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"People invite each other to Christmas parties? Damn, no one must like me then," he says dead pan, teasing clearly before taking another drink of his beer. This was what friendship was right? Bros giving each other a hard time, it'd honestly been a long time since he'd dealt with actual friends who work Steve. Ugh, that idiot.

"Am I gonna get an invite out to the farm sometime, or is The Winter Soldier too scary to have around your kids? I assure you, Sam's nephews think I am awesome because of the weird shit I can do with the arm." He motions to the hidden vibranium that's concealed by leather jacket and gloves.

"The Winter Soldier might be a little too scary for the kids. Thank god he's dealt with. I'll gladly give an invitation to Bucky Barnes, though." Because if there was any doubt those are two different personas, two different people, the fact that Bucky's a walking and talking real boy and not a silent murder machine is proof enough.

(And what, then, does that say about Ronin? Too much.)

"Sam's promised to take the kiddos fishing sometime I go down and visit. I feel like Lila isn't going to be impressed with learning to gut a fish."

Ah, and there it was. The simple way that his friends tried to separate his life into separate people it always drove him a little crazy. He can't help but huff out a laugh at the comment.

"Oh Clint, you were listening to Steve too much. Not some magical button that's pushed that turns you into someone else. I didn't see you ever saying Natalia wasn't Black Widow just because she was originally trained to kill and forced to by them."

Then of course there was the whole idea of his own agency that was taken away, if it was never him, then what even were his memories with Nat.

"She took the name and made it something else. You, you had your whole brain fucked with. Genuine actual brainwashing. Trust that I've got an idea what that's like." Has he ever been able to silence the voice that blames himself anyway? That wants to be blamed? Irrelevant. "How could you still be you while you were under if everything that was you was suppressed? If you never had any choice in the matter or any agency?"

"Clint, it wasn't like that all the time," He says and he sounds frustrated, shaking his head. "Like sure, freshly wiped, it happened. A lot at the beginning at the end -- but there was times I was The Soldier and there were parts of me, sure I thought that like, I was there to do it from mother Russia or whatever - or the reasons I was there."

He sighs frustrated, he'd never tried to explain the big complex entanglements that were his brain and he brought his fingers up to his forehead and pinched his brow. "I had experiences and friends and relationships that are still a part of me to this day and you can't just write them off with some big brush stroke. Fuck, they punished me for them. You think if I was just some controlled thing I would have had to be punished?"

Clint raises his hands, placating. "Dude, I fought on your side. I don't think you should've been punished. I don't! If you're gonna say it's all the same person in there and not, y'know, a totally separate thing, then you're not really any different from Nat. And she didn't deserve any punishment for all the red in her ledger, either."

At first he's opening his mouth to continue to argue with him but then he just shakes his head closing it. He fidgets with the gloves on his fingers in silence for a moment before taking a drink of beer and then letting the silence stir around him until it was almost awkward.

"No. I'm not talking about us here. I'm--" he pauses and can't believe he's going to explain this to anyone, but Barton was closest to Nat, surely he knew? Or maybe she didn't remember at all? Maybe she was embarrassed. Who knew. "They punished her, they punished me, they punished us for having a life outside our ledgers. For not being just killing machines."

It's a strange thing, an almost-jealousy, in knowing there are parts of Nat's life even he'll probably never know. He stuffs it down with a sigh pushed out his nose and a calming inhale. "I know you guys had history," is what he starts with. Neutral and tentative. It admits to nothing of whatever the breadth and depth of the scope of his understanding might be. "Before she got out. Back in the Red Room." The room that had been a myth for so long, with only the highly trained assassins as proof it was out there at all.

Bucky pressed his lips together as he let that sink in, the first clue that maybe something had changed or she had remembered him. Was it like him the longer he was out more of the memories coming back? Who knew, it didn’t matter now, she was gone.

“Yeah, we trained and worked Ops together a lot because she was the absolute best they had,” a fondness crossed his face making it soft as he said it. “Wish I would have gotten to know her out here like you did too. God, she was perfect.”

"She was always the best. The best you guys had, the best we had--just the best."

