FIC: Double Dog Date (part 3) [MCU, Bucky x Jane & Steve & Thor & Tony & Loki & etc]
Part 1: http://omnicat.livejournal.com/210512.html
Part 2: http://omnicat.livejournal.com/210844.html
For a while after, he could remembered helping Jane into her coat, but most of the rest of that night was merely snippets; the sound of Jane’s laughter, the smell of her hair, the complete trust she put in his nearness and the sudden realization of joy that after everything, his body was still good for this thing he loved. He was dancing again to all the best swing, with his combat boots and his metal arm and his twenty-first century girl, and for the first time in a long, long time, the world was good and he just knew everything would be alright.
Bucky fell into bed with the biggest smile on his face - and awoke screaming in a strange bed with Jane’s blood on his hands, because Hydra didn’t need to get him back when they still had him, when they were inside him, their tentacles buried deeper in his brain and his bones than Bucky himself could reach -
No.
Stop.
It was a dream.
None of it was rea-
He didn’t recognize the room he was in. His apartment didn’t have all this furniture in it. Hydra had found him. They’d done this. They’d moved him, they could’ve done anything to him, made him do anything.
Jane.
- helicarrier burning and groaning blood everywhere his fingers slipping in it as he tightened his grip and brought his hand down again her lifeless eyes staring up at -
Oh god, Jane.
He stumbled out of the strange bed and tore the farce of a home apart until he found his phone... right smack in the middle of the coffee table. The room was spinning.
"Jane Jane Jane Jane please Jane," he begged the dial tone until finally there was a click and she answered with a groggy, "Hello?"
"Jane, you have to run. They’re coming for you."
"Whah - ? Who is this?"
"It’s Bucky, it’s - it’s me, James. Jane, they found me," he said, words blurring together as he tripped over his tongue. "I don’t know what they did but if they knew I was here then they know about you and’ll try to get you next. You have to -" He faltered. "Have to -"
"Call the Avengers to your aid," a helpful voice supplied. "Let them fall out for your protection."
Bucky’s knees gave out. Slumped against the coffee table, he went very, very still.
"James?" Jane sounded more awake now. "James, what’s going on? What are you talking about?"
"Jane," he said, as clearly and calmly urgent as he could. "Listen to me. Go to Avengers Tower. Ask them for shelter. Avoid the obvious routes. Detour. But hurry. They’re coming."
"James, you’re scaring me. Are you okay? Should I come over?"
"No, you need to run."
"You sound really not okay. Shit, I don’t even know where you live. Listen, James, I’m gonna call a friend of mine to trace this call so I can come over. Everything will be okay. I’ll be there before you know it. Just stay where you are and - and don’t do anything stupid, okay? Promise me."
"The Avengers -"
"Yes, I’ll bring the Avengers, I’ll call them -"
"No, don’t make them leave headquarters, go to them -"
The line went dead.
"That’ll be all, good soldier," said that same smooth, deceptively pleasant voice. Clammy fingers plucked the phone from Bucky’s grasp. "Thanks ever so much for your service."
In one last burst of strength and coordination, Bucky whipped around towards the origin of the sound and struck like a snake - only for his outstretched metal wrist to be caught in an unyielding grip. A man (or three) shimmered to life before his unfocusing eyes; raven-haired, narrow-faced, and dressed in a fine but frightfully thin linen suit. He was starkly pale beneath his flush and seemed to be sweating like a pig.
"Loki," Bucky said - or tried to. Whatever the rat bastard had done to him had finally stolen away control of his mouth and vocal chords altogether.
With a thin smile, Loki flicked Bucky’s arm away from him like a piece of lint, and sent Bucky straight through the coffee table after it.
"Why don’t you take a nap while I walk the dog, hm, Sergeant?"
Fear, clear and sharp like ice, penetrated the distorting fog trying to smother Bucky’s mind and senses. He tried to get up, to look around, to get to Steve, but his limbs would no longer obey him.
"Right here," Loki said, as if from very far away. Through the swirling darkness, Bucky thought he saw him hoist Steve’s limp dog body over his shoulder. And then Loki carried him off to whatever scheme he needed Jane for, while unconsciousness descended over Bucky, powerless to stop him.
And to think Bucky had come to believe there were no more new ways left for his heart to break.
"The cell signal’s coming from this apartment," Tony said.
Jane pressed the doorbell. It didn’t work. She started knocking, then banging with the side of her fist.
"James? James, it’s Jane! Please open up! James? Are you there?!"
The next door up the hall opened, and a gaunt-faced woman stuck her head out into the hallway, glaring at them with a mixture of irritation and mistrust. Then she caught sight of Tony, all suited up, and her expression morphed into one of slack-jawed horror.
"Oh Christ, I knew that creep was up to no good!"
And she slammed the door and locked what sounded like five different locks.
Jane could only gape, her frantic worry momentarily overwritten by pure indignation. "Creep?!"
Tony frowned. "Stand back for a sec, would you? I’m breaking this door down."
"He is not a creep," Jane insisted as Tony lowered the visor of his suit. "He’s just -"
"Yeah, yeah, I know, combat vet with post-traumatic stress."
"Just please don’t scare -"
But Tony very calmly and neatly popped the door out of its hinges and propped it up against the hallway wall.
The moment Tony moved aside enough for Jane to get a peek through the doorway, she gasped and rushed inside. "James!"
He lay crumpled on his side in the middle of the living room, amidst the splintered remains of a table. He was pale and still and looked like a discarded rag doll, and Jane was thrown back straight to Thor lying broken in the middle of a New Mexico street, the shadow of the blazing Destroyer still hanging over them as his life left him right there in Jane’s arms, and to a courtyard in Greenwich, futilely trying to drag his insensate body out from under collapsing black death. And Thor had been a god, but James was just a man -
"No no no no no no," she realized she was begging as she touched James’ cheek and shoulder and neck and wrist trying with numb fingers to find a pulse or a breath or or or -
"FRIDAY?" Tony said.
James groaned minutely. Or maybe he didn’t and she was just imagining signs of life.
"His vital signs are all stable," Tony said, flipping up the visor.
Jane promptly burst into tears.
"No, no, I’m okay, I’m okay," she said a minute or two and several deep breaths later, wiped the tears from her face, and cleared a patch of floor of debris so she could gently turn James on his back. "Tony, call an ambulance or something. Something clearly happened to him."
"Jane," Tony said in a very strange voice. "Jane, step away from that man."
"What?"
Jane looked up. Tony had his repulsor up and aimed at James.
"Your boyfriend’s been lying to you, Jane. You see his left arm? That’s the Winter Soldier. And - FRIDAY, help me out here, is that the face I think it is?" The visor closed again, and sprang open moments later. "Yep. He’s also a dead ringer for a dead man called Bucky Barnes."
"Bucky Barnes," Jane said flatly. "As in, Steve’s Bucky Barnes."
"Exactly. Which answers one question I’ve had for the past two years and raises about a million more, but that can wait. Because Winter Soldier."
She’d never paid much attention in history class. She wouldn’t know Bucky Barnes from James Dean. She’d been around Steve long enough to know that ‘Bucky Barnes’ and ‘that Hydra assassin who almost killed half the current Avengers roster and nearly beat Steve to death on Insight Day’ were inherently incompatible, though.
"Tony," Jane said impatiently. "Either call an ambulance for James or for your own paranoid delusions, but call an ambulance or get out."
"Hey, a little gratitude would be nice."
"A little less slandering an innocent man in need of medical assistance would be nice!"
"Did you know about that arm?"
Jane focused on it for the first time. James was wearing sweat pants and a singlet, as if he’d stumbled out of bed and crashed straight through the table, and his left arm was - well, not horribly burned all over like he’d made it sound. Looking at the scarring around his shoulder she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d lost the entire limb in a fire instead, though. Maybe that’s what he’d meant with ‘burn damage’.
"There’s a lot I don’t know about him yet. Why do you think I needed you to find his apartment for me?"
Come to think of it, she couldn’t even remember giving him her number. She sure didn’t have his.
"Yeah, that’s pretty convenient too, because - take a whiff - do you smell that? I smell it. The whole place is drenched in eau de fresh plywood. That trash bag over by the door? Full of packaging materials. All of your boyfriend’s furniture is a week old tops, and if you’ll tear your eyes away from his pretty face for a sec, you’ll see that he has literally nothing but the bare essentials in here. An unused prison cell has more personality."
Apparently confident that James wouldn’t wake up right that second, Tony turned away and went to inspect the other two rooms of the apartment. Jane couldn’t tear her eyes away from James’ pretty face until Tony could no longer see them. He was right about the state of the apartment. Jane even spotted bits of styrofoam in the creases of the couch cushions, a little errant sawdust by a cabinet against the opposite wall.
Not that it proved anything. James could’ve just moved here this week. She wouldn’t necessarily know; they hadn’t often talked about big things like that.
Basic things like that, Jane realized with something like a jolt.
James hadn’t, as a rule, volunteered information of that kind, and Jane was suddenly coming to realize that she hadn’t even really noticed there were different kinds of information at play. The lack of that weight - of knowing where he fit into the world when he wasn’t awkwardly flirting with her, or taking her sight-seeing like a tourist in their own home, or telling her about a youth that more often than not sounded like it belonged to a dead man, a man who had never made it back from the war; of knowing where his independent trajectory might take him, and lead him to want to take them - had just been so convenient to her. She already had one big project on her mind: turning the Avengers back into themselves. There hadn’t been enough room left in her mind to start a relationship with too much obvious potential for long-term commitment.
Oh, she was head over heels for the guy, no doubt about that. But the unsentimental, analytical side of her had to admit she’d been using James as a distraction all this time.
"Jane?"
