(someone told me long ago) there's a calm before the storm

I dunno man, this thing has been taking over my life for the past *checks watch* two weeks.
E rating and Graphic Violence warning are mostly for precaution! It was difficult to avoid the subjects (and PTSD) entirely once the story started taking shape, but there should be nothing too egregious (there'll be a missing scene tho). Title's from Have You Ever Seen The Rain.

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It takes Wilson only one and half months to find him in Albuquerque, even bouncing from city to city and shelter to shelter as he’s been doing since the fallout, because of course he fucking does, it’s like he can’t leave well enough alone, even when he hates the guy who wants to be left alone.

Then again, maybe that’s why Wilson’s Captain America instead of him, or, well, was?

“You’re not gonna leave me alone unless I kill you with my very own hands, or are you?”

Wilson shrugs with a smug smirk, looking very confident and confident all things considered.

“Maybe someone else will kill me instead in the meantime, if you’re that scrupulous all of a sudden, who knows.”

John narrows his eyes coldly. “Not scrupulous, Wilson. Just don’t want all eyes on me over putting a few new dents on the people’s second favorite national hero. First on the list, if you take Strange out for not having the White House seal of approval.”

“Dude, no one’s got the White House seal of approval,” Wilson rolls his eyes, showing something other than smug cockyness or righteous confidence for once.

“What do you want?” John bites out forcefully, getting all over the other man’s space, suddenly sick and tired of these clowns.

“Back off,” Barnes chips in softly from behind Wilson, pushing off the railing he’s been all but lounging against since Wilson beckoned him to the back exit of the shelter.

For once in his goddamn life John thinks things through, then thinks it a bit more, and hey, maybe that actually is worth something this time around.

“I’ve got more experience and net strength than you, kid,” the Winter Fucking Soldier adds, confident in an entirely different way than his companion. “And even if you somehow get the upper hand on me, we’ve got more cover, and you know she’s a great shot, you’ve seen it.”

John thinks about the feeling of his left elbow giving out while being pinned down by Barnes and backs off, as does the other man but only after Wilson signals him to. What, is he a fucking guard dog now?

“Don’t call me kid,” he sneers half-heartedly.

“Sure, kid,” Barnes replies flatly without missing a beat.

Usually, that kind of response would come along with the kind of mocking expression that’d make John want to punch his face in. Now, it just looks like his team leader - former team leader - is as done as he is with playing games, running around each other like crazed dogs, nipping at each other’s ankles every chance they get. Not like any of that was working, or ever going to, Liv seemed unconvinced and distrustful about the other man at best .

He asks again: “What do you want with me?”

Wilson gives him a long, hard look before sighing and finally getting on with it. And he used to think talking to Barnes was like pulling teeth, Jesus Christ Almighty.

“We have a proposition, from all of us, not just Buck and I.”

It’s a whole month and then another half after the Thunderbolts Initiative has been dismantled, and Valentina de Fontaine and Sharon Carter have become people of interest in the worst possible ways, and an arrest warrant on his and most of his teammates’ names was issued, and his own wife kicked him out of the house - not that he really could’ve stayed there to begin with, but still -, that John Walker loads himself into a beat up, second hand sedan with the one duffel bag he’s got on him, and sits behind James Barnes and Sam Wilson planning to only listen to or stay with them for as long as it takes for him to make sure the other are doing okay and to get some decent fucking rest himself before ditching them again, shots at redemption be damned.

Then they pick up Yelena from a nearby alleyway on their way out of town and she punches him in the face with fucking brass knuckles, because clearly this day wasn’t bad enough already.

Their so-called safehouse turns out to be an old, rundown ranch, and they’re not even using the house itself but the goddamned barn to stay in. John almost wants to demand they take him to the next city or town over instead when they pile in and he takes a good look at the place: he likes his chances better with sleeping on a park bench than here, at least where ticks and fleas are concerned. Then again, Ava’s here and not in a park next town over, so he keeps his mouth shut and sets his bag at the foot of one of the unclaimed cots.

“Hey there, Little Tin Soldier,” she greets him with a weak fistbump, looking rough and sounding rougher.

He doesn’t say anything about it either way; he’d rather make someone else feel bad, maybe someone like Wilson, or Barnes, or Valentina de Fucking Fontaine.

“These assholes treating you right ‘round here, Shooting Star?”

Ava shrugs. “Food’s not that great right now, and they insist on giving me their blankets, but at least they’re being honest, you know…”

He knows , that’s for sure.

“We got anyone else?” John looks around, but he can’t quite make out anything for sure, not with how there seems to be things thrown around without more care and order than the strictly necessary.

“Here, no, it’s just the four of us. In general? The rest of the team made it out mostly safe and sound, and we reconvened a month back, except for Zemo, he got caught by the Dora Milaje.”

John gives her an incredulous look. He can believe Shostakov making his way to them, because he often follows Yelena’s lead like a particularly loyal, persistent dog, but… “Even Antonia?”

“Believe it or not,” Ava says with a proud smile. “They got a bit more beat up than the rest of us, though, so they’re staying somewhere else with Red for now. We’ll rendezvous with them in a couple of months or so to let them recover and figure things out.”

“Sounds good to me, but are they gonna be safe ?”

“Yelena says they will,” Barnes replies as he walks by them, clearly having been listening to them the whole time and giving Ava’s shoulder a quick squeeze as he passes in a show of comforting camaraderie, ever the silent, stoic, oddly supportive leader, never mind he’s more or less sharing the role with Wilson now from the looks of it.

John just doesn’t have the energy to make any comments, snide or playful or otherwise, and the way Yelena keeps shooting daggers at him from the corner she’s perched at doesn't help any. Ava, at least, gives him a smile and a pat on the arm in quiet support when she notices his unease.

He eats a can of chicken noodle soup and some leftover rice with a protein bar for dessert, and then goes straight to sleep on his cots by one of the side walls, uncomfortable in a familiar sort of way, barely bothering with taking some of his outer layers off and draping a pair of thin blankets on top. He thinks he can hear Wilson snort amusedly at the way he all but throws himself at the flimsy thing, but he ignores it, John’s just that fucking tired after over a month on his own and on the run, barely stopping and resting even less.

He’s so tired he doesn’t think he even dreams all night long, and maybe even overdoes it, feeling like death warmed over by the time he wakes up next, just before sunrise the following day.

“I was starting to get worried you were going to sleep through the morning too, maybe even past noon,” Barnes teases lightly when John walks up to where the other man is leaning against the small side door of the barn. He doesn’t look like he’s slept at all.

“Wouldn’t want that, now would we?”

Barnes turns his head just enough to give him a side glance, but it’s one John can’t quite decipher for once, not patently annoyed or forcefully patient, but almost carefully blank instead.

“How’s your body holding up?”

John shrugs. “More or less like you used to say it’d be: fast paced and too sensitive, my sleep’s too light unless I’m just about to drop dead from exhaustion. I’m still not entirely on the same page with my own strength and agility either; Val’s experts didn’t help shit.”

“Thought as much,” Barnes sounds almost disappointed. “I told her to let me have a talk with them first, or let me be in your roundtable meetings, but she kept pushing it back, something about making this as comfortable and safe for you as possible. I don’t think she wanted me to be involved in any of it to begin with, you and Antonia.”

John has to snort at that, all too derisive. “You don’t think? I believe we can safely say by now that she didn’t want us to be the kind of team that genuinely trusted each other with anything more than our backs, if. You wanna know what she told me about Antonia before I even met them? She said they were still touch and go with her programming, that they couldn’t make as much progress as it’d been done with you, that kinda bullshit. Never mentioned any of the training they went through in the Red Room, all the things their own father did to them, or how they’d severed their own olfactory nerve after they were rescued by Romanoff and Yelena, just in case, just to be fucking safe. All for Val to use her as a mercenary too, just with sweet nothings instead of a chip in the back of her head.”

Barnes doesn’t really say anything in answer to that, but John can see the way his face contorts with frustration, shame and guilt. And he gets it too: if he feels like used up toilet paper and an idiot to boot for not picking up on all bullshit stinking up the place right under his own nose, their former HYDRA puppet of a team leader can’t be feeling all that jazzed about this damned mess.

Come to think of it…

“Did you have any idea about it? I promise I won’t try to rip your throat out with my own teeth if you say you did, though I’ll still be pissed.”

Barnes just sighs, thumping his head against the wall he leans on with a close-eyed, weary, pained expression, shoulders slumped and all. It probably also speaks volumes about John’s own state that his first thought at having his attention drawn to the good old Sergeant’s shoulders isn’t about how badly he wants to wrap his own legs around them and not let go until he’s thoroughly spent.

“I had a hunch, and the vague notion that Yelena was onto something,” he admits with a growling kind of voice. “But I was also being kept busy most of the time and still having to attend my therapy for what little of it I had left afterwards. Good thing for them I didn’t have much of a social life to begin with, right?”

“Other than Wilson?” He knows he sounds bitchy but, eh, fuck it.

It’s not like he has any chances anymore, or even that he cares all that much about it. Just, lost chances, what ifs, would have been nieces, and all that crap. He hardly would get to enjoy it with his wife the way he’d wanted from the beginning, even if he did have the slimmest of possibilities.

Barnes doesn’t acknowledge his tone. “It’s not like I know all that many people outside of these super team-ups, or even inside of them. And I can’t really afford to pick and choose, or on the contrary, get back to my social butterfly ways, when the chances of me killing someone’s relative aren’t zero, either.”

John shoots him a frankly alarmed look, but all the other man does is shrug with a colorless, drained smile on.

“Breakfast? There’s some decent coffee and supermarket brand bagels? And the rest is gonna wake up any minute now, you of all people may want to get your fill before then.”

“Sure, o captain, my captain.”

“That’s Sergeant for you, kid,” Barnes throws back at him.

They eat quietly for the most part until Ava joins them, somehow looking even worse than she did the previous day. She tells him she’s running low on her quantum stuff, so she’s managing the doses until they go to San Francisco to get more from the Pyms, hopefully in the following month, and John lets it go for the time being. He’s letting a lot of things go for the time being , he’s almost being patient for once, someone should give him props for that.

“Don’t worry, we’ll make a run for it earlier if it comes to it,” Barnes reassures him once Ava’s out of hearing distance, exchanging watch shifts with Wilson. “We’re just trying to lay low for a while as the dust settles.”

John waits for Wilson and Yelena to take their seats before speaking up: “So, what’s the plan?”

As it turns out, the plan for now is to just not fucking die and not get caught by Ross’ people, or anyone else for that matter, apparently the only ones somewhat willing to give them a hand at any given point are the Wakandans and the Mystics. John would love to be snide about it, but in all honesty, it’s not all that different to what he was already doing and he can kinda get behind it, he’s getting tired of aimlessly bouncing around the country.

“Any ideas about the how, at least?”

“We’ve been throwing some ideas around, but we’re stuck on whether to stay together in groups of two and three, or splitting up further instead,” Wilson explains, grabbing at his coffee cup like it’s the only thing keeping him alive. “Have any thoughts to spare?”

John makes a face over his own coffee, turns to look outside through the door. “I can see the pros and cons for either option, but I’ll vote for staying in groups, or at least in pairs, if there’s a vote going ‘round.”

“It feels safer at least, doesn’t it?” Barnes says.

“Over reliant, codependent, you mean,” Yelena contradicts, but otherwise doesn’t fight them on it and commits to sticking with Ava and John once they move along, at least until they get Ava sorted out with her refills and stable.

“Let’s stay here for another couple of weeks before we commit to it, until Ava’s deadline to be on her way to San Francisco, how’s that sound?”

They agree with Wilson, probably because they’re all worn down to the bone and they could do with some company and security right about now, for all that Yelena still won’t talk to him yet - not that John blames her -, and John himself blatantly avoids Wilson.

He spends most of his time the first two, almost three days at the abandoned homestead either sleeping, eating, or roaming around the unkempt fields and modest groves of the property, either alone or with Ava whenever she’s feeling up for it. Whenever he’s not doing either of those, John gets some one-on-one time with Barnes, and he can see and feel the difference between these sessions and his lackluster training with Val’s experts from the very beginning and without even looking for it.

“I actually had to go through a lot of testing and training to get used to the effects of the serum when I was caught by HYDRA the second time around,” Barnes explains surprisingly easy when John prods, the two of them sprawled on the dusty floor of the barn after a spar while the others are out on grocery shopping duty.

“They needed you to get a good hold of your strength in case you needed to be delicate, huh?”

The grin Barnes throws at him is just shy of an angry wolf’s sneer, sharp and deadly, and John kinda wants to feel the edges of it on his skin, tearing the muscle off his bones.

“Among other things.”

He ends up falling into a routine even in spite of his original intentions and best efforts: sleep, wake up, eat breakfast, shit, train, eat lunch, sleep, wake up, pee, train, eat dinner, sleep - more or less, rinse and repeat. He’s only included in the watch rotations by his second week with them, once Barnes has decided he’s not going to drop from exhaustion or dehydration anymore. Never mind how much John insisted he could pull his own weight from the start, doubly so when he began sparring with Barnes properly.

“You were underfed, dehydrated and sleep deprived, I’d argue you’re likely still all of those only your heart’s not going to give out now,” Barnes grumbles at his protests. “You’re just not used to the feeling of it with your post-serum body.”

John rolls his eyes and drops it, goes back to sleep instead, knowing he must come across like a snotty child.

Wilson comes looking for him the very next day, and that just can’t be good for him and the feeble tightrope his peace of mind is trying to keep balance on.

“What do you want now, Wilson?” John grunts from where he’s splayed out on the front porch steps of the broken-down house, enjoying some sunlight for once.

“To talk with you without getting my head bitten off, maybe?”

He says that, but he doesn’t come any closer to John than necessary for them to talk. Wilson takes his time to lean against the wood posts of the railing around the porch and take a good look around them. What for, no idea, it’s all grass and dirt and blue skies, and very little more, as usual.

“I want us to train together,” the de facto right hand eventually says, still watching the grass grow.

“Excuse me?” John doesn’t even bother trying to disguise the surprise in his voice or his face.

Wilson shoots him a sharp, mocking look before he explains himself. “We’re a team now, kind, whether either of us likes it or not. At the very least we’re both sticking with Bucky until this whole mess stops dripping on the carpet, and that means we may have to fight together at some point. I don’t know about you, but I figure it’d be a good idea to get a proper idea of how well, or bad, we mesh together, especially since we have Buck here to guide us, too.”

This is probably the most either of them had told the other without any shows of mockery or antagonism between them, however subtle or evident, since the disaster with the Flag Smashers and Morgentheau. And as much as he hates to admit it, Wilson’s making a lot of sense right about now.

“Why should I listen to you now, when you didn’t listen to me two years ago?”

Wilson tilts his head back against the top of the railing, eyes closed against the sun and throat fully exposed to John.

“I like to think I can learn from my mistakes, don’t you? There’s a lot of stuff I wish I’d done differently two years ago, with Bucky, with Karli. With you. Considering how things turned out in the end, I’d say more so with you than with anyone else, maybe then everything with Hoskins wouldn’t have happened.”

“Maybe,” John admits, sitting up on the steps, looking at his hand, thinking about how it had felt to touch Lemar’s neck and not finding the steady, reassuring beat he’d grown used to in over a decade. “Maybe I shouldn’t have dragged him with me into the whole Captain America thing to begin with.”

Wilson does look at him then, face serious like he’s seen very few times. “For what it’s worth, I know the feeling of losing someone like that first-hand, and I’m very sorry it happened to you.”

John… accepts the sentiment much more easily than he would’ve previously expected, nodding at Wilson wearily.

“How do you wanna go about it?”

“I don’t want to fight you directly, at least not until Buck gives you the all go for that, but I was thinking maybe we could go two-on-one against Buck himself? That way he also has a first row seat to judge our teamwork from.”

“You worried I’ll be going too hard on you?” He teases meanly with a sneer and a blatant once over. The later one appears to go mostly unnoticed, which may be for the best all things considered.

“Yeah, I kinda am,” Wilson turns back to look at him straight on again, a frown on his face. “Buck’s told you about Karli, right?”

John frowns back, only barely stopping himself from grimacing. “Yeah, he did. Still wondering how you guys kept it from Val, though.”

“And we’re still not telling you, so there’s that too. We don’t want you to go out looking for her, even if it’s just to talk or whatever, especially not now that you’ve gotten better at the whole super soldier thing. It should be her choice after everything that happened, if she can even make it.”

“Fair enough,” he tries to shrug it off, probably failing miserably with Wilson as his sole, very attentive witness. “She's training too, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, with Shostakov too, now.” Wilson grins, “I’m not sure which of them I should be more concerned about.”

“Shostakov, probably. Morgentheau’s too tough and stubborn to suffer over some fucking training. She’ll be kicking his ass in no time.” She’d fared well enough against him when they fought, that’s for sure, not that he’ll ever tell as much to Wilson, or anyone else.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” The other man pushes himself off the wood and starts making his way towards the barn. “I’ll talk to Bucky about the training, you can have your one-on-one with him later when we go grocery shopping.” Wilson briefly turns around and walks backwards for a moment there: “Anything you want us to get you?”

John almost tells him all he wants is for him to leave him the fuck alone already, but reconsiders. “Get me stuff like trail mix, some yogurt, protein bars, and a few bottles of sport drinks, will ya?”

“Sure thing. Nothing else?” Wilson smirks. “Some dog treats maybe?”

John does glare at him then, and Wilson walks the rest of the way to the barn cackling like the asshole he clearly can’t help himself from being around him.

“I believe you’re overthinking it,” Barnes sighs later that day, cooling down from their sparring.

It’s starting to look like that’s their favorite time of day to talk, or maybe it’s the good chemicals running through their veins after the exercise that makes them more open to conversation.

“ Overthinking what?”

“Everything.”

John, who believes he’s been more patient than he really should since joining them, kicks him harshly on the only good place he can reach: Barnes’ fleshy shoulder. The other man just huffs while he rubs at the spot, but John can’t tell whether it’s in amusement or annoyance. Either way, fuck him, and not in the nice way he occasionally thinks about.

“Fuck you and start talking, I’m getting sick and tired about vague bullshit, think I’ve had enough of it for a whole life by now.”

“Hmm, and we seem to be heading towards a pretty long life too, if we don’t get ourselves killed along the way, that is.”

John sits up, and maybe that’s not the best idea when he puts too much force behind it and almost sends himself in a crash course towards Barnes, only catching himself with one hand against the dirt at the last second, and with the other man’s help.

“Case in point,” Barnes chuckles, actually fucking chuckles, and John just wants to bite the expression out of his handsome fucking face, maybe lick at it too for good measure. He swears he wasn’t so bad before the serum, at least not since he was a teenager.

“That’s not what I want you to talk about and you know it,” John lets himself tip further like he thinks Barnes’ insistent hand is trying to make him, and tentatively leans against the other man’s chest, arm-first. It’s not the most comfortable position at all, but he’s not planning to stay there for long and Barnes’ crewneck is infinitely softer than the ground.

“Sam’s not making fun of you 24/7 or anything like that, he’s just carefree, too friendly for his own good. I actually have this theory that it’s something of a defense mechanism, and you can tell him that I say as much, I say it to his face all the time,” he rambles and John almost hates how fond he sounds about it too. Almost, he’s not heartless enough, will probably never be.

“Does he roll his eyes when you do?”

Barnes makes the dopiest fucking smile. “Sometimes he just snorts. But the point still stands: he’s not targeting you or anything, he doesn’t exactly differentiate between the people he likes and dislikes that way, it’s less about the jokes and more about the emotion behind them. Also, Yelena doesn’t hate you.”

That makes John laugh, a full-bodied, breathless, almost despairing kind of laughter that makes him topple over the rest of the way down until he’s laughing with his face almost buried against Barnes’ side. Barnes himself takes it like a champ, doesn’t stir or readjust his grip, nothing like that, simply pats him on the back with his fleshy hand.

“I’d beg to differ, Sarge,” John manages to wheeze out a couple of minutes later, still winding down, still thrown across the other man and not giving a shit about it for the time being.

“John -”

“No,” he snarls in warning. “She greeted me with a punch to the face, brass fucking knuckles and all, and she’s barely given me more that two monosyllable words strung together like that makes a sentence in almost two weeks.”

“Yeah, I know, I’m living here too, remember? But she doesn’t hate you, John.”

John goes to push himself up and walk away from this fucking conversation before he punches Barnes in the face, but Barnes doesn’t let him off the hook so easily. He holds John down against his own torso with his metal arm thrown across the blond’s back, his hand almost low enough to be grabbing at his hip, and his right hand keeping John’s head nestled against his sternum. John doesn’t try to trash out of the grip, because he may be volatile - he’s well aware of it - but he’s not entirely brainless. He does make a half-hearted attempt at catching Barnes off-guard with a hard poke-pinch into the relatively soft meat right above the hip, the situation not nearly bad enough to go for the family jewels… Yet.

“God, you’re such an angry, rabid thing,” Barnes says with a weary sigh, tightening his grip slightly when John squirms in return. “Don’t make me pin you down.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” John sneers, not bothering to mask the suggestiveness behind the words.

The shrug is awkward and John can feel it more than see it. “Depends on the context. I don’t wanna make you feel trapped, I know how awful that is, kid.”

John whirls his head to his own left, reaching a little further, and bites down right under the lower edge of the rib cage before Barnes can figure out what he’s doing and stop him, only for the brunette to yelp and release him at the shock of sharp, sudden pain. John simply rolls up and takes a few steps away until he feels safe enough to look back at his work and the other man, already sitting up and rubbing at his side with a grimace on his face.

“I keep telling you not to fucking call me that .”

Barnes calls out after him as he walks away and towards the barn: “It’s meant to be an endearment , you know?”

John just flips him off over his shoulder, deciding a nap until dinner is in order.

Barnes is conspicuously quiet about it for the next couple of days, instead focusing on their - meaning, John and Wilson’s - teamwork and John’s own training, his strength control, more specifically.

And it’s on the second evening, as he’s sitting by a small fire he’d set up earlier with Ava, that Yelena drops by and talks to him. With him? Barnes choked him with a mean-spirited stranglehold during training that same afternoon, likely retaliation for the other day’s bite, and his throat’s still not feeling quite all the way there yet, even in spite of the hours in between and the effects of the serum, so he watches quietly as the Widow approaches at the end of her shift.

“Bucky tells me you seem to believe I hate you,” Yelena says lightly as she kneels by his left, mindful of Ava dozing off, tucked up against his other side.

John shoots her an aggrieved look and figures this is worthy enough to speak, even if he sounds like gravel to his own ears. “I’m starting to think you’re all trying to gaslight me here.”

Yelena snorts at him mockingly. “I don’t hate you, you idiot.”

“You punched me in the face, with brass knuckles,” he thinks he needs to stress on that by now, nobody else seems to remember it anymore.

“Yeah, because I’m pissed at your impulsive, stupid ass, and because I wanted it to leave a mark for longer than an hour or two. If I hated you I would have shot you.”

John mulls it over for a minute or two, maybe five, tired and empty-headed as he feels at the moment. He may even fall asleep for a few seconds there; which might be a good sign that he should move himself and Ava indoors for the night.

“Okay, fine, so you don’t hate me,” John admits with a scratchy grumble, starting to think about the logistics of relocating. “Why are you pissed at me, then?”

“Because you’re stupid and reckless, keep up,” Yelena rolls her eyes at him. “And don’t worry about the fire, I’ll put it out; you just take Ava inside.”

“Wait,” John keeps her beside him with a light touch on her arm, very conscious of the pressure he puts behind it. “Talk to me, okay? Why are you mad at me, use your words here so I don’t go around life guessing.”

“What is this, couple’s therapy? You’re not Bucky, and I’m not Sam.”

“I don’t have a practicing license, and now I don’t really have a marriage either, but I did get to keep a somewhat complex relationship nice and steady for over six years before that, make of it what you will.”

Yelena gives him a doubtful glare. “What’s complex supposed to even mean here?”

“A throuple, Yelena. I’m talking about the well-established little threesome I had going for me for years , one that took a lot of talking to maintain, for Christ’s sake.” Right up until Lemar got killed thanks to me, and now my wife doesn’t even want to hear from me because she feels like I betrayed he r, he doesn’t add, but then again they’re not talking about survivability or manipulation here, only communication; one struggle at a time.

“Didn’t know about that, sorry, I guess. I guess dear Liv got that third wheel along with the house.”

“Not quite, and it doesn’t matter anyways, stop trying to change the subject, Yelena, or then I’ll get mad at you and we’ll be locked in a miserable cycle of anger and pettiness. I’m already having trouble being in the same postal code as Wilson on a good day, and he’s not someone I tend to think of as a friend, or at least a friendly acquaintance.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll tell you, but first you have to tell me why you even have so much bad blood with Sam.”

“Honestly, I’m not even sure anymore.” John winces, decides to back up instead of continuing. “Okay, no, that’s not entirely true. Part of it I’m not sure anymore, I don’t know why we’re still stuck on it. I get along fine with Barnes by now, but I suppose we haven’t had the time or put in the effort to bury the hatchet or anything. Really, we just started off on the wrong foot while all three of us were in a delicate spot, and all the bullshit with the Flag Smashers and the way the serums affected me, they only made things worse in the grand scheme of things.”

“Is that when your partner died?” Yelena asks with something that could almost be called empathy if that expression didn’t look so much like anger.

John breathes in deeply, breathes out slow and steady. “Remember what I just said about my wife not quite keeping the third wheel along with the house?”

“Yeah?”

“Lemar was my partner but as in he was also my boyfriend,” John admits, looking at the fire instead of her. “Add my PTSD acting up, the stress, mix in with the serum, and I’m sure you can see how poorly that was bound to end. My clashing with Barnes and Wilson was just the icing on the fucking cake.”

They stay like that for a few minutes, quietly contemplating the fire. John doesn’t talk about Lemar often anymore, not outside of his therapy sessions with Christina or his occasional phone calls with the man’s family, some of the very few people who ever even knew they were a thing to begin with. And it’s not like he thinks anyone on the team would judge him for it, not anymore at any rate, it’s just something he keeps very close to his broken up core, is all.

“I always thought it was because you have the hots for Bucky,” Yelena admits with her nose all scrunched up, a little sister gesture if he’s ever seen one.

He snorts. “No, it’s not because of that, I’m not a goddamned highschooler. Your turn now.”

Yelena replies without skipping a beat: “You’re not invincible, you know?”

John looks at her with nothing but sheer confusion, maybe some apprehension too. “Of course I know. What are you talking ‘bout?”

“Ugh, you’re so stupid behind those mean blue eyes,” Yelena groans at him. “You’re not invincible just because you chugged the super soldier serum, none of us are, not even Bucky, but the rest of us don’t throw ourselves into danger like we are just to, to - I don’t even know, to prove a point? To prove our worth?”

He stares at her for a long moment, suddenly very much awake and alert, gives himself a minute to actually think instead of saying the first thing that comes to his mind and putting his foot in his mouth so deep he chokes on it while at it.

“I do that a lot, don’t I,” he eventually admits with a wince. “In all fairness, Lemar was at least eighty percent my impulse control, Barnes has maybe worked his way up to twenty percent of that so far.

And she has the irritated younger sister glare absolutely nailed down, it’s so good it almost reminds him of Lemar’s sister. He’s almost glad Romanoff didn’t have to deal with it for all that long. Almost .

