Apartment Above Stark Industries

[heroic_jawline]

Steve was back from his normal run and enjoying the air conditioning of their apartment (which he'd turned up a little bit to make himself feel less guilty about being engaged to an engineering genius while everyone else was melting in the heat) and had showered and changed and was now sprawled out on the sofa with his Stark tablet, going through more of the exposed SHIELD files that Natasha had flagged for him in an email titled "Tugging on that Thread."

It was probably a bad idea to be reading the information, but Steve couldn't help himself. He'd been chasing Bucky for years and had gotten exactly nowhere. Maybe what SHIELD, well, Hydra, had on his past would give him some more leads to follow.

[OOC: For that guy! Let's detonate MCU canon today, shall we?]

Comments

[imafuturist]

Tony, meanwhile, had been checking and rechecking the generator to make sure it wasn't going to crap out on them in this heat. The sheer number of computers that would damage down in the lab was staggering, after all.

"Hey," he said, dropping a kiss on Steve's head as he passed to go get a drink of water.

[heroic_jawline]

"Hey, sweetheart," Steve said. "Done re-checking the generators?"

[imafuturist]

"It's just being prudent," Tony replied, coming back to drop onto the other couch.

[heroic_jawline]

Steve nodded. "You have a few dozen projects running at the same time pretty much always," he agreed. "I love how your mind works."

Truth telling meant some serious Tony fanboying.

[imafuturist]

Tony beamed, going over to kiss him. "I love you too."

[heroic_jawline]

"Big plans for today?" he asked.

[imafuturist]

"Enjoy the still working air conditioning," Tony replied. "You?"

[heroic_jawline]

"Reading some old files Natasha sent me from when she released all of the SHIELD files to the public," he said slowly, frowning a bit at what he was reading.

[imafuturist]

"Oh? Is the Holy Grail in there?" he teased.

[heroic_jawline]

"Not yet," Steve said, sounding a little distracted. "This is what they'd been hiding on the Winter Soldier."

[imafuturist]

"Oh?" Tony said, shuffling in beside him to look. "How bad is it?"

Because he could only imagine how awful it must have been with HYDRA, honestly. What happened to him in Afghanistan must pale in comparison.

[heroic_jawline]

"Got to the report Natasha filed when he shot her witness through her stomach," Steve said. "It's a little...stomach churning."

[imafuturist]

Tony hummed, parsing through that other difference in their world's thoughtfully. "They, uh, they have a different history for me."

[heroic_jawline]

"Oh?" Steve said. "How?"

[imafuturist]

"HYDRA had their fingers in the Red Room too," Tony replied quietly. "He was used to train Black Widow operatives."

[heroic_jawline]

Steve winced. "Well, I haven't gotten all the way through the files yet, but Nat would've mentioned that, right?"

Maybe?

[imafuturist]

WELL, THE MOVIE THAT WOULD SAY WAS POSTPONED, SO...

"Who knows," Tony replied with a little sigh. "Yours is more chatty than mine."

[heroic_jawline]

"I'll ask her about later and see what she does," Steve said, flipping to the next file and frowning in concentration before reaching up to rub between his eyes. "Good thing I read up on the politics of the last fifty years. They kept Buck busy balancing some scales."

[imafuturist]

Tony winced. "I can only imagine. I can't believe they just kept all this information, you know?"

[heroic_jawline]

"They really didn't think Nat would just chuck it out there for everyone to get to, either," Steve said. "Tony--the other Tony--had JARVIS scrambling to pull down all the Stark proprietary stuff. Not the suit, but helicarrier upgrades, that kind of stuff."

He shrugged. "He was yelling loud enough that I could hear him over Natasha's phone when I pretended to be passed out in the hospital bed."

That was honest.

[imafuturist]

Tony snorted, resting his cheek on Steve's shoulder. "Steve

[heroic_jawline]

Steve kissed his head, then kept reading. "Let's go back further into the 90's, hmm?" he said.

[imafuturist]

"How often did they have him active anyway?" Tony asked.

[heroic_jawline]

"Judging by the number of files Nat sent me, maybe a couple times a decade?" Steve said. "No idea how complete these are, either. But from what Zola inferred, Bucky was the heavy hitter and he came out when they really needed history changed."

[imafuturist]

"Alright," Tony said, going through this logically. "What in the 90s changed history? Other than hair metal."