IT’S A CONDITION OF YOUR PARDON.

[thestaremaster]

WHO: Bucky Barnes, OTA
WHERE: Calibrations
WHAT: Calibrations
WHEN: Calibrations
WARNINGS: All of them, PTSD, Graphic violence, torture, amputation, brain washing, gaslighting




The wall opposite the one you walk in through is trees. Birch trees. Wallpaper, maybe a large painting…it doesn’t really matter. It’s peaceful. Through vertical blinds you can see glimpses of the city outside, warm light streaming through.

It’s an office room, cozied up a little with these touches, but still formal in the way all these spaces are. This is a room where secrets are spilled and notes are taken, until the hour ticks away and you’re released back into the world outside. Which makes it an appropriate enough space for this.

There’s a white couch against the wall, and Bucky sit’s there stiffly, gloved hands folded in his lap. In front of his is a black leather chair waiting empty, a notebook perched on the arm of it.

If you care to take a seat and flip through the book you’ll see a few notes to help prompt you.

Rule 1.
Rule 2.
Rule 3.

Of course, you could pose your own questions if there’s something else you’re interested in knowing. Or, if you’re not so interested in playing the roll of doctor as you are in investigating, you might find a different book, red with a star on it, hidden away in a filing cabinet. There are some strange words written inside.

Comments

[in_extremis]

That quick look around didn't seem to linger anywhere in particular until it was intent on the chair, making Tony slowly scrape his lip between his teeth with a flicker of irritation. If that was where Bucky wanted him to go, it probably wasn't all that interesting. "No doc here," Tony pointed out, glancing away like he might be searching for one, "so must be a little bit of you."

There was no way someone's darkest recesses were filed away in an orderly fashion in one of these dream-spaces, but there wasn't too much else taking up room in the office. Sauntering in a watchful arc, like a cat stalking his sensible office furniture prey, Tony continued, "Unless that's what you meant--I could throw on a lab coat, you could pull your pants down. I have very gentle hands."

[thestaremaster]

Fair enough. Bucky glanced around with an almost shy look breaking through. It wasn't what he expected either. But he guessed he felt...safe here. Able to share things in way he couldn't outside of this room.

He breathed out a faint laugh through his nose. "You sound like Howard," he teased, and then an apologetic smile, knowing no one liked to be compared to their parents, least of all Stark.

[in_extremis]

Yeah, the accusation wasn't a new one, and was getting harder to ignore. There was the slightest defensive lift of Tony's shoulder, and his smile in response was hard and brief, and he was much happier to turn his attention aggressively to the filing cabinet to find something that might make Bucky flinch in the same way.

It was files, unfortunately, which didn't make for a particularly flashy parry, leaving Tony rifling through them as he said, "He was always much cagier about you. Even when I asked him, it would be--you two were a unit, 'They were real patriots. Knew what it was like to be a real man.'" Hello, what was this? Not a file full of papers, but a small, bound book, enticingly red among the white and tan. Tony plucked it up curiously.

[thestaremaster]

Bucky's nose wrinkled, wondering when it was Howard turned into that. Or maybe Tony's Howard had always been that way.

He stiffened as Tony pulled the red book free, and the room shifted. It was cold. Dark. Still an office of sorts. Or a bunker. And it seemed to be old Soviet.

Bucky's couch had been replaced with a chair, and his breath came quick.

"You don't want to look at that..."

[in_extremis]

In a rare instance of not being compulsively contrary, Tony took a cautious step back from where the filing cabinet had been, book still in hand but arms raised stiffly like he thought if he moved too much it might disturb the already charged energy of the room they had been plunged into. With a careful glance around, he was almost inclined to agree. Still holding the book aloft, very aware that it was a threat now, he looked toward Bucky and assessed this new chair with the same cold calculation that he had the comfortable office, and offered the alternative, "What's about to happen?"

[thestaremaster]

"You're going to meet the Winter Solider," Bucky answered, lifting his chin to meet Tony's gaze with a hard stare. "Is that what you want?"

[in_extremis]

That kind of challenging stare Tony could definitely be contrary about, shrugging casually and responding with a light, "We've met." It hadn't been clear to him yet how much this Bucky and the one who called himself the Winter Soldier actually had in common--neither of them were particularly open about how that happened, and Tony didn't have a Bucky from his world that survived the war to fill in the blanks. All he had were guesses, suggestions, and this cold room to fit together a sense of dread, but if Bucky didn't want to actually answer...Tony considered the book again, and flipped open the cover.