The three of them - John, Barnes, Wilson - don’t get to train together nearly as much as they may have been hoping for in the two more weeks they had expected to stay together in the homestead before Ava starts taking a nosedive for the worse and doubles her rations while the rest of them scramble to make a quick getaway. At most they get a handful of proper, mostly disastrous, if somewhat enlightening sparring sessions before they split ways again, with Ava, Yelena and John taking the beat up sedan and heading to San Jose to meet up with the Pyms, while Barnes and Wilson claim the equally beat up pick up truck for themselves. They don’t tell him where they’re going, but John has a sneaking suspicion they’ll be paying Clint Barton a visit, based on nothing as it is.

And by enlightening he means:

John quickly finds out Wilson is far more agile and springy than he seems at first glance, with a good repertoire of acrobatic moves aided by his wings and short bursts of his jet-like engine, which he uses expertly to dodge Barnes. He’s not sure if it looks more like some sort of artistic expression a la capoeira, or just like a very complicated game of you’re it ; could honestly be either one with how playful if not outright childish these two can be together at times

“ Holy shit ,” Wilson huffs out wheezily on another occasion, sitting up on the hard packed dirt and looking at him like he’s never even seen him before, at least not post serum. “Not gonna lie, I didn’t think anyone outside of Red Room alumnae could pull off that kind of move.”

John, sprawled on the floor as far as he goes and with his thighs still wrapped around the general area of Barnes’ neck, shoulders and maybe face, just loose enough for the other man to also suck up air, thinks about the few occasions he’s seen either recordings of Romanoff or the live badassery of Yelena, doing their signature moves of bringing down an enemy using kinetic energy and a thigh headlock sort of maneuver. He also thinks about just where his crotch is in relation to the other man’s head and lets go of Barnes, moving away to get his bearings somewhere else, hopefully several feet away from either of the two assholes.

“Shut up and keep it in your pants, Wilson,” he wheezes back, coughing when all that does is get him to breathe some of the dust he’s kicked up, clearly amusing Barnes and Wilson with his misery.

When they leave, John and Yelena take a good couple of days to make their way to San Jose and make sure they’re not being followed or anything, Ava usually curled up with a couple of blankets in the back seat, either one of the blondes who isn’t driving at the moment keeping her close company.

The Pyms seem like perfectly nice people, at least from his very minimal interaction with them for as long as they all sit down at the roadside diner booth they rendezvous at.

It’s also the most people John’s been surrounded by since he rejoined the team and got sequestered into the homestead almost an entire month prior, Barnes and him staying there the whole time while the others did any shopping or other errands in the nearby town to avoid recognition as much as possible. It’s still only less than a dozen people there, waitress, cashier and cook included, he thinks, but he keeps his sunglasses on and tries to play the hangover card so people won’t think much of it and steer especially clear from him and the foul mood he’s hopefully conveying, does his best to ignore the way his skin itches with the certainty that everyone’s looking at him, perceiving him anyways.

Hank wishes them the best and tells them to take good care of each other, and Janet takes a short walk for a little chat with Ava before they get in their cars with the new supplies and part ways.

“What did van Dyne want?” He asks the moment they’re driving away in the opposite direction of the scientific power couple.

“She just wanted to know how I’m holding on, to check that I wasn’t getting worse or presenting new symptoms, dosage aside,” Ava answers sleepily from her cocoon next to Yelena.

John thinks there might be more to it than Ava’s telling them, but lets the subject go for now and focuses on the road instead.

They drive all the way to Oregon and then cross the state border further north into Washington, decide to stick to the coast and take a good couple of days looking for somewhere good to stay in, someplace kinda large and busy but not too large either. Just the perfect middle ground where they should have less chances to get recognized by the locals - and by them , John really means himself. And he’d love to chalk this one up to Val too, but no, it was his own choice to let himself be paraded around as the new Cap.

They do find a large town/small city type place to adopt as base for the time being, getting themselves lodgings in a nice boarding house just at the edge of it for a few weeks with the pretext of looking for steadier, more independent housing in the meantime. For once, Yelena decides to ditch her persistent accent and adopt something closer to his own so they can pass as siblings and make things a little easier for them, and the old lady running the place even seems to take Ava and Yelena right under her wing after assuming - correctly, but still - that they’re a couple from the get go. Which is very reassuring for him, the poor, unstable recently separated asshole who’d probably finish breaking down if he had to play house.

“What are you going to do about it?” Yelena asks him a week in, the three of them camping out in the back porch swing set Mrs Harris kindly offers them to unwind for the evening.

“About what?” He asks as he restlessly peels the label off his beer bottle.

“Dear Liv.”

John groans and winces, drops his head back until it rests on the upper edge of the seat, swinging them gently with his legs.

“I don’t know there’s much to do about it. Liv thinks I let her down by letting myself get wrapped around Val’s finger instead of trusting her, and I for one agree with her. And that’s without mentioning we’ve been dragging issues since Lemar and the Flag Smashers. She doesn’t even wanna talk to me, or even listen to me.”

“Have you at least tried ?” Ava pipes* in.

John snorts. “Many, many times. She usually hangs up on me the moment she realizes it’s me. I think I broke her heart as much as she broke mine, no turning back from that.”

“Well, at least you don’t have any dogs or cats to fight over,” Yelena adds, raising her beer like a toast, the or children going unmentioned.

John chuckles and tries his damndest to think about anything except his failed post-serum vasectomy.

He’s kinda disappointed about it when they move on from the town almost two months later, but in the meantime he and Yelena can at least make some money picking up odd jobs, Ava starts digging further into the few leads they’ve collected on either Val or Carter, and he even gets a few pounds back in with the better, more filling meals Mrs Harris sweetly makes for them for only a few more bucks along with their rent. He thinks he’ll miss Mrs Harris.

“I’ve been thinking about going back to Alexei and Melina for a while now,” Yelena tells him over a beer and a nearby bonfire on their second night back on the road, this time on their way towards somewhere in the Midwest, maybe Nebraska. “There’s something I want to look into with their help, and Ava wants to check up on Antonia.”

“Alright,” he takes a swig from his bottle and lies back against the windshield, hearing the tunes coming out of the car’s radio and through the windows, following the rhythm with his foot. “What’s stopping ya?”

“Karli’s with them too.”

Ah , John thinks, yeah, that’ll do it .

He gives her a long-suffering glare. “Remember what I told you about sharing the same space with Wilson for any amount of time?”

“Sorry,” Yelena says, looking hardly sorry at all. “Why don’t you think of it as some well-deserved, long-awaited exposure therapy?”

“Fine, you fucking bully,” he says with an eyeroll. “For how long can I cling to peace in the meantime?”

“I figured we should stock up a bit more on Ava’s stuff and get you set up with Bucky and Sam first, so, let’s give it another month, how does that sound?”

They make a quick trip into Topeka to check out an allegedly abandoned Power Broker warehouse, which happens to be thankfully abandoned when they get there, then keep driving all the way into South Dakota, where they hole up for a couple of weeks until Wilson calls Yelena.

“You’re being requested , John,” the Russian menace tells him with a shit eating grin from the passenger’s seat, ignoring Wilson’s phone-speaker tiny don’t make it sound like that protest.

John just rolls his eyes at their antics, not much else he can do at the moment unless he wants to stop the car or risk driving them into a ditch, or worse, a fucking tree.

“Do you want me to cut your hair?” Ava asks that same night, her fingers delicately playing with some strands of it from where she’s sitting on the fallen tree trunk right behind him.

John leans with his head tipped forwards and shakes it, just enough to make a mess out of his loose hair, watching the fire they have going through the veritable curtain it makes, then leans back against Ava’s thigh, considering the outcome.

“Maybe the ends, a couple of inches. I don’t want it to get so long or unruly that it bothers me while fighting even if I’m wearing a cowl, I’m not Barnes, but the length and the mess also helps me stay a bit less recognizable.”

“Is that why you’re also keeping the bear, Little Tin Soldier?”

He snorts harshly. “Makes me look less baby-face, don’t you think?”

“It makes you look like a crossbreed between a bear and a lumberjack,” she teases softly. He grins at her upside down.

Ava calls over to Yelena, and the other woman comes out of the car triumphantly holding a large, faux leather toiletry bag after several long minutes rummaging around the backseat. Ava’s already working on getting the lower half of his hair wet with some bottled water by the time their teammate sits on the woodland floor next to him, setting the bag on the log beside her girlfriend and starting to take a few items out of it herself, namely a hand towel that’s just barely big enough to encircle his neck and partially cover his shoulders. And when Ava finally dips her fingers in between the strands of his hair, the way she usually does to comb out the knots, discerning them out, it feels, it feel like -

It feels like home, in a way his own home hadn’t felt since Lemar, and that makes his chest go painfully tight.

The next morning they start the long, winding drive from South Dakota, south through Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri and Tennessee, before finally turning northward, up the Virginias, Pennsylvania and New York before they finally split up, John on to take a train to Portland and the girls off to honestly only God Almighty knows where and to what, and with Ava and Yelena involved, maybe not even he knows anymore.

“Are you sure about taking the train alone? It’s still a long enough ride that something could go wrong,” Ava asks him over the rushing late Winter wind that keeps throwing the hood of her jacket against her face, too cold for her to simply not use when she’s still unsteady on her feet.

John walks up to her to rub some warmth into her arms and sides. “I spent almost two months on my own right at the beginning of this mess, and we took the long way around just to make sure no one was following after us. I should be alright for a single night.”

“I thought we already established you’re stupid and reckless, though,” Yelena comes to rain on his parade, carrying his backpack to add to the lonely pile his duffel bag makes by Ava’s feet. “Those two months must have been a fluke.”

She leans against the side of the car - not the same one they started their drive in, but still a beat up sedan, only maroon instead of silver - and right next to Ava to share some of her own body warmth when John won’t, too anxious at the moment for all that he tries not to show it.

“Then let’s hope the fluke is still ongoing. We at least haven’t had any trouble, maybe the bad luck’s all on Barnes and Wilson.”

He doesn't believe that for one single moment, but his ongoing feud with the other men, and Wilson in specific, cheers Ava up so he sticks to it until he’s finally boarding the train for his overnight ride. They’ve done their best to make him a little less recognizable than usual, with brown colored contacts behind faux prescription glasses and a brown-red shade of hair and beard dye Yelena had dumped on him somewhere around the border between Kansas and Missouri.

John still feels itchy with the restless sensation of everyone in the car he’s in constantly watching him, everyone debating with themselves or their companions whether or not he really is who they think he is, if they should try to surreptitiously call the NSA or Fbi from their seats where they can keep their eyes on him, or try to make a subtle run for the nearest bathroom, for all that he knows none of it is true, only his hypervigilance acting out. It’s maddening at first, but after a frustrating first hour attempting to get a good start on the book Yelena had picker for him in a little bookshop outside the station and having to tell his seat companion that he’s so sorry but traveling makes him anxious, feeling like screaming or tearing his hair out, he picks his things up and goes to the café car for a change of scenery and less people around to ogle at him or for him to worry about. And a drink, any fucking drink with some amount of alcohol in it he can get his hands on.

Not that he could possibly get drunk, or even tipsy, without industrial amounts of Golden Grain or Everclear, of course, not only does he know it because he’s been told, but also because he’s tried, more so out of curiosity than anything else. Still, the taste of whiskey - mid-range price wise, leaving the trail of a decent burn down his throat - on his tongue gives him something else to focus on for a moment, and that’s enough to settle his nerves for the time being.

He gets something generous to eat as a late dinner and another drink, finally sinks into the thick book - some Scandinavian crime thriller that’s apparently one of Yelena’s favorites - that could definitely last him several train rides much longer than this one but whatever, he can pass it along to Barnes if he really doesn’t like it. He’s the snobby reader of the group either way.

Even with the book, and his intentional professorial look, and the bad blood kind of look on his face - mostly from concentration by now, in all honesty -, John almost jumps out of his skin when someone drops into the seat right in front of him in the booth. Two someones, one per chair, actually: a jolly man in his mid-forties, slightly taller than himself and showing too much chest for the season, and a distracted looking woman in her mid-thirties, maybe late-thirties if she has the money for some really good skin care, plastic surgeons, whatever.

“Hi there,” the man says with a bright, too-white smile, eyes just this side of too fucking intense to the point it’s more annoying than intimidating for him, would’ve been even without the serum coursing through his veins. “I’m Marcus and this is my wife, Helena,” the woman gives him a less anemic, almost interested smile at the sound of her name. “We noticed you looking very lonely over here, thought we’d come say hi, maybe keep you company for the ride.”

John quietly stares at them from behind his book and his annoying glasses like the infamous deer in headlights, and quickly realizes these people - or at least Marcus - are being serious. He’d almost prefer them to be paid killers sent by Val or Carter - or Liv, even -, secret agents from SHIELD or whatever other organization may be onto him, or even HYDRA goons, than this.

He briefly considers his wedding ring but dismisses it just as quickly: it’s right there on his finger where his hands are holding his book up for everyone to see, and even in the softer light of the car in the evening he highly doubts the couple has missed it. He’s not sure if he cares all that much about it, however, or even if he should: he’s definitely separated, would be divorced too if either Liv or he would take the step, and Liv still doesn’t want to hear about him after several months apart, he’d meant it when he told Yelena he didn’t know if there was anything to be done about it anymore. And he knows , because he called from a disposable phone a few days prior just to make sure she was still set on it.

John thinks he may have even surprised Liv when he followed through and hung up on her after she told him to fuck off, too. And just when he thought he couldn’t surprise her anymore.

But back to the problem at hand. Marcus and Helena are easy enough on the eyes, that’s for sure, but even if they’re not a threat to him - in general or specific -, there’s something in them that doesn’t sit quite right with him. Or maybe it’s John himself who’s not really up for it, that sounds just as likely, even with, well…

“So, what’s your na-”

“No,” John interrupts the man, going back to his reading.

“ Excuse me ?”

Or tries to, anyways.

John sighs heavily, puts his book down to finish the rest of his drink with a single gulp. And properly tell these people off, at least Helena seems to be paying proper attention now, big doe eyes jumping between both men

“Look, Marcus . You may not care about the sanctity of marriage - my marriage at least, you can do whatever you want with yours so long your darling wife here agrees out of her own volition -, but I do, and so does my husband.” John’s never been a particularly convincing act, everyone and his own mother can attest to that, but he can be intimidating, and he takes full advantage of it as he leans forward with a dark look in his eyes, taking a page out of Barnes’ book: “Not to mention, you’re disturbing my night and my reading.”

Marcus opens his mouth, chest all puffed out, and John just stares at him, dispassionately bitchy like Ava’s called it a few times, waiting for it and already bracing for whatever Yelena’s gonna give him when she finds out he got into a fight in the fucking train. Helena thankfully steps in, leaning against her husband and whispering something he can barely make out even with his enhanced hearing, but sounds a lot like she thinks he’s a psycho and absolutely not worth it.

John wouldn’t say he’s a psychopath or psychotic, and takes offense on behalf of the people who are for being lumped with him, but he’s hardly a harmless little kitten, and he’s been simmering in a poor mood for half a year now, hasn’t had the chance to really let off some steam with Barnes since they split up and Marcus over here looks like he’s just your average human being, your everyday good Joe. He’d hate to break him.

The couple apologizes - Helena profusely, and Marcus almost sadly, like he’s trying to give him the sad puppy eyes, get him to reconsider through sheer guilt alone. Which is not only ill fitting on him, but also fucking annoying. Really, sad puppy eyes on a forty-something year old man he doesn’t even know and who’s trying to hit on him? John’s hardly a beacon of virtue and humility, but at least he’s been told no in his life, Jesus Christ.

Case in point, he’s already planning to get a good, hard sparring session out of Barnes as soon as he can to release some tension, since he can’t suck his dick.

At least the rest of the ride is as uneventful as it gets for him, save for the sleeplessness and the occasional annoying noises from his car companions, made all the more irritating and starker by his super soldier serum level hearing. Good thing his nose is only so much better than it used to be, fuck knows what he’d be smelling by now. And he does get a whole lot of reading while at it too, he can kinda see why Yelena likes the damned thing, other than it probably being one of Romanoff’s favorites too.

“Walker,” he’s greeted with on the other end of the street in front of the Portland station - the name already escaping him -, and with as tired as he’s feeling he’s not even annoyed anymore. At least he can get some well-deserved sleep soon now.

“Wilson,” John replies and immediately heads for the passenger door, throwing his things wherever.

“What, no greeting smooches? Pecks on the cheek?” Wilson teases once they’re both seated in the warm, quiet interior of the surprisingly decent SUV the two assholes have gotten their hands on.

John looks at him, hopefully properly conveying murder with his eyes, more likely showing nothing but exhaustion and pain instead.

“I should’ve fucked Mark and Lena in the goddamned train,” he sighs.

Wilson smirks, eyebrows going up high into his forehead in bewilderment. “ Mark and Lena , huh?”

“It might’ve been nice, in retrospect and in comparison,” he grumbles, trying to make himself comfortable in his seats to get right into the unconscious stage of this already shit day.

He can hear Wilson snort under the loud rumble of the car’s engine starting, and maybe also something that sounds suspiciously like a missed you too, Goldilocks before he fades to black.

John dreams of Lemar, and fire in his veins, and a girl that’s done too much for her age, and eyes fucking everywhere, and a shield, heavy with expectations and dripping with blood, and he almost throws an unchecked punch when he’s woken up with a shake to his shoulder.

“Sorry, man,” Wilson says simply, ignoring his split second outburst so obviously it’s kinda painful to watch. “We’re here, and I know you run hot because of the serum and all that, but come on, surely you’d rather have a bed to sleep the train ride off on.”

Well, if he’s offering , John thinks as he eyes the isolated little one floor cabin Wilson’s driven him to, old stone and dark woods almost blending in with the forestry all around them, and gets out of the car with his bags. They first walk into a large area that makes up both the living room and the kitchen, open plane with only a counter to divide them and no dining room, easily making up the whole front, a good third or fourth of the building, the rest a number of rooms and bathrooms parted into two by a somewhat narrow hallway. Wilson gives him the barest of house tours, mostly just so he won’t get lost from his room to the bathroom, and leaves him to continue sleeping on his own, the bed thankfully already made, perhaps a bit bare, but between Wilson and Barnes one of them must’ve cared about him overheating, he supposes, and there’re some extra blankets neatly folded on the armchair by the window.

John doesn’t care much about it either way, strips down to his briefs and his short-sleeves tee, only bothers to grab a fleece blanket to throw over the covers, just in case, and tiredly crawls in. He’s already sleeping deeply, maybe two minutes flat after he gets comfortable on the surprisingly good mattress.

And he must be out for hours because when he next opens his eyes he’s feeling a bit stiff and too warm, and the light streaming in from the window is less bright and more orange than he last remembers. John almost wishes he hadn’t gone to sleep at all to begin with when he starts untangling himself off the bed and his whole spine pops when he stretches out, feeling a little more like the walking dead than earlier. He grabs his duffle bag and makes his way to the bathroom right next door, only answering with a groan when Wilson makes a jab at his expense. He couldn’t repeat what the other man says with a gun pointing at his head, but see if he cares at the moment.

Barnes is back in from wherever he’d been by the time John walks out of the bathroom, clean and clothed and feeling more or less alive again. And he’s not wrecked or stupid enough to not see the way Captain America and the Winter Soldier stand so close to each other, almost orbiting one another as Wilson slaps something vaguely dinner-like together for them to eat. It’s spaghetti with some kind of seafood based sauce, as it turns out, all he really cares about is that it doesn’t taste offensively and it fills him up - it tastes fine he thinks, even better than, and Wilson actually makes enough for each of them to get seconds. John supposes this is as close to content as he’ll get for the foreseeable future with these two.

“So, why am I here?” He finally breaks the peace once seconds have been served and they’re all sitting at the table again.

It oddly feels like he’s in an interrogation room, with Barnes and Wilson as the famous bad cop/good cop duo sitting close together on one half of the table, right in front of him and watching him intently, and yet he seems to be the one who’ll be making all the questions today.

“Can’t it just be that we were missing your pretty face?” Wilson attempts some levity.

John just shoots him a glare and feels almost elated with validation when Barnes turns towards his partner with a similar kind of expression.

Wilson shrugs defensively. “I’m just saying! Can’t we just switch teams around and socialize every once in a while?”

“He’s feeling a little cooped up because we have an emergency calls only rule right now, and we don’t hit the nearby towns much, sorry,” Barnes tells John with a straight face.

“Yeah, I get the feeling, I’m something of a social butterfly too,” John mumbles, ignoring the third man’s frustrated complaining. “So, what am I really doing here?”

Wilson sighs but otherwise keeps his mouth shut and shoots Barnes a side glance, like he’s throwing the metaphorical ball to his metaphorical side of the court. Barnes just nods at him and leans into him with almost his full side. John doesn’t bring attention to it, nor does he make the smallest attempt at coming off as if he can’t see a thing of whatever this is. He’s decided that if this is really going to happen while they’re stuck together, then he will become Switzerland.

He does wonder when exactly this happened; surely it couldn’t have been while they were all together back in the homestead because they definitely would’ve been risking exposing themselves to the group. Unless they hadn’t cared at all and it had ended up working in their favor - because there’s no way neither of the girls wouldn’t have told him about it if they’d found out -; unlikely but hardly impossible.

“We got a tip about a clandestine base hidden by the shore a little south from here, possibly HYDRA, about a week ago. It’s set up in an old, abandoned factory surrounded by equally old, abandoned warehouses, not all that many people in it, but definitely above skeleton crew. Maybe we could take them down on our own but…”

“You prefer to have back up,” John fills in, admittedly curious as to their reticence to say so from the beginning.

Barnes and Wilson exchange another look, and John prides himself in having become decently fluent in Barnes glares and looks and facial tics since the Flag Smashers fiasco, but he can’t quite read this for his dear life, and Wilson when he gets serious is a closed book in a dark room for him, for the most part.

“Pretty much,” Wilson takes the word back. “We thought about including Yelena too, but we don’t think we can get away with having you and Yelena in the fight, and still expect Ava to stay on the sidelines, and from what Yelena's told us, Ava’s still not in any shape to fight.”

John makes a so-so gesture with his head. “She’s doing better now, but I can see where Yelena’s coming from. And with as few people in there as you alleged, we should be enough to bring the place down, unless they get reinforcements in the meantime or have a whole squad hidden somewhere for these kinds of situations, you never know.”

“They seem to be mostly acting as an actual warehouse, storing weapons, maybe a small, single-room lab or workshop in one of the upper floors, with minimal but otherwise tight security.” Barnes adds further: “It seems they’re going for inconspicuousness above all else, and getting cocky about it, who knows how long they’ve been there.”

“You already gave it a good look, then?” He asks and finishes off his plate. He supposes he should wash the dishes, it’s only polite, but for the time being he only piles his things up and waits for the other two to get around to it too.

“Yeah, gave it the Little Wings treatment: infrared, x-rays, all that good stuff,” Wilson looks very proud of himself, adamantly ignoring John and Barnes’ gestures of sheer contempt.

“Timeframe?”

“Well, I’m of the opinion we should wait it out a bit, take a week or so to get ready, get you kitted out, observe further, maybe spar together some more,” Wilson begins, leaning further and further into Barnes’ personal space with the most obnoxious humor.

Barnes, who simply weathers it with the shadow of a fondly annoyed smile on his face. Yeah, if John didn’t stand a chance before, he’s not even showing up on radar by now.

“Buck over here thinks we should get going and raid them as soon as we have you dressed to the nines, with guns blazing and all that.”

John sips from his glass of water, wishing it were filled with pure vodka instead, if only for the pungent ethanol smell to distract him from the lovebirds sitting on the other side of the table. But not even his hopeless musings can help him ignore the expectant looks his teammates shoot him across said table.

“ What ?”

“Thoughts?” Wilson asks encouragingly.

“And prayers?” John shrugs. “I’m liking our odds so far but we may end up needing those anyways.”

The room goes suddenly very still and very silent until Wilson snorts, quickly devolving into chuckling, face bright with surprise.

“Did you just make a joke that wasn’t strictly at our expense?” Barnes asks with something akin to confused wonder.

John rolls his eyes at these idiots. “You know, there are only so many jokes I can possibly crack at the expense of you two assholes before the gig gets stale. Some variety is needed and appreciated, and I don’t see anyone else here to offer it.” Wilson opens his mouth but he catches him and immediately adds: “No, I don’t trust either one of you with it.”

“Who would’ve thought you wouldn’t turn out to be as much of a tediously bland white guy as I first thought?” Wilson questions rhetorically with a toothy smile.

Lemar and Liv, probably , John thinks but doesn’t say, just brushes it off and starts collecting their dishes to get the washing done and over with. He’d rather like to get back to sleeping or reading soon, and maybe also get away from these two for a while even sooner.

“Sam was actually asking if you had any thoughts on either of our plans,” Barnes says after a drawn out moment of them seemingly just staring at him for no discernible reason at all. “Any preferences?”

The blond man meticulously sets the dishes down in the sink and opens the hot water tab, turns back around to face them as he lets it run, thinking about it all the while.

“How far away is the factory from here? Timewise, I mean.”

“At a steady, decent speed, I’d say it’s one hour cutting through the woods on the jeep, then a fifteen minute walk down to the beach, and another fifteen, twenty minutes by boat. So, little more than an hour and a half, and I figure we can maybe shave fifteen or twenty minutes off it, give or take.”

So they can push it to a minimum of one hour and twenty minutes, more or less. That’s not an egregiously long commute, given everything goes smoothly and they don’t have to slow down due to rain or a fallen tree, some dumb, fortuitous shit like that. On the other hand, he has more experience fighting against Wilson than alongside him still, and he doubts the few training sessions they had all three together back in the homestead have changed much about it, in the grand scheme of things.

“And how long will it take to equip me?”

Wilson shrugs. “We have a decent caché set up near Bangor, I’m sure we can find you the equivalent to a whole suit and whatever armor and weapons you need in there. I’m more worried about fit, we may have to improvise and adjust if our stuff doesn’t sit all that right on you.”

He’s not entirely sure he’s comfortable with the way Barnes and Wilson’s eyes scrutinize his form. John figures they’re trying to judge whether or not the gear they have available will indeed fit him or not, but there’s an unwarranted intensity to their stares that gets under his skin.

“And how close is the caché to the warehouse? We can go tomorrow and take care of that right away while Buc- Barnes keeps watch. Any chances we can get the place bugged? All eyes and ears in?”

“The ride from the caché is just a little shorter than from here, but also less inconspicuous, that area is very lonely and there are a lot of cameras set up in a wide circle from what we could find out,” Barnes explains after a considering beat, probably dissecting his little slip up. “And maybe we can get a couple more listening devices or cameras in with the drones, but if we end up tipping them off then it’d still be better if we’re ready to act at a moment’s notice.”

John nods, acknowledging the good sense in that. “We can get my gear ready tomorrow then, and Barnes can try and find out if there are any better places or times of day to try and bug the place further. Maybe during a shift change, something like that?” He turns to address Wilson in particular: “You want me to train with you on the shield, don’t you?”

“I’ve never said that,” Wilson winces. “But yeah, pretty much. I’ve already gotten the hang of using the shield with buck, and you two have more specialized training with it, not to mention the serum enhancements. But I’m still just little old me, in case you don’t remember.”

“I remember,” he replies with exaggerated irritation. In reality, John has been painfully aware of how different the serum made him from regular people since the very beginning; has become almost obsessed with it in the last couple of years, in spite of all his work with Christina and Liv’s endless reassurances.

Not even Val had managed to genuinely get the thought of it out of his head, one of the few things that ran deeper than the finger she’d had him wrapped around. Or more accurately, the long, hard fucking nail she had dug into him from the very beginning.

