Elevated

Nora took the elevator to the ninety-fifth floor after work. She figured Clint might be there and if he wasn’t she’d just carry on up to Bucky’s floor and text him. Bucky hadn’t come by the lab for coffee at noon, but he’d messaged her to say he wasn’t going to which was new. She was only a little disappointed. Bruce had agreed that her idea was interesting and they’d spent half the day brainstorming how best to pursue it.

Bruce had also informed her that their paper had already appeared in a leading scientific journal and that the response had been a little ridiculous. Nora had never heard of a review process taking so little time and wondered if it was another of those things Tony had thrown money at. They spent the time they weren’t brainstorming responding to emails and requests for further data.

Nora took three steps out of the elevator and stopped.

Half the team were arranged in a loose circle in the kitchen. Sam was sitting on a barstool and had a bag of frozen peas tied to his shoulder with a tea towel. He looked sullen. Steve was stirring something on the stove. There was an ugly split across the bridge of his nose like someone had tried to break it. Bucky was chopping something with lightning quick precision, a purpling bruise on his cheekbone. Clint was halfway in the fridge. He seemed fine, if a little pale.

“Uh.” Nora started, letting Luna hurry off to greet Bucky, “Are you guys okay?”

“Thank god,” Clint said loudly, slamming the fridge door and turning to press both hands to the countertop, “Did you talk to Darcy?”

“Yeah,” She answered. She frowned at Bucky’s bruise but he gave her a little grin, so she thought he was probably okay. She crossed the room to sit on the stool beside Sam and surveyed his bag of peas, “Did you have a mission or something?”

“Nora, for the love of Christ,” Clint was turning green, “Bucky said she’s got a grudge against me?”

Nobody had answered either of her questions, but Clint was clearly in a state. Nora frowned at him, “I thought you knew that?” He clearly didn’t and she thought he might start freaking out in earnest, so she steamed ahead, “Jane told me like way back when we went for coffee with Thor that time. She said Darcy’s had a grudge against you since the thing in New Mexico with the robot.”

He looked stricken, “That was years ago! I don’t even remember what I did!”

“Well good thing I asked,” Bucky filled a glass with water and slid it across the counter to her. Reflexively she picked it up and had a sip, “Don’t worry, she thought I was asking because of the bag you guys grabbed from my apartment. Who doesn’t pack a person pajamas by the way?”

The energy in the room went suddenly tense. Sam shrunk a little and leaned away from her. Steve, who had been looking over his shoulder at her, cleared his throat and turned towards the stove. Bucky’s knife went still on the cutting board. Clint visibly flinched.

Nora frowned again, sweeping her eyes over each of them, “What the heck? What’s your guy’s problem?”

Bucky rolled his shoulders, “Nothin’.”

Well, she wasn’t buying that at all, but she supposed it wasn’t any of her business, “Sure.” She said slowly, “Anyways, she said you led a team of goons that raided her and Jane’s lab?” Clint nodded, “Well apparently you took her iPod. She was furious just telling me about it. I’ve seriously never seen her that mad.”

“I didn’t take it!” Clint wailed, “We had orders to clean out the lab, I was just there to make sure the job got done! I didn’t touch anything!”

“Woah,” Sam muttered, fixing Clint with an alarmed look.

Nora thought ‘woah’ was about right, “Okay, chill.” She pointed at the stool next to her and Clint rounded the counter to flop onto it, “It’s fine, you can fix it.”

“How?”

“Two options,” She took another sip of her water, “It was a purple Nano. You find one on eBay and give it to her for her birthday, which is coming up.”

Sam gave her an approving nod, “That’s a good plan.”

Clint chewed on the suggestion then said slowly, “What’s the second option?”

“It’s a little tougher I think,” Nora reached across the counter to steal a handful of cucumbers from Bucky’s cutting board, “Darcy spends an insane amount of time curating her music. She told me she had like two dozen playlists on that thing. If you could find her iPod, I bet she’d be thrilled.” She crunched on her stolen snack, “Of course, that means you’d have to know where all their old gear got stored and probably spend hours rifling through boxes.” She looked at Clint, “Do you have any idea where it would be?”

“The Vault.” Clint answered. He was frowning.

“What’s that?”

Steve turned fully away from the stove to frown at them, so she thought she probably wasn’t supposed to know but Clint answered anyways, “A warehouse of Tony’s. He had everything moved after the whole-“ He circled a finger in the air and Nora had no idea what the gesture might be referring to. She squinted at him as he continued, “It’s packed with everything SHIELD ever confiscated.”

Nora frowned, “Tony keeps it all in the same place? That seems insane. Is it organized somehow?”

He let out a slow breath, “It’s supposed to be.”

“So not really,” Nora inferred, “Well if you ask Tony for help, I bet he could set FRIDAY to scan through inventory for the right metal compositions.” She caught Sam’s confused look, “Just seems like the sort of thing he could do.”

“When’s Darcy’s birthday?” Steve asked.

“Three weeks.”

Clint shoved himself up from the counter and stalked to the elevator. He tended to be at least a little goofy, but the look on his face was serious as he disappeared from the lounge. Nora could see how frightening he might be on a mission. “Do you think that was helpful?” She asked the rest of them.

“Can’t have hurt.” Sam answered, untying his tea towel and going to the freezer to swap his peas for a new bag.

Nora watched the process with interest. She opened her mouth to ask again what had happened, but Bucky slid the cutting board towards her and she snagged a carrot to snack on instead.

It was interesting, Bucky thought, that the way he knew Nora was the inverse of how she knew him.

Almost everything he knew about Nora, he knew because she’d told him. She was free with her words in a way his friends, all spies and soldiers, weren’t. She told him stories every day about things she’d done and people she’d spoken to. He knew she didn’t have patience for misunderstandings because she’d told him so, but also because of how she reacted to them in the half dozen stories he’d heard from her.

He rarely managed to tell her much of anything, but she knew him anyways because she watched. She knew when things made him uncomfortable from some little change in his body. She knew when he liked something new because she always offered him an out to take in case he didn’t.

Spending time with Nora in his apartment, and hers, gave Bucky the opportunity to learn her the same way. By watching what she did, how she moved, the set of her body when she was in the space. It was different, because he saw the things she didn’t want to admit to, or didn’t even realize she was doing.

Nora, for example, did not pour herself a single glass of water during any of the four days they spent together after she was taken. He’d never given any thought before to the fact that he only saw her drinking coffee, because that was what they went out to do nearly every day at noon. He had assumed that she must drink other things when he wasn’t around to see it. Evidently, she did not. The semi-frequent headaches that she blamed on the fluorescent lights in the lab seemed to Bucky to have a different, more obvious explanation.

He found that if he poured a glass and put it in her hand, she would drink it. It didn’t seem to matter what she was in the middle of, a long story about the lab, a crossword on her phone, cooking dinner. She would pause whatever she was doing and have a drink, seemingly on autopilot.

She was so good at taking care of him, he wondered what other ways she was failing to take care of herself. It didn’t take him long to puzzle out.

She ordered dinner or cooked in the evening and was good at it. But apparently, she ate cereal for breakfast every morning, which was essentially sugared cardboard. Bucky had liked the taste and been furious about it. He’d never seen her actually eat lunch, despite saying on multiple occasions, that was what she was leaving the lab for during the day. He had a difficult time seeing how she could get to the end of her workday and not be starving. It seemed more likely that she was and failed to notice because she was occupied with other things.

He had a solution to the first problem, he just had to figure out what to do about the second.