Undone
Bucky stepped out of the truck with deliberate care, his boots crunching against the gravel lot as though every sound echoed louder than it should. He didn’t speak, didn’t glance at Yelena as she slid out from the passenger side beside him, her expression guarded, arms folded tightly across her chest. The sunlight was harsh, bouncing off the concrete with an edge that made Bucky squint, his pupils slow to adjust. The moment they parked, his anxiety had begun winding tighter again, a cord pulled taut in the pit of his stomach. His body was already aching from the sick tension that hadn’t truly left him since they'd crossed through the base gates—since that building had ripped open something he hadn't known was buried.
Then the door opened.
Sam emerged from the low-slung building, balancing a box in his arms with practiced ease, his face flushed from exertion and summer heat, curls stuck to his forehead with sweat. He looked tired—bone-deep, mission-long tired—but when he caught sight of Bucky standing by the truck, something bright and immediate lit up in his face. His whole expression shifted like the sun had decided to rise again just for this moment.
“Well, would you look at that,” Sam called out, grinning as he moved to the truck and set the box in the bed with a soft thud. “You bring me that Bo-Berry biscuit and sweet tea, or do I have to file a formal complaint?”
Bucky startled slightly, pulled from his spiraling thoughts, and gave Sam a sheepish smile, tilting his head in mock regret. “We, uh... forgot.”
Sam gasped, hand on his chest, feigning betrayal. “You mean to tell me, Barnes, that I’ve been out here saving democracy and my reward is what? Nothing?”
Bucky shrugged, the corner of his mouth twitching upward. “I brought my sparkling personality.”
“Great,” Sam said dryly. “I’ll chew on that with a side of air. Asshole.”
Yelena chuckled quietly under her breath, but Bucky barely heard it. Because Sam had stepped closer now, still grinning—until he wasn’t. Until the laughter faded from his face like fog retreating under heat. His gaze shifted, zeroed in on Bucky’s eyes—on the tight line of his jaw, the tension in his shoulders. He saw it immediately, the crack in the armor Bucky was trying to keep steady.
“Buck,” Sam said softly, the humor gone in an instant. “What’s wrong?”
Bucky looked down, but it didn’t help. Sam’s hand found his jaw gently, thumb brushing over his cheek with that familiar warmth that always managed to undo him. Sam touched him like Bucky was something worth protecting.
“Is it the fever again?” Sam asked, worried. “Did it come back? Is it worse?”
“No,” Bucky whispered, and then again with more weight. “No. It’s not that.”
Sam’s hands didn’t move, still cupping Bucky’s face like he might fall apart without the touch. “Then what is it?”
Bucky covered Sam’s wrists with his own hands, grounding himself in the touch. He stared at Sam like he was trying to commit the lines of his face to memory, voice soft as he said, “I’m okay.”
It wasn’t entirely a lie. But it wasn’t true either.
Before Sam could ask again, Torres came stumbling out of the building behind them, arms full of another heavy box. He tripped on the last step and nearly sent the files flying, righting himself with a wheeze.
“Jesus fuck,” he muttered, catching himself. Then, glancing up and seeing the tension like a storm cloud clinging to them, he tilted his head. “Wait—Bucky, you didn’t tell him about the gate guard?”
Bucky flinched, and Sam immediately went still. His hands dropped from Bucky’s face and instead settled firmly at his waist—a gesture that had become second nature over time, one Sam didn’t even seem aware he did anymore.
“What gate guard?” Sam asked, voice low but firm.
Torres hesitated, clearly catching the look Yelena shot him—one that said shut the hell up or I will end you.
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t look at her. Talk to me.”
Torres looked between them again, clearly weighing his options. But Sam’s face was stone now, the Captain America part of him rising like a tide. Torres sighed, shifting the box awkwardly in his arms. “When we got to the gate, the private on duty didn’t want to let Bucky through. Said something about needing to radio command. It was weird. Sketchy.”
Sam’s brows furrowed. “And you didn’t think I should know this?”
“I told him to tell you,” Torres said, glancing at Bucky. “You didn’t?”
Bucky’s mouth was dry. “I was GETTING to it-”
Sam turned to Yelena now. “Did you think I shouldn’t know either?”
Yelena looked exasperated. “It was a private getting jumpy over a file he probably read wrong. We’re fine now. He let us through.”
“It’s not just that,” Torres said quickly. “It’s also—well, there was this building. Bucky saw it and got real sick. Pulled over and everything.”
Sam’s eyes snapped to Bucky again. “That’s why you look pale as hell.”
“I’m not THAT pale-”
“Bucky-”
“Samuel-”
“BUCK-”
Bucky sighed softly before slowly giving a hesitant nod. “I remembered something. Not everything, but… enough.”
Sam listened, rapt and quiet, as Bucky explained—haltingly, carefully—what he’d seen. The lights. The cryo chamber. The sense of being there, even though no part of his conscious memory could recall how or why. Yelena’s arms crossed tighter the longer he spoke.
When he finished, Yelena finally said, a bit too quickly, “It could be anything, though. Some flashback that doesn’t even belong to this place. The brain does that, sometimes.”
Something about the casual tone of it, the way she dismissed it, needled under Bucky’s skin. He said nothing, but the mistrust settled deeper.
Sam didn’t seem convinced either. He turned to Bucky, voice gentler. “What do you want to do?”
The question dropped into the space between them like a stone in deep water. Heavy. Honest.
Bucky hesitated, eyes flicking to Yelena, who looked back at him with a faint shake of her head.
And then he looked at Sam. Sam, who always asked—not told. Who never pushed. Who always, always stood at his side, no matter how deep the hole went.
“I want to see the building,” Bucky said quietly. “I need to.”
Sam nodded. “Then we’re doing it.”
“Sam—” Yelena started.
But Sam held up a hand. “You and Torres get the rest of the files in the truck. Me and Buck got this.”
“I don’t think—”
Sam’s tone didn’t change, but something steel-hard threaded through it now. “We’ve handled worse, Yelena.”
She glared at him, and then at Bucky, something complicated—maybe even afraid—flashing in her eyes before she turned on her heel and stalked back into the building, Torres trailing after her with a nervous look.
Bucky stood there, the sun sharp and hot on the back of his neck, feeling like he couldn’t quite breathe. Something was wrong. Deeply wrong. He felt it in the marrow of him.
Sam stepped in close again, hand brushing lightly against his back.
“Hey,” he said, low and steady. “We’re okay. You and me, alright? We’ll figure it out. Just like we always do.”
Bucky didn’t answer, just climbed into the truck with that dread still gnawing at his gut like a second heartbeat. He didn’t know what they were about to find—but he knew it would change everything.
----------------------
The truck came to a quiet halt at the edge of the clearing, its tires crunching over gravel and dust as the engine idled and then clicked off with a reluctant sigh. Bucky stared out the windshield, unmoving, shoulders tight beneath the faded stretch of his T-shirt, his hands clenched so hard on his knees the veins stood out in sharp relief. The building in front of them was not particularly large, nor did it seem especially remarkable—not from a structural perspective, anyway—but it gave off a kind of stillness that made the skin itch and the heart beat too fast. It looked like it had been abandoned mid-thought. Half-collapsing under the weight of its own silence. The windows, smeared with years of grime and tinted by mildew, gave nothing away.
But it was the feeling. That suffocating pressure in the air. Like the whole place was watching.
Beside him, Sam was quiet at first, his own expression sober as he took in the crumbling outline of the building, one hand resting loosely on the steering wheel, the other reaching down without ceremony to settle on Bucky’s thigh—a firm, grounding touch that sparked a flicker of warmth through the freezing dread curling around Bucky’s spine.
“Hey,” Sam said gently, squeezing once. “Breathe.”
“I AM breathing, Samuel-” Bucky murmured tightly, though he wasn’t sure he had been. His heart pounded against his ribs like it was trying to claw its way out.
