remains • b. barnes

1

IN A HOLOGRAM he left me before he died, Tony said he wanted me to be happy and start chilling out. No further instructions. No road map to accomplish either outcome. What the hell was I supposed to do? What the hell did I have to be happy and chill about?

I woke up from the Blip in someone else's apartment. My stuff was all gone, including the laptop I'd been using to remotely commandeer US military drones for the battle in Wakanda. The man who moved into my apartment chased me out with a bat. A couple hours later, Steve found me and caught me up on what I'd missed. Tony and Nat were dead. Then Steve fucked off forever too. Then, Pepper finally decided it was important for someone to let me know that Tony left a storage unit for me. It had all my stuff and the snarky goodbye hologram.

At first, I tried to re-invent myself, like Tony said. I tried to be the kind of person who smokes a ton of weed, but I couldn't keep up with that because it either made me paranoid or stupid. Paranoia was the opposite of chill, and so it explicitly went against a dead man's wishes, and I couldn't afford to be stupid, because I had projects to work on. I built some bombs for the US military, and then I wandered around Europe working on humanitarian relief projects that didn't do much to help anybody, and then I built some more bombs for the US military.

I wasn't chill at all. But I wasn't cut out to be a minor villain for the military, either. Tony would have told me so.

Seven months after the Blip, after he'd taken on the Captain America mantle, Sam showed up at my lab. He said they were re-building the Avengers Compound. I said "that's a terrible idea," and he said "I know." But I wasn't in any position to say no, because I wasn't doing anything of use either, and besides, I didn't have any friends.

Later that year, the facility was done. I came on board in October. There was only a quarter of the personnel we used to have in 2016. 2016 was back when things mattered, when I used to build important tech for important Avengers business. Tony taught me everything. MIT helped, too—I have some PhD's—but mostly it was Tony.

I regretted coming on board with the new Avengers project (can't bring myself to say "initiative"—initiative to do what?). The building was too new. It creaked like it was in pain. Sometimes I'd slide a filing cabinet in front of the door of my office as a weak barricade. I wasn't sure what I was trying to keep out. Maybe I was trying to prevent myself from leaving.

I almost never saw Sam those first couple of weeks. He was always jetting off somewhere. Usually with Bucky, who I never bothered to speak to, because he always seemed like he was in a bad mood. Can't really blame him, but I've been known to cry on the spot when people snap at me, so I kept my distance.

Darcy Lewis worked across the hall from me. She was friendly. I knew I should've tried harder to be her friend. But I was a little pissed off, I guess, that I'd already made friends, had already gone to all the trouble of bonding with people back when I used to work at the old facility, and now they were all gone. I didn't know where the fuck Wanda was either, except that Darcy said she held a town hostage.

The stress of it all was starting to creep up on me one night, the third Friday after I'd arrived. I'd been fiddling with one of Sam's Redwings in my office. It had been shot, and one of the wings needed repaired. I worked until suddenly, I looked up, and it was past midnight. As I became aware of the darkness I'd been sitting in, I became uneasy, with that stiff feeling like cold hands were gripping me by the spine. I found myself unable to concentrate on the drone. I couldn't stop checking my surroundings.

The trees outside my office window were turning brown and golden and orange, but I couldn't see the colors in the dark. I hated them anyway; they were so dense that I couldn't make out the Hudson, and I didn't trust them either. They weren't the sort of trees you could trust. But mostly I hated them because they were different trees than the ones that used to be outside my office window, because those trees got blown up.