Archive of Our Own ^beta

As far as proverbial back alleys went, this definitely wasn’t the worst--but it had to have been among the dingiest.

Steve had seen his fair share of cracked mortar and brick, puddles of glistening rainbow sludge pooled in the corners near garbage bags waiting to make the latest mold of his face. The real back alleys, he could deal with those. It was always the proverbial ones that gave him the most trouble. Aliens raining from the sky. Pieces of the Triskelion and Sokovia raining from the sky. Himself, raining from the sky. A lot of terrible situations and being crowded up with seemingly no way out.

It certainly wasn’t life or death this time, but he felt like he could die from either the dread or the embarrassment pulsing in his temple, so it could have been for all he knew. Steve Rogers, Captain fucking America, was handcuffed to an interrogation desk in New York City’s 15th Precinct and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. They even had cuffs that could hold him--which, given the state of the world, shouldn’t have been as big of a shock as it was--and it had been what felt like hours and still no one had even bothered to ask if he wanted a cup of water.

But speak of the devil and he shall appear: one of the cops who had booked him poked his head around the door. “You’re represented by Stark Industry’s lawyers, right?”

“You can’t get ahold of them, can you?”

“No, sir, we can’t.”

“They’re out of range,” he sighed. It was a nice way of putting it. If he really wanted to be honest with them, he would have said that Pepper preemptively took the entire public relations juggernaut of a department with them all the way to the Kyrgyz-Tajik border for issues with Tony’s precarious pro-bono project, and if the waystation they were upgrading didn’t even have electricity, how the hell were they supposed to have cell service?

“Would you like a court-appointed lawyer or--”

The door clicked shut quite suddenly as the cop was pulled back into the hallway. Not even a minute later, he stuck his head back in. “Apparently there are people here who are claiming to be your representa--” He looked over his shoulder, presumably frowning from the irritation in his voice. “Oh, excuse me, do you mind--”

“We’d like to speak with our client, thank you very much, and he’s been detained here without any progress long enough,” said a voice on the other side of the wall.

“Foggy…” a lower voice said, on the edge of a mutter.

“So if you’ll please step aside.”

And the officer did, presumably, or the two lawyers simply pushed on past him anyway--one, looking fairly smug about the whole ordeal, was leading the other by the shoulder to the chair. Sunglasses, cane: clearly blind. Mouth pushed into a tight, thin frown: clearly frustrated with his partner, who didn’t seem to notice or may have just been used to it.

“Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law,” the blond one said as the other sat down. “I’m Nelson, and he’s Murdock.” His wide grin faltered slightly as he eyed the handcuffs around Steve’s wrists. “Ah… I would shake hands but… you’re a little--”

“It’s fine.” He watched Nelson settle into the chair next to Murdock, pull out his briefcase, shuffle some papers--every so often he would cast a small glance to his partner, who still had barely said two words since getting in earshot of the cell.

“Don’t mind him,” Nelson said. “He’s just grumpy because he owes me ten bucks.”

“Foggy.”

“What? Half an hour ago I told you Captain America was down at the precinct without representation, and you were all like ‘no he’s not, Foggy, I’m not falling for that again’ and now here we are. With Captain America. Or--sorry,” he said, turning back to Steve. “Steve Rogers. Do you--do you have a preference--”

“Steve is fine, really,” he said.

“Duly noted… duly… noted,” Nelson--Foggy, whichever--started scribbling down notes on his legal pad.

“So do you want to want to tell us what exactly happened?” Murdock said suddenly, leaning forward on the table.

If he were to be completely honest, Steve was having second thoughts about refusing to represent himself a few hours earlier. Where these two had come from, how they had even heard that he had gotten arrested, and why hadn’t he appreciated how organized and with it the Stark legal team was before now? What he wanted to do, that was a whole other thing than telling two strangers about his embarrassing afternoon. He really had an itch to pick up the whole table he was cuffed to and crash through the wall back to Stark Tower. He’d seen the Hulk do it a hundred times and had memorized the technique. Just in case, of course. For times like these--or, not exactly times like these, because that would just bring on heaps of more serious trouble. But close enough.

“So…?”

“Oh, right,” he said. But that fantasy was for another day, apparently. “Um… well, I was walking down West 49th and a woman was getting mugged in the alley. So I ran down and ended up punching the guy out because--you know.” Murdock shifted in his seat, leaned back. “Unfortunately a cop walked by and saw me throw a punch that broke the mugger’s nose. Only the mugger wasn’t a mugger to the cop. It was Captain America beating someone up.” He shrugged. “And now I’m here. You know how things are.”

Nelson squinted at him. Fought off a frown. The notes he continued to scribble became, as far as Steve could tell, completely illegible, not something that would be reliable in the courtroom--not that this particular misunderstanding could get that far, no, but how old were these two? Fresh out of law school, probably, and fumbling around trying to get their bearings.

“How many cases have you had?” he asked, feeling his cheeks go hot as soon as the question left his mouth. It would figure he would slip up and say something rude when literally no one asked them to step in.

Murdock smirked, tilted his head up like he was looking at the single strip of fluorescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling--but he wasn’t, Steve knew that, so it must have just been a reflex. “Oh, what is it now, Foggy? Are we up to--ten, eleven cases?”

“We’re a new practice,” Nelson said. “With a good track record, y’know.”

“But do enlighten me, Mr. Rogers--”

“Matt--Captain Rogers--”

“Right, right, sorry,” Murdock grimaced, though it tilted somewhat close to a grin just for a moment. “Captain Rogers. Why did you swing at them? I’m simply trying to get all the information, not trying to be accusatory or anything. It just, um…”

“What my partner is trying to say,” Nelson said with a small grin, “is that you’re Captain America. And you punched a civilian in the face with your supersoldier fist.”

And there it was.

Nelson and Murdock, to keep harping on that thought he had earlier, couldn’t have been much older than Steve himself was, not counting the decades in the ice. The Captain America they knew was the one of the comics, the propaganda that hung in museums, the couple paragraphs that made it into high school history textbooks. And then more recently: the blue-cowled Avenger standing between Tony Stark and Thor at press conferences as they reassured the world that the hatchet had been buried. A real upstanding, all-American guy. Not the type for back alley fights and toeing the fine line of freshly-minted international laws. No, no, no. Why would Captain America ever get involved in something like that?

“He was going to hurt her,” Steve shrugged. “So I intervened.”

“Did you… try talking to him first?” Nelson asked.

“Yes…? Of course I did. He didn’t listen.”

“So you punched him,” Murdock said with a single nod.

“Exactly. I punched him. Old habits, I guess.”

Again that small smirk crept onto Murdock’s face as he adjusted his suit jacket, but it faded before it grew too prominent and caught Nelson’s eye. Maybe he knew about the days before the war, even if Nelson didn’t. Maybe he just wanted to hear Steve say it for himself: I, Captain America, used to pick fights and get my ass handed to me on a weekly basis before the war. Or maybe not. It was just as likely that Murdock was fighting laughing to himself because the entire scenario was utterly absurd and certainly not what he expected for his Thursday afternoon.

“Old… habits?” Nelson said slowly.

“We’ll make sure this gets cleared up, Captain Rogers,” said Murdock, rising. Nelson scrambled to his feet, Steve assumed, to help guide Murdock back out the door, but a cane had already materialized in his hand and was tapping along the floor. “Shouldn’t be anything some nearby security footage shouldn’t sort out. Given what you’ve told us, this shouldn’t amount to an Accords violation. And the officer on duty said your one phone call didn’t pick up, so we’ll contact Stark Industries to wire over your bail money.”

Two hours later to the second, Steve was walking into the top-floor lounge of Stark Tower where Natasha was giving him the stink eye.

“You missed the Scrabble game,” she said a little too lightly. “We didn’t stand a chance against Tony and Sam without you.”

“Sorry, sorry…” He fell onto the couch next to her with a flump, tossing his discharge papers onto the coffee table. “It’s hard to make it back for game night when I’m stuck in a police precinct.” Her eyebrow cocked sharply over the lip of her coffee mug, the closest he was going to get to a verbal response, apparently. “I got arrested, Nat.”

All at the same time--

From Natasha, skeptical: “No you didn’t.”

And from Bucky, popping his head up from the overstuffed armchair in the corner: “Geez, Steve, what for now?”

So he told them. Some punk in an alley who wouldn’t listen to reason, tapping gleefully on every button that sent the cold fire blazing up his skin. Not hot, it was never hot: it always crystallized and condensed around his hands, that urge to hold them up to defend whatever he was going to stand up for that day. Hour. Minute.

“You’re nothing if not consistent,” Bucky said.

“You’re lucky there was footage to corroborate your story. Who did you say showed up to represent you?” Natasha asked.

Steve handed her the business card Nelson had slipped him as he was hopping out the door after Murdock. Deep green Times New Roman on basic white background, NELSON AND MURDOCK, cheap cardstock. “They’re young. Sounded local.”

“Well, good for you,” she sighed. The card went sailing, spinning haphazardly through the air until it landed on the crumpled papers from the police station. “You still need to help us beat Team Iron Bird in the rematch game, though, unless you want to hear them talk about it for the next week and a half.”

Three months passed and the mishap in Hell’s Kitchen was all but forgotten--unless, of course, it was late on a Saturday night and edging close to Sunday morning and Bucky simply had to bring it up to illustrate whatever point he had been making. There was always a mug of Thor’s mead in one hand with the other gripping the invisible bulb of a story and plucking it from the air, the dramatic flourish deepening as the alcohol disappeared. “I can’t believe you guys ever thought this asshole was straight-laced. Got into fights when the wind would knock him over and he gets into fights now--Stevie! Tell Colonel Rhodes how you got arrested back in March--nah, nevermind, I can tell it better, see--”

And so it would go: another incident to add to the ever-growing highlight reel, from the flickering film of the thirties to the digital HD of today. Steve Rogers across the century with a narrative so predictable it was on its way to becoming a legitimate trope.

Stark Tower could truly get noisy. Unbearably noisy. And yes, alcohol helped, but it wasn’t always in the equation: if they had neighbors who could hear the ruckus from all the way up on the ninetieth floor, they would have had every excuse to call the cops for a noise violation at eleven on a Tuesday morning. Everyone had to speak over everybody. No one knew just how to shut up.

Sometimes Steve had to get away from all that. There were only so many times he could listen to Clint and Pepper argue ABBA vs The Beatles, and that morning had devolved into some sort of horrific acapella show. Neither of them could sing. Steve couldn’t take it.

As he saw it, the MoMA was already open for the day, the MoMA was only a few blocks away, and--most importantly--the MoMA had some goddamn peace and quiet.

You sound old, a voice in his head said, and it felt annoyingly similar to Tony’s.

Whoever’s voice it was quieted down once he strode down the first exhibit halls, replaced by the soft murmurs from the other early patrons. He made a beeline, or a slow one at least, towards Starry Night--as a base of sorts. While he did love the painting, could admire the swirls of color and the iconic reach of the trees in the foreground, his mission didn’t involve the works he could readily understand. Self-professed art lover, and all this postmodern nonsense (or whatever they called it) seemed wildly out of place. He’d seen exhibits at private art galleries where Stark Industries was hosting a charity gala, and he had spent half the night frowning at a canvas that was, as far as he could tell, painted a simple solid blue.

“C’mon,” he muttered to Sam when he walked up beside him. “I could’ve done that.”

“Yeah. You know what they say, though.” Sam nudged his shoulder. “‘But you didn’t.’”

That morning he was determined to get at least one step closer to getting a tenuous grasp on Jackson Pollock: famous enough that even Clint and Thor had a flash of recognition when the name was dropped around the conference table and “postmodern” enough that he would feel like he was really digging in and making his way with the future. (The present. The present, not the future.) There had to be something there that could generate some meaning.

“Nihilism!” Wanda had shrugged late one night. “All that post-post-postmodern shit is all nihilism, I promise you. Don’t waste your time.”

Which--of course--had only made his mission beacon shine that much brighter.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to help that much once he actually got to one of the paintings in question. The placard next to the canvas read One: Number 31; were there more like this? Was there One: Number 32 out there somewhere? Or Two: Number 12? And what was supposed to differentiate them all: colors, particular splatter patterns, what? The question of what it was supposed to be was so engrossing that the next step, the reach for it was supposed to mean, completely eluded him, and the noise of his thoughts muffled the steps of the person who came to stand beside him.

“This is the Pollock section, right?” said the man next to Steve, and he jumped at the sound. “Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s no problem--wait, you look familiar. Do I know you?”

The question was a matter of formality, or maybe just self-preservation of sorts; of course he knew him. He would have recognized the latter half of Nelson and Murdock from a mile away in a thick crowd, such was the nature of his serum-enhanced memory. But outside the core Avengers crew, Steve knew his near-eidetic memory could be deemed “weird” or, as Clint once remarked, “creepy.” And Steve didn’t want to come off as creepy to his onetime lawyer.

“Well, I would hope so,” Murdock grinned, face aimed straight ahead at the art. “Does Captain America get himself arrested so much that he can’t keep all the attorneys straight in his head?”

“No--well. Not anymore,” Steve said. “Or--I mean. I knew it was you, Mr. Murdock, but I just--I’m bad at this, sometimes.”

“‘This?’ What do you mean by ‘this’?” Murdock’s grin only grew wider, pulling up to one side to reveal a row of white teeth that gleamed under the museum lighting. “And you can call me Matt, by the way.”

Laughing to himself, Steve shrugged. Realized that response was the most useless action he could have chosen. Added, “Not exactly sure. And, um…” Let’s just get all the terrible out in one go, shall we? “If you don’t mind me asking--”

“Why is a blind guy at an art museum?”

“Uh. Yeah.” Now Steve’s face was really burning, probably just the right hue of red that had made Thor ask if he was coming down with a fever. At least it was something that he could reasonably hide from Matt, even if his mouth did keep running.

“I like listening to the guided tours of the new exhibits. And coming back to old favorites.” Steve watched as Matt swiveled around a couple times, cocking his head to the side like he was trying to listen to something hidden back in the depths of the room. “Which Pollock is this?”

“‘One: Number 31.’”

Matt nodded. “There’s one they have in storage of his that I really want to hear about. ‘The Flame.’ I like to check every so often. It’s still not here, is it?”

It wasn’t--where he had stopped was the last work that he examined in the hall, and the name didn’t sound familiar. “To tell you the truth,” Steve said. “I really don’t get this kind of stuff.”

“You’re telling me,” Matt laughed, really laughed, not just a quiet chuckle to himself under his breath. “But you’re here though. You’re trying to.”

“Yeah. You miss a lot in seventy years. Hell,” he sighed. “You miss a lot in a couple weeks nowadays.”

Steve was back to staring at the pattern of splatters on the enormous canvas, eyes crawling up all eight feet of it and straining to find any sort of coherence in what his head was only deeming a mess best left unexamined. And Matt stood there with him without any indication of impatience: cane collapsed in his hands, one crossed over the other, matching the angle of his neck almost exactly, all features calm, like he was content with just listening to the soft footsteps behind them, to the sound of Steve breathing.

Steve’s face flashed hot again but he forced it back down.

“I had to do a lot of background research on art for a case a while back,” Matt said after a few minutes. “Did you know Pollock liked to paint with his canvases on the floor? He said it helped him feel like he was a part of the painting, that he could be in it while he was working. I admire that,” he added quietly. “Immersing yourself in your work. You become a part of it, and it can become a part of you.”

Steve turned so he could get a better look at him, trace the line of his profile. The grin he had been wearing had faded to a pensive line, a small bit of his bottom lip tugged inwards, like he was chewing at it.

“What does it actually look like, though?” he asked. “I usually come here alone.”

“You want... me to describe it?”

Matt shrugged. “You’re here. I know you. And…” The grin was back. Steve tried not to think about how his gaze kept ending up there, locked onto the slight curves of his mouth. “Might help you understand, talking it out.”

He had a point. But the pressure--it was possible that his mental image of what this famous work of art looked like would be reliant on his verbal rendering for good, and who was he to have that power? He was an Avenger, not an art critic, much less an art student--not since those three weeks in 1940. The doubts in his head faded out as he glanced back over at Matt, whose grin--god--was angled in a way that Steve would call hopeful. Subtle, but still hopeful.

“Okay. Okay.” Steve frowned at the piece, determined, even readjusting his stance for better footing in case it decided to put up a fight. “It’s huge, for one. Probably eight feet tall… ten, eleven feet wide? The canvas is brown, a light brown--tan--and you can still see a lot of it around the edges. And it’s a bunch of paint splatters. Black. White. A couple different shades of brown. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it. No patterns. No shapes. It looks like a mess someone let dry.”

“Chaos?” Matt supplied.

“I guess…” He sighed. Frowned. Crossed his arms and uncrossed them, sorting through the words popping up in his head to match them to the unnamed feelings in his gut. “Maybe the art isn’t just in the end result?”

“How do you mean?”

“The act of splattering the paint. It’s… not how you picture artists painting. It’s rash and uninhibited and--chaos that creates something people like us still want to look at?”

Matt was fighting off a smirk and failing. “I like your explanation,” he said. “Do you feel any closer to getting modern art?”

The laugh that Steve couldn’t keep down echoed through the room and down into the other sections of the gallery, loud and disruptive and completely inappropriate, and he managed to push it back down to a snigger, muffled by his hand. “I mean,” he choked out. “I guess?”

“Let’s try another one, then.” Matt held out his arm, tucking his cane inside his suit jacket. “I would use the cane, but this is… um, easier, I think.”

Steve’s heart was about to hop right up his throat, and the reddish tinge to his face probably wasn’t getting any better, either. But he maneuvered his arm over to Matt’s anyway, silently thankful no other Avenger was likely to traipse down to the museum and catch him escorting his former lawyer around the postmodern art exhibits arm in arm.

(What the fuck, honestly. How the hell did he get here? Why was his blood running so hot and scalding the underside of his skin? His attraction to men was never this sudden, never rocketed around his chest with such ferocity. It burned slow, small prods at smoking embers gradually building up to a flame that felt like it had been there all along. Not like this, not overwhelming, not forcing himself to be so self-conscious about his every move and so aware of Matt’s fingers along the crook of his elbow. It was untoward. Even around Peggy he had been able to keep his wits about him, though the war was still going on to distract him from it, and this was an art museum, not the front.)

As they wandered through the galleries, Steve was only taking cursory glances at the art around him, hoping that Matt had some inkling of an idea where he wanted to go--and maybe he was imagining it, but occasionally he felt the slightest tug on his arm as if Matt was the one leading them, and that Steve was following, and that he really didn’t know anything of what was going on at all. When they finally stopped, somewhere along the route of Gallery 5, Steve took a moment to read the placard before facing the next work Matt would want to hear about.

“‘In Advance of the Broken Arm,’” he read.

“Marcel Duchamp, if I’m not mistaken.”

“You’re not.”

It was official: Steve hated modern art.

“So? What does it look like?” Matt asked.

“It’s…” Steve fought back a slew of unhelpful yet not inaccurate adjectives--it’s absurd, inane, borderline insulting when I spent hours hunched over a scrap of paper with graphite staining the side of my hand. He coughed instead, and he got the feeling that Matt already knew what it was. “It’s a shovel. It’s literally just a snow shovel.”

“Just a snow shovel?” Matt was definitely trying to keep from laughing.

“Like someone from maintenance left it here a little too long after the last snowstorm and and no one said, ‘Hey, that doesn’t belong here! That’s not art!’ I mean…” He tilted his head to one side, then the other, squinting. As if squinting would somehow make it not a shovel. “The only bit of ‘art’ I can find in it is the title. That’s it. That’s literally it.”

“That’s the thing, isn’t it, though?” Matt said. “The title gives it meaning. In a closet, it’s just a shovel. On display here, it’s celebrated for what it stands for. The shovel gets rid of the ice. It prevents falls and broken bones. The title calls attention to that and makes you reflect on the grace of simple uses… how items like this keep our lives beautiful when they are not necessarily beautiful themselves.”

Steve still hated modern art, but he hated it a little bit less when Matt was talking about it. His voice had a calming effect to it, a low, soft quality that he suspected could make anything the most interesting topic in the world and the most absurd notions appear close to sensical. If Bucky or Sam had tried to give him that spiel on the shovel, he would have laughed and walked back to the Impressionists.

“I think that’s enough art for one day,” Steve sighed. “And I probably ought to get back to the Tower. Not that, um…” he added hastily. “Not that this wasn’t fun, I just--”

“Avengers duty, I know.” Matt pulled his mouth to one side--not that Steve was still looking, no--and pushed his dark glasses up with his middle finger on the bridge, and it shouldn’t have been as fascinating as it was, but Steve was sure he had given up a while ago. “I’m really glad I ran into you today--for a number of reasons,” he smiled. “I wanted to ask you to come by my office sometime. There’s some paperwork that just got processed back from your, um--incident in March, so--”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll come over this week.” Steve let himself smile without keeping tabs on how wide or ridiculous it got, because what did it matter if Matt couldn’t start drawing conclusions from it, and rested his hand on Matt’s shoulder. “It was good to see you too.”

They parted with a simple nod, and Steve speedwalked back to the entrance, out the door, and the couple blocks back to Stark Tower, pausing on the steps to the building to check his phone. Collect his wits. Attempt to chill the fuck out. There was a single text from Natasha timestamped fifteen minutes earlier:

You were supposed to be Clint’s sparring partner this morning, so you better be on a date or something because that’s the only excuse he’s going to accept.

A date.

Sure, he could call it that. He could. Technically. But should he? Probably not. Half a day’s worth of extra snark from Clint was far more preferable than the entire squad pressing him for details relentlessly, unendingly, until some mission came up and they were forced to think about things that actually mattered.

Whoops, he texted back. Tell him I’ll bring him a pizza for lunch.

The last thing Natasha--or anyone--needed to know was that he had developed some sort of schoolboy crush on that lawyer from Bucky’s favorite story. The very, very last thing.

“Remind me why you’re going to Hell’s Kitchen again, Steve?”

“There’s a… a restaurant I wanted to pick up lunch from. It’s bacon-themed. Isn’t the future incredible?”

“You’ve been out of the ice for almost six years,” Natasha deadpanned. “It’s time you stopped calling it the future.” He felt her eyes on him as he searched through the couch cushions for his keys--no matter how many times she insisted on not having any powers, sometimes (like these times) he had to wonder if that was just another part of her covers. When he paused his search to rub the back of his neck, he half expected to find burn marks. “Anyway,” she said. “Why don’t you take Sam with you? I just heard him complaining about how hungry he was.”

“Did someone say my name?” Sam called from the next room over.

“Steve’s going for lunch all by himself… to some bacon restaurant in He--”

Goddammit Natasha. “No no no no no--hey Sam!”

As soon as the two of them exchanged glances, the ruse was up. But that couldn’t just be it. They couldn’t simply roll their eyes and shake their heads and let the matter go quietly: they had to savor it like it was their last meal and the cook only had just enough of the ingredients left in the back of the pantry to make the delicacy of Steve’s Frustration from scratch. They relished in the flavor, they reveled in their good fortune--and they couldn’t keep the overly satisfied looks off their faces.

“This is your worst attempt at lying yet,” Natasha laughed.

“Y’know, Bucky said he used to be good at it,” Sam stage-whispered.

“Such a shame he let his talents go to waste like that.”

“Why is it such a big deal that I’m going to Hell’s Kitchen?” he said, hands automatically going to his hips, but he made a huffy point of putting them back by his side when Sam and Natasha mirrored his pose. This was exactly why he wanted to leave and come back without anyone noticing, but of course he had to go and lose his keys and of course Natasha had to walk in and make some quip about if his age was catching up to him. Plan officially dismantled.

“Maybe you got yourself arrested again and wanted to keep it quiet by not involving Tony’s lawyers,” said Sam, “so we wouldn’t give you shit about it.”

“I didn’t get arrested again!” His voice managed to climb embarrassingly high in pitch before starting to crack, and Natasha’s face twitched to keep the smirk buried. “I didn’t. And besides,” he added. “Bucky would have told you if I had. He has a sixth sense for that sort of thing.”

That was the exact wording he had used for it too, especially after seeing the movie. Instead of I see dead people it was I see Steve Rogers’ arrest record, and as soon as Steve rolled his eyes, Bucky would walk away whistling “Friend Like Me.” (He re-re-re-re-underlined the mental note to ask Clint to take a break on the pop culture education nights--they really were doing more harm than good.)

Right on cue, his keys glinted in the corner of his eye, somehow completely ignored in that obvious spot on the coffee table; it was likely that Natasha had swiped them somehow in order to properly question him. But there was no way to know for sure. “So can I go now?”

He could and he did. Twenty minutes later he was standing at the door to an unimpressive brick building with a lone black and gold sign next to the doorframe--Nelson and Murdock, Attorneys at Law.

Ten minutes later, he was standing in front of the office’s door inside. Not that the building was so large that it took him ten minutes to get all the way up there, but not all obstacles had to be physical. Nerves. Psyching himself out. He could jump out of a plane without a parachute but he couldn’t, what, go talk to his lawyer? Ridiculous, said a chorus of Sam, Bucky, and Natasha’s voices in his head.

The main reception area was abandoned, though the light at the desk still shone on a lone stack of paper all out of sorts. In the corner laid a heap of angular plastic that was probably once some piece of office equipment. He absently regretted not calling ahead. “Um. Matt? It’s, uh. It’s--”

“Steve, hi,” his voice called from the office off to the left. “Come on in, I’m just finishing up reading this case report.”

He walked in to take the seat in front of Matt’s desk, so mesmerized by the quick movements of his hands along the braille that he nearly tripped over the chair and into the desk lamp. The chair skidded slightly along the floor and that (cursing redacted) grin flared up along Matt’s face. “Two left feet?”

“Something like it,” he said, finally getting settled in the chair. “Never did get the hang of dancing, anyhow.”

“You and me both.” Matt’s fingers continued along the bright white page--long, nimble, and he would have said delicate, almost, had it not been for the couple angry red scratches along some of the knuckles. After about a minute he pushed the papers aside, clearing his throat. “Thanks for coming by. I do apologize for no one else being here--I wanted you to meet the rest of the office, but there was an unfortunate incident with the fax machine this morning.” So that was what the mess in the front was. “They ran out to get a replacement. Karen could have probably taken care of it herself… but Foggy was the one who broke it, so.”

“What happened… exactly?” One part of him wanted to make Matt keep talking forever the way his voice lifted and fell around the words, but mostly he just wanted to know how a fax machine ended up looking like that.

“Fairly sure Foggy smacked it off the table. Accidentally, of course,” he added. “But enough about that. I’m sure you didn’t come down here to hear me talk about office drama.” No, but Steve could always change his plans. “We’ll keep the copies on file here, but I wanted you to have the originals.” Those same nimble fingers deftly slid a couple of carefully-folded sheets to the clear space right in front of Steve. “It’s not a standard document, so Foggy and I drew it up.”

Steve took the paperwork and skimmed the first couple of lines--looked like a whole lot of legalese--then flipping to the last page and eyeing the deep black ink along the signature line. The scribble was illegible.

“Your remark about old habits got me thinking, so I hope you don’t mind if I did a little digging,” Matt continued. “I found a hefty stack of old arrest records from before 1943.” He waited for him to say something, but Steve only shifted in his chair. “Considering your prominent position as an Avenger and the tendencies of certain journalists… that document ensures that if you get arrested in the city that the police are legally obligated to--not keep it off the records, but keep it from leaking to the public as long as it’s not an Accords violation. That sort of thing. We can’t have Captain America publicly arrested for… protesting the forced closing of a gay bar, as I recall. Gloria’s, right?”

“You really did your homework,” he sighed. Steve had almost forgotten about that afternoon in the 1938, standing outside with a voice hoarse from his asthma in the cold and a cobbled-together sign that stained his fingers with newspaper ink, and when the cops came to tell him to keep it moving, he fought past the pain in his chest to give them a hard time. Which, of course, they only returned tenfold. “Surprised the rest of the world hadn’t discovered that sooner.”

“Most of these files aren’t digitized. Foggy told me yours were under an impressive layer of dust,” he said. Matt opened his mouth, shut it again like he had reconsidered, but kept on anyway: “Did you frequent the bar often, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I mean. Sometimes?” Steve said, making sure to add the verbal shrug to mirror his shoulders while entirely astounded his mouth was still forming the words he heard himself saying. It wasn’t like he was closeted, but he certainly didn’t go around proclaiming that he was Captain Bisexual either. “Bucky and I didn’t have a whole lot of money, so we couldn’t always go, but… I don’t know. Those nights always seemed to go a bit better than the double dates he’d try to set up with girls.” At the very least, he told himself, Matt finding out now was probably a good thing considering--well, the situation his stomach kept finding itself in, the one that convinced it to do flips every time he caught the corners of Matt’s eyes crinkling behind his glasses. “I mean, he and I, we were never--well there was that one time when Dana and Wendy--these really great drag queens--they dared us to, uh… it was nothing.”

You talk too much when you’re nervous and have nothing to say, Peggy said to him once at the SSR base during the war. Bucky and Gabe had choked on their water, Howard adding in a lone “ha!” from behind his work bench, and apparently what she had said was common knowledge. Now Matt knew that too. Among other things. What a party.

“But uh… thanks for this,” he said, coughing slightly. “The nondisclosure, um. Yeah. This will help a lot, I’m guessing. You didn’t have to do this.”

“You’re our client,” Matt said simply, shrugging. “We’re here for your best interest.”

In the silences, Steve found himself reaching back again, that old bad habit that he could never seem to get rid of: the Commandos were hovering around his shoulders and he could sense their eyes rolling, the jibes waiting on the tips of their hazy tongues. In that moment, the clearest image was Dernier’s smirk with the air of I don’t even have to speak English to know you flubbed that exchange with Carter.

But here: Say something, you dunce. (That was unmistakably Falsworth.)

His face contorted in frustration instead of listening, and he hoped that it didn’t make too much of a noise that Matt could hear the crack of his jaw as his grimace swiveled and stretched. But that was just being overly worried, right? There was no way Matt developed that kind of super hearing when he went blind.

“So. Do you want to go grab a coffee?”

Steve’s eyes widened so quickly he almost felt a muscle pull in his lids. “Um. Yeah! Sure!” Tone it down soldier, Morita snorted in his head. “Sounds good,” he said, hopefully a bit less openly enthusiastic. “Right now?”

“Unless you’ve got someplace to be?”

“No, no, not at all.”

The cafe Matt led him to--literally led, as in Captain America followed a blind man through the streets of New York, half hoping he would reach to take his arm again like a really, truly pathetic golden retriever--was the closest thing to a hole in the wall Steve had seen yet. The door was so small both of them had to duck slightly, Matt reaching to feel for the top of the jamb, and the paint mirrored the worn color of the surrounding brick. The inside was homey in the sort of way that actually reminded Steve of home, the apartment he and his ma lived in before the TB settled into her chest. Patchworked but charming. The deep scent of coffee and tea was already sinking into the fabric of his shirt.

“I like coming down here to think,” Matt said, gesturing vaguely before him. A smattering of tables sat along the wall across from the cash register, and he followed Steve to sit at the one towards the back corner, a hand hovering just above his shoulder. “It’s quiet the times I tend to be here. And they don’t ask questions.”

“Questions?”

“Ah…” Matt shifted in his seat, pulled at his suit sleeve. “If I bring casework down. And you know.” He tilted his head to the cane resting at his knee.

“Right.” Something was itching at Steve’s side, but that was more of Natasha rubbing off on him than anything, probably. Not everyone was a spy who folded the truth into unrecognizable shapes. Some people were just lawyers who invited clients out to coffee in the middle of the day for the hell of it. Lawyers with really great faces and hands who had clients with enormous idiot streaks.

Steve opened his mouth to say something else but was interrupted as the barista, a young girl with spiky blue hair, plopped a paper mug of coffee by Matt’s hand. The usual, apparently. It wasn’t long before she reappeared with one for Steve. “I always have his ready by this time but I didn’t know he’d have someone with him. Sugar and cream’s on the table.”

And he’d hoped that he would have some topic of conversation by the time she came back. He didn’t, of course. Because why should his head cooperate with him like that? What a foolish expectation.

“So what’s your usual?” he coughed out after a moment. Clever boy, that one--Colonel Phillips this time.

“I’m not really sure, to tell you the truth,” he frowned. “It’s mostly straight espresso but I think she puts something caramel in it.” Slowly his fingers crawled around the edges of the cup, tracing the line of the brown sleeve along the middle--Steve caught himself staring and caught the barista quirking an eyebrow in his direction, shaking her head. “I don’t always get a lot of sleep, so this helps. But I wanted to ask you…”

Steve’s heart leapt up to his throat and settled back down in his chest with a crash. It was starting to get ridiculous.

“How closely did you follow the case with Wilson Fisk a couple of years ago?”

“I think I read about it more after the fact,” he said as he wrapped his hands around his mug to mirror Matt’s. “I was a little, uh… caught up in things.”

“Right, that was in the middle of…” Matt’s head tilted vaguely from side to side, the motion filling in the blanks of what neither of them wanted to say out loud. When Steve would disappear off the face of the earth for months at a time, leading to wild tabloids speculation on his whereabouts; the crazed mesh of time, unquantifiable, when his life centered around putting out the fires in the media and the Avengers themselves while Bucky came back to himself; Sokovia. The first night back in Stark Tower after Theta Protocol had been initiated, he had come across an old newspaper shoved a dusty magazine rack with Fisk’s face plastered on the front page. He’d skimmed the article. Nodded to himself, glad that things were turning out the way they should be a few neighborhoods over from his old stomping ground. But he hadn’t given it much thought outside a couple nights with Sam upstate.

“You saw that he’s in prison, correct?” Matt asked, and after Steve nodded, he continued: “That case was--it was a rather personal one. It was happening in our backyard and we were representing some of the tenants his contacts were trying to push out--it was… complicated.”

“And messy, I’m assuming.”

“Yes,” he said with a laugh, quickly pushing it down with a cough. “Very messy. His girlfriend--fiancee, maybe--we’re pretty sure she got herself involved as well, but she managed to leave the city before any of that could come out. And now I’m hearing things about how she is pulling strings to get Fisk released.” Even in the warm lighting of the cafe, a dark untouchable shadow seemed to crawl along Matt’s forehead as his brow furrowed. “Vanessa Marianna. Have you heard anything about her? Have any of your team members mentioned the name at all?”

The name didn’t sound the least bit familiar. “Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry,” said Steve. His hands wrapped back around the bottom of his coffee, and he found that it was still hot enough to try to scald the pads of his fingers. “I can see if anything comes up in our files? Someone might know something even if they haven’t mentioned it yet--”

“Thank you,” Matt said quickly. “Really. Thank you.”

There was a grin tugging on the corners of Matt’s mouth, flickering enough to show the smallest flash of teeth to contrast against the lenses of his glasses. Steve felt a hopeless sort of grimace flash onto his face with the heat of his blush, and he forced out with as normal of a voice as he could manage, “It’s really not a problem.”

“And, um…” Matt rubbed his hand along the back of his neck. “Would you be willing to lend a hand with this whole thing if we needed it? Murdock and Nelson is--well, we’re still pretty small and that limits a lot of what we can do--”

“Matt, I’m no lawyer. I don’t even have a college education. I don’t think I could realistically help with any of this.”

“Other things, I mean--”

“Do you want me to be the public face or something? Like a spokesperson? Because I can, I just don’t know if that would really help… what?”

Matt had shoved his coffee to the side, dangerously close to the edge--the barista eyed his hand carefully, weighing whether she should have a replacement ready to go or not. From behind his glasses, Steve could see the corners of his eyes bunching up, but without the smile that had started to make his heart problems come rushing back, Matt looked only painfully frustrated. “I don’t need you to be a public face,” he said quietly. “I just--I might need help with this. And I am asking for your help.”

“I can do that, Matt, and I want to.” He reached across the table and moved the coffee back to Matt’s hands, and they gripped around the sleeve slowly. Like every movement had to be carefully calculated to keep in anything he didn’t want spilling out all over the table. “I want to help you, but you have to tell me how I can.”

Matt nodded, took a sip of his coffee, and Steve mirrored him, not paying any attention to the bitterness on his tongue. “Thank you,” he said finally.

“So are you going to tell me what you need?”

Matt cocked his head to the side. Massaged his eyebrows, pinched the bridge of his nose. “Not yet.”

Before Steve could say anything, Matt’s phone began to ring, a monotone electronic voice repeating Foggy Foggy Foggy into his pocket. Foggy on the other end was speaking a mile a minute and loudly, too, so much so that Matt had to hold the phone a few inches from his ear and that Steve could hear nearly every third word.

Sorry, Matt mouthed.

“It’s fine,” he whispered. “Just…” Matt looked up at him, and Steve tried to keep the sigh building up in his chest to himself. “Just let me know when you can tell me what you need, okay?”

Steve put a hand on Matt’s shoulder, nodded to the barista, and turned to leave, careful to make his lingering fingers along the seam of Matt’s coat seem as unintentional as possible.

Time passed, as it was prone to do, and the odd coffee outing--not date, definitely not date--faded to the back of Steve’s mind. Or, at least, it was gently shifted to the furthest back burner: not left to grow cold on the counter, but certainly not being lavished with attention like what was hissing and frothing right under his nose. Missions, while not nearly as frequent as they once had been, still announced themselves in the form of a surprise visit from Maria and Fury, and within a couple of hours, part or all of them would be flying off to some remote corner of the country or the planet with pit stops along the way to pick up anyone they needed who hadn’t been in Manhattan.

Halfway through the flight back from the Bamako mission, Steve could hardly take anymore of watching Wanda and Vision make eyes at each other--good for them, really, even if he didn’t understand it, but he didn’t want to see it, not in his current circumstances--and he moved up to the empty seat in the cockpit beside Maria.

“I’m surprised you lasted this long. They’re absolutely disgusting,” Maria said as soon as fell into the chair. “And you know what I mean, right? Not because he’s a synthezoid but because--”

“I know, I know,” he sighed.

“Romance is gross as a third party!”

“You’re telling me like I don’t know already.”

She grinned, exhaled sharply in what could have been called a laugh. Her eyes flicked down to the instruments along the dash and out back along the dark expanse of the Atlantic, to the horizon where the black of the sea and the blank of the sky met at some indistinguishable line.

“You were in New York when the Wilson Fisk ordeal happened in Hell’s Kitchen, right?”

She glanced at him, eyebrow raised. “I was, yeah. Where’s this coming from?”

“I’m just curious.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“I’m not lying!”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Do you know anything about Fisk’s partner Vanessa Marianna?”

Maria’s thumb punched the autopilot button so she could take the time to make her reaction count: slow turn, a blank stare so fed-up that it almost had Steve running back to the cabin to sit amid whatever nonsense Wanda and Vision had gotten up to in his absence. And he expected her to say something after a few moments, but the silent stare dragged on.

“If it helps,” Steve said lightly, “she’s Fisk’s girlfriend or possibly fiancee.”

“So you’re obviously not just curious,” she said. “You want to know specific information, so it’s for a reason. I just want to know why.”

