Chapter Text
1.
It was a clear spring day in Washington DC. A jogger was nearing the Potomac on her usual route when a sound like engines coupled with the movement of massive amounts of water came through the trees from the river. She ignored it at first, then slowed, nervous. There was a large forbidding building nearby, headquarters of some shady government organization, something military. Base instinct told her something was happening. She looked up as a huge shape, more than one, filled the sky. She stared, riveted, at the incredible ships, some kind of flying aircraft carriers bristling with weaponry, hauled themselves into the sky with a powerful throb of engines. Was this planned? She didn’t know whether to be terrified or awed. A scattering of people were doing the same as her, watching, heads craned, poleaxed.
The wailing of sirens became audible, coming from the building as well as rabidly approaching from a distance. The atmosphere among the spectators shifted. People began exchanging glances, taking steps in uncertain directions.
Then the sky exploded. Someone screamed, “RUN!” She gave a sharp cry of terror, took a stumbling step backward, turned, and broke into a sprint.
The three helicarriers were exchanging devastating close-range missiles. They continued to fire on each other over the river even while exploding into collapsing heaps of demolished metal, becoming swallowed by a black cloud of smoke that spread like a fatally expanding wound in the blue sky.
Hydra was exposed and Insight was foiled. The plans to murder millions of people and extend an iron grip over the world, that had been seeded half a century in the past and had grown like cancer in secret, were burning in ruins for everyone on earth to see. The ships fell, grudgingly, reluctantly, as though through molasses, crushing the Triskelion building in the course of their descent.
In the heart of the chaos, a chopper circled low, avoiding debris by luck as much as skill, Fury grim and silent at the controls. Natasha and Sam leaned out either side as far as possible, looking everywhere. The mission had succeeded under Captain Steve Rogers’ leadership, but according to last contact, he was still on Helicarrier C, going down with the ship.
There was a clenched fist in Natasha’s chest and it squeezed tighter and tighter. She refused to acknowledge it, leaned out an inch further, straining her eyes. A chunk of metal sheared past her close enough that she could feel the sizzling heat. The craft was burning, sliding out of the sky and breaking apart, accelerating. Fury already had them closer than safety allowed, but if they went directly under it would mean death. Steve was still on there. Unless he had fallen and was under it. In which case he would also be under water.
Steve had been barely more than sore after fighting an army of aliens. She had watched him get blown up and flung hundreds of feet into solid concrete. She’d seen his body make contact with rock and steel hard enough to dent and crack the material. He would grunt, wince, and get up. She’d watched him shrug off what looked like 3rd-degree burns. She was still positive he’d kicked a power cell of active plutonium.
Steve was Captain America from the comic books. He was indestructible.
She couldn’t see anything but twisted falling metal, smoke and water and fire. All she needed was a scrap of red, white, and blue. That ridiculous old relic of a uniform, it was down there somewhere. They were going to find him and he would be fine. The fist clenched tighter; it was getting hard to breathe. She ignored it angrily. Keep looking. Find him. He had done it, and now all they had to do was bring him home.
She scanned the waterline, squinting through smoke, and heard a low groan through the comms from Sam, looking out the side closer to the dying helicarrier. She glanced over and saw it crashing into the water below them, and for a moment everything in her went flat and empty. The fucking robotic apathy from the Red Room, protecting her from feeling so she could complete the mission, and did anyone ever suspect how bitterly she hated that? Steve, probably. Steve felt everything and it made him stronger. Steve wore his heart on his sleeve and trusted people and believed in them and she wasn’t done figuring out how he survived doing that. It wasn’t his super soldier body. He used to be small and frail. He was mortal.
She didn’t let herself dive out of the chopper to find him get him but she felt the impulse zing through her body like a shock. She turned back to scanning the waterline and her vision was blurred. She blinked and glared and bared her teeth, no one could see her, and she was so, so furious. If Steve didn’t come back from this she would never fucking forgive him. Any of them.
