Chapter Text
The thing of it is, when everything goes to shit Bucky isn’t even trying.
“Oh yeah,” Bucky says into his headset, flipping idly through an old Wonder Woman comic. He has his feet up on his cheap melamine desk and social media open on his computer in full view of the entire office because hey, he can’t get fired. He’s about ninety five percent sure none of the art team could, which is probably why no one has called him on his bullshit yet. “They’re absolutely working on an invisible plane here for the Avengers. I’m trying to get into the department that will be more involved in it. No, I’ll let you know when I know more.”
It turns out that sometimes you can be right completely by accident.
***
“We have an invisible jet?” Steve Rogers asks, frowning. He's still stuck in a hospital bed at SHIELD headquarters, pretending he isn’t genuinely considering climbing out the window to escape, while his boss and best friend sits curled up like a cat in the visitor’s chair. It looks like it was designed to make people leave as soon as possible, but instead Natasha could be lounging on a feather stuffed throne for how comfortable she seems. “When did we get an invisible jet?”
“When I ordered R&D to make one, Steve, keep up.” Natasha drops a file folder filled with what looks at a glance to be blueprints and chat logs into his lap. “How do you feel about a stint of corporate espionage in Oregon?”
He blanches. “Like I want to run screaming in the other direction,” he says honestly, looking up at her with big, wounded eyes.
“Lucky for me your legs are fucked,” she tells him mercilessly. “Maybe next time you jump out of a plane and break both of them, you won’t follow through on the op anyway.”
“I want to know when I’m going to get an invisible jet,” Steve says instead of engaging with this slander. He eyes the terrible hospital pudding that is nevertheless better than anything he managed in his tenement back before the war. Natasha is giving it the look it probably deserves, so just out of spite he pops a heaping spoonful into his mouth and pretends oversweetened mucus is a taste he enjoys.
“If we don’t find out who the leak is, never.” Natasha smacks him upside the head with another file. “So focus. R&D is in charge of everything that’s actually invisible, but I don’t need the best minds at SHIELD working on a better cup holder. We split up the standard components to eighteen different manufacturers, all of whom pay someone to pay someone to pay someone in China to make it. They should have been so far removed from the process that they’d think we were making tractors. Someone figured it out anyway.”
“You’re sending American manufacturing jobs overseas?” Steve asks, horrified. “What are we paying taxes for if you’re just going to throw them away?”
“Your toys cost money, Steve,” Natasha tells him, snapping her fingers under his nose to pull his attention back to the matter at hand. “And you keep breaking them. You broke the freeze ray Stark just finished by hitting someone over the head with it. Just shoot them with the freeze ray, Steve.”
“It’s not like you don’t know I’m going to hit people over the head with things, so it’s your fault for giving me breakable tech,” Steve points out reasonably, and Natasha closes her eyes like she’s counting to ten so she doesn’t shoot him with his own smashed-up freeze ray.
Damn, he loves Natasha. She kicks his ass just like Peggy used to.
“I am hoping,” she finally says, “that if I make you take care of your own arsenal, then maybe you will treat it a little bit better.”
“This super body is half my arsenal,” Steve says, gesturing vaguely at himself with his spoon, “and I fuck my legs running ops after I break them.”
“Steve, you are going to put back on your grandpa khakis and plaid and go spy on this stupid firm because I am busy operating Shield after we put half of it in the river three years ago, and I’m still running eighteen simultaneous investigations on the other half for any Hydra left over,” Natasha says. “My hands are full, you’re one of the few people I know for absolutely certain is not a Nazi, and you’re drafted. Quit trying to wiggle out of it and read up on your cover.”
***
Right up until the shit hits the fan, Bucky’s doing pretty well for a maybe-illegal immigrant under the thumb of a shady organization that is definitely going to off him and drop his body in an industrial composter someday. He doesn’t really need the passport Hydra confiscated ‘for safekeeping’ most of the time. He has a clean apartment close enough to Portland for the food and far enough to avoid the worst of the bridge traffic, he can afford meals and rent with a little left over to save and buy nice shoes with, and he even has a roommate he doesn’t hate. Sure, Sam is an asshole, but he’s gone a lot, and he cleans up after himself. He doesn’t leave dishes in the sink like Bucky’s roommate in Romania, or bring home random strangers from dive bars like Bucky’s roommate in Bulgaria, and most importantly hasn’t gotten Bucky tortured in a basement by the local crime syndicates like his roommate back in Russia did. Which is really considerate of him, Bucky thinks. Bucky likes Sam just fine.
