Chapter Text
By the time Bruce came back, Avengers Tower was home to Natasha, Clint and Phil, in addition to Pepper, Tony and their AI/robot children. Thor had also made it his base for when he came to Midguard, or at least the base that wasn’t wherever Jane Foster was.
Bruce Banner came home on a very normal summer afternoon for New York City. People’s tempers were short, and there was the odd siren he could hear in the background as he trudged towards the glass doors. He’d been there before so he didn’t blink when he was greeted by a bodiless voice. “Hi Jarvis,” he responded wearily. “Tony home?”
“No, Dr. Banner, Mr. Stark is unfortunately away from the Tower. Ms. Potts is here and has been notified about your arrival.”
“Oh… good.” Bruce had nothing against Pepper, she’d been lovely the last time he’d stayed, but there was something about her that reminded him of Betty, particularly in her way of looking at him and seeing things he didn’t want to show the world. A useful trick when it came to Tony, he thought.
He knew the way to the floor that Tony had assigned him. It was a generic apartment until Tony had outfitted it with a panic room and a small lab, a miniature version of the one that he’d all but given the keys to Bruce.
But when he arrived, he stopped at the door, momentarily sure he’d gotten off at the wrong floor, that Jarvis had a glitch in his system. The apartment had been redecorated in soothing blues, greens and cream. The wall that separated the panic room from the living room was now some kind of thick, almost translucent metal, and the panic room itself looked very different.
“It’s an elevator,” Pepper explained. “I took a look at what Tony had done and thought that you should have your space that is just yours. And the Hulk, the other guy should have space of his own.”
He swallowed, undone by the kindness and generosity his hosts, his friends and teammates, had shown him. Fighting back sudden tears, he turned to her and smiled shakily. “Thank you.” Clearing his throat, he added, “I appreciate the thought-“
Pepper’s mouth twisted. “Oh God, Bruce.”
He wasn’t sure how it happened, or when she touched him, but it was as if he blinked and then he was sitting on the bed, and she was holding him as he cried. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry,” he sobbed. “Tired. I’m just so fucking tired.”
“I know,” she murmured, clutching him close with one hand, letting him wet the shoulder of her suit as her other hand rubbed his back. “You’re so much like him, you know? You may break in different ways, but you both keep going, pushing your limits, until you’re so far beyond breaking point you don’t know where you are anymore. So I get it, and you don’t ever, ever, have to apologize for being tired.”
*
Steve lay flat on the generic couch in the bland living room of the box-like apartment he called home, thanks to a pension account Howard and Peggy had used all their influence to keep alive, and SHIELD’s apparent lack of taste in apartment-searching. He’d been dozing as he watched the last few minutes of something that people called a TV show, but mostly he’d just been wondering how watching people eat insects counted as entertainment. He’d eaten an insect, once, when they’d spent a few days camping out behind enemy lines and scoping out a Hydra base before attacking. He still hadn’t been used to his faster metabolism and had run through his rations faster than expected. His men had offered him their food, but he hadn’t taken it. He’d been hungry most of his life, all the way until he got into the army and started training. For a brief period of time, he’d experienced going to sleep without hunger gnawing at his insides, and it had been as comfortable as it had been alien.
Being full was one of those things that you became used to fast, he thought, because it had been years since he had last experienced eating until he wasn’t hungry and he still missed the feeling. Then came the serum, and he’d had to go hungry because he couldn’t justify eating enough food to make himself full. So he had eaten some kind of large insect after burning it to a crisp so it didn’t look so insect-like. It hadn’t been the best meal he’d had, but he’d felt so sick afterwards he hadn’t needed to eat until the end of the mission, so it had all worked out.
If this was what progress had come to, he wasn’t sure they were headed in the right direction. It was a familiar thought, one he’d had a few dozen times since waking up.
He tried to calculate how much time had passed since he’d woken up, and then sat up in shock.
“Six months,” he said hollowly, out loud to an empty apartment. “Oh my God, it’s been six whole months. Just six months,” he repeated, caught between the feeling that time passed too quickly and agonizingly slowly. “Six months today.”
