Firestar'sniece brought up some good points that aren't directly answered in the story and may be confusing some people. So: Bucky came to the Tower about three months prior to the previous chapter (9 months after Insight). He stayed mostly isolated in Steve's place for over two of those months and has only been interacting with the Avengers for a week or so. When Steve and Sam found him, Bucky was living on his own. They (metaphorically) circled each other for a while before Bucky agreed to come with Steve. When the hallucination started, Bucky ignored it until he couldn't anymore.

Hopefully that cleared some things up, and if you have any questions the chapter doesn't answer, feel free to PM me. And, as always, thank you for the reviews! I love reading them.

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Bucky does not spar. Most of the others do; Steve often goes against Thor, and they work on complicated maneuvers that must have taken weeks to get right even twice in a row. Romanoff and Barton spar against each other, Steve, or Wilson, and Bucky recognizes many of the fighting styles they use. Banner stays away from the training floor, but Bucky figures he must do something in his time to at least sharpen his mind if not his skills.

But Bucky does not spar. He runs. Lap after lap around the track, and it would get boring but JARVIS adds obstacles at random intervals. Sometimes Bucky believes the AI is trying to trip him, but he never falls or stumbles. He can jog for hours. In the second month after he came to this place, Bucky had gone to the gym at hours he knew it would be empty in order to quiet the memories in his head by exhausting himself. Steve had only caught Bucky sneaking off their floor a few times, but Bucky suspects that Steve had noticed his absence plenty more than that and had chosen not to do anything to stop him.

He runs for thirty minutes and then stops. There is a climbing wall on one side of the gym that Bucky has been eyeing since his first foray into the massive room, but getting to it means getting close to Steve and Thor.

"Just run past the super soldier and the space alien guy currently throwing around very dangerous weapons," James says. "It'll be fun. Like dodgeball."

Bucky figures getting hit with the hammer Thor carries will hurt much more than a rubber ball.

"You've been pining after the wall for weeks. Just go, already. Stevie isn't gonna care."

Bucky scans the gym thoroughly under the pretense of retying his shoe before he begins walking. He watches the match between Steve and Thor carefully.

When the hammer inevitably misses its intended target and flies towards Bucky, he ducks. It whistles over his head and then back the way it had come.

"Sorry, my friend!" Thor calls.

Bucky stares at the massive man for a moment, wondering how to respond. He decides no response is necessary, and continues to the climbing wall without further incident.

The wall is bigger up close. Bucky estimates that it is at least thirty feet, and he is not surprised that Stark went for something so tall. He climbs it—not quickly, not slowly, letting a steady burn build in his muscles—and when he gets to the top, he swings himself up and sits with his legs hanging over the edge. He watches Steve and waits for the vertigo to set in like it had last night.

"It's not gonna," says James.

Steve is far away, distracted. He won't notice anything amiss if Bucky talks to James.

Bucky doesn't like the idea of keeping James a secret. He just—it would confuse Steve. He'd get worried, and then Bucky would have to explain everything and he'd inevitably mess it up and the entire thing would become another mess drilling holes in Bucky's brain. He is keeping it a secret from Steve to protect Steve, and he ignores the voice hissing in the back of his mind that he's just doing it so Steve won't see him as weak and throw him out—

So. Secrets.

"How do you know?" replies Bucky.

"Because it wasn't vertigo the first time, pal. 'Sides, it's nice up here."

Bucky agrees. He can see the whole gym, and there is a solid wall at his back. It is a vantage point that makes him feel—not relaxed, but it eases some of the tension he feels when he enters a space he is not intimately familiar with. He is not intimately familiar with most of the rooms in this tower save his own, and on bad days not even there. Right now it's nice, because even though his mind is trying to pull him back to his earlier thoughts he can push himself against the wall and stay in the moment.

He keeps observing Steve.

"Idiot's dropping his guard on the left side," James says. Bucky glances at him; James looks older. He is wearing a loose-fitting uniform.

"He is," Bucky says, and returns his attention to Steve.

"We gotta tell him."

"Later."

"Why not now?"

Because Thor is there and the room is too open and Bucky's mind is too loud.

"Later."

"Okay."

Later is seven hours later, when he and Steve are finishing dinner. Steve has made pasta, one of the small array of dishes he can prepare and serve with complete confidence. Bucky eats less than Steve, and slower, but even though he wants to eat more he knows too much at once will make him nauseous. He has smoothies and shakes to supplement his meals, and the amount he can eat is increasing, if slowly, as is the variety of what he can eat.

But Steve always frowns at his plate anyway. Not a big frown, but the kind of worried frown Bucky has seen him directing at Romanoff, Banner, and even Stark. He tries to hide it but Bucky never misses it.

The meal progresses slowly and Bucky's need to report to Steve about his observations grows as an irritating itch in the back of his brain that he ignores until he can't anymore.

"You don't cover your left side," Bucky says as he sets down his fork. Steve glances up, surprise on his face until he wipes it away.

"Pardon?"

"Your left side," Bucky repeats. "You aren't covering it. Your shield is three centimeters too low and four centimeters too far to your right when you block."

