The Stark Legacy

Logic

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE—July 2039

Shirtless and a little cold, Bucky sat in a lab with someone poking and prodding at his arm...again. Tony and Samantha stood arguing over him, radiating stubborn righteousness.

Tony mumbled critiques of Bucky's impeccably detailed arm, each proving moot upon inspection or a single-phrase reason from its designer. Bucky watched Sam's shoulders raise, her back shrinking with each backhanded compliment. She was defensive, but for his part, Bucky thought she should be proud. He had no complaints, save for the one time Tony continued to harp on.

"But the neural overload of being hit by Thor's lightning...?" Tony jabbed again.

"Corrected by a tissue-specific Extremis, locally injected as you witnessed," Sam answered.

Tony hovered over the bare shoulder of the super-soldier, wearing magnifiers. "You got lucky," he scoffed finally.

"No, I didn't." Sam backed towards the far chairs, tired and avoiding eye-contact. "That strain was engineered to die after one proliferation. Captain Barnes was never in danger of infection."

"So you admit it's an infection?" Her father straightened, bouncing a reflex tool off of Bucky's elbow to measure the flinch. There was no point to it, but Tony enjoyed making Bucky furrow his brow in annoyance. "Do you know how many things could have gone wrong with an adaptive virus like that?"

Sam's nostril's flared. "It worked on Wilson, didn't it?"

The room filled with lead. Tony dropped the tool, eyes wide. "Excuse me," he breathed.

A light clicked on so ferociously in his mind it made Bucky's eye twitched. Her concern on our flight to Wakanda, testing Wilson with cards during training...A surge of irritation for not connecting it sooner swept through him.

Sam broke the heavy silence. "I knew the neural-isolated virus would work on Big Sam because I'd already used a dermal version on myself. He wasn't waking up. Steve told me you all had as good as given up."

So Steve had to have pieced together what she'd done... This meant she had already used Extremis on herself before that day in the woods. Samantha knew exactly what she carried around with her. She had pointed for him to use it. She was exactly as brilliant as Tony and just as self-destructive.

"And Buc—Barnes's enhanced nerve cells just hadn't adjusted to the magnification effects of vibranium—" stares followed every move of her anxious hands "—so I...aided their...adaptation."

Bucky tried to help. "And now I'm fine, so we are all good."

"You experimented on a member of this team?" Tony's face went purple, several veins dangerously pulsing with every word. "Without his permission? In this building?"

Bucky distinctly remembered Tony saying they had run out of viable therapies.

Sam rang her hands. "You lied to me," she spat, "at the wedding you told me he would be fine. Of course I tried everything—I tried more than you did."

"So you graduated to organ and limb replacement—"

"—treatment—"

"—after one success? That's ridiculous. That's reckless." Tony almost charged at Samantha. She leaned towards him, unafraid. Bucky couldn't get between them this time.

"How was I supposed to know Buck would get hit by 30,000 amps in a newly connected neuron path?" Sam threw up her arms in Tony's face. "Even if he had his metal arm, you can't just dial people up to eleven."

Tony buckled. "That—" he shouted, waving a finger in his daughter's face "—that movie is a classic." He took a long moment to swallow a boulder of pride.