Sleep was suddenly impossible, though he’d been on the cusp of it seconds before. He dressed in his regular khaki pants, though Stark would probably have told him that the sweat pants he’d been wearing before were more appropriate for an evening spent wandering around New York City alleys without any particular destination in mind. But they hadn’t been when Steve had been young, and he’d adjusted to enough things in six months, damn it.
He started out without a destination, but at some point he ended up in Chinatown and hopped on a bus to Washington D.C. The girl next to him kept trying to show him obscene pictures on her miniature phone, her cell, but he was able to ignore her easily enough. She didn’t look like she’d have recognized him even if he hadn’t been wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, but maybe he was being a little judgmental. Just because she was wearing almost nothing, spoke in a slurred voice and had a dozen tattoos of twelve different men’s names didn’t mean she had no idea who Captain America was.
About an hour into the drive, he noticed that the tattoo on her right shoulder looked suspiciously like his shield. Apologizing in his head for his unkind thoughts about her, but sparing a second to feel sympathy for the mother of the girl trying to seduce strange men on a bus in the middle of the night, while obviously under the influence of something, he turned and presented his shoulder to her to signify that he wanted to sleep.
He didn’t sleep. It had been a long time since he’d been able to just fall asleep, unless he was collapsing from the exhaustion of a battle. But he was able to tune out her huff of frustration and stare blankly out the bus window. It was a dry day, not as humid as June normally was in New York, or D.C. for that matter, but all he could see was raindrops streaking down the windows.
*
“Seriously, Steve,” Bucky groaned. “You really have nothing better planned for our first weekend in Washington D.C. than a bunch of museum tours?”
Steve shrugged. “It’s the Smithsonian, Bucky! The Freer Gallery of Art, the American Art Museum. And best of all, getting in is within our budget- free!” Bucky couldn’t help laughing at Steve’s wide grin. It was so rare seeing people smile so widely, so joyously, now that war was on the horizon. “Come on, Bucky, don’t tell me you’re not the least bit curious to see the Capitol!”
Bucky rolled his eyes. “Steve, it’s the first time we’ve left New York. No, I don’t want to see the Capitol. I want to see if D.C. girls are any friendlier to a couple of boys from Brooklyn than New York dames.”
It was Steve’s turn to roll his eyes. “Maybe to you,” he mumbled, slightly resentful, but then more loudly, “Well, hopefully it won’t rain the whole time.”
Bucky turned quickly to glance out the window of the train. In just the few minutes that he had been talking to Steve, it had begun to rain. He groaned at the sight of large drops, the ones that didn’t last very long but managed to soak completely through every article of clothing one wore. Then, turning back to his best friend, he warned, “You’d better wear that extra jacket, the one Father Brian gave you. No getting sick.”
Steve smiled. “Yes, mom.” It was said fondly, and Bucky smiled back. Mom was an important word to them, a reminder that there was still someone who cared. More softly, Steve added, “thanks.”
*
Steve opened his eyes and looked, for a few seconds, at his softly smiling reflection in the bus windows, now streaked with rain. From dry to humid in minutes, Mother Nature was a fickle lady. He always seemed to come to D.C. in the rain.
In the end, he and Bucky had been in the District of Columbia for a few hours before Steve had suffered one of the most severe asthmatic attacks he had ever experienced. Realizing quickly that he was reacting to something flowering in the nation’s capital, he had offered to return home alone. Bucky had refused to entertain the notion, and had packed him up and taken him to the train station immediately. He had felt guilty about ruining Bucky’s first trip outside New York for a long time.
Fitting then, that he would return to the city to visit Bucky one last time.
*
The sun was still a few hours from overhead when he arrived at Arlington National cemetery. Bucky wasn’t resting there, of course. Steve had made sure of that when he’d been unable to catch his best friend, or even find his body. But he’d heard that there was a memorial here for his best friend, and that the rest of his Howling Commandos, the ones that had made it home at least, were buried there. There was a memorial for Captain America too, but he wasn’t so interested in that one.
He stopped on the way at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He couldn’t skip it; it was as much a memorial for Bucky, for all the Buckys out there, as the one he was there to see.
“Miss, you need to shut that off,” a voice, military oozing from every syllable, snapped.
