Send a heartbeat to
The void that cries through you
The pale princess of a palace cracked
And now the kingdom comes
The world is lost and blown
And we are flesh and blood disintegrate
In your darkest hour, I hold secrets flame
We can watch the world devoured in its pain

Smashing Pumpkins, "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning"*
*lyrics as arranged for the Watchmen trailer

Notes:

Well, this was a harder chapter to write than I thought it would be. Not a whole lot of action, but other things occur, including the following:

Chapter Warnings - PTSD, anxiety attacks, polyamory negotiations, a partial breakdown that's been a long, long time coming. Friends telling each other harsh truths. There is angst in this chapter.

(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)

oOoOoOo

Med Labs, Treatment Floor
May 5, 2012

When Toni wakes again, the pain is different. The sharp, stabbing knives in her side, shoulder and hand have faded into itches and twinges, replaced by a deep, throbbing ache in her bones, and a horrible hollowness in her stomach. She opens her eyes, squinting in the bright light above, and a shadow falls on her face. Toni blinks up to see Helen Cho leaning over her, with an apologetic smile.

"Sorry, Toni," Helen says, and adjusts something above Toni's head. "You're past the point where the nanites are cleansing your blood. They've probably neutralized the painkillers and sedatives now."

"Oh goodie," she says, and her voice is only a little raspy. "I get to be awake for the really good parts. Sometimes, Helen, I think you're a closet sadist." She closes her eyes and settles back against the biobed. "How many colonies did you inject?"

"Three in your shoulder," Helen says. "Two in your ankle. Four in your chest. One for each rib your fractured. Three free-moving colonies in your bloodstream seeking infections and repairing circulatory damage." She pauses, then adds, "Six in your right hand and wrist."

Toni blinks her eyes open again, wincing at the feeling of red-hot needles sporadically stabbing her insides. "Jesus. Really? That's not overkill?"

Helen gives her a small smile. "There's a lot of delicate work to be done there. It was a judgement call. I assumed you'd want your complete flexibility and dexterity back."

"You assumed correctly," Toni replies, still trying to process exactly how damaged her hand had to be to warrant that many nanites swarming around to repair things. "Six colonies. Fuck." She shifts her head a little, scanning for any of the screen feeds she knows Helen's got running, but the angle is completely wrong. "How's it going?"

"Another five minutes or so, and the initial work is done. I've programmed a 60% die-off for the twelve-hour mark, and an additional five percent per additional twenty-four hours until the colonies are extinct."

"Neat," she says. "I've always wanted to be a self-contained apocalypse."

Helen smiles back. "If you ask the peanut gallery, I'd say you have that locked down already."

Toni raises an eyebrow questioningly, and Helen points upwards. Toni follows the line of the gesture, to where the observation area is recessed into the upper walls. Clint and Bucky and Steve are visible just over the rails on one side. Coulson and FitzSimmons are standing in the middle, with Carol, Rhodey and Pepper on the other side. "Great," she says, though she tosses off a jaunty tip of her fingers as a wave. "If only Tash was there. I could get all my disappointed looks with over at once. Wait, why is Pepper here?"

"She flew in with me last night," Helen says. "She's here to keep an eye on you, and make sure you listen to me when I say that this process is going to use up a lot of your body's resources, so you're going to have to take it easy for a couple of weeks. Food, rest, all the stuff you really hate the most. Speaking of which, are you hungry? You're probably feeling the effects already."

If a herd of wildebeest suddenly stampeded through the lab, Toni would eat six of them raw, horns and hooves and all. "Is that what that is? I thought it was a black hole in my stomach."

By the time the hum of the cradle shuts off, Toni's sitting up and drinking her second bottle of Helen Cho's nutrient-bomb concoction, which she is told contains about five times the daily recommended intake of all nutrients and proteins. It's thick and green and tastes like it was brewed in Toni's workshop mini-fridge, the one with the semi-sentient Chinese takeout. But she drinks them, because the first bottle takes the edge off the hunger, and the second reduces it down from starvation pangs to a feeling of hey, I could probably eat.

She gives the empty bottle a look of extreme distaste as she sets it back down on the edge of the bed. "That," she says, "is the most disgusting thing I have ever drank, and I have had more than my share of ambiguously-aged workshop coffee."

