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i.
Bucky might himself be evidence that dead doesn’t always mean Dead, but even he finds it kinda weird that there’s now a blue blur joining them at the base. The others try to explain it – stuff about Cradles and Infinity Stones and Tahiti – but he gives up on understanding their way of telling it quickly.
Instead he goes and sits with Wanda.
“So,” he says, rolling his set of dice. “Your brother.”
Wanda’s smile, when he looks up from moving his backgammon pieces, is possibly one of the most beautiful things he’s ever seen.
“It is almost a miracle,” she says. “To have felt him die but to feel him alive now. I could almost Believe again.”
She rolls her dice with scarlet that spills from her fingers, moves her pieces, and takes a sip from her glass of wine. Bucky’s got a beer – some weird microbrewery stuff that Stark gets – but apparently it is too sweet for Wanda’s taste. (Quietly, in the peace of his mind, he agrees with her.)
“He’s still blurring everyplace,” Bucky says, and Wanda shrugs.
“When we first got our powers,” she says, “He did that. At least here he is not running into walls. He will calm from it soon. He will control it, or he will ask me for help.”
Wanda’s certainty in her brother is so absolute that Bucky cannot disagree.
ii.
There is something about Pietro’s expression that Steve can’t quite put his finger on. It is… he can’t quite call it bliss or joy or happiness, because it isn’t quite any of those. Pietro’s expression is of nothing less than the utmost ease, an absolute surety and the contentment that comes from that.
Pietro lopes easily over to his sister looking as though there is nothing he could want more in that moment than what he’d already been given by Wanda’s questioning glance; an invitation to join her. He looks, Steve thinks, as though his world is simple and happy. Pietro’s hand took Wanda’s, squeezed hers and let it fall, simple and easy and unhesitating.
They interacted, Steve realised, as simply and as readily as he and Bucky once had.
iii.
Bucky is watching the team when Steve walks up to him. He likes doing this, now. It’s peaceful without slipping into Asset, and it allows him to get a better feel for his teammates without risking going Winter Soldier on them as he had the last time. Wanda had offered to put blocks in his mind, to help him control when he slipped between his other self and his actual self, but he hadn’t felt able to accept.
Sometimes, he knows, volatility is useful.
“Buck?”
Bucky turns to look without even having to think. It’s Steve. Steve who pulled him out from the mindset of the Asset, Steve who found him lost amongst the fragmenting person Hydra had created. Steve who he’s known all his life, without whom he wouldn’t even be here.
Steve’s in armour (of course he’s in armour, Bucky thinks) but his face is still the face of the Steve Bucky knows as easily as instinct.
“The twins,” he says, and Bucky doesn’t have to think to understand the question of it.
“Pietro,” he says. “He’s the one who’ll end up dying, and Wanda’s the one who’ll go diving into the ice. It already happened.”
Steve looks half-startled, half-appeased, and Bucky doesn’t quite understand.
“I don’t…” Steve starts. “I don’t want that to happen again. Not to us, not to just kids. They’ve been through too much already.”
Bucky looks back at the team. After a moment Steve joins him.
“It’s nice, though,” he says. “To know there are more people like us.”
It’s easy to laugh at that. “Course there are,” Bucky says. “Always stubborn people who lead, always loyal idiots who follow.”
Steve’s voice is quiet. “No,” he says. “Not like this.”
Bucky knows what he means. You don’t dive into ice, risk vaporising with your city for just anyone.
iv.
Sometimes, now that Pietro is back from the dead, Bucky is woken from the Asset by both of the twins. He blinks out of the Asset and back into Bucky and sees the twins there, hand in hand, some perfect synchrony keeping them matched.
Bucky finds it odd honestly, almost eerie, but it’s familiar at the same time, like watching reflections of him and Steve. It’s easy to sit with them both, to talk of nightmares while Pietro braids back his sister’s hair. Around Wanda Pietro is a quiet presence, almost like Vision but distinctly more protective. And there was no jealousy there. For all Pietro would watch him warily around Wanda there was never any sense of the resentment for the twins closeness or intrusion from Pietro’s presence as he had felt when Wanda spent time with Vision instead of him.