There doesn’t seem to be much else to talk about after that, other than settling on the week-long timetable, and Wilson goes to take a long nap while John does the dishes and Barnes sets up with a tablet on one of the couches to keep an eye on the live footage of the old factory. John figures he can play nice for once and keep Barnes company for a while with his book before going back to sleep whenever Wilson pops up to take over. Hell, he may even keep Wilson company for a moment too, given the other man doesn’t aggravate him too much too quickly.

Barnes thanks him honestly, almost delighted, when John comes back around from his room with the book and hands him a coffee mug before sitting on the nearby armchair himself, stretching out his legs until he can rest his sock-clad feet on it. Socks only, he can’t help but feel like Wilson would be the kind of guy to get an aneurysm if he even suspected someone’s put their shoes on any of the furniture.

“Yelena picked that one, didn’t she?”

John snorts fondly. “Yeah. Lemme take a guess here: is it one of Romanoff’s favorites?”

“Yeah,” Barnes confirms with a surprisingly soft smile. “She’d always try to get me to read it back when I was in Wakanda and Steve would call me. I don’t know if she got to be the one to tell Yelena about it, or if Yelena found out from Sam or Barton, but I’m glad she at least has this much of Nat.”

John sips his coffee for a moment, restlessly tapping at the cover of the book with his index finger, wondering if he should even ask. Eh, fuck it.

“What was she like?”

“Nat?” Barnes asks in corroboration, gets a thoughtful frown across his brow when John nods. “I’m not sure what to tell you, I didn’t really get to know her all that much during that time, or even Sam for that matter, mostly I just talked a lot with Stevie. But she seemed nice enough: soft spoken but strong-willed, clever and observant as all Hell, very loyal and caring. Sad in a very gentle, peculiar way.”

“So I should go to Wilson if I want to know more?”

The other man grimaces. “I wouldn’t bring her up unless Sam does first.”

John shoots him a questioning glance.

“Sam, he got very close to Nat and Steve while they were on the run. I won’t get into details, but he took their losses pretty hard, especially Nat’s, since at least Stevie got himself a happy ending and all that, so he doesn’t really talk much about her with most people.”

John is… familiar with some of that wording, but he doesn’t say anything about it, not now. He doesn’t want to just start assuming things about either of these two, especially Wilson, and only to make a complete fool out of himself too, maybe even needlessly upset them while at it, despite the little crumbs they seem to be dropping all over the goddamn place without a care in the world.

He just stays quiet and gets back to his book, keeps Barnes company for a couple of hours before picking up their mugs and rinsing them, going out for a walk through the woods around them and hopefully shake off some of his persistent restlessness, give himself a moment to think about what he wants to do next instead of rushing straight into a fucking concrete wall as usual. John likes to think he’s been getting better at it since Lemar’s death and with Christina’s help and Barnes’ lead, but then the Thunderbolts Initiative fell through and he hasn’t felt nearly as steady on his feet since. And that’s not to mention he ran out of his meds - experimental as they were - back when he was still in Washington State with the girls. He ends up doing a full perimeter around the cabin.

“You should go with Sam, lie down for a while. I can keep watch and wake him up if I get too tired,” he tells Barnes once he makes it back inside, almost a full hour later.

Barnes just looks at him. “Go with Sam? What are you -”

“Don’t,” John sighs, already in the kitchen to make himself some more coffee. He doesn’t need it to stay awake anymore, the serum’s more than enough for that, but he still likes the damned stuff and he should probably get something to munch on so he won’t go hungry during the night ahead. “You’re not exactly subtle. Actually, scratch that: leaving aside stuff like always leaning into each other and all that lovey dovey shit, you guys kinda reek of each other, and I mean it in the Ava and Yelena way, not the, I don’t know, Antonia and Shostakov way, if you get what I mean.”

Barnes gives him one of his patented intense stares, the ones that are virtually glares only without any true anger in them. Most of the time.

“And you’re not bothered by it?”

John gives him a sardonic smile, a very close cousin of a sneer. “Should I be?”

Barnes’ eyes narrow. “I don’t know, John. You’re not exactly the easiest to read sometimes, but you do strike me as a bit of a, say, traditionalist .”

He can’t help it, he laughs at that, a full-bodied laugh, the edge of the counter he’s leaning against digging painfully into his hip, the rush of endorphins he gets - maybe more of trickle, but he’ll take what he can get - almost intoxicating. Goddamn, he really should’ve fucked Mark and Lena in the train.

“I think the words you’re trying to say are egregiously straight , old man. And no, I’m not even straight to begin with, you idiot.”

“That so?” Barnes asks with a carefully blank expression. Damn this man’s angry poker face.

John has no problem showing him exactly how annoyed he’s becoming by all this stalling “Bucky, go to sleep. I’m sure Wilson could use the company of a human heated blanket.”

Barnes grunts but at least he also gets up, stretches for a moment and finally vacates the area, bringing the tablet with him to the kitchen for John to have at hand while he makes himself food. He stops and stares at him instead of walking along once he sets the device down.

“ What now?”

Barnes shakes his head with an almost fond expression in his face, slightly but meaningfully leaning forward, straight into John’s personal space.

“I’ve got to agree with Sam: this hair color doesn’t look bad on you at all, but I prefer your usual dirty blond.”

John watches Barnes walk away and down the hallway to Wilson’s room, wide-eyed and tensed like a coil, the only reason his jaw or any other part of his body doesn’t go slack. What the fuck . He has to make himself move when the kettle gets close to boiling, otherwise he may stand stock still right there in the kitchen for the rest of the night, and at least Barnes is bound to come looking for what the noise is all about, even if he’s somehow already asleep. But seriously, what?

If he already didn’t need the coffee to stay awake before, even less so now, but at least it gives him something to try and focus on for the time being, until he’s approaching something calm and he can get back to his reading, a paragraph or three for every long hard look at the tablet display in search of even the smallest sign of anything amiss.

John even takes the opportunity to study the people being recorded until he’s well-assured that yeah, they’re HYDRA, at least one of the many factions running amuck since everything with the helicarriers went down over a decade prior. He also gets a better hang of the layout of the factory and the surrounding area with some help from the blueprints lying around in a folder on the coffee table, some of them printed or photocopied from God knows where, and others carefully drawn with pencil on loose folios, comments added all over the margins and in some of the rooms. He vaguely wonders if they were done by Barnes or Wilson, since either one of them could’ve taken tips from Rogers during their times together and he’s not really familiar with their handwriting to even figure out who did the notes either. They’re neat and perfectly readable, at least, making it easy for him to match floors, rooms, doors and stairs to their parallels in the video feeds, for all that there are only two cameras actually inside the main building.

If they could get a couple more cameras and listening devices inside they would be more than set up for this, even if the assholes in there are speaking fucking German or Russian, since they’re all at least bilingual.

The rest of the night goes by in a restless blur as he tries to stay quiet for the sake of the other men, especially Barnes and his enhanced hearing. For the most part he simply reads, watches the camera feed and nibbles on some dry fruits he finds in one of the cupboards, with short stretches of simply staring out the window from the dark of the living room, either in numb contemplation or just to reassure himself there’s nothing watching them from somewhere out there among the trees.

He finally gets to move around and stretch out with any freedom when he starts hearing the soft cadence of Wilson’s voice coming from the main bedroom entwined with Barnes’ even quieter replies. Their voices are low enough for him to have trouble understanding what they’re saying even if he forced himself to try, which he’s decidedly not going to do, both for his sake and for their privacy. He can be mature and sensible sometimes, like he’s told Yelena insistently.

“God, that smells good,” Wilson groans when he finally steps out of the room and towards the kitchen, still in the sweats he’s likely wearing as pajamas. “I’d forgotten we had bacon. Is it even good to eat anymore?”

“I gave it a sniff and it smells just fine,” John says, noncommittal.

He winces. “Man, that can’t be sanitary. How do you even know what bad bacon smells like?”

“Ask lover-boy,” John replies with an annoying grin.

Wilson just gives him the most unimpressed look in his repertoire. “Cute. Spent the whole night coming up with new jokes, didn’t you?”

“Despite popular belief, you don’t actually live rent free in my head, Wilson.” That’s not strictly speaking true, but neither of these assholes needs to know what goes on in his mind.

“You do know you can just call me Sam, right?”

“Sure, Wilson.”

He goes to take a nap while Wilson takes over watch of the feed so he can get some more rest in. And for once his dreams are so odd and jumbled he can’t quite make out exactly what they’re about and he gets some semblance of relaxation - short but needed nonetheless.

“Barnes still in?” He questions sleepily when he’s back on his feet sometime after noon and finds Wilson in the living room still with the tablet.

“Yeah, he won’t go to the look out until a couple hours more,” Wilson explains. “He’s still sleeping.”

He nods along and leans against the edge of the counter that faces the living room. “And when are we going to the caché?”

“Tonight, once Buck is in place and the building’s empty. Less chances for us to get recognized by any passersby.”

John stretches as far as he can with a semi-satisfied groan - the best he can get for now, he reckons -, turning his head one way and the other until his whole spine pops loudly.

“Jesus, you sound like bubble wrap,” Wilson says with an amused tone as the blond winds down. “You sure you’re up for this, old man?”

He teases him with a shit eating grin, but John still catches him staring for a split second when he begrudgingly opens up his own eyes again. He really doesn’t want to deal with this right now, and lets Wilson get away with it, but it’s becoming more and more difficult to tell himself he’s just imagining things where these two are concerned, especially after Barnes’ comment during the night.

“Shut the fuck up, Wilson,” he bites back so softly it could be a puppy lick instead. John turns around and uses a nearby chair to lean on and tie the laces of his beat up sneakers, adding: “I’m going out for a run, promise to stay nearby.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m starting to feel too restless for anyone’s sake. I haven’t done much steam blowing since the homestead.” Plus I could probably use the fucking cortisol , he leaves out.

Wilson expresses his agreement by simply handing him a disposable phone and recommending him to stick to the small forest roads close to the cabin.

Before… everything, really, back when he was still only a candidate, whenever John said he was going out for a run he generally meant that he was actually going for a jog with some sprints here and there for added flavor. Sure, he’s always been very athletic - almost suspiciously athletic sometimes, according to his mother the last time he talked to her a couple of years back - and he was perfectly capable of needlessly pushing himself to his limits and beyond, as his highschool coach would always reproach him, but for the short while he could be home in between deployments and training before being given the shield - and all that ended up coming with it -, he had learnt to take pleasure in the easier, simpler pleasures of life, in no small amount thanks to Liv and, of course, Lemar.

When he says he’s going out for a run now, though…

He comes back to the cabin an hour later, well-spent and clear-headed, the hoodie he’d been wearing when he’d first stepped out now wrapped around his waist leaving him only in his loose tank top even in spite of the cold October Maine temperature. Wilson watches him like he’s both concerned and horrified but keeps quiet anyways and lets John down two glasses filled to the brim with water.

“Is this like, the normal thing for you guys?”

“What is?” John asks back, still catching his breath while he begins his post workout stretches.

He probably doesn’t need to stretch at all anymore, before or after a workout, and Barnes sure doesn’t seem to care about them, only unwinding very occasionally from what he’s seen, but fuck him if he’s going to stop now just for an unbacked possibility.

“The whole running like the Devil himself is chasing after you when you could just jog like a regular person,” Wilson explains with a wince. “It doesn’t seem all that sustainable to me, serum and all, but Steve used to do that too. It was actually how I met the little shit.”

John looks in askance but quickly decides against prodding. “Barnes usually just jogs, though?”

Wilson snorts at him. “Buck used to just jog for de Fontaine and everyone else overseeing you guys, but trust me, he does the same annoying shit all the time too. I don’t think he was fully conscious of it, not the way he was about Yelena’s shenanigans, but he was still suspicious of them regardless, certainly wasn’t comfortable with them watching over you guys less like guardian angels and more like vultures.

“They really did watch us like a hungry funcking pack of hyenas,” John snorts derisively. “Didn’t think he was so apprehensive though: mostly he looked annoyed with them, and he didn’t mention all that much when we talked about it.”

“He only looked annoyed because that’s his default, that pretty resting bitch face of his. If he’s uncomfortable in a situation and wants to hide it - so, all the time -, then he pulls one of those and calls it a day instead of trying to act around it.”

“Because he sucks at acting unless it’s acting angry, doesn’t he?” He finishes his stretches throwing a grin at Wilson, still eyeing him from the couch.

Wilson chuckles. “You know it.”

He puts the kettle on and goes to take a shower before he starts stinking up the place - for Barnes, not Wilson and his regular human nose -, takes his sweet time under the hot spray, letting it wash out not just the sweat but also the tension off his muscles, gets dressed quickly when he steps out and starts hearing Barnes making noises in his room, Wilson already starting dinner from the sounds of it. He chucks his clothes into the reusable bag either of the others have left hanging from the door for laundry and makes his way back to the kitchen to get some coffee in him and help Wilson with dinner.

John briefly considers jerking it while he’s in the shower, taking advantage of Barnes still being asleep by when he steps in, and even if it’s more so for the sake of getting a taste of the good hormones running through his system, before he decides he’s not only using up the hot water and isn’t all that sure Barnes won’t be able to smell him afterwards, but he simply can’t bring himself to do it. It’s not like he doesn’t have some good memories to pull from or anything, but between his dead partner, his likely soon-to-be ex-wife, and the lovebirds he’s currently shacking up with in perhaps the most ill-advised move conceivable, he’s too unsettled to make himself think of anything vaguely sexual, never mind how much he’d like to, never mind how much his own body may be wanting it.

“Man, what do you think you’re doing?” Wilson begins when he realizes what’s happening, because he may not be able to drag him off the kitchen but he can still protest. “I’m not planning on eating some bland chicken or anything like that, I have enough with Buck on that front and I’d rather not sacrifice my chicken parm.”

John just rolls his eyes and doesn’t let it go, rolling his sleeves up. “I’ve tried the stuff he calls food and trust me, I want none of it. Don’t worry, mine’s at least decent too and I’m just planning to help, chop up veggies, all that stuff.”

“Uh-huh, decent he says,” Wilson crosses his arms and narrows his eyes at him, mostly playful but the warning still comes across clearly.

“Jesus Christ Almighty, Wilson, relax, I know how to cook,” John rolls his eyes, the inklings of annoyance sparking up. “My mom’s a chef, she insisted she couldn’t let her only child out into the world if he couldn’t fend for himself, even if she clocked me pretty early on.”

“ Clocked you ?” Wilson asks with suspicion.

“Growing up I liked dressing up in my dad’s formals when he wasn’t around.”

Wilson doesn’t ask further, maybe because he catches sight of John’s face or maybe not, either way they get into the ebb and flow of making dinner mostly in silence. The whole thing is starting to give him a migraine with how domestic it all feels, less like he’s staying with his teammates for a time-sensitive mission, and more like he’s sharing a place with roommates, maybe even friends, cognitive dissonance.

And he can tell the switch up in his own perceptions and sensations because he’s already felt it before, with Lemar, and Ava, and Yelena, even with Dreykov, just less intensely in comparison. With Barnes and Wilson and some of the sentiments - good and bad - attached to them, it just messes up with his head a little more than he’s ever had to deal with before. In comparison, his nerves and doubts about even bringing up the sliver of the possibility of Lemar to Liv over a decade prior were manageable.

Their second dinner all three of them alone together goes surprisingly nice and chatty, and they even talk about things outside of their current mission, outside of the Thunderbolts and the superhero gig, too, even if they still stray back to those subjects sooner rather than later each time. He supposes they’re getting there, feeling the way maybe, easing his extroverted tendencies somewhat.

Barnes leaves them quickly after he finishes his own plate, but not before thanking them with a soft smile and all too comfortable squeeze of his shoulder as he gets up. John glares at his own plate so he doesn’t have to see Barnes and Wilson smooching across the table, it’s already bad enough he can hear it so clearly.

Once Barnes drives off in the jeep, it’s only a matter of waiting for him to text them he’s in position and then they can make their way to Bangor, hopefully before night falls so that they can do their errands in the city without looking too suspicious to the locals, just a pair of fellows holing up in some nearby cabin running later than they first meant. In the meantime they simply get everything ready - the laundry, the bags for the grocery store, the bags for John’s equipment -, taking turns with the tablet so they don’t miss anything going on.

It’s hardly hour and a half later, the sun only now taking a proper nosedive down towards the horizon, when they’re back in the car and on the road, a backroad leading west straight into Bangor from where they’ll later take a turn to the outskirts, Barnes keeping in touch with them as he makes his last stretch towards the lookout and John keeping an eye on the camera feed until then.

After it, John spends most of the rest of the ride in a half-asleep daze, his coffee gone quickly along with one of the plain sandwiches Wilson had the foresight of slapping together for him.

“I was teasing you earlier and all, but,” Wilson begins when they arrive on Bangor proper and start piling out of the car and into the laundromat. “Are you sure you’re up for this? You seem like you’re still catching up on sleep to begin with.”

“Don’t you worry your little head about it, I’ll get some proper sleep in the next couple of days,” he insists as they walk in and head straight to the back of the room after a polite greeting to the cashier that thankfully goes mostly ignored.

They put the clothes in, note the time ticking downwards and decide to go get their non-perishables in a close by store in the meantime, they wait the drier out instead when they come back, conversing quietly while they share a bench and only go get the rest of the grocery list once they have everything in the car and drive it to a store across the city, Wilson arguing it’s a cheaper place.

There’s still time left before the store closes, so they go about it as leisurely as John’s comfortable with, squabbling about what to make for dinner during the rest of the week, what to get for after the week is over when they’ll get back on the road, and checking out protein rich foods for John - at Barnes’ insistence. Eventually they have everything they need, the frozen goods chilling in a pair of reusable freezer bags with a decent amount of ice, and Wilson leads them to a place to get a light dinner, wasting some more minutes just to ensure the way to the warehouses and the buildings themselves are as empty as possible. John, who hasn’t set foot in a proper Mom & Pop sort of diner quite like MacKay’s or eaten anything even resembling what they have in offer since Mrs Harris, gets himself the very tempting breakfast for dinner especial they advertise by the entrance.

“Seriously?” Wilson asks after the waitress has brought him everything promised in the sign, looking somewhat nauseous.

“Loosen up, you only live once,” replies John, already stuffing his face full with the hash browns and offering the other man a taste of the waffles.

Wilson looks at him like he’s a living, walking offense to his entire family. John simply grins and tries to eat as obnoxiously as he can manage, all the while being the prettiest angel in town to the waitress whenever she checks up on them, the establishment mostly empty for all that the food is to die for, to kill for.

They resume their positions once they get in the car, Wilson driving and John grabbing a hold of the tablet where he’s lazily sinking into the passenger’s seat, texting Barnes to ask how everything is going on his end only for the man to call back.

“Still not great with texting,” Sam shakes his head despairingly after John hangs up at the sudden stop, still a curve away from the warehouses.

“Maybe your boyfriend just wanted to hear your sweet voice, must be pretty lonely over there. Didn’t think of that, did ya?”

Wilson rolls his eyes at him, but John can just about make out the pull of a lopsided smile before they get out of the car. The Falcon sends one of his awfully named Little Wings ahead to make sure the way is clear and leads them straight towards the front entrance of the dilapidated, empty-looking building, only taking the time to cut off the security systems.

John pulls an expression that feels like what he supposes a happy grimace would as they walk past the empty, grimy, white lobby. “What’s up with this place, anyways, it looks like a horror movie set. A zombie apocalypse horror movie set.”

“You don’t have to sound so gleeful about it, man.”

John grins with an eye roll from where he’s walking a step or two behind him, nicer than anything he’d ever let Wilson see face to face.

They actually have two units, one next to the other, to their fake names on the second floor of the building, and Wilson straight up ignores the first one and goes directly for the other instead.

“That one’s for the girls,” his companion explains when prompted. “Except for the weapons, those are more up for grabs and you can take a look around it if you really wanna, but we should have more than enough for you in this one nonetheless.”

The second room certainly has a lot in stock for him and even more variety than Wilson himself had realized before digging through the trunks pushed under most of the shelves lining the walls, John trying some of the more promising clothes hanging or folded on racks, shelves and lockers.

He hates to even admit it to himself, but as the minutes turn into an hour it’s definitely looking like Steve Rogers’ clothes are the ones that fit him the best, only the slightest bit wider on the shoulders but tapering nicely down his ribs and waist. It makes him recoil and itch the longer he’s wearing any of it.

“You doing good over there?” Wilson asks from much closer than John had thought he was.

“Yeah,” John raps.

He struggles to hold back the urge to bring the diner food back up as he leans forwards against some storage shelves with his forehead and left arm, his right forearm pressing across his waist, eyes shut tight and teeth grinding against each other, the most he can do with someone watching him as closely as Wilson must be doing. Goddamn it, he thought he had this under control already.

“Breathe, John,” Wilson says softly, intimately, the shelves next to John’s head creaking under his added weight and he has to look up at the other man now leaning with his back against the rack, a few bare inches away and openly staring at him.

John can fucking taste him as he desperately sucks air in through his mouth.

“ I am ,” he wheezes, swallowing down some spit to damp his throat and trying to get his breathing back under control, unintentionally picking up the slow, calm cadence of Wilson’s respiration.

“I don’t think I can wear this,” he eventually spits out with a huff of a laugh, almost manic, still breathless and clearly self-deprecating even to his own ears.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t think I could pick up the shield, and yet here we are,” Wilson admits apropos of very little.

John looks up at him again, confused, both at the words and the sympathetic way he says them, rather than with the sarcasm he would’ve expected. Wilson doesn’t look back, rather pushes off the shelves and goes to grab some shirts and pants he’d left on top of a nearby crate without John’s notice.

“Try these instead. I’m almost confident in the pants, we can work something else with the shirts.”

John mercilessly tugs and chucks Rogers’ clothes off him and grabs or Wilson’s offerings like they’re a lifeline, ignoring the other man’s thinly veiled apprehension, accepting his attempts at help when he stumbles on his own two feet in his impatience to get one set of pants off and another on. He feels immediately lighter the moment he doesn’t have anything directly tied to Steve Rogers touching a single square inch of his skin, and even better when Wilson picks the clothes off the floor and stuffs them back into the locker, closing the door almost reverently.

“That’s going to need a belt but looks good otherwise,” Wilson offers with a critical look.

“Bucky said something last night, and it made me think,” he jerkily steps back until he makes contact with the thick sheet of corrugated aluminum that acts as a door, considers staying up but ends up sliding down along it.

Wilson looks at him with the kind of expression that reminds of an entirely different abandoned building to the one they’re planning to raid by the time the week’s up, stern, hyper focused and almost hurt.

“About what?”

He doesn’t know how to continue at first. Just saying that he gets any and all of it, that he knows about Rogers and Romanoff - or at least he thinks he does -, doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like it’s quite enough.

“Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves, but we wear our losses instead, don’t we? Our heartbreak.”

“I don’t care much about ambiguity, you know? You can ask around if you wanna.”

“But I’m not really being ambiguous when we both know what I’m talking about, am I? We still have a drawer full with Lemar’s stuff back at the house.” He quickly amends: “Well, Liv still has it, that and the house.”

“Figured as much,” Wilson murmurs, nodding along, and John thinks this is the one thing they’ve ever really been on the same page about.

“And I’m not gonna make you go into the first unit, I know exactly what I want to get out of there and it’s obvious I can get everything else here. These clothes are fine, too, just get me some outerwear to try on and we can get going, I don’t want to smell any more of Rogers’, no offense.”

Wilson winces painfully. “You can smell him? How do you even know it’s him?”

“Oh, so you’ve brought other guys here before? And here I thought I was special,” John replies abruptly and flat like a fucking board. He’s getting tired of all the questioning and doubting, going both ways. “I take it you didn’t ask Barnes about it after all.”

“I don’t usually ask Buck about super soldier stuff unless it becomes blatantly necessary, dude.”

“You ask me, though,” John points out passively. He’s not really upset about it, he doesn’t necessarily mind to begin with, but it does bear mentioning.

Wilson walks over and crouches down just in front of him, too much sympathy written on his face for the sake of John’s own… ego? Comfort ? The first seems more likely for him by now, because even if he wouldn’t really call the sensation he gets around Wilson and Barnes as comforting, it is safe, and that amounts to very similar things for him.

“Look, if you don’t want me to ask you about any of this, just tell me and I’ll back off, I promise. I just thought you seemed more open to it.”

“Why? It’s not like I don’t deserve the torment or the mistrust.” He quickly corrects: “Within reason, you really should be getting the hang of this by now, exactly how our senses are enhanced, the limits, all of that. You say you want to train with me, that you want to do things right this time around, and you seem to be doing pretty well with Bucky, but there’s all this other stuff beyond fighting and acrobatics that you should know about too. Think, like the opposite end of how I have to be conscious about my strength around you: it’s a two way street type thing.”

Wilson nods consideringly, staring at him intently. “I can see where you’re coming from, and I can promise you to work harder on it from now on, but you don’t deserve torment, John. And this sure as hell doesn’t give me all the freedom in the world to make either of you twitch like you’re doing right now.”

John glares half-heartedly at him. “I’m not twitching .”

“That would probably sound more convincing if you weren’t right in front of me and under the bright lights all on to boot,” Wilson points out, rising to his feet and extending his hand out to help him up too. “Let’s finish this, avoiding Steve’s stuff this time around, yeah?”

Wilson makes sure to point out all the lockers and crates where he knows for sure some of Rogers’ things are stashed away, and they ignore any that slap him with a whiff of the stale pine-citrus scent. Things go much more smoothly like that, but they still take a good couple of hours in that unit alone, trying to get the clothes that match him the best. And at least the ones they leave with are more than decent, really they’re as close to his tailored suit in fit as he supposes any unmodified set will get.

Then comes the matter of the weaponry. It makes him perk up - already feeling better, steadier from his previous crisis - for all of five seconds before Wilson asks him to please enact some form of restraint, eyeing him judgmentally from where he’s leaning against a clear patch of wall, crossed arms and all.

“You’re no fucking fun, Wilson,” he murmurs and picks up a Beretta to examine it. Wilson does not try to contradict him on this.

John would like it to be acknowledged and added to the record that he tries his best, despite what Wilson's expression when he sees his first selection may say. He decides to compromise and cooperate: he asks Wilson to point out the most egregious offenders and leaves those aside, and the other man looks genuinely, pleasantly surprised at the mere suggestion of it, and almost proud when John sticks to it.

They leave the storage units in the dark hour before sunrise with all the clothes and weapons he needs, and then a little extra, for caution’s sake. He feels the need to ask again once they make it back to the confined safety of the SUV.

“Are you sure it’s fine of me to use it?”

He must sound a particular kind of way because Wilson stops from starting the engine and turns to look at him with a keen expression.

“The bracelet? Why wouldn’t it be?”

John gives him a meaningful look, hoping it conveys at least half of what he’s trying to say.

Wilson sighs again and finally starts the engine. “Look, we have the bracelets, they’re functional. If you ask me, not using them sounds more like a waste than anything else, even if I won’t use them myself. Yelena uses them, you must have noticed it already.”

“I mean yeah, but Yelena’s… Yelena, basically. She has an inherent right to all things Romanoff. Actually, most things Romanoff, I suppose.”

“And you don’t, that it?”

“I have permission at most,” John insists, shutting his eyes tight and thumping his head against the rest behind it. “And it’s secondhand at best.”

He tries to keep thumping his head, the motion and the metronome sound grounding him, but Wilson stops him by placing his right hand between him and the rest and sinking his fingers into his hair, not grabbing at it, just holding him by cupping the back of his head.

“Look, John, I’m not gonna say or even try to consider whether or not Nat would’ve given you her blessings if she were still here,” Wilson’s eyes shimmer with an emotion John is all too familiar with at the mention of her name. “She was a complicated person, and I may have grown very close to her, I may have grown to love her, but that doesn’t mean I ever got anywhere near to understanding her or most of the decisions she made. I can barely understand why she made her very last, and probably only because I have a sister and nephews myself.”

