Bucky watched with wide eyes as Tony pulled the arc reactor out of his chest. He knew - he wasn’t sure how, but he knew - that that was what kept the man alive. But here he was holding it in his hand, a gaping hole in his chest. And Bucky understood. This was a peace offering. A show of trust.
In a similar show of good faith, he gestured to his now useless arm. “It’s not that simple with this, either,” he said gruffly. He raised the limb as far as he could under its own power, then used his other arm to shift it so that the connections underneath showed. It was less obvious elsewhere, but here one could see just how deeply integrated the shoulder attachment was. It was less an attachment and more a replacement. “They took a lot to make this work. And they integrated what was left of the nerves. So I can’t just… take it off. But it’s throwing off feedback. It was designed to fail. I recognize that much. But I can’t… I don’t know how to fix it so that it’ll stop.”
He was sure that Stark was going to want to know precisely how much of his shoulder they had taken; what was real bone and what was metal, where had sinew been replaced with hydraulics. But Bucky wasn’t even entirely sure. He’d never seen an x-ray of it. He only knew the parts he could see. The ones he could pull apart and work with.
“Yeah, no. I get that. This thing? They took a chunk of my lungs and pulled out parts of my sternum and ribs. It basically takes my whole diaphragm to hold this thing together. People don’t realize that.“ He shrugged like it was nothing, like he didn’t deal with chronic pain every moment. Because that wasn’t something he shared, at least not willingly. He could deal with it, so it never needed to come up.
“We can fix it, I can promise you that. Myself, or myself and Bruce, plus you, or however you want to work it. We can fix it, and make sure it stays that way. I promise I won’t propose anything ridiculous. I mean, maybe a retractable knife, yeah? OR not, however you want it. You’d be leading the whole thing, nothing done without your consent. This is your arm, and we’re not going to take that from you.” He glanced down to hide hands, looking a bit in shock at the torn apart tablet in his hands.
“We’d need to see what’s all going on in there, so that would mean tests. And for now, I’m sure we could stop it from throwing feedback. That’s priority number one.”
Bucky stiffened at the mention of tests, but he reminded himself that Tony meant him no harm. He could talk to Steve. He could have Steve with him if he wanted to, he was sure. He hadn’t asked, but he was sure Tony wouldn’t refuse.
“Fine,” he said tensely. “You’ll probably need Bruce if you aren’t good at working with biological components. But,” he said with heavy emphasis, his eyes narrowing challengingly, “I want Steve here. If you’ve got my arm torn apart I need to know… I need someone watching my back. I’ll talk to him, but I want him here.”
Tony set aside the ripped up tablet and wiggled his fingers, needing something fresh to mess around with. he was not focusing on Barnes, trying to not to make the guy uncomfortable.
“Of course, however you want to run it, that’s all your call.” He shrugged, settling for swinging his legs on the stool. “Yeah, I mean, I could learn all of that stuff fairly quickly, but Bruce has like ... degrees and crap for that. All my degrees are some form of engineering or technical science. Not the whole .. body innards kind of stuff.” He wiggled his fingers at Barnes. “Want me to stop that feedback, then? And then we can work the rest out, yeah?”
