“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

- Thomas Paine

War

401 KILLS

IF YOU ARE RECOVERING MY BODY FUCK YOU

Bucky snapped the lid of the lighter back, flicking at the wheel until a small flame appeared in the midnight air. For a moment, his thumb was lit yellow, then he leaned forward to light the end of his cigarette, and in second, the flame was gone, the yellow was gone, and all that remained was a tiny red circle of burning.

That, and the sour taste of smoke.

He’d always been a smoker. His father was a smoker, and his mother smoked in the yard when she thought no one was watching. His little sister used to wrinkle her nose up at the smell that permeated the house and turned the ceilings a dull yellow, but even Rebecca, in time, would smoke in the darkness after dance halls and parties. He’d seen her once on the bus, lit golden on the inside as it passed through Brooklyn on the way back from some do in Queens; she and her friends had been laughing, gaggled together by a window. Maybe she’d had a little to drink, because her laugh was loudest of all. In one hand, raised and loosely flung out the crack of the window, was a cigarette, almost burnt down to her fingertips.

She smoked for fun, his father smoked for appearances, his mother smoked for stress, and Bucky smoked for focus. Because, for a few minutes, he could watch the smoke dissipate; could do something non-violent, non-anything with his hands.

The Barneses were all smokers.

He couldn’t see the engraving he’d carved into his lighter, but he ran his thumb over the words anyway. 401 kills. He’d been in the army for less than two years, and yet he had four-hundred-and-one lives on his hands, bloody and bruised and dead. At least, he did a month ago, when he’d written it. Now the total was some twenty heads higher.

Bucky stuffed the lighter in his pocket and settled back down in the dark. Like all the nights in Europe, he had a feeling it was going to be a long one.

*

Bucky had met Steve Rogers in the playground. He’d been seven at the time, trying to flirt with Betty Turner by the apple tree, when she lost interest in him entirely to watch the scrawny kid who only showed up to half the classes get thrown onto the tarmac. Bucky had never really taken notice of him, but now he stared like everyone else as Ben Clark whaled on the kid.

Poor sap, Bucky had thought as he watched, and then – what the hell? as he stood back up, smeared the blood from his lip across his cheek with the back of his hand, and proceeded to fly back into the fray. He’d gotten back up. He’d gotten back up and was still fighting.

He was also still losing.

There was absolutely no thought process going on as Bucky pushed himself away from the tree and into the fight. Just the feeling that this was what he had to do.

He punched Ben Clark so hard the kid went reeling, his nose spurting with thick, red blood, and placed himself between he and the tiny boy on the ground. Bucky wasn’t the biggest guy on the playground, not by a long shot, but he’d been in his fair share of fights, and he supposed Ben Clark knew that, because he backed off, wary-eyed and sniffing hard.

“You shouldn’t get back up like that,” Bucky had said then, looking at the kid on the ground. He was tiny, really. All bare bones and gaunt features. His hair was a mop of yellow, and already red marks were forming across his face (and, Bucky assumed, his torso) from the hits.

“Well I’m not staying down here,” the kid growled, his arms shaking as he propped himself up on his elbows. Bucky threw out a hand to pull him up, and the kid eyed it suspiciously before taking it.

“I meant in a fight. Play dead. Stay down. You don’t get hit so much that way.”

“I’m gonna get hit whether I’m up or down,” the kid retorted. “So I might as well be on my feet. Why’d—why’d you help me, anyway?”

Bucky shrugged. “Looked like you were gonna die, I dunno.”

The kid cracked half a smile then, and it made his face seem more… alive. Like, all of a sudden, he wasn’t looking at a walking child corpse, but a real body; all flush with colour and vitality.

“Well… thanks,” the kid said. “That was a good punch.”

Bucky had shrugged, shoving his hands into the pockets of his trousers. They were too small; most of his clothes were. The only things that properly fit were his shoes, and that was because his next-door neighbour had passed them down to him only two weeks before. While Bucky hoped he’d grow a lot – he wanted to be bigger and taller than everyone else in class – he also hoped he wouldn’t grow for a while; his Ma had looked pinched and uncomfortable for three days after trading a week’s worth of milk for them.

“I’m Steve,” the kid said, and Bucky pulled out his hand to meet Steve’s.

“Bucky.”

“Bucky?” Steve pulled a face that made Bucky laugh. “Really?”

“James, then,” Bucky said, rolling his eyes and snatching his hand back.

“No, no,” Steve replied with a crooked smile. His nose was crooked too, and his eyes. Everything about Steve was a little off centre. “I like Bucky. It’s nice to meet you, Bucky.”

“Likewise, Steve.”

*

If there was one thing Bucky didn’t miss about the 107^th, it was the trenches.

The blood, mud and reeking stench of piss stayed with him for weeks afterwards; tracked in on his boots, in his clothes and hair, under his nails. It melted into his body, fused with his skin – sometimes he couldn’t even get it all off when he cleaned. Sometimes, he’d scrub so hard his skin would turn red and raw, and still dirt would stain it, still blood coated his hands, still he could smell the lingering scent of piss and shit and death.

Death, Bucky learned early on in the war, had a smell. It had a body and a voice and a cruel sense of humour. He would see Death out of the corner of his eye, and yet it always hid from him when he turned. It always vanished under his gaze, always melted into the shadows – but it stayed around him like perfume. It never really left if he could still smell it.

A cruel sense of humour, like he said; Death pretending to be gone but always there on the scent of gunpowder and stale rations.

Sometimes, Bucky would curl up in the smell, in the dirt and blood and piss, and he’d try to sleep. He never really succeeded; would just stay awake and listen to the far-off shelling, to closer gunfire, to murmuring and crying and screaming. He’d curl up in the shit and sewage and wonder if that would be his death bed; if this hole in the ground would be the last thing he ever saw, if Bucky Barnes had fought through the mean streets of Brooklyn just to die in some ditch in Italy.

Occasionally, he’d think about Steve in those moments. Rarely, barely; his best friend and whether he was still alive, still kicking on the other side of the world – whether he made it through winter without Bucky’s job at the docks and body heat on cold nights. His soldier pay was still being funnelled home, and Steve knew it was all for him – all for medication and heat and food; Bucky just hoped he’d suck it up and accept it.

Then, he’d stop thinking about Steve – because thinking about Steve’s chances at survival made his own feel even more dire. And then, maybe eight days after arriving, sometime twelve or fourteen, he’d be marched out of the trench and back to the reserve to wipe away the dirt and death and try to unsee everything that had burned itself into his eyeballs.

*

“I think Agent Carter’s got a thing for you,” Bucky said, relaxed back in Steve’s bed. They were somewhere in London, on a brief respite before the Howling Commandos were taken back to the war, back to the danger, away from the ritz and glamour of a city that hadn’t stopped for even a moment in the face of doom.

Steve looked at him in the mirror before focusing on tying his tie once more. “I think you’re imagining things.”

Bucky shook his head, reaching across to the nightstand and lifting the book he found there with mild interest. It was nothing he’d read before, and he thumbed through the pages idly while he waited for Steve to get ready.

They were going out and they were going to get drunk. At least, most of them were getting drunk. Good old Captain Rogers over there hadn’t been even tipsy since letting a group of crazy scientists inject him with a miracle formula with absolutely no questions other than when do you need me?

They were going to go out, they were going to drink, and maybe Steve would finally make a move on Agent Carter if she showed. Bucky had been sitting around, waiting for it to happen for a while.

“You know I’m not,” he said a moment later, as Steve pulled on his jacket. “Imagining things, I mean.” The two of them were dressed in their uniforms, all clean and sparkling for the first time in a few months. Bucky had even managed to clean the blood out from under his nails with a knife, and now he looked like he did back in those months before he was shipped out; when he could walk around in his suit and look like the war hadn’t yet touched him.

(The war had touched him, grabbed him, torn him apart and pieced him back together in the wrong order – but you wouldn’t know that from looking at him.)

The only difference now was that look in his eyes; cold, empty, like he’d seen a thousand deaths and at least half of them had been by his own hand. Like he’d stopped caring, too.

“I can’t make a move on her, you know that,” Steve continued, finally turning to face him. “There’s—” he sighed, and Bucky dumped the book back on the table; Steve was already looking away. “Rules. I don’t know.”

Bucky swung his legs off the bed, joining Steve by the mirror and straightening out his jacket as he went. He spun his best friend around to look at their reflection.

“There’s no rules,” Bucky said. “There’s just a gorgeous dame called Carter and there’s you – an average-looking shmuck with no self-preservation instincts.” Steve laughed and jabbed Bucky with an elbow. “She’s interested,” Bucky promised. “You’ve just got to go and get her. Ask her to dance, buy her a drink – hell, just sit with her and talk until she makes a move; she seems like the kinda lady who would do that.”

Still, Steve didn’t look so won over by the idea. Bucky shrugged, clapping his hands on Steve’s shoulders. “You don’t just let a dame like that get away, Steve. You’ve gotta go for it.”

“Right. Right. And what will you be doing while I go for it?”

Bucky tossed him a lazy smile. “I’m going to drink myself stupid and dance with whichever girl smiles at me first.”

They laughed, and Bucky led them to the door.

*

The bar was crowded with people and smoke; music from a live band played throughout the joint and everyone was shouting and yelling to make themselves heard. Further back, people were dancing; loose and happy on a Friday night.

They joined the other Commandos at the booth they’d grabbed and ordered two scotches before Dugan started in on some overexaggerated story. Bucky laughed in the right places and drank in the lulls, and he watched as Steve’s eyes roved the entire bar throughout. He would be searching for Carter; the beautiful lady who was their boss, who had barely even looked Bucky’s way the first time he met her.

It was the first time in his whole life that he’d felt invisible, and he loved it.

Never before had little Stevie Rogers had the eyes of every dame in the room, let alone the best of them all – and now every woman that walked past did a double take for Steve alone. Agent Carter looked at him like he was both reckless and admirable – the same way Bucky had always looked at him.

Finally, someone else was seeing Steve the way he did. Finally, everyone was seeing Steve the way he had since that day in the playground, when he kept getting back up even when it was best for him to stay down. Betty Turner hadn’t looked his way again for eight years out of some kind of grudge or spite that he’d left her alone by the apple tree, but it had been worth it to see Steve the way everyone saw him now. (Also, Betty Turner had eventually forgotten his ignoring her and kissed him behind the sweet shop when they were fifteen – so he hadn’t lost anything, in the end, just gained.)

As the night wore on, Bucky felt looser and louder than he had in a while. London did that to him, alcohol did that to him; the dancing and the lights and the atmosphere did that to him.

He danced with every girl who looked his way; swung them around the dance floor and handed them back to their boyfriends or soldier one-night-stands when the song was over. He hadn’t danced like this in a long time, hadn’t thought he ever would again when he was six foot in the ground, ducking to avoid the shell that tore Private Phillips clean in two.

(Phillips kept moving, kept screaming, kept crying even when his legs were long gone and his torso was riddled with shrapnel and holes. Everyone was silent in the trench; everyone gaped and waited for Phillips to finally fall silent – but he didn’t. Not for a long time. He just wouldn’t die, and he wanted to so badly, to stop the pain, to stop the agony, to stop the feeling of Death lurking in the periphery but refusing to take his hand. Eventually, Bucky couldn’t hold out anymore, grabbed his gun, and shot Phillips twice in the head.)

The band was finally winding down when Bucky caught sight of Carter. She was in her uniform, rather than a dress, but was by far the most beautiful woman in the room. And she was smiling at Steve, the two of them leaned against the bar, glasses in their hands, heads tilted together like co-conspirators.

Bucky twirled the girl in front of him – they never had exchanged names, just latched onto one another for a song or two – and watched over her shoulder as Carter spoke. He couldn’t read lips and was too far away to hear her words, but Steve ducked his head like he did when he was smiling, and her lips quirked upwards as she watched.

If someone had told Bucky even a year earlier that Steve Rogers was going to have a wife and kids and a whole life after the war was through, he would’ve hit them for raising his hopes like that. He would’ve smacked them for making light of the fifteen years he’d spent by Steve’s bedside, nursing him back to health and crying in the night, sure that it was going to be Steve’s last.

But here it was in front of him. Steve was going to fall in love with Agent Carter; Agent Carter was probably already in love with him – they would win the war, get married, and start their lives together, and Bucky—

Bucky would probably be dead in the ground. Because he’d realised a long time ago that Death wasn’t following him for kicks; but merely biding his time before he latched on for good.

*

The girl Bucky went home with was called Cindy, and she was eager and enthusiastic. Bucky left sometime around sunrise, nodded at the soldiers on the street that passed him, walking home just like he was, and let himself into the hotel room the SSR had paid for. He collapsed into his bed, and finally slept.

He dreamt of shooting Private Phillips in the face.

*

In one of Bucky’s numerous stints in the trenches, there was a cat with yellow-white fur that Bucky called Stevie. There were thousands of cats across all the trenches in the war – out of all the problems they had, rats were no longer one of them – but Bucky rarely saw any of them; just the yellow-white Stevie who would sit on his shoulder and paw at the trigger of his rifle, as if he wanted to make the shot himself.

Bucky told some of the soldiers in his company that Stevie had the same colour hair as his best friend from back home, and when the human Steve sent letters and chocolate to the front, the men nodded their approval.

“Too sickly to join up though, eh?” one asked, though he knew the answer – Bucky had told them all before about the winters and the pneumonia and the medicine that never seemed to last long enough.

“And pissed as anything about it,” Bucky replied, Stevie the cat on his knee, a three-page letter in his hands. He didn’t have a girl back home to go back to; no dame sending him photos or letters doused in perfume – just Steve and his folks and his little sister, whose letters all came at once, months of them delivered in a stack bound with string. He kept as many as he could, and replied as often as possible, though sometimes it was difficult to get a single word out, even when he was out of the dirt and catching up on a week’s worth of sleep.

When he read them back over he’d count the lies and know it would do them better than knowing the truth.

Ma, I’m eating fine, and the guys are all nice, thank you for the socks it gets cold out here—

Pa, thanks for the smokes. I heard rumours the war might be over soon and I can’t wait to be back home—

Becca, I’m sleeping great don’t worry. I’m never in the trenches for long, though there’s a cat out here I called Stevie and he keeps me company whenever I’m around—

Steve, I’m so fucking scared

Steve I can’t sleep

Steve I’m gonna die I know I’m gonna die

Steve I named a cat after you

Steve I miss our shitty apartment, spooning you when you’re hypothermic is a thousand times better than spooning Carlson’s dead body

Steve, thank you for the chocolate – all the boys were so jealous when they saw it. I’m glad you got work for that magazine, I hope I can see the art when I get back. Remember you can use any of the money in my account, whenever you need. Winter’s coming soon and I don’t want you to freeze. I know you don’t like going out but try to have some fun – I’ll teach you how to dance again when I get home and then maybe you’ll finally come with me to a dance hall and not step on a girl’s toes—

*

There was a jet-black cat in France that followed the Commandos for six hours before Bucky finally took pity on it and picked it up.

“Didn’t know you like cats,” Dugan said, one eyebrow cocked.

Bucky shrugged, holding the cat to his chest with one hand and holding his gun with the other. It was early Fall, not cold but no longer sweltering hot, but the cat snuggled up against his coat anyway, like it was dying for the warmth.

“There was this mangy thing back in Brooklyn I used to feed,” he said in response. Up ahead, Steve turned his head, just slightly, to listen in. He still did that despite his deaf ear healing up with the serum; pointing his formerly good ear in Bucky’s direction, not wanting to miss a word. “It used to live around the neighbourhood, all skin and bones, and I’d feed it whenever my parents were looking the other way. Wasn’t much, you know? A little milk, a little fish if I could swipe any. Pretty sure three other houses on the block were doing the same thing, but it never got any fatter.

“Then there was the one who lived in the alley beside our apartment. We called her Suckerpunch because that’s the kind of hit Steve took the day we found her—”

“I was knocked out cold,” Steve added as they walked. The group laughed, though before they were silent and listening, probably committing every fact to memory. That’s what it was like sometimes; having to hold every story close lest they be forgotten when the storyteller was shot in the head. “Bucky scared off the guy who hit me and I woke back up with a cat on my chest while Bucky was swearing and cursing and trying to wake me up.”

“She figured out which fire escape was ours and if we had anything to spare we’d leave it out for her. In the winter we’d bring her into the apartment though – she was tiny and we didn’t want her to freeze. She’d sleep in Steve’s bed whether the heat was out or not, and then when it warmed up she’d go back to being an alley cat. Then there was Stevie, in the trenches.”

“Who now?” Steve asked, glancing over his shoulder.

“I remember Stevie,” Jones said, having been in the same trenches Bucky had been in a year prior. “That was your cat, right, Sarge?”

Bucky nodded, and to answer Steve’s questioning look, said, “There were a lot of trench cats. They ate rats and kept us entertained out there. Sometimes they showed preferences, and there was this one that liked me best – I called him Stevie because he wouldn’t stop following me around.” The men laughed and Steve did too, though they both knew deep down that Bucky had been the one following, and Steve had always been the leader of the two. Bucky shrugged when the laughter peeled away, the path they walked along quiet once more. “Cats like me, I like cats. This one’s called The Witch.”

“You named it already?” Morita asked, almost looking like he was smiling.

Bucky shrugged. “It’s been following us for six hours, I’ve had the time.”

“The Witch?” Dugan asked with a scoff.

Bucky sniffed and held the cat a little tighter. “Name it yourself if you don’t like my choice.”

He carried The Witch through Southern France, through bombed villages and small towns, through marshland and forests and empty, hollowed out buildings. Early on, The Witch took to sitting on his shoulder, or climbing in his bag and poking her head out the top. He gave her some of his rations and she’d sometimes go stalking through the underbrush for some of her own. Occasionally, he’d use the glint of sunlight on a canteen or watch-face and let her follow the spot of the light on the ground, leaping and bounding for it, paws neatly placed over the top until he twisted the watch a little to the right and her eyes followed it, full of shock.

Some nights, when they slept without tents, Bucky and Steve would place their bedrolls near to each other, near to the fire, and The Witch would slip between them and curl up, falling fast asleep long before either of them had stopped whispering about home and memories and faraway things that Bucky thought he’d never see again.

*

Steve had found him in a Hydra base, strapped to a table and mumbling the same thing, over and over and over. He’d long forgotten what the words meant, just that they were the only sounds his mouth could wrap around, the only ones he could remember how to make:

“Barnes. James Buchanan. Sergeant. 32557038. Barnes. James Buchanan. Sergeant. 32557038.”

Months later he would wake up with the same words on his lips, muttered in sleep, insistent that it be the first thing he said when he awoke.

Months later he would still be dreaming about the experiments, about the torture, the injections and incisions and hands on his skin like it was theirs to own, not his.

Months later, he’d whisper Barnes. James Buchanan. Sergeant. 32557038 over and over until his heart rate slowed and he stopped hearing alarms in his ears and his head felt a little less like it was about to be torn from his shoulders any minute.

*

WHEN I DIE BURY ME FACE DOWN SO THE WHOLE WORLD CAN KISS MY ASS

He took a long drag of his cigarette before looking through the scope. From his spot in the tree, the whole valley was spread out before him; sloping hills brown with mud, and a small brick building, free standing and ominous. It wasn’t built in a great defensive position, with rising hills on two of its four sides, and long dirt road leading out the other two. There was a barbed wire fence around it, however, and check points at the mouths to the valley, with armed men wandering about the clearing.

Dusk had settled nicely, the sun setting behind the far hill, and Bucky waited. He was good at waiting, which was lucky, because war was ninety percent waiting, ten percent dying. He was good at being silent and still, and sitting for a long time, watching. He was good at being a sniper – he’d been picked out early on as having talent, and had it trained until it was sharp, lethal.

On his back, The Witch had long settled in for the ride, still travelling with the unit and seeing the world as she did so. A few times he’d hidden her from Colonel Phillips or Agent Carter; higher ups who might scowl and take the cat away. Bucky might just cry if that happened. He had only cried a grand total of three times since shipping out for the war, and he really didn’t want to make it four.

Stevie had been the only good thing about the trenches and The Witch brought those same feelings back; a smaller life relying on him, a good life relying on him. Bucky hadn’t felt needed since leaving Brooklyn; he’d felt useful in the army, but not needed. And even when Steve came back—

Steve didn’t need him anymore. Steve was six-foot and bulky with a bulletproof shield and a higher rank than Bucky. Steve had access to classified documents, had a team of his own, had all the allies watching with eyes wide. Steve was a national fucking hero.

Stevie, the cat, was none of those things. Stevie, the cat, liked it when Bucky fed him. Stevie, the cat, came to him every night because he preferred curling up on Bucky than anyone else.

He blinked his thoughts away. The only problem about waiting was that his mind tended to wander. On his back, The Witch twitched, and Bucky did a slow sweep of the valley through his scope. Eventually, his gaze landed on Dernier, crouched near the top of the far hill, poking out from behind a tree.

Bucky watched the guards change shift, watched the rotation start up again, caught sight of Dum Dum hiding in the hills. He went through the motions, over and over, taking occasional drags of his cigarette, blowing out the smoke and feeling The Witch kneading her paws against his back. Then, right as darkness settled over the valley, the Commandos moved in.

If he’d just gone through the waiting, now the dying started.

It began with gun fire from all sides, then an explosion and scattered body parts. Bucky stayed quiet, watching through his scope as guards fell down, one by one, and puddles of red soaked into the mud. He didn’t want to give away his position, so kept an eye on the fight as more guards raced from the building with bigger guns, as suddenly a red, white and blue shield flew into sight, decapitating Hydra soldiers and sending their bodies sprawling.

Only then did Bucky start shooting.

He did it methodically, one after the other. Headshots, each one.

Bucky shot the men that crept up behind Steve’s back; he shot the men that looked for him in the treeline; he shot the men holding the biggest guns, and watched the Commandos race to enter the building, weapons raised and alert.

He took out the rest of the stragglers and the injured-but-not-quite-dead who could still radio for backup, before slowly climbing out of the tree, letting The Witch jump from branch to branch to his shoulder. He packed up the rifle, slung the duffle over his shoulder, and swung the submachine gun he’d rested at the bottom of the tree around to his front. Bucky held the bag open for The Witch to jump into, then zipped it almost shut, and started towards the base.

When he neared, he crouched in a defensive position beside a car and waited, keeping an eye on the hills as he waited. Then, when he heard footsteps from the building, tensed and raised his gun.

“Sarge!” a voice said, and he lowered it again. He poked up from behind the vehicle, spotting Gabe Jones in the doorway. “You’ve got to see this. Come on!”

Bucky took one last look around before darting into the building, following Jones down the hall to a staircase, leading both up and down. Jones took the stairs down two at a time, and Bucky followed behind, taking note of the bodies along the way.

Downstairs, there was a makeshift medical suite – though to Bucky’s eyes, it looked more like a torture chamber. The table was rusted in all the wrong ways and the tools hadn’t been cleaned as well as they should’ve. There were bodies here, too, on the floor, new blood pooling around them – but the body the Commandos were crowded around was on the operating table, still alive, writhing.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Bucky breathed, joining the others.

On the table was a man, bloodied and bruised and destroyed. His head was tilted back, eyes squeezed shut, and limbs clamped down to the table as he laboured over his breathing. It looked like everything hurt him; like breathing was pushing against the purple bruises on his ribs, like lying there was aching the angry red marks at his restraints.

Morita was trying to check over him, but every touch made the man howl in pain, which in turn made him whimper, and Bucky watched the tears that rolling down towards his temples, lost in his hair, balding with burns.

“What do you think happened to him?” Jones whispered, and Morita shook his head, peering over the man.

“I think he’s been tortured,” Morita replied, matter-of-fact. The man hissed and cried, and Bucky turned a slow circle around the room. He took it in, one item at a time: x-rays on the wall, redacted papers and files on the desk, a series of syringes, some empty, some containing liquid in bright colours.

“He’s an experiment,” Bucky said, certain.

“What?” Steve asked, as Bucky stepped towards the syringes. He lifted one carefully, frowning at the remainder of the purple-blue liquid coating the inside of the barrel. “You think so?”

“I know so,” Bucky replied, showing him the syringe. “And it’s probably killing him.”

The unit frowned at him, before looking back to the man. Eventually, Morita sighed, and said, “If he’s got that in his system, who knows what it’s doing to him.”

“What do you think they were trying to do?” Jones asked, and from the other side of the room, Dugan lifted a slip of paper to the light, replying, “I think they were trying to make another Captain America.”

And that always was the way, since this war began.

Hydra and the Nazis trying to replicate Steve; a one-off miracle. There was supposed to be an army of him, before Dr. Erskine was killed. There was supposed to be a battalion, not just the one man.

Bucky’s mind flew back, for a split second, to Azzano, to the table and Barnes. James Buchanan. There was no doubt in his mind that whatever they did to him, they were trying to replicate Steve.

(Funny, he thought, because Bucky had been trying to be more like Steve for as long as he could remember.)

He had no idea if it worked, just that he wasn’t like this man on the table, wasn’t writhing in agony, wasn’t dying. The serum didn’t seem to work on Bucky, but it was killing the man, here.

Across the room, Falsworth lifted a metal chain on his finger, dog tags clinking together. “Lieutenant John Campbell,” he read aloud, pronouncing the rank leftenant, like the Brits did. “From the United Kingdom.”

Dernier found torn clothes in the corner, coated in dried blood. “British Paratroop Company,” he read aloud, chipping away at the blood with his thumb.

“Can you help him?” Steve asked, a frown stuck firmly over his features.

Morita studied the body in front of him and, minutely, shook his head. “We don’t have enough pain meds to stop him from hurting, and I have no idea what’s in his body—”

“Okay,” Steve said softly. “Okay. Dugan, collect whatever files you can find – take one of the syringes, too. Maybe someone in the SSR can analyse it. Who checked upstairs?”

“We did, Cap,” Falsworth answered, nodding to Dernier. “Empty bar a few bunks for the guards. Couldn’t find anything of use in their packs, either. At the ground level is just office space – you saw. Nothing of note.”

Steve nodded. Sometimes, Bucky could see the change between Steve Rogers and Captain America. For most, they were the same man, but for Bucky, he knew they were two. It was Captain America giving the orders; firm jaw, straight back, all hard lines and filling the space of this new body. It was Steve Rogers who looked down at the dying man, who shrunk in on himself, eyes softening, like he was trying to be as small as he used to be, as invisible as he once mastered.

Bucky watched Captain America turn into Steve Rogers and then turn back again.

“What are we doing with the Lieutenant?” Morita asked. On the table, John Campbell had stopped crying and was struggling to breathe; gasping and huffing like there was too much oxygen and not enough all at once.

“I’ll… uh.” Steve nodded down to him, and Morita nodded once, his face carefully blank.

Bucky stepped to Steve’s side, and the two of them waited for the room to be cleared. The others filed out, taking what they needed as they went.

“Set the charges,” Steve said as they left, and Dernier saluted him without looking back.

Then they were alone with the dying man.

“Was it like this? For you?” Bucky whispered into the quiet.

“No. There was a chamber. It was like they burned off my skin and stretched me out all at once. The light was so blinding I thought I’d never see again. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“In… In Azzano. Was it like this?”

Bucky blinked down at the man below him, flashes appearing behind his eyelids. The cages, the beatings, the electricity that coursed through him, occasionally waking him up even now. He shrugged. “Yes and no.” He sighed. “Go outside. I’ll meet you up there.”

“I need to—”

“Go on, Steve,” Bucky said. He pulled the strap of his duffle off his shoulder and handed it over, a small mew coming from inside the canvas. Steve studied him for a moment, as Bucky pulled out his handgun and checked the clip.

In his periphery, Steve’s hand hesitated in the air before landing on Bucky’s shoulder. “One of these days,” Steve said, low and soft, “you’re gonna have to stop protecting me.”

Bucky scoffed. “In your dreams.”

He waited until Steve’s footsteps had receded all the way up the stairs before turning off the safety. In the moment, Bucky smelt that familiar scent; Death reaching his fingertips out and brushing along the side of Bucky’s hand. Always at the edges of his vision, but now settling over the man before him like a heavy blanket; this one is mine, here, give him to me.

Bucky had murdered and maimed and mercy killed, and it was just another on the list when he lifted his gun to the man’s forehead, and gave him one last moment to gasp in air. And, like he knew, Lieutenant John Campbell opened his eyes, and met Bucky’s gaze.

Then a shot rang out, and Death said thank you, and Bucky joined the other Commandos.

*

Becca, I’m glad to hear you got the job – you’re gonna kick all kinds of butt out there. Please don’t take Henry’s shit like that, I know you think he’s cute and all, but I went to school with that guy and he couldn’t tell his ass from his head. I’m eating fine, sleeping okay, and Steve’s doing good, too. We have a cat in the unit – she followed us and I couldn’t help but bring her along. She’s as good at mice killing as the trench cats were, and she’s cute, too. A few weeks ago we slept in real beds for the first time in a while, but we’re back to bedrolls and the ground now we’re moving again. One day, after the war, you should visit Europe. When it’s rebuilt, anyway. Right now it’s a mess – but maybe one day the buildings will be standing again, and people will be home again. A month ago we were in this small town, and there was a piano crammed into the corner of a bar. You should’ve heard everyone singing along. It was like there wasn’t a war, weren’t guns at everyone’s hips, like Captain fucking America wasn’t standing around, looking all… Captain fucking America, as opposed to Steve fucking Rogers. It was like it was before the war. Light. Happy. I love you. Send Ma and Pa my love, too.