“I don’t, Sam, I don’t really understand -”

“I’m telling you all of that because if there’s one thing I can say about her that I want you to trust is that she believed in second chances, alright?”

John stares at him for a long time, feeling a hurtful, almost sorrowful sort of comfort at the words, the hand at the back of his head solid, and warm, and he can’t help but turn further to his side and lean his face against it, not caring about how uncomfortable the position is for him, twisting in his seat when he already has the belt on. Wilson… doesn’t react with any surprise or confusion or anything else like that that he can see or hear, his body still and his breathing steady, face filled with compassion.

“ Do you understand what I’m trying to get at here?”

“Yeah,” John croaks, breathing Sam in one last time before turning around and giving him his hand back. “We should get going before someone shows up.”

Wilson turns on the engine and drives them away and back to the cabin through a veritable maze of backroads, some of them not even paved, and John sets up the tablet on his side of the console so he can keep his hands tucked close to him under the throw blanket he finds thrown on the backseats, uncharacteristically cold.

“Also, you should probably know: Nat would’ve absolutely let you take the bracelets for her own amusement too,” Wilson says a few minutes after they’ve left the warehouses behind.

John sighs. “You’re expecting me to electrocute myself with the damned thing, don’t you?”

His bark of laughter sounds like enough of an answer to John.

John does electrocute himself with the damned thing a couple of times as he tries to get used to it during his sparring sessions with Barnes, but that hardly discourages him from persisting with it.

“It does match your fighting style better than mine, especially since you don’t have a shield of your own right now,” Wilson shrugs after the second incident. “And it’s not like Buck can use them.”

“The metal arm,” he asks, too breathless from the shock to genuinely make it sound like a question but the others seem to catch on to what he means.

“If I accidentally touch the two the arm short-circuits, sometimes drops too, kind of like a mix between what happened at our fight in the warehouse and Ayo’s failsafe before that,” Barnes explains, eyeing him critically from where he stands above John.

“So, you’re training off me as much as I’m training off you, for once,” he points out.

“Yeah,” the brunette agrees with an amused smile. “You seem to take the electric shock well enough, all things considered.”

“Don’t feel like it,” John groans.

“Give yourself some credit, John,” Wilson chimes in from the doorframe of the cabin, mostly watching the feed of the old factory but his ears still trained on them. “That thing can put me to sleep in milliseconds, even Steve had trouble with it sometimes.”

Barnes agrees with his partner and offers him a hand up. John doesn’t quite feel like getting up just yet but accepts it either way, figures he’s been miserable enough for the time being.

They may be taking his side about the Black Widow Bite , but it still takes him some effort to get used to it and he straight up decides to wear the bracelet on his everyday life until he does, keeping them at a lower voltage so he doesn’t accidentally incapacitate himself - or the others - while doing menial tasks, just high enough that he feels the sting of electricity whenever he messes up.

Wilson asks him if maybe he’s a masochist on his second day like that, eyes too serious and concerned above his smiling mouth, and the only reason John doesn’t lash out is because the thought crosses his mind that Barnes isn’t there to hold him back, that Wilson doesn’t have the serum like they do. So instead he storms out without even stopping to take the phone, ignoring Wilson calling after him, and just runs through the dirt-packed roads that wind through the woods like streams at first, until he decides he needs more, he needs a challenge to focus on instead of the hot-red anger, and that’s when he ditches the roads entirely and cuts into the treeline.

He feels every second of it, every sensation and stimulation, the minute changes in the terrain and the dips in the bark of each tree he touches, the sting of a hundred cuts left behind by branches he can’t quite avoid, the way the tissue knits itself together faster than it ever should, the tug of the breeze on each individual strand of hair.

At one point he unconsciously notices he’s being followed and almost makes an attempt on one of Wilson’s drones before his conscious self catches up with it. It annoys him at first, that Wilson would send the damned thing to watch over him as if he couldn’t be trusted with that little, but even that fades away after some time focusing on his actions and the woods surrounding him, and by the time he decides to make his way back he can appreciate the quiet guidance the drone provides towards the cabin. John’s very well aware that there’s the smallest of speakers they could fit into the thing and that Wilson could use it to tell him whatever he wants, but doesn’t.

By the time he rounds back all the way to the cabin, the shadows have grown long and dark, he feels like he could drink an entire gallon of water in a single sitting, and the jeep is already parked next to the SUV, but more than that he can hear Barnes’ grunting and the thumping of something hitting wood coming from the other side of the house. John walks in through the entrance as usual, leaving his busted sneakers right outside, downs a glass of water and serves himself a second one before he pokes out of the other door to figure out what’s going on.

What’s going on is Barnes, shirtless and glistening with sweat, chopping logs with an ax like it’s nobody’s business. And they don’t even have a chimney, they only use an electric heater.

“It’s a trick he took up from Steve,” Wilson explains at John’s confused face. “To deal with frustration and anger without causing property damage, or worse.”

John should probably be taking notes from him.

“How are you feeling?” Wilson asks, only giving him a cursory glance before turning his eyes back to the tablet propped up on his lap.

“Calm er ,” John replies. He doesn’t want to think about it anymore, but he has to say something, it’s the adult thing to do. “Sorry about blowing up like that. I was doing better with it before this mess, but now…”

“It’s my fault too, it was a nasty comment, I should’ve handled it better, or not bring it up at all.”

John considers that for a moment as he continues sipping his water and watching Barnes, who must know he’s there already but hasn’t made any acknowledging gestures his way. He wonders if Wilson has a way of dealing with this too, something that looks like this, like running through the woods like he’s dying, and he just hasn’t needed it for as long as they’ve been around each other. Not that he’s planning to ask any time soon, even if he was given a free pass to do so.

“I ran out of my mood stabilizers a month ago,” he finally admits, sitting down on the step, not quite next to Wilson but closer, speaking loud enough for Barnes to hear him too, even through the angry wood chopping. “And they weren’t great to begin with, only better than the ones I was taking before the serum.”

“You didn’t get re-evaluated, before…?”

John snorts. “I did, actually.”

He sees Wilson nodding along by the corner of his eyes before closing them and inhaling deeply, crossing his legs beneath him, securing his hands on his ankles, and straightening his posture. John’s never been good with meditation, but he does like the posture, and he feels safe and relaxed at that moment, knowing nothing short of a tactical missile should be a danger to him, not with present company.

“Is there anything we should worry about?”

John chuckles darkly at the question, opens his eyes again to find Barnes walking slowly up to them, breathing heavily and dropping the ax carelessly in the general direction towards the shed at the back of the house.

“You mean, besides the bad temper?”

“You already know how to deal with that one, don’t you? Or do you bite people for fun?”

“ Depends on the context ,” John throws Barnes’ own words to his face with a nasty smile, all bared teeth.

“ Guys ,” Wilson berates them gently, like he’s only coaxing a pair of small, pissed off dogs down.

John backs down and watches Barnes blankly as the brunette sighs and combs his right hand through his hair, already longer than how he’s kept it for the last couple of years. He tries really hard not to stare at him, especially when he’s so starkly conscious of the man’s boyfriend sitting right there next to them and likely keeping a close eye on them; it doesn’t quite help either when Barnes drops to a crouch in front of him, not even two feet away and metal fingers lightly touching the inside of John’s flexed knee, whether to tether or balance himself, or for John’s own sake, he has no fucking clue.

He wants to look at Wilson to catch a glimpse of his reaction, but he doesn’t think he can take his eyes off of Barnes, and the other man’s breathing sounds as steady and light as it had done not five, ten seconds before.

“I’m asking if we should worry about you , John,” Barnes says softly, softer than he’s ever talked to John in the time they’ve known each other, even back when Lemar had died.

John doesn’t even know what to do about it, how to reply, he already hates feeling vulnerable in front of people outside of Liv and Christina, maybe Yelena and Ava, and now it’s the second time in less than a week that he’s feeling like he wants to push himself into either of these men, melt into them and fill every empty nook and cranny inside them, never to leave again, safe.

It takes him a moment to get his head back on straight and reply. “I’m fine - I should be fine. I’ve got other symptoms , but the outbursts are the worst of it, and I should get to keep those under control so long I can do my thing,” he finishes lamely, vaguely gesturing at the space around them.

“Don’t want to sound like I’m doubting your own knowledge of yourself here, but are you sure? If there’s anything you feel like you can’t tell either of us, for whatever reason, if it’s important …”

John shakes his head loosely, glancing at Wilson now that the spell Barnes’ eyes have had on him is broken. “I don’t wanna talk about it right now, but I do mean it when I say you don’t have to worry about it, not right now at least.”

They accept his word and drop it, and it’s just that easy, Barnes gives him first turn with the shower and Wilson goes to make dinner like usual, some casserole John barely tastes with how ravenous he is by the time they sit down at the table. He gets some more reading done, stretched out on the couch with his feet on Wilson’s lap, the other man still watching over the camera feed and going from one audio channel to the next while Barnes takes a long nap. John himself falls asleep at some point, without him even noticing until he’s woken up by voices near him.

“Time for some sparring,” Wilson says, all faux cheer.

“You’re joking,” John grunts, glaring sleepily at him.

“No, he’s not,” Barnes chimes in from where he’s tying his shoelaces. “Up and out, John. The sooner we do this, the sooner you can go back to sleep.”

“Good thing we’re not paying utility bills, huh?” Wilson tells him with a long suffering expression on his face.

The session is not long but it is hard, harder than usual at least, Barnes insisting they do it with very little light, grabbing Wilson’s viewer and chucking it back inside when he decides the hero can’t be trusted with not using the night vision display to his advantage.

“You rely too much on it, Sam,” he finally interrupts Wilson’s complaints with, right before throwing himself at John and sending them careening back into training.

John drops into bed feeling exhausted in both the best and worst possible way over an hour later, the only relief being the knowledge he won’t be feeling even half of it come morning, unlike Wilson. Tit for tat, he thinks, remembering the glimpse he’d caught of the man kissing his boyfriend by the kitchen counter as John himself had taken a little detour to let them know he was going to bed and that they would be risking an arm and a leg if either of them woke him up for anything short of SHIELD raining down on them.

He feels the smallest spark of something between jealousy and envy at the thought, but thankfully he’s too tired for it to blossom, and the worst of it is, he’s not even sure who he envies anymore.

John sleeps for nine hours straight, which is almost three hours more than he’s used to by now, and finds both Barnes and Wilson sitting at the living room when he stumbles his way towards the kitchen and the coffee, also unusual.

“We talked it out and decided I’ll be staying for today,” Barnes explains, eyeing him concernedly. “We wanna spar with you fully dressed and equipped to make sure there aren’t any wardrobe malfunctions.”

John looks dumbly at him. “You are aware of what that expression’s supposed to mean, right?”

“Yeah,” Barnes grins playfully over the rim of his mug, the glint in his eyes anything but.

John slinks back to his room to read some more with the company of his coffee and a pair of plain bagels, confused as all Hell and then some when he catches Wilson’s fond eye roll at his boyfriend’s attitude.

They’re out on the empty lot of dirt that passes for a yard next to the cabin some two hours later, the tablet propped by the doorway for easy access and John immediately feeling uncomfortable at the sight of the other two, dressed noticeably more loosely than his full gear.

“Don’t worry about it, man,” Wilson reassures him, squeezing his upper arm lightly as he walks by. “It’s just to make sure nothing impedes your movement or anything like that.”

John nods, hardly feeling at ease but understanding the point, and steps forward, fully onto the yard.

His attire and equipment are all pretty basic: two layers of clothes, with the shirt and pants made up of lighter yet reinforced fabric, and the jacket easy to take off in a pinch; he has a utility belt that helps keep his pants snug and in place, and a thigh holster to his right, much like the ones he’d had with his Captain America and US Agent suits; the fingerless gloves are a nice if stiff leather, and the boots are standard issued, and he almost wants to ask how they even got them but doesn’t. There are also his usual shoulder and forearms guards, as well as heavy duty knee pads and a discrete jockstrap.

He refused to use a cowl or mask back at the caché, admitting with some embarrassment that he’s never been good with either, whether it’d be putting them on or wearing them at all. Wilson had only chuckled and offered him a few different combat goggles he apparently keeps at hand in their reserves, just in case his usual pair breaks irreparably, just to at least try them, since he could use the advantage of night or thermal vision. John had eventually picked a light pair, but he wasn’t planning to actually use them unless he absolutely had to, if the power went out and they were left in the dark or something like it; they may sit better on his face than his US Agent cowl, but they were still a pain.

As for the weapons…

He never went out into the field with much as Val’s Agent, only a pistol or two, batons for a while, and of course there was the shield during his short Cap stint, and he chooses to uphold the tradition, sort of speak: one standard issue handgun in his holster and a second, much lighter and smaller one tucked into the inside of his left boot, extra ammunition in the back pouches of his utility belt, a few stun grenades by his right side and some smoke ones by his left, a couple of knives hidden in invisible pockets. He’d briefly considered taking a pair of batons too, but had ended up making up his mind about the Black Widow Bite bracelet before they’d even finished getting his clothes sorted out at the warehouse. John feels as light as usual, which means very ever since the serum.

“Anything stand out to you right now?” Barnes asks, walking slow circles around him to take everything in, John trying to keep his cool under the men’s scrutiny.

“The holster’s a bit lower than I’m entirely used to,” he admits, fiddling with the belt until it’s tight enough he can almost feel the material through the waistband of the pants.

Barnes stops by his right side and leans to tuck a pair of his fingers in between the bands of the holster and John’s covered leg, almost making him jump at the sudden forwardness.

“The fit seems right. You just couldn’t find any better ones, right?”

“Yeah,” John rasps, throat suddenly dry. “I tried some of the ones in the girls’ unit too, call it a fool’s hope .”

Barnes grins up at him, definitely catching the turn of the phrase, the charming fucking nerd.

“Any other problems?” The other man asks as he straightens back up, fingers only coming loose from the clutch of the holster as they move with the rest of him, the brush against his leg nice even with a layer of clothes between their skins.

This is actually going worse for him than he’d first expected, not that he’s particularly surprised about it. His impulse control issues run deep and are always finding new ways to express themselves.

“None so far,” John answers, stretching in any way he can think of on the spot. “Let’s get on with this already and I’ll let you know if there are.”

“You only want us to get on with it so you can go back to sleep,” Wilson teases from where he’s giving the camera feed a quick check up.

John just flips him off and not too soon before Barnes is on him.

It ends up being one of their best spars, for the most part. Wilson and he are as in sync as he supposes they’ll ever be outside of an actual life-or-death sort of situation, the clothes and accessories sit on him nicely, nicer than he’d even hoped for, he only shocks himself with the bracelet twice - both more or less caused by Barnes tripping him or tossing him to the ground and him flailing momentarily - and Wilson not even once. John even manages to hold his own against Barnes better than usual when Wilson goes to take a break and check on the tablet about an hour in.

“Careful, guys,” Wilson reminds them whenever they start veering into too tough, too careless territory, building up momentum and meanness off of each other like they’d done back in the warehouse in Latvia.

It becomes difficult not to think about it, about Barnes crowding into him, just that little stronger than him, and far, far more experienced than him, both in technique and with the serum. He can almost feel Wilson’s whole upper body pushing against his arm too, pushing, pushing, until…

“ That’s enough ,” Wilson shouts, making him stumble back and down, away from an equally startled Barnes.

John trips on his own two feet and falls flat on his ass, loose little rocks digging into the skin of his fingers and finer dirt particles making their way into the edges of his nails when he tries to brace himself, breathless, red-faced and wide-eyed, still staring at Barnes above him, and very obviously turned on.

“You two are going to be the end of me,” Wilson groans off to the side, standing about halfway between them and the cabin’s door, hands on his hips and worried eyes jumping from one of them to the other like he’s deciding who to chew up first.

John doesn’t give him the time to decide, quickly getting back up on his feet and almost falling onto his face in his haste instead. He doesn’t miss the way both Barnes and Wilson step forward to try and help him up, as if they’d somehow forgotten about his super soldier status and all the shit his body can do and take now.

“Sorry,” he wheezes and evades both of them on his way into the house and towards the bathroom.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck .

John remembers to put the bolt on, not that he thinks either of the others would just burst in on him - if they even decide to come after him - or that the bolt could actually stop either of them if they pushed the door open like usual, especially Barnes, but it makes him feel a little better, like he has some modicum of privacy for once in a cabin he shares with a fellow super.

Goddamnit .

He barely prevents himself from ripping his gear off himself, not unlike he’d almost done back at the storage units with Rogers’ scented clothes, and instead goes the careful route, piling everything on top of the toilet lid until he’s down to the loose undershirt and his jockstrap, and he takes a heavy seat on the edge of the bathtub, slumped and head on his hands.

There’s a knock on the door and Wilson’s voice comes through. “You okay in there?”

“Define okay ,” John growls back.

“Sorry.”

John glares at the door, which isn’t all that different from glaring at his hard on other than he at least won’t be getting a crick on his neck.

“What are you apologizing about?”

“I should have stopped you guys sooner,” Wilson says with a long-winded, frustrated-sounding sigh. He continues, inadvertently cutting off John before he can reply: “We’re gonna change our clothes and then make a quick run to the nearby town, to get some groceries for today and tomorrow, so you, uh, can take your time in there. Just give us a couple minutes first, ‘kay?”

John agrees automatically, numbly, thinking he should go out there, walk up to them in their bedroom and drop the rest of his clothes off, the sorry excuse of them he’s still clinging onto. He wants to tell them they don’t have to worry about the sanctity of his marriage, and the irony of even thinking to say that when it’s only been a few scant days since he used the excuse of his wedding ring to get rid of a proposition is not lost on him.

He doesn’t say anything in the end, and it’s only a few minutes, no more than ten or so, for the other men to be ready and get out of dodge, their footsteps on the wooden floor loud and the SUV even louder in the otherwise all too still cabin, John’s own breathing too slow and faint for him to pick up on over the pounding of his heartbeat. He starts counting seconds in his head as soon as the sounds of the car have faded until he can’t hear it, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, like his dad taught him as a kid - he even tries thinking about his dad, and his mom, and how it wasn’t the Blip that really split them apart, either to try and stop the dam from breaking or staving the flood just a little more, but he doesn’t even make it to second sixty out of the first ten minutes he’s trying for before he hits the hot water tap of the shower, ditches his shirt and the jockstrap, and steps in closing the curtain behind him, the water still tepid at best. He considers whether or not to open the window to let the steam - and smell - out, but quickly admits to himself he’s not gonna last long enough for that to make much of a difference.

John almost screams along with the promised release, his entire body tensing for a millisecond then relaxing so completely he almost falls on his ass for the second time in maybe half an hour, only this time the thought of slipping further and cracking his head open only to be found naked, water still running and comatose at best by either Wilson, Barnes, or both, keeps him lucid enough to regain his balance.

God, he’s been wanting this for weeks, he’s been wanting more than this since he made it to the cabin, the low fever running under his skin gaining heat with every look and touch. But if this is all he’s going to get for the time being, or ever, then so be it, he can make himself live with that.

He finally opens the window and washes away all his sins, has a brief moment to panic about the fact he doesn’t have his towels on hand, he didn’t even consider grabbing them before locking himself in the bathroom. Then he thinks fuck it and does his best to shake and wring as much water off himself, stepping off the tub and padding to his room quickly in the hopes he won’t drip too much on the floor but already accepting he’ll just have to clean it up.

He’s already done that, gotten all dried and dressed, his gear left neatly folded on the armchair by his window, waiting for tomorrow, plates from earlier washed and left to dry, all by the time Barnes and Wilson come back. John doesn’t go out to welcome them, staying in his little cocoon on the bed where he’s been reading quietly for the last twenty or so minutes, but he’s also left the door open for either of them to walk in if they want, and eventually Barnes’ head pops into frame.

“Hey, how are you holding up there?”

John shoots him a dubious look, immediately making the other man fidget. This is gonna be a problem, but he can’t be bothered to deal with it just now. He might be up for it after they raid the HYDRA warehouse, but until then…

“Good, why?”

Barnes grins awkwardly. “We brought beers and Sam’s gonna make hamburgers. We’re gonna camp in the living room, he insists we should watch a movie or something. If you wanna join.”

Last dinner stuff, huh? John doesn’t mention it and instead thanks him, and eventually makes his way out of his room, helping around where he can and parking himself on one end of the large couch with the other men right next to him. The beers are nice and cold, the food is too good to be true, Wilson puts on Silverado of all things - because he says Barnes must be properly educated, and it’s not like John’s about to complain, he likes Silverado -, and for once he doesn’t feel crowded and like he’s running out of breath simply by sitting close to other people, who also happen to be as large and strong as him.

There’s a persistent low warmth simmering under his skin, in his groin, low in his gut, but it’s nothing that’ll burn him. Not yet at least, and he can come back to it after tomorrow’s mission, given there is an after it.

John gets up to wash the dishes once they’re done eating like starved hyenas - especially Barnes and himself, he can admit as much - at around the same time the final conflict begins, the other two watching the end of the movie with the last of their beers and more or less wrapped up around each other. They should get a bigger, sturdier couch next time, because that ugly beige thing is flailing , it’s nothing short of a miracle it hasn’t given up with all three of them on it yet.

He gets a hold of the tablet in between all the cleaning up, tries to be sneaky about it but one look at Barnes and he knows he’s only succeeded partially, and that’s only if Wilson really hasn’t realized and isn’t simply ignoring it. Whatever, he can at least keep more of an eye on it while he does the dishes, let Barnes and Wilson do something else and relax for a change.

Barnes is also the one who gives the remaining seat a pointed look when John’s done in the kitchen, folding the edge of the blanket they have thrown over their laps in a clear invitation. John doesn’t bother thinking about it, he doesn’t even try: he grabs a water bottle from the fridge and rejoins them just as the movie is ending and Wilson puts on another movie. It’s The Magnificent Seven , that one with Denzel Washington and Ethan Hawke, because he’s clearly going for the western theme tonight. John still doesn’t mind, it’s a pretty decent movie either way and the actor who plays Vasquez is easy on the eyes. And Wilson shoots him a suggestive grin when he says as much, so sue him.

The following morning finds him in his bed, still dressed in the loose clothes he’d put on after his perhaps infamous shower and with only a pair of layers of bedding on top, the rest gathered by his feet, and the last he remembers is the scene near the end with everyone at the saloon’s front porch, the night before. It’s kinda alarming for him.

“Oh yeah, sorry about that, I guess,” Wilson tells him with a grimace of a smile once he catches him nervously making his way through the house for an early run. “You fell asleep sometime during the end of the movie and Buck just picked you up and carried you to the room.”

John shoots him a look from where he’s filling a bottle with water at the sink. “And I didn’t wake up?”

Wilson shrugs loosely. “I think I heard you mumble something to him, but you must’ve gotten right back to sleep after whatever Bucky said in reply.”

“That’s… uh,” John trails off, unsure what to even think. The only person he hasn’t had trouble waking up like that to since Lemar and the serum have been Liv, Ava and Yelena, and Yelena’s still a bit fifty-fifty.

They get up and do everything else early that day: getting both the SUV and the jeep ready in the morning, eat an abundant lunch earlier than usual, make sure everything’s right how and where it should be in the hour after noon before turning off the gas, water and breakers, leaving everything bare and clean. If the government hasn’t gotten the drop on them yet, then they figure they won’t by now either, but they still give it a wipe to try and get some of their fingerprints and other evidence muddled.

The sky is taking on the prettiest oranges and purples by the time they’re pulling up near the shore on the jeep, already with most of their outfits on save for the weapon holsters and Wilson’s wings.

“Alright, repeat the ground rules back to me,” Wilson says as they wait inside the car for the sky to get darker, checking and rechecking his own weapons.

John can see Barnes roll his eyes, but he’s just this side of too keyed up to properly share the sentiment and savor it, the wait before the storm too drawn out for the sake of his peace of mind. Too much time for him to consider and reconsider every single way in which this whole thing could go to shit and then even further down.

“Avoid killing shots and incapacitate as much as possible, keep tabs on one another as constantly as possible, and to please, avoid being reckless, you want us safe and sound and in one piece by the end of the night, no exceptions,” John repeats dutifully, verbatim.

“And if we split up?”

“We round back to the boat, given it hasn’t been found already, or to the abandoned security shack on the other side of the area if it has,” Barnes drones out in reply, clearly wanting to say more and trying hard to keep it in, likely for the sake of his relationship.

Or maybe because he’s well aware that going out on bad terms with someone you care for and love means nothing but misery for the surviving half of the pair. Yeah, that could be it too.

The rest of the hour before they make the last stretch of the trip to the factory is spent mostly in silence, with John keeping his eyes firmly on the tablet display in a valiant but ultimately futile attempt to ignore the two lovebirds on the front seats, until he finally has enough and gets out of the car to give them some time alone together with the excuse of needing to pee. He does have to pee, that part’s true, but he probably could’ve waited for a while longer until it was time to actually step out instead.

He doesn’t miss the way Wilson leans over the console like he wants to tell him something, maybe tell him to wait or stay, before stopping just shy of speaking and looking at Barnes instead. John can’t see Barnes’s face from where he’s slipping out of the backseats, and he hasn’t a clue as to what Wilson may want to tell him, but he doesn’t wait for either of them and makes himself scarce anyways. He thinks he can feel their eyes following him, boring holes into his back as he walks into the treeline, far enough that he can’t hear them talking inside the car, but not too far that he couldn’t hear them calling out for him or the SUV starting up again.

The trek down to the small beach where the boat’s waiting for them is just as quiet, if not quieter now that they’ve split up from Wilson, their earpieces remaining silent maybe because the man’s driving further through the back roads and he’s focusing on not ending up wrapped around a tree or plastered on a fallen trunk.

Barnes, he found out fairly quickly, isn’t all that much of a talker, not unless he has someone to bounce off of - namely Wilson, maybe Yelena -, and while John has been able to get a lot out of him sometimes in the past, he’s not in the mood for it right now. There’s a certain feeling of finality sinking into his gut, like some catastrophe, small or big, is looming just beyond the dark horizon the way of invisible storm clouds he can just barely make out if he stands still long enough. John doesn’t usually get anxious or scared just before a mission, but looking at Barnes - at Bucky as he steers the boat gently along the shore, he can’t stop himself from feeling restless and itchy, too warm under his clothes even with the bone chilling wind hitting them. He almost wants to pray, an urge he hasn’t had since the first few days at the beginning of the Blip.

“We’re in position, Sam,” Bucky mutters into his piece, just loud enough for his voice to come through above the sounds of the wind and the waves.

“How’s it looking over there?” Sam asks over the comms, all business-like, the whir of his engine so low John can only hear it thanks to his enhanced senses and still just barely.

“Like it always does, well put together but scant personnel. John’s hasn’t found any signals on the scanner yet, so, so far so good.”

The boat rocks harshly then, and Bucky double times it, grabbing onto one of the rotting wood pillars littering the area they’re in with his metal hand and helping John remain steady with his right.

“You good?”

John breathes deeply a couple of times. “Ngh, just motion sick, sorry.”

Bucky grins in front of him. “Yeah, that takes a while to get used to with the serum.”

“My kind of a while , or yours?”

Bucky just grins some more and turns to get them into a better position once he deems John safe and Sam gives them a ten minute ETA. He’s only ever done PDA with Liv, in no small part because Lemar wasn’t really one for it, and John himself isn’t all that big on it either, so he’s not entirely sure exactly how he feels once Bucky’s hand drops his own forearm, other than untethered.

