Steve/Bucky/Jemma

BioStucky?

Another triad, so another 2,000 word target!

Jemma had always been reasonably sure she'd meet her two soulmates at the same time. The soulmarks curved under her breasts like bra underwires. One, in a strong masculine hand, said Don't touch him! The second, spiky and jagged, said It's all right, моя любовь. So she was pretty sure that they were already together. Which would be awkward, trying to insert herself into what was probably a fairly stable, established relationship. Between what she suspected was two men. One of them possibly Russian.

She hadn't anticipated quite how long the relationship would turn out to have been established for, though.

The first inkling she had that something was wrong was when Coulson came belting into the lab shouting her name. Phil never normally ran unless things were about to start exploding, so Jemma immediately started looking for something substantial to hide under. And then he grabbed her arm – well really! – and started tugging her towards the door.

"Come now," he blathered incoherently. "He's here. Needs help. Oh God."

"Who is here, and let go, you're wrinkling my lab coat!" Jemma jerked her arm free and frowned at him.

"Captain America," Phil said reverently.

"Oh," well, that certainly explained Phil's temporary lapse of reason. "Captain America needs my help? For what?"

"He found him. The Winter Soldier. Steve Rogers found him, and he's injured, and for obvious reasons he can't just take him to a hospital…"

"I see." Jemma certainly did see. They wanted her to treat some unknown condition on a super-strong, brainwashed, possibly psychotic HYDRA assassin. For some reason a line from a Monty Python film popped into her mind. "Run away bravely!" she muttered under her breath, collecting her medical bag and following after Phil.

"Say what?"

"Nothing, Director, just a stray thought! So where – oh, I see."

They were at Vault D. Sunil Bakshi had long since been removed, handed over to the military – Coulson trusted General Talbot to handle that one properly – and obviously it was the only safe place they really had to put the Winter Soldier.

"Is he really Bucky Barnes?" Jemma asked quietly as they walked down the stairs.

"Yes – or he was. HYDRA did some pretty terrible things to him, Jemma."

She pursed her lips and shook her head. Agent 33 and Donnie Gill were just the two people she'd known personally who were brainwashed into following HYDRA's leaders. But to think that they'd had Bucky Barnes, the legendary Howling Commando, Captain America's best friend, all these years – well, it was sick. She looked with great sympathy as they approached the transparent barrier.

"I need to stay out here," Phil told her, "to let you out when you're done. Barnes appears to be docile as long as Rogers is with him, so you should be in no danger."

Jemma was barely listening, instead staring at the two men in the vault. Barnes lay on the bed, his metal arm across his chest, his human arm dangling towards the floor. His shirt was little more than rags across his chest, his hair a tangled, filthy mess, his beard thick. He looked like a hobo.

"What's wrong with him?" she put out a hand and stayed Coulson from opening the barrier. Neither Rogers, who was sitting on the end of the bed with Barnes' legs across his lap, nor Barnes had looked up, so she guessed the screen was opaqued from their side.

"Not sure exactly. The Captain thinks that HYDRA may have kept him hopped up on a cocktail of drugs. Plus apparently they had some sort of machine – like the reverse of the memory machine we had – it wipes out memories. They put him in it regularly, but because he was serum enhanced at some point, his brain kept repairing itself. They kept him in cryo in between missions, sometimes for years at a time, so he's temporally very confused."

"So, withdrawal from unknown narcotics, possible brain damage, chemically induced psychosis and who knows what else," Jemma summed up. Phil gave her a weak smile.

"Marvellous." She slipped a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of her lab coat and snapped them on. "And from the look of him, probably fleas. I know you don't want to let him out, but is there any chance you could get Mack or Hunter to haul a few buckets of hot water down here so I could at least give him a sponge bath?"

"I'll see to it," Phil promised, and then he tapped on the control panel.

Captain Rogers' head snapped up, and he stared at them from penetrating blue eyes. He was dressed in his full Captain America regalia, minus the identity-concealing cowl, which hung down at the back of his neck. And he was just as beautiful as all the old images suggested. Jemma tried not to stare, but it was very difficult, with the Adonis-like perfection before her.

"This is our medical expert, Dr Simmons," Phil said as the screen dropped with a hum and Jemma walked across into the secure part of the vault with her medical bag. The screen hummed back up behind her.

"Hello," she said politely to Rogers, who only watched her from those blue, blue eyes. She moved forward, looking at Barnes, who hadn't moved. "Is he asleep?" she reached out to touch his forehead.

"Don't touch him!" Rogers said sharply, just as the metal hand whirred up and grabbed Jemma's wrist in a bruising grip.

"Don't you dare break my wrist!" she snapped crisply.

Eyes even bluer than Rogers' snapped open, staring at her, and then the crushing hold slowly relaxed.

"It's all right, моя любовь," Barnes said quietly, releasing her wrist gently and lowering his hand to his stomach.

What?

Jemma blinked. Stared at Barnes. Then at Rogers. Then down, at where Barnes was plucking away the remnants of his tattered shirt over his stomach. At that sculpted, muscled stomach – and the words printed neatly there, at the top of his abs, in her careful, precise handwriting.

Don't you dare break my wrist.

She looked up into those knowing blue eyes, and then, because she couldn't look at him any more, she looked at Rogers. Who was staring at her with his mouth open.

