Archive of Our Own ^beta

"…yes, but why haven't we seen her? Or him?" the blond host trills at the camera, as his daemon, a brightly colored parrot, preens for the viewers. "It seems odd that a god would have a daemon too tiny to be noticed."

Sam stretches on the couch, heels hanging just over the backrest, a Slim Jim hanging out of his mouth, and grins. The host is so-so, but the parrot is always delightful.

"We know very little about Thor," his guest says, shaking her head. She's a little mousy, a little timid, wears a lot of beige, but her daemon is a corvid that looks massive to Sam's amateur ornithologist eye. He can't tell if it's male or female, but it is goddamned impressive, shiny, iridescent black feathers; no wonder the woman doesn't bother dressing up. "But I can tell you what he reminds me of: witches."

"But aren't witches a myth?"

"Hardly!" the woman – a professor of theology, according to the subtitles – scoffs, and her daemon lets out a loud enough caw to briefly short out the microphones. "There are still covens in Siberia and Alaska. They prefer to keep out of the modern world, though."

"Why does Thor remind you of them?"

"Well, for the very simple fact that we have not seen his daemon. It's a well-documented fact that the witches have the ability to separate from their daemons—"

Sam feels the shudder that goes through Ilma. She hops from the backrest of the couch onto his stomach, and yep, he feels the claws, too. He can't fault her for it, because the idea makes his teeth itch. He agreed to have a jetpack strapped to his ass so that he could chase her feathery butt across the sky, after all: being separated from his daemon is not happening.

"—and travel great distances apart. They are also long-lived. So little has been released about Thor, but he is not exactly a stranger, is he? We know him from mythology, so maybe he is of the same stock, as it were."

"Yes, but didn't the mythology specify that Thor had a daemon? A raven?"

"There's actually been two ravens, but they tend to be associated with his mythological father, not Thor himself. Adding to it the fact that mythology is hardly reliable, we can't be sure what it was our ancestors actually saw, and if they understood it."

The discussion strays to actual mythology, so Sam stretches and searches for the remote among the cushions.

"Enough news?" Ilma asks, her sharp claws digging into his stomach just enough to make her presence known.

"Yeah, it's too early to listen to metaphysics."

She keeps looking at the TV though, but whether she's still listening to the broadcast or watching the prancing parrot is unclear. "What do you think Thor's daemon is?"

"I'm hoping it's the eight-legged horse."

"I am hoping that story is definitely not true," Ilma mutters, which is a feat for any bird, a raptor in particular. The only bird Sam imagines would have more trouble is a flamingo.

"Maybe it was too big to fit through the portal, or however he came through to here," Sam tells her, before closing the laptop lid and rolling off the bed. "Wanna circle the monument again?"

"Are we hoping to see Steve and Sorcha again?"

"If you tell me we aren't, I will know you're lying," Sam says. He pulls his shorts on, followed by a T-shirt, and goes for the door, Ilma perched on his shoulder.

It's a nice day outside, perfect jogging weather, which means Sam is bouncing off tourists as they run. Steve isn't among them, which sucks. Sam gets them home, very literally, because Ilma is sulking on his shoulder, and goes straight for the orange juice in his fridge. He should probably be drinking something that's not a whole goddamned orange, compressed, but he needs the pick me up.

Of course, that's when there is a knock on the door, which he opens to find Steve and a redhead, both of them looking hot and disheveled and shaken. There's a fox draped around the redhead's shoulders, while Sorcha looks up from where she's pressed against Steve's knee to nod at Ilma.

"Everyone we know is trying to kill us," the redhead says, and finally something clicks in Sam's brain: this is the Black Widow. Black Widow and Captain America, right there on his doorstep.

Christmas has come to DC, hallelujah.

"Not everyone," he says, and stands aside to let them enter.

Sam is more of a soldier than a spy, but he would be lying if he said didn't enjoy this subterfuge and sneaking around, just a little bit. Ilma is having less fun – she spends most of the time clutching Sam's shoulder, every last feather fluffed up. It's all Sam can do to not call her an angry bird whenever he catches a glimpse in the rearview mirror, but he can't help it: she is perfectly round.

Ridiculous, amazing fluffball.

Bit of an odd thought to have, when there's a very angry killing machine on the roof. Sitwell doesn't get the chance to scream before he is flung out into oncoming traffic, and Sam just barely catches the sight of Sitwell's handsome python daemon cry out and dissolve into thin air at his death.

The man – Winter Soldier Natasha called him – on the roof follows up by driving his fist through the windshield and tearing the steering wheel out of Sam's grasp and flinging it away. They escape the pile up by the grace of god, and Sam watches Steve go flying over the railing, Sorcha clinging to him desperately. He dispatches a guy, takes his gun and makes a run for the trunk of his poor car, to get the wings. Struggling into them without backup and under fire is no picnic, but he's done it in worse conditions: Ilma is the best kind of backup, and before long he is taking off to join her in the sky.

They dive together, him at the Winter Soldier, Ilma at the buzzard that's following the one-man tank at a distance; it's enough to distract him and give Steve time to deliver a blow that throws him back half a block and into a car, and in the same moment a ping ricochets off of Sam's wing and into his face, thankfully bereft of most of its momentum.

The buzzard tears itself out of Ilma's claws as Sam lands and she flies into his arms, inspecting his face. "It's good," she whispers. "Just a scratch."

Steve is surrounded Natasha limps into the open, hand against her shoulder, and Sam has no less than three machine guns pointed at him. He lets himself be herded into a van, mindful of the fingers twitching on the triggers – who trained those assholes – and lets them cuff him, and shove Ilma into a crate.

"Natasha?" Sam asks quietly, as they sit in the back of the van, on their way to their apparent execution and hasty burial.

"I'm good," she says, white as a sheet, holding herself taut against the side of the van, to maintain a semblance of pressure on the gunshot wound. Her daemon does not appear to strain against the leash and muzzle they put on him; instead he watches the guards with a lethal focus. His eyes flicker only minutely from one guard to the other, to their daemons – a large dog and a crow, both of whom regard them with fangs and claws, respectively, at the ready. Neither inspires confidence in the empathy of their hosts.

"She needs dressing, or she's going to bleed out," Sam says, but the guard on the left just cracks his cattle prod.

The cattle prod then cracks the helmet of the other guard, the crow descends on the dog, digging his claws into its ears and opening the beak right over his eyeball. "Make a sound," the crow says, revealing herself to be female, "and you will lose the eyeball, before you die." She takes flight the moment the cattle prod is jammed into the other daemon's side, and the dog goes down with a yelp.

The guard pulls of the helmet to reveal a very attractive white woman: angular face, blue eyes, dark hair, firm grip on the cattle prod communicating business.

"This thing was squeezing my brain," she gripes, scowling into the helmet. "Who is this guy?" she adds, nodding at Sam.

"Sam Wilson," Steve says. "Maria Hill. Deputy director of SHIELD."

"That's a good thing, now?" Sam asks, eyebrows raised. He has been paying attention, even if both Steve and Natasha were giving him only the broadest of strokes, of how SHIELD was, apparently, full of Nazis.

"We're on your side, if that's what you're asking," Hill's daemon says. "Trust us, or trust them."

Sam has a very bad feeling about the "them", so the attractive woman with the menacing crow daemon it is. Then there also is a menacing, one-eyed man with a raven daemon, who, as Sam understands, was supposed to be dead, and a damp, dreary base, under a dam, and a plan that only a complete idiot would contemplate.

"What have we gotten ourselves into?" Ilma asks, rhetorically, as they outline the nuts and bolts of the grand scheme to get the murderdrones out of the sky.

"I need to make one more stop," Steve says before they go. "I need a uniform."

"There's a decent selection in the costume store on fifth," Natasha tells him, lips quirked. "Or, if you're feeling adventurous, there is the sex shop on seventeenth. The buckles there look like they might hold up."

"Buckles might, the mesh wouldn't," Steve tells her, and grins, while Sam works to collect his scattered wits. "But I meant the one in the Smithsonian."

"That old thing?"

"It doesn't have a GPS tracker in it, and we're not exactly swimming in Kevlar in my size here. I want to do it right."

"Afraid this will be attributed to some other superhero?"

Steve's face closes off, and Sorcha comes up to lick at his palm. He lets her, then buries his hand in her fur. "Call it vindictiveness."

Sam almost asks, but then he thinks: he wore it when he thought he was putting Hydra down, he wants to wear it when he does it again. What a drama queen.

Natasha nods. "Fair. I need to warm the shoulder up, anyway."

"Sure, count me in," Sam says, and adds breaking, entering and what is probably grand larceny, to his long resume. He is strangely okay with that.

The op goes about as well as one might expect; Sam swaps the first circuit board without incident, gets shot at as he swaps the second, but with his wings is able to escape back through the emergency exit he made with plastic explosives, and then it's off to rescue Steve. He almost doesn't make it: shots are exchanged, which Sam hears distinctively even through the roar of the helicarriers' engines, and the damage to the structure suggests a grenade was involved.

"Maria, fire at will!" Steve calls through the crackle of breaking glass, and then, almost in the same breath, "Sam, I need evac!"

Sam thinks he can make Steve out, if only just, but he's too far, and flight path impossible for his size. Shit! The voices in the earpiece converge as the beams break through the plexiglass and Steve falls, falls towards the grey turbulence of the Potomac river, Sorcha's claws hooked deep into the fabric of his uniform.

Sam dives, folds his wings and fires the jetpack: he scoops them up from among the debris the voices in his ear harmonize; muted whoops of joy and final confirmation that the mission is complete, that they succeeded. Steve grins at him, though there is blood on his teeth, and he looks, frankly, like shit.

He passes out before Sam manages to find a spot to land that's not on fire.

Sam is in the room when Steve wakes up, roughly fifteen minutes after the doctor says he has no idea when that might happen, as they had to up his sedatives three times during the brief surgery to get the bullets out.

Steve's first question, after an uncalled for "on your left", is "Do you think I'm still insured?"

"Seeing how your employer just went belly-up, I wouldn't count on it."

Steve nods. His pupils are wide, and frantic, as he claws at the covers. "I need to get out of here."

Sorcha leaps onto the bed at that, pins him in place. "Steve, no," she says.

"Can't afford a hospital stay," he mumbles.

"Yes, we can," she insists. "Lie down. It is 2014. We can afford a short stay in the hospital. Plus, Natasha promised to send the bill to Pierce's estate."

That helps him to settle, at least until the nurse bursts through the door, and Sorcha has to sit on him to keep him still.

"Sir?" The nurse is young and starry-eyed. Her daemon is a red squirrel, whose beady eyes carefully asses the daemons present for signs of trouble, even as the woman twitters. "Sir, are you okay?"

Steve looks around, as though looking for the sir in question. Sam snorts, and that is enough for Steve to turn to the nurse and sink back onto the pillow. "I'm alright, thank you. How am I doing?"

