Archive of Our Own

Bucky crouched behind a chimney and glowered down at his cellphone, watching the surveillance feed from his own security cameras as the SHIELD team surrounded his apartment. He'd liked Bucharest. Now all his shit was going to wind up in an evidence locker, and Bucky would have to go apartment hunting in a new goddamn country.

Why was SHIELD chasing after him, anyway? He was retired.  

Mostly. Mostly retired. Sure he still picked up some security work or ran the occasional infiltration as a favor to a friend (or the closest things he had to friends), but he hadn’t shot anyone in years. 

Well, no one important. HYDRA guys didn’t count. He’d only taken out some kneecaps, for fuck’s sake. He’d even left the guys gift wrapped for INTERPOL to pick up. Shouldn’t that count for something? Weren’t there bigger threats to world peace than one very nearly retired ex-assassin just trying to get by? These days his goals had shrunk from “infiltrate hostile base and extract its commander” to “try not to eat beets more than three times a week.” These were not concerns he had expected to grab the attention of a multi-jurisdictional international task force. 

The video display on his phone was tiny, but he could still recognize some familiar figures in the crowd of suits outside his apartment, including the unassuming bald guy who’d been turning up at his gift-wrapped HYDRA goon drops with alarming regularity. It was not a good sign that he’d been invited to this little raiding party. INTERPOL was one thing, but Bucky hadn’t been able to find anything on Mr. Fashion’s Most Boring Tie, and those were the kind of guys who could authorize one-way tickets to black sites. 

Bucky looked up to scan the rooftop again. Still nothing more suspicious than a cluster of pigeons warbling hopefully at the paper sandwich bag by his foot. Bucky had gone out to get lunch and had veered off instead of going home once he’d realized there was a suspicious number of unfamiliar faces around his building, all apparently absorbed in innocuous tasks that just so happened to give them reasons to be out on the street. He’d calmly walked past his usual turn and picked a random pedestrian to follow until he was sure he wasn’t being tailed, then scaled the nearest building with a roof wall high enough to hide behind. It had only taken an hour of waiting before whoever was in charge made the call to stop stalling and sent the first team inside to storm his apartment.

The guys in tactical gear were filing back into the armored vans now that they’d determined Bucky hadn’t left any explosives behind (of course he hadn’t; he had neighbors, and he had standards, and the only booby trap he’d left had sprayed the first team in through the door with those obnoxious wash-proof dye packs, more out of sheer perversity than any real tactical considerations). That alone should have been enough to sell the whole retired thing, but at this rate he would have to rent out a billboard or something. Former alias Winter Soldier, current business: none of yours, assholes. 

Maybe if he sent that note along with a glitter bomb to the personal addresses of a few heads of central intelligence they’d get the message. 

The one guy still in his apartment was also the only member of the initial attack squad who didn’t have neon magenta sprayed across his chest, which was doubly impressive since he’d been the first man inside and by all rights should have taken a blast of dye to the face. Bucky had watched the man execute a truly ridiculous mid-air spin flip to avoid it. If he hadn’t been in the middle of trashing Bucky’s apartment, Bucky might have been impressed instead of annoyed. 

The man walked through the whole apartment again, slower this time, looking at the appliances and furniture instead of checking the corners for traps. He turned to face one of the cameras directly and Bucky finally recognized him: Captain America, in a navy tac suit instead of the gaudy flag pin-up costume he apparently reserved for fighting aliens.

“What the hell,” Bucky hissed, eyes flicking up to sweep the roof again as paranoia reasserted itself. Captain America was about as major league as it got, with he and Iron Man taking turns seizing the mantle of Most Dramatic Superhero Savior on alternating weekends as they flung themselves in front of the world’s biggest threats. 

And now he was standing in Bucky’s ex-apartment, crouching on the shitty rug Bucky had only gotten to cover his floorboard cache, reaching under Bucky’s couch and pulling out--

“Oh, fuck me,” Bucky said, and had to dig his metal hand into the brick behind him to stop himself from getting up and sprinting back to his apartment. He’d forgotten about the fucking cat.

The Fucking Cat, as Bucky had called him for months before finally accepting that the cat wasn’t going anywhere and they were now roommates, was a giant tabby with the survival instincts and general personality of a brick wrapped in fur. All he ever did was eat, sleep, and shred Bucky’s fuzziest blankets. At least three times a week Bucky woke up half-suffocated with a dense, purring weight on his chest. The Fucking Cat was a saboteur who’d slunk in through an open window one rainy evening and refused to leave, and Bucky had only named him and fed him in self defense. It shouldn’t have made his chest clench to think about Mishka huddled under the sofa in a trashed apartment surrounded by hostile soldiers.

Not that the Captain was acting particularly hostile, exactly; he was making little shushing noises, one of his unreasonably large hands supporting Mishka’s belly while the cat’s back feet paddled the air in panic. The Captain stripped the glove off his other hand with his teeth and held out his fingers for Mishka to sniff. Mishka stopped trying to squirm away and latched onto the Captain’s forearm instead. Spitefully, Bucky hoped the Captain’s sleeve material was thinner than Mishka’s claws.

"Hey there, girl," the Captain said cautiously.

"He’s a boy, dipshit," Bucky muttered.

"I'm afraid your owner is long gone."

"I'm three fucking blocks away!"

Mishka, the traitor, was already rubbing his cheek on the Captain’s knuckles, his fur sleeking back down as his puffed tail deflated. The Captain looked down at him with a soft little smile. "I guess you'd better come home with me."

"Are you serious?" Bucky yelled, startling a nearby cluster of pigeons into taking flight. "That's my fucking cat! Put him down!"

