Chapter 1
Losing his arm hasn’t been easy for Bucky but recovery had been probably even harder.
For some reason, he thought that being in the Stark Prosthetics Program would solve all of his problems. He thought that, after getting the arm, his life would go back to how it was before the accident.
Spoiler: it didn’t.
The arm was great, it fit his body perfectly, like it was his own, it was light, it never acted up and it really did make life easier for Bucky.
However, like everything, having the arm had a downside. Sometimes he just wanted to take it out and let his shoulder be free but the arm was so well embedded in his flesh that it was impossible to pull out, and that made him lose his mind from time to time.
The program was complex. It required a long and thorough series of doctor appointments at the Stark headquarters before the fitting, therapy sessions, in groups and solo, both before and after receiving the arm. Physiotherapy was a must just like it was taking part in activities that would rehabilitate him for the outside world. Thanks to the program, he ended up finding a job at the coffee shop on the ground floor of the Stark Tower. That job was supposed to be a bridge between the program and reality but he eventually fell in love with being a barista and he was in no rush to abandon the familiar environment of Stark Cafe.
Tony was a recovering alcoholic. He didn’t like telling people that or asking for help. For this reason, he never went to rehab or, God forbid, to AA meetings.
He had addiction in his blood, both his father and his mother were addicts. His dad was an angry drunk, when he drank, which was way too often, he got violent with Tony and his mother was always too high on painkillers to help him.
Tony started drinking as early as 14. At the time, it was only a drink or two on the weekend but it only got worse after his parents’ death. At first, he drank to deal with the pain of the grief, mostly for his mother, he didn’t really care about his dad, but then it came his way to cope with the pressure of dealing with his parents’ business. He was involved in Stark Enterprises since before his parents died but after their death, he was not just working as an engineer anymore. He had to be the CEO, the President, but he was not a businessman. He didn’t understand economy or management, he hated taking part in meetings, going on business trips, meeting partners. If it was for him, Pepper would do the whole CEO thing, as long as he could go back to the lab and work on his stuff, after all, without his projects Stark Enterprises wouldn’t exist.
Some days were worse than others for both Bucky and Tony. Admittedly, it had been easier for Bucky to get used to his new life. His support system was great, that was also something that was taken into serious consideration by the executives in the process that led him to get his new arm. His best friend Steve slowly but surely moved in with him, stationing himself in the spare room, taking care of anything and everything Bucky might need. And it’s not that Bucky wasn’t grateful for all the help he got from Steve, he was, he wouldn’t even be alive if it wasn’t for Steve, but his presence sometimes was…overbearing. And yes, sometimes it was better than being alone and he wouldn’t know how to deal with it all if it wasn’t for the blond veteran, but from time to time he just needed him out of the house. Bucky managed to get him into art school, thinking that maybe, just for a few hours, he would be able to enjoy the chaos of his own flat in peace. But he was wrong, oh how he was wrong. Yes, Steve did go to art school, but as soon as the lessons finished, Steve was home to deal with the chaos Bucky found so much comfort in. So his only option was to pick up even more shifts at the cafe.
He liked his life, even if he didn’t want to admit it, therapy really helped him get over the incident and accept what had become of his life, and especially accept that not every day could be a good one. And the bad days were really bad, at first, so much so that he tried to yank the foreign arm away from his body. He would have succeeded, if Steve hadn’t been there to stop him. It took him even more therapy sessions to be ok with the arm on a bad day. Now, bad head days were few and in those days he just wanted to stay in bed.
What was worse now, were bad physical days. When the weather was changing, he felt it all in what would be his little stump. Those were the unbearable days. The pain and discomfort didn’t come all at once, it build up in the span of a few days, starting with an itch on the conjunction with the metal, then it was a more general itch that started from the tips of his fingers that weren’t there, ending in a couple of days of intense and painful pangs that not even painkillers seemed to calm down. Then, it all went away overnight and suddenly there were more pros to keeping it than cons. But when the pain was so unbearable to concentrate on the orders of the customers, all he wanted was to climb up the tower and pay a visit to mister Stark.
