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The tower learned a new way to be quiet after the Shame Room.
It wasn’t hush or fear; it was careful. Doors didn’t slam. Elevators announced themselves softly. Even Thor modulated to “indoor thunder.” And in that careful quiet, Sam and Bucky got to work—apologies as verbs, not nouns.
Sam swapped John’s sparring slot for his own, showed up early, and held pads without comment. He corrected footwork with a coach’s touch—tap-tap at the ankle, “weight here,” “breathe there”—and then let the silence stand where speeches used to be. Coffee appeared on John’s shelf labeled WALKER in thick marker; when John tried to replace it with his own, a second bag appeared labeled STOP IT. In a briefing, when John floated a plan and immediately backed off with a too-bright “or not,” Sam turned the holo back to him and said, “Walk me through it,” like the room had always been his.
Bucky worked smaller. Hinges that had whined since winter suddenly glided. John’s locker stopped catching. A duffel he’d torn on a mission came back stitched with invisible seams. On Monday, bread duty migrated from “any volunteer” to Bucky without being discussed; loaves cooled on the island like a treaty.
None of it landed the way they wanted.
John smiled, said thanks, and moved around gestures like they were furniture. He trained and did well, took the coffee and brewed it for everyone else, presented the plan and then stepped away from it the second someone else nodded. The fixes—the tapes they were laying over hairline cracks—only made him more aware the cracks existed.
He didn’t like feeling precious.
The mission on Monday didn’t help. Tight corridors, bad intel, a third-story mezzanine with loose railings and panic bottled up behind a dozen small mistakes. John went over the edge—one second of slip, one inch of bad footing—and from the floor cams it looked like a choice. He caught himself on a beam, swung, dropped to tile hard enough that the building coughed dust. He grunted, rolled, stood—already signaling I’m okay with that hollow laugh he used for impacts—and finished the job with a bruise blossoming under his shirt like bad weather.
To everyone else, the context made it worse. He’d been taking the hungriest routes lately—the window instead of the stairwell, the sprint across open floor instead of the safer crawl—like a man who wouldn’t mind if the world decided for him. Clipping in late. Skipping the spotter on jumps he used to call “not worth the paperwork.” Volunteering for point even when he was still taped from the last hit. Laughing off med checks with save the scans for someone who matters. Standing too close to balcony rails in the tower, not leaning, just… not stepping back. Writing labels on his Thursday recipes (“Bread: 25 min. Don’t open the oven,” “Cornbread: toothpick test”) like instructions for anyone who might have to make them without him.
Yelena watched the footage of the mezzanine and swore in Russian because the step looked clean, not panicked.
Ava said, quietly, he didn’t even flinch from the glass.
Shuri pointed out the missing safety callout in his comms—he always said clear; this time he said nothing.
Sam didn’t say anything at all; he just clenched his jaw because he’d seen this flavor before: not a man trying to die, but a man who’d stopped arguing with risk.
And Bucky… Bucky watched the second before the slip—the microsettling of shoulders that could be physics or resignation—and felt his ribs lock. It was the way John moved through harm like it was weather: not courting it, exactly, but refusing the umbrella. That’s what scared them. Not a leap. A pattern. An if it takes me, it takes me that read like a jump even when it wasn’t.
Back at the tower, the med bay turned into a traffic jam.
Bruce scanned him twice.
Shuri appeared out of nowhere, muttering about shock protocols and “if you insist on falling out of buildings at least do it onto my lab mats.”
Yelena hovered with a frown so deep it counted as a scold.
Alexei invented three Russian folk remedies and then was disallowed from all three.
Even Wong materialized to ask, perfectly calm, if John had hit his head (“no,” John said, “just my pride,” and Wong looked at him for a long second like that was the wrong answer but let it pass).
They weren’t wrong to check. They weren’t unkind. But every look stacked.
By evening, anywhere John stood felt like a display case. The bruise pulled when he breathed; the attention pulled worse.
—
Bucky didn’t go in. He kept his post against the hallway wall outside the med bay door, hands open because clenched looked like a threat. Sam found him there—leaned beside him, shoulder to the same paint.
“You look like a malfunctioning coat rack,” Sam said, because teasing was how he knock-knocked on a locked door.
Bucky’s mouth ticked, then fell straight. “He fell.”
“He got up.”
“I watched a world end once,” Bucky said, voice low. “Sometimes I still hear the sound. When he goes over a rail, my head… lies.”
