Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It was assumed, by congresspeople, senators, lawyers, businesspersons, teammates, and close personal friends, that Bucky Barnes did not read his emails. They complained about it at length, usually to each other but sometimes to his face, that the result was him missing out on meetings, opportunities, and key information.

Bucky Barnes read his emails. He read all of his emails. He found the little red icon that indicated an unread email personally offensive, and was compelled to clear it at his earliest convenience. Usually late at night when people who got tired and/or didn’t have nightmares were asleep.

Bucky read his emails, committed the information to memory, and then declined both responding and attending whatever meeting or directive had been launched at him.

It was easier to let people believe that he was technologically ignorant than to explain that he just couldn’t be fucked attending another press event that would take up half the day with questions he had already answered or didn’t want to answer. Nevermind that this one came with photographers and a four page spread. There was no fucking shot he was sitting through that. He’d mostly gotten used to having his picture taken during his campaign and in the months that followed, but he refused to pose. The suggestion that he might was ridiculous.

He would’ve been fine trashing the email thread and pretending that he had no idea it was happening, except Alexei had agreed to it. And John. And while John could mostly be counted on not to say anything outrageously stupid, Alexei couldn’t be.

It wasn’t that Bucky didn’t trust him, because he did. And it wasn’t that Bucky felt responsible for him, because he didn’t. It just felt a little irresponsible to not at least check in and make sure the man wasn’t going to pour gasoline on the last dredges of their public favour and light it on fire.

The shoot was being held in the tower on the forty-second floor between two and four PM. John was scheduled to go first and would give Bucky relentless shit if he saw him, so Bucky waited until John was gone and Alexei was well into power-posing before he slipped through the doors.

For a roomful of people whose jobs it was to commit superheroes to film, they were all surprisingly unobservant. Nobody glanced at him twice as he edged along the wall to lurk in the relative darkness at the back of the room. He supposed there was a reason they usually picked Alexei to run their diversions. The man’s poses were as eye-catching as they were borderline indecent.

The photographer, a harassed looking blond man, kept trying his best to direct in his French accented voice and kept failing. Bucky wondered at what point he would be having a full-fledged breakdown and if it would make it into the photo captions.

“Sorry,” A woman edged past him, not very close but close enough, and eyed the table of snacks. She scooped several mini-donuts onto her fingers like ill-fitting rings and shoved the first in her mouth. Then she glanced back at Bucky.

She was pale and slender, dressed in black trousers and something that resembled a buttoned suit-vest. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail to surprising effect, her pointed chin and sharp nose highlighted dramatically despite her chewing. Her grey eyes roved over him. She was pretty, he thought. She was also, worryingly, in possession of a very professional looking camera.

“Congressman,” She greeted. She had a pleasant, friendly voice and was speaking low enough that nobody else took notice, “I mean Sergeant. Mr. Barnes?” She tipped her head to the side, “Sorry, what are people calling you these days?”

All of the above and he didn’t really give a shit as long as they weren’t calling him ‘soldier’, “Bucky.”

”Bucky,” She grinned, lifted her hand a little like she was going to offer hers, remembered they were both full, and gestured vaguely to herself instead, “Nicola North.”

”Nice to meet you,” That remained to be seen, actually, but he’d been raised right. He tipped his head toward Alexei who had his foot up on a metal box and was gesturing wildly up at the lights, “Shouldn’t you be over there?”

”Oh, no.” She shook her head and hefted her camera up toward her shoulder, “I’m assisting today and I do my very best assisting right here. By the snacks.”

Bucky raised his eyebrows, “So you assist by,” He chewed on the thought, positive it was rude, then powered through when she took a delicate bite of the donut on her middle finger, “Doing nothing?

“Yeah,” She answered, “Unless Francois has a stroke. Which is looking more likely than it was forty-five minutes ago.”

Francois was the photographer. Bucky knew because he had read the email. The man did indeed look dangerously close to hysteria, “How likely is it they’d pull the article if he did?”

”Not at all likely,” Nicola asserted.

Bucky frowned.

”Do you care if they run it or not?” She took another bite and said around it, “You aren’t even in it.”

He eyed her camera skeptically.

Nicola turned to set it on the table next to an arrangement of water bottles and held her, now empty, hands up in surrender, “Don’t worry. I heard you declined participating,” Technically Bucky hadn’t declined. He hadn’t responded to the emails, there was a difference, “And despite how much it would piss Francois off if I got a shot and he didn’t, I don’t shoot without consent.”

His mouth twitched up, despite himself, at her phrasing. He only shot without consent but he supposed the tools they did it with were very different, “Not gonna use me for a leg up, then?”

”Nope,” She glanced toward the three ring circus taking place twenty feet to her left, “I actually mostly shoot for restaurant reviews. Food, buildings, chefs. Between you and me, celebrity shoots are terrible and celebrity photographers are worse. I’d hate to make this my everyday.”

”Celebrity,” He let the word drag out of his mouth and tasted his own scorn, “Is that what you think about us?”

Nicola grinned widely, turning to pin the full force of it on him, “That’s what everyone thinks about you. Do anything well enough eventually you reach celebrity status.”

That was upsetting news to Bucky but he wasn’t sure how to express as much. Her smile hitched a little higher on the right than the left. He liked it. It spurred him to continue the conversation that ordinarily he would’ve extricated himself from, “What would your boss say if they knew you let me get away?” He gestured toward Francois’ back.

She shrugged, “I’m used to shooting food. It doesn’t run away. Also,” She followed his gesture, pointing severely toward Francois, “I cannot express firmly enough that he is not my boss.”

That was interesting, “You said you were assisting him.”

”Technically,” She conceded, “But I work for the Times and he was contracted by the Avengers press team.”

As content as he was for people to think otherwise, Bucky liked to know what was going on around him. He liked knowing how things worked. He often filled his free hours with research about politics, technology, pop culture. Anything that might help him to navigate the world without looking like a hundred year old idiot, “What’s that mean?”

Nicola laid a hand on her chest and he noted the thin gold chain under her palm, “Well the Times secured the interview and provided the journalist. Ordinarily my colleague Lito would take the photos to go with it, but someone in your PR division either doesn’t like Lito’s work or wanted some extra control over the final product. They hired Francois,” She gestured at the photographer who had a fistful of his own hair, “I’m really only here so my boss can say we had equal input.”

Bucky filed the information away. That the team look a certain way was exactly the kind of thing Valentina might concern herself with, “So where’s this Lito guy?”

”No idea. Taking pictures of a senator or a Knick or something? He,” She lowered her voice in a dramatic and certainly terrible impression of a man he’d never met, “Doesn’t assist.”

Bucky had never heard of someone refer to a singular member of the New York Knicks that way. He felt his mouth twist into something resembling a smile against his will, “You don’t mind though?”

”No. I get paid the same either way,” She reached out and snagged another mini donut on her pinky, “And the snacks are great.”

“Quite the work ethic you’ve got there,” The teasing statement was out of his mouth before he could rein it back in.

Nicola snorted a laugh around the bite she’d taken, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. It was a horrible, unladylike sound, and Bucky’s smile grew, “There is a reason I took the restaurant beat Bucky. You gotta think of the job perks!”

“Sure,” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jeans, “What are the perks on this one?”

Her reply was quick and easy, “I think it’s this conversation.”

The words zipped through his chest like they had a static charge. He remembered being eighteen, dressed in a suit at a dance hall, and asking a dame to dance. He blinked the mental picture away and wasn’t sure why he’d conjured it to begin with,

”Nicola!” It was more of a squawk than a call, the photographer in front of Alexei clearly having reached some sort of limit. He shoved his camera toward a lingering assistant, “Nicola, where did you go?”

”Shit,” Nicola turned to snag her camera from the table and ditch her last, half-eaten donut. She shot him one last smile, “Nice meeting you, Bucky.”

”You too,” He replied, but she was already jogging across the room.

When she drew up to the photographer the man wailed, “Make him see sense! These poses! Sont ridicules!”

”Sure, sure,” Nicola nodded, hopping a handful of poorly placed wires onto the white drape they were shooting against, “Hi Mr. Shostakov, I’m Nicki,” She offered Alexei her hand and Bucky was, for one very brief second, jealous.

“Nikita!” Alexei boomed, gripping her hand with both of his, “A pleasure. You also take photos?” He dropped her hand to gesture at the camera she was holding, “Perhaps you have more vision than the short man.”

Francois covered his mouth with both hands, which did very little to muffle the high screech that escaped it.

”Oh yeah, Frankie’s seriously lacking in vision,” She muttered conspiratorially so that those not possessed of superhuman hearing, couldn’t, “But I totally get what you’re going for.”

”Aha!” Alexei beamed, “Then you understand we must display strength in all our undertakings!”

Bucky wasn’t sure strength was exactly what he’d been portraying, but Nicola nodded seriously, “Absolutely. Strength, stability, cunning,” Bucky was sure she was just listing random adjectives, “See, thing is, with this article specifically, we’re kind of going for a,” She trailed off, then snapped her fingers and continued, “Lover not a fighter, vibe. You know? Something lowkey. Covert. Sexy.”

Again, she was just listing random adjectives, and Bucky fucking hated photoshoots, but it was starting to sound pretty good. Alexei seemed to agree, he was nodding intensely, “Like a Widow’s primanka.”

Bucky winced but Nicola nodded, regardless of whether she knew the word or not, “Totally. So I think the best way to go about it is if you sit here,” She wrapped a hand around Alexei’s bicep to steer him onto the metal box and Bucky was jealous again, “That’s great. Just relax and look at me while I fire off a few test shots,” She backed up two steps, then stepped forward and muttered a low, “Sorry,” as she adjusted the right panel of his jacket.

Alexei sat very straight, but seemed content not to launch into a new set of ridiculous poses while Nicola hopped the wires again, crouched, and hefted her camera. Bucky could see her fingers move on the lens but she didn’t hit the shutter button, “So, you fight crime with your daughter, right?”

Alexei beamed, “Yes! Yelena is a fierce fighter. Truly gifted in the killing arts.”

Bucky winced again, but nobody seemed to be writing the statement down so maybe it was alright. Nicola shifted forward a little, “You sound really proud.”

“Of course!” Alexei thumped his closed fist over his chest above his heart, “Is a father’s job to be proud of his girls. Your papa must surely express pride of your work,” He waved a hand at the lights over his head.

Nicola huffed and edged forward another handful of inches, “Yeah, no. I don’t think so.”

Alexei frowned. For a second he was quiet, then he leant forward a little, resting his elbows on his knees to survey her seriously, “Why you are not thinking so?”

”Well, I haven’t heard from him in,” She tipped the camera in her hands to check the watch on her left wrist, “Nine years.” She shrugged and let her camera shift back into place.

“Ah,” Alexei shrank a little. He didn’t seem concerned with the camera anymore, or anyone else in the room. He looked at Nicola, “I made that same mistake. My life’s biggest regret. I was afraid that my girls would not want to see me. That they would be,” He lowered his voice, "Embarrassed. But I am their papa. It was my job to be brave and I failed. This is not their fault." He shifted, straightened out his shoulders and draped his left hand over his right, “If your papa called, would you speak with him?”

The room was huge, full of a dozen people including a hyperventilating photographer. But it felt small. Intimate. Like the conversation taking place between the two of them was private and Bucky was intruding somehow.

Nicola lifted her head and locked eyes with Alexei, “Yes.”

The shutter clicked.

Bucky didn’t stay. He didn’t want to hear how the rest of the conversation went, and he really didn’t want to be spotted when the press team was done with Alexei. He went back to his room on the ninety-third floor. He didn’t think about the pretty photographer. He didn’t think about the conversation with her that had made him smile, and he didn’t think of her conversation with Alexei.

He was pretty good at recognizing when a person was putting on a show. When they were manipulating the person across from them to get at what they wanted. Well Nicola had done that, with all the ease of a woman used to putting others in their place, but the whole time she’d been working at it she had seemed genuine. Like everything that she’d said was true.

Except the shit about the vibe of the shoot. That she’d pulled out of the air.

When the article was published the following week he scrolled past the photos of John and skimmed the writing to ensure there was no mention of ‘the killing arts’. There were three photos of Alexei. Two were ridiculous. Poses he was sure the man had pulled out while he’d been at the back of the room distracted by a woman wearing a donut as a ring.

The last he’d seen already.

He might’ve asked Alexei about it. How he felt about the photo, and the woman who had taken it. What his impression of her had been.

But of course, Bucky didn’t read his emails, so he didn’t know about the article, or the shoot, or the photo. He pretended not to know about the woman too.

Chapter Text

Bob was beginning to think that he’d made a mistake.

It had seemed like such a simple plan before he’d left the tower. Like the kind of thing he could actually manage to do, and that would have a measurable effect. It had seemed easy. His therapist had approved.

Of course most things seemed easy in the safety of the tower. Before he stepped foot on the pavement and all the security of knowing his friends were just a few doors down evaporated.

He had grown up in New York. It wasn’t the noise or the crowds that bothered him. Nobody ever recognized him as the black shadow that had plunged everyone into a nightmare realm for a little over three and a half hours either, so it was pretty easy to make his way a few blocks down the street.

It was the other things. The little things. The things he hadn’t considered until he was already out of the building and it was too late to go back.

Like the fact that a public class would be attended by other people. People who might talk to him, and would definitely find him weird if they did. He didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. He agonized over the thought the whole last block to the studio, then agonized over it a little more before he forced himself through the doors.

The yoga studio was plain brick on the outside, and whitewashed on the inside. The floors were a little squashy, and the windows were set high and frosted, bathing the room in soft late morning light. It smelled like jasmine. There was soothing instrumental music playing. Overall, it was an extremely calming space.

Bob’s anxiety spiked.

He’d recognized the certainty of seeing people. He had not considered the possibility that all of the people would be women. Women in very tight yoga pants and tops with varying degrees of coverage.

It seemed obvious to Bob that he didn’t belong there. He didn’t want to disrupt the space, but he couldn’t turn around and leave either. What if the ladies thought he was only there to get a look at them in their workout gear? What if they thought he was leaving because he knew they knew he was only there to get a look at them in their workout gear?

“Hi!” A woman in pink pants floated across the floor toward him. Not the way he did but in a way that was both more graceful and more terrifying, “Bob?”

“Yeah,” He regretted registering online. It would be too fucking strange for him to leave now. He fidgeted with the hem of his long sleeve.

“So nice to have a new face!” She laid a hand on her chest, “I’m Tiffany. Do you have an intention you want to set today that I should be aware of?”

He intended to get through the class and never come back, but she didn’t need to be aware of that, “No. Nope.”

“Alrighty,” She beamed and gestured to a shelf against the wall, “You can grab a mat and set up wherever feels comfortable.”

“Okay. Thanks,” He sidestepped awkwardly and was thankful when she floated off to greet a woman in lavender. The mats on the shelf were all the same, plain cork and rolled up tightly, so he grabbed the first one his hand touched and turned to survey the room.

His first instinct was to roll out his mat in the back corner. The instructor wouldn’t be able to see him well and nobody else would be able to look at him at all. But that was a terrible idea. If he sat at the back, it would look to everyone else like he had done it on purpose to check out their asses when they went into downward dog.

Why the fuck did he think a yoga class was a good idea? He was such an idiot.

“Sorry, I think that’s my mat.”

Bob’s knee-jerk reaction was to apologize, “Sorry, I didn’t- I’m new. Sorry,” He turned to offer the woman the mat, the same cork as the rest of them, and realized that his apology didn’t make any sense.

The woman was grinning at him. She was close to his own age if he had to guess. She had her long hair pulled up in a messy bun and was wearing similar leggings to the rest of the ladies present but in black. Her tshirt had a Rampage graphic, a hole in the collar, and had been cut in half, “I was joking,” She clarified, “Sorry. For real this time.”

“Oh. That’s,” He reached for an adjective, “Funny.”

“I don’t think it was, or you would’ve smiled, but thanks,” She pulled a different, identical mat off the shelf in front of them, “Been to a class here before?”

She started across the room but she kept her head turned to look at him so he followed out of instinct, doing his level best to keep his feet from the yoga mats already set up in loose rows and his eyes off the other ladies and their perfectly arranged hair, “No. I heard it’s good for you. Like, mental health- uh, wise?” A beat late he realized he was essentially admitting to being unstable and snapped his mouth shut.

The woman did not choose a spot in the two existing rows and didn’t start a new third row. She flicked her mat out against a side wall perpendicular to the rest of them and bent to straighten it, “Oh yeah, it’s great. Tiff’s a monster though. How’s your core strength?”

That was a worrying statement, “Fine. Good. I think,” He’d never done yoga in his life but he could crush a cinderblock with one hand so he was pretty sure he could handle it.

The woman spun and lowered herself to sit cross-legged. She squinted up at him for a second, “You seem kind of nervous.”

Nervous was an understatement. He felt like his heart was trying to break out of his chest. If he could still sweat, he would’ve soaked through his tshirt already, “A little.”

The woman nodded, “It’s really cool that you came. It’s hard to try new things by yourself. When I started coming I made my coworker come with me ‘cause I was too chicken to do it alone.”

Bob blinked down at her. He hadn’t considered that attending the class might have been hard for other people too. He felt mildly soothed.

“I’m Nicki, by the way,” She offered him another smile.

“Bob.”

“Bob,” She repeated. Then gestured to the empty floor space beside her, “Do you wanna join me?”

Bob could remember the last time he’d been invited to join someone. It had been a big deal. He nodded, “Yeah, thanks,” He did his best to mimic the flick she’d done with her mat and then straightened it when he failed. He lowered himself to sit, “Cool shirt by the way.”

Nicki let go of her ankle and slapped her hand over her chest, “You know Rampage?”

“Yeah, I used to play it all the time with my cousin,” All the way back when he was a kid avoiding going home. They’d spend hours in front of the TV until his aunt got home and sent him on his way, positive his dad would want him home safe before dinner.

“I’m totally a Ralph,” She looked down at her shirt and poked the werewolf, “If I were to get crazy mutant powers, it would definitely be from eating a street hotdog.”

Bob considered that. He supposed there was no harm in saying, “I’m more of a George. Experimental vitamins. Seems like an easy fix, y’know?” Nevermind that it wasn’t. If anything the experimental vitamins were almost worse than the meth had been.

Nicki looked delighted, “Totally! If I could take a vitamin and never have to exercise again, I’d do it.” It was nice to have the worst decision in history validated, even if she didn’t really get it, “Can I give you a tip? For the class?”

“Sure,” Bob was feeling a little better about the whole thing but he was willing to take it if it would help.

“Okay, number one, this spot,” She gestured along the wall where they were seated, “The best. If you sit in the rows at some point it feels like everyone’s looking at you. Over here? Not a problem”

“Smart,” He agreed, “I don’t really like when people,” He glanced across the rows of put-together ladies, “Look at me.”

“It’s kind of the worst. Number two,” She lowered her voice dramatically and tipped her head in a subtle way that would’ve made Bucky proud, “Tiffany?”

Bob followed her signal to look at the perky young woman who was bent perfectly in half, her blond ponytail trailing the mat at her feet. She had her face turned and was talking to another woman with a sleek bun, totally unbothered by the posture. Bob was pretty sure he’d seen Yelena do something similar once.

“You will die if you try to do everything she does,” They both watched her roll into a perfectly parallel split. Nicki muttered lowly, “I’m pretty sure she used to be some kind of secret agent.”

Bob wondered if that could be true and decided it seemed unlikely, “She’s… perky.”

“Yeah, it kind of lulls you into a false sense of security. When she offers the adaptation, there is no shame in taking it. I’ve got about three chatarangas in me and after that it’s more of a flop.”

He grinned. He really didn’t think he was going to have that kind of problem with the class, but it was comforting to hear that it would be okay if he did.

Tiffany rolled to her feet and clapped her hands together, “Alright, lets get started!”

It was a little more energy than Bob had expected. He glanced at Nicki. She mouthed, ‘good luck’ in reply.

The problem with the class, Bob found quickly, wasn’t that he didn’t have the strength to follow the movements. It was that he didn’t know, at any given time, what he was supposed to be doing. He tried his hardest to follow Tiffany and found about half the time that his copy of the pose was a little off. Or more than a little off.

But Nicki was right. Despite their turning around on their mats, nobody was ever facing him, and he didn’t feel like they were watching. As often as he made a mistake, Nicki struggled to hold a pose and muttered under her breath. He didn’t know how many ‘holy fuck’s usually occupied a yoga session, but probably not very many. At the end of the class period, they were directed to lie down and do something approximating meditation. It was surprisingly calming. When they finished, his heart wasn’t trying to escape from his body anymore.

“I cannot believe that you held that plank so long,” Nicki shouldered through the door ahead of him and held it so he could follow after, “I think Tiff was playing chicken with you, I thought she’d never stop.”

He fought for an explanation that might make sense, “I workout with my friends sometimes. At home.” Was that weird? He’d never lived anywhere that could accommodate a home gym before, “Our building has a gym.”

“Oh yeah? Sometimes?” Her tone was teasing. She hefted her messenger bag a little higher on her shoulder, “You didn’t even break a sweat!”

He didn’t sweat anymore. His long sleeve and shorts were bone dry, “I have a- uh, condition. It’s-” He winced at the sheer embarrassment of his own excuse, “Glandular.”

Nicki snorted a laugh, “Okay. Think you’ll come back next week?”

Bob had been rolling the question over in his mind since the savasana. The class really hadn’t been so bad. It was calming once he let himself believe that nobody was looking at him twice. And he liked Nicki. He thought maybe they could be friends. The normal kind that had never threatened to kill each other, or punched each other in the face. He didn’t have any of those, “Yeah, I think so. It was fun. Thanks. For that.”

“Cool,” She grinned, glanced once over her shoulder, then said, “So if you’re coming back I can give you the most important yoga tip I’ve got. If you want.”

Bob had found the first two helpful, “Hit me.”

“Post-class snacks. They’re key. I’ve gotta be back at work in forty-five minutes and I can’t make it through hungry, so I always hit somewhere with a guarantee of not having a line.” She hitched her thumb over her shoulder, “You wanna come?”

“Yes.” Nicki snorted another laugh, “Sorry, Did I- Did I say that way too fast?”

“Nooo,” She shook her head, still grinning, and started down the sidewalk, “You played it super cool.”

“That’s me. Cool.” He followed, tapping his pocket to make sure he still had his wallet, “I’m just really excited to know where there’s no line at noon on a Wednesday.” He wasn’t. He didn’t care what they ate, he was excited at the possibility of someone wanting to spend time with him. Genuinely. Not because he might turn into a shadow otherwise and eat the city’s shame.

“I’m giving away a trade secret here, so don’t sell it,” She twisted to point at him seriously.

“Trade secret?” He ducked around a man in a suit who was yelling into his phone in the middle of the sidewalk, “What trade?”

Nicki waved generally east, “I’m a photographer at the Times. I basically take pictures of food for a living so I know all the best places.”

That was bad news, Bob thought. Before waking up in Valentina’s incinerator, his life experiences went something like this: child with abusive parents, homeless teenager, meth-addicted young adult, lab rat. He hadn’t been a spy, or a soldier. He had trouble making tactical decisions, so when he had to, he thought about what the team might say. Bucky in particular, he thought, would hate him being friends with any kind of reporter. The man hated press. Bob knew because he’d heard it said out loud.

He resolved not to mention Nicki to the team.

“So like, fancy restaurants?” He wasn’t sure how they could get in and out of a sushi place in forty-five minutes. He wasn’t overly worried about the price. He didn’t pay rent or bills, but he did get paid. It was unclear if it was some kind of government wage or Valentina hush money, but there was a lot of it.

