Archive of Our Own

“What if there is somewhere we need to go and they don't let us? We may not be perfect, but the safest hands are still our own.”

Steve hits the nail right on the head, at least in Sam’s humble opinion, but of course Stark has to bring out the big dick energy and disagree. The fact that Romanoff of all people approves of his view concerning this Accords bullshit is what Sam riles up most, though, so he just has to say something. 

He opens his mouth but is cut off by Steve’s phone buzzing and then omitting The Sound. 

It’s one of those pre-installed ringtones nobody actually uses, and Sam looked, all right, he opened the settings and looked and it’s called Instant Calm.

Now, the funny thing is that whenever this music starts to play, Steve is instantly as calm as a roaring bull about to impale the matador dumb enough to wag a red cape in front of its nose. This whole situation would be a hilarious anecdote for a night out with friends if Sam wouldn’t have to deal with the afterglow of the damn ringtone every fucking time. Countermeasures usually consist of a shit ton of alcohol and sad Disney movies and Sam is in no way prepared to deal with that tonight.

Steve gets his phone out of his pocket, fingers slightly trembling, and then stares at the screen with a hopeful puppy expression that makes Sam want to puke because he knows it’s going to turn into a puppy-whose-siblings-all-died-a-horrible-death-in-front-of-its-eyes look.

He mentally catalogs the number of beer bottles in his fridge and how many more he has to buy for this evening when his astonished brain screeches a loud WHAT at him. Because this is not the everyone-is-dead-and-I’m-super-alone look. This is – bafflement paired with anxiety and a huge pinch of the patented Steve Rogers Urge To Just Do Something Right Now. 

“I have to go,” he says and then the guy just gets up and leaves.

Even Stark is left dumbfounded.

The BFF app, Bucky Friend Finder as Sam used to call it, had been a gift of Vision shortly after the android had started to be an Avenger. Downloading the whole internet into his mechanical brain had seemed to be his favorite downtime thing back then, which was why he’d learned about the whole Barnes falling off a speeding train and dying a hero and then somehow not being dead. He’d programmed a highly functional facial recognition software and fed it Barnes’ face: every grainy photo, every black-and-white film material, every shaky video from the fight on the bridge. If Stark had noticed that his server space was used for this purpose, he’d never said anything. Probably didn’t want to explain why he hadn’t suggested something like that.

Anyway, Vision had put a new app on a very moved, very teary-eyed National Icon’s phone that would call for Steve’s attention with the Instant Calm sound every time it found a new photo or video clip resembling Barnes in the depths of the internet. The likelihood of the person being Barnes had to be around 80 % for it to chirp. 

Steve – and, admittedly, Sam too – had thought with this kind of help they would find the ghost within a couple of days, but both of them had underestimated Barnes’ freaking assassin skills of avoiding all kinds of cameras and surveillance. 

They had also misjudged the number of people living in this good world that had, for example, a similar jawline or eyes-to-nose-ratio. Seven times the BFF app had chirped its Instant Calm sound already, only for Steve to check the photos with endearing hopefulness that was then crushed by the horrible realization that nope, the new Instagram pic or the live video on youtube did not contain a single Bucky Barnes hair. 

This time, though, this time it is different, at least according to Steve. The guy with the baseball cap and the ugly jacket can be anyone in Sam's opinion, but he trusts Steve's intuition -- and he wants to be there for his friend when the realization hits that nope, still no Bucky Bear around.

He takes another look at the photo some girl on Instagram posted. She's sitting outside a little café with her friend, both with huge iced coffees in their hands, smiling at the camera. Barnes is in the background, walking by, clearly not intended to be part of the photo. He has a dire stubble situation going on and the baseball cap shadows half of his face. The broad shoulders could belong to him, though.

The BFF app only tells them about the date, time, and coordinates where the photo was taken. Steve asks Natasha Romanoff for help once he's sure the guy is his Bucky because there are nearly two million people living in Bucharest and even if Sam is pretty certain that Steve would knock on every single door of every single building they simply don't have time for that.

So, Natasha Romanoff it is. 

She hacks into the database of the registry office and then compares the names to those they know the Winter Soldier used in the past. She even combines different forenames and surnames. No luck, of course. Barnes is smarter than that.

Then she tries her luck on more private servers of landlords that don't need passports or other legal papers, of employers not asking questions because they don't want to be asked questions about their kind of work themselves. To Steve's disappointment and Sam's surprise, there are still hundreds of people that haven't officially registered but are still living in Bucharest. 

