"Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence."
-Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
You get Barnes and Rogers sorted with as little fuss as possible.
Somehow, the deeper sutures haven't been severed, so it doesn't take long to stitch Barnes back up. You cover the line of black surgical thread with sterile pads, and then tape them down to provide a little more protection from further irritation. The knuckles of his right hand are skinned raw, but he won't let you do more than clean them. The side of his face, where you'd hit him, is a mess of yellow and purple bruises.
"You hit like a freight train," he scowls as you wipe the blood from the split skin beneath his eye.
"Could say the same for you," you mutter, tossing the soiled gauze onto the floor. "Just be glad I didn't use claws. Pretty sure your brains would be splattered all over the walls."
He falls silent after that, but allows you to ice down the bruising after you make sure neither his orbital socket or the zygomatic bone are fractured.
Steve's nose needs to be readjusted; the crooked angle of the bridge straightened with an audible crackle. You give him an instant cold pack which he balances on his face to keep the swelling down. All you can do for his ribs is wrap him tightly with semi-flexible bandages and then tape the hell out of it.
You sit with the two men as they nurse their respective injuries, perched on the staircase next to Rogers.
After a long silence, Steve pulls the pack away and looks sidelong at you, squinting through double black-eyes.
"We gonna have that talk now?" he asks, motioning with one finger to the grey-black scales covering up your private bits.
"Mmm, not sure my colleagues would approve of my sharing that sort of information with an outsider," you consider. "But, I suppose you can ask whatever you're curious about. If I decline to answer, don't take it personally."
"Fair enough," he nods, taking a moment to sort out his own thoughts. "What are you, exactly? I mean, in terms of your abilities."
"The commonly accepted terminology is 'shapeshifter,' or 'metamorph.' I've heard others, but those are the two I prefer," you tell him. "Some shapeshifters can only mimic the forms of other people, while those like myself have a greater flexibility."
"How much greater?" he presses.
"You saw the bear," you sigh. "There are only two other known shapeshifters with the degree of control I have, and none with the range. I can move between complete forms, pick-and-choose specific components from entirely different species, or just make micro-adjustments to my own body."
"So when your eyes changed yesterday at the cafe-?"
"A micro-adjustment. Those are the kinds of changes that don't necessarily come from alternate source material. More like enhancing what I already have. Better hearing, better reflexes, that sort of thing."
"And the other kind?" Barnes croaks from the floor.
You quirk a brow, surprised that Barnes is even paying attention to the conversation. You honestly thought he had checked out again, he'd been so quiet.
"Those are trickier. They take a lot more concentration to maintain. For example, I can replicate the genetic sequences that build venom glands, fangs, and the neuro- and cytotoxins that spitting cobras use to blind or kill their prey. Usually amounts to a very bad day for whoever is trying to bash my face in."
Both men fall quiet again, though Steve is staring at you with a mix of fear and awe that you find extremely disconcerting.
"You're serious?" he finally asks.
"Yes, Rogers, I'm serious. Whatever I need to maintain an edge or survive a situation," you answer with a tilt of your head. "You freaking out?"
"A little," he admits, smiling to take the sting out of the admission. "I thought I had a pretty good grasp of just how strange the world is nowadays..."
You chuckle quietly, gathering up some of your medical supplies that lay scattered around you and packing them back into your kit.
"If—" Barnes starts, quieter than before. "If you get hurt…"
"I don't. Not really," you explain, pushing yourself away from the stairs and walking over to where he's stretched out on the floor. You crouch down, gently draping your hand over the one he has pressed to the icepack on his face and lifting it away so you can check the bruising underneath.
"Injuries don't alter your genetic code, and mine is very good at maintaining the status quo. If I get hurt, I just reset the bits that were damaged. Everything grows back in seconds, sometimes fractions of seconds. I only feel pain long enough to recognize that I've been wounded. Then the receptors get switched off, maybe dissolved completely. I can do that by choice, but it's usually more of an unconscious reaction, like breathing or blinking."
"So if—" He glances over at his metal arm.
"If I lost an arm, I'd grow a new one. Whole limbs take a bit longer than most injuries. That burns a lot of energy, almost as much as a full shift. But it wouldn't kill me, or even hurt very much. Itches like the devil, though."
He sighs and closes his eyes.
"Must be nice."
"I suppose I don't appreciate it nearly enough. There are other side effects, of course, but I'd rather not get into them. Some good, some bad. We'll leave it at that," you finish, guiding his hand back down to press the cold pack against his face once more.
