As a consequence of being in the same room with his parents and their team mates when a couple of fights broke out against enemies, Peter was a real perfectionist.
His pulse would speed up drastically whenever he did something wrong. He knew what they were capable of, and too scared of any reactions. It was quite okay though; whenever something bad happened, Peter would just leave the room, and everyone learned to live with that.
It was on one of Bucky’s babysitting days that the at-least-at-one-point-inevitable happened.
Peter came home from school completely thrilled to be spending an afternoon with his favorite uncle.
“Monster-bug,” Bucky exclaimed when Peter came running from the elevator.
“Uncle Bucky!” The ten-year old was quite hyperactive, especially when there was someone to focus just on him.
After some juice and a snack, the two of them were off to the gym.
Starting off with the trampoline then moving on to every sport one could imagine, the two had the fun of their lives.
At some point, Peter decided that it would be fun to play soccer. Him as a striker and Bucky as a goalkeeper.
What neither of them knew was that one of the chords in Bucky’s shoulder was about to disconnect, and that every hit he took was making it worse.
“It’s gonna throw you back this time,” Peter said as he smirked. Then, he kicked with as much force as he could bring up. That was the final string.
The power chord fell of its designated plug and created an electronic flash from Bucky’s shoulder to his wrist.
Then, the arm disconnected completely from Bucky’s body; an automatic reaction to keep the electricity from shocking the soldier.
Bucky looked at the prosthetic in wild bemusement and jumped at Peter’s ear piercing shriek.
“Peter, it’s okay-“
“I’m so sorry uncle Bucky,” Peter said and after some thinking, ran straight past the man and out of the gym.
Eyes burning, heart racing, Peter didn’t even look up when he ran into his father. Instead, he started to sob right into Tony’s Black Sabbath t-shirt, knowing exactly that it was his dad standing there. The boy grabbed the fabric of Tony’s shirt tight in fear.
“Pete? What happened?” The sobs were slowly breaking Tony’s heart piece by piece, and the wetness on his stomach didn’t help to cease the knot beneath its skin. “Talk to me,” Tony pleaded and picked his boy up by the armpits.
“I… I broke uncle Bucky.”
“Wha...”
Tony was interrupted by Bucking walking towards him, his prosthetic arm in his flesh hand. The billionaire had to suppress a chuckle at that. “Oh Pete, I’m sure that’s not your fault. It’ll take only a second to reattach.”
Peter’s sobs stopped after a few seconds, then he lifted his face out of the crook of Tony’s neck.
Wiping his face - snot and tears and all – with the back of his hand, he finally faced his uncle again.
“Your dad’s right Peter. It falls off automatically when something’s wrong. Just a precaution so I don’t get my brains fried.”
Peter giggled but he was still shaking with adrenaline and Bucky noticed. He had Tony hold his arm and hand Peter over to him. (I mean I’ve been writing for 6 years but this has got to be the weirdest sentence I’ve ever written).
Then, he sat down against a wall with the boy and waited until his nephew’s pulse was back to normal while Tony went off to fix the arm.