"I don't suppose you have Hello, Is he asleep written on you somewhere?" she said a bit pitifully.

"As a matter of fact, I do." His smile was a bit sheepish as he tugged up his sleeve to show the words she'd spoken on the inside of his muscled forearm.

Barnes let out a harsh little laugh. "You coulda told me you had a new mark too, punk!"

"I didn't want to upset you! I only saw that you had a new mark yesterday…"

Jemma stared from one to the other of them, barely able to believe what was happening. Captain America and his soulmate James "Bucky" Barnes were legends, a soulmate pair with a tragic ending, true, but what they'd been able to achieve together first – and now she was supposed to be a third wheel in their bond?

"Inconceivable!" she said aloud.

"Why do you say that?" Bucky pushed himself up to sit upright with a pained grunt.

"Oh, don't, please," Jemma tried to revert to professionalism, pressing gently on his stomach to make him lie down. "We can talk later, if you want to. But right now I need to look at you."

"Look all you like, doll, feel free to touch as well," he gave her a roguish grin.

"I can see you're going to be a dreadful patient."

Steve smiled beatifically. "She's got you figured out already, Buck."

"I'll be the best patient in the world with you to take care of me, котенок," he promised, gazing up at Jemma as she leaned over him to look at a nasty-looking gash right where his prosthesis met his body.

"I'm not a kitten," Jemma responded absently, turning to dig in her medical bag.

"You speak Russian?" Steve asked.

"I learned. I thought one of my soulmates might be Russian."

"Sort of," Bucky sighed as she carefully cleaned the gash with an antiseptic wipe. "Don't worry about that, doll. It's already healing."

"It's filthy," she protested, "and it must be at least three days old, you'll get an infection if I don't clean it up."

He shook his head. "No, I got it this morning."

Jemma stared. Peered at the deep gash, which was definitely days old. Or would have been, on anyone but a super-soldier. Her hands began to shake.

Steve was the one who lunged forward and caught her before she fell, which Bucky was grateful for, because he wasn't sure he could move that quickly right now. He managed to wriggle over sideways, though, and Steve laid Dr Simmons – and they still didn't know her first name! – gently on the bed beside him.

"Bit of a shock, I should think," Bucky said, smoothing her chestnut hair back from her face. "Wow, Stevie, she's so beautiful."

"We're damned lucky," Steve was staring too. He'd barely been able to get a word out since the pretty doctor had entered the room, and once he discovered she was their soulmate – well. He looked up and out through the still-transparent barrier at an open-mouthed Agent Coulson. "Do you want me to bring her out, sir? I think she just fainted with shock."

"I never faint," Jemma said weakly, snapping his gaze back to her face. "I despise people who faint." She struggled to sit up. Steve pressed on her shoulder lightly to hold her down.

"Perhaps just a temporary lapse on consciousness due to shock," Steve suggested, his mouth twitching into a smile at her offended expression. Bucky was right, she was just like a kitten, all fluff and tiny sharp claws. She narrowed those soft brown eyes at him.

"I'm not complaining," Bucky said cheerfully. "Hey Stevie, I got our soulmate into bed on first meeting!"

"You're impossible," Steve said as Jemma turned her head and glared at Bucky. And then her expression turned even crosser.

"If you've given me fleas, Barnes, I will never forgive you."

Both men couldn't help but laugh as Jemma slowly pushed herself to sit up, turning her glare on Steve when he moved to stop her again. "Don't you dare."

"котенок has claws," Bucky chuckled.

She hissed at him, and then laughed at his expression. "I suppose you could think of a worse pet name for me."

"I wanna pet you like a kitty cat," Bucky said salaciously.

"Not until you're properly cleaned up!" Jemma said firmly as he reached to stroke her hair. "God only knows what I've picked up just from sharing that pillow! Is that hot water on the way, Coulson?"

"Be here shortly," as her reply.

"Oh no, you're not giving me a sponge bath," Bucky realised what she intended.

"What, you don't want my hands all over your naked body?" given boldness by his flirting, Jemma grinned cheekily back.

Sharp intakes of breath, and hot stares from two pairs of intense blue eyes, made her blush and look away.

"I'd like nothin' better once I'm back to myself," Bucky murmured after a moment. "But first, котенок, will you tell us your name?"

"Oh!" she went even redder. How had she forgotten to introduce herself? "Jemma. It's Jemma."

Bucky scooped her gloved hand in his and squeezed it gently. "Jemma. That's a beautiful name for a little cat."

"Our little cat," Steve reached for her other hand.

Jemma looked from Bucky to Steve, and back again. And the expressions on their faces told her quite clearly that she wasn't going to be a third wheel in their relationship.

She was going to be the heart of it.

моя любовь = my love

котенок = kitten

1961 words.

They're just so adorable! I think I got Jemma about right in this one, a bit of a snarky internal monologue, confident in her own field, a bit nervous when shoved out of her comfort zone.

The two triads, Steve/Bucky/Skye and Steve/Bucky/Jemma were runaway leaders in the voting. Next up apparently you want to see Skye with the Asgardians; Skye/Thor and Skye/Loki!

Don't forget to vote in the Poll if you didn't already! And remember, if you're interested in collaborating on a sequel or continuation to any of these starts, get in touch!

I'd like to add a theme song to each Short as well, so if you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them – I'm thinking Behind Blue Eyes for Jemma/Bucky…