Archive of Our Own

It all starts when Barnes gets the call.

He’s somewhere in Belarus, finishing up his last hit when his phone buzzes in his pocket. He takes one look at his target, currently bleeding onto the floor through a hole in the middle of his forehead, and shrugs. He figures the guy wouldn’t mind if he answered it; after all, dead men aren’t exactly in the best position to complain about propriety.

“Barnes,” he says, when he picks up.

It’s two seconds until someone speaks. “Yeah,” Alexander Pierce replies, voice tinny through the phone. “Got a new mission for you.”

. . .

It’s in D.C.

Barnes takes it immediately when he hears this. He’s been in Eastern Europe for the last six months, which, though fun, was not the place he envisioned spending the winter. It just gets ridiculously cold there that even though Barnes can withstand crazy temperatures, he’s a bit afraid that the cold will make his metal arm malfunction. He’s got no idea what kind of features are built into this arm, and he knows from experience that the arm is temperature-resistant, but he doesn’t know if it’s only until a certain temperature. Barnes is a tiny bit afraid that negative fifty-degree Celsius weather is what’ll finally do it in.

Pierce sends him the file on the target later, when Barnes is curled up under his duvet. He gives it a cursory look, skimming through paragraphs of English, German and Russian text.

Steven Grant Rogers. Born July 4, 1918. 1.83 meters in height. Level 6 target.

Easy enough.

. . .

Pierce doesn’t tell him how he wants the target to be killed, which is why a week later, Barnes finds himself on the roof opposite of Steven Rogers’ supposed building, his sniper rifle in front of him. Barnes enjoys sniping—if he could, he would do all his hits with his sniper. It’s quick, clean, efficient, and quiet, cause the target won’t even have the time to scream.

According to the files Pierce sent him, this guy usually goes on a run at around seven in the morning and comes back at around nine. He then opens the curtains of his bay window before he starts breakfast, usually making something with eggs and bread, which he then eats on his tiny kitchen table. It’s a routine, and well. In Barnes’ line of work, routines are deadly.

He lines up his sniper, adjusts his scope, and waits. And sure enough, at around nine in the morning, the curtains on the window pull apart, and Barnes finds himself staring at…

Someone.

Someone tall. Someone wearing a dri-fit shirt that is way too small for him and clings to every single muscle on his body. Someone whose dirty blonde hair way too neat for the running he supposedly did.

But it’s the guy’s face that catches Barnes off-guard. Because despite the fact that Barnes is sure that he doesn’t know anybody with ridiculously large muscles like that, that’s…that’s a face he knows.

He finds himself staring at the guys’ chiseled jaw, finds himself fixated at the blue of the guys’ eyes. Staring at him seems to trigger something in his brain, fragments of things that are either long-lost memories or forgotten dreams.

Worn sketchbooks. Charcoal on fingers. Brooklyn.

Brooklyn?

It takes him a moment to remember what he’s supposed to be doing, and just as he curls his finger around the trigger, the guy—Rogers, his mind supplies—disappears, presumably to make breakfast.

Well. Fuck.

. . .

The thing is, Barnes has no idea who the hell he actually is. His earliest memory is waking up in an abandoned laboratory two years ago, naked with a metal arm. It was Pierce who found him a few hours later, who’d given him food and clothing and a place to stay. Who’d helped him discover what he can do, who’d said to him, I want to make this world a better place, and I could use a guy like you.

He doesn’t even know his name. Pierce had called him the Winter Soldier in the beginning, but that was a moniker that was far too long to keep saying. So after a bunch of Barnes’ complaints, Pierce just randomly decided that his name would be Barnes.

So Barnes calls himself Barnes just because Pierce said so.

. . .

He calls Pierce later in the evening.

“That man,” He says, the instant Pierce picks up. “That Rogers guy…did I know him?”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line.

“No,” Pierce replies.

Barnes hangs up.

. . .

His second attempt at the hit goes just as well as the first.

He’s tailing the guy through the streets of D.C., a cap on his head and a pair of sunglasses on his face. He has to admit, the guy’s pretty good at hiding—despite his large, bulky body, he blends in with the crowd easily, makes himself look like an ordinary passer-by. At one point, Barnes almost loses sight of him; it takes him a bit of shoving and jogging to catch up.

He’s not quite sure where the guy’s going—there was so much information collated on the guy that Barnes, at one point, simply gave up reading. All he needs to do is kill the guy, after all, and he can do that with his eyes closed. Besides, Barnes firmly believes that he has better things to do with his time than learn random things about a guy who’ll be dead at the end of the day. Such as watch amateur bakers fail at baking on Netflix.

It’s about ten minutes into walking when Barnes notices the guy’s head perk up, and Barnes resolutely keeps himself inconspicuous as the guy’s head turns to the direction of a back alley. Without hesitation, he disappears into it, and Barnes follows him, pushing aside the sudden weird feeling in his chest.

In a back alley with this guy. Why does it feel so familiar?

It’ll be easy to kill him in a back alley, he thinks, as he curls his fist around the handle of his favorite knife. No witnesses, no loud noises. Just one stab to the neck, through the carotid artery, and he bleeds out like a pig in a butcher’s shop.

Except, just as he gets there, he finds the guy cuddling a kitten in his large arms.

“Meow,” says the kitten, looking up at the guy. Its eyes are large, round and somehow, admiring, and if kittens could talk, Barnes is pretty sure the cat would be saying something like you’re my hero or I love you.

It’s an adorable sight.

“I found him crushed under some crates,” Rogers says, not looking up from the kitten. It takes Barnes a while to realize that he’s being spoken to. “I think he’s injured.”

“Oh,” Barnes says, because he doesn’t know what else to say. He could kill the guy, sure, but the kitten would witness it, and Barnes doesn’t think the kitten deserves to be subject to that. It’s actually pretty cute, barring its dirty, ginger, matted fur.

“I’d take him to the vet, but, I have a meeting in—” Rogers looks at his watch, swears under his breath, “—five minutes ago.”

Then Rogers does something unexpected.

He looks up from the kitten, and Barnes freezes when he catches sight of those familiar blue eyes. It takes a moment, but his instincts kick in; he averts his face, keeps it hidden under the shadow of his cap. Rogers mentioned that he was in a hurry, and if Barnes is right (which he usually is about these things), he’s not going to take his time trying to figure out why this stranger is keeping his face hidden.

And he is.

“I’m really sorry to force this on you,” Rogers says, his attention mostly divided between the kitten in his arms and the time on his watch. Barnes clenches and unclenches his hand around his knife, trying to force himself to pull it out, to do what he was assigned to do. “But would you mind taking him to the vet for me?”

Barnes blinks from behind his sunglasses. He should really just go and stab this guy.

But the guy just saved a kitten. Barnes figures he can probably let him go for now.

“Uh, sure,” he says, and it’s the wrong thing to say, because Steven’s face lights up like the sun. He starts shrugging off his jacket, and Barnes can only watch, dumbfounded, as he wraps the kitten carefully in his jacket before handing it over.

“Really sorry about this,” Rogers says, because apparently, he has no qualms about trusting a random guy in a back alley with a kitten. He’s lucky that Barnes is an assassin, not a kitten torturer. “Don’t worry about the cost, here.”

He then hands Barnes a wad of fifty-dollar bills. “I have no idea how much it’ll cost, so just—” he waves a hand “—keep the change. Bye.”

And then he’s off, running out of the back alley and disappearing into the crowd. Barnes stares at his retreating back for a few seconds, before staring down at the kitten in his arm.

The kitten looks up at him. “Meow,” he says, before snuggling into the crook of Barnes’ metal elbow.

“Goddammit,” Barnes mutters, mostly to himself.

He takes the kitten to the vet. 

. . .

The kitten, as he finds out from the vet, is biologically female. She’s got a broken left leg, and Barnes watches as the vet place a splint on her.

Once she’s all treated and cleaned up, Barnes pays for the cost with the bills Rogers gave him. As it turns out, Rogers had given him way too much money for a vet treatment, so Barnes uses the rest of the money to buy kitty food, kitty litter, a kitty bed, and a kitty carrier cage. Then he puts the kitten—whom he’d named Dot—into the cage, picks up the stuff he’d just bought, and takes her back to his dingy, tiny studio apartment.

He’s got a cat now.

. . .

The third attempt is a rather elaborate plan—get a few drugs in the guy’s system, mix it with alcohol, and have him suffer a terrible, unfortunate and accidental simple poisoning.

Obviously, it fails, because Rogers is a mutant, and his metabolism quickly burns up any alcohol in his body. Pierce yells at him for that, because he’d wasted their valuable resources—money—buying the guy drinks, when Roger’s crazy metabolism is apparently, mentioned in the file Barnes didn’t really read.

Barnes is starting to think Rogers is impossible to kill.

. . .

“Meow,” says Dot, hopping gingerly onto his lap and butting her head against his fingers. Barnes has taken a liking to her, because she’s sweet and she doesn’t care that he’s got a weird metal arm. She doesn’t look at him like he’s damaged or broken, the way some people do when they realize he’s only got one proper arm. Of course, she’s also a cat and cats don’t really know any better, but whatever. Barnes is just happy to have the company.

“I don’t suppose you have any ideas about how to kill the guy, do you?” He asks her as he’s scratching under her jaw. His fourth attempt failed today, a simple plan of tailing Rogers, blowing his tires out, and making it look like a road accident. Just as he’d taken his gun out to shoot, Rogers had crossed over to Jersey, which.

Barnes refuses to go to Jersey. He fucking hates it there.

“Meow,” Dot says again, before closing her eyes and purring happily. Barnes watches her tail curl into strange shapes.

“No, of course not,” he says. “You’re a kitten.” He thinks for a moment. “Or are you a murder kitten?”

Dot blinks her big eyes up at him and meows again.

It’s entirely possible that Barnes, who’s not exactly mentally stable to begin with, has now truly, officially lost it.

He decides to go sharpen his knives for something to do.

. . .

It’s during his eighth attempt at killing Steven that something actually happens.

He’s decided to try sniping again, and finds himself back on the roof across Rogers’ building. This time, he’s dressed himself in his full Kevlar gear, complete with mask and war paint, because appearances do matter and Barnes thinks that being all dressed up will remind him of his mission and what he’s supposed to do. He’d also checked the area around Rogers’ building making sure there were no injured kittens or puppies around. He refuses to let himself get distracted by Rogers with a baby animal again.

But just as he’s waiting for Rogers to return to his apartment, he witnesses something strange—a man breaks into Rogers’ apartment, stands with his back against the window. Barnes can’t see his face or his expression; he can only see the way the man moves, carefully, as if heavily injured.

Rogers arrives not long after, and through his scope, Barnes sees the play of emotion on Rogers’ face, surprise morphing into suspicion. They talk for a while and Barnes waits, trying to get a clear, unfettered view of Rogers’ head. Then, when he’s finally got a clear shot, he holds his breath, curls his finger around the trigger, and pulls.

The bullet travels down, straight towards Rogers, and Barnes is eighty percent sure it’s going to hit—

—Until the injured man moves, ends up in front of the window just as the glass shatters, and Barnes watches as the bullet carves a hole into his coat, embeds itself into him.

There’s a pause as Barnes processes what happened.

He’d accidentally killed the wrong guy.

Oops.

And then Rogers looks through the window and catches sight of him on the roof, sniper rifle in hand. His face contorts from shock to anger, and then he’s jumping out his window like an idiot, crashing into the floor right below Barnes.

Barnes abandons his rifle and runs the length of the rooftop, listening to the sounds of Rogers crashing bull-headedly into things. The obstacles don’t seem to slow him down, however, because Rogers is right behind him as he jumps onto the roof top of the next building, crashing through the window and landing easily on his feet.

Barnes hears it—Rogers’ grunt, the sound of something metal whizzing through the air. He finds himself counting one, two, before he turns around, easily catching a shield in his left arm.

The sound of metal against metal reverberates into the night, and Rogers stares at him with wide blue eyes, a hint of fear in them. Barnes looks him dead in the eye, throws the shield at him with as much force as he can muster, then jumps off the building and disappears into the night.

. . .

Turns out, Barnes has accidentally killed Nick Fury. Whoever that is.

(“You know,” Pierce says on the phone the next day, “I assigned Rumlow to kill Fury. I don’t mind that you did, though.”

“Hm,” Barnes says, more focused on watching some girl trying to get her cakes unstuck from the cake pan. He doesn’t understand why everybody forgets to grease their pans before pouring their cake batter in. Shouldn’t this be covered in, like, baking boot camp?

“But you still have to kill Rogers,” Pierce adds, and Barnes mumbles something affirmative, hangs up, and goes back to watching people mangle their cakes.)

. . .

Barnes turns into a wanted man overnight.

Actually, that’s a little untrue; Barnes has been wanted for quite some time now. Pierce doesn’t tell him, but despite his mental instability, he isn’t dumb—he knows he’s pretty good at his job, and he knows he’s been targeting high-profile individuals since he started. And with a job profile like that comes notoriety, comes the people wanting to put him behind bars because he’d killed their asshole president or something.

But it’s the first time he’s the subject of an honest-to-god man hunt. There are police and agents out in the field searching for him, tracking clues and following leads. Of course, they’re not going to find anything—Barnes had made sure to keep his tracks covered—but it’s amusing to watch them, to follow their (measly) progress.

If he’s being honest, he quite likes his job, quite likes helping usher a new era of peace and order. According to Pierce, his work is a gift to mankind, the kind of dirty work needed in order to shape the future. Of course, Barnes privately thinks that Pierce is full of shit—Pierce has the tendency to be dramatic—but he’s seen the reports, seen how towns organize and cities rebuild after one of his hits. 

And sure, maybe he knows nothing about himself; maybe he doesn’t know his name or how old he is or if he’s even got family. But he knows he’s pretty important in the grand scheme of things, and he thinks the person he was before would quite like that.

. . .

Pierce calls him to his apartment a few hours later, offers him some milk. Reminds him of his mission, then shoots his housemaid in front of him.

All in all, a pretty normal meeting.

. . .

For his ninth attempt, Barnes gives up on working alone. He asks Pierce for back up, and back up arrives in the form of an armored van, five men with rifles, and a grenade-launcher-slash-machine-gun. Barnes has no idea where Pierce recruited them from, but they all look terrified of him, sending him uncomfortable looks from the corner of their eye every so often.

Barnes plays this up by staring angrily at nothing and speaking only in Russian.

Honestly, he has no idea why they’re so afraid of him. Sure, he kills people sometimes, but so do they. And it’s not like he’s going to randomly go rogue and kill them just because he feels like it—he’s got a mission, and he tends to be single-minded about his missions. Especially this one, because he’s attempted to kill this guy eight times and yet Rogers stupidly refuses to die.

