Chapter Four

He knew I was there before he opened the door. That was made pretty obvious when the lights flipped on and he walked right past me without even glancing around. I shifted back into my position on the sofa and wiped my sweaty hands on my pants. He seemed very preoccupied in taking off his shoes. Finally, he briefly glanced at me and said, "Get out."

"But you don't know why I'm here."

"Doesn't matter, get out."

This wasn't going how I hoped. "I need your help, and I think you might actually want to help with this."

He mockingly raised an eyebrow, "Oh really? Let me guess, you have the next great idea for an invention. It'll make billions. You just can't figure out how to get it to work. Am I right?" I almost laughed, his sarcasm was totally endearing. "No, not at all. Actually, I need you to make the next great invention to help a, umm, mental ailment that one of my friends has."

"I'm not a doctor and I don't help people. So get out of my hotel." An Iron man suit came from an adjoining room, fully assembled and walking with its hand in the air as if threatening to shoot. I was temporarily distracted, "Is that empty? I mean, is it a robot?"

He was obviously not about to stand for any more delay, and the suit seemed to be preparing to throw me out. I decided that I couldn't afford to waste any more time. "Look, I know you're friends with Captain America and if you help me then you'll be helping him too. His best friend is mentally ill and I don't know if you can help him, so if you can't that's fine, but if you can then you absolutely should."

"And just who exactly is Captain America's best friend?"

"Bucky Barnes, of course." He suddenly got really serious, "What do you know about Barnes?"

This wasn't quite the reaction I had planned for, "Well, I, uh, know him, kind of, and he has serious memory problems and I thought you might be able to help." "You're lying. You heard rumors and you're here to see if you could use them to get something off of me. Well a little bad news for you, it didn't work. Now get out." The robotic Iron man grabbed me and actually pulled me off of the sofa. "No, wait. I can show you. Let me show you." With the arm that wasn't being held, I scrambled around in my pocket to pull out my phone. The tinted green transparent screen lit up as I told it to bring up the video I wanted. I tapped it in the air and it projected the video into midair. It was just a short clip from my security cameras, showing Bucky sitting on the couch, but Stark was immediately interested. It wasn't the video, though, that he was staring at, but the phone in my hand.

"Let me see that." The sudden urge to completely get out of there, phone and all came over me. I had the distinct feeling that I shouldn't have shown him what kind of tech I had. Telling myself that I was doing it for Bucky, I handed him my phone. He flipped it around a few times and swiped around on the screen. He muttered something under his breath and then looked up. "Where did you get this?"

"I don't know, it's mine."

"No, it's most certainly mine." Panic rose. This was not somewhere I imagined this meeting going, and I was not prepared for anything like this. I swiped at my phone, "Give it back." He stepped back a few steps and the phone still rested in his hand as he gazed at me interestedly

"What are you doing? Look, the phone is mine. Maybe it's similar to your technology, but it's not like I stole it or anything. I've always had it, and it's mine and you'd better give it back." He was still looking at me bemusedly. I was getting really angry and kind of scared too.

"Does the name Brian Jungwirth mean anything to you?" He looked as if he were only mildly interested in the answer, but my mind was wildly interested in the question. How did he know that name? I knew that he worked with SHIELD, but surely he didn't know anything about their efforts to track me down. "That's my dad," I stuttered. Tony whistled, "So you're his kid. Never thought I'd see you. How is the old man, by the way? He was always a bit of a stick in the mud, but a good guy. I haven't seen him in... well, it must have been ten years." This was another unexpected turn and my confusion was rampant. "You knew my dad?"

"I gave him open access to my money and set him up with my technology and he doesn't even tell you that we know each other?"

"Your money... that's where the money comes from? It's yours? But why would you let us use your money?"

"Cause I like your dad and I don't like SHIELD. But the real question is why you're here. Where are your parents? Aren't you supposed to be hiding away somewhere?"

"My parents died ten years ago." That made him stop short.

"Both of them? Dead? How?"

"They were shot by an assassin sent by Hydra. I got away and I've been living in D.C. ever since." I gave him a moment to absorb the news and used it myself to absorb everything I had learned. Then I pushed back onto the reason that I was here, "I had no idea that you were funding my safe house, although I should have guessed that it wasn't just some hidden bank account of my dad's, but since apparently you've been helping me for the past ten years, maybe that will make you more likely believe me, Bucky Barnes is alive but he has severe memory loss. He can remember a few things vaguely, but he's having a lot of trouble and I thought that maybe you could make something to... I don't know, stimulate his memory and get him back into working order. If you can't help, then just say so and I'll get out of here."

"I didn't say that I couldn't help, but I'm having a hard time believing that you know where he is. Cap has been searching for days, and we've scanned every single available security camera footage and even the unavailable security footage in a one-hundred-mile radius. There's not a sign of him. How could you possibly know where he is when we can't find any trace of him?"

"Well, he was in the woods when I found him, so there wouldn't have been any security cameras there, and when we went into town, he was with me and I have this little program thing that blocks me from—"

"All videos and pictures," Tony finished. "Of course, I designed that myself."

"Yeah, besides, I think that if you had looked at my video, you would consider it to be pretty conclusive proof." He turned to the video that had been playing the same twenty-second clip on repeat for the last few minutes and looked at it like he hadn't even noticed that it was there before.

