Enough
Tony has spent a lot of time in dangerous situations but a disassociated ex- HYDRA weapon was not on his list of things he has handled before. If Bucky was a weapon he’d be fine, he knew weapons, they were easy, predictable. People? They were the opposite of that, always doing something stupid, unpredictable, they weren’t something one could take apart and put back together at will. It took time to do that and even then Tony knew plenty of people who’ve been ripped apart at the seams and put back together in all sorts of fucked up ways and he has yet to see the person remain undone in the way the person who made them that way wanted.
Wanda fought back every step of the way, Natasha went on a killing spree, he fought his own captors and they had never even managed to break him, just bend him a little, Skye persevered in some surprising ways, Clint has dealt with mind control and that didn’t stick either. Bucky, he assumed, was something like the rest of the people he dealt with but all of those people dealt with things in wildly different ways and for some reason Tony had thought that maybe Steve would know how to help. That was not the case.
Bucky remains calm, not moving whatsoever while Tony waited for Steve to show up and deal with… whatever this was. If Bucky had any particular feelings about Tony they didn’t really show, he simply watched as if he was mildly curious but mostly detached from those feelings. When Steve shows up Bucky’s body language changes completely, shifting as if he was preparing for a fight and his facial expression changes too, going from mostly blank to concentrated. Shit. “Ugh,” he says and both Steve and Bucky turn to look at him, “what the hell, guys?” he asks.
“Get out,” Steve tells him and hell no, he was not going to have the two of them brawl in his lab. They could go brawl in Bruce’s lab. Okay so more like Bruce’s room-turned-lab, there was only so much room in the house and Tony claimed lab space and Fitsimmons claimed the basement so Bruce got the short stick.
“No, this is my space, I’m not leaving it!” he says and Bucky frowns slightly, head tilting to the side. Categorizing information no doubt.
Steve rolls his eyes, “I don’t have time for your stubbornness Tony, get out, it’s safer.”
“No offense but Bucky didn’t look like he was going to rip anyone’s faces off until you showed up so from where I’m standing you’re the problem here,” he says bluntly and admittedly he probably should have thought that through before saying it but having lived some time with Loki and Natasha he sort of lost his patience for sugar coating things. It was just easier to call things what they were regardless of the feelings that got hurt. It was more efficient.
Steve’s eyebrows shoot up, “excuse me?” he says, shifting to face Tony more than Bucky and Tony watches as Bucky adjusts himself, shifting so he was still just as prepared if Steve suddenly chose to re-focus on him.
“I said he was fine before you walked in-”
“You call this fine-”
“For the current situation yeah, not consistently recalculating body language in preparation for a fight is the better state of mind. Why is he reacting this way? You’re closer to him than anyone else,” Tony says, frowning. He would have figured Steve’s presence would sooth Bucky, maybe get him to come back to himself but it only seemed to further entrench Bucky in his dissociative state.
“Contrary to what you think you don’t know everything,” Steve snaps and excuse him, Tony asked a question; there was no need for the attitude.
“Look, I figured you’d help and you haven’t so maybe you should just… go or something,” he says and Steve looks at him like he was stupid, which only pisses Tony off more. It wasn’t as if he much wanted to be stuck in a room with someone who might do god knows what to him, Bucky just seemed to react better to being alone with him than he did with Steve.
“You have no idea what you’re doing-”
“Do you?” Tony asks, interrupting Steve, “or are you going to just wing it until something works? Because if it’s option two than we’re in the same boat and you don’t have much of a right to tell me to leave considering we’d be doing the same damn thing.”
Steve goes to open his mouth but Bucky interrupts them, “enough,” he says quietly and Tony can’t tell if it’s Bucky or… not.
Steve’s expression softens and for the first time Tony sees him as something other than the irritatingly sharp alpha Sam seems to think was a good match for him. Steve steps forward slowly and Bucky regards him with suspicion but he doesn’t react too noticeably, he simply watches. “Hey Buck, are you okay? Do you know me?” he asks softly, taking another slow step forward.
