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"Sir, there is a SHIELD agent requesting entrance at the gate. He wishes to speak with you about a matter of some importance."
Tony heard his AI's announcement, but didn't take his focus away from the sigil in front of him until the paper had burned to ashes. It hardly mattered who was at the gate, anyway, because Tony had no intention of letting anyone in.
Still, it was always good to keep an eye on SHIELD, especially considering his past dealings with them. Actually, JARVIS had heard Tony's feelings about the organization in depth and at length, so it was strange that he had even bothered to mention it.
For a moment, his heart lurched painfully in his chest. What if they had come for him? What if they hadn’t rooted out all of HYDRA? What if—
“It’s Agent Coulson, Sir.”
If anything, Tony’s heart clenched tighter and his breathing stuttered in the silence. He knew he was overreacting, that JARVIS would protect him, but he couldn’t breathe. There were too many unanswered questions. Lackey SHIELD agents were easy to ignore, but this was Phil. Why send Phil unless the Avengers had finally found out who he was? What if they had found out what his father had done? What if—
“He is asking for Tony Stark, Sir,” JARVIS cut into his panic. “There is no indication that he has made the connection between this and your former identity. Do you wish to let him in?”
God, yes. Please, no. Tony’s hands shook, but he knew what he had to do. “Send him away, J.”
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Tony Stark learned early on that his father only had two rules: be silent, and be useful. The first was not so hard, because Tony didn’t like most of his father’s friends, who came and went at all hours and who were constantly convincing his father to cast more and more dangerous spells. They were loud, and mean, and even Obadiah, who smiled at him, sometimes looked at Tony like he wanted to cut him open and dig the juicy parts out. So Tony kept to his bedroom, or the kitchen, or the library, and rarely talked to anyone outside of the staff or his mother.
The second rule was much more difficult, because what Howard Stark considered useful could change in the blink of an eye. As a child, before anyone could know whether or not Tony would be a witch, Howard hardly seemed to know he had a son. Tony tried, at first, in the way that all children want to be loved by their parents, and regretted it more than not. By the time he was eight, he hardly ever saw his father.
(It was better that way, though it hardly seemed so at the time.)
Just before Tony turned thirteen, he and his mother ran away from Howard and the empire he was trying to build. He changed his name to Anthony Edwards, and Maria sealed any magic he might have had before it ever manifested. At eighteen, when his mother died, he found SHIELD.
At twenty-three, he found the Avengers.
At twenty-eight, after months of captivity, he died in a cave not far from where he had been born.
And in the stillness of the aftermath, when Tony had left the smoldering bodies of the other Starks behind, and somehow found his way home, he realized that there was no returning to what had been. There were too many pieces missing now, filled imprecisely with magic and a void where his humanity used to live.
He couldn’t possibly go back to his team, to his family. There was too much power in his veins now. Too much pain. Too much loss.
He walked away, and didn’t let himself look back.
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“I’m telling you, I know that it’s him!”
Steve's face scrunched up in that way that said he was getting ready to argue, but Bucky pushed on. “I don't know what happened to him in between the years when you last saw him and I met him, but I recognize the guy that saved my life, okay?" The whole HYDRA experience was etched indelibly in his brain; he wasn't about to forget the guy who had (albeit reluctantly) taken him in when Bucky could barely remember how to tie his own shoes.
The other Avengers weren't looking any happier than Steve, but Coulson was as unflappable as ever. He did, however, soften a bit as he looked at Bucky.
"I can neither confirm nor deny that Anthony Edwards and Tony Stark are one in the same, as I was not allowed on the premises. But," he raised a hand when it looked like Bucky was going to interrupt, "the Starks are a well-known witch family and Anthony never displayed any proclivity toward magic while he was an Avenger."
"He never talked about his past much, is it possible he had a brother?"
Bucky appreciated that Bruce was trying to keep an open mind, but all this talk about the man that had saved him five years ago being dead made his claws itch to come out. Tony had been...damaged by whatever had happened to him, even Bucky had seen that. The man had been reserved, and temperamental, and stubborn, but he was most definitely alive . And if Bucky had to storm Tony's mini-fortress and drag the genius out, he would.
"Bucky, Tony was human. He was a brilliant, brilliant engineer, and a great man, but he was human." And that's what got him killed , Steve didn't say, but Bucky heard him anyway.
ΩΩΩ
"The base has been destroyed, Sir, and all magical artifacts accounted for. Might I suggest having dinner before the bots are forced to find your famished body unresponsive on the floor?"
