1. Pre-Serum Era
Bucky offered to walk Steve home after one of his meetings, but he didn't think it would have been the ordeal it became. Which was the problem; he didn’t think.
The promise of summer hung on the smoggy city air when Steve emerged from his meeting and they followed the sidewalk home. They walked in the almost shadowless interim between dusk and when the street lamps came to life, Steve talking about the need for major social reform and Bucky only half listening. His week's pay burned in his hip pocket and the part of his brain not humming encouragingly when Steve paused for breath wondered if there would be enough slack in the budget for a soda with Cindy and her shy friend ("Who would be perfect for your friend, Steve! What do you say?") The mugger stepped out from the shadows, his gun on Bucky and his free hand shoving Steve against the nearest wall. “Look,” he drawled, voice cool and lazy to hide his nerves, “I want your wallets, not your lives but you make trouble and it’s not a choice, right?”
Jaw hard, Steve reached for his wallet, not that there was anything in it, but it was the principle of the matter. He tossed it on the ground and it splashed in a puddle, making their mugger grimace. “Wise guy,” he muttered, and glared at Bucky. “You too, slim.”
Bucky ground his teeth, and too late, Steve realized it was payday and Bucky went straight from work to walk Steve home. Forget standing in the bread line—they weren’t going to be able to clear rent this month. Bucky slipped his hand into his pocket, but brought up his free hand quick, slapped the gun aside and knocked it clattering to the street. But the mugger moved fast, too, and the hand pinned Steve to the wall came up in a fist and cold cocked Bucky between the eyes.
He went down hard, and the mugger fled, abandoning the gun and the wallet both. “Bucky!” Steve cried, dropping to grip his collar in his hands. Bucky lay on the ground, too still, and the nagging worry that Steve never let get him in his waking hours seized his heart. He gave his friend a sharp shake. “Bucky? Bucky, come on, you can't leave me like this.”
The heart clenching moment of horror passed and he blinked his eyes open slowly. “He get away?” he slurred.
“Don’t worry about him. Can you stand?” It took some doing, but Steve pulled Bucky to his feet and, doing his best to support him, they made their way home.
“Had ‘im on the ropes.” A passing couple glared at them, obviously thinking Bucky was drunk. Steve glared right back.
“Sure you did, buddy,” Steve assured him. “I know you did. That’s why he turned tail. Come on, up the steps.”
“I’m tired.”
“Well you’re not sleepin’ on the stairs. Come on.” He half walked, half dragged Bucky into their shoe box apartment and pushed him on the couch. Bucky sank down gratefully, and accepted a cold, damp washcloth to press to the swelling lump on his forehead. Steve fussed about him, and not for the first time Bucky realized with a pang of empathy how goddamn annoying it was. Steve was probably trying to clean, but they didn't exactly own very much so he was mostly picking things up and putting them back down again: the throw pillow on the couch, the jackets on the coat rack, a newspaper from last week. He brought Bucky a glass of water, and then a blanket, and the last of the aspirin (that Bucky wasn't going to touch except to put back in the bottle for when Steve got sick and feverish). Bucky peeled the wet cloth from his eyes to tell Steve to kindly fuck off when he cradled Bucky’s face between his palms. Bucky’s mouth parted to ask him what he thought he was doing and then Steve’s mouth was there, pressed close and warm and a little shy but a lot needy.
It was a brief kiss, and downright chaste compared to the kisses Bucky shared with dames. And then they parted and there was no looking away from Steve’s eyes, no averting his gaze, no laughing it off or pretending this was just a thing friends do. Bucky swallowed hard. “What was that for?” he meant it almost as a joke, but it came out tired, resigned.
Steve looked at him, at the gray-blue of his eyes and the fall of his sweat-damp hair over his face, at the freckles blooming across his skin, the lips he had just brushed with his own. He wanted to tell him the truth, that Bucky was everything he wished he could be, that what had started as envy became admiration became adoration, that no matter how many times he committed the span of his shoulders, the breadth between eyebrows, and the crease of his smile to paper he would never be able to do the real thing justice. But he couldn’t preface any of it with “I’m no invert but if you ask me to…” or “I think you’re important, fuck-face, quit following me into fights,” or even “Sometimes it feels like we’re one soul with two bodies and sometimes I want to see how close we can get to one body.”
Steve swept his thumbs over Bucky’s cheeks. “Thought you died for a minute, there,” he admitted with a sheepish grin. “But you didn’t. You came back to me. And I decided that if you come back to me you get a kiss, Barnes.”
Bucky blinked at him, feeling too tired to even argue with this crazy punk. He sank a little deeper into the couch. “What are they telling you in these meetings, Rogers?”
Steve snorted. “How to fight fascism, mostly. I’ll wake you up when dinner’s done.”
Eyes already closed, Bucky allowed himself a wicked grin. “Gonna kiss me awake, Prince Charming?” Steve threw a pillow at his face, but Bucky laughed and laughed.
2. War Era
“Don’t you know how to send smoke messages or something?” Dum Dum demanded.
