This is not the Endgame

On Sunday, Bucky waited until early afternoon before going over to Ava's apartment. She'd been doing laundry; sheets and towels were pinned to her clothesline. Slowly, giving him time to evade, she wrapped her arms around him, coming in close for the hug. He closed his arms around her too, but he'd been a little late and the hug was over too soon. They chatted as she cut the lock out of its packaging and gave him the appropriate screwdriver from a set she had. He was about to ask whether there was something else she needed done--not likely, she was handy and could actually have done this herself--when his phone rang insistently. He listened, said a few words, and hung up.

"Something at work's come up," he said. "Sorry. I was hoping to spend more time with you, if you were free."

"Well, that would have been fun, but we've got to keep the bosses happy, right?" She reached up and indulged in running her fingers through his hair. He'd taken special care with it, hoping for just this result. "Come by later, though." He dipped his head and kissed her mouth, nipping her lower lip at the end. She grinned. Reluctantly, he left. One of his targets, an important but shielded member of the Serpent Society support team, was on the move. He hoped that the woman was just doing shopping or something, not leaving town.

Luck was with him; he followed the target into Central Park, observing her leaving a flash drive on a park bench--amateur--he wandered over and sat down, the drive a millimeter from his leg. It was a nice day; he sat there for almost an hour, talking to a few people who also sat down, just for the fun of pissing off whoever was waiting to retrieve the drive. The park was crowded and there were plenty of tourists as well as locals. Finally, a group of people who looked like they were here for a convention went by, and he stood, casually palming the drive before working his way through the conventioneers. He slid the drive into his glove and made his way to the nearest path to the street, moving briskly but not hurriedly. He felt hands delicately insert themselves into the pockets of his jacket, and turned abruptly. "Hey!" he barked. "Thief!" The man turned and ran, quickly swallowed up by the crowd. There was nothing in his pockets to take; even his keyring with the apartment and motorcycle keys was in his jeans pocket, and he'd conspicuously put his hands only into his jacket pockets. He started for home. Maybe Ava would go out to dinner with him.

***

"This is it," Sam said, indicating The Shithole. He opened the door and they walked into the lobby. Sam looked around and saw Ava coming down the stairs. She wasn't wearing a coat, just a heavy sweatshirt, so she wasn't going out. She walked over to the mailboxes, removing a decent chunk of mail, and turned to the stairs.

"Hey!" he said, and she turned.

"Hi... Sam, isn't it?"

"Yeah. Hey--"

"Do you know if Bucky's around?" the man with him asked eagerly.

"Who's Bucky?" she asked blankly.

"Jim," Sam inserted quickly. Her eyebrows drew together, like these guys were crazy.

"Who wants to know?" she asked suspiciously.

"I'm his friend," the blond man said. "Steve." Her eyes flicked between the two men a few times, not missing Sam looking jaundiced about this statement.

"Steve.... he mentioned a Steve... you wouldn't be the friend who went haring off after the Unsnappening, would you?" Her voice had acquired a bite. A significant snap.

"Uh--"

"Does Jim/Bucky know about this? That he's back?" she asked Sam, who wanted to facepalm.

"No."

"You need to let him know, you can't just hit him with this," she said urgently to Sam.

"I didn't really have a choice," he said flatly.

"Oh, yeah? You're an adult man, right? You can always say no."

"You're right," Sam said, after visibly tamping down a flare of anger. "It's habit."

"Hey," this Steve said. "I'm right here."

"Wow," she said sarcastically. "Too bad you haven't always been right there for your friend. You might look like a human Golden Retriever, but you sure don't have the loyalty."

"You don't know what you're talking about," this Steve said harshly.

"I know some things. And you need to respect him, let him decide whether he wants to see you, under what conditions. It's kind of a dick move to show up here, as if you're expecting to pick things right back up. Like nothing happened." This Steve drew himself up.

"Hey, Charlie," she hailed one of several men who entered the lobby. "Do you know if Manny's around?"

"He's not," the man said with a little drawl. "I can help, though." She jerked her head at Steve.

"This guy is here to harass a resident, who doesn't know that he's back in town." The group of four men looked at Steve in sync.

"I don't want any trouble," he said, holding up his hands.

"Good. Don't come back unless you're accompanied by a resident," Charlie said. The men stared at each other a moment. Sam was wary of the guy; he was one of the drug dealers that Bucky had said protected the place; he'd done a little poking around and found that no few residents had rap sheets; the dealers and gang members had all been under suspicion for murder in other cases but nothing could be proven. Then the men and Ava nodded at each other, and the men went down the hall to the apartments.

