but making no attempt to hide his tears from Clint. Interesting, usually alphas, especially men, put up some stupid macho attitude to pretend like they didn’t have feelings but Coulson seemed to have no such inclination. “They’re adorable. We have to lock them in a room together until they make out,” Natasha whispers in his ear. He shakes his head and gives her a look over his shoulder; she knew he didn’t like it when people whispered in his ear. It creeped him out. She presses her face to the back of his head again, “sorry,” she mumbles into his hair rather than his ear this time.
“I am not an embarrassment!” Coulson protests, “I just have a lot of feelings okay? Don’t you give me that look, Barton, I’ll mess up all your arrows!” he threatens and Clint gasps.
“You take that back!” he says, clutching his chest in mock offense. Natasha makes a squealing sound and wiggles around in glee. Thankfully he manages to keep his hold on her lest he accidentally drop poor Nat and end up on the floor like Clint almost had.
*
Tony was holed up in the lab, reconfiguring a few things for his suit, adding a few of the designs Fitzsimmons had made, with his own alterations of course. “Sir, Bucky is waiting outside the door,” JARVIS tells him and Tony sighs.
“Let him in,” he says, ignoring the door with more purpose than he had been before.
“Are you sure?” the AI asks him and he nods, knowing JARVIS would pick up his movement via motion detecting cameras and infer what it meant. He hears the door to his lap slide open and footsteps approaching but he ignores the person they belong to.
“How come your lab is locked and the others aren’t?” Bucky asks, lifting his nose and sniffing the air. Creepy.
“I don’t play well with others,” he says, which wasn’t false, but he also liked to keep his work to himself. He was a perfectionist and people getting ahold of his work before it was ready irritated him… no, made him anxious, very anxious. Obi broke into his lab once, got ahold of an unfinished prototype and showed it to the board. He had been livid enough to make every lab he’s had since uncrackable, he had tested them all on Skye and even her skill combined with Fitzsimmons and Bruce hadn’t been able to crack his codes. That was just the way he liked it, and besides, his work was dangerous in the wrong hands, hell, half the time it was dangerous in his own hands. It was best he kept it to himself.
“That runs contrary to everything I’ve seen in the last day and a half,” Bucky says, raising an eyebrow, “so how come you’re special enough to get a locked lab?” Bucky tilts his head to the side in question and Tony glares at him. Why Bucky thought he was entitled to an answer to his questions he had no idea.
“I don’t like the idea of someone getting their hands on my work, it isn’t finished and it’s highly dangerous. People shouldn’t have access to it,” he says and watches Bucky closely. Bucky wasn’t the only one with observation skills, Natasha had taught him a thing or two and even if he was terrible at reading micro expressions he was good enough to see when people were surprised, questioning his word, confused. It was all stuff he had encountered a million times before, usually in business meetings, it was almost like the alphas he worked with ninety percent of the time were surprised he actually knew what he was doing, that he was as smart as people made him out to be.
“And you think you have more of a right to work with it than others, hmm, that it?” he asks, eyes narrowing.
“No,” he says bluntly, “but I know how it works better than most anyone else, and I can monitor it if I know I’m the only one with access to it. Then I talk to Fitzsimmons and Bruce.” The three of them generally looked at applications, if it did more harm than good, what might happen should it fall into the wrong hands, what to do it if did.
“You must value their opinions highly if you’re so secretive about your work,” he says. Bucky was pacing in front of him while he sat on the ground, it was making him nervous and he didn’t must like that.
He pulls himself off the ground, “what does it matter to you? If I have my way you’ll be gone by the end of the day,” he tells him, turning his back on Bucky and walking back to his desk and fiddling around with a few of the things scattered over the surface.
“You can’t exactly toss us all out, Coulson and your Clint have a bond,” Bucky says, paying no attention to Tony rummaging through the stuff on his desk. Honestly, how many times did he and his team have to fuck these people over before they understood that they were not to be trifled with? Once more, apparently.
“That’s easily fixable,” he says and turns around, quickly reaching out and grabbing Bucky’s metal arm pressing a small object to it and pressing the button on it.
Bucky yelps and clutches his now useless arm, “what the fuck was that?” he snaps, glaring at Tony.
Tony takes a step forward, “let me be perfectly clear here, I don’t know what you’re playing at with this pathetic little show of yours, but you are not in a position of authority here. This space belongs to me and the other people who live here, not you, and certainly not either of your friends bonded to Clint or not. You don’t get to come in here and pull some bullshit interrogation act like you have a right to question me about anything. If you want to talk to me or anyone else, fine, but you talk to us like equals, not like we’ve been arrested and we’re in the middle of an interrogation. That was a localized EMP, designed to take out whatever tech it’s attached to and that only, your arm’s been shorted, don’t think I don’t know how to level the playing field. This is my territory, start acting like it,” he snaps and turns around, making a dismissive gesture.
