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Steve watched the doctor work on Natasha’s shoulder. Despite Natasha’s claims that it wasn’t necessary, the doctor used a local anesthetic before taking a pair of sterilized hemostats and digging out a bullet. Soviet made, no rifling.
Bucky had shot her. Bucky had shot her. Steve rubbed his face, his head spinning. How could that even be possible? But it was. That was a face burned into his memory like no other.
A year ago, Steve stumbled through making peace with Bucky’s death and now this?
Bucky wasn’t dead. But this alternative was worse—far, far worse.
Steve stood, paced for only a few steps before he sat again on a half-rusted folding chair. He knew Natasha watched his every move, despite the work on her shoulder.
How could he have never considered it? He knew Zola had experimented on Bucky in Austria. He should have realized something had changed. Just as Steve wasn’t the same boy he’d been in Brooklyn, neither was Bucky—but not simply for the shock and abrasiveness of war.
All the little things that he’d never pieced together, they were clues he’d blindly missed: How Bucky couldn’t get drunk anymore, how his sharpshooting had excelled to perfection, how he endured the elements with the same hardy vigor Steve knew. How he’d had no trouble grabbing Steve by the uniform collar and pulling him bodily forward for that kiss.
How could have NEVER considered it!?
“Dammit!” Steve stood and threw his fist against the wall. The concrete spidered into fragments and crumpled to dusk around his hit. He didn’t often have anger like this, but it thundered through him with nowhere to go but further in. He’d failed Bucky in a way that Bucky never would have failed him.
“Steve.” Natasha’s voice still sounded soft at the edges, the pain or blood loss affecting her. “Stop beating yourself up. You couldn’t have known.”
Steve didn’t believe that; he paced again. “I should have known. I should have been able to save him from this.” He faced her and gestured to his body. “What’s the point of all this if not to save my best friend?”
Natasha raised one brow. “I’ve seen a lot of martyr complexes in my days, Rogers, but this one might take the cake.”
“Call it what you like, but how can I not feel responsible for what’s become of him? I know Bucky and that—“ His voice caught; he rested his hands on his hips and took a deep breath to calm his emotions. “That shouldn’t be him,” he continued, softer. “He was a good man.”
“I know.”
Steve looked at Natasha and realized that she knew because that story—Bucky and the Howling Commandos—was SHIELD entrance reading material. Everyone knew that story. Everyone knew that James Buchanan Barnes had been the first death of a fledgling institution; an icon immortalized on the SHIELD’s Wall of Valor.
But not everyone would understand that this weapon, this thing Hydra had created, had been Steve’s best friend and possibly the love of his life.
No one would understand what this meant to Steve.
“I need some air.”
Steve strode through the hallway. Maria called his name, but he didn’t pause a single step. Whatever it was, it could wait. He had too much on his mind; too much to digest.
Bucky.
Though Steve didn’t doubt that gut-wrenching moment of recognition, it was still hard to believe. What had they done to him? How could he have become the ghost Natasha spoke of? How could he be the bringer of mayhem that Zola had prided himself on?
He had been Steve’s cocky, handsome, kind, self-less, bright, caring friend; he’s been Steve’s first love before Steve could even realize it.
Steve ran up the 138 steps that led to the dam crest. He’d meant to run across the crest, eager for a sprint, but the energy left him as if blown away by the fresh air. He slowed, defeated, and instead walked until he stood looking out over the reservoir. He shoved his hands in his pockets.
“Bucky,” he said, softly.
There were endless memories Steve could draw about Bucky, but the one that came to the fore was the day of Steve’s mother’s funeral. He’d certainly thought about that day since waking from his deep, frozen sleep, but more in an effort to acclimate himself. He’d visited his parents’ grave shortly after SHEILD let him linger from their over-watchful eye.
But also on that day, there had been Bucky. From the beginning, early in Steve’s mother’s illness, Bucky had been there in quiet—and sometimes vocal—support, delivering bowls of his grandmother’s chicken soup and joining Steve on his visits to the sanatorium where the doctors promised, with rest and fresh air, his mother would recover. When she didn’t, Bucky stood by Steve’s side, like a member of the family—which, for Steve, he was. During the small visitation, hosted in the basement of St. Francis of Assisi, Bucky kept his arm across Steve’s shoulder and intercepted most of the visitors in such a fluid way that no one seemed to notice Steve hadn’t spoken for two hours. Even after the funeral service, when Steve slipped away so that he could attend the interment alone, Bucky waited for him afterwards, sitting on the dusty steps of the tenement in his one good suit.