[thestaremaster]

"No. You haven't," Bucky assured.

Soldat was...somewhere in between.

But Tony would see that for himself.

"Bucky- no!" Cap's voice cut in, like it was playing over broken radio waves at first, and there was a long scream as Bucky fell.

The room cut to black and then they were there with Bucky's broken body, much of his left arm ripped away, snow falling all round them. Soldiers were dragging his body, and Bucky quickly lost consciousness again, the world cutting to black.

Then a makeshift operating theatre. Saws cutting into flesh. Needles and straps, and a voice- "The procedure has all ready started."

[in_extremis]

Tony might have had regrets. It was possible he didn't need to know the whole story in intimate detail, he could have kept pushing for Bucky to just tell him, he had the leverage. Now, he had the haunting sound of that scream to live with, and the rusty trail of blood dragged through the snow. He hardly moved until they were in this new room, though, then he was abruptly clapping a hand over his face, unprepared for the visceral reality of what Bucky's enticing, shiny, wonderfully engineered arm actually meant; the smell of the dead flesh, and the blood. He tried to take a quick step back, away from the table, tucking the book against his chest.

[thestaremaster]

Thankfully at least it was only a brief moment before the blackness overtook them again, and when it lit back up the Soldier attacked the nearest scientist with his shiny new arm, gripping his throat with a crushing force as people rushed to subdue him.

"Put him on ice," Zola's voice echoed and the room grew unnaturally, unbearably cold.

"Still curious?" Bucky asked.

[in_extremis]

The heart in his throat making every breath short and sharp made Tony's flippant, "Always," much less convincing. The voice had made him jump, not expecting Bucky to also still be there while he stared at the Bucky being brutalized, and when Tony did look around he was pale with an apologetic knit to his brow. This was Bucky Barnes. If there was a fight he couldn't win, Cap was supposed to be there to have his back. "How did you survive?" Tony hissed.

[thestaremaster]

"The fall?" Bucky asked, and the scene changed to one that must have been sooner, given this Bucky still had both his arms. It seemed to be some kind of prison camp, and clearly, Bucky had seen better days, coughing weakly on the table he was strapped to.

He was approached by the same doctor, and injected with Zola's latest attempt at replicating Erksine's formula.

"It's not as good as Steve's, but it gets the job done," Bucky noted blithely.

[in_extremis]

The fall was only a fraction of the challenge, but Tony was reluctant to elaborate now that getting his answers seemed so easy. He was much more cautious about actually watching now, retreating closer to Bucky with his head down, but his eyes still darted, taking in every detail, intent on the syringe like it could tell him what the formula was.

"But how--why did they find you, and not Steve?" he asked. Steve had gone down with the ship, surely that would have been easier to find than Bucky in pieces in the snow, and they didn't find Steve for decades. If it was a supersoldier they were after, the choice seemed clear to Tony.

[thestaremaster]

"Zola knew where to look," Bucky answered with a shrug. "He was on the train."

"Steve...no one knew where he brought the Valkyrie down. Your father looked for years." At least as far as what he'd learned after the fact.

[in_extremis]

"Train...?" Tony echoed, feeling like he knew less with every detail. Bucky fell off some train? "Cap was there--" Tony knew that much, he could still hear Steve's voice under that scream, "He knew where to look." That didn't make any sense.

"He woke up a hundred years later and was still looking!" Tony knew, logically, that it wasn't fair to Bucky to be so angry at him about this, he already had to deal with living it and didn't deserve Tony arguing with him about the details of it. But it felt so profoundly wrong. "He roamed the streets of New York for months thinking every fucking raccoon was you."

He had always gone back for Bucky.

[thestaremaster]

"They thought I was dead, Tony. And Schmitt was going to blow up half the world, they didn't exactly have time to arrange a search party," Bucky argued, lips pressed thin.

He'd imagined countless times that things had gone different, but that didn't help anyone.

"He saved me. It just...took him a while."

[in_extremis]

According to the stories Tony was steeped in from birth, there was about a thousand times that everyone thought Bucky was dead and Captain America brought him home anyway. That was who Cap was, and in the years that Tony had known him, he had only exceeded the legend. Tony only sucked his teeth in disbelief at the idea that they didn't have time.

