Chapter 2
Tony Stark wandered into the shared kitchen blearily, the stink of fried circuits and motor oil clinging to his hair and singed clothes. He refrained from inviting himself (i.e. breaking into) the floors of the other Avengers, but as far as he was concerned the communal kitchen and dining area were fair game. He liked to think of his regular forays into the bare, almost sterile floor as an attempt at team bonding and a way to keep an eye on his fellow Avengers, but really it was because nothing in the cupboards had the words “Gluten Free” on the packaging and, bless his heart, Barton kept the place stocked with Oreos. A piece of printer paper taped to the fridge door drew his eye and gave him pause.
“The hell is this?”
JARVIS chimed, a little electronic jangle he made as an alternative to a throat clearing noise, a habit he adopted because the less enlightened occupants of the building found his occasional interjections alarming. “I believe Sergeant Barnes left that note late last night, sir.”
“Right,” Tony grunted. He took the orange juice from the top shelf, uncapped it, and drank directly from the carton. He eyed Barnes’ blocky scrawl while he debated making coffee.
THE WINTER SOLDIER IS AN EVIL-MINDED RAT BASTARD AND OTHER OBSCURE TIPS FOR THE WINTER SOLDIER MAINTENANCE PROCESS AS PENNED BY JAMES BARNES, ESQ.
1) THE WINTER SOLDIER HAS ONLY ONE SETTING: ALL SYSTEMS GO.
“We will fight them on the beaches,” Steve declared. Bucky didn’t look up from the blades of grass he was tying into little knots, but next to him on the hill Sam started to look alarmed. “We will fight them in the fields. We will fight them in the streets. We will never surrender.”
“It’s a water gun fight, not an armed assault,” Bucky reminded him. His own vivid green water pistol lay next to his knee in the grass, condensating under the relentless summer sun.
“That’s no excuse to get complacent.” Bucky rolled his eyes, picked up his water gun and squirted a stream right into Steve’s face. “Friendly fire! Friendly fire!” he squawked, performing a dramatic dodge and roll maneuver.
2) THE WINTER SOLDIER DOES NOT HAVE A FIGHT-OR-FLIGHT RESPONSE. THERE IS ONLY FIGHT.
“Did you have something against running away?” Agent Carter asked Steve more than a lifetime ago. She looked at the skinny, angry man in the backseat beside her and marveled that it was miracle he survived this long. Could there be anything more horrifying than a miracle?
“Once you start running they’ll never let you stop,” he told her, and God save them but he believed that.
Some months later, in a darkened camp haunted by the whistle and boom of falling bombs, Sergeant Barnes, Steve’s oldest friend, would sit back on the hard earth and regard her through the curling smoke of his cigarette. “Kid has, had, asthma,” he explained. “Couldn’t run more than a block without his lungs giving up on him, and then where’d he be? Naw.” He took a long drag off his cigarette. “If he had to go down, he’d go down bloody, with his fists up.”
Peggy took the cigarette from his unresisting fingers and puffed, trying to think of how she wanted to phrase what she was thinking. “So he’s always been…?”
“Yeah.”
“Bloody hell,” she swore and Bucky laughed and took his smoke back from her.
A) IN THE EVENT OF RETREAT, YOU MAY NEED TO BODILY REMOVE THE WINTER SOLDIER FROM THE FRAY.
Afterward, Beta could not say what, exactly, went wrong. Alpha stood poised at the end of the embankment, gun raised even as the Strike team was swallowed by a barrage of enemy fire. In his ear, Rumlow ordered the Winter Soldiers to retreat, first in English and then in Russian. Alpha squeezed the trigger, once, twice, three times and three enemy combatants crumpled, but not enough. Beta wrapped his metal hand around Alpha’s bicep to pull him away, and only got a snarl for his efforts.
“A retreat order was given!” Beta snapped, but Alpha shrugged him off and turned back to the battle, his free hand going to his shield. Too little too late, the last of their team fell and Alpha was crouching to launch himself into the lost fight. Beta kicked him hard and instead of springing forward Alpha toppled. He came up swinging but Beta was ready for him, getting his flesh arm tight around his neck and cutting off his air supply while his metal arm batted the shield away and tried to keep his flailing in check. The seconds ticked by, agonizingly slow, but soon enough Alpha’s struggles stopped. Beta plucked the communicator out of his ear and tossed it to the ground; he would say he lost it during the battle and Alpha was wounded during the same. Rumlow need never know. He hefted Alpha over his shoulder and marched back to the extraction point, careful to avert his eyes from the bloodbath not two-hundred yards away.
