the two of us, all used and beaten up
watching fate as it flows down the path we have chose
you and me, we're in this together now
none of them can stop us now
we will make it through somehow
you and me, if the world should break in two
until the very end of me, until the very end of you

Nine Inch Nails, "We're In This Together"

Notes: Second half of the Bucky POV chapter, which is seriously as long as the last one got. Your regularly styled chapters will return in Ch 8, featuring flashbacks and Toni-centric POVs again.

CONTENT WARNING - Discussions of trauma, torture, mentioned possible rape. Violence. Lots and lots of violence.

oOoOoOo

Toni is practically asleep on her feet after Bucky finds their clothes. Her eyes aren't even open as she shoves her arms carelessly into her shirt and tugs her jeans back over her hips, leaving them unbuttoned. She staggers towards a couch in the corner, mumbling about bed now, but Bucky's sat on that thing, been jabbed in the kidneys and the ass by broken springs. Hell no is she going to sleep on it after the day she's had. Instead, he scoops her up and carries her out of the workshop and through the house, back to their room.

Toni is a clingy fucker, all hands and whines and don't leave me, buck, as he strips her again, but it's four in the afternoon. Even after all that strenuous activity, he's not the least bit tired. So he kisses her neck, untangles her octopus grip and makes sure she's comfortable and warm. It does sappy things to his heart when her hand snatches his pillow from his side of the bed, and buries her face in it with a contented purr.

God, he's so fucking gone on her. If it wasn't pretty much the best thing that'd happened to him since Stevie, he'd be disgusted with how gooey his brain feels just looking at her.

He goes to the window and fixes the blinds, even though he knows post-binge Toni can sleep through the Apocalypse once coaxed away from her toys, and a little sunlight isn't going to bother her in the least. He's pretty sure adding "post-coital" only enhances that. "JARVIS," he says quietly, "wouldja mind alerting me if she wakes?"

"Of course, sir." The AI's voice is equally soft. "I've already made that note."

He arches an eyebrow, wondering when JARVIS had switched his address from Sgt. Barnes to "sir", figures Toni had something to do with it. " Hey, J, wouldja mind calling me Bucky or James or something? I mean, you don't have to be so formal with me."

"I'm sorry, sir," JARVIS says, "but I cannot."

He sighs. "Can't go around Toni's orders, huh? Yeah, okay, J. I'll talk to her when she gets up."

"I'm afraid that won't do any good, sir. Ma'am did not order me to call you 'sir'. She prefers to let others request their own forms of familiarity from me, which I am free to grant or deny."

Bucky's missing something here, and he frowns as he puzzles it out, but for the life of him, he can't put his finger on it. "I didn't ask you to call me 'sir', did I?"

"No, sir."

"Then why're you doing it?"

There's a pause. "For the same reason," JARVIS says firmly, "I refer to ma'am as 'ma'am'."

It takes a minute, because Bucky doesn't have Toni's smarts, but he's certainly not all that slow on the uptake. His eyes widen a little as it dawns on him. "Uh, thanks then, J. I like you too."

"Very good, sir."

Bucky closes the bedroom door gently behind him, and as he pads back down the hall towards the kitchen - he never did get that sandwich and now he's fucking starving - and wonders if it's the universe's messed-up sense of humor to make a package deal of a nuclear-powered soulmate and an electronic stepkid to go with his cybernetic arm.

As he approaches the kitchen, he hears voices coming from it and pulls up short. Just for a second, he doesn't know who they are, starts reaching for a knife that he no longer carries, and then squeezes his eyes shut. He's not going to lose it now, not fucking now, get it together Barnes, that's Natasha and Clint. You know who they are.

His shoulders go tight and bristly at the sound of Clint's voice. "-in the fucking eye, Nat!" he complains, accompanied by a sound like rattling ice cubes in a bag. "It hurt!"

"And you want sympathy for your eye." Nat's voice is flat and Bucky can almost picture her, standing there with one eyebrow raised and her arms folded. "I don't see why you should have it, honestly."

