The Winter Soldier shows up in Tony’s workshop on the first day of December.
Tony decides he’s a hallucination, and keeps throwing empty boxes at the wall.
—
He drives Peter to school because the kid’s been through enough shit as it is and also he shouldn’t have to walk that far in the snow, so really it’s for all practical reasons, Tony tells Pepper every morning when she stares at him with one eyebrow perfectly raised, stirring her tea with a glacial pace. Sometimes Morgan goes with them because Peter’s her favorite person in the world but she’s asleep still; it’s Monday, and they were up late watching Finding Nemo.
“Bye Pepper,” Peter says, soft, and it makes her smile so fast it’s like flipping on a switch.
“Be smart,” she says, just like she does every morning.
Tony jingles the keys. “C’mon, kid, you don’t want to be late.”
“Drive safe,” Pepper says, and Tony’s heart swells so large he’s afraid it’s going to shatter in his chest. They leave her there with her tea and the morning paper, bare feet curled beneath her on the booth in the breakfast nook that was one of Tony’s projects after everything. She doesn’t say goodbye to them, and they don’t say goodbye to her, because that would be jinxing everything they’ve built here, together; a small pocket of safety in a world so devoid of it.
Usually the mornings go like this: Happy and Tony have their coffee and see if Morgan will wake up on time. Then they drive to May’s apartment in Queens to pick up Peter. Now, though, the mornings have shifted. Happy has time off and decided to take it in the Netherlands. May, who also, coincidentally, has time off, decided to go to Europe. “I haven’t seen as much of the world as I’d like to,” is what she said to Peter. “I just need a break,” is what she told Tony. Technically, Happy and May aren’t going to see each other on their respective vacations, but Happy’s shit at keeping secrets; his whistling filled the compound for a week before his flight. It was nice to hear. Peter showed up with his bag and a bemused smile fixed to his face, like he was more amused with the fact that he was playing along with the pseudo-secret than the fact that he knew about it. But it’s nice, the time Tony gets with Peter. He knows not to take it for granted, now. Lessons hard learned, and all that.
Sometimes they listen to music. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they talk. Most of the time they don’t. Maybe before they’d try to fill the empty space with words but there isn’t that pressure now. Tony thinks back to the tense silence between him and his father, a silence that Howard Stark tried to fill with larger-than-life stories of super soldiers and inventing magnificent things to help the army and, privately, Tony wondered if his father’s medals were deserved when he experienced the war behind the walls of a lab.
And Tony must be doing something right, because the silence is never like that with Peter. It’s something they slide into, like a weighted blanket. One of them will talk if they need to.
Today, Peter asks, “How much did you sleep last night?”
Tony glances over at him. They’re caught in a section of traffic, because the day there isn’t any traffic in New York City is the day New Yorkers stop expecting aliens to come pouring out of a hole in the sky. “Why does that sound like a particularly loaded question?”
Peter shrugs. The dark carvings under his eyes are nearly gone; he sleeps better at the compound than at his aunt’s house because, as he explained one sleep-deprived night, he’s always looking after May. “I just know that your sleep wasn’t great before—everything, and I want to make sure you’re okay.”
And Tony’s heart swells again. This kid. This kid. “I’m okay, Pete. I’d tell you if I wasn’t.”
Peter flashes him a supremely unimpressed look.
“Yeah, okay. Maybe I wouldn’t. But it’s not your job to look after me.”
“Who’s job is it, then?”
“Mine.”
Peter sighs. Tony’s expecting him to say something else, but he doesn’t, so he flips on the radio and they listen to shitty music for the rest of the ride.
M.J.’s waiting for him, just like she always is, even though it’s December in the city. She unclenches infinitesimally when she sees Peter, and she even waves at Tony, which is a hell of a lot better than outright ignoring him. Peter had been worried out of his mind about it, after the Blip and the Mysterio shit show that could have been a hell of a lot worse if he hadn’t asked for help, when he introduced the two of them and M.J. had just stared. Hard. Unblinking. Unwavering. And Tony had thought, This is someone I want on Peter’s side.
The thing was, he understands. He knows M.J. looks at him and sees the man who got the most important person in her life dragged into a never-ending cycle of hurt. He understands, because he looks into the mirror and that’s all he can see. So Peter worried that M.J. hated him, and Tony told him not to worry, and they’ve worked to some common understanding over time.
