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Sam wakes up in the trunk of a car, and it’s a testament to his poor life choices thus far that he recognises the inside of a car trunk within three seconds of emerging from what he’s assuming is a drug-induced unconsciousness. He sniffs at his clothes and at the rough upholstery, but can’t smell anything except cheap plastic and his own alpha sweat. Gross. The last thing he remembers is going for his morning jog, and it smells like he’s brought his morning jog with him into this thoughtfully provided unventilated enclosed space. Terrific.
The trunk has been stripped of anything useful, including the spare tyre and tool kit, but someone has put a fat couch cushion under his head. Aw, his kidnapper doesn’t want him to bump his noggin while he’s being drugged, abducted, and taken to his death. How considerate.
The car rolls to a stop and as soon as the engine cuts off Sam starts hollering. Maybe there’s someone nearby who can save him. Preferably someone with bad eyesight who won’t be able to identify him as an actual Avenger in need of rescue from an actual car trunk.
He’s still yelling when the trunk swings open. He squints up at the person. Unfortunately, it’s not a charming little old lady ready to offer him some cookies and a ride to the nearest police station.
“You’re not a grandma,” Sam says to the Winter Fucking Soldier.
The Soldier nods, gravely. Then points a gun at Sam’s face. Precisely the last place Sam likes having guns pointed at. “The Falcon will exit the vehicle,” he says.
“Pass,” Sam says, and grabs the top of the door, slamming it back over himself. Who knows, maybe the Winter Soldier is like those dogs that forget things exist as soon as they’re out of eyesight.
The door pops back open. Drat. The Soldier looks irritated. Probably not the greatest expression for a known murderer to be wearing while pointing a gun at Sam’s head.
“For the record,” Sam says, “I did not know you were alive when Steve and I were fucking.”
The Soldier’s eye twitches.
“Out of the car, Wilson.”
“I’m good here, thanks.”
“Bucky?” someone calls. A very familiar someone.
Sam pops his head up. Like a prairie dog from a burrow. Or one of those whack-a-moles.
“Bucky, did you— Is there someone in the trunk of that car?”
The Soldier looks down at Sam, and then back up at Steve Rogers, who has the audacity to be standing shirtless on the porch of an adorable stone cottage, holding a steaming mug and wearing grey sweats. Like he’s gracing the front page of a two-buck omega romance novel, rather than becoming a witness to Sam’s imminent murder.
“Affirmative,” the Soldier says, but he upticks the word so it comes out like a question.
“Buck, you can’t just— Sam?”
“Well, hey there, Cap. Fancy seeing you here.”
“Bucky, did you bring Sam here in the trunk of a car?”
The Soldier looks back down at Sam, something like bewilderment on his face. “I…” He hesitates. Probably no one in the entire world has heard the Soldier hesitate. “The Falcon was unconscious,” he says.
Steve puts his mug down on the porch railing. “Why,” he asks, voice going dangerously even, “was my alpha unconscious in the trunk of your car?”
Sam, who is getting competing messages from his nervous system about the imminence of his brain being introduced to the cheap interior upholstery, puffs up a bit at the possessive. Sure, he and Steve haven’t so much as kissed since finding out Bucky was alive, but they had shared two ruts before that. Sam had been pretty sure he was going to be asked to heat-partner Steve next.
The Soldier shifts, and Sam tries to reign in the giddy Steve-called-me- his feeling. Probably not a great time to be smelling like smug alpha, when an alpha with a competing claim is right there and—crucially—armed.
“Unconscious targets go in the trunk,” the Soldier says, visibly thrown. “That’s where they… That’s where they’ve always gone.”
“I sent you out for heat supplies,” Steve says.
The Soldier gestures at Sam.
Oh, great, he was kidnapped because an assassin mistook him for groceries.
Steve comes round the side of the car and offers Sam a hand up. He smells delicious. “Heya, Sam.”