There's a moment of silence and then Clint says, "Because a fucking supersoldier punched me. If Toni'd punched me, you think I'd be up here getting ice and aspirin?"

"Yes," Natasha replies immediately. "You enjoy when people fawn over you, sokolik, but you fail to realize that Toni is usually the one who tucks you in and spoon-feeds you soup when you're sick. Or maybe you do and this is just you sulking because Toni is otherwise occupied."

"I'm not sulking," he snaps, "I'm worried." More ice rattles, water and chips spilling onto a metal surface, the sink. "And I'm pissed. Worried and pissed."

"And there's no jealousy in there whatsoever." Nat's voice is clearly skeptical.

"No, for fuck's sake," Clint says, exasperated. "Why would I be jealous of her soulmate? Jesus Christ, Natasha, you know better than anyone why that's not even in the same room as the table, let alone on it."

"Just checking," Natasha murmurs.

"The time for jealousy was about thirteen years ago. That's never been who we are, and you know it."

"I do know it. I'd still like you to explain why you're behaving like a spurned lover right now. You've never been this protective with any of her other people she's taken to her bed. Why is her soulmate so different?"

That's a question Bucky would very much like answered himself. He eases himself back against the wall and leans there, not feeling the least bit sorry or guilty for eavesdropping, and waits for Clint's response.

Clint sighs noisily. "It's just…hasn't she been through enough? Does the universe just really need to fuck her this much? I mean, fuck, Nat. How much shit does a person have to go through? How much more kicking is karmic fucking fate going to give her?"

"She can handle it, Clint," Natasha says evenly.

"I know she can. She's the strongest fucking person I know, living or dead. I know she can handle it. But see, here's my problem: she shouldn't have to! Christ on a fucking cracker. You don't understand. You really don't understand."

"So explain it to me. No, don't glare. I mean it. Explain it to me so I understand."

There's a sigh that almost sounds like a sob. "You didn't know her when she wasn't trying to drink herself to death before the palladium killed her," Clint says tiredly. "You didn't know her before Obadiah fucking Stane ripped her arc reactor out of her chest and left her for dead on the floor of her own fucking house. You didn't know her before a bomb blew up in her face in Afghanistan, and she was tortured and beaten and fucking raped for all I know, because she never talks about it, for nearly four months!"

"No," Natasha says softly. "No, I knew her after all of that. You two don't talk a lot about the time that came before I started living here."

"Fuck. She used to trust people, you know? I mean, Howard was a real piece of work, but he more or less ignored her until he wanted us to dance the high society shuffle and squeeze out a couple of heirs for the Stark legacy, and when that didn't happen on command, he never bothered with her again. Not until he dumped every fucking scrap of Stark-branded bullshit he could in her lap, anyway. She hadn't been prepared to inherit. She thought it was all going to her asshole cousin, Morgan. She had her own shit going, Star Solutions. She did it with her mother's money, all by herself. In the middle of her expansion plans, boom, hey, look at that. Now she's got Stark Industries too. Any sane person would have taken a fucking vacation to Aruba, but not Toni fucking Stark. Nope, she promotes Pepper to Star's CEO, rebrands it under the Stark name, and takes over as CEO of the Industries side of things. I barely saw her for six months, because she was reorganizing the entire fucking business to get out of weapons and into telecom. Six months. I think we had four dinners together, two of them at her goddamn office. Three dates. Every single one, she was falling asleep in her soup, or couldn't follow a conversation because she was on overload. Half her fucking closet ended up next to her desk at SI, because she was pulling eighteen, twenty hour days to get shit done in record time. But she was still happy. She still trusted people."

The sink goes on, a glass fills, and Clint drinks it all in a single pull. Natasha is silent, and so is Bucky, mostly because he wouldn't know what to say even if they both walked out and saw him standing there right this second. Jesus Christ.

