Chapter Text
“Huh,” Steve managed. His hand missed the car door as he tried to close it, and it made a sad click as it stuck but didn’t catch.
Natasha leaned back against the Chevy and pursed her lips. “Well,” she said at length, her breath fogging in the chill. “I guess you have to give them points for sticking to the local theme. You’d want to match the architecture and landmarks around you.”
Behind them and across the street, said landmark struck the hour. A door at the top of the multi-story glockenspiel popped open and ejected a life sized mechanical figure of a nimble looking fella in red and green pajamas playing a flute. He was followed by a lavishly berobed king, shaking his head and wagging a stern finger. There were little painted rats. A couple of wooden villagers ticked along behind, faces both horrified and confused. Steve could sympathize.
He watched for a moment, then turned back to the building they’d parked at; impossibly, it was somehow much worse.
“I know I spent a while frozen in the arctic,” Steve said as he slowly reshut the driver’s side door and stepped back to take in the view. “So I guess I haven’t had a chance to see everything here in the future. But I was not expecting a Bavarian-themed Taco Bell with the KFC guy standing out front wearing lederhosen.”
“The wonders of the modern world, Rogers.” Natasha gazed with dark delight upon the white stucco and mahogany stained wooden scrollwork framing neon fast food signage. “Don’t say I never take you anywhere interesting.”
“I would never say that,” Steve promised. “‘Interesting’ is...definitely a word I would use for this place. Are you going to be in there long? I want to call home, but I also kind of don’t want to be caught out here alone with that clock tower after dark.”
“Depends.” Natasha slung her purse over her shoulder and surreptitiously checked her knives under her jacket. “I may just turn around as soon as I open the door depending on what’s in there. Wish me luck.”
“Godspeed,” Steve told her, and she tossed off a messy salute and headed inside. Steve pulled out his phone and dialed, eyeing the fast food Frankenstein. He made sure to put the car between him and the animatronic Colonel in a feathered cap which was waving seductively at the road like a fried chicken incubus. A cluster of clipped hedges shaped like ducks shielded his eyes if he stood just right.
“Fuck you,” Bucky said as soon as he picked up.
Steve smiled. “I miss you so much.”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve, calling right now. You know what I’m doing? You know what I’m doing right now?” Bucky grunted, then shifted something, and Steve’s phone notified him of an incoming video chat.
“I’m not accepting this if you’re about to wave your dick at me, I’m in a classy area,” Steve lied, trying to sound stern. “They got topiary here. Topiary and statues. This is not an establishment I can stream my boyfriend’s penis in.”
“Just accept the damn video,” Bucky ordered, and Steve swiped to open up a grainy view of Bucky holding his phone aloft in one hand and dumping a comically huge cardboard box with “MISC” sharpied in Steve’s handwriting on the floor in front of him. “You called eighteen of these ‘miscellaneous,’ Steve. You wrote ‘Sam’s things?’ on four. And the rest just have a series of question marks, except for one box you wrote ‘maybe coffee’ on.”
“I couldn’t remember!” Steve protested. “You said you wanted me to be more specific, I did the best I could.”
“You have an eidetic memory, you asshole,” Bucky said. “And now. And now. You call me right in the middle of our big move. You call from your trumped up ‘definitely searching for Hydra’ mission. In a resort town in the midwest . You liar. I know what you’re doing, Steve. Next time we move you’re carrying everything .”
“Bucky,” Steve said, making sure that what Sam called his Earnest Eyebrows were clearly on screen. “Sweetheart. Honey. I may, sometimes, occasionally , enjoy pissing you off, but I promise you: I would not come to a Bavarian-themed tourist trap where Christmas never dies just to get out of moving a few boxes into our new house.”
“Oh sure, sure,” Bucky said, hands up and eyes wide. He sat down on one of the kitchen chairs, which looked like it had been tossed haphazardly into the middle of whatever room Bucky was in now. Steve hadn’t actually seen the whole place yet— he’d been on another mission when Sam and Bucky had picked it out. That one HAD been on purpose. “I believe you, pal! I do. It’s just so weird how the evidence keeps piling up.” He shook his head, baffled. “So much evidence. Just, you know. Boxes. Packed full of evidence. That Sam and I gotta lug around ourselves.”
Steve tried to pivot from earnest to the face Natasha had made last night when she caught him with half a can of Spam and a plastic fork at 2 am. “I don’t see you lugging shit right now, Barnes.”