She beams and steps forward, snatching the chart from the foot of his bed. "Three gunshot wounds, one to the upper arm, one to the side, one to the thigh. Trauma to the head, definite concussion. Sprained shoulder. The wounds are healing at an accelerated rate, but there is a concern regarding the head trauma, so the neurologist said they would like to schedule an MRI as soon as you're conscious."

Steve's face communicates he has no idea what an MRI is, but isn't going to admit it.

"We're really glad you're awake, sir," the nurse says, clutching the chart to her chest.

Steve thanks her, and she beams, bright as anything. "You'd you like some daylight?" she asks, and moves to the side of the window, to turn the vertical blinds.

Sam doesn't register fast enough to protest, but thankfully Sorcha has the presence of mind to let out a roar, which prompts Steve to vault over the handles by the bed, and hit the floor just as the glass shatters and the pillow he was resting on emits a faint hiss and a wisp of smoke. He catches Sam's eye under the bed, and nods in the direction of the door.

Sam nods; there's a clear path that should be out of sight. He crawls towards the exist and raps twice. "Sniper with a direct shot at the head of the bed," he tells the guard, before turning to survey the room.

The nurse is on the floor and crawling towards Steve with a mixture of terror and determination on her face. "On your left, sir! Do not strain the right shoulder!" There is panic in her eyes and labored breaths coming out of her mouth, but her steady hands force Steve to turn remain sheltered under the bed.

"It's alright," Steve tells her, as Sorcha joins them.

Sam looks to the window, but he should have some room to maneuver. He rolls back into the room, stretches, grabs the leg of the bed and pulls, and strains, and achieves nothing, until the squirrel hops onto Steve's chart and says, "Undo the breaks first. They're the yellow lever."

Sam lets Ilma thank him and does as instructed.

The bed moves, slowly, towards the open door. Steve is visibly in pain, and the nurse is supporting his shoulder, but they are moving, until the entire bed is out and the guards are helping them to their feet.

"I'm so sorry—" the nurse begins, tearfully, but Steve is not even listening. One of their guards gently takes her arm and leads her away, while Steve props his back against the wall and breathes.

"Sam?"

"Did you see the shooter?"

"I don't even know why I jumped." He takes a moment to reorient himself. "Why did I jump?"

"Natasha said not to open the blinds, just in case. I didn't think you'd remember that."

What she actually said was: "He's not a plant, lack of sunshine won't do him any harm," and then made some vague noises about making sure, told Sam her daemon's name, and left immediately. Volya gave him a long look, from the top of his head to the soles of his shoes, pausing at the paperback in his hands, before following her out the door with a sashay of his tail. Sam has been thinking about that ever since.

"Did you send anyone after the shooter?" Steve asked the nearest guard, who consulted his radio.

"The closest building they could have taken the shot from is half a mile away. We sent people, but it's highly unlikely they will make it on time."

Steve nods, and leans on Sam as a new nurse shows up to guide them to a room not compromised by assassins. "They knew which room I was in and they were good enough to take the shot within a second of getting the visual."

Sam nods, uncertain. He doesn't have the patience to be a sniper, though he knows enough that lining up a shot takes forever; he was in sniper training for precisely half an hour before the sergeant in charge dismissed him as hopeless. He picked up the theory though, some through osmosis: estimate the distance, calculate the rotation of the bullet, watch out for the wind and local air movements, factor in target trajectory, aim accordingly. To hit the target's head from a block away in a matter of seconds you have to be prepared for every eventuality. "I'm no expert, but that's a goddamn difficult shot to pull off."

"Bucky could do it," Steve says. He is staring off into space, pupils still wide. "This one time, we were staking out a Hydra base when we got intel about a high-ranking Hydra officer coming in. We were hunting that asshole for months, and suddenly he was supposed to be there… We had fifteen minutes to find Bucky a spot. The target showed up in an armored truck, the door opened, and immediately was surrounded by guards, and I thought that's it, the window's too narrow, there's going to be a fraction of a second to do it in, then boom." Steve mimes the shot. "I saw the guard detail panicking, with red spatter over their faces, and Bucky was already packing up his rifle."

"Hell," Sam says, helplessly. Ilma digs her claws into his shoulder, and he doesn't have to guess why. Steve, flying high in his head, sounds like all of his internal organs were replaced by pure, grade-A wistfulness. "I've known a couple of snipers, but I don't know how doable that is."

"You need to be really good," Steve says quietly. He stares at the ceiling, unblinking, as does Sorcha, and yep, Sam knows that look. Spent a good few weeks doing the same thing, after Riley.

"That's not good news."

"Not even close," Steve says. "Fury was shot through a wall with no sightlines whatsoever. He must have judged the angles by watching me through the window."

"Fuck – wasn't it the guy from the helicarrier that shot him?"

"Yeah, that was him."

Thankfully Natasha arrives soon after they are moved to an uncomfortably cramped room that Sam could swear was labelled as a broom closet the first time he passed it. She arrives without batting an eye at the change in setting and makes a space for herself on the foot of the bed that is touching both walls.

"Most of the intelligence community may not believe he exists, but they do keep meticulous records of the kills the crackpots credit him with," Natasha says, and the heavy file hits the bedspread.

Steve skims the thirty names, Sam reads over his shoulder; he recognizes some, he is not surprised to find.

"Who were they?"

"Holdup," Sam says flatly, ripping the page out of Natasha's hands. "Is that JFK? JFK was killed by a Hydra bogeyman?"

"They were people who mattered. A president, a warlord," her fingernails strike the paper as she speaks. "A scientist, an assassin, a general, a politician. An inventor. No connection."

"So not all of them rich and famous."

"JFK?" Sam asks. "Really?"

"This one I'm actually uncertain about. Might have been him, but Oswald wasn't exactly an unlikely culprit."

"You think he survived the helicarrier?" Steve asks, looking up at her.

"Be honest now – do you think he wasn't enhanced?"

Steve looks down and Sorcha, then they both shake their heads. "He kept up with me. No one's been able to, except Thor."

"Then we can't assume he's dead."

"I shot him in the head, Natasha, then the helicarrier exploded."

"His body wasn't found. No body, no death."

"Shot in the head."

"And we'll confirm that, when there is a body." Natasha smiles brightly. "This is serious, Steve."

"How serious?"

"I knew him," she says then, and Volya, already still, seems to hold his breath. "He trained me when I was a child in the Red Room."

"Natasha—"

"Do not underestimate him, Steve." Her eyes are wide-open, showing the fear Sam thought he saw on the highway. "He is enhanced and he will not stop. The only way to stop him is to kill him. He doesn't feel fear, or pain, he can't be reasoned with once he has a mission. If you killed him, good; if not then we find him and we kill him."

"What's his daemon like?" Sam asks.

Volya looks down at his paws. "He doesn't have one."

"What?"

"Have you seen a daemon on the highway? Had Steve?"

"There was a bird circling nearby, a buzzard. I think it was his. Not all daemons need to be within grabbing distance at all times, but—"

"The Winter Soldier doesn't have a daemon," Natasha repeats, and Sam finds her words to be oddly cool, considering she is spouting utter horror. "I know this. He was around us for weeks, including in the field. There was nothing. He doesn't have a daemon."

Sam sinks back against the wall, barely able to breathe. Then he looks at Steve, whose face is grim, but somehow less shocked than what Sam would have expected.

"This… this is okay with you?"

"No," Steve says shortly. "Could he be an alien?"

"Isn't that a weird leap, an alien?"

Natasha reaches out to lay a hand on his shoulder. "Thor and Loki, and the other Asgardians, don't have daemons at all. They are like the Panserbjørne that way."

"What the fuck is a panserbjorne?" Sam asks, before his brain can catch up to the rest of Natasha's words.

"They were giant polar bears. Sentient creatures, not like those dying right now. The last of them died in the world war. They were sentient, but they didn't have daemons, instead they would forge themselves armor from asteroids. Thor said that's what Asgardians do, too, they put their whole souls into what they create, in whatever way. For him it was the hammer."

Ilma squawks and lands in Sam's lap, from where he gathers her close to his chest, where he can feel her rapid heartbeat against his skin and stroke her warm feathers. "Doesn't feel like a fair trade, a hammer for a daemon."

"There's a lot of theological work on the Panserbjørne. I recommend it."

"Thanks, I'm good," Sam says. He and Ilma still wake up in the middle of the night because of the book with the clown who ate children's daemons, leaving them as empty husks, though to be fair: ninety-nine percent of that is the goddamned clown.

"So, could he be an alien?" Steve asks again.

Natasha shrugs. "We can't rule it out. Didn't seem to be one, but then I wouldn't have pegged Thor for an alien, if I saw him on the street, so yeah, it's possible."

Steve nods, absently. "Okay. Step one, we find the shooter. Step two, we find the body in the Potomac."

"Step one, you rest and get in fighting shape," Sam interjects immediately. "You get winded walking down the corridor, no way you're up for round two."

"It's not that bad!"

"It's plenty bad. Get some rest, Steve," Volya says. "We'll find the shooter. There are teams dragging the Potomac right now."

"I don't trust SHIELD."

"I hope that doesn't extend to Coast Guard." Natasha piles up the files and slides them neatly into her bag. "They're the ones doing the dragging. SHIELD is in shambles."

"As it should be," Steve mutters.

"Stay in bed, Steve," she says, packs up and closes the door behind herself and Volya, leaving Sam and Steve to stare at each other from across the bed.

"Do you play cards or something?" Sam asks, and thus he earns a story to tell his potential grandchildren: never engage an army man in a battle of poker, because the army is a bunch of cheaters who will drag the last piece of candy out of your pocket with a sneaky fucking pair of sixes. The worst part is that Steve isn't even trying, and what makes that worse is that Sam can clearly see Steve is not even trying, but that doesn't really hit him until he gets back from a trip to the vending machine with an armful of candy to lose, and finds Steve staring blankly at the wall, Sorcha within touching distance, equally absorbed by the puke-colored paint.

"We're gonna get them," he says quietly.

"What?"

"I said—"

"Yeah, that, I know. We'll get them." Steve looks away, at Sorcha's twitching tail. "I was… I miss them, Sam."

"Bucky and…?"

"Bracha. Bucky and Bracha." Steve smiles fondly at the back of Sorcha's head. "She was a dog, a beautiful, sleek Alsatian. She had this beautiful black and tan coat, Bucky spent hours brushing her, even during the war, god, you should see her preen, she gleamed in the sunshine." He closes his eyes just as Sorcha does. "She jumped after him the moment his hand slipped. Nothing made sense since them, not like it used to."

"Yeah. I know what you mean." Sam sits down, his back turned, because counsellor or not, there's facets of you that can't be shared face to face. "When we lost Riley and Gin – Riley's hawk was male – we thought nothing would ever be whole again." He hesitates before he continues, but Ilma nudges his palm, so he does. "Honestly. Nothing really was. Not in the same way. We put ourselves together and went on, and it's good, I like who we are now, and it does make sense. But it's put together different, and don't get me started on the fault lines."

"But it's whole."

"It is." Sam chances a look. "It's whole, and it makes sense, on good days."

"What about the bad?"

