Natasha Stark (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ax_ironsights) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ax_main2019-02-17 03:38 pm
ax_ironsights) wrote in ax_main2019-02-17 03:38 pm
Entry tags:
Natasha and Bucky, Backdated
Natasha Stark discovers a boy in a box. Things get a little strange from there.
Dreams are rare, forgotten things.
A smile. Blue eyes. The taste of metal. The crack of ice shattering, plummeting beneath icy water.
He struggles and forgets again not to draw in a sharp, panicked breath.
Air filled Bucky's lungs as he jerked against the restraints holding him in place. His skin was damp from the liquid receding from the stasis chamber. The mask was still over his face, no longer dosing him with the chemicals that kept him asleep or in this case finally brought him awake. No one came to unhook him and take him from the pod. Bucky reached for the harness over his chest, struggling to tear it free.
The room wasn't right. He looked around wildly. He froze when he locked eyes with the only person in the room. A woman, young, he didn't recognize the face... not strange... she had no lab coat. No uniform. Where the fuck< was he?
"Uh," Natasha said intelligently. When she'd found the box tucked away into the basement of a forgotten company warehouse, for a moment she'd thought there was a dead body in there. Turned out she'd been right about the body, but wrong about the state of it. Messing with the controls probably hadn't been the best idea, but apparently it had worked, because...there he was. Staring at her.
"Hi?" That wasn't much better, but she did add a ridiculous little wave. "How are you feeling? Trouble seeing, nausea, sudden hunger for brains?"
Those words did nothing to center his equilibrium. They weren’t what he was expecting. He felt naked. Metaphorically. Stripped bare in a way far more troubling than his physical status.
Which, he realized, was naked in a different capacity. The black briefs he was wearing left little to the imagination and his long hair was plastered down around his shoulders. Metal fingers gripped the harness. He managed to tear it loose. Bucky sat up.
“Where?” He asked.
It took everything Natasha had not to back up a step, especially given just how easily he ripped that free. Instead she just stood there and tipped her jaw up slightly. No way she was backing down from...whatever the hell this was.
"Long Island." Probably not what he was actually asking. Was it?
He stared at her blankly for a moment. “When?” His voice was rusty, tone flat.
Okay, that was a bigger question. She shifted a little, eyes darting to the pod before back to the boy inside it. "Do you maybe want to come out of there first? I promise I'll answer anything you want to know."
Despite his confusion, he looked closer at the girl. No indication of weapons or equipment. No immediate sign of threat. That didn’t set Bucky at ease. Visible indicators were easier to prepare for. He had no clues for this situation, other than something was clearly wrong. Bucky climbed unsteadily out of the tank. The room was crowded with other crates and oddities. He wasn’t sure the best place to stand. There he was, rivulets of liquid beading down his legs and chest, feet cold against the metal floor.
The look he gave her was a clear now what?
...good question. Natasha scanned around until she found a blanket tucked into box, probably to keep things from shifting around, and went to go grab it. A little dusty, maybe, but better than nothing. "Here," she said as she held it out to him. "Uh. What's your name?"
Not the thing she most wanted to ask, but probably a better thing to start with than, 'why were you in a box in the basement'.
He took the blanket and tucked it around his shoulders. It covered to about mid thigh.
“My name...” He frowned. “Sorry. Can’t really... kind of jumbled.”
Right. Okay. Natasha took a deep breath and shook her head. Well, she had promised. "Okay, well. You're on Long Island, it's 2018, and I am really confused as to how you ended up in a box in a warehouse basement, mysterious stranger."
“2018.” That started slotting pieces into place. Smaller numbers, with big gaps in the sequence. He winced. “Shit,” he swore softly. Was he supposed to report in? There was a protocol, and his instincts warred between trying to remember where he needed to check in and warning him not to trust that impulse. No one had hold of his strings right now. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?
“Anyone else here?”
That got a longer pause as Natasha tried to figure out what the better response was. Tell him the place was crawling with people in case he was getting any ideas about going through her to get out, or reassure the obvious tension she could see in him that there wasn't anyone else lurking?
"I'm sure there's a security guard or two around somewhere," she said finally. Split the difference, why not.
Bucky looked around the cluttered space. "Empty warehouse, minimal security." He glanced her over. "What are you even doing in here?"
She tensed up just a little at the summation, then made herself relax again. Enough to give him a dry look. "Hey, buddy, I work here." Sort of. Close enough. "I could ask you the same question.
“Ask whoever put me here. What kind of place is this? You keeping other bodies in your basement?” There was only so long he could stand here naked asking questions if she didn’t have much useful information. He might have no clue what was going on, but he didn’t feel like waiting for her to call security. No doubt he’d end up somewhere else locked up for the night.
"It's a warehouse," Natasha said with the tone of voice that implied an unspoken duh at the end of it. "As for the rest, good question. Guess I'm gonna have to look through here better than I thought." She squinted at him for a moment, then let out a long sigh. "I guess we'd better get you out of here before someone turns up to arrest me for kidnapping."
Bucky looked around the room again, glancing around sharply for any objects that looked like his tank. Shit. He didn't think there was anyone else like him out there, but who knew what was really going on? His shoulders slumped as he realized how royally fucked he was right now. His memory was still a jumble, but he knew that much.