A huge wave of displaced water was rushing to the shore. If Steve wasn’t at the bottom of the Potomac maybe he was part of the swirling wreckage being shoved up the riverbank. Her gaze continued along the shore, tracking the wave as it broke, and suddenly with a surge of adrenaline zeroed in on a pair of dull red boots.
“ TWO O’CLOCK ” she barked, and a second later heard Sam scream “ Steve! ” and spared a glance to see him just barely stop himself from lunging out of the chopper wingless. She turned all her focus back to the motionless body just far enough up the bank that he wasn’t completely swamped by the wave. She widened her field of vision to his surroundings and caught movement at the treeline. Just a flicker, but she knew what it was: a tall dark figure about to vanish.
“It’s him,” she said into the comms. “The Winter Soldier survived and is leaving the scene.” The likely chain of events was simple: the Soldier had completed his mission, or as much of it as he was able.
Sam reached the same conclusion. “Murdering mother fucker, ” he snarled. “ Get us down NOW! ” Fury responded with silence and an immediate dive. She leapt out at around 20 feet, hit the ground and rolled, her shoulder screaming. Sam followed with a shout of alarm.
Steve’s body was three feet away. There was a long blip of time between seeing and comprehending that he was— breathing. She crouched over him and put fingers to his pulse, which was there. Faint and rapid. He was coughing up water weakly, eyelids fluttering. Sam had slid to his knees next to her, she realized, and without a second thought she turned care over to him and rose. Sam called her name but she didn’t turn back. There were boot prints in the mud and he had just been there. He wasn’t vanishing this time.
“I’m in pursuit.”
Steve was alive. The Winter Soldier was escaping. That awful fist clenching her chest was gone and everything was razor sharp; she was hunting. A corner of her mind was tallying facts:
-She couldn’t take the Soldier down alone with her injury, maybe not even without it, but he was likely injured as well.
-He had not killed Steve, had left him on the riverbank alive: total mission failure for Hydra.
-Steve getting out of the water on his own seemed unlikely.
-The Winter Soldier had been James Buchanan Barnes and Steve had been determined, in the way only he could be, that his friend was still in there.
She was in the treeline now and the prints had faded, but they had been uneven in the mud, betraying a bad limp. His big black-clad body and chrome-shining arm should be visible but she saw nothing. She froze and listened, finding the layer of quiet beneath the chaos of the river.
A rustle. Breath through gritted teeth. Putting on her best act she continued forward, looking for footprints on the ground, a figure in the brush, but never upward, toward the branches overhead, where he was watching.
Either her subterfuge failed or the Soldier just didn’t believe in taking chances —he dropped on her like a panther. She dipped out of the way barely in time and suddenly they were fighting and old strange memories were flickering at the edges of her vision. She shoved them away, she had to focus, she would be dead already if he weren’t significantly damaged. His flesh arm was moving with a painful limited range that pointed to a dislocated shoulder, and some other injury to the hip, pelvis, or upper femur was inhibiting his movements as well. His teeth were bared.
<“Not going back,”> He suddenly snarled in hoarse Russian as she flipped to avoid a blow from the metal arm that would have killed her. She danced away and bought herself a single second to respond.
<“Not to them,”> She could read his movements too well. She shook off the deja vu and let herself see that he was going for a knife to throw it into her carotid and make a getaway. A kick high on the leg she saw him favor caused him to grunt in pain and falter. <“We are not Hydra. We can help you—”> her death in the shape of a metal fist whizzed past her again. The increasing agony in her shoulder wound was an urgent warning; it became clear her choices were to either let him go or let him kill her.
<“Fuck you, Widow.”> Beneath the viciousness he sounded weary. There was a tree at her back. He would have her by the throat, and that would be it.
There was always a third option. <“Don’t you want to know if he made it?”>
He flinched and for the barest second the glare was replaced with wild-eyed confusion, fear, and need. The momentary distraction was all she needed.
She activated all her remaining Bites and jammed them right where metal met flesh, and the Soldier screamed. The sound tugged at something hidden in her mind.
