Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

There were four files lying on the table.

They were printed scans of folders that Fury’s contacts had managed to salvage from Hydra’s mass destruction of their own files during the expulsion and imprisonment of Hydra officials hidden in international organizations. Two were originally in the possession of the MI6, while one belonged to a private military contractor based out of South Africa; the last was a joint Korean-American report of an incident that had involved the sabotage of the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.

All were in English, and the photographic evidence makes Steve’s head spin itself into rags. The South Africans had sold the body off to the highest black market bidder—Steve glances at a nearby wall, pinned with papers and connections. Hydra had reclaimed the mechanical components, but the rest had been discreetly purchased by the Chinese government. MI6 kept their bodies in deep-freeze, and of the intruder at the DMZ, there was nothing left but a few pieces of bone, fabric, and metal locked away in a little tin box somewhere in the South Korean American embassy.

There’s no mistaking the faces, at least in the pictures which showed what remained of them. A footnote in the former MI6 file states that the assassin—young, estimated to be barely twenty years of age—resisted interrogation procedures, and committed suicide via a remote mechanism. They’d managed to keep him alive long enough to extract his name; he had called himself Beta-11. This section of the file was dated back to 1972.

It’s the “11” that claws at the back of Steve’s heart like a starving dog at a fresh grave. 11, 11. Did ten separate individuals come before? How many came after? How many were currently active?

He doesn’t hear Sharon come into the FBI forensics morgue, not until she gently rearranges a bloodied scissor on the autopsy tray behind him. He doesn’t turn around.

When he speaks, he’s not startled by the sound of his own voice so much as it’s if he nearly thinks someone else has taken possession of his throat; as if he’s parting his lips and moving his tongue independently of words that seem as if they’re coming from a place that’s further away than just his own body. “It wasn’t. It wasn’t quick. How exactly did he die?”

There’s a rustle—Sharon’s looking at the state of progress made by the team of forensic technicians on their in-depth secondary autopsy. It’s very cold in the room. Steve doesn’t think he has the strength to shiver. “A failure of an internal mechanism in the arm. There was something irregular with the coagulation of his blood outwards from a particular point of origin, suggesting that some kind of toxin was released in one large burst that dwindled off as reserves were depleted.”

“And this was—this poisoning was caused by the sniper’s bullet?”

“Partially,” she replies. “You were there, you saw. The shot entered behind his right shoulder at an oblique angle, going through his heart and striking a trigger device installed into the lower left side of his ribcage. That was what prompted the toxin release from the arm, disregarding the simultaneous heart failure—we’re still trying to figure out the composition. Your report states that he remained standing for a nearly a minute, but the shock rendered him unable to speak before convulsions caused his collapse.”

Steve turns. Fortunately, the body is covered in a sheet; unfortunately, the vague suggestion of the corpse’s profile through the cloth is enough to make vomit tease at the base of Steve’s tongue. “The only way,” he grits, uneven and buckling, “The only way that someone could have hit that internal switch from eight hundred meters is if they already knew it was there. He was a moving target—he was running away from me in the middle of rush hour. Either the sniper was one of the people who put it there themselves, or if.”

He still can’t quite wrap his mind around it, around this. The possibility that any of it is real, even though he ought to know better by now about things that can’t be true. This just seems like another bad, bad joke, but that’s the thing with bad jokes; they’re not actually jokes.

He can’t wrap his mind around anything. “Or, or if the sniper had one, himself. The same kind of failsafe—the same kind of training.” The same face.

“Yes, that’s what we think.” Sharon’s gaze switches from Steve, down to the shine of the metal thumb sticking out from under the edge of the sheet. She tucks back the sheet with care to expose the entire limb, illuminating the straight line of the corpse’s nose and strong, sweet brow as the fabric rucks up everywhere else. Steve, leaning back against the table with the files, crushes the corner of the stainless steel structure with a hand.

“I’m limited in my ability to help you, now that SHIELD’s gone; but I’ll try give you as many leads from here as I can, as a CIA liaison with some leeway due to my peripheral experience with both you and the situation this past April.” She shrugs carelessly, but her voice is far kinder. “It’s not much. If I can get myself reassigned to the FBI, I might be of more use to you than just the bureaucratic standby I’ve been reduced to. At least with the CIA, I can get out of the country that much easier; but that puts me out of the country and mostly ineffectual if you find yourself remaining here in need of my help.””

Sharon pulls on sterile gloves and lifts the arm until the inner join of the elbow is exposed. “For the entire time you’ve been in here, you haven’t looked once at the details of the autopsy, or at the body.” She cradles the metal in her hands; it’s formed such that Sharon’s fingers wrap around the curves of that artificial flesh below the shoulder and at the wrist with ease, as if the plating itself was nothing but a glove over the real thing beneath.

“You don’t have much time left to be alone, and I was getting worried that you wouldn’t actually, well. I figured that you wanted to see this for yourself,” she says. “The initial autopsy report generated states that a designation of some kind was found hidden in the plating—ah, here it is.”

With his enhanced vision, Steve can read the letters and numbers from where he stands, but steps forward anyway. Beta-24, the engraving says, in a precise, engineered font. It’s in Greek—a lowercase β-dash-2-4, but Steve has at least remembered some of the mathematics that he’d have to catch up on whenever he’d missed a week or two of school from yet another routine illness. He’d be sitting up in bed with a handkerchief over his mouth, being drilled on common algebraic variables by his best friend in the whole world. Tau, phi, rho, zeta, lambda—beta. But that was a long time ago.

The designation only visible when the arm is fully extended; otherwise, the plates cleverly overlap and obscure it. Steve goes very still. Twenty-four is a far larger number than eleven.

“Biological age is estimated to be about twenty-nine, thirty. Nearly his entire torso is reworked biosynthetic material—the technician was at a total loss as to how fluid the integration was with the subject’s actual flesh. Working thesis is that some of this has been installed and the rest has been symbiotically grown.”

“Grown?” That doesn’t make sense. You can’t grow metal. It must show on his face, because Sharon exhales, apologetically.

“That’s what the report says.” Strands of her hair have slipped out from her bun, and for a moment, she looks as wretched as Steve feels. “Honestly, all of this. It’s unbelievable. There’s not much more I can tell you, since we’ve got several teams working day and night right now trying to figure out the puzzle of how this body can exist and nothing else. You’re Captain America. That’s enough to earn you an hour of alone time, but we’re almost up and the technicians have to get back in and continue working.”

Steve’s not sure why his hands aren’t shaking more. They aren’t shaking at all. He reaches out, and uncovers Beta-24’s face, Bucky’s face.

And it is, it is Bucky’s face. Beta-24 had spoken with Bucky’s voice, looked at him with Bucky’s wide, anguished eyes on the helicarrier. Beta-24 had saved him from the water and fled and when Steve had finally caught up months later in Beirut, Beta-24 had only managed to gasp, “Please, please, just go—“ before a shot rang out and Steve had thought he’d lost Bucky forever, again.

Turns out, there had been at least twenty-four men out there with Bucky’s face, bleeding with Bucky’s blood and killing with Bucky’s hands. Sharon lays a hand on Steve’s arm; she’s removed her gloves. “I’m sorry, Steve.”

She’s about to say more, but Steve nods in the affirmative before the silence departs. “I’ve got five, I know. I’ll be out in a moment.” He swivels to face her as she starts turning to leave, shuddering with his whole body. “I—Sharon, thank you. The rest, I can do on my own.”

“I think they’d deign to argue otherwise,” Sharon murmurs, canting her head towards the observation windows along one entire wall. Through the reinforced glass, the sunset and oak of Natasha and Sam frame either side of Steve’s view. “You might think you’re alone. In some ways, you are, but not in all. So long as you remember, you’ll never be truly by yourself.”

Steve lets her go, his heart thick and dry against his lungs. She leaves in a faint cloud of pine and graphite.

He has four minutes left; these, he gives to Beta-24. “I was too late,” Steve whispers. His throat closes up and he can’t say the rest. What would I have done if I had saved you? If you hadn’t been shot? Where would you go? Who would you be, if not Bucky?

There’s nothing more that Steve wants than to touch Beta-24’s face and find out if the skin of his face feels like how Steve remembers the skin of Bucky’s face felt. It had felt like skin, when they had been grappling all those months ago. But to touch him here would be contaminating the evidence and potentially influencing the results of all the testing that the body has yet to undergo. Technically, Steve shouldn’t even be breathing on the body, but that’s what he’s doing by leaning in so close.

“I’ll find you. I’ll find all of you, and I’ll bring you home safe.” He’s not sure who he’s talking to. It might be to Beta-24 and the rest of his brothers. It might be to Bucky. God knows how he’d failed the first few times.

Steve hears the door squeak behind him, hears the awkward shuffle of sanitized shoe covers. It’s time to go. He pulls the sheet back up, but not before he spares the back of his knuckles to brush a lock of hair off of the cold, white forehead before him. “Goodbye, Beta-24.”

It takes precisely forty-six days to pull together all the pieces of the puzzle, but when the time comes Steve pulls on the spare suit that he’d stashed in a duffel at Sam’s place, where he’s been holed up in the guest room when he and Sam weren’t chasing down cold leads; he and Sam rendezvous together to an empty lot outside of D.C., where they’re picked up by Natasha in an unmarked vehicle and drive out even further to a small plot of private land in West Virginia. Clint’s there, waiting with a small Avengers quinjet. It’s best if nobody knows they’re going.

“Maria can’t be here, but she’s got tech support with Tony Stark,” Clint greets, already strapped-in and seated in the main pilot’s seat. Natasha joins him in the front and squeezes his shoulder; Clint nods in quick understanding. “It’ll be a sixteen-hour flight to Khan Tengri. We’ll get there at around four AM, so get some sleep. We won’t be stopping.”

Steve says nothing. Sam nods back, reiterating their pre-planned destination to confirm. “It’s at the easternmost tip of Kyrgyzstan, right next to Kazakhstan and China. Got it.”

Three hours in, Steve’s looking out the front windshield past Clint and Natasha, down at the early afternoon light glancing off of the waves of the Atlantic. He’s churning worse than if he’d had a storm in his gut. “Blood Mountain; that’s what Khan Tengri’s known as in the native languages,” he mutters. Blood Mountain, Blood Mountain, Blood Mountain. Steve knows that the nickname is because the marble peak lights up at sunset, but the alternate interpretation is impossible to avoid, not when they’ve pinpointed the location of Hydra’s offshoot cloning facility.