The Captain didn't put him down. Instead he emptied the wooden fruit crate Bucky used to hold mugs, put it inside the mesh laundry bag he found inside the bedroom, and got Mishka into the improvised cat carrier with minimal injuries. And then he walked right out the door. 

Bucky could only watch with speechless indignation as Captain Fucking America stole his cat.

Objectively, losing the Bucharest safehouse and its contents was the least of Bucky’s problems. The balding agent he’d seen directing the raid was apparently affiliated with SHIELD, which was a shadowy government agency that made representatives from other shadowy government agencies suddenly remember urgent appointments when Bucky tried to bribe, threaten, and otherwise shake them down for information on what the hell SHIELD might want with a former brainwashed assassin. Dodging SHIELD should be his number one priority.

Subjectively, he wanted his fucking cat back.

Getting back into the US was easy enough for intrepid travelers who didn’t mind spending a few days in a cargo shipping container. That didn’t make it any less of a terrible idea, but Bucky was something of a specialist in terrible ideas. It was rare enough for him to actually, genuinely want something that he’d made a rule with himself about going after whatever harmless joys he could scrape up, whether it was eating a truly unwise amount of fresh fruit or stealing a paperweight off the head of INTERPOL’s desk or pursuing his stolen cat over international waters.

At least being in the US would make it easy to meet the one person who had a lead for him. Most of his contacts had stopped returning his calls once word got around about exactly who he was asking about, but he still had a name in reserve. This particular contact didn’t care who Captain No Seriously The Captain America was working with; burning the Red Room to the ground and exfoliating with the ashes when she was still a teenager had left Natasha Romanova with precisely zero fucks to give about whatever watch lists she wound up on. She was the only one who responded to Bucky’s information request with a date and location.

Her prices were steep, and sometimes alarmingly vague, given that she was less interested in money than in favors. Bucky still owed her from the early days after his escape from HYDRA, back when his arm had been administering electric shocks every 90 seconds to encourage him to return to base and she’d found a mechanic who could disable the nastiest bits of circuitry without taking his nervous system hook-ups down with them. They’d worked together since then on a few jobs of mutual benefit, but somehow she always managed to come out just a little bit ahead, so his debt never quite cleared. Bucky didn’t mind as much as he probably should have. Sometimes it was just nice to work with a fucking professional.

And there was something comfortable about Natasha’s company. She wasn’t afraid of him, she didn’t feel sorry for him, and she never expected him to be any better or worse than he was. There were worse foundations for a working relationship.

On the other hand, ever since he’d made the mistake of making a pointed comment about spy cliches after she set a meeting in an abandoned parking garage, she’d used every opportunity to troll him about it. 

The location she’d sent this time was the most harrowing choice yet. Bucky met the eyes of his reflection in the locker room mirror with grim resolve, pulled up his leg warmers, and plunged once more into the breach.

“Welcome to Thursday morning jazzercise!” the impossibly chipper instructor said, zeroing in on him with laser focus as soon as he stepped into Gym A. Bucky gave the instructor a tight smile and went to lurk in the back of the room. Natasha was already there, stretching by the wall of mirrors with about half of her actual flexibility and laughing at him without moving a single facial muscle.

He already knew she wouldn’t talk business until the class was over. Forcing him to endure forty minutes of vigorous hip gyrations to the soundtrack of saxophone blarts was the down payment on whatever he’d wind up owing her. Bucky found a spot in the corner and tried to pretend he was under deep cover. This was hardly the worst thing he’d ever done to get intel, even if none of his previous jobs had involved quite this much turquoise spandex. 

He wouldn’t have admitted it under literal torture, but the class was kind of fun. The instructor shouted commands from the front of the room with lung control that would’ve put a drill sergeant to shame, but they were a lot more smiley than any of his COs or handlers had ever been, and the aqua scoop tank they were wearing was nowhere close to any uniform he had bad associations with. Bucky didn’t even flinch when the instructor clapped him on the shoulder at the end of the class.

“Great hustle, man, awesome stamina! Most first-timers slow down after a while, but you really kept up the pace.”

Oops. “Thanks,” Bucky said, with a theatrical wheeze.

Natasha rescued him, for a given value of rescue, by whisking Bucky away to the gym cafe for a smoothie that cost more than anything that virulently green should, unless it was spiked with absinthe. Maybe that was the latest fitness trend.

It was an unspoken contest to see who would crack first and bring up business. Bucky held out until Natasha started using the last quarter inch of her smoothie as an offensive auditory weapon, drawing out each rattling slurp as long as possible. Sometimes surrender was the only way forward.

“So,” Bucky said. “Did you find what I asked for?”

Natasha unzipped the tiny pocket on her yoga pants and held out a flash drive. She whipped her arm back when Bucky reached for it, smiling at him pleasantly. “What kind of job is this for?”

“You really want to ask those kinds of questions?”

“If you’re going to kill Captain America? Yes, I want to ask, so I know how deep a hole to hide in when they trace the information back to me.”

“He’s not a target.”

“Really,” Natasha said flatly. Bucky eyed the flash drive longingly; he could lunge for it, but she’d just use the taser hidden under her fitbit to fry the drive and his face at the same time. “Why the interest in where he lives? You want to send him a postcard?”

“He has my cat,” Bucky blurted.

Natasha blinked. “You have a cat?”

“I had a cat, until that fucker led a raid on my safehouse and stole him.”

Unholy glee kindled in Natasha’s eyes. “And you’re tracking him down so you can steal it back?”

“Natasha,” Bucky said warningly.

“Do you miss it? Do you miss your little housecat?”

“Don’t even start.”

