Carrying Small Stones

“How the hell did I get here?” Sam asked himself.

A couple weeks ago he was living in D.C., working at the Veteran’s Center, waving at the neighbors when he came home. Now he was standing outside the Avengers Tower, his head leaned back as far as it could go just so he could try to see the top.

“Life comes at you fast,” Clint said sympathetically, resting a hand on his shoulder, and then fucking abandoning him, because he was sort of an asshole.

So now he was in the tower lobby alone, holding a bag of broken wings, wondering when his life had spiraled so far out of control. Was it that morning run? Was it when he let them in? Was it when he, inexplicably, offered to help them rob a US army base and then question and threaten a US government agent?

“All of the above,” Sam muttered to himself.

The lobby was about as ostentatious as Sam would have expected from Tony Stark, but there was an order to it that didn’t seem to quite match up. People walked back and forth in business attire like pretty much any other office in New York, though he noticed a heavy locked metal door off to the side that wouldn’t have been out of place in a bank vault.

“Mr. Wilson?” a man called. He looked like a pretty regular guy, but Sam watched him warily anyway. Maria Hill looked like a nice lady, if you just glanced at her, and she was terrifying as hell. “Mr. Stark has been expecting your arrival. I’m Happy.”

“Yeah, man, sure, I’m happy too,” Sam said warily.

“What? No, I’m—nevermind,” he said, shaking his head, before motioning to an elevator located off to the side from all the rest. “The residential elevator is this way. If you’re ready?”

Sam followed the happy man to the elevator, and watched half in awe and half in disbelief as he had to use both a palm scan and a retinal scan in order to get it to open.

“Jarvis, please take Mr. Wilson to Captain Rogers’ floor,” he said.

“Of course, Mr. Hogan,” Jarvis said.

Clint had warned Sam about Jarvis, the AI that apparently ran the entire building. Because of fucking course.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Wilson,” Jarvis told him once the elevator doors closed.

“Yeah, you too, Hal,” Sam said.

“Ah, a joke,” Jarvis said. “2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968. I’ve certainly never heard that one before, Mr. Wilson. Very funny. I’m laughing on the inside.”

The AI was sassing him. He regretted everything.

“We have arrived at Captain Rogers’ floor,” Jarvis announced, as the doors opened. He hadn’t even felt the elevator move. “At the moment, you have access to return to the lobby, or the training floor. Anywhere else will require an escort. If you need anything, please do not hesitate to ask. I assure you, I’m far more obliging than Hal.”

He exited out onto the floor with a snort. Out snarked by an artificial intelligence, he should have stayed retired. Maybe it wasn’t too late to just turn around, no one really knew he was involved with the fall of SHIELD, he could still—

His train of thought broke when he caught sight of Steve.

He looked like he hadn’t slept since the last time he’d seen him. For once, he wasn’t clean shaven. He had the makings of a beard, which may have looked sort of distinguished if it had been properly groomed. As it was, his hair was flying out in multiple directions like he’d been running his hands through it, and the beard was patchy and uneven.

And that’s when he remembered why he was putting up with all this madness. Steve Rogers wasn’t gonna fall apart on his watch.

“Steve,” he said quietly.

Steve’s head shot up like he hadn’t actually heard him come in, and his eyes looked a little wild even as he broke out into a relieved grin. “Sam,” he said. “You came.”

“Well, you left without goodbye,” Sam said wryly. “Had to make sure you were doing okay. Not feeling entirely reassured, I gotta admit.”

Steve winced, reaching up to run a hand though his hair, which pretty much made it worse. “Yeah, I—“ he started, before trailing off.

Sam stepped closer, finally noticing what Steve had spread out on the table in front of him. It was a mixture of drawings that looked like police sketches, old black and white photos, and what looked like mission reports written in Cyrillic. “What’s going on, Steve?”

“Bucky’s alive,” Steve said, and he seemed to almost choke on his own words, but somehow he was still smiling as he said them.

