Bonding
“There was a time in American history when people had to convince other people that slavery was bad. Slavery guys, what the fuck?” Tony says, looking largely disappointed with history itself.
“White people,” Sam says, shaking his head.
“Right, why are we like this?” Tony asks, looking distressed.
Natasha sighs, “look, JARVIS says you’ve been awake for like seventy eight hours Tony, you need to go to bed,” she says.
“Slavery guys. There were people for slavery, who the fuck thought this was a good idea, seriously guys. Think about this for a second, people had to argue that keeping people, people, as slaves was not desirable. What kind of fucked up society has to argue people are people? Why. Why are things like this,” he says and sits down on the ground, staring at the wall opposite to him.
“Tony. Go the fuck to bed,” Natasha tells him. Tony’s response is to flop over so he’s lying on the ground and let out a long groan.
*
“Does he always do that?” Steve asks, frowning at Tony, who had passed out on the ground some time ago.
Natasha shrugs, “semi frequently. Did he go on some rant at you?” she asks. Tony, she felt, was very fun when sleep deprived but also she worried that his sleeping habits, or lack thereof, were unhealthy. So far she had not been able to curb his bad habits no matter what she tried and she had even asked Bruce for advice. That had been an absolute bust and she was never asking him for advice on Tony again because his advice was to let Tony be. In her opinion that was dumb, he was being self-destructive, he needed to stop that. She’d figure it out though, she always did.
“Yeah, he went on a long rant about gendered clothing, complaining that clothing was strips of fabric with stiches and there was nothing gendered about that. Then he said something about draping his dying flesh bag in whatever the hell he wanted to because if he was going to be stuck in a feeble body that was slowly dying from the inside out than he would damn well throw silk on it if he wanted to.” Steve looks generally confused about Tony’s statement but it was more of the same for Natasha, who’d been hearing this shit for literal years. Once she got annoyed with one of Tony’s rants, that particular one had been about heels originally being designed for men and now they wouldn’t touch them with a ten foot pole because maybe that will make them gay, which wasn’t how sexuality worked. So she dared him to walk in a pair of her heels and the fucker liked them so much she hadn’t seen then since, and she looked very hard for them too.
She wanted her fucking black pumps back; she stole them fair and square. Frankly she was upset that they had fit Tony well enough for him to steal them, apparently he had small feet though she hadn’t noticed until then.
“Yeah, he does that. ‘Dying flesh bag’ is new though, usually he prefers ‘flesh prison’,” she says, “mostly it’s when he starts asking weird existential questions like ‘do you realize we’re just pieces of meat with personalities?’ or ‘what if you could feel your blood moving through your veins?’ that you have to worry. Usually he passes out pretty fast after some of the more weird shit starts coming out but sometimes he ends up awake longer and he starts seeing sound and you have to start experimenting with Russian potions because he’s surprisingly resilient to sedatives,” she says.
Steve looks horrified, “you drug Tony?”
“It doesn’t count if he knows about it. Later, after he wakes up, we’ve talked about it and agree it’s the best course of action.” Tony generally didn’t remember half of his actions anyways, which was simultaneously hilarious, terrifying, and sometimes useful because he invented something cool and impossible. Unfortunately that also usually involved him doing something incredibly stupid because on the best of days he had no self-preservation instincts, when he’s been awake for days any instinct he has not to die disappears completely.
“That… that’s still immoral,” Steve says, obviously judging her. He didn’t live with Tony for two years so he could shove it as far as he was concerned.
“You don’t know Tony, and you weren’t there the time he told Clint his breath sounded like the colour nine and that my hair smelled like a freshly shaved kitten. Trust me; drugging him is for his own good.” And that didn’t even include all of the crazy shit he’s done sleep deprived for no apparent reason. Like the rocket Heelys. That was hilarious, at least until he rocketed full force into a wall and got a pretty nasty concussion that had required Loki to take care of him and complain the whole time but not let anyone else take over. Loki was horrible, 0/10 she would not recommend.
