Chapter Text
At first, Bucky Barnes didn't like you, and he certainly didn't trust you.
After the dust was settled and the Sokovia Accord had been repealed, Stark had reached out and offered everyone a place in Avengers Tower - even Bucky. And after Steve had talked him out of a peaceful cryostasis in Wakanda, it's not like he really had anywhere else to go. He could disappear again, go off the grid and lie low, but there was always the chance of someone finding him who knew his trigger words. With his handler dead and Zemo in custody, the likelihood was low but not nonexistent, which was too high of a risk.
He should have let Shuri freeze him for everyone's safety, but Steve had been through enough. He went through hell to save Bucky more than once. The least Bucky could do was to be there for Steve, even if he was just the ghost of the man Steve once knew.
You got an invitation from Stark, too. Sam had seemed surprised when you accepted but wouldn't say much about why beyond "She's not always a people person" or "Teams aren't really her thing."
Bucky suspected you almost as soon as you shook hands for the first time. It was in the main kitchen. He was scrounging around for a snack - who puts an apple in the icebox, Stark - when you floated in. Not actually floating, though. You didn't have that power…at least Bucky didn't think you did. You didn't seem to have any powers. Other than getting under his skin the second he touched you.
"Nice to, uh, officially meet you, I guess." You gave him your name with a tentative smile that flattened your lips as they curled upward at the edges. The handshake was firm but not so much that you were trying to prove something. It felt natural. You were strong. For a non-super soldier. And your hand was deceptively soft.
Bucky pulled his own hand back a little quicker than strictly necessary, skin tingling uncomfortably, making his palm sweat. He successfully fought back the urge to wipe it on his pants.
"Same," Bucky mumbled with a sharp nod. He didn't give you his name. You had helped Steve save him in Germany. You knew who he was. Why waste his breath?
You didn't seem to mind, quickly moving on to introduce yourself to Vision who'd just floated in (literally this time). But the heat of your gaze followed him until he left the kitchen with the apple he went in there for. Originally, he was planning on peeling and slicing it there, but, if Bucky Barnes had one thing, it was a plethora of knives. And most of them were clean. He could do that back in his room. Away from you.
On a team of flashy powers and big personalities, you stood out by being nondescript. Purposefully so, it seemed. Even most of your clothes were neutrals.
In crowded rooms, you slipped through unnoticed, dodging people like it was second nature, sliding past them so easily that it was like you temporarily weren't solid. You were the wave of a sea parting around ocean liner ships before washing back into open waters.
Even in the Tower, you lingered at the edges of rooms when you were forced to occupy them with others. It was easy to recognize the bone-deep need to have your back to a wall and eyes on the exits, because he felt it too.
During any team gathering that you'd both been coerced into attending, Bucky usually found himself next to you. Or you next to him, hovering at the fringes of the team. It should have made him feel closer to you. But all it did was make Bucky realize he knew nothing about you.
The rest of the team had pasts like open books. The public knew their stories - Tony Stark: genius, billionaire, playboy, jackass. Steve Rogers: the man out of time with a giant metal dinner plate. Even Natasha Romanoff: former brainwashed child assassin ballerina who fought with her wiles, wrist tasers, and thighs. But you? A complete unknown. You didn't seem to have any powers. But there was something there, lurking behind the pretty face and the quiet demeanor. He could feel it. So Bucky knew what he had to do.
The first step in Bucky's reconnaissance was usually the most fruitful - research. He had access to relevant databases and had maintained networks of non-Hydra contacts that had kept him mostly under the radar since he broke through his programming. All it should have taken was some hacking in the right places, some money greasing the palms of a handful of less-than-savory people, and, at worst, pulling some strings.
But all his resources could turn up was mundane at best and spotty at worst. From what he could piece together, your parents died when you were a toddler, and you were sent to various group homes in your childhood years. They didn't have much time for you, so you got in trouble judging by your expunged juvie record for various counts of vandalism and petty theft in your preteen years.
After that, no trace could be found of you.
There was no record of your teenage years or young adulthood at all. It was like you'd vanished from the face of the earth. You just popped up on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s radar for recruitment years later for infuriatingly vague reasons: strong potential (for what?), useful abilities for an agent (what kind of abilities?), and a slightly worrying suspicion of authority that your assigned agent seemed to find endearing.
It made no sense. S.H.I.E.L.D. kept excruciatingly thorough records of their recruitment efforts (and of their agents), but your file was one page, front and back. Bucky had never seen anything like it. It positively reeked of a cover up.
And Bucky couldn't afford to have any rogue elements so close by, not when a handful of words were all that stood between Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier.