"On the bad days we just gotta remember the good," Sam says, and offers a small smile. "So, do I earn a pack of Skittles back?"

Of course Steve is a super-soldier, so it takes less than a week before he is ready to waltz out of the hospital, and by some miracle by this point he is willing to acknowledge that waltz is probably the most strenuous activity he is capable of. Sam is glad, because he is this close to strangling the motherfucker. If it wasn't for his day job he probably would have, but as Steve lifts himself out of the hospital wheelchair Sam realizes that a weekend of uninterrupted healing is looming before them, and nothing whatsoever is standing before him and possibly strangling a national icon.

Joy.

Ilma flaps her wings and lets out a snort, but thankfully they don't have to wait long before a car careens into the garage, which the hospital thankfully has, and stops just short of pulverizing some toes.

"Fellas," Natasha drawls from the front seat.

"How's the situation?"

"Tenuous and unclear," is all she says, then completely belies those words by having Volya unravel a rock-solid thirty-step plan to trap the Winter Soldier and catch him in the act, while somehow keeping Steve contained.

"That is ambitious," Sam says, soon as the latter undertone occurs to him.

"I am an ambitious woman," Natasha says, smirks, and pulls out onto the street. Half an hour later they are poring over the outline of the plan and associated visual aids, spread out over a kitchen table of a carefully arranged flat.

"You called Stark?" Steve asks, aghast.

"I called Stark."

"But…"

"I also called Clint. And Bruce."

"I don't think the Hulk—"

"The Hulk's job is to sit on you."

Sam and Steve blanch at the mental image.

"Natasha, do we really want them involved here?"

"We need backup, especially as long as you're out of commission."

"I meant that more in terms of firepower. Stark isn't exactly subtle."

"In 1999 the Winter Soldier was sent after a head of a cartel in Mexico. Someone warned the cartel, and they went into hiding, so he took out a whole city block. There were hundreds of casualties."

"He didn't take out the hospital, though. He could have, but he didn't."

"Doesn't mean it wasn't plan B. We need him contained, Steve. If it takes Stark, so be it."

Sam nods, wisely, while Ilma totally ruins the vibe by letting out a loud squawk. He startles a fraction of a second before she does, because, well. "How—don't hate me. How do we know Stark, or the others, are not Hydra?"

Steve and Natasha turn to look at him, both their eyes wide.

"I mean. No offence, but Stark's a very polarizing figure, still is, and Hydra was in the business of fueling conflicts. He also helped design the helicarriers, so he must have known what they could do."

Natasha looks at Steve, who is still gaping at Sam. "Stark is not Hydra," she says. "Neither is Bruce or Clint. I know this for sure. Stark may be hotheaded and easy to dupe into doing something dumb, but he and Clint were both on the Insight target list, and Bruce… Well, Bruce hid away when he thought he might be used for anything."

"We vouch for them," Volya says.

Sam looks away. "I didn't want to offend," he tells Sorcha, who is looking at him, aghast. "But we gotta be careful. I believe you," he adds in Volya's direction.

"He's right to ask, Steve," Natasha says.

"I know. I think. Yeah." Steve shakes his head and lays his hand on Sorcha's head. "We know."

Well, that went terribly, Sam thinks, and folds his arms.

"We're converging here," Natasha continues meanwhile, putting her iPad on the table and spreading her fingers so that the satellite photo on the display shows stray bricks on the sidewalk. "Steve will be stationed here."

"As bait," Sorcha say drily, both paws on the table.

"Yes."

"Well, we will be contained."

"Can you handle this, Steve?"

"Sitting still and waiting to be sniped? Piece of cake."

Sorcha is definitely rolling her eyes, but she is doing so fondly. Sam's starting to get a sense of her by now: some daemons take a moment to figure out. She was largely absent from the Captain America mythos, and now he understands why: in the comics she was always made bigger, more akin to a lioness than the lynx she was, save for that one run where the artist decided historical accuracy was worth nothing whatsoever and changed her to a bald eagle, and frankly that run had so many other problems, Sam was willing to let the eagle slide. It worked in context, the majestic, enormous eagle whose wings would periodically block out the sun in a dramatic fashion, and frequently would overshadow Captain America himself.

In real life Sorcha is sleek. She's majestic in her own way: for one she is a cat, so that comes with the territory. It's more than just the natural feline arrogance, though: her fur is a beautiful golden-blond, spotted and thick, and for all that she is not a particularly small animal, she weaves between furniture legs like they make space for her. Yet she is also easy to overlook, next to Steve's bulging muscles and Captain America presence, and rarely climbs where she'd be on eye-level with the humans in the room.

Volya, in contrast, takes all the space he can, as high as he can. He lounges, is the best term, legs stretched out and eyes half-closed, keeping track of every moving element of the room, while at the same giving off the impression that he is deeply uninterested in the concerns of the plebs. A façade that would have kept much of the attention away from both him and Natasha, were it not for the animated voice in which she was detailing the plan of attack.

"When do we start?" Sam asks, and answers Natasha's grin with his own.

The plan is deceptively simple, once put in action: as soon as Tony Stark gets there, he and Natasha proceed with hacking into the cameras surrounding the café they selected. Once they are sure they have everything under control, Steve makes his way across the square, Sorcha glued to his calves.

"In position," Steve reports into his sleeve, prompting a slew of groans, his own daemon included. He is not made for surreptitious tasks, Sam thinks sympathetically, and arches his spine just enough so that he can feel the jetpack and giant metal wings strapped to his back.

"I have movement," Natasha says. "Stark?"

"I see him."

From across the rooftop Sam sees the Iron Man armor wake. The pod that contains the pilot is a mile away, parked atop a building, from where it can provide additional coverage and containment.

"He will try to make his way across a roof to the north. It's a twenty-foot jump, piece of cake for him, but would stump all pursuers."

"Do you have a visual on his daemon?" Stark asks.

"No."

"Do we know what to look for?"

"The one we fought was a buzzard. Probably. Steve says he didn't see anything on the helicarrier, so probably a bird, and it has a considerable range of movement."

"So, we patrol the sky?"

"We have no confirmation they are the same person yet. Could be anything."

"He's got the rifle out. Stark, get ready," Natasha whispers into the comes. "Steve, on my mark."

Sam adjusts his binoculars to watch Steve throw himself back, roll off the chair and behind a concrete wall, just as Iron Man descends onto the Winter Soldier.

Ilma lets out a squawk. "I see her!" She takes flight, the slits of white dotting her wings catching the light of the sun. She flies, and Sam, distracted by Steve's roll misses his mark, and a cry makes it out of his mouth when she pushes too far, and the pain of being separated from his daemon tears at this chest. He breaks into a run, dives off the roof, following the glittering spot into the sky.

He's got a complex relationship with the army, but this, this was worth everything: having the wings to follow Ilmatar into the sky, to fly: they were born for this, him and her.

Ilma must have sensed his joy, all the more potent for the preceding moment of fright, and wiggles in the air, as she does where the currents are particularly good. Then, with only a fraction of a second of a warning she dives, zeroing in on a—bird?

Sam follows, dragging a magnetic leash out of his pocket.

"Wilson, where the hell are you!" Natasha demands in his ear, but Ilma is so close, claws extended, when the bird – some kind of corvid – turns and looks at her, and… lets her land on top of it, lets her dig her claws into its flash and roll. Sam lands immediately after, activates the leash and curls it round the bird's middle.

Ilma lets go then, hops up to perch on Sam's shoulder, and together they watch the corvid stare back at them, seemingly unperturbed by the development.

"Wilson!"

"I got his daemon," Sam says.

"You sure about that, birdy?"

"I've got a daemon," he concedes. The corvid has not spoken, but it's not hard to distinguish a daemon from an animal, even if their human isn't immediately visible. "There's no one around."

He landed on a hear empty roof. Even a bird daemon wouldn't want to sit on a roof without their human present, and Sam's pretty sure they are standing on top of a warehouse.

"Can you transport them? What are they anyway?"

"Uh, a bird – a corvid. I got them immobilized, but I've only got fingerless gloves and short sleeves on. They're bigger than Ilma."

"Stand by, I'm coming to you."

Sam stands by, then, watching the bird make no move to try to free themselves. They don't even look around, and if Sam had any lingering doubts that it's a stray corvid (which he didn't, Ilma was an air force bird, she would know), they would be gone. No animal would be this calm with its wings secured to its body.

It only takes a minute or two before a mini jet appears between the buildings, coming to a hover just to the side of the building Sam is standing on. It is the same red-and-gold as the armor, polished into high shine. It perches on the very edge, sturdy legs extending, and the front hatch opens, revealing Stark, strapped into a half-reclining chair, surrounded by screens, and his daemon, fur as gold as the armor, stretched next to him in her own nest.

"Hang on," Stark says, and flexes his fingers. The chair unfolds, and the daemon hops out and pads over to the immobilized bird. She sniffs them gently, and looks at Tony over her shoulder.

"She's not afraid," she tells him, takes the corvid into her jaws, and carries her to the jet, where she sets her down in the middle of the nest. Tony nods at Sam, then the hatch closes and the piloting unit takes to the sky. Sam and Ilma follow in short order, to where the Winter Soldier is waiting, hands immobilized by a pair of heavy handcuffs, kneeling on the rooftop, with Iron Man holding out a repulsor near his head.

"How's Steve?" Sam asks.

"The usual," Natasha tells him via the com unit.

"Steve is fine, thanks," Steve manages to sound normal even though a faint hitch in his breath tells Sam he must have pulled a stitch or two.

Stark, as it turns out, has secured a place he swears up and down could rival the best intelligence safe houses, while topping them in terms of luxury, and Sam won't deny it: he is loving the shower and the coffeemaker. He is also not at all averse to Clint Barton holding out his hand with a broad grin and telling Sam to call him Clint. His daemon, a plump, grey pigeon with keen, beady eyes, nods at Ilma, before puffing up and seemingly nodding off on top of the refrigerator.

Stark fashions an impromptu contraption out of the armor components to ensure the Winter Soldier causes them no problems, and it is only when that is complete that Natasha removes his mask and goggles. She seems to be weighing the two items in her hands, before she looks their prisoner in the eye. "What's your name?"

He stares at her. He must understand the question, but just in case Natasha repeats it in half a dozen languages. His daemon, whom they've settled in a cage Stark inexplicably had at hand, observes he proceedings without making a single sound.

"So what, no one's gonna try anything?" Stark asks after a few long moments of an intense staring contest. "Isn't that how it works, we play good cop – bad cop?"

Natasha shrugs, but she is looking about as comfortable as she was when she and Steve showed up at Sam's door, which is to say not at all.

"It doesn't work like that," she says, and leaves the room. Steve catches Sam's eye and follows, leaving him, Stark and Barton looking at one another.

"So… was that a cue or something? Are we supposed to proceed with 'enhanced interrogation'?" Stark asks, cool on the surface, but the audible scoff of his daemon betrays him.

"It's called torture, and it doesn't actually work," Barton says.