“The Winter Soldier,” Natasha cooed. “Going after big bad Captain America to protect his poor precious fluffykins--”

Bucky made a desperate grab for the drive. Natasha let him take it, now that she had far more valuable intelligence, i.e. that Bucky was a horrible goddamn sap who was tracking down one of the most dangerous men in the world because he needed to reclaim a wayward stray that had once horked half-digested tuna into his favorite boots. 

Fatalistically, Bucky contemplated the odds that she would keep this information to herself. He could try to threaten her to ensure her silence, if he wanted her to laugh in his face and then stab him somewhere awkward. 

“Thank you,” he gritted out instead.

“You owe me,” Natasha said. “I expect a courtesy call if you change your mind and decide to shoot him.”

“I’m not going to shoot him!”

“He stole your cat,” Natasha pointed out. 

“I’m not going to shoot him,” Bucky said. “I’m just going to quietly, non-confrontationally, extract my fucking cat.” 

Bucky didn’t mean to shoot him. The only saving grace, Bucky thought grimly as he sprinted for the roof, Captain America charging into walls behind him, was that he’d used a tranq gun, so Natasha wouldn’t be coming after him to gut him in his sleep. 

The downside of having used tranqs was that Bucky had calculated the dosage for the non-enhanced agents who were living in the Captain’s building pretending to be his neighbors, which meant the Captain had shaken off three darts to the chest so fast he was now gaining on Bucky, despite cornering as gracefully as a rhinoceros in roller skates. Bucky hated dealing with supes. 

He launched himself out of the roof hatch and leapt to the neighbor’s roof. Any jump he could make, the Captain could make, so he didn’t bother trying to lose him with sheer speed. He took pinhead turns as he ran instead, using the close-packed row house roofs as an improvised obstacle course and betting on his greater agility. The only alternative was trying to tag the Captain with enough tranqs to actually drop him, and now that he’d lost the element of surprise, Bucky didn’t like his odds.

He tracked the Captain’s progress by the sound of crashing behind him. Smash, there went someone’s brick chimney. Clang, that was a new massive dent in someone’s HVAC vent. Scrabble-scrabble-yelp, that was someone losing their grip and dropping over the edge of the roof--

Shit. Bucky risked a look behind him. The Captain was out of sight. Possibly hanging over the edge waiting to ambush anyone stupid enough to approach, possibly lying broken in an alley after a four-story drop. Shit fuck.

Natasha would legitimately, actually murder him if he’d somehow gotten Captain America killed based on her intel. That was why he turned around and slowly approached the section of roof with pale scrape marks showing against the damp tar. It wasn’t like he’d feel bad if the Captain had managed to fall off a roof chasing him. He’d stolen Bucky’s cat first, so Bucky was the real victim here. 

Bucky repeated all these extremely reasonable justifications to himself as he cautiously leaned over the edge of the roof. It was too dark to see much definition, but Bucky could make out a pale blur in a dumpster below. It wasn’t moving. Bucky grimaced, broke off a small chunk of slate tiling, and dropped it onto the blur’s center mass.

“Hey,” the blur said faintly. 

All the air left Bucky’s lungs in a relieved exhale. The Captain was fine. He was even incapacitated, nonlethally, which left Bucky plenty of time to make a clean escape. This was about as good as it got in the getaway business. He turned away from the edge of the roof.

Five seconds later he leaned back over. The Captain still wasn’t moving.

“God dammit,” Bucky said, and started climbing down the fire escape.

“Why are you lying in a dumpster?”

The Captain blinked up at him muzzily. He was sprawled out over a stack of cardboard, one arm up by his head and the other resting on his stomach. It was an incongruously relaxed pose, like he’d just happened to crawl into a pile of trash in order to take a nap. “Fell off the roof.”

“So why are you still in the dumpster?”

“Got a concussion. If I sit up, I’ll puke.”

Bucky put his head in his hands. Fucking perfect end to a perfect day. “You sure?”

“I can tell. I have a lot of experience with concussions.” He sounded a little smug about it.

“Great.” Bucky still didn’t hear any sirens, and if someone had heard their rooftop chase and called the cops, there should’ve been some by now. Captain America’s apartment was wired to hell and back, but Bucky had, naturally, disabled all the alarms before he’d even set foot inside. For one thing, he didn’t want to get arrested, and for another, he knew exactly how hard it was to pry Mishka out of a hiding spot after a perimeter alarm had startled him. Disabling the alarms had been a great idea when he’d only meant to dart in a window, scoop up his cat, and evac sixty seconds later. Now that he was solely responsible for a concussed symbol of the free world, it was revealing a significant downside.

“Okay,” Bucky said decisively. “I’m going to get you on your feet, and then we’re going to go back to your apartment.” And Bucky would pick up his cat on the way out. 

“Okay,” the Captain said peaceably. 

Actually extracting the Captain from the dumpster was every bit as awkward and smelly as Bucky had expected, but after five minutes of swearing they were staggering out of the alley. After a few false starts they found a precarious balance with the Captain’s arm over Bucky’s shoulder and lurched down the street to the Captain’s building.

The front door was locked, but unlike the Captain’s apartment, not otherwise alarmed. Bucky propped the Captain up against the doorframe and leaned against him to pin him upright so he’d have both hands free to pick the lock. The Captain blinked down at what he was doing with detached interest.

It was hard to tell how much of his docility was due to the concussion versus the tranquilizers finally taking hold, or maybe just post-mission exhaustion; he had looked tired when he’d walked into his apartment, in the split second before he caught Bucky with a leg over his windowsill and immediately snapped into charging rhino mode. His pupils weren’t quite the same size, but the scrape behind his ear had already stopped bleeding, so he definitely had enhanced healing, and probably Bucky could just leave him to sleep it off without worrying about waking up to headlines like CAPTAIN AMERICA FOUND DEAD IN BROOKLYN APARTMENT, subheading REPORTS OF WINTER SOLDIER’S RETIREMENT GREATLY EXAGGERATED; “I KNEW IT ALL ALONG,” INTERPOL CHIEF CLAIMS. 