"Well," Helen says, and begins to disconnect the leads trailing from the sides of the cradle to the sticky pads dotted all over Toni's body. "You're going to have to get used to it, I'm afraid. You need at least one every thirty minutes or so until the mass die-off hits early tomorrow morning. Human beings aren't meant to heal this fast, Toni. The nanites need raw materials, and this is the best way to make sure you have them available."

"That's it," Toni says sourly, trying to scrape the taste off her teeth with a bottle of water Helen hands her, "appeal to my love of efficiency. Pepper's been teaching you her tricks."

Helen grins. "We do get along rather well," she says, and there's a note in her voice, something in her face, that tips Toni off.

She waggles a finger at Helen. "Oh my god ," she says, grinning widely. "You're her soulmate." When Helen twitches ever so slightly, she knows she guessed right. And she turns to point up at Pepper with the smuggest, most obnoxious smirk she can dredge up at the moment. Pepper sears her with a look of blistering disdain, then disappears from the window.

"Uh oh," Toni says, and can't stop grinning. "I'm in for it now. Ow! Hey!" She rubs the stinging spot on her collarbone where Helen just ripped one of the electrode pads off her skin. "Sadist," she mutters with a glare.

"Sorry," Helen says, not sounding sorry in the slightest, and reaches for the next one, relentless around Toni trying to dodge away. "Some of these are on pretty well. Hold still, this might hurt."

-o-o-o-o-o-

Pepper shoves another bottle of the world's worst energy drinks into her hands after cracking the top. Toni makes a face, but doesn't argue, because she's still got a hollow, gnawing feeling in her stomach that she'd really like to not get worse. She drains it as quickly as she can, trying not to notice the taste and failing completely.

Pepper, nonplussed, has a bottle of water ready when the protein shake from hell is gone. Toni all but snatches it out of her hand and drains that too.

Pepper crosses her arms. "How much longer are you going to do this, Toni?" she asks archly.

Toni glances up at the observation area, but no one's visible. With a sigh, she slumps, rubs her temples. The nanites are doing their work, but her whole body is a mess of dull aches and fiery itching. "I do a lot of things more or less constantly, Pep," she says tiredly. "Would you mind narrowing it down a little?"

"Toni…" Pepper's voice softens in a way Toni never likes to hear it go. "Toni, we've been friends for a long time now. And you know I would help you with anything. I really would."

Toni's been expecting this conversation for some time now, and she closes her eyes, because she knows what's coming. "But..?"

"But it's really hard on us to see you like this," Pepper says, still in that soft tone, and it sounds like she's on the verge of tears on top of it. "Not to mention what it does to our stocks. I know you don't really care about those, Toni, but I do. It's why you hired me in the first place, to care about the things that you pathologically can't find interest in. And I am very good at my job, Toni. Very good."

"Don't sell yourself too much, Pepper," Toni says. "I'll be tempted to make you CEO of SI as well."

She's rewarded by Pepper's most withering look, the one that scares her straight down to her toes. "Don't," she says, and the soft tone is gone now. It's all hard and unmoving, the Big Boss Pepper voice Toni usually prefers to see used on obstinate board members because it always makes that person quail and quake. "Because I'd take the promotion, Toni, and I'd fire you from every position you hold."

Toni blinks, rapidly, a lot. "Uh... " She and Pepper have had a couple of variations on this argument for some time now, but she's never threatened to remove her from her own companies. "You can't do that?" But she's not really eager to find out if Pepper actually can or can't. "You know what? I'm done talking about me. Let's talk about you. And Helen. Cos wow, Pep. What ever happened to your hardcore 'I don't care if I ever meet my soulmate, I'm too busy to bond with them' attitude?"

"Helen's perfectly understanding about the demands on my time, because she has her own," Pepper says evenly, and crosses her arms again. "And then there's the added bonus of not having her beat the living hell out of me the first time we met."

Toni flinches violently, almost like Pepper physically hit her, and her eyes are suddenly hot and burning. "Jesus, Pepper," she whispers, and her voice quavers, chokes. She puts a hand over her face, tries to reach for outrage and indignation, but doesn't find them. "Fucking hell , that wasn't called for."

"Wasn't it?" Pepper continues, relentless. "You've been nearly killed four times by my count in the last four months, and I know they weren't in their right minds at the time, but they're still the reason that happened. I understand if you feel that it was still worth it, but from where I'm standing, it doesn't look anything at all like that."

