Archive of Our Own ^beta

“I’m thinking Easter egg cookies,” Bucky said. “The ones that are all iced up to look like pysanki eggs. Only I don’t know if all of them celebrate Easter, and it’s not like St. Patrick’s Day, where no one minds about four leaf clover cookies even if they don’t much care for the holiday itself.”

“So get some plain cookies too,” Steve said.

It was a bright, sunny spring morning, and they were walking to Les Trois Pains to buy pastries to take with them on their visit to the Home. The flowering crabapple trees blossomed pink and white, and the pearly early morning sky was deepening to blue.

“Yeah, I know. I just want it to be special. We missed the last two weeks.” They went to the Home every Saturday when they were in DC, but for the last two weekends they had been on a fruitless wild goose chase after Ivanov and Mercer, two of Coulson’s mind-wiped Hydra agents who had escaped the Home. “And éclairs for Joyce and Simmons, like always,” Bucky said. “What are you getting for Rumlow?”

“Probably some dog biscuits for Lucy,” Steve said. Rumlow had a lot of difficulties with eating, probably a result of burn scarring in his throat, and a present that he couldn’t eat would probably be worse than no present at all.

“Good old Lucy,” Bucky said fondly. He gave a little hop. “You know they’re going ahead with the dog program?”

Steve grinned. “I think Tony just wanted to shut you up.”

“Oh, probably.” Bucky wasn’t bothered. “It’s gonna be so good for everyone, though, Tony won’t regret it. I hope Reynolds does it. Or Rodriguez – I think it’d be really good for him, having to be good to a dog. I’ve been reading this book about non-standard therapies – ”

For years, Bucky had steadfastly refused to read anything about PTSD or therapy or even plain old psychology. He always gave the impression of considering the material utterly irrelevant to his life.

Steve wondered if he saw any of it as relevant to his life now, but he figured there was no reason to press. Maybe it would help him to read it, even if it was ostensibly about Joyce or Reynolds or Reynolds’ fellow DeathLok soldiers at the Home.

“ – and it’s like just about anything you’d do as a hobby can be therapy. Dance therapy, gardening therapy, art therapy. Dolphin therapy.” Bucky’s eyes lit up. “Steve!”

“I don’t think even Tony’s going to be willing to pay for a dolphin facility, Bucky. He’s gotta draw the line somewhere.”

“Don’t be a stick in the mud, Steve. If you presented it to him right, made a technical challenge out of it – ”

“Bucky!” Steve was laughing, rather rueful, because of course Bucky was right. If Tony fell in love with the idea of a dolphin therapy pond, he would absolutely go ahead and build one.

“He’d probably end up building a great big hamster palace type thing for them. All the amenities a dolphin could want.” Bucky grew abruptly serious. “No, that wouldn’t be good. For the dolphins, I mean. We oughta just leave them with their pods.”

“They’d probably be happier that way,” Steve agreed.

They walked quietly for a while. A few sparrows hopped along the pavement in front of them, pecking at spilled granola. Someone must have been trying to eat breakfast on the go.

“How about a horse program?” Bucky said, and Steve began to laugh again.

“Bucky!”

Bucky laughed too. But Steve grew serious. “No one at the Home’s going to go for a program that gives the patients access to a bunch of horses,” he said. “Not after Mercer and Ivanov’s escape.”

They both fell silent and sober. A bird tweeted in one of the spindly sidewalk trees. “It’s not like they can bring Hydra much new info about the Home,” Bucky said. “We already know Hydra knows where it is.”

Steve nodded. Hydra had sent a strike force at the Home less than a month into its operations. They hadn’t tried it since. Steve suspected they were hoping to lull the staff into a false sense of security before they struck again.

“Do we have time for coffee before we head out to the Home?” Bucky asked.

Steve shook off his dark thoughts and checked his watch. He’d stopped carrying his phone with him unless he had to; it was too easy for a phone to become a portable listening device for someone like Coulson. “Plenty of time,” he said.

He hoped they’d get one of the window tables. Les Trois Pains faced east, and the early morning sun streaming through the windows made everything look soft and beautiful. Steve itched to sketch him sitting at the table with one of those big white coffee cups. Looking out the window maybe.

He celebrated inwardly when they reached the café and found one of the window tables open. A corner table too; Bucky would be happy about that. Steve swung his laptop bag off his shoulder – he wasn’t carrying a laptop, but it was just the right size for a big sketchbook – and made to claim the table, only to discover that Bucky had stopped almost on the welcome mat.

Steve went back to him, puzzled by his sudden stillness, but his puzzlement fell away abruptly as he followed Bucky’s gaze. Dr. Charles, Bucky’s old psychologist, sat in an armchair by the window, the sunlight bright on his white hair and white coffee cup. He held a book in his hand, but he wasn’t reading it any longer; he had looked up and was looking at Bucky and not moving.

Steve put a hand on Bucky’s arm. He wasn’t sure what he intended to do, but it didn’t matter anyway, because Bucky slid out from under his hand and moved over to Dr. Charles.

Dr. Charles tensed slightly. Steve didn’t blame him. Bucky generally looked like he was on a warpath whenever he approached anything, especially when he was nervous, and Steve thought he was very nervous. He stood over Dr. Charles a moment, and Steve was just about to try to lead him away, because it looked like Bucky intended to just stand there and glare at him till Dr. Charles moved. But then Bucky plunked down in the armchair next to Dr. Charles, catty corner around the same small table.

He still didn’t speak, though, just sat there. Steve stood awkwardly a few yards away. Should he go order and leave them to it?

“Bucky?” said Dr. Charles. He didn’t sound angry or frightened or anything, really, except enormously surprised.

“You should come work at the Home,” Bucky blurted.

That didn’t seem to help with the surprise. “At the…”

“At Rosemont,” Bucky clarified, using the Home’s formal name. “I told Pepper she ought to contact you. Did she?”

“Oh!” Dr. Charles’ face cleared, only to crease in puzzlement again. “Yes, she did. But as I told her, I’m semi-retired now, actually, and – ” He stopped. He moved an empty sugar packet onto his saucer and back to the tabletop. “You’re the one who gave her my name?”

