Perfectly Civil

“Hello, Mr. Barnes. I’ve been sent by the United Nations to evaluate you. Do you mind if I sit?”

Standing next to her brother, Kara tried to focus on the psychologist’s examination of Bucky but she couldn’t help but feel Steve’s eyes piercing the back of her skull.

“Your first name is James?”

Kara heard Sharon enter the office where Sam and Steve were waiting and hand them some paperwork before turning on the interview for them. Though she wanted to be on his side as much as Sharon was, she felt that her presence would just start another argument and chose to stay where she was.

“I’m not here to judge you. I just want to ask you a few questions. Do you know where you are, James? I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me, James.”

“My name is Bucky.”

Kara felt her heart squeeze a little in pain as she realized he was beginning to remember his old life. She knew it had to be hard going through that transition alone and was glad that neither she nor Steve had to be. Now, however, she knew her fiancé would feel worse than before and hoped he reigned in his actions.

Then she heard him start to speak and listened to their conversation with her super hearing.

“Why would the Task Force release this photo, to begin with?” Steve wondered.

Sharon sighed. “Get the word out, involve as many eyes as we can?”

“Right,” Steve told her. “It’s a good way to flush a guy out of hiding. Set off a bomb, get your picture taken. Get seven billion people looking for the Winter Soldier.”

“You’re saying someone framed him to find him?” Sharon wondered.

“Steve, we looked for the guy for two years and found nothing.” Sam reminded him.

“We didn’t bomb the UN. That turns a lot of heads.”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t guarantee that whoever framed him would get him. It guarantees that we would.” Sharon said quickly and Kara felt her heart start to beat faster.

She realized, now, that maybe Steve had a point. She had been so quick to dismiss his claims that Bucky was innocent but what if he was right?

“Tell me, Bucky. You’ve seen a great deal, haven’t you?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Bucky replied calmly, his voice strained from his fight earlier.

The psychologist, or whoever he was, continued anyway. “You fear that if you open your mouth, the horrors might never stop.”

Kara watched as the man touched a screen in front of him and furrowed her brows in confusion as he continued speaking. “Don’t worry. We only have to talk about one.”

Then the screens went black and all the lights went out. Looking up at her brother, she saw that he was just as confused as she was and they turned to find their friends. “FRIDAY, get me a source on that outage.”

“Sub-level five. East wing.”

Hearing Sharon’s voice tell Steve and Sam where Bucky was being kept, Kara instantly removed her glasses and used her x-ray vision to find him first.

“What the hell is this?” Bucky asked the man, who seemed unfazed by the power outage.

“Why don’t we discuss your home? Not Romania. Certainly not Brooklyn, no. I mean…your real home.”

She saw that the psychologist was now standing, holding a book in his hands as he paced the floor in front of Bucky’s cage. He was speaking German and Bucky looked distressed.

“Tony…it’s a set-up. He’s not a real psychologist.”

“What?” Then he noticed her glasses had come off and she was staring at the floor intently. “What’s going on? What are you seeing?”

“Something’s wrong. He’s…speaking random words in German and Bucky seems distressed by them.” She reported back. “I’m telling you, something isn’t right.”

“What is he saying? Can you understand him?”

“Longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak, furnace, nine, benign, homecoming, freight car…” Her words trailed off as she went pale. “They’re trigger words. He’s trying to trigger the Winter Soldier.”

“Go.”

She didn’t need to be told twice as she sped out of the room in pursuit of the man.

…

As Kara listened upstairs, Steve and Sam arrived at Bucky’s cell to find all of the guards unconscious on the ground.

“Help me.”

Walking to where the fake psychologist lay on the floor of the cell, Steve lifted him up and slammed him against a wall. “Who are you? What do you want?”

The man smirked. “To watch an empire fall.”

Then Sam was thrown into the room by Bucky and Steve left to fight him. Bucky threw punch after punch, but Steve seemed to handle all of them. It wasn’t until he broke the door to the elevator that Steve found himself free falling down the shaft, landing on the top of the nearest elevator.

Back inside the room, Sam’s vision came back just in time to see the man looking down the tunnel at Steve. “Hey.”

Turning to look at Sam, the man turned and fled the room, making Sam jump up as quickly as he could to follow him.

…

Upstairs, Natasha and Tony hurried from the room.

“Please tell me you brought a suit.” She said hopefully.

He nodded. “Sure did. It’s a lovely three-piece, Tom Ford. I’m an active-duty non-combatant.”

“Follow me.”

Sharon wasted no time in grabbing them and taking them from the room in search of their friends and enemies.