Sam leaned over just slightly, eyes never leaving Bucky’s face. “You don’t have to go in. We’ve got nothing to prove. If something’s in there, we’ll find another way to—”
“I have to,” Bucky said, his voice softer than it should’ve been for how loud the fear felt in his chest. “I don’t know what it is, but... I have to. And there could be something in there that we need.”
Sam studied him, his thumb stroking slow circles into Bucky’s leg. “Okay,” he said eventually, nodding once. “Then let’s go.”
There was a moment, a flicker of something that passed between them—unspoken but understood. And then Sam leaned forward, brushing a gentle kiss to the corner of Bucky’s mouth, before pulling back with a crooked grin that barely masked his worry.
“You owe me a sweet tea after this though,” he said.
Bucky huffed a laugh, shaky but real. “You’re never letting that go, are you?”
Sam’s smile widened just slightly. “Nope.”
They stepped out, their boots crunching over brittle grass and broken asphalt as they circled the building’s perimeter, falling into step like muscle memory—fluid and quiet, the way they always did when a mission slipped into motion. Bucky swept the left, Sam the right, eyes sharp, hands ready. The air was dense with the scent of rotting wood, wet earth, and something metallic that lingered beneath it all like a warning.
Every step closer felt heavier. The air thickened. The silence grew louder.
Inside, the building was somehow worse.
Mold crept along the ceiling like dark veins. The floorboards beneath their boots creaked with every step, giving just enough to make them feel unsteady. The air was stale, bitter, thick with the scent of decay. In one corner of what might’ve once been a break room, a fridge stood slightly ajar, the contents long-since rotted and mummified. The walls were streaked with water damage and the windows, though still intact, looked like they were smeared with something that had nothing to do with time.
“No wonder you felt sick,” Sam muttered, squinting into one of the darker hallways. “Place looks like it could’ve given the Hulk tuberculosis.”
“I’d bet money on the black mold alone,” Bucky deadpanned, scanning the water-stained ceiling.
“I don’t get paid enough for this shit,” Sam whispered dramatically, earning a faint huff from Bucky.
They moved in tandem, clearing room after room with the efficiency of years of fieldwork, their banter quiet but steady. But even with the familiarity between them—Sam’s warm shoulder brushing against his in narrow corridors, the occasional glance that lingered too long—it wasn’t enough to silence the pounding in Bucky’s chest.
Because the further they went in, the worse it got.
There was something here. Something under the surface.
“I don’t think this place was evacuated,” Sam said, poking a half-open filing cabinet with the barrel of his sidearm. “Feels like it was... abandoned. Fast.”
Bucky said nothing at first. His hand had lifted of its own accord, brushing across the warped wallpaper near one of the back walls. Something in his gut turned, flipped hard, and before he could stop himself, he was pressing his fingers into a jagged crack in the plaster.
Sam noticed, lowering his weapon slightly. “What are you doing?”
Bucky didn’t answer. Couldn’t. He didn’t know how to explain it. Just that something—some invisible pull—was dragging him forward. His palm flattened over the wall, then drew back slowly. He clenched his fist.
“Bucky,” Sam warned, already wary.
“I can feel it,” Bucky whispered.
“Feel what?”
“There’s something back there.” His voice was firm now. Conviction replacing fear.
And before Sam could stop him, Bucky drew back his vibranium fist and slammed it into the wall.
The sound echoed like a gunshot.
Sam jumped. “Jesus—Buck!”
Bucky ignored him, drawing back and punching again. Plaster cracked, chunks falling in dusty clouds. The wall groaned under the assault.
“I swear to God,” Sam muttered. “Do I look like FEMA, Barnes? I’d rather not get crushed by a mildew piece of drywall-”
“Oh my GOD, Wilson! Shut up,” Bucky growled, slamming his fist into the wall a third time.
“Are you gonna tell me why you’re turning this place into Swiss cheese or am I just supposed to fucking guess?”
Bucky paused, breath heaving in shallow, steady pulls as he stood before the half-shattered wall, sweat curling at the nape of his neck, dampening the collar of his shirt where it clung to the ridges of muscle and anxiety strung tight beneath skin. His chest rose and fell with labored rhythm, metal fingers flexing absently at his side as he stared down the cracked drywall like it had personally offended him. “I don’t know,” he muttered, voice rough and raw from exertion. “I just—I know something’s behind this. I can feel it.”
He didn’t wait for a reply. The next punch cracked through the wall with a deep, splintering echo, dust billowing around him as if the building itself exhaled in response. Another strike, more forceful, the sound of crumbling concrete and rusted studs collapsing behind the drywall roaring in his ears. His metal fist struck again. Again. The pain in his shoulder was distant now—dulled by adrenaline and something primal clawing its way to the surface, some half-buried instinct that told him to dig, to break, to uncover whatever had been hidden behind that wall for far too long.
Sam stepped back a few feet, observing silently with furrowed brows and the tension of a man ready to leap in at any second. His gaze wasn’t worried—not yet—but watchful, like a handler with a bomb whose wires were twitching beneath the surface.
Then, finally, the wall gave way with a shuddering groan, the last slab of drywall and framing crashing down to reveal a steel bulkhead door, massive and unforgiving, dull gray with oxidized streaks running down its face like tears.
Bucky, breathless and bracing himself against the remnants of the wall, glared at the vault like it had personally betrayed him. “Of course,” he muttered, flexing his metal knuckles. “Fucking knew it.”
Sam ambled up beside him, gave a low whistle as he took in the heavy-duty door. “Damn. All that work, and we could’ve just brought Redwing from the start. You really are outta shape, baby.”
Bucky shot him a sideways glare, mouth twitching despite himself. “I’ll show you outta shape.”
Sam leaned in, grin widening. “You better. I love that smartass mouth of yours.”
Bucky sputtered, caught off guard by the blatant affection, his cheeks coloring despite the cool air rolling in from the hollowed-out space. He elbowed Sam lightly in the ribs. “Shut up.”
“Never,” Sam replied, saccharine sweet, as he tapped something into his smartwatch. A few moments later, Redwing whirred overhead, its tiny frame blinking with light as it hovered into position.
Sam stepped back, gesturing grandly. “Behold. My contribution. Now watch the birdie.”
Redwing's small but focused lasers activated with a sharp hiss, slicing through the vault’s locking mechanism with eerie precision. A hiss of steam escaped as the bolts retracted and the door fell outward with a deafening clang that echoed like cannon fire in the empty halls.
Bucky stood there, arms crossed and unimpressed. “So I punched through concrete for nothing.”
Sam shrugged, all cheek. “You needed the cardio. Builds character.”
“Gonna build a crater next time. With your face.”
“And there’s the man I know and love,” Sam quipped, slapping Bucky’s shoulder before they both turned toward the gaping void of darkness beyond the threshold.
The air changed immediately. The light behind them seemed weaker as they stepped into the yawning staircase that spiraled down, the shadows growing heavier, thicker, clinging to their skin like oil. Their banter quieted, tension settling into their bones as the weight of the unknown pushed down harder with each step.
They moved in sync—like always—silent, purposeful, every gesture fluid from too many missions run side by side. Sam took point, hand up to silently motion a stop, a go, a pause to listen. Bucky followed close, steps careful, boots echoing on concrete. The scent shifted the deeper they went—dampness giving way to metal, then bleach, and then something worse. Decay.
At the bottom of the staircase, they came into a wide corridor lined with reinforced doors. A chill ran through Bucky’s spine as he stepped inside and his boots hit the tile floor of what looked like a lab—some nightmarish holdover from HYDRA’s darkest days.
The lights flickered on automatically, harsh fluorescence buzzing overhead. The space was massive. Rows of rusted metal tables, chalkboards still covered in half-erased formulas, rat cages with skeletons curled in corners, and lab equipment coated in dust but far too organized to have been abandoned long.