“Maria--”

“You’re an Avenger, Steve.” She turned back to the controls and took the plane off autopilot. “And you know what that means nowadays. I know you want to stick your nose in things for justice and whatever else, and it’s admirable, but with the regulations on us…” She sighed loudly before hitting autopilot again, not even bothering to look at him. “The whole thing with Fisk… that is not something to get mixed up in. He’s a powerful man and the Accords are still new enough that he could pay someone to make the language work in his favor. Okay?” And then she looked at him, and the worry was so palpable along her brow that it almost made her unrecognizable. “Either way, the name you mentioned doesn’t sound familiar.”

So he had dropped it--with her at least, but he found that when they got back to New York and he was around the wide expanse of resources allotted to them that her tone of voice and pinched concern kept perching on his shoulder and guiding him away. After enough time, though, the worry would cycle back on itself and burrow into his chest: Matt was still facing this threat, and who was Steve Rogers to let some law dictate what he should do?

But at the same time: Maria had a point. The Accords didn’t just apply to him--if he fucked up badly enough, the repercussions could spread to swallow them all.

It was getting harder to focus.

More missions came and went: to Libreville, to Guayaquil, to some floating AIM base off the coast of Palau. Steve stayed behind on all of them, watched Sam suit up, or Natasha follow behind Clint with his forgotten quiver, or Bucky toss Rhodey his WD-40 before they headed down to the tarmac. Maybe his skills weren’t needed on these quick stop-and-drops, but it was likely, Steve figured, that Maria thought he was too distracted at the moment to be out in the field. And she was probably right.

Six weeks after his coffee with Matt, the entire team was off somewhere outside Porto Alegre save himself, Tony, and Bruce--and the latter two had gone on some very important excursion for colored electrical tape. (Something about a labeling system in the lab and preventing whatever mishap had occurred this time. Typical.) So he was alone and wandering through the building as he was prone to when something was eating away in his head, and before long he found himself in the wide expanse of the lobby, the midday sun streaming in through the glass front facade, and Pepper was looking like she had been trying to flag him down for a good ten seconds.

“I was just talking about you,” she said warmly once they managed to meet in the middle of the floor. “Resident artist of the Avengers among all those left brains…”

Steve tried to keep the frown from showing too visibly, even though he know it tried to push past his attempts. Pepper was never quite this bubbly around anyone ever--unless she was trying to close a deal. The small woman at her side, though, was not the usual recipient of this cleverly-laid charade. “I mean… I guess? I don’t really--”

“He’s so humble,” Pepper laughed, tossing a grin at the other woman. It was unclear, at least to Steve, whether she was buying the act, and his inability to read her at all was quickly making him uncomfortable. Her mouth lay on the cusp between expressions, wavering between two poles in a way that was impossible to pin down. “You should see what he calls doodles. Really, Steve, they’re very impressive.”

“Well--thank you--”

“Tony wanted some new art around the boardroom,” Pepper said quickly, “and I found this gallery down the road in Hell’s Kitchen--”

“I’m an art dealer,” the woman said. She pulled a tablet out of her purse and started scrolling through the digital catalogue--with her attention directed elsewhere, Pepper took the moment to flash Steve a look that screamed please kill me. “Contemporary, postmodern mostly.” The painting she offered up on the screen was had less sense than the Pollock he had tried to describe to Matt that morning: the lines didn’t form anything that could readily be identified, the colors splattered and bubbled together in ways he almost felt compelled to try to fix, and he really, truly, was prepared to start penning the introduction to his manifesto against this sort of thing. “It’s called ‘Between Voice and Presence.’”

“Looks kind of like a duck’s foot,” he blurted.

“It’s, um… well, it’s not that,” she said.

“I mean, I figured--”

She opened her mouth but shut it soon after, tucking the tablet back in her bag. “I really ought to get going, Ms. Potts,” she said, “but it was an honor to meet you, Captain. Do stop by if you’re ever around West 55th.” The threat of trying to educate him was layered on thick and apparently quite real as she slipped a business card into his palm as they shook hands.

VANESSA MARIANNA

SCENE CONTEMPO GALLERY

“Wait…”

Pepper had already walked Vanessa to the door and Steve was left standing in the middle of the lobby by himself--like an idiot, Falsworth’s voice muttered, and just to add gas to the fire he stayed where he stood until Pepper huffed back, her normal demeanor returned to the surface.

“That took way too long,” she said, motioning for Steve to walk with her to wherever she was going, which he guessed she was probably running late to. “And it’s nice stuff, it really is, but she pulled up this artist who did just weird naked portraits and you know Tony, suddenly that was the best choice for a corporate boardroom, but thankfully this isn’t ten years ago and I call the shots and he can deal with it.”

“Pepper--”

“And Vanessa was one of those self-aggrandizing art types and it was infuriating after about half an hour--”

“Pepper.”

She was halfway into the elevator, fingers pressed against the button for the ninety-eighth floor. In a few seconds, the doors would try to close and start buzzing angrily when their feet still stood in the way.

“How did you find this dealer?”

And right on cue, the elevator began to buzz, grating in his ear and highlighting the just seconds-too-long squint Pepper hastily tried to hide once she realized what she was doing. “Oh, you know,” she shrugged. “Google. Yelp. That sort of thing. I really don’t remember.” Her phone started to ring from her pocket, and he stepped back out of the elevator door and let it close.

Coincidences weren’t a thing he really trusted, not anymore. Not that he ever had--once oddities, they now carried a more menacing air that seemed to gravitate to him like an atmosphere. He breathed it in and his lungs tightened: at one point he might have called it anxiety, but now he only saw it as smog. Some days were better than others. Today was a bad day, though he could always trace it back to the source, some clunker of a rifle following his path from the shadows with a bullseye etched into the scope.

---

He called Matt. No answer. The mission lasted longer than expected, some unforeseen circumstances cropping up on the other side of Lago Guaíba from the city, and everything but the sat phones had run out of battery days ago--not like they would have had time to shoot him an email anyway, by the looks of it. Tony kept an eye on them through Vision’s connection to the Tower’s system, and every so often FRIDAY would chirp some update, usually inconsequential.

Natasha would have known how to approach this, wouldn’t she? Of course she would have. But only after she had pushed him on Sam and Bucky to solve the messy bits first. “When you get like this,” she had said to him once, “I have to treat you like a toddler. Wear you out. Feed you. And if the problem persists I can lend a hand, but that’s rarely necessary.” So of course he would have to endure a run and one of Sam’s lumpy-but-delicious grilled cheeses, and then Bucky would sit him down and ask in a bored tone if the person in question this time was a girl or a boy or otherwise.

And only then could he tell Natasha about Vanessa and Pepper.

If they ever got back from Brazil.

Every couple minutes he caught himself checking his phone--just in case--and then it was every minute. Every thirty seconds. And finally he was staring at it, in the back of his head hoping that Tony or Bruce wouldn’t walk in. Nothing: no calls or texts or emails or anything at all, except for yet another Candy Crush invitation from Darcy that, for once, looked vaguely appealing in the tense monotony of the past few hours.

He thought about calling Matt again. They had exchanged numbers, and Matt had handed him his phone to program the contact for him. When he called, was the ringtone his name on repeat like Foggy’s? (Steve Steve Steve Steve. Hello, here is who’s thinking about you right now. Here is who wants to hear your voice.)

Sometime in the last however long it had been since he last looked out the window, the sun had set--hard, with purpose.

He could call Matt again, right? He needed answers, and Matt had them, and if he had to sit alone and stew in the juices of his own spun-out thoughts he was liable to start screaming, and that never ended well.

It rang twice before a cough and a half-choked hello answered.

“You need to tell me what’s going on.”

“Steve--what do you mean--”

“About Vanessa. And--this whole thing.” He had started pacing without realizing it and found himself at the window staring out over the sea of lights in the city. “I wanted to help you. I still do. But every time I try to dig, people pull me back by my collar.”

Matt sighed into the receiver, a fuzz in his ear, and then silence.

“Matt?”

“Still here. Just…” Another sigh, another fuzz. “Come over. I don’t want to do this over the phone.”

Steve’s heart rocketed against his chest so hard that he almost couldn’t hear the address--but his fingers managed to grip the scrap of paper, the pen and form something legible. And his feet moved of their own accord, navigating the grid system to the nondescript brick building in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen, squinting against the looped cherry blossom advertisement across the street. A break on the sidewalk, and they methodically plodded up the staircase, dark wood lining a dark hall, until the dull golden number on the door laid before him, just like Matt said on the phone. He reached up to knock, but the door opened before his knuckles hit the door.

“Hi,” Matt said (breathily, almost, or maybe just out-of-breath, Steve didn’t know what he was supposed to expect). He quickly retreated from the door, padding down to the living room. The apartment was lit only by the ad Steve had seen earlier and the entire place was minimalistic. Spartan, if he was using the term correctly. “If you want to turn on a light, go right ahead. I obviously don’t have a preference.”

The ad was doing well enough on its own. “I don’t mean to get right to it--or I guess I do, I don’t know…” Steve let his voice trail off as he watched Matt lean forward on the counter, gripping the edges of it tightly, squeezing like he wanted to break a chunk of the stone off in his hand. Like breaking something would fix another. His head tucked down, chin reaching for his sternum. The pale pink light played off the contours of his face and he wanted to trace the shadows with his finger. “I want to know what’s going on. What’s really going on. You don’t often hear my people telling me to stay out of something.”

Matt didn’t move at first, nodding and slowly walking back towards where Steve was standing by the couches, away from the yet unbroken surfaces in the kitchen. Somehow he came to a stop right in front of him, a few feet back, and he hadn’t been using a cane or anything. Of course he knew the layout of his own home well enough, but to know so precisely where he was standing…

“Fisk was a danger to Hell’s Kitchen. He could’ve spread to other parts of the city,” he started carefully. His speech was halting, picking words out one by one. “And you can’t just stand by idly when it happens… when you know about it.”

“Of course not,” said Steve.

“So I took some matters into my own hands.”

Matt’s mouth twitched, a thin line across his face. Maybe waiting to collect the nerve to say what he wanted to follow, maybe hoping Steve would fill in the blanks himself.

“Did you represent his victims in court…?”

That look stayed. Resolute but frustrated. Heels skidding into the concrete, catching on the gravel and crackling under the soles as he was being dragged, clearly, towards something he didn’t want to do. “That, and…” Matt’s hands were on Steve’s shoulders, arms locked at the elbow, surprisingly strong. “Punch me. Or--try.”

“I… I’m…”

“I’m serious.”

He couldn’t be. He couldn’t possibly be serious. But he also couldn’t be an idiot because he was a lawyer, right? From an Ivy? Surely if you could graduate from Ivy-League law school and pass the bar you had it together--yet Matt wanted Steve, Captain America, to throw a punch at him, a man who literally would not see it coming.

“Is this a test?”

Matt’s hands tightened on his shoulders, moved down onto his arms to grip harder at the muscle there, away from the bone. “No. Not a test. Punch me.”

“Not getting out of this, am I?”

The corner of his lips turned up slightly and faded back down as he took one step back, relinquishing his hold. “Go on, then.”

As he set his feet, Steve wondered if Bucky could sense he was doing something stupid all the way from South America. Was he going to get a strongly-worded text out of the blue that would save him from this? One could only hope, and he didn’t have all day. Hell, he hardly had a few more seconds--Matt was starting to get visibly impatient.

He threw the punch.

Matt’s head bolted to the right of it and, vise-like, his hands and arms wound around the parts of himself Steve had extended, had exposed; in the shock of it all, Matt was able to force Steve’s weight to tip, toppling him to the ground on his back, two knees digging into his rib cage and his wrists pinned down on either side of his head.

Steve could have pushed him off, freed his wrists, gotten back to his feet so they could take this new bit of information and move on--Matt was strong, more so than expected, but not serum-strong--but he let himself lie there beneath him and catch his breath after having the wind knocked out of him when he landed. That was why he was breathing so hard. Partly.

Above him, Matt was leveling his breathing as well, chest going up and down, closer to Steve’s then further away, and the heat of his panting brushed up against his forehead. Along his eyes, down to his ears, where his heart was beating against his eardrum with a physical mallet. “There were… other ways I fought back. Not just in court.” Suddenly the pressure was gone from Steve’s wrists as Matt leaned up, shifting his weight back to Steve’s stomach. “You should go,” he said, but he didn’t move.

“You didn’t answer my question,” Steve said. “About what this whole thing is.”

“I know.”

“And you gotta know I only have more questions, Matt,” he said, coming close to a murmur. “A lot more.”

“I know.”

He climbed off and helped Steve to his feet, holding a hand out to the nothing before him and waiting for him to latch on. Provide an anchor. Stronger than he looks echoed in his head again. A few light pink scars around his eyebrow caught in the garish light from the window as it fell across those same dips and hollows he eyed from across the room earlier--at this close distance they felt sharper, another weapon held hidden behind his back.

Matt’s footsteps behind him offered a dull echo of his own as he walked to the door. The door squeaked on its hinges. With one leg in the hallway, Steve felt that grip on his arm again, just above his wrist, gently tugging him back.

“What?” he whispered. In the building’s hall he sensed eyes--not actual eyes, but ears pressed to walls, or even just a presence pushing down on his voice until it quieted.

“I didn’t mean for it to happen like this,” said Matt, punctuation dotting every syllable, then sighing. “Come back tomorrow morning. I’m going to tell you everything.”

The next morning, Steve rose early after waking even earlier--Bruce and Tony had been skulking about the halls all night, finally taking themselves to bed a little after sunrise, and having them catch him slipping out before he would typically go for his morning run with Sam would generate questions. The Avengers, as a whole, were a nosy lot and with Steve’s apparent inability to pass even a white lie by them unnoticed, it was better to just avoid those situations altogether. Playing it safe for the first time, if he were going to be honest and introspective and try to not think about whatever happened the night before at Matt’s apartment.

It wasn’t until he had walked through the doors to Stark Tower that he consciously realized that Matt, in addition to being far stronger than expected, had also avoided his fist completely. Matt, who was blind. He had no reason to suspect that he was lying about his disability, which would have been a complicated double life to pull off anyway and for seemingly no payoff. For once since this ordeal set itself in motion, he was glad that most everyone was still out on that mission: not a single one of them would have let Steve live it down if he had admitted that he’d been a little too distracted to immediately notice the most unusual and important detail.

He was going to keep that to himself. Forever.

After the sun had risen to a decent hour, Steve retraced the route he took to Hell’s Kitchen in the daylight to find that Matt’s apartment was empty--not answering the doorbell had been his first clue, but a neighbor had seen “that sweet blind young man in the corner unit” head out of the building just after six.

Maybe he had meant to come to the office. It was a Monday, after all.

But he wasn’t there either.

Their--secretary? Admin assistant? Paralegal?--was still gaping at him. She had been gaping at him ever since she opened the door a few minutes ago and motioned to the faded armchair in the corner where he could wait until Foggy got off the phone. And it wasn’t so much gaping as it was panicked staring, maybe. Either way, she hadn’t said much to him and hadn’t paid any attention to the stack of papers on her desk or the whining noises from the copy machine.

“Do you know when Matt is supposed to be in this morning?” he asked.

A brief glance down at what was probably her calendar, a noncommittal twitch of her shoulders. No real answer. He grinned at her, which appeared to do nothing to calm her nerves. He felt a little bad for her--most of the time when people reacted like this (which never had never stopped being weird for him), they had the ability to turn right around and stave off whatever feeling they were experiencing against their will. Here, she was completely stuck.

Her eyes stayed wide and slightly frantic until the clack of the phone hanging up in Foggy’s office dragged her from her chair and into the room, door slamming behind her, the voices that followed clearly unaware of how thin the walls were. “Why is Captain America in our office?”

“Karen, he’s a client.”

“What.”

“You filed the paperwork for him. Rogers-comma-Steve.”

“That’s a common enough name! Was I supposed to assume we had an Avenger--just--he’s outside.”

She opened the door, smiling--if just a tad too brightly to pass as normal--with Foggy standing behind his desk toeing the line somewhere between amused and resigned. “He’s all yours.”

Steve wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be directed at Foggy or himself, but he tried to throw her an apologetic grin as they stepped around each other in the doorway. (Why didn’t he think to call before dropping by? That would have made much more sense. Leaping then looking, classic Rogers, drawled Morita’s voice. Eagerness getting the best of him once again.)

“So…” Foggy said as he sat back down in his chair. “What can I do you for?”

“I was, um…” So much for avoiding situations perfect for white lies. “I was actually looking for Matt?” Foggy raised an eyebrows, so he added, “He wanted me to come by this morning after what--uh. Well. I saw him last night and--okay.” Foggy was staring at him in earnest now, clearly holding back an avalanche of questions, and could he blame him? Not in the slightest. He was really bringing this on himself. “Do you know about Matt?” he asked quietly.

            At that, Foggy snorted. “Do I know about Matt? Please. What don’t I know about him? I mean, I obviously don’t know exactly what you’re referring to but I can infer that you’re talking about something a little less…” He made a wavy motion with his hand. “Y’know. The answer is still probably yes.”

“Okay,” he said. He wouldn’t--couldn’t--get into details, obviously, but at least he would be able to ground himself instead of free-floating through the haze of uncertainty where he’d been for the better half of a day. “Is this a--a new thing? How long has he been--”

“I mean, almost as long as I’ve known him?” Foggy said. “A lot of things happen in college. He never really, y’know, with me--it’s just theoretical knowledge. In the abstract.” He leaned forward, propping his head in his hand, elbow on the desk. “So how did you find out? When did this happen?” There was an odd impish spark in his eyes, the kind that too often found itself in and around Clint.

“Last night. Honestly less than ten hours ago,” he sighed.

“So we’re having a bit of a crisis now, are we? Had to talk it out? Confer with Matt’s best friend to plan out the next move?”

(Steve was going to make sure Foggy and Clint never met.)

“I don’t know if ‘crisis’ is the right word for it…” he said slowly, and Foggy flashed a smirk like he was saying, sure it isn’t, sweetheart. “I’m a registered Avenger, and knowing there are people out there who do have abilities of some sort that got missed by the Accords--that’s certainly part of it--”

“Steve, being good in the sack hardly makes Matt a full-fledged superhero!”

“What?”

“What--oh. Oh my,” Foggy grimaced. “We’re talking about two different things aren’t we?”

Steve dragged his hand down his face, hoping that he hadn’t yet turned a deep shade of red. “Looks like it.” The heat stinging in his cheeks only proved that his hope had been a futile one. “So Matt is into men?”

“To some degree. So you know about his kung-fu senses shit?”

“To some degree.”

Steve took a peek at Foggy through his fingers, which had crawled back up to cover his eyes. He was nodding, looking around the room like there was something there that could help him--unlikely--and taking deep breaths in and out of his nose. Assessing something, the next thing to say or do or whether it was better to let the conversation drop and pretend it never happened. “So,” he said finally. Aiming for option one. “How much… do you know?”

“He dodged um, something really well for someone who can’t see and he’s pretty good at hand-to-hand,” Steve said with a shrug.

“Ah, okay,” Foggy frowned. “Is that it?”

“He was going to explain more today, which is why I’m here.”

Foggy took a quick look at the clock on the wall--it was ticking closer and closer to nine, and by the way his frown creased deeper, Steve could tell Matt was getting later by the second. But his mouth didn’t push into that shape out of anger; those lines were sharper and drew blood. This was something else.

“Well…” he sighed. “Feel free to wait out where you were. Karen doesn’t bite, promise,” he added.

“And I’ll tell her that I don’t either.”

“Probably for the best.”

When Steve went to open the door back to their small lobby, he found Matt on the other side, hand stretching out for a knob that was no longer in reach. A small bemused grin crossed his face as he stepped aside to let Steve through, and Steve noted absently that Karen’s tense stature hadn’t eased up in the slightest since he went into Foggy’s office.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” Matt said.

“No, no, not at all.” But the way Karen’s hand twitched around her pen said she thought otherwise. Thankfully there was no way for Matt to know that.

“Let’s take a walk.”

Steve followed Matt down the stairs and out onto the sidewalk--Matt leaned against the bricks, his back covering the sign for Nelson and Murdock. “Foggy really didn’t tell you anything of that much consequence,” he said quietly.

“So you heard all of that… somehow?”

“‘Kung-fu senses and shit’ really isn’t that far off.” He collapsed his cane, sticking it into the breast pocket of his coat and holding out his other arm, which Steve looped inside his elbow. Again. He made a mental note to look for a word to describe the middle ground between delight and horror just so he could aptly describe it when the time came--and it was probably coming soon. Keeping everything bottled up in his head was starting to get noisy.

“So… where are we going?”

“Take a left at the corner.”

One left, a few blocks, and approximately twelve near foot-in-mouth incidents later, they stood before an old stone church with a lone bench beside the front gate. Matt sat on the right side and motioned for Steve to join him. He didn’t say anything at first: head tilted up towards the sky, deep breaths when the wind picked up, readjusting his position on the bench until--and maybe it was just Steve being far too hyper-aware--their knees almost touched.

“I like to come here to think some mornings,” he said. “Sometimes I go to confession. The history books said you’re Catholic.”

“Lapsed, mostly.”

Matt nodded, then turned slightly to face him. “I’m going to get right to the point, which I know I avoided for too long. The accident that blinded me as a child also gave me heightened senses.” He started to speed up, the words bumping into each other uneasily as he pushed to get it all out, his head shifting away from Steve’s gaze as if he didn’t even want to appear like he was looking at him. “That’s how I dodged your punch last night. I could hear the air move around you, feel your body heat shift in space. I was involved in the Fisk case not only as a lawyer but also--” He sighed. Frowned. “I’m Daredevil,” he muttered. “I’m the devil of Hell’s Kitchen.”

Another sigh, tensed shoulders. It wasn’t something he was used to sharing with people so openly, it seemed. Not all in one go. Matt’s hands were gripped on his knees, knuckles white and fingers trembling. Controlled breathing, a pattern. Steve wanted to reach out, touch his shoulder, grab his hand even--but he didn’t know how Matt would react. Tony never wanted people touching him during his episodes, but Bucky had clung to his side like glue after they brought him back. So he waited.

“You know who Daredevil is, right?” Matt murmured after his hands stopped shaking. “You got that far when you read up on the case, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, I mean…” he said. “My sources didn’t really go into him all that much. Mentioned the vigilante in the neighborhood that got tied up in the whole mess and who ended up delivering Fisk to the cops.” What was left of SHIELD had hardly paid it any attention, even when the media finally made the nickname; he’d overheard Fury once on the phone mutter something about “everyone getting bright ideas after seeing us take out a bunch of aliens, dangerous and stupid as hell,” but they had all miscalculated what they were looking at. “So that was you. Bringing Fisk down.”

“It was.”

“If you hadn’t throw me to the ground last night, there’s no way I would’ve believed you, you know,” he half-laughed, and thankfully Matt joined in, if only slightly. Tentatively he reached out and put his hand overtop of Matt’s own. “Thank you for trusting me with this.” He waited for Matt to tense up and pull his hand back into himself, to rebuild part of his wall, but it stayed there under his, warm. “If you don’t mind me asking… how did you avoid the registration?”

Matt laughed for real this time. “I’m a lawyer. I’ve read the Accords front to back three different times. There’s no way they could have made me do anything,” he said. “I have no connection to SHIELD, so my identity--which is still under wraps--wasn’t leaked when it all fell apart a few years ago. All of the Avengers, everything under Pym Technologies or Stark Industries, anyone who may have had a contract with SHIELD: public knowledge, and that’s where they mined their data. They were looking for people with abilities, and to them, I was just a guy in a mask. There wasn’t any way for them to know any differently.”

And now Steve had to keep this knowledge to himself: that was what he saw between the lines. “Okay. Okay…” he said, nodding to himself. “So. Why are you telling me all this?”

Matt flipped his hand, gripping Steve’s tightly and looking him dead on as best as he could, pushing his glasses down his nose so Steve could look into the bright hazel of his eyes. “Because I want you to help me.”

---

There was no doubting it: Steve was royally fucked.

He had excused himself quickly from the bench with Matt that morning, walking straight past Stark Tower and into Central Park where he could sit and contemplate his circumstances in peace. Or--relative peace, considering the foot traffic of the particular section where he had finally dropped himself. And he stayed there. For hours. The sun was going down and his phone had buzzed a few times, and he had hardly thought to check if it was the rest of the group on their way back from the mission.

Matt was Daredevil. Matt wanted him to play vigilante with him, break the law jumping around the rooftops at night and beating up on low-level punks who terrorized the most vulnerable of Hell’s Kitchen.

It would have been easy if all he had to do was tell Matt no, he couldn’t help him in the way he wanted, all while preserving the chance that maybe, just maybe, he could still bundle up the nerves to ask him to dinner or something. Nothing had ever been that easy for him, and this was not proving to be the exception to the rule--because the problem was that he wanted to tell him yes. All those back alley fights he could never win, all those times his nose shattered and he bled on the asphalt shouting after some asshole who wouldn’t leave a pack of girls alone or had disrespected an old vet--he could make a difference now, couldn’t he? This was a graduation, a new mission to fit his new body in this new century.

“Just think on it,” Matt had said as he had stood up to leave. “We could do a lot of good.”

In theory, in a vacuum, maybe. New York City the way it was now wasn’t in abstract: it was a real concrete thing with laws, a glass thing that could shatter if you threw your fist too hard or in the wrong direction. And wasn’t this what Matt’s proposal was? Put down your shield and take a leap of faith. This is what you want.

He checked his phone, saw one missed call from Sam and a couple texts from Bucky saying they were on their way back and boy did they have a story to tell--so he had a few more hours to sort this out. Alone. Which hadn’t gotten him anywhere all day.

Bereft of options, he dialed Matt.

“I need you to talk me through this,” he said as soon as Matt picked up.

“Okay. I can do that.”

“I don’t know how I could say yes with the Accords still in play. I don’t know a way around it. My hands are tied.”

“Come back to the office. Foggy and Karen are out.”

He hung up. Heart pounding, palms slick with sweat--he couldn’t even blame this on his thing for Matt. This was genuine anxiety. Was he about to make a truly awful decision? Was he going to screw up his life and fuck over the Avengers at the same time? With SHIELD gone, The Fridge technically didn’t exist anymore, but if SHIELD had that, then surely other agencies had facilities like it and worse where he could be thrown to rot. The Avengers could be disbanded, possibly prosecuted for not being aware one of their own had gone astray. The possibilities were endless and bleak.

That is, if he ended up going along with Matt and things went south, which was a decision he hadn’t made yet. He thought.

Matt was waiting for him in front of Karen’s desk, having pushed aside her paperwork and pencil cup for a spot to sit. He held his cane between his legs and was chewing on his bottom lip--and none of it was helping.

“What is troubling you?” Matt asked simply. As if the evening had enough time for a thorough answer.

“I told you on the phone,” he said. “Because I am an Avenger, I am registered with the government. Anything I do is regulated. All of our missions that we go on--we get those orders from a committee. We can’t suit up and fight an attack on the city until we get the green light. They have to know what research Tony and Bruce are up to so we can be sure we don’t have another Ultron, and there’s an emergency shut-down protocol for Vision just in case. And you’re telling me,” he said, catching his breath, “that you want me to go in the face of that, of all this regulation that carries really, really terrible penalties, to help you?”

And Matt--this asshole--grinned at him. He fucking grinned.

“What’s so amusing about all this, Matt?”

And he laughed. Actually laughed, ducked his head down and everything. “You’re Steve Rogers.” He reached one hand into the outbound paperwork bin and patted around until he latched onto a thick file, holding it up. “You protested the closing of a gay bar when the state sodomy laws wouldn’t get repealed for another thirty years. A number of historians found records of six different Steve Rogers trying to enlist in the New York City area--all with the exact same handwriting, all rejected--and they seem to think you were so determined to get to war that you committed multiple felonies to do so. You helped take down SHIELD. You confronted the government and everyone standing behind Tony Stark when they tried to go after James Barnes.” With an emphatic slap he dropped the file back on the desk, and a few papers fluttered out, old scans of newspaper clippings or peer-reviewed journals where, if he squinted, he could spy his own name.

“That’s what’s funny to me,” Matt continued. “You know just as well and probably better than I do that the Accords have strangled certain arms of our justice and intelligence systems.” He moved to stand from the desk and his cane clattered to the floor, toeing it aside as he crossed the room, Steve’s heart thumping loudly. Matt stopped within a few feet of him, but it was still close enough to make Steve’s face flush. “You have always defied the law when it clashed with your morals. And I--I’m not asking you to do this lightly. I know this is asking a lot, more than I probably should. But I need help. I’m only one man, and I’m more human than you are. I think Fisk’s hired someone dangerous to enact revenge on me. On the neighborhood that rejected him like a bad transplant. We could be a good team, you and I.”

Steve watched his fingers as they removed his glasses, folded them and tucked them into his breast pocket--Matt’s cheeks had a tinge of red to them, flashing from the passion with which he spoke, with which he felt. The way his knees locked and unlocked, how the corners of his eyes squeezed together in time with the rest of him. He had a sudden urge to push him back against the wall and kiss him with all the feeling that had been building up since he first heard the proposition that morning, which may not find another outlet. It’s not that I don’t want to. Let me show you how much I want this. It’s in my blood and it’s in yours too and I don’t know what to do with myself other than this. I need to show you somehow.

But he didn’t. He didn’t move, only trying to press a calming mental hand down to sooth his racing heart. “This doesn’t just affect me,” he said quietly. “You know the law. Captain America gets busted, they’ll go after everyone.”

“Well…” And there was that smirk again, forcing that urge to kiss him back to the surface. “I’m not asking Captain America. I’m asking Steve Rogers.” Matt’s eyes were directed at his own, firm and unblinking. His chest rose and fell almost too evenly, like it was tightly controlled, and then Steve noticed the flush had crawled further and brighter under his stubble. “So what’s it going to be?”--his voice was low, and Steve started to lean forward despite himself, because that would be a way to answer him, surely--

“Manchu Wok was already closed so we--oh hey, Captain.” Foggy and Karen were standing behind him in the doorway, both balancing large brown bags with grease stains spotting the bottoms. Karen looked as if she were ready to die on the spot, but Foggy’s grin didn’t waver in the slightest. If he had any idea of what he just walked in on--which he probably did--he didn’t show it.

“So!” Matt said a little too loudly.

“So, right--” Steve coughed. “Yes.” He waited for Matt to nod before continuing, “I’ll be by sometime to get the paperwork straightened out… signatures… all that…” And now Matt looked like he wanted to die on the spot, newly initiated into his list of shortcomings. “When should I--”

“I’ll call you,” he said shortly, but there was a hint of a smile playing at the edge of his lips.

“Y’know, you can stay and get that done now if you want,” Foggy said. “We’ve got plenty of food to go around. We found this really great Indian place--”

“I’m going to go,” Steve said quickly. “But thank you.” He wanted to say something further to Matt, but Foggy and Karen had already pushed through the door, plopping the bags on the clear spot on Karen’s desk. He truly did need to get back to the Tower, someplace where he could reconcile the sinking feeling in his gut with the crackling high from the thought of Matt pressed up against him.

“Where are you going?”

“Out? For a walk, I dunno. I need to clear my head. Got a lot on my mind.”

“Steve, it’s almost midnight,” Bucky groaned, throwing a lonely sock at Steve’s head from his perch on the bed. It hooked around his ear for a brief moment before flopping to the ground as Steve continued to dig for his shoes, which had managed to disappear. “What could you possibly get out of walking around Manhattan that you couldn’t get, I don’t know… here at the Tower?"

“Fresh air maybe?”

“The balcony on the top floor.”

“Maybe I want to think about stuff in peace. Kind of hard with you lot around.” Steve didn’t have to turn around to know the light thud that followed was Bucky dramatically feigning a betrayed faint back onto the mattress. “Oh come on. What’s it to you anyway? You look like you’re headed to bed right now.” He snuck a peek behind him and Bucky still hadn’t moved from his position on the bed at a full sprawl, left hand palm up over his eyes and catching the glint from the corner lamp.

“I forgot I had a story to tell you about Brazil,” he said. “It was something only you would appreciate. But I guess it can wait until morning.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“You love me for it.”

“Can’t say I would disagree,” he laughed, swatting at Bucky’s ankle hanging off the edge. “But seriously--” Finally he spotted his shoes underneath a pile of what looked like Clint’s laundry. There were some things he didn’t question anymore. “I’m just taking a walk. You can tell me about Brazil when I get back. Or. The morning.” He hopped around the mess pulling the sneakers on without undoing the laces, and Bucky moved his hand just enough that he could eye him without sitting up. “What?”

“This whole thing you’re doing right now is so unbecoming of Captain America.”

“Shut up, Buck. What is it?”

“You’re not going to go do something stupid, are you?”

Steve snorted. “Now when have I ever done that?”

“So you’re admitting it!”          

Rolling his eyes, he glanced around the room to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything--which he knew he hadn’t, but he had to make it seem like this was a casual outing, like he hadn’t checked and double-checked everything before Bucky had pushed through the doorway. Contingency plans, he had plenty of those, if just for tonight. A throwback to before the war when no one accused him of being a terrible liar. Nowadays, he was never prepared for it. Tonight would be different--it had to be different.

So as much as he hated it, he kept lying to Bucky’s face.

“You have no witnesses. I’ll deny it all later,” he said with a smirk. “But seriously, I just need to get out for a while. We can go up the road and get donuts or something tomorrow morning. Donuts and Brazil, perfect combination.”

Bucky waved him off, still sprawled on his bed, and only after he’d gone a couple blocks towards Hell’s Kitchen did Steve realize that he might not have convinced him at all. He could have shaken Natasha awake so they could tail him just in case, or she had already hacked into his phone somehow or--

Relax, Peggy’s voice snapped lightly in his head.

Right. Relax. Nothing more relaxing than meeting a vigilante in the middle of the night. Nothing at all. The yellow tinge of the streetlights could be calming in the right frame of mind--Steve tried to find that frame, readjusting it and turning it every which way, but whenever he looked back, the yellows still glared and threw the voids of the alleys and wet slicks across the brick walls into terrible relief. The sides of the city he hadn’t seen or looked for in years, and this time he felt like he fit in--everything dark so he would fade into the steam rising from underground, hood pulled up over his blond hair to keep from reflecting that gold back onto itself. He was skulking, that was the word that kept coming back to him, skulking, and Steve Rogers didn’t skulk. Or--he didn’t used to. But a lot had changed. Too much. And that was what he kept coming back to.

Matt had left him a voicemail directing him to the parking garage near 10th and 49th, not saying where he would be. Steve guessed that he would show himself once he saw the lone figure walking around the empty streets, but as he approached the intersection the hairs on the back of his neck prickled up--there were too many places where someone could hide themselves, Matt or anyone with less-than-friendly intentions. Not that the latter would have posed any problem, but another day chained to a desk in the police station wasn’t ranking too high on his to-do list.

Across the street from the garage was a construction site, its deep pit sequestered by a mesh-covered chainlink fence. And just beyond the fence, having squeezed past the padlocked gate, was a man in red turned maroon by the night. The man’s hand raised in an aborted greeting, and he held open the gate long enough for Steve to slip through.

“Is this what you normally wear?” Steve whispered. He’d seen the photos, grainy and dark as they were, but in person it was an entirely different thing. Funny, almost, to see Matt in a mask that turned his eyes dark and menacing and gave his head demon’s horns. “It’s--”

“It works. Here,” he said, voice at a lower pitch than normal. He shoved a bundle of black clothes into Steve’s chest. “It’s my old uniform. Sized-up. The mask is the same.” A pause. “You need to wear the mask.”

“What, like over my eyes? But I--” Need to see, he finished silently.

“From what I’m told, the weave is easy to see through once it’s stretched across the top of your face. You can’t have anyone recognizing you, remember?”

And, of course, Matt was right. They left his old clothes tucked under one of the on-site dumpsters and moved across the street, pressed up against the brick to tuck themselves into the shadows. The ease with which Matt maneuvered around the fire hydrant on the corner and found the thin alleyway squeezed between the buildings made Steve wonder if the cane was just for show.

Apparently it was--as soon as Matt was satisfied with his scan of the area, he pointed at the latticework of fire escapes and large-ledged window sills. “Follow me.” And the dark red shadow of his suit vaulted through the alley, launching himself from one side of the wall up to the lowest rung of the second story’s fire escape ladder, up and up and up, latching onto the top sill and flipping himself onto the roof.

“What the fuck,” he hissed to himself. “What the fuck.” He traced the path Matt had used, taking the time to move a little less recklessly than he had witnessed. (“By god, you’re learning!” Bucky’s voice said, laden with the Brooklyn accent he had before the ice.)

The view from the rooftop wasn’t anything Steve hadn’t seen before: an uneven patchwork of fluorescent rectangles spread across a skyscraper, red flashes of brake lights, a jagged boundary between city and the blank canvas of the night sky. The view from Hell’s Kitchen was new, and the mask through which he saw was, too. And maybe also what he was looking for. Matt stood on the edge of the roof’s corner, still (and a little statuesque), with his head turning at slight, minute angles whenever something caught his ear--but nothing ever stood out to Steve over the normal white noise.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” he breathed, just barely able to hear it himself, and Matt snapped his head around.

“I’m trying to concentrate,” he said at normal volume.

Just as Steve’s joints were starting to groan from keeping still, Matt leapt from his perch and was beside him before he had noticed his silhouette was missing from his view. “There’s a trafficking ring I’ve run into a couple times since I started doing this. Found a couple mid-level guys right before Fisk crossed into my radar but I never got the chance to follow up with it. The guy in the alley is one of their associates.” He stretched his neck, rolled his shoulders. The horns on his mask shone dully from the streetlamps below.

“This isn’t drug trafficking, is it?” Steve asked despondently.

“No. It isn’t.”

His stomach lurched, receding like a tide until the pressure built up into his spine. “Okay. So what do we--”

But Matt had already turned on his heel, half-jogging to the edge of the roof before leaping, limbs splayed in the air, onto the opposite building’s fire escape, the dumpster back against the parking garage, and then to the ground where he had kicked the man in the chest, sending him flying into the wall. The man hardly had time to react other than crying out in pain.

How the fuck did he not die from that. Kung-fu senses, my ass, Foggy, what the fuck--

He peered back down--Matt had grabbed the man by the shirt collar and had him shoved into the bricks as his arms and legs struggled to fight him off. Did Matt need him down there? Was he supposed to just watch this time? The drop directly down onto the dumpster Matt had used wasn’t that far, so he hopped over the ledge, wind rushing in his ear merging abruptly into the clang of his soles on metal, the jolt of his knees as he fought to keep his balance.

The man had gotten free, was swinging a fist and a broken PVC pipe and hadn’t landed a significant hit on Matt yet, but the wild frenzy in which he was moving had managed to block all of Matt’s attacks as well. They knocked into trash cans, ripped open the bags beside them with their frenetic side-stepping, and Steve could only watch. His feet were frozen beside the dumpster, hands held palms forward near his shoulder--and then Matt’s fists started to make contact one right after the other. The cracks of the man’s bones snapped in the close space--nose, a finger, a forearm--and once he was on the ground between Matt’s legs as he stood over him, half pulled from the grimy pavement by the hold back on his shirt collar, Steve could hear the thick bubbles of blood popping as he gasped for breath.

