Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

(Part Nine – Follow)

2015

antwerp, belgium

(another start)

A boat leaves a harbour, bearing two unseen passengers, while spring is still young in the trees.

The men are quiet. Shadows of skin and metal. It’s a long journey. Tiresome. They take turns keeping watch, in case they are found. Sit up for hours, each of them, creaking, their fingers buried in their sleeping companion’s hair, or covering their eyes with their palm.

Twenty days later, the boat docks in a boxed up, reddish grey harbour. There are voices shouting. Signs written in Dutch and German and French.

WELKOM IN ANTWERPEN/

WILLKOMMEN IN ANTWERPEN/

BIENVENUE À ANVERS

Antwerp swallows the two men up that night, as they steal away from the stench of saltwater, iron and brine. The streets are old. The ground is strong. They stop in an underpass.

The two men, Barnes and Hawk, shadows of skin and metal and relief, smile cautiously at each other in the dark.

“Ninety-five medals,” Barnes says inexplicably.

Hawk laughs.

“What are you saying?”

“Antwerp,” Barnes says with a churlish shrug. “Ninety-five medals. Someone – someone told me.”

Hawk doesn’t laugh again, but he does shuffle closer to headbutt Barnes’ metal shoulder lightly.

“Regular encyclopaedia, ain’tcha?” Hawk mutters. “Half the words scribbled out.”

Barnes flashes him a grin. He’s filthy from the travel. His hair is unruly and long. He’s happy in his eyes.

“Come on,” Hawk says, pushing him. “M’hungry.”

“You’ll be sick again.”

“M’ hungry,” Hawk repeats anyway.

Antwerp covers them in darkness. Feeds them. Shelters them. They travel by night. South and south-east; south-west and south. Compasses in their heads, and one place in their hearts.

Eleven days later, the silhouette of Novi Grad looms before them. And inside the fortress, their answers await them.

avengers base, upper new york state

emilia fowler

When Emilia looks down into her cupped palm, she realises she’s been holding a mint in her hand for over ten minutes, and the tacky surface has melted a little into her skin. She scowls at it, holds her hand to her mouth and scrapes the sweet off with her teeth, where it sticks and clacks.

Over her computer monitor, she sees Rupert watching her with raised eyebrows.

“You are so good at your job,” he says, incredulously. “And such a fucking gremlin at the same time.”

Emilia just smiles back at him, pulls a tissue out of the box on his desk and wipes her hand.

“I can’t –” she begins, but her retort is interrupted by a voice from behind her.

“Fowler, with me,” Hill says, and Emilia swivels in her chair, leaping to her feet. She’s been waiting for Hill to return all morning, her feet anxiously tapping under her desk until her ankles ached.

“Seeya,” she responds to Rupert instead, snatching up a bag of chips and crunching her mint down.

“Eat a fucking apple, Fowler,” is all he replies with, returning to his own monitor as he shakes his head.

“Any news?” Emilia asks as she catches up with Hill halfway down the corridor towards her office. Hill shakes her head, but taps her earpiece, sweeping into the room and holding the door open for Emilia to follow.

“Update me,” Hill says, moving to behind her desk and tapping at her screen.

Emilia learned long before the fall of SHIELD that Hill and Maria are two entirely different people, and there is absolutely no point in pretending otherwise. Outside of work, Emilia quite likes Maria. Inside the walls of the Avengers Base, she has come to realise, Hill is quite the asshole.

“Kincaid and Jeppeson checked in at oh-five-hundred. They confirmed their ground contact in Sofia has come across dealings with Wolfgang von Strucker four times over the past year. They don’t know where he’s operating out of, but he is gathering a lot of firepower. Elle Makharinsky has been spotted in St Petersburg, entering a bank. No further sightings. Plus, our friend at the CIA left a note saying she’d be out of town for the next two weeks but she’d bring us back some sangria.”

Hill purses her lips, finally looking away from her screen.

“Good work,” she says, then nods at a chair. “Take a seat.”

Emilia does so, trying her best not to feel like she’s been called into the Headmistress’ office. Somehow, reporting to Hill feels just as intimidating, if not more so, than reporting to Nicky Fury ever had. Or perhaps that’s just the rosy tint of nostalgia, for the days she was Agent Fowler for real, and not just in name.

Hill unhooks her earpiece, pulls out her phone and taps it.

“Go ahead, Phil,” she says, and Emilia does her best not to huff, as Phil Coulson’s voice comes out of the phone speaker.

“I have someone on the ground near St Petersburg that can check out your Makharinsky lead,” he says. “We’ve hit two bases so far that show clear evidence they’ve been struck by the Soldier and the FALCON.”

Emilia feels her eyebrows shooting up her forehead.

“Captain Rogers –”

“Will be informed if and when we actually know where they are,” Hill says sternly, her mouth flat.

Emilia nods curtly, and ignores the bubbling of concern in her gut at the thought of having to talk to the man and not mention it. She’s never been particularly starstruck by Captain America, but she’s grown fond of working with Steve Rogers. She doesn’t want to feel like she’s lying to him, even by omission.

“Do we know they’re together?” she asks instead.

“It seems likely,” is all Coulson responds with. “One of my team has made contact with Black Widow. She’s got a lead on a HYDRA cell operating out of the north border of Moldova.”

“I’ll be joining her tomorrow,” Hill responds, and doesn’t react to Emilia’s hard stare of surprise. “Thanks, Phil.”

She ends the call abruptly, and meets Emilia’s gaze.

“You’re going to Moldova tomorrow?” Emilia scoffs. “Don’t you think we have enough –”

“I want you to take over running the day-to-day operations here while I’m gone,” Hill says coolly, and Emilia stumbles over the rest of her accusation in surprise.

Her?

No. Absolutely not. What a complete farce.

“Hill. Hanshaw and Dunbar are way more qualified to –”

“Are you saying you don’t want to?” Hill asks, and Emilia clenches her fists, the bag of chips in her hand crinkling.

Feeling facetious, she opens the bag and crunches down some chips while she thinks. Hill’s flat mouth moves a little wonkily, and when Emilia holds out the bag to her, she takes one.

“Of course I want to,” Emilia says after a moment’s thought. “I’d be fucking great at it.”

“Yes, you would.”

“Why?”

Hill’s flat mouth gets wonkier, and then she actually laughs. She looks, for a brief moment, like Maria again.

“What?” Emilia asks defensively.

Hill reaches over her desk and helps herself to a handful more chips. The wonk has become a smile.

“Just finally understanding what Nick felt like, when I asked him the same thing. Dismissed, Fowler. And McLean’s right. You should try eating an apple.”

Emilia purses her lips and scrunches her bag of chips up before Hill can take any more. She can feel the burn of embarrassed pleasure reddening her cheeks, but she refuses to acknowledge it as she stands back up and nods.

“What should I do about –”

“I’ll hand over everything this afternoon, Fowler.”

“And –”

“And I’ll handle Dunbar.”

Unfortunately, there is very little else Emilia can think of to try and trip Hill up on. So instead, she just nods, says “Thanks, Hill,” and leaves without another word.

She’s out of the room before her victorious grin bursts through her composure, and a sigh of relief falls out of her as she returns to her desk.

07/08/2007

S.H.I.E.L.D. ASSET DUE DILIGENCE PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION_MARK UP IP5_HAWKEYE_BARTON_CLINTON_F

EMERGENCY RESPOND. DOCTOR KOCIANOVA_HANNA_T

TRANSCRIBED BY SPA. LAWRENCE_JOHN_J (07/13/2008)

CLASSIFIED

RECORDING DESTROYED AP PROTOCOL J-9-g

(HTK) GOOD EVENING AGENT BARTON. … I’M DOCTOR KOCIANOVA. WE MET DURING YOUR INDUCTION A FEW YEARS AGO. DO YOU REMEMBER ME? … AGENT BARTON, I’M GOING TO NEED YOU TO ACKNOWLEDGE ME. … VERBALLY, PLEASE. FOR THE RECORD.

(CFB) YES.

(HTK) THANK YOU. DO YOU KNOW WHY I’M HERE? … AGENT BARTON. THIS WILL GO MUCH QUICKER IF

(CFB) I KNOW WHY YOU’RE HERE.

(HTK) GOOD. AND YOU KNOW THAT I’M OBLIGATED TO

(CFB) ALL OF THIS COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED IF YOU ALL HADN’T SPLIT US UP.

(HTK) SPLIT WHO UP, AGENT BARTON?

(CFB) IF NAT HAD BEEN THERE, NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.

(HTK) AGENT ROMANOFF. THE TWO OF YOU FILED APPROPRIATE PAPERWORK ALERTING SHIELD TO A CHANGE IN THE NATURE OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP EARLIER THIS YEAR. YOU ARE ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED.

(CFB) IF SHE HAD BEEN THERE

(HTK) THE NATURE OF YOUR RELATIONSHIP

[SPEECH INCOHERENT: SHOUTING]

…

(CFB) IF NAT HAD BEEN THERE, THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN EASY. WE’D HAVE DONE IT NO PROBLEM. BUT THEY SENT ME IN WITH GREENS FOR BACK UP, AND HERNANDEZ HAD NO BUSINESS BEING LEFT BY HIMSELF BUT THAT WAS THE PLAN AND WE STUCK TO IT. IF IT HAD BEEN NAT DOWN THERE, SHE WOULD HAVE DONE IT.

(HTK) WERE YOU CLOSE WITH AGENT HERNANDEZ? … AGENT BARTON, WERE YOU CLOSE WITH

(CFB) I KNEW HIM. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR? WE ATE LUNCH TOGETHER A COUPLE OF TIMES.

(HTK) I WANT TO HEAR THE TRUTH. WOULD YOU SAY AGENT HERNANDEZ WAS A FRIEND OF YOURS?

(CFB) WHY? SHOULD WE HAVE FILED PAPERWORK WITH HR IF WE WERE?

(HTK) AGENT BARTON, IT’S MY JOB TO ASCERTAIN YOUR MENTAL STATE FOLLOWING THE DEATH OF A TEAMMATE. IT’S IMPORTANT FOR ME, AND FOR YOUR WELLBEING, THAT WE ARE ON THE SAME PAGE. WAS AGENT HERNANDEZ A COLLEAGUE OR A FRIEND?

(CFB) I TOLD THEM, AS SOON AS THEY REASSIGNED ME, THAT THIS WOULD END BADLY.

(HTK) YOU MEAN YOU FORESAW THESE EVENTS?

(CFB) NOT – NOT THIS EXACT THING, NO. I MEANT SOMETHING BAD.

(HTK) YOU PREDICTED SOMETHING BAD WOULD HAPPEN IF SHIELD FOLLOWED PROTOCOL AND PROFESSIONALLY SEPARATED TWO ROMANTICALLY INVOLVED, THEREFORE EMOTIONALLY COMPROMISED, AGENTS?

(CFB) I CAN BE PROFESSIONAL WITH NAT – AGENT ROMANOFF.

(HTK) AGENT BARTON, LET ME BE CLEAR. STATING YOU “TOLD THEM SO” AFTER THE DEATH OF YOUR SUBORDINATE CAN BE INTERPRETED AS AN EXPRESSION OF FRUSTRATION, OR SPITE. IT COULD ALSO EASILY BE TAKEN TO MEAN THAT YOU KNEW WHAT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN, BUT OUT OF RESOLVE TO PROVE YOURSELF CORRECT, YOU ALLOWED AGENT HERNANDEZ’S DEATH TO OCCUR. IS THAT WHAT HAPPENED?

(CFB) ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE? RAFI WAS A GODDAMN GOOD AGENT. A GOOD MAN. I WOULD NEVER – NEVER LET SOMEONE DOWN ON MY WATCH. I CAN’T – WHAT THE FUCK?

(HTK) I’M NOT SAYING THIS IS WHAT I THINK HAPPENED, AGENT BARTON. I AM SIMPLY REMINDING YOU THAT THIS IS A MANDATORY PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION, AND THERE CAN BE NO ROOM FOR MISINTERPRETATION.

(CFB) I DID EVERYTHING I COULD TO SAVE RAF – AGENT HERNANDEZ. IT IS MY PROFESSIONAL BELIEF NO MY EXPERT OPINION THAT HE WOULD STILL BE ALIVE IF I HAD BEEN ALLOWED TO OPERATE MY CHOSEN TEAM THE WAY I WANTED TO.

(HTK) PERHAPS YOU ARE RIGHT. BUT THOSE PROTOCOLS ARE IN PLACE FOR A REASON, AGENT BARTON. WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE DONE IF AGENT ROMANOFF HAD BEEN IN AGENT HERNANDEZ’S POSITION?

(CFB) I WOULD HAVE TRUSTED SHE WOULD GET THE FUCKING JOB DONE.

…

[DOOR OPENS AND CLOSES]

(HTK) STATING FOR THE RECORD, AGENT PHIL COULSON HAS JUST ENTERED THE ROOM.

(PJC) THANK YOU, DOCTOR KOCIANOVA. MAY I HAVE A MOMENT ALONE WITH AGENT BARTON?

(CFB) YES.

(HTK) THAT WOULD BE VERY UNWISE. AGENT BARTON HAS BEEN THROUGH A TRAUMATIC MISSION WITH A NON-IDEAL OUTCOME AND HE NEEDS

(CFB) JESUS. I SAID RAFI SHOULDN’T HAVE DIED. YOU CALL HIM A NON-IDEAL OUTCOME AND I’M THE ONE GETTING QUESTIONED BY PSYCH?

(PJC) CLINT. PLEASE. DOCTOR KOCIANOVA, I APPRECIATE THIS IS A LITTLE UNORTHODOX. IF YOU WOULD STAND OUTSIDE FOR A MOMENT.

(HTK) FOR THE RECORD DOCTOR KOCIANOVA IS LEAVING THE ROOM.

[DOOR OPENS AND CLOSES]

(PJC) CLINT. I DON’T WANT

(CFB) COME ON MAN. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

[SPEECH INCOHERENT: STATIC]

(CFB) I’M SORRY YOU HAD TO COME DOWN HERE.

(PJC) I WAS WORRIED WHEN I HEARD ABOUT RAFAEL. ARE YOU OK?

(CFB) ARE THEY PUTTING ME ON LEAVE?

(PJC) GIVE YOURSELF FORTY-EIGHT HOURS.

(CFB) PHIL.

[SPEECH INCOHERENT: STATIC]

[DOOR OPENS AND CLOSES]

[ END FILE ]

fortress, sokovia

scarlet witch

“Again,” Dr List says dryly without looking up from his clipboard.

The smoky trails rising from the platform of coals glowing and hissing in the dark air swirl up into the high ceiling.

Behind her bars, Wanda flexes her wrists. Her hands are bound to fists with wire, tight enough to bruise her. Between her thumbs and forefingers, the tendons have been strained. There’s blood pooling in one of her palms, very slowly, from a rip in her skin.

“Please, stop,” she says, as pointless as the first time.

Pietro is ashen, sweating furiously. List isn’t even watching anymore; this isn’t about data. This is about control. This is about punishment.

This is about Pietro finally getting caught sneaking into her room. About Wanda not digging deep enough into their prisoners’ heads. About asking Strucker, stupidly, how long he thought it would be before HYDRA’s missing Assets struck Europe.

The wires clenching her hands together aren’t magical. They aren’t special. No, they are merely painful; they are, quite simply, strong in ways Wanda is still too weak to overcome. She does not understand the ebb and flow of power in her skin, but she does know this: she can’t seem to control it without her hands, yet.

Dr List knows it, too.

So here she is, locked in a cage, her fingers twisted but not broken, held together by copper string that bites her like a cruel north wind nipping at her bare hands. She stares out helplessly at her twin, his shaking body. His bare feet blistered and red from traversing the coals. He’s getting tired. He was slow enough to burn his heels this time. His knees half buckle underneath him. His eyes are downcast, tear-filled.

“Again,” Dr List repeats, angrier this time. He accompanies the word with a jerk of his thumb.

The order is followed by a gun shooting at Pietro’s shadow.

Wanda flinches, feeling his fear in her chest, a space carved out between her lungs. She shakes her head, but no-one is looking.

Pietro darts away from the new bullet scar in the floor. He stumbles, his legs giving way to exhaustion, and Wanda’s stomach seizes when he falls, arms out, face first, directly into the burning coals.

“PIETRO!” Wanda shrieks, and she sees it. The exact moment of it.

Like days of rubble and a Stark bomb condensed into a heartbeat she sees Pietro, her twin, her soul; his sheer terror as the scorching ground rushes towards him without hope of mercy.

Wanda’s fists try to unlatch, and the pain of her skin tearing is as blinding as it is grounding. She grabs the feeling. Yields to it. Bends with it. Her heart is in her mouth as a flash of her own stubborn willpower bursts out of her, and Pietro’s body is thrown sideways. He smacks his shoulder on the hard wall, and the breath is knocked out of him when he hits the cold stone ground.

Wanda drops to her knees, exhausted, as Pietro lets out a dreadful sob of relief.

“Please, stop,” Wanda says again, looking down at her purpling, mangled hands. She thinks she might have dislocated a thumb. It’s throbbing and swelling alarmingly fast. There is the scrape of a chair, and Dr List’s face close to the bars.

“It’s not your turn yet, Miss Witch,” he sneers. “Perhaps after this you will behave better, hmm?”

It is not a real question, but Wanda nods anyway, her mouth wobbling. There’s a bloodstain on the floor beside her, she realises. Attached to the wall, a collared chain. A shiver runs down her spine as Pietro staggers to his feet.

He’s winded, unburned and crying as silently as he did when their parents once fought violently enough to break crockery.

Wanda leans over and presses her fingers to the bloodstain on the floor. It’s cold, dusty; she feels nothing.

Still, she imagines otherwise. And, against all her instinctive beliefs, she prays.

Hours later, across the compound, a guard cups his hand around a lighter, sucking at his cigarette and squinting in the sunshine with his gun slung over his shoulder. The tang is harsh in his throat, and he coughs out a cloud that he bats away with flapping fingers, knuckling his chest in surprise.

He bends his neck to catch his breath, just for a moment, just to loosen the tension in his muscles. It’s one moment too many.

His bare skin exposed, just for that moment, there is a gush of moving air, a heavy shadow, a hot engine. A blade slices through his spine, and his corpse collapses into the grass. For a beat there is silence, all is still. Then, movement between the rocks, and a man pulls himself up the boulders into the grassy bank below the fortress keep.

Hawk reaches down to heave Barnes up the rest of the way.

“Ready?” he asks, tugging a lock of Barnes’ hair lightly.

Barnes grunts, taking the dead guard’s guns.

“Don’t hesitate,” he reminds Hawk.

They nod together, check their weapons, and make for the heart of the fortress, together.

amnestypress @amnestypress

An estimated 1.5 mill people have been displaced by civil unrest in Sokovia since 2011. 4 years ago, the UN promised to provide support towards a peaceful resolution of the conflicts.

Read more: amnesty.org/en/latest/news/sokovia

#sokovia #humanrights

United Nations @UN

With the cooperation of @MSF on we have rehomed over 500,000 refugees globally in the past 12 months. This morning, @CEOPotts announced fresh funding for global support to end human rights abuses and give voices to the voiceless. #StarkIndustries #Potts #MariaStarkFoundation

Maria Stark Foundation @MSF

3 years ago today, thousands of lives were affected by the alien attack on NYC. We at MSF have worked tirelessly to bring relief to those still suffering the aftermath of the attack. A vigil will be held outside #AvengersTower, attended by leading figures of the recovery, including @NYCMayor, @CEOPotts and @IAmIronMan. #NYCVigil

Secretary Thaddeus Ross @SecRoss

Once again so called “Captain America” is absent from front facing Avenger affairs at #NYCVigil tonight. Is this the man we are expected to trust with our lives and the lives of our children? Will we be warned ahead of the next catastrophe?

#CaptainAmerica #Avengers #EnhancedRegistration

avengers base, upper state new york

dr banner

By all accounts, it’s been a peaceful morning.

Bruce woke up later than usual, feeling energised and hungry. He cooked himself breakfast, did a healthy dose of meditating, and has spent the day so far reading Dr Helen Cho’s newest academic paper on her work with cellular re-genesis, which she has asked him to look over before it gets published. His notes in the margins, scribbled in a happy shade of pink, have so far been underlining various sentences and writing variations of the word Amazing!

He is, perhaps, not the most helpful person to ask when it comes to this sort of thing. His modus operandi is drawing smiley faces and signing off with I wish I had thought of this ten years ago.

Bruce is savouring his coffee. He only gets one a day, in order to avoid a caffeine overload, but at least it’s made him care a lot more about the quality of his coffee than he used to. He remembers being a student, chugging the thick mud that was more coffee than water out of his cups fast enough he could barely taste it – which was usually just as well, because it was the cheap, awful stuff that came in bulk batches with Just Add Water on the label.

Now, Bruce has learned how to make an art of his coffees. There are different roasting techniques, and brewing techniques. He times each part of the process, weighs out the exact number of beans required for a single cup. The cream, when he includes it, is warmed or foamed or frothed to perfection. He even knows how to make latte art clovers.

Admittedly, he only learned the clovers to impress Thor, who had returned from a bakery visit with Jane one day and couldn’t stop talking about the Wizard-Baristas of New York City.

Halfway through his cup, he places it on the kitchen table and flips to the next page of Helen’s paper, pink smiley faces at the ready. He’s interrupted, however, by quick footsteps behind him, and a voice calling out:

“Honey, have you seen what that asshat – oh.”

Bruce smirks, glancing over his shoulder.

“Tony, I’m flattered, but you and Pepper are good together. I wouldn’t want to get in the way of something so special.”

For a moment, Tony looks blindsided, before he regains composure and shrugs.

