Chapter Text
Bucky really hated magic. He had always hated magic, ever since the first time he'd been forced to believe in it, back in the trenches in occupied France.
He hated it even more now.
A beautiful white swan was standing where Steve should have been, and Enchantress was fucking giggling like the asshole she was.
"You're so much prettier this way," she crooned, reaching out to pet the swan.
Bucky would have felt bad for her, if she wasn't such an asshole. But as it was, he kinda enjoyed watching the way her face went from smug and superior to terrified and appalled.
The swan rose up and punched Enchantress in the face, with both wings, and proceeded to hiss and spit and claw at her, showing every bit of Steve's usual idiotic fury.
"How is he doing that?" Clint asked. "He's so little, he shouldn't be able--"
"Believe me, bein' little never once slowed that fucker down," Bucky said, before jumping over the edge of the rooftop they'd been sharing.
"Huh. That, uh, that's happening," Tony said over the comms. "I can't get a shot. Anyone want to jump in there with Sir Bites-a-Lot?"
Wanda scoffed. "And get in his way? Thank you, no."
"Why did she think a swan was a good idea? Swans are evil," said Sam. "Swans are directly descended from Satan. Why would--"
Bucky yanked out his earpiece. It had been a long time since he'd fought beside a tiny rage monster, and he needed to focus.
Swan-Steve twisted around to one side, and Bucky waded into the fight without hesitation, taking a swing at Enchantress and not thinking about which side Steve's bad ear used to be on, so many years ago.
He scooped up Steve's shield and blocked a tendril of green light from reaching the swan, hoping desperately that he hadn't kept her from reversing the goddamn spell. Swan-Steve darted under and pecked at Enchantress's knees, making her shriek and dance back.
They fought the way they always fought, side by side, more worried about each other's safety than their own. All too soon there was a flash of bright green, and Enchantress was gone.
Steve was a swan. Steve was a fucking swan, which was so much worse than when he'd gotten himself turned into a bulky super-soldier. At least then he'd kept his blue eyes and his long fingers and his stupid deep voice, telling lies about how it only hurt a little and making Bucky's chest ache the way he always did.
Bucky held his hand out. Steve nudged it with his head, then huffed and curled into a feathery ball, glaring around at everyone. So at least his attitude was still intact. Bucky joined him in glaring around.
Wanda was biting her lip and shaking her head. Tony had flipped up his visor and was frowning deeply.
"C'mon," Bucky said, with a nonchalance he did not feel. "Let's get you to the lab so they can fix you up."
He scooped the swan into his arms and started walking. Steve would get back to normal, somehow. He was too damned stubborn not to, and the alternative was not worth thinking about.
In the end, it just wore off. For three hours they poked him and scanned him and muttered to each other, even bringing Bruce in to mutter with them, but at 7:08 PM the swan glowed white and Steve appeared in its place, all two hundred and twelve angry pounds of him.
Bucky heaved a silent sigh of relief at the way those blue eyes flashed and that square jaw clenched, and he punched Steve in the shoulder before any shouting happened.
"Welcome back, dumbass. You learn anything about going hand-to-hand against a fucking magic-user?"
"Yeah, next time I'll hit her sooner," Steve shot back, and he was exactly stupid enough to punch Bucky's metal shoulder, probably on purpose. The old familiar ache in Bucky's chest roared up fiercer than ever.
"You need to eat. It's been a long goddamn day." Bucky slung his arm around Steve's shoulders and dragged him toward the elevator, while Tony squawked about tests and waiting and 'just one fucking minute Winter Buzzkill!'
The elevator doors closed, and Steve muttered, "Glad that's over."
Bucky winced. He hated magic, and he didn't begin to trust that it was really over. But all he said was, "Yeah pal, me too."
Clint supposed he'd done his fair share of weird stuff. He'd fought actual literal space aliens. He'd made his own exploding arrows, which he didn't find all that weird, but Natasha had assured him it was. He'd been coated in glittery slime one time, in a fight with a gross plant monster thing. So maybe he should be used to weird stuff, or have a higher standard for weirdness.
Taking a dog on the elevator still seemed weird, though.
