When it's over, we can say 'well done'
But not yet, cos it's only begun
So pick up and follow me, cos we're the only ones
To fight this thing until we've won
Drive on and don't look back
Doesn't mean we can't learn from our past
All the things that we might have done wrong
We coulda been doing this all along
Pillar, "Frontline"
Bro-bonding, apparently. The guys just wouldn't stop talking. Also, Carol is a good bro.
Chapter Warning - Discussion of the aftermath of Toni's time in Afghanistan. Jealousy. Rage. Mentions of violence and aftereffects of Steve's mind-control.
oOoOoOo
Natasha
Quinjet, Atlantic Ocean
May 4, 2012
Even a thousand miles away, Natasha can feel Clint's anger. Their bond has always been stronger for her than it has been for him, stronger and steadier than studies say bonds usually are. It was disquieting at first, in the early days, to feel someone else's unchecked emotions, their raw pain and effervescent joy, sitting beneath her skin like a ball of electricity, but she's come to appreciate it over their time together. Her life has been spent sussing out the deepest truths of her targets, keeping her own reactions under tight control. It's comforting to know that there is one person she never has to try to read, because she knows his shifting moods from moment to moment.
This anger, though. It doesn't feel like his. She knows it is, can feel him in it, the bright flash of his mind laces through it, but it's not anger he's ever had before. It's a quiet, bleeding well as deep as an ocean, as still as a mirror. And that anger, she knows intimately well, because it's hers.
It comes from him, but it's her rage.
She taps a fingernail on the comm console, debating for a moment before inputting Clint's cell number and sending it through. She isn't on strict communications blackout for the operation, but she even if she was, she'd break it for this.
The line is picked up on the first ring. "Hi Nat," he says and sounds perfectly calm and normal.
She checks her flight plan, trajectory, calculates the distance and time it would take her to travel back to New York if he tells her to come home. "What happened?"
He doesn't try to deflect or dissemble, another refreshing trait of his she deeply appreciates. "I knocked Barnes on his ass and punched Rogers in the mouth," he says, collected and matter-of-fact. "And told them that I'd end them if this ever happened again."
She arches an eyebrow, even though he can't see. "Is anything broken?"
"My patience. That's it." He pauses, knows what she's asking. "Remember that thing Toni gave me for my birthday two years back? It came in handy."
Natasha does remember, and she smiles. "And their response?"
"I made myself clear. Barnes understood. Rogers was busy bleeding, so who knows? I'm sure Bucky'll explain it to him if he needs a reminder."
Natasha is torn, because she understands mental conditioning, not being in control of one's own actions, understands that it's not really either of their faults. But she also understands that Toni's frequency of needing medical attention is becoming untenable. If she's being honest with herself, which is harder than it sounds, she's surprised Clint held out this long before snapping. "Will they retaliate?"
"They can try." Dark promise in that statement, and it sends a frisson of fear and arousal down Natasha's spine. "In fact, let them try. One toenail over the line, and I'll grab Toni, and you and I will disappear with her. We're very good at disappearing. They'd never find us."
Natasha lays her hand gently on the edge of the comm, brushing a fingertip along the ring of the speaker. "You'd never do anything that compromises Toni's right of choices," she says, less of a statement of fact and more of a gentle reminder. "Even if that would solve a lot of problems," she adds, after thinking about it for a moment.
"I know," he says, and sighs. The eerie calm drains from his voice, and now he's just plaintive and tired. "Things would be so much easier if I was a goddamn villain, you know. I fucking hate having morals and basic respect for others right now. When are you coming home?"
"A day or so," she says. "Coulson asked me to try and recruit an expert in biochemistry and the various incarnations of the supersoldier project in particular, to help Simmons decipher the Hydra files. Is Toni in the machine yet?"
"Tomorrow, I think. Cho's landing in an hour, and Coulson's arranging transport for her and all her shiny shit. Gonna take her awhile to set up, so I'm guessing it'll be tomorrow afternoon at the earliest."
"I'll try to make it back in time. Keep me updated if something changes."
"Always, darling. I love you."
