Old Maria Cotar brought forth a bundle of beets with the solemnity of a Wakandan priestess exposing the Eye of Bast. "Finest of the spring sowing, Domnule Barnes," she said. "I could have had top lion for them in the Old Town, but I said to myself, 'No, Măriuca, you must encourage your poor American friend who is just learning to appreciate real food.' So for your sake, copilul meu, I rob myself and only ask ten lei."

Bucky took the beets in his metal hand, and ran his flesh one over the surface of each root. So far as a city boy like him could judge, they were indeed fine specimens: sturdy heft, firm flesh, no perceptible abrasions. Of course, ten lions was still a ridiculous price, but that was to be expected; he'd spent enough time dickering with Romanian peasants lately to figure out how the game was played.

"Not bad at all, Doamnă Cotar," he said. "I'm almost tempted to give it a try. Of course, no good American ever eats foreign vegetables, but if it were a really good deal – say, two lei – I just might be able to overlook that."

Mrs. Cotar laughed heartily. "Oh, Domnule Barnes, I do love your American sense of humor," she said. "It is worth impoverishing oneself to be on good terms with such neighbors. Suppose we say eight lei."

Bucky, in his turn, heaved a dramatic sigh. "Ah, neighbors," he said. "You've found my weak spot, Doamnă Cotar. When I think of the old Brooklyn neighborhood of my youth, a flood of sentimentality overwhelms my reason, and even paying three lei fifty for a bundle of beets seems reasonable."

"Oh, Domnule Barnes, shame on you!" Mrs. Cotar exclaimed. "You know how my judgment fails me when you remind me of the losses you have suffered – how the wicked Soviet Hidre robbed you of your youth and innocence that they might use you as their tool. Never, though it cost me all my livelihood, can I demand full price from one whom fate has used so cruelly. Five lei and twenty bani."

"Deal," said Bucky.

As he pulled out his wallet to withdraw the appropriate notes and coins, a woman's voice sounded behind him – a light, amused voice, but with a quiet note of ever-present danger underneath. "And this is the way in which bargains were struck of old time in these hills," it said, "when your fathers and mine lived and shivered in a cave, hunted wolves, and bargained with clubs only."

Bucky turned, and saw the red-headed figure behind him. A ten-ban piece fell from his fingers, and he had to pause for a moment to clamp down on the instincts surging within him. Having achieved this, he said neutrally, "Agent Romanova."

The Black Widow shook her head with a small smile. "Just Romanoff, now," she said. "My adopted country doesn't use feminized surnames. Apparently Americans don't like to be reminded that some of them are also women."

As Bucky considered what to make of that, she reached down, picked up the coin he had dropped, and handed it to Mrs. Cotar. "So," she said, turning back to him and glancing at the beets. "Any specific plans for those, Sergeant Barnes?"

Something about her manner made up Bucky's mind. It was quite plainly oriented toward establishing an easy rapport, befitting their common acquaintance and their likely shared interests. Or, as his more innocent self from seventy years before would have put it, she was clearly trying to make friends. Which he had no real problem with; he could use all the strong allies he could get, especially in his present circumstances – and, besides, she was a friend of Steve's. And so, rather than grow wary at her overture, he shrugged casually and said, "I was thinking something in the soup line. You know, I spent over fifty years in Russia, but I've never actually tasted borscht? I figure it's time to fix that."

Romanoff nodded approvingly. "What kind of stock are you using?" she said.

Bucky hesitated. "Well… I hadn't really gotten that far, actually."

"Well, take an old Russkaya's advice, then, and spring for beef," said Romanoff. "There's nothing wrong with pork on its own, but it's overrated as a soup base – and a taste for fish or mushroom borscht isn't something you get just by being well-intentioned."

Bucky grinned despite himself, and Romanoff smiled again, a hair wider than before. "Though, honestly, I was never much of a soup person to begin with," she said. "That was Yelena's department; I was always the little tsarevna with the incorrigible sweet tooth. Give me a little table at a tea-shop and a plate of sweet blini to nibble at, and I'm a happy girl."

Bucky nodded. "Yeah, that sounds all right," he agreed.

