Conclusions manifest
Your first impression's got to be your very best
I see you're full of shit, and that's alright
That's how you play, I guess you'll get through every night
Well now that's over
- Trapt, "Headstrong"

oOoOoOo

Med Lab, Stark Tower
May 4, 2012

It's funny, when he thinks about it, because three months ago, he was a soulless Hydra assassin with no thoughts of his own. And now he's the goddamn adult in charge of the whole asylum, because the head lunatic had the bright idea to hand him top-access codes to the whole place, then got herself all unconscious and heavily medicated with half her body broken, bleeding or bruised.

Sometimes, he misses the ice. After two days of answering questions and authorizing accesses and giving permission for people to start moving in, and dealing with SHIELD via Coulson, in between sitting with his soulmates who are not conveniently placed in the same room, he's more than ready to climb in the chair, have this whole fucking week wiped right out, and curl up for a few years of undisturbed rest.

But he has to do it, because he has Toni's back, fuck his life. He's her soulmate, all official and shit even, and he has to do it because she can't. Toni is still out cold, drugged to the gills with heavy painkillers and serious sedatives, until Helen Cho can get her head out of her ass and fly out from California to fix Toni.

He's being uncharitable, and he knows it. Cho needs equipment transported, is taking the time to ensure it's packed away carefully, crossing her Ts and dotting her Is before making the trip to New York. But the stress is just getting to him. He's not wired for this shit. He's not meant to be a leader. He's the guy who follows right behind the leader. The lieutenant. Damned good at making sure shit gets done, but not the guy who comes up with the plans.

Toni's good at plans. And leading had always been Steve's thing.

Which brings him to Steve.

Steve, Steve, Steve.

Fucking Steve.

Logically, he knows it's not Steve's fault. Just like he logically knows that Toni's physical state after Siberia isn't his fault either. But see, logic isn't playing in Bucky's ballpark right now. Logic isn't even on the game schedule. Logic is way down the line, in the bottom of the league. Right now, Rage is playing Self-Recrimination, and so far, score is tied.

He sighs with his arms folded, looking through the one-way glass into Steve's isolation room. It's supposed to be rated for something called a Hulk - which he assumes is big and strong, from the name - so it's holding Steve just fine while he sweats out whatever chemical cocktail the good docs at Hydra Labs had been loading him with.

Steve's never liked being sick, has to hate it now, since Erskine's experiment was supposed to cure him of ever getting sick again. He should go in, sit with him while he's awake and more-or-less lucid.

And he should tell Steve about Toni.

Or punch him in the mouth for Toni.

One of those two.

Toni'd probably want to do her own punching, though. He keeps forgetting this is a time when the ladies want to look after their own slugging and slapping.

Okay, honestly, he wants to punch Steve for himself.

He should go check on Toni, but it's only a half-hearted attempt to convince himself to leave Steve alone. He knows Toni's got company, lots of it. Company that isn't going to leave her alone. Clint's eyes had been hard and sharp and accusing the last time he looked in on her and found Clint wrapped around her, keeping her warm and comfortable.

It was the kind of look that said, I trusted you to appreciate my friend, but she's had nothing but pain since she chose you. Go away, you're not needed. I'm taking care of her now.

Or maybe that's his own goddamn guilt talking. Bucky doesn't know. He's too goddamn tired to keep track. His enhanced body might be able to stay awake and on his feet for days at a time, but there are some kinds of exhaustion that are beyond its abilities to cure.

Yet here he goes again, taking a deep breath, opening Steve's door, stepping inside. Moving quietly to the chair beside the bed Steve is curled up in, broad shoulders hunched and tall length curled around his stomach.

He sits and pulls his phone out of the pocket of his sweatpants, ties his hair back and plays Angry Birds quietly until Steve's eyes fly open maybe ten minutes later. He knows the routine by now, has seen it enough times to move his legs out of the way as Steve scrambles off the bed and rushes for the bathroom. Moves them again after a prolonged period of muffled retching and spitting to let Steve lie back down, then slouches down in his chair and crosses his ankles on the mattress.

"My head hurts," Steve mumbles.

"That's what happens when you let Hydra dick around with it," Bucky replies, though not without sympathy. He knows better than most people what Steve's going through right now. "Doc says you've got another day or so before all that shit's out of your system. But you're not talkin' to people who aren't there anymore. That's something."

"I'll take your word for it." Steve flops onto his back, and pulls a pillow over his eyes. "I don't really remember a whole lot clearly. I'm not entirely sure I know what happened and what didn't."

"They have these great inventions in the 21st century," Bucky says. "They're called mouths and people use them to ask questions when they aren't sure about things."