“Yeah.” Bucky was grinning. He leaned forward in the chair, an almost confiding posture. One foot jiggled on the floor. “I told her, you’re so good with impossible cases. Like me.”

Dr. Charles didn’t reply right away. Steve moved to stand behind Bucky’s chair. Dr. Charles’ gaze flickered up to him, then back to Bucky’s face. “I realize this is your line,” Dr. Charles said wryly. “But I have to say it. Are you fucking with me?”

He sounded bemused rather than angry, but Bucky still lowered his face, his lips clamping together in embarrassment.

“I’m sorry,” Dr. Charles began.

But Bucky shook his head. “No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I do mean it, though. You did a good job. I had to get rid of you because you were getting too close – ” He paused again, looking away, blinking, and then he looked back at Dr. Charles. “And I wasn’t ready to be caught yet. So I had to blow it up.” He swallowed. “And I’m sorry.”

Dr. Charles’ face softened perceptibly. “It’s all right,” he said. “I confess my pride was rather bruised at first, but it’s important for a psychologist to stay humble. You did me no lasting damage.”

“They pushed you out of SHIELD a few months later…”

Dr. Charles shook his head. “I quit,” he said. “Coulson asked me to stay, in point of fact. I suppose he felt I was valuable even if he ignored nearly every single one of my recommendations.”

He spoke with such dryness that Steve had to laugh. They both looked at him, as if surprised he was still there, and Steve decided that was a sign he ought to take himself off for a bit. Any danger had passed. “I’m going to get some breakfast,” he said. “You want anything, Buck?”

“Yeah. A cappuccino. Pain aux chocolate?”

“Please tell my wife it’s on me,” Dr. Charles said. He gestured with his head toward a smiling older woman behind the counter. “She owns this bakery.”

Bucky must have known, Steve realized, as he moved to stand in line behind a group of joggers. Quite possibly he’d been bringing them here for months to engineer this meeting. And here Steve had thought Bucky had a crush on the cute barista who wore a red scarf tied around her high ponytail.

Back in Brooklyn, Steve used to be terribly jealous of Bucky’s crushes. Maybe it was because he thought his own crush was hopeless at the time; he didn’t mind them now.

The joggers spent a long time talking over the pastries in the case before they finally settled on their choices, and Steve was grateful. It gave him an excuse to give Bucky and Dr. Charles their space.

Eventually, though, Steve ended up back at the table, setting Bucky’s cappuccino down as unobtrusively as he could. He wasn’t sure where to sit, but Bucky twisted around and snagged a wooden chair for him, all without breaking off his conversation with Dr. Charles. “At least let us take you there for a visit,” Bucky said. “We’re going there today. And it’s not too far away.”

“Well,” said Dr. Charles, capitulating. “I suppose I might as well see the facility.”

Steve figured Bucky would have him signing a contract by the end of the day.

***

At the gatehouse, one of the staff members spirited Dr. Charles away to show him around the Home.

Steve’s heart rate rose as he drove the car up the winding road to the parking lot, but it slowed again when they reached the lot and Coulson’s red convertible wasn’t there.

Coulson’s red convertible was never in the lot when Steve and Bucky came to the Home. Steve suspected that Coulson was avoiding them.

Coulson wasn’t allowed anywhere near the patients who were still in the thick of treatment, let alone near the debriefings of new patients. Tony and Pepper had at least held firm on that. But they did let him come to the Home to give recruitment talks to patients who were on the cusp of leaving and looking for a new direction in life. “At least if he’s recruiting them here, we’ll know who goes with him,” Pepper had told Steve.

Which was true, of course. Steve could just imagine Coulson showing up out of the blue, the way he’d shown up in Steve’s apartment a few months after the fall of the Triskelion, all “Do you want to help save the world?”

And if they wanted to atone or they wanted vengeance against Hydra or they just wanted to stay in the action, well. Bucky had been bugging Tony to open up the Avengers for reinforcements (“At least consider the DeathLoks,” he’d said, and Tony replied, “It’s always the DeathLoks with you,”) but for now, Coulson’s CIA unit was the only game in town.

Steve just wished Coulson wasn’t in the position to recruit anyone at all.

Simmons’ lab took up a spacious white house with a pillared porch: the headmaster’s house, back when the Home had been a boarding school. The receptionist sent them up to Simmons’ office, which Steve always thought must once have been a girl’s bedroom: someone had carved the name Judith into the windowsill, the deep grooves obscured but not effaced by decades of white paint, and a delicate forget-me-not flocked wallpaper peeked through Simmons’ shelves of books and journals, her inspirational posters (Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out at the camera, the words “Imagination is more important than knowledge” emblazoned by his head), and her bulletin board.

The bulletin board drew Bucky like a lodestone. “This one’s new,” he said, and removed a postcard from Hawaii: black sand beach, blue sky, dark green palm tries, Wish you were here in slanted white script.

Steve moved to stand beside him as he flipped it over, although he already knew it would have no message. Just the lab’s P.O. Box address (although that, in itself, was a message; how had May found that?) and a postmark that didn’t match the picture. Tucson, Arizona, this time.

“Don’t you just love May’s postcards?” Joyce said. She stood in the doorway, hanging onto the two doorposts, and then let go of them and crossed the room. It was always a crapshoot whether she’d be at the lab when they visited, but today she was here, all but bouncing with energy. “I can’t believe you really worked with the Cavalry,” Joyce told Simmons, who had come in behind her.

Simmons looked far less sprightly. She had little lines at the corners of her eyes and bags beneath them, and although she summoned up a smile for Bucky, the nervous, almost hunted look to her eyes didn’t change.

“I hear she’s made good on the name,” Simmons said lightly. “She’s tamed a mustang and rides it across the Western plains.”

“A whole herd of mustangs,” Bucky suggested.

“A whole herd of mustangs, and she’s gathered a troop of rough-riding women to patrol the plains with her,” Joyce added. “They battle eldritch creatures in ghost towns and abandoned mine shafts. Oh my gosh, are those éclairs?” She pounced on the box, which Bucky had placed on Simmons’ paper-strewn desk. “Here, Jemma, have one.”

