WHO: Natasha Romanoff, Bucky Barnes WHEN: Sometime after they got back to Tumbleweed, but not immediately. WHERE: Bureau to around town. WHAT: Natasha and Bucky grab lunch. TRIGGERS: Endgame spoilers for that scene.
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It felt like he was never going to get the sand off him, but after the third shower he had taken since getting back to Tumbleweed, Bucky started to feel human again. People were still settling back into their lives and picking up the pieces of being taken on unexpected cruise had left, but Bucky was looking forward to jumping into work again. A good case was just the perk up he needed, but they weren't reopening the business for another couple of days. Because all of them had personal business to take care of before returning to their lives and Bucky was no exception.
He had gotten the update the rest of his original world seemed to be in the process of getting and he had been hit, all over again, with deaths of two people he cared about. Yeah, this Tony wasn't the one that he had become close with, and this Natasha had been with another Bucky, but that didn't mean he didn't mourn them like they were his own.
And he had done what he had said, he had let Natasha hide away for as long as she had wanted...but now it was weeks later and he refused to let her hide any longer. You could only ignore something like this for so long.
Of course he figured the best place to start would be the Bureau and he wasn't wrong when he found her in her office. "What? That eager to get back to work?" Bucky asked, leaning against the frame of her open door.
"Someone's gotta make sure the town didn't explode while we were gone," Natasha answered without looking up from her paperwork. She wasn't deliberately trying to be cryptic or puzzling; she just had a million pages of portal information to deal with. For starters, she wanted to know how the hell all those people showed up and disappeared all at the same time. The data from that time period would be in here somewhere, she hoped. "So far so good."
But she knew that Barnes wouldn't take a half-arsed comment about the town as a reply when she knew damn well why he was here. She looked up, tossed the documents back onto the file of folders she had stacked up, and leaned back in her chair. "New York office still standing?"
Making a show of looking around at the obviously unexploded building around them, Bucky quirked an eyebrow at her. "I'd say that's an accurate assessment on your part. New York's doing just fine too. Since we seem to be all doing fine, let's go grab lunch."
Yeah, she knew why he was there. They both knew. There was an unresolved part of their story back in their world that would never be resolved now, but, more importantly, he just wanted to make sure she was still there, still with them. That she wouldn't be going anywhere.
That was the thing. Natasha wasn't suicidal. She'd never been, but she'd long accepted that to make things right in their world, sometimes sacrifice was necessary. In the situation she'd been on Vormir, there had been no other choice. The whole purpose was to bring everyone back. If Clint made that sacrifice then his family — his children in particular — would have to go through the loss of their father, knowing he could not come back. They could not come back empty-handed. Natasha refused the notion even.
In the here and now, though, she had Clint and Barnes and Rogers and Stark. She could live with that.
She could just grab a sad sandwich from the breakroom, but after a few months of airship food, she was ready for something with some spices. She'd already stood up and was grabbing her keys when she answered, "Tex-Mex, and you're on."
If there was one thing that the Texans did right, other than the quality of their guns, it was Tex-Mex. Nodding because he had missed food that wasn't sad ship food, he nodded. "Lead the way, Nat."
He knew that he didn't have anything to worry about. At least, with Natasha being suicidal. She had too much here, for her to decide on that as a valid option for her. No, he knew what happened back in their world was circumstantial, that she had done it to make sure that Clint could go home to his family, but he still knew that there was other ways to lose people. Like to unending work. And he refused to see that happen to Natasha, because even outside of their history, he cared about her. Had known her before memories of their past had ever been in his memory.
"How's Barton settling in?" He asked, as they made their way to the garage.
Natasha was not accustomed to having people to lose, and when they were gone, she often disappeared into herself. It happened with the first three James's left. Happened when the fourth one, who'd been around for a few years. Happened both time Kobik left. And now with T'Challa and Thor, well… Barnes wasn't wrong to be worried.
She had history with new people — Rocket, Nebula, Danvers, — but they all knew her from after she'd started working to become a better person. They might know the things she'd done because she'd dumped them onto the internet in the wake of HYDRA being outed, but there was a difference between reading about something, knowing it happened, and really understanding it. There were only two people in the entire world who understood that: Barnes and Barton.
