Chapter 5
“Sir,” FRIDAY says. Tony groans, shifting a little and blinking a couple times to try and wake himself up. “Sir,” FRIDAY says again and Tony lets out a soft breath, disturbing Bucky enough to wake him up.
“What is it, babe?” he asks, curling his flesh arm around Tony and drawing him back in close.
He smiles as he goes, settling in against Bucky’s chest. “What is it, FRI?” he asks the AI. Bucky trails his fingers up and down Tony’s arm, pressing a kiss to the top of his head.
“Steve Rogers keeps trying to contact you in regards to Bucky, Sir. Would you like me to put him through? He’s been very persistent,” the AI informs him.
Tony and Bucky groan at once, “yeah put him through,” Bucky mumbles, grabbing Tony’s phone off his end table. Tony watches in shock as he hears Steve’s panicked voice on the other end of the phone. “Hey, holly hell calm it,” Bucky tells Steve, prompting Tony to cover his mouth to stifle his laughter. No sense in tipping Steve off to their relationship by alerting his superior hearing to Tony laughing at him. “Seriously, relax before you have an aneurism or something Steve. There was a… technical malfunction- shit happens. Anyways it took some time to fix because you know, technology. Its complicated. Why are you still yelling? When will I be home? When I feel like it, do I have a fucking curfew or something? No? Then why you yelling? I’ll be home when I feel like it,” he tells Steve.
He can hear that Steve is still yelling and Bucky rolls his eyes, pulling the phone away from his ear and leaning forward to kiss Tony. He grins into the kiss, admiring the sheer amount of guts a move like that took, especially when he draws Tony further in, hand sliding down his back and over his left ass cheek as he brings the phone back to his ear. “I’ll be home when I’m home,” he tells Steve, hanging up and tossing Tony’s phone aside in favor of focusing on Tony.
“Oh my god, he’s going to be fucking livid,” Tony tells him but Bucky shrugs.
“Its worth it if I get to spend more time with you,” he murmurs.
*
Normally James switched with Bucky before he had to deal with fucking Steve Rogers- sometimes in the very literal sense- again but this time he doesn’t feel like it. For once he’d like to bask in his own existence and spend a little time remembering Tony. It was hard only ever being out and around when he was with Tony and he wanted more freedom, more time to… he didn’t know, be himself maybe? It sounded stupid when he worded it like that but the point was that he didn’t want to go back into Bucky’s head and linger around watching whatever the fuck he did now. Besides, Steve was bound to be pissed and it seemed kind of crappy to leave him with the fallout of his earlier phone call.
Or that’s what he tells himself anyways.
“Where the hell were you?” Steve asks before he even gets in the door technically.
James rolls his eyes immediately and throws his keys in the dish on the table beside the door. “I was at Tony’s, moron, we established that.” He gives Steve an unimpressed look and finds that he’s getting a pretty nasty glare right back. For a moment a brief flash of confusion crosses Steve’s features, like he’s surprised that James is looking back at him so easily, but it doesn’t stick around.
“Excuse me?” Steve asks and James rolls his eyes again.
“I. Was. At. Tony’s. Do you need me to repeat it slower for you this time?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. He already wished he’d stayed at Tony’s with the way this was going but… well he couldn’t stay there forever. Bucky was bound to come back and that was a whole mess James wanted nothing to do with.
Steve frowns; looking confused and a little hurt. “What is with you lately?” he asks, shaking his head a little.
“What’s with me is that I’m fucking tired of you calling Tony every five god damn minutes whenever I’m gone for more than whatever allotted amount of time you think is acceptable. Maybe, and this might be shocking to you, I like doing things without you. At least Tony doesn’t try and put a fucking leash on me,” he mumbles, rolling his eyes one final time before he marches out of the living room and down the hall to the bedroom he shared with Steve. Because apparently he couldn’t even get his own damn sleeping area.
*
“I have no idea what I’m looking for,” Shuri admits and Tony sighs.
“Me either kid. Looks like there was an uptake in research on the Winter Soldier and the Black Widow Program but that makes sense. Both programs involved heavy conditioning of some kind so if they’re looking for Bucky back or to find themselves a new fist this is normal,” he says. There was also an uptake of research on Captain America but he had super soldier serum that made him valuable to look up. These three things combined led Tony to believe HYDRA wanted a new super soldier fighting their battles but his conclusions weren’t supported by more than his theories on why HYDRA wanted to know more about those three things specifically. The evidence lined up, but that didn’t mean that’s what the evidence was actually saying.
Shuri shakes her head, looking away from the camera for a moment and deflating visibly. “This is more difficult than I thought it would be,” she says softly.
If she were her brother he’d say welcome to the real world- T’Challa was old enough to know better. But Shuri was a kid, sixteen she had told him, and she reminded him a lot of this kid he was keeping track of in Queens. Bright, talented, and way too optimistic to ever last in a world that did its damndest to crush hopes. He knew that optimism wasn’t going to last- his own didn’t- but he didn’t want to be the one to crush it either. He knew what it was like being on the receiving in of that kind of treatment and he had no desire to be his father, thanks.