*

“Have you kissed her yet?” Bucky asked, smoking out Steve’s hotel room window.

Behind him, Steve spluttered for a moment. “No! Buck—I haven’t! Why are you so obsessed with this?”

“Because I don’t want you to die a virgin,” he replied easily, blowing the smoke away before glancing over his shoulder. Steve was staring at him, wearing his Captain America getup in the middle of the bedroom.

“I’m not a—”

“Steve.” Steve silenced. “I’ve known you since we were seven. If you weren’t a virgin, I’d know about it.”

“Bucky.”

He cracked a grin. “What? It’s fine! I’m not judging! I’m just saying there’s a fine dame downstairs who you could absolutely have a roll in the hay with before you do something dumb like letting a Nazi shoot you.”

Steve frowned. “If it looks like a Nazi bullet is gonna kill me, you gotta shoot me first.” Bucky cocked an eyebrow. “I ain’t letting a Nazi kill me.”

“You got it, Stevie. I’ll shoot you if you ask Agent Carter out.”

“Bucky! I’m not—I don’t think I even like her that way.”

Bucky blinked, then crushed his cigarette on the window sill and flicked it out into the night. “Am I hearing you right?”

“Buck—”

“Did you just say you’re not even into Agent Carter? Agent Carter, an eligible woman who likes you. I thought the serum fixed your shit, Steve? How are you so blind?”

“Bucky—”

“No, seriously, Steve. We’ve been on enough double dates that I know you have no game. I’ve tried to teach you, Lord knows I’ve done my time – but you can’t talk to women to save your life, you can’t dance, and you sure as hell don’t have the guts to neck with a girl behind a theatre or something. So you turning down the one woman who is not only interested in you, but actively pursuing you is the biggest pile of steaming horseshit I’ve ever heard!”

“I’m just not—I’m not interested, Buck! I don’t know what to tell you. I thought I liked her, but—”

“But what? But she’s too intelligent? Too confident? Too attractive? Steve!”

“God, Bucky! Just let me like who I like!” Steve huffed, exasperated.

“I wish I could! But apparently the problem is you not liking her!”

Steve rolled his eyes and flopped back on his bed. It made the posts screech in protest, and Bucky shook his head.

“You do this a lot, you know,” he said after a moment, quiet as anything.

“Do what?” Steve asked, though he didn’t sound interested in the answer.

“You get this close to having a good thing, and you push it away.” Bucky huffed and flopped down in the bed next to Steve. They’d shared beds since they were young; both for nights spent at each other’s houses, and then later, in their apartment in the winter months, with no heat and Steve’s immune system weak and poised to attack.

“I don’t push you away,” Steve muttered.

Bucky scoffed. “I’m not a good thing,” he replied.

“You’re the best thing.”

“Steve—”

“No, you are. You’re the best thing in this shithole. In all of France and Italy and Europe. In this war. You’re loyal, and brave, and you’re still looking out for me, even though I’m twice your size and a little bit immortal.”

“Don’t tempt fate, Stevie.”

“You’re the best thing,” Steve repeated, firm.

Bucky was too tired to argue that he wasn’t; that he was the farthest thing from the best there was – that his kill count was so high he couldn’t even picture that number of people. That he’d stopped cleaning out the blood from under his fingernails because he knew more would wind up there anyway. That he and Death were becoming old pals with how often they spent in each other’s presence.

Instead of arguing, he shut his eyes, and listened to Steve’s soft breathing, to the music from a nearby bar, filtering into the night, and to the soft padding of The Witch’s paws on the floor, before she jumped onto the bed and settled between the two.

And in the quiet, Bucky let himself fall asleep.

*

Bucky was hardened in a way the other men weren’t. Sure, they’d all seen death and misery, they’d all killed and hurt and suffered, they’d all sat in the same shit-and-piss trench as him (bar Steve, who’d never seen a day of the real war in his life) – but they weren’t emptied out like Bucky. They hadn’t been forced onto a table and left mutilated, broken, delirious; they hadn’t been pumped full of something unknown that made his skin burn and ache, but refused to kill him. They hadn’t said their own name so many times that it lost all meaning for them.

So when they needed to interrogate a Hydra operative, it was Bucky that they left to do it. Steve’s resolve had slowly crumbled when the Nazi wouldn’t speak, when the Commandos started threatening punishment for silence, and Bucky had seen it go. He didn’t think anyone else had noticed it, but Bucky knew every tell Steve Rogers had, and that meant he’d do it alone.

The cyanide pill had already been ripped from his mouth, so now the only thing stopping the Nazi from speaking was his own will, and Bucky had seen enough of them broken to know how to do it himself. When he slipped out his knife, he emptied the room, and let Death guide his hand until the man was sobbing, screaming, wailing.

Only then did he talk; names and locations and begging for the end. Only then did Steve barge back into the room, grabbing Bucky’s hand and yanking it back from where he’d pressed the knife into the Nazi’s skin and couldn’t comprehend pulling it out. Only then did the interrogation end, and Falsworth shot the man in the head, and Steve didn’t loosen his grip on Bucky’s wrist.

*

Only a few nights later, Bucky was on watch, staring out into the dark. They were camped in the middle of a forest a few clicks from the location the Nazi had given up, and they’d probably set off at daybreak to make it to the base. Then Bucky would likely scale a tree and watch for a few hours; take note of rotations and guards, weaponry and machinery. Then, when dark fell once more, they’d blow the bunker to smithereens.

It was a tried and tested method, one they used over and over with varying degrees of obstacle along the way. Someone might get shot, or break their leg, or their gun would jam and they’d be defenceless until they could fix it. Sometimes Steve forgot he was faster than the others and would end up alone and surrounded, if not for Bucky’s position as a sniper. Sometimes Hydra would know they were coming – maybe heard it through the grapevine or caught sight of them on their journey – and the whole thing would be a trap.

Bucky didn’t like traps. Azzano had been a trap, and the 107^th had been a mouse, tail caught and squealing.

He let his mind wander, as it often did in the dark – wander across the campfire, his friends’ sleeping bodies, across Europe and the sea and all the way back to Brooklyn, where Becca was probably getting engaged to Henry Jameson, despite Bucky’s misgivings, and his parents would likely be trying to fit all of his and Steve’s possessions from the apartment in his childhood bedroom.

His mind wandered down familiar streets, into the grocery store and theatre and dance halls. He thought about Annie Weaver, his virginity lost in a shoebox apartment while her parents were at work, about working in the dockyard and grinding the soft skin of his hands hard, about the pencils he bought at the art store for Steve’s birthday, even though there were cheaper things.

He wandered through Coney Island, the beach, the dark of bars and the bright light of sunrise. There was the fire escape where he and Steve pulled the mattress to sleep on in the dead of sweltering summer, there was the cat that joined them with her pathetic mews, there was their next-door neighbour giving them oranges, and their phonograph playing the same three records over and over and over—

And through Brooklyn, there was the boat to London, there was training and shooting and fighting. There was the moment he was handed his dog tags, his name imprinted on one side, JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES. Then being thrown into a war, into marching and waiting and dying—trenches filled with blood and gore and a bandage wrapped around his hand, red seeping through; Phillips bleeding into the mud and two bullets in his face; watching Baker sleep in the mess the next night because there was nowhere to rest that wasn’t already claimed by Death and his trail.

Then Azzano. A trap; moths to flames and mice to cheese, falling down the hole and surrounded by hundreds of men with glowing Hydra weapons that don’t just kill but disintegrate. The cages they were locked in, too cramped to even sit; no water, no food, no sunlight, and then—

The table and everything that came with it. The smarmy little scientist who smiled at his pain and pressed his clammy hands to Bucky’s skin over and over; the syringes and knives and echoing pain that had him forgetting who he was, forgetting who he had once been, and his name became less than words, less than anything, and he dreamed:

He dreamed that Steve was there, all tiny body, skin and bones, hunched and sickly with long delicate fingers and a crooked nose from Bucky’s resetting the breaks three times. He dreamed he was home, on the fire escape, Steve on one side and the mangy alley cat on the other. But even those dreams were painted in pain—

“Buck?”

He blinked and he was in the woods, crouched at the base of a tree in the pitch black of night. Ahead of him, Steve crouched, too, holding Bucky’s wrists in a firm grip.

“Steve?”

He could see the vague outline of a relieved smile. “Yeah. Yeah – you were rocking back and forth, Buck. Crying, it—”

“Sorry for waking you.” He snatched back a hand and wiped it roughly across his cheeks. Steve was right; it came back damp. Oh well, he thought. That’s four.

“It’s okay,” Steve said. He shifted, moving beside Bucky and settling against the base of the tree. Bucky relaxed his legs, stretching them out in front of him. He did a quick scan of the perimeter – how long had he been stuck inside his own head? – before looking at Steve. “You alright?”

“’M fine.”

“Buck.”

“Really. I’m just—homesick. Miss the city, you know?”

Steve nodded and the two lapsed into silence. A bird flew overhead, rustling the leaves, and Bucky tracked its progress until it settled on a branch. Ahead of them, the campfire had long gone out into red embers, and the other Commandos laid sleeping; curled figures in the dirt.

Then, quiet as anything Bucky had ever heard: “Maybe you should’ve taken that honourable discharge.”

“What?”

Steve wouldn’t look at him. “Maybe it would’ve been better for you. If you’d gone home. You—you shouldn’t have joined the Commandos when you had a route out of this shit. I shouldn’t’ve offered it to you—”

“Steve—”

“No, I—I knew you’d say yes if I asked. I shouldn’t have asked you.”

“I’m fine out here—”

“No, you’re not.” He huffed. “You haven’t laughed in weeks. You look—look fucking empty, Buck. Like someone scooped out your insides.”

“Everyone looks like that out here.”

“Everyone looks tired. You look like you haven’t slept in a year.” Maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he hadn’t slept since he got the letter in the mail. Maybe he’d been awake for every inch of war he’d lived through.

“I’m not gonna leave you out here. Where you go, I go.”

Steve’s laugh was empty, quiet. “I know, that’s the problem. You could be home right now.”

“Not without you I couldn’t.” He blew out a breath. “It’s not home if you’re not there.”

“Buck—”

“Captain America’s not going back to Brooklyn after all this. You’ll be shipped out and used for—for intelligence or something. I don’t know. But wherever that is, that’s where I’ll be.” If I live that long, he didn’t bother adding.

Steve had turned to face him, and though Bucky couldn’t see his eyes, he felt the way Steve was looking at him; like he did when they argued, all emotion and feeling that he couldn’t contain.

“You don’t have to follow me to the ends of the Earth, pal,” Steve said, soft.

Bucky scoffed, rolling his head to look at him. “Well I don’t wanna be homeless—” and that’s when Steve kissed him.

*

Steve, I’m sorry I didn’t—

Steve, you’ve got to understand—

Steve, I don’t have the words in my mouth and my hands won’t write them any better—

God, fuck, Steve. I’m sorry—

*

Bucky didn’t move, didn’t react, just sat there, eyes wide as Steve kissed him.

It was—soft. Bucky hadn’t expected that. Sure, he hadn’t expected Steve to kiss him, but softly? Steve Rogers was all grit and fight, and yet here he was, holding Bucky like he was fragile, delicate, and kissing him like he didn’t want to make it hurt.

And this was Steve Rogers. Steve who he’d shared a bed with countless times. Steve who he changed in front of with no hesitation or worry. Steve who—well, fuck, Steve who was his best friend. Steve who led him into battles and scrapes, who always got back up after he got hit, who drew Bucky so carefully, tenderly—

It was like that kiss. He kissed Bucky in the same way he drew him. Caution in getting the lines right, touch feather-light. Bucky had sat a hundred times for Steve’s sketching; had been painted from every angle in every light; fully clothed, shirtless, lounging on the couch or cooking dinner. Sketches of Bucky filled every one of Steve’s sketchbooks; his hands, his smile, his body sat on the window sill as he smoked and stared out across the view.

And it all slotted together in Bucky’s head, about the same time he began to relax, his eyes threatening to close—and that was when Steve pulled away.

Neither breathed or spoke or moved. They stared, they were silent, still as the statues Steve had shown him in the art gallery in Manhattan. Then:

“Oh, shit,” Steve breathed. “I shouldn’t’ve—Buck—I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—I don’t know what that was, fuck, shit—I can’t, I don’t,” and he was scrambling back, like he hadn’t been aware of the kiss while it was happening, and then the memory flooded into his mind all at once.

Bucky gasped in a breath. “Steve—”

“No, shit, fuck—I’m. I’m gonna do a—a perimeter check. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

As Steve climbed to his feet, off kilter, Bucky followed. He stumbled forward, grabbing Steve’s arm and yanking him around to face him. Steve looked—he looked petrified. He looked fucking terrified and Bucky wasn’t saying a word, just staring at him with all the confusion he had in his body displayed on his face.

It was probably the fear in Steve’s eyes that made him say, “It’s okay,” when really he wanted to flail and scream and ask a thousand questions—what, why, when, how, what the fuck fuck fuck.

“It’s not—I shouldn’t have—”

“No, it’s—it’s okay. You’re—you’re fine,” Bucky said. Steve looked no less afraid, and Bucky could figure why – if it were anyone else, Steve would be leaving the army with the blue ticket; at home, he’d be a pariah, a fairy, a queer to be scorned and unemployed for the rest of his life. One kiss could bring everything down around him, if it were anyone but Bucky.

But it was Bucky, and he didn’t have the time or effort or courage to look into why it was Bucky, but it was – which meant he’d never tell, never snitch, would keep this quiet to his deathbed and even then, Death would be in the dark. Death who knew all Bucky’s secrets wouldn’t be privy to this one.

“It’s okay,” Bucky repeated. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Steve slowed for just a moment and Bucky almost wished it were daytime; that he could see Steve’s face and know how he was feeling – but then Steve might see Bucky’s face, and any of the men might see the kiss, and suddenly Bucky was very grateful for the dark.

“I’m gonna check the perimeter,” Steve said after a beat. He pulled his arm from Bucky’s grip and started off into the dark, his only weapon the pistol at his hip.

Bucky watched him go until he merged with the black, and then he stumbled back to the tree, collapsing against it with heaving breaths.

Steve. Steve—kissing him.

He shook out his hands and screwed his eyes shut tight. He listened for sounds of an ambush, but only found Steve’s footsteps, gentle on the forest floor.

*

Bucky was half asleep, lying in on the sofa in the splashes of setting sun. Brooklyn was an orange glow out the window, the cool breeze wafting through the apartment, and Bucky was having trouble keeping his eyes open. Everything was… quiet. Quiet, soothing, relaxing. Someone was playing the saxophone across the street; someone else was laughing and talking down by the road; and there were the familiar, soft sounds of Steve’s pencil, scratching at his paper.

And Bucky, stretched out; one foot dangling to the floor, the other propped on the arm rest. An arm loosely slung behind his head, another across his stomach. He’d have to think about dinner soon; about boiling whatever they had left in the cupboards and maybe eating the last of the apples that had felt like such a delicacy when he bought them. They’d maybe push his mattress out onto the fire escape if it was as hot as last night and sleep out there in the cooler air; Steve and Bucky pressed together between the window and the railing.

Maybe he’d read before the light died entirely. Steve had bought him a pulp novel at the market and Bucky had been working through it slowly, dragging out the story and making it last, to make the most of the pages. He’d likely read it three times over before trading it for something else, and even then he’d tell the story to himself – mythical, magical things he’d never even thought of existing; time travel and other worlds, aliens and laser guns and space ships, exploring the stars.

His eyes fluttered shut, and he just listened to Steve’s breathing, to him drawing, to the birds outside the window. He’d more than once thought that he could live in this moment forever; that he’d be more than happy to live out the rest of his days just like this one, with Steve and a crummy apartment and a warm summer day. Screw marriage, kids, and a house in the suburbs – this was where Bucky pictured when he thought of home.

This was what he’d be imagining on the cold nights in Europe. This was what he’d fight to come home to.

The draft letter burned a hole in the pocket he’d stuffed it into when he found it that morning. He wouldn’t tell Steve, of course. He’d tell him he enlisted, would tell him it was his duty, would promise that he’d be back, two years tops. Then he’d come back home – he’d tell Steve about the letter at Coney Island or the theatre or someplace happy – and he’d stretch out on the couch just like this, and he’d hope that Steve would draw him.

“Don’t fall asleep over there,” Steve said, soft.

The corners of Bucky’s lips turned upwards. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” he replied, though he would. He absolutely would.

*

In his dream, Steve was kissing Bucky.

Funny how a kiss can unravel you. Funny how it can tear you apart and uncoil your insides. Funny how it can shine a brand new light on every interaction you can recall.

Steve’s hand on Bucky’s wrist. Steve sketching him in the dying sun. Steve saying I’m not interested about Peggy – though, was he interested in Bucky? Was he—

You get this close to having a good thing, and you push it away, Bucky had told him, the night Steve had revealed his lack of interest in Peggy. Maybe he’d liked her once, or tried to like her, or maybe he was lying for appearances and couldn’t keep it up.

I don’t push you away, Steve had replied – was this Steve going back on his word? No, Bucky thought, because Steve wouldn’t have kissed him to push him away. Steve would never push Bucky away, not matter what he did, no matter who he was.

I’m not a good thing.

You’re the best thing.

He’d said it so surely. You’re the best thing, like there was no room for argument, no version of events where Steve felt any less about him.

Bucky dreamed of Steve kissing him and in his dream he kissed back.

*

If the men noticed something was off, they didn’t say so.

Night turned into day into night into day again. They kept walking through forests, through shelled towns and the husks of what was once houses and homes. They killed the Nazis they came across and slept where they could. They took turns carrying The Witch when she was bored of Bucky’s duffle, and fed her scraps of rations even when they were running dangerously low.

And Bucky pretended Steve hadn’t kissed him, no matter how he was replaying it on a loop in his head.

To be fair, Steve was pretending he hadn’t kissed him, too.

It was for the best; the war didn’t care about kissing and friendship and love and everything in between. The war cared about killing, and land, territory, prisoners – it cared about intelligence and bullets and camps filled to the brim with people and corpses.

After the mission ended, they were crushed into a cargo plane back to England, where they drank and danced and tried to forget whatever horrors they’d seen – and Steve still talked with Peggy, but he didn’t brush his hand on her arm anymore, and he didn’t talk about dancing and dates and after the war anymore, and Bucky felt unbalanced for noticing.

And then it had been three weeks since the kiss, since Bucky had called him his home and Steve had broken whatever binds had held him back, and Bucky was standing in the hotel corridor, knocking on Steve’s door before he’d thought it fully through.

It was the middle of the night, so Steve opened the door rumpled and dressed for bed, clearly having been woken up. His brow furrowed when he saw Bucky, eyes alert with worry; “What’s wrong? Has something happened?”

Bucky pushed past Steve into his room. His uniform was laid out carefully on the side, his bed clearly recently used. The room was dark, though, and Bucky didn’t want to do this in the dark again, so he flicked on a lamp before turning back to Steve. “Something happened three weeks ago and we haven’t talked about it,” he said, swallowing hard.

Steve shut the door. The furrow had gone but the worry was overflowing now. He stepped further into the room, eyes on Bucky alone.

“I—uh. I thought you wouldn’t want to talk about it.”

“I don’t. Didn’t. I do now.”

“Are you drunk?”

“Tipsy,” Bucky allowed. “But it’s—it’s It. I can’t—I don’t know how to do this sober.”

“Do what? Bucky, I thought—”

“Well that’s dangerous,” Bucky said. “You should do less of that.”

Steve huffed, and propped himself nervously on the edge of his bed. He wrung his fingers together and quietened, as if he knew that Bucky needed the space to speak. (Of course he knew; Steve knew everything there was to know about Bucky Barnes, just like Bucky knew everything there was to know about Steve Rogers.)

“I don’t. Uh. You’re—a queer. That’s—is that the term?”

Steve shrugged a little helplessly. “I think so.”

“Can I—since when?”

“A while. It’s—it’s been a while.”

“Right. Right.” Bucky started pacing. Had drinking before this been the right move? Well, if he were sober, he’d be in bed, not having this conversation. So—no, maybe it hadn’t been the right move. Maybe they should’ve left the matter alone, never picked it back up. Maybe a lot of things. “I’m not—I kinda wish you’d’ve told me, but I. I get why you didn’t. That’s—that’s a nonissue.”

“A nonissue.”

“Yeah.” Bucky nodded and stared at the hotel room painting. It was ugly. Steve could paint better. “I was thrown for sure. But it’s—you’re my best friend. It’s a nonissue. My, uh, my main point is about… the uh. The.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

He sighed through his nose before pressing his fingertips into his eye sockets and pushing hard until he saw colours and felt the fuzzy good kind of pain. Absently, he remembered gouging out a man’s eyes only the week before. He’d been caught off guard, his gun had been wrestled away. He pulled his hands from his face and bit the bullet.

“Did you not wanna go with Peggy because you wanted to go with—with me?”

Steve looked like he’d been sucker punched; like he didn’t think Bucky would really say it out loud – and he almost hadn’t. It was a whisper, a hoarse question barely making a sound in the room. But Steve didn’t have a bum ear anymore; he had super soldier hearing, too sensitive for his own good. If Steve was like—like he used to be, Bucky could pretend he’d never said anything at all.

“Do you really wanna know the answer to that?” Steve asked.

“No. Yes. I don’t—Steve, I don’t fucking know. I just—we don’t lie to each other. I won’t lie to you if you don’t lie to me.”

“You don’t really have as much riding on this conversation as I do,” he replied easily.

“Steve.”

“I don’t know, Buck. I liked her. I really did. She’s—well she’s incredible. You know that. But she kissed me last time we were in London—”

“She did?”

“Yeah. Just once, when I walked her back to her room. And when the door closed I realised—I realised I was wishing she was someone else.”

“That she was me?”

“I don’t—I don’t know, Buck!” He stood suddenly, and Bucky tried to ignore how his face was red and how he was probably a lot more uncomfortable than Bucky was, and—“I just didn’t want it to be her. I don’t wanna ruin us, Buck. I don’t want you to feel weird about me—Christ, I’m your commanding officer—”

“Oh, fuck that.”

“No, I am. And I don’t wanna put stress on our friendship – I shouldn’t’a done it, and I’m sorry.” Steve began pacing, his hands flailing wildly as he spoke, trying to apologise, trying to make things right. But Bucky knew things weren’t… they weren’t wrong. Just off-kilter. “Things have been tense between us since it happened and that’s on me. I don’t think the men noticed but they might if this keeps up – so I just want us to get it out in the open, okay? We need to make this work and—I’d understand if you don’t want to go back to what we had before, but, Jesus Christ, Bucky, you’re my best friend and I can’t do this – I can’t be this – without you, and—”

Bucky kissed him.

It was brief, but he did it, and Steve shut up very suddenly, eyes wide with shock. When Bucky pulled away, he felt Steve follow, just for a moment. Then everything was silent.

“Jeez,” Bucky said, forcibly casual, “if I’d’ve known that k-kissing you would make you shut up I would’ve done it years ago.”

“Buck.” It was so strained, so ridiculously hopeful, Bucky couldn’t take it.

“I don’t—I don’t know,” he said, an answer to an unasked question. “I just—I need time. I need—like, a hundred years, or something.”

Steve nodded. “Okay. That’s okay.”

Bucky huffed, a smile so close to his lips he could taste it – or maybe he was tasting Steve. Maybe this delirious, giddy sensation was the taste of Steve’s mouth. “This is so stupid,” he said at last. “We’re in a fucking war. Jesus – they’d kick us out in a heartbeat—”

“I know—”

“Well, maybe not you. You’re Captain America. They’d cover it up, probably. Jesus Christ, Steve.”

“I know.”

Bucky shook out his hands, then stilled, looking at Steve, smiling that big, ridiculous smile of his, so fucking happy. And all because Bucky was willing to—to what? Consider it? Consider falling in love with Steve? Consider fucking men? Consider something he’d never once even let cross his mind? And what if it didn’t work out? What if Bucky realised he wasn’t attracted to men, just wanted Steve as a friend and nothing more? He’d have to crush Steve’s big dumb smile under his boot.

But—and this was what kept Bucky rooted in that spot: it was Steve. It was Steve Rogers. If it weren’t, he would never have brought it up again. If it weren’t, he wouldn’t have raided the bar downstairs and come to his room in the middle of the night. If it weren’t, he would never even let the thought cross his mind.

If Bucky was going to love another man, it was going to be Steve or it was going to be no one.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “Okay. Okay. Tell you what.”

“What.”

“I’ll—I’ll take the time. All hundred years if I have to, and I’ll—I don’t know what I’ll do, but I’ll work it out, I dunno. God. Okay. And I’ll—I’ll tell you. When I’ve figured it out.”

Steve was still smiling, and he nodded now, before reaching out a single, hesitant hand, and taking Bucky’s. It was like that kiss – soft and gentle and everything he’d never describe Steve Rogers as.

“Okay. You tell me,” Steve said, quiet.

Bucky nodded. “Here’s—you know what?” His hand tightened around Steve’s with the sudden thought, and he stepped closer. “If I wanna—if I wanna try things. With you. You know—like that. I’ll give you my tags.”

“Buck—”

“We might not get to talk about it. We might not get to be alone again—God fucking knows there’s no privacy out there. So, if I give you my tags—that’s. That’s my answer.” It was a dumb idea, he realised suddenly. Why would Steve want his tags? Why would Steve even wait around for him to fumble his way through all this just to get his tags? Why—

“Okay,” Steve said. “Okay. You give me yours and I’ll give you mine.”

“Steve—”

“It’s only fair,” he said, smiling. “Figure out what you’re feeling. Then come back, alright?”

Bucky nodded. “Alright.”

And this time, they kissed each other.

*

Less than a month later, Bucky fell.

His life didn’t flash before his eyes; it just stood there, screaming his name from the hole in the side of the train, arm stretched out but not reaching, not catching—

Bucky fell into black, his life screaming in the snow the last thing he saw.

*

Ma, I heard we’re gonna get some leave soon, but I don’t know how soon – maybe I’ll be home before Christmas, maybe I’ll get to be stateside for a few days, come back home to Brooklyn. I need some of that bread that the bakers sell across the street – the circle loaves all braided like Becca’s hair. I’ve been craving it for weeks—

Pa, I need smokes. I need a thousand of them. I need a whole room filled to the top with cigarettes that I can burn through. I think the end is coming, I think we’re not far off. The work the Howling Commandos have done has been vital – people keep telling me so. Maybe it means we’re almost there. I haven’t smoked in two weeks and I’m drowning. When I get back, shove a pack in my hands and don’t let me leave the house ‘till I’ve smoked through them all—

Becca, I’ve been thinking and I’ve decided that if you have a son you better name him after me. I’m an American hero, after all. And if you have a daughter, well, you should name her after me, too. I don’t know any girls called Jamie but she could be the first. Also, ask Ma how to make that apple pie I love so you can raise your kids on the best damn pie I’ve ever tasted (don’t tell Steve’s mother; she’ll roll in her grave if she knows I prefer Ma’s apple to her rhubarb). I hope I can come home for your wedding, maybe I’ll be back in time—

Steve I don’t know—

Steve, I’ve thought it over—

Steve, I wish you’d draw me again--

Steve, here. You have them, if you want them. You have me, if you want me. It’s—I’m all yours. Fuck. See, I wasn’t sure until just now. I looked over at you – we’re all at the campfire right now, and soon we’re gonna be going to the Alps, and honestly, I’m just excited to be warm. Tomorrow it’ll be freezing fucking cold. Tomorrow I’ll probably die of frostbite, and I don’t really wanna wait until I’m dead to do this. But you’re over there, and Dugan’s arguing with Jones, and Morita just told the worst joke I’ve ever heard, and you’re laughing, and I realised, watching you laugh, that I could do this for the rest of my life.

Watch you, I mean. Laugh, I mean.

And I meant what I said a long time ago in that shitty London hotel room – I’m no good. Not for you. I don’t deserve whatever it is you’re offering, everything you’ve given me in the past – but I want it anyway. I want you, anyway. I haven’t been selfish in a long time – I’ve been a killer and sinner, but I haven’t been selfish. But I want to be, just this once. Holy shit. Holy fucking shit. This is all new to me, but I’m willing to learn it for you. I’m willing to try.

Steve, burn this when you’ve read it. My words aren’t for anyone but you and they’re certainly not for whatever government fucker finds them and issues us blue tickets all the way back home. Burn it and I’ll tell you it all again if you forget what I wrote. Because, Steve, I’ve never tried loving a man before but for you I’ve run headfirst into wars and Death’s wide, gaping jaws, so this is easy in comparison. This is like breathing.

I thought it’d take all hundred years to figure out, but it was only a few weeks of soul searching and wondering how it would feel to love you, how it would feel to be loved by you, and in the end it was so simple. It was you, laughing. I wanna make you laugh for as long as I can. I wanna make you smile till we’re old and grey and the only thing to smile about is that we made it.

So, take my tags, and I’ll take yours, and if I die in this shitty fucking war, don’t tell them we switched; let me be buried under your name – and some fifty years from now, you can be buried under mine.

*

Steven Grant Rogers, the tombstone in his mind’s eye read. Bucky was buried beneath; soft earth piled overhead, cold and cool under the ground.

And then he wasn’t. Instead, he was covered in snow, and his life was speeding away on a train, a whole mountain above him.

Winter

Soldier was cold. Soldier was always cold. Even when he was warm, Soldier was not. Handler #4 said it was because he was in the chamber so often, while Handler #5 told him to quit being a little bitch. Soldier did not think he was a little bitch, but Soldier did not know much.