Simmons waved them away. She had settled on the couch, leaning against the pillow. It was a bed pillow rather than a throw pillow, and Steve hoped that didn’t mean that Simmons was sleeping here regularly. She had taken the second fall of SHIELD hard, and it seemed to be getting harder rather than easier as the months wore on.

“No, come on, have one,” Joyce said, landing on the cushion next to Simmons with a bounce. “You haven’t had lunch yet.”

“I’ve been busy.” Simmons’ voice was taut. “I’ve been interviewing candidates to act as lab technicians, and I had a meeting this morning with the senior scientists to discuss the top candidates to lead the new laboratory, and I’ve been supervising the final stages of the latest experiments, and one can hardly let crumbs get in the lab rat’s cages.”

Joyce looked abashed.

“Well, you have a break now,” said Bucky. “So eat an éclair.” Simmons took the éclair Joyce proffered and nibbled at it. “You think maybe you’re doing too much?” Bucky asked, his tone almost joking, although it clearly wasn’t a joke.

“Oh no,” said Simmons, smiling, slightly defensive. “I’m doing exactly as much as I need to be doing.”

“Have you seen Fitz recently?”

She shook her head, the smile slipping away before she pulled it back in place. “He’s at the SI labs in New York,” she said. “They keep him very busy. And of course I’m so busy here. We’re both terribly busy.”

Steve sat next to her on the couch. “Not too busy to come with us to CarterCon next month, I hope,” he said. The CarterCon organizers had asked Steve to be their guest of honor, and somehow things had ballooned from there. “Do you have your tickets to London yet?”

“Oh, I don’t think I should,” Simmons said.

“But weren’t you planning on visiting your parents?” Bucky sounded scandalized.

“Well, yes, but we have so many experiments running, and with so many new patients in the Home…”

“But Jemma! You’ve got to go!” Joyce wailed. “I can’t go on my own.” She caught her breath and giggled a little. “Um, partly because I’m pretty sure the Home’s not going to let me go without you. So you can’t bail on me.”

“So you’re definitely coming along, then?” Steve asked Joyce. “It sounds like you’re doing better.”

Joyce’s anxious look brightened into relief. “Oh, I’m doing great!” she said. “I’m sleeping so much better, and I’ve been to the lab nearly every day this week – ” In her bad weeks, Joyce sometimes couldn’t make it to the lab at all. “And I’ve been reading to one of the lab rats. I mean, not one of our lab rats, obviously, because they’re actually rats and probably don’t care, but one of the powered girls, you know. She never even got a chance to read Mockingjay after Hydra kidnapped her. She’s sooooo sweet. Like, occasionally she makes stuff explode with her brain, but still, just the sweetest person. Oh! Oh!” Joyce had been sitting on the couch, but now she leaped upright, as if she had received an electric shock. “Come with me!” she told Bucky. “I’ve got to show you something.”

“Oh, Joyce,” Simmons sighed. Joyce flashed a scowl at her and dashed out of the room. Bucky glanced at Simmons, then at Steve. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged and followed. Steve could hear them going down the staircase: Joyce’s light scampering tread, followed by the heavy clumps of Bucky’s feet.

Steve moved to the sash window. He could see them below, standing by the cracked empty birdbath in the backyard as Joyce retrieved a piece of paper from her pocket.

“She got a letter from Skye,” Simmons said.

Steve turned sharply away from the window. She sat on the couch, one arm crossed over her stomach, her other hand against her forehead. “She’s terribly excited about it,” Simmons said. She sounded tired. “She emails Skye sometimes.”

“Really?” Steve was amazed. Rumlow wouldn’t even talk about Bobbi, let alone try to contact her.

“It’s a bit like someone with a drinking problem, really. She knows she shouldn’t and goes weeks without writing a word, and then one night she falls off the wagon and writes,” Simmons said. “And cries to me about it in the morning.”

“That sounds exhausting,” Steve said.

Simmons didn’t respond. She lifted her hands to her temples. “We had quite an argument about the letter. She thinks I’m just jealous that Skye wrote to her instead of me.” She lifted her head slightly, though her shoulders remained stooped, so she was looking up at Steve from an appealing angle. “You see why I don’t think it’s a good thing, don’t you? After all the lies Skye told her…”

“I know,” Steve assured her.

Simmons’ head dropped forward again. She clasped her hands, leaning her mouth against them, thoughtful. Steve looked at the hunched curve of her spine. They had never been close. She must be at the end of her rope to be telling him this. “You should come visit us,” Steve said.

She straightened. “I haven’t got time.”

“Just for a weekend,” Steve urged. “It’s not a long drive.”

But Simmons was shaking her head. “I can’t,” she said, and stood, moving behind her desk. She began to sort the papers swiftly. “Certainly not if I’m going to be going to CarterCon.”

Steve hesitated. She straightened up, tapping a stack of papers smartly against the desk to straighten them. “I really must be getting back,” she said.

Steve stood too. “Simmons – ”

“Terribly important things to do, I’m afraid,” she said briskly. “We’ll see you next week, I hope?”

“Yes. If we don’t find another Hydra base to sack. Jemma – ”

“You can wait in my office if you like,” she said.

He went outside instead, and sat in the sunlight on the porch. Bucky met him there a few minutes later, and they set off toward the path through the forest that separated the visitor parking lot from the grounds of the Home.

Bucky didn’t speak while they were still on the laboratory lawn, but once they were in the shade of the trees, Bucky said, “I’m glad Skye wrote to her.”

“Yeah?” said Steve. “Did she apologize?”

“Sort of. She was sorry they didn’t realize Joyce was innocent. But she didn’t apologize for the mind-wiping in general.” Bucky shrugged. “She didn’t write a justification for it either.”

“There are probably a dozen or so crumpled up in the wastebasket,” Steve said wryly. He made a face. “Simmons said Joyce emails Skye sometimes.”

“Who else is she gonna email?” Bucky snapped. “She doesn’t have any family. And her friends were her SHIELD colleagues, before she killed a bunch of them and they put her in prison.”

Yeah, that might make rekindling those friendships awkward. Remember our friends that I killed? Turns out that wasn’t actually my fault!

“Still,” said Steve. “Skye. All those months pretending to care about Joyce just so she could keep tabs on whether the mind-wipe was holding – ”

“Oh yeah?” Bucky said. “Rumlow lied to you for – how long was it now? – two years?”