“Next time you need a heat partner, a phone call will do just fine, man.”
—
They get to the kitchen, and Sam and Steve sit on tall wooden stools like schoolchildren while the Soldier does what Sam is assuming is the assassin version of fussing. Which is very similar to regular-person fussing, except if they don’t comply they get either a gun to the face (Sam) or a very stern look (Steve).
The Soldier makes both of them drink exactly 200 ml of water, and then 200 ml of milk. He measures it and everything, frowning slightly, like hydration is a competitive sport that he plans on winning. A competitive armed sport.
Sam’s trying his best to listen to Steve, but it’s hard to pay attention to anything except the armed-and-armoured Winter Soldier making scrambled eggs with an expression of utmost concentration.
“How’s Nat handling it?” Steve’s asking. The Soldier has rolled up the sleeves of his all-black tactical undershirt, and is using his metal hand to test the temperature of a hot pan. Which is either super unhygienic or super hot, it cannot be both, Sam will not allow his brain to think of it as both.
“Handling what?” he asks, distracted.
“My disappearance.”
“Huh?”
“Well, Bucky found me yesterday, and I missed our morning run, so…”
Sam looks at him.
“So someone noticed, right, that I was…?”
“Er…”
“Sam!”
“What! We thought you were just sleeping in or something!”
“Tactical failing,” the Soldier says. “Captain Rogers does not sleep in.” He pours some whipped eggs into the pan and starts adding chives and tiny diced tomatoes.
“We would have come looking eventually!”
“Hm. I wonder if Nat will notice something’s up now that both of us are missing.”
Sam winces. “I’m not missing,” he says. “I have a booking tonight at La Splendore.” He looks at Steve. “We have a booking tonight at La Splendore!”
“No you don’t,” the Soldier tells him.
“Do you have any idea how far in advance I had to reserve that table!”
“You’re not going.”
“Like hell I ain’t! We are driving back to New York this instant! Steve, get your—”
He pauses, and eyes the gun the Soldier is pointing at his face.
“Right,” Sam says, sinking back into his seat. “Yeah. Their food looks terrible, anyway.”
—
Steve’s heat starts the next day. Sam is loath to admit it, but the Winter Soldier is MAYBE a useful addition to a super-soldier heat party. Sam doesn’t have to pay attention to pesky things like replacing the gatorade or fixing the side of the nest when someone comes so hard they put a fist through it.
He also doesn’t have to worry about going toe-to-toe with Steve Rogers at his most demanding. He’s not even self-conscious about not being able to keep up. Mostly he’s just relieved. The Soldier at least waits for his last knot to go down before slotting into place behind Steve, both of them on their sides facing the dehydrated husk formerly known as Sam Wilson. Steve makes broken begging sounds, as desperate as he was right at the start. The Soldier pulls Steve’s outer thigh up and out, so Sam gets front-row tickets to the show.
“You lasted longer than I expected you to,” the Soldier tells him over Steve’s shoulder, barely ruffled, even as his cock slides through the mess Sam’s left on Steve’s thighs.
Sam’s too busy panting to muster a proper reply, so he just waves an exhausted middle finger more-or-less in the Soldier’s direction.
“That’s okay, Falcon. I’ll show you how to do it right.” And then he scoops Steve’s leg up properly, so his knee is in the crook of the Soldier’s metal elbow. And then the Soldier hauls Steve’s leg up, metal arm whirring, inexorable, bending Steve further than Sam would have thought possible given Steve’s bulk, until the Soldier can get his metal hand around Steve’s throat. It puts everything between his legs on display as the Soldier uses his grip to pull Steve’s body down onto his cock, Steve’s head thrown back, his toes clenching in the air as the position gives him no room to go anywhere except where the Soldier yanks him and oh, okay, turns out Sam actually can get hard again tonight.
“Holy shit,” he breathes, while Steve makes sounds not unlike a rooster on its deathbed, a half strangled scream as the Soldier fucks into him.
