BUCKY

About an hour into our flight, agitation was eating at me again. I bounced my leg as I stared out of the window, then tapped my metal fingers against my knee, then starting tapping my foot. Eventually, I couldn’t sit still any longer. I stood from my seat and looked toward the front of the cabin, where most of the team was attempting to get some sleep.

Indy still hadn’t returned from the back. I dithered in the aisle for a minute before deciding to go and clear the air with her. There wasn’t much else to do. A black curtain hung in the doorway that separated the two cabins.

My hand hovered in the air just before that curtain as a familiar voice drifted to me from the other side.

“-if you can’t even keep your team under control?” Fury’s voice was raised, probably coming from some communication device; I hadn’t seen him throughout this little extraction.

“I know, sir, but I’ve got them back. The mission went off without any fatalities or serious injuries. If anything, the two of them going in first distracted Eleanor from the rest of us coming in behind them.” Indy’s voice was just as professional and level as usual, but even I could hear the undercurrent of desperation in it. “Please, sir. Give me another chance.”

“It’s not just you we’re worried about. Barnes is a loose cannon. We’re considering cutting him-”

“Sir, with all due respect,” Indy cut in, a firmer note in her voice now. “Without Steve Rogers around, he is the only super soldier we’ve got. We need him. And after the Peach Bottom incident, we know Hydra’s got their eye on him again. We let him loose and we leave him vulnerable to reacquisition.”

My mouth went dry. So Hydra was after me again. I had a hunch after the whole ordeal with Riley, but having it confirmed formed a knot of uncertainty in my stomach.

There was a pause. Then a sigh. “Agent Strathos. Tony put a lot of faith in you. It’s the main reason you’re here. Show us you’re capable of handling this team.” His tone was ominous.

“I will, sir.”

There was a beat of silence before I heard a soft click. Then Indy whined quietly.

“Ugh, Tony. What the hell did you get me into?”

I slid my hand between the curtain and the wall and pulled it aside. Indy was seated, her elbows on her knees and face tilted down into her hands.

“Hey,” I mumbled as I stepped into the cabin, letting the curtain fall shut behind me.

Her head whipped up, surprise in her eyes. “Bucky-”

I held a hand up as I approached. “I know you said you’d deal with me back at the compound, but…”

I glanced around uncomfortably as she cocked an eyebrow at me.

Given my longer-than-average lifespan and my personal history, I’d eaten my fair share of crow. This girl wasn’t one of the many I’d killed. And I had no way of knowing for sure, but it certainly would have come up by now if I had killed someone she knew. So why was it so hard to push the apology out of my suddenly dry mouth? Why was it harder to apologize for being reckless at her expense than it was to apologize to strangers for inflicting traumatizing pain?

Because she trusted you.

My running off with Sam had caused problems for her with her superiors. And still she had defended me against Fury’s threats of tossing me off the team. The reminder of her insistence that I was needed here is what spurred me into motion.

I sat in the seat across from her, breathing deeply before letting out a heavy exhale.

“I’m sorry,” I finally said. My voice was quieter than I meant it to be, and I couldn’t look up from my own hands. But she straightened up across from me.

“I shouldn’t have-”

Invaded your office.

Gone through your email.

Run off without saying anything.

Underestimated your role on the team.

“Well, there’s a lot of things I shouldn’t have done.” I ran a hand over the back of my neck, closing my eyes as the rashness of my actions caught up with me.

Her eyebrows were still drawn in with the stress of her situation, but her mouth lost some of its tension.

“Well,” she said after a moment of processing what I’d said. “Thank you. I’m glad you realize how important the things I do for the team are now.”

She still seemed sort of pale and somewhat depressed compared to her usual affability.

“Look, I’m not…very good at this,” I admitted, leaning forward a little. “But I appreciate what you do for us all. You’re good at your job. I didn’t realize how good until I was cuffed to Sam on Kate’s crazy mom’s yacht-”

She laughed a little despite herself and a small amount of relief coursed through me. It was discomfiting to see someone so naturally chipper so down.

