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Crowds are something Bucky has to get used to. People brush up against you casually, it’s noisy, and sometimes you can’t get to an exit. (Unless you don’t care about taking out the people in your path, of course, which he does, now.) He’s just started being able to handle the corner market if Steve’s with him and they keep it to under twenty minutes. Steve acts like this is an accomplishment. Steve acts like everything Bucky does is an accomplishment. It would be irritating from anyone else.
Bucky has to brave a crowd now, and he can’t bring Steve with him for support. Bucky has a mission. Target: Steve’s birthday present. Location: An antiques collector. He’d done multiple searches on Google (with some help from Jarvis) and called no fewer than eight stores to find what he wants. And Steve is meeting with Fury today, with the rest of the Avengers, so it’s the perfect (and possibly only) opportunity.
But there are so many people.
He feels a little off-kilter anyway, because he’s back in Brooklyn and some of the buildings look the same but mostly everything is different, and he knows his way around the streets but they’re not the same streets he knew before, not really. And he’s standing in front of the store and it’s bursting with people and he’s on edge. He takes a deep breath in and counts to ten before he lets it out. Sam taught him that. Bruce always talks to him about visualizing locking his anger in a box but Bucky’s still not quite clear on what his anger looks like, so it’s hard to visualize it at all.
He is James Buchanan Barnes, the fiercest scrapper in Brooklyn. He was (is?) a Howling Commando. He is (was?) a trained assassin. He can handle a toy store. He squares his shoulders, narrows his eyes, and goes inside.
He wants to run away immediately. The crowd is oppressive and there’s only the one door. One door? That seems like a violation of a fire code, not to mention supremely dangerous in the event of a hostile attack. Bucky forces himself to breathe. There probably aren’t a lot of hostile attacks on antique stores.
Bucky needs to talk to the owner, the one he’d spoken with on the phone. This mission isn’t supposed to take long—the man on the phone said he’d hold the toy behind the counter and Bucky could pay for it and go. He’d planned for ten minutes in the store, then a five-minute walk back to the train and a twenty-five minute ride back into the city, where he would walk a few blocks (six minutes, twenty-four seconds) back to Stark Tower and ride the elevator for thirty-nine seconds up to the floor he and Steve live on.
Now all his calculations are being messed up because there is no one behind the counter and seven people waiting in line. He forces his breathing to deepen, his heart rate to slow. Missions are lost because of panic and haste. If he is in the store for twenty minutes, all his calculations are still correct but pushed back by double. If he is in the store for twenty-five minutes, he’ll have to factor in an additional four minutes to wait for the next train. As long as it takes twenty-five minutes or less inside the store, he will still beat Steve home, unless Steve takes a different route home—if Tony flies them home instead of Steve taking the train, everything will be different, all the time frames will be skewed, and Bucky’s not sure—
Someone jostles his elbow and his entire body freezes. Breathe, he commands himself, following his own order obediently. He can’t always control his own mind, but his body obeys. He reminds himself the other people around him are not targets and cannot be collateral damage. Someone stands directly behind him in the line and he grits his teeth.
It’s for Steve, he reminds himself, calming slightly. For Steve, for Steve, for Steve.
He can feel the person behind him breathing on him and he’s going to snap, oh no, he can’t deal with this—
“Bucky?”
He looks to his left. It’s Tony’s friend, the blonde one. Steve says she is very nice but also powerful. Tony says Steve is being polite and by powerful he means terrifying. Clint agrees and says she gets shit done.
“Ms. Potts.” He nods at her. She rolls her eyes, but she’s smiling.
“You 40s men and your chivalry.” She says with a laugh. “Please call me Pepper.”
“Pepper.” He tests the word. If she is as fierce as Tony says, the name fits.
“What are you doing here?” Pepper asks. The without Steve is implied.
“I…” Is the mission confidential? No. Not to her. “I’m getting Steve’s birthday present.” He confides, a little shyly.
“Something from the old days?” She has a nice smile and Bucky feels himself relaxing a little. He uncurls his tight fist.
“Kind of.” He works on a smile of his own, going for the crooked grin from his youth. “Something he always wanted but couldn’t afford.”
“Some kind of art set?” Pepper guesses, and Bucky thinks from the tone of her voice they might be playing a game now—she wants to guess. The smile starts to feel more natural on his face and he shakes his head.
“He always had plenty to draw with.” He feels some pride about that. He’d always done as much as he could to help make that true.
“Hmm…” She narrows her eyes, thinking, cataloguing what she knows about Steve. “Does it have to do with war?”
“No.” Bucky says emphatically. Pepper winces a little and he smiles ruefully. “I’m not buying him anything war-related.” He elaborates more gently. She nods understandingly.
“Well, I give up.” She says with a little laugh and a shrug. “What is it?”
“A chemistry set.” He tells her conspiratorially. “No one knows this, but Steve wanted to be the scientist before he ever wanted to be the experiment.”
Pepper laughs, and it’s a light sound that makes Bucky grin. “Wow. A chemistry set. I never would’ve guessed that.”
“Yeah, he only looks like a big dummy.” Bucky jokes fondly. “I, uh…I didn’t know there would be so many people here.” He admits.
“Oh, there’s usually not.” Pepper sympathizes. “I come here when they get new pieces, to see if there’s anything to add to my—um, the Stark collection.” She looks sheepish and it makes him laugh. “There’s usually only a few other people, but today’s sort of an expo.”
“Of course it is.” Bucky sighs. Someone brushes against his back as they slide past him and he tenses. Pepper lays a light hand on his forearm.
“Do you want me to get it and you can go on home?” She asks him kindly, and Bucky suddenly feels a little overwhelmed with how nice she is. She can see how uncomfortable he is and she’s offering him an out. But he shakes his head.
“I can do this.” He says firmly. “It’s for Steve.” Her eyebrows go up, just a touch, and he can see her evaluating this new information.
“Well, is it alright if I wait in line with you?” She asks. “I need to talk to the owner, too, and then if you want, you can ride back with me in the car.”
The car is so much better than the train. The train makes his stomach hurt because the last time he’d been on a train he’d fallen to his apparent death. The last time he’d been on a train he’d lost his arm. The last time he’d been on a train he’d lost Steve for seventy years. But the car will change all his calculations, and so will waiting for Pepper’s business after finishing his own. What kind of time will this take? He can’t recalibrate the timetable if he doesn’t know how long she’ll take.
She’s looking at him expectantly, waiting for an answer, and she is Steve’s friend, and she is kind and caring and wants to help him. Bucky takes a deep breath and ignores the automated voice in his head asking him his ETA back to base.
“Thank you.” He tells her sincerely. “That would be really nice.”
And since he waits for her, he gets to see firsthand the way she gets shit done, as she fixes the owner with a steely gaze and talks him down a hundred bucks for the chemistry set. Bucky can afford it either way—apparently the Army owed him some money, and interest had just been piling higher while he’d been away, so he’s got more money than he’s ever heard of—but it’s nice to see her in action, in any case.
And the look on Steve’s face when he opens it, pulling off the newspaper because they might be able to afford real wrapping paper now but newspaper works just fine, makes Bucky think he could deal with more crowds if he has to. For Steve.