It's the third morning in Clint's apartment and Sam and Steve are valiantly-but-fruitlessly searching the fridge and pantry for some sort of food that isn't cold pizza, leftover Chinese takeout, or cereal marketed toward children. Actually, it's not quite a fruitless search: they have turned up a fruit salad and a bunch of bananas, which Steve grimaces at. "What?" Sam asks, turning them over in his hands. They appear fine to him.
"They're not right," Steve replies, and Sam is about to ask him to elaborate when Bucky, hair a complete and utter disaster, shuffles in with the dog at his heels. "Good morning, Bucky."
Bucky looks alarmed, nods a little, and goes into the fridge for pizza. Oh. That's why the dog is following him.
There's only two chairs at the kitchen table and possibly in the entire apartment, but for as long as Clint isn't here yet, it's fine, because Bucky very rarely sits like a regular person. He's sitting on the counter now, eyes moving constantly around the room, the front door of the apartment, the entryway to the living room. It probably isn't coincidental that he's positioned himself in the corner. No one can get to his back or catch him from the side while he's there.
Steve casts one last glare at the bananas, defers the fruit salad to Sam, and swipes a piece of pizza from the box in Bucky's lap. Sam regards this as a risky move, but Steve is really fucking stupid when it comes to Bucky and this is really the least stupid of everything he's done. Bucky doesn't even look like he noticed, except for how his eyes linger on Steve on his latest scan of the room. Then his head snaps up and he's looking at the doorway to the living room for a few seconds before Clint walks in.
"We can't keep eating pizza," Steve says immediately.
"Morning to you, too," Clint grumbles. "There's takeout, and fruit."
"You know that's not what I mean," Steve says.
"Haven't had coffee, dunno what anything means." He stumbles over to the coffeemaker and looks like he's about to just take the entire pot before he realizes he has company and goes for a mug. "Guess if you're telling me the hell to eat means you're planning to stay for a while."
Sam is pretty sure that is two sentences mashed into one. "What?" Steve asks, and yeah, okay, good, he has no idea what the hell Clint's saying, either.
"You guys aren't planning on taking off anytime soon, yeah?" For some reason he's looking at Sam.
Sam shrugs. "I'm just with him," he says, tilting his head toward Steve. He's just following him and helping him save the world.
(He could've gone home after SHIELD came crashing down, he didn't have to go with Steve. Sam knew that, Steve knew that, and here Sam is. Hydra's still out there, there's still people to save and people to stop, Sam's not abandoning that fight but he can't do it on his own. So here he is.)
Clint looks to Steve and suddenly Sam has the feeling that Steve is going to say the same thing, just go "I'm with him" and pass the question off to the guy who hasn't been a person for seventy years.
"I haven't thought about it," Steve admits, and then yeah, Sam guessed it, he looks over to Bucky.
"I like it here," Bucky says, mouth full of pizza. "I like the dog."
"And me?" Clint asks.
Bucky stops chewing and looks at Clint, considering him thoughtfully for about ten seconds before he reaches his verdict. "Eh."
Clint sighs exaggeratedly and takes a long sip of his coffee. "Whatever," he grunts, leaning up against the counter. Sam really can't figure him out, how he's so relaxed given their situation - which, granted, he seems to have a good handle on, better than Sam expected. Really, though, the thing Sam can't get over is that this man saw the Winter Soldier tear through a building full of Hydra agents without getting a scratch, and then - no, even before then, Natasha had told him what the Winter Soldier could do and he still said "hey let's team up" to and turned his back on the world's most feared assassin, and then he decided that yeah, sure, he can come crash on his couch.
Sam's not going so far as to say that Clint Barton is hiding something or has intentions that aren't good in regards to the Winter - to Bucky - but if he's not, he is either colossally stupid (stupider than Steve, who at least has their old friendship as a reason for his stupidity in re: Bucky) or there's some piece that Sam is still missing. Steve trusts him, but, well, Steve's the guy who went "Hey, Sam, I know we've talked like, twice, but you're my go-to person for when the government has a bounty on my head, because I have no friends and you're the closest thing other than my coworker here, the secretive ex-assassin," so having Steve's trust is a weird sort of thing.
(And okay, Sam accepted Steve and Natasha in without a question, god only knows what that says about him.)
"There has to be a grocery store somewhere nearby, right?" Steve asks, looking to Clint, who shrugs.
"I can tell you every takeout place within a two-mile radius..."