“If I was going to suggest a threeway to Pep, you’re the only one she’d even consider. Where is she, anyway?”

Bruce takes off his glasses to clean them habitually with his shirt, while Tony potters around the kitchen worktops looking for – something.

“Doesn’t she have that big meeting today?”

“It’s Saturday!” Tony splutters, taking a bite out of an apple before grimacing and tossing it in the sink. There’s a wildness to his eyes that Bruce isn’t very fond of.

“It’s Thursday, Tony,” Bruce corrects him patiently.

For a second, it looks like Tony is about to argue. Only, then he spots the cup next to Bruce’s hand, and makes a lunge for it.

“Don’t even think about it, Stark,” Bruce says, clutching his coffee possessively and bringing it to his chest. “Get your own sludge water. It took me seventeen minutes to make this.”

Tony rolls his eyes and makes for the Keurig in the corner.

“Spoilsport,” he mutters.

“What did you want to show her, anyway?”

“Nothing.”

Tony’s back is stiff, his voice tight. Bruce doesn’t particularly mind being lied to – or at least, he used to not mind too much. But these days Bruce feels just about ready to burst, waiting for Tony to drop another truth bomb on him like the one from two weeks ago.

(“Hope can be very, very cruel, Brucie. You know that. I know that,” he said, and he meant it, and it was a terrible thing, Bruce’s agreeing silence. For the first time ever, Bruce has been glad Natasha’s far away.)

“Who’s the asshat?” Bruce asks determinedly.

“Bruce, it’s honestly not your concern,” Tony says, only slightly pleading as he snatches the espresso cup away from the machine and downs it like a teenager sneaking shots.

Bruce fixes Tony with a stare, and patiently waits him out. He sips his coffee sensibly, leaving his pen lying neatly over the line he got to on the page, so he can pick back up where he left off as soon as this awkward stand-off is over. Tony fidgets with his cup, washing it and drying it and even putting it back on the shelf, clearly just for something to do that isn’t look back at Bruce.

It’s no matter whatsoever. Bruce has infinitely more patience than most people, and certainly a hell of a lot more than Tony Stark.

Eventually, Tony swings up onto a stool next to Bruce and tosses his phone over the table.

Bruce picks it up and finds himself looking at the twitter page of Secretary Thaddeus Ross.

Bruce breathes calmly through his nose, and appreciates Tony Stark a bit more. It’s a pointless worry for Tony to have; he’s not going to lose his shit looking at Ross’ twitter bio and a few ranting tweets. Nevertheless, just seeing the man’s face does come with a squirm of anxiety in his stomach, a shortness of his breath, and Bruce is grateful for Tony’s haphazard attempt to shield him from it.

He slides his thumb over the screen, reading the last few tweets, before calmly handing it back to Tony.

“Right,” he says, as dryly as he can. It mostly seems to work. Tony’s shoulder’s shrink a bit lower from his ears, at least. “Well, that’s nothing new. Ross has had a bee in his bonnet about Steve for a while now.”

“Yeah, but, the more Rogers avoids the limelight, the more traction this,” Tony says, waving the phone loosely in his hands, “is going to get. People have barely seen Steve outside of a few Avengers outings since last year. It’s not a good look.”

“Aren’t you and Pepper the ones stopping him from doing press briefings?”

“Of course we are!” Tony exclaims, with a burst of frustration that makes him spin a full three-sixty on his barstool. “Are you kidding me? You saw what he was like. You’ve seen him. He’s a mess. I’m not standing him in front of a microphone when there’s a chance he’ll start running his mouth.”

Bruce pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to clear the fog from his eyes that refuses to budge.

“Well, I don’t really see what other options you have.”

“This Enhanced Registration thing is dangerous, Brucie Bear.”

“I know, Tony.”

“We could all go down with this, one wrong move and –”

“I know, Tony!” Bruce barks, louder than he means to, and he grimaces at the way Tony schools his expression immediately into nonchalance. Shame tickles the back of Bruce’s throat. He rarely raises his voice, and if there’s one person he’d really hope never to do it to, it’s Tony, who understands all too well Bruce’s own reasons for disliking shouting.

Bruce takes a steadying breath, rotating his coffee cup on the table with one hand while the other shuffles through the mess of curly hair that’s in dire need of a trim. He nods once, to clear his head, then looks properly back at Tony’s solemn expression. His big, watchful eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Tony opens his mouth to dismiss it. “I’m sorry, Tony,” Bruce says again. Tony closes his mouth. “We’re going to have to be careful, that’s all. And you should talk to Steve.”

Tony scoffs.

“Have you even tried?” Bruce asks.

It’s Tony’s turn to do the fixing with a look, and it’s a withering one.

“Sure I have,” he drawls with narrowed eyes. “Hey Stevie-Pie, want to sit down and have a chit chat? You can cry about how the love of your life got tortured into a monster, and I’ll cry about how he murdered my mom.”

Bruce bites the insides of his cheeks.

“Tony –”

“I know,” Tony gasps, waving his words away with long, lazy hands. “I know, alright? I have tried. We both just. You know. I’ve had a lot on my plate.”

Like keeping Barton’s whereabouts a secret, Bruce thinks darkly, and a little unkindly. They don’t know Barton’s whereabouts, per say. But they do know he’s probably wherever Barnes is, too, and that would be something, wouldn’t it? That would maybe take some of the despair out of Natasha’s eyes, next time she’s home. It might close some of that horrible chasm that seems to exist between her and Steve whenever they’re in a room together.

“Yeah,” Bruce says uselessly instead. “Look, don’t worry about Ross. Right now, it’s hot air. If that changes, we’ll deal with it. But right now, there are things we can actually be doing. Have you heard anything more from Thor?”

Tony shakes his head.

“JARVIS hasn’t picked anything new up from your gamma scans. Thor said his All Seeing Friend was doing what he could. Don’t know how All Seeing he is, if he can’t find a big deathy glow stick.”

Bruce drains his coffee cup, surprised to realise he’s finished it already. He considers, for one moment, allowing himself a second one, before remembering what happened last time, and deciding against it. Instead, he taps the papers in front of him with a hard finger.

“I’m reading Dr Cho’s latest on artificial cell regeneration,” he says. Tony raises his eyebrows, looking curious. He always perks up when he hears Helen’s name. “You know, if we ever did find Barnes, and get a look at that arm of his, she could probably help with fixing him up.”

Tony nods, distracted, clearly reading the lines upside down.

Bruce picks it up to shield it from Tony’s view.

“You can read it after me,” he promises Tony’s pout of betrayal. “Make your own notes in purple, so she can compare them.”

Tony laughs once, more token than genuine, but the lines around his eyes have softened considerably as he gets to his feet.

“Thursday, huh?” he asks, looking a little disbelieving. “JARVIS, is it Thursday?”

“It is indeed, Sir,” JARVIS replies through the speakers. Tony shrugs, like he maybe still doesn’t believe either of them, but doesn’t care enough to probe further.

“I’ll leave you to it, Doctor Banner,” he says, rapping his knuckles on the table as he turns to leave.

“Thank you, Doctor Stark,” Bruce replies, just to enjoy Tony’s squawk of indignation.

“I have told you not to call me that!” he cries. “JARVIS, didn’t I tell him? Didn’t I expressly say –”

The rest of his diatribe, along with what Bruce assumes is JARVIS’ consoling platitudes of agreement, are lost down the corridor as Tony leaves. Bruce uncaps his pen again and gets back to reading.

There are onions and garlic in the pan, rubbed to death with turmeric and cumin, when Bruce is interrupted again by another set of footsteps behind him. Softer than Tony’s. Trainers of some kind. There is a twist of worry briefly in Bruce’s chest, a fight or flight, Hulkish instinct that is easy to ignore. The footsteps are less familiar, but they are not un familiar.

With a glance over his shoulder at the newcomer, Bruce says, “Good afternoon, Sam.”

“Afternoon, Doc,” Sam Wilson replies.

While not yet part of the furnishings, Sam Wilson has become something of a regular fixture around the base these past few months. He’s a pleasant man, with a soothing presence and sparkling laugh, quick to smile, more so now that Tony has stopped making poor tasting jokes about That Time We Thought You Were HYDRA.

“Hungry?” Bruce asks, nudging the onions around the sizzling pan with a wooden spoon.

Sam comes closer, sniffing audibly and picking up the tub of masala spices lying open on the worktop.

“I wouldn’t want to invite myself in on your lunch,” he says, sounding hopeful.

“Then it’s lucky I’m the one inviting you,” Bruce replies mildly. “You can’t make decent curries for just one person, anyway. Eggplant OK?”

“Everything’s great except red peppers,” Sam says cheerfully. “Anything I can do to help?”

Bruce holds out the spoon, and Sam dutifully takes it, stirring in an exact imitation of what Bruce had just been doing. It’s the air of someone used to following the rules in another person’s kitchen. Or maybe that’s just the military man in him. Maybe it’s both.

While he pulls the cuts of fish out of the refrigerator, Bruce tries to formulate what it is he really wants to say Sam can do to help around here, that isn’t stirring some spices into a pan. Before he can decide how to phrase it, however, Sam beats him to the punch.

“You seen Steve anywhere today?”

Bruce shakes his head.

“Not for a few days now.”

When Sam doesn’t respond, Bruce looks over from slicing mackerel to see Sam frowning thoughtfully at the onions.

“You got something on your mind, Sam?” he asks.

A smile twitches at Sam’s lips, pausing his stirs as instructed to let Bruce toss some chopped chillies and ginger into the pan.

“Thought you weren’t that kind of Doctor, Bruce?”

Bruce shrugs, dusting the chilli seeds off his fingers and returning his attention to the fish.

“You don’t need to be a therapist to listen to a friend talk about their problems. Especially when most of the time, if someone has problems around here, they tend to turn into group issues.”

Sam chuckles, leaning down to take a deeper inhale of the rising scent coming from the pan and then wrinkling his nose when his eyes start to water.

“He texted yesterday, saying he had a lead on Barnes, but I haven’t heard from him since. I’m worried he might try take off without backup. Again.”

The gritted teeth he displays at the final word is worryingly similar to how Bruce feels about Tony, sometimes, when he hears a crash across the lab and half of him doesn’t want to turn around to see what on earth just happened. He always does turn, though. It’s a habit, a compulsion, and one he thinks Sam Wilson is familiar with, too.

Before Bruce can say something slightly less than actual advice, but hopefully more than a platitude, there is a bright, loud alarm pinging through the room.

“Doctor Banner, Major Wilson. An alert has been intercepted – there has been an explosion in Novi Grad, Sokovia, at a fortress that is a suspected HYDRA hotspot. All Avengers are called to Assemble.”

The effect is immediate. The cooker is off, the ingredients mournfully abandoned. Bruce and Sam are leaving the room even as they speak.

“How long to take off, JARVIS?” Sam asks, dashing down the corridor.

“T-minus two minutes until the jet is flight ready, Major Wilson.”

“Is everyone accounted for?” Bruce asks.

At the end of the hallway, one of the ex-SHIELD Agents on base – Fowler, he thinks – is waiting with two bags in hand, which she holds out at arm’s length, kicking the door open behind her.

“Agents Romanoff and Hill have been contacted. They are in North Europe, and will meet you there.”

“Gentlemen,” Agent Fowler says, as they take their bags.

“What’s this?” Bruce asks. Sam simply slings the backpack over his shoulder.

Fowler nods her head as she leads the way up to the landing pad.

“Reading material for the journey on Novi Grad. Some extra clothes. And lunch.”

“You’re too good to us, you know,” Bruce says. She shrugs, pausing to let them take over and hurry to the jet. From another side door, there is a clatter of voices, and Tony appears, alongside a large furrowed brow attached to one Captain America. “Found him,” Bruce mutters, to which Sam snorts, then mutters something probably impossible and definitely illegal under his breath.

“Brucie!” Tony shouts, pointedly ignoring Steve’s glower. “Vámonos!”

At the ramp of the jet, Thor stands with his hands planted on his hips, a grimace on his face to challenge Steve’s.

Bruce tries to tamper down the stirring in his gut as he makes his way onto the jet. There’s no guarantee a call to Assemble will mean a Code Green. The past two outings were positively boring for Bruce. Tony even left him a book the last time.

Granted, it was an unofficial biography of himself from 2006. Bruce skimmed a few chapters, but even the contents page was too salacious for his tastes.

Nevertheless, clambering aboard the jet always grinds the cogs of anxiety for Bruce. He rubs his thumbs and fingers together rhythmically, trying to ease the greenish feeling of tension cording his muscles at the thought that maybe, at the end of this flight, Hulk will be waiting for him.

It’s an awful anticipation, and one gracefully recognised by Steve, who gives him a tight smile as he enters, sitting opposite.

“Ooh, Boy’s Club!” Tony barks, clapping his hands together as he makes for the pilot’s seat. “JARVIS, how we doing, my man?”

JARVIS must answer exclusively in Tony’s ear, because there is only anxious silence inside the jet while Sam and Thor take their seats.

At the bottom of the ramp, Agent Fowler makes a complicated sign with her hands, which Steve answers in kind.

Bruce opens up his backpack, pulling out a neatly packed box of food and one of Tony’s new hologram finger pad prototypes. He taps it, and a display opens up before him labelled NOVI_GRAD_SOKOVIA_HYDRA. It won’t make for pleasant reading, he assumes, but it will be more fruitful than a Tony Stark Unofficial Biography.

Across the jet, Sam appears to be doing the same.

Thor and Steve are speaking quietly to each other, while Tony argues with JARVIS in his ear.

The jet hums as the ramp door closes, sealing them in cool semi-darkness. Bruce takes a long, ragged breath, swallowing air and trying to focus on the words in front of him, trying to reconcile the disorientation of cooking fish in the kitchen two minutes ago, with sitting in this godforsaken jet once more, the threat of Code Green hanging over his head.

“Bruce,” a voice says.

He turns to look at Steve. His earnest eyes. His flat mouth. He hasn’t looked the same, since that day in Avengers Tower; blood in his palms, sweat on his forehead, vomit on the floor. A book lying open and flat beside him, covered in neat scrawled handwriting.

Or maybe Bruce’s sight is what changed. Maybe Steve was always this young, this lost, this sad, and Bruce was simply naïve enough to believe otherwise, just like everybody else.

Well, almost everybody else. Bruce doesn’t think he was the only one to notice the way Natasha’s eyes would track Steve thoughtfully across every room.

“You OK?” Steve asks, and Bruce would laugh if it wasn’t a cruel answer.

“I’m good, Steve,” he reassures the Captain. “You?”

Maybe Steve hears the irony of his tone, because his response of Sure thing comes with a wry smile.

“This is your pilot speaking,” Tony says, as the jet surges with a belly flop push into the air. “We will be landing in sunny, stricken Novi Grad in approximately five hours. But let’s see if we can’t make it four, just to prove JARVIS wrong and upset London Heathrow’s flight schedules for a third time this year.”

Bruce sinks back in his seat, and works on dampening the fluttering worries in his chest. He opens the lunchbox and eats a grape. He ignores the sad blue eyes beside him, as best he can.

fortress, novi grad

barnes

Not for the first time, Barnes sees familiar views with brand new eyes. The dizzying flashes of memory are piercing. The faces, their hands, their mouths. A spray of gunfire, the heat of panic.

Her.

Halford, her voice cracking the air, a weapon of its own. Is she here?

The walls of the fortress are high, imposing; one leap, a breath beat of wings, and Hawk is atop them.

Barnes feels a swoop of fear in his chest each time Hawk vanishes from sight. It feels different, here. The air is different. There is a charge in the ground. Electricity in every mouthful of air.

Barnes reaches the north-west side entrance with only two dead bodies behind him. The door is nothing to his metal arm, although his ribs protest painfully. He remembers this place. Remembers the way his lungs remember how to breathe.

He remembers stone. The clang of metal, clamouring limbs – his limbs? He remembers a young frightened face, sharp youth in his jaw, in his eyes. Sweat tangling his hair, wetting his lashes.

The fortress is dark inside. Dark and cold: a swallowing cold that plummets through him as he treads silently down corridor after corridor. He can hear deeper inside, panic. The pinpricks of gunfire; bullets battering hard.

Barnes replaces his clips and makes his way to the lower level, where the hum of electricity is stronger. He can hear a voice, bellowing orders. A man, his vowels harsh and long. He feels the memory of the route in his feet; his legs know the way, and he walks, trusting an instinct he does not recall developing.

The voice roars: “BACK TO THE NORTH SIDE!”

And then, quieter, more curiously: “Where is she?”

Barnes comes to a pause outside a bolted door, with an imposing metal frame. But Barnes, he has an imposing metal arm. In two swift punches, he wrenches the steel bolting out of place, kicks the door open, and fires –

BANG!

                               BANG!

                                                             BANG!

The guards drop quickly, their weapons barely raised; behind a meshed cage wall, a boy kneels, his fingers clutching the bars, his eyes wide.

“Soldat!” he cries, and Barnes’ trigger finger flinches only – his eyes, sharp in their youth. Gleeful. The boy sounds happy – happy to see Barnes, to see the Soldier, but that can’t be right. The boy is young; bare traces of stubble on his young cheeks, the oldness of his gaze is not age, but weariness.

The boy is weary.

The boy is a prisoner.

Barnes drops to his knees to meet the boy’s eye level, guns re-holstered.

“We knew you weren’t dead,” the boy says in rapid Sokovian, with the guttural stops of a voice from the city. It makes him sound even younger than he looks.

“I’m not dead,” Barnes confirms, in Sokovian first. Then, in rough English: “Who else is here?”

Immediately, the boy’s hands drop away, and he flinches back.

“You’re American.”

Fear. Barnes would recognise it in any face, in any tongue. Fear, and perhaps, disappointment?

“Maybe,” is all Barnes can think to reply, even though it feels like deception to say it. Yes, he knows, knows without rational thought, he is American.

The boy’s mouth works around a response before, in accented English, he says: “Please. My sister. They took her.”

In a moment, the cage is ripped apart, and Barnes is pulling the boy to his feet.

“She knew you weren’t like the others. You and the Hawk.”

A jolt of ferocity nearly unleashes from Barnes’ chest at Hawk’s mention. Instead, he grabs back his guns.

“Your sister?” he grunts.

“Wanda,” the boy replies. “I’m Pietro.”

“Hm,” Barnes acknowledges, without offering anything in return. There is a loud rumbling underfoot. He is keenly aware he doesn’t know where Hawk is.

“Are you here for the sceptre?” Pietro asks.

A cold, hollow sensation washes all over Barnes, and he turns to the boy.

“Sceptre,” he says, and the word tastes of blue and ice. He remembers – a light. A flame in grey eyes, a body slumped over; his wretched sobs as –

“They keep it downstairs,” the boy, Pietro, offers freely.

He’s standing – close, Barnes realises with alarm. Closer than he expected, as if he cannot sense the predator he is in the company of. He’s close – young and vulnerable and crowding into Barnes’ right shoulder as if it might keep him safe. As if Barnes might keep him safe, which feels… awful.

The boy, Pietro, Pietro, he has a name, his name is Pietro, pushes his blond hair out of his eyes. His mouth is bruised at the corners, and the rims of his eyes are pink with exhaustion. That weariness, that Barnes can feel, too. This boy, this Pietro, newly freed, and standing close to Barnes’ right shoulder like he isn’t the most dangerous thing within a hundred miles.

“I’m coming with you,” Pietro says determinedly, as if he knows what Barnes is about to say to him.

Barnes growls under his breath. He doesn’t have time to argue.

“Stay out of my way,” is his only reply, as he returns to the corridor and makes for the stairs that lead down, into the heart of the fortress.

Pietro is surprisingly light on his feet. Barnes only knows he’s following because of the flicker of his shadow crossing over his own at each turn. He smells of that odd, electrical current that permeates the fortress.

The air is thick and cold as they make their way down. Barnes can feel the cut of each breath stretching his lungs, the back of his neck prickling with every rat-like tremble from the foundations below them.

Pausing at an open door, Barnes takes in the catastrophe of shredded computers and toppled corpses spread across the room. He can see where each strike of Hawk’s wings landed, and a knot tightens in his chest.

“Who was in charge here?” he asks the shadow behind him.

“Strucker and Doctor List,” Pietro replies dutifully. He’s peering over Barnes’ shoulder, his eyes wide as saucers as he takes in the sight of wanton destruction. “Will you kill them?”

Barnes grits his teeth.

“If I have to.”

Pietro makes a puffing sound of distaste – although whether it is at the prospect of further violence, or the possible lack of it, Barnes can’t tell.

“Come on,” Barnes says. “Keep behind me.”

If the kid is only going to follow anyway, the least Barnes can do is make sure he stays in his place. Flexing his hands routinely, Barnes moves from room to room, his pace picking up along with his heartbeat. As it gets colder, the electric tang in the air gets stronger. Pietro’s breaths seem loud behind him, despite his silent feet.

Then, up ahead, there is a keening bellow of sound – a scream like an open chest cavity.

“Strucker!” Pietro hoarsely whispers, sounding gleeful.

Barnes runs. A door at the end of the corridor flies open, revealing three armed guards. Bullets spray, Barnes breaks their path with his arm before Pietro can be harmed, only –

The shiver of movement in the air is fast as lightning; perhaps even faster. One moment, Pietro is ducking behind Barnes’ arm, the next, he is standing over three toppled corpses, their heads wrenched around and their necks violently broken.

Barnes pauses, his gun aloft, taking in the harrowing terror in Pietro’s young, sharp eyes.

The boy is staring down at his victims, his open palms held up, clean and yet, quite suddenly, not. When he looks up at Barnes, there is fear in the lines of his mouth.

“I killed them,” he says, and he sounds deeply ashamed, yet, somehow, proud.