With his arms folded defensively and still looking away like it was Bucky that he was frustrated with, he pressed, "And you were...? The whole time?" It still wasn't clear exactly where that had left Bucky, the only way for Tony to finish that question was 'not frozen', like Steve.

[thestaremaster]

"...The Winter Soldier was used for missions...assassinations, covert operations. And put on ice when it wasn't needed," Bucky explained reluctantly.

A cryo chamber faded into view, fingertips reaching to the view plate before the Soldier inside was frozen with a look of distress on his face.

[in_extremis]

Tony didn't miss the way Bucky said 'it', like they were talking about a program and not a person, and would have locked him in a lingering stare if the motion his doppelganger made didn't draw Tony's attention. Instead, Tony raised a hand as though to meet the trapped Winter Soldier's, only to redirect to press to his own heart instead as he watched the fog of the ice.

"My dad should have been looking for you," he muttered, guilty like he was the one that had sent Howard away on his endless quest for Captain America's remains. It suddenly felt so unconscionable that they didn't even look for the body to bury. He never really thought about that part before, just the adventures, the glory, that they won. Maybe Tony hadn't really been thinking of Bucky as a person that whole time, either.

[thestaremaster]

The sentiment earned Tony a small smile, though there was a twinge of guilt at the mention of Howard.

"I was far from the only soldier who was never found," he offered. It was war. There was no shortage of bodies, and no way to find all of them, let alone ensure they received a proper burial.

"Your father did what he could. He was a good man..."

"Howard-" A woman's voice cut through, pained and distressed, and Bucky tensed, trying to will the memory away.

[in_extremis]

Plenty of people liked to remind Tony of that, and just like every other time he could feel the pain of the tension between his shoulders and had to consciously relax them with a slow nod. At least he still had Bucky convinced they were alike, some of Howard's lessons must have been effective, there just wasn't any fixing Tony to be a good man, really.

The last thing he expected to hear in what was supposed to be Bucky's head was his own mother's voice. It made him tilt his head, brow furrowed, not sure what he was hearing without the context, but Tony had heard her sound so much like that enough times that it couldn't be anyone else. "What...?" he breathed, trying to back away, glancing around anxiously for what he might have touched to suddenly send them into one of his memories, the awful ones where his mom's voice cracked like that, and tried to shove them all back down again; Howard was a good man, he was a good man, Bucky had just said that.

;___; tony

[thestaremaster]

Bucky's face was a confused mix of tense of guilt, and he willed them back to the office, shaking his head faintly.

"We don't need to go there-" he murmured, though the tone seemed to be saying something else, a pleading edge to it, guilt...

Some of that tension blinked away in surprise at the look on Tony's face, head tilting as he tried to read that anxiety.

[in_extremis]

This time, Tony had to demand, "What?" of Bucky, because he was really making it sound like he had a lot more control over both of them here than Tony had understood. Standing back in the serene office, like all of those brutal things hadn't just happened to Bucky, and like his mom's voice had never cut between them at all, made Tony's mounting anxiety feel profoundly ridiculous and particularly inactionable, reducing him to abruptly throwing the red book that he still carried away. "Sorry--" he started to say immediately, like he might go collect the book where it fell, only to round on Bucky again before he had properly gotten the word out to ask, "Did you know my mom?"

[thestaremaster]

God. What a loaded question.

Bucky tried to keep that guarded expression, but the conflict ebbed through, quickly followed by guilt.

"This isn't something you want to hear in here, Tony..." he tried to caution. He should have told him before now. He knew that. It was the same thing Steve had done, but Bucky didn't know how to begin that conversation. Especially not knowing if this was the same fate that met them in Tony's world.

"I'll tell you anything you want to know out there."

[in_extremis]

That was the wrong way to answer the question. It only made Tony more on edge, with no way to know what to expect, leaving him tense and tight-jawed, shoulders back to try to take up space and regain some control, betrayed by his wide, panicked eyes. It would have been nice if Bucky had imagined him some sunglasses.

"She was happy, she had everything she could have wanted..." he tried to circumvent, laying the groundwork so they both knew if Bucky was lying about Maria's perfect, magazine-cover family, and advancing slowly with an intent stare that dared Bucky to say his piece. "James," he prompted. "You had plenty to say about my dad."