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Chapter Text

According to the comics, one-reels, newspaper articles and other fanciful pieces of fiction, being one of the Howling Commandos consisted entirely of ingenious plans and fantastic acts of bravery and daring.  Bucky Barnes shivered in the frigid wind, and frantically rubbed his hands together for the hundredth time that night as he paced around the dilapidated hut they were currently using as a base.  He should be asking for his money back, he reflected to himself.  Tonight’s guard duty had been discouragingly devoid of dazzling heroics, unless you counted his heroic decision to venture out of the warmth inside to check the perimeter.

He stopped briefly, listened and watched.  The wind whistled faintly through the snow-covered trees, rocking the lantern that hung from the eaves, making the shadows dance and twist.  The snow muffled all other sound, the silence echoing through the night.  If he didn’t know better, he could believe that he was the only person for miles.

He sighed and hitched up the rifle on his shoulder.  Quiet was good, no matter what the newsreels said.  Quiet meant safety.  If it also meant that he had to be alone with his thoughts, that was a small price to pay.  Fog ghosted out into the air as he took a deep breath.  Thoughts were nothing to worry about, anyway.  If his brain happened to flash back every now and again to the table, and the straps, and a pudgy man in round glasses hovering over him with a syringe full of something that burned like acid and froze like ice until the world was nothing but—

A sudden crack echoed through the forest and he nearly jumped two feet into the air, and had his rifle out sweeping wildly around before his brain caught up to what he was doing.  He held his breath and scanned the shadows frantically, ears straining to hear a sound.  The lantern swung gently.  The shadows flickered.  The breeze wafted branches.  Nothing else moved. 

Slowly he let out his breath.  A broken branch from the snow?  Nothing to worry about, in any case.  He lowered the rifle, took a deep breath, turned back towards the hut—

—and swallowed a scream as the world turned inside out.

***

Something grabbed at him from two hundred directions at once.  Bright sparks of colours flashed across his vision.  Something howled in his ears and itched under his skin and stole his breath when he tried to shout.  He hit something, or something hit him, and his back lit up with fire, his head shrieked, he tried to move his arms and legs but he couldn’t be sure that the messages were getting through from his brain— just like when— The colours screamed at him and fragments of sounds swirled around him, making no sense at all.

“—careful he’s not—”

“—his arm isn’t—”

“—ucky, just calm—”

Somewhere in his mind, a signal fired and he lifted his eyelids.  Ghostly faces crowded over him—too-bright lights behind them and melting ribbons of colours wavering around them.  He tried his tongue.  “Wha—”

A hand cradled the side of his head and one of the faces came closer.  Blue eyes looked urgently at him.  “It’s okay Buck—”

“…steve?”  For a few fragile seconds, his brain attempted to pull his thoughts into something resembling coherency.  Then another wave of colours slammed through his vision, swirling like a pin-wheel until they blended into bright, clear white that bleached away everything else and then faded into nothing at all.

***

He woke up in fits and starts; at first awareness was elusive, then there was a snatch of sound, the feel of a hand on his wrist, softness underneath his body, the growing recognition of light under his eyelids.  It was vague and confusing, and then suddenly his thoughts focused enough for him to realise that he didn’t remember falling asleep and also he didn’t know where he was. 

Instinct slammed into gear.  His muscles surged, his eyes snapped open, and he launched himself upright, nearly slamming straight into the man who had been leaning over him seconds before.

“Whoa!”  Familiar hands grabbed his arms and a familiar face looked worriedly at his.  “Buck!  Bucky!  Calm down.  It’s okay.  It’s me.  Please stop struggling.”

Struggling?  Bucky stared wildly at Steve and belatedly realised that his arms were still fruitlessly trying to grapple with his friend’s, trying to get free…  What the hell was he doing?

He took a breath and forced himself to freeze, forced himself to look at Steve with a gaze that was at least approaching collected.  It was just Steve, for heaven’s sake.  It was his best friend.  It was Captain freaking America.

When he found his voice, Bucky was relieved to discover that it was relatively steady.  “Steve.  I… right.  I was lying down and I didn’t recognise…”  He frowned as he began to notice his surroundings.  “Wait, this… isn’t that hut we were using as a base…”

The walls surrounding him were dark and made of a material that was almost reflective.  Classy-looking ornaments decorated sleek and streamlined furniture that looked like it had been designed by someone who had spent way too many hours at the World Exposition of Tomorrow.  It was definitely a far cry from the battered timber walls of their temporary base.  What?

He turned back to Steve, the sense of alarm he’d awoken with suddenly pushing to the fore again.  “Jesus, Steve, how long have I been out!?”

Steve looked like he was trying to make his expression comforting without quite being successful at it.  “Not for long.  It’s okay, Buck, I swear.”  His eyes flicked down to Bucky’s left, just momentarily, and then snapped back to his face.  “Everything’s okay.”

He looked doubtfully around the room, and then down at himself, suddenly realising that his coat had been stripped off and replaced with a soft gown made of some kind of weird, overly soft and slippery material.  It was red and gold, just this side of ostentatious.  He looked back at Steve and raised an eyebrow.  “Everything’s okay.”

“Yeah.”  His expression turned pained.  “There’s just been a bit of an…incident.”

“An incident,” Bucky repeated, and then he frowned.  “Wait, did you cut your hair?”

He looked somewhat thrown by this statement. “My hair?”

“I thought you said I was only out for a little while!”

“You were!”

 “And you had time to get to the barber?”

Steve shook his head, looking something between exasperated and… amused? “Bucky—”

Suddenly irritated, he snapped back.  “What is going on, Steve?  Where are the others?  Where am I?”

There was a pause, and the pained look was back on Steve’s face.  “Not so much ‘where’, Buck, as ‘when’.”

Bucky stared back at him.  “When?”

And Steve took a deep breath.  “As I said,” he explained.  “There’s been an…incident.”

***

“2015.” Bucky stared down at the glass tablet in his hands.  Symbols glimmered along the sides of it, and in the middle was what looked like a newspaper headline with what looked like the start of a newspaper article, except the pictures were in colour and it was on a glowing glass screen.  There was a date at the top.  It was not a date that he had at all expected to see.

“You touch it and pull it down to read the rest,” said Steve.  “Swipe it to the side to go to the next page."

Newspapers.  Of the future.  That you swiped to read.  In the future.  He looked up at Steve and then turned again to look at the left wall of the room.  The black colouring there had disappeared with a few words from his friend, and the wall was now a vast window looking over a massive cityscape.  It was just familiar enough to be identifiable, and just different enough to be disconcerting.

“2015,” he repeated.  And then:  “Right outside that window is New York in 2015.”

Steve smiled slightly.  “Inside the window too, Buck.  This isn’t a magical building.”

“Is there a magical building?  Because I’m pretty sure this isn’t something that happens out of nowhere!”

Steve looked sympathetic.  “Not a magical building, but no, definitely not something that happened out of nowhere.  It was more like a kind of… accident.  With an alien artifact.”

He frowned.  “An alien— What, like Howard thinks that thing Hydra’s using might be?  Well that’s just swell.”

“Like that, yeah,” Steve replied.  “Not Hydra, though.  This was… another crowd.”

“Another evil society?”

He looked somewhat rueful.  “We’ve got quite a few of them gunning for us.”

Bucky looked at the window, at the strange, impossible city that lay beyond the glass, and then back at Steve.  “We?  Okay, look.  Steve, this is nice and all, but you’re gonna have to go back a step right now because this is… okay.  This is 2015?”

“Yes, it’s—”

“—So how are you here?  How do you know what’s going on?  The war… the war’s over?  And we won?  We must have won.  What happened?  And this… alien artifact.  It brought you here too?  But earlier on, so you had time to figure everything out and spruce yourself up, and come talk to me….”

Steve made a face.

“…Or not?”

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, sorry.”

“Complicated.”  Bucky put down the news tablet and looked at Steve, really looked.  There was something— It wasn’t just the hairstyle that was different, or the clothes.  It was the way he held himself, the troubled set to his expression….  His eyes widened.  “How long have you been in this time?”

Steve looked almost apologetic.  “A couple of years.”

“A couple of years.”

“A couple of years,” he confirmed.  “But the artifact?  That, we just found.  I kinda went a different route.”

“Different…wait.  Did the serum— Are you saying you don’t age?”  He blinked.  “No wait, you said only a couple of years, that wouldn’t—”

“No!” Steve replied hastily.  “Not that different.  I mean, I think it’s going slower, but I do normally age.  I just stopped while I was frozen.”

There was an uneasy pause while Bucky stared at him.

“Buck…?”

“While you were frozen.”

“Yeah.  Uh—it was in the arctic.  And, yes, the war did end.  The Germans, the Japanese, they lost.”

He gazed at Steve in amazement.  “So that means we won?”

Steve looked conflicted, but he nodded.  “Yeah.”

Bucky paused to let this sink in.  “The war’s over, and we won.  And you got frozen into a block of ice in the arctic.  And then they—”

“Unfroze me in the future.”  Steve shrugged ruefully.

“And now I’m in the future too.  Because of an alien artifact.”

“I’m afraid so?”

Bucky shook his head slowly.  “Our lives are very, very strange.”

Steve looked sympathetic.  “Well, that’s not uncommon around here.”

“I’d question whether all of this is real—“

“It is—”

He put up a hand.  “I would question whether it’s real, but I’ve spent the last few months of my life blowing up factories full of weird blue energy weapons made by a guy whose complexion is the colour of my last date’s lipstick so no, it’s fine, I believe you.  It’s just…. I remember when we were kids, playing all those fantasy games about what we were going to be when we grew up.  I guess real life can be even stranger than a kid’s imagination, sometimes.”

The look on Steve’s face was… hard to decipher.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Sometimes it can be.”

Bucky took a deep breath.  “Okay,” he said.  “So how do we need to deal with this?  Am I going to… mess up time being here like this?  I mean, I didn’t get here the frozen way.”

Steve’s expression turned even more indecipherable.  “No…. No you didn’t.  Of course.  Look, you’ll be okay here for the moment.  We’re still trying to figure what the… best course of action is.”

“‘We’ again?  Do you have a team in the— What am I talking about; of course you have a team in the future.  Are they as interesting as us?”

“They are certainly interesting,” said Steve.

“Any of them experts on alien artifacts?”

Steve’s lips curled into a smile.  “Well, one of the guys is an alien, so….”

Bucky blinked.  “You have an alien on your team.  No wait, seriously.  You have someone from another world on your team?”

“I’ve got someone from another world on my team.”

He stared at Steve with a certain degree of awe.  “Okay, you have gotta introduce me to him.”

***

The alien team member, who was apparently called Thor, of all things, was currently not in the building, but Bucky managed to get a guarantee that he could meet him when he came back.  In the meantime, Steve suggested that he clean up so they could grab some food and meet the team who were currently on site.  He took a look at himself and agreed that this was probably a good idea, partly because of an ingrained soldier’s instinct to use good bathing facilities when he could get them, and partly because apparently travelling through time didn’t do much for your personal hygiene.  He dimly registered that he should maybe be panicking more on the whole “travelling in time” thing but his life had been so saturated in insanity of late he found he couldn’t muster up the energy.  Getting clean seemed far more important right now.

The bathroom was astonishing in its opulence.  It was huge and sparkling clean, with an enormous mirror and an even more enormous shower.  There were dozens of different-smelling soaps, aftershaves, and other mysterious potions that he had absolutely no idea of the purpose of.  When he turned the shower on, the water pressure was amazing and the water temperature was sublime.  Apparently either bathing was an astonishing pursuit in the future, or Steve had really fallen on his feet here.

He spent far too long drenched in the shower and then longer than he probably should have looking at the clothes that Steve had provided and wondering what the hell they were made of.  He eventually found a label that talked about woven bamboo fibres, and that was even more baffling because since when was bamboo something that you could weave into soft shirts?  Geez, he hadn’t even got out of the bathroom and already the future was confusing.

Eventually he wandered out, dressed in bamboo fibres and cleaner than he’d felt in months.  Steve was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, and there was another man talking to him, with dirty blonde hair and wearing a short-sleeved top that showed off muscular arms.  As soon as he exited the bathroom, the man tilted his head and watched him keenly.  Bucky got the feeling that he was being quickly and thoroughly appraised for strengths and weaknesses, which would have been more disconcerting had Steve not obviously been at ease in the guy’s presence.

“One of your team?” he said to Steve, and gave the man a nod of greeting.

The man smiled.  “Or, if you put it another way, you could say that he’s one of our team,” he said.  “I mean, technically no one elected him leader.”

Bucky grinned.  “Let me guess.  He walked up, started to lead, and everyone decided by mutual unspoken agreement to do what he said?”

The man’s smile widened.  “You guys too, huh?”

Steve looked slightly embarrassed.  “You can kick me out if I’m not up to scratch, you know.”

The man looked at Steve with a mixture of amusement and fondness, and Bucky instantly liked him.  “And yet you’re still here?  How’d that happen, I wonder?”

“Careful, I think he’s blushing.”

Steve shook his head at them both, and then nodded it towards the man.  “This is Clint Barton, Bucky.  He’s our eyes in the sky, and also the resident funny guy, apparently.”

“I’m great value at parties,” Clint quipped.

“Eyes in the…” Bucky looked at him, interested.  “You a sniper?”

He shrugged modestly.  “I tried hand to hand, but it’s hard to compete when you’ve got a god-like alien and the peak of human physical perfection on your team.”

“I know what you mean,” Bucky said.  “Well, except for the god-like alien, unless there was something Dum-Dum wasn’t telling us.”

Steve gave a snort of laughter at this, and Bucky grinned at him and then turned back to Clint.  “So how’s the rifle tech in the future?”

Clint shrugged.  “Adequate.  But me, I’m more of an old-fashioned type.”  He nodded his head towards the bed that Bucky had recently vacated and he realised that someone had placed a sleek, black bow and a bafflingly futuristic quiver on top of it.

He blinked.  “You’re an archer?”  Then he looked back at Clint with a calculating grin.  “Wow, thought people’d be beyond the Robin Hood stuff by this point.”

Clint raised an eyebrow at that.  “Oh, I’m so going to school you for that comment, sniper-boy.”

“Looking forward to it, Robin.”

“Maybe later, you two.  Clint, don’t you have somewhere to be?”

Clint turned back to Steve and shrugged easily.  “Nat’s fine, Steve.  Just letting her enjoy an extra coffee before the pick-up.”

“Pick-up?”  Bucky asked, curious.

Steve looked faintly exasperated.  “Natasha’s another team mate.  We can be… busy, and there have been some fires to put out—”

“—metaphorical and literal—” interrupted Clint.

“—while we’ve been dealing with your situation.  Natasha’s done with her one but there was an issue with transport…”

“She totalled the jet,” said Clint.  “Second time this month, too.  Tony’s gonna be pissed.”  He looked a bit more pleased about that than he probably should have.

“Tony’s what?  Your engineer?”

“Something like that,” said Steve.  “Look, I’ll introduce you a bit later.  Clint—“

“I know, I know.”  He put his hands up in a placating gesture.  “I’m gone.  Nice to meet you, Bucky.  See you around.”  Just for a second, his eyes flicked to Steve with an odd expression.  “If you have time.”

“Right.  You too.”  He watched Clint go, then turned to Steve.  “Fires to put out?  Is that what your alien is doing as well?”

Steve nodded.  “We’re not always this busy, but when it rains…”

Bucky looked at him soberly.  “Do you have to be anywhere?  ’Cause I can wait, if you need to.  Just point me to the food before you go because I think I could eat a horse or two right now.”

Steve’s expression was back to being slightly indecipherable.  He smiled, and it looked…fond.  “It’s okay, Buck.  The others have been—They’re all very capable, and they’ll let me know if there’s something that I’ve gotta see.  And Tony and Bruce are still here; they’re working with the artifact.”

Bucky nearly jumped out of his skin as a voice said, “I am likewise still here, Captain, although I will grant that I am also in the field.”

He spun around, but there was no sign of the person to whom the voice belonged. 

Steve seemed to be just fine with talking to thin air, however.  “JARVIS.  I’m sorry, I should have mentioned you.”

The voice sounded unbothered.  “An understandable omission, Captain.  You did not wish to startle your friend before he was somewhat settled.”

Bucky glared at Steve.  “Okay, what the hell?”

To his credit, Steve did look apologetic.  “Bucky, this is JARVIS.  He’s… well, he’s a machine that can think like a human.   The word they use nowadays is artificial intelligence.”

Bucky stared at him, and then looked up towards the ceiling.

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” said the ceiling.

“You’re… Okay, where are you exactly?”

“I am currently maintaining many locations,” said JARVIS.  “I inhabit the servers in this building, and numerous other residences.  I have several backups available.  I am also out in the field with the Falcon and his team, at the moment.”

“What, all at the same time?”

“Indeed.  I am an unapologetic multi-tasker.”

Bucky glanced back at Steve, who looked sympathetic, at least.  He addressed the ceiling again.  He really wasn’t sure how else to talk to a voice that seemed to exist in any number of places.  “So you— If you’re artificial, then where did you come from?  Someone made you?”

“That is correct.  And I feel that this is an appropriate time to mention that I have a message for the Captain from my creator.”

Steve frowned at that.  “Exactly why is Tony not talking to me himself?”

“Tony!  The engineer guy, right?”

JARVIS’s voice was as calm and composed as ever.  “Indeed.  And Sir claims to be too busy attempting to address the situation with the artifact.”

“With Bruce.”

“Not at this current moment in time.  That would be the content of the message, which is that the situation with Thor escalated and Bruce left to join him.”

At this, Steve crossed from being annoyed to genuinely looking heated.  “I asked to be kept informed about any—JARVIS, patch me through to Tony.”

“He claims to be very busy with the artifact.”

“I’m sure he claims that.  Patch me through!”

There was a brief silence, and Bucky wondered whether that meant that JARVIS was thinking, and then wondered whether artificial intelligences that could apparently be in dozens of places at once really needed thinking time.

Then another voice said, “I’m sorry, did the ‘too busy’ message not get through, or are you just deliberately being a pain in my ass?”

Bucky tried to suppress a grin.  The elusive Tony was apparently not one to sugar-coat things.

“Why was I not informed about the situation with Thor?”

Tony sounded just as annoyed as Steve looked.  “That’s what you’re interrupting me for?  Look, Thor called in looking for a fighty type, you were busy fussing over the Summer Sergeant, and Bruce volunteered to help.  Why exactly is that hard to understand?”

“If Thor needed help you should have called me to go in!  You told me about the importance of what you were doing—”

“And Bruce knows the importance of what we are doing!  Which is why he was feeling just a little stressed.”

Steve hesitated, and Bucky frowned.  He had a feeling that there was another layer to this conversation that he didn’t quite understand.  “Uh, Steve?  I don’t want to butt in here or anything, and I know you’re worried, but you were just saying about how capable they all were…”

Tony’s voice rang through the building’s speakers again.  “Of course he was.  He’s always going on about how awesome we are.  You should hear him at parties.  He’s like a proud grandparent, both in disposition, age and sadly, fashion sense.  So, Bucky, right?”

“Tony…” said Steve, warningly.

“Yeah,” said Bucky.  “And you’re Tony.  The engineer?”

“I prefer the title ‘resident genius and sugar daddy’ myself.  Look, I’d chat with you, but I’m in the middle of a bunch of calculations that you most certainly won’t understand.  Steve, Thor needed help and Bruce needed to blow off steam.  He’ll be back, and this lab will be more likely to stay intact for one more day.  The situation is under control at this particular moment.  Go get something to eat, and I’ll talk to you when I have enough figured out to talk about.”

“Tony—”

“Sayonara.  Signing out.  Over and out?  Is that how you soldier types do it?”

“Tony!”

“Sorry Cap!  Can’t hear you!  Signed out!” 

There was an awkward silence.  Bucky turned to Steve, raising an eyebrow.  “Wow.  He’s worse than Howard.”

A complicated expression danced across Steve’s face.

“Wait, he’s not—”

Steve sighed.

“Oh Jesus, he is.”

“Tony Stark.  Only son of Howard and Maria.”

“Howard had a kid.  You have Howard’s kid on your team.  That’s… wow.”

“He does have his good points,” said Steve.  “He’s just—“

“Loud?  Obnoxious?”

“I was going to go for, ‘a little over the top’…”

Bucky grinned at him.  “That’s one of the reasons you’re a better man than me.”

Steve smiled back, although there was something odd in his eyes—

JARVIS interjected smoothly.  “If I may interrupt?  Reports show that the situation with Thor and Dr Banner appears to be almost resolved.  I’m sure they will be back soon.  If you’d like to have something to eat while you wait, there is a selection of lunch materials available in the common lunch room.”

Bucky’s stomach rumbled and he was suddenly reminded that he had no idea how much relative time it had been since he’d last eaten.  “Sounds like a great idea to me.”

Steve nodded and gestured down the corridor.  “Okay, follow me.  If there’s one thing you will like here, it’s the food.”

“Hey, I’ve been living on army rations, so really anything would be a step up.”

Steve looked a bit happier.  “Try more like a pole vault than a step.”

“Okay, now I’m interested.”

Steve headed off and as he made to follow, Bucky glanced back at the room with the dark walls, and the sleek furniture, and the window, and the twisting crack of light along the wall.

He blinked.  The room looked perfectly ordinary, if somewhat futuristic.

“You coming?” said Steve, looking back at him.

Bucky frowned and shook his head.  Trick of the light.  Must have been.  “Sure,” he said.  “Coming.”

Chapter Text

Steve hadn’t been kidding about the food.  His lunch had apparently consisted “only” of last night’s leftovers and sandwiches, and it was seriously up there with some of the most delicious food he’d ever eaten.  Even the salad had forsaken the traditional tomato and iceberg lettuce, and instead had been laden with stuff such as dried cranberries and pumpkin and something called quinoa that he’d never seen before in his life.  He quickly set about demolishing two sourdough sandwiches, a bowl of the baffling salad, and some kind of spiced meat dish that had a name he couldn’t actually pronounce. 

Steve watched with some amusement.  “You know, you can slow down there, Buck.  It’s not going to go away.”

Bucky paused between mouthfuls of the salad.  “I’m hungry!  Don’t tell me you don’t remember the army ration days.”

