FIC: Double Dog Date (part 2) [MCU, Bucky x Jane & Steve & Thor & Tony & Loki & etc]
Part 1: http://omnicat.livejournal.com/210512.html
"Enough about me. It’s your turn again," Jane said fifteen minutes later, around a mouthful of burger. "Tell me something about you."
James had ordered fries and was eating them with a little plastic fork as they meandered aimlessly through the lamp-lit streets. Jane had pounced on his suggestion that they get something they could eat on the go. Thor made people uncomfortable enough in wide open spaces and with his ‘owner’ close by; she wasn’t looking forward to trying to cram him into a crowded diner or leaving him waiting on the curb.
"Not much to tell," James mumbled down at his hands.
"Come on, I don’t believe that," Jane said, gently teasing.
He shrugged. (Jane idly wondered how much of his bulk was his jacket and how much was his own honest-to-god shoulders.) "Went overseas, came back with my head screwed on all wrong. Now I live off the state and don’t get around much."
Folding down a bit of the wrapping around her hamburger, Jane hmm-ed thoughtfully. "Well, okay. What’s your favorite color?"
James looked up, confused. "What does that have to do with me being -"
"A disabled veteran? Nothing. A person like anybody else? Everything," Jane said airily, and took another big bite. Smooth, Jane. Ten points to Ravenclaw.
James looked astonished.
...oh. Oh, no. That was heartbreaking.
They both looked away at the same time. Jane because, instead of the pity some rational part of her brain... suggested? expected?, she felt a strange tendril of self-doubt creep down her throat and flit around inside her chest. James because who knew; maybe he was embarrassed to have been caught unaware and vulnerable. What would Jane know? Just because she’d helped save the universe that one time and won a Nobel Prize and changed the world with her research didn’t mean she was all that interpersonally savvy. Her smoothness was a fluke.
"...yellow," James said, just as Jane decided: But I’m a grown-ass woman. If there are bridges coming up ahead, I’ll cross them when I get there. "And orange, maybe," James went on. "But definitely yellow."
"...huh."
Jane studied James’s profile - the luscious scruff of his beard, the long, chocolate brown hair held back from his face by a well-worn baseball cap, the tiny dip in the bridge of his nose that was just begging her to run her finger from there to the junction of his eyebrows and back until his lashes fluttered down and brushed the back of her hand, the absentminded distraction in his eyes - and she felt herself smile, completely smitten.
"Wouldn’t have pegged you for the type at all. See?" She nudged him with her elbow. "I’m getting to know you better already."
He gave her a faint but sincere smile in return.
They kept walking, and eating, and slowly, in fits and starts, he opened up to her.
"I used to have three of the exact same yellow shirts, before I... before. Made up almost half my wardrobe. And for a couple of years, bow ties. My friends were always making fun of me for it, but I’d wear them wherever I could get away with them. Looking back on it, I honestly don’t know what possessed me."
Jane laughed.
"And I had really nice hair," he said almost plaintively. "Not this..." He grabbed a fistful in his gloved hand. "...cavemannish, washed up bum, barely human -"
"You don’t like your hair the way it is?" Jane asked, eyebrows shooting up.
"I... didn’t choose it."
"How can you not - how does that work? Why don’t you just get it cut, then?"
He barked out a humorless laugh. "If there’s a way to get a proper haircut without having strangers hold sharp objects up to your throat, in your blind spots, I’m all ears."
There were plenty, Jane thought. Surely a man would know that even better than she did?
"Well... how long or short do you want it, exactly? ’Cause electric trimmer attachments come in all kinds of different lengths, no scissors necessary."
This laugh bordered on hysterical. "That’s even worse."
Dodger squeezed his way between Jane and James to nudge and lick at his hand. Jane almost yelped; she’d totally forgotten the dogs were there. And from the looks of it, so had James.
They fell into something of a routine. Several times a week, they would meet, sometimes for just ten minutes in the park, sometimes for however long Jane’s workload and other social obligations allowed. Searching for Loki proved close to futile, but Bucky kept it up and even allowed it to interfere with seeing Jane from time to time just to keep up the appearance that he, too, had something resembling a life. He tried to make sure their meetings and movements did not become too predictable and was thankful that Jane did not mind his wholesale disruption of her and Thor’s routine.
Sometimes they just walked and talked, and sometimes they went to see a movie, or the sights of the city. "It’s amazing how much more you suddenly see of a place you’ve lived for years once you have someone to see it with you," Jane said after an afternoon of mocking modern art and pointing out all the barely disguised pornography in the classical section at the Met. Bucky had kept his left hand in his pocket and slipped the glove off the other. They’d held hands.
Bucky bought a deck of cards and cheated mercilessly; Jane brought a variety of board games and failed to teach him half the rules until pointing them out conveniently let her win. They played in diners and at stone tables in the park, Jane bundled up endearingly in her long, puffy coat and huge scarf while Bucky layered on another piece of clothing every time the temperature dropped further.
They never made plans more than a day or two ahead, and only ever face-to-face. Neither of them suggested visiting each other’s apartments. Bucky couldn’t see a way to ask her why she didn’t that didn’t carry the risk of making her change her mind and want to see his place, so he let it be.
Jane hit a wall in her current research project and two out of her three assistants and coworkers were apparently insufferable in one way or another. Bucky put his own attempts at charting the scope and gradations of his guilt on hold in favor of the history of the space program for one day and realized more than a week later that he was reading about the cure for polio and newly discovered species of frogs and an arrogant little twerp called Justin Bieber, but hadn’t thought of the SHIELD data dump in days.
He hadn’t had a nightmare in almost as long, either. Unless he counted the one where he tried to furnish his apartment, had to assemble all the hideously expensive furniture from unlabelled pieces the size of his thumb, and kept having it all collapse under his weight once he tried to use it.
