Soft Robotics ✧ Bucky Barnes

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There were way too many people in the lab. It was a fire hazard, frankly. But if you tell an Avenger what you ate for breakfast this morning, the rest of them will have about 40% of the details by lunch, and they'll be interrogating you for the whole story, which you've already told a hundred times, by dinner. That was what happened to me as I sat at my computer, awaiting some sign that Colin was still alive. Everyone wanted a firsthand version of the story.

That is, until Bucky showed up and started glaring at anyone who tried to approach me. Then everybody got the hint and left me alone.

It wasn't until nearly midnight that the others started filtering out, with reminders to call them if anything progressed that night. Eventually, Tony, Steve, and Bucky were the only ones left in the lab. I could handle that.

"You can go to bed if you want to, Grace," Steve said. "Can't you set it up on your laptop? Make it so it'll make noise if you get anything?"

"I'm not going to bed," I said distractedly. I didn't stop typing at my keyboard. Tony was doing the same at his across the room. The others didn't know it yet —too focused to explain yet—but Tony and I had been communicating for the past couple of hours over a secure server, independent of FRIDAY, which might be compromised by someone other than Colin. Not to mention the fact that we couldn't trust Colin anyway. Tony had disabled FRIDAY in the lab, so no one could hear us, and I knew it was breaking his heart.

Tony had gone into Colin's SHIELD file and tried to trace back its contents. Eventually, if you looked hard enough, it all came up with a dead end. All fake. His whole life. Past employment, education, relatives, all of it. But someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make it look real.

They hadn't exhumed Colin's body—too conspicuous, could alert whomever he was running from. But by all accounts, if you dug far enough into his grave, there was a body there, and the DNA matched Colin's. Then again, how did we know the DNA on file that we were matching it to wasn't fake as well?

"What are you two working on? Is there something we should know?" Steve tried again.

Neither of us replied. The farther Tony and I dug, the more frustrated we became, the more furiously we typed, the room growing silent except for the sounds of our keyboards. I had no idea what Steve and Bucky thought we were doing.

Bucky stooped low to speak to me quietly, so only I could hear him. "What's going on?" I hadn't spoken to him in person in weeks. I had a sudden, desperate urge to cry, which I swallowed down.

I stopped typing to look at him. "We can't find anything about Colin," I told him, loud enough for Steve to hear. "As in, there's nothing in Colin's file that's real, if you trace it back. It's all dead ends."

"Well," Tony spoke up suddenly too. He'd stopped typing as well, watching something on his screen intently. "Maybe not everything is a dead end."

"What'd you find?" Steve asked immediately.