Sam’s jaw worked. “Why are you this close, Buck? You’re not his parole officer.”
Bucky stared at the opposite wall until the paint blurred. When he spoke, it was the thing he hadn’t admitted in words. “With most of my mess, I can point at the Soldier and say there. Programming. A handler. A word. But the way I treated John?” He swallowed. “That wasn’t a trigger. That was me. My aim. My choices. No Winter Soldier to blame. If he forgives me—if he sees me after that and I’m still standing—then there’s something here I can save that’s mine to save.”
Sam didn’t flinch. He didn’t laugh. “You keep circling the word.”
“Don’t.”
“You’re in love,” Sam said, gentler than the hallway deserved. “Flavor’s devotion with a dash of worship and a splash of ‘make me clean.’ The worship part? That’ll drown him if you pour it faster than he can drink.”
Bucky huffed something like a laugh. “Is it bad if I want to clip his wings? Keep him. Care for him. Show him every form of my love until he believes it?”
“Yes,” Sam said, no wiggle. “If you love him, you let him fly.”
“I can’t,” Bucky said, honest and ugly.
“Then start by not caging him.” Sam pushed off the wall. “And for God’s sake, stop monogramming his feelings with cookware.”
Bucky glanced down the hall like a man checking exits. “I’ll try.”
—
That night, John called Mel from the laundry room because the hum of dryers felt like white noise he could hide under. “I need a week,” he said. “Off the floor. Away from the tower.”
“Request received,” Mel said, voice crisp as a stapled memo. “You’re owed time. I’ve got a resthouse up the river—quiet, stocked, boring. Go breathe. Don’t break anything I’ll have to budget for.”
“Thank you,” he said, and meant please don’t tell anyone.
Mel hung up, then immediately called Bucky. “Team lead,” she said without hello, “Walker put in for a week at Hudson Rest. You need coverage; you also need to decide if our leader is taking the same week.”
Bucky didn’t even pretend to think. “I want the same week.”
“You don’t need my permission,” Mel said. “Higher rank, remember? Don’t make me say Congressman like a threat.”
“Thank you,” Bucky said.
“Then don’t turn it into a hostage situation,” Mel replied, and hung up before he could promise anything foolish.
—
The safehouse sat at the edge of trees and river, a long low shape with a porch that sagged deliberately so it looked like a place people actually lived. Inside: one bedroom, one bathroom, a kitchen full of clean pans and old spices, a living room with a stack of blankets that had been washed enough to lose the factory smell. The thermostat was labeled in pen: Don’t touch: it’s vindictive.
John got there first and staked the smaller bedroom. He cooked eggs he didn’t want and washed the pan immediately. He stood on the porch and let the river move for him. He told himself he didn’t care that a second set of tires crunched the gravel.
Bucky arrived with a battered duffel, a paper bag from a bakery, and a look that tried very hard to be neutral.
“Mel told me,” Bucky said. “I’m team lead—requests like that hit my desk. I was always going to know.”
“Of course she did,” John said, flat.
“I—” Bucky caught himself trying to apologize for showing up and didn’t. “I wanted to come.”
“Barnes,” John said, tired. “I asked for off-grid, not a hall monitor.”
“Buck,” Bucky corrected, almost gentle. “Or Bucky. Not—Barnes.”
John stared. “Sergeant. You can sleep on the porch.”
Bucky’s mouth kicked once. “I’ll take the floor.”
“Congratulations on your martyrdom.”
“Not martyrdom,” he said too fast. “Choice. I choose you.”
“Uh-huh. I’m not a pokemon.”
“What’s a pokemon?” Bucky asks, genuinely curious.
“Forgot that you’re a grandpa.”
They coexisted with the precise politeness of men who had spent years in rooms where politeness kept people alive. Coffee, rinse. Door, thank you. Jog, see you. The river did most of the talking.
By late afternoon the quiet had edges.
John tried to count the colors in the water and kept coming back to white where the light fractured.
Bucky repaired a loose porch rail because he couldn’t not.
Inside, a clock ticked loud enough to be an argument.
“I don’t need you here,” John said finally, staring at the river.
“I know,” Bucky said. He stood a careful distance to the left—close enough to be in the weather with him, far enough that a man could walk away without brushing sleeves. “I’m not here to need you to need me.”
John huffed. “Practiced that one?”
“Yeah.”
“Go home, then.”