Tony fought not to frown or roll his eyes. JARVIS would see it, somehow, and use it against him later. "That was one time, and it was a very complicated spell, you know."
"And yet, we would all be quite lost without you, Sir."
I don't know what I would have done without you, Doll.
Bucky's voice popped into his mind, unbidden, as Tony cleaned up the remnants of his latest attack on HYDRA. That was, perhaps, one of the greatest benefits of no longer being human—he didn't even have to leave his house to go after his enemies.
When he'd first escaped from captivity, he'd stayed shut in because his powers were out of control and he'd been afraid of hurting someone; by the time Bucky had shown up, Tony had mostly gotten a handle on both his abilities and the surrounding magical community. Still, he'd needed to be extra careful around the former Winter Soldier, and any hang-ups he still had were quickly wrangled into submission—one couldn't be accidentally exploding potions at a traumatized soldier, after all.
Aside from a few close calls, it had been surprisingly nice having Bucky there. Bucky hadn't minded JARVIS, or the bots, or the fact that Tony was a dangerous witch. At least you're not a rabid dog , Bucky would say, and then they'd argue until Tony had stopped trying to convince him to leave.
After a while, Tony had almost started thinking of Bucky as part of the family. And then Bucky had mentioned his friend Steve.
Steve Rogers, Avenger and former teammate, who Tony would never (could never) see again. Tony couldn’t (wouldn’t) keep Bucky from his long-lost friend, so he did a little magic to make sure that they would find each other. The accident was unexpected, but Tony was sure that by the time Bucky had recovered, the werewolf would have forgotten all about him.
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"Convince us."
Bucky punched the bag in front of him one last time and glanced over to where Clint was semi-hiding in the corner.
"Natasha says you don't lie, so that means that you saw someone that looked enough like our Tony to get Phil to investigate." He shifted forward, just enough for Bucky to see a flash of teeth and the naked hope in his eye. Steve hadn’t been the only one attached to the genius human, after all. "I'll help you beat down the door if we need to, but you've got to have proof."
It'll kill Steve otherwise, Clint didn't say, but Bucky knew enough about his old friend to read between the lines. No doubt, Steve had been seriously overprotective of the only non-shifter on the team, for various reasons, and he would have seen it as a personal failure when Tony disappeared. The unexpected possibility that Tony was not only alive but also suddenly the most powerful of the Avengers would be almost impossible for Steve's white knight tendencies to comprehend, not because Steve saw Tony as lesser, somehow, but because Steve wanted to be Tony’s protector.
(It was a feeling with which Bucky was intimately familiar.)
Bucky thought back to what little he knew about Tony’s life with the team, trying to think of anything short of dragging the genius out of his tower, and he mentally cursed himself for drawing a blank. For better or worse, the Avengers alarm went off a moment later, leaving the question unanswered.
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Bucky hated wolfsbane, and not just because he was a werewolf. Wolfsbane was poisonous to everyone, not just shifters, so this idea that HYDRA was just trying to cleanse the world of the supernatural was a bunch of nonsense. They were interested in destruction, no matter who got hurt.
The good news about this particular batch of airborne aconite was that the Avengers had intercepted it before HYDRA had released it into the city; the bad news was that everyone inside the lab—including the Avengers—had been exposed, and none of them were doing well at the moment. SHIELD wouldn’t enter the warehouse and risk exposing anyone else to the poison, but the team was in no condition to get themselves out.
Clint and Natasha were already unconscious and breathing too shallowly for Bucky’s tastes. Bruce was conscious but visibly struggling, his eyes repeatedly flashing from his normal brown into his shifter green. Steve and Bucky were better off, but Steve kept staring out the window blankly rather than trying to help Bucky find a solution.
“If Tony was here,” Steve offered, without looking away from the window, “he would have hacked the computers and shut everything down, or created some air purifiers out of paper clips and empty toilet paper rolls, or some other random thing he picked up on the way in. He was always doing things like that—saving us.”
"Steve—" Bucky began, but the other man ignored him.
"Tony would be so mad at me for giving up, but I just miss him so much," he breathed, the words no more than a whisper of air, and Bucky watched as Steve's legs all but folded beneath him and his eyes slid closed.
Damn it.
Bucky tried to find something, anything, to break the window, and came up laughably empty. It didn't help that everything was mostly blobs of color at the point and he could no longer feel his fingers. He took a deep breath to center himself before he remembered why that was a bad idea.