Bucky grit his teeth. Dugan might have been a private officer but he was also a major asshole. Morita bristled, apparently at the end of his patience. “Why the hell would I know anything about smoke messages?”
“It’s what your people do, don’t they?”
For fuck’s sake. Usually Morita was good about letting stupid comments like that slide, but the three of them had been marching through the forest for three hours with no sign of being any closer to camp and tensions were running high. “My people.” Morita said the words like he was feeling them out, testing their mettle. “Were you born stupid or did your mom have to drop you on your head a few times first?”
Dum Dum sucked in a breath to retort but Bucky was already stepping between them. “Dum Dum, quit being stupid. No one knows how to send smoke messages, and even if we did, who in our camp would decode them? Huh? Morita, cool your jets. Dum Dum is trying to get a rise out of you. Now if you sorry fucks don’t mind, I’d like to make camp before night fall.”
The op had gone, as Monty would say, completely tits up and the Howlies needed to separate or risk capture. For all Bucky knew, Steve and the others had been captured anyway, but he tried not to think too hard along those lines. Of course, nothing could be easy; they meant to head back to the rendezvous point, but must have wandered off course because they should have made it there thirty minutes ago. Bucky consciously did not think about that, either. Or how the sun was getting real low.
“Uh, do you see what I see, Sarge?”
Bucky paused and followed Dum Dum’s line of sight to the forest canopy and, squinting through the gaps in the leaves, only just made out the steady column of gray smoke. “Let’s go investigate,” Bucky decided.
The smoke was coming from camp, and they had in fact moved about a mile and a half out of their way. They tumbled through the foliage to see the rest of the Commandos, some of them banged up and bandaged, but on the whole hale and hearty as ever. “Shouldn’t we be keeping a low profile?” Bucky demanded, jerking his chin to the certainly-not-low-profile campfire. Some of the roughly cut logs were still green with moss and part of a tank's tread burned and gave off oily black smoke. Monty was trying to boil water over it, but he looked about as dubious as Bucky felt.
Dernier chattered happily in French and Gabe translated. “We blew the absolute shit out of that base after we got separated. If whoever’s left wants a piece of us, they’re more than welcome.”
“And we’ll be gone by tomorrow, anyway.” Bucky turned to look up at Steve, no, Captain America. He looked up and up and up (he would never get used to the height difference, he decided) right up into the face of pure pissed-off-ness. Before Bucky could come up with an excuse to place himself out of the Captain’s war path, Rogers crooked a finger. “A word in private, Sergeant.”
“Sir.” He followed Steve out of the welcoming light of the camp, away from the nervous chatter of the Howlies and into the cold dark of the woods.
“What were you thinking!?” Steve snarled, and wasted no time rounding on him. “We’ve been waiting in camp for hours. The charges went off and I had no idea if you and Morita and Dugan were still in there! You could have died, Barnes!”
Bucky snapped that he knew that, that there were no other options available, and probably a whole host of other things that would have landed him in some deep insubordination charges, or at least he would have if Steve’s face wasn’t on his face. Bucky froze for half a heartbeat and then he found himself leaning forward, just a little, wrapping his hands in the front of Steve’s uniform and Steve’s hand came up to cradle his face, impossibly large and strong and furnace warm.
Steve broke the kiss, because Bucky didn’t think himself physically capable of doing it himself. “You scare me half to death, Barnes,” he murmured, and maybe it was wishful thinking but Bucky would swear he was breathless when he said it.
He wanted to shoot off his mouth, and say something dumb like Now you know how it feels, punk. But he opened his mouth and said “Won’t happen again, Cap.”
Steve pressed his forehead to Bucky’s for just a moment, a breath of a reprieve in the madness of their war torn lives. “You’re so full of shit, Buck. Try to look properly reprimanded when we get back to camp, okay?”
“Yessir.”
3. The Winter Soldier Era
The mission was going poorly. Tits up, Winter Soldier designation: Alpha noted, though that turn of phrase never entered into his vocabulary, could not have entered his vocabulary, was as strange to him as the social niceties shared between his handlers and the exchanges in the Strike team. And the op had begun with so much promise.
Alpha stood poised on the lip of the fight, waiting for his handler’s go ahead before he entered the fray, when he caught a glimmer of movement in the corner of his eye. Movement from Winter Soldier designation: Beta’s sniper nest. He swiveled his head, not quite in that direction, but enough to watch the proceedings, eyes safely hidden behind his tinted goggles to protect Beta’s position. The op took place on the outskirts of Moscow; Hydra intended to deploy the Winter Soldiers only as backup in case the deal went sour, which appeared to be the case. Alpha waited in the shadows nearby, with Beta waiting in his nest on the top floor of a building half a block away in case they needed something closer to divine intervention.
Looking now, Alpha realized that their opposition was one step ahead of them, and, if the flare of napalm was any indication, intended to take out the back up first. Sticky fire rolled over the top of the building, engulfing Beta’s nest.
“Shit,” his handler muttered at Alpha’s elbow. “Whitehall is going to kill me.”