Tony waves back and rolls down the window to ask about her latest research project, which they yell back and forth about for a moment while Peter looks on wearing a smile as bright as the sun and then cars start honking so Tony leaves them to brave the day.
What a thing to expect of kids.
Back home, Morgan’s toddling around and complaining that no one had woken her up to take Peter to school. Tony suggests hot chocolate as a peace offering and they watch Finding Nemo again because it’s Morgan’s new favorite movie and Tony holds his daughter close and promises to never let her go.
—
“We’re going to be okay,” Pepper had said, all kindness and love and everything good that Tony didn’t deserve. “You can rest now.” You can let go.
And he did. He let go of Iron Man.
He didn’t let go of Tony Stark.
—
And maybe that’s selfish, and maybe he doesn’t deserve it, and maybe he’s stolen too much from the world in order to keep living but the world stole a hell of a lot from him.
In his defense, he really thought he was dying. That’s sort of the assumption, when you’re on an alien planet millions of miles from medical assistance, when you’re surrounded by your family and your friends and a whole bunch of other people who you’ve never seen before, and some others who have definitely tried to kill you and who you’ve definitely tried to kill. But Peter was beside him, and Rhodey was at his peripheral, and Pepper was in front of him, and miles away, there was a letter from a Tennessee shithead he had to respond to, and Happy was looking after Morgan, and Morgan was waiting for her dad to come home. And none of them were waiting for Iron Man, they were waiting for Tony.
It was a strange feeling.
And then he died.
Only he didn’t.
He woke up in a hospital, an honest-to-God Earth hospital. He never thought he’d see one of those again. And all of them were still there. Peter beside him, Rodey at his peripheral, Pepper in front of him arguing with a doctor, and Morgan was asleep in the waiting chair, and Happy was on the phone with someone outside who, Tony learned when Happy handed over the phone, was the Tennessee shithead.
Pepper tried to get him to connect with the people who she called his ‘friends’ but they weren’t. They were colleagues at best. (Could they have been friends? Maybe. Maybe in an alternate universe, which is apparently a thing now. Maybe if they hadn’t drawn lines between themselves and him, between right and wrong. Only it wasn’t a matter of right and wrong, he can admit now. But when it comes down to it, they chose against him. They chose against him.)
Pepper handled everything on the legal side. There was the matter of pardoning Wanda Maximoff and Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff (a ghost who was recently a person) and Sam Wilson and Yelena Belova (a person who was recently a ghost) and Scott Lang and everyone else who’s decidedly an enemy of the United States government. There are statements to draft about what happened on Titan. Statements to draft about the disappearance of Captain Steve Rogers, who gave up his shield and vanished, which isn’t an explanation Secretary of State Ross excepted. Wilson took a lot of shit for that, so Pepper called in a favor, and a ghost who was recently a person paid a visit to Ross’s home and that pretty much cleared everything up. There are funerals to attend and funerals to send his condolences to. Tony signs a lot of papers while he’s recuperating in the Earth hospital.
(The only funeral he goes to—and remembers completely—is for King T’Challa who he fought alongside, then argued with, then yelled at while all the terrifying guards looked on with their terrifying spears. Tony has more respect for T’Challa than he has for most of the people he’s worked with, and he hadn’t known T’Challa for very long, but he knew that he was a kind man, a good brother, and a respectful leader. So he goes to the funeral.
It’s an indescribable experience. He gets overwhelmed by the love the Wakandians have for their king; he gets overwhelmed by the love T’Challa obviously had for his people. After, the princess—Shuri—who had been noticeably silent until she vanished with her mother finds him as he’s preparing to leave. She calls him ‘Stark,’ and inquires into his healing, and asks how long he’s going to be in the wheelchair. He tells her the doctors say it’ll be forever. She looks him dead in the eye and says, “They’re wrong.” He gives Shuri all of his actual contact information, Rhodey looking on, amused, and he wants nothing more than for Shuri to meet Peter and M.J. and Harley.
Six months later, his doctor, bemused, tells him the wheelchair was no longer necessary. Tony reaches out and tells Shuri. In response, she sends him a vibranium cane that is tuned directly to Tony’s neurological synapsis.)
After Thanos, he was useless. Not in a self-deprecating way; it’s a fact. Irrefutable. Pepper was the face of the operation. Well, she always was. She was just more in the public eye than she ever was before. Tony didn’t want to be the one people looked to.