Barnes always finishes his missions. He’s got a reputation to uphold, and this guy is just ruining everything.

They tail Rogers’ car all the way to the highway. He’s with three other people—two guys and a red-haired woman Barnes thinks he’s encountered in a previous mission. Barnes only has to kill Rogers, but as Rogers is pretty hard to kill, he just decides to kill all of them.

It occurs to him, just as he pulls one guy from the car and throws him in front of a moving truck, that this is probably why all of Pierce’s men think he’s terrifying.

It’s a huge mess—they wreck the highway, destroy busses, blow up cars. Rogers gets a grenade shot at him but he just won’t die, like some sort of cockroach. The girl is a nuisance, managing to shoot off his eyepiece, but Barnes manages to shoot her in the shoulder and renders her incapacitated. The rest of his men deal with the other guy, while Barnes continues on his way to kill Rogers.

Rogers fights back, of course he does. He’s pretty good, dodging his hits and landing his own. Barnes gets frustrated, which is probably why he gets caught off-guard—Rogers manages to land two hits and throws him across the road, his mask falling off in the process.

Barnes stands and turns around, incredibly ready to really just end this guy’s life, when the expression on Rogers’ face makes him pause. Unbidden, that weird feeling of nostalgia returns, shooting through his chest like lightning.

“…Bucky?” Rogers says.

Bucky. The name triggers something in his head, hazy images of the schoolyard and the battlefield. He was a soldier, fighting a war; he was a school boy, getting all A’s. Or was he? He doesn’t know, can’t seem to form a clear enough picture of who he is, who he was, but—

That guy, Rogers. That guy called him Bucky, but…

“Who the hell is Bucky?”

But before anything else happens, he gets knocked over by the guy, who somehow seems to have procured wings. Then, he gets a grenade shot at him, after which he promptly decides to flee.

Because Rogers hadn’t stopped staring at him like a lost puppy, hadn’t stopped staring at him like he’d just got stabbed in the back. Hadn’t stopped staring at him like he knew him, knew all the nooks and crannies of Barnes that he himself can’t even access, and Barnes felt like he’d been turned inside out, all his organs exposed for the world to see.

. . .

That evening, he pulls up the file on Rogers, reads everything cover to cover. He learns that he was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Sarah and Joseph Rogers. He learns that he used to be a sickly child—his eyes bulge when he reads all of Rogers’ former illnesses.

He reads that Rogers is Captain America, and that he came to hold that title after subjecting himself to an experimental super serum. He learns that he fought in a war, and that he’d crashed a plane into the ice in 1945 and remained frozen there for almost seventy years.

Rogers, Barnes notes, should be completely lost right now—he’d woken up in a world completely different from the one he grew up in, woken up at a time when all his old friends were either old or dead. He woken up and he didn’t know anything, a feeling that Barnes himself can relate to.

Rogers, for all intents and purposes, is a man out of his time. But then he’d looked at Barnes like he knew him, looked at him like he’d just seen a ghost come back to life.

Does that mean Barnes is a man out of time too?

“The guy on the bridge,” he says, when Pierce picks up. “Who was he?”

There’s a pause. Barnes is beginning to suspect that Pierce knows more than he’s letting on. “Steven Rogers. Your mission.”

Barnes makes an affirmative noise, and hangs up, throws his phone against the wall of his studio. It breaks into tiny pieces, and catches Dot’s attention, who gingerly hops up on the couch and curls into his lap.

“But I knew him,” he tells Dot quietly. “I knew him.”

Dot meows at him, the way she does when she’s being spoken to. Barnes knows that she’s a cat, and her meows don’t really have any meaning behind it, but he can’t help but think that maybe she’s communicating, saying something like yes, you did. You knew him.

. . .

But that doesn’t mean he stops trying to kill the guy. Missions are missions, after all.

. . .

Though everything gets a little bit harder after the bridge.

It’s two days of violence and action and chaos—something Barnes decides to sit out, because he’s a wanted man and he’s got a cat to take care of. So that ends up being two days of watching baking fails on Netflix and feeding Dot, two days of reading Rogers’ file. Two days of trying to piece together hazy memories and failing.

Then as soon as the dust settles, Pierce—who had managed to escape relatively unscathed—calls him up, tells him Rogers is on the move.

“Where’s he going?” Barnes can’t help but ask as he pours Dot’s food into her little kitty bowl.

“That’s your job to find out,” Pierce tells him, sounding a little pissed. “I want confirmed death as soon as possible.”

As it turns out, Rogers doesn’t seem to have a definite pattern on where he’s going—one day he seems to be somewhere in Europe, the next day he’s back in D.C. Barnes puts out a few feelers, talks to some of his contacts on the street, taps into a few phone lines and finds out that Rogers seems to be searching for someone.

It takes him another few days to find out that Rogers is searching for him.

So, he does what he has to do. He illegally downloads photoshop, starts photoshopping himself in different countries. Romania, Nigeria, Sokovia, South Africa—wherever he can think of. He shows Dot when he’s done, lifting her up to his lap to show her the doctored photos, then puts them on the internet for Rogers to find.

. . .

The doctored photos send Rogers and his friends on a goose chase, one Barnes finds far too entertaining. He spends a week locked up in his apartment, timing his uploads so that it appears as if he’s spotted somewhere else just as Rogers arrives at a different country.

But that, eventually, loses its appeal, so Barnes stops posting the fake sightings. Waits until he gets the news that Rogers is back in the U.S., and starts planning his next hit.

. . .

As expected, it fails.

Because Barnes accidentally saves Rogers’ life.

. . .

Okay, fine—not accidentally. More of instinctively, because if he’s being honest, he doesn’t know what possesses him to do so.

He’s hanging out on a rooftop, his trusty sniper rifle in hand, easily hidden from sight as Rogers fights off a couple of goons. He’s outnumbered, easily—from Barnes’ view, it looks like it’s fifteen to one, and even though he holds his own, he’s getting beaten up. Badly.

His nose is bloodied, his eye is starting to swell shut, and even as he manages to knock quite a bunch of them out, he gets hurt as well—tazers and what look to be tranquilizer guns.

Really, Barnes has his work cut out for him. All he has to do is wait until Rogers stays still for a few seconds, and then take the shot.

Someone clobbers Rogers on the head and Rogers goes down hard, his knees buckling from the force and from the effect of the tranquilizers. Barnes readies his gun, curls his finger around the trigger—

Watches, from his scope, as Rogers stands up again, a little wobbly on his feet. His damn metal frisbee is gone, and he holds his fists in front of him, a weak semblance of a fighting stance.

Then Barnes hears him say, “I can do this all day.”

And it’s nothing, a simple phrase, but it sends a shock to Barnes’ system, and he doesn’t know why. It feels like the universe tilts on its axis for a few moments, disorienting him, and suddenly Barnes is staring at a tiny, skinny boy, head right in the center of the crosshairs. A tiny, skinny boy who feels awfully familiar—Barnes has the vaguest memories of finding him in back alleys, bloodied and bruised and beaten, someone he’d pick up, dust off and take home. The feeling of gauze in his hand as he carefully, painstakingly wrapped it around bleeding knuckles, only for Steve to reopen them the next day.

Steve. The name sticks in his head, matching itself with the tiny boy in Barnes’ head. Barnes stares in horror. This is Steve.

He watches, then, as Steve gets clobbered in the head, watches as Steve loses his balance and falls off the side of the building and into the river below. Barnes doesn’t even hesitate—just leaves his sniper where it is, free runs through the roof and jumps off, diving into the river after Steve.

Steve is dead weight as Barnes lifts him from the water, pulls him to the shore. He’s completely passed out when Barnes lays him on this back, and there’s this heart-wrenching panic creeping up Barnes’ veins. Steve’s going to die, because he can’t breathe, his asthma is choking him, his faulty lungs are filled with water that he’s too weak to expel, and Barnes places a hand on his chest, about to do something, when Steve coughs.

Water spurts out from his mouth, dribbling down his chin, and Barnes exhales in relief, feels the steady beating of Steve’s heart beneath his flesh-and-bone hand, and he’s alive, he’s not dead yet, and he’s got the sudden urge to press his ear to his chest and listen to a wheezing heartbeat because despite the odds, Steve is alive and breathing and—

“Bucky?” He hears someone croak. Looks up to find blue eyes staring at him.

And the universe rights itself, setting things back where they belong, and Barnes realizes that the person beneath him isn’t Steve, it’s Rogers. It’s Rogers that he pulled from the river, Rogers who’s staring up at him now like he’d just seen a ghost. Rogers who is Barnes’ mission.

One of Rogers’ hands comes up to grab Barnes’ wrist, and Barnes yanks it away, before pushing himself into a standing position and running away.

Rogers doesn’t follow.

. . .

Rogers also doesn’t leave the U.S. after that incident. No amount of photoshopped photos convinces him.

. . .

And then things go wildly out of hand.

Rogers jumps back to looking for him immediately, but this time he gathers intel much quicker and much more thoroughly. He seems to have realized that Barnes has a mission that has to do with him, and as such, Barnes can’t leave the East Coast unless he finishes it. Barnes tries to leave the country just to spite him, but Pierce won’t let him, and he can’t exactly travel around without Pierce’s help. His metal arm and metal detectors just don’t get along.

So, Barnes is stuck here for the time being.

He makes sure to cover his trail while walking around D.C., makes sure to make himself invisible to Rogers. If Rogers is so hell-bent on finding him, then he’s going to make sure Rogers works for it.

Of course, in the end, it doesn’t work out that way. Because through some random stroke of luck, a member of Rogers’ merry band of friends finds him.

He’s walking to the nearby pet shop, about to buy more food for Dot, when suddenly someone swoops in and kicks him into a dead end. The force sends him hurtling against the wall, hard enough to make a sound, but not hard enough to actually injure him.

“Bucky.” It’s a voice Barnes would recognize anywhere, mainly because the last two times he’d heard it, it’d said the exact same thing.

Rogers steps out of the shadows of the alley like some sort of dark, comic book character. He’s got his arms crossed and a grim expression on his face, and he stands imposingly between Barnes and the street. He looks so different from the Steve Barnes’ head conjured up, the other day, that he has no idea how the fuck he even confused the two of them.

He could still make it, he thinks, as he looks around, planning an escape route. Rogers is big, but not that big, and if he made a run for it, he could just slip past him.

But just as he thinks that, something—no, someone—lands behind Rogers, effectively blocking his window.

Which means Barnes is effectively trapped, stuck in a dirty dead end in D.C. Great.

“Buck,” Rogers says, and immediately, his tone shifts to something gentler. “How’ve you been?”

He takes a few steps forward, despite the fact that his companion makes warning noises that sound like some sort of animal. Barnes lets him approach, keeping absolutely still, and just when Rogers reaches point-blank range, he pulls out his gun and aims it at Rogers’ forehead.

He never goes out unprepared, after all.

Rogers freezes, and his hands come up. “Buck,” he says.

Barnes doesn’t look at him. “You move, I shoot,” he tells Rogers’ companion, who’d also frozen in his tracks.

He may have turned into a pretty terrible assassin, but he’s pleased to see that he’s still pretty intimidating.

He turns his attention back to Rogers. “Why are you looking for me?” He demands.

He digs the barrel of the gun into Rogers’ forehead, and Rogers’ frowns, his brow furrowing. “Bucky,” he says again. “It’s me.”

“Why. Are. You. Looking. For. Me.” Barnes repeats slowly.

Rogers looks at him in such a way that he looks like a sad Labrador puppy. “What?” He stammers. “But I—but we—” he stops. Barnes watches as he takes a deep breath, composes himself. “You pulled me from the river. Why.”

Barnes doesn’t know. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.” The blue in Rogers’ eyes goes from cornflower to ice. “You know me.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You do,” Rogers insists, as stubborn as ever. Barnes watches as he slowly puts his hands down. “Think.”

Barnes shakes his head. He doesn’t even know who he is, how the fuck is he expected to know a whole different person? “I don’t know,” he says, and he feels anger building up inside him, slow and visceral. “All I know of you is what’s written on your file. Steven Grant Rogers. Born July 4th, 1918.” He resolutely doesn’t mention the small, sickly Steve that’s been inhabiting his brain recently, doesn’t mention how at times, he confuses his Steve with Rogers in front of him.

“File?” Rogers asks, looking confused. “You have a file on me?”

“Yeah,” Barnes says, and he meets Rogers’ eye, and cocks his gun. His other hand sneaks into his pocket, grabbing the small, grappling cable he has in there. “The file they gave me when they hired me to kill you.”

He senses it before he sees it—Rogers’ companion running at him, his weird bird wings flapping behind him. Barnes moves quickly; the end of his grappling cable snags at one of the guy’s bird wings, and Barnes pulls, easily sending him to the ground. With one more flick of his metal wrist, the large bird wings detach from his suit, rendering him grounded.

When he turns his attention back to Rogers, he finds that he hasn’t moved, and he looks far too relaxed for someone who’s just been told that he’s going to die. “You’re not going to kill me,” he says.

“Why not?” Barnes asks before he can stop himself. He has half a mind to shoot him right now, just to prove him wrong.

“Because,” Rogers replies, “you’ve known me your whole life.”

The way he says it makes something seize in Barnes chest, hazy memories trying to break free. Barnes shakes his head, tries to ignore it.

“You’re lying,” he says. The quiver in his voice is imperceptible to everyone except him.

Or, well, it should be. Rogers seems to hear it because he seems to relax even more, a small smile creeping onto his face. “I’m not,” he replies. “We knew each other. Your name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

“No,” Barnes says immediately, but the name breaks through the barriers he’d put up, sending the remnants of his mind into a tailspin. A barrage of distorted images flash in his mind: him and Rogers in school, him and Rogers in the trenches. Him and Rogers sharing a blanket one cold winter, Rogers’—no, Steve’s—fingers cold where they’re pressed against his ribs.

He hadn’t moved away, though. The feeling of ice had spread down his ribs and into his veins, and all over his body until he couldn’t move, frozen all over and stuck in a metal chamber—

Or, wait—

More and more images flash through: the furrow of Steve’s brow as he sketches, the light coming from the window turning his hair white. The contentment on Steve’s face in the back of the pick-up truck, riding back from Coney Island. Him and Steve sharing some strawberries one warm summer afternoon. The blue of Steve’s lips as he lay under a mound of blankets, shivering. Barnes had thought he’d lose him then.

“Everyone called you Bucky,” Rogers continues, oblivious to Barnes’ mounting panic.