"What do you mean torture doesn't work?"

"It means you don't get reliable intel that way."

"That can't be right."

"No, it is," Sam says. He's not happy he knows this, but he does. "People will say anything you want to hear."

"He's not exactly forthcoming as is," Stark says, gesturing to their prisoner. "Maybe it would jog something."

"It's also mediaeval and inhumane," Sam tells him coolly.

"Everyone's a critic," Stark mutters. Tesla pads over, to insert her golden head under his palm, just where his fingers naturally fall behind her ears to deliver scratches.

"Don't you have all those super-computers?" Clint asks in the meantime. "Shouldn't you be combing through the files? We have a much better chance of finding something there."

"One, I'm insulted you even thought I'm not already doing that. Two, what am I, a caveman? JARVIS is sifting through them as we speak."

"What is JARVIS looking for?" Volya asks, having materialized out of thin air, and even though Sam knows Natasha is standing just outside the door, it still gives him a jolt to see her daemon, but not her.

"Anything interesting."

"Have him focus on anything pertaining to the Winter Soldier program."

"Why?"

"I have a hunch," Volya says, just that and nothing else. He takes a leap and lands on a desk, which allows him to look at the Winter Soldier they captured and his daemon. For their part, they do nothing; they sit and stare ahead, unmoving, uninterested in the world around them.

Natasha doesn't so much give up on interrogation as she delegates it: she makes a phone call and within a few hours an FBI detail shows up, ready to take their captive into custody. It says something about the quality of her contacts that they don't even try to reprimand them for not coming forward sooner.

They – and Sam is thrilled to be part of this particular they, he's not gonna lie – relocate to New York, after that, to an apartment even shinier than the (supposed) hole Stark dug up for them in DC. Sam is not complaining: Ilma can perform her early morning flight routine in the bedroom he's staying in, it's that expansive.

It is quiet, for the most part, as research tends to be, at least until one Tuesday morning, when Tony suddenly startles, white as a sheet, bent over a holographic screen, on which there is a mission report: December 16^th, 1991.

"My parents. He killed my parents," he manages, and trembles in his chair. He does not turn, does not look at any of them, but stays in place and lets his daemon put her head on his knee and whine softly. "They were going to a party, I thought it was an accident, all those years—"

He's out of the chair, eyes wild, ready to go flying off to the FBI facility where the Winter Soldier is being held.

"Wait," Natasha says.

"Wait?"

"They found a body in the Potomac. The body armor matches what the attacker from the overpass was wearing." She passes on her phone to Steve, who squints at the tiny screen.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means the man in custody is not the only Winter Soldier," Natasha says, shoulders squared and jaw set.

"What?"

"This is the one from the helicarrier," Steve says. "And the overpass."

"And you're sure about that?"

"Reasonably. There was a buzzard on the overpass, this one had a raven shadowing him."

"I was trained by the Winter Soldier," Natasha says. "It wasn't him." She stares down at Volya, and very slowly she says, "It wasn't either of them."

"Why does it matter?" Sam asks, looking between Natasha and Steve, whose stricken expressions are giving him a sense he should be dreading something for which he doesn't have a name just yet. "Hydra is all over the place, we know that now."

"He was enhanced," Steve says through grit teeth. "The one I fought definitely was enhanced, and this one, too, judging from the jumps he took. And whatever he had, they have, it's as good as what I have. Someone's recreated the supersoldier serum."

"So was the one who trained me," Natasha admits quietly. "I remember him throwing one of our handlers out the window from across the room with one hand. He was faster, stronger than anyone I have ever seen until very recently."

No one seems to know what to say, so instead they keep digging, keep going through the terabytes of data, keyword by keyword, meticulously indexed by JARVIS, until finally Steve says, "I found something about the Winter Soldier program. There were five of them: the enhancement procedures were carried out in February of 1992," he says, and then looks down onto the page. "Shit."

"That can't be a coincidence," Stark says immediately. "My old man gets offed in late ninety-one, then magically a super-soldier serum hits the market?"

"Yeah…" Steve stands, transfers the pages he was reading onto the main display, flips through a couple. "It's in Russian, but there are a few dates here. Where's Natasha?"

"Bathroom break, and I think she and Clint went to get us something to eat."

"I can translate," JARVIS interjects smoothly, and the Cyrillic is overlaid with glowing Latin.

Sam is still reading through the translation, skimming through the bits highlighted by the AI, when Steve and Tony swear in unison.

"There are five of them," Steve repeats, mainly for his own benefit.

"Five supersoldiers, that's not great news."

"But hang on… if they gave the serum to the five in 1992… then who killed my parents?" Tony flexes his hands, staring at the blinking lights, though Sam is pretty damn sure he doesn't actually see anything. "The other document said the Winter Soldier did it."

"It makes sense, if you want to use him as a boogey man, to have multiple people playing him," Sam says. "It's a cool pseudonym. They probably passed the title on to the next guy when the previous one died."

"So there was a Winter Soldier before 1991… and after there were more. JARVIS, flag that code name everywhere you can, see if there's a timeline."

"Right away, sir."

They wait, but the exercise doesn't yield much. There is a fractional increase in the frequency of deployment, but nothing that would confirm there was more than one, even. A Winter Soldier was relegated to the Red Room, Natasha gathers from between the lines, but it's hard to ascertain which one, as none of them are identified at any point.

"Goddamn it, aren't Nazis supposed to be great at documentation?" Sam gripes as yet another promising lead goes down in flames.

"The Red Room was first and foremost Russian. You'd be surprised how good Soviet bureaucracy was at not documenting things," Natasha tells him with a small smile.

"Socialism," Sam says with a lot of feeling.

"Communism, Sam," Volya corrects, lolling out his tongue and smiling, and after that they spend a whole afternoon giggling, which is pretty awesome, in Sam's humble opinion.

The call comes through maybe an hour later, when even Tony gets too fed up to stare at the screens. Natasha listens to the voice on the other end, and her face does not so much as twitch.

"The Winter Soldier's dead," she says once she hangs up. Her words hit the room like a wagon of bricks.

"What?"

"How did he die?" Steve asks immediately, while Sorcha leaps into the table to butt her head against his shoulder.

"His daemon escaped custody and flew into traffic on the highway," Natasha says.

Sam stares at her, uncomprehending.

"Where the hell were they keeping them, that she could just… escape?"

"Middle of the building. He was bolted down, but the daemon managed to slip out of the cage and out the door."

"Hold up," Sam says, lifting his hand. "His daemon just flew out and no one noticed?"

"Do you know how many crows and ravens are in that building?"

"Yeah, but…"

"You can train yourself to not react when your daemon is away," Volya says. "It's not pleasant, but it can be done."

Natasha drops a hand onto his head and scratches behind his ears. "We can be as far apart as quarter of a mile," she admits. "If we have to. It's got its uses."

"That's… Barbaric."

"It's useful," Volya says, and then climbs Natasha's shoulder and falls silent, which, Sam would say, really conveys everything.

They do catch a break, eventually, and by they Sam means a collective global community of people who are anti-Nazi. The CIA follows rumors and a name of a scientist missing since the DC showdown, and in the intense shootout that follows another Winter Soldier is killed, but unfortunately so is the scientist. The Interpol corners a Hydra cell, calls in backup and Sam gets the dubious pleasure of watching another lose his head to a well-aimed shield throw. The handler – and they are fairly sure it's the handler – gives them the slip, but thankfully he is barely a covert operative, and Natasha tracks him easily to a base in Paris, where they find him retching as he finds, at the same time as they do, that the Winter Soldier was not quite as contained as Hydra probably wanted him to be.

On the bright side, they managed to contain him, in the end.

"How does that make sense," Sam wonders and tries not to look.

"You will never win!" the handler spits at them, and spits bloody, because torture does not work, but removing a tooth so that the man lives to answer for Hydra's crimes is just common sense. His daemon, a very hissy weasel, thrashes in her bindings. He rolls his Rs and folds the words: he's Russian, to Sam's inexpert ear.

"Take an ibuprofen and shut up," Sam tells him.

"You won't catch all of us," he says. "Someone will find him, and then you'll see."

"Him? Pal, the Winter Soldiers are all dead. At least one at the hands of your people.

"Them," he spits again. "They'd do in a pinch, they can be replaced."

"And the last one can't?"

"Someone will find him," the man vows. "Cut of one head, another will take its place."

"We're good at taking off heads," Tony says. "Ask number four."

"Not him. Not the original. You can't defeat him. You think you know us, you think you know Hydra, because you fought and killed those coddled westerners? You've seen nothing yet! The Soldier cannot be stopped, cannot be reasoned with: he has no weakness, no daemon; he isn't human. He was born to serve Hydra."

"We're looking forward to meeting him," Steve says calmly. "Directions will be appreciated."

"You wish."

"Suit yourself," Steve says. Natasha winks at him, and nods at the Interpol agent who's sitting in on the interrogation. "We're done."

"We're done?" Sam asks when they take the weasel and his daemon out.

"We're down to one Winter Soldier," Natasha says. "Just one. And I'm pretty sure we'll find him in Russia."

Ilma, Sam is sorry to say, acts like a common pigeon and burrows into the folds of Sam's parka when the gangway opens and the cold, Siberian air sweeps inside.

"Really? We were in the army!"

"We were in the desert," she says, her voice muffled by the thick felt.

"You're ridiculous."

"You're ridiculous," she mocks him, and burrows deeper.

Natasha glances at him and smirks with the corner of her mouth, even as she straps another gun to her thigh.

"Are we expecting resistance? I'm not going to be of much use in tight quarters."

"I don't think so. The base should be abandoned." According to the scant information they were able to uncover, the base was abandoned, has been for a while, to the point of leaving few clues in the documentation they had. What they had on their side was volume: enough tiny, seemingly insignificant clues that only made sense when there were hundreds of them.

"So… aren't we leaving someone to stand guard?"

"We are," Stark says. The armor unfolds out of its resting place, and steps out of the helicarrier, arms raised. Above them the piloting unit detaches from the craft and lands by the door, before folding up into a solid ball of red and gold. It's totally inconspicuous against the concrete and snow. Sam hopes they get no fly-bys.

"Do we know if the flooring is stable enough to support the armor?" Sam asks instead, because the Iron Man is poised to follow them into the base.

"One way to find out."

"Tony—"

"It's dead, Rogers. It's a concrete bunker without a single source of heat in the entire base. And the armor can fly."

Steve takes a moment to stare. "How is it that I have to explain to you the existence of bombs."

"I'm perfectly capable of detecting bombs!"

"This was built by Hydra. I wouldn't trust it."

"You're walking in with a helmet that crumbles in your own fist. Your daemon doesn't even wear armor."

"We're soldiers," Steve says, patiently.

"Do you seriously think there's bombs here?"

"I do," Volya answers in place of Steve. "They would rather lose the base than surrender it. There will be booby traps and explosives."

"I have the technology to handle both."

"Can we please wear some protection?" Tesla tells Tony. "Pepper and Salis would want us to."