"It's not anything like that, Pepper," Toni says. "It… they're…"

"It was bad enough enough when it was just Clint," Pepper continues, as if Toni hadn't just spoken. "But at least I knew he had your back. Even Natasha, once she lost the distrust, that was fine too. But ever since Fury gave you those files of your father's two years ago, and you found your red star…" She lifts her hands in a defeated, helpless gesture. "It's been one mission after another. And yes, you found him, and I'm happy for you. I really am. But your heart stopped, Toni. And now this, with Steve? How much more are you going to take? How many more times are you going to halfway kill yourself before it's enough for you?"

She will not cry. She is not going to cry. "Why are you doing this, Pepper?" she says.

Pepper's arms slip around her, and her embrace is fierce. "Because one of those things you hired me to care about," she says gently, "the ones you are incapable of caring about, is your well-being."

oOoOoOo

Helen releases her after performing a few basic tests to check her pain and functional range, but privately Toni thinks Helen's just looking for an excuse to get Pepper alone. She grins knowingly at Helen as she leaves, winks salaciously at Pepper, and blithely ignores Pepper's return glare.

All that disappears when she leaves the medical lab, every falsely cheerful thought, every jocular wink, folds away and tucks neatly inward into their bottles and boxes in the back of Toni's mind. God, Pepper must really be wrapped up in Helen if she never noticed Toni's media smile. She wraps her arms around herself and walks with her head down, lost in thought.

It'd be nice if it were easy to shrug off Pepper's little chat, but something about those words are sticking in her head, ringing around with a hundred other miniature truths Pepper's spoken over the years. It's pretty clear that Pepper thinks she has a death wish. Toni doesn't think she does, because she has no intention of dying until she's old and grey and has conquered the world through technological superiority, but Pepper's rarely wrong about something as huge as that.

"Ma'am?"

She jumps in surprise, head jerking up. "JARVIS? Whatcha need, kiddo?"

"Nothing in particular, ma'am. I apologize if I startled you. I simply wished to express my relief and gratification that you are doing well."

She laughs, but there's only a little humor in it. "I dunno about 'well', J, but I'm at least standing, and that counts for something, right?"

"Indeed, ma'am. Welcome back."

"Thanks, J." She eyes the corridor, debates for a second. "Hey, out of curiosity, where is everyone? I figure they'd have all swarmed me by now."

"Miss Potts expressed her desire that you be given space while in the Cradle, ma'am. She was quite intimidating. Per your standing directives, whenever someone successfully frightens Natasha, I have archived a recording of the event for you to watch at your convenience. They have instead gathered in the den to celebrate your felicitous return from injury."

She closes her eyes briefly. God, spare her from the horrors of socializing right now. She's so not in the mood. "Surprise party, huh? You don't usually ruin those."

JARVIS's voice softens just a little. "You do not seem to be in a mindset that allows for enjoyable surprise, ma'am. It goes against my directives to not attempt to prevent more discomfort."

Goddammit. Pepper couldn't make her cry, but JARVIS just might. "Thanks, J. I love you too." She runs her hands through her hair, making a face at the tangles her fingers catch on. Christ, she's got to pull herself together and go mingle with a room of superspies and government agents and people with metaphysical connections to her soul, and somehow convince them all that she's perfectly okay and happy to be amongst them, when all she wants to do is curl up in her bed and sleep for a month.

"Okay, Stark," she says to herself, shaking back her hair and squaring her shoulders. "You once convinced an entire roster of calendar models to join you and Barton in defacing an Italian landmark with booze and nudity. You can convince a room full of the people who know you the best that you are perfectly business as usual."

oOoOoOo

Steve
Community Den

Steve would rather not have come to Toni's impromptu surprise party, because it seems a little disingenuous for the person who hurt her help celebrate her return from serious injury. But Bucky is a terrible nag, and he recruited Carol and Agent Coulson to help him make sure Steve made it into the den instead of slipping off to … not hide, exactly, because Captain America never hides. He might have preferred a tactical retreat to his room instead of sitting in a chair with people who he's pretty sure hate him.