”Sometimes,” Nicki turned a corner and a park became visible down the road, “Sometimes they’re more casual. Mom and Pop’s, new places, food trucks. Usually I get a free meal out of it and file away the standouts, but I always ask the chef where their favourite place to eat is. I’ve found so many gems that way that nobody else knows about.”

“That’s really cool,” Bob hit the button for the crosswalk, “I’m not really working right now.”

Nicki hummed, “What did you used to do?”

He wasn’t about to tell her about the sign twirling, “Nothing much. I never really found my thing.”

They crossed the street and Nicki carried on into the park, cutting diagonally across the grass, “That’s a bummer. Do you know what you want to do?”

”Not really,” He didn’t have a ton of options. He wasn’t sure he could go off into the city in pursuit of an ordinary life but he couldn’t go on missions with the team either, “Might try this logistical thing? For my friend.” He could monitor comms and surveillance video. It wasn’t rocket science, right?

Nicki nodded, “Try anything once, right?” Bob nodded his reply and then she was pointing across the grass, “Here.”

Bob followed her finger, “That’s a hotdog cart.”

”Yes,” Her expression was deadly serious, “The best hotdog card in the city. Hands down,” She shoved her hand in her bag and dug for a second before procuring a black zippered wallet.

Bob thought there were very few meals better than a New York hotdog. He smiled, “You really are a Ralph.”

Bob and Nicki each ordered a hotdog and she insisted on paying. He didn’t argue, because altogether it cost four dollars. They sat on a bench in the shade and Nicki asked him a long series of questions about his history with Rampage specifically, and then a list of semi-obscure old video games that slowly gained modernity until they found themselves discussing Stardew Valley at length.

Bob managed to return a lot of the questions and found it felt completely natural to do so. He remembered being fifteen, before he ran away from home, and hanging out with his friend Andy. Andy had a basement couch he let Bob sleep on sometimes and the two of them together were always on the same page. They liked the same stuff, hated the same stuff, and never ran out of things to talk about.

Andy moved to Indiana and then Bob ran away from home and got hooked on drugs so it wasn’t exactly a happy ending to their friendship, but that wasn’t Andy’s fault. Or Bob’s, he didn’t think.

When Nicki checked her phone and announced with surprise that she had to get back to work, Bob waved goodbye and said he’d see her the following week.

He did see her the following week. She cussed her way through class and then asked if he wanted to get a slice of pizza.

Nicki gave him what she called the, ‘yoga class lore’. It mostly consisted of the gossip she’d heard from participants about other participants, all of whom apparently lived in penthouse apartments in the neighbourhood, were frequently on hiatus from class while their plastic surgery healed, and weren’t opposed to sharing the messy details of their marriages.

She told him about her job and always had a restaurant recommendation she said was actually worth the time involved in booking a reservation. They talked about games, and movies, and music. She hated country, which he loved, and they spent a while arguing about it on sticky bench seats in a greasy spoon diner.

Bob told her about his roommate who had never heard of cleaning a dish (Alexei), his gym partner who he thought might be trying to kill him (John), and his friend who didn’t seem to know how to work his own iPhone (Bucky).

He told his therapist that the yoga classes were helping him to feel more balanced, but he wasn’t sure how much of it actually had to do with the yoga.

Chapter Text

”It’s like she doesn’t even think she needs to loop us in!” John yanked his beret off and threw it. It caught the air, hit the edge of the couch, and slid to the floor, “What, we’re just supposed to sit around all day and wait for her to call?”

Bucky tipped his head back against the cushion and closed his eyes, “Calm down, John.”

”No, I’m not gonna calm down! We’re a team! Teammates are supposed to tell each other when they run off on level four covert ops!” He grit his teeth and yanked at the folded edges of his shield. His arms flexed with effort under his suit but the metal didn’t move.

Bucky had declined to get mission ready. He’d known that Yelena and Ava were going to run some surveillance on a high-profile tech company they were pretty sure was trying to make the next Bob, and might need backup. He knew because Yelena had asked him about it. Unlike John, he was just pretty sure they wouldn’t need help, and he didn’t mind being left at home.

Or, he hadn’t, until John had stalked into the living room all pissed off. All his shouting made the afternoon a lot less relaxing, “It’s not a level four. They’re just trying to get eyes on the scientist.”

”What do you-“ John spun to look at him, “Did they tell you that?”

Bucky didn’t answer. He was pretty sure speaking had been a mistake.

”Why did they tell you that and not me?” John gestured wildly between them with his shield, “Do they not trust me?”

He tried a distraction tactic, ”I’m pretty sure Yelena’s plan was to take a building tour in a wig.” He lifted his head to eye John, “You wanna wear a wig?”

John reached up to touch his hair. He frowned. It was common knowledge within the tower that John disliked wigs, covert ops, and taking orders from Yelena. It was why he hadn’t been invited. He wouldn’t have gone if he was.

”That’s what I thought,” Bucky directed his attention back to his tablet.

“What’re you looking at?” John’s tone was accusatory. Like he thought Bucky was monitoring mission ops from the couch.

”The news,” Bucky deadpanned. He flipped the device long enough for John to see the Times logo before turning to prop it on his leg.

John made a huffy noise. He tapped his fingers on the edge of his shield. Then he tossed it onto the couch and flopped against the cushions, “You’re so fucking old.”

”Uh-huh,” Bucky was so fucking old. He felt it every time he had to field an argument between his teammates. He scrolled slowly through the articles on his screen. It had been his habit for years to read the news every day. He used to favour the Post. Of course, nobody knew that, so they couldn’t accuse him of being weird.

He was being a little weird.

The article the Times had run featuring Alexei and John had actually been pretty good. The writing was decent and it wasn’t deliberately inflammatory in any particular direction. Then there was the picture. It had made Alexei look, for once, like the genuinely half-decent guy Bucky knew he could be. Bucky had just wanted to know what kind of person it was that had managed to make the photo happen.

He bought an online subscription to the paper and checked out their restaurant reviews. It was a genuinely idiotic strategy. The woman he’d met at the shoot wasn’t a writer. There was no insight to be gained from reading the reviews, and it was impossible to tell from a picture of a steak what the woman who had taken it was like.

It looked like a good steak. He would’ve eaten the steak.

It was still somehow more illuminating than searching up her social media had been. Her Instagram account was set to private, and she didn’t have Facebook. Or X. Or Tiktok. Or any of the other ones Yelena teased him for not understanding.

He could’ve hacked the account, but that was a bridge too far. He could’ve made an account and requested to follow her, but that was even weirder. He resigned himself to the knowledge that barring an act of God, he would not be seeing the woman again.

Of course, he told himself that, but then he kept going back and reading the reviews. He studied pictures of sushi, brie sandwiches, and Trinidadian food he didn’t know the name of. He gained no insights beyond the fact that he was hungry.

The elevator door swished open and almost in the same second John barked, “Where have you been?”

”I was, um-“ Bucky locked his tablet and twisted to get a look at Bob where he was fidgeting just inside the doorway in a pair of sweat shorts and a blue long sleeve. He hitched his thumb over his shoulder, “Out?”

”Out where?” John snapped.

Bob shrank inward a little. He picked at his sleeve, “Just out.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “Getting a bite.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“John,” A warning tone slipped into Bucky’s voice. He didn’t think Bob deserved to get snapped at because Yelena had hurt John’s feelings.

It didn’t work. John lurched to his feet and gestured wildly at Bob, “Seriously? Even Bob is keeping secrets now?”

Bob flinched, either because John was shouting or because it was true, “I’m not.”

John’s voice edged up toward a shout, “So where the fuck were you?”

“John!” Bucky snapped. He tossed his tablet aside and stood.

For a second, they were in a dangerous place. Bucky wouldn’t let John yell at Bob, and as much as John probably didn’t want to be yelling at Bob, he wouldn’t back down from Bucky. And as much as nobody wanted a supersoldier fist fight in the middle of the living room, there was a fifty fifty shot that would be where they ended up.

Bob lasted three seconds in the crackling tension before he erupted, “I was having lunch with a friend!”

John deflated instantly, “What?”

Bucky turned to get a look at Bob, eyebrows furrowed.

Bob looked extremely anxious. His shoulders were hunched and he didn’t seem to notice he was shredding the hem of his sleeve between his fingers. His eyes bounced between Bucky and John, “I was out for lunch. With my friend,” His eyes flicked up toward the roof, “Nick.”

That was a false name, and an unfortunate coincidence, Bucky thought.

“Your friend,” John repeated, his tone incredulous, “What friend? You don’t have friends.”

“I have-“ Bob stopped. Considered the statement. Started again, “I have a friend.”

John laughed. It was never a good sign when he laughed like that. Bucky held up a warning hand, “John, do not-“

But it was too late. John had been upset all morning and it was coming out sideways and in the form of raging jackassery, “Who in their right mind wants to be friends with the guy that ashed half the city?”

Bucky felt the words like a slap. He couldn’t imagine how they landed on Bob. He fixed John with an ice cold look, and thought he might not mind starting that fist fight after all.

Very quietly, Bob answered, “Nick.”

The air in the living room was suffocating. Bucky looked at John. John looked at Bob. Bob looked at his feet.

John threw up his hands, ”Great. Some random dude is gonna have more intel on this team than I do!” He might’ve recognized that he was being a dick or might not have. Either way he snatched up his shield, turned, and stalked off down the hall.

Bucky watched him go and resolved to talk to Yelena about not inviting him places. Slowly, he let the angry breath in his lungs escape, and lowered himself back onto the couch, “Sorry Bob.”

There was a long stretch of silence before Bob stepped into the living room properly and circled toward his beanbag chair, “It’s okay.”

Bucky watched him flop onto the leather with a poof and poke halfheartedly at the bulge under his arm, “It’s not okay. He’s upset about something else, he shouldn’t be taking it out on you.” Bob shrugged. Bucky didn’t like the idea that he was used to it. Not from John necessarily, but from someone else who also should have known better. He didn’t think it was outrageous that Bob had made a friend. He was happy to hear it. But, “I don’t have to tell you not to talk about missions.”

“No,” Bob kept his eyes fixed on the thread he was pulling, “We don’t talk about the team.”

Bucky nodded and considered the statement, “Does your friend know who you are?”

Bob shrank almost the same way he had when John had started barking, “No.”

Right. Bucky was familiar with that particular brand of guilt. He’d spent a lot of time feeling horrible for not telling people who he really was, or had been, and was too terrified to open his mouth. He just carried on feeling like shit. He wasn’t sure what to say to relieve some of that guilt for Bob, so he said nothing.

Bob gave up on the thread and muttered, “Nick’s really nice.”

”I’m sure,” He wasn’t really, but he thought Bob needed to hear something positive, “So where were you?” It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Bob to make good choices, but it made him itchy that the man had refused to answer the question. Bucky knew about two hundred factors that might influence a person to lie or evade providing information concerning their whereabouts, and none of them were good.

Bob winced. Quietly, like he was afraid that John would hear despite the tower’s soundproofing, he answered, “I’ve been going to a yoga class.”

That wasn’t remotely the answer Bucky had expected, ”A yoga class.”

”Yeah. Yoga’s like, these patterns of stretches?” Bob took a deep breath and swung his arms straight out and up over his head to illustrate his point.

Bucky squinted at him, “I know what yoga is.” Bruce Banner used to like to practice it to manage his anger but Ayo had called it appropriative nonsense. Bucky had never participated but he had been operating under the knowledge that within the confines of US borders it was mostly a fitness strategy for middle-aged white women. And Bob, apparently.

“Right,” Bob at least had the decency to look sheepish, “It’s supposed to be good for my,” He reached up to tap his thumb against his temple, “Mental health.”

Bucky nodded his approval, “That’s good, Bob.” The cumulative mental health within the tower was generally very poor. They were all traumatized, haunted, and guilty of murder. Some days they managed, and some days John snapped at Bob and Bucky responded by thinking about punching him in the face. Or actually punching him in the face. He thought they might all have benefited from a few more calming strategies but at the end of the day only one of them had the potential to destroy the city if they were feeling a little off.

Bob straightened up. He seemed relieved, but Bucky couldn’t have guessed why he would be, “I go on Wednesdays. I met Nick there and we started getting lunch together after.”

The routine sounded incredibly ordinary. If it was true that Bob didn’t talk about the team and it was helping keep him grounded, Bucky didn’t see the harm, “Sounds fun.” He couldn’t recall the last time he’d gotten lunch with a friend. It almost made him inclined to text Sam, but he couldn’t have another argument about the Avengers trademark, “Where’d you go?”

Bob lit up, “Oh man, there’s this hotdog cart in Bryant Park? It’s the best dog I’ve ever had. We’ve been twice.”

The best hotdog Bucky had ever eaten was at Ebbets field when he’d snuck in with Steve to see a Dodgers game. He was pretty sure he was never going to top it because it turned out that hotdogs, unlike Christmas carols and Levi’s jeans, had changed a lot in the last eighty years. But Bob had at least grown up in New York. Unlike John who had grown up in Georgia and was allowed as much of an opinion on New York culture as Alexei. Which was none, “I’ll have to check it out sometime.”

The elevator door swished open, “I cannot believe we wasted the whole day on that,” Yelena griped.

”I can,” Ava replied, “Next time, maybe apply for the internship.”

”Yeah, maybe,” The red wig Yelena had been sporting slapped onto the couch cushion beside Bucky and he eyed it with distaste as the woman hopped the back to flop at the other end, “Hi Bob.”

”Hey,” He didn’t seem bothered by the wig even though he was the one who would probably end up tidying it away, “How was the thing?”

”It was ass,” Yelena was dressed in distinctly un-Yelena clothing. She looked like she might’ve spent the day studying in a library somewhere for a pre-law exam and kicked her feet up onto the coffee table, “How was your day?”

”Fine,” Bob replied. He glanced at Bucky.

Bucky understood the look. He understood why Bob hadn’t wanted John to know about the friend, he’d proven to be an ass and would probably be worse if he heard about the yoga class. Bucky didn’t really understand why Bob didn’t want Yelena to hear about it. They were close. They told each other all kinds of mundane shit. It really did seem harmless, so he figured it wasn’t for him to worry about. He reached out and nudged Yelena’s ankle until her shoes hit the floor, “I need you to invite John next time you run an op.”

”Why?” Ava appeared on his other side and sank into the squashy leather armchair she favoured, “He hates doing recon,” She looked the exact same as usual. Bucky could appreciate the value in only ever wearing one thing, but he supposed it would be nicer if it wasn’t tied to the need to keep all one’s atoms forcibly contained.

”And he’s terrible at it,” Yelena leant forward just far enough to free the knife she had hidden at the back of her belt under her cardigan and tossed it onto the side table.

”Just,” Bucky lifted his hands in a pacifying gesture, “Invite him. Please.”

Yelena rolled her eyes, “Fine,” She studied him briefly as he ran a hand through his hair, “What did you do today?”

”Filed old mission reports,” He replied, “Read the news,” Tried to read the news. Really only managed to study a photo of a complicated looking bao bun. He kind of wished Nicola North was a worse photographer. At least then there might be the occasional reflection in a wine glass to give him some sort of extra intel.

“You are so old,” Ava muttered to the roof in tandem with Yelena’s, “So goddamn boring.”

”Uh-huh,” Bucky snatched up his tablet and rocked to his feet, “I need a nap.”

Chapter Text

“Seriously,” John held up the piece of plastic in his hand and inspected it seriously, “Who even goes to a library these days?”

Bob jogged down the steps to meet him and together they started in the general direction of the nearest subway station, “Members of the Finnish mob, I guess.”

The little library in Harlem wasn’t big or particularly nice, but it did have an old filing system that apparently made a great place to stash records if one was keeping track of their drug shipments. Which the Finnish mob was. Bob didn’t usually go on outings to stop criminal enterprises but John had invited him and he didn’t have the heart to say no. It had seemed like an olive branch.

They took the subway in plain clothes to the library, spent an hour and a half trying to decode some jenky Finnish riddles, realized they were Sami, spent another hour trying to decode them, argued about whether they should call Bucky to help, brute forced it by opening every drawer, and then signed John up for a library card.

It had been a good morning. John hadn’t been an ass nearly at all and when he wasn’t ripping into Bob he was an okay guy. They could talk about movies or play video games (although the only things John played were COD and Madden) and it actually tended to be pretty fun.

“Can we call it a mob if it’s only like, eight guys?” John pulled his wallet from his back pocket and tucked the library card into the foremost slot over his ID.

Bob thought his organizational system was whack but he didn’t say so, “I dunno. Oh,” He snapped his fingers, “I used to go to the library all the time when I was homeless.”

John shoved his wallet back in his jeans and turned to frown at Bob, “Really?”

“Yeah. Librarians don’t care if you’re a meth addict as long as you don’t fuck with the books.” He used to go, more so before the drugs, because it was warm and dry. And the librarians really didn’t care if he spent all day there as long as he didn’t try to reshelve his own books.

John shoved his hands in his pockets. He tended to walk down the middle of a sidewalk leaving Bob to awkwardly trail in his wake, but he wasn’t marching at his usual clip. They walked side by side instead, “How long were you homeless for?” He sounded almost tentative.

“Four years?” Bob answered, “But not all at the same time. I ran away from home when I was sixteen, then I had a place for a while,” He didn’t really want to think about it, “Then I didn’t.”

“That sounds really rough,” John offered.

Bob had heard that one before. It was the kind of statement people made when they didn’t really know what to say, and didn’t really know how rough it had been, “It wasn’t all bad.”

“Really?”

He considered it seriously, “No. I think it was pretty much all bad,” He’d gotten tetanus once.

John snorted, “I used to say that about growing up in Georgia.”

Bob tried to call to mind what Georgia looked like and couldn’t. He hadn’t been great at geography and then quit high school at the halfway mark, “What’s in Georgia?”

John let out a slow puff of air, “Haunted mountains. I don’t know, it was fine I guess.”

He thought that statement deserved a second pass, “Haunted mountains?”

“Bob?”

Bob swiveled automatically at the sound of his name. John did the same, straightening to his full height and letting his hand stray to his hip over his jacket as he did.

“I thought that was you!” Nicki let the door of the Chinese restaurant fall shut behind her and shot a glance over her shoulder as she strode down the sidewalk toward them. She was dressed for work in a pair of green trousers and a loose white button-down and had a backpack slung over her shoulder, “This seems like a crazy coincidence.”

Bob’s brain misfired, almost like it didn’t recognize Nicki in the context of a new neighbourhood. But it was definitely her striding their way, grinning like she was happy to see him.

“Who is that?” John muttered.

His brain restarted, and clicked into panicky overdrive. He was in trouble. Big trouble. John was about to know that he’d fibbed, which was bad, but not half as bad as Nicki knowing that he knew John Walker. What excuse could he possibly offer for knowing the former Captain America? And she would definitely ask about it which meant he would have to lie, which he was garbage at.

Regardless of how bad things were about to be, they would be worse if John got excited and shot her. Bob took half a step to put himself between John’s concealed gun, and Nicki, “Nicki! What are you doing here?”

“Nicki?” John muttered, then, sharper, “Nick?”

Nicki waved a hand back toward the restaurant she’d stepped out of, “I had a shoot. I’ve been taking pictures of dim sum for like, four hours.” She drew up in front of him and her eyes slid over his shoulder to John. Her smile slipped. She tilted her head, “Hi.”

“Hi,” John greeted. He sidestepped Bob and stuck out his hand, “John Walker.”

“Yeah,” Nicki drawled. She glanced at Bob and took John's hand to shake, “We’ve met, actually.”

“You have?” Bob asked. His heart beat quick and hard.

“We have?” John squinted at her, confused.

Nicki nodded and took her hand back, sliding it over the shoulder strap of her bag, “Yeah. I worked a Times shoot a couple months ago at Avengers tower.” John shot her a blank look, “You had this bow tie on?” She gestured to her neck.

John’s eyes went wide, “Oh. Oh no.”

Bob really wished, all of a sudden, that he got invited to press events. But nobody knew about the sixth Avenger, and he didn’t actually want to get his photo taken so that was a dumb thought. He really just wanted to see the bow tie. He wondered if Nicki had the pictures.

“It’s cool. Nobody’s ever at their best during a shoot.” She was doing an excellent job of hiding how confused she must have been. Bob felt like he was going to vomit.

John seemed to brush away his momentary embarrassment. His posture relaxed a little and he smiled at Nicki, “Except you, right?”

Bob blinked. There was something unusual about John’s tone. He turned his head to inspect the wide smile splitting his friend’s mouth.

“Except me. But I’m always at my best,” Nicki reached up and tossed her long hair over her shoulder. She grinned at Bob.

Bob was familiar with the joke. Nicki insisted that the best way to build real confidence was to project fake confidence all over the place. He had briefly considered giving her method a try, and then immediately chickened out.

“I remember you now,” John eyed her backpack, clearly recognizing it as containing camera gear, “You were assisting that French guy.” At Nicki’s nod he continued, “I can’t believe they were keeping you in the back.”

Bob frowned. What the hell was happening?

“Frankie’s intimidated by my skills.”

“I’d be intimidated by you too.”

Bob turned fully to stare at the side of John’s head.

John didn’t seem to notice. He kept looking at Nicki, “How do you know Bob?”

“We’re workout buddies,” Nicki answered easily.

“Clearly,” John replied, his eyes flicked over her figure.

Bob had been concerned about John knowing he went to yoga classes. Not because he thought it was something to be ashamed of, just because John would give him shit about it anyway. He was no longer concerned when faced with what was obviously John flirting with Nicki. John didn’t get to flirt with Nicki. John was an entire ass.

Nicki laughed, “Bob, how do-”

Oh no. There it was. She was about to ask him how he knew the former Captain America. A current Avenger. And he would have to lie, because he couldn’t tell her that it was him that had locked half of the city's citizens in a grand mind palace of shame. Had probably locked her in a mental prison too. It was definitely too much to hope for that she had been out of town at the time.

But overwhelmingly, Bob didn’t want to lie. He liked Nicki. She was his friend. The only friend he had that wasn’t a superhero professionally invested in his wellbeing. The only friend he’d made out of pure shared interest in close to fifteen years. There was no way to lie and have her believe it, he was a terrible liar. So she would know he was lying and then she wouldn’t trust him anymore.

But he couldn’t tell the truth. What would Bucky say if he gave away the team’s best kept secret to a woman who worked at a newspaper?

There was a sharp four note trill. Nicki stopped mid sentence and shoved her hand in her pocket to fish out her phone. She frowned briefly at the screen, “Shit. I have to get back to Midtown,” She typed a one-handed reply to whatever text she’d gotten and shoved her phone away, “Sorry, nice meeting you again, John. I’ll see you Wednesday, Bob?”

Bob had never gotten a lucky break before. Not one time in his life. But luck was apparently on his side. He let a relieved breath out with the words, “Yeah. See you.”

Nicki shot him one last smile, then stepped off the sidewalk to wave down a passing cab, which slowed to a stop.

“Really nice seeing you, Nicki,” John called as she slid into the back seat and shut the door behind her. They both watched the cab pull away from the curb and off down the road. Neither of them moved until it turned the corner at the end of the block and was gone from view, “That was your friend Nick?”

Bob swiveled to face him, “What were you doing?”

“Me?” John waved at Bob, “What about you?”

“Were you flirting with her?” He accused. He could think of very few things more icky than John flirting with pretty much anybody.

“Yes!” The same hand gestured down the street where the cab had disappeared, “Have you not looked at her?”

Bob didn’t know how to answer that. Of course he’d looked at her. They hung out every week. She’d worn a different tshirt every time, all of which had a vintage graphic for a game or a movie. He had thought her Titan AE shirt was particularly cool, “What do you mean?”

“Jesus,” John muttered. He clapped his hands together and pointed his fingertips at Bob, “That woman was gorgeous.”

Bob wasn’t proud of his knee-jerk response, “Ew!”

John’s responding outrage was palpable, “What do you mean, ‘ew’? She’s hot!”