Steve took another bite from one of his own sandwiches.  “I did get more than you guys.”  He looked a little conflicted at that.

“You needed it to keep super soldiering.  Wasn’t your fault your body burned through it faster than us mortals.”  He took another spoonful, and looked up again to see Steve biting his lip.  “What?”

“Nothing.  I— you went hungry a lot.”

He rolled his eyes.  “I’m a pig.  The others were fine – I managed.  Not your fault.  Again. You needed it more.”

“Right.”  He looked unhappy, and Bucky was debating making an even more sarcastic comment when the door swung open, an enormous man wearing a cape and carrying a huge hammer burst into the room, and he settled on nearly choking on his sandwich instead.

“Captain!” said the man.  “The situation has been dealt with.  My focus can once more be on the more pressing situation of—ah.”  His eyes alighted upon Bucky, who was still coughing and spluttering, and he smiled.  “I see that you have awakened.  My greetings.  I am Thor.”

Bucky blinked rapidly at Thor.  “Uh,” he said, and then spluttered again, intelligently.

“Here, Bucky.”  Steve passed over a glass of water and he sipped it gratefully.  Thor looked slightly concerned and he waved his hand in a way that he hoped still meant ‘just give me a second’ to aliens.

Successfully breathing oxygen again, he looked up apologetically.  “Uh, sorry.  I’m Bucky?  You must be the… I mean, Steve said you were from…”

Thor looked at him understandingly. “I hail from Asgard, a world that is far from yours, although not so far if one has the means to make the journey.”

“Wow.  That’s...  You look very—I wasn’t sure what I was expecting really.  I mean, the stories I read as a kid, about Martians and such… They were all green with tentacles and not so…”  He looked up hastily.  “I mean, no offense intended!”

Thor’s expression was a combination of amused and slightly baffled.  “And none taken.  I have known many fine tentacled beings, and many green ones as well.  I confess not to having met any from Mars recently, however.”

Bucky gawked at him.  “Recently?”

Thor smiled.  “I have lived for some time, and seen many things.  In fact, our people visited yours many years before now, and left you with stories and legends that grew and changed as the years passed.”

“Leg—wait, you’re saying that you’re really Thor?”

He blinked. “Of course.”

“What, as in Thor as in the Norse—Steve, you’ve got Thor as in the Norse god Thor on your team?”

Steve smiled at him and shrugged in a way that was far too nonchalant for the circumstances.  “Turns out we do, yeah.”

“I am not truly a god,” said Thor, reassuringly.  “Our civilisation is simply more advanced than yours in matters of… technology.  It is something that I discuss with Jane, my beloved, at great lengths.”

“Jane’s a scientist,” said Steve, accommodatingly.  “She studies space.”

“She studies all that is within the universe,” said Thor enthusiastically.  “Though she is currently out of the country, she has also been in consult with us in regards to your situation.”

Bucky stared, and then turned to Steve helplessly.  “You’re not just pulling my leg about all of this, are you?”

Steve smiled sympathetically.  “Afraid not.  It’s a strange world out there.”

Thor grasped Steve’s shoulder good-naturedly.  “But one full of marvels and mysteries.  Speaking of which,” his face turned more sober, “how goes the research?”

Steve’s expression fell for a split second, and then levelled out to something more even.  “There isn’t much most of us can do at the moment.  Obviously the others have been dealing with issues as they arise.  Natasha’s done with hers but her transport was destroyed and Clint’s gone to pick her up. Falcon and his team are still helping at the disaster zone in Venezuela, and might be for a few days. Tony is locked in his lab and isn’t saying much.  Bruce…”

Thor nodded.  “He joined me briefly and was of much help.  He is currently refreshing himself.”

“Actually I’m finished now,” said a quiet voice from the doorway, and a rumpled-looking man with glasses walked into the room.  Bucky looked up at him curiously.  While Thor looked like exactly the type of person (or reasonable equivalent) you’d want out dealing with ‘incidents’, Bruce really didn’t look like the ‘fighty type’ at all.  Still, he was apparently one of the team’s eggheads, so maybe he was good with explosives or something like that.  Bucky knew enough about first impressions to never rely on them.

“This is Doctor Bruce Banner,” said Steve, and when Bruce nodded to Bucky in greeting, he continued, “Bruce.  Are you feeling…calmer now?”

Bucky thought that was rather odd wording, but Bruce just looked at Steve.  “Enough, yes,” he said.  “Sorry about my exit.  I’m just going to get something to eat and then I’ll head back to Tony to see if he’s made any progress.”

“On the research on what to do about me?”  said Bucky.

Bruce looked at him properly for the first time since he’d come into the room.  “On that, yes.  And on the artifact that brought you here.”

“So what are you doing, exactly?” he asked.

When Steve looked worriedly at him, he shrugged.  “Look, I know I’m not the science type, but what are you even trying to do?  Put me back?  Can you do that?  If I stay here, wouldn’t that screw up time or something?”

Despite the fact that there was still a huge alien god in the room, albeit one who was quietly making a sandwich in the background now, Bruce instead looked carefully at Steve before he said, “What we should do is really what we’re trying to determine, or at least it was when I left Tony.  We— we’re leaning toward trying to get you back, though there are…some problems with that scenario.”

Bucky thought about this.  “Because I know things about the future?  Is that going to cause a lot of problems?”

“It…might,” replied Bruce.

Bucky frowned.  “If it helps, Steve hasn’t really told me much at all; just enough so that I actually believe what he’s saying.  I’m guessing that’s deliberate.”

Steve nodded, and Bruce replied, “It could be fine.  Or it could not be.  Time travel is a concept that humans have only dealt with in theory.”

“Even on Asgard it is seen as dangerous knowledge,” added Thor.  “Although I have been helping when I can with what I know.”

Steve frowned at this.  “This team has some of the best minds in the country, if not the world,” he said, with a voice that sounded more optimistic than his face.  “They’re doing everything they can.”

“Right,” Bucky said, and he probably should have been paying more attention, but something had just occurred to him, something he should have realised already, instead of letting all the marvels of the future side-track him. It was causing an unpleasant feeling to settle deep in his gut.  “Steve, you— you don’t really look that much older than when I saw you last.  Especially if you’ve been here for two years.”

Steve looked unhappy to have to broach the subject.  “It’s been a few years,” he said, carefully.

“A few years.”  The unpleasant feeling escalated.  “Not many years.”

Steve sighed.  “Not many years, no,” he admitted.

Bucky looked at him tightly.  “And would ‘not many’ mean ‘two and a bit’?  Maybe three if I’m lucky?”

Steve’s expression was tinged with pain.  “Bucky, I—I’m sorry.”

And that was as good as a confirmation, really.  Which meant that—

He continued on, pulling it all together, unable to stop now, no matter how much he wanted to.   “When you said you got here because you were frozen…I didn’t even think about how that would work; I was too distracted by everything when you told me.” Bucky looked at Steve in dismay.  “You put me back where I was, and it happens right after, doesn’t it?  In weeks, or maybe months at the most.  You’re lost in some arctic wilderness, and what, no one finds you?  As far as we’re—as far as I’m concerned, you’re gone forever.”

Steve’s face was conflicted, but he didn’t try to deny it.  “Buck— look, most thought I was dead.   I crashed in the middle of nowhere, it was impossible to— It was sheer coincidence I was found when I was, really.  I could’ve been there for even longer.  It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

“I’m not worried about whether it was someone’s fault!”  He realised that Thor was looking at him, and that he almost certainly had shouted that last line.  He found it hard to care, but he concentrated on keeping his voice steady.  “Were you even planning on telling me this?  Were you hoping I wouldn’t notice?”

Steve cast a troubled look towards Thor, and then he turned his eyes towards Bucky, and he could see the distress in them.  “Bucky, I don’t wanna hurt you.  I would never want that, believe me.”

He stared at Steve, and suddenly he felt a stab of guilt.  Because of course Steve didn’t want to hurt him.  Steve had never wanted to do that, and Steve knew that telling him the truth about how, according to history, he’d soon be out of his life, would do just that.  Was it any wonder he’d be reluctant to bring it up?

Bucky took a deep breath to calm himself.  “Okay, I’m sorry, I’m just—but hey, it doesn’t matter, right?  I mean, if you do put me back, I can fix it.  I can let you know about it and we can change it.”

If it were possible for Steve to look more miserable, he did.

“Steve?”

But it was Thor who answered, putting down the knife he’d been using to cut enormous slices of ham.  “To try to manipulate time is a dangerous thing.”  He glanced at both Steve and Bruce, and an indecipherable look passed between them.  “What we attempt to do has no small chance of causing changes that will impact not only on Steven and yourself, but on all the people of the world.”

Bucky looked back at Steve with a sinking heart.  “You mean the things you’ve done— Dammit, when you, when you got lost in the arctic?  That was something vital to the war.  They needed you to do that.”  He paused, while Steve grimaced and the others looked uncomfortable.  “But you could just tell me where you went down and we could find you.  It’s more than that.”  He frowned in unhappy realisation. “It’s what you’re doing in the future.  You’re saying you need to be here.”

Steve bit his lip.  “It’s… really complicated, Bucky.”

“So, basically, even if you do put me back where I’m supposed to be in time, I’m going to lose my best friend.” 

Steve looked at him helplessly.  “I know, Buck.  I know what it’s—” he stopped himself.  “I missed—I miss you, and the others.  Every day.  But there’s things here I need to do. ”

He knew he sounded bitter, but goddamn.  “Important things.  I mean, of course there are.  You’re Captain America.”

“Important things,” repeated Steve.  But he looked like he’d rather be anyone else but Captain America right then.

Bucky bit his lip and turned to Bruce.  “So you don’t want me to change things.  Not for him, at least.”

Bruce looked uncomfortable to have the focus on himself.  “That seems like it would be unwise.  But truthfully we just don’t know the best way to deal with the situation yet.  We need to run more calculations, complete more scenarios to get a bigger picture.”

He frowned at Bruce, trying to wrap his head around the problem.    “Your scenarios are trying to figure out what, exactly?”

Bruce took off his glasses and began to polish them distractedly.  “What will happen if we do different things.  If we can tell you the future.  If we should give you some information about… events.” His eyes flicked to Steve, as if he wasn’t sure whether he should keep talking about this.  When Steve didn’t react except to look unhappy, he continued.   “If it’s—  If it’s good or bad in the long term for you to change them.  If we can put you back at all, or if we have to put you back knowing as little as possible.” He put his glasses back on.  “We think what we’ve done so far is of minimal risk but…it is possible that you might already know too much, even if you don’t choose to act on it.  According to some theories even the most minuscule of changes can make huge differences.”

Bucky looked over to Steve.  He’d picked up a glass of water to drink, and now he was gripping it so tight, Bucky could see the veins in his hands.  Bucky looked back at Bruce.  “Do you think they’re right?”

Bruce looked even more uncomfortable.  “I—think there’s always a possibility they could be viable.  We need to do more—”

“More tests, right,” Bucky said, frustrated.

“Bucky.  Tony and Bruce are going to do everything they can,” Steve said.

Bucky looked back at Steve and deflated slightly.  Why was he poking at this?  It wasn’t like Steve could do anything about time itself, and it was obvious from his face that he wasn’t happy with the situation.

He took a deep breath.  “Okay, sorry.  This is just, the whole thing is just a kick in the teeth, no matter which way you look at it.”

Bruce looked down at the bench, suddenly overly invested in sandwich-making again.  “It’s… hard to deal with events that seem out of your control,” he said, quietly.  Steve threw him a sharp look, but Bruce simply grabbed a small knife and stabbed a tomato with greater-than-necessary force

Bucky was rapidly feeling awkward as well as frustrated.  It was increasingly clear that, no matter how positive Steve had tried to be when he woke up, they were all worried about the current situation, and everything he said was making them all feel worse about it.  That was hardly going to help.

He steadied himself, summoned up an apologetic expression for Bruce and said, “Look, I’m sure you can… figure out whatever needs to be done.” When Bruce looked back at him with a neutral expression on his face, he raced on. “We could find a way to get Steve back there or, if worst comes to worst and it’s really not possible, I guess you put me back and I’ll— I’ll try and make sure I keep anything I know from here under wraps.”  He swallowed painfully.  That option still seemed by far the worse, but Steve knew these guys, right?  He trusted them; he said they were smarter than anything.  “That’s the best I can do, in the end.  I know you said I might know too much already, but it’s too late to do anything about that now.  I mean, what are you going to do, wipe my mind or somethi—?”

There was an almighty crack. He jumped three inches into the air, eyes darting around wildly before they settled on where everyone else’s in the room already were.

Steve was standing, staring at Bucky, his expression indescribable.  He was holding the shattered pieces of the glass in his hands.  Tiny spots of blood splattered to the ground. 

There was a stunned silence for several seconds, and everyone stayed frozen.  Then Bruce grimaced, and stood up abruptly, and walked out mumbling something about going to find a bandage. 

Thor carefully put his sandwich down and said, “Captain?”

“Steve?” said Bucky, slightly shocked.

Steve blinked, took a deep breath, and then looked down at the mixture of blood and glass shards in his hands as though he wasn’t quite sure how they had gotten there.

“Steve, geez!”  He jumped up and hurried to him, as Thor came around the kitchen bench to Steve’s side, looking concerned.

Steve looked up and winced.  “I—sorry.”

Bucky raised his eyebrows.  “Sorry? You’ve sliced up your—hey, no, don’t curl it up, that’ll make it worse!”  He grabbed at Steve’s wrist and pulled it down to look at the damage.  Truthfully, it wasn’t too bad, it was only a glass and Steve was a freaking super soldier after all, but some of the shards looked like they’d wedged themselves deep.

Steve pulled his hand back and visibly gathered himself.  “It’s okay.  It doesn’t hurt.”  He accepted a dishtowel from Thor and loosely wrapped it around his hand to absorb the blood.  “I guess I still don’t know my own strength.”  He smiled weakly at Bucky.

Bucky shook his head at him, worried.  “Yeah?  Well I don’t think you should take it out on the glassware.  Seriously, Steve.  Are you—”

Thor interceded gently.  “Captain, I believe Bruce said that he was going to get some bandages.  If you are not sorely wounded, perhaps you could meet him in the first aid room?  You should have the shards taken out before your body heals over them.”

Steve looked at Thor, and then back at Bucky.  “I can’t—”

“I can look after your friend, Captain.  Please, tend to your wounds.”

Bucky opened his mouth to volunteer to go with him, and then caught the look Thor threw to him and stopped, puzzled.  He looked at Steve, carefully, and then back at the sober expression on the alien.  “Uh, sure,” he said.  “I’ll be fine.  See you in a bit.”

Steve still looked worried, but with some more reassurance, he headed off in the direction that Bruce had gone.

As soon as he had left, Bucky turned to Thor.  “Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t realise he was so—”

Thor raised his hand to intercede.  “Please, you…misinterpret the situation somewhat.  The Captain has recently dealt with foes who used some methods of ‘mind wiping’, as you called it.  These methods were brutal and crude.”

His eyes widened.  “Oh.  God.  He didn’t get—”

Thor regarded him carefully.  “They did not harm him, no.  However, the Captain has had to deal with the aftermath of their ruthlessness and I believe it has…affected him sorely.”

Bucky grimaced.  He’d seen Steve keep a brave face through any number of horrors.  For it to upset him like that…. “Now I feel like a prize mug.  I was actually trying to make him feel better.  I mean, he always thinks this kinda thing is all his fault.  I just wanted him to know that I trust that whatever he does— I mean,” he added hastily, “it cuts me up that I’ll be pretty much losing him if you have to put me back. But I don’t want him to blame himself for me being down.”

Thor nodded sympathetically, his face faintly grim.  “I suspected that his tendency for guilt was something he’d had for some time.”

Bucky gave a soft snort of laughter.  “You can say that again.  And this whole situation is just— I mean, seeing all the future tech has been amazing, and the food!  But we have to figure out how to deal with it.”

“Indeed,” Thor nodded.  “However it…may be that simply waiting while our fellow teammates attempt to solve the issues may be all that we can do at the moment.”  He looked unhappy at this.  Bucky sensed that patience was not a trait that sat easily with Thor.

A disquieting sensation crept through him.  “So you actually do know—  It actually is possible to wipe people’s brains?”

Thor seemed to hesitate for a second and then said, “If ever that is indeed what needs to be done, and I promise you that it would only be as a last recourse, then I have a technology from my own people that is far less invasive than that which Steven has seen.”

Bucky hesitated, then nodded.  Oddly, he felt slightly reassured.  “Okay.  Okay then.”  He decided he liked Thor.  For an alien he was remarkably honest and…pragmatic, he supposed.

“I would…suggest not discussing the existence of this technology with the Captain.”

He made a face.  “Yeah.  I got it.”

“As for now, since it is best that your knowledge of this era remains minimal, I believe that for the foreseeable future you will be availing yourself of the Tower’s hospitality while we all wait for further developments.  I do know how frustrating that can be,” he added.

Bucky sighed in resignation. “At least I get to see what other types of futuristic miracles you’ve got tucked away up here?” he said, trying to sound optimistic. 

At this, Thor smiled.  “I believe,” he said, “you will not be disappointed on that front.”

Chapter Text

The next couple of days passed with short bouts of interesting discoveries and long stretches of frustrating inactivity.  After the incident in the lunchroom, Bruce had not returned but Steve had come back from the first aid room with his hand bandaged, and several apologies on his lips that Bucky brushed off with a shrug and a determined smile.  They’d finished their food, and then true to Thor’s word, Steve regretfully explained that it was best he be restricted to the tower for the length of his stay in the future.

He understood why, he did, but it was maddening to know the kind of futuristic wonders that had to be beyond this building, and yet be unable to explore them.  The other thing was that he’d, just a few days ago, been balanced for so long on the constant knife edge of adrenaline that came with being part of the world’s best defence against Hydra’s forces.  Pulling himself back from that made him… twitchy, and when he wasn’t with Steve or the others he found himself relentlessly exploring the parts of the tower they allowed him access to. 

The group that Steve led in the future were called the Avengers, and, presumably in a fit of stunning creativity, the tower had been named the Avengers Tower.  It was, undoubtedly, an amazing place.  Just in the few floors he had access to, there was a private theatre, gymnasium, firing range, several private and public kitchen and dining areas, recreation rooms, a library, a swimming pool, laboratories, workshops, studies, rooms for sleeping, rooms for lounging, rooms for bathing, rooms for storage, rooms for growing plants….  There were probably rooms for cutting your toenails and singing badly along to show tunes as well.  When he was a kid he’d dreamed of visiting a place this grandiose; he’d never dreamed he’d actually be staying in one.  Hell, he’d only half believed that a place like this could even exist, even disregarding the amazing technology woven into its very structure.

On the first day Steve gave him a tour, although one that carefully avoided certain parts of the building.  After he was called off for important business (Bucky sensed that Steve was trying to spend as much time as possible with him, but there were obviously some tasks the group leader couldn’t avoid) he was left to himself briefly, but any idle thoughts he might have had to explore those tantalising restricted areas were quickly dispersed by the realisation that JARVIS effectively inhabited the whole building, and could essentially turn up anywhere.  Bucky nearly jumped out of his skin when he bent down to inspect the lock on a door that he suspected might lead to the laboratories that Bruce and Tony were working in, only to have a polite voice explain that his presence near the artifact might destabilise some of the important experiments that were being completed, and he regretted that Tony and Bruce were very busy right now and unable to talk, and also perhaps, if he was bored, he would like to watch a movie or take a swim instead?

He chose the movie option and was treated to a space movie called Star Wars. It was fast paced, in bright technicolour, and was actually pretty good, but he couldn’t help but notice that it also contained no information about the outside world, either.  After the movie, Steve came back with the glass tablet and showed him how to use it properly, saying that it had been ‘loaded’ with entertainment and some information.   It was frankly amazing that something that small could contain that many things, but again, any news and reference writing on it was carefully trimmed to exclude anything that seemed truly important.

Bucky knew they were doing this for a reason.  They’d explained how he could affect things if he knew too much, and he even agreed.  It was just—frustrating.  Knowing he was locked in, and simultaneously locked out, and all the while he couldn’t do anything but wait.

Could he?

He considered this again as he worked out in the gym on the second day.  Steve had stepped out once more, and it had seemed like a good place to burn off some of the jittery energy he’d been unable to get rid of.  The equipment was certainly amazing, and ranged from the traditional and easily recognisable, to the cutting edge and utterly baffling.  Since JARVIS seemed happy to help if Bucky looked too confused, he’d settled for trying it all, and he was, at that time, attached to a harness and climbing up and down various smooth walls with different plastic bits jutting out of them.  It provided a good balance of challenge and exercise, and he found himself quite enjoying it.  And it gave him time to think.

He’d always known, theoretically, that he could lose Steve at any moment.  Hell, he’d only been a child when he’d genuinely acknowledged the possibility to himself.  They’d been running around the local park, Bucky egging Steve on with a child-like disregard for his poor health, when Steve had crumpled to his knees and Bucky realised that his friend’s breath had faded to a strung-out wheeze as he desperately fought for air.  He still remembered the stab of panic as he rushed to Steve’s side, held him by the shoulders, begged him to take the next breath.  And Steve had gasped, and coughed, and gradually managed to drag in enough oxygen to make it home, where he stayed in bed for the next two weeks, and Bucky visited him every day, guilt-ridden and offering gifts of candy buttons and caramels.