"Think you could find me real pants?"
Oddly enough, it was that sudden slump that made up Natasha's mind. He might still be dangerous, but she couldn't just leave him here. Technically, he was StarkIndustries property. Probably.
"I think we can find you something." She tipped her head back towards the door. "Come on."
He braced himself for an ambush and followed her.
****
Of course, all it had taken was one second with Howard Stark to upend everything.
In the couple of days it had been since Natasha had dragged her new friend home with her they'd danced a bit awkwardly around one another, but Natasha had tried to get him settled as best as she could. Wouldn't do to just toss the poor guy out now especially when he was still having some memory problems. And there was obviously someone intelligent behind the wild hair and quiet glower, bits and pieces of a personality that emerged just enough to catch her off guard every so often. It might just have been curiosity, but she wanted to know more.
And then Howard had come home. And he'd taken one look at the guest in the kitchen and everything had gone to hell.
Somehow, she'd managed to get both of them away from Howard and back to her rooms, thanks to some unspoken pleading for her not to leave them alone and some very quick thinking. Which meant that she was once again alone with James Buchanan Barnes. Somehow, she'd ended up with a long-dead war hero. What the hell.
"Are you okay?" She asked once the door was very firmly closed behind them.
Bucky sat down in the chair that had the best sightlines to all doors in the room. He hunched forward.
“Will be,” he said. Back to broken sentences. He’d gotten better with that by their first morning together. Now here he was again, as if he didn’t have enough breath to add a pronoun to that sentence. Bucky rubbed his gloved hand over his face. Lucky the metal arm was covered when they bumped into Howard. He hadn’t told Tasha about the Winter Soldier, but he hid the arm so that ‘whoever put him into that box’ wouldn’t recognize him. Seemed like Howard didn’t know what happened to Bucky after the fall. He recognized him from the war, and he showed no indication that he followed his progress after.
Bucky was a dead man walking.
“So,” Bucky said, trying to get through his headache of memories. “Howard’s your grandpa. And your dad’s his only kid. I’m really surprised by that.”
There was a long pause while Natasha tried to process that. Any of that. "Which part?"
“All of it,” Bucky said vaguely. “Can I... That tablet thing. Do you mind if I look some things up?”
Natasha studied him for a second, then moved to her desk to grab her tablet and handed it over to him.
Bucky shifted the tablet into his gloved hand. Time for a history lesson. As wary as he was to search for answers, this opened too many doors to ignore. He shut his eyes briefly. “Of all the people. Howard wasn’t the one I was expecting.”
"Yeah, well. He always has been good at doing the unexpected." There was a hint of genuine sourness to Natasha's voice, but she just shook her head rather than elaborating. Instead, she pulled out her phone and tucked herself into a corner of the sofa, wordlessly giving Barnes some time and a little distance to process everything.
Bucky’s expression grew grimmer the more he researched. No doubt Natasha’s AI could recount Bucky’s search history to her later, so there were plenty of things he wasn’t looking up. It wasn’t his time with this arm that he had questions about. It was the people before that. Many of whom were long gone. His sister. Fuck. He’d outlived his sister. He hadn’t thought of her in decades, and now he couldn’t help but remember the way she’d looked when she’d shipped off to boarding school. She had kids. Grandkids. Bucky was about their age now. Relatively, because Bucky was also nearly 90 chronologically speaking.
Nearly 90, and he lived maybe 17 or 18 years of that time? The waking and sleeping was still the haziest part of his memory, and he was afraid to push that fog. Pretty sure the things he wasn’t remembering were out of self preservation.
In the house that Howard Stark build, Bucky looked up more details he dreaded. The history of Captain America.
When he thought his heart had enough for the day, he set the tablet back on the couch and dropped his head into his hands.
It took her a moment to register that something had changed, but when Natasha glanced up from her phone her expression immediately shifted into something almost concerned. She was still supposed to be looking after him, right? Right.
"Hey. Barnes. You okay?"
He laughed, the sound shaky at best.
Right. Stupid question. Natasha leaned forward a little, studying him. "Do you need anything?"
Shoulders hunched, he glanced up at Natasha through the curtain of his hair. “Honestly? Time.”
Her eyes narrowed in a way that said she might actually try to make it happen. "What kind of time?"
“75 years, give or take,” he said wryly. “You sure you want to keep me around? I can’t imagine it’s going to be easy. Howard probably wants to know what’s kept me ticking.”
Yeah okay, that she couldn't do. But it didn't stop Natasha from giving him a thoughtful stare. And huffing a quiet laugh. "I can handle Howard, don't worry about him. But. If you want to go, I can arrange it."
He looked at the floor by her feet. His jaw set, and he finally said. “You’ll be safer without me in your life, Natasha.”
She just snorted at that, crossing her arms over her chest. "What exactly do you think you're going to do? Besides," she added, a bit more lightly, "I have JARVIS to look after me."
"How exactly does your AI protect you? From physical threats?" Bucky asked, skeptical.
Natasha gave him a long, even look. "You've noticed where we are, right? What about this says security is a problem to you?"
He snorted softly. Her security was tight, which made this a reasonable safehouse. There was always room for improvements. Letting the killer sleep in your spare room was the first flaw. “The people that put me in stasis may still be looking for me,” he warned her.