She sighed, a tiny smile finally lifting the corners of her mouth. “Thanks, Bucky. But you are still kind of in the doghouse.”

“Oh no,” I groaned theatrically, sitting back against the seat and rolling my head back. “What does that mean?”

Her smile turned into a semi-evil smirk. “You’re grounded.”

INDY

Fall rolled in just as Bucky was beginning his sentence. He took it like the soldier he was, which shouldn’t have surprised me. The guilt I’d seen in his eyes that night on the plane had been alarming in its intensity. Like he was still blaming himself for more than just this particular fuck up.

Sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t paying attention, he would look at me with a slight frown on his face. I got the sense that he was still upset with himself for what happened even though I had forgiven him (and was currently playing warden). It seemed to confuse him, my forgiveness.

There were upsides, though. In the two weeks since we had to rescue him and Sam from Eleanor Bishop, our dynamic had shifted. I’d never doubted that he would help if I were in trouble; he’s a literal hero. It’s his job. But there were slight changes in the way he was around me.

When I stood near him, he seemed to angle his body more toward me, like he was subconsciously letting me know he was open to conversation. He threw his support behind me whenever I made decisions, as if maintaining his apology. He’d dispensed with the hesitance to ask for my help when I gave him a whole slew of paperwork as part of his probation.

Maybe the most surprising part, though, was how protective Bucky had become.

“I’m going grocery shopping. You wanna come?” I asked him as I tied a scarf loosely around my neck.

The rest of the team was off on separate missions. Kate and Yelena were headed to Ohio to check up on a lead I’d gotten about another potential Hydra sympathizer. Sam and John were helping the local government in Salem with settling the emotional climate in the area after a fake super hero took advantage of them.

The two of us had been slogging through paperwork, but my eyes were starting to hurt and we were running low on spaghetti noodles.

He glanced up at the window, where the sun was setting already, and frowned a little.

“You’re going now?”

“It’s that or we can eat 6-day-old Chinese that Sam left in the back of the fridge,” I suggested with a benevolent expression.

A visible shudder ran through him before he hauled himself to his feet. “Yeah, I’m coming.”

I was from the south originally, but I had lived in New York for almost 20 years now. The sprawl of the city had been intimidating when I was a kid. It was an adjustment, getting familiar with the flow of traffic, the general attitudes of New Yorkers, the rats that would sometimes come to scurry among the feet of traveling humans. But eventually walking the streets of New York was no longer a panic-inducing nightmare, and things like hailing a cab grew to be second nature.

By now, I was used to crossing paths with the occasional leering creep out on the street, especially at night. So, when a thin man with scraggly facial hair and a ratty beanie started walking my direction with a lecherous smile on his face, I didn’t think much of it. I just prepared myself to either ignore him completely or firmly turn him down.

But suddenly Bucky was stepping around me, to the outside of the sidewalk, between me and the street. He moved up closer to my side, his arm brushing mine. I glanced up at him and saw the chill-inducing death stare he was giving the man, who now had to pass by Bucky instead.

The guy didn’t glance back at us, but his face seemed blanched.

Bucky didn’t even mention it, just kept walking beside me, a little closer than usual.

When we got to the store, Bucky took command of the grocery cart and I read off of the list I’d crammed in my pocket before we’d left the compound. A few people stopped and stared at Bucky’s metal hand any time he used it without thinking. It was usually at that point that I’d spot a sale on something nearby and have to slide between them to get a closer look.

“This is a ridiculous amount of options,” Bucky muttered to himself in the cereal aisle, eyes scanning the (admittedly broad) range of brightly colored boxes.

“Hey, they didn’t have this one pre-blip!” I plucked a coconut-flavored variation on Cheerios from the shelf.

He cocked his head at me suddenly, blue eyes catching the fluorescents of the store. “Were you… you know, snapped away?”

I was almost as shocked as he seemed to be that neither of us had ever talked about it. It was a hugely impactful moment for everyone on the planet.

