Title: Chapter 1: Fairest One of All
Pairing: Bucky Barnes, Rebecca Barnes Proctor
Series: Witch Bucky
Rating: PG
Genre: Canon Divergent Post CAWS
Warning: Magic, Witch Bucky, BAMF Bucky, Bucky Remembers, Siblings/Family
Summary: It was a monumental task, protecting the protectors, but Bucky had done so much bad. If he could make up for decades of pain and destruction by using his magic to help Steve's team, he was damn well going to do it.
Bucky's been in Brooklyn for two months before he decides the world has calmed down enough from the Fall of SHIELD for him to move more freely.
He'd been visiting his sister twice a week and putting off meeting his nieces and nephews long enough that he figured Rebecca would strong arm him into a family reunion if he couldn't come up with a good excuse to avoid it.
Stalking the Avengers seemed like a good enough excuse. Well, some would say stalking, Bucky would say strategic surveillance. And by that he meant stalking.
In truth, he had long since planned out his next moves and it was past time he made them. The first was protecting his allies and to do that Bucky had to know exactly what he was protecting them from. For that he used a combination of old fashioned spy techniques, technological infiltration, and a number of different spells designed to reveal the past, future, and present in that order, strangely enough.
Using his baseline laptop and the high-speed wifi from the coffee shop across the street, Bucky spent a business week of hacking a staggering number of secret originations, governments, and departments. Most of what he learned was unsurprising, but a few things were worth keeping track of.
Natasha Romanov his student, his apprentice, his little spider- was predictably still on every Russian secret organization's kill-with-extreme-prejudice list. She'd been on it since defecting in the late 2000s. Bucky figured she'd been doing a good job of surviving on her own so far, he didn't need to immediately deal with the issue.
Now the U.S. government was sniffing around her for her part in exposing Hydra and all its secrets, but that was something that could be handled with judicious application of lawyers and ten thousand (and more) dollar handshakes. He was staying as far away from that mess as he possibly could.
Digging into the Black Widow's threat assessment brought Bucky to Hawkeye.
Clinton Francis Barton. Now there was an interesting man with interesting problems. The most pressing being, namely, the ongoing conflict he had with the local mob in Bed Stuy. Fortunately for Clint, track suit mafias were easily taken care of when you didn't worry about silly little things like murder charges. Bucky added "put the fear of the Winter Soldier into some gangsters" on his to-do list.
The hard part of his current objective of protecting Barton would be his family. Because against all odds, he'd managed to get married and have kids and live a normal life in between saving the world. Bucky was going to have to go all the way to the middle of nowhere Iowa to get at the Barton homestead. There, of course, was no way it wasn't his next stop after he finished all the prep and planning he could.
Dr. Bruce Banner. Bucky watched the videos, read the reports, and pondered over the man's very unique situation.
There wasn't any way, short of assassination, for Bucky to solve the issue of the asshole Thunderbolt Ross. Tony Stark seemed to have that situation under control anyway. What Bucky was really mulling over was if there was a way to help the man with his control of the other half of his soul, the Hulk. And it was a part of the man's very soul. That much was obvious to Bucky's eyes even through shaky cellphone footage of the giant green being. Helping Banner would require a shit ton of study and research and dredging through the magic texts Rebecca had hoarded over the years.
It awakened the long buried enthusiasm for solving magical puzzles that had made Bucky one of the most powerful and innovative witches in the state of New York, if not the East Coast. Unfortunately that would have to be one of the last things on his to-do list. It wasn't time sensitive. He had more immediate things to worry about.
Which turned Bucky's attention to Tony Stark. The man had more enemies than the entirety of the United States of America it seemed. Eighty percent of them Stark had well in hand; lawyers and money spread around like butter on toast. Another fifteen percent could be blown up with the Iron Man suit. But it was that last five percent that Bucky resolved to deal with.
A mix of rage and comradery burned in Bucky's chest as he looked through medical reports and chest x-rays. Every second of his life, Tony had shrapnel digging to get at his heart. The casing for the Arc Reactor had cut his lung capacity almost in half. Not the least of it, lingering damage from the Palladium poisoning had rendered him sterile.
That more than anything would be the most complicated part of Bucky's new mission. Brewing the potions and weaving the spells would be the easy part. Getting into the tower to spike Tony's food or switch out the potions was going to be the hard part. But Bucky wasn't the most feared assassin in a hundred years for nothing. With planning and opportunity he should be able to get it done.
The one member Bucky was utterly sure he didn't have to worry about was Crown Prince Thor, God of Thunder. The alien spent half his time on his own planet and when he was on Earth he was resilient to most weaponry he was likely to encounter and could go toe to toe with the Hulk. He also, Bucky observed sitting on the roof of his building watching Thor's lightning arc through the sky, had his own kind of magic. He didn't need Bucky's.
Steve.
Rebecca told Bucky she had Steve blessed and warded with his full knowledge. He had sigils soaked into his shield, magic knots sewn into his uniform, and talismans hung up in his apartment in Avengers Tower. The only thing Steven Grant Rogers didn't have were battle spells painted on his naked skin over the entirety of his body.