"And then Obadiah fucking Stane broke her to pieces. SHIELD had already snatched me up. Apparently, being the soulmate of a really fucking rich businesswoman while also having the exact skills a covert organization needs for assassins is a thing they jumped at. I wasn't even fucking home when she got taken, you know. I was in Beirut on some bullshit assignment. I heard about it two weeks after it happened. Cos fuck a soulmate needing to know their other half is missing. Why would I fucking need to know?"

You're not her soulmate, Bucky thinks, but without any real anger. What he's hearing is really goddamn enlightening. In some ways, maybe Clint has a better claim to the title than he does.

"So four months later, she comes back with a fucking car battery in her chest, new and hilarious scars, all kinds of mental trauma, and the first thing she does is build Iron Maiden two point oh and start waging war on terrorist camps, because the weapons and missiles that were supposed to be, you know, not being designed and manufactured anymore, were in the hands of the Ten Rings."

"I read the SHIELD file," Natasha says. "A lot of deep cover ops got blown. Director Stoner must have been upset."

"Yeah, well fuck him anyway," Clint snarls, deep and vicious. "He was a douchebag. He's the one who decided I didn't need to know about Toni up and vanishing. I'm glad he's fucking dead. We were legally registered, Nat. There are fucking laws against that kind of shit when a soulbond is involved."

"You were legally registered? You weren't actually bonded, though. How'd you manage to pull that one off?"

"A really good lawyer and layers on layers of cover-your-ass paperwork. There's precedent for public soulmates, especially if one partner is a high-profile celebrity." There's an odd sound, which Bucky places a few moments later as the sound of Clint scrubbing his hands through his hair. "Christ. So there's all that shit, and Stane swore up and down that he'd find out who'd been dealing Stark weapons under the table. Turns out it was him. I mean, neither of us liked him. He was an asshole beyond the capabilities of just about anyone. An asshole and a goddamn bully. He sold Toni out to the Ten Rings to get his fat fucking hands on the company. You know how Toni found out?"

"No."

"When he came to the Malibu house, he gave her a file he said had the information she wanted and then took advantage of that to try and kill her again. Used something to lock her muscles, some early-model prototype Stark Solutions had been working on to try and help epileptics of all fucking people, something that was supposed to stop seizures, for chrissake. Stole the fucking arc reactor out of her fucking chest. That's why she doesn't like it when people hand her things. That's when she lost the ability to trust people. I mean, kidnapped by terrorists, operated on without anaesthesia in a fucking germ-infested cave, open fucking heart surgery by someone without light or, you know, sterile tools, shit rations, no medicine, daily waterboarding… And she still trusted people. And then Stane took that all away."

Bucky's hand is squeezing his leg so hard he's going to have bruises, and his jaw hurts from clenching it tight. The Asset is whispering around the edges of his mind. This Stane asshole better be dead and burned, or Bucky's going to track him down and make the last few hours of his life interesting.

"You know the rest. She's carried too much crap for far too long, and then she jumped right into helping you because darling, I love the shit out of you, but you were a fucking mess and I wasn't much better. And Toni just…"

"Toni did what Toni does, which is take very good care of her friends without taking care of herself. I know. I remember."

"She had no driving reason to just jump in, steady you, keep me from going off my fucking nut. She just did it, because she loves me. Because I needed it. Because she has my fucking back. And now, she'd do the same for you. Cos she loves you. That goddamn arrogant, crazy woman has a heart of fucking gold, but nobody gets to see it because if they did, they'd try to rip it out of her fucking ribcage."

"She's the best of us," Natasha murmurs.

"Yeah. So why can't she have just one fucking thing, just one, that's easy? Why can't she have a soulmate who's not a former Hydra killbot, who she didn't have to pry out of the fucking ass end of Siberia with her fucking fingernails, only to have to rebuild him from the ground fucking up when she gets him home? Why can't she have like, a cellist or a writer or a guy who'll sit at home and look after the cats while she's out conquering the known fucking world? Why does everything have to be blood, sweat and tears for her? Why can't she just have ...something easy?"

"I thought you liked Bucky."