“Who do you report to?” Matt growled. The man coughed, spluttered, and it grew stronger as Matt shook him. “Who. Do you. Report to.”

“I don’t have a name,” the man said, spitting a thick glob of saliva and blood on the toe of Matt’s shoe. “I get my orders from a drop point--”

“I don’t believe you.” He dropped him to the ground and put a foot on his sternum.

Steve’s stomach was churning again. Palms sweaty. Something hot and constricting weaving its way through his chest.

“Who do you report to?” he repeated, and he leaned a slight bit of pressure onto his foot, squeezing the air from the man’s lungs. “Give me a name--”

“I don’t--” the man gasped.

“--and you walk away.”

If Matt could hear the slightest breath of speech back on the roof, then there was no way he couldn’t hear how fast Steve’s heart was hammering away, and Steve half-suspected he could sense the current of his thoughts racing, the quiet slide of sweat from his temples too. Limits weren’t a thing he appeared to be interested in.

Tentatively he took one step forward, and Matt held up a hand to stop him.

“I don’t--I don’t have a name!” the man choked again. “But I can tell--I can tell you where the girls are being held--just off Pier 86--”

Quick gritty steps of shoes on pavement and a rough grab at the front of his shirt, and Matt was dragging him out of the alley and back onto the street, leaving the man where he lay, ducking quickly into another alley a couple blocks down--Steve was done being surprised at how he was able to navigate. Matt released the grip abruptly, the slight jerk behind it pushing the heels of Steve’s shoes into the trashcan, and his face, eyes shadowed by the thick red material of the mask, drew close, speaking in harsh whispers: “I thought you wanted to be a part of this.”

“You didn’t tell me what the plan was. What any of this was.” They were close enough to be breathing each other’s air, but the heat pricking under Steve’s skin was from a steadily-rising anger. “You could have killed him.”

“But I didn’t. I don’t.” Mouth pursed, hands falling to grip at Steve’s shoulders. “I don’t kill.”

“I need some time,” he said. “Just--let me process this. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?” When Matt didn’t move, he added, “Go get those girls. That’s the important thing here.”

With half a second before any reaction, Steve was sure that he was about to hesitate, but one nod later, he had climbed and jumped back to the rooftops to run down to the river. The mask was constricting on his face, pushing at his nose all the wrong ways, and he stripped it off. Shoved it deep in his pocket for the long walk home. The noise of the city couldn’t reach him: his feet carried a vacuum, redirecting the clutter in the air away from his head that was deafening enough with streams of doubt.

---

(Matt had suspected it would go this way: eagerly running into the fray once the path had been chosen only to come skidding to a halt with the shock and terror of what the choice truly signified. Steve’s hand wrapping around the the call for justice as it always had, magnetized, feet grinding the dirt of that trail until the forest grew too thick and dark. Trees, gnarled and overgrown, changing the shape of the way before him until he had to turn back. But the view was never the reality of it. Never had been.

There was something different that night in the alley, routine as most of it had been. Even though he had acted alone, as he always had, the heat of the tall body behind him lent a new source of power coursing through the space between his muscle and bone. Electric. Like it had always been there. Like he would feel its absence when it inevitably dropped away. Already a dullness was seeping its way through to his fingertips.)

---

Wanda had been eyeing him across the table for closing on five minutes, eyebrow arched just enough for someone to notice the extra tilt of the curve. Her coffee remained untouched, the curls of steam growing less intense, the bagel left half-eaten. It was unnerving. Being stared at was unnerving for Steve whenever it happened--and it happened often--but Wanda’s gaze was piercing in a way that was more than just a figure of speech, and she used that to her advantage. Eventually, any appetite he had waned and his coffee turned into sludge on his tongue.

“So… what’s on your mind?” he sighed.

“You’ve been weird lately.”

“I’m weird?”

“Can it, Steven,” she snorted, rolling her eyes. “Your energy has been off. More so than usual, especially this morning.”

More so than usual? He rolled his eyes in return, cracking a smirk so she would at least be tempted to let it go. Hopefully. When it became clear her eyebrow wouldn’t release the suspicion it held there, he turned back to his coffee. The bitterness and heat stung down his throat even through the cover of milk and sugar. “While we’re getting nosy, what’s up with you and Vision?”

Her eyebrow finally dropped. “I’m afraid your weird is officially incurable.”

“Mhm. Okay,” he said lightly.

She ripped the remaining slice of her bagel in half and chewed at it indignantly. After a few minutes of silence between the two of them heartily not enjoying anything they were eating, she lazily waved her hand and the door to the kitchen swung open in a flurry of red; Bucky stood on the other side with his hand still extended for the knob.

“Uh. Thanks?” he said. Wanda only shrugged. “Well it looks like you two are in a good mood this morning. You know what would make it better, Steve?”

“Donuts and Brazil?”

“That’s exactly right. Donuts and Brazil. Come on.”

He shot Wanda a half-apologetic grin as he got up to follow Bucky, and she shook her head. Weird energy? What was that even supposed to have meant? She said that like it wasn’t possible for her to reach into his head and get to the root of the issue in seconds--though maybe that was it, respecting boundaries when the situation was clearly something he was trying to push down past being exposed. And as much as literally everyone would want to hear her reaction to his own prodding, he wanted to return the favor.

“Okay,” Bucky threw over his shoulder as they exited the Tower lobby. “I’m thinking we split a dozen jelly-filled and let me regale you somewhere in the park where we can’t be overheard. Sensitive information, blah blah, you know the deal.”

“Sounds good.”

Bucky’s grins were always bright white nowadays, whether it was from the wide expanse of his teeth or the warmth radiating from his tightly-pursed lips, pressed closed as if letting them open would split his entire face in half. His return was no longer recent news; but still, after everything, just knowing he had found this old side to himself and magnified it past the consuming hollow void of what had been done to him was enough to reorient Steve’s mood to the far positive end of the spectrum.

“So,” Bucky said significantly as they searched for a secluded spot in the park ten minutes later. “What was up with Wanda?”

“Not a morning person, I guess.”

“And what was up with you? Just her vibes infecting the room?”

“I guess.”

(Wanda didn’t want to talk about her crush on a synthezoid and I didn’t want to talk about my crush on a violent vigilante lawyer who doesn’t need eyes to see. You should probably drop it.)

They finally located a shady tree far off the main path, large enough for them to sit behind that they could stay hidden from any prying eyes of tourists. Bucky shoved half a donut in his mouth before he had a chance to sit down, and Steve felt his defeated sense of I can’t take you anywhere cross his face. “So what happened in Brazil, Buck? All this build-up’s got me curious, you know.”

“Mkay,” Bucky said, mouth still half-full of donut. “You see--” Swallowed. Cleared his throat. “That’s good shit. Anyway--Brazil. Steve, this whole thing we’ve got going on is going to go full--oh, what was that one thing Peggy and Falsworth used to say? Tits up? Yeah. It’s going to go full tits up one day.”

Porto Alegre was supposed to have been simple, he said. That was what the committee had said--and you would have thought that a joint task force between the FBI, CIA, NSA, Interpol, and the UN would have been able to figure out that much. Simple or complicated? What would they have needed to know going in? The briefing had been short. Too short, as Natasha had said as they boarded the quinjets. And what was supposed to have been a simple extraction of a kidnapped undercover MI6 agent turned into something far more convoluted.

“We were underprepared and underarmed,” he muttered. His left hand was slowly squeezing the jelly out of the donut into a pink glob on the grass. “Walked right into the middle of an underground gang war who had been supplied arms by AIM. It was seriously a lucky break that we walked away like we did.” A few of the firearm extensions on Rhodey’s suit had been ripped off and Clint had suffered a particularly nasty burn from the AIM ammo on his calf. But the mission had been completed. The agent was extracted and the worst of the fighting had subsided, leaving the unaffiliated civilians to go about their lives in peace, for the most part.

“So did the committee even know about that issue?” Steve asked. He still hadn’t taken more than a couple bites of his first donut, and Bucky was burning through the rest of the box.

“The committee? No,” he scoffed. “The information about the agent was passed along through Interpol’s channel, but the CIA branch that did know, however, didn’t feel like passing their intelligence along to their representatives. And it’s not like they didn’t know what was going on. There’s absolutely no communication between the people who keep us on a leash and their agencies as a whole. One day they’re going to send us someplace and realize they forgot to tell us the zombie apocalypse had fucking broken out or some shit.”

He pulled open his seventh donut and scooped out the jelly with his finger, licking it off. His gaze was blank, staring into the nearby bushes and deep in thoughts that were surely skewering every protocol that the committee had ever passed or followed or even briefly thought about. And Steve tried not to think about Matt. Matt would have had something to say on the matter. Would have used this incident to argue--but simply. Making a subtle face, a slight tap of the toe of his shoe to Steve’s. Come to the conclusion on your own, it would say, but Steve pushed the thought away.

“Have Maria and Fury brought this up with them?” he asked.

“Maria was on the phone with them as soon as we had cleared the city,” Bucky said. “Wasn’t the first time, either. But they gave some non-response and forced her off the phone. ‘The Superhuman Accords Joint Task Force Committee is looking into the issue,’” he mocked with a deep, exaggerated news anchor tone. “‘But we cannot comment at this time. Please submit your request for information to SuperNet.net for an official response.’ It’s bullshit. They set up that whole system for public transparency but they never give a straight answer anyway.”

He fell back on the grass, spread eagle like he had been on Steve’s bed late last night. Sighed dramatically, trying to make fists in the short grass. “I gotta tell you man,” he said quietly. “A lot of this still feels so surreal, you know? What the fuck are the two of us doing in the middle of this sort of shit?”

“I know.”

“You ever wish things could be simple again?” He lifted his head up off the grass and caught Steve’s eye. “Sometimes I do,” he said, and his head flopped back down to the ground. “You and me against those assholes harassing us coming back from Gloria’s. How are we not in over our heads?”

There were a thousand things Steve could say but they all would have been in agreement with the sentiment picking at Bucky’s thoughts, and he recognized patterns enough to know that feeding this idea could lead to a crash. We’ve been in over our heads here from the beginning, he almost said. They hadn’t been prepared for the Chitauri or Sokovia or turning against each other, and constantly playing catch up had worn them down to nubs.

“We’re better at this than we feel,” he said eventually, and Bucky snorted, threw a small piece of donut at his face. “Otherwise they wouldn’t let us keep doing it.”

“Yeah, well, we’d probably be better if we had a little autonomy.”

(Steve definitely did not think about Matt. He didn’t think about whether Matt had the same qualms, acting alone, if he felt the same self-doubt.)

“Have you had time to think it over?”

Those were the first words out of Matt’s mouth when he answered Steve’s call, and two replies sat on the edge of Steve’s tongue, waiting for him to decide what he wanted “it” to refer to. Had he had enough time to think over Matt’s proposition, the ins and outs and consequences of pulling on a mask and being Daredevil’s second in command? No, not nearly enough. He would approach the thought, start working through it, and a rushing roar would cover his ears like he was drowning. All day, the thickness of it suffocating his submerged limbs and lapping against his chin as he tried to keep it from splashing into his mouth.

But the few seconds of hearing his voice pressed up to his ear with the sunset shining off the glass panels of the buildings under Stark Tower--that had been time to think the rest of him over, to make the sappy comparison of the deep crimsons and yellows along the horizon to the hint of a smirk leaking through the way Matt spoke. It was terrible, and doubly so because the anger that had coursed through him so strongly the night before faded just as suddenly. And it shouldn’t have been that way: there were sides to Matt that Steve was just now witnessing and needed to fully come to terms with. But he had never exactly been sensible.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Did you find the girls?”

“I did. They’re safe now.”

“Good.” He sighed, making sure to keep his breath from going straight into the receiver. “Do you maybe... want to get coffee tomorrow morning?”

“I’d like that,” Matt said, and Steve hoped he couldn’t hear the thudding in his chest through the phone.

---

As Steve was leaving the next morning, he found a small gathering around Rhodey’s laptop in the kitchen--he sat on the barstool at the counter with Wanda, Vision, and Natasha huddled around with eyes glued to the CNN breaking news report. The screen showed a map highlighting a small country sandwiched between Hungary, Serbia, and Romania while the reporters spoke hastily, details clearly still spilling in.

“Something bad’s going down in Latveria,” Natasha muttered when he stopped to investigate.

“You mean something worse than usual,” Wanda said tensely.

The report switched away from the map, displaying a recent Associated Press photo of the UK Prime Minister in a heated argument with a man in a green hooded cloak and metal mask side-by-side with live aerial footage of explosions along the Serbian-Latverian border. The smoke was too dense to discern anything of what was happening on the ground.

“What sort of something?”

“The sort of something we’re going to be getting a briefing on in about ten days or so,” Rhodey said.

He wanted to say something but nothing felt right. Wanda was gripping at the edge of Vision’s cape, rumpling the material, and Rhodey and Natasha kept shooting each other silent looks laden with a thousand things he still hadn’t learned to pinpoint. “Let me know if we get anything, okay?”

Vision nodded, the only one who recognized he had said anything at all. “And do be sure to not mention this to Barnes,” he said quietly. Only then did Steve notice the shards of a broken coffee mug lying next to the sink.

---

He tried to keep his lives separate.

Every other morning, as it turned out, he would slip past the group parked in front of the television and laptops with a hundred different news sources blaring, and sit across from Matt with a mug warming his palms. They would discuss the weather, the latest item Steve had crossed off his ever-lengthening list of things to catch up on from the twentieth century (ones usually that Matt had added himself), and only once they were headed out the door did the question come up.

“Have you come to a decision?”

“Not yet.”

At Stark Tower, the situation in Latveria pulled everything into its current: Bruce and Tony’s research shifted, focusing on the latest reports on the reclusive regime’s firepower; Wanda would hardly eat unless Vision gently peeled open her white-knuckled fist to place an apple there, a sandwich; and Bucky and Natasha were often found pacing the halls, arguing in Russian. Steve tried to keep up the best he could, lending a hand wherever anyone needed it, but everyone was slowly losing their composure being forced to wait. Fury and Maria’s phones were going straight to voicemail, and all news reports, from CNN to Al Jazeera, had been repeating the same information for days on end.

The facts were these: Latveria’s dictator, Victor von Doom, had enacted new regulations and prohibitions on an already tenuous social welfare program. Initial protests, while sparse given the regime’s history with such actions, were violently crushed with extensive civilian casualties, sparking a mass exodus of refugees across the country’s borders. What no one knew, however, was that the borders were lined with something--maybe landmines, maybe worse from AIM or Hydra or someone in Klaue’s network of suppliers--but the exodus could only be an attempt at one because of it.

It was Doom’s clear ties to the organizations that SHIELD and now the Avengers found themselves up against again and again that would have prompted action in years prior--but that was then. And this was now: radio silence, no calls to suit up. Just watching the smoke billow and the questions grow higher.

---

“You seem tense.”

The cafe was closed for some minor renovation work that morning, so Matt had led them back to the bench in front of the old church down the road. No coffee, nothing to occupy his hands except the squirming as his fingers tangled in each other. “Really?” he deadpanned. “How can you tell?”

Matt slowly reached towards him, took hold of his wrist. Turned it so the underside faced up in the bit of sun that made it down through the trees overhead. He rested two fingers lightly on his pulse point, and Steve was about ready to die.

“Like that,” he said quietly.

That demonstration might have skewed your results. “That obvious, huh?”

Matt only grinned.

“Latveria’s got everyone on edge,” he said.

“Are you going over there?”

“Not yet.”

He grinned again, a brief flicker of it like he didn’t know how else to respond. “There’s been a lot of that in you lately.”

Silence fell between them, and Steve was almost overcome with the urge to cross the few inches between them and hold his hand. He wanted to stop twiddling his thumbs with the Avengers and do something with Latveria, and he wanted to help Matt with the trouble he’d found himself in--that was who he was, whom everyone had pinned him down to be a long time ago, and now the practicalities of it all were stifling, and here was someone (a version of someone, he reminded himself futilely) who would sit with him in the storm without pressing too hard.

It was hard to believe he was the same person who was well on his way to breaking half the bones in a stranger’s body when he tilted his face up into the splotched sunlight filtered through the tree above them, a smile spreading slowly up to his eyes.

(But couldn’t he say the same about himself?)

(Would it be in the same way?)

“I know,” he said. “And I don’t like it.” He found his hand hovering near Matt’s, but he placed it just above his knee instead. Safer, probably.

“If you do go, please be safe. I’ve been…” Matt paused. Sighed. Ducked his head slightly. “I’ve been worried.”

Steve moved his hand again, but back to Matt’s--carefully, resting his fingers along his knuckles before the rest followed, and his heart leapt up to his throat when Matt flipped his hand to hold his properly.

“Okay,” Steve said. “Okay.”

“Please.”

---

Two days later and nine after the first reports from Europe made their way across the Atlantic and into Stark Tower, Maria and Fury arrived to shuttle them to Latveria. The briefing would take place on the flight, there wasn’t time to waste now that they had the green light from Washington, and yes, Natasha, more information would be available. The committee had actually learned from Porto Alegre, or so they said. (Maria’s lips were pursed more tightly than Steve had ever seen, and the faint outline of a vein in her temple was visibly pulsing as she stormed to the cockpit to get them in the air.)

New York City disappearing behind them, Fury dropped a thick packet of paper on each of their laps, two or three clumsy staples holding the whole thing together. “Familiarize yourselves,” he said. “First part’s from the committee, second part’s from what Stark and Banner could dig up on the weaponry they might be using--”

“Might?” Bucky muttered.

“Yes, Barnes, might. Now read. I’d brief you myself but the damn thing just landed in my inbox an hour ago.”

“Typical.”

“Read.”

The briefing, while substantial in text, lacked anything that they hadn’t already learned from watching the news, except an estimated death toll. Most of the space was dedicated to profiles of the country and Doom built from information dated back to the mid-eighties. Wanda was the first to toss it aside, and when Fury eyed her, she added, “I could have told you your intelligence would be useless. Nothing gets into that place and nothing gets out.”

“Making me feel real good about this mission,” he muttered.

Rhodey and Sam worked to hook one of the monitors in the back of the quinjet to the news, and one by one the packets fell to the floor, with Vision taking a final scan of Tony and Bruce’s contribution in the back. Finally the news was starting to show something new, but it was only reports of the Avengers being sent in with footage of protestors outside the Latverian embassies in Washington, Paris, Tokyo.

“Wanda,” Bucky said quietly. “When was… do you know when Doom came to power over there?”

“It was sometime during the late sixties,” she said. “Most everyone was too busy with Vietnam to notice the coup, even though it was really fishy…are you okay?”

The blood had completely drained from Bucky’s face, and The Look, as they’d come to call it, was at its full potential. “Buck,” Steve said. “Hey, stay with us.” But he didn’t look up from the spot by his toes--his left hand only crushed the briefing packet into a tight, crumpled accordion.

“When are we landing?” Bucky asked, both with a sharp edge and half absent like his face betrayed.

A few hours later, long after everyone had fallen quiet and muted the monitor, Steve’s phone buzzed in one of the side pockets of his uniform--Heard the news. Remember what I said. M

--- 

It was over before it began.  

The central square of Doomstadt hadn’t been reduced to rubble, but something else had been, something that turned the atmosphere around them into a dour, impenetrable soup. The military police had them surrounded before they could exit the quinjet, emerging from alleyways and behind bushes, eyes in the crossfires and safeties off. As Wanda tried to put up a subtle force field against the potential bullets, Steve gazed beyond them and into the rest of the city that he could see through hazy remnants of smoke from the nearby border--not a single civilian on the streets.

“By decree of Doom, your presence in Latveria is not authorized.”

Fury pushed through Steve and Rhodey at the front. “Sir--”

“Return to your jet. We have the situation under control.”

They all exchanged glances. Waited. Fury set his jaw and his hand twitched, like it was considering reaching for one of the many pistols he kept stashed in his coat and belt. That tension, the rubber band pulled back and ready to fling itself into the firefight, they could all feel it, but someone had to be the first person to let go.

If it wasn’t going to be Fury, Bucky was next in line: his metal fingers readjusting themselves on the hold of his rifle clinked loudly in the absence of any other sound.

“Boss…” Maria said from behind him. Her finger was at her ear, pressing into her comm connection. “They’ve rescinded the orders.”

“They’ve what.”

--- 

Doom had agreed to a ceasefire (“On his own fucking people,” Wanda muttered) and to a hearing at the UN. His mask gleamed under the fluorescent bulbs and lights from news cameras lining the walls of the General Assembly Hall. Every two minutes, the ticker along the bottom of the screen would announce the final estimate for the death toll, and once they realized the frequency, the television was immediately shut off.

While the rest of them had thrown the briefing packet away as soon as they touched back down in New York, Steve tucked it behind one of the straps to his shield and read it cover to cover back in his room.

MISSION:, it stated in big, bold text on the last page of the briefing, BRING AS MANY CIVILIANS TO SAFETY AS POSSIBLE. Below, bullet points outlined the specifics, but he didn’t bother to read them. It didn’t matter anymore. There would be sanctions. Resolutions. Debates. A promise to keep an eye on the small, reclusive country and its despotic ruler so this never happened again.

It shouldn’t have happened at all.

They couldn’t have done much, but a few more people would have been alive that no longer were, and that was reason enough to go in early.

Which they didn’t. Which they couldn’t undo.

During the war, one of the earlier Commandos missions, they’d missed their window infiltrating the target base by ten minutes, and Peggy was out for their hides upon their return to camp. “You were late,” she snapped. “And now--” Her finger traced along the map tacked onto the wall from the X marking the base to the middle of a thick expanse of German woods. “They could be anywhere. If you can’t hit your marks, Colonel Phillips is going to send you all back to the front.”

They had learned then. But the question remained if the same would hold true now with those who called the shots.

The time on his phone read 2 am, but he dialed Matt anyway--he picked up after two rings.

“You… You’re back? Are you okay--”

“No more ‘not yet,’” he said quickly. “Tomorrow night?”

For a moment, Steve thought that the connection had cut out, but the sound of Matt breathing on the other end told him otherwise: the pattern of indecision, stopping and starting words before they’re fully formed. “Same place.” A pause. “What happened over there, Steve?”

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

---

The hour ticked closer to 1 am and Steve’s footing thought about wavering--the arches of his feet flexed over the ledge of the roof overlooking Hell’s Kitchen, and through the meshed cloth of his mask he could spot the parking garage near where they had perched a few weeks earlier. The night held a similar chill, the same hint of a breeze coming off the river, but the uncertainties that had overcrowded his abilities to take in the sight before him had quieted. Beside him, Matt stood attentively.

“Do you hear that?” he murmured.

He didn’t, but he followed the line of Matt’s finger to shadows moving along the roof of another building a couple streets away. Something different edged around Matt’s presence as well: the hold of his mouth, the way his knees locked and flexed as he stood. A slight tilt to his stance, aimed toward him, like he wanted to be sneaking looks at him but had to settle for tuning his ears in his direction instead.

“The man from last time,” Matt said into his ear. “This is his partner. He might be more willing to talk.”

“Let’s go then.”

The words had hardly gotten out of his mouth before Matt took off across the rooftops, leaping deftly over the ledges of the ones tucked closer together, somehow landing close to silently on the fire escapes and launching himself up and over the ladders to keep his feet pushing forward. Steve kept up the best he could, but there was at least one building between them the entire way until Matt suddenly stopped, holding up a hand to catch Steve from skidding into him.

“Listen.”

The serum had amplified his hearing, that much was certain, but it was still no match for whatever range Matt possessed. Regardless, he tried. Strained. After a few close moments with Matt’s hand still hovering over his chest, he could pick out feet scuffling along the sidewalk below them, a huff or two as a thumb poked forcefully on the screen of a smartphone.

“Moving to get visual cues can blow your cover,” he breathed. Barely audible, and surely silent as far as their target was concerned. “Trust yourself and your other senses.”

He closed his eyes, listened harder. The sound of the man’s footsteps shifted to a lower-pitched grit, gravel sticking and sliding in the treads of his shoes, faster and twisting like he was breaking into a frustrated pace--so he was in the alley, outside of the public’s line of sight, and could react to whatever he was dealing with however he wanted without gathering suspicion.

Steve reached and latched his hand around Matt’s wrist, squeezing--a cue. And this time, instead of watching as Matt jumped down into the alley, he leaped alongside him, landing in a slightly off-balance crouch on the other side of the man, blocking him in.

“No,” the man mumbled. “No, no, no, I saw what you fuckers did to Henderson--”

“Just me, actually,” Matt said, grabbing the front of the man’s shirt and pushing him up against the wall. “Are you going to cooperate then?” The man lifted his chin, set his jaw, a defiant look that maybe Matt could sense, but it dug under Steve’s skin roughly, burrowing. “Who do you report to?”

“No one you’re ever going to find--”

“Wrong answer.”

Matt turned on his heel, threw the man to the ground with one fist still buried in his shirt and the other coming to land on his face--aiming for the nose, but smacking against his cheekbone as he tried to shift and turn away. The crack came all the same, a dribble of blood oozing out where the skin split. “You’ve been operating in this neighborhood and city long enough without anyone cracking down on you. Who do you report to? Think about your answer.”

The man grinned. Teeth a dull white in the dark of the alley and the spiteful mirth spreading all the way to the corners of his eyes as he tried not to laugh. It was a look of secret victory, knowing that while he may have been down in this one moment in time, the grand arc of it all would still curve in his favor. Smugness. A familiar sheen in his eyes that Steve had spotted on the news too often since coming home, and something in his blood was reaching the flash point, steaming hot.

But finally the laughter began to leak from the man: first a sharp exhale, then a snort, and at last it bubbled over into a cackling stifled only by the pain radiating from the broken pieces of his skull.

“You think this is funny--” And Matt released his hold on him, reached back to throw another punch, but the man took the opportunity to whip his foot back, tripping him, and landing his other toe directly into one of Matt’s lower ribs.

“It is a little, yeah,” he gasped as they both scrambled to their feet. Matt’s hand was pressed into his side along the spreading bruise or broken rib, but only for a moment. He swallowed his grimace and launched himself back at the man, who ducked, tripping him again--he drew his leg far back, readying himself for another blow into Matt’s chest--

Steve felt his knuckles connect with the man’s nose, heard him slam up against the wall, and realized what had just occurred--in that order. Matt was pulling himself up behind him, and Steve stepped in front of the man, his body blocking him from maneuvering around him once he managed to get up. “Here’s the deal,” he said. His voice grumbled, and to his own ears, he sounded nothing like himself. “You’re going to tell us who you report to… or at least where you pick up your orders. And then we’re dropping you on the steps of the police station. What state you arrive there in is up to you.”

The man coughed. Sniffed, loud and wet and thick. Got to his feet and tried to kick Steve in the chest, send him stumbling back far enough to make his escape--a thud, a wince of pain, and Steve’s body didn’t even wobble to register the impact.

“The hell--”

Steve grabbed his shoulders and shoved him back against the wall. “You think you can make a living dealing in people like they’re some lifeless cargo like you’re some sort of god and no one has the power to stop you. Here’s where I tell you you’re wrong.” He tightened his grip on his shoulders gradually, watching the pain seep onto his face. “So what’s it going to be?” 

--- 

Nelson & Murdock was closer to the police station than Matt’s apartment; after they dumped the bound man on the steps, Steve had offered to carry Matt back there, but the stubborn streak was not to be dissuaded by a few possibly fractured bones. He accepted a shoulder to lean on to help him walk, but he was going to fucking walk there himself.

“I’ve managed worse on my own,” he winced.

“Doesn’t mean you have to,” Steve countered. “C’mon.”

The couple blocks took them longer than it should have, even considering the slow pace; the cloudy night played with the shadows, and they couldn’t risk being seen hobbling along, Daredevil with someone wearing a version of his old suit carrying keys to their office. And even while the risk plucked at Steve’s already thrumming anxiety, Matt’s arm around his shoulder and his own around Matt’s waist felt alarmingly natural. He was hurt but he was pressed up against him, and Steve hoped fervently that there was some way to transfer part of his healing power to him so he didn’t have to suffer. Matt may have been playing tough, but only so much could be done to make a grimace into a smirk satisfied by a relatively victorious outcome.

“I need to take a breather,” Matt said once they had gotten inside the office building. Steve took him to the steps and he leaned up against the wall, the top of his head grazing the banister. “I think they’re broken.”

“Let me see.” Matt raised his eyebrows. “What, I may not have been the medic of the Howling Commandos but I still had to know a thing or two.”

Matt pulled his mask off as Steve began to trace the left side of his ribcage, searching for the telltale signs of the damage beneath the skin. Towards the bottom, a few inches above his hip, and the wince returned full-force. He lightly pressed around the spot and threw a small grin up at Matt before he realized what he was doing. “Not as bad as I thought,” he said. “Mostly bruising. One of them might be a little fractured though. We should probably--”

“No hospitals,” Matt gasped. He pushed himself up so he could sit against the wall of the stairwell properly. “And no covert uses of Avengers medical facilities,” he added as Steve opened his mouth to argue. “It’ll heal. And I don’t need this on any records.”

“If it sets badly, you’ll be regretting you said that later.”

“Yeah, well…” He readjusted himself again, clearly fighting the urge to flinch at the smarting pain he had to have been feeling along his sides. “That’s a problem for another day.”

“Trust me,” Steve sighed. He settled himself down on the opposite side of the stair where Matt was sitting, one leg curled up beneath him and the other stretched out so that if he pointed his toe, he could tap Matt on the knee. “Leaving problems for future-you to solve is actually a huge pain in the ass.”

Matt laughed, or tried to--it turned into a sharp gasp and clutch at his side.

The streetlights filtered in through the old warped glass windows on the sides of the door, splashing yellow across Matt’s eyes, aimed haphazardly at some nothing along the crease where wall met ceiling. And he let himself stare, take in the dips of the shadows along his bones, get lost in them--it was better than thinking too hard on what they had done. A cog in the wheel of a human trafficking ring had been pried out with its main crank identified. They had a name now, it would be easier to track him down and squash out the whole operation, and he should feel good about this. Unequivocally so. It was mostly there, the faint pulse of having done the right thing, if he were to measure out the net value of it all. A couple key clauses of the Accords violated, sure. A super-serumed fist shattering the bones of a civilian, okay. But the civilian was engaged in vile activities and the Accords had already laid out that he couldn’t do shit. So the pulse: weak but present. Reassurance, an invisible hand stroking his hair in the dark.

“You never did tell me what happened in Latveria,” Matt said after a few minutes.

“Nothing. Nothing happened.” That was the truth wasn’t it?

“Okay.” His mouth twitched, and he jerked his leg to nudge Steve’s outstretched foot. “I told you we make a good team.”

“You did.”

“And I was right.”

“I guess so,” he said, trying to put his grin into his voice. His chest hummed when he saw it mirrored on Matt’s face. “We need to get your ribs wrapped, c’mon.”

Matt’s grip around his waist tightened with the arduous journey up the stairs: his palm pressed in at his hip, fingers arched, four small points along the muscle and bone. The humming kept on, and loudly. Was that what Matt was doing? Pushing his hand into the heart of that hum in Steve’s chest, trying to get a handle on it, to understand? Because he could hear it, couldn’t he? He probably heard it long before Steve was aware of it at all.

“I should tell you,” Matt said on the first landing, “that I swore for a long time that I--do you smell aerosol?”

“What?”

“Aerosol. Like spray paint.”

“I--no? I don’t think so?” Nodding, Matt nudged him to keep going, and their feet plodded heavily on the next step. “For a long time you swore you would what?” he asked softly.

“Go at this alone. The actual fighting people part, anyway.”

(Did Matt hold on harder when he spoke? Was he afraid that if he didn’t hold fast against the lonesome void of the night, voicing the sentiment aloud, that Steve would disappear?)

“Why?”

“Cuts a few steps out of the process…” he said with a stifled grimace. “Keeps a few more bones unbroken.”

When Steve caught a glimpse of him in another slice of light from the outside, he was strangely blank. This is the truth, he said--which is not the whole truth in itself. You could run a hand along the trunk of a tree and say, this is a tree, but you still would not be counting the leaves, the roots, the seeds flitting through the sky on a loose pocket of wind.

“With you here,” Matt continued, “I start to wonder how I could have ever thought that way.” They had reached the firm’s floor, Matt’s free arm beaming support at the corner, Steve’s own a reflection as his knees jellied with the heat pooling in unusual places. “Are you sure you don’t smell anything?”

He didn’t, but he didn’t have to: as they approached the door to Nelson & Murdock, the off-white color was marred--clearly, even in the shadows--by rings of black spray paint, a thick solid dot at the center of them.

“Steve… what’s wrong?”

“You were right about the spray paint.” He walked closer, Matt still latched to his side. “And--”

“What?”

Squinting, he brought his finger to the edge of the object that he had just noticed protruding from the center of the dot: a thick rectangular cardstock stuck, one corner firmly embedded in the wood. Outside a streetlight flickered back to life and shone through the window along the back of it.

“Ace of spades…?”

“Steve,” Matt said firmly. He pulled himself up to stand more solidly on his own two feet, one hand still stiffly grasping at Steve’s shoulder. “What. Is going. On.”

“Here--”

He grabbed Matt at the wrist and brought his hand to the door; the paint was thick, still wet in some places, still dripping. It smeared under his fingers as Steve moved it along the curve of the rings, his palm pressed to the back of Matt’s hand, and when they made it to the center where the playing card thrust out like a challenge, an aborted word crawled from his mouth, a glottal stop of a sigh.

“How... “ he finally managed. “The card isn’t bent.”

“It’s not.”

Steve watched as Matt’s brows furrowed together, practiced creases deepening to keep up with the worry sprouting from every other inch of him. “We can’t stay here. I need to tell Foggy and Karen to not come in tomorrow.” Hand along the wall, he started limping back to the stairwell without Steve. “I thought we had more time--”

“Matt, wait, let me--”

“I’m fine. I just need to--”

“At least let me take you home. We’re a team remember?”

Matt said nothing. Sighed. Half-reluctantly slid into his position leaning into Steve--but as soon as he was flush up against him, his hand was back to gripping Steve’s waist, his fingers seeking something in the way they carefully dug at the fabric snug on his skin.

(He saw a lot less of Claire nowadays. Perhaps she had moved or her shifts at the hospital had changed. But that didn’t matter when he could still hear her voice clear as day over his shoulder or pressed warmly against his forehead--the martyrs, the saints, the saviors… they always end up the same way: bloody and alone. He never tried to count himself among those deserving of the exalted titles she had listed, but if he inched closer, the risks were still there. The lonesome heavy hollow of a silent apartment. The bandages wet under his fingers.

She never said anything about wading into the muck with someone at his side. Would they still end up bloody? In the end, would they still be alone despite their beginning? He liked to think that it would be different now, and there was some proof, maybe. What had possessed him to push through on the urge to hold Steve’s hand properly was still a mystery, but the burst of heat there traveling up his arm, his elbow, all the way to the tip of his ears--that was a sign, surely. This was a step in the right direction, and the universe or God--or whoever--was saying yes yes yes.

It could have been just him saying that. To himself. His thoughts channeling something larger while speaking to a more personal truth.)

One day Steve was going to have to sit down with Karen so she would stop staring at him like she tended to. Maybe it would have been easier for him to wear a bell on his shoes so she could hear him coming--it was probably a bad idea, but it was still the first one that came to him when he got to Nelson & Murdock’s floor the next morning and found her just leaving the firm as he rounded the corner.

A tumbleweed could have rolled between their frozen frames in the silence, and it would not have felt out of place.

“Good morning, Karen,” he said lightly.

Her eyes, already wide as it was, strained a little wider. “Of course,” she said. The blank stare finally broke, shifting into a resigned slash of a grin. “Of course there would be two of you this morning. She’s frightening, okay?”

Steve figured the chances between whether she was referring to Natasha or Wanda were fairly even, but that didn’t explain--“I’m guessing Matt called you about the vandalism?” she continued. “I came here late last night--because… I, uh. I forgot something in my desk. When I saw the door, I called the cops. It was weird enough that they were able to let one of you come down to look at it.” She said this all very quickly and almost made a point not to look at him directly. “I’m going to step out. Matt’s in there. It’s why you’re here, anyway, isn’t it?”

She certainly wasn’t lying.

The door to their office was splayed open, the smeared paint now dry and the ace of spades still stuck in the center of the homemade target. And a few inches away from the furthest corner of the playing card was the tip of Natasha’s nose. “I didn’t realize I was so scary,” she said.

“Most people haven’t seen you with Bruce’s cat,” he sighed. “Didn’t know this was up our alley.”

“When they actually give us the green light on something, it’s kind of tempting to go regardless,” she threw over her shoulder. “Besides, Bucky and Sam thought you’d be here and I wanted to see where you got off to in the morning.”

She smirked, or not so much as smirked as pursed her lips ever so slightly that unless you knew where to look you would miss it entirely. From behind the walls of their private offices, the presence of Foggy’s eyes and the rest of Matt’s senses fell heavy on him and his face flushed. “I never told them--”

“It was a lucky guess, I’m assuming. Unless they slipped Scott a twenty to tail you for a week. Which I doubt, relax,” she added. “What’s with you?”

“Nothing, it’s fine.” While she did raise an eyebrow, there wasn’t any indication that she flat-out didn’t believe him at all. “What do you think this is?” he asked, motioning to the mess on the door.

“No… idea…” She took a few steps back to get the entire door in the frame of her phone camera. “But seeing as the card hit the dead-center of this target, I figured Clint might know. Birds of a feather, et cetera.”

“Ha ha,” he muttered.

If Natasha was going to make any more terrible puns, Matt emerging from his office put an end to it--Steve noticed her eyes quickly fall over the couple deep mauve splotches curved along his face and the hesitant way he held himself against what she didn’t know were his fractured ribs. “Ms. Romanoff,” he said, nodding in her general direction. “It’s a pleasure.”

Charm turned up past eleven, and he willed his heart not to skip a beat where Matt could hear it. Not that his heart was keen to listening to much from upstairs.

“So you’re the elusive Matt Murdock who’s been gracing the top of ‘recent contacts’ in Steve’s phone,” she said.

And somehow Steve wasn’t surprised. “Um. Excuse me?”

Matt only grinned. Pushed his glasses back up his nose with a nudge from a slender finger. “I would assume so, yes,” he said after a moment.

Thankfully Natasha’s phone buzzed before she could manage to say anything that would actually start bordering on truly awful for Steve’s composure, and she walked to the far corner to roll her eyes at whatever Clint was apparently blathering on about. Or he assumed it was Clint; resignation often manifested itself on her face, but it was always softer with Clint, less frustrated than it was with, say, Bruce and Tony. Her lips were certainly pursed, but she hadn’t reached to massage her forehead yet. (So it was Clint after all.)

The door to Foggy’s office creaked open and he slid over to Steve and Matt in one fluid step. “We got ourselves a real party, huh?”

Across the room, Natasha sighed loudly, a half groan, and Matt snorted to himself--obviously having overheard whatever inane remark had tumbled out from Clint’s side of the phone. But as he ducked his head to hide the growing smirk, Steve noticed that Foggy was glancing heavily between the bruise on Matt’s face and Steve, who may have had some bags under his eyes but no other signs of having been out with Daredevil the night before. But he had to know, right? He was Matt’s best friend. He knew about everything else.