Sam exhaled beside him, low and disbelieving. “This place is straight outta a horror movie. Remind me again why we didn’t bring backup?”
Bucky’s eyes were fixed ahead, hyperfocused. “Because we’re idiots. Thats why.”
“You say that like it’s new thing.”
They moved through the rows slowly. Bucky’s heart thudded in his throat. Sam reached out, brushing a hand along his arm in a grounding gesture, voice low. “Stay close. You wander out of my sight, I swear to God, I’m tying you to my hip.”
Bucky smirked faintly, sucking at his teeth. “Kinky.”
Sam didn’t miss a beat. “Only for you, sweetheart.”
But the humor didn’t last. The lights continued to flicker above them. Each room they passed showed more signs of recent occupation—a chair still askew, an untouched coffee mug on a desk, footprints in the dust. The silence was suffocating.
They turned a final corner, a long hallway stretching ahead. As they stepped forward, the motion-sensor lights snapped on in bursts—blinding, abrupt, sterile.
Bucky froze, then suddenly staggered.
His knees hit the tile with a sharp crack, and his hands came up to his head, gripping it hard. Pain flared through his skull like an ice pick behind his eyes.
“Bucky!” Sam was at his side instantly, hands gripping his shoulders. “Hey, hey—I’ve got you. Talk to me, babe, what is it?”
But Bucky couldn’t respond. His mind was not here—not anymore.
He was strapped to a table, steel restraints biting into his flesh. A voice barked orders in Russian—cold, unfeeling. A syringe filled with something glowing pressed into his neck. Lights stuttered overhead. His body bucked against the restraints as something burned beneath his skin.
Then—
Desert wind.
Heat.
Screams.
The air tasted of ash. Dry, brittle dust whipped against his skin like glass shards, and the world beyond the ridge glowed a sickening shade of orange. Something massive was falling from the sky—a fireball plummeting through the stars, its frame breaking apart mid-descent like a dying animal flailing against gravity. Metal shrieked against atmosphere, a high-pitched keening that twisted into something else. Something human.
A voice—no, a scream. Someone screaming a name through the wind. Desperate. Grief-struck. Familiar.
Bucky stood rooted on the edge of a dark cliff, bazooka heavy across his back, as though he’d been carved out of the stone itself. The sand below whipped and shifted, but he barely blinked. A storm was coming. Something unnatural. The sky above Afghanistan split like fabric, bleeding fire and ruin across the mountains.
A shape dove after the wreckage—sleek, fast. Wings. But not a plane.
Something else.
He strained to make it out, the scream crawling deeper into his skull like it was being piped through a speaker behind his eyes. But the second the image clarified, the moment he nearly understood what—who—he was watching, something collided with him from the side in the memory, and the whole vision detonated.
Pain.
Everything turned red. Blinding.
And then—
Steel walls. Stale air. The echo of his own hoarse screams.
He was on the slab again, the Hydra lab's surgical light blinding above him, yellowed and flickering. His body jerked and arched as voices barked in Russian over the buzz of a saw. His left arm—what was left of it—hung useless at his side, molten metal fused into skin. Burnt nerves. Muscle torn from bone. His torso was shredded with chemical burns, charred black from the shoulder to his ribs. He couldn't breathe. Couldn't move. Just writhe in restraints slick with sweat and blood and scream until his throat shredded raw.
His metal arm had melted. It had fucking MELTED.
They were taking it.
The saw bit through plating, metal shrieking. Bone snapped. He thrashed, trying to curl in on himself, trying to make it stop, but Hydra's techs held him down like livestock. The pressure was too much. His back arched off the table. The world dimmed. The pain was everything.
Until—
“Bucky. Bucky. Buck, come on—”
A hand. Soft against his cheek. A voice, low and urgent.
“Hey. Hey—look at me. You’re safe. You’re here. With me. Come back to me, Buck.”
His eyes snapped open, a gasp catching in his throat. His vision tilted and he collapsed forward with a strangled noise—straight into Sam’s chest.
Strong arms caught him immediately, wrapping around his torso and holding tight. Sam sank to the concrete floor with him, taking his weight easily, murmuring steady, grounding things into the crown of his head.
“I’ve got you,” Sam whispered. “Right here. You’re okay. You’re safe. You’re okay.”
Bucky pressed his face into Sam’s jacket, breath ragged and hot with panic. His skin was damp with sweat. His metal shoulder ached like it had been split wide open. His heart stuttered beneath his ribs like it was trying to escape.
For a long minute, they just stayed like that—on the dusty concrete floor of a secret underground lab, surrounded by ghosts and rot and silence. Sam's hand carded slowly through his hair, the other tight around his ribs. Bucky clung back, not quite aware of how hard.
“…I think I hate basements,” Bucky rasped eventually, his voice dry and sandpaper-thin.
Sam let out a small, breathy laugh into his hair. “Yeah, babe, that tracks. Is a pretty shitty ass basement.”
They stayed sitting there for another minute, maybe longer, until the hammering in Bucky’s chest eased just enough to allow him to lift his head. Sam studied him closely, eyes scanning his face with the kind of worry that made Bucky feel both seen and stripped bare.
“What did you see?” Sam asked softly.
Bucky leaned back slightly, wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. “Something falling,” he said slowly, voice hoarse. “From the sky. It was burning. And someone… someone screamed.”
He paused. His head pounded. “I think… I think it was Afghanistan.”
Sam’s brow furrowed. “Afghanistan?”
“I was on a cliff,” Bucky added, shaking his head as if trying to shake the pieces loose. “There was a bazooka on my back. Something was coming down hard. I couldn’t see what. I think…”
He trailed off, then winced. “I don’t know. There was a voice. Screaming someone’s name. I almost recognized it. And then—something hit me. An explosion.”
Sam’s hand came up to cup his cheek again, thumb brushing under his eye. “You don’t have to explain it right now,” he said gently. “We’ll figure it out later. Just breathe.”
Bucky swallowed hard and nodded, the edges of his vision still swimming. “They took my arm,” he whispered. “I saw it. Burned. Like it had melted clean off.”
Sam’s face hardened, grief and fury warring behind his eyes. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to.
Eventually, Bucky nodded again, shaky but steadier. “Let’s finish clearing this place. I want to know what the hell this place was.”
They stood slowly. Sam kept a hand on his back until Bucky’s balance steadied, and then they continued, walking deeper into the hallway, the air growing heavier with every step.
They came to a large room at the end of the corridor—an office of sorts. Or maybe a command center. The overhead lights were already on, humming faintly. It looked like it hadn’t been abandoned for long.
Bucky froze in the doorway.
There was a whiteboard covered in formulas—some scrawled, some printed. Equations that felt surgical in their precision. Not military strategy. Science.
And beneath it, a folding table stacked with files.
Sam walked forward cautiously, scanning the whiteboard. “These are recent,” he murmured. “A couple months, maybe. These aren’t just left behind.”
Bucky stepped up beside him and reached for the topmost folder.
His name was on the label.
His hand trembled slightly as he opened it.
There were diagrams. Anatomical breakdowns. A full schematic of his old metal arm. An updated one of his vibranium arm. Next to it, scans of his nervous system, dated from the 70s, the 80s… even a few more recent than he expected. And pages of redacted documents—his file as the Winter Soldier. His body rendered clinical. Numbers. Charts. Pain reduced to formulas.
Sam hovered beside him, watching his expression.
Bucky flipped the page—and saw a photo. A grainy black and white still of his unconscious form strapped to a gurney. Tubes. Metal restraints. The image blurred as bile rose in his throat.
“Sam—” he croaked, stepping back, the folder falling from his hands.
His breath hitched in his throat, chest tight as if his ribs had shrunk two sizes too small. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed, casting a clinical wash across the desk, the floor, the open folder now lying at his boots like a crime scene. He couldn’t move. Could barely blink. His eyes remained pinned to the splatter of his own medical history—drawings, vitals, notes that belonged to a man who’d stopped being human a long time ago. He leaned subtly toward Sam, as if by proximity alone he could anchor himself in reality. But even that felt distant now. Detached.
