Summary: Deciding to stay was the easy part.
Notes: So, obviously, this isn't the end of the story but it is the end of Bucky's part. I've been staring at this fic for so long I actually wrote 'A Quiet War' in it's entirety while procrastinating on it. I hope you enjoy it. I still need to tell the story of how Steve and Buck hooked up (Bucky's an unreliable narrator) and the so-nerdy-my-husband-is-helping story about Jane's cousin Kenny. Thanks for everyone who hung in there while I finished this beast.
Chapter TextHe took Thor to the common area first. Only Clint and Phil were there and only Phil was awake. Clint was apparently napping in self defense against Phil's terrible tv choices. "Look who I found."
Clint and Phil had been curled up together on the couch and Phil made an unsuccessful attempt to get up to say hello . "Thor. Welcome back to Earth."
"Son of Coul." Thor was frozen in the doorway, an immovable object if James had ever seen one. Whether he'd thought James was lying or not, he looked shocked. "How is this possible?"
"Your brother had bad aim." On his second attempt, Phil managed to wiggle free from Clint. "I coded but the doctors brought me back."
"I am relieved then, to see you so well." When Phil came into arm's reach, Thor grabbed him into a hug but his eyes were fixed on Clint's sleeping form.
Something was very wrong here. "Everything okay, Thor?"
"Of course. I am grateful my friend has returned to us." Thor was a terrible liar and something was very wrong.
Steve's apartment was all windows and none of them had curtains. Steve had muttered something about one way glass the first night but they'd been distracted so he'd let it go. The windows let in the grey light of a rainy afternoon and gave a good view of the pounding rain. It was almost fall.
Steve wasn't here either but James was pretty sure he was still welcome so he went into Steve's bedroom. He threw his wet jacket onto a chair and started pulling off his boots. He'd told Clint and Phil they'd needed to talk and had the voice in the ceiling arrange a meeting before dinner. In the meantime, all he had was time to think.
When you looked at Steve Rogers now, it was easy to love him. A big guy with an attitude like Steve's, a lot of people went for that, but James had loved him before the shiny new wrapper, had loved him when every winter seemed like it might be his last. When Steve had reached for him in the middle of the night the first time, he'd already been so far gone for the guy it was pathetic. He'd never told Steve that, had kept his mouth shut for the first year until he couldn't stand it anymore. After a year, 'I love you' sounded less ridiculous, especially when you were nineteen and getting off together every night.
The front door of the apartment opened with a rattle and he could hear Stark hiss, "Shhh."
There was a deep, rumbling reply and heavy footsteps came towards the bedroom. "Thanks, big guy." Tony pushed open the bedroom door. "Just dump him on the bed and I'll…"
The Hulk was standing behind Tony, Steve asleep in his arms. The Hulk growled when he saw James and wow, that was as terrifying as James had imagined it would be. He took a step back, involuntarily, as the Hulk came forward to deposit Steve on the bed. "Is he okay?"
That was the wrong question. The Hulk bent his head down so it was even with James' and bared his teeth. Tony grabbed him by the arm. "Whoa, whoa. Remember you promised Steve, no smashing."
The Hulk was huge, he was dangerous and James had no idea what he'd done to piss him off. It seemed like a bad idea to ask any more questions. Tony patted at the Hulk's big green bicep. "Go down to the TV room, okay? JARVIS will put on Myth Busters for you."
The Hulk growled one last time, just inches from James' face, then lumbered out of the room. James wasn't scared of many things but, "So, that was terrifying. Is Steve *drunk*?" He had that same loose limbed quality the few times James had gotten him drunk before but that wasn't supposed to be possible anymore, not with the serum.
"There was science." Tony tugged at the laces of Steve's sneakers and pulled them off. "Today has been a day of revelations. The Hulk, as far as I can tell, he's not real chatty, thinks of Steve as his big brother. That makes you the jerk who is breaking his brother's heart."
Tony managed to get Steve to roll over onto his side after a few good shoves, and stuck a pillow at his back to keep him from rolling over. "Do you know what I did today, Barnes? I helped my childhood hero get really drunk. It took a lot of effort and involved inserting an IV line, which meant getting Bruce to help. Then, Steve insisted someone had to drink with him. I am capable of a lot of things but keeping up with two superhuman metabolisms isn't on the list."
