Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“He may very well be a ghost again,” Natasha says, her voice soft and almost distant at the other end of the line. “With a four-day head start, he could be anywhere by now.”

It’s been less than twenty-four hours since Sam last saw Natasha - since she handed Steve that unsavory dossier as they stood by Nick Fury’s empty grave with the dust still settling over D.C. - and in that short time, Sam has learned enough about the Winter Soldier that it makes him queasy just thinking about it. But as morbidly fascinating as the files are, they’re also old, and any fresh trail Barnes might have left is growing colder by the minute. CCTV footage from around the lake where he left Steve has yielded nothing, and neither has scouting the muddy bank, and not even the endless hours of live broadcasting from the traditional networks have managed to pick up anything of note.

So this morning, Sam had caved and unfolded the note Natasha had slipped him at the graveyard and made the call. To his surprise, she’d picked up. “That was quick, Sam,” she’d said, amused. “No one ever tell you about the three-day rule? ”

“And if you had to guess,” Sam says now. “Where do you think he’ll go?”

Natasha lets out a little sigh. It sounds almost wistful. “If I had to guess, I’d say he’ll seek out Hydra,” she says.

Sam considers that, wonders if it could be true. All those years in captivity can do things to a man; it might be the only home Barnes knows.

“To work for them again?” he asks.

“Or to bring them down.”

That works for Steve – flushing out Hydra cells is already extremely up his alley, and the prospect of getting to do it while he’s looking for Barnes only serves to sweeten the deal. It’s not hard to find a starting point either: former Shield bases all over the world are swarming like ant hills, and when word reaches them about a bomb going off in an old safehouse near Kaliningrad only a couple of hours later, Steve decides to bite.

And Sam would love to go – he really would – but unlike Steve, who apparently bounces back faster than the Energizer Bunny, Sam’s still nursing a couple of broken ribs from the showdown in D.C., and the simple act of rolling his shoulders back sends alarming spikes of lightning crackling down his spine. Besides, without his wings he’s effectively grounded and would only slow Steve down.

“Next time, Cap,” Sam says to Steve when he drops him off at the air strip at Andrews in the early hours of the morning.

“Hopefully there won’t be a next time,” Steve says, looking grim and expectant all at once.

It can’t be that easy, Sam thinks as he watches Steve disappear up the steps to the waiting jet.

The thing is, Sam doesn’t completely buy the whole revenge on Hydra theory. If he’s honest he’s still not sure how much Barnes pulling Steve out of the lake actually means. Maybe it was a moment of clarity. Maybe it was also just that. A moment .

But if – and this is a big if – Barnes actually did wake up to find himself a free man for the first time in seventy-something years, Sam somehow doesn’t think his first course of action would be to voluntarily go on yet another murder spree. If Sam had to guess, he'd say Bucky Barnes would start by looking for himself, and New York is only a few hours away.

Bucky’s old address in Brooklyn looks nothing like it did in the forties. Of course it doesn't. The whole neighborhood has been gentrified beyond recognition, which works in Sam's favor because it means having an abundance of overpriced coffee shops to choose from when he picks a spot for his stakeout. In a baseball cap and shades he doesn’t exactly blend in with the unkempt beards and beanies of the small army of struggling, office-less freelancers that populate Hungry Ghost Coffee, but at least he looks good, he reflects as the barista hands him his coffee with a shy smile; she’s drawn a multi-layered heart in the foam of the cappuccino.

“Refills are on the house,” she says, completely contrary to the sign behind her saying refills are half price.

“I might just take you up on that,” Sam says, flashing her a smile back. “I’ll probably be here all day.”

It definitely can’t be this easy, he thinks as he settles down by the window to scan the crowded street outside.

But as Sam finds out only a few hours later, it absolutely can.

Barnes shows up around mid-afternoon, and Sam nearly chokes on his third cappuccino, doing a double-triple take to make sure it’s really Barnes before he remembers he's not supposed to be staring. Not that it matters if he is, because Barnes isn't looking Sam's way. Clearly, he didn't get the dress code memo either. He stands out like a sore thumb in a no-name-brand cap, a worn hoodie, and practical jeans, his gloved hands hanging onto the straps of his backpack as he gawks up at his childhood home. 

Sam fumbles for his phone, but then it strikes him that Steve is currently somewhere above the Atlantic with no cell reception, and he lets his hand sink for a second. Then he reaches for the phone again, thinking to call Natasha, but suddenly Bucky is on the move, waiting to cross the street. And Sam knows that it’s now or never, so he tucks five bucks under his coffee cup and hurries outside. 

Barnes isn’t even particularly hard to follow. In fact, the slow pace of his wandering is almost a problem; he keeps stopping to look at absolutely everything, which means Sam has to hang back instead of blending in with the flow of pedestrians. Bucky doesn’t move entirely without purpose though. He keeps walking due south on the same street, even when the crowds thin out along with the boutiques and the micro breweries. 

Eventually it’s just the two of them on the sidewalk, and Sam ducks into an alley, not wanting to risk Barnes turning back and spotting him. Besides, Sam’s got a pretty good idea of where they’re headed. 

“We used to practically live there, during the summers,” Steve had told Sam, a soft murmur from the sickbed that first day when he was still recovering. “Used to hunt for pennies under the boardwalk, or in the arcade until they shooed us out. We’d sleep out on the beach, right there on the sand…”

Coney Island. It’ll be mostly empty now, on a bleak April day with the steel-gray clouds so low they might turn into mist before they have the chance to rain. There’ll be plenty of sheltered spots for someone looking for a place to stay the night. Sam hopes he’s right about this, wishes he had some kind of means to track Barnes, because by now he’s so far away that Sam can’t see him when he pokes his head around the corner again. The hunch he has is still strong enough that he takes his phone out and calls Natasha as he keeps walking. This time, there’s no answer. It doesn’t even ring, just clicks in Sam’s ear the first, second, and third time he tries it.

Fine. He'll do this on his own. It's not like he's scared or anything.

Not scared, but maybe just a bit stupid, he thinks two hours later from his hiding spot in Brighton Beach Park. He’s flat on the ground under the thorny skeleton of a rose bush; his ribs are aching, his shoulders are sore, and the cold’s been seeping in through his jacket for long enough that he’s gone a bit numb. Barnes is holed up in the abandoned lifeguard hut on the other side of the boardwalk, and the only thing keeping Sam from moving in on him is - well. He’s out here, alone and armed with a single concealed dagger and nothing else. It’s not like he thought he’d actually find Barnes, and so here he is, a man without a plan.

He gets his phone out, tries Natasha’s one last time, and then Steve, but it goes straight to voicemail. Sam doesn’t leave a message, doesn’t want to dump that kind of information on Steve in a one-way conversation.

A stray drop of rain kisses Sam’s cheek, and then another, and another, until there’s a steady pattering on the ground, on the stiff leather of his jacket. He glances up at the sky. It’ll be dark within the hour, and if Barnes’ night vision is anything like Steve’s, that’s only going to be a disadvantage for one of them. Fuck it. Rogers had better be right about James Bucky Barnes, Sam thinks as he eases himself upright with a wince. And if he is, there’s no point in lurking in a bush or sneaking around.

As he walks across the boardwalk towards the lifeguard hut, Sam feels himself slip into another mindset, the lingering pain in his limbs washed away by a rush of adrenaline surging hot under his skin. He flexes his fingers, feels the strength in his arms, his thighs, feels how in control over of his body he is even when it’s like this, a little broken. He’s aware of his limitations, but he also knows he’s strong, and that coming in hot only serves to sharpen his mind, his reflexes. He survived the Winter Soldier before, and he can do it again. 

Sam slows his steps when he reaches the hut. Right now he feels amped up enough that he could kick that rickety door in, reduce it to splinters with a well-placed boot. But then what good would that do either of them. He flexes the fingers of his right hand again, curls them into a fist.

Against all reason, Sam knocks on the door. Against all reason, Bucky opens it, like some kind of normal human being. 

After a blank half-second stare at Sam, Bucky looks down at his own hand on the doorknob, like he’s confused about what it’s doing there. That’s... That’s not how Sam had expected this to go, at all.

“Hey,” Sam says, because it seems as good a way as any to strike up a conversation with what is hopefully just a former - not current - assassin.

“Hey,” Bucky says, a little distant, looking back up at Sam.

And something shifts in Bucky’s face, in his whole stance, as if he’s only just realizing what's happening. He looks somewhere between about to pounce on Sam and about to flee the scene.

"It's okay," says Sam, raising his hands. "It's cool, all right? It's cool."

The words mean nothing, but they seem to put Bucky somewhat at ease.

"I know you," Bucky says then, shoulders sinking an inch or two. "Wilson."

"That's me," Sam says. "Steve's friend."

"How’d you find me?"

Sam raises his eyebrows. "I followed you from your old house. It wasn't exactly hard. And then I watched you break in here."

Bucky stares at him. "I don't remember…" he starts, trails off. "Is he here? Steve."

Sam shakes his head. "Sorry. It's just me." 

For a moment, Barnes goes distant again, eyes drifting aside as if he’s remembering something. 

“Hey,” Sam says again, a little firmer this time, and Bucky snaps his gaze up to meet Sam’s. “Bucky? I think you should come with me. There are better places to stay. We can wait for Steve to–”

“No,” Bucky rasps, and without warning he reaches out, quick as lightning, to grab Sam by the jacket. 

He pulls Sam inside the hut as if he weighs nothing and then slams the door shut behind them. Sam struggles briefly against Bucky’s arm, manages to twist himself free, and scrambles back against the wall, reaching behind him to pull the dagger from his belt. His blood is pounding in his ears, and even as he holds the knife out in front of him, ready to fight, he knows he’s done for.

But then Bucky stumbles back, hands thrown up disarmingly, walking sideways along the wall, causing a stack of lifesavers to crash to the floor with a clatter.

“Sorry,” he says. “Sorry. I’m not gonna… You can go, if you want.”

He’s squeezing himself into a corner, not like he’s scared, but as if he’s trying to get as far away from Sam as humanly possible. He glances at the door, nods encouragingly at it. Sam’s close enough to make a run for it, but instead he looks at Bucky, searching his face, trying to see who’s in there. It’s not the same person who kicked him off that helicarrier, that’s for sure.

“Shit,” he says, lowering the dagger slowly. “Steve was right, wasn’t he?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky says, frowning. “I don’t know...”

“Okay,” Sam says. “Bucky, listen. Do you know where you are?”

“Bucky?” Bucky says, looking at Sam, eyes sharp and clear all of a sudden. For a moment, his lip pulls up, exposing his teeth in a grin. “I’m not even sure I know who I am.”

“I think I know people who can help with that,” Sam says.

“I don’t need help,” Bucky says firmly. “From anyone.” 

“That’s debatable,” Sam mutters. “But listen. Right now, he’s on a plane on his way to Europe, but in a couple of hours we can call Steve and-”

“No,” Bucky snarls, and Sam grips the dagger tighter. Bucky’s eyes drift to Sam’s hand, and he swallows hard a couple of times. When he speaks again, his voice is carefully controlled. “Not Steve,” he says.

“Okay, not Steve,” Sam agrees, leaving the question of why the hell not Steve for later.

Bucky relaxes visibly at that. “I just… I need some time, all right? To remember.”

Sam nods, lowers the knife again. “Yeah, okay, I get that, but I can’t just leave you here,” he says.

Bucky frowns, like he’s not completely clear on why not.

Sam cocks his head. “Remember D.C.? Four days ago? I know that probably wasn’t strictly you, alright? But buddy, you are gonna have to convince a whole lot of people.”

“No,” Bucky says, shaking his head slowly. “I can’t. I don’t even know… Wilson?” he asks.

“Sam.”

“Sam,” Bucky repeats, as if tasting the name, trying it out. “Listen, Sam. I’m not sure I’ve slept since I woke up. I think I’ve been walking this whole time. And I’m... I’m just really tired, okay?”

“You walked here from Washington?”

“I think so.”

Sam does the math in his head. Two hundred and fifty miles, more or less. It’s impossible, of course, for any normal person. But for someone like Steve? Like Bucky? Yeah, it’s possible. Just about.

“Jesus Christ,” Sam says, taking a deep breath and blowing it out slowly. 

“I just need to sleep,” Bucky says.

“I can’t let you go,” Sam says, but even to his own ears, he sounds resigned.

“I won’t go anywhere. To be honest I don’t think I could.”

And with that, Sam folds, because it sure looks like Bucky could do with a solid eight-to-ten hours. 

They both set their terms: rendezvous at six AM tomorrow, eleven hours from now. Bucky promises again he won’t go anywhere. Sam promises he won’t call Steve or any of the other Avengers for now. When Sam leaves, Bucky looks at Sam like he doesn’t quite trust him. And when Sam squats down under the rose bush again, settling in for an all-nighter in the steady drizzle, he can’t exactly blame him.

The sun’s just on its way up when Sam pushes up off the ground one final time, knees protesting wildly. He’s soaked through and freezing, but compared to some of the nights spent on the lookout in active duty, it’s been far from the worst watch he’s ever kept. 

He knocks on the door to the hut, half expecting to find it empty in spite of his stubborn vigil, but after a few seconds he can hear a groan followed by slow shuffling. 

Bucky looks like hell and stinks even worse. Maybe he did last night as well and Sam just couldn’t smell it through all that adrenaline.

“Man, you could use a shower,” Sam says, hovering on the doorstep, kind of hoping he won’t have to venture inside. “Or, you know, the ocean’s right there. You should consider it.”

“I don’t like the cold,” Bucky says, voice cracked with sleep. And no, he wouldn’t, Sam thinks. “The YMCA around here still open?” Bucky asks, yawning wide. 

As it turns out, it is. Twenty-four hours, seven days a week, and at half past six on a Thursday, it’s silent and empty, the tiled corridors echoing their steps back to them. Sam still keeps watch just outside the showers as Bucky cleans up, half to make sure no one gets a look at that arm of his, half to keep an eye on Bucky himself – or an ear, in this case, back respectfully turned. 

Bucky doesn’t have a towel, and the shower leaves him looking like a drenched cat, his hair dripping dark stains on his hoodie. That and the rest of his clothes could do with a wash, or maybe simply being set on fire, but the overall result is a definite improvement. 

“So,” Sam says as Bucky shoulders his backpack. “You asked for time. I gave you time. Steve is going to–”

The brief glimmer of panic that flashes across Bucky’s face is enough to make Sam trail off, frowning.

“He’s worried about you,” Sam says flatly. “You know that, right? From the moment he saw you, realized it was you, he’s been doing nothing but trying to help you. Save you. What’s more, he was the only one who believed it was worth trying. Hell, even I told him it was a shit idea, and he refused to listen. So what’s the problem, Barnes?”

“It’s a long story,” Bucky says, mouth twisting into something that might have been intended as a smile but definitely doesn’t pass for it. “I think.”

“You think?” Sam folds his arms stubbornly. “Well, it’s a four-hour drive to D.C. We’ve got time.”

Bucky stares at him. “D.C.? I just walked for days to get from there to where I am now.”

“And what are you going to do now that you are?” Sam asks. “In case you hadn’t noticed, your old digs were converted into a gender-reveal-party startup business. Or were you planning on staying in that hut until the Baywatch squad came and kicked you out? Make a nest out of lifejackets and live off sand?”

For a second Bucky just stands there, silently mouthing, fumbling for a response.

“Well guess what,” Sam says impatiently. “I’m not staying here, and I’m sure as hell not going to let you just waltz out of here to disappear off to god knows where. You’re going to tell me what your deal is, and unless you’ve got a better idea, we might as well do it in the car. I already spent all night awake in the rain on account of your tongue-tied ass, and I miss my bed, all right?”

Half an hour later, Sam rips three parking tickets from under the windshield wiper of his rental car and stuffs them in his pocket without looking at the damage. Maybe he can get Tony Stark to cover it: chances are he thinks tickets are just the normal way of paying for parking. Or maybe if he’s lucky, Bucky Barnes comes with a hefty finder’s fee, Sam thinks as he punches his own home address into the GPS and pulls out of the parking lot.

“Careful, it’s a rental,” he tells Bucky, who’s already started fiddling with the seat, pushing it back with a loud clang to make room for his legs.

“Because, you know,” Sam adds, unable to help himself, “some asshole totalled mine the other day.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Barnes says, unflinching. “Drivers these days, huh.”

“Pedestrians are even worse if you ask me,” Sam says as he makes a turn towards Verrazzano Bridge. “Walking in the middle of the road where they’ve got no business being.”

Bucky sits quietly for a while, staring out the window across the bay. The city’s barely visible behind the curtain of gray this morning, and Sam’s heart suddenly aches for home, to feel the warmth of the sun on his face and smell the breeze coming in off the sea. He’s always loved April in Delacroix; warm enough that you never have to worry about being cold, and the air made for flying, as high and clear as it’ll get before summer sets in, blanketing everything in heat and humidity.

“I don’t think I’m safe,” Bucky says suddenly, snapping Sam back to the here and now. “To be around, I mean. This...”

He trails off and slips off his glove, turning his left hand this way and that. Sam glances at it between looking at the traffic. The metal looks dull and harmless now, but he knows what it can do, feels the burn between his shoulder blades as he tenses involuntarily at the thought.

“I think it might still be in there,” Bucky says. 

“The Winter Soldier?” Sam asks warily. “Exactly how worried should I be, man? On a scale of one to sledding down the highway on a car door again.”

At that, Barnes snorts a laugh. “No immediate homicidal tendencies,” he says dryly. “But…” He trails off again, and for a long while he sits there, just watching the traffic as Sam takes them onto I-95. 

“There was a moment,” Bucky starts, gazing distantly out at the endless row of trees lining the road. “When I was up there with…Steve. And I knew it was him. And I didn’t - I didn’t stop. Even though I knew. I could have killed him,” Bucky says, the final sentence a short, snappy statement, as if he has to spit it out because it won’t come willingly.

“Steve’s one of maybe five individuals on Earth who can hold their own against you, Bucky,” Sam says.

“Not against the Winter Soldier,” Bucky says, shaking his head. “Not when Steve still thinks of me as his friend. He didn’t even fight back up on that helicarrier. And I can’t let that happen again, because I don’t give up. I don’t fight to win - I fight to kill.”

Sam doesn’t know what to say to that; it’s a lot to take in. Bucky suddenly looks exhausted. It’s clear that it’s hard to talk about, and so they fall silent for a while, Sam concentrating on the road and Bucky going back to his stubborn staring out the window.

“Hey, you want some coffee?” Sam asks when he spots a sign for a rest area coming up. 

“God, yes,” Bucky groans. 

Sam hasn’t had any caffeine since yesterday, and it’s good, so good that he can’t stand to wait and scalds his tongue as he sips it while driving. Next to him, Bucky practically inhales two donuts in short succession before he starts on the coffee. Not ten minutes later, he’s snoring softly, head resting against the window and rattling uncomfortably along with the bumps in the road.

Bucky sleeps until Sam pulls up outside his house and switches off the engine.

"Where are we?" Bucky asks, blinking around at the surroundings.

"My place," Sam says.

"Damn, Wilson," Bucky says as he gets out of the car, stretching his arms with a wince. "I look that easy to you?"

Sam’s eyebrows fly up at that. 

“You look like someone who could do with another shower,” he says evenly. “You can borrow some clothes too,” he adds as he locks the car and makes for the stairs.

“You think they’ll fit?” Bucky says doubtfully, eyeing Sam briefly up and down.

Sam stops in his tracks. “What are you trying to say? We’re about the same size.”

“Sure,” Bucky says. “Give or take a few inches.”

“They should fit you just fine, given that I like my shirts on the tight side,” Sam says, shooting Bucky a dirty look.

But Bucky seems lost in thought, staring at Sam’s door.

“This is your house,” he says. It’s not exactly a question.

“Yeah,” Sam says, fishing his keys out, fumbling for the one to the front door one-handed. “It’s a bit of a mess, but I’m guessing you’ve seen worse…”

He opens the door and steps aside to let Bucky in, only to realize he’s alone on the stairs. He whirls around, looking up and down the street, finding it empty. 

“Shit,” he says, then tosses his bag inside and slams the door shut.

Barnes is nowhere to be found, and without knowing which direction he went, Sam soon gives up his attempts to track him. Unlike Sam, Bucky is well-rested by now, not to mention he probably has a marching speed to match Tyson Gay doing the hundred. And Sam is tired: tired and still aching all over from jumping out a window and falling into a helicopter, not to mention from having his ribs kicked in by Bucky, and so he follows the only reasonable course of action, which is to go back home to take a shower and get some sleep.

He’s rudely awoken just an hour later by his phone ringing. It’s an unknown number, which up until very recently used to mean unwelcome telesales. But in the past couple of weeks, that’s all changed.

“Steve?” he mumbles into the receiver.

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“Ugh,” Sam says, pulling a face. He takes the phone from his ear, puts it on speakerphone, and tosses it down on the pillow next to him. Then he lies back down, eyes closed.

“You still there?” Bucky asks.

“Unfortunately. I was asleep, asshole.” Then a thought strikes him. “How’d you get this number? How’d you even get a phone, man, I–”

“Tricks of the trade, Sam. Sorry I flaked out on you. After you bought me coffee and everything.”

Sam huffs. “What happened?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t worry–” Sam barks a laugh. “Yeah, I’m not worried about you, Barnes.”

“Did you talk to Steve?”

Sam hasn’t even tried calling Steve, or Natasha, or anyone else who might be of assistance in this goddamn mess of a situation. 

“Not yet,” he admits.

“Thank you,” Bucky says. “I mean it.”

“Yeah, well, you might want to take that back. I just haven’t had the chance, is all.”

The line goes quiet for several seconds, until Sam thinks maybe Bucky hung up on him.

“Can we talk about this?” Bucky says then.

Sam drags his hand down his face, exasperated. “Hey, I’ve been trying to talk about it. But sure, whatever. You know where I live.”

“Yeah, I do. Not there though.”

Sam can’t even bring himself to ask why not. “Listen, I’m not about to get out of bed again right after I got in it,” he says.

“Tomorrow then. Somewhere public.”

Sam meets Bucky at the Jazz Café on the first floor of the Smithsonian. He’s wearing different - and more importantly cleaner - clothes, but the ratty baseball cap still sits firmly on top of his unkempt hair.

“I saw the exhibition,” Bucky says, absent-mindedly stirring his coffee. “About us, back then.”

“Bring back memories?” Sam asks.

“You could say that. I feel like they glossed over a decade or seven though. People think I died a hero.”

“For now,” Sam says. “But Hydra’s secrets are out there. It’s only a matter of time before someone starts connecting the dots.”

“I need a little more of that, Sam,” Bucky says. “Time.”

Sam drains the last of his coffee and leans forward on the table, lowering his voice.

“What you need,” he says, “is to talk to Steve. The blurbs in that exhibition say you were best buddies. Inseparable. And Steve never said anything to the contrary. So what gives, Barnes?”

And Bucky does that thing again, where he looks lost in time, as if he’s working through something. 

“A lot happened that he wasn’t around for. I’m not the Bucky he knew.”

“Maybe not,” someone says, and Bucky whips his head around to face Steve. “But if there’s a chance to get to know the Bucky you are now, I’d like to take it.”

Steve is flanked by Maria Hill, who keeps a warning hand hovering at her hip, and Natasha, who gives Bucky a nod of acknowledgement. Bucky looks at them each in turn, his expression rapidly changing from shock to defeat, and when his eyes fall on Sam again, they glint with the sharp disappointment of someone who’s just been betrayed.

Chapter Text

“What’s your excuse?”

The question comes after a long stretch of silence, and it shakes Sam from the twilight territory between waking and sleeping that he’s carelessly slipped into, makes him prop himself up on his elbows on the mattress to look at Bucky across the hotel room. He’s turned the chair around to face the bed where Sam is half-lying, and the way the desk lamp is casting a warm light on Bucky's body while leaving his face in shadow gives the whole situation an almost cinematic vibe: the faceless killer, the villain in the dark, catching the victim at their most vulnerable.

“My excuse?” Sam asks. 

“You know,” Bucky says. “What do you tell people when you disappear halfway across the world to come check on me?”

“I don’t need an excuse to go on a wine-tasting trip, man. I’m retired, remember? This is exactly the kind of shit retired people do.”

“Oh,” Bucky says, sounding a little put out. “You didn’t give me a fancy code name? Operation Northern Star, something like that.”

Sam snorts a laugh. “Sorry, buddy. No code name. No Red Dawn, no Neptune Spear. Steve calls it our ‘missing person’s case,’ if it’s any consolation.”

“Your missing person’s case,” Bucky repeats, and Sam can hear the amused smirk.

"That's what he calls it," Sam says with a lazy shrug.

He feels loose and heavy all over, and his thoughts keep drifting here and there, untethered as they are in the Rioja-induced fog in his brain. People who go on wine-tasting trips - for pleasure or for subterfuge - don't usually get shit-faced on the first evening. It's not proper, makes it seem like you're in it for the buzz and not the bouquet. And no, Sam isn't shit-faced, but the combination of jet lag and the lingering summer heat is making the wine hit different.

This is his fourth monthly rendezvous with Bucky. Why the meeting is taking place here, in one of Spain’s northern wine districts, and why it’s between Bucky and Sam, as opposed to Steve Rogers, or Natasha Romanoff, or literally anyone more suited to the task… Well. It’s complicated.

Cornering Barnes at the Smithsonian had been easy enough. Figuring out where to go from there had been a lot harder. First off, there was the fact that the Winter Soldier had been working for Soviet Russia for the entirety of the Cold War, with a considerable number of spectacular assassinations across the globe under his belt.

“That wasn’t you,” Steve had said during their little round table at the Jazz Café. “That was Hydra.”

“You think that’s gonna convince the CIA?” Bucky had replied. “The Army? The World Court, Interpol, MI6? To them I am Hydra.”

Steve had looked at Natasha, perhaps for support, but she had only folded her arms and shrugged apologetically.

“He’s not wrong,” she said. “Rumor has it there’s a new name on the unofficial bonus board at Langley.”

“How much?” Barnes asked, eyes glinting with sudden interest.

“Not enough for me to consider it,” Natasha said flatly.

“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear that,” Steve said, getting to his feet with a heavy sigh.

No, Bucky simply coming forward wasn’t the easy option it might have seemed like. Neither was hunkering down with Steve – not with all eyes on Captain America after the fall of SHIELD, leaving him balancing on a tightrope-thin line between being a hero of the people and an enemy of the state.

Besides, for reasons still not entirely clear to Sam, it wasn’t what Bucky wanted.

“Trust me,” he’d said. “It’s better if you just keep pretending like I don’t exist.”

“You don’t want that,” Steve had said. "Why would you-"

Before Bucky had been forced to answer, Hill had broken in. “You know we can’t let you do that, Barnes.”