“That’s not the same,” Steve protested.

“Keeping tabs on whether you’d figured anything out. Probably trying to sniff out a way to recruit you for Hydra. You wanna bet Pierce wanted a matched supersoldier set?”

Steve winced. “Fine. But Rumlow’s in no position to hurt me now. Whereas Skye – ”

“You care about him,” Bucky interrupted. “That means he can hurt you.”

“He could hurt my feelings,” Steve conceded. “But he has no power over me.”

“Neither does Skye over Joyce, unless Joyce joins the CIA. Which I don’t think she will. There’s no employment offer in the letter, and what would the CIA want with a research scientist who can’t come into work half the time?”

Which was true, of course. But still. “So you think Skye and Joyce should… What? Become penpals?”

Bucky plucked a bud off a low-hanging tree branch. He gently peeled off the leaves. “No,” he said. “But I think it’s good that Skye wrote once. It’s very…” He paused. “Very damaging, to think someone you relied on was laughing at you the whole time.” He threw the dissected bud at Steve, the little leaves fluttering like confetti. “Not that it matters very much what either of us think about it. She’s going to write back anyway. She flounced off in a huff when I told her to be careful what she told Skye about operations here.”

Steve sighed.

The path through the forest opened out onto a lane leading across the Home’s lawn, lush and green from early spring rain. The intensely golden-green leaves of spring unfurled on the shade trees dotting the lawn, and across it, quite at home in those palatial grounds, stood the Home: a collection of red brick buildings with high arched windows, a cross between a school and a gothic church.

As they got closer, Steve caught sight of someone sitting on the steps: Reynolds, the DeathLok soldier.

Bucky lifted the bakery box. “I brought cookies,” he called.

Reynolds lifted a hand in greeting. But he didn’t get to his feet until they were closer.

“You’re late!” Reynolds said, and shoved Bucky’s shoulder.

Bucky shoved Reynolds right back, maybe a little harder than he meant to. “We had to stop and pick someone up on the way,” Bucky said. “My old shrink. He’s the reason I’m the lovable nutjob you know and love today.”

“I think that’s an exaggeration,” Steve put in.

Bucky ignored him. “Aren’t you supposed to be…” Bucky waved a hand. “Somewhere?”

“I’m always supposed to be somewhere,” Reynolds said. “I’m sick of being somewhere. I’m playing hooky today.”

“You’re gonna be stuck here forever, punk,” Bucky said, teasing gently.

“Yeah, well. Not like I got anywhere else to go,” Reynolds said.

There was a moment’s awkwardness, and then Reynolds said, “You wanna see the baseball diamond we’re putting together? Me and the rest of Company D.”

“Yeah!”

They tore off around the corner of the building, which left Steve alone.

He had people to see – he had, in fact, a regular round that he went on – but he didn’t head into the building right away. He hesitated in the bright sunshine, uncertain, and checked his watch. Two o’clock. Late enough that all the patients would have already eaten; so he’d go eat lunch first. The cafeteria must be fixed by now.

The first few weeks that the Home had been open, the cafeteria simply kept open meal times: anyone well enough to eat there could come down whenever they liked during the two-hour spans when it was open. But they kept getting into fights.

Partly it was because a lot of the patients had impulse control problems, dating back before they’d joined Hydra, even. Hydra didn’t just brainwash people who refused to work for them out of moral principle. They also used it to solve discipline problems or pay disputes. Someone got drunk on shift or cussed out their superior officer or threatened to walk if they don’t get a raise, well. Faustus would fix them right up, and keep the others in line too.

And partly it was because there was a lot of leftover bad blood from their Hydra days.

It all came to a head when one of the Faustus victims insulted the most pugnacious of the DeathLok soldiers, Rodriguez. Got up right in the middle of the cafeteria, at the most crowded time during the lunch hour, and shouted, “Hey, Rodriguez, do you call you Hot Rod because your handlers liked to make you jerk off so they could watch through the camera?”

Steve and Bucky had been eating lunch with the DeathLoks – Company D, as they called themselves. Rodriguez flipped the table, and the whole cafeteria devolved into pandemonium as four DeathLok soldiers stormed through it, knocked over tables and passersby to avenge themselves, and then one of the powered people panicked and blew up all the light bulbs, which panicked everyone who wasn’t panicking already, and by the end of it the cafeteria was trashed.

It was lucky Steve and Bucky had been there, or Steve didn’t know how the staff would have managed to subdue five DeathLok supersoldiers. They were still red-faced with fury by the end of it, when they’d been sweeping up the mess on the cafeteria floor, and Steve and Bucky were picking up the broken chairs and tables to carry them out into the hall.

Bucky had hurled one of the tables against the wall, where it chipped the paint and clattered to the floor in pieces. “Bucky!” Steve protested.

“He ought to be shot!” Bucky shot back, and Steve knew he was talking about the man who had shouted the insult.

“We can’t shoot him just for being a dumbass,” Steve replied.

“He’s not a dumbass. He planned this. He waited till we were here because he knew we’d have to stop the DeathLoks from ripping him limb from limb. He’s taking advantage of our good nature.” And Bucky kicked the broken table.

And he was right, more or less. The culprit said Rodriguez picked on him back when they were with Hydra; DeathLoks ranked above the general run of Faustus victims in the Hydra hierarchy. Now that it was safe, he’d taken his revenge. “Like a coward,” Bucky said, unbending in his rage. “He knows you’re too fucking wussy to punish him like he deserves.”

It had been months since Steve had seen him so mad; days before he started to calm down. He clomped around the apartment in combat boots and barely showered and barely spoke, and mostly just to snap when he did.

After nearly a week of this he showed up at Steve’s door after a shower, his hair still hanging wet around his face. “Hey.”

Steve put his book down, wary, thumb between the pages to mark his place. “You gonna be nice to me?”

Bucky lowered his eyes. “I’m always nice.”

Steve waited, thumb still in his book. Bucky leaned against the doorframe. His hair dripped blotches onto his shirt.

Finally Steve sighed and held out an arm. Bucky crossed the room to him and lay down, stiff as a board, and rested his head on Steve’s shoulder. The frigid water in his hair soaked through Steve’s shirt; his metal arm was cold too, cold enough that Steve could feel it even though he wasn’t touching it.