"Uh—" Steve blinks, then shakes his head to clear it. "Right. Natasha mentioned that to me the other day." He looks as though he is going to say something else, but he just purses his lips and says nothing.

"We used to cover his left side," James says. Bucky glances at him, and James looks even older. Worn out, dust and grime on his features and in his hair. Years in his eyes. "That was our job."

Steve had probably been about to say something to that effect. Hence the pursed lips, the I'm-a-self-torturing-jackass expression.

He has to fix this. Dinner and the rest of the day had been going well. Bucky does not want to end on a low note. He manages an expression approximating something positive.

"And you didn't listen to her?"

The tension in Steve's shoulder eases. Not much, but noticeably.

Progress.

James flips between ages. Bucky does not know the context for them, but he can see the general gist of each one. There is the teenager, the young man, and the army man in a clean uniform and another army man in a blue coat. And something dark buried beneath all of them, a persona Bucky suspects he has not seen yet.

"Y'know, I haven't seen Steve smile in a while," James says. He is a teenager now, lying on Bucky's bed and tossing an intangible ball up and down. "He's got that dumb worry line in his forehead. Gonna get wrinkles before Ol' Jan does." James abruptly sits up, the ball vanishing before it hits his head. He is looking at Bucky with strange intent. "You can't let him get like that. Not Stevie. Ya hear?"

Bucky nods, not sure what he is agreeing to. He cannot stop Steve from being upset. He does not have the information to positively affect Steve's mood reliably. He does not know what will make Steve smile.

He does not know what will make Steve smile.

Bucky does not sleep for forty-one hours. He does not leave his room for fifty-seven hours. Steve leaves food outside his door and does not knock more than once a day.

The hot water in the shower runs red down the drain.

Steve and Wilson are running. Bucky is in the tower, alone on Steve's floor.

"Your floor too," James says.

It's a formality. This is Steve's floor because without Steve Bucky would not be here. He can still remember the first few days (mere weeks ago) after Stark found out the truth about his parents' death, can remember the urge to run-kill-disappear driving him to the roof most nights.

Can remember Steve talking to him during those late hours. Steve and one more: the redhead. Romanoff. She had been cautious and wary but her words came from a different angle than Steve's, pulled apart the tangle of Bucky's thoughts from the other end and that helped, usually. She always left before Bucky snapped.

Romanoff is interesting. Bucky suspects they have crossed paths before—even before Insight. But he does not remember, and she does not say anything.

He knows there is a reason for that. He does not know the specifics, but he does not have to.

The silence of Steve's floor is stifling. Bucky needs to see someone, hear movement. Hear people. Know he is not alone.

"I'm here," says James.

Bucky ignores him and gets to his feet. In two minutes he is heading for the elevator, grabbing the book he has been reading for the past couple of days on the way. A gift from Steve, who noticed Bucky's interest in fiction and acted accordingly.

Somewhere, there is significance in having something freely given to him—as a gift. But Bucky does not want to think about that right now.

Banner and a woman Bucky has not been introduced to yet are the only ones on the common floor. After a second spent determining how much of a threat the woman is, Bucky walks to the cabinets lining the kitchen and pulls out a box of crackers. He then grabs a jar of peanut butter and moves to the table, putting his back to the wall and opening his book.

It takes the woman three minutes and twenty-four seconds to approach him. Bucky eats a peanut-butter-dipped cracker while she sits down. He is very aware of the knives hidden on his person and the places on her body where she can hide weapons of her own. She stands out of his reach, right at the point where Bucky's senses say ally and not threat.

"We haven't been introduced yet," she says. "I'm Maria Hill. You can call me Hill. I run security in the Tower for Tony."

She sticks out her hand. Bucky eyes it for a moment, seeing no signs of weapons or contact poisons. Banner is still in the room. No attacker aware of his identity would be stupid enough to start a fight with him nearby.

Security. Bucky finds it amusing—in a dark way that he knows Steve would not find funny—that he has not met her before. Surely Stark would want his head of security accustomed to the deadly assassin living in the same building as his significant other.

Bucky shakes her hand. She has a strong grip. "Bucky Barnes. Barnes."

"Nice to meet you, Barnes."

The thought of it being nice for anyone to be introduced to him makes Bucky's lips want to turn up at the corners, but he stifles the expression and nods.

She gets up in the half second before the lack of conversation would have become awkward. Bucky returns to his book and his crackers.

"You coulda been more polite," James says a few minutes later. His hair is slicked back, his youthful frame bound by a dark suit.

"Why?" Bucky says, but he speaks quietly. Banner and Hill have moved to the other room and Bucky is out of their lines of vision. He does not know for sure how sensitive their hearing is.

"She's a dame. You gotta be polite to dames. Mom taught us that."

"She taught you that."

James frowns. Bucky can see his expression over his book and pauses in his reading.

"What?"

"She taught us that," James says, something dark lurking behind his teenage eyes. "You hear? Us. Me. You."

Bucky nods only to stop the conversation and forestall the headache he can already feel encroaching on the left side of his brain.

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