The solution is this – inelegant and precarious, but ultimately functional. For now, Bucky stays off the grid, but keeps in touch. And Sam is the logical choice as a point of contact. Technically retired and with time to spare, still unknown to the public, able to travel freely on his own passport. Out of the five people who know the connection between the Winter Soldier and James Bucky Barnes, Sam is the only one able to hide in plain sight.

Their routine is simple: Bucky calls Sam weekly at home from a payphone, or from a business, or a hotel - never a mobile, even though Sam suspects he does own one. Roughly once a month, they meet face to face, in a location Bucky specifies. Sam hands Bucky some cash, they shoot the shit for an hour or two before parting ways again, and so far it's worked out just fine. 

It’s not exactly a chore either. Sam’s got a medium-grade Amex card to cover his expenses, and over the summer months, he’s seen the midnight sun at Svalbard, found amber-adorned earrings for Sarah in a Krakow market, and explored the Knossos on Crete, all vaguely courtesy of the Avengers. 

“Wake up, Sam.”

Sam opens his eyes again, blinks a couple of times as he gets his bearings; the steady, high-pitched humming of cicadas reminds him of when and where he is.

It’s late September, in a quaint vineyard providing bed-and-breakfast options, a few miles out from Logroño. Sam is exactly where he wants to be, both mentally and physically. The fact that he has to take a couple of hours out of his frankly already maxed-out schedule of wine tasting, paella-eating, and relaxing to bring himself up to speed with the activities of one geriatric ex-assassin – well, he can live with that.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” he says.

But Bucky is standing by the balcony door now, his face pale and silver in the moonlight. He must have moved soundlessly, Sam thinks. Because he wasn’t sleeping. Just resting his eyes.

“You’re getting comfortable,” Bucky observes, like it’s not wholly a good thing. 

“I’m jet lagged is what I am.”

Which is true, but Bucky is also right. The more time Sam spends around him, the more relaxed he gets. Bucky’s not bad company - he can be witty, even charming at times, and it’s difficult to reconcile this person with the one who kicked Sam so hard off a helicarrier that seven of his ribs cracked like twigs.

That thought sends a sobering shock of embarrassment through Sam’s chest, as if his very body wants to put him to shame for forgetting for a moment. He gets up, pulls his t-shirt over his head and tosses it on the bed.

“Good talk, Barnes,” he says as he starts unbuttoning his jeans, “but I need to hit the shower and then get some beauty sleep. Call me next week, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, a little distant.

For a second, Sam wonders if maybe Bucky’s having one of those moments where he drifts off somewhere. It happens, usually when he remembers something new, Bucky has told him. But now – and this could just be the wine talking, Sam thinks, because surely not… Now it seems as if Bucky is distracted by Sam undressing.

“You alright there, Buck?” Sam says, moving around to pick up the towel from the foot of the bed.

“Yeah, sorry,” Bucky says, shaking his head. “I, uh, what’s the word again?”

“You zoned out?”

“Yeah. I zoned out.”

Sam flashes Bucky a smile and heads towards the bathroom, confident that Bucky will see himself out just as quietly as he’d seen himself in earlier. A couple of steps later, he stops, turns around to fetch the shower oil in his bag – and walks right into Bucky.

It shouldn’t be possible, moving that fast, and without making a sound, and Sam opens his mouth to give Bucky hell about it, but before he can say a word, Bucky leans in, slips his hand behind Sam’s neck and kisses him full on the lips.

It takes Sam a second to fully process what’s happening, and by the time he does, he’s already closing his eyes and kissing Bucky back. Bucky’s lips are soft and searching against Sam’s, but the rest of him is solid and unyielding, a hard and sharp strength in the hand curled around Sam's neck that reminds him of what Bucky's fingers could do with a quick flick of the wrist. Sam's heart speeds up, beats frantically with what could be either fear or sudden arousal, and when Bucky deepens the kiss, Sam's chest blooms with a burning of the kind that’s too intense to tell if it’s hot or cold. 

Sam pulls away to suck in a short breath, and Bucky’s hand falls from Sam’s neck, but his gaze lingers on Sam like an unspoken question.

“What are you doing,” Sam murmurs.

Clearly, that wasn’t the answer Bucky was hoping for, because he goes stiff, ducks aside and moves past Sam.

“Hey,” Sam says, louder, turning around after him.

“Sorry,” Bucky mutters, one hand already on the door handle. “I got the wrong idea.”

And before Sam can think for half a minute about right or wrong ideas, Bucky is gone, drawing the door shut behind him. 

Sam stands there, just staring at the door for a moment, and his heart hasn’t even slowed down completely when the sound of a notification going off on his phone makes it beat hard in his chest again. He scrambles for it on the bed, somehow expects it to be from Bucky, even though they never text, but it’s just a newsflash.

Disaster averted: Small but extremely fast spinning asteroid 2014 RC, dubbed “the Tiny Terror,” has passed safely past Earth at a distance of less than 25,000 miles. “A close shave,” a NASA representative comments.

Close shave indeed, Sam thinks, dimming the phone screen and flopping back on the bed.

The kiss stays with Sam all night, and he wakes up with the ghost of it still burning on his lips. I got the wrong idea. What idea, Sam wonders. The idea that Sam might be attracted to guys, or attracted to Bucky, specifically? Because the first one is true, and the second he doesn’t reject immediately, even though he absolutely should.

In the past couple of years, he’s dipped his toes in the whole dating-app scene. He’s had plenty of casual flings and dinner dates, with men and women alike; plenty of them have been interested in taking things further, too, but something in Sam’s brain isn’t wired for it. Flirting and fucking he can do, but he can count the number of times he’s fallen in love on the fingers of one hand, and so the one-, two-, maybe three-night stands have passed in a blur of trying to work up an enthusiasm that never appears. 

As for Bucky, he spells trouble in neon letters half a mile high, and maybe that’s it. Maybe Sam has been waiting to be shaken up a little, needs something that isn’t routine, mundane, safe. But there’s a difference between a thrill and a bad fucking idea, and Sam’s pretty sure which category this would fall into.

Sam spends the next week flushing hot and then cold whenever he thinks about what happened in Rioja; he might even do the stupid thing where he thinks about it while jerking off once or twice. He fully expects Bucky to miss their next scheduled talk, to flake out and go off grid, forcing Sam to come clean about the whole thing to Steve and get the search-party routine going again. But Bucky doesn't miss it. He calls on time, reports his location, suggests the same time next week. He does it all without as much as breathing a word about what passed between them.

They don’t mention Rioja the next time they speak either. It’s another perfunctory phone call; Bucky is hiking in the Swiss Alps before the snows hit, and he’s got nothing to report. Three weeks out from the weird blip on their otherwise professional radar, Bucky is still in Switzerland, and by now Sam is starting to think that they’re going to move on without ever mentioning the awkward, aborted makeout session again.

It’s a relief, honestly, when Bucky slips back into being talkative, when he jokes about Sam forcing him out of bed, even though their call is scheduled for after a morning session at the VA, where Sam's been covering for a colleague who’s caught the flu.

“Isn’t it, like, four in the afternoon over there?” Sam says.

“I’m an old man, Sam. Napping is an essential part of my daily routine.”

“Yeah? What’s next, papaw slippers and using your rifle sight to spy on the neighbors?”

"Sounds like a dream."

Sam can't help but grin to himself. It's good to be back to some kind of normalcy, especially given that they're due to meet in person next. "It's about time I booked a flight," he says. "You got a time and place for me?"

The place is a park in Lausanne, and Sam shows up early as usual. Lake Geneva lies calm as a mirror before him, and the air is high and clear. Autumn is well and truly here, and what little wind there is promises snow. Birds are wheeling in the sky, and Sam watches them, feeling each turn and tumble as a ghostly tugging in his arms. 

"You miss it, don’t you.”

Sam flinches, then turns his head and squints up at Bucky, who’s come to stand next to the bench where Sam is sitting.

“Remind me to get you one of those cat bells to hang around your neck,” he says. 

Bucky flashes him a grin. “No need to worry, Sam,” he says. “I’ve stopped swiping at sparrows.”

Bucky joins Sam on the bench, leaving a respectful distance between them, but he still sits close enough to signal friendly intentions. They watch the birds in silence for a while.

“You studied birds as part of your training,” Bucky says eventually.

“I did,” Sam says, frowning. “You been reading my classified files, Barnes?”

“No. But I remember you flying, and it looked a bit like that,” he says, pointing at a couple of birds - ravens by the look of it - playfully swooping around one another, rolling and weaving in and out of each other’s space. “You’re good at it,” he adds.

That’s an understatement, because Sam is - well, he’s the best at it, simple as that. “I know,” he says. “But I’m not a paratrooper anymore. And even if I did miss it, my gear’s seen better days,” he adds pointedly.

Bucky doesn’t answer that, but Sam notes that he at least has the dignity to flush a satisfying shade of pink. In fact, Bucky looks a little tan in general, Sam thinks, the realization giving him sudden pause. Then again, he has allegedly been hiking in the Alps, and while it is cold, the sun is still strong enough to kiss some life into your cheeks.

“You got the time?” Sam asks.

Bucky pulls the sleeve of his jacket back to check his watch. “Ten thirty-five,” he says. “Why, you got someplace to be?”

“No,” Sam says, eyes lingering on the sun-bleached hairs on Bucky’s arm. “Mine’s still on D.C. time, is all.”

A few days later when Sam is back home, Steve calls, asking if he can drop by and borrow a book.

“You know there are plenty of libraries in the city, right?” Sam says, amused.

“Yeah, but you don’t threaten me with late fees.”

“Well maybe I should. I’m still missing The Three-Body Problem.”

“Someone in the Tower is reading it,” Steve says apologetically. “Banner, I think. Also, I’ve just managed to shake that freelance hack who keeps sticking to me like glue,” he adds.

“All right then,” Sam says. He looks at the tangled wires in front of him and pulls a face. “I gotta warn you though, the place is a bit of a mess.”

“Hah, good one, Sam. See you in a few.”

Twenty minutes later, Steve is standing frozen in the doorway to the kitchen.

“Okay, that’s…” he says, motioning vaguely at the kitchen table where the twisted metal skeleton of the right wing of the EXO-7 suit lies, at the floor that’s covered in the rest of the Falcon gear, laid out piece by piece. “You weren’t kidding.”

Steve treads carefully around it, making his way to the coffee pot, where he pours himself a cup.

“I didn’t think any of this survived,” he says, prodding at a shin guard with his foot.

“Sharon came by a few weeks ago with this in the back of her truck,” Sam says. “Apparently they fished it out of the Potomac during cleanup. She said she didn’t want it in the evidence vault at Langley and gave me the choice of having the scraps melted down or keeping it hidden.”

Steve nods thoughtfully. “So you’re putting it back together. Missing the jet streams?”

“I like fixing stuff,” Sam says, shrugging like it’s no big deal.

“Uh-huh,” Steve says, sounding thoroughly unconvinced. 

He joins Sam by the table and lifts a hydraulic cylinder to inspect the sooty, broken-off piston before putting it back up-side down.

“You know the offer still stands, right?” he asks.

“I know,” Sam says, turning the cylinder the right way around. “And I appreciate it, but I’m not getting any younger.”

“Ouch.” Steve puts a hand on his chest to mimic a shot to the heart. “Seriously though, Sam, you’re thirty-six. That’s nothing.”

“I’m not a super soldier, my friend,” Sam points out. 

“No, you’re better than that. You’re an extraordinary soldier.”

Sam laughs. “Flattery might get you anywhere, Rogers, but it won’t get me to New York.”

Steve smiles dejectedly. “Well, you know I think it’s a damn shame. Tony could help you with this,” he says hopefully, picking up another wing part at random.

“Thanks but no thanks,” Sam says, plucking the piece from Steve’s hand.

As Steve makes his way into the living room to raid Sam’s bookshelves, Sam carefully puts the part back in its place on the table. The truth is, he does miss it, misses it enough to dream of vaulting above the clouds at night, enough that he longs for it during the day. And while he does enjoy fixing things, he rarely does it for no reason. 

The vow to never get himself in a position to take orders again is one he doesn’t intend to break, ever, but Sam is aware there are options available. Sharon has expressed an interest (“short-term contracts, no strings attached”), and Steve probably isn’t about to stop his gentle prodding any time soon. But being an Avenger - that’s a big step in multiple directions. He’s seen Steve and Natasha at work, and by their side, he’d be fighting for the right thing again, and he’d be free to fly.

But one kind of freedom would come at the cost of another, Sam thinks as he watches Steve pull a book from the shelf to read the blurb on the back. Steve is more than a person now. He’s more than a superhero and a reluctant celebrity, hounded by the press: he’s a symbol. Sam has seen first-hand what people with power can do with symbols, how they twist them to suit their own agenda or use them to score cheap political points. 

“This is on my list,” Steve says, holding Sam’s copy of Nineteen-Eighty-Four up. “Anything you’d recommend?”

Sam smiles, remembering the way he’d barely skimmed it in high school and still got an excellent grade. “It’s definitely what people would call a modern classic,” he says.

“But is it good?”

“You tell me after you read it.”

And as Steve sinks down on the armrest of Sam’s sofa to flip through the first few pages, Sam figures that for now, it’s worth keeping a low profile if it means being able to visit the damn library whenever he feels like it. 

Chapter Text

“If Steve asked you to join the Avengers, what would you say?”

The phone line crackles in the silence that follows Sam’s question, a subtle reminder of the distance between Washington and Bratislava.

“I don’t get it,” Bucky says eventually.

“What do you mean you don’t get it.”

“It’s a joke, right? You’re joking.”

“I’m not,” Sam says. Bucky lapses into a stubborn silence, clearly waiting for an explanation, so Sam goes on. “You’ve got the speed, the muscle, a badass left arm–”

“–all courtesy of Hydra.”

“Yeah, but before Hydra you were a Howlie, just like Steve. If you wanted, you could use those powers to do good.”

Bucky sighs. “It’s not that easy.”

“Of course it’s not,” Sam says. “But there’s gonna come a time when you need to think about what you want to do with the rest of your life.”

“Early retirement doesn’t seem too bad,” Bucky muses. “Looks good on you, at least.”

The words themselves could be innocuous, but the way Bucky says them sends a little shock through Sam’s chest, makes him lose track of what he was saying. 

“Uh,” he starts, stuck somewhere between wanting to laugh it off and firing a compliment back. Then he hears something else over the line: a distant, monotonous, yet songlike sound that he hasn’t heard in almost three years.

“I’m running out of call time,” Bucky says suddenly. “Same time next week, yeah?”

He hangs up before Sam can confirm, and Sam is left listening to a distant beep-beep-beep . 

“Huh,” he says to himself. He takes out his mobile and brings up his contact list, scrolls down a little until he finds the name he’s looking for.

Sam knows Natasha is back in the Tower for the weekend, and she picks up on the second ring.

“This is a nice surprise,” she says by way of greeting, and she does sound genuinely happy to hear from him. “But you didn't call just to chat, did you?”

“I’m afraid it’s more business than pleasure,” he admits. 

“Heartbreaker,” she says, and he can hear her smile all the way from New York. “Well, out with it, Wilson.”

“Weird question maybe, but…do you have access to call-tracking tech by any chance?”

When Bucky next calls, Sam is ready, phone hooked up to the laptop where Natasha’s sniffer software is set up. When the call connects, he watches the screen as the trace starts; Natasha has warned him that it might take a couple of minutes to locate a landline.

“What’s up, Bucky,” Sam says cheerfully.

A little too cheerfully, perhaps, because Bucky hesitates, then replies with: “Something wrong?”

“Oh no, just, you know how much I enjoy our weekly chats,” Sam jokes, staring at the progress bar on the screen, at the world map that zooms around to the other side of the globe. Bucky doesn’t reply, the tense silence stretching on for several seconds. “You there, Barnes?” Sam asks. 

“Christ,” Bucky says with a sigh. “For a minute there I thought you’d been compromised.”

Sam barks a short laugh. “What?”

“I don’t know. You sounded different.” He pauses, and Sam watches as the map zooms in on central Europe, then makes a swift sweep south. “Maybe we should have a code word or something,” Bucky suggests. “Just in case.”

“A code word?” Sam manages. Come on, come on , he thinks as the map grows still, then closes in on Morocco. “What for?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky says defensively. “If you’re ever in trouble, I guess.”

“And if I was, what would you do?” Sam asks, tearing his focus away from the screen for a second. “Stow away on a container ship? ‘Don’t worry Sam, help is on its way. In ten to fifteen business days,’” he says, trying to imitate Bucky’s Brooklyn accent.

“Ha fucking ha,” Bucky says. “No, I’d get in touch with one of your superhero pals, obviously. Anyway, forget I said anything. It was just a thought. A stupid one, evidently.”

Sam chews his lip. It’s actually not a bad idea, and it’s clear that it came from a place of genuine concern. But then a steadily blinking dot on the map catches his attention; the trace is complete.

“Where did you say you wanted to meet next week?” Sam asks.

“I didn’t.”

“Well, where are you at?”

“Still in Slovakia, but I guess it’s time I got moving,” Bucky says, and now that Sam knows it’s a lie, he can hear it in Bucky’s voice, how it goes light and casual all of a sudden. “Vienna, maybe?” Bucky goes on. “I always wanted to go to the Prater.”

“Sounds fun, but I was hoping you’d suggest someplace warmer,” Sam says, letting a little edge creep into his voice.

Bucky goes quiet for a second. “How about Spain again,” he says.

“How about Marrakech?”

“Fucking Natalia,” Bucky says, for the third time in as many minutes.

They’re sitting in a cafe in Medina, sharing a small plate of baklava between them. Sam is drinking mint tea and Bucky spiced coffee. The market is busy, but they’ve found a relatively quiet corner, sheltered from the midday sun by a gnarly tree with dark, waxy leaves.

“I was already onto you, you know,” Sam says. 

“Oh yeah?”

Sam raises his eyebrows and sips the tea. “Now, I haven’t been personally, but I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t hear a call to Maghrib anywhere in Bratislava.”

Bucky snorts. “Well, it was fun while it lasted, right?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam frowns. “That this is all just some game to you?”

“Sure,” Bucky says, eyes resting on Sam. “Something to pass the time.”

“Like I said, I don’t believe you,” Sam says plainly.

“What are you, Sherlock Holmes all of a sudden? I thought you said spy work wasn’t your thing.”

“It isn’t. But if something’s rotten enough, even I can smell it. So I’m going to ask you again, what the fuck is going on, Bucky?”

Bucky’s gaze drifts away to the throng of the marketplace, his attention flitting here and there, following people at random, and Sam can see his jaw clenching and relaxing a couple of times.

“There’s a loose end I’m trying to tie off,” Bucky says eventually.

“What kind of a loose end?” Sam asks.

“Mm-mm,” Bucky says, shaking his head but refusing to look at Sam. “Too risky.”

Sam makes no effort to stop the sigh of frustration that wells up in his chest. “The whole point of this stupid arrangement is that I keep tabs on you in exchange for a life in relative freedom, right?” he says. “And you’re out here double crossing me, probably since day one. Give me a single good reason why I shouldn’t just call Hill right now, tell her to lock you up in that Hulk-safe basement room in the Tower.”

At that, Bucky snaps his head around to look at Sam. He leans forward over the table, and there’s a sudden storm in his eyes that makes Sam want to shy away, but he keeps still, meeting Bucky’s gaze head-on as he says “I need to do this. I need to do this.”

“Do what?” Sam says.

For a couple of seconds they engage in some kind of impromptu staring contest, and as ridiculous as it might be, Sam immediately decides that he definitely isn’t going to be the first one to fold.

“How come you retired?” Bucky asks.

Sam blinks. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“You’re still young, you were good at what you did…”

“The program was canceled,” Sam cuts him off, already not liking the turn the conversation is taking.

“It’s not like the Air Force was though. There are career options aplenty.”

“Taking orders never really agreed with me,” Sam says. “Don’t think giving them would either.”

And up there, they’d done things their own way, he and Riley. Because no one knew the open skies like they did, knew the tech like they did, knew the possibilities and the pitfalls like they did. The commanding officer might have laid it all out down on the ground, may have thought and felt like he was in charge, but once they were airborne, the mission was in their hands. In the end, they’d always made their own decisions. The good ones and the bad.

“That’s it?” Bucky asks. “No bad blood, no bones to pick?”

Sam stands up so abruptly that the rickety chair he’s sitting in almost topples over backwards. “I’m staying at the Riad Nerja,” he says. “You come by and let me know how you want this whole thing to go before I leave tomorrow, all right?”

Something inside the AC unit in the hotel room is broken, and whenever it starts up, that dislodged piece produces a steady flap-flap-flap noise that makes Sam want to rip the thing off the wall. To make matters worse, it’s doing absolutely nothing to cool down the room, and Sam is sprawled out on top of the sheets in just his boxers. Even though he’s exhausted, brain jet-lagged to hell again, sleep won’t come, because every time he’s on the verge of drifting off to never-never land, that sound pulls him back to the sticky heat of the room.

When he finally does fall asleep, things take a turn for the worse, because the clattering of the AC morphs into the deafening drone of a four-engine Hercules plane.

“Fifteen seconds to drop!” someone shouts in Sam’s ear, and he shrugs them off, focuses on straightening his goggles.

Riley is still sitting on the bench fastening some snap, eleventh-fucking-hour style as per usual. And normally Sam wouldn’t think twice about it. He trusts Riley implicitly, but for some reason he wants to go over there and shake him, wants to pull him up by the straps and make sure they’re all tightened. But he can’t. His boots seem glued to the floor, and when he finally manages to lift a foot, all he can do is step in the other direction, away from Riley, back, and back, and back, until he’s falling backwards out of the plane through the pitch black night.

“Where you at, Ri?” he says into the darkness.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” the reply crackles over the comms. “I thought I saw something moving up in the hills. A vehicle maybe.”

Sam grows cold, and the sweat from the wing pack starts beading between his shoulder blades, making him shiver. “That wasn’t the plan, man,” he says, and now he can see Riley as an indistinct, blurry shape against the thin line of light on the horizon. He’s far away, too far, and the icy feeling in the pit of Sam’s stomach seems to sprout thorns all of a sudden, twisting and prickling at his insides.

“Just a small detour, going east around this ridge. Keep heading north, all right?”

And then all is quiet except for the whistling – Sam realizes he’s been listening to it for several seconds before he recognizes it for what it is.

“Riley!” he says sharply.

“Calm down, Sammy,” Riley says with one of those carefree laughs. “I’ll see you on the other side.”

The scream that claws its way up Sam’s throat is cut off by a hand clamped across his mouth, and Sam struggles briefly against the pressure before his brain kicks into gear. Then he bites down hard, is instantly rewarded with a choked-back yelp, and then the hand is gone.

“Jesus, Sam,” Bucky groans, clutching his arm against his chest.

“What the fuck are you doing here,” Sam asks, scrambling back on the sand. He can still hear the whistling of the grenade, the drone of the engine, but then he realizes that it’s blending seamlessly into the noise from the struggling AC unit, that the ground beneath him is made from crisp linen.

A dream. That dream. It’s been so long, months probably, since he last had it, and clearly he’s grown complacent in his confidence that it had been laid to rest at last.

“You said–” Bucky starts, but now that Sam’s awake, he wants Bucky gone, doesn’t want him or anyone else to see him like this. Anger and humiliation burn through his chest, up his neck and cheeks until it all threatens to spill out and betray him, so he surges forward to push at Bucky where he’s sitting on the edge of the bed. But Bucky barely shifts, doesn’t even make an attempt to defend himself.

“Get out,” Sam says. He shoves Bucky again, harder, and Bucky finally takes the hint and stumbles up from the bed. Sam is wide awake and trembling now, and he suddenly remembers Bucky’s questions at the cafe. It’s his fault, the dream, all of it, and Sam gets up after him, pushing and shoving and pounding at Bucky’s chest while hissing: “Get out, get out, get out.”

“Alright, alright, alright,” Bucky says, stepping backwards. 

Sam gives Bucky one last shove before whipping around and stepping up to the window to throw it open. The night air rushes at him where he leans on the sill, and he closes his eyes and fills his lungs with it, lets the smells of the city and the alley below ground him. The still-cooling sun-warmed asphalt, whafts of detergent from the laundromat on the corner, the overflowing trash cans by the hotel’s back entrance: they’re all familiar and safe smells, dispelling the lingering phantom scents of desert dust and gasoline.

“Bad dream?” Bucky asks.

Sam opens his eyes with a sigh and wipes quickly at his cheeks before turning around. “Why are you still here,” he says.

Bucky is hovering by the door, barely visible among the shadows in his dark clothes, but Sam can see the shrug when he says: “You said to come by.”

“That wasn’t an invitation to come creeping on me in the middle of the night.”

“It’s not even ten o’clock,” Bucky says.

Sam glances at the digital alarm clock on the bedside table. It spells 21:47 - he was probably asleep for less than half an hour in total.

“Goddamn jet lag,” he mutters. “Still, you’re pushing a hundred, Buck, I assume by now you’ve learned how to knock.”

“I did knock,” Bucky says defensively. “And then I heard you, you know…” He trails off, motioning vaguely at the bed.

“Yeah, okay,” Sam says, holding a hand up to show Bucky he doesn’t need to elaborate.

Since Bucky seems determined to stick around, Sam digs a t-shirt and sweats out of his bag even though it’s still bordering on uncomfortably hot in the room. He does what he should have done hours ago and unplugs the AC unit, leaving the window open instead; the desert nights are cool, and it’ll be bearable soon enough.

The hotel is cheap, and Sam’s room is no-frills: a bathroom, a bed, and not much else. The bed is a good size though, and when Sam sinks down on the mattress again, he leaves ample space on one side. 

“I won’t bite,” he says when Bucky hesitates.

“Really?” Bucky holds his hand out, showing an angry welt on his palm just below the thumb, where Sam sank his teeth in no more than a couple of minutes ago.

“Fine. I won’t bite as long as you’re not actively trying to choke me in my sleep,” Sam amends.

Bucky finally sits down, propped up against the headboard next to Sam.

“I get them too,” he says after a while. “Dreams. Almost every night.”

“Fuck,” Sam says. Given what Bucky’s life has been in the past seventy-odd years, Sam can’t even begin to imagine what kind of dreams. “Want to talk about it?” he offers.

“Christ, no,” Bucky says. “You?” he asks cautiously.

“Oh, I have,” Sam says. “Twice a week in the months after my final tour. With a therapist,” he adds when Bucky looks confused.

“You mean like…talking to a psychiatrist?” Bucky says. He sounds mildly disgusted.

“The field has evolved since the 1930’s.”

“I heard they stopped doing lobotomies," Bucky says, giving Sam a doubtful look.

“Oh yeah,” Sam says, frowning. “No, this is just, you know. Working through your shit, developing strategies to cope with the side effects.”

Bucky seems to consider that for a while. “By talking.”

“By talking.”

“And it works?” Bucky asks.

Sam doesn’t answer immediately. There are no quick fixes - he knows that - and no matter how good he gets at predicting, preventing, and processing, what he’s been through is still a part of him. Perhaps closer to the surface than he likes to believe.