"The homestead showed up." She turned a sympathetic expression in Barnes's direction. She understood; it was the same with Avengers compound. Everywhere she looked during those five years, she saw people. And now there were very few of those. She couldn't say that she wasn't surprised that Tony saw fit to keep it in working order, but all that space for one person? It wasn't good. Especially not with the internet. Natasha almost never had to leave. It suited her at the time because if someone contacted her, she needed to be there. "He's been staying at the compound. Can't say that I blame him."
Yeah, he couldn't imagine that Clint would go home after losing his family. It was a little how he felt about Team America House and the lack of his whole family there. The circumstances weren't the same at all, but the end result was the same. "Yeah, I'm not actually surprised by that. You back there too now? Or still with Okoye?" Who was another person on his list that he knew he would have to check up on soon. The fact that he had a list didn't fail to upset him, but a lot had happened in their original world. Of course it had hit a lot of his people.
Hopefully, though, having this place helped. Tumbleweed itself wasn't much, but the community was strong and other people had built lives there. He wasn't sure if he counted himself among those people yet, but he hoped Natasha would, even with all the losses she had suffered there.
It was enough for Natasha to feel needed in Tumbleweed, even if it was just to "welcome" people to their new reality and get them paperwork and jobs. She couldn't send them home (and some of them wouldn't want to, like her) but she could at least help them pick up the pieces they did have here. It wasn't quite as important as working with the Avengers, but it was enough.
"The room in Wakanda was really James's anyway," she answered, and that was the answer. There was too much of him in it, which she realized was weird saying to the same man without the same history in Tumbleweed, and Kobik's room was there. It was just too painful. Instead, she opted for her room back at the compound. She missed that damn wall that turned around to reveal all of her guns and weapons. "I'm back with the Avengers."
James. Was it weird to miss his other self? Probably, but he did. Natasha had been a lot more happy when he had been around and the other man...well, he had a peace here that wasn't waiting for them back in their universe. It was easy to miss him. But it added sense for Natasha to put distance between the memory of the other him and what they had shared in this world.
"Not back to the safe house? Cause the murder wall there was a thing of beauty," he said, small smile at the memory of how he had been when he had first arrived. She had done a lot to help him settle in.
"It's still there. I may still run away when the Pokemon girls get too hyper." Lillie and Selene were good kids, but Natasha needed a lot more quiet than she wanted to impose on them. Instead of asking them to quiet down or take it outside, Natasha would routinely take off to another part of the compound or to her Safe House. The safe house was small, but it was quiet and had all the things she needed, including any kind of weaponry she could use for underground sort of missions.
(Alas, no bazookas.)
"I have a murder wall at the compound. It's hidden." She'd invite him to see it, but that would be awkward, given that it was her bedroom. Once they were in the garage, Natasha hit the button on one of her cars. Over the years, the portal had gifted her a very respectable collection of fast cars and motorcycles. She'd brought the Bugatti Veyron Super Sport today. "It's very James Bond."
"I'm not at all surprised that you're playing up your super spy side." He had his own hidden weapons wall and a hidden war room back at Team America House, but he had stripped most of the weapons from them since it would be only Maxria's house soon. They didn't need a murder wall, though he did leave enough weapons there for them if they ever needed it.
"You show me yours, I'll show you mine when I get set up in New York," he offered, as he strapped himself into the passenger side of her ridiculous car.
"You're on." Natasha turned and grinned at him as she revved the engine and peeled out of the parking lot of the Bureau. She knew Tumbleweed like the back of her hand, which was strange in itself since the whole damn thing constantly changed after one of their trips. Looked like it didn't this time, and even the speed traps were the same.
Natasha didn't know why it bothered her so much, but: "When are you moving full time?"
"You know it's not a race, right?" And Bucky would deny that he had clutched the passenger side door like a lifeline as Natasha zipped through Tumbleweed. "And speed limits aren't suggestions!" He added, voice a little more high pitched than normal while she took a sharp turn. What was with the people in his life being crazy drivers?