It almost feels like it used to, the bantering, the not-quite-flirting. Steve lifts the pillow off his face long enough to glare at Bucky with one baleful blue eye. He stares back, unimpressed, and Steve lets the pillow corner drop again. "How's the woman? Stark, was it? I guess she's Howard's daughter? How is she doing?"

Bucky tries to force himself not to tense, not to react to the shot of rage and fear the goes across him, through him. Tries not to remember the way Toni looked sprawled in blood on the floor, even though he knows that's going to feature in his nightmares for a while. "Toni's a survivor, and her life is kinda… rough. She's bad, but this isn't the worst she's been through. She'll be okay."

He needs to tell Steve. He really needs to tell Steve.

Steve slumps into the bed. "Good," he says, with clear relief. "Good. I… there was a lot of blood. And I…" He looks like he's going to be sick again. "I don't understand any of what's happened, Buck. Everything's jumbled together. And…" He pauses. "I can tell you're angry, but I don't know why."

Bucky really doesn't want to do this. He's not the therapist type. He's not anywhere near stable enough to deal with this. But that's the thing: none of them have ever been stable enough. He's read enough psychology books and articles about shell shock and battle fatigue – what they call post-traumatic stress disorder these days – to know that every single one of his weird family unit could use deep, deep therapy, but they clutch each other and drag themselves through, muddling along until they find something that works.

He knows that, just as Toni and Clint and Natasha made room in their strange co-orbits, they'll make room for Steve. And not just for Toni's sake. For Bucky's too, because he's integrated with them now. He belongs to them, and they belong to him.

It's the first time the thought of him belonging somewhere, having family, hasn't felt strange or wondrous. It's just felt comfortable and right.

"Alright," he says, and leans his head against the back of the chair. "Let's see if we can unjumble it a bit. Ask me something."

Steve sits up, crossing his legs. "Why are you so angry?"

Trust Steve to go right for the question Bucky wants to answer the least. For a long moment, he isn't sure how to answer. Finally, he just sighs and unzips his hoodie, hooks his fingers in the neck of his shirt, and pulls it down to show Toni's soulmark.

Steve's eyes go wide and soft, and his hand lifts off the bed, reaching out but stopping shy of touching. "You found her," he breathes. "You found…" Cuts dead with a strangled noise, like an animal in pain, and Bucky knows he's figured it out. "Oh fuck, no."

"Oh fuck, yes," Bucky says as neutrally as he can, isn't as successful as he wants to be. He zips his hoodie back up.

Steve's hand stays outstretched for a moment, and a fine tremor goes through it. He curls it into a fist, tight and white-knuckled, and carefully puts it back down in his lap. Bucky doesn't need a bond to feel the rage pouring off Steve, never has. But it beats in his breast anyway, deep and cold as ice, counterpoint to his own hot, molten fury.

"How bad is she?" Steve asks tightly. "How badly did I hurt her?"

"Bad enough," Bucky replies. "But she'll be okay." At Steve's burning, pointed look, he sighs. "Stevie…"

"Tell me."

Bucky eyes Steve, sees the set of his jaw, the defiant jut forward, the stubborn frown. Knows Steve's not going to let it go, no matter how much he probably doesn't need the laundry list of how fucked-up Toni is. "Broken shoulder, broken clavicle," he says, and watches every word punch Steve in the teeth. "Broken ankle. Concussion. Her right hand is a mess. Almost every bone is broken in a couple of places. I lost track of the bruises. Probably a couple of cracked ribs. Couple of deep cuts. Lots of little ones. She lost some blood."

"Fucking God," Steve says shakily, and pushes his hands through his hair, holding onto his head for a moment. "How the hell is she going to be okay with all that, Bucky?"

"You don't know Toni yet," he replies. "I'm pretty sure that you beating the shit out of her might make the top ten list of times she's been hospitalized, but it definitely doesn't crack the top five. Number six, maybe."

Steve just stares at him, stricken and sick. "That isn't comforting, Bucky."

Bucky shrugs. "It is to me," he says, smirks a little. "Shoves me down to number seven."

oOoOoOo

Med Lab, Stark Tower
Toni's Room
May 5, 2012

To Toni's eternal astonishment, she wakes up.

And it sucks .

Her head has that foggy, drifting feeling that means she's on some truly epic painkillers. She knows everything hurts, but it's distant and dull, ruthlessly shoved and smothered under a numbing blanket of narcotics and sedatives. Her mind isn't screaming along at warp speed, it's crawling on its hands and knees and stopping to take power naps. It's going to take her days to shake off the fogginess.