The Soldier gives Sam the smuggest smirk over Steve’s shoulder, before biting down on Steve’s neck. Right over the mark Sam just put there.
“Asshole,” Sam mutters, but can’t quite gather the energy to do anything about it.
—
Hygiene is, apparently, an essential part of the Soldier’s heat-care routine. Sam finds this out when he wakes up not in the arms of a delicious heating Steve Rogers, but instead under the cold spray of a shower with the world’s foremost assassin squirting shampoo at his face.
Sam yells so loudly he wakes Steve up, who comes to investigate the commotion, which of course ends in shower sex. Sam’s urge to murder the Winter Soldier declines markedly when he’s got Steve bent and braced against the tiles, water pouring down the golden planes of his back and ass while he begs Sam for harder.
“The shower is reinforced,” the Soldier says. Conversationally. From where he’s meticulously washing sex toys in the sink, like he does this all the time.
“I’ll show you reinforced,” Sam mutters under his breath, and sucks another mark into the back of Steve’s shoulder, adamant that he’ll get one of them to stay eventually. He contemplates kissing the spot behind Steve’s ear that makes him thrash like a fish on a hook, just to see if he can put a fist through the Soldier’s super-strength tiles.
The Soldier looks over at him, unphased.
“If the Falcon requires assistance, he only needs to ask.”
“Oh for the love of… Get in here already, jackass.”
—
It’s late afternoon a few millennia later when Steve’s heat breaks, having managed to bring Sam well past the limits of his body. He feels limp and overcooked, like a noodle left in the pot too long and then thrown at a wall one too many times. Even the Winter Soldier looks exhausted, though Sam notes he manages to make exhaustion look both sexy and on purpose.
“Alphas,” Steve’s murmuring sleepily, all mussed up and smelling sated (finally, thank fucking God).
“We gotcha,” the Soldier is murmuring back, kissing over Steve’s cheeks and nose with all the tenderness a brainwashed murderer is capable of. Which, it turns out, is a lot. It’s almost sappy.
“Knew you’d take care of me,” Steve says into the Soldier’s mouth.
Sam raises an eyebrow, which is about the only part of his body he can raise. “And what am I, chopped liver?”
“Buck figured out how to get me a pack back in the war, too,” Steve agrees, not seeming to hear him.
Sam snorts, and tries to find a bit of nest that’s clean enough to sleep in. “Two alphas is hardly pack, Rogers.”
He’s already closing his eyes, so he almost misses the expression on the Soldier’s face. Something calculating and intent.
Huh. Probably not a fantastic expression for the world’s most wanted criminal to be wearing.
But that’s tomorrow’s problem.
—
Tomorrow’s problem arrives in the form of a gigantic green rage monster, barrelling towards the cottage with the kind of sound that’s measured in flattened trees rather than decibels.
Sam hobbles—literally hobbles, he’s only fucking human and it’s been a busy few days—to the front door in time to greet the Soldier as he breezes past, seemingly unconcerned with the 1500 pounds of imminent destruction behind him.
“WHAT DID YOU DO?” he yells, slamming the door shut, as though a bit of wood and some hinges will stop the Hulk—the motherfucking Hulk, oh christ on a cracker they are so in for it—from tearing the lot of them apart.
“Steve,” the Soldier hollers up the hall, and Steve pops his head around the bedroom door, looking relaxed and refreshed, like he’s just come back from a retreat in the Bahamas rather than three violent days of back-to-back combat in the form of a heat. Sam tries to will his body into something less like a shrivelled corpse. He’s pretty sure no one’s noticed that he still looks like shit.
“Hey,” Steve says. God, he smells like post-heat and sunshine. “What’s up with—Woah, Sam, are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Sam grits out.
“You look half dead, do you need a—”
“Maybe we should be more worried about the rage-monster outside?”
“We’ve got a few minutes,” the Soldier says. “More than enough time for you to tell us what’s wrong.”