Again, Bob had looked at Nicki before. He knew she was pretty, but when he thought about her, it wasn’t the first thing that came to mind. It wasn’t even the tenth thing that came to mind. Nicki was his friend, not some sort of romantic prospect. Reasonably he knew that she might be seen that way by other people, he just didn’t want one of those people to be John, “Don’t say that.”

“Why not?” A handful of people filed out of the building to their left but neither of them were inclined to get out of the way.

“Because! Just- You can’t flirt with Nicki, okay?” According to Bob’s therapist, drawing specific boundaries helped to establish safety and respect in a relationship. He had never seen it work.

“Why not?” John scoffed. He eyed Bob from his hair to his sneakers, “Do you like her?”

Bob found he really couldn’t be on the sidewalk one second longer. He turned to stride down the sidewalk toward the subway, “She’s my friend.”

John turned to follow, taking a few quick strides to catch up. He shoved his hands in his pockets and huffed, “Fine, okay, I won’t flirt with her.”

It wasn’t an apology, Bob knew better than to expect one of those, but it was pretty good all things considered. He sucked in a breath he hoped might be calming. The afternoon had only turned out to be mildly disastrous. John still didn’t know about the yoga, but he did know about Nicki and that she worked for a newspaper. Bob wasn’t sure if Bucky finding out about that would be better or worse than watching John flirt with Nicki had been.

It was a Friday, so he had five days to figure out what to tell Nicki about his knowing an Avenger. It was enough time to come up with a convincing lie, but he still wasn’t sure he could be convincing. And he still didn’t want to lie.

“Okay, seriously,” John burst suddenly, “Why is that woman hanging out with you?”

Chapter Text

Bucky was aware that he was in danger of becoming an old hermit.

He wasn’t doing it on purpose, things just seemed to be headed that direction. He’d left the tower three days before, at two in the morning, to trade bullets with a handful of bikers in a Russian bar in Queens.

Before that, it had been three days. He went to a coffee place on 43rd. It was mostly fine. The coffee was okay. But on the walk back he’d been recognized, not as an Avenger, but as a former congressman. The man who’d recognized him spent a couple minutes taking a strip off of him for his stance on tax reform. Bucky thought it was pretty fucking stupid. The man clearly didn’t know how taxes worked, and had also clearly forgotten that Bucky had spent seventy years as an assassin before his brief foray into politics.

He loved New York. He would’ve liked to spend his mornings drinking coffee somewhere quiet and his afternoons wandering the numbered streets just to see what he could find. He just fucking hated when people recognized him. Sometimes it was as a killer and they were afraid. They crossed the sidewalk or ducked out of doors to get away from him. Sometimes it was as a politician and somehow that was almost worse.

He supposed it wasn’t all bad. Sometimes people knew him as an Avenger. They would smile. Give him a thumbs up. Say hello. Even when it wasn’t awful, it didn’t necessarily mean he was any more interested in the conversation.

He just wanted to go about his day. Alone.

So most days he stayed home. He’d read the news or a book. He’d work on developing mission intel or write up reports. Sometimes he’d watch a movie with Bob. He’d do research and eat and exercise. It only felt a little bit like he was trapped in a glass prison.

What did it say about the state of his mental health that Bob was getting out more consistently than he was?

As soon as the thought slipped into his brain, he felt guilty for it. Bob was a good guy. His darker half really wasn’t his fault, and he was doing his best to keep it contained.

Bucky figured he ought to try a little harder himself.

He was dressed already, in jeans and a tshirt, but that wasn’t quite dressed enough for an outing. He pulled on a jacket made of thick dark canvas, and a pair of gloves. He didn’t usually cover up his hand anymore but it was a dead giveaway and he really didn’t want to be spoken to. He looked briefly in the mirror, then swept his hair back and put on a hat.

In theory, a hat was a pretty shitty disguise. In practice, it pulled surprising weight. Especially if he remembered to keep his head down and his hands in his pockets, which he would. It was entirely possible he could make it to Bryant park and back, and the only person who would ever know he’d been out was the hotdog vendor he intended to visit.

Sometimes he missed being an unknown fugitive.

Bucky took the private elevator to the equally private parking garage and walked to the exit that spit him out on East 42nd. The late-morning foot traffic was thin, and he followed the sidewalk west. Usually, he found that New Yorkers on a sidewalk were too busy trying to get wherever they were going to look at him twice. The danger was always when he stopped to do something.

The park wasn’t far. It only took him a few minutes to reach the east corner and cut past the library. Bucky had been pretty taken with his tablet’s ability to download any book on planet Earth but he considered briefly whether he ought to get a library card. Nobody could shout at him inside the library. No self-respecting librarian would allow shouting of any sort, and they were nearly as frightening as former assassins.

He paused on the walking path and ducked under the shade of a nearby tree to survey the park. There were thin metal tables and chairs set up around the fringes of the central grass patch, all surrounded by trees and cement pathways. There were a decent number of people scattered across all of it, none of whom he pegged as particularly suspicious. He could see the cart he was after, classic red with an umbrella, on the other side of the grass.

There was absolutely no cause for concern and Bucky still wished that parks weren’t such a tactical nightmare. Anyone could step out from behind a tree and fire off a shot toward the grass. Which wasn’t to even consider the Grace Building looming up to the north, all fifty floors of windows primed for snipers.

His neck itched. It really had been too long since he left the tower to do something normal. He was thinking about snipers when he should have been halfway across the grass. He shook aside the thought.

Then he turned and rounded the perimeter of the park under the treeline.

The park was only four acres to begin with, he reasoned, the detour only added eighty seconds. It was nice. He liked the trees.

He approached the cart from the west side, and the vendor didn’t look at him twice when he ordered. He squeezed mustard onto his hotdog and retreated a few meters to a bench that he reasoned was as defensibly sound as he was going to get. It put a few tall shrubs and a railing at his back that anyone who wanted to get at him would need to jump.

He glanced over his shoulder, wondering how likely that would be, and his train of thought came to a screeching halt.

Eight feet away, passing right by him heading west, was Nicola North.

Bucky had been pretty serious about resigning himself to never seeing her again. The odds of running into anyone in New York were slim. Especially if one almost never left their glass prison tower. Even if the Times’ building was on West 41st and 8th, close enough he could throw a rock and hit it.

But there she was, in a pair of grey plaid trousers and a high-necked black sweater. Her hair was loose down her back and she had a cellphone clamped to her ear. He caught her voice without meaning to, “-Yeah, I got that, but how many pictures of a caprese salad do we really need? No. It’s not my fault Geraldine’s boring-” She disappeared behind a shrub and Bucky cursed reciprocal cover.

For a second he seriously debated standing up. He could ditch the food in his hand and catch up to her. He could pretend to bump into her. Say hi. He was pretty sure that was an insane thing to do. He grit his teeth and stayed where he was.

Then she reappeared, rounding the corner toward the park steps. Bucky couldn’t help but watch as she bounced down them and set her trajectory directly toward the hotdog cart.

He really couldn’t say what it was about her that had caught his attention so forcefully. She was beautiful, so there was that, but so were lots of women that he’d run into, spoken with, or worked alongside. He’d barely paid any of them a second thought. She’d been funny. He’d enjoyed talking to her. Could recall smiling at a joke she’d made. Again, surely other people were also funny. He couldn’t recall laughing lately, but that didn’t make the statement untrue.

Maybe it was something about watching her eat a donut off her pinky finger. That had stuck with him for some reason.

He watched her clamp her phone between her ear and her shoulder and give her order to the vendor. She listened for a minute then threw her hands up and bent her knees in the picture of exasperation, before straightening to take the hotdog that was handed to her. She took a turn speaking as she poured condiments and then she turned around.

There was a kind of uncomfortable prickle that nagged at the base of his skull which always indicated to Bucky when he was being watched. There was an art to recognizing the feeling and identifying its origin without giving away that he knew. Nicola North clearly wasn’t practiced in it because she looked directly at him.

Bucky’s heart did something weird in his chest. He felt the sudden urge to make a break for it, he wouldn’t have a problem jumping the shrubs or the railing, and was glued to the bench underneath him.

Nicola tilted her head, smiled, and pointed at him with her free hand.

His heart did something even weirder. Slowly, he lifted his hand and waved. Regretted it almost instantly when she started walking towards him. She walked quickly despite her heeled boots and he could hear her voice again as she spoke into the phone, “I understand, but I’m not doing it. No. Because it’s dumb. I gotta go, I have a lunch meeting. A former client. None of your business,” She lowered the phone, clicked to hang up the call, and shoved it in her pocket as she drew up in front of him, “Hi.”

“Hi,” He wanted to kick himself. How the fuck did a person start a conversation with a beautiful woman? He used to be able to do it, “How are you?” Good God.

“Oh boy,” She grinned at him, “Ask me again after I’ve eaten.”

Her phone call had sounded somewhat contentious, “Bad day?”

Her grin hitched a little higher, “It’s improving.”

Thirty seconds ago he’d wanted to vault a railing to escape into the city and all it had taken was two words from her to have him considering doing something monumentally stupid, “Do you wanna sit?” There it was, out of his mouth before he could stop it. He cleared his throat, “Unless you need to get to that meeting.”

Nicola flapped her empty hand, “Oh no, I totally made that up,” She took two steps and sat on the bench beside him, close enough that he could smell her perfume, like lilacs and rainfall. She crossed one leg over the other and angled herself toward him, “My boss is trying to send me back to this restaurant uptown. It’s a total waste of time because the woman filling in for our usual critic is awful and there’s no way the article runs.”

Bucky must’ve been a little drunk on the lilacs because he had a hard time deciding which follow-up question to ask, “Do you always lie to your boss?”

Nicola laughed and something warm unfurled in Bucky’s chest in reply, “I do, yeah. It’s fine. He knows I’m lying but he loves me so he won’t say anything.”

He felt the need to move past that one, “Where’s your usual critic?”

“She’s off with tonsillitis. Under strict orders to consume only mush,” Nicola picked up her hotdog, “It’s basically her version of hell,” She took a bite.

Bucky realized belatedly that he definitely shouldn’t look at her mouth. He looked off across the grass instead, “That’s a shame. She’s good.”

“She’s the best,” Nicola replied. She moved to take another bite of her food, stopped, and lowered it, “But how do you know that?”

Bucky was a fucking dumbass. He’d gotten distracted and walked right into the middle of a trap. It was practically the first rule of clandestine ops to never give an opponent any information they didn’t already have. He should’ve sat in the middle of the grass so his imaginary snipers could put him out of his misery. There was no avoiding the question so he figured he might as well cop to it. His neck felt hot, “I’ve read a couple of her reviews.”

Nicola studied the side of his face. Her expression was unreadable, “Really?”

“Yeah,” In for a penny, he supposed, “I saw your photo of Alexei, too. It was good.”

Nicola’s voice was soft when she responded, “Thank you.”

There was a weight to the words he couldn’t quite identify. It might’ve been a genuine appreciation for the compliment or it might’ve been that an assassin had checked her work and it made her uncomfortable. He glanced at her sidelong, noted her lip pinned between her teeth, and directed his eyes toward the sky instead.

They sat with it for a beat. Bucky was too afraid to say anything else, his stomach twisting uncomfortably. Finally, Nicola shook her head, a lock of hair breaking free to slip down against her collarbone, “I didn’t always spend my time photographing fancy sandwiches,” Her tone was joking again.

He was almost afraid to say it, “The sandwiches looked good too.”

Nicola shifted to face him more directly, her knee knocking against his and sending a jolt of lightning all the way through his body and out his metal fingertips, “You really read some of our articles?”

She sounded mystified. Bucky had never broken under interrogation, but he was helpless against the question, “Couple times,” More than a couple times. Every time one was published in the last several months. A healthy chunk of the online back catalogue. He knew more about the New York restaurant scene than he had ever wanted to.

Nicola opened her mouth like she was going to say something, then changed her mind and took a bite of her lunch. Bucky loosed a slow breath of relief. They both knew he was fucking weird, but at least she wasn’t going to say it out loud.

Her knee bumped his again, purposefully, and he was forced to look directly at her. She gestured to the food in his own hand, “Are you going to eat that?”

“Yeah,” He’d intended to and then forgotten all about it. He thought Bob might like to hear that he’d taken the recommendation about the cart seriously.

“I mean, I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, you dressed that thing all wrong. But it’s a crime to let a hotdog go to waste,” She took another bite.

Bucky paused where he had his hotdog halfway to his mouth, “Excuse me?”

Nicola raised her hand to hide her mouth behind the back of it as she answered, “Mustard only? Gross.”

He’d never been judged for his condiment choices before. It was somehow more offensive than being called an idiot for his stance on taxes had been, “This is the right way. You don’t put ketchup on a hotdog.”

Nicola had, and scoffed at him, “Yeah, you do. I make a living off of food reviews, I know what I’m talking about.”

“You take the pictures,” Bucky pointed out, “Someone else writes about the food.”

She threw up her free hand, “I could write the reviews if I knew how to use a comma. Your dog is underdressed.”

Bucky frowned at her, “Where are you from?”

Nicola raised her eyebrows at him, “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Answer the question,” He surveyed her like it would give him a clue. She wasn’t wearing a jacket in April so somewhere colder than New York, probably.

She pressed her lips together and studied him right back, “Vancouver.”

Bucky scoffed.

“What?” She sounded outraged but she’d started to smile, “What’s wrong with Vancouver? They’ve got hotdogs on the west coast!”

He raised his eyebrows at her and lifted his hotdog to finally take a bite. Despite it being cold which was almost a universally unpleasant experience, it was good. Maybe the best he’d had since before he’d fought in a war.

Nicola nodded slowly, “Wow. I don’t get an opinion because I’m not from here?”

“Correct,” He took a second bite. Bucky had scruples. She wasn’t getting a pass just because she was beautiful. Even with her mouth full. Even when she was rolling her eyes at him. Why did he like that? Yelena rolled her eyes at him sometimes and it usually made him want to throw something at her. He didn’t really want to examine that. He went for another bite and because he had never caught a break a single time in his life, dripped mustard on his coat. He smothered the curse that tried to escape his mouth under a growl.

“Oh, that’s unfortunate,” He could feel heat climbing up his neck again, “I’d love to help you with that,” Nicola held up her left hand where she had several napkins wedged under the cardboard tray her lunch had come in, “But I don’t share with New York elitists. Maybe if I felt my opinion was valued,” She trailed off.

Bucky raised his eyebrows, “Are you blackmailing me?”

“Extorting,” Nicola corrected.

The nice thing about having all his dirty laundry aired by a mass data breach was that Bucky was largely un-extortable. Everyone knew about the crimes he had committed so there was no holding them over his head. He might rather have had someone threaten to reveal another handful of his assassinations than be stuck with mustard on his coat in front of Nicola. He huffed, “I apologize.”

Her smile grew, “And?”

Clearly she wasn’t going to let him off the hook easily. He scowled, “I respect your opinion.”

It grew a little more, “And?”

There was still embarrassment heating the back of his neck but something else was building behind his ribs. Something that crackled like static and was as exhilarating as it was terrifying, “And-” He didn’t know what she wanted him to say, “You’re very pretty?”

Nicola laughed, high and sweet, and as embarrassed as he was he couldn’t regret saying the words when it had earned him the sound. She knocked her knee into his for a third time and he wished she’d just keep it there, “Say something nice about Canada!”

“Oh,” He’d been to Canada before. To a half-dozen major cities and one sub-arctic base. He’d also crossed over with some Canadian regiments during the war. They had been mildly terrifying, “Beautiful country. Very polite citizens.”

“Thank you,” She smiled broadly and held out her hand, “Was that so hard?”

Bucky tugged a napkin free of her grip and deeply regretted wearing his gloves, “A little. Never been extorted by a New Yorker.”

Nicola shrugged, “You’re still young, there’s time,” She shoved the last bite of her hotdog into her mouth.

Bucky wiped the mustard off his shirt and muttered, “I am one hundred years old,” Before taking another bite.

She swallowed and wiped her mouth with one of her remaining napkins, of which there were still half a dozen, “Well you look great for your age. You must have a fantastic skincare routine.”

He huffed a laugh.

For a little while they just sat. Bucky ate and failed at not watching Nicola out of the corner of his eye. She watched the people that cluttered the park, walking by on the pathway or the grass, a little smile on her mouth. He wondered what she saw. To him, every stranger was a potential threat first. It was a habit that had built and built and which he had yet to tear down. Somehow he didn’t think she saw the world that way.

When he was done, he reached out and took the crumpled mass of paper and cardboard from her hand, wishing again that he’d left his hands bare.

Nicola glanced at him, “Thanks.” After one more second she stood, “I guess I better get back to work.”

Bucky stood too and wished he had some excuse to keep her. Or talk to her again. Somehow he got the feeling that not seeing her again was going to be way worse the second time. He followed her toward the steps under the guise of throwing away their trash, “Food’s not going to photograph itself.”

She laughed, “Yeah, I’m not going to photograph it either. I’ve got better things to do.”

He pretended the question wasn’t because he didn’t want her to go yet, “Like what?”

“Editing photos for articles that are actually gonna run,” They ascended the steps and stopped.

Bucky supposed that she knew what direction the tower was in and there wouldn’t be any feigning a need to go the opposite direction with her, “Right.”

Nicola looked up at him. She chewed her lip briefly, “It was nice talking to you again.”

“Yeah,” He agreed dumbly.

“I’ll uh- see you around. Maybe,” She kicked out her heel and tapped the toe of her boot against the ground.

The odds that they would run into each other again were astronomical. Bucky really wished he didn’t know that, “Yeah.”

Nicola smiled at him. She opened her mouth to say something, then changed her mind and bit her lip, “Okay,” She took a few steps back, “Bye Bucky.”

He lifted his hand in an almost wave and tried to commit her smile to memory before she turned and strode off in the direction of the Times building. He let his hand fall and shoved both in his pockets.

He thought he might be an idiot, but he couldn’t quite figure out why.

Chapter Text

Things weren’t going well.

For the most part, John seemed to have let the meeting with Nicki go. Beyond a handful of vague comments on the subway that indicated his suspicions about her motives for hanging out with Bob, he hadn’t said anything. Bucky didn’t know his friend Nick was a reporter, and Yelena didn’t know about his friend at all.

“-suspicious. I don’t know. What do you think?”

He felt a little bit bad about withholding information from the team. They didn’t keep information from him, even though he wasn’t much help when it came to interpreting mission intel.

“Bob.”

He felt a lot bad about withholding information from Nicki. He hadn’t felt great about keeping his identity as a mutant not-superhero secret before. Now, faced with the possibility of needing to lie, he felt worse.

“Bob.”

He had been waffling on whether or not to come clean since their meeting on the sidewalk. He knew the team would tell him not to. His identity was secret for a reason, it had the potential to cause all kinds of legal and political issues. He probably should have been more concerned about that. Really he was just concerned that if he told her, Nicki wouldn’t want to hang out with him anymore. He couldn’t blame her. He wasn’t exactly stable.

“Bob!”

“What?” He jerked his head to look at Yelena where she was sitting on the kitchen countertop frowning at him, “Yeah?”

She shook her head, “What is up with you? You’ve been strange all weekend.”

Bob had been strange all weekend. The stress was eating him alive, “I’m not being strange.”

“You are!” Yelena accused, “You’re all-“ she waved a hand in the air in a gesture that was both totally meaningless and surprisingly apt.

Bob tried to come up with an excuse and couldn’t think of anything convincing, “I’m fine.”

Yelena stared him down. She was extremely good at it. Bob fidgeted and was glad to have an excuse to look away when Bucky wandered into the kitchen. He nodded a greeting to Bob and pulled open the fridge.

“Bucky, tell Bob he’s being strange.”

Bucky let a long breath whistle out of his mouth. He reached and shifted a jug of milk out of the way to assess the contents behind it, “Bob can be strange if he wants to.”

It wasn’t the best defense he could’ve hoped for, Bucky had clearly also noticed whatever Yelena had, but at least the man wasn’t willing to dig.

“Oh, come on!” Yelena plucked an apple out of the fruit bowl behind her and threw it at him, “You’re being strange too!”

Bucky caught it without looking and rubbed it on the shoulder of his tshirt. He let the fridge door fall shut, “Strange how?”

“You’re mopey,” The word clipped strangely around her accent, “Like the cartoon dog.”

Usually Bob had a pretty good idea of what Yelena was talking about but he couldn’t for the life of him identify which cartoon dog she might’ve been referring to. He also wasn’t convinced that Bucky was being ‘mopey’. He’d been quiet for a few days, but he was always quiet.

Bucky turned to face Yelena and set his shoulder against the fridge door, “My favourite jazz pianist died,” He lifted the apple and took a bite.

Bob thought he might be kidding but it was almost impossible to tell when Bucky was being sarcastic and he didn’t follow the happenings around classical jazz. He offered his sympathy just in case, “That sucks.”

Yelena rolled her eyes and muttered something Russian that Bob didn’t understand. She pointed at him firmly and looked at Bucky, “You’re telling jokes but Bob hasn’t responded to any of the Tiktoks I’ve sent him.” That was fairly damning evidence of his weirdness. They’d had a long-running streak of sending each other videos every day, even when Yelena was off on missions, which Bob had broken by being too stressed to interact with social media.

Bucky chewed slowly and swallowed, “What’s a Tiktok?”

Again, it would have been impossible to tell the man was messing with them if Bob hadn’t spent a good chunk of an afternoon showing Bucky his favourite videos. Unlike Alexei, Bucky didn’t tend to forget things the second they were out of his eyesight.

Yelena threw up her hands. She let out a harsh string of Russian as she slid from the counter and stalked toward the livingroom, reaching out to snatch the apple from Bucky’s hand as she passed.

Bob frowned after her. Bucky, who understood Russian, also frowned. Although, that might’ve been less about the words and more about his snack. After a moment’s silence he straightened up and crossed the kitchen to sink into one of the dining chairs across from Bob. He set his metal hand on the table and tapped his pointer finger twice, “I went to that hotdog cart you like. In Bryant park.”

Bob flinched. He couldn’t think about the park or the cart or a hotdog without thinking about Nicki. And lying. And how bad he was at lying.

Bucky’s frown deepened, “Okay. Do you want to tell me about it?”

His heart took up a panicked tempo in his chest. Bucky wasn’t a telepath. He couldn’t know what Bob was thinking, “About what?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky answered, “Whatever’s upsetting you.”

Bob was pretty sure he didn’t want to talk about it. He was pretty sure that telling Bucky specifically about the situation would be a mistake. But keeping it in wasn’t serving him any better. Maybe he needed to hear it said out loud that telling Nicki would be a mistake. If Bucky ordered him to keep his mouth shut, he’d have to, “John and I ran into my friend Nick the other day. When we went to Harlem.”

“Okay?” Bucky’s gaze was steady on his face.

“I don’t-” Bob sucked in a breath and let the problem out, “I don’t know how to explain how I know an Avenger.”

Bucky didn’t respond right away. He let the statement settle on the table between them and seemed to mull it over. He tapped his finger, “You want to tell the truth.”

“I don’t want to lie!” Bob had told a lot of lies in his life. Like, a lot. They had never made anything better and he’d promised to quit doing it when he’d quit the drugs.

Bucky nodded, “Alright, I understand.”

But he didn’t, because Bob hadn’t told him the worst part, “But Nick’s a-” He dropped his voice to a whisper, “Journalist.”

The change was sudden and dramatic. Bucky’s eyebrows crashed together and he clenched his jaw hard. He looked pissed. It was the most upset Bob had seen him in- maybe ever. His voice was low and hard when he asked, “What paper?”

There were a long list of papers that had reported on the so-called New Avengers and while they were all bound by an ethical obligation to tell the truth, the lens they did it from varied wildly. Bob tried to remember if Nicki’s paper painted them favourably and couldn’t, “The Times.”

