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They were nearing the end of their drive to DC, driving through rural Virginia in the black hours after midnight, when Steve brought it up. Maybe he was just too tired to curb his tongue anymore. “We should tell Natasha about us,” he said.
Steve was driving, so he wasn’t looking at Bucky, but even through the corner of his eye he could see the sudden tension in Bucky’s body as he sat bolt upright. “Why?” Bucky snapped.
“Well,” said Steve. He wanted – maybe not to shout it from the rooftops – but to tell all his friends, at least. “It might cheer her up. Distract her from the Scapegoat hearings. And she already sort of knows. She and Clint made a bet – ”
“She had a bet with Clint?” Bucky demanded, voice rising. “What’d you tell her about us?”
“She guessed,” Steve protested.
“And you confirmed it?” Bucky sounded outraged.
“I wasn’t going to lie to her!”
“You should have talked to me first,” Bucky insisted.
“You would have said no.”
“If you knew that, then – ”
“I needed to talk to her!” Steve cried. “I needed to talk to someone about – ” He faltered. “Our old relationship. To make sure getting involved with you again wouldn’t be making the same mistake.”
A movement flickered at the corner of his eye, and he glanced over at Bucky. The lights from the console of the car were too dim to pick out a lot of detail, but he could see that Bucky had lifted a hand to his forehead, and he wondered if talking about this was always going to hurt.
“She said she thought we could make it work this time,” Steve said, and Bucky removed his hand from his forehead and shifted in his seat and looked out his window into the blackness.
Steve drove in silence for a while, trying not to let his eyes stray to the darkness behind the rim of his headlights. The country road was so black that Steve felt almost as though he were driving through outer space. The distant farmhouse lights might have been stars for all the illumination they provided.
Finally Steve said, “I’m not suggesting we should hold a press conference, Bucky. I just don’t want to keep it a secret from our closest friends.”
“Once you tell your closest friends,” Bucky shot back, “it’s not a secret at all anymore.”
“Natasha wouldn’t tell.”
“She’d have to tell Clint to collect on the bet,” Bucky snapped. “People can’t keep secrets for shit. You can’t tell anyone anything or everyone will know.”
Steve knew that was true. He didn’t think any of his friends would tell on purpose, sell the story to the tabloids or anything like that, but things leaked out. People talked to their friends. If he told Tony, Pepper and Rhodey and Bruce would all know, maybe even Thor if he swung by for a visit, and of course Thor would tell Jane who would tell Darcy who would tell God knows who, and Steve could construct similar chains of gossip for a lot of his other friends, too. And it only took one weak link.
“People are a lot more accepting about this sort of thing these days,” Steve tried.
“Right now.” Bucky’s voice was flat. “Wait till there’s an alien invasion that takes longer than two days to chase out. You think people won’t say Captain America could’ve defeated it if he wasn’t a fucking fairy?”
Bucky’s voice went rough on the word fairy. Steve flinched slightly despite himself.
“And none of the other Avengers or anyone in SHIELD is open about this kind of stuff,” Bucky added. “So why should we be?”
Steve was silent a long time, eyes on the road. The yellow dashes of the center line passed by, coming into visibility in his headlights and then flashing into darkness again. “Because I don’t want to hide it,” he said at last.
Bucky made a soft frustrated sound, somewhere between a moan and a snort, and he didn’t reply.
He and Steve didn’t speak for the rest of the drive, in fact. They unpacked their light luggage in silence and carried it up to their apartment, and Bucky dropped his duffle bag by the door and walked directly to the sofa, where he collapsed face first and buried his head in one of the pillows.
Something in his attitude suggested that he intended to stay there all night. Never mind they’d talked just that morning about how they both slept better together. Steve’s throat hurt. “Bucky,” he began.
Bucky flipped up his hand to silence him. “The walls – !”
Steve fell silent with exhaustion. The walls might have ears. He was much too tired to give the place a thorough sweep.
He left his door open in case Bucky changed his mind, and drifted in and out of wispy half-formed nightmares all night. But Bucky never joined him.
***
Bucky was still asleep on the couch when Steve left for his run the next morning, but by the time Steve got back, Bucky was gone.