“I am completely fine,” Sam says through clenched teeth, and then adds, pointedly, “I’m not the one who brought the Hulk here to kill us!”
Steve visibly brightens. Somehow. He’s practically radiant. Sam glowers at him from his shell of un-serumed normality. “Banner’s here?” He jogs to the door, and Sam can barely yell a warning before he’s throwing it open and running towards where the Hulk is ripping up a tree.
Hulk roars.
“Bruce!” Steve yells back, jovial, arms wide.
“Oh god,” Sam whispers, half convinced he’s about to watch Steve get torn in half. Hulk reaches two big meaty cabbage-patch sized fists down to him, yanking him into the air with a bellow that gets cut off halfway.
“Heya,” Sam hears Steve say in the quiet, warm and friendly.
Hulk takes a huge breath of air, eyes half shutting as he brings Steve close to his face to sniff at him.
“Friend Steve?” he asks. “Smell good.”
“Thanks, buddy,” Steve says, and then Sam has to wobble his way over to the nearest chair before his legs give out on him.
Hulk carries Steve over to the cottage, getting smaller with every step.
“Next time just give invite,” he growls at the Soldier, still mostly green. The Soldier grins lazily, unrepentant.
“Every pack needs brains,” he says, by way of explanation. Sam puts his face in his hands. Hulk/Bruce peers at him.
“Why Falcon look like death?”
—
It’s true that Bruce is one of the smartest men on the planet, but Sam’s not convinced that the Soldier has truly considered the repercussions of finding a packmate with a tendency for turning things into rubble whenever he’s provoked and then putting that packmate into an enclosed space with Steve I-Don’t-Know-When-To-Back-Down Rogers.
“You don’t need to be here, Banner. We do not need three alphas for just Steve,” Sam points out. Valiantly. Because honestly he doesn’t know if he can go that hard again, even if he’s got a few months to prepare.
“Is your nose broken as well as your dick?” The Soldier’s smirk isn’t exactly unkind, but also isn’t exactly unterrifying.
“Beta,” Banner volunteers, which is useful because honestly? All Sam can smell right now is Happy Sunshine Sated Steve and also the Hulk is WHAT??? “Someone’s gotta take care of you sex-crazed yahoos. Plus, if you’re going to survive the next round, I’m pretty sure I need to make a chore wheel.”
“Hey!” says Steve, at the same time the Soldier says, voice gone suddenly, deadly cold, “Heat partnering Steve is not a chore.”
Banner waves two placating hands because apparently even the Hulk knows when he’s stepped in it. “Right right, of course. I just meant I can calculate Steve’s heat frequency and Sam and Bucky’s refractory periods; factor in calorie, hydration, and sleep needs; and make a scientifically optimized list of, you know… who bangs who when. Trust me, it’ll be great. And Sam won’t end up looking like…” He waves one frankly insulting hand. “That.”
Steve laughs, and it’s such a delighted sound that Sam almost doesn’t glare at him.
Meanwhile, the Soldier, terrifyingly efficient as ever, has somehow snuck out and come back without anyone noticing (and by “anyone” Sam means “Sam” because neither Steve nor Banner look the least bit surprised). He solemnly deposits a laptop on the table in front of Banner.
“ We—” he looks pointedly at Sam, and, hey, “—will be ready to comply,” he says.
—
Banner’s already through half a pot of coffee by the time Sam makes it into the kitchen for breakfast the next morning. He’s scowling at some hellishly complex set of equations on his borrowed laptop. Sam tries to be surreptitious about sniffing at him. Science guy smell and caffeine. Nice.
“You were wrong,” Banner says, instead of something normal like good morning. And also, hey. “Steve does need three alphas.”
Sam totally does not secretly sigh the world’s biggest sigh of relief-slash-jealously, and, playing it cucumber cool, grabs a mug and pours himself some coffee. “Good morning to you too, Banner. Little advice? Don’t tell the Soldier.”