"That's definitely him. Although how you got through a meeting with that assassin and came out alive is a definite mystery."

"I don't think he's really very dangerous anymore. Okay, well, he's a bit erratic at times. And he did almost kill my bodyguard, but like, he doesn't exactly just go around killing people for the sake of killing. So yeah, anyway, I didn't really know what you would need if you were gonna help, so I just took a scan of his brain." I reached out for my phone and finally got it back from him. All it took was a few swipes and then another tap and a 3D detailed x-ray of a brain popped up. Tony looked at it and then started swiping around and zooming in.

"So you think you'll be able to do anything?" I asked after a few minutes. He looked up and seemed surprised that I was standing there like he had forgotten all about me, "Yeah, this shouldn't be any problem."

.

A few hours later, he had a fully functional electromagnetic stimulator set up, or something like that. "So you're sure this will work?" He stopped admiring his work and turned towards me, "My machines always work. It should only take up to a month of therapy sessions with this to see marked improvement."

"A month?" I was disappointed.

"What? You didn't think it was going to magically restore his memory, did you?" That's exactly what I had thought. "This isn't a miracle worker, it's just a therapy machine. It'll encourage extra brain activity and gently stimulate the areas of his brain that have been damaged and dormant. Of course, if I was back at my tower I could've whipped up something to regain his memory on the spot, but as it is, it's not easy to get the supplies I need in D.C."

"Well, I don't know how I'm gonna get the Winter Soldier to agree to a month of therapy, but miracles do happen. Could I bring him here tomorrow?"

"You want to bring him here? The man's a fugitive from the law."

"Well I'd love to take the electro-thingy with me, but I don't exactly see how that's going to work. You have any better ideas?"

"Yeah, I'll find a place that isn't being watched by every news reporter in a hundred mile radius."

"That does sound like a better idea," I admitted.

"I'll text you where to go later."

"Okay, that's cool. Oh, and one more thing, you can't tell Captain America about any of this."

"Oh really? Since when do you get to tell me what to do?"

"Please? If he knew, he wouldn't be able to stay away."

"So?"

"Bucky really seems to have very violent reactions to even the mention of Captain America's name. How do you think he'd react if he actually saw him?"

"That might be a fair point. I won't tell him… for now."

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.

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It was late when I got back. The lights were dim as I walked down the steps leading into my home. The main room had been carefully designed to be as light and cheerful as possible. Since there couldn't be any windows, everything was made specifically to feel fresh and open. The Christmas lights were my idea to make everything more playful and had been added a few years ago.

The newest addition, though, was the dark, grim shadow in the corner of the room. He was bent over something, his long hair shading his set jaw. He was focused on the black object in his hand and didn't look up as I rushed to the table in the middle of the room and felt under the corner. Sure enough, the hidden holster was empty.

"Your weapons won't work if you don't keep them clean." He wasn't looking at me-he was still wiping off my pistol-the cartridge, and ammo laying on the floor beside him.

I walked a little closer so I could watch him a little better, "I didn't know that they got dirty if you weren't using them."

He spit a little on the barrel of the gun and wiped it again. "Dust," he said simply.

"Well, a little bit of dust isn't going to hurt it."

He looked up just a little at me, "Dust can build up to become dirt, and dirt can make it misfire and a misfire could mean that you end up dead." He stopped wiping the gun and it lay in his lap as his eyebrows furrowed and he stared into the distance. I glanced behind me and then asked, "What?"

"I... I've said that before," he said slowly as if each word was hard, "I was teaching... a lot of girls... about guns." I leaned forward eagerly, excited that he was remembering things. "It was in a red… room or… something." He stopped abruptly and started pushing the bullets back into the cartridge before jamming the cartridge back into the gun. He flipped it in his hand and offered it to me, handle first.

My fingers slid unfamiliarly over the handle. He let go, and I immediately let the point drop to the ground.

"Thanks," I muttered and walked across the room to reverently push it back into the holster. I stood there tracing circles into the top of the table, trying to decide how best to bring up the conversation that needed to be had. With half-formed thoughts on the tip of my tongue, I turned, ready to bring the subject up. I found Bucky in the same place he had been a moment ago, but now he was bent over a notebook, scratching something out in pencil. The notebook I recognized as being the one that I had been doodling in earlier and had left on the table.

His face was screwed up in concentration as he glared at the paper and wrote sporadically. The urge to find out what he was doing was dampened by the desire to not interrupt him. So I watched him. A few minutes later, he stopped writing and stared hard at the page, the pencil twitching in his hand. Sighing, he closed the notebook with a snap, tucked it carefully back into his pocket and asked the question with no ceremony, "Can he help?"

"I think so, yes. In fact, we already have a treatment all set up." Not wanting him to feel trapped, I added, "Of course, you don't have to use it if you don't want to. We just thought it would be better to have it set up in case you decided you wanted to."

Indecision showed in his eyes. His hand brushed seemingly subconsciously against his back pocket and his fingers brushed over the top of the notebook sticking out of the pocket. "When?"

"Tomorrow, if you want."

He nodded, "Tomorrow." He walked over and lay down on the sofa. Taking the hint, I moved into my room. The sight of my bed made me realize how tired I was again, and I quickly got ready for sleep. Lying in my bed and drifting off to sleep, my last thought was, 'I hope Stark can work it all out.'