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The first time Tony Stark meets Bucky Barnes, he’s stiff and halting, flanked on either side by Cap and Natasha, oblivious to the hurried and hushed explanations being delivered while he just stares at Tony with a twisted sort of confusion on his brooding face.
Negotiations are quick; Tony neither knows nor trusts the ex-Hydra assassin, but he does have faith that Steve, Natasha, and Sam can handle anything between the three of them. At worst, this little lie low and drop off the grid venture might strike the secluded, wooded property where they’re gathered at a house slightly too grandiose to be called a cabin from his list of potential safe houses. But he’s got plenty of those and this one’s a bit outdated anyway.
Steve claps him on the shoulder and offers a thank you that’s entirely too heartfelt, before turning and extending a hand towards Barnes. “Ah… Tony, this is my old friend, Bucky,” he emphasizes it in such a way that suggests to Tony he’s still trying to convince Barnes himself of that fact. “Buck, I want you to meet my friend, To-”
He’s cut off by a rote, mechanical voice. “Anthony Edward Stark. Twenty-nine May 1970.”
Tony blinks once, twice, exchanges a quick look with Natasha – Steve is staring, bewildered, at his friend – and just shrugs and gestures them all inside. “Your friend’s creepy, Capsicle. Who’s hungry?”
X---X
Howard Stark was fifty-three years old in 1970.
Tony, ever the precocious child, notes early on that his classmates have fathers far younger (and far more present) than his own. He shares this observation with Nanny one day, who smiles and tells him that his parents only married a few years before his birth, and it just took Mister Stark longer to find his perfect partner, someone with whom he wanted to start a family, than it had most other couples.
He’s not much older when he understands the real reason that he is the only child of a father twice the age of some of his friends; Howard Stark had never wanted children, and Tony was the result of an unhappy accident.
When Tony’s forty years old, Nick Fury upends his reality slightly when he drops a chest of Howard’s belongings at his feet alongside the casual revelation that his father had helped found S.H.I.E.L.D. Hearing Fury claim that Howard saw Tony as the only hope to bring some of his ideas to life was one-upped only by hearing the words from his father’s own mouth in one of the film reels contained in the locker.
What is and always will be my greatest creation is you.
And so nearly twenty years after Howard Stark’s death, Tony adjusts his assessment of his father’s paternal bearing to never wanted kids; experience slightly redeemed by having produced child prodigy.
Of course, Tony is well on his way towards that age at which his father had found himself saddled with a family, and he would find the idea of kids of his own laughable if it weren’t for the rising panic that threatens first, so he really can’t judge.
But what he can’t know – though maybe he could infer, given the proper reflection on his conversation with Fury, the film reel, and his own experiences, but he’s never been the self-reflective type and thinks he’s stirred up enough of his family demons for the time-being – is that he’s absolutely right about Howard. Children were not in the plan, Tony was not in the plan. Not for the reasons a neglected childhood convinced him of, that parenthood would be a burden, an inconvenience, but because Howard Stark was more-than-averagely aware of the evils in the world, had spent decades pitting himself against some of the worst ones, and he was keenly aware that any family he ever had was liable to find itself in harm’s way because of it.
Maria had known, accepted those risks; a child had no choice in the matter.
Tony tells Fury that Howard never showed him any measure of warmth or affection, which is the truth as best he remembers it, but what he can’t know is that it was not indifference in his father which caused their fraught relationship but, rather, fear and guilt. He can’t know that it was relief Howard was feeling, not happiness, the day he shipped Tony off to boarding school, because S.H.I.E.L.D. was growing concerned about some potential new threats directed towards Howard, and young Tony had proven himself too brilliant and too eager for attention to hope to keep him out of the public eye at home.
In his ersatz therapy session with an unenthused Bruce, Tony confesses the shame of having a nanny until he was fourteen – until he went to college, really. What he can’t know is that the assorted live-in caretakers he had over the years, all sweet and soft-spoken when he was younger and then decidedly less so when he grew older and learned the fine art of pushing buttons and testing boundaries, were carefully selected S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who were not present, as an older Tony often grumbled, to make sure he didn’t accidentally kill himself somehow, but rather to protect him from enemies of Howard who might.