And now, he isn’t Iron Man. He’s the guy who drives Peter to school. He’s the guy who, yes, has a shit ton of money, but who now doesn’t spend it on metal suits that protect the people he loves. He’s the guy who has occasional visits from government officials to make sure he’s not breaking any of those rules he risked everything for, back in the day. He’s the guy who helps raise Morgan.
He wants nothing more.
—
The Winter Soldier shows up in Tony’s workshop on the seventh day of December.
Tony glares at him for a long moment—for a hallucination he’s pretty inconsistent about his comings and goings—then goes back to looking over the blueprints for the balcony space.
—
This time it’s not Secretary of State Ross, it’s Agent Ross, who Tony likes a hell of a lot more. For one, he’s got Shuri’s seal of approval which is all the reason Tony needs.
Agent Ross is soft-spoken but firm and great with Morgan. He’s gotten roped into making brownies with her more than once resulting in some adorably hilarious photos. He also doesn’t waste much time on the stupid questions—Have you had any contact with Captain Steve Rogers? Has Captain Steve Rogers attempted to contact you? Have you attempted to aid Captain Steve Rogers?—and instead starts asking about the latest renovation.
The compound isn’t a place to raise a child, and it isn’t a place Tony is particularly fond of, so he’s lended his time to making it feel more like a home. He put in a breakfast nook for Pepper and redid the kitchen so that he and Morgan and Peter can make dinner together and he made the living room a place for comfort as opposed to modernity. He made each of the kids’ rooms something that feels like their own.
“So, what’s the latest passion project?” Ross asks.
Tony wrinkles his nose; he hates that term. It sounds too flimsy for what he’s trying to do. “The balcony doesn’t need to be a landing dock for Iron Man anymore. It would be nice to have some outdoor seating.”
“And the house by the lake?”
“Some minor touch-ups,” Tony shrugs. “Hasn’t changed much since the last time you were there. We’ll probably spend Christmas there.”
“Careful Stark,” Ross says kindly. “You’re going all domestic on us.”
“There’s nothing better,” he says, and they clink glasses.
There was a time when he’d have a panic attack over the fact that the government is keeping close tabs on him, and then probably break down a wall knowing it’s only because they’re looking for Captain Rogers, but now he can’t muster up anything more than a twinge of annoyance on bad days. Today is not a bad day. Today is a good day. Today he and Ross are having gin and tonics in a breakfast nook Tony built with his own two hands. Today they’re sitting around a table that is just that: a table. No fancy gadgets, no hidden mechanisms. Today he can hear his six-year-old daughter jumping around in her room and Pepper is in her study researching the best primary schools to send Morgan to.
“You should know,” Ross says, “that Barton is back in the city.”
Tony takes a sip. “Has he got his kids with him?”
“Nope. He doesn’t seem to be up to anything, though. Wilson’s still in Delacroix, Maximoff is in Westview. As far as I can tell, he’s alone.”
Clint’s never alone, Tony thinks, semi-fondly. But because Ross brought up work, he sics Morgan on him, and Peter gets sent a photo of Morgan holding Ross in a headlock as she tries to braid his hair.
Later in the day—gin and tonics drunk, Ross and Pepper settling some minor details, Tony watching Morgan build a castle out of Jenga blocks—he gets a text from Peter that says Can you pick me up from school? and he’s in the car before he hits send on his response.
Usually, after school for Peter is spent with Ned in a club while M.J. lingers in the background. Or the three of them will go out for boba and do homework. The days when Peter asks to be brought home are the days when his eyes are more vacant than they should be and his fingers tap against his knees in a loop. Tony expects a lot of the kid. Iron Man demanded even more. So now Tony picks him up whenever he asks.
Peter’s friends are with him, and Tony rolls down the window to make sure they have ways to get home. M.J. just scoffs. Ned goes out of his way to convince him that he’s safe and that it’s really no trouble Mr. Stark I’m fine walking home, really, but Tony drives both of them home regardless and even convinces M.J. to promise to send him her research paper when she thinks it’s in a good place.
Then it’s just him and Peter in the car. He tightens his hands around the wheel. “You alright, kid?”
“What?” Peter blinks owlishly at him. “Oh. Oh. It isn’t one of those days. I just got a weird feeling and I thought I should head back early.”
“Weird, like, bad weird?”
Peter shakes his head. “No. I thought Aunt May was in the building but I texted her and she’s in Venice.”
“With Happy.” Happy had sent Pepper a picture of a gondola about a day ago.