“The Times,” Bucky repeated. He closed his eyes. Bob could only describe the expression on his face as pained, “Right. So, Nick is a journalist,” He put a weird stress on the name that Bob couldn’t interpret, “If you tell them that New York’s mass hallucination event wasn’t caused by a chemical attack, is it gonna end up on the front page?”

The lie had been pretty weak to begin with. Bob was sure that most of the city knew there had been something weirder going on, but Valentina had greased enough palms that it was the story that had been printed. It might’ve been more convincing if there weren’t at least three different photos of The Void floating around on the internet, “I dunno,” he muttered.

Bucky set his elbows on the table and lowered his face into his palms.

Bob had been hoping for some help. He hadn’t meant to pass his existential crisis onto his friend, “I won’t do it. I’ll just- lie. I guess.” He wanted to vomit at the thought.

A huge sigh escaped between Bucky’s hands. He lifted his head and smoothed his expression, “Do you like this person?”

That was an easy question, “Yeah. They’re my friend.”

“Do you trust them?”

That was a little harder to answer, because he had never really considered it. He liked Nicki a lot. They had a long list of things in common, and she made him feel like an ordinary person. With a life and some friends. She’d laugh and tease him when he was weird, but he never felt badly for it. It was more like she made space. Space where he could be strange and she would accept it and liked him anyway.

“Yes,” He answered finally.

Bucky took another audibly put-upon breath, “Then you should tell them the truth.”

Bob’s mouth dropped open in surprise, “What?”

“Tell the truth,” He shoved up from the table, “If they’re your friend they won’t print it. If not, it’s Valentina’s problem,” He turned sharply on his heel and stalked off in the direction of the elevator.

Bob stared after him. He really hadn’t been expecting that. He’d thought for sure that Bucky would tell him to keep his mouth shut. Even without knowing the bit about the newspaper. He just took everything, all their missions and daily operations, so seriously. But apparently he was willing to let all that get disrupted for the sake of Bob feeling better, despite how badly it obviously pissed him off.

He swallowed the lump in his throat at the realization that Bucky obviously cared about how he felt. Maybe more than he cared about the team’s reputation.

Of course, Bucky’s permission meant that he had to actually tell Nicki the truth. That was a terrifying thought. What if he told her and she hated him? What if she printed it? He supposed either way it would solve the problem. It just might send him into a spiral and turn him into a dangerous shadow monster.

Only one way to find out.

He didn’t actually have Nicki’s phone number, but he did follow her on Instagram. He thought her account was interesting for a professional photographer. The photos were decent enough, but nothing like the ones she’d taken for the Times. The assortment of subjects were weird. There were a handful of buildings he didn’t recognize and a few he did. Some landscapes of public spaces around the city. Odd, close shots of objects or food or graffiti. None of the pictures were captioned to tell him what the hell was happening or why the subject was important.

He didn’t linger on the newest picture, an overexposed shot of Bryant Park, he tapped into the empty message thread between them and stared at his screen a while. He wasn’t sure what to say. It took him close to ten minutes to settle on Hey.

Of course, she didn’t reply. Bob spent another ten minutes sitting in the kitchen staring at his phone before he resigned himself to the knowledge that she was probably busy.

He emptied the dishwasher, tidied the living room, spent an hour running on the treadmill in the gym, and checked his phone every four minutes the whole time. At 5:03, it buzzed.

Bob! Whats up?

The anxiety of her response was almost worse than the anxiety of waiting for it had been. He wasn’t sure exactly how to set up the conversation they needed to have. It needed to be in person but he’d also never seen her not on a Wednesday before. After a long while he responded with, Wanna grab some dinner?

The reply that time was almost immediate. Always. followed by a pin of a location four blocks north of the tower.

Bob was pretty sure he could make it four blocks. He trusted that whatever the place was, it would be delicious and probably without a crowd. Not that he’d be managing to eat anything. He’d be much more likely to vomit on the table.

He sent a thumbs up, yanked on his coat, and made a break for the elevator.

“Bob! Where are you heading off to?”

He stuttered to a stop in the parking garage. Alexei was climbing out of his truck, some kind of compact antique, grinning.

“Meeting a friend. I’m kind of in a hurry,” He gestured over his shoulder toward the exit.

Alexei crossed the concrete between them to slap him on the shoulder, “Ah, to be young. Always rushing, like everything is so urgent. When I was small soldier in-“

“Right, Alexei I really have to go, I’ll see you later, okay?” He backed out from underneath the man’s hand and turned to jog toward the exit.

Alexei’s cry of, “Enjoy the night, Bob!” Echoed after him.

Bob didn’t think he would be enjoying the night, and he felt pretty bad about cutting Alexei off. He felt like there were bees behind his ribs and had to consciously stop himself from running down the sidewalk. Four blocks seemed to take forever.

It took him a second of looking at building faces on 48th to realize he wasn’t looking for a building at all. Parked in front of Rockefeller Plaza was a food truck decorated with a flag he didn’t recognize. Scattered loosely on the concrete nearby were a handful of bar-height tables.

“Bob!”

He swivelled. Nicki was headed toward him from the opposite end of the sidewalk. She was wearing a black jumpsuit and smiling. It was bizarre to see her in professional clothing again when he was so used to seeing her in cutoff tshirts so old they were practically disintegrating. He waved, “Hi.”

“How’s it going?” She drew up beside him and unzipped her bag to dig, presumably for her wallet.

“Fine. Good. Great,” He wondered if listing more adjectives would make one of them true.

“Okay,” Nicki squinted at him, “Because you don’t seem great. You seem kind of-“

He cut her off, “I have to tell you something!”

Her eyebrows shot up, “Alright. Does this have something to do with the other day? Your friend John?”

“Yes!” He felt like all his worries were racing out of his mouth and getting tangled up on exit, “He shouldn’t have been hitting on you, I’m really sorry about that. I know he comes across like a dick but he’s not that bad. At least, not all the time. He can be kind of a dick-“

“Bob,” Nicki reached out and wrapped her hand around his elbow over his sweatshirt, “I work in restaurants. I’ve been hit on by the world's slimiest line cooks. Your friend didn’t even break the top twenty.”

Her grip was grounding. He took a deep breath and counted the way Tiffany had taught him, “Right. Still.”

Nicki shrugged. She studied his face, her expression pinched in concern, “That’s not what you had to tell me, was it?”

“No,” He couldn’t tell her in the middle of the sidewalk so he started off toward the plaza, trusting her to follow. A little ways in was a bench set against a low wall. Close enough to the street that if she ran screaming she wouldn’t have to run very far, but private enough that they wouldn’t be overheard.

Nicki sat, crossed one leg over the other, and turned to face him. She didn’t speak.

Nicki talked kind of a lot. Bob liked it because she was funny and because she said so many weird things he didn’t have to be self conscious when he said something weird in return. When faced with her quiet, despite how badly he wanted to clam up, he had to start.

“Do you remember the chemical attack? Last year?” It was a dumb question he didn’t know how anyone could forget it.

Something passed across her face. Something surprised and upset, “Yes.”

“It wasn’t,” He twisted the edge of his sleeve between his fingers, “A chemical attack. It was me.”

“You,” Nicki repeated, “What do you mean it was you?”

Bob tried to swallow down the lump in his throat, “A while ago I signed up for this drug trial. It was supposed to fix me.”

There were people crossing through the plaza in front of them, all going about their business and totally unaware of the monster just a few dozen feet away.

“There’s a part of me that’s just me. And there’s a part that’s something else. I lost track of myself. I got stuck in that dark place and everyone else got pulled in too,” There were other pieces he knew he should say. That he had powers and couldn’t use them. That the Void wasn’t him and was and he tried every day to keep it quiet. That he never meant to hurt anyone. He couldn’t get any of it past his mouth.

Nicki didn’t run but she looked away. Off the opposite direction so he almost couldn’t see the look on her face. All twisted up like she might start to cry.

It was happening. She was going to get up and walk away because he’d hurt her just like everyone else in the city.

Nicki sucked in a shaky breath, “You were in there too?”

“Yes,” It had taken a while to come back but he remembered the attic and the lab and the street corner. He remembered seeing Yelena through the mirror. The bathroom. The forest. He remembered John in the nursery. It hurt.

“Do you know what I saw?” Her eyes were teary.

“No. I was stuck,” Stuck in his own shame and fear and helplessness. Nicki nodded and he wasn’t sure if his response had helped or hurt, “I’m sorry, Nicki. I’m sorry I hurt everyone and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t mean to do it,” He felt like he couldn’t get a full breath. Desperate and sad and sure that the thing between them was broken.

“Yeah,” She lifted a hand and wiped harshly at her cheeks. She sniffed and shook her head, then straightened and turned to look at him. Her eyes were red and her cheeks were splotchy, but there weren’t any tears on her face, “I don’t think this is a Singaporean food conversation. If I’m going to cry I need a grilled cheese,” She rocked to her feet.

“Nicki,” There was a flicker of something that felt like hope sitting where his shame had been.

“Seriously. A drug trial?” She held out her hand, “Such a George.”

Chapter Text

There were two things that everybody was always on John’s case about. Being an asshole, and not caring.

Sure, he could be an asshole. He could admit that. The whole team were assholes, except for Bob, so he didn’t really see why he was the only one who got shit for it, but that was fine.

He did care. He cared a lot. He cared about his reputation and the city. He cared about citizens he didn’t know. He cared about his family, and his team. He cared about Bucky, who could be an even bigger dick than he was. He cared about Yelena, who left him out of things as often as she invited him into them. He cared about Alexei who never shut up, and Ava who nearly never didn’t shut up. He cared about Bob.

And he just really didn’t see why the photographer lady was so invested in Bob specifically. It was weird.

John had shut his mouth after meeting her on the sidewalk in Harlem, because Bob was obviously annoyed about the whole thing and he was almost never annoyed. It seemed like it could be a precursor to the city getting ashed, so John swallowed his questions.

It was apparent that he couldn’t ask Bob directly, so he transitioned to recon.

On Wednesdays, Bob went to a yoga class and then the two of them wandered off to get food somewhere. The food seemed to always be from somewhere different, but the locations stayed within a five block radius of the tower.

It was pretty funny that Bob was going to a yoga class with a bunch of real housewives, John would’ve liked to make a comment about that, but it would blow his cover. So he didn’t.

The relationship seemed harmless, and John didn’t trust it for a second. He’d been taught that when an extremely attractive woman took an interest in a man in a high-profile position, it was a red flag. He worked with a Black Widow assassin for Christ’s sake, that was their whole MO.

Sure, Bob wasn’t exactly high profile. They’d done a lot of work to ensure that his profile was nearly non-existent. But the tower could have leaks. It wasn’t impossible that the woman had gained some sort of intel from journalistic sources and was trying to lull Bob into a false sense of security. Once he let his guard down, she would start pumping him for mission intel. Or dirt on the team. Or she’d collect blackmail material and they’d be on the hook for millions. Worst case scenario, Bob would fall in love with her, and then she’d be pulling the strings of potentially the most dangerous man in the world.

Not if John had anything to say about it.

He’d thought, after watching the two of them hang out a couple times, that he might get a better idea of what she wanted by surveilling Nicki. It was sort of a pain in the ass.

She had an Instagram account but hacking it only showed him that she posted extremely sporadically and complete nonsense. The pictures were weird and of nothing in particular. It could’ve been some sort of code, or signal, but she definitely wasn’t a high-level spy. Her background check was clean.

She had lived in the greater Vancouver area, Surrey specifically, as a kid. Her family moved to New York when she was a teenager, and then her mom passed away. She got a Visual Arts degree from NYU. Her brother passed too, the day of the Blip. She worked for a high-profile photography studio, was let go after a few years, and then started at the Times.

She didn’t have a car which was annoying when he spent two days tailing her on foot. The results of his tail, were extremely boring. She lived in Murray Hill. She got up at an unholy hour and would run halfway to Lenox Hill and back every morning. She walked the twenty minutes to work where she’d spend a few hours at her desk, then go out for lunch. In the afternoon she would take a packful of camera equipment and catch a cab to a different restaurant. She always went back to the office to drop her bag before she went home.

And she did just go home. She’d stop at the grocery store or the bodega on her street first, but from there it was straight back to her building. It was narrow and blue, and she lived on the third of four stories. She would cook and read and John was almost starting to feel like she was just a regular person living her life who happened to like Bob for some reason, so it felt too creepy to break in and look around.

It didn’t feel too creepy to break into her office though.

She wasn’t a spy, so if she was digging for intel, it must’ve been to publish. She could’ve been after a promotion, or a bonus, or the moral satisfaction of exposing the Avengers for covering up what could have turned into a mass casualty event perpetrated by their roommate. She never took her equipment home so It stood to reason she would keep the intel she had on her work computer.

The Times was housed in a huge building covered with grated windows. It had decent security in the lobby, and terrible security at the maintenance entrance. There wasn’t a camera in the alley to catch him smashing the lock, and thanks to the EMP interference device he’d had a Fedex guy deliver to security that afternoon, the cameras on the inside of the building were down.

A newspaper wasn’t exactly a high-value target for theft. The security team hung out on the first floor only and he dodged them easily and ducked into the stairwell. He took two flights, exited, and found the elevator to ride it the rest of the way up. Nicki’s desk was on like, the fortieth floor. There was no way he was climbing that many stairs, supersoldier or not.

The fortieth floor was totally empty when the elevator doors slid open. The emergency lights were low but that wasn’t a problem for him. It was a bit of a problem finding the right desk. The bullpen was huge and cluttered with cubicles. Twenty or so separate work stations with no outside indicator of who they belonged to.

“Couldn’t put up a fucking nameplate?” He muttered to himself. He ducked into another cubicle and scanned for personal photos. He hadn’t tailed her for long, but he was pretty sure Nicki didn’t have a Filipino son. He backed out and tried the next desk.

It turned out that Nicki didn’t have personal photos on her desk. She had a half-dead succulent, a cup of pens, and a notebook full of doodles. He only knew it was her desk from a half-shredded envelope in the trash can in the corner. He sat in her rolling chair, swore, fiddled with the side levers for a second until it was a more acceptable height, then flicked through the rest of the papers in the trash.

There were three internal memos that seemed semi-important but unrelated to Bob, and a magazine. He put them back and spun toward the computer.

John wasn’t a hacker. He was more of a point and shoot kind of guy. He’d tracked down one of the Avengers’ tech guys a few days before and gotten a flash drive that was supposed to crack the password for him. He pulled it from his pocket and plugged it in. The guy had said it could take five minutes depending on the password's strength, but Nicki must’ve been the kind of person who made her password ‘password’ because it only took ten seconds.

“Okay, let’s see,” He clicked into her file explorer window and spent a few seconds poking before he found what was obviously the bulk of her work, “Good lord.”

Apparently, Nicki was committed to organization. There were a half dozen folders, all labeled by year. John was pretty sure he only needed the most recent. When he clicked in, they were again broken down by month. Then automatically by most recent, and restaurant name. Each restaurant’s shoot was subdivided by food, chef and building. Food was again broken down into specific dishes.

It was a little ridiculous. He wondered how much time she wasted organizing her files.

He went back a couple months and found an outlier labeled ‘Avengers’. He clicked in and was disappointed to find the photos from the shoot he’d already known she’d participated in. Half a dozen shots of Alexei looking surprisingly serious. They were good.

He spent fifteen more minutes digging around in the corners of her hard drive before realizing there was nothing worth digging for. He found paystubs, draft articles, communications with clients and other journalists, and absolutely nothing about Bob.

He searched ‘Bob’, ‘Avengers’, ‘Void’, and ‘Disaster’, and came up with nothing.

What a fucking waste of an evening. He yanked the flash drive free and shut off the computer. There was no way she had nothing.

He rifled through her desk drawers. Then the notebook. There was a corner of a page that was mostly notes about some chef that worked in the East Village that was covered in hearts. Did she have a crush on Bob? Was that all that was happening?

Was Bob good looking? He’d really never thought about it before. Surely he wasn’t good looking enough for someone like Nikki. He was definitely too weird. The team liked him, but the team was also weird as fuck. John was by far the most normal member and he was spending his Friday night perpetrating a B&E.

The elevator pinged. Automatically, John ducked behind the cubicle wall.

The cleaners had gone home hours ago, why the fuck was anybody checking the floor? He listened hard and registered soft bootfalls circling toward the east side of the bullpen.

Easy. He was done anyway. He stayed low and darted out and across the floor toward a side hallway. The hall passed three offices, a breakroom, and a copy room. At the end around a corner was a door to the stairwell.

He would’ve rather not had to take forty flights of stairs down, but it was better than taking them forty flights up. He pressed the handle gently and pushed.

The door didn’t budge.

He pushed a little harder.

It didn’t move.

Well, fuck. Who locked an emergency exit? That was a major fire code issue. He wondered if he should report it to someone, and figured probably not. What he did need to do was find a secondary exit. The footfalls in the bullpen got a little louder.

He needed a distraction so he could get to the elevator. He ducked into the copy room. There were two photocopiers, a bank of cabinets, and a recycling bin. Fires were always distracting, he reasoned, and there was a secondary exit from the room into another hallway that looped back to the main room.

John didn’t actually carry a lighter, so he had to improvise. He pulled the copier’s power cord from the wall, ripped off the end, and shoved the wires back into the outlet. He felt the resulting shock in his fillings. Sparks leapt from the wall into the recycling bin, and the papers started to smoke. That was good enough for him. He didn’t really want to burn the place down so he dropped the wires to the floor and kicked the recycling bin toward the open middle of the room. If the security guy was quick with the extinguisher, there wouldn’t even be any smoke damage.

He ducked out the second exit and walked back toward the bullpen. He judged by the man’s, “Oh shit!” and pounding footsteps that he’d seen the smoke. John sauntered toward the elevator doors and hit the button. He listened to scrambling foodsteps and swearing. The doors slid open.

There was a click, a high ringing, and the overhead sprinklers started to pour down onto the room.

“Fuck.”

Chapter Text

On Saturday mornings, Alexei made pancakes.

It was funny, really. Most days he didn’t make breakfast. Or set a morning alarm. Or even know what day of the week it was. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t like the Avengers worked 9-5. If there wasn’t a mission, he could sleep as late as he wanted, and there was always food in the kitchen when he made it there.

But when he’d lived in Ohio, he’d had a 9-5. He’d gotten up early, Monday to Friday, and been out of the house before the girls were awake. So, on Saturdays, he would wake up in the morning and he would make them breakfast. Pancakes, because Natasha loved pancakes and Yelena loved any food that could be made in the shape of a smiling face.

Which was a lot of them. It turned out he was the Picasso of smiling foods, he just never managed to make it work with cereal.

It was important, as spies, to project a certain image. To be seen as ordinary, happy, and beyond scrutiny. That wasn’t why he’d done it. He’d done it because he loved his girls.

They might not have been his by blood, but he was the one who told them stories at night and taught them right from wrong. He was the one who picked them up from the pavement when they fell, cleaned their skinned knees and taught them to be strong. And at night, when they had a nightmare, it was for him that they called.

He was their Papa. He loved them more than anything.

So on Saturdays, he got up early and he made pancakes. Pancakes because Natasha had loved them and Yelena rolled her eyes when he made hers into a smiling face, but he thought she still liked it.

Ava was always the first to the kitchen. She woke up early and liked to start her day with a latte from the fancy machine Alexei could never figure out. She would make a drink for herself, and one for him that was delicious, and then she would take a seat in her usual spot at the table.

Alexei always ate the first pancake because everyone knew the first one wasn’t as good as the rest, and then gave her the second. She liked to eat them with whip cream and syrup and she liked the quiet while she did. Alexei could be quiet.

Bob was second to the kitchen. He had an appointment every Saturday morning. Therapy, with a man on the medical floor of the tower. Alexei thought therapy was stupid and made up, but he hoped it worked anyway. For Bob.

Bob always slapped peanut butter on a cold pancake and took it with him to the elevator. He didn’t have a lot to say in the morning either. Not because he liked the quiet but because he was more like a zombie than a person before ten.

Yelena was next. She would make herself a latte and sit beside Ava. The two of them would talk, sometimes about missions and sometimes about nothing in particular.

Alexei liked to listen. He had never gotten to know what it sounded like to have adult daughters. The kind of things that Natasha and Yelena might talk about when they weren’t dismantling a dangerous assassination ring. He liked to think that it would sound a little like the conversations between his daughter and her friend. He liked to think that he would’ve been allowed to hear it.

John was next. He insisted on training, even on Saturday mornings. Probably because Bucky insisted on doing the same, despite needing it the least. They both were up early and spent a few hours on the training floor, and then they would appear one at a time in the kitchen, always John first.

It had taken John a while to warm up to the pancake breakfast thing. He’d spent quite a few Saturdays mocking Alexei and refusing to eat any. Alexei might’ve had something to say about it, but he was sure it was just John being sad, so he kept it to himself. Alexei had been where John was. He had spent years failing his children and it was the thing he hated most about himself. He was willing to cut John some slack, even if John wasn’t willing to do it for himself.

About the same time he started calling his ex-wife every evening to read a bedtime story to his son, John started sitting down for a pancake. But, officially, Alexei didn’t know anything about that.

Bucky was last. He’d make himself a coffee and sit down for some breakfast. He always had a little something to say to John while he did. A compliment of some kind, related to whatever they’d done that morning. It seemed to Alexei that Bucky always wanted the team to feel that they were doing a good job. He would find something to compliment whenever they trained. As often as John would reply by telling him to fuck off, he did seem to work a little harder after.

Alexei wondered if any of the team knew that the Winter Soldier could’ve mopped the floor with them. He watched Bucky hold back and couldn’t tell if it was purposeful or the accidental consequence of regaining his moral compass.

For once, John appeared not to have made it to the training floor before he flopped into his usual dining chair across from Yelena. His hair was dry and stuck up strangely. He snatched up several pancakes from the serving platter on the center of the table and slapped them on his own plate.

“I heard an interesting rumour,” Yelena offered to the room. Ava lifted her mug and had a drink. She eyed John closely, who grunted his reply. “I heard that you turned up at three in the morning wearing tactical gear, soaking wet.” She had definitely heard the rumour from Ava, Alexei thought. Ava was always up at the crack of dawn wandering around the tower.

John went still, the syrup bottle dangling from his hand, “I was just- working an op.”

“What op?” Ava asked.

“Nothing. It’s not important,” John poured the syrup and tried to look stern.

Yelena had never responded to stern, “So you didn’t break into a newspaper office last night?”

The syrup hit the table with a bang, “For fuck’s sake, you can’t let anything slide, can you?”

She shrugged, “I just think it’s interesting. You were mad we didn’t loop you in and now you’re running covert operations without us? I thought we were using teamwork these days.”

John huffed. He picked up his silverware and started tearing his pancakes apart, “Yeah, okay. Fine. I broke into the Times. Big whoop. How’d you hear about it?”

Ava answered, her tone mocking, “You made the news. Broken maintenance entrance, deliberate fire, sprinkler system activation.”

Yelena scoffed a laugh, “You suck at covert ops.”

John gripped his fork hard, “Ha ha.” He pointed the silverware at Alexei, “I’m better at it than him.”

“He was undercover stealing government secrets in Ohio for three years,” Yelena waved over her shoulder in his general direction, “Nobody even looked at him twice.”

Alexei flipped the pancake on the stove, “Not nobody. The soccer moms were very interested.”

“Okay, ew. Thank you for that,” Yelena made a face at him, then turned back to face John, “Seriously why were you breaking into a newspaper office? Are you being blackmailed?”

“No,” John shoved a forkful of pancake into his mouth and the next statement came out muffled, “It’s personal.”

“Personal like blackmail,” Ava muttered.