“The thing is, you don’t have to.”
That night, Bucky came to Steve’s place with another bowl of his grandmother’s chicken soup and a few extra couch cushions to camp on Steve’s floor. They’d listened to Jack Benny on the Detrola and talked of Bucky’s latest girl, Julie. Bucky’s mother didn’t like her because she was Jewish, to which Bucky had said, “Gives us something to argue about over the bolognaise.”
Steve had accused him of dating her just to annoy his mother—to which they’d both laughed until Steve remembered: he could never annoy his own mother with the wrong date. The thought had hit him hard. But before he couldn’t even gather his wits enough to cry, Bucky had left his nest of blankets and cushion to pull Steve to his chest so that Steve’s first deep, body wracking sob had been buried against Bucky’s shoulder.
“I’m with you till the end of the line, pal.”
Steve had thought the end of the line had come on a cold day in the Alps, in the thick of a war that had bonded the two men even closer than ever. He’d thought the end had come on the heels of an argument and kiss that left Steve confused and excited and hopeful.
“Wait, Steve! What are you saying?”
“I’m saying,” Steve said aloud, to the ghost of his memory, in the conversation they never had, “I can’t pretend that you aren’t the most important person in my life. I’m saying, I have to face what that might mean. What it still means, even now.”
How could he fight this Hydra creation made from the warped body and stolen soul of his best friend? How would he even consider it? Steve supposed he could continue with the belief that Bucky had died with that fall, to still accept what Montgomery had said to him all those years ago in that SSR base: “There won’t be anything to rescue. Captain, that fall could not be survived. James Barnes is dead.”
Steve could choose to ignore that face he knew and pretend that their end of the line had come and gone and the man he loved had died, even if his body still lived.
But Steve couldn’t do that.
“No, not without you!”
Bucky needed him, now as before. Just as Bucky had been Steve’s savior time and again in Brooklyn, Steve had long ago decided that part of the serum’s benefit was to return that favor in every way he could. He’d dove behind enemy lines because Bucky needed him. He’d leapt into the unknown, fire blasting his face and hands in that exploding Hydra factory, because he knew Bucky would die with him rather than go on without him.
Steve needed to survive so that Bucky would live.
Steve had often wondered, since he’d woken, why he hadn’t simply died as expected. He’d meant his sacrifice when he made it. He’d broken Peggy’s heart and for what?
Was it for this?
As Sam slowly approached him, Steve didn’t turn; he suspected Natasha had sent Sam on this task, worried after Steve’s troubled exit. Go check on him. But Sam’s hesitant approach and heavy sigh revealed another reason for this visit, a less comfortable one.
“He’s going to be there, you know,” Sam said.
“I know.”
Steve could tell Sam chose his words carefully, considering them even as he said them. Steve figured Sam had anger towards Bucky—The Winter Soldier. He’d been shot at, chased, terrorized, nearly killed. He’d want to see him dead. So would others.
“Whoever he used to be, the guy he is now, I-I don’t think he’s the kind you save, he’s the kind you stop.”
Steve didn’t blame Sam. Really, Sam was being reasonable. But Steve couldn’t claim to be rational this time; he never could about Bucky. He loved him and he believed, without a shadow of doubt, that the man he knew—the man who’d picked him up from countless back alleys, who half carried him down DeKalb street to see a doctor; the man who trusted his every command to the point of plummeting to a believed death; the man who’d been by his side through everything—could still be found inside that weapon.
“I don’t know if I can do that.”
“Well, he might not give you a choice. He doesn’t know you.”
Steve wasn’t so sure. Lost inside a dark pit of brainwashing and skilled training, Bucky still breathed. Somewhere beyond the intense stare of a mythologized assassin, Bucky could still see. Just as Bucky had meant everything to Steve, Steve knew what he’d meant to Bucky. He’d proven it with a kiss.
Some faces are burned into memory, some moments can never be erased; Steve had to believe that.
“He will. Gear up, it’s time.”
END