And through it all, Bucky steadfastly ignored Steve.
He ignored Steve even though everything he told Jane about himself and his life was a barely edited memory of their life before, and every one he spoke of aloud brought three new ones to the surface. He ignored Steve even though he started making out increasingly clear outlines between things he remembered and things he didn’t, things that stubbornly refused to return and which only Steve now knew. He ignored Steve even though, while he may have quieted considerably after Bucky’s outburst, his devotion never wavered, and he didn’t need a human voice or face to show Bucky how the stories about their childhood made him feel. He ignored Steve even though an ever-growing part of him looked at the dog and missed the man like a physical ache.
He ignored Steve because the rest of him still had a very different opinion, because even the smallest and most innocuous thing could be the wrong thing that caused the dam to break and all that anger and resentment to burst back to the surface. He ignored Steve because he knew that once he stopped pretending there was nothing for them to talk about, he would only say more things he would regret.
And most of all: he did not apologize for or take back anything he’d said already. No matter how much he wanted to.
It would be better this way. All he had to do was hold out until either he found Loki or the Avengers found a cure. Then they would part ways for good, Bucky could let Jane down gently, and he’d go back to - to -
Afterwards, she couldn’t really remember what he’d said to finally make it happen; just that she’d waited long enough and knew with absolute clarity that this was what she wanted. Jane kissed James because sometimes his eyes were so soft and kind she couldn’t stand it, and they crinkled along two distinct little lines when he smiled, and he made her laugh, and he was reading up on the entire history of mankind’s reach for the stars in chronological order just to have something to talk to her about, and he was built like a bull but gentle as a kitten just the way she liked ’em, and generous, and he didn’t even realize how wonderful he was.
So she stood up on her tip-toes, pressed into the whole solid length of him, cupped the back of his neck and the small of his back, and kissed him.
When she pulled away long, mutually eager minutes later, his eyes were closed and his lips moved as if mouthing silent words.
"What?" Jane whispered.
Opening his eyes, he rested his forehead against hers and almost tentatively put his hands on her hips. "I think I -"
"You think you what?"
He opened and closed his mouth. "I think you know what."
"Probably, yeah."
"But you deserve a guy who..." James searched her eyes for a long moment, then swallowed thickly. "A guy with the guts to say it out loud."
Jane couldn’t help it: she burst out giggling.
"I swear, if you’re about to turn all insecure self-loathing martyr on me, I will take my research into bending the fabric of reality to my will and go supervillain on your ass."
James looked a little stunned.
She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. "Come home with me tonight. We don’t have to use the bed, I’ve got a great couch for snuggling on. Plus it’s warm inside."
The corner of his mouth curled up minutely. "How warm?"
"As warm as we damn well please."
"My one weakness. How could I refuse?"
On the way there, with the hand not tugging James along, Jane surreptitiously texted Darcy to get the hell out of her house and take Thor with her. And for Thor to take Mjolnir with him. And also to get rid of Tony’s guarding armor, Jane’s collection of alien souvenirs and scrapbooks she’d collected when she was still dating Thor and he took her sight-seeing, every photograph depicting an Avenger, and to put all her animal shapeshifting research in the safe.
‘r u under attack??’ Darcy texted back.
‘Worse. If any of it is still there when I get home, I’m not getting laid.’
She didn’t really want to think about that conversation yet. James, somewhat to her surprise, had yet to put two and two together and realize she was that Jane Foster, the one from the Convergence and the Bifrost and the Nobel and the Avengers. That hadn’t been entirely intentional, but as long as the team was still incapacitated, Loki still at large, and she the world’s leading expert on Asgardian technology i.e. their best shot at a solution, she wasn’t going to disabuse him of his ignorance if she didn’t have to. Tony had yet to retrieve his suit from her hallway closet for a reason, after all.
Darcy had been very thorough. Without the results of her methods and other actually important things to balance out the whole, it seemed Jane’s apartment was filled with nothing but chaos and her own slobbery.
"It’s, um," she said with a fake little laugh, kicking some laundry under the couch. "Usually I know I’ll be having guests over beforehand."
"It makes me feel a lot better about my own apartment," James joked. "Where’s the dog?"
"Darcy borrowed him. You want something to drink? A snack? Wait, don’t answer that - I’m not sure I have anything."
While Jane went through her kitchen cabinets, James first took in her space in that soldier’s way she’d come to recognize from Thor and some of the other Avengers and hanger-ons, and only then took off his shoes and coat.
"It is nice and warm in here," he said, as if it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him.
"I have a present for you," Jane said after a moment of deliberation. She urged him to get comfortable while she went into her bedroom, and came back with her hands behind her back. "I was gonna save this for the one month anniversary of our meeting, but... close enough, right?"
She held it out to him with a fiendish glint in her eyes.
"You said you liked the color, but I never see you wear it."
Slack-jawed and wide-eyed, James took her gifts and unfolded them. It was a short-sleeved t-shirt, a button-up shirt, and a cable-knit sweater, all an eye-searingly bright canary yellow. The tee and sweater had one big white banana on the chest and back and the button-up was covered in a pattern of little white bananas all over. James ran the fingers of his ‘good’ right hand, without the burn damage he was so self-conscious about, over the fabric. He started laughing.
"So you like it?" Jane asked, grinning.
"I love it," he said. Touching the banana on the t-shirt, he started laughing even harder, until he collapsed in a shaking heap on her couch, his hand pressed over his eyes.
She’d never seen him like this before. She hoped they could make it a habit.
"Good. I thought you’d like bananas."
"Oh no, I hate bananas," he corrected her, hiccuping a little. "So much. They taste like deceit and disappointment. I have no idea why that makes this even better, but it does."
