A/N: Hello to any new readers and a very big welcome to any of my old ones.

I know I don't really update anymore, but I felt like putting this one out there while I keep revising IWFCSPA. This fic was written for fangirltothe-end as both a birthday present and kind of a culmination of all these ridiculous scenarios we'd come up with while I was finishing the last few chapters of 'An Agent and an Assassin'.

If you haven't read that, the link to it is in my profile and I highly recommend reading both that and my now ammended version of In Which Fury Chooses Stark's PA's as this kinda falls in between the two pieces, and I do reference the two works A LOT. Either way I hope you enjoy it, it was an absolute romp to write and tbh if I hadn't spent all my time writing this I'd have probably gotten a better ATAR lmao.

In terms of ratings, Part 5 does have like some steamy stuff, but you can skip past it to the fluff. I've just got it rated M because I'd rather be on the safe side of things.

Feel free to follow me on Tumblr (mischief-and-maryment) and to follow my sideblog with reader x character fics (if-weshadows-haveoffended). I also have an AO3 (merethengilith), but I've abandoned my Hobbit fics there in the meanwhile.

Disclaimer: Do we still do this in the year of our lord 2017? I don't own anyone or profit from any of the MCU, if I did, I wouldn't have had to apply for HECS.


Act 1- Chocolate Bon Bons

There were several reasons as to why Bucky refused to live with them in Avengers Tower.

First of all, why would he move to a location where the inhabitants were soon to move out? Stark had once described the tower as a bachelor pad, but with most undertaking the cohabitation and production of offspring thing, it wasn't such anymore. Avengers mansion, Stark had also mentioned, was designed without children or younger members becoming the Avengers in mind and needed to be repurposed. Which led to his second reason:

He hated the Compound. Everything about it from its layout to the cold architecture to the fact it was too far away from Brooklyn. Mary had helped him pick out an apartment and he decided it was probably for the best that he painfully refused to ask her to move in with him despite the fact he would do anything to keep her close to his side.

But the third and most pressing reason as to why he refused to live with them were the nightmares. The triggers were gone, okay, but the pain wasn't. Usually they were about the killings or the torture but after that unwilling trip into her mind, there was one that he never mentioned to her and hardly dared to bring it up with himself. And he saw it again tonight.

It started as it always did, somewhere after Triskelion, however the dreamed seemed to follow the reality the gem presented in which she had been kidnapped just before starting university. In that reality it also seemed her elder sister never existed and that her parents had stayed together in the early 90s as opposed to breaking up and meeting each other years later once again to marry, thus, leaving her four years older than she was in his own world. He assumed that she'd helped him escape or perhaps he'd assisted her, but there he was once again, half-carrying half-dragging her through the rainy streets of Bucharest, city lights reflecting off black puddles of water upon the pavement. Her lips quivered as the black night sky unleashed unrelenting rain and in her thin cardigan, he knew she would not survive much longer but her fingers kept moving on the wet and slippery glass of the smart phone, muttering that they were nearly there.

They rounded the corner of a block she'd pointed to and he entered the apartment block, climbing the treacherous stairs to the fifth floor, always feeling real no matter the fact he'd relived this dream dozens of times over, and that he'd already observed the garish wallpaper of the corridor and known that the floorboards were too squeaky for his liking. He knew that the third apartment from the stairwell had a pram outside the door and that he would inevitably bump into the wall with his left shoulder in order to have Mary avoid it.

"Twelve C," Mary, wiping away damp hair from her head and her lips turning pale, managed in the barest of a whisper. He was frantically pounding on the door as she collapsed in his arms, he retracted his metal arm from the door and held her as tight as he could, hoping that she as alive.

The door was wrenched open by a confused Clint Barton, behind him Thor sipping on a coffee and leaning against a table; Tony Stark. The murderous glare in Stark's eyes were enough of a warning to tell Bucky that Tony knew of the nature of his parent's deaths.

"Please," His voice was breaking "It's her-

"Fuck, she's slipping into hypothermia. Thor I need you to heat up that soup again," Clint shut the door behind them as he tried to prise Mary from Bucky's grip, but Bucky never let her go. Not ever in any of the times he'd had this dream. Thor disappeared from sight, running into the kitchen briefly before crossing the small sitting room into another room. "Tony, you can use a dryer, right?"

"Barton-" Tony seemed hesitant, his anger fading the moment he noticed her form, still awake, eyes blinking in the glowing light of the room and her breathing slow and shallow.

"Tony you asshole!" Clint shouted over the top of his half-formed protest. "If she dies on us, it's on you. I need you to heat up as many heavy blankets as you can, put it on the quickest tumble dry setting," Tony took one more look at her before entering the room Thor had previously entered and retrieved clothes before entering the kitchen where Bucky knew from the previous dreams, held a washing machine and dryer. Bucky carried her over to the sofa as Thor re-entered with a mound of warm and dry clothing.

"Dress her," Clint informed him "We'll get food, just keep her talking, okay? If she goes severe, we're going to have to take her to a hospital and we can't afford that with you." Bucky nodded and began to peel away thin layers of a cardigan and a summery dress from her cold form, pressing small kisses to her collarbone and shoulder. Her eyes seemed unfocused but she answered his questions well enough. He'd always ask her about what she could sense, and she would ramble about Tony's internal conflict, Thor's genuine concern and Clint's desire to be with his family. She seemed a little better in a couple of Clint's jumpers, track pants borrowed from Tony and some fuzzy socks Thor had found.

