When you work for a government agency as secretive as SHIELD is the whole 'secret identity' thing is taken way more seriously than in the movies. Working with the Avengers is much different than running ops with the Howlies had been.
They're suppose to work as a team but Steve doesn't even know half of the team's names.
Hell, Steve doesn't know half of the teams faces. Besides Tony Stark, who publicly admitted to being Ironman, the majority of the team wears some type of masks or works remotely through the new technologies of the 21st century.
Steve himself wears a cowl that covers the top half of his face. Captain America could be any muscular white man in a star-spangled suit, no one needs to know that he is the same Captain America who fought and died in World War II.
Which is why Steve is so surprised to see unmasked faces when he's called into SHIELD's director's office on a random Tuesday.
Director Fury has gathered all of the Avengers, behind him in what Steve thinks are called holographic displays, are the faces around the room and the call sign they're connected to. Fury is outing the identities of all of the Avengers to one another, but Steve can't figure out why.
On the far right is Tony Stark, aka Ironman, to no ones surprise. There's a list of his doctorates and strengths in battle under his name, age, and nationality.
Then is Clinton F. Barton, which is apparently Hawkeye's real name. There's a mugshot style picture of the man without his mask.
Dr. Robert "Bruce" Banner is next. He also has a list of doctorate and PhD's attached to his file. His picture flickers between the man in the room and the green giant known as Hulk.
Thor isn't present in the room, but his file is still displayed.
Natasha Romanov, the Black Widow, is the next holographic display. Her file has Defect : Russia in bold, underlined letters under her name and surprisingly young age. Her picture looks nothing like the woman Steve usually works with, not least of all because of her bright red hair.
Steve is next. His picture also includes a pre-serum photograph from the army.
Then, there is Samuel T. Wilson, aka Falcon. The file includes a picture of his wing pack and a list of achievements durning his time in the military.
Finally, Nicholas J. Fury's extremely redacted file is the last one in the row of holographs.
Falcon - Wilson - is the first one in the room to speak up. He asks what, exactly, this is about.
Fury doesn't answer except to change the holographs to a collection of blacked out files. He says that SHIELD has been compromised, that the only people he's sure of are in this room, and then he pushed a button that clears the black ink off of the words in the file.
"At o'eight hundred this morning, there was a terrorist attack launched against the UN council members during a meeting in Vienna. Four bombs killed eight security guards, three secretaries, three civilians, two Vice Presidents and a King." Barely an hour ago, Steve tries to think about what he was doing an hour ago.
The files that light up the wall behind Fury all read 'Hydra' which is a kick in the gut that Steve hadn't expected of the 21st century. He'd died trying to wipe Hydra out and here they are, nearly eighty years later.
"This man," Fury waits for the pictures to change to that of a man, covered completely in black clothing, only his eyes visible to the camera. "Is suspected to be the Hydra operative that set and detonated the bombs. We also suspect him to be this man," another photo comes up beside that of the bomber. The man's eyes are still all that's visible, a black mask obscuring the bottom half of his face, his left arm is either covered in metal or made entirely of it. Facial recognition puts the two photos at at 93% match. "Codename Winter Soldier is credited with over ten dozen assassinations in the last fifty years."
"That's impossible," Says the Black Widow, who is apparently not a slim blonde woman with a wide nose and thin lips. Instead, she sits two seats down from Steve, blonde wig on the table, revealing bright red hair that falls just past her shoulders in slight waves. Her nose is small and turns up at the tip and her cheeks hold a scattering of light freckles. "The Soldier isn't real, he's just the ghost story told to little girls in the Red Room to make us behave."
Steve doesn't know what the 'Red Room' refers to but Fury must because he seems unsurprised. In fact, Steve thinks that this whole thing might have been a ruse to get Romanov talking. He thinks back to the 'Defect : Russia' in the Widow's file.