"That works too," Jane said easily. "I hope they fit. Wanna try them on?"
He changed in her bedroom and showed his new clothes off with a lot of mirth but all the grace of a rake, and kept his own grey zip-up hoodie on over the t-shirt. The complete lack of skin was a little disappointing, but his eyes had practically begged her not to push when she first brought up the glove thing, so she stuck to a wolf whistle and saved further cajoling for later. Everything in its right time.
"Nailed it," she declared, and kissed him again. The button-up, tucked into his jeans for extra effect, perfectly accentuated the width of his shoulders, and the dip of his back, and the size of his arms, and his thighs too come to think of it, and god she could jump him right here and now, clownish banana shirt and all.
Eventually he put the sweater on over his own black Henley, and they ordered pizza. Jane didn’t think James saw much of the movie they watched, though. When he wasn’t sneaking her glances filled with wonder and barely concealed adoration, his thoughts seemed a million miles away.
When he got home, he sat in his pile of blankets in his pitch-black apartment, his back pressed to the blazing radiator, lost in thought.
He laid out the facts, as he had countless times before:
- What had happened to the world because he didn’t die when he was supposed to, could never be undone.
- He was out now, but Hydra was not gone.
- Hydra would never be gone.
- He was never going to forgive himself for what the ‘Winter Soldier’ had done.
But this time, he put opposite it:
- His name was James Buchanan Barnes, and he was a free man.
- He hadn’t deserved any of what happened to him.
- He didn’t want to go back to being lonely and miserable.
Bucky didn’t sleep that night.
At 05:02, he set his phone on the floor in flashlight mode. He stood and turned to the windows. His fingers shook as he went to work.
"Steve?" he whispered some time later, stilling the tremors by laying his hand on Steve’s head. Steve blinked quickly into wakefulness, ears perking and eyes widening. "I’m gonna need your help with something today, okay?"
After breakfast, they geared up and went out. He bought a packet of razorblades and as many clothes as he could stuff into his backpack. They took a train to the nearest Ikea and arranged for his purchases to be delivered to his address. He didn’t skimp on the furniture either. One thing he was willing to hand to Hydra: once you knew where to look and who to shoot, they had excellent retirement and inheritance packages.
And then they visited a barbershop run by a young lady combat veteran. Steve pulled Bucky the last few feet across the threshold and pressed heavily into his knee the whole time he was in the barber chair, staring over Bucky’s shoulder and ready to tear the hairdresser’s throat out the moment she made one wrong move with the scissors, or suddenly whipped out a syringe or electric charge device, or tore her face off, or the chair spontaneously grew restraints, or -
She was real considerate about the whole thing. That did make Bucky feel a little better as he fumbled through the adrenaline crash back at his apartment until he had to give up on assembling his brand new wardrobe and just clutch at Steve and breathe into his neck for a while. This gave Steve the opportunity to finally lick Bucky’s ear to his heart’s content, but he figured they both deserved that.
We’ll get you back in shape, pal, he thought, running the fingers of his right hand through his old friend’s fur. We’ll get the both of us back in shape.
The next evening, Bucky Barnes showed up on Jane’s doorstep looking like someone he might actually enjoy being.
"- come on. Look, I know you’re supportive of my career and the advancement of the human race and everything, but Asgardian magic requires resources we simply have no access to at this point in our development, and I’m not gonna get another Nobel Prize anytime soon for cracking the tech of a civilization we’re trying to build friendly ties with. Historically, taking things you haven’t been freely offered hasn’t worked out so well for us. It would s - cough -"
She took a gulp of her honey with tea.
"- send all the wrong messages, you know?"
Jane did not, in fact, know. This was Darcy’s area of expertise. Jane was just bluffing. Jane was, at this point, talking entirely out of her ass. Jane was at her wit’s end, out of ideas, out of options, and out of patience most of all. Jane had been talking at the ceiling for two fucking hours straight after weeks of futile attempts at cracking this mystery and Asgard still wouldn’t budge, which meant one of three things.
One: the whole situation down here on Earth was so trivial she had been making a fool of herself for two fucking hours straight and Heimdall was laughing himself blue in the face from on high.
Two: Asgard was under attack and the whole universe could be fucked without them even knowing it.
Or three: like Thor when it came to doing anything for the Avengers that looked remotely like giving orders instead of following them, Frigga was invoking a selectively overzealous Prime Directive over this mess for shits and giggles. Which would mean - and the realization hit Jane like a ton of bricks - that the ‘magic’ Loki had used was neither of Asgardian nor of any other extraterrestrial origin.
"Son of a bitch," she said.
Chewing on the biggest dog bone she and James had been able to find, Thor wagged his tail at her.
"That son of a bitch," she said ten minutes later, having double-checked all her data. "Not you, Frigga."
She sat back in her chair and let this change of perspective cascade through her thoughts like falling dominos.
A lot of alien magic was, by definition, so advanced that even Jane’s attempts at affecting it were like banging on an old television to get the static to clear up. She could deduce what was happening on the physics level, but Earth technology simply wasn’t advanced enough yet for the how, let alone reproducing that how. That’s why trying to mine the ‘Space’ Infinity Stone had given them ray guns and an invasion, their attempt at slotting the ‘Mind’ Stone into the most advanced digital framework on the planet built by the greatest engineering mind of the century promptly went Skynet on their asses, and SHIELD-Hydra had taken an artificially intelligent, fuel-free furnace armor that could be telepathically controlled from the other end of the galaxy, stripped it of everything that made it incredible, and turned it into a laser bazooka. Somehow, almost being blown up by the original made Jane no less bitter about stumbling across that little detail on the Insight Day wiki.