These are the things Soldier knew: how to use any gun placed in his hands with startling accuracy; how to kill with one hand and his eyes closed; the sound a neck made when it snapped.

These are the things Soldier did not know: who he was before he was Soldier; his handler’s names; what his last mission was.

Soldier did not know more things than he knew, but his handlers told him he didn’t need to know things – he needed to do things, and the two were not mutually exclusive. Soldier did not know what mutually exclusive meant, but he knew when to be quiet, and he knew when he was not supposed to ask questions, and this was that moment.

*

Soldier had a routine. It started with a form of sleep that was… not sleep. Not exactly. Soldier did not know exactly how sleep felt – he couldn’t remember ever having done it – but he knew it was not this. He knew it was not in a chamber, iced over and frozen, and he knew he was supposed to not be tired when he woke up. Soldier was not tired, but he was not not tired.

Soldier would be wrapped in a blanket, then, and ushered into a shower. A handler would watch as he stood beneath the water – always the wrong side of hot, but Soldier didn’t have opinions and judgements – and then Soldier would dress. Soldier would be given his assignment, often in a brown file, with faces and facts to memorise, and then he would be bundled into a van or a plane, and he would follow the mission. After, he would come back, take off his clothes, and step back into the chamber.

Sometimes, he would be placed in the chair, before or after the mission. They would make his entire body scream with pain, each time like the first; though he couldn’t remember having sat in the chair before, the entire event was familiar, and then he would shudder and spasm until they thought he was done.

Sometimes, they would make him compliant. He had the feeling it was more often than not, but again, Soldier had no memories of this.

*

19^th May 1945

ASSET #67b9

PROJECT WINTER SOLDIER

PROGRESS REPORT

#67b9 has aggressive tendencies, and frequently disobeys direct orders. Has attacked and injured handlers, guards, and medical staff on more than one occasion. #67b9 does not react well to being touched, spoken to, fed, or washed, and lashes out whenever staff get within arm’s reach.

#67b9 still says “Barnes. James Buchanan. Sergeant. 32557038” during fitful sleep and episodes of shellshock when awake. #67b9 does not use the weapon unless attacking staff, and otherwise leaves it limp. #67b9 attacked Private Babinski, allegedly yelling “He’ll come for me. You fucking hear that? When Captain America comes you’ll fucking wish you’d died at my hand.” Private Babinski left the altercation with one eye gouged out by the weapon, and his left arm crushed.

As #67b9 still refuses to be obedient, it is recommended that techniques used to subdue and neutralise become more direct. Arnim Zola has offered designs for a machine that may help to erase the “human” part of the asset, and Dr. Adamovich has recommended verbal conditioning to make #67b9 more agreeable.

*

Soldier stepped silently through the house. It didn’t matter that he was wearing heavy boots; his footsteps were too quiet to be heard. At the end of the hall, a door was lit yellow beneath with a faint glow – likely a bedside lamp, Soldier noted, his eyes scanning the other doors in the hall. The one to the bathroom was open, and he pointed his gun inside as he paused to poke his head in – empty, silent, the tap dripping every three seconds like clockwork.

A child’s bedroom to the left, he believed, but only by the door open a crack. The body in bed was curled up and small, barely visible, most likely asleep. Soldier would remember their presence, however, as the mission wore on – he could not forget potential witnesses. He did not believe his last assignment was so stringent on witnesses, but he could not be sure. He didn’t sit on the thought for long, though he had the faintest recollection of a little girl crying, staring up at his blood-splattered body in terror, as he stood in the corner of her father’s bedroom.

He did not know where the thought came from, either, and elected not to chase it down.

Soldier paused by the door at the end of the hall, where the faint glow emanated from. Likely his target – a Captain Jessop of the now-deceased SSR – and his wife were inside, though he could not tell if they were still awake. At least one would be, due to the light, but he did not know if it was his target or the civilian. He supposed it didn’t really matter.

Soldier turned the doorknob slowly and opened the door only an inch. In the gap, he could see the bedsheets moving, but nothing else. His presence had gone unnoticed. For a moment, he watched the sheets rise and fall, accompanied by only the quietest of breathing, then he heard a gasp, a little louder, and cocked his head to the side.

He pushed the door open a little further, and watched the bedsheets move with more purpose; two figures tangled underneath, moving and breathing. Soldier wasn’t sure what he was seeing, though he had the faintest feeling he might’ve, once.

At a moan, Jessop hissed, “Quiet,” but kept moving. “We don’t want Harry to hear.”

Soldier decided that he would have to kill both Jessop and his wife – no witnesses was in the parameters of the mission, and he couldn’t stand here and wait for them to fall asleep. He did not care about this decision, just clicked the safety off his gun and stepped into the room, pushing the door fully open.

It was enough of a noise for the movement to halt, and Jessop to spin, wide-eyed at the door, expecting his son to be standing there—but. It wasn’t Jessop.

Soldier blinked. The man gaping was not his target, but—ah, the man beneath him was. Maybe, Soldier thought for a brief half-second, he was as worried about Jessop’s wife walking in as he was about Jessop’s son. Neither had thought the Soldier would be there; a worse result than either of their worries.

He shot them both neatly in the head, pistol silenced, and watched them bleed over each other, naked and covered barely by the sheet that had fallen from their bodies upon the Soldier’s entrance.

Soldier glanced over to the bureau in the corner, and pulled the locked drawers open with the weapon. He took the files and folders inside, and slid the drawers shut behind him. On the way back down the hall, he checked into the boy’s bedroom – still asleep, unmoving – and then left the house the way he came.

Upon returning to base, Handler #8 nodded and took the files, and sat him at a desk to debrief. They went over each point of the mission, step by step, Soldier answering in monosyllables and short, terse nods, until—

“Witnesses?” Handler #8 wasn’t even looking at him, rather flipping through the files he’d stolen.

“One,” Soldier replied. Handler #8 glanced up. “Dealt with.”

“The wife, I assume.”

Beneath Soldier’s mask, he almost cracked a smile. Almost. “Or the husband.”

Handler #8 blinked, flattening the files on the table. He straightened in his chair, and said, “The target was with a man?”

“The target was under a man,” Soldier corrected.

After a brief pause, Handler #8 nodded, and called for the guard. “Take the Asset to the chair before returning him to cryo. Wipe him.”

“Sir,” the guard confirmed, and those were the last three minutes Soldier remembered Captain Jessop and his lover.

*

S.H.I.E.L.D. REPORT

CLASSIFICATION LEVEL 8

FROM THE DESK OF DIRECTOR CARTER

21^st August 1958

The confirmed death of Captain Ronald Jessop has been ruled an assassination. He and his civilian male lover were shot in the early hours of Monday morning, while both they and his eight-year-old son, Harry, were present in the house. Mrs. Jessop was visiting her mother at the time.

The ballistics report Soviet-made bullets, and the back-door handle crushed, as if by a particularly strong hand. The drawers of the bureau in the master bedroom were forced open, and all contents have yet to be recovered. It is unknown what was kept within those drawers, and whether anything classified may now be in enemy hands.

From the official reports, it is believed that the killer was Russian-aligned, though not much else is known other than possible considerable strength on their part. This is unconfirmed, however. No witnesses have come forward, and no further evidence has been uncovered.

*

Soldier was placed in the cryo chamber, and when he drifted off, he dreamed of someone kissing him.

*

Soldier was placed in the cryo chamber and dreamt of nothing.

*

Soldier was placed in the cryo chamber and he fought the guards and handlers until one neck had snapped under his fingers, and a tranquiliser had been administered into his body. Good, he thought, I don’t like falling asleep in the ice.

*

S.H.I.E.L.D. REPORT

CLASSIFICATION LEVEL 7

FROM THE DESK OF AGENT HALLIWELL

March 2, 1975

Agent Olesya Koslov, former Russian spy before defecting to S.H.I.E.L.D. in 1973, was killed in her apartment in Washington D.C. on March 1, 1975.

According to forensics, she put up a struggle; her furniture was in complete disarray upon police arrival, and her gun had shot four bullets – out of the nine holes found in the room (two of which were on her person). The blood splatter is also consistent with a close-up fight, and Agent Koslov appeared to have dragged herself across her apartment after being injured.

Blood found at the crime scene is currently being tested, in case the killer’s DNA is discovered.

Agent Koslov had previously given multiple statements on the workings of Soviet cells, the KGB, and KGB-funded training grounds called “Red Rooms”. She was working in a small team to infiltrate and gather more Russian intelligence and would have been travelling to Russia on March 4.

Her American-born team have all confirmed life and are being held in various safe houses. It is believed that a leak of intelligence led to Agent Koslov’s death, and that the killer knew she had already reported classified Russian information, and was prepared to continue doing so.

The crime has been ruled an assassination, and Agents Blake and Shepherd have been assigned finding the assassin.

*

Soldier was awake. Soldier was never awake, so it was strange now. He had been out of the ice for three days, and he no longer felt as if he were curled up inside himself in the fetal position. Rather, he filled his whole body. He did not remember a time when he had done so before.

After thawing out and spending a few agonising minutes in the chair, he was dumped in a cargo plane. He did not know the handler’s names, though he felt he’d never known any of their names and numbered them all. Handler’s #1-6. Handler #3 was very short, and Handler #5 looked at him like he was an animal. Handler #1 spoke about him as if he wasn’t there, while Handler #2 shot worried glances his direction all the while.

After the plane, he was led into a nondescript black van, and they drove for a while in an unknown direction. There were no windows, so he waited in the darkness, while Handler #3 radioed that they were en route, and Handler #4 clenched their gun so tight their wrists trembled a little. Soldier simply sat, upright, stiff as a board, and waited for instructions.

Then they were at a low, decrepit building with barbed wire fences and broken windows. The entire neighbourhood – residential, it seemed – was clouded over with grey, and all the paint on the block seemed to be peeling off. Down the street, a few kids were playing with unfamiliar toys, yelling at each other from the middle of the road.

Soldier was led into the building and immediately into the basement, where a service tunnel took them a short way to an adjoining basement. There, they waited for three days.

All six handlers got nervous and antsy fast, but Soldier sat quietly, paced quietly when he was given the space to do so, and ate his meagre rations silent as a mouse. He exercised in the morning, for lack of anything better to do, and the handlers eyed him warily from across the basement, but never told him to quit it.

They talked about him, sometimes, about the mission, others. He could not ascertain the details, however. When they spoke about him, Handler #3 mentioned how creepy he was, and Handler #5 called him a dog and a mutt and a mongrel. Always, in those conversations, Handler #2 hissed that Soldier could hear them, and you don’t wanna be the one he kills first, right? Handler #1 would always assure Handler #2 then that Soldier’s programming was airtight, and that he wouldn’t kill any of them despite whatever rumours you might’ve heard.

When they spoke about the mission, it was always agitated, like they hadn’t been given any information. Just to board the plane, get in the van, hide out in a basement for three days until they’re collected. The only thing he learned was that he was in Kazakhstan, North, near the border. That did not provide him with much, other than which language he should speak upon arrival to wherever it was they were going, so he continued to sit or pace or exercise or eat, and he continued to wait.

After three days, they were transported North.

This time, he was placed in the central seat of a car, Handlers #2, 4 and 5 in the vehicle with him, and an unknown driver in the front seat. A second car held the other handlers and followed behind.

They drove North, and at the border checkpoint spoke low, quick Russian to the patrol officer, who in turn looked at the blank sheet of paper that was offered as proof and nodded like he was reading an official document. They drove for a total of five hours and two minutes after leaving the basement, before they ended up in a tall, stately mansion. It was unlike anything Soldier had seen before, but he did not have the capability to marvel, only to look at it once, and have an absent feeling that he’d been somewhere similar before, even if he could not recall what it looked like.

France, a corner of his mind supplied, though that made no sense to him, as Soldier did not remember ever having been to France, either.

They were welcomed by men with guns and a tall, pinched woman in a sleek dress. She greeted Handler #1 with a nod, and perfect Russian.

“I am Madame B. Welcome to the Red Room. I hope your travels went well,” she said, offering a hand to shake.

Handler #1 took it, and replied, “They were fine, thank you.” They moved immediately into business, as Madame B. turned on her heel and led the group up a grand staircase to the front door. “We’ve been assigned to stay with the Asset. He is not allowed to be without at least three guards at any one time.”

“Yes, I received the report,” she agreed. “We have set up your rooms – I hope they’ll suffice.”

Inside was all tall ceilings and glittering chandeliers. Soldier didn’t stop to look at any of it, rather, he calculated the doors, windows, escape routes. In his head, he created a floor plan; all rooms leading to each other, the height he’d have to fall if he leapt out a window, which walls would take more bullets than others.

Soldier didn’t have possessions, though the handlers did. The rooms were sparse; his in the attic, a creaky staircase leading up, and his bed had chains and shackles linked to the walls, three other beds pressed to the corners of the room. The handlers muttered between themselves about creating a rota, while he peered out the window – the drop was high, survivable but likely to break at least one bone on impact. Thorny bushes sat at the bottom of the wall, threatening to pluck his eyes out if he fell. The window, too, only opened a few inches.

Then Madame B. reappeared at the doorway, addressing him directly.

“Winter Soldier,” she said, and he eyed her with no feeling. He was only ever called Asset or Soldier. No one ever referred to him by the name they spread through agents and intelligence, a codename to sign his kills with. “It is an honour to have you here to train the girls. Why don’t we introduce you.”

*

There were thirty-two girls in the Red Room. The youngest twelve were not to be taught by him; too young, too delicate, still learning beginner’s ballet, barely reaching his knees in height. The oldest eight were graduating that week and were to be sent on assignment next – all he did was watch them fight and nod if he approved of their technique and shake his head if he didn’t.

Madame B. was asking him to form opinions in a way, though that didn’t make sense with Soldier, so he considered it as fact. Was the girl’s foot up high enough? If yes, he nodded, if not he didn’t. Could the blonde have taken down the brunette two moves earlier – if yes, he disapproved, if no, he nodded her on.

It was not Soldier’s opinion they wanted, he decided, it was his knowledge. He knew what was good and what was not, and he relayed it in a gruff, barely-used voice when necessary. He did not speak if he was not asked, and he did not speak if he could show, instead.

The middle twelve were the ones he trained. They were young, brittle, and all held their heads high when he paced up and down the line, looking them over. He pressed a hand on the shoulder of the tallest in the group – her hair was sharply shorn at her shoulders, and her eyes were grey like storms.

“Knives,” he said, and her eyes darted to him and away. He had not worn his mask once since arrival – the handlers had taken it from him when Madame B. thought he looked roguish and a little murderous, don’t you think? His face felt bare and vulnerable, but he made up for it by making himself taller, sharper, untouchable.

“Polina,” Madame B. said. “I believe he means your knives are too visible. We taught you better than this.”

“Yes, Madame B.,” Polina replied, her head ducking minutely. Soldier paused and touched his hand to the underside of her chin, pushing it lightly back up. He watched her eyes dart back to him, and he met them before continuing down the line.

*

The girls were precise, dangerous.

They had sharp tongues and quick wit, dexterous hands and eyes for trouble. They were all afraid, but they all held that fear close to them, so no one else would feel it. Soldier did, but Soldier felt it because he recognised it – because fear to him was something tangible, was something that dripped from every target and, sometimes, he smelt on his own skin. But, like the girls, he would die before letting someone else see that fear for what it was.

After the first two weeks, they were unafraid of him, however. He was still their childhood bedtime story – “The Winter Soldier will cut out your tongue if you talk back,” Polina had informed him in a conspiratorial whisper, “that’s what Madame B. told us” – and still a nightmare that had dogged them through childhood, but they were not scared of the man that stood before them. Not really. Not when he was docile, compliant, not when his handlers followed him every hour of the day. Not when he was slowly beginning to resemble someone human.

He realised that two weeks in when he formed an opinion on the ostentatious décor of the cafeteria, and that it was what happened when he was left out of cryo too long; when they didn’t wipe him down to a blank slate. He became human. Which, he worked out, meant he’d been human before he’d been the Winter Soldier, and had maybe been human since.

“I know,” Natalia said in quick Russian, slipping her tray down beside his at the table. She climbed into the seat next to him, while Polina and Florentina sat opposite. The girls were dangerous and precise, but they were also girls. “I don’t like borscht either. I remember you didn’t like it last time, too.” Soldier looked down at the bowl of red soup he’d tasted a spoonful of and grimaced at. He was forming opinions on food, as well.

“What,” he said, first, before pausing. The girls looked at him and waited patiently. He thought they believed he was just slow, or bad at Russian, but he was a lightning fast thinker, fluent in the language – he just wasn’t used to speaking aloud; he wasn’t used to asking questions. “What,” he tried again, “is in it?”

“Beetroot,” Natalia replied, and Soldier pulled a face, making her laugh. He silently added beetroot to the list of dislikes he was forming in his head, along with the interior design of the Red Room and Handler #5 in his entirety.

“Here,” Florentina said. “You can have mine.” She was shorter than most of the girls, with dark hair and wide, too-innocent eyes. She was deceptively deadly and had learned faster than the other girls how to use an opponent’s larger size against them. She picked up her bowl, and then his, and switched the two. The bowl in front of him now still contained something reddish in hue, but it was very different to the smooth consistency of the borscht soup.

“What is—it.”

“Solyanka,” she replied. “Beef, pork and chicken soup.” She dug into his beetroot soup without hesitation, seemingly enjoying the taste, while he stared at his new meal for a moment longer. He hadn’t asked for the borscht soup when being served – rather, the woman handing out bowls chose for him, like she did every day, while everyone else got their preference. Until now, Soldier hadn’t had a preference. He’d understood that food was necessary for survival and that the taste didn’t matter. He was going to eat the borscht whether he liked it or not.

Soldier tried the Solyanka soup and found the taste peculiar. It was a watery liquid, with chunks of meat and vegetables, but it was—good. He took another spoonful. He liked it. He put that on the list of likes, with the girls, and the non-tac-gear clothes the Red Room had provided for him.

The three girls shared secretive smiles as he ate his soup, and when he was finished, he placed the spoon gently in the bowl, and tilted his head towards Florentina.

He took a moment to find the word; he hadn’t tasted it on his tongue in a long time. “Thank you.”

Florentina burst into a grin. “You’re welcome,” she replied.

*

“You’re too soft,” he heard Natalia whisper to Florentina later that day. They were cooling down from ballet practice, and he was waiting by the door, where they would join him when they were finished to start their next training session.

“I’m not,” Florentina replied.

“You switched lunches with him.”

“Because he didn’t like his.”

“Flo—”

Florentina huffed. “If I hadn’t liked borscht I wouldn’t have switched, Natalia. But I do like it, so there was no harm.” She paused for a moment before saying, “Just because we are killers does not mean we cannot be good people.”

*

Soldier was a killer, but he wasn’t sure if he was a good person. What made a good person? He didn’t know. He didn’t know, until Florentina said so, that there were such things as good and bad people – that he might be one or the other. The way she spoke implied that killers were not often good; that to be good, she had to persist in the face of her killing.

Soldier’s killing was for the greater good – that’s what he was told. Maybe he was the good kind of killer. The kind that made the world a better place with his violence.

*

“Natalia,” he said some months later, and the red-haired girl looked up at him from her place on the ground. She was somewhere around fourteen, he believed. The twelve girls he taught where above twelve, but not yet sixteen and ready to graduate. “Why did you let Yelena win?”

“I didn’t let—”

“Oh no, you just didn’t see her fist or her foot or even the knife she didn’t even try to hide.” He flicked Yelena’s elbow and she gradually pulled the blade away from Natalia’s throat. He held out his hand for it, and Yelena placed it in his open palm. She’d hidden in her boot, obvious from the moment she walked in the door – but it seemed the girls didn’t look for weapons on their classmates. They did not think they’d turn against each other.

“Up,” he said, and the two girls climbed to their feet while the other ten stood by the wall, watching. He flipped the knife between his hands, watching the blade catch the light. Soldier remembered doing this, remembered two hands playing with knives and lighters – but he didn’t think those memories were his. He only had one hand and a weapon.

“Why did you let Yelena win?” he asked again, not looking at either girl. Instead, he was eyeing Handler #3, who stood by the door, hand lax on his gun. Even the handlers had stopped watching him so diligently. He’d been at the Red Room for five months with no problems with compliance, no reports of memories resurfacing – no, he kept those to himself, even if they were not his own. They still made him compliant, some days, but mostly let him train the girls and wander where he wanted, let him like things and have opinions on things they deemed unimportant, and he deemed vital – like soups and their flavours.

He was wearing them down, he knew. Soon, even Handler #5 might see him as something akin to a person, and then he would snap his neck and maybe take his hand with him when he ran, just for fun.

Because, now he was a human, a person, he’d realised that of all the things he didn’t like, he very much didn’t like the people he worked for.

“I didn’t let her win,” Natalia said.

“You need to work on your lying,” he replied.

“I’m not lying.”

“Then you’re much worse at fighting than we thought. Maybe I should recommend to Madame that you train with the toddlers for a few more years, hm?” A few of the girls snickered along the wall, Yelena included, while Natalia’s face turned red. She’d have to work on that too – her emotions were too clear; they lived on the surface, and she should’ve already mastered hiding them in the depths of her body.

Thing was, he liked Natalia. He liked all the girls – he’d met all thirty-two that were there when he started, and now knew the names of the twenty-nine that remained, even the newest, tiniest of recruits. He ate lunch with Natalia, Polina and Florentina every day, and often shared breakfast with Yelena and Eva, dinner with Irena and Galina. They seemed to like him too – would often grab his hand with no hesitation and pull him towards the ballet studio, to watch the girls dance, watch the youngest learn their basics for the first time, watch the oldest spin and spiral with pinpoint accuracy, like knives twirling in the mirrors.

So he didn’t want to embarrass Natalia, but she was better than this; better than to be pinned by Yelena, who he considered worse at combat but better at espionage. However, with the handlers watching and Madame B.’s instructions on teaching in his head, he could not be soft. He was the Winter Soldier, the most prolific assassin of the twentieth century, and he was raising young girls in his image. He was not afforded softness, so he could not give them it either.

“Yelena, back to the wall,” he ordered, and she swivelled and joined the other girls on the other side of the room. Soldier moved in front of Natalia, and she kept her head firmly high, meeting his gaze. “You let her win,” he said, low. “You are better than she is and you let her win.”

“I didn’t see the knife,” she said. “I didn’t know she had one.”

“Because you trust her. Because all you girls trust each other.” He straightened and nodded them forwards. “Over here.” The girls brought their line forward, then separated into two; six girls to each. They watched him with eagle eyes. “Yelena brought a knife into the fight,” he said. “It was clever. Natalia is better than she is, so she brought an advantage. Natalia didn’t think to look for the knife. Why?”

“Because we’re friends,” Yelena said. Friends. They had friends in the Red Room – Soldier had no friends at his old bases. He did not remember them well; just smudges of memories of dank rooms and guns pointed at his head – but he knew there were no friends there.

“Correct,” he said. “But you will not be friends one day. You will leave this place, and likely all be hired by different organisations. Some will go to the KGB, to Hydra, to underground cells in the West, to destabilising the Middle East. Some may stay and train recruits, others may be assassins, spies, agents. You may bring down governments, kill presidents, lead armies.”

“We’re spies, not generals,” Polina interrupted. Madame B. would’ve hit her across the backs of her knees for that, but Soldier did not mind.

“Sometimes armies are best led by those who know people better than soldiers,” he replied before hesitating. “By people who haven’t seen a day of war in their lives.” It was too familiar, somehow, but he couldn’t locate how. He stopped for all of two seconds, before forcing the feeling from his body. “You may fight each other, someday,” he continued. “You may have to kill each other – and in those fights, you will be kicking yourselves for not remembering the skills and weaknesses they exhibited now. Even the people who are on your side you have to be wary of, have to watch. Maybe they will never fight you – maybe Natalia and Yelena will never be on opposing sides their whole life; maybe they will be… friends when they are my age. But it does not hurt to practise now. To know who in this room has a knife on them, and who does not.”

He flicked the knife between his fingers, and pointed the blade to Eva, who stepped forward. “Name one person with a weapon on them right now.”

“You,” she replied immediately.

The girls laughed, and Soldier smiled, just slightly. That had been happening more since he became human, too. He nodded her back into the line, pointing to Nina.

She stepped forward. “Valeriya does.”

“Where?”

Nina pressed her fingertips to her right side, just below her armpit. Soldier looked over to Valeriya, raised an eyebrow, and watched as she nodded, reaching under her shirt and pulling out the knife.

“Well done,” he told them both. “Natalia.”

Natalia stepped forward and, unlike Eva and Nina, had to look at the other girls. She hadn’t checked at all. A promising student, he would tell Madame B. when she inevitably asked his opinion this weekend, as she did every week, but in need of a nudge in the right direction.

“Florentina,” she decided. “Her hair.”

“It’s not a knife,” Florentina responded, but she pulled out the pin from her hair anyway, sharp and shining and dangerous. Soldier almost smiled as he stepped forward to examine it – he hadn’t noticed the pin like he had Yelena’s and Valeriya’s knives. He hadn’t looked at her hair.

“No,” he said, quiet. “It is smarter than a knife.”

*

Later, only ten minutes before curfew, he and Natalia sat in the alcove of the hall, looking out over the darkened garden of the sprawling estate.

“You need to keep your emotions in check,” he said, his fingers in her hair as he braided one side from her scalp to the tips. He’d recalled this particular ability a month before and mentioned it offhand when Natalia was wistfully telling Polina that she wished she could braid her hair like Irena. “They’re yours, no one else’s, and so they have no rights to see them.”

“You make it sound so easy,” she grumbled in the dim light. His handlers stood at the ends of the hall, not particularly caring – one of the other trainers had once seen him braiding Natalia’s hair, and after a moment had simply complimented his technique and moved along. He thought Madame B. would have been harsher, but neither his handlers, nor their other sole witness, had snitched.

“It is easy when you are made compliant every morning,” he said, low. “When you are not allowed to have emotions, it is incredibly easy. Otherwise, no, it is not – but you need to learn how to hide them now, before someone takes advantage.”

Natalia nodded minutely and Soldier secured the braid with one of the bands she’d held out for him. He started on the other side of her head.

“Am I really better than Yelena?” she asked.

“There you go again,” he replied, “sounding hopeful. You want me to approve of your abilities, and you want to be better than her.”

“How should I have asked then?” Natalia huffed, and he could see a ghost of her frown in the window pane’s reflection.

“You shouldn’t have asked at all. Just trusted what I said in class as fact. Or, some form of it. But, because you asked – at fighting, you excel, Natalia. Better than most of the girls.”

“Bar whom?”

“Polina, probably. She has a head for strategy and improvising. And Florentina, most definitely. She’s feral.” Natalia huffed a laugh. “But Yelena is better at keeping her emotions in check, at recovering intel and lying on the spot. Why did you let her win?”

Natalia is quiet for a moment, then: “Because I found out what the graduation ceremony is.”

Soldier had figured it was just a ceremony. “What is it?”

“An operation,” she replied. “They said it’s an honour. It makes us… better. Superior. But it messes with our bodies, and it hurts.”

“You don’t want to hurt.”

“If I started failing, I’ll never graduate.”

“And you’ll be sold as a whore or shot out in the forest,” he replied. Natalia didn’t flinch with her body, but with her face. Soldier finished the braid and tied it off, before turning her to face him. “You are talented, Natalia, and you are strong. This softness—this is what will kill you. And you deserve a long life, one with choice and freedom.” He didn’t know where the words came from, but he believed them as they poured out of his mouth. “You do your time here, you follow your orders, you excel – and you will get your life. You will get your freedom.”

“Have you got yours?” she whispered.

“Not yet,” he replied, just as quiet. “But I will.” He remembered blonde hair, blue eyes, and a mouth on his. He remembered a smile and a laugh and a city he didn’t know the name of. He remembered bony knees and knobbly elbows and narrow shoulders. “Maybe someday soon – I will.”

*

They did not watch television in the Red Room, but they read the newspaper every Sunday. Madame B. would read it first, then pass it around the other handful of trainers in the Room, and lastly it would end up in Soldier’s hands. They all called him Soldier, still, as that was the only name he had – though the handlers called him Asset like they’d been trained – but they’d say it in Russian, Soldat, all harsh sounds biting around his identity.

He was not allowed the newspaper for a long time, until Handler #1 eventually sighed and said, just let him read it who fucking cares, and Handler #2 pressed it into his hand. It was in Russian, which he spoke better than he read, but he got better every week, reading things he didn’t understand about people he’d never heard of.

They got their news either via the newspaper, or by the intelligence network the Red Room was connected to – the public news, and that which was classified.

A little over six months into his station at the Red Room, he was a person. A human with thoughts and feelings and opinions. Memories that weren’t his but we’re not his were filtering into his mind, fuzzy and blurry, like photographs that weren’t fully developed – a lot of delicate hands with pencils, gunfire and army fatigues, lively music and shining pieces of metal on chains. Nothing solid, though. Nothing concrete. Nothing that told him about who he might’ve been before Soldier, before the weapon and the Room and Hydra.

And a little over six months in, they heard a rumour.

“One of my sources tell me,” Madame B. said one Sunday morning as Soldier flipped through the newspaper in the lounge. Only the trainers and Soldiers’ handlers were allowed in there, and there were prim teacups on the coffee tables, as well as cakes and kinds of foods he couldn’t remember but found a love of. Madame B. had taken great interest some months ago in watching him try a slice of Kiev cake for the first time. “That one of those Howling Commandos from the 40s has just come back to life.”

