Chapter Text
Caught in a tempest of rage, panic, and abject fear, Sam came to an abrupt stop outside the safehouse, realizing he didn’t have a plan. After receiving Rhodey’s coordinates, he’d acted on adrenaline alone, too addled with anxious thoughts in his frenetic rush to get to Bucky to consider what came next. Now perched on the steps of the non-descript, blue-sided building, he had to admit a plan would probably be useful.
Yeah, only what I’ve been saying all along. Now you listen. Bucky’s snarky voice chose that moment to intrude. After showing up, clearly without a plan.
You’re the one who said come alone, Sam argued right back. He really needed to stop these internal conversations when Bucky was gone, but they provided him with an odd sense of comfort. Though Bucky had said to come alone, now…now that felt questionable…a little idiotic. He knew Bucky would never send him into a dangerous situation without all the facts, but if that phone call was any indication, Bucky wasn’t operating on full cognitive ability. Shit, he should’ve had Joaquin suit up and hover near the premises at least.
Now, what the fuck, what?
Did he knock? Sneak in? Come barreling through in his stealth suit, armed with the shield and good intentions? He knew Walker was inside, Belova too. What about wildcards like Taskmaster, Ghost, and Red Guardian? Getting to Bucky meant getting through Walker and possibly the others. Sam suppressed a shiver at the thought of Taskmaster coming at him getting her mimic on. Just…no. That was some freaky shit, right there. But fuck it, none of them were keeping him from Bucky.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to stew over it long, the door swinging open to reveal Yelena Belova, smirking as she gave him a slightly judgey, mostly unimpressed onceover. “Captain America Sam Wilson. This should surprise me, and yet somehow it does not.”
“Belova.” He kept his tone blunt, leaving no room for argument. Yelena had followed Bucky back to Delacroix so many times that Sarah now stocked her favorite hot sauce in the fridge. He had a hard time believing she was holding Bucky against his will, but Sam had also been around long enough to know the mission came first. Even Bucky, after declaring he was hurt in one breath, had refused to compromise the mission in the next. “I know Walker has Bucky. I’m not leaving here without him.”
Yelena stared at him for a long moment, her expression unreadable before she finally guffawed. “You are so funny Sam Wilson. Come in.” She stepped aside as she imitated him under her breath. “I am not leaving here without him. Oh, you crack me up, you really do.”
Sam carefully entered, his gaze flitting around in search of the catch. Though he’d been counting on her as an ally, that was still surprisingly easy.
“Where is Walker keeping Bucky?”
“Why do you keep saying this like it’s a problem? Do you not want him kept, when he is in grave need of the keeping? And how are you here? You should not be here.”
Sam widened his stance, crossing his arms over his chest as he searched her expression. Her lack of a reaction helped lower his anxious energy. Whatever the mission–whatever the Thunderbolts were covering up–if Bucky was at death’s door, Yelena would care enough to show it. “Bucky called me. I know about the neurotoxin. I know…I know he’s hurt. You won’t keep me from him.”
“Nobody wants to keep you from him-” she started, only to be interrupted by the boisterous voice of John Walker as he bounded down the stairs.
“No! No, no, NO-”
“Must you be so loud, all of the time? It is like you walk around with one of those…what are they…the things that are at the games?””
“Air horn,” Walker deadpanned as he came to a full stop at the foot of the stairs, taking up as much space as possible to prevent Sam from getting around him.
“Bullhorn,” Sam tried at the same time. He glowered. Why was he joining this conversation? He needed to get to Bucky. These two were in his fucking way, not even caring their teammate needed him.
“Whatever,” Yelena said with a wave. “Stop being this loud. If Barnes hears you yell at Sam Wilson, he will attempt to tear your vocal cords out. And you know the doctor said to keep him calm.”
“Did you call him?” Accusing blue eyes raked over Yelena. “I told everybody no phones!”
“How cute it is that you think you’re in charge,” Yelena sniffed even as she shrugged. “Of course I did not call him. Do you think I want to deal with his hysterics on top of Smolders’?”
Hysterics? Sam stiffened in affront at the casual assessment. He was behaving in a perfectly reasonable, logical manner and would continue to do so as long as they didn’t make the mistake of trying to keep him from Bucky. Walker swung toward him, puffing his chest out, clearly looking for a fight. “Who called you?”
“Technically you did, Asshole.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Check your phone. Oh, that’s right. You can’t, can you?”
“The call is coming from inside the house,” Yelena mocked with a sarcastic snort as Walker patted his pockets in desperate search of his phone.
“Barnes stole my fucking phone?! I’m gonna kill him-”
“You’re not touching him!” Sam growled, ready to pounce.