Barnes doesn’t have the words to tell him he shouldn’t be either.

“They would have killed you,” he agrees, even though that isn’t true, because he had his own arm out, he would have protected the boy. He didn’t have to dirty his fingers with the stain of their deaths, and yet –

Barnes thinks about his hands on that cage. His face pressed against the bars. Who knows what this boy has seen, and done, and felt, inside these ghastly walls.

Barnes approaches Pietro cautiously, and puts a hand over both of the boy’s own.

Before he can say anything, there is a shout, and two more guards appear, followed by more.

Between Barnes and Pietro, they don’t stand a chance. Adrenaline surges through Barnes, his eyes tracking the blur of Pietro’s form. He’s grace itself, a whirlwind of energy, and Barnes shoots through the gaps in his movements, taking down the guards the boy weaves around in pursuit of others.

They make short work of the remaining laboratories. The stairs echo with the clatter of dropped weapons, they run together, Pietro breathing hard and clutching his chest, as if he wasn’t used to such bursts of energy. Barnes takes the lead, kicks down another door and then –

“WANDA!” Pietro shouts his sister’s name, coming to a halt at Barnes’ shoulder where he stands, sucking in lungful after lungful of relief.

He remembers this space. The towering scaffolding, and Halford’s voice slicing through him, telling him to Climb, telling Hawk to Fly, telling them both to Fall. He remembers the rush of air screeching in his ears, and Hawk’s arms around him as they tumbled down, and he remembers the awful, grinding crunch of his wings embedded into the stone floor, the sobbing of the Hawk as he held Barnes safely off the ground.

Those two deep grooves in the stone are still there.

Across the room, there is a slashed apart cage, an open door that leads directly into the mountain. Furniture scattered.

And in the middle of it all, stands Hawk.

His blond hair is sweaty, and there’s a cut on his cheek. His wings are spread, as wide and impressive as ever, his shoulders visibly straining, the cords of his neck tight. In his arms, he’s carrying a girl.

She looks to be Pietro’s age, with reddish brown hair and spindly limbs. Her eyes are feverishly half-closed, and with each hitched sound that leaves her mouth, her lips tremble.

Her hands are resting on her chest, and for a moment it seems as if they are locked in prayer. Only, as Barnes takes them in better, he feels a yank of disgust in his stomach.

Her fingers are broken. Bent out of shape, wires like garrottes are cutting into her flesh, locking her hands uselessly together. From the gashes in her skin, an odd, reddish light seems to ooze out of her and, when Barnes steps closer, he realises the smell of electricity is coming from her. Seeping out of her, stinging his nostrils like acid, almost bringing tears to his eyes.

Hawk is clutching her to his chest with a fierce look on his face.

Barnes nods at him in understanding, his head tilted towards Pietro, who rushes straight to his sister’s side.

He knows, suddenly, they won’t be leaving this place without both the boy and the girl safely in their clutches.

“Our best chance is through the underpass,” Hawk says, gesturing towards the door across the room with his forehead.

Pietro strokes his sister’s hair with his hand, looking between Barnes and Hawk.

“The sceptre,” Barnes reminds Hawk, to which, the girl in his arms tucks her face deeper into his chest, as if to hide from the very word. She’s murmuring under her breath, but the words are indistinguishable from the shudder of air in her throat.

Hawk frowns, glancing at the door and back again.

“No time,” he says, one step closer to freedom, but they’re close, so close.

“Hawk,” Barnes growls, and Hawk flinches a little, but doesn’t falter. He clutches the girl to his chest, as her brother strokes her head.

“Please,” he whispers, and it’s hoarse, and soft, and frightening, and Barnes feels powerful in the most monstrous of ways, with Hawk’s eyes so big and his voice so quiet, asking, pleading, pleading like Barnes was some kind of…

The boy, Pietro, turns to Barnes as well, frowning. His hand is possessively resting on his sister’s head, his thumb tucked into the locks of her matted hair. Blood trickles down the girl’s wrists, soaking into her grey sweatshirt. When her eyes open blearily, they are the same shade of pinkish grey as her brother’s.

Barnes licks his lips, and holsters his gun.

“Take them,” he tells Hawk with a nod. “I’ll meet you at the southwest ridge.”

“No,” Hawk says, big eyes burning.

“We have to stop them,” Barnes reminds him, ignoring the hook in his belly tearing up his insides with doubt.

The girl, Wanda, blinks dazedly out at him like a bird in a nest peering out into the smog. Hawk’s grip on her tightens, hoisting her higher, and she winces, hissing between her teeth. She hums when her brother kisses her face once before turning back.

“I can help,” Pietro says, stepping away from his sister with visibly heavy feet.

“No, you can’t,” Barnes snarls. “Go with Hawk. He’ll get you out of here.”

But Pietro only looks at Hawk, who nods firmly back at the boy, his hands soft and strong around the girl’s limp figure.

Barnes curses loudly. He doesn’t need a tag along. He doesn’t want a tag along. Not this lanky boy with hair hanging limp over sharp young eyes, fretful hands and nervous, coltish legs. This child who looked afraid of him, as he whispered, You’re American.

Before Barnes can say anything more, though, Wanda twists around in Hawk’s grip, and a low, keening yowl falls out of her mouth. Hawk stumbles sideways in his bid to keep her in his arms, his wings scooping around to stabilise them both as the girl wriggles and cries out, and when she opens her eyes they’re alight with a scarlet flame, and Barnes hears it – the footsteps.

The scraping of something lethal through the air, he turns back, blocks their path. Pietro behind him. Wanda behind him.

Hawk, behind him.

“Fools!” the man in the doorway snarls, and Barnes knows his face, as if through the fog of a dream.

The Doctor. The other one. Not Halford. The not-Halford. Barnes feels a burning in his throat, and in his chest, remembering the man’s eyes, his hands, his voice. Contempt. That’s it. He feels the burning of contempt.

“Asset,” the man says, with all the authority of an ant. This man does not command him.

Only, in the man’s hands, there is the long, silky metal of the sceptre. Its iridescent glow flickers in his eyes, turning them a cruel shade of blue. He’s holding it in both hands, strong like the stance of his legs, his head cocked.

Kapanen. That was it. That was his name.

“I told her,” Kapanen is saying, standing in the doorway, with the sceptre in his hands. “I warned her what rabid dogs did, but she didn’t listen.”

Behind him, Barnes can hear Hawk’s wings whirring. His steps tapping faintly as they step to the side, mirroring Kapanen’s path. Barnes tilts his body with the movement, his eyes never leaving the sceptre in the doctor’s hands. The girl is panting, loud, fearful noises in the back of her throat, choking. Pietro is entirely silent.

“Did you kill her, Soldier?” Kapanen asks, and for a brief moment, Barnes remembers the heavy pull of his gun pressing into Halford’s cheek. He didn’t kill her. Did he?

A pang aches fiercely in his chest. He ignores it.

Kapanen’s mutinous expression twists with ugly glee.

“You think taking off your shackles makes you free?” he asks, and the glow of the sceptre swirls all about him, and Wanda’s moans grow as if they are swirling her insides, too.

Out of the corner of his eye, Barnes can see her twist in Hawk’s grip. Her hands are shaking, lifting. They are swallowed up in the crimson fog leaking from her wounds, almost as if she was trying to force it out.

“You think giving yourself a name will make you a person?” Kapanen asks.

Barnes bites the edges of his tongue, and ignores the hushing of Hawk’s mouth and wings, and Kapanen’s ruthless eyes are bright, and the sceptre twists with his smirk.

“Желание,” he says, rough consonants of Russian. Longing, it bounces back, and raw panic surges up Barnes’ throat. It reverberates through him, an inescapable trigger of a command.

“No,” he whispers, and he tries to step back, but it is as if he has sunk half a foot into the stone of the floor.

“Rusted,” Kapanen continues, as Pietro shouts at Hawk, and Hawk shouts at Barnes, and Barnes tries to lock onto the sound of Hawk’s voice but the next words come too quickly, forcing bolts of steel through his spine, through his legs, through his mind. “ Seventeen. Daybreak–”

Pietro is a blur, rushing past Barnes as he topples to his knees, his gut clenching as he tries to fight the screaming white of winter as it burns a hole in his thoughts.

“BARNES!” Hawk shouts, and for just a moment, the word means nothing, and he lets out a hard, terrified sob.

Pietro is yelling. Terror is shrieking through Soldier’s – no, Barnes, Barnes’ ears. He’s Barnes, he’s Barnes, he’s –

“ Furnace.”

His hands on the floor, his neck bending, maybe breaking, and the spill of red smog pours over his head, the glow of the sceptre, Kapanen’s voice. Barnes cracks his head against the stone floor, tries to break stone, break bone, anything to keep those final words from reaching his ears.

A girl’s voice – the girl’s voice.

She’s screaming, and when Barnes looks up through the sweat and blood on his head he sees Hawk holding a wildfire thing, her hands shaking as they bleed pure electricity, pure light, pure flame, and the power is too much for those thin cutting wires, too much for her feeble body wrapped in Hawk’s embrace, and in a single burst of energy that flings sparks like diamonds, shredding the air –

The world around him shatters.

                                    (10-20-1942)

NEW YORK CITY NEW YORK USA

                       166 MONTAGUE ST

                                 S. G. ROGERS

ALL SAFE NO SNOW KEEP WARM. BUCKY.

[g.] Smithsonian Archives, “Welcome Home Cap” Exhibition, 2013 _“The USO Months” _“Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes”_“Before the Howling Commandos”

                                   (12-23-1942)

NEW YORK CITY NEW YORK USA

                     166 MONTAGUE ST

                                S. G. ROGERS

TOO MUCH SNOW STILL SAFE KEEP WARM. BUCKY.

[h.] Smithsonian Archives, “Welcome Home Cap” Exhibition, 2013 _“The USO Months” _“Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes”_“Before the Howling Commandos”

south sokovia

scarlet witch

The colours come back in shades of autumn. Light spills between her gummy eyelashes, prising her eyelids apart, and when she blinks, she feels the winged sweep of a hand passing over her hair, fingers as familiar as her own running over her scalp.

“Pietro,” Wanda tries to say, but the consonants get stuck between her teeth.  She licks her gums, tasting blood, and tries again. “Pietro?”

“Ssh, it’s OK, you’re alright,” he promises her, and she frowns, wondering why his voice sounds like that.

It takes a moment for her to realise he’s speaking in English. They never speak in English when it’s just the two of them. Wanda purses her lips, and forces her eyes to open properly. The shape of her brother is hazy, hanging over her. His hair is matted and filthy, damp as if hastily swept off his face with wet hands, and his face is streaky clean, water still clinging to his cheeks and eyebrows in dark droplets.

Pietro smiles at her, looking relieved, before holding up a damp piece of cloth to run over her cheeks. It’s cool and soothing, and Wanda doesn’t hurry to move, instead allows the attention, even relishes it.

Everything feels fuzzy around the edges. They were in the fortress. There was a cage – she was pressed up against it, leaning and fighting, and her hands were bound. There was a burning in her bones, and then there was shouting – was there shouting? There was screaming. There was –

The Hawk.

Wanda’s eyes burst open again, and her body bolts upright. She’s caught by Pietro’s strong hands, and she sees wooden walls, and dusty sunlight, and she looks down.

She’s lying on a cot of some kind. There are blankets piled over her, and her hands are wrapped in thick, fluffy looking bandaging. Each finger has been delicately bound. At only the very edges of her awareness, she can feel the deep-rooted pain beneath them. Her thoughts feel sluggish, unpleasant. Medicated.

But, looking down at her hands and remembering the fierce, awful agony of them, she thinks perhaps it is preferable to sink into the haze of her scattered thoughts.

Pietro brushes her face with the cloth again.

“Where are we?” Wanda asks, and is frustrated when Pietro responds yet again in pointed English:

“Far outside the city. South, somewhere. At least twelve miles.”

It’s only as her eyes roam further than Pietro’s face, trying to find some clue as to what – or perhaps, whose – bed she’s lying in, that Wanda catches sight of the two figures crouched across the room. They are a tangle of flesh and cotton and metal.

Wanda knows, instinctively, that they aren’t oblivious to her stare. Hunched over as the Hawk is, his thick metal spine protruding painfully out of his back through his shirt, he angles his ear towards her even as she watches. His arms, which are bruised and chafed, are locked tightly around the Soldier’s stiff upper body.

She remembers the intimate heat of his embrace as he’d picked her up, and can only imagine the stifling heat of the Soldier’s face buried into his chest now.

“They saved us,” Pietro says, sounding so hopeful, so lovely, so true.

But Wanda still remembers the way the Soldier had stared right through her over his muzzle. How the Hawk had kneeled obediently to let that awful woman lock a hood over his head. They were HYDRA. Maybe not at first, and maybe not by choice, but they were the same as all those guards and doctors.

It would be naïve to forget it so soon.

She clears her throat with rusty coughs, wincing when the shocks bite through her bandaged hands.

Pietro moves with her, bodily. He is attuned to her every moment, still. Bruised as he is, all over like a graze.

The Hawk lifts his head, and looks directly into Wanda’s eyes.

His own, large and round and murky, are startling bright in the gloom of the cabin. More owl than hawk, she thinks a little hysterically. Looking at him, feeling his attention, fills her stomach with angry moths that batter her insides. It’s a lurch of memory without the responding images to go with it. As if she knows him, and yet, she doesn’t.

The Hawk strokes the back of the Soldier’s head when he shudders.

For a moment, the anticipation swells horribly in Wanda’s throat, constricting her airways. Then, the Hawk tilts his head, placing his murmurs directly at the curled shell of the Soldier’s ear. They extract themselves slowly, both clambering laboriously to their feet.

Wanda is taken aback momentarily by the sheer size of them. The Soldier’s hulking form feels massive in the smallness of the cabin. His hair hides most of his face as he moves to the foot of her bed, but when he looks up, his expression is clear and collected. His eyes are a dark, piercing blue.

“How – are you feeling?”

Wanda is struck first by the thickness of his American accent, no trace of which had been there the last time she heard him speak, and second by the stiltedness of his question. Formal, almost. Rehearsed.

“Thank you for saving us,” she replies, instead of answering.

The Soldier bows his head and rubs his neck. It’s an oddly shy form to take. Bashful, even.

“Your powers –” he continues, gesturing to her clumsily elevated fingers. “Saved us.”

He is rescued from his own awkward words by the Hawk who, so much smaller looking without his wingspan, yet somehow still so tall, carries over a dented tin cup, which he hands to Pietro. It’s lukewarm tea, bitter smelling and leafy. Wanda wrinkles her nose when her brother offers it to her mouth, embarrassed under the rude scrutiny of the two men.

“It’s good,” Pietro promises, and Wanda lets him tip a few sips past her lips, grimacing and blushing. She coughs at the taste.

“Liar,” she chastises her brother, who smirks shamelessly even as he brushes droplets from chin with his hand.

“We’re safe here, for now,” the Soldier says, eyes darting back and forth between the twins.

“Why should we trust you?” Wanda asks. The English words feel wonky between her teeth. She only ever spoke in English to Dr List, and his minions.

“Sister,” Pietro hisses.

“No,” she retorts, glaring her brother down before fixing the Soldier with her stare. The Soldier glances at her hands, then her face. “You were obedient dogs, before you left,” she continues, her insides squirming with anxiety as Pietro’s hand nips her leg through the covers. “What has changed? How do we know you won’t go back to them?”

The Soldier’s brow is furrowed, while the Hawk stands a little behind his left shoulder with a dutiful expression that she doesn’t entirely trust. When the Soldier’s lips twist wryly, it changes his whole face. He looks so young, she realises. Beneath the grime and the unkempt hair and the days of stubble on his jaw, he looks barely ten years her senior.

After a moment, the Soldier turns to look at the Hawk. He’s startlingly young, too. His gold hair looks thatched and uneven, and he stands with an odd stoop, his knees locked, as if the metal of his additional spine keeps him weighted against his centre of gravity. It’s uncomfortable to look at.

“She’s not wrong,” the Soldier says dryly. At first glance, the Hawk is silent, pinned by his partner’s gaze. He reaches out, fingers ghosting the Soldier’s metal arm.

“It won’t happen again,” the Hawk implores. American, too. A different kind, although Wanda’s ear can’t parse the distinction between the accents beyond different. The Hawk sounds worried, nearly pleading. When the Soldier responds, there’s a reedy undertone that wasn’t there before.

“We don’t know who has the words.”

“We can stop them.”

“We might not.”

Their argument is softly spoken, not even a stern edge to their voices, but it’s worn with sincerity and blatant repetition.

“It’s too dangerous,” the Hawk urges, after a beat. He’s holding the Soldier’s wrist, now. At his words, the Soldier looks back at Wanda. His frown has returned.

“You can look into people’s minds,” he states.

Wanda isn’t sure if it’s a guess, or if he remembers something from before, or even if Pietro told him. She doesn’t believe her twin would be so foolish, would betray her confidence so easily. Still…

Wanda inclines her head in acknowledgement.

“Can you change things?”

The Soldier’s question takes her by surprise, and a sound traps itself in her throat. When she looks to her right, Pietro’s eyebrows are raised, his mouth open in wordless confusion. She feels the flutter of his heart beside her own.

“I – don’t know,” Wanda replies, too taken aback to lie. She hasn’t really thought about the full extent of her powers, truth be told. She left that to the professional curiosity of Dr List, and the other scientists who had poked and prodded at her.

The Hawk pulls at the Soldier’s wrist. It’s a soft, childlike gesture. He looks distressed, now, and she is aware of a faint buzzing rippling over her skin. His fear, she realises. Too dangerous, he’d said. She thinks she understands what the Soldier wants.

Wanda looks down at her hands, curled and painful hovering just above her lap, a stiffness in her shoulders. She feels horribly defenceless. Pietro nudges her, coming to sit closer, on the edge of her bed. He takes one of her hands in both of his, cradling it as carefully as he did those kittens they found in the alley behind their mother’s shop. She still remembers their feeble meows, and how Pietro tucked them under his shirt on his belly to share his warmth.

“She’s injured,” Pietro says now, defensively. “She needs to recover.”

“Of course, yes,” the Hawk says eagerly, leaping on the opportunity offered by Pietro’s obstinance. “She needs to rest, Barnes. Let her rest.”

Barnes.

Wanda doesn’t remember either of them having names before. Except, hidden in the cavern of the Hawk’s thoughts…

The Soldier, Barnes, sighs deeply. He cups the Hawk’s head, and when he brushes back his tawny gold hair, Wanda catches a glint of silver metal plate embedded in the man’s head, surrounded by ropy scar tissue as pink as fresh blisters.

Wanda purses her lips, reluctantly remembering the chaotic avalanche of thoughts and voices that had been battering at their weak cages, when she looked inside his head. The Soldier catches her eye. Barnes. It suits him, oddly enough. His blue eyes are grave, as if he knows, as if they both know, eventually, her hands will heal, and this conversation will be returned to.

In the snowstorm of his presence, Wanda is sure she can taste whisky in the back of her throat; hear distant trains on old tracks, rattling in her ears. She nods very gently, in a solemn promise she doesn’t know if she can keep.

“You should sleep,” the Soldier, Barnes, tells her, jutting his chin out. “We’ll let you sleep.”

Without another word he turns, bringing the Hawk with him, as they make for the other side of the cabin.

Wanda glances at her brother, who huddles closer to her side on the bed. His mouth is flat as he watches them, but his eyes are very soft, and he presses a kiss to her temple. He doesn’t smell like he used to. Something has changed, intrinsically, and she knows she has changed, too.

“Sleep,” he tells her, in their own tongue, and the words wash over her like spring rain on parched ground. “I will be here when you wake.”

She believes him, and with that, closes her eyes against the blurred shades of the murky cabin, and slowly returns to sleep.

s.h.i.e.l.d. private weapons division | lab 12

natasha romanoff

She was stripping AKs when she was interrupted. It was a heartbeat of a motion; the thorough repetition of the breaks and clicks and clacks. Each component perfectly made. Her fingertips knew their shapes like childhood trinkets.

Her mind swept through the lingering anger that simmered under her skin, brushing aside each fleeting thought with decided moments and gritted teeth. The air was still, the hum of silence absolute.

And then, quite suddenly, he was beside her.

Catlike paws for feet, she’d taught him well. He was tall, a tower of all the things she’d learned to resist; strength and softness, temptation and smiles. He was so close she could smell the sweat on his neck, the tacky hair gel, the starchy SHIELD gear.

“Natasha,” he said, and spikes swelled in the back of her throat. She could see his slow healing black eyes out of the corner of her own.

“Don’t,” she forced out, and her body flinched into him, and away.

The magazine slid out from between her fingers and with a carnie’s deft hand, Clint caught it. He put it on the table next to all the others, at a purposeful wrong angle to make her twitch.

“Love,” he said, dared to, in a voice that spoke the truth.

Then, Natasha punched him in the throat.

Clint went down hard.

The sound of it, the wet gasp of air leaving him, the shocked heave of his chest. The crash of his body hitting the ground. It reverberated through her.

Danger, screamed her instincts. Red alert.

Clint is down .

Natasha saw, suddenly, his big grey eyes, black with bruises, a burst blood vessel in one of them. His hand on his throat. His big grey eyes on her fist. It was raised before her, ready, and Natasha looked at it as if for the first time.

Her own raised fist. The way Clint stared at it, too.

Frightened.

She frightened him. More than. His hand on his throat, his breathing ragged, like torn skin.

“Nat,” he said, and the word was dry and all tangled up in his mouth, his eyes spoiled with tears. She put down the rest of the gun in her other hand very slowly. The hornet’s nest of her heart was pulsing horribly. Something was sticking her tongue to the roof of her mouth.