"I do, goddammit. He's the kinda guy I want to sit on the couch with and drink beer while you and Toni break some fucking heads with your thighs of death. She's happy again, in a way she hasn't been in too fucking long. In a way I thought she'd never have again. She deserves that. And he's just fucking stupid for her too. He's got that stoic Russian I'll-kill-you-with-my-eyes shit going on, but I can tell." There's another pause. "He'll kill for her, without hesitation. So will I. So will you. I just don't understand why, with three fucking trigger-happy assassins around her, the world can just reach right past us and knock her on her ass. I can't wrap my brain around it. We're supposed to have her back, like she has ours, but how the fuck are you supposed to fight something that you can't even see coming?"

"I know. But we still try."

"Damn straight. I'm going to go out to the range, kill some targets. I just gotta…"

"I understand. You've been holding all that for awhile. Go on, solkonik. I'll be in our room when you're done."

The door in the kitchen opens and then closes again, and everything is silent. Bucky leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. Just for a second, he contemplates rushing right back to his room, make sure Toni's still where he left her, still asleep, still safe. He knows it's irrational, because JARVIS would have said something if she was awake, or injured, or under attack.

"I know you're there, Bucky. You can come out now."

He lifts his head as Natasha calls out, a little surprised. He's light on his feet. Most people don't even know he's on them until it's far too late. Natasha's good though, very good. He lifts away from the wall and pads around the corner, sees her at the counter with a cup of tea in her hand, paper tag still dangling from the mug. She's eyeing him in contemplation, but doesn't say anything. "How'd you know I was there?"

She smiles, very faintly, and moves past him. "Because I know everything."

"Oh yeah?" He turns with her as she goes by. "Then why'd you have to ask Clint so many questions?"

She stops, looks over her shoulder, and shrugs. "Now you know everything too."

He stares for a long time after her, wondering exactly how fucked the world would be if she was ever inclined to conquer it. Decides he doesn't want to know, because some things are best left unexplored. He turns to the fridge and starts making himself that sandwich, hands moving mechanically in the assembly of meat and bread and cheese and veggies, thinking and thinking and thinking.

oOoOoOo

April 21, 2012

For someone who got her family's company out of weapons design as soon as she took it over, Toni's got an awful lot of guns. Pistols and rifles of every stripe, every size, right from six-shooters all the way up to futuristic-looking weapons made of plastic and branded with the Stark Industries logo. And not just guns, either. Combat knives and throwing knives and darts. A miniature tower of ammo tins.

"I think I'm in love," Bucky says reverently, and looks at the spread laid out on the bench in front of him. "Toni, Jesus. I'm leaving you. I just found the love of my life." He slides his hand around the stock of what looks to be a Dragunov rifle, if the Dragunov had a sleek, sexy little sister that was ounces lighter, better balanced and shot lasers instead of bullets.

Toni glances back over her shoulder at him, rolls her eyes, disappears head and shoulders into the weapons locker again. "Goddammit," she grumbles. "I lose more boyfriends to my personal arsenal. I've gotta stop whipping it out so readily, learn to preserve the mystery."

"What can I say, it's not me, it's you. Also, it's your guns." He sets the Dragunov carefully back down, picks up the Sig Sauer sitting next to it, sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the bench, and starts field-stripping it.

"Look at you," Toni says fondly, "like a goddamn cat with a ball of yarn. Hey, you think you could roll on your back and I'll hold one of the rifles out by its strap and you can bat at it? I want a picture of that on social media, hashtag superkid."

"I have no fuckin' clue what any of that last bits are supposed to mean," he says, and the steady slide and click of the gun coming expertly apart in his hands is soothing. "But if I can have a rocket launcher, you got a deal."

He feels her drop a kiss onto the top of his head, distractedly leans in her general direction. She sets down a case beside him, flips the catches, opens it so he can see the maintenance equipment inside. "I knew I forgot something," she says, clucking her tongue. "Shoulder-mounted heavy artillery. Ah well. Guess you're just going to have to keep tolerating me until I can make you one. You gonna be occupied for awhile?"

