Chapter Text
Earth 283 - Washington D.C.
The American spaceflight, Mercury-Redstone 3, was dubbed the Freedom 7 as soon as it became clear that Steve Rogers would pilot the second human space flight. Nearly four years after the Soviet dog Laika entered orbit and, unfortunately, a month after Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth once in Low Earth Orbit.
The cherry blossoms were blooming in DC on April 10th when they announced the May 5th spaceflight. Steve had been in training for ten months, a joint effort between NASA and S.H.I.E.L.D., though the general public didn’t know that. He shook John F. Kennedy’s hand in front of the cameras in the Rose Garden, with the headlines reading that it would be the first human spaceflight.
The Soviets beat them to the chase, sending up the Vostok 1 two days later. There was a heavy rain in Washington, sending the petals of the cherry blossoms down to the pavement. Steve was already back in Cape Canaveral, continuing his training as the technology was refined for the pending space flight. They had planned on a December space flight with another astronaut, but the capsule wasn’t ready. The astronaut’s wife had a baby, and a replacement was suggested.
Captain America had been a useless figurehead for some time from the public’s point of view. Elvis being drafted had done more for the war effort in Vietnam than Steve Rogers could have, though the Generals and the White House had begged him to join up again.
Steve could read between the lines in the news, and flat out refused to be complicit in leading soldiers in the conflict. He and Lieutenant Carter were quietly making moves within S.H.I.E.L.D. to minimize damage and nudge the government towards giving up the fight. It was a losing battle, but he knew he could do more good with that limited power than being thrown in a cell with protesters.
But the Generals knew his feelings on the matter. And when he was suggested for the space flight, it became clear that it was either this, or Vietnam. Unlike twenty years prior, Steve didn’t believe in the fight his country was waging.
“You don’t have to do this,” Peggy had told him on the phone that night. “I’m sure we can figure something out.” Steve could hear the squall of her youngest girl in the background, with the thudding footsteps of her husband heading to the nursery to tend to the child.
“If anyone can withstand the g-forces, it’s Erskine’s experiment. Don’t worry about me. I survived crashing Schmidt’s plane, didn’t I?” He stared at the parquet flooring in his apartment, willing away the feeling of acceptance he had felt as he went down. It had seemed a fitting ending. But wonderboy Stark and his friends had other ideas for him.
“Barely. Stark thawed you in his sauna, as I recall.” He could practically see her smirk over the line. They had forged a great friendship out of what they both thought would be an epic love story. Two dates in, he had walked her home to her place in New York, and he knew it wasn’t going to work. There was a hole in his chest the size of his best friend. Peggy deserved more than a man with half a heart.
“With the Commandos beating down the door.” Steve smiled. “I’ll never forget waking up to a string of French swears that made even Howard blush.” He remembered chuckling for a moment in the hot wooden sauna, his face stinging with pain from frostbite, before remembering that Bucky was no longer in their band of misfits.
“Two and a half years later, we had never expected that you would still be alive, serum or not.” Efforts to find him hadn’t started until after the war. Peggy had indulged Howard’s excursions since he had the money for them and she was busy finding her own way.
They had been realistic about their search for his body, and overjoyed when their hopes exceeded their expectations.
As soon as he recovered, Steve had gone on his own Odyssey: his search for Bucky’s body. Steve hiked every section of the region, visited every village in thirty miles, going once a year. The area had suffered multiple avalanches while he was under the ice, and he knew it was fruitless from the start. He had wanted to find something of Bucky, for his mother and sister, for himself. But every time he saw a mop of dark hair in a Swiss village, his heart soared; he knew there was no way Bucky could have survived, but he couldn’t help it. Steve had survived, hadn’t he?
He’d gone back every year, for ten years.