Steve frowns, “what does a freshly shave kitten smell like?” he asks and the fuck if she knew. Tony’s answer was ‘space-time continuum’, which did not clarify things.
Instead of answering Steve she figured she’d deal with Tony’s presence in the hallway and kicks one of his feet, “go to bed,” she tells him. Tony makes annoyed noises and shimmies a bit but doesn’t move, “I’ll shave your face hair,” she says and Tony’s eyes open wide and he rolls onto his hands and knees and crawls away, presumably to his bedroom. She sort of felt bad for convincing him to shave his face hair for spy purposes before this whole mess started because it hadn’t even been useful but mostly she considered it payback for stealing her shoes. He felt very attached to his face hair, she felt very attached to her shoes, he should have given her shoes back and his face hair would have remained.
“That was effective,” Steve comments and she chooses to ignore that too because that was a stupid statement, and she had some cultures of Bruce’s to go fuck around with. So far she’s managed to convince him a particularly disgusting potato salad experiment she and Clint made was some scientific discovery; she wasn’t sure what he supposedly found because science jargon made her brain stop working. It didn’t really matter, he was convinced he made some discovery and all he had confirmed was that she and Clint made a truly disgusting salad.
“Just make sure he doesn’t crawl back into the hallway, he does that sometimes. Throw him back into his room if he does decide to crawl back,” she says full well knowing that Tony had crawled off somewhere else, to his room or not was in question, and he was not crawling back anytime soon but she figured she’d fuck with Steve for funsies.
*
Tony never did sleep for very long, even if he was well and truly exhausted. It used to annoy Rhodey because he’d keep the poor guy up at all hours of the day and night to tell him about all his cool discoveries. Tony was very much under the impression that Rhodey undervalued all the cool shit he found but that may be because he regularly called him at strange times and he did not care if Rhodey was in the middle of sex, his science was way cooler and needed immediate attention. Regardless he still got strange looks when he made his reappearance a little after five hours after he passed out, he confirmed with Bruce, who had been much more excited that he had convinced Natasha that he was convinced he’s made some scientific discovery from potato salad. Apparently all it took to convince her was some scientific jargon and she stopped paying attention to what he was saying, which had essentially been ‘water is wet’ but in a more convoluted and complicated way. He kept up the body language because he knew she’d be reading it no matter how little attention she was paying to his words and now he was waiting for her to figure it out.
Frankly he didn’t care if Natasha’s very gross salad actually was a scientific discovery, when he was asleep he had an idea for phone updates and it’s been awhile since Stark released a new phone. Now he was on his way to the lab to work on prototypes and once he figured that out it was time for tests and he always had fun with the tests. Once he made a phone arrow proof for fun and Clint was more than happy to shoot prototypes. “You sure you’re alright?” Lance asks upon seeing him, “you were pretty tired, don’t you think you need more sleep?”
“Don’t you think I know my own sleep patterns better than you?” he snaps mostly unintentionally. He loathed when people questioned his ability to judge his own body, Obi used to do it all the time. He liked to think his Commands for Tony to sleep more were subtle but they weren’t and Tony remained just as profitable a cash cow even with the severe insomnia. “I’m fine,” he says and Lance raises his lands and backs away wisely, walking off to do other things. He recognized that he should feel bad but he didn’t so he figured he’d go off to do other things too. The alphas, he noted, seemed interested in his reaction to Lance because thus far they were the only ones who had gotten reactions similar to that. They hadn’t been around long enough to note his hot buttons considering he only had like three but they’d take him from a decent mood to enraged in less than a few seconds. Nat knew them all, having figured them out when she had subtly interrogated him shortly after she and Clint found him wandering in the desert.