She smiles, runs her index finger along the rim of the speaker again. "С любовью," she says softly, and cuts the call. She flies in silence for awhile, drawing closer and closer to the Indian coast, thinking about Clint, about Toni, about soulmates in general. Privately, secretly grateful she only ever manifested the one mark, because she has never wanted to share her life that much with anyone.
She doesn't do romance and love and expressions of affection. She prefers loyalty and respect, devotion to hard-forged bonds. Still, she knows that, if it were at all possible to force it into existence, she'd already have given Clint Toni's mark, be wearing Toni's mark herself, and have her comfortable partnership with Clint a full-blown metaphysical triad instead.
She will never act on it, or at least has almost zero intention to ever act on it, but she's gotten this far in life by making plans and having contingencies for even the remotest possibilities stored away in the back of her mind. But if it is necessary, she won't have any compunctions like Clint would. Clint may be bound by morals and respect for self-determination, but Natasha has her own limits to how much she will tolerate. She hasn't reached them yet, but her moral compass is far, far cloudier than her soulmate's could ever be.
She tucks that realization into the back of her mind, lets it simmer on a quiet little burner, just in case she one day needs it. Because there is one Sorcerer Supreme she knows where to find, and failing that, she can go beat answers out of the Sorcerer-King of Latveria.
oOoOoOo
Steve
Gymnasium, Stark Tower
May 5, 2012
In hindsight, Steve is a fucking idiot.
His fist sinks into the heavy bag, denting the thick leather around his knuckles and rocking the whole rig with an alarming creak. Steve ignores it and hits it again, with his other hand, with the same result. It's easy to be angry with himself. He's been running everything he remembers of his time at the Hydra labs through his head for the past hour, near-perfect recall not his friend in this, analyzing every word spoken, every tone used, every nuance he can pull meaning from.
Hydra played him pretty masterfully, though he hates to admit it even to himself. Fennhoff was convincing in his carefully-worded, mild-voiced conversations, knew just what to say to seed doubt and confusion deeper. Manipulated Steve into trusting him, and Steve was too stupid to listen to every instinct that screamed about how wrong things were.
He doesn't understand how they turned another woman into Peggy, let alone hidden his own goddamned soulmarks from him and put a false one on him. Bucky'd shown him the technology, some fine mesh panel that can be programmed to make a person look however they want. It's science-fiction to him, though. It's something that HG Wells or Jules Verne write about in their novels and serials. He's seen it work, both in the security footage taken from Hydra, and on Bucky's own body, changing his artificial arm back and forth between looking metal and looking like flesh. He just can't really believe it's real.
But that's really his problem right now, isn't it? He can't believe any of this is real. It was a long night's sleep to him, one minute crashing into the ice and sinking into the ocean and the next waking up to a brand new world. But it wasn't just a long night's sleep. It was seventy fucking years. It was at least five major wars, twelve Presidents, massive cultural and social evolution in all corners of the world, thousands of technological innovations, millions of new songs and books and movies, new laws, new industries, new everything.
Methodically, he pounds into the bag, every hit a precise blow, every muscle and tendon in perfect control. The bag rocks rhythmically on its chains, rattling softly as it moves back and forth, vague impressions of his fists leaving vague dents that shift as the bag does. If he pretends hard enough, he can almost see Dr. Fennhoff's face silhouetted in the dull shine, and his hits get a little harder.
He feels like he's living in the stories of Edward Page Mitchell, carefully cut from the pages of old copies of The Sun he could find, carefully tied together with leftover pieces of twine and read and re-read on days he was too sick to get out of bed. Cyborgs and mutants and computers that could think like people and flying machines that could go to the moon kept his mind occupied, his hands sketching what his imagination spun with his chewed-up pencils and jealously-hoarded scraps of paper.
He doesn't have to imagine any of it anymore, because everything he read about in his newspaper serials and library books and listened to in radio plays, everything that long-ago Stark Expo promised, all the fantastic tales of futuristic technology are present-day technology. He's lived some of it, he thinks, the time travel and being frozen in time and becoming superhuman and unearthly objects with incredible power. But living it doesn't make it any easier to accept.