As soon as they got inside, the Captain pointed at the stairwell. “Fourth floor.”

“No elevator?”

“Old building.” 

“Fantastic,” Bucky said grimly. They wobbled up the stairs, even more dumpster slime transferring to Bucky’s clothes with every step. He was going to have to burn these pants. 

It was already surreal to just waltz right up to the front door of the apartment Bucky had been staking out for the last seven hours, and it got worse when the Captain didn’t activate a palm lock or retinal scan or anything, but instead fumbled in his pockets until he unearthed an honest to god metal key and then just opened the door. 

“You don’t have biometric locks?” Bucky shouldered more of the Captain’s weight when he tripped on the doormat. There was a scattering of junk mail the Captain had dropped earlier, all addressed to Steve Rogers. Probably a pseudonym, but it was easier than thinking of him as “the Captain”.

“Nah,” Steve said vaguely. “Too much of a hassle. Broken fingers mess up palm prints, and black eyes don’t open wide enough for retinal scans.”

“Exactly how much time do you spend getting punched in the face?”

Steve shrugged. “It’s part of the job.”

They shuffled towards the first piece of furniture Bucky saw, a slightly beat-up couch sitting in the living room. This being an apartment in New York, the living room was also the kitchen and dining room. The window Bucky had broken into and then fled out of was still open, the sill a little crooked where his boot had shoved off hard enough to kick the wood away from the wall. Bucky plopped Steve onto the couch and shut it. He snuck a glance over his shoulder. Steve was dragging his heel back and forth with a frown of concentration, trying to just scrape his shoe off against the floor instead of bending down to untie it. Bucky left him to it and did a sweep of the apartment, making quiet tongue clicks that he’d trained Mishka to associate with pieces of chicken.

He did a second, less subtle sweep after the first turned up nothing, and then a third sweep where he didn’t even try to hide what he was doing. There were food and water bowls in the kitchen and a litterbox in the bathroom, and familiar drifts of long cat hairs accumulating in corners and brushed against the furniture, but the glaring absence of actual cat was making Bucky increasingly agitated.

“Hey,” Steve said mildly, when Bucky lifted one end of the couch he was on top of to look for Mishka under it, rolling Steve from one end to the other like a particularly lumpy sandbag.

“Where is he?”

“Who?” 

“Mishka,” Bucky said. “Toddler sized, brown and black stripes, tiny little cartoon meow?”

Steve blinked. “My cat?”

“My cat,” Bucky corrected. “Where is he, Rogers? Where is my cat.”

“With my friend. I was supposed to be on a mission until Tuesday. The apartment was going to be empty.”

“Yes,” Bucky ground out. “I’m aware.”

“He doesn’t like being alone, and he gets along with dogs, and Lucky likes cats. So Clint’s cat-sitting,” Steve continued, oblivious to Bucky’s inner torment. He’d carried two hundred pounds of garbage-covered national icon up four flights of stairs because Captain Goddamn America was too much a man of the people to live in a building with a working elevator, and Mishka wasn’t even there. 

“Great.” 

“Are you okay?” Steve asked, annoyingly earnestly. Bucky could have done without knowing that Captain America, aside from being an actual superhero with biologically implausible abs and endearingly terrible fashion sense, was also kind of sweet. 

At least his home security was shit. The man had to have some flaws. 

“I’m fantastic.” It probably wasn’t convincing, since Bucky was speaking through the hands he had pressed against his face, but he was fresh out of fucks to give about it. 

“You don’t look fantastic.”

“Who’s the one with the concussion here?”

Steve paused like he was thinking about it. Bucky dropped his hands and moved to the kitchen, reminded that there actually was someone in need of medical attention here. Even if his little good samaritan exercise wasn’t going to get him any closer to getting Mishka back, it would be a dick move to drop a guy off a roof and then dump him on his couch to sleep it off without even giving him an ice pack. At least he could still accomplish something tonight.

Steve’s freezer had seven ice packs of various shapes and sizes, an empty ice tray, and a single Klondike bar. Bucky stared at them all for a minute, then pulled out all seven ice packs and carried them back to where Steve had listed sideways onto the couch, his feet dangling over one arm. 

“Which of these do you want?” Bucky asked.

“The round one’s good for concussions.”

“You really are an expert, huh. Do you have any painkillers?”

“Not worth it for this.” Steve actually closed his eyes when Bucky rested the donut-shaped ice pack over the lump on his skull. If he didn’t have advanced healing, Bucky would be taking him in for whatever kind of head scan was appropriate for concussed idiots who forgot that one of INTERPOL’s most wanted was the one standing in their living room playing Florence Nightingale. 

Bucky really should leave before Steve remembered who he was, but the man was such an oddly forlorn figure, too big for the couch under him and reeking faintly of old coffee grounds and pizza grease from the dumpster’s tender embrace, his jaw just a little too tight as he breathed through the pain. Bucky had done the same thing on more nights than he could count, holing up alone in whatever forgotten room he could find to wait out sick headaches and cracked ribs, the familiar souveniers of close calls. He didn’t like how used to it Steve seemed. Even with a concussion, Steve should have thought of calling someone by now.

“Are you hungry?” Bucky asked abruptly.

Steve held up a hand and waved it side to side. “Kind of nauseous.” 

“You should eat anyway.” Healing burned calories, Bucky knew from experience. He’d started keeping famine relief bars in his med kits to deal with the inevitable hunger that kicked in while his body patched himself up.