"So when you become another, uh, animal, is it always wild like that?" Steve asks, gently probing his nose with one finger before your withering glare causes him to stop.
"No, that was… That hasn't happened for a long time. Not since I was a kid, when my mutation first manifested."
"So what went wrong?"
"I have a theory, but no real way to test it. I think that whatever Ana did to get me inside Barnes' mind, it… it severed things that are still being sorted out. When she pushed me back inside my body—and fuck me, but that sounds bizarre even to my ears—it felt like having your left foot crammed into your right shoe. May take a few days to sort myself out."
"So the bear…?"
"When I shapeshift into a different organism, I get all the instinctual baggage that's hardwired into their brains. So because I wasn't quite fittinginto my own head yet, the bear was able to take control, to overwhelm my consciousness. When you yelled my name, it was like getting doused with ice water. Shocked me enough to regain command."
"Sounds like a solid theory," Steve agrees.
"Sounds like she had her soul ripped out of her body several times to—"
"Oh, don't be so melodramatic, Barnes," you chide. "I'm a grown woman. I make my own decisions and accept that those decisions may lead to consequences I don't particularly like."
He glares at you from one eye, the other hidden behind the cold pack.
"But—"
"Stop," you insist, pressing one hand against his chest as he struggles to sit up. "Whatever is owed, I'll gladly pay."
"Why?" he asks, almost choking on the word, unable to look at you directly.
"Because you didn't deserve the cage they built for you. I couldn't walk away from that, knowing where you were," you pause, lifting your hand from his chest. "Because it was the right thing to do."
"We've got your back, pal," Rogers adds, slowly getting to his feet. "We're in your corner."
The man on the floor closes his eyes as the tears come, slow and without fanfare. The ice pack slides to the floor as he covers his face with his hand, hiding.
Barnes' breakdown feels like a knife twisting in your guts and you look to Steve for help.
"I got this," he says, bracing against you as he settles down on the floor next to his friend. "Give us a minute?"
You nod, grateful for the time-out, and retreat to the adjacent living room. You fall heavily into an overstuffed wingback, drawing your bare legs up to your chest.
You've counseled a lot of damaged kids over the years, first as one of the older students at the school, and now as a member of the staff. Hell, you'd been one of the most brittle wards that Charles had taken under his wing.
You remember feeling like you weren't in control of your own emotions, how despite knowing you could handle just about anything the world threw at you, you wanted to curl up in a corner and cry, and wait for someone else to come and fix everything, to hold you and tell you lies about how it would all be okay in the end, that you were worthy of the effort. That you had value.
Perhaps that's why you feel yourself becoming more and more invested with Barnes' situation. In less than 24 hours, you'd gone from reluctantly agreeing to assist Rogers to feeling like you have a personal stake in the complete recovery of his friend. If you could be salvaged, so can he.
Still, it's undeniable that Barnes is going to need more than a few pep talks and a fistful of Tylenol to pull himself together. You sigh and stretch, straining your joints almost to the point of pain.
Rogers peeks around the broad arch leading into the living room.
"He's pretty beat," he says. "I don't think we should risk the stairs. Maybe he can sleep in here?"
"Sure," you nod. "I'll bring the blankets down from the bedroom, along with a clean sweatshirt. His is soaked with blood."
"Not all of it is his," Steve adds, scrunching his face and sniffing.
"Stop with the faces, Rogers," you warn. "Even you need more than a few hours to heal a dislocation. Probably."
He smiles again, but it's a sad, tired expression. "Can you help me get him up? I don't think my ribs can take all the weight."
You return with him to the foyer where Barnes has composed himself. His eyes are glassy and distant, and he still won't look at you, despite your best efforts to get him to engage in some light banter.
"Okay," you breathe. "On three."
You and Steve manage to haul the other man back up, and you end up taking most of the weight to spare Rogers any further injury. Everyone makes it into the livingroom, where Barnes immediately sits down in front of the fireplace, fingers digging into the soft Persian rug spread out across the hardwood.
You leave the two men to get comfortable, and retrieve all the blankets and a clean zip-up from upstairs. Barnes is compliant as you get him out of the bloodied clothing, though he does grab your hand and push it away when you linger too long against his bare skin.
"I'm sorry," you tell him, mouth twisting into a frown. He continues to stare at the stone hearth in front of him, completely unresponsive. "Barnes?"
With what appears to be great effort, his eyes drift to yours.