Bucky would like him, you know, better though, if he’d maybe stop trying to get Bucky to quit his super villain spy agency job. Bucky still has the scars and is a whole roommate short after the last time he got a little too honest about how much he would just desperately love to do exactly that, so he goes for flippant instead.
“I told you this already,” Bucky says, face down on the table with a half empty mug of oversugared coffee gripped in front of him like it can shield him from the onslaught of very dangerous kindness. “I can’t quit. I gotta work for them for three more years or I have to pay back all my student loans by myself.”
Sam looks just like he always does during this conversation, which is half buying Bucky’s bullshit and half ready to smack him with a newspaper. “Dude. These guys are super villains. You can go to any lawyer in the world and get out of whatever you signed.”
Letting slip the Hydra thing was a mistake that Bucky keeps making. Every so often Bucky blurts out some new detail, and Sam gives him this look, like he’s putting together a puzzle that Bucky doesn’t want him seeing at all. Sam is without a doubt the kind of guy who will take in the whole picture and decide Bucky needs saving, and that’s not a fun trip to be part of, Bucky has found. He rolls his eyes and makes a face. “Sure, unless I happen to tell one of the many lawyers who are also Hydra. Anyway, my student loans are still real, man. They’re not Evil Maniac School loans. I started late in life and I couldn’t apply for grants because I’m not supposed to have the government look too hard at my visa, which Hydra won’t let me see anyways. I have serious loans.”
“You are working,” Sam says slowly, like Bucky maybe hasn’t realized this, “for a homicidal criminal organization bent on world domination. You are working for actual Nazis.
“Ooh, don’t say that at the Christmas party,” Bucky warns him, downing the last of his syrupy sludge and getting up for more. “They get really grouchy about the whole Nazi thing nowadays. Everyone will go off for like forty-five minutes apiece about how Hitler was only a means to an end and none of them are actually Nazis. They kill people regardless of color or creed.”
“Oh yeah? You gonna take me to your Christmas party?” Sam asks.
“Nah man. They’d think we were fucking,” Bucky says, popping out Sam’s reusable coffee pod. “Miscegenation and sodomy? They’d murder us both before we got through the buffet, I work for a bunch of Nazis.”
Sam looks at him like his brains are visibly leaking out his ears. It’s better than the alternative, which is a lot more literal, but Bucky wilts anyway and does the stupid thing.
“Okay, look, I know you’re right,” Bucky admits, filling the pod and slotting it back into the coffeemaker. “You’re completely right! But the whole reason I jumped for the first program that promised a ticket out of Russia and got stuck in this situation was because I pissed off a huge organized crime ring there and had to flee the country before I got dumped in the river. That shit is off my bucket list. I burn this bridge and if I don’t wind up dead, I’ll be an illegal immigrant in Australia working for Baby Eaters R Us.”
“I can hook you up, you know,” Sam promises. “I have people. I can promise you one hundred and ten percent that they are not Nazis.”
“You can’t tell, you were rooming with me for two years before I straight out told you over takeout. You were so surprised you chipped a tooth on your chopsticks, and that was before I showed you all the bugs we had that I was blocking.”
“I can’t believe someone opened up the drywall and I didn’t see it. I’m lucky I never talk about work while I’m here,” Sam tells him, momentarily distracted from Bucky’s life of crime, thank god. “If you ever meet any of my other friends, do not tell them I missed those for that long, I will never live it down.”
“Yeah, you’re safe. I don’t usually lead with the whole super villain thing, it throws people off.” Sam gives him an it sure does look, but Bucky just pours some milk and about half a jar of sugar into the coffee and leans back against the counter. He takes a moment to breathe in the steam before he takes a sip. “Anyway, it’s not like I’m actually helping them. I’m basically just keeping busy until they try to kill me for actively sabotaging them when I turn in huge piles of steaming horseshit every time I write a report. There is no way they’re getting anything useful out of me, and I’m happy to keep taking up space and money while I do it.”
Sam makes a face that says he is not at all convinced, but would let it lie for now because his therapist has him trying some new Zen thing. Bucky raises his coffee at him to let him know he appreciates it, and gets ready for a long day of botching Evil’s grunt work.
***
So yeah, Bucky is stuck involuntarily infiltrating a faceless engineering conglomerate for a pack of maniacs, in a town that requires a masters degree to sell donuts, and he’s walking a razor wire between being as unhelpful as he can possibly be and not actually getting murdered along with everyone he cares about. But generally, usually, he just does a job he sucks at, surrounded by people who won’t meet his eyes, in a beige cubicle maze designed to drain every shred of spirit from its denizens, and tries not to let the banality of it all kill him before Hydra does.