“I promised myself I wouldn’t leave you alone with a week you asked for and didn’t get.”
John turned. “That’s exactly the week I asked for.”
Bucky took it, the spike and the hurt under it. “Okay. I won’t talk unless you talk to me. I won’t fix anything. I’ll eat what I cook. I’ll sleep on the floor if you want the couch and the bed.”
“You think this is about furniture.”
“I think this is about not making you adjust to me.”
John laughed in that way that wasn’t a laugh. “Barnes, I’ve been adjusting to you since the first day you looked at me like I’d stolen your childhood.”
Bucky flinched. “I know.”
“Do you?” John asked, voice rising. “Because it sure looks like the tower decided I’m made of glass the second I took a fall, and you decided your job was to hover like a guardrail. Where was that three months ago? Where was that when the only thing I had that felt like a job was Thursday?”
“It was in a room where I was losing,” Bucky said, honesty scraping him raw. “And then it was in a room that showed me exactly how, and I don’t know how to do anything but—try, John. Even bad.”
John stared, jaw working. He looked away first, back at the water, like if he watched long enough he could learn how to be fluid.
“I don’t like being pitied,” he said at last.
“I don’t pity you.”
“You feel guilty.”
“Yeah.”
“And now I’m a project.”
“No.” Bucky’s voice sharpened, then flattened again by force. “You are not a project. You’re a man I… care about.” He swallowed. “I’m not good at that without turning it into a mission. So I asked Sam how not to. He said do smaller things and shut up.”
“Sam’s a genius,” John muttered.
“Yeah,” Bucky said. “He is.”
“Don’t make me your penance.”
“I’m not.” A beat. “I don’t know how to prove that except to keep not making you my penance.”
“That sounds like you just invented a new penance.”
“Probably.”
Silence again, but different—less like pressure, more like weather pattern.
“Why the bread?” John asked, unexpected.
Bucky blinked. “What?”
“Monday. The bread.”
“Oh.” Bucky rubbed the back of his neck. “You cook every week because it’s Thursday and you want to. I can’t take that from you. But I can meet it. Put my hands on something that isn’t a weapon and make it useful.”
John’s mouth did that complicated thing again—something between a fight and a thank you. “It’s good bread.”
“Thanks.” Bucky let a corner of a smile show. “It’s terrible when I’m nervous.”
“You’re always nervous.”
“Yeah,” Bucky said. “Around you.”
That landed between them like a dropped tool. John didn’t pick it up. He stepped around it.
“I asked for a week off to breathe,” he said, tone sanded down. “And now you’re here, and it feels like I’m being supervised.”
“Then I’m doing it wrong,” Bucky said. “Tell me how to do it less wrong.”
“You can’t fix this. That’s not how—” John cut himself off, frustrated at the sentence he couldn’t finish without sounding like a man who’d been opened on a screen. “Just don’t… don’t follow me around the house, okay? Don’t hover when I cook. Don’t intercept every heavy box like I’m going to cry if I lift it.”
“Okay.”
“And stop looking at me like you’re worried I’ll disappear.”
Bucky considered lying. Didn’t. “I can’t promise that one.”
“I thought so.”
“I can try to do it less,” Bucky amended. “And I can look away on purpose sometimes and let you… walk out of a room without me counting to ten.”
John breathed out. He didn’t say thank you. He didn’t say stay. He didn’t say go. He walked inside, let the screen door slap once because it pleased him to hear something normal.
Bucky stayed on the porch and listened to the house adjust. The thermostat clicked, vindictive. The fridge hummed. Water ran briefly and stopped. Somewhere, a drawer opened, closed.
He put the bakery bag on the porch table and opened it—two plain rolls, one seeded, one sweet. He broke one in half, left the other half on the plate, and ate his portion with deliberate, stubborn slowness, like the act itself might train the frantic part of him to unclench.
That night, the safehouse slept badly.
John lay awake with the bruise thudding in the dark, listening for footsteps that didn’t come. He checked his phone three times and put it facedown. He counted the beats between the clock ticks until numbers stopped arranging themselves and turned into noise. The hole the Shame Room had carved out of him ached like weather.
Bucky lay awake on the couch because he hadn’t asked for the bed and hadn’t been invited to the floor. The springs sang his weight. He stared at the ceiling and tried not to list every time he had put his palm against someone and felt them stop being a person and start being an objective. Once, he would have held that thought until it calcified into orders. Instead, he let it pass and thought of bread flour on his knuckles and Sam saying learn him.