"Tell me you're okay. Or that you're not okay. But don't shut us out," you say, letting your own gaze flick to Steve, who has already taken up a post on the nearest couch.
"You—" he starts, and it's almost as if he has to fight to get each word out. "You're—gonna-get hurt-'cause-of me." He inhales sharply and wets his lips. "HYDRA. They'll-come."
You scoot closer to him, letting your shoulders touch.
"We can handle them," you assure him. "No one's going to take you away again."
"Don't—want—to—go," he says. You draw up the comforter around his arms.
"Listen to the lady, Buck," Steve says, looking rather wrung out himself.
You nod but Barnes seems unconvinced.
"You both need to rest," you remind them. "Give your bodies a chance to catch up."
"You haven't slept yet," Rogers objects. "You've got to be exhausted."
"I'm fine," you lie. "Really. I promise I'll take a really long nap later."
"You have a terrible poker face," Rogers gripes, but reclines on the couch regardless.
Once again, he drops off fast. You figure that's probably a byproduct of being a soldier. He'd have to be able to grab whatever sleep he could whenever and wherever possible. Or it could be a serum thing. Or just a Steve thing. You don't know him well enough do suss out a definitive explanation.
Barnes shivers against you, so you slowly, tentatively get an arm across his back and murmur soothing words until he stops.
"You're—good—at—this," he forces out.
"I've had it done for me often enough," you explain, concerned that his speech faculties seem to be impaired by something. You hope it's not a sign of an impending seizure, but it very well may be.
"S'nice."
"I imagine you didn't get much in the way of positive human contact when you were with your handlers," you say, raising your hand to curl your fingers through his hair. "If I do something you don't like, just say so. I'll stop."
"Mmph," he grunts, shaking his head 'no.' He starts to lean back into your touch but pauses, his body going taut. You check him for telltale tremors, afraid he's about to have another fit, but he slowly relaxes again.
"Still waiting for the other shoe to drop?" you ask, recalling what he'd said to you the first time you'd entered one of his nightmares.
Then you'll stop and the pain will come.
He cringes.
"They—liked—to—trick me," he says, starting to shiver again. "When—I'd—start—remembering—things."
"Is there anything I can do to make this easier for you?" you ask, hating yourself for the way your voice wavers. Get a grip.
"Just—stay." He takes a deep breath and glances at you from the corners of his eyes. "Keep—touching."
"I can do that," you tell him, scritching along the base of his skull. His eyes slowly shut and you wonder if you've actually gained a tiny bit of his trust.
Barnes falls asleep against you, head tilted down on your shoulder. It doesn't look like a terribly comfortable position, but he's been out for a few hours now with no outward signs of night terrors or overwhelming pain. You decide to leave him as he is, switching off the synapses in your lower back as they start to complain.
Steve sits up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes—which are remarkably no longer black and blue, but a sort of sickly yellow color.
"That was barely a catnap, Rogers," you whisper to him.
"Says the woman who hasn't shut her eyes except to blink," he counters. "How is he?"
"Out cold," you answer, still running your fingers through Barnes' hair. "We need to talk about what happens next."
Rogers' face falls and he hunches over on the edge of the couch. That, you expect, is something left over from when he was scrawny and sick, before he volunteered to be the U.S. Army's lab rat.
"I know," he says. "I made some calls last night when I went for that walk. Natasha and Wilson are just waiting for me to tell them when, and they'll be on their way here. Nat has experience with de-programming and Sam is a counselor at the V.A. He's actually kind of pissed that I didn't call him sooner."
"Might have been a good idea," you huff. "I feel like all we've done here is put a Band-Aid on a broken knee. To be honest, at this point, anything else I do for him will border on professional negligence. He needs to be in a hospital, Steve."
He looks away, brow furrowed and his right leg bouncing with anxiety.
"I can't let them put him back in a cell," he finally says.
"Why would you think that's—No legitimate doctor or psychologist is going to suggest that, Rogers."
"There's no way we can keep his identity—both identities—a secret forever. Eventually, some pretty big players are going to come looking for him. The government, S.H.I.E.L.D., HYDRA…"
"Fuck 'em," you answer with a shrug. "I assume one of the calls you made was to Stark?"
He nods.
"Well that's half the battle won right there," you contend. "Besides, I'm pretty sure if all the information in his file is presented to the right people, in the right framework, there's no way they could justify throwing him in jail, or prosecuting him. Fury knows what you're up to, so I don't think S.H.I.E.L.D.'s going to come around looking for trouble."