Sam understood the words. He knew who Bucky Barnes was. He may have visited that museum exhibit more than a few times prior to his chance encounter with the main attraction. But that didn’t help him comprehend it.

“What?” he asked, ineloquently.

“He’s been Hydra’s prisoner for the last seventy years,” Steve told him, his smile dropping away. He reached up with both hands and covered his nose and mouth, like he was trying to hold something in.

“Shit,” Sam whispered, dropping down to sit across from him. “And he’s still…he was still alive?” He would have to be in his nineties, Sam figured. He couldn’t imagine. It was almost too terrible to think on.

“Yeah, he’s…” Steve trailed off for a minute. “He’s alive. Hydra gave him a version of my serum. He looks just like he did in the war.” He pulled out a piece of sketch paper from under one of the files, and dropped it to the top of the pile.

It was unmistakably Bucky Barnes, though his hair was a little longer. He was wearing a t-shirt instead of the iconic uniform, and smiling at someone off the edge of the page. Sam reached out and spun the drawing towards him. “That’s…incredible,” he said.

He wasn’t sure if he was talking about the incredibly lifelike drawing or the fact that any of this was even possible. His mind seemed to be having trouble processing it all. It was both, probably.

“I left him there, Sam,” Steve said brokenly.

Sam looked up worriedly, and suddenly the fact that Steve was sitting here sleep deprived and wallowing when he’d just gotten himself a miracle made a whole lot more sense. “That’s not how I’ve heard that story,” he said gently. “Way I heard it, you did everything you could to try to save him.”

“It wasn’t good enough,” Steve said. “I let him fall, and then I didn’t even go back for him.”

Sam remembered reading about the mission that had cost Bucky Barnes his life in school. He’d fallen from a moving train in the Alps. He can’t imagine there was anything else that Steve could have done. Sam was still having trouble believing it was even possible that Barnes had survived at all. “That wasn’t your fault,” he said.

“Everyone keeps telling me that,” Steve said, “but you don’t understand. You weren’t there.”

“No, I wasn’t there,” Sam admitted. “But I was there with you at SHIELD. I was there with you on that highway when he had an entire Strike team on our tail. So I know you.”

“He doesn’t,” Steve admitted quietly. “He doesn’t remember me.”

Which, shit. Sam was way out of his league with this. “Steve, maybe—“

“He knows all the right things to say, but it’s like he’s playing a part,” he continued. “I don’t know what I’d do without Tony.”

That threw Sam for a loop, and he blinked back at him. “Tony?” he echoed. “Tony Stark?”

They hadn’t really talked about Iron Man before, but Steve had made enough snide little remarks about Stark that he hadn’t figured the two were really friends.

“He’s the one that saved him,” Steve admitted. “Bucky killed his parents.”

“Wait, what?” Sam asked incredulously.

Steve looked up with wide pain-filled eyes. “Oh,” he said. “I forgot to mention that part. Hydra brainwashed him to kill for them.” He paused for a minute. “Don’t tell anyone that, okay?”

“Jesus,” Sam muttered. “So Bucky Barnes killed the Starks. And Tony saved him?”

“It wasn’t Bucky’s fault,” he said quickly. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”

“I mean, okay, yeah, I get that,” Sam said, but he didn’t actually get it at all. Now that he had the backstory, he could remember seeing the man that had pulled Steve from the water as Natasha forced him into the helicopter. Now he realized it had obviously been Bucky Barnes, which, what a head trip.

But he also remembered seeing the way he and Iron Man had kept looking to each other. They had not been using the sort of body language one would expect from a man and the murderer of his parents.

Sam leaned forward, watching Steve in concern. “What do you need?”

“They came for him, here. They tried to take him from me again,” Steve told him, before glancing back up. His eyes were cold and unpenetrable, and Sam wondered if this part of Steve was new, or had just been hidden. “I’m going to stop them.”

It was like the moment they met, the moment he opened that door, the moment he took back his wings.

His life was at another crossroads, and there was only one road he could take.

“When do we start?” he asked.