He was primed for any explanation that made sense to him, and Hydra provided one. What seems more realistic, Captain Rogers? That you remained youthful and alive for nearly seven decades in Arctic ice until being quite coincidentally found and thawed, or that you are Captain America's successor, who suffered an injury which resulted in memory loss your brain tries to compensate for by creating false memories and fantasy situations?
It had been so logical, so rational, so believable, so fucking stupid of him to fall for it.
And then, they sent him after Toni, knowing who she was, twisting and manipulating and playing with his mind until he was driven to kill, driven to destroy, driven to completely annihilate the one other person besides Bucky who should never, ever have cause to fear him. But they ruined that, made him ruin it, and it's always going to be between them now.
He drives his fist into the bag, snarling with the sudden surge of rage that screams behind his eyes. The thick leather of the bag gives way with a loud, groaning rip, and sand patters fast and furious on the floor. He sighs, closes his eyes, leans his forehead against the cool surface of the bag. Pulls his hand out, sending more sand cascading everywhere. " Fuck ," he says, soft and savage, and reaches for his towel and the bottle of water on the nearby bench
"Rough day?"
On some level, he must have noticed the presence of another person, because he doesn't instinctively prepare to attack. The voice is unexpected, but there's no rush of adrenaline, no honed reactions swinging him around with clenched fists, just a tight, unhappy knot between his shoulderblades.
He spares a glance back, then wipes his face with the towel. It's the blonde woman, the one Bucky said also had a suit of armor Toni made for her. Carol Danvers, Air Force colonel. Drilled-in training wants him to salute, but Steve isn't in the mood for playing military politics today. "I'm fine," he says shortly, and unscrews the cap to the water, gulping it down.
"Clearly," Carol says flatly, moving around to stand in his line of sight. She has an eyebrow up, and her arms are crossed over her chest. "People who are fine punch holes in heavy-duty, impact-resistant, shock-absorbent bags specially engineered for supersoldier strength all the time. Captain, if you're going to lie through your teeth right in my face, at least have the common goddamn courtesy to make it believable."
He sighs, lifts the bottle again and drains it completely without breaking eye contact. "What do you want, Colonel?"
"It's actually pronounced Carol, but I'll give you points for getting it close." Her face softens, her voice grows less sharp. "Dr. Cho is just about ready. Toni's going to be undergoing treatment in a few minutes. I thought I'd come see if you wanted to be there. You know, moral support for both your soulmates?"
He stops to think about it for a minute. He wants to - God, he wants to - but he probably shouldn't. He mulls it over as he gets another bottle of water out of the refrigerator against the wall, is still thinking when he finishes the bottle. "Not sure that's a good idea," he mutters.
Her response is to slap him a glancing blow up the back of his skull. It's not painful, because Carol simply doesn't have the strength to hurt him, but it's startling enough that he says ow simply by reflex. "What was that for?"
"You're starting to wallow," Carol replies. "It's not your turn to wallow. We have a roster drawn up and this is Bucky's time to wallow, since it's his soulmate on the table and all. It's terrible form to just horn in on someone else's scheduled self-pity."
"She's my soulmate too," Steve says automatically, then hears what just came out of his mouth and stops dead, staring blankly at the empty bottle in his hand. Jesus Christ, she's his soulmate, she's injured and about to undergo a medical procedure. So what's he doing down here, feeling sorry for himself?
"Yeah." Carol is smiling. "She is. And it's really nice to hear you admit it. Is that the first time you said it out loud?"
"I… I don't know." He tries to think back, tries to remember if he ever used the words before. Oh. He doesn't think he has. "Yeah. I think so. Why?"
Carol just keeps smiling at him like he said something particularly cute or adorable. "Because when you say it out loud so you can hear it? That's when it hits you, fully and completely, that you have a soulmate. Or two, in your case. You've already bonded with one, so you should know this."
"She's my soulmate," he says again, trying it out, testing the facts. He feels a little stupid with wonder.