He tucked the comforter up around Bucky, and after a long time Bucky relaxed. “Sorry,” Bucky mumbled.

“It’s okay.”

“I want this to be over,” Bucky said, his face mashed in Steve’s shoulder, and Steve set aside his book and put both arms around Bucky and kissed his cold wet hair.

The cafeteria had indeed reopened. A roster hung next to the door: the patients had been divided into groups and scheduled to eat in shifts. Staff and visitors, like Steve, ate in the odd times in between.

It reminded Steve of the college cafeterias where he sometimes ate when he gave speeches on college campuses. Salad and sandwich bars, a pizza counter with a vast domed pizza oven behind it, cereal dispensers along one wall, a hot bar where the decimated remains of a pot roast floated in rich brown gravy. All the meat in the Home came either stewed or shish-kebabed or on sandwiches; the cafeteria offered forks and spoons but no knives.

Dr. Charles stood by the sandwich station.

Steve wavered in the doorway. Last time Steve and Dr. Charles had a conversation, it had ended with Steve suggesting that maybe Dr. Charles had better read a Wikipedia entry about Bucky’s childhood. He’d been so fucking mad about the orphanage stories – and when he’d finally thought maybe Bucky was making a little progress, too –

Probably he should have focused more on that progress, slight as it had seemed, and less on the lying. Too busy glowering at the trees to look at the forest.

Steve steadied himself and crossed the room to Dr. Charles, who seemed deep in contemplation of the various sandwich toppings. He hadn’t noticed Steve; it surprised Steve a little that civilians could simply fail to notice things like that. “They leave you all alone?” Steve asked.

Dr. Charles looked up and smiled at him. “I have the impression they’re understaffed,” he said.

Steve nodded. The Avengers had knocked over half a dozen Hydra bases in quick succession after MedCom Willoughby, every place they could get a bead on, intent on using the “Your compliance will be rewarded” trick as many times as they could before Hydra had time to rebrainwash everyone into a new code phrase. The Home was having trouble keeping up.

“They’ve been doing a lot of group therapy,” Steve said. “Which isn’t a bad thing. A lot of them, what they need most is just to be able to talk about what it was like with someone who understands. Who went through it. Like veterans after a war.”

This was probably true of a lot of the Home’s patients, but Steve was thinking of Bucky. The DeathLoks’ experiences was not exactly parallel to his, perhaps not even close – having a camera in one’s eye was clearly a special kind of hell – but they were probably still about as close as Bucky would come to a peer group.

“But I’m sure a lot of them would benefit from individual therapy,” Steve added. “If you’re interested.”

Dr. Charles smiled again, but didn’t reply directly. “Would you like to eat lunch with me?”

Steve transferred most of the pot roast onto his plate, as well as half a dozen rolls, and filled up a plate at the salad bar, too. He snagged one of the few lonely slices of apple pie at the dessert case before taking them to a table by the windows. A few of the patients played Frisbee in the sunshine across the lawn, and Steve watched them as he ate.

“Would you see Bucky again?” Steve asked abruptly. “As a patient.”

He had timed it badly. Dr. Charles was halfway through a bite of sandwich and, despite heroic attempts to chew faster, seemed to take forever to swallow.

Finally, hand in front of his mouth as if to hide any remaining traces of sandwich, Dr. Charles said, “He’d need to ask me himself.”

“No, I know. I don’t know if he will. I don’t know if he wants to, even.” Although Steve doubted that Bucky had visited the bakery regularly for months purely in the hopes of lining up a psychologist for the Home. “But if the answer is No, definitely not, I think it would save you both a lot of embarrassment if you’d tell me now.”

Dr. Charles smiled. “The answer’s not no,” he said. “It would depend on my caseload when he asked. It might take some time to work him in if I’m very busy.”

“But I hear you’re not busy at all,” Steve replied. “Semi-retired?”

Dr. Charles’ smile grew rueful. “I’ve always liked the odd cases,” he said. “This seems like the right place.”

***

After lunch, Steve headed out to meet Rumlow. “He’s outside,” one of the orderlies told him, and Steve sighed. Given the beautiful day, he had expected that, but nonetheless he’d rather hoped to catch Rumlow inside. His chats with Rumlow always seemed to go better when they had a board game to take up most of their attention. They’d progressed from checkers to Scrabble.

The TAHITI victims had their own walled-in slice of the grounds. Steve knew Rumlow resented the extent to which they were segregated from all the other patients at the Home, and he suspected that the others did, too. Probably it was one of the reasons why Mercer and Ivanov decided to run for it.

But it was for their own protection as much as anyone else’s. Some of the other patients weren’t at all happy to share the facility with genuine Hydra agents, even genuine Hydra agents who had spent years in solitary confinement and then had their minds wiped. Sanderson had nearly been set on fire in the library by one of the powered people he experimented on years ago.

As a visitor rather than someone stuck in that same slice of earth every day of his life, Steve found the walled garden rather charming. It contained an actual garden, too, at the far end of the field – as far away from the Home as possible, so the bees from Murphy’s two beehives wouldn’t bother the other patients. Steve could see Murphy bending over the compost heap, turning it over with a shovel. The seedlings had grown tall and green in the weeks Steve had been gone.

Rumlow himself had a favorite bench, not far from the door out of the Home. Steve had gotten to the point where he could tell how much pain Rumlow was in purely by his posture. Today looked like a bad day.

Lucy trotted up to Rumlow with an orange Frisbee dangling from her mouth. She put her front paws on the bench to hold the Frisbee close to him, and when he didn’t take it, let it fall from her mouth onto the bench.

“Rumlow,” Steve called, moving toward the bench.

Rumlow didn’t call back – Steve was pretty sure shouting hurt his throat – or lift a hand. Lucy shot toward Steve, barking joyously.

Rumlow didn’t like it when other people gave his dog treats, so Steve just went to one knee and scratched Lucy’s ears. She tried to lick his face, too, but he twisted aside and stood up. “C’mon, girl,” Steve said, and she trotted along beside him as he walked over to Rumlow. “I brought you something for Lucy,” he said, and took a white paper bag of dog treats from his pocket to lay it next to Rumlow.

