Eight Weeks Later (Jan 2025)
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He walked into the apartment.
His apartment.
The paperwork signed and notarized and official.
Her apartment.
In his mind, it would always be hers no matter what changes major or minor he had made. Not that there had been many.
Granted, he had officially moved in just before Christmas, the lease renewal on his tiny place coming up at the first of the year, and given he'd barely spent any time there since the funeral he'd just thrown in the towel and moved his stuff into her place. He'd been unable to bring himself to move into the master bedroom and simply taken over the nearly as large guest room.
He'd kept hers clean and tidy, not able to even think about going through her things with the intention of getting rid of them. Her family had offered to do so and make the hard decisions of keep, donate, sell, or toss, but he hadn't been ready for that step. They hadn't really been ready either based on the poorly disguised sighs of relief that each of them had issued at his polite refusal.
The few items in her will that had been left to others had been collected and distributed within a couple of weeks of her funeral. He'd been there simply because he had been the only one she'd trusted with her security codes. Not to imply that she hadn't trusted her family, but they had their own lives and when they visited usually stayed at the fancy Manhattan apartment that her father lived in.
Her family might not be one-percenter rich, but they weren't middle-class either.
Her home might be his now, but he had still considered himself a visitor and acted as such.
Only as of just a couple hours ago the keys and codes had been placed into his hands. The place and all the responsibility now falling upon his shoulders.
Not that there was much to do, the modified Roombas kept the floors swept in both the living and office areas. Most of the systems were automated for the greenhouse, he just needed to pick the ripe fruits and vegetables and monitor the status of the beehive. He knew she made trades for the honey those bees created, but had no idea with whom. He only hoped he would be able to find the info on the computer now that he legally could look.
So far he'd had no issues even when gone for lengthy periods for work.
The servers and systems had been another issue entirely. Iris had been modified at some point so that she monitored them along with everything else she handled and had occasionally alerted Bucky to items that needed to be handled directly. Iris didn't yet have hands, so when the cooling system had issues she'd needed Bucky to fix it, which he had.
In truth he had no real idea what Nienna had done with the system, he only knew it from his end. He would ask questions or request information and Iris would do her level best to provide it. Even if that meant gaining access to cameras or systems she had no previous association with.
Was it legal?
Probably not.
Was it needed in the moment?
Usually.
And the computer being able to do that, to delve into any nook or cranny in any computer system anywhere in the world, had quite literally saved lives.
Sam and Bucky might not need IR satellite intel very often, but when they did Iris somehow found it for them.
Even Bucky found it astonishing at times. He was good, better than most, and could do things with computers that would scare some usually not scareable people. The US government only thought they had a complete record of what the Winter Soldier had done during his tenure, in truth they only had the Cliff Notes version. Hydra had excelled at hiding in plain sight. So even though Zemo had discovered the Siberian base where Bucky had ended his career as the Fist of Hydra, neither he nor anyone else had found the other locations where he'd been stationed.
Bucky had been to three of them so far. Some burnt-out shells, with little to nothing left behind for others to discover; Hydra had clearly done their best to cover their tracks as they vacated the premises.
Others had remained undisturbed since there had last been anyone stationed in the building. One a leftover from their efforts in the eighties and obviously one they had not planned on abandoning for long. Computers that had been state of the art at the time stood with dark screens and covered in thick layers of dust. The files sitting atop desks crumbling at a touch the air had remained so dry.
Still, there had been data worth retrieving and he'd done so. Converting gigabytes of data stored on old-school floppy disks to zip drives which he kept for himself before making a few calls to inform the relevant authorities that another Hydra base had been discovered.
Some he burned to the ground not about to let the knowledge he'd discovered be released into the wild.
Some knowledge did not belong in the hands of anyone in power. Especially a government.
Bucky had dozens of flash drives stored away where only he could access them. The information was far too dangerous to share even with Iris. She was already powerful enough without giving her access to some of the toys Hydra had created if only theoretically.
For some the tech simply hadn't been there, but now...
More than one could wipe the planet clean and make Insight look like a child's toy.
Should he have the knowledge?