Tony came clanking back into the room. He’d found a backpack in what must be the bedroom, the big, sturdy kind with extra straps you took hiking. Grim-faced, he upended the contents onto the couch and began sliding pertinent items towards Jane.
Two guns of different kinds. A silencer. Four knives in sheaths with straps of different lengths. A coil of wire with a handle on each end. High-denomination rolls of cash - dollars, euros, pounds, rubles. Six passports.
Jane lifted her hand from James’ shoulder and opened the passports one by one.
Travis Osmond. Vasily Bogoslovsky. Dietrich Schreiner. Thierry Pétain. Ian Doherty. Alexandru Vinea.
James’ face was on all of them.
"Right." Thoughts racing and getting to a lot of nowhere, Jane bit her lip. "Yeah. Um."
Okay, this looked bad. Still didn’t rule out a set-up or plain old trauma-induced paranoia, but this looked really really bad.
It’s Bucky, it’s - it’s me, James, Jane suddenly remembered. He’d said that on the phone, hadn’t he? It’s Bucky. Or was that just wishful thinking rewriting memories ripe for misremembering because of the haze of sleep enveloping them?
"And then there’s this," Tony said, and held up... a frisbee.
"That’s his dog’s," Jane said.
"FRIDAY says it’s made of vibranium," Tony said.
Frowning, Jane took the red-white-and-blue vibranium frisbee - and felt herself go cold all over. "Tony, where’s the dog?"
"I didn’t see any dog. Just a bag of stuff for one."
Jane turned around and started shaking James’ shoulder. Hard. "James, James, wake up, wake up, come on. James - Bucky -"
"Oh, now you believe me and you immediately start poking the sleeping Winter Soldier? For god’s sake, Jane, stop poking the sleeping Winter Soldier."
"I’m not poking the Winter Soldier, Tony, I’m poking Bucky Barnes."
"Woah, back up, I never said he was Bucky Barnes, just that he looked like Bucky Barnes."
"He is Bucky Barnes. I don’t know how, but trust me, he is."
James - Bucky - groaned.
"That’s it!" Jane cheered. "Come on, wake up, Bucky, wake up."
"Jane?" he slurred, slowly prying his eyelids open and blinking his eyes into focus. Then he became aware of something other than her face, took in the rest of the room in a flash (Tony waggled his fingers at him around the light of the repulsor), and turned wide, desperate eyes back on her, his whole body tensing. "I can explain all of this."
"Never mind that right now. Where’s Steve? Dodger?"
Jane took that ‘desperate’ back. This was what despair looked like. "Loki. Loki took him. I woke up and he’d drugged me. I couldn’t stop him."
"Hold on," Tony said. "Dodger is his dog?"
"Yes," Jane said.
"And you’re insinuating that Dodger is Steve Rogers?"
"He is," James said wretchedly.
"But we already have Steve. He’s a cat."
"Thor lied to me," Jane deduced. "All we had to go on by that point was his word, remember? Not a trace of magic left to corroborate his claims."
"Hold on," James said, sitting up warily. "Thor?"
"My dog Thor," Jane said. "He’s the real Thor, the same way Dodger is Steve. Loki got almost all of the Avengers last month and turned them into various animals."
"Yeah, Steve told me that much," James said.
"Why did you steal Steve?" Tony asked.
"I didn’t. He used his dog’s nose to sniff me out and once he found me, he refused to leave. What I don’t understand is," James said to Jane. "How did you end up looking after Thor?"
Jane blinked. She’d almost forgotten he still hadn’t realized. "We’re friends. And exes."
James frowned. "Exes? Wait, you’re Jane Foster?"
"You know I am!"
"Not until now I didn’t! You never told me your last name!"
"I didn- and it never occurred to you to ask?"
That threw him for a loop. "I, uh. No."
"How - ?" Tony started, making a face.
"Names get weird when you’re made to forget your own for seventy years, okay?" James snapped.
Jane and Tony stared. "Made to forget?"
"Oh, god help me." James pushed his real hand through his hair. "We don’t have time for this. Loki took Steve and lured you away from Avengers Tower and the others!"
"No, no, we have a little time for this," Tony insisted. He still hadn’t lowered the repulsor. "Let’s say that you being Steve’s Bucky is an undisputable fact. That still leaves the question of how you’re also the Winter Soldier."
James’ expression shuttered.
"I signed up for the US army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. My unit was captured by Hydra at Azzano in 1943. Hydra scientist Arnim Zola experimented on me to no apparent effect until Steve came and busted us out," he rattled off, his voice completely void of inflection or emotion. "In ’45, I fell off a train and lost my arm, but the experiments turned out to have had an effect after all; I didn’t die. Hydra captured me again, wiped my memory, tortured me, and brainwashed me to be their obedient killing machine. If I resisted or started remembering things, they would wipe the slate clean and recondition me using electric shocks and psychotropic drugs. They kept me in cryogenic suspension between missions until Steve showed up again and disrupted the programming. I’ve been on the run ever since and I’ll die before I let Hydra take me a third time."
Tony stared, slack-jawed. Tears escaped down Jane’s cheeks when she blinked.
"Wow. Did you - rehearse that?" Tony floundered.
"After I escaped I had to relearn how to sleep naturally. Sometimes I’d get things mixed up and wake up thinking they still had me and I was just coming out of cryo, blank slate memory and all. So I wrote the truth down and used to read it first thing every time I woke up." James’ hands were balled into shaking fists on top of his thighs. "Happy now? You trust me enough to fucking go save Steve and the others now?"
"Um. Yeah. I guess. Yep. Totally," Tony said, flipped down his visor, and hurried off.
In the sudden silent isolation, Jane tried to stifle her hitching breaths.
"Please don’t cry," James mumbled at his knees.
Jane wiped at her face. "I’m sorry."
"No. I lied to you. I’m the one who should be sorry."
He got up a little unsteadily and disappeared into the bedroom. By the time he came back, dressed in what she could only think of as urban combat gear, and started disappearing the weapons from the couch onto his person, his stance was solid and Jane had pulled herself together.
"It’s pretty freaky, not gonna lie," she said. "But on the other hand, I kinda understand why you did it."
"It’s no excuse," he said without meeting her eyes.
"I forgive you anyway."
He looked up warily. She shrugged.
"So we both forgot to mention a couple of things about ourselves. Big deal. It’s not like I pushed you for any of the important stuff." She held out her hand. "Hi. Jane Foster. Nice to meet you."
Slowly, he took her hand and shook it.
"James Buchanan Barnes. My friends called me Bucky, when I still had them."
"And what should I call you?"
He looked at her like he might drown in her. "Bucky. I never want to be anything but Bucky again."
"Alright. Bucky."
"How are you taking this so well?" He seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop - with a bomb in it.
"My last boyfriend was the Norse god of thunder," Jane said. "My former brother-in-law tried to conquer the planet. Tony nearly ushered in a robot apocalypse, and professional curiosity once lead me to being possessed by a semi-sentient concentrated singularity from before the start of the universe. Betty - my friend and sometimes coworker - used to date the Hulk. Maybe is again. She won’t tell me, he’s supposed to be MIA."
"Huh." Bucky stared, then blinked. "Where’s Thor?"
"My place."
"That at least means he won’t have access to everyone at once. I don’t suppose you brought a car."
"No, I hitched a ride with Tony. And I take it you don’t have a car either."
"No. We can’t take public transport."
"Or walk. God knows what Loki’s gotten up to by the time we arrive at the Tower."
"Yeah, walking didn’t go so well for me last time."
They looked at each other for a moment and then, in stereo, said: "We could steal a car?"
"Oh thank god, I thought I was going to regret saying that," Bucky said.
Jane grinned. "We’ll bring it back after. Let’s go."
They pulled up to the private entrance to Avengers Tower just as Iron Man slammed a crater into the pavement. Luckily, Tony Stark’s expertise in shock-dampening technology was greater than any magic, so the man inside the suit was fine.
"Ouch," Stark croaked.
Mostly fine.
"Oh, hi Jane, Sarge," Stark groaned, twitching and sparking a little. "Right on time. Oh sweet mother of ouch."
"Tony!" Jane wrestled out of her seatbelt and hurried over to Stark. "Are you okay?"
"What’s the situation?" Bucky demanded, following on Jane’s heels.
"The building’s been evacuated. Loki’s up in the penthouse. He’s got the whole petting zoo caged up and ready to ship out, but Janet’s still holding him off -"
As if on cue, an explosion and a shriek resounded. Jane and Bucky looked up to see a woman tumbling from one of the top story windows, just as Stark had. The dragonfly wings of her suit were just barely visible, flapping at full speed but too flimsy to bear a full-sized woman’s weight.
"Oh my -" Jane started, but Bucky said, "Don’t worry, she’s fine."
And she shrunk, disappearing in mid-air and letting the change in aerodynamic variables put her wings back in action just as she had when the Winter Soldier threw her off a different skyscraper during the Cold War. Which was another conversation Bucky was not looking forward to having.
"Stay with Stark," he told Jane. "I’ll help the Wasp take Loki down."
"Wait, I -" she yelled after him, but he was already out of earshot.
Riding an elevator in his current state of suspense was hardly one of the worst things he’d ever experienced, but it definitely felt like it. He fired a bullet at Loki’s head the moment the elevator doors opened onto the top floor. The alien bastard had heard him coming and dodged, retaliating with a flurry of knives like shards of glimmering pale blue light.
"Oh, for Yggdrasil’s sake!" Loki swore.
Look who’s talking, Bucky thought, drawing a knife of his own and lunging. Loki deflected Bucky’s attack only to be socked right in the jaw by the miniaturized Wasp coming at him from the other side.
Just as Bucky had hoped.