He’d thought, for the briefest of moments, that the serum had meant he could finally stop worrying about his friend, but it became almost immediately obvious that becoming the pinnacle of human health only meant that Steve stopped throwing himself into dangerous situations in favour of throwing himself into really, really dangerous situations.  Even a super soldier couldn’t survive being atomised by one of Schmidt’s terrifying disintegrator guns, and so Bucky had at first followed Steve into battle with his eyes open and his heart in his throat.  The feeling had just recently begun to ease, as their victories mounted and Steve stayed resolutely unharmed.  To find out now that, according to the history books, he was going to lose him, probably forever, in just a short amount of time…

But that was the thing, wasn’t it?  Bucky was going to lose him, but Steve wasn’t going to die.  He was fine here.  He had a team, he lived in a luxurious building, he was doing good.  Bucky didn’t doubt that Steve missed him a lot; the look on his face the last couple of days had mostly been kind of heartbreaking and Bucky was slightly ashamed at how pleased that made him feel.  But Steve was not hurt, and Steve was a hero. His actions and deeds were important to the world in a way that Bucky’s couldn’t possibly be.  Everything inside him wanted to break out of this place, find all the information he could on what had happened in the arctic, and go back and prevent it, but if he did that, he’d affect more than just himself and his best friend.  He’d be changing the lives of all the people Captain America helped, and there had to be many of them.  Hundreds, maybe thousands.  Even if he could figure out what happened and when, maybe make sure someone else was there to help instead of Steve, how could he possibly account for every life and who could possibly do what Captain America could do?  In the end, if he did try to change history, Bucky would have to admit to himself that he’d be doing it for selfish reasons, and –

“I can’t do it,” he said, pulling himself up from the top of the wall to the platform above and then smashing his fist against the wooden floor there because damn it.  “I can’t change things just because I want him back.  God I hate this.”

“It is a frustrating situation, Sir,” said the ceiling.

He started, and nearly fell off the platform.  “Holy crap!”

“My apologies, Sir!”

He steadied himself frantically.  “I—I’m—JARVIS?  Is it?”

“That is my name, yes.”

“Okay.”  He carefully grabbed hold of the rails behind the ledge to secure himself.  “Please don’t do that again?”

“Again, I do apologise.  I should have taken into account your unfamiliarity with my presence.”

“Your presence?” he frowned up at the ceiling.  He felt a little silly about doing that, but not having a concrete place to direct his voice was disconcerting.  “Wait, are you always around?”  He’d assumed the incident with the lab was because JARVIS was specifically keeping an eye on that area.  If he was watching every part of the building, or even if he was always watching Bucky himself, that would be…unsettling.

“I always maintain a presence within the building, but I am not always recording the activities within,” reassured JARVIS.  “Although Mr Stark has a…strained relationship with other people’s privacy, I do understand that many humans see the notion as a necessity. I apologise for intruding on your thoughts, but I connected to here to deliver a message and overheard your musings.”

“Oh,” he answered, still a little disconcerted, but somewhat reassured.  “A message?  Is Steve back from his meeting?”

“I’m afraid not.  However, after numerous diversions, Natasha Romanov and Clint Barton have arrived back from their mission.  If you would like to meet Natasha?”

Bucky seized on the chance to not be alone with his own thoughts.  They weren’t going any place good, anyway.  “Yeah,” he said. “I’d like that.”

***************

Once he’d rappelled down and untangled himself from the climbing harness, he headed to the communal kitchen, which seemed to be the accepted place to congregate after missions.  This seemed like a reasonable idea to Bucky.  Nothing like fighting for your life to build up an appetite.

Natasha turned out to be an athletic lady with mid-length hair, several weapons tucked unobtrusively into her black jumpsuit, and an aura of dangerous confidence that made him silently curse the circumstances he was currently in. If he’d been anywhere other than time-shifted into the future by a strange alien device, flirting outrageously would definitely have been the first thing on his mind. 

She was sitting on a stool at the bench when he came in, slicing vegetables into a salad, and she turned to him, mouth set in a pleasant smile.  “Hello.  Bucky, I presume?”

Bucky smiled back in what he hoped was a smooth manner.  “Bucky is right.  You already know all about me, I guess?”

Natasha shrugged slightly, and her smile didn’t waver.  “I could be polite, but if we’re going for truth instead, Clint’s given me all the latest gossip.”  She gestured to the sink where Clint glanced up from washing a plate to give a welcoming nod.

Bucky raised his eyebrows in mock offense.  “He’s got the latest gossip on me already?  We only talked for two minutes.”

“Long enough for you to imply some hurtful things about the fine art of hitting things with arrows,” countered Clint, easily.

Bucky grinned.  Banter was good.  He could do banter.  “Never implied a thing.  I just found it weird to find that the guy from 1944 was the most modern marksman in the building.”

“See, that’s because you’re clearly not someone who respects the classics, and their capacity to adapt with the time,” said Clint.

Bucky glanced at Natasha, smirked when he saw her looking increasingly amused, and then turned to look at Clint sceptically.  “How exactly do you adapt arrows to the future?  Use feathers from highly evolved birds?”

Clint looked appropriately offended.  “My arrows,” he said, waving the dishtowel emphatically, “do not have feathers from ‘highly evolved birds’.  They are made of very special advanced scientific materials, and, even better, they have special advanced scientific points for extra versatility.”

Bucky looked confused at that.   “Scientific points…?”

“Exploding arrows,” said Natasha, helpfully. 

“They don’t just explode!  They shoot different things.  Knockout gas, grappling hooks, acid—”

“Confetti,” added Natasha.

“Confetti?” Bucky turned back to look at Clint incredulously.

Clint looked slightly embarrassed.  “Okay, that was one time, and, in my defence, I was very drunk when I designed that one and I have already admitted that I shouldn’t have forgotten I put it in there.”

Natasha nodded solemnly.  “To be fair, it was a great distraction.  The terrorists were baffled.”

“Not helping, Nat!”

Bucky couldn’t help it.  He started to laugh.

“Okay, that’s it,” said Clint, throwing down the dishtowel.  “We are definitely going down to the range.  I clearly need to educate you.”

Natasha looked at him with some fondness.  “Your curry’s in the microwave,” she pointed out.

Clint paused at this.  “Okay.  We are definitely going to eat, and then we are going down to the range.  You had curry before?”

Bucky looked helplessly between them both.  "No, but I’m more confused over how something can be inside a microwave.  Unless that’s now the name of something completely different than what I’m imagining.”

Natasha looked amused at that.  “Microwave oven,” she said, pointing to a small white box that was making beeping sounds.  “Reheating device of the future.”

“Don’t eat last night’s leftover pizza without it!” added Clint.  “Unless you’re Tony.  You can basically shove anything in his mouth when he’s in his techie zone; cold pizza’s nothing.”

“Harsh but accurate,” observed Natasha.  She had finished making her salad and was now nibbling daintily on a forkful of it.  “In any case, it’s nice to meet you, Bucky.”

Bucky grinned at her.  “Nice to meet you too.”

She smiled gracefully, watching him.  “You okay with eating before testing your gun arm against his bow arm?” 

Natasha had a way of saying it that made it sound like a dare, and Bucky immediately narrowed his eyes.  “Yeah,” he said, “sounds like fun.”

*****************

Which was why he spent most of the afternoon of the second day on the range with a rifle, firing at progressively more elaborate targets and watching with increasing disbelief as Clint and his bow effortlessly managed round after round of the most ridiculously impossible shots he had ever seen in his life.

Bucky knew, without any arrogance, that he was good with a gun.  He’d been the Commandos’ sniper of choice for some time, and he hadn’t yet let them down.  Also, Natasha, who stayed with them for the first hour before wandering off to rest, was no lightweight herself when it came to marksmanship. 

Neither of them, however, came anywhere near close to Clint’s level, because Clint’s level was insane.

First Bucky watched as he picked up the sleek black bow Bucky had seen earlier, aimed, and methodically, one after another, hit the bullseye on every target in the range, pausing only to draw the bow, and to grab another arrow from his quiver after shooting.  Bucky found himself impressed despite himself, but, summing up all his concentration and skill, he managed to duplicate the feat, albeit not quite as quickly as his opponent.

Clint just grinned, and brought out the moving targets.  And then the moving-faster targets.  Then the targets that wove in and out between “civilian” targets that you weren’t allowed to hit.  Then the miniature targets, and the flying targets, and by the time they were down to the targets that were literally life-sized fake insects, Bucky had given up trying to outmatch his opponent and settled for standing there looking slightly gobsmacked while Clint fired arrows that split into smaller arrows and then carried on to precisely skewer a half-dozen fake moths that were all one inch wide, if that, and also jerking and twitching around at top speed.

Clint delicately picked off the last one, and then finally stood back, looking satisfied and then turning to Bucky with a smile that was just this side of smug.  “And that,” he said, “is what a melding of classic and modern technology can do.”

Bucky stared at him, realised his mouth was hanging open, and shut it with a click.  “Okay,” he said.  “That was....”

“Amazing.” Clint grinned brightly.

“I didn’t say— I mean, it was— You’re a super soldier!”

At this, Clint looked taken aback.  “I’m a what?  Yeah...okay.  Pretty sure I only wish I looked like Steve.”

Bucky had to admit this was true.  “Okay, fine.  Not a super soldier.  Just a…super accurate soldier or something.”

Clint grinned at him again.  “Nope.”

“Oh come on, there was no way that was just all you!”

“Training, tenacity, and talent,” said Clint, easily.  “All the way.”  He folded down his bow with a click and started over to a bin in the middle of the range, where a spindly robotic arm had been depositing arrows that it had picked up throughout their practice.

Bucky shook his head in astonishment.  Seventy years later, and Steve was still attracting the most amazing people to his side.

“Quite seriously though,” continued Clint as he scooped up arrows.  “You are damned good.  Don’t feel bad about it or anything, you’ve got nothing to worry about there.”

Bucky sighed.  “Right.  I just don’t have super-powered arms like y—”

There was an almighty crash as several dozen arrows scattered across the floor.

Bucky jumped up from the wall where he’d been leaning.  “Geez!  You okay?”

Clint grimaced, and then knelt down and started to gather them again.  “Yes! Fine!  Sorry.  Butterfingers.”

“Need any help?”

Clint shook his head without looking back at him.  “Nah, I’m good.  Just a bit clumsy.”

Bucky gave a faint snort.  “Pity you picked up the clumsy streak now instead of ten minutes ago.  I might’ve won something then.”  He glanced to the side, at the door to the range and then did a double take. 

A crack of light was winding its way down the door, glowing and twisting in a way that was decidedly eerie.  He glanced frantically over to Clint.  It could only have been for a second, but when he looked back, the door was as ordinary as it had ever been.  “What the hell?”

Clint looked up at that.  “What?”

“The door!  Did you see that?”

Clint turned his gaze to the door, which continued to look completely inoffensive.  “Well, it is a door.”

“I know that.  It was—there was a light.”  At Clint’s look, he added, “Bright light?  Like a…crack?”

Clint frowned.  “Can’t see anything now,” he said.

“I know!”

He gave Bucky a strange look.  “You know,” he said. “We have been having some electricity problems in here.  Just occasionally.  Flashes of light and such.  Still trying to get to the bottom of it.”

“Electricity problems.”

“Yeah.”

Bucky looked at Clint.  Clint met his gaze, expression inscrutable.

Bucky blinked first, in the end.  “Right,” he frowned, but continued on.  “That…must have been it.”

Clint gave him a reassuring smile.  “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said.

Looking back on it, Bucky supposed that this was an odd way to phrase things.  But he was distracted by the puzzle of the light and by the time he got around to really thinking about it…

Well, by then it was too late.

Chapter Text

Bucky slept fitfully that night.  Admittedly, ever since Steve had dragged him out of Zola’s laboratory, his sleep in general hadn’t been peaceful, filled with hazy nightmares of scalpels and needles that left him waking up in panic, throwing himself out of bed almost immediately just to prove to himself that he wasn’t strapped down.  This night, however, he just felt a horrible sense of apprehension, like something was going to happen, and the worst of it was that he couldn’t tell whether it was justified or not.  He was usually all for trusting his feelings, but this was different from any circumstance he’d experienced, and he’d experienced some strange (very, very strange) circumstances.

So he tossed and turned restlessly, dozed briefly, and got up for breakfast feeling a little like a tank had run him over.

Natasha, Steve, and Clint were down in the kitchen area, and he ate a bowl of something called Lucky Charms while nodding and smiling at their small talk and trying to look as though he was paying attention.  He felt a little better after the cereal, probably because it appeared to be almost entirely composed of sugar, but dawdling around the kitchen half-heartedly looking at futuristic appliances didn’t exactly provide much distraction and after the third concerned look Steve sent his way, he was just about fed up.

He dropped himself into the chair in front of Steve.  “So, still no news on the research?”

Steve sighed.  “This is going to take time, Buck.  I trust Tony and Bruce to—”

“Okay, okay, I know.”  He tapped the table restlessly.  “Just—they haven’t figured out whether it’d screw things up for me to get any info, I’m presuming.”

“They haven’t, no.”

“Right.”  He sat glumly at the table for an uncomfortable thirty seconds.  “I only— Is it really going to be a problem if I know general things?  I mean, I already know stuff about the technology, and I know you’re here, now.  I’m just not allowed to ask any questions about what I really want to know, and it’s getting…  I feel like we’re all practising a smaller version of the whole ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’ policy.”

“Bucky, you’re not the enemy.  But we don’t know—” said Steve, looking pained.

“We’re covering all bases,” said Clint, who had finished his toast and was hovering eagerly near the coffee pot.  “Better to be safe than sorry and all that.”

Bucky scowled.  “If it turns out that really little things can cause changes, we’re screwed anyway, though.  You’ll have to—” —use Thor’s tech to wipe my brain, he nearly said, but he caught himself in time.   He didn’t really want to think about it, and there was no need to give Steve flashbacks because he was feeling twitchy, for god’s sake.  “—to figure something out to deal with that.”

“So it’s probably best not to make it any worse then.”  Natasha observed him calmly over her tea cup, from which she was taking dainty sips.  Bucky tried to glare at her, but she didn’t bat an eyelid.

Finally he sighed in frustration and stood up.  “I’m going back to my room.  To read a book, watch a film or something.”

Steve shot him yet another concerned look.  “I am sorry, Buck.  Are you okay?”

He looked over at Steve’s worried face and sighed.  “Yeah, I’m—I slept bad, that’s all.  I’m just frustrated and twitchy.”

“We could do something to wear you out,” said Steve.  In the background there was a sudden splutter as Clint choked on his coffee.  A complicated expression passed over Steve’s face.  “By which I mean,” he added, slightly louder than he needed to, “we could play a game in the gym or something.”

Bucky found himself smiling despite himself.  “Yeah, that’s okay, Steve.  I’m not really in the mood for games.”

In the background, Clint smirked and Natasha gave him a look that adequately conveyed how disappointed she was in his immaturity. 

Steve just looked as worried as ever, and Bucky tried to seem reassuring.  “I’m okay, honest,” he said.  “Just need a bit of rest or something.  I’ll come down later.”

At this, Steve looked slightly mollified.  “Don’t forget lunch.  I’ll see if I can catch up with Tony and Bruce’s progress, maybe see if I can get them to come down.”

“That’d be great,” he replied, and meant it.  Actually having some idea of what was going on would surely help with the restlessness, after all.  It would at least make him feel less paranoid.

***

Bucky did try reading at first, and then he tried watching another film, the second movie in the “Star Wars” trilogy this time.  He couldn’t really concentrate though, and ended up switching it off before he found out how Luke managed to avoid expiring from hypothermia on Hoth (clearly he was going to; it wasn’t like they’d leave a main character to freeze in the middle of nowhere when there were still one and a half films to go).

Next he wandered listlessly around the room for a bit, looking at shelves and posters.  They’d moved him from where he’d initially woken up, and he was now staying in Steve’s apartment in the Tower, in a massive bedroom with a plush bed, multiple chairs for lounging and even a small balcony, although he hadn’t yet gone out onto it.  This meant that the decorations were at least more personal that the sleek, generic ornaments from the other room, but he couldn’t help but notice the absence of anything that gave any real information about future events.  Probably the only exception was a framed black and white photograph of wild celebrations in New York; from the skyline and the clothing style of the citizens and servicemen it was easy to guess that it was a photo of the victory celebrations from when the war ended.  Still, he already knew that it had all ended; all that really told him was that victory couldn’t have been too long from when he was picked up.  That in itself should have made him relieved, and it did, but this still didn’t quiet his sense of jittery unease.  It didn’t help that he knew that Steve hadn’t been there to celebrate, and he’d almost wonder why Steve would keep a picture of something he never experienced himself except—he got it.  He did.  It was evidence.  A reassurance that something so huge and all-encompassing, that defined the lives of so many for so long, could come to a finish.  If Bucky were in Steve’s place, he’d put up that picture too.

Wearying of the room investigation, he flopped down into a comfy lounge chair next to the window and stared out at the city below.  It was so much taller than before, the sky filled with skyscrapers of all shapes and designs.  Some were sleek and streamlined; others looked similar to the ones that he recognised, the ones that had been around in his time.   Then there was the good old Empire State, and there was something eminently comforting about the fact that it, at least, was still standing strong.

He hadn’t seen the outside of the Avengers Tower, but judging from the interior, he guessed it was leaning towards the “sleek and streamlined” end of skyscraper design.  It also had to be one of the tallest buildings in New York; he wasn’t even on the top floor and he had to crane to see anything that was happening on the ground.  The people looked like toy figurines, thousands of them weaving around the streets and in and out of traffic. 

He’d been somewhat disappointed to see a distinct lack of flying cars.  Steve assured him that there were some working examples around, but he’d rather thought that they’d be in everyday use by now.  Still, scanning the skyline, there were quite a few helicopters hovering around above the buildings, and he could see the black spots of planes in the distance and off to the sides, so it wasn’t like the sky didn’t have its share of… wait a sec—

Bucky blinked, and turned his head back to focus on the window next to the balcony.  There had been something—something out of the corner of his eye.  Another black spot, and his mind had at first discounted it as something in the sky, but now he wasn’t so sure that it had been—there!

He frowned and leaned closer in the chair, puzzled.  It wasn’t something in the sky; it wasn’t something far away at all.  It was outside on the window itself, and he would have thought that it was a blemish, except that he’d seen it move.  An insect?  A spider?  Up here?  This place was enormous; how far up did spiders live?  Curiosity finally pushed him out of the chair and he padded over a few steps to look at the window close-up.   

His first thought was, “Oh, it is a spider.”  It certainly had spider-like proportions; it was tiny and had a black body with spindly legs extending from it.  Then he looked closer at the body and… was that metal? 

Suddenly wide-awake, Bucky backed away carefully, keeping his eyes on the—thing, until he got to the small panel that was situated next to the bedroom door.  He tapped it.  “JARVIS?” he said in a low voice.

Gratifyingly, JARVIS replied in a voice that was equally soft, “Sergeant Barnes?”

He watched the black mechanical spider thing.  It shuffled slightly to the left, further from the balcony but slightly closer to where Bucky was currently standing.  He frowned.  “This is going to sound like a strange question, but… you live in the mechanical things in this building, right?  Like—you’re connected to them all?”

“I am networked to most of the tower’s systems,” JARVIS replied, quietly, “Although my ability to connect with a device is restricted if it lacks complexity within its own systems.  Is there a device that you wish me to interact with?”

“No, I—actually maybe.  Look, maybe this is even part of your systems.  Do you have things that look like metal spiders walking around on the windows outside of the buildings?”

JARVIS seemed to pause for a tiny second, or perhaps Bucky just imagined it.  “I do not have a feature like that, no.  Am I to assume that you have come across something like it?”

“There’s something like it outside the window in my room!”

This time there was a slight delay.  “None of my sensors are detecting any kind of device, even through visual means.”

Bucky carefully moved back closer to the spider thing, still keeping his voice low.  “I’m looking right at it!  And it’s definitely made of metal.  I can see the joins in it; it’s not a real spider.”  He paused as a sudden thought struck him.  “It might be a real bug, though.  I mean, an electronic one.  Howard showed us some designs he was making with hidden microphones and they were real small, so I’m assuming that in the future they’d be able to be disguised as insects, or spiders…”

“If it is an electronic bug, then it is very troubling that it would be cloaked from my sensors,” said JARVIS.  “I will put out an alert to the team.”

“No, wait!” he hissed.

Another pause.  Then: “Yes?”

“Look.”  He had to resist the urge to take his eyes off the bug and address the ceiling, or the wall, or something.  It was maddening, talking to thin air.  “We need to be careful.  It’s tiny, and hanging on the side of the building, and it’s capable of movement.  If it’s a bug, the person on the other side will get rid of it in a heartbeat if they realise there’s something wrong, and if you can’t detect this one we don’t know how many other bugs there are around the building.  Making a fuss about it means it’ll disappear and we won’t get a chance to examine it.”

JARVIS seemed to accept this for the moment.  “Do you have a suggestion that might allow us to retrieve it?”

Bucky thought quickly.  “Well, I don’t think the person listening is suspicious yet, or else it would probably already be gone.  Look, it’s near the balcony.  It might be able to be reached from there.”  He looked over at the coffee table, where an empty bowl he’d been using for popcorn the other night was still resting.  “We could try the traditional way of trapping bugs.”

“You are saying that a bowl should be an adequate means to trap a device that is sophisticated enough to cloak itself from my sensors?”

Bucky did briefly look at the ceiling then, with some suspicion.  The AI’s tone hadn’t sounded sarcastic, but it was hard to tell.  “Do you have a something on hand that would be better?”

When JARVIS didn’t answer, he grabbed the bowl, glided quietly over to the balcony doors, and tried to open them. 

They didn’t budge.

He frowned impatiently, keeping one eye on the bug and the other on the doors.  They didn’t have handles, but there were two metal panels inlaid where the handles would be.  He’d assumed that pushing on or tapping them would do something but— “JARVIS?” he whispered.  “The doors won’t open.”

“Yes,” said JARVIS.  “I’m afraid I’ve been directed to not allow you to go out there.  If you will wait, I’ll discreetly alert one of the others to the situation so that they can—“

“Wait, what?” Bucky interrupted sharply.  “I’m not allowed to go out on the balcony?”

JARVIS’s voice was as calm as ever.  “I have been instructed to not allow you to leave the building.”

“Not even to the balcony?”  His voice was rising despite himself, and he hastily reined himself in and hissed: “I’m not supposed to go out so I don’t find out too much about the future!  What exactly can I find out on the balcony that I can’t find out looking out the window?”

“My instructions are—”

“That’s ridiculous.  Look, we’re wasting time.  Open the doors.”

Bucky waited.  The doors completely failed to open.   “JARVIS!”

“I’m afraid that my instructions were quite clear.  It would be dangerous to allow you to leave the building.”