Fury pushes a button and yet another picture is added to the rest. This one is only an 88% match in the facial recognition software. It's a man with the same blue eyes, his hair is cropped so short he's almost bald. The long beard makes nearly as good of a mask as the ones in the previous pictures. In this one, however, the man is holding a small, red headed girl in the silver arm. His other hand is against her head, covering one ear and pressing a freckled cheek to his chest.
It's a young Natasha Romanov.
Black Widow always seemed to know Director Fury the best, which is why it's not all together surprising when she snaps, "What do you want, Nick?"
"I want to know where the Winter Soldier is. Where he was an hour ago, and-"
"He didn't do that, Nick." Comes from Hawkeye and not Natasha.
Fury blinks his one eye, "You've met him," is not a question.
Hawkeye and the Widow make eye contact. Steve and the rest of the room watch them have a conversation solely through their eyes.
"If he didn't do it, then someone really wants us to think that he did." Steve interrupts eventually.
"Why?" Stark asks, Steve can't tell if he's speculating or genuinely giving the Soldier the benefit if the doubt.
"If they know he's alive," Natasha says reluctantly, "They'll want him back. They're trying to flush him out."
"How would they know?" Barton asks, attention fully on the Widow.
"They wouldn't, unless he's let them know. Which likely means there's another,"
Barton looks stricken, "Still? Tash, it's been years. Hydra, the Red Room, that shits suppose to be over."
"Another what, Romanov?" Fury asks.
"Another me,"
Natasha hadn't seen this house since she was fourteen.
She was beyond reluctant to be dragging the team along to what amounted to her family's safe house. It had taken awhile to even contact the Soldier and then to convince him that the Avengers were trust worthy. It was only slightly easier to convince the Avengers to meet with the Soldier in his own territory, to hear him out, to not shoot first.
In the end, it's Clint piloting the jet with Natasha, Steve and Sam on board. Fury was happy to monitor from the safety of his office, Bruce was a 'Hulk risk' and Tony was too unpredictable.
Steve and Sam are surprised to see a young, blonde girl on the front porch of the cabin-style house, watering the plants along the grass. She tenses as the group appears in her line of sight. The girl has to be in her very early teens but she doesn't hesitate to level a gun at Steve's center mass, obviously seeing him as the biggest threat. She doesn't move, doesn't so much as twitch until Natasha says, "Yelena," followed by something in Russian.
Natasha grabs the girl up in a tight hug, "Yelena, I brought some of my team mates, Sam and Steve," she points them out, excluding Clint who has already admitted to having met everyone that the Black Widow has tried so hard to protect. "Sam, Steve, this is Yelena, my sister."
Sam offers a handshake that is completely ignored, so Steve puts on his best Captain America smile and keeps his hands firmly to himself. "Avengers," Yelena spits in a thick Russian accent, "Does he know you've brought Avengers here?"
"I mentioned it,"
"He will not be happy about it,"
"He'll get over it," A woman's voice calls from the doorway. She's shorter than Natasha, her hair falls long and dark down her back. She looks to be of Asian decent and speaks with an accent that doesn't match Yelena or Natasha's. "Natasha, it's been too long,"
"Ayla," Yelena holsters her gun as Natasha climbs the stairs to hug the new girl. Ayla is older than Yelena but younger than Natasha, she reaches just below Natasha's nose in height. "I thought you were in college,"
"Vanya rounded us up," Ayla says, "There are twins, Wanda and Sasha. The boy was a surprise,"
Yelena huffs, annoyed when Sam and Steve are invited into the house. She follows behind them into the house, Steve tries not to be intimidated by a teenage girl at his back but he also knows she's armed. Knowing the Winter Soldier's history and Natasha's history, he thinks it would be a bad idea to underestimate anyone right now.
The living room area is the first room that the reach and it is filled with women. There are women (and girls) of all different races and ethnicities, some older than Natasha and some much younger.
They're all standing, some with weapons, some seemingly unarmed. They relax marginally when Natasha speaks to the room at large in Russian. Clit actually goes over to speak with one of the older women.
