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There’s a sudden, deafening ringing in the Soldier’s ears. Sound cannon, localized, no permanent damage. He turns towards the source. Man rushes towards him: older, tailored suit, red glasses. Raises his right hand, mechanized - flash of light. The Soldier closes his eyes a moment too late and ducks on instinct.
He rises to strike. Enemy focused on the gun in his hand; the Soldier raises it, fires. Blocked. Enemy is visibly startled - emotion, inexperience perhaps - grips the pistol with both hands and pulls. The Soldier is left with only the frame.
The missing rack strikes him across the face, he retaliates with an elbow. Enemy hesitates. Soldier strikes him in the chest to send him sprawling.
Two more approaching, female, one behind the other. They’re trained, they strike together - the Soldier is hit hard in the chest, groin, head. Blonde wraps her leg around the arm to restrain it. She underestimates its strength. The Soldier tosses her back.
The other woman vaults up his back, wraps her thighs around his neck. Too strong a grip to throw her off. She’s striking him on the top of the head. He throws her down onto a table, wraps his metal fingers around her throat to crush it.
“You could at least recognize me,” she says, straining.
He does.
He hesitates. Loosens his grip. Something inside him very strongly says do not kill. He’s not sure whether it’s an order.
Something knocks him away from the woman. New combatant, dark skinned, large but light on his feet. Strikes fast, strong - well-trained, enhanced. Another Soldier.
He does not strike back. His mind slides away from him, distracted, and he is unable to focus. He glances at the woman again. She’s sitting up, watching him. Her expression is neutral, but something in her eyes shines like hope.
How does he know hope?
The black Soldier does not advance. Instead positions himself to block the exits, tense and balanced on the balls of his feet.
“Hey, big guy,” A voice says, and he growls. The man with the metal hand - glove, he can see flesh fingertips - approaches cautiously, “You done with your tantrum?”
He watches the man with the metal glove raise it in his direction, clenched in a fist. His own arm clenches, relaxes, the plates settling as the fog of war lifts from his mind and his vision widens back out.
There’s a soft hiss and something’s sticking out of his left shoulder. Metal, about the size and length of a pen. A thin wire connects it to the man’s metal glove. He hears the crackle of electricity coming down the line, but it doesn’t register-
His blood starts to sing. Knees give out, he sinks to the floor, jerking, catching himself on his right arm because the left isn’t responding. Deadened. Electric shock. He feels his heart pump erratically. Can’t help but cry out as the lighting dances down to his fingertips. The muscles in his neck and back twitch, his lungs spasm and stop, his breath hitches in his throat -
“-thought he was gearing up to go again!” He hears, and opens his eyes. When had he closed them?
“Just shut up,” A woman snaps, closer to him than the man, and someone is gently guiding him to sit back up on his knees. He can’t move his left arm.
His eyelids are heavy but he fights to open them. The world starts to slide into soft focus.
The red-haired woman is crouched beside him. Do not kill. Recognize me.
She is the most important person there, and he doesn’t remember why.
He blinks at her. No words come out; his heart is still beating arhythmically. It’s slowly getting easier to breathe. His head jerks involuntarily.
She tugs on the pen device, the line slack now, and he watches her do it. He hears more than feels it come out, although his ears are still quietly ringing.
“Bucky!” A set of quick, heavy footsteps behind him, another man’s voice - this time familiar. One he knows. Steve.
He was Bucky. He remembered now, using that name earlier, correcting someone who had called him something else.
“James,” says the red-haired woman, quietly, and he looks at her. Blinks again. It’s only the right name when she says it.
“Natalia,” He breathes. Doesn’t take his eyes off her face.
“Oh, so now you remember?” She says softly. It’s passed off as a joke, but he can see the relief in her face. He’s relieved too, because he knows her name, knows she’s important to him, somehow. He knows her and Steve, which means that for now, the people around him are safe.
For now.
He swallows, licks his lips, not knowing what to say so he offers, “I don’t know.”
A large hand on his shoulder - he jerks away, involuntary, though he’s not sure if it’s from a leftover shock.
“Sorry,” says Steve, suddenly kneeling on his other side. He watches Steve and Natalia share a look, and she nods. Steve continues, turning back to Bucky, “What happened?”
Bucky doesn’t know how to answer that. His right hand twitches.
“Your pal here went Terminator,” The man with the metal glove says tersely. He’s eyeing Bucky, albeit from a safer distance. He looks like he doesn’t regret the electric shock. Good, “Cut through at least a dozen guys like they were training dummies.”
“I know that,” Steve bites out. He has his jaw set in that way he does when he’s not going to accept what’s put in front of him.
Bucky is looking at the bodies littered throughout the atrium. He can only see some of them breathing.
Steve follows his eyes to the blonde woman lying in the remains of a cafe table. She’s shifting, gives a soft groan, trying to get her arms under her and prop herself up. Steve hurries over to her, calls her “Sharon”, checks her over before letting her sit up.
She seems alright, if a bit dazed. Bucky is thankful that he didn’t kill Sharon.
“Can you stand?” The black Soldier says. He’s still on edge, as if he doesn’t trust Bucky’s display of frailty. That’s good too. The man’s accent is . . not American like the rest, not any kind of European. Bucky ventures a guess at somewhere in central Africa.
“Bossman probably wants you back in the cell,” says Natalia. She stands and offers a hand to help him up.
Bucky nods, stands with a grimace. Lists to the left as the dead weight tugs on his neck and back and he stumbles. With a soft grunt he gathers his left arm up in his right, sticks his right hand between his metal bicep and the left side of his chest, effectively crossing his arms. Much easier to balance like this. Much less threatening if one arm is disabled and the other is tucked away.
