He has two broken ribs, and a hairline fracture in his left arm. He’s got a bruise down his back that’s nearly black, from his right shoulder almost to his left thigh. The rest of his skin is a mix of pink and purple, like some bizarre abstract piece of modern art. He’s cut anywhere his skin was exposed, but the suit did its job.
It’s strange that he almost doesn’t even feel any of it.
The only thing he can focus on is the thundering roar that’s buzzing in the back of his head.
Ross’s soldiers have secured the whole base, and he’s set the pieces of his suit aside. They try to rush him to a med-evac but he waves them off. He isn’t ready to leave here yet. There’s unfinished business here that he isn’t sure he can ever resolve, but he isn’t quite ready to give up yet.
He doesn’t know how to give up, honestly.
He tries not to look in the corner of the room where he’d tiredly dropped the shield. It sits unmoving beside the pieces of his ruined suit, and it keeps catching on the flickering overhead lights—trying to catch his gaze.
You don’t deserve it
It’s weird how you can think you know someone, right down to their core, and then realize you never knew them at all. He supposes he shouldn’t be surprised. Steve had never played up the wholesome, innocent act on purpose. He’d grin and bear it, but if you asked him about his dark side: maybe you just haven’t seen it yet.
“You should be in a hospital,” Natasha says.
He doesn’t turn in surprise. It’s probably the shock. He doesn’t need the arc reactor to live any longer, but since the moment Steve sliced through it, he’s felt numb. It’s like he’s shut down—conservation mode.
“I thought you’d be hiding underground by now,” Tony tells her. “Why aren’t you arrested?”
Natasha slips into his line of sight. He’s been staring at the black screen that had played the night of his parents deaths. There’s more videos on their servers than just the one he’s seen, he’ll need to make copies. They’ll need to be reviewed. He doesn’t trust the CIA. FRIDAY already remotely accessed the laptop Zemo had been using from his phone, and was backing up the entire thing to one of his own secure servers.
But whenever he thinks of watching them his hand starts to tremble just slightly.
"It seems King T'Challa remembered things a little differently after he calmed down from the battle," Natasha tells him, watching him too carefully as she does. It’s frustrating, being around spies. Tony likes playing his parts and he doesn’t like having people see through them like they’re not there. "He told them he was mistaken, I wasn't firing at him but at Barnes. Apparently, I'm a terrible shot, but at least I'm off the hook."
"Switched sides too, did he?" Tony asks. He means for it to come out scathing, but he just sounds tired. He adjusts his arm within his homemade sling. Natasha very carefully does not look down at it when he does.
"It's not about sides," she says.
"Says the girl that always plays them both," Tony says wryly.
"T'Challa knows now it wasn't Barnes’ fault,” she explains. “So do you.”
“So he wasn't responsible for T’Challa’s tragedy, doesn't mean he wasn't responsible for mine,” Tony tells her, glancing over to meet her eyes. If she wants to play games she can, but he’s lost the taste for them for now.
“No,” Natasha agreed. “Zemo was responsible for his, and T’Challa took him in alive.”
“Yeah, I know. Thought he was smarter than that,” he says, his tone clipped. He notices the slight signs of surprise on her face, nearly indistinguishable, and gives a wry grin. “Oh, come on, like you would have saved him?”
“No, I wouldn't have,” she agrees easily. “But that doesn't say anything good about me, Tony. It's not something to be proud of.”
"You've seen what he can do," Tony says. She knows without clarification he’s no longer talking about Zemo. "He tore himself out of a two-inch thick glass prison and killed thirty-six highly trained agents, all in less than seven minutes. He didn't even use a weapon, if you don't count that arm.”
“He didn’t tear himself out of that cage because he was trying to hurt anyone,” Natasha says softly. “He did it because he was trying not to.”
The thought is so counter-intuitive that it sparks curiosity somewhere inside Tony’s numb mind. He blinks back at her. “What the hell are you even talking about?”
