Chapter 3
When Tony finally got to them, after cutting through pounds of debris, he almost didn’t see Penny at first. Bucky had completely covered her, wrapping his body around hers, rubbing her frigid hands between his, anxiously pleading with her to wake up again. His metal arm was gone. He had ripped it off trying to get to Penny, digging a precarious tunnel to her with his normal hand.
But then Tony saw the leg jutting out at an awkward angle before disappearing underneath a heap of concrete, illuminated in the blue glow of his suit. Bucky turned to him, a pale forlorn expression stamped on his face, mouth agape in helplessness.
They lifted the rubble only to be faced with a bloody mess that looked like it used to be a leg. Tony felt bile creep up the back of his throat but he swallowed it down painfully. Penny screamed as the debris was removed, her eyes remaining shut as she threw her head back in agony.
Tony barely remembered what happened after that. He remembers her crying but her eyes never opening. He remembers them flying through the air together, her blood coating his suit, creating a jetstream behind them as it slicked off from the wind. He remembers fear so potent he could feel it pumping through his veins.
And then he had been sitting, blood coating his hands and clothes, in the sterile waiting area of the medbay with no apparent understanding of how long he had been there. He lifted his gaze from his bloody hands to find Bucky sitting across from him, the same shell-shocked expression on his face that Tony imagined was on his own. He was covered in Penny’s blood and his metal arm was still missing, leaving a spattering of jagged wires in its place.
“You told me she was fine.” Tony’s voice was hard and coarse, his eyes boring holes in Bucky’s chest. Anger was easier than fear. It was easier than sadness. Than guilt.
“I didn’t know.” Bucky sounded hollow. Everything about him seemed hollow. Tony didn’t care.
“How didn’t you know? How could you not know her leg was being completely crushed?” His voice raised as his mind flooded with images of Penny’s mangled leg. Bucky just cast his eyes to the floor with a watery expression.
“She didn’t say anything.” Bucky grasped for something more, but couldn’t find the words.
“Of course, she didn’t. She’s a fucking kid trying to prove herself to the Avengers.” He couldn’t stop yelling. He wished he wasn’t. He wanted to ask him if she had cried. If she had been scared. He wanted to ask him if she had called for him, if she had been angry at him for leaving her. But he didn’t ask any of that. Instead, he just stared daggers into Bucky, letting his anger keep him moving and nothing else.
“Tony--” Bucky started.
“You were the adult in the room. You were supposed to watch out for her.” Tony cut him off, his voice as cold and steely as the blade of a knife. Bucky dropped his head lower and didn’t reply. That only added fuel to the fire blazing in Tony’s gut, and suddenly this was no longer just about Penny. This was about all of it. It was about his parents and Steve’s favoritism and the man who had threatened to tear the Avengers apart at the seams.
“Make no mistake, Barnes.” Tony stood and crossed the hallway, towering over Bucky, his finger drawing an invisible line between Bucky’s eyes.
“You may sleep in my building, eat from my fridge, and piss in my toilet. You may fight on my team and fire my weapons. And you may even think that means I’ve somehow forgotten the person you were. The things that you did. But I remember.” Now Tony pointed his finger into his own chest, his voice rising as he tore into Bucky.
“I know who you are, Bucky Barnes. You’re nothing but the fucked up science experiment created by a masochist nazi.” He knew he was crossing a line. Hell, he could basically see it drawn in thick black Sharpie across the medbay floor. Tony was grateful Bucky was sparing him from having to see his face, instead keeping it firmly tilted away from him.
But Tony couldn’t help himself.
It had been six months since Berlin. Six months since he discovered his parents had been murdered. His mother’s neck had been snapped while she was pleading for her life. Six months since he realized the hands that had put his parents to death had been Bucky’s. And Steve had known about it.