Clint, on the floor. On the floor where Natasha put him.

Where she punched him.

She could feel the fading blossom of pain in her knuckles. That tower toppled, all strength and softness vanishing as Clint clambered very slowly to his feet. Weak limbs shaking, and a hardness in his face she didn’t recognise that made her recoil. Clint swallowed once, twice, and cleared his throat as if to check it was still there.

Natasha tried to ignore the burning feeling behind her eyes.

Clint opened his mouth, a fishlike gape of surprise.

“I don’t,” he began, but the words must have scratched out too painfully, because he gave up.

His mouth closed. His gaze averted.

He turned away and left, stiff back, broad shoulders, and just as silently as he came in.

Natasha, frozen and pitiful and simmering, put down her raised fist like an anchor, dropped into the ocean bed.

“What made you agree to come in today?” Doctor Hajer asked.

Natasha didn’t reply at first. There were too many possible answers.

The silent look Phil passed her from across his desk. The hollow echo of her lonely SHIELD quarters. The steely anger of Agent Morse’s voice hissing in her ear.

The quiet sadness on Clint’s face when he told her about the op in Zimbabwe, and didn’t even look her in the eye as he said goodbye.

Natasha looked at her hands, which had felt too heavy, too clumsy, for days now. She had dropped her coffee that morning, and watched it soak into her socks, barely noticing the burn.

“I hurt someone,” she said, and Doctor Hajer didn’t laugh, although she should have done. There was nothing new there. Natasha had hurt more people than not in her life.

An immovable fact of her being.

Doctor Hajer merely raised her eyebrows.

Natasha looked back at her clumsy, hurtful hands, ignoring the burning behind her eyes.

“I hurt someone I love.”

She told Doctor Hajer before anyone else.

Before Clint, even.

It bit at her insides. It ate her alive.

He came back from Zimbabwe, tanned and tall. All strength and softness.

“Never again,” he told her, with his flat mouth and his big grey eyes. “I can’t live on third chances.”

Natasha relented to the burning behind her eyes. It dragged out of her like poison from a wound, grief and guilt. She held him fiercely, and kissed his brow, and made a promise she would keep to the end of her days,

It never happened again.

novi grad, sokovia

black widow

Smoke rises from the rubble of the Novi Grad Fortress; the sky is thick with the ash of pulverised stone. In the city below, residents have barred their doors and the streets are barren, trembling in the aftermath of the explosion that rocked the city’s very foundations.

“Magnetic field readings are off the charts,” Tony says from high in the air, where he is nothing more than a faint golden red glimmer through the smog.

Natasha kicks a chip of brick out from under her heel and looks over at Maria, who is frowning at the view from their perch on the east wall of the ruins. From inside the jet, Bruce makes a noise of agreement.

“There’s a radiation hotspot underground almost directly below you, Natasha,” he says.

“Any sign of life?” Steve asks. He’s standing beside Sam, in what looks like it used to be a courtyard, but is now only a scarred valley between half-walls.

“Heat signatures are all over the shop,” Tony replies. His suit crackles in the hum of the wind as he zooms closer. “Could be.”

“Alright,” Steve says. “Proceed with caution. Assume hostiles remain active until we’ve finished our sweep. Sam and I will cover the West entry. Nat, Maria, you take East. Tony, take the North. Thor, South. Bruce, you’ll be our outside eyes from the jet.”

Not a syllable misspoken. Not a hair out of place. Natasha feels a swoop of careful longing in her chest at the flatness of Steve’s voice. Perhaps it’s shame she feels, being so far for so long. She isn’t proud of herself for avoiding Steve so thoroughly. She can’t imagine the pain he’s in.

Or, rather, she can, too well. She can feel it, the pale distance of his eyes. The way he strengthens the edges of his voice, to keep his words from bleeding. Her last visit to the States had been so brief, her feet had barely touched American soil before she was itching to leave it again.

“Ready?” Maria asks, beside her. Natasha nods, taking in a steady breath.

There’s a tang to the air, beneath the chalky fog. Electricity like the aftermath of a thunderstorm, and something deeper, earthier. They make their way down the battlement. Past the broken arm of a crushed soldier sticking out of an avalanche of bricks. Past the body of another who has a bullet hole in his throat.

It’s hard not to see the ghostly handprints of the Winter Soldier left behind, on every toppled wall, on every fallen HYDRA member.

“High body count for one insurgent,” Maria says, and it’s not supposed to be unkind, but Natasha can picture Steve’s flinch all the same.

“Do we have any sign of what caused the blast?” Sam asks. Maybe he saw some of that flinch for real.

“Ground zero appears to be the radiation hotspot under the East entrance, according to these readings,” Bruce replies.

Moving through a blasted doorway that leads to a looming, unlit corridor, Natasha nods at Maria as they unholster a gun and flashlight each.

Natasha goes first. The sudden damp dark feels horribly reminiscent of the subway shelter she followed two men down, three years ago. Emilia Fowler in her ears, Anyone got eyes on Hawkeye?

She breathes through the sense memory, her eyes adjusting to the dark. Over the comms, and echoing through the walls, she can hear Tony’s suit wrenching through wreckage.

The first room they come to is full of fried computers. Some look deliberately smashed. Others, as if they’ve been burned out from the inside. There is frayed wiring everywhere, long smears of blood and the torched smell of metal and flesh.

“Got a possible data source for you, Stark,” Maria says.

“Hook J up, he’ll do his thing,” Tony retorts sharply, a thick strain of effort in his voice.

Natasha nods at Maria to go ahead, and moves further down the corridor.

She can taste that heavy electricity coating her teeth like the polluted grit of brick she’s inhaling. The fortress is powerless against their curiosity. Natasha digs through room after room. Cells with bars and rooms with shattered shelves. Laboratories without signs of their experiments, work tools without workmen.

Bodies stacked in doorways with the carelessness of a mission unhindered by hesitation. By the time she reaches a tall, narrow stairway, she’s lost count of the dead. The door is on its hinges. Bullet scars in the walls. Three broken necked men on their backs.

“Nat,” Bruce says, sharply, suddenly, and she freezes.

She can see it – the faintest glow of iridescent blue, so horrid and familiar, even three years later.

“It’s down there,” she says, and there is a thunderous punching sound from the south.

“I’m picking up a heartbeat,” Tony says. “Romanoff –”

“Copy that,” Natasha says, and steps down into the room, her footsteps sure, and her heart in her mouth.

Three years ago. The bags under his eyes, his scalp bruised from her blows.

Thank you, he told her in the jet, before they took off for New York, to save it from a wormhole. He said it quietly, his eyes on the skyline. For not giving up on me, he qualified needlessly. He was hurting and strong and wonderful and she should have reminded him she loved him then and there, but she didn’t, and there wasn’t another chance before he was gone.

Years later, Emilia Fowler’s dusty face in the rubble remains of the Triskelion. Blood on her lip.

The timeline fits, Agent Romanoff, please, I think –

And Natasha knows what Emilia Fowler thinks. She remembers the searing cut of that rogue FALCON curving through the air. She’s read the data of his approximate height and weight and it’s all off and it’s all wrong and it’s all just too close to perfect. Natasha knows what Emilia Fowler thinks.

Does anybody have eyes on Hawkeye? She asked.

Natasha can barely look at her anymore.

It’s a much taller room than she had anticipated.

It delves deep into the mountain. Scaffolds into the rafters like a vertical obstacle course she can’t make sense of. Piping and footboards hanging apart like broken limbs. To the left at the foot of the stairs, iron bars rooted deep into the stone form a mangled cage.

There are burn marks streaking over the floor in thick stripes. From the unstable ceiling, bricks have fallen, and peppered light falls over everything in shallow tones of grey. Against the far wall, half bent over broken furnishings that might once have been a desk, lies a man.

Natasha’s gun is trained on him as she approaches, her eyes caught between the rapid rise and fall of his chest, and the long, golden sceptre lying across his lap.

“I have eyes on your heartbeat, Stark,” she says. “Target unknown. He has the sceptre.”

“Do not approach, Romanoff,” Steve says in his most Captainly voice, but it’s too late.

She stands over him, close enough for the pulsing light of the sceptre to spill over her in eerie beats of blue.

The man is tall, long limbed; thin and burned. His skin a deathly pale, beset with the spidery marks and ligatures of something hot and toxic, like veins blistering out of him. His eyes are open, but listless, staring with milky pupils in the direction of the west wall. His lips twitch sluggishly.

“Romanoff, acknowledge,” Steve is saying, and Natasha removes her comm from her ear.

The sudden prickle of silence is disturbing as she takes in the man at her feet. There’s something pitiful in his repulsiveness. His wet, bloody chin. His twisted spine. His gaping mouth.

“What’s your name?” she asks. The man’s eyes twitch in their pitted sockets. His mouth flutters in a hush of air.

Natasha crouches beside him, her gun aimed at his gut, and leans in to hear his voice trapped between his teeth.

He’s muttering in a hushed rhythm that’s all too recognisable, despite the unfamiliar shapes of his actual words. The glint of a crucifix around his neck, welded by the heat of the blast into his chest, makes her skin crawl. Plucking it indelicately out of the bloody grooves it’s embedded in, Natasha ignores the pained whimper in the man’s throat as she rips it off him and throws it aside.

There’s a gurgle of sound in his breath as his eyes roll blindly.

His hands tighten weakly around their poor hold on the sceptre.

From high above their heads, Natasha hears Tony’s suit whirring down, and he clinks to landing behind her.

“Christ,” Tony says with a mechanical sounding whistle. “He lucid?”

“Don’t think so,” Natasha replies, standing back up and turning to see Sam and Steve across the room. Steve is wearing an expression of exasperation and relief that she’s more than used to by now. It’s only moments before Thor thunders to landing beside her.

“Not even Loki could wield the full potential of this weapon,” Thor says, frowning at the man. “Any human would be foolish to try.”

With that, he reaches down and pulls the sceptre easily from the man’s grasp. The man chokes and gurgles, his arms limply sliding to the floor without the sceptre’s weight to keep them up.

“I will return this to Asgard, where it will remain safe in my father’s vaults, far from temptation,” Thor promises gravely. He is staring with a look of sadness at the wretch lying at his feet. Natasha almost wishes she could feel something other than contemptuous disgust, but she can’t.

“What do we do with this guy?” Tony asks. “The base technically …”

Tailing off, Tony aims one hand at the man, scanning him. After a moment, a small hologram appears from his suit for all to see, showing the face of a man with a shaved head, bearing a marked resemblance to the gargling mess of a person before them.

“Lasse Kapanen,” Tony reads out. “Doctor. Thought to have died in Black Dolphin Prison almost three years ago. He was on SHIELD’s naughty list.”

“A.k.a HYDRA’s recruitment list,” Maria corrects darkly, standing halfway down the stairs Natasha had entered from. She jogs the rest of the way down, looking grim. “He could have information. We should bring him into our custody. Keep a low profile while we figure out what he knows.”

“This guy is not answering questions any time soon,” Sam scoffs, arms folded across his chest. “Look at him, for God’s sake. He needs a hospital.”

Kapanen blinks slowly, his gaze unfixed, sliding downwards.

Natasha doesn’t bother wasting her breath explaining to Sam how low a priority she considers this man’s basic human rights to be. She crouches at his side, ignoring Steve’s mothering warnings, and touches the man’s head. His ghostly eyes stare right through her.

It would almost be a mercy, she thinks bitterly, to put him out of this misery.

“I’ve got files,” Maria’s voice interrupts, loud enough to bounce through the scaffolding. Natasha lets go of the man’s hair, a few strands pulling loose from his scalp onto her hands like petals from a daisy, and moves aside to join Hill across the room.

She’s pulling folders and papers out of a crushed filing cabinet. The corners are seared, but most of the papers inside are readable.

“I’ll take them back for Bruce,” Tony says, his voice reed thin and shard sharp. There’s an off-handedness to his words that feels suddenly out of place, a forced casualness that doesn’t belong in this dingy ruin, and Natasha’s hackles rise like the roll of an oncoming storm. She feels a prickle of the paranoia that has kept her alive since childhood, and she withdraws, papers in hand, out of Tony’s reach.

“Why?” she asks.

Tony’s faceplate has been flipped up. His big brown eyes are wide and pleading as he fails to come up with a reason that isn’t the word Science in an important voice. Steve follows behind him, while Sam checks over the limp bodied Kapanen, tall and small and curious. Thor stands, broad and pensive, at Steve’s right hand side, his mouth set in a stern line she’s never seen before, the sceptre steady in his strong hands. 

All their eyes upon her like beacons in the night, like cameras on her downturned face, Natasha feels a burning need to turn away from their attention.

“Natasha,” Tony says in the gravest of tones. “Give me the files.”

Something catches in the back of Natasha’s throat, burning like bile, and she randomly pulls one folded sheet out of the mix, ripping it open with hard hands. There is the clink of Tony taking a step forward, and she instinctively pulls back a second time. She scans the document once, a series of hand and body signals that are numbered 14-22.

She tosses it aside with prejudice, and the next one, and the next one.

Bloodwork data. A sketch of a human hand. Four pages entitled EX8-OSTEO.

Each discarded clue scatters to the floor in sweeps of movement along with her disdain, and she steps back at Steve’s stern voice as he demands her name in three hard syllables that leave her throat clogged up, her lips pursed and her back half turned.

“Natasha, please don’t -” Tony tries, a second time, but he’s too late.

Natasha drops the rest of the files at her feet as she unfolds a wide A2 page that grabs her attention like none of the others, and for a merciful heartbeat she doesn’t understand why.

It’s a blueprint of wings, not unlike the ones she took from the Swordsman’s shoddy cabin. The ones that started this sorry downturn into the pits of HYDRA. For a moment, that merciful heartbeat, the details are a meaningless blur.

Then she reads the scribbles in black marker in the top right-hand corner of the page.

ASSET CALIBRATION (PROJECT STYMPHALIAN): JASTRZĄB

The bottom of her heart drops with the gravitational pull of a thousand suspicions settling into place all around her. The noxious torment of that secret fear that has lived inside her, every waking moment, since the fight at the bunker took place.

“Hawk,” she translates, out loud for all the room. The word punctures the air like a needle, and Natasha hears it as if it came not from herself, but from someone else, some mistaken shadow looming among them. She looks up at them all.

The wide-eyed Maria Hill and the tense-shouldered Steve Rogers. Sam’s worried brow and Thor’s soft mouth. The breathing corpse of Lasse Kapanen. The stricken look on Tony Stark’s face.

“The FALCON’s name is Hawk,” she says, and there is the slow contortion of shock in every face except one.

Tony’s eyes dart down and up, and his mouth doesn’t move at all, and that’s when Natasha understands perfectly.

It settles in her gut like arsenic, she understands , in her bones, as she doesn’t ever remember understanding anything before. That word is not a surprise to Tony Stark. He knew what it would say, and he knows it’s not a coincidence. He knows what it means.

She’s not misreading the facts. She’s not jumping to illogical conclusions.

There is a diagram of a repurposed FALCON suit, and it has been labelled HAWK, in Polish, in Clint Barton’s second language, and it is not a coincidence.

And Tony Stark knows why.

For a moment, Natasha’s mouth is too dry to speak. She can’t move her sandstone lips, for fear of cracking them.

She is ten thousand miles away, her head spinning with Agent Emilia Fowler’s voice ringing in her ears, Does anybody have eyes on Hawkeye?

She is below sea level, in a ruined fortress in Novi Grad, staring at a blueprint labelled Hawk.

“Clint,” she says, very, very quietly. So quietly the air barely brushes past her lips.

She can feel the crumbling walls of the fortress, as if they were falling all about her right this moment.

And here is Tony Stark, standing so close she can hear his breaths scraping over his tongue. He’s right in front of her, his metal hand gripping the other side of the blueprint, ready to tear it out of her grasp, with his unsurprised fucking face.

“How long have you known? How long have you known it was Clint?” she asks, the keel of her voice a splintered plank beset with an unnameable rage that trembles in her lungs. She bites it down, hard, and forces out, “How long, Stark?”

Tony’s own expression cracks like a sheet of glass under her barest hint of pressure. His eyes sparkle with guilt; he smells of metal and sweat and his mouth is skewed and his voice comes out as if through a sea cave when the tide rolls in.

“A few weeks,” he says, although Natasha would bet he can count it to the millisecond. She can see it, suddenly. His quietude when they arrived. His avoidance. His averted gaze. The weight of it all, crushing him, crushing them. She knows it in her bones. Jastrząb, fuck.

“Jesus,” someone says, maybe Steve, maybe Maria, Natasha doesn’t know. All she knows is she’s holding a diagram of wings labelled Hawk, and Tony is looking at her with eyes she wants to pull out and bury in the ground.

Tony Stark. She remembers his pasty face staring back at her as she buckled his watchstrap, when she was Natalie Rushman and Clint was texting her from his sickbed and Fury kept telling her to stay focused but all she wanted was to buy Burger King whoppers and strawberry milkshakes and take them back to Bed-Stuy and get mustard on her dresses and kiss Clint until he was all better but she was stuck, stuck babysitting Tony fucking Stark.

Tony Stark, standing here staring at her with his Death Merchant eyes and his pristine suit of titanium.

A sound itches up out of her throat. A death rattle of the peace that stayed her, the ignorance that blessed her.

Tony’s show-pony face falters at her laugh.

“Natasha,” he says, all vowels, all self-pity and pride. “You have to understand-”

“I have to, do I?” she asks him, ice thin over the strongest currents of the deepest lake.

Clint. Her Clint. Her own, all hers. Not theirs, hers. Not Tony’s, not Steve’s, not Emilia Fowler’s. Not anybody’s.

Tony’s teeth clack together as he bites down the rest of his diatribe, musters his courage and goes in, two for two.

“You have to know–”

“Know what?” Natasha hisses, her foot sliding over the floor with her step towards him, and Tony flinches, and Natasha doesn’t care.

Somebody else says her name. Not Tony though. Tony’s eyes are full of guilt and his face is full of shadows. He shakes his head.

Natasha doesn’t think she knows anything. Nothing real, nothing good.

All she knows is that dog was dead on the sidewalk and she told Fury it wasn’t Clint, and Clint, her fingers in his hair one last time but she didn’t commit it to her fingertips, and she’s forgetting the feel of those golden cowlicks, she’s forgotten the heat of his skin. Tony’s big eyes shiny and guilty and his hand is holding the page and Steve’s shoulders are squaring up behind him.

Emilia Fowler’s voice Does anybody have – the timeline fits – eyes on Hawkeye? The timeline fucking fitted and Natasha didn’t listen, she didn’t want to know, because how could she have looked at him and not seen him, it wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible.

Everything is closing in around her. The broken bones of the rafters above them, the scorched ground below. Five pairs of eyes staring and five bodies waiting; their gaze, their attention, some awful pitiful thing, like that breathing corpse in the corner. That corpse, with his rolling eyes and his praying mouth, she wants to be sick.

Jastrząb.

They called him Jastrząb.

Natasha’s eyes dart to Kapanen, to his lifeless limbs and hushed breaths, Sam Wilson leaning over him like he deserves protection, like he deserves to take up space in this world.

He was not theirs to name. He was not theirs to control.

He was not theirs.

Thank you , he said in the jet, and he never needed to thank her. There were no debts between them, not really, not in any meaningful way. She was his, and he was hers.

He was not theirs, but they took him anyway.

They called him Jastrząb.

There is tug, and Natasha feels the blueprint slip out of her grip as Tony pulls it away.

It’s all the trigger her taut instincts need.

The impulse strikes, surges through her in an instant, and when she meets resistance in the air it’s an armoured arm blocking her and she falls through the momentum of the blow when Tony pulls away, blasters whining and her voice tears out with grasping hands but they are not fast enough to stop him, not strong enough, not enough at all –

“Let go of me!” Natasha bellows when a lunging arm blocks her path before she can leap up after him. Voices are yelling. White noise like broken glass.

Steve, large and strong and violent, she’s never fought him with all her strength, he’s never fought her with all of his own. His arms, massive and scorching, impervious to her clawing nails as he swings her back, away from Wilson as he blocks her view of Kapanen, away from Tony who’s flown out of reach. Steve Rogers, the unstoppable force, the immovable object. He’s a barrier, a burning wall between her and her prey. She strikes out and so does Steve, and he grabs her with a fierce, unyielding grip.

Natasha fights.

She fights with everything she has and with nothing she knows. All forward, all fervour, Madame B. would be ashamed of it, heels whipped to bleeding for her sloppy hooks and bullish moves. No Widow moves like her heart is broken, because there is no heart to break, yet here she is anyway. Fighting, it’s what she knows. It’s what she does.

“Steve!” Natasha roars, head flung down at his thrice broken nose but she misses his face entirely in the grapple for freedom.

“Natasha-Natasha-Nat-” he dares say in hoarse sorrow that spills, crude oil in the ocean of her rage.

Natasha scrabbles at his arms, his throat, his face, and Steve takes it all. He takes it. His hands clamp over her wrists without striking back. His shoulders bear her weight without tossing her aside.

She strikes with her legs and he simply takes her down with him and it’s an insult and a terror that guts her like a meat hook. A crushing rush. There is nothing but his body heat and her own thumping heart and an awful scraping sound that rackets through them, through her.

She can taste salt on her lips, feel the shake of her shoulders, the flutter of jastrąb stretching the elastic of her limbs to breaking. Clint, her Clint. Her Clint. The feathers of his hair in her hand and that dog bleeding out on the sidewalk.

A few weeks.

It’s been weeks.

It’s been years.

She can feel Steve’s face, taste his tears like her own. She wants to disappear inside him. Bury her clawed hands into his chest and curl up in the cavity left behind, she wants to vanish into him and never look at Tony Stark’s guilt-ridden eyes again.