But somehow, despite being stronger, faster and more tactically-experienced than all of them, he finds himself herded, neatly and expertly, by a double-team of Carol and Coulson, who distract him with a sales pitch for the Avengers Initiative and questions about aerial tactics to use in tandem with other aerial fighters, bouncing his attention back and forth between them until his goddamn head is spinning. The next thing he knows, he is sitting in a chair on the far side of the den with an unopened beer in one hand and Bucky on the arm of the chair, his feet firmly pressing Steve's knees down.

Some genius tactician he turned out to be. Maybe he should return the shield and hang up the tights.

He still thinks his being here is a terrible idea, but there's an entire room full of people who are more or less going to insist he stay as well, so his goal for the night has shifted from not being here at all to drawing as little attention as he can.

Most of the others seem inclined to leave him alone, which suits him fine. He's not an unsociable kind of guy, he normally loves talking to people and getting to know them, and this seems like a fine group. But the anger churning in his gut is a constant companion, one he has tenuous control over. Half the time, he feels like a bomb ticking down with indecipherable numbers, like he should be treated gingerly and with an eye to getting out of the way for the inevitable explosion.

He's just not in the mood to do anything but stare out a window and try to see the city he remembers in the skyline he no longer knows. Maybe punch a few heavy bags into submission. And… if he's being as honest with himself as he usually is, he's also a little worried that he's going to see Toni's face, and all the conditioning is going to come roaring back.

It might be irrational, because he's seen Toni since, but always from a distance, always with glass and bodies between them. He has no idea how he's going to react to seeing her awake and in arm's reach.

A muted cheer goes up from across the room, and Steve automatically looks towards the noise. Rhodes is hunched over in front of the open door, which confuses Steve for a moment until a pair of pale hands come awkwardly around Rhodes' back to pat his shoulder.

Anxiety chews on his nerves. Toni's here.

Rhodes steps back, and Steve gets a good look at her for the first time since he tried to kill her. She's pale, too pale, and the shadows under her eyes are as dark as fresh bruises. She's smiling and happy, but Steve's pretty sure it's all for show. He's never been much of an actor - the dancing monkey routine for the war bonds tours proved that to just about everyone - but he doesn't have to be a great performer to recognize a complete fiction when he sees it. Just like he doesn't need the feeling of being overwhelmed and anxious fluttering through his chest like a dying hummingbird to know that Toni wants to be here as little as he does. Doesn't need to put a hand on Bucky's thigh to know that his soulmate is thrumming with tension because he feels it too.

Across the room, Toni's head lifts away from her conversation with the curly-haired kid and turn towards them. Maybe she's drawn by the sudden surge in apprehension from them both, maybe she's just looking around for Bucky or him. But it doesn't really matter in the end why she looks at them, only that she does.

Steve's a romantic at heart. He likes stories with happy endings. He likes grand gestures of affection. Poetry. Fanciness. It should be like a fairy tale, a feeling of belonging and completion, a drawing-together of what God has set down. Like it was with Bucky, all those years ago. And for a moment, he has hope. Hope that maybe the potential for bonding between them will be enough to get them through the horror, past the pain.

But his eyes meet hers, and see nothing but fear.

It's only there for a second, but it's battering around his chest under the blue circle, and he knows he didn't imagine it. She smiles at him, at them, but he knows that's false too. The bottom drops out of his stomach, and for a minute or two, all he can hear is the pounding of his pulse in his temples. All he can feel is the desire to retreat to the gym and smash through a few dozen reinforced bags.

He sets his still-unopened now-warm beer on the table in front of him with a resolute clink, and pushes Bucky's feet off his legs.

"Stevie," Bucky says. "You're seriously gonna run from this?"

"I'm sorry, Buck," he mutters, jaw clenching with the effort to control his temper. No one at here is at fault, no one here deserves to be beaten to a pulp. He's saving all that for Hydra. "I just can't do this right now."

When he stands, she flinches involuntarily, and he reels back like she slapped him. For a long moment, punctuated by deadly, uncomfortable silence as conversations die away, Toni and Steve just stare at each other, wide eyed and holding their breath.

Toni's the first to move. She takes a single, hesitant step towards him, lifting a hand to hold out towards him. And all of that might have saved the situation, if only he couldn't see how badly her hand is trembling. If only he couldn't feel her panic. If only he didn't know that if she let her inner reaction come out of her mouth, she'd be screaming her head off in terror.

