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Amidst the terror of the highway, the screaming of metal being shredded like paper, Sam’s shout as the steering wheel is torn from his grip, Natasha’s fist in Steve’s jacket, pulling him close, the stench of gasoline, of blood, of fear, his heart pounding in his ears, the shudder of his shield as the rocket connects and flings him over the bridge into the bus, civilians screaming (get the civilians to safety), bullets ricocheting (head down knees up), Natasha’s shadow behind the minivan lurching as the bullet rips through her shoulder (not too late not too late), amidst –
Steve stops, breathes, waits, and then collides with the man in black. The fight is fast-paced, the knife flinging towards his face like a striking cobra – left, right, left, left, duck – and the metal arm whirs like an overheating computer. Steve throws his shoulders down, drives his weight into the soldier’s stomach, sends them both careening into the side of a nearby truck and crumbling the metal like wet tissue. His strength must surprise the soldier, because he pauses for a sheer millisecond before continuing his assault, breath coming in harsh grunts as he aims for Steve’s soft spots, and then reassessing his approach when he finds them already covered.
At some point Steve gains the advantage. The knife is lost within the jamb of a door, wrenched out of the soldier’s grip with a sickening crack, and Steve throws his weight in again, again, again, until the two men are out of breath and bleeding. They wrestle, grapple for each other’s throats, but Steve begins to see a wildness in his attacker’s eyes that he recognises, a desperation –
“Are you--?” he huffs.
The soldier lurches back as if shot, puts a metre of space between them. He seems to reassess Steve yet again, but suddenly pauses. Steve’s shirt is torn at the throat, and there is blood from where the harsh plats of the metal arm dragged across his throat. The wounds have already healed, but Steve is still out of breath. He hasn’t faced an enemy like this since the Battle of New York, and even then it was because he was an army of one against one thousand.
Here he is different. They are perfectly matched in every way. Fifty years, Natasha had said, a long time for a man as young as his enemy to be killing people. A ghost story, or something else? Something unnatural? Something like the serum thrumming through Steve’s veins with every collision, every grapple, and every tear at his skin.
Steve is an unmoveable object against the Soldier’s unstoppable force.
The Soldier is frozen, eyes narrowed with a strange expression Steve can’t place. He snaps something at Steve, in Russian he thinks, and takes a half step forward. His hand slowly arches forward. It’s empty, flesh and blood underneath slick leather. Steve hesitates. The Soldier speaks again.
“I don’t understand,” Steve says, “who are you?”
The Soldier takes another step. His expression deepens, his eyes tracking the tear in Steve’s civilian clothing, the dirt on his knees. He’s almost at Steve now, and his eyes darken. He speaks again, in that gruff, dry Russian. Says something low, almost sweet, almost --
Natasha fires the launcher, and Sam swoops in. The Soldier disappears into a screen of smoke and Steve is left on the road, feeling raw and open, as if he had put his palms against a mirror and watched his reflection move.
“I’m calling in Clint,” Natasha announces from the other end of the bunker.
“You okay, man?” Sam asks Steve. Steve has been slumped in his chair for the past twenty minutes, gazing at the far end of the room. “That fight really shook you up, huh?”
“I think,” Steve starts, and then hesitates, “I think – I think he needs our help.”
“I am calling in Clint,” Natasha repeats, as if they hadn’t heard her already.
The thing is – the thing is –
Steve has good intentions. He had seen a man indentured into service through brutality and brainwashing. Had seen a cold mask of a face that still couldn’t hide the desperation in his blue gaze as he collided with Steve on the highway. He had seen another soldier lost in time and stumbling to find his footing and he had understood, so he wanted to help. He only wanted to help. He only ever had good intentions.
On the helicarrier, hurrying to reach the central hub of the third aircraft in time, the chip clenched in his gloved fist, Steve turns to find a ghost blocking his path, and is abruptly reminded on what the road to hell is paved with.
