Chapter Text
Earth 616 - New Avengers Tower
They set up in Bob’s bedroom, each taking a position cross legged on the rug, five or so feet apart. He had chosen the one room with no windows, citing a fear of heights. The darkness and lack of outside noise and color would hopefully help Bob clear his mind. The patchouli scented candle glowing on the nightstand was not helping Bucky, in fact it was giving him a bit of a headache, but this wasn’t his meditation.
After a few minutes of tensing with his eyes closed and his arms laid unnaturally on his crossed legs, Bob’s nostrils flared as he let out a huff of frustration. “This isn’t working. She suggested I focus on something that keeps me grounded. But… I don’t even know what that is.”
Bucky reached deep within himself, willing himself to be honest. He wanted to help Bob, and a bullshit answer wasn’t going to do that. “For a long time, for me, that was Steve. We were best friends from grade school. It’s been years since he left, but when I feel lost, I still sometimes ask myself what he would say to me.” He smiled, despite himself. “He’d probably call me a jerk, but somehow I would still feel better.”
Bob closed his eyes again, and a smile quirked at the side of his lips. Bucky could see the tension uncoiling, and the young man’s muscles relaxing. “Okay, you keep the picture in your mind that you have right now. And I’ll walk you through the physical part of the meditation.”
Sending his voice into a lower register, he droned, “First, tense all the muscles in your body. Feel any spots of pain, or tenderness, and allow them to fade to the back of your mind. Now, tense your jaw, your brow, pinch your eyelids shut, and release them. Then, your neck. Swallow, and allow the feeling to pass. Bring your shoulders up to your ears, then let them fall.
As each muscle group tensed, then relaxed, Bob seemed lighter. His face, though it always looked young to Bucky, had seemed to lose years of worry. Maybe this would actually work.
Secretly, Bob had been a Captain America fanboy growing up. He would not admit this to Walker, mostly because he had really been a Steve Rogers fanboy. When he was little, he had fantasized about Captain America showing up at his door, politely asking his mother, “Ma’am, is your husband at home? Might I ask you to step out of the way?” And then he would punch Bob’s father out cold and they would all go out for ice cream.
It was the fantasy of a scared little boy, but for many years it was all he had.
He hadn’t had the heart to tell Bucky that he didn’t have a childhood best friend that kept him grounded. Bob had been a lonely boy, picked on by his peers and ostracized. Kids were natural born assholes, able to sense weakness. They saw his bruises and knew that meant he had a troubled home life, which somehow meant his troubles could catch and he should be avoided. By high school, he only had smoking buddies, not friends.
So, as Bucky droned on and Bob’s body felt lighter and lighter, Bob thought about his childhood hero. Steve Rogers’ unwavering moral code and empathy were something Bob wished he had been strong enough to employ in his brief afternoon-long stint as a superhero. If he had another chance, he wouldn’t waste it.
5… 4… 3… 2… 1… Liftoff!
Bob heard the sounds of a rocket launching off as if from a distance. It sounded like Apollo 11 or something. He must have started to confuse his childhood heroes and slipped into a memory of a space documentary.
“Boosters shut down. Preparing to jettison the escape tower.” That sounded like Steve Rogers’ voice though, not Neil Armstrong. He had watched enough footage to recognize it. Bob’s closed eyes had seen only black, but now his vision was in technicolor. Reeling, thousands of feet above the ground, was a small capsule, still joined to its booster.
“Booster will jettison momentarily,” A scratchy voice over a radio frequency intoned.
Rather than pushing off with a small jet of flame and smoke like the escape tower had, the remaining booster went red hot, and then suddenly Bob was just outside the capsule, like a drone camera, seeing Steve Rogers scream as flame engulfed it.
Without thinking, he reached out, as if to help. He felt himself catch a heavy weight, and fell backwards, for a moment feeling as if he fell through nothing but open air, then landed on his back on his bedroom floor, with what felt like a flaming hot weighted blanket on top of him.
“Bob! What the–” Bucky must have wrenched the weighted blanket or rug or whatever it was off of him, because Bob felt like he could breathe again. He was sweating from the heat and his head felt like a million bees were buzzing around inside. His last thought before passing out was that someone had burned their brisket.
When Bob fell into a meditative state, he fell hard. Bucky had stopped speaking ten minutes ago, and he wasn’t sure he could knock Bob out of that state if he tried. Leaning back against the bed, Bucky waited to see if anything would come of the exercise.
And then Bob started floating. Still totally relaxed, meditating, but three feet in the air. Which, considering this room had probably been built as an overly luxurious closet, meant Bob was almost dead center in the room.
Then Bucky started to feel warm, like there was a campfire nearby. Before he knew it, there was a fire in the middle of the room. The fire was attached to a person in a silver colored suit, and that person dropped from the center of the room on top of Bob, sending them both down to the floor.
Quickly, Bucky grabbed the wool blanket from the bed and smothered both of them, ensuring the fire was out before separating the two people. Prioritizing, he checked Bob’s pulse and lifted an eyelid. His eyes had a bit of glow around the iris, but it was quickly fading. And he was out cold.
