Having checked her email the next morning, Shay was just noting down the details of the invitation Everett had sent when there was a soft knock on the door.
"Come in."
She didn't look up as the door opened and softly closed. Less than twelve hours home and already much of her hypervigilance had retreated behind the comforting security of the team.
Bucky walked up beside her desk, looking out the big picture window, admiring the view over the lake, and tapping the glass experimentally with vibranium fingers. A solid reverberating thud answered instead of the crystalline ringing he'd anticipated.
"Re-enforced plexiglass, mirrored from the outside and protected by 12-inch steel shutters that descend in 10 seconds if there's a security breach on the compound." Shay said, "Tony was thorough."
Tony. Who built this place, for Steve and Shay and the rest.
"He still hates me." Bucky said bluntly.
Shay finally looked up, "he doesn't know you, James."
"Don't think that'll ever change."
"Maybe not," Shay shrugged honestly, "but you offered him an olive branch last night that he won't easily forget." Bucky quirked an eyebrow at this and she flashed him a fiendish grin, "he's been dying to get a closer look at that arm of yours. Pure vibranium? stuffed to the hilt with Wakandan tech? Kind of surprised he didn't take it and run at the first chance."
Shay's prophecy proved true that afternoon when Bucky was summoned to Lab Four by Friday. "Mr. Stark would like a few words with you. In private."
Steve looked worried, but Shay held him back, sussing out Tony's intent and speaking low. "He's not walking into an ambush, Steve. You've got to let them work it out. Tony forgave you, didn't he?"
"Only after I let him hit me."
"But it worked." Shay chuckled at the memory.
"You want me to just let you waltz in here and pretend like the accords didn't happen? Like Siberia never happened?"
"That's not what I'm asking Tony." Steve pleaded; hand spread wide in supplication. "I did what I though was the best thing, and I screwed up. But I couldn't let you kill him, Tony, I couldn't let you murder a man in cold blood."
"There's nothing cold in my blood Rogers, I can promise you that."
"He was compelled. He didn't have a choice. Have you already forgotten what that felt like, when Wanda put all your fears in a blender and convinced you to build Ultron?"
Tony punched Steve in the face, grunting as the skin on his fist tore.
"You still had more control than Bucky did as the winter soldier, so we figured out what went wrong and we worked together to fix our mistakes. We did that, Tony, because we were a team. A family. And I get it if I'll never be family to you again, but the world needs us to be a team, the team needs us to be a team."
Tony was looking over his bruising knuckles ruefully, hating to admit that Steve was right, hating the hatred he'd been carrying around like a bullet wound, bleeding on everything he touched. "Fine but I get to hit you again, after all, you did crush my suit."
Steve should have seen it coming, but in his relief, he missed the iron gauntlet forming around Tony's fist until he went to shake it and got blasted with a pulsar in the gut, knocking him backwards. The second blast put him flat on his back.
"Now we're even." Tony smirked, offering Steve a helping hand, "alright Captain underpants, we're getting the band back together."
The door slid open automatically as Bucky approached, and he stepped through uneasily, waiting for a sign that the man relentlessly hammering a glowing piece of steel on the anvil had noticed his arrival.
Finally seeming satisfied, Stark plunged the flat sheet in an upright tank of shimmering liquid, pulled it out, admired it for a moment before setting it down on a toweled work bench. "Come in, I won't bite." He hollered as he turned off the roaring flame in the forge. "Not yet anyway."
Bucky moved forward slowly, approaching Stark as though he was a snake, though the rattling was all in his head. "You wanted to see me?"
"I asked to speak with you, never said I wanted to see you." Stark snarked, wiping his hands on a rag and bracing them on a clean worktable to glare at him. Bucky retreated to the door, had nearly reached it when Stark spoke again. "I was out of line, yesterday."
A pause.
"Not wrong though." Bucky muttered as he turned back to face him.
Tony scrunched his face, like the memory hurt. "No, I suppose not." Rubbing his chin, contemplating. "Steve's been trying to convince me for ages, that you weren't really in there-" he pointed at his temple. "Not sure I can believe that."
A long pause, a long glaring look.
"So, you're really not a deranged robo-cop anymore?"
Bucky grimaced, shook his head.
"I saw the tapes," for a moment Stark looked uncomfortable. "I saw… you fought it. they kept having to wipe you, after… after my… They wiped you twice, and you were still…" there was moisture gathering in Starks eyes, and Bucky looked away, his face itching with heat and the memory. "I don't know what to believe anymore. What's the truth."
"I didn't- I don't… They didn't deserve that." Bucky stumbled over thoughts, trying not to say the wrong thing, stopped and sighed heavily. "They didn't, and you didn't and I'm sorry."
"Sometimes I wish you'd've died falling from that train." Stark's voice was flat as he said it, focusing on a point somewhere over Bucky's shoulder, adding before he could respond, "and other days I wish that IED had just taken me with it."
Shifting from one foot to the next, Bucky waited, the rattling growing in his skull.
"Pep says that's the ptsd talking. That I can do more good alive, even if my brain never gets set right. They don't make shiny new vibranium brains in Wakanda, do they?"
"Not exactly." Bucky murmured, thinking of the other kind of chair, the padded one with the headset that didn't dig into his skin, and the swivel chair Ena rocked in during their sessions. How much easier it would have been not to remember. "Wouldn't trust it."
"Huh?" Stark said.
"New brain, anybody could have put anything in there."
"That- yeah." Stark muttered. "Therapy though, that's ok?" There was an edge there, like Bucky's answer might be important.
"Yeah."
"Crap."
"Yeah."
"Pepper's been pushing me to do it for years. Says it can't hurt to try."
"Sounds like Sam."
"Hmm."
The strangely calm turn to the conversation now stagnated into an awful pool of silence. Stark was the first one to break it, less comfortable there than Bucky.
"Don't think I'll just get over the facts, Barnes. You killed my Mum and Dad."
"I don't expect you to. Or to forgive me." Bucky rubbed the back of his neck, "I wouldn't."
"Good." Tony clapped his hands, as though the problem was resolved. "So, here's the deal: inspector gadget: you let me look at that arm, I don't kill you, and we tell Steve that it's all water under the bridge."
Bucky offered him a left-handed shake, pressing the sequence to release the mechanism and letting Stark lift the arm free of the coupling.
"It's heavier than it looks, not just vibranium is it?" Stark asked, expertly weighing the prosthetic in his hands.
"Counterweights." Bucky answered. Glad to leave the difficult topic behind in favour of mechanical interests, he pressed a button in the elbow that was only now visible, opening a compartment in the bicep and letting the battery shaped weight slide into his palm.
Tony prodded the bundle of wires that had dropped out with the weight. "Explains why they made it detachable, much easier to adjust when its not directly wired into a living neural network."
"I- wanted. Asked. To be able to take it off." Bucky offered solemnly, startling Stark from his exploration of the forearm plates. Brown eyes met his and he realized he'd not been this close to Stark since Siberia.
Stark had manufactured weapons, and Bucky had been crafted into one. Regrets, second chances, the desire to do better, knowing nothing could ever erase the stain of the past, trying anyway.
They might never like each other, but they had more common ground than either had expected. And maybe, perhaps, someday, that might grow into something like mutual respect.