Bucky wonders if anyone else even notices, the way Peter carries himself for those few weeks. If anyone sees the curling ink in the hollow of his throat when his shirts, growing too big for his withering body, dip just a little. If they smell the ointment used to keep ink from weeping, from festering, from fading.
He wants to see it.
But Tony didn’t ask him to stare at a kid’s chest; he asked him to protect him. Watch out for him. “Be the shadow he needs, Buck, when everyone else is in his face.”
Stupid request, really, but that was Tony. Dumbass tryin’ to be a hero, even now, even still, even gone dead.
But Bucky owes Tony this. He owes him a lot, everything he could do for him, but this request? It bothers him a lot, because he thinks he knows in some locked away part of him why Tony left him this command.
Sure, Happy and Pepper and the whole team, they’re watching out for the Parkers, for the Keeners. Good people, what else could they do?
But this? Sitting on ledges with not enough caffeine as Peter swings recklessly through the skies, hovering awkwardly outside a school as Peter zombies through his classes. Peter’s trying, kind of, Bucky thinks.
As much as anyone in his shoes could.
But he’s up so late all the time. Bucky sleeps more than he does, and Bucky’s sleep is still riddled with nightmares, cold sweats, terrors that wake him up screaming.
He doesn’t eat either. May cooks for him, food that Bucky isn’t ashamed to admit he steals from the can.
It feels like the whole goddamned world was there when Tony Stark died. The whole world should’ve been, all things considered. But only three people were really there. Rhodey, fighting to get to his best friend first. Peter, who came back just to hold Tony as he died, and Pepper, who let Tony find peace.
Sometimes Bucky thinks he should be checking on Rhodey, that he should look after Pepper and Morgan. But that’s not what Tony asked him to do; besides, Pepper and Rhodey? They’ve learned how to say good-bye. They’ve said good-bye before.
Peter has too, but Peter hasn’t learned what Pepper and Rhodey have; how to let go how to move on how to find support in those around you.
Tony might not have fathered Peter, but he sure instilled a lot of his own… uniqueness in him. The kid doesn’t ever let go, especially of guilt.
But he knows why Tony asked him; Who else would understand the burden, the five-year gap? Who other than Bucky could rescue Peter from being saved, at the cost of everything?
-
Peter is skinny. He’s a kid, growing and learning and stretching, but he’s bending in all the wrong ways and his bones cut through everything.
Bucky resents Tony for this. For rescuing them. Sometimes he thinks that weird few minutes they were gone was the best time of his life. Of Peter’s. He’s not sure, doesn’t entirely remember it.
He heard Peter once talking to May though, about “soft, cottony.” Muted.
It has to be better, whatever lies beyond. But Peter is skinny, and getting skinnier and the dark swirl on his chest becomes more visible when he forgets to zip his hoodie.
Bucky leans forward, over the ledge, squinting when Peter begins his nightly routine. There’s always a second, one split blink when he’s at the right angle to squint at the mirror and see- but Peter always moves away before the image is clear and Bucky isn’t ever gonna see what that black smear on his chest is.
He asked Happy once, casually, if he knew anything about Peter.
“Kid’s good, never gets into any trouble. Hangs out with some kid playing video games.”
“He ever ask you or May about getting ink?”
Happy blinked at him. “He’s kinda young, and I doubt May would sign anyway. Why? He say something to you?”
Bucky shrugs, pushes off the ledge and says, “Patrol.”
Happy hollars after him and Bucky has a flash of guilt because he’s got the feeling that Peter is going to get some kinda lecture tonight he’s not going to be prepared for. And then he doesn’t feel guilty because Peter’s going to drag him all over New York and forcing them into all of 3 hours of sleep.
Peter’s in class right now though, staring blankly out the window and Bucky knows Peter can’t see him, but he takes two steps farther back into the shadows and rest his head against the wall.
Thank God the Russian’s taught their assets to grab sleep when they could, and how sleep anywhere.
-
Bucky wakes, jumps right out of his skin. Peter’s in front of his face, hanging upside down. His shirt skims up his belly just a bit, dark curls and the edges of grey smear visible before he adjusts his position. “Could have you arrested,” Peter mumbles.