It’s buried somewhere in the mountain, into the base below the glacier but not so far up that the entrance is beyond the obscuring treeline. Kyrgyzstan is mostly mountain, anyway, rich in gold and rare earth metals. It’s landlocked, isolated, and mostly pastoral in the parts that aren’t mountainous.

The Kingdom of Wakanda may be the most abundant source and have the only near-surface vibranium deposits in the world, but that doesn’t mean that vibranium exists elsewhere, in small quantities and at excruciating depth, difficulty of retrieval, and extravagant cost. There’s not much vibranium and adamantium in this mountain range, but there’s enough to make it worthwhile, if the payoff they find is to be expected.

Sam’s warm by Steve’s side; their thighs press together, and it’s comforting. It’s comforting in the way it has been for that scant handful of months they’d spent running from one obscure corner of the globe to the next obscure corner of the globe. It’s familiar, and warm, and even if Steve’s not sure if anything can quell the heavy knots tying up his insides from the base of his spine to his tailbone, at least he’s not alone.

Sam himself is poring over a geological survey of the area, which includes a map that has a red X over the facility location. The site probably doubles as a mine, and they’ll be going as deep as they can. “Not much use for my wings, here.” Sam shrugs. “Clint and I will be going shallow, you and Nat go deep.”

Steve hasn’t looked away from the front. “That’s right.” He pauses, considering. “You should sleep.”

That earns him a slight nudge of an elbow to his bicep. “Don’t think I haven’t seen the bags under your eyes, Steve. Nat and I have got first watch.”

Ok, Steve thinks. Ok. “Yeah.”

He doesn’t have anything better to do. He doesn’t know if there’s anything else better to do. He could spend the whole time working himself into a further mess, or growing so tense he can hardly bend over to pick up his shield, or losing track of what he’s supposed to do, anyway. The muted, oddly crisp drawl of Stark’s voice through the radio sounds almost like Howard’s—does Stark know that he reads statistics and coordinates and strategies in the same pitch and tone and pace as his father?

It’s as disconcerting as it is comforting, and irrationally endears some nostalgic part of him. He ends up dead to the world for the entire trip, since nobody bothers to wake him up after he nods off against Sam’s shoulder. The others don’t look any worse off for having split sixteen hours evenly between them to monitor the autopilot.

He ends up dead to the world for the entire trip, since nobody bothers to wake him up after he nods off against Sam’s shoulder. The others don’t look any worse off for having split eighteen hours evenly between them to monitor the autopilot.

Steve doesn’t dream of anything while he’s asleep, and he’s not sure if the endless dark is less of a misery than the whirlwind rushing of his usual fare—of himself, being cut by the glass from the broken windshield of the Valkyrie as water surges into the cockpit in a swell of the coldest, whitest hell; of his neck breaking from the whiplash of that final collision, of all the times his neck has broken from his early mistakes in the field; of all the floods of fire and blood and soil, of all the unshat shit that he’s wiped off of his face and spat out of his mouth, of all the allied screams he’s silenced himself because there’s only one thing left to do when a man’s legs are up over his head some twenty yards and his insides are all out some twenty yards in the other direction; of all the times Dernier got cussed out for his bad timing with his fuses, of Morita howling over their little radios of an ambush, of Dugan’s bad gas from their k-rations, of Falsworth getting his beret shot off his head by rebel friendly fire and shivering that whole night through, of Jones reciting poetry he’d learned in college by the fire while they waited for the frost to melt off their gear, of Bucky cleaning his rifle over and over and over while he sat on a log with an ankle over one knee and gave no care to the snow melting in the small V of his neck exposed by his unbuttoned coat.

He doesn’t dream of anything, and the deceptive, shadowed lull of that empty state carries with him as the plane prepares to land and he gathers his gear.

“Blood Mountain,” Natasha languidly comments as she stretches before disembarking. It sounds like a purr. Steve has known Nat long enough that he knows that it’s a sound of predation, rather than of pleasure. With Natasha, they might be one and the same. There’s not much of a difference between killing and saving. The only things that change are your perspective and your reasons. Steve has done both of those things and knows intimately that there, indeed, is very little difference. He hasn’t used a gun for years, hasn’t needed a gun, doesn’t care for guns, but—he still takes the pistol she passes over to him and tucks it into a holster strapped to his thigh. He has a couple of knives strapped to the other. Unlike guns, they stick when he throws them.

Clint lands the quinjet in a clearing a half mile distant, for security. They walk the rest of the way in silence; the temperate forest between them and the base of the mountain is dripping with fog and dense with the faint rustle of nocturnal life. It’s the peak of summer; even at these high elevations it shouldn’t be so cold, but it is. It’s cold. It’s cold. It’s cold.

Steve’s gone over the codes to the facility doors so many times he could say them on his deathbed, and yet—

Natasha briefly places a hand below one of his shoulderblades to get his attention.

“Breathe, Steve.”

He breathes. He grips his gun; he grips his shield. He grips his gun tighter, and inputs the number into the hidden panel. The hologram of lichen-covered rock fizzles away to reveal a heavy metal door, which begins to slide open with the soundless hum of constant use.

Steve breathes. “Let’s go.”

Inside, the facility is surprisingly bright.

Natasha inputs another code which locks the doors open, and the light spills out into the darkness like a lantern at the bottom of the sea. None of them look back to judge the length of their shadows.

They take a step, and then several more. There are two hallways branching out from the main entrance, on either side of a lone, industrial elevator. There are two keycoded staircases tucked off to the far edges of the large hexagonal room—the overall effect is unsettlingly symmetrical, unaided by the fact that Hydra’s emblem is stenciled in a livid, flaking red in the center of the floor. It’s quiet, but there’s something about the emptiness of their introduction to the base that makes it hard to determine if their setting is silent in the way it gets before an ambush, or if merely indicates their arrival at a grave.

“Widow and I will go under. Falcon, Hawkeye—hit the hallways. You’ve got your packs. Get what you can and send the rest to hell.” He’s only distantly aware of what he sounds like, but none of that matters right now. He’s too cold to feel much else itching in his bones.

Clint grunts. The sound echoes. His voice is dry. It holds the false suggestion of perpetual, jaded amusement. “Roger that, Cap.”

Sam and Clint are capable, so Steve heads for the elevator without bothering to watch them split up left and right. There’s a small device in Natasha’s palm that produces a small, holographic projection of the facility; like Howard, the younger Stark becomes exponentially more resourceful the more limited his information happens to be. It’s a convenient talent to have inherited.

“They shouldn’t run into any trouble,” Natasha says. “The five levels above us are mainly Hydra residences and bureaucratic office space, as well as the first few below. It’s the ones underground that remain a mystery. Their deep-coring mine adjacent is currently inactive; it’s all mechanized and we wouldn’t have access in the first place since construction didn’t account for any human-sized maintenance tunnels. There’s nothing there, so we should focus on what’s directly below us.”

Steve presses the button for the lowest floor they can access, which happens to Basement Level 9. They hadn’t been able to obtain the access codes for Basement Levels 10-21; they had no information about what was below other than how many floors there were in total. The projection shows the approximate location of the staircases and the elevator; it gives estimates of the ceiling heights, square footage, and perimeter boundaries, but nothing else. Steve’s been around for long enough that he knows better than to let himself imagine what he’d find.

He had plunged the Valkyrie into the Arctic Sea before the liberation of Buchenwald but after the liberation of Auschwitz. He had seen pictures, had read the reports; but then there had been the train, in the Alps, and Steve’s motivations had spun down into a red, red needle of agony and he’d lost his perception of the entire war in grief. Although the Howling Commandos had been primarily applied towards the extermination of Hydra, it didn’t change the fact that Hydra itself, at its origin, was a radical, deep-science offshoot of the Nazi machine. They, unlike the rest of their cohort, left very few bodies behind in their laboratories and barracks.

It’s something that he thinks about more often than not—was it worse to leave your body behind as evidence of the atrocities to which you had been subjected, or was it worse to have your existence wiped from the face of the earth? Steve had lost count of how many faint, blue scorchmarks he’d counted running the SSR’s missions. He’d lost count of how many names were lost to the void.

But that’s only considering Hydra’s past outlook on research and development. Has anything changed since then? Their political outlook has blurred so thoroughly into the norm of modern security practice that Steve has no idea whether or not they still use strange machines with hooks and barbs suspended over stained tables with leather straps strained by resistance. Given what he’s seen of the chair seized by the FBI after Natasha’s document release, it could be anything at all.

He shrugs. “We’ll know soon enough.”

The elevator doesn’t ping when it lands, which is simultaneously a blessing and a curse—it grants Steve the time to tug Natasha back behind his shield, but he then he’s forced to watch the guard directly in front of the open doors deliberately turn a grizzled, shorn head around to reveal a face that’s not unlike what Steve remembers of George Barnes, Bucky’s father. The guard—the clone—is wearing what appears to be a simplified, dual-sleeved version of the tactical uniform Beta-24 had worn. There’s a small patch on the left shoulder that’s embroidered with an “8”.

The clone holds an assault rifle, but the arms that lift it are slow. Natasha shoots at the clone’s hands, but the gun doesn’t drop. She shoots at his knees, at his shoulders, at his groin and neck and face. Beta-8 moves closer, and the gun doesn’t drop. Ignoring Natasha’s assault, Beta-8 only fires once, at a panel on the far wall that causes all the lights on the level to flash red and pulse in time to a terrible, thumping siren; it’s loud enough to rattle the spent casings scattered on the floor.

Suddenly, what comes to Steve’s mind is both far-removed and terribly relevant. His team—the team—SHIELD’s former Strike team, under his command and to which he’d previously entrusted his mundane life on more than one occasion up until the point when they’d done their best to beat him into submission in the Triskelion elevator, that team—they’d been a team, like brothers-not-brothers, almost, almost like friends, except they weren’t in the end, at all. This team, these men, these almost-friends, they’d foisted “classic” movies on him on occasion, along with their company.

At the time, he had enjoyed it. Their company always, their movies sometimes. He doesn’t know if he should feel guilty about that—he only feels dirty.

One of those had been The Terminator. The similarities to the current situation are rather disorienting.

“Steve,” Natasha hisses. Her gun clicks, empty. She reloads. Her face has gone utterly white. “Steve.”

Steve’s body automatically responds after the delay; it lunges forward to smash the sharp edge of the shield into Beta-8’s torso. The fabric tears, but beneath, an outer layer of interwoven skin and electronic mesh splits like melted butter to reveal a jagged, patchwork puzzle of hot metal and sizzling, altered meat; it’s crawling through with the blooded chrome worms and maggots of machinery, clicking and ticking in time to some inexplicable prerogative. Steve’s shoved back, leaving the shield lodged into Beta-8’s chest.