Tony grabbed a blanket from the end of the bed and laid it over Steve. "So I got to be sober while Steve told us all about how you used to take care of him when he was sick, how he seduced you, how he found you in that Hydra base and how you went and died on him, but not once did he mention you were an asshole."
Tony's profile called him possessive. James hadn't really understood what it meant, until now. "I'm staying, if he still wants that."
That stopped whatever rant Tony had been about to launch. "What happened to your whole 'I'm a murderer, we can't be together' bullshit?"
"Steve's got bigger problems than my sketchy past." James tossed Tony his phone. "Thor's downstairs, he can back up what's on there. It's all bad news."
"I'm going to need you to quantify bad. On a scale of one to ten, with the Battle for New York being a nine-"
"An eleven." James cut Tony off, suddenly exhausted. He hadn't eaten since breakfast and he had hours of reading to do before he called Erik. "It's bad, alright? Bad enough that it doesn't matter what I've done, so I'm staying." If Steve would let him, he'd stay forever. "Let me get Steve sobered up and we'll talk."
When Tony left, James climbed into bed with Steve. What he really needed was a few hours sleep but laying here for a few minutes with Steve would be almost as good. He stretched out so they were eye to eye. "Steve?"
"Bucky." A heavy arm fell across his hips and dragged him in closer.
"Sobering up yet?" Steve's metabolism was twice as fast as James', he had to be getting there.
"Working on it." Steve reached for the button on James' pants.
"Hold up, Steve." He didn't want to stop him but he'd pulled the same thing this morning when James had been sleepy and completely without willpower. "Can we talk for a minute, first?"
Steve drew his hand back and the buzzed smile faded away. "Maybe I don't want to hear what you have to say. I'm not your CO anymore, you don't have to justify yourself to me but if you're going to crawl into bed with me the rules haven't changed."
He meant to say something about the end of the world but what came out was, "I love you." Steve looked a bit more stunned by that than James felt comfortable with. "Steve, you knew that."
"That was a long time ago." Steve rolled away from him and sat up on the edge of the bed. "We were, in a pretty literal sense, other people then."
"Come back here." He'd made a worse mess of this than he'd realized. He caught Steve by the wrist, using the cybernetic hand. "If you thought I didn't love you anymore, what the hell have you been doing the past few days? Did you think if you just kept me distracted enough I would forget to leave?"
"In my defense, it worked the first time around." Steve couldn't look small, not anymore, but he was hunched in on himself.
"Steve." James touched the small of Steve's back. The muscles were stiff and Steve didn't lean into the touch. "I just thought you would want to know I'm staying in New York. Here, if I'm still welcome."
Steve finally looked back, the same suspicious look he'd given James their entire lives. "What happened today? Where have you been?"
"In a meeting." He drew Steve back down onto the mattress and kissed him, because he had to. "You've got bigger problems than me, I hate to tell you."
In the days leading up to the meeting, James had given himself a crash course in Victor Von Doom. He hadn't been able to understand Loki but he'd had hopes that his long friendship with Erik would help him understand Doom, his country and his diplomatic immunity.
The basic gist of it seemed to be that Doom, like Erik, was loved by his people. He'd taken control of Latveria when it was a post-Soviet hellhole barely able to feed itself. Today, it's people were among the world's best educated and a global leader in robotics.
As far as the supervillain thing went, most of the world seemed to think it was a joke. Doom's attempts on Reed Richard's life were so over the top cartoonish that the only people who reported on them with a straight face was the Daily Show. To most of the world, Doom was a charismatic, eccentric but relatively benign dictator who hid his disfigurement out of vanity. The more Richards ranted to the contrary, the less people cared if it was true.
Just as Loki said -Why do you think I killed Agent Coulson?- Tony paused the video. "It was sort of formulaic, wasn't it? The villain made too many mistakes, the heroes rallied and beat overwhelming odds. It gave me nightmares for months, the randomness of it all. I built suits like a crazy person, trying to plan for whatever was coming next."
"Clint." Steve's voice was gentle but Clint tensed up anyway. "Did you know?"