“Who’s being blackmailed?” Bucky had clearly not missed his usual Saturday workout. His hair was wet and shoved away from his face. He beelined directly to the coffee maker and pulled the jar of grounds forward to start scooping.

“Nobody,” John answered.

“John broke into the Times building and flooded the place. Probably because they were blackmailing him,” Yelena answered over him.

“Fucking-” Bucky set down the spoon in his hand and gripped the edge of the counter. He looked pained, “What?”

John threw down his fork, “It wasn’t half the building, it was one floor. I don’t even know how they knew I was up there-”

Ava muttered underneath his rising voice, “Because you broke the door on entry.”

“The cameras were down, nobody saw me, I got away clean. It’s fine!”

Bucky spun to face the table and lifted a finger to point at John, “It isn’t fine. Why the hell did you break into the Times?”

He seemed more irritated than usual. Alexei moved to take the coffee pod he had filled from the countertop and stuck it in the machine to run. He hoped it might keep them from a full shouting match if Bucky got his terrible, jet-fuel-esque cup of Joe before the conversation got too much further.

“Okay! Okay. You remember Bob’s friend Nick?” John shifted forward and set his elbow on the table.

Everybody moved a little at once. Ava and Yelena both shifted forward, their full attention on John. Bucky slapped both his hands over his face. Alexei smiled, “Bob made a friend?”

John pointed at him in return, “Yes! He told Bucky and I that he had a friend named Nick, but I met Nick three weeks ago. Turns out, Nick is actually Nicola North, that Times photographer from a few months back.”

“What,” Yelena stretched the word out strangely. She looked confused, “Bob would have mentioned a friend to me.”

John shrugged, “Apparently not. Seems like he was hiding her from us. Now, why would he do that?”

“Because she’s a journalist?” Ava guessed. Her eyes flicked toward Bucky at his pained mutter of, ‘Jesus Christ’. It was well known the degree to which Bucky hated press of any kind.

“Maybe,” John agreed, “Now who else thinks it’s interesting that Nicki North makes friends with Bob just a few weeks after she’s in the tower for a shoot with her paper?” He lifted both hands in question and looked at each of them in turn.

Alexei snapped his fingers, “I remember! Nikita! She was assisting the small French man. She was a sweet girl.”

“Sweet,” John scoffed, “She obviously saw Bob and thought she had a way to gain some intel. I went to the Times to check her computer, see what she might’ve gotten already.”

“That’s a stretch,” Yelena frowned.

“Bob wasn’t at the shoot,” Alexei remembered the shoot well. Less because of the event itself and more because of his conversation with Nikita. She really had been sweet. They’d talked about her papa. A man she hadn’t spoken to in nine years, but seemed to want to hear from.

“Whatever,” John waved his hand, “She’s clearly working him!”

Ava set her mug down beside her plate, “Why is that clear?”

John opened his mouth, then shut it. He seemed to fight with the words for a second before he burst, “Look, you didn’t see this woman. She’s gorgeous, and she’s hanging out with Bob? Our Bob?”

The table exploded into an argument. Ava and Yelena both insisted together and in different words, that Bob was perfectly likeable and also good looking. They agreed that there was no reason a pretty girl couldn’t like him and want to hang out with him just because. John insisted, even louder, that the whole situation was extremely suspicious on the merits of her having been in the tower shortly before their meeting. According to him, Bob had a crush, and the woman wanted to use it.

Alexei, for his part, wasn’t sure who to agree with. On the one hand, it did seem overly coincidental that the woman had been in the tower talking with him and then met Bob through unrelated circumstances. And it was possible that someone who worked at a newspaper would fish for some sort of scoop through contact with the Avengers.

But he’d also spoken with Nikita. They’d chatted through the whole tail-end of his shoot, and then while she was helping to clear away the set. She had told him about her old job taking photos of famous people while she’d broken down fancy lights and coiled up wires. She’d seemed genuinely happy to have a conversation with him, and none of the story he’d told her about Natasha in return had made it into the final article.

Besides that, Bob was a perfectly nice young man when he wasn’t turning into an evil spectre. He always cleaned the dishes, and he made Yelena laugh. He listened to Alexei’s stories and tried to teach Bucky how to use his phone properly. He played games with John when they were in the tower together. It seemed mean for John to accuse him of being unable to make a friend.

Except, John wasn’t really mean. Alexei knew that. He didn’t tend to come across as nice, but he had thrown himself in front of more than one bullet for the sake of the rest of them. It occurred to him that maybe John was just concerned for Bob. Concerned for how he might feel if his friend turned out not to be his friend.

“Okay, Okay.” Bucky let his hands drop from his face and held them up in a placating gesture. The arguing continued. The kids could really get going when they were given a second, “Enough!” Three mouths snapped shut. The occupants of the table all turned to look at Bucky. There was a pinched, angry look on his face but he took a deep breath and smoothed it away before continuing, “Here’s what we are not going to do. We are not going to break into any more news outlets,” He laid a hard look on John.

“I was just-”

“No. It is a very bad look for us, if we get caught tampering with the news.” He lowered his hands, “We are also not going to dig into Bob’s friend.”

“But what if she-”

“No!” Bucky snapped, “Bob is allowed to make his own choices. If he likes this woman, that’s his business. We’re all going to keep our noses out of it, and if she prints something we will let Valentina deal with it. Our jobs are to deal with criminals, not manipulate PR campaigns. Are we all clear on that?”

There was a tick working in John’s jaw. The kind that usually indicated he was about to start arguing. He didn’t. He slumped a little into his chair and picked up his fork. Yelena and Ava traded a long look. Neither of them said anything either, but Ava picked her mug back up and Yelena ate a blueberry from the bowl on the table. It was the closest to acquiescence or apologies that they ever got.

For a minute the dining room was silent. Bucky picked up his mugful of coffee and had a sip. A lesser man would’ve made a face, but he remained impassive. Alexei had spent many long years in a Siberian prison. The coffee there had been better than the stuff Bucky insisted on drinking.

“And nobody tell Bob about this conversation,” Bucky said firmly.

Chapter Text

Bucky had been around the block a time or two. He had learned to recognize when a situation was starting to get out of hand. All it took was one wrong move and a carefully planned operation was suddenly a mess.

The situation with Nicola North was really starting to get out of hand.

It hadn’t been ideal to begin with. Compulsively checking a newspaper for restaurant reviews because the woman who took the photos was pretty, was not great. It was borderline creepy. And a little pathetic.

It got a little worse after eating lunch with her in Bryant park. He’d gotten to sit next to her and made her laugh. The sound had sparked something that had been gone so long he almost didn’t recognize it.

He had also spilled mustard on his coat and called her pretty. That was embarrassing enough that he spent the entire four hours he usually slept that night staring at the roof and stewing. Why had he called her pretty? Probably because she was. When he closed his eyes he couldn’t help picturing the line of her neck. Her mouth. The dark curtain of her hair.

But why had he called her pretty like that?

He used to flirt with women all the time. He’d compliment them and ask them about themselves and at the end of the conversation, he always had a date. What the hell had happened to that guy?

Not that he was trying to flirt with Nicola. And he definitely wasn’t looking to land a date.

Because it turned out she was Bob’s friend. Bob’s friend that John was convinced was trying to use him for publishable information. Which Bucky had convinced him to tell the truth and give her. That was a fucking mess, and then it had gotten ten times worse because John had broken into her goddamn office.

Bucky’s concern wasn’t that Nicki was trying to steal intel or that Bob was so naive he wouldn’t be able to tell. His concern was that knowing what Bob was actually capable of had scared her just enough that John’s dumbassery was going to push her over the edge.

It was pretty obvious what they needed to do, and that was fucking nothing.

Nothing good could come out of any of them getting any further into Bob’s business. Nicola already had everything she needed to expose the team’s participation in a massive coverup. Trying to suss out whether or not she would do so had the potential to make her realize how insane they all were and that she should go ahead and print the story. Then the Avengers would be sunk and the mantle would pass to Sam’s slightly more stable but definitely too young team of heroes.

Or, in possibly the worst potential outcome, she would just decide not to be friends with Bob anymore. Bucky wasn’t about to let that be his fault.

He could do nothing. It was easier, in most cases, to do nothing rather than something. He just had to go about his business and forget the beautiful woman who had given him shit for his ‘underdressed’ hotdog. If he was a man who could catch a fucking break, it would’ve been simple. He wasn’t.

At least walking down the sidewalk on West 45th he didn’t have mustard on his jacket.

What he did have was an intention to walk the city until he felt slightly less insane. He’d had a dream seven hours before, during the sliver of night where usually he had nightmares. The pleasant kind of dream he never had that had him waking up wishing it was real. In the dream, he’d been sitting on a porch somewhere. It might’ve been Romania and it might’ve been his old place in Brooklyn. On his right was Steve. They were in the middle of a conversation when someone came up behind him and set their hand on his shoulder.

Usually when that happened in his dreams, he realized suddenly that his arm was gone. The hand would yank him backwards and even with super strength it was impossible to get away as they tightened the strap across his chest. The fear was suffocating. He woke up still choking on it.

But that hadn’t happened this time. The hand on his shoulder did nothing. He couldn’t see who it was but he could feel them. The hold on him was grounding, like being at home in his family’s old apartment. He felt safe.

When he woke up he tried to remember the conversation he’d been having with Steve. Whether it had been real, something replayed from the depths of his memory, or something his mind had conjured new. He couldn’t remember any of the words to know for sure. Just the feel of the hand on his shoulder. Just the smell of lilacs and rain.

He couldn’t let his mind do the thing it was doing, that was dangerous, so he got up and trained. He was a little sharper with John than he meant to be, usually he kept himself more level, and had his teammate in a chokehold too quickly for John to recognize where his mistake had been.

He showered, dressed, ate, and still couldn’t shake the feeling of warm fingertips against his collarbone.

So he pulled on a jacket and went for a walk. He didn’t wear a hat because if anyone recognized and shouted at him, maybe it would help knock the dream loose. He’d be willing to argue about overpolicing, the irony of which was not lost on him, if it would put his feet back on normal ground.

He stalked down the sidewalk like he had somewhere to be, his hands wedged in his pockets, a scowl on his face. He made it most of the way to the Hudson before realizing his strategy wasn’t working and turning around. When he made it most of the way back to the tower and the door of a plain brick building opened in front of him, he took half a step sideways so that he could go around, and stopped dead.

What were the odds? Maybe there was something weird going on because for the second time, there was Nicola North. Stepping out the door onto the sidewalk in a pair of skintight yoga pants and a deep navy hoodie. His eyes caught for half a second on her legs before he dragged them back up to her face. It wasn’t any better. Her cheeks were pink and the few loose strands of her hair were damp with sweat. His heart did something weird again.

Nicola glanced down the sidewalk toward him, turned the opposite way, then spun back and planted her feet, “Hey.”

Seeing her was like hitting a light switch and getting a sharp static shock. Having her direct attention was more akin to punching through the battery of a car. It took him a second to form a response around his own confusion, “Hey,” He glanced up at the building she’d emerged from. Plain as day on the face was a sign for ‘Spristle and Sage Yoga’.

Right. So the odds were less astronomical than he’d thought. The second time they’d met, at Bryant Park, he’d gone on Bob’s recommendation, who had already been there with her. This time, he’d wandered by the yoga studio they both went to. It was about the right time for it, according to Bob’s usual schedule, but the wrong day. She must’ve attended more classes than he did.

Nicola had her head tilted and was surveying him through wide eyes, “This is so strange. I never run into people like this.”

“Me neither,” He really couldn’t have known that he was putting himself in a position to see her when he left the tower. It was the exact opposite of what he’d been intending to do.

She lifted her hand and gestured east over her shoulder, “I’m going that way.”

Bucky briefly considered saying he was going any other direction. But he was facing east, It would be immediately obvious that he was changing course because of her, “Me too.”

“You wanna,” She hesitated. Her eyes flicked down to the pavement, then back to his, “Walk together?”

Maybe his arm was malfunctioning and sending rogue electrical impulses through his chest, “Okay,” His agreement was out before he could register that it meant complete mission failure on his part. He really hoped she believed in coincidences.

“Okay,” For a second they both stayed stuck on the sidewalk, then Nicola turned and started walking and Bucky was forced to move too.

He took a couple quick strides then slowed when he drew up beside her on the outside of the sidewalk. He kept both hands shoved firmly in his pockets and tried to focus on being normal.

“It seems we have a mutual friend,” Nicola said.

Bucky tried hard to assess her tone. She sounded pretty much the same as she had the last time he’d spoken to her, warm and friendly, but Bob had clearly told her some sort of truth.
Whether it was all of it or not he couldn’t guess, “So I hear,” He tried to focus on the street in front of him, the cars and the walking traffic and all the possible threats, and watched her out of the corner of his eye instead.

She wasn’t carrying a bag but he could see the outline of a phone in her hoodie pocket and hear the light jingle of a keyring, “Oh yeah? What is it you hear?”

He’d heard very little for a long time but Bob had been more forthcoming since Bucky had offered him the advice that he tell the truth. He was still light on the details and Bucky had yet to develop a strategy for gaining more that wouldn’t be deeply suspicious, “Bob thinks you’re nice. Says you have good taste in food. Think he might be getting extorted.”

Nicola turned to smile at him. He’d almost forgotten the shape her mouth made when she did it, hitched a little higher at the right side, “No way. Who’d ever extort Bob? He’s so sweet.”

She was joking but the statement was comforting anyway. She was either the world’s best liar or she really did think Bob was sweet, despite whatever he’d told her, “Of course. You only extort the elderly.”

She laughed and he could feel it in his bones, “That is not fair. I would not describe you as elderly.” Nicola reached up to pull her hair free of the messy ponytail it was in and set about smoothing it all back in place.

Bucky blamed the sight for his mouth running away on him, “So how would you describe me?”

Nicola twisted her polka-dot scrunchy back around her hair in quick moves. She bit at her lip briefly then offered, “Intimidating.”

That wasn’t the answer he expected and he wasn’t sure how to feel about it, “Intimidating,” He repeated, “You don’t seem intimidated,” She was far too willing to give him a hard time to be nervous.

“Oh, I was,” She stepped closer to his side as they passed a handful of bistro tables belonging to a bakery and he could almost feel the heat of her arm through his coat, “But former assassins are way less scary after you’ve watched them dump food on themselves.”

Ordinarily he didn’t like to be reminded of his past. It was hard to think about, even with the work he’d put into being okay. From Nicola’s mouth the joke was oddly comforting. She clearly knew about his past and wasn’t bothered by it. It was easier to believe she wouldn’t be bothered by Bob’s past either. He did fucking wish he hadn’t needed to embarrass himself to make her comfortable, “Fantastic. You gonna let me forget about that?”

Nicola hummed, “I dunno. Depends what you’re willing to offer.”

Bucky huffed, “If I’m sweet to you will you quit with the extortion?”

“Maybe,” She glanced up at the green building they were passing and changed course toward the clear glass door, “You could give it a try.” He shook his head and stepped past her to pull the door open. She grinned at him as she crossed the threshold, “Good start, great effort.”

He didn’t think it was. Opening the door for her seemed like the bare minimum. He stepped into the building too and realized he had no idea what they were doing or why he’d followed her.

The space was a long rectangle with a u-shaped counter on one side and tables in a row on the other. It was painted an obnoxious shade of orange and the tables were white plastic. There was a young Asian man in black working the counter, and two highschool age girls sitting near the front window. His gut reaction was that they were in a coffee shop but that seemed wrong. There was no fancy espresso machine behind the counter. He eyed the colourful menu mounted to the wall and recognized Taiwanese but couldn’t read it.

Nicola went directly to the register, “Hi.”

The clerk nodded a greeting, “What can I get you?”

Nicola could either read Taiwanese or she’d been there before. She dug in her pocket to produce her phone as she relayed her order, “Can I get a medium lychee tea with jellies, please,” She turned to look at him where he hovered a few feet away, “D’you want anything? Boba? Tea?”

Bucky didn’t really care for tea, as hard as Percival and Frenchie had tried to convert him in a trench in France somewhere, “What’s a boba?”

“Okay,” That wasn’t an answer but she turned back toward the counter, “A medium original with pearls.”

The young man tapped at the tablet screen between them and spun it before wandering off to begin mixing drinks. Nicola tapped her phone against it, waited for the confirmation ping, then moved to wait at the end of the counter. Belatedly Bucky asked, “That wasn’t- that’s not for me?”

“Yeah,” Nicola nodded, “You’ve never had bubble tea before?”

He’d never even heard of it, “Nicola.”

“Oh gosh,” She grinned at him, “This is like, our second date, you better call me Nicki.”

He’d meant to tell her she didn’t need to be ordering him anything but at her words his brain short-circuited. She was joking, clearly, but his neck felt hot and the electricity was zinging across his ribs again. He couldn’t help the thought that sprang to mind. That if they were on a date, he wouldn’t be wearing fucking jeans, and the restaurant wouldn’t have plastic tables.

“Okay,” She flicked her ponytail over her shoulder and reached to free a pair of paper-wrapped straws from a bucket on the counter, “You do me now.”

Why was the shop so hot all of a sudden? “Do- What?”

“How would you describe me?”

It was a perfect setup. He could say it now. Call her beautiful, or stunning. Maybe he had enough of his old self in him to come away from the conversation with a date. But he still meant what he’d said to the team. That they were better off to all leave her alone. She was Bob’s friend and it wouldn’t be fair for him to get in the middle of that. He took a breath and let his disappointment go, “Vivacious.”

“Vivacious,” Nicki raised her eyebrows, “What’s that mean, exactly?”

Bucky shrugged. It was the best he could come up with and somehow wasn’t remotely enough.

Nicki hummed and turned away from him as the young man set two plastic cups on the counter between them, “Thanks,” She picked one up, light brown and half-full of little black spheres, and held it out to Bucky. He stepped forward to take it, then the straw that was offered after. He was so careful as a rule to avoid touching people that he didn’t realize until after that his hand was bare. He could’ve felt her fingertips against his and missed his chance.

He watched Nicki peel the paper off of her straw and pick up her drink, pink with little gelatin cubes floating at the bottom, “You stab your straw right through the plastic and be careful of the pearls when you drink it. They’re chewy and I don’t know the heimlich if you choke.” She stabbed her straw through the plastic on her cup with a pop, and took a sip.

“Alright. Thank you,” Bucky ripped the straw paper with his teeth and pulled it free, then stabbed it through the top. He had no idea what to expect, flavour wise, and was even less sure about the drink overall. It seemed to him that if a beverage required a choking hazard warning, it was ill-designed.

He followed Nicki to the exit and reached over her head to shove the door open. She shot a grin back at him, “Why thank you. So sweet.”

Bucky rolled his eyes as he put himself on the outside of the sidewalk, but his neck was still hot. He took a sip of his drink in an attempt to banish the feeling. It tasted like sweetened tea. The pearls, which caught him by surprise despite Nicki’s warning, were mild and sugary. He thought he might like them better if he didn’t have to drink the tea to get at them, “This is weird.”

“Yeah,” Nicki agreed, “Do you like it?”

He frowned, “I dunno.”

“That’s fair,” She held her cup out toward him, “Do you wanna try my jellies?”

“No,” He was pretty sure that if he put his mouth on the same straw she had, he would combust, “Thanks,” He surveyed the intersection as they reached the end of the sidewalk and Nicki hit the crosswalk button with her elbow. They’d reached 5th and it only just occurred to him to ask, “Shouldn’t you be at work?”

“Sort of,” She leant backwards to get a look at a dog being walked on his other side, “Someone broke into the office and flooded my floor.” Bucky was inclined to slap a hand over his face in sheer exasperation at the reminder. He didn’t, and she continued, “I get a week off while they dry everything out and replace the computers. Danny wanted me to work from home but I asked if he was going to buy me a laptop to do it from and that sort of ended the conversation.” She shrugged and started across the street when the light changed.

Bucky still couldn’t believe that John had thought it was a good idea to break into the Times. He also couldn’t believe what a bad job the man had done of being covert. He was lucky nobody had seen him, “They catch the guy that did it?”

“No,” Nicki sipped her drink, “And the investigative journalists are so self-important they all think it was a targeted attack against them. Like somebody was trying to steal their files or something.”

Bucky winced.

“I’m just stoked to have some time off. I’ve been to three extra yoga classes and read four books,” She glanced over at him, “What do you do with yourself when you aren’t fighting crime?”

He was almost inclined to tell her the truth about her break in, but he didn’t see how it would be helpful, “Depends.”

“On?”

“You gonna leak the information to the paper?”

“Yes,” She answered immediately, “You’ll be the next feature in a Buzzfeed article about how superheroes are just like us.” He raised his eyebrows at her and she reached out to nudge his bicep in return. His skin under his jacket was on fire, “I’m kidding. I’m not a writer, I’m a photographer. I work at the paper because I like taking pictures, not because I need to expose every piece of information I come across to the public.”

“In that case,” He had another drink from the cup in his hand. He might’ve been starting to like it. Or he hated it. He couldn’t tell, “Exercise. Read. Watch TV.”

Nicki looked intensely interested, “What kind of TV?”

“Lately?” He wasn’t sure why he was telling her. He tended to watch TV only in the guaranteed quiet of his own room where Yelena and John wouldn’t make fun of his choices. He was pretty sure the team thought he didn’t consume popular media independently of them at all, “The Expanse.”

Nicki gasped and slapped her hand over her mouth.

Automatically he surveyed their surroundings. They’d hit the intersection of Madison and 45th. Each corner was occupied by a clothing store, and the buildings were over a dozen stories high. There were a handful of commuter vehicles and one large box van that was closed. There were ten other pedestrians that he could see, none of whom were noteworthy. He looked at Nicki.

In a stage-whisper she asked, “Is Bucky Barnes a big nerd?”

He scowled, “Yeah, alright. I like science fiction, sue me.”

Nicki dropped her hand and beamed as they crossed the street, “That’s cute.” He wasn’t sure what about liking sci-fi was cute. He was both confused and pleased, “Did you read the books too?”

For the second time that day, he stopped dead in his tracks, “There are books?”

Nicki stopped too, “Yes. Did you really not know that? It’s like the second thing Google tells you when you look it up.”

Bucky frowned. He wondered how many books he was missing out on because he’d never looked into things further, “I’ve never looked it up.” He forced himself to carry on forward.

“Well there’s like ten of them and they’re fantastic. Definitely worth a read.”

Bucky raised his eyebrows, “Hold on. Is Nicola North a big nerd?”

“Yes. But that’s not a surprise, I’m wearing a Star Trek tshirt under this,” She yanked at the hem of her hoodie, then gestured to him, “You’re wearing leather and look like you could bench a motorcycle.”

He could bench a motorcycle. He also loved Star Trek. He wondered which generation the tshirt was from and figured it was better he not ask. He made a noncommittal noise instead and sipped his boba. He really didn’t think he liked it. He chewed a pearl and changed his mind.

They walked in silence for a minute, side-by-side and close enough he could reach out and touch her. It was a little surprising how badly he wanted to. She had touched him and he could feel where it lingered on his arm despite the layer between their skin.

They reached the corner of the block and the tower loomed up suddenly into view across the street. Bucky had forgotten that he was on his way home. If they’d been a block further north, he would’ve carried right on by to wherever it was Nicki was headed. He wished he had an excuse to do it anyway. They crossed the road together and followed the sidewalk until they reached the north side of the building and Bucky stopped.

Nicki stopped with him and turned to squint up at the tower, “How’s the view from up there?”

“Nice,” His bedroom had floor to ceiling windows that looked out to the north. At night he couldn’t see the stars but he could see the glittering lights of every south facing apartment in the city.

“Hm,” She looked at him and grinned, “From my window I can see the bodega cat that lives on the corner of my block.”