He doesn’t expect Bucky to walk away but he’s still somewhat surprised when Bucky doesn’t go anywhere. “Are you going to take this thing off my arm?” Bucky asks eventually, sounding annoyed.
Tony turns around and pulls the small piece of tech off, “there, your arm any less shorted?” he asks sarcastically. Bucky looks irritated when his arm doesn’t do anything and seems to think a bit too late that asking Tony to remove his tech was fucking useless because it had already done his job.
Bucky sulks for a few more minutes, obviously not recognizing that he has been dismissed, before speaking again. “He isn’t that bad you know,” he says eventually, sounding as sulky as he looked.
“I’m assuming you mean your blonde friend,” Tony says, shuffling some blueprints around, “his intentions don’t matter so much as his actions in this case and before you go spouting off about trying to be a good person and maybe going wrong in a few places or whatever I know what that’s like. I used to blow people up for a living, remember? Didn’t make me a good person, it didn’t make me any less damaging, and it didn’t make me any less arrogant for dismissing everyone who tried to call me out, and it sure as hell isn’t going to unkill everyone who’s been murdered by my weaponry. My intentions may have been good, but my effects were a global disaster, and Steve isn’t any different, he just effects people in a different way and believe me, being stripped of personal choice is a lot more terrifying than death.” Mutilation less so, but he knew what that was like too, he got a little poetic justice in the form of his arc reactor but he supposed he more than deserved that.
Bucky doesn’t say anything, just watches Tony work, which was only unnerving until Tony tuned him out to focus on the gauntlet he was trying to alter. Working all the small pieces in was a pain in the ass, not to mention making the exoskeleton a manageable thickness. Fitting all those pieces together like that was nothing short of art in his opinion and it took a lot of time, alterations, recalculating, intelligence, and spatial awareness. Also he had to pad himself from the inside so he didn’t get sliced to ribbons by his own tech when he was inevitably knocked around, and on top of all that he needed to make sure the entire suit was lightweight but the weapons had to be no less effective. Nothing less than a genius level intelligence could pull it off and my all accounts his suit was impossible, he was certain there wasn’t a person on this planet that could pull off making a replica with any level of effectiveness. He’s had Fitzsimmons try and replicate his results dozens of times, even with Bruce’s help, and even the occasional outsider they were unable to pull it off. Even with step by step instructions on how to build it they had failed. By all accounts the technology that made up his suit didn’t actually exist, not in this time period, and it wouldn’t for at least the next ten years.
There was a reason Stark Industries was the best, so much so that they hadn’t suffered any damage during the recession, and even after everyone jumped overboard when Pep announced ending weapons sales he only lost millions. That should have ended his career, dead in the water, but it only took a few months to get back on track and within a year and a half they were back on top and making more than ever. Some people thought Stark was just a name, that all the money was in the brand stamp rather than the actual product. They were very, very wrong and that was why he was the best at what he did, people consistently underestimated the value of his work and it consistently outranked every other product group out there. He just bought Apple for Christ sakes, and people were ten times happier with the alterations he made to the products. It helped that he listened to the feedback he got rather than assume he knew best because he was smarter. He was smarter but that didn’t mean his user base was stupid, and they knew what they wanted more than he did most of the time. It was a big business mistake people made all the time, not listening to the user base, and it was what put a lot of people out of business. He’s never had any such issues, thank you, and it delighted him that people were mad about that.
He worked on; oblivious to Bucky’s sulking in the corner while he tried to figure out the mechanics of the damn gauntlet. Eventually he figures it out, he had to shuffle a few things around, and he remembers Bucky again when he happens to look over to find the alpha slumped over in the corner of his lab with his useless arm in his lap. “Can you fix this?” he asks, giving Tony some very gloomy looks. Adorable. Wait, what?
“Fix it yourself,” he says, tossing the gantlet onto his desk with the rest of the materials he had been toying around with. Only the rest of the suit needed to be altered now, so there was that.
“I have no idea how to do that and you know it, besides, I’ve sat here for the last three hours while you tinkered with that metal suit hand and it was pretty clear that you’re whole heartedly invested in your tech. Aren’t you the least bit curious about my arm?” he asks, tilting his head to the side.
Bucky thought he was being clever, trying to manipulate Tony but playing on his interest in technology, but Tony wasn’t a fucking moron, a dog could have seen through that. Shit, Clint’s soggy tacos from Taco Bell could see though that. “You aren’t clever, stop trying to be. I’m not going to fix your arm because you made a very terrible attempt at manipulation, I’m genuinely curious and if you’ll let my poke at your arm than great. Get over here,” he instructs. Bucky grins and pulls himself to his feet while his metal arm dangles uselessly. It was actually kind of funny to watch.
“Are you seriously laughing at an amputee that you purposefully re-disabled?” Bucky asks, taking mock offense to Tony’s snort of laughter.
