Chapter Text
“Longing, rusted—”
His eyes snap open and he’s instantly alert. No! Nonononono, not again! He went back in the fucking freezer to make sure this didn’t happen…
“--seventeen, daybreak—”
He’s in the lab, but the chamber is open and he’s on his hands and knees on the floor. He looks around wildly, but he doesn’t see anyone, only hears an unearthly voice.
“--furnace, nine—”
“STOP!” he yells, clamping his hands over his ears, but he knows it’s useless. He can feel himself going under, his mind going numb…
“--benign, homecoming—”
The last word is almost cut off and none follow. He shakes his head, thoughts foggy, not sure what’s going on.
“Bucky!” he hears someone yell and he looks up.
“S- Steve?” he asks, dazed, unable to completely pull himself out of the semi-hypnotic state.
“Come on, Buck, we gotta go,” Steve says urgently and grabs his arm, pulling him to his feet.
He feels clumsy and he stumbles, but Steve drags him along. He digs in his heels and stops them, and Steve whirls around impatiently. “Buck, we gotta GO!”
He pulls his arm from Steve's grip and shakes his head. He can't concentrate. “Someone… someone started the sequence…”
“I KNOW!” Steve yells at him and he can hear frustration and fear. “We need to get you out of here! We’re not sure how many there are but we're under attack and we need to make sure they don’t get their hands on you or finish the sequence.” Steve reaches for his arm again.
He shakes his head again and jerks away. His brain is a fog, the words floating there, trying to come together, searching for the rest of it, wanting to connect into orders. He shakes his head again, like some kind of wet dog. “No. YOU Have to get out of here! All of you! The trigger sequence—”
“Wasn’t finished! You’re fine, now come with me.” Steve pulls him along again, dragging him out of the lab and down the corridor.
Steve's wrong. He knows that he's not fine, but he can't find the words to explain it and convince Steve because the unfinished trigger sequence echoes too loudly in his head.
Longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak, furnace, nine, benign, homecoming… Longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak, furnace, nine, benign, homecoming…
Clint wakes in a panic, an instant before a hand clamps down hard over his mouth. Adrenaline spikes through his body and he tries to roll, reaching for his bow on autopilot. But the hand is too strong and it presses harder and then there’s another holding him down. Clint goes feral, thrashing and fighting with everything he’s got to get free.
“Clint,” a voice hisses roughly in his ear. “Clint! Stop! It’s me!”
The voice connects in his brain and Clint’s eyes finally make out the shape of the person looming over him as Steve Rogers. He stops fighting, but remains taut with fight reflex, chest heaving and breath pushing loudly through his nose. Jesus Christ, doesn’t Rogers know it’s not a good idea to startle people like him awake?
Clint settles and pushes Rogers’ hand from his mouth. Cap relaxes his hold, but he stays where he is, still looming over him. “Clint. The compound’s been breached,” Rogers whispers urgently, then finally sits back and lets go of him.
There’s an explosion and a faint blue light flickers in through the window. Clint flinches noticeably, then feels his face heat at his reaction. He hopes that it’s dark enough that Cap didn't notice. Another explosion, closer this time and throwing more light, and Clint realizes for the first time that there’s another person in the room. He turns his head sharply and sees Bucky Barnes hovering near the door, looking… off. Clint pushes Rogers and he finally stands up so Clint can scramble out of the bed and grab some clothes. He’s wearing only boxer briefs because it’s fucking hot in Wakanda, and he catches Barnes’ eyes flicking across his body.
Clint long ago stopped being bothered by people’s reactions to the many scars on his body – not that that many people actually see them - but that doesn’t mean he appreciates when they stare. “Like what you see?” he asks with a hard edge as he pulls on his shirt. Barnes' eyes dart away, and at least he has the decency to look embarrassed for being caught staring.
Rogers looks at them both impatiently and quickly switches gears. “Clint, I need you to take Bucky. Get him out of Wakanda and somewhere safe.”