"I'll get Vanya," Yelena says, still visibly unhappy about bringing Avengers into the house.
Steve says, "Vanya, that's the Winter Soldier?"
"Don't," a black woman snaps from her spot in a love seat, "Don't call him that."
Steve raises his hands slightly in surrender, going to apologize but a deep voice beats him to it. "It's fine,"
The voice is painfully familiar. It's deep and thick with a Brooklyn accent, but not how Brooklyn accents sound now. It sounds like home, like 1936, like back ally fights.
The man attached to the voice is also painfully familiar at the same time as he is painfully unfamiliar to Steve. He's the right height, just a bit shorter than Steve. Steve remembers how odd that was the first time they stood together after the serum, how weird it was to not look up. His hair is long again but it's not the stringy, greasy mess it had been in Fury's files. Instead, his hair looks clean and neat, pulled back into a bun at the nape of his neck, there are a few fly away pieces that have floated into his face and curl slightly at the ends. He doesn't have the thick beard he'd had in the unmasked picture either, instead he has just enough stubble across his chin to imply that he'd skipped a day of shaving. The scar above his eyebrow is new and so is the slightly crooked tilt to his nose, like it had been broken and didn't heal quite right.
Still, it's definitely, "Bucky?"
"Who the hell is Bucky?"
Yelena spits the name like it tastes bad in her mouth.
"Hi, Stevie," Bucky says, just like he had a thousand times before.
When Steve stumbles forwards towards Bucky, he's met with the barrel of a gun. Yelena has to tilt it up to a near comical extreme to aim between Steve's eyes.
She's not the only one either. Nearly every woman in the room has acquired some type of weapon, even Natasha has a hand to her belt like she's considering pulling her gun. For some reason that Steve hasn't quite yet grasped, all of these girls are so extremely protective of Bucky Barnes that Steve doesn't make it a single foot closer.
Bucky raises a hand, a silver hand, to wrap around Yelena's gun, pushing the barrel gently towards the floor. "Vniz," Bucky spits the sounds in a harsh command and immediately every weapon disappears - out of sight but not out of mind.
Bucky's the one that steps forward then. No one stops him from wrapping Steve up in a hug that feels decades over due despite Steve only having been out of ice for a few years. "What ever happened to 'don't do anything stupid,' huh?"
The only word Steve is capable of forming is, "Bucky,"
"Crashing a plane into the ocean seems pretty fuckin' stupid to me, punk."
Steve's pretty positive that he's shaking in Bucky's arms.
When they finally break apart - Steve allowing no more than an arms length of distance between them - Bucky says to the room at large, "Girls," and that is sufficient to send most of the bystanders out to other part of the house.
"You knew," Natasha doesn't ask. The rest of the house hums with life, there are soft sounds of everyone going about their lives as if this is no different than any other day.
Bucky nods, "I knew, Natalia." He takes a seat in the living room on the love seat, prompting the others left in the room to do the same. Steve squeezes himself into to the extra space next to Bucky. "The man you're looking for, the bomber, if I had to guess, Helmut Zemo." His accent loses all traces of Brooklyn, goes thick and heavy like Yelena's.
"Helmut?" is the first thing Sam has said.
"Da, yes." Bucky fades into Russian for the slightest moment.
Natasha says something in a language that probably isn't Russian this time, Bucky responds in the same.
Sam says, "We're suppose to ask you to come into SHIELD headquarters for a meeting,"
"Fury? Yeah, I guessed," Bucky says, shifting back into his Brooklyn drawl. "Don't see that goin' well, if I'm honest. Nattie, half your agency is Hydra. Your ma's so far up Fury's ass it's a wonder she ain't off'ed 'em."
"She's not my mother,"
"And I am not your father? Is it Shastakov then? Dreykov, perhaps?" The switch between the Brooklyn accent and the sharp Russian accent it instantaneous and honestly shocking to hear.