Battle spells were something only a fellow soldier, a brother in arms could give you. It was an intimate process and only someone you trust utterly and completely, someone in whose hands you willingly put your life could perform on you. Anything less and it was just body paint and meaningless words.
Back in the war, a life time ago, before every mission Steve would strip down and let Bucky paint him up and chant his magic words to sink the magic into his skin.
Now, though, Bucky had tried to kill his heart's brother and Steve had spent the last few months thinking his best friend had been scooped out and replaced with a weaponized automaton.
That effortless trust was gone, tattered and torn, and stained in blood. Bucky wouldn't be painting any battle spells on his brother of the soul for a long while yet.
He'd just have to content himself with protecting Steve's teammates and the tower he lived in.
Warding a physical structure was both simple and complicated. Homestead warding was simple, protection from weather, theft, invasions of human and creature, good health and fortune for those that lived there, etc. Pretty standard stuff.
Warding Avengers Tower was going to be much, much more complex. It was all a permanent residence, place of innovation and discovery, base of operations, and beacon of freedom and hope. Each of these kinds of places required different wards and some of the wards conflicted with others. Calculating the correct combination and placement of wards for the Tower was going to be akin to inventing a language and writing a story in it.
One of the components to weaving that kind of magic was deciding what Bucky wanted in that warding story. He needed to know what kinds of threats he was supposed to be protecting the Tower from and in order to discover that he needed to look into the past, future, and present.
He needed a mirror. He could borrow his sister's, but he needed to start rebuilding to his magic tool collect so he walked to the antique shop Rebecca pointed him to.
Wandering through the aisles, Bucky touched every reflective surface he passed with a breeze of his magic upon his fingertips. You could find mirrors specifically created for scrying, soaked in generic magic and sold next to crystal balls and tarot cards. There was nothing wrong with them, but the Barnes witches were traditionalists. Hand spelled mirrors that came by their unique magic naturally were so much more powerful.
Bucky was halfway through the shop when his felt an icy chill run down his spine. There was a mirror in a simple weathered wooden frame perched on a dressing table to his left. Its third owner had been murdered by her husband in 1939. Strangled while touching up her make-up for a rendezvous with her not-so-secret lover. Her spirit was trapped in the mirror and crying out for release.
The mirror was medium sized and rectangular, the reflective surface was dotted with tarnish, etched with a delicate floral design along the top. Bucky couldn't stop staring at his reflection in it and listening to the woman's cries of sorrow.
Slowly he stepped toward the mirror and reached out to touch it. The barest touch of his flesh along the wooden frame told him what he needed to do. Pulling the glove off his left hand, Bucky placed his metal index finger to the exact center of the mirror. He pressed slow and steady until there was a delicate crunch and a crater the size of the tip of his finger caved in the glass. A breathy sob of relief echoed through the shop.
Bucky felt the woman's soul depart for her afterlife and the mirror was left only with the mark of his magic of mercy.
"Is everything alright, sir?"
Turning from the mirror, Bucky gave the old man, the owner, a reassuring smile. "Yep. I'll take this one." He gestured with his flesh thumbed over his shoulder at the mirror, keeping his left hand in his jacket pocket until he could put his glove back on. "How much?"
The old man looked around him and eyed the mirror dubiously. "You sure, son? It's cracked."
Bucky looked at the perfectly round fingertip sized shatter in the exact center. He looked back at the man and nodded. "Very sure."
He left the shop minus fifty Hydra dollars and plus a wooden framed mirror wrapped in brown paper.
Swinging by the local craft store on his way home, Bucky picked up a set of etching tools. Becca had lent him a few of her spell books so he could start refreshing his memory. He'd come across an enchantment for creating a scrying mirror that would require him to brush up on his etching.
Work area set up in his living room, Bucky was sitting at his curbside table. There were two books open next to him, a fraying ribbon marking the page in one and a receipt for dish soap and a six pack of coke marking the other. The book on his left had the instructions written in turn of the century Romanian for creating a magic mirror. The book in front of him, a rune, sigil, and symbol dictionary, had the magic characters Bucky was going to use in his casting documented throughout its pages.
It took him the rest of the evening to configure a combination of runes he was satisfied with, then it took him through the night to copy them over and over and over again until he was satisfied with his penmanship, so to speak. Over seventy years he'd lost some of his muscle memory and he couldn't afford to screw up the precision of the runes. The mirror was the only one that would work for him, the only one he would ever have a connection to so he needed it to be perfect.
The sun was just breaking over the horizon, peeking out between the high-rises, when Bucky finally started lining up his tools. A copy of the rune equation on his left, the mirror in front of him, and his etching tools on his right.
There was no incantation needed for this, no special potion, just a steady hand and an accurate rune equation.
The mirror was two feet tall and one and half feet wide, its wooden frame was attached to wooden legs, and would seesaw on an axis with a gentle nudge. Another look at the sheet of runes, and Bucky picked up a thin sharp implement and painstakingly etched the first character in the top left hand corner just beneath the decorative design already across the top.
One by one Bucky went down the left side of the mirror, etching intricate lines and curves in the delicate antique mirror glass. It took him almost an hour to finish transferring the first third of the equation. The last rune in the first sequence was the first rune in the second, and the last rune in the second sequence would be the last rune in the third.