The three of them fought viciously. Both sides smashed through pieces of furniture or used them as improvised bludgeons as their grappling led them through the rooms (and walls) of the penthouse. Wasp specialized in close-range attacks and Bucky focused on supporting that, saving his bullets for distraction shots after Loki batted one too many of them out of the air like flies. Loki’s supply of magic knives was endless and what barehanded blows he dealt were frightful, and just when Bucky they couldn’t be more outmatched, he made it worse by filling the room with a blinding, thronging crowd of clones.
"YOU CANNOT WIN THIS," all the Lokis chorused. "THE EVER-EXPANDING UNIVERSE HAS LEFT YOU TWO FORGOTTEN SOLDIERS IN THE DUST."
A few of the clones went up in showers of light as the Wasp shot through them like a bullet and alighted on Bucky’s shoulder. For him, she only made the impact sting a little.
"They’re just holograms," she said, her voice tiny and tinny. "They can’t hurt us."
"But they can let the real deal get away while we stare ourselves blind on the doubles," Bucky said, cutting a swathe through the illusory Lokis as he made his way toward the animal cages. New holograms sprung up as soon as he’d passed.
Then the sprinkler system turned on.
"Jane," Bucky realized immediately. And, grinning fiercely, he shot a look at the nearest security camera before turning toward the one remaining solid Loki in the room.
Loki tsk-ed and brushed his sodden hair from his face. "She always was clever, that mortal. I was almost looking forward to gaining a sister in her. But enough, now. This pointless resistance has gone on long enough."
Bucky gripped his knife more securely and advanced. The Wasp darted away through the rain.
"Believe me when I say this pains my heart as much as it will pain the whole of you," Loki murmured, expression grim and face draining from any color it had had...
Only to be replaced by blue.
What the fuck? was all Bucky could think - before Loki threw all his strategies so far to the wind and barreled straight into him. And the next thing Bucky knew, he was strapped into the chamber and the cold of the flash freeze washed over him, eating through his skin into his flesh and bone and brain like fire, like acid, and all he could do was scream and lash out with the one part of him that wasn’t dissolving in terror and agony, and hold on -
CLANG, something said. And, "Hulkbuster, smash! Take that, you blue -"
- and then Bucky went very, very far away.
When Jane didn’t know what to do with herself, she worked. And she may have set up her workplace in the infirmary this time, but work she did. She had finally relocated her research to Avengers Tower, and Betty had flown in, and between them and Tony and Janet, it was a matter of days, maybe hours, before they had the Avengers back to normal. Minutes if Loki stopped being a dick, but, predictably, Loki did not stop being a dick just because they wanted him to.
And Bucky... Bucky would wake up when he wanted to, they supposed.
Initially it seemed like he would regain consciousness as soon as they thawed him out of the block of ice Loki had encased him in. They’d all but kidnaped Helen Cho from Seoul just to have someone absolutely trustworthy oversee the process. Steve - the dog, not Imposter Steve the cat - had snarled any lesser suggestion into non-existence. Steve the dog had also been right beside Bucky when his vitals leveled out and he started twitching and whimpering and his heartbeat spiking, right on the verge of waking up in a haze of misery and panic until Steve stuck his nose in his ear, and wuffled comfortingly, and pressed his furry body into Bucky’s side until instinct had him curling around the source of warmth and comfort, deep and peacefully asleep.
Steve-the-dog hadn’t left Bucky’s arms since, nor Jane his bedside. No matter what, they wouldn’t let Bucky wake up from his ordeal alone this time. Not again. Never again.
"Jane?" Darcy stuck her head around the doorframe. "Betty’s done. Sciencevengers assemble!"
Jane and Steve exchanged a look.
"You stay," Jane said. "I’ll be back."
They tested their finished transformation pod - modeled after the Project Rebirth cradle used on Steve way back - on Thor first. All things considered, he was the hardest to kill out of all of them. So if they’d made a mistake somewhere...
They hadn’t.
Thor emerged from the pod naked, and therefore very obviously completely unharmed and unchanged from his old self.
"You did it!" he laughed, and, after haphazardly wrapping himself in a robe Darcy pushed on him, swept Jane up in a hug. "My dear friend, I knew you would do it!"
"We did it!" Jane cheered along with everyone else, and hugged Thor back tightly.
Jane relieved Steve-the-dog from Bucky-sitting duty while the others prepped the machine for their next patient, and twenty minutes later, Steve-the-man came to a sliding stop in the doorway in sweats and a shirt, clearly having sprinted all the way back.
Jane hung back for a while.
Looking like he’d fought seventy years worth of war chasing a fool’s hope and now found the reward beyond even his wildest dreams, Steve sank down on the edge of his friend’s bed. He touched the sides of Bucky’s face, and his metal arm, and the IV cannula in the back of his real hand, and lay his head on his chest and just felt his heart beat for a while, his shoulders shaking minutely.
When Steve finally turned to Jane, his eyes were red-rimmed and his smile bigger and brighter than she’d ever seen it.
"Doc... Jane..."
"You think you’re funny, don’t you?" Jane interrupted with a watery grin of her own. "And so clever. Woof woof, let’s play matchmaker for my friends! Who knew Captain America was such a..."
She couldn’t seem to finish that sentence, so Steve just hugged her. Tight.
Yeah.
Yeah, that about covered it.
"Thank you," he said eventually, voice wobbly.
"For what? He did all the work himself."
"Only because he had you to put in the effort for. I don’t know how I would have ever gotten through to him otherwise."
Jane laughed. "Steve, I’ve been in on the two of you for two days and I can list a million ways how. But if we’re going to be grateful, thank you for making it so I got to meet him in the first place."
"He did all the work on that himself too."
"Steeeeeeve," Bucky whined. "Stop talkin’, I’m tryna sleep."
"Really?" Steve asked, obnoxiously chipper. "That’s the first thing you’re gonna say to me?"
"Ugh."
Bucky threw his arm over his head, intent on ignoring the light and the noise both, but felt something pull unpleasantly at the back of his hand. He blinked his eyes open and squinted at it - then beyond it at Steve, human Steve, big Steve, sitting next to him.
"Steve," he said stupidly. Memories and context came flooding back. "I thought..."
"Jane figured out how to turn us back," Steve said, beaming.
"Jane had a lot of help," Jane corrected from the other side of Bucky’s bed. "Because that’s how science works."
"Jane," he said, whipping around, just as stupidly.
"Jane figured out how to turn us back practically all by herself," was Steve’s compromise.
Bucky felt himself starting to tear up. He grabbed Steve, pulling him into a crushing hug and clinging to him like a lifeline.
"Hey, hey, it’s okay," Steve said, even though he wrapped his arms around Bucky just as tightly. "You’re okay. Jane and I are okay. Everything’s okay now."
"Shut up. It’s the ice, it fucks with my brain chemistry," he blubbered. "Why the hell do I remember ice? Wasn’t I fighting Loki?"
"Loki caused the ice," Jane said. Bucky let go of Steve and grabbed Jane’s hand instead as she explained about Loki’s adoption into Thor’s family and his ability to switch between the different species of aliens they belonged to. Clearly his face spoke volumes about his incomprehension, because she said tentatively, "There’s footage. If you think you’re up to watching yourself get, uh -"
"Show me."
She retrieved a tablet from another room and asked FRIDAY to play the recording of the end of the fight.
"I was watching from the security room downstairs," she explained. "Tony had FRIDAY give me access."
The footage was as Bucky remembered. Loki turned blue and bowled him over. Then the part that had made Bucky’s brain go haywire: ice grew straight from Loki’s hands and enveloped him, spreading outward from his chest. Bucky’s metal arm flailed around and he managed to grab Loki by the throat until the Wasp showed up in the Hulkbuster armor, whacked Loki over the head, and knocked him out cold.
Ha. Cold.
Bucky’s teeth ached from the force with which he clenched his jaw. "That bullshit line about how the ice was gonna hurt him as much as it would hurt me..."
"The frost giant thing is a reeeeeaaaally sensitive subject," Jane said, grimacing.
"Oh yeah? Well cryo is a really sensitive subject for me. Do the Avengers still have him in custody? I wanna see him."
Jane and Steve exchanged worried looks, but didn’t try to dissuade him.
Loki was in the tower’s reinforced glass-walled former Hulk-containment chamber, repurposed as a whatever-needs-containing-chamber upon Bruce Banner’s retirement from superheroism. He was wearing Asgardian shackles and looked human once more - and was also sweating profusely again, just as he had in Bucky’s apartment. He even sounded rough.
"Well well, look who it is," Loki said listlessly from where he was slumped against the smooth glass wall. "That was quick. You are truly a master of the defrosting process, aren’t you, Sergeant?"
"It’s called revictimization, asshole, and it’s not funny," Bucky snapped. Steve and Jane stared at him. "What? I read."
"I would apologize," Loki drawled. "But I find I cannot currently bring myself to give a damn."
"You mean you ever do?" Jane asked.
"You know I do, Jane Foster."
"Lots of otherwise remorseless killers love their families, Loki. It really doesn’t mean much."
Loki sighed in irritation. "I did not come to your pathetic little planet to play games or commit wanton and pointless murders, Jane Foster. I came for that," he said, pointing between Jane and Bucky, at Steve. "For the serum your warriors forced me to squander on use as an offensive weapon."
The three of them stared at Loki, and then each other, in confusion.
"Are you saying... you never meant to use the animal transformations as a weapon?" Jane asked.
"Why in the Nine would I do that?" Loki groused. "What kind of lunatic would use animal transformations as a weapon when there are so many easier and more direct ways to incapacitate an opponent?"
"Oh, I don’t know, a trickster god?"
"May I remind you that you mortals, not we Asgardians, came up with that ridiculous moniker while Thor and I were but little children?"
"Somehow I have a hard time buying into the idea that you grew out of it."
Bucky looked over at Steve to see if he found Jane and Loki’s descent into bickering as bizarre as he did, and was comforted to find that the answer was yes. Yes he did.
