Peter
Stark Tower, the Night After Bucky’s Talk With Tony (About the Notebooks)
The Soldier slipped silently out of bed, the faint rustle of the covers the only noise in the room. He left the room without another sound and without so much as examining his surroundings, walking slowly but surely, his bare feet coming down as quietly as he could make them.
The room and the hallway outside were pitch dark. No lights turned on for him when he stepped out into the hallway. He was being watched, from somewhere in that darkness. Someone was out there, lurking just out of sight in the shadows. Whoever they were, their eyes were on him and only him.
He didn’t know where he was going — only that he had to walk. He had to walk over every square inch of this building, examine every corner, every hall, and the inside of every file cabinet. No one had told him what the information he found was used for, and he didn’t think about it, either, because who cared if the length of this hallway was exactly fifty meters? But he did it, anyway, the way he’d done for weeks before this.
This time, though, something was different.
He reached the end of the hall and headed for the stairs like he usually did. He took them up four or five floors. The number didn’t matter. What did matter was that when he reached the door he was looking for, it didn’t open for him.
That had never happened before. He pulled at the handle with his left hand, this time, in the hope that it would break.
It held. More alarmingly still, a voice seemed to come from behind him.
Please don’t do that. It’ll be a lot of paperwork to fix.
He tugged harder on the handle, his efforts becoming more and more frantic, to no avail. He’d never met another person on any of his little expeditions. He didn’t want to start now — his only instinct was to break the door open and run through it.
Mr. Barnes, sir. Please.
He didn’t know who this “Mr. Barnes” person was, but he turned around to look behind him anyway. There was no one there. In fact, the voice didn’t so much come from behind him as from everywhere around him.
Go back downstairs. Somewhere else. You know you’re not supposed to be here.
The voice was unnaturally calm. It was almost gentle, and the Soldier hated it. He obeyed, though, because it was just a voice. Even if it didn’t like his trying to break down the door, it couldn’t do anything about it.
He went back down the stairs, the way he’d come. His plan for the night had been disrupted. If that hall was off-limits, he would have to come back later and check to see if the voice was gone. When it was, he’d be free to go. Until then, he had to find somewhere else to look, but where? He didn’t know what his handlers would want. He was supposed to be careful and methodical, and they’d be angry when they learned he’d given up on that floor, even temporarily, but there was nothing he could do.
Since the plan for the night had already been disrupted, he chose another door at random. This one opened and he walked through it, even though he knew he should be back upstairs. It was wasting time, wandering around like this, and his handlers would be very, very angry, but he had nothing else to do.
He walked down a long hall, occasionally pausing to examine a framed picture or document or a view from a window. His handlers wouldn’t like that, either. They never cared about a pretty view or a painting or a sculpture, and maybe he couldn’t blame them, but this particular walk was just for him, now that he’d been cut off from his hallway.
Faint music drifted down the hall from around a corner. It wasn’t like any music he was used to hearing — he could hardly make it out, anyway. That should have been a sign for him to turn around immediately, but after the voice, he didn’t quite believe that there were any other people to find him. He proceeded, turning the corner and finding himself a short distance from a pair of wide-open double doors.
He headed towards them. The music stopped.
Before he could even set one foot inside, something cold and hard slammed into his side, and everything went dark.
When Bucky woke up, he was lying on cold, hard tile. Worse, he was tied up. His bonds — whatever they were — were colder than the floor. They were hard and didn’t yield the slightest bit no matter how hard he strained against them. It was as if he were wrapped in a cocoon of metal.
There was someone standing over him. He blinked up at them, waiting for the face to come into focus.
They were talking, too. He squinted up at them, trying to make out a face or a word or two. He’d probably hit his head.
“I’m sorry,” the man — the boy — was saying. “I’m sorry! I panicked, I didn’t mean to hurt you, are you okay?”
The kid was kneeling beside him, looking down at him with wide, anxious eyes. He was holding a knife.
“‘M fine,” Bucky mumbled. His head ached, and his ears rang. “Where am I?”
“Stark Tower?” The kid tried, his voice shaking. “Lab six. Downstairs?”
“Never been here before...” One of the ridges in the tile dug into the back of his head. It hurt. “What is this stuff?” He tried to gesture towards the bonds wrapped around his arms and chest but to no avail.
“Webs,” the kid said.
“Webs?” He repeated, deciding then and there that this was just some sort of bizarre dream. Webs. Yeah, right.