They quietly make their way up onto the unkempt harbor and towards the building, slinking and weaving through the crates and other cover, like a car that’s actually less of a car and more so the rusty shell of it with some concrete block propping it up, for some unknown, unknowable reason. And everything goes pretty well for the most part… Until John knocks out the third guard they come across with the Bite and an alarm starts going off.

“Shit, Sam, now, go now ,” Bucky hisses into his comms as he tackles John down to the ground behind a stack of metallic sheets, a hail of gunfire hitting the concrete right behind them before they even hit the concrete.

After that it’s a confused daze of running, fighting, rolling, shooting, ducking, rinse and fucking repeat. Sam swipes down to get a couple of guards off their tail and throws a stun grenade, helping clear a path for them as they book it straight into the relative safety of the building. Bucky keeps sprinting onwards, gun out and carefully but quickly checking every corner on his way to secure the other entrance, John watching his back for a moment before making his way to the second floor and easily clearing it of the few people there on his own until he hears the all too unmistakable sound of Sam crashing through a window upstairs and turns towards the nearest set of stairs so fast it would give a regular person whiplash.

“Sam, talk to me,” he breathes into his comms, running up the steps like an exhalation, hearing Bucky cursing up a blue streak as he storms through the ground level.

“Fourth floor,” Sam calls back. “I still don’t know if they’re scientists or technicians or what, but they have some good fucking aim, shit.”

“John,” Bucky says through the comms, and really, that’s all he needs to say.

He almost hates the way these two idiots have him wrapped around their fingers. Almost , and only because he knows, with absolute certainty, that they’re not Valentina de Fontaine, that he can genuinely trust them with that.

“Already on it,” he throws back, breaking into the third level briefly, just to find another set of stairs when the first stupidly runs out on him.

If only things were that simple.

“Shit,” John growls, stumbling down when he gets shot in the meat of his left leg, quickly rolling back up, gun drawn and aimed before he even thinks about it, taking less than a second to aim at the man behind him.

He wasn’t exactly thinking about finesse or anything like that before, but the very strong screams the HYDRA goon starts letting out at least reassure him he’s not going to get chewed out by Sam later, never mind John’s now bleeding from the inside of his leg. He can’t feel a bullet lodged in there under the sharp pain that explodes and radiates from the wound with each fast, impactful step, so either it went right through or it only just grazed him. All he knows is that it doesn’t look like he’ll be bleeding out from it any time soon as he sprints up the next set of stairs and finally makes it to the fourth floor, and the absolute fucking mayhem that waits for him there.

“Jesus Christ Almighty, Sam ,” he groans as he runs up to the nearest goon, pushing him towards his mate nearby.

The sounds of their bodies colliding is genuinely fucking satisfying to him.

“Don’t say it like that, man!” Sam shouts from where he’s both pinned down and fighting off a particularly skillful and persistent HYDRA asshole.

“Like what?!” John throws back, dropping to swipe one of his legs under another guy’s and trying to aim at someone else attempting to get a shot at Sam at the same time. “Shield up, you idiot!”

Sam at least hears him and pulls out his wings, folded up to cover his back. “You know how!”

He thinks he hears one of the goons asking themselves what the fuck is even going on, and he kind of has to agree except he then gets a knife sent his way, catching him in the forearm before ending in someone else’s chest. Tough luck, and not his responsibility.

Next chance he has to look over at Sam he’s at least incapacitated the overachiever and exchanging shots with a pair of people taking cover behind some crates on the other side of the floor. That’s not sustainable, John notes as he catches glances of reinforcements coming up the stairs.

He takes a few shots in the general direction of the stairs and drops behind a crate for cover before he starts talking: “Bucky, check in.”

“Checking in,” is all Bucky says at first, devolving into a frustrated groan halfway through. “I can hold them down here, I don’t think there’s any backup coming my way, they’re all going after you.”

Well, shit on a stick , John thinks. He frantically looks around himself until something catches his attention.

“Sam, get out and circle back around, get a good flight and tell me how the third floor is looking.”

He can almost feel the spike of anger like a blow to his body when Sam shouts: “There’s no way in hell I’m leaving you alone here, John!”

They clearly still need to work further in their coordination, but at least this time around his first thought isn’t about how Lemar would’ve gotten it right away. Baby steps.

“Sam, don’t worry, just lis-”

“Fuck you, man, all I do is worry about your stupid asses,” Sam interupts him harshly, joining the shoot-out.

John sighs heavily, asking the Heavens for patience.

“Sam, listen to the man,” Bucky chimes in with a grunt, the sound of someone else yelping in pain in the background.

It takes a moment but Sam’s voice speaks to his ear once more. “Okay, fine, explain.”

“Circle around the third floor, get back to me if it’s decent and come back around here with some stun grenades while I make my way down,” John explains, more patient than he ought to be given the circumstances.

“You’ve got a plan,” Sam admits idly.

John shoots a goon in the arm, rolling his eyes. “Yes, Sam, I’ve got a plan. It’s like you don’t even know me by now.”

He can see Sam’s answering eye roll inside his own mind. “Alright, fine. Taking off on the count of ten, cover me. And don’t die, or I’ll go get Doctor Strange or whoever to bring your ass back -”

“Just so you can kill me yourself again?” John asks, patience waning. “Sounds fair to me, now get moving, you only have three seconds left.”

John gets up to throw a grenade, is second to last, and lays down some cover fire, and Sam curses meanly through their comms, through gritted teeth and all, he can almost see him, but makes the jump only a second after the countdown. John weaves and ducks through the crates again, leading the HYDRA goons in a little merry chase while he waits for his partner, luring them in and closer together nearer to the large windows to give Sam a better, easier target.

He counts up to one-hundred and forty-two seconds before Sam’s voice comes through again. “Third floor is clear, John, only a couple of people making their way up. Rounding back up.”

“Aim from the north and east windows,” John guides him, already looking for a way back to his previous spot through all the boogies. “In ten?”

“Eighteen,” Sam replies. “Seventeen, sixteen…”

Fifteen, fourteen , John counts along inside his own head, using the single-level pile of thankfully whole and hale crates behind him as a platform to roll backwards on, stretching his legs to hit the unsuspecting man on the other side squarely on the chest and sending him straight to a stack behind him. Thirteen, twelve , he quickly puts his feet on the ground and dashes to his left, jumping and bouncing off a decent looking pillar back toward the right, impulsing him another stack over and straight to tackle - or rather bowl over - another two goons, eleven, ten , using the momentum to spring upwards, hands landing harshly on a third man’s shoulders, making him crash down to the ground with a satisfying sound, John landing on the ground with far more grace rolling back up and rounding another corner.

“Seven, John,” Sam’s voice gets louder, and John tries to focus on it rather than the shots making his ears tingle, takes a long, low step and pivots on it to swipe a woman’s legs from under her, six, five , then pushes up once he has both feet firmly on the ground and leaps backwards, rolling into a loose ball to make himself a smaller target. “Four, three…”

John almost misjudges and drops to the floor on his back, but catches himself with his hands against a half collapsed pillar, a piece of metal sticking out of it stabbing right into left palm with an intense flare of pain spreading up his arm, but at least it gives him just enough propulsion to -

“Two, one .”

He hears the breaking of glass just as he pushes himself off one last time, a bullet just grazing his right ribs as he does, and lands straight onto the hastily done wooden patch on the concrete ground he’d first noticed on the ceiling of the third floor, feet pressing together and pointed for maximum force, hoping there’s nothing else in between that could cause a ballistic super soldier damage - or outright stop him.

John might actually black out for a blink there, only really getting back to his senses when his feet hitting the next floor roughly are quickly followed by his knees doing the same, painfully . He leans forward with the force of the motion, catching himself with his hands against the dusty, debris-covered concrete and yelping at the pain shooting up from his hand. Between it and the throb in his leg, his vision swims foggily for a second or five, leaning further until the top of his head is resting against the ground. His ragged breathing kicks up the dust around him and they’re still in an active fight, but he can’t hear anyone all too close to him just yet, Barnes’ groaning through the comms is more frustrated than anything else, and he needs a moment to just… Be , he supposes.

“John, talk to us,” Buck grunts through the comms, Sam’s engine giving off his intention to round back, likely towards him.

“I’m good,” John replies after a second or third try, sounding like he’s anything but. He could definitely use some water to wash away the dust.

He’s halfway through the ordeal of standing back up when he realizes his screw up.

“Hello, John,” Val says from only a couple of steps up the staircase leading to the pandemonium that he hopes the fourth floor has become. “Long time no see.”

She’s got some kind of weapon trained on him, large enough that she needs to hold it with both hands and even rest some of it against the crook of her elbow. It looks like a mishmash of the Iron suits’ blasters and one of the weapons he’d seen the so-called Rocket use in the recordings of the battle of Wakanda and the Attack of the Avengers Compound, the few of them he was allowed to see beyond just clips of Steve Rogers. Definitely a HYDRA special, and looking mean as fuck with it’s gaping maw staring him right in the eyes.

The shock must show clearly even through the pain and sudden exhaustion, because she asks with a grin: “You didn’t even know I was here, did you?”

John just stares, as blankly as he can manage, refusing to give her any more to gloat over.

“I wonder… Were your partners in the dark too, or did they just not tell you?”

He has to consciously make himself not grit his teeth together or even narrow his eyes, and simply focus on getting his breath back, inconspicuously poking at the wound on his hand with the pads of his fingers to ground himself. It’s not like he can do much more than that, even with the serum he’s not faster than Val’s shooting speed - he knows -, and he has no idea what the weapon does to begin with, even if he can make some educated guesses.

Val’s eyes do narrow at him, the closest to a sneer he’s ever seen from her. “Look at what they’re doing to you. And to think you had such a nice fire burning right through you.”

Through , not in . God, he’s such an idiot.

John sees her arms tensing and eyes glinting, and thinks fuck it , lets his body take the wheel and move how it wants to move, how it feels it must move. Or tries to, at any rate, freezing in place at the sound of breaking glass, a fading engine and slick mechanical whirring, Val’s wide eyes a dangerous mirror of his own.

“John, what the fuck is-”

He doesn’t hear the rest of Sam’s words as he moves in tandem with Val, sprinting at Sam because Val may be holding the gun but he’s closer, and all he can think is a barely coherent string of please no s, and God not him s, and let me do this right s. John has the very lucid thought that he’d wished he’d stayed in the jeep with Sam and Bucky earlier in the spacetime just between pushing his partner out of the way and being hit by the blast on the chest.

And unlike his crash through the unkempt floor, this time he’s very much conscious for the whole lot of it. It fucking sucks.

Unfortunately for John, Sam’s too close to the windows behind them, so when he gets hit by what seems to be some sort of magnetic burst - at least at a first, brief, very frantic glance - he’s pushed backwards through it, the force behind the damned thing greater than he’d had the chance to even consider bracing for. The pain on his chest is immediate, made all the more striking by the sudden nothingness he falls through, air rushing past his ears, the seconds stretching into minutes and hours until he eventually hits something, a fucking container and one of the new ones, holding strong against him before he more or less bounces over the edge of it and lands on his side on the ground.

When John wakes up again he does so sitting upright on an unfamiliar bed and breathing like he’s ran a marathon, and while the pain across his chest is nowhere near as bad as he could’ve feared, as he thinks he remembers, it’s no joke either and he has to lean back against the headboard and the pillows almost immediately.

“Hey,” Sam begins springing up from a chair by the corner of John’s eyes. “Hey, man, easy there, you’re still pretty banged up.”

John gives him a wild look. “You don’t fucking say,” he croaks, throat parched and chest tight.

“Jesus, sorry,” Sam’s acting too carefully for his usual playfulness, grabbing and uncapping a bottle of water on the bedside table. “The point still stands though: you may have the serum and Doctor Strange did his hand-wavy magic thing, but you need to rest and let your body heal, no sudden movements like that or anything for a while.”

The moment his first sip of water touches his tongue John wants to down the whole thing in one go, but Sam is nothing if not exasperating in his caution. Still, he’s grateful enough not to be a bitch about it. It’s a good thing too, because otherwise he might have choked on it when he’s caught off guard by the sound of what may or may not be a thunderstorm making its way through the house they’re in, clearly not the cabin they’d been in before the raid but similar enough he’d mistaken it for a moment.

The thunderstorm deflates once he reaches them, leaning heavily against the doorframe.

“ John ,” Bucky breathes out with so much relief that his hackles rise, whether he wants them or not. “Thank God, you’re awake.”

John frowns and asks at no one in particular: “How long have I been out?”

“Almost two whole days,” Sam replies with a pained expression, eyeing the inky darkness beyond the nearby window.

Well, he’s surprised he’s alive at all, so two days doesn’t sound all that bad to him.

“What happened? I don’t remember all that much right now, and I hurt everywhere.”

Bucky and Sam exchange a look between them, and he almost wants to snap at them, except for the part talking is a pain and a hassle, and they seem to reach a consensus soon enough.

“You’re a self-sacrificing idiot, that’s what happened,” Sam says, which only makes him even more confused.

Bucky sighs, running a hand through his hair and stepping fully into the room until he gingerly sits on the foot of the bed. “ Sam .”

“Nu-uh, don’t Sam me. I know it, you know it, it’s about time he figures it out himself,” he tells his boyfriend off angrily, then turns back towards John and shit, he is mad . “Yelena’s right, you know? Either you have a complex, believe you’re suddenly immortal, or are trying to atone for something, and I for one don’t appreciate either of those, especially when they revolve around me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Wilson,” John spits out, convincing absolutely no one, not even himself.

“Oh, so it’s back to Wilson now, huh? Alright then, Walker ,” this is the most poisonous John has ever heard Sam since the Flag Smashers, and maybe even then too. “You know, I once gave Buck the chance to reject some tough love, but you’re gonna be a special case: you’re gonna get it whether you like it or not.”

“Don’t bother,” he growls, trying to move up before his chest reminds him exactly why that’s the wrong move to make.

Sam catches him reflexively - or at least that’s what John stupidly hopes for despite the lingering touch - and hands him the bottled water. “Drink that, slowly, or so help me God and all the fucking Saints.”

Bucky glances at Sam with a pained grimace - which can’t be a good sign at all - but otherwise keeps his mouth shut - which has to be even worse -, simply watches on, probably deciding to stay out of it unless it becomes absolutely necessary. John’s not Sam’s boyfriend, but oh, does he get it.

“Look, John, I’m not a licensed therapist, I’m not gonna pretend I am because that’s the shittiest fucking move I could pull, but I do have experience dealing with veterans, veterans with all kinds of backgrounds, and experiences, and medical problems, and traumas. Hell, I’m a veteran with trauma myself, ever thought about that?”

John has to shake his head no after a moment of Sam clearly expecting an answer, and a wholly honest one.

“No, you didn’t, of course you didn’t. Because you’ve been locking yourself in a tiny fucking Hellraiser box with yours for God knows how long, at least since Hoskins died. And I know you’re going - were going to therapy, with Raynor, which, fine, she was your commanding officer, you trust her, whatever, I won’t complain or anything, she’s definitely trying to help, fuck, she even got you those shiny new experimental meds to try on, that’s actually great. But just because you’re going to therapy doesn’t mean that you’re putting all the work that you need to put into it, Buck didn’t put all the work for long enough even I could see it, even you could see it, I bet. And you’ve got to be doing the same to some extent because there’s jumping onto a live grenade when there’s no other choice, reinforced helmet or not, and then there’s throwing yourself into gunfire when you could’ve just told me to fucking duck!”

Sam goes on and on for a while, long enough that Bucky reels him back down a notch a couple of times and goes out of the room to hunt for more water for them, but mostly for the man who’s running out of air talking, and gesticulating, and pacing around the room like he’ll drop dead if he stops, if he doesn’t get it all out of his chest right here right now.

John… John doesn’t check out, doesn’t dissociate or even go numb through any of it, not even when Sam finally starts winding down and releasing him from his grasp. Instead, John thinks: I can’t do this, I can’t have this, not after Lemar, and Liv, and fucking Val, and everything else . He’s made up his mind before he even realizes it, which makes sense considering he’s gone and foolishly fallen in love with these two clowns without his knowledge, or his say so.

“I’m sorry,” is all he really thinks to say when Sam’s finally done, wearily hunching forwards on his seat, head in his hands.

Bucky’s still mostly just watching them in silence, sitting with his hip right next to John’s leg - the right one, thankfully, because his left one’s still aching where it’s laid propped up on a pillow.

Sam groans. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” John asks back, too spent to muster the energy for anything even resembling annoyance - or its false look-alike - for the sake of an animosity that hasn’t really been there since the homestead.

“Apologize just to try and make me feel better, as if you’re not going to run off and do the same thing at the drop of a hat, as if you’re not going to make me worry over your dumb, pasty ass.”

“Why would you even have to worry to begin with?”

Sam looks at him with so many emotions in every line and dip and smoothness on his face that John doesn’t think he could untangle either of them from each other if he had a hundred years to learn, study and categorize every single one.

“I think you know the answer to that, you’re pretty damned smart, John. Whether or not you want to accept it is an entirely different thing.”

He leaves after that, and John wishes he would’ve taken the weight pressing down on his heart along with him.

“Are you going to chew me out too?” He questions Bucky, still sitting quietly on his bed, looking for all the world like a storm didn’t just upend his whole worldview.

Well, for him that’s very likely the case, or maybe he just has more experience with hurricane Sam.

“Nah,” Bucky gives him a languid head shake, however his eyes are all too keen and understanding when he turns to look at him properly. “I think that’d make me a hypocrite, and I don’t suppose you’d appreciate it.”

He’s right, mostly, but John’s getting too tired, his chest is starting to ache too much to tell him as much. He closes his eyes and leans his head back until it’s resting against the headboard too, not wanting to move and get more comfortable if it means jostling his wounds.

“Did you get her?”

Bucky doesn’t reply for a long moment, and John has to consciously keep his eyes closed, because he really doesn’t want to see the expression on the other man’s face.

“No, she got away while we were waiting for Strange to show up.”

John wishes he could scream to the top of his lungs without fainting like some Victorian waif halfway through it. Instead he goes back to sleep between one breath and the next, the feeling of chapped lips leaving an imprint on his left temple as he does so.

He spends the next couple of days mostly sleeping, in the bed or on the surprisingly decent couch in the family room, either Sam or Bucky watching over him like he’s a small child that can’t be trusted with keeping his fingers away from any electrical outlets. John would think that out of the two, Bucky would be the one to spend the most time with him, since he seems to be less pissed with him or maybe even not at all, but they end up splitting it very evenly, even though…

“Sam just doesn’t wanna be around when you’re awake because he’s afraid he’ll start yelling at you again, and by then it’d mostly just be things he doesn’t wanna say, regardless of the truth in them.”

John would almost prefer to be yelled at some more instead of the unintentional cold shoulder, but he’s not going to ask Sam that, he can’t. He just takes what he can get and occasionally pretends to be asleep after a nap just to hear Sam’s deep, steady breaths from the other end of the couch as he reads or watches something on his laptop.

The pain on his leg starts subsiding a couple of days after he wakes up, and he immediately demands to stop being carried away by Bucky by then; he’d already been getting exponentially annoyed at the bridal carries just to get from the bedroom to the family room, not even ten steps from each other. His chest pain also begins dissipating soon after, and then Doctor Strange drops by before the week’s up.

John’s only met the guy twice by now - while conscious, that is -, and he knows for a fact that neither Bucky or Sam know him all that much more, since most of all their meetings with the man have been mission-induced. Unless someone’s magical or a straight up god - yeah, he’s heard the rumors about Thor -, Strange tends to mostly keep to himself, even when it comes to the core Avengers that were involved in everything with Thanos and the Infinity Stones.

“You’re looking a lot better already, Captain Walker,” Strange says, oggling his fucking insides with his magic. John tries not to think about it and instead grunts that he’s not actually a Captain anymore, to which the other man just shrugs where he’s looming above him. “How long did you say it took for your arm to heal that one time, two weeks?”

“A little less, maybe ten or so days,” John replies, thinking back on the Flag Smashers fiasco.

It’s not so much a maybe as it is an exactly ten days, he’d counted them then and the number had stuck in his head. Kind of hard not to when the average for a broken forearm to heal in three to six months, a fact he already knew all too well from his highschool days, when he’d broken his right one, once. That damned thing had taken nearly five months back then, and it was nowhere near as bad as what Bucky and Sam did to his radius and ulna.

Strange whistles lowly, eyes glinting and hands shaking as he adjusts his spell. “Who like you, huh?”

The sorcerer advises him to keep resting as absolutely as he can for maybe two, three more days, and to keep things on the down low for maybe a month after that, just for them to be entirely sure that he won’t end up breaking later on, someway, somehow.

John pretends to listen to and agree with him about everything, does such a good job of it not even Bucky seems to sniff the bullshit. At least he doesn’t show any signs he does, and with Bucky it can be difficult to figure out the whys.

“Let me know at the first signs of something turning for the worse. Even if I can’t come myself I can always ask someone else to do so instead,” Strange tells Bucky and Sam in the hallway just outside his room where the others have been waiting to give him some privacy - what a joke -, and all of a sudden the man is gone, leaving like an exhalation.

John would almost be willing to believe the sorcerer was never there at all in the first place, except he’s not particularly prone to hallucinations, despite it all, and even if he were he doesn’t think he’s creative or imaginative enough for the yellow-orange glow display of his thoracic bones and organs that he’ll spend the next months trying and failing to forget about. He has enough material for his intrusive thoughts, he doesn’t need to add this shit to the folder too, thanks.

He stays only two more days with only one of their nights, which he spends pacing around, going along the lines of his own four walls, squatting to test his leg every once in a while. Either Bucky or Sam had left his bags on the countertop of the drawers even before he’d woken up, only having taken a few clothes to dress him in after the bloodied mess he’d left on the others - something he’s decidedly not thinking about -, and that was probably their first mistake. Their second was either telling him exactly where they are or thinking he’d ditched his suit.

John’s in Oregon a week later, loitering in his Uncle Ray’s old cabin, the one he’s been keeping a quiet eye on for when he needs a place to crash at and lie low in, and won’t you look at that. He’s never told anyone outside of his closest friends about the place and it shouldn’t show up in any paper work either, and he’s so grateful about it when he makes it there and goes straight to ready the main bedroom for a long nap after days on the road, his chest and leg aching dully, his left hand throbbing to the rhythm of his heartbeat.

He’d taken a page out of Bucky’s book and thanked the Heavens - or maybe just climate change - that it’s still cold enough for him to wear gloves around and claim he has poor circulation, but at the same time he’s almost afraid he’s made his wound worse somehow until he can finally take the moment to get all the extra layers off and check on it under the harsh white light of the cabin’s bathroom. It doesn’t look nearly as bad as he’d feared, but it is a little swollen, a couple of stitches that hadn’t fully healed yet ripped and bleeding, and he’s definitely going to need some good couple of weeks of rest before he can even think about going out, guns blazing .

He starts with that as soon as the dust in the bedroom isn’t bad enough to bother him, whether awake or asleep, laying down on the bare mattress with only a smelly pillow and the most acceptable pair of blankets he can find, still clothed enough that if anything happens all he has to do is put his boots on, shoulder his bags, and bolt. Even as tired and hurt as he is, it takes John a long time to fall asleep, watching the waning sunlight streaming in through the windows like counting sheep, feeling the empty quiet of the house in his bones and blood vessels, the sounds of the woods outside hardly enough to fill the void left behind by the breathing, and muttering, and laughing of two whole human beings.

The next two, three months are slow and quiet, mostly just him on his own with the invigorating sunlight and the sound of the wind rustling through the tree. He sets his eyes on a third-hand car that sounds like it’s about to give up and fall apart whenever he gets in on it, but two weeks and four or five different trips there and back from the nearest town and he starts breathing easier when it doesn’t. John probably shouldn’t put this much effort into the cabin, he’s not planning to stay in it longer than he has to and he may not even get to use it that much either if anyone finds him, but he likes being comfortable, so sue him, and it gives him something to do other than sit on his ass, wrapped in a blanket, drinking coffee and watching the screen of his laptop the entire day. Respect to everyone working IT and writers and whatnot, but he has enough of that after less than a day, less than a whole afternoon; he needs things to do, hopefully with his hands, and it’s not like the money he’s using is his, so.

The laptop is new though, as are the phones, and as safe as he supposes they’ll ever be; he’s not bad at this stuff, but he’s also not Sam and -

And he’s going to stop himself right there, because that way only madness lies waiting.

He gets some over the counter anti inflammatory meds - mostly just ibuprofen and naproxen - when the swelling and pain in his hand doesn’t fade as quickly as he wants it to, figures the stuff will either help or do nothing at all, and he knows for sure he’s not allergic to either, at least he wasn’t back before the serum and he highly doubts that’s changed now, but then again that would be his luck.

When he doesn’t die alone in the middle of the woods, and once the cabin is clean, stocked and with the utilities up and running, he gets to work.

John makes sure everything is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, even the goddamned VPN, and uses a list of stolen credentials Yelena had given him when they were at the homestead to begin with. He finds a handful of reports and memos about the old Maine factory and reads every single one, deliberately and twice each, only skimming through the parts that mention the large stain of blood that they seem to be assuming used to be John just north of the main building. He’d skip them entirely but he can’t know if there’s nothing of value noted down in between, and in some of the memos it gets difficult to tell where exactly that tidbit ends, the paragraphs all mushed together in haste or carelessness or both, the composition shot to hell and back.

He finds a few first leads reading between the lines, mostly in the memos, and spends a good couple of weeks and then some following each one in the same order they originally appeared, all the while constantly checking out any updates about the situation that aren’t on how much Ross is blowing up a gasket at any moment. He feels kinda sorry for all the pen-pushers, techies and any other underlings; he knows he’d hate to be in their shoes, and it’s not like his own are faring all that well, if John’s being entirely honest.

Most of the leads are duds, obviously, what else can be expected of crumb trails left behind by a fucking witch . But a couple are kinda promising from the get go: one leading south from Maine, towards the Carolinas, or maybe even Georgia or Florida, and the other upwards into Canada.

It’s day forty-two at the cabin when he decides to split his efforts between the two and gets another laptop, the exact same only for this one he goes out of his way to get it from a store three hours away, along with some other goods he’d been putting off acquiring until he finally figures he’s going to be spending some quality time at the cabin whether he likes it or not, and maybe he could give them some good use later too. On the way back he makes a little detour, further west and closer to Salem, to pick up his suit from his own little caché.

John panics for a moment the day before when he remembers he’d been using black temporary hair paint when he’d gone and gotten his unit, paranoid that the clerk would eventually realize who he was if the process to get him signed and give him the keys took just a little too long. And not only that but his other dye has been starting to wear off in the last week, not too much but enough that he’s starting to look more redheaded than brunette.

He would take a moment to think it through, try and come up with another solution, like a beanie or Sam’s nighttime B&E method, but he’s out the door and driving down the beaten road before he realizes that. Fuck it, he can’t believe he misses his therapy as much as he does, even if they were with Christina, who he misses all on her own. Lemar really was most of his impulse control.

He ends up stealing the hair and beard dye at a corner store two towns over.

The drive there and the rest of his actual shopping give him enough time to think it through and decide that yeah, he’s gonna put on the dye, it’s useful for more than just going to the storage units for one, and he doesn’t wanna go the B&E route either, he could probably do something with the security systems at the place, but he’s nowhere near confident about that stuff as Ava and Sam are, or even Bucky and Yelena.

Then there’s the matter of acquiring the dye. The store he ends up walking into is the nicer he finds in town, but even then their cameras and pair of mirrors don’t offer all that much coverage, making it easy to smuggle things with enough care on his part. And on the other hand he’d genuinely rather do that than risk being recalled by the clerk later on because the man thought it funny that a guy like John would be getting hair and beard dye or something. Call him paranoid, it’s fine, it’s one of his symptoms according to Christina either way.