…

When Kara arrived downstairs, all she found was ruin. Everyone was either dead or unconscious and there was glass everywhere. Shutting her eyes she listened for the sound of anyone but all she could focus on were the blaring alarms and the sounds of people barking orders.

Shaking her head to clear out the extra chatter, she finally picked up on her brother’s hoarse voice. “Kara…”

Wasting no time waiting for instructions, she fled the room and went to the main floor of the building. There she found furniture smashed and Tony, Sharon, Natasha, and T’Challa on the ground in pain. Bucky turned to leave, but Kara had had enough for one day.

“Hey!”

He stopped for a moment before turning to look at her.

“This isn’t you.” She told him. “Snap out of it.”

He seemed to listen to her words for a second before letting out a yell and running at her. Balling her hands into fists she let one connect with his face the second he was close enough and threw a kick to his stomach. He doubled over for only a moment before she received the same treatment and he was grabbing her by the throat.

“Why…is it…always…the…throat?” She gasped out as he carried her back into a wall and threw her through it.

She felt herself fly back through several layers of the building before finally collapsing on the floor. Looking up, she zipped back into the room and slammed him into the furthest wall she could find. Running back at her, he lifted his hand to punch her and she used her freeze breath to blow him back a few feet before he could hit her.

Then he held up his metal hand and used it to block her breath as he walked toward her. Grabbing her by the arm, he spun around and threw her into another wall. This time she stayed down as the room glowed green from the contents of the room she’d unwillingly opened a door into.

Groaning in pain, she tried to lift her head to look around and found Tony laying on the floor next to a heap of broken parts from one of the tables. Using all her strength, she crawled over to him and nearly cried out in pain.

“Tony…”

“I’m okay.” He told her. “Someone block that Kryptonite!”

Letting herself fall back to the floor again, she listened as soldiers ran around trying to both find Bucky and cover the green substance from her path. When they finally had done so, Tony helped her up and her ears picked up on the sound of metal scraping against metal.

Zooming outside, she froze midair as she took in the sight before her. Bucky had tried stealing a helicopter, it looked like, and Steve had stopped him. Part of the building was destroyed and the helicopter now floated in the water.

Seeing no sign of her fiancé or his friend, she took no time in diving into the water to find them. When she flew out of the water, she was soaking wet in her civilian clothes and had no one with her. Looking around with her x-ray vision, she spotted Steve and Bucky making their way out of the water.

Then Steve turned to face her, grabbed Bucky, and ducked behind a lead wall cutting off her path of finding them.

…

Bucky groaned as he woke up chained to a machine with Sam and Steve staring at him. “Steve.”

“Which Bucky am I talking to?” Steve wondered, trying to figure out if they’d have to fight again.

Bucky thought for a second before responding. “Your mom’s name was Sarah.” Then he chuckled. “You used to wear newspapers in your shoes.”

“Can’t read that in a museum,” Steve said but Sam was unsure.

“Just like that, we’re supposed to be cool?”

“What did I do?” Bucky asked, a look of regret passing across his face.

“Enough.” Was all Steve said.

Looking down, Bucky sighed. “Oh, God, I knew this would happen. Everything HYDRA put inside me is still there. All he had to do was say the goddamn words.”

“Who was he?” Steve questioned.

“I don’t know.” His friend told him honestly.

“People are dead,” Steve told him. “The bombing, the setup…the doctor did all that just to get ten minutes with you. I need you to do better than ‘I don’t know’.”

“He wanted to know about Siberia…where I was kept. He wanted to know exactly where.”

“Why would he need to know that?”

Bucky swallowed. “Because I’m not the only Winter Soldier.”

As Bucky relayed the story to them, Sam and Steve listened intently. It was all Steve could do to stop himself from punching a wall as they took in the story of the group of volunteers who took the serum and then revolted against their own people.

“Who were they?”

Buck sighed. “Their most elite death squad. More kills than anyone in HYDRA history, and that was before the serum.”

“They all turn out like you?” Sam asked him.

“Worse.”

“The doctor,” Steve crossed his arms. “could he control them?”

“Enough.”

Looking at Sam, Steve sighed. “He said he wanted to see an empire fall.”

“With these guys, he could do it,” Bucky told him. “They speak thirty languages, can hide in plain sight…infiltrate, assassinate, destabilize. They can take a whole country down in one night, you’d never see them coming.”

Sam walked over to Steve and shook his head. “This would have been a lot easier a week ago.”

“If we call Tony or Kara…”

“No, they won’t believe us.” Sam dismissed.

“Even if they did…”

“Who knows if the Accords would let them help.” Sam finished the sentence for him.

Steve looked heartbroken and annoyed at the same time. “We’re on our own.”

“Maybe not.” Sam shrugged. “I know a guy…”