CA:TWS fic: That Others May Live

Too long to post here, so to AO3 you must go...

That Others May Live
15k words | PG-13-ish | Sam Wilson, Avengers, Bucky Barnes

summary: Sam was prepared to help Steve bring Bucky Barnes in from the cold, but this is not exactly how he'd figured on it going down.

"Hey, man, you free?"

Sam could tell from the tone of voice that Clint wasn't asking if he wanted to grab a beer somewhere far away from the Tower, but he didn't know the man well enough to guess what was really being asked instead. Clint wasn't intentionally opaque the way Natasha was, but he was also still closer to Steve than Thor on the 'I will suffer in silence before I show weakness and ask for help' meter.

"Depends," he answered honestly. "If it's urgent, yeah. Otherwise, I got work 'til five-thirtyish."

If it was internal Avengers bullshit, then it could keep until he was done tending to his clients. The Tower was one part BEQ and one part soap opera set and one part MTV reality show set and one part the most amazing and surreal and wonderful thing ever, but that still meant it was three-quarters insanity. If it was HYDRA pulling shit because they could -- Captain America's very public disappearance had rattled good people around the country and the world, but it had also energized HYDRA and every other bad guy with delusions of world conquest -- then tending to those clients might include getting coverage for his sessions so he could go save the world. But his little Avengers alarm hadn't gone off (it was an app on his phone, designed by Tony), so the answer was probably somewhere in between.

A vague noise from Clint. "It's not urgent-urgent," he said. "Steve turned up."

This is a timestamp/POV shift for the end of Recursive. It is possible to read this without having read the original story, but it's probably more fun if you do that first. Needless to say, this is spoilery as heck.