Tony rolls his eyes, “you were never not disabled, dipshit, you just happen to have a very well made arm attached to you. And yes, I’m seriously laughing at how fucking stupid you look, now sit,” he instructs, gesturing for Bucky to sit on a stool he had laying around for some reason.
Bucky follows his instructions and perches on the stool, shedding his shirt while he was at it and accidentally catching it on his now-useless arm. He detangles himself and Tony rolls over in his desk chair, tucking one leg under himself and getting to work. “So what gave you think giant chip on your shoulder?” Bucky asks after a few minutes.
Tony considers telling him to fuck off, but that might mean he’ll take off arm and all so he decides to go with the flow for now. “I’m fucking tired of people seeing me only as an omega and not an actual person, of people thinking ‘omega’ is synonymous with ‘weak’, of people thinking it’s natural for me to be lesser than them for being born a certain way. It’s what we’re all sick of, some more so than others,” he says. Clint is deaf, Wanda and Nat were women, he and Bruce had mental health issues though Bruce’s came with the added turning into a giant green rage monster, and all of them were some level of queer, plus Wanda was also an immigrant. It was fucking annoying, being reduced to only those parts, or in Tony’s case being seen as a ‘success’ despite being an omega, like he had somehow risen above nature to earn his place in the world rather than being an omega and being successful, not one or the other. He wasn’t like an alpha because he had business sense; he was like an omega because he fucking was one. Not to mention people seemed to casually ignore that he slept with guys too, because apparently being a womanizer was a good thing. Literally what the fuck?
“So what, you think that being pissed off at the world is going to help you somehow?” he asks, raising an eyebrow.
Tony rolls his eyes hard, “no, I demand the respect I deserve and instead of getting it like you do I get reduced to being pissed off at the world for expecting to be treated like a person and an equal,” he snaps. Bucky at least has the good sense to look cowed by that statement.
He works in silence for a few more minutes, taking much longer than he needed to with the arm, he could have fixed it in minutes if he wanted to but Bucky didn’t know the wiser and he wanted to know what was up with the arm. “How did you all end up here? A few of you aren’t even from this country,” he says, looking at Tony out of the corner of his eye, gauging he reaction Tony assumed.
He shrugs, “I don’t know Nat and Clint’s story, just that he was in Russia and she was in HYDRA and somehow he got her out. She went on a massive killing spree, raising her status as Black Widow from mildly scary ghost story to terrifying legend.” Bucky’s head snaps around so fast Tony wasn’t sure how he didn’t get whiplash from the movement.
“She’s the Black Widow?” he asks, looking shocked.
“Mmhm,” Tony hums, disinterested in Bucky’s surprise at that revelation. Eventually Bucky prompts him to continue. “Nat and Clint teamed up, found Skye right before the CIA did after she hacked them, she wasn’t in long enough to get anything useful though, still, her skill set was a threat and they wanted her gone. Didn’t happen, obviously. They pulled Fitzsimmons out of some hazing ritual where god knows what happened to them, they don’t talk about it, that Nat and Clint stumbled upon by chance. They found me in the desert shortly thereafter; we pulled Wanda out of some HYDRA facility when liberating my tech from those fucks. She had a brother too, be he got a wee bit shot but about two dozen machine guns. I found Loki in a bar and should have listened to everyone when they told me he was bad news, and Loki found Bruce shortly after his disastrous attempt at experimenting on himself,” he tells Bucky. The story was vastly over simplified and skipped over a lot of very important details but it didn’t much matter, he didn’t need to know the details anyways.
“And you all do what, exactly? Regularly break into government agencies?” he asks.
Tony shakes his head, “no, not unless we need to, we’ve been trying to crack HYDRA but that shit runs deep, apparently government agency deep, and they have their own tech geniuses. The problem with that is that it’s either my father’s work or mine that’s typically used as the base for anything they create, and they’ve made some scary shit let me tell you, so I’ve been trying to get my tech out. Most of what’s made isn’t based off original design so in theory I remove my tech, they stop making weapons of mass destruction until they figure out something else. In the mean time we fucking crush them like a bug. It isn’t really going well,” he says.
“And you manage to take down entire bases on your own? Or individually in Clint’s case I guess, did you even send back up with him?” Bucky frowns, trying to figure out their operation.
“No need to send most any of us with backup, we’re all more than capable on our own except for Fitzsimmons, their almost strictly brains,” he says.
“That… sounds really dangerous, reckless even,” Bucky says, eyebrows drawing together.
“That’s efficient,” Tony says, “we don’t need the extra help, and when we have it it only gets in our way. When we need to we send more people in, work as a team on the ground and back here but for the most part we don’t need to send more than one of us. For all intents and purposes we’re basically all superhuman, a few of us actually are. HYDRA doesn’t stand much of a chance with us, shit, pretty much no one stands a chance against Wanda alone not to mention Bruce.” The guy shot himself in the head and came back and Wanda was telekinetic and telepathic, no one was going to get past her unless they pulled a Clint and electrocuted her fucking head.