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It had been the kind of day where ending it was the best part.

Counseling veterans didn't come with hours attached, so Sam had spent the last three (11pm to 2am, if anyone was counting) talking to a twenty-two year old who had just come back and found out the girl he had been 'getting serious about' when he left got pregnant. It wasn't his. And he was on a mile-long waiting list for another VA appointment about his tinnitus and the doctor's assistant was a [expletive expletive] ho-bag. And his father had been diagnosed with cancer while he was deployed and what the [expletive] are you supposed to do about that, man?

Sam had talked him out of binge-drinking the pain away (or at least, as close as Sam could come to being sure of that), got some food in him, and listened. Promised to make calls in the morning, made sure the soldier was stable enough to get to his door, and sent a follow-up text as he was walking away, reminding the soldier of what was going to happen now.

Thank God Steve was on a month-long break from the Find Bucky Road Trip. It was disorienting for soldiers to switch counselors, even when Parham, the new alternate counselor, was qualified and did the best he could. Trust didn't jump from person to person like that.

Shifting the bag of McDs to one hand, (yes, it was terrible, but he would run in the morning) Sam went to unlock the sliding door of his house. Wait. Nope.

Setting down the paper bag, he took the steel baseball bat from the garden and went around to the window. The window was a calculated security risk – it led into a storage room and could be jiggled open. The door to the storage room was locked from the inside. Sam jiggled open the window, climbed in, and unlocked the door with the key. He opened it slowly, checking for flashlights in the house.

None yet, but something was off.

He moved quickly towards the kitchen, where he had seen the shadow. At an angle, based on the light from the outside, there was a boot on the floor. Shifting, he quietly set down the bat, grabbed the gun from behind the toaster, and pointed it at the intruder. The man didn't move. Rising to a standing position, he took partial cover behind the wall.

"I'm not running a hotel."

"Sam." The man said the name reflectively, trying it out. The voice wasn't familiar.

"If we have an appointment, I don't remember," Sam replied.

Silence again, so Sam moved into range of the light switch and flipped it on. The fluorescent gleam should have made the intruder flinch, recoil, something, but he just sat there, hands on the table. Hand—on the table. The other thing was tarnished metal and shone in the unnatural lighting. Sam kept the gun up, moving around the far side of the kitchen. He had to move carefully around this guy.

"Hey."

The intruder didn't respond the first two times he said it. The third time, he tacked on: "Hey. Soldier."

Steve's friend looked up. He looked lost, mask-free, eyeliner-free, with healing bruises and unkempt hair.

"You a vet?" Sam asked. An expression of cringing, deep loss came into the man's eyes and he ducked his head. After a minute, he nodded.

"Okay. Hey. Hey."

After another minute, the intruder looked up again, making uncomfortable eye contact because it was, he was learning, the only way Sam was going to have a conversation with him.

"That's good," Sam said. "Cause I help vets."

The intruder broke eye contact and looked away into Sam's hallway and living room as if either of them were going to help him with this conversation.

"But there's a problem," Sam said. Eye contact flickered back again, wary. "You are also homicidal and tried to kill one of my good friends. Are we gonna have a problem?"

The intruder didn't break eye contact, not exactly, but he stared down at the kitchen table in kind of a numb horror. Saying 'hey' a couple of times didn't bring him back, so Sam let him sit and began making eggs until the guy pulled himself together enough to answer. Sometimes people did better when they didn't feel you were waiting on them. Still, his back was never fully on the man and he had confidence in his draw on the gun.

Nah, he reflected unhappily, that wasn't it. If the Winter Soldier wanted him dead, he would probably be dead. Steve wouldn't get here fast enough, even if Sam called him right now. The police here wouldn't show up for a good thirty minutes after he placed a call. In Harlem, as a superhero, you knew. Right. It was 2am and he was a superhero.

A sound like a toaster falling off the top of the fridge stirred him from his thoughts. He turned around to see the intruder stabilizing himself with his other hand. Where the metal arm had been, there was just a gaping circle fused to his left shoulder. The prosthetic itself lay on the floor like a dead thing. The intruder looked tired and deeply worried, glancing at the floor and then, seeing Sam looking at him looking at the floor, gave up and reached over to cover the circle where the arm had been.

"Okay," Sam said. "So no killings right now. If that dented my floor though, you're paying for it."

