They are so fucked
“Because that’s stupid!” Stiles’ friends are only half surprised that he’s willing to yell at one of the smartest, richest, and most powerful men in the world. “If you take the transmitter out of the head and put it in the tail, you can compact the camera down to make room for the laser right here.”
“I can’t believe that they’re arguing about lasers.” Erica shakes her head.
“Tell me about it.” Isaac says. “You missed the five a.m. phone call where they argued for an hour over whether or not penguins have knees.”
“That actually might work.” Tony says and he and Stiles ignore where their friends are lounged out on the couch less than ten feet away.
“That’s what I’ve been telling you for the past fifteen minutes!”
“Save it for after it blows something up, kid.”
“I vote marshmallows.”
“Marshmallows don’t explode.”
“Is that a challenge?” Stiles asks, a spark in his eyes that his friends haven’t seen in a long time.
“NO.” At least six people shout.
“Okay. Okay.” Stiles puts his hands up in defeat, but he and Tony exchange a look that tells everyone that a marshmallow is going to explode one way or another. “Jeez.”
Thankfully, Pepper steps in just then before they can get too far into their plotting and disrupts their plans. “Lunch break. Let’s go. We’re meeting Stiles’ father at the restaurant.”
“But, Pepper-“
“Nice try Stiles.” She says in what he thinks is a wonderful ‘mom voice’ and puts her hands on her hips. “Lunch. Now. The cars are waiting for us.”
“You ruin all my fun.” He pouts as he and Tony abandon their work begrudgingly.
“I love her.” Erica says in awe.
Pepper just smiles as everyone gets up and makes for the cars.
One hour later Stiles’ face is hot with embarrassment as his friends tell story after embarrassing story of stupid things he’s done since they knew him, his dad is aiding and abetting the whole time.
“No, you can’t tell that story!” He groans with his face in his hands.
“Watch me.” Erica laughs evilly. “Two years ago, it was our friend’s birthday. We’d never celebrated with him before because no one knew when it was. So, Stiles, being the nosy little shit that he is, decided that he was tired of Derek ignoring the question every time that we asked, so he got into his Dad’s computer at the station to pull up his birth certificate-“
“Oh, really?” John fixes the Disappointed Dad stare on him.
“Erica!” Stiles complains.
“-Anyways, the day rolls around and Stiles has decided that he’s going to throw Derek a surprise party, because Derek just loves surprises.” Stiles sticks his tongue out at her at the sarcasm in her voice. “So he rounds us all up and takes us to the loft and just as everyone starts to sing happy birthday Derek wakes up and punches Stiles in the stomach. So, he goes flying backward with the breath knocked out of him and falls back into Scott, who knocks into Ethan and like dominoes, everyone falls. In the end, Theo has a black eye, Scott has a gash on his head from hitting the dresser, Boyd has a sprained ankle from where I fell on him, and Isaac broke his leg falling off the stairs. The entire time this is happening, Derek is yelling at Stiles who’s only response to the chaos around him is to say, ‘happy birthday?’.”
The whole group is practically in tears at this point.
“Okay, first off, it was an amazing idea.” Stiles defends, although he’s holding back laughter himself. “It is not my fault that Derek doesn’t know how to function like a normal human being. Second, I have apologized to everyone that was involved several times.”
“That’s nothing.” Bucky chuckles as he sits down at the table with Steve. They hadn’t even noticed his presence until now, but now that he’s here, Stiles can’t help but stare at him. “Has Steve ever told you about the time he got me shot at camp because we was trying to help one of the rookies clean his gun?”
“Oh, my God, James, no!” Steve groans and blushes a startling shade of red.
“Oh, my God, yes!” Stiles practically cries enthusiastically.
His stories are hilarious. The entire group laughs so hard that Isaac shoots soda out of his nose.
But Stiles particularly finds himself captivated by Bucky’s charm. There’s just something about him that holds his attention. Erica, Boyd, Isaac, and Lydia aren’t sure whether to groan or laugh at Stiles’ new crush.
“You lying little punk!” Steve smacks James – the name that Bucky now prefers to go by – on the arm, resulting in a metallic clang.
If Stiles weren’t so caught up in laughing at the scene before him, he’d definitely pause at the arm. He hadn’t actually noticed it up until Steve smacked it – despite the fact that James gestures wildly when he really gets caught up in a story – but he certainly remembers his confusion at the drastic difference of temperature of the hands that had wrapped around his wrists just two days ago.
“That is the goddamned truth and you know it!” James smacks him back with the metal arm reflexively.
No one else seems to notice him cringe just a little bit while he waits for Steve to react negatively – either from the memory of how sickly Steve used to be, or from the fact that he probably thinks that he just hurt him – except Stiles.
“No, no, no.” Steve shakes his head. “That is NOT what happened! You ran off with…ah, what was her name…Morgan?”