Clint hastily pulls on his pants, throwing a quick glance over his shoulder at Barnes. “What’s wrong with him?” he asks Rogers, sotto voce, but he sees Barnes sharp gaze return and his nostrils flare. Clint makes a note to himself: apparently Barnes has enhanced hearing.
Steve casts his own uneasy glance at Bucky. “We just pulled him out of cryostasis. I think he’s still a little out of it. He’ll be okay.” The last is said with Steve’s patented determination, as though he can control what kind of condition Bucky Barnes is in.
As Clint grabs his boots, he glances out the window to see dark shapes moving quickly toward the building. “Anywhere in particular you want me to take him?”
“No. And it’s better if I don’t know. Just get him out of Wakanda.” He holds out a cell phone toward Clint. “Check it every day. I’ll message you when it’s safe, but otherwise keep it turned off.”
Clint snatches the phone from his hand and jams it in his pocket. “I know how the spy stuff works, Cap.”
Another blue explosion rocks the building, closer this time. Clint ignores the chill that runs down his spine and grabs his go-bag and his bow, and slings his quiver onto his back. He sees Barnes scan the weapon and then look glassy-eyed up at Clint. Doesn’t matter what Cap thinks; Barnes is clearly out of it, barely registering the fight going on outside, listlessly gripping the pistol he’s got in his hand. It doesn’t look like he’s going to be much good in a fight if it comes to it. Fucking great.
“Come on,” he says, grabbing Barnes by the shirt and, with one last glance at Cap, pulls him out of his apartment and into the hall. Barnes stumbles but then finds his feet and Clint lets go, assuming the man will follow him. He does.
When they’d gotten to Wakanda, Clint had spent the first week getting to know every corner of the compound where they were quartered, and then moved on to familiarizing himself with the surrounding terrain - for miles. He’d accessed satellite maps online and plotted in his head every viable escape route – and several not very viable - trying to plan for every contingency since he (apparently correctly) figured they wouldn’t be safe here forever.
There’s a quinjet camouflaged on an airfield near their compound, but Clint doesn’t think flying is the smartest thing right now. Who knows what their attackers have in terms of air-strength and putting that kind of ship in the air isn’t subtle and will only draw attention. Ditto a vehicle, at least in the immediate vicinity. Clint understands that Cap is relying on Clint’s stealth here; if he’d just wanted someone he trusts, he would have sent Barnes with Wilson, or taken him himself, for that matter. The fact that he sought out Clint means he wants Barnes to disappear quietly. So Clint opts to travel on foot for now, because on foot they can slip away without anyone realizing they're gone – at least not for a while. He doesn’t need much time; if Cap and the others can hold off the attack for an hour or two, they can disappear into the night and no one will ever find them.
He leads them out the back of the building then rounds to the front where he stops to loose a few arrows at the black figures surging toward the front. It’s a diversion, really, just enough to make whoever the intruders are think that Clint's in the fight like they would expect him to be.
“You gonna fire that thing or is it just a fashion accessory?” Clint asks, nodding toward the gun in Barnes’ hand, even while firing four arrows in the other direction. Fifty yards away, three people go down.
Barnes looks down at the pistol in his hand and then quickly raises it and fires. Nine shots; nine bodies down. Clint whistles appreciatively and then grabs Barnes and pulls him back toward the building.
He takes them up to the roof and shoots a grappling arrow into a tree 75 yards into the thick jungle behind the building before hooking his end to the parapet. “Go,” he directs Barnes, low but firm. Barnes immediately understands and grabs the line with his metal hand, sliding silently into the darkness. Clint follows as soon as he’s clear, and then presses the trigger on his bow, retracting the line so their escape route won't be obvious, and coiling it up for future use.
Barnes is standing pliantly at the bottom of the tree, looking unsure and confused. Fuck. This might not be as straight forward as he thought. Barnes looks more like a spooked animal than a deadly assassin. “Hey. You okay?” Clint whispers.
Barnes turns his head slowly and stares. Clint curses under his breath.