The uneasy feeling that he’d woken up with was now curling through him again.  “I’m sorry, what possible danger is there in letting me out onto the balcony?  There’s no information out there, unless…unless there’s something out there that I can’t see from here.”  A thread of panic started deep in his gut.  He’d been assuming that what he could see out the window was what was actually out the window, but now that he thought about it, what proof did he have?  With the technology he’d seen, it’d be easy to project an image on the windows.  Why was he even trusting—

JARVIS cut into his thoughts, tone soothing.  “There is no deceit about what is outside the windows, I assure you.  If you wish to talk to the Captain—“

Steve.  That was why he was trusting these people.  Goddammit, he needed to calm down.  Steve wouldn’t deceive him like that.  “Okay fine.  What’s the danger you’re talking about then?  What do they think I’m going to do, throw myself off?”

“Were that to happen, it would present a problem—”

“Why the hell would I—”

“However, it may be that this decision was made in haste.” JARVIS managed to sound marginally apologetic.  “I am attempting to contact Sir in order to discuss the situation.”

“Or you could just make the decision,” Bucky said, irritated now.  “I thought they said you could think for yourself.”

JARVIS blithely ignored him.  “It will only take a short time to check,” he said, and went silent again.

Bucky bit his lip in frustration and watched the bug.  If there really was someone on the other side of it, he thought, it was a miracle that it hadn’t already been destroyed with the amount of conversation he’d been having.  Yes, he’d kept his voice down, but surely someone had heard something?  Of course, the fact that it hadn’t been destroyed could mean any number of other things.  It might be there to do something other than eavesdrop, although he was stumped as to what else a minute metallic fake spider would be for.  Perhaps it was recording but didn’t have someone actually listening to it live?  Which meant he needed to retrieve it as soon as possible, before someone did start to listen.  “JARVIS,” he warned.  “I’m about thirty seconds from prying the door—”

“I apologise for the delay,” intercepted JARVIS smoothly.  “Sir has given permission for the door to be opened.  However, if you wait just a few minutes more, he and Clint are going to come down—“

“I’ll have it for them to look at, then,” he said impatiently.  The last thing he wanted to do was wait longer.

Bucky pressed against the panels on the balcony doors, and this time they opened effortlessly under his touch and he stepped outside.  A tiny, irrational part of himself was still holding its breath in anticipation of the world outside the building turning out to be some kind of horrible apocalypse or something, but JARVIS had been telling the truth at that.  It looked exactly the same, although there was an odd smell to the air that hadn’t been there in his day.  He looked carefully over at the bug.  It seemed mostly still and was sitting about three feet off to the side of the balcony.  He might have to lean, but he could reach it with the bowl, and he’d be able to pull it closer when he got it.  Bucky soundlessly shuffled closer, keeping an eye on the bug as he did. 

He was so absorbed in his task, he’d be the first to say that he wasn’t paying attention to his surroundings.  So when he glanced over the balcony edge at one of the buildings in the distance, it was pure instinct that caused him to register movement and a small flash of light near the top.

Pure instinct that made him drop to the balcony floor, just in time for the bullet to whistle over his head and into the glass behind him.

Sniper.  Adrenaline kicked in like a flood.  The balcony was tiny and bare, with almost no cover.  The worst place to be under fire; the best place to hit your target.  Idiot, he was an idiot.  He lunged back through the balcony door and another bullet whistled past, barely missing this time.  It hit the door, which swung open widely and cracked but didn’t shatter.  Reinforced glass, had to be.  Good news for him, although the fact that it could stand up to one bullet didn’t mean it would stand up to several.  He turned back momentarily to try to push the balcony door back, then dived behind the comfy chair as another bullet thumped into the glass, and then two more bullets whistled through the open doorway and into the far wall, just in time for the bedroom door to fly open and Clint to burst in. 

“Sniper!” Bucky yelled, and to his credit, Clint was already in motion, falling to his knees, loosening an arrow just before dropping behind the bed.

“The hell happened?!” he yelled.

“They wanted me on the balcony!” he yelled back, because of course they did.  Dammit.

Clint expertly drew another arrow while half lying down, and then, keeping it drawn, he carefully craned his head around the side of the bed.

Several things happened at once, then.  First, there was a crashing sound behind him, and the doorway of the bedroom was filled with what looked like a large red and gold robot.  The robot surged forward and raised an arm and—

Clint’s body tensed in alarm and he yelled, “get down” and then “grenade!” and—

The robot was suddenly flying towards him and—

There was a sound like thunder and—

The room dissolved into light—

He was flying backwards—

His head slammed—

His head—

Time snapped back into motion, and there was fire and concrete and he was lying, stunned, amongst the dust, and furniture, and building parts, and he opened his mouth to say something, and then coughed and gasped as his chest seized with pain, and there was no sound but the ringing, droning in his ears that obliterated anything else and his head pounded and he blinked vaguely and noticed that there were spots of red all over his vision which was very—which was very—

Chapter Text

There were voices, and it was strange that there were voices, because usually voices came with other things like light and colours.  Didn’t they?  Maybe?  Though the voices were fading in and out like audible shadows, so maybe that was…was…  He strained to make them out….

“—was blood everywhere, are you sure? ”

“—told you…be fine.”

“But…cracked?”

“Was—it’s not as bad now—”

“—was bad!”

“And it’s already healing! By tomorrow you’ll barely know it was there.”

Oh.  They must be talking about Steve.  Steve healed fast because he was a super soldier.  Sometimes people did get confused about that. 

“—anything I can do?”

It was strange though, because he didn’t remember Steve being in the room when everything exploded.  Actually, he didn’t remember much at all about what happened when everything exploded. 

“—needs rest.  Just wait…”

That did sound like a good idea.  His head hurt.  He stopped trying to listen to the voices and let himself sink into the darkness.

***

“—to say?  Sure!  Fine!  I admit it!  It was all my fault!  I’m a terrible Avenger and I suck!  Happy now?”

“Tony, stop it!  I’m not trying to—”

Bucky winced.  His head still hurt, although it felt clearer.  With a sudden burst of panic, he shifted his arms.  Not strapped down, although there was something stuck to them.  Soft blankets.  And that was Steve talking.  It was okay; he was okay.

“Yes, I was distracted when JARVIS talked to me!  He said Sergeant Oblivious was getting anxious about the balcony thing and I figured it was harmless!  I mean, why did we even decide on the balcony thing?  I know we said stay indoors but did we even make a decision on the balcony thing, or did JARVIS just take things too literally?”

“You did make a decision on the balcony thing, Sir, although it was considered a fairly incidental decision.”

“It was a precaution, Tony!”  Steve sounded more than a little bent out of shape.  “We were trying to be safe and smart about this, which means you communicate—!”

“Okay, now you just sound like you’re practising for the most patriotic contraception commercial ever.”

“Tony!"

Yeah.  Definitely Steve.

“Okay, fine, I’m sorry!  It was just the balcony!  There was no information there, he still seemed pretty well-adjusted, you didn’t want him in a panic.  I thought it’d be the lesser of the two evils, and yes, I was clearly wrong because I didn’t factor in the fact that we apparently have a homicidal maniac lobbing missiles into the side of the building!”

Bucky opened his eyes and managed to croak, “It wasn’t his fault.”  He thought it needed to be said.

“Buck!”  Steve broke away from Tony and hurried over to his bed.  “How are you feeling?”

Bucky winced and carefully eased himself up a little on the pillow, glancing around the room as he did.  He looked to be in some kind of medical area, but the view out the window seemed to indicate that he was still in the tower.  It made sense; considering everything else the tower had, it surely would have a medical wing as well.  He looked down at his body.  He was dressed in a hospital gown, but he could see bruises on his legs.  With a sudden stab of panic he realised that there were stickers on his arms and chest with wires attached to them, leading to a small beeping box on a stand, with bright blinking symbols on it.  His first instinct was to rip them off, but he took a deep breath and pulled himself back.  Steve was right there.  Steve wasn’t worried.  They were monitoring wires.  Nothing to worry about.  Everything was fine.

Still, he hesitated before he answered. “Kind of bad?”  He coughed and then winced again.  “My head hurts.  And my side hurts.  My arms and legs seem mostly okay…”

“You crack—” Steve paused fractionally and started again.  “You nearly cracked your skull open.  You had me worried there for a bit.”  He looked relieved.

Bucky managed a weak smile of reassurance.  “Always said I had a thick skull.”  He shifted uncomfortably and added.  “It wasn’t his fault though, Steve.  I kept pushing it.”

Steve smiled tightly back at him.  “Don’t worry about that.”  He picked up a slim glass rectangular gadget and touched his fingers to it.  “I’m going to call the doctor in to have a look at you…”

Bucky was hardly listening.  His aching head and the sharp pain in his side were worrying, sure, but he suddenly felt like there were more pressing concerns, as the events from the balcony came flooding back in a disturbing rush.  “Someone tried to kill me!” he blurted out.

Steve paused and the strained smile dropped off his face.  “We know.  We haven’t managed to ID the shooter yet.  A lot of people want a piece of the Avengers—“

“Why would someone who was after the Avengers try to kill me, when they could have fired a grenade at one of you?”  Adrenaline was suddenly making his thoughts sharp, even though his head was still pounding like a metronome.  He frowned at Steve a little wildly. 

“It could have been a random attack.”  Steve looked up at Tony and held out the glass rectangle.  “Tony, can you call the—”

Tony rolled his eyes and produced a glass rectangle of his own, this one rimmed with bright red and gold.  He stepped away, held it to his ear, and started talking softly, which meant it was maybe a communication device.  A phone of some kind?

Bucky tried to think.  “No, that’s not…If it were random, why not send a grenade into the lobby of the building?”  He paused to think again.  Yes, that did seem like a logical argument.  “You said there were people working on the lower floors, right?”  He stopped and winced again, bringing a hand up to his aching head.  When Steve leaned forward worriedly, he looked up, directly into his eyes.  “Steve, someone tried to kill me.  They were—I think they lured me out onto the balcony.  They were trying to kill me.  Why the hell was someone trying to…?”

Steve hesitated, and then sighed.  “We’ve managed to make a lot of enemies, Bucky.  There are some particular ones that have been causing problems of late who like to make it…personal.  If they knew who you were—”

Bucky thought about this.  His head really hurt.  “How would they know that, though?  And more importantly, how did they know I was there?”

“By listening in,” said Tony.  As Bucky looked up, he touched the front of the phone and slipped it in his pocket.  “Doc’s coming.”  He continued on without waiting for anyone to acknowledge this.  “I think you could have been right about it being a bug.  Easiest way for whoever it is to have figured out who you are.  Now, how someone managed to create a bug that’s completely undetectable by JARVIS’s sensors?  That’s the big question, and frankly, I’m more than a bit ticked off about it.”

Bucky pressed his lips together.  “So you think someone has been listening in to you?  How long could they have been –wait.”  He stopped, as something occurred to him.  “There could be more of them.”

Tony exchanged a worried look with Steve at that.  “We figured that, yeah.  Problem is that we don’t know how long they’ve been infiltrating the building, and short of playing the world’s most difficult Easter egg hunt, we don’t have a way to find them all if our systems can’t detect them.  It’d help if I had a sample of one, but the one you saw—”

“—Probably isn’t in any condition to study,” finished Steve.  “Look, Buck, it’s okay.  We’ll deal with this.  You’ve been injured—”

“Injured… Clint!” Bucky looked up in sudden concern as another memory of recent events slotted into place.  “He was in the room when it exploded!”

“He’s okay,” Steve hastily reassured him.  “Mostly.  He hurt his leg, but it’s not too bad.”

“He’s not here?”

“Natasha busted him out,” said Tony.  “They’ve gone off to scour the rubble, which maybe isn’t a bad idea.  If there is anything left of the bug, he’d be the one to spot it.  He’s got freaky laser vision.”

Bucky frowned at that.  “He said he didn’t have any super powers.”

“Figure of speech,” said Steve, reassuringly.  “He’s just particularly talented in that area.”

“Okay.”  Bucky said.  He tried again to concentrate on the recent events.  “I—Look, I don’t want to seem as if I’m crazy, but I also thought I saw a-a robot?  It was gold and red?  Although I did just hit my head…”

Tony put up his hand.  “Nope, that was me.  Literally me; it’s a suit.  It flies, blasts things, shields people from rubble.  I was in it.  It’s a thing I do.”

“You have a—”

“Captain!  Our patient has woken?”  A man, carrying something that could have been an elaborately futuristic stethoscope in one hand and a piece of equipment Bucky couldn’t identify in the other, appeared at the doorway and hurried towards the bed.  He wore an official-looking badge that said “DR. FINE” and had a photo and various bits of identification data on it.  He also had an expression of concern on his face.  “Why is he sitting up?”

“I’m okay,” Bucky mumbled, but the doctor frowned at him disapprovingly and pressed him back onto the bed.  Bucky felt himself tense at that, but he bit his lip and forced himself to calm down. 

“You’ve suffered a head injury,” the doctor continued.  “No matter how well you—” He stopped, almost if he was catching himself.  “You can’t push yourself, anyway.   Are you in pain?”

“He was wincing a little,” volunteered Steve, then he added.  “This is Dr Fine, Bucky.  He’s come highly recommended and he’s good at keeping things confidential.”

The doctor looked back at him impatiently.  “I appreciate the introduction but I’d prefer if the answers came from him, please.”  Steve looked slightly chastised at this. 

Tony looked amused.  “Look, while you deal with this, I’m going to continue trying to work out the g—the artifact, and I’m also going to work with JARVIS and Bruce in the area of bug detection, because confidential doesn’t mean squat if we can’t get that under control.  Adios and get well soon.”

Steve nodded.  “Be careful.  Try to—try to work quickly.” A strange look passed between them.  Bucky couldn’t have even tried to guess at its meaning.

He opened his mouth to say something but the doctor gave him a stern look and he lost his train of thought.  “Umm… what did you…?”

“Pain,” said the doctor.  “Are you in any?”

Bucky made a face.  “My head hurts,” he admitted.  “And my side, though that’s not too bad.”  His thoughts rattled through his aching head, refusing to stay in any order.  “Steve, seriously, why would someone target me if they could get to you guys?  I don’t get why—”

“Lie down,” said Dr Fine, and Bucky belatedly realised that he’d been trying to sit up again.  “I need to check your vitals.  This can wait.”  The doctor sat on the bed and adjusted some settings on the mysterious equipment.  It was slim and cylindrical, and had a panel in the side with switches and symbols.  Bucky twitched.

“He’s right,” said Steve, in a mollifying tone.  “Look, we’re still investigating what’s happened, Bucky.  Rest for now.  I’ll go and see how things are going if you want, and I’ll come back later.”

Bucky… he did hear him, he just suddenly found it very hard to listen, because there was Dr Fine, and  he finished calibrating his equipment, looked up with a satisfied expression, leaned right forward and brought it up towards Bucky’s  head…

It made a high pitched humming sound, just like when— just like—

No!  The panic hit him like a sledgehammer, climbing to a roar before rational thought could intervene; adrenaline surging through his body like a tidal wave.  He moved without thinking, the instinct that had earlier saved his life now screaming at him to get back, get away, get out of the straps, off the table, away from the probes, and the needles and the humming machines with the electricity get away get away get away.

“Are you okay?  I’m so sorry!  Bucky!”

Nonononono…

“Buck it’s me; it’s Steve.”

Steve?

“You need to calm down.  You need to calm down now.  Bucky.”

He gasped and blinked rapidly, mind crashing back down to earth in bits and pieces.

“Bucky, it’s Steve.  I’m sorry, Doctor.  I should have thought; I should have warned you...”

Off to the side, someone replied to this remark in a rather shocked tone.  Also, Steve was crouched in front of him.  Also, Bucky seemed to be on the floor.

Steve was looking back at him.  Carefully, very carefully he reached a hand out to rest on his shoulder reassuringly. “I’m so sorry, Buck.  I knew you were edgy around doctors after…what happened.  And you hit your head something fierce and with all the stress of the last few days…”

He stared at Steve.  Just Steve.  Steve was there.  Safe now.  It was okay.  “I…”

“It’s okay.  It’s okay.”

Bucky blinked again and managed to turn his head, take in some of his surroundings.  He was definitely on the floor.  The bed was pushed to the side a few feet away, pillows and blankets scattered.  The beeping machine had toppled from its stand, the wires torn off of his arms and chest. 

“Bucky?” said Steve.  “Are you okay?”

Dr Fine sat on the floor, a careful distance away.  He was looking shocked, and holding the side of his head as if in pain.

Bucky swallowed.  “I think I…I might have…”  He looked at the doctor.  He was starting to have a nasty suspicion that he might be responsible for the look of shock.  Shit.  “Shit,” he said, because he really didn’t feel capable of engaging any type of filter right then.  He looked back at Steve. “I, ah… I’m sorry.”

Steve looked upset, although he was clearly trying to hide it.  “Are you okay?” he repeated.  The hand on Bucky’s shoulder turned into an awkward half hug and then Steve was patting his back comfortingly. 

Bucky took a shaky breath.  Bit by bit, the adrenaline was draining off, leaving a rush of embarrassment in its place.  Jesus, what the hell had that been about? 

“I’m really sorry, Buck.  I didn’t even think.”

“You didn’t… It’s wasn’t your fault; Jesus.”  It was just a doctor, he knew that.  He was a prize idiot.  He was acting like a little kid, not a soldier.  Not one of the famous Howling Commandos.  He was— God, his head hurt.  And now he’d hit his side again and that hurt too, a twist of pain spiralling through him as the adrenaline surge drained away.  Idiot, idiot…

“Hey, it’s okay.  It’s fine.  You were startled; your head’s hurt.  It’s okay; it’s fine.”  Steve’s hand stayed on his back, and he felt himself relax into it ever so slightly.

Dr Fine’s voice joined in then.  “I am okay, Sergeant Barnes.  It was as much my fault as anyone’s.  I have worked with soldiers fresh from war before, I should have taken that into account.”

Bucky gave a faint snort of laughter.  “I hit you.”

The doctor smiled wearily.  “There may be a bruise, but it was not serious.  However, your injuries may be.  You have undoubtedly exacerbated your side injury, at the least.  May I check you out?”

Bucky’s eyes flicked to Steve, who was trying to look encouraging, and then back to Dr Fine.  “Yeah.  Yeah, that’s… that’s fine.  I was stupid, I just—you startled me, is all.  I’m really sorry…”

“Shall we get you back on the bed?” said Steve, and Bucky gratefully allowed himself to be distracted by being half-lifted back into the bed, and sheepishly allowing the stickers and wires to be hooked back up.

When he was settled back, Dr Fine restarted the examination, this time carefully telegraphing every move he made, and explaining what all the gadgets did as he worked.  Steve sat down in the chair next to the bed, making no more comments about leaving, and Bucky felt simultaneously incredibly embarrassed by and incredibly grateful for that.

He tried to cover for this by rambling.  “I am worried about it,” he said to Steve.  “But maybe it’s a bit… reassuring as well.  Now that I think about it.”

Steve just looked confused.  “Your injuries?”

Bucky frowned at this.  “No, not that.  I mean that someone’s trying to kill me.”

Now Steve stopped looking confused and looked slightly horrified.  Bucky replayed his last statement through his aching brain and realised that this might possibly be justified.  “Not because of that!” he added, hastily.  “I mean, I just… you’re the guy who… I know I’m part of the Commandos too.  I know we all are, or were, or…Christ, my head hurts too bad to phrase things right now.”

“It’s okay,” reassured Steve.

“Can you flex your left arm for me, please?” said Dr Fine.

He obeyed distractedly, and said, “I know what we do, and what I do, is important, but you’re the super soldier.  Everyone knows who you are. I knew that you’d be in all the history books—”

“Bucky—” Steve looked slightly embarrassed.

“C’mon Steve, of course you would be.  But, the thing is, if someone was trying to kill me, and if Tony’s right, and he really knew who I was, and why I was…. That means I’ve gotta be known too, right?  I must have made an impact, to be known for that long.  Enough to get someone’s attention.”

He looked over to Steve.  Steve’s expression was…  He couldn’t tell.  Worried?  Unhappy?

Scared?

Bucky hastily tried to put up a hand comfortingly, and was foiled when the doctor pointedly pulled it down.  “Look, I know I’m not supposed to know about anything about my future!  I swear, I’m not planning to pry, I just…  I am curious, Steve.  I can’t help it; I’m only human!”

“You are.”  Steve took a deep breath, and seemed to rally himself.  “I know you are, Buck.  And I know you’re curious, and I swear that as soon as we get this sorted out, it’ll all be…”

“Steve!”

Both their eyes went to the door as Natasha strode through purposefully.

Steve stood up from the chair.  “Natasha?”

Natasha’s expression was calmly professional.  She looked at him, and at the doctor, and then back to Steve.  “Clint and I need to talk to you,” she said.

Steve frowned at her, and then at the doctor, who had stepped back for the moment and was currently pressing symbols on the beeping machine.  “I… can it wait for just a bit?”

“It is quite urgent.”  Natasha’s expression didn’t change, but she did emphasise her words ever so slightly.

Steve turned to her fully, looking frustrated.  “Look, I want… I need to stay here just for a little bit longer.  If Clint can come here…”

Bucky opened his mouth to say something, because he could manage, he could, but Natasha beat him to it.  “Steve.”

“Natasha, I—”

“Steve,” said Natasha, and her eyes were flint as she stared at his face.  “We found something important.  Bullets from the rifle the assailant was using before switching to the grenade.”  Just for a second, she paused.  “They were Soviet-made.  No rifling.”

Steve went very still.

Natasha continued, still calm.  “If,” she said, “you feel like someone else needs to be here, I can get Bruce to come up.  He…would prefer to concentrate on the artifact and the bugs.  I do, however, feel that it would be wise for us to have a conversation as soon as possible.”

Bucky stared at Steve’s back, confused.  He couldn’t see Steve’s face from where he was, but whatever his expression was, Natasha didn’t seem to be daunted by it.  She said, gentler, “Steve.”

And Steve’s shoulders lifted as he took a deep breath.  “Yes,” he said.

Chapter Text

Steve apologised and said he really needed to go, and when Bucky asked what the hell had happened, he threw out vague explanations about a possible lead and completely avoided telling Bucky anything at all useful.  Then he left before Bucky could gather the energy to push the issue, which was probably prudent on his part because Bucky certainly intended to push it, injuries or not.  Steve’s expression had turned into one of barely veiled misery from the moment Natasha gave her information, and the horrible sense of apprehension Bucky had felt was back with a vengeance.