Steve wakes in hospital with Sam on one side and a Situation on the other. The Situation looks an awful lot like the famed Winter Soldier, and he’s dressed to the nines in his leather and Kevlar, belts and buckles gleaming under the crappy hospital downlights. He’s also staring quite intently at Steve’s face, and, wow, Sam has a point, that’s a lot of not blinking that’s going on there, that’s, that’s really impressive actually, won’t his eyes dry up at this rate, that’s really ---
“Oh my god,” Sam swears, “please let me hit your morphine button for you.”
“’M fine,” Steve croaks, more out of instinct, when in reality he does feel a little bit like he’s still floating in the Potomac, “has he really been here all night?”
“I tried to feed him your jello cup, and he looked at me like I’d killed his dog,” Sam affirms, “also: you just had three bullets removed from your stomach. It will actually wound my pride if you don’t let me drug you up with painkillers. It will wound me, Steve.”
The Soldier takes that moment to reach across the bed to a tray, where he retrieves a hospital-grade cup of jello and gently places it into Steve’s hand. Steve’s fingers curl around it reflexively, and the Soldier looks quietly smug, shooting Sam a narrow-eyed look.
“I am not going to fight with you about jello,” Sam hisses, somewhat nonsensically, until Steve realises everything in the room is going sort of wobbly, and he glances aside in time to see the Soldier remove his other hand from the morphine feed.
“Hey,” he protests weakly, “I said I was fine.”
The Soldier shoots him a look, and mutters something lowly in Russian. Sam looks nonplussed, but from somewhere in the air vents a familiar voice says:
“Nat? Translation?”
There is a pause, and then:
“Wow.”
“The walls are talking,” Steve mumbles to Sam, eyes slipping shut. The Soldier’s hand is still cupped around his, warm leather scratching back and forth over the sensitive skin of his knuckles. Somewhat blearily, Steve wonders what his skin feels like when it isn’t hurting, and then he feels like his own skin is hurting, and then his thoughts start to bleed together and together and together –
At some point he is relocated to Avenger’s tower, to his personalised floor, and he’s still pleasantly coming down from his drug buzz that he barely notices who is directing him where until he feels his familiar living room couch sag underneath his weight.
“Great, now we have two popsicles cluttering up the joint,” Tony is nattering in the background, which is a bit rich, really, considering Steve vividly remembers the night Tony drunk called him sobbing about empty rooms and empty hearts, before he diverged wildly into Celine Dion lyrics and Steve had hung up, “I suppose Barton can bunk with Nat – not that he’d mind, according to my security footage, wow – while I sort out his floor for Jack Frost over here. What do you need pal? A gym? Two gyms? A place to hide our bodies? I mean, do you sleep? Eat? Or, oh, okay. I mean, that’s Steve’s bedroom there, do you really want to – no, nope, you’re totally right, sure, sure you can stay here until the floor is fixed up, I doubt Captain Under-The-Influence will notice right at the moment because he – or, or you could stay here permanently. That’s. That’s good too. Do you. Do you blink? Is he blinking?”
A heavy sigh above him. Steve smells Sam’s aftershave.
“Don’t start on the blinking man,” his deep voice falls over Steve like warm water. He sinks a little more into his cushions, boneless.
“Okay that’s, that’s Cap’s underwear drawer you have there, yeah, you definitely found it, so-”
Sleep, Steve decides, is probably a good option right about now.
“-did you just put that in your pocket-”
Definitely a good option. Steve slips into the darkness easily, gratefully, with a sort of weight that drags him down. Just on the cusp of unconsciousness, metal fingertips drag through his hair, rough against his scalp. A shiver down his spine.
Upon consciousness and lucidity, Steve learns several things about the Winter Soldier in quick succession over the following days.
These are:
- The Soldier does not want his own floor. Or his own bedroom. The Soldier is perfectly content to take the couch cushions from the living room and shove them alongside Steve’s bed in a makeshift mattress.
- The Soldier will eat anything that is put in front of him, as long as it is made by Steve. Steve’s cooking abilities are nothing to write home about, he knows. But even burnt pancakes are swallowed with a speed and gusto that makes even Clint wince.