Steve glares daggers at him. "I'll go look it up," he says, standing up and heading into the living room. Bucky sets the pizza box down and follows him. He gets twitchy whenever Steve is out of his field of view, follows Steve whenever he can, like he thinks that Hydra can swoop in and separate them in the time it takes Steve to go get the tablet to do a search on local grocery stores.
"Dude, you're an Avenger," Sam says to Clint. "How the hell do you stay in shape if you eat pizza all the time?"
Clint grins wickedly. "I don't. I just took a cheat week because he crashed here and I'm not used to cooking for two people, and I was almost out of food anyway and didn't think it would be a god idea to leave him alone here to go get something. Also I just like giving Cap shit, it's fun."
"I keep being amazed," Sam says, "by how dumb you aren't."
"It's my superpower," Clint replies. "Convincing people that I'm an idiot."
"That's a shit superpower."
"Only because you don't know how to use it." He shrugs. "Or maybe since you're a soldier and I'm a spy, it wouldn't be as useful for you." He raises his voice and calls, "Yo, Cap, there's a store like two blocks down and it opens at eight, so you'll be fine if you really can't stand bananas and pizza for breakfast."
There's some muffled swearing from the other room and Steve returns with Bucky trailing behind him like a shadow. Steve doesn't say anything, though, just stares at Clint, not even angry, just staring. "How does it feel to have disappointed Captain America?" Sam asks.
Steve cracks a grin but Clint says smoothly, "Dude, Captain America is a freeloader and crashing on my living room floor, Captain America is disappointing me."
"Was that really necessary?" Steve asks Clint. "Was it really?"
"C'mon, team, let's make a shopping list," Clint says, ignoring Steve and grabbing a notepad off the fridge.
His contributions to the list consist of only fruit, what Sam figures is probably every type, ever, and then he just sort of leaves it to Sam and Steve, and then at some point he and Steve get into a fight about who's paying for groceries, because Clint is somehow apparently loaded and not just because of stolen Hydra money, and Steve is absolutely appalled by how much money he has from seventy years of military back pay and merchandising and he can't give it to charity fast enough, and oh god Sam's listening to two white men argue over who is richer, this is the stuff of nightmares, honestly.
When it's all finally blown through and the shopping trip takes place and the kitchen is stocked, Sam still has no idea what the hell is with Clint and fruit.
Their sleeping arrangement is the sort of thing that only a bunch of passive-aggressive people with martyr complexes could come up with. There is a bed and a couch in this apartment but they're all piled on the living room floor because everyone wanted to concede the comfortable places to someone else. Sam's pretty sure that he's going to be the first to say "screw it" and just go pass out in Clint's room because it's kind of dumb that only the dog is using it and Sam is probably the least stubborn of them. He might be the most well-adjusted human being in this apartment. That is terrifying.
He's started waking up from nightmares again. Riley isn't there anymore, Sam isn't in the desert anymore, he's in DC and the helicarriers crash on populated areas, they didn't stop Project Insight at all, Natasha's helicopter wasn't there to catch him from the collapsing Triskelion, Steve is killed by the Winter Soldier, and whatever it is, Sam wakes up not knowing where he is, and as of three days ago, he wakes up in close proximity to one of his nightmares.
Steve vehemently denies that Bucky and the Winter Soldier are the same, but they are - which doesn't mean that Bucky can't be saved, he's proven that he can, but what Hydra's done to him isn't going to be separable from Bucky, even when/if he's a well-adjusted human being. Right now he's curled up like a cat, back against the couch, metal hand clenched in a fist.
Sam can't get back to sleep and he can see a faint light on in the kitchen, so he gets up to see who else is awake, hoping to god that he doesn't wake Bucky. That's not how he plans to die. He plans to die at age 95, thereabouts, in his own home, in bed, surrounded by his loved ones.
He makes it into the kitchen to find Clint sitting at the table with a huge bowl, a huge pile of fruit, and a cutting board. "What," Sam asks, "are you doing?" Honestly he's not that surprised. He's sort of gotten used to the fact that these people don't act like anyone else he's ever met.
"I'm making a fruit salad - what does it look like I'm doing?" Clint answers, slicing a grape in half with a little more force than is probably necessary and throwing both parts into the bowl.
"It's..." Sam glances over at the microwave clock. "It's 2 am."
"Like you've never done weird stuff in the middle of the night when you can't sleep," Clint snaps. He sets the knife down and just starts eating grapes. "Or are you playing ignorant to see if you can get me to open up?"