“Listen to me!” he hisses fiercely. “You gotta get your head in the game, alright? We gotta move and we gotta move fast. Okay?” he asks. Barnes just blinks at him and Clint grabs his shoulders and shakes him a little, and when he does, Barnes finally comes alive, jerking his head up, using his metal hand to shove Clint, a hard, brutally efficient jab to the chest.
Clint gasps as he stumbles back a step, then watches warily, resisting the urge to rub his hand across the pain blooming in his sternum. This feels a lot more like what he’d heard about the Winter Soldier than Cap’s old buddy Bucky Barnes. But then Barnes looks at Clint’s chest, then up at Clint’s face, and he looks a little more clear-eyed and guilty, and less like a mindless killing machine, so Clint shakes off the pain. “Good,” he says, and turns to lead them away from the compound. “Keep up.”
He leads them along a stream through the jungle. There’s no trail, but Clint has walked this stretch more than once and he knows if he follows the drainage it will take them to Lake Turkana, and from there into Kenya. It’s dark and they can’t chance using any kind of light, but Clint’s vision is better than most and his eyes adjust quickly. Barnes moves easily behind him so Clint adds ‘enhanced vision’ under ‘enhanced hearing’ on the list of things he’s learning about the man. Barnes stays close but never says anything, and when Clint looks back at him periodically, he still seems like he’s in a daze. It doesn’t stop him from doing what Clint tells him to do, though, so at least there’s that.
********
They stop for water, and Barton pulls out a collapsible bottle and purification tablets from his pack. He fills it and shakes the bottle until the pills dissolve, then quickly guzzles the entire thing without stopping. After drinking two full bottles himself, Barton fills it again and hands it over to him. He takes it without comment and drinks.
“You okay?” Barton asks him.
It’s the third time he’s asked since Steve dragged him to Barton’s room and woke the man up. His reaction time had been impressive. He and Steve had been silent as they’d made their way through the corridor and then slipped into the room. But Barton woke before Steve could wake him and he’s pretty sure he would have done Steve some pretty serious – if temporary - damage if he’d woken a half-an-instant sooner, or if Steve didn’t have twenty-five pounds and super serum on his side.
He nods again, like he has the last two times, but he still feels like there’s a veil over his brain and he can’t shake it.
“Hey, man, I’m asking seriously,” Barton snaps at him. “I need to know if you’re gonna collapse or something so I can plan for it.”
He stands up straighter. “I’m fine,” he grunts, casting a defiant look at the other man. “We can keep moving. My body doesn’t need to stop,” he says pointedly, because Barton is looking a little ragged after ten hours of fast-paced and rugged hiking.
“Yeah, well, fuck you, too,” Barton says as he snatches the bottle away and shoves it into his pack. There’s a light edge to his voice, but he doesn’t sound completely pissed off.
The lush Wakandan jungle had quickly given way to a more arid landscape and then to a large lake. He has no idea where they are but Barton seems to know, so he follows obediently. Barton skirts them along the lakeshore where there’s plenty of foliage so at least they have more cover and can move with the hope of not being spotted. They started walking several hours before sunrise and have walked through most of the day. It’s a few hours from sunset when Barton stops them in a thick grove of trees and brush, this time dropping down to sit against a tree after he hands over the newly-filled bottle. “We’ll stop here for a while,” he says.
“I don’t need to stop.”
Barton snorts quietly. “Good for you. But I’m just a regular person and I need to rest. We’re going to have to keep moving all night and if I don’t get some shuteye I won’t be functional,” he says, then settles onto his side with his head on his pack.
He watches Barton for a few minutes and then closes his eyes but doesn’t sleep, words swirling disjointedly in his brain. Longing, rusted, furnace, daybreak, seventeen, benign, nine, homecoming…
********
A few hours later, he hears Barton moving quietly and he opens his eyes. His head feels a little clearer, but still not like it should. Barton is staring at him as he chews on something.
“You hungry?”