< “Why does he sound like that?”> Olga, one of the youngest, dared to ask in a whisper. They all stood at attention as they’d been ordered to after Soldat had attacked Instructor Prushka. Everything had been normal, Soldat leading the Red Room girls through another of what he called their “dancing lessons,” which were meant to be serious but were in fact much more fun than their actual ballet classes: one-on-one or in groups they would try to snatch a ribbon from his neck or a twig from behind his ear while he teased them in English, tapping their heads, necks, chests; saying “Dead, dead, you’re dead” when they failed to evade his play-blows. It was a game, he’d explained haltingly to Instructor P. when he’d burst in demanding to know why he heard laughter.
<“They learn this way,”> Soldat had said. <“Children...learn better with games.”> He stared at the floor with a wrinkle in his brow as if his own words confused him.
Instructor P. backhanded him across the face, the sound ringing through the room. <“These are not children,”> he’d hissed. <“These are Widows. They are tools, like you. Understand this, you useless soft-head. They are whatever the mission requires them to be: weapons, spies, sacrifices, whores—”> And suddenly Instructor had dangled by the neck as the metal fist tightened and the Soldier snarled close to his face, in English, “They’re kids, you fuckin—”
He had choked out a word and Soldat had collapsed and been dragged out by men with guns, and the girls had been ordered to stand against the wall where they remained, rigid, ignoring the tired ache beginning in their feet. Long, drawn-out screams had begun to echo through the building from some hidden room.
<“Tomorrow there will be a new exercise. No more games with the dancing bear. You will learn: the bear always has teeth.”>
The next day they had been sent into the woods and after an hour the Winter Soldier was sent after them. They were told the first caught would be punished. Olga’s neck had snapped like a twig under the metal fingers.
Breathing hard, Natasha stared down at the man convulsing at her feet as he stilled into unconsciousness. That much voltage would endanger a normal person’s life, but it couldn’t be counted on to keep him out for longer than ten minutes, maybe a lot less. A bullet in the spine would render him helpless more effectively. He’d probably survive it. Her head was cocked to one side, her gun pointing loosely at his still form as she considered.
The chopper was still hovering. She touched her ear. “Fury.”
“Romanov,” he barked.
“What’s our status.”
“Wilson’s keeping Rogers stable while they wait for EMS, on their way. No place to land this bird and he’s too injured to pull him up. What the hell is your status? He get away?”
“I need to know if you have tranquilizers on board.”
“Medical, or ICER? Eh, got some of both.”
She was surprised to feel a hint of relief that she wouldn’t need to shoot him just yet. “I need you directly over my location. Lower tranqs and a rope. We need to keep him under, and we need to get him to the Hulk-proof room at the Tower right now.”
17 hours later
Steve came awake in a soft, slow haze. Everything was far away and floaty, but as awareness returned he felt a frisson of panic. Was he...was he waking up again? Was it the future, again? Had he lost time—
But, no. His body hurt all over, sharp pain in several places. Bullets, shattered glass and steel...Insight. If he was still injured it had just happened. He cracked his eyes open and registered the soft music playing from a phone. There was Sam, on his right.
He just lay for a while, listening to the song, the words, savoring the calm, steady presence at his bedside. Another friend had sat in that spot, seventy—or five—years ago. A metal fist had slammed into his face, over and over, it hadn’t seemed like it would stop until he was dead, and...and he had let it, and he had let himself sink, and now—he gave the man next to him a sidelong glance. This friend, here and now, might have some things to be angry with him for.
“On your left.” The look he got was a mix of relief and exasperation. Sam smirked and stayed quiet and let Steve drift in the quiet music until he came back to himself a little more, uncounted minutes later.
“What happened?” His voice rasped and Sam held a cup of water to his face that he immediately took in his own hand and drank in one gulp.
“What happened is we took down Pierce, and the helicarriers, and Hydra, and you almost died. And all there is for you to accomplish now, right now? Is to lie in that bed and let your super-body finish the work the doctors that saved your life started.”
“And?” Sam just looked at him. “What about Bucky?”
“I really want to tell you to wait and rest before we get into that, but I already know you enough to know that would be a waste of breath.” A sigh. “The Winter Soldier is not dead. He is...also not in the wind.”