“Shut up,” Barnes says. His voice comes out raw, and he shuts his eyes, shakes the images out of his head. “Shut up.”

Rogers ignores him. “You’re my friend,” he says gently, and his eyes are Steve’s eyes, the same fond look Steve would give him when Barnes would do something stupid to make him laugh. He’d made Steve laugh a lot, and—

These aren’t real memories. These can’t be.

“Shut up!” Barnes roars, the anger returning in a flood, mixing with the panic. He socks Rogers in the jaw, bashes him on the head with the butt of his gun. Rogers crumbles as Sam comes running, and Barnes shoots at him—close enough to scare him, but wide enough so it doesn’t injure him, then jumps over Rogers’ prone body and runs out into the street.

He walks an extra fifteen blocks to lose them, in case they chased after him.

He also forgets to get Dot’s cat food.

. . .

Through a strange turn of events, the Smithsonian holds an exhibit about Captain America. Barnes spends most of the day convincing himself not to think about it.

But an hour before closing, he shows up. He sneaks past the metal detectors, blends in with the crowd, and stands in front of the glass cases for so long that his vision gets blurry.

The exhibit contains information about Rogers that Barnes already knew. He reads them again anyway, taking the time to commit the supplementary photos into his memories. Catches sight of a video installation of little Steve morphing into the Rogers that he’s seen countless times now. And it’s like a shock of ice-cold water to his system when he looks closely, finds that despite everything—despite the size and the muscles and the height—Steve and Rogers have the exact same eyes.

Rogers is…Steve. His Steve, the one who lurks around the war-torn landscape of his mind like his own personal ghost.

And he knew this, before—he’s not fucked up in the head enough that he can’t realize that someone named Steven could also be conceivably called Steve, but it’s harder to ignore when all the facts are laid out in front of you, staring you right in the face. Rogers is Steve, and Barnes…well Barnes knew him. Before.

The uniforms displayed right next to the video installation are what Barnes identifies as standard; most soldiers who’d joined the war were issued one of these. Barnes ignores the tingling of his fingertips, ignores the fact that he can feel the roughness of the cloth under his palm.

But it’s the comparatively small memorial installation that he’s most drawn to.

“Best friends since childhood, Bucky Barnes and Steven Rogers were inseparable, in both schoolyard and battlefield,” the monotonous voice drones. Barnes isn’t really paying attention, because on the glass in front of him is a blown-up photo of, well. Him.

Or at least, he’s pretty sure it’s him. He’s not in the habit of keeping mirrors around, and he’s only really seen himself in distorted, reflected surfaces—the backs of spoons, the surfaces of lakes—but his heart speeds up in his chest, as if letting him know that he’s on the right path to finding out who he really was.

The exhibit occupies his thoughts all the way into the evening, when he’s lying on his futon in shitty studio apartment with Dot curled up next to him. He’s—well, he was there, back when Captain America had just turned up on the scene. He was there during the war and he was a sergeant and he was Bucky, Captain America’s best friend. Steve’s best friend.

(Bucky, come on, Steve had said, his blue eyes blazing. There are men laying down their lives. I got no right to do any less than them.)

“Bucky,” he says, into the quiet of his apartment. The name falls clumsily from his lips. “My name is Bucky.”

It’s hard, he thinks, trying to get know somebody you don’t remember, trying to find their hidden crevices, all the thoughts they keep under lock and key. Barnes remembers nothing about being Bucky—doesn’t remember anything about his childhood in Brooklyn or his life during the war. Doesn’t remember his parents—did he even have parents? Doesn’t remember the people he supposedly fought alongside and died alongside, the people he tried to protect.

All he remembers is tiny Steve, and even that is debatable, considering that Barnes’ head isn’t the most stable place in the world.

. . .

The weird, alien invasion of New York happens a few days later. The Avengers, as always, are called to dispose of that threat.

Barnes steals a motorcycle and guns it all the way to New York. He makes it just in time for the battle.

It’s chaos, immediately. The aliens leak out weird goop when they die, and there seem to be millions of them, pouring out from a weird black hole that popped up in the middle of Fifth Avenue. The Avengers do a good job of pushing them back, but they know as well as Barnes does that to stop this, one of them would have to go into the black hole and shut it down.

Rogers—Steve—immediately volunteers to do it. Barnes nearly has an aneurysm when he hears.

So he does the only thing he can think of. He spots a group of aliens turning down the street, charging at the Avengers. He quickly moves into position, hoists up his gun, and fires.

The aliens go down one by one, shocked by the ambush. It only takes a few moments for the Avengers to notice, and Barnes can hear Sam say, “is that a civilian?”

“No,” Steve says, his voice taking a distant quality. Barnes reloads his gun, making sure his metal arm catches the light. “No, that’s—”

And just as he intended, Steve is running away from the group, charging towards his direction. “Bucky,” he says breathlessly, coming to a stop in front of him. “You—you’re helping us.”

“No,” Barnes disagrees, just to be contrary. Over Steve’s shoulder, he spots an alien; he lifts his gun up and shoots it straight through the head.

“What are you doing, then?” Steve asks, an eyebrow raised.

Barnes shoots another alien. “Target practice.” He then gives Steve a look, then stalks off to look for more aliens.

Steve follows, because he always does. In the distance, Barnes can hear the Avengers discussing on someone else to send into the black hole, because Steve seems to have left them. Iron Man volunteers, and that makes Barnes smile.

Steve, however, catches Barnes’ smile. “What are you smiling about?” He asks. On his right, an alien comes running at him; he doesn’t even look at it as he flicks it away with his shield.

Barnes drops his smile. “Nothing,” he says as stoically as he can, before pinning Steve with a look. “Were you seriously going to jump into a black hole with nothing but your spandex and your damn frisbee?”

Steve looks a little surprised at the outburst. “Well,” he says, “the aliens are—”

“I don’t care,” Barnes interrupts. “Do you know how reckless that is?”

He expects Steve to look cowed, expects him to look a little embarrassed and apologetic. What he doesn’t expect, however, is for Steve’s eyes to go all big and shiny. “Bucky,” he says, and he sounds way too happy for the discussion they’re currently having. “Were you worried about me?”

God-fucking-dammit. “No,” Barnes answers. “I just can’t stand how stupid you are.” He turns his attention to the aliens creeping up to them, shooting each one of them cleanly through the head. “God, you have literally no respect. I’m here working my ass off to kill you and you’re just going to sacrifice yourself to some weird alien race.”

Steve falls silent. “You know,” he says, “I can’t tell if that’s an insult or a compliment.”

Barnes gives him a look that hopefully conveys the amount of frustration he feels. And this guy is supposed to be his best friend? He wonders how he didn’t already kill Steve all those years ago.

“Steve, we need you back here,” comes the voice of the red-headed girl, tinny through Steve’s earpiece. “Tony’s gone through the hole, but more of these things are popping out.”

“Understood.” Steve then fixes Barnes with a look. “Come fight with us,” he says, earnestness seeping through every single word. “It sounds like we need all the back-up we can get.”

Barnes thinks about it. On one hand, he’s getting real tired of shooting at aliens. On the other, he can figure out the way Steve moves on the battlefield, find out his weak areas. You know, for when he inevitably kills him.

“As long as you don’t do anything stupid,” Barnes replies slowly, and Steve grins at him, quick and happy, before running off to join the rest of the Avengers.

Barnes hesitates, then follows.

. . .

The Avengers manage to successfully stop the alien invasion. In the midst of the celebration, Barnes gets on his motorcycle and leaves.

. . .

He doesn’t hear from Steve for a week.

It’s a rather peaceful week, if he says so himself. He and Dot spend hours curled up on the mattress, watching terrible movie after terrible movie. He goes to the firing range, keeps himself from getting rusty. In the evenings, he goes to the gym, trains until he’s exhausted. On those days, he sleeps peacefully, dreamlessly.

But the peace doesn’t last, because Steve starts doing stupid things.

. . .

Barnes doesn’t notice, at first. Steve is always on the news for some reason or the other, speaking at press conferences or getting into skirmishes. The country loves their Captain America, after all, and press coverage on him is always extensive.

The first time he suspects that something’s up, it’s when a viral video of Steve is uploaded on YouTube. The video—which seems to be taken on a rooftop—features Steve free-running through three different rooftops, before jumping off with no parachute. Iron Man catches him at the last minute, of course, and he lands lightly on his feet and takes off running.

Three days later, Steve’s on the news, stuck to the side of the Empire State Building, climbing. There’s some sort of weird energy source coming from the top, and apparently Steve is the one who has to check it out, rather than any of his other, capable-of-flight companions. Barnes turns the TV off before he sees what happens.

And then a few days later, Barnes incredulously watches Steve run into a burning house, and escape with a puppy in his hands, mere seconds before the house collapses.

“I feel that it is my duty to save everyone I can,” Steve says later, in a press conference. There’s a smear of ash on his temple, and his blonde hair is singed, but otherwise, he’s right as rain. “And if it means risking my life, then I’ll gladly do it.”

He sounds so righteous when he says it that everyone stands up and applauds him, looking like there are tears in their eyes. And look, Barnes can’t begrudge him for saving the dog, but really, he could’ve been a little less reckless about it. He can just imagine the headlines if Steve hadn’t made it out on time: Captain America killed in action while saving a puppy. The entire world would weep. And Barnes would end up resenting the puppy, because it would’ve done something he can’t seem to fucking do: kill Steve Rogers.

Like a cockroach, Steve is.

. . .

And then Steve goes and gets himself kidnapped.

In a stupid way, too—Barnes is a distance away, doing some reconnaissance work, when suddenly he’s ambushed by five, heavily armed men. He tries to fight back, but one of them stabs a syringe in his arm that makes him go limp, and then they’re placing a cloth bag over his head and loading him into the van.

The strangest thing is, Barnes doesn’t even think. Doesn’t even give himself time to think. Can’t, if he’s being honest, because his vision suddenly goes all dark and red and his vision is narrowed to the van that’s now making its way down small side streets and every muscle in his body is screaming go go go, and Barnes follows his instincts, of course, because it’s steadily been harder to ignore them the last few days.

The van ends up in an abandoned warehouse just outside of New York City, and Barnes watches from a distance as the men unload a dead-weighted Captain America from the back. He’s completely out, his large limbs flopping around uselessly as the men struggle to drag him fifty meters from the van into the warehouse. Whatever’s in that syringe must have had some sort of crazy dosage.

Barnes categorizes the layout of the warehouse, locates its entries and exits. Spots its weak points—the window located conveniently in the blind spot between the armed men in front door and in the back. He makes a few calculations in his head, draws out a rough diagram.

Leaves.

Comes back when the moon is high, with his mask on and a semi-automatic in each hand.

Storming the warehouse is easy. Barnes has never been shy when it comes to killing, has never stumbled or hesitated. A burst of noise, then a bullet straight to the head. A flash of light, then three bullets— two in the chest and one in the stomach. He doesn’t even need to look; he hears footsteps and fires a shot, without a doubt hitting the man straight in the neck, killing him instantly.

It’s rote, it’s mechanical, and it’s easy, leaving dead bodies in his wake. The war had a profound effect on him; from a strong, naïve boy to a man with a stone heart and a stomach of steel. He’s no longer the same person that left Brooklyn all those years ago.

…But what war? And did he come from Brooklyn?

He’s so distracted by his thoughts that he commits a rookie mistake—he doesn’t hear the footsteps of a man approaching, only realizes when the butt of a rifle gun makes contact with the back of his head. It’s enough to shock him, disorient him a little, but not enough to knock him out—he whirls around and sends one more bullet, clean through the man’s forehead.

The door in front of him is thick, made of steel, and Barnes knows in his gut that this is where Steve is. He takes a deep breath, pulls out a hand grenade from his pocket, and rolls it carefully to the door.

The subsequent explosion is a mess—metal flying everywhere, fire and smoke blurring his vision, but Barnes is used to this, used to chaos and mess and violence. His instincts have been forged appropriately, and despite the low visibility, he’s able to step forward into the room, eliminate the men assigned to guard the room, and train his two guns at the center of the room.

Steve is tied up on a chair, his face is bloody and bruised, but he still perks up when he catches sight of Barnes, his eyes going big and shiny in a way that Barnes has come to recognize (and be annoyed by). “Bucky,” he says, his voice filled with more warmth than it should considering his predicament. “You saved me.”

The guy beside Steve musters himself to his full height. “Who the fuck are you?” He spits. He trains his gun towards Steve’s head, a warning. “You take one step closer and I’ll shoot him.”

Barnes looks around the room, at the sleek metal walls and at the machines whirring about. It’s a lab, he realizes belatedly, and that means the guy in front of him isn’t a soldier. He’s a scientist.

And scientists, more often than not, don’t know how to fight.

He looks back at Steve, who is still looking at him with those big, shiny eyes, and Barnes resists the urge to roll his eyes at him.

Instead, he stands down, lowers his weapon.

The scientist sneers like Barnes is a particularly disgusting piece of gum that got stuck to his shoe. “Good,” he says. “Now I’ll ask again. Who the fuck—”

He doesn’t get to finish his sentence because Steve to headbutt the guy unconscious.

“Man,” Steve says, as they watch the guy fall onto the floor, knocked out cold. “I thought he’d never shut up.”

Barnes puts a bullet through the guy’s skull. “You’re fucking annoying, you know that?”

“How so?” Steve asks.

Barnes, this time, makes a show of rolling his eyes, pulling out a dagger. “This people were shit,” he says. He focuses his attention on cutting through Steve’s bindings. “Terrible. Kidnapping in daylight, conspicuous warehouse, and very weak, very few guards. You could’ve easily broken yourself out any fucking time. And yet you didn’t. Why?”

When he’s done, he looks back up; Steve has a small, mischievous smile playing on his lips. “Maybe I was waiting for something,” he says.

Barnes narrows his eyes. “Or someone,” he says, as his fucked-up mind starts to put everything together. “You set this up, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t!” Steve protests immediately. “Of course I didn’t, I wouldn’t kidnap myself.” He worries on his lower lip for a while. “But, I may have just…let myself get kidnapped?”

Barnes looks at him incredulously. “You’re fucked up.”

“Says the guy who keeps showing up wherever I am,” Steve answers easily.

“I show up where you are because I’m assigned to kill you,” Barnes says bluntly.

Steve, however, seems to find that funny because his grin widens. “Yeah?” He asks. “How’s that going for you?”

“Uh, not very well,” Barnes answers sarcastically. “Because you keep doing stupid things and almost getting yourself killed by someone who isn’t me.” He pauses. “Wait a minute, do you do all those stupid things to get my attention?”