“Don’t want to move.”

“I’ll make you something,” Bucky said, because apparently now--after two tours of army service and a forced conscription into HYDRA and years of piecing himself back together after his escape--he was finally turning into his mother. “What do you have?”

Steve’s brow furrowed like this was a particularly challenging question. ”Soup?” 

His kitchen did, indeed, have soup. Soup filled an entire shelf in his pantry, with bulk boxes of the kind of hyper-masculine energy bars that had PROTEIN PUMP-UP POWER!!! and a stylized black outline of a grizzly bear on the box taking up the second shelf and a six-pack of peanut butter on the third. Bucky was beginning to think the Klondike had been left by a previous tenant.  

But one of the cans of soup was basic chicken noodle, so Bucky popped the top and heated it up directly on the stove burner, since there was no microwave in sight and Steve’s pans were dusty enough that he must never use them. Bucky was squatting in a half-renovated foreclosed condo, and even he had a microwave (although he had to siphon off power from a neighboring building to run it). 

He picked up the can to take to Steve, remembered that Steve didn’t have a heat-impervious metal hand, and went back to wrap the can in a kitchen towel. Steve didn’t have any potholders, and his single dishtowel was neatly folded in a drawer like an afterthought, apparently brand new.

It was weird to cook for someone again, even this kindergarten-level version of cooking. It was weird to be in someone else’s home, rifling through the cabinets, noticing the way furniture had been placed: the couch could be flipped to provide a barrier for anyone coming in through the front door, nothing obscured the path to the fire escape window, and there were boots set seemingly casually near every egress point. Bucky was positive there was a go-bag under the bed and another one near the front door, probably in the coat closet.

Everything was designed for maximum utility except the stuff Steve had clearly bought for Mishka. Beyond the basics of the litter pan and food and water dishes, there were toys strewn around the floor in every room--jingle balls set around cardboard scratching pads, squishy mice with feather tails, felted catnip fish--the bright pops of color jarring against the bland wooden furniture and white walls. Steve had even put a massive cat climbing tree in front of the largest window. The top platform was matted with familiar brown fur, and Bucky could easily picture Mishka sleeping there in the sun. 

For the first time, Bucky actually felt bad about his plans to steal his cat back. Steve’s apartment was unpleasantly familiar, and he didn’t like seeing echoes of who Bucky had been when he’d first shed HYDRA reenacted in the home of someone who shouldn’t have been anything like him. Captain America was supposed to be an international superhero darling with nearly unlimited resources at his disposal. He shouldn’t have bare walls and an empty refrigerator and fewer belongings than his own cat.

Not his cat. Bucky’s cat. The thought was a little less automatic than usual, and Bucky scowled and tried not to think about why as he brought the soup to the couch.

“Here,” he said.

“Thanks.” Steve took a long sip. His cheeks had regained some color and his shoulders were starting to straighten back into that ruler-perfect posture Bucky remembered from the surveillance feed. Bucky was deeply annoyed by how attractive he was even with an ice pack dribbling condensation down his forehead. “What’s your name again?”

“I have to go,” Bucky said, and went out the window. 

It took Steve half an hour of sitting on his couch sipping soup and waiting for his brain to unscramble before he realized the man who’d hauled him back to his apartment was the Winter Soldier. By that point it was too late to do anything useful about it. 

He spent another fifteen minutes staring thoughtfully at the open window, matching and discarding pieces of SHIELD’s behavioral profile of the Winter Soldier based on his new first-hand observations, and waited another hour after that before he texted his team to let them know what had happened. Tony and JARVIS were very good at tracking people, and he wanted to give the Soldier a solid head start. 

SHIELD’s orders were to apprehend the Winter Soldier on sight. Steve’s priorities had become a little different. 

“So,” Steve said, leaning over the arm of Clint’s couch to scratch Lucky’s belly, “I’m thinking about asking him out.”

“Okay,” Sam said, setting his game controller down and steepling his fingers, the better to give Steve a level stare over them. “Just wondering, no judgment, is mind control real? Is that a thing we should get you checked out for? I bet Tony has a mind control scanner. We could hit up Stark Tower and then go get kniches at that deli you like, make a day trip out of it.”

“I’m not mind controlled,” Steve repeated for the third time since he’d debriefed his team--not Fury, not Hill or Coulson or anyone who would be obliged to act on the information, just the Avengers that were currently planetside--on his encounter with the Winter Soldier. 

At first he had thought they weren’t getting it because he was telling them via the Avengers group chat and he was still a little too concussed to focus on the tiny keyboard (“Net the winter solder. He’s mice. Have headache can’t go brunch too marrow.” was evidently not a reassuring explanation), but even after his headache cleared up and Clint and Sam showed up in person to yell about it, they had been stubbornly resistant to accepting Steve’s point of view. That was fine. Steve was stubborn enough for a whole platoon.

Three days later, they’d mostly stopped trying to convince him to tell SHIELD about it, which was why Steve had brought up the dating thing.

So far, they didn’t seem particularly receptive.

“That’s what someone being mind controlled would say,” Clint pointed out. 

“Quick recap.” Sam held up one finger for each point he counted off. “The Winter Soldier is an internationally wanted assassin. He broke into your apartment. He gave you a concussion--”

“I gave myself a concussion falling off a roof, and then he helped me get home safe.”

“You need me to go over the assassin who broke into your apartment part again?”

“He made me soup, Sam,” Steve said earnestly. To him it was obvious. The Soldier had gone out of his way and put himself at risk to help Steve after his actions got Steve hurt, and the only reason he’d gone after Steve’s apartment in the first place was to get the cat Steve had accidentally stolen; it was hard to feel threatened by that. Kindness wasn’t something Steve encountered a lot in his line of work. He wasn’t going to just ignore it. And if kindness came accompanied by a deep voice and sure hands and a touch of the kind of judgmental competence that Steve had always felt the urge to rise to, that was just a bonus.