“It always is, but we always manage in some way or another. So you’ve got my theories on why HYDRA and AIM are looking into super soldiers and Black Widows, what do you think?” he asks. Shuri looks a little surprised at this but readjusts herself the way kids did when they realized adults were taking them seriously for a moment.
“Your theories make more sense than mine- I don’t have the same working knowledge you do with these organizations. What confused me was why your red headed friend was in Russia in a location that, according to these files, used to be a Black Widow training facility. Thoughts?” she asks, looking up from her notes to Tony.
He raises an eyebrow because he had no idea that Natasha was in Russia let alone at old Black Widow facilities. “No clue, but if there’s something I need to know she’d tell me. Any sights of her since then?” he asks, curious to see what the Dora Milaje caught. Natasha wasn’t the type to be busted so the fact that they had this much news on her at all was impressive to Tony.
Shuri shakes her head, “no. But she left in a hurry and the last news we got of her she seemed to be headed back to America, or at least headed west. Maybe she has news and wanted to deliver it in person?” she asks Tony, eyebrows rising.
Natasha’s motivations were beyond him most days but he nods. “Natasha isn’t easy to read, but I’d say it’s a fairly safe bet to guess she’s coming here. Or at least somewhere she could reach me without raising suspicion anyways. Any other news?” he asks and Shuri shakes her head, looking somewhat disappointed with this. She shouldn’t, Natasha wasn’t easy to keep track of when she didn’t want to be tracked and it was safe to say she didn’t want to be tracked right now so he tells Shuri that. She takes the compliment well, smiling a little and informing him that she’d give her brother the latest news before she signs off. Tony leans back in his chair and sighs, pressing his fingers to his temples and wishing someone else was here with him. Rhodey was still tied up with the Accords mess, and Tony doubted Bucky would be able to manage escape for at least a week given the sheer amount of calls Steve made to him.
He understood he must have been worried with Bucky’s history but seriously, harassing his AI to the point where she woke him up? That was more than a bit much but it wasn’t his problem to deal with. Bucky, he was sure, was capable of telling Steve off himself. So he considers his options for some time before he shakes his head and settles on working on an actual suit for that spider kid. The poor kid was running around in what looked like pajamas with these weird goggle things and he needed an upgrade stat if he was going to continue putting his life in danger catching cars before they drove into busses and whatnot. Plus his web shooters were interesting and full of possibilities. So far Tony had thought up over three hundred different ways to use those webs and he had some ideas still, so he sets to work on them.
*
Bucky was acting more than a little odd so Steve goes back to those files he managed to find on the Winter Soldier in that info dump. Most of it made him sick to look at let alone spend any time on but he needed to figure out why Bucky was acting so… so… strange. Normally he was soft and quiet and he was always happy to be around Steve but today he was in a retched mood and Steve was sure it had something to do with his past as the Winter Soldier because this just wasn’t like him at all. His Bucky would never act that way and whatever had gotten into him it made him like tea too, and Bucky hates tea. When he asked about it though Bucky told him to fuck off and mind his own business and that was just shocking.
So he goes to the files looking for help, sifting through the ones he already knew had something to do with torture thanks to his unfortunate experience reading them, and sifting through the ones that were related to various Russian Ops programs. None of those were relevant at the moment but he wasn’t sure if there was anything in here that was. Most of it was keeping violent tabs on Bucky’s mind being turned to mush and a bunch of other things that made Steve’s stomach turn in disgust. He does eventually find a personality folder though so he decides to read it.
Most of it was stuff he already knew about Bucky- like what his personality was pre war, his temperament, his- and this one was hard to swallow- his ability to withstand torture before he gave in. The records showed Bucky had a shockingly strong will and Steve wished that weren’t true for Bucky’s sake. No one should have had to suffer what he did in those HYDRA bases. The information starts to get interesting around the early sixties though. HYDRA had noted weird things before with Bucky, like odd outbursts and anger that normally wasn’t there, but they start documenting more thoroughly after an incident in ’63 left five doctors dead and it took twice as long to electrotherapy Bucky back into cooperating again.
That’s, Steve learns, when they introduce the trigger words. With whatever it was messing with Bucky’s conditioning HYDRA wanted to ensure his ability to be controlled was absolute and Steve skips over the details of that, stomach heaving on Bucky’s behalf. But he does continue to pick out the bits of Bucky’s odd behavior that matched what he was seeing now.
Everything Steve noted was on the record for HYDRA too- like his angry outbursts, refusal to follow orders, lashing out, and then a few things Steve could add to that list too. HYDRA never came up with an explanation for it though and Steve was at a loss. When in captivity he could imagine that Bucky wanted out, that he sometimes even broke his conditioning every once an awhile to fight back but he wasn’t being held by HYDRA anymore so how come this was still happening? Was it some kind of stress reaction? A weird way of coping?
Or, and the thought occurs to Steve far too late, these weird outbursts happened to perfectly coincide with visits to Tony’s lab. He felt like a moron for not noticing it before given how obvious it was but it was clear Tony was doing something to Bucky and he was going to figure it out now.