“I feel like this is Slade all over again,” Bucky whispered hoarsely, voice raw with dread. “Like I’m never gonna have peace.”
Sam didn’t hesitate. One broad hand slid around Bucky’s waist while the other lifted the folder from the floor. His voice was low, measured—but firm, grounding. “We don’t know that, Buck. Let’s not go there yet, okay? Let’s not spiral.”
But the spiral had already begun, coiling deep in Bucky’s stomach, acidic and tight. His hands trembled, fists clenching at his sides as his eyes remained fixed on the folder now in Sam’s grip. The page on top was an anatomical drawing—his anatomy, unmistakably. The bones of his arm, the spinal integration notes, the serial number etched into the tissue along his left scapula. His body, laid out like parts on a table.
“They’re never gonna stop coming,” Bucky said quietly, head bowing. “Someone’s always going to want a piece of me. Either because of what I was, or what I did.”
Sam turned, still holding him, and looked him dead in the eye. “And I’ll be right here, fighting them off. One by one if I have to.” His tone didn’t allow argument. “But right now? We need to figure out what this is. Who this came from. Then we make a plan.”
Bucky nodded, once. It wasn’t conviction. It was survival. Sam's voice had steadied the tremble in his spine, but the fear still throbbed beneath his skin like a second pulse.
They moved deeper into the office space, stepping carefully around half-packed boxes and overturned chairs. The desk drawers had been rifled through in a hurry—papers scattered, broken pens leaking dried ink into warped folders. Someone left in a rush.
It didn’t feel abandoned. It felt interrupted.
Sam moved toward a small refrigerator against the back wall, glancing inside. His brow furrowed as he reached for a set of labeled vials.
“WS Toxin,” he read aloud, voice hushed with dawning horror. “Shit. This came from here.”
Bucky turned, eyes narrowing at the label. His chest tightened. Every hair on his arm stood on end. The air in the room seemed colder now, thicker.
He took a step back.
So. Something from Bragg had tried to kill him.
Fucking figures.
He’d known the fever wasn’t normal. The way it struck. The hallucinations. The agony. Even the serum had struggled to keep pace.
Bucky’s jaw flexed. His body fell into an old stance—heels slightly braced, fists loose but ready, eyes scanning corners that hadn’t even moved. He wasn’t just on edge. He was waiting for something. For someone. The Winter Soldier was stirring—not in the way he used to, with orders and names—but as instinct, reflex. The animal caged beneath his ribs. Something was off. His senses knew it before he did.
He turned to Sam. “How do you think Austin fits into this?”
Sam was holding the vial up to the light. “I honestly don’t know. But the toxin—we have proof now. That’s something. Maybe when we go through the files—”
“Assuming Yelena lets us near them,” Bucky muttered darkly.
Sam offered a faint smile. “She’s worried about you.”
“She’s hiding something.”
Sam didn’t argue. Which was answer enough.
They moved across the room again. The filing cabinets yielded nothing except dust and redacted pages. But then, tucked against the far wall, Bucky spotted a large, industrial-grade steel box. Heavy. Bolted shut with an old-school latch. No markings except a white tag duct-taped to the front.
Sam leaned down, reading aloud. “2008–2014. WS Ops Only.”
Bucky’s stomach dropped at the sheer amount.
“Jesus,” he muttered.
Sam glanced at him, eyes unreadable. “You wanna look now?”
Bucky stared at the box for a beat too long before shaking his head. “No. Let’s just—let’s just take it with us.”
Sam nodded and picked it up, grunting under the weight but steady. “Alright. We’ve got what we need. For now.”
But Bucky didn’t feel any safer. His skin prickled like frostbite, like nerve endings just below the surface. His hearing sharpened, breath shortening. Every creak of the building’s frame, every buzz of old wiring sent a jolt through his spine. He was keyed up. Senses blazing. Alert to shadows that didn’t move and air that didn’t flow.
The Winter Soldier had always been good at sensing threats.
Sam shifted the box in his arms. “Let’s get outta here.”
Bucky didn’t answer, but he followed. Closely.
They moved back through the corridor, past the chalkboard scribbled in equations that meant nothing to either of them. The formulas felt out of place—frenetic and purposeful. Not just science. Weaponization. Sam had pointed to one, muttering that it reminded him of chemical synthesis processes he’d seen during missions in Syria. The kind you don’t want in a basement lab beneath a military base.
Bucky turned toward Sam, who was still clutching the folder of recordings like it might bite him. The way he said it—quiet, flat, almost offhand—sent a chill down Bucky’s spine. There was something in Sam’s voice, a sliver of memory or regret, that made Bucky pause.
He studied Sam’s face for a moment, the way his jaw clenched, the furrow between his brows like he was holding something back. Bucky didn’t ask. He wanted to. But not here. Not yet.
Still, the curiosity itched under his skin.
Just what kind of missions had the Falcon program sent him on?
The question stayed nestled in the back of his mind as they moved, boots echoing faintly off the metal stairwell. Every creak, every scuff, scraped like sandpaper against Bucky’s nerves. The deeper they’d gone into that place, the louder his instincts screamed. His pulse hadn’t slowed since they’d descended, and now, going back up, it pounded like a war drum in his ears.
He didn’t realize he’d paused until Sam glanced back over his shoulder. “You good?”
Bucky was halfway up the stairs, one hand still on the railing. The other rested lightly over his abdomen, where a phantom pain twisted deep in his gut. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.
That was when it happened.
Something shifted in the air behind him.
There was no sound. No heat. Just... movement.
A flicker. A tremor in the light. That same hallway—the one that had been empty moments ago—lit up with a brief, sickly blink. A ceiling light flared and stuttered, and in that instant, Bucky saw him.
A silhouette.
Charred and blackened like it had walked through fire and never come out clean. Its wing—if it could still be called that—was warped and half-melted, the metal twisted like a shredded blade. The eyes glowed.
Red.
Boring into him like a brand.
His heart punched into his throat. He blinked.
Gone.
The hallway stood empty. Still. Silent.
“Bucky?” Sam’s voice was closer now. Gentle. Wary. “What is it?”
He spun to look at Sam, breath caught in his throat, pupils wide. “I thought I saw…” He shook his head. “Nothing. It’s nothing.”
Sam looked him over like he didn’t believe a word of it. “You sure?”
No. Not even a little bit.
But he nodded anyway.
He forced himself to take the last few steps up the stairs, each one feeling heavier than the last. He could feel the ghost of that thing behind him, watching, waiting. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He didn’t let himself look back.
Outside, the light of day hit him like a slap. It was still overcast, the sky low and grey, wind threading through the long grass that bordered the building. The air was sharp and too clean after what they’d just climbed out of.
Bucky barely registered Sam opening the truck door for him. He climbed in, silent, staring at his boots.
Sam got behind the wheel, tossed the folder into the back seat, and glanced over at him. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Bucky didn’t answer.
Because maybe he had.
He shifted in his seat, fingers tapping anxiously against his knee. His chest felt tight. His hearing had turned hypersensitive again, a PTSD aftershock he hadn’t experienced in months. He could hear every click of the engine cooling, the wind pressing against the windshield-
Like the world had moved a few feet away from him.
He pressed his metal hand flat against the dashboard to ground himself, the cold surface a small anchor in a sea of noise.
Sam turned the engine over and didn’t speak. He just reached across the seat, fingers sliding gently over Bucky’s thigh, his thumb rubbing small circles above the fabric.
That helped. A little.
“You sure you’re okay?” Sam asked finally, eyes still on the road.
“No.” Bucky’s voice was rough. Honest.
Sam nodded. “We’ll figure it out. Whatever this is.”
Bucky exhaled slowly, leaning his head back against the seat. The image of those red eyes lingered in his mind like a smudge on glass, impossible to wipe away.