The girl he was snapping at jumped, her eyes widening as she mumbled something into the phone and then pressed a button. “Sorry,” she whispered, “sorry.” She fumbled with the buttons on her phone, reminding Steve that he, too, had to turn the volume down.
Steve frowned at the over-eager soldier. He understood the policy, and agreed with it. This was a place of mourning, and that couldn’t be lost for all that it had become a tourist attraction. But there was always a courteous way of doing things, and well, a way not to make people afraid of their own military.
He wasn’t going to cause a scene, but the soldier’s attitude had spoiled the simple beauty of the place, and the moment. He paused only long enough to nod at the two men marching in front of the tomb, and say a quick prayer, and then he continued on his way.
He wasn’t sure where the memorial was, so he wandered about, pausing for a few minutes at the Eternal Flame to read the words of two brothers who had died serving their country. He had not served with President Kennedy, but he had known of the Kennedys, and he had actually met their eldest brother, Joseph, when the Howling Commandos had had to take a ride with the Navy to get to a Hydra stronghold. He still remembered the other man; it hadn’t been that long for him, for all that sixty-eight or so years had passed. They sat together for several hours, and had somehow begun talking about families. Steve had talked about never knowing his father, and losing his mother much too young, and how being alone, except for Bucky, always except for Bucky, had made him yearn for a large family of his own. Joseph, on the other hand, had known nothing but a large family, and there had been something desperate behind his sardonic observation about the difficulty of standing out in a crowd. Steve hadn’t been too surprised to hear of the man’s death on a dangerous mission, one he’d volunteered for, just a few months later. Saddened, of course, but not surprised.
He meandered past a row of graves of strangers, walking for what must have been an hour, because it was starting to become uncomfortably warm when he turned a corner and found himself staring at a statue of Captain America. He yelped, and then quickly looked away, surprisingly shaken at the reminder that he’d become someone immortalized in stone. “Moving on,” he said to himself, repeating a phrase he’d heard Tony use a few times.
He had barely recovered from seeing himself when he came across the name, James Buchanan Barnes, etched in stone. It was cold and unforgiving, but Steve was relieved at the thought that Bucky had been remembered as being someone, that he would always be known as someone. He traced the words, trying to find some connection to the man whose body was lost thousands of miles away from its supposed resting place, and remembered.
*
He was too old for this, boys didn’t cry, and she wasn’t going to come for him no matter how loudly he wept. He knew all that, but knowledge didn’t stop little Steven Rogers from sitting down next to his bed and bursting into tears as soon as the door shut behind the woman who ran the orphanage.
“Mama,” he cried, though it had been four days since he had walked into his mother’s bedroom with her medicine and juice, and realized he was the only one there. “Mama, please take me home. I don’t want to be here anymore. Mama, please.”
He wasn’t sure how long he wept, but his throat and eyes were hurting by the time he felt too tired to cry. It was then that he noticed the taller, bigger boy about his own age sitting on the bed closest to his.
At eleven, Steve should have been ashamed to have been seen crying like a little girl, but he was too drained to care. He ran his sleeve across his face and looked at the other boy with more apathy than curiosity.
The boy, on the other hand, tilted his head at Steve and then smiled. “Hi, I’m Bucky. Who died?”
Steve was too shocked at the direct question to avoid it. “My mother, and I’m Steve.”
Bucky pursed his lips. “Sorry, that’s tough. Mine died when I was born; grandma used to say that I was the death of her. Grandma died last year, along with Dad. They were sick. Lots of people got sick. Seems like every day we get a kid whose family got sick.”
“My mother was sick,” Steve confirmed.
“Yes sir, that’s the common story here.” Bucky’s words shouldn’t have been comforting, but the knowledge that he wasn’t alone made the loneliness a little less sharp. “That and being poor. I don’t know if rich people don’t get sick or if their kids get a special orphanage, but we don’t see them here.”
Steve looked around at their humble surroundings where water dripped ceaselessly into a bucket in the middle of the room, paint peeled exposing walls that weren’t quite dry, and the beds were covered with a few thin, moth-eaten blankets. It wasn’t that different from what he’d known at home, but his mother wasn’t there making it better, so it was a thousand times worse. “I suppose rich families aren’t all that different from poor families,” he responded. “’Cept maybe warmer.”