“More freaky ass organic dog treats?” Rumlow said. At the word treat, Lucy barked and play-bowed.

Rumlow’s fingers were stiff; it took some doing for him to open up the paper bag and extract a treat to toss to Lucy. She leaped up and caught it in the air, then lay down with her stomach on Rumlow’s feet to eat it. Rumlow petted her with one foot.

“I hear you couldn’t catch Mercer and Ivanov,” he said.

“Nope,” Steve replied easily. There was no point to letting Rumlow get his goat. “Don’t suppose you could give us any clues where they might have gone.”

Rumlow bridled. “I’m not a snitch,” he said, and an ugly flush rose in his face, making his scars stand out painfully. He had told his SHIELD interrogator plenty, back in the day. “I don’t know anything. They’re not stupid, they didn’t tell any of us about their plans.”

Steve settled next to him on the bench. “I figured,” he said. He wished he hadn’t asked.

They sat quietly for a while. Lucy lay across Rumlow’s feet, panting softly. Steve could hear the crack of a ball against a baseball bat somewhere else on the grounds. Rumlow picked up the orange Frisbee and turned it around in his hands.

"You throw the Frisbee," Rumlow said. He sounded grudging. "You can throw it farther than I can."

"All right," Steve said, and he lofted the Frisbee down along the long field. Lucy took off after it, barking madly, a flash of gold against the green field. She veered around Murphy's garden and picked up the orange Frisbee from where it had fallen in the grass, just shy of the fence separating the garden from the rest of the grounds.

"How're the Yankees doing?" Rumlow asked.

"Still beating everyone," Steve said. He could never figure out if Rumlow actually gave a damn about the Yankees or if he just pretended to be a fan to get Steve's goat.

Rumlow leaned back, tilting his face toward the sun. "They're going to win the World Series again this year," he told Steve.

"In your dreams," Steve shot back. "The Red Sox are looking pretty good this year."

"Like you give a damn about the Red Sox. You'd root for anyone who wasn't the Yankees."

"Rooting for the not-Yankees is a fine and noble tradition," Steve replied, leaning back on the bench as well. Lucy trotted up, the Frisbee in her mouth. Steve sent it sailing again.

They talked baseball for a while. They had always talked sports a lot, back with the STRIKE team, although usually the topic was football rather than baseball. The STRIKE team even had an annual Superbowl party at Rumlow's place.

Steve hadn’t been able to get Rumlow to talk about football at all that winter. Maybe it hurt now because it had been so important to him then.

By the time the conversation wore down, chasing the Frisbee had worn Lucy out, and she lay down for a snooze by Rumlow’s feet.

But she came to her feet at the sound of a sharp two-note whistle. Rumlow stiffened; Steve rolled his eyes to himself. Bucky always called Lucy with that whistle whenever he showed up.

Bucky let Lucy knock him over. She leaped on top of him, tail wagging joyfully, and licked his face while he pretended to try to fend her off. Rumlow watched sourly.

Steve had asked Bucky not to sneak Lucy treats, but Bucky had responded, with an air of deeply injured innocence, that he wasn’t. Which was possible. Bucky loved dogs, and many of them responded to it by loving him right back.

On the other hand, there was no love lost between Bucky and Rumlow, and Steve wouldn’t put it past Bucky at all to rub it in Rumlow’s face just how much Lucy loved him.

Lucy trotted along happily beside Bucky now. Rumlow turned away, so like a child pretending he didn’t care that Steve almost wanted to laugh, or perhaps knock their heads together.

But Lucy settled happily by Rumlow again when she got back, her chin on his knee. Rumlow rubbed her ears.

“I’m here to fetch you,” Bucky informed Steve. “We’ve been invited to dinner with the DeathLoks.”

Rumlow scowled. The TAHITI wing didn’t get to eat in the cafeteria like everyone else, either. Their food came to them on carts.

“You want me to come back this evening?” Steve asked him. “We could play Scrabble.”

Rumlow bent over Lucy, picking bits of last autumn’s dead leaves from her fur. “Nah,” he said. “Busy night planned.” His voice was dry, the bite almost hidden. “We’re watching The Horse Whisperer. There might even be popcorn.”

***

Company D sat, like they always sat, in the corner farthest from the windows. Five of them lost limbs in either Iraq or Afghanistan before they got entangled with Hydra, and Steve suspected that for some of them, all that Hydra trauma got piled on top of already severe PTSD.

Hell, that was probably how they’d recruited some of them. We’ll make you soldiers again. Promise they could fix the PTSD symptoms on top of giving them new limbs, even though they had no intention of trying. Hydra had no aversion to lying.

At any rate, six of the eight Deathlok soldiers had crowded onto the side of the table where they could sit with their backs to the wall. Steve perforce sat on the other side, between Bucky and a kid named Johnny, who sat, spoon in hand, staring at the surface of his chowder.

Johnny generally stared vaguely at nothing, as if he were still bracing himself for someone to start typing commands across his vision again. “See, and he doesn’t read very well,” Bucky had explained to Steve. “So he couldn’t obey very fast, and they’d shock him with the thing in his eye. Five years of that…”

No wonder Johnny was practically catatonic.

The others were much livelier, pugnacious even, and currently laughing uproariously as they discussed their former handlers. They hadn’t met any of those former handlers; the handlers were identified, instead, by typing style.

“Exclamation Points,” Rodriguez said, and the others groaned appreciatively. “Son of a bitch wouldn’t even give time to read the damn order before he’d be shocking you.”

“Yeah, but at least he’d shut the fuck up sometimes,” said Reynolds. “Not like Honeykins.”

Another groaned around the table. “Honeykins?” said Steve.

“He – ” Reynolds started, but Rodriguez leaned forward and took over. He was a big guy, even among the DeathLoks; big enough that he made Steve feel small, and that didn’t happen much anymore.

“He was dating some chick he always called stupid cutesy pet names,” Rodriguez said. “Honeykins and Baby Boo and Sweet Sugar Pie, and he’d write these long screeds about his latest argument with her about what color they oughta paint the baby’s room or some shit like that. He’d go on and on till you wanted to tell him, ‘Drop the bitch, she’s just using you,’ but of course we didn’t have no way to reply.”