(But Bucky doesn’t know about this. Your assumptions are grounded in the air under Daredevil’s scrambling feet.)

"So here’s the deal--oh, Nelson, right?” Natasha pointed at Foggy and when he nodded, she turned back to the rest of them. “Okay. Clint has absolutely no idea what any of this means, but he is cutting his trip to San Francisco short and taking the next flight back. Hank Pym was getting on his nerves anyway. Secondly, part of the deal with ‘The Avengers’”--the air quotes were palpable in her voice--“examining this is that the NYPD has to be the primary lead in the investigation, so we need to clear out before they get here.”

“We need to find Karen, then, before she comes back and gets a face full of cop,” Foggy said. “I think she left her phone--”

“She’s outside,” Matt said quickly. “Didn’t go far. I don’t think,” he added quickly. Steve wondered if he was able to sense the suspicion that had risen in Natasha, leaking out in waves.

--- 

Somehow they had ended up meandering back into Manhattan and in the lobby of the MoMA--it hadn’t been Steve’s suggestion, nor had it been Matt’s. Maybe Natasha had shrugged in its general direction when he hadn’t been paying attention and led them there by the beacon of the deep burnt orange sweater that matched her hair. Regardless, Steve realized he hadn’t been to the museum since he ran into Matt by the Pollack installation; when he’d needed to escape the din of Stark Tower lately, he’d taken the longer walk into Hell’s Kitchen instead.

“The last time I was here,” Karen said to herself once they entered the lobby, “I saw something that was literally just two strings of lights tangled together.”

Steve stifled a snort but Natasha asked, “Was it supposed to be symbolic of something?”

“I mean. I guess,” she shrugged. “But I didn’t stop to read the write-up about it.”

They wandered aimlessly and nowhere near the pieces where Steve and Matt had run ashore--the most recent contemporary works drew the attention of the rest of the group, particularly an exhibit with a series of album covers over the last couple of decades. Nirvana, The Sex Pistols: Natasha read over the placards next to the prints with a faint smile, pointing out a couple interesting features to Karen and Foggy. Matt’s hand on Steve’s elbow stayed even as they stood back, immobile. No change in the pressure of his resting fingers. No movement in the crook of the bones. The smile on Natasha’s face was echoed on Matt’s as he listened to their conversation and sensed the blood pulsing in Steve’s veins.

A few galleries over they came upon a series of odd chairs, and Foggy started riffing off them out of the corner of his mouth to Karen and Natasha. The room was the pressing sort of quiet, the squeaks of people’s shoes on the hardwood already too loud, and they cupped their hands over their faces to keep the laughing in. Eyes tearing up from the strain, cheeks red.

“What’s he saying?” Steve murmured in Matt’s ear.

“Oh, just some of his tried and true art jokes. New audience.”

“Are they really that funny?”

“I guess if you didn’t have to hear them go through the draft stages. And then again every time we ran into New School art students at parties he’d drag me to in law school.”

As it had turned out, Matt suspected that there was someone among the ranks of those art students that Foggy had a thing for, though he never found out who it was. “He always denied it,” he said. “But the jokes never worked. I would have known. We were living together in a terribly small studio back then.”

“So now he’s left with all that still in his head, huh?”

“Exactly.”

Having another Avenger with them at the museum should have worried Steve more than it did, but seeing them all getting along so well counteracted what Matt’s touch would have been doing to his heartbeat otherwise--it beat at a steady pace, and warmth spread up his breastbone as Karen relaxed into Natasha’s touch on her arm, getting her attention to point out some odd feature in the piece before them. They could work, these two halves of his life, melding together into a single thing instead of slipping against each other like oil and water. Even if it did mean Foggy and Clint combining forces. That would be a side effect they’d just have to deal with.

“Wait, what’s that?” Karen said suddenly, and their half of the group moved into the next room.

“What is it?” Matt asked in Steve’s ear as they followed.

He didn’t know quite how to answer.

The entire room was dedicated to the lone work, which was suspended from the ceiling by tight wires latched into the wood. Or he assumed it was wood: the base of the piece was difficult to see through the prickly nest of arrows protruding from it on all sides, though it appeared to be a kind of boat. A small Chinese flag flew from the front of it.

Except for Matt, they all craned their necks up to squint at it properly, tilt their heads if necessary.

“It’s probably another metaphor,” he whispered back. “You know how this stuff is.”

“A boat with arrows is hanging from the ceiling, Matt,” Foggy said. “It’s definitely a metaphor. You’re loud when you whisper, you know that, Captain?”

Natasha laughed which, of course she did. “Been telling him for years.”

On the opposite wall, the museum had posted the write up, and they shuffled over to see if it would offer any illumination. Steve watched them go, staring at Matt as he tilted his head up futilely like the others had done moments ago. The muscles under a few patches of bruised skin pulled and waned as he tried to get some sense of what was hanging above him--if their small skirmish the night before had left him with such significant injuries, what was supposed to happen when the threat was more than just some nobody in an alley? Steve could withstand what Bucky had called “a truly stupid amount of force,” but Matt--Matt was just a man. And men broke so much easier than his own enhanced bones.

And Steve supposed that the realization should have been accompanied by a sinking feeling, but the thought fell dully against the floor of his head: consequences be damned, he couldn’t let Matt face this alone.

“So what is it called?” Matt called over to Foggy, who was still reading the long paragraph under the biography of the artist.

“Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows.”

Natasha caught Steve’s eye and she looked rather smug, though it was a happy sort of smug rather than an annoyingly victorious type. You were staring at him for a long time, she mouthed.

“The arrows are in the boat…” Matt said slowly, still staring up at what he couldn’t see. He started to pace, and instead of leaving Steve where he stood, he pulled him along with the grip he still had on his elbow. “Taking what’s been used against you to fight back.”

He turned towards him, the lights in the tall ceiling highlighting the dark red tint in his glasses. “We’d know a little something about that, wouldn’t we?”--it was light, breathless, and his lips hardly moved as he said it. And his hand had moved from his elbow to the small of his back; something in Steve short circuited and his mouth went dry. He could see so many things behind the black of his eye, the insults and broken noses he had hoarded before the war to build his own invisible shield before it manifested on its own, the expectations and doubts Matt used to shroud his second life from making any connection to the one they stood in now. Held it close, let it grow in the heat between their cupped hands, and when it finally released nothing was prepared to catch it.

Matt’s hand was warm against his back through his shirt, and he wanted the warmth of his lips on his own. He was staring again, and he knew it, and he couldn’t be bothered--Natasha, Karen, and Foggy’s figures were out of focus in his peripheral vision, and it didn’t matter because Matt might as well have been staring right back at him.

“I’m hungry,” Karen said a little loudly. “Is anyone else hungry?”

“Yep. Lead the way,” Foggy said.

Natasha followed them, only after she gestured something fairly suggestive their way, something that told Steve that there would be a litany of questions headed his way the next time that Sam and Bucky got him alone.

“We should come back to one of these places sometime… not in the middle of an investigation,” Matt said. The smirk was back, and Steve was working on accepting the fact that if Matt hadn’t connected the dots from his heartbeat by now, then he should start alerting Maria and Fury that pigs were going to be flying any day now.

“That would be nice,” he sighed. Natasha’s footsteps were fading down the hall towards whatever museum cafe Karen had found signs to and they were so much more alone under the arrows jutting out of the boat, reaching down towards them through the quiet pressing in on all sides of them. “That would be really nice.” It struck Steve then, as Matt’s hand kept moving--from the small of his back, all the way around to his hip, his arm locked around his waist--that he didn’t know what this was. He had been so consumed with the intensity of his own feelings rushing wildly through his veins and his Avengers duties and trying to find his place at Matt’s side under the cover of a mask and the night that he hadn’t even considered what next. Matt had his arm around his waist while they were alone in an art museum. That wasn’t strictly platonic in his limited experience, but none of his friends had ever been blind. Of course Matt was bound to be more tactile than most, all things considering. This didn’t have to mean anything, and it probably didn’t: it was Daredevil that really needed Steve, not Matt.

All the same, even as his thoughts worked on a fiery loop in his head, five points of pressure lit up on his hipbone from Matt’s fingers, and he had to wonder.

--- 

Part of the reason Natasha had stuck around after they had left Nelson & Murdock--“not that they weren’t nice company,” she said--was that the rest of the Avengers had a dire need for a meeting that he could not possibly miss. And by the rest of the Avengers, she actually meant that Bucky was trying to call a meeting without Fury and Maria.

“So he’s a little stressed,” she said as they walked back towards Park Avenue after saying goodbye to Matt, Karen, and Foggy. “And you know how he gets when he’s stressed.”

“That I do.”

“Sam can only do so much.”

“You say that like he can’t do much of anything,” he said. “He and Bucky are really close. He can do a lot.”

“Yeah, but he’s not you,” she said. “And thank god. One of you is more than enough.”

By the time they got back up to the upper floors of Stark Tower, everyone else was already gathered around the long table in one of the conference rooms that rarely got used--Tony in particular was paying little attention to the chatter, staring around at the corners of the room, the various carpet tiles, the wall colors like he couldn’t remember the room having existed before fifteen minutes ago.

“Cap!” he said distractedly as they walked in. “Welcome to, uh. Here, I guess.”

“Didn’t you look over the architect’s shoulders while they were designing this place?” Rhodey said. He wasn’t looking at him, instead exchanging resigned glances with Bruce from across the table. “You know where ‘here’ is.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay Honeybear--and Barnes,” he said quickly as Bucky stood up. “You know we gotta take care of certain matters before you go talking our ears off... right?”

Before Steve could register the reason why, his face started to run hot again, and it wasn’t the type that burned down all the way through his chest--no, this was the side effect of too many pairs of eyes focusing too intently on him, heating up his skin with the lines from their gazes. The room was silent and they were waiting for him to speak. Or someone, maybe not him--

“So where’d Romanoff find you this morning?” Tony said, cracking a smile.

“Um.” This had to be the end. It hadn’t been the fall of SHIELD or the “civil war” or any of that. No. It was happening now. “Hell’s Kitchen.” Which apparently wasn’t good enough of an answer because they all either raised their eyebrows or leaned forward the tiniest bit. “At Matt Murdock’s office,” he muttered.

The room erupted into shouts: some victorious, some pushing all of their laments into the patterns they were massaging into their foreheads. As the noise leveled itself, Steve noticed that the only two who seemed to be pleased about this outcome were Sam and Bucky, whose hands were outstretched as they waltzed around the table collecting money from the rest of the crew. And to think Steve had thought it couldn’t get any worse.

“Vizh, buddy, you have to pay up,” Sam said.

“I’m, um…” The synthezoid’s face was fairly blank, but the subtle lines of embarrassment were clear once you looked in the right places. “I’m afraid I don’t have any currency.”

Wanda sighed and slapped another ten dollars in Sam’s palm--followed immediately by Rhodey cracking an impressive glower and sliding a fifty over to Bruce. One of the fluorescent bulbs above them burst in a shower of sparks, and the slightest hint of red faded from Wanda’s eye.

“Oh my god, are we done yet?” Natasha said. The light tone and grin were somehow more terrifying than anything that would be considered more traditionally threatening. (Steve was starting to see what Karen meant.) “Bucky?”

Bucky cleared his throat, scrunched his mouth to one side just like he used to when he tried to bargain with the pharmacist at their local drug store for Steve’s old asthma meds. Holding the words there until he could get them just right, a recognition of the delicate issue at hand. “Right. So--Steve, sit down, you look ridiculous.” He hadn’t realized he was still up, and the rest of the group swallowed their laughter. “Anyway. As you all know: everything sucks!”

His arms spread wide at the declaration, maybe waiting for someone to chime in with a hear-hear! that never came. They stared at him, Wanda’s gaze particularly withering from Steve’s view of it.

“Oh, come on, we’re all thinking it. We’re useless. We don’t go anywhere where we can be of any use, and not in time. And really--why did they try to send us into Latveria without backup? That wasn’t aliens or rogue robots or anything. Are we supposed to solve political problems for them now?” He’d struck a chord, and he knew it: they’d all ducked their heads, become suddenly very involved with a hangnail or the grain of the table. Steve caught his eye and gave a single nod in agreement. “They’re going to twiddle their thumbs on everything big, but we have a chance to do something good here.”

Steve’s stomach sank violently.

“Natasha just got back from the vandalism scene over at”--he pointed at Steve, smirking--“Nelson & Murdock’s law offices in Hell’s Kitchen. We don’t know if it’s a random act or a hate crime by some ableist fuckwad or what--but whoever did it could throw a playing card hard enough that it embedded itself in an oak door, so.”

“So it would fall under our jurisdiction?” Vision asked.

“In a perfect world, yes,” Bucky shrugged. “But--”

“So, no,” Wanda finished for him.

In an act that defied all laws of physics and biology, Steve’s stomach continued to sink--right out of his body and onto the floor, through the concrete under the layer of carpet, finally settling in the space above the drop ceiling on the level below. The indigestion, or perhaps just hunger from the lack of expected morning coffee with Matt at the cafe, still rumbled the rest of his chest despite the distance. He could feel it coming, the crash.

“We still can’t do anything,” Bucky said slowly. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t… y’know… casually look into the matter.” He paused, waited. Both sides of the one-sided conversation were waiting for the other to pick up the mantle. “We all know how Porto Alegre and Latveria went. If this does end up getting us fully involved, we’ll at least be more prepared this time. And no,” he said, pointing at Rhodey’s raised hand. “Already checked. No Accords violations. Have to share intel breakthroughs with the NYPD. First physical confrontation before we’re greenlit and it’s over. You know.”

The mask he’d gotten from Matt was stashed in the back of his closet in an old pair of boots, but he could feel the material in his hands, heavy. Something else was buried in the threads now, the weight of the lies he’d managed to tuck in his pocket far too easily for someone who was ribbed at every chance for being completely transparent. They’d come to expect too little of him on that front. Caught off guard looking out for thunderclaps when their ears should’ve been pressed on the walls listening for the soft clack of old settling pipes.

Natasha’s hand was leaving his shoulder before he had been aware it was there at all, adding a couple friendly taps as she followed Wanda in the file out the door. Apparently the matter had been easy to settle, and he wasn’t surprised. Even Bruce and Tony were starting to get restless with the recent string of mishaps and they were never deployed further than the doors of their lab.

Soon he and Bucky were the only ones left.

“You all right?” Bucky asked as he fell into the chair beside him. “The bet wasn’t my idea, by the way. I actually think Tony had been talking and Nat was trying to defend your honor or something. But--”

“I’m not mad about the bet, Buck.” And he wasn’t. At least five different betting pools centered around different people’s personal lives were running at any given time and today wasn’t the first time he’d been the subject of one either. But bets surrounding his preference for boxers or briefs didn’t carry consequences outside the five minute span when money was finally collected. “How, uh…” Careful, careful. “How did you know I was with Matt so much?”

“We didn’t,” he said. “That’s why it was a bet. Wouldn’t have been fair.”

“Yeah, like you’d give up an opportunity to swindle Tony out of ten bucks.”

Bucky waved his hand. “C’mon, we weren’t following you around every morning. Sam and I know you.” He gripped Steve’s left shoulder, thumb running along his collarbone like he always used to, and that same pre-war grin stretched out across his face. “So is he a good lay?”

Steve shrugged off his hand and got up to leave. “You’re a jerk,” he half-laughed.

“And you’re a punk, as always.”

The hall outside was surprisingly empty, not a single person in sight down the entire stretch of the building, which made it extremely attractive as a destination even though he knew that Bucky would be following him. Steve’s footsteps weren’t throwing demands to be left alone with every fall of his heels, which meant nothing was telling Bucky not to listen to that innate urge. “We’re not a thing, by the way. Matt and I,” Steve said once Bucky caught up.

“But you want to be, right?”

He slowed despite himself, coming to a stop as the outside wall turned into floor-to-ceiling glass leaning over the city. His watch said high noon but there was no way to tell through the clouds muffling the sunlight. “Well,” he sighed. “It’s complicated.”

An hour into the night’s watch, Steve still didn’t have a handle on any of the forces tugging his limbs in different directions. They cycled through his head methodically, one at a time with a thump as they came into view: the person behind the vandalism, breaking the accords, the sex trafficking ring they still hadn’t stopped, that singular tensing in Matt’s jaw as he strained his heightened hearing to its already lengthy limits. It was hard to keep his balance in the crouch by the roof’s corner with the dizzying spin of things to distract his attention, especially when the last option kept changing. Thankfully Matt was stable enough that a hand on his shoulder barely made him waver.

The night was too quiet--it was never this quiet. A bubble had descended on them, maybe the whole of Hell’s Kitchen, a black and bright meld of the sky and streetlights but silent, too, with entire neighborhood muted. The rest of Manhattan loomed ahead, winking and honking under the gleaming A on Stark Tower.

“He’s coming,” Matt breathed. He didn’t move.

“Who?” Steve murmured back. “When?”

Matt’s hand latched onto his wrist. “Jump.”

The alley below them was wide, and once he knew Steve had followed him into the void, Matt let go, vaulting himself the rest of the way with a flip to land on the plastic lid of a dumpster to break his fall. Steve hit the ground with a thick and unforgiving slam, consumed with the replaying image in his head of Matt doing a flip midair. Pain was radiating where he landed on his shoulder and hip, yes, but a flip. Matt. He scrambled to his feet--“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he muttered when Matt started to ask if he was okay. “I’ve had much worse than this.” And also, what the fuck, you continue to surprise me even though I shouldn’t be.

“He’s two alleys over.”

“Matt, who.”

The tensing in his jaw was tighter than he’d ever seen it. “The vandal,” he said, twisting his head to scan the surrounding buildings, but only for a moment--he stepped forward, closing much of the space between them and clutching his hand. His breath was hot on Steve’s nose. “He’s from Fisk,” and he was so quiet that if he hadn’t said anything, Steve wouldn’t have been sure he was breathing at all. “I suspected before, but now…”

His head whipped back towards the street and then back to Steve again. “He’s speaking at a normal volume. But to me. Because he knows I can hear him.”

“What do we do?”

He asked him like he didn’t already know that there was only one answer. Of course they were going to confront him. It was pulsing at the back of their heels and up to the heartbeats in their fingers where they were still squeezing too hard. Cemented by urgency.

“He’s headed over here,” he said. “He knows where we are. So we wait.”

A clamor of voices fought to be heard in Steve’s head, shouting on and on about strategic positions and how this would have never passed for a plan on the front. And he could see it, too, if he unfocused his eyes and let the world before him smudge into a yellow-tinged grey: a weathered map of Hell’s Kitchen, the unknown man marked in a thick black X, their own position with two red ones to match. Peggy and Colonel Phillips would subtly fight for ownership of the pointer to demonstrate how it would be best to get an advantageous position back on top of the buildings, catch him by surprise. And Bucky would hide his mouth under his hands, choking down the laughter Howard let out freely behind them, and when he caught Steve’s eyes across the table in that same golden light that seemed to bathe everything nowadays, he found that the urge was truly contagious.

But that was then. And now: trepidation crawling both ways along his throat, up to his tongue and down to his stomach; no plans hastily devised and carried out. They waited. He would find them eventually. No good would come from prolonging an inevitability.

“They said there’d only be one of ya.”

Matt tensed but said nothing, so Steve swallowed the quips that had come to mind.

“The info was a little outdated, anyway,” he shrugged, stepping into the shadow of the alley. His black suit melded with the surroundings so the only thing Steve could see was the lower half of his face and the white pattern of a target on his forehead--one to match the one left on the door of Nelson & Murdock. “Happens when you’re stuck in prison. Shit changes and ya just don’t know.” His teeth sparked white for a moment and faded. “What, the devil got your tongue?”

“Whatever you want, let’s get it over with,” Matt said.

“‘Mfraid it’s not that simple.” The man stepped forward, slowly, with a pregnant pause between each footfall. He ground the soles of his shoes into the gravel forcefully as if he knew the sound would grate into Matt’s eardrums like the real thing. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m going to kill you--and you too, by the way,” he added, pointing at Steve. “But there are a few more things on my to-do list before I get to that.”

“That’s a list better left unfinished,” Steve said lowly. “You’re going to leave Hell’s Kitchen and New York. Tonight.”

“Or what? You’ll make me?”

Matt shifted beside him, a slow swivel overtaking his neck as he stretched, a twitch of a grin flickering up his cheek.

“I don’t know where ya got that idea from, pal, but I ain’t nobody’s street thug like you fought before--”

Matt may have launched himself at the man first, but the heel of Steve’s shoe landed in his chest before he had pulled back his fist to aim. The man went flying back over the sidewalk and into the street, scrambling back to his feet and throwing his fist directly into the center of Matt’s chest without ever taking his eyes of Steve. Matt stumbled back, gasping for the breath that had been knocked from his lungs, the suffocating sharpness echoed along Steve’s own ribs like he had been hit as well. (His ribs are still hurt, did he recrack them, did--) But the man redirected his attacks, all focused on him, moving back to the shadows in the alley--let him think he’s overpowering me, get back in the dark, Matt’s best in the dark--neither of them landing a hit that wasn’t immediately blocked by a quickly-bruising forearm or thigh.

The three brick walls around them began to blot out the streetlights; Matt’s silhouette appeared over the man’s shoulder as their stalemate continued, Steve inhibiting less and less of his strength with every blow, and something wasn’t right. He had been in enough hand-to-hand combat to know the threshold where he started to truly hurt someone: breaking skin or a bone, hearing the sickening crack and yowl as something jutted up out of a uniform that wasn’t supposed to be there. And he had passed it, shifted a few toes across that line and the man was still wearing that toothy lear without the tiniest flicker of pain. An entire leg across the line got a labored grunt, more a rise to another challenge than anything, and with Matt silently running up to him from behind, Steve just wanted to put an end to it. Let loose all the pieces holding him back and knock the man out cold, dump him on the front steps of the 15th Precinct station without ceremony just like Fisk. Surely some open case with unidentified fingerprints could tie him to something--

The man swung wide at Steve’s jaw, catching him off guard, making contact but not hard enough to do anything but sting at his serum-enhanced bones--but as he skidded back, he saw him kick up a cracked piece of a wooden pallet, fling it back at Matt right into the soft parts on the side of his kneecap, straight through his suit. And he kept running at them, limping through it, a gleaming wet patch already dribbling down his calf.

“Not now, Daredevil,” the man sighed. Almost bored. Like he and Steve still weren’t in the middle of trying to beat the other down. “I know about you. I wanna see what you’re friend’s got up his sleeve, y’see--”

Steve pushed himself another couple of inches over the line, and finally the man’s smirk started to crack. But not his bones. Nothing that would allow them to end the fight without blowing Steve’s cover to this new adversary--how many people in New York could hit like he did? And then it would all be over--

He had to stop his fist mid-swing; in one blink and distracted thought, Matt had brought the man down unconscious at their feet. And Matt: still standing, a chunk of wood sticking out of his knee, barely out of breath. A splat of blood sat under one nostril and the bruise along his face that had been there that morning was growing into a sicker shade of green even in the dark.

Too many questions tried to fight their way off of his tongue: are you okay, what do we do with him, what do we do next, are you okay, what does this all mean, are you okay are you okay are you okay--

“We… we need to leave him here,” Matt said slowly. His body bent at an odd angle, like he was trying to keep standing even though, more than anything, he just wanted to double over. “I’m not getting anyone else involved right now. Fisk wouldn’t hire… ugh,” he winced, gripping at his chest wrap through the suit. “He wouldn’t hire anyone who had a record the cops could pull up.”

“Matt--” Steve moved to step over the man, reach forward to catch any part of Matt that might fall, and he met him halfway. “Okay--hey, hey,” he said as Matt half collapsed against him. He stepped back so he could prop their weight on the wall behind him, and he pulled both of their masks back so they could take a moment to breathe. It was late and it was dark and they could take a moment against the bare night to recollect themselves.

“I’m usually better at this.” The breath from Matt’s words went straight to the edge of his shoulder where it met his neck. “Going at it solo is different--”

“You were fine,” Steve said. “I think he wanted it the way it was. Not your fault. Are you… are you okay?”

“I’m okay. Knee hurts”--and there was that tone, the hidden laugh without actually laughing--“but I’m okay. I just… need to rest for a second.”

Hell’s Kitchen was still silent around them but Matt’s breathing below his ear thundered, rocketing his heart almost through his chest where Matt lay, and he was really fucked, wasn’t he? Matt had to know. He couldn’t not know by this point. But there wasn’t anything to do but stand there and help him stand while he gathered the strength he he spent knocking the mystery man out so they could drag themselves back to Matt’s apartment.

The deep in-and-outs of his breathing suddenly burned, and Steve realized that Matt’s head had turned, his face half pressed against Steve’s neck, mouth lightly grazing under his pulse point. Maybe he was too hurt to hear Steve’s heartbeat or his quickened, shallow breathing, but there were other ways his body could betray him at this point that didn’t require noticing such subtleties--yet that soft bit of contact, their slight movement along his skin while he stopped and started on the words he was trying to say, he didn’t want it to stop. He buried his nose in Matt’s hair and closed his eyes and let the pricking sparks shoot down his spine.

“Can you take me home?” Matt murmured into his neck.

“Of course. Yeah,” he said. “C’mon.”

Later, after they had crawled back into the apartment and Steve had laid Matt out on the couch, checked the damage on his ribs, carefully pulled the wood from his knee and wrapped it--arguing all the while how he needed a real doctor, there could be joint damage, tears along the tendon, stray splinters he couldn’t dig out--Matt had drifted to sleep, and fitfully. His brows were knitted together and his mouth curled down into a frown. Steve watched his chest rise and fall, stuttering whenever it rose too high and strained his ribs; the sight clogged his throat, stung at the corners of his eyes, and for the first time Steve felt he understood how hard this was going to be. They had no back up. No support. No medical team. Any bit of that network either of them had needed to be cut away to not blow Steve’s cover--and Matt had been willing to risk all that to have him by his side.

The thought tugged down at Steve’s already exhausted muscles. He pushed it aside, reaching out to brush a few strands of hair from Matt’s sleeping face, dropping his head into his propped-up hand to catch some blink of rest that would never come, chased away by the quick thumping in his chest.

It was all dancing a little too closely for comfort.

The morning after their run-in with the man in black, Steve nursed a large mug of coffee while sitting on the kitchen counter, head leaning against the refrigerator. The rest of the common space--chairs, tables, and all--was strewn with papers and laptops, a few stray beakers with colorful dried chemical stains ringed along the bottom. A bundle of red string sat hopefully next to a box of thumbtacks, scotch tape, and cut-outs of maps and blurry photos, though all remained unused. He could hear Bucky and Natasha now: “Tony, Clint, that’s a nice thought but we’re not at the ‘classic cop drama’ level yet, put it away.” Vision’s neat, blocky handwriting dominated the whiteboard, listing bullet points that had to be nonsensical only because of the many voices contributing to the discussion and trying to record it all.

“Can’t sleep?”

A light had flicked on by the door; Tony stood in the entrance, pointing idly to the clock on the wall. It was almost five in the morning.

“More like never did.”

“Jesus,” Tony said once he got closer, grimacing at however Steve must have looked. “Yeah, no kidding. Same,” he added. He started rifling through the cabinets at Steve’s feet, and when he pulled out a half-full handle of vodka, Steve gave him The Look and he put it back.

“Why don’t you have some coffee,” he said lightly. “I made more than enough.”

“Yeah, yeah…” He hoisted himself up on the counter across from Steve after clearing a couple stacks of files stamped with outdated SHIELD logos. “So if you weren’t sleeping, how many rounds did you go with your lawyer-toy?”

“Tony.”

“Important court case this morning? Had to kick you out early so he could get ready without the presence of Adonis wiping all his prepared arguments clean from his head?”

“Tony.”

“Everyone’s thinking it. I’m just vocalizing it.”

Steve sighed into his coffee, the displaced waves fluttering up the inside of the mug. “I had nightmares,” he said quickly, looking away. Waited. Tony was looking straight into the urn of coffee that he was treating like his personal oversized mug, pursing his lips together like the pressure was going to turn into a black hole and swallow him.

“Well,” he said quietly. “That makes two of us.” He made a face at him across the kitchen, the kind of joking, quirked expression that had come to mean, sorry, this won’t cause round two of the civil war, right, because I can’t deal with the media using that dumb name again. It was a brief flicker of a face, but all the meaning was packed in there tightly regardless. “Speaking of nightmares, though”--and the front was back up, full force--“FRIDAY already got this morning’s issue of the Times.”

He pulled a carefully-folded paper airplane out of his pocket and tossed it across to Steve. The ink on the newspaper page was fresh and the paper unusually crisp and unweathered, and the picture that he pulled open was an anvil to his chest. Blurry, grainy black-and-white of a man with short devil horns darting across a rooftop with a shadow close behind, the ends of his mask tie flying behind him.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever heard Fury talk about this guy,” he said. Steve was thankful that the lighting in the room was still dim so Tony couldn’t see the how the blood was undoubtedly draining from his face. “But the committee is apparently all over him trying to see if they should get him registered, and Fury doesn’t want anything to do with it. And I get why. If the guy wants to play Batman, let him. But now he has a partner or something.”

Steve’s phone started buzzing, but he left it in his pocket. One missed call. Another short burst for a text. And another. And another. And a third. “So…” he said carefully. Now is not the time to fuck up lying, Rogers. “What exactly is his deal?”

“Vigilante,” Tony shrugged. “Doesn’t venture further than west Manhattan. His name got tossed around a bit last night, you know.”

“What do you mean?” The anvil sank lower into his chest, ready to flatten his ribcage completely.

“I mean, Daredevil worked with your hubby’s--”

“TONY.”

“--law firm during the Fisk case. And now they’ve been vandalized. He could know something.”

A headache was starting to smart violently behind Steve’s eyes, and then his phone was buzzing again. His brain couldn’t take the attacks from all sides. “I think I need to go lie down.” He didn’t give Tony enough time to say anything--any time at all for him to elbow in another half a sentence, and there wasn’t any telling what else he could extrapolate and pass on to the rest of the Avengers, who combined were smart enough to unravel any puzzle thrown at their feet.

He was pressing his luck now under the heel of their scrutinizing research, and soon the structure of it all would pop and break. There wasn’t much luck to replace it with at this point. Not like he had that much in the first place.

--- 

The sun rose and bathed the entire day in a haze. Sluggishly sidestepping the bustle in Stark Tower, Steve slipped out amid the mess unnoticed to head down to Nelson & Murdock after piecing together that his phone had blown up under Foggy’s watch. Because of course he saw the Times that morning already before Matt could do damage control. (Shouldn’t he have stayed at Matt’s last night? That might have been better to ward off Foggy’s onslaught of questions, but the Avengers would have had their own inquisition waiting for him if he’d stayed out past sunrise even if they didn’t immediately connect the article to him. Another back alley they found themselves in, but surely there were ways to climb out of it.)

“I shouldn’t have to tell you how stupid this is,” Foggy said as soon as he walked in the door of their office, pressing a newspaper folded open to the article in question into his chest. “You of all people.” Lines he hadn’t seen before creased his forehead, yet they appeared well-worn. “And don’t try to tell me it isn’t you because a, who else would it be, and b, I already weaseled it out of Matt.”

Matt was sitting on Karen’s empty desk in the same t-shirt and athletic shorts Steve had left him in the night before, but the bandage on his knee looked new despite the maroon tinge starting to seep up to the top layers of gauze. The rest of his injuries had healed over well, but their footprints along his skin in the daylight were more alarming than he remembered them being.

“I know,” Steve said. “I know what this means. Which is why we didn’t want other people to get involved--”

“A little late for that!” Foggy sighed, looked for a chair to fall into dramatically and, finding none that weren’t covered in boxes of files, settled for sprawling out on the floor on his back. “You’re both idiots.”

Matt frowned like he couldn’t exactly disagree with him, then pointed in Steve’s direction. “Did you read the article, though?”

“Didn’t get a chance to, no,” Steve said.

“You should see what they’re calling you.” Slowly a smirk crawled onto Matt’s face. Heart skipped a beat, and he swore that smirk grew another fraction of an inch.

He skimmed the article. “‘Pandemonium’? What?”

“It’s pretty clever,” Foggy said, but his voice still held an edge of frustration.

“In Doctor Faustus,” Matt said, “Pandemonium is the home of all the demons in hell. Take the word apart and the the Latin root’s right there. I guess it’s fitting to them that the devil has his demon consort.” And he had to have known the situation was serious--the threat of the Accords wrapping around their throats and tossing them all in a shitstorm of trouble with international law--but Matt started laughing, a low chuckle that grew into an outright cackle.

“Matty, this is--god, what is wrong with you, now is not the time--” Foggy groaned into his hand.

“Can you believe that Captain America also houses every one of Satan’s spawn?”

(So maybe it was a little funny.)

“See, Foggy, Steve’s just laughed. It’s funny.”

“Steve doesn’t count,” Foggy said, sitting up. “I’m pretty sure Steve would laugh at any joke you told, even if you stole one of those terrible ones from the Laffy Taffy wrappers.” As he scrambled to his feet, he maintained eye contact with Steve, keeping it even as he had to pick through files and pack his briefcase. Large of handfuls of paper, probably not all of them relevant to what he needed, were stuffed in fairly unceremoniously and without any bit of organization, but such was his commitment to the cause. Don’t think I don’t know what else is going on here, his face said; and when he looked behind him at Matt, who had ducked his head, the look was that much stronger when he turned back to Steve.

“I gotta get down to the courthouse, and no!” Foggy said, cutting across whatever Matt was about to say. “You’re not coming. Not with that knee. I’ll be fine. And you”--pointing at Steve--“Don’t enable him.”

They waited until Foggy was out the door and his hurried, lumbering steps were no longer groaning on the staircase, but then they were just left with each other and the shifting plates under their feet. Matt’s bandage was still growing redder, the lines of his bruises weren’t receding, the press wouldn’t relent now that they’d found a sliver of something and put it on display in the window. So it was getting more difficult than it was already. Steve had counted on that--hadn’t it always happened that way?

“So…” Matt said. “Probably shouldn’t go looking for our guy tonight, huh?”

“Not unless you want to take on Foggy after we’re done.”

He snorted. “Yeah… no thank you.”

“I, um…” he started, and his face felt as red as the stains on Matt’s bandage. “I have an idea of what we could do, though.”

---

Sunset, a nondescript, graffitied Soho side street, and white lights leaking out the windows of the red-painted brick building--not that any of it mattered to Matt. There was a line, which Steve hadn’t anticipated, and Matt’s arm looped in his, which he hadn’t anticipated either: not a hand at his elbow or arm, but a purposeful arm-in-arm. The snippets of other conversations bubbled around them, filling the comfortable silence they had fallen into, and Steve closed his eyes to imagine what the scene must have seemed like to Matt: low murmurs bathed over the cars and sirens from the main road, a hint of bread from the bakery around the corner and something much less pleasant from the nearby trashcan. The sun falling into shadow and taking the temperature with it. And so much else Steve hadn’t learned to pluck from beyond his eyelids.

“You still haven’t told me what this is,” Matt said once the line started to move.

“I’m aware.”

They stepped inside into the open space of the gallery, all sounds muted by the expansive white walls and careful steps on the hardwood. A grin came to Matt’s face. “Are you ready to fend off the questions about why you brought a blind man to an art exhibit? We’re never going to hear the end of it--”

“Pretty sure we might not even hear the start of it.”

“What--”

The first painting stood before them, starkly black against the blank white of the walls around it: an enveloping void dipping into the imagined depth of the canvas, a throng of hands reaching up from the shadows, pressing at the weave and reaching around each other without any other limb in sight, without a face. Gripping at nothing but not trying to.

Steve took Matt’s hand and guided it up to the painting.

“Steve.”

“It’s okay, you’re supposed to.”

Matt’s fingers caught on the first raised node, moved right slowly, feeling out the patterns building and falling underneath, and his mouth split open wide so unlike the smirks and tight grins Steve had gotten used to. “It’s braille.”

“Yeah.” He heard himself, breathless, and he took a step to press up close to his side.

“C’mere.” Matt reached back for his hand, placed it back up where his had been. “Do you feel the letters? That’s an E, there, with the two at a diagonal. And next is an R, the line down and the one in the middle.”

Watching the corners of his eyes crinkle up behind his glasses, spreading down to the pink tinting his cheeks, Steve’s heart ached. His hand dropped, let Matt feel the work completely, both hands, and it was like the painting had been missing something until that moment when Matt’s hands went palm-to-palm with the ones soaked in the canvas.

“What does it look like, Steve?” he whispered. And he told him, right into his ear, and he didn’t need super sensitive hearing to notice the slight shudder in Matt’s breath.

They moved on to the next, and the next, on to the sheer white canvases dotted with poems and bereft of ink, stained by the charcoal-dipped fingers of the patrons before them, and they put their hands in together and followed the speckled verses, Matt translating under his breath, Steve filling in with the image depicted before them. A whirlwind. The gallery was crowded but they never stepped on any toes, ran into a crowd, or had trouble picking each other’s voices out of the hushed hissing of whispers.

“Come back to Hell’s Kitchen,” Matt said back on the sidewalk outside. “It’s a little further away than Stark Tower, but--”

“Not enough to matter.”

The cab ride was swallowed into the quicksand that had become the whirring in his head--he stared at the back of the headrest in front of him but he didn’t see it, not really, and then he was following Matt up the stairs of his building trying not to pull something to worry about over each iteration of his limp, and then--then--the door was shut behind them, dark and quiet, and Matt’s hands were fidgeting.

Steve leaned back into the wall, the pink light from the ad across the street shining into the living room in his peripheral vision. Matt stood, cemented. Took a step forward. “I…” he started. “My heightened senses don’t give me details.” Another step. Head up, glasses off, eyes just off from making contact but it didn’t matter in the dark. The green ring around the outside glowed emerald and the angle was perfect for digging up the best bits of the color. “I don’t know what you look like, you know.” He reached out. Pulled back. “Can I…?”

“Yeah.” (But it sounded like please.)

Matt’s fingers traced the edge of his face, running back up his cheekbones and over his eyelids. Slowly down the bridge of his nose. Holding his face, a whole, pressing in along the entire lengths of his fingers, and then pulling them down, ring fingers catching on Steve’s bottom lip. The tip of his tongue brushing the tip of his finger. An accident, but then: back again, on purpose.

“Oh.” Matt’s finger had pulled back, carefully tracing the line where Steve’s lip dipped down to his chin.

“What?”

“God--”

Matt stepped forward, returned his hands to the side of Steve’s head, holding it with a gentle fervor as he kissed him--long and deep, slow. Chests flushed together, and Steve’s hands latched onto his shoulder blades, moving and scrambling to get back to his face to hold it close to his, this heat that had built up since that first morning in the museum, behind his eyes and under his cheekbones, finally pushing back where it had meant to go.

One hand left the side of Steve’s face. It ran down his chest, down his abs, feeling the contours of the muscles there under the shirt, and Matt groaned into Steve’s mouth.

