Chapter Text
Title: Everything I (N)ever Wanted.
Author: Nemesi.
Beta: Shirokou
Fandom: Captain America.
Continuity: Comics verse. Post/Alternate Secret Empire Omega.
Genre: Angst. Romance.
Word Count: 3000 circa.
Characters: Steve Rogers, Hydra Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes.
Pairings: Steve/Bucky and also Hydra Steve/Bucky.
Rating: PG-13/soft R.
Disclaimer: Marvel owns my soul, and also all the characters and themes herein portrayed. I'm putting everything back inside Marvel's sandbox as soon as I'm done playing with their toys.
Warnings: Hydra Steve is his own warning, tbh. So. Some looming, face-touching, arm-touching and hands-kissing, but nothing sexual. Some lines lifted from, or inspired by Secret Empire Omega and Man Out of Time.
Notes: I HAVE NO SYMPATHY FOR HYDRA STEVE. There's no love lost between us. I simply refuse to believe there’s a Steve - ANY Steve - out there, whose soulmate is not Bucky Barnes. ALSO, THIS DOESN’T END THERE. I have heart.
Summary: In the wake of the final battle, Hydra Steve is put in a cell to rot.
From there, he asks to see Bucky.
Asks specifically for *him*, and for some reason he isn't denied.
Steve isn't okay with any of that.
* * * * *
[He] won't go
Where I
I would go for you
I'd curse my heart
For you
Skin – Purple
1 - Bucky
He asks for Bucky.
Asks specifically for him, and for some reason he isn't denied.
“It's because I'm Captain America,” he says, and Bucky recoils, anger burning hot in the pit of his stomach.
“You're not him.”
He – this strange Steve, this evil doppelgänger with the soulful eyes and the lines of care etched deeply around his mouth – just smiles at him, all patience, wordlessly remarking that yes, for all intents and purposes, that's who he is.
Bucky takes a step back, feeling in equal parts vulnerable and defensive. They’re on opposite sides of the cell, and there’s still not enough room between them. He crosses his arms, hands clamping down hard around his elbows. His jaw goes tight enough to hurt. The soulful eyes locked on him soften impossibly. Bucky's stomach is revolting, and yet it's the Steve who belongs to Hydra that looks away first.
“What do you want from me?” Bucky says. His voice is low, but it echoes strangely against the metal walls of the containment chamber. It might have started soft, but it comes back to him with the force of a slap: “What do you want from me?”
Steve – Hydra Steve, Fake Steve, Captain Hydra, Leader of the World, Span of Evil, Steve, SteveSteveStevestevesteve – looks up at him from the corner of his eye. His lashes look like spun gold, even at a distance. In the dimness, they glow. As pretty as fireflies. Underneath, his eyes are full of liquid shadows.
Bucky's hands tighten enough that the metal – the bone? - of his elbow creaks. The noise makes Hydra Steve turn back towards him sharply, gauging Bucky with a long, long look before settling back in his crouch against the wall, deceptively harmless.
“I had to see you,” he murmurs after a moment, as if it made sense.
“Well, now you have!” Bucky snaps, then pivots on his heel and makes for the door but--
“I had to see you!” Hydra Steve repeats, quiet enough for it to be a whisper, but the commanding tone is familiar enough to arrest Bucky – to arrest the very heart in his chest, the breath in his lungs. He turns around with a sigh and a scowl, and Hydra Steve just.
Smiles.
A slow, impossible smile.
He's looking at Bucky like a wanderer might look at a pool of cool water in the desert – with a thirst in his gaze that's strong enough to be felt on the skin.
“I still can’t believe you’re really alive.”
“No thanks to you,” Bucky snaps. But for all the venom in his voice, it trembles, noticeably so. He doesn't want to be here. He doesn't want to be here. He--
Hydra Steve straightens from his crouch and moves towards Bucky, as slow as molasses. His mountain of a body glides across the slanted slices of light dripping from the ceiling. The Hydra on his naked chest ripples with the movement, lurches blindly in the dark like vermin, a parasite. Bucky feels bile surge in the back of his throat, but when Hydra Steve reaches out--
--he stands his ground.