The last third of the equation was going to be the hardest because it would have to be transcribed onto the mirror backwards, from the bottom up, end to beginning.
It took the entire morning and through lunch before Bucky was done. His hand was numb and his back ached, but looking at the perfectly composed equation, elegant runes nearly lovingly etched into the glass it was worth it.
Pride filled his chest and he couldn't help smiling at his work. It felt so, so good to be working his magic again. Every spell, potion, charm, incantation, talisman healed just a little bit more of his battered soul.
The process of creating a scrying mirror was surprisingly uncomplicated. The hardest part being calculating the rune equation and etching it into the glass. With that done there was only one more step and then Bucky was finished and he would finally have his means of seeing the past, future, and present.
Metal fingers wiggled into Bucky's jean pocket and pulled out his lighter; returned to him by Rebecca who'd received it with his affects after he was declared KIA. He'd taken it from the first enemy soldier he'd ever killed. Death magic, unlike the merciful Death spell cast to ease a person's passing, was dark and easily twisted to evil purposes.
The lighter had been a prized possession of the soldier and his violent death had shadowed it with dark magic. It had called to Bucky so Bucky took it. He carved the Romanian symbol for forgiveness onto one side of the lighter and the symbol for warrior on the other. His magic kept the darkness from twisting the lighter, from making it into an instrument of evil. Instead it was an instrument of chaos and mischief. Many an explosive fuse was touched off and arson of enemy property was lit with its flame. Not to mention lighting up the occasional reefer cigarette, when they could get their hands on one.
His metal thumb popped the top and flicked the flint. Filled with fresh oil and new wick, it lit with ease. Right hand pretty much useless until his knockoff serum fixed the strain and swelling in his muscles, Bucky's metal hand lifted the lighter with a gentle whirring of gears and lightly touched the flame to the very first rune in the equation.
The runes smoldered in a domino effect along the equation. When the orange embers died out on the last rune, they were all frosted like the original floral embellishment decorating the top of the mirror. To the untrained eye the runes would look like a continuation of the design. A handy bit of camouflaging, Bucky thought.
His scrying mirror hummed with magic and Bucky put it and his tools back in their proper places. His stacked the books back with the others he'd borrowed and decided he was starving. The serum did give him the metabolism of a humming bird after all. Time to head to the Jewish deli Rebecca had recommended and clean out their stock for the day.
The next day, rested with his hunger satisfied and his hand recovered, Bucky tried to decide which he should do first. Scry for threats, or begin weaving the protections and charms for Steve's new friends. Ever the strategist, he decided it was more efficient to do his threat assessments first then he could plant his gifts and ward their homes at the same time.
Sitting on his third hand couch, Bucky opened his brand new moleskin notebook, clicked his pen, and turned his attention to his mirror set before him on his coffee table.
He focused on the glass, not looking at his reflection, but through it, into the distance. It began to fog up and Bucky intoned the incantation.
"Mirror, mirror reveal it all,
Show me their enemies from rise to fall."
Like a gentle cascade of a waterfall, the images and stories started materializing in the glass, bright technicolor tales playing out before Bucky's eyes and in his mind. His pen glided across the pages of his notebook in his elegant, nun trained handwriting. Page after page, never taking his eyes off the glass, Bucky recorded everything the mirror showed him.
The notebook was three-quarters of the way filled when the pictures and stories started slowing down. They tapered off and Bucky's vision returned to the here and now in the sun lit living room of his Hydra stolen Brooklyn apartment.
Bucky clicked the pen again, dropped it on the coffee table and flipped back to the beginning of the notebook. He started on page one and by page five he realized this was going to take a hell of a lot longer than he thought.
He'd seen a multitude of things. Each Avenger could have a saga written about their enemies alone. Some dangers were weeks, months, a season in the future, some years, decades, or in Thor's case centuries away.
Past enemies and dangers were surprisingly shorter lists than present and future, but no less important. They gave context and offered hints on how to combat the things to come.
Dr. Bruce Banner for instance. The mirror had shown more of Thunderbolt Ross. While not Hydra, his goals disgustingly enough had run parallel with theirs more often than not. Bucky could remember the higher ups planning ways to recruit and if that failed manipulate him into doing their bidding.
He'd seen just how much death and destruction the fanatical general would catalyst in the future. And unfortunately as powerful and innovative as Bucky was there was only so much his magic could do. But, good thing is, Tony Stark was already taking steps to handle Ross. Even so, Bucky could think of any number of ways to protect Banner and keep Ross occupied, magically and mundanely if the need should arise.
Tony Stark had a lot of enemies scattered across his past, plotting in his present, and or poised for his future. He could handle plenty without any help, but a few of them bore watching. The ridiculousness with the Mandarin being one of them.
Of course, the danger that most sent Bucky's heart racing in panic and fear, was the playact of Iron Man facing off against Captain America. Neither coming out the victor. Just destroyed friendships and broken bodies. He'd seen that tragedy from two sides, Stark and Steve. Both just as tragic and unacceptable as the other.