Is he? He glances down at himself as though looking at his stomach will give him the right answer. A second later, a protein bar lands precisely in the middle of his half-curled right fist.
He startles and snaps his head up. “Eat,” the other man says. “You’re hungry.” There’s an edge in Barton’s voice that he doesn’t understand. “Eat,” Barton tells him again a moment later, more gently this time.
He stares at it for a few seconds, then opens the wrapper and takes a bite, chewing without tasting.
“So, we were never really introduced,” Barton says after a minute. “I’m Clint.”
“I know who you are.” Clint is Steve’s friend. He knows that. Clint came when Steve called and got sent to prison for his efforts. He knows Steve believes they can trust him. He nods his head jerkily. Barton - Clint - stares at him, as though expecting something, but he doesn’t know what. If he could just think straight…
Clint rolls his eyes. “What do I call you?”
He narrows his eyes at the other man, unsure how to answer.
“I mean, what do you like people to call you?”
Like? He doesn’t have an answer – doesn’t know what he likes - and he feels his face flush in embarrassment.
There are a few moments of awkward silence before Clint speaks again. “You mostly go by Bucky, right?”
He jerks his head up and sees Clint looking at him expectantly. He feels suddenly irritable and looks away. “Steve calls me that,” he says flatly.
“Yeah. And judging by the way you flinched when I said it, I’m guessing you don’t want me to.”
He looks back to see Clint’s keen eyes assessing him. He shrugs. “I don’t feel like him anymore,” he says slowly.
“Okay,” Clint nods while chewing, accepting that easily. “Who do you feel like?”
He stares at Clint, who just waits patiently. Who does he feel like? He stares down at his new arm. Right now he feels like… "Soldier,” he says. “They called me Soldier." He feels more like that than anything, especially right now, with the trigger sequence still echoing in his head.
Clint’s face morphs angrily. “Yeah, no. I’m not calling you that,” he bites out, then curses under his breath before he grabs his water bottle and stalks off to go fill it. He watches with confusion as Barton – Clint – fills his bottle in the lake, adding the tablets and shaking it violently before drinking. Clint doesn’t guzzle it like he had each time earlier in the day. Instead, he takes smaller swallows and stops in between, staring for a long time across the wide body of water.
He stares, confused, after the other man. He’s obviously bothered by something and it’s at least ten minutes before Clint finishes the entire bottle and refills it, then visibly gathers control, stretching his neck and relaxing his shoulders. He’s calm again when he returns and hands over the full bottle. “Okay, your first name is really James, right? How ‘bout I call you that?”
He considers that for a second as he sips at the water. Something about it doesn’t sit right. “My ma’s the only person who called me James. When she was mad.”
“Okay. Not James, then,” Clint mutters and turns to start securing the pack. “You’re not making this easy, you know?”
He doesn’t know what to say. He has no answer that Clint will apparently accept.
Clint starts walking again and he follows close behind. They hike away from the lake, back into the arid landscape, but Clint keeps them off the road and as close to any kind of cover as they can find.
Clint seems tense and he knows that was misstep before, though he’s not sure why Clint was so bothered. He doesn’t feel like Bucky or James, and Clint doesn’t want to call him Soldier. He doesn’t know who he is. Or what. And he doesn’t really know this man in front of him. “Barnes,” he says to Clint’s back. “Just call me Barnes.”
Clint stops and turns around. “Aw, come on. Seriously? I tell you to call me Clint and the only thing you can come up with is Barnes? I don’t think so,” he says, shaking his head, then turns and starts walking again.
He doesn’t know what to say. He can’t think of anything else. No one has ever called him anything other than those things. That he remembers. Or maybe he remembers a deep voice murmuring “Baby” into his ear, but he doesn’t think he should tell Clint to call him that.
A few minutes later, Clint stops and pulls out the water bottle, taking a measured drink before tipping his head and giving him a considered look. “I think I’m gonna call you Jamie.”
“What?” he asks, confused.