"Then better that you're here instead of wandering around out there instead," she shot back, then let out a breath. "Look, if you really want to go, we'll make it happen. But if you're just worried for my sake...don't."
“You don’t know me,” Bucky pointed out. “Even Howard doesn’t know where I’ve been since the 1940s. That is a lot of shit to deal with, so of course I’m worried what this might bring to you. You’re a real sweet girl, but do you think it’s a great idea harboring child soldiers you found frozen in a box?” Okay, that last bit was heavy handed. Bucky wanted to stay, but he didn’t want to get her hurt. Maybe it would be easier to piss her off until Natasha was happy to see him go.
Out of all of that, it was the description of herself as a real sweet girl that got the most disbelieving look. Nevermind Natasha not knowing him, he clearly didn't know her. "Well okay, but that box was on my property, which does pretty literally make you my problem."
He raised a brow. “Your family bought or stole me back in the day, so now I’m you problem?”
Not quite how Natasha might have put it, but she just smirked. "Pretty much, yeah."
Bucky looked at her, taking her in one more time. With a tightness in his chest he said, “Keep the box. If you want to trap anyone in your basement it might come in handy.”
Her eyes narrowed just a little, but Natasha could read through those lines. She stared at him for a moment, then nodded once. "I'll keep Howard off your back."
"Thank you, Tasha." He got up from the couch. "I think I'm going to lay down for a bit."
The nickname made her arch an eyebrow but Natasha just huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh and shook her head. Sure he was. "Make yourself at home." It was just a little dry.
He nodded and headed back to the room he was crashing in. In a few hours he’d test exactly how good her security really was.
****
So it turned out that Natasha had bigger things to worry about.
It had been a month since she'd been taken, she thought. It was hard to keep track of time in the windowless expanse of warehouse rooms she'd been kept in, but the errant signals that occasionally shot through her brain sometimes had dates. She was trying really hard not to think about those. One crisis at a time. Getting the armor to a place where it was workable without anyone realizing what she was doing had taken up most of her attention anyway.
It wasn't pretty. It was a massive, ugly walking tank, really, but it was doing an excellent job of keeping her bullet free so she wasn't going to complain. Yinsen was...Yinsen wasn't coming, anyway, so there was nothing stopping her from just wading into the nearest group of armed men and taking out a whole lot of frustration. Even the sounds of gunshots outside weren't enough to distract her. It was just one more thing to deal with in a moment.
A month was a long time for a socialite to go missing. Even with her people suppressing the news, this wasn’t the kind of event that would go unnoticed. Tracking her down was trainwreck. Between misinformation and bureaucratic bullshit, Bucky was pretty sure her team planned on sitting on their asses instead of following through on their current lead. This was how Bucky ended up alone when the firefight started in the compound. Well, there went sneaking in after sunset. If Natasha was in there he couldn’t wait until she got caught in crossfire.
Bucky took a deep breath and did a final check on his stolen equipment. He slipped out of his hiding place and went for the most discrete path inside. Maybe this was the perfect distraction. Maybe she was locked inside a secure room safe from ricochet. He could sneak her out the back while everyone shot each other without his assistance. What an easy op, right? Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.
Around the corridor the sound of heavy fire got louder followed by shouts. Then, with a thud a huge metal soldier crashed through the wall in front of Bucky. What the fuck were these assholes playing with? Even with a mask covering half his face, Bucky swung his metal arm up to shield his eyes from the shower of rubble. The gun in his hand was inadequate against that suit.
“Hey,” Bucky shouted up, because why not bank on confusion? “Where’s the girl?” And again in the local dialect, “She gets hurt, we don’t get paid.”
The fight had been long enough that Natasha was plenty keyed up, and she immediately swung towards the new figure with the gun, arms raised to fire. And then stopped.
There weren't that many people with shiny metal prosthetics in the world.
"...Barnes?"
He tensed to dodge, but the blow was of an unexpected variety. "Stark?" he answered back. Then, "I told you you needed better security."
There was a brief pause and then suddenly the faceplate of the helmet flipped up to reveal a gaunt, pale and deeply incredulous Natasha. "Did you seriously come all the way here just to say you told me so?"
In the middle of this life threatening shit show Bucky smiled. “I came here to save your ass. Mask back down. If you’re wearing that thing out keep your face covered. Come on, let’s go home.”
"What did you think I was doing?" She grumbled as it flipped back down, because it was easier than trying to figure out exactly what Bucky meant by 'home.' Natasha didn't hesitate to move out in front of him in, even if she did slide him a quick side-eye as she passed. "How did you even get here?"
“It's a long story I'll be reluctant to tell you when we get out of here. But if you're really good, I'll tell you anyway." He tipped his head, listening to the commotion around them. "Right. Let's move."
Natasha rolled her eyes unseen behind the helmet and stomped her way forward. Stealth was pretty much useless at that point, even if she thought the frankensteined tank she was wearing could manage it. "Where?"
He eyed the armor. “We’re going to turn left up ahead, and if walls aren’t an issue for you I’ve got a short cut. You’ve got more friends set up a few clicks away, but they were stuck debating semantics.”