Probably good to leave it at that. The temptation to snap something about knowing her on the outside leading to her dying is not insignificant, and it's entirely unjustified.

“Thanks for getting her out Clint, and not killing her. Steve told me about that — she always wanted out,” he assured Clint because it felt like Clint never got enough thanks for the shit he did and Bucky knew what it was like to feel like the accessory to someone else’s story.

“You did better then me — when we tried to escape from together we got caught and drug back in. I got put on ice, end of story. One of the only times the Soldier failed” of course he didn’t mention that he had a chance to get away still but they’d gotten caught cause Nat got shot and couldn’t move well and he refused to leave her behind.

"I took a chance that could've easily backfired. I could've read the situation wrong. SHIELD could've deemed her a threat. Coulson--my, our old handler, before he died, he trusted my instincts and saw the potential in her." A shrug. "The only thing I really did was what I didn't do, and that was take the shot."

"You're a good man, Clint," he says again quietly before draining the rest of his beer smiling a little sadly over at him. "Y'all went through a lot of crap, it makes sense why you were close like that," he adds.

"So do you have any plans now that you're the last Avenger left here? Or I guess is Banner running around somewhere again? Train up new kids to take care of it? Retire to Iowa and enjoy life?" he asks curiously.

"It's a miracle I ended up halfway sane with a home life and, y'know, alive." Don't ask him how he did it, because he has no idea most of the time. What a trip it's been. Because he easily could've had a whole hell of a lot worse happen to him when he was young and ended up on the streets all his life or dead before he ever got recruited. Figuring out relationships as an adult and not exactly having a good frame of reference from youth wasn't fun. And here he is.

Wild.

"Banner's off hanging out in some Mexico lab he and Stark built. Now that he's got his shit mostly sorted, he really deserves to just retire and take care of himself. Thor's always off on some quest to find himself or something; he was never gonna confine himself to just Earth anyway." Which, yes, then makes him the last Avenger otherwise, except: "I'm also retired. You know that, right? I'm so retired. Getting the band back together to save the universe feels like it doesn't really count. God, is being an Avenger one of those jobs? You can never really leave it."

And, well, he spent several years very decidedly not retired in the least. But in a different sense.

"It might be one of those jobs you either have to die or fuck off in time to get away from, I guess Sam is like one of you now or something?" He asks with a chuckle. It really was weird as he thought about it all, the shield passing on and all that junk. He was glad it had all avoided him.

"Maybe it's like a cult and the only way to get out is to not get in. Thank god, with Steve gone I'll never have to risk being dragged into that shit..." he says with a smirk.

"Hey, he was training at the Avengers compound before he ever got the shield; he's definitely one of us. He's god damn Captain America, and he's gonna drag you into so much shit." Because that's what Captains America do, as far as he's concerned. You get Cap calling you up, you go.

"No no, I always said I was following Steve from Brooklyn and not Captain America. This one is yours to follow," he teases back at him. "I did my duty on that one, it's time for someone else to be 'caps best friend' for once. Please you can't think I can replace Steve that quickly, it's not like you're running around best friends with Yelena now."

"And which one of us has hung out with Sam's family and had kiddos hanging off his arm? Sounds to me you guys are getting pretty buddy-buddy already." Just saying! "And your new good friend definitely hasn't tried to kill you yet, so it's not the same kind of situation at all."

"You know-- speaking of which? Why did Yelena try to kill you?" he asks changing the subject. He's not really sure how Clint knows all about that, but he assumes it's more spy shit and he doesn't want to get into it.

Yelena trying to kill him however -- that was something more interesting.

Wilson's a good dude who's not out to kill teammates. He figures it's a good guess that attempted murder hasn't happened. Yelena doesn't have a team. She has herself and whatever's left of the Black Widows.

"She got hired to." The long and the short of it. The fact that she hadn't come after him sooner, in spite of the desire for revenge, is...a little alarming, actually. Because she doesn't strike him as the type to be motivated by money. (At least, not to that amount.) Was she biding her time, in mourning? Did she get told what had happened? Which meant that that story got out somehow, and it sure as hell wasn't Clint talking to anyone outside the time heist group.

Concerning. But, now that the issue is resolved, not a problem. Anymore.

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