Finally, when he brought up borrowing the jet for his yearly trip, Peggy and Howard gave him a gentle intervention, threatening to fly in the Commandos if he didn’t relent. He wasn’t ready to give up just yet, so they struck a bargain. Instead of Steve going alone, they all went that year, March 1957, a belated funeral for their Sergeant. It would have been Bucky’s 40th birthday. They raised their glasses to him in the nearest chalet, celebrating his life.
In the night, dead sober despite downing two bottles of something high proof that burned down his throat, Steve began his trek down to the ravine. He found nothing, as usual. Sunrise found him, and he returned to the chalet, avoiding the disapproving glares of Morita and Carter, the only early birds in the group.
That was four years ago, and he was banned from missions in Switzerland lest he be tempted to search again.
“Steve, where did you go?” Peggy’s voice on the line reminded him of social niceties.
He cleared his throat. “Sorry, just reminiscing.” He heard her daughter’s noisy rebukes of any attempts to be shushed. “You go on with your night. You have more important things to worry about than a little NASA publicity stunt. I’ll be fine.”
Sighing, she relented, “Just say the word, and we will make it go away. Somehow. Have a good night, Steve.”
“You too, Peggy.”
So, on May 5th, he strapped himself into a capsule, sat for two hours while scientists fiddled around him, and an additional hour spent holding for computer issues. He had to piss like a racehorse by the end of it, but the flight would only be twenty minutes.
Finally, it was time for liftoff. He went up, jarred and jostled and pounded by gravitational force until the capsule separated. Or it was supposed to. There were explosive bolts on the outside that should have separated the capsule from the booster safely, jettisoning the unnecessary material. The noise came much louder than expected, and he felt hot flames burst across his face.
Around the country, people watching from their living room television sets gasped. They were watching Captain America burn alive and fall from the sky, live on TV.
Earth 616 - Washington D.C.
“Your training is missing a key component of the team and it needs to be addressed.” Valentina’s smug face leered at him across the conference table. Bucky refused to let her into the New Avengers building (yes, despite the fact that she owned it), which meant he had to take the train from New York to her offices in D.C. to meet.
Rather than providing her something to latch onto, he stared at her in silence. She squirmed uncomfortably at the lack of deference, and continued, saying too much to fill the void, “Bob is the most powerful member of your team and he’s no more than a glorified mascot. You worked with heroes in the fight against Thanos, surely you have some experience you can lend to… nudge him along.” Shuffling her papers, she cleared her throat.
“The only person strong enough to train Bob imprisoned a whole town in New Jersey in a magic grief bubble and hasn’t been seen since.” The sentences he uttered these days. He thought the days of Schmidt and his search for Teutonic myth and power had been bad enough.
“Still, you were able to take him down before. Surely with the…” she searched for a word, “bond you all have now, you should be able to help him reign in his dark impulses.”
“Is that why you called me down here? To talk about Bob?” His posture moved from unimpressed to slouching so far he may as well have become the chair.
“Partially. We also need to discuss image.” Oh god, she was taking out a whole packet. He thought his packet days were over when he gave up his seat in Congress.
“You are aware that Zoom exists, right?”
Valentina plopped the dreaded sheaf of paper in front of him. The first section was relating to ‘short form video content.’ He kept flipping, and it didn’t get any better. Podcasts, really?
“So,” she started, taking a breath as if a long sentence was coming.
He took his packet and turned the paper back to pulp in his metal fist, “No.”
Valentina was still chasing him as he walked out of her office, his shoulders squared. “Look, we need to work together here and create some synergy, you guys are dying in the press.”
“No, no more buzzwords, no more bullshit.” He turned on her and she went stock still, like a prey animal in the bushes. “Remember Valentina, we know all your dirty laundry. We are allowing you to stay on in a supervisory capacity as long as it suits us. Social media and Bob are off the table.”
“Respectfully, Bob can’t be off the table.”
He answered her with a stony stare.
After a few moments of silence, he turned and began to walk away. “Next time you call a meeting, send me an agenda first.”
“You need me, Barnes. You’ve never been a leader, you know you can’t carry the weight of this team by yourself. ”
He let her have the last word. Listening to her speak was giving him a headache. He was above her petty power plays, or at least, he tried to make it seem like it.
