The Mission
Sam triple-checked his ammo clips as he waited for Steve to take up position on the other side of the entrance to HYDRA base. He was a bit dubious about Steve's plan of attack, and if things go to hell, Stark's still working on his wings so he didn't even have a way to lift them out of danger. Not that wings were all that helpful in underground HYDRA bases, whereas Winter was an expert in infiltration. Sam didn't think he'd say this 2 months ago, but he missed Winter more than he missed his wings in this situation.
Winter had gotten a lot better in the last two months -- the research helped. It's pretty cool how Winter'd be flipping through an old National Geographic, come across a photo of some South Asian forest, and a quick cross-check later, discover he was in Vietnam in 1974. It was also great to see Winter come out of his shell -- he moved from researching assassinations to researching recipes, from making a beeline for the library to exploring local markets for food ingredients. Sam still had to make sure not to be upset around Winter -- a raised voice would still send his shoulder twitching, but they've been working on some physical and verbal signals to remind Winter that he was safe and won't be punished.
Sam wasn't sure whether all the HYDRA bases made things better or worse, though.
The first base they went to had been abandoned since the 70s. They’d found a Zola machine but couldn’t turn it on. Then Winter lead them to a room with a an old electro-shock chair from the 1960s, which he *did* manage to turn on. He showed them how it worked, which made Steve blanche and made Sam almost throw up. Winter didn't react at the time, but after dinner Sam found him shaking uncontrollably in his room.
The second base had a few active HYDRA guards who went into high alert once they caught sight of Steve. Then Winter went into some scary assassin mode and killed everyone before Steve could even swing his shield. Their Zola machine had self-destructed some time in the process. Worse, they had to spend hours getting Winter out of mission mode. He kept switching between accents and languages, mechanically re-enacting various missions. In the end, Steve had to use one of the HYDRA phrases that Winter'd given him.
Which was why they decided to leave Winter at home with a book for the this one.
Sam sighed. It was better for Winter, he knew -- Winter had a weird thing going on with Steve since day one, but after Winter came to from the trigger phrase, they'd been even more awkward around each other. Which was too bad, because Sam would have really appreciated Winter's help with this HYDRA base. Sam counted 4 guards at the entrance, and more dim shadows beyond. And of course Steve wanted to take the direct approach instead of looking for a side door.
Speaking of which ... Sam heard a rustle from the other side, and there was Steve, charging out with his shield up to draw the fire. Somewhere inside the base an alarm sounded.
Sam squared his shoulders, took a deep breath, and followed. Stark better have his wings fixed soon.
* * *
Winter meticulously dried the last dish in the sink, and looked over at the phone on the counter. Still silent. Still no check-in from Sam or the Captain. He then spent the next ten minutes walking around the house, but he couldn’t find anything else left to do: the floors were swept, the carpets vacuumed, the shelves organized. He’d made an easily reheatable dinner and refilled the cookie jar. They would have gotten to the base an hour ago.
He went back to his room, sat on the armchair, and took out the notebooks in his backpack.
Even here, there wasn’t that much left to work on. With the help of the internet and the library, he’d figured out the year and location of the majority of his missions. The weight of that notebook was now evenly distributed across 67 pages – hundreds of assassinations and assignments, starting from 1948. He felt a tightness in his chest that Sam’s book said was a feeling of guilt.
Sam had gotten him that book after he reported that his body was malfunctioning more than usual. At first Sam wanted to take him to see a doctor, but when he described the malfunctions, Sam had told him they were feelings, and handed him the book. The author of the book helpfully linked physical reactions to potential emotional reactions. Winter was still testing the parameters of that theory – he could recognize emotions in others, but if *he* had emotions, that meant the person he was before had emotions, which meant that HYDRA would have had to remove them, and that thought made his fingers twitch and his throat feel bitter.
Which was why he put his second notebook aside without opening it. That notebook was for all the memories with HYDRA that were not mission related. He’d gotten about a quarter of the way through sorting it when the malfunctions had started: sweating, difficulty breathing, flood of images, phantom pains, uncontrollable vocalizations. And the more he tried to push through, the worse it got. For every post-it he tried to categorize into “punishment” “training” or “debrief”, he was adding 3 more. He'd kept the malfunctions mostly contained, until the first mission. After that, Sam gave him the book and didn't punish him at all. Sam was always so helpful.