Banner grins. “First of all, call me Bruce—we are pack now, after all. And second of all, point taken. Probably best to avoid any more kidnappings.”
“I WAS BEING EFFICIENT,” the Soldier shouts from down the hall and two rooms away.
Frigging supersoldier hearing. Sam flips him the bird and whispers, “Sense this through the wall, asshole.”
“He says ‘right back atcha,’” Steve shouts from the other room.
—
“It’s too big!” Steve’s yelling. Sam drags himself to the bedroom window to make sure no one is doing anything fun without him. Or anything illegal. Actually, probably all of this is illegal. Three kidnappees and the world’s most wanted criminal shacked up in a cottage. Huh.
The Hulk is outside lifting honest to god boulders and placing them in a more-or-less squarish shape beside the cottage. Steve is yelling something about how the new rooms only need to sleep one person, not ten.
The Soldier is, most worryingly of all, absent.
Sam goes back to bed and puts the pillow over his face.
—
Clint Barton arrives draped over the Soldier’s shoulder, with a cappuccino in one hand and what Sam’s pretty sure is a human tibia in the other.
“Put me down!” he’s yelling, whacking the Soldier with the bone. There’s still some gristle attached. “Unhand me, fiend!”
Steve’s wearing red boxers, mismatched socks, and his Captain America is disappointed in you face. The combination is doing something to Sam’s hindbrain that he’s gonna have to examine later. “Bucky, we talked about this. You can’t just kidnap people you wanna pack-bond with!”
“I didn’t choose him,” the Soldier says defensively. “He just got in my car!” He dumps Clint on the sofa. Sam’s kind of impressed that Clint manages not to spill a single drop of coffee. Which Clint smells like, through and through. Bold, but one of the nicer alpha scents Sam’s encountered.
“Did you carry him all the way here?”
“We drove,” the Soldier says, sounding put out about it. “He wanted to be carried through the door to make it a ‘proper kidnapping.’”
“Oh brave sir knight,” Clint says, making upside-down goo-goo eyes at Sam. The effect is somewhat ruined by the bit of leg still in his hand. It’s dripping blood on the carpet. “Are you here to rescue me from this horrible man?”
“You could’ve just kicked him out,” Sam points out.
The Soldier shrugs. “He smells like Steve,” he says.
And coffee. And competence . Yeah, this is gonna work out okay.
“Buck, I lived in a tower with the entire Avengers team. They probably all smell like me.”
The Soldier shrugs again, as if to say Yeah, so?
Steve sighs. “I’ll go tell Bruce to add more rooms.”
“Why’ve you got a human leg?” Sam asks.
Clint looks at his hand. “Uh. Bonding present?”
Sam pinches the bridge of his nose. “So help me Clint, if you say something about boning—”
Clint tosses the leg over the back of the couch. “I don’t have to say anything, handsome. I could show you instead?”
“I don’t get it,” the Soldier says. “Is the tibia an erogenous zone?”
Sam covers Clint’s mouth with his own before he can give the Soldier any ideas about sexcapades involving skeletons.
—
They’ve already got their third alpha, and the Soldier hasn’t tried to kidnap anyone else, but it turns out that Nat did, indeed, notice they were missing.
She shows up three days later in a pokemon hoodie and ugg boots, with the air of someone who’s sure her invitation to the slumber party must have been lost in the mail because she knows they wouldn’t have forgotten.
“I know you don’t need me anymore,” she says, precision-thudding a big duffel down on the kitchen table between Bruce’s laptop, Steve’s neverending stack of pancakes (courtesy of the Soldier), and Clint’s collection of coffee mugs (which are slobbish, but at least much less intimidating than the Soldier’s collection of pointy things awaiting their daily sharpening). “But since I’m here…” She ruffles through the bag, pushing aside two garrotes, a grenade, and what Sam’s sincerely hoping is not a bazooka, before finally pulling out the most intimidating strap-on Sam’s ever seen. “I think you’ve had enough pancakes, Steve.”