Earth 616 - New York City
Later, in the tower, he collapsed on the couch in the living room. He had opted for the last train home, partially to take care of some matters in Washington, and partially to avoid his team for another few hours. The constant bickering was putting grey in the hair at his temples. And he’d thought trying to work with Sam a few years back was bad, but these kids made that seem like child’s play.
Just as had gotten his breathing to a nice steady pace and had tipped his head back to relax for a few minutes, he heard the subtle whirr of Ava’s suit as she phased into the room. She thought it was silent, but to a super soldier it was far from it.
“Oh, hey Bucky.” She sat down on the couch opposite, eyes in her phone and one hand in a bag of popcorn. The crackling of the bag and the sound of her breathing sent his blood pressure right back up. Her thumb hovered over the screen as her eyes devoured the image, then she swiped. The same leftward motion, every few seconds, then a moment of pause, scrolling down, left again.
Living up to her namesake, the Widow slowly descended from the ceiling on a retractable cable, legs akimbo. Apparently she had been up there the whole time. Bucky was a little impressed.
“You know,” she sing-songed in her Russian accent. “You do have to swipe right on someone if you want to see more than just their picture holding fish.”
Ava scoffed, “You mean if I want a picture holding their dicks? No thank you.”
“You can change settings to see girls too, I don’t mean to assume.” Yelena threw her hands up, or really down since she was still suspended upside down from the ceiling, totally comfortable.
“I’m curious about our neighbors. I’ve never lived in one place long enough to have any.”
“So boys and girls.” Yelena flipped a few times, and landed gracefully, taking a criss cross seat on the floor.
“Okay, okay, what about you, Bucky? What are your tinder settings?” It was casual, of course. She was a modern woman, everything about sexuality was fluid to her. But she knew it was a loaded question to someone like him; she wasn’t totally oblivious, just nosy as all hell.
Bucky breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth, and tried to regain his patience. He held up his flip phone in silent answer. Even with his eyes closed, he could tell Yelena was pouting that he subverted her tactic.
“What, were you expecting him to get all flustered? He’s been living in this century with us, you know,” Great, Walker was here too. To top it all off, he was noisily eating an apple and stomping around like an antsy draft horse.
Bucky needed to get a recliner for his room so he could lounge somewhere in peace. No one on this team went to bed when normal people went to bed. He stretched his hearing, and in the distance caught the drone of Alexei snoring. Bob’s soft tread and the swish of his hemp pants preceded him down the hallway. So, only one member of their team slept at normal hours.
“No, no.” Yelena was getting defensive. “I like to know people’s preferences. How you say, team bonding?” He rolled his eyes. She knew exactly what she was doing and that it had nothing to do with team bonding.
“Hey guys, what are we talking about?” Bob entered the room, his question hitting like a dead weight. Ava was now just eating her popcorn and no longer swiping through her app.
Sighing, because he was never going to get any rest here even though he wasn’t quite ready for bed yet, he bashed his head gently against the cushions of the couch, willing the room to empty again.
“Sexual proclivities,” Walker announced.
“Preferences,” Yelena corrected. “I really do not want to know the proclivities, thank you.”
“Right on.” Bob didn’t elaborate further.
“Well, I can say what I do know. I like nobody, but if it comes to the sex, I have little preference, bodies are bodies. Let’s see, who else… Walker is a Kinsey zero, of course.” Yelena paused. “My dad was definitely into my mom, but he is communist and spent long time in Siberian prison, so not quite a zero.”
Walker chipped in helpfully, “All the biographies said Sergeant James Barnes was a ladies’ man, am I right?”
Bucky remained silent, annoyed. Now he couldn’t walk away until the conversation veered another direction without appearing to give away some sort of clue.
Ava abandoned her popcorn momentarily. “Biographers and historians have called same-sex couples ‘roommates’ for years. That hardly signifies.”