Slowly, slowly their lips dragged across each other, thumbs brushing under their eyes, and--oh, there was a nagging thought dangling by the most gossamer of threads at the back of Steve’s mind about consequences and now you’re truly fucked, but it fell away before he could even think to laugh because there’s an idea that wouldn’t be so bad--

Matt’s teeth pulled lightly at Steve’s bottom lip, shaky fingers rolling the buttons of his shirt open, his good knee slamming against the wall between Steve’s legs, pressing, and Steve was dizzy with it. Matt’s hands laid on his bare back as the shirt fell to the ground and he was branded, a hot stripe wrapping around as Matt moved to his chest, his collarbone, and he hadn’t even been breathing this hard that day lapping Sam back in DC--

A clatter of buttons bounced across the floor and Matt’s shirt fell with it. “I’m sorry,” Steve gasped into Matt’s mouth. “I just--I’ll get you a new one--”

“Shut up.” Skin on skin, and Matt was sucking into his pulse point, that same place where he’d worried the night before, returning to unfinished business. Steve could feel the bruise forming, could feel his body start to absorb the mark back into nothing.

“Gotta get you off that knee,” Steve half-moaned. Matt only doubled his efforts, venturing up to the hollow under his earlobe. “I’m--I’m serious--

“So am I--hey!”

In one fluid motion, Steve reached down and hoisted Matt up by his ass--a great ass, jesus christ--got his legs wrapped around his waist and they were still attached at the mouth, kissing more hungrily as Steve tried to steer them towards the bedroom with his eyes closed, brain short-circuiting, attention being drawn south and wherever Matt’s hands had last landed.

He bumped into a side table and a lamp, unplugged, toppled over onto the couch and rolled onto the floor.

“Watch out,” Matt smiled into the corner of his mouth.

“I’m trying…” he said. Sidestepped the couch, eyed the straight line to the bedroom’s open door. “I’m a little distracted…”

“Yeah?” And the smirk that followed was devilish, no other word for it, not one that Steve could reach for, because Matt was reaching, down. Knees momentarily jelly. A slight wobble, readjusting. And back towards that open door.

Another miscalculation and he was falling backwards onto the bed, pushing himself up, and Matt was making quick work of their pants without his mouth ever straying further down than his collarbone. They gripped at each other, moving almost lazily, languid, cautious against Matt’s ribs and knee, muffling themselves in each other’s mouths or the crooks of their necks.

When they finally pulled apart, Matt rolling to Steve’s side with a brushing kiss, he could see the beginnings of little half moons along the top of his shoulders where he had tried to ground himself, dig into Matt while they were already merged because it wasn’t enough, and there was a something that clicked so perfectly, and there had to be more somethings like that: at a shoulder, maybe, or at the tips of their noses as they bumped together.

“Hey,” Matt whispered. Pushed his nose against Steve’s again.

“Hi.”

“I was worried--” Steve kissed him to swallow the rest of his words and pulled away to find a floppy grin on his face. “I was worried I had read you wrong.”

“Do you need more convincing… because,” and he drew close to Matt’s face, a hair’s breadth from touching, “I can do that.”

Matt tilted Steve’s face towards his own by his chin, a light kiss that shot straight down to his toes. “I could touch your face all night and still not know what you look like. Not completely.” One of his fingers ran down the side of Steve’s nose, pausing on the bump halfway down. “I wish I could see you.”

There wasn’t anything he could say to that, only watching as certain lines on Matt’s face grew quietly taut, strained, like he was trying to will his eyes to take in the image before them for even a fraction of a second. But then Steve blinked and the lines had grown slack, leaving a defeated vacuum in its wake.

“People like you and me…we have to lose part of ourselves to become who we are now. I lost my sight, you lost… tell me what it was like before the serum.”

Asthma, for one, in a world where doctors still tried to treat it with cigarettes. The diabetes that acted up whenever money ran low and the pantry echoed. The heart murmur and the anemia, the fears that the cold of the month would develop into a sinus infection or pneumonia, that the soreness from a racking cough was his mother’s angina jumping into a new victim. The scoliosis that twinged worse every day from the thin mattress and the fights he couldn’t keep himself out of. It’s amazing you’re still standing, Bucky had said when he found him dabbing at a bloody nose in an alley and tilted at an odd angle as he leaned against a wall. He’d picked that fight half a day after being released from Bucky’s mandated bed rest. He’d half-joked on the way back home that if people kept knocking him in the head that both ears would go bad, but Steve always acted like he’d missed it. “Wouldn’t let Bucky help me walk even if he suspected I needed it,” Steve said.

“You had something to prove,” Matt said. “Did that feeling ever go away, even after?”

No, he wanted to say, and it’s so misplaced. But his throat wasn’t opening up to let his vocal cords answer.

“And then when all the SHIELD records went public--I read through a lot of them. Mostly about the Avengers, because I knew far before then that my abilities were, um… not exactly normal, and you all had that too. And in every file, every background report there was something awful, even in the couple lines of Romanoff’s. And when Barnes--Bucky… Foggy was worried about me. I hardly slept. All I did was watch the news. With the Accords, obviously, there was reason to be concerned, but so much was taken from him. From all of you. And sometimes I have to wonder if it was worth it, what we got in return.”

Matt lightly placed his spread hand across Steve’s face, and through the gaps in his fingers, Steve could see his own smile spreading across the gap, pulling up the corners of Matt’s lips. And the fingers moved, brushed at his hair, leaving sparks of a trail in their wake. “What do you tell a little kid who wants to be a superhero?” he murmured. “‘Dream smaller, it’ll hurt less’?”

“Do a lot of kids want that?”

Matt tapped his ear. “Oh yes. A good bit of them want to grow up to be you.”

“Pretty sure I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”

The warmth was back, pressing against the corner of his mouth then back to the center, Matt’s tongue touching against his, and just as he was about to let himself get lost in the scramble of hands and teeth and hips pushed back together, Matt pulled back. His forehead rested on Steve’s, hands on either side of his face, and then it rang high like a church bell, that truth that this pulse between them, it was was fed by two rivers pumped by mirrored hearts.

“There’s a diner up the street that’s open late,” Matt said. “I could really go for an omelette.”

“That does sound pretty good.”

Clean and fully-clothed, the night air’s bite felt sharper than he remembered, but at least part of him didn’t feel it completely, the palms of his hand that was gripped around Matt’s while he followed the directions to the diner that was becoming more legendary by the minute.

“Foggy always gets some special-made sort of thing with black beans and really really hot salsa,” Matt said, “which I don’t understand the appeal for breakfast, burning off your tongue--”

He was deaf and there was gravel stuck in his cheek, and maybe it was bleeding, but he was still holding onto Matt’s hand, and Matt’s hand was still attached to the rest of Matt--

He wasn’t deaf anymore, just ringing in his ears and heat at his back, muffled speech like the ocean had swallowed up the island at long last and they were swimming through the body’s last attempt to live before everything went cold. Matt’s hand on his was crushing, squeezing in a rhythm. Panicked. Steve wrenched his eyes open, and the murky mumbling had to have been coming from Matt, right? He was saying something, and the sound came rushing back, a roar, and he was able to turn his head enough to see the shattered glass sprinkled in the street, the fire licking past the broken panes where light from the billboard had passed over their bare chests minutes earlier.

“It’s my apartment, isn’t it?”

“Matt--”

“Isn’t it?”

“Are you okay?”

“I--I’m fine,” he said. They pushed themselves up, got to the sidewalk to lean against a light post and catch their breath. A long gash ran under one of his eyes, blood starting to leak down his cheek like he was crying. The lenses of his glasses were cracked, a piece missing here and there towards the edges. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah…” His gaze was drawn back to the inferno and the rest of the building’s tenants running out across the street in pajamas and slippers. Somewhere, there was a siren howling, maybe headed towards them. But there were always sirens. There was always another fire.

The one demanding their attention, it blazed like it wanted the street bathed in daylight. The wood floors he had just padded across to pull on his shoes popped in the heat. Bricks burned black on the outside, ash gathering minutely in the pores.

“It looks like it’s just the bedroom for now,” Steve said.

“Firetruck’s almost here,” Matt mumbled.

“They’ll be able to contain it.”

“The fire, yeah,” he sighed. He didn’t have to say it out loud. The fire could be contained, but there wasn’t a single thing the fire department could do about the cause, the man in black with the target on his head. A target he had painted homages to across their backs.

(There weren’t many safe spaces left, he guessed. Fisk had obviously figured out who Daredevil was, or the man had, and it was calculated. Here we are at your place of work. Here we are in your bedroom. We’re going to drive Daredevil into the light.

For a few terrifying seconds, the only sensations his brain could grasp for were the heat singeing his neck, the dirt on his tongue, Steve’s hand crushing his own. The rest quiet and black. And not just quiet: choking, hands plugging up his ears and reaching in and down until the fist hit the back of his tongue. Once it was taken, it wasn’t coming back. That was what history had told him, what some part of himself believed and was muttering in the back of his head on repeat until it was proven wrong with a rush and the city was back and Steve was back and the sirens and the crackling--

He called Foggy and Karen to meet them out of Hell’s Kitchen. No safe spaces left. Targets had centers but the rings around them earned points too, and when they sat in the very back booth in a diner in Manhattan, Steve told them what little they knew. But neither of them were looking at him. Foggy’s gaze had always had a particular heaviness to it when it fell upon Matt’s skin, and it buzzed there now, consistently. His heartbeat pumped frustration or worry, something strong and full of adrenaline. Beside him, Karen was silent.

Steve was still holding his hand under the table; a good choice, considering the suggestion to follow: “I already talked to some people, and we’re taking all three of you to Stark Tower.”

The question always revolved around how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, but they never said anything about devils. They never wondered, or maybe they had always been convinced by the costume they’d donned to keep the counters guessing. Either way, more feet had to balance on the edges now. They were going to find out.)

Tony had shown Foggy and Karen to where they would be staying, offering up far too much fanfare and frivolity for the middle of the night and the circumstance that brought them there; he offered to show Matt as well, but he adamantly insisted that he stay with Steve. Steve, on the other hand, was grateful that Matt couldn’t see the looks that got tossed their way. At least money wasn’t exchanging hands--yet.

“I don’t want to wait until after this meeting to do this, so hi,” Bucky said, extending his hand.  “Bucky Barnes. I assume Steve and the media have told you all you really need to know.” Matt released his hold on Steve’s arm to meet Bucky’s hand, making it on the second try.

“Matt Murdock.”

“Oh, we know,” Sam called from the other room.

“Still,” Bucky said, and Steve was starting to really wish he’d made Matt follow Foggy and Karen, “We’ve heard surprisingly little about you from our dear old captain himself, which obviously means…”

“You might want to double check that look Steve’s giving you before you finish that sentence,” Rhodey said as he passed behind him.

Steve hadn’t been aware that he was giving him any other look than the resigned deadpan he’d come to perfect since basically living with the rest of the team, but there were other things on his mind than monitoring exactly what his face was doing.

Bucky grimaced apologetically. “Sorry, sorry. I know it’s been a rough night. I’m glad nobody got hurt.”

Matt’s hand had reassumed the position at Steve’s elbow, and the terseness in the grip was all he was letting himself show from whatever was going on in his head. An easy smile crossed his face, the one that still made his heart skip a beat, and the grin had returned to Bucky’s face under its glow. “What were you saying before, though?”

“Hm?”

“Before, um--Rhodes, was it?--made the comment about Steve.” The grin didn’t falter. Like he knew exactly where this was going.

“Oh. Right.” Bucky locked eyes with Steve, but he only got a shrug. The moment had been deflated by Rhodey’s comment and there didn’t seem to be a way to blow it back up. Which was just fine by Steve, really. “Well. It wasn’t important. C’mon, pretty sure Nat and Vision got all their shit together.”

And indeed they had: the red string and push-pins that had been abandoned the last time he was in the common area had been put to use, connecting newspaper clippings and post-it notes with near-indecipherable scribbles of observations and connections. The whiteboard had been erased and reused, half of it obscured by a grainy photo held up by a magnet. Carefully, Steve tried to tease through the volumes of information presented before him to look for that one photo he couldn’t have them connecting to this case, even if it was a futile thought--and it was there, he spotted finally, set off to one side with one lone string tying it to a sheet of notebook paper that read Matt Murdock/Nelson & Murdock. Someone had tied a post-it with a giant question mark along the connection.

Doesn’t mean anything. It’s just because of the connection with Fisk, not because they know who he is and that the other person in the picture is me. It’s fine. It’s fine--his heart rate must have spiked because Matt’s hand moved lower, down to his wrist where he gently laid his first two fingers on the sensitive skin over the veins.

It’s okay, those fingers said, and he could take a deep breath without feeling like the anxiety tearing him up would cause it to shake.

“This is him?” Wanda said with a grin as everyone settled into their seats crowding around the table. “Nice work, Steve.”

Rhodey was suddenly very interested in massaging out some headache that had sprung along his temple. “Has everyone forgotten why we’re here?”

“Nope, nope,” Tony said, running into the room. “Not starting without me.” He fell into the last remaining chair so forcefully that its wheels sent him thudding into the wall. “All right. And no, Sourpatch, we all know why we’re here. We just want Mr. Murdock to know he’s welcome.”

“Is that what you guys are calling it?”

“Well what would you call it, then?”

“The word ‘hazing’ keeps coming up.”

Tony clutched at his chest with the most dramatic look of offense he could muster, Clint and Wanda following suit in their own ways. “Hazing? This is nothing like what happened with Scott--”

Rhodey was clearly trying to suppress the urge to use some choice language. “I want to make sure Turtle Man doesn’t happen again--”

“Is this really the time to talk about Turtle Man?” Vision sighed.

“Oh, it’s always time to talk about Turtle Man,” Sam said.

“HEY.” Suddenly Natasha was on her feet and the room fell silent, save for her ringing phone. She held it up so the caller ID was visible. “It’s Fury,” she added for Matt. “So much for Earth’s fucking Mightiest--hello?”

No one felt like it was their place to listen in on Natasha’s side of the conversation, so they took to occupying themselves by inspecting their fingernails, staring off into space--or, in Vision and Wanda’s cases, staring oddly at each other--and trying to sneak in a quick nap. Matt placed his hand on Steve’s thigh under the table and whispered into his ear, “What’s Turtle Man?”

“A joke that got out of hand. Long story.” But one look at the small uptick of the corner of his mouth and Steve added, “But I’ll tell you tonight.”

(On Steve’s other side, Bucky was staring, grinning widely, chin in hand. Which Steve chose to ignore.)

“Okay,” Natasha said loudly. She walked back to the head of the table, leaning on it with both arms. “Fury and Maria are in DC, as you all know. They convinced the committee to give us a full go-ahead on this--which, yes Sam, is unprecedented for something this local… but there’s a catch.” She turned around and grabbed the red marker from the whiteboard tray and drew a thick,  angry circle around the photo of Daredevil and Pandemonium from the previous morning’s paper. “They are almost certain that these two are going to show up. Neither of them are registered. You do the math.”

Steve willed himself to not react past anything only Matt would recognize, including a desperate plea to the blood in his face to stay where it was. Under the table, Matt’s hold on his leg tightened, but almost reassuringly. Or so Steve told himself. He was probably having the same thoughts he was, but it was nice to imagine that a plan might already be forming in that clever head of his--

“I don’t understand,” Bruce said, frowning and shrugging when Natasha turned to him impatiently. “Daredevil’s been around since before Ultron. If they wanted him registered, why didn’t they do that with the rest of us? He couldn’t be hard to find. They even tracked down a living dead man and his secret underground SHIELD team.” He paused, clearly waiting for someone to jump in, but no one did. “We don’t even know if he’s enhanced.”

“Half the people at this table aren’t,” Sam said. “But I know that’s easy to forget.” He grinned when Natasha let out a lone chuckle. “They were probably hoping he’d go away on his own and got tired of not being able to have him under their thumb when he didn’t.”

“Well, whatever the reason,” Natasha said, “that’s the catch. They’re giving us a little more autonomy on this one because it’s more our usual gig: we’re now on an official basis leading intelligence and strategy, but action taken still needs a green light from them.” The rest of the group groaned, Bucky the loudest. “Come on, what did you expect?”

“That bit about the intelligence and strategy got my hopes up,” Rhodey muttered.

But, as they reminded themselves, relying on the information they themselves had gathered and verified would be a step in the right direction, and they already had leads to go on. Steve watched Vision assume his position as the group scribe, handing the photo pinned to it over to Natasha for her to display.

“Clint made some phone calls and got Scott to do the same, and we think we’ve got a suspect.” The photo was poor quality, but the long face, wide set of teeth, and scar on his forehead were still clear--and felt vaguely familiar. “Goes by Lester, no last name available. Known in the underworld as Bullseye.” She pointed to the scar, which did appear to be in the shape of a target now. “It’s sort of his thing.”

In the short amount of time since the vandalism at Nelson & Murdock was discovered, they had buckled down and dug into it, uncovering more information than Steve had expected--though, he admitted to himself, he hadn’t exactly been spending much time around Stark Tower since then, either. Most of the information had come from one of Scott’s friends, and it had come to this friend by way of an extremely convoluted trail of he-said-she-said that had been nearly impossible to follow: “Scott was shouting at this guy in the background trying to get him back on topic,” Clint said. The end of the trail, as looped and fragmented as it was, ended with a low-level mobster in Chicago who could confirm Bullseye’s ties to Fisk, who obviously had motive.

“And as it turned out,” Clint continued, “that same guy said our man first attracted attention of his sort of people during a circus act in Iowa.”

“Let me guess,” Sam said. “You asked for a volunteer from the audience and he showed you up?”

“Ha… not quite,” Clint said, rolling his eyes. “Actually, scratch that, not even close--”

“Clint,” Natasha sighed.

“Right. Whatever. He comes up, scar on his forehead, makes an impossible mark with a butter knife and puts it halfway through the target.” He pointed over Natasha’s shoulder where a photo from the first crime scene showed a close-up of the card embedded in the door to the Nelson & Murdock office. “Didn’t make the connection til now.”

It was so much and too little all at the same time--they had a name now, some idea of his abilities, but it felt like they had climbed up to the next ledge just to hold on by the strength of their little finger. Not to mention the catch, knowing the rest of the Avengers would be hunting him and Matt down alongside Bullseye--there was a way around this, to avoid the converging crash, but if they couldn’t think of it in time…

“Well that’s about all we have right now, Matt,” Natasha said. “So we’re going to get somewhere with it soon.”

“I appreciate the effort,” he said in that quiet, polite way he had, when the guards were coming up so slowly hardly anyone noticed. “It’s comforting to know the Avengers are looking into it. And, um…” He squeezed Steve’s leg under the table. “As much as I would like to stay and chat, it’s been a long night, so--”

"Tony, don’t get up,” Steve said quickly as Tony quickly rose from his seat. “I can show him. It’s the same wing where we all stayed at first, right?”

Even though yes, it indeed was, and there was a room waiting for Matt between Foggy and Karen’s, Steve took a couple wrong turns and ended up at the door to his own apartment. As soon as he closed the door behind them, Matt let out a long sigh like he had been holding his breath since they convened with the rest of the group. Tucked his glasses into his pocket, rubbed his hands over his eyes. The front of his hair got mussed up in the process, leaving him with imitation bedhead that only exaggerated how tired he looked.

“I would ask if you’re okay,” Steve said as he guided them to the couch. “But obviously, considering things…”

“It is a lot to take in… this entire, uh… night,” he said. “But this is just sensory overload. A lot of new--I’m not used to people who are enhanced other than you. Dr. Banner’s heartbeat had some underlying tick to it, not like a murmur, but something else, and for a while it was all I could hear--and then… had to have been Maximoff… her entire body hums. It’s low, really low, and then I couldn’t get that out of my head. And--” He dragged his hands over his face again, frowning. “I didn’t even realize Vision was there until he said something. I don’t know why. I could clearly sense something large and mechanical in the room, but I assumed Stark had, I don’t know, modified a roomba or something.”

“A roomba?” Steve was trying not to laugh. Really, he was. But it was so hard.

“I know, okay? I don’t know what I was thinking.”

And Matt’s face pulled into something so fraught with frustration and embarrassment, even if it was slightly subdued like everything seemed to be with him--Steve was halfway to frustrated himself before he remembered that he could offer the comfort he wanted without it being weird. An arm around Matt’s shoulder. When he leaned into his chest, a small peck on the temple by his hairline. It should have felt weird, he thought. Even just a little bit. Romantic entanglements with people you’re fighting beside--that should’ve carried some air of weird. Had he not crashed the plane during the war, the last few years of it probably would’ve been a little weird with Peggy too.

But also: maybe it wouldn’t have. A new element was added to the mix, but it slid into place without a hitch, like it was always supposed to be there. Like it would make the entire system work better.

“At least now we know who we’re up against,” Matt said. “On both sides.”

“Yeah… both sides,” Steve sighed. “We’ll figure it out.”

“You don’t have to keep doing this, you know.” Matt’s head was turned slightly away from Steve, back towards the door. “Neither of us anticipated things getting so complicated and I would completely respect your decision if you wanted to back out.”

Hand at Matt’s chin, Steve tilted his face toward him, taking it in both hands once he could make Matt feel the weight of his gaze. Even if he couldn’t see it himself. “I don’t back down from a fight.”

“Steve, this isn’t your fight--”

“Maybe it wasn’t once, but like hell it isn’t now.” He kissed him deeply, and Matt sighed as his hands reached up to twist themselves into the short hair at the back of Steve’s neck. “Look,” he said as they pulled apart. Their foreheads rested together and their heavy breathing mingled in the close space between their mouths and Steve wanted to cross that void again--“We obviously got a thing going here. And I can’t let you face it on your own. Not that I don’t think you’re capable of it, because I know you are--you’re incredible, more than incredible--but I need to guarantee this thing will get beaten. And I can’t sit here with the rest of the Avengers and worry while you’re out there. It’s risky but I don’t care. You are worth it.”

Matt smiled, a slow one inching across his face, but something in the edges was trying to pull it down. “You say ‘risky’ like you’re not this close to being found out for breaking international law.” He paused, pursed his lips together, thinking. “That bothered you so much before.”

“That was before. And this is now.”

Later that night, after fixing them both a hot mug of herbal tea from the stash Pepper kept supplying him, Matt fell asleep with his head tucked into Steve’s back. His body was bent at odd shapes that must have kept the twinging pain from his remaining injuries at bay, but one of arms was slung over Steve’s chest all the same, lightly brushing the skin whenever he breathed.

He couldn’t sleep.

And it wasn’t that he had lied to Matt, not that he could have anyway, but just because he wasn’t considering abandoning his post beside Daredevil didn’t mean that the consequences revealing themselves didn’t send lead bricks straight to his stomach. The Accords were one thing--a big thing, a big thing which he’d gotten himself to ignore lately--but the committee sending the Avengers after them. It was a familiar hand growing too close again. But history repeated itself, didn’t it? Curving back on itself, back around to the origin but slightly off, just different enough to stake a claim on a sense of novelty.

First SHIELD. Then the civil war. Now this.

The lead in his stomach sank further.

He focused on the soft brush of heat along his back every time Matt exhaled, and one by one, like counting sheep, he was able to keep his eyes closed. Even if the sleep never came.

A full forty-eight hours had not passed since Matt, Foggy, and Karen had come to Stark Tower, and already Matt was starting to get antsy--his injuries were nowhere close to being healed enough for the kind of punishment Daredevil would put it through. His bruises and scrapes were one thing, and even his ribs were starting to settle back into themselves, but his knee was holding onto its derelict state by a stubborn thread, throwing a limp into Matt’s gait. Foggy knew it had been bad and didn’t prod, though the rest of the Avengers would only believe his story about a misplaced sidewalk pothole and the subsequent twist for so long. Bruce would practically be begging him to get it looked at, only to find a knot of scar tissue forming over the former hole in his flesh.

And then--then there’d be questions.

Not that he wasn’t getting questions now, but they were only from Matt in hushed whispers in the hallway or mouthed into his jawbone after he’d turned off the light for the night. “You know the security around this place better than I do. How are we going to come and go at night without someone getting suspicious?”--and it was right into the sensitive spot on his neck, but it didn’t matter at that point. Vigilantism, for the central part it was paying in their relationship, was a real mood killer.

“We go out now that knee’ll collapse as soon as you land a jump,” he said.

“If we go out now, FRIDAY will undoubtedly tell Stark that you and I left in the middle of the night and didn’t come back for hours,” Matt said pointedly. Steve felt him shift as if he were forcing a sigh out through his shoulders instead of his nose, clearly thinking back to the morning after the bombing when the entire team was interrogating FRIDAY on where Matt had spent the night only to find Pepper had installed some new privacy programming, rendering their efforts moot. Of course, the barrage of questions only got redirected--and went unanswered.

“It wouldn’t hurt to think ahead,” Matt said.

He wasn’t wrong, but the remark took the entire situation they found themselves in and reduced it to something far too simple to work with, as if getting out of the Tower undetected were the only thing they had to worry about. During the day, when Matt and his crew were holed up in an empty office space on a lower floor tending to their casework, Steve would sit between Bucky and Rhodey as the spiderweb of red string and article clippings grew larger and more confusing. Bits and pieces were scattered on the table before them, and they were supposed to be skimming them looking for anything of use, but the paper would inevitably be snatched from their hands as Wanda and Clint began completing each other’s sentences, drawing connection after connection, often--as Steve realized with a twinge--circling closer to places he didn’t want them going.

Such as: mapping out Daredevil’s most recent sightings, whose foci were the blocks of Matt’s apartment and Nelson & Murdock.

Such as: connecting Vanessa Marianna to Fisk, and thus to the situation, with Tony waltzing through in the middle of the group’s train of thought to add, “Hey, Pepper and I bought art from her a few months back right after Steve got arrested.”

Little things, nothing that could be incriminating now. But later: that was was tugged at him. That, and attempts at casual conversation to assuage the worst fears that they had already been had, the fears he couldn’t bring up to Matt until he knew that they didn’t have to worry. That was how he found himself alone with Wanda in the kitchen mid-morning as the rest of them were literally running down to Tony and Bruce’s lab chasing a hunch. Slumped over the counter, chin in hand, she stared into the slots of the ticking toaster heating up a pair of frozen waffles.

“Before you ask, I didn’t eat breakfast,” she said. “Natasha ate the last of my yogurt.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just…” The right words leapt away from him, so he crooked his fingers into a claw shape--which, on second thought, probably wasn’t the best option either.

Wanda raised an eyebrow and reached into the freezer for another waffle, which she set on the counter and zapped with a bolt of light from her little finger. It turned into a hockey puck of charcoal. “Do you want to eat that?”

“Not… particularly, no,” he said. “I mean…” He gingerly took the blackened waffle to the trash and leaned back on the counter next to her. “I just thought there were… I don’t know--”

“Settings?” she said. The waffles hopped up out of the toaster and she plopped them on a ripped paper towel to pick at them. “No, not with that. Some things.”

“What about your mind reading?” And he hoped to god it sounded casual.

“That’s only when I want to, and I don’t really care to know the details of what this group is thinking about,” she said, rolling her eyes. “What are you afraid of, Steven? Didn’t want me spreading the news about you and Matt sealing the deal?”

“What--”

“Sometimes I can’t sleep,” she said quietly. “So I take a walk around the halls.” The smirk that inched across her face was impish enough to rival Matt’s. “You’re both very loud.”

“That’s. Um.” Not where he thought the conversation was going. And he couldn’t even be relieved that she didn’t know anything about Daredevil because she kept talking--

“I mean,” she said with a mouth half-full of waffle, “I get that’s probably for his benefit since he can’t see, but it doesn’t explain his contributions.” The smirk was back. Some days he felt that the “Scarlet Witch” moniker was a bit much, but today was not one of them. “And I repeat: nice work, Steve.”

There was a dig to be had about her and Vision, certainly, but her smirk faded to a harmless, kind grin and a promise that she wouldn’t tell anyone until he had, and he didn’t have it in him to put her in a bad mood again. “You know,” he said, “if you ever can’t sleep, Bucky keeps weird hours. Could keep you company.”

“I know. He has.” She kept picking at the waffle, digging into the little pockets of whatever had been passed off as blueberries. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, though, since you’ve been so quiet--do you really think Fisk is trying to target you too? Okay, so you haven’t been paying attention,” she said quickly when the confusion rose to his face. “Sam is concerned that Vanessa showing up here so soon after you meeting Matt is more than a coincidence. How long have you two been a thing?”

"Not long enough for that to have anything to do with it,” he said with a frown. “But let me go ask Matt what he thinks. He knows that whole outfit better than I do, anyway.”

He pushed past the door into the hallway (with Wanda muttering, “Oh okay, I guess you meant now” at his back) and stood waiting for the elevator down to the lower floors, far too conscious of the sudden urge to jiggle his knee. What the hell was taking the elevator so long? Didn’t Tony think to make this place as modern as possible? Didn’t that include lightning-speed elevators that could guarantee that certain people avoid certain packs returning from certain labs when they didn’t want to talk about certain things? Stark Industries could make a killing off of one modeled from a bullet train. That had to be safe.

And even once the elevator got to the ninety-seventh floor, he still had to go eighty-five stories down: each steel beam that washed by in the glass windows looking out onto the city was another thud of a worst case scenario against his ribs. So all in all, he shouldn’t have been surprised to see Matt waiting for him when the elevator door opened.

But he was.

“Hi,” he said half in a daze.

“Remember what I said about Banner and Maximoff?” Matt said. “Well. Your heartbeat can drown out a lot of other sounds. And… you’re warm. I mean--your body runs hotter than most. I--” A grin flickered, sheepish, before deciding to stay. “I could sense you coming fifty floors up.”

And even in his tense state of worry, the blush still rose to his cheeks. “We need to talk. It’s um…” He glanced over Matt’s shoulder and saw through the door’s large window Foggy and Karen among mountains of paperwork, clearly only pretending to take notes while they peered around the mess at them. “They’re staring.”

“Good. That’ll give us an out.” He placed the hand not carrying his cane on Steve’s hip and stepped closer until he could reach around to his ass--the movement was slow and deliberate and maddening, and not the least bit concerned with discretion. “Are they still looking?”

“N--not even hiding it,” he choked. Matt’s face lingered close to the pulse point on his neck, not touching, but hovering so that there was the sensation, the feather-touch of heat from his breath. “This is kind of a serious issue, you know--”

“I do,” he murmured. “Which is why--” He tilted his head up, impeccable aim landing his teeth on the edge of his earlobe on the first try, dragging lightly down. Steve’s eyes must have fallen shut because when he opened them again, Karen’s jaw was hanging open and Foggy’s was well on its way to a similar position. “We needed an exit they wouldn’t want to ask questions about. Get the elevator.”

Thirty vexing seconds later, it dinged open and Matt walked him backwards into the thankfully empty car, making a show of throwing his cane to the floor and grabbing Steve’s face with both hands as the door slid shut. The ground lurched up beneath them as they rose through the building, kissing sloppily and with a burgeoning sense of recklessness as they passed Stark Industries offices halfway reaching to start removing pieces of clothing.

“You’re so--fucking smart,” Steve panted. A brief look above the door told him they were leaving R&D and heading through the executive offices. “We need to hit the--god--emergency stop--before someone walks in on--me on my knees--” A few scrambled slaps against the wall and the car shuddered to a stop. “But…” He swallowed a groan as Matt mouthed at his neck. “We do have a problem--”

“Tell me.”

And his thoughts were running, scattering across the inside edges of his skull, rattling like marbles on stone as he tried to collect them, as he kneeled and made slow work of Matt’s belt, the button and zipper--“They’re connecting me to the situation faster… than I expected.” His heart pumped forcefully, fueled by anxiety and lust, and he pressed his forehead against the thick outline of his cock. “We need to shut this down before they figure it out.” Matt’s hand cradled the back of his head, fingers slowly twisting around his hair, tracing lazy circles in his scalp. “How’s...how’s your knee?”

One long, shaky breath and that smirk was back--and Steve had been wrong before, because there was no way Wanda could have even begun to rival that particular upturn of the lips, the glint reflecting off the canines in anticipation of the yellow bath of the streetlamps. “I think it’s up for some more… strenuous activities.” He gasped as Steve pulled his slacks down to his ankles. “I love the sound of your heart,” he said quietly, and maybe it was an accident that he said it out loud from the slightly darker tinge of red to cross his cheeks, but he added, just as quietly: “I think I could find you from across the city.”

Steve smiled against his hip, felt Matt’s quick laugh vibrate down his body, then the lower gasps and a choked groan as he took him in his mouth, with the vague thought quickly tossed aside about security cameras and oncoming gossip. The crosshairs, for this one moment, could lift them from its sights.

Their feet slapped against the pavement, potholed and dotted with puddles from a drizzle that had fallen before the night had turned this dark and frenzied. The water was shallow, barely-there, but it had still managed to seep through to Steve’s socks and splash up the sides of Matt’s red-clad legs, droplets catching the far light from the lights toward the street side of the cargo yard. In the sea of half-rusted steel containers stacked on each other five and six high as far as he could see before they melted into the shadow, the chances of him catching sight of the white target on Bullseye’s suit was abysmal. That much was already clear after Matt yanked him out of the way of a surprise attack just off the Hudson River Greenway, a punch landing on concrete without a yelp of broken bones. They’d chased each other in circles, finally leading to the maze where Bullseye’s cackling bounced off the metal walls rising around them and left Matt leaning a little too much on his good knee.

(But both were good now. One just hadn’t been that way recently, Steve reminded himself.)

“Can you hear him?” Steve breathed, and Matt held up a hand, collapsing it slowly until only his first finger was left up. A pause--then he pointed it down the stretch of containers to their right.

He stayed close behind Matt, walking backwards and watching their six even though he knew Matt had it covered at all angles, but it soothed his nerves. It was what Bucky would do, or Natasha or Sam, and they’d done it so many times before, and even earlier, during the war too, with Morita pressed up behind him in the Hydra base in Prague. He wasn’t about to take any chances, enhanced senses or not.

Though--with the way the light was receding from them the further they ventured down this row, he wished he could share in Matt’s abilities, if just for the next couple of hours.

“You seem worried that I’m going to kill you tonight.”

They stopped dead where they stood, Matt’s head already tilting to try to pinpoint where Bullseye had situated himself. It came from above, that was all Steve could discern; but Matt’s head, it kept swiveling, seeking it out, and when he couldn’t stuff the source under his thumb, his jaw tightened so toughly Steve heard it pop. He wanted to grab his hand, a reassurance, but the last thing they needed when they didn’t have a twenty on the adversary was to give him more ammo to gun them down.

“Well. I’m not. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this because then you’ll get a little fearless, and I can’t have that. So just know that I’m not killing you tonight. At least not on purpose. Which is a shame, because I love killing. But I will hurt you. I know who you are, both of you. And I’ll make you bleed without breaking the skin.”

“Where. Is. He,” Matt gritted under his breath.

Steve craned his head around, and straight ahead, down the lengths of five containers, the gleaming white teeth and target hovered almost disembodied in the distance, the stripes of white along his arms shifting as he spread his arms wide in some sort of ironic welcome. “Straight ahead. You got him?”

“Now I do.”

“I got your back. Go.”

Matt took off at a sprint with Steve following in his wake, pulling back on his natural speed to stay a couple steps behind him, and he stayed on the ground as Matt launched himself at one of the steel sides, flying up to grab the top ledge of the container on the other side, stacked at intervals to create a staircase up to the highest layers. Scrambling, finding purchase on chipped paint and dried sea salt, like his body wasn’t still trying to put the finishing touches on stitching him back together.

Bullseye didn’t move. He didn’t even lower his arms. Or stop grinning.

Steve put on the extra push of speed, his arms pumping and thighs pulling themselves parallel with the ground, and only then did Bullseye move, but just out of the way, jumping to the side where the river sloshed up against the pier. Blows aimed but never landing, Steve’s foot connecting with Bullseye’s heel, tripping him, the grainy thud of body on gravel and the shuffling to his feet that followed suit, a light line of red leaking, caked with dirt at the seams. Matt’s steps above them thundered on the metal until they were nothing, until there was a clatter on the warehouse at the end of the line by the pier and the red horned head reemerged above the line of the roof.

“Now now,” Bullseye said as he continued to evade whatever blow Steve threw his way. “Let’s not get irrational about this--”

“What do you want?” And it was a little wilder than he wanted to sound, a little more desperate than his voice was used to being beyond the confines of a closed door, but he couldn’t take it back or keep it from fueling the growth of Bullseye’s teeth as the corners of his mouth pulled upwards.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Matt leaping from the warehouse, slated to land on Bullseye if Steve could keep him still--

“I want to see you hurt,” Bullseye spat, grunting loudly as Matt landed on him, impeccable aim but not enough to pin him down because he wrestled free, getting a kick in to Matt’s cheekbone, a loud crack. “Captain, I want to see you watch yourselves burn.”

He pressed something on the inside of his wrist, and distantly at first, then with a growing roar, metal ripped at the seams and flew into the air riding on the billowing mounds of orange fireballs--row by row they burst and the insides scattered, charred, rushing into the air still red-hot from the fire. Wrenching away from the sight, Bullseye had disappeared, and Matt was back on his feet and the fire was growing, popping the containers into the air, and the instinct was still there without his shield: grabbed Matt, put himself between him and the fire, curling himself over his body. But it was still coming, still hot at his back and the shrapnel and debris could kill Matt, they could lodge in his throat and not heal because he was human. Steve lifted Matt off his feet, running, yelling “hold your breath” before jumping off the pier, thrusting them underwater and hearing the muted booms of the firestorm reaching the air above them, the distorted oranges and whites shimmering thickly.

Steve pulled him out of the water. Held him as he coughed and spluttered, and lagged behind when he rose first, darting into the dark alleys and side streets near the pier. There was a cut on his face, but it would heal without painting more scar tissue across his skin. Ashes continued to rain down behind them, sirens wailing, growing closer. They dumped their suits in the newly-designated spot in dark corner under a fire escape, took a step towards the main road to walk back to the Tower and the heart of Manhattan--but Matt grabbed his hand first, brought it to his lips, a soft brush against the scratched knuckles now healed over. Blotches of blood laid over the scabs, now pressed to Matt’s lips and licked into his mouth. Steve’s heart was still racing, and from the look on Matt’s face as he kept holding his hand, he knew he was listening to it, an anchor to drown out the rushing hot memory of the fire just behind them.

--- 

“At approximately 2:35 this morning, a large explosion rocked the cargo storage yard in Hell’s Kitchen off the Hudson River Greenway. Thankfully there were no reported casualties, though the financial damage is extensive--management officials of the storage yard estimate that over fifty million dollars of goods were destroyed, including secured warehouse material slated to for shipment to a Department of State construction project overseas. Police have no leads on a suspect aside from the man known as Bullseye, who is already under watch by the Avengers via the Superhuman Accords Joint Task Force Committee. Security footage, however, only shows the vigilante team of Daredevil and Pandemonium leaving the scene shortly thereafter. It remains unseen whether the Committee will look to hold them responsible for the incident with the lack of other substantial evidence. We will bring you developments as we receive them. And now over to Janice with the score of tonight’s Mets game--”

--- 

The revised orders came in the next afternoon by way of a harried-looking Fury and Maria, bags under their eyes from the jolting half-sleep that came by way of lethal combinations of red-eye flights and conference calls. They walked past Matt, Foggy, and Karen in the common area without paying them any mind--a stray look from Fury, maybe, but no comment. So the Avengers were making friends outside the boundaries of SHIELD’s still smoldering wreckage. That was probably registering as a good thing.