JARVIS greets him when he walks into his lab, asking how his nap was. They chat back and forth and JARVIS knows full well that Tony is only paying half attention to his words, his code was advanced enough to determine moods via examining body language and he had more than enough information on Tony to determine he was distracted. That was probably why he didn’t notice the entire human being sitting by his desk looking grumpy until he sat down and nearly rolled himself into Bucky’s lap. “Shit, Jesus, you’re a person. Okay. Sorry, sorry,” he says when Bucky flinches at the noise.
Bucky seems to recover fast, “no, no, it’s fine,” he says as he gathers himself.
“Are you alright?” Tony asks because Bucky looks exhausted, traumatized, and a little lost.
Bucky blinks slowly and it takes a second for him to register that Tony has asked him a question, “yeah, m’fine,” he says, “just not having a very good day. Came here because watching you work is calming for some reason but you weren’t here.”
Tony couldn’t imagine what about him blowing things up and accidentally hammering his own fingers or having one of his bots mistake his outrage for being on fire again could be calming but to each their own. “Okay,” he says, “but you might not want to sit almost under my desk because I’m bound to forget you’re there and that’s not going to end well when I accidentally run you over.”
Bucky frowns, “your fine with this?”
Tony shrugs, “you look more likely to kill yourself than me,” he says bluntly. Besides, Bucky’s had plenty of opportunity and he chose not to capitalize on it, Tony doubted that’s changed any.
Bucky lets out a harsh laugh, “you’re blunt. Stevie would never dare say that to anyone let alone me,” he says.
“I don’t see a point in sugar coating things, I find it more efficient to call things how I see them, makes them easier to deal with,” he says. Bucky nods in agreement and they lapse into a comfortable silence while Tony works on creating a working prototype so he can find bugs, eliminate them, and then work on making the thing basically indestructible. Last year someone accidentally baked their phone into a cake, he’d work on making it bake-proof. Plus he knew the kind of abuse he put his phones through, he used to regularly lose them out of helicopters, so he figured if he could make a phone that even he couldn’t destroy the general public would probably have a hard time breaking the phones too.
While he constructs a working prototype he notices Bucky fiddling with his arm in discomfort and eventually he gets bored of the phone ideas because Bucky’s arm was significantly more interesting. “Something bothering you?” he asks and pulls a bag of chips from his desk drawer.
Bucky eyes the chips suspiciously for a second and shrugs, “S’nothing,” he says, “it always gets like this when I over think things, when the flashbacks come. S’fine, I’ll get over it,” Bucky tells him and Tony isn’t so sure.
“Want me to look at it?” he asks. Mack, he figured, was the one who did the upkeep on Bucky’s arm considering he was the only one that was even remotely qualified to do such a thing but that didn’t mean he didn’t have something to offer.
“I… I’m not sure what you could do with it,” Bucky says after thinking on Tony’s question for a minute before replying.
“Well first of all the metal that arm is made out of is designed for weapons, not prosthetics, which is unsurprising considering HYDRA’s… um, uses for you. But I could make the arm significantly lighter with a material that would give you the same durability but with a lot less requirements to keep muscle mass high. I’m sure I could do a bunch more but I don’t know the full makeup of the arm and any redesign would require me to take a bunch of x-rays. What’s you problem, exactly, with the arm when things get… hairy?” he asks gently, leaning down so he was closer to Bucky’s level.
Bucky thinks his answer over and Tony waits patiently for him to place words to feelings, he knew what it was like to not have a name to his own emotions and to feel out of control because of it. It wasn’t pleasant, feeling out of control, like you were the only person in the world that felt that way. Logically that was statistically unlikely if not flat out impossible but when everyone else seemed to function with no issues it felt as if you were alone and that was frightening. Even Natasha, who arguably had the most horrifying history out of all of them, seemed to function just fine, even Wanda, who had to look at Tony every day seemed to function better than he had. If Bucky felt even remotely the same way it wasn’t very fun at all.