Shortly after that, Bruce arrived with a bunch of equipment, which he dumped on one of the benches, and a worried frown.  His presence during the rest of Bucky’s examination clearly wouldn’t be nearly as comforting as Steve’s but the tension about the latest developments made Bucky less anxious about the doctor’s ministrations anyway, so he didn’t make a fuss.  The best way to stop worrying about one thing was apparently to start worrying about another instead.

Bruce gave him an apprehensive smile and carefully took the seat that Steve had vacated.  He apologized for the problems and made some comforting overtures, but he didn’t attempt to touch Bucky or otherwise intrude into his personal space, and Bucky was glad of it.  The ten minutes after Steve had hurried out were spent in near-silence, with Dr Fine finishing his work, Bruce seated quietly next to the bed, and Bucky biting his lip and trying frantically to figure out what had just happened, and how he was supposed to deal with it.

Something about their findings had upset Steve greatly.  Since the only finding Natasha needed to voice was the ID of the bullets that were used, that meant, what, that it was someone’s trademark?  That there was someone who always used those bullets, and Steve knew who that was?  It seemed to make sense, so the questions that followed were, why did that shake Steve so much, and while Bucky was at it, how the hell could he get someone to just give him some information?  The arguments about how he shouldn’t know too much of the future seemed logical, but he’d just been shot at and blown up, and the fact that everyone appeared determined to not share anything with him even in light of that was getting seriously disturbing.

Bucky winced again as the doctor carefully moved his aching head and stuck something in his ear.  “You almost finished?” he asked.  Maybe if he got Bruce alone he might be able to pry something out.  He didn’t look too happy about the situation, after all, although to be fair, Bucky didn’t think he could remember Bruce looking happy about anything since he’d first met him.

Dr Fine nodded.  “Yes,” he said.  He turned slightly to address both Bucky and Bruce.  “The blow to the head and the side wound are worrying, but the only thing that seems to be broken is a cracked rib.”  He gestured towards Bucky.  “You have a concussion, and deep bruising in several areas, but rest and observation are really the best that can be done at this point.  You were…very lucky, to say the least.”

Bucky grimaced.  “Lucky.  Yeah.”

“If the pain is very bad, we can probably give you something, but that wouldn't necessarily be the best thing to do with a head injury."

"That's fine!" he said, perhaps just a bit too quickly, but he couldn't help the sudden flash to the table, with the injections that burned at first and then turned the world sickly strange and syrupy, and just this side of wrong. 

Both Bruce and the Dr Fine looked at him a little too keenly, but neither questioned this, to his great relief.  Instead, Bruce nodded at the doctor.  "I can keep an eye on him." He nodded to the table.  "I brought some of my stuff down to work on anyway."

Dr Fine looked at Bruce carefully. "Will you be okay?" he said, which Bucky thought was odd because it wasn't as though Bruce was the one who'd just been blown up.

Bruce, however, just nodded.  "I'll be...all right" he replied, and the doctor appeared to consider this adequate enough to head off, after noting that he’d be on call if he was needed again.

Which left him alone with Bruce.  Finally.  Now, if only his head would stop throbbing so he could concentrate enough to actually extract some information.

After a brief, awkward silence, Bruce was the first to talk.  “Okay,” he said.  “So, if you want to get some rest, I’ll just be over there in the corner working on some…work.   If you need anything—”

“Are you all right?” asked Bucky.  His brain was working well enough to figure that the first step to information was establishing a connection, and besides, there was something vaguely odd about the way everyone seemed to almost tiptoe around Bruce sometimes.  “I mean, you didn’t get hurt yourself or anything?  Because the doctor seemed concerned…”

Bruce grimaced slightly.  “I’m okay.  I’m just not… I don’t deal well with stress, sometimes.”

And you work here? was his first thought, but he quickly swallowed it.  Instead he just said, “Oh.”  That would be why Bruce wasn’t at the meeting with the others, at least.  Bucky sat himself up and looked at Bruce carefully.  There was more to the story than that, he was sure, but pushing Bruce about something that wasn’t really related to what he needed to know seemed pointless, so...  “I’m sorry.”

Bruce smiled thinly.  “Not your fault.”  He got up and moved over to the bench with his equipment.

Bucky watched him as he pulled things out and set them up.  “Are you still working on the artifact?” he said.  He couldn’t see anything amongst the metal, plastic and wire that seemed like an alien artifact, but it wasn’t as though he knew what to look for.

Bruce paused distractedly.  “No.  We’re… running some automated scenarios with it at the moment.”  He pulled out a black tablet like the one Bucky had been reading from earlier, and plugged a couple of tiny square objects into the side.  “This is to try and find out whether there are still some of those bugs around.”

“Tony seemed pretty sore about the fact that someone could make something he couldn’t detect.”

This time Bruce’s smile seemed at least halfway genuine.  “Tony tends to get sore when he finds out other people’s technology might be better than his.”

“And it’s even worse when it’s on the side of the bad guys.”

“…yes.”  Bruce looked very interested at the tablet’s screen. 

Bucky frowned.  That was…odd.   “So… you think you have an idea who it might be?”

Bruce didn’t look up at him.  “There are several suspects.”

“Several?  ‘Cause Steve said they had a solid lead there.”  This wasn’t exactly true, but considering how much they weren’t telling him, Bucky didn’t see the problem in stretching the truth a little.

Bruce looked up at him briefly, and then down at the screen again.  “You really should get some rest, and worry about this later.  You need time to heal.”

Okay, so stretching didn’t work.  How about logic?  “Maybe I need to worry about it now.  I mean, this guy managed to bug your tower and then figure out a way to nearly kill me once. How do you know he won't do it again?  Maybe he'll find a way to get in this time.  If I know more about him I can defend myself if...”

“Okay, firstly,” Bruce was looking up at him now, with an expression on his face that was a strange mix of frustration and...sympathy?  “If he does get in it's probable we'll know about it; bugs - and bugs on the outside of the building at that - are one thing, but Tony has this tower locked up like a safe when it comes to people.  It's likely any infiltration attempt will be...splashy, to say the least.  Secondly, even if he does get in quietly, Steve isn't leaving you without protection.  Believe me.”

“He's left me with you,” said Bucky.

“Yes,” said Bruce.

Bucky waited for him to elaborate on this.  He completely failed to do so. Well, fine.  “You could bring down whoever's trying to kill me?”

Bruce looked resigned.  “Yes.”

There was another significant silence before Bucky gave in.  “Okay, how?”

Bruce looked as though he was weighing up what to say.  “I’m not… all that I look like.  It’s a long story and right now really isn’t the time to tell it.”

“Is any time good to tell me anything?”  Bucky said, before he could stop himself.  Then he bit his tongue, because that was hardly the subtle approach he had been trying for.

But Bruce just sighed.  “Thirdly,” he said, “I know what you’re doing.  You’re frustrated with how little information we’re giving you, and you’re fishing for more.”

Bucky felt slightly taken aback that he was being so obvious.  “Uh…I’m not…”

“Look, I sympathise with you.  You’re being asked to take a lot on faith, and there doesn’t seem to be a good reason for why we’re keeping back some of the information we are.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow at this.  “And I suppose you’re going to tell me that there’s a deep, special reason, and I just have to—“

“I’m not,” said Bruce.  When Bucky blinked at this, he continued.  “It’s hardly going to help the situation.”

“Well, you’re right there.”

Bruce snorted.  “There you go.  Look, the question of the information you’re being given is one that we have discussed, believe me.   There have been queries, and arguments from all sides.”

Bucky looked at him speculatively.  “Which side are you on?”

Bruce bit his lip.  “My view…wasn’t necessarily the same as many of the others.  The position that you’re in is…” he hesitated, and Bucky watched him, bewildered.   Then Bruce sighed again.  “Were I in your position,” he said, “I have my own views on how I would want things to go.  But I understand that those views are not necessarily wise or universal, and I’ve agreed to the group’s decision. “

“Oh, come on…”

“As I said, I am sorry, and I sympathise—”

“—but you’re not going to tell me anything.” Bucky scowled.  For just a second, he thought he might have been getting somewhere.  Goddammit.

Bruce shrugged.  “I’m not.  And you need to rest and heal.   You look terrible.”

Bucky’s scowl deepened.  “Yeah, thanks so much.”

“Pushing yourself isn’t helping anything,” said Bruce, sympathetically.  “Sometimes the best thing to do is regain your strength.  Believe me on this.”

Bucky opened his mouth to argue and then winced again as his side injury made itself known.  Damn.  “Look, you—”

A loud ring interrupted his grumbling, and Bruce jumped slightly and fumbled in his pocket, drawing out one of the rectangular objects that Bucky had earlier decided had to be a phone of some sort.  He gave Bucky an apologetic look and proceeded to have a conversation that consisted entirely, on his end, of short comments and sounds of affirmation.

Bucky was still watching Bruce when he put the phone back.  “So what was it?”

Bruce looked slightly exasperated.  “You know, I did just tell you I agreed—”

“Oh, come on.”  An idea occurred to him.  “Give me something, and I’ll take your advice and get some rest.”

Bruce’s eyes narrowed, and Bucky managed a moderately sassy grin in return.

Bruce rolled his eyes, but there was a faint smile on his face.  “It was Tony”, he said.  “Clint found another bug.”

“I thought they were having a meeting?”

“I assume that’s where he found it.”

“In the meeting room?  Oh come on, really?”

“It appears so.  Or outside of it, I guess.  Now lie down.”

He opened his mouth again, but shut it at the look on Bruce’s face.  There was genuine concern there, no matter how frustrated Bucky was with the guy.  Plus, the constant tango of pain from his head and side were becoming exhausting.  It wasn’t as though he was giving up; it was…regaining his strength.  With a final resigned look, he lay back against the pillows.

He didn’t think he’d have a chance of sleeping with all the questions racing through his head, but, as it turned out, his body very quickly took that out of his hands, and he drifted off to the sounds of faint clicking and rustling as Bruce tinkered away.

***

He slept surprisingly deeply for surprisingly long, waking after few hours to drink a bottle of water and note that it was dark, Bruce was gone and Natasha was sitting in the room, reading a book.  He meant to get up then, but he closed his eyes momentarily and the next thing he knew the room was lighter and Tony was tapping away on a large semi-translucent screen in the corner.  He blinked rapidly and a yawn escaped before he could stop it. He definitely felt better, energized and in far less pain, although there was still a nagging ache.  Even better, if he’d had any bad dreams, he didn’t remember them, which was a double relief when people were watching over him.  He cautiously stretched his arms and sat up a little, looked over at Tony.  “Getting any work done?”

Tony jumped when he talked and then gave him a withering look.  “The sleeping giant awakens.  You know, you could have at least rattled around, let me know you were up.”

“I was rattling a bit,” replied Bucky. “You were just really absorbed.”

“Well that’s true,” conceded Tony, “Although I’d be able to concentrate better with some metal blasting through the speakers.  Steve seems to think that I wouldn’t be paying ‘sufficient attention’ if I did that, though.”  He rolled his eyes to show just what he thought of Steve’s ideas.

Bucky tried to imagine how you could blast metal through a speaker but the only answers he could think of were both confusing and a little terrifying .  He seized on the last part of the speech instead.  “Sufficient attention on me?”  He thought back to Natasha.  “What, everyone’s taking turns on watch duty?”

Tony shrugged.  “Well, you know.  Head wound.  Gotta keep you under observation.”

“Right.”  Bucky frowned and glanced down at the workbench under Tony’s screen, then did a double take and looked closer.  There were wires trailing from the sides of the screen to the bench, and they appeared to be hooked up to a largish black object that looked almost, but not quite, like a spider.  “Okay, you definitely found one of them.”

Tony nodded.  “Yep.  Don’t worry, I’ve dismantled the recording and mobility capabilities.”

“What other capabilities does it have?”

Tony looked annoyed at this.  “Shielding!  It projects an aura that disrupts electronics, makes it undetectable to JARVIS.  Which if you ask me is just rude. ”

“Or practical.”

“Mostly rude.  People can’t just go around creating tech that can stand up to my tech.  My tech is awesome!”

“Um…”

“Anyway, I’m reverse engineering it so I can figure out how it was done and feed the info back to JARVIS.  Then he can find any other nasties that might be out there.”

Bucky looked at it carefully.  “Reverse…  Sort of like you’re scanning what it’s giving off?”

Tony sighed.  “Yeah, sure.  ‘Scanning what it’s giving off’” 

“Any clues as to who it belongs to?”

“There’re suspects,” said Tony, suspiciously quickly. “It’s high end stuff, so it does narrow things down a bit.”

“But no one specifically who springs to mind?”

Tony was looking back at the screen now, tapping away at various letters and symbols.  “There’re a few.  And of course, it might just be someone using someone else’s tech, so, y’know.  Complicated.”

Bucky watched Tony at work for a few seconds.  He seemed terribly absorbed with whatever was on the screen.  Okay, that was it.  Bucky made a decision.  If no one was going to tell him anything, he’d damn well find some information himself.  “Hey.”

Tony looked up.  “Hmm?”

He indicated the wires that were still stuck to him.  They’d been reduced down to just two.  “Can I take these off?  If they’re supposed to be monitoring me I can put them back when I get back…”

“Back from where?”

“Well the bathroom first of all.”  Bucky raised a challenging eyebrow.  “The bedpan’s not really cutting it.”

“Eww,” said Tony, hastily.  “Yeah, okay.  Fair point.  I, ah, I can help, I guess…”

“I’ll be fine.”  It was the truth, too.  He felt amazingly good, especially considering how terrible he’d felt when he fell asleep. 

Tony looked relieved.

“I might grab something to eat, after, if I can get a jacket and some shoes, and if there’s a kitchen nearby.”   

Tony brightened. “You don’t need to worry about that.  I can have any meal you want brought up here.  Literally anything.  I’m pretty much obscenely wealthy.”

“I don’t—” he almost snapped, then reigned himself in.  “I don’t need anything fancy.  I just want to, I dunno, make toast or something.”

“I can have that—”

“I also want to stretch my legs.  Just for a little?  I’ve been lying here for hours!”

“Well, you did get blown up only a day and a bit ago.”

“I didn’t get blown up.  I got a cracked rib, a hit on the noggin and a lot of bruising.”  Bucky narrowed his eyes as an idea struck him.  “Would you let that keep you in bed?”

Tony’s expression turned slightly sheepish.  “To be fair, it would depend on whether my better half was glaring at me.”

He opened his mouth to continue the argument but got derailed by that comment.  “Wait, you’re married?”  Okay, he had not picked that one at all.

Tony looked flustered.  “Well, no.  Not ye—I mean, I am being slow and mature about the relationship but I’ll have you know that it is very loving and fulfilling and I hardly ever get shouted at any more.  I mean, only when I’m really risking my life, which admittedly happens a lot, but—”

“Uh, okay.  That’s…”  Bucky shook his head to clear it.  “I’m happy for you.  Look, I really just want to get out of bed for a bit and make toast.  I’ll come straight back, honest.”

“Well, there’s a small kitchen just down the corridor.  I’d better escort you, though.” Tony looked back at the screen and frowned at something on it.

Bucky seized on this.  If he wanted to go looking for information, he’d have to get out from the constant observation.  “I’ll be okay on my own.  I really do feel much better and you’ve got work to do here.”

“That’s true.”

He held his breath.

“Okay, how about I just get JARVIS to keep an eye on you.  JARVIS?”

“Sir?” the ceiling said.

Dammit, he’d forgotten about JARVIS.  Bucky cursed inwardly.

“Bucky needs a jacket and shoes, and then he’s going to use the facilities and pop down to the lunch room for a snack.  Can you keep an eye on him; tell me if he’s getting wobbly?”

“Of course, Sir.”

“Okay.”  He smiled at Bucky, pleased.  “There you go.  Have fun.”

Bucky smiled back awkwardly.  “Yeah,” he said. “Fun.”

***

JARVIS made polite small talk with him up until the point where they got to the bathroom and Bucky finally snapped and told him he wasn’t in the mood for conversation, and also, he’d better not be “keeping an eye on him” while he was using the john.  Silence reigned after that, and he was mostly relieved and only a tiny bit guilty for shouting at it.  It was an artificial intelligence, for heaven’s sake, and a particularly irritating one at that.  It wasn’t like it had real feelings, right?

Bucky wondered about that after he exited the bathroom, and JARVIS gave him clipped instructions to the lunchroom and lapsed back into a silence that didn’t sound at all reproachful. He reserved comment, however, and made his way forward.

“…we just can’t find him…”

Bucky froze.  That was Steve’s voice, drifting out from one of the rooms ahead.

Another voice replied; this one he didn’t recognize.  He strained his ears.  “…not your fault…you get why he might think this is the only…know what happened to…”

Holding his breath, he very carefully and quietly paced up the corridor.  “I don’t know if I’m…the right thing.  I don’t know if I should…but then if he knows too much…”

“…situation isn’t one that anyone’s faced before…”

It looked like it was coming from a room that was a couple of doors down from the kitchen.  He ghosted up to it…

“…it really is the Winter Soldier…”

“Captain Rogers?”  Inside the room, JARVIS’s voice smoothly interrupted the conversation, and Bucky cursed under his breath.  “Sergeant Barnes has woken and appears to be much better.  He is headed to the kitchen at the moment, if you wish to converse with him.”

Bucky bit his lip hard and clenched his fists, stepping back as the door opened and Steve looked out anxiously.

“Bucky?  You’re…are you okay?”

While Steve took up a good section of the doorway, Bucky could just see into the room beyond.  It didn’t hold any other people, but there was a desk, upon which sat a large screen with a man’s face on it.  The man appeared to be looking at Bucky with as much curiosity as Bucky was looking at him.

Noticing his gaze, Steve looked back towards the screen.  “Uh, Sam?  This is Bucky.  Bucky, this is Sam.  He’s…he’s a good friend.  He’s not able to be here right now but I was just talking—”

“Over a…what, picture phone?”

Sam shrugged his shoulders lightly on the screen.  “Hey, the future, right?  What can you do?”  More seriously, he added:  “Nice to meet you Bucky.  Steve’s told me a lot about you.”

Bucky barely managed to hold back a snort at that.  “Really?  That’s interesting, because he’s been less than open with information to me.”

There was an uncomfortable silence.  Steve gave him a pained look.  “Bucky, you know we don’t know what will happen if we tell you—”

“—my future.  Yeah, okay, fine.  So what about something not directly related to my future?  Like, oh, I dunno?  Who it was who tried to kill me, perhaps?   Unless you think I'm going to try and strangle their parents so they’re never born, I don’t think it’s likely I’ll be affecting anything there!” He looked at Steve challengingly.

Steve met his gaze, but all he said was, “We’re not sure who...”

“Really?  Because you seemed awfully sure it was someone called the Winter Soldier two seconds ago!”

Steve went very still, and usually that would give him pause, but right now he was finding really damn difficult to muster up any sympathy.

“Come on!  I’m not even asking why they’d want me dead, though I can think of plenty of possible reasons.  I’m asking for some information, Steve!  Something!  Anything!  Because this has gone past just keeping things from me.  This is you straight up lying to me.  To me!  After everything we’ve….  And you’re sitting here asking me to trust you?  To take this all on faith?”

“Look…” said Sam on the screen.

Bucky gave him a look.  “Okay, no offense to whoever you are, but I was not talking to you.”

Sam hesitated, and said, “Steve?”

Steve turned to glance back at the screen.  “It’s…okay Sam. I’ll speak to you later.”

“Right.”  Sam looked worriedly between them both, and then the screen went dark.

Steve looked back to him.  “Look,” he said.  “Please believe me when I say I don’t wanna do this, Buck…”

Bucky bit back another snort of laughter.  “Yeah, sorry, but I’m having trouble with that.”

Steve looked upset.  “Bucky I… I swear I’m just trying to figure out how to sort this out without hurting you.”

Bucky stared at him.  “Without hurting me?”  He repeated.

“Yes—”

“So are you actually going to give me any concrete information here?”

The silence this time was even more uncomfortable.   Then Steve said, “I could…I’d need to talk to the others…”

Bucky’s lip curled.  “Right.  But you’re trying to do it without hurting me.”

Steve grimaced.  “Bucky, there are a lot of problems—”

“Okay, that’s it.”  He turned and walked back towards the medical area.

Steve followed.  “Buck, please—”

He kept walking, fists curled in fury.

“You were going to get something to eat…” said Steve.

“Yeah, well suddenly I’m not hungry.”  Bucky stormed past a baffled looking Tony, plonked himself down on the bed, and closed his eyes resolutely.

He half expected Steve to keep on about it, but to his gratitude, he was left alone.  After a few seconds, a hushed conversation between Steve and Tony started up, mostly consisting of an explanation of what just happened.  Then there was a pause, and footsteps.

Curiosity made him open his eyes.  Apparently Steve had cottoned on to the whole “eavesdropping” thing, and had hustled Tony off somewhere else to have an emergency conversation.  Well, good.  Right now, he didn’t want to look at either of them.   He sat up and stared blankly around the room.  The tower’s grandiose fittings were beginning to seem less and less like a luxury and more like a prison.  And JARVIS just completed the package, didn’t he?  He couldn’t even go looking for information when there was an invisible eye watching his every—

His gaze drifted to Tony’s workbench, and suddenly he froze, as a spike of adrenaline shot through him.  The screen sat there as usual, numbers scrolling across it, and there were the wires, and at the end of them was a tiny spider-like object.  It projects an aura that makes it undetectable to JARVIS…

Carefully, he relaxed his posture with exaggerated casualness and continued sweeping the room with his eyes.  Taking the elevators wasn’t going to work; JARVIS could still turn off the nearby ones if he wasn’t sure which one Bucky was in.  He really needed— There!  Off in the corner was a brightly coloured door marked “Fire Exit”.  His eyes flicked to the door.  No sign of Steve and Tony, but he’d have to hurry…

Bucky stood up casually and stretched, then wandered moodily around the room for a minute, looking annoyed and bored, and a little bit at wits end. 

Then he casually bumped up next to the workbench, swiped the little bug, marched over to the fire exit, bumped it open while holding his breath, and, when no alarm sounded, ran down the stairwell as if the hounds of hell were after him.

