The dead eyes of loved ones staring up at him and the scent of smoke and burning flesh filled Duo's sleep. It seemed like every time he closed his own eyes, his mind took him back to those places, those people, he had lost, and after watching Sister Helen die in his arms for probably the fourth time in one night, Duo finally stumbled out of bed. Under his skin, Shini seemed awake and itched to act. Duo pushed it down as best he could.

"Duo?" Wufei asked, groggy, groping for him. Hearing Wufei say his name like that, when he was more asleep than awake, helped to wash some of the ash and smoke from his mouth, even as he felt bad about it. Wufei was one of those infuriating morning people, who typically went from asleep to wide awake with little assistance or transition time needed. If he was this groggy, chances were good that Duo's nightmares hadn't just disturbed his own sleep.

A glance at the clock showed it wasn't quite four a.m., which meant it was way too early for anyone to be up, much less severely jetlagged Gundam pilots.

"Going to get some water," Duo told him softly, hoping that his own stress from the nightmares didn't invade his voice.

Wufei squinted blearily up at him. "Don't be long," he commanded, which was kind of adorable when he was that sleep-mussed and exhausted.

Duo smiled fondly, pushing some of Wufei's hair back, only to get his hand swatted. "Get some rest," he said, sure that between the exhaustion and Duo's distraction that Wufei wouldn't notice that he hadn't made the requisite promise. Sure enough, Wufei let his head drop back to the pillow in a rare, graceless moment. His eyes closed as soon as his head hit the pillow, and he was out cold before Duo stepped away.

Padding on soundless feet, he grabbed his shoes and stepped out into the hall to put them on. He did go down to the kitchen to grab water—had to cover his bases—before wandering down to the gym.

Somehow, he wasn't entirely surprised to find Bucky there, beating the hell out of a punching bag.

"That bag do something personal to you or something?" he quipped, then winced as Bucky whirled on him. He held up his hands in front of him, including the one with the water bottle. "Sorry," he said, "Didn't mean to startle you. My brain-to-mouth filter's not the best at the best of times, and it's even worse when sleep-deprived."

Bucky's shoulders dropped as he recognized Duo, then focused back on the bag.

"If you're sleep-deprived, you should go back to bed," Bucky said, as grumpy as Duo had seen him yet.

"Well, I could," Duo admitted, going over to a bench to set his water bottle down before he began to stretch. "But all I'm doing is costing Wufei sleep right now." He laced his fingers together, then bent over, pressing them flat to the floor, feeling the stretch in his legs and lower back, even a nice burn in his shoulders. Rather than standing straight up again, he shifted his weight to walkover, feeling it stretch his sides and abdomen as he pressed up into a bridge. He hadn't risked doing this in a while, but he was glad that it didn't really hurt hurt, just ached in the way that muscles did when they hadn't been used enough. He held it for another ten-count before pushing off to stand upright. The stretches told his brain it was time to get up, and although it didn't make the exhaustion go away, it did make him more awake. He felt eyes on him and turned to look at Bucky, raising an eyebrow in a silent question.

Huffing as he was caught out, Bucky turned back to the bag, though his hits were far less personal and more controlled when he started punching again. "You should train with Natasha sometime," he said. "She can do that contortionist shit too."

Duo scoffed. "That's not contortionist shit," he said. "You want contortionist shit, ask Trowa. Besides, you're a supersoldier. I'm sure you're plenty flexible."

After the words came out, Duo heard how they sounded and winced. When he looked at Bucky again, he was pretty sure he wasn't imaging the flash of interest in his eyes, but he let it go.

"Do you want to, uh…" Bucky made a punching motion.

"Wait, are you, Mr. 'I don't think sparring with you is safe,' asking me to spar?" Duo asked, narrowing his eyes in suspicion.

To his credit, Bucky actually seemed to stop and think about it. "You're right. It's probably not a good idea."

"Oh no," Duo said, stepping over to him. "You offered, Terminator. You don't think I'm letting you off the hook that easily, do you?"

"I'm… not really in the best headspace," Bucky said, picking his words with obvious care.

Shrugging, Duo stretched his neck and pulled an arm across his chest to stretch the back of the muscle there. "Don't wuss out now."

"Wuss out?" Bucky asked with an expression caught between amusement and offense. Duo mentally put a tally in his box.

Switching his arms and the way he stretched his neck, Duo said, "Gone hard of hearing, old man? Or did you have a nicer way of saying it back in ye old days?"