Pulling neon orange sticky tabs from the package next to him, Bucky stuck two in the notebook, one for Stark's story and one for Steve's.
For all the Avengers Loki Odinson-Laufeyson-Prince of Asgard-rightful King of Jotunnheim-God of Mischief seemed to be a reoccurring nuisance. His heart and his mind were troubled, broken, crying out in agonizing pain. Though he hid it well; behind walls of so much crazy like you wouldn't believe. Sitting on Thor's throne on another planet, there wasn't anything Bucky could do. Help him or stop him, Bucky's hands were tied so he marked him as a thing to be watched.
Clint Barton was easy. The Avenger's enemies were his enemies. Apart from the tracksuit mafia and a bitchy soccer mom plotting PTA sabotage against his wife, his enemies would be seen to with the others'.
Except for the twins. The Maximoff twins. Wanda and Pietro. They were the Avengers' enemies as a whole, but they had a special connection to Barton. Bucky couldn't see what it was though. It wasn't quite enemy and it wasn't quite friend. He'd scryed for danger and while the twins were dangerous, stained in unnatural, irredeemably twisted, abominable magic from a different world, to Clint Barton they were something else as well. He just couldn't put his finger on what.
He marked them for further study, maybe a more specific scrying. They were connected to Hydra after all. He was damned sure to cover all his bases on that front.
It took a couple hours and nearly his whole supply of color coded sticky tabs, but Bucky steadfastly worked his way through the notebook of danger. No one could accuse him of not doing his due diligence.
The next day Bucky payed a visit to his little sister and cleaned her out of every book on warding and protection magics she had. Which, since she'd had eighty some-odd years to collect them, was a lot.
It took him another two days of review and planning and pages and pages of considered and discarded warding story drafts, before Bucky was satisfied. A day and a half of nonstop magic weaving and he had a collection of about two dozen talismans and a quart of his own blood freshly bled into a couple of mason jars.
The trip to Iowa, to the Barton homestead was anticlimactic after all that preparation, always the hardest, most time consuming part of magic.
Walking the borders of the three hundred and sixty acre farm planting talismans at the four major points of the compass then walking it again planting talismans at the four minor points of the compass was just good exercise. It was a good thing Barton seemed to be in New York or out on mission when Bucky moved inward to plant another eight around the farmhouse itself. There was no way a seasoned spyssassin like Barton wouldn't have noticed the chickens' indignant middle of the night squawking when Bucky had to bury a talisman in the middle of their coop.
He waited for Laura Barton to take her kids to school the next morning before he planted two talismans on either side of the gate leading onto the property. Then he waited until she was busy cooking dinner before he planted one in her car, one in the farm truck parked in the barn and the last four on the major compass points around the barn itself.
That done, the foundations laid, Bucky waited until late that night when the full moon was high and heavy in the sky.
He knelt in the middle of the drive just outside of the gate and dipped a paintbrush in the jar of his blood. He used half the quart painting warding symbols and sigils on the gate and its posts. The other half quart was painstakingly dripped in precise symbols onto the gravel drive itself.
A heartbeat after the very last drop of Bucky's blood fell from his paintbrush the magic took hold and sank unfathomably deep into the earth. The air surrounding the farm pulsed with the beat of the earth, the pressure in the atmosphere grew almost painful, and the silence rang deafeningly.
Then it was over and the sounds of crickets in the grass and the hooting of that one stubborn owl roosting in the barn could be heard again.
Bucky sucked in a breath like coming up from under water then his eyes rolled in the back of his head and he keeled over in utter magical and physical exhaustion. He stayed there sprawled twisted at an uncomfortable angle on the gravel drive, a stained paintbrush and two rusty ringed mason jars tipped over next to him. Hours he stayed there unconscious, thirstily soaking up the ambient magic that bubbled up from the earth.
When the cock crowed as the sun just started to look toward the horizon, Bucky finally fluttered his eyes open. He was still utterly exhausted, but he was the kind of exhausted after an over taxing workout. Too long it's been since he'd performed any kind of magic near this scope. Not just on a physical large scale, but with the intention of permanency. That kind of magic takes experience and careful pacing of oneself.
Neither of which Bucky had when he set out to ward Clinton Francis Barton's home and family.
He overreached, overestimated his own ability after seventy years of magical atrophy and rushed headlong into one of the most complicated and difficult forms of magic. No consideration to the possible consequences for himself. A novice's mistake and one his ma would have tanned his hide for.
As it was, Bucky was lucky he had woken up before the next full moon at all. Had he been anyone else. Had he less of a connection to his hereditary magic, a natural talent. Had he not been physically near indestructible, he very well could have killed himself. At the very least irreversibly damaged his connection to his magic by draining himself like that.
Bucky shakily shoved his supplies back in the bag and dragged it and his aching body off into the trees that surrounded the property. He collapsed under a massive oak, closed his eyes, and just concentrated on breathing in the earth magic misting in the morning air. Lesson learned, he thought to himself wryly deprecating, no more warding large areas without preparation.
He wasn't able to move again until afternoon was sliding into evening and even then he staggered weakly toward his rental. The trip back to Brooklyn was not pleasant.