He did it twice a day, because he wasn't a masochist, no matter what his dating history might say, so he wasn't going to take the stairs. It just seemed weird twice a day.
Anyway, he thought, holding open the door so Lucky could go out in front of him, a dog had to do what a dog had to do. There weren't any grassy places inside for Lucky to go on.
Maybe he could convince Tony to plant some grass in the hallway.
He let Lucky lead the way around the block, wondering if he could get Natasha to push Tony in the right direction. Maybe he'd even make a robot to scoop up the mess, and another one to mow, and...
"Dude, get your nose outta the grate, there's nothing in there for you."
Lucky shot Clint a skeptical look and went back to sniffing and pawing at the storm drain.
Well, Lucky was the expert here. What did Clint know about sniffing storm drains?
He stepped back to get a better look and--
"Kitten!"
That finally earned him a tail wag from Lucky, and a baleful glare from the kitten, who was clinging desperately to a ledge down inside the drain.
Arrows with safety nets. He knew he'd find a use for them one day, dammit, he never should have let Sam talk him out of making them. Instead the only option he had was to pull his belt off, lower the end of it through the grill and hope that the kitten would eventually figure out how to climb.
He shouldn't have worried. The kitten dove recklessly for the belt as soon as it was in range and shimmied up with no coaxing at all, right into Clint's hand.
It was tiny and soaked and it gave a rusty meow as Lucky nuzzled at it a bit, and Clint's heart grew three sizes just watching how gentle Lucky was.
The kitten turned around and gave a low growl at Clint, with its face all scrunched up like it was giving orders, and Clint chuckled. It just looked so ridiculous, with its filthy orange and white fur sticking up in corkscrews all over. He reluctantly lowered it down to the sidewalk to set it free, but Lucky nudged it to keep it in place, not that it had made any move to leave.
"Huh. You think we should take it home? At least let it warm up a little?"
Lucky fixed his eye solemnly on Clint and nudged the kitten again.
"Right."
It turned out that riding on an elevator with a dog and the dog's kitten was even weirder than with just a dog.
He got up to the common area, figuring it was as good a place as any to give the kitten a bath.
Sam smiled at him from one of the couches. " Hey man how [...] Lucky? What's [...] jacket?"
"Shit, hang on." Clint dug his hearing aids out of his pocket and hooked them on. "What was that?"
"Clint. You either need to go see a real doctor immediately, or you’ve got something small, wet, and furry inside your hoodie."
"It’s a kitten," Clint said, opening his zipper a little to give Sam a better look. "Lucky fished him out of a storm drain. I guess he decided he needed a pet of his own."
"You sure you want to keep him, man? He looks kind of mad, maybe he has rabies," Sam said, as the kitten turned its glare of doom on him.
Actually, Clint hadn't been sure, until he found himself saying, "His name is Fluffernutter, and I’m not keeping him, Lucky is."
Sam held his hand up for a fistbump. "My man! The best of all sandwiches!"
"I know! C'mon, help me give him a bath."
Half an hour later, they were both bleeding from various scratches and covered in soap, and Clint was starting to regret putting his aids in.
Fluffernutter was clean (and angry) and wouldn't stop meowing (angrily) at everybody and everything. He even meowed (angrily) at Friday, who was just a disembodied voice offering them pizza, which is the best possible kind of disembodied voice.
The poor kitten never purred. Not once. Not even when it curled into a ball on Lucky's back and rested for an entire minute before it started meowing again. (Angrily.)
“Shouldn’t it be,” Clint trailed off, gesturing in the air vaguely. “I don’t know, doing cat things? Grooming its fur?”
“Not trying to murder us? I don’t know man, maybe he really does have rabies,” Sam said.
Barnes stalked into the room, looking murderous as usual, and saying, "Is the pizza--" He froze, eyes wide. "A kitten! Holy cow, it's adorable!"
He reached out for Fluffernutter before Clint got the chance to warn him, and Fluffernutter...
Fluffernutter climbed up the Winter Soldier's arm and started to purr. He made a sound like a hiccup, meowed in Barnes' face, and purred some more.
Barnes cupped the kitten in his metal hand and stroked it between the ears with the other. Fluffernutter wrapped both paws around his thumb and bit him, then let go and meowed pitifully, and started purring again.