Morning diluted the house. John was already on the porch when Bucky sat up, wearing a sweatshirt and the kind of scowl that pretends it isn’t a shield. There were two mugs on the railing. One drifted steam like ember and lemon.
“You don’t like it sweet,” John said without looking. “So I didn’t put anything in it.”
“Thanks,” Bucky said, and didn’t ruin it by saying you remembered.
They drank in a quiet that wasn’t quite truce and wasn’t quite war. When the mugs were empty, John stood.
“I’m going to run,” he said.
“I’m coming,” Bucky said, already kneeling to lace his shoes.
John hesitated like he was bracing for the correction. It came as action, not words. He went. Bucky ghosted after him, not ten steps back—at his shoulder, then a stride behind, then pulling even whenever the trail narrowed like the path had been cut to fit them both. When John tried to surge ahead, Bucky matched; when John slowed to spit the stitch in his side, Bucky’s hand appeared with a bottle he hadn’t asked for. John veered off under the birches to lose him; Bucky cut across leaf-litter and met him at the bend without gloating, breathing even, eyes on the tree line as if danger were a habit he refused to unlearn.
“Keep going,” Bucky said, quiet. “I’ve got you.”
By the time they got back, the porch had memorized two sets of footfalls. John showered with the door latched and the water respectfully loud; Bucky sat on the hall floor outside, back to the wall, listening for the rhythm of pipes the way other men listen for rain. John ate one of the rolls without comment, picked up a book, pretended to read, and folded sideways on the couch in a knot made for men who don’t trust cushions.
Bucky didn’t pass the doorway. He stepped in, set a blanket over John with a care that belonged to surgeons, then took the chair and turned it so his knees faced the couch. He didn’t touch. He watched. Counted breaths. Mapped the hitch when the bruise complained. When John flinched in some half-dream, Bucky’s hand hovered—close enough to catch, far enough to claim he hadn’t. He stayed until the angle of the light changed and the house decided afternoon had begun.
At some point, John woke and felt the stare like a hand on his throat. He jerked upright, shoved the blanket to his knees, and cut Bucky a look sharp enough to nick. “Don’t watch me sleep.”
Bucky dropped his gaze, then, barely audible: “Watching you… it assures me you’re here. That you’re real.”
“You’re a menace,” John declares.
“I know,” Bucky said.
“You think shoving people in rooms fixes them.”
“Sometimes it breaks them first,” Bucky said. “Then maybe they learn to fix themselves.”
John’s mouth tugged. “You’re going to keep… being here, aren’t you.”
“Yeah.”
“And keep following me.”
“Yeah.”
“And keep trying to stop looking worried but is worried.”
“Yeah.”
“And keep making terrible eggs.”
Bucky considered it. “No. I’ll fix the eggs.”
A breath that was almost a laugh punched out of John. He looked at the river. “I hate feeling like fine china.”
“You’re not,” Bucky said. “You’re a cast-iron pan someone forgot to season for a few years and then remembered. Heavy, useful, stubborn. Hot for a long time.”
John’s mouth did something complicated—offense and reluctant pleasure, both. “That’s a terrible metaphor.”
“I’m out of practice,” Bucky said. “But I meant it as a compliment.”
John turned back to the river to hide the way it landed. “You can be out of this house.”
“I’ll stay outside when you want me out,” Bucky said. “But I’m not going back to the tower.”
“Because.”
“Because I want to be where you are,” he said simply, and there it was—the choking version of devotion, not spoken as worship, but moving like it under his skin.
John rubbed his brow. “You’re making me feel like a bird in a box.”
“I’m trying not to,” Bucky said. “Help me do it less wrong.”
“You can start by not following me when I run.”
Bucky nodded. “Compromise.”
“I said don’t follow.”
“I heard you.” He held the line, gently relentless. “Ten steps behind, never ahead. Headphones in. If you disappear, I track you.” He didn’t soften the last part. “I won’t drag you home. I’ll just find you.”
“That’s following.”
“It’s me breathing,” he said, small and terrible. “Please. John, please.”
John stared at him, at the cords in his neck, at the way his metal hand had stayed open since he arrived. “Fine,” he said at last, disgusted with both of them. “Ten steps. You lurk polite. If I tell you to drop back, you drop. If I say go to the house, you go.”
“Compromise,” Bucky said, relief messy as rain.