“Tony don’t –”

“Stark, it’s not –”

“Keep her –”

“Rogers –”

She can still hear his voice. That rubbed raw voice of his is still talking, can’t shut up for a moment, not even when her heart is breaking into splinters and cutting up her insides and a sound rips out of her that she will never make again.

“Stop, stop- stop!” she says, or perhaps she begs. Can’t bear it but it tumbles out, in heaving sobs she didn’t know how to make as a child, and the hard ground under her shoulders leaves bruises that will disappear too soon.

Steve’s arms tighten around her. His own breaths are rugged and loud in his panting chest, boxing her in with a largeness she can’t compete against. Large shoulders, large hands, large heart.

“Stop,” she says, one final time, her eyes clenched shut, and the silence is swallowing and absolute.

Scuffed footsteps come to a halt. A hitched breath is held.

Natasha hides in the dark of her closed eyes, the stifling heat of Steve Rogers’ arms, the unbidden ghost of wingbeats scratching at the corners of her memory. Steve’s mouth is on her crown. His fingers are dimpling her back in their inexorable clutch.

She tries to keep the sounds trapped in her throat, but they bleed out in fits and starts without permission.

When she opens her eyes, she can see her hands crushed up between her breastbone, and Steve’s. When she tilts up her head, she can see the thick red lines her nails scored down his face, two grazes of broken skin on his cheek and neck. He doesn’t even seem to notice them, just looks down at her with his eyes the same insulting shade of brilliant blue, his eyelashes clumped together and his mouth pinched at the corners.

Out of the corner of her gaze, she sees the glimmer of red and gold approaching, the slow step of Tony’s suited feet. She’s keenly aware of the damp ache of her eyelids, the heavy flush of her face. Steve’s blood under her nails.

Tony is still holding the blueprint in both of his hands, looking like one hundred thoughts, each more anguished than the next.

Natasha remembers him, high in the air in the moonless sky above the bunker thirteen months ago. Entwined with the blades of the FALCON shape cutting at his armour only – it wasn’t a shape, it wasn’t a FALCON, it wasn’t. It was Clint.

They called him Jastrząb.

Jastrząb . Clint. Clint, high in the air, that mangled thing that was only half human, that was silent as an owl and ruthless and HYDRA and Clint, her Clint, not theirs, not theirs to destroy, not theirs to deform. Clint, tumbling through the air when Sam Wilson blasted his fucking wings off.

Natasha chokes on a sob before it bursts her insides, and she clenches her teeth, keening under the box of Steve Rogers’ weight.

“Stop, Clint, stop,” she says, and Steve tries to whisper something but she can’t hear it.

Natasha shakes her head and it bangs on the hard floor when she bucks just once, just one more try, and lets out a shredding scream of three years wasted in the dark.

“I’ll help you,” he promised her, in the dark underbelly of Rome. His suntanned face, his rough hands, his smile. She didn’t love him straight away. She didn’t even like him. But the memory is dusted with what they would become, now. Motes of light peppering the way he batted her knife away, the way he smiled at her, and called her Natalia, and promised, I’ll help you.

He kept his promise. He kept it.

Why the fuck hasn’t she kept hers?

She grieved him. She fucking grieved him while he waited for her.

The next thing Natasha knows is Steve’s body weight changing. His chest lifts off her, and she half expects to find herself lying in a dent in the floor, the way he’d pinned her. Her hands are free, and she remembers, callously, her Red Room trainer unlocking her handcuffs every morning. Each girl freed, bed by bed, morning by morning, clink after clink after clink.

It’s an unkind comparison, and she doesn’t voice it, although she wants to.

Steve kneels over her before shifting off. The scratch marks on his face have faded to pink paint lines. His eyes are tired, and wet. His shoulders are stooped, and behind him, Sam Wilson is standing with his wings out, and the insult glides over her, water on a duck’s back. Natasha’s used to being untrustworthy.

She pushes herself up. She can feel Maria behind her, hear her feet on the ground a safe distance away. Thor is watching with those sad eyes full of stars and Natasha turns her face away, and finds herself looking at Tony.

The papers are gone. Gone where, she hasn’t the slightest clue. Just gone, and Natasha takes a shaking lungful of dusty air. She realises, a hum of stupidity throttling her thoughts, he isn’t wearing his Iron Man suit anymore. He’s stepped out of it, leaving it hovering in sentry mode in the middle of the room. He’s wringing his bare hands in looped fingers as he watches her get to her feet.

For a moment they stare at each other. Tony’s mouth hanging open, and Natasha’s heart shut up like the barred windows of a cell.

“Don’t ask me to forgive you,” she says, and Tony doesn’t have the skills to hide the disappointment in his eyes. He simply nods his head.

Natasha lifts a hand and places it squarely on Steve’s chest without looking at him. His own hand holds her forearm in return. They’ll talk later, she’s sure. There’s too much to say now, and she can’t look at him with the marks of her nails marring his skin.

Instead, she looks around the room, resolutely taking in each crevice without any of the faces still watching her, until they come to rest on a strange mark on the ground, near the centre of the room. Unlike the rest of the dents and cracks that are clearly scorched with whatever exactly exploded here, these are two grooves in the concrete. Identical and, when she walks over to them, she realises, very deep.

Steve follows her, step for step, and so does Maria. The others don’t approach, and Natasha thinks she might feel sore over it later, but not now. She hasn’t the space for anything right now. There is just the heavy thrum of her heart, the rasp of her breath down her throat, and one word stuttering like a record skip.

Hawk. Hawk. Hawk.

Leaning down, Natasha can slot most of her hand all the way down one of the marks in the floor.

Steve copies her gesture, and even his larger hands can wedge easily down into the gap. Natasha looks up, catching his eye without meaning to, and to his credit, he doesn’t react. He simply shrugs, jaw jutting at the unusual marks, before standing up again.

“Tony,” he says. Nobody comments on the way he pauses to clear his throat, or the roughness of his voice. Natasha feels a burning on the back of her neck. “Get this guy to the jet. Maybe Bruce can help stabilise him. Maria, Sam, clear whatever files you think we’ll need. Thor, get that deathstick out of here.”

Natasha doesn’t pay attention to the mumbling affirmations, the rush of movements about the room. She traces the insides of the floor marks. Sheer cuts, like the driving strokes of blades directly into the concrete. Coarse at the edges, smooth on the inside.

It’s silent all about them before she looks up, and there is only Steve.

The marks on his face aren’t gone yet. There’s a bruise on the corner of his mouth, and his hair is out of place, and his eyes are the same true blue they’ve always been. Natasha, kneeling on the floor, can’t escape the scalding shame that floods inside her. Three years she’s watched, and waited, and for what? For this?

She remembers the bunker. Steve, the picture of devastation, his shield on the ground as he stared at the Winter Soldier, wearing his lover’s face. She wants to burn the memory, along with everything else. She wants to burn it all.

Steve sucks in a deep, shuddering breath that barely makes it back out again.

“They’ll take care of each other,” he says, and the worst part is he means it.

Natasha blinks away the burn of her eyes, can’t bring herself to push back the tears that spill down her cheeks as she bites her lips together and nods.

“I – yeah,” she replies.

Are they even still together?

She has to believe they are. Three years wasted, thinking he was alone. She has to believe he isn’t. She has to.

Steve holds out his hand, and when she takes it, he pulls her back up to her feet in a solid yank. She remembers when they found him in the ice. She remembers Clint teasing Phil for days. She wonders what he’s going to think of them, now.

The scratch marks on Steve’s face are bright and accusatory. The bruise on his mouth seems darker than it is.

Jastrząb, they called him. How dare they?

He was not theirs to name.

“If Secretary Ross catches word the Avengers have taken in a prisoner, all hell will break loose. You know that, right?” she says, glancing at the broken desk where the man’s body is no longer lying prone.

Steve nods grimly.

“How have you been?” she asks, for the first time.

Steve shrugs noncommittally, and Natasha winces.

“You weren’t there,” he tells her. “It’s been hard.”

Natasha nods. There’s no point in apologising. Steve knows that as well as her.

“Are you coming home?” he asks.

Natasha glances around the room, taking in the scorched remains, the nonsensical cuts, the mangled cage, the ruined furniture. Her heart thumps heavily in her chest. She wants to refuse. They were here, she’s sure of it. They were right here, and she wants to stay here, sniff out their trail like a bloodhound, she feels so close.

Steve reaches out, and takes her hand. He’s blood warm and true blue and she feels a surge of compassion that is too big for her stuttering lungs.

“Let’s go,” she agrees.

They leave the room as they found it, but for the broken man and the sceptre. Natasha’s knees ache wearily as they clamber back out into the weak sunlight above ground, and when she wipes her face with her palms, they come away wet and grimy. She follows in Steve’s large shadow, to the jet.

Jastrząb, she thinks, again, and it stings the exact same.

She thinks about the creature she’d seen, soaring above in the night sky.

And, as the jet takes off high into the air, Natasha wishes she could get one last view of the smouldering ruins of the HYDRA Fortress, to commit the sight to memory, the way she’d watched the smoke rise from the remains of the Red Room one last time, before she left.

a waking nightmare

bucky barnes

His teeth are bared like an animal. The shard of glass from the monitor is digging into his palm, cutting the tendons of his fingers. The shouting of the men around him is incoherent, a rupture of vowels he doesn’t know, and yet he understands instinctively.

“Stay back! Stay back!” he tries to shout, but the words come out all wrong. They’re not coming out properly. They’re not coming out in words he knows.

They’re not English.

The surge of panic leaves him breathless. He’s backed up against the wall, winded by the force of throwing himself back. The men are shouting, and their guns are pointed at him, but nobody is shooting. He has a shard of glass in his hand and he doesn’t remember what he was going to do with it because they all have guns, big fucking guns, what was he gonna fucking do?

Tears are burning down his face. His breaths are as sharp as the glass cutting his hand and blood is pouring down his arm as he bellows in words he doesn’t remember learning.

“STAY BACK! STAY BACK!”

The men are clamouring, they’re panicking, too. They have fucking guns, what are they so afraid of?

Bucky tries to push himself all the way back into the brickwork of the wall but he can’t go any farther. He screams at them to stay away, doesn’t recognise those consonants, they hurt his teeth to say. His head is bursting with thoughts like lightning, scattering even as they land.

A man steps forward out of the bunch, his gun a little lower, and he isn’t shouting. He’s speaking.

“Put the glass down, Soldier,” he is saying, and Bucky grips it tighter in response. Pain spasms down his arm.

Blood oozes out, dripping in thick splatters to the floor. When Bucky glances down, he realises he’s naked. He can’t remember getting naked.

Then again, he can’t remember being clothed, either.

He can’t remember.

“Soldier,” the man at the front says, his voice so much softer than the jittery men behind him. He’s tall, soft hair that’s dusty blond. Blue eyes like crystals set deep above prominent cheekbones. He’s familiar. He’s so familiar.

Bucky begs him to stay back. He raises the glass shard out in front of him, and his hand shakes terribly but he keeps it up anyway. The man keeps getting closer and Bucky shrinks against the wall, tries to squirm away but he’s burrowed himself into a corner and now there are just bricks and the man, and between them, Bucky. Bucky and his single shard of glass that’s buried into his hand.

“Soldier,” the man’s voice is a soothing timbre, a mellow sound against the clattering of guns and anger, and Bucky feels something shift inside him at the sound. His hand drops a little, as blood pours in thick globs out of the wounds and runs sticky down his arm.

The man reaches out his own hand, and Bucky tries to tell him to stay back, but this time, no words come at all, not in any language. Just a howling plea, a dog’s plea. He bruises his shoulders against the wall and holds out the glass shard and begs with a long howl of sound, and when the man’s hand closes around the piece of glass, Bucky shatters into a thousand pieces.

His knees give out, and the man stands over him, holding the bloody piece of glass, looking down at the crumpled heap of Bucky’s skin and bones as he sobs and begs. Bucky tries to heave in a breath, his folded limbs aching, covered in blood.

“Stay,” he says, and he thinks that might be wrong.

What was he saying?

The man tosses the shard of glass over his shoulder, useless, and crouches in front of Bucky, who flinches.

When he takes Bucky’s injured hand, he makes a tutting sound of disapproval, turning the palm out and over and back for inspection.

“Please, stay,” Bucky whimpers, as the man digs a gloved thumb into the deep wound in his palm.

“This,” the man says, with a cold anger that feels like more glass in Bucky’s gut, “Is HYDRA property. You do not damage what is mine. Do you understand?”

Bucky nods, even though he’s not sure he understands at all, and when a fresh wave of tears pour down his cheeks, the man slaps them away furiously. He grips Bucky’s hand painfully tight, so that more blood leaks down his arm, dropping flecks onto the floor, and Bucky’s legs.

“You do not damage HYDRA property. Do you understand, Soldier?”

Bucky heaves in a thick breath, nodding desperately as he watches the man crush his knuckles together harder.

“Please, stay, please,” he begs, and the man’s smile is a cold balm of promises when, finally, he lets go.

Bucky pulls his injured hand back to his chest, cradling it as his fingers spasm.

“Get up, Soldier,” the man says. Bucky clambers painfully to his feet, tripping over himself to step into the man’s shadow. Behind the man, the others have turned silent, and curious. Their guns are still raised, but they are forgotten in their loose hands. “Back to the chair, Soldier.”

Bucky’s feet drag painfully over the floor as he walks in the direction the man points at. His head is thumping, and he stumbles twice, his hand cupped to his chest. The group of men part silently, pressing in closely as Bucky passes them.

He’s almost at the chair when a hand presses flat against his spine and shoves him, hard.

He goes down like folded steel, tumbling to the floor in a splatter of three torn limbs, as pain shoots up his arm. His breath catches in his chest and he heaves, almost throwing up. When he crawls up again, and glances over his shoulder, the man is grinning wildly. He has the glass shard in his hand again, and is tossing it up and catching it without looking. Bucky’s head spins, and his stomach heaves.

He gets back in the chair.

Romanoff

Hard copies of all remaining evidence enclosed. The only remaining ones. They belong to you.

Tony

rome, italy (before)

clint barton

There was a dead man in the hotel bed.

Two broken mirrors, a snapped pen, a ripped pillowcase, and an open window letting in the hot midday breeze.

“Fuck!” Clint hissed through clenched teeth. “Too late.”

“Exit route?” Coulson asked over the comms unit.

Clint snorted, eyeing the window of the ninth storey room; the fluttering blinds tapping at the ledge.

“Unlikely,” he scoffed, kicking the broken pen over the floor. “We –”

As he looked up, a flash of colour caught his eye and Clint froze in his tracks, voice jammed in his throat.

He could see her. The glass wall of the shower was visible through the open bathroom door, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, and reflected in the sliver of light bouncing from the panel – a thin tumble of red hair, pale skin, drawn breath.

For a heartbeat, Clint considered it. Truly considered calling it in.

Only, in the fraction of time it took for him to not speak, he lost the advantage of his observation.

The Black Widow sprang into action.

“Barton, report!”

Coulson’s voice was piercing, but Clint had neither the breath nor the time to respond as he swung, ducked, dodged.

She was fast – lethal and vicious and armed. Her long red hair whipped like a banner his fingers couldn’t grasp through the air as she rolled out from under his punch; the sting of her knife over his bicep splashed blood over the floor as he gave chase to her scampering feet.

Past the bed. Through the door. Out into the hotel corridor –

Clint swung with momentum out into the hallway after her, and within moments, a siren was blaring as a fire exit was opened without warning.

Sloppy, was his only thought, as his legs burned, bolting out into the sunshine after her. He squinted at the elegant lizard-like scuttle of the Black Widow swinging down off the scaffold stairs and onto the back of a parked truck.

For a brief moment, she looked up at him. Her green eyes were ablaze, and Clint faltered, one hand on the gash in his arm, taking in her young, rosy-cheeked face. Sweat shiny on her brow.

“Barton – report – Barton!” Coulson was saying in his measured-yet-actually-panicking way.

Clint took the comm off, tossing it on the steps. He grabbed the railing and swung over them.

The Black Widow, Natalia Romanoff according to her spartan file, took off down the street.

Clint followed.

He followed her for years.

But first.

The Catacombs of San Callisto were off limits to the public at this time of night, but No Entry signs, whatever their language, had been no match for a fourteen-year-old carnie Clint Barton, much less a SHIELD-trained Clint Barton.

All day their chase had led them through Rome, from sly turns down quiet alleyways to Clint, sweltering in a stolen sweatshirt to cover up the wound in his arm, burrowing through the crowds marching towards the Colosseum like a rabbit through a warren, following an artfully placed scarf concealing vibrant red hair.

His arm stopped bleeding hours ago, but the blood was still tacky and irritating. He had only his short bow, and three arrows, couldn’t risk losing her to source anything more. The gun in his holster was heavy, and he was loath to use it. As far as he could tell, the Widow only had her knives, but that was more than enough.

The catacombs echoed with even the faintest of his steps. It was so dark, the air so lonely, and as Clint traced the long corridor of graves stretching out before him, he held his breath, listening for the barest pin drop of movement.

Nocking his arrow, Clint walked forwards, eyes on all sides as he searched the shapes of the walls for anything out of place.

“Natalia?” he said, eventually, into the blankness of the air around him.

Nothing.

“Natalia,” he tried again, louder this time. “My name is Clint Barton. You know me as Hawkeye.”

Up ahead, a light shaft of some kind was spilling outwards, casting muted grey shadows along the walls. Something was standing sentry, almost out of sight. He kept his movements slow and wandering, and pretended not to have seen her this time.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Natalia,” he called out. Step after step on the ground smoothed out by thousands upon thousands of feet. He could taste his heart in his mouth. “I don’t think you want to hurt me, either.”

A long shot, perhaps. He’d seen the fire in her eyes, looking up at him from the street.

“You could have killed me in that hotel room, and you didn’t,” he continued.

Step. Step. Step.

Out into the wider sanctuary, past the grave nooks, past the odd, stooping shapes on the walls.

The sentry up ahead seemed to shiver without movement. Clint half-turned his back on it, his attention never leaving her.

“It’s just you and me here, Romanoff,” he promised her, one foot sliding over a smooth patch of stone.

He wondered at her stillness. Was that how he looked, in his nest? No wonder some of the other recruits avoided his gaze. It was frightening, her stillness, her absoluteness.

“Come on,” he whispered, and for just a second he bowed his head long enough to appear distracted.

He was ready for her this time.

The Widow leapt out from the shadows as silently as she had stood, and the only sound was the whuff of air and the smack of flesh as Clint swung his bow, striking her across the torso, sending her careening over into the wall behind him.

Romanoff snarled, her impatience stirred, and there was only the glint of sharpness to go by as Clint ducked out of the way of a knife aimed directly for his throat. She was wild and skilled as she lunged at him, more blades in hand, twisting them so smoothly it was as if she had conjured them from thin air.

Clint swerved out of her path, the brute strength of his backswing all that kept her from gutting him, and in the space of a few moments he felt the sharp, deep agony of something sliding into the meat of his thigh.

“Fuck!” he cried out instinctively, as his leg buckled but instead of backing up, as he was clearly supposed to, he let the momentum roll him forwards, and in her surprise the infamous Black Widow hesitated – and it was all he needed.

The second knife clattered to the floor. The woman tumbled under his grip, her legs twisting but he had her pinned, and as blood poured down his leg and sweat poured down his face, he saw her rage and he saw her fear and he saw her, all of her. The green in her eyes, the hurt of them, as the tip of his arrow touched her damp throat and she jutted out her chin, welcoming the defeat with fury.

For a second, they remained. The Black Widow pinned under Hawkeye’s arrow, awaiting her execution.

And, for a moment, Clint truly considered it. His fingers on the arrow, her life cupped in his rough hands, he considered it. It was, after all, his assignment.

And then, the moment passed.

Clint removed the arrow from the Widow’s throat, and her eyes sparkled with sheer disgust. He stood, kicking her abandoned knife far out of reach, the other one still digging into his leg as he limped backwards, two steps. The Black Widow lay frozen, her gaze scattered as she followed his movements, and Clint placed the bow and arrow down on the ground behind him.

He took a long, slow breath, teeth gritted against the pain throbbing down his left leg.

“Natalia, stop,” he said, as calmly as he could, and she looked young, and she looked sad. How old was she? Twenty? Nineteen, even?

“How?” she asked, and her voice did not tremble, even as she lay on the grounds of a catacomb, awaiting death in the bleak dark underworld of Rome.

Something unfolded inside of Clint. Some secret, lonely thing, that stretched out from his guts to his fingertips, looking at her. Nineteen, twenty, her grave half dug.

“I’ll help you,” he replied.

“Why?” she asked, and it was a fair question, but he laughed a little, anyway, and her eyes narrowed.

Clint held up his hands in soft surrender. He squatted down, close to the ground and his thigh burned in protest, as Natalia very cautiously pushed herself up with the heels of her hands.

“You could have killed me in that hotel room, but you didn’t,” he said. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Natalia flung back, and it was meant to be a sneer, but it was such a lost sound, and Clint felt it in his soul. He remembered that moment, too. Looking at someone he was supposed to kill, and something freezing his killer instinct in place, some unknown thing, some frightening thing more powerful than every lesson he’d learned before.

Clint reached out his hand, and stood up, waiting for Natalia to take it.

It took almost a full minute for her to move. When she did, her hand in his was warm, and she was featherlight in his grip.

She was short, much shorter than he’d realised, and he was so distracted by it he nearly missed the turn of her hand as she reached behind her, and in one swift move swung it out and up and –

Clint smacked the blade out of her hand before it could slice his face in half.

Natalia gave him a tight smile, one shoulder cocked in a careless shrug.

