Chapter 3
“You look exhausted.”
“Huh?” Steve forced open eyes he hadn’t realized had fallen shut to see Sam looking at him from the controls of the quinjet. Steve straightened in his seat, feeling the telltale bulk of another videotape in the pocket of his suit shifting as he went. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
Steve’s relentless poring over the Winter Soldier file had yielded the coordinates of another base, this one hidden deep in the far reaches of Siberia. Steve had risked frostbite to find it, already knowing what would await him when he did; a burned-out shell of a structure littered with bodies clad in HYDRA uniforms. An intact package tucked just out of sight containing another suspiciously preserved videotape.
Asset: Field Damage Documentation, File 55 of 128 (1981)
Sam shook his head, returning his eyes to the controls of the jet. “You know you’ve gotta take care of yourself, too,” he said. “You’re not doing anyone any favors running yourself into the ground.”
“I can’t —” Steve paused to get the intensity of his tone in check. “I can’t just stop, Sam,” he finished softly. “Bucky’s out there. And we keep coming so close, I just — I gotta find him.”
Steve blamed his exhaustion for letting the next part slip out. “I’ve just got to tell him that I’m sorry.”
He winced, half-expecting the familiar well-meaning lecture about perseverating and misplaced guilt, but Sam just looked at him, a sad recognition in his eyes, and Steve remembered — “it’s like I was up there just to watch him fall.”
“I get it,” Sam sighed. “I do. But Bucky’s been through a lot.”
Understatement of the century, Steve thought bitterly.
“And he’s got a lot to work through. It kind of feels like we’re not going to find him until he wants to be found.”
Steve bit his lip, fighting to keep tears from springing up in his eyes. He was so tired that all his emotions felt amplified, hovering just under the surface and waiting to overwhelm him when he least expected them to. “I know,” he managed. “But I’m not gonna stop. I’m not gonna give up on him again.”
Sam frowned, that sad look in his eyes only growing. But he pushed on, piloting the jet back to its landing field just outside of DC.
Whenever Steve closed his eyes, he saw Bucky’s face.
That, at least, wasn’t just a product of his exhaustion, although exhaustion was definitely amplifying the intensity of the experience. He’d been seeing Bucky’s face behind his eyelids intermittently since even before Bucky fell.
It used to be flashes of them growing up together — Bucky’s gap-toothed smile when they were eight and he’d lost most of his baby teeth before Steve had, the excited bounce in his step as he dragged Steve down the boardwalk of Coney Island with newly long twelve-year-old legs, the way he’d squared his shoulders at sixteen like the man he hadn’t quite grown up to be yet and vowed to step up and take care of his family — a family which, in his eyes, had always included Steve.
Steve had always been looking at him, studying all the little details that made him who he was, even before he’d known what all that fascination had meant.
(Of course, even when he’d figured it out, he’d never said anything about it. He’d always thought they’d have more time together than what the world had given them.)
Back before the Winter Soldier’s mask had fallen away for the first time, Steve had half-resented those barrages of images he got of Bucky sometimes. They ached, made Steve long for all the things he couldn’t have because he’d always been too scared, too slow, too late. Now, Steve would give just about anything to replay those memories, if only to replace the new images of Bucky that had been burned into his brain.
Now, Steve closed his eyes and saw Bucky strapped flat on his back to a table, foaming at the mouth. Saw him in that chair with his head held back, gurgling as he gasped for air. Saw the burns on the bottoms of his feet. He saw Bucky over and over again, dead-eyed and staring him down through the haze of chemical smoke, metal fist raised to complete his mission in that one fraction of a moment when Steve hadn’t been convinced he was going to stop.
As Steve eyed the new videotape in his hands, he very nearly reconsidered and set it aside. The thought of overwriting any more of those old memories with torture made him almost breathless with anxiety over the thought that maybe this was the only part of Bucky he’d have left.
But Bucky had left that tape there, obviously knowing by now that Steve would find it. Steve felt he had no right to deny him anything, even a request as grave as this. Grimly, he settled in and forced himself to watch.
1981
The mission had been going well, all the way up until some rookie agent had blown their cover wide open. It wasn’t even the Soldier’s fault things had gone FUBAR, but that hadn’t mattered; he’d certainly been the one to pay the price. Once upon a time that might have surprised him, angered him, but now the clearest thought he could muster, his mind hazy with stimulants and adrenaline, was that it was only right for him to be hurting. He was the fist of HYDRA; when HYDRA won, he survived until his next mission, but when HYDRA lost, he hurt for it. He and HYDRA were one and the same — the physical link between them only made sense.
The Soldier snarled, gritting his teeth against the pain as he dragged his way through the dark, snow-laden forest. He could see the outline of the safe house he was meant to report to in the distance, but it swam in his vision, impossibly far away. It didn’t help that he was stuck crawling there through the surrounding cover of trees on all fours, his right leg being dragged along, an aching, pulsing deadweight behind him.
