Chapter Text
The shop bell rang and Tony looked up with a bright, professional smile. “Good afternoon, welcome to Stark’s Sparks Electronics! I’m Tony; how can I help you?”
The omega paused, barely through the door, and looked around cautiously. She looked at Tony and her nostrils flared a little, testing the air.
He waited, holding the smile in place, while she registered that the only alpha scents in the shop were hours old -- Tony didn’t get many alpha customers. That Tony was an omega, himself, and naked of any jewelry proclaiming him bonded. She had earrings in her ears and a ring on her finger that said she was bonded and married, but they were plain and small, her jacket patched in three places Tony could see.
“I don’t know if you can help,” she hedged, clutching a large bag to her chest.
“Well, let’s have a look,” Tony suggested. “If it’s got a circuit board, chances are I can at least diagnose the problem.”
“It’s just that money’s tight, and--”
“I understand completely,” Tony said. He patted the counter. “Pop it up here and let’s have a look. Diagnostic is free; no hard feelings if you decide to try your luck elsewhere.”
She hesitated again, then hefted the bag up on the counter. When she opened it, Tony found himself face-to-face with a K-10 robot. It was a kid’s toy, a do-it-yourself kit, but for all that, it was one of the more challenging kits available, at least in its price range. Which, given her simple jewelry and threadbare jacket, Tony would have guessed was beyond her. No wonder she didn’t want to have to replace it. “What happened?” He lifted it out of the bag and set it on the counter, reaching for his jeweler’s screwdriver to open up the case.
“My fault,” she said with a sigh, slowly warming. “As many times as I’ve told him to put his toys away -- my kid, you know how they can be, or, well, I guess you don’t--”
“I do,” Tony said smoothly, pulling off the cover and dragging the desk lamp closer so he could peer in at the wiring. “Mine is fifteen; how old is yours?”
Her eyes flickered to Tony’s hand and ears again. He was used to it now, the silent judgment, or sometimes pity, so he was able to pretend he hadn’t seen it and keep working. “He’s twelve,” she said, after a blessedly brief pause. “But this time he actually did put it away. And then I bumped the shelf with the vacuum and it fell, and...” She waved at the K-10.
“It’s not uncommon for these sorts of kits to break after a tumble,” Tony said. He tipped it one way and then the other, looking for-- Aha, a loose wire. “Did your son build it himself?”
“My nephew, actually. And mostly,” she agreed, smiling a little. “He needed some help with the...” She mimed a claw opening and closing, the K-10’s small hands. “They were too small for him.”
“I’m impressed,” Tony said, meaning it. “This is an advanced kit for a twelve-year-old.”
“Oh, we’ve had it for a few years,” she said. “It was the only thing he wanted for his ninth birthday.” She smiled fondly. “Good thing, too. I had to scrimp and save for months.”
I, not we. Which meant her alpha was out of the picture; most likely dead, since she was still wearing the jewelry. Tony was even more impressed; the connections were very neat for an nine-year-old’s work, and omegas, as a rule, were discouraged from pursuing STEM hobbies or schooling; he’d had to fight tooth and nail for his own degree.
“Okay, well, this is pretty fixable,” he told her. “There’s a loose wire in here, and as long as I’ve got it open, this gear for the arm joint--” He pointed with his screwdriver. “--is pretty worn and stripped, and I give it another month, maybe, before it stops working. Other than that, it’s in good shape. So I can fix it for, oh, probably fifteen bucks. Or I can sell you the stuff he’ll need to fix it himself for about ten. You’d have to admit to breaking it,” he said, flashing a quick grin, “but on the other hand, it would give him another project to do.”
The woman laughed, a touch ruefully. “Yeah, okay, I’ll do that.”
“Great. Give me a minute to pull it all together.”
Tony was sorting through the spare gears and trying to find one that would fit when the shop bell rang again.
“Hey, Dad!” Harley called. “Did you get--” He stumbled to a stop, belatedly noticing the customer. “Oops, sorry.”
“It’s all right, we’re almost done,” Tony said. He found the gear and wrapped it up with the other bits and pieces that he thought would come in handy, and rang it up. “If he’s interested in something other than off-the-shelf kits, bring him in and we’ll put together a home-grown kit for a lot less than what this cost.”
She smiled. “I just might do that. It’s hard to keep him challenged.” She offered him her hand. “May Parker. You’ll be seeing me again, definitely. Peter will be thrilled to find another omega to talk shop with. He tried to join the robotics club at his school, but... Well, I’m sure you can imagine.”
Tony grimaced in sympathy. “Yeah. You’re both welcome to drop in any time.”