Just breathes in deeply when those calloused fingers land on his cheek and then trail down the line of his jaw, the side of his neck, cupping his face, so tenderly, and tilting it up. Hydra Steve's eyes are black vacuums aureoled by the tiniest ring of blue. The pupils flutter as they drink Bucky in, hungry for the sight of him.
“I would've brought you back,” Hydra Steve avows. “The cube even showed me, for a moment. The real world. Reality as it was supposed to be. You and me, together. Hydra's Rulers. The Shield and the Fist. It lasted only a moment, but it was beautiful. I never wanted anything as much as I wanted to have you at my side, where you belonged.”
Bucky bares his teeth, like a cornered animal.
“So you had me hunted, captured and killed, but the plan was always to bring me back? Sounds like a whole lotta work for nothing.”
Hydra Steve hums, transfixed by how Bucky's pulse feels, drumming under his fingertips.
“I couldn't let you go, but I did owe Helmut something.”
“Did it feel good, to play God with my life?”
“Didn't you ever ask yourself,” Hydra Steve murmurs, “why you had to be my sacrifice, Bucky?” His thumb presses down on the plushness of Bucky's lips, testing their give. “You, and no one else?”
Bucky wrenches his face away.
“Because if you hadn't killed me, I would have stopped you,” he snarls.
Hydra Steve smiles that impossible smile again.
“You would have tried,” he concedes. He touches the star on Bucky's shoulder. Follows the plates of his arm all the way down to the wrist, rubbing his thumb across the cold smoothness of it, searching for the long-gone pulse, like it used to happen a lifetime and several wars ago.
“I wanted you with me,” he says on the next exhale, soft like a man in confessional. Soft like a lover.
And then, after a quiet heartbeat:
“I wanted all of them with me. Rick. Jack. Thor. Wanda. Hulk. But you... I just wanted you. I wanted you always. I want you now. Forever. My Bucky. My beautiful, beautiful Bucky.”
Bucky's spine goes rigid. The sweat gathering at the small of his back needles him like ice. Hydra Steve's eyes raise to his own, pinning him like an insect to a board.
“I was just an obstacle,” Bucky croaks.
“You are the one I love,” Hydra Steve replies, gentle as anything.
The world lurches suddenly, tilting under Bucky's feet. He staggers backwards, eyes wide, breathing fast and sharp. But there's a wall behind him, cold and hard; against his front, Hydra Steve is another wall, just as unyielding as the metal one, but pressing steadily closer and pumping warmth like a crackling hearth.
“Those few years we had together at the front were the best of my life. I lied to you, yes. I hid what I was, I hid who I fought for, and I hid what I felt. But I never once lied to myself.
“I wanted you. I wanted you to join Hydra with me. I wanted to steal you away. I had it all planned, you see? I knew you wouldn't bow under Hydra's rule. So once Hydra had won the war, we would've gone into hiding, lived the rest of our lives underground, if that's what it took to keep you with me. I would give everything to Hydra, Bucky. But not you. Not you.”
Bucky's hands are between them now. Against Hydra Steve's chest, a measly barrier that refuses to push them apart. He gulps down air that burns his throat like fire.
“That's not true. Nothing of that is true. That reality was all an invention of Kobik.”
Bucky's hair is long and soft. Hydra Steve buries his face in the waves of it, breathes in deeply through his nose, nuzzles the skin at Bucky's temple, dewy with perspiration.
“It was my reality. The reality I fought for. The reality I died for. The love I died for,” Hydra Steve says. His eyes are incandescent. His focus makes his whole countenance glow like a star. “If you believe nothing else, believe this – You were my one. And I loved you like I never loved anyone else. I love you still, Bucky. And I don't think I'll ever stop.”
Bucky squeezes his eyes shut. It's all he can do to keep himself from thrashing, spitting like a angry cat, trying to wake from the madness of this all.
“Why are you telling me this?”
Hydra Steve touches Bucky's lips again, the lips he remembers drawing hundreds of times, before and after ice, drawing them constantly, like trying to soothe an ache. He exhales softly, and rests his forehead against Bucky's.
“Because I know you love me too.”
At last, Bucky manages the will to wrench himself away.