"No." Clint was sitting ramrod straight in his chair and his fingertips were digging into Phil's thigh. Compared to the other guy Loki had taken, Clint was a model of recovery but he still hadn't reacted so well to seeing the video. "He didn't trust any of us, not completely. I would have said something." No one but James knew what Clint had offered Loki and James wasn't going to say anything. This was different. "Thor, please tell us he's lying."
"No." In the months it had taken James to find Clint, he'd spent a lot of time with Phil. Phil had described Thor as an especially enthusiastic golden retriever but the past year had changed him. "Jane and I made the journey to the far edge of the Bifrost's reach. We witnessed the fleet with our own eyes."
"You should have told us." Phil was absently rubbing circles on Clint's wrist. "Six months isn't enough time."
"What proof could we have offered you? My brother's oath? My mother's magic?" Thor had Mjolnir in his lap, cradling it like a child might hold a toy. "Would SHIELD have done for us what Lord Doom has, on nothing but a traitor's word?"
"No." Phil was honest, at least. Latveria was ready for war, ready to arm her allies. "If you'd come back five minutes after you left, the World Security Council would still be arguing about this. But Fury-"
Thor slammed a hand against the table. "Why should we have handed the fate of the universe to Fury, when he has already proven himself a liar? Your organization was willing to kill millions, pointlessly."
"I agree that the missile was a terrible mistake but-"
"Thor's right." Bruce had been quiet until now, reading but Phil stopped talking when he spoke up. "I agree with Doctor Foster's findings. Detonating that bomb would have done nothing to the portal and the conventional explosion would have had minimal effects on the Chitauri. Their biology is so different than ours I can't say what the radiation would have done to them, but I can tell you what it would have done to the people of New York. Launching that missile wasn't rational, it was desperate and it almost killed Tony."
"Doctor Banner-" Phil tried again but Bruce just plowed on.
"You weren't here, Agent. None of you were." Bruce was icily calm as he spoke and James wondered, not for the first time, what it took to control the Hulk. "I was. I was the one who Pepper called crying when she thought Tony was dead and I'm the one who helped Tony rewrite her genetic code when we thought she might burn to death in her sleep. SHIELD was unreachable the whole time, no one would take my phone calls, not even when the Mandarin almost killed the President. We're all glad you're alive, Agent Coulson, but all SHIELD and the World Security Council have done is show me they can't be trusted."
The room got quiet again and James let it settle, let it get uncomfortable. Bruce's anger was understandable, it was how he kept control but Thor's anger didn't make sense. There was something else going on here. "Thor, who designed this battle campaign? It wasn't your brother."
"The greatest military minds of Asgard sat in council for months and in the end deemed the battle unwinnable. It was suggested we do nothing, reserve our strength and destroy your world when it fell." Of all of them, Thor seemed the most comfortable with James which was another thing that didn't make sense. "Jane wouldn't hear it. She shouted in my father's face, demanding we think of something else. Jane is a brave woman, my father can be a harsh man, but he simply told her if she had some great strategist hidden away, she need only tell us and he would send me to fetch him. Her kinsman has been a great help to us."
Natasha had never been a soldier, she had always been more personal with her kills, but she had focused in on the casualty projections. "Are these right?"
The best estimates put the casualties for the defenders at twenty percent. "I would call them pretty optimistic, actually."
"JARVIS, re-run these simulations. Let's see if we can do any better." Tony Stark hated to lose. In that way, at least, he was like Howard. "No offense to your guy, Thor, but if we're crawling into bed with the Evil League of Evil, we need to be sure."
Marcus turned up the next morning at breakfast and sat at the kitchen table eating eggs while Steve and Tony took turns monologuing at him with occasionally interjections by the rest of the team. James, who had heard Steve's side of this rant before he'd started a ten hour phone call to Erik, Erik's friend Mystique and Mystique's friends the dangerous killing machines, tuned it all out and tried to sweet talk the coffee machine into brewing something that would work on his metabolism.
When Tony stopped for breath, Marcus picked up a piece of bacon and snapped it in half. "Barton, do you have anything to contribute?"