Bucky takes a step back and looks at Tony. Steve, Tony thinks, tries not to react, but the pain still shows on his face anyways. “Uhh, it’s fine. Steve’s fine,” he says because he doesn’t know what else to say.
He doesn’t believe the words though and Bucky knows it, “you don’t trust him,” he says bluntly.
Tony wonders how, exactly Steve feels, because he can’t imagine what he would do if the situations were reversed and Rhodey trusted Steve more than Tony he had no idea what he’d do. Well, he had some general ideas; number one would be hurt and pissed off though not at Rhodey. So he treads lightly, sort of, he wasn’t in the habit of lying and he wasn’t going to start to save Steve some hurt feelings. “No,” he says, “I don’t trust him, but you trust him more than anyone else I’ve seen you with and I trust you,” he tells Bucky.
Bucky relaxes some and Steve flinches as if Bucky slapped him. Tony feels bad for the guy, barely, because he couldn’t imagine being Steve in this situation, watching as someone you’re connected to more than anyone else trusts a virtual stranger more than you. “You trust me?” Bucky asks quietly, “Why?”
Tony shrugs, “you’ve had more than enough opportunity to hurt me, or Steve, but you haven’t. And before you,” Tony waves his hand around and drops it when Bucky flinches, “before whatever it is that’s happened to you happened you told me that you liked to come here and watch me work, that it was calming. I think that maybe you were trying to get that back, that calm, but you didn’t realize it because you’re a little broken right now and I kind of fucked everything up by assuming Steve would fix it,” he says, trailing off because he had no idea if he was even remotely correct.
Bucky frowns and his grip on his knife tightens, “but I could hurt you,” he says, sizing Tony up.
Steve looks worried and shifts a bit; looking back and forth between Bucky and Tony like he wasn’t quite sure what to do here. Tony sighs, “then do it, I don’t have time for some long drawn out movie death scene in which I tell everyone how much I love them or some shit. If you want me dead, fine, then kill me.”
“Tony!” Steve says, looking oddly offended by the statement.
Bucky just looks confused, like he had no idea why someone would be so complicit in their own death, “why are you willing to fight for me but not yourself?” he asks.
Maybe Tony was wrong about that initial assessment of Bucky’s thought process. He shrugs, “because I low-key want to die, I figured all the stupid stunts, recklessness, and arrogance to cover a low self-confidence made that pretty obvious. Guess not,” he says flippantly, “and don’t you dare look at me like that. I don’t need your pity,” he snaps at Steve, who gives him that look, the one people gave dying children because they felt bad for them. If there was anything Tony hated more than people trying to control him it was people taking pity on him.
“But you have so much fire,” Bucky says quietly.
“To do what? All I’ve managed to do with it is fuck everything up, I’ve made a mess of my tech so large I’ve spent the last two years cleaning up after myself and it’s still done nothing. What’s the point?” he snaps. He’s spent enough time thinking about it, obsessing over it in his own head, probably far too much not that he cared.
“Tony-” Steve starts and Tony cuts him off.
“No, don’t you dare treat me differently, I don’t need that. Besides, Bucky’s the one who needs help,” he points out and Steve’s attention, mercifully, shifts back to Bucky. He looks mostly like himself now, though traumatized.
*
Steve watches Tony more closely after the incident in his lab and he’s surprised that what he had mistaken for insatiable curiosity coupled with absolute stupidity was actually incredibly dangerous self-destructive behavior. And he hadn’t noticed it simply because he held a number of biases in regards to Tony Stark. It made him wonder what else he missed when he didn’t look at things more objectively, or at least consider other possibilities. He doesn’t notice Natasha watching him though, probably because she hadn’t wanted him to, until she sits down beside him, “he’d never do it. Commit suicide, I mean,” she says, getting straight to the point.