Oddly, this caused a look of mild annoyance to pass over Romanoff's face, as though he had missed some sort of cue she had expected him to pick up. "I think so," she said. "Especially when there's someone else at the table with you – someone you'd like to get to know a bit better, and find out what he thinks about the things that matter to you."

Even this broad hint might have taken some time to penetrate Bucky's mind – that mind that had for so long been used by others as a mere helpless instrument of unspeakable deeds, and that simply wasn't equipped anymore for this kind of subtlety – had not Mrs. Cotar chuckled behind him. "Take her up, Domnule Barnes," she said. "It isn't every day that beautiful women are so kindly."

Bucky turned to her with a puzzled look, and she elaborated, "Obviously, she wants to ask you about the mystery man in Vienna who was wearing your face; why else would she be here, when the Avengers have so much else to occupy them? But she would have you make the first move – perhaps for some subtle advantage that only she can see, but I would rather think that she has compassion for your days of wintry soldiering, and wishes to give you back some measure of your volition."

Bucky tried that idea on for size, and had to concede that it did sound like something a legendary super-spy and friend of Steve's would do. "Huh," he said. "Okay, then. Thanks, Doamnă Cotar."

"Not at all, Domnule Barnes," said Mrs. Cotar. "Such counsel I dispense free of charge. For the beets, though, I still need five lei ten."

"Oh, right," said Bucky, remembering, and handed her the rest of her money. This done, he turned back to the other woman, put on what he hoped was a charming smile, and said, "Well, Agent Romanoff, what do you say we drop by this little tea shop I know on Strada Pitar Moṣ? Maybe we could get to know each other a bit better, and find out what we think about the things that matter to us."

"I think I'd like that," said Romanoff.


So Bucky hailed a cab and gave the driver the address, and, a few minutes later, the two most dangerous assassins on Earth were sitting and sipping tea at a charming little patio table in one of Bucharest's higher-end neighborhoods. (A third, who would have been just as deadly had he used ordinary sharpened arrows, was at a gas station picking up hot-dog buns for his wife. Meanwhile, the Latverian ambassador to the U.N. was fine-tuning a speech denouncing "enhanced operatives" as tireless, inhuman foes of ordinary people everywhere.)

"You know, Sergeant, you're a hard man to reach," said Romanoff. "I got into Bucharest in the wee hours of the morning, and it was past noon before I'd manage to locate you. Do you just cease to exist when the local farmers' market isn't in session, or are there wrinkles to the art of keeping a low profile that I'm not aware of?"

Her tone was casual enough, but Bucky could tell she was uncomfortable with the thought of what such wrinkles might entail, if she wasn't aware of them. Preferring not to disturb her mind, and not caring to reveal all his secrets in any case, he deflected the question with, "Well, I know some that a few people might have thought I wasn't aware of, if what's-his-name up in Asgard hadn't been so quick on the draw. Like the one about not letting your face show up on a security camera while you're sneaking on board a news van to blow it up."

Romanoff made a wry face. "Yes, that is pretty basic, isn't it?" she said. "Bad enough to be framed, but to be made to look like an idiot on top of it… if it were me, I'd want to give the perpetrator a little payback for that."

This time Bucky did catch the implication. He wasn't prepared to bite just yet, though. "Hard to pay back a dead man," he said guardedly.

"Not always," said Romanoff. "Sometimes a man's work outlives him."

Ah, so… "And what kind of work would that be?"

"You tell me," said Romanoff. "I assume you've asked yourself why somebody would be walking around Vienna with your face; I know I would have. If you'd care to share what you've come up with, I'm sure the other Avengers would be glad to hear about it."

At this juncture, their waiter arrived with the albiniţa Romanoff had ordered, and she interrupted herself for a few minutes' sternly self-controlled rapture. While she ate, Bucky considered her invitation, searching it for hidden loopholes; concluding, at length, that she meant just what she seemed to be saying – the team commanded by your last friend on Earth wants to avenge you, and we could use your help – he decided that she had him dead to rights, and he might as well share such thoughts as he had formed about his impersonator's probable tactics.

"Okay, Agent Romanoff," he said, once there was nothing left of the little layered honey cakes but a few stray crumbs on the super-spy's cheek. "I guess you do have an interest in that whole business, given what they were there to vote on. I don't actually know what the official Avengers position is on the Accords, but, whatever it is…"

"I don't think we have one, actually," said Romanoff.

