AN: Hello there fellow Avengers/Captain America fans, and welcome to my first attempt at a multi-chapter Marvel fic. With my Hobbit one about to wrap up (insert shameless plug for Mirkwood here) I figured I would get back to one of my favorite fandoms.

The basic premise comes from the similarities I saw between two of my favorite characters: Wanda Maximoff and Bucky Barnes. You already read the summary so I'm not giving any more info out here except it takes place post-Age of Ultron and before Civil War. Just assume it's AU as we know very little about Civil War ploy yet and it is impossible for this story to end up anything like it. With that said, I hope you enjoy.

The Eclipsed Men

Clint had been sitting out on his porch, trying to catch a spare moment between putting the kids to bed, cleaning up after dinner, and cleaning up from the renovation work he had been doing. The night was still and quite, the way he liked, and he could hear a breeze sweeping across the farm, rustling his hair. This was why he lived a secret life. What other agent got to live like this?

It had been an uneventful couple of months since the cleanup of what Laura had called "Aisle Ultron." Sure, Clint wasn't complaining. It was more of a comment, really. It had given him the much needed time to spend time with Nathan and the rest of his family, fix up the house, and otherwise have a little rest and relaxation. Natasha had come to visit a couple of times, and he'd gotten some basic information about the new Avengers' training, and while he coveted those descriptions, the quiet simplicity of the farm life kept him from turning back.

As the wind brushed across the tips of the grass, he sighed.

"Clint?" Laura asked from the open doorway.

"Yeah?" he turned, to face his wife. Her warm smile mimicked the warm glow from inside, but a dark nervousness rested behind her eyes.

"I was looking for the level in the supply closet and I saw there was some sort of light coming form the barn," she confessed. Her husband felt an immediate rush and whirled to his right, looking at the structure that had seemed commonplace just a moment ago and now appeared looming and dangerous. "Did you leave a light-"

"No," he shook his head. "No, I didn't."

"Should I get the bow?" she asked, looking at the barn with an apprehension.

"If they don't know who we are already, we shouldn't get them a reason to," he reasoned, standing up. "Go upstairs with the kids. Lock the doors. I'm taking the shotgun."

"Are you sure?" she questioned, still hanging in the doorway.

"It's fine," he reassured, putting a hand on her shoulder. "It's probably just a rabbit that got in front of the motion censor." She nodded, still not quite convinced. "If I'm not back at the house in 10 minutes, call Natasha. Call Stark. Hell, call Fury if you need to just…"

"Be careful," she finished his thought. The archer dashed to the side, looking back just quick enough to see her vanish back inside the house, to hear the front door slam and triple lock. This was why he'd been warned against living a secret life. What other agent had to live like this?

The shotgun was hidden in the porch. His fingers never fumbled over the loose board as he retrieved the weapon from the compartment, but he could feel something wavering inside his throat. It was different than his missions before. Before, he only risked his own life and the security of an administration that few even knew existed. And hey, maybe the world was at stake but he had backup. Here he could suddenly felt the night closing in and choking him as he looked at the dim and flickering light that came from the barn. He knelt there for a moment, staring at its pulsing glow and took several deep breaths. Then, he sprung into action.

A quick dash was all he needed to be at the barn wall, a moment to gather his thoughts was all that was required. But just as he raised the gun to beat against the wooden planks, the front doors of the structure crashed open, the shadow of a man sprinting out onto the farm. Clint's heart felt like it stopped beating as he gave chase. The person was slowing down, against all odds, as if it didn't have a plan of where it would go next.

"Put your hands above your head!" Clint shouted. The figure dropped to his knees in the wild grasses, seemingly giving up on his endeavor. The agent walked slowly closer, apprehensive as to what the person could be doing. "You're trespassing you know," he informed the runner. The other man lifted his face slightly, letting the dusk set light and shadow across it.

