"Good morning, I'd like to speak with the editor please."
The receptionist of the New York Morning Express looked Steve up and down with the expression of someone well used to dealing with whatever happened to drift into a New York lobby. "Do you have an appointment?" Next to her, the security guy puts down his phone and gives Steve a slower, more-deliberate once over.
"No." Steve's in street clothes and he realizes he has his earphones dangling around his neck and a copy of the Express crumpled under his arm.
"Then I'm afraid there's nothing I can do for you, sir - if you have a comment or opinion you'd like to share you can always email us, yoursay@nyexpress.com"
Steve draws himself up, assumes his most authoritative voice, and starts patting his jacket pockets for his wallet. "Ma'am, I'm afraid I'm going to have to -"
He never gets to finish because every phone behind the desk begins to ring at once. The receptionist holds up a finger at him and turns to start answering frantically. Then someone's at his side, and Natasha says in his ear, "We're leaving right now."
She gets one hand on the small of his back and the other clamped around his elbow, and since the only alternative is starting a fight right there in the lobby Steve lets her steer him out the doors and onto the street. Once they've merged into the pedestrians she says just loud enough for him to hear, "What the hell did you think you were doing in there?" She's wearing a blond wig with bad roots and glasses that make her eyes look enormous.
"What was I doing there, what were you doing there? And let go of me."
"Call it women's intuition," Natasha says, swinging them around a corner. She jay-walks them to the other side of the street and stops just long enough to tap a card against the security pad on one of the gates that block off the gaps between buildings before shouldering both of them through. She does let go of Steve’s elbow to jerk her chin at one of the fire escapes. "Give me a leg up."
Steve folds his arms. "I revise my question, what are we doing here?"
"Have you ever tried to find a private place to talk in this town?"
Steve makes the jump up easily after her and they climb up a few flights before settling on a step which is neatly situated between a blocked-off window and one that shows a sliver of a storage room. Steve, who has indeed tried to find a private place to talk in this town many times, is a little impressed. Though not enough to tamp down his annoyance.
“You shouldn’t have dragged me out of there. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I just wanted to talk to him." Steve paused as a sudden horror hit him. “Oh God, you didn't think I was going to beat him up, did you?"
"Of course not." Natasha waves a hand. "I'm sure you would have gone in and talked about the fifth estate and the nature of the public interest and what his mother would say if she could see him now. And tomorrow that headline would say Captain America Threatens Journalist. And if you're lucky,” she continues, raising her voice slightly when Steve opens his mouth to respond, “The story won’t have the words ‘rumored gay affair,’ and if you're very lucky, they won’t run that photo again with it.’”
That fucking photo.
"Have you seen this?" Steve brandishes the Express at her. The headline reads CASH FOR KILLERS? FEDS CAVE ON NAZI ASSASSIN PAYOUT. The photo is an old one. Steve's seen the original. Someone wrote "Canal Zone, 1974" on the back like it was a vacation snapshot. Bucky's staring into the camera, eyes glassy and mouth hanging half open. He looks, to put it bluntly, high as a kite. His hair is dirty, and the whitewashed wall behind him isn't particularly clean either. The Express had put a stock art picture of a stack of bills next to it just in case someone missed the point. "Nothing on this page is true." Steve knows he's shouting now and he doesn't care. "Absolutely nothing! It's not a payout, it's his back pay! And Bucky isn’t a – a Nazi, he was a prisoner of war and they tortured him and –”
Natasha’s hand on his elbow again stopped him mid-sentence. A dark-haired woman had stepped into the storage room. Steve and Natasha waited, silently, as she got what she needed and left.
Steve kept his voice down this time.
“This isn’t an opinion. It isn’t a different view on the facts. Everything here is a lie, and a newsman should know better, anybody should know better than to print it! I came back and they couldn’t trip over themselves enough to get me my back pay! Bucky comes back and for the same thing, he has to wait a year and a half – and then this! After seventy years of, of – you saw those files, the whole world saw them, I don’t understand how anyone could look at that and still write this trash!” The Morning Express is in two pieces in Steve’s hands, torn down the middle. He isn’t sure when it got that way.
Natasha squeezes his elbow. “Those files were like an inkblot test,” she says, her voice calm but gentle. “People saw what they were going to see.”
Steve looks at her, the set of her mouth and the calmness of her body, and it hits him that this is what she’s always thought. “You released them anyway.”
“It was the right move to make. But nothing turns on a dime. I knew that, and I think James always has too.”