"I need the serum," Loki said through gritted teeth. "Because ever since Odin passed, the spell keeping me Asgardian has been fading, to the point that any stray thought can now banish it like mist."
"Is that why you’re -"
"Melting? Yes, quite. Frost giants are no more suited for extended stays in temperate climes such as these than Asgardians are for their sunless, icy realm. I have lost count of the number of heat strokes I have suffered recently. But to use one of your Earthly expressions: so sue me, but I happen to like living on planets with light and vegetation and liquid water, and I am not about to give that up just because someone lied to me all my life."
Jane threw up her hands in exasperation "You couldn’t have just said that?"
"This conversation is humiliating enough as it is." Loki looked like he might have an aneurism or explosive diarrhea any moment. "Asking Thor or the Queen for help with this? I would rather hurl myself into a star. If the spell hadn’t slipped from my grasp in a thoughtless moment, none need have known I was ever here. That was always my intent. So, for once not wishing to court any more trouble, after losing the serum, I went in search of similar solutions on other worlds. I found several, but all so sophisticated that they too, like Odin’s spell, were subject to the whims of my subconscious. The primitive nature of your Earthly mutagen turned out to be its unique strength. Indeed, when I returned, all of your Avengers were still trapped in the shapes the serum had given them, despite their desperate desire to return to their original forms. But lo and behold, the creators of the serum had flushed all their remaining product down the drain in a failed attempt at avoiding arrest by your warriors’ hands. So you see it’s all your fault I had to actively target you this time, Jane Foster."
Jane pinched the bridge of her nose and took a very, very deep breath. "Okay. Fine. Betty recreated plenty of the mutagen to go around and SHIELD had your DNA on file from New York. I’ll see what I can do."
"What?!" Bucky and Steve exclaimed.
Loki’s eyes were bright, his expression pinched. "I would be forever in your debt, Jane Foster."
"You better," she said, turning on her heel and leaving the room. Struck speechless, Bucky and Steve followed.
"Don’t tell Thor!" Loki called after her.
"I’m telling Thor. I am not enabling your family drama!" she yelled over her shoulder.
"You’re not seriously going to help him?" Bucky said.
"Look..." She heaved a deep, deep sigh. "I’m not siding with him, okay? But I know a little bit about the way Asgard does things, and especially the way Frigga does things now that she’s in charge. She doesn’t really believe in retributive justice anymore and has declared that Asgard, as an intergalactic mediator, has a duty to practice restorative justice instead. Loki is her poster boy for the kind of rehabilitation and community service approach she’s trying to iron out, and from what Thor has told me, it’s mostly working. He violated the conditions of his parole by coming to Earth, so there will absolutely be consequences for all of this when Thor takes him back. But the bottom line is that the more comfortable Loki feels in his own skin, the better it is for the universe at large. If not for our generation or our children’s, then for the ones after that."
"It’s complicated," Steve confirmed unhappily.
"Can’t we just kill him while we have him?" Bucky muttered.
"Heimdall heard that," Jane said wryly. She shrugged helplessly. "If nothing else, the royal family owes you weregild - a blood debt - for what Loki did. And it’s Loki, so they’ll be damn generous about it."
"Do they have time machines on Asgard?"
"No."
"Then I don’t see how they could possibly offer me anything useful."
"Hmm." Jane gave him a considering look. "You might be surprised."
Jane left to go talk to Doctor Betty and the other eggheads, leaving Steve and Bucky back in the infirmary with a promise that she would be back for Bucky once she was done. It was hard to wrap his head around everything that had happened - and might still happen. Bucky and Steve settled on the edge of the bed and mostly just stared at each other a lot.
"I’m so glad you’re back," Steve said. "I can’t even tell you."
Bucky could only nod, and smile.
"Do you, uh, wanna meet the others? The Avengers? I bet they’d like to get to know the guy who helped save their hides."
"Right now? Do I have to?" Bucky grimaced. "I know they’re your friends, Steve, but the last time I met half of them, I shot your Black Widow - twice - tore off Wilson’s wings and kicked him over the edge of a helicarrier, and tore off the elder Van Dyne’s wings and tried to beat her to death until she managed to crawl into my arm and tear it apart from the inside."
Steve cringed with him, not away from him.
"And I blew up the car of the boss of three of them with him inside and forced Howard and Maria Stark’s car off the road."
"God, they made you do that? Buck, I’m so -"
"Sure, sure, and look, no offense," Bucky went on quickly. "But I’m not coming within a hundred yards of that Maximoff girl and her horrible mind-reading, mind-controlling -"
"Yeah, you’re right. There’s no rush." Steve nudged their shoulders together. "I’m sure they’ll understand if I wanna keep my best friend to myself for a while."
Bucky conjured up a smile and nudged back a little harder. "No more slobbering though, okay? I ain’t Agent Carter."
"Coulda fooled me, with that head’a hair of yours."
"Don’t make fun of my torture, you ass."
It was so easy, in the end. They slipped back into their friendship like nothing had ever gotten in the way of it. Talking so easily and openly about ‘the past’ - about a life that wasn’t real anymore for anyone but the two of them - was like watching the sun rise after months of polar winter. Which was a terrible analogy, but Bucky was already laughing at something Steve said, so he just laughed harder and delighted in the sight of his friend, his partner, his brother laughing along with him again, finally, after all this time.
"Steve?" Bucky said afterwards. "I’m sorry. I take back everything I said to you that day you tried to open the windows. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry."
Steve was infuriatingly ready and willing to sober up. "No, Bucky, you have no idea how long I’ve been telling myself the same things."
"That’s exactly why I’m taking it back, dumbass," Bucky said heatedly. "I know it’s bullshit. You know it’s bullshit. None of it was true. None of what happened to me was your fault, and I know I shouldn’t, that they put that poison in my head -"
"No, Bucky, Bucky, Buck..."
Steve pulled him into a one-armed hug that turned into a needy, full-blown hug Bucky couldn’t even bring himself to be ashamed of.
"You’re allowed to feel angry and hurt and betrayed," Steve said, looking him in the face. "And if you want or need to feel that way towards me, I’m okay with that, because I’m your friend and I want to help you."
"That’s real swell of you, Steve, but I don’t want to feel it at you. It’s not helping. But there’s so much of it, my brain just can’t seem to find any other direction to point it at."
"At Hydra?" Hydra said mock-innocently. "Just a suggestion."
Bucky smiled wryly. "There ain’t nearly enough of them to go around for what I’m feeling." The smile slipped away. "Actually, that’s not true. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why I got so mad at you, but I think I got it."
"Yeah?"
Steve had the look of a man bracing himself to get sentenced to death. Bucky dropped his eyes.
"It’s because you’re the only person left in the world I know beyond a shadow of a doubt would never hurt me. ’Cause I’m too much of a coward to put my anger where it belongs. But I knew it wouldn’t be fair to put that on you either, so I... I tried to make sure you never saw my face again."
Silence greeted that statement. Bucky looked up. There were tears in Steve’s eyes.
He poked Bucky in the chest. "If you ever call my best friend names again, I swear to god -"
Bucky huffed out a watery little laugh. Steve pulled him in for another hug. All of this emotional excess started feeling a little, well, excessive, but hell. He figured they’d earned it.
"You dumbass," Steve said into his shoulder. "You dumbass. Remember what a little shit I could be when I got sick and needful?"
"Oh, you bet. First memory in line to come crowding back. Real treat."
Steve laughed. "And you didn’t think sticking around through all of that meant I owed you the same in return?"
"...that was different."
"No it wasn’t," Steve said, settling with his back against the wall and his arm around Bucky’s shoulder.
"That was totally different."
"I felt bad, took it out on you, and you stuck around. You went through hell, wanted to take it out one me - I’d have stuck around."
"This is not helping my long-standing impression that you just like getting punched."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever. Ingrate."
"So," Jane said when, at last, all the Avengers were their own humanoid selves again, and all the ones with worried loved ones elsewhere had made their long-awaited good news calls, and Loki had received his own dose of the mutagen, and Steve’s shield and Rhodey’s armor were back to their original size (that had been all magic), and cleaning crews had cleared the rubble out of the penthouse, and Pepper had started making plans for the renovation, and the evacuation order on the building was cancelled, and and and and...
"So," Bucky answered. "Now what?"
"I was hoping you’d have some ideas."
"Up until a couple of days ago, my plans for a scenario like this were ‘leave Steve safely in the care of the Avengers, let Jane down gently if at all possible, and disappear forever’. I haven’t gotten around to formulating an alternative yet now that that’s off the table."
"In that case, here’s an idea: stay."
Bucky smiled. "Yeah, I’ll stay."
"And kiss me again."
He searched her face. "You really want that?"
"I thought I’d already answered that."
In case she hadn’t been clear enough before, she pulled him down and kissed him herself. He responded with breathtaking enthusiasm.
There was a hell of a lot of change and work waiting for him, and for them, down the line. He couldn’t - clearly didn’t want - to stay an unholy combination of a wanted man and a dead man forever. The legal nightmare alone could drag out for years, and Jane had already made Thor promise that if worst came to worst, Asgard would repay Bucky’s weregild in either asylum or some kind of honorary function granting him diplomatic immunity for the crimes he had been forced to commit as the Winter Soldier.
But that could wait. For now, everything could wait except getting to know this strange, wonderful man better. No more secrets. No more distractions. Just him, and her, and -
Wait.
Jane disentangled herself from Bucky and said: "Steve the cat!"
"The imposter cat?" Bucky said with a frown.
"Yes."
"What about him?"
"We can’t just kick him back out onto the streets. I... I think I might adopt him."
Bucky stared.
"To be perfectly honest, I’m more of a cat person than a dog person," Jane confessed.
"I like both," Bucky said, grinning.
Phew.