He waits for a quieter moment, only a pair of teenagers left in the store with them, bickering at the back by the coolers, before he approaches the cash register with what he hopes is a friendly smile and not a grimacing wreckage. John’s made sure to get everything he needs for a good, hearty three-course dinner, and maybe a little extra to have for next day’s lunch too; he’s trying to keep up with meals on his own for now and until he’s through with his work. He also has the foresight to pick up a decent bottle of wine, correctly predicting that the clerk would see the quantities and assume he’s cooking for more than one. The man gives him an appreciative nod and John takes a quick glance at the set up around the register while he’s busy ringing up the items.

“Could you give me a pack of Pall Malls too? The, uh, which are the light ones?”

“Oh, the blues?” The man asks, turning around to search the wall display right behind him.

John throws the money to cover for the dyes into the depths behind the counter, away from the perspective of the cameras and the man, as smoothly and discreetly as he can manage. His money may have come from dubious sources, but he’s not about to steal from a small-town corner store.

He makes his way home with that weight off his shoulders and a bottle of wine he has to wait to get back home before opening despite his inability to get drunk. What the fuck is his life that it makes him want to pull at his own hair. John decides to stop by a liquor store on the road back and get himself a second bottle of wine to halfheartedly drown his sorrows with. That and a bottle of lube, because fuck it, no super soldier with enhanced hearing around to bear witness to his sins and maybe even a scream or two that sound just this side of too much like his and his boyfriend’s names and nothing at all like they’re been punched out of him by a nightmare.

Things pick back up once he has the second laptop, with a second modem to boot, so he doesn’t have to sacrifice wi-fi efficiency and speed. And he pulls every trick in the book and then some, starting with roadside footage and police reports, looking for anything out of place, anything that may scream HYDRA, special forces, or cover ups.

It’s what he ends up doing most of his waking time during those fours months he spends alone at the cabin, looking at footage at twice the speed and reading through an ever growing pile of reports and hypothesizing wildly until he falls asleep, on the sole couch and very late at night, or very early at morning, whichever’s meant to somehow be the better option.

Until he finally finds it, his needle in a haystack.

He doesn’t believe it at first, shit, he doesn’t believe it even as he makes his way back east, making the first leg by airplane on a flight that takes him all the way to Kentucky, fidgeting the whole time they’re up in the air and passing it off as traveling nerves. Once they’ve landed and no one comes around to arrest him or even seems to follow him, he makes his way to a four-star hotel across the city from the airport to spend the night at and take a moment to check if anything else has happened. He barely sleeps while at the hotel, but he gets some rest out of it at least, his nerves manage to let up some, and he doesn’t feel entirely manic when he goes out to find himself a second-hand car the next morning.

The road towards North Carolina is winding and largely uneventful, which is just fine by him, and he already has a quiet, out of the way place to stay in not two days after he makes it to Roxboro. His hair has been growing out as usual, his roots already visible after his second hand with the dye, but he’d gotten another couple of boxes in a dark brown along the way, and he stocks up on supplies, holes up in the house and waits out a couple more weeks for the dye to wash out further and not make a mess with the lighter brown. And once everything is said and done he takes one look in the bathroom mirror and - inevitably thinking about Bucky - ties his hair up in a half bun with some string left lying around the house by the previous inhabitants, too unsure about picking up the razor unless it’s to bluntly shave his whole head, nothing to say about scissors.

He’s hardly sitting pretty and doing nothing in the meanwhile. John takes full advantage of how hidden and uninteresting the street he’s staying at is, half the houses sitting empty even three years after the end of the Blip, and does some small errands around: he goes out in the day once or twice a week at first, mostly to Timberlake and Oxford, one longer trip to Raleigh he stays the night out for, needing to break into a Police Station records room, while the bulk of his on the ground work he does at night, having left a bike locked in an abandoned shack for that same purpose.

During the first week of June, right before the bulk of the schools let up for the Summer, he makes a couple of calls, grabs his things and throws them into the car, and drives all the way to the Outer Banks, where he already has a room saved to his name that should be free for at least a couple of weeks before tourists start making their way there, certainly well before the 4th of July invasion.

John supposes he’s being reckless and irresponsible doing this, he’s still a wanted man and just because he hasn’t seen hair or hide of anyone looking for him and he may be getting the hang of this whole going - mostly - unnoticed and - apparently - unrecognized business doesn’t mean he gets a vacation. For one, he could slip up all too easily, and for another he has important work to do.

But the truth of the whole thing is he’s burning out: he hardly speaks to anyone anymore, he’s been catching himself twitching, tapping and bouncing in place more often each day that passes by, constantly looking out the windows and going over the feed of his cameras in search of any signs of people watching him, has hunted down the complete records of everyone living in the street and all their visitors, has memorized their faces and some of the mannerisms even he hasn’t even said a word to most of them, and he keeps thinking about either burning the house down with himself in it or going out to pick a fight in some seedy, roadside bar.

He doesn’t want to do the first one, and he can’t allow himself to do the second, not when the probabilities of catching the eye of a fellow super soldier or someone equally durable in North Carolina are very little to none at all.

So, the Outer Banks it is, and hopefully it’ll be enough to ease him some, at least until he moves along before the national birthday. He already has most of the data he needs, either way, and a somewhat clear path ahead and straight towards Valentina, he just needs to see where it leads. Really, he’s more surprised that Ross’ people haven’t caught up with her than anything else, searching in Madrid of all places, unless of course…

Well, at least he has his hypervigilance, hopefully the piece of shit is worth something if his already careful consciousness slips up too bad.

He rents a room on the second floor of a beach house owned by a recently retired couple and wonders what they even did to have the money to buy it in retirement to begin with for all of two hours before Mrs Frank - a spindly black woman who reminds him just a little too much of his own mother in personality for him to feel entirely comfortable in her presence - mentions that she was a doctor until the previous year and her husband used to be a well-respected lawyer during dinner. Mr Frank - call me Pete, please - is as different from his stern, proud wife as he looks, a jovial man whose sad eyes get under John’s skin nonetheless. It takes some effort but he almost manages to get used to the odd pair during his first week there before their college-aged daughter, Harry, drops by and makes things a little easier for him, at least during dinner which is the only time of day he actually spends with the family or their other lodger, a landscape artist called Chloe who’s friendly enough but definitely a loner and on a tight schedule.

So he spends most of his days walking up and down the beaches, looking for the best, loneliest spots to sit on his own and take a nap or a little swim, and soaking in the sun with the advantage that he may be pasty-assed as Sam’s called him but the serum heals his skin whether he uses any sunblock or not. It’s nice, and at night after dinner he hits the bars and restaurants for a drink or two and maybe some small talk, never the same place twice.

His first thought is that Bucky and Sam would like it, and it takes him a while to realize he hasn’t even considered if Liv would. He spends that night crying and sipping from a bottle of vodka as quietly as he can in his room, but come morning he cleans up, wears his usual smile, eats breakfast with the Franks, and puts a pin on it for the time being.

He leaves the beach by the end of June, a week after he’d expected thanks to a last minute cancellation from another lodger, and waits until the very last minute before he has to get his things in his car and turn south to call Liv.

“Hello?”

He hasn’t heard Liv’s voice since before the whole HYDRA warehouse shitshow, but he’s not entirely surprised about how little effect it has on him, at least for now, that might change after it when he no longer needs to keep his cool.

“Get us some divorce papers for me to sign, leave somewhere easy to notice in the living room or the kitchen until I do, and you can keep the house and everything in it,” John says in a contained rush. Contained because he’d rather be understood and not repeat himself, and rushed because… Well, he doesn’t think he’d ever be able to say the words if he doesn’t make himself do so.

There’s a long beat of silence and then another one; he’d think something’s happened with the call except he can hear her breathing on the other side, deliberately slow like she always does when she’s trying to stay calm.

“ John -”

“If you’re not going to say yes then I don’t wanna hear it,” he interrupts her, not mad just matter of fact, almost numb. “I broke your trust, you broke my heart, fuck, I broke your heart too. We haven’t even talked in a semester, I think I almost died back in February though everyone kept trying to reassure me it wasn’t quite that bad, and I didn’t even think to call you one last time before that shitshow. The only way you would’ve found out if I did then is the fact that my team isn’t shitty and they would’ve let you and my family know, even if Bucky knows you don’t like him and probably would’ve blamed him too.”

Liv doesn’t seem to have much of anything to say to that, or she’s doing that thing where she waits for him to get things off his chest instead of talking and making him shut off.

“So, I’m calling you now, okay? To -” John bites his tongue and faces the glare of the early mid-morning sunlight reflecting off the waves, the salt breeze tugging at his too-long hair and the grains of sand finding their way into his shoes and between the edge of his shorts and the back of his thighs. “Look, I’m trying to make things right here, somehow and for whatever it’s worth or not, and that includes you. You may not be the one I’ve hurt the most with this whole situation, but you are the one I hurt most intimately, and the sooner I let you go the sooner you can have your shot at healing from it. I love you, always have and always will, Liv, but I didn’t even think about you for maybe two weeks until I noticed, and holding onto that just sounds selfish to me, doesn’t it? To you?”

He could tell her all about how he’d been constantly thinking back on Bucky and Sam during that same stretch, wondering and worrying about what they might be doing, being reminded about them by the weirdest of reasons and at the most random of times. It’s like John has them tattooed all over his skin for easy access, like that weird movie with Carrie-Anne Moss about the guy with amnesia. But he doesn’t, because he may be a dickwad but even he has limits and a part of him is pretty confident Liv’s gonna cry over this regardless of her answer, he doesn’t need to add fuel to that fire.

“Do you get what I’m trying to say here, Liv? I need you to tell me because I’m not sure I’m making much sense anymore myself.”

There’s another moment of silence that the wind and the waves can’t quite fill in, a loaded one, before Liv’s voice finally comes through again.

“I think you are,” she rasps, low, coughs the lump lodged in her throat away and continues. “Alright, I’ll get the papers ready and then I’ll leave them on top of the book shelf, the big wooden one in the living room. But please keep in mind that I’m probably being watched right now, I can’t even promise you no one’s listening to us right now.”

John thanks her hastily and doesn’t tell her not to worry, he made sure they wouldn’t be heard or recorded, before he hangs up, snapping the flip phone in two, searching the beach around himself as he gets up and walks closer to the water, and finally throwing the pieces into the big, wide blue, as far as he can, which is very .

He gives himself a while to shake the sand off and compose himself; if the Franks are going to remember him when questioned, he’d rather it were not because he looked like he’d just been told his elderly dog just died. They still catch him though, or at least Mrs Frank - Meredith - does, pulling him for a short yet strong hug when he explains, the two of them standing by his car in the long driveway for everyone in the street to see them and gossip.

“Don’t you worry, sweetie, you’ll meet the right person someday. Maybe not tomorrow, and maybe not next year, but everyone has someone right for them. Just look at me: took me a while but eventually I found my Pete.”

He tries to show her as much gratitude as he can and doesn’t tell that it’s not about whether or not he has them, but if he even deserves to keep them.

Mr Frank gives him a small tupperware filled with almond and honey cookies, and Harry sends him off with a fist bump and a toothy grin, and tells to come back next year so she can take him diving once she gets better at it. John pulls from the bottomless well of his southern charm best he can and makes promises he knows he won’t keep and tries to keep it together until he’s three blocks away. He’s starting to hate it when people are nice to him over nothing, which is to say, all the time by now.

John makes it all the way past Aurora, leading any tails northward, before he caves and fishes for another disposable phone, puts in the number while he waits at a red light and hits the speaker function.

“John,” comes the answer shortly after the third ring.

“How,” John questions, frowning at the road ahead and the orange tint of the sky.

“Olivia’s mother called me, how else,” Mary Ann Hannah - formerly Walker , for as long as she was married - snorts with good humor.

John exhales heavily, hands convulsing on the steering wheel, and his mother, bless her soul, waits him out until he can talk again.

“What did she say?”

“Not much, just to keep away for a while and something about how it was time already. She sounded exasperated more than anything, so maybe it’s not going as bad as you’re thinking.”

“And how do you know what I’m thinking about it?”

He can hear her eye roll through the call. “ Please , you’ve been with her for longer than you’ve had your driving license.”

That at least gets a chuckle out of him, however anxious. “I’m making a huge mistake, aren’t I?”

“Now, that I don’t know,” his mother muses. “Are you?”

“Ma,” he groans.

“Johnny,” she sing-songs obnoxiously. “You think I’m teasing you or being facetious, but I’m asking you honestly. You know what I did and what I think and how I feel about the entire matter of your daddy -”

“You want to castrate him the way of the Fighting Club , yeah,” John winces, amused despite himself. He’s never hidden how he feels about the whole thing either, and genital equality isn’t enough for his dad to earn his camaraderie back after what he did.

“- But our situations are different,” Mary Ann continues as if he hasn’t said a thing. “Your relationship was different, trust fell out but neither of you cheated. Neither of you cheated, right?”

“Right, ma. Lemar…”

“Lemar was both your best friend, and then your boyfriend, and he had as many of his things in your house as he did in his apartment, and we can go on and on, but you didn’t do none of it behind Olivia’s back, now did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” he sighs, turning and taking a backroad at the last moment when he chooses to skip the next town entirely. “I asked her first.”

“You asked Olivia first, and that was after what, five years of all too obvious, painful pining?

“Six,” he breathes out.

“Six years of pining! And your daddy couldn’t be bothered after five months of knowing the woman! And your aunt Enid still had the gall to call you weak, scared little boy that one time, the cheek!”

John can’t help but laugh at his mother’s exaggeratedly shrill impression of his aunt’s voice. “You can’t fault her for trying to defend her older brother.”

“I can do it too, for doing it at the expense of you when you were at your lowest.”

“Second lowest,” John corrects lightly. “I didn’t get divorced back then, did I?”

“I don’t hear you hyperventilating or shaking right now either, I suppose you haven’t actually reached your lowest just yet.”

“Remind me to tell you about putting Steve Rogers’ old clothes in a Maine storage unit in front of the guy who got the Captain America title from right under my nose.”

Mary Ann sighs so heavily the noise that comes out of the speaker makes his ear canals itch. “Oh, Johnny.”

“It’s fine, he helped me out of it at least. Did I ever tell you he used to lead vet center meetings in D.C. before he joined Rogers?”

“Wilson? No, you didn’t actually…”

He stays on the phone with his mother for almost an hour before he decides he’s pushing his luck too far and says his goodbyes. Unlike with Olivia, he doesn’t have the heart to even hint at anything going awry, not in Maine and not in his near future, and simply tells her he’ll try to call her again sometime soon.

John makes it all the way up to Annapolis, where he ditches the car and spends the night in a small hostel, spending a couple of hours in the morning to get a new vehicle and think about how nice and pretty the place is, and how it’d be to live there with Bucky and Sam, maybe in one of the apartments on top of the shops that lined the side of the port.

He almost catches himself but almost immediately shrugs it off, hardly any harm can come from daydreaming, especially now .

John leaves the city that very same day, after eating a hefty lunch and giving his hair a good touch up. Dark chocolate brown suits him surprisingly well, at least better than black did, in his humble opinion. He makes it sound like he’s planning to continue north on his way to Maine, and with any luck if anyone follows his trail this way they’ll believe he’s going back to the northern state and possibly to the abandoned factory itself and not being particularly careful, or to Canada instead and being more careful about that one.

Then he takes his bags and his new car and heads back south, following the coastline at a distance and sticking to backroads, changing cars another two times before he finally, thankfully reaches Albany, Georgia. Unlike in Oregon and North Carolina, he doesn’t bother finding a house or cabin to hole up in, because Albany, and everywhere else for the foreseeable future, is just a pit stop until he finds his way to wherever Val is hiding.

Which he ends up finding sooner than he’d even wished. She’s in Florida, obviously . But it’s the where exactly in Florida that catches him off guard: Tallahassee.

He’s not sure if Val’s being delirious, cocky, or fucking brilliant, choosing to make camp in a city as large as the Floridian state capital, John thinks the first time he scouts the building he suspects to be her new base of operations, a former penitentiary that was emptied and closed shortly after the beginning of the Blip and had allegedly been bought by a private company - a transport one - a year and a half prior, according to the city’s public records. Apparently the idea was for it to become the major hub of a new branch of a company that was originally from New Mexico, but considering he can’t find a single transportation enterprise with the name in the document either in that state or any other, he’s calling bull. Even if Val wasn’t there with her little HYDRA posse, someone was definitely making suspicious use of the place, it’s just such an obvious discrepancy it makes him want to roll his eyes.

John has to scout the place for a good two weeks and even work around planting a few cameras pointed in its direction before he gets more to work with, finding a back door that some of the people using the building take for smoke breaks sometimes, usually between shifts. It takes him another month or so to figure out the rest of the security system, but at least by then he’s already made sure of it: Val’s here.

It almost takes him by surprise, but once he’s sure he has to lock himself in his room at the nearby Motel 6, and laugh himself sick. Val’s going about life as usual wearing a dirty blonde wig , and it’s so cheeky that he doesn’t quite feel the sting of it at first. He thinks Bucky and Sam would feel plenty of righteous fury on his behalf if they knew. Ah, if only.

Well, since he’s already so close and because he figures two can play this game, he decides to wait a little longer. Not enough that he risks losing Val’s scent, but enough that his hair grows just a little more, walks out of a shop with specialized scissors, and sheds the darkened mane, carefully cutting it into something closer to what he’d usually wear on his day-to-day with the help of many, many Youtube videos. It’s not particularly good, it’s certainly nothing like what Ava would’ve achieved, but it’s decent and just what he needs right now. And his hair’s not nearly as fried as he’d feared either; he chooses to chalk it up to the super soldier serum and ignore it.

He has a small crisis over it though, crawling into the bathtub, closing the curtains and cowering there for a minute or twenty, wishing he could call his mother without risking exposing himself. Wishing he could…

John drags himself out of the tub and the bathroom, back to his bedside and digs through his backpack until he finds one of his remaining phones. He doesn’t try talking - or rather thinking - himself out of it as he puts in one of the numbers he remembers off the top of his head and hits the call icon only to be told the line’s no longer in use. He also doesn’t stop and reconsider when he calls for the second or third number, sighing with barely contained hope when the fourth try starts ringing.

“Hello?” A voice answers, Bucky’s voice, and John’s heart skips a beat. “Hello? Yelena, is that you?”

“It’s John,” he croaks quickly, afraid Bucky will hang up on him.

Admittedly, Bucky could still hang up on him, but at least if he does so now it’ll be because of John himself and not because he thought maybe someone else was onto them or something else like that. Hell, he almost expects the other man to cut the call off now, holding his breath with his heartbeat clogging up his throat.

“ John ,” Bucky whispers instead, almost sounding relieved, reverential even. “Sam, stop the car, it’s John!”

And he can’t help it, sprawling on the floor with his back against the bed, the wet way he chuckles when he hears Sam’s string of curses and the screeching of tires on pavement.

“John, where are you?” Bucky asks quickly, breathlessly, before the car stops moving completely from the sounds of it. “We caught wind you’re going further north from the Carolinas, so we’re headed back to Maine.”

“You better don’t do anything stupid until we get there,” Sam half-yells, the noises of rustling and Bucky’s complaints painting the kind of picture that makes him chuckle even more, ecstatic. “Belova’s pissed at us enough as it is.”

“I’m nowhere near Maine,” he says between jerky breaths, immediately diving back into laughter.

There’s a drawn out silence from the other side of the call at that, and John can just see them, staring at each other, having entire conversations with their facial expressions alone, Bucky’s angry and Sam’s adamant. He wonders exactly what those faces may look like, what they may be trying to express when it’s about him, and the thought sobers him pretty quick.

“John, I need you to give us a hand here,” Sam starts talking, slow like he’s trying to get something through to a little kid, probably quantum mechanics or the practical aspect of the concept of death. “Where are you, right now? And where can we rendezvous?”

John considers telling them for a moment, he truly does. He could definitely use the help entering the building and facing off Val, and above that he has the bone-deep yearning to be within touching distance of them once again, never mind how he’s never the one to reach out to them, especially if everything goes sideways in the end…

He glances at the large, messy scar that’s chosen to linger on the palm of his left hand, tracing some of the edges with the pad of his thumb.

“I need to do this myself.” He adds when he hears one of them bracing to say something: “On my own, don’t try to use rhetoric and technicalities against me, assholes.”

“Sometimes I forget you’re actually smart,” Bucky mutters grumpily, but his voice is almost entirely swallowed by Sam’s.

“Damn it, John,” there’s some more rustling and crinkling, and he thinks the latter is from Bucky holding onto the phone while Sam’s trying to pry and hog it out of him. “Remember what I told you months ago? About your self-sacrificing tendencies? It still applies now, you know.”

“Sam, babe -”

“Shit, we’re supposed to be a team in this, Walker. Even if you fucking hate my guts because I had the gall to ask you for the shield back in Latvia, and everything else that happened, the point was to look out for one another in this mess. We can go back to sticking to each of our sides of the country once it’s all said and done, and never see each other again.”

Bucky sighs heavily from the other side, and John feels like echoing him. “That’s not what it’s about, I mean, no, it is but -”

“Well, at least now you’re admitting it! It’s only took you years, hasn’t it? Just tell us where the Hell you are, we’ll be there tomorrow, even if it’s halfway across the world, we can just take a plane for once, and then everything will be -”

“Sam!” Bucky finally breaks through, probably shouting straight at his boyfriend’s face. “Slow down, it’s not like you can make the man give you anything. Just listen to him, ‘kay?”

Silence, only broken by the noise of the afternoon traffic outside and the heavy breathing of the other men crackling through the speaker of the phone. When it stretches beyond a couple of heartbeats, John decides to clumsily crawl into bed; he should probably get a shower and wash off the cut hair that’s still clinging to its brethren and his skin, but he can do that after getting a nap in and before putting on the suit for tonight’s show. In the meantime, he can just have a little lie down without sitting on his ass on the floor and let the voices lull him into an approximation of quietness.

“Alright, fine,” Sam grunts. “John, what do you have to say for yourself?”

“Why are you acting like I have to explain myself to you? I didn’t even have to explain myself to my mother, and she’s had to put up with me for almost twenty times the amount you’ve tried .”

“Maybe because I have the tech to track you down, and none of the poor woman’s patience,” he reasons, but most of his previous forcefulness is gone now, leaving only weariness behind.

“Yeah, okay, that’s actually a skill she had to master. God knows my dad didn’t bother with it,” he takes a moment to shake his head over the edge of the mattress and some of the worst offenders, grabs a dirty tee to clean his neck and shoulders too - he’ll be trusting the cleaning service to get whatever he leaves behind despite his best efforts, but he doesn’t think it should matter all that much either way. “How have you guys been anyways?”

Sam groans but otherwise lets Bucky have the word.

“Kinda fine, but mostly just worried, John, dunno what else you want us to tell you. We’ve been looking for you since you dropped the hat on us in Iowa.”

“Are you taking the guilt tripping road instead? Kind of a low blow.”

“You know me, I don’t always fight fair,” John can hear the soft smile on Bucky’s face as he talks, can see it like he’s laying down right in front of him in the bed. “And it’s not like you make me wanna start playing by the rules.”

“Are we doing this?” Sam breathes in the background. “Are we really doing this right now?”

“ Yes ,” Bucky and John reply in unison, Bucky’s gently amused and John’s languid in the best way.

He rolls onto his back, making sure to lie his head down on the mattress instead of the pillow so he can ditch some more of the hair, and puts the call on speaker close to his ear, getting comfortable and throwing caution into the wind.

“Sam, just go with it,” Bucky insists and all his boyfriend does is huff in annoyance. “How long do you have, John?”

John shrugs against the blanket, eyes closing. “Until I start falling asleep, I reckon.”

“Alright then, come ‘ere,” Bucky demands, sounding like he’s rearranging himself in his seat.

“You’re kidding,” is the unimpressed reply.

“Am I?” Questions Bucky at the same John snorts: “ Bucky? Kidding anyone?”

“More likely than you’d think,” Sam complains but must comply otherwise because there’s a long moment filled with swishing, crinkling, mumbling, sighing and apologizing after saying: “Backseat.”

“You guys good?” John asks once the noises mostly settle.

“Yeah,” Bucky calls back, sounding content and silky, his voice deeper than usual yet not in barely contained anger for once. “You?”

“Never better.”

“Honest?” Sam asks, already calmer, or maybe just defeated*. “I don’t wanna pick the fight back up, but you were pretty beat up last time we saw you, the fact you made it past the dirt road in the first place…”

“Super soldier serum, remember?”

Bucky snorts. “The serum doesn’t make you quieter than a cat though.”

“Well, I learnt from the best of them.”

His former team leader groans, growls more like, and Sam throws a cheeky little what’s that, and John just knows he’s grinning toothily at his exasperated boyfriend.

“What, he never told you about the cute little nickname we gave him?”

“Oh?”

“ John ,” Bucky warns, making the pair chuckle.

“Fine, you tell him then. Or I’ll tell him next time we see each other.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything back, but Sam’s laughter speaks enough for the both of him and whatever face the grumpy brunette must be making. John sighs happily, trying to focus on what he has right now instead of all the things he wishes to ask, knowing he shouldn’t.

“ How are you though?” Bucky asks again.

“I’m fine, I promise. I healed most of the way back in North Carolina, and I’ve been keeping up with my food and water intake.”

“ Food and water intake , he says,” Sam sighs. “See, this is what I was worried about, the man’s surviving on his own instead of living.”

John snorts fondly. “I actually took almost a whole month to myself in the Outer Banks, if you can believe that, Wilson.”

“And they didn’t catch you ?”

“The fluke must still be ongoing,” he mumbles, turning to his side and curling into himself, throwing a nearby blanket over his body from the ribs down. It might just be you two the unlucky ones.

“I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about, but I hope it continues if it means you remain safe and sound until we get back to you.”

He’s not sure this skirting around the word if they’re all doing, whether intentionally or not, sits all that well with him, but he doesn’t want to ruin the mood, and he’s already done enough heart-breaking in life that he’s willing to leave this one for the after , if it really comes to it.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“To whom ?” Sam asks.

“Either one, both…”

“Sure, John,” Bucky says after a silent spell. “What’s it?”

Do you really want me or is this all in my head - What would you change of the last two, three years - What is this - Why do you even care about me - Why -

“What do you think Rogers would’ve thought of me?”

“ Oh , now you’re asking the interesting questions,” Sam says jovially.

Bucky and Sam dive into a long, entirely too intricate discussion about it that would be much more amusing and interesting to him if he could manage to stay awake for it. By the time he wakes up thanks to the alarm he had the foresight to set up before he took scissors to hair, the call’s long been cut off and a text’s waiting for him: Sit tight, John, we’ll be there by noon.

John does not sit tight and wait ‘til noon. If his mother knew about any of this, she’d call him inappropriately restless , and if Bucky and Sam caught wind of it they’d agree, very enthusiastically in Sam’s case. Hopefully they won’t have to meet at his funeral.

His large duffel bag is already done and so is most of his backpack except for the few toiletries and clothes he has lying around, and he takes a long moment to clean up as he moves along, gathering all the chopped up hair he can into a plastic bag to light it up and throw it into the trash on his way to Val’s. He puts the underlayers of his suit - the US Agent one - on and a light jacket and cargo pants on top, as well as a mask that will hopefully not only help him pass by unrecognized but will also encourage the staff to give the room a particularly good wipe down. After all that’s taken cared of, and he checks out with some halfhearted family emergency excuse, the clerk wishing him and his family the best, he piles into the car, drives roundabout for a while, goes to a diner he’s come to like for a final meal in town, and drives around a little more before leaving his car in a parking lot near the HYDRA building, just not so close that they may catch on to him before he even has a chance at kicking them in the fucking face.