Bucky kicked his feet up on a box and gave him a sunny smile. “I can’t, I’m talking to you. Anyway, you better bring me back something good from Christmas Land or whatever, or I’m leaving you for Natasha. Natasha brings me nice things.”
“Natasha would never have you,” Steve scoffed. “And she brought you back a water-damaged shoe catalogue from our last mission.”
“I got these boots from that catalogue,” Bucky mused, admiring them for a moment. “Oh, I know! I want a tenement. I want one of those little porcelain 1940s tenement buildings that light up so I can put it on the mantle right here in the living room.”
Steve narrowed his eyes and waited for the punchline.
“So then,” Bucky went on, not even needing a prompt, “the next time you start bitching about the future and talking about the ‘good old days,’ I can point at the tiny light-up tenement building over the fireplace . The one in the two story house we own , with working bathrooms and hot water on every floor , to remind you how much the ‘good old days’ sucked.”
“Sure,” Steve said dryly. “I’ll get you one, but it probably shouldn’t light up. Our tenement didn’t have electricity.”
“You are just proving my point, pal,” Bucky said, pointing at the screen.
“Is that Steve?” Sam’s thighs and the lower edge of another box staggered through the background at an improbable angle. “Tell him we know what he’s doing!”
Bucky leaned partially off-screen, rocking the chair back and letting his feet dangle. “I told him!”
“We know what you’re doing, Steve!”
“I’m stalking Hydra!” Steve protested. “At great personal cost! Sam, I am as we speak looking at a hedge made of ducks. I’m not here because I want to be.”
“And I know what you’re doing, too, Barnes,” Sam shouted from somewhere behind the phone now, judging by where Bucky was suddenly directing his best Tragic Formerly-Brainwashed Look. It didn’t seem to be having the intended effect—Sam was immune to most supersoldier Looks after years of exposure. “Quit your middle school balancing act, it’s gonna break another chair. I refuse to be the only one living in this house who doesn’t have unethical wartime-engineered steroids and the only one moving our shit in, get lifting.”
“Gotta go Stevie,” Bucky said, meekly dropping back to four legs. “But I hope you have a real nice time over there while we drag in all the crates that you packed and stacked with your Erskine formula muscles and store brand brain.”
Steve grinned and nodded. “I will,” he assured him.
Sam leaned into view. “Hey, your fussy animal hair paint brushes got a little dirty on the trip, Steve, how about I run ‘em through the dishwasher?” He moved like he was nudging something with his foot. “I think this one has all your pastels, so I assumed it didn’t matter which side was down. Who cares what order they end up in, am I right? But you want I should sharpen ‘em for you? Since you’re not here for the move and all. I want to make sure you feel comfortable when you get here.”
Steve’s grin dropped off his face. “Those brushes are sable , and if you—”
“Bye, Stevie!” Bucky chirped, and the ‘call ended’ icon popped up just as Natasha stalked back over.
“No one in there knows anything,” she grumbled, sliding into the passenger side and slamming the door with maybe more force than advisable. Steve folded himself back inside and turned the elderly ignition, which gargled bitterly. “I even giggled. I giggled and leaned my boobs on the counter at a Taco Bell in Frankenmuth while a demonic choir from hell sang in German out of a plastic clock on the wall.”
“I’ll go in and loom at the next one instead,” Steve promised, pulling out of the parking lot. There were rows of multicolored fake tulips circling a life sized statue of a reindeer at the corner. “Or I could wear my running shirt. That gets a lot of attention.”
“You’d better.” Natasha glared out of the window at the smirking wildlife. “I’m not going to put this much work into my makeup tomorrow just to get drooled over by teenagers in felt hats.”
“Yeah, full face is only worth it if the teenagers are Hydra. I don’t even bother with mascara if I’m not guaranteed at least four Nazis that day,” Steve agreed cheerfully, and got an empty soda can thrown at his head.
***
It would have been completely untrue to say that the worst part of Hydra infiltrating Shield was Steve getting stuck doing all the boring stuff that would have gone to some Triskelion intern in the past. Sitting around doing mind-numbing intelligence gathering by, say, watching one of eighteen million fudge shops, in the cold and the dark, for hours. And. Hours. Obviously this minor discomfort didn’t at all compare to an absolute evil coming within a hair's breadth of taking over the country and murdering the more troublesome end of the populace.
It was undeniably wrong to say it.