Steve tried not to worry about it. Maybe it was a good sign, even. Bucky had gone somewhere else to work through his feelings rather than just taking them out on Steve.
And it wasn’t like Steve didn’t have plenty to do. The apartment had acquired a thin layer of dust in the two months they’d been gone. And he needed to check for bugs.
He didn’t expect to be so disappointed when he found them. But he was.
He collected the listening devices in a saucer on the coffee table. He found half a dozen by the time he’d gone through the whole apartment, and after that, he didn’t even bother trying to dust. He just sat down in the armchair and stared at the bowl.
Maybe SHIELD had planted the bugs when Steve and Natasha were on their post-Scapegoat road trip. Or maybe Hydra planted them. Or some other government organization. Maybe Coulson had founded a newer, even more secret SHIELD and continued merrily on. Hammer Industries might back him.
Steve was still sitting in the chair when Bucky arrived back. Steve turned around to greet him, and just stared, because Bucky was carrying an unwieldy pile of long boxes. They clattered as he set them down in the entryway.
“Bucky,” said Steve.
“I went to IKEA,” Bucky said.
Steve just stared. He stared at Bucky, and then he stared at the boxes.
“I bought a bed,” Bucky said.
“Bucky,” Steve said, and wasn’t sure how to continue. If Bucky offered to sleep with him again if only Steve would just promise not to tell anyone, Steve wasn’t sure he could bring himself to say no. And he didn’t want to have a relationship with Bucky on those terms.
Bucky didn’t even take off his coat. He flung himself full-length on the couch, his feet in their slushy boots hanging over the far arm. He picked up one of the bugs from the bowl and crushed it to glittering powder between his fingertips. “Mind if I put up my feet for a while?” Bucky asked.
Steve shrugged.
Bucky tilted his head back, so he was looking at Steve upside down. “I used to say that when I dropped by your apartment,” he reminded Steve. “It’s what I was gonna say when I first came back. If I hadn’t gotten caught by SHIELD on the way.”
Steve’s throat tightened. “I wish you’d had the chance,” he said. He could just imagine his own joy if Bucky had come to his apartment and tossed himself down on the sofa and said something he used to say to Steve.
Bucky kept smashing the bugs. When they were all crushed, he wiped the glittering metallic powder off his leather glove into the saucer. “I don’t think it would’ve changed much,” he said.
“I guess not.” Steve would still have had to take Bucky to SHIELD. He didn’t have the resources to check Bucky’s teeth for cyanide capsules or his eyes for cameras or his skin for tracking devices himself; that was one of the reasons he’d wanted SHIELD involved with Bucky’s debriefing.
He wanted to hold him. He always wanted to hold Bucky when he thought about SHIELD, but especially now. “Bucky,” he said again. Bucky looked at him. “We should talk.”
Bucky held up his hand. The glittering powder from the bugs still clung to the leather. “You sure you got them all?”
“Of course I’m not sure,” Steve said. His voice came out more roughly than he intended. “There’s no way to be sure.”
Bucky swung his legs off the couch and stood up. “Let’s go for a walk,” Bucky said. “Let’s go to the bakery.”
Steve didn’t feel particularly hungry, and he didn’t particularly want to go out in the cold. But then his sluggish brain kicked into gear. Bucky probably wanted to talk away from the threat of bugs. “All right,” Steve said.
There was a local bakery where they went sometimes, but Bucky walked right past that. The thin winter sun made no inroads against the cold. They walked and walked, and Bucky didn’t speak. Steve turned up his coat collar against the cold.
“The thing is,” Bucky said suddenly. He was speaking rapidly, but even so, he couldn’t seem to get the sentence up off the ground. “The thing is,” he tried again, and then burst out, “Steve, I suck at trusting people, all right? I always trust all the wrong people; I’ll probably tell someone who sells it to the tabloids. I trusted Skye, and by the end I probably would have said I trusted Coulson, and for fuck’s sake, Steve, I trusted Pierce.”
“You didn’t have any memories at the time.”