The man had a hollow face with empty blue eyes and a facial expression as if he was still in shock from some sort of tragic accident. His lank dark hair hung in front of his face, almost covering the healing bruises and scratches he had on his face. The man didn't look at Clint, but also didn't look away. There was something horrifically familiar about his face, but the agent couldn't put his finger on it.

"Hiding on another person's property is illegal, you know," Clint pointed out. The man didn't respond, just knelt there in the dirt. He was wearing an oversized black sweatshirt that gave the illusion that he was shrinking into himself. All his clothes were ridiculously worn and dirty, as was all the exposed skin the bowman could see. He's probably homeless, Clint thought, just down on his luck. But another part of his head was screaming that no one had ever come to the house before this and definitely hadn't hidden in his barn. Still, he extended a hand. "You don't seem to be dangerous," he decided aloud. The man looked up at him with wide eyes. Even with the facial hair and tired face, he seemed to be young, younger than Clint at least. But furthermore there was a sort of sorrowful youth beneath the man's eyes that made the agent pause. The man still didn't move. Clint shook his left hand as emphasis for his offer. "I'll help you up." The man didn't look convinced. The less the runner spoke, the more nervous it was making the father. "Can you talk?"

"When I want to," the man whispered. His voice was hoarse and rough from underuse. Clint raised his eyebrows.

"Good. You want to tell me why you were in my barn?" he asked. The other man sort of shrugged, an answer that was almost offensive. Instead of speaking at all, the man seemed to try to read Clint's face, as if the clues to his very existence was hidden in the wrinkle between his eyebrows.

"Are you from around here?" the archer asked, skeptical. The man didn't answer, just shook his head. Clint reached his hand further down. "Do you have a name?" The runner stared at the agent's palm for a minute, before reaching out himself and taking it. He didn't need to say a name at all. The father knew exactly who it was. The fingers glimpsed from under the sweatshirt sleeve glinted in the dying light and were cool and slick against Clint's skin. The man's arm wasn't made of flesh and bone at all. The sweatshirt slipped further down his forearm. It was made of metal. The bowman had the time to think, Winter Soldier, oh shit, before he took the butt of the shotgun and clocked the assassin over the head with it. The renegade Hydra agent toppled like a pile of bricks, his eyes rolling back into his head and grip on Clint's fingers releasing.

Wanda did not sign up for this. Both Steve's phone and the landline at the training center had been buzzing for the past hour, and she was sick and tired of being the secretary while the others were away. She had been holding strong and not answering the entire time when she saw an unknown number, the calls she had been told to ignore. Wanda leaned back in the chair and stared at the vibrating device. It announced that there were 5 new voicemails from a number listed as 'unknown.' Tempted, she drummed her fingers on the table as she eyed it suspiciously. With almost every other Avenger off doing something else, Steve, Natasha, and Sam on what they called a "private investigation mission," she was just about to go insane. It wouldn't have been as bad if Vision had been deployed to work with Nick Fury on a new plan for threat analysis, but without him, Wanda had just about had it. Surrounded only by basic personnel and the infuriating phone, Wanda gave a final growl of frustration before selecting the option to listen to the messages.

A fuzzy and familiar voice burst from the microphone, scuffing the microphone. "Hey, um…Steve. It's Clint. Don't panic, but I think I found that uh…guy you're looking for. Call me back or uh…come to my house. He's tied to our tractor right now. Hurry up. Please." Wanda furrowed her eyebrows and continued to listen.

"Don't know if you got my last message, Steve, but you need to pick up your phone more often. Like I said, we have an old friend of yours at my house right now, tied up in my barn. I don't know what to do. Communicate in some form so I can figure it out." Wanda shrugged as the next call from Clint began to play, but was quickly shocked by his quickly rising and apprehensive voice.

"God damn, Steve. I need you here, like, right now. Don't know if you got my last message or just didn't understand what I meant. Your old Sergeant buddy is currently chained to my tractor. Call me back or come and pick him up before he wakes up and freaks out." Another pause. Wanda began to stand.

"Steve! Where are you?" She recoiled when a high pitched shriek screamed from the microphone as Clint shouted through the phone. "I have a Russian assassin in my barn! He's yours!"