“He heated up a can of Campbell’s.”

“It was sweet.”

“Steve,” Sam said seriously, “I’m saying this as a friend: if your standards were any lower, you’d have to date a goddamn moleman.”

“I like canned soup.” Clint had muted the sound and restarted the racing game they’d been playing while Sam was distracted, so that Sam’s car was idling at the start of the track while Clint’s raced forward, Clint’s arms barely twitching while he worked the controller hidden in his hoodie pocket. “That might be enough for me to ask someone out, if it was the name brand stuff.”

Sam raised his eyebrows at both of them meaningfully.

“Yeah, I guess that does kind of prove your point,” Clint conceded. Sam gave him a conciliatory pat on the back. 

“Sweet Bee likes him.” Clint had brought Sweet Bee back home when he came by to yell about assassin incursions, and Sweet Bee had spent fifteen minutes sniffing the spots on Steve’s shirt where the Soldier had touched him to haul him up the stairs, purring the whole time. Whatever charges could be laid at the Soldier’s door, negligent pet owner wasn’t one of them.

“Sweet Bee would like Doctor Doom if he was holding a piece of cheese.” 

“So you don’t think I should ask him out?”

Sam held his hands up, absolving himself of all responsibility for the situation. “No, you know what? Go for it. If this is what it takes to get you to voluntarily socialize with someone you’re into, I’m willing to take the risk. We can always snatch you back if he kidnaps you and your cat. Is the cat microchipped? Are you microchipped?”

“Serum means they don’t take.”

“Maybe swallow one before the date,” Clint suggested. “Just to be on the safe side. I used to do that when Natasha and I were first seeing each other. One time I forgot to check in with Coulson and he crashed in at a pretty delicate moment.”

“How’d that end up for you?”

Clint shrugged. “I got a threesome out of it, so, no complaints.”

Sam side-eyed Clint, then looked at Steve.

“I don’t try to figure out when he’s bullshitting anymore,” Steve told him. “If you keep asking, he gives details.”

A burst of light from the television caught Sam’s attention, and he squawked indignantly and tackled Clint, both of them toppling over the back of the couch with a yelp. Steve sighed and scratched behind Lucky’s ears, wondering how he could find a way to contact the Soldier. Steve wished he’d left a business card or something. Probably leaving a business card wasn’t part of breaking and entering protocol. Then again, neither was heating up soup for concussion victims.

Steve didn’t even know the Soldier’s name.

“Does the Winter Soldier have any known contacts?”

Clint’s head popped up from behind the couch. Half his hair was sticking up the wrong way. “I might know a guy who knows a guy. Off the record.” 

“What record?” Sam swung a throw pillow into Clint’s face. “Steve’s not a reporter. Or a cop.”

“He looks like a cop.”

“I’ve been arrested nine times,” Steve said absently. He was thinking about what kind of arrangement he could come to with the Soldier about Sweet Bee; Steve didn’t want to lose him entirely, not when he actually looked forward to going home knowing there’d be a cat there to greet him and sprawl over his chest as soon as he went horizontal. Steve hadn’t slept this well since before the war. But it wouldn’t be fair to keep someone else’s cat, not when the Soldier had only lost him because of the SHIELD raid Steve had helped with.

He wanted to talk with the Soldier about Sweet Bee and thank him for his help at the same time. Maybe he should make the Soldier soup to pay him back? Steve’s cooking skills were more functional than impressive. Take him out to dinner?

“Do you think the Soldier likes Italian food?” Steve asked, and Sam groaned and tried to suffocate him with the throw pillow.

Bucky got stuck in a holding pattern after his failed raid on Steve’s apartment. He had to assume Steve would have tightened his home security after the first attempt, and Iron Man had been spotted over Brooklyn a lot more than usual, so surveillance was out, too. 

His one lead was the name of Steve’s cat-sitting friend. How many Clints could there be in one city, anyway?

Too many. Bucky spent tedious hours bouncing between surveillance and research at the public library, researching and eliminating possibilities, until he hit paydirt a week later. 

Clinton Francis Barton lived in an apartment in Brooklyn. Bucky watched from a nearby rooftop until a man matching Barton’s ID ambled out of the building, leaning on a crutch with fresh bandages on his forehead. When he yelled plaintively after his dog, a yellow mutt he was walking on a sparkly pink leash who kept bolting after squirrels and tangling his leash around Barton’s crutch, he called him Lucky. Jackpot.

Barton had blond hair and shoulders broad enough that Bucky, assuming Captain America wouldn’t give the level of access pet sitting required to any old civilian off the street, tentatively pegged him as Hawkeye. The muttered “ow ow ow, fucking Doombots” he overheard when Barton tripped over a curb and landed on his already sprained ankle confirmed it. 

There was nothing to do but watch and wait. Eventually Steve would drop his cat off with Barton again, and Bucky could at least see Mishka and make sure he was being taken care of. Bucky had no other jobs to work and nothing else to do but get intimately acquainted with the rooftops around Barton’s building and the flocks of pigeons who roosted there. Maybe his new post-retirement career could be pigeon keeping. He’d certainly put his elbows in enough piles of pigeon shit over the years to get used to it.

It was a week before something interesting happened. Barton stayed in all afternoon, shuffling around his apartment in loose pajama pants and a muscle tank with “Right To Bare Arms” printed on the back in bright purple lettering. Bucky maintained surveillance more because he’d been watching Jane the Virgin on a neighbor’s TV through his binoculars and wanted to see how the season ended than because he expected to see anything useful. 