"Yeah," she said, low and grim as she shifted the arms of the armor, "walls aren't really an issue." Neither were friends, but she was trying harder not to think about that. Natasha just put her head down and plowed forward, instinctively aiming for the weakest part of the wall to drive straight through.
Shit that was lethal. Bucky didn’t like the numbers of combatants vs girl in military grade suit, but knowing she wasn’t defensiveness was a relief. Hell. Knowing she was alive was something even bigger. He’d deal with whatever this protective instinct was after they got back to New York.
First priority. They were going home.
****
Somewhere along the line, they'd gotten this down to a science. So maybe neither of them liked these big glittery parties, and it was an easy way for Natasha to deploy her new socialite face without much in the way of work. Well. Physical work. They were still exhausting to do, but involved much less in the way of fire fights.
Bucky still wasn't completely on board with the idea, and he'd made it abundantly clear that he didn't understand why she was willingly making herself seem like an idiot, but Natasha had stopped trying to explain it to him. He still came, anyway, still stood stone-faced just behind her as she blithely introduced him as her PA, and somehow managed to be extremely unimpressed and remarkably tolerant at the same time. And okay, maybe Natasha just got kind of a kick out of swanning up to the most dangerous person in the room and demanding that he hold her purse.
It was his own fault for making her carry weapons in it anyway. Those things were heavy. She was really going to have to redesign that taser thing again.
"Having fun?" She asked brightly as she brushed by him, holding a glass of something that certainly looked like wine.
Bucky adjusted the glasses on his nose. He only wore these things for public appearances, in part to obscure his appearance, and to keep a link to JARVIS in case he needed some intel. Sometime between the first party he’d attended as Natasha’s PA and now he’d developed this tick that was a close as he came to looking up at the heavens and asking why the world was filled with self-entitled assholes. He should be grateful that the biggest threats in this room were rich boys with wandering intentions, but he still didn’t love watching them flirt with Natasha. Yes, it annoyed him that she pretended to love this scene. Not that he could judge feigning appearances.
He was scrubbed, with his hair pulled back, and the thick glasses were accentuated by an unironic pocket protector. Also, he was holding Natasha’s fuck me red purse with an entirely benign expression on his face.
“Are you?” Bucky asked, glancing at the level on her glass.
"Always," Natasha said with a quick flash of a more genuine smile. "We're not gonna have to stay too much longer. People are already starting to throw up in the bushes." Lightweights.
Bucky’s nose wrinkled. “You know, it’s not too late to consider other hobbies.”
"No one said you had to come," she shot back a little too innocently. "I'm sure there are plenty of fine, upstanding gentleman here who would hold my purse."
“They aren’t looking to hold your purse, Stark.”
Her eyes widened in complete and utter shock. "No! Tell me it isn't so. What could they possibly want?"
“Your very sharp wit,” he said dryly. “That is, if you didn’t leave it in the purse. By the way, I forget to replace the towels in the car. Could you maybe not end this night fully clothed in a fountain or hot tub?”
"No promises," she said cheerfully, taking a sip of her drink as a cover for a covert glance around. No one was paying them any particular attention, but Natasha still put a bit of a drunken sway into her posture as she leaned in closer, bracing her free hand on his metal shoulder. "How's the arm?" She asked in a quiet undertone, eyes intent in a way they hadn't been the rest of the evening.
The sensory on this arm was off the charts compared to his last one. When Hydra built their tech their focus wasn’t on Bucky’s quality of life. The murder-arm, as they now cheerfully referred it, was a nasty piece of work. When Natasha’s powers kicked in she noticed some of the dormant features that would lead not only to Bucky being tracked down, but to him hurting people. He let Natasha remove the arm.
Of course, Stark being the wunderkind that she was, it wasn't long before she built a new prosthetic. There were a few shitty weeks in there while Bucky adjusted and contemplated all the triggers and traps that couldn't be surgically removed from him. He’d started taking care of Natasha’s dog while she buried herself in the work shop, and every day got better and stranger. And yeah. Now he had this tech, just as strong as the last arm, with some unnecessary bells and whistles.
It was odd feeling that ghost of her hand on him. He slipped a hand briefly to her waist, squeezing her hip as he righted her. “What? You’re not doing diagnostics for fun? Or is it bad science if you don’t get multiple sources of data?”
"Excuse me, who was the one who said, and I quote, 'Natasha keep your brain out of my things'?" She huffed leaning into his hold and doing her best to keep a truly ridiculous grin off her face. Wouldn't do to be caught unphotogenic in this space. She slowly righted herself, arching an eyebrow in his direction. "Besides, unless you want me to hook you up to a bunch of sensors right now, it's not going to tell me how you're feeling."
Reluctantly he let her go. The last thing he needed was more photos and speculation that she was banging her PA. He was perfecting an image of oblivious, sexless nerd so that other women at these parties wouldn’t start squeezing his bicep in passing.
“The arm is good,” he said quietly.
"Glad to hear it," Natasha said with a flash of a more genuine smile. "Which doesn't mean I'm not still going to upgrade it."
“I don’t need a rocket launcher.” The polite smile on his face was at odds with the soft growl in his tone. “Overwork your own toys.”
"You say that like I won't do it." She studied him for another moment, then gave him an absent pat on the shoulder. "Half an hour more, then we can go."