He considers, looks down the bench with its many, many toys, knows he's not going anywhere until he's taken them all apart, cleaned them to his satisfaction, probably test-fired them if he can find the range. "Yeah. Why?"

She blows out a breath, scratches her hands through her hair. "Cos I have to go into the office today," she says. "And Clint and Tash aren't here either. I mean, I can push it off again if you're not comfortable being alone in the house, but sooner or later, I'm going to have to go in and, you know, be a boss. There's a building that I need to do the final sign-offs on, designs to approve, people to fire, coffee to drink. Lots of coffee, since there's going to be meetings with the board and SHIELD wants a meeting to discuss their contracts and even though I'm not CEO of Stark Solutions, they won't deal with Pepper for some weird fucking reason and-hey!"

He reaches up, yanks her down into his lap, cuts off her babbling with a lazy kiss, kisses her til the tension in her shoulders and throbbing through their soulmark goes soft and pliant.

"Go be a boss," he says, ruthlessly smothering the unease that still curls through him at the reminder of how thoroughly she's been disrupting her life. "I'm gonna be too busy to entertain you. You may as well find somethin' to do."

Her eyes are bright, dazed and happy. "I also thought I'd file the paperwork today," she says softly, "if that's okay with you."

"Paperwork? For what?"

Her response is to slide her hand over his shirt, rest over their blended soulmark on his chest.

"Oh," he says, blinking. "That paperwork. Uh…I thought you needed an identity for that. I kinda... don't think the Department of Soulmate Registration's gonna take my social, since I got it in the forties."

"Aw, shit. I knew there was something I was forgetting to give you." She wiggles out of his lap, goes over to the table where she left her briefcase and thumbs the biometric lock. She comes back and plops back down in his lap and breaks the seal on the manilla envelope with her thumb. "I kinda took care of all that too," she mumbles. "It's been done for weeks, just… there wasn't a good moment to give it to you."

She tips the envelope over the floor beside them. Documents and plastic rectangles and smaller envelopes spill onto the floor, accompanied by the more solid thump of a worn leather wallet and the jingle of metal keys. His own face stares up at him under the glossy shine on a New York state driver's license, half hiding the top formal script of a Record of Birth. A new StarkPhone, this one with a red and silver star on the back of the sleek, black case.

"I kept as much as I could true," Toni's saying, but he can barely hear her past the ringing in his ears. "You still have your full name, your birthday, which, shit, we missed because reasons, fucking Hydra, honestly, but I had to push the year forward. You have a new social, and excellent credit. Your job history is mostly Stark Industries, but I kept the first couple of years of your service intact, just made them overseas. After that, SI's security division. It's what was easiest, since I own the damn place. Your taxes have been retro-filed. School records too, extrapolated from what I could find from the 40s. For all intents and purposes, James Buchanan Barnes is a real, legal, modern person."

He separates everything slowly, pushing aside bank account statements with cards attached via paper clip for four separate banks, one of which isn't even in the United States. Three separate credit cards, all of them sleek and black and bearing the name J. Barnes in smooth, raised letters. A US passport. Pages of print-outs that look like tax records and job histories. A clear, press-zip envelope with JOINT ACCOUNTS written in black marker in Toni's messy scrawl, with more envelopes and cards and information inside.

"If it's too fast, it's too fast," she says, all in a rush. "I just thought, well… you're doing a lot better now, and with everything that's happened in the last few days. We can take more time, go over things, make adjustments. I don't want you to think I'm trying to make you into someone you're not or someone you're not comfortable having as your past, or-"

He cuts her off with another kiss, this one a little harder, a little more possessive. It's the only way he knows to express everything this is making him feel, because he's too overwhelmed to find the right words. "You talk too much," he says. "File the paperwork."

She beams, blue eyes bright and soft and glittering. "Yeah?"

"Yeah." He kisses her again. "And when you get home, you can make up for having missed my birthday."