Bucky laughed, his eyes widening. Then, with the suddenness of a young boy, he made up his mind that, “We’re going to be best friends, I think.”
“We are?” Steve asked doubtfully.
“We are. Because I’m the strongest boy here, and I’m going to be the strongest, best man I can when I grow up and join the army just like my father did. And you’re coming with me!”
Steve looked down at his scrawny arms, and thought about how his mother had made him gargle with water that smelled of flowers every day during the winter to relieve the ache in his throat. He didn’t think the army gave you flowers to gargle with, but what did he know? “I am?”
“Yes, because I have a feeling that you’re the bravest boy I know.” At Steve’s incredulous look, Bucky continued. “None of the other boys cry in front of each other, you know? And yes, it’s something only girls are supposed to do, but I have to think it takes a lot of courage to do something no other boy is willing to do, even if, sometimes, it’s the only thing we want to do.”
*
“You were always the smartest one out of all of us, and the best, and the strongest. Captain America or not, I hope that you died knowing you were always that person to me, and to the other people around you.” Steve smiled at the stone in front of him, lost in memories of a quick smile, warm brown eyes, and a warm hand on his shoulder. Then, sobering, “I miss you more than I can ever tell you. I was always afraid that you’d leave me behind, but you were always two steps ahead, or alongside, or behind me, always within reach. I’m not sure what to do in a world without you within reach, Bucky.”
There was no answer. That was the worst of all of it, Steve thought. He’d felt his mother for the longest time. Her presence had kept him going until his friends and his adopted brother had replaced the need he had for her to be with him. He still thought of her, and would always love her and respect the sacrifices she had made to provide him a home despite their straitened circumstances. But he had healed and made new bonds, and now he had lost those as well. This time, he couldn’t even feel Bucky or the rest of his friends with him. He couldn’t even feel Peggy because she was still alive, but dying slowly in a hospital room he wasn’t allowed to visit.
It was the loneliest he’d ever been since those first few minutes in his dormitory, but where Bucky had driven back the loneliness in minutes, it had now been months and he still couldn’t drive away the feeling that he had lost everyone and everything.
He gasped, grief stealing his breath, and it was as if the serum had stopped working and his asthma was back. Instincts that three years could not erase made him try to take a breath, but he failed. He gasped again, and then a third time in shock when he felt a narrow hand on his back.
“Steve,” Natasha said calmly. It was obviously not the first time she’d said it, though he hadn’t heard her until now. “Steve, we need to talk.”
The expression on her face chilled him to the bone. All of a sudden he could breathe, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
*
“I don’t understand- is he alive or dead?”
Fury threw a glare at Natasha, who bore it with her customary composure. “He’s probably in cryogenic sleep, unless he’s on a mission.”
“That’s basically the man-made version of what happened to you, Capsicle,” Tony threw in. His words were mocking, but the look he chanced Steve’s way was gentle and carefully probing.
“When they want him for something, they thaw him out,” Natasha explained. “That can be anywhere from days to months, and on one occasion, when they wanted him training us, he was unfrozen for years.”
Her words were delivered in the same level tone she always used, but Clint knew her better than anyone else there. “You love him,” he realized, and then winced at everyone’s reaction.
Fury straightened up. “Is this true? Shut up Stark. Is this true, Agent Romanov?”
She narrowed her eyes at Clint, taking some satisfaction in how he paled a little. He would pay during their next sparring session. But when she turned to the Director, she was the picture of professionalism. “Yes,” she admitted baldly. “But if you think that will make the slightest difference in how I…”
“It will make a difference,” Fury opined heavily. “But I’m sure you’ll manage anyway. Credit me with not being a complete idiot and ordering you off this, would you?”
“Yes sir.”
“Wait- ‘this?’ What is ‘this?’ Are we going after him?” Steve asked eagerly. He ignored the strangeness of everything he’d heard; nothing mattered but getting Bucky back. Then they’d worry about the rest. “Do we know where he is?”
“We have an idea,” Natasha smiled dangerously.