“One of the methods used to control him—one of many—was a series of trigger words,” she says. “Zemo had them. I watched the footage, saw the last frames before the power was cut. Barnes knew exactly what Zemo was doing. He wanted to stop him.”
“You can’t know that,” he says.
“Zemo had the book with the words,” she says. “We recovered it. It’s all there. If Barnes was a mindless killing machine, he wouldn’t have been able to disappear for two years without harming anyone. There’s a reason Barnes never left a trail for Steve to follow. He didn’t even go after revenge. He just wanted to be somewhere safe.”
“Are you seriously trying to get me to sympathize with the guy that killed my parents?” he asks her tightly.
“No, I’m asking you to sympathize with James Barnes,” she tells him steadily. “He was a good man, a war hero. And he was a POW for over seventy years.” Natasha pulls her eyes away, aiming them at the wall as her expression goes flat. “They didn’t just torture him, he might have withstood that. He had once before. They went for his mind, instead—they unmade him. They hollowed him out until he was nothing and then they made him a weapon.”
She turns then, glancing at the screen beside them. “You don’t blame the gun, Tony,” she says, as she hits something on her phone, “you blame the one holding it.”
The video screen lights up as new footage starts playing. Tony swallows thickly, itching to shut it back off. FRIDAY could do it, no problem. She already put a Trojan in the network here, and she can do anything Tony wants her to.
But that would be a surrender, and he’s already done that once today.
This recording is also dated the day his parents died. It is grainy and terrible quality, some kind of security camera, aimed at the center from the corner of this very room.
Tony knows enough Russian to get by, and the typical Hydra foot soldiers vocabulary certainly isn’t advanced enough to trip him up. So when they start asking questions, he realizes this is the post mission debriefing.
Barnes, for his part, seems to default back to English. If asked a direct question in Russian he will reply in kind with flawless pronounciation, but then he slips back to English. Somehow, it makes the whole tableau even more disquieting.
“Start again, from the beginning,” one of the Russians, Karpov, Tony recalls, says. “You caused the crash. Did they die on impact?”
“The man got out…there was a woman…” Barnes says in English, his brow furrowing as he looks off to the side, and a sob catches in Tony’s throat. Tony does not let it out. “She was not a threat. Did I…?”
“You’ve killed women before,” Karpov replies dismissively. He sounds bored. Tony feels his anger bubbling up again. If Karpov had been here, there was nothing that could have saved him.
“Have I?” Barnes asks breathlessly, his eyes skittering side to side, as though he’s trying to make sense of where he is.
“You do what is necessary,” Karpov tells him simply. “You do what you’re told.”
do you even remember them?
I remember all of them
But Tony could see now that he hadn't always. He obviously hadn't known what he was doing at the time.
“He called me Sergeant Barnes,” Barnes says, tilting his head as though he were trying to puzzle something out. “Was that my codename?”
“You are the Asset,” Karpov says.
“Yes,” Barnes agrees, toneless and calm.
“He shouldn’t be able to think for himself,” Natasha says quietly, breaking Tony’s concentration on the footage, “let alone hold an intelligent conversation. Put anyone else in that chair, and they’d be brain dead after a couple rounds. But he’s like Steve, so his brain would heal. He’d start to remember. And they’d wipe him again. And again. Then store him away.” She leans to the side slightly, making sure she has his attention. “It had to be like waking from a nightmare over and over, except you’re not fighting monsters in the dreams. You are the monster.”
“Stop it,” Tony says hoarsely.
“I know what that’s like,” Natasha says softly, and Tony’s never trusted the soothing tone of her voice. “Clint knows what it’s like, too. Bruce…probably better than any of us. But you don’t, so I get it, Tony, I really do.” He glances towards her sharply, prepared to refute that, but she cuts him off. “I know you’ve gone through hell too, that’s not what I mean. But when you came out the other side, you’d remade yourself. So you still think he had a choice. That he could have stopped it. He could have saved them. But that’s not how it works.”
