Chapter Text
You hit the tower’s private elevator with your hip, the neural cortex module case slipping in your right hand, its matte black corners still warm from the last heated lecture. The biometric panel glowed, cool blue against your thumbprint, and a soft chime echoed before the doors whispered shut behind you. Above the hum of motion, you could still hear echoes of that last student’s question in your head, “But how do you make the hippocampus forget without wiping the limbic tether?” and for a split second, you almost respected him. Almost.
You rolled your neck back against the mirrored panel, tension cracking beneath skin that hadn't seen sunlight since last weekend’s brief, regrettable rooftop coffee. The afternoon light was already draining from the sky, casting the skyline in that burnished steel hue you always associated with early Manhattan fall, gold-leaf buildings against blue-grey cold, like the city was trying to put on its best Stark tech finish before winter corroded everything. Your floor pinged. The doors opened not into sterile corporate glass, not into the tech-forward labs below or the Avenger floors above, but into the chaos-masked sanctuary of your personal living space. Home. High ceilings, slatted walnut walls, shelves bowed with books and backlit schematics, a Persian rug you definitely spilled lab-grade nanogel on last month, and a long, arched window that framed the city like an AI-generated masterpiece.
JARVIS’s voice greeted you before your boot hit the hardwood.
“Welcome back, Miss Stark. Your father is currently still offsite. He’s texted eleven memes and an image of what appears to be a caffeinated chicken. I’ve archived them under ‘Unfiled Parental Chaos.’ Shall I read them aloud?”
Your face pulled into a lazy smirk before you even dropped the case on the entryway console.
"No, but label the chicken one evidence."
You kicked off your boots, one after the other, the soles thudding softly against the entry wall. The quiet that followed was the kind you had grown to crave, a blanket of curated silence, broken only by the occasional hum of your high-resolution wall display flickering into standby mode, and the distant sound of city life below: faint sirens, a car backfire, the whoosh of air slicing between skyscrapers. The scent of espresso still lingered from this morning, faint, bitter, warm and the edge of your notes from the lab were still visible on the counter, half-coded strings of neural remap equations and memory decoupling algorithms. The tower’s AI, linked to your personal profile, dimmed the lighting to your preferred late-afternoon warmth: 3400 Kelvin, just shy of candlelight, casting deep shadows across the shelves and reflecting amber off the holographic architectural model suspended midair near your desk. You paused. The pressure in your shoulders, the grinding hum in the base of your skull, none of it dissipated, even in your own space. Typical. That class hadn’t just been long, it had been interrogative, draining. Even when they didn’t know what you were doing, what you were really building, they still found ways to push. JARVIS murmured again, this time quieter, almost conspiratorial.
“Would you like me to activate the focus filtration, Miss? Or shall I play your father’s latest voicemail, which contains—according to my scan—three swears, a threat of interdimensional consequences, and a request for Vietnamese takeout?”
You exhaled softly through your nose, reaching for the neural case again as you moved toward the couch. One arm tucked beneath the device like it weighed nothing, the other lifting to rake fingers through your hair, pushing it off your face as your eyes scanned the apartment’s far corner: a personal lab alcove, carefully sectioned off with curved glass and illuminated in sterile white. That’s where your actual work lived. Not the university-approved research. Not the palatable public-facing Stark Industries projects. Not the cognitive-behavioral write-ups that Tony thought you were wasting your “genius-level gray matter” on.
No—that was where the real work lived.
Where you reprogrammed pain into pattern.
Where you reconstructed memory like lace.
Where you buried ghosts with firmware and resurrected identities through mapped trauma redirection. The tech on your table had already booted up. Red-orange lights flickered like living embers, alive with possibility. Or consequence. You leaned your head back against the arm of the couch, eyes half-lidded toward the ceiling, muscles unwilling to move just yet. And in the distance, somewhere above, beyond, or through you a cold wind whispered down the tower’s verticals. You didn’t know it yet. But that sound…That sound was the future shifting its weight. And it was about to look back. You groaned and shifted.