3) THE WINTER SOLDIER IS AN EVIL-MINDED RAT BASTARD.
Captain Rogers opened a tab at the Italian pub, the name of which he had yet to pronounce correctly with his treacherous Anglo tongue. He graced the barkeep with a beatific smile, and she saw his long eyelashes and prominent cheekbones and crisp uniform and nearly dropped the tumbler she was cleaning. He blushed.
A) HE WILL CHEAT AT POKER LIKE A SON OF A BITCH.
“I don’t cheat!” the Captain asserted for the third time that night, or at least the Commandos heard an assertion whereas Bucky heard a whine.
“You know counting cards is still cheating, right?” Morita pointed out, swaying dangerously but still managing to keep his seat.
B) HE WILL DRINK YOU UNDER THE TABLE.
“And you’re sober,” Monty pointed out. He sat directly across from Morita. Bucky, from his place two tables away, suspected the poor bastard was getting seasick as a direct result.
“I told you not to try to match me,” Steve replied. He sounded all prim and honest but Bucky could tell by the way his ears pinked that he knew he was being a little shit. You can’t go into a bar with the Howlies and say “Don’t try to outdrink me” without making it an unspoken challenge.
C) HE WILL RECRUIT YOU INTO HIS TERRIBLE CRUSADES.
With his commandos properly sloshed, Steve went in for the kill. “We have some time before our next mission,” he opened. He shuffled the deck confidently with his oversized hands, no longer clumsily dropping things, crumpling papers or otherwise making a buffoon of himself. “I was thinking we could do some recon on the next Hydra base while we wait on Colonel Phillips’ go ahead.”
Gabe, drunk enough to talk a little too loud but not yet falling down when he got up, grinned and shrugged. “Beats staying in camp,” he said.
Dum Dum laughed and raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that!”
Steve beamed.
i) HE WILL WITHHOLD HOW TERRIBLE HIS CRUSADES ARE UNTIL THE LAST MINUTE.
Dum Dum squinted through his hangover. “Ay, Cap?”
“Yes?”
“I thought you said we were doing recon. On a Hydra base. You know, since we’re not doing anything else at the moment.” He couldn’t look Gabe in the eye, or Monty or Morita for that matter. Dernier seemed oddly pleased—he kept turning around and around and running his hands over the silky fabric. Bucky had the usual air of piercing focus about him, completely unchanged even in the circumstances. “So…” Dum Dum scrounged for a delicate way to say it, and then gave up. “Why the unholy fuck are we wearing dresses into a recon mission?”
The Captain sighed. “Because we’re going undercover. No one will see this coming, least of all Hydra. And my eyes are up here, mister.”
Dum Dum’s face burned. He unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth. “You’re very pretty, Cap.”
Steve grinned. “Thank you.”
D) HE WILL PICK FIGHTS WITH ANYTHING UP TO AND INCLUDING NAZI TANKS ARMED WITH ADVANCED HYDRA WEAPONRY.
Steve abandoned his impractical pumps and sprinted through the marshy field barefoot, yellow wig whipping in the wind, one hand lifting the hem of his cornflower blue skirt up so he could run without tripping, the other hand raising his shield for what would be a killing blow in any other scenario. “He’s running straight for that tank,” Dum Dum marveled. “He’s…he’s going to actually try to fight a tank.” Dernier cackled something that was both French and unprintable, lined up the shot, and fired. The tank didn’t stand a chance.
4) THE WINTER SOLDIER HAS NO CONCEPT OF PERSONAL SAFETY OR ADEQUATE SELF-MAINTENANCE.
“I’m fine!” Steve snapped. His hands shook and even though they had been cutting their rations in half for only three days his Captain America getup looked loose on him. Winter wind whipped around their crude bivouac, whistling through the yawning crags of the mountains. The promise of snow hung on the air.
“You need to eat,” Bucky growled. He pushed the last of his rations at his stupid C.O, who pushed them back.
“It’s your food. I’m fine.”
“You need to keep your strength up, Cap. Who else is going to lead the Howlies into the jaws of death and back?” He wrapped a hand around Steve’s wrist, let his thumb pass over the pulse point. “Please.”
A) SEE ABOVE.