Bucky clicked his tongue, “Got me beat.”

For a second they stood together in silence and Bucky could almost think that she didn’t want to walk away either. Then she reached up to run her hand over her ponytail and said, “Well, I guess I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah,” It seemed a lot more likely that they would see each other again this time, even if he still intended otherwise.

“Bye Bucky,” She took a few slow steps backward. Bucky lifted his cup in a movement that was more a salute than a wave. Nicki smiled at him one more time before she turned away and was off down the sidewalk.

Something like disappointment settled heavily into his chest. He didn’t think he’d embarrassed himself, and he felt like an idiot anyway.

Chapter Text

Bob liked to spend his afternoons in the living room.

His bedroom, like all the private rooms, was enormous. It was closer to a full apartment than a bedroom, with high vaulted windows, a couch and tv, a gigantic bathroom and a less gigantic kitchenette. If he wanted to, he could go a whole day without seeing anyone.

He didn’t want to. He didn’t really like being by himself.

So he would stretch out on the couch or in his beanbag chair, pick a tv show to watch, and wait.

The rest of the team tended to keep bizarre schedules of Avenger-related work. They would train or connect with the tech guys or jet off to fight crime. Sometimes apart and sometimes together. When they were in the tower though, they would cross in and out of the living room all day long.

Alexei didn’t seem to care what was on the tv when he walked by, whatever it was he would stop and sit and stay until something required his attention or Bob turned it off. He would mumble comments under his breath whenever he was reminded of his own life, which was often, but so quietly that it almost didn’t seem like he meant for anyone else to hear.

Yelena didn’t seem to care what was on either. She would watch comedies and dramas, and talk over just about anything else. She would make fun of the show, or start an entirely unrelated conversation and Bob didn’t care because he liked talking to her more than he liked watching tv.

Ava liked home renovation shows, which seemed really strange, and she would scoff and complain about the paint palates whenever a decorator used the word, ‘minimalist’. Bob wondered how she felt about the decor in the tower, but she never mentioned it, and never changed anything that he could see.

John liked action. He would always sit down to watch a fight scene, and then stay for the rest of whatever was playing. He also didn’t seem to like being alone because he would always stay if there were more than two of them in the room but he would make fun of whatever was playing. Despite doing the same thing, Yelena would give him shit for it and they usually ended up arguing, but neither of them seemed to really be mad so Bob didn’t comment.

Bucky didn’t seem to like tv at all. He would walk through the room and pause behind the couch for approximately two minutes before moving on to do whatever he’d been planning on doing. Genre seemed to have no bearing on how long he lingered, and he never commented on what was playing. He would, however, stay to watch if he was invited.

Bob had learned that on a day when everyone else was gone. He didn’t know where they were, but he had been by himself all morning. Usually that was okay, he didn’t prefer it but he could handle being alone. He’d just been feeling a little off. A little worthless. A little like everyone was gone because they were avoiding him.

And then Bucky had stepped out of the elevator and crossed the floor to the back of the couch. He studied the cartoon on the screen (Bob’s Burgers because it was funny and sometimes it made Bob feel better) like he could gain some sort of intel from it. It seemed like the sort of thing that Bucky would hate, but the words slipped out anyway, “Hey. You wanna watch with me?” He tried not to sound completely desperate, and he couldn’t tell if he succeeded.

Bucky replied, “Sure,” and rounded the couch to sit in his usual spot. He stayed for three episodes and only stood to announce his intention to make dinner and ask if Bob wanted pasta or burgers.

Bob was pretty sure that Bucky hadn’t liked the show, and didn’t like tv, but he had stayed to spend time together. He knew that Bucky never turned down a request from the team to help with a mission. It was a little overwhelming to know that Bucky wouldn’t turn down a request to help him either. It made him feel like he meant something, even though he couldn’t do the kinds of things the rest of them did.

Bob tried not to abuse what he’d learned. He invited Bucky to watch something when he thought he’d like the show, if most of the team was already watching, or if he really needed the company. He couldn’t tell if Bucky ever liked the things he picked, and he couldn’t tell if he liked spending time with the team. But he always stayed.

Bob usually preferred to watch feel-good shows, but he liked trying to figure out what everyone else liked too. He spent twenty minutes of his afternoon scrolling through options before landing on Stranger Things because it was kind of nerdy and he wanted to see who would bite.

Surprisingly, Ava did first. She wandered into the room and sat directly in her usual armchair, her eyes fixed on the screen. Bob would’ve liked to know what about the show had drawn her in, but she didn’t say anything and he didn’t want to talk over the tv if she was enjoying it.

Yelena was next, but Bob couldn’t tell if she had any interest in the show or if she just flopped onto the couch because he and Ava were already there. John was close behind and there were three of them, but someone was also being chased by a monster so it was hard to say what got him. Then Bucky emerged from the hallway and paused near the couch and the two minute countdown started.

Bob’s phone started to ring.

His sound was on and the default tone was obnoxious and loud which got everybodies attention but Bob didn’t really think he could be blamed because nobody ever called him. He fumbled to pick it up from the floor where he’d left it and swiped to answer, “Hello?”

”Who the hell is calling you?” John asked. He had his boots on the coffee table which Bucky hated, but not enough to cross the living room and start a fight.

“Bob, hey, what’cha doing?” Nicki’s voice floated from the speaker and directly into his ear.

He wasn’t quite sure how to answer the question. It was too weird to say he was watching tv with four Avengers, “Just- uh, nothing much. What’s up?” They had traded phone numbers after a long conversation in a diner near the tower during which Nicki didn’t cry, but did eat a grilled cheese. Bob had spun out the whole story, the experiment and the confusion and the Void, and at the end of it when Nicki had said she’d see him on Wednesday, he had almost cried.

John shoved off the armrest of the couch to sit up straight, “Is that Nicki?”

Bob realized that fifty percent of the people in the room had super hearing, and that he’d rather not catch hell for whatever it was she was about to say. He stood up and fled toward the kitchen as she replied, “Nothing. I thought I’d see if you wanted to hang out tonight.”

John muttered something to Yelena that he didn’t catch. Yelena shot out a hand to punch him in the thigh. Over John’s obnoxious, “OW!” Bucky barked a sharp, “Enough.”

It was surprisingly effective. The living room was quiet behind him as he considered the invitation. He liked hanging out with Nicki. She always picked good places to eat, and he never felt like people were taking notice of him. He liked spending time with the team, but they were almost guaranteed to float off in separate directions when the show was over or dinner was delivered, whichever came first. He thought it might be nice to go out, “Sure.”

“I heard there’s an arcade in the East Village that has retro games. Meet me at the station by the tower at like, seven?”

”Alright. Sounds good.”

”Sweet! Bye Bob!”

”Bye,” His phone offered a beep, and went quiet. Very briefly he considered going to his room. It felt strange to talk to the team about Nicki and someone was definitely going to ask. But after he had told Bucky she was journalist-adjacent and Bucky hadn’t seemed to mind, Bob started to feel less like he was breaking an unwritten rule. He was allowed to have friends that weren’t superheroes. He shoved his phone into his pocket and stepped back into the living room.

For a minute it was quiet. John and Ava both looked at Bucky, but Yelena looked at Bob. She broke the silence first, “Who was that?”

”My friend. Nicki,” He fidgeted with his sleeve.

Bucky rolled his left shoulder and moved into the living room to sit in the chair beside Ava. Bob wondered if he was doing it to offer moral support in the conversation they were about to have. He appreciated it.

“Still hanging with Nicki, huh?” John asked.

Bob wasn’t sure why John would think he wasn’t. John didn’t know Bob had told her he was a dangerous metahuman, “Yeah.”

”Bob,” Yelena sat forward on the couch, “I cannot believe you didn’t tell me about your friend. I tell you about my friends!”

John furrowed his eyebrows and shot a look sidelong at her, “You have friends?”

Yelena did have friends. She sometimes went to hang out with Kate Bishop who was also some kind of superhero. Kate had a one-eyed dog and liked scary movies. Bob knew that because Yelena had told him. He felt a little bad, “Sorry.”

”What’s she like?” Ava asked.

“Oh, she’s cool,” Ava, to Bobs’ knowledge, didn’t have friends, “We like the same old video games and movies and stuff. She found an arcade somewhere in the East Village. We’re gonna go later,” He thought that going out to do something ordinary in the evening was a good thing. It showed he was doing better than he had been. There was a little bubble of something like pride in his chest.

”An arcade? Seriously?” John looked at Bob and opened his mouth. Bucky cleared his throat, and John’s mouth snapped shut. After a second he said, “That’s cool.”

”Yeah,” Bob lowered himself back into his beanbag chair, “I’ll tell you if they’ve got Galaxian,” It was John’s favourite old game which he’d told Bob once that he hadn’t played since he was seven.

John muttered, “Thanks.”

Nobody seemed inclined to say anything else. They all returned their attention to the tv and finished the episode. Sure enough when it was done, everyone wandered off their separate directions. John seemed annoyed, and so did Bucky, but Bob wasn’t sure why they would be. Maybe they were mad at each other for something Avenger related. That happened often enough.

Bob debated whether to eat something or not and decided if he didn’t, Nicki would definitely have a good spot to recommend. He brushed his teeth, put on a sweater, and paced until it was late enough to quit the tower and walk to the subway station. He didn’t know exactly where Nicki lived, but it was close enough that she walked to work and passed the tower to do it. He was a little early by the time he hit the steps down to the platform but it turned out not to matter because Nicki was early too.

She was leaning against a column wearing a pair of slim light-coloured jeans and a pink hoodie. She had her phone in her hand and was typing a message, her eyes pinned on the screen.

He figured it was a good idea to announce himself before he walked up and scared her by accident, “Nicki.”

She looked up and smiled, “Bob!” Briefly she returned her attention to her phone, seemed to finish the message, and shoved it in her pocket, “How’s it going?”

“Good. How’re you?”

She blew a raspberry, “Annoyed. Danny’s scheduled like six shoots for next week to make up for the whole flooded office snafu, and now he’s trying to convince me to work on Saturday too.”

Bob had, at one point, worked a regular job. It wasn’t remotely similar to the job that Nicki had, “Can he do that?”

”No,” The train pulled up to the platform with a screech and a rush of air and Nicki started across the tile to the doors, “There’s this pop up happening uptown that he really wants Syd and I to hit, and he can’t make us, so if I push back I can get him to make a really outrageous offer.”

Bob followed her. There were a few people getting off and on, but the crowd was thin and they slipped by easily and took a pair of seats, “Like what?”

Nicki shrugged, “I dunno. Vacation days? Double danger overtime? He offered me hockey tickets once.”

He’d never heard her mention sports of any kind, “Do you like hockey?”

”No. But I took the tickets anyway because my boyfriend at the time did.” She reached up and pulled her hair over her shoulder before she leant back against the plastic, “Do you like sports?”

He considered the question, “I never really played any. I like watching the Olympics.”

”Well that’s a national pride thing, not a sports thing. I got really invested in ladies curling during the last Winter Games,” She turned her head to eye a man with a guitar case suspiciously.

The man didn’t open it and break into song, and they made it safely to their stop. There were a handful of people and one breakdancer on the platform and they passed them all by to climb the stairs into the relatively fresh evening air. Nicki glanced once over her shoulder and followed the sidewalk in the direction they’d been spat out.

Bob shoved his hands in his pockets, “Do you know anywhere good to eat around here?”

”Uh,” She thought about it for a second, then spun as they walked to look back the way they’d come. She turned to face forward again as they reached the intersection at the end of the block and inspected the street sign, “Yes. There’s a sushi place that way,” She gestured to their left, “Or this arcade has those really crappy nachos with the toxic liquid cheese?” She gestured right.

”That’s a real Ralph move,” Bob replied, “But I could definitely eat some nachos.”

”Oh man,” Nicki bounced excitedly as they crossed the street south, “I hope they have Rampage.”

”They’ve got to,” It wasn’t Bob’s favourite, but it was a classic. He was more of a Mrs. Pac-Man man.

“Hey, speaking of Ralph,” She reached out and swatted his bicep with the back of her hand, “I ran into one of your super friends the other day.”

That was a worrying statement, “Not John.”

Nicki laughed, ”No, not John. Bucky.”

That was less worrying. He hadn’t wanted to hear about John hitting on Nicki again and he didn’t think Bucky was the type to flirt with random women he’d just met. Bob liked Bucky. He was quiet and difficult to read, but he was kind. He was protective of the team and that included Bob, “Oh. What did you think?”

“He’s funny. I like him.”

Bob stopped dead in his tracks, positive he’d heard wrong, “Funny?”

Nicki stopped a beat behind and twisted to look back at him. She raised her eyebrows, “Yeah? You don’t think so?”

It wasn’t that Bucky didn’t make jokes. Bob just had a hard time determining when he was joking. Although, sometimes Nicki’s jokes went over his head too, so maybe she was better able to tell what was serious and what was the dry humour Bucky favoured. Bob frowned. He couldn’t picture Bucky joking with a stranger, “I don’t- it’s not how I’d describe him.”

”Huh,” Nicki looked thoughtful. She started down the sidewalk again and Bob followed, “Well, if you ever get the chance to give a hundred year old man bubble tea for the first time, you should do it. It’s pretty funny.”

”You went for bubble tea? With Bucky?” Bob couldn’t picture any part of the situation she was describing and was monumentally confused, “Did he like it?”

”I don’t know,” Nicki answered. She pointed to a low neon-lit building across the street, “I don’t think he did either.”

Bob tried to assess what that meant as they waited for a cab to zip past and then crossed the street. The arcade was painted grey with a huge purple and green sign announcing it for what it was. There weren’t any windows and when Nicki pulled the door open for him he was plunged into semi darkness. The inside was carpeted and lit only with neon and black lights, the harsh blue wash of old arcade machines shining out from beyond the front counter. There were a handful of plasticky tables around the front of the establishment and the high ring of overlapping music singing out from the back.

Nicki beamed as she approached the counter, “This place is awesome. Nachos first?”

“Yeah,” It was awesome. Bob had only ever played arcade games in the rec-center lobby near his childhood home. He’d thought at the time that the three machines available were pretty cool. They paled in comparison to what was available to him now. He was still too caught on the Nicki-Bucky situation to appreciate it properly, “Bucky didn’t flirt with you, did he?”

Nicki scoffed, “I wish.” She set her elbow on the counter and turned to face him. There was an odd expression on her face he didn’t recognize, “Does he flirt with a lot of women?”

Bob shook his head. He couldn’t tell if she was joking or not, “No. I don’t think he’s interested in dating.”

”Bummer,” She remarked.

A young woman appeared behind the counter and at her greeting Nicki ordered two baskets of nachos and a pair of cards to be loaded with an outrageous number of digital tokens. Bob pulled out his own wallet and insisted on paying and she let him without too much of an argument.

Bob really couldn’t tell if Nicki was serious about the flirting thing or not. He didn’t suppose it really mattered. It was less icky to think that Nicki might like Bucky than it had been to think that John might like Nicki. Bucky, at least, wasn’t a whole ass.

Chapter Text

Bucky found it was a little easier to ignore his personal issues when he was working.

It gave him an excuse to spend nights looking through surveillance footage and police reports, drawing connections and putting timelines together, rather than lie in bed and deal with the uncomfortable thoughts chasing each other around his brain.

It also gave him an excuse to be out of the tower where he didn’t have to hear Bob talk about his friend.

It was awful. He was happy for Bob, really. He wanted Bob to be happy and to be able to talk about the nice, normal things he had in his life. The jealousy of listening just made him want to put his metal hand through a wall.

So he found himself a nice case to work. It was small potatoes compared to what Yelena and John had been busy with, but that meant he could justify working it alone. He didn’t need more Avengers to track down a drug trafficker in hiding, he was more than capable of handling it.

The man’s name was Enzo Farina. Enzo was Italian American, thirty-eight years old, and five foot eleven. He had decided eight years before to take advantage of the power vacuum created in the wake of the Blip. He took the threads of his old boss’s remaining network and stitched them into a passable criminal empire. For four years, he ran the drug trade in New York. Then, suddenly, his old boss was back. Along with the rest of the network that predated Enzo’s control.

The resulting bout of criminal house-cleaning was bloody and dramatic. It kept the NYPD busy for months and at the end of it, Enzo was gone. But not dead. Bucky was sure of that. The man couldn’t hope to win the battle for control of the empire, and he couldn’t be allowed to live to threaten that control, so he’d gone to ground. He’d done a good job of hiding. He didn’t use existing property or possessions. He didn’t touch his known bank accounts, and was never flagged in city surveillance footage.

Too bad for him, Bucky had found his accomplice. The only person who would care enough about Enzo to risk their own wellbeing in hiding him.

Antonio Costa was also Italian American, thirty-two years old, and six foot two. On paper, he was clean. The son of a real-estate magnate who funded Antonio’s lavish lifestyle and series of hobby businesses. His father’s success leant Antonio a level of credibility in his work and legitimized his need for a security presence.

There was absolutely no paper trail that connected the two men. There was instead, a young model named Stacy Finch, who had briefly dated Antonio. Or, pretended to date Antonio. And Stacy loved a selfie.

Bucky’s plan was simple. He’d use Stacy’s intel to lean on Antonio, who would in turn give up Enzo. Enzo could then be squeezed for every ounce of information he still had on the New York drug trade, in exchange for not being left in the open for the Italian mob to find.

He hadn’t decided yet if he’d be taking down the mafia himself or if he’d pass it off to the DEA. He supposed he’d see how he felt when he got there.

Antonio’s newest business venture was a restaurant along the north end of Central Park. It was, predictably, an Italian place, but less the kind of place one might expect to find a mob boss in the back corner, and more the kind of place one would take a date to drink wine. Mid-afternoon wasn’t an ideal time to shake anybody down, but he couldn’t exactly go when the restaurant was open and it seemed that Antonio was dead-set on spending all his time there. Bucky surveyed the outside from the seat of his motorcycle just long enough to determine that it was closed, but occupied, before swinging his leg free and starting toward the huge frosted-glass double doors.

If Antonio were actually a member of the mafia, Bucky might’ve been more inclined to be subtle. He would’ve snuck in the back and cleared the kitchen before approaching the man himself. But Antonio wasn’t a mobster, he was just an overgrown spoiled kid, with a mobster for a boyfriend. Bucky didn’t expect he’d even need to reach for the knife concealed under his jacket. He shoved the door open and stepped through into the dining room.

He had already scoped out the restaurant, so he knew exactly what he was going to find. The dining room was a long rectangle with concrete floors and high arched stonework ceilings. The south side was faced in frosted glass, and there was a high bar on the north side. There were a dozen tables covered in white table cloths, each surrounded by simple birch chairs. When he’d been in before, the restaurant had been dim. The chandeliers set low and the light from outside already faded. This time it wasn’t dim. The overhead lighting was brighter, and the sun filtered in to cast the whole place in sunny warmth. There were four men in the room and one woman.

As a rule, Bucky didn’t swear in front of ladies. But he could have.

Very slowly Nicki lowered her camera to stare at him.

The youngest man, and the only one Bucky didn’t recognize, spoke, “I’m sorry sir, we’re closed.”

Bucky assumed he was the cook, and that he’d made the food Nicki was in the middle of photographing. Bucky also assumed that he had no idea his boss had been dating a mobster, unlike the two security goons who squared themselves to Bucky, and Antonio who started to sweat.

“I just need a quick word with your boss. In private,” He looked from the cook to Nicki. She was wearing a blazer and slim jeans, her hair tied back neatly. The electricity that started up in his body when he saw her crackled to life but it was less exhilarating and more agonizing than usual. He couldn’t have been less happy to see her, because the two security goons were clearly carrying, “Mind waiting outside, Miss?”

Nicki took a sharp breath and stepped away from the table and Antonio, who reached a placating hand out toward her, “Stay, Miss North,” He straightened his spine and tried to inject some authority into his tone, “I’m afraid we’re in the middle of something. You’ll have to make an appointment with my assistant.”

Bucky thought it was a good thing Nicki had removed herself from touching distance of the man because he hadn’t intended on breaking Antonio’s arm when he walked in, but he would have. The two security goons moved slowly and together, to get on opposite sides of him. They were trained, but there weren’t enough of them for that to matter, “Miss North.”

”Yeah,” Nicki scooped a backpack off the floor and started toward the exit, “Sorry Antonio, I don’t get paid enough for whatever this is. You can take it up with Danny,” She gave Goon 1 and Bucky both a wide berth, shooting him an almost fearful look on her way past and out the door. The cook, seeing her leave, fled toward the kitchen.

Fucking fantastic. He’d just wanted a quick job that would let him forget the smile on her face when she told him goodbye last. The one that gave him heart palpitations whenever it came to mind. Well, he’d gotten his wish, Monkey’s Paw style. He’d be remembering how he’d scared her forever instead. The electricity turned excruciating. He scowled, “Alright. Let’s make this quick. Where’s your boyfriend?”

”I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Antonio wiped his right palm against his pant leg, “Get out before my security throws you out.”

Goon 1 took half a step forward. Goon 2 reached.

Bucky lifted his hand and pointed at Goon 2 firmly, “If you touch that gun, I’m gonna hit you,” The idiot was on Bucky’s right which meant that any shots he fired were liable to go right through the restaurant's front window and into the street beyond. Bucky wasn’t about to be gentle and risk the chance that Nicki was still somewhere outside the building in the potential path of a bullet.

Goon 2 hesitated and Goon 1 didn’t. He pulled his gun, tried to point it at Bucky, and was stopped with a vibranium hand around the barrel driving it back down toward the floor. The gun went off with a crack and the bullet hit the concrete and bounced off to embed itself in the front of the bar. Goon 2 stepped forward to throw a punch that Bucky diverted with a boot to his ribcage, knocking him back into a table that flipped and sent stoneware shattering across the concrete.

Goon 1 threw an elbow toward Bucky’s nose that he ducked backwards to avoid, then slammed his right fist into the man’s nose. He crumpled. Bucky released the magazine from the glock left in his hand, threw the slide, and tossed the pieces in opposite directions.

He registered that Antonio was trying to make a late exit through the kitchen and disregarded it as a priority when Goon 2 launched himself in Bucky’s direction with a knife. It was better than a gun. Bucky let the blade screech off the metal of his arm, stepped in, and slammed his elbow into the man’s solar plexus. He dropped to the floor.

Bucky caught the knife on its way down and threw it. It sank into the wood trim of the kitchen door, halting Antonio in his tracks with a high, “Fuck!”

“Where’s your boyfriend, Antonio?” Bucky stalked across the dining room toward him. Antonio, in a truly stupid move, tried to make a break for the front door. Bucky took two quick steps to intercept him, wrapped a firm hand around his jacket and the other around his belt, and hauled him up to slam him flat-backed on the end of the bar.

Antonio wheezed.

Bucky might’ve been sympathetic if he wasn’t so pissed, ”I don’t have all day. Where’s Enzo?”

Clearly, Antonio wasn’t used to being tossed around by supersoldiers and he wasn’t interested in knowing what Bucky’s next step might’ve been, “Newport-“ He stammered, “The Silver Lady!”

Bucky frowned, “What is that? A club?”

”Dad’s yacht!” He lifted his palms awkwardly in surrender, “Please, I just wanted to keep him safe, I promise I never touched the drugs!”

”Sure,” Bucky patted the front of his jacket roughly until he found what he was looking for and dug Antonio’s phone free, “Passcode.”

”Six-eight-nine-two-four-two!”

Bucky tapped it in, hit the call button and dialed from memory. It rang three times before a woman answered, “Special agent Turner.”

“Enzo Farina’s on a yacht in Newport, The Silver Lady, owned by George Costa,” He eyed Antonio who squeezed his eyes shut and whimpered.