Alpha declined to comment, partly because he hated wasting breath on something unrelated to the mission, but mostly because the only thing keeping him from screaming like a dying man was the way he clamped his jaw shut. Hydra conditioned him well to only move when ordered to do so, but he felt himself bristle against those mental boundaries and roll his shoulders, shift his weight from one foot to the other. His handler noticed and took a step back, like an unwitting traveler realizing he had stepped a little too close to a nest of rattle snakes for comfort.
“Light ‘em up,” he ordered, and Alpha was knee deep into the fracas before the last syllable left his mouth. If his handler failed to appreciate the sheer killing power of the Winter Soldier, Alpha rectified the problem with relish. Bodies fell in every direction with him nary breaking stride. Spent pistols hit the asphalt and he smoothly drew fresh ones from the various holsters on his person. He never took the shield from his back; he squeezed triggers until he ran out of bullets, then he reloaded and squeezed triggers until he ran out of targets. Within minutes he singlehandedly secured the area.
Alpha did not bother taking his handler’s weak praises, did not participate in clean up or deign to collect the assets Hydra needed. He walked with the burning focus of a diamond tipped drill and cut his way on foot to the rendezvous point. If he could want, he would want to go to the building Beta had been hiding in, but he knew better than to try it; Beta was the Best and if he still lived he would pull himself out of the wreckage and make it to extraction. Alpha needed to make sure extraction waited long enough to take him. He hovered there, not fidgeting or pacing like people do, but he might have chewed his bottom lip raw. He briefly debated with himself whether he should climb in the nondescript beige van to wait out of the sun, but dismissed the thought. He wanted to be able to watch the road from this vantage point.
The Strike team and their support trickled in first, minus the more grievously wounded members. Alpha counted their heads to see how many had been taken by med evac—a holdover from some forgotten conditioning. Some of the Strike team limped dramatically, or nursed hurt arms, but they seemed healthy for the most part. The Winter Soldiers’ handler returned to rendezvous last, slapping his hand on the side of the van to let the driver know he arrived. “Get in,” he ordered, and Alpha was back on his feet before he could stop himself. He did not get in. The handler watched him for a long moment, wary. “You heard! Get in the van!”
Alpha unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “The other,” he rasped.
“He’s not here right now. We need to clear out. Get in the van.”
If anyone could have seen his face, they might have described it as mulish, but Alpha’s goggles and muzzle hid everything, including the war between his need to obey orders and his need to recover Beta, even if he recovered little more than a charred body. The Strike team and their support waited for him in the van, all presumably armed but many injured, all tired, coming down from the adrenaline high. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Take out the driver first, then the handler; everyone else would follow. He blinked the thought away. Killing his team existed so far outside acceptable mission parameters it belonged in deep space. The thought was still attractive, but wrong.
Fortunately, their standoff was cut short by Beta himself. He shambled, one ankle clearly sprained, shaggy hair singed on one side, the ear of that same side in need of medical attention, but his muzzle and goggles, still in place, would have protected the majority of his face from the blast. Alpha crossed the distance between them in three long strides and pulled Beta’s heavy metal arm across his shoulders to take the majority of his weight before their handler could so much as blink. The Winter Soldiers clambered like that in the van, and Alpha slapped the roof twice before their handler made it all the way inside. The driver hit the gas and the handler swore angrily when he nearly toppled into the street. The other passengers sniggered and the handler glared daggers at them all, but Alpha glowed secretly behind his mask. He pressed close to Beta, who stank of napalm and burnt hair and warm dumpster, and he decided he would rather be nowhere else.
The base was chaos when the van pulled into its depot- child’s play for the Winter Soldiers to lose themselves in the bustle and shadows. Alpha half carried the other to a secluded place out of view of the security cameras and pressed him against the cold cement wall. “You require maintenance,” he breathed in the space between them, plucking the goggles and the muzzle in turn from his face with one hand while the other hand kept him comfortably upright.
“You require maintenance,” Beta retorted. His face, always so pale, was downright sallow: a symptom of shock.
Alpha crushed his mouth to Beta’s in a brief, hungry gesture. The Winter Soldiers did not know affection, but Beta made it out of that mission alive and Alpha had nothing else to give him. Struck by inspiration, he nuzzled him when they slowly parted. “We are more useable together than apart,” he said, because it needed saying, and because the words he most wanted to say escaped him.
Beta looked back at him, lips parted. “Yessir,” he breathed.
Alpha ran his fingers lightly, ever so lightly, through Beta’s longish dark hair. “You require medical attention,” he told him, and half carried him from the shadows and into the brilliant light, straight to the med bay.
4. Recovery Era
Bucky would not willingly return to Hydra, not if you paid him, but sometimes he missed the straightforward way of life he and Steve left behind. While reasonably bright, the Winter Soldiers were not kept around to do a lot of thinking. Hydra aimed them at a target and set them loose. It was a painful way of life, but immeasurably simple: Follow orders, eliminate targets, complete missions, return to base. Rinse and repeat.