“Yeah, webs. Look, I gotta get you out, okay? They’ll dissolve on their own but that’s gonna take a while.”
Bucky sighed. “How’re you gonna do that?”
Peter held up the knife. “It’s not much, I guess. But it’s better than nothing! I feel like MacGyver.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.” The kid shook his head, his face going slightly pink. “I guess you wouldn’t… yeah. Never mind.”
“No, tell me,” Bucky protested. He wanted to know — and he needed something to do while he was waiting for the kid to untie him.
“You know what TV is, right?” He asked. Bucky hardly heard him over the scraping of the knife against the “webs.”
He nodded. He did. There was one in his room upstairs — not that he used it. It was a marvelous piece of technology, one of the many things Jarvis had shown him when his stay had begun, but he hadn’t used it. It didn’t bring him any closer to understanding who MacGyver was.
“It’s a TV show,” the kid explained helpfully, the knife in his hand going still. “About this guy who uses stuff like this —” He held up the knife. “To diffuse bombs and get out of all kinds of crazy situations. It’s… really cool.”
Bucky nodded. “Okay. I… I get it.” He’d have to watch it when he got back. Not that he had much interest in TV now that Steve had given him all those books, but he would give it a shot. It had looked pretty cool.
“Yeah. It’s kinda… old, but it’s still really good… not too realistic, though.” He laughed to himself, pulling harder with the knife, which made Bucky wince. “Sorry,” he said hastily. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Bucky said. It hadn’t hurt — just startled him. “‘M okay.”
But he was much more gentle after that.
Slowly, the bonds loosened and fell away. The kid sat back on his heels, triumphantly tossing aside the knife as if he hadn’t been the one to do this to Bucky in the first place.
He decided to let it slide and sat up, the remaining wires or threads or whatever they were snapping and falling to the side. “Thanks.” He smiled softly, reaching up to rub at the place where his right arm had started to go numb. Pins and needles rushed into his hand when he flexed his fingers.
“No problem.” He smiled, retrieving the knife and playing with it absently, tapping it against his palm and twirling it between his fingers. It was a miracle he didn’t cut himself, Bucky thought.
“Never got your name,” Bucky said absently. He really should be getting back to bed soon — his whole body was weighed down with exhaustion, and his head and his back hurt after falling to the floor. But the least he could do was learn this kid’s name. And what he was doing in the Tower, too, for that matter.
“I’m Peter,” he said, with a little shrug. “And you’re Bucky, aren’t you? I remember your rescue mission.”
“Nice to meet you,” Bucky said. “Were you… on my rescue mission?” Surely not. He was just a little kid. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen — just a baby. It would have been cruel to make him go on a rescue mission.
“No,” Peter said. “No, of course not.” Bucky thought he almost sounded disappointed. “But Tony and Steve told me all about it.”
“Oh.” Well, that wasn’t quite so bad. Tony and his friends were still barbarians, but that redeemed them a little. “It’s late. What are you doing in here?” He should have been in bed — not working in a lab past midnight. If Tony put him up to this — whether he’d sent him on the rescue mission or not — he’d be sure to have a word with him about it.
“I’m spending the night here,” Peter explained. “Mr. Stark lets me stay and work in the lab if it’s not a school night. He’d be mad if he found out I was up this late, though, okay?”
“Right.” He wouldn’t tell. “So what are you doing up this late, anyway?” He asked.
“Just a… little project.” He sounded wary, but he stood up and beckoned for Bucky to follow. He did, shakily at first, nearly falling over as the blood rushed back into his legs.
Peter led him further into the room, which he was only just now getting to admire. It was small but brightly lit, one wall entirely covered with windows that showed off a positively glamorous view of the New York City skyline outside. There were tables arranged in circles, spiraling towards the middle of the room. Bluish lights hovered over them, arranged into shapes and designs and schematics that Bucky could never hope to decipher. On the wall adjacent to the windows, there was a row of glass cases with something humanoid in them, all built out of shiny metal plates that reflected the blue lights from the rest of the room. They looked like suits of armor. He wanted to go and admire them, but that wasn’t where Peter was going.
He led him into the center of the room, where a single rolling chair sat in front of one of the tables. There was a bookbag on the floor and a stack of textbooks beside it. Another book rested on the table. The spine read, Chemistry II. To Bucky, it looked like homework.
Peter ignored that, though, and instead, he picked up a little metal device from the table and held it out to Bucky.
He took it, hesitantly. “What’s this?”