Bucky wasn't sure when he'd hit the floor, but the stone was cool against his cheek. It reminded him of smoothies and metal arms and other soothing things.
Barely a breath later, there was a flash of light so bright it filled the entire warehouse, but none of the Avengers were awake to see it.
ΩΩΩ
Bucky woke to the familiar hum of Tony's lab and hushed voices across the room. It settled something in him, almost immediately, and he let himself sink into the safety of the place he'd once called home. It took him an extra moment to realize that he was in his wolf form, and a few more seconds to tune his ears past the sounds of his sleeping teammates to where Tony was speaking with Coulson. Bucky could tell from their breathing patterns alone that they'd been at it for a while.
"If you need protection—" Coulson began.
"Are you kidding?" and Bucky could hear the shocked incredulity in Tony's voice. He could also clearly picture the way the witch's eyebrows were practically vanishing into his hairline and the grease-covered hand likely running through his hair. "If anything, you need protection from me."
Bucky could only imagine what Coulson was feeling at that proclamation (other than vehement denial), but literally none of it came through his voice. His, "We'll have to agree to disagree," was perfectly neutral.
Tony scoffed. "There is no agree to disagree. I forced them into their wolf forms, I'm keeping them asleep—"
"You got them out of a situation where they were definitely going to die and applied aid as best you knew how," Phil argued, as implacable as ever. And because the man knew everything, he added, "and Bucky's been awake for the past five minutes, so obviously, you didn't cause any lasting damage."
"The others all show signs of waking in the next hour or so," JARVIS offered, now that the gig was up, and Bucky lifted his head and pointedly whined in Tony's direction. The former assassin wasn't sure what Tony's issues were with the Avengers (though he could guess), but he was not above begging for head scratches while everyone else was still unconscious.
(And if he wanted to have a reunion of sorts of his own with Tony before the others woke up, well, Coulson was polite enough to find something else to do in the meantime.)
One by one, the Avengers woke to a lab that, while largely unfamiliar, smelled strongly of magic and a certain supposedly-dead human. Bruce came first, with his dire wolf all but smothering Tony in his attempt to keep the other man from moving more than five feet away from the group. Occasionally, flashes of Bruce would come through, but the mild-mannered scientist seemed content with the Hulk getting his fill of Tony first. Clint, surprisingly, was next, and he immediately shifted back to human form so that he could run his hands all over his friend's body, as if searching for the trick. There was also a vaguely alarming amount of laughter, mumbling, and threats to everyone from SHIELD to Tony's dead father. Twenty minutes after that, Natasha woke up. She stayed in wolf form, but her eyes constantly followed Tony. She'd wait, Bucky knew, to talk to their lost friend when the two of them could be alone.
And then there was Steve.
It had been obvious to everyone—save the man himself—how Steve had felt about Tony. It was there in the way Steve looked for Tony, first, at the end of every mission. It was in the way they stayed up at all hours, talking, or the way Tony was the only person who was allowed to touch Steve as a wolf.
(No matter what Tony thought, losing the pack's human had broken something in Steve that not even Bucky could fix.)
Maybe it was Steve's utter despair in those last moments in the warehouse that kept him unconscious for as long as it did, but it was almost ninety minutes after JARVIS's initial announcement when the super soldier started to stir.
Bucky slid his hand into Tony's and squeezed.
It was almost comical to watch the way Steve's wolf immediately locked onto Tony. He whined in a way that hurt Bucky's ears to hear it, and then almost fell off the bed as he pushed his massive head into Tony's chest. Between one breath and the next, Steve went from wolf to man, and then he really was falling because his human legs weren't ment to stay in that position. Tony staggered under the sudden change and Bucky shifted just enough to end up sprawled beneath both Tony and Steve as the blonde pushed forward.
"It's you," Steve breathed into Tony's neck. "I've missed you so much." His fingers were tight enough on the brunette's arms to leave bruises. Neither man noticed.
From there, everything devolved into a mass of sobbing and hugging and petting and Bucky wasn't sure how they all ended up in that mass of blankets and pillows, but Bucky suspected the bots. Or maybe a bit of magic. Possibly both.
It didn't matter. Coulson would fix everything that needed fixing with SHIELD. Tony would help Steve and Bucky be the men they wanted to be, Bucky would help Steve and Tony reconnect with each other, and Steve would would likely mother-hen everyone into mutiny.
But right now, surrounded by pack and the bots and Tony, Bucky thought everything was perfect.