- Anything that is not cooked by Steve is judged unacceptable and, possibly, poisoned.
- Especially after that time with the actual food poisoning.
- The Soldier sleeps lightly and wakes promptly and fully functional, even if it’s only because Steve has woken in the night to use the bathroom. He walks Steve to the en-suite, waits patiently outside the closed door, and then walks Steve back to his bed with an expression of utmost seriousness.
- The Soldier does not seem particularly interested in fighting Steve anymore, or anyone at all, really. He does however regularly shadow the gymnasium when Steve is going through his workout warm-ups with Natasha and Sam, and sometimes looks kind of angrily at Steve as if he has done something wrong, when all Steve has been is understanding and cautious, treating him with gentle words and sometimes a soft hand on the Soldier’s shoulder.
- (“What is he looking for, do you think?” Steve asks Natasha under his breath, after they’re locked together in a check-mate pretzel of sharp elbows and knees on the training mat. There is a black shadow on the rafters, metal arm glimmering slightly. Natasha wriggles out of Steve’s hold, and he absent-mindedly stretches onto his stomach. Something metallic shrieks overhead, a tearing noise.
“Were you seriously the smartest tactician in the war?” She counters, and slaps him upside the head.)
It is six AM, and Steve is climbing out from the shower ready to dress for his morning run with Sam, when he spots a black blur in the steamed bathroom mirror and whirls around, looking for anything that could constitute as a weapon. The bathrooms are all security locked automatically - according to Tony this became something of a necessity after an incident with Bruce and a stern conversation with Pepper – but of course that doesn’t seem to mean anything to the Winter Soldier, who is standing at the doorway with a chunk of metal in one hand and a half-eaten banana in the other.
From the hallway speakers, Steve can hear Tony complaining something over the com, but it all sort of fades away under the intensity of the Soldier’s stare.
“Hey there,” Steve says slowly, grabbing for a towel and wrapping it around his waist. The Soldier’s mouth slants with upset. “You shouldn’t break in here like that, it really hurts Tony’s ego. He prides himself on the tower’s security, you know.”
A smirk, now. The Winter Soldier glances at the chunk of metal in his hand, then at the door.
What, this old thing? Steve thinks his expression says.
Despite himself, Steve smiles a little. Ever since the Potomac the Soldier’s personality has trickled through bit by bit, and though he hasn’t spoken any English yet, Steve thinks he’s finally getting a read on the guy.
(“He’s finally remembering who he is,” he tells Sam over lunch, a little proudly.
“Who he is, is an asshole,” Tony swears over by the coffee machine, which he has taken apart with a screwdriver for an undisclosed reason.
“I know,” Steve says warmly, “He’s going to fit right in.”
“Oh my god,” Sam says, but it’s the third time he’s said it that morning, so everyone mostly ignores it.)
In the bathroom with its fogged up mirror and steamy air, a cool breeze trickles in through the hallway and Steve shivers, twists the towel a little tighter around his hips.
“Uh,” he begins. “Really, though. Did you need something? Because Sam’s waiting downstairs and I don’t want… to be late…”
He trails off. Halts. Pauses. Freezes altogether. Because the Winter Soldier takes one step into the bathroom, bare feet against warm tiles but still dressed neck to wrist in Kevlar and dark wool, and pulls up right before Steve. He looks at Steve from head to toe, nods slowly, and without breaking eye contact, takes a significant bite of the banana.
“Oh, come on,” Tony’s voice wails from the hallway.
“Um,” Steve gulps. Because that’s. That’s.
The other thing.
The other thing being: the Situation. The Situation that Steve has been valiantly ignoring – he has, really, he has tried so hard – which involves a shadow he can’t shake 24/7, a warm body next to his bed at night and pressed up alongside him in the morning while he tries to make pancakes with shaky hands, a weight against his shoulder on movie nights, and crawling across rooftops with him under a scope on the few incidents since the Potomac that Steve has been sent out on a mission.
The Winter Soldier puts warm metal fingertips against Steve’s stomach, traces the points where bullets had torn through flesh and yet left no scar behind.
