Work Text:
It wasn’t that it was unusual for Steve to find his lover in the workshop in the early hours of any given morning, it’s just that the lover in question was usually Tony -- manic in the grip of a notion that might slip away if he slept, or dour and determinedly focused on his tinkering instead of whatever his brain was using to drive him from sleep.
In the early days, Steve had had to go hunting so often that he’d finally just stashed a blanket and pillow in the corner beside the workshop’s sofa and trusted his Soldierly skill of sleeping anywhere to see him through. Tony had grumbled, of course, and threatened to make Jarvis lock him out, but Steve felt it was important to let Tony know that his absence was noted, that someone cared about it -- about him and his well-being beyond his ability to perform under the influence of fatigue toxins.
For all his complaints, Tony never had locked Steve out of the workshop.
Which turned out to be a decidedly useful thing, now that it was Bucky who’d gone missing while Tony snored and twitched in a starfish sprawl across the bed the three of them shared. Friday didn’t bother asking him for his pass-code when Steve approached, just slid the doors silently out of his way. Even so, Steve allowed himself a moment to sag in relief, and to banish the low-key panic that had built in his gut every time he looked in another of Bucky’s favorite lurking spots and failed to find him there.
Bucky was perched at Tony’s desk, three holoscreens hanging in the air before him and a thick paper file opened and scattered across the cluttered surface, both ignored in favor of hunting and pecking at the small laptop Bucky had brought with him when he’d shown back up in Steve’s life, and had refused to allow Tony to upgrade ever since. He was curled into his work, but not slumped in shock or exhaustion; his brow was furrowed in concentration, not smoothed as blank as the vacant, brooding stares Steve had learned to dread. Bucky looked... well, not happy, but at least he didn’t look like he wished he was still frozen.
“Hey Buck,” Steve said after taking a long moment to look his fill. “What are you working on?”
Bucky didn’t startle -- no surprise there, Steve hadn’t yet managed to sneak up on him, even when he’d been trying to. He just cast one glance through his long-hanging hair, pressed a tired sort of smile out of his soft lips and shrugged one shoulder. “Just looking something up’s all,” he said, turning back to his work. “Tony okay?”
“Out like a light,” Steve replied, his bare feet quiet as he crossed the workshop. “Is that...” he swallowed against the sudden sinking in his belly. “That’s Howard’s file.”
Bucky looked up again, his eyes sad, his smile sadder, and somehow knowing as he watched Steve struggle to keep his own expression neutral. “Yeah.” He turned back to his computer, pausing to tip a nod at the holoscreen on the right. “Police report,” a nod at the center, “coroner’s report,” and a nod at the left, “SHIELD’s incident report, and...” he nudged back the laptop screen just enough for Steve to see the skull-and-squid logo on the page header, “HYDRA’s termination order.”
Steve swallowed hard, forced all the words of comfort, defense and absolution he’d been saying to Bucky for months now down deep in his chest, and hooked a rolling chair close enough to sit into it. “That from Natasha’s download?” he asked, because he couldn’t manage anything else.
“Nah,” Bucky said, then gave that half-shrug again, the plates in his shoulder resettling with a whir. “I mean, not really. Sort of, in a way. The link to this server was coded into the downloaded files, but this isn’t-“
“Wait, you’re actually accessing a HYDRA server?” Steve cut in, suddenly and sharply worried. “As in, right now? Realtime?”
“Sure. There’s no downloading this stuff, even if you have the proper shadow codes running. Triggers a kill virus if you try to so much as take a screencap,” Bucky replied, then quit worrying at his thumbnail for long enough to slant a real smile Steve’s way. “I worked too hard to get this machine to let a stupid mistake brick my access now.”
“Bucky, you can’t just-” Steve scraped a hand through his hair and tried to squeeze the panic out of his voice. “They have things that can track-” he cut off as the metal hand closed, chill and gentle over his foot.