Bucky narrows his eyes, “Pretty sure I’ve been cleared of everything.” Maybe, he’s never checked.
“Creepin’ around outside of schools, hanging out watchin’ minors? That’s a level of offender I don’t think being an Avenger can make go away,” Peter’s voice is flat which is somehow worse than the implication that Bucky’s a pedo.
Bucky shrugs. “Got a mission.”
“Yeah? From who? ‘N why aren’t there any other Avengers spying on children?” Peter demands this, the first edge of something angry cracking on the last word and Bucky straightens.
He cocks his head to the side, gives a lazy and dismissive shrug. “Nah, it’s something small. Just watching a potential recruit,” Bucky picks at his thumbnail, watches the way Peter’s whole body stiffens. “Some kid who can apparently run super fast or something.” Bucky tilts his head back against the wall and closes his eyes, then cracks them a slip to watch. “I dunno, think it’s a waste of time. But the team needs fresh blood, healthy blood, so…” he trails off.
Peter’s body goes slack, spins on the webbing and he looks grey. “Avengers don’t usually go for healthy,” he says quietly. “All Avengers are in some way extremely malnourished. Mentally, Emotionally.”
Bucky reaches out and prods the boney wrist in the gaping sleeve of Parker’s coat. “Not many of them are physically malnourished.”
Peter bares his teeth, begins scuttling up his webbing. “Fuck off, Barnes. Stop tailing me everywhere. It’s creepy and I will have May call the cops on your ass. She’s still not keen on you.”
Bucky waits until even Peter’s super hearing can’t hear him before muttering, “God kid, I wish Tony had asked anyone else.”
-
Peter turns sixteen and Bucky rots on a fire escape while Peter and his friend and his… girlfriend? Eat a homemade cake that makes his stomach grumble.
Well, Peter’s friends eat cake. But most of them are smiling, even if May’s hands twitch towards Peter’s half full plate.
Bucky’s with her, fingers, metal and flesh, aching to fill Peter’s belly. It settles wrong in his bones, watching Peter sneak away. Peter sits on his bed and Bucky can’t see what he’s doing, but he spots a flash of ink on his neck and he leans in to see it.
The railing creaks, Peter’s head whips around and Bucky is quick, but Peter’s back down at the party before Bucky’s back in position.
Peter can’t possibly see Bucky but he stares out the window, brown eyes bruise rimmed and wide, hateful. He smiles at his friends, at May, but Bucky shivers because it’s all feral teeth and cruelty.
Peter makes his life hell. Bucky can’t keep up. Peter was bred on these streets, grew up in the shadows and forgotten pathways.
Bucky’s an old man in an unaged body who really just wants a nap and is so fucking tired of dead men giving him orders.
So he stops.
-
Peter doesn’t.
Bucky runs into him in Tony’s lab, and he’s nothing. He’s grey skin stretched over cut-steel bones and bruise painted eyes staring blankly at emptiness.
Pepper and May, Happy. Fucking Sam and Rhodey, they all whisper. Peter is corralled into guidance councilors’ offices, therapists’ offices, psychiatrists’ offices.
Once even, May tricks him into a crocheting club and that's about the time when Peter flips his lid.
Bucky isn’t there for it, but from the shell shocked looks on all the faces of those gathered in the tower, he’s glad for it.
May’s shaking, Happy’s grim. Rhodey is staring at Bucky like he knows too much. Bucky stares back, face blank, but Rhodey knows that move.
“Where is he?” Bucky asks.
No one answers, May sniffs, the start of a sob caught in her chest. Bucky stands up a little taller. “Well?”
Happy says, “We don’t know.”
Rhodey fills in, “He took off after he blew up and none of us are quick enough, quiet enough to shadow him.”
It’s not even subtle, the dig at Bucky. But it’s also…
“Did anyone think to check Tony’s lab?”
“Yeah,” Happy says defensively. “We aren’t idiots.”
“I mean, did anyone check it after checking it the first time and going everywhere else?” Bucky sighs.
He gets a lot of blank looks so he peels himself off the counter, snatches a tall cup of coffee and stalks towards the lab.