“I don't,” he spits, all vehemence. Laughter ripples out of Hydra Steve, like poison seeping from a wound.
“Because you love him? Oh, but Bucky--” he reaches out, pushes a single thumb to the hollow of Bucky's throat, deep to the point of pain. “--I am him. What you remember happening in the war? I remember it too. All of it. The long marches in the snow. The endless campaigns. The planes whistling overhead. The alarms. The bombs. The fires. The blood. All that blood.
“You remember us fighting viciously in the light of day, only to huddle close together in the night, whispering and laughing with the relish of little kids? You remember adoring me so completely you'd follow me anywhere? You remember bleeding for each other, caring for each other, protecting each other? All the little things that made you fall in love with him. They happened between the two of us, too.
“And the only difference between his reality and mine, his memories and mine? Is that I knew how you felt. I knew that you loved me. And with every touch, every breath, every beat of my heart I loved you back. Your Captain? God's shining, perfect soldier. He never knew. He never saw you. He never. Loved. You.”
Bucky's eyes go wide. They shine, wet and wounded in the dark. His mouth moves soundlessly in the dark.
Hydra Steve steps back, bursting into that poisonous laugh once more.
“You see? You can't even deny it! You know it! You know I'm right. He doesn't love you. He might care for you, like a little brother. But it's me. Me who's been in love with you all this time, Bucky. Me who's noticed you pining in secret. Me, who's waited all along to make you mine.” He surges forward, feverish with his intent, grabbing Bucky's hands in his own, cradling them with such strange care, such tenderness. “Tell me you understand that. You love him, and I am him, and I love you. Always and forever. Like he never has. Like he never will!” He pauses long enough to press his mouth, hotly, against the back of Bucky's hands. “We love each other, Buck. We belong together. And I couldn't go another moment without telling you.”
He drops Bucky's hands, fast but with that strange adoring care still, and steps backwards into the teeming shadows. A siren blares from above them, red lights burst suddenly from all around them, knifing the shadows apart.
“Think about it,” Hydra Steve says, stepping back until his shoulders find the wall and then sliding down against it, hands clasped behind his head in surrender. “If the Allies hadn't used the cube to change reality – to create him – I would've woken from the ice still burning for you. I would've raged. I would have burned through all Hydra’s resources until I found you in your cryotube – I would've fought for you. Freed you. And we would've been together all along. All along.”
Bucky reaches out, dumb with shock. He can't. He can't.
Can't think.
Can't breathe.
Can't see, through the blurriness in his eyes. He thinks he might've nodded at Steven at one point. Once, if at all.
Their time together is up.
Guards force their way into the cell, swarm around the prisoner, like locusts, hiding him, swallowing the sight of him whole, screaming at the top of their lungs, pushing him this way and that, using their shields and batons on his prone, unresisting figure.
Bucky turns towards the door – doesn't run, doesn't stumble, he simply walks against the tide of rushing guards, chin high and eyes burning, he walks, one step after the other, he walks; keeps his dignity until he reaches the other side of the threshold – and then he buries his face in his hands, there, in the sterile metal corridor
and
silently
weeps.
2 - Steve
Steve doesn't know what he's doing here, at the Shadow Pillar prison.
He thinks - he thought it was to meet his Nazi double. To gain closure, maybe. An explanation. Something to stitch him where he's oozing out of his seams.
But Bucky is here. And there was never a time when Bucky was not his priority.
He slips uninvited into the building, navigates through each security barrier with an ease that comes from weariness more than practice. He’s just too tired to care about the details of what he’s doing. He goes through each motion mechanically - disabling, opening, hacking, flashing cards, codes, digits, producing synthetic eyes from his pocket for the reading - until he’s inside at last.
Inside, and lost.
He knows that they’re here somewhere, his double and his… Bucky. But he’s given little to no thought on what he’d do once he finds them.
He’s not hitching for a fight. He doesn’t feel particularly talkative, either. He just.
Wants.
In some strange, abstract capacity. He wants.
He feels hollow, deep into his bones, and the void in him demands to be filled. But what could restore his wholeness, he has no idea.