Living in Avengers Tower, on the other hand, involved less bloodshed and electrical torture but more initiative. “What makes you happy?” Sam Wilson asked him once. Bucky had stared at him blankly. It was a nonsensical question. It did not compute. The Winter Soldier does not know how to “happy.”
The whole living situation existed in a perpetual state of touch and go. Without the slurry of chemicals Hydra technicians administered to them on a near daily basis, the regular mind wipes, the weeks or months or years between missions in cryostasis, the brutal conditioning and even more brutal reinforcements, the Winter Soldiers found themselves facing the most daunting mission they had ever received: Living in the world, as people do. That meant, to Bucky’s untrained eye, filling the empty void between waking and sleeping with activities.
Admittedly, he considered Steve to be more naturally suited to that task. In their youth, Steve always came up with the games and master plans. Even when Bucky grew older and built a social circle outside of Steve’s influence, he planned out double dates while Steve planned on how to save the world. Even joining the military was more Steve’s idea than Bucky’s; he dragged Bucky to enough socialist meetings and anti-fascism rallies to convince him to enlist and fight the wave of autocracy that threatened to swallow Europe. But even if Steve was better at filling the vacuous slots of time between therapy sessions, Bucky still put himself in charge because Steve had Terrible Ideas.
Steve wanted to join the Socialist Party. (“Does the Red Scare seriously mean nothing to you?” Bucky demanded on more than one occasion.) Steve wanted to fight Al Qaeda (with his bare fists. Idiot.) Steve wanted to pay the local chapter of the Tea Party a visit. (Which Bucky was all for until he did a quick online search and realized Steve’s intentions were less than pure.) Steve wanted to scale the Statue of Liberty to see if he could (“I’m about 500% sure that’s illegal.” “Only if they catch us!” “That…that’s not how laws work, Rogers.”) Steve wanted to do all kinds of crazy shit.
Bucky rubbed the heel of his metal hand against his forehead. “Steve. Steve, shut up a minute. We’re not pulling any crazy stunts while half of the free world thinks we’re terrorists or double agents.”
Steve deflated. “Well what do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t we catch up on U.S. culture, huh? We’re just going to sit quietly where no one is going to shoot at us and marathon movies.”
Steve conceded defeat and Bucky settled on the couch beside him with a massive bowl of popcorn. First on the list of Must See movies (as penned by Clint, so they took the list with the world’s biggest grain of salt) was Homeward Bound. Bucky skimmed the various reviews online before hitting the play button. It was a safe film, a children’s film, lighthearted and wholesome and well-liked.
No one said there was a train in it.
To be fair, the problem never came up before. Bucky barely remembered falling to his almost-death, and his years in Hydra’s hands so thoroughly wiped his memories that the sorts of things that should have bothered him didn’t. But then the sound of a train, heavy, grinding, fast, filtered through the surround sound speakers and Bucky felt himself, still safely seated on the couch, felt himself falling at breakneck speed.
Some indeterminate amount of time later his eyes snapped open because someone was screaming themselves hoarse. Oh. That would be him. The yowling petered out and he sucked in great lungfuls of air. His eyes quit rolling in his head to focus and make out his surroundings, which seemed to consist primarily of Steve. His face was dreadfully white, eyes wide with panic, and that was enough to send Bucky into a tizzy all over again because the only time Steve looked like that was because something awful was happening. Of course, Bucky was also flat on his back on the floor (How did that happen?) and he only managed to flail a little before Steve grabbed his wrists, more touching than restraining, and he made worried cooing noises at him.
Reassurances, Bucky belatedly realized. “You’re okay, you’re safe,” Steve kept repeating, forcing his voice to be gentle. “You’re in Avengers Tower, in the year 2013, you’re with me. We made it, Bucky. You’re okay. It’s okay.” He let the words wash over him, listened to the way they seemed to get more confident the longer Bucky blinked at the ceiling. “You with me, soldier?”
“Yeah,” he rasped, throat raw. “Yeah, I’m with you.”
“Are you alright?”
Bucky gave him a Look. “Feel like I fell off a train, but otherwise I’m good.”
“You’re such a jerk,” Steve muttered, and pressed his lips over Bucky’s tentatively, an invitation. Bucky kissed him back, halfhearted, and after a fashion Steve pulled back, a sad smile tugging at his mouth. He ran his hands through Bucky’s hair. “I’m glad you came back to me,” he said, because it needed saying.
Bucky nodded and blinked around at the room. “I broke the coffee table.”
Steve helped him to his feet and walked with him to his bedroom. Bucky dropped heavily onto the bedspread. “I’ll fix it,” Steve promised.
Bucky shook his head and shut his eyes against the world. “No you won’t,” he grumbled. “You’re just going to make it look fixed and then swap our table with Clint’s, and then he’s going to put a Hot Pocket or something on it and when it breaks apart again you’re going to blame overseas manufacturing.”
Steve made an indignant noise. “Would I do that?”
“I know you did that to Thor a week ago.”
“In my defense, the dining room chairs are very poorly made.” He pecked him on the cheek and tiptoed out of the room so Bucky could be alone for a little bit.