The squeaking of his books is intentional and Peter isn’t there when he enters. “Friday?”
“Mr. Barnes?” She sasses.
“How many minutes?”
“Three.”
-
It takes three months for Bucky to corner Peter. He’s always half a step behind the kid, which really grates on his nerves, all things considered.
Sometimes he’s convinced he has helps.
Other times, watching Ned and MJ, he knows it.
But he finally pins Peter down, fist on either side of his face and growling like a wolf, “The fuck are you thinking?”
Peter pushes back. He should, Bucky frowns. This kid stopped his metal fist once, and now he can’t even shove Bucky’s shoulders without wincing. “Friendly Neighborhood-Spider,” Peter huffs out.
Bucky pounds the concrete. “You can’t protect anyone if you’re dead!” Bucky doesn’t scream it. Screaming isn’t his thing. He hisses it, low and quiet and bitter in Peter’s ear, just to make the boy shiver. “You of all people, you especially should understand this, Peter.”
Peter’s eyes water, but the fight… he does something guaranteed to make Bucky let go. He kisses him. Lights flash, either behind Bucky’s eyes or before them, who cares. He scrambles off of Peter, and watches as the kid curls in on himself, sobbing.
“Fuck you, Peter,” Bucky says. He’s itchy, sweaty, and he’s supposed to protect this suicidal mess. “Fuck, what the hell are you doing?”
But he picks him up, and the kid weighs nothing, and Bucky can feel too many knobs in too many places. He carries Peter seventeen blocks to a shitty apartment no one else knows he has and tucks him into a musty set of cotton sheets.
He doesn’t feed him, because Peter won’t eat it. He doesn’t stroke his hair, or sing him songs, or anything.
He sits and he watches and Peter sleeps. Bucky might cheat, filling the air with incense that makes him drowsy. But he has years of training and he doesn’t give in until Peter’s snores fill the room.
Bucky’s not a mathematician or a scientist, but even spiders need sleep and this shit is strong, so he sets an alarm for 12 hours.
-
His phone rings ten hours later and Bucky curses gods, literal, figurative, and lightning wielding. Peter doesn’t stir at all though, and that’s a win.
“Ngh,” he grunts into the phone.
“It’s uh-” The voice hesitates.
“May?” Bucky asks confused. “How’d you get this number?”
“Have you seen Peter?” She asks instead.
“Yeah, he’s safe,” and the sigh of relief she breathes out soothes something in Bucky. “I’ll bring him home soon,” he starts but she cuts him off.
“No, it’s just-” there’s whispering, unintelligible over the tinny speaker, and then, “just keep him safe, Barnes.”
It’s not an olive branch, but Bucky takes it anyway.
-
Peter turns 17 and no one celebrates with him.
But he does that to himself. There’s a surprise party floundering while Peter Parker, not Spiderman, sits atop the head of a Tony Stark Memorial.
Bucky rest in the crook of an arm that’s surprisingly comfortable, half asleep. “You don’t have to,” he hears above him.
Bucky waves a hand at him. “Expand.”
“Protect me,” Peter says. Once, his voice was lilting, cracking with puberty and excitable. Bucky heard it when he heard “You have a metal arm?”
Now, now he could be a truly poor designed AI; all deadtoned and mono-inflection. His arm flops down and there’s a red smear that makes Bucky sit up. He’s fast, fast enough to grab the brittle wrist and yanks.
It’s beautiful, an entire tiny sea, volatile and red and angry, splashing across his wrist, curling up into the crook of his elbow. “In Celtic,” Bucky says quietly, “Morgan means ‘sea’.”
“Technically it comes from two words meaning ‘sea’ and ‘circle’,” Peter snarks right back.
“Take off your shirt,” Bucky demands.
Peter tries to yank his hand back, but Bucky tightens his metal fingers until he can feel bird-bones shift. “Chrsit, Bucky, I didn’t actually think you were a creep.”
“We’re in New York, so you’re legal as of six minutes ago,” Bucky snarks annoyed. “Take the fucking shirt off, Parker. Or I swear to God I’ll rip the material from your back.”