The Soldier sucked in a deep breath that tasted like blood and hazarded a glance over his shoulder. The midnight sky was oppressively dark, but his enhanced eyesight was still able to pick up the shape of his right leg, a dark mass standing out against the snow. His tactical pants were torn all along the thigh, the edges of that tear drenched with so much blood that it left a trail behind him when he moved. Somewhere in the recesses of that tear, something in his leg was out of place; he’d heard the snap when he was forced to leap from a rooftop to dodge a barrage of bullets and hadn’t had time to calculate for the landing. He could see it now, his leg bending outward at the middle of his thigh when the only bend should have been at his crumpled knee.
The sight of that unnatural crook in his leg made him nauseous. The Soldier forced his eyes away from it, forced his gloved hands to grab fistfuls of the snow before him and keep dragging himself forward. His fingers burned with cold, the sensation radiating all the way up through the joints of his wrists and making every movement ache. But the pain of freezing was a familiar one. It almost didn’t register compared to the blind, nauseating, white-hot throb of his shattered thigh.
Get through this, he begged himself with a voice that didn’t sound much like his own. Don’t look at it. Don’t think. Just get through this.
The Soldier made it six more hard-fought feet across the frozen ground before encountering a tree branch hidden in the snow. His limp right leg dragged across it before he realized what it was, and the small amount of control the Soldier had over himself shattered. His vision whited out, blood roaring in his ears. Every nerve in his body lit up with a shudder of pain that seemed to radiate out from his broken leg. He had just enough awareness to shove his face into the crook of his arm before screaming. His teeth ground into the leather of his sleeve as his muffled howl absorbed into the bend of his elbow.
The trail of blood he was leaving behind was bad enough. The last thing he needed was to alert any lingering enemies to his position with something so amateur as a cry of pain.
When he was finally sure he was no longer in danger of screaming if he moved, the Soldier let his arm flop away from his face and let himself collapse on his side in the snow. His forehead was clammy with sweat despite the freezing temperature around him. Every shallow, panting breath he managed to pull in amplified the feeling of blood gurgling at the back of his throat — whether from the exertion, the cold, or some other internal injury, the Soldier was too exhausted to assess.
This wasn’t working. He was never going to make it. He needed a new plan.
He was going to have to treat his injury here, in the field.
The Soldier clenched and unclenched his frozen fingers, steeling himself for the inevitable. He breathed in harshly once, feeling the cold air sting his lungs on its way down, and reached a shaking hand down to further tear away the fabric of his pant leg.
The Soldier had to grind his teeth to keep from screaming again as his fingers skimmed the area around his wound. He caged the sounds in the back of his throat, but hints of them escaped anyway, pathetic half-whimpers that the Soldier might have felt shame for — if he’d been able to feel anything at all besides the awful feedback loop of pain and nausea reverberating between his stomach and the mess of his leg.
With the fabric of his pants finally torn away, the Soldier dropped his sweaty forehead back to rest against the snow, breathing through a wave of dizziness. His head spun, kicking the nausea already churning in his stomach into a higher gear. Distantly, the Soldier thought he might like to submit to the vertigo, pass out right there in the snow. He’d keep bleeding, he’d bleed until he was as cold as the snow itself, chasing that moment of impossible warmth that always just preceded freezing —
No. He had his orders to report to the safe house.
He was not to fight back. He had no right to disobey.
Right. The Soldier steeled himself, raised his head, and finally looked at his injured leg in detail for the first time.
The Soldier had a strong stomach. He’d seen plenty of blood and gore in his line of work. He’d counted on that training helping him now, but there was something very different about seeing a mess like that attached to the well-oiled machine of his own body.
The Soldier’s thigh was shiny with blood from a wound torn open halfway down it, the spot coinciding with that strange bend in his femur that shouldn’t have been there, and when the Soldier looked into the wound he could see bits of sinewy muscle curling around the thing that had punctured his skin — white and jagged-edged and — the bone —
The Soldier’s stomach clenched with a cramp so intense it felt like a knife to the gut, and he gagged, barely turning his face away from the injury in time to vomit up a stream of tasteless nutritional formula into the snow beside his head. He coughed as bile burned his throat, trying to keep the motions contained to his upper body to avoid further jarring the — awful broken wrong — mess of his leg.
Finished, the Soldier panted into the snow, keeping his eyes open and fixed in the middle distance in front of him to avoid seeing flashes of the wound again when he closed his eyes. It was bad, worse than he’d initially thought when the drugs and adrenaline had still been taking the edge off the pain. He knew at this point that delaying field treatment was just prolonging the inevitable. It still took every ounce of strength he had left to force himself back into motion, to complete his mission so he could report to the safe house the way he’d been ordered to.