Steve’s brain sort of
Stops
And
Starts again – he flinches back as if struck, and then, chuckling nervously, edges around the side of the Soldier until he can escape the suddenly too-small bathroom, yammering the whole time:
“Going to be late! Sorry, I’m going on my run with Sam. You know Sam. Sam’s great. You guys get along great. Are you coming? Good, good, I’ll see you in the lobby, I’m just going to--” Fling himself inside his bedroom and shut the door with a snap, and ignore the look the Soldier had given him when he’d squeezed through the doorway, heady and deep.
"Is it the brainwashing thing that bothers you?” Natasha asks without aplomb, splayed over the mat where she’s twisted Steve’s arm at an interesting angle. “Because I don’t think Hydra’s failsafe in case it all went to shit was to give their Asset a raging boner.”
“Really, right now?” Steve retorts.
“The things he says to me,” she insists, “you have no idea.”
“If you ever repeat this to Tony I will make you regret it,” Bruce says during one of his short visits, cornering Steve in the kitchen late at night while Steve is making a coffee after a night of ineffectual sleep.
“Please don’t,” Steve starts.
“-But as the leading authority on blue balls, this is getting kind of ridiculous.”
“He is right there,” Steve gestures towards the kitchen island, haloed by the single lit bulb, where the Winter Soldier is munching on some cornflakes and looking as though Steve’s interrupted sleep hasn’t bothered his internal clock in the slightest.
“Of course he is,” Bruce says gently, and then, “JARVIS, could you tell us the last time the Soldier has been more than five metres away from Steve since his return to the tower?”
There is a great silence.
“JARVIS--”
“Still calculating, sir.” JARVIS speaks, albeit somewhat apologetically.
“I am going to bed,” Steve announces waspishly, but his forceful exit is somewhat dampened by the speed at which the Soldier lurches out of his chair, and follows him from the room.
The problem isn’t that Steve hasn’t noticed. He has definitely noticed. He’s maybe even woken up two or three times over the past few weeks with abrupt shock, sweaty sheets tangled around his thighs and bright blue eyes gleaming from the edge of his bed, where the Soldier is sitting upright ramrod straight, eyes fixed on Steve, on the white-grip he has on his pillow, and the steady thump of his chest where his heart is beating out of tune. His dreams wash up and over his mind like the ebb of the ocean, a confusing jumble of the fight on the helicarrier – the first real fight he’d had in a long time – the tangle of limbs and fists, the exact moment Steve had noticed the Soldier pulling his punches, blue eyes gone dark and considerate, and hands grasping rather than tearing.
The problem is that Steve is trying so hard to help this man, this Soldier, this fellow prisoner of War and Time, and the Soldier is making it so damn difficult to be considerate when –
The Soldier must see something in his eyes, turns towards the bed, reaches a metallic arm over the moon-dappled sheets and grasps Steve’s thigh.
“Bathroom!” Steve yelps, and if he trips on his way out of the bed, at least none of the Avengers were there to see.
Then Thor arrives, and asks the Soldier’s name, and – and –
“Oh, James,” the Soldier – James – says, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Steve’s breath catches a little in his chest. At the curl of James’ voice, the smoky rasp of English, the way he glances at Steve a little victoriously.
“The amount of boners in this room,” Clint announces, “is breathtaking.”
Natasha kicks him, but only a little.
Days pass. Days of feeling on edge, a sense of nervousness. Steve sleeps and eats and trains and runs and has meetings with Fury wherein the man mostly stares at Steve, opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again, and squints real hard at him.
(“He’s doing fine,” Steve says, answering the unvoiced question.
“Oh I know how he’s doing,” Fury drawls, “I’m getting regular updates from the chuckle crew in that crazy house you lot call a tower.”
Steve squeezes his eyes shut. “And these updates are--”
Fury turns his phone to face Steve. Steve is abruptly reminded of the night that started this whole mess, of jazz music playing in a dark room and Fury beat up and slumped in a couch: EARS EVERYWHERE.