"Oh naturally it likes you," Sam said, "The two of you can bond over your murderous tendencies."
"Where did you find him?" Barnes asked quietly, staring at the kitten.
"Storm drain down the block."
Barnes muttered something that sounded like 'Of course' and sat carefully on the couch, holding Fluffernutter against his chest.
This was definitely going on the list of weird. Half-cyborg ex-assassin cuddling an angry kitten? Definitely weird.
Sweet though. Barnes was even more gentle with Fluffernutter than Lucky was, and it was far more surprising. Maybe he needed a kitten of his own. Maybe--
"Hey," said Bruce, breezing into the room in as relaxed a way as he did anything, which wasn't very relaxed at all. "Is the food here yet?"
Clint missed most of Bruce's explanation about doing experiments and missing lunch.
Fluffernutter was green.
As soon as Bruce entered the room, Fluffernutter had turned green. Not big and green but-- "Green."
Bruce frowned at Clint, then followed his line of sight to Fluffernutter, who was fucking green and shimmering. "Holy shit, it's a raycat."
"Don't be ridiculous," Tony announced as he came in the room. He always sounded like he was making an announcement. "Raycats were just a thought experiment, they never actually existe...holy shit it's a raycat!"
A bright blue whorl appeared on Fluffernutter's bright green fur as Tony crowded closer, and when Tony reached out for it, the kitten scrambled up onto Barnes' head and started hissing furiously.
That didn't slow Tony down at all, he just reached out further, until Barnes also started hissing furiously, which was both terrifying and effective. Tony backed up a step, blinking in surprise.
"Okay, I'm gonna go...somewhere that isn't here." Bruce slowly backed away until Fluffernutter turned orange and white again, but still with the blue swirl.
Clint sighed, because he knew there was only one way this wouldn't end in a disaster. "So, what is a raycat?"
Tony flapped his hand and didn't look away from Fluffernutter.
"Oh, it's from Star Trek," Sam said, shooting Clint a meaningful look and cementing his reputation as the world's best wingman.
Tony could resist giving an explanation, but he couldn't resist correcting someone. He turned and said, "No it isn't."
Sam wandered toward the kitchen area, saying over his shoulder, "Yeah, from that one movie with Baze and Chirrut."
Tony chased after him. "That's Star Wars, not Star Trek! And there are no raycats in it, either! Raycats are a way to warn about radiation when there's no common language. The idea was developed [...]"
Clint pulled out his aids and tucked them in his pocket.
Barnes slowly worked on extracting tiny needle claws from his scalp. Clint tried to help, but it only made Fluffernutter start hissing again, so he sat back and watched instead.
"Hey pal you [...] let go [...] brain surgery [...] little punk"
It took five minutes and a lot of gentle coaxing, but Barnes finally got Fluffernutter secured safely against his chest, with the metal hand, which was a lot less biteable than the other one.
With Stark far enough away, it was safe for Clint to put his aids back in. He kept his voice low and said, "I'm going to tell all the tabloids that Winter Soldier kidnapped my dog's kitten."
"Pretty sure he kidnapped me," Barnes said, with a crooked little smile Clint had never seen on him before. "He's a troublemaker."
"Yeah, whatever, kitten-thief. Look at poor Lucky, he's heartbroken."
Lucky was lying on the floor with his head on his paws, his eye fixed intently on the doorway to the kitchen, waiting for someone to bring him pizza.
Barnes twitched his shoulders in a silent laugh. "He does look pretty devastated. I'll try to find a way to make it up to him."
Clint nodded.
"--But the whole thing depends on developing a mythos around the raycats so that--"
Sam interrupted Tony as they came back in, because it was the only way to ever talk when Tony was around, and said, "Really? You don't figure people would just see a cat's fur turn all neon and realize that something freaky was going on?"
"Sure, but we want them to associate it with the radiation, not with the cat," Tony said.
The blue swirl on Fluffernutter's fur came back, and Tony stared at it and absentmindedly handed Clint the slice of pizza he'd been eating.
Clint took a bite. Around the mouthful, he said, "Is today Wednesday?"
"It's Saturday," Tony muttered, still staring. "How could that possibly be relevant?"