Sometimes he thinks it’s because they’re twins, their closeness less intimidating because of the bond of blood. Other times he hears the rumours the agents put about on the twins and considers how their closeness looks to anyone else.
He knows the rumours that existed about him and Steve.
v.
“People are wondering,” Wanda says when they next play backgammon. “About you and the Captain. You are so close.”
Bucky shrugs. “Sometimes I think he’s an idiot. Sometimes he thinks he’s done something bad and needs space. Always friends though. People sometimes think you end up splitting off with a friend when they do that to you, but it’s not true. Friendship is friendship.”
Wanda looks at him assessingly, understandingly. Bucky wonders how many times she and Pietro have done the exact same thing.
“People,” she says slowly, “Wonder more than that.”
He blinks up at her from the backgammon board. She’s holding her wineglass close to her chest, as she does when something is a problem to tread carefully around, holding it like a cross to ward off evil (or a Star of David? He wonders. She said she might Believe again), like some kind of barrier.
“Of course I love Steve,” Bucky says. “I’ve known him since I was a kid, we’ve been friends forever. Hell, I followed him back into a war when I coulda been let out, honourable discharge and everything. You don’t do that for anythin’ less than love.” Wanda is watching still, wineglass held carefully, scarlet wisping around her fingers and illuminating the dark liquid. “It’s like you and Pietro,” he says. “You do anythin’ for each other, because for those you love, you’d do anything at all, right? And maybe we’re all closer than people think we oughtta be, but that doesn’t make it closer than people think it is. Course I love Steve. Course he loves me. But it’s like you and your brother. People always get us all wrong.”
Wanda’s smile, Wanda’s nod of understanding means more than the same thing from anyone else in the team, except possibly Steve.
vi.
The twins perfect ease soothes Bucky, if anything. Pietro’s ready responses to Wanda, Wanda ever alert to her brother, a perfectly balanced harmony that maintains the peace that both twins need.
When he can sit with them he doesn’t feel the need to slip into the Asset.
“You are calmer,” Wanda says one evening. She is curled against her sleeping brother, Pietro’s arms wrapped gently around her middle. He’d fallen asleep during a lull earlier, and Wanda’s hair is still loosely plaited back from her brother’s handiwork.
Bucky nods.
She settles into the couch, pulls a blanket over her brother. Her eyes are bright and watchful as she asks, “Why?”
Bucky considers. Bucky shrugs. “Less stress?” he says. “Better company. I have you two to talk to now, and you’re less stressed with your brother back. And you both understand.”
“Pietro does not always trust you,” she says, fingers combing through her brother’s hair. “He worries you will become the Asset again, and hurt someone. Or that you will pull both my mind and his into the mindset, so no one can pull us out.”
“Steve-” Bucky starts.
“Would not wake Pietro.”
“Clint-”
“Would not wake you. As three we would be stable. Reinforcing. Harder to break us all from it.”
For a while there is quiet. The soft sound of Bucky sipping at his soda, of Wanda’s fingers combing through her brother’s hair, Pietro’s soft breathing and occasional snores.
“I don’t think I’ll be the Asset much again,” Bucky says eventually. “You understand. Nat isn’t so worrying to me. I can talk to you about Hydra, about nightmares. You understand.”
Wanda’s smile to him is soft, but it is what he needs to see then. Her hand in her brother’s hair, her smile down at her sleeping brother’s face is not possessive, but there is a certain surety to it, a perfect knowledge that, when it comes down to it, Pietro will always be at her side, be there for her. “It is important to have people who understand.”
vii.
“She told you I don’t trust you,” Pietro says with no preamble. Bucky blinks. “It is true,” he continues, shrugging. “But I don’t trust anyone, not with Wanda. I only trust myself. With her power – and even without – Wanda is dangerous if she is hurt. I will never intentionally hurt her. Can you say the same?”