The easiest conclusion Bucky could draw with what little evidence he found was that you were Hydra. It made the most sense. Even though Hydra’s biggest secrets were out in the open and their leaders either in prison or dead, most of their agents had scattered to the wind. The Avengers had done a good job shutting down the obvious Hydra bases when they searched for Von Strucker and Loki’s scepter, but there were still an untold number of sleeper cells in operation. They just kept even quieter, closer to the vest than before. Cut off one head and two more shall take its place, indeed.
So when Bucky caught you muttering to Natasha under your breath in perfect Russian during a mission and then overheard you helping Steve practice his German, everything fell into place. At least, that’s what it seemed.
Upon first glance, it made perfect sense. You could lay low, invade Avengers Tower for useful intel, and wrap everything up by reactivating the Winter Soldier and bringing him back to your superiors as his new handler. All you had to do was bide your time.
On the other hand, there were plenty of opportunities for you to have used the words on Bucky while helping Steve and even more once you both had joined the Avengers. Hell, you could have even used them on him mid-op, rejoined Hydra, and turned the battle against the rest of the team.
It also wasn't really a safe bet that there even would be the Avengers anymore. If Steve hadn't come clean to Tony early on about Tony's parents, everything could have turned out entirely differently. The team could be fractured, and Steve and everyone who helped him could be on the lam for breaking the Sokovia Accords and for aiding, abetting, and harboring a fugitive of the law. So why would you bet on such a low probability of a good outcome?
What really changed his mind was one covert mission that saw you, Bucky, Sam, and Natasha going after a radical hate group that had captured and killed several young runaways. They called themselves the Purifiers, saying that their mission was to "keep humans pure" by ridding the world of anyone with "filth" in their genes. You were all supposed to infiltrate, rescue any captives, do some recon, and get out, but a chance encounter with the group's leader turned into a fire fight.
You fought with a viciousness Bucky had rarely seen before. You were like a cornered animal, fighting like your life was on the line. Gone was the careful and efficient fighter he'd seen in the field before that, replaced with a berserker version with wild eyes, smeared with gore. You tore through members first with gunfire then with knives and fists. You beat their leader into a coma, and Sam had to enlist Bucky to drag you off of him, kicking and screaming.
He didn't say anything to you on the flight back, but you had obviously felt him looking. You looked up at him with watery, reddened eyes, the rage that was in them earlier having transmuted to the kind of pain that comes with remembering something awful, the kind of look Bucky saw on himself when he looked in the mirror after a sleepless night.
"People like that deserve to die," you said, voice barely loud enough even for Bucky to hear. "Supremacists, hate groups, fascists…bastards who would say someone isn't a person because they aren't like them."
You swallowed hard, and Bucky couldn't help but watch your tongue as you licked your chapped lips. Bucky’s mouth suddenly felt dry, and he found himself wetting his lips almost in sympathy for yours.
"I hope I killed him. I hope he dies." Bucky nodded, barely an incline of his head but that seemed to satisfy you, and you looked back down at your hands. You were both silent the rest of the flight, and Bucky crossed Hydra off of his mental list.
Step number two in Bucky's investigation was interviewing those closest to the subject. Sam was the one who knew you best, so Bucky went to him first. He cornered the other man in the kitchen after Sam had done his morning run.
"You drink straight out of the container?"
Sam startled, almost sloshing orange juice on himself from the nearly-full carton he was drinking from.
"Jesus, Bucky!" He had still been panting from his run, and the sudden jumpscare didn't exactly bring his heart rate down. "Don't go scaring people like that. Do we have to get you a bell like a damn cat?"
Bucky ignored the question, shooting Sam an unimpressed look instead. "You know, that's unsanitary. Drinking straight from the carton."
Sam eyed him back, taking another swig before putting the cap back on. Always so damn stubborn.
"Has my name on it, right on the front. Anyone who drinks it deserves my germs."
Opening the fridge, Sam put the orange juice back, label facing out so the block letters in all caps spelling out his name faced whoever would dare to take it. "What do you want, Buck?"
"Tell me about her."
Sam hesitated at first.
From that look in his eyes, he knew exactly who her entailed. More damn secrets, it seemed. Bucky could almost hear Sam's brain working, cogs whirring as he tried to decide if he was going to play stupid or give in. Bucky fought the urge to glare, to try to pressure. Sam didn't intimidate easily. In the time Bucky had known him, he found the other man answered to honesty more than anything else.
As much as that made him uncomfortable, deeply so, Bucky conceded.
"I know about everyone else on the team. But I don't know anything about her," he admitted, not trying to hide his reluctance. "I want to know who has my 6 in a fight."
Sam eyed him with that appraising look that Bucky'd been on the receiving end of a handful of times. It was like the other man was seeing right through him, past all his defenses and straight into his brain. Or his heart. Either way, Bucky couldn't help but squirm.
"I was on my second tour in Afghanistan when my partner, Riley, and I were called in on this important mission," Sam started. "It was top secret. We weren't even told the full plan, just our roles and contingency plans."