"Don't worry, Sam, they wouldn't have killed me," that Steve said matter-of-factly.

"You're immortal?" she asked sarcastically.

"No, just hard to kill. More desperate and better armed men than that have tried." Steve's voice was level and hard.

"Is that a challenge?" she asked, her eyes slit with dislike, putting her hands on her hips. "Give me a little time to think about it."

"Whoa, whoa," Sam said, making palm-down motions. "Nobody's ingenuity needs to be tested, nobody's fighting skill. This is private property, Steve. She's got a good point. I'll break the news of your return first, see what he wants to do." He jerked his head toward the door. "Come on." Reluctantly, the two men headed for the exit. She waited until they were on the street before going upstairs.

***

Bucky almost bounced up the stairs. He'd dropped off the drive at the Avengers compound, after noticing that he didn't have his smartphone with him, and was hoping to spend some time with Ava. She opened the door before he could even knock, and his pleasure at this faded immediately when he saw her sober face.

"What's wrong?" he asked urgently.

"Your pal Sam was here, looking for you. You need to call him." She shook her head. "I don't know the story. Just go make your call. If you want to talk afterward--or not--I'm right here." He hurried down the hall. His phone was almost dead when he picked it up; he'd forgotten to put it on the charger. He tossed it on the Qi charger for five minutes, then called Sam.

***

A good half hour later, he walked slowly to Ava's apartment. The phone call hadn't taken long, about five minutes; he'd needed some time to come to grips with what it meant.

Steve was back. The sickly, underdeveloped boy that Bucky'd befriended and protected when they were kids. Up until he'd shipped out for the European theater of operations in WWII, actually, had joined his band of commandos in order to watch his back, because Steve really never had a decent sense of self-preservation. The friend who had saved him from torture and experimentation but hadn't been able to keep him from falling from the train. Who'd broken through his Hydra conditioning, basically flipped off the world with both fingers to get him help. And who'd decided that the past, with all its inequities and problems, was preferable to the family he'd found since he had been defrosted, to his best friend. Bucky had taken that personally. He'd shown up once, for a couple minutes, after he'd gone back, just long enough to hand Sam the shield, anoint his successor. And then... there was just a great big Steve-sized void in his life.

He knocked; Ava opened the door immediately and drew him in. "You've had an awful shock," she said worriedly. "Come sit down." She fussed over him, tucking him into the corner of the sofa with pillows and an afghan after taking off his shoes, and went to boil some water. She made him strong black tea, making it sweet and adding milk. Some spices. He liked it a lot, and he wasn't a tea drinker. "You don't have to go into specifics if you don't want to, but I'm ready to listen. If you do." He sipped the tea silently until it was gone.

"I was going to tell you most of it anyway, before things went too much farther between us. I have to be honest with you, explain what happened to me. What I'm going to say sounds incredible, like some bad, unbelievable story, but I promise you it's true. Actually, wait here a second." He fought his way out of his comfortable nest and padded back to his place, retrieved a few old fashioned paper files, then returned. She gently but firmly tucked him back in. It was really nice to be fussed over, he found. "I can back up everything I tell you."

"Ok," she said cautiously.

"Let me tell you my way, then you can ask questions," he requested, and she nodded. He drew a deep breath.

"My name is James Buchanan Barnes. Both my parents liked James, and Buchanan was my mom's maiden name. Dad thought it was funny that it was coincidentally the name of one of the worst US presidents, said that it proved that anybody could succeed. I prefer to go by the nickname Bucky. I was born in Brooklyn, March tenth. 1917." He watched her eyes go big as she sucked in air, but she didn't say anything. "My parents were George and Winifred Barnes. I had a sister, Rebecca. Both of my parents died pretty young, so I joined the police right out of high school. I was a good boxer, a three time champion. A good shot. I had a lot of friends growing up, got good grades. In primary school, I met Steve on the playground; he was being extorted for his lunch money. Neither of our families were well off, so this was a significant problem. I sort of put him under my wing, and it wasn't long before we were like brothers." He choked out a laugh. "He had a chip on his shoulder that was bigger than he was. He was thin, undersized, had asthma, heart palpitations and other heart trouble, astigmatism, scoliosis, high blood pressure, angina, pernicious anemia, was partially deaf, stomach ulcers, flat feet, recurring colds and sinus problems, had scarlet fever and rheumatic fever. I was always surprised that he didn't get polio somehow. His mom had diabetes and died from TB, which was something else I was surprised he didn't get. His mom was a nurse, though, a good one, and this is probably what kept him alive, because antibiotics weren't widespread during our childhood. Life was hard for him in other ways; people always think that eugenics is a Nazi thing, but it was really popular in the US in the 20s and 30s before the Nazis embraced it.