*
Later, after a briefing that had included information about assassinations and amputations and metal arms, Steve caught up with Natasha. “Agent Romanov, Natasha, wait!”
She stopped, closing her eyes in a brief moment of weakness. Then, because she’d never allowed anything to frighten her for long, she gathered the courage that had her fighting with the Hulk hours after he’d hunted her with the single-mindedness of the monsters from her childhood. She turned around and did him the courtesy of not pretending that she didn’t know what he wanted. “He doesn’t remember you,” she said, because she didn’t think he’d really understood when she had said he doesn’t have a memory of who he was before he was the Winter Soldier during the briefing. “He won’t know who you are.”
Steve smiled, reminding her that Captain America had always been more than a pretty face and recruiting tool. “Maybe not at first, but it doesn’t matter.”
She disagreed, and he must have read her skepticism because he laughed. “Natasha, it’s been seventy years and somehow he and I are alive at the same time, and soon to be in the same place. I can’t believe that fate and life would bring us here without there being a point to it. He saved me, and now I’m meant to save him and bring him home. We’ll take what comes from there.”
He reached out and hugged her. She stiffened, unused to the easy affection he threw around the way he threw that ridiculously decorated shield. Slowly, hesitatingly, her arms came up and patted his back awkwardly.
He let her go and smiled at her. “And I, I’m so grateful that you were able to give…”
“Cap!” She stopped him by flinging up her hand. “Please stop.”
He nodded, giving in to her obvious discomfort, and hurried away to discuss battle plans with Coulson and Tony, who were both impressed with the way he had caught up with modern technology in a way that made him of real use in such operation planning sessions. Not that Tony would ever admit it, of course.
But as he walked away, Natasha’s brow furrowed. She didn’t think it would be that easy. Whoever the Winter Soldier was, he wasn’t the man Steve had known seventy years ago. He was probably not even the man Natasha had known ten years ago, but that was fine, because she wasn’t the girl she’d been then either. Steve, on the other hand, hadn’t changed at all because it had barely been six months for him.
“This is not going to end well,” Bruce echoed her thoughts.
She had known he was there, so she didn’t move when he spoke, but she bit her lip as she considered his words. “No, it probably won’t.”
He walked with her for a bit, glancing her way every few seconds. “If you have something to say, Dr. Banner, you should”-
He smiled, cutting off her impatience as quickly as if he’d turned into the Hulk. There was a simple charm to him that got behind her defenses, and that was dangerous. Still, he was a smart man, and Natasha knew to listen to smart men, so she let him continue. “When did you know?”
It took her a few seconds to understand what he was asking, and she took a few more to consider her answer. Then, not insulting him by asking what he meant, she told him, “I had never seen anything but comics about Bucky Barnes. I knew his name, but not what he looked like. I didn’t see a picture until they gave us the briefing, and then there was Loki, and Clint. And then Coulson and well- I wanted Clint with me to get him back. No offense, doctor, but there’s no one else I’d rather have at my back for a mission like this, and he wasn’t in the right place to do it until now. I needed to find him first anyway.”
He nodded, taking in her words. Then, looking back the way Steve had gone, he asked, “How will it go? The reunion, I mean.”
Natasha looked straight into his eyes and deliberately spoke in an emotionless voice. “In the eight months I knew him, and Dr. Banner, I knew him intimately, he never showed any sign of remembering his past, or Captain America.”
Bruce winced, then repeated, “This is not going to end well.”
*
Tony would be the first to admit he wasn’t a particularly kind man. Pepper and Rhodey would probably be the second and third, respectively, followed by every other person he knew. He was, however, capable of being kind when he thought about it and, for all his faults, he sometimes thought about it with people he loved.
He didn’t love Captain America; he maybe liked Steve Rogers, but that was pretty much it. Still, he respected Captain America and sometimes, when he least expected it, he could see the basis of a very powerful friendship, almost a defining relationship, in their interactions.
And even if none of that was true, he wouldn’t wish some things on his worst enemy. He’d spent three months away from the people (both human and machine) he’d loved, the food he gorged on, and the home that was his to trash. He couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to never have the option of going home; he imagined that Steve was still holding on to the dream of going back. It was what he’d done; it was what had given him the strength to make it through the hard times.