“Would’ve been better if we did,” Hollis said.

“No way,” Reynolds said. “Just give ‘em another excuse to shock us.”

There was a little silence then. Fork tines scraped on plates. There was a little shoving as a couple of the guys worked their way out of the corner to get more food, and from the corner of his eye Steve could see the orderlies tensing, but the pair got out without any more hassle than some swearing.

Most of Company D had cleaned their plates, but Johnny still hadn’t eaten anything. Finally Hollis leaned over the table. “C’mon, bro, eat something.”

The spoon dived into the soup. Johnny began to eat in great big gulps.

“Christ, man, he’s never gonna learn to think for himself if you keep telling him what to do all the time,” Rodriguez said.

“He’s not gonna do nothing if nobody tells him what to do,” Hollis said.

“You tell him to take a shit every morning, is that how it is?”

“Shut it, Hot Rod,” Bucky said. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to talk about people when they’re sitting right there?”

“He’s got shit for brains, man, it’s not like he – ”

Johnny had stopped eating.

“I said shut it,” Bucky said. “Christ!”

Rodriguez looked at him, long and measuring. But he knew that he wouldn’t get to eat in the cafeteria for a week if he got in a fight, and he knew he’d lose, too, because Bucky was the one who knocked him down during the cafeteria riot. He’d been sick and shaking about it afterward. “They drugged him,” Bucky had told Steve. “I held him down while they drugged him. I didn’t think they’d drug him.”

“He was still trying to get up and kill that guy, Buck,” Steve said. He tried to put an arm around Bucky’s shoulder, but Bucky had moved sharply away.

This time, Rodriguez settled back down. “I’m fucking sick of this shitty place,” he said. “When are we gonna get out, huh?” He glared at Steve and Bucky. “They keep saying this ain’t a prison, but it’s only those useless little Faustus shits and the lab rats who ever get let out. When are they gonna let us free?”

“You’ve been here just a month, Hot Rod, give it some time,” Reynolds said.

“I’m sick of giving other people my time! I wanna go home!”

Silence greeted that outburst. Johnny wasn’t the only one staring at his plate now. Rodriguez might have a home to go back to, but a lot of them didn’t. Grew up in foster care, ended up on the streets or in the army – and for a lot of them, the army had just postponed ending up in the streets for a while, till they came back from the war with limbs missing and nerves so bad they couldn’t hold down a job.

“Eat your pie, Johnny,” Hollis said, and Johnny ate his rhubarb pie.

“And I don’t want no tracking device in my arm,” Rodriguez added. Murmurs of assent rose around the table at that. They might not all want to leave right away, but none of them wanted to leave with new hardware.

“We’ll talk to him,” Steve promised.

***

“No can do, freezer burn,” Tony said.

“Why not?” Steve asked. He batted aside a thin branch as they walked through the woods. “We’ve already released some of the patients. Some Faustus victims, a few of the lab rats. They don’t have tracking devices.”

“Yeah, but none of them had a battering ram attached to their arms,” Tony said. He turned to face Steve, walking backwards on the path. “As I recall, this was one of your objections to Coulson’s little program. He let loose all those potentially dangerous ex-Hydra agents without any method of making sure they didn’t attack – ” He stumbled over a tree root. He jumped to keep from falling.

“But those people – most of those people – were genuine ex-Hydra agents,” Steve said.

“So are some of ours,” Tony said bluntly. “They didn’t all get brainwashed because of moral qualms.”

Steve sighed. “C’mon, Tony, don’t you think these guys have had enough tech attached to them? Bombs in their eyes, extra metal limbs?”

“So one little tracking device after all isn’t much of a stretch,” Tony said.

“Tony!”

“None of them are going to believe it’s just a tracking device,” Bucky added. “Is it going to be just a tracking device?”

“Yes, it’s going to be just a tracking device,” Tony said. He sounded cranky. “I know you don’t like it, but we’ve got to have some way of keeping tabs on these guys. What happens if one of them punches his way into a bank, and then it comes out that we had him in our custody and let him loose? People would be howling at the gates.”

“Which is why you should let them become Avengers,” Bucky said.

“Bucky,” Steve began.

“If they want to,” Bucky said. “Because someone’s going to find out about the Home eventually, and they’ll probably be a lot more complimentary about it if some of the former inmates have saved the world in the meantime, than if they’re loafing around doing nothing at all to atone for all the shit they did with Hydra.”

“They don’t need to atone – ” Steve began.

“They don’t all feel that way. And even if they did, you know Fox News sure as fuck isn’t going to feel that way. You want a bunch of people standing around the gates with signs about how all the murderers oughta go to jail like they deserve instead of staying in a health resort? They’d probably find a way to imply it’s on the taxpayers dime, too, for maximum outrage.”

Steve winced. It wasn’t a pretty picture, and it wasn’t one he could disregard, either. The DeathLok soldiers and the Faustus victims almost all had dirty hands, and it wasn’t at all clear that brainwashing would be a successful defense if they went to trial.

“Besides, if they want to be useful, why shouldn’t they have the opportunity?” Bucky pressed. “You’re not going to privatize world security with six soldiers and some dumb robots, Tony.”

“Seven, actually,” Tony said, as if this were an insuperable retort to Bucky’s remark. “That’s why I asked you to come out here today.”

They came to the end of the pathway through the woods. It opened out onto an old playing field from when Rosemont had been a boarding school. A ramshackle picnic table stood along the sidelines.

Pepper stood at the foot of the table, pouring a steaming stream of liquid from a Thermos. She handed the cup to the Natasha, who sat on the picnic table, head tilted back and face lifted toward the sky. Her red hair seemed to glow in the lowering sun.

She turned to look at them as they appeared. Sam, standing next to her, followed the movement of her gaze, and when he saw them, he lifted his hand in greeting. And his wings spread too: a great black sweeping motion against the golden sky.

Bucky drew in his breath.

“The Falcon’s back,” Tony said, smug. “I made him some new wings.”

***

“And here I thought you were coming to the Home to help put the veterans in touch with the VA,” Steve teased. (Hydra loved to recruit veterans. No need to invest in combat training that way.)