Steve’s righteous anger has started to ebb, but hearing Bucky’s name makes him realize with a jolt what an idiot he’s been acting like. He should’ve thought about Bucky first instead of storming off to grandstand at some hack journalist. What this is gonna do to him –
Steve pulls himself up. “I need to go home. If he hasn’t seen this ...” And even more, Steve realizes, if he has – “I should be with him.”
Natasha’s response is to stand and start down the fire escape with him. “How did you hear about it?” she asks as they make the jump down to the alleyway.
“I left early and went running. Stopped into a bodega to get a Good Humor.” Steve had been in line at the counter when he had seen the Morning Express’ cover. He’d grabbed the paper along with the ice cream, thrown down the first bill that came out of his wallet on the counter and walked out, the woman behind the counter yelling “Hey mister, you want your change?” after him. The next time Steve thought about his Good Humor was in a subway station in Midtown, when he stopped to throw the mostly-melted packet into a trash can.
Natasha’s mouth quirks down. “Someone’s asleep at the switch.”
He knows what she isn’t saying. SHIELD would never let this happen. But they’re working with a patchwork of too many organizations trying to do the work of one. Everybody probably thought that “media watch” fell under someone else’s mandate.
“That’s a project for tomorrow.” Steve pushes the heavy metal door open and they step out of the shady quiet of the alley, onto the sidewalk and into the brightness of the late afternoon sun. “Thanks for bailing me out back there.”
She’s turning to leave already, but Steve can see the flash of her smile as she goes. “I’m just filling in until you get a professional.”
When Steve walks in, Bucky is leaning against the back of the couch in his shirtsleeves, rolling up his cuffs. He looks up and says something right at the same time Steve bursts out with, “We gotta talk.”
“What’s going on?”
“Someone talked to one of the city papers about your back pay. It’s coming through soon,” Steve adds. Fucking hell of a way to find out. “The way they decided to spin it – I’m sorry, Bucky, it was wrong.” He stops to take a breath, and Bucky says,
“Is this about the Express?”
“You know?”
“I saw it on a news rack when I was getting my coffee this morning.” Bucky says it like it was a headline about a dancing dog or a movie star breakup.
Steve doesn’t know what to do. He was ready for Bucky to be off-kilter already, morose or pent-up angry. He was ready for him to snap and call Steve names or say that he deserved it anyway. He wasn’t ready for Bucky to shrug it off like it was no big deal, especially when Steve didn’t think he should be shrugging it off.
Bucky pushes off the couch. “Don’t spend too much time on this stuff, Steve. You’ll make yourself crazy.”
“I’ll make myself crazy?” Steve demands before he can listen to the voice in his head telling him to just thank his lucky stars and let this go.
“Yeah,” Bucky snaps, and there’s the edge Steve was waiting for. “Something like this was always going to happen.” He grabs for the corner of the torn Morning Express poking out of Steve’s jacket pocket, flicks through it and holds up half the cover next to his face. “People look at me and this is what they see.”
“It’s not true.” Steve steps up and before he knows it they’re right up against each other, thigh to thigh, mouth to mouth. “Nothing on that page is true.”
“Doesn’t make a difference,” Bucky says, but when Steve presses a kiss on the corner of his mouth he lets him.
Steve doesn’t see Bucky for the rest of the evening. He resigns himself to it, until Bucky shows up when he’s getting ready for bed, slips into the room with a quiet knock and into the other side of Steve’s bed. He lies down like he’s always here, and Steve takes the hint. In bed, with the light off, he rolls on his side, presses his face into the hair at the nape of Bucky’s neck and tries to block the draft.
The next morning, Steve steps into his not-officially-an-office on the Tower floor that houses Not-Actually-SHIELD to see that someone has left a tabloid-style newspaper on his desk. He glances at the masthead – the Daily Bugle – and unfolds it to look at the headline.
TAKE THE FU EXPRESS – TABLOID SMEARS NY NATIVE SON BARNES, CALLS AMERICAN HERO “NAZI,” “KILLER”
He texts Natasha a photo of it.
Her response, two minutes later, is a screenshot of an article on the Bugle’s website – a blurry photo of the two of them stepping out of the alley door yesterday titled CAPTAIN AMERICA AND BLACK WIDOW IN BACK ALLEY TRYST?? – and the caption Don’t get too hopeful. They also think I have three secret love children.