“It’s not perfect,” he says. “But it’s a hell of a lot better than lobotomy.” 

For a second, he can see Riley’s face again, with that playful smile playing about his lips, an untamed look in his eyes as they meet Sam’s right before the drop.

“And no matter how much I wish what happened hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t want to wipe out that memory either.”

“What was your last mission?” Bucky asks.

“Afghanistan, two - no three years ago now. I lifted a target out of Bakhmala.”

“Bakhmala,” Bucky repeats. “When was this? Exactly.”

“July 2011,” Sam says. “Why?”

But Bucky just stares straight ahead, lost in thought.

“Hey,” Sam says, bumping his knee into Bucky’s, making Bucky stir alive again.

“What happened?” he asks. “In Bakhmala.”

And Sam tells him, because strange as it may seem, it doesn’t bother him, even this soon after the dream. It’s another thing entirely to be in control of the narrative, to repeat familiar phrases and recount the details of a story he’s told a hundred times over, in and outside of work. It’s only when he gets to the part where Riley falls that he feels his throat tighten, and he trails off, staring out the window.

“And, you know, technically, I’m over it,” Sam says.

“Technically?”

“I got out, I grieved, I got over it.”

“But…”

“But if I had the name of the man who shot Riley down, I honestly don’t know what I’d do,” Sam says. It’s a lie, it’s such a fucking lie because he knows exactly what he’d do.

“Did you complete the mission?” Bucky asks.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Got the target out. He’s rotting in prison.”

He had completed the mission – not because of the CO shouting in his ear to get to the target, but because it’s what they’d agreed, he and Riley. 

"If I go, I go." That’s what Sam had told Riley once. "And if I do then you gotta do what you gotta do, but what you don't do is some stupid shit like going back for me when it's already too late, all right? Promise me that."

"I'll promise if you do."

"Of course," Sam had said without hesitation. But in Sam's mind it had always been him going, never Riley.

“Khalid Khandil,” Bucky says quietly.

A sudden gust of cool air rushes in from the window, makes the hair on Sam’s arms stand on end.

“You know about this?” Sam says. “How come?”

He regrets asking as soon as the words are out of his mouth; he knows that the answer can’t be good.

“Bakhmala three years ago, Russian RPGs,” Bucky says, counting the facts off on two of his fingers. “Khalid Khandil.” He adds another finger, before spreading them all, palm facing up in the universal gesture signaling an inevitable truth, and Sam shivers in the breeze. “That was a Hydra mission,” Bucky finishes.

Despite the alarm bells that have been going off for the past minute, it’s as if someone’s upended a bucket of ice over Sam, and it’s followed by a swell of anger that burns right through that chill. The cold-hot sensation washes over him in waves, and he fists the sheet beside him in an attempt to anchor himself.

“What the fuck are you saying, Bucky,” he says quietly.

“That Bakhmala wasn’t a Taliban stronghold. It was a Hydra–”

“I heard you,” Sam cuts him off. “Was it you?”

Bucky stares at him. “No.”

“Because I swear to god, Bucky, if that was you,” Sam says, his voice trembling. He’s clutching the sheet so hard that the linen creaks in protest.

“It wasn’t me, Sam,” Bucky says. 

“How can you be sure?”

At that, Bucky’s face turns hurt and then hard in the space of a heartbeat, and he sits up straight to fix Sam with his gaze.

"Because I remember it all, Sam," he says. "I remember every damn mission even though I wish to God I didn't. And Bahkmala? I wasn’t there – I was in the goddamn freezer. You have my records, all the dates, you can check them yourself.”

The list that details the times when the Winter Soldier was brought out of cryo is currently locked in a safe in the Tower, but it’s true – every single mission is meticulously logged, and the answer to Sam’s question is a simple phone call away.

"Yeah, okay," Sam says. “Sorry, I just…I believe you, all right? I believe you.” 

Bucky nods once, sinking back on the pillows while Sam slowly unfurls his fingers, flexing them a couple of times to relax them.

“Do you know who it was?” he asks.

“It was Rumlow’s operation,” Bucky says.

The tension drains from Sam’s limbs, and his arms go watery and weak as he breathes out with what should be relief but feels an awful lot like disappointment.

“That’s…that’s good.”

“Good?”

“That fucker’s dead already, and I practically killed him, so yeah, it’s good,” Sam says, and now Bucky relaxes too, with a trembling sigh.

“Are you sure,” he says after a while.

“That he’s dead?” Sam says. “He was still in the Triskelion when that helicarrier crashed into it. Last time I saw him he was stuck on the forty-first floor when the whole thing collapsed, so yeah. Pretty sure no one can survive that.”

Bucky hums in agreement, and they sit in silence for a while.

“So,” Sam says eventually. “Where do we go from here?”

“Oh, yeah,” Bucky says, as if he’s just remembered something. He digs around in the inner pocket of his jacket and fishes out an ancient-looking mobile phone that he holds out to Sam.

“What’s this?” Sam asks, picking the phone up and turning it over in his hand. It’s an old Nokia, and his brain and thumbs alike are hit with an intense flashback of spending his entire time on the bus to high school playing Snake.

“I’ve got one too,” Bucky says. “My number’s in that one, yours is in mine.”

“A burner phone.”

Bucky shrugs. “Sure, whatever. The point is, you can reach me whenever and wherever.”

“It’s a start, I guess, but you still haven’t told me about this loose end of yours,” Sam says.

“It’s…information,” Bucky says. “About the Winter Soldier, that’s still in Hydra’s hands. And if I want any hope of ever living some kind of normal life, I need it back.”

“What kind of information?”

“Sam,” Bucky says, pleading. “Just. Please trust me on this one, okay? I can’t tell you. Not yet.”

Sam sighs. “I’ll sleep on it,” he says, and as if speaking the words casts some kind of spell on him, he’s suddenly deadly tired - so tired he can barely keep his eyes open. He scoots down on the bed, folds his arms behind his neck and makes himself comfortable.

When Sam next opens his eyes, it’s hours later. He’s shivering lightly, and his left arm is almost numb with cold. The temperature in the room has plummeted, and the only source of heat is Bucky, fast asleep on Sam’s right side, back turned against Sam. As carefully as he can in his sleep-addled state, Sam stumbles up to close the window, then grabs the blanket from the foot of the bed. Curling up with his back against Bucky’s feels better and more familiar than it should, and once Sam has settled, Bucky shuffles closer in his sleep to press his shoulder blades against Sam’s as if they’re out there in the field and not in a bed in Medina. The body remembers too, Sam thinks, feeling the warmth spread through his limbs as he starts drifting off to sleep again.

Chapter Text

Bucky texts Sam a week later - a simple, perfunctory message. Call when you can.

“What’s up?” Sam says when the call connects.

“Jack Rollins,” Bucky says.

“What?”

“Rumlow’s second-in-command. Jackson ‘Jack’ Rollins. He was in DC too. You know who I mean?”

“Hold on,” Sam says, wedging the phone in between his shoulder and cheek as he opens his laptop and taps his way into his secure work files. He scrolls through a folder, double-clicks an image file. “Oh, yeah,” he says darkly. “That guy.”

Sam knows his face, couldn’t forget it if he tried. Last time Sam saw him, he was aiming a rifle at the back of Steve’s head. But Rumlow had told him to put it down. Probably he’d wanted to finish the job himself, Sam thinks bitterly.

“What about him?” Sam says.

“He was running ops on the ground in Bahkmala. That RPG that took your wingman out? Chances are high he was the one holding the launcher.”

“Fuck,” Sam whispers. His head is swimming now. With dread and repulsion, and maybe just a little bit of hope.

“Sam…” Bucky says. “He’s still alive. Last seen in Copenhagen, where he’s spear-heading some Hydra-owned freighter company. Probably a front for something shadier though. If you want to go after him, I'll be in the area.”

After they hang up, Sam can’t bring himself to move from the table. He sits there with the phone in his hand, turning what Bucky told him over in his head until he sinks into an almost meditative state. When he emerges from it, the one thought that’s become crystallized into a clear, firm idea is this: someone like Rollins shouldn’t be out there, walking around as a free man. Capturing him wouldn’t be vengeance. It’d be justice. He unlocks his phone again, bringing up the list of recent calls. For a few seconds, he hesitates with his thumb over the call button, but when he finally taps the screen, it’s a number further down on the list.

“Hey, Steve,” Sam says when the call connects. “How do you feel about cracking a Hydra cell?”

Steve laughs. “ Why, have you got one in mind? ”

“I do.”

There’s a moment of hesitation before Steve answers. “Does this mean-”

“No, this isn’t an application to join the Avengers,” Sam cuts him off. “It’s a one-off thing: a lead that’s too good to pass up.”

“Alright,” Steve says, bemused. “Where are we going?”

“Copenhagen,” Sam says. Then he glances down at the floor where various parts of his Falcon gear are still spread out. “Might need a pit stop in New York though.”

“Alright, Icarus," Tony Stark says, tapping nimbly away at a tablet. "Let’s see what we’re working with.”

Sam is standing in Stark’s lab in the Tower, watching as a laser sweeps over the mangled remains of his wings, the red beam highlighting every scrape and dent in them. Sam keeps his hands behind his back, his right hand holding onto his left thumb, squeezing it to keep himself from doing something stupid like scooping the whole mess of metal up in his arms and making a run for it.

“I can do it myself,” Sam says. “I’d just…I could borrow some tools and spare parts, maybe use the lab for an hour or two.” He motions vaguely around him.

“Borrow some tools?” Stark says. "Spare parts? What, do you think I’m running some kind of DIY auto-repair shop here?”

“You’re a busy man,” Sam says diplomatically.

“And you’re particular about who gets to touch your stuff,” Tony replies. 

He taps another button on the tablet, and a 3D blueprint of the wings suddenly blooms into shape in the air above the workbench. Tony scratches at his beard and pulls a dissatisfied face, and then he starts pulling and pinching at the schematic, adjusting angles and joints.

“Hey, hey, what are you doing,” Sam says, shifting from one foot to another.

“Let the record show that I’m not actually touching anything,” Stark says. “Just…” he turns the blueprint around to survey it from another angle “...coming up with a few suggestions.”

Sam gives up trying to restrain himself and lifts his hands. “Can I…?”

“Be my guest,” Tony says, taking a step back with a flourish. 

Sam can’t quite tell if he’s being trusted or ridiculed, but he moves closer to the schematic and tentatively grabs at what should be thin air, turning the model over slowly.

It takes a minute to get a hang of the handling, but after some trial and error, Sam’s having fun. So much fun he’s all but forgotten his reluctance to come here in the first place.

“I always wanted them to look less clunky,” he muses, pinching and pulling a section of the right wing into shape. “More organic, you know?”

“Essentially you want to dress up as a bird,” Tony says. “That’s a compliment, by the way,” he adds when Sam turns around, eyebrows raised. “Can’t one-up nature, right?”

For a few minutes, Sam works while Stark watches in silence. He tries not to feel self-conscious about it, tries to shake the feeling that he’s being evaluated. But when he decides to go a little wild, reworking the foldable segments of the wings into something more feather-like and Tony hums in approval, he can’t help but feel good about it.

“Ideally I’d want them to be bigger,” Sam says, taking a step back to survey his progress. It’s not exactly an invitation for Tony to give him feedback - he’s just filling the silence. “And stronger. And lighter. But that’s never going to add up.”

“Sure it would,” Tony murmurs. “If you’re willing to keep the equation but scrap the current values. Do you mind if I…?” 

Sam shuffles aside a little, making room for Tony to join him. Soon enough, they’re deep in discussion about everything from flexibility versus stability to aerodynamics and possible material and color choices.

“The gray,” Tony says in a voice that’s gearing up to deliver a very strong suggestion.

“It’s practical,” Sam says defensively.

“It’s boring.”

“It’s stylish.”

“Okay, yes," Tony says, "but how do you feel about red?”

In Copenhagen, the operation swiftly turns disastrous in an almost spectacular fashion. Rollins isn’t there, but around fifteen others are, and even though Sam and Steve had everything planned out as they went in, it only takes minutes for it all to go to shit.

It’s the new suit, Sam thinks as he flings himself behind the bar of a restaurant. The place is empty, dinner plates and half-finished bottles of wine left behind by sensible civilians who probably heard trouble coming long before Sam came hurtling in wings-first through the window. 

The wings. They’re just too much fun: razor sharp, perfectly balanced and heeding his slightest command. They’re not much use to him now though, where he’s crouched low to avoid the shower of bullets from the Hydra men he’s been drawing away from the crowds to a place where he could get them alone.

Problem is, they’ve kind of got him alone, too.

The thrusters on the Stark-tech wingpack are truly impressive, and they’ve sent him so far ahead of Steve that the two were forced to split up when the goons started scattering. Now he’s got seven men with Kalashnikovs and god-knows-what else up their sleeves on his tail, and maybe, just maybe, he’s bitten off more than he can chew. 

The sudden silence that follows the peppering of gunfire lasts only a couple of seconds before it’s broken by the sound of glass shattering as something hits a bottle on the shelf behind Sam. The air fills with the smell of Sambuca, and then he spots it - a V40 mini-grenade, less than five feet away.

“Shit!” he curses, and he throws the wings up to shield himself just before the grenade blows, shattering glasses, bottles, and the mirrored wall, sending shards raining down on Sam’s makeshift cover. He sends a quick thank you Tony Stark’s way - he’s alive and mostly unharmed, but while the explosion leaves his ears ringing and his back aching from the impact, this is no time to fuck about.

He shakes his head, trying to focus his vision, then gathers himself into a crouch and unfolds the wings to whirl up into the air from behind the bar, guns out and blazing. With the advantage of the element of surprise, he manages to get two of the men before the others catch on and start returning fire. Quick as a flash, Sam drops to the floor again. 

When the next grenade comes flying, he’s ready. He wasn’t named number one catcher in his year for nothing, and he plucks the explosive one-handed as it whistles through the air, then lobs it blindly right back across the bar. Judging by the screams that follow the explosion, he’s hit something.

“Sam, what’s going on?” Steve says over the comms. It’s followed by a few dull thuds; clearly, Cap’s equally tied up on his end.

There’s at least one ruffian still in the game on the other side of the bar from Sam, because a fresh round of bullets starts pinging off the juice fridge, the chandelier, and finally the cash register, which opens with a cheerful ding, showering Sam with 100-Kroner bills. 

“Just cleaning house,” Sam grits out as he tucks his arms and legs in, bracing for any shots that might stray his way.

“I’m on my– Oof!” Steve’s grunt is followed by more thumps and a couple of gunshots. “I’m on my way!” he finishes, sounding decidedly winded.

“Stay where you are, Cap,” Sam says. “I’ve got this.” He rolls his neck, steeling himself.

“Sam, I–”

“I’ll be fine. Trust me.”

Maybe he will, and maybe he won’t. But it’s a moot point anyway; Steve’s too far away to get here in time, not to mention busy bundling up his own fair share of thugs. 

“I’ve got this,” Sam mutters, to himself this time. He grips his guns tighter, gearing up for the big one.

And then a shot echoes, sharp and precise, followed by the sound of a body hitting the floor. Another shot - another man down, and then there’s confused shouting and the ra-ta-ta of haphazard automatic gunfire. Sam feels himself go clammy all over – someone else is in here, and they’re–

His train of thought is interrupted by yet another single shot, and a second later, a Hydra henchman topples over in the narrow entrance to the space behind the bar, his cheek producing a sickening slap as it hits the tiled floor. He’s been shot right between the eyes, his dead stare turned on Sam.

“What the fuck,” Sam whispers. 

He scrambles up off the floor, guns at the ready, turning this way and that to try and target the mystery shooter.

“I know you’re out there!” he shouts, but he’s met with nothing but silence.

Tentatively, he lowers his weapons and looks around to assess the situation. The Hydra men are all dead. He can see the two he got with his Steyrs, another two taken out by the grenade, and… The remaining three, all with freshly acquired unibrows of the deadly kind. Whoever took them out is nowhere to be seen, and it sends a jolt of suspicion down Sam’s spine.

Fucking Barnes, he thinks.

Their hotel room is as Nordically compact, clean, and impersonal as they come, but at least it has a TV, and Sam’s busy watching blurry footage of himself on the news when his burner phone rings.

“You alone?” Bucky asks as soon as Sam picks it up.

Sam scoffs. “Would it kill you to be a little less creepy?” He looks over at Steve’s bed, sheets crisp and smooth: Cap’s still over at the embassy with Maria Hill, trying to magic away some paperwork. “Yeah, I’m alone. Why?”

“That stunt you pulled today was a dumb fucking move, you know. ”

In one fluid motion, Sam gets up off the bed. “What do you mean?” he asks, keeping his voice as neutral as he can. He walks a few steps to the window and Bucky snorts impatiently.

“Don’t act stupid, Wilson.”

“Yeah?” Sam says, glancing out into the darkness before drawing the curtains. “You’re the one trailing my ass all the way into a goddamn Hydra nest instead of working on your own top-secret research project, so who’s acting stupid, huh?”

Bucky lets out a slow sigh, and Sam wonders where he is, if it’s nearby. He curls his fingers into a fist, resisting the urge to part the curtains a fraction again to peek out.

“Look, when I told you about Rollins I didn’t think you’d turn it into a suicide mission.”

“I was doing fine,” Sam says defensively.

Bucky laughs, almost fondly. “Sure you were, darling.”

“I–” Sam starts, momentarily thrown off-balance by the pet name.

“What were you planning on doing?” Bucky interrupts him, suddenly serious. “If you’d found him.”

They had a plan. Sam had a plan. The plan was to capture Rollins, put him on trial. Be the bigger man.

“I was planning on catching him,” Sam says, telling himself as much as he’s telling Bucky. “Why, what did you think?”

“You tell me, Sam. In Marrakech it sounded like you wanted something different, and we left seven bodies on the floor today.”

Sam sighs and sinks down on the bed. “It never actually helps though, does it?” he says.

“Killing someone? I don’t know. I honestly don’t know anymore, Sam. Rollins probably deserves it a hundred times over.”

“Bucky…”

"Anyway, that’s beside the point. If you’re serious about going after him, we should partner up." 

Something inside Sam lurches expectantly. "Why?" he asks.

"Because if you follow that breadcrumb trail, you’ll end up getting shot at again.”

When Steve arrives a few minutes later, it’s to a dark room with Sam standing by the window, scanning the street below, the building opposite, the rooftops along the street.

“What’s wrong?” Steve asks.

Sam could ask himself the same question, because there’s no rational explanation for how right it felt to agree to Bucky’s suggestion. This retirement thing is going terribly, and Sam wants to think it’s everything to do with how good it felt to fly again, how at least this way he doesn’t have to split his attention between Bucky and Rollins, and nothing at all to do with the coiling snakes in his gut when he thinks about Bucky calling him partner, calling him darling.

Sam shakes his head and draws the curtains again before turning on the bedside light. “Just keeping an eye out.”

Chapter Text

“No killing if we can help it,” Bucky says when Sam meets him in Tampere.

Sam blinks. “Okay,” he says. “I mean, I’m all for that, but it’s kind of weird hearing it from Mr Headshot himself.”

“Copenhagen was a shitshow,” Bucky says bluntly. “That’s exactly the kind of situation we want to avoid. And trust me, no one hates Hydra more than I do, but…” 

He trails off, staring into the middle distance.

“Yeah, okay,” Sam says. He can tell Bucky’s been over this in the days that have passed since the showdown in Denmark, that it’s some kind of conscious decision he’s come to. “No killing if we can help it. Even if it’s Hydra.”

“Even if it’s Hydra. Now let's go flush out a rat."

The monthly rendezvous between Sam and Bucky is as good an excuse as any, but the real reason they’re in Tampere is because Bucky suggested they pay a visit to one of the Hydra men who got away in Copenhagen – a small-time hustler in the cocaine trade. They don’t find him, but they do find an address to a bookmaker’s office in Tallinn, and when the trail cools in an abandoned apartment in a small town north of Kaunas, it’s not like they’re out of options.

“Hydra had property all over,” Bucky explains, as he circles city after city on the overview map of Europe that folds out from inside the cover of their road atlas. “Anything from whole underground supervillain bases to tiny safehouses. These are the ones I can remember off the top of my head, so, you know. Take your pick.”

Working with Bucky is easier than Sam anticipated, even if true trust seems hard-earned for both of them. For one, they’re equally childish in bringing up past grievances to justify new ones, and they bicker as much as they banter, but it’s hard to ignore the fact that they make a pretty good team.

It goes without saying that Sam is their ticket to a rooftop entrance while Bucky can force a cellar door with next to no effort, but they complement one another in other ways too. Where Bucky is a skilled spy, Sam is the better strategist; Bucky is surprisingly good at technology, which comes in handy when he’s able to hack into ancient Hydra systems, but when it’s time to rewire a security system to take it out without tripping any alarms, Sam’s the man for the job; Sam is good at negotiation, and when that fails, Bucky is worryingly good at interrogation.

Sam spends less and less time at home, racks up more frequent flier miles than he ever thought possible, and for bigger operations where he needs the wings, he even wheedles Maria Hill into lending him the quinjet to save him the hassle of trying to get his stuff through customs.

Over the next few months, Sam and Bucky carry out twenty-something operations in their hunt for Rollins. Some are dead ends, others provide them with new leads, but almost all of them result in capturing Hydra agents. Whatever it is Bucky is looking for, he has a habit of turning cupboards and desk drawers inside out, which means they’re also securing varying amounts of incriminating evidence that Sam keeps leaving an increasingly exasperated Hill to deal with.

When she meets Sam in the Toulon harbor in southern France, she takes one look at the bundled-up men and the pile of packages of uncut cocaine on the floor of a freight container, and heaves a sigh.

“You are…” she starts, waving her hand at the unconscious bodies on the floor.

“A force of nature?” Sam supplies hopefully.

“A natural disaster,” Hill says firmly. “The pair of you,” she adds with a knowing look.

Sam blinks innocently. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Commander.”

As for the pair of them, even though Bucky and Sam’s relationship stays professional, it might just be because Sam tells himself over and over that anything else is totally and utterly impossible. And still they toe the line sometimes. 

It’s in Sam’s hands - that much becomes clear very quickly, because now that they spend days on end together, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Bucky looks. 

It happens anywhere and everywhere, and if Bucky thinks he’s being subtle about it, he couldn’t be more wrong. In the car when Sam’s driving, he looks; at Sam’s hand when he shifts gears, at his face when he thinks Sam’s focused on something else. Bucky looks when he’s the one driving too, eyes flitting across to Sam and lingering dangerously, long enough that they start drifting. 

When they’re on stakeout, Bucky watches Sam as much as he watches their target, and on more than one occasion he holds Sam’s gaze over dinner like it’s a substitute for his hand.

Sam tries halfheartedly to shut it down once or twice. Tells him take a picture, it'll last longer, tells him to watch the road, and when he catches Bucky checking him out as he goes over the safety routine on the wingpack, Sam makes sure to acknowledge it with a blank stare until Bucky tears his gaze away, ears reddening. 

But then there are times when Sam can't help but do the same. Like when Bucky changes out of his underarmor after a mission, and Sam finds himself indulging in watching the way Bucky’s back muscles move, remembers what his own chest felt like pressed against Bucky’s, and when Bucky meets his eyes in the mirror with a desperate kind of hope, Sam’s the one flushing hot, turning away, pretending like he wasn't looking.

And although Sam decided all the way back in Rioja that anything between him and Bucky is unthinkable, he spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about it. Whenever they brush against one another in a tight space, he thinks about it. Whenever Bucky nudges Sam's hip with his fingers, wordlessly asking him to step aside, he thinks about it. Whenever Bucky calls him dollface, sugar, sweetie, darling with that lopsided smile that keeps growing softer as the weeks go by, he thinks about it.

He thinks about the kiss, too. About the sharp angles of Bucky’s body close to his, and the bewildering contrast with the softness of his lips and tongue on Sam’s. I got the wrong idea. The words are as clear in Sam’s mind as if he heard them only yesterday. At one point he’s on the verge of asking Bucky about it. What, he almost says after five shots of ouzo in a cheap bar in Thessaloniki. What was the idea. 

When he wakes up the next morning, with a splitting headache and a tongue like dried leather, he promises himself to not get that drunk around Barnes again.

Sam keeps all his promises; he doesn’t kill anyone, doesn’t get drunk, doesn’t bring up the kiss. Doesn’t entertain his thoughts about making a move on Bucky. And if Bucky’s made similar promises, he keeps them too, keeps the heat in his gaze to those lingering looks and nothing else. 

They’re both doing so well, right up to the point where they don’t.

The abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Bucharest is meant to be just that – abandoned – and Bucky has been in a foul mood ever since Sam put his foot down and insisted they check it out.

“Not that one,” he’d said when Sam suggested they pass it on their way from Varna to Belgrade.

“Why not? It’s literally next door.”

Bucky had snorted. “How very American of you, Samuel.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“When you’re in Europe, you think every other European country is ‘literally next door.’”

“Okay,” Sam had said, crossing his arms. “First of all, ‘you’? You are an American, James Barnes–”

“Debatable at this point, honestly.”

“–and secondly, it is literally next door. It’s only a couple of hours from here, and it’s on the way.”

“There’s nothing there,” Bucky had said. “I’ve checked. Several times, in fact.”

“What? When?”

Bucky had shrugged, pulled a bothered face. “I don’t know. Last month? I like Bucharest, okay? And trust me, there’s nothing there.”

The fact that Bucky had been so obnoxious about it had put Sam on edge, had brought out an unparalleled urge to dig in usually reserved for arguments with Sarah.

“It’s the capital of Romania, Buck,” he’d replied mildly. “I’m sure there’s something there.”

And because Bucky had kept insisting there wasn’t, Sam kept insisting they check again.

Three and a half hours later, they step inside the deserted warehouse, still bickering about whether or not they’re wasting their time, and promptly get shot at.

Fuck, Sam thinks as the first shot rings out, and without thinking, he throws himself at Bucky to push him out of the way and behind a rusty container. The problem is, Bucky throws himself at Sam at the exact same moment, and Bucky is faster, heavier, stronger, and-

Fucking fuck , Sam thinks when the second shot sounds just as he collides with Bucky. He grapples with Bucky’s jacket and a moment later they’re rolling over, hitting the floor in a tangle of limbs.

“Stay there,” Bucky snarls at Sam, pushing him back down when he tries to get up. “Take cover.”

And Sam actually does - not because Bucky tells him so, but because of the sudden pain that courses through his shoulder, radiating down his arm and across his chest when he tries to move, and so he crawls in behind a stack of pallets in pure confusion, clutching at what he realizes is a bullet wound.

Bucky is not staying anywhere though; he’s on his feet in a heartbeat, and Sam watches as he steps calmly and confidently in the direction of the shooter. He deflects another shot with his left hand even as he gets his own gun out with his right, takes aim, and fires a single shot up into the shadows of the rafters. The shooter hits the ground with a dull thud at Bucky’s feet, and after a cursory glance at the body, Bucky steps over it and walks a few yards into the warehouse.