Carol sighs and rolls her eyes, then puts her hands on him, spins him around by the shoulders, and gently starts pushing him towards the door. "Let's go, Captain Rogers," she says. "The punching bag's done in, and you've got somewhere else to be."
oOoOoOo
Bucky
Observation Room, Med Labs
He's not handling this well.
He's not about to go off the rails or anything, but he's definitely not handling this well. He hasn't slept in what feels like years, because he's not used to sleeping alone anymore. He's too used to sleeping beside Toni, wrapping around her skin and warmth and vanilla-metal-coffee scent. Too used to drifting off with his nose in her hair, too used to waking up with her legs around his hips. In the grand scheme of things, it hasn't technically been that long, but subjectively it's a goddamn eternity he can't wait to be over.
He slouches back on his chair with a steaming cup of coffee, staring darkly and balefully at Clint, who is sitting on the other end of the row with one foot resting on the rail in front of him, ignoring Bucky like a champ in favor of keeping an eye on Dr. Cho's preparations in the laboratory below. Bucky finds himself reaching for a knife he no longer carries everywhere, has to remind himself that Toni will be very upset if she comes to and Clint's head is missing.
He'd feel better, though.
He doesn't know where to look. Staring off into space just makes him want to slip into the Winter Soldier, let fresh rime crystallize his thoughts, and that's a bad idea with Clint at the other end of the room, because if he goes sociopath, Clint will be dead when he comes out of it. Again, good for him, bad for Toni, so also bad for him. Staring at Clint also makes him want to kill Clint, but with his own bare hands, in hot red rage. And staring down at Toni makes him want to go find Steve and do his best to kill Captain America, for putting them in this position in the first place.
Fuck, he really should have tried harder to sleep. Hovering on the verge of homicide, he thinks, is not an appropriate mindset for watching one's soulmate undergo some vaguely-explained medical procedure that's supposed to cut her healing time to a bare fraction of what it would otherwise have taken. Bucky can smell the experimental qualifier on "treatment" a floor away and through shatterproof glass. It makes him antsy, unsettled, to know that things have been glossed over for his benefit. He settles for closing his eyes and focusing on his coffee. The taste, the smell, the heat. The curve of the cup in his hand. The nearly-silent slurp as he sips it. Tries to ignore the tremor in his hand, the sour taste in the back of his throat.
"I think the worst damage I've ever seen Toni recover from," Clint says unexpectedly, and Bucky starts enough that coffee sloshes over his hand, "has to be the shit she came back from Afghanistan with." His head barely turns, eyes sliding over to Bucky briefly before returning to Toni, unconscious on the bed below them. "I thought she was fucking dead when we found her. She's always been curvy, you know? Hips that…" His hands trace a shape in the air, outlining generous curves, then fall into his lap. "She never fell into that ideal weight bullshit. Never ordered salad when what she wanted was steak. Didn't guilt herself when she wanted cheesecake or ice cream or donuts for breakfast. She didn't have the habit of skipping meals for days at a time because science, Clint." He breaks off, clears his throat, rubs his forehead with one hand, bridges that hand over his nose and squeezes his eyes with thumb and middle finger. Looks suddenly as wrecked as Bucky feels. "Shit. Sorry," he mumbles. "Got sidetracked. Where was I?"
Bucky has absolutely no fucking idea of where he's going with this. He has a notion that Clint's trying to be reassuring, but it's apparently backfiring on him. "Afghanistan," he says neutrally.
"Right. So. I thought she was fucking dead, man. She was in a bad, bad way. Every bit of body fat, every single curve, and a lot of her muscle tone was just gone. They fed her bare minimum, and shit food at that. She was sick most of the time in that fucking cave, too. And she had the reactor in her chest. I mean, I honestly thought she was going to die in the evac chopper. But she held on until we got her to Ramstein Air Base. Took four weeks of constant IV nutrients to begin unfucking the damage. Nearly a year before she was anywhere near herself again." Clint's looking down at Toni again. "That was bad," he says quietly. "This is fucking nothing. A week or two, tops, and she'll be completely fine."