The room quietened, before Ms. Zolotov clarified, “Has come back to life?”

Madame B. hummed affirmative. “Only two died, you know. The Captain and Sergeant.” There was an undercurrent to the words, like everyone knew exactly who they were talking about. Soldier, on the other hand, had never heard of the Howling Commandos. So he asked, because he could now he was a person. Madame B. raised a pointed eyebrow at him, then looked to the handlers and back again. “No,” she mused, “I don’t suppose you would know of them.” Soldier wondered if the whole room knew about the chair and the mind wipes – maybe he’d known about the Commandos once, and now they were just another memory that had been taken to make him effective, deadly.

“They were a unit fighting for America in World War II – they were specialists, I believe, and excellent at their jobs. They took down many Hydra bases—”

“Hydra?” Soldier asked.

Madame B. sent him a look for interrupting, but nodded and continued, “Yes, they were the enemy. The Soviet Union was actually on their side, during the war, but Hydra later came to our aid and allied with us. The Howling Commandos were a particularly popular group in the States, led by a man they called Captain America.”

The name was like a fucking lightning bolt down his spine. He didn’t even twitch, didn’t move, didn’t breathe. Why did he know that name?

“Captain Rogers was a genetically engineered super soldier,” Madame B. informed him. “Like you, correct?” Handler #1 nodded. “Right. And he died on a mission in the Arctic – crashed his plane to stop a German bomb reaching the US.” Fucking dumbass, his mind said, unbidden. “The only other Howling Commando who died was Sergeant James Barnes.” Again, Soldier felt like screaming; like there was fire in his throat and if he didn’t scream bloody murder he’d burn from the inside out.

He didn’t move.

“Hell of a sniper, I heard,” she continued. “He fell from a moving train in the Alps during a mission. Killed in action. But anyway, a little birdy told me one of them didn’t actually die.”

“You think it was a cover up?” Ms. Zolotov asked.

“Not from what I heard. He just walked into civilisation like fifty years hadn’t gone by. Apparently, he’d been frozen in the ice, and somehow survived it. Frozen—" like Soldier’s cryostasis; like the chamber they placed him in every time they wanted to put him away, let him sleep a few years before waking up and shooting someone dead. “—but still alive.”

“Which one was it?” Ms. Sorokin asked from where she was pouring milk into her teacup.

Madame B. picked up her cup, smiling coyly, knowing the whole room was waiting on her word. “The charmer,” she told them. “Sergeant James Barnes is back among the living.”

*

That whole day Soldier was antsy. He did his best to hide it, and he caught no searching looks or worried eyes. Maybe he was good at taking his own advice; they were his nerves, no one else was allowed to see them.

He still thought over the names that had him freewheeling. Captain America. Captain Rogers. Sergeant James Barnes.

He must’ve been someone else once, someone human before the mind wipes and the compliance, someone who knew these people or these names. Maybe one of the handlers had noticed his reeling mind, or maybe they were just in a strict mood, because the next morning, they woke him up with, “Longing. Rusted. Seventeen. Daybreak. Furnace. Nine. Benign. Homecoming. One. Freight car.”

The Russian was a blade to the head and made him recede inside himself for the next three days.

*

It was two weeks later when guests arrived at the Red Room. Soldier was training the girls when the large doorway to the room filled with men in black, their eyes sharp and hungry, watching the fights. At first thought, Soldier assumed them to be scouts, recruiting the girls, but at second, he realised they were watching him.

He’d been holding himself together, barely. Memories were flashing back faster and faster – Captain Rogers was Steve and Steve loved him and Steve had kissed him and Soldier had kissed him back – and he was close to bolting. He knew this place like the back of his hand; had memorised guard patterns and knew which days the delivery vans arrived and how long they stayed. He knew the path from the flower garden to the forest that lay beyond the estate and had memorised a map with the neighbouring area neatly into his mind.

His lists of likes and dislikes had been growing, and soon enough all of Hydra had made his dislikes when he recalled the assignments, the missions, and then what he’d fought for before. He’d killed Hydra soldiers, when he was a human once – he’d hated them with vitriol. He was beginning to feel that now.

He was beginning to yearn for that freedom he’d promised Natalia she’d one day earn.

So it was likely he would run, soon. He’d figured early on that he would be able to break out of the shackles that bound him every night with relative ease – and if not, only three handlers slept in his room and woke him in the morning; only three to get through before he could be in the hall and leaving via the house staff’s entrance. He could be in the nearest town within the hour, and trusted that he was a faster runner than anyone in the Room.

But now there were men in black watching him. And he knew what this was.

Absently, he wondered what Steve would do. He didn’t know much about Steve, other than the few memories that made him little, then big, and that he’d been Captain America, the genetically engineered hero of the United States – but to be a hero, he had to be smart. He had to be good in a fight. Soldier could remember, if he tried, a shield all red and white and blue.

He didn’t know what Steve would do. But he knew what he had to do.

Soldier continued the lesson, ignoring the men until the clock struck three PM. He hadn’t been made compliant in a week, so did not mind the girls chattering after their lesson or taking the time to explain to Elena where she went wrong in her last grapple.

Half the girls had filtered out when one of the men stepped in the room. He was young, blonde, with an idealistic face. “Soldier,” he greeted, and Soldier decided quickly that this man had been told what people called him now he was a person and not just an asset. “I’m Agent Pierce – I’ve been sent to retrieve you.”

Madame B. appeared in the doorway, harried as if she’d just been notified of their presence. “Hm, excuse me,” she interjected, while the remaining girls in the room slowed to watch. Retrieve you, Polina mouthed, questioning. “I’m Madame B. – this is my establishment. It’s rather rude to bypass your host entirely and simply poach one of her instructors.”

“The Soldier was on loan from Hydra,” Pierce said mildly. “We’re now asking for him back.”

“The Soldier was promised to us for two years,” Madame B. retorted, “so he could see these girls to graduation.”

“He’s an assassin, not a teacher,” Pierce scorned, rolling his eyes. “And if you don’t mind, he’s still our property.”

“Property?” Natalia asked, making everyone in the room suddenly aware of the gaggle of girls watching. “You don’t own him.”

“Oh, girlie, I think we do.”

“It’s alright, Natalia,” Soldier said calmly, though his heart was racing a mile a minute inside his chest. Escape wouldn’t come in the night, now. It would have to be immediate – he counted the guns; four of his six handlers were present, two would be on their break, and Pierce had come with four men. At least nine Hydra agents in the room, Madame B. had no weapons other than her lead-lined cane that broke bones like china; though he didn’t think she’d fight against him in this moment. And the girls – they would be on his side; he’d won them over, and although he didn’t want to sacrifice them for his escape, he wondered if they’d jump into the fray anyway.

“He speaks,” Pierce said, smiling. “You know, I’ve been reading the reports, and we were all rather surprised to hear that you’d gotten talkative during your time here. You were always so… quiet, Stateside.”

“Easier to teach when you can talk,” Soldier replied.

“Of course. Now, I hope you do understand that Hydra is calling you back. You can collect your gear and we’ll be back in the States by tomorrow.”

Soldier didn’t move. “Who’s calling me back?”

“Orders from on high.”

“What for?”

“I don’t think you’re in the position to be asking for clarification, Soldier. You’ve been called back, so you will be brought back.” Soldier opened his mouth, but Pierce interrupted, “Now don’t you say you prefer it here, teaching these little girls, while your real work is left to the side.”

“My real work,” Soldier bit out.

Pierce stepped forward casually, like this wasn’t a standoff for Soldier’s entire life. “You have an assignment to complete. A congressman, I’ve been told. Top priority, I assure you. You’re needed, Soldier. You are the fist of Hydra, our deliverer – without you, how are we going to make the world a better place?”

A killer and a good person, Florentina had wanted to be. A killer and a good person, Soldier was not if he was under Hydra’s control.

So, he stepped forward, close enough to Pierce that the agent seemed satisfied and smug, before saying, “Suck my dick, you motherfucker,” and grabbed the gun from Pierce’s holster.

Soldier thrived in chaos, and he felt it in that moment. He slammed the weapon hard enough into Pierce’s chest that he went sprawling, knocking down two of his own men in the process – then Soldier turned, shooting easy shots into Handler’s #1, 3, and 6. He rolled, pulling a knife from his waistband and upper-cutting it through one of Pierce’s agents, then yanking it out to slice the throat of the one beside him.

Only then did anyone move. He heard the first gunshot that he dodged, shoving the dying body of an agent in front of him to take the next two. As he turned, he caught sight of Madame B., hurrying the girls away from the fray, to the corner of the room. Ah, not her fight, he thought, she can’t take sides before shooting the third agent in the face and taking a punch to the gut from the last. For this one, he shot out the weapon and grabbed her face, crunching it in his grip.

Pierce was still coughing up blood on the floor when Soldier ducked behind the door to avoid Handler #5’s shots. God he fucking hated Handler #5. He took the extra few seconds to return to the room and slam the weapon into his face so hard his nose snapped flat. He then dragged his knife up through Handler #5’s torso, so he’d die painful and bloody.

Then— “Soldier.” He looked over to Natalia, to the other girls and Madame B.

“Natalia. I’ve got to go now.”

She looked like she was going to protest, but instead she nodded, and darted out from under Madame B.’s arms to leap at him. For a moment, he was still in the fight, ready to throw her into the wall, but then she hugged him, and instead his mind was thrown all the way back into a memory of another teenage girl, embracing him tightly when he had to go.

He hugged her back, just for a moment, and then she pulled away and Polina replaced her, then Florentina and the other remaining girls in the room. He was wasting precious time, he knew, but they wanted to say goodbye.

He met Madame B.’s gaze, as the last girl gave him a quick squeeze. “Come back if you’re able,” she said. “We’ll protect you the best we can, just like we do for the girls.”

He nodded once, grabbed one of the agent’s guns, and looked back into the room. Handler #5 was dying quietly in the corner, and Soldier felt sickly satisfied about it.

Natalia said, “Go get your freedom,” and he turned, running to the door.

He shot Handlers #4 and 2, and left the house, running through the flower garden and down the rolling hills towards the forest. He’d hit the next town over by dinner, and then he’d steal a car and be rid of Hydra for good.

*

S.H.I.E.L.D. REPORT

CLASSIFICATION LEVEL 10

FROM THE DESK OF AGENT FURY

June 7, 1998

The following is the transcript of the interview with one Captain Steven Grant Rogers (Codename: Captain America) following his retrieval from North Alaska on June 6, 1998.

AGENT FURY: Captain Rogers, thank you for waiting.

CAPTAIN ROGERS: I don’t think I had much choice in the matter. Nice interrogation room you’ve got here. I distinctly remember interrogation rooms being dirtier.

AF: Well, it’s been a while.

CR: Yeah. Fifty years, I’m told.

AF: When did you find that out?

CR: A few weeks ago. The scientists I holed up with—they told me the date. Thought I was losing my mind.

AF: Not crazy yet.

CR: I wouldn’t be so sure. [PAUSE] So, S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t exist in my day.

AF: No, but its early predecessor was the SSR, which I’m sure you’re familiar with.

CR: Just a little.

AF: [PAUSE] I don’t want to hold you here long, Cap – this is just a formality. All I need is some basic information, then we’ll set you up somewhere nicer and talk about your readjustment to the 20^th century.

CR: Seems it’s almost over.

AF: Got a few more years yet, Captain. [PAUSE] So, if you’ll answer a few questions, we can get you out of here and into somewhere more comfortable. Alright?

CR: Ask away.

AF: According to reports made in 1945, you downed the Hydra aircraft known as The Valkyrie in the Arctic due to the plane being headed for New York with bombs that were scheduled to drop there.

CR: Yes, sir.

AF: Johann Schmidt, known as Redskull, and a device referred to as ‘the cube’ were on board. Where are they now?

CR: Hell knows. [PAUSE] Schmidt picked up the cube, there was a light show… like the whole universe was suddenly inside the ship, and he disintegrated into it. The cube dropped and burnt through the ship, so it’s gone. Dropped in the ocean somewhere.

AF: [PAUSE] Alright. And you woke up…?

CR: Three weeks ago.

AF: Climbed out of the ship and made your way through freezing temperatures to an outpost over an hour’s walk away—

CR: Broke in, stole the first clothes I found, yes, sir. Hid out for about a day before I saw another person, and that was only because they woke me up.

AF: Right. And let’s talk about this James Barnes business. Because the rumour mill has churned out something that even the public has gotten a hold of.

CR: That so?

AF: Made front page news, Captain. “Sgt. James Barnes back from the dead.” You’ll understand that the remaining Howling Commandos and Barnes’ family have been phoning up Director Carter for two days straight.

CR: [PAUSE] They’re alive?

AF: And right as rain – well, I heard Dugan’s seen better days, but the rest of them are holding up fine. What prompted you to use his name then, Captain?

CR: I… I didn’t. The scientist who found me, Dr Shirbert – she saw the dog tags. She read the name, and that’s what they all called me. Even after I woke up, I just… let them call me James. They hadn’t seen the outfit and the shield—

AF: They’re smart individuals, though. They would’ve grown up seeing your face. Barnes’ too.

CR: I don’t know. I didn’t correct them, they didn’t correct themselves. I went with it, even when I got to Alaska.

AF: Why do you have Sgt. Barnes’ tags?

CR: Because he has—had mine. It was a fair trade.

AF: [PAUSE] Of course. Final question, then we’ll get you out of here: you heard about the Dodgers yet?

CR: [PAUSE] What about them?

AF: They moved.

CR: What? Where to?

AF: LA.

CR: You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

*

The Soldier was always cold, in the end, even when he’d felt warm for a long time.

*

20^th June 1998

ASSET #67b9

PROJECT WINTER SOLDIER

SEARCH AND RESCUE REPORT

After #67b9 went rogue during a routine pick up by Agent Pierce, a 22-day search commenced to retrieve the asset. When going rogue, #67b9 killed all six of his handlers, as well as the four agents accompanying Agent Pierce, who was severely injured but left alive. All employees and students of the Red Room, where the assault occurred, were left unharmed.

#67b9 was found in a barn 33 miles away from the Red Room on June 19^th and retrieved by a strike unit. The asset attacked and killed 7 agents before being apprehended. The compliance conditioning was vital to seizing and returning him back to base. #67b9 was injured but healing from a series of gunshot wounds when discovered, believed to be from Unit 78, who went dark on June 16^th while searching for the Asset.

Following return to base, #67b9 was reconditioned, wiped and returned to the cryo chamber for further reprogramming in future. Reports from the six deceased handlers and Red Room staff suggest he was becoming talkative, opinionated, and self-sufficient during his time in the Red Room despite frequent compliance conditioning. It is unknown if the wipes were also diminishing during this time, or if he stayed loyal to Hydra until his escape. It is advised, however, that memory wipes become more regular, and the technology improved upon to be more substantial. It is possible that the escape was triggered by returning memories.

None of the students of the Red Room reported any abnormal behaviour or aggressive tendencies and reported him as loyal to Hydra to the best of their knowledge. However, some students referred to him positively, as “a good teacher” and “friendly”.

Returning #67b9 to the Red Room in future is not advised without frequent wipes to hinder his forming relationships with the students and faculty. The assignment (Code H92TY1) the Asset was retrieved for was not carried out by him, and a separate unit has been dispatched to complete it.

Further programming and conditioning of the Asset is advised.

Any knowledge of “Sgt. James Barnes’” reported return is unknown, but at no point has the asset suggested awareness of this fact.

*

To Soldier, the cold was the realest thing in the world; the only constant. No matter where he was with, or who stood beside him, the only fact was that he could never, truly, get warm.

*

S.H.I.E.L.D. REPORT

CLASSIFICATION LEVEL 8

FROM THE DESK OF AGENT RIPLEY

April 22, 2000

The investigation into the assassin thought to be behind at least ten deaths in the past fifty years (Investigation TT56OK) has yet to produce a named suspect, though it is widely believed that all assassinations were done under the name of The Winter Soldier – a rumour in the intelligence community; one not known to be factual, yet. Upon Agent Olesya Koslov’s death in 1975, Agents Blake and Shepherd opened the official investigation, later producing similar evidence, rumours and, occasionally, witness statements surrounding a number of other murders, including Captain Jessop (1958), Enrique Acosta (1967), Colonel Garfield (1984), and Howard and Maria Stark (1991).

While more of a ghost story and urban legend than factual assassin, the term “The Winter Soldier” has appeared multiple times in documents and intercepted communications from Soviet Russia since the end of World War II. Black and Shepherd’s investigation did not find any names, however, nor any evidence that this soldier actually existed as a person, rather than a concept that might strike fear into targets’ hearts.

It has been postulated within S.H.I.E.L.D. that this soldier may, in fact, exist as a single person if they had some form of Dr Erksine’s serum, used on Captain America during WWII. While initially a wild speculation, after analysing Rogers’ physiology with today’s technology after his re-emergence in 1998, it has been concluded to be at least theoretically possible that an assassin with a similar serum may have the vitality and strength to perform a number of the assassinations. Again, no proof has been recovered. It is more likely that “The Winter Soldier” is simply a number of assassins working under the same codename.

*

Soldier was always cold, even when he was not.

*

A Dinner with Captain America: Who is the Hero Behind the Mask? And Who Did He Leave Behind?

Samantha Borne, September 9, 2005

Captain Rogers arrived early for our dinner and was already waiting when I arrived. It was surprising, to say the least, that he looked so much like the photographs – just as tall, just as young, just as Captain America. Even in civilian clothes, he looked like he might rush off into battle at any moment; he watched everything and everyone, and a lifetime of living with soldiers let me notice how he was seated facing all the exits. Behind him was a wall and a wall only, despite the reservations having been made for my favourite table, across the restaurant next to the windows.

He didn’t seem eager to jump into the interview, but I suppose he wouldn’t – this was only the third he’d agreed to do since his reappearance in 1998. “I hesitate to call it a resurrection, though no one else has a problem with it,” he said on the subject. “From what I’ve been told, I never actually died.” No, Captain Steve Rogers crashed a Nazi plane into the Arctic, and rather than dying, he ended up in some form of cryostasis, just waiting to be thawed out.

The following dinner was beyond pleasant, and Captain Rogers was every bit the hero we’ve been imagining him as for sixty years – but he was also so, so much more.

I thought we could start from the beginning. Born in Brooklyn, 1918, a single parent family. Your mother was a nurse, right?

Yeah. Yeah, Sarah Rogers was—she was something special, alright. She was the one who never let me stay on the ground. Told me we always had to get back up, even if the beating was worse off for it.

And it was, often, apparently. Just about every biography and movie about your life tells a story about a Steve Rogers who got the crap kicked out of him in every alley in Brooklyn.

[Laughs] Oh yeah. The first thing I did when I woke up in ’98 was check out the old haunts. Found out there’s a whole lot of new alleys to get hit in.

Was anything the same?

There were a few familiar buildings, but they’d been refurbished. The old grocery store is a sushi place now, and the store we used to buy second-hand clothes in was a Blockbuster – though I think now it’s a—it’s a café and it’s filled with cats.

Cat café.

Yeah, one of those. Which—when I was a kid that would’ve been the greatest thing imaginable. Buck would’ve loved that place; if it had been around in the thirties we would’ve spent every spare dime in a place like that.

Buck—Bucky Barnes, I presume? He was a cat person?

Oh, hell, Bucky and cats, isn’t that a love story for the ages? He adopted every stray animal he saw, me included. Used to feed every mangy thing on the street when he was a kid, even had a regular one – it was brown and white and absolutely feral – that would know to slip into the backyard every few nights, and he’d feed it whatever he could swipe from the cupboards. And Suckerpunch – that was our alley cat when we lived together. Named it after the hit that knocked me out when we first found her. [Laughs] She was snow white, real independent, but she liked to hang around our apartment and I’d come home from work at the store and she’d be waiting on the fire escape for me. Bucky adored her, though he wouldn’t admit it. Loved it when it got cold enough that we couldn’t leave her outside to freeze, ‘cause it meant she’d be around all the time. And then there was Stevie—

He named a cat after you?

Yeah. Yeah. In the trenches. There—I’d heard there were cats out there, but he never told me he named one after me at the time. His letters were always vague and overly upbeat and more worried about me than about himself – I think it was the same for his folks and sister; he never let on how bad it was out there. Even when I showed up in Europe, he was trying to act like it was a holiday, not a waking nightmare.

I found out about Stevie when we were in the Commandos together. I was still looking after Suckerpunch at home though, until I finally managed to enlist. She missed him something fierce. Would always yowl so loud when Bucky wasn’t there in winter or to let her out when spring came around. But he had Stevie out in the trenches, and later, there was the witch—

A literal witch? Or—

Nah, he named this jet-black cat The Witch, ‘T’ and ‘W’ capitalised, when we were out in Europe somewhere. Carried her with him everywhere he went. He handed her off to Dernier right before the Alps mission – didn’t want to risk her on that train, you know? [Pause] One thing that really was the same, when I got back, was the Commandos – same as they’d always been; rowdy, loud, hard drinkers, loyal to a fault. All still kickin’ til ’03 and Dugan’s stroke.

His passing made national news, I remember.

Yeah. He would’ve loved to know that a whole country mourned him. He always said his ego never was quite as big as it deserved. But, uh, I remember seeing them all again, back in the 90s, and Dernier had gotten on a plane despite his bad hip just to see me, and he sat me down and showed me these photos, like a string of them from his wallet – some were all grainy and black and white, and one had been taken only a year or so before – and they were all of these cats. And he goes, ‘That one there, that’s The Witch, and those are her babies. And in this photo are her babies’ babies. We gave some away, kept a few for ourselves. And these are her great grandchildren.’ and so on, all the way to now. [Pause] He wouldn’t let go of The Witch after Bucky… after he fell, and his kids and their grandkids all have her descendants. I have one of them myself.

You have a cat?

I have a cat. His name’s James. Absolute attention-seeker, doesn’t like to be left alone or ignored for even a second – just like his namesake, honestly. We’ve taken to calling him Son of a Witch, though. I think Buck would appreciate that.

[Laughs] You know, I’ve never thought about it, but I always kind of assumed Captain America would be a dog person.

I am, at heart. I’d love a real big dog – an Alsatian or something – but James is part of the family; he’s Buck’s, and when Jacques asked if I wanted one from the new litter I didn’t even hesitate.

So, when you came back, there was an international news leak about you being Sgt. Barnes. I know the topic’s been done to death, both via speculation and your interview from the time, but I’ve always wondered, when did you come to own Barnes’ tags?

Ah, well. It was only a few days before, actually. We switched.

Do you mind my asking how come?

Just—it was an agreement we’d come to. It’s complicated, now, to get into. But switching like that—it was a big deal to us.

The tags are used to identify the body once wounded or killed, right?

Yeah. One’s kept on a chain around your neck, and the other in your shoe. Though I’ve got both on the chain now; less likely to get my legs blown off at home, I guess. But, yeah, risking death and injury under someone else’s name is a big deal. And—and he died. He… He died with my name around his neck. And I died with his. I remember waking up, those first awful few days in the future, and thinking, ‘Maybe they found his body. Maybe he’s out there, buried under a gravestone with my name on it.’ That’s—he would’ve liked that, I think.

Really?

Yeah. And it—it hurt like nobody’s business when I woke up and discovered no one had ever found his body; that he had no grave, no place to go mourn him. His name’s on every dedication wall and memorial statue, but there’s nowhere just for him.

I read his family couldn’t afford to get a memorial gravestone for him.

I’m working on that, trust me. Buck deserved better than to get lost in all those other names, and sometimes that’s what puts me off putting him under mine. I keep getting hung up on that, you know? The world should know Bucky the way I knew him, but—if I hadn’t woken up, I think I would prefer being buried under his name, too.

To continue reading this interview, pick up the newest issue of Vanity Fair.

*

INCOMING TRANSMISSION:

OUT OF THE SHADOWS INTO THE LIGHT

*

Soldier was cold, but that was not new. Soldier had a vague recollection of being cold for an eternity, of never getting fully warm, of being buried in ice on ice on ice.

He was pulled out of the chamber, wrapped in blankets and clothes, his hair shorn messy and uneven up to his chin, and then marched out into the adjoining room. He was somewhere different, he knew that immediately. While Soldier did not remember much, he remembered entering the chamber in a different base entirely – this one was tinted green, with tiled walls and a new contraption on the chair, all upgraded and ominous.

There were lots of armed soldiers along the walls, and an aged blonde man in a suit, watching him with a cold smile and calculating eyes.

Soldier was pushed down into the chair, and someone with a tray of tools opened up the weapon and stared at the innards. Soldier faced forwards, eyes on the blonde man. He was the only one wearing a suit and he didn’t have a weapon, yet he was the most protected man in the room.

“Alexander Pierce,” the man introduced, cocking his head to the side and stuffing his hands in his pockets as Soldier’s weapon was worked on. “We’ve met before, a long time ago, but I suppose you don’t remember that.”

Soldier didn’t respond, just stared. He was emptied out and hollow – the only thing he could remember was undressing and climbing into the cryo chamber. Everything before that was a blank – a hazy field of memories he couldn’t reach. Soldier assumed he had a life before cryo, but he could not recall it, so he doubted it was important.

“Right,” Pierce continued, ignoring Soldier’s silence. “Soldier, we’ve brought you back out for good reason. Very soon, everything Hydra has worked for will come to fruition. So, are you ready to serve Hydra?” Soldier didn’t speak. “I asked you a question,” Pierce said, low. “Are you ready to serve Hydra?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.” He turned and Soldier watched his back as he made his way out of the room. “Do what you need to do with him, then have him ready. If we’re going to tear down S.H.I.E.L.D., we’re going to start from the very top.”

*

“Destabilise. Make a scene. Let the whole world know that something’s coming.”

“I am made for undercover operations,” Soldier said. “I am not made to kill in public.”

“We all go against the grain eventually. This is your mission. You will complete your mission, then return to Agent Pierce for further assignments. Am I understood?”

“Understood.”

*

At the end of the day, weapons only know violence. It is what they are designed to create, what they are brought into the world to manifest. Violence on violence on violence. Knives are made only to slice away skin and reveal the muscles beneath, twitching, red and bloody, veins criss-crossing, blue blood turning red in the air, and guns are made only to damage, to puncture holes and shatter bones and leave gaping tunnels through bodies that they bleed out of, their entire life draining.

And a metal arm, perfect weight, perfect size, shining silver plates that interlock with every movement, is a weapon. And it is only made for violence. It is all the arm knows. It is all the arm’s wielder knows, too – because he wouldn’t have a weapon and not know how to use it.

*

Soldier couldn’t fail, it wasn’t in his programming. The car carrying Director Fury had flipped in the middle of the street, a great black plume of smoke following, and still, the Director had scurried down into the sewers like the rat he was.

Soldier had been given a team – a whole group of men and women in cars with guns and battering rams, and still they did not catch the rat and put him down. Hydra was planning on making a better world, a world where they lived in the light, and they could not do that if the target lived.

He collected the nearest gun he’d thrown to the side and stalked back towards the remaining few operatives. Many had died at the target’s hands, and only a handful remained, dusting themselves off or riddled with bullets, ready to die slow and painful in the streets of Washington D.C.

Soldier had no memory of ever being here before, but Soldier had no memories at all, so that meant very little to him.

His eyes caught on a motorcycle down the street – the entire place was gridlocked after the fire fight, and he needed an easy escape route. A motorcycle would do just the trick.

“Sir,” one of the operatives said, rushing up to him. He’d never been sir before – but he knew it was only temporary. He was Asset. He was Soldier. He didn’t have a position of authority; he had a position of respect. Hydra’s fist. The weapon that would cause the violence necessary to bring them out of hiding. He’d been given a unit for the mission – an insistence, really, that he was not to fail, so he would be given as many men as they could spare – and that was the only reason he would be called sir. They were his men, for an hour.

“Sir,” the operative repeated. “Majority of the men are down – there are seven of us still standing and ready to go.”

“Go home,” Soldier said.

“Sir—”

Soldier stopped, rounding on the operative. He looked young, scared. Soldier didn’t care. “You’re of no use to me. I will do this by myself.”

The hour was up. He didn’t want the men if they were just going to get shot and die. It seemed that the organisation itself was the only cockroach Hydra had – everyone else couldn’t withstand a single fire fight; they just laid down and died at the first sign of inconvenience. Soldier didn’t know how long he’d been alive, but he knew he’d been in many inconvenient spots.

Dying wasn’t an option. Only completing the mission.

He climbed on the motorcycle and vanished before the police could even make it to the scene.

*

Funny, he thought absently, somewhere so deep in the back of his mind, his conscious self barely heard it, who brings a shield to a gun fight?

He threw it back towards the man, using the weapon’s strength to land it as hard as possible. Then he leapt off the roof, and darted into a safe, dark spot. He watched as the man rushed to the edge of the building, the target’s blood still on him, and stared out into the dark.

Complete the mission, go to Pierce. Soldier waited until the man with the shield had gone before silently slipping out of the shadows and heading towards Pierce’s apartment.

*

He didn’t have thoughts or opinions or judgements so he didn’t enjoy seeing Pierce’s shock at seeing Soldier in the shadows of his apartment, but it was certainly… amusing.

Pierce’s housekeeper left and the agent searched through his fridge.

Soldier was cold.