Chapter Text

JARVIS was likely to alert Steve and Tony as soon as he disappeared from the AI’s sensors, at least if the bug worked like Tony said it did.  Therefore, the first thing he needed to do was get as far as possible as quickly as possible.  He vaulted down the stairwell at fifty miles an hour, and slid out several floors down. 

He seemed to have stumbled onto a floor of laboratories and research rooms, which he supposed made sense, because he knew the building had more people working in it than Steve’s team.  He made his way across through the corridors, avoiding people for the most part and walking swiftly and confidently when in their vision.   While most Commandos missions tended to be less than discreet, he’d had to bluff his way into enough places to know that people rarely stopped you when you looked as though you were meant to be there.

When he reached the opposite stairwell he again went down, and again came out into rooms filled with scientists and researchers.  He stopped and wondered at this.  How many floors of research facilities were in this place?  Was that what the whole rest of the building was for?  Several floors devoted to a strike force and the rest devoted to people researching… well that was a good question, actually.  Weapons?  Maybe Tony and Bruce were only the leaders of a massive armaments program; Howard’s legacy writ large. 

He slipped through the corridors, his mind whirling.  Steve and Tony had to be looking for him by now, but there weren’t any sirens going off, so he had to assume that, firstly, the bug’s shielding was working (even to the point where it was preventing any alarmed doors from activating), and secondly, they didn’t want to risk people figuring out who he was and asking questions.  And that was fine; Bucky didn’t want that either.  He wasn’t going to get down very quickly via the stairwell, however, so he needed to risk the elevators, which meant that he needed some kind of ID.  Looking like you were meant to be there was fine when you were coasting past people, but not so fine when you were crammed next to them in an elevator for several minutes.  He’d also been worried about the sweatpants, jacket and sneakers he was wearing, but seeing the outfits of some of the researchers around here, he imagined he could fairly easily get away with pretending to be someone with a particularly eccentric style.  Apparently scientists in the future didn’t actually give a damn about uniforms, or suits, or in the case of several of them, irons.

Ducking down and pretending to tie his shoe, Bucky carefully watched two men, deep in conversation, walk towards his position.  There were small cards with photos attached to both of them, one on the lapel, and the other, interestingly enough, clipped onto one of the men’s jeans pocket. 

Okay, that was both too casual for proper security, and just perfect for his needs.  As they went by, Bucky’s hand glided up and in one swift movement, detached the ID.   He then turned very swiftly in the other direction, clipping the ID onto the pockets of his sweatpants and half-tugging the shirt down, enough that you could see the ID but not the photo that was attached to it.  He headed for the lift.  Time to get out of here.

***

A few minutes later, he was cursing silently and standing in the basement.  He’d successfully negotiated the lift and arrived in the lobby, but he hadn’t gone more than a few steps before realising that there was just no way that he was going to be able to leave here.  Not only were there turnstiles and scanners, which he was pretty sure he could get past with the bug, there were security guards everywhere, checking IDs of people coming both in and out of the building.  Steve and his team might not have told them exactly what the situation was, but they would certainly have asked them to be on the look-out for anything suspicious, right?  He frowned, edged closer to them in the hope of finding out if there was any hope of getting past, and was rewarded by overhearing a snatch of conversation about needing to be on the alert for a possible intruder without correct ID and wearing--

Bucky turned swiftly, made an exaggerated mime of patting himself down and cursing as though he’d left something behind, jumped into the nearest elevator, and pressed for the basement.  Okay, fine!  If he couldn’t get out through the main exit, maybe there was some kind of service elevator.  And if getting out wasn’t as option, there had to be some kind of accessible information somewhere in this building.  Yes, most of it seemed to be on electronic devices that were impossible to access if you weren’t the right person or didn’t have the right code, but they surely couldn’t have destroyed all of their paper records!

Walking swiftly through the basement, he found himself hoping frantically that they really hadn’t, because it looked like the last option was going to be the only one left to him.  While he’d found doors that could possibly have been exits, they were locked tight, and when he’d cautiously tried pressing the panel next to a door, all it did was flash a disturbing red message on the front panel about how he was an “unknown user”.  Bucky hastily scrambled away, fuming.  Security in the future was really, really annoying.

Bucky slowed himself, walking down the corridor in a way that would look casual but purposeful to anyone who cared to take notice.  Sure, so far no one had – he looked confident, he had the ID and even if someone recognised him, it wasn’t like they were going to jump to thinking he was a time traveller rather than just an uncanny lookalike.  Still, he was glad that there seemed to be fewer people down here; if nothing else it gave him time to consider his options.  On the plus side, there was no sign of Steve or any of his team yet, so for the moment it looked like he was free to explore the building.  On the minus side, “exploring the building” really only meant exploring what he could get into, and it didn’t look like this was going to be much.  So far any room that looked like it had anything in it had a door and a security panel, so trying to slip in after someone else, or wandering the corridors until he came across one that had been accidently left open, seemed like his only choices.  As choices went, they wasn’t necessarily as bad as they might seem – another thing he’d learned was that any security measure was only as good as the people using it, and people were flawed.  They did depend on luck, however, and that wasn’t really something he was confident with depending on.

He stopped, suddenly realising that he’d gotten turned around in the maze of corridors, and he really wasn’t sure where he was now.  Here in the basement the ever-present windows onto the city were absent, and the regular looking corridor with the interior windows that looked into workspaces and offices had given away to a corridor that had no windows, no doors, and looked like it was made of solid concrete.  Bucky frowned.  Okay, that was odd.  Turning back, he could see the divide where normal corridor turned into threateningly solid corridor.  Looking forward again, the concrete corridor kept going for several feet before turning.  One door broke the unyielding expanse ahead of him.  

Curiosity won out over safety.  Hesitantly, trying to look both behind and in front of himself at the same time, Bucky edged forward.  He was reaching out towards the security panel, although he wasn’t really sure what he was planning to do with it, when he realised that the door wasn’t even properly closed.  It was a sliding door, opaque, thick and solid looking, and with a spanner wedged in the doorway near the bottom, keeping it open just a crack.  Whether this had been done on purpose or was just an accident, he couldn’t tell.

Still, there was one way to find out…

He put his eye to the crack.  The inside of the room looked like yet another laboratory/workroom hybrid, one of many that he’d passed today.  It seemed empty, and when straining his ears also failed to succeed in discovering anything, he took a deep breath and slid inside.

Nothing happened.  It looked like the room was indeed empty, although there were signs that someone had been working in it recently.  While parts of it, the strange looking machines along the wall and the lab bench with the beakers and burners, looked similar to all of the others he’d seen, there were some fairly odd features.

Firstly, there were the walls, which looked as solid as those of the outside corridor.  Tapping on them confirmed just how dense they were. Secondly, there appeared to be metal slides attached to the sides of most of the machinery, and, when he looked closer, recesses behind them, as if you could flip a switch and have them all slide into the wall and out of sight. Bucky frowned and stepped uneasily towards the door. Was this some kind of trap? But that didn't make sense.  What kind of trap had a laboratory as a lure, for heaven's sake? And someone had clearly been using it too; there were papers and tools strewn about.  In one corner there was a tiny cupboard and a sink with a few spoons and an upside down coffee cup next to it. One of the computers was on.

Well, Bucky supposed, there was no use looking a gift horse in the mouth. He explored.

Most of the tools that were lying around seemed useless to him, but he did find a few sharp kitchen knives in the sink drawer.  He wasn’t exactly sure if he was willing to use a weapon against Steve's team, but he was no longer really sure that any part of the situation was what he’d thought it was, and he was certainly no longer sure who he could trust.  Even if he couldn't bring himself to do anything…he could bluff.  They had to know he was angry, and they had to know that he could be dangerous as well.  So, as a last resort…

Next he checked the computers.  The screen of the one that was on had a strange pattern of coloured bubbles floating across the screen.  Hesitantly, he touched it, and the bubbles disappeared.  In the centre of the screen was a box asking for his username and password or printscan, whatever that was.  He scowled.  Another piece of tech he didn’t know how to get into.  He tried a few different numbers and words, hopefully, but it was obvious fairly soon that this wasn’t going to cut it.  Frustrated, he went over to another computer but, while he eventually managed to figure out how to turn the thing on, it too was locked up. 

Increasingly annoyed, he scanned the rest of the room.  Stapled papers sat on a bench, but when he looked through them the titles were so long and scientific he didn’t have the first clue what they meant.  On another bench he recognised a tablet that was much like the one he’d been given when he first arrived.  Bucky picked it up without much hope and, sure enough, it needed a password.  Sighing, he put it down and picked up the notepad that sat next to it.  Only the top page had writing on it, just a few words, and frustratingly, the writing wasn’t actually in English.  He squinted.  It looked like…Russian?  Maybe?  He thought he recognised some of the letters but he just didn’t know it well enough to translate.  Damn it all to hell.  “This is ridiculous,” he hissed to himself.

“Is it?”

How the hell had he not heard footsteps?  Cursing, Bucky swung to face the door, one knife held up defensively.  Then he cursed again.

Bruce Banner stood in the doorway with a boxful of equipment.  He was looking at Bucky with some surprise. 

Bucky pulled himself together.  “The fact that even the computers in this place won’t give me any information?  Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty ridiculous.”

Bruce gave him a measured look.  “We did explain that.  You know, Steve’s going frantic looking for you right now.”

“You didn’t explain enough, and yeah, I do know that.  And you’re not going to tell him.”

Bruce raised an eyebrow at that.  “I’m not?”

“You’re not,” Bucky said, “Because I want some answers, and if you’re really going to push it, yeah, I also have weapons.”  His hand tightened on the knife’s handle.  “I’m not kidding here.”

Bruce’s eyes flicked to the knife.  “Kitchen knives?”

“What, think that because they used to slice tomatoes they can’t just as easily slice a jugular?”

This time when Bruce looked at him, his expression was approaching concern.  “You’re nowhere near—”

Alright, that was it.  Bucky lunged, barrelling into him with one smooth move.  The box Bruce was holding went crashing to the floor, and Bucky worked with the element of surprise, shoving his target against the wall, knife held threateningly to his throat.

“I don’t need a gun to be a threat, Dr Banner.”

Bruce froze, didn’t breath, stared at him.   “Okay,” he said, incredibly carefully.

“So believe me when I tell you that I don’t want to hurt you.  I don’t want to believe that you’ve done anything to deserve being hurt, because I don’t want to believe that of any of Steve’s friends.  Right now, though?  It’s pretty  damn clear to me that I’m being lied to, and I’m beginning to wonder just how deep that lying goes.”

Bruce stayed very still, his eyes trying to keep the knife in his vision.  “This…isn’t a good idea,” he said.

Bucky snorted.  “Yeah, I’m sure you think so.”

“That’s not what I—”

“I’ve been locked up, shot at, nearly killed, and I find out that even my best friend is being less than truthful.  And you know, I do trust Steve, so do you know what I’ve found myself wondering?  Whether it even is Steve.”

Bruce looked back up to Bucky’s face, frowning. 

He kept going, unravelling the thought; almost unable to stop now that he was finally voicing the ugly suspicion.  “I mean, people…the enemy…Hydra.  They have to know who can get me to play along with all of this.  How do I know that this isn’t some kind of…trick?  Or illusion?  To make me docile.  To make it so I won’t fight back?  This is all…I mean, time travel?  And I’m just supposed to take your word for it?  You’ve given me nothing to back this up and I am damn well not going to go back to you and your buddies until you do.” He stopped abruptly, panting, staring furiously at the scientist.

There was a tense silence, and then Bruce said, “You need to pull the knife back.  Even if just a little.  Please.”

Bucky blinked, slightly thrown.  “…Fine.  You’d better talk.”  He pulled back, enough so that the knife was no longer pressed into Bruce’s throat.

Bruce looked at him apprehensively. “Before we have any kind of conversation,” he said, “I have to give a warning to you.  An honest warning.”

“An honest warning.”

“Yes,” said Bruce, and then, “you do not want to stab me with that knife.  It won’t end well for either one of us, believe me.”

Bucky looked at him sceptically.  “Right.  Because what?  You’re some kind of secret super soldier?”  Bruce visibly winced, and Bucky’s eyebrows went up.  “Wait, what are you—”

“I’m not a super soldier,” said Bruce.  “But I have been injected with a version of the serum.”

Bucky regarded him in disbelief.  “Not a working version, then?”

“Not exactly.”  Bruce hesitated, and then continued.  “I’m a scientist.  I was working on combining a version of the serum with radiation to… well, it doesn’t matter what I was trying to do.  It didn’t work the way I wanted it to.  The way anyone wanted it to.  And I was stupid enough to think that it was a good idea to, since they weren’t letting me test on humans, use myself as a guinea pig.”

A failed version of the serum?  Bucky was morbidly fascinated, despite himself.  He knew what the serum could do, what it did do, to Steve.  If things had gone wrong… “So what happened?”

Bruce smile was bitter.  “It turned me into a monster.”

“You don’t look like a—”

“Yeah,” he interrupted softly, “Well, you haven’t seen me when I’m angry.  You will if you stab me, though.”  He shrugged, and looked meaningfully at the knife.  “Briefly.”

Bucky opened his mouth.  Closed it, and then opened it again.  “I’m supposed to believe you?”

Bruce jerked his head to indicate the rest of the room.  “This,” he said, “is my special lab.”

Bucky looked confused.  “What does that—” Then he stopped, and looked around. 

Concrete walls.  Denser than he’d ever seen.  Alcoves in the walls, so the equipment, the expensive equipment, could be tucked away.  So it wouldn’t be destroyed straight away if something happened.  Something that made the lab’s owner…

Bucky turned back to Bruce.  The hand with the knife wavered uncertainly.  “You could be bluffing,” he said.

Bruce nodded.  “I could.”

Bucky gritted his teeth.  Dammit.  “I just want information.  Something.”

“I know,” said Bruce.  Softly.  Sympathetically.  “But I needed to give you a warning.”

Bucky stared into his eyes, and then cursed and stepped back, lowering his arm, but keeping the grip on the knife.   He watched Bruce’s face, the conflicted look, and remembered his earlier comments. My view wasn’t necessarily the same as many of the others.    “Please,” he said.

Bruce sighed and cast his eyes around the lab.  “Information.  Well, there’s certainly a lot of it in here.” 

“I didn’t manage to find much.”

Bruce shrugged.  “It’s not all accessible, not even when it’s on paper.  That, for example.”  He nodded his head to the table where Bucky had dropped the pad of paper he’d been looking at when Bruce came in. 

Okay, he’d play along.  Bucky picked it up.  “I thought it looked like Russian?” he said, looking questioningly at Bruce. 

“You’d be right,” Bruce answered.  “I’ve been using translation programmes and my own vague understanding to translate some documents.  I wrote those down to make sure I got a precise translation, though.  They…are more important than the rest.”

Bucky looked at them, but Russian was definitely not his strong point.  “What do they mean?”

Bruce's mouth quirked into a smile.  "Ramses. Corner. Sputnik."

Well that was just odd.  "Yeah, sounds important."

"Important enough to maybe prevent a lot of damage, if used in the right context," said Bruce. "Steve, of course, hates the implication, and he isn't that fond of me exploring it. But I can't help but think that..."

"What?" said Bucky, baffled.

"I wish I had some words like that, sometimes."  Bruce looked…resigned?

Bucky gave up. "Okay, I think I have to let you know that I don't actually understand what you're talking about," he said.

Bruce twisted his face into a sharp smile. "I know.  Just...you might want to remember..." He shook his head. "Never mind. Look, you said you didn't trust us. So, what can I tell you that will make you?"

Bucky looked at him warily. "Just like that?"

"No promises.  But it seems like the best place to start, don't you think?"

He frowned at Bruce, tried to figure out his angle, but Bruce's face gave little away.  Well, okay, fine.  He might as well dive straight in.  "Who’s the Winter Soldier?"

Bruce's eyebrows shot up. "Where did you hear that name?" he asked sharply.  Bingo. 

"I overheard Steve talking about him.  Seemed pretty thrown off balance about it too."

"...he would be, yes."

"He was the one who tried to kill me.  That’s what you think, right?"

Bruce chewed on his lip, and Bucky wondered whether he'd refuse to talk.  In the end though, he said, "Yes.  It seems likely."

“So?  Give me something here!”

Bruce seemed to be thinking.  “He’s…an assassin.  One who’s somewhat of a legend.”

“A legendary assassin?”  Bucky narrowed his eyes.  “Legendary for what?  And why would that concern Steve? He’s gone up against worse.”

“The last time they clashed it was…unpleasant.”  Bruce looked like he was choosing his words carefully.  “And he’s legendary in that he’s somewhat of a ghost story in the intelligence community.  For a long time people doubted he existed.  We now know he does.”

“And that’s the truth.”  Bucky watched him sceptically.

Bruce met his gaze.  “It is.”

Bucky continued to watch his expression.  “You’ll excuse me if I think there’s more to it.”

They faced off for a few tense seconds. 

Then Bruce seemed to come to a decision.  “The computer behind you,” he said.

Bucky turned his head slightly to look.  “What about it?”

Bruce walked over to it and typed in a password, then opened up one of the programmes, and gestured for Bucky to come over.  Curious, he did.

“The tablet computer we gave you,” said Bruce, “was able to access so much information because it was connected to something called an internal network.  Specific information was stored there by us on several computers, and it could be retrieved by you when you wanted to view it.  Anyone else connected to the network could access the same information, and send things to other computers on the network.  Like a...kind of like a telephone network for information.”

“Okay?”  That seemed to make sense, but Bucky wasn’t sure where Bruce was going with it.

Bruce nodded towards the computer.  “This is connected to something called the internet.  It’s a…call it a system, that allows millions of computers, all over the world to connect to each other.  Anyone online has access to the material from all of the other computers.  Millions of people constantly communicating and constantly exchanging information.”

Bucky looked at the screen with more interest.  “That’s…they can do that?”

“It is the future.”  Bruce indicated the screen.  “This program I have up?”

Bucky looked at it.  The screen was white, and in the middle sat a box and few letters bafflingly spelling out the word, ‘Google’.

“It’s called a search engine, and it’s designed to find information on the internet.  To give you access to the thoughts of millions.”  Then he leant forward and typed ‘winter soldier’ in the box in the middle.  The screen lit up with lists of phrases in blue.

Bucky looked at the screen, and then at Bruce, a little confused. 

“You can press on them to read them,” said Bruce helpfully.  “Like the icons on the tablet.  It’s called browsing, in this context.”

“How do I know this isn’t just another…internal network?  That you created?”

“With millions of pages of data?  Even with all the people in this tower combined, we couldn’t possibly be responsible for that much information.  That doesn’t make sense.”

He had a point.  And ‘browsing’ didn’t sound hard.  With another curious glance at Bruce, he shifted in front of the screen and started to read. 

He skimmed for a few minutes before his frustration started to build again.  The information he found was…infuriating.  It appeared that people had heard of the Winter Soldier, but Bruce was correct.  It was all just… ghost stories. An electronic ‘message board’ where paranoid people discussed possible sightings.  A snatch of a document discussing ‘plausible targets versus obvious diversions’.  A ‘tweet’ on something called Twitter claiming that the government was keeping back links with someone called the ‘DC shooter’.  A post on ‘Facebook’ claiming to have found clues hidden in the ‘leaked shield documents’, whatever that was. 

Goddammit.  He stepped back from the computer, infuriated.  He couldn’t find anything solid in this mess, and everything that was there just seemed to back up what Bruce said.

Bucky turned back to Bruce, who was watching him cautiously.  “This still doesn’t make any sense, then.  Look, I know Steve.  He wasn’t just….  He was shaken, really shaken.  He doesn’t get shaken, not like that.  This was…is personal.”

Bruce looked uncomfortable again.  “I’m sorry—”

Bucky bit his lip, thinking it out. "Personal, and something to do with me. So if it's not the shooter himself, then it's that the shooter knows who I am? And I did- I will do, something he's angry about?"

Bruce grimaced, just for a few microseconds, but he saw it.

He seized on this.  "It's something I'm going to do in the future, isn't it?" Bucky’s stomach sank, as the implications hit him. "But if it was good, then Steve wouldn't be so cut up about telling me— I screwed up."

"That's not..."

"I did.  That's why Steve’s upset; I screwed up badly, messed people up and he doesn't want to tell me.  Doesn't want to hurt me.  And someone’s angry with me because of it; they want me dead..."  He sat back on the bench, mind racing, horrified.

"No."

"Then what!?" He snapped. "There isn't anything else that makes sense!"

"Listen to me," said Bruce, emphatically, fiercely.  He looked straight into his eyes, angrier than Bucky had ever seen him. "You are not responsible for screwing anything up."

Bucky hesitated, staring at him. It wasn't that he inherently trusted the man, but, right now, Bruce looked more sincere than anyone had since he'd arrived at the tower. "I.... Then what..."  And then his mouth snapped shut, as inspiration struck.  He turned back to the computer and the little “Google” box, and started to type: ‘bucky bar—‘.

Bruce hastily stepped forward.  “Look, you probably don’t—“

Then they both jumped and stopped short, as a very loud and very insistent siren started blaring forcefully throughout the building.

Bucky recovered first.  “What’s tha—”

“THIS IS A CODE RED ALERT,” JARVIS’s voice rang out over across the building.  “A HOSTILE INTRUDER HAS INFILTRATED THE LOBBY.  ALL EMPLOYEES SHOULD EVACUATE THROUGH THE EMERGENCY EXITS NEAR THE EAST AND WEST STAIRWELLS.  I REPEAT – THERE IS A HOSTILE INTRUDER IN THE LOBBY.  ALL EMPLOYEES SHOULD EVACUATE THROUGH THE EMERGENCY EXITS NEAR THE EAST AND WEST STAIRWELLS…”

Bucky’s and Bruce’s eyes met in dismay. 

“That sounds—splashy,” said Bruce.

“It’s him.  It has to be…”

“I’m calling Steve,” replied Bruce, and pressed a panel on the wall.  Torn, Bucky didn’t try to stop him.

