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Stories often start with the idea that before something happened, it was a normal day. Of course, the happening of something unusual enough to make it a worthwhile story abolishes the normalness of the day, thereby making the statement ‘it was a normal day’ defunct. In other words, the particular day when Barton found an assassin in his barn was by no means a normal day; even if, in the time before the finding of an assassin, the day would have been considered normal.
The barn was no stranger to assassins – it was, of course, Clint Barton’s barn – nor even Russian assassins; Natasha Romanoff, the Black Widow, pride of the Soviet Union (when it still existed and therefore had pride to give) was a frequent visitor. So yes, the barn knew assassins, and, to the barn, the appearance of an assassin had not been a surprise for many years.
The surprise, and indeed the abnormality, of the day, came not in the existence of an assassin in a barn all too familiar with assassins, but rather of the identity of that particular assassin.
However unfamiliar the assassin was to the barn, barns in general were not too unfamiliar to the assassin. He had slept in a number of barns, decrepit houses and abandoned shacks over the last month, since his everything he knew (which was, sadly, very little) had come crashing down. The tiredness of never sleeping in one place for more than a night, with added nightmares thrown in for extra exhaustion, was perhaps why, on that particular day, he slept long enough to hear voices when he woke up.
Clint Barton’s farm was not a working farm, at least not to the extent of the other farms in the area. He owned chickens and a large vegetable patch and rented out the three top fields to the Millers on the next farm over to grow corn on, but he had another job (until it collapsed rather suddenly into the Potomac), and was not at home nearly enough to make farming a viable career choice. His wife Laura was, but though she enjoyed the view of the farmland, she had two children to look after and no interest in seeing that view at four in the morning as many of the other local farmers did. She worked from the house as a consultant, and unlike her husband, her job at least had not ended in a watery death thanks to her best friend.
Despite it not being a working farm, there were still chickens to feed and collect the eggs from, and that day the job had been tasked to 9-year-old Cooper (under the watchful eye of his father).
“D’you want to go get the feed and the basket from the barn,” Clint suggested to his son, “and I’ll go and bring the hose around to fill up the buckets?”
“Yeah, dad,” Cooper replied.
“You know which the sack with the food for the chickens is in?” Clint asked.
“Unless it’s been moved in the last two days, it’s probably still in the sack that says chicken feed on.”
The father laughed. “Okay, you got me there.” He ruffled Cooper’s hair, before going around back, to where the hose was. His son entered the barn, unaware of its current state of occupancy.
The assassin inside had heard the conversation between father and son, and had moved into the shadows in the corner of the barn, much more awake and alert than he had been moments before, intending to hide until he could slip out of the building and away from the farm. He was a ghost; a child wouldn’t see him. Unfortunately, he hadn’t counted on one thing.
When babies are born, family and friends will gather around, cooing over the child and telling the new parents that they have ‘your nose’ or ‘your smile’ or (often unfortunately for the child) ‘your ears’. Clint and Laura hadn’t had much in the way of family or friends, especially not when Cooper was born, and the new child’s godfather Nick Fury was not much for cooing over small children (at least not when anyone else could see). If there were people to coo over the child, they would have told the parents that he had Clint’s eyes. Clint was proud of his, and subsequently Cooper and Lila’s eyes; his eyesight outshone even Steve Rogers’ enhanced view. Laura was less impressed; it was hard to be a parent to a child who saw everything.
It took Cooper a moment to spot the man hiding in the corner of the barn, busy as he was with the sack that had ‘chicken feed’ on it, but the second he moved in the young boy’s periphery (a movement no larger than a slightly deeper than normal breath), Cooper’s eyes went swinging around to the corner.
To the alternating pride and exasperation of Laura, eyesight was not the only thing that her son had inherited from his father. Rather than back or run away as many children might have done in his situation, or scream or shout for his father as some may have done, Cooper tilted his head slightly and then asked with the innocence only a child could manage:
“Why are you in the corner of our barn? It’s all dark there, and dad says there’s woodworm so we shouldn’t go back there until he fixes it.”
The man didn’t reply. Perhaps it was the shock of being spotted by a child when highly-trained adults had missed him for years. Perhaps he still wasn’t sure how to talk, stuck in the mostly-forgotten memories of his past, no idea how to be a person. Perhaps he just really didn’t like woodworm.
It was just then that something seemed to occur to the young boy. “Why are you in our barn?” It seemed like an obvious question, but when you are nine there are very few questions that seem obvious, and Cooper’s mind was much more preoccupied by his father’s warnings about woodworm than the less recent warnings of strangers. He had never found a stranger in the barn before (unless you count the Evans’ cat, who had been asleep on the tractor when Cooper came in once).
“I… needed a place… to rest,” the man said slowly and quietly. Fortunately, Cooper had not inherited his father’s ears, and heard the voice.
