It’s not every day that that your friend comes back from the dead. It’s even less common for a deceased veteran from world war two to show up looking like he’s still in his twenties.
Steve Rogers supposes that he should be used to phenomena like that by now.
He doesn’t know where Bucky is. He’s fairly certain that it was Bucky who saved him; Bucky who dragged him from the water and left him alone but alive on the shore. It worries Steve, that he just left like that, and that no one knows where he is now. But despite not even knowing whether Bucky had gone straight back to Hydra or not, Steve can feel the bubbles of hope filling his chest.
Sam is his rock, in the days after he wakes up. Natasha is there too, but Steve knows her well enough to know that she’ll be gone soon enough. She’s solitary; a lone wolf. He understands that, now. Before, she was a mystery. Now she’s a friend. She won’t stay.
She does hang around him for a few days, while the after-effects of battle still have hold and their friendship forged in fire is still smoldering. Soon the ashes will cool and they’ll be left with strong links in an unbreakable chain, but for now the three of them are drawn together by shared experience – and a lack of anywhere else to go. They need time to recuperate. To come to terms with the knowledge that everything they thought they knew was Hydra.
Natasha seems almost guilty when she announces her intention to leave, but Steve doesn’t resent it. They’ll meet again. And he knows what she’s going through. All she knew was S.H.I.E.L.D. She was a spy and a soldier, and a good one. And part of what made her good was that she followed orders and kept her head down, because she trusted S.H.I.E.L.D to do what was right in a way she couldn’t even trust herself. To have that turned on it’s head; to have been working for the enemy the entire time… with her history, Steve could understand her feeling of disorientation and betrayal.
He felt disorientated as well. S.H.I.E.L.D had in many ways been his crutch for coming to terms with the twenty-first century, and it felt uncomfortable to be left standing with nothing but his own two feet to hold him up. He had to forge his own direction.
If he’d had to do that a week ago, he would have floundered. But a week ago, he hadn’t had Sam at his side, willing to go wherever his captain led. And a week ago, he hadn’t known Bucky was alive.
Because it didn’t matter how disorientated he felt. It didn’t matter that a few days ago he’d nearly died. It didn’t matter that he was greatly questioning his effectiveness against the many-headed Hydra. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know what his next move was or where it was going to lead. He knew what he had to do.
All roads lead to Bucky.
-
The problem with Steve’s grand plan is that they have literally no information. They know that Bucky was brainwashed by Hydra. They know he was known as the Winter Soldier. But it’s there that their expertise ends. With S.H.I.E.L.D down, most of Steve’s (limited) contacts have scattered to the winds. Sam has a few more, but they’re of very little help. In fact, no help would be a better descriptor.
They spend the next three weeks breaking into former S.H.I.E.L.D facilities to access their databases, finding out that neither of them are particularly adept at hacking, going on a three day car ride to locate a reliable hacker, breaking into three separate facilities to try and find a system to hack (they get caught twice and have to abandon the mission), downloading part-files and randomly-found hidden information onto a harddrive, discovering that they’ve stolen nothing of any value, breaking in a fourth time and downloading some more pertinent files, decrypting them, travelling to an emptied secret base, dropping the hacker off at home and driving back to Sam’s place and flopping on his floor from the exhaustion of constant, unsuccessful searching.
At which point, Sam’s phone rings.
“It’s Natasha,” Sam says, confusion evident on his face as he holds out the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Nat?” Steve asks into the mouthpiece.
“I’m just giving you a heads up. The Winter Soldier has Wilson’s address.”
“What?” asked Steve. “How?”
“I told my associate to give it to him, if he ever came knocking. Which he did. She says he didn’t ask for it, but she wrote it down and handed it to him, with your name below it. I figured that it might help your search for him if he came to you. I have to go. I’ll speak to you later.”
“Right, bye Nat.” But she’d already hung up.
“What’s the news?” Sam asked as Steve lowered the phone.
“We might not have to go too far to find Bucky,” Steve tells him. “With any luck, he’s coming here.”
-
They spend the next few days barely leaving the flat, keeping watch while the other one slept. Steve refuses to leave the house unoccupied incase Bucky comes in search of him and found it empty; Sam refuses to let their guard down in case Bucky isn't searching for Steve just to catch up over a cup of tea and some biscuits.
It's logical, and Steve probably would have done the same thing if Sam hadn’t suggested it first. They have no idea whether Bucky had returned to Hydra after leaving Steve; if he had, Hydra won't let him out unless they were sure he is 100% under control again. In that case, the only reason Bucky would be coming after them would be to try and kill them again, and Sam isn't taking the chance that Steve can remind him who he is a second time.
And even if Bucky hasn’t be reprogrammed again, he is entirely unpredictable. He could decide to kill Steve of his own accord for any number of reasons, none of which would seem unreasonable to the brainwashed, deranged soldier. As much as Steve hits to admit it, it's possible that when he and Bucky met next, it may not be as friends.
Despite that, he still has hope.