Everything would be alright, then.
Part 2: http://omnicat.livejournal.com/210844.html
For a while after, he could remembered helping Jane into her coat, but most of the rest of that night was merely snippets; the sound of Jane’s laughter, the smell of her hair, the complete trust she put in his nearness and the sudden realization of joy that after everything, his body was still good for this thing he loved. He was dancing again to all the best swing, with his combat boots and his metal arm and his twenty-first century girl, and for the first time in a long, long time, the world was good and he just knew everything would be alright.
Bucky fell into bed with the biggest smile on his face - and awoke screaming in a strange bed with Jane’s blood on his hands, because Hydra didn’t need to get him back when they still had him, when they were inside him, their tentacles buried deeper in his brain and his bones than Bucky himself could reach -
No.
Stop.
It was a dream.
None of it was rea-
He didn’t recognize the room he was in. His apartment didn’t have all this furniture in it. Hydra had found him. They’d done this. They’d moved him, they could’ve done anything to him, made him do anything.
Jane.
- helicarrier burning and groaning blood everywhere his fingers slipping in it as he tightened his grip and brought his hand down again her lifeless eyes staring up at -
Oh god, Jane.
He stumbled out of the strange bed and tore the farce of a home apart until he found his phone... right smack in the middle of the coffee table. The room was spinning.
"Jane Jane Jane Jane please Jane," he begged the dial tone until finally there was a click and she answered with a groggy, "Hello?"
"Jane, you have to run. They’re coming for you."
"Whah - ? Who is this?"
"It’s Bucky, it’s - it’s me, James. Jane, they found me," he said, words blurring together as he tripped over his tongue. "I don’t know what they did but if they knew I was here then they know about you and’ll try to get you next. You have to -" He faltered. "Have to -"
"Call the Avengers to your aid," a helpful voice supplied. "Let them fall out for your protection."
Bucky’s knees gave out. Slumped against the coffee table, he went very, very still.
"James?" Jane sounded more awake now. "James, what’s going on? What are you talking about?"
"Jane," he said, as clearly and calmly urgent as he could. "Listen to me. Go to Avengers Tower. Ask them for shelter. Avoid the obvious routes. Detour. But hurry. They’re coming."
"James, you’re scaring me. Are you okay? Should I come over?"
"No, you need to run."
"You sound really not okay. Shit, I don’t even know where you live. Listen, James, I’m gonna call a friend of mine to trace this call so I can come over. Everything will be okay. I’ll be there before you know it. Just stay where you are and - and don’t do anything stupid, okay? Promise me."
"The Avengers -"
"Yes, I’ll bring the Avengers, I’ll call them -"
"No, don’t make them leave headquarters, go to them -"
The line went dead.
"That’ll be all, good soldier," said that same smooth, deceptively pleasant voice. Clammy fingers plucked the phone from Bucky’s grasp. "Thanks ever so much for your service."
In one last burst of strength and coordination, Bucky whipped around towards the origin of the sound and struck like a snake - only for his outstretched metal wrist to be caught in an unyielding grip. A man (or three) shimmered to life before his unfocusing eyes; raven-haired, narrow-faced, and dressed in a fine but frightfully thin linen suit. He was starkly pale beneath his flush and seemed to be sweating like a pig.
"Loki," Bucky said - or tried to. Whatever the rat bastard had done to him had finally stolen away control of his mouth and vocal chords altogether.
With a thin smile, Loki flicked Bucky’s arm away from him like a piece of lint, and sent Bucky straight through the coffee table after it.
"Why don’t you take a nap while I walk the dog, hm, Sergeant?"
Fear, clear and sharp like ice, penetrated the distorting fog trying to smother Bucky’s mind and senses. He tried to get up, to look around, to get to Steve, but his limbs would no longer obey him.
"Right here," Loki said, as if from very far away. Through the swirling darkness, Bucky thought he saw him hoist Steve’s limp dog body over his shoulder. And then Loki carried him off to whatever scheme he needed Jane for, while unconsciousness descended over Bucky, powerless to stop him.
And to think Bucky had come to believe there were no more new ways left for his heart to break.
"The cell signal’s coming from this apartment," Tony said.
Jane pressed the doorbell. It didn’t work. She started knocking, then banging with the side of her fist.
"James? James, it’s Jane! Please open up! James? Are you there?!"
The next door up the hall opened, and a gaunt-faced woman stuck her head out into the hallway, glaring at them with a mixture of irritation and mistrust. Then she caught sight of Tony, all suited up, and her expression morphed into one of slack-jawed horror.
"Oh Christ, I knew that creep was up to no good!"
And she slammed the door and locked what sounded like five different locks.
Jane could only gape, her frantic worry momentarily overwritten by pure indignation. "Creep?!"
Tony frowned. "Stand back for a sec, would you? I’m breaking this door down."
"He is not a creep," Jane insisted as Tony lowered the visor of his suit. "He’s just -"
"Yeah, yeah, I know, combat vet with post-traumatic stress."
"Just please don’t scare -"
But Tony very calmly and neatly popped the door out of its hinges and propped it up against the hallway wall.
The moment Tony moved aside enough for Jane to get a peek through the doorway, she gasped and rushed inside. "James!"
He lay crumpled on his side in the middle of the living room, amidst the splintered remains of a table. He was pale and still and looked like a discarded rag doll, and Jane was thrown back straight to Thor lying broken in the middle of a New Mexico street, the shadow of the blazing Destroyer still hanging over them as his life left him right there in Jane’s arms, and to a courtyard in Greenwich, futilely trying to drag his insensate body out from under collapsing black death. And Thor had been a god, but James was just a man -
"No no no no no no," she realized she was begging as she touched James’ cheek and shoulder and neck and wrist trying with numb fingers to find a pulse or a breath or or or -
"FRIDAY?" Tony said.
James groaned minutely. Or maybe he didn’t and she was just imagining signs of life.
"His vital signs are all stable," Tony said, flipping up the visor.
Jane promptly burst into tears.
"No, no, I’m okay, I’m okay," she said a minute or two and several deep breaths later, wiped the tears from her face, and cleared a patch of floor of debris so she could gently turn James on his back. "Tony, call an ambulance or something. Something clearly happened to him."
"Jane," Tony said in a very strange voice. "Jane, step away from that man."
"What?"
Jane looked up. Tony had his repulsor up and aimed at James.
"Your boyfriend’s been lying to you, Jane. You see his left arm? That’s the Winter Soldier. And - FRIDAY, help me out here, is that the face I think it is?" The visor closed again, and sprang open moments later. "Yep. He’s also a dead ringer for a dead man called Bucky Barnes."
"Bucky Barnes," Jane said flatly. "As in, Steve’s Bucky Barnes."
"Exactly. Which answers one question I’ve had for the past two years and raises about a million more, but that can wait. Because Winter Soldier."
She’d never paid much attention in history class. She wouldn’t know Bucky Barnes from James Dean. She’d been around Steve long enough to know that ‘Bucky Barnes’ and ‘that Hydra assassin who almost killed half the current Avengers roster and nearly beat Steve to death on Insight Day’ were inherently incompatible, though.
"Tony," Jane said impatiently. "Either call an ambulance for James or for your own paranoid delusions, but call an ambulance or get out."
"Hey, a little gratitude would be nice."
"A little less slandering an innocent man in need of medical assistance would be nice!"
"Did you know about that arm?"
Jane focused on it for the first time. James was wearing sweat pants and a singlet, as if he’d stumbled out of bed and crashed straight through the table, and his left arm was - well, not horribly burned all over like he’d made it sound. Looking at the scarring around his shoulder she wouldn’t be surprised if he’d lost the entire limb in a fire instead, though. Maybe that’s what he’d meant with ‘burn damage’.
"There’s a lot I don’t know about him yet. Why do you think I needed you to find his apartment for me?"
Come to think of it, she couldn’t even remember giving him her number. She sure didn’t have his.
"Yeah, that’s pretty convenient too, because - take a whiff - do you smell that? I smell it. The whole place is drenched in eau de fresh plywood. That trash bag over by the door? Full of packaging materials. All of your boyfriend’s furniture is a week old tops, and if you’ll tear your eyes away from his pretty face for a sec, you’ll see that he has literally nothing but the bare essentials in here. An unused prison cell has more personality."
Apparently confident that James wouldn’t wake up right that second, Tony turned away and went to inspect the other two rooms of the apartment. Jane couldn’t tear her eyes away from James’ pretty face until Tony could no longer see them. He was right about the state of the apartment. Jane even spotted bits of styrofoam in the creases of the couch cushions, a little errant sawdust by a cabinet against the opposite wall.
Not that it proved anything. James could’ve just moved here this week. She wouldn’t necessarily know; they hadn’t often talked about big things like that.
Basic things like that, Jane realized with something like a jolt.
James hadn’t, as a rule, volunteered information of that kind, and Jane was suddenly coming to realize that she hadn’t even really noticed there were different kinds of information at play. The lack of that weight - of knowing where he fit into the world when he wasn’t awkwardly flirting with her, or taking her sight-seeing like a tourist in their own home, or telling her about a youth that more often than not sounded like it belonged to a dead man, a man who had never made it back from the war; of knowing where his independent trajectory might take him, and lead him to want to take them - had just been so convenient to her. She already had one big project on her mind: turning the Avengers back into themselves. There hadn’t been enough room left in her mind to start a relationship with too much obvious potential for long-term commitment.
Oh, she was head over heels for the guy, no doubt about that. But the unsentimental, analytical side of her had to admit she’d been using James as a distraction all this time.
"Jane?"
Tony came clanking back into the room. He’d found a backpack in what must be the bedroom, the big, sturdy kind with extra straps you took hiking. Grim-faced, he upended the contents onto the couch and began sliding pertinent items towards Jane.