“Just checking,” she replied coolly. “Goodbye, Clint Barton.”

She turned to leave, heading deeper into the catacombs, her red curls bouncing.

“Where the hell are you going?” he called after her, his voice echoing in the gloom.

“Away,” she replied, without turning back.

Clint sighed, picking up his bow and arrow and following her into the crypts.

“I didn’t invite you,” she scolded over her shoulder, and Clint just chuckled, matching her steady pace from five feet behind.

“I rarely go where I’m invited, Natalia.”

She didn’t reply.

She didn’t tell him to go away, either.

Five months later, Clint called Phil Coulson on his private number, and told him: I’m not dead. Set up a rendezvous. I have someone you’ll want to meet.

avengers base

falcon

Perhaps he should feel guilty about snooping around the private living quarters of a national icon. His Ma did her best to raise a polite enough scoundrel, after all, and there was a time not so long ago when he wouldn’t even consider acting in stealth mode on a friend…

However, the time for politeness has long since passed as far as Sam Wilson is concerned. If Steve Rogers wanted his privacy respected, he shouldn’t spend so much time violently sulking in the gym.

Not to mention, he should have JARVIS lock his doors.

The living space is, somehow, both over-furnished and lacking in home comforts. The kitchenette is stuffed to the brim with cooking implements and starved of ingredients, and Sam is torn between heartbreak and heavy judgement as he starts the heavy task of moving pans around to make room for boxes of nut bars and dried goods, turning the ornamental dust display bowl back into a fruit bowl, and stocking the fridge with smoothies and vegetables.

He’s sliding the empty crate across the floor towards the door, mid-turn on his heel, when he discovers he is very much not alone.

“Fuck! Jesus shit,” he says, and ignores the phantom scolding from his mother in the back of his brain as he catches his breath, scowling at the redhead standing in the doorway to Steve’s room.

“Hello, Samuel,” Natasha Romanoff says, one eyebrow arched and her mouth flat.

“I was just…” Sam says, gesturing around the kitchen and waggling his fingers. “His metabolism is too high to skip meals.”

It feels a little lame, saying it out loud. Steve’s a big boy, after all, and under the pensive eye of the Black Widow, Sam feels a bit foolish for the all-consuming worry he’s been acting in the shadow of. Across the room, Natasha nods, but doesn’t say anything at first.

There’s something missing from Natasha, that Sam is sure he doesn’t know her well enough to identify. Steve probably knows; they seem to know each other well, better than Sam could have guessed, before moving upstate and sharing domestic space with them. He doesn’t pretend to understand whatever there is between them.

Whatever it is that has Steve touching her arms and shoulders every time she’s in reach; that has Natasha barefoot in Steve’s quarters, in one of Steve’s shirts.

Then again, it’s none of his business, he reminds himself sternly.

“You’re a good friend,” Natasha says, her shell pink smile aimed at the overflowing fruit bowl.

Her words jolt Sam back into action. He slams the last cupboard door shut, and fiddles with a rogue pear that won’t fit nicely in the bowl. Sam hasn’t spent much time with Natasha, one-to-one. She had rocked up in his house, unannounced, making bold accusations, and before Sam could catch his breath, there had been a HYDRA shitstorm to deal with.

Not to mention, she’s only been a real presence at the base since their return from Sokovia, which - nope, Sam isn’t touching that one. He’s had details from Bruce. He knows his input will be as welcome as Satan at a christening.

Natasha slinks into the room, her red curls soft, her eyes hard, and it’s only when she hops up onto the window ledge overlooking a courtyard that he realises what’s in her hand.

“You shouldn’t - should you - is that?” he splutters.

Natasha’s eyebrows twitch, as she looks down at the battered blue book in her hands. The corners are curled with age. Her smile is gentle as she thumbs the fragile spine.

Sam feels guilty just looking at it.

He knows what it is. Bruce warned him.

It’s Bucky Barnes’ journal, or whatever the fuck it was they kept in the trenches of World War Two.

And now the Black Widow is flicking through it like it’s a glossy magazine in a dentist’s office.

“It’s sweet,” Natasha says, after a moment of deliberation. Her forehead is wrinkled with a look Sam can only call longing. “He’s sweet. At least, he was.”

Sam nods, his mouth dry. There’s no separating Bucky Barnes, in truth, from the masked monster that tore off his wings and booted him off that rooftop. The healed crack in his skull feels itchy, just remembering. He rarely goes a day without headaches, anymore. It’s hard to imagine a face behind that mask, let alone a sweet one.

“Steve doesn’t mind?” he asks, before he can think the better of questioning Black Widow.

Then again, she doesn’t look much like Black Widow at the moment, with her rumpled hair and her naked toes, their nails painted lilac.

Natasha’s blank stare seems to root around inside him, and Sam tries not to retract the question.

After a moment, Natasha clenches the book between her knees and folds her arms again. The silence feels like a cobra, unhinging its jaw and swallowing them whole. Sam wants to look away, but he has the strangest feeling Natasha will think less of him if he does.

To his great surprise, it’s Natasha who blinks first. Her gaze shifts to the open bedroom door, whether because she wants to close it, or hide behind it, Sam can’t tell. She’s startlingly young - or at least, she looks it.

Then again, he remembers uncomfortably, so is Steve. They make Sam feel old, though he’s barely more than five years their senior.

Natasha lets out a soft breath, a pushing exhale that seems to steal some of the blankness from her eyes, too.

“What happened in Sokovia,” she says, almost hesitant.

Sam holds his breath, his stomach tight. It will be difficult to ever forget what happened in Sokovia. It had been shocking - horrifying, even. The wildfire of Natasha’s rage had scorched them all, flashing into being with such little warning, burning in and out of existence with painful speed. And the way Steve had caged her to the ground; Sam doesn’t think he imagined the tears in his eyes as he begged her to stop.

Sam feels uncomfortable, remembering the fracture of her voice. Now, Natasha is quiet, and small, and young; there’s little of the Black Widow in the curve of her ashamed neck.

“It won’t happen again,” she says, and meets his eyes with a prideful challenge, as if daring him to suggest otherwise. Sam isn’t going to.

“OK,” he says. He’s heard similar determinations at the VA; vets coming off a bender, swearing never again; cooling from an outburst, softening from a bad spell.

Sometimes it’s true, sometimes it’s not. Sam knows better than to express doubt when it’s promised or disappointment when that promise is broken. It’s not his place. And in any case - well.

Sam isn’t sure he could blame her, anyway.

If HYDRA hadn’t kicked down his front door last year, providing a better outlet for his betrayed anger, he can’t be certain he wouldn’t have unleashed hell on Steve and Nat himself. His heart still smarts, even at the memory of their accusation - and worse, their revelations.

The thought that Riley’s suit was pulled off him, that he was maybe even collateral damage for it…

That someone surgically attached it to another human being. He feels sick every time he wakes up from a ghastly nightmare. He’d pushed a gun into the joint and shot one of those wings clean off.

It’s barely a memory. Soaring through the air. The body plummeting to the ground. The rooftop.

Steve’s shout of warning too late before a metal hand grabbed him by the arm, his ribs kicked in and then he was falling.

And it wasn’t the body at all, was it? It wasn’t a faceless stranger.

It was Clint Barton. Sam’s seen photos now. More than one. A SHIELD profile of a flat mouthed man with grey eyes and sandy hair and a strong jaw. And a snap from a beach, a violet plaster on his upper arm. Lilac hearing aids in his ears. His eyes bright, his smile toothy, his hair kissed with sunlight. Handsome, happy, real.

No, Sam can’t blame Natasha Romanoff for her horror, or her grief.

On her window perch, Natasha kicks her legs up, hugging the blue notebook to her chest.

If Barnes and Barton are still together, he supposes…if he was Natasha, he’d want to know whatever he could about the man his partner was travelling with, even if it’s a version lost to the annals of history and the cruelty of HYDRA.

“Romanoff,” he says, before he can think the better of it, and Natasha’s eyebrows are so delicate, so dangerous.

“Yes, Samuel?” she asks calmly.

Sam pushes his hand back against the cool kitchen worktop.

“If you need…” he starts, but finds he doesn’t know what it is he wants to offer. Friendship? An ear? A shoulder?

It feels so petty, so condescending. It dies on his tongue, and Natasha laughs at its demise. Her eyes aren’t full of tears, but they are full, nonetheless.

“Stark sent me the files they got from the fortress,” she says thickly. “They put something in his head. An implant. Fixed his hearing.”

Sam doesn’t say I know. He got the same briefing as the others. The sparknotes edition. He can’t imagine what the raw data looked like. He wonders if it was wise to give it to her. Natasha’s mouth pinches at the corners, and when she speaks again, there’s a trace of an accent that isn’t American, bubbling to the surface.

“SHIELD offered him something similar. Not that intrusive, but…he said no. He didn’t - want it.”

Sam doesn’t pretend to understand why this, of all things, is what is at the forefront of Natasha’s mind. Not the spine and wings surgically implanted. The metal soldered into his skin. Injections and chemicals and bone marrow transplants. It doesn’t matter. 

All that matters is it makes Natasha’s voice shake. Makes her fists clench.

Sam feels torn between the belief she deserves a hug, and the knowledge she will put her fist through his sternum if he tries. Natasha shakes her head.

Another pushing exhale.

“You bring any coffee?” she asks.

Sam allows it. He offers her a grin and opens a cupboard, revealing coffee beans and six colourfully boxed kinds of tea.

Natasha returns his smile, albeit barely. She hops to the floor, notebook in hand, and disappears momentarily through the bedroom door, returning before the scent of brewing coffee can fill the room.

She pulls out creamer and fusses with the cups, and Sam feels himself acclimating to her presence. They stand side by side, watching the pot fill up.

He thinks about what she said. About Barton, saying no to the surgery. About Barnes, being sweet.

“We’ll find them,” he says, without looking at her.

“I know,” she replies, without a hint of doubt.

Steve

Do you remember Amelia and Ambrose, from across the street? She’s a nurse now. Ambrose got his legs blown off in France. Becca told me, in her last letter. She’s not seen you in a while. She’s worried. I’m worried.

No, I’m not. I’ve been worried. This isn’t it.

I’m scared. I’m scared, Steve.  What are you up to? You haven't answered in too long. Don’t you dare try come here. I won’t ever forgive you.

Bucky

[Smithsonian Archives_ERSKINE PROJECT COLLECTION_“SGR Intercepted Letters”_Purchase Receipt 12/06/1947_Stark_Howard_Private Collection_NOT-FOR-DISPLAY]

The communal kitchen is smoky with scents wafting all the way down the corridor when Sam arrives.

“Smells good,” he says, and Bruce is grinning when he glances over his shoulder. He’s shovelling things around the pan distractedly.

“You’re getting very good at showing up in time to be fed, Major Wilson,” Bruce says pointedly, offering Sam the wooden spoon.

Sam takes it and resumes the methodical shuffling of onions and lentils, while Bruce grabs a knife and chopping board. The chilli pinches his nostrils and his eyes, and he inhales deeply through the sting.

“Natasha and Steve left?” Bruce asks.

“Not yet,” Sam replies.

Bruce makes a chortle of sound that Sam simultaneously can’t interpret and agree with entirely.

“You can’t protect them from everything.”

“I’m not trying to,” Sam retorts, with a bite he hadn’t expected in his tone.

Bruce, however, is far too even tempered to react to it. He just keeps slicing tomatoes and dropping them into the pan as Sam stirs. It reminds Sam painfully of his sister, bullying him around the kitchen, slapping utensils into his hands. It’s been far too long since he called her.

Bruce catches a tomato half before it can roll off the chopping board, tossing it into the pan.

“What do you think of the enhanced experimentation files Fowler showed us yesterday?” he asks.

Sam latches eagerly onto the new subject, grateful for the change in direction.

“There were no signs of survivors. And I think we’d have seen something by now, if a bunch of newly made supes were running around central Europe.”

Bruce pours water into the pan, and a billow of steam briefly separates them, accompanied by a thick, drawn-out hiss. 

“You’d be surprised how well hidden even the most obvious of enhanced individuals can become,” he says, wearing a delicate smirk.

“No offence, Doctor Banner, but when you first - uhm, acquired Hulk, you weren’t exactly versed in the art of subtlety.”

Bruce’s mouth scrunches up briefly, but he doesn’t look offended, per say. Sam eyes him worriedly all the same.

“You’re right,” is all he says at first. The smell of the spices intensifies in the hot steam. “But that spear…Loki only made such a loud entry with it, back in 2012, because he wanted to. He could have done a lot more damage, maybe, if he’d decided to be quiet about it.”

Sam stirs as he mulls that one over. He hadn’t been entirely aware of Loki’s attack, the moment it happened. Wrapped in a hurricane of grief and guilt, he’d been far from attentive of the news reels playing the attack in Germany, the undocumented explosions - Manhattan.

Maybe Bruce is right. He’s heard some of it from Steve, and a little more from Fowler even, about the events of 2012 and the alien invasion. Loki’s arrival couldn’t have been any more obvious, more attention-seeking. If he had been silent, if he had stayed just a bit more invisible, there’s no telling the devastation he could have caused.

They should probably be a whole lot more grateful for his hubris, after all.

“So, you think there could be survivors?”

Bruce tilts his head curiously, his glasses slipping a little down his nose.

“I think it would be naive to dismiss the possibility.”

With that, he turns down the heat of the pan and pulls out a bowl and two tubs of what looks like flour, and sets to mixing them together with quiet determination. Sam, with no further instructions, puts down his spoon and leans his hip against the worktop to watch with interest.

I can’t heal your heart, Sim-Sam, and I can’t heal your head. But God help me, I can fill your belly and keep you warm, Sarah said to him, stripping prawns and fluttering between saucepans in her cramped kitchen while he lay on her sofa and pretended he couldn’t hear her. That’s what being a sister always was, for her. Practice run for being the best mom to her kids there ever was. Sarah Wilson, taking care of her brother with the furious love their parents taught them.

Sam recognises some of that furious love in Bruce Banner, now, as he prepares ten times more food than one man could possibly pretend is just for himself. Perhaps because he knows he can’t heal his friends’ hearts, or their heads. But he can fill their bellies to keep them warm, at least. The kind of love that can be given only by a man who knows what it is like being out alone in the cold.

“Pass me the salt?” Bruce asks, fingers cloudy with flour as he nods at Sam, who reaches over and pulls the tub of salt flakes open as an offering. Bruce takes a large pinch, scattering it into the mixture, and returns to mixing with deliberate care. 

Sam picks up the spoon, and gives the food another stir.

“Smells great, Bruce. Thank you. You didn’t have to,” Steve says later as the dishes are served up, the fresh chapatis ripped and steaming and the table mostly full.

“It was nothing,” Bruce lies shamelessly. “Sam helped,” he adds, which is mostly a lie, too.

“Sam stirred things in pots when told to,” Sam corrects him with a grin, handing Natasha the garnishes when she reaches for them and taking the potatoes from Pepper when they’re offered.

“As important a task as hunting the kill and skinning the catch!” Thor interjects with a twinkle in his eye. Sam hasn’t known Thor all that long, but he’s starting to think he hams up the cartoonish grandeur of most of his statements for the fun of it. The flickering grin on his face would suggest as much. 

“Thanks,” he says, a little too dry. Is he allowed to be sarcastic to a Norse God?

Natasha smirks, and tips a handful of cilantro onto her plate as she inclines her head at him, as if he’d asked the question aloud. Before Sam can retort, however, they are interrupted by a sharp, barking voice from the doorway.

“Then you can tell him - what I said before.”

Tony pulls up short mid-tirade at the sight of the full table, his phone pulled from his ear almost before he’s finished his collapsed sentence. His grin is brittle, but he beelines for Pepper, sliding into the seat she pulls back but ignoring the pointed look on her face. “Brucie Bear, pulling double shifts on kitchen duty again, I smell.”

“Sam helped,” the table replies in almost perfect unison, with varying degrees of sarcasm. Sam, torn between who deserves his scowl the most, just ends up glowering at Steve’s cutlery and Bruce’s left hand.

There’s a brief reprieve as everybody digs into their first mouthfuls, but it doesn’t last.

“Who were you talking to?” Steve asks, his fork full of spinach and potato, his eyes full of unrelenting curiosity.

Around the table, several spines straighten, including Sam’s own.

Tony takes his time chewing his food before answering.

“Pepper has a rule about shop talk at the dinner table.”

“That’s true,” Pepper agrees obliquely. She had politely agreed to join everyone for dinner when Thor beckoned her over, but her usual relaxed edges aren’t quite so soft these days; had only stiffened more when Steve and Natasha entered, half dressed for combat, their go bags dropped at the door.

The table, so welcoming with its heavy bowls of food and loud company, is deceiving in its warmth.

Sam shovels curry into his mouth and doesn’t make eye contact with anybody, hoping it’s perceived to be peacekeeping and not cowardly. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Bruce doing the same, and feels, at least, less alone for it.

“Then we should talk merriment, instead!” Thor interjects, a large hand waving wildly, so the drink in his grip loses a few droplets over the side. There’s a cluelessness to the gesture, a sense of trampling all over the awkwardness of the moment, that Sam doesn’t believe for a second. His gratitude for it, false as it is, is overwhelming. “My dearest Jane has been busy in London these past months, but I have word from young Darcy that the fair intern is determined to remove her from her duties and fly her here, to New York, early next month, for her birthday.”

“Oh, it’s Jane’s birthday?” Pepper asks immediately. Diplomat at heart, Sam thinks, which is perhaps uncharitable.

Thor laughs, shaking his head.

“Not at all, but Darcy has certain ideas about surprising people for their birthdays, and apparently it is best done at least three months too early.”

Pepper’s smile is indulgent, only very slightly strained.

“Then we can have an early party for her, too, while she’s here.”

“I’m sure she would be delighted.”

“Haven’t heard from Darcy Lewis in a while,” Tony adds, successfully moving his lamb around his plate in half moon shapes. “She finished her PhD yet?”

“Not yet.” It’s Bruce who replies to this. “She called me two months ago, asking questions about biochemistry advancements for astronaut welfare and nutrition. Said she got distracted from her thesis again.”

“Well, we all get a little distracted from what’s important, sometimes,” Steve says, and Sam very nearly flings his forkful of rice across the table. There’s nothing overtly mean in the sentence, but the tone - it isn’t gentle at all. Natasha’s all side eyes, glancing at Steve, and Pepper’s mouth whitens at the corners, her jaw tight.

Thor, reliable Thor, wonderful Thor, doesn’t miss a beat.

“Young Darcy has a remarkably keen mind. Vibrant as a butterfly, but equally prone to moving from one thing to the next all too easily. Jane grows quite impatient with her, but I find her thriving curiosity refreshing.”

Bruce takes up the offer to talk about Darcy Lewis, a name Sam has never heard before tonight, and steers the conversation onwards with unfamiliar zeal. Sam eats his rice without throwing it at Steve, who must sense the attention, because he glances up and catches Sam’s eye. There are shadows under his eyes, and his throat is pink, hopefully with embarrassment at his lack of - everything.  

Natasha turns her head to speak under her breath, pulling Steve’s gaze back around to her. Sam watches them for a moment. Their necks bent together. Their eyes downturned.

Sam turns to his left. Down the table, Tony Stark is half his usual height, eating his food.

Pepper Potts is taller than ever. Her eyes cool, her back strong. Her hand rests briefly on Tony’s arm, and squeezes just once. When she catches Sam’s gaze, she’s surprised for a moment. Then she smiles, and it’s real, and it’s warm, and it’s undeniably sorrowful, too.

Less than two hours later Natasha and Steve board a jet, side by side. Bags in hand. Guns and knives and bites, one shield between them.

“Be careful, you hear me?” Sam shouts after them.

Steve’s salute is sincere. Natasha’s is not.

“See you in two days, Sam,” Steve says.

“Fucking better do,” Sam mutters under his breath.

12/25/2006

Barney

Happy Christmas, brother. Thanks for the snaps. Sorry for the postcard, only thing with green and red that seemed festive enough. Give the kids a kiss from Unc. And Laura, of course. 

There’s someone I want you to meet. Hopefully next year.

C

manhattan, new york

pepper potts

Waking up to an empty bed is par for the course, when that bed is being shared with Tony Stark. Nevertheless, it’s an eerie, downhearted feeling, when Pepper slides her hand across the covers, and the sheets aren’t even warm anymore.

“JARVIS, what time is it?” she asks, her face in the pillow, breathing in the lingering scent of Tony from the cotton.

He’d been there when she fell asleep, of that much she is sure.

“It is eighteen minutes past three in the morning, Miss Potts. You have an alarm scheduled for six forty-five.”

“Cancel my alarm. Thanks, JARVIS.”

“Your alarm has been cancelled, Miss Potts.”

When her bare feet touch the cool floor, it sends a shiver running through her bones. Pepper stifles a yawn, pulling on the robe left haphazardly over the bottom of the bed. It takes two goes to tie it properly as she shoves her feet into waiting slippers and steps out of the room.

The apartment is overcast with shadows as she wanders through it. The city lights peer in through the tinted windows, following her from bedroom to hallway to kitchen to living space. The sofa shows signs of life – a coffee cup beside one leg, two blankets crumpled and cushions on the floor. No Tony, though.

“Where is Tony, J?” she asks, picking up the cushions one by one and folding the blankets as she stares out of the ceiling to floor window that shows a sleepless city winking and blinking.

“Mister Stark is in the media room.”

That, at least, wakes her up a little. She’d mostly asked out of routine, expecting to find him in one of the labs several floors below.

Pepper picks up the abandoned coffee and cups it in her hands.

Stone cold.

She dumps it in the sink on her way through the apartment, back out to the corridor, past the abandoned bedroom, to the end of the hall. Goosebumps tickle up her arms and she wraps one forearm around her middle.