"You," Tony says, "Are a treacherous coward and will not get any treats."

None of his anger is supported by the hidden closet filled with form-fitting, perfectly sized body armor, for everyone. Tesla is rolling her eyes, but as she is also grinning with her tongue lolling out of her mouth. Sam suspects she takes Tony about as seriously as he takes the swear jar.

They are not fools, however. The corridors are too low for the armor to fly, so its heavy footsteps echo among the iron and concrete, and their pace allows time enough for each step to land, reverberate, and fade, before the next one hits. Sam feels his skin prickle: he feels watched, even though the armor is constantly projecting the layout with potential red zones into his and Ilma's goggles.

They encounter six, all of them, in Tony's words, basic.

"I am a little disappointed," he says when they reach the cavernous heart of the base.

"Dental chair of nightmares not doing it for you?" Sam asks, checks the goggles one more time and nudges them onto his forehead. It's a chair in the same sense the electric chair is a chair: there's the shape and very clearly the spot where the ass is supposed to go. The rest of it is a tentacled nightmare of restraints and a sort of halo, that Sam's pretty sure he doesn't want to understand.

It's connected to the electric grid by a very benign looking plug, laid out on the concrete, right beside a drain.

"What's it for?" Ilma asks. Her head is swiveling, and Sam feels the tension in her small body.

"The Winter Soldier apparently required conditioning before each murder spree," Tony says. he's scrolling through the display panel on his forearm. Tesla holds herself close to his side, so that his fingertips are rarely not in contact with her head, which, now that Sam is paying attention, strikes him as unusual. All the times he's seen photos and reports on Tony's past exploits his daemon was a step behind.

"By conditioning you mean…"

"Electrocution. Really, really intense electrocution."

"Right," Sam says. "Why?"

"Doesn't really elaborate, it's apparently the standard process."

"How does that make sense?" Sam asks. "Electrocuting a soldier before a mission? Won't that mess him up?"

"Apparently not doing it made him erratic, likely to attack his handlers, or run off."

"What the hell, man," Sam just says, and looks at Ilma.

"Hey," Natasha says. "I found the door."

She is standing in front of what Sam would indeed call a door, but only because it met the technical criteria of having hinges and being approximately the right shape for a couple of humans to pass through. There are no visible locks or access panels, just a couple of huge levers, the sort that should stop a rhinoceros from breaking it down. It is hidden in the shadows of an already creepy room, and Sam finds he doesn't want to look at it any longer than necessary. Ilma is shuddering against his chest, the harder the closer they get, so much so that he unzips the parka he's wearing and lets her out, so that she can perch on his shoulder.

"I don't see any explosives," she says, scanning the door and surrounding walls. The Iron Man armor comes to stand beside them, repeats the scan.

"Nothing," Tony says. "It's clear."

"How do we open it?" Steve places a hand on the lever and tests the give. "What does this do?"

"Give me a moment." The armor continues to scan, and Tony is poking at the holographic displays emerging from the gauntlet. "Okay, this needs to be done in unison, else they will jam, and that will require lasers to fix. Rogers, you turn this one clockwise, I'll turn the other. On the count of three."

Steve and the armor take their spots their hands on the levers. On three they begin turning, until the heavy machinery inside groans with the strain. "A little more," Tony says. "There!"

Sam would have known that anyway. The final click of the gears turning was punctuated by a low groan of metal, and then the door was slowly coming open, despite its weight.

"Holy shit," Clint says, poking at the side. "That's what, two feet thick?"

"Twenty-six inches."

"Holy shit," Sam echoes. "But it's not that hard to open, no offense, Steve. You didn't strain."

"Natasha would be able to open it, no offence, Natasha."

"None taken," she says, and smiles, but Sam feels the tension she radiates. Sees, too, the way her hand is white on the pistol she's holding. "It was designed to be accessible from the outside."

"Great, nothing ominous there," Sam mutters. The heavy door is bare from the inside. If he were to guess, Sam would say it matches the color and texture of the walls exactly.

"Hold on, I'm picking something up." Tony raises his arm and scans the darkness, revealing, via the faint laser lights, shimmering in the steam, outlines of enormous cylindrical shapes. "There's still power here."

"Where? And how big is it?"

"Pretty big."

"It's a circular room, with a diameter or about twenty-five meters," Tesla says. "It smells… empty. No one has been in there for years."

"But the power is still on," Steve says. "What's being powered?"

"Is there a light?" Natasha asks.

Tony flicks through the images on the holoprojector. "There are lightbulbs, yes, but they don't appear to be connected to the grid."

"That's encouraging." Steve reaches for the shield on his back, holds it up in front of him. Sorcha's hackles raise even further, effectively doubling her volume. "Does the armor have lights?"

"Does it ever," Tony says, and a thick beam hits the first of the cylindrical structures inside. It's about five meters from the entrance, with numerous cables leading into its base. "This one is offline. There are six of those, the one in the middle is the one with the power."

"We'll follow the armor inside. Tony, you hold back, keep scanning. Clint, Natasha, stand guard. Sam, you come with me," Steve says, and steps inside, Sorcha and Sam following on his heels, their shimmering shadows crisscrossed by the edges of the metal tiling.

They are no more than five inches in when Ilma lets out a cry and dives off Sam's shoulder and outside; Sorcha doesn't even set a paw inside before letting out a roar. "What happened?" Sam calls out, frantic. "Ilma!"

"I can't," she cries. "I can't go in there!"

"Sorcha—" Steve starts, but the lynx, now curled up on the threshold, is shaking her head.

"I can't, Steve. I can't walk on whatever that is."

"What the hell?" Tony mutters, strides in despite protests and kneels just inside, where he can examine the floor closely. He straightens and his fingers dance across the gauntlet, which is immediately followed by the armor doing a full spin with its arms thrown akimbo. "The whole room is covered with the same alloy. All of it, every inch of space, including the door."

"I know what this is," Steve says, pale as death. "The Nazis were experimenting with it during the war. It's daemon isolation."

"It is what?" Sam and Clint ask at the same time, bother their daemons flapping up to perch on their respective shoulders. Ilma tucks herself close to Sam's cheek and coos.

"It's an alloy of some sort, I don't know the exact makeup, but I think they mentioned meteor iron."

"Why would you…?" Sam starts and trails off, because there are no words, there can be no words. "Why?"

"What are they keeping there?" Clint asks.

"The Winter Soldiers," Volya says. "That's what the documents said."

"Why would they keep them separately from their daemons?"

"Because they are separated from their daemons," Natasha says slowly. Volya hops so that his paws are on her thigh and she bends to let him climb into her arms. "There's no way they could be kept in there, with the door closed, and their daemons outside."

"Separated?" Sam repeats, and feels the waves of nausea. "How can a person be separated from their daemon?"

"It can be done. It's dangerous, and kills more often they not, but those that survive can be trained to be effective soldiers. They are not limited by needing the daemon close, they tend to be more… obedient."

"But—"

"Hydra thought they would be able to use it in weapons. Separating daemons from people releases a lot of energy, they tried to weaponize it, for a while. Didn't really go anywhere, but they tried," Steve says. "We found a base in Poland, during the war, where they conducted the experiments. There were… there were a lot of bodies."

"Fuck," Sam says, and covers Ilma with his palm where she is nestled into his neck. "Fuck."

"That would explain how the daemon managed to escape without anyone noticing." Steve stared into the darkness, though Sam's not sure what, if anything he's seeing. "If they can move separately without disturbing their human. But then he still died when the daemon did."

"I don't know," Natasha says, staring into the darkness. "I don't know the details. Maybe the enhancement helps."

"So… daemons can't go in, but they held the Winter Soldiers here," Tony says, looking around. "Where do their daemons go, then?"

The armor withdraws from the containment chamber, and soon they are standing before a pretty convenient door, considering the rest of the décor. It has actual locks on it, which Steve punches through, and beyond it they find a significantly less traumatic space: considering the rest of the facility, this one is downright pleasant. There are cages, yes, but they are open, and lined with rotting bedding. There are perches and enough space for a daemon to be comfortably contained.

"No power here, either," Tony concludes after a short examination, then turns back towards the main hall. "The only place that's still taking the juice is in the room of nightmares, and even then it's just the tube."

"Do we even want to know?" Clint asks.

"What other choice do we have?"

"We can stream it." Tony holds up the gauntlet and the armor mirrors his movements. "Armor goes in, deals with whatever it is, we reconvene for shawarma and viewing party in New York."

"We can't just… deal with it," Clint says.

"Look. We are all smart people here. These tubes are cryo-chambers. Per everything we have, this was the Winter Soldiers home base. Five Winter Soldiers have been apprehended or killed, which means that odds are the sixth is still frozen in there. And that's the one who killed my parents."

"We can't execute an unconscious man, Tony," Steve says gently. "I know how you feel, but… We can't do that."

"Miss me with the Geneva Convention, please," Tony says while rolling his eyes, but Tesla is shuddering and Sam has known enough people with dog daemons to know how to read that.

"We have all the time in the world, and superior fire power," Natasha says. "We'll do it right."

"How do we do it, then?" Clint folds his arms across his chest and approaches the door. "I can go – you said twenty-five meters, right, it's not a problem for Jolene and me."

"Same," Sam says. Neither Ilma nor he love the idea of going near the door, let alone inside, but they wouldn't be such an effective pararescue team if she couldn't keep long-range watch while he was on the ground. Twenty-five meters is nothing.

"Seriously, twenty-five?" Tony is watching the both of them with his mouth half-open. "How?"

"We're birds," Jolene tells him, cocking her head. She looks as sleepy as always.

"That doesn't actually explain anything."

"No, it makes sense," Steve says. "Birds tend to be able to go further than other kinds of daemons."

"I'll go, too," Natasha says, turning to Tony. "You and Steve keep watch."

Sam starts. "But—"

"Volya and I have been trained to fight when separated by considerable distance. Were you?"

No, Sam has to admit he wasn't. Ilma and he can be apart, at a distance that freaked Riley and the rest of his teammates the fuck out, but whenever fighting started Ilma tended to stick close.

Steve nods and Sorcha pads to be near him. "Iron Man first. Sam, Clint – be careful in there. Maintain contact at all times."

"If anything goes wrong, yell 'Agrabah', and grab on to the armor. Or let it grab you, whatever. It's an emergency protocol, Iron Man will fly you out, and we're nuking the site from orbit," Tony says, and then feigns a heart attack when Steve nods and adds, "It's the only way to be sure."

Volya settles just outside the door, his side against the wall, so that he can peak inside. Both Jolene and Ilma flutter to join him, and Tesla paddles to their side.

"Ready?" Natasha asks, catching Sam's eye. Her hand lingers on his arm. He can barely feel it trough the parka, but he knows it's there, and that is, not to get too soppy about it, everything.

"Not really," he replies, but what can they do? Iron Man advances slowly, would be out of sight already, if it weren't for the beams of light shooting out of both of his hands. Sam takes a deep breath and follows, gun outstretched. He can hear Clint breathing two steps behind him, his steps heavy against the metal tiling, and it's the same as his, measured, but it is measured because he makes conscious effort to breathe evenly.