"I was just thinking, Weird Wednesday. It sounded like a thing. Are you sure it's--"
"I need to run some tests on it, Barnes. Come on, just four."
Barnes gave his full murderglare. "No. He's not an experiment."
"We need to at least scan it to make sure it's not dangerous. Three tests, and I'll stop asking for the rest of the day."
"He's not dangerous. He's..." Barnes looked down at the kitten, and they held each other's eyes for a long moment. "Tomorrow. Two tests, and you can't hurt him, and you can't start until tomorrow."
"But--"
"No buts."
"Christ, fine. Two scans, no hurting. Which, by the way, fuck you for implying I would." Tony crossed his arms over his chest, and seemed genuinely hurt.
"I..." Barnes closed his eyes and sighed. "I know you wouldn't, not on purpose. We'll talk about it tomorrow. He needs today to get settled in."
Tony huffed and turned to Clint with his hand out. He blinked in dismay. "You ate my pizza?"
"You gave Clint pizza and expected him to do what, exactly?" Bruce said from the doorway.
"I'd already taken three bites. Next time I want to be aware that I've made it to first base."
Clint shrugged. "Hey, it was good for me."
"Of course it was, I'm excellent. Come over here."
Warily, Clint followed along to the farthest corner of the room. "You weren't planning to make out, right? 'Cause there were anchovies--"
"Is the blue still there?"
"Blue, what..." Clint turned around to see Tony squinting at Barnes and Fluffernutter. "Ah. No."
Tony signaled at Bruce, who sighed and stepped further into the room.
"Oh come on," Barnes said, scowling at Tony as Fluffernutter went green all over.
"I'm not experimenting, I'm just observing."
That turned out to be a lie, of course. Bruce went back to the kitchen, but Tony dragged Clint all over the room, muttering about Geiger counters and lumens and whatever shit floated through his oversized brain while Barnes and Fluffernutter gave matching glares.
Sam quietly ate his pizza, and fell back down the ranks of wingmen by not bringing any to Clint.
Finally, Barnes gave up scowling and dragged a blanket over to cover himself and the kitten, while staring pointedly at Tony.
"That's just childish," Tony pouted.
"Us elderly folks gotta get our kicks somewhere."
"I wasn't even doing anything!"
"You were turning him blue. You have no idea what it might be doing to him."
"Best way to know that is to let me--"
"You're not fucking scanning him!"
"If you would just--"
Tendrils of deep green rose up from under the blanket.
"Shit!" Barnes pulled off the blanket and made to get up, but he was too late.
Barnes had a lapful of Steve.
Steve.
Curled up on Barnes' lap.
"Aww, Fluffernutter."
Steve glared at Clint, and really, his glare was exactly the same as when he was a kitten, Clint should have recognized it sooner.
Sam threw his hands up. "Okay, are we sure it's not Wednesday?"
Steve apologized for scratching Clint and Sam, even though he still felt justified, since they'd dunked him in soapy water, and he apologized to Lucky for not being a kitten, even though Lucky didn't seem to care at all.
He didn't apologize to Tony, who had taken one look at him, turned to Bucky and said, "You asshole! You knew! That's why you wouldn't let me scan him."
Steve wanted to hiss at him all over again, which was a very odd thing to want.
Bucky shrugged everything off and called Wanda.
After she came up and heard the whole story, she gently patted Steve's shoulder. "Do you remember any of it?"
Did he remember finally getting a taste of what he'd always wanted most in the world?
Being safe in Bucky's arms. Being wrapped in his scent. Feeling his voice rumble through his chest.
It wasn't a sex thing. Steve would know, he had a lifetime's worth of dirty thoughts about Bucky to compare it to. But hell if he wouldn't give up kissing for the rest of eternity if it meant being held like that again.
"Uh, yeah, I remember, it's just a little--"
"Fuzzy?" Tony supplied cheerfully.
Steve gritted his teeth. "Hazy."
"Does he even need to be here?" Bucky asked Wanda.
Before she could answer, Tony said, "Hey, I'm the tech expert who might have a chance at fixing the Swan Prince. Why are you here?"
"Because I asked him to be," Steve lied. He didn't need to ask Bucky for things like that.