Beta-8 doesn’t bother to remove the shield as he starts regaining the several paces he’d lost. The machines—the robots—imbedded into Beta-8’s body burrow in and out of his exposed flesh and do their best to knit his split torso back together, around the shield. They eject chunks of ruined muscle and fat out of one end, and with the other, ooze some greyish substance that writhes until it takes the color and form of new, healing material. It’s unlike anything Steve’s ever seen in his strange life, unimaginably worse than the lurid story he’d seen on that borrowed DVD.

It doesn’t take long for Beta-8 to come close enough that the spluttering mist of blood and sparks splatter onto Steve’s face, into Natasha’s hair. Some bullets have gotten wedged into the body; others have ricocheted and been stopped null by the shield.

Then, Beta-8 stops and deliberately tugs on his torn, dripping jacket. Cables gloss with sanguine luster inside of him, where Steve should have been seeing guts. There should have been viscera pooling on the ground, but it all holds itself together with shiny little jointed legs, with writhing wires and netting—instead of gathering his intestines to himself like any other man would have done, Beta-8 only tucks a stray wire back under a rib, looking vaguely satisfied, like no other man would be.

“I’ve heard of you,” he says. “The good Captain, the man out-of-time. The Black Widow, the defector.”

His voice is, is—

Steve lifts his gun. He points it right at the empty, red-weeping hole of Beta-8’s shot-out left eye socket, but Beta-8 is so calm that Steve can’t bring himself to keep his weapon on-target. The barrel ends up being directed down off to the side; Steve feels like his labored breathing is louder than the wail of the alarm. “So you have.”

The air is heavy with a hellish taste, full of sharp ozone and smoke mixed together with the pulse of the siren; it’s so much that Steve is nearly dizzy with the need to be sick.

“I was waiting for you.”

“Why?” Beta-8 doesn’t answer immediately—one shoulder drops in contemplation. The gesture, so familiar, opens up a fissure along the bottom edge of Steve’s heart. He tries to shut it, but the sickness burning behind his eyes and under his throat and deep in his gut shifts, horrifyingly, with the disturbed longing familiar from when he’d still thought Beta-24 was Bucky.

Half of Beta-8’s face is gone, and the synthetic muscle beneath ripples in self-repair when he speaks. “Were it not for me, perhaps none of this would have ever been brought to fruition; perhaps you never would have had to come here, but to you, I do owe some measure of my life, and in consideration of how I was the beginning, and of how I wish to be the end, heh.” The chuckle reads as an echo, as close as it is far.

“Why?” Steve pleads. Natasha’s gripping his elbow hard enough to bruise, although the mark could never linger.

Beta-8 looks so…it’s not pride, nor is it relief, nor is it joy. Strange, lonely bliss spreads across the remains of his aged features, unsettling in its sincerity. “It was time for us to die. All of us, together, as it should have been. You’ll complete the mission? You’ll kill us?” Desperate expectation renews tragic youth to the timbre of his voice. “I’ve already activated the self-destruction protocols for the base. As for Hydra, you shouldn’t need to worry about here. I kept them in the dark, and they’ll think nothing of following the termination procedure.” Beta-8 pauses, but only to reach out abortively. His hand drops to his side and his head droops in in plaintive supplication. “Please, please kill us—but if you don’t, be our witness.”

At that moment, Steve’s comms flare up and Maria cries out, her voice ringing. “Cap, Widow, get out of there, right fucking now, shit, shit—“ The transmission cuts off as the floor beneath their feet rumbles; it tilts a scant degree down to Steve’s right. The fluid on the floor starts to slide.

Steve shouts, reeling in confusion and dismay. “Wait, kill? No, I won’t, what do you—“

He never gets a proper reply. Beta-8 suddenly rips the shield out of his chest, and with it, most of his internal machinery. It falls in misshapen chunks and tangles, writhing in a near-sentient display of distress all across the floor. The shield is dropped to the side; ignoring the wet scrabble of his guts as they try to get back to him, Beta-8 crumples to his knees and thrusts an arm inside of the resulting cavity in his torso, gouging the gash down further so as to allow room for his other arm, too.

There is an ill ripping, a shattering and visceral sound; Beta-8 pulls out the remainder of what’s left inside of himself—his lungs, his heart, the segmented and augmented veins and arteries that branched like lattices of silver throughout his interior. Beta-8 tears and tears and tears, throwing away indiscriminate handfuls of squirming flesh that sometimes slap across Steve’s suit and cling to him in some alien fear before they slide off, dwindling as Beta-8 himself weakens from the loss of so much blood and mass, both organic and inorganic.

“STOP, STOP,” Steve cries. He tears himself out of Natasha’s hold, but in his anguish, he slips on the gory slick that’s pooled on the concrete and loses his footing for a brief moment, just far enough away that his arm can’t reach the man in front of him. It’s a brief fumble—it’s the briefest of brief, but brief is all it takes for Beta-8 to win.

Under the red alarm lights, it all looks the same to Steve, but Beta-8 finally finds what he had apparently been looking for; it’s a disconnected portion of vertebrae that bears a faint, blinking light, still connected to him by a gold-glimmering spinal cord stretched out from either end like an elastic band around an isolated bead upon a child’s bracelet.

He displays it to Steve with plain finality upon his face, and promptly crushes it in his gloved fist.

Then, there is nothing more between Steve and the rest of the base than a sad pile of scrap metal and posthuman flesh, all still and silent, even the parts that were more gears than genetic material.

Steve finds that, again, his body acts before his mind has properly registered what has happened. “Widow, go up.” He doesn’t sound strange at all. Does he? He can hardly hear himself over the siren.

“Absolutely not—“

“Go up. Pretty sure the elevator isn’t going to work anymore. You’re going to run up nine flights of stairs and I can run faster than you can, for longer. Go first and scout it on your way out. I’ll catch up.”

Her fingers brush the back of his bare knuckles. Her nails scratch where his skin’s exposed; she’s frustrated by his orders. “You—I’ll have your hide when you’re done, Rogers.” Steve manages to crack a foreign smile for her before he grabs his shield from the floor, slippery with gore, and uses it to smash his way down, down, down.

He finds that he has to wind back and forth through the floors because the staircases happen to be located at opposite ends of each floor. The alarms have released all of the locks, and researchers and guards seem to pour out of the walls like the roaches did at the squalid Brooklyn tenement in which Steve had been born, and where he lived up until he’d left with the USO tour.

The building’s gone, now. It’s been gone for over half of a century, demolished sometime in the spread of post-war affluence and health regulation. There’s a little plaque set into the sidewalk that had been installed in the late 1960s, in commemoration of what would have been Steve’s 50th birthday. When he’d gone to visit it, a paparazzo had snapped a picture that made the cover of the New York Times. Even now, it’s become a stock photo that keeps popping up whenever there’s a news or magazine article glorifying the gritty, golden nostalgia of the pre-war era. Steve’s just glad that American children no longer die of polio.

In a way, it feels like he’s going back in time. It feels like he’s spiraling deeper into the circles of hell, all nine of them with an extra three tacked on for Steve’s tardiness to his punishment. The red of the lights beat harder, darker, almost lovely in their awful familiarity the further down he goes—on either side of him, Hydra agents kill each other and themselves in synchronized droves. They burn their papers, smash their equipment. They ignore Steve entirely, save for when he ducks left and right to grab harddrives and thumbdrives and things that could vaguely seem important—only then do they try to shoot him, but Steve was always faster with his shield than he was with his gun.

The depth of their devotion to their cause is, as ever, grimly astonishing. It’s been too soon for Steve to have forgotten how far Hydra affiliates would go, but it’s not until he reaches Basement Level 14 and sees the tanks that his skin skitters all fresh like it had been when he’d rescued the 107th. The dread reminds him, terribly, of those long, dark hallways between the POW barracks and that final office. If it weren’t for the fact that his skin was quite attached to him, he’d almost believe that it would crawl right off in the face of Steve’s growing unease.

It’s bizarrely devoid of researchers, or of anyone besides him, but it’s still the most laboratory-like room Steve’s seen so far.

Cylindrical tanks of various sizes are arranged about the room, all full of some pinkish embryonic gel tainted with green; most hold twisted little lumps of flesh and metal. Some are flesh-only, holding organs and disconnected muscles in biological stasis. Others hold cybernetic parts in various states of construction and repair. Others still nurture little rippling mantles of liquid nanobots rapidly revolving around a clumped nucleus of cells. Steve slows to examine the reading on one of the machines adjacent to this last category of hosts; next to an array of diminishing statistics, a digital display reads “Beta-75,” alongside a notation of “FETAL TERMINATION INITIATED: 47% COMPLETE.”

Steve retches, violently and with such little warning that he chokes on it, the acid burning up his nose and throat enough to provoke him to reflexive, blurring tears. He can’t remember what he’d eaten last, or when.

He hasn’t puked like this since the first time he saw what was left after someone had gotten run over by a tank. The man had looked like a crushed roach left to dry; his guts and bones shone irregularly outside the husk of his burst skin, swimming with the flies and maggots that had come hand-in-hand with that warmer span of days. The body had been old enough that there were parts that were discolored and putrid, but fresh enough that the clothes had not yet fallen away—the ruts left behind by the tank’s treads were still distinct. Damn, Dugan had said. The poor kraut got left behind. Bucky had said nothing at all, but his hand had rested on Steve’s back, as much a comfort as it was a dull reminder. Steve had to get over it, or else.

It shouldn’t affect him now—he’s seen too much, he’s done so much of it himself—but it does. Beta-75 was hardly even a body, far less recognizable than what dead children he has already seen, but there’s a self-disgust and horror present the fact that at first, Steve didn’t realize what the machine contained was a developing fetus.

That’s not how someone would make a child; that’s how someone would throw away the parts to a weapon that they no longer needed to have built.

There’s bile but no solids in his vomit, so there’s nothing else for him to do but wipe his mouth and go down another floor.

Basement Level 15 is where all the Hydra scientists from Level 14 have gone.

There’s no screaming, no cries—it’s the stagnant quietude that clues him into the fact that he’s too late. Steve’s pretty sure that if he stops running, he’ll shake himself into useless shards. He forces himself to run past the cribs of already-silenced children, and throws his shield at the first researcher he sees. The woman and her belt of tiny syringes are knocked to the ground, but in response, the scientists around her pull out small handguns without pause; instead of shooting at Steve, they begin eliminating the rest of the infants with great rapidity.