For Tony, good days were bad and bad days were horrible. He hated his life, and if he wasn’t for the fact that, if he died, Stark Enterprises would fall into the hands of all of those people who were just waiting to get him out of the way to use all of his technology for all of the wrong purposes. And there was no way Tony could let that happen, even if it meant staying alive, and he really, really didn’t want to do that.
Those were the good days, when he actually got some work done, when he locked himself in his lab for days on end and survived only on coffee and cheeseburgers. On good days, he didn’t sleep. Sleeping meant nightmares and nightmares meant that he would drink. If he wasn’t sleeping, he wasn’t drinking, and that’s how he coped with his problem. It wasn’t healthy in the slightest, he could admit it, but when has anything in it been healthy anyways? Healthy things just weren’t for him.
But at least he was doing some work, getting things done, and those work streaks were the only reason he managed to get all of the custom made prosthetics ready for his Veterans program in such a short amount of time.
Bad days were more common than good ones. They were always a consequence of a long streak of good days. As much as he liked to say that he didn’t need any sleep, his body was always in disagreement. His mind was always up and running, ideating new things, creating new projects, solving new problems. If it had been for his mind, he really would have survived on coffee and cheeseburgers alone. His mind was never tired, or at the very least, Tony never let it get too tired.
A tired mind was a mind that walked back into stuff that Tony had more or less successfully locked at the very back of his brain, not to be ever dug up ever again. He made sure he was constantly stimulated, that he always had something new to work on, because as long as his mind was focused on something else, anything really, no bad memories and triggers would re-emerge.
But unfortunately, his body did get tired, of course it did. And when that happened, Tony would quite literally fall asleep on whatever surface he had the luck to find himself close to. That was mostly his lab table, but Pepper had found him asleep in various places of the house.
Saint woman Pepper was. She was always there to pick Tony up from wherever she had found him and drag him onto his bed for some needed, yet very short lived, rest.
Because if Tony wasn’t giving himself something to do, his mind was free to freely wander around all of the closed doors in Tony’s brain. And that was the one thing he was trying to avoid. Everything bad that had happened to him was behind those doors, and without any control over his mind’s doing, all of that would pop up again and it would haunt Tony. A bad day started with a nightmare.
Tony would wake up in a pool of his own sweat, screaming and crying, with the vivid images of whatever the nightmare was about in front of his eyes. He tried everything he could to wipe it away, but nothing ever worked. The only little relief he could find was at the bottom of an expensive whisky bottle. He might have been an alcoholic, but he still had style and if alcohol was going to kill him, it might as well be a bottle of fine liqueur.
It worked, for a little while, in the little time frame between being tipsy and blackout drunk. If he was tipsy, he still remembered. If he was blackout drunk, the nightmares would come back. And that was the worst thing about the bad days, they were a vicious cycle: the more he drank, the more he forgot, but at the same time, the more he drank the more time he spent blacking out, and the more time he spent blacking out, the more the nightmares would come back. And of course, the more the nightmares would come back, the more he wanted to drink.
And it went on sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks. It always ended with Pepper finding Tony dangerously balancing on a windowsill or with Tony showing up at Pepper’s cabin imploring her to help him. And she did, always. She always did the best she could to make him better, yet it was never enough. She committed him to rehab structures that could help him more than she ever could, but every single time Tony wouldn't last a day in there. “I don’t have a problem,” he would say before checking out of the facility.
The best she could do was keep him in her cabin until his system was free from all of the alcohol he had drank, handling sleepless nights and a very jumpy and mean Tony. But truth to be told, she would do all of this and more to make him better. She would keep him with her until he wasn’t a danger for himself anymore, until he was okay enough not to go through the same routine in the next few weeks, if only Tony let her. The moment he felt he was fine, he would leave in the middle of the night and go back to his unhealthy ways and every time he was not surprised to find him back on her doorstep.