"Fine, play the voicemails."
JARVIS didn’t even pause.
“As you wish, Miss Stark. Playing the most recent first—timestamp: 3:17 PM.”
Your father’s voice erupted through the overhead speakers like a shot of espresso laced with jet fuel and poor impulse control.
“Y/N. Tell me why—and I mean this seriously—tell me why MIT won’t let me come guest lecture anymore? Was it the laser pointer? The Starkcoin NFT demonstration? I think it was the Starkcoin. Honestly, I thought the market simulation was brilliant. Anyway, I need you to bring back two things on your way home tomorrow: one, shrimp pho. Extra cilantro, please. Two, my dignity. It’s somewhere in Building 32.”
“Oh, also—don’t tell Pepper I tried to replace the toaster with an arc reactor prototype. It works fine. Mostly. Everything’s fine.”
You let your head thump back against the couch again, a dry groan echoing off the ceiling.
“God, he’s like a raccoon with a doctorate.”
“Next message,” JARVIS intoned, utterly unbothered.
“Okay update—I may have overloaded the induction coils. Not my fault. Too many bagels in the wrong slot. It’s basically a bagel collider now. Oh, and there’s a glowing pigeon on the terrace. Not sure if that’s related. Just flagging it.”
“Also, how’s the mind-bending cortex decoupler going? Or is it the memory firewall loopback thing? Honestly, you’re worse than me. I asked you what your PhD was about and you told me it was ‘a glorified Excel sheet about DNA.’ I’m your father. I invented lying. Don’t lie to me with spreadsheets, sweetie.”
You barked a laugh despite yourself.
“Last message, timestamp: 12:42 PM,” JARVIS added.
“Y/N… I miss you, kid.”
The tone was quieter. Less caffeine. Less carnival.
“I know I’m a jackass sometimes. Most of the time. But you—you’re the best thing I’ve ever accidentally created. And that’s saying something. I made a robot once that made smoothies and reported tax fraud. It still wasn’t you.”
“Whatever you’re building up there? I know it’s bigger than you’re letting on. I know that look. Hell, I designed that look. Just… don’t go too far into the dark, alright? Come home tonight. I’ll order Vietnamese. No arc reactors. I promise.”
The line went quiet. Then a click. Silence settled again. Not sterile. Not hollow. Just... soft.
Like a perimeter. Like the kind of quiet someone else had carved out just for you to fall into. And through the floor-to-ceiling window, the light had shifted again, gold running to rust as the sun sank behind the Chrysler Building. Below, the city pulsed on, unaware. But somewhere in the layers of coded thought still buzzing behind your temples, the words don’t go too far into the dark threaded in like a cautionary subroutine. Too late. You were already there. And someone else was about to follow. You sat up and rubbed your eyes with the heels of your hands, your eyes seeing stars from the pressure.
"Hey, Jarvis? Will my dad be home at all this evening or is he like…out?"
“Negative, Miss Stark,” JARVIS replied, his voice tempered with that smooth, British neutrality that somehow always made you feel slightly like an inconvenience at boarding school.
“Mr. Stark is currently en route to the Palisades compound. He left approximately twenty-three minutes ago, muttering something about ‘needing a breather from the intellectually gifted household saboteur.’”
You exhaled through your nose, the kind of tired breath that hit at the back of your eyes and wrapped itself around your sinuses. Of course he left. Probably after the pigeon incident. Or maybe the tax-fraud smoothie blender finally came online again. You didn’t ask anymore. The stars from your eye pressure hadn’t quite faded yet, sharp pricks of light cutting at the corners of your vision like little retinal fireworks, and the low throb behind your temples had grown teeth. Still, you pushed up from the couch, muscles dragging like thick rope through molasses, and padded across the hardwood barefoot toward the glass-walled alcove lab in the corner.