Point being: all this time, Jane had been looking for a hammer to smash a lock too intricate to pick - while what she was dealing with was actually a knot. Or, more specifically, she’d been trying to apply physics to a biological problem.
She grabbed her phone and dialed up Culver University.
"Hey, Betty? It’s Jane. I need your help with something."
"Oh, hi. What can I do for you? Is this about the... ‘dog’ thing?"
"Yeah. I’ve been looking at this all wrong, Betty. I’m gonna send you some blood samples. Ten bucks says the magic was only a small part of it and the real key is a mutagen. As in, an actual physical substance."
"You mean -"
"Manmade. Human made."
"Oh my god."
"My thoughts exactly."
Next, Tony:
"What kind of store had Loki visited before he dropped his disguise?"
"Uh, I think it was..."
"A Petsmart, boss," FRIDAY supplied.
"Right, what she said."
"Shit. Wait, seriously? A Petsmart?"
"Why? Did you find something?"
"I have reason to believe there might be illegal biological experiments being conducted in that establishment, or at least the products of it being sold, and that’s why Loki came there."
"Oh. You’re right. Shit. FRIDAY, get me the chief of police. And the Queen Mother Bee. This calls for some heavy-duty shrinking and entering."
The rest of the day passed in a flurry of activity. Tony, Janet and Betty kept Jane informed of their findings and developments, and Jane’s own research progressed by leaps and bounds now that she’d finally found the missing link. All Loki’s magic had really contributed was a metaphorical jumper cable and the sorcerous imagination and will necessary to choose such a symbolic new shape for each Avenger. Two could play that game. Jane didn’t even have to be a sorceress for it. A little mutagen, a little of the Avengers’ original DNA, a little of the right zap!, and they’d have the gang right back to normal.
An awl, not a hammer.
She slept fitfully, ate a cup of coffee for breakfast, and went right back to work and did not stop until suddenly, the doorbell rang. Jane jolted in surprise, knocking the half-empty Tupperware container of lasagna Thor had microwaved for her off of her desk.
"Aw, crap," she grumbled, standing and stepping on the bra she only now remembered she wasn’t wearing. Stretching away the worst of her stiffness, she stumbled out into the hallway. "The hell do they want from me at a time like this anyway."
She opened the door.
"Hi."
Jane blinked. "Uh. Can I... help you?"
The stranger furrowed his brow and twisted his mouth, and suddenly Jane’s brain clicked into place.
"James?"
"Hi," he repeated, grinning wryly.
"Oh my god. I almost didn’t..."
It was James alright, but not like she’d ever imagined him. He’d shaved off his beard, for starters. In spite of all conscious knowledge and prior experience, Jane was astounded by how much younger and softer that made him look. He might even be younger than her. He had a cleft in his chin she’d never noticed before. His mouth looked somehow more expressive. And good lord, the difference the short-cropped hair made. A pale blue checkered button-down she’d never seen before under a leather jacket that looked brand new...
"Is this how you normally look?" Jane found herself saying.
"It’s been a while," he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets self-consciously. "But yeah. More or less."
"It’s a good look."
James smiled, and it looked almost relieved.
Jane shook off her little stab of disappointment at the loss of the Viking warrior look. She had known he wasn’t fond of it himself all along. She’d get used to the change.
"Who knew you’d clean up so nice," she said with a smile, and grabbed his hand to draw him out of the cold and close the door to it behind him. "Wow."
He gave a little laugh and kissed her cheek. "Go easy on me, I feel exposed enough as it is with all this wind and sun on my face."
Thor’s nails clicked against the floor, and he stuck his head around the living room door.
"Look Thor, it’s James."
"Hey, big guy."
"Wuf?" Thor said, looking pleasantly surprised.
"Sorry pal, I left Dodger at home this time," James said.
"Woof!" Thor came up to them, tail wagging, allowed James to ruffle his fur for a moment, and nodded in approval. "Woof."
Jane drew his head toward her to kiss his whiskered cheek, whispered "close my files and laptop" in his ear, and she and James watched him stroll off together. Only when her ex turned alien dog was out of sight did Jane turn her attention back to James.
"So. Not that you weren’t a handsome devil before, but what brought on the make-over?"
"Sometimes..." He linked the fingers of their other hands too and looked her in the eye very earnestly. "Sometimes it’s hard to remember I have options. Thank you for reminding me. Would you like to go dancing?"
Jane’s brain came to a screeching halt. "What?"
"Dancing. To music. With steps."
"I - uh -"
"It’s fine if you don’t know how! I’m roughly fifty years out of practice myself. But I found this little place that offers lessons, so..."
He looked at her expectantly.
But my work! her mind cried.
But your hot boyfriend, her loins whispered. Yes, he’s your boyfriend now. It’s official. And dancing is really intimate when you want it to be. And he smells so good. Are you ovulating? Are you overworked? Is the new look just that hot? Who even knows.
"I. Uh."
"Woof!" Thor said, sticking his head into the hallway again. ‘Woof’ clearly meaning ‘SAY YES’.
"Um."
He growled and came toward them. "Woof. Woof woof wuffle woof."
He took her coat from the coat rack with his teeth and pushed it into her arms. If she tried to go back to work he would probably sit on her stuff. Or on her directly, come to think of it.
She was way ahead of the others, she supposed. She couldn’t get all that much more done until she heard back from Betty or Tony, or Janet and the police investigators.
"Can’t argue with that," Jane laughed. "Just to warn you though, I’ve been told I have two left feet plus a phantom third. Is there a dress code? I should probably freshen up before we leave either way. I made a major breakthrough in my work today. I can’t talk about the details yet, but it’s amazing and I’m gonna talk you ear off about it in all kinds of roundabout ways on our way there."
"Wow," James said, looking at Thor with wide eyes. "Thanks."