Natalia starts to lead him back the way he came, with the black Soldier and the man with the metal glove (Stark, the name floats back to him) following behind, but Steve plants himself in their path. Sharon is shadowing behind him, eyes narrowed. She’s still suspicious.
These people are doing the right thing. Steve is an idiot for not treating him like a threat, even like this.
“Let them do their jobs, Steve,” Bucky says tiredly, “I’m done fighting.”
He means it. He can feel Natalia’s eyes on him, but they slide away to another pair of footsteps coming up behind.
“I lost him, Steve, that bastard-” The voice stops. Bucky recognizes it from Steve’s earpiece in Bucharest.
Another man steps into his view, facing Steve. He glances over his shoulder at Bucky, and even without the goggles and wings Bucky recognizes the Falcon. Another one he’s tried to kill. He’s grateful for whatever stroke of luck meant he didn’t succeed.
“Which Bucky Barnes is this?” The Falcon says coldly, turning to face him.
Bucky opens his mouth to answer, but he doesn’t know how. He doesn’t know how many pieces of him there are anymore: the piece that knows Steve, the piece that’s shot presidents and kings, the piece that’s killed operatives just trying to do their jobs and keep him restrained, the piece that killed Stark - Howard and Maria.
He looks down and vows not to look Tony Stark in the eye. The man should’ve shot him in the heart. Upped the voltage.
The piece that’s murdered children.
The piece that remembers Natalia.
Bucky glances at her again, just in time to see the spectre of doubt cross across Steve’s face in the corner of his eye before Steve answers, “He - He’s fine, Sam. He snapped out of it.”
“Let’s go,” Natalia says to him, and she strides forward. Steve and the Falcon step out of her way. Bucky slinks behind and doesn’t look at anyone.
He follows, not tracking or caring where Natalia is leading him. If she were smart, she would wind her way around the premises, avoiding the way he took down here. She would circle around and backtrack so he would lose his sense of where in the building he was.
He remembers her being smart. He remembers her being the best.
The best at what?
In the end she doesn’t lead him back to the cell from before. The new one is just a holding cell, a long bench with a sink and toilet separated from the rest of the room by simple metal bars. It would never hold him if he intended to break out.
He sits on the bench, arms still folded, and presses his back against the cinderblock wall. With a long sigh, he closes his eyes.
“Buck?”
Bucky cracks his eyes open, flicks them up at Steve and then back down to the ground. He says nothing. The others are waiting impatiently on the other side of the bars. Tony Stark is tapping his foot by the door.
“You, uh, you need anything?” Steve says, shoving his hands in his pockets. He’s trying to make it better, but he can’t.
After a moment, Bucky says, “Better restraints.”
It’s not a joke.
Stark grits his teeth, “Cap.”
Steve nods, takes a deep breath, but none of the tension leaves his shoulders. “I’ll be back, Buck, I swear,” He says, and turns on his heel to leave. Looking guilty, even though he did nothing wrong.
Stupid of him, to take on Bucky’s sins as his own.
Sharon leads Steve and Stark out of the room. The Falcon clears his throat at Natalia, who nods, and he files out behind them.
The other Soldier, the man from Africa, is staring at him intently from the other side of the bars. Bucky’s not concerned. Between him and Natalia, he knows they’ll take him down when he loses himself again.
A long silence stretches over them. None of them are eager to fill it.
“What was the meaning of all of this?” The other Soldier says finally, “The bomb at the United Nations, only to be captured, to escape, and then be recaptured once again?”
It’s not a question; it’s an interrogation. Bucky can practically feel the anger blazing under the other man’s skin.
“That wasn’t me,” Bucky says, softly because he knows it will offer little comfort, “I wasn’t in Vienna.”
He looks to Natalia. Whatever she knows of him, whatever connection they had that he can only just grasp, he knows that she can tell it’s the truth. He needs to know if she believes him.
The other Soldier pushes off of the wall and turns away from them, shoulders set, hands clasped tightly together in front of him. It was the stance of a man trying very hard to restrain himself.
“The doctor,” He offers to the man’s back, “He knew the . . . the code words. They’re buried in my head. I thought everyone who knew them was dead, but - he had the book. The book tells him what to say, the words are what make me into. . . that.”
That grabs Natalia’s attention. It’s not obvious to the casual observer, but he knows, he remembers her tells. She takes a breath in and holds it for a fraction of a moment, her nostrils flare as she lets it out. One of her eyebrows twitches up.
“What did he tell you to do?”
Bucky thinks back, but it’s fuzzy. There’s restraint there too, the kind of hesitation that keeps you from sticking your hand in boiling water because you know it will burn, no matter what lies at the bottom.
“I don’t,” begins Bucky slowly, not knowing where to go from there, “I don’t remember.”
“Do better,” the other Soldier says. He’s closer to the bars now, back straight and head held high, regal.
Natalia steps forward as well, “Was it a kill order?”
“No,” Bucky shakes his head, squeezes his eyes shut and reaches for it, “It was . . a mission report. He wanted to know about Siberia. Where I was - where I was kept.”
“What about Siberia?” Natalia murmurs. And she knows, she knows, she knows about him. He can’t help his heart rate picking up at the thought of a missing piece, something she remembers about him, about them.
The other Soldier glances suspiciously at her, eyes narrowing like he’s weighing his chances against the two of them together.
Bucky clears his throat to bring the other man’s attention back to him.
“I-,” He says, not sure how to phrase it but confident in the information. He sits up a little and glances between the other two. How much of this does she know? How much does she know that he’s missing? “I was only the first. The prototype. He wanted to know about the other Winter Soldiers.”