"We're okay, Sam," he hears Ilma call, but her voice seems to be coming from far away.

It's an illusion, he knows. She is just there, at the threshold, and the room is not that big. They are fine.

Steve won't let the door close.

They circle the space, and just as the initial scans showed, there are six of those tubes there, along the circumference of the room, forming a circle whose center falls about three meters away from the center of the room. Five of them are dead, no electric activity, nothing.

The sixth is humming.

"What are we looking at, Tony?" Natasha asks and shines a light onto the panel before them.

"It is operational, and it is occupied," comes the voice from the armor. Sam jumps. It is not Tony's voice, nor Steve's.

"What the—"

"Apologies, Mr. Wilson. The armor has an autonomous mode, at which point I'm in charge," says the voice of JARVIS.

"Thanks for springing that on us," Clint mutters.

Sam grins at nothing in particular. He knew it, of course he knew it. He's glad for the jolt, now: took his mind of how he was literally walking where Ilma couldn't follow.

"Report," comes another voice, and this time it's Steve, talking into their com units, but really, he shouldn't have bothered. Sam can hear him from across the room, whoever the sadistic fuck who designed this space was, he had an excellent sense of acoustics.

"We're at the operational cryo-unit," Natasha says, and shines her light higher. In the beam Sam can just make out the shape of a man. "According to the control panel he is still alive."

"Can you thaw him out?"

Natasha looks at Sam and Clint, nods and lifts her hand to her ear. "Hang on."

Turns out Hydra keeps highly sensitive manuals right underneath the panels, which is excellent practice when it comes to operational flow, slightly less so when your enemies gain access to the base and want to turn your machine on, or off, as it were.

"Initiating the sequence," Natasha says, and slides the first lever into position. With assistance from Clint she aligns the flips, switches and buttons per instruction, and, once the controls turn green, hits the massive red button in the middle of the console.

"Done," she says.

"Is he awake?"

"Won't be for hours."

"What do you mean won't be for hours!?"

"Defrosting is a delicate process, Stark, and this is not a microwave."

"Fall back," Steve orders. "Iron Man can monitor."

Sam's entire insides loosen up. He looks to Natasha, then Clint, and once JARVIS confirms he's got the defrosting process under control, they march their way back to the world. It feels like he can breathe again when Ilma is tucked into his neck, shivering, her sharp beak digging into his skin.

They spend the hours planning. Per the manual the Winter Soldier will be disoriented, and should be transported into the chair immediately, for conditioning, for maximum effectiveness. That's obviously out, to the point that Tony takes a quarter of an hour to take the thing apart and remove its most crucial components, and they spend a solid half-hour using his pocket laser to shred them into nothing.

Slightly more concerning is the promise of violence, should the procedure not be followed, which Sam reluctantly brings up, but is then reminded of the armor, which can, probably, handle one enhanced individual.

"Probably?"

"It is titanium alloy that would give Captain America trouble. We can restrain him."

"Do we have means to knock him out? And whacking him on the head does not count." Clint is juggling spare lightbulbs, as one does in a crisis.

"We have supersoldier-caliber drugs, yes," Sam volunteers, and does not look away when Steve gives him the stink-eye. "Don't look at me, man, you are the worst patient, I did what I had to do."

They find a few stretchers, stacked out of the way in an operating room straight out of Silent Hill. Sam deliberates for a few minutes, before picking out the one that is very definitely reinforced, and fitted with restraints that seem like overkill.

"I don't like this," Ilma tells him quietly, from her cozy position in his parka.

"What's not to like?"

"Why were they keeping them in a daemon-proof room?"

"If they are separated…"

"That still doesn't make sense. Why? They are together during missions, aren't they? Why keep them apart when they weren't?"

Sam shakes his head. "I have no idea."

He makes his way out of the operating room with a tremendous sense of relief, pushing the heavy cart in front of him, and parks it before the entrance to the insulated room. He can see the Iron Man standing in front of the cryo-unit, casting light onto the panel and the motionless figure hidden behind the clouded glass. There is just the man there; no space for a daemon, either.

"Why would they do this?" Ilma asks in a small voice, and Sam has no answers for her. He stops, lays a hand against the bulge in his parka and holds her even closer, desperate to let her know he was going to protect her, that he would die before letting them be separated.

"I don't know," he says.

The alert comes a few solid hours later, when even Stark is bored with analyzing the tech.

"Finally."

"Finally," Sam mutters, flexing his hands. Another trip to the nightmare room, hooray, just what he wanted.

"Can you handle it?" Steve asks him quietly. "I can—"

"It's fine. It wasn't so bad the first time." It wasn't, not really. Ilma and he, they were one of the freaks of the unit, they have once been almost across a football field from one another, and it only hurt a little. It wasn't painful, it wasn't bad. "It's just… the knowing, you know? That's worse."

It was the stuff that nightmares are made of, him walking, without the touch of wings, the flutter of a heartbeat that was at his side since birth.

Steve nods, and looks away, into the tenebrous interior of the room. "I can imagine."

"So, what is the game plan?" Tony asks.

"Sedate him, get him onto the stretcher." Natasha checks her widow's bites first, then opens a small silver case and pulls out a syringe. "This will act fast, if I manage to get it into a vein."

"So we hold the supersoldier down for injection. That will be easy." Clint flexes his arms, gives Jolene a pat, and shoos her off his shoulder. "Let's do this."

It's easier this time; easier and harder, both. Sam doesn't start to panic, doesn't anticipate the slow pull of the bond with his daemon being stretched and having his heart dragged out through his chest, but he still controls his breathing, focuses on not thinking why he's here, without Ilma's comforting weight on his shoulder. He reaches the central panel right behind Natasha and stares.

"Is it me, or is it cloudier?"

"Residual moisture has vaporized. According to the manual this is standard."

"Russian facility, last used in the early nineties, clearly built earlier, why does that make me very uncomfortable?"

"Chernobyl was in Ukraine," Clint tells him cheerfully.

"Yeah, that helps. Thanks."

"There is no indication this facility ever used nuclear power," Iron Man tells them. Sam makes a face, but doesn't get into it. It's the spirit of the thing that gives him trouble, not the particulars.

Iron Man raises his head and pushes a lever. Somewhere high above them there is a groan and the tube slowly begins to raise. The machine hisses; smoke billows out. Sam holds on to the edge of the panel, counts his breath and watches as the fog melts into the darkness of the room.

He can hear the Winter Soldier draw a breath, a hideous, distorted sound, hindered by the mask on his face.

"Where is Padme," Clint intones in a breathy voice, only to be shushed by Natasha.

"He's awake."

"Right, but do you think he's seen Revenge of the Sith?"

Natasha rolls her eyes, fondly, and checks the manual. "Alright. Iron Man – get him out of there."

The armor engages the thrusters, flies up, removes the mask and picks the soldier up from his perch, then deposits him on the stretcher. As he does the soldier's hands twitch, hand closing around the metal arms, as though—

Sam clenches his eyes shut and looks away, because the way those mismatched hands seek purchase is uncannily like the way he reached for Ilma when they got out of the room the first time. There's no daemon in his cryo-tube, no substitute. Nothing to hold, nothing to love.

The man does not resist; he stares at the ceiling and pants, his eyes barely open. He makes no move to fight when they fasten the restraints onto his wrists, elbows, knees and ankles, he makes no move, save for the heaving of his chest, when Natasha loops the belts around his hips and over his forehead. He makes no move when she takes the syringe and plunges it into the exposed skin of his right forearm.

Sam holds his pistol at the ready, but the soldier does not make an attempt to get away, does not struggle, does not fight. He does not even look at them. He lies there and breathes.

"I thought this would go differently," Clint says, when Iron Man begins to push the stretcher towards the heavy door, towards Ilma. "I really did."

"He has been frozen for decades now, maybe it took its toll?"

"Is he damaged?" Clint asks.

Iron Man surveys the man and replies, "I'm unable to tell. I was built for battle and detecting explosives through walls, not brain scans."

They cross the threshold and Ilma leaps into his arms, warm and soft, and Sam is whole again, can breathe again, without the vice squeezing his chest. "We're okay," he tells her. "We are okay."

He is so focused on her that it is only when Sorcha lets out a howl that he realizes something is wrong. He releases Ilma onto his shoulder, and stares at Steve, who is bent over the stretcher, both his hands on the soldier's face, Sorcha on his shoulders. They are both hyperventilating, and the soldier is looking up at them, half-awake.

"Bucky," Steve says, heaves out, and Sorcha howls again.

The soldier stares at him, confused. "Who the hell is Bucky?" he slurs, before the drugs Natasha pumped into his veins take hold and pull him under.

Steve sags, drops to his knees, his face slack. Sorcha slithers from his shoulders and into his arms, where he holds on to her as though the base has suddenly filled with water, and she is the last tank of oxygen.

"What's going on?" Tony asks, looking warily between the man on the stretcher and Steve, crumpled on the ground.

"It's him," Steve replies, as Sorcha mewls. "It's him."

"Did he also kill your parents?"

Natasha brushes the moist hair from the soldier's face. She pulls out her phone, taps at it for a few moments. "His name is James Barnes. He went by 'Bucky'. He was Steve's sergeant during the war."

"He was Steve's best friend," Sam adds into the silence. "He died in 1945."

Tony nods, absently, looks down at Tesla. "So… I take it my revenge plan is not go."

He is met with half a dozen heavy stares, which he doesn't bother to return.

"Yeah, yeah, not touching prisoners of war, I figured."

"Figured?"

"Come on, Romanoff, I'm not stupid. This whole thing was built for him, the electrocution, the isolation chamber, everything. Doesn't exactly make me think he was here by choice."

"His daemon isn't here," Tesla says. Her voice is deep, usually: when she is being quiet it reverberates. She moves towards Steve, just enough that she can prod Sorcha's tail with her nose. "No daemon has been here in years."

Steve nods. Sorcha lets out one final mewl against his shoulder, and leaps to the ground. He picks himself up slowly, one hand on the edge of the stretcher, and stays there, nodding at the rest of them to go.

They move through the facility slowly, partially so that Tony can make sure to bug the place, in case someone goes snooping. "There's no telling who knows, might as well be prepared," he says, but no one is really listening.

"He didn't know me," Steve says when they secure their cargo? Their prisoner? He stares at him, still, as though he'd disintegrate before his eyes if he looked away for even a moment. "He looked right at me, and didn't know me."

"How is it possible?" Ilma asks.

"His whole unit has been captured in 43. Zola experimented on him. He must have done something that let him survive the fall."

"It's not your fault, Steve," Natasha says, but it feels painfully inadequate, considering the man trussed up like Hannibal Lecter.

"I should have looked for him. I should have—"

Sorcha is perched on an empty chair, on the other side of the hold. She doesn't seem to be blinking: her wide eyes take in the stretcher, the man upon it, and little else.