“Want some milk?” Pierce barely looked over his shoulder while Soldier sat silently. “The timetable has moved. Our window is limited. Two targets, Level Six.” Pierce poured himself a glass of milk on the counter before joining Soldier at the table. Soldier’s gun sat in front of his hand, ominous in the pitch-black kitchen. “They already cost me Zola.” The scientist, Soldier’s mind provided. They did not wipe him of everything, just that which was not important. The cruel Swiss man who had torn off his arm and given him a weapon – Soldier had not known that he knew that. He could not picture Zola, nor the procedure that gave him the weapon, but he knew it was the truth. “I want confirmed death in ten hours.”

Soldier had heard the front door reopen on the word Zola. Pierce had not.

Now, his housekeeper entered the kitchen from the corridor, saying, “Sorry, Mr Pierce, I—I forgot my phone.” She stopped, staring at him – covered in tac-gear and guns, a mask and goggles on his face.

Soldier knew what was going to happen before it did.

“Oh, Renata,” Pierce said, almost sympathetic. “I wish you would have knocked.”

Pierce picked up Soldier’s gun and shot the housekeeper. Her blood splattered the windows, and her body slumped to the ground. Pierce sighed, then replaced the weapon on the table.

“Agent Natasha Romanoff and Captain Steve Rogers,” he said. “Ten hours. Go.”

*

Information was not difficult to obtain when the targets were famous and their lives detailed in S.H.I.E.L.D. computers.

Agent Natasha Romanoff of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Born 1984 in Soviet Russia, with links to the KGB and Red Rooms. Joined S.H.I.E.L.D. in 2005 and was a founding member of the Avengers Initiative in 2012 during the alien invasion of New York. Worked within S.H.I.E.L.D. as a plant and spy and was currently residing in Washington D.C. to work at the main HQ. Her level classification was unknown, but assumed high, and she was registered as a threat.

Captain Steven Rogers, more commonly known as Captain America, also of S.H.I.E.L.D.: joined the organisation in 2008 and led many operations and missions in his role – specifically ones involving necessary force. Founding member of the Avengers Initiative, relocated from New York to Washington D.C. to work at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ. Was born, interestingly enough, in 1918 and given a super soldier serum that helped him survive in the Arctic ice until his revival in 1998. Since then, he lived partially as a public figure, and also as a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent – his opinions on almost every subject, from the war on terror to presidential candidates were extensively documented. Level classification unknown, but assumed high, and registered as a serious threat.

And then the third man, whom they had been spotted with after the destruction of Zola and Camp Leigh: Samuel Wilson of the United States Air Force. His address was noted in D.C., and his entire family history only a five-minute read, but until recently, had no known involvement with Rogers and Romanoff. He was, however, in the driving seat when Soldier leapt onto his car as it was doing sixty down the highway.

He was given another strike team, this time hopefully less incompetent and death-inclined, and a fight followed. Cars careened sideways and Rogers landed in a bus on the street below the bridge the highway had arced into. Soldier laid down a covering fire, keeping an eye out for Romanoff, too. He’d known they’d both fight back. That was the first thing he’d known about each of them.

The fight was bloody and violent. Romanoff was shot in the shoulder and Soldier’s own team were dropping like flies against Wilson. For the moment, Rogers had vanished, and Soldier followed Romanoff’s trail, only to have her jump out from behind and swing up onto his shoulders, a garotte in her hands.

He pulled the wire away with the weapon, slamming her back into a van as he gasped in a breath. When she fell off, she neatly dodged a punch, the weapon making a dent in the van’s side.

“You don’t remember me at all, huh,” she said, before her eyes leapt over his shoulder. The two of them pulled apart just in time for a red, white, and blue shield to imbed itself in the van. Soldier pushed her words away. He didn’t know her – or remember. But he didn’t remember anything, only what mattered. And if she wasn’t in his mind, then she didn’t matter to the mission.

He flung himself into the fight with Rogers, the target taking every hit he gave, and pummelling back twice as hard. They were evenly matched in strength and speed. Romanoff had to rely on stealth and trickery to pull an advantage, but Rogers was already there; lightning quick and fighting back with a vengeance.

Soldier’s knife went skittering and Rogers’ hit sent him flipping back. His goggles had long come off, and now his mask followed, clattering across the tarmac and leaving him bare-faced. Vulnerable, some part of him supplied. Because the mask wasn’t all about concealing identity and making him look terrifying – it was about hiding whatever lay beneath it; a face he barely knew, could barely control, with emotions he didn’t recognise.

The fight stilled with the mask falling off.

As if, just for a moment, everyone in the world stopped breathing with the reveal.

“Bucky?” Rogers asked, and every part of him looked wrecked. He didn’t nearly look his age of ninety-six, nor his lived-age of forty. He looked young, fresh-faced, serum-immortal, and fucking destroyed.

Soldier could’ve shot him ten times in the stillness. But all he said was, “Who the hell is Bucky?” and flung himself back towards Rogers, only to be knocked aside by Wilson in a pair of large, mechanical wings.

Then Romanoff used his own grenade launcher and he darted into the smoke, brain spinning. Bucky, Bucky, Bucky. What was that word? What did it mean? Bucky. Who the hell was Bucky, and who the hell was Steve Rogers?

*

Soldier had mere minutes before he needed to be back at the underground base where he was stored. He knew Pierce would be waiting for him, along with operatives and scientists. His weapon was sparking too – some damage taken in the fight – and his mask was still left, forgotten, on the street. He was vulnerable and reeling, and he couldn’t go back yet. He couldn’t.

Bucky. Who the fuck was Bucky? What kind of name was that? And his target, Rogers, why did he know him? Because—fuck. That’s what this feeling was, right? Acknowledgement. Recognition. Somewhere in his hollowed-out head were answers he couldn’t reach for – wasn’t allowed to reach for. But Rogers was in there, and Soldier had a bet that Romanoff was too – You don’t remember me at all, huh. Should he? Who was she to remember? Who had she been? Who had he been?

Had he been Bucky? Had he been someone other than Soldier when he knew her? Or had he simply shot at her, left her for dead; a witness to a target he hadn’t been ordered to silence. He couldn’t tell, couldn’t figure, couldn’t find the answers.

He needed to know who Bucky was.

Soldier stalked the streets, heading fast away from the scene as police sirens raced back towards it. By now, the targets were either long gone or in Hydra’s hands – he couldn’t bring himself not to care about the answer, as much as he wanted to. He’d been given ten hours to bring them in and he was running short on time; Soldier was not a failure. But he hadn’t predicted Wilson’s wings, or being so evenly matched with Rogers – and he certainly hadn’t predicted a fight-stalling word. A fight-stalling name.

Fuck. He’d find out soon enough if they were captured or not. Then he’d be punished if they weren’t and put back on ice if they were, and he wouldn’t have to worry about this anymore. They’d wipe him and it’d all be gone. Soldier could be a blank slate again, an empty vessel, a weapon that didn’t talk back – because what good was a gun that had opinions about the person he was shooting.

But—but, he knew him.

Soldier knew him. The man on the bridge – Steve Rogers – Soldier knew him and he didn’t know how.

People gave him a wide berth on the street, so he made for alleyways and swiped a jacket from a clothing rail at an out-door market to cover his gear. He kept his head down and slowed his pace, made it average, normal, unimportant. When the crowd stopped parting for him and flowed with him, he slipped his hand into a woman’s bag and pulled out her phone, thankfully without a password, ducking away into a side street to search his problem online. He knew about the internet but couldn’t say how – it was just information that was deemed important as time went on; just like how he could work a modern computer and use a password hacking software – things that were relevant were allowed in his mind, and things deemed – what? Useless? Damaging? were long forgotten.

Bucky he typed into the bar. Options came up, and he frowned at the words – Bucky Barnes wiki, Bucky Barnes Howling Commandos, Bucky Barnes birthday.

The name dislodged something in his chest and he clicked on the first result, eyes jumping around the pages as they led him closer and closer to his answer.

“Sergeant James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes was a soldier during World War II, a former officer of the 107^th Infantry Regiment, and the best friend of Captain Steve Rogers since childhood.” Soldier swallowed, back rigid and pressed against the brick wall of the alley. He felt the knife at the base of his back press into his skin, locked between he and the wall, and he forced himself to breathe. “Barnes was drafted and assigned to the 107^th in 1942. His regiment was captured by Hydra, where he was reported to have been experimented on by Swiss scientist Arnim Zola. Barnes, along with the remainders of his regiment, were later rescued by Rogers, who had become Captain America during Barnes’ time at war. Upon joining forces in the continuing war, Barnes and Rogers formed the Howling Commandos to battle Red Skull’s forces. However, during an attempt to finally capture Zola in the Austrian Alps, Barnes was caught in their ambush and plummeted hundreds of feet from a train. As no body was ever recovered, Barnes was then presumed deceased, but officially listed as missing in action. He is the only Howling Commando to have given his life for the cause.”

The phone screen cracked in his hand, and Soldier dropped the device, breathing heavily. He was affected by this—this Barnes. There was someone out there with a name that resonated with him too deeply, and he went missing in action some seventy years ago, and yet—Bucky?

Rogers had recognised Soldier on the bridge. Rogers, who was Barnes’ childhood best friend. Rogers, who had died and come back to life because of the super soldier serum in his veins – because of the same thing that Soldier knew was coursing through his.

Oh, fuck, this was too difficult to wrap his head around. Too much was coming in and out and the words were still staring up at him from the ground, taunting. Soldier dropped into a crouch to be closer to them and reached out his shaking hand – why was it shaking, why was this getting to him – and scrolled the page down.

“In 1998, it was reported internationally that Sgt. James Barnes had come back from the dead, after a man appeared in the Arctic, believing the year to be 1944, wearing Barnes’ military dog tags. Despite knowledge that Barnes went missing in the Austrian Alps, the news spread quickly that he was back from the dead, only to be disproven a mere week after it hit newsstands, as the man in question was actually Captain Steve Rogers – Captain America – who’d returned instead.”

Soldier had the strangest, strongest feeling that he’d seen the words Sgt. James Barnes Back from The Dead – only, in his mind’s eye, they weren’t in English, but a language he couldn’t fully comprehend in the moment. He was there and not, breathing tight and erratic, and his trembling hand picked up the phone, holding it almost tight enough to break.

He pressed his thumb on the back arrow, and then on the word images. He had—he had to know, he couldn’t not.

The screen took a moment to load, and then through the cracked glass he saw himself, in grainy black and white; a face he barely knew but couldn’t forget – Soldier, Asset, #67b9, The Winter Soldier, James Buchanan Barnes.

*

He went back to the base. His hands were shaking like nobody’s business, but it was ingrained in him – return to base, be wiped, start again. Be compliant, be silent, be obedient. The fist of Hydra, the assassin in the dark, the one who could turn the balance from order to chaos and free the people of the world.

James fucking Barnes.

Stop it, he told himself, marching himself through the guarded door and down the stairs. Stop it. But he couldn’t, because the name was like a trigger and his mind was a gun, shooting off in all directions and leaving him with holes in his head, fucking gaping and smoking and bleeding out everywhere. There was blood in his eye, distorting his vision, and he needed it gone. Needed the wipe, but—

Fucking stop it. He ground to a halt in the hall. You’ve done this before.

Had he? Had he been in this place before, knowing his name and face and history – because he’d read that entire page to the bitter end, which wasn’t that long as Rogers wasn’t giving up personal details, but apparently he had a sister and parents and a fucking cat. There were books written about him, movies about his life, about Rogers’ and the Commandos – and half of them were still living too, he found when he moved from one page to the next; an entire life he couldn’t recall unfolding in front of him.

And he wanted to forget? To let it all sink back beneath the surface, so far below that it’d take another run in with Rogers to maybe dreg up that unreeling feeling again? No, no, fuck no, his insides told him, and then a thought struck hard against the side of his mind: why did Captain America have his tags?

He thought back to the fight, to the glittering silver tags around Rogers’ neck as he fought. Wilson had been wearing similar ones, and Romanoff an arrow necklace – his eyes were built for details and he’d caught them all between gunshots and garottes, and – was Rogers wearing Soldier’s tags, or, at least, Soldier’s from another life?

So where were Rogers’?

He blinked, and for a second, he saw them in his hand, saw the way his fingers enclosed around them, dark grey and vital. Then they were gone, and that moment was simply a fragment he couldn’t pick up – sharp edges made his fingers bleed, after all – but he knew it had been there, had been real. He’d had Rogers’ tags when he—when he died, when he fell, when he’d been found, and Rogers had had his.

It was something, but it wasn’t helpful in the moment. He didn’t have those tags and now he stood motionless in the middle of an underground hall, only a few steps and a corner away from a chair that would wipe him back to blank, from Pierce and the guns and—he wouldn’t get answers that way.

Soldier turned, faced the door he’d come in through. You’ve done this, too, the voice said. He knew the voice meant running, but he couldn’t bring up the memory to match.

If the guards tried to keep him, he could kill them. He still had two pistols and six knives and a garotte and a grenade and a weapon. If they tried to call him back he’d run. If they made him compliant—well then he’d be out of luck, and back in that chair in seconds, putting himself there and baring his teeth for the mouth guard with no complaints. No – he couldn’t let them live in case they knew about compliance. He couldn’t risk it. Not until—

Not until what? Until all the pieces were back together and he could tell what side he was on? What side he was supposed to be on? Because James Barnes fought Hydra and the Winter Soldier fought for Hydra, and he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do with conflicting information.

He had been James Barnes once, according to Rogers’ reaction and the photos on the phone that had crunched between his fingers, screen flickering a light show of colours before turning black. He had been James Barnes, and somewhere along the line, he’d lost that – or, maybe, it had been taken from him.

Soldier forced his feet to move, and he started back up the stairs, towards the guards. They looked up when he pushed the door open, and he shot them both in the head. He took one of their rifles for good measure.

Then he was gone, like he’d never been there at all.

Waking

He’d been consistently two steps ahead of Rogers and his flying buddy Wilson for five months. It wasn’t that he was trying to evade them entirely – he was just trying to evade them for now. There was no set plan but staying away forever wasn’t part of it.

Not when he was coming back to himself, anyway.

After leaving Hydra, he didn’t have anyone to name him, provide orders, and make him compliant until he’d forgotten how to think of anything but the mission, so Barnes had to make a lot of decisions for himself. His name, for starters – Soldier and Asset weren’t sitting right on his shoulders, and James and Bucky felt a little too… distant, unknowable, unrecognisable. He’d been them once, maybe, but he was not them right then. All he was in the weeks after Hydra was Barnes, and that was because it was the only name left.

Then he had to decide what he wanted to do. At first, it was get as far away from D.C. as possible – he’d ended up in an unrecognisable Brooklyn neighbourhood, and broke into a decrepit building booked for demolition. After, dazed and disoriented with no food and no money and no idea who he was supposed to be, he set about remembering. It was his only option, after all: remember who he was, what he wanted, what he cared about – and then maybe he would have an idea of where to go.

He stole bank cards, committed more fraud than he’d ever committed with Hydra, and rented an apartment in Brooklyn with cash under the name Dimitri Yeltsin. He bought food with stolen money – just enough to get him through every day – and a shitty third-hand sofa he could sleep and sit on. He had his first opinion he could recall about that sofa: it looked disgusting, but it was comfy as all hell.

After stealing a phone from a street market two weeks in, he used the wifi for the apartment below his (he’d broken in during the middle of the day while the tenant was at work, taken their wifi code, and left), and started out remembering. Or—researching, because knowing facts was one thing, but being able to recall the moment himself was an entirely different beast.

First, he everything he could on Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes of the Howling Commandos. He’d read his Wikipedia page the day he ran from Hydra, but he read it again anyway. Then the articles on his life, then the books he found online and downloaded to his phone.

He stayed up all night reading The Falling Commando: The Unauthorised Biography of Sgt. James Barnes, followed the next night by Howlers – a collection of stories written by the Commandos and their loved ones long after the war, talking about missions as well as their childhoods. He read the whole thing in one go, then reread the sections on himself and Rogers, both written by Barnes’ sister Becca Proctor – The last of Steve’s family died in the Alps, Becca started, under the title ‘CAPTAIN ROGERS’, so my parents and me might just be the last people on Earth who remember him from before the suit and shield.

After that, he couldn’t not read the biographies and articles and interviews about Steve Rogers. He couldn’t not learn every little thing he could hold in his fractured, hollowed out head about the man who was supposedly his best friend. He read everything he could find, watched every bad Hollywood movie from the 40’s all the way to the present, propped up on his sofa, holed up in his dingy apartment where he could see the toilet from the kitchen and the sofa-bed from the shower.

There was a lot more about Rogers than there ever was about Barnes – but that made sense. Rogers had come back to life in 1998, clawed his way out of the ice of the Arctic and kept living. According to the cache of leaked S.H.I.E.L.D. files, courtesy of Natasha Romanoff on the day the helicarriers fell, a mere twenty hours after Barnes left D.C., he’d lived primarily in New York until 2008, then Washington until the day a wormhole opened above Stark Tower. He’d also kicked up a bit of a shitfit over “the cube”, more commonly known as the Tesseract, after Fury revealed ownership of it since before Rogers had woken up and neglected to tell him about it.

Rogers had attended parties and press events, had been a public figure since the ‘90s; the whole world wanted in on his business and for the longest time, he had barely given them scraps.

There were three exceptions: the interview from ’98 being the first. Apparently, it was a defining moment of the end of the century, watched internationally as Steve Rogers sat in a television studio and told the world about crashing into the ice and waking up fifty years later. All Barnes could think as Rogers talked about the bombs headed for New York was Dumbass. You absolute dumbass. There was always a way out, and Rogers had simply refused to take it. Barnes had briefly wondered why, before remembering his own apparent death mere days before the crash—

“You wouldn’t,” he muttered, glaring at the screen. But then the interviewer asked Rogers about Barnes, and he looked more pained than he had talking about his own death.

“He and I… we’ve been beside each other for our whole lives. I never saw it ending like that – I never… I always thought we’d go home together. Thought we’d see the end of the war together. Thought we’d see everything after it together, too.”

Barnes sighed. “You would.” Because even in his manic-depressive state, in his confusion and fear and isolation, in his sleep-deprived, dehydrated, barely-there stasis, Barnes knew that Rogers had given up on that plane and refused to save himself.

The weight of who he had to be to live up to his own goddamn self was crushing.

In the second interview, in ‘03, Rogers was sat beside the other Commandos, all bar Dugan, who’d died from heart problems two weeks before. The interview was in his honour – a chance to talk about the good old days and reminisce. Barnes couldn’t remember much of what they were saying – occasionally he’d feel a flash of recognition over a name or place, but that was it. He was just like all the other viewers; learning for the first time about the heroes of World War Two. Even when they talked about him, he was distant to the facts.

“The best dancer in the war,” Jim Morita said. “You shoulda seen him in those bars. No one could take their eyes off him.”

“No one could take their eyes of Cap, either,” Gabe Jones added with a laugh. “He wasn’t a good dancer though, just the prettiest face in the war.”

Now, his limbs felt clunky, misused. He’d given the weapon as much maintenance as he knew how to manage, but it was grinding and squeaking, albeit no longer sparking. The rest of him was twitchy, keyed-up, desperate to jump into a fight and run from one end of Brooklyn to the other. In his third week of being Barnes he saw a brawl outside a bar and involved himself just because he could; because his entire body was yearning to be hit, to hit something, because he needed the rush or he’d break something, break himself.

It was the third interview, however, that finally gave him something worth remembering. Before then, it’d been flashes, infrequent and far apart – no context breaths of war and guns and sunsets. Finally, there was fact.

The interview was an article, published in 2005, two years after Rogers’ last foray into the limelight. It took some work, but he managed to get a copy of the full article, rather than just the preview, and read it over his allotted three protein bars for lunch. He read then reread each paragraph, cataloguing the information about himself: a cat-lover, apparently, who named a cat after Rogers, who later returned the favour—

“I have a cat,” Barnes murmured, reading the words aloud for the fourth time. “His name’s James. Absolute attention-seeker, doesn’t like to be left alone or ignored for even a second – just like his namesake, honestly.” He read the words a fifth time before they sunk in. Barnes had named a cat after Rogers and Rogers had named a cat after Barnes. We’ve taken to calling him Son of a Witch, though. I think Buck would appreciate that.

He wasn’t Buck anymore, but he appreciated it all the same.

And then the moment came: when did you come to own Barnes’ tags?

“Ah, well. It was only a few days before, actually. We switched… It was a big deal to us.”

And it was. Barnes could remember it like it had just happened, like the tags were in his hand and he was slipping the chain between the folds of the cream paper he’d torn from his notebook. He’d folded it up tight so they wouldn’t fall out and had slipped it into Rogers’ hand as he passed on his way to his tent. It was so dark, the fire was just burning out, and he’d glanced back only once, to see Rogers watching him as he walked away.

And then, like it was all before him, like he was there and the past was playing in the present, he saw the canvas of his tent - sun warming him through the fabric, the first real sunny, warm day in weeks - and there, beside his pack and shoes and sheathed knives, was a silver chain and two tags. He could remember the flash of panic – what if he gave them back? What if he’d changed his mind and this was his way of saying – and his fingers had scrabbled for purchase, pure fear coursing through his body. But when he lifted the tags to his face, the name there wasn’t his own, and he was loved.

He was loved.

He died with my name around his neck, Rogers continued in the interview, as Barnes read in a daze, lunch long forgotten, the feeling of Rogers’ tags, warmed by the morning sun, between his fingers still present and precious. And I died with his. I remember waking up, those first awful few days in the future, and thinking, ‘Maybe they found his body. Maybe he’s out there, buried under a gravestone with my name on it.’ That’s—he would’ve liked that, I think.

And Barnes knew, very suddenly, very viscerally, that he would’ve liked that. That he would’ve preferred dying at the bottom of that mountain, Rogers’ name around his neck, and being buried beneath it.

But he wasn’t dead – he was very much alive no matter how it made him ache. And he’d finally remembered something real, something important. So Barnes finally knew what to do, what he had to do: he was going to go to every Hydra base he’d ever lived in, and he was going to find Steve Rogers’ tags. And then, maybe, Bucky Barnes would finally come back to himself.

*

Five months later, Bucky was two steps ahead of Rogers and Wilson. He was a little proud of how he strung them along, and how they followed no matter where he went. Sometimes, he didn’t even lead – he watched, and followed, and listened in on their conversations about where they thought he’d be heading next.

They seemed to believe he was on a revenge mission, but revenge hadn’t even occurred to him. As far as Bucky was concerned, as he travelled the world and tore apart Hydra bases, it was a search and rescue mission.

Occasionally, he’d let them do the work for him: he’d slow down and let them catch up, and watch as they noted the Hydra base to be full and working, despite the organisation scurrying back to the holes they came out of some seven months before, and called in the big guns: i.e. the Avengers.

Bucky, who was feeling more like Bucky and less like Barnes since this mission began, would hide in the tree line and watch the red-and-gold Iron Man, and the giant green monster Hulk. They did an excellent job at not destroying these bases – though Bucky had been initially worried. But Rogers seemed anxious that Bucky might be in the base during the attack, and didn’t want him hurt, while Romanoff had advised that there might be a lot they could find within these bases; weapons, plans, information.

Usually, in those cases, Bucky would enter as the firefight was winding down, and creep through the base until he found locked offices and incineration rooms. Once or twice, he’d found rooms packed with vials and jars filled with possessions and body parts, but none the tags he was searching for. After he was certain he wouldn’t find them, he’d sneak out of the base, and leave them long behind him. But to every base he went, he left a note – something small, something easily hidden, that wouldn’t be found for a day or so by whichever intelligence agency had jurisdiction: a scrap of paper with a clumsily drawn shield and the name of his next target, or his next-next target, if he wanted them to get there first.

He’d led them on a chase through the States and much of Eastern Europe in this way, stopping off briefly in the Middle East and taking the scenic route towards Russia along the way.

The sightseeing tour, as winding and confusing as it had been, was bringing Bucky back to himself; slowly but surely, a memory here, an opinion there. Some days he’d walk into a diner and count his likes and dislikes – the colour themes, the patterns, the jukebox at the end of the bar; he’d take minutes sometimes and hours others, zoning in on every object in the room and forming an opinion before he left.

He was coming back, step by step, filling his own body with a human soul once more. Bucky partially wished he had Rogers with him rather than chasing him – that maybe a friendly, vaguely familiar face, would help loosen the memories he’d yet to unstick; that maybe he’d feel less like a hermit, scurrying from place to place, and more like a person if he weren’t so alone.

But he worried Rogers would ask him to stop, would tell him that the tags weren’t worth it. He was also afraid of that feeling he’d enjoyed so much: being loved. Bucky and fear were not easy friends, but he felt it closely when it came to being loved by someone he didn't remember – or, even more so, at the prospect of remembering being loved, and how to love someone else, only to discover it vanished in the present.

It was as he was travelling from Kazakhstan to Russia that he had the thought, the first borderline memory that didn’t link to Rogers at all: Red Room.

Bucky slowed the bike and parked it by the side of the road. What the fuck is a Red Room?

He probed the word for a moment, searching for the memory, for something attached, but nothing personal came, only the knowledge of Natasha Romanoff having a relation to one. He’d researched her when she was a target, after all. Then why was the thought coming to him now? He drummed the weapon’s fingers on the handle grip and sat back, looking down the long, empty strip of road. There had to be something to it, something he’d lived, something that wasn’t coming back to him just yet.

They won’t be in a Red Room, he told himself with a sigh, but that didn’t lessen the allure of the word, the feeling of a rope tied neatly around his torso and tugging him forward. Fine. A detour. He kicked up the kick-stand and started off down the road once more.

*

Five hours past the border, driving on gut feeling and intuition, he found it.

The mansion must’ve once been a sight, Bucky could tell from the remains that sprawled across an empty, overgrown estate. The paint peeled in strips and more than one window was smashed between the other, dirtied panes of glass. From the front path, he watched the birds that had nested in the eaves of the porch flutter from nest to nest, chirping as they went, and in the underbrush, rabbits darted away into hidden groves of shrubbery, unused to human presence.

He had wanted to feel a sense of homecoming when he walked around Brooklyn, found the corner where his and Rogers’ apartment had once been, when he took in sights that should’ve been familiar – but he hadn’t. Just an empty space in his chest where home should’ve been.

Now, staring up at the mansion, one of the many Red Rooms hidden in plain sight across Russia, he breathed out a sigh of relief. Home, his gut told him, even if it wasn’t. This is yours, his body promised, though he didn’t want it to be.

The door took only a little persuasion from the weapon to unlock, creaking open and shedding light across the dust-ridden black and white checked floor. The foyer spread forward, dead plants along the walls, spiders building cobwebs in every corner. Bucky checked the floor for disturbance in the dust, but there was nothing, not even a single footprint.

He swung the door shut behind him.

The Red Room didn’t immediately jog his memories but poked at them gently until their corners and edges spread into the light of his mind.

“I am Madame B.,” he heard, though there was no one there – just a ghost in the back of his head, replaying a voice, a conversation. The words were Russian, clipped, her tone sharp as a knife. He couldn’t picture her face, just the wrinkles she endeavoured to smooth and her dark hair pulled back in a neat bun. The sound of a cane, too, tapping at the marble floors, perfectly in time with her heels meeting the ground.

The front of the mansion held a lounge, frozen in decades past. The furniture was sophisticated but gaudy, the curtains pulled open, a newspaper on the coffee table. Feb. 1, 2002, the date read. Had this building stood empty and hollow for thirteen years? It would’ve been hard to believe had Bucky himself not stood empty and hollow for seventy.

On the side board, a teapot and selection of teacups sat, waiting. The coffee machine was full, mold-covered and smelling. He had the faintest feeling he’d drunk coffee from that machine; that it was always overly strong and bitter, that someone with jet black hair and icy eyes always poured half a cup of creamer in her mug first to counteract it. He did not know her name, nor her face, just saw a mug of pale coffee in one hand and a pistol in the other.

Bucky stepped back into the foyer and followed the hall away from the lounge. He came quickly to a cafeteria, not large inside, but with linoleum floor and the same chandeliers that he saw everywhere else. Rotten food on abandoned plates attracted flies, and Bucky pulled a face. People had been here, once. They had filled this room and this house, and now they were all gone. Thirteen years gone.

“But not by choice,” Bucky murmured, glancing through the still-open hatch into the kitchen beyond. The electrics and water were all out, presumably had been for a long while, but there were still pans on the oven hobs, still dishes in the sink. People had been here and left in a rush, left without warning, left without cleaning up after them.

He remembered Madame B.’s voice, pointed and brittle, “You do not leave a room in a worse state than you found it, and you do not expect anyone to clean up after you, even if that is precisely the maid’s job.” He remembered the maid too, trailing after them as they descended the staircase, teacups rattling on their saucers.

Only a minute later, he found the training room. He spent the next minute wishing he hadn’t.

The training room was hard wood, with tall windows and floor-to-ceiling mirrors lining opposite walls. A piano sat in one corner, as he vaguely remembered, and across the floor, dried, deep brown blood. It splattered across the mirrors in arcs, across the walls and windows and piano. The ivories were drenched in the centre, like a head had been rammed onto them, like a head had been shot in front of them, like a head had been torn apart over them. It must’ve puddled on the floor, with its thickness, must’ve shone in the chandelier lights and taken days to fully dry. Thirteen years ago.

There were streaks, where the bodies were dragged into the hall, but they petered off only a metre from the doorway. The halls had been cleaned, but the training room had not; an unwelcoming surprise for anyone who came back.