But hey, still breathing. She's labeling that a win. Tentatively.

Even though everything hurts, including her eyes when she opens them.

"Ow," she whispers, and it comes out as a creak, because her throat is bone-dry.

"Morning, honey," Clint says from somewhere above and to the left, and his voice is very soft. Something touches her forehead, hard to tell because of how utterly disconnected she is from her own skin, but she thinks it's his fingers. "Sleep well?"

"... hotel sucks," she rasps, and her eyes drift closed again. "Bed's flat. Room s'rvice sucks. Gimme m'money back."

"All the things you broke, and your terrible, inappropriate sense of humor stays intact. Just our luck." His rumbling chuckle sounds very far away. The drugs are creeping up to cloud her brain again, and she starts to sink into it, then remembers and fights her way back with a pained gasp.

"Stop moving, Toni." Clint's voice is edged with unhappy worry, and his fingers stroke her forehead and cheeks. "You gotta stay still. You're pretty banged up. Go back to sleep. Better if you pass out til Dr. Cho's here to fix you up."

"Steve," she gets out, hazy and dreamy. "Bucky. Where..."

His hands go still on her face. "Forget those two assholes," he says, roughly. "Worry about yourself right now, huh?"

"Yeah," she breathes. "Kay." She licks her lips, and it feels like cotton over sandpaper. His hands feel good, remind her of all the times he's been there, remind her of sunlight and beaches and her mansion on the cliffs. She misses it, suddenly, knows it's probably just the drugs, but misses it desperately, because everything was simpler and brighter. She wonders if he misses it too. "Hey… ever wanna go back?"

The light, soothing touches resume. "Go back? Go back where?"

"Malibu. Just me an' you. Before…. everything." She sighs, sinks into the pillows, closes her eyes. Barely notices Clint's soft, choked cry. "Was good. Easier. Ever wanna?"

"Sometimes," he says, and she feels him kiss her forehead, a light pressure she barely senses. "Go back to sleep, Toni. I'll be here when you wake up."

"Kay. M'tired." She doesn't fight it this time, just sinks into the warm, numbing, drugged feeling, and lets the world slip away.

Clint

Toni doesn't hesitate to speak her mind, and it's one of the things Clint really appreciates about her. Neither one of them have patience or the appropriate brain-to-mouth filters for idiots, and sometimes there's nothing he likes better than to just sit with her and see who can come up with the snippiest one-liners. It's fun. It's challenging. It's something he can do with no one else in his life, because no one else has the snark or the weird twist to their sense of humor he and Toni do.

But Toni censors herself far more often than he does. His mouth moves too fast for his brain to catch, whereas her mouth happens to be able to keep up with her brain. He knows there's things she doesn't say sometimes, or things she words more carefully than she thought them. She only speaks the raw, unrefined content of her thoughts when she's under the influence of something. Booze, normally, even if she needs to get into a state of rip-roaring drunk she rarely ever has. But pain meds, he's found out far too frequently for his liking recently, have the same effect on her self-censorship. Toni says exactly what she's thinking, without stopping to pretty it up or tone it down.

Toni's never looked backward and missed it. She might think fondly about something she experienced, and he knows better than anyone that she has regrets, or things she wishes she had done differently, but Toni is firmly eyes-forward, focused on what is to come. The future is what beckons her, not the past. Not once in his earshot has she ever said, I want to go back. And certainly never because it waseasier back then.

He stares down at Toni, lost and pained, her battered face framed in his palms. Wishing for things that were is his wheelhouse, not hers. It stabs something in him, cracks something in him, to hear her wish for simpler times, because that has never been who she is.

"Goddammit, Toni," he says, and his heart is breaking. "You don't deserve any of this."

No great secret to anyone that she's the love of his life, but only if he had to label it. He doesn't usually bother trying to define it, because whoever he's trying to explain it to is just going to spin it their own way anyway. Like Bucky, who still thinks he's just jealous because his presence means Clint doesn't share her bed right now, but it's not about that. It's never been about that.

It's always been about safety and happiness, and there is an alarmingly exponential downward trend of both in Toni's life. A snowball that keeps rolling until it's a fucking avalanche burying her alive, that he has to stand watch happen until she calls for his help. And most of the time, it's fine. He's happy to jump in when she needs. But he can't stand back and watch, not this time. No more. He has limits too.

He's long past them.

Even if it means Toni never speaks to him or trusts him again, he's going to take care of this shit once and for all. Because in the end, it's always been up to him to have her back, even when she thinks she doesn't need protection.

