"Nightmare cocoa? It's in the last cabinet on the left."

Bucky spun around, reaching for knives that he no longer had and drawing protest from his still-tender chest. "Ow. Hi. Clint, right?"

"Yep." Clint opened the cabinet in question. "Raspberry, mint, or hazelnut?"

"Raspberry."

Clint busied himself putting the kettle on and hunting down clean mugs. "Also, 'Ow'?"

"Moved too quick. Made my chest hurt."

"A 97-year-old with chest pain. Should I be worried?"

"No. I just had a helicarrier go to pieces with me on it a couple weeks ago and a support beam fall on me. Broke some ribs and tore my chest open. I'm not really supposed to be making any sudden movements or reaching for things or lifting things."

"Hey, but you're alive." Clint pushed a mug in his direction. "More than can really be expected in that situation."

"Yeah. Thanks to my stubborn idiot best friend fighting me, deliberately dislocating my shoulder, choking me out, pulling the beam off me even though I'd just shot him multiple times, and then daring me to kill him in an effort to restore my memory." Bucky shook his head. "And that moron outranks me."

"My best friend went looking for me and concussed me to break the mind control I was under instead of putting a bullet in my head like any other agent would have." Clint told him. "Not nearly as dramatic, but yeah. What are best friends for."

"You were mind controlled?"

Clint scowled. "Alien invasion led by a power-crazed god armed with that very same goddamn cube that Hydra was using to make weapons in your day."

"You're kidding me." Bucky looked at him incredulously as Clint filled his mug for him. "Thanks."

"Wish I was. Steve sure told us off for fishing the damn thing out of the ocean and trying to use it after he went to the trouble of losing it there."

"I don't blame him. Please tell me it's been destroyed properly this time."

"Thor-yes the Norse god-took it and his crazy brother back to their own realm." Bucky raised an eyebrow. Clint raised one right back. "Hydra inside SHIELD is not the weirdest thing that's happened in recent years. The world's fucking insane."

"Oh boy."

"You said it. And we are right in the epicenter of the insanity, surrounded by gods and enhanced and or mutated people and ridiculous geniuses. It's, yeah, it's superheroes and stuff." Clint dipped a finger in his cocoa to check the temperature. "I mean, Steve and his serum, Tony and his suits, Bruce and his transformation, Thor being a fucking god, Nat and the things they did to her in the Red Room that even she doesn't know what they were, and then there's me, ordinary human who happens to have some trick arrows."

"Wow." Bucky studied the grain of the tabletop intently. "They all sound so... perfect."

Clint snorted. "No. Did the fact that we have a shelf specifically for cocoa specifically for when we have nightmares not tip you off? We're pretty fucked up. And have you not noticed yet how much Cap hates cold things and wet things?"

Bucky made a face. "Ok, traumatized, yes. Soldiers have emotional scars."

"You feel like your metal arm will never be as good as your real arm was, no matter how superior it is to flesh and bone." Clint stated, no question in his voice.

Bucky looked startled. "How do you know that?"

Clint pulled one of his hearing aids out. "You have a bionic arm, I have bionic ears. These are ridiculously advanced and programmed to especially magnify certain sounds that are handy in this line of work. I can hear someone sneaking up on me better than a normal person would. But yet I still feel like damaged goods. I still remember having functioning ears, and feel like these will never compare, even though technically they're better." He tucked the hearing aid back into his ear, and took a sip of his cocoa. "And if you need more convincing that you're no more of damaged goods than the rest of us, here are a few more examples. Bruce doesn't have full control over his transformations into a giant green rage monster, which was the result of a lab accident in the first place. Tony spent years with a battery sticking out of his chest to stop his chest-full of shrapnel from working its way into his heart. Nat doesn't get to choose whether or not she wants to have children in the future, because the Red Room deliberately sterilized her for the sake of efficiency."

Bucky took a long drink of his cocoa, almost too hot compared to his serum-lowered body temperature. "Perhaps you do understand." He paused. "I think I dreamt about it tonight, losing my arm. I was falling. I know I fell for real, a very long way down, right before Hydra captured me for the second time, so I'm guessing that's when it happened, and I know we spent a lot of time in the snow with the Howling Commandos. In the nightmare it was snowy and I was falling and falling it felt like forever."

"And that's how you ended up here, talking to someone you hardly know but gets how you're feeling." Clint smiled sadly.

Bucky shrugged and winced as the movement caused his shoulder and chest to complain. "I didn't want to wake Steve over a stupid nightmare. Dumb punk was awake for two days straight on whatever secret mission he got talked into."

"It's not stupid. I still have nightmares about the mission where I lost my hearing." Bucky looked up at him, a question in his eyes. "Yeah, it was on a mission. Accident with a sonic arrow. I got tackled, didn't get out the window as I had intended before it went off. Woke up in the SHIELD infirmary with 80% hearing loss. That's what I dreamt about tonight, actually." Clint told him ruefully. "Scrambling to get away, and knowing I wasn't going to make it."

They both stared at their cocoa for a minute, and then Bucky broke the silence. "You keep talking about arrows."

"I'm a sniper. Mostly."

"I am too. Or I was in the war, anyway. Probably still am. I'm not sure how much of which things I've done since then."

Clint looked at the clock. 3:48. There was no point in trying to get back to sleep tonight. "Want to hit the range for a little friendly competition? Weapons of choice?"

"That probably violates doctor's orders."

"Chicken?" Clint dared him.

Bucky narrowed his eyes. "Fine. You're on. But this is our little secret."

Natasha being sterile isn't "oh, I'm a woman, babies are important to me" like some people claim it is and get upset about. It's the fact that the choice was taken away from her of what to do with her body. She may have gotten away from the KGB and most of the other effects and has control over her own life now, but that loss of ability to choose is a lasting effect of what was done to her.