Bucky's journals have a lot of history and a lot of secrets. Sam and Clint talk Steve down as he learns one of them.
Post MCU-Civil War
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Clint didn't mind playing parent or being emotional support. When shit hit the fan both during missions and away from them he felt a little obligated to lend a hand cleaning it all up like the team janitor slash mom that he was turning into. He'd had plenty of practice over the years, between bringing Nat into SHIELD and being a literal parent to boot, something none of the other Avengers could say. It also didn't hurt that he now had trained counselor and all around decent human Sam Wilson to help keep tabs on the emotional well-being of their not-always-super-stable super-teammates.
Clint and Sam didn't tag team their friends so much as share the load, with Sam taking an admittedly larger brunt of the heavy stuff, especially Steve's heavy stuff, than Clint thought was entirely healthy. But Sam always came to Clint for help when he knew he was getting in over his head. That was something Clint liked about Sam. He wasn't too stubborn to ask for help before things got really bad.
Unlike some of their over-dramatic, self-sacrificing friends.
So when Sam knocked on his door, the sound echoing noisily through the spacious rooms T'Challa had insisted they use during their Sokovia-induced exile, Clint could safely assume that things weren't totally dire. Even if the midnight hour did give him pause.
"S'going on?" Clint asked, the sleep he hadn't been able to catch fading fast as he took in Sam's tense features.
"Steve," Sam replied, stiff and weary.
Clint rubbed at his eyes. "Gotcha. So I'm taking him for a walk or spar or something? Get him to leave the freezer for a bit?"
"I'd appreciate that, but he wants to talk to you," Was Sam's answer. And by the sound of his voice Clint had a sinking suspicion that this talk wasn't the good thing it should have been.
Clint followed Sam to the cryo chamber where Steve had taken up residence since Barnes' re-freezing several weeks earlier. T'Challa had offered each of them individual accommodations in the same building that Barnes was being kept in, something Clint knew was done for Steve's benefit. But so far Rogers had barely set foot in the rooms assigned to him, choosing instead to camp out in a chair by the cryo tube obsessively pouring over Bucky Barnes' journals.
There were at least six of them recovered from the Soldier's backpack and bachelor pad hideaway in Bucharest. Three were locked away somewhere that Clint naively hoped they would never see the light of day. The other three were secreted away to Steve in Wakanda over the course of several weeks by Sharon Carter in a series of back-channel care packages.
According to Wanda, Steve's reception of the packages was mixed. The guy had been a wreck since Barnes went back into cryo and ate up every word in the journals like they would magically bring his friend back to him and everything would be sunshine and pizza dogs again, or whatever the 1940's equivalent was. And then he would read the little notes Sharon added to the packages, updates on the goings-on of the other Avengers and their friends, and look even more torn apart.
That was how Wanda described it, anyway. But then, Wanda was more in tune to people's feelings than the details that put those feelings into place.
Details like the loose paper surrounding Steve in a hurricane-like mess on the floor of the cryo room, scrawled within an inch of their life with Steve's looping and showy cursive (Even the guy's handwriting was over-dramatic, Clint noticed.). Translation books for Russian, Romanian, and other languages were equally sprawled around the floor, sticky notes tucked into the pages. Steve had abandoned the lone chair in front of the cryo tank and instead sat on the cold floor, memory journal perched on one knee, and pen scribbling furiously onto the note paper on the other knee, his lips mouthing foreign words to make sense of them.
"Aw, Steve, no…"
"Just another page," Steve insisted to the ghost on the paper in front of him.
Sam shot Clint a weary expression, not sure how to help their friend without sounding like a broken record. Clint knew the journals had become an obsession for Steve, but now he was worried Steve was treating them like holy scripture and hanging on their every word. Never mind that it was an obvious breach of privacy to be going through Barnes' journals without the man in question knowing.
He frowned at the thought. "This kinda feels like going through a little kid's diary," Clint half-joked, his voice teasing but his words serious as he stepped further into the room.
"That something you've had to do?" Steve asked absently, eyes still glued to the pages in front of him.
"No," Clint told him honestly. "Kids are allowed to have secrets from their parents."
Out of the corner of his eye, Clint saw Sam's confusion at his words, like he knew he was missing out on the punchline of an inside joke.
Steve snorted. The cynical and abrupt sound was so wrong coming from Captain America. "Weird thing to say for someone who works as a spy," He said.