He glanced sideways at Sam, watching the way his profile tensed with focus, hands steady on the wheel. Reliable. Constant.
He couldn’t lose him.
He couldn’t.
As they pulled away from the building, Bucky didn’t look back. But he could still feel it—the weight of the place clinging to his skin like ash.
And somewhere deep inside, in the place he rarely let himself look, something began to shift.
Something was coming.
-----------
The basement was lit by a half-coiled string of LED lights and the bluish cast of an old desk lamp that buzzed every so often like a bug zapper left out too long. The space smelled of old concrete, printer paper, coffee, and something vaguely like lavender—probably from one of Yelena’s essential oil candles, which she swore weren’t for relaxation, just ambiance.
Maps covered the walls, overlapping like scales. Photos had been pinned in wild clusters, string zig-zagged from location markers to names scrawled in all-caps, some circled in red, others in jagged black. Sticky notes dotted the corners, curling from the humidity, with shorthand in both English and Russian. The cement floor was cold beneath them, even with the scattered rugs. In one corner, an overturned crate held up Yelena’s laptop, which cycled through helmet cam footage on a muted loop. She hadn’t looked away from it in hours.
Bucky sat cross-legged near her, his back braced against the wall. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been there—long enough that the knot between his shoulder blades had hardened into something calcified, long enough that the white noise of the footage had sunk into the back of his mind like an echo. Every few minutes, he found his eyes drifting—not to the footage, or the boards, but to her.
Yelena was hunched over a thick stack of folders, her ponytail fraying from where she kept yanking at it with one hand. Her fingers were stained with highlighter ink—orange and pink mostly—and she had two pens tucked behind her ear and another clutched between her teeth. She muttered to herself, occasionally pausing to flip back several pages and growl something under her breath.
Across the room, Sam and Torres were on their third debate over takeout. At this point, Bucky couldn’t tell if they were actually hungry or just trying to break the tension. Probably both.
“We’re not ordering from that place again,” Sam said, arms crossed, looking every bit like a man ready to go to war over dinner.
Torres held up his phone with a dramatic flourish. “Why not? It was DELICIOUS. And the fortune cookie said I’d have a prosperous romantic entanglement this week, so clearly they know what they’re talking about.”
“You got food poisoning,” Sam said flatly.
“Food poisoning builds character.”
“No, food poisoning builds ER bills, Joquin.”
Torres gasped. “You’re just afraid to try new things.”
“I tried THAT. And then I tried surviving the worst dumpling of my life.”
Yelena didn’t even look up. “If one of you doesn’t pick something soon, I’m feeding you both MREs and watching you suffer.”
Sam pointed a triumphant finger. “Bam. Authority. You hear that?”
Torres rolled his eyes. “You’re siding with the woman who eats raw garlic cloves like they’re breath mints.”
“It’s natural antibiotic, you idiot,” Yelena snapped, flipping a folder open so aggressively it smacked the wall.
Bucky smiled faintly, the corner of his mouth twitching. The humor—however ridiculous—anchored the room. Made it feel like something other than a post-apocalyptic war bunker buried under a farmhouse in the middle of Southern Pines. But even as he watched them, laughed under his breath, something in his chest wouldn’t unclench.
He rubbed absently at his temple, the ghost of a headache flickering just behind his eyes. Every now and then, something from the footage would catch the edge of his vision—blurry camcorder flashes of a soldier’s boot crunching into sand, a low corridor with peeling paint, a faint red glint in the corner of a lens—and his pulse would stutter, his lungs drawing in too much air or not enough.
He didn’t say anything. Not about how the images wormed their way into his brain like old recordings playing back too loud, too distorted to make sense of. Not about how the sound of boots scuffing concrete in the footage reminded him of screaming. Not about how he kept waking up with his hands clenched and his back drenched in sweat.
Bucky glanced toward Sam again. He was still arguing with Torres, now physically shielding the phone while Torres attempted an acrobatic reach over his shoulder. The two of them were a blur of swatting hands and exaggerated sighs.
“What about pizza?” Sam offered, deadpan.
“Oh sure, let’s just grease our arteries into oblivion.”
“You said you wanted flavor!”
“I want INTEGRITY in a meal, Cap! C’mmon!”
Bucky exhaled through his nose and looked back at Yelena, who had paused to watch them, her mouth curling at the corner.
“They’re worse than toddlers,” she said.
“Toddlers with access to credit cards,” Bucky added.
Yelena chuckled softly and leaned her head against the wall. The glow from her laptop lit the sharp curve of her cheekbone, the faint shadow beneath her eyes. She looked exhausted but wired, her whole body tense like a bowstring.
“You find anything?” Bucky asked, keeping his voice low.
Yelena let out a long, theatrical groan and tossed a manila folder onto the floor in front of them. “Just a steaming pile of military-grade bullshit,” she muttered. “I’ve been reading these for hours, and all I’ve found is that Delta Force is full of lunatics and Austin is either the dumbest bastard alive or the smartest bastard alive. To be determined.”
Bucky arched a brow as he flipped open the folder. Inside were mission logs, surveillance stills, and notations in Yelena’s cramped handwriting. One page had a thick pink circle drawn around Austin’s name, with little hand-drawn knives stabbing into it from all directions. There were also skulls. And one doodle of what Bucky suspected was a cat with an machine gun.
He smirked. “Subtle.”
“I was feeling creative,” she muttered. “And I ran out of black ink.”
Bucky read through her notes. She’d tracked Austin’s location across multiple ops—places that didn’t quite line up, behaviors that didn’t make sense. There were timestamps that clashed with official reports. Mentions of unrecorded ‘downtime’ after missions. A pattern that almost seemed deliberate.
“This is good work,” Bucky said, genuinely impressed. “Really good.”
Yelena shrugged, fiddling with the cap of a pen. “I was trained by the best.”
He looked at her, something flickering behind his eyes.
She glanced back, catching the look, and gave him a small smile. “Don’t get sentimental on me, Barnes. I still remember the time you threw me into a snowbank for disarming a landmine too slow.”
“I was trying to teach you how to live.”
“You were trying to teach me how to be paranoid.”
“Worked, didn’t it?”
Yelena snorted and leaned back again, her voice quieter now. “Austin knew what he was doing. Maybe not everything. But enough. He was around when the prototype toxins were tested—most of it on animals. Rats, mostly. Some birds. Whatever could be conditioned. His name’s not on the paperwork directly, but it’s in the background. He’s there in the logs, lurking.”
Bucky’s stomach twisted.
“And if he was close to the formula,” she continued, “he might’ve learned how to tweak it. To make it specific.”
“You mean to target me.”
“Yeah.”
There was a beat of silence.
Not the peaceful kind—the kind that came after laughter or just before sleep—but a heavy, low-humming silence that settled over Bucky’s shoulders like the first shadow of dusk when the sun drops behind the mountains too fast and you know, instinctively, that something is wrong even if nothing yet has happened.
The bunker breathed around him. Yelena’s wall of string and ink and paper rustled faintly under the draft from the floor vent. The soft whir of her laptop fan, still open but paused on a blurry frame from a helmet cam, flickered like an old memory trying to resurface. Across the room, Sam and Torres were still bickering in the kind of warm, unhurried cadence that spoke of familiarity and safety—Torres loudly advocating for “double fried Korean wings with that sauce that changed my SOUL,” while Sam countered with something about real food, the kind that didn’t require a napkin budget and a fire extinguisher.
It was normal. It was stupid. It was warm.
And yet—
Something was wrong.
Bucky’s body knew it before his brain did.
The instinct slithered up his spine, cold and slick, like an old wire rethreading itself through bones it hadn’t moved in years. He hadn’t noticed it at first—had chalked it up to exhaustion or residual adrenaline. But now, now that the arguing had dulled into background noise and Yelena had finally stopped muttering at her files, it pressed harder. He felt it in the way his fingers curled around the edge of the rug. In the way his shoulder blades refused to rest against the wall. In the way his eyes kept drifting to the glowing pause symbol on the laptop screen, like it was the only thing in the room that knew what was coming.
