Ocean's Eleven: How Rusty met Danny, the WinterIron Edition

[The title is a bold-faced lie. This story is not about Rusty and Danny. This story is about Bucky and Tony, and their general inability to use their words]

This is how it starts:

"You can't con Tony Stark," Natasha points out matter-of-factly. She says it because someone has to and she knows she's the only one up for the job. Because Steve is easy to convince, has never been able knock some sense into Bucky's head, always too busy jumping head first into trouble with him.

Bucky should listen to her, he knows. Steve is good, and Bucky is better, but Natasha reads people the way honest people read newspapers. Her word isn't law, because Bucky breaks laws all the time and Natasha's verdict is final.

But Bucky is twenty two, has the whole world at his fingertips, and he hasn't gone from nothing to everything by playing it small and safe. Tony Stark may be a legend –one not that much older than Bucky himself, not that anyone knows for sure, because until seven years ago Tony Stark didn't exist – but there's no better mark than one convinced he knows all the tricks in the book, and Bucky has never learned how to back down from a challenge.

Steve grins and Natasha shakes her head and Bucky flies too high to be pulled down ever again.

This is somewhere in the middle:

"Stark's gonna mess up one of these days–and you'll be the one to take the fall," Fury tells him over another hand of cards he deals out so fast, Bucky only catches 3 out of 5 cheats.

It's not a warning he hasn't heard before, in a thousand different variations at that. Stark's gonna eat you alive, and You know Stark only keeps you around because you're his exist strategy, right, and So you're Stark's fall guy, funny, thought you'd be prettier. Every hustler in the business is very keen to let him know how ridiculously out-classed he really is.

Bucky doesn't mind, is the thing. He shrugs off the insults, the disbelief, the ridicule, like Steve's taunts back in the day. There's no point in resentment – this is what the whole con depends on after all.

In this world, their world, one built on rumours and illusions and shadows cast by reputation and silence, Stark is a legend. He's the kid that pulled one over the HYDRA, the high-end security system everyone thought unhackable when he was only twenty-two and no one took him seriously.

Except Bucky knows that Stark wasn't Tony Stark back then, was just Tony with another last name that Bucky never asks for and Tony never offers, only fifteen, and that's an edge of truth people don't want to be told. Nobody likes getting shown up by a teenager.

It doesn't matter, because whatever they started out as is long gone and forgotten and was never even known. Now they're Tony Stark and Bucky Barnes, and what matters is what they are now. Tony Stark is a legend and Bucky Barnes is a nobody.

That's why it will work in the end. That's why he'll pull this off.

But all Bucky does in response is shrug, like he doesn't mind. He pulls it off so graceful and habitual, he actually believes it himself for a second.

Fury watches him and deals the cards a little faster, like everything that has to be said has been said.

Bucky doesn't win the game, but that's not what the long con is about anyways.

This is how it goes wrong:

The problem with the long con is that it gets into your head. Messes with your mind. Bucky knows that, has prepared for that. He's prepared to find himself liking Tony Stark. He's prepared to find himself getting caught up in the thrill of the jobs they pull. He's prepared to lose contact with Steve and Natasha however long is necessary.

He's not prepared to like Bucky Barnes. He's not prepared to like being the slowly rising talent, the quick fingers and cool head, the guy who makes sure Tony Stark's crazy plans work out on the ground level, where the rest of them live. The one who ensures that Tony Stark stays a legend and Bucky Barnes stays a nobody.

Here's the problem with men like Bucky, who're living a life that's all about the risks and the thrills and the brief second where the whole world falls into place exactly as you demand it to: he's very good at being who he needs to be and doing what needs getting done to get what he wants. Because that's what it's all about; getting what you want because you can.

Bucky isn't very good at denying himself what he wants. Not when he so easily can. Unsurprisingly, that turns out to be a problem.

This is how it ends:

"You should've seen this coming," Pepper states. She's not looking at him, can't possibly read him right now, and Bucky guesses it doesn't matter anymore.

She's right, and they both know it. He hasn't though, and he's not sure whether or not she knows that.

Right from the start, Bucky's known he'd get in over his own head. Would swim with the big fishes when he'd barely earned his own place in a very small pond. He has exit strategies for every possible scenario he could think of–and a few more the combined power of Steve and Natasha came up with–and only a third of them end with Stark's death. As they watch the news report in silence, Bucky thinks of every single one of them.

The job had been routine, nothing they hadn't pulled off effortlessly before. But Bucky didn't have his head in the game. Was too caught up in being Bucky Barnes, being the shadow of a legend, flying too high to be pulled down by anyone.

There was a girl, a pretty one with a challenging glint in her eyes and a smile that says you-can-try-but-you-won't-succeed. She was the kind of girl Bucky Barnes likes, the kind of girl Bucky Barnes could fall in love with. She was dangerous, and Bucky has never been all that good at resisting danger.

They play the game like a well-oiled machine, because at this point that's what they are. It's Bucky's job to make Tony's crazy plans work on the ground level. It's Bucky's job to read people because that's perhaps the only thing he's ever gonna be better at than Tony. But Bucky is distracted, and it all goes wrong too fast to fix.

As the reporter finishes his statement about how the infamous Tony Stark has been sentenced to four years in jail, Bucky doesn't think about how he won't need those exist strategies after all. He doesn't think about how the legend of Tony Stark has fallen apart all on its own. Doesn't think about how nobody is going to remember him because Bucky Barnes only ever was Tony Stark's shadow, and the only who's brought down Tony Stark is Tony Stark.

All he can think of is that it figures that even when losing, Tony still beats him at a game Tony didn't even know they were playing.

(All Bucky can think of is that he doesn't even remember the pretty girl's name.)

This is what he doesn't tell anyone:

When everything goes wrong, Tony Stark is in the clear and Bucky couldn't have been in a better situation to take the fall if he had planned it himself. By the end of the night Tony is in chains and Bucky isn't any closer to seeing the inside of a holding cell than he was twenty four hours ago.

He lies awake that night, wondering how he convinced Tony to take the fall for him. Wondering how he conned Tony Stark.

He figures it out two days later. After he's poured sugar into his coffee for the sixth time because Tony likes it that way. After he's picked a fight with the meth dealer a couple of blocks down and the first person he calls is Tony. Bucky is half-way through the voicemail before he realises that Tony won't get the message any time soon and he should probably call Steve. After he's winked at seventeen security cameras because he's gotten used to Tony having eyes on him at all times.

He figures it out in front of a tiny post office, holding a package of self-made cookies, the peanut butter, chocolate ones Tony loves so much.

You can't con Tony Stark, Natasha has told him once.

It's only taken him twenty seven months of smug certainty that she's wrong to realise that she's been right all along. He hasn't conned Tony Stark.

He's conned himself into becoming Bucky Barnes.

This is what it all amounts to:

Bucky claps his hands. "We're here because tomorrow Tony Stark will be transferred, and we're going to ensure that his travel destination improves significantly."

The gathered group exchanges long looks.

"Look, not that I don't like Stark's style, but why bother?" Natasha asks after a momentary silence with her personal brand of pragmatism. "Four years isn't the end of the world, and besides it's Stark. He's gonna turn prison on its head within his first two weeks, probably own it by the end of the month."

She expertly ignores the death glare Pepper shoots her.

Bucky smiles. It's anything but a friendly smile. "Maybe," he agrees because he knows Tony better than most. "We'll never know."

Because letting Tony go to prison is not an option. Bucky is the fall guy, and once he has Tony back by his side, he's gonna make damn sure Tony knows it.

Natasha raises her eyebrows, but she doesn't walk away. None of them do.

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