Work Text:
“Did they deserve it?”
Bucky is in the lab, tinkering with scraps of wires and solder, when Tony finally asks. He likes the lab as a place of refuge. The lights are always on at full brightness no matter the time and fast jumpy music is almost always playing from one forgotten device. It’s so close to being what he used to know -his Pa’s fix it shop and Howard’s lab and the technicians prep room for him- but most of it is wildly different and everchanging so that he never slips too far into the past.
The questions Tony asks come randomly, one at a time, as they both try to get the size and shape of the man who sits in the corner of the room, as they both try to calculate the length of the shadow he casts. Bucky can usually gauge what topic the question will painfully probe by the amount of time it takes for Tony to ask and the amount of fidgeting done while asking. This one had been brewing for a while and Tony had twitched like a live wire.
Did they deserve it? Who is they? Collectively, looking at the sprawl of bodies Bucky put bullets into, the answer comes easy. No, of course not. No child or random bystander or wife who listens to closely to her husband's work complaints deserves it.
HYDRA? Did they deserve what was coming? Yes. Yes the organization, the one that destroyed lives and families and countries; yes HYDRA deserved a bullet for every rotten head. But the frightened men, the boys who were tricked into this. The ones who pissed their pants when the Winter Soldier loomed over them? Maybe, that is too big a question for Bucky to unravel. They died, he did it, the made him do it. They died.
The other Soldiers? The Widows he helped beat into shape? When you core out a human to just a shell filled with violence can they deserve anything but a bullet to the brain?
They. Maria and Howard. Driving down a dark and wet road in the middle of the night. Rushing off for a vacation or a meeting. Would they deserve a worn out tire that gives way? A deer that darts in the road and freezes, looking at them with wide reflective eyes? Would they deserve a moment of peace, a shared joke, a moment of eye contact between them as a hand drifts and sets the car on a course of collision? Maybe. Destiny or chance or happenstance don’t care much for those human types of justifications. Did they deserve to fall in bed, fall in love, fall in the path of a bullet -a fist?
It’s unfathomable. You know the answer but as you trace it back the lines grow fainter and mix in with the rest of the picture. You know it in some insistent place of you, one that you can never quite find and touch.
“I’m not sure,” Is what Bucky says, looking up from the two wires he joined together.
“Just give me an answer, I don’t care which one.” Tony is staring deep into an engine, the blue holograms around him fuzzing out his silhouette. Like he too could just be data bouncing off of floating particles of dust.
Did the Winter Soldier deserve to shoot them? A present from HYDRA, a show of trust. You have shaped the world, do this one more time, then you can rest… Did he deserve the confusion that briefly flickered across his face as he punched the cheekbones and ribs in of an old friend? The rush of a job well done, a hand rubbing his spine as he told he was a gift. Did he deserve the ice and chair and needle that came after? All those various ways of forgetting? Of disappearing?
As much as he wants to, Bucky cannot ignore this situation until it goes away. “I wanted them to die, I wanted to kill them, and to do it well. I think that is what matters more than whether they had a balanced cosmic scale, weighted by some arbitrary being.”
“Did you like it? You weren’t wearing the mask -wonder when that fashionable piece of the uniform came to join your snazzy ensemble- and you had that creepy dead eye thing going on. Very grimdark of you. Did you like it, the killing?” Tony seems to be buzzing, frantically jerking his shoulders and cheek twitching as these words fall out of him.
“I don’t think so. I don’t think it bothered me very much either, but that wasn’t what satisfied me. I was… excited, as well as i could be, for a job well done and for the treat.”
“Treat? What, did they call you good boy and let you sleep on their bed? Like a dog. Like a pet assassin they could chain up and command?”
“Yeah, basically that’s what it was. Not the sleeping, that was done in cryostasis. But some handlers would pet me, or tell me how good I was for them.”
“Jesus.”
“After the 70’s though, I think then my handlers wanted to suppress my memory more. I was out more often doing ops and started to remember faces of the tech team. If I got out somehow I couldn’t be allowed to give out their secrets. So they would give me LSD, fentanyl, MDMA, heroin, mescaline… anything, really, that they thought would work.”
His hand stills in the gut of the machinery in front of him. “Jesus. And it worked? A sip of Daddy’s wine and a pat on the back and you were, what? Ready to comply. March to the beat of their drum.”
And what can Bucky say? Yes, you’re right, I craved it all so much I killed the president for it. God. No. Some truths can be bent in favor of kindness, Bucky tries a different tactic. “Tony, you know as well as I do what it’s like to be lost. And when someone or something gives you a place to stay a while -you’ve felt what that’s like. How powerful it is to be allowed to rest.”
“No. No, you don’t get to frame my adolescent exploits like that. What I did -what Dad did too- it’s nothing like, it’s not like we killed people!” Tony rips his hand out from the engine and waves away all the holograms. He is dressed in all black, with stubble creeping in to the edges of his maintained goatee, and purple stamped underneath his eyes. He seems dwarfed against the white of the rest of the lab and the chrome of his past projects. “Fuck! Okay, fuck, I know you’re right. Goddamnit.”
“I don’t think they deserved it. I don’t think anyone could.” How unfair it all seems, a genius overtaken by his own brilliance, a steadfast woman stolen away from the home she built. A child ripped away from his family. And, Bucky can’t help but think, how pointless it is to discuss the unfairness of it all when nothing more can be done about it. He killed them, they died, he did it, he killed the ones who made him do it.
“Oh.” Tony curls in a little more, tucking his chin into his his hoodie.
A very loud silence over takes the lab.
But telling Tony that all the sorrow Bucky had he has already cried out won’t help anything. “Since waking up I haven’t been able to do much besides wait. Wait and listen to you throw quips and references at me that I had no idea how to argue against.” Tony gives a ghost of a smile, no doubt remembering all the Robo-cops and Luke Skywalkers he tossed at Bucky. “I’m better at reading now, which is nice, I used to hate it. I couldn’t stand sitting around and being still, but being a designated marksman teaches you that. But I’ve been readin’ a lot more and thinkin’ a lot more too. And I don’t wanna say that I think this will help, I just want to say it. So. Life is a hideous invention by somebody I don't know…”
“...It doesn't last, and it's good for nothing,” Tony continues. “Yeah. Victor Hugo, Les Miserables. The Brick, Lez Mizz. 1860-something. You saying you wanna eat a bullet?”
“No. Just a nice quote. And don’t play dumb with me, I know you know when it was published. When did you read it?”
“I read it after I fucked your…” Tony trails off and doesn’t finish his sentence after looking up at Bucky’s flat glare. “Seventh grade. I had already gone through the school’s library.”
Bucky nods. They both stare awkwardly at each other. Tomorrow he will come back to the laboratory and everything will go back to normal -as normal as it gets with Tony involved- but right now the air is thick and presses against Bucky uncomfortably. As he pushes the door open he hears Tony clear his throat.
“Just, for the record, you don’t deserve it either.”
Bucky could stop his eyes from widening and his back from tensing, but he lets his surprise show. He turns around halfway and looks at Tony in the eyes. “Thank you.”
The door shuts behind him, but he can hear a muffled “Why does he have to be so sincere?” and Bucky lets himself smile.