‘Don’t leave.’
The voice wasn’t real. Not exactly. But it didn’t need to be.
It lived in his bones, in muscle memory too deep to unlearn. It was the Winter Soldier’s voice—not a voice with a mouth, or a face, but the cold command system carved into his instincts with fire and electrodes. The one that had told him, in the past, when to run. When to kill. When to STAY.
And it was screaming now.
‘Don’t leave this room.’
Because if he did—if he let his guard down for a second, if he turned his back on this space with its photos and red string and glitching footage—he would lose it. All of it. Sam. Yelena. Torres. The safety they had carved out of blood and compromise and too many second chances. The warmth in Sam’s eyes. The calloused steadiness of Yelena’s loyalty. The bright, dumb sunshine that poured off Torres like armor.
They’d vanish.
He would come back to ashes.
The memory would be gone. The proof, erased. The people, taken.
Because that was how it had always worked.
But he swallowed it.
Hard.
Pressed it down beneath his ribs like contraband smuggled past a checkpoint, and forced his shoulders to loosen before anyone noticed how tense they’d become.
He wanted—WANTED, for once—to trust that this was not the world he used to live in. That maybe he didn’t have to obey the ghost in his spine every time it whispered ruin. That maybe Sam was right. That maybe the others were right.
He forced a breath through his nose, grounding himself in the present.
“Hey.”
The voice was Torres, chipper and bright as he bounded across the bunker, beaming like they hadn’t spent the last seventy-two hours buried in black ops horror.
“Okay, team Sad and Sadder,” he said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “I’m calling a food intervention. I need spice, I need grease, I need something that tastes like bad decisions and good sex. Bucky, Yelena, come with. Sam’s being no fun.”
“You tried to order fermented tofu in a taco,” Sam replied without looking up.
“And it was DELICIOUS.”
“You’re an absolute moron,” Yelena said dryly, not bothering to lift her head from her notes.
Torres scoffed. “You people are uncultured.”
He turned back to Bucky, eyes bright, expectant.
“Come on,” he said. “Fresh air. Weird neon lighting. Me flirting poorly with the cashier. It’ll be fun.”
Bucky opened his mouth. Closed it again.
The voice in his head was louder now.
‘Don’t leave.’
And it wasn’t even about the memory anymore, not really. It was something deeper, primal. A bone-deep warning that stepping away meant failure. Meant loss. Meant waking up to an empty house again, like he had after Steve left. Meant silence where Sam’s voice used to be.
But Sam was here.
Now.
And Sam, of all people, was watching him.
Bucky didn’t even have to look to know. He felt the weight of Sam’s attention settle on him like a hand between his shoulder blades. Gentle. Anchoring.
“Buck,” Sam said, quiet, soft—just his name, nothing else, but it was enough to make the breath in Bucky’s chest hitch and crackle like fire catching on old ash.
He turned, slowly, like a man surfacing from deep water.
Sam was already beside him, crouched down so they were eye level. Not looming. Just… there. Solid and real and safe in the way only Sam could be.
“You okay?” Sam asked.
It wasn’t rhetorical. It wasn’t pitying. It was honest. Earnest. Like he’d felt the shift too, even if he didn’t have the language for it.
“I…” Bucky swallowed. “I think something’s about to happen. I feel it. Like I’m right on the edge. Like if I leave, everything’ll fall apart. The memory. The room. You.”
Sam blinked, slow. Then reached out, his hand steady, palm up, a quiet offer.
“You won’t lose me,” he said. “Not for a food run. Not for a bad night. Not for anything. I’m right here. We all are.”
Bucky stared at that hand like it was a lifeline and a guillotine both.
But still—he reached for it.
Sam pulled him up, gently. Let him lean into the movement. Didn’t rush him. Just stood beside him until his breath steadied and his vision cleared and the Winter Soldier instinct began to retreat, slow and suspicious.
Yelena stood with a groan, cracking her back like a tree about to fall. “God, it’s like watching an A24 movie in slow motion down here. Can we GO, or is someone going to burst into song about their tragic past?”
Torres perked up. “I could sing—”
“No,” she and Sam said simultaneously.
Bucky found himself smiling, the smallest, reluctant curve of his mouth. “Fine,” he muttered. “I’ll go.”
Sam bumped their shoulders. “Atta boy.”
“Don’t solve the mystery without me.”
“Wouldn’t dare.”
They headed up the stairs—Yelena muttering about testing out tasers while stealing tacos, Torres narrating like they were in a road trip comedy, Bucky following behind like a man walking a line between two lives. One foot in the dark. One foot in the warmth.
He settled into the back of Yelena’s truck, phone in hand before he’d even buckled.
BUCKY: what do you want
SAM: you. and maybe a biscuit.
Bucky rolled his eyes, but the warmth bloomed in his chest anyway.
Another ping.
SAM: for real tho. get me my damn sweet tea and a boberry biscuit. or i swear i’ll file a complaint.
BUCKY: to who
SAM: god. or yelena. same difference
Bucky laughed under his breath.
And for just a moment, the fear eased. The whisper went quiet. The walls stopped closing in.
Just for a moment.
--------------------
The truck’s suspension groaned as Yelena turned off the main road and onto the rutted gravel stretch that led to her farmhouse, tires crunching beneath them in the dark. The headlights cast long beams through the trees, illuminating branches that arched like skeletal fingers over the drive, but the mood inside the cab was anything but grim.
Bucky was in the backseat, grinning despite himself, his cheek resting against the cool window as he tried—and failed—not to laugh at Torres’ latest recounting of their dinner experience.
“I’m TELLING you,” Torres said, waving an egg roll wrapper like a cigarette, “she WANTED my number. You saw her, right? She kept giving me free sauces.”
Yelena barked a laugh and jerked the wheel slightly. “You confused pity with desire again. That wasn’t seduction, that was customer service with concern.”
Torres turned toward the backseat, eyes wide. “Buck, back me up.”
Bucky smirked. “I think she thought you were lost. Or, like, a really enthusiastic exchange student.”
“Okay, first of all? Rude. Second, she asked if I wanted extra fortune cookies TWICE. That’s basically foreplay.”
“That’s basically a cry for help,” Yelena muttered, the truck bouncing over a pothole.
Bucky laughed, a quiet, raw sound that surprised even him with how easily it came out. He hadn’t laughed like this in days—not the polite kind, not the masking kind. This was real. It sat somewhere warm in his chest. He felt looser than he had in weeks, stomach full from greasy, glorious Chinese food from a tiny place in downtown Southern Pines that had no right being that good. They’d eaten in the truck with the windows rolled down, hot dumplings balanced on their laps, dipping sauces passed back and forth like contraband. For a brief hour, they’d existed in a world untouched by conspiracy, trauma, or blood.
And Bucky had made sure to stop on the way home. One more detour, quiet and purposeful.
He’d walked into the gas station alone, the bell over the door chiming overhead. It had taken only a few minutes to grab what he needed—Sam’s favorite brand of sweet tea, a Bo-Berry biscuit from Bojangles still warm in its wax paper pouch, and a small pile of junk snacks Sam pretended he didn’t eat but always finished by the time Bucky looked away. It wasn’t about the food. Not really.
It was about saying: ‘I remembered. I love you. You matter, even in this.’
And now, as the porch came into view, light spilling golden from the bulb above the door, it felt like maybe, just maybe, things were going to be alright.
“You think Sam’s still glued to the monitor?” Torres asked, crumpling his trash and tossing it into the paper bag between his feet.
“If he’s not halfway through building a red string murder board, I’ll be shocked,” Yelena replied. “He gets that furrow in his brow when he’s about to reorganize crime.”