Two guns of different kinds. A silencer. Four knives in sheaths with straps of different lengths. A coil of wire with a handle on each end. High-denomination rolls of cash - dollars, euros, pounds, rubles. Six passports.
Jane lifted her hand from James’ shoulder and opened the passports one by one.
Travis Osmond. Vasily Bogoslovsky. Dietrich Schreiner. Thierry Pétain. Ian Doherty. Alexandru Vinea.
James’ face was on all of them.
"Right." Thoughts racing and getting to a lot of nowhere, Jane bit her lip. "Yeah. Um."
Okay, this looked bad. Still didn’t rule out a set-up or plain old trauma-induced paranoia, but this looked really really bad.
It’s Bucky, it’s - it’s me, James, Jane suddenly remembered. He’d said that on the phone, hadn’t he? It’s Bucky. Or was that just wishful thinking rewriting memories ripe for misremembering because of the haze of sleep enveloping them?
"And then there’s this," Tony said, and held up... a frisbee.
"That’s his dog’s," Jane said.
"FRIDAY says it’s made of vibranium," Tony said.
Frowning, Jane took the red-white-and-blue vibranium frisbee - and felt herself go cold all over. "Tony, where’s the dog?"
"I didn’t see any dog. Just a bag of stuff for one."
Jane turned around and started shaking James’ shoulder. Hard. "James, James, wake up, wake up, come on. James - Bucky -"
"Oh, now you believe me and you immediately start poking the sleeping Winter Soldier? For god’s sake, Jane, stop poking the sleeping Winter Soldier."
"I’m not poking the Winter Soldier, Tony, I’m poking Bucky Barnes."
"Woah, back up, I never said he was Bucky Barnes, just that he looked like Bucky Barnes."
"He is Bucky Barnes. I don’t know how, but trust me, he is."
James - Bucky - groaned.
"That’s it!" Jane cheered. "Come on, wake up, Bucky, wake up."
"Jane?" he slurred, slowly prying his eyelids open and blinking his eyes into focus. Then he became aware of something other than her face, took in the rest of the room in a flash (Tony waggled his fingers at him around the light of the repulsor), and turned wide, desperate eyes back on her, his whole body tensing. "I can explain all of this."
"Never mind that right now. Where’s Steve? Dodger?"
Jane took that ‘desperate’ back. This was what despair looked like. "Loki. Loki took him. I woke up and he’d drugged me. I couldn’t stop him."
"Hold on," Tony said. "Dodger is his dog?"
"Yes," Jane said.
"And you’re insinuating that Dodger is Steve Rogers?"
"He is," James said wretchedly.
"But we already have Steve. He’s a cat."
"Thor lied to me," Jane deduced. "All we had to go on by that point was his word, remember? Not a trace of magic left to corroborate his claims."
"Hold on," James said, sitting up warily. "Thor?"
"My dog Thor," Jane said. "He’s the real Thor, the same way Dodger is Steve. Loki got almost all of the Avengers last month and turned them into various animals."
"Yeah, Steve told me that much," James said.
"Why did you steal Steve?" Tony asked.
"I didn’t. He used his dog’s nose to sniff me out and once he found me, he refused to leave. What I don’t understand is," James said to Jane. "How did you end up looking after Thor?"
Jane blinked. She’d almost forgotten he still hadn’t realized. "We’re friends. And exes."
James frowned. "Exes? Wait, you’re Jane Foster?"
"You know I am!"
"Not until now I didn’t! You never told me your last name!"
"I didn- and it never occurred to you to ask?"
That threw him for a loop. "I, uh. No."
"How - ?" Tony started, making a face.
"Names get weird when you’re made to forget your own for seventy years, okay?" James snapped.
Jane and Tony stared. "Made to forget?"
"Oh, god help me." James pushed his real hand through his hair. "We don’t have time for this. Loki took Steve and lured you away from Avengers Tower and the others!"
"No, no, we have a little time for this," Tony insisted. He still hadn’t lowered the repulsor. "Let’s say that you being Steve’s Bucky is an undisputable fact. That still leaves the question of how you’re also the Winter Soldier."
James’ expression shuttered.
"I signed up for the US army after the attack on Pearl Harbor. My unit was captured by Hydra at Azzano in 1943. Hydra scientist Arnim Zola experimented on me to no apparent effect until Steve came and busted us out," he rattled off, his voice completely void of inflection or emotion. "In ’45, I fell off a train and lost my arm, but the experiments turned out to have had an effect after all; I didn’t die. Hydra captured me again, wiped my memory, tortured me, and brainwashed me to be their obedient killing machine. If I resisted or started remembering things, they would wipe the slate clean and recondition me using electric shocks and psychotropic drugs. They kept me in cryogenic suspension between missions until Steve showed up again and disrupted the programming. I’ve been on the run ever since and I’ll die before I let Hydra take me a third time."
Tony stared, slack-jawed. Tears escaped down Jane’s cheeks when she blinked.
"Wow. Did you - rehearse that?" Tony floundered.
"After I escaped I had to relearn how to sleep naturally. Sometimes I’d get things mixed up and wake up thinking they still had me and I was just coming out of cryo, blank slate memory and all. So I wrote the truth down and used to read it first thing every time I woke up." James’ hands were balled into shaking fists on top of his thighs. "Happy now? You trust me enough to fucking go save Steve and the others now?"
"Um. Yeah. I guess. Yep. Totally," Tony said, flipped down his visor, and hurried off.
In the sudden silent isolation, Jane tried to stifle her hitching breaths.
"Please don’t cry," James mumbled at his knees.
Jane wiped at her face. "I’m sorry."
"No. I lied to you. I’m the one who should be sorry."
He got up a little unsteadily and disappeared into the bedroom. By the time he came back, dressed in what she could only think of as urban combat gear, and started disappearing the weapons from the couch onto his person, his stance was solid and Jane had pulled herself together.
"It’s pretty freaky, not gonna lie," she said. "But on the other hand, I kinda understand why you did it."
"It’s no excuse," he said without meeting her eyes.
"I forgive you anyway."
He looked up warily. She shrugged.
"So we both forgot to mention a couple of things about ourselves. Big deal. It’s not like I pushed you for any of the important stuff." She held out her hand. "Hi. Jane Foster. Nice to meet you."
Slowly, he took her hand and shook it.
"James Buchanan Barnes. My friends called me Bucky, when I still had them."
"And what should I call you?"
He looked at her like he might drown in her. "Bucky. I never want to be anything but Bucky again."
"Alright. Bucky."
"How are you taking this so well?" He seemed to be waiting for the other shoe to drop - with a bomb in it.
"My last boyfriend was the Norse god of thunder," Jane said. "My former brother-in-law tried to conquer the planet. Tony nearly ushered in a robot apocalypse, and professional curiosity once lead me to being possessed by a semi-sentient concentrated singularity from before the start of the universe. Betty - my friend and sometimes coworker - used to date the Hulk. Maybe is again. She won’t tell me, he’s supposed to be MIA."
"Huh." Bucky stared, then blinked. "Where’s Thor?"
"My place."
"That at least means he won’t have access to everyone at once. I don’t suppose you brought a car."
"No, I hitched a ride with Tony. And I take it you don’t have a car either."
"No. We can’t take public transport."
"Or walk. God knows what Loki’s gotten up to by the time we arrive at the Tower."
"Yeah, walking didn’t go so well for me last time."
They looked at each other for a moment and then, in stereo, said: "We could steal a car?"
"Oh thank god, I thought I was going to regret saying that," Bucky said.
Jane grinned. "We’ll bring it back after. Let’s go."
They pulled up to the private entrance to Avengers Tower just as Iron Man slammed a crater into the pavement. Luckily, Tony Stark’s expertise in shock-dampening technology was greater than any magic, so the man inside the suit was fine.
"Ouch," Stark croaked.
Mostly fine.
"Oh, hi Jane, Sarge," Stark groaned, twitching and sparking a little. "Right on time. Oh sweet mother of ouch."
"Tony!" Jane wrestled out of her seatbelt and hurried over to Stark. "Are you okay?"
"What’s the situation?" Bucky demanded, following on Jane’s heels.
"The building’s been evacuated. Loki’s up in the penthouse. He’s got the whole petting zoo caged up and ready to ship out, but Janet’s still holding him off -"
As if on cue, an explosion and a shriek resounded. Jane and Bucky looked up to see a woman tumbling from one of the top story windows, just as Stark had. The dragonfly wings of her suit were just barely visible, flapping at full speed but too flimsy to bear a full-sized woman’s weight.
"Oh my -" Jane started, but Bucky said, "Don’t worry, she’s fine."
And she shrunk, disappearing in mid-air and letting the change in aerodynamic variables put her wings back in action just as she had when the Winter Soldier threw her off a different skyscraper during the Cold War. Which was another conversation Bucky was not looking forward to having.
"Stay with Stark," he told Jane. "I’ll help the Wasp take Loki down."
"Wait, I -" she yelled after him, but he was already out of earshot.
Riding an elevator in his current state of suspense was hardly one of the worst things he’d ever experienced, but it definitely felt like it. He fired a bullet at Loki’s head the moment the elevator doors opened onto the top floor. The alien bastard had heard him coming and dodged, retaliating with a flurry of knives like shards of glimmering pale blue light.
"Oh, for Yggdrasil’s sake!" Loki swore.
Look who’s talking, Bucky thought, drawing a knife of his own and lunging. Loki deflected Bucky’s attack only to be socked right in the jaw by the miniaturized Wasp coming at him from the other side.
Just as Bucky had hoped.