Bucky had a perfect poker face. He didn't react at all to Steve's story, he just sneered at Tony, "So how are you planning to fix it, Geek Squad?"
"If you had let me scan him--"
"Stop."
Wanda hadn't raised her voice, but everyone immediately went silent. Steve might envy that, except he knew a little about the burdens of power, and her power was immeasurable.
She looked between Steve and Bucky, then at Tony, then back to Steve, then Bucky again. Her eyes narrowed. "The spell is not active now. We can only wait until dawn and see if Steve will change again. If he does, I can change him back, but there's nothing more I can do until then. Tony, we should set up a space in the medical wing, so your scanners will be ready..."
She led the way out of the room, leaving Steve and Bucky in blessed quiet.
The marathon was coming up in a month. Rhodey was almost guaranteed to beat his best time this year, but that was no excuse for slacking off.
He pushed himself harder, chasing the burn, chasing the pain, needing every bit of it he could find, now that only half of him could feel.
Well damn, that was one of those thoughts he should mention in his next therapy session.
He coasted to a stop at the side of the path and dug out his water bottle. There was some kind of commotion on the bridge up ahead, he might as well drink before he tried to thread his chair through the crowd. Hopefully without crushing any toes. This time.
The sweat on his back and chest chilled rapidly in the March air, leaving him just this side of miserable. His internal thermostat didn't work any better than his legs did anymore, and he couldn't contain the shiver that rolled through him.
He had 12 miles left to go. He tossed his empty bottle in a recycle bin and pushed on, into the crowd.
"--alligators in New York, morons."
"Yeah, no aliens either. Ohhhh waaaait."
"So now it's a space alligator?"
"I'm just saying..."
The teen girls were too far away to hear any more, but Rhodey had heard enough already.
Tony had spent half the night chattering happily about Captain Rogers being a raycat yesterday, and a swan the day before. It was probably just a weird shadow in the water, but--
Fuck.
Shadows aren't bright white and perfectly alligator shaped.
He wasn't convinced, he wasn't sure at all, but if there was any chance that it was Rogers...
He gritted his teeth and hit the 'alert' button that his asshole of a best friend had installed in his chair, then dove into the pond.
See, this was why he'd gone Air Force and not Navy. The water was fucking awful.
Diving down to the alligator went fine, except for how it was an actual alligator, in a duckpond, in Manhattan, in March.
He really should have practiced swimming with one hand, though. It was exactly as hard as it sounded, which was to say, nearly impossible. If he survived this, he planned to spend more time in Tony's pool, doing rescue drills. He could make up some dummies of different sizes. Start smaller than the alligator, which was only about as long as his arm, and work his way up to bigger ones. Maybe eventually throw Tony in the water and drag him back out, for practice.
A metal hand grabbed his shoulder and interrupted his thoughts.
Oh good. He breathed in some sweet, sweet oxygen and let Barnes drag him toward the shore, where Tony and Maximoff were waiting. Hopefully they had towels.
Tony hissed in a breath as he waded knee deep into the water, like an idiot. "This is exactly the kind of situation where you should use the very expensive high tech suit I made for you," he scolded as he grabbed Rhodey's arms. "I didn't name it War Machine because it was good for hopscotch. It's even waterproof. Unlike you."
"Wasn't time," Rhodey gasped as Tony helped him up onto the grass. "Colder than I thought, though."
"It's him, right?" Barnes asked desperately. He opened his leather jacket and pulled the alligator inside it, against his shirt.
Maximoff nodded gravely. "It is. All of you hold on."
"Wai--"
Before Tony finished the word, the world glowed bright red, and they were in the upper med bay of the tower.
"Fucking magic," Tony grumbled.
Rhodey was in a bed now, with Tony by his side. Tony pulled a blanket out of a drawer and dropped it unceremoniously on Rhodey's chest. Then the pushy asshole climbed right into the bed and wrapped the blanket around both of them, tucking his chin up against Rhodey's shoulder in a way that was warm and comforting and all kinds of wrong for their very platonic relationship. Completely platonic. Painfully so, one could argue.
Neither of them pulled away though.
In the next bed over, Barnes was trying to untangle his jacket from around Captain Rogers, who was back to his usual shape.