“It’s a webshooter.” Peter held up his arm, and Bucky saw an identical device strapped to his wrist. “I’m just fixing it.”
“So… what does it do?” He asked, turning it over in his hand.
That question was answered for him only seconds after. The “webshooter” let out a short, high-pitched hum, and a tiny version of the same material that Bucky had been wrapped in earlier shot out.
He nearly dropped it. “Shit — sorry — what was that?”
Peter was laughing. He reached over to take it back, setting it securely on the table. Bucky tried to get the web off of his hand by wiping it on his sweatpants, but he only made the situation worse.
“It’s just like the one I… you know. Used on you. You’re gonna need to cut that, though. They don’t really… break. I always keep a couple of knives handy when I’m working on something like this. ‘Cause… you know. Accidents.” And sure enough, there was one lying beside the textbook on the table in addition to the one already in his hand. Peter deftly cut through the strange material, and the knife was resting on the table before Bucky could so much as flinch.
“So that’s what you and Tony do around here, huh?” Bucky asked, looking around the lab with interest.
Peter nodded. “Yeah. He usually lets me work on the webshooters or my suit — I use it for patrols and stuff. You wanna see? I mean… if you don’t wanna go back to bed.”
“Oh.” Bucky would like to go back to bed, but Peter was nice. A little awkward, maybe, but he was nice and he was excited to show him around the lab. And Bucky wanted to see, too. “Yeah, can you show me? This place is… really nice.”
“Thanks!” He grinned. “It’s Mr. Stark’s, but… I clean up a lot. And those computers over there —” he gestured towards a bank of computers on the wall opposite them. “Those are kind of mine, too. He lets me borrow them.”
They had to be the most futuristic computers Bucky had ever seen. He wanted a closer look, but, well, they were Peter’s. He couldn’t just go over and look. “They look really nice,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say — nothing described them or the rest of the lab quite the right way.
“I know,” Peter said smugly. “That’s what everybody thinks, too. And they’re awesome, I promise. Anyway, you wanna see some other cool stuff?”
Bucky could hardly even reply before Peter was already picking up a little round disk from the table and pressing buttons on it. A web of little blue lights sprung out of it — like lasers — and formed themselves into a picture. It was difficult to make out at first because it was very bright and it kept changing, but slowly it resolved itself into a schematic.
What exactly the schematic was, Bucky couldn’t tell, but that didn’t matter. Peter was already explaining.
“I spent weeks on this thing,” he was saying. “It’s part of my suit. Mr. Stark wanted me to make it —just a cool little gadget, I guess. And he set it up kind of like the science labs we do in school, but… a lot harder. Gave me all the instructions and the supplies and stuff, and he says he’ll have a look at it when I’m done. It’s really weird, and… kinda hard to explain, I guess.” He shrugged. “It’s really cool. It doesn’t sound that cool, but it’s awesome.”
“Well… what is it?” Bucky couldn’t make out what the schematic was supposed to be for the life of him.
“Nothing much.” Peter contemplated it for a moment. “It’s just a video display. So I can talk to Mr. Stark, mostly. He says it’ll also connect to the security cameras here. So I can keep an eye on the place, I guess.”
A shiver ran down Bucky’s spine. If only he hadn’t asked — that wasn’t something he wanted to know. If Tony wanted a watchdog, he should put Jarvis up to it. Not Peter. “Oh,” he said after a moment, his voice coming out small and anxious and fragile. “That’s… cool.”
“I know, right?” But Peter seemed to have sensed his anxiety. He was tense, too. He switched off the hologram and reached over to pick up a pen from the desk, fiddling with it instead. “Is there anything else you wanna see? I mean… plenty of stuff around here to look at.”
Bucky appreciated the change of subject. “Maybe some other time?” He asked. “It’s late. And it looks like you’ve got stuff to do.” Like spying on me. Did they have security cameras everywhere, or just in the hallways and the offices? Did Tony watch him while he was in his room, too?
“Oh.” Peter’s face fell. “Okay. You’re right, anyway. I have… chemistry.”
“So, um… see you around?” Peter looked absolutely crestfallen, and he didn’t want to disappoint him like this, but he knew Tony would find out about all of this in the morning. It was for the best if he left early.
“Yeah. See you around,” Peter echoed.
Bucky turned away and started to wind his way through the tables and computer equipment that cluttered the room. “Good night,” he murmured on his way out. He didn’t hear a reply.