“I will neither confirm nor deny that,” Steve answers, but the way his eyes twinkle tells Barnes everything he needs to know. “Now, come on, we gotta leave before the other guards realize what we’re doing.”

“Everyone in this fucking warehouse is dead,” Barnes snarks at him, but he dutifully follows Steve to the exit anyway.

. . .

The next day, Barnes packs up his sniper, his knife, his pistol and his semi-automatic rifle, really, fully, and wholly intent to kill Steve. Properly, and for real this time. The last fifty or so times were just the dress rehearsals. This is…this is the opening night.

It’s not hard to break into Steve’s apartment—he’s got no security except for the standard lock and key, and Barnes could break into that with his eyes closed
He sits on the dining table and lays out his weapons methodically: knife first, then pistol, then semi-automatic, then sniper. Then he just…waits.

And waits. And waits.

And after thirty minutes, the front door opens. Barnes tenses, his left hand coming up to grip the pistol in front of him. He squeezes it, raises it slightly, and…

…finds himself aiming at a man who is decidedly not Steve.

The man blinks, clearly taken by surprise. “Um,” he says, taking in the weapons laid out neatly on the table, to Barnes, in all his Kevlar-and-leather glory. “I…what?”

Barnes shrugs easily, puts the pistol back down. “Steve said he wanted to learn about guns,” he lies tonelessly. “Thinking of buying one. To protect himself.”

The man nods. “Second amendment rights,” he says, still uneasy.

That makes absolutely no sense to Barnes. “Um, yeah…? Make America great again, and all that.”

The man stares at him like he’s grown another head. Barnes matches his stare easily.

“…Right,” the man says eventually. “Well, if you see Mr. Rogers, please do tell him that I came to see him for that thing we discussed.”

“Absolutely,” Barnes says, his mouth running away from him. “But what was it that you were discussing? So I can remind him properly.”

The man sighs. “I told him I’d start renting out all the apartments in this building to two people. He’s welcome to stay, of course, but as I mentioned to him the other day, he’s going to have to find a roommate. Or else he’ll have to move out.” He shakes his head. “Owner’s orders.”

And Barnes doesn’t know what in the hell it is that comes over him, but. “I’m…I’m his roommate.”

The man looks stunned. “You are?”

“Yes.”

“That’s, that’s wonderful!” The man says, delight spreading through his features. “I can go get the paperwork right now—Mr. Rogers is such an amazing tenant, I wouldn’t want to replace him with some college kids who can’t keep it down. Wait here—” and the rest of his words are lost in a flurry of scrambling and movement.

Barnes spends the afternoon negotiating contracts, reading the fine print, and signing the dotted line, and paying rent—the same rent that was supposed to be for the studio apartment he’s currently staying in. And an hour after the man leaves, Steve shows up red in the face, yelling and swearing about who in the hell told Stanley I’m a Trump supporter I’m goddamn Captain America you better get out of here if you know what’s good for you.

The instant he sees Barnes though, it stops. “Bucky,” he says, immediately looking like a lost puppy who’d just been reunited with their owner.

Barnes is maybe starting to suspect that Steve has a soft spot for him. Like, really soft. Marshmallow soft.

“Um, so,” Steve begins, when Barnes doesn’t say anything. “Stanley said that…that you were my roommate?”

And it’s only hearing those words come out of Steve’s mouth, in that exact order, does it dawn on Barnes just what the fuck he just did.

Barnes swallows, suddenly feeling very uncomfortable. “I,” he says. “I have to go.”

But before he can leave, Steve blocks him, a hand gripping his flesh-and-bone arm in a way that conveys Steve’s sudden urgency. “Please don’t,” Steve says, his voice vulnerable. “I’ve been…I’ve been looking for you, Buck. Chasing you, trying to get you to stay. You don’t know how many times I’ve closed my eyes and seen you—“ he breaks off, shakes his head. “I just can’t lose you again.”

Barnes really isn’t a sentimental person—there’s really nothing to get sentimental about when you’ve only got two years’ worth of memories in your brain—but there’s something in the tone of Steve’s voice that makes him want to reach out, to just murmur I’m okay, I’m here. It’s an unprecedented feeling, one that Barnes has never encountered, and one that he doesn’t know how to ignore.

“Please,” Steve whispers and it makes Barnes’ heart writhe in his chest.

Barnes swallows. “My cat,” he replies. “I need to get my cat.”

And then he runs out the window and dives right off the fire escape.

. . .

“Are you aware,” Pierce says on the phone that evening, when Barnes has packed up all his meager belongings and transferred them to Steve’s place, “that you’re essentially living with your target?”

From the other room, Barnes can hear the sounds of Steve playing with Dot; her little meows, him talking to her, his voice soft and soothing. It had been quite an event earlier when Steve had found out she’d been the kitten he’d saved, and he seems to think that playing with her will make up for him abandoning her to a complete stranger. “It’s hard to forget.”

Pierce sighs. “Just don’t mess this up,” he warns vaguely. “It should be much easier for you to finish your mission now.”

Steve suddenly chuckles, so loud that Barnes is sure that Pierce hears it from the other side of the line. The sound makes him smile, and schools his expression into one of indifference once he realizes what he’s doing. “Yes, sir,” he says, then hangs up.

. . .

Living with Steve isn’t so bad.

Barnes had genuinely thought it would be a lot worse, but Steve is a respectful roommate, quiet and clean. He doesn’t impose on Barnes’ personal space, nor does he hover—in fact, Barnes’ only complaint is that Steve tends to watch him for much longer than normal. Barnes pretends not to notice it, but it makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand, makes him feel like a cat that spooks easy.

He supposes he is, in a way, a cat that spooks easy.

And look, Barnes can’t blame the guy for staring; if he had an intact memory and was nearly a hundred years old and his old best friend shows up alive out of the blue, he’d most likely be staring a lot too. But it just feels so strange, is the thing. It’s as if Steve knows him the way he doesn’t even know himself, as if Steve is just waiting for the curtain to fall and for his old pal Bucky to walk out. And genuinely, Barnes would really like to help him out and remember—he’s got a few questions for his past self too—but all he has is a few fuzzy images and a strange fondness for Steve, none of which are anything concrete.

So Steve keeps staring and Barnes keeps pretending not to notice Steve staring and no matter how much Steve makes him instinctively hesitant, instinctively softer, Barnes is sure he’s still going to finish his mission.

. . .

Three weeks after officially moving in with Steve, Barnes comes home from to massive amounts of food crammed onto Steve’s tiny dining table.

“I thought we could have dinner together,” Steve says, from behind all the food. His eyes are big and shiny, somewhat like a comic book character, and Barnes the expression to be weirdly endearing. “I mean, it’s been a few weeks since you’ve been living here, and we haven’t—we haven’t really gotten the chance to talk much.”

Steve Rogers is truly a character. What kind of person would invite an assassin who’s supposed to kill you to dinner?

But Barnes will admit, he’s a little hungry. Pierce had given him another mission, and what was supposed to be a quick thirty-minute mission turned into something close to four hours, simply because the guy had meeting after meeting after meeting and Barnes just couldn’t get a clean shot at him.

He looks at the food and then at Steve, still wearing that comic book expression. He figures it would be okay to put his mission to kill this man for one dinner.

This is a one-time thing, he tells himself, as he drops down onto the seat and tries to decide what to eat first. 

Steve, however, misinterprets Barnes hesitation for wariness. “You don’t have to worry about any of it being poisoned,” he says, like Barnes is actually worried that some guy who considers him to be the best friend he had seventy years ago will poison his food. “My friend Nat showed me how to use the UberEats.”

The UberEats. God, there really is no doubt about it. Steve is a gentle, old man in the body of a tank.

“I think you should be more worried about me poisoning your food,” Barnes replies, instead of making a comment. He spears a piece of sushi and pops it into his mouth. “I’m an assassin, you know. Just in case you forgot.”

Steve chuckles. “Well, I trust you,” he says, like an idiot.

Barnes takes the moment to wonder if maybe Steve Rogers has a death wish. Does this man even think about the words coming out of his mouth? Does he have any friends that are as worried about his way of blindly trusting everyone as much as Barnes is? Does he just want to get die already?

Like, the fact that he’s still alive isn’t due to his own stupid survival skills, that’s for sure. It’s due to Barnes’ annoying inability to kill him.

But, he shouldn’t be complaining. It’ll be a lot easier to kill the guy if he keeps this kind of behavior up.

“So, how’s everything, Buck?” Steve asks. He’s already started eating, his plate piled high with what looks to be chicken. At Barnes raised eyebrow, he looks down self-consciously. “The serum made my metabolism go crazy,” he explains. “I have to eat like, ten times as much as I used to.”

“You ate before?” Barnes asks, half-joking. “From the old pictures of you at the museum, I just assumed you survived off air.”

That makes Steve laugh. “Couldn’t do that,” he says. “You know, cause of the asthma.” He pops a piece of chicken in his mouth, chews thoughtfully. “It was…tough, being sick all the time. People always thought I was going to die.”

“Would’ve made my job so much easier then,” Barnes says, without meaning to.  

Steve grins. “You actually almost killed me, once,” he says. “We went out for dinner and I ate something that sent me to the ER.”

He says it so casually, like he’s simply telling an old story, but Barnes’ fucked-up brain latches onto Steve’s words, and Barnes’ brain is digging deep, producing…something. Something hazy. He’d worked at…somewhere. A factory. Worked until he was covered in soot and then he’d gotten paid and he felt like a king. And so he’d gone home that night, giddy as hell and told Steve to get dressed, we’re going out.

And then…he doesn’t know what happens next, but then he remembers curling up against Steve’s small, sleeping form, skin still covered in hives. He’d pressed his ear against Steve’s stuttering heart and made a mantra of it, whispering he’s alive with every irregular beat.

The last part of the memory blindsides him, the sudden intensity of it making him stand up from the table. Barnes had felt it all: the worry, the panic, and the fierce protectiveness, and it makes something visceral squeeze in his chest.

“Buck?” He hears, looks up to find Steve staring at him, surprised. “You okay?”

Barnes shakes his head. “Fine,” he manages to get out, sitting back down on the chair. He avoids Steve’s eyes. “Pass me those vegetables, please?”

. . .

He doesn’t tell Steve about it. In fact, he doesn’t even tell Steve that he thinks his memory might be coming back, in bits and pieces. If he did, he’d have no doubt that Steve would be all over him—asking him questions, telling old childhood stories like a grandpa, looking at him with sad eyes when Barnes ultimately fails to remember, and Barnes just. Doesn’t think he can handle it. Steve staring for much longer than normal is already a bit too much for him.

But Steve seems intent in forming some sort of bond with him, and if he’s being honest with himself, he’s kind of curious to see what kind of memories Steve will manage to bring out, so between the two of them, they manage to establish a routine: Barnes will make breakfast for the both them and Steve will make dinner for the both of them and Barnes only promises to try and kill Steve every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

. . .

Steve’s bird-man friend comes barging into Steve’s apartment one Monday morning, interrupting Barnes’ poison pancake breakfast.

“What,” is the first thing he says, because he’s friendly like that. Barnes looks up at him, back down at the pancakes he’s whisking as per the instructions at the back of the box, and back up again.

“What,” he says, infusing a bit of murder into his voice. The guy instinctively reaches for his holster, finds it isn’t there, then promptly begins yelling.

“Cap!” He yells, loud enough that Barnes has to resist the urge to cover his ears. “Why is there a highly trained, incredibly deadly assassin making box mix pancakes on your stove top?”

“What?” Steve asks, bumbling out into the kitchen. He’d changed from his running clothes to a soft hoodie and another pair of sweats—Barnes thinks he looks ready to fall asleep. “Oh. I don’t know why you’re so scared, there’s always a deadly assassin cooking on my stove.”

“Okay, first of all,” The guy starts, ticking a finger off. “Nat isn’t an assassin that’s actively trying to kill you. Or me. And second of all, Nat doesn’t make box mix pancakes, what the fuck. She makes French toast and spends half the time burning them.”

Barnes frowns down at his batter. It looks good—white, smooth and thick—but he feels like he’s forgetting something. “Did I forget something?”

Steve makes his way over to the kitchen, peeks at the batter over Barnes shoulder. “Did you add the milk and the eggs?”

“Yeah.”

“Then they should be fine,” Steve says. He claps him on the shoulder. The guy looks like he’s about to have an aneurysm.

“Again,” he says. “What. Can someone explain what’s happening, please?”

This time, Steve answers. “Sam, this is Bucky,” he says.

“We’ve met,” The guy—Sam, Barnes scrambled brain supplies—answers icily. “Remember? He shot me.”

“I didn’t shoot you, I shot at you,” Barnes interjects, because there’s a distinction, thank you very much. He pours the batter onto the griddle, managing to fit four, tiny circles on to it. “And I wouldn’t have shot at you if you weren’t blocking the way, Big Bird.”

Sam’s mouth drops open. “Big Bird?”

Barnes shrugs—I said what I said—and continues watching his pancakes.

“Well,” Steve pipes up, sounding a little bit uncomfortable. “You are sort of a bird. And you’re pretty big…for a bird…?”

Sam, if it’s even possible, looks even more affronted. “Falcon, man, I’m the Falcon,” he complains. “I thought you would be on my side.”

“I’m just saying that logically, it makes sense,” Steve answers, his voice placating. “You’re a man-sized bird. It just makes sense that he’d call you a big bird, seeing as you look nothing like a falcon.”

Sam opens his mouth, presumably to speak, but something seems to dawn on him. “Wait,” he says. “You have no idea why I’m complaining, do you? Do you know who Big Bird is?”

“…Not a clue,” Steve admits.

Barnes flips the pancakes one at a time, enjoying how nicely they’ve turned out. They’re evenly brown, and look to be growing quite fluffy. See, baking isn’t so hard—those amateur bakers on Netflix must just be really, really bad.

“Okay,” Sam says. “But why is he making pancakes on your stove?”

“Bucky makes breakfast every day,” Steve replies. “He lives here now.”

Sam, if possible, looks even more shell-shocked.  “He lives here?” He asks, incredulously. “You just—”

“Sam, let’s talk somewhere else,” Steve says, nudging Sam towards the living room.

The last thing he hears is Sam saying, “and why is there a kitten napping on the windowsill,” before the door to Steve’s bedroom closes behind him, effectively blocking any chance of Barnes overhearing anything.

Barnes focuses on cooking his pancakes, making sure they’re all brown and fluffy.