The door has a hand scanner, but JARVIS unlocks it for her at her approach. It’s one of their rules , now. Unless it would be actively harmful to open the door at a given moment, JARVIS is to let Pepper inside any room Tony has holed himself up in.

It’s a rule.

When she pushes at the black backed frame, the door gives immediately, swinging open – and a barrier of pure, chaotic noise comes pouring out.

Pepper clamps her hands over her ears as a thick, bloodcurdling scream unleashes from the open door, chilling her to the core.

“Tony!” she yells, instinctively. It’s a man’s voice, a man screaming, and a spiny lump tucks itself neatly in the back of her throat as she runs inside, expecting – she doesn’t know.

Tony, on the floor. Tony, bleeding out. Tony, in agony. Tony, dying –

But he isn’t on the floor, or bleeding out. He isn’t dying.

The sound shrinks to half the volume instantaneously, and Pepper takes in Tony, sitting at one of the monitors, the wall-wide screen lit up with a poor quality video, all pastel colours and pixels, but there’s no hiding what it shows. Tony has his hands on the desk, fingers splayed, as he watches a group of individuals in stained lab coats perform some sort of roughshod surgery on a man strapped to a table.

It’s the Winter Soldier.

She’s seen the footage. She knows all about that metal plated arm, the long dark hair, the handsome young face covered by a thick black mask.

The Winter Soldier isn’t masked now, though. He’s buckled to the table, and he’s screaming while a doctor scores a line around the connecting joints of his left shoulder with a scalpel.

“JARVIS, JARVIS stop this, stop it right now!” Pepper bellows, and the video pauses just as a burst of blood sprays out from under the doctor’s hand.

The silence is deafening in the absence of the Winter Soldier’s screams, and Pepper has to swallow down the nausea rising behind her sternum. Beside her, there’s a heaving sigh.

“Hey, Pep,” Tony says. He’s still staring at the video, his eyes red with tiredness, his lips cracked and bleeding from being chewed to bits.

“Jesus God, Tony,” Pepper snaps, coming around the desk to force Tony to look at her. He blinks, dazed, and it takes a moment for him to go from staring at her midriff to looking her in the eyes. When he does, he flinches. “What the hell are you doing?” she demands, placing her hands over Tony’s as delicately as she can, restraining the urge to clutch him, to grab him, to shake him.

“Learning,” Tony says in a rough voice.

When he licks his lips, all he succeeds in doing is smearing a drop of blood to the corner of his mouth.

“You are not learning anything from that – that torture, Tony,” Pepper says, as calmly as she can possibly pretend to be. Her heart is still hammering from the shock of the noise she’d walked into. Her hands feel too cold, jittery and not properly attached to her body. She can’t keep them from trembling.

“It’s the only way, Pepper,” Tony says firmly, dropping his gaze as if to stare straight through her body at the video.

Pepper tries not to acknowledge the sinking sensation in her gut. All the same, it pulls her down to a crouch. When she reaches out to place a hand on Tony’s cheek, he’s damp and cold as a nightmare. She feels the strain of the past few months pulling between them like an elastic band, taut and ready to snap.

“Only way what, Tony?” she asks.

She doesn’t need to. She knows. It hurts to know. She doesn’t want to hear it.

“It’s the only way to forget what he did.”

Pepper drops her hand from Tony’s cheek, and instead pulls his hand to the warmth of her throat. She swallows, twice, a bitter dryness clogging her airway as she takes in his devastated face. The long shadows of sleepless months pull at his eyes, hollowing him out, and her heart breaks just looking at him. He’s exhausted, exhausted beyond measure, and she doesn’t know what to do about it. For the first time in a long time, she isn’t sure she’ll be able to fix it for him.

“Tony,” she says, stalling a response, but whatever it is her voice betrays, it makes Tony yank his hand away, looking dismayed.

“Don’t,” he says shortly, and turns his attention to the monitor on the desk, stabbing at it with a trembling finger. “Somebody needs to watch it.”

“Not you, Tony, for God’s sake, it doesn’t have to be you –”

“Yes, it does, Pepper!”

She can’t remember him ever raising his voice at her like that before. It sends a jolt of fear down her spine, and she stands back up, her arms stiff by her sides.

In his seat, Tony looks stricken. His gaping mouth visibly struggles to fill with words, and he stares at the big screen behind her, his eyes caught.

“I just – that thing that – that killed. It killed my mom.”

Pepper grimaces. According to JARVIS, Tony destroyed all remaining copies of the video. She doesn’t know if that’s for the better or the worse.

“I know,” is all she can think to say. It’s all she seems to say anymore. I know. An impotent, awful thing. Knowing, without means to change that knowledge.

Tony rubs his face with shaking fingers that remind her too much of a Tony from ten years ago. A different Tony. A different time. A different them.

“James Barnes was,” Tony starts, only to falter through his fingers. “My dad offered him a job. Did you know that?”

Pepper can’t help glancing over her shoulder at his name. His face is barely discernible, but it’s still there. James Barnes. Pepper can’t see it, without remembering the lost look in Steve Rogers’ eyes, wandering around the Avengers Base, aimless with heartbreak.

She shakes her head. It’s impossible to piece together the images from the war reels, with the picture on the screen.

Tony laughs, then chokes on it. A tear slips past the net of his eyelashes, only to be caught by the angry back of his hand.

“He had some mechanics shop experience. My dad told me. Before the Howling Commandos was formed, turns out Howard tried to snatch him up onto his team, building planes and whatever shit the SSR needed. Barnes turned him down to be a sniper for the golden boy.”

Pepper doesn’t ask if Steve knows that. She doesn’t think either way, the answer would be anything good.

Each breath Tony tries to suck in takes jagged hitches out of his voice, like he’s slowly running out with every try. Pepper presses her lips together and steps towards him, without reaching out this time. Tony does it for her. His grasping hands take hold of her robe, which half slips as he pushes his head into her midriff. She doesn’t miss the wet sniffle he tries to hide in her bedclothes.

She does miss the words that are muffled into her belly, though, and she has to tug at the hair on the back of his head to make him look up.

“What?” she asks.

When he finally draws back, he’s tear streaky and sad, and he’s still the person she loves most in the world. She wants to package him up and keep him here, in the dark, hidden away from everything else that might cut his soul.

“I have to forgive him, or Steve won’t forgive me. He’ll – He won’t.”

Let him, Pepper wants to say. Her hands full of his hair, she wants to tell Tony fuck Steve Rogers, that he can do this to you, but even in her heart-blind rage, she knows Steve hasn’t done this to Tony willingly. Tony’s done this to himself, expert wielder of the double-edged sword, Tony would cut himself to ribbons if it meant keeping Steve Rogers, keeping his Avengers, around.

And isn’t that the crux of it?

Tony’s found himself a group of misfits to align himself with, and he’ll kill himself, keeping them. This is why Pepper was secretly relieved, when Fury said no, the first time around.

Fuck them all, that they can weigh you down like this, she thinks, with all the uncharitable anger she can muster.

She remembers them piling off the jet together last month. Nat first, her eyes down, her cheeks flushed, her mouth pinched. Tony last, that solemn face downcast, not since waking up in a hospital bed to his worry had she seen him like that. She hasn’t spoken to Natasha since. She doesn’t want to. She can’t see her face without thinking of Tony’s knees hitting the floor as soon as they were alone, the way he gulped and gasped and, panic-stricken, kept apologising, over and over and over until Pepper was sick of it.

She strokes Tony’s face with her thumbs, and presses a kiss to the frown line between his eyebrows.

“Not like this, Tony,” she says, very quietly. He smells of old coffee and cold sweat, he smells of the thousand nightmares that keep him awake at night. “Not like this.”

He tries to pull his face out of her grip, but she doesn’t let him hide. She catches his tears, she’ll catch all his tears, if it means he never spends a night like this again. She loves him. She loves him. It’s not for her to be gracious, to be forgiving, to be fair. Love isn’t fair. Love is a burning, selfish thing, and if this love means she needs to protect Tony from Natasha’s ire and Steve’s blame, then she will shoulder that responsibility with everything she has.

“Not this,” she says, as, finally, something about Tony softens. His shoulders sink, just a little, and his eyes crease up, and his mouth collapses from the weight of all those stored up words. Without breaking eye contact, she says, firmly: “JARVIS, shut this down. We’re going to bed.”

Tony doesn’t even protest.

The wide screen goes blank, as does the monitor. At her tug, Tony stands up, and allows himself to be coaxed from the room, back down the hall, and into their cooled bedsheets. He’s pliant as a doll, his eyes never straying from her face, until that exhaustion under his eyes eventually claims him, and he slips down beneath the surface of sleep.

Pepper, on the other hand, keeps her eyes transfixed on his face. She strokes his hair, and watches him, and loves him.

It’s all she can do.

south sokovia

hawk

It takes a few tries to write the words clearly.

The pen feels wrong in his hand, his fingers pinching awkwardly, his palm cramping up quickly. He can’t remember holding a pen before, although he must have, because the letters flow out from his impatient fingertips, albeit wonky and ugly on the paper.

Even writing the words down feels treacherous.

Желание, says the top line.

Hawk frowns at the paper, holding it out at arms length.

The boy stands jittery at his side.

“This is nonsense,” Pietro says, flicking the paper.

“It’s code,” Hawk replies, and Pietro scoffs.

“They are nonsense,” the boy repeats.

Hawk envies the luxury of reading the list and seeing only nonsense. He had - not forgotten the words, as such. But hidden away with Barnes these past months, the threat the words posed was so remote, so minimal…maybe it was a sort of forgetting. He is good at forgetting, after all.

Across the room, the girl, Wanda, is sitting quietly.

Meditating, she called it.

Fancy sulking, her twin corrected behind her back.

She’s greatly recovered from their ordeal but her scarred hands still tremble, sometimes, when she is tired. She’s taken to exercising her fingers every morning with her brother; peeling fruit and making flower chains and writing alphabets. She’s very strong. Stronger even than Hawk had realised, when he picked her up out of her wire cage.

Hawk is still staring at her when she opens her eyes.

“Are you ready?” she asks.

Does it matter? Hawk wants to ask, the question burning his tongue. It never mattered if he was ready or not before. Nobody asked if he was ready. He was always ready.

What does ready even mean?

Before he can figure out how to respond, Wanda has pushed herself to her feet and is walking out of the cabin.

Outside, the trees are blooming. Fat purple blossoms with long, tongue-like petals and bright green leaves soaking up the late summer sunshine. Hawk has checked the outermost perimeter three times already today: still undisturbed.

They’ve stayed longer than they intended to. The truth is, he’s relieved. He likes it here, in the mountains, with the gloomy forests and the happy stream that cuts through the land. They are alone, here. Safe from faces and eyes and hands. Safe from cameras and needles and guns.

Safe from code words that penetrate their skulls and rob their thoughts.

Or at least, they should be.

The paper is crinkled in his grip and when Wanda holds out her hand to take it, he finds it impossible to hand over. It feels - wrong. It feels dangerous. Too dangerous.

Across the grass, before the ferns sprout taller than any of them, Barnes is standing with his hands on his hips, watching the horizon. Even from the side, Hawk can see the anxious uptic of his brow, the turn of his mouth. Whatever he might say, Barnes is worried.

Wanda pauses at the sight of him, her gaze darting to Hawk and back. There’s a question in the angle of her head, and Hawk doesn’t want to answer it. He doesn’t want to do anything . But Barnes is a sheet of steel in the wind, Pietro is bouncing on his heels, and there’s nobody else.

“OK,” he says, very quietly. He hands Wanda the piece of paper, straightens his curved spine, and walks over to Barnes. “You don’t have to,” he says, even though Barnes didn’t like being told that yesterday, either. It’s still true, however he feels about it. They don’t have to do anything anymore. Wasn’t that the point?

Barnes’ dry look is loud. His starving eyes crease up at the edges. He reaches out with one hand - his right, pink tips of his fingers, dry skin, soft - and presses his fingers to the exposed ridge of Hawk’s spine. The metal is warm, and Hawk feels the touch as if through a cloudy barrier.

“You’re worried,” he says, and Hawk recoils.

“Of course,” he insists, his hand on Barnes’ wrist. “The sceptre-”

“She is not the sceptre,” Barnes reminds him, again. It’s still not enough. Hawk remembers; remembers it like he remembers flying even when his feet are on the ground. He remembers a burning under his sternum, that blue glow of something rotten peeling him apart from the inside. Barnes’ hand is on his face. “She is not going to hurt me. I promise.”

“You can’t,” Hawk replies, which is true, and Barnes knows it. He can’t promise she won’t hurt him. Not even Wanda can promise she won’t hurt him. She’s walking towards them and Hawk isn’t ready but it doesn’t matter, it never mattered before and it doesn’t matter now. Barnes pulls out of his grip, holds him at arm’s length and his blue eyes are hardened with determination. 

“Please,” Hawk tries, one last time.

Barnes pulls away and watches Wanda approach, the paper clutched between her hands.

“If it doesn’t work -”

“Then we’ll find another way,” Barnes says, jaw of steel and forgiveness.

His sharp look sends Hawk back three steps, and Pietro is suddenly there, tall and slender and just as frightened. His face is so young. Hawk didn’t ask their age. Was afraid to, maybe. Or perhaps, afraid they’d want to know his in return. He doesn’t want to ask a question he doesn’t have his own answer to, and in the end, his solace becomes only silence.

Overhead, a bird of prey circles and hovers, hunting for voles, or maybe rabbits. 

Wanda’s fingers tremble for a moment. She holds the paper in one hand, the other stretched out to their full, scarred strength. There are deep grooves in her skin now; dark purple and livid red. Painful looking; brittle yet strong. Hawk wonders if he can find her some gloves, before winter sets in.

Barnes’ eyes dart to Hawk and away once, again, again. He’s afraid. His breath sharp in his nose, like the metal of the chair clamping around him, but the vice is only his will to stand, ready. A slice of red impermanence stretches out from Wanda’s hand, reaching towards him, and her own breaths are ragged, and Hawk takes hold of Pietro’s forearm.

“Longing,” Wanda reads, in pitch perfect Russian, as the red mist circles Barnes’ throat.

Barnes is holding his breath now, the blue of his eyes tinged to violet by the scarlet storm swelling around him.

“Rusted. Seventeen. Daybreak.”

Wanda’s voice is cruel, roughened, or perhaps it is the words mangling her gentility. The red spill is a stream, near a flood now, and her eyes widen, lit with something from within like the iridescence of the sceptre that leaves Hawk cold. A whimper catches in the back of Barnes’ throat, and Hawk feels it choke him from inside his own.

Barnes’ eyes close, his face twisted up, red currents twisting knots around him as Wanda reads the words through clenched teeth, tears on her cheeks, and suddenly it is Pietro holding Hawk’s forearm.

“No, wait,” he is saying, and Hawk realises he is pulling towards Barnes. He can feel the dig of a collar around his throat, chained to a wall, the bars of a cage cutting him up, a metal gag on his tongue as he wrestles for freedom and the Soldier - no, and Barnes is wrestled into the chair, wrestled -

“Furnace. Nine.”

A shaking cry makes it past Barnes’ lips. Wanda’s hand drops an inch before twisting back up, the red storm tightening, her face scrunched up.

“Benign. Homecoming. One.”

“No!” Barnes bellows, his eyes flashing open, blue and white and red and his entire body is trembling, locked tight in the vice of Wanda’s power. 

“Wait, wait,” a voice in Hawk’s ear, hands on his arms, he tries to cut them away with his wings but his wings aren’t there, just the taut pull of his spine.

The paper falls out of Wanda’s hand, both are now bleeding sparks of power that cut through Barnes, swell his skin in clouds of red. Panic rises up Hawk’s throat in a plea that doesn’t make it out.

“Freight car,” Wanda finishes, louder than the others, her hands locked flat like a surrender.

Barnes’ drops to his knees, his neck bent downwards, and the last of Wanda’s red, scorching power surges around him and pours straight into his bowed head.

For a moment, there is nothing. Then, the bird of prey overhead lets out a mournful shriek. The hands leave Hawk’s bare arms. 

“Wanda?” Pietro says, rushing to his sister.

“James?” Wanda says, more than one question in a single syllable and  her eyes on Barnes’ crown.

Barnes looks up, and his eyes are blue again. Blue and nothing more. No shred of thought, no curiosity, no fear, no Barnes at all.

“No!” Hawk cries, his knees sinking into the grass before Barnes can so much as blink. “No, come back. Come back. Come - come back. Barnes. Come back.”

He tugs at Barnes’ cheeks. Pushes his damp hair off his face, sweat and tears have poured down his face and Hawk brushes it away with rough, demanding hands. “Come back. You have to. Don’t. Come back.”

Behind him, the twins are approaching. He can hear their feet. Their breaths. Feel the shiver of their presence. Barnes sways on his knees and Hawk holds him upright, hand on his head, thumb on his cheek. Their foreheads pushed together, their noses squashed against each other. Like the boat, like the train, like the underpass, like every day. “Come back. Please. Please.”

Wanda stands to his left, and when he looks up at her, she’s full of horror and grief.

“Bring him back,” Hawk begs, but she doesn’t say anything. “Bring him back! Bring him back!”

But Wanda can only shake her head, her lips fluttering silently. Pietro, behind her. His hands pulling her, just like they pulled Hawk’s.

Hawk turns back to Barnes, to his empty eyes and his slack mouth. He strokes his face. Kisses his head. Pushes their cheeks and chests together and Barnes’ nose is in his throat and he can feel his own tears streaming and his panic rising like a wind taking him as he soars, gutting him, airless in the sky as he tumbles without his wings. “Come back. Please. Come back.”

If the twins stay close, they are entirely silent. Hawk clutches Barnes to him and shakes him and pulls him and when there is only his blue stare he shoves his face into the hollow of Barnes’ throat and sobs his pleas into his damp skin.

“Come back. Come back. Please. You have to come back.”

Barnes is warm. Thrumming like machinery underground, his breaths regular - clockwork in his lungs. Hawk scrabbles at his back, his shoulders; the cut seam where skin meets metal.

“Come back. Come back. You promised. Come back."

He can’t be alone. He can’t. Not this, not again. Not like this. They were together. They were free. 

“Please. Barnes. Please. Wake up. Come back. Come back.”

They were supposed to be free.

“Hawk?” Wanda says, but her fingers don’t make contact with Hawk’s back. 

“No,” he snarls, pulling Barnes in, his swaying torso clutched to Hawk’s.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Hawk doesn’t reply.

He runs his palm over Barnes’ head, his sweaty neck. And Barnes just breathes, hot against Hawk’s throat. In and out. In and out.

The bird of prey hunts and screams. The wind chafes the ferns. Pietro whispers to his sister, pulls her back even as she calls Hawk’s name in cautious clamours. The sun pierces the clouds. Hawk whispers into Barnes’ cheek, but he kneels without blinking, and Hawk’s despair engulfs them both, as surely as a cloud of red mist.

“I’m sorry, Hawk. Hawk? Hawk. Please, Hawk. Please.”

In the snow, there was a moment. His lungs full of blood and ice, coughing it up, choking it up. The sky was grey, peppered with storms. The train was gone and - “Steve? Please. Come back. Come back.” - But maybe he said nothing at all, because his lungs, full of blood and ice, coughing it up, choking. His eyes closed, and his chest collapsed, and there was a light that was not the sun in his eyes. James Barnes died in a frozen wasteland, and the future swallowed him whole.

It’s nighttime, when Barnes feels something yield against the iron wall encasing him. His eyes are itchy and dry, and his skin is wet. Neither cool, nor warm. Hands soft on his head, and his back.

He blinks, and when he lifts his hands, they sparkle with droplets of water. The sound of breath catching in the air like the whistle of a trap greets him from behind, and the hand on his neck then is callused and familiar.

“Barnes?” Hawk says, and Barnes looks down. He’s naked, sitting in a metal tub full of water and soapy residue. He’s slippery clean, and Hawk is behind him, long tan legs safe around him, and when Barnes turns his head halfway, he can see a wet cloth in his hand.

“Hawk?” Barnes says, very quietly, and the wail of something unspeakable that comes from Hawk’s mouth is painful. Barnes turns in the bath, the water swishing, and sees Hawk’s tearfilled eyes, his wobbling smile, and there’s barely a second before he’s crushed in a hug. The water sloshes over the lip of the tub, onto the floor.

“You came back,” Hawk whispers, directly into Barnes’ ear, and Barnes frowns, pulling back so he can take hold of Hawk’s face. Their foreheads fit together. Their noses. Their cheeks. Their mouths. Hawk is relief, and terror, and something else. Something kind, and loving, and good. “You came back.”

Barnes smiles, knocks gently against the iron wall in his head, full of red sparks. The words trapped safely behind it don’t so much as stir against him. Hope punctures the fear, the piercing cry of a bird of prey.

“Of course,” he says, and kisses away Hawk’s tears even as they meet his cheeks.

“You came back,” Hawk says again, anyway. His hands are warm and safe on Barnes’ face, and Barnes sees his eyes as if for the first time. The grey irises, like a sky peppered with storms.

Barnes shifts, to sit more comfortably, and squeezes out some of the water from his long hair. Too long. Irritating on his skin. His discomfort must show on his face, or perhaps Hawk reads his mind. Perhaps they are one mind. Perhaps they always were.

“I can cut it. If you want.”

Barnes raises his eyebrows, takes in that watery grin. His pink cheeks. His damp mouth.

Handsome, Barnes thinks. He’s not sure if he ever thought that before. But it’s true.

Barnes flicks some water at Hawk. “You think you know how?”