The world pitched and rolled around him as he thrust a hand out again, searching through the snow for more tree branches like the one he’d just caught his leg on. He managed to dust off a pair of them, sturdy but still small enough to work with.
Writhing around to gather those supplies left him almost blind with pain. Still, he knew that had only been the easy part.
Shoving a fist into his mouth to muffle the inevitable scream, the Soldier tensed his muscles and slowly, carefully, bent his broken leg up to his chest.
The motion sent electric bolts of pain through the halves of his femur, and the Soldier sobbed helplessly around his hand. His teeth pierced through his glove into soft flesh, only adding to the taste of blood in his mouth. He gagged again, stomach aching as he brought up a pitiful amount of bile and forcibly spat his fist out of his mouth.
The smell of blood was stronger now, and the Soldier was starting to lose himself in it. He reached for his ripped pant leg to tear off a strip of fabric, and when his fingers prodded a little too close to his wound he felt the world careening away from him until suddenly he was looking at it from the wrong end of a long, dark tunnel.
Numb hands fumbled with sticks and fabric strips, clumsy and uncoordinated as they tried to fashion a splint the way the Soldier had been taught. Even the Soldier’s metal arm wasn’t performing the way it should have been, but the Soldier was too far away to notice. He was staring at the night sky above him, so lightheaded and disoriented that it was starting to feel like its own kind of clarity.
The snow was deathly cold below him, and he could feel the emptiness of the forest around him, air still and silent as though just to remind him how alone he was. And in his mind he was lying at the bottom of a ravine while a train roared by in the distance, incapacitated and in pain with the smell of warm blood heavy in his nostrils.
That image felt far more real than the world in front of his eyes, and the dissonance made consciousness that much harder to cling to. The Soldier’s hands fell limp to his sides, abandoning his makeshift splint as his body grew too heavy to control. In the moments before he blacked out, he swore he could hear a voice calling to him from above, telling him to just hang on.
Grab my hand.
Bucky —
2014
Steve was watching a HYDRA mission commander, dressed in a long coat to combat the Russian winter, pace back and forth in distress in what looked like a bunker, or maybe an especially bleak safe house. The walls were bare concrete, exposed pipes running their way up and along the ceiling. A couple of bare metal benches were bolted to the floor in place of furniture.
A surveillance camera had been hurriedly switched on a few minutes prior. Steve’s translator app informed him that it was to document probable field damage. That the Soldier is late to the rendezvous point and likely compromised.
Mission failure.
A search party had been sent out to recover the Soldier — Bucky — shortly after, and Steve felt as nervous as the commander on screen looked as he waited to find out what had happened.
A sound like a door opening echoed in from outside the frame, and the anxious commander stopped his pacing, head snapping toward the sound.
“сэр, мы нашли его.” Sir, we found him.
There was a grunt of effort, and a pair of Russian soldiers marched into frame, carrying a rickety stretcher between them. On the stretcher was a crumpled body clad in black tactical gear. Long brown hair, run through with snow, fell over its face.
Steve swallowed against a rising tide of emotion. What he could see of Bucky’s skin was mottled with patches of blue. Ice was frozen in his hair and the crevices of his uniform. The stretcher beneath his head was a faded army green, but below his legs it had gone red with blood.
The soldiers bent to place the stretcher on the ground, allowing the commander to sweep in and take a look. He bent over to analyze Bucky with a cold, appraising eye.
“Didn’t even have to go far,” one of the soldiers was explaining. “Found him passed out just beyond the treeline. Left quite the trail of blood behind him. Was like he wanted to be followed.”
“His leg’s fucked up something bad,” the other soldier supplied. “Even tried to take care of it himself.”
That last bit of information was relayed with an air of laughter, and the soldier nudged Bucky’s body with his foot so that he uncurled a little, making his leg more visible. The air left Steve’s lungs in a rush when he noticed just how bloody and misshapen Bucky’s right leg was. A few equally bloody sticks and strips of fabric laid beside him on the stretcher, and Steve quickly put two and two together.
“Oh, Buck,” Steve murmured. How desperate and hurt Bucky must have been to try something so futile.
The commander didn’t seem quite so amused as his subordinate as he surveyed the damage. “We weren’t followed. You’re sure?”
The men confirmed that they were sure they’d evaded detection, but the commander was still frowning. He extended a gloved hand to shift Bucky so that he was fully uncurled, lying on his back. Hair fell away from Bucky’s eyes, and Steve could see that he was unconscious, his face vacant, his lips slack and shot through with deep purple from the cold. Still, even unconscious, Bucky was shivering.
“Damned scientific team won’t like this,” the commander muttered, almost to himself. “Can’t return him in this condition… You.” He addressed one of his men. “You trained as a medic, no?”