That had been a bigger blow than Tony was comfortable admitting. It hadn’t been until that moment--that betrayal--that Tony had realized he had seen Steve as something like a friend. Or at least an equal. A mutual respect had grown between them in the years of working together. And it was that respect that kept them in check. They saw the burden of leadership in each other, they saw past the performative patriotism and the cynical chauvinism in one another to the moral code carved deep beneath. It wasn’t a friendship, necessarily. More a partnership. A co-parenting unit raising a child into fruition, their egos kept dampened by the understanding that what they were raising was more important than themselves.
And then Steve had looked Tony in the eyes and told him he had known about his parents, a glint of righteousness in his eyes, and all of that shattered. That fragile understanding of the order of things was severed and Tony realized that there was one thing more important than the team to Steve. And that was Bucky.
And then Steve and Bucky had beaten him and left him for dead in the freezing Siberia wasteland.
But Tony had been the collateral damage of enough marital spats to know when mommy and daddy fight it only hurts the kids. So he swallowed his damaged pride, his lust for revenge, and his grief and he called Steve. He smiled and lied and played nice with the metal-armed murderer. He tried to put to rest all the insults and threats he never got to say to Bucky. He tried to reorient his energy. He put more effort into patching things up with Pepper. He moved the Avengers upstate. He offered the kid a spot on the team, and when she turned that down, he gave her an internship.
And things were stable. They weren’t good, but they weren’t on the brink of collapse. And that would have to be enough, at least for now. That was as much as he could do.
But then he had seen Penny’s leg crushed under rubble. He held her while she wailed as they meticulously cut her from the debris. They had been down there for nearly two hours before Bucky called him. Two hours.
“Steve and his band of misfits may be willing to fall in line behind a good old-fashioned redemption story but I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m smarter than Steve. Less trusting, too. And I protect my family from monsters like you. So if I ever see you near Parker again, I swear to God I’ll--” Tony looked like he might hit him. He felt like he might, too. It was like he was seeing himself from above, no longer in control of the fury that had overtaken him. He knew it was misplaced--he knew Bucky hadn’t meant to hurt Penny--but still, it was unstoppable. His own Pandora’s box had been opened inside himself. He wanted to see Bucky punished.
“Tony!” The commanding voice of America shot through the room, silencing Tony in an instant. Tony wheeled around to see Steve in the doorway, an incredulous look plastered on his face. Quickly shaking off the look of shock, Tony took a step back from Bucky, no longer towering over him. Bucky’s eyes were still trained on the floor.
“You should keep your dog on a tighter leash.” Tony scoffed, crossing his arms and turning away from Bucky.
“What happened wasn’t his fault.” Steve took a challenging few steps toward Tony. Tony just rolled his eyes. That was Steve: always ready to put someone in their place.
“Oh, I know. Nothing is ever his fault. He was brainwashed, right? Or it was an accident? Or he didn’t know better?” Tony quickly retorted.
“This isn’t about Bucky,” Steve responded, his trademark authority clear in his tone. It made Tony’s skin crawl, the way Steve always thought he knew better. Always thought he was the only one in the room with a heart just because he wore his on his sleeve.
“Don’t tell me what this is about. Do you think I’m not aware of the kid behind those doors?” Tony’s voice raised as he thought of Penny on some operating table, cold and alone.
“You’re right. I’m sorry.” Steve raised his hands like he was trying to soothe a wild horse but his eyes kept darting back to Bucky, his head still hanging low.
“What are you two even doing here?” Tony asked, incredulous. He wanted to leave. He didn’t want to have this conversation now, especially not with the present company. But he couldn’t leave Penny.
“I wanted to see how the kid was doing. Bucky brought you in.” Of course. Of course. Another thing he owed to these two.
“Don’t say it like that. Don’t say ‘Bucky brought me in’ like it was some hero’s journey. He walked me to the medbay. I didn’t ask him to stay. And I didn’t ask you to be here.” Tony turned away from Steve, dismissing him with a quick wave of his hand as if that could compel him to turn into smoke.
“Well, that’s good because I’m not here for you.” Steve shot back, the passive aggression that rubbed against Tony like sandpaper alive and well.