“Yeah,” Clint says with a smirk. “I like it. It’s, you know, a nickname for James. You’re not Bucky and you’re not James – I get it. Jamie’s kind of a mash-up of both, but something completely different. New."
He furrows his brow. “I don’t think…” he starts slowly, but Clint cuts him off.
“Jamie. I like it,” he says and smacks him on his metal arm before heading off again, setting a fast pace up a rise. “Come on, Jamie, let’s go,” he calls over his shoulder and he catches a glimpse of Clint’s grin. “We’ve got a couple more miles to cover before it gets dark.”
Jamie. Jamie… he tumbles it around in his head. He doesn’t like it. Or… maybe he does. He’s not sure. He doesn’t know what to think. “I don’t know if I like that,” he says, pitching his voice so Clint will hear him, but not too loud in case there’s anyone else in the vicinity (though somehow Clint has so far ensured that they haven’t crossed paths with any other human beings).
“Look, man. I’m open to other suggestions,” Clint says over his shoulder, “but until you give me something else to call you that doesn’t intentionally put distance between us, or - Jesus – isn’t what those fucking assholes called you, then I’m going to call you Jamie.”
“Okay,” he says eventually, because he doesn’t have anything better to offer.
********
The first order of business is getting out of Africa and to a place where they can disappear. Or at least to a place where a couple of white guys can go unnoticed more readily. Clint used to have a handful of stocked safe-houses scattered across Europe but he decommissioned them when he retired. The paranoid part in him had held on to one, though, and he’s glad he did. It’s his most secure one - that even Natasha never knew about. It makes him a little ill that it even enters his mind that he needs to be hiding from Nat. He trusts her implicitly, but things are still kind of murky as to her status and he doesn’t want to put her in a bad position by making her have to choose.
He leads them to Ileret, in northern Kenya. It’s big enough and close enough to the Sibiloi National Park, (which gets a decent amount of tourism) that a couple of white faces won’t stand out as completely out of place. But that doesn’t mean he wants to just walk right through the middle of the town either, and he does his best to make sure they aren’t spotted. He circles them around the outskirts until he finds what he’s looking for – two National Park vehicles parked next to an administrative building. They’re solid Range Rovers and look to be decently maintained.
“Why are we waiting?” Jamie asks sullenly when Clint leads them back out to a patch of overgrowth about a quarter mile outside of town. “I could have the door off those cars in one second.”
Clint huffs. “We don’t need muscle at the moment, we need stealth. If we take one of the cars now, they’ll know within five minutes and be looking for us. We wait until we’ll be able to get a good few hours lead before they realize a car is missing.” He reminds himself that the Winter Soldier wasn’t so much a spy as a weapon, set loose at the whims of his handlers to accomplish missions primarily through brute force. “Settle in. We have a few hours to wait.” Clint tells him and does just that, himself, intending to get a few more hours of sleep so he can drive through the night. The ground is hard and unforgiving and Clint’s nowhere near as young as he was last time he slept rough like this. It kinda sucks, actually. He sighs and tries to get comfortable and then watches Jamie sit down with a disgruntled air.
Clint studies the other man. He doesn’t really know Jamie at all. Clint’d just arrived in Germany with Wanda and Lang when the shit hit the fan and they’d literally exchanged no words at all – hadn’t even been properly introduced. Not that Clint wasn’t fully aware of who he was. They fought together at the airport, but he and Wanda had paired off immediately, and he only caught a glimpse of Barnes and what he was doing during the fight; what he did see was pretty fucking impressive. Afterward, Cap and Barnes were gone and he and the rest of them were on the Raft. By the time Steve busted them out and got them to Wakanda, Barnes had already been in cryostasis for a couple of weeks.
Steve had filled in all the blanks once they’d gotten to Wakanda, and if he’s honest, Clint has to admit that what Barnes had been through struck a little too close to home and he was just as happy not to have to spend time getting to know a brainwashed assassin.
And now here he is, babysitting a brainwashed assassin for god knows how long. Clint sighs inwardly and settles in to sleep.