Part 3: http://omnicat.livejournal.com/211046.html
"Enough about me. It’s your turn again," Jane said fifteen minutes later, around a mouthful of burger. "Tell me something about you."
James had ordered fries and was eating them with a little plastic fork as they meandered aimlessly through the lamp-lit streets. Jane had pounced on his suggestion that they get something they could eat on the go. Thor made people uncomfortable enough in wide open spaces and with his ‘owner’ close by; she wasn’t looking forward to trying to cram him into a crowded diner or leaving him waiting on the curb.
"Not much to tell," James mumbled down at his hands.
"Come on, I don’t believe that," Jane said, gently teasing.
He shrugged. (Jane idly wondered how much of his bulk was his jacket and how much was his own honest-to-god shoulders.) "Went overseas, came back with my head screwed on all wrong. Now I live off the state and don’t get around much."
Folding down a bit of the wrapping around her hamburger, Jane hmm-ed thoughtfully. "Well, okay. What’s your favorite color?"
James looked up, confused. "What does that have to do with me being -"
"A disabled veteran? Nothing. A person like anybody else? Everything," Jane said airily, and took another big bite. Smooth, Jane. Ten points to Ravenclaw.
James looked astonished.
...oh. Oh, no. That was heartbreaking.
They both looked away at the same time. Jane because, instead of the pity some rational part of her brain... suggested? expected?, she felt a strange tendril of self-doubt creep down her throat and flit around inside her chest. James because who knew; maybe he was embarrassed to have been caught unaware and vulnerable. What would Jane know? Just because she’d helped save the universe that one time and won a Nobel Prize and changed the world with her research didn’t mean she was all that interpersonally savvy. Her smoothness was a fluke.
"...yellow," James said, just as Jane decided: But I’m a grown-ass woman. If there are bridges coming up ahead, I’ll cross them when I get there. "And orange, maybe," James went on. "But definitely yellow."
"...huh."
Jane studied James’s profile - the luscious scruff of his beard, the long, chocolate brown hair held back from his face by a well-worn baseball cap, the tiny dip in the bridge of his nose that was just begging her to run her finger from there to the junction of his eyebrows and back until his lashes fluttered down and brushed the back of her hand, the absentminded distraction in his eyes - and she felt herself smile, completely smitten.
"Wouldn’t have pegged you for the type at all. See?" She nudged him with her elbow. "I’m getting to know you better already."
He gave her a faint but sincere smile in return.
They kept walking, and eating, and slowly, in fits and starts, he opened up to her.
"I used to have three of the exact same yellow shirts, before I... before. Made up almost half my wardrobe. And for a couple of years, bow ties. My friends were always making fun of me for it, but I’d wear them wherever I could get away with them. Looking back on it, I honestly don’t know what possessed me."
Jane laughed.
"And I had really nice hair," he said almost plaintively. "Not this..." He grabbed a fistful in his gloved hand. "...cavemannish, washed up bum, barely human -"
"You don’t like your hair the way it is?" Jane asked, eyebrows shooting up.
"I... didn’t choose it."
"How can you not - how does that work? Why don’t you just get it cut, then?"
He barked out a humorless laugh. "If there’s a way to get a proper haircut without having strangers hold sharp objects up to your throat, in your blind spots, I’m all ears."
There were plenty, Jane thought. Surely a man would know that even better than she did?
"Well... how long or short do you want it, exactly? ’Cause electric trimmer attachments come in all kinds of different lengths, no scissors necessary."
This laugh bordered on hysterical. "That’s even worse."
Dodger squeezed his way between Jane and James to nudge and lick at his hand. Jane almost yelped; she’d totally forgotten the dogs were there. And from the looks of it, so had James.
They fell into something of a routine. Several times a week, they would meet, sometimes for just ten minutes in the park, sometimes for however long Jane’s workload and other social obligations allowed. Searching for Loki proved close to futile, but Bucky kept it up and even allowed it to interfere with seeing Jane from time to time just to keep up the appearance that he, too, had something resembling a life. He tried to make sure their meetings and movements did not become too predictable and was thankful that Jane did not mind his wholesale disruption of her and Thor’s routine.
Sometimes they just walked and talked, and sometimes they went to see a movie, or the sights of the city. "It’s amazing how much more you suddenly see of a place you’ve lived for years once you have someone to see it with you," Jane said after an afternoon of mocking modern art and pointing out all the barely disguised pornography in the classical section at the Met. Bucky had kept his left hand in his pocket and slipped the glove off the other. They’d held hands.
Bucky bought a deck of cards and cheated mercilessly; Jane brought a variety of board games and failed to teach him half the rules until pointing them out conveniently let her win. They played in diners and at stone tables in the park, Jane bundled up endearingly in her long, puffy coat and huge scarf while Bucky layered on another piece of clothing every time the temperature dropped further.
They never made plans more than a day or two ahead, and only ever face-to-face. Neither of them suggested visiting each other’s apartments. Bucky couldn’t see a way to ask her why she didn’t that didn’t carry the risk of making her change her mind and want to see his place, so he let it be.
Jane hit a wall in her current research project and two out of her three assistants and coworkers were apparently insufferable in one way or another. Bucky put his own attempts at charting the scope and gradations of his guilt on hold in favor of the history of the space program for one day and realized more than a week later that he was reading about the cure for polio and newly discovered species of frogs and an arrogant little twerp called Justin Bieber, but hadn’t thought of the SHIELD data dump in days.
He hadn’t had a nightmare in almost as long, either. Unless he counted the one where he tried to furnish his apartment, had to assemble all the hideously expensive furniture from unlabelled pieces the size of his thumb, and kept having it all collapse under his weight once he tried to use it.