Steve has just gone past the last security check, when a loud siren starts its plaintive blaring. It’s not the signal of an escape, but the Guards all rally together nonetheless, cascading like fire ants down the stairs and into a long corridor. It means, Steve guess, that whoever runs the place has grown tired of indulging Captain Hydra, and is cutting Bucky’s visit short with any means necessary.
Steve can’t say he minds.
He idles a moment more in the shadows, and then, when even the last straggler has left the hall, he tucks his head low and moves to follow the Guards at a distance.
He doesn’t expect to find Bucky just outside Captain Hydra’s Cell. He doesn’t expect to see him with his face buried in his hands, either; broad shoulders heaving soundlessly.
Steve falters in his steps, and:
“Buck…?” he calls.
Bucky’s head snaps up towards him like a deer’s. His eyes go wide, and Steve feels a moment of vertigo. Bucky’s cheeks are flushed and dry, but there are tears - tears - brimming inside those wide eyes, clumping into Bucky’s long lashes like alien pearls.
Vertigo quickly turns into ice turns into hot
encompassing
rage.
A wet roar fills Steve’s head with noise, and he’s in Bucky’s space in the matter of a heartbeat. He flexes his hands, unsure for a moment which instinct is the most powerful - to find and break apart whoever hurt Bucky, or to draw Bucky to his own chest and never let him go.
“What happened?” Steve asks, in a voice as removed from him as his rage feels. It's a terrible, otherworldly voice, for a terrible, otherworldly feeling. His eyes narrow into slits. “What did he do to you?”
There’s a long silence. It’s all Steve can do not to reach out and brush aside the hair clinging to Bucky’s temples. Then, slowly, a corner of Bucky’s lips quirk up in the diluted mockery of a smile.
“Nothing, Steve.”
The words penetrate the fog in Steve’s mind, but they make no sense.
“What did he do to you, Bucky?”
And Steve would reach out, if he could, but he cannot trust his own instincts. Whatever has happened to Bucky, his tormentor wore Steve’s face. Steve’s touch could be anything but welcome, and so Steve clenches his fingers against the need to fold Bucky into a hug.
But Bucky was always the braver of the two. He reaches out, telegraphing his moments as if Steve were a skittish colt. Gentle fingers circle around Steve’s wrist, the ring of coldness doing wonders to calm his thrumming pulse.
“It’s fine, Steve,” Bucky smiles, rueful and bitter. “He didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. I have no idea why it’s affecting me like this.”
It’s because it was my voice that said it, Steve wants to scream. It was my face. It was me who hurt you. And we never had any defence against one another.
Deftly, Steve turns his hand, interlocking one of his fingers with one of Bucky’s. It’s the only point of contact between them, but it feels as sturdy as an iron chain. It feels as if Steve would come unmoored, if he let go.
“You sure you’re all right?” he asks.
He sees Bucky swallow hard. Eyes glancing down and back to Steve, long lashes fluttering against his cheekbones. His bottom lip rolls into his mouth, whitening under the pressure of his teeth and then blooming into a deep rose’s red.
“It’s just…”
“What?”
“Back… back in the war,” Bucky says. And his voice sounds like he’s been gargling glass. “And later, when. After the cube gave me back my memories. Did you. Or. Was I. Was I ever… important... to you?”
Steve feels a rush of coldness down his spine.
“Is that what he told you?” He growls. “That I never cared for you?” He tugs gently on their interlocked fingers. “Bucky, you are my partner. My best friend. How could I not care about you? The one guy gutsy enough to follow me anywhere? To have my six even when I was a reckless fool? From the moment we met, we’ve been more attuned that actual twins. Brothers do not care as deeply as we care for each other! How could you ever doubt how much you mean to me?”
The smile on Steve’s face blossoms and dies a swift, painful death. Something dark and heavy is shuttering with cold finality behind Bucky’s shivering eyes. It feels like a precious gift has been cut away from Steve forever. He has no idea what it was, but he aches for its return, nonetheless.
“Bucky?” he pleads, scared, confused, but Bucky just shakes his head, a wet shine in his eyes, a knife-wound of a grin on his trembling mouth, and answers:
“Don’t worry, Steve. Brothers. I knew that. Whatever he said to me… I never doubted that.”
- TBC