It takes until Barnes is pouring the last of the batter on the griddle for Steve and Sam to come back, the latter looking a little put upon. Barnes slides the stack of pancakes in front of them, and Steve smiles at him brightly, looking like one of those models on the posters.

“Did you poison these?” Sam asks, out of the blue.

“Sam,” Steve admonishes.

And shit, that’s what Barnes forgot. The poison. After all the trouble he’d gone through to procure it, too—calling Pierce, convincing him to get him a vial of this incredibly expensive, incredibly rare poison. 

“No,” he says, a little disappointed.

Sam opens his mouth, probably about to press some more, but Steve cuts him off. “Thank you for this, Buck,” he says, his voice warm. “Come join us.”

And Barnes thinks about declining, but, well. He’s a little hungry and the pancakes aren’t poisoned anyway and Steve is looking at him in a way that makes him feel something, his face relaxed and open, his eyes made bluer by the morning light streaming through the window.

So, he sits.

. . .

 Steve has the tendency to retreat into himself; has the tendency to shut down and keep quiet for hours, huddled up as small as he can possibly be in the corner of the room. Barnes doesn’t know why, but he’s got two working theories: either it’s all the pressure of being a national icon or it’s the fact that it’s the twenty-first century and everyone Steve grew up with is now dead. Except for, well, him, who’s an amnesiac assassin.

Both theories are plausible. Both are also most probably true.

If Barnes had a working brain in him, he’d probably want to keep silent for hours, too. But, he doesn’t, so he lives his life the way he knows how: go to the gun range for some target practice, sharpen some knives in his and Steve’s flat, feed and play with Dot, marathon every single baking show on Netflix, spend hours at the gym. Everything he can think of so he can leave Steve alone.

Except—no, because on those days, Barnes also finds himself hovering—listening to Steve’s quiet breathing, making sure he’s always got Steve in his line of sight. Finds himself holding a blanket, soft and warm—winters in New York have always been hell, the promise of snow already in the air despite it only being October.

(There’s an image that haunts him; Steve, his face pale and his lips blue. Skin like ice—if Barnes focuses hard enough, he thinks he can still feel Steve’s hands, small and delicate and cold; a letter clutched like a vice.)

So Steve stays silent for hours at a time, and Barnes finds himself placing a blanket on him, finds himself accepting the small, sad smile Steve shoots his way.

He tries to convince himself it’s strangulation. It doesn’t really work.

. . .

The thing about being an amnesiac, supposed war veteran is Barnes still gets nightmares about things he has no recollection of. His mind is littered with fragments, vignettes filled with mud and blood and watching people he knew bleed out; filled with snow-capped mountains and snows and trains. Always trains.

My arm, he always thinks in a panic, crippling pain shooting up his left arm. The cold makes its way into his lungs, spreads through veins and arteries, wraps around him like a noose. My arm, my arm, what the fuck is wrong with my arm—

The first time he wakes up from a nightmare in Steve’s apartment, he ends up throwing Steve into a wall.

Steve looks shocked—he’s still in his sleep clothes, his hair all mussed up. “Bucky,” he says, but he makes no move to stand up from where he’d fallen to the ground. “Buck, it’s me.”

Barnes can still see it in front of him—the winter trees, snow on its branches; his blood, stark against the crisp white of the snow. The procedure has already started, a voice in his head says, quiet and terrifying.

“It’s me,” Steve repeats, his voice breaking through Barnes’ muddled thoughts. “It’s okay, you’re okay. You were having a nightmare.”

“My arm,” it slips out of his mouth. He looks down, finds himself greeted with metal, the ridges overlapping. Phantom pain shoots up his arm, makes its home right below his left shoulder where metal and flesh meet. “What the fuck did you do to my arm?”

“Buck, I didn’t—” And then Steve is right next to him, a hand on Barnes’ arm—the real one, the one that actually feels something—and Barnes sees nothing but scientists and their knives, feels nothing but pain, excruciating, burning pain—

He grabs one of them by the neck and tosses him out the door.

And it’s Steve who hits the ground with a loud noise, Steve who topples over and slides out into the hall. His eyes are heartbreakingly wide as he looks at Barnes, one hand still raised, reaching out to him. “Buck—”

Barnes slams the door closed and locks it behind him. Dot meows at him from the bed, hops down to butt her head against his metal fingers, curls around him like comfort.

He doesn’t go back to sleep after that.

(In the morning, Steve looks right as rain—only small, already-fading bruises the shape of Barnes metal fingers to allude for the events of last night. Barnes hesitates when he sees him, but Steve just smiles at him the way he normally does, his eyes crinkled in the corners. He doesn’t bring it up, and neither does Barnes.)

. . .

 The nightmares become a nightly occurrence. Barnes keeps the door locked every night, preferring to deal with them by himself.

But even so, Steve still chooses to be as near as he can be, chooses to sit right outside Barnes door and talk to him. And Barnes would rather go to hell than admit it to him, but Steve’s voice grounds him, helps him break free from the fog of nightmares he doesn’t yet understand.

. . .

There’s an old newspaper clipping that Steve has framed. It’s three weeks until Barnes spots it, tucked behind photographs of New York in the 1920s. Steve had kept it clean—kept the glass polished and the wood dusted, and Barnes can’t help but pick it up.

It’s nothing much, just a brief article on a successful raid the Howling Commandos conducted sometime in 1944.

(Jesus Christ, Buck—)

He doesn’t know why he spends an awful lot of time reading it, his eyes flitting over the words again and again and again. One more successful raid in the north of Italy, thanks to Captain America and his Howling Commandos.

(We need to get him back to base, Morita, Steve’s voice had sounded so far away to his ears, tinny over gunshots and explosions. He’s lost a lot of blood—)

Beside it, there’s a photograph, the print faded from age. Barnes thinks he can recognize Steve in his blue-and-white spandex, can recognize himself on Steve’s right, a bandage on his left shoulder.

(Stay with me, Steve had said, and for a moment, just for a moment, he’d felt Steve’s forehead on his, Steve’s breath hot against his lips. C’mon Buck, please. Stay with me.)

. . .

Early one Wednesday morning, Natasha Romanoff comes over.

She strides in like she owns the place, drops a grocery bag on Steve’s counter and says, “fancy seeing you here,” to him, like they’re supposed to be old acquaintances.

Barnes just continues to watch her like a hawk from where he’s sat on the kitchen table, nursing a cup of black coffee and sharpening his knives.

When Pierce had first given him a mission that required a little bit of interrogation, Barnes had been a little bit pleased to discover that he was good at it. He could instinctively pick up on the slightest tremors in their voices, could catalogue their weaknesses and hit them where it hurt. And most importantly, he could outwait his victim—keep silent and stare at them unnervingly until they snapped and spoke.

It’s the same with Natasha—she fares better than the other people he’s ever interrogated (they stare at each other in silence for approximately fifteen minutes), but in the end, she snaps.

“Oh, come on,” she says, frustration in her voice. She turns around and starts unloading the stuff from the bag—bread, milk, egg, cinnamon, vanilla, syrup. “You could at least recognize me.”

Barnes does recognize her; they’d fought the aliens side by side in New York. “I do,” he tells her. He takes a long, pointed sip of her coffee. “We fought the aliens together.”

That…probably wasn’t the answer she’d been expecting. “We did,” she says, after a moment of silence. “But before that?”

Before that would probably be when he’d been assigned a hit in Iran about a year ago. She’d been there, her shock of red hair bright among the sea of black and brown. From what he’d gathered, she’d been sent to escort a man safely into U.S. territory, but she’d been too late—when she’d knocked on the door the man had already been dead, bleeding out on the carpeted floor.

“In Iran,” he says. “I saw you there. You had an escort mission.”

On the counter, Natasha’s pulled out a bowl from somewhere, and is whisking eggs, milk, and cinnamon together. Her back is turned to him, so Barnes can’t see her face, but he knows she’s mulling his words over. She probably hadn’t realized he was there.

But it still doesn’t seem to be the answer she’s looking for, because she says, “and before that?”

Barnes is stumped. He racks his brain, but he can only remember until two years ago; anything before that and he’s coming up blank. “I don’t know,” he tells her, and it’s the honest to God truth.

He spots the way her hands freeze for a split second over the ingredients, imperceptible to everyone except probably Barnes. “I see,” she says, and she sounds disappointed.

It’s quiet after that, Natasha making French toast with surprising efficiency and Barnes drinking his coffee and sharpening his knives. There’s something about the way she moves that’s familiar to him, all artful force and deadly grace. And her eyes; Barnes can see the green of it in his mind’s eye, can imagine a childlike twinkle in them—

“Good morning.”

Barnes doesn’t startle—he doesn’t, okay—but he does throw his knife at the source of the sound. Steve dodges it easily, Natasha pulls out a gun and points it at him, and the knife embeds itself onto the wall behind Steve.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she threatens, clicking the safety off.

Steve, however, is either high or fucked in the head, because for some reason, he finds the whole thing amusing. “Jesus, Buck,” he says, chuckling. He ignores the way Natasha has her gun trained at Barnes. “Is that the attempt for today, then?”

“No,” Barnes says. “That was just a trial.”

Steve pulls the knife out of the wall and hands it back to Barnes, handle side up. “Well, I think you could do better,” he says earnestly. With his other hand, he forces Natasha’s gun down.

Sam stumbles in behind Steve, shirt drenched with sweat and his eyes wide. “Please do not do better,” he tells Barnes.

“Breakfast,” Natasha calls, and then suddenly, it’s like last few seconds never happened. Her gun disappears, replaced by the plate of food she’d been cooking. She raises an eyebrow at Barnes until he moves his knives off the tiny kitchen table, and sets a heaping plate of French toast in the middle.

“My favorite,” Sam says, sliding into the seat across from Barnes. “Burnt French toast.”

Barnes expects Natasha to take offense to that comment, but she just rolls her eyes. “Next time, make your own breakfast.”

“No, no,” Sam says. He holds up a piece of toast, much darker than it should be. “I understand what you were trying to do and I have to let you know, I do feel represented in here. Thank you, Natasha.”

“Fuck you,” Natasha says, but she’s laughing as she says it. It makes her look younger, a bit like a little girl—

“At least it’s not boiled food,” Steve interrupts his train of thought, sliding into the seat beside Barnes. He takes a slice and cuts it up, pops it into his mouth thoughtfully. “Or rations.”

“Rations are the worst,” Sam agrees, and begins cutting into his food.

And then the topic changes, from what kind of breakfast they’ll be having next week (Eggs and bacon, Steve promises), to work (Tony’s been trying this new thing, Natasha says), to whatever movies Steve needs to watch this week (Sesame Street, Sam insists). They’re a team, a well-oiled machine, and between them, Barnes feels incredibly out of place, a bit like he’s encroaching on something that isn’t for him. So he bundles up his knives and leaves, ignores the eyes boring into his back (two pairs of them familiar, far too familiar) and locks himself in his room.

. . .

They don’t talk about the time Barnes woke up in the middle of the night, screaming Steve’s name, and Steve had knocked on his door, whispered I’m here through the wood over and over again until Barnes could breathe.

. . . 

“Look, whoever he used to be, the guy he is now, I don’t think you can save him.” Barnes overhears Sam say to Steve one day, after yet another assassination attempts. He’d pointed a gun at Steve when he’d walked in the door, and Sam jumped in front of him and wrestled the gun away 

“I have to try,” Steve says, as stubborn and bullheaded as ever. Barnes hears Dot meow; she’s probably somewhere beside Steve, trying to get his attention.

“But what happens when he finally pulls the trigger on you?” Sam presses. “You’ve been living with this guy for weeks and he still doesn’t remember you, Steve.”

“He will,” Steve says, and Barnes can hear the slightest quiver in his voice. “He’s my best friend, Sam. He…he has to.”

. . .

The fact that Steve can draw isn’t really surprising to him.

There’s something in his brain that tells him that Steve used to have a sketchbook, used to walk the world with charcoal in his pocket. Used to leave smudged fingerprints everywhere: on the walls, on the couch, even on Barnes himself. It was something that (he thinks) Steve apologized for, and something that he’d just dismissed. He thinks that maybe, he’d quite liked the charcoal residue on him—Steve’s fingerprints on his skin, Steve leaving smudges in his wake.

Steve doesn’t have a sketchbook now; instead, he sketches everywhere: on the backs of old receipts, on loose pieces of paper, in his little notebook, and sometimes even on napkins. Just things and people haphazardly rendered in the strokes of a ball point pen, whenever he gets the urge.

Barnes sometimes catches him drawing, his head bowed down over the table, the pen making strokes on pieces of paper. Sometimes, he makes an expression—a slight furrow of the brow, or a certain curl of lip—and it’s far too easy to picture little Steve, barely five years old, drawing under a big tree in their schoolyard.

Steve had been small, even for his age, and his myriad of illnesses had made it so he kept very still, or was often sat quietly somewhere, papers and crayons surrounding him. He’d taught Barnes to draw—your turn, the five-year-old Steve in his head says, handing Barnes a crayon and some pieces of paper. It’s not hard at all, all you have to do is make lines, see?

And all throughout the year, whatever the weather, Barnes had sat next to him, watched as he’d drawn blue dogs or red cats, pink horses or green lions. And one day, Barnes had asked to take a drawing home with him, and Steve had lit up like the sun, and full of five-year-old innocence and bravado, had said, you’re my best friend, Bucky.

(Steve always tosses his drawings in the trash when he’s done. And Barnes always fishes them out and saves them, always tucks them carefully into his bedside drawer.)

. . .

“It’s getting pretty cold,” Steve tells him, one day towards the end of November. He’s hardly dressed for the weather—he’s in a white shirt and some jeans, with a scarf wrapped around his neck. He looks like one of those idiots that insist on wearing shorts in the snow.

“Then bundle up,” Barnes replies, without looking up from where he’s cleaning his guns. “Properly,” he adds, when Steve gestures to his scarf. “What the hell is that tiny piece of fabric even going to do to protect you from the cold?”

“It’s style,” Steve says, because he’s a frustrating human being. Some days, Barnes just wants to bash his head against the wall.

He doesn’t do that though. It’s a Thursday today, and he doesn’t have assassination rights today. And okay, Barnes isn’t exactly a known to be a man of honor, but he’ll do anything to have Steve not give him those terrible sad eyes he did the one time Barnes tried to kill him on a Tuesday.

“I won’t freeze to death,” Steve tells him, misreading Barnes’ frustration for worry. “My body just auto-regulates to the temperature now.”

Barnes’ fucked up body does the same thing. But Barnes still has the common sense to wear proper clothes for the weather, because he’s less likely to stand out that way. For sure, there will be new photos of Steve all over the internet tomorrow, and Barnes is going to get an earful from Pierce wondering why on Earth Steve Rogers is still alive.