“Bruce!”  Steve’s voice echoed out of the wall’s speaker, loudly so he could be heard over the siren and JARVIS’s warnings.  “He’s in the building!  We need to find—”

“I’ve got Bucky here, Steve,” Bruce interrupted.  “He’s down in my basement lab.”

“What?  Bucky!!”

“I’m sorry, okay!”  Bucky yelled back, fighting to be heard over the cacophony.  “You can hardly blame me for—”

“Alright!”  Steve’s tone was short and to the point; soldier mode.  “You need to get away from—“

”The express elevator up to our levels,” said Bruce.  “It’s quick, and no one’s going to be able to cut the power in this building.”  He had Bucky by the arm and was already hustling him out into the corridor and across to a discreet door-shaped panel in the corridor outside.  It was the same colour as the walls, and Bucky hadn’t even noticed it when he’d come in. 

“I’ll meet him at the top,” said Steve.

Bruce pressed his finger to a panel and when the doors opened, he pushed Bucky forwards.

Rapidly losing patience with the manhandling, Bucky shook off Bruce’s hand. “I can fight back if I need to, you know!”

Bruce glared at him.  “I don’t.  I’m being really serious here, so listen to me: you need to stay as far away from this as you can.  This is just—  This is vital.  I’m not kidding around—“

The expression on Bruce’s face was just this side of outright panic.  Bucky felt a cold chill.  “I—Okay, okay.  I’ll try to—”

“Go!”  Bruce nudged him back in the elevator and pressed the panel again.  Bucky saw him step back as the elevator’s doors closed, and then he was in motion.  

The elevator rose swiftly, and he leaned against its back wall, mind whirling.  The tower’s security had seemed almost impregnable to him; what kind of man had managed to get through it so quickly?  Who the hell was the Winter Soldier?  How were they going to—?”

The elevator stopped abruptly, and Bucky nearly fell over.  He looked up, startled.  That hadn’t taken long.  Was he there?

He looked at the doors.  They didn’t open.  No one’s going to be able to cut the power in this building, Bruce had said, so why?

“JARVIS?” The artificial intelligence wasn’t happy with him, but he surely wouldn’t be this cruel.  “JARVIS, you didn’t… can you hear-- oh.”  Crap.  He still had the spider, didn’t he?  JARVIS couldn’t even see him.  Dammit.  He looked for a phone handset, or a button to press, or something.  “Anyone?  Look, this thing’s stu—“

Then he yelled in shock, as a metal arm erupted through the floor.

Chapter Text

Adrenaline surged through Bucky, and slammed himself back, out of reach of the grasping fingers of the— God, it was an arm.  And the elevator’s floor was metal, he could see that, but the arm had torn through it like it was tissue paper.  Was that what the Winter Soldier was?  Some kind of robot? 

Unable to find its target, the arm pulled back and then there was the twisted groan of metal being pushed aside as the hole in the floor was methodically enlarged.  Frantically, Bucky pressed himself back, then scrambled up so he was standing on the hand rail that was against the elevator’s back wall, hands braced against the sides to keep his balance.  He needed to get out.  He needed to get out of here now, before whoever or whatever the hell was on the other end of that thing managed to get in.

The elevator gave a horrifying creaking sound, and seemed to shudder to the side.  Bucky’s eyes darted to the elevator’s ceiling.  There had to be a… there!  A trap door into the elevator shaft; it was small but he should be able to squeeze through.

The elevator shuddered once more, and he braced himself again, nearly falling off the rail.  God, the hole in the floor was already much bigger…  He leaned forward, grasping at the trap door, and it burst open, leaving a gaping hollow in the ceiling.  He glanced down at the floor and saw a flash of metal and hair, and a brief glimpse of a masked face – human then?  Probably?  Was there any hope that he’d listen to reason?

As he scrambled forward and swung himself through the gap and into the elevator shaft, he yelled, “Why are you even doing this?  What the hell’s your problem?”

There was no reply, just more sounds of metal twisting and giving way.

Heart thudding, he clambered onto the top of the elevator and took stock of his surroundings.  The elevator shaft was dim and narrow.  Cables stretched up into the void, and he couldn’t see any sign of doors along the sides.  Maybe there weren’t any – it was supposed to be an express elevator, after all.  He cursed, and glanced down.  “You don’t want to do this,” he called out.  “You know what the Avengers can do!  You’re in the middle of their building, and this has gotta be attracting attention.”  He looked around frantically.  The cables, just the cables.  “They’ll find you, and they’ll bring you down!” 

He flicked his eyes down again.  The hole was a lot bigger, and he could see someone squeezing through.  Dammit, dammit, fuck.  He abandoned talking, leapt to the cables and started to climb. 

There was a horrendous crunching noise underneath and he glanced down, panting, to see the masked man emerge into the lift, jump smoothly and immediately up, catch the edge of the trap door cavity, and pull himself into the lift shaft in one impossibly smooth and fast action.

“Fuck!” he said, out loud this time, and then the cable shook as the man began to climb. Frantically, Bucky pulled himself upwards, but the masked man was terrifyingly fast. There was a clang of metal hitting metal, as the robotic arm grabbed the cable just underneath him, and then a hand fastened around his ankle, and pulled.  Bucky clung to the cable, frantically trying to keep his grip, but his hands burned as slowly, inch by inch, they slid down. The vice-like grip on his ankle tightened agonisingly and he screamed.  He wasn't going to be able to hold on. So, maybe…

Bucky closed his eyes, said a silent prayer, and let go.  Suddenly, the Winter Soldier found himself pulling down on a free-falling object, and Bucky rocketed backwards, crashing into him as momentum yanked them both downwards.  They hurtled backwards down the shaft and crashed onto the elevator’s roof in a pile. 

Gasping with pain and a frantic, all-encompassing terror, Bucky jabbed his elbow back into the Soldier's ribs and then twisted, bringing his hand around to aim for the eyes.  This wasn't a fair or honourable fight; it was a fight for survival.  He felt absolutely no guilt in using every tool in his arsenal, including all the dirty fighting techniques he’d learned in the alleyways of Brooklyn and the streets of Europe.

Unfortunately, none of the tools in his arsenal appeared to have any effect.  The blow to the ribs didn't even cause the man to pause.  The jab to the eyes didn't even make it halfway there, as his wrist was abruptly caught and wrenched back painfully.  He let out another yell and tried to kick, to punch.  Bucky was far from a bad hand-to-hand fighter; he’d even go so far as to say that he was excellent.  Against this man, this soldier, he had no chance.  In less than thirty seconds he was pinned painfully down, his face mashed into the lift’s roof.

“You can’t—can’t kill me!” he panted, desperately, uselessly.  “Do know what they’ll do?  The Avengers?  Steve?”

His assailant didn’t go in for the kill, but he didn’t let go either, and he pressed forward to pin Bucky’s limbs down more securely.  Bucky gasped with pain as his shoulders were wrenched back.  God, he was so fast, so incredibly, implacably strong.  “You’re not…human,” Bucky wheezed out as the pressure on his ribs increased.

Finally, the Winter Soldier broke his silence.  “No.”  He didn’t sound angry, or emotional.  He didn’t sound anything at all.

“Let me go!”

“No.” 

“There’s no reason— You freaking homicidal maniac—”

“No!” The word was roared, abruptly, and Bucky jolted underneath the Soldier.

“What—  What the—”

“Not homicidal.”

Seriously.  That was what was angering him?  Despite his position, Bucky had to suppress a bark of laughter.  “No?  Have you seen—?”

Suddenly he found himself being turned around and shoved violently against the wall of the elevator shaft, the back of his head connecting with the concrete with a dull thunk that sent stars wheeling across his consciousness.  The Winter Soldier was right in front of his face, staring at him over the mask with an expression that could drill holes in diamond.

He blinked groggily, instinctively jerking his head back and them wincing as another wave of stars threatened.  “Wha—”

In one smooth move, the Soldier removed his flesh hand from where it was pinning Bucky’s shoulder, lifted it to his face, and removed the mask.  “Not,” he said, viciously, hopelessly, “homicidal.”

And Bucky stared uncomprehendingly at his own face, as the horrible sense of dread he’d been feeling for the last few days finally rose to a shrieking crescendo.

The uneven drag of his own breathing was the only thing that Bucky was aware of for the next few seconds.  The face...that was his face.  That was….  He stared helplessly.  This had to be a trick, or a mistake, or an—

“Illusion,” he gasped.

The Soldier stared back at him, and all traces of the emotion he’d recently displayed abruptly drained away like water.  “No.”

"Yes! This is a trick of some sort.  This is a...I'm not alive is this time...why would I be alive in this..." His mind spun around wildly.  "They said the Winter Soldier was an assassin.  A killer!"

The Soldier was barely restraining Bucky now.  He barely needed to. "Yes," he said in monosyllabic agreement.

“That’s not what… I wouldn’t...”

The Winter Soldier’s brow furrowed slightly at that.  “Not true.”

“I am not—”

“A soldier.  You are.”  He looked at Bucky, his expression mostly impassive but with a touch of…irritation? Perhaps?   “You killed, then.  And after…”

Bucky felt a surge of fury, and he grasped onto it.  It was the only thing that made sense right now. “I killed Hydra troops.  And Nazi soldiers.  Combatants who knew what they were signing up for.  No civilians.  No innocents.”

His own eyes stared at him.  “Not yet,” said the Soldier.

“Not….  I wouldn’t….”  Bucky stared back, trying desperately to make sense of the situation.  “You, you’re trying to kill me.”  A chill went down his spine.  “Kill me before I turn into…”

The Winter Soldier frowned at him, then nodded his head fractionally.  “It needs to be done.  The mission…the mission is… There needs to be payback.”

“No.  There doesn’t.  You think you…  I don’t know who you think you are but I don’t believe—” The Soldier narrowed his eyes, and Bucky found himself jolted back against the wall again.  He swore.  “This is insane.  I am not going to do anything.  This isn’t going to solve anything!”

“It’s better.  They won’t be hurt.  He won’t be…no one will be hurt.”  In the blink of an eye, a knife appeared in the Soldier’s hand.

Bucky stared at it, his heart racing.  This couldn’t be happening.  He was going to die, unless….  He had a sudden flash of inspiration.  “He?  You mean Steve?”  When the Soldier hesitated, Bucky pressed on, adrenaline pumping wildly.  “You think Steve won’t be hurt by this?  Really?” 

The man with his face suddenly looked unsure.  “He…. It would be better…”

“Better?  He’s going to arrive here and his friend will be dead, and he won’t even know how or why!  I don’t think you could find something that would hurt him more!”

And the Soldier’s face crumpled slightly.  “It…  It can’t be….”  He frowned, looking conflicted.  “He has to understand…”

Bucky exhaled shakily.  “Okay, so don’t kill me, and we can find an explanation for everyo—”

And then the Winter Soldier’s expression sharpened, like he’d made a decision, “He has to understand.” 

Bucky’s stomach dropped, and he opened his mouth to make an argument just in time to choke on the words when the Soldier’s head rammed into his forehead.  A stab of pain spiked through his already abused brain, and everything faded to grey. 

***

He was moving, rocking from side to side, and all the blood was rushing to his head.  Hazily, Bucky opened his eyes, and saw dark walls going by.  Upside down?  Why was he upside—Oh.  He was being carried.  Over a shoulder?  The world jolted and he let out a small cry before he could stop himself.  His head hurt again.  Where was he being carried?  What was—?  He gasped slightly and winced as a flash of light flared against one of the walls.  Fast as lightning, it twisted up the wall like a crack, and then, before he could wonder, it was gone, and Bucky was being whirled around, and his head really hurt, and the world faded once more…

***

Bucky woke up to a metallic tapping sound that echoed through his skull.  He flinched, and then recent events jumped urgently to the front of his mind and he slammed his eyes open in panic. 

He was in some kind of room.  The furniture was practical and minimalistic, and the walls were dark and reflective.  One wall was almost entirely taken up with panels and screens, and another with two enormous, heavy looking doors that met in the middle.  The Winter Soldier was currently in front of these doors, and he was attaching strange electronic devices to the place where they joined.  As Bucky watched, he placed another one and stood back.  The metallic tapping sound started up again, getting faster and faster until it erupted into a hissing.  The smell of burning wafted through the room.

Okay, he thought.  Push away the fear.  Push away the feeling of horror.  Focus.  Survive.  You’ve done this before.  Do it again.  Gathering his wits, Bucky assessed his position.  Despite the fact that there was certainly furniture in the room, he had been deposited onto the floor.  Worse, his arms were cuffed to the legs of a bench, and when he craned his head back he could see that it was bolted down.  Gritting his teeth, he tested the cuffs. Possibly he could slip out of them, although he might need to break a finger or two to do it.  But what then?  He couldn't see any convenient exits nearby, and the large inconvenient exit looked like it was being...welded together?  By the strange, twisted soldier who was pretending to be him, because he couldn't be, couldn't be...

The Soldier turned from the door and regarded him silently.  Bucky tried to glare back equally silently, but desperate curiosity soon won over. "Where the hell are we?"

"Panic room," said his captor.

"A room where you go when you're panicking?  What's...like an emergency room?" He stopped, as a thought came to him and he looked over the room with fresh eyes.  "Or a bunker? This is a bunker?"

The Soldier blinked at him. "This panic room was designed by Anthony Stark in 2010, during preliminary planning phrases for this building," he said blandly, as if reciting from a manual. "Its function is to provide, in emergencies ranging from natural disasters to hostile incursions, a secure and safe place for Virginia Potts and other key staff members who may be at risk because of their personal ties to Anthony Stark.  The panic room is stocked with two weeks of food and essentials, and has a state of the art air and water filtration system to prevent outside contaminants from affecting the occupants.  The walls are made of a ten inch titanium alloy, and the room is fully insulated and virtually impregnable."  His mouth snapped shut as he finished the recital, and he resumed his silent stare.

Bucky stared back, disturbed.  "So it's like Bruce's lab then."

"No."  When Bucky looked confused, the Winter Soldier furrowed his brow, and continued.  "There are...differences.  The panic room was part of the original architecture, and the laboratory was added to the design in 2012." As he continued, his voice once more assumed the distant tone of recital.  "The laboratory is designed to lock from the outside and resist damage inflicted to the interior for as long as possible, to allow time for the building to be evacuated and for calming tactics to be used.  The panic room is designed to lock from the inside, and is designed to resist damage to the exterior for an extended period of time..."

"So what was with the welding?”  Bucky snapped, disconcerted.

The other man looked indifferently at him.  “A guarantee.  All mission plans should have built in redundancies and back-ups.  No element should be left to chance.”

Bucky glanced over the room again, and his mind was racing.  Getting out would be difficult, to say the least, which meant that he was trapped in here with…which meant that he was trapped.  The only discernible hope seemed to lie with the Avengers finding where he was and somehow getting through the ludicrously secure door.  In his favour he had only one positive that he could think of, and that was that he…that the Soldier seemed open to talking. 

The more they talked, the more time his potential rescuers had.  Great.  Fine.  So, conversation topics?  How about— “You broke into a building full of people to find one man, and that wasn’t leaving anything to chance?”

The Winter Soldier frowned at him.  “No.”

“Really?  Because it seems like you were awfully lucky to me.”

“No,” he repeated.  For a few seconds it didn’t seem like he was going to elaborate, and then he seemed to realise that more detail might be needed.  “Information from the covert listening devices indicated that you were separated and you had taken the device with the deactivated microphone.”

“That had everything turned off—”

“—Except the electronic shielding, which had a tracking algorithm hidden within its coding.”

Bucky didn’t really understand much of the last sentence, but it dawned on him that his current situation might possibly be his own fault.  Stupid freaking technology.  “Shit.”

His thoughts were interrupted by a dull, very muted thumping sound coming from the door.  It didn’t sound like machinery or anything so…Steve’s team?  Had they finally figured out where he was?  Suddenly hopeful, Bucky yelled, “I’m in here!”

“They can’t hear you.”

Bucky glared at him.  “You’ll excuse me if I’m going to try anyway.”  He took another breath and yelled, “Hey!”

“The panic room is fully contained and almost sound-proof,” the voice next to him recited implacably.  “Voice communication is via a satellite link—”

“Okay!”  Bucky snapped, disappointed.  There was absolutely no acknowledgement of his voice from the outside, as far as he could see.  The thumping continued for half a minute more, and then faded totally.  “Fuck.”

The Winter Soldier gave him a curious look but otherwise did not reply.  Instead, he gave the door a final check and then walked over to the wall with the panels and screens on it.  As Bucky watched, he plugged a couple of small rectangular devices into the one of the panels, and then began tapping at a keypad that was nestled in another. 

Bucky watched him cautiously.  “Now what are you doing?”

The Winter Soldier didn’t pause.  “Setting up the recording,” he said.  “It will save automatically to the tower’s servers.”

“The recording.”

“Yes.”

Bucky gritted his teeth.  “What,” he said, “are you recording?  And why?”

The Soldier paused at that, looking genuinely bewildered.  “The conversation,” he said, in a tone that implied, ‘obviously’. 

“Our conversation.”

“For Steve.”

“For Steve?”

The Winter Soldier frowned at him again.  “He needs to understand.  You said.  He needs to know it was a…choice.  Not knowing will…will make him hurt.”

“Me dying will make him hurt.”

The Soldier paused, looking faintly troubled.  “Yes?”  He said, in a tone that implied he wasn’t at all sure of that.  “But he will hurt…less this way.  If he understands.  He’ll understand.”

“He’ll understand why I’m dead?”

“Understand it was your choice.” 

“You’ve got another thing coming if you think I’m going to—”

He was drowned out by a hiss of static, and then Tony’s voice suddenly rang out from a speaker on the wall.  “Testing, testing?  Anyone in there?”

“Yes!” yelled Bucky, as at the same time the Winter Soldier dove for a backpack that was sitting on a chair a few feet away.

“Right?  Bucky?  There’s no… injuries?”

Bucky glanced warily at the Winter Soldier.  He had pulled several electronic objects from the backpack over to the panels, and now he was plugging one of them in.  “No.  Not really, I…There’s someone—”

“Bucky!” Steve’s voice broke in loudly, as though he’d pushed himself in front of the microphone.  Bucky saw the Soldier freeze, for just a second, before he continued tinkering with the panel.

“Steve,” said Bucky, his mind racing, because what was he supposed to say?  ‘You were keeping this from me?’  ‘Can I have a freaking explanation?’ ‘There’s a guy here who thinks that he’s me, ha-ha, ridiculous isn’t it, now get me out?’ 

He opened his mouth, and then Steve said, “Bucky please.  You don’t need to do this.  I know it’s been bad, but we can do something about it now.  If you just give us time—”

Bucky shut his mouth with a snap.  Wasn’t talking…  Steve wasn’t talking to him.  He wasn’t talking to him, but he was talking to Bucky.  But that meant…

From his position on the floor, Bucky saw the Winter Soldier’s mouth set into a grim line.  “Too late,” he said, softly, tiredly.

“It’s not too late,” replied Steve.  “Bucky, you know I would never—”  The Winter Soldier slammed his hand onto a switch.  The voice abruptly cut out.

The silence that followed was painful, and Bucky sat, frozen with horror.  Steve was talking to Bucky.  He called him Bucky.  Steve did.  This wasn’t…  This wasn’t someone pretending to be….  This was himself.  That was himself. 

The Winter Soldier.  The killer.  His future.

The Soldier turned, slowly, and looked at him with eyes that held a thousand nightmares. 

“Now,” he said.  “We talk.”

Chapter Text

The Winter Soldier looked expectantly at Bucky, as if he should be the one to start the conversation rolling, except that hardly worked because right now Bucky didn’t even really want to look at him.  Every glance gave him more information that Bucky didn’t want to know ; the pale skin, the hollow expression, the eyes that vacillated wildly between glassy and hyper-aware.  This was wrong.  It was all wrong.  His very presence, both of their presences, in this century were wrong.  He wanted to go back.  He wanted to go home .

Bucky jumped slightly as the faint banging at the door started up once more, and without really thinking about it he turned back to look into the eyes that were so terribly similar and eerily different than his own.  “They don’t seem to have given up.”

The Soldier seemed unconcerned.  “They have only one weapon that is capable of getting through.  They won’t risk using it.  There is a danger of collateral damage, and Dr Banner’s scientific skills are too much of an asset to lose at this point.”

Bucky tried to figure out this last sentence.  “Wait, are you saying—” Then he jumped again, as the device that the Winter Soldier had plugged into the communication panel let out a loud pinging sound.  He looked over at it, suddenly unreasonably irritated.  “Why’s it making that sound?”

If the Soldier was bothered by inconsequential nature of the inquiry, he didn’t show it on his face.  “The comms channel has been scrambled by a random encryption algorithm.  Stark is attempting to decipher it.”

“Will he be able to?”

“With time, probably.  And then I’ll scramble it again.”  He nodded to his backpack, and Bucky saw several more of the devices near the top.

Bucky felt his mouth curl.  “Great.”  He looked back at the door, and at the other devices that were attached to various panels.  “Where did you get all of this technology?”

The Winter Soldier looked at him expressionlessly.  “Hydra.”

Bucky looked back to the Soldier, startled.  “Hydra?

“Yes.”

“That’s who…  All of this.  It’s Hydra tech.”

“Yes.”

“Did they help you…help you kill the people you assassinated?”

The Soldier’s face showed nothing.  “Yes,” he said, lifelessly, hollowly.

Bucky stared at him, appalled.  “Right.  Of course. Of course they did.”  He swallowed down the bile in his throat. “You—  You want to explain to me, then, why I’m alive seventy years in the future, kitted out in Hydra weapons?  Because you’ll have to excuse me if I—“

“I am a Hydra weapon.”

“I…I’m—” Bucky stopped, unnerved. 

And terrifyingly, the Winter Soldier suddenly looked just as stricken.  “Uh…I…”  He stopped, clamped his mouth shut, as if he couldn’t bring himself to even use the pronoun.  “The Winter Soldier,” he tried again, his voice distant.  “The fist of Hydra.  To strike down their enemies.”

"How did his...  How?  Why?  I was fighting Hydra.  We were doing everything we could to.... They shouldn't even be around anymore."

The Winter Soldier looked miserable still. "There was a...fall."

"Fall?  I...you fell?  From what?"

The Soldier's brow creased in frustration.  "There was ice."