"Anything," she says. "What do you want? A plane? Trip to Disneyland? Dinner and sex? Private island? Tell me what you want, and it's done."

The scary thing is, she means anything, and Bucky knows that. He could say he wants a trip to the fucking moon, and Toni would build him a rocket ship. But what he wants is much simpler. She's already doing it. "Finish my arm," he says firmly, and palms her cheek. "Sick of carrying this Hydra shit. Much rather carry yours. Have you with me always."

The way Toni's looking at him, soft and vulnerable and teary, shit, he'd do anything to keep that look on her face forever. It's the most powerful feeling in the world, and the most terrifying. Nobody should have that much power over another person, but she's given it to him, and she's never going to want to take it back. Bucky's pretty sure he's never going to be worth a tenth of what she is, but he can try to be. And he's going to fucking try.

"You got it, honey," she says. "Anything you want. Anything at all."

oOoOoOo

April 24, 2012

Toni is getting ready to leave for the office again, fourth day in a row, but is dragging her ass like she usually does. She's just hit the half hour mark in her endless, epithet-laden bitch-session about SHIELD and their incessant need to make sure every single line of every single page of every single contract is read over and understood. Bucky doesn't understand half of what she's complaining about, and honestly never wants to know, because even just listening to her rant makes his eyes glass over and his brain shut down. But he knows now that she doesn't need him to understand, she just needs him to listen and make sympathetic noises at the appropriate places.

He stirs two cups of coffee as she bangs around in the fridge, looking for her fucking honeycrisp apples, I swear to fucking God if Clint ate them again I will end him in his fucking sleep. He carries them both over to the counter silently, as she slams the fridge door closed and turns around with murder in her eye.

"That fucking man is going to die," she hisses. "Those are my fucking apples. I labeled them with TONI'S SO FUCK OFF CLINT and everything. Christ, why do I keep him around?"

"Because he'll just crawl into the vents and nest in there if you try to kick him out," Bucky says, and starts to put her cup of coffee on the counter beside her.

"I'm fucking rich. I can hire an exterminator that can take out an assassin," she snaps, and glances over to him. "Ooh, is that mine? Jesus, you're too good to me. Thank you, honey." And she reaches out, intercepts his arm in mid-extension…

And takes the cup from his hand.

Bucky freezes, heart hammering in his chest. For a moment, it feels like a panic attack rising, but it's not like that at all. It's… Jesus, it's deep and it's wondered and it's awesome.

"I'm going to try and cut out early today," she says, gulping coffee and seeming to not even notice the amazing, wonderful thing she just did. "See if I can't get home in time to have dinner with you, at least. Celebrate."

"Yeah, okay," he says, still stunned. "Wait, celebrate what?"

She grins. "Well, not only did I finish your arm early this morning," she says, "it's also the third day post-registration, so it's pretty much official, honey." Her eyes are dancing above her coffee cup. "Courier should be picking up the DSMR cards for you and me today, dropping them off this afternoon to the office. Our bond is officially recognized in the eyes of the law."

"Oh." He knows that's huge, that it's important, that it's huge and vital and something that he should be happy about, but as far as he's concerned, it's fucking nothing next to the fact that she just took a cup of coffee out of his hand without waiting for it to be placed next to her.

"... Having second thoughts?"

He starts, blinks. She's not smiling anymore, and there's the faint hum of worry in his chest. "What? No, no. You an' me, we're in this together. I'm with you." He snags her around the waist, nuzzles into her neck until she's purring happily again. "Out for dinner, or y'wanna stay in and I'll cook for you?"

"Whatever you want," Toni says, then flicks her nose across his and pulls reluctantly away. "I'm sorry, honey. I gotta go. Meeting Agent Carter this morning, and if I'm late, she'll snark off at me. And if she does that, well, I'm not going to be responsible for her medical bills or her dental work." She tosses back the rest of her coffee, sets the cup by the sink, leans in and gives him a fleeting kiss. "Love you."