The gist was simple: Daredevil and Pandemonium’s priority levels were raised to equal footing with Bullseye. “Bullseye is obviously still dangerous, but they can’t have those two goons running around anymore,” Maria sighed, massaging a headache out of her temple. “The committee thinks they’re attracting the trouble, so having them under control would make the situation better overall.”

“Do you really believe that?” Sam asked.

But Maria pressed on like she hadn’t heard him, and Fury’s mouth pressed into a thin line to keep back what he was thinking. “The next time Daredevil and Pandemonium are spotted out, we are to go after them. Bullseye will likely be around, and locals recognize them much more easily.” And tweeted about it. Whispered among each other about it. Elbowed the friend standing nearby to motion to the flitting shadow on the rooftops.

Steve was silent.

There was a hand closing around his throat, a hand wearing an old SHIELD-regulation glove, and the eyes behind it couldn’t see through his mask like he could.

But he could feel Matt reaching out to him through the walls and doors that separated them; not his eyes boring through the barriers, but another hand sliding through the joints and the pockets of space in the drywall, and it came to rest on his shoulder, his face, releasing the pressure gagging him just below. A weak sensation, but present, and maybe Matt wasn’t merely tuning in to something invisible to the rest of them as much as he was taking the time to pay attention. And Steve was learning. Was wondering if Matt could feel him reaching back.

--- 

Matt and Foggy tried their cases. Made their way down to the police precincts if the public defender’s office was swamped. Steve took his runs with Sam, was force-fed by Natasha--begrudgingly taking careful bites of the concoctions she and Bucky formed from the blast radius of sauces and flour left in the kitchen, waiting for the other boot to drop. Bucky pulling him aside and asking, so it’s Matt right, you’re hung up on him, because that was their method Natasha had told him about before, because he was off, and Bucky would have to assume because no one outside of Foggy, Karen, and Wanda had any idea. But the boot didn’t drop. It hovered--it took the form of Bucky and Sam and Natasha hovering gently and gingerly around him, unsure of what to say, unsure if they could borrow that phrase of Wanda’s (your energy is weird) and be using it correctly. The tension was palpable along his shoulders and made him hold them at sharp angles counter to their usual square set: it threw off his shadow, the shape of him in the corners of their eyes, and suddenly he didn’t seem to fit in the old hole where they’d been placing his peg. He was bound to grow out of it eventually, Bucky should have known that, that was all that he had done before the war, cracking the ideas of himself he saw others holding.

How many of his parents’ friends had seen him standing outside Gloria’s with a cheap homemade sign defying every word they’d said to each other about how good of a Catholic boy Sarah’s son was? How many of them had seen him standing his ground and shouting back when the cops came? The rest of the story, that was the part everyone else knew.

Matt sensed the tension, and Steve expected it. He watched him loosen his tie, toss it on the chair in the corner of the bedroom, only missing a couple of rare occasions. And he wouldn’t ask what was wrong because he knew, he knew, he felt it too, in his own way. So he didn’t ask, just glided over wordlessly to where Steve had sprawled on the bed, placed a lingering kiss to his cheek, and laid beside him. Two of his fingers pressed themselves against the underside of Steve’s wrist, and if the beats felt off, or if something else just wasn’t right, Matt would crawl on top of him. Kiss along his jawbone, trace his chest with a single shaking finger. Fuck him deep and slow and quiet.

And then the next day they would begin again. The court cases. The running. Tying new lines of red yarn on the wall, new photos pinned in the mess. Daredevil and Pandemonium stayed off the streets, laying low.

One afternoon in the haze of it all, while Steve was watching Rhodey and Clint across the room try to video call Scott and that friend of his, Natasha walked up beside him, bumped his shoulder with hers, grinning. “Hey.”

“Do you want to take bets on how long it takes Rhodey to start screaming into a pillow,” he muttered behind his hand.

A deflection, and she saw right through it. “Everybody knows, you know.”

His heart stopped, full force. Cold radiating through his ribs, along his fingers--

“You stare at him a lot because you know he’s not looking,” she said. “But the rest of us are.” Her smile grew a couple notches, borrowed some warmth from the blazing strands of hair lining her face. “Do you notice how Matt blushes when you stand beside him?”

He hadn’t, no, but the blood was rushing back to his limbs, relief, they were still safe, it was nothing, they hadn’t fallen from this thinning ledge of grace--

“It’s okay,” she said quietly. “Doesn’t change anything. Same old, same old. Except now Tony’s going to have to find a replacement for those tired virgin jokes.” She grinned again, and when his own must have looked as half-hearted as he felt, she added, “We’re happy for you, Steve.”

He tried at a laugh, got one out that she was able to echo, and they turned back to the scene before them: Rhodey massaging his temple, Clint holding up a hand in the hopes that he could cut through to the quick back-and-forth on the screen, some argument about two other members of the entourage with intermittent attempts by Scott to, once again, steer the subject back on track.

“It’s really not important what Kurt and Dave had to say about that exhibit--” Scott groaned.

“Yo man, but it was though! You gotta let me finish, I promise it’s relevant,” his friend said.

“Luis.”

“Right, so anyway, cubism. It’s great, y’know? I’m sure you know, man,” Luis said pointing at Rhodey, who didn’t say a word. “Yeah, ‘course you do. You’re a smart guy. So my cousin’s boyfriend’s upstairs neighbor told me about this exhibit down at the museum and I took Kurt and Dave with me because I wanted to share my interests with them, y’know? That’s what bros do. And this fancy art lady came up to us, I guess because we kept talking about you, Scott, sorry man--but she was like ‘oh, you know Scott Lang? Do you know the rest of the Avengers?’ and I was like, ‘Not really, though, not exactly my scene,’ but she told me to tell Scott to tell you guys that she knows who that guy is that you’re after.”

They could’ve heard a pin drop had Rhodey not sat up so quickly that his chair loudly slid across the floor; and had Matt been there, all that sound would have been lost completely under the thunder of Steve’s heartbeat.

“Which guy?” Rhodey said slowly.

“There’s more than one?” Luis said. “Damn, you guys stay busy as hell. Scott, why aren’t you over there helping them, man? Like what do you even do all day--”

“Luis…” sighed Clint.

“Right, my bad. Yeah, she said it was the…” He snapped his fingers a few times. “Demon… rider… the one with the fire--”

“That’s one of mine,” Scott said from behind him. He’d turned back to the table in the background that was littered with old circuit boards, wires, and screwdrivers. “Close, though. He meant to say ‘Daredevil.’ And no, she didn’t tell them who he is.”

Luis grimaced when he noticed Rhodey and Clint collapsing back into their seats in frustration. “Yeah, man. She was real cryptic, like, ‘I know who they are and they do too, they just haven’t realized it yet,’ and like, man, that’s so unhelpful.”

But it was something, they all agreed, and Natasha put a hand on Steve’s shoulder warmly before walking back towards the door, cell phone already at her ear with Fury or Maria’s number already dialed. Steve didn’t wait around to listen to the rest of Clint and Scott’s conversation, and his hearing was starting to get murky with the rasping sound of blood pumping through his body, double time. But it wasn’t anxiety this time: this held a different sort of thrum under his skin. Frustration? Close, veering towards it and sharply away towards the hotter core of anger at Fisk pulling strings from jail, Vanessa for tugging at them in her own way, flying across the country just to put pressure on them to act. Instead of hiding.

He had been heading to his section of the Tower, and the clacking of Matt’s cane drew up next to him halfway there. “I hadn’t heard it quite like that before,” he said quietly. He didn’t fold up the cane, instead holding it vertically at his side while his other arm looped in around Steve’s elbow. “What’s happened?”

“I…” Matt squeezed his arm, moved his hand down to Steve’s own, and his voice came back to him. “I’m tired of hiding. They want us to get out there and fuck up, but someone is going to get hurt eventually if we don’t do something. I can’t sit around and do nothing anymore. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, but we can still climb up the rock, right?”

There was a clatter as the cane fell to the floor, and suddenly Matt’s hands were on both sides of his face, pulling him down for a quick, closed-mouth kiss. “You might be the only legend I know of who lives up to every part of it.”

--- 

(The sun was starting to set, Foggy was saying as they left the Tower, and it was apparently a really bright set of oranges and pinks. He had left Steve back upstairs, embroiled in some Scrabble game Stark had dragged him into, and he could sense where Foggy’s errand was taking them--the smells of the bakeries and bodegas left a particular trail of breadcrumbs, the specific chirps from the talking crosswalk signs, all signs of Foggy’s favorite path from Manhattan to his street in Hell’s Kitchen. Just needed to get a few things I forgot in the hurry to pack, he was saying, and it’s been too long since we got something from the deli, anyway. Dinner. Old times. They’d be back before the night really set in, Matt told himself, and it wasn’t like he would be any help on Steve’s Scrabble team anyway.

Foggy stopped at the precinct to deliver Mahoney some cigars, and Matt stayed outside, listened to the snippets of conversation at the newsstand--and it hit him all at once, the voice overtop the mix of lilac and sterile scent of the hospital, how the sounds stopped abruptly followed by a small but sharp intake of breath. A few steps, folding the newspaper under her arm haphazardly so it crinkled.

“You’re still standing,” said Claire. “I’m glad.”

“How’ve you been? “ he asked.

“You first.” Her feet shifted on the sidewalk, grinding the tiny rocks into the cement, heartbeat was steady. “I’ve seen the papers,” she said lightly, but the door to the precinct squeaked open behind him, Foggy saying something over his shoulder to Mahoney and whoever else was on duty. “I should go. Stay safe, Matt. Please.” The grit scratched under her heel as she turned on it and walked down the street, turning down an alley before Foggy would even realize he had been speaking to someone.

Claire, he had wanted to ask, what did your Sunday School class say about martyrs when they found each other? Could their fates be averted then?)

--- 

The night was quiet and Bullseye was nowhere to be found, but the rooftops stayed under their feet as Matt scanned the neighborhood for signs of the trafficking ring or any other trouble that Hell’s Kitchen was serving them on a platter swathed in the blackened navy sky. Steve listened too, so hard his jaw started to hurt from an unconscious clenching, but there wasn’t anything he could discern. No sounds outside of honking, rubber on asphalt. Sirens. The occasional dog barking, muffled behind an apartment window.

The running commentary of the 107th had quieted in his head lately, but a string of incomprehensible French barreled through him--there was that stakeout with Dernier, on edge for every minute of every hour that it lasted, the only noise the light tinkering of his nimble hands with the explosives he had whittled together from what seemed like thin air. A small force of Axis jeeps was supposed to drive on the path under their camouflaged shelter in the tree above, but it never did. Every snapped branch or isolated rumble tensed their muscles, made them reach for bomb and shield, and by the end of it all when they rendezvoused with Falsworth, they were as exhausted as they would have been had they fought off all the Germans they were supposed to have seen. Steve felt the same thing coming tonight, Bullseye catching a ride in a seventy-year-old ghost jeep and disappearing into the trees of Central Park. The rest of the dregs of Hell’s Kitchen might have followed.

“This is unusual,” Matt breathed. “Why can’t I sense what’s going on?”

“Maybe nothing is.”

“No.” He flexed his hands, popped a couple knuckles against his thigh. “They’re just hidden. Like they know.”

But he tensed, turned his head to the side back towards the alley--a couple alleys away it had to be, there wasn’t anything that Steve could see or hear directly below them--and then Matt was hanging off the ledge of the roof, grabbing hold of the water spout and sliding down like a fireman’s pole, taking off in the shadows of the sidewalk. Darting down another alleyway. Steve tried to keep an eye on him as he followed, memorizing his turns. He jumped to the street below, landing and rolling on the pavement, swerving into the alley he swore he’d seen Matt’s red figure dart into--and found a mob.

Seven men, all Steve’s height or taller, armed with guns that couldn’t have been available anywhere but the black market, muscles straining at the sleeves of their tracksuits: Matt was fighting all of them at once, bullets popping and limbs flying and every time a blow landed on his smaller body with a crack, he’d fall. He’d fall and he’d get back up like it was nothing, even though he could see the blood smeared on his face and the ground in the millisecond burst of light following fingers on triggers.

He was two places at once, frozen where he had stood at the alley’s mouth, paralyzed at the sight of Matt in the shadow of all these men--and then sprinting towards them, reaching a hand around the throat of the first thug he hits, flinging him into the brick wall. Bending back the barrels of guns to render them useless. Pressed back-to-back with Matt as they knocked their assailants skulls together, jammed fingers into a bony pulp with their heels; and when only the largest man was left standing, blood dribbling down into his mustache, they charged, grabbed one arm each, and there was no way to count how many bones broke from the snapping alone.

Matt wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and it came away wet and a deeper red. “There was a woman,” he said, catching his breath. “Someone she knew must have owed them money. But she got away.” He cracked a small grin, and Steve could see dark lines of blood between a few of his teeth.

“You asshole, you were outnumbered,” he hissed. “They had guns, you could have waited for me--”

“There wasn’t time. And I’ve taken on more than that before.” He shrugged, casually, and Steve’s frustrated nearly rent his chest in two.

“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” he sighed.

“We can talk about this later,” Matt said. He began to scale the fire escape behind them to get back to the roof line. “Staying in one place too long after that isn’t a good idea since…”

“I know, I know.”

Matt led the way down what was probably an entire five-block stretch of road heading towards the river, sticking to the routes best suited for staying as out of sight as possible when the distance over the streets was too far to jump safely. At least he was doing Steve that one favor, already thankful that their precarious situation meant that his fear-stricken frustration would never get back to Bucky, who would only say that it was karma coming back to bite him in the ass.

“Do you worry about the rest of your team like that?” Matt whispered after he decided on a roof to rest on. The ledges were high, and they could sit behind them without being seen from the street below.

“Most of them don’t charge into a situation when they’re outgunned like that,” he said. He noticed whatever had been bleeding in Matt’s mouth had stopped, but he was still wincing. “How bad did they get you?”

“Just some bruises, nothing major,” he said. “And I wasn’t outgunned. I told you I’ve handled worse on my own. Still here,” he added with a small grin.

“Well, that’s not something I knew then, was it?” He’d sounded tired, but there was a smile on his face that he knew Matt was missing, so he took his hand and brought it to his mouth so he could feel it for himself. Kissed his fingers lightly as the pads of them traced the upturned curve of his lips.

But his hand dropped from Steve’s face. Suddenly, a strained and taut jerk of the muscle there, and he sprung into a crouch. Steve followed suit, scanning the skyline for anything that Matt could have picked up on--

“Wh--”

“Shh.” The blood was draining from the small amount of his exposed face that the Daredevil suit allowed. “We’ve got a problem. Your friends are here.”

“What.”

“Someone must have spotted us, and it got back to them,” he said, moving along the wall still at a crouch.

Steve scrambled after him on his hands and knees, limbs cold, heart hammering away. “Is it all of them?”

“Just two. It’s--hold on--” Grimacing, head tilted to one side, towards the east. “Maximoff. And Barnes.” He paused, turned to face Steve, holding what he wanted to say on his tongue, unsure, until finally asking, “Why them? Why would it be them?”

The unstated this isn’t the ideal duo to be up against here rang church bell loud in the space between them. “Bucky… I don’t know. I really don’t. But he can’t go out in the field without Wanda as a backup.” Matt frowned. “Precautionary measure. He--nothing’s happened in years, but--”

“Right.” A couple slow, calculated breaths, and he swallowed, waiting and listening. “So what do we do?”

Bucky and Wanda couldn’t be outrun--not Bucky at least, not by anyone but Steve--and so much of Wanda’s powers remained an unknown variable because no one could be completely sure that she was ever using her complete capabilities at any one time. The roof was covered in a thin layer of dirt, and Steve took a nearby wood splinter to draw out a crude strategy, whispering it to Matt as it solidified under him. And it was a terrible plan, truly awful, something that would have been ridiculed under the leaking canvas tents on the European front so many decades ago, but it was all they had. Matt’s lips were pursing into paper-thin lines as the seconds wore on, undoubtedly from his sensing Bucky and Wanda’s quick approach, and careful analysis was a luxury they couldn’t even dream of affording.

So they would split up, Steve luring Bucky away from Matt and across the rooftops and Matt stealing away into a dark alley as soon as possible to put as much distance between him and Wanda as possible--she wouldn’t read the thoughts of anyone around the Tower, but turning on the ability against an adversary, that was almost a guarantee. And she would know who Daredevil was immediately. And the ruse would be up.

“I don’t like this,” Matt muttered.

“Do you have a better idea?”

He opened his mouth to speak but must have thought better of whatever he had planned on saying because the lip-pursing was back, inwardly directed, and he shook his head. “They’re here. Next roof over. Meet me back at Pier 81.” He stood, straightened his shoulders, and Steve rose beside him: the unmistakable silhouettes of Bucky and Wanda shifting, readying themselves for a confrontation, but then Matt was vaulting himself down into the alley below, a metal clang of feet on dumpsters rising up past the brick, and Steve took off at full speed, crossing the fully length of the alley and then some in one easy leap. And again at the next building’s edge. Bucky’s voice was yelling behind him, telling Wanda to go after Daredevil, that he had this other guy, and it was working so far, it was working, and Bucky’s legs had to have been pumping behind him in time with the mechanical whirring of his arm not far behind. He put on another burst of speed as a red flash lit up his peripheral vision and he jumped again; Bucky swore loudly, then more under his breath, pushing himself to match the pace Steve was setting.

The lights from Wanda’s fingers kept throbbing, brightly and edging on white, concentrated in one alley across the street, a couple blocks up--and then a hand was gripping at his shoulder, yanking him down, and Bucky fell on top of him as they rolled. Slid up to the wall at the ledge and crashing into it, breathing heavily and scrambling back to their feet, only for Bucky to shove him back down. Crawl on top of him, knees digging into his biceps.

“Goddammit, Steve,” he said, and his voice broke, a sound he hadn’t heard since the last bad bout with pneumonia the winter of ‘38. “You’re not going to say anything? I know it’s you, Stevie. I’d recognize the stupid fucking way you run anywhere.”

Steve was numb: his arms from the bones of Bucky’s knees cutting off circulation, but the rest of him too. He sat up once Bucky climbed off, pushed himself back up against the wall ledge, and he slid the mask from his face with a quick motion, eager to get it over with, and he couldn’t meet Bucky’s eyes to see the look there. Whatever it held in the quiet.

But instead of words, Bucky reached towards him with his right hand, flattening the spikes of hair mussed up from sweat and rested there for a moment before pulling back. Sat cross-legged in front him, close, rubbed his hand over his mouth and swore more under his breath, or so Steve guessed: it wasn’t English and it wasn’t Russian, but his throat moved around the sounds the same as if he had.

“Who’s the other guy, Steve?” He could feel Bucky’s eyes on him but he was staring over Bucky’s shoulder, down at the little sliver of scar tissue that peeked up past his collar on the left side. “Does Matt know about this? How did you get involved with this Daredevil? How did you even find each other?”

“Bucky…”

“No. No,” he said. “And look at me, dammit. Come on.”

So he did. And immediately wished he hadn’t, because it was an expression he would not be able to make himself forget easily, if at all: a miserable black line between hurt and anger, a yellow sheen from the streetlights coming off what he was blinking back.

“This is the most idiotic thing you’ve ever done.”

--- 

(The lucky thing about his hearing and Maximoff’s abilities was that he could still detect the humming under her skin on the streets, that it wasn’t quiet enough to get drowned out by the din of the city. Before it came bursting from her fingertips, he could hear the sound gather at her arms, push down past her wrists in a rush, and then the humming would be out in the air, amplified and dodgeable. Projectile attacks shrieked like a dog whistle once they were released, and they were only catching the ends of his heels as he ran and leaped away from them; the force fields she would throw up in front of him, those were low, vibrated his ribs and his stomach and wound around his toes, threatening to send him skittling across the pavement. She couldn’t land a hit on him, and even though Steve hadn’t said not to, Matt wouldn’t even try to retaliate. Not even in self defense.

And she was getting angry, muttering to herself in Sokovian as he climbed up the fire escape, swung back across to the scaffolding lining the back of the alleyway, bits of heat singeing his ears as the energy whizzed past screaming. She was standing at the street end, keeping a force field up over the top of it to keep him penned in, and even if they were at a stalemate, there was no place for him to go unless he wanted to try to edge past her.

So he dropped down to the ground, landing on the balls of his feet, one ear tuned towards the details of her movement, the humming, and the other ear reaching to the rest of the neighborhood for any sign of how Steve was faring or if he had managed to evade Barnes at all, and there wasn’t any immediate indication either way.

“You’re making this a lot harder than it needs to be,” Wanda said.

“I could say the same thing about you,” he said lowly. He added an extra layer of grumbling to his voice to be sure she wouldn’t recognize it. “We’re not the ones you want.”

“You couldn’t know a damn thing about what we have to do,” she said, some emotion vaguely simmering under her tongue and around the way she spat the words out. “I’m sorry.” The humming gathered in her arms again, blew forth from her fingers and he ducked away from the screech, stood tall again. But the screeching was getting louder after fading away--it had doubled back suddenly, and one blink of distraction had him slammed on his back, the the energy wrapped around his ankle and dragging him towards her until he could feel the heat of her breath against his nose, hand around his collar. “I wish I didn’t have to do this.”

But there wasn’t anything, just a silence and her dropping him to the ground and a slight heat spreading along his brow, and--

He blinked, and the sun was bearing down on him, scalding, the pavement hot under his back, and the Daredevil suit was gone. No clouds in the sky to dot the vibrant blue--

I can see.)

--- 

“You have to talk to me, Steve,” Bucky huffed.

“There isn’t anything I can say that can make this better,” he said finally.

Bucky threw his arms up, shrugging, biting back another long string of curses in languages Steve would never be able to identify. “That’s helpful.”

Wanda’s lights in the distance had dimmed, and he could only hope that it was a sign of something good, that Matt had gotten away and was waiting for him in the shadows by the pier. But he could only afford him a passing thought as Bucky’s glower wrenched his attention back to right in front of him.

“I just…” Bucky said. “I know why you did it. Or I think I do. Some asshole vigilante like Daredevil doesn’t have to listen to the committee, do they? You can do the good you know needs to get done without all that fucking oversight, but Steve… god, I hate it as much as you do, but...I am so mad I could hit you in the nose. This isn’t the way to do this.” He got to his feet and ran his fingers through his hair, gripping and pulling his head back until he could only look up at the starless sky. Neck straining and feet shuffling in a pacing circle. “I know you have the best intentions, but do you know what this looks like? Do you?”

“I--”

“You’re not happy with how shit is going so you’re operating from the shadows to take matters into your own hands! I thought I was done with that when you came back to me, Steve. I didn’t have a choice in all that, and you’re volunteering--”

“Hey, wait,” Steve said. He got up and walked back to where Bucky had ended up on the roof, put a heavy hand on his shoulder to keep him still. “This is not the same thing.”

“I didn’t say it was,” he said, shrugging off Steve’s hand. “I’m just saying what it looks like. And now I know it’s you.” His voice broke again, delicate hairline cracks and Steve needed to keep it from spiderwebbing out further to the rest of him, but he didn’t know how.

“Are you going to turn me in?”

And then, right then, Steve almost wondered if Bucky really was going to nail him in the face from the way he looked at him, with all of his face screwed up and tightly wound. “Fucking christ, Steve, you think I would do that? God. No. But I’m not happy with you. Just because I’m not turning you in doesn’t mean I’m not pissed beyond belief. Because you still did this. You did this to all of us. You’re putting us all at risk because you decided this moral mission of yours was worth more than the implications we would all face if one of us put a toe out of line, and now I have to keep your secret too. And you know how much harder they’re going to come for me if this gets out. Yeah, whatever, cleared my record, but the public’s going to want my head, and the committee is going to give it to them.” Bucky stepped up close to him, grabbed both of his shoulders so hard he could feel the bruises start to seep up and blot at his skin. “But I’m not going to turn you in even if you’re the biggest punk ever born because you’re still my best fucking friend, god help me, and I don’t think it’s in my power to determine where the end of this damn line is.”

As he turned to walk back towards the side of the roof by the main road, shaking his head, he put a finger to his ear. Looked up, scanned along the horizon, and turned back to Steve. “Wanda lost your friend. He got away. So. I guess I’ll see you back at the Tower, huh?”

An invisible hand tightened around Steve’s heart and squeezed until, just for a moment, it stopped beating. “Bucky,” he said quietly, getting him to stop. “I’m sorry.”

His mouth twitched too quickly to tell if it was aiming for a grin or down further into his ire. “I know you’re not, but thanks for saying so anyway.” 

---

(He rubbed his eyes, opened them back up again--and he could still see, unfocused as it was at first with his knuckles digging in. Wanda was nowhere to be found and Hell’s Kitchen only looked a little bit different from what he remembered from his childhood, but he could see, and he had to find Foggy, he had to find Steve--

“Hey buddy, I thought you were running up to the Thai place for that takeout.” At the head of the alley was Foggy--or it had to be, who else had that voice even if he didn’t have a face to put with it--briefcase in one hand and a rumpled paper bag in the other. “I mean, unless they moved locations to, uh… here.”

Jumping to his feet, he half-jogged to the sidewalk, got up close to Foggy’s face to take it all in: the warm rosiness of his cheeks in the sun, the long blond hair that lined his grin and the way his eyes pushed up into barely-there lines when he laughed. Gray suit, maroon tie, a particular bemused quirk of his lips when Matt didn’t say anything and kept staring.

“What’s with you, man?” he half laughed, and when Matt smiled wider and wordlessly, he nudged him in the shoulder and kept walking wherever he had been heading. “C’mon, you know that gang bust scandal that just got booked at the precinct? Well, this pack of recently un-embargoed Cuban cigars says we might get some of those cases.” And he went on about how Mahoney was stationed in left field of a stakeout down closer to Chelsea and that they could pick up lunch on the way, and really, something was up with you, Matty, fess up.

The words weren’t important. He could hear them any day. It was watching them sit on Foggy’s tongue beforehand with the entire backdrop of the expressions surrounding them: he’d missed so much of what made Foggy Foggy when he let himself babble on about the subject of the hour. The city, too, with Stark Tower looming in the distance over some of the incomplete luxury condos Fisk’s fingerprints had covered, scaffolding covering entire blocks like armor where cladding remained off the walls or even chunks left over from the Battle of New York had not yet been repaired.

Had blue ever been as sharp as it was in the sky right then?

“I’ll be just a second, bud, hold on.” Foggy clapped him on the shoulder, ducked down into the alley, which was a little too dark and a little too grimy for the high noon light.

There was so much to look at--the newspaper dispenser with its flat ink letters behind the glass that he didn’t need to touch to understand, and a strong-jawed blond man staring blankly in the photo splashed across the front page. Bold capital letters screamed CAPTAIN AMERICA in the first half of the headline, the rest cut off by the bottom edge of the dispenser window.

Steve. Just as handsome as he knew he was, but nothing that his fingers could have done justice. Where is he, where is he in this new city--

And he listened for Foggy’s footsteps before remembering he could look for him first, turn his head and just know if he was there or not without the roundabouts--he glanced down the alley, how it jerked left and disappeared around the corner, and Foggy wasn’t there. Listening, he couldn’t hear anything over the normal white noise of Hell’s Kitchen, all indistinguishable even as he focused his entire attention to it, eyes squeezed shut and dark like they’d been for so long. “Foggy--”

A thud landed down the alley, softer than it should have been on the asphalt and another part of it, delayed, a hand splashing in a puddle. A man clad in dark clothes tucking a briefcase under his arm as he scaled the fire escape to vault over the roof and disappear, leaving Foggy splayed and stretched beyond the corner, head flopped and turned so Matt could see the thick crimson arc across his throat and how it spilled across his pale skin and turned his eyes gray in the contrast.

“No.”

He didn’t know there was someone down there that wasn’t Mahoney. He didn’t hear the knife being pulled from its sheath tucked into the man’s belt or boot and he didn’t hear Foggy struggling against the hand that had likely fallen over his mouth to silence his screaming or the threats that had been muttered in his ear and he was useless and now Foggy was dead, he was dead and the first time he could see him in the years since they met, and his face was blank and bloody and cold.

"No.”

His limbs wouldn’t move. The lunch crowd spilling out from offices in the surrounding blocks stepped around him, only barely jostling him from side to side, and no one bothered to turn their heads to notice the body or the deep red swirling amid the rainbow oil slicks in the puddles that was being sucked back up in the fabric of Foggy’s suit.

“No no no no--”

A rushing sound roared past his ears, growing louder until the static of it creeped into his head and along the grooves of his brain, and then the black started blotting against the blue blue blue of the sky until he could blink and the world stopped falling away for that half second. Because it couldn’t fall away if it didn’t come back at all.)

Mission: get a couple cups of yogurt from the fridge without running into anyone and return to the apartment.

Chances of this ending up anything but FUBAR: fifteen percent and falling.

It wasn’t that Steve thought this way about everyday tasks or even in the field with his shield strapped to his arm, but the rote nature of it was a way to steel against the uncomfortable interactions that he would likely encounter on the way. Matt needed to eat (and so did he, probably) and his own pantry was embarrassingly bare--but most of all, Matt needed rest and both of them needed nothing short of a miracle.

The common area of the Tower was bustling when he slipped through the doors, the majority of the group crowded around the card table stacked with dishes that had held some variety of breakfast food. Bucky caught his eye from the corner of the table, pinched his mouth shut, and looked back down at whatever Clint was pointing at: a map, maybe, or some invisible diagram he felt the need to explain. Foggy was across from him, clearly biting his tongue, and of course this had to be a morning of everything Steve dreaded come to life, and not even in the way he had expected.

“That’s all fine and pretty fucking dandy, Rainy, but all these theoretical ideas you have aren’t so theoretical to us,” Clint said.

“Okay,” Foggy said slowly. “First of all, I’m Foggy all year and don’t need a meteorologist. And secondly, okay, yes, I recognize this, but the Accords laws explicitly state that--”

“Whoops, sorry, it’s local on the eights and we’ve got a low pressure system of ignorant settling down over New York!”

“Steve!” Foggy called, and dammit, this was not his morning. Mission failed. “Please tell Mr. Barton here that I clearly know how your dumb little oversight committee would handle the arrival of Superman.”

And to think he had been worried that they were having an argument over something real that mattered and could possibly affect the quicksand he and Matt found themselves in. But no: he was getting wrapped up in something trivial that he should have expected. “Um,” he said, pausing and then taking two yogurt cups from the stack not labeled NATASHA. “What.”

“Thor is obviously a precedent,” Foggy said. “They’re both aliens. So I don’t understand why--”

“I’m sorry, is Superman Asgardian?” Clint half-shouted. “I didn’t know they were one in the same--”

“Isn’t there something else we should be discussing right now?” Steve said, and he tried not to show that he noticed the couple concerned looks that arose at the monotone fatigue coloring his voice. “Bullseye… y’know?”

But apparently they were waiting on Wanda to stop dragging her feet because Bucky had already relayed his side of last night’s events. Nothing of substance, they said, just an assessment of what Daredevil and Pandemonium seemed generally capable of, but Wanda was the one who had the most one-on-one with the former. “Scoot over, Buttercup,” Tony motioned to Rhodey. “Let our good Captain sit down for the briefing.”

“Catch me up later,” he sighed. “Matt’s not feeling too good. I have to go take care of him.” He shrugged, ignored Tony and Clint’s protests that came close to whining (“He’s a grown man, he’ll be fine for half an hour!”) as well as the narrowed eyes he glimpsed from Foggy and Bucky.

“Would you like me to come get you later?” Vision asked, the calmest of the lot. “Fury and Hill are supposed to have an update about Latveria this afternoon.”

And yes, that would be good. Just to check in. No promises. A casual shrug of a salute and he was back out the door, trying not to squeeze the yogurts until they popped all over his hands. The footsteps approaching him from behind were making it more difficult--it wasn’t obvious enough that he wanted to be left alone, apparently, and his gripped tightened, threatening to crack the plastic casing.

“Steve, wait up.” It was Foggy, slightly out of breath. “What’s wrong with Matt? Is he sick? Usually he tries to basically shotgun chicken soup until it makes him even sicker but--what?”

There wasn’t much he could say in the open of the hallway when anyone was liable to round the corner; he grimaced, motioned with his head to follow him back to his apartment. He hoped that Matt had been filling Foggy in the best he could on the events of late, and a pang of guilt hit him: he’d barely thought to tell him any of it. Granted, he and Karen kept themselves busy enough that he hardly ever saw them, but that wasn’t really a viable excuse--

With the door shut behind him, he put the risky yogurts on the counter and turned back to Foggy, still speaking lowly to at least create the illusion that Matt couldn’t hear them if he was awake. “We ran into Bucky and Wanda last night,” he said.

“Right. Heard about that. So what the hell happened?”

“She, um…she can do this thing,” he said slowly, “that gets in your head and makes you vividly hallucinate whatever you fear or plagues you the most. She hit him with it.” Foggy opened his mouth to say something, but Steve continued, “It’s not pleasant. She got all of us back during the whole thing with Ultron when she and her brother were on their side. It’s--he’ll be fine. He just needs some time.”

Foggy rubbed his hands over his face, grumbled. Matt had told Steve one night, when neither of them could sleep and the sirens outside seemed like they would never fade, about the fight he’d had with Foggy once it came out that he was Daredevil. It had been a trust issue, he said, that was the crux of it, and the underlying current that buoyed it along at such strengths was Foggy’s concern for his well-being. And he had been able to adjust to the idea of Matt being the mysterious vigilante celebrity of the neighborhood over the years, recognize the dangers he was subjecting himself to and escaping on a regular basis, despite the bruises and the blood and the scars, but Steve could tell that Foggy would need a lot more time to come to terms with Matt facing foes of a different caliber.

“Did they find out?” he asked quietly. He wouldn’t look at Steve; the wood grain on the counters was suddenly much, much more interesting.

“I don’t think so.” At least as far as Foggy could know at this point. Bucky staying quiet was Steve’s own secret to keep, but Wanda, that was an entire other issue. Did she see what Matt’s hallucination was? Did she look into his mind when he was hidden behind the red mask? There wasn’t any way to know until she briefed them. “I’m going to keep him safe, Foggy, I--” He glanced back over his shoulder to the cracked door of the bedroom, where the mass under the rumpled duvet rose and fell softly in time with Matt’s breathing. “He never stays down.”

Foggy followed Steve’s line of sight, breathed deeply, pressed himself together, but just barely. “Let me know when he gets up, okay? And, um… did he tell you what…?” He tapped the side of his head and winced.

“No, not yet.” 

Foggy glanced down at his watch and sighed. “I told Karen I was going to meet her at a client’s office in like twenty minutes…” Another sigh and another pained look thrown in Matt’s direction through the doorway. “I mean it, Steve, you text me when he’s awake, okay?”

And he reassured him, yes of course, of course he would tell him, and as soon as the door clicked behind him, he palmed the yogurt and took two spoons between his fingers, gently sat on the bed beside Matt. Fought the urge to brush a few stray bits of his bangs off his forehead. His chest swelled as he watched his sleeping face and how the lines there laid smooth.

This had to end soon, the conflict with Fisk, the Avengers chasing after them--it couldn’t go on as it had been forever, and eventually someone was going to get hurt. Bullseye’s projectiles would jam through a throat instead of a knee, or Wanda’s powers would knock some part of their heads off-balance, or the committee would finally catch up to it all, and and they had to put an end to it, really put an end to it. Under the shade of the tree by the church, Matt had asked for help, a request that weighed far more than Steve had known at the time, and his presence had only been a magnet for the kinds of attention they’d been trying to avoid. And he would dig his feet in, hold fast, because the best course of action, practically-speaking, was dropping the act and moving on. Letting Fisk win to preserve their freedom unmarred by international felonies and further erosion at the tenuously-rebuilt bonds of trust among the team.

(No, you move.)

But Steve had never been one to take the smartest road. 

--- 

(He knew how to fake being asleep better than anyone he knew, probably because everyone else he knew couldn’t hide their heart and breathing rates from his sensitive ears. And pretending to be asleep was better than facing the questions Steve undoubtedly still had, since Matt hadn’t answered any that he’d posed since finding him in the alley the night before, and he didn’t have answers. Or: he did have answers.

I saw. I saw Foggy die and I saw your face on the front page of the newspaper.

I don’t even know if that’s what you really look like. There’s no way to know.)

--- 

Having an analog clock in the living room of the apartment wasn’t so much an aesthetic choice or some weird attempt to evoke the air of his and Bucky’s old place before the war as much as it was a way to rib Tony for all his inaccurate jokes about Old Man Versus Technology. Tony hadn’t been too keen on being the butt of his snark after the civil war had been settled, which only meant that it was that much more satisfying.

But now, with the ticking being the only sound that was permeating through the thickening air of the room, Steve wished that he had skipped out on seeing Tony squirm and gone completely digital.

Matt had finished the yogurt a while ago, left the spoon in the cup and tried to balance so it wouldn’t tip over: every time it clattered over, the metal against wood sent him wincing, and he had to get it right, apparently. Had to keep everything where it was supposed to be, withstanding the forces of gravity that were begging it to bow under the weight and pull of immovable forces. And he couldn’t leave it be, fiddling with it even as Steve said again, “You don’t have to tell me what happened with Wanda. But something’s on your mind.”

He let the yogurt cup and spoon rest on their sides, finally, reaching out slowly with his hand until it secured itself on the side of Steve’s face--just one at first, and then the other as he turned, pulled him down and pressed their lips together, all at once open-mouthed and pushing something Steve couldn’t quite read past his teeth by the tip of Matt’s tongue. Maybe it was in braille, maybe if he just keep feeling there, meeting him halfway, he could learn--there were already those two letters he taught him at the museum, and he could spend hours here breathing Matt’s air and dragging his lips over his and down to his jaw and neck.

Except--always except--he suspected this was just a way to change the subject.

“Matt…” he said, and Matt kissed him through it, kissed him breathless until he could finally hold Steve’s face inches from his own and feel the curves of bones under his fingers. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t…” he said, and the grip on Steve’s cheeks, thumbs pressed along his jaw, he squeezed there so hard it almost started to hurt. “I can’t let Foggy get anymore involved in this than he is. I can’t let you keep doing what you’re doing. It’s--it’s--”

“We’ve been over this.” Steve stretched his own hands around Matt’s arms to hold something, some part of him that could sense that the truth of what he was saying was in his blood, but Matt turned his head, and his hands fell back at his side. “We have been over this,” he repeated. “You know, I probably love you. I don’t know what else to call what I’m feeling. So you can’t tell me not to help you. And Foggy--he’s your best friend. Keeping us at arm’s length right now--”

“And have you die?” It was so quiet. Matt’s hands pulled back into himself, and his eyes were aimed just to the side of Steve’s right eye, shiny and wet in the afternoon sun streaming through the windows. “Die because of me?”

“That’s not going to happen.”