"Not playing anything," Sam says, because it's 2 am and his mind only works so well and it didn't (but should have) occur to him that goofy, irreverent Clint Barton might be as damaged as the rest of them. "Can't say fruit has ever been my choice of coping mechanism. Mostly I'd just watch infomercials or do sudoku or something."
"Yeah, because infomercials aren't weird." Clint picks the knife up again and gestures at one of the drawers. "There's an orange peeler in there if you wanna help out, or are you going back to sleep now that you know there's not someone breaking in and it's just Hawkeye being a lunatic, like always."
Tonight in the dark and the silence, Sam wasn't quick enough and the Winter Soldier shoots Steve as he stands there frozen helplessly staring at a face he once knew, and Sam hits the enemy and knocks him over at the same moment Steve's body thuds to the street, and no, Sam couldn't go back to sleep if he tried.
He gets the orange peeler.
"Gotta be honest, I know jackshit about you," Clint says as Sam grabs the other chair and drags it around to sit opposite Clint. "Like you're a guy with a jetpack with wings - which is awesome, by the way - who just kind of showed up to help and here you are now, Cap's right-hand-man while the rest of us are still going 'who's this?' What's your story?"
"I answer one, do I get one?" Sam asks. He doesn't know any more about Clint than Clint knows about him, and they've been living in Clint's apartment for three days.
"Fair enough," Clint responds, and when Sam doesn't speak immediately Clint tosses out, "Heard you're a shrink." He says it a bit accusingly, like he's going to close himself off if Sam confirms that.
"Kinda," Sam says. "More of a counselor," and Clint raises an eyebrow like where's the difference? "Work – worked – at the VA helping everyone adjust to coming home."
"You a soldier?" Clint asks, returning to cutting the grapes.
"Was," Sam says. "Two tours in Iraq, pararescue. Second tour I got the wings, there were three sets. Two got destroyed out there." He decides to leave out Riley from the story, the part where Sam's job is saving people and he just watches his best friend go down in smoke like Icarus. "We stole the last back to fight Hydra."
"Didn't see that in your checked bags," Clint says lightly in an attempt to deflect the fact that he is asking a rather prying question.
"Hydra happened," Sam says, although he's of the opinion that his wings could have survived Hydra if not for the Winter Soldier.
Clint nods with an expression that suggests he thinks that maybe he shouldn't have asked and doesn't say anything else. "My question," Sam says. "You're SHIELD - you were - I've heard you and Natasha were close" - he makes sure not to phrase anything before the actual question as a question, because he doesn't doubt that Clint is the type of person to say that "you were SHIELD, yeah?" as the one question he allotted to Sam - "where were you when SHIELD collapsed?"
"Deep cover mission in South Africa," Clint answers, spearing a grape through with the knife. "Think it was Hydra who sent me out there without Nat. Wanted us split up when they made their play. Sure helped them a whole lot. They still had to deal with Nat and a birdman." He sets the knife down and stares at Sam for a few seconds before his gaze moves over to the door. "My handlers for the mission were all Hydra. When Nat blew everything they tried to kill me. Killed them instead, came home, found Hill later and we went and turned up what Hydra was still here."
"It took you that long?" Sam asks.
"Not all of them were as visible as the ones you went after," Clint says. He's still staring at the door. "I keep wondering who else that I knew was actually Hydra, and how many of them got away and how many who weren't Hydra got killed instead. What could I have seen that coulda let me find out before it was too late."
"Easiest way to destroy yourself is keep asking that."
"What, you know a way to stop?" Clint smiles but his tone is dripping bitterness. "If you did you'd be asleep right now."
"Ain't easy, that's for sure." Sam has been picking the pulp off of this orange for the past two minutes. He rolls it across the table to Clint. Clint stabs it. That was completely unnecessary.
After a minute or so of silence, Clint abruptly looks up and says, "Why the hell are you here?"
"Na…tasha sent us here?" That is not the right answer. Sam knows that much.
Clint frowns. Yes, wrong answer. "You just showed up to help and then you dropped your normal life to follow Cap wherever the hell he went on his find Bucky quest, he would've gone to the ends of the earth and you..." He shrugs.
Really, it's something that Sam has wondered plenty of the long days and nights traveling or being shot at or whatever it was, and he doesn't have a good handle on what compelled him to drop everything to help out Captain America. To help Steve.