Bucky was smiling at him, fondly indulgent. “It’s fine, Steve. I’ve already cracked the GPS. They’ll just track it right back to where it’s supposed to be, assuming anybody at this depot is monitoring access at all.” He turned his focus back to the screen again, rolled the text downward a bit more and squinted to read, not letting go his grip on Steve’s foot. “I just... I needed to check something. Something I remembered.”
Steve couldn’t keep himself from glancing up at the holoscreen, and the stern, sad, hard-aged face of the playboy they’d both once known as a showboating kid no older than themselves. Howard Stark showed the wear of the years in his hardened eyes, the steel at his temples, and an appraising chill underlying the practiced, press-ready smile he’d given the camera on the last ID photo he would ever take.
“You gonna tell me it wasn’t my fault again?” Bucky asked, wry and amused over the lingering weight of the bone they couldn’t stop picking.
“You gonna listen this time?” Steve challenged back on reflex. Only to his surprise, it was Bucky who dropped the thread of the fight they both had nearly memorised.
He huffed, looked down at the shine of steel curled over Steve’s foot, flexed his fingers so that the light skated along the joints. Then he cut a furtive, sad glance up at Steve’s face through his hair and said, “Don’t tell Tony, okay?”
He blinked, thrown for a second before he could manage a nod. “You know Tony’s forgiven you too though,” he couldn’t stop himself saying it.
Bucky’s lips quirked up, wry around an arid laugh. “Yeah, I kinda got that idea when he let me suck his dick, sleep with his lover, and use his bathroom towels, thanks.”
But Steve wasn’t about to be ditched in the weeds on that point. “What HYDRA did to Howard Stark was-“
“Stevie.” It was the same voice he’d always used to try and shut Steve’s arguments down -- the one he’d use when he had a wet cloth and a piece of ice in hand, or a pair of girls on the hook, or a draft notice clutched behind his back. It was the voice of inevitability, Bucky Barnes’ gently condescending way of letting Steve know that resistance would only draw out the foregone conclusion. It still made Steve’s back prickle and his jaw clench hard, even after all these years.
Bucky let go of his foot to tap one metal finger gently against the laptop’s screen. “Stevie, HYDRA didn’t kill Howard Stark.” Another pleading glance, and he worried at his thumbnail with his teeth again.
“But you said...” Steve peered at the laptop screen, its menacing sigil, its shaky green text on the black screen. “You said there was a termination order.”
“Yeah,” Bucky sighed, and scrolled the screen up to the top again. “And I remember the job too. They p-prepped me hard for it, you know? So they could be sure the conditioning wouldn’t crack, but bits...” he peered at the screen, then nodded slow. “Bits have been coming back, you know, the longer I go without-” Steve reached for Bucky’s shoulder, jostled him out of the babble he’d begun to court, and won a grateful glance for his effort. “I just... I need to tell you what happened. Just you. Promise?”
Steve hesitated, glanced at the camera bulb in the corner. “Friday, what does your protocol say about this?” he asked.
“So long as my monitoring feeds don’t pick up information implying threat to the Boss, or to his property, I’m not strictly required to tell him about it,” the lilting voice replied, just as readily as Jarvis would have done, but somehow without the warmth and humanity the previous AI had always owned.
“That sounds about right to me,” he answered, catching and holding Bucky’s eyes with a boosted eyebrow. “You okay with that, Buck?”
“It would hurt him more if you told, I can promise you that,” he nodded at once, then turned back to the screens as if eager to get it over with -- like confession, or a particularly bad debrief. “All the reports have the same time of death -- December 17th, 1991. HYDRA’s order is dated for December 15th, which squares for transport time.” He swallowed, brushed his hair back out of his face and nodded at the little screen. “I remember being surprised when my handler said it was December, because it was so warm in California that I was sweating as soon as I stepped outside in my armor.” Steve, remembering the months he’d spent shooting movies in Hollywood between USO tours, had to wrestle down the smile that wanted to rise to his lips.