“Yeah, with Happy. Which they’re still not admitting to, it’s hilarious. But it wasn’t Aunt May, so it was something else I trust, but they were in the school building which is a bit weird. So, like, confusing weird. That’s all.”
Tony considers this. They’re at a red light for a while, then he keeps driving. About a block from the compound he asks, “How do you feel about going to the lake house for Christmas?”
And Peter starts planning how they’ll transport all the presents without Morgan knowing, and all Tony thinks is, You’re a damn good big brother.
The rest of the night is pretty par for the course until the assassin-agent (ex-assassin? ex-agent?) breaks in (remembered the password that Tony keeps forgetting to change). They make spaghetti aglio e olio with chicken, just like Tony’s mother used to make. They had a chef all of Tony’s childhood, but Maria Stark occasionally grew sentimental, usually after getting a letter from one of her family members, and threw herself into the kitchen with a gusto that was slightly frightening. She make spaghetti aglio e olio, ravioli, cacio e pepe, anything they had the ingredients for. When Tony makes the same dishes he thinks of Maria, and of the specific shade of lipstick she used to wear: red dahlia.
They eat at the dining table, all within arms reach of one another, and they laugh about stupid little things that are funny because they’re little. Peter offers to put Morgan to bed, and Pepper rests her head on Tony’s shoulder.
“We’re doing good,” she murmurs to him, and he presses a kiss to her forehead and tries not to shatter with the force of the love he feels for all of them.
(“I did good back then,” Howard Stark sighs, and Tony, all of ten years old, thinks, Why can’t you do good now?
Steve Rogers always did get the best version of Tony’s father.)
Pepper falls asleep sometime after one o’clock and Tony gives it another hour before sliding out of bed, down the hall, and down the stairs to his workshop. It’s different now without JARVIS or FRIDAY and sometimes the workshop feels achingly empty, which is wildly selfish, but something in him still settles as the door comes into view at the bottom of the stairs. He sees the door and some part of his brain knows that he’s going to solve something.
He opens the door and flicks on the light and Natasha Romanoff, who, technically, is not on U.S. soil at the moment, smiles at him. It gives him about as much comfort as a leopard crouched fifteen feet away.
“Knew Barton wasn’t alone,” he grumbles.
“Good friends are hard to find,” she agrees. “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
“What are you doing here, Tasha?”
She stands from where she had monopolized his favorite chair—his favorite chair! Every movement looks graceful, calculated; a ballerina deciding how and where to stand. “Just cleaning up some loose ends. The world had a bit of an explosion. We haven’t found all the pieces yet.”
“Why does Ross think you’re in Vienna?”
“Secretary Ross’s information is slow.”
“Evidently,” he mutters, the gears in his brain turning. He leans a bit heavier on his cane.
She looks good. Tense, but her eyes are light. The icy tips of her hair are gone save for a strand of blonde right at the front. She’s wearing a green jacket with so, so many pockets. Natasha doesn’t go anywhere she doesn’t want to go. Not anymore. Neither she or Clint made any moves to talk about what happened on Vormir and Tony knows that it’s the kind of thing they’ll never talk about. But they came back, and their eyes were a bit more hollow—a familiar look nowadays—and something changed in them. It feels like a natural progression of life, of war, but when Tony looks at her he feels like he missed several chapters of his favorite book.
Good friends are hard to find. Natasha never says anything she doesn’t mean.
“He’s in New York.”
“It’s his home.”
Tony says, “This hasn’t been his home in a long time,” but he knows he’s wrong. Brooklyn has been Steve’s home for as long as he could breathe. Probably longer. He narrows his eyes. “You know, I could tell Ross and all of you would be screwed.”
“You’re not going to tell Ross,” she says cheerfully. “I didn’t have to come here, Tony.”
“Peter felt it when you were at his school.” Tony flutters his fingers around his head. “Spider-sense.”
She shrugs. “I wanted to see how he’s been doing.”
“You could have asked.”
Natasha tilts her head, raises an eyebrow. “Like I said. I didn’t have to come here.”
These things don’t happen out of the blue. Nothing is ever so perfect. It isn’t a coincidence that Barton and Romanoff are here, in this place, at this time. They chose to put each other here, in each other’s orbits, in Tony’s orbit. A ball dropped, the first domino was pushed, a rube goldberg was set into motion.
“He’s real, then,” Tony says, not to Natasha, but to the empty room at large. To the wall he threw empty boxes. To the table he spread out the blueprints for the balcony on.