“You don’t know that,” he said, pulling his mouth into a sad grin. “Last night, after Wanda left me in the alley, I saw for the first time in decades, and Foggy was murdered because I let him do something stupid and didn’t act fast enough. And I keep having nightmares...that I buy one of the newspapers that had your face on it. And you’re dead, too. That attempt on your life at the end of the civil war not being thwarted, and maybe if Daredevil had come out of the shadows sooner I could’ve…”

“Matt…” He reached out again, but Matt sensed him, stood up and walked back towards the kitchen where the fridge had just started to whir lowly. Cautiously he patted around for the counter and gripped at it. Faced away from Steve, shielding him from whatever was flitting across his face. “Matt, I want to be here. You asked me to help you and that’s what I’m--”

“I’m un-asking you!”

The volume of it, uncharacteristically loud, filled the entire room and retreated, the resulting vacuum threatening to crush his eardrums and already pinning every part of him where it lay. Immobile. Even his own breathing screamed too loudly in his head. “I can’t just sit here and watch you get hurt.”

“And that’s exactly my problem as well,” he said quietly. “I thought I knew what I was asking you for. It seemed much less…” He hung his head, shoulders hunched, and Steve wanted to cross the space between them and wrap his arms around his stomach, cover the spine that refused to remain anything but unbowed with a reassurance that he didn’t have to carry it all alone. Steve wanted to, but he knew it would be unwelcome.

“I was arrogant to think that this wouldn’t happen,” Matt continued. “You are not going to throw your life away because of me.”

“I’m not--Jesus--I’m not throwing my life away just because I want to stand beside you for this.”

Matt turned, leaned back against the counter, ran his hands through his hair and down his face, leaving a mess of spiked-up tangles in his wake. He was smiling. Desperately. “You really believe that.”

Not a question, a statement, given away by the unerring tempo beating under his ribs.

“Well I don’t,” he said. “I get caught by myself, they get me registered, life could continue as close to normal as possible. I can easily say I didn’t know who you were. We get caught together and we’re both facing a lot of hell. You for being you and me for… letting you.”

Between the spaces where Matt paused to breathe, Steve saw the unspoken third option, where the first Avenger to the communal television switches on CNN, the breaking news showing a Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood wrapped in crime scene tape, the headline Daredevil found dead, ticker tape scrolling through the worst of the details: target symbol carved in his chest, identity revealed to be neighborhood local and resident lawyer, no leads on the suspect. And Steve would wake up, not even be in the same room as the television or even close enough to hear it, and he would know.

“I can’t do that,” Steve said.

“Please.”

“It’s not worth it.” And before Steve could open his mouth to protest, he added, “I need to lie down. Head’s hurting again.”

The clock kept ticking, the off-beats of Matt’s steady footfalls down the hall.

---

(What happens when two martyrs find each other? They keep walking. It’s always at a crossroads, and the dead ends lie miles apart.)

---

 He left Matt alone, texted Foggy to let him know Matt was up though probably wanted to be left alone for a while, and trod slowly up the stairs to find Bucky, Sam, and Bruce setting up another Scrabble game, and when did this become the unofficial Avengers board game anyway? And he could tell before he even entered the room what was going on, what with the sound of cardboard being carelessly flung onto the wood floors and each little tile tumbling onto the glass table amid arguments of who was sitting where and how they were going to get a fourth person to join them. He should have turned around. He knew how these things played out.

Steve didn’t think today was a good day for starting a new tradition of backing down from fights, and he wasn’t about to tempt himself by walking away from a fucking Scrabble game.

“Steve!” Sam said, not even trying to hide his dangerously enthusiastic smirk. “We’ve got an empty seat with your name on it.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever” he said. He sidled up to side of the table between Sam and Bruce and pushed back the chair so he had enough room to join them on the floor. “Rack me up.”

So maybe he had been deemed good at this game when it first took over the Tower, but that didn’t make Steve loathe it any less. Crossword puzzles could be fun, if not informative about something he’d missed catching up on the rest of the twentieth century, but Scrabble was decidedly trying out a different kind of fun, the incurably frustrating kind that came with a handful of vowels and a Q. In other words: not fun. But he was good and got roped into it and he needed something to take his mind off the predicament with Matt, and nothing was better than Frustrating, Not Fun things for the task.

“What did Tony banish you from the lab for this time?” Sam asked as he arranged his tiles on the rack. “I thought you’d learned not to comment on when he changes his goatee.”

“I’m pretty sure that was you,” Bucky snorted.

“It was,” Bruce said, frowning at what had to have been an unfortunate combination of letters before him. “And whatever he’s doing was prone to making unannounced loud bangs. You do the math.”

“That is definitely your job.” Bucky picked up a tile between his left thumb and forefinger and held it up in front of his nose like he was inspecting a diamond. Another stroke of bad luck around the table, likely. “At least he’s thinking ahead.”

Sam went first, throwing out five tiles to spell ASIDE and motioned for FRIDAY to keep score--a non-negotiable house rule after the Thanksgiving match between Tony, Rhodey, and Natasha resulted in claims that a math error had given Tony an incomprehensible lead when Natasha had been steadily kicking their asses for hours. Steve had been down in Washington visiting Sharon and the rest of Peggy’s family, and he could hardly hear Bucky over the noise when he called in a panic asking how to get everyone to calm down.

Reason number seventeen why Steve wished Avengers Scrabble could get on its way to being passé.

Bruce played DAM off of Sam’s D and didn’t look any more pleased with the tiles he got in the draw. Hardly a couple seconds passed before Bucky laid down four more tiles to make MORON--they were skewed and off-center from the board’s gridlines, and Bruce reached over to straighten them as Bucky leaned back with a huff against the chair behind him.

“How’s Matt doing, man?” Sam asked. “Do you think he just caught a stomach bug or something?”

“Maybe,” said Steve. “He’ll be on his feet again in a couple days, I think. At the latest.” Bucky’s eyes on him were hot lasers bent on burning a hole in his forehead, and he wouldn’t look at him no matter how badly he felt his skin start to burn and crack.

His letters were terrible, that he could focus on. The vowel choices were abysmal and any word he could make didn’t have anywhere on the board to latch onto for play. Except--

He put three tiles above the N of MORON, and immediately Bucky said, “That’s not a word.”

“‘WYNN,’” Sam read. “Um… kind of inclined to agree.”

“It’s a word, I promise you,” Steve said. “I read it somewhere--”

“FRIDAY,” Bruce sighed. “Please fix this before the fridge door gets torn off again.”

“Of course, Dr. Banner.”

Across the table, Bucky’s lips were pressed thin, barely there, the entirety of his presence reduced to an imitation of the sheen of his left arm--steely. And Steve thought for a moment to try to defuse the tension curling around the corners of the board and every tile between them, but it would have been throwing water on a grease fire. This stubborn ire and intensity, that was a new part of Bucky he still needed to remind himself to tiptoe around.

“The word ‘wynn,’” FRIDAY said, “is defined as the name of a runic letter used in Old and Middle English, later replaced by the W. The official Scrabble dictionary accepts it as a playable word.”

Bruce shrugged and Sam muttered something about learning a new thing every day, but Bucky kept staring. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It’s in their official dictionary, man,” Sam said.

“There’s a lot of stuff in there that doesn’t go by the rules, though,” he said. He leaned forward, one elbow on the table and the other arm extended to waggle a finger at Steve. “You know how there’s a rule against abbreviations? Well apparently the word ‘prez’ is playable. Like short for ‘president.’” And there he leaned in further, a darker glint to him. “That dictionary doesn’t mean shit.”

“Maybe they changed the rules a little since the game came out,” Steve said lightly. “Wouldn’t be the first different thing we’ve had to get used to.”

“I think you’re just trying to deflect from the fact that technically this is from a different language,” said Bucky. “I mean, next time it’s my go I’ll throw down the first Russian word I can fit on the board.”

“Old and Middle English are still English, Buck.”

“Really? Really? Have you ever tried to read Beowulf untranslated?”

“No, but I sure as hell know they teach it in English classes, unlike Dostoevsky or whoever.”

They both were standing now, and Steve was unaware of when he’d decide to jump to his feet. Sam and Bruce’s heads were angled like they were trying to stare up to dissuade them from whatever was coming, but they had given up, squeezed their eyes shut from the power of their growing winces.

“You know Steve,” said Bucky lowly, “you’ve got yourself a real bad habit of thinking you know what you’re talking about when you’re just the most naive asshole this side of the galaxy.”

There wasn’t anything he could say to that, not anything that could sway Bucky’s stance at all--and not that the game mattered. It wasn’t that he had some attachment or vendetta about playing WYNN, but Bucky was so angry and he couldn’t--or wouldn’t--understand. How many laws did you break following me into a fight? He had to have remembered 1937, outside Gloria’s before it shut down, when Steve wouldn’t stop mouthing off at the two cops tossing slurs between them like a baseball. The one cop had thrown the first punch, and Bucky had thrown the second, catching Steve before he fell to the ground and his blood stained along the shoulder seam of his shirt. You know what we risked getting you on this side of freedom.

(Which is maybe--maybe--he told himself quietly, why he didn’t want to watch Steve toss it all aside so carelessly. It’s you and me again, finally, Stevie, here in the 21st century and young and you never learned how to pick your battles. What Bucky didn’t understand, never quite did understand, is that it was Steve’s battle if he could do something about it.The criteria never got more detailed than that.)

“You always try to make things more complicated than they really are,” said Steve. “But it’s not my job to convince you.” He picked up the three tiles he had put down and tossed them and his entire rack back in the bag. “I need to go review the meeting notes from this morning anyway.”

He had no intention of doing any such thing, at least not immediately, but he ventured a few floors down to where he’d seen Natasha curled up with a novel on one of the low windowsills after a workout--and she was there, sitting cross-legged and facing Wanda, book tossed aside cracked open along the spine. Her hands were animated, tone hushed, and he couldn’t bear to interrupt. Could hardly bear to be this near Wanda knowing that she too held the potential to blow it all open in the red-ringed palms of her hands.

I know, her voice said in his head suddenly. He looked back towards her, and even at the far distance, the crimson light in her eyes glowed brightly. Bucky already spoke to me. He’s very, very worried.

Such was the default setting, apparently. The new normal of a jittering, silently hand-wringing team put on a thin, thin edge.

Beyond the shores of Long Island, a thunderstorm was roaring, lightning blitzing down into the Atlantic bright and silent from the distance. The rain could be coming, but it could also not be. The thunder could be lying in wait under the white noise of the city, but it could also be swallowed up by the surf. Steve didn’t care either way about the possibilities it held, only what he could hear and feel around him and the little see through the mesh of the mask from his spot hidden in the shadows.

Not like staying out of the streetlights would hide him from everyone he was trying to avoid. Passersby wouldn’t be able to post a blurry snapshot to Instagram, but Matt--Matt could still hear his heartbeat across the boroughs. He would know that he was tailing him from a distance, and Steve didn’t and couldn’t care. It would be too easy for Bullseye to stop pulling punches once he saw that he was alone, and Matt may have made him promise, but his toes were crossed inside his sneakers. Childish, yes, but Matt hadn’t heard about the medical records Vision had managed to procure, the reports of a John Doe with Bullseye’s face who had bones laced with adamantium.

The top of Matt’s head weaved as he paced along the roof a couple blocks over. It was an angry pacing, so roiling with it that he wasn’t bothering to stay low near the bright intersection at the northwest corner of the building. He could hear Steve, his breathing and the pulse of his blood, the way he popped his knuckles with the thumb of the same hand--quickly, like firecrackers.

“I’m doing this alone tonight,” Matt had said. “Promise?”

“Okay,” he’d nodded, toes crossed, and Matt had kissed him, pulling away with Steve’s bottom lip still tucked snug between his teeth--a slow drag that brought him in again for more with one of Steve’s hands at the back of his neck, the other guiding his hip so Matt could straddle him where he sat on the couch. “If you meant you were doing this alone,” he said as Matt kissed a line down the shell of his ear, “I think you’re off to a pretty rough start.”

“So are you then,” Matt laughed. “You did promise.”

“Sure.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he spotted the flickering whirl of police lights, but it was only the storm creeping closer towards the Lower Bay. No wail of sirens wove through to Hell’s Kitchen from the surrounding neighborhoods, and if he squinted and tossed in some careful imagination, the top glass floors of Stark Tower were darkened by an unmoving figure in maroon and the gold-tinged spark gracing the head.

He pulled off the mask and shoved it behind the loose brick in the wall that he and Matt had scoped out after matters had grown more complicated. Stalking after Matt wasn’t going to do anything but distract him, and while he could have tried to make the argument that it was too quiet, that surely this indicated something was going to collapse and strike at any moment, his presence would only ensure that Matt would be more likely to miss it. He could picture it too clearly: his heart drowning out any footsteps approaching Matt from behind, concern for Steve overtaking any scrap of remaining self-preservation he would use to normally track them.

The sweater came next, folded just well enough to squeeze the brick back into place. The t-shirt he had put on under it offered no solace against the unseasonably cold wind that had picked up. And in the distance, a few blocks over, there was the dissonant clanging of metal, shouting in some unknown Eastern European tongue, smacks of bone on bone like the skin didn’t matter. So the night wasn’t so quiet, but Matt would manage. He was managing: the echoes of his landing attacks showed no signs of letting up as Steve walked back towards Manhattan, and the shouting was replaced by a snap, a shriek of pain, silence. And more punches, more, growing thicker and muted by the blood that had to be oozing onto their faces by now.

He supposed it should bother him, how Matt wasn’t holding back in the least in the way his fists kept swinging and coming away stained. But his thoughts revolved around a different point of gravity: did they hurt him, are those ribs okay, is his knee going to give out on him, please don’t bleed out while I’m just down the road.

He kept walking until he couldn’t hear them anymore. A couple turns here and there, veering away from the glaring sheen of Midtown and back into the Kitchen, an address half-crossing his mind. Half-crossing--if only because a chorus of voices was berating him much louder than the location could manage on its own. Matt and Bucky, Peggy with some back-up grunts of assent from Colonel Phillips, grumbled curses under Fury’s breath.

You’re always going to find a way to risk your neck, aren’t you?--that one was Matt specifically, rising above the rest, and he was bound to learn sooner or later.

By some miracle, Scene Contempo Gallery still had its lights on at this hour and the door was still open. The gallery was airy and silent save for the quiet chime on the inside door fading into the swaths of ink on the displayed canvases. When he couldn’t see or hear anyone inside, he thought vaguely of how he would describe these works to Matt: this one is just blue, different shades of blue; another in splotches of dull olive greens; but this one is fire, a burning copper caught mid-writhe in oils, you when you’re mid-air, upside-down, leg extended above some poor gangster’s head. (But it didn’t make him hate modern art any less.)

“Do forgive me, I must have forgotten to lock up--we’re actually…” The clicks of her heels, sudden enough to make Steve jump, came to an abrupt stop when she rounded the corner and found him staring at the coppery fire piece. “Captain Rogers. A little late to be shopping for art, isn’t it?”

“Vanessa.”

“How is Ms. Potts enjoying the pieces she selected?” she said, completely inured to the stiff set Steve felt settle into his shoulders. “They suited the lighting in that board room so well--”

“Call it off.”

Her mouth hung open for a moment before she closed it softly into a small grin. “Are we still talking about art?”

Heat rose into his face, the bubbling kind of anger, and he pushed it down past his ankles to keep his voice steady. “You know what this is about.”

Sighing, Vanessa walked slowly back around the corner, and Steve followed. She was already stopped in front of another canvas that was just another swirl of colors--purples and indigos this time with splotches of silver--and her calm, thoughtful pose sent his jaw clenching so badly it hurt his teeth. “A lot of my clients say this work reminds them of space. Or the night sky. Most of the younger ones lean towards outer space.”

He bit his tongue to keep back the what’s your point edging closer to being vocalized.

“But I don’t think of it as either. There’s a mystery pulsing beneath the surface, and these silver streaks are hints of it… I spoke with the artist at their exhibit. They wanted to dwarf the viewer and make you feel uncomfortable, like there was something you were missing… and I can see that. The meaning was never what you thought it was supposed to be.” She pointed along some of the lines where the colors merged into each other, and while they looked like swirls from a distance, they were jagged upon closer inspection and carefully so--there would be no realized you’d sliced your hand open until you happened to look down minutes after leaving.

“That’s nice and all, but my point still stands.” He never liked using his height as an intimidation factor, especially against women, but Vanessa’s presence towered much higher than her slight physical frame; he took a couple steps closer and lowered his voice, head blocking the overhead lights and casting a shadow. “Tell Fisk to call it off.”

“Oh, Captain,” she grinned. And it wasn’t even menacing, so close to genuine that Steve almost let himself be fooled. “Haven’t you been listening?”

--- 

New York Weekly

LATEST NEWS: Is Captain America gay? Rogers seen canoodling with man not yet identified at time of publication in Hell’s Kitchen--

--- 

“Before you go on one of those oh-so-righteous rants of yours, just know Pepper’s already working on it,” Tony said as soon as Steve and Matt walked into the common area the next morning. “And what happened to you?” he asked Matt. “Wait--is that insensitive? Should I not have said that? Is it rude to ask blind people why they have a black eye and split lip--”

“You’re making it worse,” Rhodey muttered over the lip his coffee.

“Of course. Sorry. Anyway, Cap,” he said. “In a take on the wise words of Mr. Barton--”

“What. Is. It,” Steve finally gritted out of his clenched jaw, and then they were brought to the living room coffee table where Wanda and Sam were trying to hold back their grimaces. In place of the Scrabble game of the previous afternoon, a busy cover of one of the trashier grocery store gossip rags laid among the stains from coaster-less drink glasses. “Seriously?”

“Welcome to the big leagues,” Tony called. “Baby’s first tabloid story--”

“Really making it worse,” Rhodey said.

Muttering to Matt the gist of what the headline was, he looked closer at the surprisingly hi-res photo of the two of them sneaking a chaste kiss just outside Matt’s favorite hole-in-the-wall cafe. Did paparazzi even venture that far into Hell’s Kitchen? Or try to get sneaky candids after that one incident with Natasha’s left hook? “You’re not identified, don’t worry,” he said to Matt. “They didn’t even get a shot of your face.” Something about it all must have amused Matt because he grinned--only for a moment, the movement pulling at the dark blob of a scab on his bottom lip.

“Okay,” Sam said. “Now before you really start going on and on about what’s wrong with this like Tony said, let us all of us here publically proclaim that we know. Yes, this sort of thing is a wild invasion of privacy, and yes, we all know you’re bisexual and not gay and that not making the distinction hurts bisexual people everywhere. And everything else that’s wrong with this damn article--”

“‘Canoodling…’” Wanda scoffed. “Terrible word choice.”

“That too,” Sam said. He caught Steve’s eye, raised one eyebrow when he didn’t say anything. They were all expecting it, even if only Tony and Sam voiced those expectations. Money would probably be exchanging hands once he did open his mouth, but for something like this he had a feeling that Natasha’s conspicuous absence was an indication that she had already told them off for it and left in a huff.

But the tabloid didn’t quite feel real, in a way. Not in the way it was supposed to. Or perhaps not real in that it was a fabrication, but that the threat of it was so far removed from what was taking up his attention--how could he bother himself with trash like this? He didn’t care if the world knew he was queer. The timing was a coincidence, surely, but what harm would come to him and Matt from some everyday gum flapping? Let the gums flap. Flap away.

“Steve,” Matt said quietly. “Could you take me back down to the room? I left my phone down there and I think Karen’s supposed to be calling any minute.”

“Yeah, of course.”

Matt grabbed his elbow, shrugged off an offer from Tony to use some of Dr. Cho’s “magic skin” on his lip. The hold was tight, another circulation-crushing vice of fingers against his tendons, and once they were behind the closed elevator doors he let himself relax. “This is what I meant earlier by ‘confronting Vanessa was a bad idea,’ by the way.”

“So you don’t think this is just a coincidence?”

“Now with the way I know they operate.”

“What does it matter, though?” The bell rang, doors sliding open, and Matt’s steeled hands locked back on Steve’s arm. All silent while they quickly strode through the short distance to the apartment and the lock was securely fastened. “So the world gets another reminder that I’m not straight because they keep forgetting, apparently. There’s nothing in there that could tie me to you.”

“I guarantee you whoever took that photo has more,” Matt said. “Where was it taken again? What were the details? What do you remember?”

The cafe where they started going right after they met--a little bit ago, just after they got together based on some of the posters peeling from the brick wall behind them and the look of the flowers in the planters. Matt was wearing his favorite suit, the dark maroon tie he’d said Foggy had given him for Christmas that year. And himself: close to needing a haircut, leather jacket covering the vintage-style SSR t-shirt scrounged from the bowels of Amazon. The lighting meant it was sunny, later in the morning than they usually managed to get there--

“Fuck.”

“That’s what I expected,” Matt sighed.

“That was the day--”

“I got you off in the alley,” he finished. “So there’s definitely more pictures that definitely feature my face.” With the unspoken addition: the dumpster we tried to hide behind couldn’t hide much, could it? “I know evidence like that effectively screws us both over in the event either of us gets caught, but I can’t say I completely regret it.”

Steve felt his ears go red and flush down his entire neck as Matt fought back a smirk. “Well… you’re much less upset about this whole thing than I thought you would be.”

Standing in the middle of the foyer, caneless, Matt seemed like a far-off island or a ship unmoored from its post contemplating the state of its furled sails, how best to drift back to the dock. Tall and lonely, turned inwards and soft. “I got it out of my system quickly,” he said quietly. “And… I knew you probably weren’t going to listen to me all the way. It’s who you are. It’s--well. It’s why I approached you about all this in the first place.”

“Even with my history of… what’ve they called it? Uh--”

“‘Supremely stupid shit’?” Matt said. “Barnes, um, thought he needed to brief me. And yes.” He held out his hand, and Steve took a couple long strides to grasp it, Matt pulling him in flush to his chest, face at his neck, the flash of his hallucinated dance with Peggy just behind his eyes but not enough to distort his vision. “I will admit… I didn’t anticipate this, though.”

“Not part of the master plan?”

Matt smiled against his pulse point and the flush went deeper, down to Steve’s shoulders and further until it wound in a tight knot in his stomach. “No.” One hand stayed locked with Steve’s and the other slid to the small of his back, pressing him closer--if he listened carefully, shut his eyes to concentrate, he could hear the faint melody of a Tchaikovsky overture from Natasha’s apartment down the hall. “There’s something to be said about...practicality, maybe.” The music swelled in the distance and Matt swayed to one side, tentatively; Steve let himself be led. “Knowing when to call off a partnership for self-preservation. But…” Swaying back in the other direction, moving a foot--haltingly, but missing Steve’s toes. “You were never going to let me go at this alone. Even if we weren’t…” He pressed a light kiss to the underside of Steve’s jaw, sighed, swayed again. Grinned, and Steve hardly knew what to do with himself the way his heart burned under the glow. “And now if this ship sinks, we’re both of us are going down either way. We’re stuck together.” The delight in his voice, while understated, was unmistakable, and the burning in Steve’s chest grew white-hot.

 “We should probably use this to be somewhat productive, huh?” Steve murmured. “Didn’t throw away the mask or anything.”

“One more song, and then we can think about that.”

The music swelled louder almost on cue, audible now without half the strain, and Matt’s feet were less hesitant and he may have been slightly off-beat, listening intensely to the melody and the slight creaking of the floor to know where exactly not to step; but the bruised knuckles that had broken so many bones the night before were gentle and earnest against his skin. 

--- 

(What happens when two martyrs find each other at the crossroads? They look away from where they think they’re headed, away from the ghosts of future headstones ready for their names. There’s a path between the two roads that led them there, ready to be ground into existence under their feet.)

The last hurricane of the season was spinning its way up the east coast, the furthest tendrils whipping up rainstorms that sat fatly over New York and waited for backup. Small rivers flowed in the space between the road and the curb, roared into the gutters and out into the Hudson. The sheets and sheets of rain had blotted out any bit of light from the supposedly full moon hours before it would have appeared in the sky, and despite being soaked to the bone, Matt seemed completely at home in it all. Close to shivering, Steve thought back to the Tower: less than two hours ago they had been squished on the couch with the rest of the team with some horrendous movie Clint and Vision had secured from the Redbox up the street, Wanda defending it a tad too ardently than anyone really should have been, and Tony pelting popcorn at Bruce and Rhodey to get as many kernels as possible stuck in their hair. It was warm, and Natasha had made some specialty spiked hot chocolate and Steve described what was happening on screen in a barely-there whisper right into his ear, hands intertwined half out of view. Bucky was watching them more than the movie, hand on his chin--he had to have figured out that Daredevil was Matt by now, what with having spoken to Wanda already. The looks he had been giving him from across the room since the discovery had pulsed with the sort of frustration Steve still hadn’t become accustomed to, but it was tearing at the edges, threads popping loose and fraying with something else entirely. They still hadn’t spoken about it since that night.

“You with me?”

The rain closed back in on him, thick and sopping and the black sweater he had pulled on over his running shirt was heavy with it. “Yeah, I’m with you.” Slowly the warmth from the Tower faded completely, and the rest of the night was black. “Were you hoping I was going to finally listen and say no?”

“I know better than to place my hopes on impossibilities.” His head craned to one side and then another--at first to listen, but then to stretch his neck, the cracks sending a sick roll through Steve’s stomach. It sounded too much like what he had heard the night Matt went out alone. “Bullseye is going to be out tonight. You know that.”

“Figured as much.”

“I don’t think they’re going to be pulling any punches, Steve,” he said softly. “Fisk, he’s--he’s protective of Vanessa. He likely wants this over after you approached her. And you know what that means for us in his mind.”

He did, but he didn’t want to think about it. In the back of his head, he wondered if the rest of them were still piled on the couch in front of a movie that was actually good, maybe something both Bucky and Vision hadn’t seen yet, and the image of this weird little family he’d been absorbed into since coming back to the world was warm--that was the word he kept coming back to--but little by little the center of it was starting to glaze over. Another home he stood to lose if matters went south.

“I know.”

Matt pursed his lips; he must have known how he would respond. “Have I ever said how the mask suits you?” And he was trying to fend off the smirk that still, still made Steve’s heart skip a beat, and he was failing miserably.

“How do you know?” he snorted. “Can’t see me in it.”

“I didn’t say it looked good on you. I said it suits you.”

The rain kept falling, harder now, splashes in the puddles slapping up against the bare skin between Steve’s shoes and the hem of his pants. With the entire alley doused in wet shadows, it was even more difficult to see, even Matt standing a foot away--the rain had weathered the scab that had been struggling to form on his bottom lip, cracked it open again. A dark and wispy smudge ran down his chin and sent it dripping down to the pavement. Lost.

“Are you feeling up for this?” Steve said suddenly. “We don’t have to do this tonight if you’re not--”

“Stop.” Matt held up his hand to Steve’s face, two fingers landing on the corner of his mouth. “Listen.”

There was the rain, and more rain, and more and more: slamming on roofs and streets and awnings and cars, umbrellas and tree canopies, sliding down brick walls and windows. Cars driving through puddles, their high hissing splash and thick wallop as it lands. Screeching tires. The sirens, too, under it all, as they always are. Doors swung open and shut in the buildings around them, clicks under the white noise. Hurried footsteps, maybe trying to get out of the downpour, but--on the roof--

“I can taste wet sulfur.”

“Um--”

“Can you see anyone on the roof behind us?”

A silhouette hovered near the ledge of the roof, blacker against the sky, and it hadn’t been there before--an arm extended, holding a tube of something, probably the source of the sulfur Matt tasted, and then it cracked a grin. A Cheshire Cat with sharper teeth at the root.

“It’s him.”

“You’re sure?”

“Matt.”

“You have a plan?”

His mouth opened to say, This is your deal, you usually have the plans, but Bullseye cracked the head of the tube against the leg of his suit and it sparked bright and red, the same color of Wanda’s energy but edging closer towards white--and then the flare was flying down at them in the alley, lit fuse first, straight at Matt’s face, and he wasn’t going to be able to duck fast enough even though he sensed it--

Steve’s hand grabbed the lid of an old metal trash can and stepped in front of Matt, the flare thudding hotly at the center of it. Already Bullseye had two more lit and ready to go, launching them in quick succession, anticipating where they would be dodging below, and Steve stayed in front of Matt, holding the lid up. Wished desperately for his shield, the easy hold of the straps, the promise of durability. With the speed that the flares were being thrown, the lid wasn’t going to last too much longer, and while Matt was fast, he wasn’t going to be fast enough to keep the burns from bubbling on his skin.

“We need to get on his level,” Steve said as he pushed himself and Matt aside of another attack and out of the alley. Onto the sidewalk. Running under the rain-speckled streetlights where anyone could see them. Footsteps slammed on the rooftops beside, right in time.

“By the time we climb up the building, he’ll be waiting to throw us back down.”

“Well, that’s assuming some things.” Turning around, he spotted Bullseye’s frame sprinting beside them above and threw the lid like he would his shield--the aim wasn’t precise and it wouldn’t have the same impact power, but it caught Bullseye right at his breastbone and sent him flying backwards with a satisfying oof!

“That’s not going to keep him down for long,” Matt muttered.

“Which is why this is a two-part plan. Hold on.”

“What--hey!”

In one fluid motion he scooped Matt up and threw him over his shoulder, breaking out into the run that still exasperated Sam to no end. He couldn’t go as fast as he would have liked being so off-balance, but it would be enough to put crucial distance between them until they could get their proper bearings.

“What are you doing? Someone is going to see this! Someone probably already saw you throw that garbage lid, this is ridiculous--”

“It’s working, though, can’t deny that.”

“I can’t believe I thought Barnes was exaggerating.”

“Yeah, can’t say he does that often.”

Ten blocks was quickly between them and where Bullseye fell, and by the time they scrambled up the fire escape, another flare had been lit and it was growing closer, attached to the shadow the the bright splotches of the target, that malicious grin.

“The sulfur taste isn’t as strong,” Matt said. “That’s probably his last one.”

And Steve had to hope so--hand-to-hand, no added weapons, he and Matt could take the guy, at least knock him out and tie him up and put him on the stoop of Stark Tower where FRIDAY could pick up his presence. The adamantium reinforcing his skeleton put him on a more even playing field, but if he had the room for all those flares, there had to be other things tucked into the pockets of his suit. He’d seen Natasha and Bucky pull pill shooters out of enough unlikely places on their persons to not underestimate another adversary.

The rain had lightened up, probably only temporarily, and the hissing evaporation as the drops hit the end of the flare softened along with it. Bullseye took the final leap onto their roof, rubbed a hand against his chest where the lid had connected with him, and made a show of spitting out a small glob of blood into a nearby puddle. “I think I’m almost gonna miss chasing after you two,” he said. “I had a few more weeks’ worth of shit planned to torment you with, but they told me to pull the trigger early.” His grin was threatening to split open his entire face. “Must’ve really pissed them off.”

Steve saw Matt’s jaw clench out of the corner of his eye, even through the mesh of his mask, and he figured that he’d finally get what he deserved with his impulsive stunt, never hear the end of it--if they got out of this unscathed on all counts.

“We can do this--god, I’m turning into a fuckin’ cliche--the easy way or the hard way,” Bullseye continued. “Easy way? Not saying it’ll be painless but I’ll at least let you choose how you kick it. Hard way… well. You’ll regret it.”

--- 

It was late, and neither of them were inching any closer to sleep--Matt’s head was tucked into the crook of Steve’s elbow under the dim light escaping through the cracked door to the bathroom, and the content hum in his throat lit Steve’s skin on fire.

“Tell me about your family,” Steve said. “I mean… you’ve never mentioned them.”

“My dad was a boxer.” He shifted onto his back, neck curved along Steve’s arm and onto the pillow. And his eyes kept staring up at the ceiling, further away than the vibe Steve sometimes normally felt. “Died when I was a kid. It was the only time he ever stayed down,” he half-laughed. “Always got back up.”

--- 

They didn’t move, any of them. Bullseye stepped forward slowly, towards Matt, arm with the flare extended to his face. Matt barely leaned away, just to keep the sparks from settling to cool on the exposed bits of his face. One wrong move and it would be shoved in his face, scarring, all the chemicals and fire going straight to his lungs--so Steve watched. Clenched his fists.

“What’s it going to be? I know it must be hard to concentrate with all this bright light in your eyes…” Licked his lips, slowly fingered a hidden pocket along his thigh where the cover of night had covered the unnatural bulge.

“Not too bad, actually.” Before his tongue even punctuated his remark, Matt grabbed Bullseye’s wrist and twisted, bringing the entire arm with it, the flare dropping and sputtering out in the puddle at their feet. “And we’ll take our chances with option two.”

Bullseye growled as he fought his way back to his feet. Knocked Matt off balance and pulled out whatever was in that pocket, aimed right at Matt’s head--but Steve grabbed him from behind, one arm around his neck and the other around his chest and up his arm. He got a hold of Bullseye’s elbow and yanked it back to his side, but a pain erupted along the top of Steve’s foot.

“Fuck.” Steve’s grip on him released, and he looked down at his foot: the last inch of a long nail was sticking straight up along the laces of his shoe, and his sock was already soaking with blood that he couldn’t see against the dark fabric.

It hurt to run on it--hell, it hurt to merely stand on it, but Bullseye was stalking straight towards Matt, and Matt was running to meet him, and he didn’t know if the mechanics of a nail gun let Matt sense when it was going to go off, where it was aimed. Because it wouldn’t miss. They’d learned that much.

He hobbled to catch up the them, running on a wobbled, unbalanced gait as they maneuvered in widening ovals around each other--limbs moving in blurs, darker smudges against the hazy lights of the city behind them. Every so often Bullseye’s hand would move--a pop, Matt ducking his head or arm out of the way, a light tinkling of metal on the roof beneath their feet. So he could dodge it, he could dodge it, he could be okay until Steve got there--whenever Steve could follow their winding path. Running this slowly, it wasn’t something he was used to. But then: a pop, no dodge, and the nail buried itself in the muscle of Matt’s arm below the shoulder, and he shouted, first in pain but then in something else entirely. Fury, starting as a high growl in the throat. And Matt kept swinging, harder now, driving back Bullseye further and further, the nail gun falling from his grip, and Steve was close, if he could just--

---

“My grandmother used to say that the men in our family…” Matt continued, “that they had the devil in them. I saw it in my father in the ring. And…” he swallowed, turned towards Steve, who had already been staring at him with rapt attention, heart thudding away. “I can feel it too, sometimes. Everything goes all hot and it’s… almost unbearable.”

Lightly he pressed a kiss to Matt’s temple, and some of the tension melted down into the mattress. “Ma would sometimes say that to me, before she died.” Matt started to laugh, like he couldn’t imagine it. “‘Steven Grant, I know you’re heart’s in the right place but don’t let the devil convince you to take the wrong way about it.’ Didn’t listen.”

And Matt laugh for real this time, deep in his chest, but short once he felt Steve’s stare heavy on his face. “The devil’s not a part of you, Steve,” he said. “He just gets you into trouble.”

--- 

Steve crashed into Bullseye, arms wrapped around his torso in a tackle right over the ledge of the roof and down into the alley. Feet clanged against the outer edges of the fire escape and sent them spinning, bouncing off the thick plastic cover of a dumpster and tumbling to the street. Above them, Matt was cursing loudly and jumping down to join them as Steve wrestled to get the upper hand--Bullseye’s knees were digging into all the wrong pressure points on his arms, forcing the leverage so somehow it was near impossible to throw him off. But a couple well-placed jerks as he leered down to taunt him forced them into a rolling tumble into the grimy puddles and slippery, busted trash bags, throwing punches and biting and once he could manage it, Bullseye choked out, “Undignified. Not a captain’s death--”

Matt’s foot connected with the side of his face, globs of blood and couple splattering into the rusted metal side of the dumpster; he reached down to the back Bullseye’s uniform and yanked him off Steve like he was a rag doll, straight into the back wall with a punch straight to the nose. Blood was flowing freely in a thick river down his face and over his mouth, but he hardly had time to take it all in before Matt was pulling him to his feet.

“You’re an idiot, we have to move,” he said quickly, hurrying him to the entrance to the street.

“Why?”

Matt’s lips thinned to a line, but then he heard it, like the rain was slowly muting itself, stepping aside for the nearing wail of sirens and bass of helicopter blades--and then, adding to it, the quiet thud as a lead brick settled into his stomach, poisoning his bloodstream with a hot stream of dread. “I can hear that Rhodes’ suit is out too,” Matt said softly and urged them forward in earnest down the sidewalk. “Hey, hey,” he said. “We don’t have to go that fast, your foot--”

“Is not going to be the reason we get caught this time, I’m fine.” It throbbed like a motherfucker every time he moved it, but he’d had worse. The shots to his stomach on the helicarrier with the cracked bones after landing in the Potomac, that had been awful. The slow freeze in the Arctic, almost unbearable. This was nothing, he kept repeating to himself, this was nothing, nothing at all--

Garbled voices over a loudspeaker, nearly overtaken by the roar of the helicopter, echoed behind them while they ran south near the piers. Quick look behind--a spotlight shone down where they had left Bullseye. Over, it’s over, except it’s not, it was never going to be.

“STOP!”

They rounded the corner, blocking out the voices of the police and agents and whoever else was chasing them down, one foot in front of the other--repeat, repeat, ignore the stabbing pain between the bones keeping your foot together, focus on the strong hands helping you forward, repeat, repeat repeat--but they were closing in and they’d stumbled into a dead end, a fire escape over the wall that Steve knew he wouldn’t be able to climb. His foot was shooting searing pain all the way up his leg and the rest of his body was creaking under the number of fractures he’d sustained from the fall, now just flaring up to his attention.

“Go,” he said, trying to shrug Matt’s arm off his shoulder. “Go.”

“If you think for one second--”

The footsteps were getting closer, with shouting into comms and faster paces and for a spark of a moment, Steve was glad that the mask was obscuring most of Matt’s face: if he had to see the expression cracking it in its entirety, the lead block in his stomach could have melted into his bones at once and killed him on the spot. But it was just his mouth, hanging open with a retort he couldn’t formulate and hating himself for it.

Steve grabbed his face and kissed him, felt Matt’s gloved hands wrap around the back of his neck, fingers weaving through the hair at his nape, and just as quickly, he pulled back. “I mean it. Run.”

Turned around. Listened as the thumps of his feet and hands on the rails grew higher and faded away. A silent apology rested on the edge of his thoughts but he wouldn’t even let himself think it. This is my choice. This is my choice--and half a dozen flashlights glared into his pupils.

“Hands in the air, on your knees!”

And a dozen guns staring him down with their gaping barrels.

“We got one of them, Daredevil’s still on the run. Rhodes, copy that to the rest of the the Avengers on perimeter--”

He sank to his knees, thankful to get the pressure off his foot, but the throbbing only shifted to the center of his chest. Tight and wound up like a pressure cooker ready to push open his ribs one by one. As he raised his hands slowly above his head, he grabbed the mask, tossed it to the side; without the mesh of the mask clouding the details of his vision, he caught a shock of red hair in the front line of the cops and one gun slowly lowering.

“Steve?”