Virtual monitors popped up to display their vital signs, and Rogers' temperature sprang from fatally low to near normal in the space of seconds. He coughed and flinched. "No, please I can't--"
"It's okay," Barnes told him, giving up on the jacket and gently touching his hair. "It's okay, it's still today. We had pancakes for breakfast, remember? You might have lost a few hours, is all."
"Bucky, the ice, I--"
"You're not going in the ice. I swear."
They don't tell you, when you sign up to wear robot armor in defense of your nation's interests, that you might end up watching as a genuine hero chokes back a sob and whispers, "What about you?"
Or that another hero might whisper back, "Not me, either. Not this time."
Barnes looked up at Maximoff. "Can you find Enchantress for me?"
After a heavy pause, Maximoff said quietly, "The spell will not be broken by her death."
Barnes' metal arm whirred and recalibrated menacingly, until Rogers shivered and patted him. They had some kind of wordless conversation with only their eyes. Barnes sighed. He tugged his jacket free and arranged himself on the bed at Rogers' side.
"What will end it?" Tony asked. His jaw twitched in that way that meant he was ready to stay up all week working on the solution.
Maximoff took a deep breath. She held a hand out and closed her eyes.
Green tendrils scattered away from Rogers' form, and a deep red enveloped him and seemed to fade into his skin, focussing into a mark on his chest. It looked something like a backward letter C, and it stayed there after the glow faded away.
"The spell is not removed entirely," she warned, “the Captain will continue to be transformed and teleported away, but the distance will not be far, and the spell is weak enough now to be broken."
"Great," Tony said. He shifted around for a better view, and casually slung his arm over Rhodey's shoulders in the process. "How?"
"It is...like a curse. It is magic, and it binds even me. I cannot tell you any more."
That cleared everything up. If curses existed in the real world, they'd probably get broken the same way they did in the stories. Not that Rhodey approved of curses existing, but reality never had felt the need to clear things with him.
He hoped like hell that his own future never rested on admitting who his one true love was.
"Fucking magic," Tony muttered again. “Rogers, looks like you need to get with making a firstborn child to give to the Wicked Witch here.”
Maximoff elegantly raised her middle finger at him and walked away with a superior smile.
When the silence dragged out for too long, which in Tony's case meant about three seconds, Tony turned back to Rhodey. "So. Did you hit that alert button on accident, or do you plan to call me for every little thing now?"
"Oh yeah," Rhodey said, putting on a bored tone. "Next time I lose the remote, you're the first one I'll call."
"Why would you even be using a remote? You've got voice commands."
"I already told you why." Rhodey turned so he wouldn't be looking at Tony's eyes anymore. "Back me up, guys, talking to the tv is creepy, right?"
Rogers shrugged. "No creepier than using a magic wand with buttons on it."
"The buttons are quiet, at least," said Barnes. "Won't wake anybody up."
"I don't care if you wake me up. I'd--" Rogers closed his eyes and muttered, "It doesn't bother me."
"Bothers me. I have to look at you, and you definitely need your beauty sleep."
Rogers snorted, and Barnes reached out and wiped a hand down his face.
"You are such a shit," Rogers said. His eyes were still closed, and there was a hell of a lot of affection in his voice.
Barnes glanced down at the mark the spell had left, and his smile turned fixed and distant. "Yeah, I know."
"What about hand gestures," Tony said. "Are they too much for your delicate television watching sensibilities?"
Rogers opened one eye. "Like sign language?"
Tony smiled. He was probably imagining little deaf kids teaching their families how to talk to the tv. He was an amazingly kind and generous person, when he wasn't busy being an asshole.
No, that wasn't true, he usually did all of those things concurrently.
Steve spent most of the night propped up in the hallway, watching Bucky sleep.
He couldn't escape the memory of the cold.
Nothing was real anymore, and he needed to know that Bucky was there. Safe in bed. Comfortable. Warm.
If there was one thing Bucky deserved, it was being warm.
Bucky deserved so many things. Every bright wonderful thing he'd ever wanted, he deserved. Every sweet thing he'd never even dreamed of wanting.
Bucky deserved the best of everything.
Steve curled in on himself and shivered against the wall.
He didn't sleep.