Bucky pushed up the bridge of his glasses and nodded. “As you wish, Ms. Stark. Enjoy.”
Dreams are rare, forgotten things.
A smile. Blue eyes. The taste of metal. The crack of ice shattering, plummeting beneath icy water.
He struggles and forgets again not to draw in a sharp, panicked breath.
Air filled Bucky's lungs as he jerked against the restraints holding him in place. His skin was damp from the liquid receding from the stasis chamber. The mask was still over his face, no longer dosing him with the chemicals that kept him asleep or in this case finally brought him awake. No one came to unhook him and take him from the pod. Bucky reached for the harness over his chest, struggling to tear it free.
The room wasn't right. He looked around wildly. He froze when he locked eyes with the only person in the room. A woman, young, he didn't recognize the face... not strange... she had no lab coat. No uniform. Where the fuck< was he?
"Uh," Natasha said intelligently. When she'd found the box tucked away into the basement of a forgotten company warehouse, for a moment she'd thought there was a dead body in there. Turned out she'd been right about the body, but wrong about the state of it. Messing with the controls probably hadn't been the best idea, but apparently it had worked, because...there he was. Staring at her.
"Hi?" That wasn't much better, but she did add a ridiculous little wave. "How are you feeling? Trouble seeing, nausea, sudden hunger for brains?"
Those words did nothing to center his equilibrium. They weren’t what he was expecting. He felt naked. Metaphorically. Stripped bare in a way far more troubling than his physical status.
Which, he realized, was naked in a different capacity. The black briefs he was wearing left little to the imagination and his long hair was plastered down around his shoulders. Metal fingers gripped the harness. He managed to tear it loose. Bucky sat up.
“Where?” He asked.
It took everything Natasha had not to back up a step, especially given just how easily he ripped that free. Instead she just stood there and tipped her jaw up slightly. No way she was backing down from...whatever the hell this was.
"Long Island." Probably not what he was actually asking. Was it?
He stared at her blankly for a moment. “When?” His voice was rusty, tone flat.
Okay, that was a bigger question. She shifted a little, eyes darting to the pod before back to the boy inside it. "Do you maybe want to come out of there first? I promise I'll answer anything you want to know."
Despite his confusion, he looked closer at the girl. No indication of weapons or equipment. No immediate sign of threat. That didn’t set Bucky at ease. Visible indicators were easier to prepare for. He had no clues for this situation, other than something was clearly wrong. Bucky climbed unsteadily out of the tank. The room was crowded with other crates and oddities. He wasn’t sure the best place to stand. There he was, rivulets of liquid beading down his legs and chest, feet cold against the metal floor.
The look he gave her was a clear now what?
...good question. Natasha scanned around until she found a blanket tucked into box, probably to keep things from shifting around, and went to go grab it. A little dusty, maybe, but better than nothing. "Here," she said as she held it out to him. "Uh. What's your name?"
Not the thing she most wanted to ask, but probably a better thing to start with than, 'why were you in a box in the basement'.
He took the blanket and tucked it around his shoulders. It covered to about mid thigh.
“My name...” He frowned. “Sorry. Can’t really... kind of jumbled.”
Right. Okay. Natasha took a deep breath and shook her head. Well, she had promised. "Okay, well. You're on Long Island, it's 2018, and I am really confused as to how you ended up in a box in a warehouse basement, mysterious stranger."
“2018.” That started slotting pieces into place. Smaller numbers, with big gaps in the sequence. He winced. “Shit,” he swore softly. Was he supposed to report in? There was a protocol, and his instincts warred between trying to remember where he needed to check in and warning him not to trust that impulse. No one had hold of his strings right now. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?
“Anyone else here?”
That got a longer pause as Natasha tried to figure out what the better response was. Tell him the place was crawling with people in case he was getting any ideas about going through her to get out, or reassure the obvious tension she could see in him that there wasn't anyone else lurking?
"I'm sure there's a security guard or two around somewhere," she said finally. Split the difference, why not.
Bucky looked around the cluttered space. "Empty warehouse, minimal security." He glanced her over. "What are you even doing in here?"
She tensed up just a little at the summation, then made herself relax again. Enough to give him a dry look. "Hey, buddy, I work here." Sort of. Close enough. "I could ask you the same question.
“Ask whoever put me here. What kind of place is this? You keeping other bodies in your basement?” There was only so long he could stand here naked asking questions if she didn’t have much useful information. He might have no clue what was going on, but he didn’t feel like waiting for her to call security. No doubt he’d end up somewhere else locked up for the night.
"It's a warehouse," Natasha said with the tone of voice that implied an unspoken duh at the end of it. "As for the rest, good question. Guess I'm gonna have to look through here better than I thought." She squinted at him for a moment, then let out a long sigh. "I guess we'd better get you out of here before someone turns up to arrest me for kidnapping."
Bucky looked around the room again, glancing around sharply for any objects that looked like his tank. Shit. He didn't think there was anyone else like him out there, but who knew what was really going on? His shoulders slumped as he realized how royally fucked he was right now. His memory was still a jumble, but he knew that much.
"Think you could find me real pants?"
