Chapter Text
The Cairo bar is one of Marc's favorites. Doesn't cater to tourists or expats, so it's a great place to meet an English-speaking contact you might want to ditch.
Over a glass of qamar al-din, he gets right to the point. "You just looked through the whole US military database until you saw a familiar face?"
"Nah, we filtered the search a little first," says the man in the booth across from him. "Some points we knew, some we had a pretty good guess about."
"Like...?"
Bucky Barnes takes a deep breath, and starts counting off points on his fingers -- the ones Marc knows are metal under the glove. "Male, brown hair, brown eyes, between five-eight and five-eleven, born in the 1980's, Hispanic, Jewish, with documented mental health issues. We were all set to change some of those and try again if you didn't pop up, but, well. You got your own functional prosthetic for combat? Or does Khonshu's favor come with a magic hand?"
"That settles it, he's found us," sighs Steven in the back of Marc's head. "Marc, love, don't panic -- he's clearly not trying to threaten or scare you, he's only bringing it up because you asked..."
The reassurance doesn't do anything to stave off Marc's building panic attack. There's a bit of internal scrambling where Steven takes the body to calm it down -- tries to take deep breaths and think calm thoughts, even summons (most of) the suit to bring the physical symptoms down -- but when he hands it off to Marc, the stress ramps back up again.
Finally, Jake elbows them both out of the way and dusts off his Marc impression. "Magic hand."
He holds up the arm where they've been keeping a partly-summoned Moon Knight glove, then lets it disappear completely. Barnes doesn't even blink at the reveal of the wrist underneath, so, points to him for that.
"Gotta be the cheapest one the old bird has in stock, though. It looks nice, but calling it functional is a stretch. Think I should try to get the cyborg kind? You've been using that one a few years, gimme the honest Yelp review."
"It's -- look, it's amazing in a lot of ways. I don't want to sound ungrateful," says Barnes. "Full articulation, full sensitivity to temperature and pressure, shockingly good at not getting gummed-up with dust in the gears. And if all you need is the hand part, you probably won't need super-soldier strength to manage the extra strain on your skeleton. If you're interested in trying it, I will call my contacts in Wakanda and try to get you an in."
"Sounds like there's a catch," prods Jake.
"Yeah." Barnes grimaces. "Found out recently, they put a failsafe in it. Any of the Dora Milaje don't like what I'm doing with it, they can trigger the arm to auto-detach."
Jake thinks "Seriously?" while Steven lets out a forlorn "oh, noooo" and Marc barks a bitterly triumphant "HAH."
...going by Barnes' taken-aback expression, Marc's reaction is the one that came out.
"I'm not -- I swear, that wasn't laughing at you," he stammers. "It's just, a certain someone has been hinting that I should maybe look into this, and I said, I said I didn't trust them not to give it some kind of shady overrides, and -- I was right! Would've been nice if I wasn't, but. I was right."
"Yeah, you called it." Barnes sighs. "Wish I knew you when it happened."
Marc grimaces, fiddling with a coaster. "Even with the magic armor, I'm not sure how long I'd last against Wakandan Special Forces."
Barnes raises an eyebrow.
"...oh. You meant for emotional support, didn't you."
"That was the idea. Although -- if you're that ready to go to bat with the Dora for me, I guess you can't be too mad at me, huh?"
Right. The reason they're here (and the reason they have Frenchie with a getaway plane on standby). Barnes and Wilson digging up their legal ID, with all the potential vulnerabilities that implies.
Marc waits for the panic attack to come back. It doesn't. And Jake is actively holding him in front now: "He's your friend. As long as you're not actively hyperventilating, you have the Feelings Conversation."
"Just...walk me through how bad our cover is," says Marc cautiously. "How'd you work out Hispanic...?"
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