"Love you too," he says, and stays there, staring at the cup until long after he's heard the sound of her car engine fade into the distance.

Bucky's down in the gym, sinking punches into the heavy bag and burning off nervous energy while he waits for Toni to come home with their registry cards, when everything goes to shit.

The bag rocks and creaks as he hits it a final time, then picks up a towel to wipe the sweat from his face and neck. He snags a bottle of water from the shelf beside the door to the locker room, drains half the bottle in one gulp. If he's figured out his schedule correctly, he should have just enough time to shower and change into clothes that make him look like a real person instead of a bridge-dwelling hobo, and be ready for when Toni walks through the door. He's got reservations for six at Toni's favorite restaurant, tickets waiting at the door for the nine o'clock show of that snarky Jewish comic she likes, the one she always tunes into that Daily Show program to watch.

He's just glad JARVIS'd been more than happy to help him make arrangements, because Bucky would otherwise still be helplessly scrolling through date idea websites, trying to figure out what to do.

"JARVIS," he says, swigging the rest of the bottle back. "Time's it?"

There's no response.

Bucky frowns, and unease begins to crawl up his spine. "J, you with me?"

Silence.

The hair on the back of his neck rises. Something is not fucking right. JARVIS is never unresponsive, not even in the middle of the night when no one else is awake but him. His system floods with adrenaline, senses sharpening until colors are neon bright, until he can hear the traffic out on the street as clear as if he was standing on the sidewalk. Muscles coil, feet shift. He doesn't fight the Asset as it swims to the surface, because something is not fucking right.

He hears the scrape of a shoe, very soft and undetectable to anyone not pumped full of supersoldier serum, and whirls and ducks under the arm of a black-clad figure holding a box with two prongs. Instinct takes over. He grabs the intruder's wrist, yanks them forward, drives his knee into their solar plexus. There's a grunt of surprised pain, something cracks, and the intruder collapses into a heap.

Turns to catch the precision swing of another black-clad intruder, trying to clothesline him. Kicks out at a third while he still has a hand around the wrist of the second, drives the third across the room to crash into the dumbbells. Spins tightly on his heel, whipcracking the second intruder into the heavy bag, spin-kicks them so hard when they stagger back that they flip in the air before piling onto the floor.

There isn't an immediate fourth attacker.

Keeping his breathing quiet and steady, Bucky swiftly crosses to where he left his phone and swipes it unlocked. He types out a rapid text to Toni, tries to send it, can't get a connection. Swears softly, tries to call. No signal.

Fuck.

He can hear other small noises in the house, now. Muffled curses and the swish of fabric and the tread of footsteps. Panic gnaws at him for a long moment, and he feels the urge to run and hide in a dark corner. But only for a long moment, because something else is surging, rising, blazing through his head, washing panic away in a bright white nuclear fire.

This is my home, and there are people who don't belong here in it.

This… this will not be tolerated.

Bucky Barnes slides into the recesses of his mind, and the Winter Soldier comes forward.

There's a trail of bodies behind him, and he's not sure how many are still breathing and how many are corpses. They know now that he is aware of their presence, and they've abandoned all pretense of stealth in order to swarm him from all directions.

He has knives now, wickedly curved kukris from one of Natasha's many hidden caches. They're not fighting to kill, he realizes quickly, the first time he is tagged by a shot from one of their guns and has to pull a trank dart out of his body. It dug into a scratch in his metal arm, a lucky shot that means he doesn't have to shake off wooziness as his system tries to process sedatives. But that's their disadvantage. They don't want to kill him. They want him alive.

The Winter Soldier has no such compunctions, and fights to kill.

Blood and bodies continue to fall in his wake. Holes appear in walls, sometimes with a body still hanging out of them. Picture frames fall from walls, vases pitch off pedestals and stands. Toni is going to be pissed when she gets home, he thinks distantly.

His enemies smarten up, come at him in numbers, six, eight, ten at a time. Knives slice his skin, electricity jitters through his nerves, the prick of two separate darts hit his shoulderblades. Blood sprays across his face, hot and fast and wet, his blades a silver whirl around him.

