@xcapereality liked for a Tony starter; Tony -> Bucky
Tony did not mean to say it.
If anyone asked later, preferably in a setting where perjury carried consequences, Tony would insist that he had come to the debrief with no intention of volunteering for anything. He had already volunteered for enough in his life. Time, money, body, reputation, several major organs, one healthy sleep schedule. His charitable era was over. Closed. Boarded up. Condemned by the city.
Then Barnes came in with his prosthetic half-locked at the elbow and a nasty grind beneath the shoulder plating, and someone across the room said, “We can send the specs to Wakanda.”
Tony heard himself say, “I can fix it.”
The room went very strange.
Not loudly strange. Worse. Quietly strange. The kind of silence that immediately informed Tony he had done something emotionally significant in public, which was illegal, probably.
Natasha looked at him like she had been waiting to see whether he would step on that particular landmine.
Tony realized what he had volunteered for approximately half a second too late.
Working on Bucky Barnes’s arm meant proximity. It meant tools and exposed wiring and standing close enough to hear him breathe. It meant touching the machinery attached to the man whose metal hand Tony had watched close around his father’s throat. It meant inviting Siberia into his workshop, giving it a chair, offering it coffee, and then pretending it was not sitting there with snow in its teeth.
Because the arm was damaged.
Because someone had said asset earlier in that same debrief and Tony had apparently developed a fatal allergy to the word.
Because forgiveness, unfortunately, had not asked him for permission before moving into his nervous system and rearranging furniture.
So now the prosthetic lay open on his table like something half remembered and forcibly made real again, metal and wiring exposed under the blue wash of holographic light. Tony kept his hands moving, because stopping would mean thinking too hard about what he had just said, and thinking too hard was how he ended up in places like Siberia in his head when he was trying very specifically not to be there.
Of course they were steady.
Tony Stark did not let trauma interfere with precision engineering, thank you very much. Trauma could wait in the lobby with a visitor badge and a stale donut. He had work to do.
Barnes was still there. That was the part Tony kept noticing and then aggressively refusing to notice again. Presence, weight, the faint shift of air when someone who had been built to disappear chose not to.
Tony rotated the screwdriver once between his fingers and did not look up.
“Stop looking at me like that.”
A pause would have been smarter.
“I said I forgave you. I didn’t say I was going to start braiding your hair.”
The screwdriver turned. Something inside the arm clicked, clean and obedient, because machinery at least had the decency to make sense when properly threatened.
“And for the record, this is not a bonding exercise. We are not having a moment. There will be no friendship bracelets. No commemorative mug. No team-building slideshow where I talk about growth while Steve looks proud and I throw myself through reinforced glass.”
He flicked a piece of casing aside. It clinked against the bench.
“I am doing this because your arm is structurally offensive and I cannot in good conscience allow it to continue existing in my workshop in its current state.”
That was safer. Technical. Detached. Something he could survive saying.
Then he found the first override line.
Not all the way. Not enough that anyone else might have noticed, maybe, unless they had spent decades learning the difference between stillness and restraint. His fingers remained exactly where they were, the tool angled beneath a coil of wiring. The holographic schematic pulsed in front of him, indifferent and blue.
“Well,” Tony said lightly, and the lightness had knives sewn into the hem, “that’s disgusting.”
He adjusted the projection, isolating the control architecture. More lines lit up. Too many. Redundancies layered under redundancies. Back doors folded into feedback systems. Safety protocols that protected the equipment from Barnes, not Barnes from the equipment.
HYDRA had not built an arm.
HYDRA had built a leash with fingers.
Tony stared at it for several seconds too long.
“And because,” he continued, quieter now without meaning to be, “someone thought it was a good idea to build override architecture into a person who already had enough people trying to override him.”
His jaw tightened slightly as he said it, like the words themselves had weight.
Then, softer, almost to himself:
“Howard would’ve hated that I’m better at this than whoever built the original.”
It came out before he could stop it.
Tony’s fingers flexed once around the screwdriver.
That was the thing about grief. It had no respect for timing. No technical discipline. It just slithered out through the nearest crack and made itself everyone’s problem.
“I mean, he would’ve hated a lot of things,” Tony added quickly, because apparently he had decided to sprint directly away from that admission until one of them developed mercy and pretended not to hear it. “My music. My facial hair. My life choices. The fact that I made more money than him while wearing novelty sunglasses indoors. Big list. Very rich tapestry of paternal disappointment.”
He removed the first damaged component and set it aside.
“But this? This would’ve annoyed the hell out of him.”
Another line lit up under his hand.
“So yes,” he said, forcing the shape of sarcasm back over his voice, even though it did not quite fit anymore. “I am removing them. Unless you object. In which case I will stop, because apparently consent and autonomy are things we do now, but I want it noted that I will be judging HYDRA’s engineering choices very loudly while I do.”
He paused, then added, “Possibly with visual aids.”
The tool in his hand rotated once more, precise and controlled. He did not look up this time, because looking up would mean seeing Barnes properly, and seeing Barnes properly meant remembering everything Tony had just admitted out loud in front of another human being without the safety net of sarcasm fully intact.
Tony’s voice dropped slightly, less performative now.
“I’m not trying to fix you,” he said. “Before you say it. You are not a toaster. You are not one of my cars. You are not a suit I dragged out of a cave with a box of scraps and a deeply concerning amount of blood loss.”
His fingers stilled against the arm for half a second.
“I’m fixing the thing that was done to you.”
The words landed too honestly.
Tony immediately hated them for it.
“There is a difference,” he added, quicker, rougher. “A very large, flashing-neon, legally and emotionally distinct difference. I am extremely invested in nobody confusing those categories, especially me.”
He separated another control line from the neural interface, careful in a way his face refused to acknowledge.
“And I’m not calling you an asset either. In case that was unclear. I know I said it very loudly in a room full of people earlier, but I would like to formally retract it in a smaller, more controlled environment where I can pretend I have dignity.”
He finally glanced up, just briefly, like checking a reading on a screen rather than meeting a person’s eyes.
Still not a weapon in the way the room had tried to define him.
Tony looked back down immediately, as if that fact was too large to hold directly.
“So,” he said again, softer this time, less armor in it than he probably intended, “do you want them gone?”
His thumb hovered near the highlighted control line.
“The little back doors. The leash code. The part where HYDRA apparently looked at basic human autonomy and went, no thanks, we prefer our prisoners with remote access.”
His expression hardened for one brief, unguarded second.
Then the sharpness folded back into something wryer. Thinner. Still Tony, because he did not know how to be anything else.
He tapped the tool once against his palm.
“Not mine. Not theirs. Not Captain America’s aggressively patriotic guilt complex. Yours.”
“Which is new. Weird. Potentially terrible for team efficiency.”