The three of them fought viciously. Both sides smashed through pieces of furniture or used them as improvised bludgeons as their grappling led them through the rooms (and walls) of the penthouse. Wasp specialized in close-range attacks and Bucky focused on supporting that, saving his bullets for distraction shots after Loki batted one too many of them out of the air like flies. Loki’s supply of magic knives was endless and what barehanded blows he dealt were frightful, and just when Bucky they couldn’t be more outmatched, he made it worse by filling the room with a blinding, thronging crowd of clones.
"YOU CANNOT WIN THIS," all the Lokis chorused. "THE EVER-EXPANDING UNIVERSE HAS LEFT YOU TWO FORGOTTEN SOLDIERS IN THE DUST."
A few of the clones went up in showers of light as the Wasp shot through them like a bullet and alighted on Bucky’s shoulder. For him, she only made the impact sting a little.
"They’re just holograms," she said, her voice tiny and tinny. "They can’t hurt us."
"But they can let the real deal get away while we stare ourselves blind on the doubles," Bucky said, cutting a swathe through the illusory Lokis as he made his way toward the animal cages. New holograms sprung up as soon as he’d passed.
Then the sprinkler system turned on.
"Jane," Bucky realized immediately. And, grinning fiercely, he shot a look at the nearest security camera before turning toward the one remaining solid Loki in the room.
Loki tsk-ed and brushed his sodden hair from his face. "She always was clever, that mortal. I was almost looking forward to gaining a sister in her. But enough, now. This pointless resistance has gone on long enough."
Bucky gripped his knife more securely and advanced. The Wasp darted away through the rain.
"Believe me when I say this pains my heart as much as it will pain the whole of you," Loki murmured, expression grim and face draining from any color it had had...
Only to be replaced by blue.
What the fuck? was all Bucky could think - before Loki threw all his strategies so far to the wind and barreled straight into him. And the next thing Bucky knew, he was strapped into the chamber and the cold of the flash freeze washed over him, eating through his skin into his flesh and bone and brain like fire, like acid, and all he could do was scream and lash out with the one part of him that wasn’t dissolving in terror and agony, and hold on -
CLANG, something said. And, "Hulkbuster, smash! Take that, you blue -"
- and then Bucky went very, very far away.
When Jane didn’t know what to do with herself, she worked. And she may have set up her workplace in the infirmary this time, but work she did. She had finally relocated her research to Avengers Tower, and Betty had flown in, and between them and Tony and Janet, it was a matter of days, maybe hours, before they had the Avengers back to normal. Minutes if Loki stopped being a dick, but, predictably, Loki did not stop being a dick just because they wanted him to.
And Bucky... Bucky would wake up when he wanted to, they supposed.
Initially it seemed like he would regain consciousness as soon as they thawed him out of the block of ice Loki had encased him in. They’d all but kidnaped Helen Cho from Seoul just to have someone absolutely trustworthy oversee the process. Steve - the dog, not Imposter Steve the cat - had snarled any lesser suggestion into non-existence. Steve the dog had also been right beside Bucky when his vitals leveled out and he started twitching and whimpering and his heartbeat spiking, right on the verge of waking up in a haze of misery and panic until Steve stuck his nose in his ear, and wuffled comfortingly, and pressed his furry body into Bucky’s side until instinct had him curling around the source of warmth and comfort, deep and peacefully asleep.
Steve-the-dog hadn’t left Bucky’s arms since, nor Jane his bedside. No matter what, they wouldn’t let Bucky wake up from his ordeal alone this time. Not again. Never again.
"Jane?" Darcy stuck her head around the doorframe. "Betty’s done. Sciencevengers assemble!"
Jane and Steve exchanged a look.
"You stay," Jane said. "I’ll be back."
They tested their finished transformation pod - modeled after the Project Rebirth cradle used on Steve way back - on Thor first. All things considered, he was the hardest to kill out of all of them. So if they’d made a mistake somewhere...
They hadn’t.
Thor emerged from the pod naked, and therefore very obviously completely unharmed and unchanged from his old self.
"You did it!" he laughed, and, after haphazardly wrapping himself in a robe Darcy pushed on him, swept Jane up in a hug. "My dear friend, I knew you would do it!"
"We did it!" Jane cheered along with everyone else, and hugged Thor back tightly.
Jane relieved Steve-the-dog from Bucky-sitting duty while the others prepped the machine for their next patient, and twenty minutes later, Steve-the-man came to a sliding stop in the doorway in sweats and a shirt, clearly having sprinted all the way back.
Jane hung back for a while.
Looking like he’d fought seventy years worth of war chasing a fool’s hope and now found the reward beyond even his wildest dreams, Steve sank down on the edge of his friend’s bed. He touched the sides of Bucky’s face, and his metal arm, and the IV cannula in the back of his real hand, and lay his head on his chest and just felt his heart beat for a while, his shoulders shaking minutely.
When Steve finally turned to Jane, his eyes were red-rimmed and his smile bigger and brighter than she’d ever seen it.
"Doc... Jane..."
"You think you’re funny, don’t you?" Jane interrupted with a watery grin of her own. "And so clever. Woof woof, let’s play matchmaker for my friends! Who knew Captain America was such a..."
She couldn’t seem to finish that sentence, so Steve just hugged her. Tight.
Yeah.
Yeah, that about covered it.
"Thank you," he said eventually, voice wobbly.
"For what? He did all the work himself."
"Only because he had you to put in the effort for. I don’t know how I would have ever gotten through to him otherwise."
Jane laughed. "Steve, I’ve been in on the two of you for two days and I can list a million ways how. But if we’re going to be grateful, thank you for making it so I got to meet him in the first place."
"He did all the work on that himself too."
"Steeeeeeve," Bucky whined. "Stop talkin’, I’m tryna sleep."
"Really?" Steve asked, obnoxiously chipper. "That’s the first thing you’re gonna say to me?"
"Ugh."
Bucky threw his arm over his head, intent on ignoring the light and the noise both, but felt something pull unpleasantly at the back of his hand. He blinked his eyes open and squinted at it - then beyond it at Steve, human Steve, big Steve, sitting next to him.
"Steve," he said stupidly. Memories and context came flooding back. "I thought..."
"Jane figured out how to turn us back," Steve said, beaming.
"Jane had a lot of help," Jane corrected from the other side of Bucky’s bed. "Because that’s how science works."
"Jane," he said, whipping around, just as stupidly.
"Jane figured out how to turn us back practically all by herself," was Steve’s compromise.
Bucky felt himself starting to tear up. He grabbed Steve, pulling him into a crushing hug and clinging to him like a lifeline.
"Hey, hey, it’s okay," Steve said, even though he wrapped his arms around Bucky just as tightly. "You’re okay. Jane and I are okay. Everything’s okay now."
"Shut up. It’s the ice, it fucks with my brain chemistry," he blubbered. "Why the hell do I remember ice? Wasn’t I fighting Loki?"
"Loki caused the ice," Jane said. Bucky let go of Steve and grabbed Jane’s hand instead as she explained about Loki’s adoption into Thor’s family and his ability to switch between the different species of aliens they belonged to. Clearly his face spoke volumes about his incomprehension, because she said tentatively, "There’s footage. If you think you’re up to watching yourself get, uh -"
"Show me."
She retrieved a tablet from another room and asked FRIDAY to play the recording of the end of the fight.
"I was watching from the security room downstairs," she explained. "Tony had FRIDAY give me access."
The footage was as Bucky remembered. Loki turned blue and bowled him over. Then the part that had made Bucky’s brain go haywire: ice grew straight from Loki’s hands and enveloped him, spreading outward from his chest. Bucky’s metal arm flailed around and he managed to grab Loki by the throat until the Wasp showed up in the Hulkbuster armor, whacked Loki over the head, and knocked him out cold.
Ha. Cold.
Bucky’s teeth ached from the force with which he clenched his jaw. "That bullshit line about how the ice was gonna hurt him as much as it would hurt me..."
"The frost giant thing is a reeeeeaaaally sensitive subject," Jane said, grimacing.
"Oh yeah? Well cryo is a really sensitive subject for me. Do the Avengers still have him in custody? I wanna see him."
Jane and Steve exchanged worried looks, but didn’t try to dissuade him.
Loki was in the tower’s reinforced glass-walled former Hulk-containment chamber, repurposed as a whatever-needs-containing-chamber upon Bruce Banner’s retirement from superheroism. He was wearing Asgardian shackles and looked human once more - and was also sweating profusely again, just as he had in Bucky’s apartment. He even sounded rough.
"Well well, look who it is," Loki said listlessly from where he was slumped against the smooth glass wall. "That was quick. You are truly a master of the defrosting process, aren’t you, Sergeant?"
"It’s called revictimization, asshole, and it’s not funny," Bucky snapped. Steve and Jane stared at him. "What? I read."
"I would apologize," Loki drawled. "But I find I cannot currently bring myself to give a damn."
"You mean you ever do?" Jane asked.
"You know I do, Jane Foster."
"Lots of otherwise remorseless killers love their families, Loki. It really doesn’t mean much."
Loki sighed in irritation. "I did not come to your pathetic little planet to play games or commit wanton and pointless murders, Jane Foster. I came for that," he said, pointing between Jane and Bucky, at Steve. "For the serum your warriors forced me to squander on use as an offensive weapon."
The three of them stared at Loki, and then each other, in confusion.
"Are you saying... you never meant to use the animal transformations as a weapon?" Jane asked.
"Why in the Nine would I do that?" Loki groused. "What kind of lunatic would use animal transformations as a weapon when there are so many easier and more direct ways to incapacitate an opponent?"
"Oh, I don’t know, a trickster god?"
"May I remind you that you mortals, not we Asgardians, came up with that ridiculous moniker while Thor and I were but little children?"
"Somehow I have a hard time buying into the idea that you grew out of it."
Bucky looked over at Steve to see if he found Jane and Loki’s descent into bickering as bizarre as he did, and was comforted to find that the answer was yes. Yes he did.