“Umm, I don’t know? I mean I do, but I don’t always feel like my arm doesn’t belong on me, like it’s some foreign part of my body that doesn’t really belong. I probably sound pretty stupid,” he says, frowning and looking away.
He doesn’t though, because Tony knows exactly what he means. “You don’t sound stupid at all; I get it, well, kind of. It isn’t like I can really understand what you’re feeling, we’re two different people but I can empathize. Sometimes it happens to me too, with the arc reactor,” he says and gestures to the glowing object in question, “but is it the tech itself or do you only feel like the arm is foreign when the memories come back, get bad?” he asks.
Bucky’s head tips up and his eyes widen in surprise, “yeah, that’s it, the second thing you said, about the arm only seeming foreign when the memories are bad. I’ve… I’ve never had anyone put that into words before,” he says, giving Tony an appraising look, like he just now realized that perhaps Tony actually could help.
Tony grins and rewards himself with some chips, “well, I do have a unique experience in non-con body modifications that bring on some very, very shitty memories. So what’s causing the problem hmm, what on your arm draws your attention when this happens?” he asks. Bucky opens up to him, telling him about his arm, Steve, a little about HYDRA though Tony was able to deduce what Bucky was saying despite not actually saying it. Bucky asks Tony questions too, but they’re far too personal for him to consider answering so mostly he says things without actually saying anything at all, but Bucky can’t read between the lines.
“Who hurt you?” he asks eventually, after Tony took about a million and one measurements and a bunch of x-rays. Tony blinks in surprise and Bucky gives him a look, “I’ve been beyond trained, brainwashed even, into recognizing all body language and figuring out how to use it against you until I manage to kill you. The way you act around alphas is similar to the way women react to men when they spot them in the dark, like you’ve been trained from birth to fear them. This isn’t a product of being kidnapped by terrorists who happened to be alphas.”
Tony would consider that a good observation but it wasn’t really, he never did react well to alphas because they always seemed to assume authority over him and he reacted even worse to authority than to alphas. “That’s a stupid question,” Tony settles on because it was. Bucky seems to think this is an insufficient answer and Tony feels bad for the guy having just opened up and all so he throw Bucky a bone. “You asked who hurt me full well knowing the answer was alphas so why ask? The question you want answered is ‘how did they hurt you?’ or maybe ‘what makes you so suspicious of them even when they’ve done nothing wrong?’, I could list a few more but I think you get the point,” he says.
Bucky considers this, “okay, out of the number of alphas that you’ve met how many of them caused you some level of harm and is that percentage why you’re so suspicious of alphas?”
Tony was impressed because at least that was an actual question, “some ninety eight percent,” he says, “and you’d be stupid not to fear a population that hurts you ninety eight percent of the time. Don’t look so surprised, every time I’ve walked into a room for almost my entire life people have treated me as if I was a prop. Talking over me, deciding what’s ‘best’ for me, telling me what I can and cannot do, what I am and am not capable of, staring at me like I’m some sort of sex object, sniffing at me, making rude comments. Almost every time I come in contact with an alpha they act as if they know what to do with my life better than I do, they talk about me like I’m not even there, like I’m a prop in my own life with which they must control by any means necessary. The amount of business partners who’ve tried to use Commands on me is nothing short of terrifying. Imagine if someone couldn’t resist? Makes me feel exposed, frightened. I’ve learned to overcompensate,” he says bluntly.
Bucky looks frightened himself, and shocked, “that… that sounds remarkably how HYDRA treated me. Minus the torture, but that only happened until I learned to play along, do what they want. That ever happen to you, torture?” Bucky asks.
Tony shrugs, “depends on what you consider torture. The terrorists that kidnapped me, they were ordered to kill me by Obadiah but they saw use for me. Unfortunately for them I’m very stubborn and claim bites did not make me easier to control, actually I’m pretty sure they killed the guys they had bite me because I’m strong willed enough to access the brains of the people who bite me, at least in my experience. So instead they chose to torture someone else because I saw more value in his life than mine and now he’s dead, mostly unrelated to torture. The real damage came from Howard though, he did damage I’m still trying to deconstruct, and Obadiah continued his shit long after the guy died until I wasn’t really me anymore, mostly I was Howard.” It took him nearly dying to figure that out and that upset him greatly.