He stops, listens for a few seconds, then turns around and hurries back to Sam.

“Nothing here, huh?” Sam grunts.

“Not anymore,” Bucky says grimly. He sinks to his knees, scans Sam’s body and nods at his shoulder. “How bad is it?”

“Stings a bit,” Sam confesses. He lifts his hand from his shoulder experimentally, and a fresh trickle of blood seeps through the tear in the jacket. “Might need stitches.”

“Keep pressure on it,” Bucky orders, then helps Sam to his feet. “I know a place.”

“Safehouse?” Sam asks.

Bucky winces, pulls a pained face. “Not exactly.”

The apartment Bucky takes Sam to looks surprisingly lived in. It’s small – one room, a kitchenette – but from a quick glance around, Sam can tell it’s more than just a temporary hideout.

“You spend a lot of time here?” Sam prods.

“Some,” Bucky says. He opens the cupboard above the sink and starts rummaging around for something. “Take your jacket off. Shirt too.”

Sam doesn’t protest. Although the bleeding seems to have mostly stopped, it’s been replaced by a dull aching that he knows better than to ignore. He shrugs out of his jacket stiffly, then takes the undershirt off, biting the inside of his cheek to stop himself from wincing when he peels the cloth of the sleeve off the drying blood on his arm.

“Doesn’t feel too bad,” he says, lifting his arm to try and get a better look.

“Sit,” Bucky orders, kicking a stool out from under the rickety table.

Sam sits, and Bucky puts supplies down next to him: saline and clean rags, a suturing kit, scissors, a wound dressing, and tape. When Bucky squirts the solution on his arm, Sam flinches a little, but by the time Bucky gently swipes a cloth across the wound, he’s steeled himself enough to sit unmoving.

“It’s fine,” Bucky says a moment later. “The bullet grazed you. No needlework necessary, but there’s crap in the wound that needs to come out.”

As Bucky gets a pair of tweezers out and wipes them down with alcohol, Sam looks around the kitchen. There’s a plate and a set of cutlery stacked neatly in a drying rack by the sink, a coffee pot with murky-looking dregs in it, a yellowed cutout of The Kiss – a newspaper advert for the Klimt collection at the Belvedere Palace, folds and all – tacked to the wall. The longer he looks, the more obvious it becomes to Sam that this isn’t just a safehouse; Bucky lives here.

“All this time you had a permanent address, and you never invited me around for dinner,” Sam says.

“Yeah, well,” Bucky says while carefully dislodging some small piece of junk from Sam’s arm. He holds the tweezers up to the light, eyeing the tiny scrap critically. “I’m not in the habit of bringing a guy home on the first date.”

Sam’s heart beats hard then, once, twice, and probably Bucky can hear it, because he looks at Sam sharply.

“Just FYI I wouldn’t consider this a date,” Sam says, for no damn reason other than having some compulsive need to make light of any situation where he feels like he’s about to show his hand.

Bucky makes a noise, a frustrated kind of sigh, like he was about to say something but then changed his mind about it. “Yeah, me neither,” he says, a little deflated. “Keep still so I don’t stab you with the tweezers.”

And Sam stays still, but his heart keeps beating wildly in his chest, and when Bucky catches a fresh rivulet of blood with the cloth and then keeps trailing it way further down Sam’s arm than necessary, he can't keep quiet, feels that same compulsive need to break the tension.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying something, Barnes,” he says.

Bucky’s hand grows still for a second, and then it disappears. There’s the sharp sound of surgical tape being pulled from its roll and bitten off, and then Bucky’s hands return, holding the dressing to the wound and fastening it down. Another three tear-and-tape moves follow in quick succession as Bucky secures the square pad.

“You really don’t know better, huh,” Bucky murmurs. He says it loud enough for Sam to hear it clearly, but it’s still quiet, like a hushed confession.

“What?” Sam says.

Bucky doesn't answer, but instead he moves around to stand behind Sam, resting his hand on Sam’s shoulder. A couple of seconds pass in silence, and then Bucky slides his hand down until his fingers are brushing over Sam’s collarbone. There’s no doubt as to what the gesture means, and Sam suddenly feels tired, deadly tired of fighting it, of his stubborn head fighting his stupid heart. Before he can think too hard on it, he reaches over with his good arm to place his hand on top of Bucky’s and pull it down a fraction. It draws a sigh from Bucky; a trembling exhale as though he’s freezing.

“Sam,” he says, and digs his fingertips gently into the soft muscle of Sam’s chest. It makes Sam’s skin prickle into gooseflesh as he echoes Bucky by drawing a shivering breath

Sam lets his head slump aside, his cheek pressed against Bucky’s arm, reveling for a moment in the simple touch, in the relief that he’s finally letting it happen. And then Bucky’s hand retreats again, slowly, in a firm sweep up Sam’s chest and neck until strong fingers grip his jaw, his chin, tipping his head back with a single decisive push. For a brief second, Sam watches Bucky’s face upside down, a stray strand of hair slipping from behind his ear as he bends forward to kiss Sam, right on the lips. 

Sam closes his eyes without meaning to; an involuntary reflex, perhaps, to being kissed. And then there’s nothing but the feeling of Bucky’s mouth on his, both of them searching, fumbling to get it right. It’s like writing with the wrong hand, backward and a little rough, but when Bucky swipes his tongue across Sam’s bottom lip and then sucks it into his mouth, it really doesn’t matter.

“Wanna fool around?” Bucky asks quietly, a low hum across Sam's lips.

“Uh-huh,” Sam says, and before he can do something stupid like think for half a damn second about what he’s about to do and change his mind, he gets up out of the chair and into Bucky’s space, kissing him the right way around, walking them out of the kitchen.

Bucky’s bed is nothing but a mattress on the floor: a thin, lumpy, sorry-looking thing, but the sheets are clean and smell faintly of fabric softener when Bucky pulls Sam down on them. They struggle briefly, grabbing at one another and slapping hands away, kissing and mouthing at bared skin. Bucky fumbles for the front of Sam's jeans, and when he finds Sam already hard, he pushes Sam onto his back, knees his legs apart, and grinds down on him with a gasp.

“Fuck,” Bucky breathes. He slumps forward, knocking the air out of Sam’s lungs with the force of it.

“Man, you’re heavy,” Sam groans. But it's a good kind of heavy, the kind that crushes Bucky's dick against Sam's, so when Bucky makes to pull away, Sam grabs his ass and keeps him there until Bucky moves again, rubbing himself against Sam with irregular little thrusts while he noses at Sam’s neck, brushing his lips over Sam's collarbone. Then he pauses and touches Sam's bandaged shoulder, seemingly lost in thought until Sam shrugs him off.

“Why’d you do that, huh,” Bucky says, bracing his hand next to Sam’s head instead.

“What?”

“Why’d you have to go act like a damn hero.”

“What the hell are you talking about,” Sam says. He's aching to be touched, wants Bucky to touch him, might even want Bucky to fuck him, so he reaches around to grab at Bucky’s ass again, trying to make him move.

But Bucky just drops his head to Sam’s neck, inhales deep and then lets out a shaky breath.

"Putting yourself in the line of fire. Could have died," he mumbles, sending shivers down Sam’s spine. 

“Shut up,” Sam breathes, lifting his hips, trying to get that friction. “It’s barely a scratch. Come on, you said so yourself.”

“Yeah, well. Don’t do it again,” Bucky says, then puts his lips on Sam’s neck, sucking a bruise into the skin there. “Okay?”

“Okay, fine, okay,” Sam gasps, because right now he’ll agree to anything if it might make Bucky fucking move.

And Bucky does; he works his hand in between their bodies, tugging at buttons and pushing down on Sam’s jeans, on his boxers, and then Bucky’s hand is on Sam's dick, coaxing it free with surprisingly gentle fingers. Sam is already painfully hard from just feeling Bucky’s cock against his own through their clothes, maybe even from Bucky’s hands on him earlier when he was patching him up. Bucky’s no better off, leaking a sticky trail over Sam's arm when Sam tries to return the favor, yanking on Bucky's jeans until they're halfway down his thighs.

“Sam,” Bucky murmurs as he starts moving, a rough drag of skin on skin.

There’s no finesse to it, the way they rock together unevenly. Sam arches himself up against Bucky over and over, wants to feel the weight of him, wants Bucky’s hands on every inch of his skin, and Bucky obliges at first, trailing his fingers up Sam’s ribs and then down his hip, working them in between Sam and the mattress to press them into the smooth skin of Sam’s ass.

“God,” Bucky groans, digging his fingertips into that soft flesh for just a second before pulling his hand away again with a sharp hiss.

Bucky grabs the hem of his t-shirt, pulls it up and then shudders, and Sam can feel him coming, can feel his cock twitch against Sam’s as he spills in warm streaks over Sam's abs, and it’s enough that Sam holds his breath, tenses his legs and feels his balls tighten in anticipation. 

“Oh Jesus,” he manages, stuttering his hips up against Bucky’s, teetering on the edge for a couple seconds.

“Shit, sorry.” Bucky says. He mouths and nips at Sam’s neck between ragged breaths, then lifts his head to plant a kiss on Sam’s cheek. “‘S been too long. Sorry, fuck, let me make it up to you,” he mumbles, kissing Sam again, on the mouth, then back down to his neck, his shoulder. 

Bucky moves down on the mattress, and the cool air that fills the space between them makes it clear what a mess Bucky made all over Sam, and it does absolutely nothing to put Sam off. He props himself up on his elbows just in time to meet Bucky’s eyes before he takes Sam in hand and bows his head down.

“Fuck,” Sam gasps, twisting his fingers into the sheet, overwhelmed by the the warm wetness of Bucky’s mouth.

It’s been too long for him too, Sam thinks faintly. It’s a little rough, sloppy and unfamiliar, but it’s been months since someone had Sam's dick in their mouth, and god, this is going to be over so quickly. 

“Bucky,” he warns, but Bucky just hums and grips Sam’s hip tighter, swallows him all the way down, and Sam sucks in breath after breath without ever really breathing out until he comes in a sudden rush down Bucky’s throat with a silent shout. 

Bucky moans through it like it's getting him off too, doesn't pull away until Sam sinks back on the mattress, utterly spent, spots dancing before his eyes. He swallows thickly, tasting adrenaline, vaguely aware that Bucky has rolled off him and onto the floor.

“Where’s the bathroom?” Sam asks hoarsely.

“Out there,” Bucky says, motioning towards the hallway, still breathing hard. “The only other door.”

The light in the cramped bathroom paints everything a sickly shade of pale turquoise. It glints off Sam’s shoulders, his brow, even though it should be impossible to work up a sweat from something that didn’t even last five minutes. He cleans up in the sink, feeling strangely numb as he goes through the motions, his brain unable to enjoy the usual post-sex haze because it’s too busy preoccuping itself with questions like “what the fuck was that,” “what the hell were you thinking,” and variations thereof. 

Because yeah. What the fuck was that, Samuel? It must have been at least fifteen years since he last let his dick take the wheel, and then suddenly this shit happens with the one person on Earth that it’s absolutely imperative that he keep at arm’s length. The brief relief and elation Sam felt when the tension between them finally broke has been replaced with something else: a hint of panic, simmering just under Sam’s skin. 

Whatever, he thinks to himself while he dries off with the hand towel. It happened. Nothing to do about it now except maybe pretend like it didn’t.

Bucky must be of the same mind, because when Sam walks out of the bathroom, Bucky simply tosses a clean t-shirt at him and says: “Your phone’s been going off.”

When Sam digs it out of his jacket, he’s got notifications in the double digits: six missed calls, countless group chat messages, a bunch of texts from Steve… But what really grabs his attention is the news flash that pops up on the screen before he can pull anything else up.

BREAKING: Avengers involved in major confrontation in central Europe – residents evacuated – potential alien energy source causes power outage – live updates to follow.

“Shit,” Sam says under his breath, then louder: “Bucky, I think something big is going on.”

“I know. I’m watching it,” Bucky says, turning his own phone towards Sam, showing a grainy news feed on the screen. “Sokovia.”

Chapter Text

The next few hours are a blur. Sam gets on the first plane back home and spends his time flipping between messages from Steve and the CNN news feed, and even though Steve’s texting half in riddles, the picture gets clearer by the minute: the Avengers have taken down a major Hydra base and managed to secure Loki’s scepter.

Come to the tower asap. Steve writes once Sam has touched down on home soil again. Pizza and drinks tonight.

Judging by that short message, Sam had assumed it was going to be just the usual crew, a not-so-quiet but by all accounts private night in at the tower, but when he steps through the elevator doors on the 130th floor, he’s met by a wall of noise; it’s most definitely a party, and it’s in full swing.

Sam spots Natasha serving drinks at the bar, looking like a dream in a tight-fitting dress with a plunging neckline, so he makes his way over there, weaving his way through the crowd.

“Well, now I feel underdressed,” Sam says, nodding appreciatively at Natasha as she pours him a whiskey on the rocks. He’s in jeans and a casual, open button-up with a t-shirt underneath. “Steve said drinks and pizza, but…”

“The guest list ballooned a little,” Natasha says, and she holds his gaze for a couple of seconds in that easy way that only she can, smiling her secret smile. “But with a face like that, who’s looking at the clothes?” 

Sam ducks his head down and laughs, almost considers flirting back just for the thrill of it, but he’s heard rumors she’s otherwise occupied these days, and anyway, the impulsive three-minute tumble in the sheets with Bucky yesterday still lingers in his mind, and it's leaving him feeling strangely unbalanced, not to mention completely lacking game.

“Now he shows up,” someone says behind Sam, and he barely has the time to turn around before he’s being pulled into a bear hug by Steve.

Steve gets a drink too, and the two of them drift towards the stairs as they do their usual little dance, where Steve prods and teases, asks Sam when he’s going to put the wings to good use again, and as usual, Sam politely declines.

“I’m more than happy chasing cold leads on our missing person’s case,” he says, giving Steve a meaningful look.

“Speaking of…” Steve says, more quietly. He pulls Sam aside from the crowds, finding an empty stretch of wall for them. “How is he? It’s been a while since we spoke.”

How is Bucky? He’s heavier than he looks and one heck of a kisser, is the first thing that pops up in Sam’s head, and he takes a gulp of whisky to keep himself from flushing at the thought.

“It’s all good,” Sam shrugs, trying to keep his face neutral, because how the hell would he even begin to explain that not only have they been running semi-secret ops in the past few months, but that Bucky had Sam’s dick in his mouth less than twenty-four hours ago. “He keeps himself to himself, mostly.”

It’s technically not a lie, though Sam’s avoiding the full truth in more than one respect. But after their team-up in Copenhagen, Steve’s been busy frying bigger fish, and over time, chasing after Rollins has come to feel increasingly private. It’s Sam’s own thing – his and Bucky’s now – and the reason he’s been going to Maria Hill with the additional fallout is because Hill doesn’t fuck about when it comes to Hydra, and more importantly, she doesn’t gossip. Hill is pragmatic, and she trusts Sam; it’s no questions asked as long as he keeps it clean.

“Maybe he won’t have to anymore,” Steve says, snapping Sam back to the here and now. Steve’s got a sly smile playing about his lips that makes Sam frown, bemused.

“What do you mean?” Sam asks.

“You’ve seen the news, right? We’re back in the good books again.”

Sam has seen the news, and he realizes suddenly that this gathering is partly celebrating just that – for the first time in over a year, the Avengers are making the right kind of headlines, with even the Daily Bugle opting to use Steve and Tony’s real names instead of regurgitating the tried old Captain Spandex and Tin Man jokes.

“So you think it’s time?” Sam says, and a small, selfish part of him already mourns the treks across Europe, the hours spent on stakeout together with Bucky.

“If not now, then when? Ross still hates our guts and there are government officials who aren’t exactly thrilled that we brought alien tech back here, but honestly? The people love us right now. And here's the kicker: Sokovia is a solid alibi for Buck.”

Sam raises his eyebrows, encouraging Steve to go on.

“We found more than just the scepter,” Steve says. His smile drops then, and he grimaces briefly. “Strucker kept prisoners there, in actual dungeons, like some kind of comic book supervillain.”

“It’s Hydra,” Sam says plainly.

Steve nods, something faraway in his expression. “Yeah, it is. And I was thinking, this is the same kind of place as where they kept Bucky back in the war, the kind of place he might still have been kept if he hadn’t gotten away. And then it struck me. What if, for all intents and purposes, he hadn't."

Steve’s eyes glitter excitedly as Sam pieces two and two together; it really is the perfect alibi. While there’s little hope for uncomplicated redemption for a rogue Winter Soldier, there’s a heck of a lot more for war hero James Buchanan Barnes rescued from a Hydra prison by the Avengers.

“We play our cards right, we could get him home soon. Maybe as soon as this week,” Steve says. 

They don’t get a chance to speak more about it, because then Tony shows up and whisks Steve away on Avengers business. Steve raises his eyebrows as he makes to leave - a silent invitation for Sam to join them - but Sam shakes his head with a laugh.

He finds Rhodey instead, and they shoot the shit for a while, and then play a couple of games of pool. After that, Sam strolls around the place getting a little tipsy on scotch, trying not to think too much about Bucky. The tower looks different now that it’s all crowded, and Sam feels even less like he belongs here than usual. He gets interested looks from women, and a couple of guys too, but they’re mostly in passing: he’s not the main event here. Even though he’s got a bed waiting for him two floors down, Sam suddenly regrets not booking a hotel for the night.

Just as that thought strikes him, there’s a buzzing in his pocket – the pocket that holds the burner phone. He slips onto the balcony that loops around the building, seeks out a private spot, and pulls the text message up.

Tired of the party yet?

Sam grins at the phone, his heart flipping happily in his chest before he checks himself, reminds himself that he’s not pursuing this. He starts typing out a response, then pauses and frowns; he tries to remember if he even told Bucky he was coming here tonight. But then he supposes this party's all over the gossip sites already.

I’m tired period, Sam types, and it’s true. He’s still on European time mentally, which means half past three in the morning by his count. Sam’s frown deepens, and he taps away at the screen. What are you doing up?

Why shouldn’t I be up? It's not even 10, comes the reply, almost instantaneously.

Sam grows cold, shakes back his sleeve to stare at his watch. Then he looks around to make sure he’s still reasonably alone before he pulls up Bucky’s number and hits the call button.

“That was fast,” Bucky says, sounding amused.

Sam ignores that. “Where the hell are you,” he says in a low voice.

“Upper East Side. The Marriott.”

“Are you-” Sam squeezes his eyes shut, takes a deep breath before he goes on. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

“Relax, I’ve been back before,” Bucky says.

It strikes Sam then that this is excellent timing, that maybe–

"Did Steve talk to you?" he asks. "Like, just now?"

"What? No," Bucky says. "Why?"

“Nevermind,” Sam says. It's not for him to say; he knows Steve would want to tell Bucky himself. "What are you doing here?" he hisses instead.

“That’s not a conversation we should be having on the phone.”

“Yeah, well. I’m busy,” Sam says, but he’s already making his way towards the balcony door again.

“Thought you said you were tired.”

Sam scoffs, even as he pushes the door open and heads for the elevator. “You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

“Okay. I know where Rollins is. How’s that for better?”

By the time Sam arrives outside the hotel room, he’s a live wire, humming with anticipation. He doesn’t want to wait another second to get back on the road. But then Bucky opens the door, and Sam’s mind goes blank for a second. 

Bucky is unrecognizable. He’s clean shaven, in a tight-fitting shirt and dark jeans, and it looks like he’s done something with his hair, like maybe he put some kind of product in it. He looks great, and smells even better.

“Hey,” he says, stepping aside to let Sam inside.

“Hey,” Sam says stupidly, and when he passes Bucky, he can’t help but inhale that fresh-from-the-shower scent. Then his brain catches up, and he turns around. “So, where is he?” 

“Colombia,” Bucky says, reaching around the door to hang the do not disturb sign up before closing it.

Sam stares at him. “Colombia?” he says incredulously, his shoulders sinking. “Colombia as in the country, not Columbia as in the college just…” he motions vaguely north.

Bucky nods. “He’s turning coca leaves into cash to fund Hydra ops in a grand old hacienda a couple of hours out from Medellín.”

“That’s…”

“It’s not exactly next door, no,” Bucky fills in as he takes a step forward.

It takes a moment for Sam to recalibrate, to accept the fact that he’s not going to get his hands on Rollins tonight, or even tomorrow. He looks sharply at Bucky.

“Then why–” Sam starts, but the are you here dies on his lips.

Because he suddenly gets it: the clothes, the aftershave, the way Bucky’s done his hair. Oh no, Sam thinks as his treacherous heart stutters. Oh shit.

“I messed it up yesterday,” Bucky says as he takes another step towards Sam, “and I want a do-over.”

“Christ, you don’t fuck around, do you?” Sam says, but even though his brain is trying to stall, his body’s already leaning into it, making him sway lightly on his feet.

“I’ve been fucking around for a year, Sam,” Bucky says. “Wasting time ever since that goddamn vineyard in Spain. We both have, so don’t come here acting all surprised, alright?”

Bucky’s right, but Sam wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of admitting it out loud, not in a million years, not after fighting it for this long, and so he says nothing even as Bucky takes another step.

“Which way do you like it,” Bucky asks, and now his face is inches away from Sam’s, his eyes burning with intent.

Sam meets Bucky’s gaze as levelly as he can. “What do you mean,” he says, even though he can guess well enough.

“What I mean is,” Bucky says, reaching up to touch Sam’s jaw with his fingertips, “do you like to take it or give it when you fuck a man.”

“Depends,” Sam says, and it’s a miracle his voice is still this steady, because the rest of him is crumbling, slipping, falling faster by the second. By now he knows that this is happening. That he’s letting it happen, again.

Bucky smiles like he knows it too, foxlike, his teeth briefly gleaming white in the light from the window. “On what?”

“On the man,” Sam says, tipping his chin up defiantly. 

And Bucky must misunderstand the gesture, because the fingers that have been resting below Sam’s ear suddenly slip around Sam’s neck as Bucky pulls him in for a kiss, hot and demanding in a way that lets Sam know exactly what kind of man Bucky can be.

“Alright then, doll,” Bucky says when he breaks away, breath ghosting across Sam’s lips. He takes Sam’s hand, shoves it unceremoniously against the front of his jeans where Sam can feel his dick, hard and straining against the fly. “The man is me, so. Can I fuck you?” 

“Christ,” Sam says again, and it’s as if it finally dawns on him - that this is what he’s been fighting all along. He’s been telling himself he can’t be falling for the Winter Soldier, when the guy he should have been worrying about all along was James Bucky Barnes, the soldier with a swagger, the confident Casanova, the Howlie, the heartbreaker.

Bucky raises his eyebrows, reminding Sam that he’s been asked a question, but the blood in Sam’s brain appears to have been rerouted south, leaving him stupid and speechless. Instead of answering, he crushes his lips to Bucky’s, threads his fingers through Bucky’s hair and kisses his mouth open.

Bucky lets out a small noise, somewhere between a moan and a sigh of relief, and Sam can feel him relaxing under his touch as they deepen the kiss. And then Bucky’s hands are all over Sam, hiking his t-shirt up, trailing over his ribs, fingers flicking a nipple in passing before he pulls the garment over Sam’s head, forcing them to break apart. 

Bucky starts unbuttoning his own shirt with a quick grin. “Thank god,” he says, and Sam notices suddenly that Bucky’s hands are trembling a little.

“What?” Sam says, reaching down to help him with the buttons. He tugs the bottom one open and starts working his way up.

“That I’m getting another shot at this. Because yesterday? I was terrible,” Bucky says emphatically. 

Sam’s hands bump against Bucky’s as they meet halfway, and he nudges Bucky's apart, sliding his own in under the open shirt and over Bucky’s skin. With a sigh, Bucky drops his forehead to Sam’s, pressing closer like he’s been craving Sam’s touch. Sam tilts his head up, rubs his cheek against Bucky’s and then presses a fleeting kiss to his jaw.

“It was pretty terrible,” Sam agrees. He lets his hands wander, tracing the sharp angles of Bucky’s hips and around to where the taut muscles of his back dip towards the spine. With a decisive push, Sam works his fingers under the top of Bucky’s jeans and the elastic of his boxers until he can grab at his ass.

Bucky gasps and mouths at Sam’s temple. “I can be so good to you, Sam,” he says, shrugging his shirt off and tossing it aside. “Let me show you, all right?”

Sam lets Bucky strip him of his jeans, and his boxers, and then Bucky drops to the floor along with the clothes to put his mouth on Sam’s half-hard dick, just takes it all the way in without preamble, leaving Sam reeling, an embarrassingly loud noise ripped from him. Bucky hums in agreement, then pulls off for a moment.

“Tell me what you want,” he says, and his breath is a cool rush of air across wet skin before he swallows Sam down again, pulling another undignified groan from him. Bucky’s got his hand wrapped around the base of Sam’s dick, and while he puts his tongue to good use, he’s cautiously letting his fingers wander back, an unspoken question in the searching touch.

“I know you can blow a guy,” Sam manages. “What else are you good at?” He pulls back and out of Bucky’s mouth, because it’s already getting too much, too fast. 

“Oh, you know,” Bucky says, getting to his feet again. He drapes his arms over Sam’s shoulders. “Only everything.”

“You’ve got some nerve,” Sam says, but god, he wants to know if Bucky can put his money where his mouth is, so he grabs a hold of the belt loops of Bucky’s jeans and backs them up towards the bed.

From the moment Sam sinks down on the sheets, Bucky’s hands are on him, confidently touching, caressing, teasing. They kiss again and again, and the kisses already feel too familiar, too easy to get lost in. Then Bucky pulls away and lies down on his side to prop himself up on his elbow. 

“Tell me what you want,” he says again, the fingers of his free hand dancing teasingly across Sam's ribs before reaching down to give Sam's dick a few easy strokes, skilled and sure, until Sam arches into the touch. Then Bucky cups Sam’s balls briefly and lets his fingertips skim over Sam’s entrance so sweetly it makes Sam shiver all over. He fumbles for Bucky’s hip, tries to urge Bucky to get on top of him, but he won’t budge.

“Tell me,” Bucky insists, looking like a cat in a goddamn creamery. 

“You can fuck me,” Sam breathes.

“What’s that?” Bucky murmurs.

“You heard me,” Sam says, and Bucky’s lips part in a small intake of breath, his eyes lighting up with a wicked kind of spark.

And yeah, Bucky is good at this. Good at distracting Sam with kisses and caresses while he preps Sam with lube that smells faintly tropical, good at easing his fingers inside, good at finding that spot that makes Sam strain his hips up towards Bucky’s arm. When Bucky nudges at Sam’s hip, he rolls over on his side without hesitation, gasping into the pillow as Bucky pushes inside him from behind in one decisive stroke. He wraps his arm around Sam, takes him in hand and starts jerking him off, as slowly and firmly as he’s fucking him. 