He doesn’t tell Steve that, though. Instead, he says, “I hope you do freeze to death.”

“Tried once,” Steve calls cheerfully. “Didn’t work.”

He closes the door behind him after that, leaving Barnes alone in the apartment. It’s quiet, the winter sun casting long shadows on the living room floor, edging everything in gold. Beside him, Dot is asleep, her chest rising and falling with each breath, content in the cold.

(Steve had always been sickly when it was cold—he was sickly most seasons, to be fair, but winter always seemed to have it out for him, would always have him bed-ridden for weeks. It didn’t stop him from going out in the snow despite the fact he’d be miserable the next day.

He’d gotten pneumonia once, his lips blue and his skin like ice. He’d stayed out far too long underdressed—when Barnes had found him, he'd only had a scarf wrapped around his neck, a draft letter clutched in his hands. Barnes had swore, placed his own winter coat over Steve's shoulders and ushered him inside.

Of course he’d gotten the flu. It's Steve, after all. But then it'd turned into pneumonia, and then he’d become delirious, shivering under a mound of blankets. And Barnes had been—he’d been terrified, the rattle in Steve’s chest keeping him awake for days. Terrified that Steve would stop breathing, right then and there. Terrified of having to bury him in a plot of land next to his ma and pa, sign him off with a shitty eulogy and a shittier epitaph he didn’t have the strength to write.

And he’d never been one for professions of faith—that was more up Steve’s alley than his—but he remembers praying, found himself pressing his palms together and whispering words he didn’t believe, if only for Steve.

Please, he’d thought, in between Our Fathers and Hail Marys, in between memorized prayers to saints and angels that spilled from his lips. Even if I never see him again—)

When Barnes’ refocuses, he finds his hands trembling minutely, clenched into fists. He’d accidentally ruined his pistol—squeezed it so hard that his metal fingers had left indents on the barrel, and now it’s unusable.

Fucking stupid, is what he is. He groans, throws the gun in the trash, and calls Pierce to order a new one.

. . .

The memories keep coming after that. It’s in the most innocuous things—some flowers (they’d spent the day in Central Park once, and Steve had turned red as lobster drawing all the flowers he could find), a cigarette (Happy Birthday, Steve had said to him in the trenches, a cigarette held up like a candle), even just looking at Dot (Did you really just spend four dollars on trying to win her a stuffed animal?). They come and they come and Barnes doesn’t do anything to stop them, just tries to piece them together, tries to form an image of the man he once was.

He still doesn’t tell Steve.

. . .

Steve gets the bright idea to bring Barnes to the tower.

Barnes protests, but Steve insists, saying something about them needing an extra hand in whatever mission they’d be doing. “It won’t be much, just some simple sniper work,” Steve had said, and then refused to take no for an answer.

The tower is practically the gaudiest thing on earth, shaped like a penis smack dab in the middle of Manhattan. It’s got security in spades too, but if the guards are surprised to see Barnes they don’t show it. They just salute Steve and lead them into the elevator, where they go up, up, up, up until they reach the penthouse.

It’s a much different reaction when he walks onto the floor.

Natasha and Sam both raise an eyebrow when they see him, but they’re the only ones; everyone else looks to be torn between attacking him or running away. Barnes can see some of them reaching for a weapon, readying themselves for a fight just in case Barnes steps out of line.

“I do not understand.” It’s Thor who speaks up first, his hammer at the ready. “Were you not just fighting this man, Captain?”

“Yeah, Captain,” Stark says sarcastically. His hand has turned into a blaster, pointed straight at Barnes. “What are you doing bringing an internationally-wanted assassin to our meeting?”

Steve pretends he can’t see the weapons directed at Barnes. “You said you needed some extra help, so I’m bringing you some extra help,” he says, completely unbothered. “Bucky’s a really good sniper.”

Stark blinks. “He’s an assassin.”

“He helped us out with the aliens.”

“Because he wanted to kill you himself.” The duh in his tone is audible to everyone in the room. “And how many times has he tried to kill you at this point? I lost count after the twelfth. Is it more than that? I think it’s more than that.”

“It’s definitely more than that,” another guy—Banner—replies. “What did you say he did last week?”

“I forget,” Steve says, the same time Natasha says, “a bomb.”

In Barnes’ defense, it wasn’t like that. He’d gotten a bunch of bomb parts from Pierce and tried building it in their living room. And then Steve came and tried to help him out and they spent the rest of the afternoon building different kinds of bombs, and Barnes had written that off as a failed attempt.

But he can’t just speak out and explain that, can he?

“A bomb?” Banner looks like he’s about to have a stroke. “He tried to blow you up with a bomb?”

“Benefit of the doubt, guys,” arrow guy—Clint—says. He looks like he hasn’t slept in days, and is chugging coffee straight from the pot. “Maybe it was a bath bomb.”

“Look, guys—” Steve starts, but he gets cut off.

“Here’s the funny part,” Sam throws in. He has it out for Barnes—he definitely hasn’t forgiven him for Big Bird, amongst other things. “Steve lives with him now.”

And that declaration makes the whole room erupt.

“He what—”

“Captain, are you quite alright—”

“What do you mean, lives with him—”

“Wait, so is this guy still trying to kill you or what—”

“Tell me right now, Cap, do you have a death wish, because—”

“Alright, alright,” Steve says. He’s clearly getting irritated; his hands are clenching into fists beside him. Honestly, this wouldn’t have happened if he’d just listened and not brought Barnes with him. Steve can be so dumb, sometimes.

“I understand why you’re all worried and I appreciate your concern,” Steve continues. “I understand the risk in living with him, but it’s a risk I’ve chosen to take. So, I would appreciate no more questions about my living arrangements. Do I make myself clear?”

There’s a pause.

“Do I make myself clear?” Steve repeats, sounding every bit the army man.

“Crystal,” Stark mutters, holding up his hands. “But the assassin—”

“Is our extra hand for this mission,” Steve cuts in. “You said you needed someone, right? And we can’t trust anyone in S.H.I.E.L.D right now, especially not after Fury—”

“Wasn’t he the one who shot Fury?” Stark replies, incredulous. “You can choose to live with him, but you can’t expect us to trust him, Rogers. What if he shoots us the minute we let our guard down?

But Steve plants himself like a tree, refuses to even budge. “He didn’t shoot us when we fought the aliens and he won’t shoot us now. Bucky is here and Bucky stays.”

“But Sir, he’s my emotional support assassin,” Clint yells rather loudly. Natasha elbows him on the side.

Stark looks like he’s about to protest, but he seems to change his mind at the last minute. “Okay, you know what, fine. Fine. Whatever. But he’s going to watch your back, Cap, because I’m sure no one else wants to have a mentally unstable assassin behind them.” He whirls towards Barnes, all manic energy. “And you, don’t even think about betraying us, because there are seven of us and one of you.” He thinks for a moment. “Or well, seven minus Cap. You’re outnumbered and we will not hold back.”

“I’ve taken down seven men single-handedly before,” Barnes tells him outright. It's not even a lie.

Stark laughs. “Not like us, you haven’t,” he says. “Now, how proficient are you with a sniper again?" 

. . .

It’s a simple breaking and entering mission. All they have to do is get in, grab a guy, and then get out. The only problem is, it looks like they’ll be breaking in the most secure HYDRA facility in the world.

Barnes’ supposed duty is simple; he’ll stay outside, watch Steve’s back until he gets in. Then he’ll wait, make sure no guards are alerted of their presence, then cover Steve’s and back as he gets out. Basically, he has to make sure Steve doesn’t die, which. Should be easy, considering he’s had a lot of practice.

Stark has some sentient voice called JARVIS brief them about the base, its whereabouts and its weak points. They’ll have to be quick—according to previous reconnaissance, once the facility shield goes down, it only takes about twelve minutes to get it back up again. They need to get in and out in that time.

“And you’re sure Strucker will be there?” Steve asks. He’s looking through a 3D-projected hologram of the base, frowning.

“According to my satellites, Baron von Strucker is currently on a jet with a programmed flight path to the facility,” JARVIS answers primly. “He should be arriving later today.”

JARVIS, Barnes privately decides, is the creepiest fucker in this whole entire building. He quietly reminds himself to be more careful when dropping off the grid.

“I don’t know, Tony,” Steve is saying. “A stealth mission seems like a huge risk. The facility is very well-guarded, and the instant we’re caught, we’re dead.”

“But if we go in guns blazing, it’ll be like giving them a heads-up,” Stark replies. “Strucker’ll plenty of time to destroy his research and escape.”

“I know, I know,” Steve worries on his lower lip. “Twelve minutes. How do we get in and out in twelve minutes?”

Barnes looks at the hologram in front of him, studying its blueprints. Steve’s right—the facility had been designed to be almost impenetrable, and the amount of entry points is frighteningly low. If they even attempt going through the window, they’ll be shot dead instantly.

Unless…

Barnes’ eyes latch onto a room, and his eyes follow an unseen path. He sees it in his mind’s eye—the archaic stone walls, the creaky wooden stairs leading underground. A winding path in the dark, culminating into a forgotten door.

“There’s a hidden path west of the mountain.” He doesn’t realize he’s spoken until seven heads swivel around to face him, scarily in sync. “In a…in a cave. A bit of a long walk, but if you run, you might be able to make it into the facility in six minutes.”

“JARVIS, show us the mountain,” Steve says, and a new 3D image pops up in front of Barnes. He turns it, frowning, until he spots the clearing he’s looking for.

“There. It leads to a hidden door in the lab that’s been covered with hard wood. If whoever you’re looking for is in there, you can tranq him, grab him, and go.”

“Wait a minute,” Stark says. “You ever been here before, RoboCop?"

Barnes doesn’t think he has. “No,” he says. Images of men in prison cells and scientists in their lab coats flash in his head; he pushes them away.

“So how do you know this?” It’s a logical question, one that Barnes is also currently asking himself. There should be no possible way for him to know something about a secure, hidden facility and yet—

“I don’t know,” Barnes answers honestly.

There’s five seconds wherein Stark just stares at Barnes, before he’s turning to Steve. “Yeah, I really don’t think we should bring him along.”

. . .

In the end, they still bring him along, because Steve is just that stubborn.

. . .

“Hey,” Clint says to him later, over the intercom. They’re both on lookout duty—Barnes west, in a blind spot between two towers, and Clint east, perched on a tree somewhere. Steve, Natasha, and Stark have gone inside, and it’s now just a matter of them making it out in time. “You wanna see how many guards we can shoot in twelve minutes?”

Barnes decides right then and there that he likes Clint. “Sure,” he says, and gets to work.

In twelve minutes, Barnes manages fifteen. But Clint wins at sixteen, managing an incredibly lucky double tranq that should really not be possible by the laws of physics. And then Steve is running out of Barnes’ secret path with Strucker passed out on his shoulder, tripping over a guard collapsed on the ground, and Strucker would’ve rolled down the mountain and out of their lives forever had Thor not appeared out of nowhere and caught him.

Sam gets angry at both him and Clint when they rendezvous, ranting about how they could’ve ruined an incredibly covert operation. But Barnes thinks he’s really just angry about losing his bet, because Banner looks overjoyed, clapping the both of them on the shoulder and congratulating them on a job well done, and later, on the quinjet, he sees Sam slip fifty dollars to Banner when he thinks Barnes isn’t looking.

. . .

Once the mission wraps up and Strucker is delivered to the concerned authorities, Stark insists on having a celebration. Barnes tries to leave, but Stark gives him a look and says, “oh no you don’t, Buckaroo,” and proceeds to have JARVIS watch him the whole night.

They’re a bit of a ragtag group, Steve’s friends. On the surface it’s as if they have nothing in common, but as Barnes finds that at their core, they all have a similar drive, a similar motivation. It’s what keeps them together, despite numerous disagreements and multiple personality clashes. At the end of the day, they all just want to do right by the world. Or universe, if he’s taking Thor into account.

They go back to D.C. the next day in a dark, tinted car that Stark calls for them. Two hours into the four-hour journey, Steve smiles at him in a way that Barnes finds far too endearing than he should.

“Thank you, Buck,” he says, and Barnes can hear everything it encompasses—for accompanying him, for his surprising insider knowledge, for watching Steve’s back the whole time.

Something forms in his chest, visceral and warm. “Your friends were right, you know,” he replies. “You shouldn’t have trusted me.”

“Well,” Steve says. “You didn’t shoot us in the back, so I’d say I made the right decision.”

Barnes presses his forehead against the car window, watches other cars speed past them. He lets himself sit with the feeling in his chest, feel its edges and probe at its depth. What is it about Steve, he thinks, that reduces me to this?

“What would you have done if I did?”

Steve is silent for a few moments. And then: “You took a bullet for me once,” he says. “You know that? We were in Italy and you took a bullet for me.”

Barnes thinks about the framed clipping Steve has in his living room, thinks about gunshots and explosions and Steve’s voice, far away.

“I was careless, and I’d let my guard down,” Steve continues. “I’d turned around to do—something, I can’t remember what.” He frowns. “And then someone’d popped out from behind the tree and fired straight at me.”

Barnes can picture it—Steve, high on adrenaline on euphoria, turning around to say something to someone. A soldier coming out from behind a tree, pistol trained straight at Steve’s heart.

“It would’ve killed me instantly,” Steve says. “It would’ve hit me right here—see?” And he presses his hand against his chest to show Barnes just where it would’ve hit. “Wasn’t wearing anything bulletproof that day. But then you’d jumped in front of me, took a bullet to the shoulder.”

Left shoulder. He feels phantom pain twinge up his metal arm, condense into his shoulder.

The turn of Steve’s mouth is a sad, little thing. “I swear, I hauled you back to camp myself,” he adds. “I…I panicked. You’d lost a lot of blood but Morita was able to stop the bleeding.”

And Steve looks at him, his eyes bright despite the dark light of the car. “And you…you probably don’t remember it,” he says. “But I think of that every time you point a gun at me, every time you try to kill me.” He shrugs, and Barnes watches the way his shoulders move beneath his suit. I trust you, Buck. And maybe that makes me stupid, or naïve or an idiot, but I trust you a whole goddamn lot.”

Only Steve, Barnes thinks, would place his full trust on a mentally unstable assassin. His platonic devotion to a man Barnes can barely remember is admirable, if not a little frightening.

But is it misplaced? A small, niggling voice in Barnes head asks. He thinks of all the memories that’s come back to him so far—him and Steve as boys, in the schoolyard; him and Steve as soldiers, in the battlefield. Never in any of those memories did he ever steer Steve wrong, never did he ever actively choose to stab him in the back.