"Were you going to tell me, sir?" Clint jammed his fork into the wooden table top and it stood on it's own, quivering. "Actually, *what* were you going to tell me? You lied, and I get it. Stark and Rogers, they needed to get their shit together but you came to me afterwards, when my husband was lying in a hospital bed, in a coma, and told me he was dead."
Marcus ate half the bacon strip. "I would have taken you to his hospital room and left you there. You're very focused, Barton. After a few days, you wouldn't have remembered to be mad at me."
"Well, that's not what happened." Natasha was eating an apple in a very threatening way, cutting pieces out of it with a paring knife. The knife didn't match anything in the kitchen which meant she'd been carrying it in her pajamas. James had maybe done a little too well training her to always be on guard. "I don't think we'll be coming back to SHIELD, sir."
"That's probably for the best, Miss Romanoff." Marcus grabbed a peice of toast and stood. "Alright, Phil, pack it up. Your bus is ready."
"Pack it up?" Phil gave Marcus a puzzled look, orange juice glass halfway to his mouth. "Sir, you and I both know the bus was just a distraction to keep me from going off the ranch to find Clint. The Avengers-"
"Are a team. Look at them, Phil." Marcus looked too damn pleased with himself. "Admittedly, they're a team that wants to kill me, but they'd be doing it together. When we planned this out, we assumed they'd be at each other's throats constantly, that they'd need a babysitter. They don't."
"Sir. Please don't ask me to do this."
"I'm not asking you. I'm telling you. Pack up your things." Marcus took a phone from his inside jacket pocket and skidded it across the table. A youtube video started playing, of a man jumping out of a building and landing with enough force to crack the asphalt, apparently unharmed. "Xavier says he's not a mutant. That means he's need to move on this."
The video was frozen on a frame of the man holding the woman he'd saved standing in the wreckage of the street, looking like a frame from a comic book. James had to hand it to Marcus, this was candy to someone like Phil.
Clint shoved the phone back at Marcus. "He died for you and you want more? What the hell do you have on him? Did you help him hid a body once?"
"Agent Coulson." Fury's smirk was gone. "We were told last night that an alien fleet is on it's way. The situation is so dire that this afternoon, I have a meeting with Wade Wilson. You will meet with Agent Grant and convince him to cut out the lone wolf bullshit. You will meet with Agent May and get her back in the field. You will be issued a science team. You will get on a plane and you will bring this man, whoever he is, into the fold because we are at war and we need every soldier we can get our hands on."
"You son of a bitch." Clint yanked the fork free from the table top and dropped it onto his plate. "Come on, I'll help you pack."
"Wait, wait." Tony grabbed onto the sleeve of Phil's suit jacket. "You're not really leaving, are you? Screw SHIELD, if you need a paycheck that badly we'll talk to Pepper."
Phil looked tired, the way he had at the beginning of summer when James had first gotten to New York. "The Director and I have known each other a long time. He knows I can't say no, not to this."
James got Steve's spare room after all, as an office. "I feel like all I do is have meetings. This isn't how I was expecting this to go." Today's meeting was with Asgard, which involved installing some kind of holographic generator and a new outlet for it to get enough juice.
"Are you really calling another planet from this thing?" Steve ran a finger across the smooth top of the table.
"That's what they tell me." Thor had given him a smooth stone, covered in shifting runes. Tony had examined it, read a note from Jane and declared it to be a VPN token. James wasn't sure what that meant, but Jane had given instructions. "Come running with me tonight? I'm going stir crazy."
"You say that now but when I come in here you'll be too busy to leave." It was true, James had fallen asleep in here more than once in the past week. "Do you want me to stay?"
"Not for this one." The plans were cold, calculated, the kind of shades-of-grey bullshit that keep men like Steve up at night. James wanted to get a feel for the man that had written them, before he let him meet Steve. James dropped the stone onto the table and it flared to life. "Seriously, Steve. Drag me out of here, if you have to."
Steve gave him the smile that always used to lead to the two of them running for their lives. "If you say so, Bucky. I"ll see you later."
The screen resolved into the image of a man. He wasn't what James had expected, not at all. He was young, early twenties probably and more absent minded professor than hardened warrior. "Hello? This is Ken Foster."
"This is James Barnes."