Bucky shrugged. “If he’d been nice to me, I probably would have adored him. I dunno why he didn’t bother.” Bucky shoved his right hand deeper in his pocket. “No, that’s a lie. He figured I was obsolete. What good would soldiers be once he had the helicarriers up and running? So why bother taking good care of something that would just be scrapped soon anyway. I don’t think he ever got over what a disappointment I was.”
“How could he possibly find you a disappointment?” Steve demanded. It was probably the wrong thing to be offended about, but there was so much about Pierce’s attitude that made Steve angry that there was no way he could tackle it all at once.
Bucky shrugged faintly. His lips quirked into a smirk. “He wanted a killing machine. And instead he got a disaster of a human being who throws temper tantrums and can’t even tie his own shoes right.”
Steve recalled a smattering of comments Bucky had made over the years: that Bucky was a mess, a wreck, a defective human being. “You’re not a disaster, Buck.”
Another shrug. They walked on for a while.
Bucky burst out, “I can’t even tie my own goddamn boots, Steve.”
Steve glanced down at Bucky’s combat boots, the laces bulky with knots from being broken and tied together again. “We could get you boots with buckles,” he said.
“Great! Let’s advertise to everyone that I can’t tie my fucking shoes!”
“Bucky. No one’s going to look at buckled boots and think ‘He can’t tie his shoes.’ They’re going to think, ‘God, those are some badass boots.’”
“Sure, whatever,” Bucky snapped.
They walked onward another couple of blocks. The wind had picked up, blowing harsh against Steve’s cheeks. It blew a few raindrops with it, and Steve shuddered.
“God, it sounds so fucking simple when you say it,” Bucky muttered. “Why the fuck couldn’t I figure that out for myself?”
“Buck - ”
“It’s not about the boots, anyway,” Bucky interrupted. “The boots were just an example.”
“I know,” Steve said.“But I think if we can fix the little things, that will give you more energy to focus on the big things.”
Bucky rubbed his hand over his face. Then he stopped abruptly. “Here we are,” he said.
Steve had almost forgotten that going to a bakery was the ostensible reason for this walk, but they were indeed in front of a small bakery-cafe, soft chairs and wooden tables visible through the plate-glass windows. A gilt-lettered sign above the door read Les Trois Pains. Steve had no idea if Bucky had actually been leading them there this whole time or if he’d just spotted it and decided that was a good excuse to cut the conversation short.
Steve was about to go in, but Bucky caught his sleeve suddenly. “I just need some time to think, okay, Steve?” His voice sounded rushed and urgent, like he was having trouble getting the words out.
“Of course,” Steve said, and wanted to hug him.“Of course you need some time to think. That’s fine.” A girl in a red coat left the store, loaf of bread in her arms. The warm yeasty scent of the bakery enveloped them in her wake, and Steve realized he was hungry, after all. “Let’s eat, okay?”
The bakery case looked like a tableau of plenty: tall thin loaves sticking out of a basket like flowers from a vase, fat loaves, a cake decorated with great crinkly cabbage leaves of chocolate. Pain aux chocolat and pain aux raisins, palmiers, mille-feuille, madeleines and eclairs; and a tray of snowflake sugar cookies, each cookie with a different intricate snowflake pattern painted on in blue and white icing.
“I want one,” Bucky said. He had bent down to look at the pastries at eye level.
“One what?”
“One of all of it.”
Steve felt such a rush of affection that he wanted to hug Bucky all over again.
Bucky got an eclair and half a dozen madeleines and a demitasse cup of hot chocolate so thick that it was almost chocolate sauce. He settled in an armchair and dipped the madeleines one by one, his attention riveted on the cookies.
They spent the afternoon putting together the IKEA bed.
***
On the third day of the Scapegoat hearings, halfway through a technical expert’s interminable explanation of the methods Natasha had used to upload SHIELD’s files onto the internet, Natasha passed Steve a note. Clint owe me dinner yet?
Steve read it. His mind was so mired in the hearings that he couldn’t remember at first what Natasha meant. He glanced over at Clint, who was looking at the chair of the committee, Senator Rowell, with a look that suggested he wished he had his bow with him, and only after a few seconds remembered that Clint and Natasha had a bet about Steve and Bucky.