"Technically, he's dead. Whoever is running what's left, it's not him."
"I'd bet money I don't have that he'd be able to pick up the phone and call off the hounds, and that's if they bother giving chase. They're not exactly seen as pillars of the community anymore, either. Barnes was used by HYDRA because he had no choice. S.H.I.E.L.D. was used by HYDRA because they were either lazy or stupid," you argue.
"And HYDRA itself?" he asks, staring at the floor.
"I don't speak for all of the X-Men," you tell him, and his head snaps up at the first use of the team's name. "But if HYDRA makes a move, I'll consider it open season. You are actively hunting them down, right?"
"Me, Natasha, and Sam, mostly. Fury's been providing intel, and I get the feeling he's not just watching from the shadows. The man has blood on his hands, and he's pissed about Pierce, about what was done to S.H.I.E.L.D."
"Good. I'm not looking to add my name to your roster; already on one too many of those, but if you think I can help, drop me a line and I'll be there," you tell him, eyes narrowing to slits.
"I gotta ask," he says after a long pause. "Why are you committing to this? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it more than I can express, but—"
"This," you snap, pointing to where Barnes' head is tucked against your shoulder. "This is wrong. It's evil and despicable and they'll do it to someone else if they haven't already."
You take a deep breath, forcing yourself to calm down.
"I saw what was in his mind, Steve. I felt it. Anyone capable of doing that to another human being—for seven decades, no less—needs to beexterminated. The organization that harbors them? Wiped off the face of the earth. No quarter. No amnesty. No exceptions."
"You're… afraid of them?" he asks, though it feels more like an observation than a true question.
"I'm afraid of what a group like HYDRA might do if they ever capture someone like me. You… You have no idea what some of us can do. Just to give you a taste, one of my mentors can punch holes through mountains with energy beams fired from him eyes."
Rogers' stares at you, jaw working spastically.
"That's—"
"I know," you cut him off, nodding. "So yes, HYDRA scares the shit out of me. All they'd have to do is get one high-powered mutant to do their bidding and a lot of people will suffer. Including us. Can you imagine the backlash? There would be witch-hunts, political, legal, and literal. Complete with hangings and burnings-at-the-stake."
He blows out his cheeks and drops back onto the couch with a groan.
"But even if none of that were a real possibility," you say, voice dropping back to a whisper as you return your gaze to Barnes. "They need to pay for what they did to him. I intend to be there when they do."
Rogers doesn't say anything else for a long time and you decide to leave him to his thoughts.
You turn your own words over in your head, examining your motivations regarding Barnes and HYDRA, your team and their stubborn refusal to get involved in something you can clearly see is a disaster waiting to happen.
Mostly, though, you come to realize that this is less about the "big picture" and more about what was done to the man sleeping against your shoulder.
He'd been one of the good guys, someone who had witnessed the worst humanity had to offer and hadn't looked away, hadn't left the task to someone else. He'd followed his friend into darkness, protected him, and when his luck finally ran out, someone saw his tragedy as an opportunity. Everything he had been, and done, and might have accomplished was burned away, cut out and disposed of, and no one had ever come for him.
That's it, you realize with a sickening lurch of your stomach.
Barnes had been left behind, and while you place no blame on Steve or the other Commandos, the truth remains: No one had ever come.
There was no rescue mission. No detail sent to retrieve the body and send it home to his grieving family. Just a letter and a folded flag, an empty coffin lowered into the ground, and a 21-gun salute.
"I know," you tell him, smoothing his hair down against the back of his head. What had been done to you, and what you had been forced to do in turn, was nothing compared to what had happened to James Buchanan Barnes, but you get it, and that's why this matters so much to you.
Someone had come for you. You hadn't been left behind, or forgotten.
You smile at the memory of Dr. MacTaggert showing up at your front door in Edmonton, glasses wobbling on the end of her nose. She'd been almost impossible to understand those first few days traveling to Muir Island; her Scottish brogue causing you no end of frustration and confusion. Ana had taken to her immediately, of course, but that was Ana for you. Undeniably loveable and loving in return.
It's time to finally pay that kindness—and all the myriad kindnesses that had followed—forward.
You smile, aware that Rogers is watching you with a mixture of concern and sympathy. You draw Barnes a little closer against you, breath ruffling his hair.
No one had come for him back then.
But you'll be goddamned if you abandon him now.