“You good?” Bucky asks.

“Oh yeah,” Sam says faintly. “Yeah I’m good.”

Bucky feels so good, inside him, around him, and Sam’s head is swimming with it, this sensation of being enveloped and weighed down, of Bucky’s warm skin against his. Maybe, just maybe, Sam thinks through the haze of pleasure, he should be making more of an effort, so he pulls himself together and grinds back on Bucky.

“Feels amazing, babe,” he murmurs. “Just like that.”

“Yeah?” Bucky says, and there’s something ragged, almost desperate in his voice. 

“Yeah,” Sam breathes. He can feel himself getting close already, so he takes Bucky’s hand, guides it up until Bucky takes the hint and squeezes Sam's pec, teasing at the nipple until it hardens under his touch. 

"Been a while since someone fucked me like this," Sam says.

Bucky's steady rhythm falters for a moment, and he buries his face in the curve of Sam's neck, pressing a kiss at his shoulder. "Like what?" he mumbles against Sam's skin.

"Like they know what the fuck they're doing," Sam says, pushing his ass back again to meet Bucky's thrusts.

“Fuck,” Bucky gasps, pulling out suddenly, making Sam whine from the loss of him. Bucky lets go of Sam’s pec, scrambles for his hip instead, pulling Sam flush against him.

“What are you–” Sam starts.

“Shh,” Bucky says, a shaky whisper in Sam’s ear, and for a moment they lie there, just breathing hard, until Sam shifts a little, eager to get Bucky back inside him. 

Bucky draws a sharp breath and presses himself against Sam, fingers tightening around Sam’s hip. “Oh shit,” he says, and then he comes, spills hot streaks all across Sam's lower back with a wrecked, drawn-out groan. 

“What the fuck," Sam hisses, quickly gripping his own dick below the head and squeezing hard. He's furious that Bucky's gone and done the exact same thing as he did yesterday, and yet he's on the verge of coming himself from just feeling Bucky's dick half up against his ass, twitching at the small of his back. "Again?" he manages.

“Yeah I know, I know, but just-” Bucky grits out, before shifting back on the bed and sliding right into Sam again.

Sam’s mouth drops open in surprise; Bucky isn't done yet, even though he just came hard enough for Sam to feel it still trickling down his side. It’s the serum – it has to be.

"Did you not just come all over my ass?" he says, gasping as Bucky sinks all the way in.

"Uh-huh," Bucky says unsteadily. He pulls out a couple of inches with a hiss, then pushes slowly back into Sam, like he's powering through the overstimulation. "Give me, like, twenty seconds, okay?"

“That's just unfair,” Sam groans. 

“Doesn’t have to be,” Bucky says as he closes his fingers around Sam’s dick again. “We’ve got all night, you can come as many times as you want.”

It doesn’t take Sam long after that before he's trembling under Bucky’s hands, coming in a hot rush all over the sheets. Bucky keeps jerking him through it, seems to know exactly how to twist his grip to draw it out of Sam until he can’t do much besides lie there, breathless and limp in Bucky’s arms.

Bucky pulls out slowly, still hard, then tips Sam onto his back and kisses him softly, stealing breath after breath as Sam comes down from his high. 

They make out for a while there on the bed, letting their hands wander wherever it pleases them. Now it’s Sam’s turn to tease, to run his fingers over Bucky’s dick just to make him shiver with it. Bucky stays hot and hard for him, and Sam wonders if he should take pity on him and jerk him off, maybe even get in the shower and show him he’s not the only one who knows how to blow a guy. 

The more he thinks about it, the more Sam’s firming up again, and when Bucky notices, he smiles against Sam’s lips, takes Sam’s hand and guides it around his back to let Sam feel that he’s already slicked up; he must have been ready since before Sam even got to the hotel.

“Okay, wow,” Sam says with a low laugh.

Bucky grins back, but when Sam slides a finger inside of him, his mouth goes slack, his eyes fluttering shut. Sam lets another finger join the first, gently pushing and probing until Bucky suddenly shudders when Sam hits home.

“That’s it,” he breathes, rutting against Sam’s hip, peppering his face with kisses. “Right there, Sam, I want you right there.”

“Then what are we waiting for,” Sam says, pulling his fingers away, and Bucky rolls over, lets Sam drape himself across Bucky’s back.

Bucky is warm; the skin of his back burns against Sam’s chest as Sam sinks into him, slow and easy until they’re as close as they can be, legs slotted together, Sam’s face nestled against Bucky’s neck. Sam runs his hand down Bucky’s arm until their fingers meet and intertwine, and when Sam moves his hips, Bucky squeezes his hand tightly and lets out a shaky breath.

“Holy shit,” he whispers.

Sam hesitates, but Bucky grinds back against him and pushes Sam deeper with a groan, wordlessly letting Sam know he wants this.

They go slower this time, fucking like they’re planning on making it last for hours. Sam’s still pleasantly languid from coming earlier, and even though Bucky feels amazing around him it’s easy to stay in that sweet spot where his climax is hovering close by without ever tumbling over the edge.

At least until Bucky suddenly clenches Sam’s hand tight, gasps and grows still. Sam stops too when he feels Bucky’s orgasm as a faint, frantic throbbing at the base of his dick.

“Fuck,” Sam says shakily, and for a second he thinks he’s about to come too, his hips jerking forward involuntarily. “Shit, sorry,” he says as he shifts back, willing himself to start pulling out.

But Bucky wraps his fingers around Sam’s wrist and keeps him in place. “No, keep going, come on,” he grunts.

“You sure?” Sam asks, balanced on his arms that are starting to shake, not from exhaustion but from the way his dick is aching for friction.

“Yeah, yeah, keep going, I’m gonna come again,” Bucky says breathlessly.

Sam doesn’t need to be told twice, and as he slumps back down, a little laugh escapes him. He can’t help it, can’t help but feel almost hysterical about how he’s having just about the best sex of his life, and thinking about how he could have been having it for months now, and about how there’s no way it’s ever going to work out in the long run.

But that, he decides as Bucky moans under him and tells him he’s close, is a problem for future Sam, because right now he can feel his own orgasm building, all the way down in his thighs and rising up like a tide, inevitable and powerful and all-consuming. He comes with a stifled shout, shaking against Bucky with the force of it. 

Maybe he’s too far gone to think straight, because the whole damn bed seems to be shaking too, the lights in the room flickering briefly off and then on again as lightning flashes outside the window, followed by a loud rumble.

What the hell kind of poetic cinema, Sam thinks dazedly, and then the power cuts out.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Bucky groans, gently pushing Sam off and getting out of bed.

Sam can’t bring himself to care where he goes, or what’s going on, so he rolls over, closes his eyes and lets himself drift. He’s weightless and heavy all at once, soaring on a cocktail of adrenaline and dopamine and sex. The bed underneath him is soft and warm and so is he. He feels like he could die right here and die happy.

Then the building trembles again, and this time, the rumble is ominous enough that Sam blinks and shakes himself awake.

“Please tell me that’s just thunder,” he says weakly.

“Sam,” Bucky says, an urgency in his voice that Sam can’t help but hate a little.

He’s standing by the window, his naked frame lit by moonlight alone. Outside, the city has grown dark, and with a sigh, Sam throws his legs over the side of the bed, gets up and walks on wobbly legs to come to stand next to Bucky.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

Bucky doesn’t answer, just scans the dark shapes of the houses outside with wary eyes. With a click and a buzz, the dim lights in the room suddenly turn on again, and the streets outside flicker back to life as the emergency power grid kicks in. And then Bucky’s eyes go wide, a wild panic in them that makes Sam grow cold, and he turns his head to follow Bucky’s gaze.

Just in time to see the Avengers Tower being blown to bits.

Chapter Text

“George Washington is still open, but not for long.” 

That’s the first thing Natasha says when Sam picks up her call.

He’s been trying Steve for the past two minutes, but it’s gone straight to voicemail; now he breathes a sigh of relief.

“Jesus, Nat,” he says. “Thank god. Is everyone okay? Where are you?”

“We’re more or less intact, but the city’s going into lockdown any minute.” Natasha lowers her voice and adds: “Get Barnes out of there if you can, but don’t take any chances. He can make it on his own just fine.”

Sam goes stiff, glancing over at Bucky. He’s busy pulling his jeans back on, so Sam turns away and hisses: “You spying on me, Natasha?”

“We’re not having this discussion right now,” she says impatiently, still in a hushed voice. At least she’s keeping it to herself, Sam thinks, thankful for small mercies. “I’m happy you boys are having fun,” Natasha goes on, “but you need to move. Now.”

Twenty minutes later, they’re in Sam’s rental, pushing north on Broadway as fast as Sam dares in a bid to make it to the bridge in time. They meet police car after police car, long lines of fire trucks and ambulances, all racing towards the billowing clouds of smoke that Sam can still make out in the rear view mirror. Two hours ago, he’d been there in the tower, whooping Rhodey’s ass at the pool table. Two hours.

“You sure about this?” Bucky asks.

"I'm sure," Sam says, gripping the steering wheel a little tighter as they approach the bridge. “Should be clear still, or Nat would have said something.”

“No, I mean this,” Bucky says. “If you're needed elsewhere I can go after Rollins myself.”

Sam drums his fingers on the wheel. Natasha had been very clear - all he needs to do is to say the word, and if it hadn’t been for Bucky dropping the lead on Rollins in his lap, he’d already be on his way to her, to Steve. But they’ve got the whole crew on board: half-gods and Hulks, assassins and archers. And truth be told, his business with Rollins is personal.

“I’m not an Avenger,” he says, and once they’re across the bridge, he turns south and towards I-95.

The roads on this side of the Hudson are as good as dead, but the sounds of helicopters hovering above can be heard even over the sound of the car engine. In the buildings they pass, people are leaning out through the windows, looking towards Manhattan and the mayhem.

“You’ll wanna take a right up here,” Bucky says after a while, nodding at a road sign.

But Sam makes no move to switch lanes. “We're stopping by D.C. first,” he says. “Need to pick up my gear.”

Bucky shifts in his seat, suddenly restless.

“What's up?” Sam asks, but Bucky just shakes his head and turns to stare out the window.

They reach the capital in the early hours of the morning, and Sam switches off the radio as they turn onto his street, silencing the news anchor reporting on the Avengers Tower incident. Speculation has been especially rampant in the past couple of hours: everything from gas leaks to suicide bombers to Tony Stark blowing up his own lab. 

Sam knows better. The single text he's received from Steve speaks volumes. Scepter was a mistake, it says. Can't bring B home yet. It makes Sam's stomach drop, thinking about how close he'd been to casually telling Bucky he was as good as a free man. 

“Wanna crash here for a few hours?” Sam says as he kills the engine outside his house. “I know I could do with a shower and some sleep.” He’s still sore all over and probably reeks of sex.

Bucky is looking out the window and up at Sam’s door, and it takes until Sam nudges him in the side before he stirs and shakes his head. “We should keep moving,” he says. “Get your stuff, I’ll drive if you need sleep.”

Sam wakes up somewhere outside of Roanoke, Virginia, feeling like death warmed over. 

“I could just about murder a coffee right now,” he says.

Bucky, on the other hand, looks miles better than when they left D.C., all easy grins and bad jokes again. They pull over at a service station where Sam uses the restroom and splashes his face with cold water, then gets them drinks and snacks to last the day while Bucky tops up the gas.

When Sam steps out into the sunshine, Bucky has parked and is waiting by the car, leaning against the hood. As he spots Sam, he stands up a little straighter and waves, his face cautiously lighting up, and Sam can feel a goofy smile pulling at his own lips, a bright, bubbly feeling rising in his chest. It happens so naturally that it startles him, makes him compose his face as he approaches the car.

"Want me to drive again?" Bucky asks.

"I think it's your turn to get some beauty sleep, right?" Sam says.

"You calling me ugly, Wilson?" Bucky asks, but he pushes away from the car and tosses Sam the keys.

Sam catches them one-handed. "Nah," he says, letting his eyes linger on Bucky for a moment. "You're cute enough."

Bucky ducks his head down as he walks over to the passenger side, ears turning pink, and Sam can’t help but grin again.

It sure as hell wasn’t the plan – falling for Bucky Barnes. It still isn’t, Sam reminds himself as he gets in the driver's seat. But it’s a fleeting thought, more by habit than anything else. It’s fun, is what it is. Last night was a whole lot of fun, and no harm done.

Once he’s behind the wheel with the open road ahead and some caffeine in his bloodstream, Sam starts feeling the buzz of the mission, too; the familiar, thrilling sensation of his heart beating a little stronger, a burst of adrenaline coursing up his arms when he pictures himself and Bucky getting the drop on Rollins. And beneath it all, the simmering heat of Bucky’s presence next to him, the lingering glances, deliberate and hungry now; the faint smell of Bucky’s aftershave, reminding Sam of what the skin below his ear tasted like.

They make it to Louisiana before night falls again, and although Bucky says he can keep driving, Sam puts his foot down when they pass a sign for a motel that boasts cheap rates, continental breakfast, and HBO.

“I’m about fifteen hours overdue a shower,” Sam says as they get out of the car. He stretches his arms up and arches his back, making it crack ominously. “And I could do with spending a night horizontal and actually asleep for once.”

“Shame,” Bucky says, gaze flitting over the strip of exposed skin where Sam’s t-shirt is riding up.

Sam freezes mid-stretch. “Are you coming on to me in the parking lot of an EconoLodge?”

“What, you need it to be at least four stars or no dice?” Bucky says.

Sam just shakes his head as he starts walking towards the reception. “I’m not twenty-five anymore,” he calls over his shoulder.

And no, he isn’t, and despite the little thrills the thought of last night sends through him, he definitely doesn’t have the energy for anything beyond a hot shower and crashing headfirst into bed.

But when the lady at the front desk asks in a disinterested voice if he’d prefer two twin beds or a king size one, he still picks the latter.

Sam takes the first turn in the bathroom, but he’s barely stepped into the shower before there’s a knock on the door.

“What?” Sam calls, a little chill of worry going down his spine as he thinks about what kind of news would warrant an interruption.

Bucky doesn’t reply, just opens the door and steps inside. The bathroom is tiny and the shower cubicle is just a rounded glass door in the corner, leaving absolutely nothing to the imagination.

“What’s so important it couldn’t wait, huh,” Sam says, turning towards the wall, letting the hot water splash over his chest.

Bucky makes an amused noise, and when Sam glances over his shoulder, Bucky is putting toothpaste on a brush. His eyes are on Sam though, and he’s making no effort to hide that he’s enjoying the view.

“After last night I kinda figured we were past being modest,” he says.

And Sam really shouldn’t be letting that particular memory get to his dick right now, but once Bucky’s said it, it’s in his head again.

“When you told me to go first I assume you meant I go first,” Sam says, trying to ignore the hum of interest in his own chest, and further down too. “Not that I go first and then you immediately follow me into the bathroom.”

By now Bucky’s got a mouth full of toothpaste, so he just shrugs, then goes back to staring at Sam’s ass. This fucking guy, Sam thinks, then turns around to face the sink to let Bucky get a good look at everything else, including his dick, which is filling out nicely from this whole situation. On impulse, he grabs it, slides his hand slowly up and down the shaft a couple of times.

Bucky grows still, toothbrush in hand, then mumbles something inaudible around it.

“If you’re just gonna stand there I’ll have to start charging by the minute,” Sam says.

Sam doesn’t have to tell him twice; seconds later, Bucky is out of his clothes and squeezing in with Sam, crowding him up against the tiled wall with spearmint kisses. He reaches down for Sam and starts jerking him off with slow, confident moves. 

“You got anything?” Bucky asks, nipping at Sam’s throat with his teeth. “I left everything back at the Mariott like a fucking idiot.”

“There’s shower oil in that bag on the sink,” Sam says, against his own better judgment.

Bucky lets out a downright dirty noise, then comes back up to claim Sam’s mouth, eager in a way that makes Sam smile into it. Sam traces the lines of Bucky’s muscles, from the defined chest down to the vee at his hip and then wraps his hand carefully around Bucky’s dick.

“You know, I’m not sure I’ve got a whole lot more than this in me, though,” Sam mumbles against Bucky’s mouth as he gives him a gentle squeeze. “You wore me out pretty well yesterday.”

“I’m good with this,” Bucky says, a little breathless. “Could still use that oil though.”

Sam manages to turn around in the tight space and pry open the door to the shower cabin. As he reaches over to pick up the shower oil, Bucky lets out an approving hum, taking the opportunity to run his hands over Sam’s ass before playfully pressing his dick against the small of Sam’s back.

“Bucky,” Sam says, and he means it to come out a little disapproving, but his voice betrays him, making it half a moan.

“I know,” Bucky says. He leans over to snatch the bottle out of Sam’s hands, then drags his teeth down Sam’s neck and shoulder, stopping at the half-healed bullet wound to press a careful kiss to the scar. “Just messing around.”

Sam’s definitely not going to have Bucky fuck him in a hotel shower with nothing but oil for slick. He’s totally not. Messing around is good, but he’s too tired for anything else, too-

There’s a soft click as Bucky opens the bottle, and a moment later, Sam feels a hot pressure against the small of his back as Bucky grinds against him with a helpless little noise, pushing his hardon in an easy slide over his skin that sends sparks all down Sam’s thighs. 

“Oh god,” Sam groans, reaching behind him for Bucky’s dick. “Just get in me.”

They fall into bed afterwards, damp and wrung-out, and the last thing that Sam sees before his eyes drop closed is the wet, tangled mess that is Bucky’s hair on the pillow next to him. That’s going to look like shit tomorrow, Sam thinks, then sinks right into oblivion.

It does look like shit, Sam observes with a smile when he wakes up. 

It’s a good ten hours later and Bucky is still fast asleep. It’s as if he hasn’t moved at all, and the slow rise and fall of his chest is the only sign that he’s still in the realm of the living. 

Sam considers kicking him a little to wake him up – then he considers kissing him. In the end, he leaves Bucky be and reaches for his phone.

“Fuck me,” he mutters after about three seconds of scrolling. “Jesus fucking… what.”

The Avengers have been busy in South Africa. The laying waste to a whole city and then some kind of busy. He texts Natasha, who lets him know everyone’s alive and breathing and on their way to a safehouse to regroup.

This is far from over, she writes. We can swing by D.C. when we move out if you want.

I’m not there, Sam replies.

Hope you know what you’re doing, Natasha writes, as if his short message was more than enough for her to guess exactly what it is Sam’s doing, and with whom.

Always.

Sam just hopes it’s true.

They call it Ultron, Steve lets him know. His messages are less perfunctory and more doom-and-gloom than Natasha’s. Another one of Tony Stark's inventions turned against him; another peace-keeping effort gone sideways.

Meanwhile, the reactions – public and official ones – to the events in Johannesburg are trickling in at a steady rate, and by the time Bucky stirs next to Sam, Sam is halfway through reading a thinkpiece in the New York Times web edition that’s proposing “swift and harsh restrictions on the movements of Avengers and adjacent accomplices”.

Sam sighs, clicks the phone off and puts it on the nightstand. They should get going. Could be that they should be turning the car around, even. But he knows he won’t, knows that he’d never forgive himself if he let Rollins slip after all this.

“Mornin’,” Bucky says sleepily, draping his arm across Sam’s chest. “Pains me to admit it, but getting a hotel was a great idea, actually.” 

Well. He can pretend to think it over for a minute, Sam thinks as he turns to face Bucky and catches his lips in a warm, drowsy kiss. Bucky pulls Sam closer, the gears in his arm whirring softly with the motion.

“If you pinch my chest hair between those plates, I swear to god,” Sam mumbles, shifting onto his side, his hand finding Bucky’s hip, and thigh, and plenty more.

It takes them another two days before they’re across the Panama Canal, and while they leave a trail of unmade beds and condom wrappers in hotel trash cans, the threat of Ultron grows. An infinity stone in the hands of an intangible presence; Ultron isn’t so much a robot as it is a virus, and there’s no telling where it’ll hit next.

Sam tries not to let it get to him, deliberately doesn’t look at his phone before he goes to sleep, and instead loses himself in the frankly spectacular sex he’s having with Bucky. It’s hard not to, when each time feels like that rising tide, inevitable and all-enveloping, the currents pulling him under again and again. But once they’re washed up and sober again, reality quickly catches up with him.

It all comes to a head in the early hours of the morning in Medellín. 

Sam wakes up with a soft gasp just minutes before the alarm is set to go off, a brief pang of panic that he’s overslept shooting through him, shaking him wide awake. But it’s still dark in the room when he opens his eyes, and the only thing he can make out is the dim, red numbers on the clock radio.

And then Bucky’s there, heavy and warm and climbing on top of him, pressing insistent kisses to Sam’s face until Sam kisses him back. This wasn’t the plan at all, Sam thinks as he arches into Bucky’s touch. They’ve got things to do, places to be, but when Bucky grabs Sam’s hips to pull him closer, Sam puts his hands on Bucky’s, making him push his fingers into the muscle until it’s almost painful, until he’s sure it’ll leave a mark that won’t fade for days.

“Steve had a plan,” Sam says afterwards, breaking the long silence after his final, wordless cry, muffled by the pillow.

By now, the gray dawn has started leaking in through the curtains, their breathing has slowed along with their heartbeats, and they’re still not moving. Sam’s got his knee wedged between Bucky’s thighs, and his arm sticks uncomfortably to Bucky’s chest. In a minute, various body parts are bound to start itching, and they need to get the stink of sex off before they suit up, but for some reason, they’re not moving.

“What kind of plan,” Bucky murmurs. His fingers had been absently drawing circles around the scar on Sam’s shoulder, but now his hand grows still.

“He had it all thought out,” Sam says. “He came up with this story about how you’d been held by Hydra in Sokovia, how he’d gotten you out of there along with the scepter. For a hot second after they came back, the Avengers were heroes again, and he figured–”

“–people would have seen Sergeant Barnes and not the Winter Soldier,” Bucky finishes.

“Yeah.”

A low laugh rumbles in Bucky’s chest, making Sam’s arm jump a little. It’s a tired laugh, almost bitter.

“It’s still a good plan,” Sam says, because even though it seems less and less likely it’ll ever work, he wants to keep a spark of hope alive, wants to pass it on to Bucky as well, and maybe together they can nurse that flame for a few more days, a couple of weeks, until everything has settled down again.

“Sure,” Bucky says evenly. “It’s a great plan.”

He gently shakes Sam off and gets up, heading for the bathroom without another word. For some reason, it feels like a rejection, like a veiled farewell to something Sam stupidly allowed himself to get attached to.

He can’t let that get in his head though. Not today, not with Rollins mere miles away, so while Bucky cleans up, Sam goes over his gear one last time. Realistically, nothing could have happened since last night, but he still checks every strap, every strut, every joint. He removes the clips from his guns, makes sure they’re fully loaded, then slots them back into place. Every move feels familiar and soothing, and by the time he’s done, he’s got nothing on his mind but the mission.

The last thing he does is put his phone away safely, but just as he’s about to turn it off, a message comes through from Steve that makes him grow cold.

They’ve got Nat. Going back to Sokovia to finish this. 

He could have been there. Should have been there, maybe could have made a difference, could have-

“What’s wrong?” Bucky asks.

Sam hadn’t even noticed him come out of the bathroom, but when he turns around, Bucky’s standing there in his boxers, hair damp from the shower. Sam holds his phone out to him, and Bucky sucks in a sharp breath.

“Do you want to call it off?” Bucky asks.

He’s talking about the move on Rollins, Sam knows. 

But he shakes his head; it’s too late for that. Sokovia is on the other side of the world, and the only thing he can do now is follow Steve’s lead in another way, and finish this.

Chapter Text

"Five thirty-two," Bucky reports, squinting down the sight of his rifle at the guard patrolling the lavish house in the valley below them. "Five seconds slower than last round."

"Four and a half minutes is definitely our time window," Sam says, shuffling forward on his elbows, as impatient as he is uncomfortable. The sun is well up now, starting to bear down on them in their stakeout spot above the hacienda where Rollins runs his business, and he feels the weight of his wingpack, the sweat gathering at the small of his back.

"Let's give him another round," Bucky says. "Just to make sure."

"We've been here almost an hour already. The longer we wait the more likely it is that something happens that makes him break the pattern."

Bucky grunts in reluctant agreement. "All right, let's move in,” he says, slinging the rifle over his shoulder again, snapping it into place.

By now, they’ve done this enough times that they don’t have to do much more than exchange glances and brief hand signals as they advance down the hillside. The undergrowth between the trees provides them with cover until they’re almost at the building – then it’s only the small matter of the thirty or so yards in the open, over a twelve-foot barbed wire fencing and then past well-kept flowerbeds and a swimming pool until they’ll be at the back door they’ve scouted out. 

It’s by no means impossible, but it’s risky. They may have the patrolling guard in check, and the single security camera on the roof is angled towards the main gate, but if anyone glances out a window they’re toast, and so they need to move quickly, quietly and precisely when the timing is right.

Sam raises his hand as they get closer to the edge of the foliage, and Bucky nods, sinking down on the ground. Sam squats next to Bucky, who holds two fingers up: two minutes until the guard passes again. Then they’ll wait another thirty seconds before making their way to the door as fast as possible. 

As they wait, adrenaline starts sparking up Sam’s arms and legs, familiar and thrilling all at once. It doesn't matter how many times he’s been in this same situation, waiting to move in on a target, or for the all-clear for a drop – it’s always like this. He closes his eyes and goes over their play again, sways a little from side to side as he visualizes the path they’re going to take, then shifts minutely on his feet, perched and ready to take to the air.

“You good?” Bucky murmurs softly.

Sam nods once. The guard passes, right on time, and Bucky glances at his watch. Twenty-five seconds pass in absolute silence, they exchange a nod, and Sam kicks away from the ground and snaps his wings out at the same time as Bucky takes off running.

Sam hovers above Bucky, as close as he dares, and when they approach the fence, Bucky jumps. Sam catches him by the armpits and gives him the extra boost he needs to safely clear the razor sharp barbs before diving down on the other side. Bucky rolls out of his grip, nimble as a cat, and sets off running the last few yards while Sam glides silently by his side until they reach the small side door. 

“Smooth,” Bucky says with a grin when Sam lands. “Practice makes perfect,” he adds. 

Over the months working together they’ve practiced this particular move a few times, to let Sam get familiar with Bucky’s weight, and to allow Bucky to work through the lingering fear of falling that makes him tense up even at a relatively low altitude.

Sam gives Bucky a quick smile back before nodding at the lock. “Work your magic,” he says. 

He moves closer and folds the wings back halfway to shield them as Bucky gets his tools out. Under normal circumstances, Bucky would simply rip the door open, but since they’re doing this quietly, his lock-picking skills are being put to the test.

The lock clicks soon enough, and Sam folds the wings away before following Bucky into an untidy storage room.

