WinterIron one shots

... That Would Start Today

Word count: 6008

Summery: part 2

"'I love you too," Bucky said softly, as if the look in his eyes didn't convey that well enough already. No one had ever looked at Tony with so much love and devotion before.'

————

Tony did end up eating the pizza Bucky had brought, but only because it would be a waste not to.

At first, JARVIS found a whole lot of nothing. The majority of the locations Bucky had visited seemed completely random — a street corner, a subway station, a convenience store, and so on and so forth — with no explanation as to why he went there. It was only when JARVIS went through the social media feeds that things started making sense.

At one location, a tourist had — on accident — captured a video of Bucky rescuing a little boy from getting run over by a car. At another, Bucky had been seen helping during some kind of medical emergency. The more JARVIS searched, the more instances he found, some of them more dramatic than the others, but all of them good deeds that, one way or another, made a difference for the better — even saved lives, on some occasions.

That was a good thing, of course — saving lives was what the Avengers did — but not on this scale or level. And they had certainly never shown up at the locations before the crisis in question happened. Bucky did so on several occasions, as if he knew what was going to happen long before it actually did — just like with Clint's accident. He went purposefully from one place to the next, to where he was most needed, then left once the situation had been handled.

There were few logical explanations for that level of precision and Tony was far too well-versed in pop culture not to jump to conclusions. He fought against it, of course, because there was no such thing as time loops or magic or any of that other stuff that couldn't be proved by science — no matter what Thor might say — but he wasn't sure how else to explain it.

How else would Bucky know where to go? How else would he, time and time again, get there just in the nick of time to save someone from a horrible fate?

Tony supposed that would also explain why Bucky was behaving so differently. Being caught in a time loop could no doubt make anyone look haunted and desperate, and Bucky's sudden habit of standing too close made a lot more sense. Tony had no way of knowing how many times Bucky might have lived through this day, but he had clearly grown closer to Tony during them — close enough that Bucky looked at Tony as if he was the beginning and end of his world.

For a split second, Tony felt a flare of jealousy, which would have made a lot more sense if he hadn't been jealous of himself. A past version of himself, even, who didn't even exist anymore.

"This is such a mess," Tony mumbled, before waving away the video of Bucky saving the little boy.

The next question, of course, was what Tony could do to help — if anything. It was clear that Bucky didn't want to talk about what was going on, probably to avoid sounding like a lunatic, but, now that Tony had figured it out on his own, that shouldn't be a problem.

Unless that would limit the odds of breaking the time loop, of course.

This might not be the first time Tony had figured it out. He could have done it countless times before, without even knowing. Just like there was no way for him to remember what he had decided to do about it — all of that was lost once the loop reset.

Tony chose to assume that his initial reaction must have been the same as it had been now— wanting to help, probably by talking it through with Bucky. That seemed like the appropriate approach, but, considering that the time loop wasn't broken yet, it couldn't have been. Odds were that Tony had already tried it and it hadn't worked.