Bucky wondered who was killed in here. The girls, likely. The teachers? The man who played the piano? What about Madame B.? Her bosses? Were all the girls in here lining up for a test? For ballet class? Or was this just where the fight ended? Were the women who cleaned and cooked and tended to the garden shot in here or did they escape?

Was this whole building simply a slaughterhouse?

Bucky stepped from the room and started back down the hall, before pausing and banging the toes of his boots into the floor until the blood chips fell from the grips. He stared at the flakes and thought, Is this Polina’s blood? He remembered her, almost. A name that had come to him with no context now making sense – one of the girls in the Room, deep brown hair cut harshly into a bob at her shoulders, grey eyes like an impending storm, but a smile so warm it upended him.

He found the staircase and ascended. Or was it Florentina’s blood? Tanned skin, eyes like mud but a heart of wolf’s fur; soft and downy. He couldn’t picture her smile but could hear her voice trailing after him up the stairs: Just because we are killers does not mean we cannot be good people. She’d traded her Solyanka soup for his borscht, and later had led him through the garden on a warm summer’s day, naming all the flowers until he’d got there first and said, “That one’s lavender.”

“How do you know?”

He’d blinked and said, “I don’t remember,” but now the memory was unpeeling another of a dining room nicer than any he’d ever sat in before, all golden-lit chandeliers like the Room’s, but guests dressed in finer clothes; a meal was set out before them, being served, and Bucky had said, No, you’re allergic, to the lavender jelly when the mutton was offered and Steve had laughed and said, Not anymore, Buck, I can’t believe you remembered that, but Bucky remembered everything about Steve back then, allergies and diseases and how many layers he needed to wear on any given day, and this was just another part of him that he knew all so intrinsically; information now useless in the wake of his new body.

He stopped outside the door leading into the girls’ bedrooms, wary of the blood stains he might find. Instead, when he pushed the door open, the beds were all dusty, made and perfect, but the windows smashed through, birds dancing around the ceiling. He had few memories of this room – it was not one he had permission to enter, and Bucky knew that Soldier followed rules with an obedience that could only be mastered through brainwashing.

He’d looked through this open door only twice before; once when Yuri, one of the younger girls, was escorted away in the middle of the night, having been chosen by a visiting KGB-or-Soviet-or-Hydra leader to come away with him, and Madame B. had helped her into a coat and kept a tight grip on her shoulder all the way to the front door, and after they’d gone, she’d turned and looked the black-haired teacher—Ms. Zolotov, he remembered with a blink—and said, “God bless that poor child and the punishment that awaits her,” and Soldier had not known how to speak when not asked very well at the time, but he’d stumbled out, “What—will—happen,” and nodded to the door, and Ms. Zolotov had smiled in a way that wasn’t a smile, and patted his shoulder as she returned to her room, saying, “We train the girls to use their bodies, Soldier, but not in the way he has plans for,” over her shoulder, as if they had no choice in the matter, and a second when he’d been asked to collect Irena from the bunk room and found her tangled with Eva on the bed.

Now, Bucky shut the door. The girls had darted apart so quickly Eva had ended up on another bed entirely, almost falling off it hadn’t it been for her honed reflexes. Soldier had tilted his head, said, “You need to get to class. Now,” and stepped back into the hall. The girls had cornered him in their free hour after dinner, as he’d expected them to, but all he said was, “I have no reason to tell Madame. Don’t give me one and your secret is safe,” and after they’d left, nervous but satisfied, Soldier had felt something strange like he’d been them once and there had been a secret he was desperate to keep; something that would’ve had him punished just as harshly as they would be if they were found out.

Bucky found Madame’s room, her jewellery still on the dresser and her clothes still hanging in the closet. The book she’d been reading was on the bedside table, bookmark tucked where she left off, and there were unopened letters on the bed, where she’d likely left them until she had a chance to read them. He couldn’t imagine her leaving without her things and tried to picture her fighting for her life in the training room – Bucky could remember her through the slither of two shut doors, playing the piano by candlelight, and he wondered if it had been her blood drenching the ivories.

He opened her letters, she too dead to complain about him reading her mail and struggled through the Russian – a language he could speak with complete ease and yet found difficult to read.

Three Hydra representatives will visit on April 18 to assess the recruits and register formal interest in the ones they wish to employ.

He threw that one aside, and the paper drifted to the floor.

The second was less official, written in long, careful script. It was even more trying to read when not typed out, but he got the gist: My love, I picture us old and weathered, I picture us frail and happy – though you will never be frail, with the kind of strength you hold – I picture us falling asleep forever in each other’s arms. It is not the gun fight you told me you would go down in, but it is softer, it is quieter. It is what we deserve.

Bucky searched Madame’s room until he found the old strong box, padlocked and hidden at the back of her closet. The weapon broke the lock, and then he brushed the dust and dirt off the arm chair in the corner, coughing into the bits that floated through the air, and settling on the cushions to read the rest. Because Madame B. had been sent love letters. Because Madame B. had a man she loved – Anton, the letters were signed – and she had given him up for the Room, for the girls.

There is no choice here, Anton wrote, because if there were we’d be in a small cottage, watching the sea stretch out forever, and Bucky changed his mind about her being here being her decision.

Bucky read them all, one by one, and as he did Madame came back to him in inches. Her cold eyes, her steel grip, her thin, pursed lips. Her voice as she listened to a girl cry, surprisingly soft and gentle. Her gaze so full of pride when the girls succeeded. Her words, the last ones he could remember her saying—Come back if you’re able. We’ll protect you the best we can, just like we do for the girls.

Bucky knew the Red Room was a training ground for child assassins on the wrong side of history; he knew Madame B. was their leader and their teacher, but he also knew she was their mother. He did not think she was a good person; but he did think she sometimes did good things. He wondered if that would be enough for Florentina.

Many years ago, you asked me if I would take a bullet for you, Anton wrote in the final letter. I had not known then what I do now. I would take a hundred bullets for you, my love, and I’d catch them with my teeth.

Bucky asked himself if he had ever felt that before, but he couldn’t give himself an answer.

*

Before he left the Red Room, he took the old, rusted set of keys from Madame B.’s strong box, (as well as the hundred-thousand-or-so rubles) and followed the hallway all the way to the end, where a set of rotten stairs led up. It was on that top floor that he unlocked the door and peered into the room that he had once slept in. He didn’t remember it so much as intrinsically know it; the small attic, one thin bed pressed against one wall and three beds as far from it as possible. It was his bed, in the corner, beneath the shackles that he could’ve broken through, but compliantly agreed not to.

The floorboards creaked under his boots. There were blood splatters up here, too – but very few, very old; so dried that they might simply crumble to dust if touched. The final stains of a fight or a nosebleed or something twenty years old and too far gone to be recalled.

He didn’t know how he knew what would be there, but Bucky lifted the mattress with the weapon, and eyed the possessions he’d collected and hidden. The ones he’d never come back for.

“I’m here now,” he told them, his voice the loudest thing in the house, on the estate, possibly for miles. Bucky collected the drawing five-year-old Oksana had drawn for him during her free hours; a stick figure Soldier with long brown hair and a grey left arm, a small blonde Oksana in a blue dress holding his hand; a threaded bracelet of blue and red and white, braided together and given to him by eight-year-old Aleksey to thank him for watching her dance so she could practice with an audience before her test with Ms. Sorokin the following day (They’re both dead now, his mind said, if they didn’t escape the slaughter they’d be dead like Madame) and—

“Natalia,” he said, the name sliding into place as he picked up the items, the makeshift blade on top. Her name was scratched into the side of the shiv, and he barely remembered making the thing with her; teaching the girls how to make blades and weapons out of materials they might be locked up with. She’d looked so satisfied with herself when they’d finished this one, but he knew the handlers couldn’t see him take it, so pretended to give it to her and slipped it up his sleeve instead. She’d come to him the next day and showed him the sharp point she’d filed one end of her toothbrush into.

Bucky slipped the bracelet around his wrist, folded the drawing and placed it and the shiv in his backpack beside Madame B.’s letters. He then got the fuck out of the Red Room before he could change his mind.

*

Natasha Romanoff was Natalia, Bucky figured out three minutes from the Red Room. Their faces were the same. Same red hair, same green eyes, same slow, stretching smile. He’d watched the Black Widow enough to pair her fighting with Natalia’s, and as he sped down the road on the motorbike, he could even recall the Red Room running a Black Widow Programme.

Natasha Romanoff was Natalia and he had helped raise her. And she had helped him become a little more human.

Go get your freedom, her young voice said in his mind, loud over the roar of the engine. How long had he been free for? How long had he holed up somewhere dark and dingy and hoped they wouldn’t find him? How long had Soldier survived without Hydra before they clawed him back?

Bucky didn’t want to think about Natalia or Natasha or Soldier (not when he’d also have to think about the bridge and Natasha’s garotte and the way he’d had no remorse about his assignment to kill her) so he thought instead about his main problem: he was running out of bases to search. There were still underground cells and hidden basements where Hydra rats scurried to evade the rain of the Avengers, but there weren’t many that he’d been to before. From the files he’d read, and his own memory grappling itself back together, he hadn’t been moved around a lot. Not many of the bases had the storage facilities necessary for him and the cryochamber, so he’d worked out of the ones that did, and be brought to the closest whenever the job was done.

There was only one in Russia that he was aware of, though Bucky knew he’d search every Hydra base to find the tags again. It was the only thing he had; the one physical thing from the past that had opened the door for the rest of his life to come through – what if having them in his hands would usher the rest in? What if his life before Hydra was just a dirty set of army dog tags away?

How could Bucky not go after them?

He drove through the night towards the base, knowing he had to make up for the lost time of the Red Room detour – Rogers and Wilson were likely already on their way, probably having found his note hours ago. They didn’t always travel with a quinjet, but they almost always had faster ways of getting places than Bucky did – just Wilson’s mechanical wings alone could outspeed his bike.

When the night filtered into morning, he took a brief rest at a gas station, filling up the tank and buying breakfast with the cash he’d taken from Madame B.’s strong box. The money even smelled dusty, but the clerk had no problem taking it, and Bucky ate through two boxed sandwiches before heading off again.

He drove for hours, stopping often to consult the map, searching for the slithers of hidden road and bramble-covered signposts. He bought lunch at another gas station, rested for ten minutes in the midday sun, and set out again after.

Bucky was having trouble feeling tired. As Soldier, he’d rarely slept on missions; usually he’d be awake for as long as he was out of cryo, and then would sleep once more in the ice. In the past seven months he’d been struggling to change behaviours. Bucky would sleep once or twice a week, and power through the rest until he was dead on his feet and close to crashing.

He kept on driving, because his eyes weren’t threatening to shut yet.

It was only an hour or so later that he found it. Long off the main road, following twisting tracks and beaten paths that wound between overgrown farmland and acres of unkempt forest, there was a small, concrete building, no bigger than a shack, seemingly abandoned. The surrounding fence was eight-foot-tall and electrified, the grass at its base dead and brown.

Bucky parked the bike in the brush and shrubbery a little from the building, before approaching on foot. He didn’t have the rifle that he wanted; just a selection of knives, the stolen garotte, and a pistol. He had the weapon too. It would be enough.

The ground showed no signs of recent activity, but the fence buzzed quietly.

Bucky rounded the building, finding the electric box on the other side, pressed against the concrete wall. Wires ran from it to the fence, and Bucky judged the distance, the angle, before heading back to the tree line and swinging himself up to a low branch. It strained under his weight, and he slowed his movements, drawing the pistol and aiming it. He wished he had any other gun than this for the shot, but he was Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, even when he was not.

It took one shot for the electrics to blow. The box sparked twice before the fence died, and Bucky dropped from the tree to approach. At the fence, he listened until he was sure the buzzing was gone, before using the weapon to break the lock on the previously-electrified gate and let himself in. The door was locked, too, but he made short work of it and entered, his gun at the ready.

The concrete shack was maybe three metres squared. It was empty inside; simply dingy and dark; a chair and table on the right by the only window, and on the left, a metal-framed bed. And nothing else.

“No,” Bucky muttered, brows furrowing as he turned in a slow circle. His eyes dragged over every inch of wall, floor, and ceiling, searching for the secret entrance, the trap door, the button that would lead to the base. He picked up the bed, looking beneath it, and threw the frame across to the far wall when he found nothing. The chair smashed into the window, the table’s legs snapped hard on the concrete. He yelled and hollered and shouted. The mattress tore into pieces and stuffing covered the floor, springs pointed wildly from the fabric. Glass shattered across the window sill, the table top crunched under his feet. His throat grew hoarse with violent emotion.

It was empty. It was fucking empty. He’d been held here and it was empty. There was nothing to even signify that there had once been a chamber, barely anything even Hydra – the black shitty graffiti Baphomet on one wall was enough to confirm that he was in the right place, and yet—

His tags weren’t here. Steve’s tags weren’t here.

He didn’t bother to correct the name and snatched up a chair leg, lobbing it through the broken window. Where else was he supposed to go? He couldn’t keep tracking down Hydra bases and emptying them out for nothing. He couldn’t keep Rogers and Wilson on his tail without giving them something new – and he had nothing new. He had no more locations, just hundreds of miles of Russian land to cover, and Rogers wouldn’t follow him forever. Eventually he’d see the dead-end Bucky had become.

Breathing heavily, Bucky forced the anger back down. He hadn’t allowed himself to be angry in a long time; there was never any point. The anger was always directed at Hydra and Hydra was always scoffing in response; there was too much of it to take down, too many rats to really kill them all. The Avengers thought he was after revenge but revenge was a footnote that didn’t even register. Revenge was fruitless if he couldn’t actually succeed. Revenge was a waste of blood and heart and energy, and he had so little of all three to go around.

He fell into a crouch, the last dwindling embers of rage finally dying out. They were still loud enough to cover the footsteps, so he jerked up at the voice.

“Done throwing a hissy fit?”

Bucky span, eyes wild, gun raised. In the doorway, a dark-skinned man lifted his hands casually in surrender. He raised a single eyebrow and took a step back, out onto the grass, showing the man who stood behind.

Sam Wilson and Steve Rogers stared at him, and Bucky stared right back.

“This a Hydra base?” Wilson asked, eyes bouncing from Bucky to the mess and back again.

Bucky hesitated but answered, “I thought it was.”

“But it’s not?”

“It’s empty.”

Wilson nodded slow before tilting his head to the gun. “You mind lowering that?”

Bucky’s eyes dragged over to Steve, watching impassively. That plain expression looked so wrong on his face; Bucky couldn’t remember much of him, but he remembered the emotion, the feeling – Rogers wore his heart on his sleeve and his feelings on his face. Maybe he’d got better at schooling his expression; maybe he felt nothing for Bucky.

He lowered the gun and shoved it in his holster. They hadn’t followed him across the world to kill him – he’d eavesdropped enough times to know that. They weren’t going to hurt him. Rogers just wanted him back – but Bucky wasn’t the him he wanted. Bucky was just filling the him’s body.

Wilson stepped further back from the door, and Bucky started towards it, not liking the feeling of his one entrance being blocked. He glanced behind him before he left, and his eyes travelled across the disarray and damage he’d caused, before he blinked away.

“What’s that?” Wilson asked as Bucky stepped out into the sun. He followed his gaze towards the inside wall, Baphomet written in black spray paint. “Baphomet. What’s that mean?”

“It’s a pagan god,” Bucky replied, knowledge pulled from some deep recess of his brain. He knew Hydra’s lore still, apparently. “It’s the goat god that inspired the logo.”

“The logo’s an octopus,” Wilson replied.

Bucky met Rogers’ gaze and turned away, looking back to Wilson. “It used to be a goat.”

Now Rogers pulled a face. “It was an octopus back in the war.”

Bucky almost retorted that the war was a hazy memory he couldn’t grasp, but he stopped the words at the back of his teeth and swallowed them whole. Instead, he shouldered past Rogers and out into the clearing, starting off for his bike. “Couple hundred years ago, Hydra was a religious cult, real freaky shit, into pagan deities or something.” He shrugged, continuing, “The logo was originally the goat head of Baphomet. Then it got turned upside down and redesigned when ole’ Red Skull took over. Hydra got re-established as the Nazi research division, tentacles came into the design, I don’t know. Schmidt distanced the new Hydra sect from the bullshit cult stuff and decided to make weapons of mass destruction instead.”

“Huh,” Rogers said.

“Yeah,” Wilson agreed. “At least we got a history lesson out of this world tour.”

“Bet you didn’t get much else,” Bucky replied.

“You moved so fast we didn’t even get to go sight-seeing.”

Bucky nudged the kick stand with his foot and wheeled the bike out onto the dirt path. Further up the road, he could see the car they’d driven here in; a beat-up old Honda, probably rented. He swung a leg over the bike and settled into the seat.

The three of them stared at each other, and slowly Bucky’s gaze moved to Rogers and stayed there, drinking in the face and shoulders and body of a man he should’ve intrinsically known. But he felt like a stranger, like a shadow he could chase and chase and never catch up with. Get those tags and it all comes back, he told himself. Find those dog tags and maybe the next time he looked at Rogers, he’d know every inch again, know every movement.

“Well,” Bucky said, breaking the silence. The problem was, he didn’t know where the tags were. He didn’t have anywhere else to lead them, other than to whatever base he could find next, and so on, until the tags were in his hands or he died in a hail storm of bullets. He didn’t so much mind which happened first. “Dasvidaniya.”

He twisted the key in the ignition and the bike roared to life. Then emotion finally flickered over Rogers’ face and he started forward. “What? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Bucky blinked – the emotion on Rogers’ face wasn’t relief or sadness or anything Bucky had factored into meeting Rogers for the first time, but anger, pure and simple.

“We followed you around the world, cleared up every mass murder you carried out, and kept just about every government and law enforcement agency off your back for months, and the first time we actually catch up you just say goodbye?”

“Technically,” Bucky coughed, “it means until the next meeting.” He twisted the handle bars to try and roll around Rogers, who glared and stepped in the way again.

“Technically,” Rogers mocked, “it’s bullshit. We’re friends, Buck—”

“I don’t currently have friends,” Bucky interrupted. “And the application process is pretty long, so—”

“Jesus Christ, Bucky,” Rogers huffed, exasperated. “I haven’t seen you in seventy years! I’ve been walking around for fifteen like a fucking ghost and now you’re back you’d do anything to get away from me?”

Bucky stopped. He switched off the motorbike’s engine and silence fell over the clearing. “Not anything,” he said at last, feeling childish. “I just—” He didn’t feel like he owed Rogers anything, but in the same breath owed him everything he had. “I thought it’d be best to do this alone.” I didn’t want anyone to watch me obsessively search for something that might be gone. I didn’t want you to be there if it all meant nothing in the end.

Rogers sighed, and with it, the hurt and anger drained from his face. “I just want to help you. We want to help you.”

Wilson nodded. “We’d both be happy to fill out friendship applications, man. Just—is razing every Hydra base to the ground going to change what they did? Is it going to make you feel better?”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” Bucky replied. “But, yeah. It does make me feel better. That’s just an added benefit, I guess.”

“So what are you trying to do?” Rogers asked.

Bucky opened his mouth and shut it again. The words died on his tongue. He couldn’t say them out loud. He couldn’t breathe them into the world where Rogers might hear and mock him; where he might even tell him to give up the search. They were in their tac-gear; Captain America and Falcon getups, bar the mask and goggles. Bucky couldn’t even see the outline of his own tags through Rogers’ clothes. He wondered if he was wearing them; he wondered if his name was burning into Rogers’ skin; JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES blistering into his chest. “Let me help you,” Rogers said.

Bucky swallowed. “I don’t need your help.” It didn’t come out as strong as he’d hoped. He’d wanted them to flinch back at the harshness in his voice, but instead it came out small, weak, like a last defence being beaten down.

Rogers took it that way, too. His eyebrows drew together, and he moved forward, just an inch. “Buck, please.”

He sighed through his nose, shutting his eyes against the afternoon light. When he opened them again, Rogers and Wilson were watching, wary. “I’m looking for something,” he said at last. “I don’t know where it is.”

They glanced at each other, before Wilson asked, “What are you looking for?”

Bucky rolled the words on his tongue. “Something I had on me when I died.”

Rogers seemed to recoil at the word but he covered it as if he hadn’t. Wilson caught it, too, quickly asking, “And you think it’s in one of these bases?”

Bucky shrugged. “I did, but every base I’ve been to as—” he coughed “—Soldat, I haven’t found it. I don’t know where else to look.”

Wilson nodded. “And you died where?”

“Uh, the Austrian Alps.” Wilson glanced at Rogers for confirmation, who nodded, looking profoundly uncomfortable with the turn in conversation.

“We haven’t looked in any bases in Austria,” Wilson replied, pulling out his phone. Wilson moved so Bucky could see his screen – some high-tech phone more glass than anything else – as a map appeared with their route from the Americas to Europe to Russia lined in green, bases marked along the way.

“I don’t know of any Austrian bases,” Bucky said after a beat. “And I haven’t seen any reports that say I’ve been kept in one.”

“Well, they had to put you somewhere,” Wilson replied with a shrug. “Right, Steve?”

Rogers nodded suddenly, stony-faced but jumping back into the conversation. “The mountain was—high. You wouldn’t have been in a good shape. They would’ve taken you somewhere nearby, right? For immediate treatment?”

Bucky pictured the ice, the cold, the burying feeling of snow piling on top of him. He saw the figures dragging him by his feet, pulling him onto a sled and the grey sky overhead. He saw his left arm, severed at the shoulder.

“I would’ve bled out otherwise,” he agreed, blinking away the memory. “I guess I’m going to Austria.” The words filled him with dread, like the snow might clog up his throat and suffocate him.

“We’re going to Austria,” Wilson corrected, and that made him feel no better.

*

They holed up in a motel for the night. Rogers had called in a favour to get use of an airstrip in Kazakhstan, and another to get a quinjet to be there the next day. It wouldn’t arrive until noon, though, so Wilson announced they were going to a motel, and when Bucky grew agitated about how slow their Honda was, they gave him the location and let him speed off down the road, blindly trusting him to actually go there.

He considered not. He considered going somewhere else entirely; driving to Austria by himself and hitting every base along the way, just in case. He considered giving up on the tags and the memories and who James Barnes used to be and starting over in a small town with a fake name and letting Wilson and Rogers search forever and never find him. He considered, even, running the bike off the road – but he figured that if he could survive falling off a mountain, he’d probably survive whatever ditch he drove himself into.

So he ended up at the motel forty minutes before the two Avengers, and scouted the place out before they arrived. He picked up another boxed sandwich at a nearby convenience store, as well as some Russian candy with colourful packaging, and waited on the bike until they drove up, shitty Honda growling uncomfortably. He was pouring Russian pop rocks into his mouth when they did, and Wilson sent him a raised eyebrow at the sight.

“I’m gonna get us a room,” he said, electing not to question Bucky’s candy choices. Rogers stepped over to wait beside Bucky and hesitated but reluctantly held out a hand when he was offered the pop rocks.

“Does he really think three full grown men are gonna fit in one room?” Bucky asked, watching Wilson head across the parking lot.

Rogers shrugged, tipping his head back and throwing the handful of candy into his mouth. Bucky purposefully didn’t look at the pale skin of his throat. “I’m more worried about him thinking he can speak Russian.”

Bucky paused, sighed, and climbed off the bike. “Better go in too, then,” he said, and they followed across to the main office, where Wilson was attempting to rent a room from a portly lady who didn’t speak a word of English.

Wilson glanced over distractedly as he tried to explain, “one room,” with one finger held up, “with two beds.”

The woman replied in hurried Russian, “Fucking American, I don’t know what you’re saying—you think those fingers help? You think slowing your words help? Jesus Christ.”

“How’s it going?” Rogers asked, the door swinging shut behind them.

Wilson just repeated the request, until Bucky huffed and stepped up to the desk. He did not remember learning Russian, nor did he know how he could keep speaking it when he hadn’t in months, but the words came to him easy, like breathing, “One room, please, ma’am,” he said, remembering his manners half way through the sentence. “Two beds if you can.”

The office grew silent for all of a second before the woman said, “Fucking finally. Why didn’t you come in here in the first place?” just as Wilson asked, “You speak Russian?”, and Rogers muttered, “Well, I guess it makes sense.”

Bucky shrugged with a forced rueful smile, and the woman went about finding a room and getting their keys. She eyed the three of them sharing two beds, until Bucky said, “There’s a sofa to crash on, right?” and she didn’t seem happy but a little more satisfied. Bucky gestured to Rogers when she read out the total payment, and he rolled his eyes and produced a shiny black card.

“Stark’s money,” Wilson whispered, slipping the keys off the counter. Then the three of them thanked the lady and went in search of room 14.

It was… exactly what they paid for. And by that, Bucky meant it was fucking cheap. Every inch of the room looked as if it had been pulled straight out of the 70’s. The gaudy orange duvets and matching curtains; the textured wallpaper and swirling green carpet; even the box television on the wall, and the questionable cream kettle on the side table.

When they were inside, Bucky hesitated before dumping his backpack down. He’d been alone for seven months, and seventy aching years before that. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to change that just yet, and this—partnership, trip to Austria—was decidedly changing it. Would they expect him to stick around after? Would he want to if he found the tags?

And now, having Steve Rogers within arm’s reach, in the same room as him—

Bucky wasn’t certain why they switched tags in the first place, but he remembered finding Rogers’ the next morning and feeling loved.

Loved. That was the word that punched him in the gut and twisted his insides. It was such a simple but deeply complicated word. Steve Rogers had loved him—like a brother? Like a best friend? Something more? He felt like he knew the answer, but he couldn’t put the words together, wouldn’t maybe, too.

If Steve Rogers had loved him once… he couldn’t finish the thought. Not with Rogers himself swinging a duffel bag onto the right-hand bed and rifling through it for clothes. His shield was on the floor in a circular case, and beside that, he’d already yanked off his boots. Once upon a time, there would’ve been a metallic tag in one of them, reading STEVEN GRANT ROGERS and then, later, JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES, and their names would’ve stuck between him and the ground and held him to Earth.

Wilson and Rogers chattered as they searched through their things and Bucky scoped out the rest of the room. They were expertly comfortable with each other, able to seemingly turn off the soldier instincts, or at least place them on a back burner. Bucky was a soldier first, it seemed; endlessly paranoid, his fingers itching to grab his gun as he slipped the bathroom door open and peered inside. God, even the shower curtain was disgusting.

When he’d cleared the apartment and checked the windows and their locks, he settled into the single chair at the tiny, dented table, facing the door. He pulled the gun from his hip holster, and the knife from where it pressed against his lower back, and placed them carefully on the surface, angling them both towards the door. Bucky noticed when Wilson and Rogers quieted to watch.

“So,” Wilson said, breaking the silence as enthusiastically as possible, “two Howling Commandos in one room – I’d be a fool to miss that opportunity. Steve rarely talks about the old days, but you’ve gotta have some good stories, huh Barnes?”

“Not really,” Bucky said, even, before dragging his gaze from the door, to Wilson. “I don’t remember that far back.”

“You don’t remember?” Rogers asked after a beat, and the words sounded hoarse, raw.

Bucky hummed, low. “Not much from before… before.”

When he looked to Rogers, he saw something like heartbreak being hastily tucked away. “But you—you know who I am, right? You know what we are—we were to each other?”

Bucky hesitated. Brothers? Best friends? Something more? Instead of any of those, he said, “I read your biographies.” Wilson barked out a laugh. “And watched your films. There was a documentary when you came back – it wasn’t very good though. Stopped half way through. And I read your interviews. I read about me, too, but there’s not as much.”

Rogers was staring at him. “So you don’t—you don’t remember us. You just—”

“I’m remembering. Sometimes. Slowly. I—” Bucky felt the sudden, desperate need to prove himself to Rogers. To prove himself to Steve, that he was coming back, that the man he used to know was somewhere, hidden, but trying. “You were allergic to lavender.”

Rogers blinked, then nodded, then blinked again. “That’s. Yeah, yeah. I was, once.”

Bucky nodded, and Steve stared, and Wilson looked between the two like they had six heads a piece. Eventually, he broke the silence by suggesting dinner.

*

That night, Rogers tried to persuade Bucky to take one of the beds, but eventually gave up when Bucky insisted he wasn’t going to sleep anyway. He already had prior plans to settle on the uncomfortable, tacky sofa and watch the door all night long, so Rogers might as well get some shut-eye. He looked hesitant about it but didn’t argue.

Bucky watched the door all through the night, pistol in one hand and knife in the other. Nothing happened, but he was vigil in case something did.

In the morning, he took a scalding shower and washed the grime from his hair and skin. He got dressed and emptied his pack on the table as Wilson and Rogers forced themselves awake, and counted up his possessions, checking his ammo and readjusting all the knives. He had enough rubles that when Wilson suggested breakfast, he could shove some of Madame’s money across the table without looking up, and enough fake I.D.s that he could vanish without a trace if this reluctant, albeit inevitable, partnership with Rogers fell through.

It was when he was biting into the Danish Wilson had brought back from the convenience store for him that Bucky started choking. Rogers had walked out of the bathroom without a shirt on. But it wasn’t the Rogers of the situation that had Wilson frowning and slapping a hand on Bucky’s back twice – it was the chain that hung from his neck.

Bucky wasn’t close enough to read his own name, but he knew it would be there. He knew those were his, and he knew it like he knew Russian and guns and Hydra’s history that he had given them to Rogers out of love. Bucky had been loved and Steve had been loved in return.