Natasha says, “We’re all as real as you want us to be,” and he kind of hates her a little bit and he also loves her but there’s only so many people he can love, so she’s going to have to take a backseat.
They don’t exchange phone numbers, because lines in and out of Stark Tower aren’t as secure as he’d like them to be, and you can’t get more secure than a genetically engineered super soldier/assassin/badass ballerina. Natasha knows better than to say goodbye, and she slips out soundlessly, leaving no hint towards her presence. And Tony’s left to wait.
—
The Winter Soldier shows up in Tony’s workshop on the eleventh day of December.
Three times is a pattern, and all that.
Tony stares at him. The Soldier stares back. Tony would know those eyes anywhere.
(He’s never seen these eyes before.)
—
Tony goes on a walk with Rhodey around Central Park. It’s probably not the best idea; they’ve barely got one fully-functional leg between the two of them. But they both like the clean air, and it stops Pepper from pestering Tony about getting out of the house. They talk nonchalantly about Tony’s ideas for the balcony, and about the work Rhodey’s doing with a nearby veterans association.
The conversation lulls. Tony looks at the rocks around them. The trees. Nature really does find a way, even in a place like New York City. Somewhere in the distance is the sound of children laughing, horse hooves against the pavement. Wind through the trees carries with it the promise of snow.
“Sam’s thinking of donating the shield,” Rhodey says.
Tony keeps his eyes on the path in front of him. His arm, the one that was nearly consumed by the gauntlet, dangles by his side. It feels detached all of a sudden, like it isn’t actually a part of him. “What shield?”
Thankfully, Rhodey doesn’t call him out on the blatant deflection. Not thankfully, he keeps talking about it. “Steve’s shield. You know, looks like a giant frisbee, made of very sharp metal, has a star—”
“Oh that shield. Why didn’t you say so?”
Rhodey sighs. “Sam wants to donate it to the Air and Space Museum with the rest of Steve’s stuff, or to the Smithsonian.”
“He asked you for advice?”
“Yep.”
“That’s proof you’re old, Rhodes.”
Rhodey punches him in his good arm. “I don’t think he should do it.”
“Why not?”
“It’s Steve’s.” He hesitates. “I don’t think it’s fair to give up something like that, especially when it means so much to him.”
Tony takes a deep breath, and imagines Morgan making snow angels and Peter and Pepper getting into snowball fights. Maybe they can get the Tennessee shithead up here. God knows he needs more snow in his life. “Look, Rhodey, they can toss that shield into a ravine in Germany for all I care. The thing’s nothing more than a pile of trouble.”
Which might not be fair but Tony has fought for fairness the entire way through. It doesn’t seem like anyone else is willing to do the same.
They finish their walk in silence, and the silence is cold.
Pepper brings up the shield at dinner, Morgan asks what the shield is, Peter clears his plate and they all pretend his hands aren’t shaking. That’s why Tony’s standing outside Peter’s door waiting for—there. The slightest hitch in his breath. Tony lets himself in and wakes up the kid.
They all have nightmares more often than not. Peter’s are day-long affairs. Little moments present themselves that create a path all the way to the final product: a racing heart, lungs that are never full enough, trembling hands. Tony takes him to the kitchen and makes him hot chocolate, because hot chocolate can solve more things that it can’t.
When Peter’s eyes have stopped counting all the entrances and exits and all the weapons closest to him Tony asks, “Was it the shield?”
Peter’s brow furrows. He looks so young, here, covered in mechanical lights. He looks so old. “What?”
“Your nightmare. Was it about the shield?”
Peter takes a careful sip of his drink. He’s wearing one of Ned’s sweatshirts, and the sleeves dangle over his hands. “I guess it was. Not in a bad way, though, it just…” he trails off, and Tony waits. “You trusted him,” he says finally. “And I understand why you don’t anymore. But I can’t help it if I…”
Ah, Tony thinks, but also, Goddamn it, Rogers, why’d you have to take my kid? Which isn’t fair to Rogers, and it isn’t fair to Peter, either. “You can trust as many people as you want, Pete. That isn’t the sort of thing you can pick and choose. It’s just something you feel. I’d never fault you for that.”
He smiles hesitantly. Neither of them go back to sleep, and they make it through the night together.
—
The Winter Soldier shows up in Tony’s workshop on the thirteenth day of December, and Tony snaps, “Alright, how the hell are you getting in here?”