Around sunset Barton went up to the roof with his dog. Lucky made a beeline for the grill stored under an awning and sniffed around for any stray bits of food that might be left over. Barton scratched his stomach, rolled his shoulders twice, and launched seamlessly into an impressively springy acrobatics routine. 

Bucky was almost reluctant to look away when his phone started buzzing, but very few people had the number for this burner, and curiosity was enough to make him pick up the call.

“So how did your non-confrontational cat extraction go?” Natasha said. 

Bucky bit back a groan. “Nobody died.”

“I hear the Captain still has your cat.”

I’m starting to think I should just let him keep the cat, Bucky didn’t say. “Do you have something helpful for me, or are you just calling to laugh?”

“I’m multitasking. The Captain wants to set up a meet. Not with him,” Natasha continued, and Bucky firmly told himself he wasn’t disappointed to hear that. “With a neutral third party.”

“Who?”

Barton rolled to a stop at the end of a long string of cartwheels, looked directly at Bucky, and fucking saluted him. The only reason Bucky didn’t drop the phone and take off running was knowing it would be pointless. If Iron Man was hiding behind a chimney somewhere waiting to spring out, he wasn’t going to outrun him.

“Hawkeye is not a neutral third party,” he said instead, trying to keep his voice level. 

“You’d be surprised. The Avengers work with SHIELD, not for them. Hawkeye was a mercenary before he went straight. He’s not going to judge you just based on your work history.”

Bucky wasn’t sure that was a recommendation either. His “work history” woke him up in a cold sweat three nights a week; anyone who wasn’t given pause by it was either more jaded than a middle school vice principal or stupidly, colossally, suicidally forgiving. 

Barton watched him dithering, sighed so dramatically Bucky could see it from two rooftops away, and started signing in ASL. “Are you coming over or what?”

“Fine,” Bucky said into the phone, then hung up and signed it, too, with a scowl big enough that Barton couldn’t miss it. 

He didn’t feel like climbing down one building just to climb up another, so he made two big, showy jumps across the rooftop gaps, tucking and rolling on the second landing to take him further away from Barton. Lucky watched him land and barked once, excited rather than freaked out. Being Hawkeye’s dog must have gotten him used to friendly humans arriving via rooftop landings.

“What do you want?” Bucky said. 

“Just to talk. You wanna pet my dog?”

Barton let go of Lucky’s collar before Bucky could reply, and the dog trotted over, panting happily. It would have been rude to just ignore him. Lucky’s tail wagging went turbo speed when Bucky found a good spot under his chin.

Bucky had intended to let Barton break the silence, which is why it was so annoying to hear himself say, “I didn’t mean for the Captain to get hurt.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Barton idly rubbed his nose, then tipped into a headstand with about as much visible effort as a slinky falling down the stairs. “We hit a lot of HYDRA bases last year. Picked up some files.”

“I’m retired,” Bucky said, because it was the easiest word he could apply to what he’d done to get beyond HYDRA’s reach.

Barton kicked his feet in the air a little, watching his untied shoelaces dangle. “How much do you know about what happened with Loki a few years back?”

Bucky willed his jaw to unlock. “Hole in the sky. Lots of aliens. The Avengers closed it.”

“I got a little brainwashed. Killed some people who didn’t deserve it. It sucked, you know?”

“Yeah,” Bucky said, and pulled his hand off of Lucky’s back so he wouldn’t grip the fur under it too hard. “I know.”

“Yeah.” Barton nodded like they’d come to some kind of arrangement and flipped back onto his feet. “Okay. So Steve wants to talk to you.”

The Captain’s name was really Steve? Was he living in a bare apartment with shitty security under his actual name? If he’d had any questions about why Steve had so much experience with concussions, that alone would have answered them. “About the cat?”

“Sure,” Barton said amiably. “About the cat. So are you going to come in, or what?”

“Come in?” Realization caught up to him, and Bucky took two steps back before he stopped himself. “He’s here?”

“He and Natasha are downstairs.”

“Natasha is here? Natasha Romanova knows Captain America?”

“Well, yeah,” Barton said, giving him a funny look. “She’s the Black Widow?”

Bucky opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Natasha was an Avenger? Natasha was an Avenger. All the while he’d been dithering about how to go straight, the terror of the Red Room had been working for the biggest hero team on the planet. 

He’d asked the Black Widow to help him break into Captain America’s apartment. Of course he had. This was just how his life worked. As if he needed more corroborating evidence that fate had it out for him.

“Fine,” Bucky said, deeply resigned. “Let’s go.”

Barton’s apartment smelled a little like wet dog and stale coffee, but in an almost cozy way. Otherwise it was just like it had appeared from a distance, except while Bucky and Barton were on the roof, Steve and Natasha--who was the goddamn Black Widow, of course she was, which meant either her information brokering was a deep cover op or the Avengers really were more permissive about side gigs than any official government agency would be--had let themselves in. Steve was holding a double armload of brown fur that started squirming as soon as Bucky stepped inside.

“Mishka,” Bucky said, too relieved to see his wayward cat to focus on the objectively more important detail that he was in a room with half the Avengers. 

“Mrrrrrrr!” Mishka made a trilling noise and launched himself at Bucky’s center mass like a cuddle-seeking missile. Bucky let him scrabble for purchase on his left arm, hugging the cat into his chest as tiny claws scraped harmlessly against the vibranium plates.

“Steve, meet James,” Natasha said, palpably smug. Of course she was. The only thing she liked better than keeping secrets was revealing them so she could rub people’s faces in what she’d known all along. 