"Not really," Bucky said, still looking a little poleaxed as Duo laces his fingers again and stretches his arms high above his head. "I just don't think anyone has ever accused me of 'wussing out' of something in my entire life."

Duo released his hands, and planted his legs, then reached for an ankle, settling into the stretch as it pulled. Stretching was easy, almost meditative, moments where he was able to just feel his body, feel like it was his, like he was locked into it. "So, Mr. Popular, then?" he asked, forcing himself to pay at least a little bit of attention to Bucky. As good as the stretches felt, they didn't take him out of his head enough to be a real distraction on their own.

"Not really," Bucky said, but in the kind of tone that told Duo that he hadn't considered it that way, but now that he thought about it…

Smirking, Duo walked his hands back to center before walking them to his other ankle. "Try that again, maybe this time with some actual conviction," he suggested.

Bucky sighed, then admitted, "Yeah, I guess I was pretty popular."

He didn't mean to snort—it just came out, and he was tired enough that it came out a little bit mean even though he didn't mean for it to. Even in his head, that sentence made him wince, and Bucky must have assumed that he was wincing at the snort, because he softened a little.

"People aren't usually at their bests when they're tired," Bucky said, as if forgiving him.

"No they are not," Duo agreed, finishing his last stretch before going over to a weight set. Weights weren't really his thing, most of the time. He relied far more on speed and agility, and—when necessary—on Shinigami for additional strength, but he wanted something that he had to focus on, something he had to pay real attention to, something that was… difficult for him. He wasn't strong enough that he could just get into a rhythm pumping iron—at least, not with the weights he was planning on pushing—the way that Heero always could. If he tried to beat on a bag, his body would start moving and his brain would still be running entirely separate from it, and that wasn't what he wanted at all.

Going over, he checked the starting weight on one of the bars. He really shouldn't have been surprised at how heavy they were. Real supersoldiers probably pressed in here regularly. There were four weight benches—way more than necessary considering how few people used this gym—and he checked each of the setups before finding one that wasn't laughably overloaded. Heero could lift in excess of five hundred pounds without much problem—Duo wasn't near those loads unless he was riding on Shinigami.

He started with 150, not far from his own body weight. It would make him work for a warm-up, at least. He wanted to see if he could get up to two hundred, but wasn't entirely sure that it was a good idea.

In the back of his head, he could hear Heero chiding him for trying to lift like this, alone, pushing himself, but he ignored it. Shy of sex, there wasn't a lot of better ways to get him out of his own head quickly than something physical he had to think about.

So focused on just doing the lift, he almost jumped when he lifted the bar off the uprights and a silver arm came into his sight, holding it between his hands.

"You want a spotter?" Bucky asked.

Duo tilted his head back and glared up at him. "You're not exactly spotting when you're just holding the bar like it's a fucking dumbbell."

Bucky raised an eyebrow at him. "And I would have thought you'd know better than to lift without a spotter." He took the bar from Duo like it was near effortless, setting it back in its uprights.

Dodging from under the bar to sit up so he could glare properly this time, Duo turned to face him. "I didn't ask for your help."

"Honestly, I think I'd rather spar than watch you lift without a spotter."

"I don't need or want your help."

Rather than answering him directly, Bucky eyed the weights on the bars. "Thought you'd be able to lift more than this." Just to add insult to injury apparently, he did a curl with the bar, and Duo nearly leapt at it to yank it out of his arm.

The edges of the world began to gray, sound starting to soften. Duo closed his eyes and made himself count his breaths.

There are no enemies here, he told himself, but something dark and cold seemed to writhe with a question.

Aren't there? it seemed to ask. He knew it was in his head. Shinigami didn't speak to him, not in anything as clear as actual word. It was just his mind making sense of the feelings it gave off, putting words to them.

Agitated now, he stood and paced, shaking out his arms.

He had wanted to lift; now he wanted to kill. He wanted the chase, the hunt. He wanted to hold someone's life in his hands and take it.

So many good people had been taken from him, why shouldn't he balance the karmic scales a little more.

Bad, he thought. This was bad. Shinigami was too close to the surface, his control too razor thin. He wasn't safe to be around when he was like this, and he knew it.

Bucky didn't though. Duo didn't see him step over and reach out to put a hand on his shoulder as much as he sensed him, but Duo didn't let it land. He grabbed Bucky's arm, wrenching him forward and putting him on the ground on his back. Then he let go as if Bucky were on fire because the world grayed further, and his pulse seemed to pound kill, kill, kill in his ears.