“He stopped with Steve,” Tony says tightly. “He saved Steve.”
“That's different,” Natasha protests.
“That was a choice,” Tony snarls back.
“Yes,” she agrees, so easily that it catches him off guard. “Probably the first choice he’s made for himself since 1944. It works until it doesn’t. I know, because Clint did for me what Steve did for Barnes. He woke me up. He told me I had a choice. And in that moment, I did. But before…if you don’t know you have a choice, if stopping is never explained to you as an option: then you don’t stop. Not for anything. You don’t know that you even can.”
As she’s been talking, they’ve strapped Barnes to the chair with thick metal cuffs across his arms on the screen. Tony saw the chair they put him in at the CIA base, and if he’d managed to break free from that, he could have broken free from this. He doesn’t. He just lays back, breathing heavily, bracing himself, as they pull the panels down to cover his face.
Then he starts screaming.
It is a strange, almost inhuman, kind of scream. The desperate, automatic sort of cry of someone that knows that screaming isn’t going to help, but has to do it anyway.
“Turn it off,” Tony says.
“Tony,” Natasha begins.
“Turn it off!” he yells, as he turns to glare at her.
She reaches out and taps her phone, and the recording pauses. Tony knows it’s a deliberate act of defiance not to simply shut it off. Pausing it instead leaves Bucky frozen on the screen—still tied down, mouth guard jammed between his teeth—while they send who knows how many volts straight to his brain.
Tony knows it isn’t fair. None of it is fair—but there were plenty of serial killers with horrifying childhoods. It doesn’t change what they did. As far as Tony is concerned, it doesn’t even mitigate it.
But the kicker is that he knows this isn’t the same. This is HYDRA and advanced technology and unimaginable torture. Tony lasted a couple days in that cave before he pretended to give in, but he had an ally. He had an out, however slim his chances had been.
The first known sighting of the Winter Soldier was in 1964, twenty years after Bucky Barnes fell from that train. Tony wonders if that’s really how long it took to break him. He wonders if he…but does it matter who he had been? Does it even matter when—
“He killed my mom,” Tony says, his voice cracking. “He has to answer for that.”
Steve had looked at him with such sad helplessness when he’d said that to him. He’d been practically leaking compassion even as he took up a stance against him. Even Barnes, god, had there really had tears in his eyes? Tony isn’t sure if he’s remembering it right. He tries to focus, and the buzzing in his head just gets worse.
Natasha stares back at him calmly. She doesn’t leak compassion. She doesn’t look sympathetic. She just looks cold, ruthless in that way she always is right before she moves in for the kill.
“We’ve killed mothers, too,” she tells him. “We’ve killed fathers and sisters and brothers. That’s why this all started in the first place, with Zemo. That’s why T’Challa went after Barnes just as hard as you. Everyone wants justice for their wrongs, but intention has to matter, or we’re all just as guilty as the rest of the murderers in this world. And Barnes never wanted to hurt anyone. That wasn’t his choice.”
She pushes off the counter, stepping up right beside him. “You lost your parents, and it’s awful,” she says. “It’s never not going to be awful. It’s never going to go away. Do you really think killing a broken, tortured man is going to make you feel better? Because I know you, Tony, so I know that it won’t.” She turns and starts to walk away. “Even if you don’t.”
He doesn’t call her back as she slinks back into the shadows, just pulls out his own phone with his good arm and reluctantly restarts the recording. Barnes stops screaming before its over, his cries tapering out into harsh, pained breaths.
The weirdest part is how he doesn’t even fight them. Tony has seen what he can do. He could take out that entire room.
Karpov begins to recite a list of meaningless words—the trigger words, he realizes—in careful Russian. As he does, it is the first time he has seen emotion from the Winter Solider. He can see him struggle without actually moving a muscle, his eyes fighting against the compulsion, his hands clutching at the arms of his chair.
It doesn’t help. His emotion fades the moment Karpov gets to the end.