Hawk reaches out of the tub, stretching his long arm all the way to the battered table, and grabs a pair of scissors that look a hundred years old. The blades are sharp, but in Hawk’s hands, they are safe. In Hawk’s hands, Barnes is safe. The words are trapped as surely behind the wall as Barnes is trapped in Hawk’s embrace. Protected.

“I think I do,” he replies, and Barnes snorts, but he turns around anyway. Drops his head, bares his neck.

“I trust you,” he says, shivering when Hawk lifts the first chunk of hair off his back. 

The snip of the scissors is quiet, vanishing under the hum of Hawk’s voice. Barnes closes his eyes. Feels the water. The weight. Hawk’s hands. Hawk.

Just Hawk. Just here. Just now.

The next morning, Hawk wakes up with the sun. The bed he’s lying in is warm, like always. The body beside him is heavy, like always.

Barnes blinks awake, with eyes of sky and a smile Hawk’s never seen before.

Outside the bedroom, there is the poorly hushed clattering of the twins making breakfast.

“Morning,” Barnes whispers. Soft, like the hand on Hawk’s head.

“Morning,” Hawk replies.

The relief is a hurricane. It envelops them all.

BREAKING NEWS: Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross to seek Congress approval for the Enhanced Registration Act, inside sources say.

@SecRoss
It’s time to take a stand as a nation and say No More to unchecked enhanced human violence. Who’s with us? #EnhancedRegistration #AvengersOnTrial

@IAmIronMan
@SecRoss Stop blocking my calls and let’s discuss this like grownups.
This tweet has been deleted.

bed-stuy, new york city

natasha romanoff

Phil drove her directly to the apartment, debriefing and rebriefing her on the way. His hands were tight on the steering wheel, his cool confidence turned needle sharp as he kept at precisely the speed limit the whole way. He was concise, as always, but brittle, as he never was.

Natasha tied her wet hair up, ate a lozenge and iced her knuckles for the ride.

It was late by the time she got home. She didn’t invite Phil up, and he didn’t ask to come. Just nodded once through the window and drove away.

Inside it was dark, but for the muted TV playing an ad for laundry detergent, and the spill of low light through the closed window, half blocked by the hooded figure sitting with his back to the door.

“Clint,” Natasha said, to no avail.

With his hood up, it was impossible to see if his hearing aids were in, but she could only assume from Phil’s recounting of the past thirty-six hours that they weren’t. Stepping closer, she caught sight of his eyes tracking her reflection in the window. His slack mouth was bruised, his eyes puffy and shadowed.

“Clint,” she repeated. His eyes simply dropped back to looking out of the window at the dark walled view. He made no move as she approached, not even as she reached over and pulled his hood down, revealing blood in his hair and that sent a jolt of alarm through her.

Phil’s words from the car ride alone reassured her. Medical signed him off. Physically, he’s fine.

Natasha ran her open hand over the back of his head, until he ducked away from it. When she joined him, cross-legged on the floor, he tilted his head away, so he couldn’t see her mouth or hands, and the raw ache in the back of her throat worsened. She wanted to press a hand to his face, a kiss to his neck or his mouth or his shoulder, hunched up and crumpled like a ball of paper as he was.

The eerie flickering of the TV screen light cast colourful shapes over them as they sat in silence. Her own breaths felt too loud, grating in and out of her lungs as she waited.

And waited, and waited.

The TV kept playing, and Clint’s interlocked fingers remained tucked between his legs, and Natasha kept hers tight on her knees. And she waited.

Eventually, so slowly it was impossible to tell when it started exactly, Clint began to turn back to her. It started with his arms opening from their rigid frames. His shoulders softened. His torso twisted, just a little, his chin slowly ducking to his chest, his cheek more prominent. His mouth, his nose, his eyes,

Until, finally, finally, he looked at her. His eyes were glassy and dark as an undisturbed lake. His mouth flat and pained, and there was blood in his teeth when he bared them, biting back some sound that trapped itself in his chest.

“Clint,” Natasha said again, clearly with her mouth, and with her hands. Clint shook his head, but he allowed her to move around him, so they were face to face. Her eyes felt strained in the poor light, taking in every aspect of his creased, crestfallen expression.

Talk to me, she signed slowly.

In response, Clint curled his hands into his chest for a moment, before signing back:

Did you know Rafi’s wife is pregnant?

Natasha shook her head. It was the truth, she didn’t know that. She didn’t really know Rafael Hernandez well at all. But she knew Clint like she knew blades; intimately, a part of her, part of her shape, of her being outside of her physical self. And she knew what it would mean to Clint, to lose Rafi. To know his pregnant wife was out there, grieving, grieving a man she loved, and a future she’d lost.

Natasha raised her hands to sign… something. She isn’t sure what. She had no platitudes to offer, and no truths to promise that Phil won’t have tried a hundred times already. Before she can fumble any nonsense, however, Clint reaches out and takes her hands, frowning at her swollen knuckles.

She smiles, shaking her head. The skirmish was nothing. She didn’t want him worried.

Still, he kissed the backs of her hands preciously, cupping his palms over her bruises.

She took hold of his face in response, pulled his attention back to her eyes, and the naked honesty of his watery grief was a hook in her gut that felt like coming home.

“I love you,” she said, clearly, without room for misinterpretation, and the noise that fell out of him was wrangled and wretched, and he was inside the cage of her embrace so quickly she fell back against the window, clutching him just as tightly as he was her. His crying shook them both, and her shirt was soaked, and some of the blood from his hair was still sticky over her hands as she kissed his head and held him close.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” she said, again and again even though he couldn’t hear her. It was true, whether he heard it or not, and hopefully he felt it, the vibrations in her throat, the touch of her fingers, the beating of her heart.

He shivered in her arms, safe from the world, and Natasha gripped him to bruises with the ferocity of her protection. The TV played, silent and flickering, and the dark room was cold. But Clint was warm; here, and heartbroken, but warm nonetheless. And Natasha loved him, and he knew that.

He knew, and it was enough.

It would be enough.

God forsaken, she hoped it would always be enough.

london, england

bucky barnes

Bucky woke up, lungs first, full to bursting, and retched hard enough he nearly fell out of the cot. Not used to being off the ground. Vertigo of half a metre swirling a vortex in his vision, and he was suspended in the air by his own surprise.

No, that wasn't right.

Two hands, holding him off the ground. A voice ushering him back.

"Jesus, Buck. You're OK. S'OK. S'all fine. You're safe."

Steve. Steve with his gigantic, unfamiliar hands. His stupid wide shoulders. Bucky shuddered and retched again, horror caught in his throat like factory smoke and for a selfish, awful moment, he missed Steve. His Steve. His own Steve Rogers, on Montague Street in Brooklyn. He wanted Steve back, not this mountain whose shadow covers Bucky over like -

"Buck? Sorry, am sorry."

Without realising it, Bucky had pulled away up the bed, out of Steve's reach. And Steve let him. Those loving blue eyes, that face. Bucky took a deep breath and reached out to run a finger down his nose.

"Broke that beak a time or two, huh?" he asked, and Steve answered with a wobbly smile.

"You can still tell?"

"Don't go getting vain on me now, Steven," Bucky scoffed, and Steve's grin widened, strengthened. Sunshine through clouds caught on the wind.

"That was always your job," Steve reminded him, sitting more heavily on the other end of the cot. "Preening yourself like a peacock for dancing."

Bucky shrugged, and his own smile felt like weak brickwork held up by hope alone. It felt so far away, dancing halls in New York City. Curls in his hair that he'd tug at and push back; Steve, rolling his eyes Yeah yeah, handsome, enough of that or the mirror won't let you leave.

Steve took hold of Bucky’s wrist, thumb rubbing circles over his pulse.

"You OK?" 

Bucky nodded.

"Yeah. Course. Why wouldn't I be?"

He realised, too late, he's heard that challenge before, a hundred thousand times. Skinny Steve Rogers, blood on his upper lip and knuckles needing ice, scornfully muttering Why wouldn't I be OK? And God forbid Bucky call him out on that bullshit.

Steve must have recognised it for what it was, too. Some alien thing, their history in reverse. Bucky, hiding his hurt while Steve saw right through it to his scorched and blistered core.

For a moment, it seemed as if Steve was going to let it slide.

Then.

"They hurt you, Bucky."

Bucky closed his eyes, tasting his stomach.

"They hurt everybody, Steve. Killed even more."

He heard Steve's bullish huff, but didn't react to it. Didn't open his eyes, or turn away. Just sat on his pillow and waited. Your move this time, asshole, feeling more unfair than he ever had before.

"Doesn't change what happened to you. Does it?" Steve asked, quietly.

Bucky knew he would never forget the torn gut feeling of hearing Steve's voice above him, while he was lying on that table. Thinking his time was up. Thinking he'd slide off that table and look down and see his corpse wasted out, still in his shackles.

But he didn't.

Bucky won't ever say it out loud, but he won't forget it either.

He was disappointed. Just for a second, he was disappointed to be alive.

Steve stroked a heavy hand down Bucky’s outstretched leg. Rested on his knee, thumb in the dimple of his kneecap. Too big. Too strong. Bucky did his best not to shrink away from it, but Steve saw it. Bucky could tell. He could always tell.

"What should I do?" Steve asked.

What was Bucky supposed to say to that?

Go home. Go away. Go back to Montague Street, where the war is written in black and white on corner stands and the mud is only in the parks, not in our beds and our souls.

"Stay?" Bucky asked instead, mostly for the relief that broke over Steve when he said it.

"Yeah, I can stay," Steve replied, scooting up the cot.

Shoulders together. Elbows and waists and hips.

Bucky turned, before he could think better of it. Nose buried into Steve's collarbone, how did he still smell the same? It was almost enough to make him forget, when Steve's arms wrapped around him, too big and too strong.

Still Steve, though. Still charcoal and sweat and love. Still home. Changed, yet not.

And in any case, could Bucky really claim to be anything else, too? Changed, yet not.

Still Bucky, and something else. Something changed. He wondered if Steve could tell.

south sokovia

barnes

Packing up the cabin doesn’t take long. Leaving it, on the other hand, is an all morning affair.

Pietro and Wanda have been fussing with the supplies for an hour, and Hawk has been on three separate scoutings already, “just to check for sure”, whatever that means. Barnes sips his coffee out of his tin cup, sitting on the grass outside, and lets them take their time. He’s not sure how long they’ve been here for, but it must be a month at least.

The scabs on Wanda’s hands have peeled and healed to scars, and both of the twins look a hell of a lot less haunted than they had back in the fortress. The deep cut grooves and weld marks on Hawk’s back have paled to silvery knots, now. His hair is shaggy, entirely covering the metal plates in his head.

Barnes knows he isn’t unchanged, either. Aside from the bristly feel of his short hair, and the loosening of the tension in the back of his neck that usually leaves headache frowns in his brow, he feels it. The wall Wanda put in his head is holding. The gouged out parts of him that felt like bloody wounds in his head are, slowly, starting to fill back up again.

Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.

The Captain. The mission. It isn’t a blinding feeling behind his eyes to think about him, now.

Steve Rogers.

Steve.

Barnes doesn’t know what to do with the gut punch thinking his name gives him. It’s different to the soft-sinking-safe warmth of being near Hawk, different to the pulling-protective-push of being near the twins. Some otherly, middle ground between the two that Barnes doesn’t remember.

Wanda made a tentative attempt to call him James, after she’d been inside his head, and while it hadn’t made him flinch back, like reading it in an old book did, so many months ago…it didn’t feel right, either. So, Barnes it is, still. He doesn’t mind. He even quite likes it.

He wants Hawk to have a name, too. But when Wanda offered to give Hawk the same gift of reprieve he had scurried away into the cold night air as if burned by it. She hasn’t mentioned it again.

And Barnes isn’t going to force him. If Barnes has any say in matters of the future, Hawk will never be forced to do anything ever again.

The last dregs of coffee are cold, but he drains them anyway, flicking the last droplets into the grass.

Behind him, the cabin door opens, letting out the sounds of the twins bickering about necessities.

A familiar hand runs through Barnes’ hair.

“You OK?” Hawk asks. Barnes closes his eyes against the feel of those kneading fingers against his scalp. He feels goosebumps trilling up his spine and his back arches instinctively.

“Mhmm,” is all he can manage to reply.

Hawk steps even closer, and Barnes leans back against his legs.

“I dreamt about her again. The woman.”

“The redhead?”

“Mmm.”

Barnes opens his eyes, looking up along Hawk’s lean body. He’s got his wings on - they’re vast and curved, pulling his centre of gravity off, but he stands firm against the drag of their weight. Tense. Barnes hates it. Hawk’s staring into the horizon, seeking out shapes in the sky that Barnes can’t see.

The redhead - not Halford. Barnes remembers her face, her green eyes, her fast knives, her fists.

Sometimes, when Barnes lets his focus drift…when his eyes are half-closed, and his attention sways like the ferns in the wind, and the past and the present blur in the shadows of memories, he thinks he remembers something, is sure, only in those moments, that he isn’t making it up. Hawk, clamped in the chair, bucking against the straps holding him down and his voice shrill, nearly silent in his terror, as he whispers a name, a name -

My name is

But the memory disintegrates even as he grasps it. Fingers plunging into a plume of smoke, only causing it to vanish quicker for his struggle to capture it.

Barnes reaches one hand around to take hold of Hawk’s calf.

“Don’t be so stupid, we can’t possibly carry two saucepans each! What do you think we will be cooking?” Wanda bellows with a cackle of laughter. 

Even looking up from below, Barnes recognises the tugging smile on Hawk’s face, to listen to her.

He likes them, the twins. Barnes does, too, for what it’s worth, but not the way Hawk does. Hawk likes them. He wants them around, not just because he feels responsible for their lives but because he likes laughing at their bickering, likes hearing them sing their favourite pop songs and talk about old comedies they watched together as children. 

They’re people, undeniably so, and Hawk is drawn in by it, by their peopleness. Barnes tries not to let it sting his heart. Because he’s just… not, is he? Maybe he was, once. Maybe Hawk was too. Not anymore.

Now they are something else. Something more than metal, less than people. Barnes sees the yearning in Hawk’s eyes when the kids reenact routines they half-remember, arguing about the details, and who gets to be Lucy. Hawk wants to join in, Barnes can tell. Hawk doesn’t even have a name yet.

Maybe they should find him one.

There’s a tug on his scalp and Barnes is yanked from his reverie by Hawk pulling a curl of hair to get his attention.

“What?” he asks, as Hawk grins down at him, pushing at Barnes’ forehead with a thumb to smooth his frown away.

“Hey Mister Grumpy Gills,” Hawk says teasingly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Barnes asks. For a moment Hawk stalls, lost in a thought that visibly escapes his explanation. “Never mind, I’m not grumpy.”

“You are the grumpiest!” Pietro cries as he bounds out of the front door to join them, a satchel on one shoulder and a backpack hanging from the other. Wanda follows behind, similarly weighed down. “You are like an old man.”

“I am an old man,” Barnes grumbles, only for Hawk to yank him again while Pietro scoffs.

“Please. You are thirty. Maybe thirty-five.”

Pietro is too busy buttoning his jacket and clipping his bag closed to notice the look that passes between Barnes and his sister. Barnes is surprised - whatever Wanda saw buried in his head, she hasn’t shared it with her twin.

Barnes feels a rush of warm gratitude for the girl. He barely understands a third of the strange, whittled memories clogging up his thoughts. He’s glad he doesn’t have to explain anything more, at least for now. He clambers wearily to his feet, feeling ten times older than thirty-five, and shakes the last of his coffee drops onto the grass. Wanda holds a bag out to him to take, and he slips the cup inside, hoisting it onto his shoulder.

It feels strange to have things. Things other than his brown and white notebook along with six knives stashed in various pockets.

Hawk similarly takes a bag from Pietro - the satchel, tucked neatly over his shoulder out of the way of his wing blades, which glimmer faintly in the light, iron and violet and teal.

Barnes watches them shift and move, distracted for a moment, enough he isn’t prepared when Wanda slips her left hand into his right one. Her fingers are thin, not entirely straight anymore. Strong, though, and very sure. She smiles at him, and he does his best to smile back.

“Ready?” he asks. Her eyes are full, her hair fluttering.

“Mhmm,” he says, heaving her bag up. 

“Hurry up, losers!” Pietro shouts, before taking off at a run northwards. Hawk shouts after him worriedly, launching up into the air, no higher than the tree tops to watch over the kid’s path.

“Losers,” Barnes scoffs, as he and Wanda start walking at a perfectly reasonable pace. She laughs, and pulls his arm a little.

The sun clambers steadily into the pink and plum clouds.

The days ahead are long, and tiring, but not lonely at all.

the raft

thaddeus ross

“...two or more metres from the glass, it is bulletproof but we take no chances. All equipment in the cell has been approved, tagged and is monitored 24/7. If you need to see anything in closer detail, or you are suspicious of something, do not…”

Thaddeus Ross did not get to where he is in life by playing nicely, and he has no intention of changing that now. He lets the warden run through the protocols as they walk down sub-5 corridor, nodding attentively, but his mind is already at the end of this long hall. It has been for days, in fact.

When Prisoner 9H arrived, he was sure he’d obtained a golden goose. It was time to test his goose’s eggs.

“Do you understand, sir?” Warden Stone asks, when they reach the final door.

Thaddeus slaps his shoulder appreciatively.

“This isn’t my first rodeo, son,” he says.

Warden Stone doesn’t respond, other than to suck his lips between his teeth and punch a code into the scanner keypad. There’s no sound of the lock opening, only the tilt of Stone’s jaw to indicate Thaddeus can go in.

“I’ll be right outside, sir,” Stone says, but Thaddeus has already yanked open the door and slammed it behind him, eager to be alone with the prisoner.

Prisoner 9H’s cell is spacious, if not luxurious. A large clear worktop table bears soft paper and a flat keyboard that seems to be connected to a wall screen. The cot in the corner is small, very neatly made, in fact almost unslept in by the looks of it. There is a plastic cup and jug of water beside it.

The prisoner turns in her chair, and fixes him with a dazzling, hungry smile.

“The Secretary of State, coming all this way to visit me. What an honour.”

Charlotte Pierce bears little resemblance to her father in her features, but her manner and expression are, quite frankly, uncanny. 

“Miss Pierce -”

“Doctor,” she corrects him sharply. “I didn’t hand over my PhDs along with everything else, did I?”

Thaddeus doesn’t smile, although he wants to. He’s not sure how she looks so dignified in a boiler suit, with her red hair scraped back by a soft band and greenish bags under her eyes, but she manages it. He’s almost impressed.

“Doctor Pierce -”

“Halford,” she corrects a second time. “I don’t care for the name Pierce, if it’s all the same to you. And what does it matter what you call me, when I’m safely tucked away under the sea?”

This is true, although Thaddeus doesn’t entirely trust the way she says it.

“Doctor Halford,” he says, nonetheless. Politeness costs nothing, and can gain everything, he learned a long time ago. 

“What can I do for you, Secretary Ross?” Doctor Halford asks pleasantly, crossing her legs elegantly and clasping her hands around her knee, as if entirely at leisure with herself and her surroundings.

Thaddeus glances at the wall screen she’s turned away from. There are odd, limblike schematics displayed in microdetail he doesn’t fully understand. He should ask for a download of all her files.

“Your information has so far proved trustworthy.”

“I’m happy to help,” Halford replies in the same, slightly dull tone. Thaddeus almost believes her. “What is it you want now? You wouldn’t come all this way just for a tipoff about a HYDRA base in Uzbekistan or Svalbard.” 

There is absolutely no twitch in her poker face as to whether these are real or not, but Thaddeus makes a mental note of them anyway. Thus far Doctor Halford has proved herself to be truthful, but pernicious.

“Your assassins,” Thaddeus says.

For a moment there is a hard, granite silence. Then.

“Decommissioned,” Halford says, with tightly wound consonants and bladelike vowels.

Thaddeus lets his smile break loose this time.

“No, they’re not.”

 Halford raises her brows high on her face in a delicate, mocking look of curiosity.

“They’re in Europe. We have reason to believe they’ve picked up a couple of strays, too. More of your… experiments.”

Halford doesn’t quite manage to hide the way her jaw clenches, then.

“It won’t be long before we find them. And when we do, we’ll have two options. Terminate, or bring them in.”

When still he gets no response, Thaddeus sighs deeply, folding his arms over his chest.

“It’s entirely your choice, Doctor Halford. But rest assured they will be found, by us or by the Avengers. Now, do I give the order to terminate, or is there going to be a way to safely bring them in?”

Halford says nothing, her freckled marble face pale, bruised with sleeplessness. She is entirely still in her chair. It almost seems she’s stopped breathing entirely.

“Very well, Doctor. I understand. Termination will probably be a mercy, anyway. I’ll look into Uzbekistan and Svalbard, as you suggested. Thank you for your continued cooperation.”

Thaddeus gives her a grim smile and turns to leave, but his feet have barely turned when she speaks.

“Codewords.”

The victory is fresh and bright as bells, her voice reedy with defeat though her expression is unchanged.

“What was that, now?”

“There are codewords to shut them down. I can give you them. But you have to do something for me.”

Thaddeus laughs, then, gesturing to the cell, and the equipment, and the bed all around her.

“I think you’ll find I’ve done a lot more for you than most would in my position.”

Halford uncrosses her legs and holds her knees with her hands, elbows tucked defensively together. 

“I can give you codewords that make them yours to control, too, Secretary Ross.”

He believes her, is the thing. She’s a devil, wicked and spiteful and vain, but she isn’t a liar. It’s not her style. Thaddeus tilts his head, considering her. Her hungry green eyes. Her locked jaw.

“Go on,” he says dryly.

Halford leans back calmly in her chair, the pleasant tone sweetening in her voice.

“I want to be there when you bring them in.”