SAM

“When do you think she’ll be back?” Kate asked from across the table, leaned back and tossing an apple into the air.

I sighed and dragged my phone out of my pocket. “Should be hearing from her anytime now.”

After John and I had taken down the cell we’d flushed out, we’d left the task force to clear up and come back to the compound to wait for Yelena’s return and debrief. Kate was already here and waiting, bouncing on her feet. She wasn’t the only one feeling impatient. We were missing two vital pieces of our team. And we still felt only a step away from eliminating the danger that had sent them running in the first place.

“I miss Indy’s cooking,” John droned, staring mournfully at the spoonful of peanut butter he was holding in front of his face. “I could go for a muffin right now.”

“How do you think us compound residents feel?” Kate groused, rising from her seat and snatching the jar of peanut butter from John as she passed. It was easy to not take that as a slight on my cooking; I missed the diversity of Indy’s contribution, too. “Besides, don’t you have a wife to cook for you?”

“Yeah,” he shrugged. “But every time I showed up here, Indy feeds me anyway. And I’m not turning down free food.”

“Fatass,” Kate grumbled, digging through the pantry in the kitchen.

I barely heard them. I was staring down at my phone, flipping through pictures and videos from months ago. Some of them were from last year.

There was the first picture we’d all taken together in the living room. Yelena hung from my back, smiling over my shoulder. Kate and Indy were hugging each other and I think I caught them mid-laugh because their eyes were squeezed shut. And then there was Bucky. Standing to the edge of the frame, arms crossed and throwing a grumpy stare at the rest of us.

There were a few of some nights out our team had taken. Most of them were taken in bars, with dark lighting and shaky focus. Smiling faces and drinks stared back at me. Most of them were uninteresting. Except the background of one, where I noticed Bucky’s face for the first time. He was typically stone-faced in most of these pictures, but this one…

He had an elbow rested on the table, drink in front of him, and was leaning with his face against his hand. Indy was seated next to him in the booth, but there was a gap of uncertain distance between them, the way there always had been in the beginning. She was facing away, talking to whoever was next to her. But he was… smiling. A little one, but it was there. He was trying to hide it, angling his chin behind his hand, but I happened to catch him staring at the side of her head and smiling at whatever she was saying in the background of my selfie with our waitress.

I found more like it as I scrolled. The man was hopeless. And, judging by the pictures I was looking at from just before they’d been forced to flee, she was just as bad.

Her eyes were on him in more than one picture, sometimes smiling and talking to him, sometimes just staring at him while he wasn’t paying attention. My friends were idiots. The tension between them in every picture I scrolled past was palpable, even through the screen.

Apparently, this team was full to bursting with oblivious people. The only reason I’d noticed is because I’d been trying to get Bucky to meet new people for a while before the team formed. So the shift in his attention on Indy from unamused and mistrusting to curious and cautiously hopeful — I’d pretty much been waiting for it. But no one else had noticed the energy between them.

Or so I’d thought until Kate approached me after Bucky and Indy had left. She mentioned Indy seeming concerned for Bucky before we’d gone to Wisconsin. Then she’d trailed off after citing Bucky’s protectiveness, his tunnel vision, when the two of them had gone after our captured tech girl. Her eyebrows had raised like she was asking me a veiled question beneath her observations. I hadn’t really answered her, just thrown out an observation of my own on their behavior toward each other. We seemed to come to an unspoken understanding.

Those two had it bad.

I wondered whether all that time alone together had led to anything. Bucky was having a hard time holding it in before he left. How much worse would it have been for him, trying that in such close quarters?

My scrolling was interrupted by an incoming call.

“It’s her,” I announced, cutting through John and Kate’s bickering. The two of them rounded the table to stand on either side of me as I answered and put the phone on speaker.

“Yelena, how’d it go?”

“I made it just after McKay. Took out the men he had surrounding the building. Then made my way inside, helped Bucky and Indy with McKay and warned them to get back on the move.”

Concise and to the point. As far as our jobs, it told me everything I needed to know. But…

“And Bucky and Indy?” Kate asked before I could.

“They were in Texas. Apparently, they’d been living there without issue since they left New York. Aside from the light beating McKay seemed to have given Indy, the two of them seemed in good condition.” There was a beat of pause. “Have they always been so… affectionate?”