The other person, a man in a 1960s style space suit, was face down on the floor. He looked straight out of the Vostok missions. Bucky suddenly found himself glad for the cold, concrete construction of the tower that prevented the fire from spreading further. The man’s suit was blackened in several spots, and his helmet looked like it had survived an explosion.
“Asks me for grounding advice then plucks a man from space… great. Let’s all agree never to listen to Valentina ever again.” And he was definitely getting Bob a new therapist.
He checked as best he could to make sure nothing in the guy’s spine was broken and assessed for other injuries, then flipped him onto his back. Definitely unconscious as well, probably from shock, but possibly from a head injury. The glass of his helmet was obscured with grey smoke residue.
Four sets of loud, annoying, team members’ feet pounded down the hallway. Bucky sighed. Maybe Walker would take care of the poor bastard, he probably had more modern field medic experience. The Winter Soldier hadn’t exactly been trusted with medic duty.
“Oh my god!” Yelena beelined straight for Bob, kneeling beside him and checking his pulse.
“He’s fine, just passed out.” The other guy’s helmet had some sort of seal. Bucky was trying to be gentle but he had no idea where to press to release it so he could get the guy some air. “Little help here, someone?”
Alexei was all bravado. “Ah, Cold War space suit. I know this!” For once, the guy being stuck in the USSR would actually be helpful. He took to fiddling with the mechanism, allowing Bucky to get up and face the rest of his team.
“So you weren’t bringing a girl home, huh?” Walker joked. Ava elbowed him sharply in the ribs.
“No, I tried to help Bob meditate and he summoned a flaming astronaut out of thin air.” The frustration crept into his voice.
“It’s cosmonaut,” Alexai corrected, just as he was able to separate the helmet from the suit. “Ah-hah, I told you!”
But the man wasn’t a stranger. That jaw, nose, lips, the eyebrows… even under the thick smudging of smoke residue, he could tell immediately. As could everyone else in the room.
“Is that…” Ava pointed.
Yelena gulped, “Uh-huh.”
“Holy shit,” from Walker.
“Captain America!” Alexai roared.
Bucky was already down on his knees, all thought of someone else helping gone as he all but shoved Alexei out of the way. Steve’s pulse was okay, airways were clear and unobstructed, but they needed to get the suit off of him. He could feel it still generating heat that could worsen any burns underneath.
“First aid kit.” He ground out, not caring who followed the order so long as someone did. The knife came out of his boot, and it was sharp enough to get through most of the suit. He ended up cutting around the reinforced neck area and lifting it off wholesale rather than trying to get through the vulcanized rubber. Steve was wearing a one piece insulated number underneath, probably to keep out the cold that came with upper atmospheric travel.
A well-stocked first aid kit sat open next to Bucky, placed there without fanfare. It must’ve been Ava, because the others would have expected a gold star or his approval. There was a third degree burn that had gone through the suit onto his forearm, and one on the opposite upper chest and shoulder. Otherwise, the damage was probably all from smoke inhalation. Nothing critical for a super soldier.
“Walker, you get his feet. We’ll take him to my room.” It was just down the hall, he had selected his room to be near Bob’s in case of any disturbances.
“Yes, sir.” Despite Walker being a military man, he almost never responded without a snide quip. This level of restraint was unusual as they efficiently moved him.
“Ava, kit.” He heard her pick it up and follow.
“We’ll stay with Bob,” Yelena shouted once they were in the hallway.
Alexei contributed something, but Bucky’s hearing was all static at that point. He had no idea what, why, or how this was happening. And he hated that it felt like someone had answered his prayers. Because the Steve he had seen, the old one sitting on the bench, he had been happy, which meant that Bucky couldn’t possibly be anything but happy for him. Even if he felt anything but.
And Bucky didn’t know how this Steve had wound up in Bob’s room. Was this a version of the same Steve on the bench? Did this Steve even know him?
Once the first aid kit and several bottles of water had been deposited, Bucky shut the door on the rest of the team and tended the astronaut’s wounds. Alternately, he was dreading this Steve waking up, and waiting with bated breath to hear his voice for the first time in years.
As it turned out, Bob woke up before Steve did, but his side of the story lent little in the way of explanation. The team huddled in the hallway, with Bob leaning heavily against the wall as if he’d just run a marathon. Yelena was subtly supporting him on one side. Walker was keeping his distance, as if Bob’s state was contagious.
“I don’t know, I just started focusing on Steve Rogers when I was meditating, because of what you said.” Bob looked down shyly. “Like a lot of kids, I always looked up to him, because I knew he was the sort of guy who would take down the biggest bully in the room. Then I heard this sound, like Mission Control, counting down to takeoff. Then it’s like I was floating while watching some sort of rocket launch.”
Bucky rubbed his chin. “You were floating here too. Three feet off the floor.”
Ava’s eyes widened and Alexei swore in Russian.