But Steve wasn’t listening. He didn’t hear them warn him that the Winter Soldier wasn’t Bucky anymore. No matter how many times someone sat him down, he always nodded but didn’t get it.
“I fear for the Captain.” Thor intoned, his broad forehead marred by a rare frown. He watched Steve fumble with a tablet as the Avenger tried to read Natasha’s reports without minimizing the window every ten seconds. “He is young to bear the burdens he bears with the grace he shows; the grace I have not been able to achieve despite ten times his many years. But I fear this is not going to be as easy for him to walk away from.
Tony shrugged, unwilling to spend too much time worrying about a future that wasn’t something he could solve in his lab. “Want something to eat? Oh wait, forgot who I was talking to,” he joked, matching Thor’s sudden grin.
They went into the kitchen, where Tony paused in the doorway, struck with a discomfort he couldn’t quite pin down. Bruce and Pepper were there fixing dinner, moving around in a synchronized pattern that spoke of familiarity he hadn’t known they felt. As he watched, he saw them share a glance and a quick laugh, and felt a little as if he was looking at love. And though he wasn’t a part of what he was seeing, he didn’t feel like an outsider.
“Stark, move your ass,” Clint grumbled behind him.
Tony moved, but was too out of balance to quip about Clint and his unerring sense of direction when it came to food. Coulson followed Clint more slowly, his sharp eyes taking in Tony’s discomfort. “Stark,” he started, then softened his words. “Tony, for once, think before you react.”
“I don’t- I,” Tony stammered.
“Exactly.” Coulson smiled. “But you know, the world is a whole lot less predictable than we’d imagine, and Pepper is so much more than you can handle on your own. And on that note, dinner.”
“Dinner,” Tony echoed, not quite ready to go where Coulson, of all people, was leading.
*
But Tony had impulse control issues, and a habit of doing what he wasn’t prepared to do. That night, as Pepper did what women did in the bathroom before they were ready for bed, and he worked on a couple of projects simultaneously before she made him put it all away, Coulson’s words echoed in his head until he couldn’t keep them in anymore. “Pepper, are you having sex with Bruce?”
There was a clatter in the bathroom, and Jarvis, who had been conversing with Pepper about some repair issues, immediately shut himself down. “I beg your pardon?” Pepper asked in the kind of calm voice that usually preceded an expansion of one of the closets that bordered their bedroom.
“Um,” said Tony.
“Did you just ask me if I was fucking Dr. Bruce Banner? Did you, the former playboy who once said fidelity is for the suburbs, accuse me, the woman who has never given you anything but loyalty, of sleeping with our best friend and your teammate, the man who can’t actually have sex with anyone without turning into a very large, green creature whose fucking penis would probably tear my body apart?”
“Well, when you put it like that…” Tony winced.
Pepper stared him down for a few seconds, then sighed. “I wouldn’t cheat on you Tony. The one deal we made was that there’d be no one else, that we’d be honest with each other before we hurt each other. And I haven’t done anything to hurt you, but I don’t think we’ve been honest with each other either.”
Tony looked away, unable to meet her eyes as his mind went to moments in the lab when he’d looked at his partner and been hit by emotion he’d only felt for two people in his life, the woman who’d given him life and the one who’d shown him that his life could include love. “I’m not sure that honesty is a good idea.”
Pepper, who had more courage than Tony had ever known, took his chin in her hand and forced his gaze back to hers. “I have feelings for Bruce.”
Tony swallowed. “So do I.”
They stared at each other for a few more minutes and then, in same moment, smiled. It was, Tony thought deliriously, like the sun coming out of the rain, and then immediately wanted to kill himself for the sentiment. “So what are we going to do about it?”
“Nothing,” Pepper warned. “He isn’t over Betty and he needs time to figure out what he wants.” Then, when Tony scowled, “Tony, we can’t do anything, or he’ll run.”
Tony wanted to argue, but well, Bruce did have a habit of running.
“I’m not going to be able to wait forever,” he warned.
“No, really?” Pepper smiled, affectionate sarcasm in her voice and the tilt of her lips. “You’re not going to have to,” she promised.