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He doesn't know who fishes his shield out of the water this time. Thinks it doesn't really matter. Probably your average elite spy organization's ridiculously overqualified clean-up crew. Or, former elite spy organization, he should say.
He sleeps through it again, anyway. The Winter Soldier had filled him with enough holes to seed a garden, but not to finish the job.
It's something of a point of pride; Bucky always was a sharper shot than that.
When he comes to for the first time, Sam is there, and Steve finds it a hell of a lot easier to fall back asleep knowing that.
Later, when he takes his first lumbering step out of the mandatory wheelchair that hauls him to the hospital curb, they hand him the shield like a gift. Hill and Romanoff. Natasha.
Congratulations, you woke up again. You might be needing this.
It feels both heavier and lighter in his hands.
No one asks him how he lost it. He can tell Natasha wants to. Or he thinks he can. It's possible that the half-tilt of her mouth means she already knows.
When it turns into a smile just shy of hesitant, like it's a new shape she's trying on for the first time, he wonders if it just means she's happy he made it at all, shield or no.
"Bet you're glad to see that again," Sam says, grinning like a man whose shoulders just shrugged off a heavy load.
"Yeah. I don't think it's covered in my insurance policy," Steve says, just to say something, anything that isn't a desperately obvious bid for information on the fate of the other thing that fell into the Potomac with him.
It's somewhat of a relief when no one asks how he lost the shield. He doesn't know if they'll understand. If they'll forgive his lapse of judgment, his total ease at letting it drop from his grip and out of reach. If they'll buy his explanation at all.
Not when he doesn't necessarily buy it himself.
At first it had seemed simple deductive reasoning: If you drop your only weapon, you don't hurt Bucky.
But what it really meant was: If you drop your only defense, you surrender your body to him.
Imagining Natasha's perfectly arched eyebrow at that is enough to lessen the blow of it.
Maybe part of him had surrendered. Given up. Maybe he'd known he wasn't going to make it and didn't want to prolong the inevitable. Maybe he'd been tilting the yoke forward again, ready to take that plane and plummet into the icy cold water below, because he'd done what needed doing to stop the war.
He wants to think, instead—does think instead—that it was a tactical decision. The Winter Soldier's mission was Captain America, but Bucky's friend was Steve, and he'd needed to throw aside anything—his shield, his uniform, even his muscles if he could've—that put distance between them. It had left him vulnerable, exposed, but also that much easier to reach out and touch. To grip by the shoulder and make a promise.
...to the end of the line.
Just go! Get out of here!
No! Not without you!
Explosions all around, falling through fire and compromised metal, a hand reaching down to grab hold of him, to pull him up and out. The feeling vague, dream-like, maybe nothing more than a memory seventy years old packed away in Austria, thirty miles behind enemy lines. This time, though, the fingers are wrapped in the cold polish of metal instead of callus-rough skin. And somehow, this time, with his nerves on fire, with every bone in his body aching, with every tangle and wire of his heart exposed and unprotected, it feels just as much like love as before.
He knows it won't be easy, finding Bucky, not with the dossier full of dead trails (and trails of dead), not with Sharon's new and untested CIA contacts, not with a heart that's telling him he's come too far and lost too much to lose this too.
He knows it won't be easy. When he and Sam head for the airstrip, ready to track down their target in this new world disorder, he leaves the shield at home.