Author's Note: Written because I'm caught in a four-way love-triangle-square between the three. Also because it was fun.

34) Four-Way

Steve and I had been together for something like three months when Pietro randomly caught me and kissed me and Bucky Freaking Barnes admitted to having a crush on me. I was never exactly the most beautiful woman around—hello! I lived in the same building as Natasha Romanoff!—but I'd always had enough self-confidence to consider myself pretty. Long, brown, thick hair, brown eyes, short, and probably fifteen pounds over skinny. I wore boring T-shirts and cargo pants all the time with Converse. I was really confused why the speedster and former Soviet assassin liked me. Steve had once told me that he liked me because I wasn't like the other women in the century. Apparently I cared less about what I looked like or something along those lines.

So, in the three months since then, I'd developed a very complicated, strained, and awkward relationship with Bucky and Pietro. I wanted to be their friend, but Pietro was making it quite clear that he wanted something more. Bucky was being chivalrous and restraining himself, but sometimes I caught him looking at me during training.

Then, one morning, I was sitting in the main gathering room with my sketchbook full of crappy drawings on my knees. Natasha, Clint, and Steve were having a deep discussion about conspiracy theories. Steve's arm was around my shoulders idly as they talked. Bucky was in a corner on a laptop—probably figuring out how to work Google since I doubted HYDRA ever let him use the internet—and it appeared like he wasn't paying attention at all. Except for the few times he stole a glance at me when he thought I wasn't looking.

Pietro breezed in and sat on my other side on the sofa, looking down at my drawing.

I did my best to ignore him.

"No way! The Kennedy assassination was not an inside job!" Steve exclaimed loudly, arm tightening around my shoulders.

Natasha rolled her eyes dramatically. "Well it wasn't the KGB so who else would it have been?"

"Not the CIA or the FBI!" Steve retorted.

"So determined to believe in the best of his country," Clint remarked sarcastically.

"That's not why I don't believe it was an inside job, Barton," Steve sassed.

The three of them kept arguing over the theory of a second shooter when Pietro stole my sketchbook and started to draw a picture on the last page, shockingly without his powers. Every time I tried to look at it he'd turn it away so I couldn't see. Bucky meanwhile was typing quickly on that laptop, his metal hand making noisy clicking noises.

Finally I got involved. "Steve! If you start gripping me any tighter you'll crack my ribs!" I called over their loud voices.

I felt Bucky and Pietro's eyes both turn to me.

"Sorry, darling," the captain muttered.

"It's alright. Just loosen up, old man," I retorted.

"Bucky!" Steve called across the room to his best friend—who still hadn't told him that he had a crush on his girlfriend. "Who do you think killed JFK?" Clint and Natasha were still discussing it while Bucky ran a hand through his hair and looked at the internet page he was on. He turned an old SHIELD PDF of a redacted file towards the rest of us.

The brunet licked his lips. "I think I did," he muttered.

The master assassins stopped talking and Pietro's constant scratching of my pencil silenced.

The entire room was deadly calm and eerily quiet.

I wasn't entirely sure the Sokovian speedster next to me understood the gravity of what my boyfriend's best friend just said, but he seemed to understand exactly how serious it was to us Americans. Sure Pietro knew that Bucky had been a brainwashed assassin for a super long time while being in cryo freeze in between, but he probably hadn't realized just how efficient and feared the Winter Soldier had been to those few of us in the intelligence community who believed he existed. The electric blue eyes turned to me with a question in them. I shook my head. Later, I mouthed. I'd explain it to him later.

Steve and I both stood up and approached him. I brushed some of my hair out of my face and tucked it behind my ear so I could lean over the screen to read what was written.

It was SHIELD's file on the JFK assassination. Steve read it while Bucky and I stared at each other. I was searching his gaze for some sign that he didn't believe what he was saying. But there was none. Bucky genuinely believed that he'd killed an American president.

"How much do you remember about being the Winter Soldier?" I asked.

"Not a lot," he admitted. "They often wiped my memories—particularly of my past as Bucky—but sometimes I remember fragments. Images. Blood. Screams. Guns. Lots of guns." His voice started to quiver a bit as his mind slipped. He was still having trouble regaining who he was. Steve and I had done our best to help him, but sometimes there was nothing we could do. "I remember heat. Texas. Looking through crosshairs at a convertible."

I felt my eyebrows lift slightly. "Oh my gosh," I whispered. I was obviously too young to be alive at the time of the Kennedy assassination, but I knew that he was in Texas in a convertible.

"It's not your fault," Steve remarked.

"Of course it's my fault," Bucky retorted. "I was the one who pulled the bloody trigger!" In his frustration he slammed his prosthetic arm against the table and knocked his empty mug off from where it had been sitting precariously close to the edge. It fell to the floor and shattered. Bucky swore loudly in Russian (making Pietro snort) as I felt pain shoot up my leg from my foot.

"Ow," I hissed, looking down.

A shard of ceramic was impaled in my skin.

"Oh," I remarked.

Pietro was instantly behind me. "Are you alright?" he demanded.

"I have a fragment of mug in my foot," I commented, eerily feeling calm as I felt blood soak through my fuzzy sock.

"Infirmary. Now," Steve ordered.

Pietro didn't need to be told twice. He scooped me into his arms and took off. In about one second we were in the hospital wing. I was sitting on a gurney and a nurse was standing in front of me, looking shocked.

"She's hurt!" Pietro exclaimed.

After a few minutes of carefully removing my sock and X-Raying my foot to make sure none of those delicate bones in the top were broken, Steve and Bucky caught up. "Are you okay? I'm so sorry!" Bucky shouted the second he entered the room. I covered my ears.

"Not so loud, Buck. I'm fine. I'll get a couple stitches and a Band-Aid and be out of here," I replied calmly. "Besides, it was an accident and I've had worse."

The three men hovered over me like a flock of concerned mother hens. Steve was a little defensive of me when Pietro got too close, but he didn't seem to notice Bucky's equal concern. I watched my boyfriend, his best friend, and the younger Avenger carefully, still wondering how on Earth they all liked me. I'm nothing special. I don't have powers, I don't have super-intelligence. I was nothing that they were—heck, they were all like some sort of pantheon of pagan deities in comparison to me. I was bland, boring, human. They were all far beyond that—they'd left humanity behind.

Yet they were all displaying their own humanity in caring.

End Note: Yeah? Good? Bad? Ugly? Beautiful? :-D

Thanks for reading!

~Cass