Steve’s stomach seized up. Of course Natasha had figured it out: she was a goddamn superspy, and even if she wasn’t, they’d spent a week in Florida in a beach cabin that practically had honeymoon written on the side in shells. It didn’t take a superspy to guess.
But of course Bucky would be fucking furious if Steve confirmed it, even though that was one of the few things Steve could do to cheer Natasha up during this horrible farce of a congressional hearing.
The worst part was that Steve didn’t think the committee particularly believed the Scapegoat theory that Alexander Pierce was an innocent patsy for SHIELD’s evil schemes; the purpose of all those Da Vinci Code comparisons in the papers had finally become clear to him. They meant that Scapegoat had gotten everyone talking, but also that mostly everyone was talking about how Scapegoat was total hooey.
But the committee was willing to pretend to consider it if it meant they could prosecute Natasha Romanov for the murder of Alexander Pierce. Natasha had humiliated Congress at the hearings after the fall of the Triskelion: she had told them they wouldn’t prosecute, and then contemptuously walked out.
Natasha was looking at him, and it was only because he knew her so well that he could detect a hint of desperation in the set of her mouth. She wanted a distraction, any distraction.
The pen felt heavy and clumsy in his hand. He couldn’t tell her the truth without betraying Bucky, but unless he straight-up lied, she would know the truth anyway.
He felt a little explosion of fury in his chest. Fuck Bucky anyway for putting him in this impossible position. He put the pen to the paper, hard enough to tear the page, and then stopped himself. He held the pen so tight that it bit into his fingers.
Instead of replying, he sketched a quick caricature of jowly Senator Rowell, transformed into a drooling bulldog.
Natasha glanced at him, comprehending, and then considered the caricature. She slid it down the table to Clint and Pepper. Her lips curved up in a smirk.
“Something funny, Miss Romanov?” Senator Rowell asked.
Natasha composed her face at once. “No.”
Senator Rowell glowered at her, his jowls heavy with that expression. “You’ve been accused of the murder of Alexander Pierce, Miss Romanov. I suggest you take that seriously,” Senator Rowell said.
“If you had enough evidence to make me take it seriously, we would be in a courtroom, not a hearing,” Natasha shot back.
Pepper leaned forward to put a hand on Natasha’s elbow. Three days of committee hearing were enough to try the patience of a saint, let alone a spy.
Rowell’s face became more jowly still. “Let me refresh your memory, Miss Romanov. Alexander Pierce invited the World Security Council to the Triskelion to view the launch of Project Insight. You infiltrated that meeting disguised as Councilwoman Hawley. You were the only one to leave that room alive.”
“Pierce killed the other members of the World Security Council using a remote switch on his phone,” Natasha replied. “The phone records confirm it.”
Across the room, Abigail Pierce made a movement as if she wanted to speak; Scapegoat argued that phone records could easily be faked. But Rowell ignored her, as he had ignored her for most of the hearings. “Then who killed Pierce?”
Natasha looked him straight in the eye, her back straight with a ballerina’s poise. “I did not kill Alexander Pierce.”
“Then who did?”
“I was busy uploading SHIELD and Hydra files onto the internet,” Natasha replied. “I didn’t see.”
“I see. You were so distracted that you didn’t keep an eye on the man who you claim was a megalomaniac bent on world domination? It didn’t occur to you that he might try to kill you?”
“He didn’t have any ranged weapons. I figured I could take him.”
There was a ripple of amusement from the reporters. Natasha gave no outward sign of satisfaction, but Rowell still looked displeased.
“Who else could have killed him, Miss Romanov? You were the only two people in the room. Someone - ” Rowell paused slightly, to make sure this sunk in - “made sure that all security recordings from that room were destroyed.”
“The building collapsed right after our confrontation,” Natasha said. “It probably had an adverse effect on the security footage.”
A single hastily muffled laugh. At least one of the reporters must be a Black Widow fan.
“But who else could have killed him, Miss Romanov?” Rowell pressed. “Do you mean to suggest that he killed himself?”
Natasha shrugged. “I can speculate just as well as you can,” she said. “He was watching the dreams of his lifetime fall out of the sky. Maybe it was too much for him.” She looked at the committee steadily. “But that’s pure speculation. I didn’t see how he died.”