”Sargeant Barnes-“ Turner sounded upset. She usually sounded upset when Bucky called her, probably because he only ever did it to hand off a cleanup job. She had begged him once to call just about anyone else, but he liked her. She never let his hard work go to waste.

“He’s been working with the son, Antonio, you should pick him up too. 296 Central Park North.” Turner made a pained noise but he could hear the tell-tale rattle of her office chair across the floor that indicated she was standing, “Be fast, I’m not babysitting,” He hung up and shoved the phone into his own pocket. He yanked at Antonio’s shirt and the man squeaked, “Don’t move.”

Bucky released Antonio, who did an impressive immigration of a piece of granite. He moved to find Goon 2 and rolled him onto his side to retrieve the gun in his holster. It only took him a second to break it down into its component pieces which he tossed into different corners of the restaurant on his way to the front door. He shouldered out into the early afternoon sun.

“Are you okay?”

He really couldn’t believe his luck lately, because Nicki had evidently chosen to stick around. A weird knot of indistinguishable emotions tangled up behind his ribs. Irritation that she’d stayed, though she’d had the sense to remove herself to the face of the next building which was brick and would’ve kept her from catching a bullet. Shame, at the still fearful look on her face. Something else that tried to shove both those things aside as she started toward him.

”Fine. We have to go,” She had to go, but he’d be damned if he was going to let her out of his sight before Antonio and Enzo were both confirmed to be in custody. That either of them would point a finger at her was a reach but criminals were stupid and he wasn’t willing to take even the off chance her safety was compromised. He reached out and wrapped one hand around her forearm, the other landing on her back as he steered her in the direction of his bike. He glanced over his shoulder at the restaurant doors.

”Bucky, your arm!” She caught the ripped sleeve of his leather jacket in her hand.

”It’s fine, it’s metal.” He grabbed his helmet and offered it to her, “Put this on,” The helmet was less about Bucky being concerned he might crash his bike and more about anonymity. And the fact that some SI egghead had designed it to withstand a high-caliber round from twenty yards.

”Oh. Right,” She slid her fingers from the rip, down the rest of his forearm to linger on the black metal of his thumb where it was still wrapped around her other arm.

Sometimes Bucky wished he still had his real arm. He’d never felt the ache of it so strongly, ”Nicki. Now.”

“Yeah, sorry,” She took the helmet from him and, after a half-second's indecision, yanked her hair free of its ponytail to pull it on, “What was that?”

Bucky tipped her head up with a finger and made quick work of the strap. His skin burned where his fingertips brushed her neck, ”An idiot with a criminal boyfriend. Feds are gonna pick him up,” He swung his leg over his bike and knocked the kickstand free, “On.”

”What? No,” Nicki seemed to realize belatedly what she needed the helmet for, “Why?”

”Because I’m taking you home, where you will stay until I hear that everything is squared away. Now,” He watched her yank nervously at the strap of her backpack, “Please,” It was obvious that she was scared and he felt badly about that, but he also felt like he’d explode if he didn’t get her off the sidewalk.

Nicki sucked in a breath, turned to look at the restaurant one more time, then stepped forward, “Oh my God, Okay,” She gripped his shoulder and swung her leg over the bike behind him, “I’m at East 36th and Lexington. What do I,” She trailed off, her right hand still on his shoulder and her left floating in the air between them.

Already, Bucky registered the effects of his mistake. He could feel the heat of her skin through two layers of denim where her legs were pressed against his. He’d thought remembering her smile was bad. Oh well. He grabbed her left hand and wrapped it around his stomach, then hit the ignition, “Hold on and don’t lean.” Nicki muttered something that might’ve been a curse and wrapped her right hand around him too. The second her grip was secure, he glanced over his shoulder and pulled out into traffic.

Overwhelmingly and for no discernable reason, the Avengers preferred to drive trucks. Yelena had an old blue and white bench seat. Alexei had an antique Bronco he’d had painted red. John had a fuck-off black Tundra so big it was a miracle he could ever find parking. Bucky liked his bike. He liked it because it was fast. Enhanced reflexes and the ability to split lanes made it so that he could get just about anywhere inside of Manhattan in ten minutes or less.

With Nicki pressed against his back, he sort of wished it took longer.

His first instinct was to drop her off directly in front of her building, but that was a bad idea. She didn’t need people seeing an Avenger dropping her off at home and asking why. He pulled into an alley off of Lexington around the north corner from her place instead and killed the engine.

It took a second that he savoured for Nicki to let go of him, and another second after that for her to swing her leg free and stand. She backed up a couple steps to fight with the strap of his helmet. Bucky toed the kickstand free and stood to help her, swatting her hands away gently. When he dropped his arms she turned away to yank off the helmet and took a huge breath, “That was terrifying.”

”Which part?” He watched her sweep a hand over her hair, her expression upset.

”The gunshots?” She held out the helmet to him, “And your driving. Are you really okay?”

He’d pretty much forgotten that someone had tried to shoot him. Even when it was happening, it hadn’t been the most pressing thing on his mind, “I’m fine. Are you alright?” He took the helmet from her and hooked it on the handle of his bike.

Nicki shook her head, “No. Not really. That-“

”Was an unfortunate coincidence,” He finished, “It’s okay. Nobody’s got any reason to look at you and they’ll all be put away by dinner time,” Nicki chewed her lip and he wished he had something more convincing to say to make her feel better, “Right now you’re going to go home,” She made an upset noise and he continued over it, “Just like usual.”

”I’m just supposed to go watch tv? After you almost got shot in the middle of my work day?” Her voice wavered dangerously.

Bucky supposed that would be upsetting for most people. In fact, he was pretty upset himself that she had been in the vicinity of a gunshot. It made him feel itchy, like he needed to do something to make it better, “I’m fine, Nicki. Wasn’t even close.”

Nicki nodded but she still looked upset, “Right. Okay,” She took another deep breath and scrubbed her hands over her face, “You think Bob would come hang out until your guys are all in jail? I hear he’s bulletproof,” The last statement almost succeeded in taking on her usual joking tone.

The same jealousy that had hit him earlier that week when Bob had mentioned their going to a sushi place together threatened to take him out at the knees. Bucky wanted Nicki to feel safe with Bob but suddenly he found he really didn’t want Nicki calling Bob to feel safe, “Probably. Let’s just focus on you going home first. What’s that look like usually? You go right home from here?”

“No,” She shook her head, “I stop and pet Frosty first,” Bucky raised his eyebrows and Nicki elaborated, “The bodega cat.”

He liked the idea, inexplicably, that Nicki stopped every day to pet a neighbourhood cat, “Great. You’re going to walk out of this alley and turn left. You’re going to stop and pet Frosty, then go the rest of the way home. When you get there you will lock the door, Okay?”

”Yeah,” She nodded again, “Yes.” Bucky watched her run her hand through her hair and over the front of her blazer. She gripped the strap of her bag and looked at him and he was forced to reckon with the nervous, upset energy still painted across her features, “Bye Bucky.”

Bucky didn’t say goodbye. He watched her walk the ten feet to the end of the alley, glance back at him once, and turn left.

He’d be damned if he was going to make her sit in her apartment alone to wait for Bob.

There was a dumpster on the south side of the alley and a fire escape above that. He took a couple steps to jump onto the dumpster’s closed door, then reached to yank the rusted ladder free and hauled himself up. It was only four flights of stairs to the roof and the apartments he passed mostly had their blinds drawn. He hoped they all chalked the noise up to an especially large pigeon.

The entire block was made up of similarly sized apartments. Bucky wouldn’t have had a problem scaling the side of a building, but it was nice to know that all it would take was a hop. He stooped low enough that hopefully nobody would take notice, and edged toward the south side of the roof.

He could see Nicki on the sidewalk where she’d crossed to the opposite side of the road. She was doing a good job of keeping her pace even, like there was nothing wrong and her day had been unremarkable. Bucky watched as she ducked through the door of the bodega on the corner, scratched the chin of a large white cat, and bought a carton of ice cream. He shadowed her as she walked the rest of the way to the centre of the block, looked both ways, and crossed back to the building he was on top of.

The flaw in his plan was that he had no idea which of the four stories he was on top of belonged to Nicki. It didn’t really matter, he supposed. He wasn’t planning to break in, she was going to let him in. Or- He hoped she was going to let him in.

He crossed to the back end of the roof and climbed over onto the fire escape. The top floor apartment had its curtains closed so he carried on to the third floor and figured he could double back if he needed to.

He didn’t. It was immediately obvious that the third floor belonged to Nicki. The kitchen the window was set into was small and tidy. There was a pink kettle on the stove and several jars full of loose leaf tea on the counter. The fridge door was covered in papers, pictures and other things.

The living room, through the arch at the end of the room, was a long white rectangle. There were light wood floors and a big rug between the couch and the tv. The wall behind the couch was covered in shelves, which were covered in books.

Despite the walls and furniture being neutral shades, the apartment was colourful. There were stacks of books in places that were not the bookshelves, and framed photos cluttered the walls. They had to be ones she had taken. Each of them was of something different and it didn’t seem like she’d tried to stick to a theme or a colour. There was a forest of bamboo against a grey sky. A piece of graffiti on a brick wall depicting a woman’s face. A walking bridge Bucky didn’t recognize. A neon-lit intersection he did.

It struck him that Nicki’s talent might have been wasted at the Times.

Briefly the light in the room changed and he registered the door to the landing must have opened. A moment later Nicki stepped into the kitchen and the light flicked on.

Bucky knocked on the window and realized belatedly that his plan was flawed when she jumped and slapped a hand over her heart. It would be good, he thought, if he could stop scaring her.

For just long enough that he began to wonder if she wasn’t going to let him in after all, Nicki stared at him. Then crossed the linoleum, unlocked the window, and slid it up and open, “How did you get up here?” Bucky shrugged. Nicki opened her mouth then shut it. She shook her head, “You could’ve walked with me, you know.”

Bucky took it as an invitation to climb through the window, “Better your neighbours don’t see me.”

”Sure,” She agreed. She stepped back, tried to cross her arms, realized her hand was full, and moved to toss the ice cream into the freezer, “You, uh- You don’t have to stay. If you don’t want. I know I was a little,” She waved her hand vaguely, “But I’ll be fine.”

It occurred to him that he hadn’t thought of a very good excuse for wanting to be there. He couldn’t tell her the truth, which was that he didn’t think he could handle leaving her alone if she was upset, “I’d rather not have to tell Bob I scared his friend and then abandoned her. He’d be upset.”

”Right,” She bit her lip, “Well if you want me to keep it to myself,” She trailed off.

”I know,” The joke was familiar but her tone was still wrong, “Don’t worry, I’ll be sweet to you.”

Nicki blinked at him, then ducked her head in a poor attempt to hide her face behind her hair, “Do you want a drink or something?”

It was possible that he’d imagined it. It was possible that for Nicki, it had been a long strange day and she was just tired. It was also possible that the pink in her cheeks had everything to do with his words.

Electricity crackled to life again behind his ribs. He wasn’t supposed to be there. He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near Nicki. Because she was normal and nice and Bob’s friend, and because Bucky was not normal and a killer and also Bob’s friend. Because according to Raynor he was an emotional shut-in. And according to John he was an asshole. And according to Sam he was morally flexible and kind of a bad friend.

But he fucking wanted to be there. So badly. The universe kept pushing him in her direction and he didn’t have the will to fight it when really what he wanted was to come up with as many excuses as he could to exist in her orbit. It had been eighty-eight years since he’d wanted another person and even then he didn’t think it had felt quite like this.

He wasn’t sure what it would do to him if he let himself believe that she might want him too.

He cleared his throat, “I’m fine, thanks,” He glanced at her sock feet, and bent to untie his boots.

“Are you sure?” She pulled open the fridge and he got a look at the inside which was mostly empty but for condiments, “Because I definitely need one. I’ve got a Guinness, a canned mojito, and-” She pulled a bottle free and held it up, “A third of a bottle of wine.”

He was aware that he should not accept a drink, “Fine. I’ll take the Guinness. Please,” He toed off his boots and left them underneath the window.

”Glass?”

”No,” He watched her shut the fridge and took the offered can before following her into the living room where she flopped onto the couch, “Straight from the bottle, huh?”

“I don’t have a dishwasher,” Nicki replied, like it was an answer to his question. She unscrewed the cap and took a drink. Bucky definitely couldn’t watch that. He let his eyes rove the bookshelves instead. Slowly she lowered the bottle to rest on her thighs, “Are you gonna tell me what Antonio was doing?”

Bucky cracked his can and took a drink. He knew he shouldn’t. She still worked for a newspaper and he was running semi-illegal investigations. At some point he’d just stopped being concerned about her keeping information to herself, “He was hiding his boyfriend. Former drug trafficker for the Italian mob.”

Nicki’s eyebrows shot up, “Like, the actual mob?”

”Yeah,” He eyed her couch. It was cream coloured with a chaise on the end closest to the window and half a dozen colourful pillows. It was also not very wide and Nicki had taken a seat almost in the middle. He weighed his options rapidly, then sat on the end of the chaise. It was far enough away that they wouldn’t touch by accident but at the cost that he was mostly facing her. Not that he wouldn’t have watched her out of the corner of his eye anyway. She was fucking pretty. Every time she touched her hair he wanted to touch it too.

“Wow,” She twisted the bottle in her hands, “And you just walked into that restaurant knowing someone might shoot you?”

”At me,” He corrected, “Only been shot three, four times.” Extensive Wakandan neurological therapy had unlocked most of his memory but it turned out that experimental drug cocktails, physical trauma, and repetitive high voltage electricity directly to the brain left some things permanently scrambled. He didn’t really want to think about that. Ever, but definitely not sitting across from Nicki.

She stared at him, “Is that supposed to be good?”

Bucky had thought so, “Been getting shot at for seventy years, so,” He trailed off. The look on her face indicated he might have made an error.

“Great ratio, then,” She reached up and tugged at a lock of her hair, “Except, you aren’t bulletproof, right?”

“No,” Getting shot after the serum hurt just as badly as it had before, but only one of those had scarred.

She didn’t look pleased and clearly discussing being shot wasn’t the way to improve her emotional wellbeing. Bucky didn’t know what to say to distract her and was glad when the low vibration of her phone did it for him.

She yanked it out of her pocket, set her wine bottle on the coffee table and stood to answer, “Hey, Danny.” Bucky could hear the voice of her boss through the phone, even as she paced away toward the kitchen, “Yeah, I’m fine. Home. No. No, I got the hell out of there when an Avenger showed up. I don’t know.” She glanced toward Bucky and started down the hallway, “When would I have asked that?”

Bucky took a long drink and listened to her boss ask a rapid string of questions about the incident at the restaurant. Nicki reappeared at the end of the hall, “Look, Danny, asking those kinds of questions really isn’t in my job description. I’m gonna take the rest of today, and tomorrow off, and you can make sure that rooftop bar I’m supposed to shoot on Monday isn’t like, laundering money or something.” She went into the kitchen and opened a cupboard to stare at the contents, “Great. Yeah. Bye,” She shoved the cupboard closed, hung up and dropped her phone to the counter.

“Lying to your boss again?” Bucky asked.

“Always,” She returned to the living room and sat, a little further away than she had been, “If I tell him, he’ll tell Carter who works crime, and that guy’s the worst. He’s basically my nemesis. I’d rather die than give him a leg up.”

Bucky felt the loss of the extra six inches keenly, “What did he do to you?” He tried not to think about the problem it would cause if he didn’t like the answer.

“He called Syd’s writing ‘overly poetic’,” She picked up her wine bottle and waved it, “Like, sorry you’re so hard-boiled you can’t appreciate a little artistry.”

Bucky huffed a laugh, “That’s all it took?“

“Syd’s my best friend. She’s the reason I work at the Times. If she reported on crime, I would totally work you over for all the details.”

He could appreciate that. He’d done worse for Steve, “She’s not interested in a different job?”

“No,” Nicki had a sip from her bottle, “I’m her best friend and she’d sell me out for a reservation to Atelier.”

Bucky hummed, “Russian mob owns that one.”

Nicki looked alarmed for half a second before she snorted a laugh. She shot a half-hearted kick at his leg, “That’s not funny.”

He caught her ankle and grinned back. Because he was paying attention, he was sure this time that the pink in her cheeks was all for him. The response in his body was sudden and dramatic, fire under his skin that lit where his hand wrapped around the denim of her pants and burned through him like napalm.

His phone vibrated in his pocket and he could’ve crushed it in his fist. He dropped her leg and reached for it. The text from Turner was short and sweet, “Feds did their job,” He wished suddenly that Turner was less effective. Maybe he should’ve called someone else.

“That was fast,” Nicki muttered.

“Yeah,” He took one last pull from his beer and set it on her coffee table before standing. He wanted to make an excuse to stay and knew no good would come of it if he did, “You gonna be alright when I go?”

”Sure,” Nicki answered. She stood to watch him cross to the kitchen and pull on his boots. When he straightened she had her lip pinned between her teeth, “Do you think it’s weird that we keep running into each other?”

He did think it was weird. He couldn’t decide if the universe was rewarding or punishing him, “This time was definitely weird,” He opened the window and threw his leg over the sill, then ducked out onto the fire escape, “Nice place by the way.”

”Thanks,” She stepped forward, set both of her hands on the bottom of the open window and smiled, “Bye Bucky.”

He wasn’t in the habit of saying goodbye so he watched while she shut the window and flipped the latch before he climbed the stairs to the roof.

The smell of lilacs and rain stuck in his nose the rest of the day.

Chapter Text

“This is a bad idea.”

”It’s fine,” Yelena insisted, “We’ll be in and out in five minutes, she won't even notice,” She kept her eyes on the apartment window.

Ava picked at her nails, “Unless she’s decided today is the day she starts conserving water.”

”Yeah, right,” Yelena scoffed, “Nobody is an environmentalist when they need to wash their hair. Twenty minutes, minimum, and the apartment is the size of a shoebox.” She’d searched much bigger spaces in much less time. Between the two of them it would be easy.

Ava raised an eyebrow, “And what do you plan on telling Bob if we find something?”

Right. She really hadn’t thought that far ahead. She made a face that Ava shook her head at.

In the beginning, Yelena had thought John was completely insane. He’d broken into the office of a photojournalist because she was pretty and that somehow indicated untrustworthiness. Like Bob was too weird to make a normal friend and the woman must’ve been taking advantage.

Sure, Bob was a little odd and a lot awkward. But he was nice. And funny. They hung out every day and Yelena liked him. So did the rest of the team. So did John. Surely other people could like him too. Yelena and Ava both had given John hell, and then Bucky had given him hell, and then Yelena had given him a little more hell.

But when their meal was done, Alexei had pulled her aside when he was pretending he might load the dishwasher and said, “You know he only worries because Bob is his friend.”

It didn’t sink in right away. At the time she’d scoffed. But then she spent the week watching and sure enough, John cared about Bob. He stopped in the living room to join when Bob was watching tv. He asked Bob to play video games and only swore a little when he was losing. When he ordered pizza, he ordered Bob’s favourite kind, even though it was an objectively insane choice (sardines?).

It forced Yelena to consider whether she wasn’t quite concerned enough. Because as much as she believed that Bob was great and more than capable of making friends, she didn’t know anything about Nicola North, and she didn’t see how she could trust someone who worked at a newspaper with her friend’s massive secret.

It didn’t really matter to Yelena professionally if the secret got out. If people knew Bob was a dangerous metahuman it wouldn’t be great, but Valentina would have a disaster-mitigation strategy, if only so that she and her team could come out of it looking okay. Having his trust betrayed would kill Bob. If he thought he’d gained something good and it blew up in his face, he would be devastated. She wasn’t about to let that happen.

First, she ran a background on Nicola North, if only to be sure that she wasn’t some kind of agent. It came back clean and uninteresting. She had no previous names, only two previous addresses in New York, and zero postal or safe deposit boxes registered to her. She only had the one job currently, but a consistent and boring work history. She was financially stable. She had a degree, a living father and stepmother, and was in enough photos on friend's social media to track her movements legitimately for years previous. John had already been to her office and found nothing, so Yelena needed to get a look at her apartment.

It would’ve been easy enough to break in when Nicola wasn’t home, but there were only two likely locations for photos to be stored. Her laptop, and her phone. Breaking in while she was home would grant easy access to both without the need to clone her cell. The woman liked long showers, and wasn’t an agent. Yelena was confident they could be in and out with whatever incriminating shit she had without being noticed.

Of course, if they found something, she really would need to tell Bob. And Bob would be crushed.

”There she goes,” Ava noted. They watched Nicola get up from the couch, deliver her empty plate to the kitchen, and walk down the hallway.

It was too late to turn back. Yelena vaulted the edge of the roof and rode her line to the ground, Ava on her heels. Besides the mildly dramatic trip to street level, the plan was simple and unworthy of notice. They crossed the road. Ava glanced both ways, phased through the front door, then opened it for Yelena. Together they walked to the third floor.

Ava paused outside of the apartment door, “Are you sure about this?”

”Yes,” She wasn’t really, but she tried to project surety anyway, “If she’s going to turn on Bob-“

”Okay, okay,” Ava held up a placating hand, and disappeared through solid oak. A second later there was the click of the deadbolt, and the door swung inward, “I’ll get the phone.”

Yelena nodded. They could hear the faint sound of pop music, accompanied by singing, over the noise of running water. She shut the door behind her as Ava stalked silently down the hall and into the bedroom across from the closed bathroom door.

The living room was lit by a pair of floor lamps on either side of the tv. It only took her a second to spot the laptop where it was shoved carelessly halfway underneath the couch. She moved to kneel beside the coffee table and pulled it free, then set it on the cushion in front of her and opened it. She tapped the spacebar a few times with a gloved finger and the screen lit up.

She’d brought a flash drive to help her get past the password, but there wasn’t one. That struck Yelena as being very dumb, and then immediately as a sign that she might’ve made an error. She tapped into the file explorer anyway.

There were several mostly empty files, but the one labeled ‘pics’ was full. Yelena clicked it and swore quietly. There were hundreds of folders, all clearly labeled and dated, but with no indication if they might be what she was looking for. She switched tactics and searched for the most recent files.

There were two within the limited time since Bob and Nicola’s meeting.

The first was titled ‘Luna’s Birthday’. Yelena clicked it and scrolled rapidly through a series of photos that all depicted a birthday party at a karaoke bar. Frowning, she backed out and clicked into ‘Frosty’, which contained eight photos of a large white cat.

Ava appeared at the end of the hallway.

”There’s nothing here,” Yelena hissed. She gestured at the laptop screen.

Ava shook her head, “There’s nothing on her camera’s memory card either.”

”The phone?”

“She has it in there,” Ava pointed toward the bathroom door, “She’s playing music, there’s no way I can grab it without her noticing.”

Yelena frowned. She slapped the laptop shut and shoved it back into its hiding place halfway under the couch. If they couldn’t look at Nicki’s phone now, they would have to find her later and clone it. Which required a dummy phone from the tech department. Which wasn’t a big deal, but Bucky had told them all to butt out, and she wouldn’t put it past him to watch and make sure they actually followed the order.

They needed a plan B.

She shoved up from the floor and signaled Ava to follow. She yanked open the front door and shut it behind her. Ava slid the deadbolt shut before following her out onto the landing, “I have a new plan.”

”Okay?” Ava raised her eyebrows.

Yelena nodded once. Then she banged on the door.

”Jesus Christ,” Ava muttered, “This is a terrible plan.”

”It’s fine,” Yelena banged on the door again, “We’re just going to ask to see the pictures of Bob she’s taken.”

“And she’s going to tell Bob we were here,” Ava remarked slowly, “And then tell everybody, via her newspaper, that a pair of Avengers tried to shake her down.”

”Oh. Shit,” She really hadn’t thought that far ahead.

There was a muffled, “What the fuck?” Through the door, and then it fell open.

