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Finding Cap alive in the Arctic had been a one in a trillion odds. Finding Bucky alive in the Alps is something like one in a zillionty gabillion odds.
The rest of the team is left scratching their heads after Fury whisks Steve off to Bucky’s recovery room in the SHIELD base. Because how even is that possible? They all have figured that it was the serum that kept Steve alive, but Bucky is just a regular guy.
Well, now he’s a regular guy with a robo arm.
Tony has been forbidden to ask to tinker with it. Which is totally unfair.
Getting Bucky moved into Stark Tower isn’t anywhere near as hectic as it was getting the rest of the team moved in, but Steve makes a huge production out of it. And he looks so earnest asking for their help in making his friend welcome that everyone just sort of can’t help but hope that Bucky feels at home there too.
He gets to the tower, and like Steve, Bucky is totally floored by modern technology. He actually screams out loud and looks around for attackers when JARVIS welcomes him. Tony totally doesn’t laugh. That would be mean.
The team has always considered Steve to be the mother hen of the group, the one who worries about if they’re all eating a healthy and balanced diet and are they getting enough sleep and did they see the SHIELD medical team after getting that paper cut? But apparently what fretting they had seen from Steve thus far is only the tip of the iceberg. Pun intended? Yeah, why not.
Steve follows Bucky around the tower, always under his feet, asking him if he’s ok, does he need anything, should he even be up and walking around yet. It doesn’t even take until lunch on Bucky’s second day there to turn on Steve and tackle him, wrestling him into a headlock and letting loose a tirade of old timey phrases that Tony actually has to have JARVIS translate for them.
Seriously, people honest to God used to talk like that?
And oh did they ever. Steve had caught on pretty quickly that times had changed. Sure, he would use old fashioned phrases, but as soon as he would notice confused looks, he would try to reword things. There were still some dorky moments, and yeah, even now, a good few years of living in the future, Steve will slip on occasion.
Only now, it’s not really an occasional thing anymore. When Bucky and Steve talk—all the freaking time, you can’t separate those two—it’s like watching an old time movie. It’s hilarious. Because they really used to talk like that.
Bruce pushes his glasses up his nose and says it’s a psychological phenomenon called associative regression. Clint says it’s revertigo and everyone needs to stop dicking around and start watching How I Met Your Mother.
Steve has been mostly showing Bucky the ropes of the future, telling him about the wars he missed, the political climates that have changed, even the differences in basic American values. The others get the sense that Bucky is a little less of that All-American goodness that Steve just oozes from every pore, so he’s a little less scandalized by the flippant way people curse in daily conversation and way more intrigued by the amount of leg that women’s clothing shows off.
But then, the others start to notice things getting a little weird. Steve shows Bucky that television is aired in color now and that there are hundreds of channels. Bucky is understandably wowed, but it’s strange to watch Steve reacting with glee as they marathon Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. When someone asks aloud for JARVIS to turn up the air, Steve jumps off the couch, grabbing Bucky, and declares that they’ll do it manually. Tony and Bruce watch bewildered as Steve and Bucky poke at the control panel and giggle—yes, giggle—as it beeps.
Tony just doesn’t understand this madness because Steve was texting and surfing the internet and popping popcorn like a pro just last week.
It goes from being funny and amusingly awkward to downright annoying when Steve shows Bucky Tony’s workshop. And it’s not just that Steve’s brought Bucky down there when Tony doesn’t really give people free passes to hang out—Pepper, Rhodey, Steve and Bruce, they’re ok, but everyone else needs to get out—because Bucky is appropriately in awe of all the cars and robots and the armor.
Never let it be said that Tony didn’t appreciate a good stroking of his ego.
And Bucky isn’t incompetent when it comes to mechanics. He apparently did some work on a factory line and lent a hand around a mechanic’s shop as a third job. Tony kind of winces at that. He forgets sometimes that other people don’t have what he’s always had, and even more so that Steve—and Bucky—grew up in the Great Depression.
But the reason it’s annoying. It’s not so much that Bucky asks questions about the armor. Steve answers those as best as he can, and Tony will pipe up to correct a statement or get more technical. It’s when Bucky asks what the suit runs on—Tony tries not to laugh obnoxiously when he guesses electricity—and Steve points to the arc reactor in Tony’s chest. The glow is easily visible under the thin t-shirt Tony’s wearing.
And then Tony is suddenly wondering if lack of understanding of personal space is a thing from the 40s too, because Bucky is suddenly right up on him, staring hard at the arc reactor. Then he asks, his expression some mix of disgust, alarm, and caution, if Tony had been stupid enough to actually insert the Cosmic Cube into his chest.
Which leads to another round of lecture time during which it’s explained that the Tesseract is something entirely different from the arc reactor—even though Howard had created the arc reactor with inspiration from the Tessaract—and that the arc reactor is actually what’s keeping a load of shrapnel from killing Tony from the inside out.
Bucky dubs it a heart battery, Steve enthusiastically agrees, and Tony can practically feel his hackles rising at the primitive terminology being used to describe one of the greatest technological advancements he has ever been a part of.
But for Steve’s sake and because Bucky doesn’t know better, Tony puts up with it right up until they both—both of them. Steve, really?—start to poke at it. It’s at that time that Tony sics the super roombas he’d been tinkering with on the trespassers, watching gleefully as they flee the room.
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The guard roombas work for a good few days until Tony comes across their ruins in the sitting room. As Tony laments over them, Thor informs him that they met their untimely demise at the hands of Bucky, who had shot the so-called devil machines to get them to stop trying to eat his pants legs and then smashed them with Steve’s shield because he had apparently heard something about zombies and didn’t want to take chances.
As Tony gathers up the pieces of his roombas and runs them down to the workshop for emergency robot surgery, his mind is whirling with the revenge he’s going to extract on Clint. Because that whole zombie thing so reeks of Clint.