“Would you like me to notify him that you’ve asked for his location?” JARVIS offered delicately.
“No,” you muttered, pushing the lab door open with your elbow, letting the motion-activated lighting blink on in a sterile cascade. Let him think I don’t need him. Inside, everything was exactly as you’d left it: wires coiled with a surgeon’s precision, data streams paused mid-analysis on the vertical interface screen, and the thin, skeletal prototype of your cortical loopback module suspended in midair over the magnetic field base, its red-orange glow slowly pulsing like a sleeping heart. The cooling fans beneath the table hummed gently, just audible beneath the hum of the city leaking through the window glass. You walked to the edge of the table and leaned your hip against it, staring down at the device. Beneath the alloy scaffolding and polymer-tethered substructures, your algorithm was still processing—one long, coiling strand of neural re-sequencing designed not just to trace trauma… but to untangle it. To reintroduce selfhood where programming had rewritten memory. To let the mind remember without being devoured by the remembering. To rebuild the kind of broken no one thought could be rebuilt. Bucky Barnes had flashed across your screen only once. A footnote in a locked S.H.I.E.L.D. data archive your father hadn’t even noticed you bypass. But that face. That name. That file. You hadn’t looked away since. Not really.
Not from the words: Asset Retraining Protocol – Terminated.
Not from the looped footage of a man holding a paperclip like it was a bomb. Not from the embedded file labeled “Winter: Failed Reentry – Sokovia Compound” that kept timing out before you could decrypt the audio. You weren’t sure when it had become personal. But something in you, the part made of iron and instinct and ache, had felt it. Like a magnetic pull toward the wound no one had bothered to treat, only chain. And the device in front of you? It wasn’t just tech. It was a lifeline. You just didn’t know who you’d be throwing it to yet. Or whether they'd catch it. Behind you, the soft chime of the elevator echoed faintly. Not your father. Not a stranger. Something else entirely. Weight in the building. Motion in the perimeter. JARVIS didn’t speak. And outside the window, the city lights blinked on like stars trying to remember who they used to be.
"Steve...I'm not in the mood for your patriotic lectures tonight."
You dead panned asI heard his footsteps approaching. You clicked off Bucky's file quickly and opened a new one on generic brain waves.His boots paused just shy of the lab entrance, the soft creak of leather shifting under muscle too careful to be casual. You didn’t have to turn to know it was him—no one else walked like that. That measured cadence of duty stitched into every step, like the floor owed him something. And still, he didn’t speak. You watched your screen flicker as the brainwave dummy file rendered, completely bland, no metadata, no significance. Just harmless academic fluff. A decoy. Your hand stayed on the table’s edge, fingers spread, grounding yourself in the quiet tension. Then:
“I’m not here to fight you.”
Steve’s voice came low, edged in something almost… hesitant. The kind of tone reserved for war zones and wounded friends. You didn’t answer. He took a step closer, enough that you could feel his shadow catch the edge of the light, long and slanted across the smooth floor. He didn’t try to cross the lab’s threshold. Just stood there, arms crossed, shield absent for once. Uniform jacket unzipped, like he hadn’t meant to end up here, but had no choice but to keep going once he did.
“I didn’t come for a lecture. I came because…” He trailed off, exhaling through his nose. “…because you’ve been reading his file. Again.”
That made your jaw tick, but your expression didn’t change. He took another step in, boots finally crossing the glass divider like the line didn’t matter.
“I’m not asking what you saw,” he added. “Not unless you want to tell me.”
The words weren’t a trap. There was no threat in them. But there was weight. The kind of weight that came from someone who’d already buried too many things he loved. From someone who had once looked into Bucky Barnes’ blank eyes and begged the ghost of his friend to come home and hadn’t known, for a long time, if he ever really had. His hand flexed at his side.
“I know what he looks like on paper,” Steve said. “But you don’t. Not really.”