But Steve sure as shit thought it for a few minutes, then felt bad about thinking it, and finally ended up counting the little dirndl silhouettes lining the awning to pass the time. When his phone lit up with a call, he snatched it off the dash out of pure desperation and swiped to answer before it even had a chance to ring.
“—you put it Barnes! Who else is it gonna be? We’re the only two people here!”
Steve frowned. “Sam?”
“Steve! Steve, where the hell would your boy toy hide my shades, man, those were an apology gift from Stark for putting me in underwater jail. They cost more money than this tin can’s entire arm.”
“I didn’t take them!” Steve heard Bucky in the background. There was the slap of maybe a book shutting and a thump as it was thrown onto something soft. “If I had taken your fancy rich-guy sunglasses I’d be wearing them somewhere to show them off, not reading alone on the couch. We just moved, literally today, you probably just lost them in one of your stupid organizers.”
“They weren’t in an organizer, I wore them in! I left them right here on the coffee table. Right here!”
“Uh,” Steve said, a little taken aback. “Are you guys okay?”
“I will be okay when this lying thief gives me back—“
“I didn’t take your crummy—“
There was a sudden crash, a lot of shouting, and then a loud clattering sound like a phone skittering across hardwood. Steve listened for a little longer on the off chance one of them would pick back up, but it was just distant grunts and garbled insults after that, so eventually Steve hung up.
It was five whole minutes before he realized that he was smiling stupidly at the blank face of the fudge factory. Tonight was chilly and dark and boring, sure, but on the whole, things were good. Steve got to go home after all this, Sam and Bucky would both be living where he could hear them breathing and clearly not dusted all night long, and he hadn’t even needed to go house hunting. Or move their things in. Or get stuck in the middle of the admittedly messy process of Sam and Bucky learning to live together in the same space.
Steve still wasn’t sure what had made Sam say yes when Steve had tentatively suggested weathering the post-Blip housing crunch by rooming all together, but he wasn’t going to question whatever Pied Piper magic or cosmic synchronicity had managed it. And Bucky had only shot him a single betrayed glare at the offer, he hadn’t even said anything, which was basically a whole-hearted agreement in the Barnes family Language of Looks.
Things were really, really good.
Steve started humming, and wasn’t even all that upset when he eventually realized it was the song the Glockenspiel had been playing every fifteen minutes.
***
Natasha was sitting at the floral carved vanity, doing something careful with her once again chin length hair, when Steve dragged in around dawn. She twisted the flat iron to make a curl to frame her jaw. “No luck?”
“No luck.” Steve tossed the night vision goggles he’d carried in onto the chair by the desk and flopped face-first onto the bed. There had only been one, because somehow November was peak Christmas season or something, but since they were switching off shifts it didn’t make a big difference. “The only pattern in this town I’ve noticed is the decor and how many signs there are for some local Christmas store. I’m going to crash. What are you covering today?”
“I’m going to watch traffic around the city,” she said, tweaking the curl. She grimaced, and pulled it a little straighter. “Maybe set up a few of the monitors and hack into local systems. One nice thing about looking for Nazis in a tourist town instead of hiking around the woods—lots of folks with home cameras and store security video.”
Steve was quiet. Natasha had apparently decided the curl was as good as she was willing to work for at the moment and reached for the hairspray. “You’re thinking,” she said after a while. “What is it?”
Steve sighed, rolling on his back. “The intel. It just isn’t…this place doesn’t really seem Hydra’s style. Unless they’re just nostalgic for the German glory days. Nothing else lines up.”
Calling what they were going on ‘intel’ was actually pretty damn generous. Natasha brought Steve in on a lot of things, but prioritizing actionable intelligence in the heat of battle was not one of the skills she usually relied on him for. She’d scavenged a sheaf of printed files from the last base they’d knocked over in the final ten minutes before the self-destruct mechanism had engaged—a mechanism that Steve had accidentally set off with two enemy combatants and an evil cow (which he still hadn’t been able explain to her without trailing off into mumbles at the end). Unfortunately, the papers had already been through smoke damage, a small fire, multiple sprays of bullets, and a thorough soaking in the building’s sprinkler system spurred by what she called ‘100% unnecessary’ grenades Steve had tossed in before she got there. After the cow, he hadn’t been prepared to take any chances, but Natasha maintained it would not kill Steve to rifle through a file or two before he destroyed the next one.