“I could tell it was his voice, Steve’s… uh Captain Rogers. I heard his voice talking about preparing to jettison something. And then something went wrong, and I saw fire, and I reached out to help. Then I fell and was back in the bedroom. I passed out after I felt you get him off me.”
“It got hot in the room before he appeared. I smelled smoke.” For the team’s edification, Bucky added, “Then he appeared and you both fell down. I smothered the fire and you were both unconscious.” Sighing, he cast his eyes back to the open door of his bedroom. The mystery Steve hadn’t yet awoken. Bucky had had to cut off most of the suit and had left the covers off his torso so the fresh burns wouldn’t have anything sticking to them.
Bob gently touched the back of his head, as if something should have hurt from where he fell, but there was nothing. He was still immune from harm, it seemed. Passing out was more due to using his powers than anything, Bucky assumed.
Yelena kept looking at Steve, and then back to Bucky, and then back to Bob as if solving a puzzle. “Steve Rogers missed the space race, right? He was under the ice during that time?” She kept asking like she was hoping she was wrong.
“Captain America was already history when the little Moscow street dog Laika took to the sky, four years before the Americans… bless her soul.” That little street dog had died of hypothermia on a one way flight. Bucky had seen the newspapers on one of his missions when he was thawed a month or so after. He had thought it cruel, even in the back of the Winter Soldier’s mind.
“Do dogs have souls?” Walker asked, totally off topic.
This elicited a wave of arguments from the group that quickly grew too loud for him. He was feeling overstimulated and was craving sitting in a dark room with no surprises and no problems. But that wasn’t Bucky’s lot in life, at least not today.
“Okay, okay. Anyone have any ideas? I mean obviously we don’t know the full extent of Bob’s powers, but even a clue might be helpful.” Bucky really needed his team to be the thinkers today; his brain was just buzzing with the possibility of having his best friend back and wondering how soon he would be taken away.
Because if one thing was certain, it was that something would go wrong. James Buchanan Barnes hadn’t had a thing go right since 1942.
“Doppelganger?” Yelena supplied.
Okay, asking his team to brainstorm was clearly going to be a stretch.
“This is… not my arena, but is it possible he’s from another timeline?” Ava’s quiet helpfulness was a huge asset. He needed to figure out a positive way to acknowledge it that wouldn’t make her freeze up. At some point he would; being team leader just wasn’t top of his list right now.
He looked up at his team. Alexei looked lost and a little nauseous, Yelena looked like her eyebrows were going to permanently gain that furrow, and Walker seemed like he was waiting for someone to give him orders. Bucky turned to Bob. The guy was pretty nerdy, he should have some idea about this thing, right?
“Uh, as far as I know, yes.” He steepled his hands. “You told us your Steve went back and lived in the past after restoring the infinity stones to their original timelines, yeah? But the world only remembers what he did after Thanos and that he disappeared after. The two don’t invalidate one another because they’ve created… I guess parallel timelines?”
“Makes sense to me.” Yelena pursed her lips.
Ava started filling in the blanks, “So part of Bob’s powers must be being able to jump around timelines, and because he saw that Steve Rogers in that timeline was about to go boom and fall thousands of feet, he somehow managed to bring him to our timeline.” Bucky didn’t like to think about other timelines where Steve died. Especially not from going boom.
“And our timeline is currently Steveless, so that’s not creating any issues. I hope.” Walker was following along, at least.
Old guy Steve had disappeared after talking to Sam on the bench. Bucky had always assumed old guy Steve had just… lived through their reality. But then he would have spent ten years avoiding himself and potentially creating paradoxes. So he must have saved Pym particles to make the trip back to their timeline instead.
“My head hurts,” Alexei complained. Bucky had been about to say the same thing.
Yelena pouted. “I need food to think this hard. I will order lots of Chinese food. What does Steve like?”
She said that as if he knew this Steve at all. Like it was an incontrovertible fact that Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers were best friends, no matter what the universe threw at them. The corner of his lip quirked in a hesitant smile. Maybe things would be alright.
“He likes cashew chicken but he picks out the cashews. Same with kung pao and peanuts.” He would need a lot of calories to heal those burns. And probably the same with time-traveling Bob. “Just get double what we usually get.” They had very quickly established the best take-out in their neighborhood and had standing orders within a week of moving into the Tower. Enhanced individuals tended to go through food quickly.
Yelena sketched a salute, which was adorable on her small frame, and marched off. The group dispersed, aside from Bob, who was staring at him like a lost kitten.
“Bucky…” He hesitated. “I’m sorry I screwed things up. I really didn’t mean to.”
Placing his non-metal hand on Bob’s shoulder, Bucky gave it a squeeze. “I know, kid. Everything’s gonna be okay.”
“Okay.” Bob leaned heavily on the wall for support as he made it down to his room. Yelena would make sure he ate. They could manage themselves for the moment, while Bucky tried to manage the storm of emotions that overtook him every time he looked at his bed’s current occupant.