With angry, trembling hands, Tony handed over a large bowl of soup while Clint held out a bowl filled with various candies. They all urged her to eat while Thor wrapped the warmed blankets around her with a reassuring clap on the shoulder, some colour returning to her lips.

Bucky, still kneeling before her, pressed a small kiss to her forehead before stepping away to face the three Avengers, experience telling him he knew what he was in for a long haul.

"Why did you run?" Thor asked first, arms crossed but with a kinder expression than the others.

"I was going to come back, we'd planned to go back." Bucky answered, the memory non-existent for him but the words escaped his mouth nonetheless. "But you all signed the New York Accords and Steve would have broken the peace." This never happened, Bucky knew that there were talks of Accords after New York and after Sokovia, but they were never signed.

"So what, this is all selfless?" Tony spat cynically.

"I don't care what you do to me, I know I wasn't really doing it. But I still did it, and I remember all of it and it keeps me up at night and I as much as I will atone for everything I've done, I'll never properly make up for it." Bucky addressed Tony directly, making eye contact but he could see Tony twitching, looking for an exit as he remained torn between forgiving him and killing him. "But it's her, she- We changed plans-"

"Who is she, Hydra didn't… I've never seen her in Hydra files." Clint looked at her, calmly sipping on a bowl of soup and extending a cold finger out of her mountain of blankets to the chocolate bowl, looking for something.

"She was kept off-record, Hydra's high command didn't know about her," Bucky explained "It's just… they found out." Bucky began to explain, exasperated and tired, only awake for her.

"What?" Thor inquired, rubbing his neck out of nerves.

"2012, St Petersburg, they dragged us out of the hotel after we'd tried to escape and they beat her up," He elaborated, taking a seat on one of the unoccupied dining chairs, staring up at the three men.

"Just her?" Stark asked with his arms crossed. Bucky new Stark well enough, behind the tough, antagonist exterior he was worried for her. Whether it be in his familiar world as an odd uncle sort of figure, or whether it be in this dream world watching a strange woman half-dead upon the tattered sofa.

"They thought she planned it and manipulated my emotions into helping her escape. I planned it because we found out she was pregnant. They found out that she miscarried just after I- after SHIELD fell." The pain felt so real even though he knew it wasn't, but this dream gave him a memory of a scared woman, battered and bruised and screaming and sobbing her throat hoarse short strands of hair stuck to her damp cheeks, lying in a pool of blood not from wounds but from something else far more sinister.

"Oh god," Clint Barton began to put the pieces together.

"They could've used the baby as a bargaining chip for our compliance, or they would have killed us for ever being romantically involved. We're running now because Hydra's plan was the first, and she's due in three months,"

"Could everyone just shut up, I can't think." Mary would hiss, clutching her throbbing head in her hands with a slight grimace. "The collective angst and guilt in here requires innumerable therapy sessions."

"Oh she talks," Tony muttered bitterly.

"Fuck off." Mary stood up on trembling legs, searching for paper and pencils upon the cluttered desk. Sitting upon the dusty floor, she pointed and flexed her toes in her old ballerina habits, scribbling numbers and words and floor schematics upon the paper.

"You won't believe us, fine, leave us." She said in such a quiet, resigned tone that it never failed to take him aback every single time he would have this dream. "But let me explain first, we can help you. We- I know that the UN or in particular General Ross has your balls on a very short leash-"

"Nice wording," Clint conceded with a gentle shake of his head, sitting on the floor with her. Bucky for some absurd reason, would always remain upon the sofa, a quiet presence as she rambled about everything she could, recounting Hydra locations and names of officers and secret projects.

"All you'd have to do is present all of this information," Mary explained in a short breath, "You'd have the upper hand… leverage…"

"Leverage." Tony huffed, "Why are you even helping us?"

"You don't think I want revenge? They killed my classmates and my teachers on the bus home from school. They tortured my parents. They nearly killed me. And you don't think I'm capable of being terrible?"

"Who got you out?" Clint fired his question, cutting off the angry, monotonous tone of the young woman.

"Helmut Zemo. Sokovian intelligence." Bucky never failed to be shocked at the second his name was uttered. "He was undercover for a month in Hydra trying to take it down, I implanted some of my memories. We managed to save his family and get political asylum in Australia. If we're lucky the Australian government can't find us, but luck is the biggest thing we lack."

"I can't believe this…" Tony muttered in slight anger.

"Yeah sure, Barnes. But think about it, years of Hydra information, a lie detector with 100% accuracy, a brainwashing machine. You'd have that. " Mary began once again in her fast-paced thinking way.

"I'm your bargaining chip-"

"No," Bucky would begin to protest.

"Then you could play the right cards, you'd get not only me, but Barnes and freedom in the bargain. That's all you'd have to do. It's that easy." She finished.

"And if it doesn't work?" Clint answered heavily, serious and tired.

Her hand wandered to her swollen abdomen, gently massaging. "I'll be alive for three more months, they wouldn't kill us both, you know, I think it's a girl."

It was always at that point that he would wake up, sweating and strangling a pillow to muffle his sobs.