The Winter Soldier wakes in the middle of the Atlantic, and they don't even notice, until the binding on his left arm snaps. Fortunately, Natasha keeps her head and is ready with a needle on his right, after which he sleeps until way after they park the quinjet and wheel him into a secure glass cell that Tony Stark just happens to have in his tower, for no goddamned reason.

It's a little more spacious than Sam would expect, to the point of triggering altophobia, anyway.

They make it back just in time for dinner, give or take a few hours, which is inconsistent with what Sam's body is telling him is the right time; time zones stubbornly remain a thing. He finds himself just nodding off, in the middle of a tense meeting, and wakes two hours later to an empty room, dusky sky outside, and Ilma curled up in the crook of his elbow. There's a blanket spread over him, which he drags along as he relocates to his room, and drops onto the bed to continue the nap.

He emerges from his room some hours later, refreshed, with a selection of cricks in his neck and shoulders that send him directly into a hot shower. He feels only a twinge of guilt at the impulse, but needs be: he is likely to spend the next however many hours talking Steve off a ledge of madness, he needs to be on top of his game.

Sam sets Ilma on the cabinet, takes out a fresh, fluffy towel, opens the shower door, and stops. It is unbearably vast, from the door to the opposite wall, gleaming and white, and his heart is pounding in his chest like mad, thinking of the room, of the vast, unimaginable space that his daemon couldn't cross.

He's hyperventilating, again, until Ilma dives over his shoulder and into his arms, and he clutches her to his chest, sinking against the glass partition.

"We are good, Sam," Ilma says; she is as breathless as he feels. "We are good."

She suffers the shower on his shoulder, indignance written in the curve of her beak, but she is happy to be there; Sam can tell by the desperate clench of her talons into the meat of his shoulder.

"Eat something," she reminds him once they are out of the shower and he is brushing his teeth.

"Not sure I can stomach anything right now."

"You'd better, because you will have to go out there and make Steve eat, which will take forever, and we shouldn't go hungry."

Sam eats; the bread swells in his mouth, but Ilma is usually right about those things, so he keeps eating. He's glad he's done so, when he finds Steve, who has definitely not eaten, but instead spent his day staring at the glass cage containing the Winter Soldier. Sam lets his eyes slide right off the glass, away from the singular creature inside.

"Steve," Sam begins, but isn't allowed to finish.

"Spare me. Natasha went through the whole thing already."

"It's not your fault, Steve."

"You know that's not true."

"You couldn't have known he'd live."

"I could have. If I was paying attention, if I listened—"

"Steve…" Sam catches himself and shakes his head. "Have you eaten?"

"What?"

"Have you eaten?"

He watches the idea get bounced between Steve and his daemon, like neither is quite able to make sense of the concept of food.

"You both should eat," Sam repeats, with about the same result. He persists; nothing to it but persistence, he reasons. It works eventually, but it only works because the tower has a kitchen crew that is on call and therefore reliably not poisoned food can be delivered to anywhere within the tower within half an hour.

"So, is he doing anything?" he asks, mouth full of absolutely spot-on pizza.

Steve doesn't lift his head. He keeps shoveling food into his mouth while still keeping an eye on the Winter Soldier, maintaining his head at an angle that has Sam worried about the state of his neck.

"He isn't," Steve says eventually, which, yeah: Sam can see that, thanks.

The Winter Soldier doesn't seem to be paying any attention to them. He's just sitting there, moving only as much as he needs to breathe. His head is bowed, but given that there are plenty of cameras aimed at him, Sam can see his eyes are flickering around the room, taking his surroundings in, and that's about as much as he can gather, before he has to look away.

"Can he see us?"

"No reason he couldn't."

Sam digests that. "Should he be seeing us?"

"I can't see the harm," says Steve. "Natasha said it's best he knows he isn't alone."

"Yeah." Sam makes himself look, take the man in, for as long as he can stomach the sight. "Yeah. It's for the best."

The alarm catches Sam by surprise. He leaps from his seat and stares wildly about. "What the hell?"

"There's been a security breach," JARVIS tells them, "On sublevel three."

"Who is it?"

"I'm not sure."

"What do you mean you're not sure?"

"There's been an explosion, but I cannot detect anything out of ordinary."

"Explosion!?"

"All flash, no substance," Stark says. There are already holographic projections hovering in the air for him to peruse. "There is no actual damage."

"So what, someone decided to set off a roman candle near the – is that the power generator?"

"It is the power generator."

"And you okay with someone having a little firework display there?"

"Is this my okay face?" Tony turns to face some, frowning. "I am very curious how someone managed to get in there, it should be sealed."

"It's ventilated."

"One, I think you watched Die Hard one too many times, and two: it is unbelievably insulting that you’d think I wouldn't make sure my vents are too small for down on their luck cops to crawl through."

"I'm going to check on Bucky," Steve says, which has been his consistent refrain for weeks now, even though, to the best of Sam's knowledge, the attention has not been reciprocated.

"Thank you for the concern for the integrity of my building!"

"I'll be concerned when you're absent, and the concern is therefore warranted," Steve says and disappears down the elevator. Tony shakes his head and returns to flipping through the images of the security cameras at the subterranean levels.

"Do we have anyone on call?" Sam asks, but Tony is in his own world, filled with zeroes and ones.

"Clint is chasing down the Ohio cell, and Bruce is in India, on a business trip, consulting on their space program. They're worried about the gamma radiation's effect on their probes. Natasha is around, I've had JARVIS call her," Tesla tells him quietly.

Sam nods and pulls up a screen. There doesn't appear to be a physical breach of any sort, which means whoever did it got in through legitimate channels, and that's not great either. Sam is about to ask for identification logs, when he is interrupted by JARVIS.

"Sir, Captain Rogers just opened the Winter Soldier's cell."

Sam is running before JARVIS gets as far as "just", already aware what the rest of the sentence would contain.

He bursts into the greater cell room at the same time as Natasha, not at all surprised to find there is a fight going on. There is a daemon in the cell, a dog, throwing itself at the soldier. Sam dives for the control panel of door, but can't bring himself to close them; Steve and Sorcha are inside, intimately tangled in the maelstrom of limbs and fur and claws.

"I am not detecting any intruders on this floor," JARVIS informs them through the discreet speakers in the console. "Not on any of the neighboring floors, either."

Sam catches Natasha's eye. There is no one here… and yet a daemon is trying to – what is that daemon trying? Ilma flies up to his shoulder and the four of them try to make sense of what is going on within the glass cage, because by all accounts it makes no sense.

Barnes takes a wild swipe at the creature's head, misses, and his fist leaves a crack in the reinforced glass, while Steve, in a move Sam was unfortunately already more than familiar with, is doing his level best to insert himself into the middle of the fight between the Winter Soldier and the daemon.

Because this is a fight between the Winter Soldier and the daemon, Sam can see that now. He can also see it's not as two-sided as he assumed it was. The dog is barely dodging the attacks, but tries to get close to the man nonetheless, and Sam realizes, at the same time as Natasha, what they're watching.

"That's his daemon. That's—"

"Bracha. Steve said her name was Bracha."

"Bucky, stop!" Steve tries to step between them, but miscalculates: Barnes swipes his legs from under him, lunges, and grabs the dog by the throat.

And then—

One second it's there, she's there, hanging from his fist, the next a sparrow takes flight, taking refuge on the ceiling, and Sorcha leaps over Steve's back, lands in the Winter Soldier's lap and presses her face to his cheek.

Sam and Ilma hold their breath.

Steve gets a hand under himself, slowly pulls his knees in, sits up.

Barnes sinks until his back hits the glass. Sorcha stays where she is, her furry cheek against his face, her paws against the bare skin of his shoulder and neck.

Sam is too far away, but he can see Steve's breath hitch.

Barnes' arm slowly comes up, his fingers sink into Sorcha's fur, as her whole body loosens and curls into him.

"Bucky," Steve whispers.

Ilma is flapping her wings against Sam's shoulder, brushing feathers against his ear with every move, because Sorcha is wrapped up in the Winter Soldier's arms, like there's not place she'd rather be.

Sorcha is touching a human being not her own. On purpose.

The sparrow flutters down from the ceiling, but it's not delicate claws that hit the ground, but sturdy paws. The dog whines softly, and Steve turns to look at her. "Bracha," he says and holds out his hand. "You came for him."

She doesn't move, her paws are still firm on the ground, ready to spring, but the tension in her should eases, her hackles settle. "Steve," she rasps. "Steve."

"Hang on," Tony's voice comes over the speakers. "Wasn't she just a sparrow?"

Sorcha refuses to leave the cell, which means Steve can't relocate either, so they settle on the ground, in a semi-circle around the door, which remains open solely in case Steve needs to get to his daemon, fast. Sam's not the only one to have misgivings, but Sorcha would not be moved.

Bracha curls up by the glass wall, her head resting on her paws. She keeps her distance from them all, eyeing both her human in the glass cell and the audience watching her every move. She's tense; the fur on her shoulders is ruffled into a thick mane, black and caramel-brown, in which her warm, brown eyes shine.

She's skinny, Sam can't help but notice. The ruffled fur brings her up to the size of a large dog: Sam is willing to bet when she's calm they'd be able to see the outline of her ribs, but even now her snout betrays she has not been eating on the regular.

"Can we get her some food?" he asks Natasha, then before she has a chance to react, says, "I'm going to get her some food." Ilma is shaking so hard, he can barely breathe himself, her claws are digging into his shoulder, drawing blood, no doubt. He needs to be out of there, if only for a moment.

He is out the door before anyone can call him back, almost walks into Tony, and dives for the bathroom.

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

Steve's daemon just went and—she really did do that.

"She really did that," Ilma says into the fragile skin right behind his ear. "Sorcha just went and… did that." Ilma shakes and steps closer to Sam's neck, until she is nestled against his jaw, like she used to when she was a chick and a duckling was her favorite form.

"Can you imagine—?" touching someone else, he means to ask, but his hands are gripping the side of the sink and his brain is too busy willing the world to stop spinning. He can't, in all honesty. The thought of laying his hands on another person's daemon is too much, but then so many things were too much lately.

Ilma just shrugs her whole body and burrows into her own feathers.

They stay in the bathroom until Sam sees the reflection in the mirror stabilize. "We're okay," Ilma whispers to him. "We're okay."

He swings by the kitchen on his way back, fills up a couple of bowls, one with fresh water, the other with chunks of meat from the leftover takeout boxes, the only immediately viable foods in the refrigerator.

Bracha eyes the food suspiciously, even when Sam withdraws to the established encampment on the other side of the room. She swallows, trots in place, but makes no move to approach, until Volya rolls his shoulders and inches towards her. He noses at the meats, extracts an orange cube of chicken from someone's Tikka Masala, and swallows it whole. He proceeds to drink a few mouthfuls of water, too, and retreats a couple paces, looking at the skinny dog in challenge.

Bracha, eventually, lets out a snort. "Would be stupid of you to poison me, at this point," she says, and digs in.

"You never know," Volya says.

Bracha swallows, licks her chops and nods. "Thanks. I appreciate it."