“All right, that’s step one,” Sam says, lifting his goggles and allowing himself to relax a little. 

“No cameras,” Bucky says, scanning the corners of the ceiling.

“Yeah I’ve got a feeling it’s not in their interest to document the shit that goes on in here,” Sam says. “Let’s move.”

While Sam loosens his Steyrs in their holsters, Bucky gets one of his smaller guns out, fastens a silencer to the muzzle, and then takes the lead. It’s an unspoken agreement now, but a detail they’ve argued over in the past. In the end, Sam had to admit Bucky’s point: Sam is best equipped to shield them from behind, and Bucky can take a bullet in most places without bleeding out.

They make their way to the upper levels relying on Bucky’s enhanced hearing to remain unseen. It’s still early, and the hallways are mostly empty. Moving soundlessly across the carpeted floors, they avoid the bustling kitchens where enticing smells of eggs and bacon come drifting out, and duck into an empty room on the ground floor to hide from an unsuspecting maid, before they find what they’ve been looking for: the back stairs. They move quickly, guns out, but all is quiet and deserted. At the top of the stairs, Bucky gets a tiny mirror out to help them peer around the corner down a long corridor. It’s empty, save for an armed guard, posted at a pair of double doors at the very far end. 

“That’ll be the office,” Sam whispers. “Need to get rid of that guy though.”

He hesitates. If they move into the hallway, no super speed or jetpack in the world will get them to the other end of it before the guard raises all hell.

“If we–,” he starts, but he’s interrupted by Bucky whistling softly: a birdlike, cheerful, chirping sound.

Sam looks sharply at Bucky, but Bucky just shakes his head, his eyebrows flying up in a ‘trust me, I know what I’m doing’, then whistles again. In the mirror, they can see the guard turning his head this way and that, and then he takes a couple of steps down the hall.

After a third whistle, the guard starts moving with determination, and Bucky pockets the mirror and signals to Sam to wait. The steps that approach aren’t cautious, exactly – more curious – and once they’re close enough, Bucky moves like lightning, whipping around the corner and knocking the guard out with one measured blow to the temple. Bucky catches him as he falls and lowers him silently to the ground.

“Go,” he says to Sam.

Sam doesn’t stop to find out what Bucky does with the guard and instead sets off jogging on light feet down the corridor to the massive double doors. 

He hesitates there for a moment, with his left hand on the handle, his right gripping his gun tight. Within seconds he could be face to face with Rollins. One of Hydra’s worst, a man responsible for what must be thousands of deaths and the suffering of millions; the man who was a trigger pull away from putting a bullet in Steve’s neck. The man who killed Riley. He tries to let that steel him, to let it harden his resolve to bring that man to justice.

He turns the handle.

The office is huge and lavish, and the morning sun is streaming in through the windows, glinting off the gilded frames of the paintings on the wall, off the mahogany desk. Rollins is sitting at that desk, angled away from the door, absorbed in something on his laptop screen, and he doesn’t even look Sam’s way when Sam steps into the room.

“How many times do I have to tell you, Rojas,” Rollins says in a bored drawl. “You wanna bother me, you gotta knock first.”

Sam could kill him right now, could put a bullet in the back of Rollins’ head and be done with it. He moves closer, stepping silently across the polished floor, then stops at a distance where he couldn’t miss the shot if he tried.

“Hands where I can see them,” he says.

Rollins jumps a little in his chair, and then turns around, and the initial flash of annoyance in his eyes immediately gives way to something else – an excited kind of fear, maybe – before he composes himself.

“Well, shit,” Rollins says, leering up at Sam. “If it isn’t the Falcon.”

“Remember me, do you?” Sam says, even though he knows he shouldn’t be indulging this asshole.

“How could I forget? And now you’ve got me all cornered,” he says, wide-eyed, waving his hands in an exaggerated mockery of fright. Then he folds his hands in his lap calmly. “Well, what do you want, Wilson? It is Wilson, isn’t it?”

“On the ground, hands on your head,” Sam says, adjusting the grip on his gun. 

Rollins tilts his head, looks at Sam with a frown. “Now why would I do that?” he says. “It’s not as if you’re about to kill me. No, that’s not how the Avengers do things, is it? You guys murder by the thousands and still get all high and mighty about people like me.”

Sam’s instinct is to squeeze the gun even tighter in his palm, to increase the pressure on the trigger. So instead, he forces himself to relax his grip, letting his finger go limp.

“I’m not an Avenger,” he says. 

Behind him, Sam can hear Bucky coming in through the door; he’d know those steady, quiet steps anywhere. As Bucky advances into the room, Rollins’ grin grows wider, and he starts chuckling: a quiet, hysterical kind of laughter.

“Oh, he’s going to love this,” he says.

Sam frowns. “Who?” he says.

Rollins ignores that. “The birdman and the motherfucking asset,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “If that isn’t just the goddamn jackpot. Boss is going to be over the moon. He won’t even be mad about losing this place. He’s watching right now, you know.” 

Boss? Sam thinks wildly. If Rollins isn’t running this, then–

“Fuck,” Bucky says under his breath, and Sam can hear him move around before firing a single shot, shattering the laptop screen next to Rollins – there must have been a video call on it, and Sam hadn’t even noticed.

“Who,” Sam repeats, an edge of impatience creeping into his voice.

“Always check the body,” Rollins says, still grinning. “Always.” 

“Rumlow.” The name tumbles out of Sam’s mouth without warning, and even though it can’t be – it can’t, it can’t – Sam can see the glint in Rollins’ eyes, and he knows it’s true.

“Sam,” Bucky says warningly, but his voice is distant, little more than a whisper to Sam’s ears.

Instead there’s a muffled roar in his head, like the sound of a stormy sea, or a four-engine Hercules, and then the roar thins out and becomes sharper, turning into a high-pitched whistling, a ringing in Sam’s ears. 

No. He blinks, refocuses, pulls himself together and back to the here and now. Because when it all comes down to it, what Rollins said is true: he’s not about to kill an unarmed man at point blank range. That’s not what Avengers do – it’s what Hydra does.

“Cuff him,” he says to Bucky. By now, whoever was on the other end of that video call must have raised the alarm, and they need to move.

“You his handler now?” Rollins asks Sam. “He’s a fun little pet, isn’t he.”

Sam looks over at Bucky, who’s making no move to bring the handcuffs out, but is now aiming his gun straight at Rollins. “The book,” Bucky says in a low voice. “Tell me where it is.”

“Oh, so that’s what you’re after,” Rollins says.

Sam can’t help it – he frowns briefly in confusion, and it sparks something in Rollins, who looks almost triumphant as he turns to Bucky.

"He doesn't know?" Rollins says, gleefully. "You didn't tell him? Wait, whose side are you on, soldier? Are you ready to come home? It’s about time, don’t you think?"

"I think it's about time you shut the fuck up and come with us now," Sam says, all while frantically racking his brain for what Bucky could possibly mean by the book.

But Rollins keeps looking right at Bucky, and then says something in what sounds like Russian. Sam doesn't understand it, but Bucky goes stiff.

"No," he says, his voice barely a whisper.

Rollins utters another word in that vaguely familiar language, and then another and–

The sound of the shot is muffled by the silencer, but it takes Sam's breath away all the same, the way the light in Rollins' eyes winks out in the split second before he slumps to the side in the chair, blood and brains leaving a smeared trail down the leather.

“What the fuck, Bucky,” Sam says faintly.

Bucky stares at the body in the chair, and Sam can see his jaw clenching and unclenching, his eyes watering. Then he blinks, shoves his gun in its holster and steps past Rollins’ limp form to the desk, where he starts pulling drawers out, rifling through them. 

“Bucky, what the fuck?” Sam says, louder.

But Bucky doesn’t answer, and just as Sam opens his mouth to speak again, the shrill sound of an alarm starts blaring through the building.

“Fuck,” Sam mutters. He can hear the faint sound of heavy feet in the hallway outside. They’ll have to deal with this somewhere else. “Let’s go,” he says, stepping over to Bucky to pull at his arm. “Window exit.”

“Wait,” Bucky says, pulling another drawer open.

There’s a loud pounding on the door, as if someone’s trying to shoulder their way in through it.

“We’ve got no time,” Sam says, and without waiting for a response from Bucky, he snaps the wings out, grabs Bucky by the armpits and squeezes the thruster controls as hard as he can, sending them flying forward. “Window exit!” he yells in Bucky’s ear.

Bucky swears, but yanks the gun up again, firing at the window mere inches before they crash into it. Someone’s shooting at them from behind too, and Sam can’t tell what’s what anymore, is only vaguely aware that the cracked window and a storm of bullets are showering them in a deadly rain of glass and gunfire as they burst out into the open air.

They’ve practiced this too, but never with Bucky unwilling and struggling in Sam’s arms, never while having to dodge automatic gunfire from what he estimates with a glance over his shoulder is fifteen armed guards. But he’s not just anyone. He’s Sam Wilson, he’s the goddamn Falcon, and he weaves back and forth through the air, all while rising as swiftly as he dares.

Soon enough, they’re in the clear from the gunfire, but that’s not even the worst of Sam’s problems right now. 

“We have to go back,” Bucky shouts.

He’s twisting this way and that, and Sam can feel him slipping from his grip.

“You’re off the fucking rails, Barnes,” Sam grunts through gritted teeth. “You sure you can survive a two hundred foot fall? If not you better keep still because with the way you’re wriggling I’m about to drop your ass.”

Maybe Bucky looks down then, because he stops kicking and instead follows some semblance of protocol, reaching up to grab a hold of Sam’s shoulder straps to take the load off his arms.

“Fucking finally,” Sam groans. 

He can feel his arms trembling already, and he doesn’t dare try and even partly relax them yet. Instead, he makes a wide arc towards where their Jeep is parked, at the end of a dirt track, half a mile off the road back to Medellín. His muscles ache worse with every second they’re airborne, his arms burning with lactic acid from his shoulders to his wrists, and the last few hundred yards, it’s sheer willpower that keeps them from giving out under Bucky’s weight.

As soon as they’re on the ground, Sam slumps to his knees, clutching his arms to his chest, trying to breathe through the pain when the blood starts flowing freely again. Meanwhile, Bucky paces back and forth, checks his guns, then turns to Sam.

“Can you drive?” he says.

“What does it fucking look like?” Sam says irritably. By now it’s catching up with him – the anger and the resentment. Rollins hadn’t been Bucky’s to kill. In the end he hadn’t even been Sam’s to kill, and yet–

“I’ll take you back to the hotel,” Bucky says distantly.

“Take me?”

“I have to go back there,” Bucky says. “Alone.”

Sam struggles to his feet again and stumbles towards the Jeep. “Now why the hell would you want to do that,” he says.

Bucky chews at his lip. “I’ll explain on the way,” he says.

“Yeah, you bet your ass you will.”

The first thing Sam does when they’re in the car, though, is to call Maria Hill, and while Bucky tears through the terrain on the dirt track, Sam listens impatiently to the sound of the signals going through. They’re going to need extraction, ASAP – he and Bucky both, it can’t be helped. Hill knows anyway. Knows that Sam’s been doing a hell of a lot more than just keeping an eye on Bucky. She’s close with Natasha, and one of the world’s best spies to boot, so it’s not like she’ll be surprised…

But it keeps ringing and Hill doesn’t pick up. 

It’s unusual. More than unusual; it’s never happened before. Sam tries twice more, then leaves a message, an uneasy feeling growing in the pit of his stomach that’s nothing to do with the way the Jeep jolts and jumps across roots and potholes.

“Okay, spill,” he says to Bucky as he puts his phone away. “You can start by telling me what you meant by ‘the book’.”

Bucky’s just taking them onto the main road, and while he shifts gears, he takes a deep breath, then starts explaining.

“There’s a sequence of words that activates the Winter Soldier. I’ve been conditioned to respond to them – kind of like hypnosis. When the sequence is complete, the Soldier is ready to comply, ready to obey any order, without ever feeling remorse or regret, or anything that could compromise the mission.”

“That’s what Rollins was doing?” Sam asks.

“Yeah. The sequence is top secret. Highest level clearance only, but there’s this book. I’ve seen it. I remember seeing it.”

“A book with the words?” Sam says, and Bucky nods. “How long did the effect last?” Sam asks.

Bucky shrugs. “Indefinitely, unless something extraordinary happened. It didn’t last while I was in the ice. Or if I passed out.”

“If the words were written down, there could be any number of copies out there.”

But Bucky shakes his head. “Hydra are obsessed with rank,” he says. “Only one high level handler was ever allowed in the room during activation, and I never saw the book anywhere else, at any time. Those words were like goddamn nuclear codes. Last time I saw it, Pierce had that book.”

“But Rollins knew the words,” Sam points out.

“Yeah. I hadn’t counted on that. I’d hoped for some clues, to find a breadcrumb trail that might lead me higher up. But if Rumlow is alive and running his own operations, it makes sense. He could have gotten his hands on it, and Rollins was always his second in command. Might be Rumlow is the only person alive right now who even knows about the book,” Bucky says, sounding almost hopeful.

Sam looks out the window, at the greens and browns rushing past and blurring together, and in his chest, the frustration swells until it’s almost painful.

“So that’s been your plan all along?” he says slowly. “Find the guy with the book, take him out, and then what? Hope for the best? Assume that he was the only guy?”

Bucky shrugs again. “Why, you got a better suggestion?”

Sam stares at him. “Uh, yeah? The one that pretty fucking immediately comes to mind is you could have told me all of this a year ago, and we could have gotten you some help. This is the twenty-first century, Buck. We’ve got everything, in case you hadn’t noticed. We’ve got therapy, CAT scans, neurosurgeons, fucking mindfulness. There’s barely a problem in the world that can’t be fixed. Hell, Steve works together with people who’ve got more degrees than I can count. Tony Stark is a goddamn billionaire–”

At that, Bucky slams the brakes so hard that the seatbelt burns across Sam’s chest. With a tug at the wheel that has the tires screeching, Bucky swerves the car around and maneuvers them onto a small side road, taking them back into the jungle.

“What the fuck is it now?” Sam says.

A few seconds later, Bucky stops the car and without a word, he gets out, yanks open the backseat door and starts rummaging around in his bag. Sam waits a minute, then unclasps his seatbelt with a sigh and goes after him, leaning against the driver’s side.

“Take the car," Bucky says. “I'm going back to look for the book.”

“And then what?” Sam asks. “You’ll go after Rumlow, kill him too? And after that?”

Bucky slams the back door shut and turns to Sam.

“That plan Steve has, of bringing me back, of me getting chummy with his Avengers pals? That’s a pipe dream, Sam. Setting foot in the same building as Howard’s son? That’s never going to happen. Never.”

Sam blinks, stunned and confused, and before he can say anything, Bucky goes on.

“Did Steve ever talk to you about Howard?"

"You were all in the war together," Sam says. 

Steve has talked about him, about how they were all friends back then. About how strange it had been to find himself, decades later, befriending Tony Stark.

"He ever tell you how he died?" Bucky asks. His face is so close to Sam’s that he can smell the adrenaline on his breath, and the quick grin he gives Sam is cold, a bitter twitch at the corner of his mouth.

Sam shakes his head. "No." But as soon as the word has left his lips, it dawns on him.

"Because he doesn’t know,” Bucky says, his voice unsteady with emotion. “If he did, he wouldn’t be talking about how Tony isn’t like Howard, but that he grows on you. He wouldn’t be talking about how once I’m home, it’ll be just like back in the days, only better.”

Bucky makes a choked noise, a desperate kind of whine, and then he leans forward to touch his lips to Sam’s. It’s a fleeting kiss, but he lingers there, so close that it’s no work at all for Sam to turn his face up and lean into another one. And Bucky sighs, maybe even sobs, and crushes his mouth to Sam’s, kissing him hard, pushing closer until Sam’s head bumps back against the car before he suddenly pulls away.

“Bucky–” Sam starts.

“I killed them,” Bucky says. “Howard and Maria both. They were my mission and I killed them.”

He pushes away from the Jeep and turns around, pacing back and forth like a caged animal, like he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

“You weren’t in control,” Sam says. It doesn’t matter, he knows. “No one can blame you for what the Winter Soldier did.” But they will, and Sam knows that too.

Bucky’s facing away from Sam, but Sam can see from the way his shoulders slump down that he’s exasperated. He turns around, and his eyes are dark and lifeless as he steps slowly towards Sam again.

“I am the Winter Soldier, Sam,” he says, then stabs at his chest with a finger. “It’s still in here, a part of me. And that part may be sleeping now, but all it takes is for someone to say the words, and I’ll be wide awake and ready to snap a neck like a twig, to put a bullet in Tony Stark’s head and reunite him with his family. I’d fight Steve to the death, Sam. And I could kill you.”

At that last word, he slams his left hand into the side of the car, hard enough that Sam can hear the metal dent, making him blink and flinch. Bucky hasn’t got more than a couple of inches on Sam, but he’s making the most of it now, looming over Sam, looking like a thunder cloud about to crack.

“April second,” Bucky says, as if it’s supposed to mean something to Sam.

“What?” Sam asks.

“April second was the day I was sent to kill you. I came to your house at six in the morning, but you weren’t there."

The words send a chill down Sam's spine. That would have been the day Steve and Natasha showed up on his doorstep, broken and dirty. He would have been on his morning run when…

"I remembered," Bucky says. "When you first found me and took me back to D.C. again. Out in the street, by your house, I suddenly remembered it all. That I'd been there just days before, that I'd walked up those steps, in through that door, on my way to kill you in your sleep. I could feel it in my bones, that itch of a mission unfinished. And I wasn’t sure, Sam. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I went inside. Would I have a shower, borrow some clothes, drink coffee in your kitchen? Or would the Soldier take over and finish the job.”

And Bucky hadn’t wanted to come inside this time either, when they went to pick up Sam’s gear. He’d been scared then too, even now.

“It’s been over a year,” Sam says. “Hasn’t it? How can you be sure–”

“I could feel the pull,” Bucky hisses, leaning in close. “As soon as Rollins started saying the words, I could feel it. And that last mission wasn’t ever completed, it would have been–”

“You think I’m scared of you?” Sam interrupts him, meeting his gaze.

Bucky laughs then, short and bitter. “Kinda wish you were,” he says, and in his eyes there’s a silent plea, like he’s begging for Sam to be the one to put an end to this. 

“Well, I’m not,” Sam says, turning his face up, defiant. Bucky must hear his heart though, how it’s beating wildly.

When Bucky kisses him again, Sam knows it’s a goodbye. It tastes of regret, and longing, even though they're both still right there. But he doesn't stop Bucky when he fumbles for the button on Sam’s jeans, just arches into the touch and kisses Bucky back, angry and determined, biting down on Bucky’s lip until he gasps and Sam can taste blood, then kisses it away.

By now, Bucky has shoved Sam’s jeans open and boxers down, and his own too, apparently, because when Bucky presses close, they’re skin to skin, Bucky already fully hard and Sam getting there fast enough. He’s going to miss this, Sam thinks as he wraps his hand around both of them, as Bucky reaches around to grab the back of Sam’s thigh for purchase when he starts thrusting into Sam’s grip. 

And then he stops thinking, lets himself get lost in this for a little while, in the rough sensation of Bucky’s dick against his own that suddenly turns wet and easy after Bucky moans and comes a first time. 

When his own orgasm hits, the noise ripped from Sam is mournful, embarrassing. He bites it off, and then Bucky’s kissing him again, over and over, his lips on Sam’s cheeks, his jaw, his neck. Bucky fumbles between them and wraps his hand around Sam’s – he’s still holding their dicks loosely – and Bucky jerks them another couple of times until he comes again, face buried against the curve of Sam’s neck.

“I’m going back there,” Bucky mumbles against Sam’s skin. 

“I’m going back home,” Sam says, still breathing hard.

Bucky snorts softly, a rush of warm air across Sam’s shoulder. Then he pushes away from Sam and pulls his pants up from where they’re hanging low on his hips. “Well,” he says with a lopsided smile. “It was fun while it lasted, huh.”

Sam doesn’t say anything, just tucks himself away and lets Bucky stew in his own words, regarding him calmly while he straightens his clothes. The seconds drag on, and the grin fades on Bucky’s face until he draws a breath as if to say something else.

“Sort your shit out, Barnes,” Sam says before Bucky gets the chance.

He opens the door to the backseat, pulls Bucky's bag out and drops it on the ground, then walks around to the driver's side, gets in, and floors it.

Chapter Text

Maria Hill gets back to Sam when he’s half an hour’s drive from Medellín. 

“You caught me at a bad time,” she says. She sounds exhausted.

“What’s up?” Sam asks warily.

“Sokovia. Up, and down too, for that matter.”

She sends a quinjet his way, piloted by a flustered junior agent who’s technically off-duty with a fractured ankle; pretty much everyone else is still in Europe, dealing with the aftermath of Sokovia’s fall, the agent explains. Literally the fall, Sam thinks as he catches up with the newsfeed. It’s almost too much to take in, but he tries focusing on the good. Nat is alive and well, for one. And it could have been worse – so much worse.

“To the Compound, sir?” the agent asks.

“Compound?” Sam asks, looking up from his phone.

“Mr. Stark has been repurposing an old S.H.I.E.L.D storage facility in Upstate New York, sir,” she says. “It’s still a work in progress, but everyone’s supposed to reconvene there tonight.”

“Sounds good,” Sam says. “And you don’t need to call me sir,” he adds with a smile.

“But you’re the Falcon, s- Mr. Wilson,” she says, glancing back at him. “An Avenger.”

Sam opens his mouth to protest, but then he hesitates. “What’s your name?” he asks.

“Agent Taylor,” she says, and when Sam raises his eyebrows, encouraging her to go on, she says: “Kimberly Taylor. Kim, for short.”

“Nice to meet you, Kim. I’m Sam.”

“Oh, I know, sir,” Kim says emphatically. Then she blinks. “I mean Sam . I mean– ugh,” she says, her ears reddening before she turns back to busy herself with the controls.

Sam lies back on the narrow pallet and checks his burner phone. There’s nothing from Bucky, and it’s not like he thought there would be either. He puts the phone away with a sigh, closes his eyes and starts his personal mission debrief process – the short, emergency version where he sifts and sorts through the morning, quickly analyzing gains and losses, good outcomes and mistakes, making sure to pause on each piece that he deems important, mentally labeling them for later. Then he boxes it all up and puts it away in a safe corner of his mind, letting the drone of the engines fill the rest with static.

Even though he tries his best not to, the last thing he thinks about before he dozes off is Bucky. He can’t help it, can’t help but feel the loss of him as a gnawing in his chest, like blunt but determined teeth tearing at his heart, and as much as Sam would like him to be, it’s clear that Bucky isn't something you bundle up into a neat package, tie a bow around, and store away for later.

The new complex is nothing like the Tower. More than anything, it looks like what it is; an enormous warehouse turned bunker, and clearly – as Kim said – a work in progress. He’s shown to a sparsely decorated room where every piece of furniture manages to give the impression of being both deeply impersonal and ridiculously expensive. It has its perks, though, including its own bathroom with a shower of the kind that basically turns a whole corner of the room into a waterfall. Sam takes full advantage of that as soon as humanly possible, standing under a veritable deluge for at least twenty minutes, letting the hot water wash over him, ridding him of everything still clinging to him.

The others arrive at nightfall. As soon as Sam hears the familiar sound of a quinjet landing, he puts another pot of coffee on and then waits, watching from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the kitchen as they make their way into the building in pairs, or huddled together in small groups. 

It’s a bittersweet victory: that much is clear from the hushed voices, the tired smiles and the silent embraces. Steve’s there, and Natasha, and Maria Hill, and even Nick Fury, and plenty of others, but there’s faces missing, too. Tony’s with Pepper, Steve explains, and Clint’s with his family.

“Thor?” Sam asks. 

“Still in Europe, going through the rubble for more clues about the stones,” Steve says. 

Sam looks around the room. “Banner?” he asks.

At that, Steve ducks his head down, and inevitably, Sam glances over to Natasha.

“We think he may have gone off-world,” she says, voice calm but short, her face betraying nothing.

There’s a movement by Natasha’s elbow then, and Sam notices a newcomer hovering there, half-hidden behind Nat. It’s a petite young woman with huge, beautiful, deeply sad, moss-green eyes that seem to see right through Sam.

“This is Wanda,” Natasha says, putting a protective arm around the other woman, offering no other explanation for the moment. She smiles briefly at Wanda, squeezing her shoulder. “Let’s go find you that room with the bath, shall we?” she says.

“Who is she?” Sam asks Steve as the pair make their way out of the kitchen.

“Long story,” Steve says. “Bet you’ve got a couple of those yourself.”

“Save them all for tomorrow?” Sam asks, handing Steve a mug of coffee.

Steve takes it and nods, then looks curiously at Sam. “One question though – and just one, I promise. I–”

“Yes,” Sam says, cutting Steve off.

“Yes as in…?”

“Yes, I’m here to stay. If you guys are still interested.”

Steve's face breaks into a grin at that, in spite of everything. “Now more than ever,” he says.

The next morning, they wake up to the news of a bombing – a power plant in the south of Poland has been obliterated overnight. One by one, those who stayed at the Compound overnight shuffle into the kitchen; Sam, Steve, Natasha, and - trailing at her heels - Wanda, hollow-eyed and quiet.

“No casualties,” Natasha says once they’re all gathered around the kitchen table, looking at the latest satellite footage.

“They knew it was coming?” Sam asks.

Natasha shakes her head. “It’s been abandoned for seven years,” she says. “The Lublin police department usually keeps a dog handler out there, but the guy who was supposed to be on duty got detained on his way to his shift.”

“Detained?” Steve asks.

“At the local bar,” Natasha adds with a smile.

“Possible motive?” Sam asks.

“None,” Natasha says. “Which is what makes it so interesting, of course. That, and the fact that they used a decommissioned S.H.I.E.L.D fighter jet to do it.” She turns to Steve. “Sounds familiar, right?”

Sam knows what she means; that morning when Steve and Nat came to his house, looking for help, Hydra had bombed Camp Lehigh using the exact same method.

“There was a Hydra base near Lublin,” Steve says, looking lost in thought. “During the war. We flushed it out then, but the Soviets controlled Poland until the fall of the Wall, so who really knows what happened between then and now.”

“Basically, it reeks of Hydra trying to cover their tracks somehow,” Natasha says, but she sounds unconvinced by her own words. “I can’t see a connection to Sokovia, though, and no new information has come to light recently.”

But new information has come to light, Sam realizes.

“Rumlow,” he says, and the others turn to him. “Rumlow’s alive, or at least I think so. I found out yesterday, but with everything happening here, I didn’t get around to mentioning it.”

That’s a half-truth, and he’s sure Natasha can tell. Sam knows he’ll have to explain how he found out, and it’s a story he wishes he’d had more time to polish before telling. 