As May left, Tony lifted an eyebrow at his son. “You have homework?”
“No?” Harley tried. “I mean, yeah, obviously, but I did most of it on the bus.”
Tony hummed and checked the time. “Okay, go in the back and finish the rest of it, and if you’re done by the time I close, we can stop for pizza on the way home.”
“Yes!” Harley pumped his fist.
Tony rolled his eyes and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Homework first.”
“I got this!” Harley grinned at Tony and dodged around the counter, all but tripping over his own feet as he dashed for the back room. Already taller than Tony, with awkward, too-long limbs and a predilection for eating everything in sight -- he was going to be at least as tall as his fath--
He was going to be damned tall. Tony shut down the rest of that thought and turned to check on the laptop he’d left defragmenting.
In the back, he could hear the shuffle of notebook pages and the faint sounds of whatever terrible music Harley was into these days. Tony had stopped paying much attention about six months after Harley had graduated from The Itsy Bitsy Spider. He would listen to whatever Harley insisted he needed to hear, politely ask a few questions about the artist or band, and then go cleanse his ears with real music. Thank god for earbuds.
Tony finished up the defrag and started another diagnostic -- the poor laptop was almost ten years old and was only going to last another six months, tops, but damned if he wasn’t going to stretch it out as long as he absolutely could.
Then he turned to the next project that was waiting, a malfunctioning sewing machine that, as near as he could tell, had faults in both the mechanics and the circuit board that operated the embroidery function. He ran a search for the model until he found a decent exploded diagram, and started taking the thing apart. Mechanical glitches were usually easier to diagnose.
He’d gotten deep into the thing’s guts when the shop bell rang again. “Be right with you!” he called without looking up. “I just need to--”
The scent hit him and he stuttered to a halt, his head whipping around as the rest of his body tensed, coiling to run. Alpha. Strong, unmitigated by the accompaniment of an omega, or even a beta.
Tony didn’t usually have too many problems with alphas in the shop. They were often carelessly insulting, certain that a mere O couldn’t possibly have any idea how to handle complex mechanics or information systems. Once in a while, one would hit on him, and then get offended when Tony didn’t succumb immediately to their charms, but they rarely caused real problems. Anyway, that didn’t happen as often now that he was on the wrong side of his thirties.
There had only been a handful of incidents that had resulted in Tony invoking real security measures, but he couldn’t help but be wary at the appearance of an unaccompanied alpha.
This one was big, too, well over six feet and built like a tank. The only softness about him was the longish hair, curling at the ends and escaping the sloppy bun he’d stuffed it in.
“Are you Tony?” he asked, his voice a deep rumble.
“I’m the owner.” Tony didn’t step up to the counter; the alpha’s arms were plenty long enough to reach over it. “Do you have something that needs to be repaired?” Or are you just here to harass an unbonded omega for daring to have a life, he didn’t finish aloud.
“Yeah, I-- Look, this is--”
“Dad?” Harley appeared in the back room doorway, phone held in one hand, practically bristling. “Everything okay? I was just on the phone with Uncle Rhodey and he says his meeting with the senator looks like it might take a little longer, but he can cut it short if you need him to.”
Not subtle, kid. Tony must be throwing off tension and nervousness in volumes if Harley had scented it from the back room, but he supposed he should be grateful that Harley was making oblique threats instead of actually swaggering out here to try and put himself physically between Tony and the strange alpha.
The alpha gave Harley a quick once-over and his posture softened. “You’re Tony,” he confirmed. “Nat said you had a kid, ‘bout his age.”
Well, that put a different face on things entirely. If Nat had sent this alpha Tony’s way, then he was probably at least halfway decent. Nat was one of the few alphas Tony trusted; she’d been his lawyer when he’d filed for sole custody of Harley and she’d fought for him almost as hard as he’d fought for himself. And then she’d continued to check in on them every so often ever since. She wasn’t likely to send some stone-age cave-alpha Tony’s way.
“Everything’s fine, Harls,” Tony said.
“Okay,” Harley said slowly, still sizing up the alpha. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”
Tony was washed with fondness, but he doubted Harley would appreciate being hugged while trying so hard to look intimidating. Juvenile alphas were hilarious. “I know where to find you,” he agreed. “Go finish your homework.” He watched until Harley had slumped back through the doorway, then turned back to the customer. “Sorry for the interruption. You were saying you had something for me to fix?”
“Yeah, hang on a sec.” He unzipped his jacket, and Tony was already composing a scathing text to Nat about her poor choice in friends when he shrugged one arm out of its sleeve and--
“Oh, wow.” The alpha’s left arm was a gorgeous metal prosthetic, starting all the way at the top of the shoulder.