In the midst of the rising shrieks, Steve simultaneously throws his shield again and starts firing in a desperate attempt to stop Beta-8’s goddamned mass murder-suicide as fast as possible. These children are too young to know what it’s like to want to die. They don’t know anything at all.

He doesn’t have a clue how he’s going to get all of these children out of here, but it turns out that he doesn’t need to. At the end of it all, Steve only manages to scoop up a whimpering Beta-51 safe into his arms, dropping his gun with mingled shame and self-hatred to do so. He had made the mistake of rushing the first time, trying to keep the gun in one hand instead of holstering it when he had made an attempt to salvage Beta-53 from a crib. In this error, he was too hasty, and his efforts only led the crib crumple in on a pre-programmed self-destruct when Steve had ignorantly bumped into a button with his hip trying to juggle everything at once; it bisected the child straight through the torso as Steve tried to cradle the head in one arm, and he had then been forced to quickly end Beta-53 himself with twist of his fingers around the fragile neck.

He’s positive now that the whimpering he hears is coming from him, not from Beta-51 tucked like a treasure into his shoulder. Beta-51 snuffles and clings to him with Bucky’s little fingers and Bucky’s soft brown hair tickling Steve’s jaw. Steve brushes a reassuring kiss over Beta-51’s brow and runs past the unmoving bodies and down to Level 16. The kiss is more for him than it was for the child.

The floor shakes, and he runs faster.

The toddlers in Level 16 are all dead when he arrives, draped over each other in their white, bare cells. The red of the lights does nothing to obscure the blood which coats the walls—although Steve grips Beta-51 tighter and doesn’t stop on his way to Level 17, he still notices that most of the toddlers had been killed by an internal mechanism. They’re oozing a thick fluid out of their mouths, eyes, nose, and ears. Some of the children had obviously thrashed about in agony; some had simply burst where they had stood, sliding down onto the floor to never move again.

It’s clear by now that not all of the children had the same degree of technological integration. A few by the cells near the staircase had bulletholes between their eyes, and must have lacked the remote trigger that had killed the others.

On what basis were all of these different failure mechanisms installed? Why did each child die in a different way, each worse than the last? What kind of punishment did they merit to be executed with less grace than a firing squad or an electric chair?

He can’t help the thoughts which rush through his mind as he passes them all by, sidestepping dead security guards and technicians; they, too, have been executed. Their throats are slit and they have an extra hole in their heads, but it’s messy. An executioner wouldn’t be so unkempt—but for a rout, it doesn’t matter what state the bodies are in.

On Level 17, Steve hears muffled sobbing.

There’s a soft protest, then a reverberating, blistering bang. Another. Several more in quick succession.

Steve runs faster, past several soundless, still rooms, all the way to the far end of the floor. “I, I don’t—I don’t want to be d-decomm—“ The voice rings sweet over the overwhelming wail siren, carrying with it the memories of swirled marbles on unpolished wooden floors and syrupy orange sauce from the Chinese restaurant three blocks down from the Barnes’ neat row house.

Bang. Steve braces Beta-51 against himself and brings his shield up, smashing the Hydra guard into the reinforced glass with a roar that he hardly recognizes as one of his own.

The force of the impact is so strong that the man crunches like a stomped rat; he leaves a bloody smear behind when Steve staggers back with an indescribable mess still trapped in his chest.

Inside the cell, there are three young boys. Two are dead, their heads entirely blown off by the gun that the guard was holding, a massive thing that steams in Tesseract blue but with a glow distorted into a garish purple by the red hell that Steve’s in. It looks like one of the SHIELD prototypes he’d seen a couple of years ago, but he can’t spare any thought about that now.

The last clone clutches one of his fellow clone’s hands in his lap; he stares at Steve with wide eyes that shine yellow under the alarm lights. Steve knows exactly how old the clone is without referencing the paper sheet tacked up outside of the room. He’d seen Bucky’s face at this age before, had watched that stage of Bucky’s face in repose at sleepovers, had seen it haloed in the late afternoon sun as Bucky had fought off yet another round of Steve’s schoolyard hurts.

Beta-39, designation given by the neat number on his left shoulder, is approximately eight years old with loose, chin-length hair. He’s wearing a saggy grey t-shirt and black cotton pants, with no shoes or socks. His left arm shimmers with the same plated metal that Beta-24 had—however, Steve can tell from the bits and pieces of biosynthetic skin sneaking down like a sleek fungus from under the edge of Beta-39’s left sleeve that the clone is somehow incomplete, or ill enough that the skin that covers up the other clones had to be removed for whatever underlying procedure that needed the plating to be exposed. There’s a central IV line going into the middle of his chest, beneath his shirt.

Steve doesn’t have the luxury to sit down and figure out what’s wrong with the clone right then and there; Beta-39 looks somewhat drained, as if he’d actually recently undergone some sort of operation after all. But that could be due in part to the fact that he’s thoroughly splattered with the sooty, smoking fragments of the other clones lying dead on either side of him like crushed birds—his hair frizzes out, singed, and the blood soaking into the fabric of his clothing makes for a harsh, smudged outline that’s not out of place with a colorized memory of one of the charcoal sketches that Steve had once drawn, one that he’d wiped a sweaty hand over in frustration to smear out all the flaws only he could see.

“Decommissioning?” Beta-39 mumbles, bewildered. Up close, Steve can hardly hear him, but instead reads his lips and shakes his head in a vehement no.

“Never. Never.” Steve unhooks the IV bag from the hook hanging from the frame of an upper bunk bed and unzips his suit just enough to secure it against his body. He carefully kneels in the pooling blood from Beta-38 and Beta-37 and extends his arms out to Beta-39, coaxing the clone inwards to cradle the unresisting body to his own with as much tenderness as he can muster. “I promise. Hang on, ok? As tightly as you can.”

Beta-39 watches him, so heartbreakingly blank and dull that Steve’s struck with a sudden panic regarding the very real possibility that the clone could say no. But instead, Beta-39 hesitates; after a moment he rapidly buries his face into Steve’s neck and wraps his legs about Steve’s waist. One arm loops around Steve’s back to grip onto the shield harness and the other latches onto Beta-51. Little lips brush at the skin exposed above Steve’s collar, almost as if it’s to murmur a fragile assent that Steve can’t hear over the incessant pulsing of the siren.

Steve breathes. In. Out. The ceiling above them groans, and the plaster dust that’s been accumulating turns from a trickle into a torrent. They’re running out of time.

He stands. With his arms full, he can’t properly wield his shield, but that’s an insignificant fact in the face of the reality that he’s only been able to save two clones out of the dozens so far. Steve shudders, and goes down another level.

The density of bodies decreases floor-by-floor as the three of them descend, with the ages of the clones present slowly increasing. Here and there, empty cells indicate that not all of the clones are actually in the facility, but the widespread carnage tells Steve that of the ones that were here, they’d been ordered to terminate themselves.

These older ones, they’d fought. It explains the stranger wounds he’s seen on the numerous guard corpses, but there’s some unpleasant satisfaction growing at the confirmation that not all of the Betas wanted to die. It doesn’t look as if any of them wanted to die—Beta-8 was wrong. But it doesn’t change the fact that nearly all of them are dead anyway. Somehow, the continuous repeat of Bucky’s face all around him, distorted and contorted, acts to muffle him from the actual details of Bucky’s face. He can see it, he can acknowledge it, but it’s not sinking in the way that it should be. Maybe Steve’s just running too fast, but he pushes the thought aside in favor of the kind of distant observation he depended upon after his aim with a gun improved and there was no time to be wasted wondering about the fact that he’d killed someone with a favorite food and favorite color and favorite song and a maybe a dead mother who had loved them and maybe a childhood best friend, too.

Most of the Betas appeared to have perished from some combination of internal failsafe, gunshot wounds, and dismemberment or disembowelment. About the latter two, Steve’s not sure if they’d been inflicted by another weapon that he hasn’t seen yet or by another Beta following Beta-8’s termination initiative, but Steve’s train of thought skids off the rails and tumbles down to the river once he reaches Level 19. A Beta, designated “28”, lies slumped halfway on the stairs leading up to Level 18 and blocks his path.

He’s young. Not like Beta-51 or Beta-39, but young, like Steve is young. Younger, actually, young like Bucky had been in 1941when he’d turned to Steve with that draft letter in hand, all red-eyed and dry-cheeked. It had only been about six years ago, in biological time. In biological time, in Steve’s 1947, the war would already be over. Pal, Bucky had slurred, wobbling against the doorframe to Steve’s rickety unit. Steve, Stevie, Steve-o, Steven, I must have run out of pretty dames on this side of the Atlantic. You got to send me some letters so I know if any of the ones at home start running to you, ok? Maybe all this time I’ve just been terrible at finding a good one for you—who knows, maybe you’ll end up doing better without me, huh?

Steve reaches forward to close Beta-28’s clouded eyes. He’d been killed trying to escape, shot several times in the back.

Steve nearly slips on the stairs going past the body—he’s trembling that badly. Beta-51 cuddles into Steve’s chest for warmth. At first, Beta-39 had been peering about; but now, he hides his face from the macabre world they’re passing through. Steve doesn’t blame him for turning away.

On the rest of Level 19, the violence had escalated to a level where it’s as if Steve’s rushing his way through an unattended abattoir rather than a series of gaping, ruined chambers and concrete corridors; were it not for the siren, the only thing to be heard on that floor would be Steve himself—the ragged breaths, the unsteady footfalls on uneven and irregular surfaces, the occasional shout released in the hopes that one of the cooling figures with Bucky’s face would sit up out of the mess of strewn limbs and brains and guts and join him.

None do.

Steve stops calling out, soon enough. It’s easier to duck his head and sidestep a chunk of forearm here, some shredded plating there, than to stop and examine what exactly had happened to each victim. In such torn, disconnected pieces, the bodies affect him less. Steve’s memories of Bucky are easier to disassociate from the corpses he dashes past, because none of them are whole.

On Level 20, Steve makes it precisely thirty-one steps into the last chamber on the floor before a man steps out from behind the alcove of the stairway leading down to the final floor. Beta-39 sees him first, and stifles an aborted scream into his metal fist; it’s this reaction that saves Steve’s life. The man lifts his gun, fires. Steve had ducked after Beta-39’s cry, but not far enough, fast enough—the round enters the upper half of Beta-51’s head and the resulting explosion blinds Steve with bits of brain and soft, such soft brown baby hair. The shock of it, the sick loss, wrenches a strangled cry from him—in response, Beta-39 shakes uncontrollably, digging his fingers and toes into Steve’s uniform as best as he can to maintain his grip on his unsteady protector.