"Barnes, Barnes." The man flipped through a giant leather bound book and stared blearily at the pages. "Sorry, I've been at this for hours. The Aesir need a lot less sleep than baseline humans." He must have found what he was looking for because he got quiet for a minute. When he looked up, the mild-manneredness was gone. In it's place was a keen interest. "James Barnes. Code name: Winter Soldier. Super soldier variant, cybernetically enhanced, assassin. You weren't in the original campaign. Can you brief me on your capabilities?"
September evaporated into a endless series of meetings, broken up by training sessions.
The Avengers were recruiting, quietly. The Falcon came to stay and a woman Tony knew from boarding school who called herself Wasp. Phil would turn up occasionally, some wayward metahuman with a suitcase in tow. He would deposit them with Bruce, disappear into Clint's suite for the night and be gone by morning.
The night he'd brought the fire starter, James stayed up all night talking to Erik. The people SHIELD were collecting weren't mutants, they didn't have the X-gene, but James didn't have anyone else who could help him figure out what they were capable of. He didn't make it to bed, again.
The next morning, a hand touched his shoulder. It wasn't Steve's hand and James was free of the Winter Soldier, but not his instincts. His gun was in his hand before he was even awake and the hand pulled back in an instant. "Thor. That was stupid."
"Aye, I see that now." Thor stood very still while James put the gun away. "My apologies. I wished to speak to you before the others woke."
Was it morning? "JARVIS, time."
"It is five am, sir. The Captain attempted to retrieve you several times but gave up several hours ago. I am to remind you that you have dinner plans tonight and that the consequences are dire for not attending."
"Right." Steve was still sorta pissed at him for trying to leave. The not making it to bed half the time wasn't helping. "Thor, we are meeting with Foster in two hours. Can't it wait?"
"It's not strategy I wish to discuss." Thor held out a styrofoam coffee cup. "The Captain tells me you are his long-time companion and that you give good advice. I am in need of good advice and there is no one else I can speak to about this."
James took the coffee and took a sip while he considered Thor. He'd flat out refused to work with SHIELD and when Phil stopped by he was conspicuously absent. "What do you need?"
Thor sat in one of the rolling chairs and picked up the hologram stone, passing it from hand to hand. "Before I returned to Asgard, I spoke to Hawkeye. My brother injured him grievously and I wanted to make reparations. He asked me for only one thing, that I carry a message to his beloved in the afterlife."
That was just about the right level of favor to ask for the kind of violation Clint had suffered. "Is that possible?"
"It is an arduous journey for most but Hel interceded for me, granted me safe passage. I searched for Coulson in all the places the newly dead but I could find no sign of him." Thor drew a battered sheet of paper from his pocket.
It was sealed but James could imagine Clint's terrible handwriting sprawled across the paper, full of all the things he'd meant to say. Okay, maybe James was projecting a little but -
"I found him roaming the halls, seeking to escape."
James must have misheard that. "You *found* him?"
"His grief was inconsolable. He believed his beloved dead and when he could not find him, Coulson feared the worst." Thor looked at the letter, sadness etched across his face. "It comforted him, that Hawkeye still lived, and he gave me that letter. I have carried it with me since that day, so that if I fell in battle it would still be found and delivered."
"That's not possible." When James picked up the paper and turned it over in his hands, written above the wax seal was 'Clint'. "Phil's alive. I saw him yesterday. You saw him yesterday, when he dropped off Chan."
"Tis true, we did see Phil Coulson last night but I also saw him more than a year ago, in Valhalla. Long was that letter my burden, James Barnes. I had duties that kept me from delivering it, a rebellion to subdue. When I returned to Earth, Hawkeye had vanished and I was my brother's keeper. When he said my friend still lived, I expected only more deception." I swear it, he was dead. Souls who linger with near mortal wounds cannot cross the veil of death. Whatever tales Fury has told," Eight seconds, Phil had only been dead eight seconds, "They were lies. No healer of Asgard could wake a man whose soul has reached the afterlife."
"But it's him." Please, let it really be him. Clint wasn't going to survive that level of deception.
"How such a thing could be accomplished, I cannot tell you." Thor touched the corner of the letter. "I don't know what to do with it."
"Give it to me." James slipped it into his pants pocket. "Thank you for telling me, Thor." He was going to have to tell Clint.