“What makes you think that?” he asks because he wasn’t so sure. Tony did too many things that would result in his imminent death for it not to be taken seriously.
“Years of observation. If he wanted to be dead he’d be dead, he’s a genius, I’m sure he could figure out an effective method of suicide but he’d never follow through on it no matter how reckless he acts. He’s a perfectionist, to a level I’ve never encountered before, if nothing else he’ll live until he thinks he’s his work is done. The problem with a perfectionist, though, is that the work is never good enough, it’s never complete. He’s fine, Steve, leave him be because the last thing that would help him is you trying to fix what he doesn’t think is a problem.” With that Natasha gets up and walks away, clearly convinced that she had warned him off. She either wasn’t as good a spy as she thought she was or she had some ulterior motive to her words because Steve was most certainly not leaving Tony be.
He decides to talk to Sam because he’s known Tony for a while, spent a lot of time with him, and in some considerably intimate ways too. “Hey,” Sam says when he spots Steve, “how’s Bucky?” he asks.
“Sleeping, you know how he gets after these sort of situations. He’ll be out for at least another four hours, probably longer. I actually wanted to talk to you about Tony though,” he says and Sam goes from mildly interested to ecstatic in point two seconds. Steve decides to crush his very false hopes fast, “in the time you’ve known Tony have you known him to be suicidal?” he asks.
Sam snorts and that pisses Steve off because this was a serious problem and no one else seemed to see it that way, “look, I know what you’re thinking. I know he has a lot of self-destructive tendencies and he’ll take just about any opportunity to punish himself but he’s not suicidal,” Sam says, using the tone that he typically chose to comfort people though it didn’t do any good.
“You said he flung himself off a building, Sam, if that isn’t suicidal I don’t know what is,” he says and god he should have seen that before, that particular example was very obvious.
Sam rolls his eyes, “he jumped after spending almost two years on those wings, if he wanted to die he would have choose literally any of the previous prototypes, but he tested those on test dummies. He full well knew they would work and that’s why he jumped. He’s a perfectionist, if he didn’t think they were ready he wouldn’t have taken them to me let alone jumped off SI, he would never leave a project unfinished.”
“He left that terrorist bomb unfinished,” Steve points out, he was there, it wasn’t complete.
Sam shakes his head, “that wasn’t a project, that was an attempt to control him. He had no investment in that, no reason to complete it, especially since it would be used to kill innocent people. The suit was the project and he has yet to stop working on it, and he never will because there will always be an improvement he could add, something else he could fix. He’s that way with everything he builds, there’s always something new to follow, something more he could add to what he’s already made. He’s compelled to do more, to not leave his work unfinished. That drive is far stronger than his desire to die and it always will be, though I don’t see why this would matter to you at all. Yesterday you didn’t seem to care,” Sam points out, raising an eyebrow.
“That was before he decided to tell Bucky to kill him,” Steve says, “imagine if Bucky had followed through on it, the damage would have been irreparable.”
Sam gives him a look, “we all know that Tony would have never been killed, you wouldn’t have allowed it, and I’m sure at that point something had happened for Tony to deem Bucky safe, or at least what Tony deems safe. You aren’t interested in Tony because you think he’s a danger to Bucky; you’re interested in Tony because you’re interested in Tony. In a non-relationship way so don’t give me that look, and for gods sakes do not talk to Tony about this, it’ll do nothing but make him shut down. If you want to help Tony than play his game, learn how to manipulate him. He isn’t an idiot, he’ll figure out you’re doing it, but if he thinks the manipulations are harmless he won’t care.”
Steve frowns, “that makes no sense, he doesn’t want to be controlled but if he perceives manipulations as harmless he doesn’t care? That makes no sense,” he says.
Sam shrugs, “I’ve accepted long ago that Tony is a very long series of contradictions that just happen to be more obvious than the average person’s. If there’s no worry for his personal safety, a drain on his resources, or a danger to his friends than he doesn’t care if he’s being manipulated because there’s no perceived downside to letting it happen,” Sam says, shrugging.