“Don’t highroad me. What do you know about this kid, exactly? How many conversations have you had with her?” Tony wheeled back around, his finger finding a place to punch against Steve’s chest.
“I know she’s from Queens.” Steve started, but Tony just laughed in his face.
“So the place where she’s from. You know her name, and the place where she’s from.” Tony deadpanned. Steve just stared him down, silently.
“Leave. Oh, and don’t worry. I’ll still fix up your boyfriend’s arm.” Tony relished watching Steve’s face redden with anger. He loved drawing that out in him, the anger that Steve tried so hard to ignore--as if that meant it didn’t exist. He liked to remind Steve he was no better than the rest of them.
“Whatever, Tony.” Steve scoffed. But Tony knew he had won. He smirked and turned away from Steve, shooing Bucky up from his pathetic spot on the chair. The pair turned to leave when the fated medbay doors shot open and a very frazzled Helen Cho stepped into the waiting room. The three men immediately snapped to attention, whatever was brewing between them dissipating in the face of Helen’s expression. Tony tried to ignore the amount of blood on her scrubs.
“What? What is it?” Tony spit out, finally getting his mouth to work.
“We’re still operating. The procedure is going fine but the anesthesia… we haven’t tested it yet, we haven’t needed to…” Helen’s usual professional tranquility had completely vanished, leaving her rambling through sentences, the necessary information absent.
“So she’s awake?” Tony asked. Helen nodded quickly in response.
“Can’t you just put her back under? Use Cap’s stuff?” Tony continued, trying not to let his frustration creep into his tone.
“We can’t. That amount of anesthesia, even with her metabolism rate, it could cause complications.” Tony’s eyes darted frantically to the doors, his body fighting the urge to sprint through them.
“Okay, so what are you doing out here talking to us about it?” Tony questioned, his anxiety mounting. Precious seconds were being wasted, how could they all not see that?
“We’ve numbed the area, so Ms. Parker will only feel a slight discomfort. But she’s being… difficult. She’s confused, disoriented…” Helen tried to explain, her face scrunching up in frustration as she tried to find the right words.
“Helen. Please, just get to the point.” Tony somehow managed to keep his voice level, despite the urge to grab Helen by the shoulders and shake the information out of her. Helen just took a deep breath and set herself straight.
“Has this happened before? Has Ms. Parker been… trapped under a building before?” Helen posed the question to the three men. They just exchanged looks between one another, all but Bucky looking completely lost.
“What?” Steve got to the question before Tony.
“She seems to think she has. And we can’t get her to calm down. I need information and I need help. My team can’t perform the surgery without risk of hurting her if she doesn’t comply.” Now that the confession had been made, some of Helen’s stability was returning.
“Has this happened before?” Helen repeated the question to Tony, but all she was met with was a blank, fearful expression.
“I--I don’t know. I don’t know.” Tony hated himself for not knowing. Hated himself more for realizing that it very well could have happened and he had no idea.
“Homecoming.” Bucky broke the stunned silence with a single word.
“What?” Tony wheeled around to face him.
“She said it happened after Homecoming. A parking garage out in Jersey. Some guy with wings… stealing from your plane.” With each word Bucky spoke, the sick feeling in Tony’s gut grew. He knew exactly what night Bucky was talking about.
“Did she mention injuries?” Helen redirected her attention to Bucky without missing a beat, her professionalism as strong as ever.
“No. No. But she said she lifted the rubble off herself.” Even Helen’s eyebrows raised slightly and her mouth turned into a fine line.
“Alright. Mr. Stark, I assume you would like to accompany me into the operating room?” Helen ignored the broken look on Tony’s face, trying to remind him of his responsibility without telling him of it.
“Yeah, yeah. Of course.” Tony shook his head slightly as if that could shake the fog away, but it still lingered, settling ominously around his shoulders. Whatever rage that had overtaken him moments ago was gone, leaving an empty husk in its place.
Steve and Bucky watched silently as Tony walked numbly behind Helen, following her through the double doors to Penny.