Volya nods back and goes back to Natasha, lying flush against her thigh, from where he has both the glass cage, Steve's broad back, and Bracha in his sights.

"Okay, so I have been patient, can I have it on the record, please? Can we start asking questions now?" Tony hits a few buttons, the cameras reposition and the man plops onto the floor, along the rest of them. "I'm ordering chips."

Sam starts. He'd missed Tony standing in the corner, tinkering with the machinery that controls the cell's environment, but cannot find it within himself to appreciate the effort it must have taken to stay quiet this long.

Bracha, to whom most of the questions are addressed, buries her nose deeper into the bowl.

"You seem perky," Tony says.

"What?"

"The other one wasn't nearly as, you know. Perky."

"Perky?" Bracha cocks her head, looks at Sam, then Natasha. She's alert; Tony is not wrong there. Her eyes are focused, and keen, very much unlike the crow that let herself be captured on the roof. She looks at Ilma and cocks her head, curious, her paws shift on the ground, as she looks for ways around them and out.

"Aha!" Tony throws his hands into the air. "I knew it! You caused the explosion!"

Bracha shrugs and bends to her food again. "I needed to distract you."

"You're too big to have gotten in without being noticed," Tony presses on, and this time she curls in on herself and bares her teeth. "Look – we've seen you change, just now. I wanna know how you got in, my security is clearly lacking."

"Your security is adequate. I got into the building through the ventilation shaft," she says eventually. "Mostly pigeon-shaped."

"We have never had a pigeon problem for as long as I lived here. Or a rat problem."

"You can get in if you're pigeon-shaped, not pigeon-brained," Bracha says. She is now nearly flat against the glass and digging her claws into the floor. Sam sees her hind legs bend slightly, ready to propel her forward, towards the exit.

Natasha catches Sam's eye and jerks her head minutely towards the door. Sam hesitates. Steve is still plastered to the glass, transfixed by what they are all trying not to look at: Steve's daemon curled up in the Winter Soldier's lap, his hand gently running through her thick fur, face buried in the fur of a daemon not his own.

Sam shudders and stares at Steve instead, Steve whose whole body is trembling, shaking out of its skin.

"Steve?"

His fingers spasm against the glass.

"Do you need—" He swallows. "We can get her out. Say the word and we will get her out."

"No," Steve tells him. When he turns his eyes are wet with tears. "It's okay. Leave her be."

"Steve…"

"Sam. It's okay."

Sam wishes he was convinced. He does. But Steve doesn't seem to be in pain, so he lets it go, for now, he steps back to join Natasha in the corridor, and all but sags against the wall.

"Shit," he says, while Ilma lets out a squawk and hops onto the railing, completes a tight loop in the open staircase and returns to his shoulder. "What a fucking mess."

"We need to get Sorcha out of there." Natasha is drumming her fingers against the railing, while Volya keeps his gaze fixed on the room, where Tony is trying to be sneaky about interrogating Bracha, with limited success.

"Good luck trying."

"She can't stay there!"

Natasha is shaking, and it gets under Sam's skin more than the sight of the metal hand against Sorcha's fur, and that, in turn, makes him finally look at the cage in earnest, rather than just scan it.

Barnes is wedged between the bed and the glass wall, cradling Sorcha in his arms. His face is hidden in her fur, and his shoulders are shaking. The daemon is shaking, too, though whether the distress if caused by the tight grip the man has on her, or for any other reason, Sam is unable to tell. It doesn't matter though, they can't just leave Steve being held hostage like this indefinitely.

"How do we get her out?"

"We have tranqs, but if he realizes he's being tranquilized, he might hurt her."

"He doesn't seem like he wants to hurt her."

Natasha narrows her eyes. "Like it's hard to seem like you don't want to hurt someone? He's just tried to kill his own daemon."

Fair point. "So, what do you suggest?" he asks, though he is now realizing that they have something of an audience. Tony is still peppering Bracha with questions, some of which are getting answers, of a sort, but Bracha herself is studiously not looking in their direction, even if her ears are angled their way. She's figured out how to break into the tower, he thinks. More than that, she found Barnes in a matter of weeks, and then figured out how to break into the tower.

Ilma flies onto his shoulder and together they step back into the cell-adjacent space, leaving Natasha behind.

"How did you know to come here?" he asks, and Bracha immediately breaks eye contact with Tesla. "He's only been here for a few week, and we haven't been advertising. How did you know it was us that took him out of the Siberian base?"

"I didn't. I just knew where to find him."

Even Steve reacts, turning away from the cell and looking at Bracha. "You knew where he was? The whole time?"

She shrinks under the collective scrutiny and takes a couple of steps back. "I could find him, that's all. Couldn't get to him in the dark place. Couldn't—sometimes I was too late, and he would be asleep again, and I couldn't…" She shakes her head and her voice slips into a high whine. "It's hard to be awake while he slept. I had to go, so they wouldn't get me. I had to leave him. I had to leave him!" She keeps inching back, step by step, and when Volya makes a cautious attempt to approach, she leaps, turns into a pigeon mid-air and perches on the light fixtures, high above their heads.

"Bracha," Steve says. He stands immediately below her, one hand on the glass cage, the other extended. "Bracha, how did you escape Hydra?"

"I didn't," she says. "When we fell—"

Sam sees movement out of the corner of his eye, and so does Ilma, because she nearly puts her claws through his shoulder again. Barnes is next to Steve, on the other side of the glass, Sorcha draped over his arm, staring up at the daemon hiding by the ceiling.

"You left," he says.

"I had to!"

"You left me!"

"You told me to go," she coos softly.

Sorcha lifts her head, licks Barnes' cheek, and a shudder goes through Steve.

"When we fell, after… I found you in the snow. I thought we would die, it hurt so much, and everything was red, and so cold, I couldn't stop the bleeding, your arm—" she shifts again, into a sparrow, drops from the ceiling to perch on Steve's shoulder. "But we didn't die. The cold saved us, then it would have killed us, if they didn't come." Steve stops breathing, and the sparrow flutters her wings, just short of brushing his ear. "We heard them coming. We heard them talk, and they were Russian, so you said I should go. You said I must go."

"I—you left me," Barnes says, but he is much less certain now. He reaches out and puts his hand against the glass, supporting Sorcha with the other. "I thought you'd gone."

"I had to go. I thought… I thought we would die if we kept going, but I couldn't stop, I thought if they didn't catch me, they couldn't hurt us. If they couldn't catch me, they couldn't…" she starts shaking, but when Steve reaches for her she dives off his shoulder and perches on the edge of a computer frame instead. "I tried to come back, I did! But they almost caught me, and then they put you in the dark place."

"I missed you," Barnes says. He looks down at Sorcha, like he is seeing her for the first time, and gently sets her down. "I know you."

"You do," Steve says, all but trying to crawl through the glass. "Bucky, you know us."

"I know you," Barnes repeats. "From the train. You were yelling."

"You've known us your entire life."

Barnes hesitates, looks at Bracha, then back to Steve.

"I know you?" he asks, quietly. "I know you."

Bracha takes off, lands on the floor by Steve's feet and transforms back into the Alsatian. Barnes sinks to his knees and presses both hands against the glass. He takes her in, the emaciated sides, bright eyes, fur the color of burned wood – were the silver strands always present? – and rests his forehead against the glass.

"Bracha," he whispers.

She takes another small step forward and presses her forehead against the glass, with a small whine.

"Guys… the door is open," Tony says then, and yelps when Tesla nips his palm.

Despite the open door, it takes Bracha a full day to come inside, and Barnes doesn't seem inclined to urge her. He sits on the bed and watches her pacing outside the cage, watches her change shape mid-stride, from dog to bird, to fox, back to dog, something that maybe was going to be a cat, but is shrugged off too quick to tell.

Sorcha spends much of the time keeping him company, which doesn't bother Steve, who has obvious trouble leaving his post, too. She still touches Barnes occasionally, and Sam has to watch the expression on Steve's face when she does, because it's something out of this world: he invariably closes his eyes, shudders, and a small smile trickles though the hurt he wears constantly.

"How's it feel?" Sam asks him once, while Bracha is doing her frantic, flying laps around the cage, chased by Ilma, and Sorcha lays her head on Barnes' knee so he can pet her.

"Weird."

"She ever done this before?"

"No," Steve says.

"So, what gives?"

"Couldn't tell you."

Sam mulls it over. "And… it's an okay weird?"

He's not really surprised when Steve blushes.

"Yeah. Okay weird."

"Okay weird" is the limit of what he manages to get out of Steve, but really, it doesn't take a genius to draw conclusions. He watches them after that, in regular intervals as scheduled by Natasha, and absorbs the changes as they come. Steve starts inching his way into the cage, until they spend their days petting Sorcha together, heads bent over a photo slideshow or a book, the lynx purring between them, the dog circling the perimeter, never close enough to touch, but not too far to be seen, either.

Sam is there when Bracha takes the final step, and nudges Sorcha aside to place her own head on Barnes' knee. He leaves soon after, tucking Ilma close to his chest; doesn't seem right to watch a grown man weep.

Bracha continues to shape-shift throughout Barnes' slow recovery, whenever she's spooked, surprised, or tired of Tony's rambling, but she never quite returns to the same shape, either, not the way children's daemon's do. It's too gradual to notice, at first, but once Tony gets it into his head to study the footage it becomes apparent that with every shift back into her original dog form Bracha's fur is interspersed with more white strands. Once Barnes is moved out of the cage and into a room on Steve's floor – carefully monitored, of course, because none of them is an idiot and brainwashing isn't shaken off in a day – the shifts become less frequent, but whenever they occur, the differences are striking.

Finally, there comes a day when they come down for lunch, Bucky and Steve, and Bracha's fur is entirely white. Her eyes, now the color of fresh caramel, shine in her pristine coat like a fire in the snow.

"Holy shit, what are you feeding her!" Tony exclaims, not without reason: Bracha now stands at least a hand taller than she had as a dog, she's considerably heavier, and it's hard to hide she is not a dog anymore. "Are pigeons going missing? Do we need to alarm Barton?"

Steve rolls his eyes, and Bracha looks up at Bucky, whose hand sinks into her thick. "I like you like this," he says. "It suits you."

She yips, bounces onto her hind paws to lick his cheek, and Sam doesn't even need to look at Steve to know he is clutching Sorcha's fur and smiling like a loon.

Does it surprise him to find out, via JARVIS, that once Barnes starts spending his nights in Steve's bedroom Bracha stops shifting entirely? It does not.

What does surprise him is that it takes a Wikipedia article to remind Tony Stark, he of the infinite scientific potential, that correlation does not indicate causation, and no, he does not want a front row seat to viewing of the supersoldiers napping in their living room, it's creepy.

Even if Bracha and Sorcha are curled up together so tight they form a golden-white yin-yang, tucked right between Bucky and Steve's tangled, half-exposed legs, and yes, the way Steve's head is tucked under Bucky's chin is adorable.

"Spoilsport," Tony says then, as he shuts the feed off.

THE END