Natasha discards all the female names first, then checks whether the remaining ones have a reliable social media account. That narrows their potential Buckys drastically because 95 % are on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. 3 % are illegal immigrants. The remaining 2 % are criminals of all shades: arms and drug dealers, thieves, even sexual offenders. Romanoff reports them to the authorities.

When Steve looks more and more like he’s just going to fly over to Romania and turn every house on its head to find Barnes, Romanoff drops an address into his lap. Apparently, she still has some shady contacts. One engages black labor workers on his building sites; he even sneaked a picture of the guy she asked for: big, probably buff, pretty strong. Never shows his left hand or arm. 

It’s grainy and from pretty far away, but even Sam has to admit: That dude looks a lot like Barnes. Steve books the first flight to Bucharest the minute he sees the photo. But only after he pressed a big kiss to Natasha Romanoff’s stunned looking face.

"Thank you, Sam. For coming with me."

Sam looks up and then shrugs because he's getting the puppy-eyes in full force and hasn't yet developed any countermeasures when it comes to Steve Rogers' gratefulness.

"Sure, man, whatever. I'm only here because you promised me a 5-star hotel in Bucharest. Speaking of, you need to take a photo of me in that jacuzzi this evening so I can brag on Facebook about it."

Steve smiles and puts his huge beef hand on Sam's shoulder and then they leave the horrible expensive hotel suite to go and catch a ghost.

Steve's plan is simple and goes like this: He will dress in civilian clothes and engage in a non-threatening manner and with lots of "Hey, Buck, you remember me? It's me, your best pal" while Sam will keep watch from above, fully armed, and intervene as soon as things might look like they could go south.

Sam doesn't like the plan one bit.

First of all: Barnes is very much able to kill Steve within the couple of seconds Sam needs to dive down from the air or sling Steve's shield at him.

Secondly: Steve is tremendously awful at being undercover. He cannot even pull off the American Tourist card, because he looks like A Man With A Plan and that plan doesn't contain sightseeing. He bulldozes his way along the sidewalk and towards the residential house Barnes might be living in to check out the situation and maybe, you know, ring the bell and wait until Barnes comes down to the door. Sam wants to shout what was that with non-threatening? into the comms.

Then he nearly topples off the roof he's keeping watch from because Steve squeaks all of a sudden and then dives into a narrow alley and out of sight.

"Steve, status update!" Sam barks into his comm, one foot on the low railing surrounding the rooftop. "Status up--"

"Fine," comes back the breathy reply. "It's him, Sam, it's him, he's there!"

" Where ," Sam demands, leaning over the railing and adjusting his goggles. Steve doesn't sound like he's in immediate danger, so he can calm the fuck down again.

"My 12, dark baseball cap, red sweater beneath a grey jacket. It's him , Sam, it really is! I just saw him for a second but I'm one hundred percent certain, he left a laundromat and -- oh God, Sam, he's washing his clothes, he's having nice clean clothes, he's taking care of himself!"

Steve sounds teary-eyed because apparently, Barnes isn't living in his own filth. Pretty easy to impress that guy. Sam likes to point out that he washes his clothes regularly, too, and wears new boxers and socks every single day but whatever.

Sam follows Steve's directions and finds the person he described. Pretty buff. Hands covered by gloves despite the warm day. He could be James Barnes.

"What are you--"

"I will follow him." Steve sounds resolute. "I will follow him and see what he's up to. There are too many civilians around in case… I'll follow him, he'll never know."

Sam nearly gives himself an aneurysm by trying to not laugh his ass off. "Steve, buddy, you want to stalk him and think he won't notice?"

Steve doesn't dignify him with an answer. Instead, he leaves the alley and bulldozes after Barnes. If this guy doesn't notice the intense I'll follow you to the end of the earth stare Sam can see piercing into Barnes' shoulder blade from 100 hundred fucking meters away, then he's not entitled to be the Winter Soldier.

He activates his wings and takes a big jump to the next rooftop, keeping a close eye on both Barnes and Steve as they follow the streets because apparently, that's the way they're doing this. Whatever.

Steve cannot stop rambling.

"He looks so good, doesn't he? His sweater seems really soft. Do you think it's as soft as it looks like, Sam? I really hope so. He deserves all the soft things in the world. And he's so big! He has been eating, all that muscle mass has to come from somewhere. I hope he’d tried chocolate these days. Oh God, what does he think about bananas in this century? I need to ask him about that. Bananas are gross . I miss our bananas…"

Sam makes the wise decision not to answer because he's gotten into a banana-based argument once and doesn't want to repeat that incident.