She was doing well, but Steve had the sickening apprehension that it didn’t matter. Two people alive in a room, and only one walks out; they had enough circumstantial evidence to railroad her through a trial. Even if she’d been willing to blow Nick Fury’s cover, who would believe her? Fury conveniently came back from the dead to kill Alexander Pierce, then disappeared into the sunset like the Lone Ranger? As if.
“You allowed one of the leaders of a vast global conspiracy aiming at world domination to slip away to die sight unseen?” Rowell sounded sarcastic. “That seems careless.”
“I was trying to escape from a collapsing building at the time,” Natasha said. “It distracted me.”
Pepper’s hand was on Natasha’s elbow again.
“I doubt it,” Rowell responded. “Given your… background, it seems unlikely to me that you would leave Pierce uncontained, given the magnitude of the threat you claim he represented. I think it’s far more likely that you decided to eliminate him. You felt comfortable taking all the time you needed to upload those files to the internet because you had already shot Pierce dead. How else did you escape getting blown up with your security badge?”
“Speculation, your honor,” Natasha said, as if this were a courtroom drama. “Incorrect speculation, as it happens. Pierce didn’t trigger the security badges to explode until after the upload was complete.”
“Then why didn’t he trigger yours?”
Natasha shrugged. “I guess it malfunctioned. We didn’t have a chat about it.”
Natasha sounded casual, but Steve felt ill. Rowell didn’t look like he believed her, and neither did the rest of the committee. Pierce would have had no reason to keep her alive except to make her help him escape, and if he had been planning an escape, he clearly hadn’t committed suicide. And as far as the committee knew, there had been no one else there to kill him.
The double doors to the chamber grated open. Everyone turned to look.
Nick Fury stood framed in the doorway, his arms wide to push both doors open, a dramatic figure in his black eyepatch and long black leather coat. “Sorry I’m late,” he said, and a thousand flashbulbs seemed to go off at once, as if his voice broke a spell that kept everyone immobile.
Fury ambled down the aisle to the rostrum.“I shot Alexander Pierce,” he said, and the doors clanged shut as if to underscore his words. The senators stared, slack-jawed. “Any questions?”
***
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Natasha said.
The lights came on automatically as they walked into Tony Stark’s DC apartment. Clint had peeled off to mislead any following reporters, and Pepper had disappeared to call Tony. Steve and Natasha sat down, as if by prior agreement, on one of the stiff white sofas that crowded around a cut glass coffee table. Fury sat in a throne-like armchair on the other side of the table, leaning forward, loosely clasped hands hanging between his knees.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Natasha repeated. She sounded dazed.
“I couldn’t let them hang you out to dry,” Fury said.
Natasha stared at him, expressionless. Then she stood swiftly and left the room. Fury looked after her, but didn’t follow.
“You should’ve come sooner,” said Steve, and abruptly his swarming feelings resolved themselves into annoyance. Fury could have saved them all a lot of trouble if he had reappeared right after Scapegoat came out.
“I should have,” Fury said.
But he didn’t explain why he hadn’t. Steve’s annoyance grew. It grew thick in his throat. “I guess it’s more dramatic,” he said, trying not to sound bitter, “if you leave it till the last minute.”
Natasha returned with three tall margaritas, the rims of the glasses heavily furred with salt. “Bottoms up,” she said. She set two of them on Tony’s glass-topped coffee table, and drained hers in one long drink. “Where’ve you been, Nick?”
“Soaking up some rays on a sandy white beach,” Fury said.
He and Natasha looked at each other. It wasn’t quite a stare-off. Natasha seemed to be searching his eyes for something, and when she looked away, Steve couldn’t tell if she’d found it or not.
She took one of the other two margaritas and drank off a gulp, so Steve didn’t think that whatever she had found had given her contentment.
“I knew if I came back, I would get back in the game,” Fury said, his voice gentler than Steve had ever heard it. “And it seemed about time to give someone else a chance to play. So I stayed away.” He met her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Natasha shrugged, flicking her hair over her shoulder as if she didn’t really care. She turned her margarita glass around in her hand, and drained it. “So you’ve spent three years sunbathing?” she asked, a trifle sarcastic.