Bucky doesn’t say anything to that, recognizing that Tony didn’t need or want to be comforted. Tony appreciates it because he loathed when people coddled him, which was why he enjoyed Pepper and Rhodey’s company so much, they never felt the need to treat him like china.
*
Sam, Tony was sure, was going to be the death of him and maybe Steve. Three times that asshole managed to shove them into the same room and somehow even managed to give them common topics to talk about without even speaking to either one of them. Two days ago their topic was dogs, turned out Steve was a dog person and Tony was particularly fond of cats, yesterday their topic was Bucky and the new arm Tony was designing for him, and today he was getting beat up by Steve. Tony wasn’t going to lie, if this was any other situation he would have tried to seduce Steve long ago because his body was sinful. This, however, was not a normal situation and he was not going to let Sam win even if that meant missing out on licking Steve’s abs, which was a damn travesty.
Steve notices that Tony isn’t paying attention though and calls him on it, “Tony, why are you so distracted?” he asks.
Tony raises an eyebrow, “have you seen you shirtless? Because if you haven’t, man you are missing out,” he says, shamelessly checking Steve out.
Steve looks vaguely and Tony would feel bad if Bucky hadn’t told him that Steve still had a lot of self-confidence issues from his skinny days. Now Tony was determined to point out that, hello, Steve was hot, and also skinny Steve was hot too. He was upset that he’d missed out on that opportunity; he had so many ideas and no skinny Steve to test them on. And big Steve was out because Sam had expectations and Tony refused to meet them, preferring his own expectations instead. “Tony stop staring at me and pay attention,” he says.
Tony snorts, “oh I’ve been paying attention, just not to foot work. Which is boring by the way, so I figured I’d focus on something more interesting, like your muscle movements, and I’d like to take this opportunity to point out I’m still technically learning.” And he was, but once Steve’s movements were becoming predictable he changed them again and Tony was getting annoyed of that.
“Stop being weird and pay attention,” Steve scolds and gives him a new set of instructions that Tony listens to, barely, because he had already worked out the logistics in his head.
Steve seems to sense something was up because he sighs and steps back, “what is happening in your head, you usually aren’t this… bad,” he says and wrinkles his nose at the word, like insulting Tony was distasteful no matter how true the comment was.
Tony shrugs, “you make your move, I figure it out, blah blah whatever, and then the next logical step is to figure out a new way to get the same results or a new way to get different but just as effective results. Obviously,” he says and makes a face, like he expected Steve to know that already.
Steve frowns, “Tony no, that’s not how fighting works, just go with the first idea,” he says.
Tony makes a face, “why would I do that though? Like I already know how to do that, you’re supposed to learn, not repeat the same five things over and over again,” he says like it’s obvious.
Steve’s eyebrows draw together, “Tony, no, that’s not how fighting works, it doesn’t really evolve like tech does. Just… just to the first thing you figure out,” he says.
Tony tries to process that, really, he does, but that makes no sense at all to him. “Why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you think of new, more efficient, faster ways to take out your opponent? That’s what makes sense,” he says. How… things didn’t function without improvement, innovation, without something new happening.
“Fighting is a simpler concept than what you’re used to, you don’t really need to improve it if it works. I mean you have to take on every opponent in a different way but the human body never changes, you just need to figure out what makes that particular body break. That generally doesn’t involve more than recalling similar incidences or finding some particularly convoluted way to punch someone in the face,” he says.