And through it all, Bucky steadfastly ignored Steve.
He ignored Steve even though everything he told Jane about himself and his life was a barely edited memory of their life before, and every one he spoke of aloud brought three new ones to the surface. He ignored Steve even though he started making out increasingly clear outlines between things he remembered and things he didn’t, things that stubbornly refused to return and which only Steve now knew. He ignored Steve even though, while he may have quieted considerably after Bucky’s outburst, his devotion never wavered, and he didn’t need a human voice or face to show Bucky how the stories about their childhood made him feel. He ignored Steve even though an ever-growing part of him looked at the dog and missed the man like a physical ache.
He ignored Steve because the rest of him still had a very different opinion, because even the smallest and most innocuous thing could be the wrong thing that caused the dam to break and all that anger and resentment to burst back to the surface. He ignored Steve because he knew that once he stopped pretending there was nothing for them to talk about, he would only say more things he would regret.
And most of all: he did not apologize for or take back anything he’d said already. No matter how much he wanted to.
It would be better this way. All he had to do was hold out until either he found Loki or the Avengers found a cure. Then they would part ways for good, Bucky could let Jane down gently, and he’d go back to - to -
Afterwards, she couldn’t really remember what he’d said to finally make it happen; just that she’d waited long enough and knew with absolute clarity that this was what she wanted. Jane kissed James because sometimes his eyes were so soft and kind she couldn’t stand it, and they crinkled along two distinct little lines when he smiled, and he made her laugh, and he was reading up on the entire history of mankind’s reach for the stars in chronological order just to have something to talk to her about, and he was built like a bull but gentle as a kitten just the way she liked ’em, and generous, and he didn’t even realize how wonderful he was.
So she stood up on her tip-toes, pressed into the whole solid length of him, cupped the back of his neck and the small of his back, and kissed him.
When she pulled away long, mutually eager minutes later, his eyes were closed and his lips moved as if mouthing silent words.
"What?" Jane whispered.
Opening his eyes, he rested his forehead against hers and almost tentatively put his hands on her hips. "I think I -"
"You think you what?"
He opened and closed his mouth. "I think you know what."
"Probably, yeah."
"But you deserve a guy who..." James searched her eyes for a long moment, then swallowed thickly. "A guy with the guts to say it out loud."
Jane couldn’t help it: she burst out giggling.
"I swear, if you’re about to turn all insecure self-loathing martyr on me, I will take my research into bending the fabric of reality to my will and go supervillain on your ass."
James looked a little stunned.
She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. "Come home with me tonight. We don’t have to use the bed, I’ve got a great couch for snuggling on. Plus it’s warm inside."
The corner of his mouth curled up minutely. "How warm?"
"As warm as we damn well please."
"My one weakness. How could I refuse?"
On the way there, with the hand not tugging James along, Jane surreptitiously texted Darcy to get the hell out of her house and take Thor with her. And for Thor to take Mjolnir with him. And also to get rid of Tony’s guarding armor, Jane’s collection of alien souvenirs and scrapbooks she’d collected when she was still dating Thor and he took her sight-seeing, every photograph depicting an Avenger, and to put all her animal shapeshifting research in the safe.
‘r u under attack??’ Darcy texted back.
‘Worse. If any of it is still there when I get home, I’m not getting laid.’
She didn’t really want to think about that conversation yet. James, somewhat to her surprise, had yet to put two and two together and realize she was that Jane Foster, the one from the Convergence and the Bifrost and the Nobel and the Avengers. That hadn’t been entirely intentional, but as long as the team was still incapacitated, Loki still at large, and she the world’s leading expert on Asgardian technology i.e. their best shot at a solution, she wasn’t going to disabuse him of his ignorance if she didn’t have to. Tony had yet to retrieve his suit from her hallway closet for a reason, after all.
Darcy had been very thorough. Without the results of her methods and other actually important things to balance out the whole, it seemed Jane’s apartment was filled with nothing but chaos and her own slobbery.
"It’s, um," she said with a fake little laugh, kicking some laundry under the couch. "Usually I know I’ll be having guests over beforehand."
"It makes me feel a lot better about my own apartment," James joked. "Where’s the dog?"
"Darcy borrowed him. You want something to drink? A snack? Wait, don’t answer that - I’m not sure I have anything."
While Jane went through her kitchen cabinets, James first took in her space in that soldier’s way she’d come to recognize from Thor and some of the other Avengers and hanger-ons, and only then took off his shoes and coat.
"It is nice and warm in here," he said, as if it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him.
"I have a present for you," Jane said after a moment of deliberation. She urged him to get comfortable while she went into her bedroom, and came back with her hands behind her back. "I was gonna save this for the one month anniversary of our meeting, but... close enough, right?"
She held it out to him with a fiendish glint in her eyes.
"You said you liked the color, but I never see you wear it."
Slack-jawed and wide-eyed, James took her gifts and unfolded them. It was a short-sleeved t-shirt, a button-up shirt, and a cable-knit sweater, all an eye-searingly bright canary yellow. The tee and sweater had one big white banana on the chest and back and the button-up was covered in a pattern of little white bananas all over. James ran the fingers of his ‘good’ right hand, without the burn damage he was so self-conscious about, over the fabric. He started laughing.
"So you like it?" Jane asked, grinning.
"I love it," he said. Touching the banana on the t-shirt, he started laughing even harder, until he collapsed in a shaking heap on her couch, his hand pressed over his eyes.
She’d never seen him like this before. She hoped they could make it a habit.
"Good. I thought you’d like bananas."
"Oh no, I hate bananas," he corrected her, hiccuping a little. "So much. They taste like deceit and disappointment. I have no idea why that makes this even better, but it does."
"That works too," Jane said easily. "I hope they fit. Wanna try them on?"