Bucky considers. Does the Asset count as him?
“I don’t know,” Bucky says eventually. “But anyone who hurts a gal as lovely as your sister deserves what they get.”
The grin Pietro gives is, Bucky thinks, almost vicious.
viii.
Bucky doesn’t know how Pietro manages to do his training, talk to new people, do all the things he does while so rarely leaving Wanda’s side. Even his speed doesn’t seem enough for this, and yet, somehow, Pietro is always three steps ahead, always managing everything he wants to manage. It baffles him, utterly, and he tells Wanda so.
She laughs. “I tell him to,” she admits. “He is too used to protecting me. It makes him happy to, it always has, but I think he might find other happiness in other things. So I tell him to go and do something else, talk to other people.” Her expression is sad as she continues. “As children, as we grew up, we both needed protecting. He has not had much time to find what he precisely likes yet.”
“Steve did the same thing to me,” Bucky says. “Sorta, at least. He’d always push me away and refuse help. I don’t think I ever got as bad as your brother.” Wanda nods. “But it’s the same thing. Someone leads. Someone follows. The follower won’t leave the leader ‘less they’re told to, ‘less they’re taught to. Otherwise they slip things in with the stuff they do for the leader. Steve kept me from sticking to his side like glue. Your brother just ain’t had the chance yet.”
ix.
They’ve become a distinct grouping almost. Wanda will still sometimes go and sit with Vision, learn some new board game that he downloads the rules for, but it’s become far more common for the twins to sit with Bucky or vice versa. On occasion Vision will join them, but he seems to have twigged that Bucky still doesn’t like him around Wanda and is willing to leave them alone.
“Do not be jealous of who Wanda spends time with,” Pietro whispers to Bucky one evening, his hands gently combing through his sleeping sister’s hair. “She is a witch. She has always been a witch. Witches belong to no one but themselves.”
“I try,” Bucky says. “But there aren’t that many that understand.”
Pietro huffs a laugh. “Maybe,” he says. “But I have long ago learned to make do. You have made your sacrifices for your Captain. I have made mine for Wanda. Jealousy-” Pietro shakes his head. “She will not welcome it one bit.”
“You-,” Bucky interjects, and Pietro shakes his head.
“We are twins,” he says. “It is different. We belong to each other. We always have. Her death is mine and mine is hers.” His head tilts forward, white hair obscuring the dark roots, pressing a kiss to his sister’s hair. “Why do you think she ripped through vibranium for me?”
A memory flickers in Bucky’s head, a flicker from the Asset which barely emerges now. Zola, working on his arm, telling him, they threatened to sic your captain on me, if I did not help them. Apparently you mean a lot to him. A small sharp grin. I wonder if your captain is turning in his watery grave, to see you like this.
Bucky knows, down to his very bones, that if Steve had known he would have burned Zola alive.
x.
“You mind him less,” Wanda says to Pietro one evening. They are watching Bucky, sprawled back in his chair and fast asleep. They, in turn, are curled close on the sofa, Wanda leaning into her brother’s side and wrapped in a blanket, his arm around her shoulders.
Pietro shrugs. “He understands.”
Wanda’s smile is filled with knowing and doubting and trust all the same; she knows the queries and questions that race through his mind with every new person they meet. “I am glad,” she says eventually, and leans her head against his shoulder. “Tell me about this new agent you have started talking to?”
Wanda falls asleep watching Bucky and listening to her brother softly recount his day.
xi.
Pietro does not trust anyone with Wanda, he never will. He barely trusts himself, knowing how she had been after his death. But Vision and Bucky each, he is trying to consider.
Vision, for all he is a creation of Stark and of Ultron is his own. Well meaning. Hard to hurt. Genuine in all things. There is little risk there for Wanda, and he cannot judge Wanda for wanting a peaceful mind to be near. It is not his place, he knows, to judge who is right and wrong for Wanda, but he assesses them all the same. He does not want to see her hurt again, scarlet screaming and purpose broken in the midst of a destroyed city. So he considers them.