5. Fieldwork Era
If someone told Steve that he would live to see the 21st century he would have probably thought it would involve more flying cars and fewer alien attacks. He would have never banked on mad space sorcerers, but them’s the breaks. Loki wore his ridiculous gold antler helmet and impractical green mantle, the former gleaming in the midmorning sun and the latter flapping wildly in the wind as he whizzed through the air on a stolen Chitauri cruiser, throwing hexes in every direction.
Thor, of course, was in Vanaheim on a diplomatic trip and had no idea what was going on in New York. Luckily, Loki seemed to know that and was mostly blowing off steam instead of trying to murder the Avengers. So far he had transmogrified Clint’s entire quiver of arrows into foam versions of themselves, turned Ironman’s suit a lurid shade of green where it was once red, dropped the Hulk into a football stadium he inexplicably filled with warm molasses, animated every statue he encountered, sicced a swarm of “bigass fucking spiders” on the Black Widow, spawned thousands of purple frogs in the harbor, and cackled wildly the whole time.
“HULK STICKY!”
Steve winced as the proclamation burst through his eardrum. “Hang in there, Hulk,” he barked. He didn’t know how they were going to take down Loki this time, or what they were going to do with him once they got him. From what he could tell, Loki’s magic didn’t care for the vibranium in his shield; the last spell that hit it made the metal chime and shudder unpleasantly in his hands, but when he looked only the paint had been affected, turning the red, white and blue green, black and yellow. In his peripheral vision he saw Clint using his mostly useless arrows to bat the bigass-fucking-spiders off Natasha. He could hear the arachnids chirp and crunch over the comm link, but they seemed impervious to all but the most vicious of attacks. No one knew if they were venomous or not, but Natasha still moved and fought and cursed in Russian so that was a plus.
Tony tagged the Chitauri cruiser with a glancing blow, sending it and Loki skittering sideways on the air. Loki whipped a dagger at Tony hard enough to land in his shoulder clear to the hilt, and that sent Ironman in a brief spiral before he righted himself. “It’s not looking good, Cap,” Tony gritted through his teeth.
“Is this the best you have to offer?” Loki roared, voice supernaturally amplified. He reared up on his cruiser and sailed closer to where Natasha and Clint battled the bigass-fucking-spider horde. “Earth’s mightiest heroes,” he sneered, “brought low by tricks! What humiliation! What disgrace!”
The rifle report sounded across the comms at the same time Loki twisted sharply, head snapping hard to the side and half turning his torso with it. He growled as he straightened up and spat the gray slug into his palm. Later the Avengers would find that same slug on the floor of the cruiser. It would have teeth marks dented along its sides. “I will have your head!” he screamed, and the declaration almost drowned out the next three rifle shots. Two missed him by inches, but the third landed in his hip, staining his mantle and splashing hot blood down his armored thigh. “Wretch!” The spear pointed straight at Bucky’s position and for a heart stopping moment Steve knew that it was Over.
Because there can be a Captain America without James Barnes, but there cannot be a Steve Rogers without Bucky.
Loki cast his spell while in motion, the cruiser listing to the left and downward. The spell cracked the air, louder than any thunder clap. It rattled the building Bucky hid himself in, shattering every window, but the ringing silence after was so much louder.
Steve did not hear himself scream. He loosed his shield on the building and watched the green-yellow-black smear of color spiral, gaining wicked momentum as raw kinetic force brought it hard and high, right where Loki stood on his cruiser. The shield knocked his legs out from under him and the change in weight distribution tipped the cruiser on a precarious angle and Loki scrambled for purchase that was not there and
he
fell.
His mantle flared and billowed and whipped around him even as he floundered to keep airborne and then he was clear of the cruiser completely and falling. He waved his scepter and he might have cast a spell to check his momentum but a mostly harmless foam arrow hit it and it slipped his grasp. His mouth fell into a displeased O just before he slammed into the asphalt with a dull crunch.
Steve did not stop to check if they killed the bastard. He was already in the stricken building, taking the stairs three at a time, heading for the vantage point he would use if he were to pick up a sniper rifle instead of a shield. The higher he climbed, the colder the air became, pressing against his clammy cheeks, biting through the Kevlar and leather of his suit, and he could scarcely see for the blur in his eyes but he pressed on.
He did not pause for breath or thought when he made it to the correct floor. He flung himself forward, for the only door left open. The carpet crunched underfoot, frosted stiff, and it crunched some more when he fell to his knees in the doorway. Bucky crouched by the farthest window from the door, eye still pressed to his scope. White coated the walls, carpet, conference table, and Bucky, creating a surrealist landscape, an angel of death wreathed in a blanket of light. Ice crystals hung on the air like dust motes.
Steve touched his comm, numb from his fingertips to his blackened soul. “I need medical. Now.”