"This was a bad idea," Duo said, forcing the words out, forcing himself to speak. It pushed Shinigami down a little bit, though it was still close, still so terrifyingly close…

Either Bucky seemed to sense how on-edge Duo was or maybe he even had a little bit of sense for Shinigami. Killers, real killers, sometimes did. Not always, but sometimes. Some people spent so much time drenched in the deaths of others that they developed a certain level of attunement to Shinigami.

But they had to kill a lot of people to do it. Personally. Up close. Close enough to see the life die in their eyes, to hold them in the moment Shinigami whispered in and snuffed their lives out.

Kill him. Kill him. Kill him thrummed in time with his heartbeat.

Bucky propped himself up on an elbow, watching Duo carefully. "You okay there?" he asked.

"Says the one on the floor?" The words felt awkward and unnatural in his mouth. Bad, bad, bad, he knew. He thought his voice sounded odd too, but it was echoing strangely in his ears, almost as if his ears were struggling to pick it up.

He could not unleash Shinigami here. Maybe the people in this Tower weren't innocent, but they didn't deserve to be killed when they thought they were safe.

"Duo?" Bucky said, getting to his feet slowly, watching him warily this time.

The urge to leap, to strike, to hurt, to kill was strong, so strong.

"I should go," he said, forcing himself to cross his arms, to make himself less dangerous, less ready. He knew Shinigami didn't like it, didn't like the fractional seconds it would give Duo's opponent, but he needed to give Bucky those fractions.

"Before you do that, I think you need to talk to me," Bucky said, still careful, his voice a little clearer this time, less like he was yelling down a metal-lined hall.

"I don't—" Words were getting harder as Shinigami pressed at him again. He gripped his arms tightly, refusing to lose control of himself. Why was this so hard? It never used to be. He used to command Shinigami, not the other way around.

"Hey," Bucky said, moving into his space with care. He reached out, slowly, tense, clearly ready to jump back if he needed to.

He wouldn't be fast enough.

He might be—with Duo's hands held like this. He was a supersoldier.

The flesh had landed first on Duo's bicep, right above where he held tightly enough, he knew he'd have bruises tomorrow. With care, Bucky mirrored the action with his metal arm. Then he squeezed, not hard, reassuring, then moved up to Duo's shoulders, squeezing again.

It was… it was the right thing to do. Just being touched, touched as if he were a human, as if he were a person and not a monster, helped ground him. Only the flesh hand moved to the back of Duo's neck, but it didn't squeeze so much as it massaged, finding the rock-solid muscles there and digging into them, trying to weed out the stress. It was working, but Duo could still feel Shini roiling inside of him, itching for a fight, hungry for the kill.

This wasn't how normal people approached or dealt with threats. Duo was enough in his own head to wonder when the last time Bucky had touched anyone like this was. Tenderly, carefully, like he was precious. No, not quite… but maybe like he could be.

Duo was aware of his appeal in what was usually a very conscious way. He had to think about it. He was used to eyes on him for a variety of reasons, and knew what it felt like when someone looked at him with desire. He had thought he'd seen flashes of it in Bucky, but it was academic information, not something he planned to do anything with.

But Shinigami still clamored under his skin and there was a single surefire way to silence it.

He unlocked a hand from his arm to place it at Bucky's neck, forcing the hand to simply rest there as he tilted his own face up. Sure enough, Bucky began to lean down to answer that silent request.

Even just the action was enough to start driving Shinigami back. Sex was a thing of life, not death, and it had always been the one guaranteed way Duo knew to send it back to sleep. He didn't think he'd do this with anyone else—maybe Quatre and Trowa, if they were here, if they were willing—but Bucky resonated with him, called to him. Maybe it was just because he reminded Duo of Heero in some way he struggled to define, but he found that if it were Bucky, he might be okay with it.

Bucky brushed his lips close enough that Duo could feel his breath, and he pressed closer to Bucky's warmth, almost closing the distance—

And then Bucky pulled back.

"I can't," he said, sounding miserable for it, though he didn't pull away, hands still on Duo.

It was enough of a shock that Duo shoved Shinigami down deep and hard. "What do you mean, you can't?" he more demanded than asked, beginning to move back, though Bucky's hands didn't let him go far.

"I want to," Bucky said, quick and sincere. "I do. I just… with everything that your father's done for me, I can't do this, be involved with you without him knowing."