“Yeah,” I finally said, shrugging as I tossed the cereal box into the basket. “I was at my old desk at Stark Industries one minute, then — gone the next.”

He nodded slowly.

“I hear you were fighting aliens at the time.” I rounded the side of the cart and hip-checked him out of the way so I could move us further down, toward the oatmeal.

“How’d you hear that?” he asked, still scanning the cereal like he thought Captain Crunch might be a Nazi in disguise.

“It’s my job to know more than I should,” I chuckled. “It wasn’t until after we all came back that I found out that everyone had gone to Wakanda.” A frown tugged my grin down. That wasn’t the only thing I’d found out after coming back.

“You were close with the old Avengers?” There was a sudden curiosity in his voice.

“Sort of. I was mostly close with Tony. I knew the others, but I was more of a casual work friend to them.”

“We could’ve used you out there,” he said idly, slipping his hands into the pockets of his jeans as we turned the corner down another aisle.

I almost tripped over my own foot in shock. It wasn’t so long ago that he was casting doubt on every call I made. What a change this was. I shook off the surprise and passed the cart back off to him so I could step away to grab a bag of rice.

“In the battle against Thanos?” I asked him dubiously, my eyebrows raised. “You think Icould’ve made a difference?”

He hesitated, squinting his eyes as he looked me up and down. “You’re good at what you do,” was the only other response he gave me, turning to push on toward the canned goods section.

We continued shopping in an easy, friendly way that was nearly foreign to us. Almost like normal roommates.

Oh, my god. I’m roommates with the Winter Soldier.

The unexpected thought almost made me break down in hysterical giggles in the checkout line. I don’t know how it took until now for that to really sink in. But now that it had, it sounded like some parody on real life.

Bucky’s prosthesis came in astoundingly helpful when carrying the groceries. Most of our bags hung from his metallic fingertips without the potential for loss of blood circulation. I caught myself feeling jealous for a split second before remembering I still enjoyed having all my limbs.

We set to putting away the food and chatting inanely, critiquing each other’s reading habits. Bucky was well read, but he hadn’t read much that was printed in this century. Not a crime, but it made his pop culture knowledge fairly lopsided. He had listened to music and watched movies and TV shows from this era, but didn’t seem to have attempted to tread the turbulent waters of the modern-day publishing industry.

I clicked my tongue when he mentioned the synopsis of Twilight as his main deterrent and slid my box of coconut Cheerios onto the pantry shelf. “You can’t judge all of modern fiction on one tween sensation/nightmare.”

“Maybe not,” he conceded, deadpan, as he put the celery away in the fridge. “But I can use it as a reason to procrastinate. And I will.”

I rolled my eyes and shot him a look. “I don’t know what else I expected from the guy who’s older than chocolate chip cookies.” I punctuated the remark by lifting a bag of recently purchased chocolate chips.

Bucky practically choked, his eyes finding mine in alarm. “There’s no way that’s true.”

I grinned, slipping my phone out of my pocket and quickly typing my query into Google. Once the results came up, I turned the phone around so Bucky could lean down, squinting to read it.

Chocolate chip cookies were first made in the late 30s. Bucky would’ve been a young man, feasibly out-of-the-loop on baking trends.

First, his stubbled face was wiped clean in shock. Then, inexplicably, his shoulders started shaking. For a minute, I worried I’d pushed some weirdly sensitive button and made a 6-foot-4 wall of muscle cry. But then his face split in a wide grin and laughter spilled from him. Actualdeep, roaring laughter. I’d never heard him so… free. Unburdened and joyful.

I couldn’t hold in my own laughter after that. Of all the things to break through to the guy, his age in relation to a beloved chocolatey treat was not on my Bingo card. We laughed for a while, maybe longer than was necessary. But it seemed to ease some of the tension that always drew his shoulders in.

I made chocolate chip cookies after dinner that night and when the rest of the team returned, everyone nabbed one. Bucky gave me a tiny smirk over their heads, like we were sharing a private joke. I raised my own cookie to him discretely, smiling back.