He changed in her bedroom and showed his new clothes off with a lot of mirth but all the grace of a rake, and kept his own grey zip-up hoodie on over the t-shirt. The complete lack of skin was a little disappointing, but his eyes had practically begged her not to push when she first brought up the glove thing, so she stuck to a wolf whistle and saved further cajoling for later. Everything in its right time.
"Nailed it," she declared, and kissed him again. The button-up, tucked into his jeans for extra effect, perfectly accentuated the width of his shoulders, and the dip of his back, and the size of his arms, and his thighs too come to think of it, and god she could jump him right here and now, clownish banana shirt and all.
Eventually he put the sweater on over his own black Henley, and they ordered pizza. Jane didn’t think James saw much of the movie they watched, though. When he wasn’t sneaking her glances filled with wonder and barely concealed adoration, his thoughts seemed a million miles away.
When he got home, he sat in his pile of blankets in his pitch-black apartment, his back pressed to the blazing radiator, lost in thought.
He laid out the facts, as he had countless times before:
- What had happened to the world because he didn’t die when he was supposed to, could never be undone.
- He was out now, but Hydra was not gone.
- Hydra would never be gone.
- He was never going to forgive himself for what the ‘Winter Soldier’ had done.
But this time, he put opposite it:
- His name was James Buchanan Barnes, and he was a free man.
- He hadn’t deserved any of what happened to him.
- He didn’t want to go back to being lonely and miserable.
Bucky didn’t sleep that night.
At 05:02, he set his phone on the floor in flashlight mode. He stood and turned to the windows. His fingers shook as he went to work.
"Steve?" he whispered some time later, stilling the tremors by laying his hand on Steve’s head. Steve blinked quickly into wakefulness, ears perking and eyes widening. "I’m gonna need your help with something today, okay?"
After breakfast, they geared up and went out. He bought a packet of razorblades and as many clothes as he could stuff into his backpack. They took a train to the nearest Ikea and arranged for his purchases to be delivered to his address. He didn’t skimp on the furniture either. One thing he was willing to hand to Hydra: once you knew where to look and who to shoot, they had excellent retirement and inheritance packages.
And then they visited a barbershop run by a young lady combat veteran. Steve pulled Bucky the last few feet across the threshold and pressed heavily into his knee the whole time he was in the barber chair, staring over Bucky’s shoulder and ready to tear the hairdresser’s throat out the moment she made one wrong move with the scissors, or suddenly whipped out a syringe or electric charge device, or tore her face off, or the chair spontaneously grew restraints, or -
She was real considerate about the whole thing. That did make Bucky feel a little better as he fumbled through the adrenaline crash back at his apartment until he had to give up on assembling his brand new wardrobe and just clutch at Steve and breathe into his neck for a while. This gave Steve the opportunity to finally lick Bucky’s ear to his heart’s content, but he figured they both deserved that.
We’ll get you back in shape, pal, he thought, running the fingers of his right hand through his old friend’s fur. We’ll get the both of us back in shape.
The next evening, Bucky Barnes showed up on Jane’s doorstep looking like someone he might actually enjoy being.
"- come on. Look, I know you’re supportive of my career and the advancement of the human race and everything, but Asgardian magic requires resources we simply have no access to at this point in our development, and I’m not gonna get another Nobel Prize anytime soon for cracking the tech of a civilization we’re trying to build friendly ties with. Historically, taking things you haven’t been freely offered hasn’t worked out so well for us. It would s - cough -"
She took a gulp of her honey with tea.
"- send all the wrong messages, you know?"
Jane did not, in fact, know. This was Darcy’s area of expertise. Jane was just bluffing. Jane was, at this point, talking entirely out of her ass. Jane was at her wit’s end, out of ideas, out of options, and out of patience most of all. Jane had been talking at the ceiling for two fucking hours straight after weeks of futile attempts at cracking this mystery and Asgard still wouldn’t budge, which meant one of three things.
One: the whole situation down here on Earth was so trivial she had been making a fool of herself for two fucking hours straight and Heimdall was laughing himself blue in the face from on high.
Two: Asgard was under attack and the whole universe could be fucked without them even knowing it.
Or three: like Thor when it came to doing anything for the Avengers that looked remotely like giving orders instead of following them, Frigga was invoking a selectively overzealous Prime Directive over this mess for shits and giggles. Which would mean - and the realization hit Jane like a ton of bricks - that the ‘magic’ Loki had used was neither of Asgardian nor of any other extraterrestrial origin.
"Son of a bitch," she said.
Chewing on the biggest dog bone she and James had been able to find, Thor wagged his tail at her.
"That son of a bitch," she said ten minutes later, having double-checked all her data. "Not you, Frigga."
She sat back in her chair and let this change of perspective cascade through her thoughts like falling dominos.
A lot of alien magic was, by definition, so advanced that even Jane’s attempts at affecting it were like banging on an old television to get the static to clear up. She could deduce what was happening on the physics level, but Earth technology simply wasn’t advanced enough yet for the how, let alone reproducing that how. That’s why trying to mine the ‘Space’ Infinity Stone had given them ray guns and an invasion, their attempt at slotting the ‘Mind’ Stone into the most advanced digital framework on the planet built by the greatest engineering mind of the century promptly went Skynet on their asses, and SHIELD-Hydra had taken an artificially intelligent, fuel-free furnace armor that could be telepathically controlled from the other end of the galaxy, stripped it of everything that made it incredible, and turned it into a laser bazooka. Somehow, almost being blown up by the original made Jane no less bitter about stumbling across that little detail on the Insight Day wiki.
Point being: all this time, Jane had been looking for a hammer to smash a lock too intricate to pick - while what she was dealing with was actually a knot. Or, more specifically, she’d been trying to apply physics to a biological problem.