The dregs of Bucky's coffee are sour on his tongue, but he swallows it down anyway. "Ever wonder if the universe should have tied her to you instead of us?" Shit, he really hadn't meant to ask that. He really should have fucking slept.
Clint side-eyes him again, and just laughs, humor tinged with bitterness. "Jesus fucking Christ, Barnes. Stop trying to understand what you clearly can't wrap your head around. I don't need her mark on me to know with perfect fucking certainty that when the world is burning down, we'll be standing back-to-back fighting to the end. Just..." He sighs, and both the humor and the anger dissipate. "Just let it the fuck go already. I'm not a threat unless you make me one. You keep gnawing at it like this, and the only one you're going to hurt is Toni."
"Yeah," Bucky says quietly. Because as much as he hates to admit it, the little shit is right. It's long past time he stopped worrying about this, because the only one who's making it an issue is him. "Yeah, okay." Eyes Clint critically for a moment, then gets up, shifts down a few seats, and holds out his fist sideways. Says more firmly, "Yeah, okay. We're good, man."
"Awesome." Clint grins faintly, bumps his fist against Bucky's. "I will, of course," he adds, "still kill you if you fuck it up."
Bucky smirks. "I'd expect nothing less."
-0-0-0-0-
Carol files in, nudging Steve along, and Bucky assesses him with a long, appraising look. He's got an expression of dazed wonder on his face, like someone cracked him over the head with his own shield and he's not sure how it happened. Carol steers him to the chair next to Bucky, and pats Steve on the shoulder before quietly leaving again.
Steve leans forward, all but off his chair, looking over the rail at Doctor Cho moving around Toni, ashen and still unconscious, adjusting leads and electrodes with delicate precision. His whole body is thrumming with tension, and a muscle in his jaw keeps jumping.
"You...okay there, Stevie?" Bucky asks warily. "You're lookin' kinda… off."
"Yeah." He inhales through his nose. Lets it out with a small, tight smile, turns eyes just a little too blue, a little too wild towards Bucky. Ferocity boils just beneath their surface, strange and unnerving. "Just all kind of... hitting me at once. You and me and..." He nods towards Toni. " Her." The word comes out breathless.
Bucky puts a hand out, rests it on Steve's shoulder, freezes when he realizes it's the cybernetic one, because Steve's been kind of weird about it, about touches in general, for that matter, since he woke up in the isolation room. But Steve appears not to notice, until he sways towards Bucky, shifting in so they're pressed together, shoulder to hip. Bucky's arm slides automatically around Steve's shoulders, and before he can stop himself and pull his arm back, Steve catches his wrist in a circle of fingers, holding him gently but firmly in place.
Bucky's breath hitches, because Steve's other arm is circling his ribs, hand settling around his hip. It's been so long, too long, since he'd hadthis touch, this easy affection, from Steve. He slumps against Steve, and if he was the sort to burst into tears, he would, just from the sudden, sure knowledge that he's not carrying everything on his own anymore, because Steve's back where he should be.
Jesus Christ, even my head is rambling. I need to fuckin' sleep.
Steve exhales, and his head tilts towards Bucky's, until it's resting against his temple. "They tried to make me kill her," he says, and his voice is shaky, rough, angry. "Jesus, look at her. They used me to do all that damage."
"They sure did," Clint drawls. Bucky'd forgotten he was there, jumps a little, head jerking in his direction. Clint's got his arms folded across his chest, feet pushing on the rail, chair tipped on two legs. "So what're you gonna do about it, Rogers?"
Steve takes a long, deep breath and lets it out like a man coming to a decision. "I'm going to kill them all," he says, matter-of-fact. Water is wet, the sky is blue, Steve Rogers will destroy Hydra.
Bucky inhales, quick and sharp. "Get in line," he says in the same tone, off-handed and firm, and Steve's arm around his back tightens approvingly.
Clint snorts, and the legs of his chair bang down on the floor as he drops his feet from the rail. "No need to fight over who gets to go first," he says. "I'm sure there'll be more than enough goons for everyone to have their fun."