The intruder blinked, reached into his pants pocket (Sam gripped the handle of the frying pan, thought about the placement of the gun), and pulled out a wallet (all tension relaxed).

"How did you find my house?" Sam asked, going back to the eggs.

"Phone book," the intruder/Steve's friend/the currently-not-homicidal-master-assassin said.

"My name is Sam Wilson, how did you—"

There was something of a person in the reply, a bit more intonation than Sam had seen coming.

"'Most eligible bachelor in Harlem.'"

Ah. Right. That interview. More accurately, that journalist conducting the interview; he would have given her his number, home address… hell, she could come over anytime. Instead, he got Bucky.

"You come looking for Steve?"

A nod.

"Well, we don't live together, man."

"Should. He needs someone, he'll get into… fights…" Bucky stared numbly at the table again for a moment, shut his eyes in concentration for another longer moment, and then said quietly: "I got into a fight. At the mall in… in Manhattan."

"You were there?" Expletives ran across Sam's mind, though he had trained many of them out by now; expletives were too good at setting off the people he worked with. Bucky was nodding, not making eye contact but more conversational than he had been in the past fifteen minutes, addressing the cabinets with a fixed attention.

"I was talking with a man and he was talking about trigger words and then I shot him."

"You shot him?" Sam asked, tone level as a carpenter's tool. Bucky shook his head like a kid trying to get out of a punishment.

"But I don't remember doing it." He looked up directly into Sam's eyes and said clearly: "I remember all of them and I don't remember shooting him."

Blink and the eye contact broke again, unsure and twitchy.

"All right. I believe you," Sam said and put a plate on the table in front of the man. "There's food if you want it. You don't have to eat it if you don't want to. What I'm going to do is have you come with me to the living room and leave the arm here. We gonna have a problem with that?"

Bucky shook his head and shifted oddly – trying to pick up the plate with the arm that wasn't there, Sam realized. Bucky quickly compensated, switching to the other hand and using the momentum to stand, carefully stepping over the prosthetic.

Sam sat him down on the couch and found a specialty music station that played Glenn Miller, jazz, swing. Stuff that might be somewhat close to what Bucky knew and Steve always seemed to prefer. Blankets were visible on top of an ottoman in the corner, but Sam took a few over to the couch anyway and let Bucky see him doing it.

"Two rules. You don't leave the house without telling me. You don't enter any of the houses in the area if you do leave. If you can't keep one, keep the other."

Bucky nodded, making his way through the mess of eggs, cheese, and everything else Sam had thrown in. He was practically ambidextrous anyway, being a master assassin, and if the imbalance of his arm threw him off, he didn't telegraph it much.

Sam went into the kitchen and sighed. The station was crooning 'Moon River' and he would have killed to listen to some Marvin Gaye right now. He called Steve and the man picked up after one ring.

"You win, Sam, it's too early to go jogging."

"This is the only time I can beat you, come on."

"What's going on?"

Sigh. "I got your friend on my couch."

The other end of the line got very quiet for a moment.

"Got back from a session, he was waiting for me. Looking for you, looks like hell, but he took off the arm so I'm guessing he's willing to talk."

"That's—great. Sam."

"Steve, he says he killed that guy in the Manhattan mall today. I can't go to sleep with him in the house, can't kick him out."

"I'm on my way. Did you call Tony?"

"Tony doesn't know this guy."

"Good, don't."

When Sam came out, Bucky was asleep, buried under all the blankets (not just the ones Sam had moved, the entire contents of the ottoman were spread over him). Keeping an eye on him, Sam grabbed one of the blankets and went to the base of the stairs. Thank God they were carpeted or this would have been really uncomfortable. Keeping phone and gun in arms' reach, he sat down, texting Steve to say the sliding glass door was unlocked. There weren't a lot of dangerous people who hadn't already gotten in anyway.

39 minutes passed before the great shadow of the super soldier filled the kitchen doorway. Sam flashed his cell phone in welcome and the big man came over, very quietly. They communicated via passing the phone back and forth. Steve had seen the prosthetic on the floor, was worried if it would do something to Bucky health-wise; Sam confirmed that Steve was going to be able to stay up the whole time – and then went to sleep.

You could worry about people; you could do things in the dead of night and run yourself ragged, but sometimes you had to sleep.

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This is my favorite chapter and oh my God I'm sorry I love Sam now lots. Thank you to everyone who is reading, commenting, and following. I really appreciate it and hope this entertains.