I stripped her of her most powerful protections, Steve thinks with a sardonic twist to his mouth, and his hands are white-knuckled fists at his side. I invaded her home, terrorized her, made her feel unsafe and hunted. Hydra may be responsible, but it isn't them that has to suffer for it, is it?

Captain America may not run from his problems, but Steve Rogers apparently does. Without another word to Bucky, without even acknowledging Toni further, he pushes past the small group of people, who part before him wordlessly. In the twenty seconds it takes him to reach the elevator, he's wheezing like an old man, despite having not exhausted himself.

He catches a glimpse of Toni and Bucky as the elevator doors close. Bucky is stricken and upset. Toni's face is still white and her eyes are huge, but he sees relief in them. Relief that he's leaving. Relief that their official meeting as soulmates is pushed off until another time.

"Fuck," he breathes, leaning against the wall of the elevator with the side of his arm, his face pressed against the other side of his arm. The panic in his chest is gone, and the doubled star is quiet. There has to be a way to fix this, he thinks, but he'll be damned if he can come up with it right now.

-o-o-o-o-o-

The first night, Toni doesn't go to bed at all, and for a good reason, which has several parts. The first part is that she's been pumped full of nanites who are constantly swirling her body, repairing any and all damage they can find, including the daily wear and tear her body undergoes. The second part is that she has to take a drink every twenty or thirty minutes or she might end up getting eaten away by the nanites - even though that can't happen, the nanites are programmed to slow down as reserves and resources dwindle, but Bucky doesn't know that. The third part is her need to take stock of the damage that's been done to the building. Easier if she thinks about it that way too, the building, because that way, it might be any building and not her home, her sanctum, her safe place that no longer feels quite as safe.

And the fourth, and probably the most painful, thing is she needs to start designing another set of armor. Many sets of armor, in fact, since the STRIKE attack left her with nothing except salvage and scrap.

Bucky just looks at her dubiously as she finishes listing off all her excuses, and she kind of hates that he's only known her for a few months, and yet knows her so well. His mouth tightens into a thin line of unhappiness, but blessedly, he chooses not to press the issue. "Alright, Toni," is all he says. "If you gotta do this, then you gotta do it."

She leans up on her tiptoes and kisses him sweetly, trying to salve the faint hurt and deep confusion she can see in the furrow of his forehead. "Seriously, honey, I'm not going to be able to sleep tonight, so I may as well capitalize on the time to take care of a few things."

He hesitates, tilts his head at her, gaze dark and far away for a moment. She's pretty sure she knows what he's going to ask, and she has a perfectly genuine smile ready for him when he does. "You mind if I bunk in with Stevie?"

"No," she says, and she's a little surprised at how honest that answer really is. "No, James. It's been, what, eighty years or so for you two? Go. Be with him. I'll be fine."

"If you're sure," he says, still frowning at her.

"I'm sure," she says, and slides a palm across his cheek. "Go on, Bucky. I've got JARVIS and if Fitz is half the engineer his degrees and patents suggest, he'll be along before too much longer to give me a hand."

"Okay," he says, but keeps looking back over his shoulder at her, standing in the workshop doorway, as he walks down the hall.

It starts being not okay when Bucky brings her breakfast the next day, to find her sitting at her main work station staring blankly at what is clearly, even to him, only partially finished schematics for Iron Maiden armor, the last edit of which is auto-logged at four hours ago, and her workshop is covered in scrap metal and scorch marks.

"Just a technical malfunction," she says absently as she picks at her bacon and coffee, with the hand still wearing the repulsor rig.

-o-o-o-o-o-

It grows less okay the third day, when Bucky realizes that Toni hasn't spent more than a consecutive hour with them. He's been a bit wrapped up in trying to help Steve acclimate to the future to see it before now, but that's no excuse and he knows it. He should have noticed that she's quiet and pale, picking at her food and contributing minimal participation in their conversations.

When he asks her if she's okay, she blinks at him once or twice and says, "Yeah. I'm okay. The nanites are still in the process of shutting down and flushing out of my system. It's a little tiring, that's all."

He doesn't notice until later that she never looks at Steve directly, always in her peripheral, He doesn't notice until much later that she doesn't come to bed at all, just works quietly on the couch with her StarkPad before slipping out in the middle of the night.