He's not sure that whatever he manages to put into words for Clint are exactly what his feelings are, but it's the best he can do. "You ever meet someone who you think could save the world, someone who's just a good person and you think yeah, I can't let this person go? Ever feel like you need to save the world?"
Clint laughs. He doesn't sound happy and he leans forward and looks at Sam very seriously. "Yeah, and take it from me: there's two ways this hero thing goes. You can get lucky, be like Nat and you find a home and a family and you find yourself and find redemption, even like Stark and Banner, that's the good way; and then there's the rest of us and you save people and you lose yourself." He sits back and rubs his eyes. "Lose yourself and then after what SHIELD turned out to be you don't even know if you did anyone any good. Just know that you don't know who the hell you are anymore."
"I don't think those are the only two outcomes of being your hero-type," Sam says.
"Yeah, there's a third one. You die."
"I don't think that's right either," Sam says.
Clint sighs. "I'm just warning you, whatever hanging around with us turns you into, it probably won't be good."
Sam wants to trust Clint Barton, but the things that Clint Barton says make it sound like Clint Barton doesn't want Sam to trust Clint Barton. "So what's your story?" Sam asks.
"Can't say I have one. Not like Cap or Nat."
"Talking like that, you've gotta have a story."
Clint shakes his head and starts cutting up an apple. "You used up your question already." Each word is clipped short. Conversation over.
"Sorry. Didn't mean to pry." Sam calls bullshit on don't have a story like Steve or Natasha. Come to think of it, he's not sure what Natasha's story is, beyond the whole vague "enemy of the United States, assassinated hundreds" thing. He could probably find all of it online, if he looked, but even though it's available for everyone and their grandmother to read doesn't mean that it still doesn't feel like it would be a violation of trust.
"Like hell you didn't," Clint snaps. Sam doesn't know how to respond, but it's less than a minute before Clint says, "Sorry. Probably natural to wanna know what the hell's up with the guy who runs into modern-day war zones with Stone Age weaponry. Doesn't mean I'm gonna answer, but I don't blame you for asking."
Well, at least he hasn't permanently offended the guy whose home he's currently crashing in – although Sam wasn't asking about the bow. He's asking about the man who's awake at 2 am chopping up fruit like this isn't the first or even one of the first times he's done this. He's asking what's got him here.
"Ballsy as hell," Sam says, trying to move the conversation somewhere else, but at the same time not. "Bow and arrow and you go out with supersoldiers and crazy robot armor and – gods and aliens and you just got a bow and arrow."
"Not like I haven't upgraded it for the modern age," Clint says with a shrug. "Explosive arrows, grappling hooks, couple acid ones, smoke, boomerang – that one is awesome, by the way."
"What exact purpose does a boomerang arrow serve?" Sam asks.
"Boomerang," Clint says empathetically. He stares at Sam very seriously for a few seconds and then laughs. "No honestly, it was just, can this actually be made? And it could." He returns to slicing fruit. "Not sure what I'm going to do when I run out of trick arrows. Don't have SHIELD to make me new ones."
"Stark?" Sam suggests, because it seems like Stark is always the solution to these kind of things (when he hasn't created the problem in the first place).
Clint snorts. "Yeah, see when I can push him to the point that he stops giving me free stuff." He tapped one of his hearing aids. "Suppose that whenever I have to go deal with him again I could throw in a word for another pair of wings."
"Think they were Stark Industries to begin with," Sam says. "You really already have Tony Stark giving you things for free?"
"Kinda was an offer he made all of us – the Avengers, I mean – and I was like yeah, why wouldn't I take you up on that offer?" Clint stops like he was going to say more but can't and holds up a hand to stop Sam from saying anything. He starts to stand up from his chair, frowning and looking at the doorway. Sam turns to look into the living room better. He doesn't see anything, but, well, Hawkeye. "S'just us, Barnes, me and Wilson, no Hydra or robbers or anything."
Bucky inches out of the darkness into the kitchen, wary like a starving dog that's been kicked too many times, keeping close to the walls and the counter rather than get nearer to Clint and Sam. "Did we wake you up talking too loud?" Clint asks, and Sam doesn't think they were but also doesn't know how good supersoldier hearing is.
Bucky shakes his head once. "I heard you after I woke up." He leans against the fridge.
"You can go back to sleep," Clint says. "Don't have to stay out here hanging with the little insomniacs-with-nightmares club."
Sam never explicitly said anything about nightmares and actually, Clint hadn't either. Funny how they each knew, anyway.