“I’m Cooper,” he said. When there was no reply, he continued “I think this is the part where you’re supposed to tell me your name. I’m not sure though, we don’t get many new people here. There’s Mrs Masters in the village who always forgets who I am, and I have to say my name every time I see her, but that doesn’t count because we’ve met before, she just doesn’t remember.”
“I haven’t done this in a long time either,” the man said quietly. He was quiet, long enough that Clint came to find out what had happened to Cooper.
“Hey, Coop! Are you okay?” That moment he came through the doorway. It took him less long than his son to spot the extra person, but then he had years of experience and it helped Cooper was still staring at the corner. He reflexively reached for the gun that wasn’t on his waist, but just as quickly aborted the movement. “Go back to the house, Coop.”
“But dad-”
“Now, Cooper.” The boy hurried away, and Clint turned to the man. “You know, there’s woodworm in that corner,” he commented.
Very slowly, the man stepped into the light. It was clear that he had been sleeping rough for a while. His hair was long and greasy, his face was spattered with mud and his clothes were dirty, worn and in some places ripped. His hands were covered by gloves.
“I’m Clint,” he said. “You gotta name?”
The man hesitated. “James,” he said finally. Clint had been a spy for well over a decade. He knew when someone was lying. The strange thing was, James was telling the truth, but it was a truth he didn’t seem to entirely believe. It was the same expression Nat used to have when she was trying to convince herself she was completely free from the Red Room. The truth, but she was still struggling to believe it. Clint decided that now was not the time to pull on that particular thread.
“Well, James, you mind telling me what you’re doing hiding in our barn?”
James glanced around for a moment, before saying “I just needed to rest. I’m sorry, I’ll go now.”
Clint snorted. “You kidding? There’s gonna be rain later. Are you going to find some other barn to hide in? ‘Cos most the people ‘round here are more of the shoot first, ask questions later kind of guys. Or do you just want to die of pneumonia in a ditch fifty miles from the nearest hospital?”
James looked a little lost in the same way and alien invasion was a little bad, or Tony Stark was a little rich; that is to say, he looked a lot lost. Clint took pity on him.
“Come inside the house. You can get cleaned up, and my wife should be just about done with breakfast.” It was clear that James was hesitating, glancing from Clint to the doorway of the barn, but he eventually nodded.
They walked side-by-side back to the house, neither one wanting to be in front of the other. “So, James, is that some Brooklyn I hear in that accent of yours?”
James’ head jerked slightly at the question, staring at Clint for a moment before giving a slight nod. Not something to bring up again then.
Laura did not seem surprised when Clint introduced her to James, and set another place at the table with cutlery already out. Clint showed James the shower and a change of clothes, and then looked at his wife questionably.
“I know you, honey,” she said. “When Cooper came back and said that there was a stranger in the barn, either there would be another mouth to feed for breakfast or a body to bury. There is no in between with you.”
He gave a small grin. “At least this one isn’t a Russian Assassin?”
James came back down with the clothes that Clint had given him on. He had rolled the sleeves of the shirt all the way down, and had put his gloves back on, but he was looking much cleaner than before. They smiled at him as he came in.
“Perfect timing,” Laura said, as she dished scrambled eggs onto five separate plates.
“Cooper, Lila!” Clint called, and the kids came running into the room, but stopping short when they saw the guest.
“This is James,” Clint said. “He’s going to be with us for a little while. James, this is Lila, and you’ve met Cooper.”
Cooper gave James a small smile. Lila gave him a grin, and a cheerful “hi”, before running over to the table.
The family and James ate quietly, and it wasn’t until the kids had finished their plates and run off (after Clint told Cooper to finish feeding the chickens) that Clint asked him “You have anywhere you can go, James?”
He shook his head, and both Clint and Laura looked grim but unsurprised. “You know,” Clint said, “we could always use some help around the place.”
James’ eyes widened slightly. “We can’t pay well,” Clint continued, “but we can give you a bed and food. Just for a little while.”
There was a pause, and then James said very quietly “thank you”.
Later that morning, James came back inside to hear the two talking upstairs.
“How much do you know about him?” Laura asked.
“Not much. Definitely ex-military, judging by his stride,” Barton said. “Probably American, given his accent. He has some kind of post-traumatic stress, and it looks bad.”
“Poor guy,” Laura whispered.
The first thing they did was turn the upstairs of the barn into a place for James to sleep. Clint offered one of the spare rooms, but James turned him down, saying that he had nightmares and didn’t want to frighten his children. Clint, who had had his own fair share of nightmares, particularly in the last two years after a Norse god had decided to take his brain for a test drive, thought his kids were made of harder stuff than that, but James was adamant.