-o-o-o-o-o-

It stops being okay late in the evening on day five, when Steve comes back from the gym, fuming and frustrated, with his hands covered in the blood-streaked innards of yet another supersoldier punching bag, and a hole that looks suspiciously like a repulsor blast in his shirt.

Bucky puts his tablet down as Steve moves past into the kitchen. "So talking to Toni went well then, I take it?" he calls after Steve, and is rewarded by the sound of a door slamming further in the suite. Bucky isn't sure when it happened, but somewhere along the line, he became the functional adult in this fucked-up back and forth. the three of them seem have have sunken into. He slides his head between his palms, locking his fingers on the back of his neck, and just breathes for a few moments. Then he sighs and scrubs his face. "Okay," he says softly. "Alright. I've had it. Goddammit, enough is enough."

oOoOoOo

Toni's Workshop

It's Toni's angry music that thumps down the hall at him, the stuff that's all screaming lyrics and screeching guitars and pounding bass. It's all noise to him, but the last time he told her that, she called him a fuddy-duddy and tried to lock him out of her lab. She tends to forget that she can't do that to him.

Most days, he respects the do-not-disturb vibe coming off her locked workshop, but today is not one of those days. "Lemme in, J," he says, after trying the handle and finding it immovable.

"Of course, sir," JARVIS says immediately, and there's a click that he feels in the bar in his hand.

Just as he's pushing down on the handle, he pauses. "J, how long's it been since Toni slept?"

"Ma'am has not slept in twenty nine hours, fourteen minutes. She slept for two hours, six minutes. Prior to her 'power nap', ma'am had been awake for thirty-eight hours, forty-five minutes. I anticipate your next question to be regarding her eating habits, sir. Ma'am has not had a substantive meal in three days, eighteen hours, and has been relying on Doctor Cho's nutrition supplements to fuel herself."

"I'm going to be hauling that woman out of the rabbit hole for the rest of my goddamn life," he grumbles under his breath. "Thanks, J."

"Of course, sir."

He pushes open the door and strides in, expecting to find… he's not sure what he was expecting to find. Toni up to her elbows in an engine, stress-welding, maybe. Floating holographic schematics for Iron Maiden suits, certainly. But not this.

Toni's sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by physical blueprints and holographic sketches, intently watching one screen that shows security footage of black-clad raiders, her hands buried in the blue-glowing guts of a 3D model of what looks like a turret.

"Kill the music, J."

" Really not in the mood, Barnes," Toni says in the silence after the music stops, and swipes the video she's watching backwards.

"Funny, me either." Bucky crosses his arms. "I wanna know why you shot at Steve, Toni."

"I wanna know why Steve can't bother asking me if I want to talk instead of creeping the fuck up on me all the time." She spares him a single, withering glance before returning her attention to her schematics. "Looks like we're both out of luck."

Bucky sighs, crouches beside her, tries a different tactic and reaches out to smooth a wayward lock of hair back behind her ear with his fingers. "Toni, c'mon. Talk to me. Tell me what's going on."

For a moment, she keeps the mutinous look, then slowly takes her hands out of the turret schematic, and slumps. One hand flicks at the air, and the video of the STRIKE agents hanging frozen in the air screels through scenes too rapid for his eye to catch. With a quick flick and twist of her wrist, Toni stops the video, flicks her fingers to start playing it, and throws her hand up, splayed in the air.

The window balloons up to nearly life-size. Steve, with the shield, frozen in mid-leap, his face a rictus of hate, jumping at Iron Maiden, who has her hands up and is falling backwards.

Toni flicks her fingers again, and the picture jumps. Steve's standing on Iron Maiden, the chest peeled and torn away in chunks, the shield raised again Toni, barely visible under the broken armor, one wide blue eye shocked and terrified. Tiny hesitation, then another flick. Toni, bleeding and dazed, crouching in front of him. Hope warring with despair, head tilted towards him. Steve, in the middle of shaking his head, still angry, still murderous.

Bucky's on his ass without being aware of sitting. Mutely, he just reaches out and hauls her into his lap, wraps his arms around her, and holds her until he can find the words to tell JARVIS to shut off the damn holoscreens.

"I'm so tired," she says brokenly.

He runs a hand through her hair, gently loosening the tangles with his fingers. "You need to sleep, sweetheart," he says softly. "Doc Cho said as much. Food and sleep. You're getting the first, sorta, but not the second."