In any case, the writing had been barely legible by the time they’d gotten a chance to decipher it later. There had been a lot of worrying phrases like ‘biggest in the world,’ and ‘enormous inventory,’ and ‘asset to Hydra worldwide,’ in it, references to lasers and pressure sensors and radio-activated arrays, the name of the small town they were staying in and a fudge shop, and not much else. So here they were, metaphorically wandering around poking the burrow with a stick, hoping something came out and tried to bite them.
“You could go back to your new house,” she offered, spritzing her hair and smoothing it. “Help the boys unpack.”
“You know what, never mind, I think I’m good,” Steve decided. “This place is probably crawling with Hydra. We had better stay here for at least a week. You can tell with all the…” He waved a hand at her. “Santas.”
“Santas are absolutely the true mark of evil,” Natasha agreed, and stood up to get to work.
***
When Steve woke up, groggy and missing Bucky a little, Natasha had created what looked like a full NASA station command center with odds and ends on the little desk they had in their room. She had pulled it over to the vanity for more space, then rigged something out of the three computer monitors they’d stored in the trunk of the Chevy along with both laptops, his drawing tablet, three burner phones and what must have been a wooden clog she had found somewhere.
“Hey,” he managed, untangling the covers. “No. You can’t use my drawing tablet for that.” Finally winning free, he stomped over and scooped it up. He didn’t think it had originally sported enough ports to be trailing as many wires as it was. “If I unplug these, is it going to wipe everything? I’ve been working on a picture of you, it was turning out really nice.”
“Hm,” Natasha said neutrally, which meant she was pleased. “No. But it’s processing all the video from the sixth chocolate shop and I’ll have to run it again on one of the burner phones if you do.”
Steve considered that. “Is it finding anything?”
“No.”
“Is it... likely to find anything?”
Natasha sighed. “Also no. We’ve got a lot of traffic patterns, but it’s all to the tourist traps around here, which makes sense.”
“I’m taking back my tablet,” Steve said, pulled the cords, and brought up Natasha’s portrait to make sure it was still there. Now that he looked at it, though, the chin was a little off. And her eyes… he frowned and sat down on the edge of the bed, leaning over to dig through his bag for the stylus.
Natasha stood, stretched, and padded over to the mini fridge. “You know,” she said over her shoulder, rummaging through the takeout boxes, “if SOMEONE hadn’t covered those files with flame retardant and then somehow set them on fire anyway, I would have been able to figure out which fudge shop in town they were talking about.”
Steve shrugged like he hadn’t been thinking the exact same thing all night and didn’t look up from his drawing app. Natasha’s chin was much more complicated than it had seemed at first. “You asked me to come on that mission,” he pointed out around the stylus in his mouth, unable to resist going in with his hands on the drawing any more than he could on paper. “It’s not my fault you didn’t pick the smart, sneaky supersoldier when you went to rout an enemy base filled with diabolical livestock. You picked the big, stupid one who hits everything with his face. This is on you.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Natasha look back over, exasperation obvious. “‘Stupid one,’ my ass. You’re the best tactician I’ve ever met, you just like solving all your problems by hitting them with your face,” she accused, and ducked back out of sight to scrounge something else.
Steve nodded, because it wasn’t like it was a secret, and switched back to the stylus for some finer detail work around Natasha’s eyes.
“The two of you are ridiculous, by the way,” she continued, making a disgusted noise and dumping three empty paper containers in the trash. “You’re both so sure you’re the jerk and that your other half is the only useful one. Every time one of you does something stupid you blame it on me for not picking your boyfriend.”
“Which one of us is right?” He still couldn’t quite catch her subtle twinkle— he’d have to pay attention next time he said something particularly embarrassing and she wanted him to know just how loud she was laughing at him on the inside.
“Neither of you are; you’re both the useless jerk.” She slammed the (empty) mini fridge door shut and started sorting through her luggage. “James ate all my takeout just last week, and you’ve eaten it all today, and both of you put the empty cartons back every time like a pair of twin dicks. Come on, let’s go get Szechuan. I saw a place in the last town, and I want cumin lamb.”
Steve made a face and looked up. “Don’t get the cumin lamb,” he complained, setting the tablet aside to grab his coat anyway. “They use garlic like onions in that one. The last time you had that much was on that pizza covered in whole cloves and it was coming out of your pores all night. With the serum I could smell it even when we weren’t sharing a bed.”
“And it was absolutely worth it. Besides, you love garlic.” She twisted her hair up and clipped it in place, then sat down to yank on her boots.