The Soldier tilts his head. His voice, when he speaks, isn’t as rough as Tony remembers. “Same way people get out. No one pays attention to that the way they pay attention to how people get in.”
Tony glowers at him. His hair is cut shorter; not in military fashion, though, more like he stood in front of a mirror and hacked away with a pair of craft scissors. The chain around his neck screams dog tags. He has less muscle now that he isn’t chasing anyone around. Anger grows, then, swift and tangling.
“So what’s your mission, Barnes?” Tony asks. “Are you here to kill me? Finish off the last of my family?”
The Soldier is wearing a cable knit sweater that hangs large over his body. He’s thinner now. He looks tired, but all of them are tired. That’s nothing special. He’s wearing a black winter coat that’s thick enough that Tony can almost pretend one of his arms isn’t metal.
“You’re not going to apologize?” Tony hisses, because his dad is dead and his mom is dead and there’s a house full of people he loves above his head but there’s still the spots carved out of his heart that he’s never going to get back. The dad he wishes he had. The mom he wishes he had more of.
The Soldier says, “You don’t want me to apologize,” and then, just like Natasha did a few days—nights—ago, he vanishes. Like he was never here in the first place.
—
Here is what Tony knows about James Barnes:
James Buchanan Barnes, born 10 March 1917, enlisted to the U.S. Army and served in the 107th infantry regiment. When his unit was captured by Hydra, Steve Rogers went against orders to save him. He was part of the Howling Commandos until he fell from a train during a mission and died in a ravine. Just another war casualty.
Here is what Tony knows about the Winter Soldier:
The Soldier is a creation that overtook the brain of one James Barnes who was kept in cryogenic stasis until his handlers assigned him a mission, like killing Howard and Maria Stark on 16 December 1991.
Here is what Tony knows about Bucky Barnes:
He is Steve Roger’s best friend.
Tony can separate the three men in his head, but they blend together more often than not. There’s a part of him who knows that Bucky isn’t the one who killed his mom, but it was Bucky’s hands, even if it was the Soldier’s mind.
Bucky knows this, too. It’s written all over his face. He wonders if Bucky looks in the mirror and sees anyone but the Soldier.
He wonders how Steve can look Bucky and only see Bucky.
—
Since the government knows Barton’s here, it’s perfectly legal for them to grab brunch at a cafe Tony loves. It’s run by an Italian couple who came to America after World War II and who have seen too much shit for them to care that Tony Stark and Clint Barton are sitting in their restaurant.
Two years, and Clint’s more or less the same. More lines around his eyes, his mouth; he’s been smiling. His hair’s more gray than not. It suits him, age.
Tony asks after Clint’s kids, and Clint asks about Morgan. They talk about Laura and Pepper and amazing women who are terrifying, and who are amazing because they are terrifying, and what it means to both simultaneously, even though it isn’t really their job to talk about that. They don’t talk about Natasha, because she’s technically in Vienna, but she lingers at the edge of everything. Eventually they talk around her, which leads them to:
“I was here to meet up with Yelena,” Clint says. It sounds a bit like a confession.
Tony frowns. Then— “Natasha’s sister?” The person who was recently a ghost.
Clint nods, and smears some more homemade jam on his toast. “Apparently they found each other before the whole end of the world situation.”
“She was in the Blip, wasn’t she?” He remembers her name on the never-ending list, nestled inconspicuously among thousands of others.
“Yeah. When she came back, the report was that Nat was dead.” His voice gets rough, and tired, and so much quieter. “She came looking for me, tried to kill me, I told her the truth, the usual.”
Unwillingly, Tony thinks back to a pair of twins who had everything ripped away from them by a missile with the name STARK painted on the side. Who grew up with anger guiding their way, but who still clutched each other’s hands. He thinks of how the second they let go they never got to hold on again. He thinks of Clint’s words, and how easily they can apply to so many people.
“And she didn’t kill you,” Tony says. “Obviously.”
“Obviously,” Clint agrees. “They’re working through some stuff. I think that comes with the territory of being a sister. But, like, they’re both assassins who have seen some of the worst of the world, so. Not really the kinds of people who bond over favorite movies.”
“They’ll get there.”
“Yeah, they will. God. You know, I thought there was only one person as stubborn as Nat, but apparently she pseudo-raised Lena—” of course Barton already had a nickname for her “—so now it’s like there’s two Nats, only one of them has little sister-stubbornness on top of everything else.”