As it turns out, Barnes' goal is the local farmer's market. It's difficult to see what he's doing, exactly, due to loads of shoppers and the different stalls he's meandering through, but Steve keeps him updated -- whether Sam likes to or not.

"He's buying tomatoes, Sam! Oh, they look really good, too. His ma made a great tomato sauce. Damn, I'm getting hungry… you think I could buy one of those flatbreads over there without him noticing? Oh, he's walking on! He's inspecting the fruits now. I think he's talking in Romanian. He learned a whole new language, Sam! Isn't that amazing? Oh, hey, he's buying plums. Didn't know he fancies those."

Sam can hear Steve wondering whether he is a bad friend because he never knew Bucky Barnes likes a certain kind of fruit and to stop that train of thought before it can reach reproach station, he asks: "When exactly are you going to approach him, Steve?"

There's a long pause which leads to Sam checking that Steve is still looming near a stall selling honey and not being lovingly choked to death by a sneaky assassin and his fancy metal arm or glaring at bananas because their flavor doesn't match his old-man tasting buds.

"He'll go home at some point, won't he? I'll follow him and knock at his door. Fewer civilians. A little more… private."

Sam wonders what Steve wants to do with this privacy but before he can ask or point out what a terrible plan this is since air support won't be of help at all inside a fucking building, he sees Steve hurrying across the market and back towards the direction they came from. Sam swears, leaps back from roof to roof until he lands at his original spot. Barnes' broad figure disappears in the laundromat.

Super soldiers. So annoying.

"So how did he look? You know, mentally speaking," Sam adds because he's pretty certain he cannot stomach another round of his hair is so shiny, surely it smells good or whatever Steve noticed in his delusional state of I'm-having-my-best-friend-back. And he wants to at least get a hint of what they're dealing with here. Mentally unstable hobo with crazy murder eyes or a somewhat coping individual with a bad hairstyle?

"He looks good, Sam, like -- I know you think I'm biased" no shit, Sherlock "but he looks healthy. Like he's eating and taking care of himself. A little nervous maybe? Shy, no, shy is not the right word, but--"

Then Steve shrieks like one of those blond chicks in horror movies that die after the first twenty minutes and Sam is nearly dangling off the roof in his attempt to get down there and help him when he belatedly realizes that Steve is still standing upright in the mouth of the alley he already hid in before, not one single hair out of place. To be on the safe side, Sam flies over there and lands on the roof of the laundromat, looking down to where Barnes has snuck up on Steve from behind, startling him. Sam's gun is trained on his head immediately.

For a few seconds, nobody says a word, there's only Steve's harsh breathing coming through the line of Sam's earpiece. Then he hears Barnes' voice, muffled by the distance between him and Steve. Obviously, Steve didn't deactivate his comm.

"Now you look kinda nervous," Barnes says and Steve releases an almost hysterical laugh. 

"Hey, Buck."

"Hey, Steve."

There's another long pause. Sam starts to sweat with the effort of training his gun at Barnes' head, though the guy doesn't look one bit threatening right now. There's a big bag sitting at his feet with freshly washed and dried clothes. Sam spots a pair of what looks like dog pajama pants laying on top. 

Sweet Jesus.

"How did you know I was here?" Steve asks eventually.

"I spotted you when I left the laundromat an hour ago."

Ha , Sam makes under his breath. Steve has the decency to squirm a little, his pale Irish neck turning red. 

"You wanna come with me?"

"Yes!" Steve nearly shouts and then steps back to let Barnes walk past him with his fruits and vegetables and bag of clean clothes.

"Steve!" Sam hisses. "Stop that shit, what are you doing? Are you actually going to follow him into the building? I'll get down asap and accom-"

"Stay put. I'll handle this," Steve whispers back emphatically as he crosses the street.

Sam curses when he disappears into the building, holsters his gun, and takes up into the air to circle the building in case Steve jumps out of one of the windows and is in dire need of a catcher.

Barnes had not looked like a guy who wants to slit anybody's throat but he's still the Winter Soldier and fucking dangerous and he has the feeling Steve is following him like a lamb following its butcher. At least he can still hear what is going on.