The third notebook made his heart rate jump. This was the one he never took out in front of Sam and the Captain, because Steve was in this one. And Steve might be the Captain. At first he was sure of that, but now... the Captain didn't laugh or joke with him the way the memories of Steve did. The Captain was someone he trusted with his trigger phrases. Steve took on fights by himself. The Captain commanded teams. He glanced at the phone again. Still no report.
Winter considered his options. On the one hand, the Captain had commanded him to stay out of this mission. On the other hand, Sam had always told him that entering and leaving the house was his choice, and that they were his friends, not his superiors. "The Right Thing to Do" is still a somewhat nebulous concept, much harder to grasp than simple orders. He knew he was banned from the current mission, and that going to the base now would bear the risk of Sam terminating their “friendship” and the Captain transferring him to another organization. However, if he didn’t act, Sam and Steve bore the risk of dying. In both options Winter might lose them, but one option allowed Sam and Steve to live. Winter glanced down at his notebook. He had made this choice before. And he’d always chosen to save Steve.
Winter packed his backpack and headed out the door.
* * *
The first thing Steve felt when he came to was the bite of something hard and metal against his abdomen. He reached instinctively for his shield and found it reassuringly nearby. He looked down: the metal thing was a seatbelt buckle. He looked up, and caught Winter’s gray gaze through in the rear view mirror. He remembered -- sudden light as Winter pulled a beam from above him. The HYDRA base –- they’d taken a direct hit halfway down a hallway, and he'd thrown him and Sam into a nearby room and tried to get cover under the shield but ... There was a moan behind him. "Sam!“ Steve tried to crane his neck to look, but that triggered sharp stabbing pains all across his torso. He looked down and saw shrapnel wounds, freshly ripped. "Winter... status report.”
“Sam’s all right, Cap. Multiple lacerations, a broken arm, three cracked ribs, likely pelvic fractures, and a concussion, but nothing that won’t heal in a few months. I’ve set his bones and covered him with a blanket and strapped him in to prevent unnecessary jarring of injuries.” Steve clung to Winter’s steady voice. "Your wounds are less severe and will likely heal in a week or less. The Zola terminal self-destructed prior to my arrival, and I took care of any remaining HYDRA witnesses."
"Thanks for coming to get us, Winter." For some reason, Steve found it easier to talk to Winter when he's not looking at him directly. "Are *you* all right? Last time didn't work out so well for you." There was a small cut right above Winter's brow. "You hurt?"
"I'm fine, Cap. Thanks for asking.“ Steve suddenly realized that it's usually Sam who did the check-in with Winter. Winter’s eyes flickered from the rear view mirror to the road and then back. "There are police ahead. We need to keep a low profile.” He tossed a gray baseball cap to Steve.
Steve nodded. It wouldn’t do to draw attention to a bloodied Captain America out of uniform, not to mention a severely wounded Falcon and the sudden appearance of the Winter Soldier. "Thanks for coming to get us, Winter." He drew the cap low over his forehead, leaned against the window and pretended to be asleep. It was good to have Winter on his team.
* * *
He pulled the stolen SUV up to Sam’s house without incident, and carefully bundled the two men upstairs and set them up with as much as the house could provide. It will be up to Steve whether he wanted to take Sam to the hospital or not. It will also be up to Steve whether his actions deserved any punishment, but none of that was as important as the thing he remembered in the collapsed operating room of the HYDRA base. He idly traced the mostly-healed bullet graze line along his brow. The collapsed room that he'd found Steve and Sam in was a lab of some sort, and as he was pulling the debris off of Steve he spotted a scalpel and there was a sudden image of his head being strapped down and his cheeks being cut open...
He closed the door to his room and took out his notebooks again. If he could confirm the memory – it’d be the final piece of the puzzle. His hand shook. All of those memories of Steve that didn't make sense -- scrawny Steve in alley fights, at school, at the library, in the park.... he’d researched every one of Steve’s known childhood acquaintances, but none of them looked like him. He was starting to wonder if the scrawny blond kid he remembered was some other boy named Steve growing up in the same neighborhood of Brooklyn. Or that he was a ghost, not just for HYDRA, but before, too. But he'd been looking in the wrong place: the answer wasn’t in the third notebook, but in the second one, the one he tried to ignore. Slowly, he flipped through the notes, trying hard to tamp down on all the physical malfunctions that came from the flood of memories. Ah, there, on an unsorted post-it 17 pages in:
Soviet commander: “A weapon should not to be recognizable. There are too many images of him out there. He looks too American.”