Bucky blinked. "One what?"

"An official position," said Romanoff. "On the Accords."

Bucky stared. "You're kidding."

Romanoff shook her head. "You credit us with too much structure, Sergeant," she said. "Next you'll be suggesting we should have bylaws."

"Don't you?"

"Nope," said Romanoff. "No bylaws, no formal leadership, no membership qualifications – none of the things you expect an organization to have. Because we're not an organization, not really," she said with a little smile. "We're just a few people who love each other, and who happen to be good at saving things."

Bucky digested that for a long moment, then shook his head. "That's not good," he said. "A high-profile group like you are should have something concrete holding you together. Personal affection is too easy to subvert; one good difference of principle could do it, much less an actual enemy."

Romanoff nodded. "I thought that, once," she said. "But I'm not so sure now. If your friends have to be bound to you by laws and contracts, they're not really your friends, are they? And friendship is a powerful thing, Sergeant – more powerful than it's easy to remember, in our world."

It surprised Bucky how moved he was by those last two words. Our world: it was easy to forget that it wasn't just his world – that other souls had been tarnished in the same mire as had produced the Winter Soldier. He sipped his tea and looked at his luncheon partner with newfound appreciation as she continued, "I suppose sooner or later we may have to form such contracts – even if the U.N. doesn't vote tonight to impose them on us willy-nilly. But they can't ever be what makes us the Avengers. If they were, the Avengers wouldn't be anything like the force we are."

Bucky nodded slowly. "Okay, I can see that," he said. "But I still think you should have better defenses in place than just your own feelings. Even if the Avengers are more than what we see from the outside, what we do see is still a tremendous power for good; people watch the Earth's mightiest heroes putting themselves on the line just because it's the right thing to do, and they think maybe there's some point after all in being honest and caring about others. You owe it to them to make sure that you don't just fall apart if that friendship of yours ever cools."

"And you think having an official position on the Accords would help with that?" said Romanoff.

"I think you've got to have a unified response to things that affect the group," said Bucky. "If you don't, you're just asking for dissensions, feuds, schisms – just trouble generally."

"All right, then," said Romanoff. "You tell me what our unified position should be, Sergeant, and I'll see that it reaches Steve and Rhodey – that's War Machine," she clarified, seeing Bucky's puzzled look, "– before they head out to Manhattan tonight for the new U.N. meeting."

Bucky smirked. "Jane Foster wasn't available this time, huh?"

"No," said Romanoff. "And even if she had been, Rhodey and Steve wouldn't have been willing to leave matters in her hands; their outlook on things changed a bit, when we heard all that she'd learned in Vienna. But that's not your affair, Sergeant," she added firmly. "Go ahead; tell me what our position should be."

Bucky took a deep breath. "Well, about the Accords themselves, it's not my call to make," he said. "Whether you folks want to be a U.N. strike team or not, it's between you and the U.N., not me. But what I can say is that, whichever way you go, it has to be just about the Avengers."

Romanoff cocked her head. "How do you mean?"

"This whole cockadoodle of 'enhanced persons'," said Bucky. "You need to kill that category now, before the witch-hunts start. It has to be absolutely clear to everyone – the U.N., the governments, the media, the people – that you can't tell someone, 'You're an enhanced person, the same as the Avengers are, so the Sokovia Accords mean we can run or ruin your life, too.'

"Because who are the Avengers?" he said, and thrust out his metal thumb. "You have Steve, Hulk, and the girl; okay, those three really are enhanced humans. But then you also have Thor and the Vision," and his index finger came out. "They aren't enhanced from anything; they're just powerful because that's the kind of thing they are." His middle finger went down. "Then you have Stark. He has super-powerful tools, but he himself isn't anything special – and yeah, I'm sure Pepper Potts would say otherwise, but you know what I mean. And the same goes for Gray Stark – Rhodey, whatever you called him – and the Negro bird-man." Ring finger. "Then there's you. As far as I know, you don't have any special powers or tools; you got into the Avengers by sheer skill alone. And there's the archer, who's you with a little bit of Stark: a world-class skill level, plus just enough special gadgetry to make it formidable."