Steve’s own agony falters under the force of his charge’s distress. He rolls down to the side, avoiding several more shots and taking shelter behind some medical equipment.

He lays what remains of Beta-51 on the floor and spits out some of cranial bone that had splattered into his mouth, weeping the gunk of grey matter and ejected calcium shrapnel out of his adjacent eye. Steve squeezes that little hand, still warm. His heart surges with rage, and he swings the shield out from his back to defend himself and Beta-39. To release Beta-39 would be akin to giving him up for dead, too—Steve cannot bring himself to face that possibility, not now. He'd promised. He can’t risk hiding Beta-39 somewhere in the room only to have him be accidentally discovered and left to fend for himself against their attacker, or a potential newcomer coming down behind them from an upper level.

Steve steels himself in order to focus on matters at-hand, and tears his still-burning eyes away from the tiny corpse by his feet. By now, it’s second nature to take peripheral stock of his environment in a combat situation—or any situation, really. Briefly, while still crouched, he tallies up what he’d already passed by on Level 20 and determines it to be a floor designed less for physical encounters than it was for physical alterations; the primary chamber is both a storage room for spare equipment and a medical prep facility for operating rooms behind other doors elsewhere, stocked with a disturbing array of replacement tactical equipment in their neat racks and shelves upon shelves of strange components shifting in their cases, and medical supplies that don’t look like any medical supplies Steve has ever seen. There isn’t a lot of open space to make efficient use of his shield as a projectile, but Steve hadn’t been considering taking his hands off of his shield, anyway.

“Remember what I told you about holding on?” he asks, not speaking so much as he mouths the words into the clumped hair at Beta-39’s temple. “I need you to trust me. I’ll keep you safe—don’t let go, no matter what. I’ll keep you safe.”

He can feel the pulse of a vein on Beta-39’s forehead swell and subside against his cheek, beating to the rhythm of a heart that Steve can’t feel over the surging of his own in his chest. The clone eventually nods, and hides his face into the crook of Steve’s neck. His grip tightens, painful with some mysterious strength Steve doesn’t have time to think about. Steve rubs a hand over Beta-39’s back in an attempt to be soothing; but even though he can feel the nubs of the boy’s spine through his glove, he’s not sure if it works. Beta-39 doesn’t respond. Steve swallows.

When he rolls back out, the man is ready, and charges him with a knife in each hand; the gun has been dropped.

The next few minutes pass in a blur of frantic defense. Steve meets his assailant’s pale eyes and catches sight of the “13” patch on the left shoulder. Steve’s not superstitious, but 13 has proven to be an unlucky number enough. The shield flies up to block a swipe at Steve’s collarbone level—the back of Beta-39’s neck—then down to protect Steve’s side, to protect Beta-39’s femoral artery.

Beta-13’s clear priority is the elimination of Beta-39, attached to Steve like octopus and worth more than the sum of all the sunken gold in the oceans.

Beta-39 shivers and shivers and shivers, but he hardly flinches when a knife slashes close enough to cut a slit through the loose fabric that covers his body. He doesn’t look up once.

They’ve interacted before, both of these clones. From the scent of heavy iron soaked into Beta-13’s damp gloves and gear, Steve concludes that Beta-13 had been the executioner for the younger clones in the floors above their heads; possibly even one of their trainers. He’s good—not just good, but terrifying—enough to send Steve running, pushing him back against shelving and stacked piles of equipment to send materials toppling all over the vivid light-stained floor, in waves of empty glass vials and misshapen scrap plating and shreds of Kevlar and electric cable and thousands of little white pills that crunch into a bitter powder dust to clump into a slippery paste of gore and chemical on their boots.

It’s getting harder and harder to keep Beta-13 at bay; there’s something lacking in Beta-13’s eyes that had been present in Beta-8’s and Beta-24’s—even in the child Beta-39’s and infant Beta-51’s.

Beta-13 must have been one of the few clones whose cybernetic enhancements had included a significant amount of wetware integration. It becomes increasingly evident in the jagged, calculated adjustments he keeps making against Steve, and it’s only a matter of time before Beta-13 outpaces Steve’s own adaptive rates and predicts Steve’s weaknesses before Steve can realize them himself.

The gunk accumulated on the bottom of his boots eventually causes Steve to falter when his foot gets tangled in a knot of cable that he’d missed in the shadows, and he slips. Beta-13 manages to push through Steve’s faltering barriers far enough to sink a knife to the hilt into Steve’s right shoulder as Steve falls—fuck, does that hurt—but when Beta-13 moves in for the kill, Steve seizes the opportunity to drop his shield and grapple the knives away from Beta-13. While they’re struggling on the floor, the comms in Steve’s helmet manage to spark back to life and Sam’s voice patches through, shouting out Steve’s name in-between codes and phrases of all kinds. Immediately, Beta-39 claps his hands over his ears to drown out the sound, but Beta-13, with his wrists trapped in Steve’s hands over Steve’s shoulders, isn’t so lucky.

Steve, pinned on his back, watches with a mounting sense of sickness as deep groan emerges from somewhere deep inside Beta-13’s body, neither wholly of organic or mechanical origin. There’s a mask over the lower portion of Beta-13’s face, but grisly froth foams up out through the ventilation filter slots that extend in a band from the nose to the chin, dripping down onto Steve’s face as Beta-13’s eyes roll back into the skull further than Steve has ever seen eyes go—and he’s seen eyes go pretty damn far back. Desperate, painful gurgles escape from that covered mouth; the fingers that scrabble at the rough fabric of Steve’s chest grow weaker and weaker in-between their spasms.

Little scraps of strange flesh, dark and wet, push out between the slots in the mask and worm their way out in dangling tendrils of clotted, internal slime—like, like worms, like snakes, like misshapen nightmare arms coming out of a face so distorted by the grip of such incomprehensible pain that it might as well be a skull—they draw uneven trajectories across the back of Beta-39’s shirt as Beta-13 convulses over Steve and Beta-39 both. There’s blood oozing out from his eyes, his ears.

The chest beneath all that black tactical gear pulses and ripples, like Beta-13’s heart is trying to burst out of his body by bouncing around inside the cavity of his torso with no regard as to whether or not that space is already occupied by another organ; struck with a sudden agony, Steve chokes back a wretched sob and makes to throw the seizing form off and away from himself—but again, Steve’s just too slow.

He’s just too fucking slow.

There’s a cracking, a popping; Beta-13's chest bursts out like a bellows to squish them all together, crushing Beta-39 down into Steve and causing the clone to whimper in fear and press his damp face into the edge of Steve’s face where it’s partially covered by the leather band of his chinstrap. He trembles, and Steve can’t bring a hand up to comfort him because there’s no space to do so all along Beta-39's back.

To Steve, the moment feels much longer than he objectively knows it to be—but he can neither tear his eyes away from Beta-13 nor bring himself to loosen his hold. In those null half-seconds, Steve finds himself searching Beta-13’s clouding, leaking stare for something more than this terrible destiny; his focus flits between the mark of an old cigarette burn that bisects Beta-13’s right eyebrow and the streaks of silver showing through at the temples of Beta-13’s blood-matted hair.

How did he get that burn? It looked old, and must have been bad enough that it didn’t heal over smoothly—it occurs to Steve that if Beta-13’s hair silvered with age, then Beta-8’s must have, too; he just hadn’t seen it amidst the silver of the exposed machinery once Natasha had destroyed most of Beta-8’s face with bullets. Even if, if there was something different inside Beta-13’s head, something too different to be called precisely human any longer—wasn’t he once a baby, too? Like Beta-51? An infant, with no awareness of what he was created to do?

Beta-13 makes a creaking sound, like a boat swaying in a storm. His mask slips off of his face to bump the back of Beta-39’s neck; it slides to rest at the hollow of Steve’s throat, and trails behind it the rest of the tendrils which had pushed through the ventilation slots—they lead into Beta-13’s mouth, with downturned lips open in a maw that opens wider, and wider, and wider; so wide that the top part of his skull simply falls off to the side and leaves his body hunched over Steve’s, the lower jaw remaining on a body that promptly disgorges the entire, semi-dissolved contents of the corpse’s interior all over Steve from a trachea exposed to light. It looks like a tunnel, a passageway beneath the jutting off-white glow of the vertebrae above. Where it leads, Steve knows, but abstractly, like he’s not really there.

Steve opens his mouth—to scream, to wail, to howl, he isn’t sure—but he opens his mouth due to some reflex, and gets his face stuffed to the throat full of floating bits of bone and crawling machines and still-firm, twitching muscle. The rest of Beta-13’s corpse collapses down upon him and Beta-39 both; Beta-39 makes the ill-timed choice to turn his head to look at Steve, and the whiteness of his face under the red-black shine of the lights and blood makes Steve retch, spewing bile and glittering guts all over their tangled bodies.

“I’m sorry,” he garbles, pushing himself upright. The body lies slack across his lap. The top half of Beta-13’s head has rolled somewhere off underneath a pile of equipment; Steve can’t see it through the mess he wipes out of his eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—“

He fists his hands in the back of Beta-39’s shirt and coughs, wetly, to clear his airways of whatever organic and inorganic material got wedged in there. He’s dimly aware that he’s drooling gristle all the way down to his gloves, but the taste is—

Sam’s voice crackles out of his helmet, somewhat static from the blood that must have gotten in to the speakers. “Cap, Cap, do you read? What’s going on, what’s your status? Steve, say something, for the love of god.”

“Stop,” Steve hoarsely commands, speaking into the communicator. He hacks out a glob of spit mixed in with a squirming machine into the middle of the room. “I’ve got a clone safe, no more trigger codes.”

There’s silence. “Just one?” Clint sounds tight-wound, but that’s quickly explained by the faint booming of explosions on his end of the line.

“So far—I have to, I’ve got one more floor, I need to—“

“You’ve got less than five minutes before the whole thing goes. Nat’s already here with us.” Sam’s gone all soft and low with concern. “See you up top, Steve.”

A startling rush of affection helps Steve muster the strength to roll the body off of his legs and shake off the rest of the glaze of shock that dulls his mind. “See you up top, Sam.”

He grips Beta-39 tighter and staggers to his feet, sidestepping the shadowed, unknown detritus scattered across the floor. He yanks the knife out of his shoulder and throws it off to the side along the way, where it clatters and bounces and disappears. The ache goes deep and lingers like a bad cough; although the knife hadn’t struck anything crucial, just because the wound will seal in a matter of minutes doesn’t mean that Steve won’t be feeling the damage for a while.

He looks back, once.