“Why are you here?” Walker continued, unaffected. He turned to Yelena. “Why is he here?”
“I can only assume Smolder called you with the dire results of his diagnosis?” Yelena asked Sam in resignation.
“I know he got hit with something. That…that he’s in pain and the doctor said…” Sam swallowed hard, the words lodging painfully in his throat. He forced them forward, his gut clenching in misery. “The doctor said there was nothing you could do but keep him comfortable, until…until the end?”
“Fuck super soldiers with super hearing,” Yelena barked, glaring at the only super soldier in the room. “It is so annoying how you have to hear everything.”
“Believe me there are things we don’t want to hear, like you singing in the effing shower-”
“I do not sing in the shower. But if I did, it would be stunning.”
Sam’s face swiveled between the two and their antagonistic squabbling. He didn’t have time for this shit. “Where is he? Now.”
“You’re not-”
Sam clenched his hands into fists to keep from stabbing them in Walker’s chest. “Fuck around an’ find out,” he seethed. “If you don’t want my footprint on your face, I’d suggest you move.”
“Oh, all right then, Captain America, if that’s how you want this to go-”
“Walker, I swear to…stop being an idiot,” Yelena interrupted with a long-suffering eye roll. Her face scrunched with sympathy as she turned toward Sam. “The gas was airborne. The doctor said those things about keeping him comfortable because they are true. This is our only recourse.”
Sam’s heart plummeted in agony. “Yeah, well, I don’t accept that there’s nothing we can do. There is something. And I’m gonna find it. We just need to find different doctors. Get him to-”
“Sam, the end in this case is the toxin wearing off.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“The toxin will wear off and then tada, all is good again. That is all. We literally went through this same scenario two weeks ago with Walker. It’s this weird gas that is dangerous to the unenhanced but for super soldiers it just…it just seems to make them loopy.”
“Barnes’ serum is different from mine–of course– but he seems to be reacting in the same way, so there’s little reason to think his recovery time will be any different,” Walker interjected with a grudging mumble.
Sam blinked. Surely, he wasn’t hearing them correctly. “Wait. Come again?”
Yelena took the lead. “It is like he is drunk. The way he would act if he was drunk is how he is acting now. For John, it was just a lot of crying and yelling. It was embarrassing.”
“I did not-”
“Please. You sobbed because there were mushrooms on your pizza-”
“I’m allergic!”
“You have the serum!”
“Bucky sounded like he was dying,” Sam bit out, recalling how his friend alternated between distress and levity.
“Yes, well, it does seem to cause bouts of catastrophic type thinking in the middle of the trippiness. And if he overheard what the doctor said, he might have assumed the worst, this is true. But he will be fine. And he is fine. He will sleep this off and be right as the rain in the morning. Walker didn’t even remember anything the next day. Like how he-”
“Is he all right?” Sam interrupted, giving zero fucks for wherever that was going.
Walker studied him, finally blowing out a breath. “Peachy, actually. He’s up there dancing with Starr, right now.”
Sam squinted as he strained to hear, just able to pick up the sounds of music coming from somewhere upstairs. Bucky…Bucky was up there? Dancing with Ava Starr? His jaw tightened as an altogether different emotion churned in the pit of his belly. He wasn’t even gonna attempt to name it.
“He took the hit for Ava,” Yelena explained off-handedly. “She now feels obligated.”
Whatever. He didn’t care.
“He’s acting like he’s back in the damn 40s. It’s weird. I don’t like it,” Walker huffed.
“You’re telling me I rushed out of an important meeting I’ve been trying to make happen for months, called in favors I don’t have to find this safe house, and Bucky is up there dancing because for all intents and purposes, he’s freakin’ tipsy?” Sam might actually murder Bucky–it could happen. He really, really didn’t want to be around when Rhodey realized he’d called in an emergency favor for this.
“Yes.” Yelena returned blandly. She arched her eyebrows in challenge. “But the real question is, now that you know these things, would you change anything?”
“Yes,” he huffed back, but it was a lie. He knew it was a lie. Yelena knew it was a lie. Walker…well, Walker was fairly clueless. So, there was that.
But yeah, there was no way Sam wouldn’t come if Bucky said he needed him, no matter the circumstances.
“Well, you can just go on back to your little meeting ‘cause you aren’t seeing Barnes,” Walker blustered.
And really, fuck that shit. Sam took a menacing step forward. “Who’s gonna stop me exactly?”
“Let him see his partner,” Yelena argued.
“Bucky. Is. Compromised, Ya-lay-nah.” Walker enunciated each syllable of her name because he was an asshole like that. “Sam can’t be near him when he’s vulnerable. What if he gives entail?”