Kate and I met eyes and grinned, John cocking his eyebrows at us quizzically.

“Why? What did you see?”

Suddenly, this was feeling more like a gossip session than an informal mission debrief. But I missed my friends. I was worried about them. And I was burning up with curiosity.

“Well, when I got there, McKay had Indy with a knife to her throat. I tried to deescalate the situation the way you suggested, Sam. But, as usual, Bucky had other ideas. So McKay is dead.”

Not a huge surprise, honestly.

“And when McKay fell, Bucky and Indy embraced.” There was confusion in her voice, like she wasn’t sure ‘embraced’ was the right word.

“Well, sure,” Kate said, shrugging. “Indy was almost killed. They were probably both overcome with relief.”

“He kissed her head. So many times I nearly threw up in my mouth.”

Atta boy, Buck.

“I think there might be something going on between them,” Yelena said in a conspiratorial voice, slowly sounding more amused by the situation. She was a deadly woman with knowledge of weaponry that might even outstrip my own, but it seemed the complexities of her friends’ love lives were slightly more challenging for her to grasp.

“You think?” I asked sarcastically, sharing an unamused look with Kate while John sat to my other side, apparently making connections in his head.

“Indy did once tell Kate and I that-”

“Okaythankyoubye!” Kate interrupted loudly, tapping her forefinger on the red button in the center of my phone screen.

I held my hands out, mouth open. “What was that?”

Kate looked at me innocently for a split second before saying, “What?” and walking away.

“What did Indy tell you?” I called after her.

She boarded the elevator and grinned back at me. “I don’t tell secrets.”

I grinned and shook my head. It sounded like whatever was going on between Indy and Bucky wasn’t much of a ‘secret’ anymore.

John looked up from the table with a befuddled expression. “Are Indy and Bucky dating or something? Isn’t that kind of… creepy?”

My smile immediately fell into a disgusted glare as I stood up, shoving his shoulder roughly as I walked toward the residential hallway. “Man, shut up.”

BUCKY

There were a few breaths of silence after Yelena left before Indy turned to look up at me. The bruising on her cheek did nothing to detract from how scared she suddenly seemed. Young and scared and maybe a little… ashamed? I didn’t have a chance to ask her, because suddenly she was crying and I was hugging her, tugging her along back into the cabin.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, clinging to my side as we made our way as quickly as we could manage to our bedroom. Quiet sobs broke up her speech.

“Shh,” I murmured, settling my fingers in her hair. I pulled her into the room and shut the door, kissing her quickly on the forehead. “There’s not much time. We need to get out. We can talk about everything else later.”

I kneeled at the side of the bed, yanking out our bags and opening them to throw in a few extra items before we booked it. Then I realized Indy was still just standing there, hugging her elbows to herself. Guilt stabbed at me, twisting and burning. I should have been able to do more for her right now. More than tactical practicality and pushing her feelings onto the back burner. But we weren’t a normal couple. I could only hope she would continue to settle for it.

I stood to cross the room, her tear-filled eyes tracking me almost leadenly.

“I know this isn’t what you need. We both knew I’d never be able to give you that,” I said in a low voice, opening the closet to grab handfuls of clothes. I turned to pace back toward the bed with our open bags. “But it’s what’s going to keep us alive.”

I paused and stood beside her, settling my hand gently against her stomach. My thumb rubbed lightly against her, my incoherent thoughts spinning through terrifyingly unfamiliar territory.

“All of us.”

She drew in a deep breath, then nodded and squeezed my hand before the two of us turned to throwing the remnants of our half-baked life here into our bags.

The one good thing about being on the run so often was that it was very much a practice-makes-perfect type of activity. Our process felt damn-near streamlined as we tossed everything into the SUV and prepared to leave. I wasn’t able to avoid leaving the bike behind this time. I sighed, patted its seat without looking as I jogged past it, and held the passenger door open for Indy.

We didn’t bother talking about a destination yet. Our main concern now was putting distance between us and any town within a fifty-mile radius. Besides, Indy was looking just as worn down as she had the night we’d fled from New York. She curled up with her legs beneath her in the seat, her head pillowed on her crossed arms. I rested my elbow on the center console, the fingers of my right hand running over her hair while I glanced tensely in the rearview, watching the darkness for signs of pursuit.