"I'm going to call Stark if I don't here from you soon. I know you don't want Tony getting involved in this, but I have to keep my family safe." Something about the way her friend threatened Tony Stark's presence in the affair made Wanda's grip around the cell phone tighten as she exited into Steve's texts. He still wasn't smart enough to set a password. With a couple of clicks, she'd managed to send a brief but all the more descriptive response.

Don't call Stark. Wanda headed over. Stay put. Everything will be fine.

It was even deeper into midnight when she finally arrived, the glow about her hands making a faint red light illuminate her path. The house and residing barn looked like a painting, no movement to be detected. The slightest wind rippled through the grass as she got closer. Wanda could barely glimpse the edge of a face peeking out of one of the second story windows. Even with the most brief of identification, she could see it as Laura. Giving a little wave first, she cautiously waited for a response. The woman in the house paused a moment, before gently tapping the window and pointing out at the barn.

Barton must have stayed to watch the intruder, she thought. It was only natural, she supposed. After all, there had been many a time in which she'd done the same for Pietro, and he'd done the same for her. Another little wave and Wanda was sure that Laura understood the plan.

Everything felt more than eerie as she approached the barn, the sound of crickets swallowing the sound like it was water. She never really got used to hearing them now. Back in Sokovia they didn't have those insects making noise all hours of the night. Shaking free all thoughts of the atmosphere, Wanda tapped on the barn door and felt her heart pound in her throat waiting for a response.

The door lurched open as she finally saw the eyes of a familiar face. "Hey!" Clint greeted, looking tired but otherwise grateful. He opened the door wider. "Wanda, you're finally here."

"I said I would be," she responded stiffly. She wasn't quite sure why all the other Avengers greeted each other with the most obvious statements. The agent didn't seem too ruffled at her words though, waving her inside. The was a moment of tense silence as her eyes adjusted to the bright lantern light.

"Where's Steve?" Clint asked, trying to sound nonchalant but still carrying a nervous quality.

"On a personal mission with Sam and Natasha," Wanda breathed, but she was distracted as the man on the floor finally came into focus. It wasn't at all based on sight; he was folded over on the ground, both hands shackled to the looming tractor. No, there were people she met, very rarely, that she could feel almost instantly, latching onto their minds and energy almost automatically and with little control. It was this sensation that she felt once the assassin came into focus, a tug at first before his head seemed to grab her by the hair and drag her into its madness. She could feel her eyes going red with concentration.

"Wanda don't do…" Clint's voice faded into nothingness as she found herself falling into the mind of a man she knew nothing about.

A man sat in the hollow chair, looking out a cracked silled window. Wanda stepped forward to look out as well. The world outside was completely undefined, a blur of green, brown, and white. The man seemed to be watching something outside with a strange intensity. It must have been in a fault in the memory, an inconsistency in the assassin's head, but Wanda started when she actually looked at the face of the smooth man put before her. He looked like the eclipse that caused the broken soldier lying in the barn. The man sighed as he let his head rest against the garish wallpaper. Next to the pink and yellow flowers on the walls, he looked faded: a stiff button-up shirt stuck to his chest with shiny black suspenders. and untucked from his black dress pants, bare feet rested on a little writing desk tucked in the corner. His dark hair was gelled to the point of being a solid mass, though stiff strands had been bent and fell in front of his clean shaven face. As Wanda stepped forward, he seemed to notice her presence in his head, sitting up and staring directly at her with eyes like the winter sky. She froze in that cold gaze, worried he would push her out, try to fight her looking at his past, present, and future. Just as she braced another wave of energy, a voice called out from the thin mattress she hadn't noticed on the other side of the room.

"Hey, Buck?" it asked. The dark-haired man stopped and sunk back into the memory, stared past Wanda and at the dingy bed. She turned with him and started, as she found a familiar pair of eyes looking right past her. She'd seen pictures of the man before Captain America, but looking at him fully realized in an assassin's head was something else entirely. Wanda could still see Steve in his expectant look and optimistic half-smile, but the small-framed, sickly, younger version of her friend's eyes lit up in a way she had never seen when the other man simply replied, "Yeah?"