Probably not, but better that he had found it than someone else. He was not likely to use any of it, other than as a potential bargaining chip in the future. Hell, some of it he wouldn't even entrust to the Wakandan scientists. They might try to improve upon them by adding vibranium into the mix and that would end up being a whole other level of bad.
No, as of right now Bucky would go to the grave with those secrets.
Plus, if one of them did get out he would have the information necessary to counter it. He had to give Hydra credit, they covered every aspect of a problem when they made something overly destructive, including cures and counters to protect their own asses. Always planning to come out on top of any situation.
And that is why Bucky had kept copies of everything he discovered. There was no guarantee that any single Hydra base was the only one with that information.
The world may have become seemingly smaller since Hydra had originally been defeated, but even they had a habit of redundancy. More bases had probably been forgotten than discovered and Bucky planned to keep searching until every single one had been identified and every last member had been rooted out and dealt with in the most efficient way possible.
He dropped his keys in the dish on the small table next to the door that had been placed there for that very reason. He'd parked his bike next to her car that sat collecting dust in the garage. He kicked off his shoes and armed the security system for the night. He had no plans to head out the rest of the day.
He hung his coat next to the door, the winter chill noticeable today with snow expected to arrive by morning. Not that it mattered as he had no place to be, a stocked larder, and hundreds of movies to watch if he chose to do so.
In truth he'd probably spend the evening reading given the collection of books she had left to him exceeded the number of movies three to one.
he sighed softly, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and took the shortcut through the dining area into the office. His office he supposed, though he would not be taking over Nyte Visions. Iris handled some of the maintenance for the systems Ni still had contracts with, but that was mostly in the background. She had made certain all the training programs had been completed months ahead of schedule ensuring that her clients, with a modicum of work, would be able to take care of everything themselves.
Bucky on more than one occasion had the insane thought that she knew she was going to be killed. If not that particular night then soon. He had no idea if the attacks real or virtual had increased during those weeks they'd separated and hadn't asked her family. He had no idea how much she had shared with them. Based on comments from her father, he knew something had been going on, the police knew, of course, but it seemed that only Bucky was aware of all the details, but even his knowledge remained incomplete.
He only knew what Iris had shared about virtual attacks on the security system and the servers, all of which the damn near AI program had fended off with seeming ease.
He'd made a few upgrades to the security, but beyond that, there wasn't much he could do. Iris was going to have to teach him how to care for the servers and keep them running up to spec. His skills lay far more in destruction than creation.
He sat down at the secondary station, the one Ni had set up for him so that he could have some semblance of privacy when working on his personal projects. Though once Iris had gone live he could literally do that from anywhere, though the main system would always be the most secure.
The screen was already on, the words 'Say, "Happy birthday"' dead center of the monitor.
"Happy birthday?" he questioned, confused as to why exactly Iris was prompting him to use this specific phrase.
The words vanished and he just sat there staring at the darkened screen for long seconds before the system kicked on like normal, his default background image, a cheesy selfie of the two of them from that first afternoon at Music in the Park. It hurt to see her smiling up at the camera, but as of right now, it could only hurt more to remove it. So he let it stay, his heart-wrenching a bit more each time he gazed upon the two of them - together and happy.
"Hey, Bucky."
He went terrifyingly still at those words.
Not because of the words themselves, but the voice.
Not Iris.
Her voice.
He closed his eyes and swallowed hard, wondering for a long, long moment if he had actually gone insane.
"Bucky?"
He forced his eyes open and turned to see...
She stood there, a few feet away. Shoulder-length dark hair, hazel eyes, jeans, and a buttoned shirt, just like she'd wear when meeting him at the Daily Grind.
Alive.
Then she... flickered.
He glanced up and quickly pinpointed the projectors that were being used to create this image of her.
And with that, the pieces fell into place.
Not alive.
Not in the usual sense anyway.
"It worked," he stated, voice rough with the dozens of tangled emotions that thrashed about inside him fighting both for dominance and to find egress.
She gave him a smile that caused his heart to squeeze tight in his chest. "I told you it would."
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"If there ever comes a day we can't be together, keep me in your heart, I'll stay there forever." - Winnie the Pooh.