And there must be a reason, after all, why he can’t find it in him to hurt Steve, despite many countless opportunities to do so. Why, months since he’d first seen Steve through the crosshairs of his sniper, Steve is still alive and well.

But he doesn’t want to dwell on it. Steve is his mission, and Barnes always finishes his missions. So he closes his eyes, and pretends to sleep the rest of the way back to D.C.

. . .

There’s a girl Steve draws with a surprising amount of regularity. Barnes has receipts and napkins in his bedside drawer filled with her face, the curl of her hair and the smile on her lips. It’s the same girl Steve’s got tucked into his pocket watch, the old photo faded, its edges torn. She’s beautiful, and there’s. There’s just something about her Barnes can’t seem to place.

One day, Barnes asks him who it is.

“Agent Margaret Carter,” Steve answers, looking down at his drawing. It’s half-finished, the left side of her face still without detail. “Or Peggy, as she was known.”

The name sounds familiar. “She sounds familiar,” he says.

Steve laughs. “You actually met her before,” he says. “She helped me save you, back when you were captured in Austria.”

Barnes looks down at the sketch, at the carefully-drawn flick of her nose, down to the lovingly-rendered curve of her jaw. She’s smiling in the sketch.

“Why her?” Barnes asks, curious.

Steve takes a moment to think. “She was the first woman who was ever nice to me,” he eventually replies. He uses his pen to trace the haphazard strokes of her curls, defining them. “She was the first woman to get to know me.”

His answer makes something in Barnes’ chest tighten. “Did you love her?”

It’s silent for a few moments. Steve gives him a long look which Barnes can’t decipher. Finally, he says, “Back in the day, I would’ve married her in a heartbeat.”

(It’s much later in the evening when Barnes’ memory of Peggy comes back. He’d met her twice; the first time was her in a red dress, in a bar. The second was later that same evening, leaving the bar. Steve had gone on ahead, and he was alone, walking back to his barracks. She’d been there, still a vision in her red dress.

Please take care of him, she’d told him, her voice almost begging. He can be kind of reckless.

And his chest had ached and his heart had splintered looking at this girl who loved Steve, the girl who Steve loved, but he’d managed to school his expression into a semblance of a grin. Don’t worry, ma’am, he’d said. I’ve been taking care of him since he was five. I don’t plan on stopping now.

And there must’ve been something in his voice or in his eyes, because her face changes, goes from pleading to shock. 

Oh, she’d said. You—

I do, he’d answered, meant it with all his heart. Meets her gaze head-on, the look in her eyes morphing to one of almost-pity. I really do.) 

. . .

It’s not a revelation. Not really.

In fact, Barnes thinks he’s sort of always known.

. . .

He slips, one day.

He really doesn’t mean to, but the memories keep coming semi-regularly, at this point, and it’s getting hard to keep track of what he should’ve known from his research about Steve (and by extension, himself), and what his fucked-up brain has managed to piece together. He remembers quite a bit now; vignettes of the life he had almost seventy years ago, insights to what Bucky Barnes was thinking and feeling. Remembers Steve, before and after serum.

So when Steve catches him reading a Buzzfeed listicle about himself and says, “that’s wrong, you were drafted, not enlisted,” Barnes really doesn’t mean to reply with, “yeah, and you picked up my draft letter and got pneumonia doing it, like an idiot.”

Steve goes deathly quiet, his face turning white as snow, and it takes Barnes a moment to realize what he’d just said. “You remember,” Steve says, his eyes wide and shiny, his voice breaking. “You remember, oh, Buck—”

Then Steve is closing the distance between them in three strides, and his mouth is on Barnes’ hot and wet and—

They’ve written countless stories about Captain America; museums with their exhibits detailing the American icon, history books with their chapters about a hero crashing a plane into the Arctic. But somehow, they’ve forgotten to write about Steve, forgotten to write about the way his blue eyes crinkle in the corners, the way his eyes get stupidly big and shiny. Forgotten to write about the boy who travelled the world to find him, the boy that sits outside his door every night. The boy who doesn’t push, doesn’t press; who places his trust wholly in Barnes—blindly, stupidly, idiotically.

The boy who’d been in love with Bucky Barnes.

The sudden intensity of the realization scares him, makes his heart beat so loud that Barnes thinks it’s going to pop out of his chest whole, fall onto the ground in front of him. Makes his mind go into overdrive, and suddenly he’s reviewing each memory, seeing them differently. Steve and dinner. Steve in the car. Steve and Dot. Steve and his stupid scarf. And then his mind seems to go haywire because all the memories are crashing into each other like waves, replaying again and again, overlapping with each other until Barnes can’t seem to distinguish them anymore, can’t seem to tell where one ends and the other begins.

“Buck?” Steve has pulled away, a hand on Barnes’ jaw. His touch feels heavy on his face, his gaze a prison. “Are you…?”

He can’t breathe. He tries; his lungs can’t seem to get enough air. In his mind’s eye, memories bleed into memories bleed into more memories and it feels like he’s suffocating, drowning, feels like he’s falling, Steve’s Bucky! ringing loud in his ear, or wait, is that another memory, or—

He needs to get out of here.

He pulls away from Steve, ignores the sudden hurt that flashes through his blue eyes. “Buck,” Steve says, but Barnes takes a few steps back, catalogues every exit around him. The window, he thinks, and it takes a split second for him to wrench open the bay window, jump down the fire escape.

. . .

He finds an abandoned old building in Maryland, holes up in there and tries his best not to think too much.

The memories still don’t stop coming. 

. . .

 (You’re a goddamn punk, Steve had always been light, and Barnes had no trouble hauling him up and bearing his weight. I swear, Stevie, you’ll be the death of me.

Steve’s nose had bled onto Barnes’ good shirt, crimson on white. I could’ve taken `em, Buck. I could’ve.)

. . .

(What I would goddamn give, Steve had said, one day in `36, for some strawberries.

The apartment was shitty—the shithole, Barnes had coined it, much to Steve’s annoyance—but it was theirs, all the peeling wallpaper and dripping roof. It’d taken them almost all day to move in, and when Steve had spoken it was already dusk, the sunset dipping behind the clouds.

It’d been an offhand comment, but it’d wriggled its way into Barnes’ brain, put down roots there. He’d thought about it as he’d worked the next day, thought about it as he’d walked home. Thought about it as he’d passed a market place, the ladies selling old fruit off.

He’d spotted a few overripe strawberries, paid a dollar for them all. And while they couldn’t afford it, it was worth it for the way Steve looked when he saw them. They’d sat on the stoop of their shithole as they ate the strawberries, the taste sickly sweet on their tongue, and when they’d finished, Steve’s lips had been dyed pink.)

. . .

(The letter had a return address in Brooklyn, and Steve’s voice rang loud and true in the charcoal smudged on the page, in the space between the letters. 

The shithole’s not the same without you. It’s bigger now. Got more space to myself. No more of your damn shoes scattered on the floor, I can finally walk around without tripping every five seconds. No more of your overflowing laundry piles either. Now, we do our laundry in an orderly time.

But—and God knows why—I miss you, Buck. Miss your stupid shoes and your stupid laundry. Miss the way you always leave the bathroom wet after your bath. Hell, I even miss your snoring. I swear to God, if you make it back here after the war, I will never complain about the absolute racket you make in the night. It’s far too quiet without you.

Write me back, when you can. I know the war is hell but you wouldn’t forget about your old pal Steve, would you?)

. . .

(How ‘bout you, Steve had asked that one evening, tone playful and eyes teasing. Ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?

And Barnes had never wanted to fight, could give fuck all about his country and his people. But he’d gladly go to war just for the way Steve looked at him at that moment, blue eyes alive and electric. 

Hell no, Barnes had told him. That little guy from Brooklyn, who was too dumb not to run away from a fight. I’m following him.)

. . .

Agent Peggy Carter dies a few weeks later.

Barnes sees it on the news as he’s walking down the street. She’d passed peacefully in her sleep, no violent fits, no crazy emergencies. Her heart had simply just stopped.

And something compels him to steal a motorcycle and ride it all the way to D.C., compels him to camp out on the rooftop by Steve’s apartment and watch him. She’d loved Steve, he knows, and he’d loved her, and she had been one of his last ties to his life before, to the world he knew before. 

. . .

The first time someone else tries to kill Steve, it’s right after Peggy Carter’s funeral. Steve is still in his suit, and he’s sat at his (their) tiny kitchen table, staring at his pocket watch. Barnes only means to watch him for a second, but he hears the familiar click of a gun on a nearby rooftop.

He makes it just as the guy fires, shoves the gun to the side so the bullet goes wide, shatters the bay window and embeds itself on the wall beside Steve’s head. One more punch to the face and the guy goes down like lead.

He looks down, finds Steve staring at him from the window, his blue eyes bloodshot, bright with unshed tears. There’s a split second where it looks like Steve is about to say something, but Barnes jumps off the building before he can speak, leaving the sniper passed out on the roof.

. . .

It makes sense, when Barnes thinks about it. Pierce had always trusted him to get the job done, but he’d always had the tendency to be a little impatient. And it’s been months since he’d assigned this hit and Steve is still popping up everywhere—on news channels and on gossip websites and in Peggy Carter’s funeral—looking alive and unharmed.

He must’ve thought he was doing Barnes a favor, sending in someone else to help him. Maybe he’d thought that it was particularly hard for Barnes to catch Steve with his guard down. But Pierce really shouldn’t have; Barnes is capable of doing all this by himself. Steve trusts him far more than he should, and Barnes is really just biding his time, waiting for the right moment to strike.

…Except that’s not true, is it? Because somewhere along the way—in between finding Steve in the middle of his crosshairs to moving in with him; in between boyhood memories and a kiss that had driven him crazy—Barnes finds that it’s not that he can’t kill Steve.

It’s that he doesn’t want to anymore.

. . .

The second assassination attempt is two days after the funeral, and one that Steve doesn’t know about. It’d consisted of two snipers and a few bombs, and Barnes had managed to take them down before they could even set up their equipment, knocking them out and tying them to a pole.

The third assassination attempt is much subtler. It’d been a poisoning—an incredibly lethal powder poison had been dusted onto a small box containing the letters Peggy wrote Steve when he’d been in the ice. Barnes had broken into the apartment when Steve was out, fished the letters out with his metal arm, and burned the whole box.

And Steve’s not dumb, no matter how much he pretends to be. There’s a reason he’d risen to become a captain during the war, a reason why there’d been so many successful raids under his leadership—because, behind all that stubbornness and spitfire, he’d had a brilliant, tactical mind.

It takes him one minute to realize his apartment had been broken in, another to realize that it had been Barnes who’d done the breaking in. A third minute to call Sam and organize a search party, his mind already working on the possible places in D.C. Barnes can be.

. . . 

(I thought you were dead, Steve had said. It’d been in Austria, and Barnes had been strapped on an operating table.

 Barnes had taken one look at him, at the way his shoulders filled out the standard issue army uniform. I thought you were smaller.)

. . .

Here are three ways Barnes thinks he’ll get caught:

One, Steve actually manages to track him down, because no matter what year it is, no matter where he is, Steve just always manages to find him.

Two, Barnes comes back of his own volition, because his good knives and all his guns are in Steve’s apartment, and also he misses Dot quite terribly.

Three, Steve starts doing stupid things again, and Barnes has to figure out how to protect a two-hundred-pound super soldier like some fucked up version of a guardian angel.

Here is the way he actually gets caught:

It’s always been far too easy to break into Steve’s apartment, with its standard locks and its minimal security. Barnes knows this, and it seems like the suspicious people loitering outside Steve’s apartment building know this too. So these suspicious people break in and set traps for Steve, and when they leave, Barnes breaks in and disables every single one of them.

He doesn’t mean to stay—he’s not sure when Steve will be back, and he would genuinely not like to be here when he does—but Dot spots him and jumps from kitchen counter onto the kitchen table to greet him, dislodging all of Steve’s papers and making something thunk onto the floor.

Barnes picks it up, turns it over in his hand It’s a notebook—a battered, red leather thing, with a star embossed on the cover. Somehow, he feels like he’s seen it before.

And out of curiosity, he opens it.

The Winter Soldier Project, the first page reads, all in bold, black text. Underneath it, in smaller font: Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes. And across it: DISCONTINUED.

The Winter Soldier. Pierce had called him that, that day Barnes woke up.

Distorted images flash through his mind: his blood bright on snow, leaving a trail. Scientists, with their knives and their needles, slicing him open, taking him apart. They’d made him feel like he was on fire, the burning right beneath his skin. Excruciating pain, excruciating agony. Barnes had screamed himself hoarse.

He blinks the memories away, turns to the next page.

It’s a fact sheet, he realizes, after staring at it for a few minutes. Everything about him is scribbled onto the page: his name, his age, his birthday. His height and weight. Hell, even his family—his mother, Winnifred, his father, George, and his sister, Rebecca.

Beneath it, there are ten Russian words: желаниe, pжавый, семнадцать, рассвет, Печь, Девять, Доброкачественные, Возвращение домой, Один, грузовой вагон.

Longing. Rusted. Seventeen. Daybreak. Furnace. Nine. Benign. Homecoming. One. Freight car.

His stomach twists uncomfortably, his heart suddenly thudding against his chest. Pain, he thinks, and suddenly he feels it—electroshocks to his brain, over and over and over again, until he couldn’t keep awake, until he couldn’t remember, After, there’d been ice, ice all the way down to his throat, beneath his ribcage, spreading until he’d been unable to think, to move, to speak—

He’d trained little girls before, he thinks. They’d brought him in to teach little girls how to fight, how to point a gun and shoot. There’d been a girl who’d been brilliant at it, who’d taken to the guns and the weapons more quickly than anyone else. She was tiny, with a shock of red hair, and eyes like—

Natalia. Natasha’s face flashes into his mind, exact same eyes, her hair the exact same shade of red. He’d met her in the Red Room almost twenty years ago, had watched as they tortured her, put various weapons in her hand and taught her to kill without mercy.

“You weren’t supposed to see that,” says a voice he can’t not recognize, and he turns around to find Steve, still in his mission suit. There’s grief in his eyes, the same grief Barnes recognize from when he’d been dangling on a train, fingers slipping off the railing.

And then the murders come back in waves.

Your work is a gift to mankind, Pierce had always told him, and Barnes sees every single hit play out in his head. He’d razed villages, killed innocent children without question. He’d gotten a bullet clean through John F. Kennedy’s skull. He’d killed the Iranian minister and his family, poisoned the Vietnamese Consul General and his kids. Made murders look like car accidents, tires swerving off road on patches of ice.