“This is true,” Yelena added.
Neither of these comments were helpful. He felt four sets of eyes bearing down on him. Luckily he had plenty of experience keeping silent.
He saw Ava’s eyes narrow, like she’d just made a decision to take pity on him. “I have a suit that keeps me from shifting into different realities. I spent so long in pain that having a preference was the farthest thing from my mind.”
“Bummer.” Yelena had flipped from criss cross to lying on her stomach with her feet hanging above her bum, kicking around like a hyperactive child.
“I get that,” Bob jumped in. “Not the pain thing, but my dad beat on my mom so bad that I could never stomach the idea of being in a relationship. Because maybe I might turn into him.”
Those confessionals dropped the room like a stone. None of them were particularly good at comfort, but a few half-hearted efforts were made to assure Bob that he wouldn’t turn into his father, because they all knew how sensitive he was. No one quite knew what to say to Ava.
Bucky patted the kid on the back before retreating down the hallway to his room. Ava shifted through the wall, keeping pace with him. “I’m assuming I’m not going to get a real answer just because I jumped in there to save you from the ravening wolves.” Her curiosity was so obvious that she was shifting slightly, back-and-forth, bleeding at the edges of his perception.
Even if he had a real answer to give her, he knew there were two super soldiers down the hall and a whatever-Bob-was. He hung his head down, shaking it. “Doesn’t matter. Everyone I ever loved is dead.”
He shut the door on her. They had a no shifting or sneaking into bedrooms via air ducts rule, quickly established after it became clear that Yelena had no boundaries and endless reserves of energy. So, while the door wouldn’t stop her, he knew the threat of losing that rule and waking up to a blonde widow hanging from her ceiling kept her in check.
Now he had to figure out why his stomach was in knots. He was a private person, sure, but he’d been on dates with women, in this century even. Yet, somehow, it didn’t feel right to say that it was only women he had a preference for. Because the emptiness in his chest was shaped like his best friend who had time traveled to be with the woman he loved. And that emptiness felt a whole lot like yearning.
Bob was allowed on one unsupervised excursion a week. Which he knew was fully supervised because spies can’t be trusted, no matter how much he liked Yelena.
He chose to go to a record shop which sat in close proximity to a weed dispensary and an overpriced coffee shop. Considering the out-of-control superpowers thing, he stayed away from the dispensary and ordered decaf when he got his coffee. Once he got his coffee and sat to read his book, he knew he’d actually have at least half an hour unsupervised. Which didn’t change his actions, he still continued to read the book, but it helped him feel better about himself.
“Is this seat taken?” A few minutes after he stopped feeling the eyes on the back of his neck, a young woman approached his table. It was Mel, Valentina’s assistant. The one that had pulled the kill switch on him.
“Uhm,” he stumbled over his words, “no, no it isn’t.”
“Thanks.” She was elegant in all black, dark nails to match and her hair pulled back neatly, an unlikely companion to his hippie chic look.
“Look, I’m the last person to say this, but in this case I think Valentina’s right.” He looked at her blankly. “You should work on using your powers more, controlling them, like you practiced with her.” Mel looked a bit pale at the notion, but her face didn’t betray any hesitation.
“Why would you say that? You had to pull that kill switch even before the void. You know I’m too…” Bob trailed off.
“Unstable. Which is why you’re in mandatory therapy.” Which was why he was on this block in the first place. His unsupervised time was really an hour to kill before his weekly appointment.
“But at some point, you have to ask yourself if you’re comfortable being a risk to everyone around you.” Mel caught his eyes and held them, dead earnest. “Whether you use your powers or not, you’re a risk. If you use them, you’re a risk for all the reasons we know. If you don’t use them, you’re a risk for all the reasons we don’t know. What if one day, repressing all this power turns you into a nuclear bomb?”