At the confused look on Bucky's face, he added, "They needed air support. Something more stealthy than a jet. We were working with her team directly. Didn't know it then, but they were S.H.I.E.L.D."
Bucky raised his eyebrows in surprise. "So, she's ex-S.H.I.E.L.D., then?"
Sam shrugged his shoulders. "S.H.I.E.L.D. adjacent. More of an independent contractor than a regular agent like Natasha and Clint were."
"So, a mercenary," Bucky said with a scowl.
As fucked up as S.H.I.E.L.D. turned out to be, at least it was semi-reputable. Mercenaries, in Bucky's experience, were anything but. At best, they were murderers for hire, ready to sell the scraps of their soul for cold, hard cash. At worst? Well, terrorist organizations had to fill their ranks somehow. And S.H.I.E.L.D. already had a homegrown terrorist infestation.
"Independent agent. Didn't want to follow orders she didn't agree with," Sam corrected. "She had the right idea of it. Didn't realize that myself until it was too late."
Sam's partner, the one who fell in combat. He left the Air Force after that and became a therapist at the VA. Steve had told him as much. Now Bucky's tongue suddenly felt too big for his mouth, like if he tried to speak, the words wouldn't come out right. Consoling people was never really his strong suit, even in his younger days. So he stayed silent and tried to school his face into a look of sympathy but probably just came out as staring.
Fortunately, Sam wasn't really looking for a response.
"So, we did some recon on a village then air lifted some agents in to infiltrate. Found out later there was a terrorist group that had kidnapped some kids from neighboring areas, trying to turn them into a child army. She was my agent. I was assigned to get her in and out safely and watch her back." Sam crossed his arms, leaning back against the fridge. "She saved my life. They spotted us dropping down, and one of them put a gun to my head. She took him out before he got a chance. Got shot for her trouble and kept fighting anyway."
Sam relayed the rest of the story: how you two kept in touch over the years. How you encouraged him to leave the service after Riley died and supported his move to D.C. even though his family was less than happy about it. How you'd meet up every time you were in town and it always felt like no time passed between you. How he was there for you after S.H.I.E.L.D. fell and your world turned upside down. And how you asked no questions when Sam said he needed your help in Germany.
"What? Why do you look so gloomy?" Sam asked, once he was done. He was watching Bucky closely, eyes scanning the other man's face like he was trying to read Bucky's mind.
"I'm not gloomy," Bucky said, a touch of petulance in his voice. But, now that Sam pointed it out, it felt obvious why he thought that.
With effort, Bucky unfurrowed his brow, letting his face muscles relax. He stood up straighter, letting his tensed shoulder muscles loosen and lower back into their regular position. He kept his arms crossed, though. It was either that or put his hands on his hips, or what Steve called his 'disappointed mom pose.' As if Steve didn't do the same damn thing. Hypocrite.
"It just sounds like you're…close. Is all."
"Oh, so that's how it is," Sam said, grinning. He bumped the fridge with his hip to stand up straight, heading to the kitchen island to grab the hand towel he left there, throwing it over his shoulder. "There's nothing to worry about. We're just friends. I have more romantic chemistry with that bottle of orange juice than with her."
Bucky frowned. "I didn't ask."
"You implied."
"I just didn't realize you guys were that close," Bucky countered coolly. For some reason, his best Winter Soldier stare didn't work on Sam. It didn't work on Steve either, much to his increasing chagrin.
"I just didn't know much about her is all," he added lamely. Even he could hear how pathetic that sounded.
Sam just grinned harder. "Well, now you have something to talk to her about. I'll put in a good word for you. I'm a good wingman in more ways than one."
Before Bucky could even properly process the drastic turn in conversation, Sam walked past him, giving him a hearty pat on the shoulder as he did.
Right as he was about to walk through the doorway, Sam turned, pivoting halfway to look back at Bucky, who watched him in confused silence.
"Music. Ask her about her taste in music. That's your opener. Just be prepared to listen to her babble for a while. But you're good at being the strong, silent type. Good chat, Buck."
As Sam walked out, Bucky was left standing alone in the kitchen, thoughts floundering as he tried to wrap his brain around what just happened.
Later, he tried to talk to Steve about you, and it went just as poorly. Of course Sam got to him first and told him Bucky's supposed motivations. Bucky tried to press him for more information, but Steve was too busy ragging on him for supposedly struggling to hit on you.
"It shouldn't exactly be hard. I mean, she's obviously into you." Bucky nearly spit out the unfortunately timed sip of water he just took. "You just gotta talk to her." Steve snapped his fingers as if remembering something. "Have you tried asking her about books? Pretty sure you're both into fantasy."
Bucky's attempt to talk to Barton went even worse, the archer just telling him to "be yourself…but less broody, maybe. But I dunno. Maybe she's into that?"
And Natasha? She just smirked and told him to ask you himself.