Beta-13 seems so small, lying there alone and incomplete; the glare from the light reflecting off of everything around him makes it seem as if he’s facedown on a pane of ice, rather than cement glossed over with vomit and gore and blood from his continued exsanguination—as if he’s fallen into the snow from a very, very great height, far enough to knock his head in two and break all his insides to the outside.

Steve looks away, and scrambles those last few steps down to Basement Level 21.

Level 21 is dark, entirely dark. There’s no siren here, no flashing red lights; the sound and sight of them quickly muffle as Steve moves further down a corridor that illuminates itself with motion sensors as Steve passes by, only to dim out after he’s moved not even ten paces beyond the fixtures. It provides the illusion that he’s encased in this peculiar bubble of sterile light, neither warm nor cold, shuttling him beyond closed door after closed door to end at a pair of them at the end of the hallway.

Steve pauses, uncertain of what he’ll find—but he’s already reached the lowest level facility level within Blood Mountain. It almost feels as if he’s defeating the purpose of going into hell if he turns around now; but he had never intended to turn around until he’s seen all there is to see in the first place. He readjusts his hold on Beta-39, and reaches for the doors.

They’re unlocked. He almost expected them not to be.

Inside of the chamber, the lights work much the same way as they had in the corridor; however, they stay on instead of turning off as Steve walks further into the room. His walk slows to a crawl, then a standstill—the instant that last wall illuminates himself, his knees buckle. Were it not for Beta-39’s scramble to stay attached, Steve might have fallen to the floor. He might have. He doesn’t know—but he releases a cry out of his body that he didn’t realize he could make; a terrible, irregular wail that echoes throughout the laboratory and drowns out the faint clicking of the machinery that surrounds them.

It’s Bucky.

Bucky, with his lips in a bow; Bucky, with his lashes dark on his cheeks; Bucky, dismembered and disassembled, mounted up upon the wall in a display both efficiently scientific and straight out of the most ghoulish of dreams Steve’s unrestful slumbers have created for him. He didn’t realize he had hope left about Bucky until it crashes, awfully, all about him.

He’s done it. He’s found Bucky, Bucky Barnes, James Buchanan Barnes, in the flesh, in the frost.

Bucky, with a cybernetic left arm exploded out in a suspended rotating display upon a research table. Bucky, with separate little cryogenic chambers for his heart, his lungs, his liver, his stomach, even his goddamned gallbladder. Bucky, with neat little rows of vials labeled as samples of skin, of blood, of bone marrow, of semen.

Bucky, dead.

His limbs are spread out across the room, in various states of preservation. His head is inset into the wall as some kind of trophy; it’s right at Steve’s face level, just a little below. It’s where Bucky would have been had he been standing upright with a whole body. Of all the details, this is the one that nearly fools Steve into thinking that his eyes are seeing things wrong. At any second, Bucky could walk out of the wall, and laugh at the mess Steve’s made of himself. Bucky could reach out, tug off Steve’s helmet and smooth back Steve’s bloodied hair, but he doesn’t move at all. Bucky can’t move at all, not with his body sectioned out so neatly, marked and categorized and scattered on tables.

Steve doesn’t realize that he’s staggered forward, moaning in heartbreak, until his forehead rests on the frozen glass above Bucky’s forehead. He cries, and his tears freeze to the glass—he leaves smears of rust and dirt on the shining chrome around the cryogenic capsule.

Slender fingers enter the periphery of Steve’s fogged vision, and he looks down to see Beta-39 touching the glass, utterly rapt. “Alpha,” the clone whispers, disbelieving and starry-eyed. “Alpha.”

They look the same. Were it not for the ice and filth and years and suffering that lies vast between them, they look the same. They damn fucking look the exactly the same, and Steve bites his tongue so hard the blood that seeps out between his wobbling, hurt-twisted lips is, at last, his own.

There’s a crackle in Steve’s helmet again. “Steve, you’re at negative two, we’ve just lost Upper Levels 4 and 5, so get your fucking star-spangled ass out of there.”

Stark’s right. Steve needs to get out. He needs to get Beta-39 out. He’s done what he’s come here to do.

He’s so close to the glass that he can’t see his reflection in it. His eyelashes leave ugly smears across the surface with each grubby blink he makes. “Buck, I—it’s over. It’s all over. You can rest now, I’m sorry I couldn’t, couldn’t have come sooner. I didn’t know.” He clutches Beta-39 so tightly that the boy squeaks in protest. “I didn’t know and I’m not finished and I don’t know what to do but I promise, Bucky, I promise, I’ll take care of it, of everything. You don’t have to do anything anymore. You just have to run up to your ma and pa and sleep, for real. Go somewhere warm, you jerk. And you can—“

Steve’s voice breaks, along with a large portion of the ceiling. The block lands about three meters to Steve’s left, crushing a table and scattering ice and glass across the floor. A fire sparks to life in the midst of the destroyed machinery. The communicator crackles in furious concern, but Steve forges on. “You can tell me all about it later. So it’s not goodbye, not really.”

He reaches back, tenses up, and smashes through the glass—reaching in, Steve brushes the crystals of frost away from Bucky’s face before he leans forward and presses their lips together, disregarding how the edges of the broken window cut into his jaw and temple. “See you, Bucky.”

Steve’s never felt so cold in his life, but it’s almost as if he can see the flush returning to Bucky’s skin as he pulls away. He shivers, and pulls Beta-39 close. “Let’s get some sunshine, son.”

By the time they get to the surface, Steve’s on the verge of collapse. He stumbles out into the clearing into the early morning light; even outside the base, there are bits of flesh and bone everywhere, probably from the rest of Steve’s crew blowing the exterior Hydra patrol to bits. It’s attracting swarms of carrion birds, but no vultures, not yet. Just crows. Natasha, Sam, and Clint must have gone to fetch the quinjet. That’s ok. Alone time would be good, even if it’s just for a few minutes.

The frigid, fresh mountain air cuts into his face, his throat; Steve briefly detaches a hand from his cargo to tug off his helmet and buckle the chinstraps through a loop on the back of his uniform. He keeps the shield dangling off of one wrist kept through a strap, just in case something crawls up out of the hell he’d just left behind. The wind helps to dry the blood still on his face, and peels it away in little flakes not unlike how old wallpaper crumbles off of ruined plaster.

He can feel Beta-39 peering curiously at their avian company, circling so close that Steve can very nearly feel their wingbeats against his skin. What he does feel is the sticky warmth of Beta-39’s face pressing into his neck, Beta-39’s fingers wrapping themselves around the straps of Steve’s suit. The motions are tentative, shy. Sharp worry prompts Steve to check in with the lonely weight in his arms.

“Beta-39,” he murmurs, reassuringly. “Do you see them?”

The clone—the boy—doesn’t respond immediately, so Steve adds, “They won’t hurt you.” If Steve can have his way, nothing will ever hurt Bucky ever again, no matter in whatever shape, form, or faded memory that Bucky himself continues to exist.

Steve suspects that the amount of scrutiny he’s receiving from Beta-39 stems more from uncertainty than it does suspicion or skepticism. It’s painfully endearing, feeling him squirm in embarrassment at being caught looking at Steve. The laugh that escapes from Steve’s lungs, surprisingly, is genuine. “Can you say it? Crows.”

Has Beta-39 even been outside before? Steve doesn’t know. Steve doesn’t know what kind of education Beta-39 has had, or if he’s had any at all. Some things, Steve can assume. Beta-39 had most likely been accustomed to a life of strict routine and medical violation—he had most likely never made a choice for himself.

He might have, but only under select circumstances. Steve’s too exhausted to think very deeply about anything right now, but when he’d first found Beta-39, the boy hadn’t been actively resisting his own murder—but after, when Steve had been carrying him around deeper underground, he’d shown distress at being confronted with Beta-13; but not when glancing blows managed to strike or cut him. Is this dichotomy more due to context than it is a lack of self-preservation? Or is it a lack of something else? Beta-39 had covered up his ears without prompting moment Sam started listing the codes through Steve’s communicator, so something’s going on, but Steve doesn’t know what.

“Crows,” Beta-39 responds. It breaks Steve’s train of thought; for a moment, time ceases to matter. “Crows.”

In the quiet of dawn, Beta-39’s voice is finally clear. If it weren’t for the smoking corpses around them, or the creaking, crumbling base behind them, or the dense vegetation in front of them, Steve could have almost gone back to Brooklyn at the disorienting recollection.

“God, you sound just like he did when he was your age—“ Steve very nearly fumbles his precious bundle at the swell of unfathomable love, so hurting. He thought the stupefaction of the inexplicable had ceased to impact him as much as it had at the very beginning when he had entered the theater of war out of the theater of…theater, but obviously, he was wrong.Beta-39 scrabbles at Steve’s straps to stay where he is, and in apology, Steve bounces the child up to rest more securely upon his hip. It occurs to him how intensely stupid it was to ask whether or not Beta-39 could say crows when he could clearly pronounce decommissioning, but whatever. He’s gotten Beta-39 to say something.

His hands are trembling. He can’t make them stop. “Sorry, sorry,” he shudders. What if Beta-39 doesn’t like him? What if the boy doesn’t want to talk to him, or if Steve messes up trying to assure him that everything is going to be ok? What is he even like? Steve can’t make assumptions about the boy’s personality, no matter how many things he’s heard about inherent genetic predispositions. “Beta—I need to call you something other than a letter and a number. Do you have a name?”

Beta-39 blinks at Steve, and his face goes from contemplative to intent; although he doesn’t look away from Steve’s face while he’s thinking, he pouts. His lips go out and his nose crinkles up and his eyebrows come together in the middle. It makes him look a bit like a small, squished duck. Steve struggles to suppress the huff that nearly escapes his chest—whether it’s from laughter or nostalgia, Steve doesn’t know.

“I don’t have a name,” Beta-39 eventually replies. It’s stated as fact, plain and impassive; his face says otherwise, though. The duckface slides away into shyness, and he hunches in a little, retreating away from Steve’s stare. It is a stare, because maybe Steve hadn’t been expecting English quite that standard. It’s so standard it could be from anywhere in the United States, but there’s something uncannily precise about it, like how news announcers nowadays apparently have to go to school and learn how to speak English in a way that’s so quintessentially American that there’s no place that’s home to people who actually sound like that. It’s not Midwestern—and it’s not a New Yorker’s.

But the uncertainty he’s receiving from Beta-39, it’s terrible. The only experience Steve’s had with children consists of playing with Bucky’s younger siblings, kissing babies during the USO tour, and failing at rescuing the dozens of dead boys trapped in the windowless grave collapsing behind him.