Sam laughed at him. “No, that’s for real,” he said. “I think seeing me around the Home finally reminded Tony to get his ass in gear on those wings he’s been promising me.” He was still smiling, but he became a little more sober. “I haven’t really needed them till now.”

Steve thought it was likely. Tony could be very much out of sight, out of mind even with his friends, let alone acquaintances like Sam. Although perhaps Sam and Tony would become friends, now that Sam had the wings, if Sam meant…

“Are you gonna be flying with us more often, Falcon?” Steve asked.

Sam nodded. “I’ve been thinking about moving on from the VA,” he said. “And seeing the mess Hydra makes… Well, getting their victims away from them seems like a good new direction.” They were both silent a moment, serious, but Sam couldn’t stay serious long, not with those new wings on his back. Suddenly he was beaming again. “You wanna ride, Cap?”

Steve sloshed his coffee in his haste to set the cup down. “Yeah!”

The last time Sam had carried Steve into the sky, they had been flying between the helicarriers, with nothing but Sam’s grip to stop Steve from plummeting right into the Potomac. Tony had designed an energy harness into the new wings, though, and Steve could feel it holding him, although Sam still held on as well.

“You tested this thing?” Steve called. The wind pulled the words from his mouth as they rose into the air.

“Knew we forgot about something!” Sam called back. They shot suddenly upward, then banked sharply and swooped low. Steve’s stomach dropped with the swoop. He spread out his arms, like a little kid playing airplane, and whooped as they skimmed a few feet above the ground, only to explode upward again near the edge of the trees.

They settled into a slow gliding loop, so high above the meadow that the figures below could have been little toy army men: still recognizably human, with arms and legs and heads that tilted back to watch them, but all one color in the darkness. They flew slowly enough that there was only a slight breeze on Steve’s face, less powerful than the gusts of air from the occasional lazy swoop of Sam’s wings.

“I’m glad you’ll be flying with us again,” Steve called. He put his hands on Sam’s forearms, wrapped around him despite the energy harness.

Sam squeezed. “I am too!” he called, and he veered off into a corkscrewing spiral that made Steve yell with delight.

Everyone clapped when Steve and Sam landed again – all except Bucky, who sat on the picnic table with a doughnut in his hand. But he stomped his feet on the picnic table bench, signaling his approval.

Steve still hadn’t told Sam that he and Bucky were… dating was probably the wrong word. But Bucky had been making an effort to be nicer to Sam when they met. Steve suspected he was buttering Sam up against the day when they told him.

Sam let go of Steve, and Steve stumbled away, still a little light-headed from the flight. “All right,” said Sam. “Who’s next?”

Tony refused to be carried into the air – “I have my own thrusters,” he said – but Pepper accepted a ride, and so did Natasha. Natasha got a veritable rollercoaster: loop-de-loops and barrel rolls, and when they landed again she was so dizzy that she stumbled, laughing, and grabbed onto the picnic table to hold her up. “You’d better cut back on the fancy flying when we go up against Hydra,” she said.

“Aw, I dunno,” Bucky put in. “I think stumbling them to death could be your new signature move, Natasha.”

She balled up a picnic napkin and threw it at him. “Direct hit!” she crowed.

Sam turned to Bucky, too. “You want a turn?”

Bucky’s eyes widened in surprise. “Really?”

“Sure.”

Bucky hesitated. “I’ll make you lopsided,” he said, and gestured at his left arm with the doughnut in his hand. “The metal…”

“It’s not going to be a very fancy flight,” Sam said. “No barrel rolls. Not the first time, anyway. We’d need to practice.”

Bucky was still staring at him. It was like he couldn’t quite process it. “You wanna practice?”

“If we’re going to be working together more often, we’d better, don’t you think?” Sam said.

Bucky smiled suddenly, the surprisingly sweet smile he rarely pulled out. He set his doughnut down. “Fuck yeah, I wanna fly,” he said. “Let’s go.”

Steve had to shade his eyes to look toward the setting sun to watch them, an ungainly black shape shooting across the sky. It was probably just as well. The sun explained why his eyes watered, because there wasn’t really any reason to cry.

***

Later – much later, long after it had gotten dark – they drove back home. Tony had urged them to stay at the Home (naturally Tony had a suite there), but Steve suspected they wouldn’t get a chance to sleep until nearly dawn if they stayed, and he’d rather get back to their own apartment.

Bucky fell asleep on the drive. Visits to the Home always wore him out.

He woke up, though, once they reached the outer edges of the suburbs and the streetlights. Steve had been glancing over at Bucky, at the way the occasional flashes of light lit his peaceful sleeping face, and the glances woke him.

“We’re still half an hour from home,” Steve said. “You can go back to sleep.”

But Bucky yawned and stretched, shaking himself awake. “Sorry,” he muttered, as if he should have been taking the phrase “riding shotgun” literally and kept his eyes open and his hand on his gun against possible marauders.

“It’s okay,” Steve said.

Bucky rubbed his face. “Wanna watch Sons of Anarchy when we get back?” he asked, his voice still blurry with sleep.

Bucky was still leery about sleeping in the same bed in the apartment: the place was too easily bugged, after all. Watching a movie and cuddling on the couch was an acceptable compromise.

And Steve suspected, although he hadn’t quite figured out how to ask if he was right, that this was also Bucky’s way of ensuring that sex didn’t entirely supersede cuddling. The thought hurt Steve in a funny, sad sort of way: he would have been happy to hold Bucky all Bucky wanted if Bucky asked. But perhaps he was asking as well as he could right now; and maybe someday they’d talk about it.

“Captain Blood,” Steve countered. He wasn’t sure why Bucky always opened with Sons of Anarchy. Steve slept much better with movies he’d seen before, movies from his youth, and they always ended up watching those.

“Well, you know, whatever you want,” Bucky said. He stretched again, arms above his head. His jacket bunched up at his shoulders, and he jerked it back into place as he brought his arms back down. “I wanna make you happy.”

Steve rolled to a stop at a stoplight. “You do,” he said.

Bucky rolled his head to look at Steve. A slice of light from the streetlamp illuminated his smile. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” said Steve. He touched Bucky’s hair, twining his fingers through the soft strands. “You do.”