She stares at him, and it hurts to see how washed-out that brilliant, sparkling blue has gotten. "I'm trying," she says. "I'm really trying, James."

"Shh, I know." He pulls her close in a one-armed embrace, presses his lips to her temple. "But you can't do it right now. It's okay. I understand. Come to bed, huh? Let me look after you. Let us look after you."

"No. I can't. I…" Her shoulders are trembling under his arm, and she scrubs her face against his collarbone. "I can't not see it, every time, Bucky," she says hoarsely. "You were different. You just… they sent you to defend the Zima Station against an intruder. Him… they sent him to kill me.They didn't say go get the Winter Soldier and kill whoever gets in your way. They told him to specifically kill me, Toni Stark, said Iron Man killed your wife, so you need to kill her back and that…" Her voice breaks and her hands fist tight in the material of his shirt at his waist, and he holds her as she sobs into his chest.

Hot, boiling anger tries to rise, but he squashes it down without hesitation. Pulls a little bit on the Winter Soldier as he rubs her back gently, discipline and ice to temper raw aggression and fury. He bottles it all away, and puts it on the mental shelf labeled Open When Coulson Says Green. He's saving it all until Hydra's in his scope.

"He's so angry all the time," Toni says miserably, swiping her eyes with her wrist. "I can feel it, and it gets stronger when he looks at me. And I know he's not angry with me, but all I can think about is how his face looked when he was ripping my armor to pieces around me. I'm trying, Bucky. I'm fucking trying, but I can't… I can't figure out how to separate it all out. I don't know how to fix it."

Bucky would like nothing more than to gear up and go find the nearest fully-staffed Hydra base, and lay waste to every brick, every circuit, every piece of flesh and bone he can find inside the walls. That isn't an option at the moment, so he just stands, and holds her, until she cries herself out. When her breathing changes from hitching inhales to smooth, even breaths, he gets his legs under him and lifts her up in a bridal carry. He can't run, he can't go destroy things, so he's just left with what he can do here and now. Which is… what, exactly?

Bring her back to sleep with him and Steve? Not an option, because she's still hurting from Steve's time under Hydra control. It might work for tonight, but he doesn't want her to have another panic attack in the morning when she realizes where she is. He could leave her and trust that she'll sleep on her own, but that clearly hasn't been working. He could leave Steve and sleep with Toni, but then Steve's nightmares will have them all awake again anyway, and he'd be right back at square one.

"Fuck," he breathes. Well, that just leaves one option then, an option that even two weeks ago, he wouldn't have ever considered, but is somewhat surprised to discover that he doesn't mind even a little anymore.

Decision made, he hitches Toni more securely in his arms and starts walking.

-o-o-o-o-o-

"Wake up, sweetheart. I know I was just yellin' at you to sleep, but this is something you need to wake up for."

Toni opens her eyes, and Bucky smiles down at her as he gently sets her on her feet. She clings to him for a moment for support as she gets her feet under her, then blearily looks around. It's probably a sign, he thinks, of just how deep in sleep debt she is when it takes her a good ten seconds to realize where they are.

"What's… going on?"

He catches her chin gently and turns her head towards him. Kisses her soft and sweet and tender. "So here's the thing," he says, and rests his forehead against hers. "I don't own you, and I was an asshole to act like I do. So go on. Go where you feel safe, huh?"

She pulls back, eyes him skeptically. He can't really blame her. "Why?"

He shrugs. "You shouldn't have to change who you are for me. He, they make you happy. Who'm I to get in the way of that? I'm not threatened, not anymore, anyway. Either I trust you, or I'm an insecure jackass. Kinda tired of being the last one."

She's still hesitating. "Steve…"

"-isn't really your problem right now." Bucky reaches out to smooth back her hair from her face. "Yeah, he's got your mark, but that's it. Right now, he's got no hold on you. If I've got my etiquette correct, you need to talk to him about this as much as you need to talk to some guy you saw at the gym. I'll talk to him. You just go...be happy, get some sleep and I'll see you in the morning."

"Bucky, are you sure?"

He rolls his eyes and reaches around her to knock firmly on the door, hears the mutter of sleepy voices grumbling inside, the shuffle of bodies in motion. "Yep. I'm good."