When they were cruising along at a more steady pace, Bucky loosened his hold on the door and finally answered her. "Not sure yet. We got derailed from house hunting, but hopefully within the next month or so." It felt strange, leaving Tumbleweed, but he needed this. Needed to finally take this step and move on from what was.
Natasha found it more than a little funny that Rogers never had a problem with her driving, but then again, he was just as reckless as she could be sometimes. She just felt like having a little bit of normal again, driving through Tumbleweed in her car. Maybe she'd got on a longer drive later in the day after her shift at the Bureau ended.
"Any particular location you looking into?" She hoped it included one of those door portals back to Tumbleweed so it wouldn't take 3+ hours to get here. "I hear Hudson Yards is up and coming these days."
Wrinkling his nose, he shook his head. "Not exactly my type of locale." Trust fund babies and rich people generally still gave him hives. "Still giving it a think with Tina, but I'm thinking Brooklyn. Crown Heights, maybe Brownsville or Dumbo." Places Bucky felt more familiar with, even though gentrification was still happening at a massive level in those areas. "It costs a ridiculous amount to live anywhere there though, so I'm really hoping business starts picking up. We were looking at expansion before the airship had stolen us away."
They had more than a decent caseload before they had been taken away on the cruise, but they had to reassess their numbers given they had disappeared for months without warning.
"See if Brooklyn's Soda Shoppe is around in this dimension. Steve took me there after the first time the Avengers got together." She had to admit: it did have the best milkshake she'd ever tasted. It had, of course, turned into a mess as things usually did, but they were able to get it dealt with. "Showed me the third floor place he and his mom lived. Got a bit bittersweet with all the gluten-free wraps and fair trade coffee in place of newstands."
He gave her a look as the drive continued along. "You ever consider getting away from the Bureau, to try and give a gluten-free lifestyle with soda shoppes a shot?" Bucky knew her, knew how she needed a mission to keep going through life, but he has hoped, once upon a time, she would be able to settle down, to live a chaos free life. At the time, he had been hoping to live that life with her.
It seemed like a lifetime ago, those hopes. It seemed so distant from the reality they were living. He knew the other Bucky, the one who had started to become something like a brother to him and was more to Natasha before he had been sent back, had been trying to convince Natasha of this, of a chance to have a life with him. Maybe one day, she would have something resembling normalcy.
Natasha pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant before she answered. The car squeaked to a stop, and Natasha let out a deep sigh. She enjoyed working at the Bureau; it gave her life a sense of purpose, and unlike Steve and Tony and Bucky, she grew up needing that. Then, it was a mission, an assassination, an infiltration — whatever the Red Room needed of her. Then it was SHIELD, which turned out to be HYDRA in disguise. But it was the Avengers who gave her not only purpose but a family. She wouldn't give that up for anything.
She didn't move to extract herself from the car, but turned to look at him. "I'm happy at the Bureau. I get to help people, even if I'm not saving the world from alien invasions or supervillains." For some reason, it seemed that people thought she wasn't happy with her situation here. She was. Of course, there were always hiccups, people you didn't get along with, situations that needed extra help, but that was anything in life. "This is about as normal as I can feel comfortable with. I didn't know normal like the rest of you did. I was a toddler when I was taken by the Red Room, and that's shaped a lot of who I am today."
And maybe that's why the other Bucky just couldn't get through to her. He didn't understand her anymore, and that made Natasha sadder than anything.
“Guess we’re too different these days because I don’t understand it. But so long as you’re happy…” He shrugged. It was all, ultimately, Natasha’s choice what she did with her life. But for Bucky, being in charge of anyone, of having to protect and patrol and be around guns all of the time because the potential of a threat could be around...He didn’t want that. He had a somewhat normal life back in Blackpoint. And while he didn’t necessarily want that life back anymore, he wanted something similar to it. After everything, after losing everything countless times over, he was just ready to have no one else’s expectations on him anymore, to do what he wanted.
Smiling over at her, Bucky added, “Still not going to stop me from kidnapping you for the occasional lunch.” Because even if they weren’t a couple or even that close in comparison to other relationships in their lives, he cared about her. And Bucky always would.