There's a lot of walking and climbing the stairs going on according to the noises -- isn't there an elevator? -- and then Sam thinks he hears the scrape of a key and a door being opened. He tries to make out where they are by peeking into the windows but a lot of them are shielded by curtains and drapes or the cumulation of twenty years of dirt and then one woman spots him and screams and he quickly gets up again in case she calls the police because there is a birdman flying around her balcony.

"You live here?" Steve asks over the comms and he sounds sad.

"Can't exactly afford a three-room-apartment in the middle of Bucharest, Steve. They want to have real contracts and see passports and that stuff."

"Right…"

There's some rustling and other noises Sam can't make out. Then there's Barnes' muffled voice again: "Don't you wanna invite Wilson inside before he frightens more of my neighbors? Fourteenth floor, south side, the balcony with the newspaper on the windows."

Sam refuses to be surprised that Barnes had spotted him as well though his pride is a tiny bit wounded.

Steve sounds sheepish for both of them: "Yeah, sure, uh -- Sam--"

"Yeah, I heard him." 

He counts the floors, does one last loop around the whole building, and then drops down on a bare balcony, Steve's shield raised in case he's getting a warm welcome of bullets.

It's Steve who opens the door and lets him inside. Up close he looks nervous and excited and a little terrified but also like a stray dog who finally found his family after ten years of wandering through the world. Or, like, seventy years Sam guesses.

Barnes' apartment is tiny. It's only one room with a small corridor leading to the door and presumably an even tinier bathroom. There's a mattress on the floor instead of an actual bed, but there are thick pillows and warm looking blankets. The kitchenette looks used and there's the normal clutter every household acquires at some point: junk mail, a few ballpoints with the logos of companies Sam doesn't recognize, a coupon for hygiene products. Sam wouldn't want to live here but it's clean and Barnes obviously put effort into making it look a little homey with the single potted plant near the pasted-up windows and the poster of a dog he clearly had gotten out of a magazine for kids.

Strangely, the apartment puts him at ease, a little. Barnes is still struggling, tremendously so, but he's also coping. Sam sets the shield down carefully and holsters his gun.

"Barnes," he greets.

"Wilson."

Barnes shed the grey jacket and the gloves before Sam entered the building. The red sweater stretches across his broad shoulders, the metal hand peeking out of a sleeve as he walks around the kitchen counter -- probably using said counter as some sort of barrier between himself and both Steve and Sam -- and pulls out the contents of his little grocery bag. 

"Do you wanna have some plums?" he asks but doesn't wait for an answer. He turns around (shoulders going up around his ears because he's vulnerable this way), rinses the fruits off, then he grabs a knife that is not meant to do kitchen work but gut a boar or maybe a small bear and cuts the plums open to get out the stone in the middle and arrange them on a pastel pink plate. 

Sam notices he's gaping a little, shuts his mouth quickly, and politely takes one half of a plum with a thank you because what the hell. Steve next to him is too busy vibrating with all sorts of emotions to do anything but stare at Barnes with bright blue eyes and the raw desire to wrap his friend up in his enormous arms and never let go. Maybe that's why Barnes fled behind the counter.

"Bucky," Steve breathes and doesn't seem to know what else to say.

Sam takes it into his hand to make a little small talk. "These are really good." He grabs another plum, chews loudly, and slurps the fruit juice off his fingers.

He swears the corners of Barnes' lips are twitching.

"How did you find me?"

Steve twitches. It's very obvious that he wants to jump across the kitchen island and plaster himself to Barnes' chest like a giant octopus. Maybe that's why Barnes is still holding the not-kitchen-knife.

"Vision -- he's some kind of very smart robot -- he wrote a program that scanned the internet and all the uploaded photos and videos with some sort of facial recognition software and somebody posted a pic of you on Instagram."

Steve fishes his phone out of the depths of his pants and shows Barnes the screen where Sam has no doubt the pic of his best friend immediately turned into a loving background photo. He thinks he can hear Barnes mutter something that sounds suspiciously like fucking social media .

"Natasha Romanoff helped with the rest."

Steve stuffs the phone back into his jeans pocket and then continues to stare at Barnes with wounded puppy eyes. Sam helps himself to another plum and lets the drama unroll because what else is he supposed to do?