He breaks in, security systems already at his beck and call, through the alleyway emergency exit, already in his full gear save for his usual Agent mask, swapped for goggles, the ones with the night vision that had been thankfully tucked into his bag while he’d been out like a light after the botched raid. He finally gets to use them now, in the gloom of the mostly gutted and unkempt building that has more in relation with a medieval dungeon in places.

John picks his way through the skeleton crew first, mostly guards throughout the above-ground levels, mindful about using the Bite so he won’t trigger some sort of alarm like previous time. For the most part, he simply gets the jump on them, knocks or chokes them unconscious, and ties them up with ditched rope coils that the previous owners left behind and some decent wiring sticking out of the wall sockets that were taken out at some point and never replaced with new connections. He doesn’t even think they’re connected to anything, since the lights and electronics that are being used are drawing power from a lonely generator.

It’s a slow, very time consuming way for him to go about it, but being on his own is dangerous enough as is, and despite popular - or just Sam’s - belief, he’s not so self-sacrificial to the point of, well… He doesn’t want to die, is the thing, regardless of what some of his actions may say for him, the fact that he has very little going for him as of right now, or how he should probably, definitely let go of Bucky and Sam. Maybe he’s too stubborn, maybe he hasn’t hit rock bottom, or maybe he’s still clinging so damned hard to the idea that he’s in the world for some grand, good purpose, but damn it if he’s going to let go of that now .

So he makes himself so slow and steady, and safe above all else, waving his way through each floor like a carefully choreographed routine, eyes wide open, ears finely attuned, and skin itching with something electrical running through him. It must be approaching an hour in by the time he’s done with the upper floors, tracing back down towards the ground level with a quick survey of his work before he begins the end of his work: time to face the music and make his way to the basement area, where the few other operatives as well as Val should be sleeping through the night. He hopes, or things will quickly go sour for him.

When John reaches the stairway that leads into the bowels of the beast, he gives himself a moment to crouch down beside it, breathe deeply a few times, check the camera feed he’d taken over earlier to review where the few guards are posted and tell himself he can do this, he really can so long as he continues to be cautious and stay level-headed. That’s all he has to do and he can live to see another day and maybe call his mother, and meet Bucky and Sam once more.

He snorts under his breath. Yeah, and Lemar didn’t die because of me, sure.

The two underground levels the HYDRA cell are using as living quarters are liberally lit, unlike the top floors, so he ditches the goggle in the time being, taking advantage of how thin and skin-tight they are and simply pushing them up towards his forehead, releases the clasp of one of his pistol holsters for easier access, coils some rope around his left arm, and moves, ever onwards.

He tries to take the same road as he did during the first hand, but there are several points where he has to be far more straightforward and gets into a scuffle or two. A couple of guards had clearly noticed him in the upper levels when he hadn’t been fast enough after taking their companions, but now he’s navigating wide, clear, well-lit corridors instead of large, mostly open rooms filled with furniture, crates and other implements, left behind or added to the total by these assholes. And even if Mission Impossible 4 gadgets were a thing it’s not like he has any Benjis to facilitate them for him.

May as well steamroll ahead then, he thinks wearily as he tackles a man down, very much using him as cover from the gunfire aimed their way by another goon frantically scrambling back and away from him on the other end of hallway with a look in her face like she’s staring directly into Satan’s eyes. Honestly, at this point he may as well embrace the sentiment.

Other than being shot at, he finds very little resistance or obstacles along the way. In all fairness at this point regular people - unless trained to the level of the Dora Milaje and the likes or wearing exo-suits like those of the Iron line - don’t necessarily pose much threat to him on their own, but he does become increasingly agitated and suspicious as he goes along and the worst that happens to him is getting nicked on the arm and shoulder when someone gets to fight him back, briefly, never mind how much of a ruckus he’s starting to make.

It’s just too easy for comfort, but there’s hardly any more evidence either in what he encounters face-to-face or what he sees in the camera feed, and he’s made sure the comms are jammed so that no one can really talk with one another. There’s very little else for him to do but to see this through, however it may end for him.

Eventually, and much like in Maine, it’s Val who comes to him rather than wait for him to reach her. She must be thinking she can pull off something like what she did back at the abandoned factory, or maybe trusts her people to deal with Bucky and Sam or whoever she may believe to be upstairs and split them up. Well, jokes on her.

“ Val ,” he sneers as he stares her down from about 25 ft away, gun trained on her and painfully thankful to have noticed her before she could get eyes and aim on him, or he’d likely be bleeding out on the floor.

“You and your kind just don’t die, do you?” Val smiles with faux sweetness at him, her hands raised, but only at half-mast, waist level at most. “And you, you never learned a damned thing, what am I, your little wife? Oh, but you don’t even have a wife anymore, now do -”

John moves the moment he sees her hands even twitch down to her own weapons, but he doesn’t shoot her - instead he tases her with the Bite mid-sentence.

And that’s the end of it…

Is it? At first he’s so shocked that he’s actually made it this far that he almost doesn’t know what to do next despite having planned for it extensively during the last week or so.

A stray gunshot that only misses his right rip by one, maybe two inches tops sets him back on course: there are still a few HYDRA stragglers unchecked and headless chicken-like in the underground, and he’d rather they were all somewhat contained once the police or whoever else shows up so that there’s at least a slimmer of a chance of them being put away legally, instead of just letting them run off into the night and maybe even help their companions that must definitely be waking up upstairs just to try and swarm them or follow his trail on his way out with Val’s unconscious ass. And the faster he does that the better, since he has no idea how long he has before previously mentioned police or whoever arrives, he’s not sure how much of this mess passersby and neighbors have heard and if they’ve called on the authorities.

He ends up breaking a lot of doorknobs and having to people together to make the best use of his rope and wiring, but eventually he makes it through, he’s done and over with this bullshit, feeling more tired than he has since his tender ribs finally stopped constricting his breathing and diet, almost two full hours in and thankfully with no new holes in him. John grabs for Val’s still motionless body - after checking her vitals, of course, he’s not planning to finalize his plan with a fucking corpse, he may as well leave that here and not bother at all -, and carefully lifts and arranges her until she’s sprawled over his uninjured shoulder, and more or less books it through the veritable maze of the level and upstairs towards the emergency exit and the back alley, calling for the police along the way to report having heard what sounded suspiciously like gunfire coming from a semi-abandoned building nearby.

It’s not perfect, but he doesn’t need it to be, and he’s already stuffing Val into the trunk of his car in the parking lot a couple of blocks away by the time he starts hearing the sirens, so still well away if he’s learned to gauge his hearing decently with Bucky’s help. He thinks a couple of people have spotted them, both at street and building-window level, but he drives his way out of town and to the spot he’s hidden his actual getaway car before that becomes an issue, setting the poor old sedan on fire once he transferred everything, even Val, to the SUV.

John drives two hours northwest in a numb frenzy, picking main and backroads at random, doing a couple of loop backs, and just barely keeping it together enough not to go over the speed limit or even too close to it so he can avoid getting pulled over as much as he can, in any way he can.

By the time he stops to take a piss by the side of the road and maybe get some air into his revolting lungs, he decides it may be a good idea to check up on Val, who he’s put in a crate on the back of the SUV. He tries to be as cautious about as possible, just because he gave her a pat up and down to check for more weapons and found none doesn’t mean she’s genuinely clean, but when he opens the box she’s just laid down there, albeit uncomfortably, still and open-eyed, immediately turning her head to glare him down, seemingly having made no attempts at getting rid of her bounds.

“I thought you were smarter than this,” Val says calmly, eyes gleaming in the dark before sunrise.

“Yeah, thought so too,” John admits, watching her just as keenly itching to wrap his hands around her throat and be done with the whole thing, but a lot can happen in two, three years, and maybe he doesn’t need to get more blood on his hands because of her, or Ross, or anyone else. “And yet here we are, huh?”

She shakes her head, ignoring how odd her position is inside the crate. “You poor, lost boy. You could’ve had it all, the world in your palm, if you’d only just followed me. Instead you’ll get, what? What do you even think you’ll get from Ross? From Barnes and Wilson? A pardon, the chance to go back home to your wife who doesn’t even trust you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” John shrugs, refusing to give her the satisfaction to see him react. “Whatever I want and whatever I get, that’s none of your business. I just care that you’re out away like you fucking deserve.”

He closes the crate again and gets back behind the steering wheel without blowing up or falling apart. He still has half a day of driving ahead of him, at the very least.

So, he gives them Val, and where does that leave him? Pardons aren’t all they used to be, not since everything about Carter came out and they all went out on the run like spooked birds - for entirely different reasons, not that it matters to the press -, and maybe even before that, so he could hardly expect to get one simply by bringing Enemy of the State number two straight to esteemed Secretary Ross’ office. If anything, they probably see it as a threat to the Secretary himself, as if he could have taken care of him and been back on his way out well before the muscle came running.

Still, first they have to catch him, and between his own experience, studying Rogers obsessively for half a decade, and all the time and energy he’s spent fighting - alongside or against - Barnes and Wilson, he has more than his fair share of tricks up his sleeve, fuck, down his boot too. Really, the Secretary’s men didn’t really stand a chance.

Yelena’s you’re not invincible, none of us are comes back around to haunt him once again when he still gets shot in the upper leg, making him tumble down with the shock of pain for a split moment before he just throws himself off a fourth story window. At least it doesn’t hit anything too important, and the fall doesn’t break him further, and he manages to stumble his way to relative safety with a makeshift tourniquet.

“This is a very bad decision, coming to me of all people,” Christina tells him with a vigorous head shake, looking upwards like she’s asking patience to the Heavens above.

At least her hands are steady as she pulls the bullet out of his outer thigh, stops the bleeding, and sews the hole shut.

“I just wanted someone to talk with. And I missed you too.”

“What about James and Sam?” Christina asks him, all no-nonsense as usual.

John amends: “With someone who doesn’t look at me like they do.”

The woman sighs, dropping the closed first aid kit onto the counter harshly. Barnes was right, she’s more passive aggressive than he first thought, or than she’d let him know.

“They don’t hate you, John.”

“That’s not how I meant it,” he can’t help but smile tiredly at her aggravation.

“Then how, pray tell, do you mean it?”

John hesitates for a moment, feeling exhaustion trying to pull him under with its pale, bony fingers. “Like they can’t decide whether they want me, or pity me.”

Christina’s glare is eloquent, but at least she lets him sleep it off in her guest room for a couple of hours before he puts her at too much risk, never mind how hard she tries to convince him to stay for the night, he clearly needs the rest.

John snorts with amusement at that, mostly at his own expense. “You’ve no idea, Christina.”

She sighs. “Just, promise me you’ll at least consider talking to James and Sam. Please, John: I’d hate to see you all alone after everything.”

“You know you’re the only one who calls him James , right?”

But he promises and more or less means it too, just not yet. First he takes a short little detour to the suburbs.

He makes sure to wait until he knows for certain that Liv isn’t home and that nobody’s watching in person - there’s no doubt that the house is bugged, but he should be in and out quickly enough for that to not be a problem. John drives to his street, calm as you may, walks up to the door and opens it with his very own key, finds the folder exactly where Liv had said he would and takes three or four seconds to sign it on the coffee table. He doesn’t think about it when he takes his ring off and leaves it on top of the papers for Liv to find, and gets back up to make quick work of the only last business he had to tend to: getting his clothes and other personal belongings out of the house with him.

John’s out the door and driving down the street barely fifteen minutes later.

He switches cars twice, hops on a train to Arkansas, gets another car, takes a plane and caps his journey off with a pain-dazed ride through daunting Appalachian roads before finally, after almost thirty-six hours of nonstop travel and maybe a grand total of eighty minutes of something like sleep, having the opportunity to walk inside a house - a house, not a cabin for once - all for him, drop his bags and backpack anywhere and every, give his bullet wound a quick check up, a wipe down and a new bandage, and crawl into bed with all the intention of sleeping for at least twelve hours straight only to curl into himself under the too-warm bedding and cry like a kid whose beloved first pet ever has died a tragic, all too graphic death by way of a careless neighbor’s car.

John does get to sleep for a while once he tires out, but all that means is he wakes up the next morning overheated, with sunlight streaming through the windows and landing squarely onto his face, a killer headache hammering away somewhere/everywhere between his ears and worst of all right behind his eyes. It’s not quite half a day after he first laid down, but it’s close enough and he thinks he must have gotten a solid four, maybe five whole hours of it.

Whatever, it’s not like he has to be somewhere, or meet anyone, or, God forbid, pull off some half-assed plan to bring down the person who’d cleverly groomed him into becoming a mercenary far worse than he’d ever been as a soldier in active combat. He can take his time, and that’s exactly what he decides to do as he kicks the blankets away, turns on the bed to his other side, and goes back to sleep for a few more hours until he’s woken up by ravenous hunger and a desert-dry throat.

He gets up and takes a long, indulgent shower, nibbles on some crackers and downs two full glasses of water before slowing for the third while he walks around the house, checking over it and putting on random clothes he pulls from the different bags he finds lying around, takes the time to set aside a laundry pile that he stuffs into his largest bag to bring along. Some are clothes he’s been wearing for the last week or so and hasn’t had the chance to get washed as much as he did to simply lock himself in the train or gas station bathroom and change into clean if smelly stuff he’d gotten back at the house.

He takes a long drive around the nearest city before he decides to settle for it, he’s got pretty much everything he needs there, even a library and a bookshop he stops at to find himself some promising paperback before everything else, just to have something to do in between the waiting at the diner for his food and the laundromat for his clothes, the groceries left for last. Very few people seem to take notice of him, and of the ones that do, none appear to recognize him, only looking at him with mild curiosity and the occasional interest or derision, and he can’t blame anyone for either - he’s aware the impression he must give off is partway between a surfer dude and a gym rat -, but each stare makes him want to drop everything and slink back to the house nonetheless.

So he makes sure to get everything he needs and then some just in case and do just that, locking the door behind himself after unloading everything at around dinner time, drained and wanting to go straight back to bed but forcing himself through the motions of cooking - and eating - something nice and easy first, not wanting to lose the habit of having three meals a day just because there’s nobody around to watch over him or there aren’t any more missions to remain fit and healthy for.

And he can rest all he wants now, at least up until someone comes knocking on his door of course. He’ll need to set up some security systems around, but figures he can wait a day or two, writing himself a reminder on a note he sticks to the fridge door, where he’ll see it everyday - several times a - until he gets back to it. He also needs to figure out what to do with himself in the near to far future…

It can wait longer than the security system, John thinks that night, and reaffirms in the morning, watching the woods that surround the neighborhood like a protective parent from where he sits on the step of the back door, scalding coffee in hand and eyeing the wispy clouds making their way towards them from a distance. Whatever, he spends the morning and all the way until three or four reading and eating, a lot of fruit and crackers for a light lunch sandwiched between a large breakfast and what he’s planned for a very filling dinner.

The rain begins at around three-thirty, a light pitter-patter on the roof and the window he’s sitting close to that quickly, effortlessly starts lulling him to a light dose despite his best efforts, how engaging the book is, and the uncomfortable fucking armchair he’s sitting on. He gives up about an hour in, after a particularly startling nod off, dropping the book on the coffee table none too gently and standing up to take a dump and grab a blanket from the closet. He’s halfway under not a minute since he cozies up on the couch, watching the darkening sky and the water droplets making short-lived roadmaps on the large window whenever he’s lucid.

That’s more or less the state he’s in when someone starts knocking on his door - unsurprisingly because that’s just his luck -, so he can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be judged too harshly for thinking the sound’s coming from one of his neighbor’s house, or that it might be the distant roll of thunder. Do the Appalachians get thunderstorms in July? He has no fucking idea.

John reacts with a start when the knocking comes back, except it’s less of that and more of a pounding on his door, the sound of something that might be his name getting lost in the haze. He rolls off the couch without falling and grabs for the gun he’d stuck to the underside of the coffee table, leaving the one he’d been sleeping with by the back corner of the couch, hidden under the blanket for easy access.

“Coming!” He shouts before whoever’s on the other side starts knocking again, giving himself a moment to breathe and think.

For all he knows it could be some poor schmuck who’s car broke down in the middle of the rain while visiting someone around, and said someone happened to not even be home. Unlikely, but not impossible; he decides to keep the gun behind his back while he opens the door with his other hand, cursing the lack of any windows directly overlooking the front of the house or, even better, a peephole.

He walks quietly, composing himself until his breath and posture come off as natural and easy going, at most upset at being woken up from the nap he’d clearly being having, hair tousled and clothes in disarray, his sweatshirt all twisted and his jeans riding low on his hips never mind how he tries to tug them up, clumsy with nerves and the sleep sticking to him.

He opens the door with a swift gesture in hopes to catch his visitor as off guard as they’d caught him. “Yeah, who’s -”

John doesn’t catch Sam off guard from the looks of it, but he does catch him turning back towards him from where he’d been looking Bucky’s way, the other man stepping up to them from where he’s parked their car next to John’s on the patch of dirt that passes for a driveway. He can catch in one glance that neither of them look particularly happy to see him, but there’s also some relief in Sam’s dark eyes when they return to John’s face after a quick scan of the rest of his body reveals no grievous wounds. John almost wants to roll his eyes at him.

“ You ,” Sam begins, John barely catching sight of Bucky’s grimace from the corner of his eye. “Are the second most frustrating person I’ve ever met, and that alone puts you on thin fucking ice.”

John eases up on his gun, taking the finger off the trigger and letting his arm swing relaxedly as he opens the door the rest of the way and turns to walk back into the living room, or maybe the kitchen, he could use a drink or ten right about now.

“Who’s the first?”

“The annoying fucking man dripping water all over the floor like a vacationing Terranova,” Sam replies, still annoyed but taking the unspoken invitation in, so that’s a promising sign, maybe. “Will be pretty hard to top that, even for you.”

“I’m honored, I reckon,” John drawls.

“John,” Bucky whines in warning and John finds him running his flesh hand through his wet hair in both an effort to squeeze some water off and in sheer frustration. “Please don’t make this worse.”

“No, no,” Sam counters, pointing a finger Bucky’s way but keeping his attention on John like a dog with a bone to pick. “Let him put his foot further into his own mouth, I’m curious how far he’ll go.”

John sighs. “Sam, what do you want me to do or say here, exactly? Do you want me to apologize for doing what I was supposed to?”

“I want you to finally realize and get it in your head that that wasn’t the only way for you to do things!”

“Sam -”

“Stop it,” John protests with a growl.

“I want you to fucking get it in your head that you have a team -”

“I know that, Wilson.”

“- And it’s not only good at this shit but it’s one that cares about you.”

John bangs his hands against the counter, strong enough to make it creak if not crack. “ Why ?”

That stuns Sam quiet at least, not that it’s actually any better with the way he stares straight at him with something kind, sad, and almost haunted. Bucky, standing a couple of steps next to his boyfriend, just looks all too understanding.

“ John ,” the sound of Sam saying his name is too soft to make him feel like he’s being kicked in the gut.

“ Don’t ,” he snarls.

Sam steps closer to him but Bucky stops him with a hand on his arm and a meaningful glare. “ Babe .”

John watches him come nearer, slow and with his hands half raised to put him at ease like he’s an angry, scared animal. He is feeling as rabid as Bucky had accused him of acting, months prior.

“John -”

“If you tell me you know what it feels like, I will show you how fucking hard I can bite, super soldier serum and all.”

“You may think I don’t, but give it a thought, you know my history with HYDRA,” Bucky tries to reason but John’s having none of it.

“It’s different,” he protests with a shake of his head.

“How exactly is it supposed to be different? De Fontaine had you do all those things just HYDRA did to me -”

“No, it’s not the same and you know it,” Bucky tries to get the word back but John simply forges on. “Because I wasn’t brainwashed by her, or any of her people, they didn’t put my mind in a little box just to have a front row seat to watch them use my body for their own purposes. I did all of it on my own free will, I chose to turn the other way and shut my eyes, while you had suspicions, and let Yelena do her thing, and said go when it was time.”

Bucky’s fingers touching the sides of his face, of his neck, Sam’s hand splayed out against his lower back, they stop him short from speaking further and saying… Whatever he was going to say next is anyone’s guess, he’s already let out everything he had been bottling inside him for over half a year, his breathing just on the edge of panicked and his heart beating so hard and loud Bucky must be hearing. Fuck it, he wouldn’t be surprised if Sam could hear it.

He still tries to get more out, to make his point loud and clear. “I was stupid, and naive, and so easy to play.”

“Maybe,” Bucky admits, their faces so close to each other that John doesn’t just smell him, he can taste him too, the mix of his usual scents - metal, fire, traces of oil, something that may be sandalwood - with the more pungent saltiness of sweat and the freshness of rainwater. “But you’re not a bad man, John, none of that makes you one. You were taken advantage of, groomed if you wanna call it that, led astray, but when everything came to the surface you tried to right the wrongs. It took you a while, sure, but it wasn’t like we were doing much more either, and you didn’t have to be told to do any of it by us, or by a court, or by Christina, did you? You did it on your own, right? You had to do it on your own.”

“I did,” John whispers, feeling sick, Sam’s hand on his back the only thing keeping him upright and more so because he doesn’t want to drag the regular old human with him on his way down. “I had to.”

Bucky smiles, beams at him, looking almost proud. “And you did great at it, you didn’t even lose a limb.”

They lean their foreheads together, John feeling like he’s dying, so close to everything he’s wanted for months, years now, and yet still on the other side of a solid barrier.

“I suppose this might be the best I can get to a good time to tell you I’m recently divorce.”

In the three years they’ve been working together by now - both in and out of the Thunderbolts -, John doesn’t think they’ve ever been as in sync as in that one moment when they both lean into each other and their lips touch. Bucky’s hands are framing his face like he’s something fragile, and John desperately grabs for the collar of his black leather to drag him in, in, in, wanting to meld with him, the kiss already deepening, harsh and biting. He doesn’t forget about Sam, he doubts he ever could, but he doesn’t think about his hand on his back until it retreats with an almost lingering touch.

John breaks the kiss despite his best intentions to turn towards the other man that has, in fact, been living rent free in his head for the last several months, using the leverage of his height and his arms around Bucky’s neck and shoulders to keep him right there with him and not get any ideas.

Sam grins at him while his boyfriend gets on with the program and starts dropping kisses along John’s jaw and down his neck, nipping on his skin just enough to make ephemeral bruises blossom.

“That’s not so bad, is it?” Sam says cheekily, watching the show with interest but distinctly keeping his hands far from any of it, not even touching his actual partner. “Only took you guys three years to get in on it.”

John stares at him like he doesn’t understand him, which for the most part is true, his brain stuttering slightly when Bucky smooths over the sting left behind by a particularly vicious bite, lapping up at it. The dazed, half-lidded eye that’s probably making him smile like it’s Christmas contorts into one of feral outrage when he finally starts connecting some dots.

“Jesus Christ Almighty, you are an idiot, Wilson,” he comments idly, breathlessly, one of Bucky’s arms lowering to wrap around his midsection and squeeze.

John untangles on of his own arms from around Bucky, but instead of relocating or redirecting it somewhere else on the man’s body, hot like a furnace and very much glued to his front, he reaches out for Sam, grabbing a hold of his sweater’s sleeve and reeling him in, definitely catching him off guard this time around. Sam’s eyes blow wide and comically open as he stumbles ahead, crashing against them - not that he minds, nor does Bucky from the appreciative little hum that reverberates against John’s own chest - until he’s finally within kissing distance for the blond too.

Still, appreciation and a few hints here and there, maybe a couple of implications too, are not enough, so he goes for a light, plain kiss, more of a caress of his closed lips, against the corner of Sam’s mouth before pulling back again, hardly far, just a couple of inches to let the other man make the next move. He’s acutely aware of the sudden absence of Bucky’s lips on him where they’d been leaving a trail along the line of his clavicle and towards his shoulder joint, stretching the neck of his loose sweater without a care in the world.

Sam’s shock quickly turns into an easy, soft smile, the kind he’d been getting more and more as the days had gone by back in the cabin, usually in quiet, empty hours when either one of them was exhausted or well on their way to sleep, not out there in the open for anyone to see. He chases after John and gives him a proper kiss, long, and languid, and wet, and searing hot.

“I think you already know why we care,” Sam whispers against his lips in between breaths, eyes as intense as he supposes Bucky’s must be from where he’s still staring at them, the pupils blown wide. “I think you’ve known for a while now.”

“I suspected ,” John counters playfully, earning himself a chuckle, a bite on the tender skin connecting his neck to his clavicle, and… “ Fuck ,” he exclaims, letting go of Sam to cling onto Bucky’s shoulders, legs clumsily wrapping around the man’s hips, looking to purchase. “ What the fuck, Bucky?”

The Winter Soldier himself simply grins up at him like the old, soft dork he genuinely is, forearms flexing and hands spread out under John’s ass to hold him up as if he weighed nothing, although in all fairness, super soldier serum, yadda yadda…

“What, you’ve never been carried around before?”

John rolls his eyes at him. “Not since fucking highschool. Lemar wasn’t exactly a superhuman himself and I’ve never been light, nothing to be said about Liv .”

“Pity: you feel great on my dick like this,” he keens, dropping John a little lower and rubbing against him before he can even attempt a comeback.

John dives back to kiss him, writhing in his hold, the angle hardly great but doable and that’s good enough for him. He thinks he could get used to this, especially if it really feels as good for Bucky as he knows the position does to himself. There’s probably a lot he’d be willing to try for these two he notes now that the thought fleetingly crosses his mind.

“You two really are going to be the end of me,” Sam complains half-heartedly from somewhere that is decidedly not right next to him, but John at least has the presence of mind to catch onto him. “Buck, I dunno about you, but my stamina isn’t all that and the idea of fucking where we’ll likely eat at some point doesn’t appeal to me.”

John moans , long and loud, both at what Sam’s saying and at Bucky following after him, carrying the blond like he actually, genuinely weighs nothing, only breaking the kiss to tilt his head and see where he’s going. Not that John’s going to protest about it when it gives him the chance to return the favor and aggressively admire Bucky’s neck, a work of art on its own. And he must be doing something well because Bucky’s chest picks up its rhythm, as do his legs.

Reaching the bedroom, however, poses a new problem for them.

“I’m not sure this bed could survive all of us sleeping on it, much less wrecking each other on it,” Sam comments, sitting on the squeaky chair next to the closet and taking his sweet time unlacing his shoes off.

John almost groans at hims to get the fuck on with the program, they’re running on a schedule here, but Bucky stops him in his tracks - knowingly or not - by throwing him onto the bed. John bounces on the mattress nicely, which is probably a good sign, but the creaking made by the bed frame is not just loud enough for Sam to notice, but also for him to stop moving and stare at the thing with a genuinely concerned frown, which is…

“Yeah, I can see what you mean,” Bucky grins, already discarding his jacket and carelessly throwing it to the side to start working on the rest of his clothes, efficiently distracting John from the slight at the first show of more skin.

“No shit,” Sam snorts, rounding back to Bucky, finally barefooted and shucking his own sweater and t-shirt to the chair.