“He better be alive down there,” Torres added. “If he’s fallen asleep with his eyes open again, I’m calling a priest.”
“I’m telling him you said that,” Bucky murmured.
“You’re just mad because you love that man and he looks better in flannel than you do.”
Yelena cut the engine, and they all climbed out, laughter still curling through the night air like smoke. The screen door creaked behind them as they stepped up onto the porch, voices overlapping, boots thudding on the boards.
And then—quietly, so softly it nearly went unnoticed—something inside Bucky twisted.
It wasn’t immediate. It wasn’t sharp. Just… a shift. A slow, creeping wrongness that filtered through his spine, low and insidious, like the room had gone cold even though the air hadn’t changed.
The porch was still. The trees still whispered. The lights still burned amber-gold.
But something was off.
His body knew it before his mind caught up.
He stopped walking.
The paper bag in his hand crinkled as his grip tightened just slightly.
Yelena, halfway through a joke about egg rolls, cut herself off mid-sentence. She turned back with a narrowed look, already reaching—casually, but not without precision—toward her waistband.
“What is it?” she asked, voice suddenly stripped of humor.
Bucky didn’t answer right away. His eyes scanned the windows, the door, the stillness of the house. He didn’t know what he was looking for.
“I don’t know,” he said finally, and his own voice felt foreign in his mouth. “Just… something’s wrong.”
Torres went still too, instantly alert, his hand ghosting near the pocket where he kept a knife tucked when they were on edge. “Wrong how?”
Bucky shook his head once, slow. “Can’t explain it. Just a feeling.”
They exchanged a glance—one of those silent, practiced looks that soldiers knew how to read. No one questioned him. No one laughed it off.
They moved together, quiet now, stepping into the farmhouse with boots soft on wood. The house smelled like lemon cleaner and something faintly floral, but it felt empty in a way that made Bucky’s gut pull tighter.
The three of them descended into the basement without speaking, footsteps falling in a steady rhythm down the stairs.
And that’s when they saw him.
Sam.
Standing with his back to them, facing the far wall, one of the computer monitors glowing faintly blue in the darkened room. He didn’t turn when the door opened. Didn’t call out a welcome. Just stood there, arms loose at his sides, shoulders drawn tight like rope wound too long.
The air shifted. Again.
Bucky felt the tension crawl up the back of his neck like static.
Yelena, trying to shake it off, tilted her head and said, “Wow. You’re not dead. Torres owes me five bucks.”
No response.
Torres frowned. “Hey, Cap? We brought offerings. Fried rice that’ll definitely keep ya regular.”
Still nothing.
And Bucky was already moving.
He crossed the room with the bag still in his hand, forcing his voice into something light. “Okay, fine. Ignore the people who love you. Very mature. I brought your precious Bo-Berry biscuit and the damn tea, Wilson. I swear to God if you say it’s the wrong temperature again—”
He stopped.
Right beside him now.
His voice trailed off.
The screen was dark at the edges but illuminated in the center—grainy night vision footage, green and grey tones flickering across a landscape that looked dry, flat, endless. There was a timestamp in the upper right corner, white block digits counting through the hour. And beneath it, stamped in faint gray: A. LIVELY – HCAM3
Helmet cam footage.
Austin’s.
Bucky narrowed his eyes.
The footage showed sand. Lots of it. A desert at night, lit only by the faint glow of the moon and the green-tinted haze of night vision. A horizon line of low dunes. Figures moving. Boots crunching. Muffled voices—distorted, garbled by wind and static.
And Bucky’s blood went cold.
He didn’t know why yet. He didn’t understand what he was seeing.
But something inside him did.
Some ancient, buried instinct.
Something about this was wrong.
Something about this was FAMILIAR-
Not in the way déjà vu crept in gently—soft and strange and forgettable—but in the way an old scar itched before a storm, the way the body remembered things the brain had worked so hard to bury. It wasn’t logical. It wasn’t clear. But Bucky felt it in the marrow of him, in the way the hairs on his arms stood up, in the way the metal plates of his left hand curled slightly like they were bracing for recoil.
He stepped closer.
Slowly. Like if he moved too fast, the whole room would break apart.
The footage on the screen was still shaky, Austin’s HUD lurching with every step as he and his team navigated through the desert terrain under a dead black sky. The camera occasionally glanced down at boots—thick-soled and dusted with sand—and then back up, scanning the horizon. The voices of the men came in clipped bursts over the mic: half-jokes, mission chatter, the occasional curse.
Torres crept closer behind Bucky, quiet now, his usual banter replaced with a heavy silence. Yelena followed suit, arms crossed, eyes narrowed—not in suspicion, but in grim understanding. She watched Bucky’s posture more than the screen, and she tried again, softly this time.
“Well. This is warm and fuzzy,” she said, tone drier than the desert in the footage. “Did we miss the invitation to trauma hour?”
Still, Sam didn’t speak.
He didn’t even blink.
His hands were braced on the edge of the table, knuckles white, his jaw tight. His whole body was rigid, like he was holding something down by sheer force of will.
Bucky didn’t look away from the screen.
The footage panned upward slowly, the camera swaying as Austin tilted his head to glance up toward the sky. And then—there they were.
Two figures cutting through the air like blades. Dark silhouettes framed by starlight, wings stretched wide and glinting silver where the HUD caught the moonlight. They moved with impossible speed, banking sharply over the dunes, kicking up trails of sand behind them as they flew in perfect formation.
Bucky’s breath caught.
One of them twisted in mid-air—too fast, too FAMILIAR—twirling into a slow roll like it was muscle memory, like it was dancing. The other followed a half-second later, adjusting in perfect sync. Not just training. Instinct. Like they were halves of the same weapon.
Sam.
And Riley.
“Oh God,” Bucky whispered.
His legs felt unsteady, and his stomach pitched, a slow wave of nausea blooming behind his ribs. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the screen, even as the tension in his gut curled into something uglier—panic, rising slow and choking.
On the audio feed, Austin’s voice cut in—young, laughing, casual.
“Yo, that’s some Iron Man shit,” he said to someone off-screen. “You think they’d let us ride on ‘em? Like, just hop on and do a loop?”
Another voice chuckled. “In your dreams, bro. They’d break your neck mid-air just to make a point.”
“Still worth it.”
Their laughter crackled through the mic, stupid and oblivious, like none of them realized what they were recording. But even then, something under their tone buzzed wrong. There was a crackle in the wind, a hum of building static.
Then another voice cut in, different from the others. Older. Sharper.
“Alright, enough screwing around. After the flyboys clear that ridge, we move in. Hit the compound while they’re drawing the heat.”
Bucky blinked.
The compound?
His mind lurched.
‘What compound?’
But the footage didn’t give time for clarity. Because someone—just off-screen—shouted, sharp and panicked:
“INCOMING!”
And everything exploded.
The HUD jolted violently, the screen erupting with static and sand and the high-pitched whine of mic feedback. Austin dropped, the camera angle lurching as his body slammed into the dirt. A moment later, the image righted—just in time for his helmet to catch the flash of something slicing through the air.
A rocket.
From above.
It hit Riley directly in the chest.
The impact was catastrophic.
There was no sound for a second. Just the visual—wings torn open, body spiraling like a broken kite, flames licking at the metal frame, Riley’s limbs jerking violently as he dropped from the sky like a comet. His suit ignited in midair, fragments shearing off into the dark as his body crumpled.
The HUD turned frantically, trying to track him as the men on the ground screamed.
And through the chaos, Bucky heard it.
A sound he hadn’t realized he knew until now.
A scream—raw and broken and SAM’S-
He knew it instantly. Not just the voice. The GRIEF in it. The way it split the desert quiet wide open, like someone had torn the world in half.
Bucky stumbled.
His vision blurred.
It was like being pulled under, like the room around him had vanished, and all that remained was the sound of Sam’s scream echoing into the sand, and the roaring in his own ears, and the unbearable pressure in his skull.