Vision – well meaning, genuine and honest. Hard to hurt, but carrying a stone people would kill for. Immortal, so long as he has the stone. Questionably alive. Calm mind. Unlikely to seek vengeance. Unlikely to put Wanda before other people.
Bucky – Understands. Honest, when asked. Hard to hurt, but possible to hurt. Many enemies, but able to face them. Alive. Possible to kill. Calm mind. Risk of Asset mindset. Would seek vengeance. Could put Wanda before others, except possibly the Captain.
He can see, quite easily, why Wanda likes spending time with Vision and with Bucky. He also knows who he would trust more with Wanda, if Wanda asked him.
(She won’t, he knows. She is a witch, and a witch belongs only to herself. That Wanda has given her death to him is more than he can ever ask, that Wanda shares her life with him as she does is because they have always been twins first. But this? Who she speaks to? It is her own to decide. Pietro will only offer his opinion if asked.)
xii.
There is blood, blood the colour of wine spilling out of Wanda’s body, and Bucky isn’t fast enough to get there in time.
Pietro is. Pietro is there in a blur of blue and silver, cradling his sister in his arms before speeding away. “I will keep her safe,” he promises down comms. “Get her seen to. You and Vision, you find who did it. You kill them.”
Vision, Bucky knows, won’t kill them unless he has to. Bucky though… Bucky very much will.
xiii.
Bucky arrives back in base with a bloodstained badge clenched tight in his metal hand. He finds the twins in medical, Wanda pale in her hospital bed, Pietro anxious beside her, holding her hands with desperate fingers, his leg jittering with nervous energy.
He is, for the first time, in perfect balance with the Asset in his head, the Asset's absolute purpose and ready, waiting cruelty and his own protective viciousness. He throws the badge onto the sheets in front of Pietro.
“They’re dead,” he says. “I ripped out their trachea.”
Pietro’s hand grabs the badge in a blur, glances to Bucky’s metal arm where pieces of cartilage remain, held in place by congealing blood. There is a glance, a question in it, and Bucky doesn’t have to understand the minutiae of the twins’ facial expressions to understand the question and to nod.
Pietro says two words Bucky would never have expected from him. “Thank you.”
xiv.
“Pietro told me,” Wanda says when she finds him, watching from the window. She’s sent Pietro off racing around base, told him to talk to the friends he has made now she is well enough to make sure he does. In her hands is the bloodstained badge. “He said it as though you only did it because he told you to. Did you?”
Bucky considers. It’s a bright day. A sunny day, meant for happiness, meant for recoveries and reunions, not questions like this, delving to the dark hearts of people.
“If he hadn’t told us,” Bucky says, “I might have done far worse. Vision stopped me from pulverising the guy’s face completely.”
In Wanda’s hands the badge turns over and over. “Would you stop,” she asks. “If we asked you to?”
“If you asked.”
“Not Pietro?”
He pauses, considers. “If you were in agreement.”
“You would protect us?” she asks. “You would take vengeance for us?”
Bucky can hear the weight behind the question, the mass of meaning. He took vengeance for her, at her brother’s request and his own will. He’s just promised that he would do it again, and that he wouldn’t if she asked. This is, he knows, a question of trust.
“You,” he says. “And Pietro for you.”
Wanda turns the badge in her hands, nods. “We will protect you and the Captain the same.”
Bucky wonders, half-considering, if they should tell Steve of these violent promises made for one another’s sakes. If Steve would even approve.
“He would,” Wanda says quietly. “He would say otherwise, but he would. He almost let the Asset kill him, to bring you back. He burned Hydra down for you, twice over. What we do for those we care for like this, it is not normal. It is not wise.” She looks at him, eyes bright and dark and certain. “But it is all we know how to do.”