She grabbed her phone and dialed up Culver University.
"Hey, Betty? It’s Jane. I need your help with something."
"Oh, hi. What can I do for you? Is this about the... ‘dog’ thing?"
"Yeah. I’ve been looking at this all wrong, Betty. I’m gonna send you some blood samples. Ten bucks says the magic was only a small part of it and the real key is a mutagen. As in, an actual physical substance."
"You mean -"
"Manmade. Human made."
"Oh my god."
"My thoughts exactly."
Next, Tony:
"What kind of store had Loki visited before he dropped his disguise?"
"Uh, I think it was..."
"A Petsmart, boss," FRIDAY supplied.
"Right, what she said."
"Shit. Wait, seriously? A Petsmart?"
"Why? Did you find something?"
"I have reason to believe there might be illegal biological experiments being conducted in that establishment, or at least the products of it being sold, and that’s why Loki came there."
"Oh. You’re right. Shit. FRIDAY, get me the chief of police. And the Queen Mother Bee. This calls for some heavy-duty shrinking and entering."
The rest of the day passed in a flurry of activity. Tony, Janet and Betty kept Jane informed of their findings and developments, and Jane’s own research progressed by leaps and bounds now that she’d finally found the missing link. All Loki’s magic had really contributed was a metaphorical jumper cable and the sorcerous imagination and will necessary to choose such a symbolic new shape for each Avenger. Two could play that game. Jane didn’t even have to be a sorceress for it. A little mutagen, a little of the Avengers’ original DNA, a little of the right zap!, and they’d have the gang right back to normal.
An awl, not a hammer.
She slept fitfully, ate a cup of coffee for breakfast, and went right back to work and did not stop until suddenly, the doorbell rang. Jane jolted in surprise, knocking the half-empty Tupperware container of lasagna Thor had microwaved for her off of her desk.
"Aw, crap," she grumbled, standing and stepping on the bra she only now remembered she wasn’t wearing. Stretching away the worst of her stiffness, she stumbled out into the hallway. "The hell do they want from me at a time like this anyway."
She opened the door.
"Hi."
Jane blinked. "Uh. Can I... help you?"
The stranger furrowed his brow and twisted his mouth, and suddenly Jane’s brain clicked into place.
"James?"
"Hi," he repeated, grinning wryly.
"Oh my god. I almost didn’t..."
It was James alright, but not like she’d ever imagined him. He’d shaved off his beard, for starters. In spite of all conscious knowledge and prior experience, Jane was astounded by how much younger and softer that made him look. He might even be younger than her. He had a cleft in his chin she’d never noticed before. His mouth looked somehow more expressive. And good lord, the difference the short-cropped hair made. A pale blue checkered button-down she’d never seen before under a leather jacket that looked brand new...
"Is this how you normally look?" Jane found herself saying.
"It’s been a while," he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets self-consciously. "But yeah. More or less."
"It’s a good look."
James smiled, and it looked almost relieved.
Jane shook off her little stab of disappointment at the loss of the Viking warrior look. She had known he wasn’t fond of it himself all along. She’d get used to the change.
"Who knew you’d clean up so nice," she said with a smile, and grabbed his hand to draw him out of the cold and close the door to it behind him. "Wow."
He gave a little laugh and kissed her cheek. "Go easy on me, I feel exposed enough as it is with all this wind and sun on my face."
Thor’s nails clicked against the floor, and he stuck his head around the living room door.
"Look Thor, it’s James."
"Hey, big guy."
"Wuf?" Thor said, looking pleasantly surprised.
"Sorry pal, I left Dodger at home this time," James said.
"Woof!" Thor came up to them, tail wagging, allowed James to ruffle his fur for a moment, and nodded in approval. "Woof."
Jane drew his head toward her to kiss his whiskered cheek, whispered "close my files and laptop" in his ear, and she and James watched him stroll off together. Only when her ex turned alien dog was out of sight did Jane turn her attention back to James.
"So. Not that you weren’t a handsome devil before, but what brought on the make-over?"
"Sometimes..." He linked the fingers of their other hands too and looked her in the eye very earnestly. "Sometimes it’s hard to remember I have options. Thank you for reminding me. Would you like to go dancing?"
Jane’s brain came to a screeching halt. "What?"
"Dancing. To music. With steps."
"I - uh -"
"It’s fine if you don’t know how! I’m roughly fifty years out of practice myself. But I found this little place that offers lessons, so..."
He looked at her expectantly.
But my work! her mind cried.
But your hot boyfriend, her loins whispered. Yes, he’s your boyfriend now. It’s official. And dancing is really intimate when you want it to be. And he smells so good. Are you ovulating? Are you overworked? Is the new look just that hot? Who even knows.
"I. Uh."
"Woof!" Thor said, sticking his head into the hallway again. ‘Woof’ clearly meaning ‘SAY YES’.
"Um."
He growled and came toward them. "Woof. Woof woof wuffle woof."
He took her coat from the coat rack with his teeth and pushed it into her arms. If she tried to go back to work he would probably sit on her stuff. Or on her directly, come to think of it.
She was way ahead of the others, she supposed. She couldn’t get all that much more done until she heard back from Betty or Tony, or Janet and the police investigators.
"Can’t argue with that," Jane laughed. "Just to warn you though, I’ve been told I have two left feet plus a phantom third. Is there a dress code? I should probably freshen up before we leave either way. I made a major breakthrough in my work today. I can’t talk about the details yet, but it’s amazing and I’m gonna talk you ear off about it in all kinds of roundabout ways on our way there."
"Wow," James said, looking at Thor with wide eyes. "Thanks."
Part 3: http://omnicat.livejournal.com/211046.html