Tony winces sympathetically. “‘M glad I’m not the one who has to deal with them.”
“Oh, they’d eat you alive.”
Which, yeah. Fair.
Tony wants to ask if Barton has seen Captain Steve Rogers, but, officially, he’s still missing. He wants to ask more about Nat, and Wanda, and all the people Clint looks after but that’s the sort of inquiry that will make Clint take out his hearing aids.
He wants to ask, Do you miss when it was just the six of us? The Avengers, living in our ivory tower, high above the world until the world asked for our help. But that really means, Do you miss the time before Ultron? and that’s a slippery slope to go down.
—
Peter gets home late—there was an explosion somewhere downtown, not casualties, thankfully—and tells Tony and Pepper that “Mr. Barton is back in New York.”
Pepper snorts. “You can call him Clint.”
“He was downtown?” Tony asks.
“Yep.” Peter darts over to the fridge. “He was with someone with blonde hair. She fought like Natasha.”
“Yelena Belova’s in town?” Pepper asks innocently. Tony narrows his eyes at her.
“Who’s that?” Peter asks, voice muffled by a frankly alarming slice of watermelon.
“Romanoff’s sister,” Tony says.
“Natasha has a sister? Did you know?”
“She’s good at keeping secrets,” Pepper says.
Later, both of them in bed, Tony turns over with some difficulty to stare at Pepper. “You knew Yelena was in New York.”
She turns a page of her book. “I did.”
“How?”
“Clint reached out.”
“To you?”
She closes the book to wack his head with it. “Yes, to me, what of it? We went and got coffee. It was lovely.”
“You know he fought against me,” Tony grumbles.
“Yes. He also fought against Nat.” She leans over to kiss him. “And then he fought with both of you.”
—
The Winter Soldier shows up on the fifteenth of December. Tony tries to pretend he’s a hallucination until his nerves fray, then pull apart, then nearly shatter completely.
“Did you know my father?” he blurts out because, hey, what the hell, right? In for a penny, in for a pound.
The Soldier—Barnes—frowns for a split second before his expression smooths out. “Not as well as Steve. He was only interested in me when he found out about the experiments, but I wasn’t a super soldier, so that train ran its course pretty quickly.”
Experiments. Right. James Buchanan Barnes, captured by Hydra, experimented on by Hydra which, Tony knows, really means tortured by.
That also doesn’t surprise him, learning that his father only cared about his lab rats. Maybe that’s all having a child was: another experiment.
“He never talked about you,” Tony says, and it sounds crueler than it should. Barnes doesn’t even flinch. Tony thinks it would take a lot to make him flinch. He’s had so much shit thrown at him. Which doesn’t make anything better. Tony’s had buildings thrown at him; he’s never thought of becoming a ghost story, the monster that lurks under childrens’ beds.
“I wouldn’t expect him to,” Barnes says. “I never liked him. He turned Steve into a puppet.”
“Then what are you?” Tony blurts out. Ultron’s taunting words run through his head. I had strings but now I’m free. There are no strings on me.
“We were all puppets,” Barnes says easily. There’s a shadow over his eyes now. “Steve was the one with the good heart.”
Tony doesn’t want to hear about perfect, all-American Steve Rogers, the kid who jumped on top of a grenade, the kid who made the self-sacrificing play at every turn, the kid who became something more than he started out as.
“You know what they say about the serum, Barnes? It amplifies qualities that are already there. Steve was a good man. The serum just added muscles. But you?” Tony laughs. “There must have been something rotten there in the beginning. I’d bet money that if Hydra got a hold of Steve he would’ve talked them into donating to the Red Cross.” He turns away, focusing on something at his desk. “Something in you destined you to destroy lives.”
The next time he looks up, Barnes is gone.
He glances at the clock on his desk. It’s well after midnight. 16 December. Happy Death Day, Mom and Dad.
—
The rest of the day passes in a haze. He makes breakfast. He eats it. He sits on the balcony. Pepper brings him a coat. He doesn’t wear it. He looks over the city, and thinks about what it must have looked like when his parents were alive. It’s a bit like floating, like a sudden realization of I’m not fully here right now. It’s cold. He’s numb. Peter walks to school with Pepper. He’s going to spend the night at M.J.’s. Pepper takes Morgan with her to stay at a friend’s apartment for the night. The haze thickens. All those cars on the street. He leaves all the lights on. He goes down to his workshop. The Soldier isn’t there. I remember all of them. I remember all of them. I remember—
How many families? How many secrets? How many lies? Is remembering enough?