Over the next few weeks, they did a variety of jobs around the house; rebuilding the chicken hutch, re-tiling the roof, beginning the construction on a sun-room. It was clear James had never done anything of the sort before, but he was a fast learner and after an explanation and a little trial and error, he was hammering in nails well enough that Clint was happy to leave him to it.
When being told what to do, he would do it without complaint, whether it was feeding chickens, tending the garden, or helping Clint remove the woodworm infested slats from the barn, and replacing them with new ones. It was when he was asked to express any kind of preference or opinion the he struggled, as Laura learnt when she asked him how he wanted his eggs done one morning, and he stood there, frozen, as though she had asked him the meaning of life, rather than his opinion on scrambled over fried.
James was also clearly not good with people. A week after he first arrived, Laura took him down to the farmers market to sell some eggs and vegetables, and buy food for the week. It probably didn’t help that he was the first new face the town had seen in almost a year, and everyone instantly wanted to know who he was, where he came from, and whether he was staying. Laura answered all their questions with the sharp politeness that came from years of experience with nosy neighbours, before calling Clint to take him home. That afternoon, James saved three days of demolition on the back wall of the barn.
One day, Laura decided that James needed a haircut. James agreed, as he always did, which was how Clint found himself standing behind the man as he sat in front of the mirror, holding a pair of scissors. It was all fine, until Clint went to make the first snip, and suddenly found himself on his back on the floor, his own scissors pointed at his neck, and a wild look in James’ eyes as he knelt over him. Clint had had plenty of time to envision his own demise. Even in his most imaginative moments, stabbed to death with his own scissors on the floor of his bathroom by a man he was about to give a haircut to was not how he imagined it going. Clint didn’t see James for three days after that particular event, and the food he left out for him remained untouched. He was mildly surprised but glad when James came back on the evening of the third day, his mouth full of apologies. After that, it was unanimously decided by Clint that James’ hair could stay as it was.
James, at the start of his stay with the Barton’s, had difficulty talking to the kids. He would often go out of his way to avoid them when he could, and he was even more distant with them than he was with Clint and Laura. Lila was her normal friendly self, talking and laughing at meals and whenever else she saw him, never seeming to care how receptive he was to her. Cooper recognised his closed off emotions much better than his sister, and was generally a quieter kid anyway, so spoke to James less than Lila. He also seemed to understand that James was hurt, and needed time “like daddy after the big fight with the aliens,” he told a proud Laura one night.
Eventually he began to be… not warm to the children, but was certainly less cold. He sat with the kids as they watched movies, not seeming to care about all the spoilers they gave as they watched, even though he appeared to have never seen any of the movies they showed before. He began to nod along as the children talked, and would occasionally begin to tell stories of his own, before suddenly stopping, looking confused. What the family actually knew about James however, remained very little until one day, about a month after that first morning in the barn.
Clint and James were down at the bottom of the property repairing the fence. Over the last month the temperature had slowly risen, and that particular day was definitely a spring day pretending to be summertime. Clint was seriously considering taking off his t-shirt, but when he glanced over at James, the man was still wearing his long-sleeved shirt and gloves.
“Don’t cover up on my account,” Clint told him.
James hesitated, before slowly peeling off first his gloves, and then his shirt, leaving just the black t-shirt he had on underneath.
Clint had spent more time that he cared to admit wondering what was on his arm that he seemed so keen to keep hidden (not that he had spent a huge amount of time wondering, but then he rarely cared to admit that he spent any time wondering at all). Clint knew it was his left arm that was the reason he covered up, not that he couldn’t or didn’t move it, but it had a certain stiffness to it that the right didn’t and was slightly bigger than the other, visible even under his shirt. Clint had been expecting scarring, or burns, some injury, possibly caused in the war, that was bad enough that he felt the need to keep it covered. He did not expect the entire thing to be made of silvery metal plates. He did not expect to see the arm, and for so much about the guy to suddenly make sense. He did not expect to see the arm and suddenly for the first time be very glad that Nat had decided to go on a trip to ‘find herself’ a week before he turned up.
Later, Clint would be annoyed at himself for not recognising James Barnes; the guy was using his own goddamn name for Christ’s sake. But the truth was, why would he? He had seen the guy’s picture maybe twice; once in Peggy Carter’s office back when she was director, years ago, and once when Coulson had been showing off some new old Howling Commando’s memorabilia. Neither time he had been interested in looking at old photographs. Natasha had mentioned that he was alive, and the Winter Soldier (‘Do you remember that guy who shot me a few years back and then we spent six months searching for?’ ‘How could I forget, Nat?’). If the guy had been shooting people when Clint had stumbled across him, he probably would have recognised him, but context did strange things to minds. The dirty, tired man in the barn hadn’t even crossed into the realm of ‘you look vaguely familiar, but I’m not quite sure where from’.
He tried to hide his reaction at seeing the arm, but clearly failed, because James breathed out in a way that any more deeply would have been a sigh. “You know who I am then,” he said. Clint nodded.