“Mindy.”
“Yes,” Steve smacks the table with his hand enthusiastically, resulting in everything on it rattling, “Mindy. You ran off with her leaving me with Tina to ride that stupid ride after you had already made me eat all that awful fair-food and then I threw up on her shoes.”
“Oh, yes.” James rolls his eyes. “Because the ‘when’ of that situation is obviously more important than the fact that you threw up on that poor dame’s shoes.”
A spark of something painful shoots through his chest for a moment as he watches everyone laugh at the two friend’s fanatics. It’s the same way he and Scott used to act before all of this crap happened.
“You okay?” His dad asks quietly from beside him.
“Yeah.” He nods, looking back to the pair. “Just wrapped up in my own little world.”
“Your friends are good people, Stiles.” He smiles at his father in surprise. They exchange a small nod before returning to the conversation just in time to see Lydia, Natasha, and Pepper bonding.
“Last week, Clint stabbed himself in the foot with an arrow because he forgot that Stiles was in the room and it scared him.” Natasha is telling them in a tone very similar to the superior one that Lydia so often uses. “We were in Stiles’ room.”
Clint’s face turns a bright red color as he tries to ignore them to finish his conversation with James.
“I once watched Stiles knee himself in the face when he fell trying to jump over Isaac who was sleeping in the floor.” Lydia nods.
Stiles’ turn to go bright red as Isaac elbows him.
“I remember.” He says ruefully, rubbing his thigh where Stiles has broken his leg a second him.
“Tony almost died once because he decided that light-sabers where something that he needed, and he accidentally cut a whole in the ceiling while playing with it. Concussion for two weeks.”
Isaac, Lydia, Erica, Boyd, and his dad all groan in unison as he shouts, “You made a LIGHT SABER???”
“It was decommissioned for safety purposes.” Pepper says with an apprehensive look in her eyes.
His phone buzzes in his pocket as everyone goes back to their conversations.
I’ve still got the blueprints.
He looks at Tony and almost squeals when he winks conspiratorially.
*****
Stiles isn’t really sure how it happened, but somehow or another he ended up alone with James – he thinks Lydia had something to do with it.
They’re walking back to Stiles’ apartment together since everyone is off doing their own thing and neither of them really feel like going back to SI and Stiles is practically torturing him with twenty questions.
“Why do you go by James?”
“Well, I’m a different person now, you know?” He asks, stuffing his hands into his pockets as they walk. He finds it endearing to watch someone so big look so small like that – but also sad, because he knows the trauma behind it. “Seventy years of anything will change you, but when I think of ‘Bucky’ I think of the wide-eyed little shit that used to get in trouble with Stevie. A kid. That’s just not who I am anymore.”
“I get that.”
“You do?” James’s brows furrow in surprise as he comes to a complete stop to stare at the younger boy beside him.
“Yeah.” Stiles shrugs, finding himself already trapped in the intensity of his eyes. “I could see it at lunch, especially with Steve. It’s like…when you ‘disappeared’ it changed Steve. His best friend was gone, or so he thought, and he was struggling to deal with that, but he never got the chance to really grieve over you before he went into the ice, you know? So, when he woke up, it was all still fresh for him, he was still trying to figure out how to function when he found you, and he thought that because you were back, things would be fine again. Yeah, he’s a little different, but he’s never really had enough time apart from you to change. You had seventy years in and out of the ice where your head wasn’t you own and your memories were practically non-existent. Like you said, seventy years of anything will change you, but with that…you’re not the same anymore, but Steve is.”
“So, it’s probably easy for you to want to be that kid that he talks about in those stories, but no matter what, you’re not him anymore. Sure, you can talk and laugh with him while you try to remember what little you can, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re a different person now. And that’s on either of you. It doesn’t make you a bad friend for not being able to be that kid anymore or him a bad friend for struggling to let that kid go. It’s just how it is.”
James just stares at him, mouth open in awe of the kid before him. In less than a day Stiles has completely gotten him figured out in way that none of his therapists – or even Steve – have yet to do in the entire time he’s been back.
“You’re something else, you know that, Stiles?”
“You are not the first person to say that.” Although I’m pretty sure you’re the first person to say it like that. He adds in his head. “Okay, so how many languages can you speak?”
Just like that they’re right back at it. Stiles asks the most random questions, to which James always has an answer to. They talk about everything from his favorite places he’s ever been to his least favorite aquatic animal – yes, Stiles did phrase it exactly like that, earning himself yet another slightly awed look from James.
It isn’t until James is woken by Isaac and Lydia crawling into Stiles’ bed that he really notes just how screwed already is that he didn’t even notice when he and Stiles fell asleep talking and the teen slowly wiggled his way into his arms.
Yep. He’s fucked.