He ached, suddenly, to touch them. To stand up and reach out and stop Rogers from pulling on his t-shirt so he could graze his thumb across the words and see if he recognised the touch and feel, if he could picture being given them, if he could remember the movements of tugging the chain over his head to give them away, to give them to Rogers.

Instead, he shoved his gaze downwards and kept eating. He would have the chance when he had his own tags back, when he had the ones marked STEVEN GRANT ROGERS that he wished, deeply and desperately, Hydra had let him keep.

*

Bucky left the motorbike in the motel’s parking lot and climbed in the backseat of the Honda for the journey, less because he wanted to travel with them and more that there wasn’t enough fuel for him to make the trip.

The ride was mostly filled with Wilson and Rogers talking up front, and one of them occasionally throwing a question over their shoulders that Bucky would respond to in grunts and monosyllables. They played music from Russian radio stations and frequently laughed so loudly that Bucky couldn’t even hear the songs.

Eventually, they made it to the airstrip. It was just a long road of tarmac in the middle of nothing; no buildings, no people, no plants. They parked the car and waited, and Wilson fiddled with the radio dial and Rogers fiddled with his phone and Bucky fiddled with his knife until he could get it to balance on the point on his metal fingertip.

Then, a plane materialised in thin air, landing half the airstrip away.

“Ride’s here,” Rogers said.                            

The quinjet’s ramp lowered and the three walked over, their belongings clutched in too-tight hands. It had occurred to Bucky in the stretch of night before that someone would have to be piloting the plane, and he had decided quickly that it would be Romanoff. She’d been present at the bridge and had been the one to leak S.H.I.E.L.D.’s files – he couldn’t imagine any of the other Avengers volunteering over her.

He didn’t feel particularly vindicated to see her at the top of the ramp, but she seemed to, by the smug look on her face when she saw him—Rogers hadn’t confirmed on the phone that Bucky was with them, but she’d surely guessed.

In a sudden burst of unpractised, bone-deep confidence, Bucky hefted his backpack over his shoulder and headed up the ramp first, passing her by. “I thought I told you,” he said as he entered the jet, “no one else has rights to your emotions – you’ve got to stop showing them on your face.”

He threw the backpack down on the seats and turned to look at the three Avengers. Wilson and Rogers wore twin expressions of shock and confusion, but Romanoff’s face was empty, closed-off.

“Better,” he said. “I knew I’d taught you to do better than that.”

“I didn’t think you’d recall,” she replied, icy cold. Over her head, Rogers and Wilson shared a look.

He went for mock-hurt. Bucky imagined he was a lot more of a person than she’d ever known Soldier to be, and he was proven right by the slight tilt of her head as he said, “Oh, you thought I’d forget you, Natalia? I couldn’t ever forget you.”

“You forgot me,” Rogers mumbled. Wilson mouthed Natalia?

“Well, considering you’ve shot me twice, I’m rather offended that you remember me. I wasn’t that bad.”

Bucky quirked a smile, then frowned. “I only shot you once.” He’d shot her in the shoulder at the bridge, and she’d vanished behind the line of cars, and he’d had to jump from the bridge to the road below in the attempt to take her out.

“Twice. Once in D.C., once in Odessa.”

He blinked. He couldn’t recall ever going to a place called Odessa.

“You shot an engineer through me,” she added, but the information didn’t help. There was a hole where a moment of his life had been, and she shrugged. “It’s okay. It all healed up. Let’s get this show on the road, yeah? Austria, right? Anywhere in particular?”

She sauntered past him to the cockpit and climbed in the left of the two chairs there. Rogers rattled off a line of co-ordinates by heart, and a moment later the ramp was whirring back up into place, and the quinjet was lifting off from the ground.

When they were in the air, Rogers asked, “You—you know each other?”

“I trained her,” Bucky said. “Red Room.”

Natalia hummed. “One of our preferred teachers, if I’m honest. He was the only one that never yelled or hit us—”

“Ms Sorokin didn’t hit you,” he said. “Or yell.”

“Ms Sorokin threatened to feed our entrails to dogs,” Natalia replied, without looking back. Bucky did not know this about Ms Sorokin. – he absently wondered if he had known this twenty years ago.

He considered the move for a moment before joining Natalia in the cockpit and taking the second chair. While Wilson moved about the cabin behind, Rogers stood between the two, watching Natalia pilot.

“And you remember her?” Rogers said after a beat – because that, no matter how done-to-death it was, was the crux of the matter. Bucky remembered Natalia but he didn’t remember Steve Rogers.

“I knew her as Soldat,” Bucky replied. “Those memories come back easier. I didn’t remember her until a few days ago, though.” Two, to be exact, though the dilapidated mansion and blood-stained training room felt like a lifetime ago now. “I went back to the Red Room.”

Natalia glanced over. “It’s still standing?”

“Define standing.”

“I heard they were all destroyed. The entire programme burned to the ground.”

“No ashes,” Bucky replied, “but a lot of blood.”

“Yeah?”

He hummed. “I don’t think anyone made it out alive.”

“No,” Natalia said, “I don’t suppose they did. Years ago, the Black Widows were all hunted down. I imagine a few others are out there, hiding. I think Yelena might be.”

“And Polina?”

“Not sure. Wouldn’t know where to start on finding out, either. You—how many do you remember?”

Bucky shrugged. “There’s a lot of names with no faces. But—I remember my favourites.”

“Teachers shouldn’t have favourites.”

“Teachers shouldn’t teach their students to make shivs, either, but I did that.”

“You’re a bad teacher,” Rogers muttered.

Bucky’s mouth stretched into some semblance of a smile – it felt almost real. He slipped out the shiv he’d taken from beneath his mattress at the Red Room, NATALIA carved into the side. He felt Rogers and Natalia glue their gazes to the knife as he twisted it between his fingers; he hadn’t been a bad teacher, he’d simply been good at teaching bad things.

“Who were your favourites?” Natalia asked as she pressed at the cockpit control board. The plane was already on autopilot, and now she was engaging some kind of stealth mode – Bucky imagined that was how the plane had appeared out of thin air back at the airstrip.

He tilted his head to the side. “Florentina and Polina,” he said. “I must’ve liked Aleksey – she gave me the bracelet.” He brushed his sleeve up from his wrist to show the braided strands of red, white, and blue. “Oksana made me a drawing, though I don’t remember her.”

“Little,” Natalia said. “Blonde. She was new, I think.”

“Yeah. And Natalia, of course.”

“No one calls me that anymore.”

“They should,” Bucky replied. “It’s your name.”

“Not for a long time.”

Bucky tilted his head. “I don’t think you know what a long time is.”

*

They were soaring over the Austrian Alps five hours later, and by the time it got dark, Natalia had an idea of where to land. They’d found a bunker entrance hidden deep in the mountainside, some three miles from where Bucky had fell, seventy years before; as they’d flown over the old train tracks, Rogers and Bucky had both stared silently at the view, at the divergence in their paths.

Bucky had wondered more than once since clawing his mind back what might’ve happened had he not fallen. Would Rogers still have crashed the plane, or would he have jumped and faced a treacherous walk back to civilisation? Would Bucky have been in the plane with him or left behind somewhere in that Hydra base, in a car with Colonel Phillips and Agent Carter? Would they have both survived the war and returned to their Brooklyn apartment; would they have stuck by one another’s side for the next seventy years; would they be old men now, best friends still and drinking like they were fifty years younger?

“Do you wanna do this now?” Natalia asked, piloting the quinjet away from the bunker to find a spot to land. “It’s already dark. We could do some recon—”

“Now,” Bucky interrupted. “Let’s get it over with.”

“We don’t know what’ll be down there,” Rogers warned from the cabin. Both he, Wilson, and Natalia were suited up like Avengers, and Bucky’s stolen tac-gear was feeling a little lacklustre in comparison. He pulled at the edges of his Kevlar and straightened in his seat.

“I never know what’ll be in the next base, but I go in anyway.” He pulled himself out of his seat and rounded out of the cockpit, searching for his pack. He made sure the garotte he’d stolen from Natalia back at the bridge was at his hip, as well as his knives and gun, and listened to the others lay out a loose battle strategy.

They came in from the North; trekking through snow and cold they were ill-prepared for, for a little over a mile, before coming to the bunker door. The four crouched behind a nearby outcropping of rocks, as Natalia threw a stone into the space in front of the door. Bucky was about to ask if it was necessary – he would’ve just walked right up – when a spot next to the door, masquerading in the rocks, seemed to blink open like an eye.

“Smile,” Natalia whispered, ducking back down, “you’re on CCTV.” Bucky watched as the eye blinked shut again, vanishing into the wall.

“Some security system,” Wilson muttered, crouching into the snow.

“You know of any other entrances?” Natalia asked, peering at Bucky. He shook his head. He barely even knew about this one – the entire base was a blank spot in his memory. All he knew from that time was waking up on the operating table with a metal arm and grabbing a surgeon’s neck and squeezing until it popped.

There were vague moments in time of being sprayed with a hose, of sweaty, dirty, naked skin curled around itself in the corner of a dark, dank room – but these memories didn’t promise Austria, as they didn’t lead anywhere else.

The four looked at each other before Natalia huffed. “How recognisable am I?”

“You’re an Avenger,” Wilson replied.

“And the person who leaked every S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra file of the past century,” Rogers added. “If they don’t know your face by now—”

“Well then Barnes will have to do it,” Natalia said. “Or Sam, no one knows him.”

“Hey—”

“Wilson doesn’t know anything about Hydra,” Bucky replied. “And I wouldn’t say he’s a great actor.”

“Hey—”

“Doesn’t know Russian either,” Natalia sighed. “Alright. It’s either you or me, teach. We just need them to open the door. Do you—will they know your face?”

Bucky hesitated. “Unless they were assigned to me or—I don’t know, studied the earlier reports? I’m sure there are photos. But… I wore a mask for a reason.”

Natalia seemed satisfied with this and nudged him forward. He took a breath and shook out his hand and weapon, listening to the satisfying clicks of the metal plates settling into place. Then he stepped out into the clearing and towards the bunker door. Almost immediately, the eye blinked open again – a tiny black camera hidden in the rocky face of the mountain.

It stared at him for a moment, before a crackling voice from nowhere asked, “Imya i biznes.” Name and business.

“Dimitri Yeltsin,” Bucky said, pulling the name from the fake I.D. he’d rented his Brooklyn apartment under. He continued in Russian, “I was ordered to report here for 0800 tomorrow morning – reassignment to this location.”

There was a moment’s pause. Bucky knew the lie wouldn’t stand up under scrutiny – it wasn’t like there was a database of every Hydra operative in the world, so maybe the name would work, but a reassignment would surely come with paperwork and notice.

As expected, the voice said, “There is no report for a Yeltsin being reassigned to Gehenna.”

Bucky huffed. “Would you check again? It’s freezing out here and I didn’t pack for this weather.” He made out to look cold, the weapon mostly covered by a sleeve as he shivered. He was cold, admittedly, but he’d been colder. This temperature reminded him of the moment before cryofreeze, when they chilled him to the bone to slow his heart, to make his body shut down little by little before freezing him over entirely. It was the slow roll of cold, the kind that wouldn’t take Bucky out, but would push on him from all sides until he slowed to a stop and stayed like that, forever.

There was a moment of hesitation from the voice, before Bucky said, “Listen, okay? I gotta get out of this cold. Antov reassigned me here yesterday like a fucking douchebag because I fucked up at another base out East. I think this shithole’s some kinda punishment, and I’d rather die slow and warm inside than slow and cold out here. Can you just—I don’t know, let me into the lobby and then take it up with Antov?”

A pause, then: “Antov assigned you out here?”

“Yeah,” Bucky lied, “he has it out for me or something.”

“He has it out for everyone,” the voice crackled. Bucky huffed a laugh before a buzzer sounded, and the bunker doors slowly grinded open.

He took a step into the warmth of the base, noticing the second set of doors rolling open inside, as the one behind him closed. Bucky watched them open, and then a man headed down a long, cement corridor towards him. He was dressed in pyjamas, clearly not expecting company, with a gun holstered at his hip. He nodded in greeting.

“Yeltsin,” he said. “Wagner. I’m overseeing Gehenna.” His Russian was lilted and fast, and he stuck out a hand which Bucky shook. When he stepped through, the second set of doors began to roll shut. “We didn’t get a heads up about your reassignment, so Fischer’s working on it right now and you can wait in the common room, yeah?”

“That’d be great,” Bucky replied, gesturing for Wagner to lead the way. He’d copped onto the cameras in the hall, but he didn’t care so much – he’d taken on bigger and fuller bases; he just needed to get that door open again.

He waited until Wagner was opening the common room door and showing him inside, then when his host was looking away, Bucky slipped the garotte into his hands and yanked it around the agent’s throat. In front of the cameras and God, Bucky held tight until Wagner was down. The choking sound would add to the others imprinted in his mind; Wagner’s was just another harmony in a cacophony of suffering Bucky had caused – maybe he’d be lucky and end up in one of Bucky’s nightmares, or maybe he’d just be another part of the noise.

Bucky dropped Wagner’s body to the ground and kicked it out of the way of the window in the door before heading back out into the hall. No alarms had sounded, nor could he hear any rushing footsteps or safeties clicking off guns.

He followed the corridor further into the base, strip lights flickering overhead, until he came to a dark door, propped open with a box. The gap was narrow, and he peered through into the room, finding a wall of security feeds and a nervous agent, pacing back and forth as he spoke into a phone in harried Russian. Fischer, Wagner had said.

“No, I know—yes. Yes. No, I’m saying Antov sent him. Yeltsin. Dimitri—no I know there was no paperwork that’s why I’m checking. Yes, yes. Well, I could ask—no, I know. What if—ah, okay—”

Bucky shook his head and gently pushed the door open. The agent kept talking into the phone. On the security feeds, he could clearly see Wagner’s body sprawled in the common room, as well as the clearing outside the bunker door where Rogers, Wilson, and Natalia were likely still waiting.

Bucky moved directly behind the agent just as he span to face him. His eyes widened in shock, and he got half a syllable out before the weapon shot out, grabbing onto his throat and squeezing. There was an audible snap before the phone dropped to the floor, and the agent’s eyes became suddenly lifeless, his body limp. Bucky dropped him and reached over to the OUTER DOOR RELEASE button. He pressed it and knelt down to pick up the phone.

“Sorry,” he said, Russian words familiar his mouth. “I’ve taken the phone, I couldn’t listen to that any longer. There was a miscommunication with Yeltsin – we have his paperwork just fine.”

“What about Antov—”

“It wasn’t Antov,” Bucky lied, not wanting to raise alarm. He didn’t want back up coming to help out, especially as the security cameras revealed the lower levels to be crawling with Hydra agents, mostly ones heading to bed, it seemed, but a good amount still idling about and working on projects in high-tech labs. “Don’t worry, it’s all sorted.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

“Well, hail Hydra.”

Bucky didn’t hesitate before hanging up the phone. Those words were never going to slip from his lips again; not even in they sliced his feet raw and burned the skin from his bones.

He found the INNER DOOR RELEASE button and pressed that one, too, just as the three Avengers poked out from behind the rock, apparently satisfied that no one was coming out to kill them. He found the speaker button and pressed it.

“Get your asses inside before I leave you out in the cold,” he said, and watched Rogers’ mouth curl into a smile and Natalia lead the three in. The doors rolled shut after them.

Bucky scanned the other cameras before deciding that he’d probably find the tags on the lower level. A storage room or office, maybe. Somewhere forgotten, he figured, seventy years of history shoved aside.

He started back down the corridor, joining up with the Avengers, who were cautious on entry.

“This floor’s clear,” he said as a greeting. “There’s at least six below us, though, crawling with agents.”

“And what are we looking for?” Natalia asked. Bucky eyed her for a moment, and she continued, “It’ll speed up the searching process if we know. Maybe we won’t even have to visit all the floors.”

“It’s—” he shut his mouth tight. “I’ll show you the surveillance room. We can get a better look of the bunker from there.”

If they noticed he was avoiding the question, none of them let it show on their face. The Avengers simply nodded and started planning out a route down – Rogers was all for taking down the entire base anyway, and they’d need explosives if they wanted it destroyed, which Wilson was more than happy to locate. Bucky led the three of them back to the surveillance room, stepping over the body he’d left in the middle of the floor as he went.

On one wall, there blueprints of the bunker; a convenient map leading them down deep into the ground. Bucky pointed at level six, the furthest down, the one they were on currently marked ‘G’ for ‘Ground’.

“I think those are cells,” he said, glancing back at the others. Wilson was resolutely not looking at the dead body, while Rogers was frowning down at it and trying to pretend that he wasn’t. “I was probably kept down there, so that surgical suite was likely the one I was operated in.”

“Any possessions you had on you might be down there,” Natalia agreed. “There’s a main service elevator, though that might be a risk.”

“There’s ventilation shafts, too,” Rogers pointed out. “Might be too big for us, but—”

“Worth a shot,” Natalia agreed. “I can head down them ahead of you guys and report back.” She flicked through the maps for a moment. “Small armoury on three and five. Could have explosives.”

“Do bases still come with self-destruct mechanisms these days?” Bucky asked, frowning as he searched through the papers. “I have a strangely vivid memory of Hydra bases having self-destruct mechanisms.”

Rogers hummed. “Azzano did, and it was likely built at the same time as this one.”

“Azzano’s the one where—” Bucky hesitated and then mimed an explosion with his hands. “But we were still inside.”

“We got out,” Rogers replied, his eyes intent on Bucky. “It was where you were kept when the 107^th got captured. Where Zola experimented on you.”

Bucky nodded though he didn’t remember it, just a catwalk and fire, just Rogers leaping across a gaping, fiery hole to reach him, just the words Get out of here and Not without you, shouted and desperate and completely terrified.

He didn’t say this, though, just nodded and turned back to the map.

“If there’s a self-destruct sequence, that’ll be way easier,” Wilson said, back on topic. “Though I’d want to make sure any innocents are out, first.”

“It’s Hydra,” Bucky drawled. “There are no innocents.”

“Captives,” Wilson replied. “You said level six has cells – that means they might have prisoners, too. It’s worth checking.”

Rogers nodded. “Right. We’ll split up. Nat can try the vents – head down to level six if you can, find the armoury and see if they’ve got anything big enough to blow this place apart. Sam, stay in here and keep an eye on things until Nat gives you some place to go – maybe try and find that self-destruct mechanism. I’ll go with Bucky down to six and we’ll work our way up – find any prisoners, find what he’s looking for, then get back up here to get out before it blows. Stay quiet, stay out of sight, try not to raise the alarms.”

The four nodded at each other, and for a strange, split second, Bucky felt as if he were part of a team. He, Natalia, and Wilson had stayed silent and listened to Rogers’ orders; and he hadn’t led with fear or commands, but with something else… something that Bucky hadn’t seen in Hydra, but he was sure he’d seen back in the war in the Commandos. Maybe it was some kind of respect – he knew Rogers wasn’t coming with him to monitor or control, but because he’d found the part of the plan that would need assistance, and that was Bucky’s.

As they turned to the door, Bucky wanted to remember him. He wanted to remember everything about Steve Rogers from how he looked when he was small and sickly to how he walked when he was in a new, tall body. He wanted to remember his likes and dislikes, what foods he ate and songs they sang. He wanted to remember who Steve Rogers was beneath the mask and shield, whether he lived up to his title or drowned in the fame. He wanted to remember what they were to each other, even if he thought he knew – he wanted to remember the look on Steve Rogers’ face when Bucky emerged from his tent that morning wearing his tags – whether he looked any certain way or if he said any certain words. He wanted to remember who this man used to be – because the man in front of him was a stranger; a good one, he supposed, but a stranger all the same.

Bucky wouldn’t recognise Rogers’ shadow, but he had a feeling that some years before, he would’ve recognised Steve’s even in darkness.

They risked the elevator and blew out relieved breaths when it rolled the whole way down and didn’t once open before. He and Rogers stepped out, gun and shield raised, to an empty, dark corridor. It was cement, but the lights were far and few between, the air stale and cold. Bucky rubbed the toe of his boot against the old blood stains on the ground. Would being here dredge up the memories of the man he used to be?

They started off down the corridor, quickly coming to a stop when the left-hand wall opened up into windows, looking directly into empty surgical suites. On the right-hand walls, iron doors with small closable slots stood every ten feet. Rogers opened one slowly, to stop the squeak of old metal, and then closed it after.

“Empty,” he said, low.

They continued down the hall.

*

Bucky did not remember the fall, but he remembered landing. He remembered the feeling of his life, speeding away from him; remembered the way that he stared up at the overcast sky, wanting to call out and wish for it back. Steve, he remembered thinking – because back then, he called Captain America by his first name, like he would a friend; like he would someone he trusted. He remembered the word being broken, even inside his head, and darkness crawling over his body and settling, heavy and cold.

He knew back then that it was Death – something he recalled hounding him when he was travelling the world, searching for his past – that Death was finally coming to claim him at last. Well done, boy, he imagined Death had said to him, you’ve done me well. Now you’re mine at last. Now is your time to rest.

Bucky had felt the skeletal grip of Death as snow piled on top of his crumpled body. Steve would come back, maybe, and find him dead and hollow – or maybe he wouldn’t, the fall was so great, and Bucky would simply be buried in the snow, be buried by Death’s cloak, be buried and forgotten.

Seventy years later, Bucky would wonder if being forgotten in death was the same as being forgiven for his sins. In the moment, however, he just knew that he would be gone, and he would’ve earned that kind of empty, terrifying silence of After, and that Steve would move on eventually, and find someone else to love, and find someone else to trust, and find someone as good as him to hold onto when the nightmares eventually came – because too long in a hellhole like warring Europe was enough to send any man into dark, twisting dreams that would drag him into darkness and regret.

And then he thought his last thought as James Buchanan Barnes, and it was this: cool, dark earth piled atop him, a gravestone of muted grey, his body shipped from Austria all the way back home, in the plot beside Sarah, where the two people who loved a spitfire boy with stars and stripes more than anyone else in the world would be collecting worms and sharing dirt. The gravestone would read Steven Grant Rogers, and Bucky’s body would decompose under the name of the one he loved most.

*

Bucky watched Rogers in the dark hallway in the belly of a Hydra base. They stepped silently down the corridor in single file; Bucky watching the back as Rogers led them forward. They resolved to check the cells on the way back, and now moved quiet and slow, poking around each corner before stepping down it. There were echoes, distantly, of voices and movement, but none of them were close – they were simply winds howling from far off rooms that they would hopefully never come across.

“What are you going to do,” Rogers whispered, “when you’ve found what you’re looking for?”

Bucky peeked behind them, gun steady, before looking to the back of Rogers’ head; blonde hair dark in these shadows. “I haven’t thought about it,” Bucky replied, equally quiet. He considered leaving it there, but his mouth moved off its own accord. “I figure when I have it again, I’ll know what I want.”

“That’s a lot of weight to put on something we can’t even be sure we’ll find.”

Bucky quieted. If he didn’t find the tags then maybe he’d never be himself again, maybe he’d never be whoever he once was; maybe even if he decided to stay with his current allies, Rogers would realise that and leave him behind. “Am I different?” he asked suddenly.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Am I different? To how you remember me?”

Rogers slowed and glanced back at him. “Well, you have longer hair now.” Bucky managed a smirk. “And a metal arm. And you talk a little less – you never used to shut up. But—no. Not really. I look at you and…” He trailed off, and Bucky cocked his head to the side.

“And?”

Rogers shrugged. “And I see the same person I’ve always seen. You’re not—who you used to be, but you’re not someone wholly different.”

Bucky frowned, and Rogers led them to the next corner of the hallway, checking around it before looking back to him. They stood side by side, close enough that they could touch, and Bucky waited – it was like Rogers wanted to say a thousand things but couldn’t find the right words. Bucky knew that feeling; he knew the feeling of having too much inside him and not knowing how to let it out; of his mouth not being able to form words he’d known his whole life.

Rogers, close and bathed in shadow, met his eye. Bucky hadn’t noticed how blue they were before now. He watched Rogers’ gaze dart down and back up, before he said, “You were haunted. Before. You were full of demons you couldn’t rid yourself of – like they wouldn’t let go and you couldn’t force them out. The trenches did that to you. War did that. You had the most kills of anyone I ever met, up until New York, maybe, and you kept count as if you were planning on asking for forgiveness for each one. You were scared all the time, but you never let anyone see it, and you were the best friend anyone in our unit could’ve asked for – the best leader, the best brother-in-arms, the best everything. You didn’t think so, but you were.

“And before that – before the war – you were charming and daring and loud and brash, and you owned every inch of Brooklyn. You were poor as dirt and you smoked like a fucking train, and you chose to spend every spare pay check on me. You bought me pencils and sketchbooks, and you’d pay for us to go on the train into Manhattan, or out to Coney Island. You stayed with me every cold night, and swiped apples from the grocers so I would have something to eat when you hadn’t had a meal in days. You saved up money for my medicine long before my Ma was even gone, because you wanted to—and that was it. You didn’t have to. You could’ve left me to die a hundred times and no one would’ve blamed you, no one would’ve asked anything more of you—but you wouldn’t. You chose to keep coming back, you chose to save my life again and again, you chose to move in with me and sleep in the same bed as me when it got so cold we were sure I was gonna catch pneumonia.

“And on those nights we thought were gonna be my last, you stayed awake until morning so you wouldn’t miss my last breath, so I would know someone was with me ‘til the end. You were the best fucking person I knew, Buck. And war didn’t change that, and I’m certain that Hydra didn’t pull that out of you either. You got haunted back then, you got dark and a little hollow, and maybe that’s how you are now. But you’re still him. I look at you, Buck, and I see the same person I’ve always seen. The same person I’ve always—”

“Loved,” Bucky finished.

Rogers nodded. Steve nodded. Bucky nodded, too.

“The same person I’ve always loved. Whether you feel like him or not, whether you’ll truly be him again or not – he’s you. And you’re still the person I’d follow into the jaws of death.”

I won’t follow Captain America into the jaws of death – but that skinny kid from Brooklyn? Yeah. I’ll follow him.

Bucky’s heart lurched, and for a moment, close and dark and silent, he felt like he was warm. He felt like maybe this was what home felt like. And Steve’s gaze darted to Bucky’s mouth, and Bucky’s fingers itched to touch Steve’s cheek, his jaw, his hair, feel the planes and angles of his face and see if he recognised it by touch after he’d failed to recognise it by sight, and that’s when a door opened around the corner, and footsteps moved out into the hallway.

Immediately, they were on alert, backs straight and bodies tense once more.

The footsteps drew closer.

“Well, I’m sure future tests will be more optimistic,” a female voice said, drawing near.

Another voice, male, sighed. “God, they better be. They’ll cut our funding you know—”

“They won’t cut our funding.”

“Okay they’ll just bury us in unmarked graves—”

The female voice laughed, and then the two rounded the corner, stumbling to a halt at the sight of Steve and Bucky directly in front of them. No, not Steve and Bucky. Captain America and the Winter Soldier. Their faces paled, eyes bulging. The woman gaped and took a step back.

“There’s an easy way or a hard way,” Steve told them, and then the woman broke out into a run.

Steve darted after her as Bucky slipped a knife into the weapon and holstered his gun in one swift movement. He was quiet as he twisted the man into his grip, locking him in and holding the blade against his throat. The man whimpered under his grip, and Bucky ignored him, sidestepping to watch down the corridor as Steve hauled the woman into his arms and carried her back towards Bucky, a hand over her mouth.

“Is this the easy way?” Bucky asked as they drew close. Steve sent him a dead look.

“You gonna talk?” he asked the man, “Or would you rather pop that cyanide pill and save us the trouble?”

The man shook and gasped his whimpers. Steve shook his head, rolling his eyes. “We’ve gotta keep moving. Let’s knock ‘em out and be done with it.”

They barged into an empty laboratory and stuffed the unconscious bodies out of sight in a storage cupboard. After barricading the door, they were back out in the hall, moving at a faster pace. Bucky wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he figured he’d know when he saw it – still, level six was just a line of corridors and surgical suites. It was a few walls of prison cells and a dingy bathroom that hadn’t been cleaned properly in a decade.

“The only way is up,” Steve said, when they came to the end of the hall. “If you told me what we were looking for—”

“Let Natalia and Wilson know we’re headed up to five,” Bucky interrupted, starting back the way they came. He knew he could tell Steve – especially after everything he’d said; Steve wouldn’t likely think less of him or ask him to forget about the tags entirely; he’d maybe even be enthusiastic in helping. But the tags were Bucky’s responsibility. He’d lost them seventy years ago, and it was his job to find them.

They checked the cells on the way back, but only one wasn’t empty. When they wrenched open the door, they were hit with the pungent smell of Death, and Bucky realised he was still being followed, even now.

*

There were many truths that curled around his memories, just out of reach. One of them was this: Steve Rogers had snuck into his tent in the middle of the night and left his tags in a pool of chain and metal by Bucky’s shoes. He’d also left a note.

A folded-up slip of cream paper, much like the one Bucky had written his letter to Steve on, like the pieces he’d torn from his journal to send letters back home – but instead of Bucky’s long, looping hand, this one was smaller, careful and neat.

I’m all yours.

He read over the three words again and again. The Witch climbed onto his lap and kneaded his thigh with her paws, searching for attention, and still he read the words back. I’m all yours. Steve Rogers. All his. Bucky Barnes. All Steve’s.