Long list of contradictions was an understatement, nothing about Tony Stark made any sort of sense.
*
Tony is curled up in front of the T.V with popcorn watching some truly horrible conspiracy theories on aliens building the pyramids, apparently white people couldn’t just accept that black people were great at architecture, when Bucky walks in rubbing his eyes. “Hey,” he mumbles and throws himself on the couch next to Tony, “the fuck are you watching.”
“Alien conspiracy theories,” he says, grinning. The guy on the T.V chooses that moment to spout some theory on aliens wiping the dinosaurs out, suggesting genocide instead of extinction, and Bucky gives him a look. “I didn’t say I believed the theories, I just think they’re fun because they’re so easy to blow holes through,” he says.
Bucky looks a little less judgmental and settles in his seat, stealing some of the popcorn Tony had sitting in his lap, “what? I like popcorn,” he says and steals some more, ignoring Tony’s protests. They watch alien theories together, Tony commenting on how flimsy the theories were while Bucky seemed to take more of an interest in Tony that the show.
“Do you not believe in aliens?” Bucky asks eventually.
Tony raises an eyebrow, “do I believe in aliens? Sure, we can’t possibly be the only hospitable planet ever, that’s just… statistically unlikely, not to mention arrogant. But aliens visiting earth to help us along technologically, helping us build things though interestingly only ancient structures, and only structures from ancient cultures that aren’t white, yeah, okay. I mean yeah, of course life has to exist elsewhere, but assuming that they’re humanoid, have better tech, that they care about us, none of that is realistic. Only humans would be so arrogant as to believe that we’re so important that aliens have spent millennia helping us do shit while taking no credit for… what purpose? Right, none, because aliens don’t get the credit, and if they did exist I have no doubt that people would be more interested in experimenting on them than collaborating with them. We aren’t exactly the ideal group of people to help,” he says.
Bucky nods along, looking surprised at Tony’s explanation, “I never really considered racism in alien theories though I guess that’s kind of obvious,” Bucky says, frowning.
“Alien theories tend to be flimsy at best, I mean show me one real reason aliens would give a flying fuck about us aside from the fact that humanity collectively has a grandiose sense of importance and thinks that obviously we’re important and then maybe, maybe I’ll consider aliens have come here,” he says. “And why they are so racist, how come they never help white people build shit? Right, because obviously black people and indigenous people can’t build cool shit, white people though, obviously we can.”
He rolls his eyes and Bucky laughs softly, “you’ve never heard alien theories about white people?”
“No, it’s always Egyptian pyramids and Mayan temples, I mean I’m sure the theories exist, but they aren’t the ones repeated over and over again by popular media and discourse. Also one of these things totally mentioned the gay agenda and that is just awesome,” he says, snickering. Bucky joins in on his making fun of alien theories, pointing out very obvious oversights, and he steals more of Tony’s popcorn.
Tony isn’t expecting it when Steve shows up too but he largely suspects Sam was involved, which was confirmed when Steve said that Sam told him Bucky was up. “We’re making fun of alien theories,” Bucky says excitedly.
Steve sighs and sits down next to Bucky, watching the T.V for all of five seconds before he’s joined in on the obvious oversights the theorists had. “God, this is melting my brain,” Steve complains and leans over Bucky, stealing Tony’s popcorn.
“Why do you people steal my food, make your own,” he complains.
“Do you really need all that popcorn?” Steve asks, stealing more.
“Yes, I’m growing, the fact that I’m growing out instead of up is irrelevant,” he says, shooing Bucky out of his popcorn. Bucky ends up stealing the bowl and Tony gives up because he and Steve practically inhale the rest of his snack. Tony was already plotting his revenge, particularly against Steve because rude.
“You should start training some more,” Steve eventually tells Tony, apparently trying to play nice after their last encounter.
“Eat my entire ass,” Tony tells him.