The door opens. Natasha is awake and alert, despite the hastily tied robe suggesting she'd been in bed thirty seconds ago. Clint shuffles behind her in sleep pants, hair stuck every which way, but just as alert, his eyes sliding between Bucky and Toni and back to Bucky again. No one says anything for a long moment, except for Natasha's raised eyebrow.

"Toni needs to be somewhere she feels safe," Bucky finally says, deliberately casual. "Is she welcome here?"

"Always," Natasha says without hesitation, and her eyes search Bucky's face. Whatever she's looking for, she finds, because she gives him a satisfied nod.

"Never even a question," Clint says, and his gaze isn't readable in the slightest. But there's faint challenge in his voice when he adds, "As long as it's what she wants."

"Yeah," Toni whispers, swallows hard and her eyes crumple at the corners. "Yeah." She reaches out for Natasha, who takes her hands and gently pulls her into a hug. Toni buries her face in the crook of Natasha's neck, and her arms go around Natasha's waist. She sighs, soft and deep, and Bucky watches the tension in her back and shoulders just dissolve away.

That's more than enough to convince him he's doing the right thing. Bucky leans in, nuzzles the back of Toni's head with his cheek, then kisses her temple. "See you tomorrow, sweetheart. Get some sleep."

"Love you too," Toni mumbles, and lets Natasha lead her into the room. Natasha looks over her shoulder at Bucky in the most open expression he's seen to date, one that manages to convey gratitude and pride and approval and affection, apparently all for him, in a single upturned smile. It floors him just a little.

Clint doesn't move, so Bucky doesn't either. "I can almost guarantee that it won't be just sleep happening," he says, leaning on the door frame with his forearm. "That sits okay with you?"

Bucky shrugs, lets his back hit the hallway wall and crosses his arms. "It isn't about me," he says. "But even if it was? Yeah. It sits just fine."

Clint eyes him, clearly skeptical. "What changed?"

He shrugs again. "I decided you were right. So mark your calendar. I got no reason to be jealous, and we've all got enough shit on our plates without making more drama for ourselves. You're not a threat to me and her. I shouldn't be a threat to you and her."

"Well, fuck me sideways," Clint says. "One of us is finally a grown up. Will wonders never cease."

"Nah," Bucky says with a sudden grin. "You got a nice ass and all, but I don't think you're really my type. I'll leave Toni to fuck you sideways though, if you accept substitutions."

All credit to Clint, it only takes him a minute to recover from gaping shock, and then his hip shifts subtly, and the defensive posture turns into a coquettish sprawl against the door frame. "Sad for you," he says with a smirk. "I was a circus performer. You have no idea how bendy I am."

Bucky reaches out, sets his hand gently over Clint's face, then shoves him backwards, through the door and back into the room. "Two smoking hot women in your bed, and you're out here trying to impress me. You're greedy, Barton." Humor drops from his voice as his hand falls back to his side. "Take care of her, huh?"

"Always," Clint says, nodding, puts his hand on the door to close it. Hesitates long enough to add quietly, "We'll talk more about all of this in the morning, you and me."

"Sure," Bucky says easily, turns away as the door closes. He waits for jealousy, anger, possessiveness to flare. And it does. It's there, probably always will be to some extent. But it's muted and weak, all but drowned by relief and a sense of rightness, contentment that Toni is somewhere she wants to be, somewhere she's happy. He's not going to try to unpack it much more than that, because it's enough as it is.

Notes:

I decided to throw this out there: you guys can decide the content of the next chapter.

As I left things here, Toni is spending the night with Clint and Natasha, and Bucky's returning to Steve for what will no doubt be a long, serious conversation. I don't really plan on dragging any of this out longer than necessary, because I tagged Steve/Toni for a reason after all. However. If y'all would like to see these currently fade-to-black scenes as they played out, I'm happy to write them. If not, story moves on a teensy bit faster. :)

So toss me a comment and let me know: more plot forwarding in the next chapter, or make room for the smut?

Also by popular demand, I will be writing an alternate take on this universe's soulmates thing. Y'all kinda like Clintashoni a bit, huh? :) It's a secondary priority right now, and I'm aiming for a 10k one-shot to explore what might have happened if Natasha took it on herself to challenge Fate for a ret-con of Toni's soulmarks. Look for it in the near future. :)