This means he does a lot of online shopping instead of actual work. Bucky barely looks up from his “Perfect Summer Palettes for EVERY Skin Tone” quiz when his boss announces they have a new hire.
It’s not that his craptastic life has turned him into a complete dick. It’s not. It’s just that he’s pretty sure someone in HR is selling jobs. Bucky sure didn’t get here based on his resume. He majored in Russian literature and classical languages, he has no idea how to use Photoshop, and he is still the most valuable player on the art team. At least he does his assignments, eventually. Everyone else seems to get by quoting insane wait times until whoever is asking just gives up in despair and patches something together themselves.
Sure, the last time someone wanted a banner made Bucky threw it together in PowerPoint and took a screenshot, but he did it. Justine in cubicle eight just sends offended emails telling people they can’t expect her to take these extraordinary requests on such short notice (no matter how much notice there is), and never replies again. Bucky has her pegged as buying the job on a dare and then forgetting to stop the autopay bribes that are keeping her employed, so she can’t get fired.
So it’s not like anybody in his department deserves the job, and they probably got it by being rich or an asshole or both. Or a spy, like Bucky. He’s definitely caught Dave in cubicle three giving really confused mission reports in Swedish on the phone. Bucky’s not sure the guy knows what he’s supposed to be doing here, but Dave’s a good kid. He dutifully reports on every project he avoids.
Mostly Dave gets asked to make fliers for Take Your Kids to Work Day and company picnics, so Bucky figures the nation’s secrets are pretty safe from Sweden.
All of this means Bucky’s not overly interested in the new hire, which is the mindset most of the new hires here are actively hoping for anyway, but he chances a look up since he’s only browsing for a new satchel online with his time. Fern green maybe.
And.
Holy.
Shit.
The most beautiful man Bucky has seen in his entire life is smiling the most beautiful smile ever smiled. At him. And waving. Directly at him, since he’s the only one who isn’t laying low behind a keyboard and/or plastic succulent. Bucky musters a smile back that hopefully doesn’t look too lust-dazed and tries not to pant.
Bucky’s boss, a sandy haired guy so bland he might not actually even have a name, waves vaguely in the direction of the art department’s cubicle farm, since he likely doesn’t know which desks are taken, and disappears back into his vapid office.
“Just grab number five,” Bucky tells the most gorgeous person in the world when the poor guy gets a panicked look and just hovers. “Jeff moved out last week and left a really nice stapler.”
Five is also right next to Bucky, and New Guy’s face clears as he makes his way over. He folds his muscular frame into his new space, pokes around for a little while, then rolls his chair back and waves again, Really Nice Stapler in his other hand. The pleather chair creaks under his weight in a really evocative way and Bucky fights the urge to adjust his slacks.
“Hi,” New Guy says. “I’m Steve.”
Bucky tries to come up with something better than ‘Hi Steve, I’m sexually available,’ and fails. He waves back instead. “Bucky,” he blurts. “Barnes.”
They stare at each for a moment. Steve looks like he’s run out of pleasantries, so it’s up to Bucky. Shit.
“So what brings you here?” Bucky asks, and locks his lips on fifteen other intrusive yet extremely pressing questions.
“Oh, uh,” Steve stammers, eyes darting and big hands fidgeting with the stapler. “I just. I thought it would be a good career choice. You know. I really love…” he looks around wildly, apparently sees Cheryl’s scenic calendar on the office wall, and clearly makes a leap of faith, “...bridges.”
“Sssure,” Bucky says, narrowing his eyes. Definitely another spy. Not like he can call Steve on it though, he doesn’t know for certain the company doesn’t make bridges. They mostly make anything anyone will pay them for, by paying someone somewhere a little bit less to do it for them. It’s why everyone and their grandmother has a spy here, because while the company isn’t anything special, it has its fingers in enough illicit business venture pies that something is sure to fall into an agency’s hands if they park someone here long enough. “And what’s your specialty?”
“Uh,” Steve seems to firm up, broad shoulders straightening. “Illustration. But you don’t get a lot of that in advertising these days, so typeface, honestly.”
“Hm.” Bucky isn’t convinced, exactly, but it seems like a reasonable response. He assumes. He wouldn’t actually know if it isn’t, he supposes. “Well,” he says slowly, trying to decide if this guy is a threat or just a super attractive Finnish agent looking to report back on the number of times HR reminds everyone they have free donuts in the breakroom only to forget to buy any, “welcome to the team. It will be good to have someone who actually belongs here for a change.”