Steve swallows audibly. “Uh.” He clears his throat. “Ye– yeah. Me too.”
He’s gone from the table so fast he leaves a breeze.
They disappear into the master bedroom, and while Sam’s contemplating Steve’s abandoned pancakes, Nat calls from down the hall, “Well? Get in here!”
Who needs second-hand pancakes, anyway?
By the time they all emerge from the bedroom that evening, Sam still isn’t sure if it was a heat or a rut, or perhaps some Natasha-specific equivalent. And also, he wishes he’d eaten those pancakes. To be fair, he’s not capable of making very coherent thoughts while he’s wearing his ankles as earrings, and Natasha planting a hand on his throat right before he comes does not make the thinky think any easier.
At least Bruce makes them all a Hulk-sized dinner when they’re done. God bless betas.
—
Someone goes into rut a few days later. Sam’s not entirely sure who. They probably should have predicted this happening, what with all the pack-bonding pheromones floating around the place. Sam sneezes three times in a row as he wanders the labyrinthine halls of the new rooms Hulk’s been adding to the main building.
“WHO THE FUCK IS RUTTING DOWN HERE?” he yells. Someone giggles nearby. Sam sneezes again.
Motherfucking Vision pokes his head through the nearest wall. Sam just about ends up on the ceiling he jumps so hard.
“Would you be so kind as to fetch the sybian?” he says, polite as always.
“We don’t have a sybian,” Sam splutters, still trying to bring his heart rate down to acceptable parameters.
“We absolutely do,” calls Tony from, presumably, somewhere behind Vision. “If you’d all just stayed in the tower like I suggested we wouldn’t have to go hunting for our toys.”
“HULK LIKE NEW NEST,” comes a voice from. Well. Sort of everywhere and oh my god WHO is crazy enough to mate with HULK?
“Coming!” Peter goddamn Parker yells, a sybian over one shoulder and Steve Rogers in his stealth suit over the other.
Sam sighs and follows.
—
A portal opens above the bed, and the only reason Sam doesn’t accidentally castrate Steve with his teeth is because the Soldier is fast enough to jam a metal finger between his molars while they all flinch in various directions.
“Captain Rogers,” Steven fucking Strange says, floating through the portal and nodding at them like this is a routine house call and no one is naked and covered in various fluids. Sam tries to remember who’s knotted to who and hopes they’re not about to be sent through a portal into a cosmic-scale battle anytime soon.
They’re not nearly hydrated enough for that.
Clint leans over and turns off a toy that’s buzzing somewhere in the bedsheets.
“Hey, Doc,” Natasha says in the quiet. Which is much more polite than the “Little busy here, Strange,” Sam was about to bark out.
“I am in need of your assistance,” Strange says. Serene. His cape floats a bit in the non existent breeze.
Uh oh, Sam thinks. He tries to remember where his wings are stored. There’s a general move towards various items of clothing and weapons. Except for Stark, who’s knotted to, of all things, his own Iron Man armour.
“Don’t get up on my account,” Strange says, still with that eerie calm. “My heat is due, and I was wondering if you would accept an—”
“Oooooh,” Clint says. “Wizard sex!”
“When?” Bruce asks from the chair where he’d been napping.
Strange looks at his watch. “Seventeen seconds. I warn you, this could get… metaphysical.”
Tony looks like he’s about to knot again at the mere idea.
“I got you,” Natasha says, reaching for a second strap-on. Well, if anyone can wield two at once, it’s definitely her.
“No way, I get dibs,” Clint argues.
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Strange tells them, still looking extremely serene for someone apparently in preheat. “Two seconds.”
There’s a brief pause, and then the floating Strange explodes into ten floating Stranges, and… well, at least there won’t be any fighting over who gets to put what where with who.