“This may come as a shock, but I don’t really give a shit what you and the rest of the Scooby Gang is up to in the capital,” Sam replied. Which okay–lie–but really, Bucky came first. “I’m not gonna pump him for information. And even if I tried, he’s as secure as The Raft–he ain’t giving shit up.”
“Do you know how many people have escaped from there?” Walker countered.
“Hey! Didn’t you escape from there?” Yelena asked Sam.
“That’s not the point-”
“Didn’t you break Helmut Zemo out of there?” Walker continued.
“Hey! I had nothing to do with that-”
“The one that dresses like the ant. He broke out of there, yes? This argument, it is not sound Sam Wilson-”
“Just let me see Bucky.”
“You don’t have clearance to be here,” Walker sneered.
Walker’s condescending scorn officially pushed Sam past his limit. “I have clearance to be wherever the hell I wanna be, Bitch. I’m Captain America and I outrank your ass. So, get out my way, before I make you get out my way.”
“Well, that took a turn,” Yelena interjected dryly. “Really John, stand down. You won’t win this one. No one who tries to separate them will. Besides, we let you see your wife when you were hit.”
“That’s not the same thing!”
“Isn’t it though?” Yelena smirked. Sam frowned, not exactly sure what she meant by that. He didn’t question it though, because Yelena proceeded to shove past Walker, who just threw his hands up and let her. Sam wasn’t about to do anything that would hamper his progress in Bucky’s direction.
“Fine, but you get to tell Val if Barnes compromises the whole thing because he’s making cow eyes at Wilson. I’m going home to Olivia. You and Starr can handle this.”
“Which is what I suggested the minute we left the hospital,” Yelena grumbled all the way up the stairs, calling Walker more than one choice name while she was at it.
“So lemme get this all straight,” Sam murmured. “This team was involved in a top-secret mission in DC where someone unloaded a toxic gas that turned Bucky flirty but might have killed you or any civilian who might have come in contact with it?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“And this has happened more than once?”
“Yes.”
“And I can’t know anything about it?”
“That is why words like top and secret are used, yes.”
Sam nodded, following her down the hall as they moved toward the music. “Full disclosure, Belova. Bucky is my friend, and Natasha was your sister.” He owed it to Nat to look after Yelena. He intuitively knew she’d want that from him more than anything else. Whatever bullshit scenarios Ross was dragging them into, Sam wanted them out. “I’m getting y’all off this damn team if it’s the last thing I do.”
Yelena’s face moved from surprise to tentative delight, then a small frown took over. “Wait, can we bring Ava, too?”
Sam stewed a little at that though he didn’t show it. “Possibly,” he groused. That was all he was willing to commit to with Bucky taking hits for the woman and currently twirling her around a bedroom. They stopped outside the room just in time for Ava to phase through the door and land in front of them.
Shit! Sam was never getting used to that. His heart inexplicably sank as he took in her pensive features. She was…well, she was stunning. And normally he would appreciate that, but today, right this second? He didn’t. “I am glad you’re here,” she said with a relieved sigh. “Both of you. I have danced with him four times and I can’t do it anymore.” She glanced at them expectantly.
Yelena gave an exaggerated shiver. “Oh no. No, no. I’m not dancing with him. That would be too weird. Very disturbing.”
“I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about him.” Ava pointed at Sam very…well pointedly.
“Me?”
“Yes, you. He said he was saving some 90’s song for when you showed up. And now you’ve shown up. Have at it.”
“What song?” Yelena asked curiously.
“Rush, Rush by Paula Abdul?” Ava answered. Sam had a lightbulb moment. Bucky’s strange comments on the phone suddenly made a lot more sense now that Sam knew he was referring to a song. One apparently, he really liked. Huh. Barnes liked cheesy, romantic bops. Somehow that wasn’t as surprising as it should have been. “I have no idea what that is. I don’t want to know.” She turned to Sam. “Bucky said you put it on a playlist of essential music he missed through the years?”
“Really?” Yelena crossed her arms over her chest as she leveled a look at Sam that was 100 percent judgey. “This is considered essential music?”
How the hell did she even know that song? Was she even born yet? “I was giving him variety,” Sam argued defensively.
“Well now you can give him a dance,” Ava countered as she side-stepped right past him and down the stairs. “We are never speaking of this again.”
Yelena reached for the knob and started turning. “Well, it is good you are here then. You can take one for the team!”
“Ya’ll ain’t even my team,” Sam retorted as Yelena gave him a hearty shove into the room. She shut the door, leaving him alone with Bucky.