“Good afternoon, Soldier,” Karpov tells him cordially. “We have a mission for you.”
“Ready to comply,” Barnes answers easily.
“You will help train your new brothers and sisters as we create the next generation,” Karpov explains. “You will also act as my protection.”
“Parameters understood,” he acknowledges.
Karpov moves to a metal briefcase, and Tony recognizes it as the one that was taken from his father. Barnes notices it too, and his expression flickers momentarily as two soldiers start to undo his bonds. He frowns as he stares at it.
“Sanction, extraction,” he says quietly. “That was from my mission.”
Karpov freezes, glancing back in surprise. “What was that, Soldier?”
“I—“ he breaks off, frowning at the briefcase, and looking suddenly terribly confused.
This isn't the Winter Soldier any longer, Tony realizes. This isn't even Bucky Barnes. This is a blank fucking slate, someone with no memory, no history.
No free will.
He looks strangely innocent and childlike. His wide, confused eyes staring straight ahead. "I think...did I...."
He stumbles over the words, unable to complete a single thought.
“He's coming out of it again,” Karpov snarls as he turns to one of the men wearing a lab coat. “I thought you said you increased the intensity?”
“We did,” the solider says nervously. “But we have to increase it gradually, or we could do irreparable damage.”
“He can take the damage, you obviously did not increase it enough,” Karpov snaps. He steps back to Barnes, roughly grabbing his chin to tilt his face up towards him. “Who are you, Solider?”
“I’m—“ he breaks off, frowning again, completely oblivious to his rough handling. “Is my code name Sergeant Barnes?”
Karpov lets go of him roughly, the motion forcing Barnes’ head to whip to the side. Karpov angrily turns to the solider in the white coat. “He still remembers the last mission,” he snaps. “Begin again.”
Barnes does nothing to defend himself as the others move to strap him back in. He just stares at that damn briefcase of his father’s as they push him back in the chair, and pull the panels back down once more. He looks like he’s trying to remember it, even as he must know they’re about to make him forget.
Tony thinks he might throw up.
“Sir?” a young agent appears at his side. “Ross needs you back at base.”
Tony shuts down the recording, swallowing hard. He can’t watch that happen again.
“Sir?” the agent prompts. “He’s afraid we’re losing time. He needs you to figure out where Rogers and Barnes would go next.”
“No,” Tony decides.
The agent’s eyes go wide, and Jesus, were they recruiting at high schools these days? Then again, Tony supposes he can’t throw stones considering the Spider-fetus he’d recruited to his own cause.
“Sir?” the agent tries again. “But he…what am I supposed to tell him?”
Tony turns around, heading for the exit. “Tell him to go fuck himself,” he calls back. “I’m taking a vacation.”
He heads back to his helicopter after picking up his suit and the shield, ignoring the other agents that try to catch his attention or call him back. He’s not going to find Rogers for Ross.
He already knows where they’ve gone, anyway. T’Challa was here, waiting, with Zemo contained, when the CIA arrived. He left with a Strike team on one of their transports to escort Zemo to holding back in Berlin.
There was no sign of whatever craft T’Challa must have used to get himself here, and he doubts that Steve or even Barnes could have flown something of Wakandan make without T’Challa’s direction. T’Challa had covered for Natasha, probably contacted her to tip her off that he was here in the first place.
Which means chances are T’Challa is helping Steve and Barnes, too. And that means there’s more than a good chance they’re hiding out in Wakanda.
“Sir?” FRIDAY queries when he drops down in his helicopter. “Where should I plot a course?”
He could do it. It wouldn’t be easy, and he might not make it out alive. He’s heard rumors about the security forces in Wakanda, and he’s seen T’Challa in action.
And Steve…
But he could do it.
If he thought he’d find the man that had fired at him point blank in Berlin, the man that had bludgeoned his father and strangled his mother, he wouldn’t hesitate.
But he doesn’t think he can find that man, even if he can find Bucky Barnes.
“Just take me home, FRIDAY,” he decides.