He thinks of the twins with the shell laying inches away from their heads. He thinks of the people in Sokovia. You’re not the guy who makes the sacrifice play. The desert. Weapons with his name on them. Everything special about you came out of a bottle. New York, time and time again. The hole in the sky. I’ve got red in my ledger. Mist made of red, suits made out of red, shields dripping with red.
I remember all of them. I remember all of them. I remember all of them.
There must have been something rotten there in the beginning.
I remember all of them. I remember—
—
After the second explosion (five casualties) Ross (the good one) shows up with eye bags the size of the Atlantic.
“Coffee?” Tony says.
“Please.”
They sit in the breakfast nook, and he doesn’t even ask the stupid questions. He says, “The recent explosions were set up to draw Steve Rogers out of hiding. They didn’t bank on Barton and Belova. Your Spider-Kid isn’t helping much, either.”
Tony thinks, five casualties. He rubs his temples. “I guarantee you Steve knows that. And he’s got systems in place to make sure no one else gets caught in the crossfire.”
“Has he been in contact with Barton?”
“I doubt it.” If anyone, he’s been in contact with Natasha, who, as far as they know, has moved on to Budapest, which has, apparently, sent the U.S. government into a tailspin for reasons Tony can’t quite figure out. “He knows how to move pieces around without the pieces knowing.”
“They think he’s in the city,” Ross says carefully.
Tony shrugs. “Brooklyn’s his home. That’s his turf. And if your guys go in there, they don’t stand a chance. They don’t know the area like he does.”
“It’s Brooklyn,” Ross says warily. He doesn’t want to be thinking about this.
“It’s Rogers,” Tony counters.
The third explosion is a whiff; a guy dressed all in black who, all accounts agree, is nothing more than a shadow, disarms the situation before the clock starts ticking.
The fourth in two in one, both on opposite ends of the city. Yelena and the shadow take care of one, Peter and Clint the other. Tony feels a migraine growing.
—
James Barnes shows up in Tony’s workshop on the twentieth of December.
“You can’t protect him forever,” Tony says.
The corner of Barnes’s mouth twitches, like he’s hearing one half of an inside joke. “He deserves to rest.”
Tony considers this. “Sixty-six years under ice is a hell of a nap.” But he doesn’t really mean it. “You think you can hold down the fort for a few days?”
“Going on holiday?”
“Christmas with kids, you know how it goes.”
The shadow’s back over Barnes’s eyes. Seriously, is there anything that doesn’t trigger this guy? Tony wonders how many things he can look at without seeing something else. “We’ll take this shift,” Barnes agrees, which is a weird fucking way to put things, but Tony doesn’t really know how the old-timey army talked.
—
Christmas goes off without a hitch. The presents were successfully smuggled into the cabin, no one broke anything dragging the tree inside, Morgan serenades them all with warbled carols, they get drunk off of peppermint hot chocolate. It is, by all accounts, perfect.
There are three more incidents that week. Barnes keeps his word: he takes this shift. There are no casualties.
—
Tony doesn’t see Barnes again until after New Years. The city’s still in a drunken stupor from all the festivities. There’s a collective easiness in the air. Another year has gone by, and they are still here.
On the fifth day of January, on a hunch, Tony goes down to his workshop and finds Barnes standing there, wearing a navy blue jacket, deep like a bruise.
“Happy New Years,” Tony says, because he doesn’t really know what else to say.
“You’re right,” Barnes says. “Had Hydra got to Steve, we would be living in a hell of a different world.”
Tony chews at his lip. “That wasn’t fair for me to say.”
“No,” Barnes agrees. “Still.”
“Still,” Tony murmurs.
Steve threw himself down the rabbit hole, Natasha said when Tony came back to Earth the first time. He was pretending to be asleep. She was pretending she believed he was asleep. Bucky got taken by the Blip. Steve kind of lost it there for a minute. I wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Which is really saying something, Natasha not knowing. I thought maybe it was going to be like Clint. I thought he wasn’t going to let anyone stand in his way.
“I’m never going to forgive you,” Tony says. It bears stating, even if it isn’t entirely fair. “You killed my mom.”
Barnes says, “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m asking you to forgive him.”
Steve was the one with the good heart, Barnes had said, and Tony thinks, Hang out with Steve Rogers long enough, it’s the sort of thing that catches.