When Steve isn't busy saving the world as an Avenger, he comes with Sam on his hunt for the Winter Soldier.

What it turns into is a guided tour of all the back alleys of Brooklyn. It sounds like Steve got into fights in every single one. And that Bucky Barnes saved his ass each time he did.

Sam's never going to know Barnes the way that Steve did, but it helps Sam believe that if there's even a spark of that man left in the Winter Soldier, he's worth saving.

Clint wants to extend a friendly hand to Barnes, because they're the charter members of the Natasha Romanov deprogramming school, and if he doesn't, who will?

At least that's Clint's plan.

He doesn't mean to spill his guts, Barnes has enough to deal with without someone throwing their feelings at him, but Barnes has this way of listening, like he's paying attention and that it's not a problem for him to listen.

"It's guilt, you know," because there's one other person on the planet that might understand him, "not just killing people," although that was bad enough. "There was this other guy, a civilian, and he got hit the same way I did, but he had enough about him to put in a fail-safe. And it's, he's a civilian, a fucking civilian, and he coped with it better than I did."

Then there was the other thing - that fear that the only reason they tried to fix him was because they knew him, and that if he'd been anyone else, they would have handed him over for trial like they should have done. There was a payment for that, a debt, a perfectly reasonable one but it still had to be paid - he had to make it seem like he was back to normal, like you could be, completely.

Clint felt ashamed, because really, he'd had an extra eighteen months to learn to deal with this, and he'd barely been under, while Barnes had been under for seventy years. It wasn't like saying this to Nat, they'd seen each other at their worst, but Barnes was barely more than a stranger.

Clint tries to draw back, stop himself from saying more, but Barnes claps him on the shoulder and says, "hey. Don't. Everyone needs an ear now and then."

They're never the best of friends, he has Nat for that, and Barnes and Steve look like every pair of schoolboys he's ever seen, but Barnes is always there to listen when Clint needs and ear, and Clint tries to be there for him. Clint knows what the Winter Soldier did, but he can't really hold that against the Barnes he knows.

Natasha makes Barnes cut his hair.

She says it's important that he looks like James Barnes if he wants to feel like him, and Clint can sort of understand. He knows that's why Nat dyes her hair fifteen different shades of red, none of which are her real colour. The Black Widow does her job and Nat tidies up afterwards.

Barnes is allowed out, supervised, of course, with Natasha normally the one supervising, because she's best at jabbing him with a sleep dart and making it look like he's fainted.

They build up to everything, slowly introducing Barnes back to the world outside the cold, steel walls of Hydra bases, into this century. One night they go out clubbing of all things. Natasha wants to believe that they can get Bucky Barnes back out of the Winter Soldier and give him all the things that any American citizen can expect out of the twenty-first century, even if that's shitty music and over-priced beer. She may also have used the phrase 'go, meet people who were not born in the nineteen-twenties.'

Of course she keeps an eye on him. They don't know how Hydra conditioned him, she's been working on best guesses and best practises from other organisations, but she knows other groups have used flashing lights and loud music to the same effect. Natasha had someone set up a fake nightclub in SHIELD's HQ before she took Barnes out, just to be on the safe side. Nothing happened, but you can never be too careful, so she's on water and has line of sight on him at all times.

She decides it's time to intervene when some idiot looks like he's about to try to hit Barnes.

Barnes has the man's wrist in a grip by the time she gets there. "Hey, the lady said no."

For a second it looks like the jerk might actually try to carry on the fight, but he obviously sees something in Barnes's expression that makes him think twice about it.

The jerk turns away, and storms out of the club. The girl is in tears and Natasha recognises yet another clean up job. Bucky is already trying to comfort the girl, "if you need someone to take you home, I'm sure Nat won't mind." The girl said that was very kind of them, but she'd be alright. It didn't stop Bucky giving her the taxi fare home.

Natasha says something, in passing, about the girl not minding if Bucky had gone home with her. It's probably true, Bucky isn't bad looking and the whole World War Two retro thing is in right now. Natasha has tried getting him to wear something that looked like it might have been made in this century but it was a losing battle, so he was wearing a suit, enlivened by a terribly loud tie.

"You don't take advantage of a girl like that. She wants to see you, you'll run into her again."

It's like looking after a kid. In fact, Sam decides, if having a kid is even half as difficult as this, he isn't having any.

If you took your eyes off Barnes, he vanished. Then you spent half an hour trying to find him and getting him out of whatever trouble he'd gotten himself into.

This time, Sam finds him up a tree.

He's getting a basketball down for two kids that live up the road. They explain to Sam what happened,

"This asshole in a BMW,"

"Language," Bucky shouts at the kids. It's like living in a Miss Manners echo chamber, except Sam knows for a fact that Bucky swears like a sailor. Still, Sam can't help the eye-roll that follows the telling off. "What?! If my Mom heard me saying things like that at their age, she would have paddled me good. I am trying to save their behinds." Which causes Sam to laugh almost as much as the kids did.

"Okay, so this moron in a BMW,"

"Got," there's a pause where the eldest kid thinks but doesn't say 'pissed off', "annoyed because the ball went near his car. We didn't even hit it or anything. He grabbed the ball and threw it up there. We were trying to get it down when Bucky saved the day." Which makes Bucky smile too, from what Sam could see of him between branches.

Getting up the tree seemed to have been relatively straight-forward, given how high up he was when Sam came along. Bucky threw the ball back to the kids. Getting down was the problem. In the end, Bucky just hurls himself down, nailing the landing but not in a way that Sam would have recommended for anyone not filled with super-soldier serum or a variant. Sam's knees hurt from just looking at it.

Bucky dusts himself off. "Don't try that yourselves. I'm trained." Sam knows that's not going to stop Dave and Eddie, because it wouldn't have stopped him, but he appreciates the effort.

Sam turns to go back into the house, and Bucky follows him, still dusting himself off. "That was stupid."

"Yeah, but they would have gone up and broken their necks, so I thought I'd better do it." Sam thinks Bucky probably has a point, and he's glad Bucky was there to help, 'cause if Dave and Eddie had injured themselves, the local council would have used it as an excuse to cut down all the trees in the neighbourhood, and a little green was always better with families growing up 'round here.

Sam supposes it's because they're all military or special ops that they even hear it. They're all trained to notice sounds that other people don't, especially noises that they don't recognise.

That's why he, Nat and Clint immediately lean round the door to peer into the living room of their temporary headquarters.

It wasn't that Steve didn't laugh, he did, normally a quiet, low chuckle.

But Steve didn't laugh so hard and loud that you could hear him in the next room, and he didn't laugh so hard that he's curled up on the floor with it.

Sam has no idea what Bucky said to set Steve off, but he's glad he did because Steve looks happy and it's good to see.