“No,” Fury said. “I’ve been writing espionage thrillers on the side.”
“Really.”
“Really. Jack Rage ring a bell?”
“Nick,” said Natasha, angry, half-laughing. “The Jack Rage books are terrible.”
“Spycraft is all about three things: misinformation, misinformation, misinformation.”
The door slammed open.
They were both on their feet in an instant. Bucky stood in the doorway, dressed all in black: black coat and black cargo pants and his black combat boots.
Fury’s arms hung tense at his sides, like a gunslinger’s. It must have been old habit. Steve didn’t think he was armed. Steve moved between them, ready to intercept if Bucky sprung, already assessing the combat terrain. Someone was going to go flying through that glass coffee table, and Steve would rather it was him than Natasha or even Fury.
But Bucky didn’t spring. He closed the door behind him with almost comic gentleness and moved over to stand by the seating area, feet planted, arms crossed, glowering. “You’re alive,” Bucky said. He sounded disgusted.
“Sorry,” Nick Fury said drily. He kept his eyes on Bucky, steady. “Here to finish the job?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Bucky snapped. “You’re not that important.” His lip curled. “Even if ninety percent of the shit Pierce told me about why I should kill you, it was all shit you actually did. Secret prisons and locking people up without trials and non-consensual human experimentation and authorizing a fucking space laser to smite people down from the sky.”
“Yes,” said Fury, poised.
“But you were doing it all to save the world and protect mankind and blah blah fucking blah, so that’s all right.” Bucky’s voice had taken on a mocking singsong lilt.
“I thought we were saving the world,” said Fury. “We all thought so. And we made mistakes. Maybe a lot of mistakes.” He spread his hands. “I regret it. But damned if I know how I could have done differently then. I thought we were doing the right thing.”
Bucky flared, rocking forward on his heels as if he were thinking about springing after all. Natasha made a small movement, and Bucky’s eyes flashed to her, and he fell still again. His arms fell open at his sides. “Was it fun playing God?” he asked.
“What do you think?”
“I think that’s not an answer.”
“I wasn’t doing it because I hated it,” Fury said.
Bucky cast himself into a chair, slouching down in it like a sulky teenager. He snatched up the remaining margarita. “I can see where Coulson learned his deflecting bastard act.”
“Coulson,” said Steve, the word bursting out of him as if he’d been stuck with a pin. “Why the hell did you ask Coulson to refound SHIELD, Nick, why Coulson of all people?”
“No one else wanted the job,” Fury said. He sat down too, and Steve noticed the slowness of his movements. Three years had aged him.
“Maybe they all realized it was a terrible idea,” Steve said. He also sat, leaning forward, pressing his fingertips to his temples. “I thought we agreed,” he said. “It all needed to go.”
Fury raised his eyebrow at Steve. “You changed your mind too,” he said. “You rejoined.”
Steve could feel his face heating, but he didn’t lower his head. “I made a mistake,” he said levelly.
A few seconds of silence followed. It had begun to rain, the noise loud on Tony’s floor-to-ceiling windows. He could hear a police car’s siren in the distance.
“We all made the same mistake, Steve,” Natasha said. She leaned forward. “Nick. Now that you’re here, tell Coulson not to refound SHIELD again.”
“What makes you think he’ll listen to me?”
Bucky snorted. “If he’ll listen to anyone, he’ll listen to you,” Steve said.
“All right,” said Fury. He pushed himself out of the chair. “I’ll stop by and see him before I head back to the beach.”
“You’re - ” Natasha’s voice rose slightly, questioning. She brought it back under control. “Leaving,” she said, a statement rather than a question. She tried to take a drink from her empty margarita glass. “Already.”
“I just confessed a murder on national television,” Fury said. “I think they’ve realized by now that it gives them a reason to arrest me.”
He turned, the hem of his heavy coat swirling at his boots. But he didn’t walk toward the door. He went instead to one of the full-length windows, which swung open for him. Rain blew in. Nick Fury walked out as calmly as if he were walking out the front door.
Steve started out of his seat, but before Steve was even properly on his feet, Fury reappeared, lifted aloft by thrusters in his boots. He waved at them, and then blasted off into the rain.