Re: Bucky can only come with penetration -- Smash All Your Mirrors, 12/?
The receptionist of the New York Morning Express looked Steve up and down with the expression of someone well used to dealing with whatever happened to drift into a New York lobby. "Do you have an appointment?" Next to her, the security guy puts down his phone and gives Steve a slower, more-deliberate once over.
"No." Steve's in street clothes and he realizes he has his earphones dangling around his neck and a copy of the Express crumpled under his arm.
"Then I'm afraid there's nothing I can do for you, sir - if you have a comment or opinion you'd like to share you can always email us, yoursay@nyexpress.com"
Steve draws himself up, assumes his most authoritative voice, and starts patting his jacket pockets for his wallet. "Ma'am, I'm afraid I'm going to have to -"
He never gets to finish because every phone behind the desk begins to ring at once. The receptionist holds up a finger at him and turns to start answering frantically. Then someone's at his side, and Natasha says in his ear, "We're leaving right now."
She gets one hand on the small of his back and the other clamped around his elbow, and since the only alternative is starting a fight right there in the lobby Steve lets her steer him out the doors and onto the street. Once they've merged into the pedestrians she says just loud enough for him to hear, "What the hell did you think you were doing in there?" She's wearing a blond wig with bad roots and glasses that make her eyes look enormous.
"What was I doing there, what were you doing there? And let go of me."
"Call it women's intuition," Natasha says, swinging them around a corner. She jay-walks them to the other side of the street and stops just long enough to tap a card against the security pad on one of the gates that block off the gaps between buildings before shouldering both of them through. She does let go of Steve’s elbow to jerk her chin at one of the fire escapes. "Give me a leg up."
Steve folds his arms. "I revise my question, what are we doing here?"
"Have you ever tried to find a private place to talk in this town?"
Steve makes the jump up easily after her and they climb up a few flights before settling on a step which is neatly situated between a blocked-off window and one that shows a sliver of a storage room. Steve, who has indeed tried to find a private place to talk in this town many times, is a little impressed. Though not enough to tamp down his annoyance.
“You shouldn’t have dragged me out of there. I wasn’t doing anything wrong. I just wanted to talk to him." Steve paused as a sudden horror hit him. “Oh God, you didn't think I was going to beat him up, did you?"
"Of course not." Natasha waves a hand. "I'm sure you would have gone in and talked about the fifth estate and the nature of the public interest and what his mother would say if she could see him now. And tomorrow that headline would say Captain America Threatens Journalist. And if you're lucky,” she continues, raising her voice slightly when Steve opens his mouth to respond, “The story won’t have the words ‘rumored gay affair,’ and if you're very lucky, they won’t run that photo again with it.’”
That fucking photo.
"Have you seen this?" Steve brandishes the Express at her. The headline reads CASH FOR KILLERS? FEDS CAVE ON NAZI ASSASSIN PAYOUT. The photo is an old one. Steve's seen the original. Someone wrote "Canal Zone, 1974" on the back like it was a vacation snapshot. Bucky's staring into the camera, eyes glassy and mouth hanging half open. He looks, to put it bluntly, high as a kite. His hair is dirty, and the whitewashed wall behind him isn't particularly clean either. The Express had put a stock art picture of a stack of bills next to it just in case someone missed the point. "Nothing on this page is true." Steve knows he's shouting now and he doesn't care. "Absolutely nothing! It's not a payout, it's his back pay! And Bucky isn’t a – a Nazi, he was a prisoner of war and they tortured him and –”
Natasha’s hand on his elbow again stopped him mid-sentence. A dark-haired woman had stepped into the storage room. Steve and Natasha waited, silently, as she got what she needed and left.
Steve kept his voice down this time.
“This isn’t an opinion. It isn’t a different view on the facts. Everything here is a lie, and a newsman should know better, anybody should know better than to print it! I came back and they couldn’t trip over themselves enough to get me my back pay! Bucky comes back and for the same thing, he has to wait a year and a half – and then this! After seventy years of, of – you saw those files, the whole world saw them, I don’t understand how anyone could look at that and still write this trash!” The Morning Express is in two pieces in Steve’s hands, torn down the middle. He isn’t sure when it got that way.
Natasha squeezes his elbow. “Those files were like an inkblot test,” she says, her voice calm but gentle. “People saw what they were going to see.”
Steve looks at her, the set of her mouth and the calmness of her body, and it hits him that this is what she’s always thought. “You released them anyway.”