Oddly enough, it was that sudden slump that made up Natasha's mind. He might still be dangerous, but she couldn't just leave him here. Technically, he was StarkIndustries property. Probably.
"I think we can find you something." She tipped her head back towards the door. "Come on."
He braced himself for an ambush and followed her.
****
Of course, all it had taken was one second with Howard Stark to upend everything.
In the couple of days it had been since Natasha had dragged her new friend home with her they'd danced a bit awkwardly around one another, but Natasha had tried to get him settled as best as she could. Wouldn't do to just toss the poor guy out now especially when he was still having some memory problems. And there was obviously someone intelligent behind the wild hair and quiet glower, bits and pieces of a personality that emerged just enough to catch her off guard every so often. It might just have been curiosity, but she wanted to know more.
And then Howard had come home. And he'd taken one look at the guest in the kitchen and everything had gone to hell.
Somehow, she'd managed to get both of them away from Howard and back to her rooms, thanks to some unspoken pleading for her not to leave them alone and some very quick thinking. Which meant that she was once again alone with James Buchanan Barnes. Somehow, she'd ended up with a long-dead war hero. What the hell.
"Are you okay?" She asked once the door was very firmly closed behind them.
Bucky sat down in the chair that had the best sightlines to all doors in the room. He hunched forward.
“Will be,” he said. Back to broken sentences. He’d gotten better with that by their first morning together. Now here he was again, as if he didn’t have enough breath to add a pronoun to that sentence. Bucky rubbed his gloved hand over his face. Lucky the metal arm was covered when they bumped into Howard. He hadn’t told Tasha about the Winter Soldier, but he hid the arm so that ‘whoever put him into that box’ wouldn’t recognize him. Seemed like Howard didn’t know what happened to Bucky after the fall. He recognized him from the war, and he showed no indication that he followed his progress after.
Bucky was a dead man walking.
“So,” Bucky said, trying to get through his headache of memories. “Howard’s your grandpa. And your dad’s his only kid. I’m really surprised by that.”
There was a long pause while Natasha tried to process that. Any of that. "Which part?"
“All of it,” Bucky said vaguely. “Can I... That tablet thing. Do you mind if I look some things up?”
Natasha studied him for a second, then moved to her desk to grab her tablet and handed it over to him.
Bucky shifted the tablet into his gloved hand. Time for a history lesson. As wary as he was to search for answers, this opened too many doors to ignore. He shut his eyes briefly. “Of all the people. Howard wasn’t the one I was expecting.”
"Yeah, well. He always has been good at doing the unexpected." There was a hint of genuine sourness to Natasha's voice, but she just shook her head rather than elaborating. Instead, she pulled out her phone and tucked herself into a corner of the sofa, wordlessly giving Barnes some time and a little distance to process everything.
Bucky’s expression grew grimmer the more he researched. No doubt Natasha’s AI could recount Bucky’s search history to her later, so there were plenty of things he wasn’t looking up. It wasn’t his time with this arm that he had questions about. It was the people before that. Many of whom were long gone. His sister. Fuck. He’d outlived his sister. He hadn’t thought of her in decades, and now he couldn’t help but remember the way she’d looked when she’d shipped off to boarding school. She had kids. Grandkids. Bucky was about their age now. Relatively, because Bucky was also nearly 90 chronologically speaking.
Nearly 90, and he lived maybe 17 or 18 years of that time? The waking and sleeping was still the haziest part of his memory, and he was afraid to push that fog. Pretty sure the things he wasn’t remembering were out of self preservation.
In the house that Howard Stark build, Bucky looked up more details he dreaded. The history of Captain America.
When he thought his heart had enough for the day, he set the tablet back on the couch and dropped his head into his hands.
It took her a moment to register that something had changed, but when Natasha glanced up from her phone her expression immediately shifted into something almost concerned. She was still supposed to be looking after him, right? Right.
"Hey. Barnes. You okay?"
He laughed, the sound shaky at best.
Right. Stupid question. Natasha leaned forward a little, studying him. "Do you need anything?"
Shoulders hunched, he glanced up at Natasha through the curtain of his hair. “Honestly? Time.”
Her eyes narrowed in a way that said she might actually try to make it happen. "What kind of time?"
“75 years, give or take,” he said wryly. “You sure you want to keep me around? I can’t imagine it’s going to be easy. Howard probably wants to know what’s kept me ticking.”
Yeah okay, that she couldn't do. But it didn't stop Natasha from giving him a thoughtful stare. And huffing a quiet laugh. "I can handle Howard, don't worry about him. But. If you want to go, I can arrange it."
He looked at the floor by her feet. His jaw set, and he finally said. “You’ll be safer without me in your life, Natasha.”
She just snorted at that, crossing her arms over her chest. "What exactly do you think you're going to do? Besides," she added, a bit more lightly, "I have JARVIS to look after me."
"How exactly does your AI protect you? From physical threats?" Bucky asked, skeptical.
Natasha gave him a long, even look. "You've noticed where we are, right? What about this says security is a problem to you?"
He snorted softly. Her security was tight, which made this a reasonable safehouse. There was always room for improvements. Letting the killer sleep in your spare room was the first flaw. “The people that put me in stasis may still be looking for me,” he warned her.