"It was a serious issue; the eugenics movement was funded by the likes of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. There was legislation about it, some of which targeted people with illnesses like epilepsy or mental problems--they called them imbeciles or feeble-minded. There were a lot of forced sterilizations, immigration restrictions. It was racist and classist--the white middle and upper classes were assumed to be fit, the lower classes and those of other races unfit. Superior versus inferior breeding. Some eugenics enthusiasts wanted euthanasia, but it wasn't widely supported. Some places did it anyway, giving milk infected with TB to mental patients, or just neglected them medically. This is to help explain why Steve was SO overwhelmingly unpopular. As a white male with no mental defects, he wasn't the focus of eugenics movements in general--those were mainly turned to women--but dames didn't want to date somebody like him, like it would rub off on them, they didn't want to pass those ailments on to their kids. The fellas never saw him as one of them; he was unfit, unacceptable. Nobody gave me a lot of trouble about it, they assumed he was my charity case. But he was bright, funny and charismatic when he let himself be, a talented artist. Loyal and generous. He was held back a lot by his illnesses. And past all that was his heart, which was pure. I know that sounds stupid, but he really never could stand a bully, hated injustice, always did what he felt to be right.

"And so we grew up, Steve went to art school for a year, he did graphic art, commercial stuff afterward, sold newspapers to make ends meet. Then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I didn't volunteer; I wasn't in a hurry to die, and I was concerned about what would happen to Steve if I was gone. I was drafted in 1943 into the 107th, Steve's dad's old unit, ironically. Or not ironically, whatever. We did boot camp in Wisconsin in the winter. Toward the end, a couple of our sergeants got busted for getting into trouble on leave, and they promoted a couple of corporals. After we were done with boot, I got promoted to corporal. Then just before we were to ship out, we lost another sergeant, and I was promoted again. I was respected in the unit by both my superior officers and the other men, and I kept the men out of trouble, helped keep the unit functioning smoothly. We were shipping out to England from New York, so on that last night, I hunted up Steve; I'd found a girl for him and we were going to double date. I wanted to go to a science showcase, dancing on my last night in town. But he was obsessed with joining the Army. Not surprisingly, he was 4F, but he kept lying in the recruitment stations, hoping to find some sympathetic doctor. 4F classification was mostly given for muscular and bone problems, hearing or circulatory defects, mental health, hernias, syphilis, so it was no surprise that he had that designation stamped on his folder over and over. But he wasn't alone, something like 30% of men were found physically unfit. But that chip on his shoulder, this burning desire to not be overlooked, dismissed, or a victim of eugenics thinking, his hatred of bullies and desire to do his part kept him going. He ditched the date for yet another try at volunteering, and I shipped out the next day. England, then Italy.

"The Italian campaign lasted from July 1943 to May 1945, it was a series of beach landings in the south and we joined up, worked our way up the boot. We got into a he-- heck of a battle at Azzano, which is northeast of Venice, not far from the Austrian border. We went up against a German battalion--only fifty men made it back to our lines; the rest of our 200 were killed or captured. Including me. We thought we'd be ok, the Germans and Italians had both signed the third Geneva Convention, which set rules for the treatment of POWs, and in general, the Germans did ok. Aside for captured commandos, or people they deemed inferior, including the Slavs." He sighed and there was a few minutes of silence.

"But instead, we were taken to the Austrian Hydra Weapons Facility, up near Kreischberg. It was a labor camp, which was something the POWs weren't supposed to do, but Hydra was ready to come out of the shadows, and it ignored the Geneva Conventions. It was one of the most heavily fortified places in Europe, produced special weapons powered by a novel energy source. It had POWs from all the Allies, I think, at least from the West. I don't remember any Soviets being there, anyway. I'd contracted pneumonia on the battlefield, and there wasn't any medical care. I got weaker, and this scum Colonel Lohmer had me beaten pretty badly when I fell behind on the quota. The lieutenant, man named Kleiber, said I was too sick to work, but the colonel didn't care. We were all locked into these freestanding cages when we weren't working, they hoped that being stuck with men of different nationalities and units would keep us at each other's throats, but that was stupid. We knew who the real enemy was. Dum Dum, Frenchie, and Monty were in my cell, and they devised a plan to get Kleiber off my back, it killed him. Didn't upset me any.

