It's Bucky, of course it is, with his back facing the approaching men. The snow is thinning out, melting as it hits his bare skin chilling his ragged breaths that condense in the air and cloud his vision. He turns towards them, gunmetal eyes too wide, posture too rigid, and everything in Steve is screaming wrong wrong wrong, protect him! — but there's nothing to protect him from. The threat has been neutralised. Eviscerated, even.
Littered across the clearing are mangled, dismembered, still twitching bodies of nazis. Their outfits are arrogant, Hydra being the special kind of idiots that wear black in a snowstorm — but that's not what strikes Steve. No, what catches his keen eye is Bucky, his Bucky, who is caked in nazi blood.
It's not even a relatively new sight - this is a war - but there seems to be too much of it, too thick, too wet, fucking everywhere. It's crystallised beneath all of their boots; splashed high up the trunks of trees and staining the clearing in red. It looks like someone, like Bucky, has drained the bodies and orchestrated a murder scene.
Steve can see it from across the space, his vision sharper than it used to be when he was just a skinny little kid from Brooklyn. Serum or not, t's not like he could miss it, and surely not even the commandos can miss the way Bucky's skin is smeared and splattered in congealing crimson and pieces of what used to be people. It's thick and sticky, dripping off his elbows, his wrists, his fingers — gushing off Bucky's body like the the source is endless.
Worse than the gore is the pride. Bucky is watching, quiet, glancing over his shoulder, lips pulled back into a proud, predatory half smile.
He’s is a sniper - his fashion is, was, and always will be clean kills; no mess, just distance shots. Hand-to-hand when he’s pinned, but bullets when he can Steve doesn't think that Bucky has missed a single target since enlisting.
These kills, though, have been made purely in sport. In the scene there is taunting, and seemingly, fun. They’re feral, something so purely animal and wild in the sporadic mess left behind, bodies mashed into one another and insides forcibly made outsides.
"Buck?”
Steve's voice cracks like lightening through clearing. Bucky, cautious and considering, tilts his head to the side. his ears— ears! — snap up off the dark tangles of his hair, flickering and twitching to pick up the echoes of sound all around him. Steve's breath catches in his throat, still not used to Bucky's ears being situated up by the top of his head, folding in to halo over the crown of his skull when he's settled. They're pointed, but softly, like a kitten's; as dark as his hair and as big as the palm of steve's hand — currently slick and matted with wind and water.
Someone behind Steve raises their gun. I time with this, Bucky's ears flicker back against his hair. He tilts his head to the left, then the right, otherwise eerily still. The commandos, with Steve guiding them, advance slowly across the clearing, flakes of ice falling, sticking to their hair and uniforms as they dutifully ignore the massacre surrounding them.
"Yes?" bucky asks, dropping into a crouch when they're within normal talking distance.
One of his hands settles in front of him, digging into the crunchy ice without a care, the other collects a handful of it. He regards the crystalline shards for a moment before scrubbing them across his face, hand sliding back into his hair, which is tacky with half-dried blood. Not all of it melts as it cleans him, dancing down the back of his neck and following the line of his jaw, staining the ground by him a watery pink.
Perhaps a little crude, but the method does clean, and humanise him. The effect is a little ruined when he repeats the process and then chews a mouthful of ice into slush, spitting out blood and licking the bloom of spit and crimson off his lips.
"Sarge," Gabe winces, "that's disgusting."
Bucky laughs amusedly, swiping his tongue across one of his sharpened canines. He stands gracefully, drips of bloodied water trailing down his face and chest, palms and fingers cleaned almost entirely. The cold doesn't seem to be bothering him at all, despite his apparent lack of shirt and the clingy flakes making home in his hair as they fall.
Steve shivers empathetically, tucking his hands back into his sleeves. The commandos echo his sentiment, shaking themselves off as best they can. Bucky's ears quiver, flicking back to face behind him, not aggressively but attentive to the information they're receiving.
"This," steve sighs, gesturing vaguely around himself, floundering, "why?"
"Recognised them." Bucky shrugs, addressing his ears and flashing the newly sharpened cut of his teeth. Steve tentatively reaches a hand out, fingertips pink with the cold. They slide gently through the front of bucky's hair, a little shaggier and unkempt than either of them are used to, still stiff and tacky with blood.
Steve isn't used to petting Bucky. he isn't used to treating him as anything other than an equal, but the fact is he's not anymore. he's different. He craves new things, he can do new things, and he isn't the same. Steve has to remind himself almost daily to think that way, to treat him like something other than the kid he grew up with.
A soft rumble starts up in Bucky’s chest and the howlies avert their eyes. He’s purring.
It makes Steve feel unacclimated, borderline indecent really, because Bucky is a human, Bucky is a man, and he shouldn't be acting like this.
Intellectually, Steve's aware it's not an active choice on anyone's behalf and that he's spent months trying to hide this. He knows how much fuss Bucky has to go to when he needs to hide his ears, and how hard bucky works as a soldier – making the best of what he is to be the best he can. In return for the impressive kill tally and heightened sense of predating, he sleeps a little more and gets borderline agitated when he hasn't hunted in a few days.
And it's because he's a predator now. He hunts anything that intrigues him enough. His smiles have started looking more like the baring of his teeth, now that he's been undone and re-built to kill. Now that he's made for it.