He released one of the tags from the chain and slotted it into his shoe, before pulling the other over his head and letting Steve’s name rest against his skin. He imagined he could feel all the letters. He imagined dying and being found and the letter going home that Steven Grant Rogers was dead.

No one would read the letter. Bucky was his next of kin and Bucky was here, not at the apartment he was listed under; where the letter would slip through the mailbox and rest on the floor, gathering dust, until the real Steve could return home and discover his own death.

Bucky shook his head of the thought and slipped the letter into his jacket pocket; the one right over his heart. I’m all yours, Steve had said. All Bucky’s. Till death did they part.

Bucky did not remember this.

*

By the time they reached level five, the alarm was blaring.

“For once,” Steve muttered as the elevator doors opened to reveal a floor of bustling men grabbing guns and arming themselves for the intruders, “I don’t think this was my fault.” He tapped his left ear twice under the flashing red emergency light. “Which one of you did this?”

“That’s my bad,” Bucky heard Wilson’s voice say, tinny and distant. “I’ll take the blame for that.”

Steve sighed, and then the closest running Hydra agents paused in their tracks, as if they’d seen the vibrant American flag getup in their peripheries. They stared at the two of them, armed and standing in the elevator.  Bucky pulled a face and reached forward, pressing the close doors button. There was a pause before they started to shut and the agents gathered their wits, storming the elevator.

Only one made it through before they shut entirely, and Bucky waited for the right moment before slamming the weapon forward and catching her head between the doors. There was a crunch sound before the elevator dinged and the doors opened back up again.

“That was… kinda gross,” Steve said as Bucky dropped the body to the floor. The Hydra agents seemed in agreement – the last agreement they would ever have, in fact, because Bucky met Steve’s eye and they attacked.

The fight was bloody and brutal, heavily skewed in Hydra’s favour – at least fifty men to two. Bucky’s clip ran empty fast and he yanked a gun off a corpse to keep raining bullets into the bodies of their attackers. He felt calm in the fight – he usually did; like existence was sinking just right into his bones; like this was what he was made for, machine more than person, monster more than human, killer over lover.

This was the express purpose of his creation: blood splatter, gore, timely and efficient deaths with no hesitation, no mourning. Mercy was not a word in the Winter Soldier’s vocabulary, and it was in the midst of battle that he found himself not as Bucky, but as what he had been once before. He slipped into the familiar metal bones like an old sweater’s embrace, felt the cool haze of war seep into his skin.

He was both a Commando, fighting back to back with his Captain, and he was an assassin, a lone wolf with single-minded focus. He was Sergeant Barnes in the moment when Steve darted out his shield to save him from a storm of bullets, and then he was the Winter Soldier a second after, as he slit a woman’s throat and then drove the knife into a man’s eyeball. He was both at once; two incarnations of the same body not fighting for dominance but existing in bloody harmony.

Maybe it was the Winter Soldier’s presence that made him compliant so easily, he would think later. Maybe, if he were all Barnes, all Bucky, he would’ve fought it when a commanding voice rang over the fighting, invisible, hidden.

Russian commands slicing through his skull: “Longing. Rusted. Seventeen.”

The Winter Soldier gasped for breath. Bucky dropped his gun and reached out to the wall to stabilise himself, knees buckling. Immediately, Steve picked up his slack, kicking an agent to the wall and slamming his shield to their neck, decapitating them.

“Daybreak. Furnace.”

Sergeant Barnes screamed. It was in his head, it was unfurling and reaching into his mind, his body, the weapon they’d strapped to his side, an arm for something more dangerous. It whirred in response, almost knowing. Soldier’s throat felt ragged, hoarse. No one attacked him – no one even came near. They either knew what he was becoming or they were afraid that a hideous beast was trying to claw its way out of his skin.

“Nine. Benign—”

“Bucky!”

Steve at his side. Captain Rogers. Captain America. Stevie, with blond hair and wide blue eyes. Clothes that were always three sizes too big and hanging limp off his frame; a soldier and saviour and hero, a target, a bullseye to shoot bullets into. His hand at Bucky’s shoulder, at his neck, his shield out to cover them but unable to save them from the sounds – the words, the compliance that seeped into his skin.

Barnes couldn’t speak. Couldn’t breathe; could only feel numbness expanding in his bones. Half his torso was metal to sustain the weight of the weapon, and it thrummed with energy, with life. Soldier ached and screamed and he wanted to cry so bad but there was nothing in his programming that allowed that, there was nothing—

“Buck, what’s happening? What’s—”

Bucky knew how to cry but Soldier would’ve flayed himself raw before letting a single tear escape. Whatever balance had been levelled in his body was now violently tilted aside, the Winter Soldier steamrolling over Barnes and Bucky and everyone in between.

“Homecoming. One.”

His back became rigid, the weapon twitching for blood, for action. His senses heightened, aware of every inch of the room, every stretch of cement and brick and body. He could hear the heartbeats racing; could see every weak point, every eye darting, every loose grip on the trigger. Rogers’ hand on his neck, the word threat rolling to meet it. Ballerina poised body, sharp as a blade and twice as deadly.

“Freight—”

A gunshot. The room so silent Soldier could hear the breath that wheezed out, blood drops splattering against the floor.

“Forgive me for interrupting,” Natalia said over the quiet, “but I wasn’t particularly interested in what he had to say next.”

And then silence; every agent in the room waiting to see what would happen next. Soldier could see them all, could feel their eyes on him, assessing: was he on their side or the Avengers’? Who was he now? The monster or the man?

He straightened, and Rogers’ hand slipped from his neck, resting on his shoulder blade for a moment before dropping entirely. Across the room, Natalia’s gun was ready, her finger on the trigger. Beside her, a dead body, bleeding from the gaping hole in his forehead. He didn’t recognise the person who knew his commands; he didn’t know how many people had the key to the lock of his mind.

He stooped low and snatched up the gun he’d dropped. It felt heavy in his hand, all flesh, and his finger itched at the trigger. Rogers stood behind him, Captain America, shield tightened around his forearm. Soldier’s head turned slightly to look at him, to take him in.

“Bucky,” Rogers said. “They don’t control you.”

He breathed out, slow. Rogers’ hand twitched, then lifted, landing gently on his metal shoulder, grazing the spot where the skin met and puckered and scarred beneath his clothes. His hands slid to the crook of his neck, cupping his erratic pulse.

“I’m here, Buck. I’m with you. ‘Til the end of the line, remember?” And he did, in a sandstorm kind of way; in a hazy blistering wind that made his eyes ache and skin sore; his own hand on Steve’s shoulder, crook of his neck, just like this, his Ma newly resting in the ground. I’m with you ‘til the end of the line. ‘Til death did they part.

He nodded, barely, but he knew Steve had caught it. His body thrummed with coiled tension, with the need to move and fight and bleed.

All eyes were on him. Man or monster?

Both, Bucky decided, and shot the nearest Hydra agent in the head.

*

In the aftermath of the violence, Bucky’s body shivered and shuddered and jerked and spasmed. There was blood under his fingernails where there hadn’t been for a long time. He searched through every room he came across, determined to find the tags, but every step was torture and every movement was like betraying himself.

The alarm was still blaring; a flashing red light that was making his blood run high and pin prick anxiety pinch at the back of his neck. Wilson had reported finding the self-destruct mechanism, as well as making his way out of the fighting and back to the surveillance room, where he managed to shut off the elevator and lock many agents on their floors. The stairwell was a choke point, of course, but levels four through six had electronic doors that were switched off and now required a battering ram to get through.

“What the hell was that?” Steve hissed somewhere behind him as Bucky slammed through a door and searched a lab. He knocked over beakers and broke through machines, tearing cupboard doors off their hinges.

“Compliance,” Natalia replied, just as low. She was keeping watch for further assailants and had promised to return to Wilson soon to protect their exit. “Hydra programmed a specific series of words into his brain – whenever he hears them he becomes completely obedient, empty, devoid of thought and judgement.”

“I can hear you,” Bucky gritted out. The weapon wanted blood, and he was holding it tight against his ribs to stop it from taking what it wanted from Steve or Natalia. She waved a hand at him, and he rushed past into another room.

“It’s one of the things that made him so deadly,” she continued. Bucky rummaged through boxes one-handed. “He’s the most efficient assassin on the face of the planet, you know – though he doesn’t seem it when he’s manically searching through someone’s personal effects.”

Bucky paused. Natalia was right – he’d broken into a dormitory; he doubted anyone in this room had acquired his possessions after his death. He turned and stormed back down the hall, Natalia and Steve following behind.

“And that comes down to him not needing food or sleep – especially when he’s compliant. It’s not a necessity when he’s hellbent on finishing a mission.”

“He didn’t sleep in the motel,” Steve replied. “He wasn’t compliant then.”

“Maybe he’s just not used to sleeping yet,” she said, “or maybe he was in a room with people he didn’t trust and wanted to keep an eye on them.” There was a pause, and Bucky stopped outside a door with a frosted glass window. It looked like an office. He tried the handle, and when it wouldn’t budge, crushed it with the weapon to let himself in.

“I’m gonna head up to Sam,” Natalia said. “Let us know when you want up. We’ll open up the stairwell.”

“You don’t think we could fit through the vents?”

Natalia hummed and it sounded like she was smiling. “Big beefy boys like you? No chance. Keep an eye on him.” She raised her voice to call into the office, “Ne ubivay yego, khorosho?”

“Bez raznitsy,” Bucky replied absently, staring into the room. Behind him, Natalia’s footsteps headed away. He stepped in the room, his eyes dragging across the furniture, before he darted into action, pulling open locked file drawers and flicking through their contents. He upended the contents, dumping it on the floor and rifling through the mess. He knocked books from shelves and knelt by the desk to search the drawers there.

“What did she say?” Steve asked from the doorway, leaning against the frame.

“Not to kill you,” Bucky replied, pulling hard enough to break a lock on a drawer. Inside was a pistol, confidential files, and possibly a sex toy – he wasn’t sure.

“Did you agree?”

“I guess.”

“That fills me with confidence.”

Bucky knocked over a fake plant and slammed down a photo frame of a smiling girl with missing front teeth. He emptied out pencil pots and swept the laptop off the desk just to hear the crashing sound. Steve just watched passively from the door, occasionally glancing down the hall for straggler Hydra operatives.

He’d almost finished with the room when he grabbed the painting from the wall and found a safe hidden behind it. Bucky’s eyes lit up.

“Jackpot.”

Steve stepped further into the room as Bucky studied the number pad and then attempted to wrench the door off its hinges. The metal fingers of the weapon barely made dent, and they scratched uselessly off the front, no matter how hard he pulled.

He knew they were behind that door, he could feel it. They were so close – his history was right there, inches away, and he couldn’t reach it.

“Hey, Buck?”

Bucky gritted his teeth and tried to pull the door off its hinges again, to no avail.

“Buck?”

Why was everything so fucking difficult? Why did everything in his life have to be a struggle? He’d already fought his way through brainwashing and hordes of enemies, and now it was just an unyielding door that stood in his way?

“Bucky!”

“What?” he spat, turning on Steve.

Captain fucking America stood holding the painting he’d tossed aside, with an unamused expression on his face, a single eyebrow raised. “How long is the keycode?”

“The what?”

“The keycode for the safe. How many digits?”

Bucky turned and pressed at the buttons, then counted the spaces that appeared on the screen. “Eight.”

“Alright.” He turned the painting so Bucky could get a look at it. The breath left his lungs in a wheeze. It wasn’t a painting at all, but a blueprint; the weapon laid out in front of his eyes, a detailed plan of the circuitry and interface with his brain. Steve lifted it so he could see it too. “Just a hunch,” he prefaced, before reading a line that ran along the bottom of the print. “Test subject: Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. Service number 3255—”

“—7038.” He’d repeated those numbers through torture and delirium, until they were all that was left of his existence. A series of numbers that defined him. 32 for the draft, 55 for New York, 7038 for James Barnes. When his body, mind, and soul were whittled away, those numbers were all that remained.

Bucky turned to face the safe. His hand was shaking as he pressed in the numbers. It beeped twice, then a light turned green and the door clicked open. He curled his fingers around the edge, into the dents he’d already made, and pulled it open.

Inside were three items, spaced evenly. On the left, a slim USB stick. On the right, a small stack of polaroids, held together with an elastic band. In the centre, a clear plastic wallet, containing a creased piece of paper and two military dog tags on a chain.

*

“Steven Grant Rogers,” an accented voice said, somewhere out of a dream. Bucky lifted his head, but barely. There was bruising and burns and welts across his skin, all stitching itself back together in precise, slow motions. He could see the smarmy Swiss scientist Arnim Zola through the bars of his cell, in his hand a chain and tags, dangling and catching the light. “I don’t think that’s you, no?”

Bucky said nothing. It took all he had to stay awake; when he slept, he was haunted with nightmares of falling and never landing, of his limbs being torn off one by one and replaced with monstrous pieces of other bodies. He was Frankenstein’s monster, in those dreams; he was a patchwork body, not a single part his, and he was unwanted, unloved, crudely made and longing for death.

Sometimes, when he fell asleep, they zapped him awake. Days ran into weeks this way. He had no idea how long he’d been in that cell, but Bucky knew it was long enough to start wishing for a bullet to the head, rather than rescue.

“I remember him. Blond, blue-eyed – that patriotic outfit. I don’t think he’s you. Do you?” He barely waited for a response, knowing Bucky wouldn’t say a word. “I do wonder why you have his tags. Did you steal them? Did you exchange? Did you want to trick us into thinking they had Captain America if you were captured?” Zola swung the chain around his fingers, a grotesque smile on his face. “Never mind. He will not be needing the tags, anyway.”

Bucky looked up a little more. He caught the flash of victory in Zola’s pale eyes.

“Steven Grant Rogers is here, apparently,” he said, catching the tags in his fist. “And James Buchanan Barnes crashed a plane loaded with bombs.” He laughed. “No bodies to find, I’m afraid.”

So Death had taken Steve too, and Bucky had nothing left, no reason to hang on, no reason to breathe and live and hope. There was no life after the war, no future, no sunrise after years of dark, stormy nights. The metal hand’s fingers hurt to move, but he clenched them tight into the floor anyway, cracking the tile.

There was no hope of rescue, no hope of leaving. This was his existence now, a prisoner and an experiment; a plaything with a metal arm and bruised heart. So Bucky resolved to kill them all; he’d shoot and slice and murder, he’d bring sin down on this building as if it wasn’t already swarming, and he’d call hell up to meet them. He’d let Death finally slip into his body, matching its hands for his own, skeletal fingers on metal on skin, cloak masking him in shadow, and he’d do what Death had wanted all along; he’d bring everyone down, soak the ground with blood and burn Europe to the ground.

He’d leave Arnim Zola for last, and wring his neck, meeting his eyes all the while and not stopping until long, long after the last breath had left his body. He’d desecrate the corpse and flay it skinless before leaving it for wolves to consume.

That night, he dreamt of Steve falling, Bucky unable to catch him.

The next day, they erased yesterday from his memory and told him about Steve’s death all over again.

*

His trembling fingers touched the packet, cold and plastic. They dragged it from the safe, his body blocking Steve’s line of sight. Gently, he upturned the packet, and the tags fell neatly into his palm.

STEVEN GRANT ROGERS. Bucky sucked in a breath. And then, nothing.

No sudden revelations or flashes, no memories forcing themselves forward. He went searching, but no – his parents’ faces were unknown to him. He had no recollection of he and Steve’s apartment, of the cold nights he’d been told about, of stealing and working and fighting in a war.

They were not there. They were still missing, and Bucky wanted to smack himself for thinking they would come back. What had it been like, all those months ago, to receive that flash of hope – the first memory back in a lifetime of hollow space? The decision that these tags, these items kept from him and hidden for seventy years, would bring it all back, when Steve’s hand on his shoulder hadn’t done the same?

He wanted to throw the tags across the room, wanted to rage and yell and scream for being so fucking foolish – but this was not an empty base in southern Russia. This was not a bare cement room with Hydra’s first god scrawled on the wall.

Bucky clenched the tags in his fist, and took a shaky breath, before turning at last.

Steve was watching him, studying, assessing. There was a crease between his brows, a thin, tense line to his lips.

“Did you find it?” he asked, and Bucky managed a tight nod. He let the tags slip from his palm, catching the chain on his fingers as it fell. They spun and caught the light; both fluorescent from above and the alarming red flashing over the door. Somewhere distant was the sound of yelling, like maybe the fight wasn’t finished with them yet, even if they were finished with it.

And across the room, Steve stared, mouth parted, and eyes filled with something unreadable. Bucky looked down at the tags. As they turned, he could see the name he’d been waiting for: STEVEN GRANT ROGERS.

But the memories weren’t back. They didn’t fall into place or rush past his eyes. No doors swung free, no synapses sparked, no jars opened and let out all the bad and all the good – he was no Pandora, and his head was no box, but Bucky was endlessly curious, desperate to know what was inside.

He tried to recall that moment some five months before, when he’d read the interview and felt the world right itself, just a little. When he’d known for certain he was someone before Soldier, when he could see the fire burning low, the look in Steve’s eyes as he’d watched Bucky head towards his tent, the morning light through the canvas and the pool of chain on the floor. He tried to picture the elation he’d felt, the feeling of rightness, of acknowledgement. He tried to find that feeling again, like he was finally on the right track—but all he felt was disappointment.

The tags didn’t bring back who he used to be. They didn’t bring forward the truth of who he was to Steve Rogers, of who Steve Rogers was to him. They brought nothing new, nothing more to the table, and instead the two simply stared at them, different expressions on their faces.

“You…” Steve cleared his throat. “You were looking for my tags?” Bucky watched his non-shield arm raise, almost to his chest. He imagined JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES lying there under the gear.

“Yeah,” Bucky sighed. “But they’re not—they were supposed to make me remember.”

“Remember… why you had them?”

Bucky shook his head, let his hand drop. The red flashed orange across Steve’s hair. “I know why I had them. I think. I—” he sighed and used the weapon to shove his hair back. The flashing was starting to irritate him, and he doubted Wilson was going to turn it off. “I thought they’d help me remember everything. All of it.”

“But they didn’t.”

“No. They didn’t.”

Steve nodded, and glanced back through the door. The hallway was empty, but if the Hydra soldiers in the stairwell made a battering ram, it might not be for long. “That’s okay.”

Bucky blinked. That’s okay? That’s fucking okay? “What?” he asked, voice hard. “No—no it’s not. It’s not okay!” He threw up his hands, holding tight to the chain. “It’s fucking—it’s the opposite of okay, Steve! It’s shitty! It’s awful! It’s like there’s a hole in my head and I can’t fill it. There’s just all this dead space and I know something goes there. I know my life goes there. I know you go there. But it just—it won’t.”

“Buck—”

“No-no. Fuck this. I just—” Bucky span, the room tinged red then yellow then red. He heaved out an exasperated sigh, his chest suddenly heavy. He wanted to cry – he wanted to just sob for the lost memories and let all the emotions out so they wouldn’t be in anymore. He turned back to Steve. “I know this means something,” he said, holding up the tags. “I know they do, because I can remember it. I can remember writing you a letter – fuck knows what it said – and giving them to you. I did it so the others wouldn’t see, and you watched me walk back to my tent. And then the next morning, I woke up and yours were sitting there. Your tags and—a note.” He blinked and reached down to where the plastic wallet had been forgotten, snatching it and the cream piece of paper inside up. He could see the words, I’m all yours, through the plastic. He pointed it at Steve. “This. This note. Right?”

Steve swallowed, eyes not moving from Bucky’s face. He nodded. “Right.”

“Right. And I—I had this panic. I remember it. This panic that you were giving me my own tags back, that you’d changed your mind or something. That you didn’t—you didn’t want me. But when I picked them up, they were yours. They were fucking yours. And you were… you were mine.” His voice fell quiet on the last words. It was the first time he’d admitted the truth to himself – not a brother, not a best friend: something more. Steve was more. He was more than anything, more than anyone. He was the end of the road for Bucky, the end of the line. And he’d asked Bucky to love him and Bucky had found it to be the only thing he could really do well, really do right—and he hadn’t even had a chance to prove it.

Bucky Barnes had been falling in love with Steve Rogers, and then he’d been falling from a mountain. He squeezed the tags so tight in his hand he worried they’d cut through the skin, open him up. He didn’t lessen the pressure.

“That was the first memory I had,” he said at last. “Feeling loved. By you.”

“So you came to find them,” Steve breathed. “You went searching for them instead of searching for me?”

Bucky shook his head. “I didn’t—I didn’t want to come back to you as half a person. I was worried you’d turn me away. I wanted to be… be me. Be whole. I wasn’t ready.”

“Are you ready now?” And, oh, the hope in Steve’s voice was everything. Bucky had half a mind to ask if he was still wanted, but he knew the answer; he could see it written across Steve’s face in big, capitals letters: I’M ALL YOURS.

He took a shaky breath in and lifted the tags uselessly. “I’m not whole.”

“You don’t have to be.”

The pressure on Bucky’s chest increased, and a pinprick feeling appeared in his eyes. He blinked the first tears away, ducking his head. Soldier didn’t know how to cry, but it seemed Bucky Barnes did. He caught sight of Steve stepping closer, his Captain America getup flashing purple.

He dropped his shield, and then Steve’s hands were at Bucky’s cheeks, their foreheads pressed together, just as the first tear slipped out.

“Steve.”

“You don’t have to be whole,” Steve said. “You don’t have to be the person you were in 1940. You can be—you.”

“I can’t—I’ve gotta be—”

“You’re enough, Buck,” Steve said, low and insistent. He tilted Bucky’s head up, one hand slipping to his neck, thumb at his jaw and fingers pressing gently into his skin. The other wiped away the tear as Steve smiled, his gaze meeting Bucky’s unwaveringly. “You have always been enough.”

When Bucky let go, the first sob rolling through his body like a wave, they shifted and grabbed at each other, the embrace tight and comforting. Bucky hid his face in the crook of Steve’s neck, his hands grasping across the wide plains of his back, chain wrapped around his fingers.

Steve held him close, held him steady, and said, “You are the best thing. I’ve told you before, and I’ll tell you again, Buck, as many times as you need to hear it: you are the best thing. You have more courage in your pinky toe than most people have in their entire bodies. You’re loyal to a fault. You’re kind, you’re gentle—you are the best thing, Bucky Barnes. And I have loved you my whole life.”

Bucky stilled, then pressed closer, as if doing so would make them one body, one entity, moulded and combined; two hearts, one soul, wrapped so tight around each other that there was no distinguishing between them.

“Since that day in the playground?” Bucky asked into his neck, the image coming back with the moment; an apple tree, Steve being knocked down, and Bucky, for the first time of many, inserting himself into Steve’s problems.

“Since before I was even born,” Steve replied.

“Fuckin’ sap.”

Steve laughed, shocked. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s me. A sap. Not like I’m the one that’s crying.”

Bucky pulled away, just a little, so he could see Steve’s smiling face. Steve’s hand came up and wiped the tears from Bucky’s cheeks. “Hey, it’s my first time crying in seventy years, gimme a break.” Bucky sniffed, his lips lifting up in a smile, mirroring Steve’s. His fingers curled into the fabric at Steve’s waist. “We should probably get outta here before your friends start wondering if we’ve been killed.”

“Yeah,” Steve replied. “Probably.” They didn’t move an inch, though, just looked at each other like it was the first time and the millionth all at once.

Bucky’s memories of Steve were far and few between, but they matched up to the man before him. Steve on the playground, getting back up even when it was smarter to stay down. Steve with a tiny frame, hair the colour of straw, clothes three sizes too big hanging off his shoulders. Steve by the fire, taller, broader, healthier, his blue eyes flickering gold in the firelight, watching him openly, excitedly, lovingly.

It was all here in the man before him; the hair yellow, the shoulders broad, the face so full of love and excitement it made his knees buckle a little. That was it, wasn’t it? The feeling that first memory gave him, that he thought about at night when he was alone in some unknown country, searching for a way to make it wash over him once more: loved. Bucky was loved.

He could almost hit himself for going on a search around the world rather than going straight to the source; as if Steve Rogers, after all he’d learnt about him, wouldn’t still be as in love with Bucky as he had been that morning before Austria, before he died.

It was Earth’s simplest truth: Steve Rogers loved Bucky Barnes.

There was no doubt in his mind that it went the other way, too; that he had been harbouring his feelings for Steve Rogers somewhere deep inside of him since the day they tore him apart; that Bucky Barnes and his love for Steve Rogers had hidden, curled up tight and tiny inside Soldier for seventy years until he was finally allowed back out into the sun; that there was no end of the line.

It was Bucky and Steve infinitely; the kind of love that continued on, past the grave and whatever came after.

“You love me,” Bucky said, quiet.

“I do,” Steve replied. “I always have.”

Bucky nodded. Simplest truth. He lifted his flesh hand to Steve’s face, thumb running along his cheekbone, down to his jaw, his mouth. Steve’s gaze never once left Bucky, even when Bucky slowed his thumb across the edge of Steve’s lower lip. The braided bracelet of red, white, and blue pressed against his chin, as if Aleksey had known, twenty years before, that this would be where Bucky ended up.

“You love me?” Steve asked in a whisper, the hope in his voice too much for Bucky to bear.

“I do,” Bucky said. “I never stopped.”

And then Bucky kissed him, because that was how it was always supposed to end.

*

Funny how a kiss can unravel you. Funny how it can tear you apart and uncoil your insides. Funny how it can also piece you back together, bit by bit, until you’re whole.

When they left Gehenna behind them, a quinjet soaring high above the Austrian Alps, Natalia scrolling through the USB from the safe, Wilson flicking through the polaroids, the weapon’s blueprints rolled up in the corner, Steve lifted the chain with his tags and lowered it around Bucky’s neck.

“When you said it’d take you a hundred years to decide,” he said, fiddling with the tag that fell against Bucky’s chest, “I didn’t think you were serious.”

“Hm?” Bucky tilted his head to the side, and Steve smiled.

“Something you said once,” Steve replied; something that hadn’t come back yet, that might not ever. Steve didn’t seem bothered. He instead dropped the tags and cupped his hand at Bucky’s neck, like if he might float away if they weren’t touching.

The quinjet landed in New York, a city that plagued Bucky as much as he plagued it. Steve barely had to ask before they were headed to his place in Brooklyn, to an apartment only a few blocks away from their old home, where the roof had leaked and the floorboards creaked, and their neighbours were grouchy and old.

Once inside, they were greeted by a blur of black; a cat that leapt into Steve’s arms and curled into his chest; James, if Bucky remembered right from the interview five months before. And once Bucky was there, in the apartment with the Son of a Witch climbing over his shoulders, and Steve, tugging on his hand and smiling like the sunrise, creeping over the horizon and shedding light across the world, it was easy to stay. It was easy to not go, to know where home was and where he belonged.

Bucky Barnes was back, whether his memories were or not. He was back and sitting comfortably in his body, sitting comfortably in Steve’s apartment, sitting comfortably in New York. And the years could crawl on, would crawl on, and he would live them all there, by Steve’s side, in one apartment and then another; in a house with a backyard and a place to hang up the shield when the time came along. And James – Jamie to Bucky – would grow old, and the next in The Witch’s line would come along, black with white paws, like dipped in paint, then really, pink and blue, covered in acrylics and swiping her paws across the walls – and she would be called Polina – Polly to Steve – and havoc would forever follow her tail.

And the Howling Commandos would travel to Brooklyn for the occasion, wrinkled and old with bad hips and bad backs, with seventy years of stories to impart, and they would bring photos and wives and grandchildren as much as they would bring champagne and schnapps and foods Bucky had never even heard of. And they’d visit Peggy Carter in her home in D.C., and see her on her good days as often as her bad; when she’d see him and cry, or see him and immediately be back in the ‘40s, as if they hadn’t aged a day. He’d meet them all, eventually; every husband and wife and child and grandchild. He’d meet every Howling baby, and Sharon Carter and Tony Stark; he’d meet the people who grew up with his names in history books, reading the letters he sent home and staring at his photo, calling him a martyr.

It would never compare to the day he saw Becca again, eighty-odd years old, her husband long gone but children all grown up with families of their own. And on that day, sitting in her suburban house, filled with grainy photos as much as ones in technicolour, he would notice that his fingernails were clean, and they had been for a long time. Then he’d look up, and meet his sister’s eyes, and ask for his first cigarette in seventy years.

And amongst it all, amongst the happiness and the warmth – all the warmth he could find in a world that grew cold each winter, like clockwork, like it had it out for him – he knew that one day, he’d be six feet under, and Steve would be right there beside him, each other’s names around their necks, each other’s names across the gravestone they were buried under.

STEVEN GRANT ROGERS and JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES, asleep and warm, asleep and together; in death did they not part, but continue on, the line never ending, the line stretching forward, onward, out into the distance of space and stars and infinity; the never-ending kind of loop that told Bucky that it would all happen again someday; they would wake up small and screaming, and stumble through life and siblings and sickness, only to find one another on a playground in Brooklyn and fall in love all over again.

But for now, in Steve’s apartment, as they lazed in a pool of sunlight, Jamie asleep on Bucky’s chest and Steve humming to the music from the phonograph, he knew that today was enough; the present was enough. Tomorrow, they’d kiss and laugh and love, they’d search his memories and the internet, they’d find photos of his family and frame them for the wall, they’d invite Natalia and Sam over and watch the Dodgers, despite them being in L.A. now, and read through Madame B.’s letters and uncover her secrets, and the day after, they’d start the life they’d been planning on beginning for some seventy years, through ice and aliens and assassinations.

But today, being warm was enough.