“ Wait, so he’s in custody? Is he in our custody, or—? Sam, I gotta,” he moved to sit up, maybe to get up, or at least to convey his urgency. A ragged blade of agony tore into his back with the first movement and the world went white for a second. He blinked back to the hospital room, feeling cold sweat prickle on his forehead. Sam was looking at him with his lips pressed very tightly together. Yeah. Fairly pissed, then.
“ That hurt? Yeah. That’s because of the bullet in your back that missed both your spine and your renal artery by no more than a centimeter before it stuck in your abdominal muscles. The muscles in your torso and thigh are fucking shredded because you used them for some extreme action after he punched holes in you.” The jump down. Lifting the girder. The Soldier’s face of blank terror and incomprehension, like a wild animal in a trap that would savage its rescuer, unable to recognize a helping hand, to see anything but death approaching. “Fractured skull. Shattered cheekbone. You were in surgery for eight hours. I wasn’t using a goddamn figure of speech, Steve. You’re a super soldier, you fought armies, but this fight—you almost fucking died. ”
It was difficult to keep meeting those hard, angry, frightened eyes. Sam was so honest, so unafraid to feel. “How...how did I get out of the water?”
“How did you...Steve. What do you mean how did you get out of the water? We found you on the shore.”
Steve found he had to stare at the ceiling rather than meet Sam’s eyes. “I mean, I didn’t get myself there.”
There was a long, long pause.
“The shield still hasn’t been found. It wasn’t with you.” Steve still couldn’t look over. “What the fuck happened on that helicarrier, Steve?”
“It was him. He pulled me out.” He finally looked over. Sam’s eyes were burning with accusation. “It was, wasn’t it? Sam. You gotta tell me what’s happened to him.”
Sam glared for a moment before deflating on a long breath. “He dumped you on the riverbank and walked away. Natasha caught up with him. He’s in a Hulk-proof cell in Avengers tower now. The only full-time guard is Jarvis. He hasn’t responded or reacted to anything since he woke up there.”
“ He’s in there. I know it, I saw it, Sam, we have to—”
“Listen to me. I don’t think either of us have any idea of what we’re dealing with here. Will you just—Natasha’s on her way. Will you wait, try to rest like you really, really need to, until she gets here and can fill us both in a little more? Pretend you’re someone who’s met the concept of patience. Okay, Steve? I’m asking you.”
He scowled darkly. And then, with a very, very conscious act of will, he relaxed himself and didn’t demand any more answers. …He really did hurt. And for being awake for all of seven minutes, he was exhausted.
“There you go. Let Marvin Gaye tell you all about it.”
Y ou know he means you no harm,
But you know you know...
According to Natasha, the Soldier had been catatonic after waking up in the Hulk Or Other Bad Overpowered Yardbird cell in the basement of Avengers Tower. Security measures consisted of JARVIS, Nat and now Sam on guard shifts, and the impenetrability of the HOO BOY containment and the Tower overall. There was a small remotely-controlled airlock door with a long list of failsafes and redundancies, through which a bot delivered water and food. A toilet with a tiny attached sink came out of the floor at the push of a panel inside the room, and vanished back down after use. The room—the cell— was otherwise smooth and featureless white.
Steve was horrified by the blank cylinder of thick titanium and impenetrable glass, but Natasha was adamant. “Listen,” she’d said in the hospital during the excessive two-day healing period Steve had submitted to before cajoling Sam into helping him escape. “It’s not just that he’s as strong as you. Hydra used him to kill people whose power and security made them untouchable. Some of the facilities he got in and out of, unseen, to kill the highest-level, most protected person there— no one knows how he did it. And if he escapes, people will die. You know this. The best-case scenario of the Winter Soldier loose in this city is that he’s run down by law enforcement and killed, and there’s no scenario where innocent people are safe.”
The cell was a semicircle of solid metal connected to another of two-foot-thick glass. A few tiny reinforced vents in the glass allowed sound and ventilation to pass through. The whole thing sat in a larger, bunker-like area, with a space connected to surveillance out of sight of the cell, behind the metal walls. Thus the prisoner could be seen from everywhere, but half the outer space was blocked from his view.