Of course the epic scolding he got from Rebecca the second she saw him after couple days of a near healing coma was even less pleasant. Though it served to truly drive the point home. He needed to take more care of himself, not just others.
"You don't have to do this," Rebecca shouted at him even as she wrapped a chartreuse fleece blanket around his shoulders and shoved a steaming bowl of stew at him, scowling until he started eating. "You have nothing to prove, Jamie."
"Yes, I do." Bucky looked into his sister's furious worried blue eyes and said, "Yes, I do. I need to prove they haven't taken anything from me, that I got back all that they stole. I need to prove that I can still do more than just kill and maim and destroy."
"Oh, Jamie," Rebecca sighed and stroked a soothing hand over his hair pausing to cradle his cheek. "You are a good man, Jamie. They couldn't have taken that away from you if they had a map and an instruction manual. Creation, protection, love," she smiled at him sad and sweet, "that has always been what you're best at."
Bucky spent the most restful night he'd had in close to ninety years sleeping on his sister's lumpy, floral print sofa surrounded by the love permeating her things and her magic layered around them.
He approached the story weaving of the wards for Avengers –Stark- Tower with more caution.
It took a month before he was ready. For the Tower wards at least. The individual spells and talismans for the Avengers themselves would have to wait just a while longer.
Urban warding presented its own brand of difficulties. Such as there could be no burying of talismans. Not unless you wanted to take a jackhammer to concrete and asphalt out in the open or go into the sewer system and attach them to slimy walls. Neither of which Bucky was prepared to do. Not only would no amount of notice –me-not spells would be able to hide a random guy jackhammering up a busy sidewalk or street, but his enhanced sense of smell would probably be permanently fried. That particular stench of New York sewer just didn't wash out with anything less than watered down bleach.
So Bucky was working with the handicap of only being able to use runes and symbols and sigils for the first part of the warding story. Not insurmountable but it would stretch his abilities and ingenuity.
In the end Bucky took inspiration from the etching technique he used on his scrying mirror. Modified of course because concrete and asphalt were a much less pliable substance than an antique silver backed mirror.
On the morning of the new moon, Bucky started the first part of his three chapter warding story for the Avengers Tower.
Because a tall, dark, mildly sketchy looking man wandering around a high profile building carrying a burning branding iron was a little much for Bucky's stealth spell, he had to borrow a hide-in-plain-sight talisman from Rebecca. He would have made one himself, but he needed all the magic he could spare just for the setting of the first chapter.
On the four points of the compass rose, Bucky poured some of his magic into the branding iron. It glowed white hot and every time he touched the burning tip to the stained concrete it seared a different rune. Four runes at each of the four points and Bucky started to breathe a little harder, wiping sweat from his eyes. By that time it was noon and he figured he'd follow Rebecca's stern instructions and break for a large lunch and about a gallon of water.
An hour later, full from a red meat heavy lunch and freshly hydrated, Bucky was back to continue with the minor points of the compass rose. Four runes at each four points and finally by midafternoon, the first chapter of warding on the Tower was finished.
He slept heavy that night, but still got up early in the morning and carted a gallon milk jug of his blood all the way to Manhattan.
The second chapter of warding story was more time consuming and intricate as well as magically exhausting. Even though there was already magic in his collected blood, it was his blood and even out of his body had a connection to him. So painting the runes around the Tower in his blood would still draw on him.
In between each cluster of runes on the compass points, Bucky painted a circle of runes in carefully crafted equations. Each circle was a different equation for a different aspect of the wards and they had to be exact. In other words time consuming detail work.
A stop for lunch when he finished painting around the base of the Tower, and Bucky made his way to the front entrance of the Tower for the second half of the second chapter.
Now while the first part was tiring, the second was going to drain him nearly dry. That is, it would if he hadn't come prepared. Rebecca insisted on packing him a large bag of high calorie snacks and electrolyte heavy sports drinks.
Front doors, main entrances, gateways, even drawbridges and portcullises, pretty much any and every type of primary entranceway were the most magically important feature of a place. There could be a hundred and one backdoors, but the only door that had to be warded was the front. So it was that Bucky stood before the massive front entrance to Avengers Tower and grimaced.
It took up a good portion of the entire front face of the building and was a collection of revolving, automatic, and good old fashioned push-pull doors. There was no way to ward each individual entry, so Bucky was going to paint the blood runes up the side of the first door on the left then across the top of them all the way to the outside of the last door on the right.
He was going to be working out in the open in broad daylight so it called for a few extra camouflage plain-sight talismans –also curtesy of Rebecca- and some props to help along the illusion.
I.e. Bucky dressed like a window cleaner complete with caution cones and scaffolding.
From 1:15pm to 7:48 Bucky painstakingly painted his seemingly endless equation of blood runes across the top of every door on the front of the Tower. Pausing only to shift the scaffolding, cones, and everything six feet to the right over and over again as he went along.
It was tedious and exhausting and not without its moments of alarm. At one point Bucky was almost sure he was going to have to run for it, disappear into the city, and back into hiding.
Tony Stark had suddenly appeared in front of his own building and stared at the lonely window cleaner blocking up two doors to his –sorry- Avengers Tower.