Steve's Room

"... and she gives me this look, like I'd just said the dumbest fuckin' thing she'd ever heard, and says, 'I'm not drunk, and I'm not twelve. I'm not calling you Bucky. I give no fucks how hot you are.'" Bucky grins at the memory as Steve laughs, and tips his chair back on two legs. "She called me James for weeks. Felt like I was back in school and I'd just pissed off one of the nuns."

"Sister Margaret?" Steve says with a tentative smile. "Like that?"

Bucky snorts a laugh. "Jesus, yes. Exactly like that. That unimpressed eyebrow and the way she could drag out your name to mean a hundred things. You're gonna love her, Stevie. Toni's so-"

The door opens without warning, and Clint walks through. Bucky glances over automatically, notes who it is, and is turning back to Steve when the look on Clint's face registers: smooth as stone, strange and distant. He jerks back, rises halfway out of his chair, suddenly certain something's happened to Toni, because Clint wouldn't look like that unless something is terribly wrong. "Clint, is Toni-"

Clint lashes out with a kick, precise and vicious, hits the top of Bucky's chair with enough force to knock it sideways and off-balance, and Bucky goes flailing out of his seat, spilling onto the floor in a sprawling tangle of limbs and a surprised grunt. Steve gets halfway off the bed, alarmed, and Clint cocks his arm back. Bucky has a split second to think dumbass is going to break his fucking hand before Clint's fist impacts in the center of Steve's face… and then Steve is rocking backwards with a sharp bark of pain, hitting the mattress heavily and streaming blood from his mouth and nose.

Bucky scrambles back to his feet, hands fisting at his side, anger flushing through him. "What the fuck, Barton?!"

"Sit. The fuck. Down. Now."

There's a dangerous note in Clint's voice, something final and terrible, that brings Bucky up short. It's the voice of someone so far past their tolerance levels, they're on another planet. The voice of someone he really doesn't want to fuck with, because even with accelerated healing and superior strength, he's got the distinct impression that Clint's beyond caring about his own well-being, and would cheerfully die as long as he takes the two of them out with him.

Bucky sits the fuck down, right next to Steve, who's holding his bleeding face with one broad hand, eyes wide and shocked above the line of his fingers.

Clint pulls something off his fist, tosses it thoughtfully between his hands. Brass knuckles, only made of some duller, thicker, weightier metal than brass or steel. "Adamantium," Clint says calmly, and enunciates every syllable precisely. "Toni made it for me a few years ago. It's not quite as satisfying as hitting you with my bare fist would have been, but I figure there are enough broken bones in this place at the moment."

"What the fuck, Barton?" Bucky says, much more calmly and politely.

Clint points at them both with the first two fingers of his right hand. "You two are going to shut up," he informs them. "I am going to speak, and you are going to listen. Do you understand?"

"Yes," Bucky says warily, echoed nasally by Steve a second later.

Clint doesn't yell, or fist his hands or anything remotely threatening. He simply stands there, staring them both down with calm, hard eyes, and says, "I have officially given my last fuck where you two assholes are concerned. I'm very sorry you were mind-controlled. I'm sure it must have sucked Satan's balls. But this is two for two, and Toni is on the edge of breaking something that can't be fixed. Girl's got a heart the size of the fucking moon, so she's not going to hold anyone but Hydra responsible for what happened. I on the other hand, am not remotely so forgiving.

"So here's your one and only warning: You two will get your shit together and you will fucking keep it together. She deserves far better than either of you will ever be, but you are who she's stuck with. And you will never give her reason to regret it. If I see her in another hospital bed with bruises that match your hands or weapons, I am not going to give a single, merrily-flying fuck about mind control or magic spells or alien shapeshifters from another fucking galaxy. I will kill you, and because you both heal insanely fast, I will do so creatively. Are we clear?"

It isn't a threat, or a promise, or a even a guarantee. It comes out of Clint's mouth ringing with the truth of an immutable law of the universe. And Clint may be an unaugmented, plain, old, vanilla human being, but there is absolutely no doubt in Bucky's mind that Clint will do exactly as he says. "We're crystal," he says.

"Good," Clint says curtly, and leaves as abruptly as he entered.

Bucky takes a long breath, releases it through his nose, rubs the back of his neck. "Jesus. Shoulda seen that coming a mile away."

"I feel like I should be taking him seriously," Steve says, gingerly touching his face. He's already healing, cuts are closed up, but his nose is still swollen and red. "Who the hell was that?"

"Oh yeah," Bucky says, and gets up to get Steve a wet rag for the blood on his face. "That was Clint. And yeah. Yeah, you should definitely take him seriously."