He couldn’t say anything to that face, even if it was the least bit likely that they would let him--it was the same expression that stared back at him from Sam’s spare bedroom years ago, still reeling from the latest revelations from Camp Lehigh, and in his mind’s eye, someone was pressing rewind, closing Natasha back up to him, dragging the backspace across the I trust you that had tethered them together.

“Romanoff, do not lower your weapon--”

“I’m not pointing my gun at Steve fucking Rogers, but go right ahead,” she said. The anger melted once she turned away from the agents, and then she wasn’t even the same Natasha from that small bubble before SHIELD’s fall. Nothing he could read broke through to the surface for more than half a second before it was plucked and drawn back in. “Rhodey, check in with everyone else, tell them to stand down.”

Rhodey’s helmet flipped open and he flew down closer to her. “Should we tell them or wait?”

“They’ll figure it out eventually.” She swallowed something else down. Glanced back at him one more time, pushing through the lines of cops and agents until she disappeared, and Rhodey followed after. Face blank, just as the inside of his chest shifted into an expansive void, swallowing up his lungs and, with it, any chance of offering any balm to soothe the sting reaching deep in her bones.

“Remember these?” An officer was behind him, yanking his arms behind his back and clamping heavy metal handcuffs around his wrists: the same ones the Fifteenth Precinct had put on him when they arrested him all those months ago. When Matt was just a mystery lawyer showing up to crash the party. It was even the same cop taking him in. “No funny business,” he said and pulled him to his feet. Almost immediately, six agents flanked them, guns still drawn to escort them to the armored vehicle to take him wherever they were planning on holding him. “Down at the precinct, we had a bet going on which one of you guys was going to be the first to slip up.”

The truck that was parked around the corner had even heavier doors and restraints than the STRIKE truck Rumlow had shoved them in; the doors swung open slowly with a deep, strained groan and required two hands to move. One of the agents nudged Steve in the back with the butt of their gun, and he stepped up, not putting up a fight as they locked him in. His foot was still sending bolts of pain up his leg, but it wasn’t registering over the loop of Natasha and Rhodey on repeat, or the brief sensation of his last kiss with Matt in the fleeting moment when the loop would skip.

“A lot of the guys down there,” the office continued as he sat across from Steve, doors shutting behind them, “they split into two camps. About a third of them were convinced the Winter Soldier was going to go off the reservation eventually. Can’t say I blamed them, really.” The truck’s engine turned over and it lurched forward, but Steve barely moved from all the restraints. “The rest of them were putting their money on Iron Man. Except for me, the lone guy with my twenty on the Hulk. Didn’t understand their line of reasoning. He was who sponsored the act in the first place, right?”

And he paused, like he was actually trying to have a conversation with him. About the civil war. While Steve was strapped to the inside of a police truck because of the laws that helped spark it. “Yup,” he said tersely. “Sure was.”

“Right. But anyway,” he sighed. “You’re not what us regular folk imagine you to be. My pops used to listen to reruns of this old radio show all the time about you, and it wasn’t like this.”

“That so.”

“What I’m trying to say--” The truck bumped over a pothole and bounced him a few inches above his seat. “I changed my bet the day we brought you in. They thought I was throwing my money away.”

Steve waited for him to keep talking, but that must have been the end of his story. He had expected to be relieved when he didn’t have to listen any longer, but without it, his own thoughts cast longer shadows, an impenetrable black that only fell darker when he closed his eyes against it.

--- 

They put him in the same room, a cramped interrogation room with a badly-scratched one-way mirror and no window and no clock. His wrists were still clamped together, cemented to the table. Ankles latched to the legs of his chair. Stale air in his lungs when he remembered to breathe and it didn’t hurt to badly to expand his chest the entire way. His ribs weren’t broken but something else was digging into the marrow and stinging like it was.

Hours passed.

The level of bustle beyond the walls never changed.

Had the sun risen yet? Had the news stations started reporting on the story?

And maybe a couple more hours had passed, or just five minutes, when someone finally stepped into the room: not a local cop, but not bearing the seal of any other agency that would have had jurisdiction on an Accords matter. Federal level or higher, likely, with a gun strapped to his hip and a glower as dark as the tactical suit he wore.

“You have no idea what’s about to happen to you, do you?” he said, sitting across the table. “There isn’t any precedent… no expectations… almost exciting, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely titillating,” Steve deadpanned.

The agent threw his feet up on the table, leaned onto the chairs back two legs. “I know you’re familiar with the law, but I’m obligated to remind you--as a registered individual under the Accords, you are obligated to report any unauthorized activities by other registered individuals and”--he paused, holding up a finger--“and persons whom should be registered and aren’t, especially if they are engaging in activities the Superhuman Accords Joint Task Force Committee wouldn’t approve of.” His grin held patience rimmed by sharp teeth.

“Okay.”

The agent frowned. “Your sentencing could be twice as severe if you don’t give Daredevil up.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think this is some sort of joke?”

“You think I’m going to talk,” Steve shrugged, “which I guess is pretty funny.”

Swearing loudly, the agent rose to leave, digging a knuckle into the side of his leg. Slammed the door behind him. Only then did the noise in the rest of the precinct move past white noise into anything distinct, scraping of chair legs and shouting and phones ringing off the hook, and even when Steve closed his eyes, it overwhelmed his senses. He couldn’t feel anything. Couldn’t process the pangs in his chest that only kept getting worse. The noise was too much and cuffs were digging welts into the skin stretched over the bones there and this was the start of what his life was going to be from now on. And it was too loud to think about what that really meant.

--- 

More hours passed.

When Natasha and Rhodey’s faces stopped crowding his mind’s eye, Peggy replaced them. And specifically: the weight on his shoulder as her pallbearer, the inconsistencies of the timeline of their shared histories, the what-ifs of alternate outcomes. In another life, he could have been seated at a table much like this one with its legs sinking into the mud under a leaking tent in northern Italy. Peggy beside him. Colonel Phillips stoically raising hell about the failed infiltration into the Hydra base, the strategic positions they gave up, all the men they lost when the factory melted under bursts of towering flames.

He searched for her voice. It used to come more often that it had been lately, always unasked for but always needed. Now, the tips of his fingers only touched against silence. Peggy was the voice of plans or of reason, and he was far beyond the help of either.

The next time the door opened, two agents stepped in, one outfitted in the same tactical garb as the one before and the other a woman with a hard face lined with bangs and a subtle Advanced Threat Containment Unit pin pushed through her lapel. Displaying the symbols of a task force disbanded after the civil war was just a power play, he told himself, pointing fingers without uncurling them from your palm.

They stared at each other for a solid minute before she spoke. “We’re not leaving this room until we get two pieces of information from you. And it would behoove you to cooperate, as our colleague emphasized earlier.”

“Two?” said Steve. “More demanding with each visit--”

“We need the whereabouts of James Barnes and Wanda Maximoff.”

An invisible foot slammed into his stomach and his head spinned trying to make sense of her words. “Um--”

“Listen, Rogers,” she said, leaning forward and speaking lowly. Threateningly. “When you and Daredevil were spotted last night, every Avenger cleared for the field was called to assist us, including Barnes and Maximoff. When it came time for the rendezvous after we’d announced your capture over the comms, they were nowhere to be seen. They haven’t returned to Stark Tower, and any electronics we could trace were abandoned in a trash can by the piers. So talk.”

He couldn’t. Wouldn’t. No more than he would have ratted out Matt. And now he not only couldn’t breathe properly with that foot digging in further into his stomach, but the little bit of movement the cuffs allowed was suddenly too much effort, weighted down by a flurry of imagined flights, Bucky and Wanda pulling baseball caps and hoods over their faces and pressing up against a wall into the shadows as fleets of cop cars sped past, wailing. Were they searching for Matt or not risking blowing his cover?

“I have no idea where they are. And that’s the truth,” he added when her face started to pinch. “I never saw them last night.”

“They knew about you, though, didn’t they?” she said. It wasn’t a question, not really, but she wanted to play with him. “They knew about Daredevil too. And they knew the law, which is scarier than the two of you combined.” She whispered something in the ear of the agent beside her, and he stepped out of the room. “Have you read the Accords in their entirety, Captain Rogers? Do you know just what they’re running from?”

A thousand words were all pushing up to get their say, tripping over each other, and Steve kept his mouth shut. Settled for taking her eye contact and trying to break it under the weight of the glare building behind his pupils.

“Maximoff’s not a US citizen. The paperwork is still being processed. When we arrest her, she’ll be deported and punished to the full extent of the Sokovian law, which hasn’t been updated too much since the days when its government looked more like Latveria’s. And Barnes…” Leaned back in her chair, crossed her legs. Like it was almost relaxing, watching the bulbs of sweat grow along his hairline. “He’s got his own subsection. Well. More like a sub-sub-subsection--”

His blood ran cold, that same chilled flame that ran up every limb and into every blood vessel in less time than it took for him to breathe. “I thought that section got removed.” The threat was implicit, but barely. Who was she to act like he didn’t remember what happened? Congress and the UN were jointly hashing out the final terms of the Accords as the split Avengers fought on, and getting Tony to convince them to drop the clause was the first step towards negotiations for a ceasefire. There was no way Steve would have buried the hatchet if anyone in power still had any sort of bounty out on Bucky’s head.

“Compromises had to be made, Captain,” she said. “It snuck back in as a rider on some language changes in the section for the Inhumans. Those senators would never had accepted the dissolution of  the ATCU had they not received something in return. The hearings for your little group of renegades had already started, anyway,” she shrugged. “I’m not sure if Stark is even aware of it.”

His knuckles were turning white, and the cuffs were starting to dig into his wrists and ankles more than they were already with how he was straining to pull them from where they were cemented in place. “You had no right--”

“They had every right. Your agreement wasn’t legally binding.” Paused. Waited. Her eyes flicked down to his hands, the white lines around his wrists where he was trying to push out of the restraints. “And now he’s in violation of the Accords. A dangerous man who had been on a lawless killing spree for the better part of a century is in trouble with the law again--”

“Don’t.”

“--which means he’s a threat which needs to be neutralized. You and he are going to end up in the same place but he’ll be making a pit stop that you won’t be--”

“You’re not going to fucking touch him,” Steve spat.

This was what she wanted--a grin stretched across her face, celebratory. And even knowing how she was planning to spin this, use his words against him, use all his reactions against him to paint this picture for the prosecutors and media of him as an advanced threat, not the man the nation had held up as a paragon of the virtue of the hour for the last eighty years: there was no stopping it now. No keeping composure or filtering whatever the anger was pushing to the forefront of his brain.

“And what makes you say that?” she asked slowly.

“Because I’m not going to let you.”

“You can’t save him sitting in this cell, Rogers.”

“Who says you’re going to be able to keep me here?”

The door behind her clicked open, and the agent that had accompanied her earlier poked his head in, flinching back slightly when both of their hardened glares whipped back in his direction. “Agent Price… they need you in the other holding room. DNA match with Bullseye--”

“Fine. Thank you. Could you give me a minute, please?” Once the door was shut, Price turned back to him, low and dark. “If you give us the information we need, I can see to it that Barnes and Maximoff get off easy. Barnes especially. Cooperate, and he won’t have to get what’s coming to him.”

“Why do you think I would agree to that knowing how that section got reinstated in the first place?” The cold had sunk into his bones, dipping so far in the mercury that it was starting to burn hot, melt the cuffs off and let him free. “No deal.”

“You’re going to regret this,” she said as she stood. “All of this.”

“I’ve heard that before from people worse than you. It doesn’t scare me.”

The door slammed behind her. Steve could feel the vibrations of it, and his hands started to shake--from that or the strain or the fury creeping higher and higher. A combination of the three. And his heart: stuttering against the inside of his ribs, heavy with the white lie he slipped to Price’s face. It doesn’t scare me--the words, no, but the threat behind them. Knowing Bucky could fall again because he hadn’t moved quickly enough or been careful enough, that was terrifying. His hands shook harder, and he wondered if Matt could hear him through the walls.

--- 

(The media had the story on blackout. Business as usual from Fox News to CNN, Aljazeera to the BBC. Nothing to tell the public what had become of Steve Rogers or how every law enforcement agent in the greater New York City area was on the lookout for Daredevil and Scarlet Witch and the Winter Soldier. Nothing for Matt to latch onto while he sat in silence and planned.

He hadn’t been back to Stark Tower since he left it that night with Steve, nor had he ventured back to his own apartment or the office. Or called Foggy or Karen. Karen still didn’t know he was Daredevil. He couldn’t tie up Foggy in this anymore than he already had--and Foggy could have plausible deniability, couldn’t he? He wasn’t registered, wouldn’t be facing the same degree of scrutiny as Barnes and Maximoff, could get out of this unscathed as long as Matt kept away. Tossed his phone. Allowed himself to give him the out.

The building where he hid, one of the old safe houses the Ranskahovs had maintained, creaked and groaned with the wildly changing temperatures between night and day. It dug into his head as he thought, the clacking pipes and moaning wood, every siren and cough past the uninsulated walls. And every sound was saying the same thing: failed, you failed, you led him and his loved ones to slaughter, you failed--

Temporarily. A temporary failure, that was all it was going to be allowed to be.)

By the end of the day, they’d moved him. Where, that he wasn’t sure of, but the ride hadn’t been far. Probably just outside the city limits: somewhere on the outskirts of Jersey City, north of Yonkers, or at the far end of Long Island. They’d done far too many roundabout turns and backtracking on the ride, enough to throw off even Natasha or Rhodey’s keen sense of direction. And with the holding cell underground behind four separate layers of security, it was starting to look more and more like the newest definition of home. At least, he repeated to himself, he had a bed. And no cuffs glueing him to where he sat.

The cell, like the interrogation room at the precinct, didn’t have a clock, and the hours sludged past like molasses, and far too quiet. Every gurgle of his stomach or creak of a joint lit up the room like the peal of a firecracker, but it wouldn’t outdo the ringing in his ears. Or the scenes that started replaying in his head after what had to be hour eight.

Walking Bucky back to where the 107th had set up camp in the town after the night in the bar. Straightening his stance and his collar for him when they passed by Colonel Phillips talking lowly with a visiting three-star general.

The night around the campfire in the dead of winter, Yugoslavia, Morita and Dum-Dum playing the most over-hyped game of gin rummy Steve had ever seen, keeping the shit-talking silent by creating new obscene gestures when their middle fingers outlived their usefulness. Dernier and Bucky snoring against each of Gabe’s shoulders. Falsworth muttering something sarcastic about Americans with a smile on his face.

The first mission with the new Avengers once Thor had gone back to Asgard and Tony and Bruce had retired from the field for good. Vision accidentally blabbing about the shrunken intruder that took Sam off guard. Wanda casually destroying Clint at Guitar Hero after they pulled him back from Bed-Stuy.

The glimpse back at Matt, Foggy, and Karen so soon after Matt had asked him to step up beside Daredevil--the bags of greasy Indian food filling the entire office with the aroma of fresh bread and curries, easy grins sliding onto their faces.

Natasha and Sam coercing him into singing along to some rap musical album he barely knew, an embarrassment for everyone involved though they refused to admit it--but Steve, they would say, it’s about the founding fathers, how do you not know? Weren’t you there? Is this how is actually went down?

Matt’s hands and mouth on his body, everywhere at once, from his temple to the inside of his thighs.

All gone.

Slurped up into the pinprick of a void, leaving nothing but a hollow behind. A blank white canvas where you felt like something should have been: a hint of a shape, a shadow. But then you look again and it’s only a mirror--this is all you have now, this is all that’s coming. Was this regret? No. No, regret was what kept him from looking at his hands after Bucky fell from the train, the pangs in his chest at the height of the civil war when he would catch Tony’s eye and the nagging thought would rise there again that they could have been closer friends in another life. That all this, too, was avoidable. A mistake driven forth to its inevitable conclusion by human foibles.

He didn’t regret donning the mask. There was still confidence in his decision that it was the right thing to do. But how that one decision ended up ripping away at Matt’s life, at Bucky and Wanda’s life, leaving so many whistling holes for the rest of them to try to ignore--that was remorse. Nothing he wanted to happen. How could he have wanted for that to happen? How could he have anticipated the reach of the sinkhole around his footprint? His chest boiled, and against nothing in particular. The law. Fisk. Himself. (A lot at himself.)

Three times he slept, so he counted it as three days passing before anyone came to his door for any other reason than food.

“You have a visitor,” the guard said. “Northwest corner of the cell has the monitor and receiver to communicate. So no,” he sighed as Steve raised an eyebrow. “You don’t actually get to leave the room. Nice try.”

The screen buzzed to life, and Natasha was sitting before him with her own receiver pressed to her ear. Despite the low quality of the picture, the projected ambivalence was clear--ambivalence, or just calculated measures of response where anyone could see. “Sam wanted to be the one to come down,” she said, “but Scott needed backup with someone he was following in California. So it’s not like he’s ditching you for something he would rather be doing.”

“Which means you’d rather not be here.”

She didn’t sigh into the receiver but the distinct way it lifted her shoulders was unmistakable. “I didn’t say that.”

“Natasha.”

“I’m not here to talk about me, okay?”

“You gotta understand--”

“Listen Steve.” Sat up off the chair, got as close to the camera as she could with the counter starting to dig into her stomach. “I do understand. I don’t know if I can say that I would’ve made a different call if it had been me in your shoes. But you lied to us. And now every one of us is facing questioning. Bucky and Wanda are who fucking knows where because they obviously figured it out that one night--and also lied to us.”

He opened his mouth but she held up one finger, holding his tongue. The steeling that washed over her face distinctly reminded him of Maria--the intensity of it, how it flushed in quick waves across the surface instead of underneath. “Foggy found us a lawyer, you know. He couldn’t do it himself--potential conflict of interest if your relationship with Matt came out and whatnot. Tall blonde with a lot corporate firm money to back her up. So it doesn’t look like we’re going to get hit with anything after they put on a show.”

Watching her closely, he took in all the little details as she sat back in her chair, eyes flicking to the corners of the booth where her monitor was stationed, the press of her lips when they sealed shut something she wanted to say. Had rethought. Had realized she couldn’t say among the present hidden eyes and ears.

“How is everyone?” he asked quietly.

“About how you’d imagine.”

“I didn’t want to lie, I just…” His throat clogged up, just for a second, and the steeled-over bits of her expression melted, warm again, right in the bits of light reflected off her eyes. “I wanted to keep you all as safe as I could if I got caught.”

“You assumed no one else would have wanted to follow the path Daredevil helped put you on,” she said. “It’s more than you think.”

“Right,” he half-laughed. “Like Tony would want to actively undermine this after…” His finger tangled in the looped cord stretching out of the receiver. The friction of the pads of his fingers against the plastic coating caught it, kept it immobile, stuck sliding Tony’s years-old hostile glare onto the face he saw emerging from the lab covered in soot mere days ago, live the war had never ended. It wasn’t right, they had moved past the conflict--and time, even in that short of a span, never preserved things so perfectly. But it dug deeper still.

“This wasn’t the world he wanted,” she said.

“I know the feeling.”

“Yeah.” Her mouth quirked into a grin and she looked down at her free hand--it clutched around nothing, fingernails likely starting to slice into her palm.  “Steve.” She looked at him earnestly now, closer to the Natasha who opened herself as wide as she would go while SHIELD crumbled around them. “Please don’t do anything rash. We’re… we’re worried. More than anything. No one knows where Bucky and Wanda are, and Foggy and Karen are beside themselves--”

Because you know why. Now you know the other half of it.

“So Foggy told you?” he said. “How Matt sometimes… gets a bit of a wild or...daring hair and doesn’t check in?”

And she almost laughed at his attempt at subtlety. “But it’s worse this time, you know. Considering.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “Considering.”

The monitor zipped close to black--a staticy voice came over the intercom system to his cell, saying that his time was up. And in the spaces between his words echoed the refrain of the thoughts that had been plaguing Steve since they brought him here. Another sheet of ice crackled as it froze around him, and he would be conscious for every second of it.

--- 

(The safehouse buzzed louder now--the underlying current, a thrum, a mechanical grinding, all harmonizing with murmurs. Quiet blips of fitful sleep. The room had started to smell faintly of pine and ash where the maps had been lightly burned into the floor, turning sharp as the cool night air settled through the walls. The daze hadn’t quite left him so he wouldn’t have been truly alone anyway, but the hours ticked by and the metal whined to his right, the low buzz further right still. This is my fault, his head repeated, and he must have said it out loud. Metal on his knee, stretched out in front of him.

No, no… The metal squeezed, but lightly. Don’t let guilt take you.

Too late.

Guilt rots. It rots in you and leaves you hollow and speckled with holes, but you can grow back. You can always grow back.

The thrumming stepped a pitch higher, still low but more present in the cup of his ear. The breathing just above the end of the metal slowed, stopped its stuttering. Blew out in a long sigh, washing through the room and curving back to cool the wildfire that had been roaring through the bottom of his stomach. The guilt. The anger. The instinct to strain his knuckles with the force of his clenched fist. Should have never asked him—

Fuck what you think you should have done. We’re here now.

He said he loves me.

And you love him too, right?

I’m a reflection of him in a puddle where his boot just stepped.

You didn’t answer my question.

I pulled him into the puddle with me.

Matt, he always had a foot there.

The wood panels creaked beneath them. They were warm now, like this was a deck outside at high noon, late July—red with it.

Of course I love him.

A light laugh beside him. So let that emotion be what you draw from.

Footsteps forcing the floor to groan even louder, a small hand stretching down to his, pulling him up. Warm, red like the wood—in a burst suddenly, doused the uncontrollable flames licking up his ribcage. The cinders laid concrete in his mind’s eye, that twenty-twenty vision brushing the rest aside. Pointing out the first baby-green bud poking out of the remains.

“You think this is going to work?” asked Bucky.

“We came up with it,” Wanda said as she walked towards the dilapidated staircase that led to the exit. “So why wouldn’t it?”

“Well excuse me, then.”

Temporary failure. Soon to be punctuated. Ended.

He pulled the mask back over his eyes and followed Bucky and Wanda out the door.)

Sarah Rogers had never been the best Catholic out of the circle of women she’d fallen into in their neighborhood; murky memories dwelled under so many layers of later years, Steve’s feet on the ground but his vantage point still so low, Sarah chatting with the stout Flannery Mullen at the door. Mrs. Mullen’s fingers would be rolling a single bead of her rosary in her fingers, half pulled from her pocket, as she went on about the latest day of obligation she thought the Rogers were likely to miss. A double shift at the hospital, surely God could forgive that. And Steve always seemed to come down with a dreadful chest cold around the Feast of Immaculate Conception, and Mrs. Mullen would pass along the good wishes from Father O’Toole, lips pursed, offering her prayers as Steve choked up another racking cough. Surely God understood that Sarah couldn’t leave her son alone. She did enough praying those nights for all the mass that she missed--low murmuring, brushing his sweat-slick hair from his forehead, quietly telling Bucky that Steve would be better soon, to come back in a few days.

Steve never saw his mother go to confession. He himself went, a few times, mainly when he got into fights around the church and the nuns caught him. They would drag him and Bucky into the narthex, insisting that they certainly hadn’t seen either of them there for confession in a while, and certainly they had enough to absolve themselves of by now. Blood would still be seeping from a nasty gash somewhere on each of them, Steve wiping it away in a smear on the back of his hand as they sternly eyed him trudging back to confessional. Bucky stayed behind and reminded them once again that he wasn’t actually Catholic, echoes of “I even invited you to my mitzvah!” fading as the door clicked behind him.

Father O’Toole listened as he rattled off his sins, or at least those he could remember. Broke a couple noses on some lucky swings. Lied to his mother about how he was feeling recovering from a cold. Didn’t hold his tongue when the curses queued up, ready to blow. “Wrath is one of the seven deadly sins, my son,” he would say. “Pride, too.” That was always an afterthought.

Atonement was never at the top of his to-do list. Too many other items shouldered their ways ahead, and if he had already earned Hail Marys and Our Fathers from earlier lies, trying to atone without his heart in it would only earn him more. Why would he seek forgiveness for something he wasn’t sorry for?

In short: when Steve stared up at the ceiling of his cell and tried to confess to it in silence, he found the mental path obscured and dusty.

Forgive me, ceiling, for I have sinned. It’s been--He counted. --Seventy-nine years since my last confession. Or--this may be my first real confession. One that I mean, anyway. You’re still just a ceiling.

The tile directly above his bed didn’t bother to ask what was troubling him, though it was likely it already knew. Something clunked loudly in the vents tucked out of sight--a response, maybe, but half a second later the tile began to glow a bright crimson.

I know it’s been a long time and there’s a lot to make right but couldn’t I at least start the list before you smite me?

The tile puffed into a fine ash, floated down to coat his face with a dark square void in its place. It wasn’t what the path to an otherworldly realm looked like--Thor had always described it as bright and shining, a whirling stream of colors flowing down the rainbow spectrum and back again, and if that was the way to Asgard, surely heaven had to be brighter still. But why are you so optimistic?--a voice in his head again, not Peggy’s or the Commandos’ but thicker and smoke-filled. There are two ways you could go once you slip from this earth, you know.

A pale hand reached over the edge of the ceiling, and only then did Steve realize that he still hadn’t moved from his position on the bed. Passive. Waiting for whatever was going to happen to him. Pigs must be flying. Natasha and Sam that time. But that hand creeping to the border of the adjacent tile belonged to neither of them.

A single finger touched to the metal grid supporting the tiles, flashed red--sparks flew at the corners, along the doorjamb to the hallway, and only then did the bright impish grin emerge from the dark. Then the maroon-tinged eyes, and finally the rest of Wanda’s expectant face, her other hand coming up to put a finger to her lips.

Something sank in his stomach, and fast. She must have felt it; the tips of her grin faltered for half a second before turning her attention back to the wall at her back, another finger pressing at what had to be a comms earpiece.

I try to confess and you send me my confessions in the flesh, like you didn’t need to hear me say it. Is this gloating? Is God so petty that this would be rubbed in my face--

But it wasn’t some physical manifestation of his sins that fell onto his face, but a bundle of frayed wires ripped at both ends, still hot to the touch. Wanda dropped down a moment later, near silence on her feet. “Security wires,” she said, pointing to where Steve had brushed them to the floor. “And I already fried the cameras. Did you know most government facilities weren’t upgraded to defend against enhanced attacks? Budget limits.” She grinned and kicked the wires under the bed and between Steve’s feet, which were swung over the side of the bed as he moved to get up and adjust to the fact that she was here, in the room with him. That Matt and Bucky--

“They’re on their way, yeah,” she said. “And no, didn’t read your mind. Don’t always need that to know what you’re thinking, believe it or not.” Her smirk faded into a frown almost as soon as her eyes fell upon Steve’s face. He wasn’t entirely sure what expression it was tied up in, but it had to have been fairly transparent. “I thought you’d be happier to see me, Captain.”

“Don’t call me that right now,” he sighed.

“Well this is uncharacteristic.” She strode around the room, inspecting the blank walls, the sparse furniture bolted to the floor. A red glow hovered at the tips of her fingers, swept across all the edges in light wisps. Covering her tracks. Probably an unnecessary move considering no alarm had gone off from their break-in. “I mean, if you were going to have a self-flagellating pity party, at least get some better decor.”

“Wanda.”

“I’m serious,” she said, and almost immediately she was sitting on the bed beside him, having moved in that odd way of hers, zipping along the floor. “Your theme could really use some sort of dungeon atmosphere, considering--you know,” she shrugged. “Where we are right now.”

“Where you shouldn’t be right now,” he said pointedly.

“This is going to be fun,” she muttered, finger at her ear again.

There was a thud, and then metal screeching and whining under some unimaginable pressure: the hinges buckled into the chasm opening up at the seam, and the door was pulled away completely, dropped unceremoniously to the side.

“Knock knock.” Bucky winced, glanced down at his left arm as the plates reset themselves and he rolled his shoulder. “Or. Not quite, you know, but almost the same thing.”

Matt followed him into the room: no Daredevil suit, no black mask covering the top half of his face. Just his usual dark glasses, scratched to hell and back, jeans, rumpled sweater. Bucky and Wanda were still in their mission garb from when it all went south--well-worn now that he took a closer look--and the circles under their eyes had grown deeper. Both Bucky and Matt regularly had a purple tinge where the corners of their eyes met their noses, but it had expanded down in arcs, bluer.

“Are you okay?” Matt put a finger to the bridge of his glasses, but they were already pushed up as far as they would go. “You’re not--they didn’t--”

“No, I’m fine. Matt…” Every limb was heavy, but he pulled himself to his feet, met him where he stood in the center of the cell. His eyes laid on Bucky and Wanda for a moment before coming back to Matt, and both of them ducked their heads. “What are you doing here?”

“I got you into this, so I’m getting you out.” His voice was fast approaching a whisper, strained with whatever was making it waver, and his breath was hot on Steve’s face as he drew closer. “We’re getting you out.”

“I got myself into this,” he said. “I could’ve said no when you first asked. I could’ve decided to run after you that night.” He could hear Bucky growling into his hands behind him, but he made no move like he had noticed. “Let me take the fall for this. If I go with you… they’ll start hunting us down even harder.”

“Stop.” Matt’s hand reached around to the back of Steve’s neck, tilted his head down to kiss him with more teeth than normal. “Do you think we hadn’t thought about that?”

And maybe they had thought about it--but surely not to the extent that had plagued Steve, tugged at the fraying threads of his nightmares whenever he caught a blip of sleep. Being apprehended had already cost them their ability to live freely, something he knew Bucky and Wanda deserved after what they had suffered; and wasn’t that what this law was about? Accountability? A confessional opening its doors to the courts, the hand guiding a parishioner to the rosary gripping around a gavel instead. He may have done the right thing in helping Matt--that he was still sure of, the act of defending against those of malintent--but timing was, as it always had been, everything. And it hadn’t gotten any better since they locked him up.

“It’s better if it’s just me here than all of us,” said Steve.

“For whom?” Matt hissed, but he softened quickly, mouth crumpling into a frown. “Please come with me. With us.” Lightly his hand traced around Steve’s cheekbones, down to the corner of his lips and the dip just above his chin. “Playing the martyr doesn’t have to mean being alone.” Matt’s other hand fell down to his hip, tugged at one of the belt loops, and Steve felt his eyes flutter shut, heard Bucky exhale in a quick laugh. “And since when did you stop fighting back?”

“I didn’t--I’m not…”

“This is cute and all,” Wanda said abruptly, “but considering the circumstances, could we hurry it up a little bit?”

Matt stepped back and tilted his head up towards the ceiling then back towards the door frame. “We’re going to have company very soon, Steve, please.” Held out his hand. Palm up with the lines Steve would trace in the morning before either of them had gotten up, sometimes even before Matt had stirred. “We can’t do this without you.”

“Yes you can.”

“If you think I’m--any of us--are leaving here without you…” Matt pushed his arm forward another few inches, and his mouth pinched trying to keep it from falling into something that could give away what was starting to make his fingers shake.

Slowly a roaring welled up inside Steve’s ears, like the past ninety-odd years were finally catching up with him, rushing toward him in a wave, and it wasn’t that he wanted to run away. Because he never had. Because, as he had told Peggy in the back of that car all those years ago and Bucky and his mother before that, he would never stop. And the wave crashed over him, slopped up over his mouth and eyes and deafened him: the years were heavy and deep and it wasn’t the channel he wanted to end up in, not like this, but he was there, with three hands thrusting into the endless black depths as the clock kept ticking. You’ve stumbled when you’ve been tripped before--and it was his mother now, he knew that, even though her voice crackled with the distance of memory--So you got knocked to your knees. Your feet didn’t stop working.

“Okay.” The roaring stopped, skidding back to silence in a heartbeat as soon as he laid his hand on Matt’s. “I--”

“Later,” Bucky said; his hand was at his back, pushing him into Matt as they scrambled back into the hall, sidestepping the mangled door he had left there moments ago. “We all know you’re sorry for being a pigheaded idiot.”

A set of double doors laid at the end of the hall, ones he couldn’t remember the agents bringing him through when he first arrived. He opened his mouth to ask if they actually knew where they were going, but the doors flew open, crashed against the walls and cracked the drywall--ten agents dressed in full tactical gear swarmed forward, loading their weapons, falling into position and Steve’s feet set themselves in their proper stance, Matt hardened beside him, and Bucky reached for a pistol in a hidden pocket--

A burst of red knocked the entire throng into the air and crashed them back to the ground. None of the agents moved, and the rest of them stood frozen for a moment until Wanda pushed past and started stepping over the limp, unconscious bodies. “Let’s be practical, please,” she threw over her shoulder.

They’d mapped out the escape route perfectly: a couple sharp turns past the double doors and they were winding around a cramped steel staircase into basement, dank and dripping over a generic black sedan with diplomatic plates screwed clumsily in place. “People are more likely to not engage when you’ve got these,” Bucky said. “Immunity in car accidents, you know. Nobody wants that.”

No one followed them as they slid up the ramp to the main facility parking lot and out onto the main road--almost too easy, Steve thought to himself. No colorful siren lights dotted the fir trees that sped by as Wanda floored it, passing every car in front of them no matter if there was a dotted lane line on their side or not. And the minutes turned into an hour and more: Bucky began to snore in the front seat, and Matt’s hand tightened its grip on Steve’s like letting go would send him careening back into the cell for good.

“What’s going to happen now?” Steve murmured.

“What has to change?”

He glanced to his side, and Matt’s grin flickered in and out of view under the sparse lights dotting the upstate road. “Everything, are you serious? We can’t go back to the Avengers, you probably can’t return to your practice--”

“That’s not everything.” Matt’s hand moved up towards Steve’s wrists, tracing circles around his pulse point until his fingers rested there, where his heartbeat didn’t slow. Though it turned gentler, uncoiling its white-knuckled grasp that had latched on when he had made Matt leave him behind. “And we can get it back. What?” he added when Steve snorted. “This isn’t over.”

“It’s not,” said Wanda from the front. “We haven’t had access to much by way of news ourselves, but Vision has been--um. Channeling communication back and forth. None of our people are happy about what’s happened, Steve.” He met her gaze in the rearview mirror, and the usual hard lines creased around her eyes were nowhere to be seen. “Vision says it’s been a controversial news piece ever since it broke.”

Bucky muttered something half into his arm and anything else resembling a useful update was lost to hissed bickering and threats to pull over--as some things, Steve admitted, had indeed not changed, including Wanda’s bristling whenever anyone hinted at an amorous connection to the synthezoid.

Including the way his chest still seized when Matt’s hand pressed warmly against his jaw, tilting it towards him, brushing their lips together.

Including the fire he knew still burned in all parts of Matt, the crackle of determination and stubbornness he felt in himself as it was rekindled by the wind whipping past them in the car hurtling back towards their new future at a hundred and ten miles per hour.

--- 

The safehouse they ended up establishing was technically in the Garment District, not Hell’s Kitchen, but they had all learned to know better when Matt was around. Not that it really mattered where the building was, another nondescript, half-decrepit part of one of the many blocks making up New York City with opportunistic contractors eyeing property like it across the boroughs. But it wasn’t on a well-traveled street, or near anything of note, so it worked. Or: Bucky put his foot down and declared that it would work for the time being to stave off the arguments he must have felt would have dragged on for hours.

“The media is still having a heyday trying to come up with suitable names for you and Barnes,” Vision said one evening. He had floated through one of the windows that looked over the back alley, maneuvering carefully through the broken glass while Wanda watched on, trying not to grimace when his cape caught on a stray shard.

“What’s wrong with our old names?” Bucky called from one of the inner rooms. “It’s obviously us. ‘Daredevil and Pandemonium seen running around Soho with Scarlet Witch and Winter Soldier,’ there, done, easy.”

Steve rolled his eyes and took an armful of the goods that Vision had brought with him, dropping a couple items onto Wanda’s pile that were threatening to fall. “Well if I’m not Captain America… we’ve said this before, Buck. This isn’t the Avengers. They’re not going to call us by those titles.”

“Yeah, okay.” He was sprawled on his back when the three of them entered the room. His left arm was holding up one of his legs that had been pulled in the previous night’s excursion, and he was fighting hard not to let the grimace sneak onto his face. “What are they saying this time, Vizh?”

The synthezoid frowned and shook his head. “Better left forgotten, I’m afraid.”

“What he’s saying,” Matt said from his perch on an old table, “is that they’re so bad you’d probably be offended.”

“Whatever. You and Steve got good ones right off the bat.”

Matt made like he was going to repeat the story Steve had probably heard six times since meeting him, how Foggy had laughed at the title the first time he saw it in a headline, but he just shook his head. Smirked over in Steve’s general direction.

The delivery this time was larger than usual: a stack of legal files from Foggy for consultation, printed in braille, with a side of a to-go box of his favorite Indian food; a handle of the obscure brand of vodka only Natasha could manage to find; a lumpy cake covered in tin-foil with a note from Tony (“Fuck you guys, this took me six hours and it’s delicious”); handwritten notes and clippings of the Sunday crossword and another installment of knick-knacks from their rooms back at the Tower. “Fury and Hill also send their regards,” Vision said. “They’ve been brought up to speed.” The committee had finally ended the questioning, turning back to their own resources in the intelligence community to try to monitor and track down their locations. None of the interrogations had been fruitful, which they had apparently expected with the Avengers and anyone who had been associated with SHIELD, but even putting Foggy under the spotlight had been like talking to a brick wall. “You’re probably going to have to move on from this building soon.”

“But soon isn’t now,” said Steve.

“That it isn’t,” he agreed. “I need to get going, though.” Casting a quick glance around the room, he stepped forward and pecked Wanda chastely on the mouth. “Very well then. I’m off.”

Wanda grinned as he left, but it morphed into a glare as soon as she turned to Bucky. “One word and I’m kicking you out the window the next time a cop car drives by.”

The sunset was long over by the time Vision soared back out the window, but the night still had time to grow darker still crawling from navy to indigo to black, dappled in the skyline with winking lights across the buildings jutting into the air. A few hours, give or take according to Matt’s ever-reliable gut, and they could head out for the night. The trafficking ring boss was still at large, after all, and Bullseye couldn’t have been the only card up Fisk’s sleeve, and--and--and. The list, when they drew it out, was unimaginably long and far below the line of anything the Avengers would be allowed to go after, especially now. Back to basics, Bucky had called it. Low budgets and back alleys and patching each other up in a drafty room.

As the hour crept closer to midnight, Wanda abruptly turned back to the hall, a window that looked out to the brick side of the building next door, southeast. Just as quickly she sprung to her feet and was at Matt’s side. “Listen for me. Something’s off around Bed-Stuy.” She put her hands, glowing, to his temples.

“A standoff,” he said after half a minute. “Mob boss… and--”

“What?” she said.

“Mob boss and his inner circle are up against a man impervious to bullets and--a woman with a metal arm…?”

Bucky sat up. “Did we just find new friends?”

Wanda cracked a grin. “I think we did.”

They ran from the room to get their gear, the masks that still sat so new and unfamiliar against their faces that it still caught Steve off-guard. But Matt’s hand was then on his hip, cutting his train of thought short.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, and Steve took his face in his hands, ran his thumbs along his cheekbones before kissing the corner of his eye. “I love you, too.”

“They’re going to beat us out there if we don’t hurry up,” Steve said as he tossed Matt the Daredevil suit that had been draped over a nearby chair. “Let’s go.”