"Then better that you're here instead of wandering around out there instead," she shot back, then let out a breath. "Look, if you really want to go, we'll make it happen. But if you're just worried for my sake...don't."
“You don’t know me,” Bucky pointed out. “Even Howard doesn’t know where I’ve been since the 1940s. That is a lot of shit to deal with, so of course I’m worried what this might bring to you. You’re a real sweet girl, but do you think it’s a great idea harboring child soldiers you found frozen in a box?” Okay, that last bit was heavy handed. Bucky wanted to stay, but he didn’t want to get her hurt. Maybe it would be easier to piss her off until Natasha was happy to see him go.
Out of all of that, it was the description of herself as a real sweet girl that got the most disbelieving look. Nevermind Natasha not knowing him, he clearly didn't know her. "Well okay, but that box was on my property, which does pretty literally make you my problem."
He raised a brow. “Your family bought or stole me back in the day, so now I’m you problem?”
Not quite how Natasha might have put it, but she just smirked. "Pretty much, yeah."
Bucky looked at her, taking her in one more time. With a tightness in his chest he said, “Keep the box. If you want to trap anyone in your basement it might come in handy.”
Her eyes narrowed just a little, but Natasha could read through those lines. She stared at him for a moment, then nodded once. "I'll keep Howard off your back."
"Thank you, Tasha." He got up from the couch. "I think I'm going to lay down for a bit."
The nickname made her arch an eyebrow but Natasha just huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh and shook her head. Sure he was. "Make yourself at home." It was just a little dry.
He nodded and headed back to the room he was crashing in. In a few hours he’d test exactly how good her security really was.
****
So it turned out that Natasha had bigger things to worry about.
It had been a month since she'd been taken, she thought. It was hard to keep track of time in the windowless expanse of warehouse rooms she'd been kept in, but the errant signals that occasionally shot through her brain sometimes had dates. She was trying really hard not to think about those. One crisis at a time. Getting the armor to a place where it was workable without anyone realizing what she was doing had taken up most of her attention anyway.
It wasn't pretty. It was a massive, ugly walking tank, really, but it was doing an excellent job of keeping her bullet free so she wasn't going to complain. Yinsen was...Yinsen wasn't coming, anyway, so there was nothing stopping her from just wading into the nearest group of armed men and taking out a whole lot of frustration. Even the sounds of gunshots outside weren't enough to distract her. It was just one more thing to deal with in a moment.
A month was a long time for a socialite to go missing. Even with her people suppressing the news, this wasn’t the kind of event that would go unnoticed. Tracking her down was trainwreck. Between misinformation and bureaucratic bullshit, Bucky was pretty sure her team planned on sitting on their asses instead of following through on their current lead. This was how Bucky ended up alone when the firefight started in the compound. Well, there went sneaking in after sunset. If Natasha was in there he couldn’t wait until she got caught in crossfire.
Bucky took a deep breath and did a final check on his stolen equipment. He slipped out of his hiding place and went for the most discrete path inside. Maybe this was the perfect distraction. Maybe she was locked inside a secure room safe from ricochet. He could sneak her out the back while everyone shot each other without his assistance. What an easy op, right? Nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.
Around the corridor the sound of heavy fire got louder followed by shouts. Then, with a thud a huge metal soldier crashed through the wall in front of Bucky. What the fuck were these assholes playing with? Even with a mask covering half his face, Bucky swung his metal arm up to shield his eyes from the shower of rubble. The gun in his hand was inadequate against that suit.
“Hey,” Bucky shouted up, because why not bank on confusion? “Where’s the girl?” And again in the local dialect, “She gets hurt, we don’t get paid.”
The fight had been long enough that Natasha was plenty keyed up, and she immediately swung towards the new figure with the gun, arms raised to fire. And then stopped.
There weren't that many people with shiny metal prosthetics in the world.
"...Barnes?"
He tensed to dodge, but the blow was of an unexpected variety. "Stark?" he answered back. Then, "I told you you needed better security."
There was a brief pause and then suddenly the faceplate of the helmet flipped up to reveal a gaunt, pale and deeply incredulous Natasha. "Did you seriously come all the way here just to say you told me so?"
In the middle of this life threatening shit show Bucky smiled. “I came here to save your ass. Mask back down. If you’re wearing that thing out keep your face covered. Come on, let’s go home.”
"What did you think I was doing?" She grumbled as it flipped back down, because it was easier than trying to figure out exactly what Bucky meant by 'home.' Natasha didn't hesitate to move out in front of him in, even if she did slide him a quick side-eye as she passed. "How did you even get here?"
“It's a long story I'll be reluctant to tell you when we get out of here. But if you're really good, I'll tell you anyway." He tipped his head, listening to the commotion around them. "Right. Let's move."
Natasha rolled her eyes unseen behind the helmet and stomped her way forward. Stealth was pretty much useless at that point, even if she thought the frankensteined tank she was wearing could manage it. "Where?"
He eyed the armor. “We’re going to turn left up ahead, and if walls aren’t an issue for you I’ve got a short cut. You’ve got more friends set up a few clicks away, but they were stuck debating semantics.”
"Yeah," she said, low and grim as she shifted the arms of the armor, "walls aren't really an issue." Neither were friends, but she was trying harder not to think about that. Natasha just put her head down and plowed forward, instinctively aiming for the weakest part of the wall to drive straight through.