You stayed facing the monitor. Because it was easier than looking at him. Easier than whatever truth you weren’t ready to say out loud. The truth that maybe you saw something in those broken files that mirrored something in you. He let the silence hang for a beat too long. Then softer:
“He’s not a case study.”
Behind your ribs, something cinched tight.
“I didn’t say he was,” you murmured. Steve didn’t push. Just watched you. His eyes, if you had turned, would’ve been the color of regret, washed-out cornflower, lined in tired. You didn’t need to see them to know. Another pause. Then,
“I should go,” he said. “I just… wanted you to know he doesn’t need saving.”
The implication hovered. Not from you. Not again. He turned to leave. But you could feel it, deep in the pit of your gut, in the marrow of your molars, in the quiet click of your prototype still running in low-power mode behind you. Maybe he didn’t need saving. But that didn’t mean he didn’t deserve it.
"When I started this...it wasn't about saving anyone, Steve. I just–I saw how you looked at him when he came home and you said how haunted he was and therapy wasn't working and–".
You cut yourself off abrubtly and plopped onto a stool and gestured at the project.
"I don't know what the fuck I'm doing." You admitted. "Rats don't exactly have Hydra level trauma."
Steve stopped mid-step. Didn’t turn. Didn’t move. Just stood there, broad back silhouetted in the lab’s clean light, shoulders sharp with tension like maybe your words had landed somewhere he wasn’t armored. And then, quietly, he came back. Two slow steps, measured. Then a third that broke the seal between distance and meaning. He moved beside you, not looming, not crowding, just there. Like gravity had rerouted itself. You didn’t look at him. Not fully. Just kept your eyes trained on the soft pulse of your prototype’s low-light housing, the faint heartbeat of code you hadn’t cracked yet, as if staring hard enough might make it make sense. Might make you make sense. Steve’s voice was low when it came, softer than you expected. No lecture. No war-story. Just… real.
“I’ve seen trauma eat people alive,” he said. “I’ve watched men carry ghosts in their teeth and call it survival.”
He rested his forearms on the counter, gaze tracking the lines of the cortical model.
“But Bucky… he didn’t just survive it. He became it. HYDRA didn’t break him. They built him wrong on purpose.”
You swallowed. He didn’t move his eyes from the tech.
“But he’s still in there. Somewhere. I see it, sometimes. A twitch in his jaw. A joke he thinks better of. The way he flinches when kids laugh too loud, like he doesn’t trust the sound.”
You said nothing. Steve glanced at you sideways.
“You’re not wrong for wanting to help.”
That landed harder than it should have. Maybe because he meant it. But then he nodded at the open interface window, your rats. The rough neural maps. The comparative trauma models. All of it raw and undercooked.
“But this?” he said, tapping the edge of the display with a finger. “You can’t brute-force empathy. You can’t code a way out of hell.”
“I know,” you said hoarsely.
He nodded again. “But maybe you can build a map.”
You looked up. Finally, really looked at him. And Steve Rogers looked tired, but honest. Open. Like maybe he had seen too much, lost too much, but was still willing to bet on someone trying. His voice dropped lower.
“If you’re gonna walk someone out of the dark, you have to be willing to stay in it with them.”
The prototype flickered again. A low hum. A patient spark. Not asking for redemption. Just… readiness.
“I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing either,” he added, a smile tugging faintly at his mouth. “I just keep showing up.”
And in the reflection off the monitor glass, for the briefest second, you caught a glimpse of yourself, shoulders square beside a soldier, eyes rimmed in stars.
"Would he do it? Actually come here and even talk to me?"
Steve didn’t answer right away. Didn’t rush it. Didn’t soften it, either. He stayed leaned on the counter, eyes flicking down to the faint pulse of your prototype again like he was weighing circuitry against history, science against blood. Then he shifted, slow, folding his arms again as he turned to face you fully. His gaze leveled with yours, clear and steady.
“He’s not good at people anymore,” Steve said, quiet but firm. “Doesn’t trust easily. Doesn’t always know how to hold a conversation that doesn’t end in an escape route.”