He swallows, but that’s a mistake because it’s mostly all blood. He grimaces reflexively, and ends up grimacing more when Beta-39 looks at him with fearful eyes. Shit, Steve’s fucked up already, how useless could he possibly be. He’s the terrible one here.

“Everyone has a name,” Steve says, trying to salvage the situation. To be nameless—it’s akin to being a non-entity, and Beta-39, warm and wriggly against Steve’s chest, is so irrefutably alive and present in the now that the thought of him being only a letter and a number forever is unbearable. “Including you.” Beta-39 snorts and looks away; he hasn’t complained about being held, but it seems now like he’s bursting at the seams with foreign sensation—it seems like he just doesn’t know how to react to close, painless proximity with a total stranger. Honestly, Steve doesn’t know how to deal with it, either.

Steve holds very still as Beta-39 struggles to decide whether or not he wants to keep squirming around—he must be uncomfortable because their clothes are soaked through with blood that’s starting to dry and stick them together—but then he reaches up towards Steve’s face. Natasha has snickered more than once at Steve’s helmet hair after missions, but Beta-39 doesn’t make a sound and Steve barely feels the touch.

Steve’s been out-of-touch with himself—it’s only now that he realizes how close he is to passing out from stress, and he takes a moment to ground himself. He does so by actually sitting down on the ground and holding Beta-39 closer, burying his face into the crook between a narrow little shoulder and a blood-caked neck. In response, Beta-39 curls into Steve, tucking his left arm into the safe space between their bodies. Steve wonders if Beta-39 feels the cold more acutely in his left arm, if the biosynthetic skin somehow acts as an insulator—or if Beta-39 even feels the cold at all.

He rubs a hand up and down Beta-39’s back to warm him better. It couldn’t hurt to be safe. “Can I give you one?” Steve whispers. He shifts a bit to put them in the best patch of sun in the clearing, although it doesn’t help much with the stiff breeze.

Steve feels abysmal. He feels like the pathetic attempt at a soufflé that Bucky had made once, for Rebecca Barnes’ fourteenth birthday. He’s soggy and deflated and when he cuddles Beta-39 and presses a nose to Bucky’s dark auburn waves, it’s all selfish and Steve just can’t bring himself to care about anything else, not when Beta-39 even smells familiar, underneath the cloying scents of iron and copper and salt and sickly antiseptic.

Pressed against Steve’s neck, Beta-39 gives Steve a slow nod, like he doesn’t quite understand what it would mean.

For Steve, it feels like a gift, to be allowed the honor. It’s better than the set of pencils Steve had received from his mother that one Christmas that he’d had pneumonia and Bucky had run all the way across Brooklyn to climb the fire escape and sneak into Steve’s bed. They’d been fifteen, and Steve had slept so well that he’d been able to sit up in bed and draw the next morning—he’d drawn Bucky, spooned around Steve’s hips and half-hidden under the crumpled quilts.

He’d never finished that sketch. Bucky, asleep, had rolled over and promptly choked on his own drool, waking the whole floor with a coughing fit that had Steve in such hysterics that Steve had started hacking up blood. Bucky’s mother had appeared an hour later, glowering up a merry storm at the door with half of a fruitcake in a basket.

The memory makes him smile. They’d been in so much trouble, because Steve was bleeding again and Bucky hadn’t told his parents where he’d gone.

In his marginally elevated mood, Steve tongue slips when he begins suggesting names. “James—no. Not that one.”

He pushes that thought away. “Jacob?” he continues. “Joshua? Jonah?” The approaching whirr of the quinjet’s engines causes Steve to pause; when the quinjet makes good to land, Beta-39 flinches at the close sound and once again takes shelter from the rushing wind in the crook of Steve’s neck. “Shhh, shhh, it’s ok, don’t be afraid,” Steve soothes, rocking Beta-39 from side-to-side.

The speed at which Beta-39 processes his words and takes them as an order is mildly horrifying. Beta-39 stops hiding immediately, and twists in Steve’s hold to watch the quinjet descend. Steve watches him carefully; Beta-39 doesn’t appear to have an adverse psychological reaction to facing something that had instinctively prompted him to use Steve as a barrier. Steve can’t see anything in Beta-39’s face to dispute his lack of fear. It makes as much sense as it doesn’t. How many of Beta-39’s reactions are him, and how many are the result of everything that he’s been taught to do? There's so much Steve doesn't know.

Steve’s careful to keep Beta-39 secure against him as he rises to his feet and staggers towards the landed quinjet. Once the back hatch has been lowered, he wordlessly straps himself into his seat, keeping an arm around Beta-39 the entire time. His helmet and shield get disentangled by Sam, who shoves them into a convenient nook inset into the wall along with the guns that they didn’t bring in to the base. Steve meets Clint’s eyes and furrows his brow in warning—hell itself could rise up at this exact moment and the legions would be hard-pressed to make Steve give up Beta-39 to another seat. Technically, Steve’s just run down into another kind of hell and staggered out mostly whole, so he honestly doesn’t give a fuck. Fuck fucks. Fuck all the fucks, Beta-39 isn’t going anywhere.

Clint, who is only sometimes an angel, simply shrugs and does the angelic thing of closing the back hatch and getting himself resituated in the pilot’s seat. Nobody says anything.

Good. Steve can’t really handle talking to anyone else right now.

It takes him off-guard, though, when Beta-39 suddenly mumbles, “I’m not afraid.” He looks like he’s sitting quite cozy on Steve’s lap, but his limbs are stiff and his head rests on Steve’s collarbone. Despite what he says, there’s still a trace of doubt when he peers at Sam or Natasha or Clint. Beta-39’s little fingers tighten in the loop of Steve’s belt, and he ultimately tucks his dirty face away into Steve’s chest.

“It’s alright,” Steve says. “They’re with me. You can trust them.”

Beta-39’s tense shoulders relax only marginally, but Steve’s relieved that Beta-39 can hear him, and maybe trusts Steve enough to believe him. Beta-39 doesn’t say a thing for a few minutes after liftoff, but with Steve rubbing little circles into his back, the boy slowly starts to lean more heavily into his chest.

That must be a good sign? Steve checks to his left to see what Sam thinks, and all he gets is a quirk of Sam’s eyebrow at Steve’s haphazard attempts to stay on top of Beta-39’s well-being. “I don’t blame him for being suspicious,” Sam mouths. “You’ve been through hell.”

It’s weird when someone else says it, but it’s true. Steve’s so goddamned tired, and he figures Beta-39 must be the same. Sam, who is an actual angel all the time, hands him a towel dampened with some water from a water bottle; as Steve rearranges himself and Beta-39 so he has better access to wipe his face and fingers cleaner than they are now, he catches a glimpse of himself in the shine of panel on the far side of the cabin.

He looks like a raccoon. Where his helmet hadn’t covered up his face, Steve’s skin is encrusted with near-black gore and drying blood. He’s seen himself look this dirty before—but before, it had been dirt and soot and some blood—but not like this. It’s like he’s gutted a horse and spent the whole night rolling around in it without bothering to take any of the actual guts out. He clenches his jaw and puts himself to work scrubbing at his face until there’s nothing more that’s peeling off; he then manages to convince Beta-39 to hold still for the same treatment with a cleaner corner of the towel.

When they’re done, Sam exchanges the dirty towel for a bottle of ambrosia and some manna, which are actually just another bottle of water and double chocolate chunky peanut butter energy bar. Sam dumps the towel in a marked bin with a lid set into the wall of the jet without any fuss—an angel, indeed. Ideally, Steve and Beta-39 would strip down, have a perfunctory wash, and change into new clothing; Steve’s got set of spare civs, but there’s nothing for Beta-39. Beta-39 has a deathgrip on him and Steve is so loathe to unwrap his arms from his charge that he’s committed himself to an uncomfortably sticky flight.

Steve takes a mouthful of water, swishes, and spits it out on the floor of the quinjet to clear his mouth of Bucky’s replicated blood, his own bile, and whatever nanomachines might still be crawling around in the environment of his face. Everything is disgusting; the others on the jet are covered with their own collection of dust, soot, and gore. There’s nobody around to give a damn. Steve’s spat out far worse than bloodied water before, anyway—but given what’s in this particular mouthful, this one might be the worst.

Besides, the whole floor of the quinjet is covered in grating that drains into a waste tank shared by the small nook of a washroom set off to the side. This is also technically Stark’s jet regardless of what emblem is plastered on the tail. He can afford to clean up the mess.

The energy bar is dry and hard to chew, but by interspersing small bites with gulps of water, it tastes like it’s from heaven.

Although he’s eating, it doesn’t make Steve exempt from an extremely brief physical—Sam looks him over and glowers when his hands brush the edges of the slash in Steve’s uniform from Beta-13’s knife. “Flesh wound?” Sam mouths, carefully checking the rest of what he can see of Steve’s body for any more injuries. Steve nods, but shakes his head when Sam asks if there’s anything else that needs attention; there is so much blood soaked into the fabric of his spare tactical suit that there’s very little of it that still looks blue, and the scraps of gore and whatnot break up the silhouette of the surface, enough that it probably does look as if his body has been shredded up a lot more than it actually did. It’s just a flesh wound and some bruising here and there. “I’ll be examining it later, all right?”

Steve nods, again. He’s barely felt the pain due to the adrenaline from everything else, but the wound is hardly life-endangering, to him. It’s not that important right now.

Steve multitasks with Sam to remove the IV drip bag from where he’s tucked it into his uniform, and they carefully hang it up on one of the overhead rafters. Sam touches Beta-39’s shoulder and asks if he could look him over; after Beta-39 looks to Steve for confirmation and Steve nods, Beta-39 slowly agrees and allows Sam to conduct the most cursory of physical checks on Beta-39 possible, only noting where the IV line enters Beta-39’s chest and the spongy, biosynthetic skin growing down Beta-39’s left arm along with other bumps and bruises. He then redirects the rest of his attention to deciphering the labels on the IV bag swinging gently at eye-level while Clint directs the quinjet towards London.

Beta-39 watches Steve continue to eat, but quietly refuses Steve’s offers of food. Steve frowns with worry, until it becomes apparent that Beta-39 was waiting for him to finish eating so he ask something. A tug on Steve’s sleeve, more timid than it is demandingly curious, is quickly followed by a soft “Designation?” Beta-39 speaks in the same tone of voice that Bucky had used to read poetry, when the teacher had called upon him to stand in class; smooth, level, and unbearably sweet.

Steve’s utterly gone over this boy, and he doesn’t know a damn thing about how to take care of him. “How about…Jesse?” he asks, softly. Beta-39 nestles closer; he rests Bucky’s cleft chin on Steve’s shoulder. “Jeremiah?”