"You're not," She says, but her shoulders slump and she can't look him in the face, "Vanya,"
"Don't you let your sister hear you say that," Natasha opens her mouth to speak but Bucky - Vanya - cuts her off in a sharp, accent-less demand of, "Shut your mouth. It's not worth saying what you're about to say,"
Steve has always thought the Black Widow beyond reproach, even Fury could never really slow her down. Bucky stops her in her tracks though and seemingly perfectly on time because around the time that Natasha settles her face into a disgruntled scowl, her sister pokes her head around the doorway from another room.
"Papa," Yelena calls, eyes still flickering around the room unhappily at their guests. She lingers on Steve, the way he's shoved his over large body into Bucky's. "Petya's stuck to the ceiling again."
Clint chuckles from his place, balanced on the arm of the couch Natasha sits on.
Baron Zemo set off the bombs in Vienna.
Of course, this isn't proven until after someone has leaked the video of a man with Bucky's face fleeing the scene. It takes six months to clear up the media storm and it's going to take even longer to drown out a majority of the conspiracy theorists.
Bucky refuses the offer to live in the Avengers Tower. He does let Howard Stark's son work on the metal arm. Tony takes to the youngest of Vanya's wards, Peter, who becomes super interesting in trying to take the arm apart while Bucky sleeps. Petya is too young to understand that that isn't okay, especially when Dad sometimes wakes up not knowing where he is.
Bucky also refuses Steve's offer of sharing his Brooklyn apartment. Brooklyn was James Barnes' home, and Bucky isn't him anymore. He's only Vanya either, besides, he can't really see himself living in such crowded area anymore. And anyways, despite the changes that the 21st century has brought along, apartments just don't have the kind of space he needs.
Instead, Bucky invites Steve to meet with a realtor, eight months after Natasha reintroduced them.
Steve swings an overly hyper Peter off of the ground and settles him on his right hip. The woman at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the first house smiles brightly at them. She confirms that they are her clients with the cover identities that her agency had been given and waves kindly to Peter who in turn hides his face in Steve's neck.
"What a cutie," She says, after Bucky has introduced himself - as Vanya - Steve and the kids. "And how old are you, Peter?"
Peter mumbles indecipherably into Steves skin. "Petya," Bucky scolds lightly in Vanya's Russian lit.
"'M six," Is only slightly more audible.
The majority of the group of kids they had with them were similarly shy. Alexandria, having spent most of her sixteen years with Vanya and not a soldier of Hydra, was loud and out spoken but she was really the only one who would voice their opinion. Fourteen year old Yelena was extremely protective of Vanya and the younger kids to the point where, in her eyes, everyone around them was a threat. The twins, Wanda and Sasha, had only just escaped the experiment labs of a branch of Hydra. The twelve year olds never spoke to strangers and barely spoke to Steve or Vanya beyond a polite 'yes, sir' or 'no, sir' and Sasha was fiercely protective of his sister.
Peter was the youngest, at only six. Like Alexandria, he had been with Bucky longer than he'd been with Hydra. Bucky had found a four week old baby boy in a lab a little over six years ago. He hadn't even been searching for kids at that point, convinced he had destroyed the last of the Red Room years prior. No, Bucky had just been starting to connect his old memories together in a way that made sense to him. He'd gone looking for answers about his own life and instead found Peter.
They ended up choosing the third house that they toured. It had a big back yard and a pool. There was a room with large windows where Steve could start painting again. All of Vanya's youngest kids got a room to themselves, even Ayla who only came home from college over the summer. There was also plenty of room for any of the older widows to drop in, whenever they wanted, as is their open invitation to be wherever Vanya is.
There's no news story when Natasha unmasks the Hydra operatives within SHIELD. No notifications to tell the world that the woman who'd posed as Natasha's mother for three years of her life had killed an executive officer and taken her place in the hierarchy.
There was just Natasha, dropping in one Sunday afternoon to watch old Disney movies, leaning against the man that wasn't her father but was a pretty damn good dad.