Tony squinted at the guy seemingly totally focused on his job. He was utterly unremarkable and the moment Tony put his eyes on him he already forgot what he looked like.
"Pep, I thought the window cleaners came last week."
Pepper Potts paused midsentence and didn't even bother to glance up from her tablet toward the scaffolding and caution cones. "Tony, you've never cared about building maintenance."
Tony tilted his head in contemplation then shrugged, "Good point." He pushed his sunglasses back up his nose and turned away swaggering through one of the revolving doors.
Bucky watched out of the corner of his eye as the billionaire and his CEO disappeared inside. He blew out a tense breath and internally cursed himself.
He should have realized, should have remember his ma's lessons. When a person builds something with their own two hands, witch or not, they put a little of themselves into it. Some even put their heart and soul into it. In Tony Stark's case literally since the Arc Reactor, the thing that keeps him alive, is also the thing that gives the Tower life.
If he'd been magically inclined even just a little bit, all of Bucky's stealth magic, notice-me-nots, and plain-sights wouldn't have done a lick of good. Good intentions or not, Bucky was messing with Tony's heart and soul, the man would not have been able to ignore that.
At 7:48pm, Bucky finished the last stroke on the last rune in the equation. He exhaled exhaustedly and the equation lit up in a domino effect to glow like embers. The air grew almost unbearably heavy, all the city noise was abruptly snuffed out in ringing silence, and time paused for a long heartbeat.
Then the runes soaked in and the atmosphere dissipated. Bucky sucked in a breath collapsing next to the now near invisible blood runes. Tilting his head back against the cool glass, he soaked up some of the edgy ambient magic of the city. It buoyed him up enough he could snag his snack bag and tear open a package of peanuts. Dumping the whole thing in his mouth he chewed twice and washed it down with an entire bottle of neon blue sports drink.
It was another twenty minutes until Bucky felt strong enough to groaningly get to his feet and start taking down his camouflage set up. He left the dismantled scaffolding and orange cones around the side of the building for some confused maintenance guy to discovered later then he dragged his feet all the way back to Brooklyn.
Even with the snacks and rest and rehydration, he knew the warding had taken a lot out of him. He probably shouldn't be alone if he had a hope in hell of getting up the next morning to finish the third and final chapter of the warding story. He bypassed his Hydra apartment all together and trudged through Rebecca's building and right up to her apartment. Collapsing face first on her sofa, Bucky was out before his sister could even scold him for not knocking.
"Well, are you happy with yourself now?" woke him up the next morning.
Bucky groaned and buried his head under a tasseled throw pillow hiding away from the early morning sunlight and his sister's unimpressed inquiry.
"I thought I told you to pace yourself."
A heavy beleaguered sigh. "I did pace myself," Bucky grumbled. "I even ate all your snacks."
"Hmph!" Rebecca turned away from her brother to finish frying them up some breakfast. "Maybe next time you'll think twice before you go warding every skyscraper in New York City."
Snorting, Bucky pulled his head out from under the tasseled monstrosity and rolled his eyes at her back. "Pretty sure it's only the one skyscraper I'll ever have to ward."
"You don't have to do anything." The sound of sizzling bacon did nothing to cover up Rebecca's resentful mutter.
Finally getting to his feet, Bucky wandered into the little kitchen and leaned against the counter next to the stove. He crossed his arms and took a moment to study his sister's unhappy, worried scowl. She refused to look at him, focusing all her attention on her cooking.
"Becca."
She scowled harder and accidentally flicked a strip of bacon out of the pan with a rough twist of her fork.
Bucky reached over and picked it up with his metal fingers dropping it back in the pan. "Rebecca, will you look at me?"
She relented, barely, tilting her face toward him just enough to meet his serious gaze out of the corner of her eye.
"I've done a lot of very terrible things for a very long time. I may have my mind and memories back, but those wounds will forever be on my soul." He squeezed her shoulder soothingly when she opened her mouth to protest. "Steve and his team do a lot of very good things. If I can help them, protect them, maybe those wounds will scar and fade a little sooner."
Rebecca had since lifted her head fully to look at her brother. It hurt her. He had suffered so much and he should be the one being protected and cared for. But James Buchanan Barnes had never let anyone take care of him. He picked up neglected strays and lonely forgottens like pennies from the street. Every one was a better, more deserving being than him and trying to argue that with him gained you nothing but a hurting heart and a splitting headache.
"But who's going to help and protect you?"
A sympathetic, unintentionally condescending reassurance was on the tip of his tongue, but Rebecca silenced him with a raised hand.
"Don't." She took a steadying breath. "Just don't. You go on and work yourself to the bone for these overpowered, self-entitled children, but don't you try and tell me not to do everything I can to take care of you. You just go on and do your thing and I'll just go on and make sure you don't kill yourself doing it."
Bucky watched his little sister for a long moment knowing she was perfectly serious. He was pretty sure if he didn't let her do as she pleased, she would just knock him over the head and tie him to her pullout couch with a knit blanket and a bowl of chicken soup. If he was being completely honest with himself, something he tended to neglect to do usually to his own detriment, having Rebecca fuss and belligerently coddle him comforted him in ways he'd long forgotten.