“I can go-” he began.
“Are you kidding? You think that a fancy arm and a tragic backstory gets you out of finishing this fence?”
The beginning of a smile made its way onto James’ face for the first time, and they didn’t talk about the fancy arm or the tragic backstory for the rest of the afternoon.
That evening they did talk about it though, sitting around the kitchen table with Laura after the kids had gone to bed.
“So, you’re the guy who shot Nat?” Laura asked, when they finished explaining.
“Twice,” Clint corrected.
“Nat…” Barnes mused. “Natalia? The girl in DC?”
“That’s the one, though she goes by Natasha now,” Clint agreed.
“I only shot her once.”
“In DC. You shot her once outside Odessa as well.”
James furrowed his brow. “I don’t remember that.”
“But you know her?” Laura asked. “And you know her as Natalia?”
“I… yes?” He made it sound like a question. “I don’t remember how. You know Natalia?”
“She’s my best friend,” Clint said. “I brought her into SHIELD.”
“You work for SHIELD?” James asked.
“I did. You and Hydra did a good job at destroying it though, so, not anymore.”
James nodded, looking slightly apologetic. “I can’t stay here,” he said. “I never meant to stay this long.”
“You’d be safe here,” Laura said. “No one knows it exists except for us, Nat and Fury.”
Clint wasn’t sure if James knew his assassination attempt on Fury had failed, probably not by the way his mouth turned at the name.
“I still need to find out who I am. I can’t do it here,” James said.
“Why not go to Captain Rogers?” She suggested. “According to Nat, he’s been tearing the world apart looking for you. He’ll be glad to see you.”
Again, James shook his head, and this was probably the most refusing he had done in seventy years. “He… he’s not looking for me. He’s looking for his best friend, and I’m not… Even if I did, there’s still triggers…”
He trailed off his thought, but Clint understood. James had mentioned that the only reason he even knew his name was because he read it in a museum. Cap was looking for his best friend, but that guy might never be coming back. Clint remembered that after three days with Loki, he had put off going home to Laura and the kids for over a month, terrified that Loki was still in his head, just waiting to take hold and bring down everything he loved. He couldn’t even imagine what seventy years of lost control felt like, knowing that the triggers, the relapses weren’t just in the imagination, but very real possibilities. He wondered if even Stark and all his money and resources had the ability to fix Barnes’ head.
“Do you know Steve?” James asked.
“Sort of,” Clint admitted. “I fought with him and the other Avengers in that alien invasion two years back, seen him a few times since.”
A pause as Barnes nodded, then “wait, what alien invasion?”
One brief explanation of an alien invasion later…
“So,” Laura summarised. “You don’t want to stay here, and you don’t want to go to Steve. Where do you want to go?”
For a guy who had freaked out about egg choices, he was decisive when faced with the entire world. “Europe,” James said. “I know I spent a long time there. If I try and retrace some of my steps, maybe some of my memories will come back.”
“What languages do you speak?” Clint asked
“Russian, German, French, Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, Polish-”
“Romania!” Clint jumped in. “Nice this time of year, fairly remote, but with some nice cities to get lost in, and no one speaks Romanian except Romanians… and Moldovans… and James Barnes, apparently.”
“I think I remember something about Romania,” James said.
“Sounds perfect,” Clint said, “as long as you don’t meet anyone who remembers you. I don’t have SHIELD resources anymore, and I can’t go to the Avengers, but I’m sure I still have a contact or two who can make a good fake Romanian passport.”
Two weeks later, Clint and James were standing outside the small plane that would take James to DC, from there he would get a flight to Bucharest. “Keep out of sight of cameras, and you should be good,” Clint told him.
“You know, I’ve being doing this a lot longer than you,” James responded. “About seventy years longer.”
“Don’t get slow then, old man. And it’s only about fifty.” They paused for a moment, and then Clint added “and when you do decide to have a good old-peoples reunion with Cap, I’d rather you didn’t mention the last couple of months.”
“Don’t you like me?” James asked, although there was no heat to it.
“I can leave my family to work for SHIELD, or the Avengers, because I know that they’re safe as long as no one knows about them. And even if they knew about my farm, do you know how much trouble I’d be in for not telling anyone about you?”
“What happens at the farm, stays at the farm?”
Clint narrowed his eyes. “Please tell me you didn’t watch that movie with my kids.”
The ghost of a smile crossed James’ lips. “I’m 97, I’m not dead,” he said.
“Watch yourself out there, James.”
“Bucky.” Clint raised an eyebrow. “I read about me in a museum. Apparently, people call me Bucky.”
“Well then, watch yourself out there, Bucky.”
And that time, Clint was sure that the expression on Bucky’s lips was a proper smile, but the man turned away before he could be certain.
Clint watched, until the plane disappeared from even his view.