Steve caught on with the almost audible ding! of a lightbulb brightening. He turned to Natasha. “You’re Clint’s ‘guy who knows a guy’?”

“I know a lot of people.”

Bucky could feel a migraine coming on. “Natasha,” he ground out, trying for patience, “why did you give me Steve’s address?”

“You asked.”

“Natasha.”

Natasha shrugged. “For people like us, it’s hard to make retirement stick. You seemed like you needed something to do.”

Bucky would have thrown his hands up if he hadn’t needed both of them to support Mishka’s weight. “And you thought getting me arrested would keep me busy?”

“I didn’t know the Bucharest raid was happening until it was over,” she said, nearly apologetic. “Steve only got dragged into it because Fury owed INTERPOL a favor.”

“INTERPOL really has it out for you,” Steve said, and Bucky’s eye twitched.

“These little misunderstandings wouldn’t happen if you weren’t on SHIELD’s target list.” Natasha shrugged. “Now you won’t be.”

Bucky sensed a trap, but he asked anyway. “Why not?”

“You can’t be on the target list if you’re working with the Avengers.”

Neither of the other Avengers in the room broke into voluble objections, which was extremely worrying. Bucky wondered if Natasha had a stack of HR forms hidden behind her back. “You sent me after Captain America to deliver a recruitment pitch? You could have just asked.”

Natasha tilted her head. “Hey James, want to come work with me?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” Natasha said brightly. 

“I’m retired.”

“You were retired. And then you tied a scarf around your face and started beating up purse snatchers in alleyways in Bucharest.”

“Wait, that was you?” Steve asked, looking excessively entertained. 

Bucky glared as best he could while Mishka was licking his chin. “This is an ambush.”

“This is an intervention,” Natasha said. “You got so bored you resorted to Daredevil cosplay, and you’re surprised I decided to step in?” 

“What was it the internet was calling you?” Steve continued, obnoxiously cheerful about uncovering Bucky’s sordid vigilante past. “The Plum Bandit?”

“In the English language papers,” Natasha said. “Everywhere else it was the Fruit Ninja.”

“One time,” Bucky said, lifting Mishka up higher so he could hide his face his belly fluff. Mishka closed soft paws around his head and chirped at him in delight. “You take out a would-be mugger with a bag of plums one time, and nobody ever lets you forget it.” 

"Didn’t you also throw a cantaloupe at--"

"The details aren't important, Steve," Bucky said, lifting his head to glare at Natasha. "The point is, I was retired."

"Was?"

Bucky rewound the last five seconds in his head. "Fuck."

“Split custody,” Steve said suddenly.

“What?”

Steve held his arms out, and Bucky reluctantly surrendered Mishka so Steve could drape the cat over his ridiculous shoulders. Mishka purred like a rusty car engine and made zero attempts to free himself. “Split custody,” Steve repeated. “I’ll have him for a week, then you’ll take him the next one.”

“We can’t haul a cat across town every weekend.”

They all looked at Mishka, whose malfunctioning can opener purring had reached newly ecstatic heights. Bucky willfully ignored the fact that Mishka could probably ride the subway without a carrier as long as someone rubbed his belly the whole time.

“Wouldn’t be across town if you were living in SHIELD housing. My building has an empty unit.”

So Steve did know half his neighbors were agents, which made his lack of home security slightly less appalling. But only slightly. “You want me to join SHIELD? It was infested with HYDRA!”

“Was,” Natasha said pointedly. “HYDRA infestations are so 2014.”

“We cleaned house,” Steve said.

“With prejudice.” Natasha smiled slowly and draped herself over Steve’s unoccupied shoulder. The menacing effect was undercut significantly by Mishka’s tail flopping over her face.

“We don’t have to decide anything now,” Steve said. “Why don’t we get together this weekend and talk about it?”

Barton gave a cough into his fist that sounded suspiciously like smooth.

Bucky’s eyes narrowed, visions of windowless interrogation rooms dancing through his head. “What did you have in mind?”

“I could make you dinner,” Steve said, as though that were some kind of incentive instead of a threat. Bucky wasn’t fooled; he’d seen the state of the man’s pantry. 

“I can buy my own gallon jars of protein powder.”

“Fine,” Steve said reasonably. “Then you can make me dinner.”

“Fine,” Bucky said, followed by, “What?”

“How’s Saturday?”

“What?”

Steve smiled at him, which was extremely unfair. “Dinner. On Saturday. Are you doing anything?”

“No.”

“Want to come over?”

Bucky stared. Mishka was winding around Steve’s shoulders like a fuzzy marquee frame advertising a bad decision Bucky knew he shouldn’t make. But Mishka looked so comfortable there, and Steve’s huge hands were nothing but gentle as they redirected Mishka’s massive paws away from his carotid artery, and Steve looked so hopeful about Bucky’s answer. It had been a long time since someone had wanted Bucky’s company. Well, someone who didn’t have four legs and a tail. 

Bucky looked at Steve and felt that quiet tug in his chest, that little I want this impulse he had spent so much time relearning, and wondered if he could afford to indulge it. 

“Dinner,” he said testingly, and Steve’s eyes lit up. It was probably safe. Natasha was his--friend. Colleague. Co-chair of the ex-brainwashed ex-assassins club. Something. She wouldn’t have shoved him into Captain America’s path if Steve’s idea of a date involved mag-cuffing Bucky to the candlelit table and interrogating him about past ops over coffee and dessert. 

“Dinner,” Steve repeated eagerly, while Mishka perched on his head like the world’s furriest gargoyle. 

“Fine,” Bucky said, capitulating in the face of Steve reaching up to rub the chin of the twenty pound carnivore trying to lovingly chew his ear off. “I’ll make dinner. But you can wash your own damn pans.”