He loses a blade to a particularly well-placed snap-kick from the next group of enemies. More darts hit him. He shakes his head hard, trying to clear the sluggishness of his movements. He's too slow to avoid the impact of brass knuckles to his face, feels his head crack back, feels something jab him in the spine and send electricity jolting all across his body.

He loses time, loses thought, loses himself.

Comes back to find a gun in each bloody hand, something pink and puffy and speckled with shards of bone clinging to the fingers of his metal hand. Hair swings into his face, slick and dripping with blood.

Another wave, twelve this time. The gun in his right hand clicks empty after three shots. The gun in his left spits out six before the slide locks. They become projectiles, one crunching into a masked face, another embedding itself halfway through another's head. The last enemy standing goes down fighting, ends up halfway through the wall between the hallway and Clint and Natasha's bedroom.

He improvises, breaking chairs over backs and shoving heads through walls. Gets knives from the kitchen, starts cutting into throats and eyes and guts again. Wonders how many fucking people are left to kill.

Something flies out of the left, blinking blue and he reaches up to bat it away. It hits the palm of his metal hand, and there's a pulse of pressure through him. His arm suddenly goes dead.

He lurches to the side as the arm drops like a rock, off-balance and reeling. Another enemy steps into view, carrying something that looks like a rocket launcher but shoots out a bundle of wires and ropes and dancing sparks that hit him and wrap around him, tangling his arms and legs before washing his awareness away in sheets of snapping white pain.

Toni's going to be so pissed, is his last thought before he goes under.

Comes back to himself an indeterminate amount of time later, trussed up with heavy cuffs and rope, in the back of a van that's moving at highway speeds. There's a bald man wearing a neat, three-piece suit and glasses sitting on a bench near the front, behind the two bucket seats. Two more of those black-clad fuckers are between him and Baldy, holding white poles.

He tries to sit up, but the two do something with the poles, and shove him back down. Belatedly, he realizes they're control nooses, and the nooses are around his throat. His thoughts are slow and hazy, sluggish. He's been drugged enough that he's not going to be able to fight his way free any time soon.

Plus, his arm is still dead. So there's that.

Head pounding, cotton dryness in the back of his throat, pain making itself known all across his body, he settles back down. Settles for a weakly snarled, "Who the fuck are you?"

Baldy watches him with a small smile, hooded eyes. "My name is Jasper Sitwell," he says. "And since your next question will no doubt be something equally vulgar asking where you are or why we captured you, let me cut out all the terribly dull questions and tell you now: you have been apprehended by a SHIELD special operations team, and are on the way to one of our black sites, where you will be held until a list of your very extensive crimes can be compiled."

Bucky's head throbs again. That voice sounds familiar, the cadence and smug fucking way of speaking, but he can't place it. "I'm an American citizen," he says. "I have rights."

"Mass-murdering Russian operatives have no rights," Sitwell replies calmly. "They have cold, lonely cells where they die, unlamented, after years of imprisonment."

"I have rights," he says again, because he can't think of anything else to say. There's a knot of something hard and scalding and furious in his chest. It promises violence and death and it's getting stronger, getting closer. "You can't do this, asshole."

"It's already done," Sitwell says, and sits back with a triumphant smile. "Who's going to stop me?"

Bucky pauses, can't help it, starts to laugh. Laugh until tears are streaming down his face. Laugh until his head is screaming with pain. That ball of fury is so hot now, he feels like it might burn right through his skin.

"Is something amusing you, Barnes?" Sitwell says.

"Yeah," he gets out between wracking guffaws. "Don't they teach you anything in secret agent school? Seriously, lesson one should be never give a superhero a perfect opening cue by asking who's going to stop you."

Because the answer, where he's concerned, is always going to be the sudden shriek of repulsors blasting the back doors off the vehicle, and a pissed-off woman in red and gold power armor hauling her grim, ruthless way inside.