Warning: Mentions of feeding tubes, rape, and general Hydra trashiness.
Standard disclaimers apply. No pairings unless you squint.
It was a lazy Saturday at the Avengers Tower. They were marathoning cartoons and Animal Planet, because those didn't trigger Bucky's PTSD. Usually. They hadn't thought Anastasia all the way through.
They were eating popcorn and Tofurky jerky, because Bucky still couldn't process meat after being fed through a tube for seventy years.
It wasn't until Bucky used his supersoldier strength to lift Steve off him and run for the bathroom that Sam realized he'd accidentally bought real jerky during his last run to Gristedes. He'd been in a hurry. My Cat from Hell was on next.
They Tivoed My Cat from Hell and tried to distract Bucky from his discomfort by helping him name the therapy dog that he and Steve had adopted three days ago from The Good Dog Foundation in the East Village. In retrospect, they may have been watching a little too much Animal Planet.
They had planned a nice, relaxing day of book shopping. Steve and Bucky had gone to the Rare Book Room at the Strand to search for old Archie comics while Tony and Sam had gone to Forbidden Planet a few blocks away. They had bonded over their mutual love of Sandman, even though Sam thought the symbolism was a little heavy-handed.
They had all agreed to meet up for shawarma at Rainbow Falafel when they were finished (after a brief but confusing Google Search, because according to Google Rainbow Falafel sold "junior and plus-sized women's clothing," and it turned out Tony actually believed what he read on the internet, even though he'd posted half of it).
When Steve and Bucky had rounded Pilates on the Square, they had been walking a black lab puppy with a missing leg. And Sam had thought the symbolism in Sandman was heavy-handed.
For the last three days, they had been calling the puppy "Dog." Except for Clint, who called him, "Tripod."
"I can't believe you still haven't named him," said Natasha, stroking his hair, as if he was Dog. Steve had gotten to the bathroom first, but Natasha had elbowed him out of the way so she could hold Bucky's hair back while he threw up. She was right. They did need more women on the Avengers.
"Well, I've never named anything before," Bucky said defensively, and Steve smiled, because these days Bucky's defenses were a whiny voice and not a Stechkin silent revolver.
"That's not true," said Steve. "You named Tony."
"Oh, yeah."
"Who says what?" asked Tony. "Why?"
Bucky started throwing up again, so Steve explained. "When Howard was working on my shield, he would bring Maria along. We would talk shop, and Bucky would take Maria to the Crocker's Folly for a schnapps. They'd talk about, well, what everyone talked about back then. The war. Life after. Your ma wanted kids. She got Howard to agree when he was distracted with work, but she figured she could get him to conceive that way too."
"That-" Tony looked like he was preparing to be offended, but then he just shrugged. "That explains a lot, actually. It doesn't explain how the Winter Soldier named me."
"Stop calling him that," Steve said automatically before continuing his story. "Everyone was really Catholic back then. Your Ma wanted to name you after a saint, and she was dead set on Saint Francis."
Now Tony did look offended on a personal, and possibly spiritual, level. "She was going to name me Francis?"
"That was her church. The one by Koreatown? It's still there," Steve added, like he was reminding himself. "Plus she was an animal lover. Sometimes Bucky took her to see the Dogs of Defense instead."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
Sam could see Steve start to ask if Tony's mother hadn't raised him Catholic before remembering that Tony's mother hadn't raised him.
"Saint Francis is the patron saint of animals," he explained gently. "Bucky talked her down though. He convinced her to name you Saint Anthony. Patron saint of lost things and missing persons. We'd all seen enough of those. She said that if you ever got lost, she wanted you to be found."
"She got it wrong," Bucky said, finally surfacing.
"First you kill my mother, now you insult her?" asked Tony, and Bucky only winced a little.
"Look at this place." He gestured around him. The Avengers looked at the pink towels monogrammed with all of their initials before they realized he probably meant the Avengers Tower in general. "She got it backwards."
Tony scoffed, but his cheeks matched the towels . "Yeah, we're a regular Land of Misfit Toys."
"And I thought I was bad at naming things."
"You took my mother on dates and you named me. Should I call you Daddy?"
Bucky wiped his mouth with a BB monogrammed towel that Steve had handed him. "Please don't."
Tony frowned. "Wait. How do you know about Daddy Kinks? Did they have those in the 40s?"
"A couple of Hydra generals did," said Bucky, and Steve only winced a lot.
"You were sexually assaulted?" asked Sam. He'd been serving as Bucky's unofficial therapist since Bucky had a Thing about doctors. A bathroom floor was not the weirdest place he'd ever held a therapy session, and the toilet was already there.
"I was a POW," Bucky said simply.
Sam was proud. It had taken a lot of sessions for Bucky to see himself as a prisoner. Almost as many as it had taken for Bucky to see himself as a person. He started the standard line of questions. "Once, or more than-"
"I was a POW for seventy years."
"I mean, are we talking a dozen or…" Sam was trying to catalog exactly how many therapy dogs Bucky would need and wishing they hadn't watched Confessions: Animal Hoarding right after 101 Dalmatians.
"Eight thousand three hundred and twelve," said Bucky.
Steve was already, like, the whitest guy Sam knew, and they'd fought Albino last week, but somehow Steve went even whiter. "Eight thousand three hundred and twelve?"
"If you don't count oral." Bucky finally seemed to notice Steve's new skin tone, which was now closer to the Hulk's. "Sorry, Stevie. You need the toilet?"
Steve shook his head, but he didn't seem to want to risk opening his mouth.
"For Nazis, Hydra sure had a lot of gay sex," said Tony, appropriate as always.
"You don't get that angry unless you're repressing a lot. I think half the generals were closet queers."
"Bucky, you can't say queers," Steve corrected gently. "It's homosexual now."
"No, it's not."
"What?"
"It's only homosexual if it's someone who's only attracted to people of the same sex. Queer encompasses people who identify as trans, bi, ace, pan, and intersex. They took the word back, because LGBTQIA+ is getting too long, and everyone always thinks the 'A' is for ally, which is just ridiculous."
Steve looked at Sam, who just shrugged. "He's right."
"Oh, my god." Tony looked delighted. "Social justice warrior, man bun, record player, and a vegetarian? The Winter Soldier is a hipster."
"Don't call him that."
"What? They're not that bad."
"How do you know all that?" Steve asked Bucky. He actually sounded a little put out that he was back to being the least-informed about the future. He'd had so much fun explaining Wikipedia and Keurig to Bucky.
"Wikipedia," said Bucky, but everyone knew he was just trying to make Steve feel better. Except Steve, who gave him a small smile. Steve was kind of oblivious when it came to Bucky. Sam figured it was a tunnel-vision thing. That was okay. Someday he would see the light.
"So you got a better name for Dog than Dog?" asked Sam.
Bucky scrunched up his nose, and Nat started to pull his hair back again, but apparently he was just thinking, because then he said, "Sebastian?"
Tony laughed, and Steve looked even more put out. Sam had to remind himself that Steve had commanded armies and won wars. He was a smart dude. Someday he would see the light.
A/N: Saint Sebastian is the patron saint of soldiers. He's also considered by some to be the patron saint of gay people.
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