"What do you dream about?" Bucky asks. Sam is very interested to see how this goes, because Bucky is looking at Clint directly, Clint who has deflected Sam's gentler attempts to dig that out of him.
Panic flashes across Clint's face for a second, but then he sets his knife down and leans back in the chair, calculated attempts to be casual and dismissive. "Suppose it's the kinda thing we all dream about: all my friends turn out to be Nazis oh wait that wasn't a dream, trying to run from velociraptors but can't run, blew my cover on a mission and got shot, being forced to strangle my best friend, getting attacked by cats, falling…"
It takes a few seconds for Sam to even recover enough to formulate the simple question of what? and by then it's too late because Bucky's responded first. "Falling?" he says, and of all things that Sam expected Bucky to identify with, that is not the one he would have picked. "I just had that dream."
Clint shrugs. "Probably the most common kinda nightmare," he says, glancing at Sam as if for verification. Sam nods. "You're falling and falling and about to hit the ground and you wake up before you land and you're flailing and you've probably kicked your dog in the head."
Sam's dreams of falling were first of the wings giving out, and then of the wings getting shot out, and now of being wrenched out of the air by a figure in black.
Sam's dream of falling is a memory, now.
"I didn't," Bucky says.
"Didn't what?" Clint asks.
"Wake up. Before I hit the ground."
"Still doesn't mean you're a basketcase," Clint says. "If you're wondering."
Bucky doesn't respond and Sam breaks in with, "And the strangling your friend bit…? Not that I'm saying that makes you a basketcase," he adds hurriedly, because Bucky suddenly looks like he's been kicked in the kidneys, "but that's…" He's not sure what it is. Worrying?
"What, you've never had a friend who gives you so much shit you're like, oh my god shut up or I'm going to strangle you?" Clint asks with a laugh, a hollow one, and a smile that's all teeth and doesn't reach his eyes.
Sam is certain that Clint used the words forced to when he was first rattling off his dreams, but he doesn't press the point. Sam's barely got a handle on his own demons and he's ill-equipped for the size of the ones that these superheroes have to deal with.
Bucky was looking at Clint but now he's staring at the floor. And then he whips his head up and stares at the doorway to the living room, metal hand going for the knife block on the counter.
Steve stumbles into the kitchen, yawning and blinking at the light. "What is everyone doing up?" he grumbles, looking between the three of them.
Bucky drops the knife on the counter.
"We've started an insomniacs club," Clint says. "Are you joining or did we just wake you up by talking too loud?"
Steve appears to not be quite awake, squinting at Clint for several seconds, and then he finally says, "Why are you cutting up fruit?"
"The illusion of productivity makes me feel better," Clint says.
"It's not an illusion," Sam says. He gestures at the bowl they've been throwing cut-up fruit in, which is much fuller than it was when he first woke up.
"Very important work," Bucky agrees solemnly. He might be mocking them. Sam can't tell.
Steve cracks a grin at that. Not because it managed to be particularly funny, but because it's Bucky attempting to be funny.
There's no fruit left on the table and Clint sticks the bowl of fruit salad in the fridge. "Good talk everyone," he says, carelessly tossing the knives in the sink, and Sam winces. "Gonna try this 'sleep' thing again."
Bucky shrugs and follows and Steve looks like he's still not even fully awake. Sam resolves to ask him later if he knows what the hell Clint Barton's deal is. In the meantime, he doesn't relish the idea of spending the rest of the night on the floor like they are, so he gives up the martyr game and heads to Clint's room and shoves the dog out of the absolute center of the bed.
He dreams of falling.
"I know Clint was on Fury's short-list for the Avengers and I know he and Natasha are close," Steve says, "but I can't tell you much of anything about him. We didn't spend much time together during… that." He gestures vaguely, like he's not sure what to call the Battle of New York.
"Getting the sense that's the way he'd rather have it," Sam says. "Talking to Bucky was the closest he's come to opening up and then he played it off as a joke. Do you have any idea…"
Steve shakes his head and says, "Yes."
Sam gives him the look that, in his mind, he has coined as really done with your shit, Rogers.
"It's not for me to tell," Steve adds, and he looks past Sam at nothing and says, "But I actually can't say there are that many people better for Bucky to have run into than Clint Barton."
And Sam mulls over what he knows about Bucky Barnes and what he knows about Clint Barton, and he wonders what the hell they could possibly have in common.