Dr. Zola: “But … the *irony* of it … to just erase all that…”
Commander: “Leave your personal fetishes out of this, Comrade Zola. I've already gotten approval from the General.”
He pulled out that post-it and put it on the final page of his notebook of personal memories. There wasn’t a corresponding post-it to to confirm the surgery – a facial structure operation would have been too minor to remember in the midst of all the other pain that HYDRA had inflicted, and if it weren’t for that operation room, he probably wouldn’t have remembered at all. But there it was, his third notebook complete: he was James Buchanan Barnes. The remaining problem was that Steve didn't know.
Bucky stared at the notebook for a bit, then put both back in his backpack and got up to check on Sam and Steve.
* * *
Steve gingerly took the soup proffered by Winter and leaned back on the bed, careful not to tear his stitches, and more importantly, not to jostle Sam, who was passed out beside him. The soup smelled amazing, just like the sort of thing his ma'd make him when he was sick as a kid. He sighed and swirled his soup, wishing he was as good at expressing his feelings as Sam was.
He wanted to thank Winter, but didn’t know how. After all, Winter saved his life when he didn't know Steve and had every reason to kill him. And in the months since then Winter's been nothing but helpful. That's so much unearned loyalty, Steve hadn't known how to respond. This wasn't the assigned command loyalty like with the STRIKE team, and this wasn't the trial-by-fire loyalty like with the Howlers. Whenever Winter looked at him with those eyes of absolute trust and protectiveness, Steve couldn't help looking away. The last person who looked at him that way fell to his death because Steve failed to catch him. Didn't Winter know Steve didn't deserve that? Didn't Winter know that all those horrible things that happened to him could have been prevented if only Steve'd stopped Zola back in 1945? It was his fault that HYDRA survived the death of Red Skull. A chilling thought came to him: Was this sort of dedication programmed into Winter's brain the same way as the rest of his HYDRA training? He knows he should repay Winter's loyalty, but he doesn't know how.
Winter was looking at him now, with those same eyes and a smile at the corner of his lips. Steve swallowed. He knew he could be melodramatic, but he was no coward.
Steve looked Winter in the eye. “Thank you.” Steve started. "For coming to get us, for being here. It's good to have someone I can count on besides Sam and Natasha, even if I haven't done anything to earn it."
Winter smiled. "It's because you're Steve Rogers, and..."
Steve stopped him before Winter could do his standard affirmation of the chain of command. "Hold on, Winter, let me finish. I know you think of me as your commander, but today was a total clusterfuck, and I don't... I don't think you should obey me and jump into these situations just because you think I'm Captain America and your superior officer. I know it was helpful at first to have someone to follow after HYDRA, but I'm... I'm not a good commander. If I were I wouldn't have gotten my best friend killed. And you're a really great guy. You should trust yourself more, like you did today."
Winter opened and closed his mouth. He was no longer smiling. "Your best friend. You got him killed."
Steve suddenly found his soup very hard to swallow. He shouldn't have brought up Bucky. But Winter deserved to know about the demons that haunted him. It was a way to show Winter that he was trusted. Steve poked at his soup. "Yes. Bucky. James Buchanan Barnes. He was ... everything to me, before the war. He was always there for me, even when I was a complete idiot. Even when I had nothing. But then the war happened and ... I stopped paying attention. I was too fixated on Red Skull, and I didn't notice how Bucky'd changed in the war." All those smiles that never reached Bucky's eyes. The way Bucky'd go silent over the comms for long stretches of time. The way Bucky drank, like he had nothing to lose. It all seemed crystal clear to Steve now, how much Bucky was struggling. But at the time...
"I wasn't there for Bucky when he needed me. Zola had done something to him in that factory, and I didn't ... I just assumed he was fine and that he'd jump at the chance to nab Zola." Bucky must have been so scared on that train. How did Steve miss the way Bucky went blank at the mention of the mousy doctor? Or the way Bucky twitched when Steve touched him by surprise?