“Not all night ,” Steve protested, “I’ll have to stake out another fudge shop in self preservation,” but the phone started going off and that was Bucky’s ring, so he picked up without finishing the thought. “Hey, hi. What’s—?”
“Where did you pack the India ink,” Bucky demanded before Steve could get a whole sentence out. There was a sound like papers falling off a surface and someone, presumably Bucky, kicking some furniture. “I know you have some. Where did you hide it?”
Steve frowned as he shrugged into his coat. “What? Why do you need India ink?”
“This flying onion,” Bucky said, shuffling something around. Steve thought ruefully that it was probably his box of sketchbooks and colored pencils. Goddamnit. “This living donut . He has been rocking in the damn chair the old owners left in the attic, it’s driving me crazy .”
“What?” Steve asked again, only more confused. “Are you talking about Sam? Who left a chair in the attic?”
“That fucking airborn salami , I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me, but he’s gonna have to say it to my face. Is he saying I’m old?” Bucky paused for a minute, like he was considering. “Is he saying I’m a codger? But then why is he the dipshit in the rocking chair at three am?” The rustling started up again, and Steve really hoped Bucky had not just dumped his neat stack of backyard landscapes out and into a mess on the floor. “Either way he’s going to regret it.”
“I don’t know what you want to do to Sam with my good drawing ink,” Steve said, the word regret circling ominously around his mind. “But whatever it is, please don’t.”
“Ah, found it,” Bucky announced, ignoring him entirely. “I’m good. Bye Stevie!”
Steve got as far as “I’m serious—” before the line cut. When he turned around, Natasha looked thoughtful. He raised his eyebrows at her.
“Eh,” she said, holding open the door with her head cocked to the side, lips pursed. “Maybe James is the jerk.”
***
They got back late, and then Steve got back even later after a long walk to safeguard his superserumed nose from the first few hours of garlic, so he hadn’t gotten nearly enough sleep when his awful, vibrating cell phone skittered around the bedside table with a call. On the other side of the bed, Natasha stayed crashed out like a sack of potatoes with red hair.
A sack of red potatoes that still reeked of cumin lamb. “Rogers,” Steve managed after he swiped to answer, rolling over and wrinkling his nose.
“I figured it out! I fucking figured it out, Steve.”
“Wha—? Sam?” Steve blinked and squinted at the alarm clock. He wasn’t sure how much sleep he’d gotten. One hour? Two? Ten minutes? “You what?”
“It’s goddamn alcohol, ” Sam crowed, followed by a rattling crash in a room that echoed. A bathroom? “He is using fucking rubbing alcohol and a damn cotton swab, Steve, where did you assholes learn this during the forties? I had to find it online. I’m drawing a dick.”
“I...okay?” Steve tried, not sure if it was lack of sleep making this completely incomprehensible. He rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”
“Uh,” Sam said, distracted, and paused like he was looking at something. “It’s 6 am here, what time is it where you are?”
“I’m just a few states over, Sam, it’s 6 am here too,” Steve told him, sitting up. “And I’m doing opposite shifts with Natasha. I just went to bed.”
“Yeah, whatever superman, this is important shit . Your boy has been escalating a...a fucking prank war since we moved in,” Sam growled, completely unremorseful. There were some heavy thumps and the snap of a plastic cap. “I have had it. I have had it with his adolescent short-sheeting vintage antics. He hid a fucking radio somewhere that plays nothing but barely inaudible swing music day and night. He wrote invisible words all over the bathroom mirror last night and scared the shit out of me when I got out of the shower and the steam showed me the message. Creepy asshole.”
“...What did he use the India ink for?” Steve asked without thinking, and Natasha stirred and rolled over, a waft of cumin and garlic following after.
“Man.” There was a squeaking noise, like something wet dragging over glass. “I do not want to talk about that.”
“Okay.” Steve cracked his jaw in a yawn. “Could I go back to sleep, since you don’t want to talk? Or are you gonna keep me awake listening to you not talk some more?”
Sam hung up on him.
Steve slowly lowered the phone to his lap.
“I am,” Natasha mumbled into her pillow after a moment, hair a tangled mess covering her entire face, “ unbelievably thankful that I am in Michigan while all this is happening. I have no idea why you thought they could share a house in the first place.”
“You and me both,” Steve admitted, lying back and tugging the covers up. After a moment, he sat back up to dig the phone out from under his butt and drop it on the side table. “Since you’re awake, though, go take a shower. It smells like Dorothy dropped a house made of garlic on top of the Wicked Witch’s sauce factory in here.”