Steve lived on the medical floor of Avengers Tower for three days. His spine protested his sleeping in the uncomfortable gray chair but he barely noticed. There were worse places to sleep. He watched the television during the daylight hours but if asked he would not be able to say what he watched. The part of his brain that still belonged to the Winter Soldier catalogued the actors and memorized any text that popped up, but he did not follow the stories or the dialogue. At one point Bruce must have brought him his sketchpad and some pencils, but he never got as far as applying graphite to paper. He opened the sketchpad, looked at it, and closed it again. Sometimes his hands worried the beads of his rosary, but he didn’t pray. Hydra burned God out of him long ago, and he didn’t know if he could believe again. He did not believe in God, but he suspected God didn’t believe in him, so that was alright.
Mostly he talked. He spoke in low, even tones about nothing in particular. If pressed he would not remember what he said, but his mouth was dry and his throat ached and his eyes stung. He talked. Maybe it would help. It couldn’t hurt. “You need to eat.”
Steve blinked and looked up into Sam’s worried face. “When did you get here?” he rasped.
“Flew in yesterday. I came as soon as I heard. You look like hell, Rogers.”
Steve shrugged. He worried his fallow rosary, turning the beads over and over between too-big fingers. Sam put a sandwich in Steve’s hands and Steve ate it mechanically. It didn’t taste like anything. He choked it down anyway; there are worse things to eat. And then Sam left, perhaps realizing this wasn’t really a two man vigil, and when night fell Steve turned off the television and dimmed the lights and he talk a little more about inconsequential things.
He dozed in the gray uncomfortable chair, a shallow, fitful sleep that broke with the gentlest of prompting. The quality of the air changed and Steve forced himself upright. He listened. “Bucky?”
The figure, stretched on the narrow bed and wrapped in stiff white sheets, breathed just a little faster. Slowly, degree by degree, Bucky turned his head and opened his eyes. His cracked lips parted. “Where?” he croaked.
Steve took one of his hands gingerly between his own. “Avengers Tower, medical floor. I’m here. You’re safe.”
Bucky shut his eyes and his brows creased. “When?”
Steve squeezed his hand. “21st century still. You were out for three days, Buck. They say you’re gonna be just fine, though. We’ve been frozen and thawed out so many times. You’re gonna be okay.” He brought him a cup of ice chips and carefully spooned a few into Bucky’s mouth. He crunched and swallowed and nodded for more. They sat in silence for some time, Steve feeding him ice and Bucky receiving it. Then he sluggishly pushed himself a little higher on his pillows and let his eyes drift shut.
“Natasha?”
“Fine,” Steve assured him. “The spiders gave her some nasty welts but they weren’t poisonous.”
“Stark?”
“He needs some serious physical therapy but he should make a full recovery. He’s as vocal as ever, so I think he’ll be okay.”
“Mm. Loki?”
“Alive.” Steve wished he wasn’t. Thor might have a soft spot for his not-brother, but Steve wouldn’t mind removing Loki’s head from his shoulders, disposing of the body and just never telling Thor. “He vanished right after SHIELD peeled him out of his crater. No one’s seen him so he’s probably hiding out somewhere, licking his wounds. Hey, hey. Don’t make that face. What’s important is we’re all alive and we’re all safe and you made it back to me again.”
“You’re a sap, Rogers,” Bucky murmured.
Steve stroked his greasy hair and pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “I’m your sap, Barnes.”
“Yessir,” Bucky sighed, and drifted back to sleep.
+1
Bad News McBride and Gullible McBride did not necessarily jog together in the morning. Grant Ward did not let this bother him though. If he could grab one Winter Soldier, the other would soon follow. That was what the Handbook said. Admittedly it said it in Russian, but Ward was a smart man and a quick learner with a gift for languages. And a damn good agent.
In this time and place, the Winter Soldiers took the somewhat permanent covers of Timothy “Bad News” McBride and Gabriel “Gullible” McBride. It took some doing, but eventually Ward pinned down where they slept, and from there he sketched out a rough idea of their habits. After a week he deemed them sloppy. They followed an almost punitive regime, and completely predictable. They ate the same food every meal, left at the same times every day for work and exercise, took the same routes, almost like they were following a script.
Gullible jogged in the mornings. He woke up with the sun, ate a piece of toast, and jogged for an hour along the same route every. Single. Day. He never deviated. Ever. It was almost laughable.
But then, deserters were no laughing matter.
Even when he had nothing, Ward had Hydra. The organization broke him and put him back together, made him stronger, smarter, better. Hydra might be in its twilight days, its many heads dead or running, but with the right tools and mindset it could be nursed back to health. Naturally, Ward would become the new Head, and he would bring the Shield and Fist of Hydra with him to ensure his place at the top.
He dressed for the occasion: a bespoke suit, loosely tailored, charcoal gray with a crisp white shirt underneath, vivid red silk tie, two hand guns tucked in his belt under his jacket, a knife sheathed up his sleeve, a garrote tightly coiled in his hip pocket. He found a cosy little hideyhole along Gullible's route: a secondhand bookshop with an eaves over the entrance, the door set inward enough for him to lurk unobserved. Right on time he heard the soft patter of quick feet on asphalt and Ward grinned to himself from the shadow of the storefront. He stepped out into Gullible’s path.