As it is, he gives them the heavily abridged version, leaving out Bucky’s involvement altogether, and keeping the details about how Rollins died as vague as he can. By the end of it, both Natasha and Steve look doubtful, but the main point - that Rumlow somehow survived the fall of the Triskelion - is still enough to keep them from trying to poking holes in the others.

“It seems unlikely but not impossible,” Natasha says, frowning. “Stranger things have happened. What bothers me, though,” she adds, “is that this is the first we’re hearing about it. It’s been more than a year, and he’s supposedly been out there, running these big operations-”

“You would have thought we’d heard his name by now,” Steve agrees.

“He must have been hurt, badly,” Sam says. “Maybe recovery took a while.”

“But to not even hear a whisper,” Natasha says, the line of worry between her eyebrows growing deeper.

“Crossbones.”

It’s Wanda who utters the strange word, and it’s the first time Sam hears her speak. She says it ever so softly but it immediately has everyone’s attention.

“There was a man,” she says, sitting up a little straighter under their gazes, as if she’s refusing to let herself be intimidated. “At the base in Sokovia. They brought him in just over a year ago. I saw it myself - he was barely breathing, a wreck of blood and burns. They took him to the lab and mended him.”

“Mended?” Steve asks. “You mean he had surgery?”

“I mean they mended him,” Wanda says. “Like an object. He’d scream for hours…” She trails off with a shudder.

“Did you see his face?” Natasha asks.

Wanda shakes her head. “He escaped a few weeks after they brought him in. I overheard them talk about it later. How he had lost faith in Hydra and gone rogue. And that he called himself Crossbones.”

Steve looks around the table, at Sam, Natasha and Wanda.

“Looks like we’ve got a thread to pull on,” he says. “If you’re up for it.”

“You know it, Cap,” Sam says, and Wanda nods quietly.

Natasha sighs. “Guess I’ll strike that three-week trip to Montserrat from the calendar.”

Later, when it’s just Steve and Sam left in the kitchen, Sam tells Steve the rest.

He tells him about his hunt for Rollins, and how Bucky helped, about their operation in Colombia, and how Rollins really died. About the book that Bucky’s looking for, and that he’s gone off the radar again; he tells Steve pretty much everything except for that little detail of how he and Bucky happened to become partners-with-benefits. It feels frankly irreverent to bring it up, especially when the last and final thing Sam tells Steve is the truth about Howard and Maria Stark.

Steve sits silently, deep in thought for a good while after that, and it suddenly seems to Sam as if he’s still carrying the weight of all those years spent in the ice on his shoulders; the time lost, and the people too. 

“It wasn’t Bucky,” Steve says eventually. “He wasn’t in control.”

“I agree,” Sam says. “The problem is, Bucky doesn’t. And as for Tony…”

Steve draws a shaky breath and runs a hand through his hair. “If it comes to that, I’ll break it to him,” he says.

“It’s Tony’s parents,” Sam says gently. “Don’t you think he deserves to know the truth?”

“The truth is, it wasn’t Bucky,” Steve says again. “The truth is complicated. And Howard was Bucky's friend, too.”

“But you doubt Tony will see it that way,” Sam says.

“It’s a clusterfuck of a situation,” Steve says plainly. “But it’s on me to untangle it, Sam. Not you.”

Tony himself comes by a few days later, sweeping through the place like a whirlwind. He complains about the condiments left on the kitchen counter and the chocolate being stored in the fridge, frantically rearranges the lounge furniture while muttering "Make it make sense", and terrorizes Steve at every opportunity. Then he shuts himself in the lab and isn’t heard from for over thirty-six hours. 

Until, suddenly, he sends for Sam.

As Sam enters the lab, he’s struck by an irrational fear that Tony somehow found out the truth - about Howard and Maria, or about Sam and Bucky, or something else that Sam doesn’t even remember; the whole thing has a distinct ‘being sent to the headmaster’-vibe.

“Ah, the new and improved bird-themed Avenger,” Tony says without looking up when Sam approaches the workbench. “Any secret kids I should know about?”

“Excuse me?” Sam says, confused.

“An extremely forward question, I know,” Tony says, turning around to face Sam as he pushes his safety goggles up. “But I’m still not over Barton hiding an entire family with a wife and two and a half kids for several years.”

“Two and a half?”

“I’m not sure the third one has popped out yet,” Tony says. “And since Clint apparently doesn’t tell me anything, ever, it’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s baby situation. Anyway, we need to get you fitted for your new suit.”

He motions at a nearby table, where Sam can see a pile of kevlar and metal; an unwieldy mass of black, gray and red. Sam relaxes a little bit; Steve had mentioned a proper suit, and Sam actually wouldn’t mind something to match the wings.

Tony turns around to give Sam some privacy to get changed and says: “Let me know when you’re ready.”

Sam pulls suspiciously at what appears to be a gigantic sleeve. “I think you might have me confused with Banner,” he says.

“Just strip down and suit up, Wilson,” Tony says impatiently. “I haven’t got all day.”

The suit is enormous. It’s comically large in a way that can’t even be explained by Tony being bad at guesstimating his measurements; once he’s zipped it up, Sam looks like a cross between an astronaut and a hip hopper circa 1992.

“Perfect,” Tony says when he turns around again. 

“I’d say it needs some minor adjustments,” Sam says dryly.

Tony ignores that. “Dum-E,” he says, snapping his fingers.

A robot comes gliding across the floor and up to Sam, where it starts carefully pulling at the fabric, taking it in and sewing it tight as it goes.

“Thanks buddy,” Sam says to the robot, which pauses to chirp shyly in response. “Think we could lose the long sleeves?” he adds. “I hate it when they snag on the wings.” 

He holds his arm steady, and Dum-E slices a majority of the sleeve off. When he looks up, Tony is standing by his workbench in thoughtful silence, regarding Sam and the robot. 

“Helpful fella,” Sam comments.

“He has his moments,” Tony murmurs.

Once the suit is fitted to Sam’s satisfaction - and it is a good look, with sweeping red and silver across the chest, steel gray shoulder plates and well-fitting pants - Tony brings out a prototype helmet. It’s stylish enough, with its sleek design and subtle wing patterns around the ears, but Sam takes one look at the visor, the snug fit, and seizes up.

“No,” he says when Tony tries handing it over. “I’m no War Machine and I’m definitely no Iron Man.”

“But you’re a smart man, Sam,” Tony says, affronted. “You’re also alive. Isn’t it in your interest to keep it that way?”

“Smart men don’t fly headfirst into things in the first place. And that,” Sam says, pointing at the helmet, “is going to give me claustrophobia.”

“It’s more than a helmet,” Tony insists. “It’s got night vision, IR vision, x-ray vision, vitals reader - yours and others’ - comms, an unlimited texts and calls plan, et cetera, et cetera. You name it, it’s got it.”

“I like my goggles,” Sam says firmly.

Tony narrows his eyes. “Are you challenging me, Wilson?”

“No, I’m saying-”

“Sounds like a challenge. A stupid one, but a challenge nonetheless.”

“My old goggles are fine, Tony.”

“Challenge accepted.”

A few days later, Tony calls him down to the lab again. The googles are everything Sam hoped for, and he spends a few minutes learning the touch controls until he can seamlessly swap between the different modes.

“What’s this one do?” he asks, stopping on a view that has a number of idle meters and controls, as well as what looks like a small, inserted screen that’s currently blank. “Some kind of remote camera?”

“Glad you asked,” Tony says.

He holds out a pair of bracers that look like something right off the Iron Man-suit. 

Sam cocks his head suspiciously. “I said-”

“And I heard you,” Tony says. “But trust me on this one.”

So Sam slips the bracers on and clicks them into place, and as soon as he’s snapped the fastenings on the left one, the heads-up display in his goggles lights up. Then he hears a soft bleeping noise, and a small drone comes flying over from Tony’s workbench. It’s a cute little thing, like a cross between a fighter jet and a bird of prey, painted a stylish silver and gray with red details on the wings. 

Sam instantly loves it. 

The little robot stops in the air in front of Sam, hovering there expectantly. Sam reaches a tentative hand out, and the drone does a smooth loop around his arm, chirping affectionately.

“Oh, he’s a beauty,” Sam says softly.

Realizing now what the bracers are for, he taps the control pad on the left one, and the robot instantly zooms off through the lab.

“Kind reminder that I keep some very expensive stuff in here,” Tony says. “Very expensive,” he adds when the drone starts weaving in and out between computers, tool racks and half-finished projects.

“Relax,” Sam says, guiding the robot with the help of the monitor in his goggles. It’s just like flying, and that’s what he does best, better than anyone else.

“I’ll relax when you take that thing outside.”

Sam lets the drone return to his side and pushes his goggles up. “Thank you,” he says sincerely.

Tony’s mouth pulls up into what Sam would say is at least half a smile, before he clears his throat and points at something on the underside of the drone. “Those missiles pack quite the punch, so use them wisely," he says. “And he slots right into the wingpack when you don’t need him." 

“He got a name yet?”

“RW-1138, but I’m sure you could think of something catchier.”

“RW,” Sam says thoughtfully. He holds his hand out, and the robot lands smoothly on his upturned palm. “I’m thinking Redwing. You good with that, buddy?”

Sam gets a call that evening, from a reporter at NOW Magazine, who wants confirmation that he’s now officially a part of the Avengers.

“Can we expect an announcement in the near future?” the ingratiating voice on the other end of the line says.

“I don’t think there’s ever been an official announcement for anyone,” Sam says warily. “It’s not like you sign a contract.”

"A contract? Tell me more. Is it long-term or on a mission-by-mission basis? And how much are they offering?"

Sam frowns. "What?"

"I can only assume Tony Stark is in charge of the finances. So are we talking six, seven or eight digits here?"

At that, Sam hangs up, goes back into the call records, and blocks the number.

Two days later, Redwing comes flying into the kitchen as Sam's having an early breakfast. He bleeps happily and does a loop around Sam’s head, then drops a copy of NOW Magazine on top of his coffee mug, which promptly topples over and sends the spoon flying across the table. Sam jumps away from the hot trickle headed towards the edge of the table and straight for his lap, snatching the magazine up with a curse. There’s a post-it note attached to it, written in Tony’s distinctive block lettering: Do we need to book a session with the media trainer?

Sam peels the post-it away, only to find his own face looking back at him. At least it’s a good picture, he reflects, but a glance at the headlines immediately negates that small victory.

BREAKING! New Avenger member FALCON recruited for alleged record sum, one says.

And right below that:

EXCLUSIVE: Identity of THE FALCON revealed in 10-page special as newest Avenger spills all - Diet and Exercise Regime - True Story of the Tower Incident - Complete Dating History - And More!

“Mistakes were made, huh,” Clint Barton says from where he’s sitting on the kitchen counter, filling a mug of coffee. 

He’s on a rare visit to the Compound with his family to show off the new baby, which keeps regular baby hours if the bottle in the hot water bath next to Clint is anything to go by. 

“I didn’t tell them anything,” Sam says, frantically flipping through the glossy pages, trying to find the right spread.

Clint grabs the dish rag, slides off the counter and saunters over to the table. “You picked up though?”

“Yeah, and hung up after, like, five seconds!”

“Ouch. Okay, yeah that’ll do it,” Clint says. He puts the mug down in front of Sam and starts mopping up the mess. “Now the first thing you’ll want to do is to change your number and redirect the old one to Pepper’s office.”

Sam tears his attention away from the magazine. “The CEO of Stark Industries deals with gossip rags?”

“No. But that phone has an automated menu modeled on the nine circles of hell, where no matter what options you pick, you’ll eventually end up listening to an almost but not quite perfect twelve-second loop of Copacabana by Barry Manilow.”

“Great,” Sam says faintly. “Thanks Clint.”

That 10-page spread is just the start. Over the next few weeks, Sam’s name crops up in everything from broadsheet editorials to SNL skits. It’s an outlandish experience, seeing himself impersonated by Jay Pharoah one minute and trending on Twitter the next. But after NOW Magazine, he’s on his toes, taking advice from the others and managing to keep the worst of the hacks away; a few weeks later he even does a carefully curated photoshoot for a respectable fashion magazine, which keeps its promise to not print a single word he doesn’t explicitly agree to.

Just when he thinks his media presence can’t get any weirder, it absolutely does. 

They’re descending over the slopes of the Tatra Mountains, less than five minutes away from their drop point, when Natasha shows Sam her phone.

“That’s it, you’ve officially made it,” she yells over the drone of the engines.

He takes the phone, where he can see an image of himself in his Falcon gear captioned You got: The Falcon (Sam Wilson).

“What am I looking at?” Sam shouts back.

“You’re a possible result in a BuzzFeed quiz!”

“What the hell is this,” Sam mutters, scrolling up a little to look at the title of the page. “‘Which Avenger should you marry’,” he reads out loud, before quickly scrolling down again.

Let’s put it simply , the text reads, you’re looking for a real man. Enhanced soldiers and half-gods aren’t for you, and suits that do everything for you is practically like cheating, right? Luckily for you, Sam Wilson is the real deal. Tall, handsome and one hundred percent authentic – an old-fashioned hero who will sweep you off your feet and fly you to a rooftop restaurant where he’ll woo you with his charming smile and those brown eyes we’d all love to drown in.

“Old-fashioned?” he says incredulously.

“It’s BuzzFeed, Sam,” Natasha says.

“Who else is an option in this?” he asks, and then a thought strikes him. “Wait, how did you even find out I was an option?”

Natasha raises an eyebrow, then starts going over her guns.

“Three minutes to drop!” Steve yells from over by the hatch.

Sam swiftly swipes himself back to the start of the quiz, where he impatiently starts clicking his way through animals, cocktails and 90’s indie rock artists, trying to pick the options that seem least unappealing.

“Thirty seconds!”

"Thor?” Sam says as Natasha snatches the phone out of his hand and pulls him up by the arm. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you’re into older, long-haired, ridiculously ripped men?” she says as they make their way to the hatch just as it slides open.

“Oh my god,” Sam mutters.

Natasha just smiles enigmatically at him, then fastens her snap hook to his belt and wraps her arms around his chest just in time before they fall headfirst out of the plane to the sound of Steve yelling: “Go! Go! Go!”

What are the odds, Sam thinks as he strips his armor off, leaving it a pile on the floor before heading for the shower. What are the fucking odds that the one time he's alone at the Compound, some goddamn smartass with flight, shrinking tech and the apparent ability to hack into F.R.I.D.A.Y. comes along. He turns the shower valve until it reaches the scorching powerwash setting and lets it hammer his skin raw while he seethes over how the guy got away.

Half an hour later, he's sitting in front of the monster of a PC Tony keeps in the lab, watching as the progress bar on his search steadily ticks towards 100%. It's not like he hasn't got wifi in his own room, but when you want to simultaneously scan over three hundred databases worldwide for the same query, you have to bring out the big guns.

Sam spends hours in the lab, scrolling through the results of his searches, going down rabbit holes involving everything from alien tech to optical illusions, determined to get to the bottom of the mystery of the miniature menace of a burglar. He sits there for long enough that Wanda comes back from her hike, pokes her head in and asks if he wants dinner, and after asking F.R.I.D.A.Y. extremely politely not to tell Tony, Sam ends up eating pierogi at the desk.

He’s right in the middle of typing in a new search when the screen goes black. 

“What the hell,” Sam mutters to himself, then taps the spacebar key a couple of times.

The screen blinks back to life, but instead of the search interface, he’s now looking at a system update screen, where a circle of dots spin lazily, along with a message informing him that the update is 2% done.

With a sigh, he gets up and goes to the bathroom, then heads into the kitchen to grab a soda. When he comes back, the update is at 3%, and Sam is starting to think maybe it’s a sign. 

Twenty minutes later, it’s at 5%, and Sam decides to call it a night. He heads back up to the living quarters where he bumps into Wanda, accompanied by a large cup of tea floating by her elbow; somehow that’s more bewildering than when she uses her powers to throw Steve thirty feet up in the air when they spar.

“We need an electric kettle,” she remarks. “I had to boil water on the stove.”

“Just microwave it like the rest of us heathens,” Sam jokes.

“F.R.I.D.A.Y. wouldn’t let me,” Wanda says, opening the door to her room with a flick of her hand.

“Wouldn’t let you?” Sam asks, perturbed.

“Maybe she’s having a bad day,” Wanda says with a shrug before slipping into her room and calling over her shoulder: “Goodnight, Sam.”

He walks the few steps over to his own room, frowning. The system update and Wanda’s comment about F.R.I.D.A.Y. – separately he might have shrugged them off, but now…

Sam doesn’t get any further in his train of thought than that, because when he opens the door, he finds Bucky there, sitting on his bed.

The sight of him knocks the breath out of Sam, makes him sway a little on his feet. Shock, relief, hurt – it all fuses together and punches him right in the chest. He slaps the lock button on the panel next to the door without taking his eyes off Bucky, half convinced he’ll disappear, vaporize on the spot, if he looks away.

“Hey, Sam,” Bucky says, and his voice is low and very, very real.

He gets to his feet, and the first thing Sam thinks is that he looks bigger than he remembers; his chest is broader, his shoulders straining a little against the worn henley he’s wearing. The hair is the usual shoulder-length DIY trim, but it’s clean, and so is the rest of Bucky. He seems tired though; well but weary.

“What are you doing here,” Sam says quietly when he finally finds his voice again.

Bucky shrugs. “I heard about the trouble you had up here. So I came to check on you.”

“Trouble?”

“You had a security breach earlier, and–”

“I think we’re having one right the fuck now,” Sam says, as the so-called system update suddenly starts making a whole lot of sense.

Bucky rolls his eyes. “If you want to blame anyone for that, blame Natasha.”

“She knows you’re here?” Sam asks.

“I’m good with security systems but I’m not that good,” Bucky says.

“Jesus,” Sam mutters, stepping into the room properly and crossing over to the window where he gazes out into the darkness. His arms tremble a little, so he folds them over his chest, wills his hammering heartbeat to settle. He’s going to get Nat back for this, he promises himself. Next time he’s giving her a ride he’ll drop her in a fucking lake, just wait. “Well, now you’ve seen me,” he says, turning to Bucky again. “And as you can see, I’m fine, all in one piece.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says distantly. He does seem busy enough making sure that Sam’s all right, with the way his eyes are flitting over Sam; they roam his face, his chest, his legs, as if Bucky's mentally cataloging all the parts, filing the memory away for later use.

Sam can’t help it – he takes a step towards Bucky before he can check himself, and Bucky looks up sharply. What’s more, Sam’s heart rate is creeping up again - clearly he’s a smart man trapped in an idiotic body - and he’s sure Bucky can tell.

“You should probably go,” Sam says, trying to sound decisive about it. "Before someone finds you here," he adds, as if Wanda would ever barge into his room unannounced.

“Yeah, probably,” Bucky says, but he makes no move to leave. 

They stay like that for a few long seconds, in some kind of emotional stalemate that Sam knows he should break by telling Bucky to get the hell out.

"Hey, uh, you find it yet?" Sam asks. Because why not. Because he’s an idiot.

Bucky seems to relax a little, shifting from one foot to the other, his shoulders losing some of that square tension in them. "Not yet," he says. "Got a good lead though."

"Yeah?"

Bucky nods, and Sam can see his jaw working in that way it does when he’s gearing up to saying or doing something he knows Sam might object to.

“In case Nat didn’t tell you, we’re tracking Rumlow,” Sam says before Bucky can say anything else. “And I’ve been keeping an eye out. So if I find anything…” he trails off, shrugging.

“I still have the phone.”

“Yeah, me too,” Sam says, and he doesn’t say what he thinks: that this could have been a phone call, a text.

He holds Bucky’s gaze for just a second too long, and Bucky crosses the distance between them, crowds Sam up against the wall, and then they’re kissing, fumbling, sucking at skin and tearing at clothes.

“You find someone else yet?” Bucky mumbles against Sam’s lips as he pulls at his t-shirt. 

“What are you talking about,” Sam says, yanking on Bucky’s fly, ripping it open with a smattering sound.

Bucky bites down on Sam’s lip, a little mean, then pulls back. “Don’t give me that bullshit,” he says. “I saw your Esquire photoshoot, and your face is every-fucking-where, don’t tell me you haven’t had offers.”

“I’m a busy man, I haven’t got time to date,” Sam says. He slips his hand down the front of Bucky’s boxers, drags his nails across the coarse hair there. Bucky gasps, looking so helpless that Sam can’t resist taking pity on him. “There’s no one else,” he says softly.

Bucky makes another noise then, low in his throat, almost like a growl, before he hoists Sam up like he weighs nothing at all and carries him to bed.

“Do you think it’s us?” Bucky asks.

It’s hours later, and they’re lying in Sam’s bed, watching a live news feed from the West Coast where a building in San Francisco appears to have been the target of a terror attack.

“Tell us again, Brad,” the news anchor says to the reporter on the scene. “The attackers used a tank to ram the building? Is there military involvement? Are we witnessing an attempted coup?”

“Well, Cynthia, the latest news here at Pym Tech is actually that the tank was used as an escape vehicle.”

“Escape vehicle? So it was, what, simply parked in the garage?” 

“More like on the seventh floor, Cynthia.”

“What do you mean do I think it’s us,” Sam says.

He shifts on the mattress, suppressing a wince. He’s mostly pleasantly sore now, but he can already tell he’ll be able to feel tonight in his thighs for several days.

“You mean you haven’t thought about it?” Bucky says.

“What?”

“That every time we fuck, something like this happens,” Bucky says, motioning at the screen.

Sam scoffs. “Okay, that’s just not true,” he says. 

“Isn’t it? Name one time it didn’t.”

Sam thinks about it for a second, only to find that irritatingly enough, Bucky is right. “Alright, yeah, but stuff happens all the time, Buck,” he says. “And if you think about it, Sokovia and Ultron was more like one prolonged event during which we also happened to fuck a lot.”

Bucky grunts, chews his lip. 

“What?” Sam laughs. “You’re not seriously saying you think we fuck world-changing disasters into existence, are you? Like it’s an actual theory you have?” 

“Pym Tech,” Bucky says then, out of nowhere. He turns on his side and looks at Sam. “Did you say that guy who broke in here could shrink?”

“Yeah,” Sam says. “Why?”

Bucky stays silent, drifting off in a way that Sam hasn’t seen since back when they’d just met, back when Bucky was still barely keeping it together at times.

“It just rings a bell,” Bucky says eventually, sounding frustrated. “Something about Pym – Hank Pym – and shrinking tech.”

“You know about this?” Sam asks.

But Bucky shakes his head and pulls a face. “It was back in the 70’s. That’s a messy era. I don’t remember much, which is probably a good thing. It’s a hunch, that’s all.” 

He sighs, seemingly shaking off that pensive state of mind. “I should go,” he says, but his hand is saying otherwise, sneaking over and up to trace a pattern across Sam’s chest.

“You probably should,” Sam says, taking Bucky’s hand and pushing it further down. 

“Yeah, I will,” Bucky says, bending down to press kisses to Sam’s shoulder, his pec, his ribs. “But I have this theory I wanna test first.”

Bucky slips away at some point during the night, as quietly as he came. Sam doesn’t text him, doesn’t call, and the burner phone stays silent. Even though the aching in Sam’s limbs lingers for days, he knows it’s for the best that he keeps pretending like the whole thing never happened. 

Luckily, he has plenty of things to keep him distracted. For one, Bucky’s hunch about Pym Tech turns out to be a winner, and after a frankly bewildering encounter with an over-excited, self-professed colleague (“I wouldn’t call myself a sidekick, ‘cause we’re both, like, the sidekicks of one another, right? We’re more like side-by-sidekicks, you know?”) of this so-called Ant-Man, he spends a whole evening on a rooftop in San Francisco, observing one Scott Lang. Sam watches as Lang builds a pillow fort with his daughter, burns homemade pizza in the oven, and passes out on the couch halfway through Inside Out, before reluctantly deciding he can file this feud away for later.

Meanwhile, the circles they draw around Rumlow become more and more narrow, and after  managing to interrupt a series of minor operations, Natasha finally gets solid intel about a major one.

“This is a laboratory in Lagos,” she says, once they’re all gathered in the conference room. She lets the map zoom in on the Nigerian coast, rapidly closing in on the capital until it shows the inner city, the streets, and finally a large concrete building. “The Institute for Infectious Diseases.”

“What does Rumlow want with it?” Sam asks.

“Steal and sell biological weapons,” Natasha says bluntly. “The hit is tomorrow, at noon.”

“And Crossbones will be there?” Wanda asks.

“As far as I can tell.”

Steve leans back in his chair, a line of worry between his eyes. “It’s a high stakes mission,” he says. “If something goes wrong, we’ll be putting an entire city at risk.”

“But if we don’t stop it, we could be putting the whole world at risk,” Wanda says.

“Can’t we stop the operation before they get to the lab itself?” Sam asks.

“Unlikely,” Natasha says. “The details of exactly how and when aren’t set in stone, and in any case, we couldn’t do it without spooking Rumlow.”

“This is what we’ve been training for,” Steve says, looking around the table. “I believe in every single one of you and your ability, but we all need to be in it together. Believe in it together. And act as the team we are.”

“It’s the best shot we have at getting to Rumlow,” Natasha says. “I vote for.”

“I’m in,” Sam says.

“Wanda?” Steve asks.

“Crossbones must be stopped,” she says. “And if we can help save innocent lives by doing so, then we must be the ones to stop him. I’m in.”

“It’s settled, then,” Steve says, getting to his feet. “Pack light, we leave in an hour.”

Chapter Text

Keep playing my heartstrings faster and faster

You can be just what I want, my true disaster

Your pal, your buddy, your Bucky. 

Your pal, your buddy. 

Your Bucky.

The words he heard through Steve’s comms echo in Sam’s head, over and over, an insistent drumming in his ears. He’s been keeping them at bay for hours, to be able to help deal with the fallout on the ground in Lagos, to get them in the air, to answer phone calls from Hill, from Rhodey, from the goddamn Secretary of State.

But once their quinjet is on autopilot, Steve’s busy talking to the White House, and Wanda’s asleep, passed out from exhaustion with her head in Natasha’s lap, the words return in full force, haunting him like a ghostly heartbeat.

Your pal, your buddy, your Bucky.

Sam gets the phone out from the drawer where he stores his civilian clothes, goes back to the pilot seat, and turns it on. His hands tremble a little as he enters the PIN number, but as soon as he gets reception, the phone buzzes several times in rapid succession.

Are you okay?

Are you in Lagos with Steve?

Call me.

The last one was sent only minutes ago, and the breath Sam lets out is halfway to a sob.

Mission fucked but we’re alive, he writes. In the air right now, can’t really talk. You ok?

It doesn’t take Bucky more than a few seconds to reply: Yeah why? He must have had the phone in his hand, Sam thinks, breathing another sigh of relief.

And then, moments later: You had me scared Wilson.

Sam hesitates, glances over his shoulder at the others, then pushes the call button anyway. He could tell himself it’s to make sure it’s actually Bucky on the other end, but he knows it’s more than that. He wants to hear Bucky’s voice for no other reason than just that – to hear it.