********
Ileret is at least 300 miles from Nairobi, but the Range Rovers both have two loaded gas cans on the back. Clint quickly takes the two from one and loads them onto the back of the rig he’s picked to take. It should be enough to get them there, but it’s also going to telegraph their intent loud and clear. He just hopes they can get to Nairobi, or close to it anyway, before the alarm is sounded and people start looking for the vehicle.
Clint jimmies the door open and then squints down the road. They’re close to the edge of town – maybe a quarter mile – and Clint turns to Jamie who standing there like he’s waiting for orders. “So, we could maybe use some of that muscle now.”
Jamie looks at him with a blank expression.
“I don’t want anyone to hear the car. We need to push this thing down the road,” he whispers.
Jamie nods slowly, then moves around to the back of the car and starts pushing. Clint gets a grip on the steering wheel with one hand and puts the other on the chassis, adding his muscle to the effort; realistically, though, Jamie is doing all the heavy lifting. He feels a flicker of guilt, then reminds himself that ‘super strength’ is also on that list along with enhanced hearing and vision. That’s just fine with Clint. About half-way there, Clint glances behind himself and sees the other man is staring straight ahead, his face empty. Steve had said Jamie was in cryostasis, and Clint doesn’t know jack about what exactly that entails, but it seemed to Clint that the guy had been way more animated when Clint had seen him at the airport. Something is definitely off. He seems a lot more like the video he’d seen of the Winter Soldier, and the familiarity of it all sends a shiver down Clint’s spine and nausea churns in his gut.
When they get far enough away from any inhabited buildings, they stop pushing and get in the car. Clint hotwires it and then looks over at Jamie, who’s staring out the windscreen. “You okay?” he asks again, because it reeeeeally doesn’t seem like he is.
Jamie turns his head slowly and blinks. “Fine.”
Clint watches him with creeping discomfort for a few seconds before putting the rig in gear and starting the next leg of their journey.
The driving is hard. He’s not using the headlights, but there’s only a quarter-moon and nothing in the way of paved roads for most of the drive, so it’s only Clint’s keen eyesight that keeps them on the two-tracks. Barnes – Jamie – is silent the entire time, staring straight ahead.
Steve had told Clint and Sam about the fight with Stark in Siberia and Clint can’t help sneaking surreptitious glances at him – and particularly his left arm. It’s matte black, not shiny silver like the one Stark ripped off of him. And thankfully there’s no fucking Russian star on it. “So, uh, you got a new arm, huh?” Clint says after a couple of hours of silence.
Jamie stares at his left arm and blinks slowly. “Yeah,” is the only response he gives.
Clint sighs. He really could use some distraction to help him staying awake. “Hey, how’s it work, anyway?” he asks, partly to try to keep the conversation going and partly because he’s actually really curious.
Jamie shrugs. “It just does.”
Clint nods. “That’s very enlightening. Thanks.”
Jamie just turns and casts his gaze back out the window.
Another hour and Clint reluctantly turns to him again. “Hey, you think you can drive? I’m running on fumes here and could use a break.” They’re on a decent-sized road now and it will take them right into Nairobi, so If Jamie can drive, he can grab a little more shuteye before the next leg of their journey, which will hopefully entail some sort of winged vehicle.
“Yeah,” Jamie rumbles, so Clint pulls over to the side of the road.
He takes the opportunity to fill the gas tank up again and then they’re back on the move.
“Just stay on this road. Wake me up in an hour.” Jamie just grunts and Clint rolls his eyes in the dark before he slumps against the door and falls immediately to sleep.
Jamie does as Clint directed and wakes him precisely sixty minutes later, just as they’re starting to get close to Nairobi. (The man’s compliance is seriously unnerving; he’d heard a lot about Barnes and his cocky swagger and there doesn’t seem to be any of that in the man sitting next to him.) Clint has him pull over and he gets behind the wheel again, skirting around the west side of the city and driving them to Nairobi National Park, where he hopes the rig will be assumed to belong there. It has the added bonus of being close to Wilson Airport.