"Why didn't you… I tried to find you, Buck. I followed you, the first few months when I had a lead. Why did you never…"

Sam internally points out that he, too, had been part of that ghost hunting dream team, but Steve's having capital F Feelings and so he contents himself with watching Barnes, who doesn’t know what to do or say or where to even look. He scrubs a hand across his face and then shoves the plate with the halved plums in front of Steve’s nose. Steve doesn’t even look down as he takes a whole fucking fistful and mashes it into his mouth, chewing aggressively as if he has to prove a point. Maybe he has. Sam has absolutely no idea what the heck is going on here.

“What do you remember,” he demands to know after swallowing audibly. It’s not even phrased as a question, it sounds more like an order.

Perhaps that’s why Barnes answers: “Bits. Pieces. Sometimes more, sometimes less. I don’t even know if part of it is real or if Hydra somehow put stuff into my head to mess me up even more.” He doesn’t look at Steve but at a dark blue notebook on top of the fridge Sam didn’t notice before. In fact, there are a couple of more notebooks strewn around the room. 

Steve’s hand twitches as if he wants to grab and read them. Barnes notices if the tiny and very brief smile is anything to go by.

“They won’t make sense to you, Steve. Half of them don’t even make sense to me. And Captain America is too wholesome to read other people’s diaries, isn’t he?”

Sam snorts, catches Steve’s wounded stare, and quickly turns to politely look at the covered windows. 

“I can help you distinguish between what’s real and what’s not, Buck. Please.”

There’s another loaded pause. Sam fakes reading a faded advertisement (which is really stupid because he doesn’t speak a single word of Romanian). 

“I’m not him, Steve. I’m not the man I was before.”

“Nor am I.”

“You don’t understand, I --”

“I do . I do understand. You’re different, what happened to you changed you, of course it did. You had to adapt to survive. I’m not the Steve Rogers from before, though. I remember being in the ice, you know. I remember drowning. And then I wake up and everything is different. There are holes in the sky that spit aliens. Everyone I knew is dead. I hear a car backfire and dive for cover because I think the Nazis start shelling again. I’m tired all the time but I can’t sleep, I don’t want to sleep because I will dream of that fucking train in the Alps and----I’m lonely, Buck. I’m so terribly, terribly lonely.”

Wow. Sam knows it’s bad, he’s a good counselor and he knows when things are really, really nasty, but whatever trick he’d attempted to apply to one Steven Grant Rogers, that fucker had never even tried to put his feelings into some words and now he is here and spilling it like the goddamn Niagara Falls. 

Sam wants to turn around and hug him but he also wants to give them some sort of privacy, so he resolutely stares at the faded newspapers covering the windows and tries to find out whether that man in the picture advertises anti-diarrheal medicine or an ointment for hemorrhoids. However, when nothing happens for five whole minutes, not even a hushed “I’m sorry” he starts to worry that Barnes is silently trying to kill Steve again and peeks over his shoulder.

His first thought is thank fucking God because they are sharing a big, fat hug and Sam is a true believer when it comes to the healing power of embraces but then his screeching brain also notices that their lips are not accidentally touching while sharing an emotional moment, they are actively -- and Sam attempts to find another word for it but comes up blank and thus has to admit that yes, those lips are making kissing movements which also means that Steve Rogers is smooching the Winter Soldier and Sam’s history lessons never told him that . 

He clears his throat, maybe a little concerned that he’s going to watch some super-soldier sex anytime soon, and they part but only after one last, obviously very passionate kiss that leaves Steve all flushed and glassy-eyed. 

“So, that’s how it is?” Sam asks, eyebrows raised.

“That’s how it is,” Steve confirms, a little flustered, eyeing Sam as if he’s going to jump at them with a fervent speech about heteronormativity and a raised finger. Sam pointedly shrugs and grabs the last of the plums because they are really good and he needs his vitamins.

For a few minutes, nobody speaks. When the silence stumbles into awkward territory again, Sam decides to be the adult here. "So, what now?"

The Winter fucking Soldier blushes . Steve has taken his hand and doesn't seem inclined to let go for the foreseeable future. Splendid.

"Um, I could ---- are you hungry? I could make some pasta, I bought tomatoes."

Right on cue, the bottomless pit that is Steve Rogers’ stomach growls. He rubs his neck, looking sheepish. “Yeah, that -- that would be great, I kinda skipped lunch today.”

Because you vibrated out of your skin in the plane instead of just eating what the nice stewardess put in front of you , Sam thinks. And because he didn’t show as much wisdom as Sam and snacked on the big fruit bowl in their 5-star hotel room. 