Ward never saw the Winter Soldier before. As a special agent he never interacted with the Soldiers directly, and he never had the clearance to learn about them from anything more substantial than rumor. Perhaps there was a mission in the desert once, but couldn't be sure what was remembered and what was implanted after the fact. The asset was huge- tall and broad and very real, a ghost story in the flesh. He wore dark blue athletic shorts, gray running shoes, a nondescript gray cotton shirt darkened by sweat under the arms. His pale face flushed with exertion, yellow hair wind swept, he slowed down his pace when Ward did not step out of his path. He bobbed his head and mouthed an almost silent, breathless, “Good morning,” and would have loped neatly around Ward.
“The snow that falls in Moscow forgets the dawn.” Russian felt raw and clumsy on his tongue, but Ward had practiced the code phrase for hours every day that week. He needed to get it right on the first try. There would be no second chance.
How much conditioning did the Avengers leave in the Winter Soldiers? Clearly they could not undo all of Hydra’s hard work, because Gullible stopped dead in his tracks in front of Ward. The Winter Soldier’s jaw worked. His whole body was poised, muscles taut, and he did not move even if turmoil raged across his face. “You will obey me,” Ward told him, tone firm. Gullible’s nostrils flared and he did not move. “We’re going to take a little walk. You in front. March.”
The Winter Soldier marched at a brisk but doable pace. The streets were still deserted at that early hour and Ward breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing he needed was to be questioned on why he was herding a jogger to the warehouse district. The Winter Soldier obeyed his every command without hesitation. “Left here. Down the block. Right this time.” Satisfaction curled in his belly. So this was what true power felt like.
Hydra still owned a few warehouses and Ward made one of them his own base of operations. He let himself and the Winter Soldier inside where it was cool and blissfully dark. “You’re to wait here,” he ordered. “Speak to no one. Do not move.”
In all the ghost stories Ward heard as a Hydra agent, the storytellers always painted the Winter Soldier as an unstoppable force. He could be outwitted, outmaneuvered, outgunned, but in the end he would keep coming for you. In the best stories the Winter Soldier was like an avalanche, innocuous at first but by the end he was a force of nature, wild and impending and deadly.
The stories left out a crucial detail.
The Winter Soldier was fast. In the span between one heartbeat and the next he had his hands fisted in Ward’s crisp white shirt and lifted him a foot off the floor. Ward stared up into a face devoid of humanity and squeaked “I said don’t move.”
Gullible’s mouth twisted into a pitiless smile. “Your Russian is appalling.”
Ward scrambled for a gun, but before he could twist his arm behind himself and pull one from his belt the Winter Soldier slammed his to the floor. His shoulder dislocated with a pop and he gasped, mouth opening in a silent scream. Gullible slammed him against the cement floor again and his head knocked back hard, sending black spots across his vision. A large hand wrapped tight around his throat and he thrashed. He pulled out his knife but the Soldier knocked it away, sending it clattering clear across the safe house. The edges of his vision blackened. In the distance he heard the front door slam open.
The hand let him go and he sucked in gasping, wheezing breaths. He tried to roll away but a gray running shoe landed heavy on his sternum and held him in place.
Bad News McBride sidled up to Gullible, his long brown hair pulled into a hasty bun, black cotton long sleeved shirt sticking damply to his chest and under his arms, hands in the pockets of his dark blue athletic shorts. He was wearing sunglasses. Ward stared up at that expressionless face and he couldn’t look away from the sunglasses. The other Winter Soldier. Wore sunglasses. Big, dark ones; he could see his reflection in them. What seems to be the trouble, officer? his brain supplied unhelpfully.
“What do you think we should do with him, Sarge?”
“I dunno, Cap. A quick death is too good for this one.”
“The snow that falls in Moscow,” Ward rasped.
“Oh my God, is he trying to speak Russian?”
“Don’t laugh at him. He’s obviously doing his best.”
“The snow—“
“Just stop. Quit trying to make this happen. It’s not going to happen,” Bad News growled. He produced zip ties from a pocket and secured Ward’s wrists behind his back, discarding his guns and garrote on the process. Bad News took him by the tie and bodily dragged him to the table in one of the sunny patches of the room, plopped him flat on the table and tore open the front of his shirt. Buttons popped and scattered, falling to the floor.
“What’re you gonna do to me?” Ward snarled. Tried to snarl. Even to his own ears he sounded like a frightened kid. The Winter Soldiers were not known for mercy. Mercy killings, sometimes, but never mercy.
“We’ve been watching you, Grant. Can I call you Grant?” Gullible said. Something buzzed by Ward’s ear and he turned his head. “We started to worry you’d never make a move.” Gullible surveyed a tattoo gun as it buzzed, low and ominous. With a lurch, Ward realized neither of the Soldiers could easily carry a tattoo gun on their person while jogging. Which meant that it had been here for God knows how long. Gullible caught his eye. “You should really keep better track of your safe houses. A penny on the door? Careless.” Bad News propped his hip against the table and crossed his arms, smirking. Gullible pulled on a pair of blue gloves, face pensive. “If you do the bare minimum, you can’t expect anything more.”