Steve breaks the stapler.
***
“I am no good at this, Natasha,” Steve hisses into the phone on his lunch break. He’s pretty sure it’s his lunch break. No one told him when to take lunch or for how long, and no one will make eye contact with him except for Bucky, who he’s pretty sure has already figured him out and is too nice to say anything. “I don’t even know what this company does. What even is my job?”
“I gave you,” Natasha says slowly, “a packet.”
“I didn’t read it, though,” Steve admits, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I was hoping this was all a joke to get me back about the broken legs right up until they gave me a cubicle next to the dangerously attractive officemate.”
There’s a click on the other end and the line goes dead.
Well.
Shit.
Steve fusses around tidying the break room for ten more minutes, then squares his shoulders and walks back into the sea of beige partitions. No one looks up at him, but Bucky gives him a distracted nod when he sits down. He’s doing something complicated on his phone. Client communications, maybe? Steve smiles, unsure of the social expectations, but when Bucky doesn’t look up Steve turns back to his desk.
Email. People do email at offices. People even do email at SHIELD. Newly confident of a direction to start in, Steve types in the username and password on his new hire paperwork, clicks through the email setup wizard, and confidently opens the email at the top of his inbox.
Someone named Bob Harding wants an event flier for an internship cookout. It needs to be “inclusive and diverse, convey a sense of camaraderie and productive synergism, and have the attached mascot but can you have him holding a beachball but make sure it isn’t a rainbow beachball because the event is in July, but not a red, white, and blue one either,” and Steve panics, closes the entire email application, and stares at the blank monitor.
“You okay?” Bucky asks, finally glancing up. He sets his phone down, screen covered in tiny multicolored gems doing ballet. The top of the screen says “Jewelry Quest!” in a cheery script. “Sorry, I was on a timed level. Everything alright?”
“Yes!” Steve assures him, jerking his head around and looking at Bucky like, probably, a dog caught with half the kitchen scattered around it and a flour bag upended on his head. “Yes. Definitely. I am a hundred percent comfortable with my job responsibilities and I’m fine.”
“Right,” Bucky says after a moment, and goes back to matching dancing precious stones.
“Right,” Steve echoes under his breath, squares his shoulders, and opens his email again. He is a 90 year old very senior operative capable of taking out an entire strike team in an elevator and then punching a jet out of the sky, he can check his goddamn email. A new one has popped up, even, so he doesn’t need to look at the evidence of his previous failure yet.
The new message is from Station Hampsteads Inventive Enthusiasm Division. Steve sits back and allows himself some time to take in the terrible name SHIELD definitely paid someone to think up, shakes his head, and clicks. The email is blank, but it has an attachment.
It’s a completed flier for the internship cookout.
It’s the ugliest flier he has ever seen. The mascot has a pair of hands sloppily cut and pasted on, with an untrimmed stock photo of a beach ball (green and yellow) complete with its watermark still visible layered over the whole thing. Steve doesn’t know a lot about digital art, having stuck mostly to charcoals so far this century, but even he can tell the resolution of each element is wildly different from the rest. The hands alone seem to be made of only twelve enlarged pixels each.
Steve stands abruptly with a squeak of chrome chair wheels, getting a few covert looks, and gives Bucky an uncomfortable grimace before hightailing it to a storage cupboard and calling Natasha.
“What now,” she demands, exasperated.
“Am I supposed to present that visual catastrophe as my work?” Steve shoots back indignantly. “Am I supposed to pretend I did that? On purpose?”
“Yes,” Natasha says.
Steve is speechless with horrified artistic indignation.
“Look,” Natasha sighs, and in the background he can hear the sounds of her multitasking— metallic shrieks and some distant gunfire make it through the speakers. “This is the current expectation for what the art department churns out. I didn’t just send you crap work, I sent you researched crap work that is in line with customary production, I swear.”
“I’ll look like I completely skipped any training and just showed up to work with a portfolio I downloaded off social media,” Steve protests, outraged. “I’ll look like I got a degree in strategic conceptualization and call myself a ‘creative’! Has your designer ever even heard of visual hierarchy?”
“Goodbye, Steve,” Natasha says, and hangs up.
Steve bites his lip and thinks for a moment. He slips back out of the supply closet, tapping the phone against his leg, and frowns.