"What do you think dying feels like," Steve asked, sitting up on the thin pillow. Wanda was expecting more of a reaction than she got.

"Why?" Buck responded, a light behind his eyes flashing with an excited twinkle. "Are you making plans?" Wanda felt like she had been punched in the stomach with the response that reminded her of what Pietro would have said if she had asked that question. Helpless, she stared as the two slowly smiled, before breaking into nervous and relieved laughter. Something in her chest cracked.

"No," Steve heaved, before his voice crashed into a series of barking coughs. The assassin, or whatever he was, hurriedly pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and handed it to the trembling man. Steve covered his mouth as he continued to hack. Wanda turned back to Buck, who was now leaning against the window again, pain in watching Steve stressing the features of his face. The fit subsided slowly, and while Steve tucked the handkerchief away quickly, Wanda knew both she and the assassin had seen the reddish stain that resulted in his coughing.

"I'm sor-" Buck tried, but Steve waved him away.

"I was just thinking about it," the smaller man wheezed. "I mean, do you think it's all painful, or is there peace?" The dark-haired man considered this for a moment before standing straighter.

"It depends on what you think dying is" he clarified.

"Well-"

"But that doesn't matter anyway," Buck declared, making vague gestures with his hands a forced optimism ran rampant of his face. "Because neither of us are dying anytime soon."

Steve frowned and accused, "You can't be sure of that."

"Why did you bring this up anyway? I don't want to talk about it." As the dark-haired man became more and more frustrated she could hear his very heartbeat begin to pound as it echoed throughout the room inside his head.

"I just thought-" Steve pleaded.

"No! You aren't dying Steve. I'm not dying." Wanda began to slowly step back. The conversation was too real, too similar to ones she'd had, too raw.

"Bucky." The young Captain America raised his voice. "You left the letter on the writing desk when you went to get milk yesterday. I didn't mean to read it but…" Bucky opened his mouth for a response, but almost immediately closed it. Only the sound of his heartbeat filled the room.

"We don't have to worry about Charlie's guys anymore. They'll stop coming after us after I get deployed," he reasoned. The war, Wanda suddenly realized. They were leaving for the war.

"I'm going to try and enlist again tomorrow," Steve confessed. The heartbeat got louder.

"We've already talked about this," the assassin dismissed, staring outside rather than at his friend.

"No," Steve argued, looking legitimately angry for the first time. "You've told me what I should be doing."

"I've done what I can to do what's expected of me, and tired to keep you from doing something idiotic while I'm at it," Bucky explained.

"And while you were at it you got mixed up in the wrong kind of people," the smaller man reminded him. The wrong people. The kind of people that always seemed to find her, always seemed to tempt her and Pietro.

"I'm not going to die Steve."

The heartbeat reached a roar, and it seemed like it was rushing closer, drowning out what her friend said next. A whistle sounded somewhere in the assassin's head and Wanda realized it wasn't a heartbeat at all. It was a train. She stared at Bucky and Steve, who looked as though they had finally settled. The sound of the oncoming train reached a shrieking conclusion and the little light within the cramped apartment snapped out. Wanda found herself screaming along with Buck as she could feel herself flung somewhere dark and cold. She was falling, she was falling and she knew no one would ever find her when she hit the ground. Thoughts intertwined with the man she was examining were becoming overwhelming. Wanda was lost, she couldn't disconnect.

He was shouting as the rush of air was almost too much to handle. The same voice called back and forth, one the kind voice of the Bucky she'd seen in the room. The other voice was the same in pitch and quality, made by the same vocal chords, but was empty as it announced. "Asset Protocol 3975 override." It was then that she realized she'd never seen the Winter Soldiers face before, but that voice, the harsh and scathing voice she'd listened to back in experimentation, was one she couldn't forget.