He found Clint alone on the range at noon, when he'd crawled away from meetings long enough to get some lunch. "Got a minute?"
"Sure." Clint fired the shot that he had nocked and it hit the target perfect dead center, splitting the other arrow like something out of a Robin Hood movie.
James set the letter on the bench. He still hadn't firgured out what to say but waiting wasn't going to help. If it wasn't Phil, they needed to know now. Clint picked it up, turned it over and looked at his name. "Where did you get this?"
"Clint…"
"I have a half dozen of these, you know, in an old footlocker under my bed." Clint ran his thumb over the wax seal. "He'd write one every time he thought he wasn't coming home although I gotta admit, they're usually a bit less formal than this. You ever do that, for Steve?"
He had pressed a letter into Dugan's hands, just before they dragged him away to Zola's lab. "Once. After that, we were generally going into mortal peril together."
"Where did it come from?" Clint didn't open it, he just slipped it into his quiver.
"Thor had it." James was expecting some kind of reaction, anything but this calm conversation.
"It's okay, Barnes. I know he was dead." Clint unstrung his bow and started to put it away. "I saw the body."
"You saw…" James remembered, Clint hadn't been surprised when he'd heard. He'd been shocked.
"I broke into the morgue. I had to be sure." Clint zipped the case shut, ran the palms of his hands over the smooth top. "He was on ice. When you gave me that phone, I was so angry. The story he told me, there was no way it was true. But he believes it. And he's Phil, I know he's Phil. The rest of it doesn't matter to me."
"It's him. You're sure?"
"Are you sure that it's really Steve Rogers you crawl into bed with at night?" Clint slung his quiver over one shoulder and grabbed the case. "Phil was on ice for a few months. Steve was down there for seventy years. But you *know*, don't you, that it's him? You're sure."
"If you say it's him, then it's him. I'll leave it alone." It doesn't matter, not really. The rest of them are all hideous science experiments anyway. What's one more?
He walked away from his desk at five. Steve made him dinner and they ate it at his kitchen table, sitting side by side, bare feet tangled under the table. They'd eaten a thousand meals together like this but it had been a long time and James reveled in the normalcy of it.
Steve waited until James' mouth was full before he talked at him. "I'm glad you're staying but you don't get to make decisions for me. I get why you thought you could, I let it go when you planned my whole life with Peggy without even asking, but you can't do this anymore."
James swallowed, the meal suddenly a bit less idyllic. "I get your point, but what would you have done if they'd come and arrested me?" If his fears about that were unfounded, Marcus had done nothing to discourage them.
"Worn my dress uniform to the trail and sat behind you." Steve gave his foot a nudge. "Gone on national television and defended you. But it would have been my choice."
Steve needed a different kind of protection now but that didn't make changing the habits of a lifetime any easier. "It's still going to be messy, you know. Just because they can't arrest us anymore doesn't mean they can't make our lives hell."
"Tony says his lawyers get bored. It will give them something to do." He slid his hand across the table and James took it in his good hand. "Besides, we could both be dead in six months."
That was true, even if he didn't want to think about it. Honestly, though, they should both be long dead. Even an extra six months was a gift. He took one last bite of dinner and asked, "Are you done eating?"
"Done enough. It'll keep."
They left the plates and the food on the table and surely their mothers were rolling in their graves but James couldn't bring himself to care. His life had become a constant cycle of meetings and sleep deprivation, peppered with stolen frantic moments with Steve. He didn't get a lot of evenings like this, where they could take their time, where he could kiss Steve for what felt like forever and peel him out of his clothes a little bit at a time, listen to the quiet desperate noises he always made.
It was slow and sweet and afterwards they lay there together in the fading light, Steve absently tracing lines on James' cybernetic arm.
Later, there will be a tense meeting between the Brotherhood and the X-Men that he will have to moderate but things between Erik and Charles will be better after that. There will be people to train, some of them so young it will give James flashbacks to the Red Room's child soldiers. There will be failed recruitment pitches where Natasha will end up stitching him up in a hotel room. Later, there will be one more war to fight.
Right now though, it is six o'clock on a Tuesday evening and he's got Steve beside him. That's more than enough.
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