Sam doesn’t say anything, though, because both Barnes and Steve seem to have forgotten that he is actually in the room, only a few meters away. Barnes directs Steve to where the dry pasta is while he grabs the not-kitchen knife and starts to dice the tomatoes as he’d probably dice evil Hydra goons. Sam feels a little sick watching him. 

They work really well together and it’s a huge ass surprise to see Steve being bossed around without complaining one time. He’s probably too busy shooting love at Barnes through his eyes to even notice the bossing.

Seriously, the last time Sam saw two people so disgustingly in love was last Thanksgiving at his Grandma’s. She and Granddad are still in the honeymoon phase, even after 50 years of marriage. They even murmur at each other throughout their cooking like his old folks do, being all “Hey, can you give me that spoon” and “Your ma put butter into her sauce, too” and “Yeah, I remembered her recipe some time ago” and “Damn, can’t wait to eat that again”.

It doesn’t take long for the sauce to start bubbling happily and emit a really delicious smell. Steve dumps two packages of spaghetti into a big pot with water and then they just stare at each other again as if they would really, really love to make out right now. In fact, they are already kissing with their eyes . Sam can’t stand it anymore. 

“Okay, enough, that’s disgusting, I’m leaving.”

“What? Sam, you--”

“Nope,” he says, “this is like a huge romantic reunion and I’m the creepy bystander. I’m gonna go back to the nice 5-star hotel room with its superb jacuzzi and I’m gonna order so much room service and you’re going to pay for all of it, Steve. We’ll see each other again tomorrow morning. Please don’t let yourself get sex-murdered tonight.”

Steve looks like being sex-murdered is something he definitely wants to achieve in the immediate future. At least Barnes looks a little offended.

“Sam, you really don’t have to--,” Steve starts again because he’s a good friend and doesn’t want to let anyone feel like a fifth wheel.

“Oh yes, I have to. Enjoy your depression noodles, I’ll eat my way through the hotel menu,” Sam says and opens the door to the balcony. He doesn’t take the shield along in case Steve does need it because Barnes freaks out and wants to add Steve’s head to the tomato sauce. 

He powers his wings up and turns around. Steve looks like somebody just gave him world peace as a birthday present. It’s ridiculous. Also a little cute. Sam would have never believed this whole Finding Barnes thing could end up being so easy but hey, he’s not going to complain. He’s really happy for Steve.

“Thank you, Sam,” Steve says all earnestly.

“Sure thing, what are friends for. Barnes.” Sam nods at the other man.

“Wilson.”

With that, Sam jumps off the balcony. He really, really needs some sugary dessert today.

Because of his jet lag and different time zones, Sam wakes up around one pm the next morning. Or rather: noon.

He sprawls out on the ridiculously oversized mattress and then looks over to the other bed which is, of course, untouched. Great. What is in the book of etiquette when it comes to contacting your best friend who got probably boned last night by a guy who bashed his head in two years ago? 

Urgh. Sam rolls over and grabs his phone.

He has 17 text messages and 23 missed calls. 

What. The. Fuck.

“Please, don’t be a sex-murder-victim, Steve,” Sam mutters as he opens his messages and clicks on the group chat that exploded all over the place. It starts with Romanoff writing I’m not injured, ttyl .

What? Why would she be injured, isn’t she in Vienna for the whole Sokovia Accords bullshit? 

Sam drops his phone on the pillow and quickly turns on the TV, searching for a channel he can understand. He stops at the BBC World News where an agitated news anchor describes horrible pictures of a blown-up building, injured people, smoke and debris and blood.

“-- the ratifying of the Sokovia Accords. Local authorities in Vienna are talking about three casualties so far, among them the king of the small African country Wakanda. There are over a hundred injured. Police forces stated half an hour ago that the footage of a surveillance camera shows the bomber to be James Buchanan Barnes, also known as the famous Winter Soldier, who disappeared after the destruction of the US-American agency SHIELD in 2014--”

The shaky phone videos of the bombed-out building change to said surveillance footage and there he is 7indeed, Barnes walking away from a van.

Sam dives for his phone again. 

“Steve,” he yells as soon as the other man picks up. “Did you see--”

“I’m on it.”

Fuck, that sounds like Steve I Have A Plan And I Don’t Care What Bad Guy Will Burn Because Of It Rogers. 

“What do you mean you’re on it?!”

“Somebody wants to frame Bucky,” he growls, like -- actually growls like some sort of overprotective tiger mama. “I’m gonna make sure the whole world will know it’s bullshit. Turn on NBC Today.”