“What’re you going to do to me?” Ward half screamed.
Bad News clamped a metal hand over his mouth hard enough to send the bitter tang of iron across his tongue. Gray-blue eyes flashed above him. “The cruelest thing we can do, Grant.” His flesh hand pinned his hip hard to the tabletop. “We’re gonna make you live.”
The McBrides walked home, tired. Physically they were fine, but mentally not so much. Ward screamed and screamed and Gullible wasn’t sorry, never sorry, but he wished it didn’t have to be this way.
“You scared the crap outta me,” Bad News said when they passed the halfway point.
“He almost had me. The programming is weak but it’s still there, Buck. He almost had me.”
Bad News bumped his shoulder against Gullible’s. “But he didn’t. You fought back and you won, Stevie.”
“I almost didn’t.”
Bad News took him by the elbow and marched him into the shadow of an alley. He pushed Gullible against the rough brick wall and stood close, resting his hands on the bricks to safely bracket his head. “He almost had you,” Bad News said. His breath was warm against Gullible’s lips. A cool metal palm, the same palm that held Agent Ward’s head down while he screamed and screamed, cupped Gullible’s cheek. Gentle, like he was touching something fragile and precious. “He almost had you, but you fought back. And you won.” His flesh hand drifted into his fine, blond hair, the touch fleeting and painfully light: Steve Rogers- Handle With Care. “And you came back to me. That’s the most important thing. You’re alive and safe and you’re in the goddamn future. You came back to me.” Bad News closed the distance and pressed his lips to Gullible’s.
The kiss was long, several minutes long, and too short by far. Gullible gripped the front of Bad News’ shirt tight enough to leave creases and Bad News never once pulled on his hair but he kissed hard enough that when they parted their lips were red and swollen. They kissed in a dirty alley, with pedestrians walking by on their way to work not ten feet away. Cars sped down the street, motorists sometimes yelling and cursing at other motorists. They kissed near the mouth of an alley in front of God and everyone and they couldn’t be bothered one iota because they were alive and free and safe as they could be and life goes on.
Life goes on.
“We got another one, boss!”
Lou Berkley looked up from her monitor. “We don’t have any scheduled new arrivals,” she told Agent Brown. Brown shifted from one foot to the other, trying to take in the office without looking like he was taking in the office. Most prison wardens would probably decorate their offices with big legal texts, or gray paint, or cinderblocks. The first thing Berkley did when she got her office was paint the walls the most obnoxiously bright shade of yellow she could find. Just because they put her in charge of the Fridge didn’t mean she needed to live in a cold, white, airtight room.
“I know that, boss. But this is another Stark special. It has the Captain’s signature on it, ma’am.”
“Well then let’s a have a look.” She took her notebook and a pencil with her and they rode the elevator up to the landing pad. An armed guard waited for them at the helicopter, and Mr. Hogan flourished the crowbar with a grin. “Proceed.”
It was a nice-sized wooden crate, nailed shut nice and tight, and the Captain's slanted, looping signature did mark the side. Happy muscled the top off with the crowbar and the armed guard tipped the crate on its side. The Hydra Agent shambled out, wrists still zip tied behind his back and bleeding a little from furiously trying to get himself free. No one bothered to peel the duct tape from his mouth; they didn’t need to. In dark blue ink with breathtaking penmanship, Captain America tattooed the words Hydra Agent: Grant Ward, property of the Fridge. Underneath that he had written If found, please call -Berkley tutted. She didn’t know how the Captain kept getting her personal phone number. It was impressive as it was alarming. But she didn’t come here to look at her own phone number.
She flipped open her notebook and paused to look between Ward’s chest and her last annotation. She placed the Winter Soldier’s addition in her own notes- an X in the upper left corner, cutting her off. She drew an O in the last blank place on the board and sighed to herself. “Cat’s game. Again. They’re tricky bastards, aren’t they?”
Agent Brown looked considerably shaken, glancing between the raw tattoo on their newest inmate’s chest and the notebook in Berkley’s hands. “They play tic-tac-toe. With you. By carving the game on Hydra agents’ chests?”
“Well I suggested chess but Rogers complained about recreating the board every time. He says ink isn’t cheap. And checkers was plain out.”
“That’s…insane!”
She shrugged. “They’re the Winter Soldiers. They’re not nice. Half of the time they’re not even good. In the forties they killed Hydra agents on sight. Today they tag ‘em and bag ‘em. So we might as well have fun with it. Brown, if you’re going to be sick please don’t be sick on my shoes. Thank you.”
"I'm tired," Gullible complained.
"Well you ain't sleepin' on the stairs," Bad News grumbled. He frogmarched Gullible up the last flight of steps and into their spartan apartment, too big for how many possessions they didn't own. They didn't keep throwpillows or photos or potted plants, but it was still home. Bad News ran metal fingers through Gullible's soft, yellow hair. "You come back to me, you get a kiss, Rogers."
Gullible's mouth twitched. "Yessir." They settled on the couch and Gullible slept the restless sleep of the hypervigilant while Bad News kept watch, as people do.