"I was safer until Schmidt, who was the head of Hydra, brought in a man called Arnim Zola to run the place. He ramped up production of the weapons and parts for this big, wild long range bomber called the Valkyrie. Hugely advanced design. One of Zola's priorities was to make a usable supersoldier serum. Because I was in a bad way because of the pneumonia and beatings, I was chosen for experimentation." His face was strained. "I don't remember much about it," he lied, "just that it hurt a whole lot. I'd been given a version of the supersoldier serum and left restrained on the treatment table when it didn't kill or deform me immediately. Zola wanted his dinner." Another silence.

"Somebody came in the room and I recited my name, rank, and serial number like I was supposed to. I thought I was hallucinating, because I saw Steve, who I'd left, safe and sound and with all the righteous fury that his 98 pound body could contain, in New York. He got me off the table, and that's when I knew whatever they'd done to me was working, because I could walk on my own, which I hadn't been able to do on my way into that room. Steve had engineered a jailbreak, and that's when I learned that he'd done his own stint as an experiment, but he'd volunteered. He'd been about five feet four before, then he was 6'2". Weighed 220. We were finding a way out as the facility burned--Steve often overdoes things a bit--and ran into Schmidt and Zola. That's where I learned that not only had Schmidt had also gotten that hell juice but it had turned his skin bright red and gotten rid of his nose, eyebrows, eyelashes, and hair. So that was something new. There was dialog between Steve and Schmidt, and ultimately we got out and walked back to our unit with the rest of the rescued POWs. Thirty miles, by then, they'd advanced after we'd been captured. By then I was in almost perfect physical condition.

"Mentally, not so much," he said softly. "I wanted my life to consist of a good job, good friends, a wife, kids. Happiness. But instead, I was drafted. The Italian campaign was brutal. Although there wasn't the infrastructure on the beaches that Normandy had, there was very stiff resistance inland, enough to make General Clark think about pulling back, but ultimately, we persevered and went up the peninsula. The Gustav Line was utterly brutal. Once we got past that, it still didn't get better. The terrain was awful. There was fighting in the mountains, fighting in positions where you couldn't dig in because it was so rocky, fighting in really extreme cold, and in terrible mud like WWI's trenches. Then the labor camp. I was really down in the dumps. These days, I had a diagnosis of major depression and a prescription. I couldn't tell any of this to Steve; for the first time, probably, he was happy and healthy and really good at what he was doing. Respected. People sought out his ideas and opinions. He had no idea, no basis for understanding what I'd gone through. And back then, nobody wanted to be seen for shellshock, it was a massive taboo. Even if a doctor had been available to treat me. Some docs thought that traumatized soldiers were just trying to get out of the fight, they weren't sympathetic.

"We were in the base bar, where he was floating the idea of the Howling Commandos to me, wanted me to join. I'd been a sharpshooter in the 107th, learned how to shoot when I was a cop in Brooklyn before the war. Of course I said yes, not because I wanted to go get killed on special missions, but Steve didn't know how bad it was out there. He had a grand total of a week of evaluative activities before he was chosen for the procedure, he'd had precisely one very targeted mission, he had no idea what combat was really like. He'd had a choice between being studied in a lab or start promoting bond sales. And don't get me wrong, he knew textsful of strategy and tactics, but his only real-world experience came from that one assault. I joined to have his back, protect him. I kidded him about his uniform," he smiled slightly. "Straight out of a propaganda film, looked like. Found out that before he came over to Europe with the USO, he'd been selling bonds, making movies. There were even comic books about him. Well, the character, rather. Then this woman I'd seen around camp came in, in this fuck me red dress--excuse the language, please--and she eggs him on. I knew immediately that something was up there, because everybody knew Carter was ambitious and looking to use the war to move up afterward. Why did she have that dress in a war zone? Nobody got to have a lot of luggage, we were on the front line. She was on loan from the Brits for intelligence anyway Steve had said that she'd seen his potential for Project Rebirth--code name for the experimental serum--but hadn't looked at him twice before he stepped into the treatment apparatus. But he didn't want to hear it; for the first time a pretty woman preferred him to me, and it would have just sounded like sour grapes anyway. But at that moment, I realized that he didn't really need me anymore. We'd switched positions. I was the damaged one, and he was the sun, ascendant. Finally, other people were noticing his potential for greatness.

"We did some missions, they were all highly successful. Then we got some intelligence that Zola was being moved by train through the Austrian Alps, and we were given that target. We ziplined onto the train, gun fight broke out. Steve went down, and I picked up the shield to save him from the bullets. Then I was blown out of the train. I lost my grip, fell hundreds of feet. Lost my left arm. Soviet patrols found me and turned me over to Hydra. It was a planned ambush, but it wasn't for Steve, as you'd think. It was for me. Zola's treatment enabled me to live. God, I wish it hadn't."