“It was the right move to make. But nothing turns on a dime. I knew that, and I think James always has too.”
Steve’s righteous anger has started to ebb, but hearing Bucky’s name makes him realize with a jolt what an idiot he’s been acting like. He should’ve thought about Bucky first instead of storming off to grandstand at some hack journalist. What this is gonna do to him –
Steve pulls himself up. “I need to go home. If he hasn’t seen this ...” And even more, Steve realizes, if he has – “I should be with him.”
Natasha’s response is to stand and start down the fire escape with him. “How did you hear about it?” she asks as they make the jump down to the alleyway.
“I left early and went running. Stopped into a bodega to get a Good Humor.” Steve had been in line at the counter when he had seen the Morning Express’ cover. He’d grabbed the paper along with the ice cream, thrown down the first bill that came out of his wallet on the counter and walked out, the woman behind the counter yelling “Hey mister, you want your change?” after him. The next time Steve thought about his Good Humor was in a subway station in Midtown, when he stopped to throw the mostly-melted packet into a trash can.
Natasha’s mouth quirks down. “Someone’s asleep at the switch.”
He knows what she isn’t saying. SHIELD would never let this happen. But they’re working with a patchwork of too many organizations trying to do the work of one. Everybody probably thought that “media watch” fell under someone else’s mandate.
“That’s a project for tomorrow.” Steve pushes the heavy metal door open and they step out of the shady quiet of the alley, onto the sidewalk and into the brightness of the late afternoon sun. “Thanks for bailing me out back there.”
She’s turning to leave already, but Steve can see the flash of her smile as she goes. “I’m just filling in until you get a professional.”
When Steve walks in, Bucky is leaning against the back of the couch in his shirtsleeves, rolling up his cuffs. He looks up and says something right at the same time Steve bursts out with, “We gotta talk.”
“What’s going on?”
“Someone talked to one of the city papers about your back pay. It’s coming through soon,” Steve adds. Fucking hell of a way to find out. “The way they decided to spin it – I’m sorry, Bucky, it was wrong.” He stops to take a breath, and Bucky says,
“Is this about the Express?”
“You know?”
“I saw it on a news rack when I was getting my coffee this morning.” Bucky says it like it was a headline about a dancing dog or a movie star breakup.
Steve doesn’t know what to do. He was ready for Bucky to be off-kilter already, morose or pent-up angry. He was ready for him to snap and call Steve names or say that he deserved it anyway. He wasn’t ready for Bucky to shrug it off like it was no big deal, especially when Steve didn’t think he should be shrugging it off.
Bucky pushes off the couch. “Don’t spend too much time on this stuff, Steve. You’ll make yourself crazy.”
“I’ll make myself crazy?” Steve demands before he can listen to the voice in his head telling him to just thank his lucky stars and let this go.
“Yeah,” Bucky snaps, and there’s the edge Steve was waiting for. “Something like this was always going to happen.” He grabs for the corner of the torn Morning Express poking out of Steve’s jacket pocket, flicks through it and holds up half the cover next to his face. “People look at me and this is what they see.”
“It’s not true.” Steve steps up and before he knows it they’re right up against each other, thigh to thigh, mouth to mouth. “Nothing on that page is true.”
“Doesn’t make a difference,” Bucky says, but when Steve presses a kiss on the corner of his mouth he lets him.
Steve doesn’t see Bucky for the rest of the evening. He resigns himself to it, until Bucky shows up when he’s getting ready for bed, slips into the room with a quiet knock and into the other side of Steve’s bed. He lies down like he’s always here, and Steve takes the hint. In bed, with the light off, he rolls on his side, presses his face into the hair at the nape of Bucky’s neck and tries to block the draft.
The next morning, Steve steps into his not-officially-an-office on the Tower floor that houses Not-Actually-SHIELD to see that someone has left a tabloid-style newspaper on his desk. He glances at the masthead – the Daily Bugle – and unfolds it to look at the headline.
TAKE THE FU EXPRESS – TABLOID SMEARS NY NATIVE SON BARNES, CALLS AMERICAN HERO “NAZI,” “KILLER”
He texts Natasha a photo of it.
Her response, two minutes later, is a screenshot of an article on the Bugle’s website – a blurry photo of the two of them stepping out of the alley door yesterday titled CAPTAIN AMERICA AND BLACK WIDOW IN BACK ALLEY TRYST?? – and the caption Don’t get too hopeful. They also think I have three secret love children.