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“If there’s one thing I’ve proven,” Stark says on the screen, “it’s that you can count on me to pleasure myself.”
Bucky snorts and shakes his head in disgust. Maybe he shouldn’t be so disgusted by the guy seeing as he’s the one offering to build him a new arm but honestly, Bucky just thinks it’s a publicity stunt. He knows the type of guy that Tony Stark is. He was at the last SI weapons demonstration before Stark nearly got himself blown up and he remembers how drunk the guy had been. He remembers Stark leering at Steve before climbing into a jeep with members of their sister troop—good soldiers, men and women who hadn’t deserved to die defending someone like Stark.
So what if Stark had stopped making weapons?
So what if it had turned out that Stane was double dealing?
So what if it isn’t actually Stark’s fault that Bucky had his arms blown off a few months after Stark announced he wasn’t going to make weapons anymore and the DoD had turned to Hammer who apparently couldn’t even make a decent bomb that blew up while he was setting it?
People are dead because Stark couldn’t pull his goddamn head out of his ass, because he’s just like every other billionaire in the world, obsessed with his own wants and his own wishes and expects the world to bow to his every whim. And now, when he gets called in front of Congress to account for breaking his contract with the DoD, he makes a complete mockery out of the proceedings. Not that that’s all that hard and honestly, Bucky would have probably done the same thing if he’d been in Stark’s position.
Bucky wouldn’t have even accepted the offer of the prosthetic if it hadn’t been for Steve signing the paper for him. He would have told Stark exactly where he could stuff his publicity stunt of a philanthropic endeavor. Steve had been the one to fish SI’s letter out of the trash, sign the waivers and the forms, and mail it back to a Ms. Potts to tell her that he was apparently accepting SI’s oh-so-generous offer.
Eventually, he’ll get Steve back for that. Probably after he gets used to having another arm.
“Mr. Barnes?” someone asks, walking into the waiting area from one of the many branching hallways. “Tony’s ready for you now.”
He stands, tucking his phone back into his pocket, and joins her. She’s pretty enough and once upon a time, he probably would have even flirted with her but that was back when he had two working arms and self-confidence. Now he has one arm, a cheap prosthetic that makes his shoulder seize in pain sometimes, and he’s in therapy to get his head straight.
…Dr. Beck probably wouldn’t call it that though and he’d probably get upset that Bucky is, even if it’s in his own head. He’s big on that whole “use nice terms to describe your PTSD” thing.
…He’s in therapy to learn how to manage his PTSD.
There. That sounds nice, right?
“Tony’s sorry he couldn’t get to you sooner,” the woman tells him as they walk down the hall. Her heels click on the floor, sounding a nice rhythm that Bucky finds himself emulating unconsciously. “He had you lined up for the program ages ago but then everything with Obadiah and—”
“It’s fine,” Bucky mutters. He probably wouldn’t have wanted to meet Stark back then anyway. He doesn’t even want to meet him now.
The woman stops in front of room that looks like it should have glass walls but are currently covered in some sort of black…stuff, Bucky isn’t sure what. A keypad pops out of the wall right next to the door and she types something in that looks long and complicated. Bucky looks away so she’s not worried about him trying to guess the password even though he doubts he could have remembered it even if he’d been hovering right over her shoulder.
The door slides open and Bucky follows her inside—into a wonderland.
There’s a whole bunch of absolutely gorgeous vintage cars in one corner and what looks like actual robots fighting over a smoothie machine in another and blue holograms filling the air and Stark himself talking to…thin air?
Except not thin air because a moment later thin air says, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, sir.”
“Sass!” Stark exclaims. “I’ll donate you to MIT, see if I don’t. Let the undergrads pick you apart.”
“As you say at least once a day, sir.”
“What do I have to do to get some respect around here?” he mutters and before Bucky can stop himself, he snickers.
Stark wheels around, seemingly startled, and peers first at Bucky and then turns to the woman. “Pepper,” he laments. “Why do you let me make a fool of myself?”
“You do that just fine on your own,” she says, smiling fondly.
“Hmph. Sass from you, sass from my own AI—”
“That was an AI?” Bucky blurts out. The articles don’t say anything about something like that.
Stark looks at him again and then asks, “Which answer is less likely to make you think of Skynet? Never mind, not important. Your arm is what’s important and I put it—somewhere. I put it somewhere. What the fuck did I do with it? Pepper!”
“Have you checked the fabricator?”
“…No.” He wanders off towards the robots and some sort of fancy device behind them.
Pepper must see the shell-shocked expression on Bucky’s face as he tries to put together the image of the polished Tony Stark he’s seen on TV with the greasy mechanic wearing goggles on the top of his head in front of him because she says, “You’ll get used to him.”
“Uh-huh,” he agrees doubtfully.
“Do you have a preference on color?” Stark calls from the other end of the—what does he call it, a lab? A workshop?
“What?”
“Color!”
“You might as well join him,” Pepper says. “He really wants your input on this.”
“Why?”
He must sound as confused as he feels because Pepper smiles understandingly at him and says, “Because it’s your arm. I know Tony puts on this front for—everyone, really—but he’s not as bad as he makes himself seem. He blames himself for you losing your arm.”
“Why would he do that? It’s not his fault Hammer makes shitty bombs.”
“No, but it is his fault that the Army went to Hammer in the first place. He still thinks this is the right direction to take the company in but he still feels guilty for what happened to you.”
“Do you agree with him?”
“About the company?” She looks over at Stark, a wistful look in her eyes. “I’ve always thought that Tony could do something more. About you? It doesn’t really matter how I feel. It matters how both of you feel.” She pauses and then adds, “He really liked your application, you know.”
“Application? What application? I didn’t apply for this.”
“No we both know that,” she reassures him. “Your friend did. Said you were too stubborn to take a handout from a stuck-up billionaire to fill out the application yourself. It made Tony laugh.”
Huh. That says something about him, doesn’t it? That he can laugh about being called a stuck-up billionaire?
He glances over at Stark who’s now jumping up and down in the air, waving his arms to get him to go over there. “Barnes!” Stark calls. “I want your opinion on the color of your arm.”
“Wait, that’s what he wants to know?” Bucky asks, amazed. The world suddenly feels like it’s been flipped upside down. “He’s asking my opinion about that?”
“It matters to him,” Pepper says simply. She raises her voice to ask, “Will that be all, Mr. Stark?”
“That’ll be all, Miss Potts,” Stark calls back, grinning like it’s an old joke between the two of them. “Barnes!”
As Pepper leaves, Bucky picks his way across the room, carefully dodging holograms even after Stark says it’s okay to walk through them. “You know, you can call me Bucky,” he says as he joins him.
“Sure, I’ll do that just as soon as you call me Tony,” Stark says distractedly.
“Can do, Tony.”
Tony visibly freezes, shivers a moment, and then flashes him a quick smile. It’s there and gone but it’s still surprisingly lovely, something real and sweet that Bucky thinks he’s gonna have to ponder when he gets home tonight.
“So, color?”
“I don’t really have a preference.”
“Great!” Tony says enthused. “Because I had an idea last night for interlocking plates.”
“Like armor?”
“Yes, but sexier.”
And his enthusiasm must be infectious because Bucky thinks about that quicksilver smile he saw a minute ago and says, “Sure thing, Tony.”