He leaned back in his seat, and spread his arms. "So what's an 'enhanced person', then? If the U.N. is trying to create this general category of people, and all the Avengers are in it, what the hell can its parameters be? And, if there is any category broad enough to cover you and Stark and Steve and Thor, who's to say that it can't also cover anyone that any politician might happen to dislike someday?" (He thought of his cousin in New Hampshire, who had had her Fallopian tubes cut out for being "mentally deficient" – which, as far as his family had ever been able to tell, had meant poor and Catholic.) "You go down that road, there's nothing but trouble at the end. So there's a policy for the Avengers, if you want one: keeping the world off it."

Romanoff stared speculatively at him for a long moment. "That's good, Sergeant," she said at length, a slow smile spreading across her face. "That's very good."

Bucky dipped his head modestly. "Well, you know," he said, "anything to oblige a lady."

At that, Romanoff pursed her lips, and lowered her eyes to the table. "Oh, I don't make that claim, Sergeant," she said, with a faint but distinct touch of bitterness in her voice.

"Maybe not," said Bucky, "but I do. There's only two things a woman who looks and carries herself like you can be, and Steve wouldn't be friends with the other one." He chuckled, and added, "Besides, who but a lady would get a guy's attention by quoting Hilaire Belloc to him?"

Romanoff glanced up sharply. "You recognized that?"

"Catholic schoolboy from the '40s," Bucky reminded her. "My history teacher thought The Path to Rome was the only good thing to come out of England since the Battle of the Boyne. I wouldn't go that far, myself, but it was good; I liked the story about the Devil and the hole in the floor."

"Ah, yes," said Romanoff, and waved her hand like the lady she didn't claim to be. "'And I,'" she said, in a 21st-Century Russian-American's idea of the voice of St. Charles Borromeo, "'I have the Pope!'"

"Yeah, that's the one," said Bucky.

"Well, good for you, Sergeant," said Romanoff. "If I ever meet your history teacher, I'll have to be sure and compliment him on his good taste."

"Her," Bucky corrected her. "Sister Bernadette."

"Her good taste, then," said Romanoff indifferently, and took another sip of her tea. "And now, how about your thoughts on the Vienna incident? I think that was what we were originally talking about, before we got so far off track."

Bucky, who had wholly forgotten about Zemo, had to think for a moment. "Oh," he said. "That. Right. Well, it's a long shot, but, if I had your skills, Agent Romanoff, I'd think about seeing if our friend left any traces in Berlin."

Romanoff arched an eyebrow. "Now, why Berlin?" she said.

"That's where the Joint Counter-Terrorism Center is," said Bucky. "If the UNOC bombing had come off, I have to believe the JTTF would have been tasked with taking me down – and once they had me, of course they'd want to question me at their own headquarters. I can't think of anything else that framing me would achieve, and our friend must have had a reason for taking so much trouble to do that, so I would guess that having me in Berlin was important to him for some reason. In which case, he's likely enough to have had a hideout there – and that might be worth casing, if you find it in time."

Romanoff considered this. It didn't seem to deeply impress her, but she nodded nonetheless. "Yes, I suppose that's worth a look," she said. "Anyway, I wouldn't mind paying a visit to Berlin; it's been a while since I was last there, and there are several Berliners I have fond memories of."

Bucky glanced at her empty albiniţa plate. "As in people, or pastries?"

Romanoff only smiled, finished her tea, and rose. "Well," she said, "I suppose I'd better get on that, then. Thank you for your help, Sergeant."

"Any time," said Bucky.


As he watched her turn and start to walk away, he had an odd feeling that he had left out something – that the sort of communion the two of them had just shared laid an obligation on them that neither had properly fulfilled. For a moment, the long loneliness of his Winter-Soldierhood lay between it and him; then he realized.

"Hey," he called. "Agent Romanoff?"

Romanoff's stride halted, and she turned her russet head with an air of surprise. "Yes?"

Her fellow ex-tool of tyrants gave her a crooked smile. "Call me Bucky."

Romanoff showed no reaction for half a second; then a smile of recognition spread over her own face also. "Natasha," she said.

Bucky nodded, and lifted his teacup in farewell. He watched his new friend recede until she disappeared behind the Bucharest skyline; then, as though to complete the picture, he hailed the waiter and ordered a little honeybee cake of his own.