Tony doesn’t get it because any fighting he’s participated in involved improvement of some sort thought it’s always involved tech. “Fighting is more art than science,” Steve explains, “once you figure out what works, and how other people work, it’s only matter of time before someone falls. Just make sure that person isn’t you,” he tells Tony and they move through some more sequences.
Repetitive tasks never did hold his attention for that long though so when Steve manages to take him down he’s not all that surprised. Steve sighs, apparently ignoring their close proximity, “Tony I get that you get bored easily but your attention span usually isn’t this short. Something distracting you?” he asks.
Ugh, besides the beautiful creature that was currently looming over him? No. Should he feel threatened? Probably. Well, he kind of felt a little threatened, “count me down as scared and horny,” he mumbles under his breath.
Steve rolls his eyes and pulls himself up, dragging Tony with him, “seriously?” he asks.
“Yeah, you’re right, I’m making it weird. I should keep my dumb thoughts to myself but seriously, if I’m not actually going to improve the system why even bother to learn it?” he asks logically.
“Working within a system can be valuable too, Tony, and the possibilities are basically endless. There’s a lot you can do by learning to move your body in different ways,” he says.
“I’m perfectly content with the ways I can currently move my body, thank you,” he says and realizes how weird that sounded, “that wasn’t supposed to be a weird sexual comment, it was supposed to reference my ability to make tech and whatnot,” he says because he didn’t want to be that guy.
Steve nods, “yeah I got that, but don’t you think that’s limiting? Only learning to break the system but never learning to use it? logically you should know how to do both considering one directly effects how effectively you can do the other,” he says.
So Steve has a point, but Tony’s learned and broken all the systems he wanted to, he didn’t feel the need to learn this too. “Sure, but this is a system I can do without, I’ve been doing just fine without it thus far,” he points out.
Steve shrugs, “sure, but we were doing just fine without all the tech you’ve invented, that doesn’t mean our lives weren’t improved by it. This could improve your life too,” Steve says and damn, Tony can’t argue with that logic so off he goes to suffer under Steve’s instruction.
*
He was well and truly exhausted, enough that he was actually tired and could probably sleep but he had some things to do in the lab first. He lets himself in and JARVIS remains suspiciously quiet, Tony’s about to ask why JARVIS was giving him the cold shoulder but the answer turns around. He isn’t a moron, he’s seen Nat when shit like this happened though admittedly it wasn’t that often and Bruce was the only one who could snap her out of it, mostly because she couldn’t break Bruce like she could the others. Bucky, he knows, isn’t really Bucky anymore and he had no clue what was supposed to help.
So he did what he did best, he acted like an asshole.
“Look Bucky, I get the whole smoky eye thing, it’s hot, but you seemed to have gotten your makeup a little bit… everywhere,” he says and gestures to Bucky’s general eye area, “maybe you should talk to Clint, he’s great with makeup,” he suggests. Turns out Tony actually looked great with smoky eyes but he wasn’t surprised, his face was just that versatile and pretty.
Bucky tilts his head to the side, drawing Tony’s attention back to him, “who the hell is Bucky?” he asks.
Tony sighs, “look man, you’re having a shitty day and all that but you need to get your shit together because you the hell is Bucky,” he says flippantly. He probably should be more worried about this but for now he was strangely calm. Probably the ‘calm before you get violently fucking murdered by an ex assassin’ thing that everyone seemed so fond of talking about.
Bucky shifts slightly and a flash catches Tony’s eye, “oh, you’re holding a knife, JARVIS call Steve. Gotta admit I did not think I was going to die this way, but on the plus side it’s a weird and unusual death that people will talk about forever so I guess my dying wish will be fulfilled. Haha, get it, cuz I’m about to die, dying wish? You suck,” he tells Bucky, talking faster and more than usual.
Bucky frowns, “you talk a lot,” he says.
“Congratulations,” Tony says, “you aren’t the first person to make that criticism, but you might be the last.” This was absolutely not how he wanted to die and frankly he was a little upset that nothing was going to blow up.