He can’t explain the weird twisting in his gut, the sinking, rotting, putrid thing festering all the way up his esophagus.
Peter gets his wrist back and he shivers despite the heat, but he finally, slowly, lifts his shirt up and turns his back towards Bucky. Bucky doesn’t know what makes him gasp more, how skinny the boy is, the smattering of bruises, scrapes and scars, or the ink.
The state of Virginia isn’t really pretty, in Bucky’s opinion, except when it's smeared across Peter’s shoulders and encased in a galaxy that looks vivid, real. There’s a broken shield, the edges of a star cutting up his neck. There’s a dancer caught in a black web trapped on his left rib-cage, a bridge of fractured-glass rainbows on his right.
His right arm, Bucky trails his fingers up it, the green lightning exploding like poison across the skin. Flowers woven into all of it, like ribbons on a May pole.
“Turn around,” Bucky hates how hoarse his voice is.
Peter does. His chest, concave, ribs countable and breastplate on display, looks like it’s been ripped open. The blood spilling from it is black, made of up of wires and cogs and gears. Bucky presses his fingers into it, and it’s like he can feel it beating. Down the sides, stone rabbits run through stone forest, all chasing brilliant metal stars.
Some of them, Bucky understands.
All of them scare him. “Oh Peter,” he begins. He cuts himself off, hands over the shirt, and flips off the statue to let the boy sob.
-
Bucky doesn’t like it, the ache in his gut for Peter. It’s wrong, feels wrong, in every sense, makes him the vilain people thought he was.
He’s not entirely sure about his own age. Based on years, he’s supposed to be about 90 or so, but physically, in time spent actually alive, he’d guess somewhere between 23 to 28.
Either option makes him too goddamned old to be pining after a child aching for a world that died before he came back to life.
And even he can see that Peter isn’t exactly in a state to be…
Peter’s not safe to have a crush on.
Bucky drags him from his bed. He forces Peter into a shower, into clean clothes, into a meal.
Peter manages a few bites before looking green, and it’s sad that green is a step up on the color scale.
“It’s a nice memorial,” Bucky says.
“Memorials are only for the dead,” Peter says.
“They were all dead at one point,” Bucky says, “weren’t they? May and Harley.”
“Morgan and Pepper,” Peter counters.
Bucky tilts his head. “It’s okay to resent them. To feel guilty.”
Peter’s hands shake, and he busies them with parts of the laptop he’s cracked open. “I don’t.”
“You do,” Bucky says as gentle as he can. It still comes out gravelly and gruff. “He loved them, and they love you. But Pepper got to say goodbye.”
Peter looks at him, something dark flashing in brown eyes that are finally warming after a long winter. “Pepper let him die,” Peter hisses.
Bucky gives him a sad smile. “Kid, we both know he was already dying. Pepper just let him find peace.”
Brown lightning cracks, fire burnt amber and whiskey, “What’s your theory on Morgan then? How’d she earn a spot?”
Bucky shrugs, “Do you really want that psychoanalysis? Or are you content to listen to me, and to eat some more?”
Peter nibbles a fry smothered in sourcream, cheese, and bacon. “Look, Tony’s gone. Christ, it’s okay to be sad and to miss him. It’s okay to hurt for everything lost, the people, the time, the innocence. But you killing yourself? It doesn’t help anyone and it doesn’t bring anyone back and it doesn’t…” Bucky stops.
“But you know this already, don’t you?” Bucky asks. He wants to reach out and push Peter’s hair from his eyes, wants to cradle him and thumb the tears from brown eyes.
“It’s my fault,” Peter whispers. “Morgan and Pepper, they’ll grow up without him and the SI is run by to protegee kids. Harley might know what he’s doing down in that garage but neither of us really know how to run a business.”
“Pepper and Happy,” Bucky says quietly, but Peter shakes his head.
“They’ve always helped, always been behind the screen. But it’s my face and Harley’s smeared across the boardrooms.”
Bucky shrugs. “You’ll figure it out. He wouldn’t have left things the way he did if you couldn’t.”
“I’m sorry he left me to you,” Peter chokes out.