Clint shrugged, "Spy work like that was always more Nat's thing than mine. Besides, there's more to being an agent than espionage and opening a few secret files." Steve's face scrunched into an odd look that Clint couldn't place. He glanced at the open journal pages, noting the Cyrillic scrawled across the paper. "Look man, I won't like it, but do you want some help translating the Russian bits? Wanda would be better, she had to learn it in primary school I think. And obviously neither of us is Nat but…"
Steve's face twisted oddly again, and Clint finally realized it was at the mention of their red-haired friend. The Captain's next words were biting and just a little betrayed. Why that was though, Clint didn't understand. "Nat's real name is Natalia Alianovna Romanova and the Red Room was the program she was raised in. I know that."
"Yeah?" Clint answered slowly. He was always wary whenever Nat's past came up and she wasn't around to deflect those questions.
"Why does Bucky know that?"
Clint tried to shrug it aside. "Nat dumped almost everything from SHIELD online back in DC, it was probably in there too. Barnes must've worked through all of it looking for intel for himself in the aftermath."
Steve didn't look convinced. "Then what's this?" He pointed to a messy scrawl of ink on one page (Messy hands, messier head, Clint thought.). The Cyrillic scribbles weren't just dates and sentences about the Black Widow program, but also held a list of woman's names under a doodle of what Clint realized was supposed to be a spider.
Clearly Bucky Barnes wasn't the artist that Steve Rogers was, although the volumes of journals he managed to fill proved he was definitely more prolific.
Clint's amusement was short-lived as he noted the name of his own best friend at the top of the list, the Cyrillic for 'Little Spider' and 'red head' tucked next to it.
"Steve…"
"I'm still translating but Buck writes about the 'little spider' practically every page in this journal. These little moments that would never be in any mission report, meals and hotel rooms and random moments from stake outs and… He knew her. And she knew him. Why didn't she tell me?"
"I don't know," Clint lied. "Nat has her secrets, Steve. After everything she's been through, I think she's allowed them. And so is Barnes."
"Bullshit," The Captain answered, finally meeting Clint's eyes. The blue depths were narrowed and hurt and tired, but as determined and unyielding as always. "She knew him and she didn't tell me. She could've helped me find him after DC, but she didn't, just handed me a file from Kiev and walked away. What kind of friend walks away like that?"
Clint met the heavy stare with a stubborn one of his own. "I'm not the one to ask about that."
"Well you're the one whose here right now," Steve shot at him, volume increasing with his growing anger.
"I don't even know the whole story."
"Then tell me what you do know!"
Sam stepped in, not willing to stand on the sidelines any longer before things got really out of hand. "Steve, take a breath. Nobody's going anywhere, we can talk more in the morning."
It was as Steve practically snarled at Sam, "No! We're dealing with this now!" that Clint really took in the manic state the Captain was in, the dark circles under his eyes and the hunch of his normally steadfast shoulders. Letting Steve fall headfirst into the journals had definitely not been a good idea.
"You've barely slept for two days, Steve," Sam reminded his friend, voice patient with practiced calm. "And the amount of time you've spent staring at these journals is unhealthy. Neither of those things is ok. What would Sharon say? Or Wanda? Hell, what would Peggy Carter say?"
It was a low blow, by Clint's standards, but it hit its mark perfectly and Steve visibly shrank inwards. His broad shoulders slouched forward and his eyes glazed in a hurt way that made him look unnaturally vulnerable. Clint would have sworn he was looking at a photo of pre-serum Steve Rogers, except for the sheer bulk of the man's frame that still took up all the air in the room, slouched inward or otherwise.
Sam stepped forward, an uneasy, heavy look on his face. "C'mon Steve, let's get you to bed. Barnes will still be here in the morning. Clint, grab the journals?" Sam led a morose but compliant Steve out of the cryo room, leaving Clint with the ghost and his thoughts.
Nat had never mentioned Barnes to Clint, not by that name. She'd briefly revealed on a mission that she was in a relationship with one of her Red Room instructors, a man with a metal arm. That they reminded each other what it was to be human and had both been punished for it. She had only told Clint so much because he asked her why she was muttering about 'Yasha' in her sleep.
When the Winter Soldier's identity came to light after DC, Clint hadn't pressed Nat for answers about what she would or wouldn't tell Steve regarding his friend's long and convoluted history. Instead, he asked her how she felt about the reappearance of the man she loved.
"Love is for children," She told Clint, adding softly, "And I was a child."
"What're you now?"
She smiled, small and uncertain, and shook as he pulled her in for a hug.
Picking up the mess of bound and unbound paper from the cryo room floor, Clint looked once more at the Cyrillic list of Widow names, at the doodled spider and scribbled notes. He heaved a weary sigh for the oncoming storm that would be Steve Rogers in the morning, sent another look to the ghost in the freezer, and shut the book.
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