In the end, as with all Barnes women, it was better to just let her do what she will and keep out of her way.
"Alright, Becca," he gave a wry smile to answer her dubiously raised eyebrow. "I'll try. For you, I'll try to let you take care of me."
Rebecca huffed and scowled at him again. "iTry/i! You damn well better try. I still got Mama's wooden spoon, you know. A good smack with it still hurts like a son of a-"
"Language," Bucky scolded with a grin. The heaviness between them finally lifted with the return of their sibling banter.
She made a derisive sound and negligently dumped the finished bacon on a plate. Bucky yelped and jumped away when a splatter of hot grease burned his arm.
Rebecca tossed him a dish towel and barely held in her vindictive smirk as he sullenly rubbed at his long since healed arm. "Stop being a baby and hand me the eggs."
Bucky did as he was told with a hard roll of his eyes. They spent the rest of breakfast bickering and picking at each other like they were still tripping over one another in their small family apartment back in Brooklyn.
The third and final chapter of the warding story Bucky had outlined for Avengers Tower was the simplest magically but the most complicated strategically.
It involved a lot of air vents, elevator shafts, and precariously hanging upside down on the outside of a ninety-three story, 1,130 foot tall high rise.
It was also the most fun Bucky'd had since jumping on top a speeding train in the Austrian Alps. He'd forgotten that before Hydra got their grubby hands on him and ruined everything good in his world, he'd actually been a bit of an adrenalin junky. Where do you think Steve learned it from?
Filled with a warm breakfast and carting a climber's pack back to Manhattan Bucky paused outside the massive tower and checked for the third time that he had all his stealth talismans and charms on him. Hiding in plain sight on the street was one thing. Hiding inside the home of a team of superheroes was another thing altogether. Hiding in someone else's territory is always tricky, private property in general didn't tend to appreciate interlopers and Bucky figured the Tower would be especially territorial considering it was the literal body of a super intelligent, semi-sentient AI.
Hydra had an entire file on the dangers posed by Tony Stark's cyber butler. JARVIS had the same threat level as the Iron Man suit. Bucky was going to have to exercise every single one of his assassin skills and stealth magics to make his job possible.
Getting the building plans filed with the city was simple. Comparing them to the Hydra pilfered blueprints gave Bucky a good picture of the inner floors and an idea of the wards he'd have to specially tailor to them. When the Tower was just Stark, the top ten floors not including the penthouse were R-n-D. After the retrofit post-Chitauri Invasion, those floors became personal labs and workshops for Stark and Banner, training facilities for the other Avengers, and private and communal living areas for the whole team.
Each floor would need its own type of warding and the task was looking to be a long and arduous one.
So it was that Bucky was now scaling up eighty-three stories in an elevator shaft to get to the first in a inconveniently large number of floors that needed his attentions. It was perilous, required caution, and put the beginnings of a manic grin on his face. JARVIS had motion sensors at every floor so as Bucky ascended beyond each one he had to pause for a minute and a half to give his magics the chance to delicately misdirect the surveillance. By his estimation if all worked like it was supposed to, he shouldn't even register as a presence in the Tower. He would be a ghost.
Fortunately that wasn't an unfamiliar state of being for him.
When he reached the first of his destinations he silently unscrewed the ventilation panel and shimmied inside with barely a whisper of cloth.
Then it was only a matter of navigating his way through the unusually large ductwork (a gift from Tony to Clint he'd find out later) to the outer most point of the floor. Pausing at that Northern end of the ducts, Bucky slid his hand into his backpack and pulled out a roll of duct tape and one of a seemingly endless supply of the different warding talismans he'd made.
Tearing off a strip of tape with his teeth, Bucky stuck the talisman on to ceiling of the vent and covered it in tape 'til it was just a lump of grey against the metal. Stowing the tape away, Bucky smoothly shimmied back to the last junction and turned off toward the East.
Around the major compass points then around again to the minor points, Bucky used up a third of the roll of duct tape before he moved on up to the next floor.
He did that over and over again using different talismans each for the training floors, the labs and workshops, the communal living areas, and the personal quarters. When he finally got to the aircraft hangar at the top of the Tower he had to descend from the vents and ghost around the wide open space carefully avoiding cameras and sensors, the ever watchful eyes of JARVIS.
The roof of the Tower was the most puzzling bit of magic he had to weave because it couldn't conflict with the Asgardian magic already rooted there. A magic Bucky knew little to nothing about. While he'd been plotting out the wards he'd spent an entire weekend combing through the Hydra and SHIELD files on their studies of Thor's Hammer and the readings they took from his first landing site in New Mexico. Eventually Bucky decided he would have to feel it for himself.
The two way trip to Puerto Antigo and back took a full twenty-seven hours. And it was worth it when Bucky was standing in the center of the massive intricate knot work burned into the dry desert ground.
The magic was utterly foreign. Like nothing Bucky had ever felt before and vice versa. The second he'd stepped into the center of the symbol the breath was knocked out of him from the force of the near overwhelming curious alien magic slamming into him.
It had never felt anything like Bucky either. Which was surprising. You'd think since the Norse gods had come thousands of years before and made such an impression on Earth's people that their magics would have at least recognized the native powers.