There’s not a peep. Ok. Steve tries again. “Or maybe a different letter altogether, huh? George, Gabriel, Gregory? Ryan? Thomas? William? Elliot—“

He freezes when Beta-39 presses a miniature of Bucky’s right hand to Steve’s face. Beta-39’s palm covers part of Steve’s mouth, and his fingers splay out over Steve’s nose and cheek. “Wait, I like—“ He stops, but then speaks up again, more daring. “I, I like Je-re-mi-ah,” he struggles to say. He’s trying so hard to communicate with Steve past the obvious anxiety and apprehension he feels, and scant moments later, Beta-39drops his hand back to curl up in a little fist over Steve’s heart, apparently alarmed by his own boldness.

Jeremiah.

Steve bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste the familiar tang of metal on his tongue. “Jeremiah. Jeremy. Jerry.” Beta-39 nods. He nods again, and again. His sweet face grows pinker with delighted embarrassment and he ultimately has to duck his head down into Steve’s pectorals. It’s precious, and Steve stares because he’s a hopeless gooey sap who feels too much. Feeling is horrible. It’s strange, because right now, it’s sort of the best thing he’s experienced for a long, long time.

There’s a light cough, and Steve reluctantly drags his eyes away from Jeremiah to meet Clint’s eyes as he turns around from the front of the quinjet, gesturing to the fact that Steve has been dripping blood out of his suit all over the seat and is starting to flake off the ochre, encrusted patches of flesh and whatnot drying in the air of the quinjet’s cabin. “If the kid’s stuck on you like that for good, we might need to pick up a stuffed animal or something to distract him once we arrive so you can both…wash off and stop being a biohazard.”

Reasonable enough. The London rendezvous is in about ten hours, which gives them approximately an hour and a half to get situated before they meet with Fury. It would certainly make an impression to stride through the halls of the MI6 headquarters in a pack of four plus one, reeking of death and carnage, but it’s not ideal when Fury is supposed to get them access to the two corpses in cold storage.

Although Steve hates the thought of bringing Jeremiah into yet another research facility, Hydra had been purged from the MI6 shortly after Natasha’s whistleblowing at the Triskelion. It’s safe. Fury’s got friends in high places. MI6 is currently the only somewhat safe place that could provide further insight into Jeremiah’s anatomy and construction beyond the digital and paper documents that they’d been able to seize; Beta-24, at the FBI, is too newly deceased to provide much, despite the fact that he and Beta-39 might be more technologically similar than any of the older bodies.

At some point, though, this would mean that Steve would have to separate from Jeremiah, who so clearly seems to enjoy soaking up the body heat that Steve radiates like a furnace—even if the stench of death is beginning to become overpowering in the small space. He needs something else to cling to, something like…

“We’ll get Jeremy a, a…” Shit, Steve can’t say it, he can’t, he fucking can’t. He can think Bucky’s name all he wants, hear it rebounding back and forth between his heart and his mind, but to say it? Steve’s composure, already so fragile, shatters and he crumples forward to laugh hysterically. It feels rather like dying. Steve knows what that’s like, intimately. “A bear. A Bu—a, a Buck—“

Jeremiah muffles a sound into Steve’s shoulder, and shifts about while Steve shakes uselessly. Steve doesn’t have enough faculties in one place to figure out what’s going on, really, but then Natasha pipes up from the second pilot’s seat.

Her normal, sultry purr is absent. Instead, she sounds like the kind of paper they use to make folding screens, veined and translucent, exquisitely delicate in appearance but warm in presence from the lacquered cherry wood frame. It’s less of a lover’s kiss and more of a mother’s. “A Jer-Bear,” she quips, and Jeremiah makes another odd, snuffling sound by Steve’s ear.

It should be a jest. It’s not. It’s perfect. It feels like it’s the most horrible joke that Natasha has ever made in Steve’s company and perhaps because of that, the most wonderful. “That’s right,” Steve gasps, breathlessly. There’s snot running out of his nose and he’s choking on iron phlegm and his eyes are doing a better job of washing his face than the damp towel did. He hasn’t cried like this since, since—since ever, he supposes. When he had cried in the bar, alone, in the dark, he’d choked out his heart in the bombed-out ruins of London and let the silence speak for itself. When he had cried in his youth, it had always been truncated by his own pigheaded stubbornness and desperation to prove himself as somebody worthwhile to have around, somebody who wasn’t weak enough to cry from a broken bone, or several.

As a result, he’s backlogged by maybe at least seventy years of miserable garbage? Probably. It’s about damn time he got rid of it all, or at least started to. “A Jer-Bear, for Jeremiah,” he rasps, and he’s already so filthy that when he squeezes Jeremiah for comfort, the boy squeezes him back, heedless of what gunk he’s getting more covered in.

Steve hears a little wheeze to match his own—oh fuck, Jerry’s crying too. Jeremiah, Jeremy, Jerry; Bucky’s half-metal clone blows his nose onto Steve’s cheek and attempts to pat Steve’s head with his skin-covered hand, but it comes across as an aggressive hair flattening treatment. Steve makes some sort of strangled gargle. Is it a guffaw? Is it a wail? The world will never know, it’s the tragedy of the modern age meant for the front pages, rendered lovingly in red and blue and black instead of white, because it’s a tragedy, folks.

It’s a tragedy.

Sam reaches over, because he’s an angel and Steve’s fit to perish. Sam reaches over and scooches close to press thigh-to-thigh, not seeming to care that gore is seeping over into his trousers or that Steve is starting to stink like a dead dog left out at high noon in the peak of summer. Sam’s hand comes around the far side of Steve’s head, and pulls him closer; Steve’s temple drops onto Sam’s broad shoulder, and he feels Jeremiah slowly follow Steve down to lie in repose across both of their laps. Automatically, Steve wraps his hands around the far side of Jeremiah’s legs and holds him secure, holds him safe.

On Sam’s side, Jeremiah’s hair splays out over Sam’s knees in damp, matted tentacles more black than brown from what’s gotten into it. Steve notices that he’d missed a spot by Jeremiah’s nose when he was cleaning, leaving a rusty blotch there that in the end just makes Jeremiah look like a very dirty puppy.

Steve’s fading fast into an exhausted stupor, even though he doesn’t want to. But he’s so worn-out. He’s a rag with more holes than weave, with loose ends so loose someone could pick any one of them and pull and make the whole thing unravel into a worthless pile of scraps. He doesn’t want to sleep. He doesn’t want to leave Jeremiah alone.

But he starts to. Drifting, he hears Sam murmur, “Nice to meet you. I’m Sam, what’s your name?”

Sam already knows Jeremiah’s name, but the fact that he’s introducing himself and giving Jeremiah a chance to interact soothes Steve’s nerves significantly. He nearly nods off there, but fights to linger when he makes out, “My name is Jeremiah. And Jeremy, and Jerry, too.””

“Three? Wow. Which one is your favorite?”

“I don’t have a favorite.” Even with his eyes closed, Steve can tell that Jeremiah’s starting to pout again from the simple pitch of his voice. He’s not upset—just thinking real hard. It’s the same reason Bucky made that face, too.

“Really?”

“Affirmative.”

“You keep saying that, and I’m going to call you Jer-Bear.”

Steve can feel Jeremiah shifting restlessly in exasperation. “Why is it necessary to have so many names—“

“Nope, it's not necessary at all. But sometimes folks just do. Like you.” Sam moves, and Jeremiah stills at the hand that must be stroking his hair. Steve’s hearing is acute enough that although it’s not quite echolocation, it can get fucking close if he focuses. “Jeremy and Jerry are variations of Jeremiah, and Jer-Bear’s just a nickname. You good with nicknames?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, Jer-Bear, I like you. Steve here likes you so much he gave you three names. Natasha, you see her over there? She technically gave you this one, but I say that we’re going share it so it’s from me, too. Nicknames are silly name variations given out of affection, and what do you know? We like you bunches. How’s that, Jerry Jerry Jer-Bear—”

Jeremiah doesn’t say anything for a long time, long enough that Steve stops breathing so he can hear Jeremiah breathe more clearly.

Then, impossibly, he hears a snort—Steve cracks open a crusty eye and drinks in his fill of Jeremiah huffing and puffing with unfamiliar giggles, gasping unsteadily from the incomparable experience of being relentlessly tickled. Sam’s careful to avoid the central IV line, but wiggles his fingers along Jeremiah’s belly and armpits and earns a squealing outburst and flailing feet on the far side of Steve’s legs. “G-good!” Jeremiah howls, trailing off into a barrage of yelping and shrieking. At first, his movements are harmlessly defensive, like he’s not sure if he’s being attacked or not and knows even less about if it’s acceptable to bat Sam’s hands away—but quickly, the fright dissipates, melting away into delight.

The grin that begins to form threatens to split Jeremiah’s round cheeks. As it is, all covered in dried blood and boogers and tear tracks, Jeremiah’s face, contorted in novel play, instantly invokes Steve’s memories of Bucky laughing and rolling about in the dust after a toothy fight; but instead of the sharp misery of recollection, there’s a budding joy that Steve’s surprised to find within himself. Bucky and Jerry; their faces overlap, blend together, the same and entirely different. What’s bad is bad is bad but it’s done and gone and what’s left is, is—

In the front, Clint’s shoulders shake with mirth, and Natasha’s turned around, smiling. It’s not one of her disturbing, too-wide toothy things, either. It’s the real deal, all curved lips and curved eyes. “Don’t think I can’t see you faking sleep, Steve,” she snickers, tender. “Jeremy’s cute as a button but the both of you really need your recovery time. We’ll wake you an hour out from London.”

Sam places a hand on Jeremiah’s chest to calm him down, and the squeals soon die down to wheezy hiccups, then soft, dreamless breaths. Jeremiah conks out like a light and Steve figures that it’s not long before he does, too. Even so, Steve could watch Jeremiah’s chest rise and fall for hours; he could count each little bare finger and toe a thousand times, he could look and look and look however much he wants and know that this child is alive. Faced with this, how could Steve even think about escaping?

“Ok, big boy, sleepytime.” Sam’s hand is warm and dry on Steve’s neck, which is refreshing because the rest of him is kind of cold and wet, but that shouldn’t really be too dangerous to his health because his suit is designed out of a material that has wool’s property of keeping him insulated no matter how sodden he gets. He sure is sodden. “How’s that sound?”

How is it, really? Steve breathes. In. Out. He listens, and Jeremiah breathes in, out. What’s left, now? Only—

“Good. It sounds good.”

Steve sleeps.