Bucky’s still on his phone when Steve gets back. He opens his mouth to say something, apparently thinks better of it after seeing the look on Steve’s face, and leaves him alone.
Okay.
Okay.
Steve can do this. How hard can... he squints at the screen and scrolls through the desktop applications until something looks good. He hopes it isn’t going to be as disappointing as ‘Paint’ had been when he had just unthawed and got his first tablet.
How hard can Photoshop be?
***
“Wait,” Bucky says, leaning around the partition to stare at Steve. “You actually know how to use that?”
It really just goddamn figures, Steve thinks, that even people who don’t know he’s ninety think he can’t handle computers.
“It’s our job,” Steve says, instead of admitting he’s figuring it all out as he goes. “I mean, what kind of idiot works in the art department and can’t use the tools?”
“Right,” Bucky says, sounding uncertain. “Of course.”
“Are these really all the fonts we have access to?” Steve mutters, opening the browser and searching for ‘how to custom font’. “This is ridiculous. How are we supposed to do decent text block design with nothing but knockoffs of Helvetica, Papyrus, and Comic Sans?”
“It’s a mystery,” Bucky says weakly, and slowly turns his monitor away from Steve. “That is...definitely one of the struggles working here, I tell you what.”
“I’m just going to make my own,” Steve decides, and sets his jaw.
***
Steve is thirteen layers deep and contemplating the merits of three kerning options when he notices everyone in the room Not Look Up: a sudden stealthy sharpening of attention to whatever is behind Steve. He frowns around the cubicle partition at Bucky, who is bent over with his face almost fused to the keyboard, and turns to figure out what’s going on.
Steve isn’t sure why the whole office was anxious about an older looking man in a suit clutching a flier and looking concerned, but it takes all types to make a world, he guesses.
“Which one of you is Steve Grant,” the man says, and all the Not Looking energy veers toward Steve. He frowns and raises his hand.
Bucky shoots a glance at him, followed by a weak smile, and ducks back behind his monitor.
“Did you do this?” The man asks Steve, coming over and holding out the flier Steve had just completed and sent in. Steve blinks. Sure, it might have been a little old timey, but he’d tried to jazz it up a bit like he’d seen in magazines and advertisements literally everywhere he went nowadays. The future would probably project underwear-shilling videos into his dreams if it could.
“Uh,” Steve says, trying to figure out what type of trouble he could possibly be in. “Yes? Is this about the mascot? Because the original file was a trademarked image from the word processor, it turns out. I tried to stick with the idea of it when I changed it up, but...”
The man’s frown deepens. He sets the ad down on Steve’s desk and stares at him like he's trying to see into Steve’s soul. “You finished it pretty fast. You’re new? Started today?”
“Um.” Steve looks at Bucky, who is peeking from behind a large brochure with wide eyes, but gives Steve a supportive rictus. “Yes?” Steve says again.
“Why don’t you open up the file for me, son,” the man says tiredly, and Steve holds back the urge to starchily announce he’s old enough to have changed this guy’s diapers and opens up the file.
The man looks at it. He reaches across Steve for the mouse and clicks a few things. He looks at it some more.
“Well cripes,” the man says, sitting back. “You did do this. Today. Two hours after it was requested.”
“Uh.” Steve feels the room go even more quiet as the Not Looking turns suddenly hostile. “Should I… not have?”
“No, no.” The man straightens and nods to himself. “No it’s… very good. And fast.”
“I assumed you just needed something thrown together,” Steve offers hesitantly. “Since it’s for an internal event. If it were outgoing copy I obviously would take a lot more time and care with it.”
“Would you,” the man says, raising an eyebrow.
“Uh.” He glances back over at Bucky, who nods at him as well as he can without moving. “Yes? Yes.”
The man hums and leaves, taking the flier with him.
The resentful atmosphere remains. Bucky scribbles something on a piece of paper and slides it to Steve across his desk.
That was the Big Boss, it says, with several underlines. Steve is still parsing the hand-drawn emoji when Bucky slides over another one. Is that a potato?
Bring in doughnuts tomorrow, the second note says. You just made the entire office look like a pack of clowns and everyone hates you. There’s a doodle of a small hand giving a thumbs up.
Steve stares at it, then back at Bucky. Bucky gives him two real-life thumbs up as well.
***
Steve brings in doughnuts the next day.
Steve is also given a promotion, which utterly snuffs out any positive energy the doughnuts might have produced. Bucky makes him a congratulations card out of sticky notes with what looks like a lovingly hand drawn pile of dead fish and poop.