"How's he doing?"
Bucky jolted out of his haze and looked up at Bruce and Clint. "Badly. Full of tubes and shit. They kicked me out of the room."
"We'll get him sorted out." Bruce squeezed his shoulder and ducked into the room where the local SHIELD base's medics were working on Steve.
Clint sat down next to Bucky. "Give me a mission report. It'll help, trust me."
"Right." Bucky pulled himself together. "Got everybody out of the building, no deaths, no particularly serious injuries that I know of. Seems to have been an explosion in the basement, but the source is a mystery. Lady whose cat I helped find mentioned an old castle that locals had started avoiding in the past couple of decades, but had an unusual number of strangers on the road that goes by it. We went to check it out, got close enough to tell that it's inhabited and the woods around it are spooky, then backtracked a ways and made camp with the intention of returning in the morning."
"Spooky. How so?"
"We both saw and heard things that we can't place, a couple times. Heard a sound like a projectile flying by, and saw motion off in the trees. Fast. We couldn't tell what it was and it was gone by the time we turned our heads. Neither one fits…anything."
"Nothing?"
"Best guess is large drone passing through the woods at extremely high speed?" Bucky made an apologetic face. "That's all I've got, and it still doesn't seem right."
"Any theories on what happened to Cap?"
"I know what happened to his leg, just not why he reacted to it how he did." Bucky scuffed a battered combat boot on the floor. "Dumbass stepped on the rim of his shield in the dark and it popped up and smacked his knee. Used to happen from time to time. We'd wake up and laugh at him and go back to sleep."
"We? The Howling Commandos?"
"Yeah." Bucky looked down, a sad smile tweaking the corners of his mouth momentarily. "Never more than a bit of a laugh for us. Bruises would be gone within a couple hours, tops, after the serum."
"No idea what's wrong with him though? Nothing weird? No symptoms yourself?" Clint pressed.
"None. He had a headache earlier, around the time we finished with the building. Mild though, I thought. And he didn't complain of it again. Seemed fine until his leg swelled up instead of improving, and then got sick in the time it took these guys to get a chopper to us and kept getting worse. Nothing the matter with me, and we ate the same rations, too."
"Your serums are different, though, as similar as the effects are. You might have different reactions or resistances to things than each other. I don't suppose this is like anything he had wrong with him as a kid?"
"You think his serum is failing." Bucky set his jaw. "Yeah, that's crossed my mind a few times today. He was never like this before. The medics, they said his blood wasn't clotting. He didn't have that as a kid. And he's breathing too fast, not struggling to. 'Course that doesn't mean it's not related…"
The door opened next to them, causing them both to jump.
"Ready to go home?" Bruce asked. "We've got him stable-ish, so we're going to try to get him back to the compound, and call Helen to meet us there."
"Do we know—?"
"No. I'm looking forward to getting some answers though."


"Are you sure there's nothing else?"
"Yes." Bucky all but growled. "I'm certain. We were within earshot and actively communicating the whole time we were in the rubble except for the ten minutes it took me to help the lady find her cat. Other than that, he was never out of my sight."
Sam sat back in his chair. "We need to know what happened in those ten minutes, then."
"Do you know anything about where he was or what what he did?" Natasha looked thoughtful.
Bucky glanced back through the window at Steve again. "He had a headache. I called him out on it, he admitted to it and blamed it on something in the rubble making a high-pitched squeal, and then the cat lady approached us. Her English was poor, but it turned out she was born in Moldova and still has family there, so her Romanian was still decent. Which Steve doesn't speak a lick of and I do, so I told him to take a breather while I helped her find her missing kitten. When I got back he was pretty much where I left him. Asked if I'd seen the police chief because somebody told him he was looking for us for an official report."
"Okay. So he talked to someone." Clint scratched the back of his head thoughtfully. "Did he mention anything else about what they talked about?"
Bucky frowned. "He was bitching about camping in the woods on the hike. Something about a hotel. The woman he was talking to offered him free hotel rooms. I think."
"Could have been trying to keep him where she could find him easily." Natasha mused.
"Or just being nice." Tony pointed out.
"Someone who's being nice, or at least pretending to, could also have given him something to eat or drink." Clint straightened slightly. "Didn't you say he's not clotting?"
"You think she slipped him a blood thinner with the intention of finding him again later and hurting him so he'd bleed out." Natasha was nodding slowly. "That's plausible. Which might mean someone set us up; they knew we were sniffing around the area and arranged a slightly fishy accident to get us to send just one or two people who they could then pick off."
"Slipping him something wouldn't work. He's got the serum. Nothing works on him." Bucky dismissed it. "Metabolizes things way too fast."
"Not necessarily." Bruce tapped his pen on his lip. "Not everything metabolizes by the same method. We know he's essentially immune to most things, but that doesn't mean everything. Probably an uncommon pathway, or we'd have noticed something he was reactive to by now. And probably effective in a small amount to have slipped it to him. JARVIS, please come up with a list of things with blood thinning properties that are not metabolized by the same pathway as anything he's already proven not to be responsive to and have an effective dose small enough to slip into food or drink. I'm going to go get ready to run more tests on that blood sample."
"On it, sir."
"Nat, what do you think she was planning?" Clint was getting the look of a man on the hunt. "Maybe his new friend went looking for him and left some clues for us to find."
"Right. So she gives him a blood thinner and tries to keep him close. If it were me, I'd start by trying to seduce him. No, I'm serious. Go knock on his hotel room door after the boys get back from dinner, say I'm just checking that he's comfortable and want to express my gratitude again. Try to charm my way into his bed, then make sure to elbow him in the stomach or knock his head on the bed frame while we're rolling around, cause some internal bleeding. A direct attack he would be able to defend himself and would tell Bucky that he'd been attacked, but if it looked like an accident he probably wouldn't give it a second thought."
"So we should see who booked the rooms and if she came by to visit." Tony smirked. "J, if I get a phone connection can you get into their systems?"
"I calculate there is a 68% chance."
"Good enough for me. Call 'em up."