“And don’t tell me to what to call you..”
“Buck,” he corrected mildly. “Or Bucky.”
“Congressman,” John said, just to be mean.
Bucky smiled like he’d earned the dig. “Buck.”
The first run set the ritual. John texted trailhead because compromise sometimes wore a leash. Bucky kept ten steps back, eyes on the world instead of John’s heels, counting threats like beads. When John vanished around a bend too long, Bucky’s chest flash-burned; he tracked a scuff, a snapped twig, found him tying his shoe and pretending he hadn’t done it just to breathe without an audience.
“You lose a foot?” Bucky asked, casual as he could make it.
“Barnes,” John said, warning.
“Buck.”
“Sergeant,” John corrected, and took off again.
Afternoons, the house learned them.
Bucky cooked eggs and made them better on purpose, because ordinary was a discipline now. John baked too much bread, ate it standing at the counter, eyes half-lidded, a man caught between offense and relief. Bucky fixed nothing in the house because he’d promised, but John caught him staring at the crooked cabinet hinge like it was a personal insult and snorted. “Touch it and die.”
“Copy that,” Bucky said, and left the squeak alive.
By day three, the weather turned. The river roughened its back; the trees argued in their own language. Storm light pressed close.
When the thunder hit, it hit like a wall. Rain punched the roof, found the seam, and a pop like a rifle cracked the quiet—oak branch through the living room window. Wind shoved rain inside; the rug darkened to a bruise; the couch went from “penance” to “sponge” in a minute. Power flickered; the thermostat beeped vindictively and then thought better of it.
John and Bucky moved in the choreographed way all their worst days had taught them. Towels. Bucket. Plastic drop cloth from a closet labeled PAINTER’S STUFF NO REALLY. They got the water stemmed and the branch stabilized until morning.
“Living room’s a swamp,” John said, breathing hard.
“Bedroom’s dry,” Bucky said. “I’ll take the floor.”
John didn’t argue. He was too tired to fight a man’s need to be uncomfortable to feel like he’d earned being present.
Hours later, with the power humming again and the rain turning from rage to apology, the house creaked itself into settling. John lay on the bed on his side, staring at a knot in the wood that looked like an eye. He sighed.
“You can… get off the floor,” he said, grudgingly kind. “You’re making my back hurt just listening to yours.”
Bucky was up in half a breath, the kind of immediate that earned him an honest laugh.
“Were you waiting for the invitation?” John asked.
“Yes,” Bucky said, shameless.
“Pathetic,” John murmured, still laughing. “If you told me a few years ago I’d have the Winter Soldier as my—what, shadow?—I’d tell you to go to a hospital and get your head checked.”
“Not a shadow,” Bucky said, easing onto his side of the bed and staying respectfully far, like a man practicing how not to crowd. “If you’ll permit, I want to be a partner.”
John went very still. “That would be toxic,” he said finally. “To both of us. We’re not… normal.”
“When did we ever have normal?” Bucky asked, soft.
John groaned into the pillow because it was unfair when the man had a point. “Fine,” he said, which in John meant I heard you; I’m not promising anything except tomorrow. He turned his back, drew the blanket up to his shoulder.
There was a quiet beat. Then Bucky, who had always learned touch like a language too late, eased an arm around John’s waist and pulled him in, slow and sure.
“You’re moving too fast,” John said, voice warm with warning. “For someone who just asked forgiveness and a date in the same week.”
“I know,” Bucky said, honest. He didn’t take his arm back. He drew John an inch closer, like the right way to hold wasn’t a grip but a gravity you agreed to share. “I’ll fix the pace tomorrow.”
“That’s not a date,” John muttered.
“I know,” Bucky said into hair that smelled like ember and lavender. “Trail. Half. Back. Bread. No sermons. Cast iron.”
John huffed. “That metaphor again.”
“Growing on you,” Bucky said.
“Don’t push it, Congressman.”
“Buck,” Bucky corrected softly.
“Barnes,” John answered, stubborn as ever.
Bucky smiled against the quiet. The storm dragged itself off to yell at some other river. The bedroom walls learned two heartbeats at once and decided they could hold them. And somewhere far away, in a tower trying to relearn how to be gentle without being a cage, a Thursday waited for whatever tomorrow would let them carry—bread, apologies, and a man who wasn’t glass, wasn’t a shadow, wasn’t a symbol.
Cast iron, hot for a long time.