“Yeah,” the alpha said, and his shoulders hunched as if he was fighting the urge to hide it.
“It’s giving you trouble?” Tony asked. He walked around the side of the counter to get a closer look.
“Yeah, it’s, there’s a gummed-up relay or something,” the alpha said.
Tony reached out, then hesitated, glancing up questioningly. The alpha nodded, and Tony smoothed his fingers over the fine joints until he found the maker’s mark along the edge of one plate. “Hydratech?”
“Yeah.”
“I feel obligated to tell you that if you let anyone other than Hydra’s own tech support open this up, you’re voiding your warranty.” Hydratech made beautiful tech, but they were utterly morally bankrupt. They paid off politicians to slither out of trouble over the toxic pollutants their factories spilled and their nonexistent recycling and disposal program, and had no compunction whatsoever about gouging customers on base price, installations, and upkeep. Only some really amazing marketing -- and, to be fair, extremely high-quality products -- kept them in the game.
“Don’t care,” the alpha said. “I’m not going back.”
There was an air of desperate determination about him that Tony found intriguing. “No?”
“No. They’re... Look, I know companies are in it for the profit, but they could at least pretend to see me as something more than a lab rat. And that doctor they’ve got at the local facility...” The alpha shuddered. “So... Nat says you’re the best. Would you be willing to look at it?”
Tony cocked his head to one side, studying the man, trying not to breathe too deeply that rich alpha scent. “You’re willing to put your arm in an omega’s hands?” he challenged.
The alpha shrugged, which was an interesting ripple, the prosthetic shoulder lifting a little slower than the original. “It was an omega who taught me how to shoot,” he said. “Reckon lotta things would be better if we could get past treatin’ Os like brainless bits of fluff too delicate to ever leave the house. You think you can fix me up, then you’re the one I want doin’ the job.”
Well, he knew how to talk the talk. It remained to be seen whether he’d walk the walk. But in the meantime, he was willing to let Tony do the job, which was a good thing.
Tony dragged over a stool. “Have a seat, then, Robocop, and I’ll have a look.” He dragged over his toolkit and put on his glasses. “You got a name I can use, or should I just keep making robotic pop culture references?”
“Uh, mostly my friends call me Bucky.”
“What, really?”
Bucky’s neck turned red. It was kind of cute. “What I get for enlisting alongside the friend I grew up with. Stuck with a dumb kid’s name, just ‘cause there were six different James’ in our class.”
Tony grinned as he pried open the maintenance access panel. Jesus, Hydra really had not wanted people being able to self-service these things; it was just about as inconvenient as it could possibly get. He pulled up a chair and had Bucky prop the arm on the edge of the counter. “Ug,” he complained, grabbing for a penlight, “I hope Hydra gives their techs good insurance, because I can’t imagine working like this all the time. They’d need to see a chiropractor, like, every other day.”
Bucky huffed out a laugh. “I dunno; most of ‘em strike me as order comes from pain fanatics, you know?”
“Far be it from me to kinkshame,” Tony said, peering into the workings of Bucky’s arm, “but ew. Can you make a fist for me? Hm. Oh, I think I see it, hang on. I’m going to disconnect the feedback array here, so you might feel a little jolt of static.”
“You’re turning it off?” Bucky tensed.
“Just while I work on it,” Tony assured him. “Otherwise you’re going to get all kinds of feedback every time I so much as tighten a screw. I don’t know how that would translate in the neural net, but I can’t imagine it would be pleasant.”
“Like pins and needles,” Bucky said, eyes fixed on the far wall. “But with knitting needles. Really sharp ones.”
Tony glanced up at him, frowning. Did those bastards at Hydra do all their work with the feedback array on? Just to save themselves a little hassle? What dicks. “Well, we certainly can’t have that.”
Disconnecting the feedback array was the work of minutes, and the instant the wire came loose, Bucky’s breath blew out in a sigh, his shoulders sagging in sudden relief. Which meant he’d been in constant pain before, even if he hadn’t realized it. Which meant there was more wrong with the arm than a simple gummed-up relay.
Tony reached for a few more tools. This was going to take a little while. “Okay,” he said, “but now you have to tell me how, exactly, you wound up with a nickname like Bucky. Even as a kid’s nickname, that’s a bit weird.”
Bucky let out a little snort, but started telling the story while Tony worked. Tony kept asking questions, at first mostly to keep Bucky distracted and relaxed, and then because he was genuinely funny and interesting.
So interesting, in fact, that Tony was startled when Harley coughed behind him. “Uh, Dad?”