John watches them step back into each other’s orbit like he’s starving for them but has to hold himself back because he’s not meant to have his dessert before the appetizer. He’s already half-hard from his short little make out with Bucky - and the entirely unsubtle display of strength -, and he hardly needs a show to avoid flagging, but fuck if he’s not going to enjoy it when Sam seizes the back of Bucky’s head by the shoulder-length hair and kisses him roughly, handling him easily and purposefully. It’s more than obvious - especially to John, who’s gotten a better hang of how strong each of them are in comparison to one another - that Bucky’s in on the whole thing, but it goes to to show how much the mere thought of relinquishing that kind of raw power is such an overt manner does for him: he wants that for himself, almost got it a couple of times before, and even if Sam can’t give it to him, maybe Bucky can.

Their kissing goes on for a solid three, four minutes and John is transfixed watching them, their movements, their bodies. He sits up and slides closer to them on the bed to get a good look at the steady but gentle grip Sam has on Bucky’s hair with his right hand while his left plunges past the waistband of his partner’s jeans to cup at his ass and guide him as they grind against each other. Bucky for his part is moaning freely, racking his hands up and down Sam’s back and sides reverently, and the most pliant and relaxed John has ever seen him, little frown across his brow notwithstanding.

The humidity of the rainy afternoon hadn’t really been much of a problem earlier while John had been reading or sleeping, even with the sweater on top of his tank, but now it’s of no help to them, especially to Bucky, a human heater, and Sam, plastered front-first to said heater. John himself is starting to get the brunt of the rising temperature until he needs to take his sweater off and the tee may as well go too. He can't wait to get back in on it and burn too - the only thing he’s mildly worried about is hydration, not like he’s about to get up to get some water bottles from the kitchen and miss a single second.

Sam breaks the kiss as abruptly as he’d started it, the men taking a moment to rest their foreheads against each other’s and catch their breaths, and John reckons that can’t be going all that well with how they’re still rubbing their pelvises together. John’s mouth waters and his dick twitches inside the confines of his own pants. Sam gentles Bucky’s head until his forehead leans on his shoulder and the brunette starts nosing at his neck with a low groan. John can’t know for sure because his sight might be eagle-sharp but he can’t see through clothes, but it does look like Sam’s reaching further down into Bucky’s pants, the muscles of his wrist and forearm tensing and flexing rhythmically: the thought his mind goes to is that he’s either feeling up Bucky’s perineum or massaging his balls.

He’s so focused on the shadow of motion from that hand, the implications of it, that he misses what Sam whispers to Bucky entirely, only a jumble muttered mess reaching his brain over the blood rush. But whatever it is Bucky seems to agree with it and straightens up to kiss Sam again on his own, and that’s good enough for John’s hazy mind.

Sam kisses back with a smile, his right hand joining it’s companion at the small of Bucky’s back to make quick work of his jeans, pulling down the zipper indelicately and doing much of the same to the pants themselves until he gets them past the knees and Bucky shakes the off the rest of the way, stepping aside in only his briefs and socks as he does. His whole body is made up of finely shaped lines, planes and curves, and never mind how well-aware John himself is with the reason why that is, his first thought is that he looks like a lovingly crafted statue rather than a terrifyingly efficient weapon of choice. And that’s before he even lets himself consider the erection awkwardly pushed toward his left by his underwear.

“Like what you see, huh?” Sam teases, grinning at John watching Bucky strutting out of the room with a smile of his own. “He’ll be right back, he’s just going to get some water.”

“Ah, so I wasn’t the only one thinking about it,” John comments, letting his attention refocus on Sam.

“Trust me, being with Buck and me? You’ll never be the only one worrying about that, especially in Summer.” He chuckles at the questioning glance John gives him: “I’ve learned the hard way, and even if you’re better, it won’t be by all that much.”

Sam’s hand flies to his waistband before he stops moving and watches John consideringly. “You do have lube ‘round here, right?”

“Yeah,” John rasps, his flexed leg bouncing against the mattress with growing restlessness. “I just got a tube yesterday.”

Sam grins. “Haven’t even broken into it yet, have you?”

He shrugs carelessly, inching closer to the edge of the bed with his left foot resting on the cool floor and his right tucked right under his opposite thigh, lightly slapping Sam’s hand away and replacing it with his own two at the waistband of his pants, leaning forward to lick a stripe up his abdomen with a coy glance, making quick work with his fingers on the other side. Sam sighs at the wet touch and sets his right hand on the side of John’s head, his own digits sinking into his hair to comb through it sweetly.

“ Fuck , you’re pretty,” he praises with an emphatic tug at his hair. “Can’t wait to make those gorgeous blue eyes of yours get all teary and desperate.”

“Have you been thinking about this before now, Wilson?” A nip to his newly uncovered hipbone. “I bet you have.”

“Oh? You believe thinking is all we’ve been doing, do you?” The other man teases, gently nudging his head downwards.

John obeys easily, curving his spine until the bottom of his chin bumps against the hard member, his lips caressing Sam’s sensitive skin the whole way down, nipping lightly here and there. He tilts his head horizontally and rubs his face mostly against Sam’s pubes and the upper side of his cock, making him hiss and tighten his hold on his hair, shorter than he’s had it in months but clearly still long enough for that.

“ John ,” he warns above him, getting bolder and pushing his crotch against the blond’s face, either ignoring the scratch of the beard or appreciating it.

If the way he’s seen him rub at Bucky’s beard sometimes, he’s willing to bet on the latter.

John decides to take pity on him, pushing him a step or two back to make himself space next to the bed and kneel on the floor, tugging his clothes the rest of the way down and helping him out of them, and finally bringing his hands up to guide them into place with one and wrap the other around the gloriously thick erection, giving it a pump, two, attentively listening to Sam moan. He waits for the man to get his bearings back and only then dives in and swallows him down, relaxing his throat as much as he can after three years without practice; John’s already moaning around the dick with just the bulbous head gone past his lips, and Sam growls above him. It’s an encouraging sound if John’s ever heard one, and he starts by slowly bobbing his head up and down, keeping Sam in place with a firm hold on his hips.

“ Fuck ,” Bucky breathes out nearby.

John finds him quickly, leaning suggestively against the frame of the bedroom door, a pair of water bottles dangling from the almost lax fingers of his metal hand while the right one kneads at his bulge through his cotton underwear.

“He feels so good, Buck,” Sam mumbles. “Like you wouldn’t believe.”

Bucky grins, eyes sliding from Sam’s blissed out face all the way down to lock onto John’s eyes. And John knows just how good his sight is, how unforgiving it is of any tiny little details, so he readjusts himself, amends his technique, puts on as much of a show as he can without sacrificing Sam’s pleasure.

“Yeah, I can see that, babe,” the other man ditches the door frame, sauntering towards the bedside table by the window to set the bottles down, the soft thump of his briefs joining the clothes on the chair following soon after. “Lube? I’d hate to have to go out to the car now.”

John lifts his head enough for Sam’s dick to drop out of his mouth, sits back on his haunches and sucks up some much-needed air, tugging roughly at the erection right in front of his face with his hand to mitigate the temptation to go right back to slobbering all over it.

“Closet, top drawer,” he manages out with a noticeably wrecked voice, crawling backwards onto the bed at a single gesture from Sam.

He folds over to get his jeans off but Sam beats him to the punch, kneeling on the mattress between John’s legs and running his hands up his sides towards his armpits and pushing his arms up insistently until John relents and raises them over his head, resting them over the tussled bedding.

Sam takes his time, caressing what feels like every inch of his arms, neck and upper torso with what feels like genuine reverence, kissing the dips of his collarbones, scratching at his ribs, licking the faint scar on his left side from the bullet graze he received in Maine, sinking his teeth into the lower half of his belly button. John arches, pushing up with his head and tailbone against the bed, only to be met by a strong hand, hot like an iron brand on his sternum. John opens his eyes to look up at Bucky’s staring back, crowding into him upside-down, bracing himself with his metal arm and his tags dangling close to his face.

John drops back down and uses the impulse and his arms to lift his upper torso instead to wrap his lips around the tags and incite him into following him downwards. Bucky huffs, eyes gleaming.

“You’re a menace, be grateful you’re also gorgeous,” he teases but goes along either way, brushing his tags out of the way with his hand to replace them with his mouth instead.

He grabs a hold of Bucky and deepens the kiss when Sam starts undoing his pants in earnest, needing to do something with them, with himself, so he won’t lose control of his own damned mind or body. Bucky encourages him to hang on, leading John’s hands around his body, smiling into the kiss because he’s a fucking dumbass and so, so soft. Bucky and Sam have both described Rogers as an overgrown golden retriever to him, but Bucky’s hardly so far from that when his walls come down even just a notch.

“You just stay with me, okay? Nice and relaxed, don’t wanna accidentally knock Sam out because you got just a little too excited,” Bucky murmurs in between pecks to his lips and face, his voice going butter soft and hot like coals as John’s hands keep exploring.

“ Hey .” Sam’s whining goes unacknowledged when John simply snorts: “I’ve had sex with regular people, Bucky. You didn’t think I stayed celibate for two years because I was too afraid to snap my wife in two, did you?”

“Do you really wanna do this?”

John frowns at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, breakups are hard, and you’ve been with Mrs Walker for what, two decades?” Sam glances up at Bucky for a brief moment and continues after whatever gesture the other man gives him: “And we don’t want to be a rebound; we’re serious about this, about you.”

John smiles up at him, tracing his chest with the fingers of one hand. “I’m serious too, I just didn’t think I could have any of this, not after… Everything. And with Liv, we’d been falling apart for a while now, and with the Thunderbolts and Val, and being separated like that, we weren’t going to come back from any of it, I knew that for months, I just wasn’t doing anything about it because I didn’t know exactly what to do yet.”

Sam leans even closer, bending John’s leg with it and pressing down on him. “Are you sure? Sure you want this right now?”

“Is this a consent is sexy kinda moment, now?”

“Maybe. Maybe we should’ve asked before, too,” he grins down at John, closing in. “So?”

John brings him in for another kiss with a steady hand at the nape of his neck. “I want everything you can give me,” another kiss, with just the hint of teeth. “And then everything left after that, too.”

Sam drops his weight on top of John, assuming - correctly - that he can take it without any problem and grinds their hips together enthusiastically, kissing him like his life depends on it. John gives back as much as he takes, tries to press back or flip them over, but for all of his serum enhancements he doesn’t have the leverage to do much of either and is left to hold on for dear life, one hand digging its finger into the meat of a shoulder, the other getting a fistful of ass that makes Sam huffs, amused, and Bucky hums appreciatively from his vantage point.

“Jeans,” he manages to say among desperate gasps, pushing Sam back up and off to get back into it, Bucky taking his place immediately, kissing him like he’s sucking the fucking life out of him, John putting his hands on him without the guidance this time.

“Move up,” Sam directs, hands already on the waistband of his pants but clearly waiting for them to do as he says.

Bucky clambers off the other side of the bed with more speed than any finesse, and John squirms after him, only stopping when the top half of his head pokes past the edge of the mattress, Sam yanking on his clothes as he goes in one fluid motion. The air that hits his crotch and legs is only passably cooler than his own body, but Sam’s mouth on him… He may die of overheating before they make it to the main course.

“Window,” he grunts, throwing his head back to stare at Bucky meaningfully and reach for the goddamned lube on the table, dropping it by the elbow of the man sucking him off hungrily.

Bucky comes back to him without a second to spare, crouching to his level, not kissing him again - yet - but giving him something solid and durable to depend on in this moment of need, nosing at his neck and shoulders, encouraging him quietly.

“Want me to suck you off?” John takes the chance to rasp against his ear when Sam briefly pulls back to breathe and explore his legs.

“Not yet, babe,” Bucky smiles right against his lips. “Right now, I want to see Sam fuck you, and I want to see you take it. And maybe after that I’ll let you suck me, or maybe I’ll just have you myself, we’ll see about that one when we get there.”

“Sounds like a plan.” John kisses him lazily, since he’s already there, focusing on Bucky so he doesn’t start thinking about the way Sam’s handling him - or at least his legs - like a doll.

Sam finds his way back up from his feet and towards his thighs and before John can even remember…

“What happened here?” The tone is less reproachful than he would’ve expected, almost purely worried, and guilty.

John sighs. “Got shot by Ross’ men on my way out. It’s fine, really, the bullet's out, didn’t do any damage, and there’s been no infection.”

He should’ve probably covered it again that day, but the fucking thing’s mostly closed by now either way, some of the scab had even fallen off during the night, and he plans to hog supplies whenever he can. Had been planning to, at least, he’s still not sure who exactly any of his plans are meant to change and evolve with Bucky and Sam there, but that’s for later.

“ John …”

“ Sam . I’m fine, I mean it.”

There’s a loaded beat of silence, but John knows it’s just the two men conversing with looks and signs. Sam doesn’t say anything more about it either way, bending to drop a soft kiss to the pinkish skin around the scarring; it makes John squirm with the uncomfortable certainty that he doesn’t deserve gestures like that.

Not that that lasts either when Sam makes the rest of his way upwards, kissing and nipping at his skin as he goes, his goal obvious.

“Sure you don’t wanna go the other way around?” Sam asks, busying himself with John’s dick and balls.

John has to wait for his eyes to focus properly on him. “Bucky said he -”

“Fuck what Bucky said - no offense, prettyboy -, I’m asking you not him.”

“None taken,” Bucky murmurs with a smile against his neck. “What you want matters too, John.”

“I can fuck either of you guys tomorrow, right?” He questions, perhaps a bit too eagerly, but just see if he fucking cares.

“Damn right, you can,” Sam replies, pushing his legs high and further apart until his knees bump against his ribs, feet up in the air.

At a single gesture, Bucky wraps his hands around the inner crook of John’s knees to keep them in place while John’s own stays firmly on him. It’s a good thing Bucky’s crouching on the floor and John’s always been flexible, or it’d be a lot harder and more disagreeable to keep kissing with the new position.

John inhales sharply through the kissing when Sam gives his perineum something that’s hardly more than a kitten lick, exhales with a punched out chuckle when he gets a bite on the butt cheek, not gone nearly enough to miss the click of the lube’s cap. He breathes in as deeply as he can while still devouring Bucky’s mouth, his arms squeezing the other’s solid chest only to relax as much as possible along with the rest of his body the very next moment, ignoring the small, annoying part of his brain that never stops thinking and suspecting.

Sam seems to have gotten tired of taking things teasingly slow and starts rubbing the slicked pad of his thumb against John’s hole in potentially soothing little circles that unfortunately only make him more eager and apprehensive. At least he has the decency to not make either of them wait any longer and starts pushing into him once the lube’s acceptably warm rather than when John calms further, because then they’d be waiting all afternoon and well into the night, and by then Sam would definitely be tiring out and John would be far too keyed up.

He sighs contentedly into Bucky’s mouth as he feels the digit burrow as deeply as it can into him with very little difficulty, moving in and out for a minute less like thrusting and more like a little caress, like the metronomy swipe of it against the back of his hand, maybe.

The finger retreats and John almost complains, only for his voice to die a pitiful death in his throat when Sam replaces it immediately with his index and middle fingers instead, cool with more lube and less delicate. The first sting of it encourages a long, pleased moan out of him, and when the scissoring begins he starts wishing Bucky wasn’t holding him so firmly and would let him move some more because fuck, he needs more of that. Still, don’t ever let it be said that he doesn’t try, because he does his very best and it gets him a third finger if nothing else.

“Don’t be a brat,” Sam reprimands him when he starts squirming. “Serum or not, we’ve waited long enough and we’re not really planning on holding back on you, especially Buck, not unless you ask us to, and something tells me you won’t. You’ll be thanking me later.”

He’s probably right about all of it, but he forgets to try to snark back when the fingers slide out of him and Bucky breaks away to ask him if he wants him to keep holding his legs up or not. Buck nods at him when he asks for his legs back, however waits for a moment to let Sam place a pillow under John’s lower back. He highly doubts he needs it, but he appreciates the thought and care nonetheless.

“Shit, condoms,” Sam hisses.

John wraps his legs loosely around his midsection, gently tugging him in, eyes drilling into his.

“We’re both clean, so stop overthinking it,” he rasps, grinding against the other man invitingly.

It does the trick, and he smirks and huffs when Sam throws his legs apart again, almost flat against the mattress, and grabs the tube to slick himself up generously, guiding himself with truest aim. They hold their breaths and lock gazes the entire time, seconds turning into minutes turning into eons, hearts sounding like they want to burst out of their chests in the deafening silence, even the rain fading to nothing, until Sam bottoms out and John exhales shakily, eyelids fluttering closed unintentionally, and the spell breaks.

“You’re doing so good, baby,” Bucky starts mumbling onto whatever stretch of skin he’s lavishing, John’s chest, collarbones, arms, neck, temples. “You’re so good for us, aren’t you? Legs wide open but eyes too, huh? Lemme see them, John, lemme see those gorgeous eyes of yours.”

John obeys with some effort, gets a frame or two of Bucky looking like he’s being unmade on top of him, and fails when Sam rolls his hips in a slow, experimental first thrust that has him arching his back and shutting off to anything but the hot, hard cock inside him, gliding in and out perfectly.

“More,” he sighs.

“John -”

“More,” he growls this time, glaring at Sam through slits.

The man listens to him for once and starts moving for real, readjusing his position so he’s keeping himself propped up with his hands framing John’s chest, hiking his knees higher and leaving the blond no choice but to settle his own legs on top of the other’s, or hook them around his torso. John does a bit of both, with his right leg thrown over Sam’s hip, and his left bent and pointing to the side.

Sam starts thrusting, and John starts unraveling, digging his short nails into the skin of Bucky’s shoulder blades, hurtful where the rest of him is left pliant and at the complete mercy of his lovers. It sets his blood in flames and he must lose the plot for a short moment there when Sam nails his prostate - accidentally, he’d think if he could -, because when he comes back to himself he’s back to moaning into Bucky’s unforgiving mouth, and someone’s picked up the pace a little more. His own hips are moving more in tandem with their partners, meeting halfway, encouraging Sam and punishing John with the sweet pleasure-pain of the impact that’s building up in strength and speed.

Sam - who’s gone shockingly, almost worryingly quiet save for the moaning and grunting - grabs his left hip with a hand like a too tight shackle, pulling him a little higher with the help of the pillow and John’s right leg still hooked around him. He adjusts his feet, his legs, his back, his angle , and -

John shouts wordlessly, or simply incoherently, does almost snap despite his best efforts, nearly bites off his own tongue, or Bucky’s, or maybe both, not that he has any time to dwell on it with the way Sam pounds into him, the sound of his pelvis slapping against him obscene at minimum and fast, making his toes curl, his eyes tear up, and his teeth sink into his lower lip until he’s drawing blood.

“Knew you’d fucking love that,” Bucky breathes out with a grin, falling back not to give him space, but to better appreciate the spectacle, one of his hands deserting John entirely to play with his own cock.

He can’t see it, he can’t really see anything below Bucky’s chest without putting the kind of coordination and effort that his body can’t manage right now, not without the risk of losing a single fraction of the intensity Sam’s devoting into his filthy fucking. But what John can do is stop clawing at Bucky’s shoulders and follow the lines of his body downwards with his fingertips, to the general area of his crotch. Bucky, thankfully, takes pity on him when he loses focus at a particularly good thrust, and leads his hands the rest of the way. He just has to touch the burning, rock hard flesh with the side of one finger and he’s already latching on to it a millisecond later, moaning wantonly. He’s hardly sound of mind or anywhere close to coherent, but all he needs is the study of his hands to know that that cock is nice - probably just a little thinner and a little longer than Sam’s - and that he needs it inside him - maybe even at the same time as Sam’s, too.

“ Fuck ,” he growls deliriously, lavishing Bucky’s cock with his hands and Sam’s with his ass, feeling the telltale tug somewhere between his balls and his gut, watching his partners kiss all too sweetly above him, he can’t keep it in, he just can’t. “Fuck, Sam,” he moans, unintentionally distracting him from the kiss.

“What’s it, Goldilocks? What do you need?”

John snorts, and huffs, and moans. “I need you to never call me, ah, that again,” not that he actually expects he’ll listen about that: Sam does whatever Sam wants, he knows from witnessing him tease Bucky in ways not even Shostakov would dare. “I, hngh, I also really need you to come right now, ah.”

Sam drapes himself over John chest to chest, mouth on mouth, John’s right leg losing some of its grip, but his reaction is immediate, almost curling into the man, kissing him back hotly, one of his hands letting go of Bucky to cup the back of his lover’s head gently. He thinks he’s accidentally smearing seminal* fluid on Sam’s short hair, but honestly who the fuck cares, he’s probably done worse with the man’s come and out of his own volition too, and it’s not like they’re going to get away with just a wet towel by now, not to mention what Bucky himself and his own super soldier status have in store for him, or for them.

It doesn’t take them very long from that, it almost takes them embarrassingly little, except it’s got nothing to do with stamina or self control, and everything to do with willingness and intention and reciprocation: he wanted to be touched, and heard, and accepted, and desired, and held, and a thousand more things, and these two men have given him all of that and more in spite of John being John; now he wants to come and Sam isn’t just willing to give him it too, he clearly wants a piece of it himself.

It’s Sweet Dreams by Eurythmics, only he used to believe he understood that song before Sam and Bucky, he thinks in a flash of lucidity before the desperate stuttering of Sam’s damning rhythm sends him over the edge, dragging his lover along with him.

Sam barely catches himself with weak arms when he tips over and lands on top of John, the fronts of their torsos gliding on one another due to the sweat, his right leg dropping entirely. The pressure and the warmth are almost too much for John, his senses overwhelmed, his body overheating, but Bucky - too clever, too knowing Bucky - catches up and rolls the pliant man off of him and to the side, helps him sit up just enough to get some water in him before softly letting him back onto the mattress. John allows himself to get his breathing - and bearings - back for a minute or two, focusing on Bucky’s own easy, relaxed rhythm and the sounds of the rain waning outside, just as the sun begins to drop, the shadows getting longer and cooler.

As soon as he stops feeling like his skin’s going to start melting, or his heart’s going to explode out of his chest, John rolls onto his right flank and curls around Sam, almost to a fetal position, legs bending and hiking up so his knees can rest against a solid set of ribs, his back getting some well-deserved variety from the previous bowing.

“Oh God, you’re a cuddler too, aren’t you?” Sam whines, but his lazy smile and the quickness with which his hand tucks John knees under his arm tells a different story.

“Maybe,” John doesn’t commit, his halfway doomed - he assumes Bucky will take care of that soon enough. “Why?”

“I’d just assume that with all the overheating and shit, you guys wouldn’t be all that much into it, you know? Guess I was wrong, next thing you’ll be telling me you love the desert.”

John’s answering grin makes him groan in frustration. He can reassure him he doesn’t even like anywhere hotter than regular body temp some other time, for now it’s fun to be the one teasing Captain America, just this once.

They lie there, talking about everything and nothing, Bucky watching them serenely from where he’s sitting ass-first on the floor and propped up with his elbow on the mattress, content and encouraging them to sip more water every couple of minutes. It’s nothing short of a trap, lulling him into a sense of peace and safety, leaving him lose-limbed and dazed before Bucky finally makes his next move, maneuvering him onto his back again with a strong touch and a little of Sam’s help.

John easily snaps out of his languid trance when Bucky bites at his lip then sucks on it mid-kiss. Hee’s starting to think he may never recover back from this, and the burning glare Bucky gives him as he waits for Sam to roll off of bed and make himself comfortable on the chair with the remains of their first water bottle only fuels John’s suspicions.

“We can stop now if you’re too tired for it,” Bucky offers him an easy way out.

John snorts. “Bucky, I want you to fuck me, not with me. We both know exhaustion for us is as close to optional as it can get for a human being.”

“Alright, fine,” he rolls his eyes. “What’s your refractory period like?”

“ What refractory period?”

Bucky kisses him again at the sound of that and grins through the whole thing, it’s annoying in the best way and John can’t get enough of it.

“Scoot closer to the middle.”

John does as told, slithering towards the opposite edge of the bed under Bucky’s appraising stare, waiting for him to say it’s enough and trying not to lose focus at the sight of his cock when his lover stands up in all his naked glory. He’s stuck between wanting to get used to this feeling because it becomes a common, everyday life sort of thing, something he can have whenever they want it; and hoping he never takes it for granted in spite of habit, to be able to always feel awed by these two men even after years or decades together.

Bucky doesn’t say anything, doesn’t warn, lead or ask him, simply crowds on John with his right knee on the mattress next to his head and his hand by his hip, his left leg stretched out and standing on the wood floor, cock hanging nice and heavy and pointing towards his face. John doesn’t even wait for the other man to be fully steady and takes the forbidden fruit being offered to him so nicely.

“Fuck,” Bucky yelps, clearly still bracing for it and metal hand landing on his thigh with a slap.

Sam snorts nearby. “Told you.”

“Shut up, Sam,” the brunette wheezes out then groans deeply when John sucks viciously, not giving him room to do anything but focus on him.

Bucky drops further, grabbing his left leg with his hand and bringing it closer to him, knee bending easily under his touch, until he can tilt his head and lick over the line of the scare left behind by the graze he got by his calf in Maine. John shudders and moans around the heavy cock in his mouth, creating a sensorial feedback loop he’s all too proud of except Bucky breaks it too fucking quickly.

“Sorry, sorry,” Bucky mutters at John’s disappointed sigh. “You can suck me off later, super soldier, right? But I’ve waited too long and you’re driving me crazy here.”

The man apologizes further with a filthy kiss on the mouth, pulling back again and wrangling him until he’s spread out on his stomach, breathless at the casual display of strength once more.

“Don’t get too comfortable just yet,” Bucky comments lightly, making his way behind him, rustling the bedding looking for the lube. “Be a good boy and get on all fours.”

John groans but obeys without complaining, listening for the sound of the cap coming off once more and smiling dumbly at Sam when he drags his chair before him.

“I think you had a better view by the corner.”

Sam shrugs, leaning forward with his elbows resting on the tops of his thighs and reaching for John’s hands with his own.

“I’m mostly here to give you some additional support, anyways.”

“Additional support?” John asks apprehensively. “What are you -”

While Sam had made his every move deliberately slow and crystal clear to him earlier, he’s not only lost the advantage of having eyes on Bucky in this position, but Bucky himself gives him no warning whatsoever, grabs his hip with a metallic hand and penetrates him in one fell swoop, almost enough to bottom out, cutting John off and turning his words into a long, low growl, hands spasming where Sam’s keeping them secure between his.

“Sorry, he likes doing that.”

Bucky doesn’t seem to have anything to say back at that, hardly a surprise with the way he’s whining like a wounded dog and supporting himself up with his hands on John’s hips, holding on for dear life himself now. How the tables have turned, huh?

“No need to, ah, apologize,” John manages, already trying his best to move his hips and coax Bucky back to work.

It works too well, because Bucky starts immediately fucking him with abandon, no mercy and certainly no build up, just the fast, steady, brutal slap of skin against skin and his insides feeling like they’re on fire. There’s no way he’s keeping his voice, or his sanity, by the time these two are done with him.

“Look at me, John,” Sam at least doesn’t seem to mind the mindless screaming and thrashing, gently tugging his hair out of his face with one hand and watching him like he’s the most beautiful thing on planet Earth and not broken shell and a murderer, equally too naive and self-assured for anyone’s sake.

“We’re right here,” Sam mutters reassuringly, kissing him so softly John almost starts sobbing. “We’re here with you, we’re not going anywhere, you couldn’t get rid of us if you tried.”

And John wants to believe it, he wants to believe it so badly, the fire they put in him the kind that shouldn’t be allowed to burn to cinders, but God, he used to believe the same about Lemar, and Liv, and Val.

“John, we’re not going to leave you.”

The tears start blurring his vision, Bucky’s pace picking up, but he keeps his eyes on Sam, who is gorgeous, and good, and so, so human.

“Let go,” Sam commands.

And let go John does.

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