Nairobi is over three million people but they still stand out more than most, so he finds an isolated corner of the park for them to hole-up for the day and rest some more until it turns dark again. Clint tries a couple times to engage Jamie, but all he gets are grunted one-word answers, so he gives up and focuses on sleep - with little luck. As the sun is setting, he starts them moving again, veering in a wide circle to take a quick look at where they stashed the rig. It’s still there, so no one has apparently noticed it yet. Clint breathes a small sigh of relief.
He finds exactly what he’s looking for in a remote hanger at Wilson Airport – an old jalopy of a plane whose looks bely the care that he knows bush pilots take of their livelihood. He feels guilty for stealing it, but he leaves $15,000 in US dollars - a quarter of the cash he has – with a one-word note of apology that he writes with his less-dominant hand. It doesn’t entirely assuage his guilt.
He flies them to Mogadishu – about the maximum distance the plane can go - where he pays a pirate $5,000 to ferry them immediately to Salalah, Oman. Clint gives him an extra $1,000 to make the plane disappear when he returns; he’s not overly optimistic that it will actually happen, but he hopes that maybe at least the guy will paint it and resell it and it won’t be located and connected to them – at least not any time soon. It’s a long miserable trip on the small boat and even Jamie looks a little green from the swells on the high sea. Apparently super serum doesn’t prevent seasickness.
The port city of Salalah has almost two million people and the population is generally lighter-skinned, so it’s easier to disappear into the crowd, especially once they don traditional clothing.
Clint’s never been to Oman, but he pretty much knows how to find the seamy underbelly of any place he is, and how to get what he needs; all it takes is money. It’s not hard to find someone who’ll make a fake passport for Jamie for $5,000 (Clint has several of his own concealed in his go-bag), so he cuts Jamie’s hair and tells him to shave (the guys is still eerily compliant and it continues to make Clint uneasy) and an hour later they have papers that will get them through any border in the world. A pilot with a longer-range plane and a willingness to fly them under the radar to the backdoor to Europe is even easier to find, but Clint has to shell out $30,000 to get them there. He’s down to $4,000 and by the time he converts 3/4 of it to Euros and the other 1/4 to Koruna, its value is greatly diminished (goddamned black-market exchange rates) and he’s starting to regret being so generous in Nairobi. But it’ll be enough money to get them where they’re going as long as nothing unexpected happens, and he’s got plenty more stashed once they get there.
He climbs into the co-pilot seat. He has an inherent distrust of people who make their living outside the law and Clint plans to keep a close eye on everything to make sure they get to where they’re paying the guy to take them. Jamie settles into the back, slumping down and looking like he really wants to sleep for the first time since they started their flight out of Wakanda. About an hour in, when Clint glances into the back of the cabin, Jamie looks to be sound asleep. The pilot banks the plane a little, causing the light of the rising sun to shine shining through the window and cast a warm glow across Jamie's face, and Clint sucks in a sharp breath at how young he looks. Without the long, dirty hair, days of facial growth, or murder-face he's been wearing, Jamie looks like the kid that it only just occurs to Clint he sort of is. He was probably in his mid-20s when he fell off that train during the war, and by all accounts, Hydra didn’t have him out of his box often enough for him to have aged more than a couple years beyond that.
Clint shifts back around in his seat, bone tired and muscles aching from days of moving nonstop. Knowing they have several more days of the same ahead of them makes Clint more than a little envious of the serum that keeps Jamie and Cap powered. He’s pushing 40 and he’s been feeling every one of those years since he picked up his phone to hear Cap’s voice all those weeks ago. He sighs inwardly and closes his eyes for a few seconds, almost tipping over into sleep before he shakes himself and forces them open again, reasserting his vigilance.
********
He plans to sleep during flight to Istanbul because he’s only slept a couple of hours since he came out of cryostasis and he still feels some lingering sickness from the boat they took from Somalia. He thinks he’s always hated being on the water. Clint’s tired, too, he can tell, but he’s in the cockpit, keeping an eye on the pilot; he appreciates Barton’s deeply suspicious nature. He stretches out in the back of the plane, his head pillowed on Clint’s bag and finally dozes off.
Longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak, furnace, nine, benign, homecoming… SOLDIER!
The command has him bolting upright and looking around wildly, his breath coming in panicked gulps.
“Hey, you okay back there?” he hears a voice and looks up to see Clint Barton staring at him.
He does a quick scan around himself, taking in his surroundings. Right, he’s on a plane with Barton. He squeezes his eyes shut tightly and rubs his hands up and down his face, then realizes that for the first time since he woke up outside of cryostasis in Wakanda, his head feels clear. Maybe since the triggering sequence wasn’t completed, the effects of the programming just… wore off? Whatever the explanation, he’s relieved.
“Hey! You hear me? Are you okay?” Barton asks again, more urgency in his voice this time.
He looks up to see Barton’s expression of wary concern. The pilot is also turned and is looking at him. “Yeah. I’m fine,” he says, then drops backward again. In his peripheral vision, he sees Barton stare at him for a few more seconds, then turn around to face forward again.
He doesn’t try to go back to sleep – doesn’t want to risk another dream like that, and he doesn’t need it anyway – so he stares out the window and watches the landscape below, reconstructing the last few days now that he can think straight. He looks toward the cockpit and studies Barton – no, Clint. He feels a brief moment of embarrassment at how the man had caught him staring when he’d climbed out of bed with virtually no clothes on, and tries to tell himself it was because he was half-triggered and he was in a fog, but he knows that’s not really true. He chases those thoughts away and focuses instead on the man himself.
He’s more than a bit of a mystery. He’d spent more time than he likes to admit during those couple of years after he’d managed to escape Hydra’s grasp researching Captain America – Steve – and by extension, the Avengers. Of all of them, Clint – Hawkeye – was the most elusive, and all he remembers ever really seeing had been a few shaky video clips from Manhattan and Sokovia, of a man high up, firing arrow after arrow (who uses a fucking bow and arrow?), every single one of them hitting true. He remembers fleeting admiration but mostly he was focused on Steve, so he’d dismissed the archer as largely immaterial.
When they’d first been on the run, Steve hadn’t said much about Clint except that they’d fought together in the past, and that he’d retired, but that he would come if asked and could deliver a powerful witch. There’d been too much going on for him to worry about the guy’s bio beyond the fact that Steve said he could be trusted. He doesn’t even know how the man had ended up in Wakanda – the last he knew, all of Steve’s friends had been locked up on the Raft.
He sighs. He has a lot of questions – not least of which is where the hell they're going. Clint’s been pretty vague about that, but given the compromised state he’s been in, he can’t blame him. He glances toward the cockpit and sees Clint sitting stiff and tense as the pilot speaks in Arabic. Clint responds but he can’t quite make out the whole conversation – something about borders and landing spots - but he can't decipher the rest because he doesn’t know much Arabic. He knows he can speak most Slavic and Romance languages, but he has no memory of learning them. His stomach twists at the thought.
Trying to distract himself, he shifts gears in his mind, retracing the previous few days to get a feel for how Clint operates and look for weaknesses. He can’t identify any real flaws. It reassures him a lot that the worst he can find to say about the guy is that he’s cocky, but he’s the last one to complain about that - he remembers enough about his life as Bucky Barnes to remember that people used to say that about him, too.
Bucky Barnes. He glances at the man in the cockpit again. Clint has been calling him Jamie. He never even considered that he could affect what people called him; he sometimes forgets he has choice in… anything. He isn’t James “Bucky” Barnes anymore, no matter what Steve wants to think. He knows that. And now that his head is clear, he cringes at the memory of suggesting Clint call him ‘Soldier’; he’d rather be dead than be that monster again. But… Jamie. He turns the name over in his mind, testing it out and seeing how it feels as he lets it settle into the cracks in his brain. Jamie. A smile twitches at the corner of his mouth.