Tony looked up and was shocked to realize that the sun was setting; the shop should have closed almost an hour ago, and his teenager was probably about ready to start gnawing on the countertop if dinner wasn’t obtained soon. “Oh, shit.”
And he was only half-finished with Bucky’s arm. And it was going to take at least another half-hour just to put it all back together, even if he didn’t finish the job today. “Shit,” he repeated. “Harls, I’m sorry, I lost track--”
“Of time,” Harley finished for him, “I know. You got a ways left to go on that?”
Tony grimaced. “Yeah, it’s going to take a little more time.”
“You need t’get going, I can just stick it in a sling for the night and come back tomorrow,” Bucky offered, glancing between Tony and Harley. “Or whenever you have an opening. I’ve done without it before, I can manage a day or two, if I have to.”
“Or,” Harley said, drawing it out, “you could give me some money and I could go down to Ray’s and grab a couple pizzas and bring ‘em back? It’s not like there’s an alpha at home waiting on us.”
Tony only barely restrained himself from facepalming. But it did offer a way out of the situation without neglecting either his customer or his son’s dinner. “Yeah, okay,” he said. He dug out his wallet and handed over a couple of twenties. “Get at least one vegetable on each of them, so I don’t have to feel like I’ve completely failed as a parent.”
“Tomato sauce is a vegetable,” Harley singsonged, snatching the bills from Tony’s hand and beelining for the door.
“Harley--!” The teen was already gone. Tony waited until the door had closed before huffing out a sigh. “Sorry about that. He’s about as subtle as a brick to the face.” Really, Harley was reaching new heights of unsubtle tonight.
Bucky’s eyes were dancing with amusement. “Yeah, well, he’s a kid. He’ll figure it out eventually.” He glanced down at the arm curiously. “How much longer, do you think? I might have to order a pizza of my own.”
“Oh, no, you can have some of ours,” Tony assured him. “At least a couple of slices to hold you until we’re done. It shouldn’t take more than another hour, maybe an hour and a half.”
“You weren’t kidding when you said it needed a complete overhaul, huh?”
“I really wasn’t,” Tony sighed. “I mean, honestly, given my choice, I’d take it completely apart and rebuild it from scratch, but that would take a couple of weeks, and I wouldn’t want you to have to go without for so long.”
“‘Preciate it,” Bucky said. “Maybe I should get your opinion on my next model.”
“If you can scrape together the payment,” Tony said, reaching back into the arm with a pair of tweezers, “Wakanda Tech. They charge like their products are made out of gold and diamonds, but I’ve never heard a single complaint about them failing to live up to spec, and their maintenance and warranty package is really excellent, and for something like this, included in the up-front costs.”
“I’ll look into it,” Bucky promised.
By the time Harley came back with the pizzas (or at least, what remained of the pizzas after his initial assault), Tony was down to the last few steps of the repair and they were deep into a discussion about Star Wars.
Harley joined in on that while they ate, and it was surprisingly comfortable.
Usually, if Tony was working late, Harley would play video games on the shop’s display computers once his homework was done, but when they’d finished the pizza, he muttered something about reading ahead on his English assignment, and disappeared back into the back room.
“Brick to the face,” Tony reiterated, torn between feeling embarrassed that Harley was trying to set him up, and touched that his son was trying to give him space to have some kind of life outside of work and parenting.
Bucky chuckled agreement. “He’s a good kid, though. He’ll do you proud.”
“He already does,” Tony said, knowing he sounded sappy but not really caring. Raising Harley on his own had been harder than he wanted to think about, but absolutely worth it.
An hour later, Tony had finished restoring Bucky’s arm. He reconnected the neural feedback array and basked in the warm praise as Bucky moved his arm and fingers all around, exclaiming over the return of functions he’d lost so gradually he hadn’t even noticed them degrading.
He rang Bucky up and walked the alpha to the door so he could lock up. He might have lingered to watch as Bucky walked down the block and turned the corner, but then he turned to the closing cleanup and shutdown.
When he picked up the pizza boxes, a white card that had apparently been under them fluttered to the floor. It proved to be one of Tony’s own business cards, the ones he kept on the counter for customers to take and, hopefully, pass out to their friends in need. On the back, in a neat, slanted hand, it read: Didn’t want to put you on the spot, but I’d love to take you out for a drink. Text if you’re interested. -B.
Tony stared at the note, running his thumb lightly over the phone number printed at the bottom. He’d sworn never to get involved with another alpha. But maybe... Just maybe, this one was actually different.
He tucked the card in his shirt pocket and went back to cleaning.