Duo tried to remember the last time he'd been caught this flatfooted and drew a complete blank. "You what?" He pulled his hand away from Bucky, trying to step back and meaning it this time.

"I've hurt him so much, and he's forgiven so much—"

"Not sure I'd call it 'forgiveness.'"

"He's been helping me," Bucky said emphatically. "He rebuilt my arm, with the BARF technology… actually asking for a pardon for me that I certainly don't deserve—"

Oh yeah, Duo was done. When Duo stepped back this time, pushing at Bucky's chest, he let him go, looking wounded. At least this wasn't the kind of emotion that stirred Shinigami. It didn't have damned clue what to do with… whatever the fuck it was Duo was feeling. Disgusted, disappointed, surprised and not entirely sure why, made for a big mixed-up ball of ugh. Worse, it made sense, honestly, why Bucky would feel indebted to Stark. Why he would feel like he couldn't go behind Stark's back with his son.

It made sense, but it was still a deal breaker.

"Nope," he said, raising his hands to warn Bucky off of reaching out to him again. "I get it, just… no."

Bucky ran a hand through his hair in obvious frustration. "I can—"

"No," Duo interrupted, "you can't. There's nothing here."

"Well, not yet—"

"And there can't be," Duo insisted. He ran his hand over his face at Bucky's hurt expression. "Look, I do understand why you feel indebted to Stark, okay? I just…" He sighed, trying to figure out how to put something this intrinsic to him, this innate, into words. "I can't be with anyone who puts my father in front of me," he said, meeting Bucky's eyes. "If you can't kiss me because your first thought is how will Stark react, I just can't be with you. Full stop. I'm not—" No, that was wrong. He took a deep breath and tried again. "I can't be second to anyone or anything else ever again. Not a job, not an obligation, not a debt. I can't…" He crossed his arms, craving someone else's. "I can't do it again. I need to be put first. I'm not going to survive loving someone who can't do that again."

He turned on his heel, going to grab his water bottle.

"What if I want to try?" Bucky asked.

Duo sighed, then looked back. Bucky Barnes was a gorgeous man, and something in his eyes pulled at Duo, called to him. But he'd been second to the job, and it had cost him Heero. He'd been second to the cartel, and it cost him Jesus. He could not be second again, not to Tony fucking Stark, of all people.

"You couldn't kiss me without thinking about him," Duo said flatly. "Are you really telling me that you don't think he'd bleed into everything?"

He started to turn away again when Bucky said, "You're pretty much the only person who just treats me like I'm a person. You don't walk on eggshells around me, you don't act like you think that I'm going to break or go crazy if you push me a little bit. I… don't want to lose that." He paused, looking frustrated, as though the words were coming out wrong. "I know it sounds stupid, but I don't want to lose you."

Bucky looked fragile, in that moment. Looked like if Duo pushed him over, he might shatter, he was holding himself so tightly. "I can be your friend, Bucky," Duo said softly. "I just can't be more." He took no pleasure in watching the vulnerability, watching the open longing close up, be shuttered, watching Bucky's face go from something animated and emotive to something hard and cold.

"I get it," he said in reply, voice tight.

Maybe he did; maybe he didn't. Duo was too exhausted to figure it out, and now heartsore to boot. He knew something about debts and paying them back, though, and he couldn't even really fault Bucky for his concerns. Being considerate of a man who had helped him so much with more than ample reason to do nothing but shoot first and not ask questions shouldn't be a mark against him. It spoke of his integrity, told Duo that no matter what he'd done and what he'd been through, Bucky Barnes was a good man. It shouldn't be a line in the sand.

But it was. It was Duo's line in the sand because he didn't need a good man, necessarily; he just needed someone to put him first. For once.

Pausing at the door, Duo glanced back. "Thank you, though," he said.

The hard expression on Bucky's face gave way to confusion. "For what?"

"For helping me, earlier." He doesn't explain further, but he doesn't think he really needs to.

Sure enough, Bucky nods. "Anytime." He frowns, then adds, "I'd like to still be friends… fuck, I sound like I'm thirteen again."

It made Duo smile, made him wish that there was a chance, but when he tried to imagine it, all he could see was Bucky's expression as he said "I can't."

"I'd like that," he said. "Being friends."

Still obviously disappointed, Bucky nodded. "Get some sleep."

Duo gave him another small, sad smile, said, "Good night, Bucky," and slipped out the door.