I didn’t have time or the mental space to sort through my feelings on the newest development in our lives, but I knew one thing with a certainty that felt set in my cursedly enhanced bones. I wasn’t letting them have her. They’d taken everything else from me. My freewill. My sanity. Even enormous chunks of time from my life. They wouldn’t have her, too. Especially not now.

We drove south for nearly an hour until we hit Crystal City. I pulled us into a gas station to refuel, grab some food, and figure out our game plan. Indy lifted her head slowly, looking like a horror movie victim.

“I know I said I wouldn’t let you out of my sight again,” I started slowly, frowning at the shaking in her hands as she put them in her lap. “But I think if I took you in there with me, it might alarm some people. Will you be okay here for a few?”

Her lips twitched. “I’m not broken, yet, Sarge. I’ll be fine.”

I huffed in exasperation, grabbed her gently by the sides of her face, and pressed my lips tenderly against the split on the corner of her lower lip. “Be good. Lock the doors. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

She looked exhausted and seemed to merely be indulging me, but I heard the SUV’s door locks click into place as I trudged away from the vehicle. I grabbed us both some drinks, random snacks, and some coconut chocolate bars for Indy. It was that or the gas station’s burritos, so oily they were almost transparent. Neither was a healthy option for a woman carrying a baby, but it was all we had to work with for the moment. I only put twenty in the tank. We were probably going to have to ditch the SUV pretty soon after coming face-to-face with a squad of Hydra goons.

As I pulled my wallet out of my pocket, the fake, clunky wedding ring that never did fit quite right on my vibranium finger caught my attention.

I’d worried for longer than I should have over Indy’s willingness to settle down and now the moment to find out was upon me. She definitely seemed distraught, but so would anyone who’d been ambushed and attacked during such a vulnerable moment. I had to wonder how much of her current demeanor was solely because of the pregnancy.

She unlocked the doors for me when I got back and I passed her the bag before pumping the gas. A lot of different ways to bring it up swirled around in my head, but in the end, when I slid back into the driver’s seat, what I settled on was much less socially graceful than I’d hoped for.

“You’re pregnant.”

Her attention snapped up from the Mounds bar in her hand, eyes alarmed. She settled quickly, lowering her gaze to somewhere near my chest. “Yes.”

I nodded and focused on the steering wheel in front of me, unsure what to do now that I had the blunt, honest answer I’d gone in search of. How did I voice all of the other, less easily answered questions I had?

“It shouldn’t have…” she whispered brokenly. “I don’t know how. I mean, I know no form of birth control is 100 percent, but…” She trailed off and shook her head, voice thickening. “I just didn’t think it would happen.”

“Honestly, I wasn’t sure I could still… do that,” I muttered, trying not to stare at the way she held onto the dog tags I’d given her. “I thought the experiments… the repeated freezing and unfreezing process… I was never trusted with all the details of what they did to me. But I figured it was a safe bet to assume sterility was up there with the rest of the issues they gave me.”

“No one told you?” Her curiosity brought some of the life back into her face. “I thought for sure the tests they ran on you after deprogramming would have included things like that.”

“It probably did. I didn’t want to know most of it, then. I was in no place mentally to even consider sentencing some poor woman to a life tied to me through a kid. It was enough to just try to live a good life. Try to be a good man, even if I always felt like it was fake. I didn’t think I was going to find you.”

Indy blew out a slow breath, reaching across the center console to grab my hand. Her fingers were familiar between mine by now, comforting after a night of worrying I’d be witnessing her last breath.

“What are we going to do?” She asked, trying to smile through the tears in her eyes.

In answer, I leaned over, tugging her closer until I could kiss her. Her fingers tightening into my hair soothed some sense of doubt I hadn’t realized I’d had, some wisp of insecurity. She kissed me back almost madly, like she wanted to lose herself in my touch and forget the threats and challenges facing us.

When we finally pulled away, both breathing heavily, she gave me a tired chuckle and shook her head. “I love you, Buck.”

My breathing had never picked up speed so quickly.

While I stared, dumbfounded, she let out a self-deprecating grin that reminded me of the girl I’d met so long ago, crawling out from beneath a desk. “Yeah. I know. I picked the most dangerous guy out there to fall for. Clearly my self-preservation instincts are shot.” Tears filled her eyes again, voice soft and breaking. “But I’m so in love with you that I was almost killed tonight and all I could think about was that I hadn’t told you yet.”