What he also can’t know – well, he could, if he asked Fury, but he most certainly never will and Fury will certainly never volunteer the information – is that every school he ever attended had subtly-placed agents on staff, and at M.I.T. there were three posing as students living in his dorm each year.
Most of the time, Tony shrugs off Howard’s shortcomings – he was absent, but ensured his son was well (if embarrassingly) cared for, educated – but when he’s feeling less generous on the rare occasion he has to reflect, a quiet voice deep in his mind will offer up the phrase bad father, and he can’t find it in him to particularly argue with the assessment.
What he can’t know is that Howard had been vividly, painfully aware of the fact that he fell short in balancing his work – publicly, with Stark Industries, and covertly with S.H.I.E.L.D. – with his family, but that his fear prevented him from trying to do better and his guilt sank him deeper into the bottle.
And what Howard could not know in turn – not through lack of trying from a number of ill-fated tutors who dared to raise the matter – is that the best schooling, the best things, and simply being the best at anything he deigned put his mind to, would never be enough for the boy who craved only the attention and approval of the man in whose footsteps he was destined to follow. That his age and the (marginal) challenge of college would help keep him grounded in his studies despite finally being cut free from the constant supervision of the dreaded nannies, the boarding school house parents, but upon his graduation, still just shy of even being a legal adult, he would have nowhere to focus his desperate need for attention but outward, no professors left to impress and no awards left to win.
The last four years of Howard’s life are characterized by a great deal of contention with his increasingly out-of-control son, but Tony can’t know that this had nothing to do with protecting the reputation of his company, his life’s work, and everything to do with the panic of seeing his great pains to shield his son come to naught with each new tabloid cover; of being faced with the harsh reality that, after an overbearing childhood terrified of making even one misstep, Tony would embrace adulthood and independence by making as many as possible.
But Tony can’t know that, even then, his father had done what little he could to protect his errant son, to shield him from the shadows threatening to rise out of Howard’s past; would put him on guest lists for company events he’d no interest in attending, didn’t even know about; booked him on trains from Boston to New York on weekends he knew Tony planned to fly several friends for a bender in Malibu, if only to provide the slightest confusion, hesitation, on the part of any would-be assassins or kidnappers.
Howard Stark was cold, he was calculating, but what Tony can’t know is that it was only because he didn’t know how to be anything else, anything better, while still protecting the most important person in his world.
X---X
The second time Tony Stark meets Bucky Barnes, nearly a year after their first encounter, is at the tower in New York, a preliminary planning session to rout out the lingering vestiges of HYDRA, and his input had been deemed important enough to risk sneaking him into the city despite any number of people and organizations who would love to get their hands on the former Winter Soldier.
Barnes doesn’t stare at Tony as he had upon their first meeting, but whenever Tony does catch his gaze, that same shadow of confusion passes over the otherwise stoic visage, before he shakes his head almost unnoticeably and returns his attention to Steve, whose side he seems unwilling to leave.
But eventually, when Tony is at the bar mixing a round, he glances up and blinks in surprise to see Barnes has trailed him and is just watching him from across the counter. “You lose your star-spangled arm candy?” A quick glance shows Steve to be immersed in conversation with Bruce and Sam. “Change your mind, want a drink? Can you get drunk? Cap can’t, which is a downright shame, because I’d pay good money to see that. Say, you knew Cap before he was Cap, did he ever get drunk then? Was he hilarious?” He doesn’t even look up as he speaks, setting out glasses and dropping ice into some of them.
“You weren’t in the car.”
“Hm?” he offers absently as he pours.
“You were supposed to be -”
He cuts off abruptly, drawing Tony’s gaze up where his words had not. Barnes is staring again, but then he blinks two, three times quickly and shakes his head. Tony watches him a moment, brow furrowed, before grabbing a tray and arranging the drinks on it. When he looks up again, Natasha has appeared seemingly out of nowhere, and it’s not until she murmurs, “Bucky…” and rests a hand gently on his metal one that he realizes Barnes has dug gouges into the wooden surface of the bar.
And much like at their first meeting, Tony just shrugs. He gathers up the tray, sets it on the table in the middle of the circle where they’re all sitting. Once he’s grabbed his own martini, he sees Steve watching Barnes and Natasha. “Your friend’s still a bit creepy, Cap.”
Because Tony can’t know any different.