The Soldier sighs, then squares his shoulders and sets his jaw. Apparently it’s not just Sam who likes that look, according to the wave of interested-alpha scent it elicits. “We’re gonna need a bigger bed.”
—
Sam’s pretty sure Strange does something hinky with his wizardiness in heat, because he manages to knot two Stranges at once, and he’s seeing what he thinks is an extra dimension. It’s a bit hard to be sure though, because no one seems to have a refractory period anymore, and Sam’s poor human brain is swimming in so many endorphins it feels like he’s got a fish bowl for a head. Has gravity actually gone weird, or are they genuinely fucking on the ceiling right now? He pushes his knot into… someone? Oh, hi Steve. He sinks his teeth into Steve’s neck and presses close while his knot ties, scenting Steve’s pleasure when he wraps a hand around him to bring him off as his own cock spills inside him.
Bruce keeps trying to ask each of them how they’re doing, and it takes Sam a while to realise he’s got an actual clipboard and he’s taking notes.
“Good luck getting a peer review for wizard sex,” Sam tells him, while Clint tries to make out with his knee.
Tony is hanging from the ceiling fan, making lazy circles above (below?) them while jerking off a Strange with one hand and scribbling equations with the other. The Iron Man armour has dissolved into a series of nanotech sex toys which Clint keeps trying to pocket. Vision is doing some kind of phasing thing, half in and half out of Strange’s main body. Judging by the sounds, either it’s causing an endless feedback loop of orgasms or they’re fighting to the death in there.
Spider-kid flits in and out, bringing Gatorade and snacks and clean blankets like Bruce’s good little soldier. In one particularly memorable moment, he splooges webbing all over Clint, which is honestly the least offensive thing anyone’s splooged on Clint all day. It might not even be the stickiest thing.
“You need to rest, Clint,” Bruce chides.
“Oh nooooo,” Clint drawls, making a little show of struggling. His dick is limp, but his hole is shining, wet with artificial slick. The view is extremely acceptable. “I’m sooooo helpless, I hope nobody TAKES ADVANTAGE OF ME.”
And that’s when Sam learns the very very weird noise that two dozen eyeballs (most of them Strange’s) rolling at once makes. “Sorry, Mr. Hawkeye,” the kid says. “It’ll dissolve soon, I promise.”
Sam kind of feels the same way.
—
Sam’s out the front of the cottage-cum-bunker with a trowel. Because the weeds aren’t gonna weed themselves, and someone has to keep up an air of respectability around here.
The Soldier comes to stand next to him. Sam thinks he’s there to help—he may barely resemble the old Bucky Steve’s talked about, but his loyalty to his new pack is unwavering, and he seems to soften a little more every day—but god forbid anyone in this pack does something other than carb-loading or sex.
The Soldier is looking at the sprawling annexes surrounding the little stone cottage. Someone has planted some flowers in one of Clint’s mugs sitting next to the porch steps. There’s a gigantic scruffy dog Sam’s never seen before eating pizza straight from the box.
The Soldier is giving off an air of such smug contentment that Sam thinks he can taste it.
“Bet you’re real pleased with yourself, huh.”
Clint pokes his head around the door before the Soldier can reply.
“Do you reckon Thor can charge sex toys while he uses them?” he calls.
The Soldier looks thoughtful, and then turns around wordlessly and heads for the car.
“Wait up, I’ll come with you,” Clint says. “But you have to drive, I’m gonna pass out.” And then he jogs to the back of the car, pops the trunk, and rolls in.
“Uh,” Sam says. “What are you doing?”
“Passing out,” Clint says, like it’s obvious. “Unconscious people go in the trunk.”
The Soldier glares at Sam, gesturing in the universal sign for See?!, then signing something to Clint in the tragically non-universal ASL that makes Clint laugh. Presumably at Sam.
“NO KIDNAPPING DEMIGODS,” Sam yells at them as they peel out of the driveway.
He’s not hopeful.