You nodded once, trying not to show how much it sunk in. Steve saw it anyway.
“But he listens.” That part came sharper, more certain. “More than you think. And more than he lets on.”
His eyes narrowed just a little, not in challenge, just focus.
“I’ve seen him scan a room in four seconds flat but spend twenty minutes standing in front of a photograph like it owed him answers.” He paused. “And I’ve seen him pick up pieces of himself no one even noticed were missing. One at a time. Without a manual.”
Then, softer:
“If he thought you saw something in him… something worth rebuilding—he’d come.”
You blinked, breath catching somewhere between doubt and gravity. Steve’s voice lowered like he didn’t want to say the next part too loud, in case it changed something.
“But if you’re asking if he’d walk into Stark Tower again?” A long beat. “I don’t know.”
You looked down at your hands. At the same fingers that wrote code that could thread memory through burnt neurons, the same hands that had once burned out a motherboard trying to map grief in a living rat. The same hands that had shaken the first time you saw his file. Steve watched you think. Then he pushed off the counter and stepped back toward the glass threshold of the lab.
“But I do know this,” he said as he paused in the doorway, silhouetted by the last light bleeding in through the windows. “He doesn’t need a therapist, or a handler, or a fix.”
A small smile, laced with something older than war.
“He needs someone who doesn’t flinch.”
The door hissed as it opened. And just before he walked out, Steve added over his shoulder, calm, quiet, unshakably sure:
“He’ll come. But not for the tech.” A beat. “For you.”
And then he was gone. Leaving you alone with a heartbeat in code and the sound of the city daring you to make the next move. You let out a long breath and grabbed a tablet and began plunking away at code, stopped, and lost the motivation. You tossed it onto the counter with a thump and groaned.
"What the fuck am I doing?" You muttered, lost in a brain that was too smart for your own good. You stood and stomped out of the lab, calling to Jarvis to lock it.
“Lab secured,” JARVIS intoned smoothly as the glass doors sealed behind you with a muted hiss, magnetic locks clicking into place like the end of a sentence you didn’t want to finish. The hallway beyond was dim and quiet—too quiet. That curated quiet Tony always insisted on for the upper floors, the kind that made your thoughts echo loud enough to feel dangerous. Your bare feet slapped lightly against the cool flooring, the artificial air just a few degrees colder than you’d like, enough to make your skin prickle in the silence.
What the fuck am I doing?
The question looped. Not just about Bucky. Not just about the code you’d written and rewritten and rewritten again. But about all of it. The degree you were close to finishing but hadn’t defended. The father you’d grown up shadowboxing, brilliant and exhausting. The legacy everyone assumed you’d already accepted. The tower you lived in but hadn’t felt like home since—You reached the living room and dropped heavily onto the couch, dragging a throw blanket over your shoulders without ceremony. It still smelled faintly like ozone and caramelized coffee, remnants of late nights and burned expectations. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city sprawled out below you in pulses of neon and motion alive, hungry, chaotic. You used to find comfort in that hum. Now it just made you feel... still. Like the world kept spinning and you were stuck in some kind of cognitive purgatory, half genius, half ghost. A notification blinked faintly in your periphery, JARVIS, waiting for instructions. You didn’t respond. Not to him. Not to the ache in your chest. Not to the file you’d locked behind three layers of biometric encryption labeled simply:
WINTER.
You let your head fall back against the couch, throat tight, eyes dry. No tears. Just the heavy kind of tired that didn’t want sleep. You weren’t sure when it had become personal. When research had turned into reach. But it had. And now it sat in your chest like a loaded gun. Somewhere, Bucky Barnes was breathing. And you couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Not saving him.
Not fixing him.
Finding him.
Somewhere inside the wreckage of himself. But right now? Right now you were just a girl on a couch. Wrapped in a blanket that smelled like failure. Staring at the city like it might hand you answers. And knowing it never would.