Apparently not, because Bucky spent an hour communing with the small bit of alien magic lingering in the knots, basically shaking hands in a meet-n-greet for lack of a better description. When he finally convinced it he had magic superiority in the realm of Midgard he had a pretty good handle on the Asgardians and how they worked, magically as well as culturally.
They all had very high opinions of themselves, the Asgardians did, and they had the nasty habit of thinking themselves above pretty much everyone else. High handed entitled old busybodies with god complexes. Their magic wasn't any more humble. Bucky hadn't had to give such a serious dressing down since he'd been task master and teacher to a dozen tiny ballerinas.
Stepping out of the symbol, Asgardian magics now firmly put in their place, Bucky felt eyes on him. He paused in walking back to his rented jeep and gave the intruding gaze a firm smack on the nose. He got a lightning fast impression of startled golden eyes then Bucky was left to his privacy once again.
Like he said, high handed busybodies.
The pavement on the roof of the Tower was burned with the same style of knot work as the site in New Mexico. Bucky didn't have any reason to converse with the foreign magics for his warding so he ignored the lightly smoking symbol and worked his way around the landing pad. Punching holes in the ground with his metal fist Bucky planted the talismans and covered them up again. A whisper of his magic resealed the concrete unblemished.
It was evening by that time and Bucky pulled out his Hydra pilfered climbing gear. A pair of magnetic gloves and magnetic toe caps for his boots. The technology was a little hit or miss when the weather was being uncooperative, but it had been used successfully before, both by the intelligence agency Hydra stole it from and by Bucky.
Supply belt secure at his waist, Bucky climbed over the edge of the roof and slowly, steadily descended the Tower's glass façade to the Iron Man landing platform. With extra caution, he transferred his magnetized holds to the installation jutting out from the side of the building. Now clinging to the underside of smooth, polished steel, Bucky crawled like a spider to the dead center of the mechanized suit dismantling landing pad.
Ever so carefully he pulled out the last talisman and his third roll of duct tape. In a matter of seconds he had the thing secured to the bottom of the platform. There was a faint tremor in the air, there and gone again, when the last bit of tape had covered the talisman signaling the magic settling in, permeating into the very fibers of the Tower.
His job well done, Bucky started crawling his way back to the main building to begin his ascent back to the roof.
Of course that was the very moment a great gust of wind blew past him and the caps on his shoes lost their grip.
Heart pounding in a heady mix of fear and exhilaration, Bucky swayed in the breeze. Clinging precariously to the underside of the platform by the magnetic tips of his fingers, over a thousand feet up, he risked a glance down.
And let out a slightly hysterical giggle. "Oh, Becca is going to kill me." The people on the sidewalk below looked like ants and yep, he was never telling his little sister about this.
Flexing his abdominal muscles, Bucky slowly lifted himself up 'til his toes tapped the steel and the magnetics gripped on again. Thankfully the rest of the climb back to the relatively safety of the roof was uneventful.
The trip back to the ground level down the elevator shaft took an hour and by the time Bucky finally exited the basement entrance stepping out onto the street he was buzzing with the satisfaction of a successful mission. The thrill of adrenaline from a good old-fashioned death defying stunt was still pumping through him.
In the mood to celebrate, Bucky made journey home to Brooklyn making a quick stop off at the little Romanian hole in the wall he'd discovered in his third week in the familiar borough. Twenty minutes later, laden down with steaming food just like their ma used to make, Bucky let himself into his sister's apartment. He greeted her stern glare and impatiently tapping toe with a grin.
"I brought dinner."
Rebecca eyed her brother suspiciously, eyed the food suspiciously, then eyed her brother again. "What did you do?"
"What makes you think I did something?" He blinked at her innocently as he started unloading the food on the kitchen table.
"You got that same look on your face as when you gave Ma flowers that time you bent her great-great-grandmother's ancient spell knife."
"I have no idea what you're talking about." Bucky waved a container of sarmale, Romanian cabbage rolls, under her nose. "I got some of your favorites."
Rebecca scowled darkly, but snatched the box out of his hands. "Fine, don't tell me. But you better have gotten some cozonac."
Bucky dutifully passed over the walnut paste filled sweetbread. "Of course, dear sister. I didn't forget."
"Good lord," Rebecca scoffed around a mouthful of bread, rolling her eyes. "On second thought, don't tell me, I don't want to know what you did. Just shut up and go get some plates."
Dipping his head to hide his triumphant grin, Bucky went and got the plates, silverware, and napkins. When he got back to the table, Rebecca had already set out the rest of the food and was surreptitiously finger picking from the boxes.
Shaking his head at her unrepentant expression, Bucky handed over a plate and silverware and the siblings went about dividing up the food.
It was good and comforting and wonderful. Brother and sister spent the rest of the evening laughing and talking and remembering home. By the time the last takeout box had been licked clean, Bucky was calm and satisfied and Rebecca had a gentle smile on her lips.
There was still work to be done before Bucky was done protecting Steve's team and Rebecca was still fighting an uphill battle trying to take care of her stubborn brother, but for the moment, they were just content in each other's company. Content surrounded by love and family.
TBC...