Broken Knows Broken (BUCKY BARNES X OC)

Chapter 3 - We're All Weirdos

When he said friends, I assumed his buddies. Maybe use me as a parlor trick. Play a few jokes on some people. I had no idea he meant the Avengers.

The next day he was picking me up to bring me to the compound. I don’t think he could wait to show everyone what he just happened to run across in daily life. According to him, people like me were usually on some sort of radar for them. I had no idea what that meant. My nervousness was overcome with excitement as Sam built up my confidence to meet everyone on the team. He gave me a quick tour of the ground level before we headed up a floor to where the lab and conference rooms were. 

I met Bruce and Tony in the lab first. Both brainiacs in their own ways. Bruce seemed nice. Quiet, calm, reserved, but he kept talking about ‘the big guy’ and I made a mental note to ask Sam about what that meant later. I’d heard of Tony Stark before, and according to him you’d have to be living under a rock to have not heard about him. Tony had a funny sarcastic arrogance about him, and it reminded me of a bartender I once knew, so I immediately hit it off with him. I too enjoyed a bit of sarcasm, and felt he and I had similar humor. He was quizzical of my talent, he advised Sam had shared his experience at the diner but wanted to hear about it first hand. 

“It’s different for everyone if I just allow your own brain to fill in the gaps,” I began, both Tony and Bruce giving me engaging looks, “For example, I could simply pull in an emotion like fear, where your brain pulls in it’s own fears, or pull in love/lust/desire and you would see or feel things that fall into those emotions.”

“Emotional manipulation overriding the brain's own sensory neurons and neural pathways, very interesting, please continue,” Bruce said, jotting down some notes.

“Then I can also override what your brain would normally pull in for you and give you something specific. I only override if it’s something very particular I want you to feel. Say I want you to fall in love with me specifically, I can’t just insert love into your mind, you’d paint your own picture of what that means to you and it most certainly wouldn’t be me. Not that I’ve done that or would do that, just using it as an example. Maybe a better example is getting you to trust me or think that I’m really trustworthy and spill your secrets to me. Recently, I’ve been able to suppress emotional responses, like having you freeze in fear or not cry, but I’m still having that backfire occasionally. Although it was successful with Sammy in the diner, he didn’t make a peep after everything he saw. Most of the time I can get a visual on what’s all going on inside your head, like what you’re seeing that’s going on inside your head with the forced emotion. Sorry, I’m rambling, it’s hard to explain.”

“No, I get it,” Tony says, “have you ever been able to draw out someone's emotions, like feel what they feel, as a way to read them?”

“No, but I don’t think I’ve tried to necessarily.” I say hesitantly, trying to think back on the countless hours of attempting to get a handle on improving and managing my abilities. “I can get a picture of what you see with the emotion I give you, but that’s about it.”  

“So a bit of telepathy as well. Can you just do one person or multiple? How long?” Tony fires off question after question.

“I can do more than one person at a time, the groups that sam held were maybe 15ish people, but only if they are all the same emotion. I’ve never tried different emotions on different people at the same time. What I can do is only temporary, trying to hold on for too long, especially when more than one person gets me really worn out. Nose bleeds, fainting, things like that.”

Tony thought for a minute, pursing his lips and narrowing his eyes as he paced a bit around the lab, “Well then, we will just have to work on developing that and mastering these talents now won’t we?”