Shit that was lethal. Bucky didn’t like the numbers of combatants vs girl in military grade suit, but knowing she wasn’t defensiveness was a relief. Hell. Knowing she was alive was something even bigger. He’d deal with whatever this protective instinct was after they got back to New York.
First priority. They were going home.
****
Somewhere along the line, they'd gotten this down to a science. So maybe neither of them liked these big glittery parties, and it was an easy way for Natasha to deploy her new socialite face without much in the way of work. Well. Physical work. They were still exhausting to do, but involved much less in the way of fire fights.
Bucky still wasn't completely on board with the idea, and he'd made it abundantly clear that he didn't understand why she was willingly making herself seem like an idiot, but Natasha had stopped trying to explain it to him. He still came, anyway, still stood stone-faced just behind her as she blithely introduced him as her PA, and somehow managed to be extremely unimpressed and remarkably tolerant at the same time. And okay, maybe Natasha just got kind of a kick out of swanning up to the most dangerous person in the room and demanding that he hold her purse.
It was his own fault for making her carry weapons in it anyway. Those things were heavy. She was really going to have to redesign that taser thing again.
"Having fun?" She asked brightly as she brushed by him, holding a glass of something that certainly looked like wine.
Bucky adjusted the glasses on his nose. He only wore these things for public appearances, in part to obscure his appearance, and to keep a link to JARVIS in case he needed some intel. Sometime between the first party he’d attended as Natasha’s PA and now he’d developed this tick that was a close as he came to looking up at the heavens and asking why the world was filled with self-entitled assholes. He should be grateful that the biggest threats in this room were rich boys with wandering intentions, but he still didn’t love watching them flirt with Natasha. Yes, it annoyed him that she pretended to love this scene. Not that he could judge feigning appearances.
He was scrubbed, with his hair pulled back, and the thick glasses were accentuated by an unironic pocket protector. Also, he was holding Natasha’s fuck me red purse with an entirely benign expression on his face.
“Are you?” Bucky asked, glancing at the level on her glass.
"Always," Natasha said with a quick flash of a more genuine smile. "We're not gonna have to stay too much longer. People are already starting to throw up in the bushes." Lightweights.
Bucky’s nose wrinkled. “You know, it’s not too late to consider other hobbies.”
"No one said you had to come," she shot back a little too innocently. "I'm sure there are plenty of fine, upstanding gentleman here who would hold my purse."
“They aren’t looking to hold your purse, Stark.”
Her eyes widened in complete and utter shock. "No! Tell me it isn't so. What could they possibly want?"
“Your very sharp wit,” he said dryly. “That is, if you didn’t leave it in the purse. By the way, I forget to replace the towels in the car. Could you maybe not end this night fully clothed in a fountain or hot tub?”
"No promises," she said cheerfully, taking a sip of her drink as a cover for a covert glance around. No one was paying them any particular attention, but Natasha still put a bit of a drunken sway into her posture as she leaned in closer, bracing her free hand on his metal shoulder. "How's the arm?" She asked in a quiet undertone, eyes intent in a way they hadn't been the rest of the evening.
The sensory on this arm was off the charts compared to his last one. When Hydra built their tech their focus wasn’t on Bucky’s quality of life. The murder-arm, as they now cheerfully referred it, was a nasty piece of work. When Natasha’s powers kicked in she noticed some of the dormant features that would lead not only to Bucky being tracked down, but to him hurting people. He let Natasha remove the arm.
Of course, Stark being the wunderkind that she was, it wasn't long before she built a new prosthetic. There were a few shitty weeks in there while Bucky adjusted and contemplated all the triggers and traps that couldn't be surgically removed from him. He’d started taking care of Natasha’s dog while she buried herself in the work shop, and every day got better and stranger. And yeah. Now he had this tech, just as strong as the last arm, with some unnecessary bells and whistles.
It was odd feeling that ghost of her hand on him. He slipped a hand briefly to her waist, squeezing her hip as he righted her. “What? You’re not doing diagnostics for fun? Or is it bad science if you don’t get multiple sources of data?”
"Excuse me, who was the one who said, and I quote, 'Natasha keep your brain out of my things'?" She huffed leaning into his hold and doing her best to keep a truly ridiculous grin off her face. Wouldn't do to be caught unphotogenic in this space. She slowly righted herself, arching an eyebrow in his direction. "Besides, unless you want me to hook you up to a bunch of sensors right now, it's not going to tell me how you're feeling."
Reluctantly he let her go. The last thing he needed was more photos and speculation that she was banging her PA. He was perfecting an image of oblivious, sexless nerd so that other women at these parties wouldn’t start squeezing his bicep in passing.
“The arm is good,” he said quietly.
"Glad to hear it," Natasha said with a flash of a more genuine smile. "Which doesn't mean I'm not still going to upgrade it."
“I don’t need a rocket launcher.” The polite smile on his face was at odds with the soft growl in his tone. “Overwork your own toys.”
"You say that like I won't do it." She studied him for another moment, then gave him an absent pat on the shoulder. "Half an hour more, then we can go."
Bucky pushed up the bridge of his glasses and nodded. “As you wish, Ms. Stark. Enjoy.”