He sat with his back to the metal wall, knees drawn up and arms resting on them, lank hair hanging in his face, gaze vacant. According to JARVIS he had paced a few circuits of the room, looking for weaknesses and cameras, and then settled in that spot and...stopped. It had been almost 60 hours since then, when Steve walked into the room that housed the cell.
Steve had to stop and take the place in. It chilled him. Stark’s tower was full of slick technology and power, but he’d never imagined it housing a space quite so brutal, so clearly meant for enemies. And apparently it was the best and only option for—for Bucky. The dissonance of it all clanged in his head. He thought he’d adjusted to the fact that Bucky was alive and had been a Hydra operative for decades, but seeing him in a cell, still in the filthy tactical gear from the fight, the shock hit him all over again. How the hell had any of this happened?
He walked up to the glass. The other man gave no sign that he was present. He didn’t know what words he was going to come up with but he forced himself to speak.
“Hey, pal. ...I’m sorry you’re stuck in there. I’m sure you’d like to know what the hell is goin’ on, what the plan is, but, well, that makes two of us.” And he heard himself chuckle helplessly. What the fuck was he doing. He’d infiltrated a base of secret Nazis in a USO costume, he’d woken up a time traveller in the twenty first century, but here and now he was finally, truly, out of his depth.
What did they do to you, he wanted to ask. They knew nothing. Tony was on his way back to the Tower and was beginning work with JARVIS on sifting through the data dump. There was nothing about a Winter Soldier at first look according to Natasha, but there might be deeply hidden encrypted information possible to parse, especially for Tony, with the advantage not only of his AI and his intellect, but also the hacked data he’d collected from SHIELD, back in 2012.
There had to be answers there somewhere. They had to exist in the man in front of him, if he could be reached. He was in there. It was just a flicker in Steve’s battered semiconscious memory of the end of their fight on the helicarrier, but the metal fist had frozen mid-strike and the Soldier’s murderous expression had cracked open. There had been something else in it, before he fell.
“ Even if there is,” Natasha had said, ruthless the way only she could be, “He’s not gonna turn back into your friend just because you ask him nicely. He’s barely a person at all. You need to understand this, ” she continued over his attempt to interrupt and object. “ He does not see himself as a person. Steve, when I say that can be taken away from someone, it’s because I know. ” Her eyes had been wide and her expression remote, looking at him like he was a bug under glass. It was how she looked when she let people see the real her, without any of her masks in place, and it was unsettling as hell, but Steve recognized it for the raw honesty it was. It was something she showed very few people. He shut up and tried to let her words sink in, and her intense stare softened a fraction.
“That’s also why you can believe me when I tell you it’s something that can be taken back.”
He wondered, not for the first time, what particular hell she had passed through, to become the Black Widow.
“But this won’t be easy. Harder for you than anyone else. It’s going to be bad, and it’ll probably get worse.”
…………...
“JARVIS?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Has he eaten?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Slept?”
“No.”
“Has...has he even moved?”
“This is, in fact, the most response I have so far observed.”
The Soldier had glanced up sharply at the first sound of the AI’s voice, and the blank expression was briefly replaced by one of surprise and then by a glare.
“JARVIS is an artificial intelligence,” Steve explained. “It...he?”
“Either pronoun is perfectly acceptable to me, Captain Rogers.”
“He,” Steve went with, “runs the security and other systems in this entire building. That includes keeping watch on you while you’re in there.”
The Soldier’s cold gaze flickered momentarily over to him, then settled back into the thousand-yard stare. But where he had before seemed entirely absent, he now seemed stonily, deliberately blank. Pissed off, in fact.
“ Bucky,” Steve said, unable to hold back any longer, “do you remember anything? Do you know who you are? Do you know me?” He was up against the glass, palms pressed to it. “What happened to you?”
Another swift glance, up and down Steve’s body and away. After a moment, Steve jolted when the Soldier actually deigned to respond out loud. He spoke a few words in hoarse, quiet Russian, staring straight ahead.