“I remembered this one because it was so weird. Everything about it was weird. The handler was someone new, someone local who acted like this was his big break, and I might screw it up, so he made really sure of all the details. The make and model and color of the car, the projected travel time between the party hotel and my kill zone...” Bucky swallowed once, his throat working hard, then rolled on as if he’d never hesitated. “I even overheard him making arrangements to be sure there was no other traffic. No witnesses. Crews on standby to move roadblock signs into place the minute the target vehicle was out of sight. Little asshole even went over my angle of fire with me, like he was afraid I’d miss, or time it wrong, and then the car wouldn’t go over the cliff at the right spot.”
Steve closed his eyes for a moment, trying to make himself blank, empty -- just a pair of ears, as he’d promised, no matter how his hands ached to hold, to soothe, to try and comfort. He could -- he would make himself a witness, now there was nothing else he could do about it.
He opened his eyes to find Bucky waiting for him, gaze level and ripe with expectation. “So you remember it then,” he managed, throat thick and sore, “The shot.”
But Bucky shook his head. “No. That’s the whole problem, Steve; I never took any shot at all.” He closed his eyes, brows furrowed down in obvious concentration. “That’s what made it weird. I held position for fourteen hours, and the target vehicle never crossed my field of fire.” He turned suddenly, tapped the laptop screen again. “Agent Stone said I did in his field report, and I even remember him taking my Dragonov away and shooting a round at the sea when he came to retrieve me, but I never pulled the trigger, shot the driver, and sent the car over the cliff into the Pacific...”
And here, he turned to the bigger holoscreens, pointing at the police report with a finger that shook only a little bit. “Because Howard Stark crashed his car into a stand of cedar trees about eight miles before the turnoff that would have taken him through my target field.” Bucky turned then to face Steve straight on, grey eyes hard, and more than a little bit tragic as he said, “I was supposed to kill Howard Stark on that night. And my handler gave me credit for the kill, but I didn’t, Stevie. Howard never gave me the chance.”
And all at once, Steve’s brain lights up with hectic energy, picking out the bright data points from the scattered reports, the papers, the screens before him; times of travel, times of death, locations, witnesses. “His blood alcohol level was nearly .2,” he murmured, then immediately spotted a note in the SHIELD file to run a background search on the toxicologist who reported it, in case of HYDRA connections. Oh Howard, you jackass, he found himself thinking as the realization sank into him like a heavy stone.
He closed his eyes, made himself take a deep, solid breath, and blew it all the way out. “Okay,” he said at last, fixing Bucky’s gaze again. “But why do you want this kept from Tony? Why in the world wouldn’t you want him to know that you never actually-”
“Because it doesn’t change the fact that I was ready to, Steve,” Bucky answered, steady now as if seeing Steve’s turmoil had eased his own. “The fact that I didn’t pull that trigger was just a matter of dumb luck.”
“It was just a matter of Howard being a dumb, drunken fool, and-”
“And that’s why, Stevie,” Bucky’s voice rose to cut him off. “That right there is why Tony can’t know about this -- about any of it. Because I’m still alive.” He thumped his metal fist against his chest. “I’m alive, so when Tony forgives me, it means something, not like trying to absolve a ghost who’ll never talk back, never tell you why, never even even fucking apologize to you for ruining your life in one stupid night.”
He sat back in his chair, stroking his hair out of his face with his flesh hand while the metal one held its place, spread like a star over his breastbone. “Don’t you see, Stevie,” he asked, grey eyes wide and pleading, “The only way I can give Tony his Dad back is if he thinks I’m the bastard that took him away in the first place.”
And what the hell could Steve do then but grab on, drag Bucky close, and hold him tight? And if they both maybe shook a little bit into that embrace, and if their breathing was a little damp, a little ragged, then nobody was gonna say a damned thing about it.
“Don’t you ever try and tell me you’re not a good man, James Barnes,” Steve breathed into Bucky’s hair at last, long strands rustling against his lips, filling his nose with the smell of sweat, heat, shampoo, and long-lost home.
“I’m not,” Bucky answered back, not pulling away. “But I don’t really expect you to understand that.”