She hadn't realized that her previous inspiration had been a man before a machine. She hadn't seen the mirror images between the three eclipsed men: Steve's friend with the throw-away grin, the HYDRA example she'd been taught to follow, and the danger that lay battered on the ground. They were all one in the same, melting together somewhere in the man's head.

"Please, please help me!" Bucky begged.

"Engagement of hippocampus and memorial cortex is forbidden," his voice droned back.

"I can't die alone," Bucky realized.

"Wiping recommended," the Soldier demanded.

"I can't die again. I don't want to die again…" Bucky cried. "I have to find him. I have to…please don't, it's so cold in here. It's so cold."

"Wanda," a familiar voice demanded, and she could feel herself shaken from the state of power. Clint looked even more concerned. She could feel her fingernails digging into his arms as he helped her off the dirty barn floor. "Are you okay?"

"I'm…I'm…" She didn't know. Wanda could still feel his pulsing fear in her fingertips.

"I told you not to," Clint frowned.

"He connected too quickly. I couldn't back out," she explained, leaning against the barn wall as she stared at the man still limp against the tractor.

"Just, stay here. Stark is coming over." At Clint's mention of the name Wanda flinched, and felt a spark.

"What? I told you not to." The moment of clam she had experienced since waking up had been drained from her entirely. While her first fight for the Avengers had given her a respect for the Iron Man, she still remembered the threatening tone Clint had used when he described

"I called him before you got here. I had to do something. Tony can take care of this until Steve gets back," he tried to explain. A high-pitched ringing began first in her ears, before she could feel in in her entire body.

"No, no, no, no," she raved. He was all wrong. He couldn't know. "You can't do that. You don't understand." The assassin's head had left her feeling broken again, and she could feel shards sticking out of her chest. Wanda wasn't sure that she liked the feeling, but it was one of familiarity that she grasped on to.

"You're right," Clint confessed, apprehensive. "I don't." She noticed the way he shrugged his shoulders this way when he got nervous, the way his hand vaguely switched to the shotgun that was propped against the door.

"It's a mess," she spat. "It's like two people trapped in the same head. I'm watching one man's memories while the other one is screaming." At her words, he flinched, maybe from an old experience, she didn't know. "I can help him but I can't…you can't bring Steve anywhere near him. Please. Call off Stark."

"Maybe Stark can help." The archer was slowly edging back towards the collapsed man, as if he could stop her.

"Just, let me talk to Bucky one more time," she tested.

"I can't." He shook his head.

"Stark will make things worse," Wanda promised. Clint bit his lips and made a hand gesture that went nowhere. He was grasping for a point. She could sense it.

"You give Tony a lot less credit than he deserves," the archer settled. "He can help…him…just like you can." While the last words were meant to be reassuring she felt it like an insult.

She gritted her teeth. "He can't. He never will."

"Wanda-" He was started to defend himself rather than convince her. She was so close.

"I know you're afraid about your family. I just want to-" Her hands were out in front of her and she realized that it was taken as a threat a second too late. Clint held the gun loosely, not aiming it, but ready to threaten it if he had to.

"Take a step back. You don't know who you're dealing with." His last plea, as he gestured to Bucky.

"My role in a world full of power was defined by him. I know him more than you do."

"I know it's been hard since Pietro-" before he could say the word Wanda feared the most, her hands snapped out of reflex, a red cloud of energy brought before Clint's eyes. It took her a moment to realize she now had him in the palm of her hand.

"I know you're not a fan, but I had to do this," she whispered as his blinking red eyes looked back at her, only shock conveyed in his face. "If you ask me why…" she looked over at the man in the corner. "It's instinct."

So! That was longer than I thought it would be, but at least we got somewhere. I'm excited to hear what you all think. If you want to be informed of when I post a new chapter on this new story, make sure to follow it. If you want to spread this story with other readers, also favorite. And as always, I want to get your feedback so put all opinions, predictions, critiques etc. in a lovely review for me. :-) Thank you for reading and until next time…