He staggered, one hand shooting out blindly, the other pressed hard to the side of his head like he could keep it from splitting open.
“Bucky!” Torres shouted, catching him just before he dropped.
The sweet tea and Bo-Berry biscuit fell from his hand and hit the floor, forgotten.
Bucky gasped, shaking, eyes wild, still locked on the screen. “That was—”
“I know,” Torres whispered, holding him upright.
Yelena stepped forward, trying to cut the monitor. “We’ve seen enough. Sam, shut it down—”
But before she could touch the keyboard, Sam’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist.
He still didn’t look at her. Didn’t even blink.
But his grip was steel.
She went still.
The footage kept playing.
Austin’s HUD was now covered in dust and grit, but still operational. The camera tilted as he stood, his voice panicked and ragged, shouting commands.
“Get to cover! Jesus Christ—who the FUCK fired that?!”
A second later, his HUD zoomed in—just enough.
A figure stood on a cliff above the chaos, silhouetted in moonlight. Broad. Tall. Arm gleaming silver.
The footage sharpened. The figure lifted a weapon—shouldered it with perfect form.
The metal arm was unmistakable.
Bucky couldn’t breathe.
Austin screamed into the mic: “THAT THING’S BACK—TAKE IT OUT!”
Another soldier near him fired—there was a thud, then a streak of fire.
The cliff erupted.
Flames and debris rained down in sheets.
Bucky dropped to his knees.
He clutched at his head with both hands now, as if he could hold the past back by force, as if he could shove the memory down far enough it would stop tearing through his mind like shrapnel.
But it was too late.
Because now—now he remembered.
The scream.
The recoil of the bazooka.
The wings in the sky.
Sam, twirling like a star.
Riley, falling like one.
And himself.
On the cliff.
Weapon drawn.
Face blank.
Mind cold.
Watching.
‘Target acquired.’
“No,” Bucky rasped, rocking slightly. “No, no—”
His body remembered the fire. The heat of it. The way it devoured his skin. The metal of his arm fusing, melting, the scream caught in his own throat as the flames swallowed him.
“Bucky—hey, hey, look at me,” Torres said, kneeling beside him, voice trembling with worry.
But Bucky wasn’t in the room anymore.
He was in the desert, watching Riley fall and Sam scream and the world explode around him.
Under all of it, under the confusion and horror and guilt, was the terrible realization:
He was the one who did it.
Sam didn’t say a word.
He just kept rewinding the footage—jerkily, violently, like he didn’t care if he snapped the keyboard in half. The monitor flickered again and again with the same grainy image: a figure on the cliff, arm glinting silver beneath the moon, bazooka hoisted on his shoulder with chilling, mechanical precision.
Fire.
Explosion.
Riley falling from the sky in pieces.
Sam’s scream ripping the desert apart.
And then again.
And again.
And again.
Bucky collapsed fully against Torres, his body going limp like something inside him had been cut loose, unspooled beyond repair. His eyes were still open, but unfocused, mouth parted like he was trying to scream and had forgotten how to breathe.
“Shit, shit—” Torres muttered, gripping Bucky tighter as his legs gave out completely.
Yelena was already moving. She dropped to her knees beside them and tapped Bucky’s cheek, hard enough to sting. “Hey—HEY! You stay with me, Barnes. Do you hear me?”
No response.
His gaze remained fixed on Sam—only Sam.
Sam, who hadn’t turned around.
Sam, who was still hunched over the desk, playing the moment back like his soul depended on seeing it one more time. Or maybe hoping—praying—that if he watched it enough, it would change. That he’d blink and it would be someone else on that cliff. Someone else behind that weapon.
Yelena snapped her head toward him. “Turn it OFF, Sam!”
No answer.
“SAM!”
Her voice cracked across the bunker like a gunshot, sharp and raw and furious.
Sam’s hand froze on the keyboard.
The room went quiet—except for Bucky’s shallow, rattling breaths.
And then, finally, FINALLY, Sam pressed the key.
The screen went black.
He didn’t move for a second.
Then, slowly, he turned.
His eyes found Bucky’s.
And everything stopped.
The world didn’t fall away—it imploded. Sound disappeared. The walls closed in. The air left Bucky’s lungs in one long, shattered exhale.
Because Sam was crying.
Not loud. Not messy. Silent tears ran down his cheeks like rain carving through glass. His face was pale, drawn, and completely, utterly empty of the light Bucky had come to cling to like a lifeline. The warmth that always sat behind his eyes—the steady, golden heat of Sam Wilson, the man who never flinched, who always saw him and not the monster—was gone.
What remained was horror.
And heartbreak.
And Bucky’s shattered mind twisted it, warped it, turned it into something worse.
HATE.
It was hate.
It had to be.
He had killed Riley.
He had tried to kill Sam.
Sam was looking at him now like he was something unspeakable, like the truth had finally cracked through all the years of denial and revealed the rot underneath.
“No,” Bucky rasped, voice small, cracking. “No—Sam—”
He surged up, tearing himself from Torres’ grip with strength that startled them both. Yelena tried to catch his arm, but he recoiled like he’d been burned.
“I didn’t—I didn’t remember—” Bucky stammered, backing away, his breath hitching in his chest, hands trembling violently. “I swear to God, I didn’t KNOW—”
“Bucky—stop,” Yelena said, reaching out slowly, like approaching a wounded animal. Her voice was softer now, urgent. “Don’t spiral. Please. We don’t know what happened. We can figure this out. Just—stay here. Stay with us.”
Torres hovered beside her, eyes wide, face tight with panic. “Come on, man, you’re okay—you’re here. Whatever this is, it’s not now. You’re not—he’s not YOU.”
But Bucky was already shaking his head, stumbling backward as the room warped around him.
Because Sam hadn’t moved.
Hadn’t spoken.
He was just staring at him, like everything Bucky had feared was true.
“Don’t—” Bucky gasped, backing up toward the stairs. “Don’t look at me like that.”
Sam opened his mouth—finally—but the only thing that came out was a choked breath. His lips moved, trying to form words, but his voice caught in his throat.
The sound of it—just that sound—broke something in Bucky so deeply it felt like his heart had been torn in half with bare hands.
“No,” he whispered, not waiting to hear it. “No—don’t. Please don’t.”
And then he ran.
He shoved past the table, past the files, past the echoing silence of his friends calling after him, and took the stairs two at a time, half-tripping on the last step and slamming into the wall before flinging himself through the screen door and out into the night.
The storm had broken wide open.
Rain lashed against him in sheets, thick and cold and merciless. The wind howled through the trees like ghosts screaming for blood. Lightning flashed across the sky in jagged streaks, turning the yard into a stuttering nightmare of light and shadow.
Bucky didn’t stop.
He ran.
Boots sinking into mud, clothes soaked instantly through, hair flattened against his scalp as water poured from the sky in torrents. Thunder cracked so loud it rattled his bones, but he didn’t hear it. He didn’t feel the cold.
All he could see was Sam’s face.
The grief.
The silence.
The way he didn’t fight for him.
Yelena’s voice called his name—sharper, hoarser than he’d ever heard her—but it sounded like it was coming from underwater. Torres shouted too, slipping in the mud behind him, but Bucky didn’t turn back.
He didn’t deserve to.
He was already halfway across the field, sprinting toward the tree line at the edge of Yelena’s property, when the next lightning bolt split the sky.
And in that brief flash of white light, he saw it again.
Riley spiraling from the sky.
The fire.
Sam’s scream, raw and feral and filled with something Bucky had never heard before—pure loss.
And above it all, glowing red eyes staring back at him.
“No—” Bucky choked, stumbling but still running, his lungs heaving, tears mixing with rain, snot and sweat and storm all clinging to him like chains.
He didn’t know where he was going.
He just needed to be GONE.
From the bunker.
From the truth.
From the look in Sam’s eyes.
‘God, what have I done.’