“What are--” The line goes dead. “Steve!” Sam yells at his phone and tries to ring him again but to no luck. He zaps through the channels to find NBC, feeling agitated, but there is no fucking NBC , just a bunch of international channels that all show various videos of the bombing in Vienna and a whole lot of Romanian TV. 

Then Sam gets a grip on himself because he is a modern man living in the future and he actually holds the whole TV landscape in his hand, so he googles for a live stream of NBC Today and clicks on it just in time. 

Natalie Applegate looks pristine in her red dress and stylishly curled hair despite the early hour in America, but her face shows distress because of the bombing footage they are broadcasting. Distress and then surprise. She touches her ear briefly, then looks away from the camera questioningly, before she squares her shoulders in an all-business manner.

“I just got the information that we have Captain America on the line. Captain Steven Rogers, we reported on that earlier, does not support the Sokovia Accords. Furthermore, the accused bomber James Barnes is Captain Rogers’ childhood friend and was part of the Howling Commandos. Captain Rogers, how do you feel about the bomber being Barnes? Will you take him into custody yourself?”

Sam wants to laugh because oh boy . Steve is going to tell the whole of America on live TV that his friend is innocent. This is going to be fantastic.

“Captain Rogers, can you hear me?” Applegate asks after a few seconds of unidentifiable noise.

“Yes, yes, wait, I --” Then the screen splits in two, showing Applegate in her red dress and Steve who apparently decided a call is not enough and activated the front camera of his phone.

He’s having terrible bed hair. 

“Bucky is innocent,” he says with passion, looking at the screen as if a bald eagle would drop dead for everyone who doesn’t believe him.

Applegate looks a little uneasy. “Captain Rogers, we are well aware that Barnes was your former friend and --”

“He still is my friend,” Steve insists, “and he is innocent.”

“How do you come to that conclusion, Captain?”

“Well, he can hardly be the bomber when he’s in a whole different country when the bomb exploded, right?”

Applegate perks up. “Does that mean you know the whereabouts of Barnes?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Captain Rogers, can you confirm that James Barnes has an alibi ?” Applegate sounds as if her birthday just came early this year. This whole interview is going to go through the roof and everybody will know her name, that’s for sure.

“Well,” Steve says.

“Oh no,” Sam sighs. This is the patented Rogers Smugness ™. Everything will change. Goodbye, sweet life.

The footage of Steve wobbles a little, then he angles the camera away so his audience sees more than just his big nose and terrible bed hair.

Sam closes his eyes briefly to give himself strength. Because Steve? Steve has a lot of hickeys all down his neck. For a guy who keeps bruises for approximately half an hour because of the experimental serum he got shot up with during a fucking world war that means he got them fairly recently. 

That’s not the worst. 

Barnes is sitting behind him, waving shyly with what is undoubtedly a metal arm. He wears the same pajama pants Sam saw yesterday in his bag of freshly laundered clothes. The printed dogs are corgis, and they are dancing. 

That’s not the worst.

Barnes is sporting a lot of hickeys as well. He’s sitting on a mattress which means that Steve is sitting on a mattress, too.

That is also not the worst. The worst is Steve grinning at a dumbfounded Natalie Applegate as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, and saying: “Yeah, I guess he’s having a sex alibi.”

Sam drops his phone.

(Steve breaks the internet.

The hashtag #SexAlibi is used so extensively on Twitter the first day, that they have to shut down the website for three hours because the servers are completely overloaded. The whole interview has 1.9 billion views on YouTube. ‘Captain America Sex Alibi’ is the most trending search on Google for five days in a row. Within one week, there are 1.5 million fanworks on Tumblr.

Someone starts to print #SexAlibi on a rainbow-colored T-Shirt and the whole LGBTQ community and their supporters seem to buy one because they are literally everywhere . Neil Patrick Harris, Sir Ian McKellen, and Elton John are seen with such a T-Shirt. 

Teenagers include it in their slang. ‘You want sex alibi?’ means they have proof or evidence for something. The Teachers’ Union complains that their students show increased usage of improper language. Sam doesn’t know how bad it is until his 13-year-old nephew yells at him that yes , “wombats poop cube-shaped droppings, you want sex alibi?!”

So, the whole homophobic attacks aside, it’s pretty hilarious. 

The best thing is Steve finally having an answer to the question What makes you happy? though.

Bucky, of course.)