“Sam?” 

Sam feels his shoulders drop, but the short word stings as much as it soothes, and a confused but intense wave of longing washes over him. Suddenly his voice isn’t enough - not nearly enough.

“Hey,” Sam says quietly.

“I’ve been trying to call,” Bucky says. “Lagos is all over the news, and I saw you, and Steve… I saw… I didn’t even know if you were still alive.”

“You too, huh,” Sam says.

Briefly, and in a hushed voice, he tells Bucky about how the mission went sideways, about Rumlow’s death, and his final words. 

“He must have been trying to get at Steve,” Bucky says. “I’m still stateside.”

“Well, it worked,” Sam says, and for a moment he feels like he’s balancing on a precipice, about to tumble into a pit of despair. He knows that as soon as they land, he’s going to have to go back out there and keep dealing with the aftermath of the disastrous mission. Privately and, no doubt, publicly.

“At least he’s dead,” Bucky says, interrupting Sam’s thoughts.

Sam closes his eyes and rubs at them tiredly. “Yeah.”

Bucky sighs. “Good riddance,” he says after a while. “Right?”

“Right,” Sam says automatically. 

Justice for Riley. Vengeance. If he's honest, he hasn't allowed himself to think about it. Not yet; he doesn’t know if he wants to think about it. Right now he’s got himself in a steel grip, his heart locked firmly inside his ribcage with his mind holding the key.

“There’s another thing,” Bucky says then. “Bad timing, I know, but I need to ask a favor.”

When Sam gets to his room at the compound, he finds a green storage box on his bed. Inside is a strange assortment of objects, including various documents, a used and cut cable tie, and a tap handle. Bucky needs them scanned for DNA traces at a proper lab.

“I had the right place, Sam,” he’d said on the phone. “But someone had been there before me. The body they left behind was still warm, and the book was gone.”

But Sam barely has the time to hand the stuff over to Natasha before they’re all called to the conference room. 

“Who are we talking to?” Sam asks Natasha as they wait for the elevator.

“Secretary Ross.”

“Great,” Sam says sourly. “I already know what he thinks of us.”

“Mm,” Natasha says, in a weirdly non-committal way.

“What?” Sam says, frowning. “You agree with him?”

The elevator doors slide open, and they step inside. With a sigh, Natasha hits the button for the mezzanine floor. 

“You know that the critique isn’t entirely without merit,” she says.

He stares at her. “It was an accident,” he says. “We all knew the risks, and we were all in it together. Rumlow would have wreaked havoc on the entire world if we hadn’t stopped him. We deal with these things because someone has to, because men like Ross don’t have the guts to step up and take responsibility.”

“I’m not–” she starts, before pausing to compose her face into a smile. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t have gone through with the mission. But as someone who’s spent her whole life toeing the line between right and wrong, I know that ultimately, those lines aren’t permanent, and they’re not drawn by us. They’re drawn in the sand – by men like Ross.”

The new line, as it turns out, is called the Sokovia Accords. The implications are vast; registration and monitoring of people with powers, people affiliated with the Avengers, people with access to advanced tech. A necessary means to ensure accountability, according to Tony Stark. A totalitarian nightmare, according to Sam, and one he somehow assumed that the others would recognize for what it is. 

Some do, some don’t. 

He says some things to Rhodey in that conference room he knows he might regret, and Rhodey probably does the same, but what really hurts is the way that Natasha’s face goes from thoughtful, to regretful, to determined.

Ross gives them less than twenty-four hours to either sign away their freedom, or effectively become outlaws, and for better or worse, the choice words Sam has sitting on the tip of his tongue are interrupted by the death of Margaret Carter.

It’s Sam’s first time back in church for years. It’s not as if he has any quarrel with God - he just got sick of funerals, is all. But he never knew Peggy Carter, and as he slowly files in through the heavy doors in the throng of people, he feels a certain kind of quiet calm. 

That doesn’t last long though, as Natasha falls into step with him, hooking her arm with his as if the last couple of days of bickering and debating never existed. Sam tenses up, and Natasha snorts a soft laugh.

“No need to worry, Sam,” she says quietly. “I’m not here to try and convince you to sign.”

“Then what are you doing?” he asks.

“You asked me a favor,” she says. “And since I technically haven’t signed yet, I figured it wouldn’t be breaking any rules, so…”

She makes a show of patting his chest companionably, and if Sam hadn’t been aware that she was up to something, he never would have noticed the folded piece of paper she slots behind his pocket square.

While the guests are still busy taking their seats, Sam slips off to the side and unfolds the note. It’s the results of the DNA analysis Bucky asked for. Helmut Zemo, 38 year old Sokovian male, it reads. The name means nothing to Sam, and neither do any of the other details on the slip. He can only hope they mean something to Bucky.

After the service, Sam lingers, even until after Steve’s gone. Something in the grand church compels him to stay. Perhaps it’s simply the somber beauty of it; the intricate stained glass windows and the pale stone arches, rising gracefully toward the ceiling. Heaven is close, they seem to say. Close, but unattainable for most people – the smooth pillars would offer no purchase, but who needs to climb when you have wings?

It’s only when even the caretaker has finished collecting the psalm books and disappeared quietly out through a side door that Sam makes his way back up the aisle. Off to the side, behind the last row of pews, there’s a globe-shaped candle holder, blazing with the light of at least a hundred candles, lit in memory of Peggy. Sam drifts over there, takes a slender candle from the box, lights it, and finds a free holder.

“Still miss you,” he whispers, so softly only he and Riley can hear.

And with the warm light from the flame on his face, he closes his eyes and cracks the door to his heart open. 

It still hurts.

Rumlow and Rollins and time and therapy be damned, it still hurts. But to his surprise, he finds the pain not only bearable, but comforting. It means Riley is still there with him, and with certain, sudden clarity, Sam realizes he’ll always be there in his heart; that he’s only a thought, a whisper, a lit candle away. 

It’s a fine day and Sam is in a contemplative mood, so instead of hailing a cab, he starts walking towards the hotel. By the time he’s made his way there, Natasha has left for Vienna and Steve isn’t picking up his phone, so Sam rides the elevator to his room on the seventh floor, to change out of the funeral suit and figure out where to go from here. Steve’s already made it clear that he wants Sam along for whatever awaits them once the accords have been signed, and most likely, that’s what he’ll do. Although neither of them have said as much, it hasn’t escaped Sam that they may very well be as much at odds with the authorities as Bucky. This walk back from the church could be one of his last as a free man. And if so– Sam thinks as he sticks the key card in the lock.

He doesn’t have the time to finish that thought, because when he steps inside the room, Bucky is standing by the window, looking out over the city.

Maybe it should come as a surprise, seeing those broad shoulders and narrow hips, the hair - longer than Sam’s ever seen it - sticking out from under the cap, and yet it doesn’t. Then again, it’s far from the first time Bucky’s broken into one of Sam’s hotel rooms.

“It’s one hell of a risk you're taking, coming here,” Sam says, carefully closing the door behind him.

“Sure, but it's a calculated one,” Bucky says and turns around, a sad smile on his lips.

A thought strikes Sam. “Were you at the funeral?” he asks. He has no doubt Bucky could have snuck in unseen, hiding somewhere on the upper levels, and of course he knew Peggy Carter, knew her well, even. In another life, he could have been right there with Steve, carrying her coffin.

Bucky hums in confirmation. “Peggy was something else,” he says. “Any one of us would have been ready to lay down our lives for her, but she only had eyes for Steve.”

“I’m sorry,” Sam says, but Bucky shakes his head dismissively.

“She, if anyone, lived a full life,” he says. “Anyway, that’s not the only reason I’m here. I read the accords.”

It's such a sudden turn that Sam is momentarily stunned into silence. “What, all five-hundred and fifty-three pages?” he says.

It’s half a joke, but Bucky isn’t smiling when he replies in a short voice:

“All of it. Not the worst pile of bureaucratic bullshit I’ve read, but it’s definitely in the top five.” He gives Sam a measuring look. “Who’s signing it?”

“Not me, that’s for goddamn sure,” Sam says.

“Yeah, well, I figured,” Bucky says, sounding tired, almost disappointed.

“What?” Sam frowns. “You said it yourself; it’s bullshit. Nat’s signing it,” he adds, spitting the words out.

Bucky draws a sharp breath, then curses. 

“That’s what I said, I said–”

“Listen, Sam,” Bucky interrupts him, a sudden urgency in his voice. 

He closes the distance between them in a few strides, takes his baseball cap off and pulls his fingers through his hair. 

“I don’t know what game she’s playing, but she knows too much, and too much about us. So whatever they throw at you, just deny it,” he says. “We’ve never met, okay? You haven’t seen me since I ripped the wings off your back up on that helicarrier. You hear me?”

“I hear you,” Sam says, “but you’re not making a whole lot of sense.”

“It’s simple,” Bucky says, flashing Sam a grim smile. “I’m turning myself in.”

The words are like a punch to the gut, and they knock the air out of Sam for long enough that Bucky keeps going:

“I’ve been a selfish bastard, Sam. I’ve lied to you, and when you found out, I kept things from you instead. I could have killed you, and instead of telling you that I let you put your life on the line for me, because–” He hesitates, licking his lips. “Because I couldn’t stay away from you. I should have done this a long time ago. Should have done the right thing a long time ago.”

Bucky has an almost feverish shine in his eyes, but when he blinks rapidly, once, twice, Sam realizes he’s close to crying.

“How’s that the right thing to do?” Sam asks, finally finding his voice again. 

“Because if I don’t, then…” Bucky makes a frustrated noise, then goes on. “The second they find out you’ve been helping me, hiding me, they’ll put you away. And they will find out. Even if Natalia doesn’t turn me in, something’ll give, sooner or later. And you, Steve, even Hill, you’ll all go straight to the castle.” Bucky snorts. “Hell, without signing the accords you’ll be lucky if they even give you a trial.”

“I’m not signing the accords,” Sam says, clinging to this one, irrefutable fact as he tries to wrap his head around what Bucky is saying.

“You have to,” Bucky says. He steps closer, grabbing hold of the lapels of Sam’s suit jacket, as if wanting to shake sense into him. “I can take prison if it means you being safe.” He smiles wryly. “I mean, whatever they throw at me, you can bet your ass I’ve had worse.”

“Is that what you want?” Sam asks, for the first time looking right into Bucky’s eyes. “Getting yourself locked up? Never seeing a friendly face ever again in your life? Not Steve’s? Or mine?”

Bucky’s gaze wavers, his eyes flitting between Sam’s. He licks his lips again, quickly, nervously.

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” he says.

“How about what I want?” Sam asks.

“What do you want?” Bucky says, and it’s barely a whisper.

“For one, I want to not sign those damned accords,” Sam says, because it’s true, and because he needs half a minute to think. He knows Bucky is a stubborn son of a bitch, a meddling menace who'll get an idea in his head and then stick to it like a goddamn gum under your shoe, and this sounds exactly like one of those ideas.

“The Avengers initiative is over,” Bucky says. “You’ve got one chance to get out of this and live a normal life. And this is it.”

A sudden wave of tiredness washes over Sam then, because he knows that on some level, Bucky is right. And at the same time, he couldn’t be more wrong. 

“Bucky,” Sam says. “I thought you know me well enough by now to realize that I’d rather spend my whole life running from Ross, than live a single day of a life where I’m held hostage by a piece of paper. That life would be a lie, and the only reason it’d resemble anything close to a normal one would be because I threw my friends under the bus.”

“It wouldn’t be you–” Bucky starts, but Sam cuts him off:

“You know, I told you once before… It’s a long time ago now, but I think I told you, there’s gonna come a time where you need to decide what to do with the rest of your life. And I’m kind of hoping I’m right in thinking you’d rather be on the run with me, and Steve, than rotting away in some supermax prison cell for no good reason. And as for what’s in your head? Those words and whatever other fucked up things Hydra put in there? Yeah, we should absolutely do what we should have done from the start, and figure it out together.”

Bucky simply stands there for a few seconds, staring at Sam, and the protest he clearly tries to form dies out with a sharp exhale before he leans in, slips his hand behind Sam’s neck and catches his lips in a kiss.

It feels almost like the first time, back in that hotel room in Rioja. The unyielding strength in Bucky’s arm, the sharp angles of his body, coupled with the softness of his mouth against Sam’s; the kiss is an unanswered question, a tentative hope.

And it's as if something clicks inside Sam, like some piece of his heart that’s been wedged in the wrong way and chafing at his chest suddenly slots into its right place, and when he lets Bucky in, lets Bucky’s tongue brush over his, it’s not because he can’t help himself, but because it’s what he wants, maybe even needs.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Sam says quietly.

“Against my better judgment,” Bucky says.

“You don’t ever quit, do you Barnes?”

“Nope.”

The hotel bed is soft, the mattress dipping low under their combined weight as Bucky gently pushes Sam back on it then climbs up after him on his knees.

Bucky starts with Sam’s tie, loosening it carefully, almost reverently. Then he moves on to the suit as Sam reaches for his jeans. They don’t rush it this time, taking it in turns to undress one another, savoring the moment, and each garment slowly pulled off and laid aside feels like a determined step toward something.

They make out there on the bed for god knows how long, Bucky draped half across Sam so as not to crush him.

“Did you miss me?” Bucky mumbles against Sam’s lips.

“‘Course I did,” Sam says, and Bucky hums, pleased.

From somewhere in the pile of discarded clothes Bucky produces slick, and his fingers are as skilled as they ever were, caressing and teasing, then caressing again, patiently, tirelessly until Sam arches up off the bed. Even though Sam can feel his erection pressed against his side, Bucky makes no move to do anything else, and by the time he eases two fingers inside him, Sam’s so ready that he feels nothing but bliss and relief; mere minutes later he’s gasping, digging his heels into the covers, pushing back against Bucky’s hand and coming blindingly hard from that touch alone.

Afterwards, Sam feels adrift, floating on the post-sex high for minutes or hours or days – he couldn’t say. He registers vaguely that Bucky wipes him clean, and when the room finally swims into focus again, Bucky is back to half lying on Sam’s chest, chin on his crossed arms. 

Sam cranes his neck a little to look down at him. “That was…” he starts, but apparently Bucky has managed to fuck him too stupid to articulate himself, so he just laughs and shakes his head.

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Bucky says, flashing him a grin.

“That’s just objectively wrong,” Sam says.

“We’ve got all day, right?”

“Check-out’s tomorrow at ten.”

“So all day and all night,” Bucky says, making himself comfortable, resting his head down on his arms.

He watches Sam in silence for a while, gray eyes calm and searching.

“Marry me, Sam,” he says suddenly.

The words are unexpected enough that Sam couldn’t hide his shock if he tried, can’t help the way he flinches, the way he almost snorts an incredulous laugh, but Bucky takes his reaction in stride, regarding him seriously.

“It’s legal in every state now, right?” he goes on. 

Sam draws a breath, clinging onto that question like it’s a rope thrown at a drowning man. “Yeah, it is,” he says, “but I feel like that would be the least of our problems.” When Bucky frowns at him, Sam goes on: “For one I think we’re both about to become internationally wanted criminals.”

“But if we ever weren’t. Would you?”

Sam could joke it off and give Bucky an out, could probably find some way of answering that wouldn’t be a complete rejection, but the yes is on the tip of his tongue so fast that he has to stop for a second and think about it. About how they ended up here, as partners, as lovers, in deep enough that Bucky would have signed away his life for Sam’s freedom, enough that Sam had been prepared to take a bullet for Bucky.

Sam has only ever pictured himself as a married man in the vaguest of terms. That whole deal with a house, a partner, kids – that went out the window years ago, and he never even thought about it hard enough to regret it, still doesn’t regret it to this day. And what Bucky’s asking probably isn’t that. Maybe if he hadn’t been born a century ago, this would have been a conversation about being exclusive, or in a committed relationship, but even so, Sam feels like things are happening all out of order, like maybe they should have at least gotten to I love you first. Then again, nothing about this, about them, has ever been normal, and to be honest, Sam wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

Falling in love has been a rare thing in Sam’s life, and with Bucky and himself…it’s been far from simple, but Sam can’t deny it–every moment has been a thrill, and he’s been falling for Bucky for so long it feels more like flying at this point. And he knows Bucky, knows every stupid habit he has, knows him at his foulest and at his most flirtatious, knows how he fights and how he fucks, and lately, he knows what Bucky looks like at five in the morning when he stumbles to the bathroom naked, knows how to drive him a little wild in bed, and the truth is, he can’t wait to know much, much more.

“I would,” Sam says.

Bucky lets out a soft, shivering sigh and presses a kiss to Sam’s chest, drags his teeth lightly across it, then pulls himself up to catch Sam’s lips instead, and it’s familiar yet brand new, the way Bucky seems to claim him, each kiss deeper than the one before, silently saying mine, mine, mine. The intensity of it makes Sam reel a little, but soon he finds that he can give as good as he gets, tugging Bucky closer, getting him where he wants him – on top of him, between his legs, inside him.

It’s almost too soon; Sam is still sensitive enough that he lets out a little hiss as Bucky starts pushing in.

Bucky stops immediately, pulling back. “We should wait,” he says, balanced on arms that are trembling, and Sam knows it’s not weakness, not in any way physical.

“No, you’re good, I’m good,” Sam whispers, urging him down again. 

Sam breathes out slowly, relaxing, and with what Bucky did to him earlier, it’s an easy slide. It’s only when Bucky bites down on his lip, looking absolutely wrecked that Sam realizes they’ve never done it like this before, never face to face.

“Hey handsome,” he murmurs, reaching up to push the hair out of Bucky’s eyes.

“Sam,” Bucky sighs, turning his face to kiss Sam’s palm. “Sweetheart. Sam,” he says as Sam pulls him in closer, takes him deeper until he can’t tell where he ends and Bucky begins, can’t tell if the heartbeats he can feel are his or Bucky’s. 

Five minutes of calm, of absolute stillness where their breathing slows until they’re both drifting off towards sleep, that’s how long fate gives them before Sam’s phone starts vibrating somewhere in the pile of clothes.

“Don’t answer,” Bucky mumbles, pulling Sam closer when he tries to roll over to look for it.

“It could be important,” Sam says, wriggling out of Bucky’s grip to dig his suit pants out.

It’s Steve. Sam shows Bucky the phone, then swipes right to accept the call.

“Steve,” he says.

“Sam, we have a situation,” Steve says, and Sam can tell from the way his voice stutters that he’s running at full speed.

Sam sits up, throwing his legs over the side of the bed, ignoring Bucky’s sigh of frustration. “What’s going on?”

“Someone just bombed the UN. In Vienna.”

“What?” Sam says, growing cold. “During the ratification of the accords?”

“Yeah, and they’re–”

“Is Natasha safe?” Sam interrupts him, because damn it all to hell, accords or no accords, he still cares for her. “Rhodey?”

“They’re safe. But listen, Sam, the King of Wakanda is dead, and maybe ten, fifteen others, and…Sam, they’re saying Bucky did it. It’s all over the news. They’re saying it was the Winter Soldier.”

Steve sounds like maybe he believes it, and Sam looks over at Bucky, who he knows can probably hear every word. Bucky shakes his head, bewildered, and Sam motions at him to put the TV on.

“Steve,” Sam says. “It wasn’t Bucky.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Steve says. “He went off the grid again over a year ago. Maybe they got to him. Maybe they got in his head again, maybe–”

“It wasn’t Bucky,” Sam repeats, a little firmer.

Steve just breathes for a couple of seconds, and it sounds like wherever he was running to, he’s slowed down.

“You can’t be sure, Sam,” he says.

“I’m sure,” Sam says. He pinches the bridge of his nose and briefly screws his eyes shut, bracing himself for what he’s about to do.

“How? How can you–”

Sam looks at Bucky again, then takes a deep breath.

“Because he’s right here in the room with me.”

It takes a few minutes of explaining, of putting Bucky on the phone to talk to Steve himself, of more or less admitting to Steve that they’re – well – that during the monthly check-ins, one thing led to another and here they are. And Steve isn’t even that surprised. More than anything he seems relieved, and when he asks to speak to Bucky again, he probably gives him some gentle hell about keeping it a secret, judging from the look on Bucky’s face.

“I’m on my way to Austria now,” Steve says to Sam when Bucky has handed the phone back.

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Sam says. “You’re going to be pretty high up on the list of people the authorities are going to want to talk to.”

“I’ll be fine ,” Steve says." I need to see it for myself, and talk to Nat. If we want to clear Bucky’s name, we’re going to have to find the guy who actually did it.”

Once he's hung up, Sam turns the volume on the TV up, and they watch the looping footage of the attack on the UN building in Vienna, including the blurry clip allegedly showing the Winter Soldier.

“It’s some kind of mask,” Bucky says. “That’s pretty advanced tech.”

“Who is he, and why did he decide to dress up like you,” Sam says. “That’s what I want to know.”

Bucky looks lost in thought, chewing at his lip. “And why now,” he says. “Rumlow and Rollins did their own thing and they’re both dead now. No one else has really taken that much of an interest in me in two years, and we kept our business clean enough. And now all of a sudden someone’s trying to frame me for a terrorist attack. I feel like it should be Hydra, but…”

“Whoever it is, they've managed to get the whole world looking for you,” Sam says.

“Maybe that's the whole point,” Bucky says. “And only days after someone got a hold of that book. There's got to be a connection somehow.”

“You think it’s the same guy?”

And then Sam remembers.

“Shit,” he says under his breath. He scrambles for his suit jacket, gets the note out from the inner pocket and hands it to Bucky. 

“What’s this?” Bucky says as he unfolds it.

“The results from that analysis you asked for.”

Bucky reads the slip, and his confused frown makes Sam’s heart sink a little.

“That name mean anything to you?” he asks. “Zemo?”

“No,” Bucky says, shaking his head slowly. “I doubt he’s with Hydra – I would have known. But Sam, this guy is Sokovian royalty. He shouldn't be that hard to find.”

And for someone like Natasha, it isn’t. But while handing Helmut Zemo over to Prince T’Challa may have put the question of Bucky’s innocence to rest, it doesn’t even begin to solve the million and one other problems they’re facing. Zemo’s grand plan wasn’t too different from General Ross’ – to shut the Avengers down once and for all. Only Zemo’s design was a hell of a lot more drastic; he was going to do it by turning the Avengers on one another, tearing them apart from the inside, and the thing that was going to tip the scales was footage of the Winter Soldier killing Howard and Maria Stark.

He needn’t have worried. Not only is Tony being completely unreasonable about the whole thing, but with the accords in place, every move they make seems to violate some paragraph or other; tracking down and handing Zemo over to the Wakandans without consulting Secretary Ross – or anyone else for that matter – is just one in a long line of transgressions Steve has made that’s only served to widen the rift between himself and Tony. Bucky wasn’t wrong when he said the Avengers were over, and so they find themselves, as Sam suspected they would, on the run. 

Things aren’t too bad though, Sam reflects as he lies in bed, trying to ignore the sunbeam that’s found its way in through a snag in the beaded curtain and is now shining directly in his face.

Yes, for now, things are as fine as they can be, Sam thinks as he shuffles down an inch or two on the bed, out of the line of sight of the offending dawn light. Nat saw reason, Wanda is a free woman, and spending a week in Wakanda has done him a world of good. And not just him – you wouldn’t be able to tell from their current living quarters, but Wakanda is– It’s something else.

Bucky has been spending a lot of time in the capital, having those trigger words gently severed from whatever neural clusterfuck the Hydra conditioning caused in his brain. Until Bucky’s free of them, he and Sam are guests here. A fair trade for turning over the man who murdered King T’Chaka, according to T’Challa, and it will mean a lifetime of freedom for Bucky.

“Morning, sweetheart,” Bucky mumbles, before draping his arm over Sam’s chest, pulling him closer to plant a lazy kiss on his shoulder.

“This place needs blackout curtains,” Sam complains, but when Bucky starts sneaking his hand down Sam’s stomach, then up on his hip to pull at it gently, Sam doesn’t resist.

Bucky tastes sleepy and warm, and he’s pleasantly heavy when he eases himself on top of Sam with slow, languid moves. They have nothing in particular to do today. T’Challa is off somewhere on business and the rest of the country is still busy celebrating his crowning; no one would miss them even if they didn’t leave their humble dwelling all day.

“You know what I’m in the mood for?” Bucky asks, his voice a little rough from sleep. He trails soft kisses over Sam’s cheek, down his neck.

“What,” Sam mumbles back.

“Doing absolutely nothing but this all day.”

“You read my mind,” Sam says, running his hands over Bucky’s back and hips until he can feel Bucky starting to firm up.

And even though they go slow, with indulgent caresses and honey-like kisses, it doesn’t take long before Bucky’s whispering in Sam’s ear – God, you feel so good, can’t keep my hands off you, never want to have to – and Sam answers with short, shuddering breaths – Right there, keep going, don’t stop – but it doesn’t matter, because they do have all day, maybe all week, to do this until they’re too sore to move.

The sweat on Sam’s brow has barely cooled when the phone chimes. Once, and then twice, and on the third signal Sam sighs and fumbles for it on the floor.

“If this is another large scale alien invasion or something I swear to God,” Bucky says, still a little out of breath.

“Come on,” Sam says, elbowing him playfully in the ribs, but when he swipes the phone open, his stomach drops.

“Looks like that visit to Korea went sideways,” he says, flipping through picture after picture of a demolished casino, a blown-out police station, car wrecks… “T’Challa is unharmed, but–“

Without a word, Bucky reaches over and grabs the phone, then gets out of bed and walks resolutely out into the sunlight, still in the altogether, seemingly without a care in the world.

“Hey, Bucky,” Sam says, scrambling up after him.

He takes a second to find his boxers and pull them on, and makes it out just in time to see Bucky fling the phone in an impossibly wide arc towards the lake, where it lands with a distant splash. Bucky dusts his hands off as though satisfied with a job well done, then turns to Sam, who should technically be too angry to be eyeing Bucky up, stark naked in the morning sun, and yet–

“What the fuck, Bucky,” he says, forcing himself to look Bucky in the eyes, and for some reason he can’t help the little laugh that escapes him. “What the fuck.”

“That thing was cursed,” Bucky says, jabbing an accusatory finger towards the lake. “I’ll get you a new one. A better one. I’ve seen what they have around town here, and–”

Sam puts his hand on Bucky’s chest, gently interrupting him.

“Don’t you think we ought to find out what’s going on?”

Bucky sighs, then cups Sam’s face in his hands and gives him a decisive kiss. “If they need us, they’ll come get us,” he says, his breath ghosting across Sam’s lips. “Korea is hours away, and I was having a good fucking morning, okay?”

Sam nods. Bucky’s right, he supposes, as he turns his face up to catch Bucky’s lips again. Maybe his phone was cursed, or maybe they are. Either way, they have half a day, maybe more, before they have to worry about that, or about the next thing, or the thing after that, and he can already tell from the way Bucky’s kissing him that they’ll be spending every minute until then in bed.