"I need the serum," Loki said through gritted teeth. "Because ever since Odin passed, the spell keeping me Asgardian has been fading, to the point that any stray thought can now banish it like mist."
"Is that why you’re -"
"Melting? Yes, quite. Frost giants are no more suited for extended stays in temperate climes such as these than Asgardians are for their sunless, icy realm. I have lost count of the number of heat strokes I have suffered recently. But to use one of your Earthly expressions: so sue me, but I happen to like living on planets with light and vegetation and liquid water, and I am not about to give that up just because someone lied to me all my life."
Jane threw up her hands in exasperation "You couldn’t have just said that?"
"This conversation is humiliating enough as it is." Loki looked like he might have an aneurism or explosive diarrhea any moment. "Asking Thor or the Queen for help with this? I would rather hurl myself into a star. If the spell hadn’t slipped from my grasp in a thoughtless moment, none need have known I was ever here. That was always my intent. So, for once not wishing to court any more trouble, after losing the serum, I went in search of similar solutions on other worlds. I found several, but all so sophisticated that they too, like Odin’s spell, were subject to the whims of my subconscious. The primitive nature of your Earthly mutagen turned out to be its unique strength. Indeed, when I returned, all of your Avengers were still trapped in the shapes the serum had given them, despite their desperate desire to return to their original forms. But lo and behold, the creators of the serum had flushed all their remaining product down the drain in a failed attempt at avoiding arrest by your warriors’ hands. So you see it’s all your fault I had to actively target you this time, Jane Foster."
Jane pinched the bridge of her nose and took a very, very deep breath. "Okay. Fine. Betty recreated plenty of the mutagen to go around and SHIELD had your DNA on file from New York. I’ll see what I can do."
"What?!" Bucky and Steve exclaimed.
Loki’s eyes were bright, his expression pinched. "I would be forever in your debt, Jane Foster."
"You better," she said, turning on her heel and leaving the room. Struck speechless, Bucky and Steve followed.
"Don’t tell Thor!" Loki called after her.
"I’m telling Thor. I am not enabling your family drama!" she yelled over her shoulder.
"You’re not seriously going to help him?" Bucky said.
"Look..." She heaved a deep, deep sigh. "I’m not siding with him, okay? But I know a little bit about the way Asgard does things, and especially the way Frigga does things now that she’s in charge. She doesn’t really believe in retributive justice anymore and has declared that Asgard, as an intergalactic mediator, has a duty to practice restorative justice instead. Loki is her poster boy for the kind of rehabilitation and community service approach she’s trying to iron out, and from what Thor has told me, it’s mostly working. He violated the conditions of his parole by coming to Earth, so there will absolutely be consequences for all of this when Thor takes him back. But the bottom line is that the more comfortable Loki feels in his own skin, the better it is for the universe at large. If not for our generation or our children’s, then for the ones after that."
"It’s complicated," Steve confirmed unhappily.
"Can’t we just kill him while we have him?" Bucky muttered.
"Heimdall heard that," Jane said wryly. She shrugged helplessly. "If nothing else, the royal family owes you weregild - a blood debt - for what Loki did. And it’s Loki, so they’ll be damn generous about it."
"Do they have time machines on Asgard?"
"No."
"Then I don’t see how they could possibly offer me anything useful."
"Hmm." Jane gave him a considering look. "You might be surprised."
Jane left to go talk to Doctor Betty and the other eggheads, leaving Steve and Bucky back in the infirmary with a promise that she would be back for Bucky once she was done. It was hard to wrap his head around everything that had happened - and might still happen. Bucky and Steve settled on the edge of the bed and mostly just stared at each other a lot.
"I’m so glad you’re back," Steve said. "I can’t even tell you."
Bucky could only nod, and smile.
"Do you, uh, wanna meet the others? The Avengers? I bet they’d like to get to know the guy who helped save their hides."
"Right now? Do I have to?" Bucky grimaced. "I know they’re your friends, Steve, but the last time I met half of them, I shot your Black Widow - twice - tore off Wilson’s wings and kicked him over the edge of a helicarrier, and tore off the elder Van Dyne’s wings and tried to beat her to death until she managed to crawl into my arm and tear it apart from the inside."
Steve cringed with him, not away from him.
"And I blew up the car of the boss of three of them with him inside and forced Howard and Maria Stark’s car off the road."
"God, they made you do that? Buck, I’m so -"
"Sure, sure, and look, no offense," Bucky went on quickly. "But I’m not coming within a hundred yards of that Maximoff girl and her horrible mind-reading, mind-controlling -"
"Yeah, you’re right. There’s no rush." Steve nudged their shoulders together. "I’m sure they’ll understand if I wanna keep my best friend to myself for a while."
Bucky conjured up a smile and nudged back a little harder. "No more slobbering though, okay? I ain’t Agent Carter."
"Coulda fooled me, with that head’a hair of yours."
"Don’t make fun of my torture, you ass."
It was so easy, in the end. They slipped back into their friendship like nothing had ever gotten in the way of it. Talking so easily and openly about ‘the past’ - about a life that wasn’t real anymore for anyone but the two of them - was like watching the sun rise after months of polar winter. Which was a terrible analogy, but Bucky was already laughing at something Steve said, so he just laughed harder and delighted in the sight of his friend, his partner, his brother laughing along with him again, finally, after all this time.
"Steve?" Bucky said afterwards. "I’m sorry. I take back everything I said to you that day you tried to open the windows. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry."
Steve was infuriatingly ready and willing to sober up. "No, Bucky, you have no idea how long I’ve been telling myself the same things."
"That’s exactly why I’m taking it back, dumbass," Bucky said heatedly. "I know it’s bullshit. You know it’s bullshit. None of it was true. None of what happened to me was your fault, and I know I shouldn’t, that they put that poison in my head -"
"No, Bucky, Bucky, Buck..."
Steve pulled him into a one-armed hug that turned into a needy, full-blown hug Bucky couldn’t even bring himself to be ashamed of.
"You’re allowed to feel angry and hurt and betrayed," Steve said, looking him in the face. "And if you want or need to feel that way towards me, I’m okay with that, because I’m your friend and I want to help you."
"That’s real swell of you, Steve, but I don’t want to feel it at you. It’s not helping. But there’s so much of it, my brain just can’t seem to find any other direction to point it at."
"At Hydra?" Hydra said mock-innocently. "Just a suggestion."
Bucky smiled wryly. "There ain’t nearly enough of them to go around for what I’m feeling." The smile slipped away. "Actually, that’s not true. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why I got so mad at you, but I think I got it."
"Yeah?"
Steve had the look of a man bracing himself to get sentenced to death. Bucky dropped his eyes.
"It’s because you’re the only person left in the world I know beyond a shadow of a doubt would never hurt me. ’Cause I’m too much of a coward to put my anger where it belongs. But I knew it wouldn’t be fair to put that on you either, so I... I tried to make sure you never saw my face again."
Silence greeted that statement. Bucky looked up. There were tears in Steve’s eyes.
He poked Bucky in the chest. "If you ever call my best friend names again, I swear to god -"
Bucky huffed out a watery little laugh. Steve pulled him in for another hug. All of this emotional excess started feeling a little, well, excessive, but hell. He figured they’d earned it.
"You dumbass," Steve said into his shoulder. "You dumbass. Remember what a little shit I could be when I got sick and needful?"
"Oh, you bet. First memory in line to come crowding back. Real treat."
Steve laughed. "And you didn’t think sticking around through all of that meant I owed you the same in return?"
"...that was different."
"No it wasn’t," Steve said, settling with his back against the wall and his arm around Bucky’s shoulder.
"That was totally different."
"I felt bad, took it out on you, and you stuck around. You went through hell, wanted to take it out one me - I’d have stuck around."
"This is not helping my long-standing impression that you just like getting punched."
"Yeah, yeah, whatever. Ingrate."
"So," Jane said when, at last, all the Avengers were their own humanoid selves again, and all the ones with worried loved ones elsewhere had made their long-awaited good news calls, and Loki had received his own dose of the mutagen, and Steve’s shield and Rhodey’s armor were back to their original size (that had been all magic), and cleaning crews had cleared the rubble out of the penthouse, and Pepper had started making plans for the renovation, and the evacuation order on the building was cancelled, and and and and...
"So," Bucky answered. "Now what?"
"I was hoping you’d have some ideas."
"Up until a couple of days ago, my plans for a scenario like this were ‘leave Steve safely in the care of the Avengers, let Jane down gently if at all possible, and disappear forever’. I haven’t gotten around to formulating an alternative yet now that that’s off the table."
"In that case, here’s an idea: stay."
Bucky smiled. "Yeah, I’ll stay."
"And kiss me again."
He searched her face. "You really want that?"
"I thought I’d already answered that."
In case she hadn’t been clear enough before, she pulled him down and kissed him herself. He responded with breathtaking enthusiasm.
There was a hell of a lot of change and work waiting for him, and for them, down the line. He couldn’t - clearly didn’t want - to stay an unholy combination of a wanted man and a dead man forever. The legal nightmare alone could drag out for years, and Jane had already made Thor promise that if worst came to worst, Asgard would repay Bucky’s weregild in either asylum or some kind of honorary function granting him diplomatic immunity for the crimes he had been forced to commit as the Winter Soldier.
But that could wait. For now, everything could wait except getting to know this strange, wonderful man better. No more secrets. No more distractions. Just him, and her, and -
Wait.
Jane disentangled herself from Bucky and said: "Steve the cat!"
"The imposter cat?" Bucky said with a frown.
"Yes."
"What about him?"
"We can’t just kick him back out onto the streets. I... I think I might adopt him."
Bucky stared.
"To be perfectly honest, I’m more of a cat person than a dog person," Jane confessed.
"I like both," Bucky said, grinning.
Phew.
Everything would be alright, then.