The Strike team watched with wide eyes as the Winter Soldiers engaged in a kind of silent bickering. There was a supply SNAFU resulting in a water crisis that would last for the duration of the mission. Rumlow carefully portioned out the remaining water supply and gave slightly more water to the Winter Soldiers than to the team, not that anyone dared to complain.
They waited for the green light to attack in the shade of a hastily made bivouac that barely kept off the unforgiving sun, and did nothing to protect them from the fine grains of sand whipping off the rolling dunes, carried on painfully dry winds.
Rumlow watched Beta take his water, sip it delicately, and then push it toward Alpha. Alpha did not deign to remove his mask, let alone his goggles (a good choice on the dunes) and shook his head. Beta pushed his canteen farther into Alpha’s space until it leaned against his knee. Alpha pushed the canteen back. Beta pushed it against the other’s knee again. And so on.
Ward, a baby-faced new recruit, leaned over to ask Rumlow, “Should we…do something?”
Their handler shook his head with a long suffering sigh. “Don’t bother. They do this every time. No, I don’t know why.”
5) THE WINTER SOLDIER WILL THROW AWAY HIS GODFORSAKEN SHIELD MID-BATTLE FOR NO GODDAM REASON.
“Well this mission has just gone completely tits up,” Monty remarked.
“You’re not wrong,” Steve muttered. He, Monty and Bucky were pinned in a Hydra war room. Bullets rang in the corridor outside and alarms blared throughout the complex. Outside, men yelled, metal doors clanged open and engines rumbled to life.
“Any ideas?” Bucky asked.
Steve squinted at the little space between where the door failed to meet the jamb and chewed his lip. “Yeah, but you’re not going to like it.”
“I don’t have to like it!” Bucky immediately wished he could take back those words when Steve placed the shield on its edge and rolled it slowly out the door. “Rogers!” he snarled. “It’s not a fucking boomerang, jeezus!” Bullets bounced off the vibranium, making sad little pinging noises and the shield rolled down in slow motion, wobbled and fell with a noise like a rolling metal pan lid before it came to a halt flat on the floor. The bullets stopped. Cautious footsteps approached their door. The Germans in the hall and the Commandos in the war room held their breath. Steve yanked the door open, ripping it off its hinges and, with a new shield that could cover three instead of one, waded into the renewed enemy fire and panicked German cursing.
6) THE WINTER SOLDIER ACTUALLY THINKS DIGITAL WRISTWATCHES ARE PRETTY NEAT.
“Well, they are!” Steve enthused, admiring Tony’s gag gift on his wrist. “It’s even solar powered! Look!”
7) THE WINTER SOLDIER, DESPITE BEING ABLE TO SWEAR IN AT LEAST SIXTEEN LANGUAGES, WILL SELF-RIGHTEOUSLY POLICE THE FOUL LANGUAGE AROUND HIMSELF.
“Language,” the Captain tutted, sipping Italian coffee in one of many nameless Italian towns barely ruffled by Hitler’s conquest. Dum Dum rolled his eyes.
“Language,” Steve scolded, making the army nurses titter and Morita look appropriately chastised, right up until the doctor dabbed his flesh wound with more rubbing alcohol.
“Language,” the Winter Soldier admonished before pushing the diplomat’s head below the water’s surface.
“Language,” Alpha murmured, cutting his newest handler off mid-correction. The pliers, a bloody fingernail still clamped in their grip, wavered over his hand on the metal table and his handler gaped at him.
“Language,” Steve said into his comm without even thinking. On the other end Iron Man made disbelieving noises while the rest of the Avengers sniggered amongst themselves.
“Language,” Gabriel McBride muttered under his breath, inaudible over the buzz of the tattoo gun and the bitten back snarls of his canvas.
A) UNLESS MARIO KART IS INVOLVED.
“Eat my entire ass, Wilson! Suck it!” Steve hooted, flushed with triumph right until a blue shell came out of nowhere on the final lap. “No!” he wailed. “You whore!”
8) THE WINTER SOLDIER HAS A PATHOLOGICAL FEAR OF BEING ALONE IN A ROOM WITH INFANTS.
“It’s unsettling, is all I’m saying. And I make babies cry, anyway.” Steve squirmed away from Sam’s tiny niece. She looked up at him from the crook of Sam’s elbow, big liquid brown eyes watching him.
“Are you for real right now, man? It’s just for the afternoon.”
“I’d love to babysit,” he lied, slowly inching his way along the wall toward the exit. “But I have a thing. A very important obligation. With the team. Yeah.”