This time his phone just displays a blurry photo of the Avenger’s communal living room, where they’re all drinking around the table. Except for one notable addition: James, one thigh flung over Steve’s, pressed alongside him from shoulder to hip. Steve’s face is red, and James’ eyes are fixed on the camera. The text beneath says: HE IS GOING TO TAKE OUR SOULS IF HE DOES NOT GET SOME D-I-C-K.
“Who was--?”
“Clint.”
“Right, of course.”
“Seriously though, Captain,” Fury presses, “that’s a little extreme.”
“Yeah,” Steve agrees, glumly.)
Days pass, and with the reveal of the Soldier’s name something in Steve crumbles and withers away. He thinks it might have been his resolve. He mourns it, a little.
Then one day he is sparring with Natasha, and the shadow that normally lurks across the rafts drops to the mat in a sudden blur, and James is barking something in Russian. Natasha, upside-down with her thighs wrapped around Steve’s pink throat, smirks and rolls gracefully away. Steve is halfway into asking what was wrong, when James drags him upright, rolls onto his stomach, and throws Steve’s thighs around his throat instead.
“Oh my god,” a voice yelps from the rafters, but Steve isn’t paying too much attention to it, not when James glares up at him with a truly wrathful expression and tears down the waist of his sweatpants all in one go.
“Nat, don’t leave me here!” the voice continues, even as Steve’s brain proceeds to melt out of his ears. There is a sound of a struggle. A distant crash, and then the sound of doors slamming closed.
“Gnuh,” Steve says.
“Mm,” James agrees.
“How is it that Cap giving up the goods has only made the Situation worse,” Tony mourns.
“The Soldier of Winter is a fierce shield mate,” Thor says approvingly, rubbing his cheek, “he protects Steven’s honour most powerfully.”
“He just punched you in the face with a chair,” Tony points out, still somewhat cowering behind the counter, “for pointing out Steve’s hickies.”
“Which he is very sorry about,” Steve swears, from where he is bundled in the furthermost corner of the couch, with a very large and very convincing paperweight weighing him down in the form of the James I-Don’t-Know-What-Modesty-Is Barnes. James appears to be having a one-man argument with Steve’s pink throat, and doesn’t seem inclined to join the conversation. Not at least until Steve shoves him meaningfully. He breaks away from the mess he is making of Steve’s white skin, all red lips and stubble, and glares at the Assembled! Avengers as if he has just noticed their presence.
“Don’t look at him like that,” he snaps, his English still coming in angry, uncertain bursts.
“What,” Tony yelps a little hysterically, “like he’s meat? Like you wanna eat him? Cos it kind of seems like you wanna eat him, I’m just saying, if anyone is doing any looking of any variety, it’s not us, definitely not, not that you’re not nice to look at, Cap, God bless America and all that, I mean, I think Pepper would mind, but if Pepper didn’t mind, then--”
“Pepper minds.” The woman in question speaks up from the kitchen island, where she is helping Natasha dice tomatoes with very large, very shiny knives. Tony’s little speech seems only to have incensed James even further, however, and the Soldier rises from Steve’s lap with an expression of single-minded bloodiness.
“Evasive action, Steve, evasive action!” Sam shouts from the other end of the floor, where he and Clint are somewhat tipsily throwing darts.
“James--” Steve starts gently, but faced with the flushed, grinning faces of his friends, and the tingling beard burn on his throat, and the warmth in his stomach that he didn’t have before the Potomac, before he woke up in a hospital, before the moment Sam briefly left the room to use the bathroom and the Soldier had loomed up over Steve with a murmured: “kotyonok.”
Steve admits defeat.
“James,” he says firmly, “if we leave now I’ll let you do the thing with the ropes.”
After the ensuing chaos, Thor calmly rights the living room door – slightly ajar – and Pepper rights the knocked over vegetable with an only slightly perturbed expression. Tony, still slumped behind the kitchen counter, stares agape at the empty couch.
“That one,” Clint decides, dart hitting dead centre with a satisfying thunk. “That one was Emergency Dick.”
“Mm hmm,” Sam nods, and fetches them both another round of drinks.