The window swung shut automatically, blocking the rain again. Steve sat down. His heart thudded in his chest, still agitated by Fury’s near-fall. “I don’t think writing Jack Rage books is the only thing he’s been doing.”
“Of course not,” Natasha said. Her voice was wry. She drew her legs up onto the couch, curling them under her the way that Pepper sometimes sat. “What was the other ten percent?” she asked Bucky.
Bucky, mouthing at the salt on the margarita rim, looked up at her interrogatively.
“The other ten percent of what Pierce told you when he wanted you to kill Fury,” Natasha said.
“Oh. He said I got mauled by a tiger when I went to Fury’s estate and that’s how I lost my memory,” Bucky replied.
Natasha shook her head. “What a liar he was,” she said. “As if Fury had an estate. Everyone knows Fury slept in his office, hanging from the ceiling like a bat.”
She was wry, calm as always; her mouth curved up as she looked down at the margarita glass in her hands. It occurred to Steve that Natasha smiled far more to hide her other emotions than to show that she was happy.
“And there was a moat full of crocodiles, too,” Bucky said, and Natasha smiled, although she didn’t raise her eyes to him. “Only I can’t remember if Pierce actually said that, or if I thought it up myself.”
“Peacocks in the garden?” Natasha said.
“Obviously. Only they keep getting eaten by the tiger.”
“Trespassers beware.”
Bucky smiled at her. Natasha held her margarita glass in both hands, holding it up with just the tips of her fingers, her eyes on the glass.
Abruptly Bucky stood, setting aside the margarita glass so swiftly that it sloshed on the glass table. “Let’s take you out to dinner,” he said. “Let’s go somewhere really nice and pretend to be someone else. We owe you.”
Natasha raised her head to look at him.
“Because Clint owes you,” Bucky said, and let out a deep breath. “Only you can’t tell him yet.”
***
Much later, after dinner, after Pepper whisked Natasha away, Steve and Bucky walked home together through the wet dark streets. The rain had stopped, but the puddles remained on the pavement, glassy in the moonlight. “What did Pierce tell you to get you to kill me?” Steve asked.
“Hmm?”
“When he sent you to kill me on the helicarriers,” Steve said. “What did he tell you about me? Did I sic a tiger on you too?”
Bucky shook his head. The moonlight silvered the tips of his hair. “It’s kind of funny, really,” he said.
Steve braced himself.
“Because he started out with the truth. He said my name was James Buchanan Barnes - I always asked, every time I woke up not knowing anything - and you used to be my friend and comrade in arms.” He shrugged, thoughtful, almost dreamy. “I guess he figured that’s what you’d say, so he might as well beat you to the punch.”
“Oh.” Of course Pierce had realized Steve would say that.
“And then he said you’d betrayed us and nearly killed me and that’s why I couldn’t remember,” Bucky said, matter-of-fact again. “And you wanted to bring down the helicarriers to leave the city defenseless against imminent nuclear attack. I can’t remember who was supposed to be attacking. It was hard to pay attention. My head hurt.” He half-smiled, head down. “And then the helicarriers fell apart and no one dropped any bombs, so I knew for sure he was lying.”
Steve put an arm around his shoulders and gave him a squeeze. Bucky allowed the caress, although he kept his own hands in his coat pockets, and Steve let his arm fall again. They walked on, side by side. “You saved me before that, though,” Steve said. “You carried me out of the Potomac.”
A slight shrug. “I dunno. I guess I realized that even if you were trying to kill everyone, I didn’t want you dead.”
Steve felt very soft toward him in that moment. He wanted to take Bucky’s hand, but he didn’t think Bucky would like it, not right out in the street like this. “Stay with me tonight,” Steve said.
Bucky glanced at him sideways. “I’m tired,” he said.
“Just to sleep,” Steve said. Bucky cast him another sideways glance. “I miss you,” Steve said.
Bucky softened. “All right,” he said. He cast another quick glance at Steve. “I love you, you know that, right?” He sounded almost angry.
“I know,” said Steve. He went to squeeze Bucky’s hand after all, only to come up short against the hard metal arm. He rested his hand on the small of Bucky’s back instead, just for a moment. “I know. I love you too.”