Howard and Maria Stark. Their names come back to Barnes like a shock of ice water to the face. He’d blown their tires off, ended their lives as mercilessly. I have a son, he remembers Maria saying as he’d closed his fingers around her neck. Please—

“Bucky,” Steve says, but Barnes can’t focus on his voice, not when every single excruciating detail comes back to him, not when it feels like he’s being cleaved in half, muscles and sinews being torn apart.

He’d been shut down, he remembers. After Howard and Maria, S.H.I.E.L.D. had gotten very suspicious and HYDRA was forced to retreat into the shadows. The entire Winter Soldier division had been shut down.

They’d strapped him down on a chair, pointed a gun to his head. He’d tried to fight it, but they injected something into him, caused him to go limp. The Winter Soldier has to be disposed of, he remembers a scientist saying.

And waste everything we’ve ever worked on? And Alexander Pierce’s voice rang clear like bell, loud in Barnes’ ears. He’d been there, watching. No. Wipe him. We’ll start over in secret.

It had been Alexander Pierce, Barnes realizes, who did this to him. Who’d scrambled up his brain, who’d tortured him until he couldn’t think straight. Who’d erased his memory, and in doing so, made the soldier Barnes once was into a monster, a weapon.

And Barnes had trusted him, believed all that bullshit he’d spouted about bringing peace and order to the world.

“Buck,” Steve says again. “Bucky, look at me—”

And Barnes can’t help it, he explodes.

“Fuck!” Rage and anger washes over him, and when he blinks, he’s got Steve slammed against a wall, his metal hand against Steve’s throat. He sees all of them beneath his eyelids; the faces of every single person he’d killed, the absolute terror in their eyes.

“Bucky, hey,” It takes him a moment to realize that Steve is speaking, his voice coming out a little hoarse. “Buck, it’s me. It’s Steve.”

Steve. God, what must Steve think of him now? He’d killed children, taken their lives before they were even old enough to understand the horrors of the world. Men could be monsters, but children—children were always innocent. 

“I know you’re angry,” Steve says. “And I know you’re scared.”

Barnes screams, because that’s the only thing he thinks he can do.

“What they did to you was—God, Buck,” and Steve is still speaking, his voice getting hoarser and hoarser by the minute. He doesn’t raise his voice, not even a little—he sounds like he’s just outside Barnes door, sounds like he’s just talking him through a nightmare. “I can’t…I don’t even want to imagine what you’ve gone through.”

There’s a trickle of a tear down Steve’s cheekbone, dripping off his jaw. “But you have to know,” Steve says, blue eyes unyielding, “that I don’t…I don’t blame you for any of that.”

Barnes tightens his grip on Steve’s throat.

“Let me help you,” Steve croaks out. His face is growing pale, ashen. “Please. I won’t…I won’t hurt you. Ever.” Barnes feels the way Steve tries to take a breath, his throat expanding beneath his metal arm. “We always said…to the end of the line, Buck. `m with you to the end of the line .”

And then a memory resurfaces, stronger than the others.

Steve disappearing after his ma’s funeral. Barnes finding him on his way home, inconsolable. Steve losing his keys. Barnes handing him the spare.

Thank you, Buck, Steve had said. But I can get by on my own.

The thing is, you don’t have to, Barnes had replied. I’m with you to the end of the line, pal. 

It takes a moment for him to realize he’d dropped Steve, another moment to realize his knees had buckled. Another moment for him to realize that he’s crying, wetness dripping from underneath his eyes and onto the hardwood floor below.

Because Barnes…remembers. He remembers everything.

“Stevie,” he manages to choke out, and then Steve’s arms are around him, bigger than Barnes remembers them to be. His chest is broader too, muscles hard beneath his stealth suit, and he holds Barnes like a vice, like he’s never going to let go, come hell or high water. Steve holds him and Barnes holds him back and he cries—cries for the kids, cries for the people he’s killed. Cries for himself, for the man he used to be. 

He’d been a soldier, then a monster. Courage to carnage.

“You’re okay,” Steve murmurs into Barnes. “You’re okay now.”

“I killed all those people.” The words fall from his lips like a dam breaking. “Men. Women. Children—”

“You didn’t,” Steve soothes.

“I did,” Barnes insists, pulling away from Steve. “I…I’ve killed presidents, burned down villages—”

“You had no idea what you were doing—”

“But I remember them all.” Barnes can see all their faces in his mind’s eye, can flick through them like he’s turning a page. “I remember them all, Steve.”

“Bucky—”

“I knew what I was doing,” the admission weighs heavily in the air between them, loud and clear. “I knew what the fuck I was doing. I was the one who pointed a gun at their heads, I was the one blew out their brains. I killed people, Steve, and I remember every single one of them.”

The people he’d killed had families. Had people who loved them, who’d waited for them to come home at night. Barnes imagines Stark, in the quiet of his room, up late waiting for his parents to come back.

I should’ve died years ago, Barnes thinks distantly. He should’ve died years ago, but dying would’ve been a heaven for someone with hell carved in his bones, for someone with much to atone for. So he’d slept for a while and forgot everything and then encountered a man who’d brought back one excruciating memory after another; first a trickle, then a flood.

“Listen to me,” Steve orders, and he grabs Barnes’ face in his hands. “Goddamn listen to me, Buck. That wasn’t you. None of that was you. They scrambled your brains, made you a weapon who couldn’t refuse.”

“But I—”

“You’re here now, Buck,” Steve is well and truly crying now, his blue eyes bloodshot. “Not the Winter Soldier, not whoever the fuck you were these years. The real you, the Bucky I knew—you’re here now, with me. Right?”

“It’s not that simple, Stevie,” Barnes tells him, because it’s not. There’s so much to consider; Barnes has a laundry list of sins and no idea where to start. “I’ve got blood on my hands. So much blood, I—"

“So do I,” Steve cuts in. “So does Natasha and Sam. So does everyone else. You’re not the only one with red on their ledger.”

He’s still got Barnes’ hands between his face, his thumb wiping away the tears that spill from Barnes’ eyes. He’s so earnest, so gentle, that Barnes’ feels his heart break just looking at him, looking at the way he continues to hope, despite everything.

“I don’t deserve you,” he says quietly. “God, Steve. You were…you were the best of us.” He swallows thickly. “You deserved more. Better. Should’ve had a girl and a family, a white picket fence and a house in the damn suburbs. Not…this.”

He remembers Peggy in her red dress, in the bar. The right partner, she’d said, looking at Steve, and Barnes could see it that instant—their stupidly nuclear family in their stupidly nuclear house in the stupidly nuclear suburbs living their stupidly nuclear lives. That’s what Steve should’ve gotten. Not seventy years of sleep and a monster.

That, however, makes Steve laugh, the sound wet. “Hate to break it to you, Buck,” he says, “but it’s not up to you to tell me what I do or don’t deserve.”

“But—”

“Let me finish,” Steve orders, but way he touches Barnes belie his gentleness. “You were…you’ve always been it for me, Buck. Crashed that plane into the ice `cause I couldn’t bear to live without you.”

He shrugs—what can you do, he seems to be saying. “Truth is, I don’t care what you’ve done,” he continues. “It’s not very selfless of me, but I genuinely don’t. As long as I have you…as long as you’re here, with me. That’s all that matters.”

Barnes looks at him, really looks at him; at the cut of his jaw, the slope of his nose. Stubborn, stubborn Steve Rogers, the same way his ma was years ago, God rest her soul. The boy he’d pointed a gun at but couldn’t kill, the boy his life has been inexplicably tied to no matter what he did. The boy his life revolved around, the incredibly stupid, incredibly naïve boy who’d given everything to get him back. The boy he’d build cities for, the boy he’d gone to hell and back for.

Because if you were to tear him apart, break him down to bone—scapula, clavicle, sternum—you’d come face to face with one crucial, undeniable fact.

Bucky Barnes was hopelessly, devotedly, and deeply in love with Steve Rogers.

It’s not in the history books he’d read, but Barnes finally remembers the feeling in its entirety, lets himself feel it all the way down to his bones. And he knows Steve loved him too; he’d read every single terrible thing Barnes had ever done and yet he’s still here, holding Barnes like a benediction, like a prayer.

“Jesus Christ,” he croaks out, scrubs a hand down his face. “Jesus fucking Christ. How are you even real, I don’t.” He takes a deep breath, tries to will the tears away. “Are you sure you want this? Because I’m warning you right now. Once you have me, you won’t be rid of me. Ever.”

“Well,” Steve’s smile is a tiny little thing. “Didn’t try to get rid of you in `23, when you’d broken all my crayons. Or in `33 when you made me ride the cyclone at Coney Island. Or in `36, when we moved into our shithole and I found out you snored through the night.”

“I’m serious,” Barnes insists, even though his heart is doing somersaults in his chest. “One last chance, Rogers. One last out. You tell me to go right now, and I will.”

Steve’s eyes crinkle in the corners. “Stay,” is what comes out of his mouth, and Barnes leans over and kisses him in a way that means I will, forever. 

. . . 

“I didn’t know,” Steve tells him later, curled up together in bed. “I really didn’t. And then you fell and it felt like...” he shakes his head. “Like you’d torn my heart out my chest.”

“`m sorry,” Barnes says, because it feels like the right thing to say. “Didn’t mean to fall.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

Decades ago, Barnes had ziplined onto a train following Steve, had fallen off a train protecting Steve. In the split-second before he’d toppled into the snow, he’d closed his eyes thought of Steve, in all his multitudes; thought of the strawberry pink of his lips and whispered if I could have anything in the world—

“I think I loved you before I even knew what love was,” Barnes admits quietly, feeling as if he’s laying his heart bare for the world to see. “I can’t tell you when. It was always just so ingrained in me, like, my name is Bucky Barnes, I’m from Brooklyn, and I love Steve Rogers.”

Steve’s eyes travel from his eyes, to his cheeks, to his lips. “Look at us idiots,” he says, smiling. He tangles their fingers together, presses a kiss on Barnes’ metal knuckles. If Barnes closes his eyes, he thinks he can feel it “Took us seventy years.”

“Seventy years and seventy assassination attempts,” Barnes replies, and Steve laughs, kisses him again to shut him up.

. . .

 It’s hard to get back to normal.

Not that Barnes even knows what normal is, nowadays—he’s a man out of his time, and they’d fucked with his head for far too long that he’s sure he’s got permanent brain damage. He still gets nightmares far too frequently, and he still spirals out of control, and sometimes he just remembers and feels waves of guilt wash over him that he has to isolate himself, has to run away from everyone and everything.

Those are the bad days. On those days, Steve is gentler. He doesn’t push, doesn’t pry. Doesn’t even force Barnes to speak. He just sits with him, a solid, warm comfort; voice Barnes’ true north, bringing him back when he gets too far out.

And on the days Barnes leaves, drops off the grid like he’s prone to do, Steve doesn’t get angry. Instead, he just waits, lets Barnes take all the time he needs, and when Barnes comes back (because he always comes back), Steve is there to greet him with a smile on his face.

It’s hard. But Steve makes it a lot easier.

Of course, despite Steve forgiving him almost immediately, it’s not so easy with the others—Stark tries to straight up kill him when he finds out about his parents. Natalia doesn’t react after Barnes tells her that he remembers, but she also doesn’t speak to him after, choosing to pretend he doesn’t exist. And it’s fine—these are reactions Barnes expected, reactions he deserves. He doesn’t blame them for it one bit.

But then one day Barnes leaves for a while, decimates every single HYDRA cell he remembers. And when he comes back, Stark doesn’t try to attack him on the spot, and Natalia actually looks at him, and Barnes thinks that maybe, with time, they’ll be okay.

. . .

Alexander Pierce’s house is heavily guarded, but Barnes has snuck in here countless times, knows where every secret entrance and every single security camera is. It’s not long until he’s snuck past the gate and scaled the house, slipping in through a back window.

He finds Pierce sitting in his living room, looking over a few files. He doesn’t startle when sees them, but it’s a close thing—he looks up from his files, eyes wide, the same time his hand grabs a pistol and points it straight at Barnes’ heart.

“Barnes,” he says. “What a surprise.”

He’d looked a lot like Steve when Barnes first met him twenty years ago: chiseled jaw, blonde hair, blue eyes. HYDRA had used that to their advantage—Pierce had been the only one who could give him orders, the only one Barnes wouldn’t attack on sight.

But now, staring at him, Barnes feels nothing but anger. Disgust. Hatred.

“My name,” he says, “is Bucky.”

Pierce raises an eyebrow, but otherwise, he doesn’t react. “Ah, so you’ve remembered,” he says. “It’s a shame we don’t have the lab anymore—a few rounds of electroshocks and we could’ve started all over again.”

“Fuck you,” Barnes spits at him, means it from the depths of his heart.

“We were so close, too,” Pierce stands up from his arm chair, picks up the gun from the table. “We could’ve given the world the freedom it deserves. Think of the order. Think of the peace. Think of how many people’s lives would’ve been better off.”

It’s a speech he’d fallen for countless of times before, but now Barnes refuses to listen, refuses to even entertain the thought. Pierce had fucked him up, twirled his brains around like spaghetti, and as a result, Barnes had trusted everything he’d said, had fired his gun at every person Pierce pointed at.

“It truly is a shame,” Pierce says. “But, these things happen. Guess I’ll just have to adjust my plans.” His grin is truly sinister. “Goodbye, Bucky.”

And then he cocks the gun, his finger on the trigger—

And gets two shots in the chest, in quick succession.

“Wow,” Steve says from the corner, “I thought he’d never shut up.”

 Barnes shrugs. “He’s always like that,” he says, watching as Pierce collapses onto the carpet. Steve had shot him right where it hurt, and blood spurts out of his chest with every weak breath he takes.

 They wait until Pierce bleeds out, wait until he finally stops breathing. Tomorrow, Barnes thinks, the new housemaid will find Pierce dead, lying in a pool of his own blood. Tomorrow, the cops will come and investigate the scene. Tomorrow, files incriminating Alexander Pierce as the head of HYDRA will turn up on the desks of the FBI, the CIA, of whatever remnants of S.H.I.E.L.D. there is, and the case will be kept secret.

But that’s something for tomorrow. The night is still young, and Steve is beside him, solid and warm and alive. And for the first time in his life, Barnes is allowed to reach out and hold his hand now, allowed to tangle their fingers and press their palms together.

 So he does.

 “C’mon, Buck,” Steve says, and his smile is warm like whiskey, like smoke. Like a signal fire that Barnes will always, always follow. “Let’s go home.”