Bucky’s brows furrow.
“I know,” Peter says. “I know you’re supposed to protect me, guard me, mentor me, whatever. And I’m sorry. You should’ve gotten Harley or Morgan. One of the ones not built of pain and shards and anger.”
Bucky nods. “Ah.” It’s all he says and he can see the angry flush in Peter’s cheeks, across his collarbone. Bucky reaches out and grabs a cold, featherweight hand. “Peter, Tony didn’t ‘leave’ you to me. Sure he gave me a mission, a purpose. But he ‘left’ us to each other.”
“The fuck does that mean?” Peter snarls, but he leans into Bucky, twists their fingers and tightens the grip.
“You think you’re the only one strung up with angry wires and broken pieces and shrapnel? Kid, you think you’re alone? My best friend left his shield to a guy who really doesn’t like me and everyone I might’ve known and loved died or is dying. You have a family, Peter, a whole giant messy circle of people around you who care.”
Peter leans into his chest, tears and salt and snot staining Bucky’s shirt. “But try as they might, most of ‘em won’t really understand. Harley might, but he never carried the world the way Tony did. The way you’re trying. Pepper wants to and god, I hope Morgan never does, but you watched Tony lose you and then you lost Tony and in the midst of all of it, you’re trying to be a hero and save the world and it’s a lot.”
“It’s too much. I’m just one person,” Peter cries.
“Yeah, but you aren’t alone,” Bucky says into brown curls that need a trim.
“I’ll lose them,” Peter says.
-
Bucky thinks a lot about what Peter said before he collapsed into tears. It takes him too long to understand it, but when he does, he breaks into Peter’s room, yanks the blankets down. “That’s not fair to May.”
Peter blinks at him and Bucky feels a little sorry for waking him up.
“May’s been with you through literally all of this.”
“Which is why,” Peter says, “I’m gonna lose her. She went with the snap. What if it hadn’t worked? What if Ned and MJ and even Harley-” he cuts himself off. “Trouble and death follow me, so who would stay with me?”
Bucky sits beside him and holds him.
“Who could stay with an angel of death,” Peter begs.
“I could,” Bucky whispers. It’s wrong. On so many levels, but Bucky doesn’t care when Peter cups his jaw and fits their lips together. Tony told him to protect Peter. Maybe this isn’t quite what he meant, but who better than the Winter Soldier to protect the heart of a kid just trying to keep everyone safe? Bucky’s always needed a mission. Steve, the war, the Russians, the Accords. “Tony’s order was as much to keep me sane as it was to protect you, Peter. And no offense kid, but you’re not even in the same realm as an angel of death. Shit happens. You lost people, lots of people, in some really fucked up ways. But you’re also a hero, and it comes with the territory. We all lose people. Non-heros lose people.”
Peter stays quiet, forehead pressed to Bucky’s and eyes closed against the tears trailing down his cheeks.
“Survivors always feel guilty. There’s always someone smart, someone better, someone prettier, someone more worthy who should’ve lived instead. But God, Fate, whatever you call it? Gives zero shits. Hands are dealt out and you deal with it, make the best of it,” Bucky traces a spine that’s finally got a little flesh over it and doesn’t worry about how he’s going to explain this thing between himself and Peter.
“Tony should be here with them,” Peter whispers.
“You should be here,” Bucky says forcefully.
“Who do I go to? I can’t expect May to understand all of this. I don’t want to rub it in Pepper’s face. The other Avengers ...”
“Me,” Bucky says. “You come to me, you cling to me. You find the guy who gets the ink on your skin and you take him with you when you try to crack the world in half and rebuild it.”
“We can’t bring them back, can we?” Peter finally says, emptily.
“No,” Bucky tells him gently. “But we honor their memories by being the best we can be.”
It’s not groundbreaking, earth shattering, problem solving, heart fixing advice. It’s a cheap fortune in a stale cookie, but it’s the best either of them have and it soothes Peter. Peter pulls, tugs, pushes, bends until they’re lying on a small twin bed, wrapped around each other.
“Stay,” Peter whispers as he drifts.
“As long as I can,” Bucky swears.