“JARVIS, can you translate?”
“He said— ‘interrogation will not yield results.’”
Steve opened his mouth to say ‘You’re not our prisoner,’ but stopped himself and sighed. That would be a lie. “I’m not your enemy, Buck.”
Sam found him, standing in front of the reinforced Plexiglass, staring helplessly. He walked up next to Steve and folded his arms, regarding the Winter Soldier with his frank gaze.
“Dude still looks scary.”
“He looks like someone flipped a switch and turned him off,” muttered Steve. It was awful, his features slack and his eyes unseeing.
“No change then?”
“Actually, he did react to Jarvis, and then responded to me when I asked him what he remembered.”
Sam turned to him with a surprised, curious “Oh?”
“He said there was no point interrogating him. In Russian. Then he shut back down. He thinks he’s our prisoner, Sam.”
“Well. Better ours than anyone else’s. C’mon.” He slapped Steve’s shoulder. “You can keep staring at him staring on the camera feeds, and he can have some illusion of privacy while we talk about him and this whole mess, come on, man.”
They sat down in surprisingly comfortable chairs in front of a bank of screens, and Sam let Steve do an impression of the Soldier’s semi-catatonic stare for a few more minutes, talking quietly about the looming threat of Congressional hearings and his own plans to move and be based up in New York for the time being, knowing Steve wasn’t fully listening. He trailed off, reached out, and squeezed his shoulder firmly, and Steve finally felt himself surface enough to look over and meet his eyes and see the understanding in them. It wasn’t pity, but Sam was hurting for him and let it show.
Faint wonder passed through his mind, not for the first time—what the hell would have happened to him if he hadn’t gone on that predawn run and reached out, with a touch of desperation, not as Captain America but as insufferable punk Steve Rogers, and found this man’s friendship?
“I can’t imagine what you must be feeling.” Sam said. “But I’m with you. We’re gonna do everything we can.”
Slowly, haltingly, they tried to piece together some kind of approach to the issue of their angry unresponsive captive who’d nearly murdered them both multiple times less than four days ago. They got a video call from Tony, who was sequestered in the top floors working furiously to sift through Hydra data, hunt through all of SI for any signs of Hydra interference, begin evaluation of all other intelligence and security agencies before they could be considered safe to work with, and overhaul and tighten security on the Tower. Pepper was with him.
Hill had gotten a last-second encrypted message off to them, just as Pierce was being unmasked, warning that their lives were ptentially in immediate danger. They had been on a trip to relax and spend time with each other, something Tony had been trying to do more with Pepper in the past year. He was sarcastic as always, needling Sam about his fast-moving bromance with Cap, but his attempts to be unserious were perfunctory and brittle. His eyes were shadowed.
“JARVIS is your man here and the bots are the support staff and that’s all I can offer you without the danger of compromised security—in either direction. I want to know the story here and get a look at that metal arm but. I can’t yet. For now, I have to—I have to know more about what the hell’s going on outside, get some kind of a handle on this clusterfuck.”
“This is more than I could ask for, Tony. More than anyone else could do. I’m grateful.”
“Yeah, well, save me and a million other people from getting lasered to death and prevent a Brave New World of fascist dystopia and I’ll be your extrajudicial prison concierge, I’m nice like that. Good luck with the assassin rehab, Cap.”
|||||||||||Captivity. Unknown enemy force. Total Mission Failure. Something had…something had gone terribly, terribly wrong on the helicarrier. Perhaps had begun before that. The Soldier had malfunctioned disastrously. Betrayed orders, betrayed Hydra. It had something to do with the man, the Captain, blue and gold and bleeding red. The Soldier had failed, had been captured, and all of it, everything, was somehow to do with the Captain. Now something terrible was coming. It (could not remember) had never disobeyed like this, never failed so thoroughly. There was no mission, no course of action; food came but it would be drugged or taken away or its face smashed into it, no matter, food was a test, men spoke to it, voices from speakers, taunting it or coaxing it to further failure, no matter. It could only wait, empty, for punishment, for the relief of order that came from pain.|||||||||||