“...yes, sir?”
“Come on, then. Let’s fix some of this damage. Don’t want another lecture from the research team about returning him in ‘suboptimal condition’ again.”
At the commander’s orders, the men hefted Bucky’s stretcher from the floor and deposited it on one of the metal benches lining the bunker instead. Jostled by the movement, Bucky started to stir. His spine arched weakly where he lay flat on his back, flesh arm grasping for something invisible at his side before stilling again. His metal arm was frozen in place, locked over his chest.
“Три… два, пять…”
Bucky was mumbling something incoherent, so soft that Steve’s translator was having trouble picking it up. Steve’s heart broke to realize Bucky was completely delirious, eyes half-shut and bleary as he glanced around the room for something only he seemed able to see.
“Target… target identified, will… will comply with… mission parameters… no, no, I need… assist-assistance required…” It was all one stream of slurred Russian, Bucky’s brow furrowing as he registered his own confusion.
“What are you mumbling about?”
The commander was back on screen, his impromptu medic in tow with a first aid kit and a bundle of towels under his arm. Bucky frowned, blinking up at him like he’d expected to find himself somewhere else.
“...холодно.”
Steve checked the translator for clarification and wanted to cry. Cold.
The young soldier assisting with the first aid kit scoffed. “Science division ought to take a break from all the shock treatment. Maybe then he’d start making some sense.”
“Shut up,” the commander said. “And come here. You know how fast he heals. We need to set this fracture while we still can.”
The HYDRA soldier’s face paled. So did Steve’s, watching from thirty years away.
The shivers wracking Bucky’s body grew worse as the men crowded towards him, leaned over him. Steve didn’t know where to look, the gory mess of Bucky’s leg or his purple lips or the fear in his heavy-lidded eyes. He felt nausea crawling up inside of him, and he was starting to think he shouldn’t be looking at any of it. It didn’t matter whether Bucky had left this tape for him or not; it was wrong to see anyone so vulnerable. Steve shouldn’t be watching.
He didn’t want to be watching anymore.
Before he had time to make that choice, the video feed jumped to a far more zoomed-in view. It looked like it had been cropped in post to give the best view possible of Bucky’s leg, maybe to catalog the damage. Steve squinted at the shattered mess now splayed out in front of him in vivid technicolor and caught a glimpse of white bone sticking out through the open wound. Bile jumped in his throat.
Hands were on Bucky’s thigh now, one man on either side of the bloodsoaked gash. Bucky made a tiny, hurt sound in the back of his throat when their grip clamped firmly over his skin.
“Готовы?” the commander asked, and his assistant nodded nervously. Two opposing sets of arms flexed. There was a sickening wet sound.
Bucky howled.
Steve hadn’t thought he had the strength for such a noise, but it kept coming, like it was being drawn out of his lungs by a power beyond his control. His arms, still weak and uncoordinated from hypothermia, twitched to life and tried to shove the men off until the third soldier had to step in and pin them, bracing his arms over Bucky’s chest.
That howl echoed around Steve’s living room walls as bones shifted and ground together, as blood bubbled up and started running faster from the gash, no anaesthetic or pain medication in sight. The video spared no details of the haphazard treatment, and Steve found himself swallowing convulsively, sweat prickling at his upper lip as the gruesome images confronted him head-on. For one horrible moment Steve swore he could see the entire inside of Bucky’s leg, and the next thing he knew he was in the other room braced against his kitchen counter and heaving up his dinner into the sink.
Judging by the miserable sounds Bucky was still making, Steve supposed he should be glad he was missing the rest of the tape.
When Steve managed to pry himself away from the sink and wander back into his living room, his television was frozen on what must have been the final frame of the video; Bucky on the stretcher being carried in the direction of the door, his leg shoddily bandaged, his face deathly pale and slack with unconsciousness once again. Steve hurried to turn the television off. Somehow, being confronted by his own reflection on the dark screen didn’t seem so bad anymore – not when compared with the alternative.
Staring at his own gaunt reflection, Steve wondered when this would stop. It seemed there was always another HYDRA base to find eviscerated, another tape left for him like an offering in the aftermath, and Steve wasn’t sure how much more of it he could take.
It felt like betrayal of the worst kind; after seventy years apart, the person he cared about most in the world was trying to communicate with him, and Steve viscerally didn’t want to listen.
Guilt and grief rose up in him like a flood, and Steve stumbled back to the kitchen to hang his head over the sink a little bit longer. He wished it was as easy to purge himself of those emotions, but they lingered with him long after he finished. He closed his eyes, wishing for a moment he could access one of those old and comfortable memories of him and Bucky before the war, but his head was too heavy to come up with anything so comforting. The darkness on the backs of his eyelids was good enough.