Beggars can’t be choosers, and all that. However, somehow his bigger worry is if he’ll be able to put up with Stark long enough to even get the upgrade, you’ll have to, Barnes, you can’t keep going with this hunk of scrap metal for much longer.
Bucky only just managed to bite back a curse after moving into a certain pose, and knows his thoughts, for once, are right.
Tony dropped out of college to get away from his abusive father. When his longtime boyfriend reveals similar tendencies, Tony refuses to endure another moment of it, running away with nothing more than the cash in his pockets. He makes it to Virginia, where he's taken in by Bucky, a restaurant owner looking for an extra hand who's willing to be paid cash under the table.
Bucky's been struggling for years: to keep the beachside restaurant he inherited from his parents above water (both financially and literally); to live down the fact that he's gay in a small southern town; to get over the man who's owned his heart since he was fourteen. But he's never had to struggle as hard as he is now, to keep his hands off Tony.
Constellations wheel around in Tony’s mind at night, illuminating his sleep with the beauty of a supernova, the terrible gaping hunger of black holes, the whimpering cry of a nebula as it births new stars into creation.
All of Space laid out for him to marvel at.
Tony learns and learns and learns and then he creeps downstairs and babbles relentlessly to his first and only friend.
All the while the Cube hums, just a bit smug, just a bit loving, and shows him more.
When the Winter Soldier fails to kill Howard and Maria Stark and is taken prisoner in the summer of 1967, his salvation comes in the unlikely form of a Russian-speaking, father-disobeying, endlessly-tinkering seventeen-year-old: Tony Stark.