And what's worse, was that every time Steve learned of some new HYDRA atrocity that'd been inflicted on Winter, his first thought was always 'at least Bucky died before they could do that to him.’ He couldn't help himself, despite knowing how wrong it was. Steve gulped and tried to focus on finishing the story, make it relevant for Winter. "Anyway, it was a dangerous mission, I got knocked out, just like today. Bucky was trying to defend me, and he got knocked off of the train. I couldn't save him." It sounded even more pathetic when he said it aloud. "That's why you shouldn't be blindly obeying me. Thank you, for what you did today."
Winter chewed over Steve's confession. “Did you go looking for him after he fell from the train?”
“Of course.” Steve hadn’t thought about this part in a while. “We went back as soon as we secured Zola with Colonel Philips. But by then there was a fresh layer of snow, and we couldn’t find anything. Even asked the Soviet encampment that we came across.” Steve sighed, all the frustration from the memory sinking down to the pit of his stomach and turning into guilt. "Delivering Zola took us 2 days. Maybe if I’d gone down there immediately, we would have found his body, but…“
"HYDRA and the mission came first.”
Steve nodded. The world needed Captain America to stop HYDRA. Steve Rogers could mourn his best friend on his own time.
As if catching the stray end of his thoughts, Winter asked, “Do you still miss him?”
The truth here was equally complicated. “When I first woke up, I missed him desperately.” It was the first time in his life that he was completely alone – no ma, no Bucky, not even the rest of the Howlers, or any of the old gang back in New York. "But he’s dead, so I’ve had to move on in the last two years. There are days when there's a joke that only Bucky would get. Or other days when I miss the way he’d grab my shoulder and call me an idiot to my good ear." How does one describe the dull ache that remains after something that important is lost? He's doesn't even have a bad ear anymore.
Steve sensed movement as Winter laid a tentative hand on his shoulder: it was his metal hand. This was the most Steve’s seen Winter reach out. Steve looked up and smiled at Winter. "I guess it's like losing an arm and getting a new one -- it's not the same but you keep going. Even though it’s only been 3 years for me, it’s been 70 years for everyone else, and I've come to accept that. Different century, different world. I’ve got Sam now, and Natasha, and you." It helped, this reminder that there were people in this century who cared, inexplicable as that was sometimes.
Winter’s eyes widened at his own inclusion in the list, and his mouth made several odd shapes before he nodded. "You’ve decided to move on.“
Before Steve could properly answer, Sam moaned in pain beside them, and suddenly all thoughts of Bucky left Steve as he turned to fuss with Sam's blankets. It's true -- thinking about Bucky still hurt, but less with every single day. From the corner of vision, Winter handed Steve another bowl of soup. "Thank you for telling me all that, Cap." He gestured at Sam. "Sam's probably hungry, and he needs to wake up from the concussion anyway.” And the next thing Steve knew, Winter was gone from the bedroom and Sam was smiling at him.
* * *
Bucky closed the door to his room and flopped down on the bed. So this was it, then. He’d finally figured out who he was before HYDRA, and it was too late. Steve didn’t need Bucky anymore. He’s no longer the scrawny guy with the impressive list of illnesses and an even more impressive will to ignore all of them. He had Sam now. And the Black Widow, and Iron Man. And who was Bucky? Just an idiot who got himself thrown off a train and wasn’t even around to stop Steve from piloting a plane into the Arctic. Steve'd even tried to look for him.
Steve blamed himself for Bucky's death, but was it any better to resurrect him? Especially when the resurrected form was so broken? The things that Steve missed about Bucky, were things that Bucky wasn’t sure he could do anymore -- he could barely pick up a hand to touch Steve without feeling like he’d violated some unspoken rule. Better to keep Steve’s memory of Bucky intact, anyway – Steve's smiles were soft and tender when he thought about Bucky, versus the way he looked at Winter – a former weapon of HYDRA deserving of rehabilitation and trust, yes, but nothing more. Being the childhood friend of Captain America did not excuse him of all that he’d done as the Winter Soldier.
He might as well face it: Bucky Barnes was obsolete and better off dead. Winter's mission of the past few months was complete. It was a complete failure.
Whereas Steve still needed Winter around to help with identifying and taking down HYDRA bases. And on good days, Steve considered Winter part of the short list of people he trusted to have his back.
That should be enough.
Winter felt a tickle by his eyes and his nose felt swollen. His breaths started coming in short gulps. This was in Sam's book, too: sadness. He buried his head in the pillows and let the tears and racking sobs flow through him.
Tomorrow it will be enough to just be Winter, but today, he mourned the death of Bucky Barnes.