Nicola North was on the opposite side, wrapped in a fluffy robe, her hair soaking wet and dripping onto both her back and the floor. She surveyed Yelena and Ava with something between confusion and suspicion, “Hi there.”

Too late to back out now. Yelena smiled at her, “Hi. Nicki, right? Bob’s friend? Mind if we come in?”

For a second, Nicki squinted at her. Then she stepped backward and opened the door wider, “Sure, why not.”

”Excellent. I’m Yelena, this is Ava,” She stepped into the apartment and took up a spot near the coffee table. Ava ducked into the kitchen to survey the outside of the fridge.

”Sure, I know you. Bob’s roommates,” Nicki tugged the band of her robe a little tighter and crossed her arms over her stomach. She didn’t seem particularly phased by having a pair of Avengers in her living room.

”That’s funny,” Yelena remarked, and if she wasn’t about to shake Nicki down, she really might’ve laughed, “Yes, Bob is a good friend of ours,” She paused and fixed Nicki with a hard look, “And you’re a reporter.”

”Photographer,” Nicki corrected. She waved at the wall of framed photos behind her and glanced at Ava.

”Right. So where are the pictures?” Ava turned and set her shoulder against the arched doorway to the living room.

Nicki frowned. She tilted her head, “What pictures?”

She was pretty good at playing dumb, Yelena thought. Or she was dumb. Or she was innocent and Yelena was dumb, “The photos of Bob. That you’re planning to sell.”

”I’m not planning to sell any photos of Bob,” Nicki replied immediately. Her voice was surprisingly firm.

Ava straightened, “Then you won’t mind if we check your phone.”

Nicki glanced from Ava to Yelena. She reached up to gather a handful of hair and squeezed, sending water splashing to the floor. She seemed unconcerned with both the mess and the accusation, “Yeah, okay. It’s on the bathroom counter.” Immediately Ava turned and phased through the kitchen wall, “Oh shit. That is-“ Ava reappeared, phone in her hand, “Really cool.”

Yelena thought that might not have been what she was about to say, but she didn’t comment on it, “Passcode.”

”Eight-two-two-six,” Nicki watched Ava punch the numbers into the screen, then start to scroll, “What made you think I’m trying to screw over Bob?”

”Reporters don’t just pal around with dangerous metahumans. They’re always working an angle,” Yelena had seen enough articles about the five official Avengers to know that much was true. Even when the team had been made up of Captain America and Iron Man, fresh from saving New York from an alien invasion, journalists couldn’t help but to smear their saviours for the sake of a catchy headline.

”Sure,” Nicki agreed, “But I’m a photographer. I take pictures of food. And I like Bob.”

Yelena was really starting to think she’d made a mistake because even a Widow would have struggled to lie so well.

”There’s only one,” Ava remarked. She tossed the phone in Yelena’s direction.

Yelena caught it, flipped it right-way up, and stared. Then she stared a little more, “What is- What the fuck is he doing?” She flipped the phone and held it out toward Nicki.

Nicki squinted briefly at the screen, “Oh. Yeah. I bet him he couldn’t eat a chilli-dog in under sixty seconds.”

”Did he?” Ava asked, her tone edged with morbid curiosity.

”No. Not even close. But I did,” A little grin curled at the corner of her mouth.

”That’s impressive,” Yelena let the phone drop to her side. There was an awful sinking feeling in her stomach. She’d let John get in her head and broken into Bob’s friend’s apartment. Now Nicki was going to tell Bob, and Bob was going to be furious. And heartbroken that Yelena hadn’t thought he could judge the character of his friend. And probably heartbroken when his friend didn’t want to hang out with him anymore because Yelena and Ava were so fucking weird.

Awkward silence permeated the apartment like a toxic cloud.

”You can have this back," She took two steps to offer Nicki her phone. A little belatedly she offered a low, "Sorry."

Nicki took it, “Thanks,” She surveyed Yelena, “I’ll, uh, not tell Bob about this, I think.”

”You- no, you should tell him,” As much as she didn’t want Bob to know, Yelena also wasn’t about to ask the woman in front of her to lie, after having just searched her phone for possible intel.

Nicki shook her head, “No, I feel like this is the kind of thing that might upset him. And, I mean, I get where you’re coming from. Heather totally would pretend to be friends with someone fully intending on stabbing them in the back the second she got something printable. But she doesn’t have a soul and I do, so,” She looked to Ava, “No harm no foul.”

Ava raised an eyebrow, “Really?”

”Yeah,” She waved a hand between Ava and Yelena, “Superheroes seem kind of weird about boundaries, so y’know. Can’t really blame you.”

Yelena snorted a laugh. She was starting to see why Bob liked the woman.

Chapter Text

It had taken Bucky a little while to select a coffee shop that he actually liked.

There was a lot to consider when choosing a usual spot. Only one of those things was the actual coffee. Which, at the Bean Counter, was terrible.

Bucky figured the lattes must’ve been passable because the place hadn’t closed yet, but the drip was godawful. It was consistently over-brewed and a little burnt. He preferred it that way. Like a lot of the things he liked, it reminded him of how his life used to be. The stuff he drank at four in the morning before heading to the docks. The shit Dumdum used to brew in the little percolator he kept in his pack that was dented from a bullet and left grounds in the coffee.

Coffee had gotten better almost across the board, and Bucky enjoyed it significantly less.

Other things he liked about the Bean Counter were its small size, high volume, and nonexistent windows. It was all plain brick and concrete on the inside. He could see every corner of the shop, assess all the patrons, and feel secure in the knowledge that none of them could hear each other. Of all the places he’d tested out near the tower, it was the most solidly defensible.

He wished the playlists were better, the barista with the nose ring liked early 2000s rock and that had never been his genre. He suffered it because the barista didn’t seem to know who he was. Hopefully, he wouldn’t know who Sam was either, but being Captain America seemed to have garnered the man a higher profile than he used to have.

It had been a hot minute since he’d spoken to Sam. Things were fairly contentious given the whole Avengers trademark situation, but that really wasn’t Bucky’s fault and he felt like he could use a friend. A friend who was capable of giving good advice. Or at least of not giving him an aneurism when he asked for it.

Because Bucky was suffering in a hell of his own creation. Or, Bob’s creation. He really wasn’t sure who should take the blame on it. Maybe the universe. Because really, what other fucking explanation was there for Nicki being everywhere, including his shit-ass coffee shop? He really thought she had better taste.

She didn’t notice him right away when she stepped through the door. She kept her eyes up on the menu mounted to the wall as the man ahead of her ordered. It gave Bucky the opportunity to stare a little.

She was wearing, god help him, a white turtleneck that clung to her chest, tucked into a pair of tightly belted black pants. Her hair was loose in messy waves and he didn’t trust for a second that when she turned around and saw him, she wouldn’t start fucking with it.

It had taken three days for his jacket to quit smelling like lilacs after he’d seen her last. Sometimes he thought he could still smell it, but that was probably because the memory of having her pressed against his back was haunting him.

He couldn’t hear her order over a sudden burst of discordant trumpet, but he watched the barista pour hot water into a takeaway cup and hand it over with a packet. Tea tracked for her, he thought, though he couldn’t put a finger on why.

Nicki ripped the packet open and dropped the tea bag into her cup. She gave it a few cursory dunks, then slapped on the lid and turned. Almost instantly her eyes met his, the same deep grey he’d been trying and failing not to think about since the shoot at the tower. She tilted her head, smiled, and reached up to flick her long hair over her shoulder.

”You’re following me,” Nicki announced when she dropped into the empty chair across from him.

”If I was following you,” He raised his mug in the hopes that burnt coffee would drown out the sweet petrichor smell of her, “You wouldn’t see me.”

Her lips twitched up, “Sure. But you can’t resist having one of our little chats. I’m too charming.” It seemed to Bucky that she’d recovered from the upset of their previous meeting. She set her elbows on the table between them and leant forward.

Bucky forced himself to keep his eyes on hers, “I think you’ll find that’s the other way around.”

”You got me,” She admitted seriously, “I’ve been following you.”

He couldn’t help the smirk that jumped to his mouth, ”I hadn’t noticed. You must be good.”

”I’m the best. I’ve been hoping to catch something embarrassing on film but you’re giving me nothing here,” She gestured at his form overall, her eyes flicking down to his chest before meeting his again.

”I gave up eating in public,” He remarked dryly. Nicki snorted a laugh.

It occurred to Bucky that as much as he used to make his friends laugh, Steve in particular, he didn’t manage it much anymore. Bob never seemed to catch it when he made a joke. Yelena and Ava did, but they only ever rolled their eyes. It wasn’t something that bothered him. He wasn’t funny anymore and he’d made his peace with that. Just another thing that had changed over the course of a century.

Nicki seemed to think he was funny.

“Excuse me,” Fuck his life, “I think you’re in my chair.”

Nicki glanced up at Sam and Bucky had to appreciate her poker face. Her expression shifted to a polite smile that didn’t betray at all that she knew exactly who she was looking at, “I’m so sorry.”

Sam’s eyes roved over her, from her hair to her boots, flicked to Bucky, then settled on her face. He offered her a wide smile, “Sam Wilson. You are?”

Nicki stood, “Just leaving,” She raised her paper cup to Bucky, “Sargeant Barnes.”

Bucky watched her brush past Sam and shoulder out the front door. It drove him insane when people were late but he wished for once that Sam would have given it a try. He would’ve way rather spent his morning trying to get another blush out of Nicki than sitting across the table from Sam. He couldn’t help but feel punished.

”Who was that?” Sam dropped into Nicki’s vacant chair.

Bucky could read his tone and chose to disregard it, “Nobody,” He only meant to brush Sam off but the lie sat like lead, “Times journalist,” That was true at least but it still tasted like ash. He and Nicki weren’t even really friends, so why did it feel like a betrayal to not at least use her name?

Sam’s eyebrows shot up, “A reporter. Really? Val paying her to run something nice?”

”Sam,” His tone tipped toward warning.

”What? I just know how you need the boost to public favour-“

”You said we weren’t going to-“

”We’re not doing anything, I just think-“

”Not my fault that we got the name-“

”Deserve to have a team sanctioned by the government-“

”Oh, like John?” Sam snapped his mouth shut and Bucky kept going, “Guy made a great Captain America, thank God the president approved.”

Sam scowled, “You know why you got that name? You know the difference between your team and mine?”

Bucky shook his head, “I told you that you and Joaquin could-“

”But not Kamala?”

“Kamala Khan-“ Bucky choked down his rising voice and hissed the rest across the table, “Is a child. I don’t understand how you’re okay with that.” They glared at each other. Bucky was reminded of what a poor idea it had been to call Sam. They couldn’t have a conversation without snapping at each other about the same dead-horse issue, “We said we weren’t going to have this argument again.”

Sam chewed the inside of his cheek, then blew out a slow breath, “Fine.” He tapped his fingers on the table, “Tell me about the reporter.”

”No,” Bucky lifted his mug. He’d wanted to ask Sam for some advice about Nicki. Not specifically. Maybe just if it was bad form in the current decade to ask a friend’s friend on a date. But that was before Sam had seen Nicki and before Sam had pissed him off.

”What’s her name?”

”Dunno,” Swallowing his coffee felt like choking down tar.

“Really? Cause she seemed to know you,” Sam’s tone was teasing.

Bucky didn’t want to talk about her. It felt dangerous. But he was desperate to know what Sam was driving at. He sniffed, “She’s a friend of Bob’s.”

Sam lowered his voice dramatically, “Iced half the city, Bob?”

”He didn’t kill anyone. He’s a nice guy,” Bucky liked Bob. Bob was a decent guy and he wished Sam would trust him on that.

”Sure,” Sam nodded, sarcasm bleeding into his tone, “As nice as the assassin that walks through walls?”

Bucky put his mug down and shoved up from the table. He shot a dark look at Sam and stalked away, shouldering out onto the sidewalk. It wasn’t a nice day, there were huge grey clouds drifting across the sun that left everything colour leeched and dim. It was only a matter of time before the rain hit, the kind that washed down the smog and stank, not the kind that smelled like an English garden.

“Bucky! I’m sorry, okay?” Sam caught his elbow and dragged him to a stop. For a second they stood still in the middle of the sidewalk, “I’m sorry.”

He did his best to let his irritation go in the form of a long breath and started down the sidewalk again, Sam at his side. For a long while they didn’t say anything, then Bucky muttered, “What’d you mean she knows me?”

Sam scoffed, “She was flirting with you. Too bad you hate reporters cause she was pretty.” He elbowed Bucky in the ribs, “Hey, you wanna pass her my number?”

It would be a cold day in hell before Bucky even told Sam her name. He shot Sam a hard look.

Sam held his hands up in surrender, “Okay, okay.”

Together they walked a few blocks south. Bucky thought about his team. He understood Sam’s argument better than he liked to let on. They weren’t the type of people a kid should look up to. They weren’t inspirations, they were killers. They’d gotten the title of Avengers because Valentina had needed to avert a PR disaster. But they were also all trying. Trying to be worthy of the name. Trying to find some sort of redemption. Bucky would sooner put himself back in a freezer than give it up and tell them all they weren’t worth the second chance.

He tried not to think about Nicki, who had maybe been flirting, and who had maybe flirted with him before.

Sam elbowed him until he took the hint and they both crossed the street to a coffee cart. Sam ordered his with cream and sugar and laughed with the vendor when he was recognized. ”So,” He started when they walked away, “Why’d you really call?”

Bucky did have a reason, he was just regretting his decision, “The VP is having a fundraiser. Valentina offered the tower. You should be there. With your team,” It was surprisingly hard to spit the invitation out.

Sam glanced over at him, “You’re inviting the competition to shake hands with the Vice President?”

”It’s not a competition,” He scowled, “I’m not handing over the name, but Valentina doesn’t get to decide who’s in charge of saving the world.”

For a minute Sam was quiet. Then he chirped, “The world, huh? Someone’s gotten a little full of themself.”

Bucky rolled his eyes.

The olive branch had a significant effect on the rest of their morning. Sam drank his coffee and they walked as far as the water. They didn’t talk about the trademark situation, but they did talk about Sam’s team. As frustrating as it was, Sam’s team was less of a conversational powder keg than Bucky’s.

Sam’s problem, which he explained at length and which Bucky could offer no solutions for, was that his team was made up of mostly civilians. Shang-Chi, Ant-Man, Hawkeye, Ms. Marvel; none of them had ever trained to fight as part of a team. Two of them had never really trained to fight at all. It made tactical decision making in the moment a nightmare.

Bucky’s team had all been solo operators when they came together, but before that Ava was the only one without a background in group tactical operations. Bucky, Alexei and John had all been military and Bucky, Alexei and Yelena had all worked with the Red Room. There was a certain level of natural group-think that came from their old training. If an operation went sideways, Bucky could count on them to respond in a particular fashion.

Kamala Khan in particular was prone to creative decision making that, while potentially beneficial, was unpredictable and dangerous to the people that were supposed to have her back.

It was oddly soothing to hear Sam vent his frustrations. It made Bucky feel like his team wasn’t as big of a disaster as they could have been. Sure they might’ve been guns for hire, but John would know never to approach a stronghold from a lower line with high visibility.

They didn’t hug when Sam got in his cab, but they did clasp hands. It felt like reaching equilibrium. Bucky hoped that when they saw each other again in two weeks for the fundraiser, they didn’t backslide. He supposed that would depend on whether Sam could get through a conversation with John without decking him.

Sam was level-headed and logical. It wasn’t likely. But John could be a pretty big prick, so the chance was never zero.

Bucky walked himself back to the tower, half convinced that he would run into Nicola North again on the way. It had stopped feeling like a surprise when he saw her and started feeling like a disappointment when he didn’t. Even when he knew that on a Wednesday at eleven she would be in a yoga class with Bob and not walking the city blocks between her office and the tower.

He shucked off his jacket the second the elevator doors opened to the penthouse and tried to recall if he used to be a jealous person. There had been a brief stint after Steve had gotten the serum and they’d been slogging through snow and mud in Europe. He had been acutely jealous that Steve’s feet never seemed to get cold.

“Hey,” John set his arm on the back of the couch and half-turned toward him, “Val said you need a suit for this fundraiser thing, we’ve got an appointment with a tailor at two.”

Bucky thought just about every part of the statement was stupid, “I have a suit.”

”Val said you need a new suit,” John clarified.

”Val can mind her own business,” He turned his back to John and started down the hall.

”I’m just the messenger! Go, don’t go, I don’t care!” John called at his back.

Bucky did not care for Valentina, and the message left him irritated. He fled to his room where he couldn’t make it John’s problem.

The private rooms in the tower’s penthouse were all similar. They were huge, with marble floors and giant windows along one wall. Bucky’s was painted grey. His duvet was blue, and he had a couch that was almost black which faced his tv. He owned twelve books, a tablet, and only enough clothes to fill one corner of his walk-in closet. He had framed three of Steve’s old drawings and they all hung over his bed.

Everyone else’s rooms looked like someone lived there. Bucky’s looked like someone had started to decorate an IKEA showroom, and forgotten what they were supposed to be doing five minutes in, after hiding a small arsenal of weapons.

He sank onto the couch and stared at the wall. Logically he knew that stewing was only going to make him feel worse, but he couldn’t bring himself to reach for anything else.

Valentina could go fuck herself. She was corrupt, dangerous, and only cared about the optics of the team and the best way to get herself a little more power. Bucky had been hell-bent on seeing her behind bars as a congressman and he was only slightly less inclined to have her arrested as an Avenger. He hadn’t yet, because Yelena had the situation in hand and as much as he loathed Val with a passion, her oversight leant them credibility they couldn’t afford to lose.

Sam could also go fuck himself. His team could barely run a functional op and he was giving Bucky shit about his teammates? Bob was more than the Void and he deserved to be seen.

Although, Bob could maybe also go fuck himself.

No. That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t Bob’s fault he had something Bucky wanted. He pressed the heels of his hands firmly to his eyes. He needed to get a fucking grip.

An insistent vibration from his phone signaled an incoming call and he fished it from his jeans and glanced at the screen. The number wasn’t one he recognized but there were only a dozen or so people that had his number so he could assume it was Yelena on a burner. She’d disappeared two days before and hadn’t checked in yet. He swiped to answer, “Yeah.”

”Good afternoon, this is Sophie Sheridan from the Brooklyn Chronicle, I’m looking to speak with a Sergeant Barnes?”

Bucky straightened very slowly. His left hand gripped at the cushion by his thigh, “Speaking.”

”Hi, we’ve got an article set to run tomorrow on the worst cafes in the tri-state area. I was wondering if you’d care to comment?”

Despite having spent a good portion of the day pissed off, Bucky found a slow grin fighting its way onto his face, “Sorry, what makes a woman who drinks tea qualified to make a judgement on coffee shops?”

“If it has both, it’s a cafe.“

”If it’s so bad, why were you there?” There was an unfamiliar warmth unfurling in his chest.

”Oh! Well, because it’s so terrible, there’s never a line. You should see the Starbucks on 43rd in the morning, it’s a complete zoo.“

“How’d you get my number, Nicki?” Whatever the answer, it was a massive security breach and he’d never been so happy for a leak.

He thought he could hear the smile in her voice when she answered, “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say. I have to protect my journalistic sources after all.”

There was only one answer that made sense, “Stole it from Bob’s phone, huh?”

She answered slowly, ”When you say it like that, it sounds really bad.”

“How’d you get through the passcode?” He hadn’t judged her to be capable of any sort of hacking. He thought he might need to revise his security assessment.

”I asked to borrow his phone real quick so he unlocked it for me?”

Bucky rubbed his metal hand across his jaw and loosed an exasperated breath. He definitely needed to revise his security assessment. Of Bob.

”Sorry, I know this is not cool and I’ll totally delete your number after, but I actually needed to ask you about something. I would’ve waited to just run into you at the dentist or whatever but it’s kind of time sensitive.”

He couldn’t imagine what Nicki might have to ask him that was pressing. Something cold slid into his chest, “What’s going on?”

”It’s nothing serious, just-“ There was a long pause, “Bob invited me to the fundraiser thing that’s happening at the tower. With the VP? I wanted to get your opinion about going.”

Bucky’s stomach seemed to drop out of his body. Nicki was going to a black tie gala. With Bob. That Bucky had to be at. The idea of seeing the two of them on a date made his chest hurt. He squeezed his eyes shut, “Opinion on what?”

”What colour gown I should wear. Y’know, so I can match your pocket square.”

”What?” He muttered.

”I’m kidding. Bob’s really nervous and I know you and the other Avengers probably have to shake a bunch of hands. I figured if I go, he and I can just hang out in a corner somewhere together, but if it would be some kind of security risk or something- I don’t know. I just wanted you to tell me if it’s a bad idea.”

It was a bad idea. The worst idea anyone had ever had, but not because it was a security risk. He could tell her as much and he knew she would listen. She wouldn’t go and she might not even ask why. But that wouldn’t be fair. He didn’t have a claim to her, “No,” He managed to choke, “It’s fine.”

”Okay. Okay, that’s great, because I’ve actually never been to a fancy gala, and I’m sort of excited. Now I take my role as emotional support friend very seriously but-“

The massive chasm opening up behind his ribs stilled mid-yawn. That didn’t sound- “Emotional support friend?”

”Yeah,” She seemed to catch the question a beat late and continued, “When you’re too scared to do something by yourself you call in your emotional support friend. I made Syd come to yoga with me for three weeks when I started because I was afraid to go alone. She hates yoga.”

Bucky sucked in a breath and tried not to let any hope in with it, “So Bob-“

”Really needs an emotional support friend. You should’ve seen him today, he practically hyperventilated through the savasana.” Bucky wasn’t sure what that was but he could infer it had to do with yoga, “I told him I’d stick with him the whole night so he wouldn’t have to figure out which fancy fork to use alone.”

He rubbed at his sternum firmly and wondered if it was possible that the emotional whiplash of the conversation would send him into cardiac arrest, “Right.”

“Now, saying that,” Nicki’s voice dropped a little. She sounded almost nervous, “I could probably sneak away for like, exactly four minutes.”

Four minutes. What was significant about four minutes? He scanned his apartment rapidly hoping for a clue and his eyes stuck firmly on his headphones on the nightstand. Lightning hit his metal fingers and arced through his chest, “You asking me for a dance?”

”Only if you don’t mind that I don’t know how to dance.”

”I don’t mind,” Bucky hadn’t danced in eighty years and he thought he might hate doing it in a roomful of glad-handing politicians, but if it allowed him to get his arms around Nicki-

“Alright then. Maybe I’ll-“ There was a metallic screech through the phone and a man’s voice shouted, “North?” Nicki said nothing and a moment later there was a creak and a clang, “Shoot, I gotta go, that was Danny and I need to pretend I’ve been working this whole time.”

Bucky was pretty sure the lightning had struck him dumb and he tried to blink away the fog, “Where are you right now?”

”The stairwell. It’s where all the investigative journalists take confidential calls, I wanted to try it.” Bucky snorted a laugh, “I’ll uh- see you in a couple weeks, I guess.”

It wasn’t Bucky’s habit to say goodbye but he wanted to say something to keep her just a second longer, “Navy blue.”

”Sorry?”

”My pocket square,” He hadn’t been planning to wear one. He didn’t think it was the fashion anymore, “And you can keep my number. For emergencies.”

The line was quiet for a minute, then, “Alright,” He swore he could hear her smile, “Now, how strict are you on that emergencies thing? Because I think-“

There was another screech and a woman’s voice called, “Nicki! Wrap it up!”

“Oh crap, I really need to go. Bye Bucky!” His phone clicked and the call ended.

Slowly Bucky let his phone drop to the couch cushion at his side. He stared at the wall a while and tried to assess the feeling invading his body. Then he glanced at the time and stood to grab his coat.