“I love you,” I got out urgently, cupping her face in my hands. I’d waited so long to tell her… I felt immediately weightless, like I was floating. So I kissed her and said it again between kisses. And again. “I love you. I love you so much, Indy. I love you.”

She was crying. I was crying. We were both a mess. We were in danger and that danger extended to another person, an innocent with no idea of how much I already feared for its safety. But we were alive. Together. We still had a lot to talk through, and another journey to prepare for, but wherever she was was where I wanted to be. For better or worse.

INDY

I had a backup plan. One I’d been thinking through since we got settled in Texas. I guessed that once we got to our next long-term destination, I’d have to start formulating a third backup. Following my instructions, Bucky drove us to the state’s southern border. It was nearly morning by the time we made it to the crappy little motel at the edge of the state, the sky beginning to bleed from black into dark red-orange.

Bucky, holding to his promise not to leave my side again, insisted on at least checking into the motel with me and getting me and our few bags safely ensconced within our room. Only then did he follow my instructions to take the SUV out a good distance and destroy it before someone saw us with it. No one was alive to see us leave the cabin, so just ditching it would leave irrefutable evidence that we’d come in this direction.

I had no illusions about Hydra’s thoroughness. Their operatives surrounding the cabin had almost certainly relayed our plates back to whoever was coordinating them before Yelena had shown up and Batman-ed us out of there.

So Bucky, agreeing with my logic, kissed me one last time, hesitant to pull away. Then he left me there.

It was good to be alone for a bit. Even though I’d been alone when I’d been attacked, and there was a small corner of my brain that influenced me to jump skittishly at every small noise. I was beginning to have my own vendetta against Hydra, hatred growing for my own reasons rather than a secondhand outrage on Bucky’s behalf. They’d blown up our compound. My home. Attacked me. Forced me to kill for the first time in my life. Then, after forcing me from my home, they’d just kept at it. Attacking when my guard was finally down, during a moment when I was more worried about my relationship than terrorism and global politics.

Now that Bucky knew, now that he was gone, and I had a few minutes to process the last week’s worth of stress, I felt… everything.

I was terrified. I’d never been pregnant before. I didn’t know how that worked. The only kid I’d ever raised was myself, and I wasn’t sure I’d done a great job with me. So yeah, I was maybe leaning against the wall laughing manically with my hands in my hair while I tried and failed not to panic.

But I was also relieved. Bucky knew. I’d told him everything. That I loved him. That I was pregnant. He knew, and it didn’t seem to have changed his feelings for me.

He’s a good man, no matter what he tells himself.

We hadn’t had a chance to really talk about it. The plan was to sleep through the day before jumping the border into Mexico after nightfall, so we probably wouldn’t be talking about it until we made it to our next safe spot. We’d be crashing with a friend who wasn’t expecting us, but I was sure there wouldn’t be much of an issue. Once we were there, we could worry about hashing out the details surrounding the baby.

The baby.

Why did that phrase feel so… wrong? Something in me wasn’t sure I could be a mother. I was excited. I think. But overriding that happy feeling was the sickening doubt that made my legs shake beneath me. I didn’t know how to do this. It was way too soon. Both in my life and in the relationship between Bucky and I.

We’d done everything so out of order. Should I even be considering leaning into this course of action? What was the alternative? Getting rid of it?

My hand flew to my stomach impulsively, clutching at the fabric of my shirt because I needed to hold on to something.

I didn’t want to go through with that. I was pro-choice, but it wasn’t something I felt I could do personally. Not without taking a big hit to my mental and emotional health. And especially not with the child of someone like Bucky. Someone I loved and respected and couldn’t imagine my life without at this point.

But, if he didn’t want it…

I shook my head sharply. There was no point speculating on his feelings on it. Not when there was still so much running to do and so many life-threatening situations to avoid. I’d just have to be patient.

So I shook my hair out, went to the bathroom to wash my cut and bruised face, then collapsed into the bed. But as I fell asleep, hope bloomed stubbornly in my chest. Because I remembered the way he’d put his hand over my stomach before we’d fled the cabin. “All of us,” he’d said. He’d keep all of us alive.