Bob jolted, spilling his hot coffee on his hand. Mel jumped back in her chair a full foot, freezing in fear. She knew what he was capable of, unlike the other patrons in the cafe, who merely glanced over at the sound of her chair legs scraping on the wood floor.
Mel’s phone beeped, and she took the obvious excuse. “I’ve gotta go. Think about it.”
He said nothing in return, staring into what was left of his coffee, still swirling slightly. His eyes reflected in the deep colored surface, blissfully normal, with no telltale ring of light around the iris.
A few minutes later, he felt the eyes on him again. In five minutes, it would be time to walk to his appointment. Who needed a calendar app when they had a spy looking over their shoulder?
Bucky swore under his breath as he trailed Valentina’s assistant from Bob’s go-to coffee shop. He hadn’t brought a means to hear from a distance, but he could guess what Mel was asking of the young man.
Two blocks away, a black town car swung around the corner. The harried assistant got in, and sped away. He dog-legged back to the subway, heading back to the Tower, knowing it wasn’t worth following her any further. She would probably be running errands for Valentina in the city all day.
He had hoped to keep the idea out of Bob’s head for at least a little longer, even chastising Walker for continuing to egg him on. They were in a good place, all things considered, and the minor missions they had gone on were reasonably smooth. If they kept their threats to a smaller scale, they could avoid having to rely on unpredictable powers.
But he didn’t control what threats they would be sent after. He could reign in Valentina in most regards, but he couldn’t reign in the government that kept them in protein shakes and pop-tarts.
The Tower was cleared out when he arrived. He sent out a text asking folks to keep it that way for another two hours. Bucky wanted to have a fully private discussion with Bob.
The texts he received back did not bode well for his team’s maturity. There were a lot of eggplant emojis, and Alexei called him to say that he received his text and that the message was understood. He didn’t have the energy to explain how texting worked to a man who still thought CD players were the height of technology.
The elevator for their level dinged. “Hey-o!” Bob called jovially out into the communal kitchen. When he didn’t hear a response, he poked his head into the living room, “Oh, hey Bucky. How’s it going?”
“Going well. Have a seat.” He gestured to the couch across from him, making a pointed effort not to use the metal arm and to smile.
“Oh no.” Bob’s brow furrowed as he sat. “You’re kicking me out, aren’t you?”
Before Bucky could get a word in edgewise, Bob had explained all the reasons that Bucky should kick him out, forgiven him and the whole team by full name and patronymic, and wandered down a story about how he failed his team members in a group project because he smoked a bowl before he was supposed to make the poster board and super-glued his hands together.
“Bob!” Bucky’s patience was at its end, “I’m not kicking you out. I just wanted to talk.”
“Oh! Okay.” Bob was still hanging his head slightly, but he wasn’t rambling at top speed, so that was an improvement.
“I know Mel came to talk to you. And because I know Valentina, I have a strong suspicion about what she asked you.”
“I was totally going to tell you, I just got caught up in the being kicked out thing, and–”
Bucky cut him off, “Again, you’re not being kicked out. I just wanted to get a feel for where your head was at. Mel asked you about exploring your powers, yes?”
Bob nodded, silent for the first time in the whole conversation.
After a full minute, Bucky prodded, “And your thoughts are…?”
He took a deep breath, as if he was breathing in from a straw. “I spoke to my therapist about what Mel said.”
Another silence stretched as Bob composed his thoughts. Bucky waited. He’d made a career out of waiting, first as a sniper, and then as the Winter Soldier.
“I may be a far cry from mentally stable, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been in my life, with the support of the team. Thanks again, for not kicking me out.” Bob’s eyes sparkled slightly. It was a joke. “She gave me some print-outs on meditation, and suggested I try to see if anything… manifests from it.”
“Okay. That seems like a good place to start. Do you mind if I…” he hunted for a word, “supervise?”
Bob nodded to himself. “I was actually going to ask Yelena, but, yeah, let’s start there. Just to be on the safe side.”
He checked his watch. They still had about an hour to kill. “Okay, let’s do it.”