Bucky scowled.  "That doesn't exactly narrow it down."  Then he caught the look on the Soldier's face and a chill ran down his spine. "Wait you... You don't remember..."

"It...it was a long way down.  And...snow?  A blue..." He frowned helplessly at Bucky.  "Blue sleeve?"

Bucky stared at him.  "The blue sleeve of my jacket?"

The Winter Soldier blinked uncomprehendingly at him. 

"The one I always wore."

The expression he got in return was a mess of frustrated confusion.

"My uniform!" said Bucky, with a touch of desperation. "You can't have forgotten that.  How could you forget... Unless you had some kind of head wound in the fall.  Is that why—"

"Not a head wound."

"Then what—"

"There was a fall," said the Winter Soldier. "And they found...they found..."

"You."  Bucky said, impatiently.  "Us?"

"Yes."

"And who exactly were they?"

"Doesn't matter," said the Soldier, hollowly.  "They went to him."

"Went to who?"

The dead, miserable gaze wandered over to meet his own.  Dread pooled in Bucky's stomach.  He suddenly felt very cold. "Went to who?"

"Armin Zola was a Swiss scientist,” recited the Winter Soldier, distantly, as if reading from an invisible file that he had studied so many times he knew it by heart. “He was recruited to Hydra in 1934 by Johann Schmidt in order to work on various weapons projects for the organisation.”

Ice seared through Bucky’s veins.  “No,” he said, softly.

“Projects that Zola was involved in implementing involved the development of hardware that was powered by the alien artifact known as the Tessaract, and chemical trials of numerous serums that were designed to duplicate and build on the work of Dr Abraham Erskine.”

Suddenly Bucky was back on the table, the straps digging into him as he fought to get free, to get away from the needles filled with horrors that twisted his mind and burned through his body until his throat was raw from the screaming.  Not that.  Anything but that.  “No.”

“While Zola was captured by US forces in 1944, he escaped imprisonment through recruitment with Operation Paperclip, and was able to continue his experiments in secret—”

“No!” he said, horrified, unable to listen any more. 

The Winter Soldier visibly pulled himself back to the present, grimacing.  “Yes,” he said.

Bucky stared back wordlessly.  He’d gotten away from Zola.  He’d been rescued by Steve, and he didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to have nightmares about…  He’d escaped, and they couldn’t have…  “He couldn’t have made me— I would have fought.”  And he had fought, on the table.  He hadn’t given in.  He hadn’t given them anything but his name, his rank, his number.  But you were close, thought a tiny, insidious voice.  You were so close.  If Steve hadn’t come…  

“Not enough.”

“I didn’t give in… I didn’t before! I would never choose—”

And just like before, the expression on his double’s face abruptly went from blank and despairing to fiercely, violently angry.  He lunged forward, off the chair and face to face, and he hissed, “There was no choice!  Humans have choices.  People have choices.  There are no choices for weapons!”  Bucky gasped as a metal hand clutched his shoulder and started to dig in.  “There is the mission.  There is nothing but the mission.  Don’t ask questions.  Don’t have opinions.  No names!  No past!  No will!  Just the mission; only the mission.  There is nothing else.  There’s nothing—” The Soldier paused, stuttered, as if he was only just realising what he was doing, what he was saying.  “There’s…there’s nothing else,” he finished lamely, and, as fast as the explosion had begun, it ended and he rocked back, the emotion on his face once more draining away.  “Nothing else but the mission.  And I…this is the mission.  To stop it all.  The last mission.  It’s all there is.  They took everything.” 

Bucky stared at him in shock.  “How could anyone do that?”

“He was clever.  The drugs.  The knives.  The chair.”  The last was said bitterly, mouth twisted with pain.

Bucky didn’t want to ask, not really, but some masochistic part of him kept opening his mouth.  “The chair?”

The Winter Soldier nodded, and then he stood up, fumbled in the backpack for a small square device with a lead and a plug.  “Here,” he said.  “This was found, with the files.  Look!”  He plugged the device in and tapped at a panel, and suddenly the big screen at the end of the room came to life.  On it was a diagram of what looked like a dentist’s chair, except there were electronic components all through and over it.  Next to the diagram were lines of what looked like instructions.  “See?” said the Soldier. 

Bucky looked at the diagram.  “I…”

“See what they did? How they explained it all—”

Bucky stared at him helplessly.  “I don’t… I’m sorry,” he said.  “I don’t understand it.  I don’t understand Russian.”

The Winter Soldier hesitated.  “You don’t….”  He looked at Bucky suspiciously, as if he wasn’t sure whether a trick was being played.  “You don’t understand….”

“I don’t understand Russian.  That’s… that’s what it’s written in, right?”

The Winter Soldier looked at him, then at the screen, then back at Bucky.  He looked genuinely lost.  “I thought—” Then he snapped his mouth shut, as though the very acting of having a thought of his own was too much to envisage.  Instead, he turned back to the screen, and in clipped, precise tones, translated the text it displayed.

And Bucky sat in horror as he learned exactly how you took a man’s memories (“…a full wipe should take exactly 60 seconds, but fifteen minutes should be allowed if full mobility is required from the asset…”), how you erased his will (“…protocol demands that re-education be applied to the asset before each deployment…”), how you obliterated his humanity (“…secondary wipes may be needed if the asset shows signs of defiance, confusion or erratic behaviour…”) and how you could, with the right tools, keep control of him for a lifetime or more (“…cryogenic freezing should be used when the interval between deployments is more than a month…”).

When he finished, the Winter Soldier sat silently for a moment, and then he turned to Bucky, waiting.

Bucky watched him numbly.  “And no one… no one thought to look for me?  Steve— Oh.  No.  Steve was… Steve was in the ice.  Steve couldn’t have known.”  It was a faint reassurance, but it was gratifying to know that Steve held no blame for that.  “But the others?”

The Soldier looked uncomfortable.  “The…others?”

“Dum Dum.  Gabe.  Falsworth, Morita—”

“Captain America and his Howling Commandos quickly earned their stripes…  Their mission, taking down—”

“You sound like you’re reciting from a newsreel!  You don’t remember them either?  Any of them?”  God, he’d been with them last week.  Fighting, travelling, trusting them with his very life.  Was there nothing of that left?

“The Smithsonian special exhibit on Captain America,” said his older self.  “There are…pieces.  A piano in a bar.  Singing?”  He made a face.  “A road, and there was a tank travelling down.  He ran out and lay on the road.  Attached an explosive by hand.  It blew up.”

“Dernier.  That was Dernier.”

“Oh,” said the Soldier.  Then he offered, “He was cunning.  Efficient.”

“Efficient,” echoed Bucky.  Impassive judgements and jumbled pieces.  Some of the best friends he’d had, and that was all there was.

“The file said…presumed dead.  It was a long fall.  No one knew.  No one thought.”

Bucky gazed at him in misery.  “The file said.”

The Winter Soldier looked back cautiously.  “Yes?”

“That’s where you’re getting most of your information, isn’t it?  Just reciting out of files.  Nothing real.  Nothing whole.  What they did to you, to us…  Do you remember anything that’s complete?  It’s all just fragments?”

The Soldier hesitated yet again.  He did that so often.  Like he couldn’t figure out the rhythm of conversation.  Like he was out of practice, and he was; of course he was.  “Some.  Sometimes… a mission,” he offered.

He didn’t want to ask.  Not really.  But that horrid, morbid part of himself said, “Mission?”

“One was…a criminal.  High ranked.  Hydra had been using his services to sow dissent but they discovered he had agreed to pass on information on them.  He had to be eliminated quickly and…they wanted to give a message to others who would think to do the same.”  The Soldier looked at him, dead-eyed once again.  “The hit should be bloody.  An example.  No witnesses, but the message should travel.”

“Oh,” said Bucky. 

“And it should include his brother, who worked for him, and visited often.  And his wife.”  The Soldier’s gaze went distant, blank.  “She had nothing to do with his dealings, was barely aware of most of them.  That mattered little to Hydra.”

Bucky caught his breath, frozen.

“He was in his back yard, talking with his brother.  His wife, too.  She… she looked like…  I don’t know.  Two maids.  They were shot in the head.  They weren’t involved, were allowed to die quickly.” He turned his cold eyes to Bucky.  “The others were not.”

“I…I don’t—”

The voice grew more distant, more detached.  “I tied them down.  I used the knives, and I was slow, so slow.  He begged me to spare his brother.  His wife.  At first.  Then he just begged me to kill them quickly.” His voice cracked, slightly.  “But that wasn’t the mission.  They…they screamed so much.  There was nothing but screams, in the end.  I completed the mission.  Exactly as directed.”

“Oh god,” Bucky whispered.  He’d thought…when he’d thought that he’d somehow screwed up in his future, talking with Bruce, he’d thought that was bad.  That it was awful.  But this…. This was beyond a nightmare.

And the Winter Soldier continued on, relentless.  “When I reported back to base the handlers swore at me.  There was blood…there was blood everywhere.  I had wiped myself down, but it was soaked though my clothes, my hair, my socks.  Between my toes.  In my ears.  They usually transferred me straight away but they couldn’t…there weren’t any bathroom facilities to deal with that.  In the end, they ordered me to strip, took me outside and turned a high pressure hose on me.  The night was cold, and I stood there naked, shivering, with two Hydra agents swearing at me as they hosed me down.  Then they shoved me in the truck, and took me back.  And I felt…I...”  He stammered, suddenly shaking, staring wildly at his younger self.  “I didn’t feel bad.  I didn’t feel good.  The mission was complete.  It was as it should be.”

Bucky wanted to be sick. He wanted to drink until he couldn't feel anything, scream until his eardrums burst.  He wanted...  He wanted it all to go away.

The panels gave an urgent beep and suddenly there was a hiss of static over the comm line.  Then Tony said, "Okay, we're through again.  Is there any hope that you're not just going to shut me down?"

"Bucky," broke in Steve, urgently.

Bucky looked up at his older self, but he was sitting motionless, his face pale and his eyes half closed.  He didn't look like he felt roused to action.  Bucky swallowed his bile, and said, "Here, Steve.  Both of us are here."

"You're both okay?"

Bucky had to choke back a ghastly laugh at that.  "Yeah, no.  We're really not."

He heard Steve take a deep breath. "I'm sorry. That...that was the wrong thing to say."

He gave a hysterical snort.  "Little bit, yeah."

"I meant you're not...  You are both physically unharmed?"

The Winter Soldier made a small sound, and Bucky looked up.  His eyes were open now, full of a horrible mix of longing and despair.

"Don't do it," Steve pleaded, when neither of them replied to him.  "Please, don't, whatever you're.... I know this seems like a solution, but we can—"

This time the Winter Soldier did talk.  He moved to his backpack while he did so, grabbing a jamming device and starting to set it up. "You don't understand.  You think you want.... You'll agree, after.  You need to listen.  Then you won't be hurt."

"Bucky, please! We can fix—"

There was a hiss of static as the link was cut off.

Bucky stared at the speaker, gears suddenly clicking in his head.  Wait a second. He'd been so...so distracted by the horror of what he'd been hearing, he'd forgotten where he was. "He's right, though."

The Soldier cocked his head to the side.

"We can fix this." He looked up at his older self, hope surging through him. "I'm in the future and they know how this happened!  They can tell me what to do to fix it." His mind raced, as he went back over previous conversations. "In fact, they were going to tell me what to do.  That's what Tony and Bruce were working on!  Figuring out the best things to tell me, what to get me to do, so I can make sure everything turns out better!”

The Soldier’s mouth twisted sharply.  “No.”

“What?”  Bucky scowled at him.  “That’s stupid!  Look, I know you don’t want all of this, everything you told me, to happen!  God, I don’t want it to— it’s a frigging nightmare, of course I don’t want it to— but we don’t have to die.  It can change.  We can fix it!”

The Winter Soldier looked at him pityingly.  “There was a scientist,” he said.  “He worked on m—the program, but he wasn’t strong.  Wasn’t cold.  He couldn’t take it.  One day, he said that he would free… free me.  That he would stop it.  Fix it all.”

Bucky frowned.  “Look, just because that didn’t—”

“I didn’t understand what he was saying  or why he was doing it.  They had taken that from me.  So, when they had suspicions and came to me, asked me whether he had been acting strangely, I told them all about him.  It was an order.  You don’t disobey orders.” He furrowed his brow.  “I didn’t see him again.”

Bucky glared at him impatiently.  “It’s not the same situation at all!  Hydra isn’t here right now!”

The Winter Soldier glared back.  “Hydra is still out there!  Steve couldn’t take them all down.  No one could!”

“We won’t have to have anything to do with them if Steve and his team can figure something out!  We don’t have to die to stop it—”

“It’s too late.”

“No it’s not!  Why would you—”

The Winter Soldier surged forward and Bucky jerked back, the cuffs yanking painfully on his wrists.  A surge of panic went through him as he found his head pulled back with the metal hand, the other roughly running over his scalp.  “What the hell…?”

“There!”  The Soldier’s hand’s tracked down the still bruised area of his skull. 

Bucky yelped in pain as he pushed.  “Ah!”

The Winter Soldier’s eyes glittered as he pulled back and faced him.  “You fractured your skull.”

“What?”  He winced, confused.  “No, I didn’t.”

“In the explosion,” he said, impatiently.  “The rubble fell on you.”

“What are you talking about?  I got a hit on the head and bruised ribs.  I didn’t fracture—”  Then he stopped, as a flash of conversation suddenly pushed itself to the forefront of his brain. 

‘And it’s already healing! By tomorrow you’ll barely know it was there.’ 

He’d thought, half out of it as he’d been, that they’d been talking about Steve, but Steve hadn’t even been there when the grenade hit.   They hadn’t been talking about Steve.

The Soldier’s mouth twitched in derision.  “You fractured your skull.  You broke your ribs.  Now it’s two days later, and there’s barely a scar.”

“I…” Once more, the ice started to creep through his veins.

“Do you know why?”  He studied Bucky.  “You do.  I do too.”  He leaned forward again.  “It’s because it’s already in you.  What they did.  What Zola did.  You remember that?  I didn’t,” he added, bleakly, “but I read the file.  That was where it started.  That was where they made it so we weren’t human.”

Bucky closed his eyes, his throat working to suppress a sob.  Suddenly all he could see was the table, with the needles and the agony, and a little man with glasses perched inoffensively on his nose who smiled at him before he—

“It’s too late to stop it.  They’re inside us now.  You think they’ll stop?  You think they’ll ever stop trying to get us back?  It doesn’t matter what Steve tells us to do when they put us back in time.  Hydra won’t leave their weapon alone forever.  They will find us and they will take us, and it will all happen again.” 

Bucky opened his eyes.  “I could stay here?” he said, desperately.

The Winter Soldier shook his head.  “You can’t.  Haven’t you seen them?  The cracks of light?”

Pretending he didn’t know what the Soldier was talking about seemed pointless.  “I…yes.”

“It’s time breaking through.  They’re keeping you here in a bubble.  The gem—”

“The gem? ”

“Artifact.  It’s a gem.  The timeline right now is still the same as it was, even though you’re not in it. It hasn’t changed yet, because of the gem.  It’s keeping you in a bubble, keeping the timeline from reverting to what it should be without you, and it’s letting you stay where you shouldn’t be.  It won’t last forever, though!  It’s already breaking down.”  The Winter Soldier looked at him imploringly.  “We need to… need to make a decision to change things permanently.  We need to make it soon.  Now.”

Bucky watched him, his mouth dry.  “A decision to die?”

“They need to put you back, but they don’t need to put you back alive.  That’s the mission!  Justice for all of the people that were murdered.  I was trying to do it but I…” He trailed off, his gaze flicking around the room, despair colouring his voice.  “It was too much.  There was too much.  Every time I looked, every file I found, there was more and more and more.  Nothing.”  He swallowed.  “Nothing could ever be enough.   And then…I was keeping a watch.  On Steve.  Making sure he was okay, and then you came, and when they talked, I realised who you were, and I knew I could stop it all!”

“By making sure it never happened….”  Bucky stared at him numbly.

“It’s the only way.  The only way to make it stop.  Everything will be better.  All the people…. The world.”  The Winter Soldier turned his eyes back to Bucky, earnestly, desperately sincere.  “Everyone will be better off,” he said.  “All you need to do is die.”

Chapter Text

A few months back, relatively, the Commandos had raided another Hydra facility, stormed in around three am and taken them by surprise, disabled half of the guards before anyone knew what was happening.  Then the alarm echoed across the camp, and there was frothing chaos everywhere.  Hydra were supposed to be the elite, beyond any kind of fear, but being caught by surprise hardly brought out their best side. 

This raid was more urgent than most - the Commandos had gotten intel that several Allied scientists who had disappeared weeks ago were being held captive there, perhaps forced to work on some of Zola’s insane experiments.  They managed to coerce some likely info from one of the staff, and he and Morita made their way over to one of the far buildings.  What they found was...

Not all the scientists were there.  Some had given in; had been too afraid, for themselves or their families.  They had bent to Hydra’s will and participated in their inhumane research. 

But some were strong.  They were so strong.

They had refused to give up anything, neither information nor their own ethics, and Hydra had punished them, made an example of them.   They hadn't died quickly.  They'd died slow, through hours, days of agonising horror as their bodies were mutilated, violated in every way there was.  Bucky remember running out of the building in a haze.  He stopped near the factory fence, and threw up everything in his stomach while Morita sat numbly next to him and patted his back.

Then they got back up and fought, because there was nothing else they could do.  Bucky remembered the anger, though.  He remembered thinking that anyone who would do something like that didn’t deserve to live.  He remembered wanting to do nothing else but make them pay.  He remembered swearing that he’d wipe out anyone in the world who’d even consider killing someone in such a slow and excruciating way.

So really, he shouldn’t even be hesitating about this, should he?

The Winter Soldier stared at him impassively, waiting, and Bucky sat numbly on the ground, his mind reeling as he tried to think of options, of any option, other than the one that loomed over all others.  “There must be some way…” he said.

“There’s no way.”

“Steve wouldn’t let them take me…”

“Steve won’t be there.  Steve will be frozen, and then he’ll be here, because they need him here too.  He’s…he’s important.  He takes down evil.  He saves people.”

He does everything that we don’t, was the unsaid sentence, and Bucky closed his eyes in misery.  All he’d wanted, all he’d ever wanted, was to do some good in the world and to protect his friend.  And he’d failed, failed in every way it was possible to fail.  Both Steve and the world were clearly immeasurably better off without him, and the nightmares he’d endure….  And cause.  He opened his eyes again, looked at the haunted, desolate expression on his future self’s face.  Maybe…maybe this was—

A clunk and then an abrupt fizzing sound echoed through the panic room, and both he and his other-self jumped in surprise and turned towards the vault-like door.  A red line had appeared at the top, and an acrid burning smell wafted down to them.  Bucky narrowed his eyes.  “Blow torch.  They’re cutting through.”

The Winter Soldier frowned, but he looked irritated rather than worried.  “It doesn’t matter.  This room’s security is top class.  It will take them hours, if they can do it at all.”

Bucky looked back at him.  “Tony and Bruce might have managed to figure out something that will get through quicker.”

The Soldier met his gaze wearily.  “We’ll be done soon.”  He held up his hand, and there was a pistol in it.  Bucky couldn’t say when he’d taken it out.

“I….”  Bucky trailed off miserably, his eyes glued to the barrel.  He should be fighting.  He should be screaming, and wailing, and gnashing his teeth.

The Winter Soldier looked at him solemnly.  “It’s for the best,” he said.  “It’s—”

“Bucky!”  The tell-tale hiss of static announced that the latest encryption of the comms channel had fallen, and suddenly Steve’s voice surged through again.  “Please listen to me—”

The Soldier’s expression twisted painfully.  “Steve, just stop.”

“I won’t!  I will not give up on you—”

“Maybe you should!”  The words were out of Bucky’s mouth before he really thought about it.

Steve paused.  “That…is that…?”

Thoughts whirling, Bucky watched at the Soldier pulled out another scrambler and started to set it up.  He talked quickly.  “It’s me, Steve.  Past me, not future me.  I know what happens to me!  He’s told me all of it, and Steve, I know you don’t want to think about it, but can you honestly prove to me that he’s not right?”

“Buck, no….”

“Maybe this is this best way.”

“It is,” confirmed his future self, earnestly, pausing from his task.  “It’s the only way.”

“It’s not—” And then there was a hiss of static and muffled voices.

Bucky’s gaze darted over to the Soldier but he was still paused, now looking confused.  Frowning, Bucky asked, “Steve?”

There was a couple more seconds of distortion, and then a voice said.  “No.  It’s not.”

Bucky swapped another cautious look with his older self.  “Bruce.”

“Yes. It’s vital that you do not shut off this link. ” Unlike Steve, Bruce did not sound worried, or frantic.  He sounded calm.  Ruthlessly calm.  “You need to listen to what I say, and you need to understand - I am not telling you this out of sentiment.  I’m not telling you this out of hopefulness.  I’m not telling you this because I think you will want to hear it, or because I want to hear it.  I’m telling you this because you need to hear it.  And I'm not asking for anything from you except to listen.  Will you let me talk?”

The Soldier glanced at Bucky, brow furrowed.  Bucky looked back at him with equal trepidation.  He didn't expect much reaction when he nodded at his older self, so he wasn't sure why he wasn't more surprised when the Soldier hesitantly put down the scrambling device and sat back. 

Maybe he was curious, too.  “Okay,” Bucky said, for both of them.  “Talk.”

"Time," said Bruce, "is not a simple thing. It would be wonderful if it was, but one of the very first things we learned when you arrived was that it is endlessly complex.  I was telling you the truth when I said that the smallest changes can make huge differences."

"How would you know?" the Winter Soldier snapped.  "You won't make any changes.  Not even the ones that need to be made."

Bruce seemed unperturbed by his reaction.  "We wanted to.  It was the first thing that we wanted to do.  Change one thing, and fix the future.  Tell you not to take the train journey that led to your fall."

The Soldier looked frustrated.  "That wouldn't work.  It was already too late."

"It wouldn't work." Bruce confirmed, regretfully. "But it's not that simple.  I told you this."

"So why, then?" Bucky said.  “Explain it to me.  To him.  To both of us.  Because if you don’t, I…” He risked a look at his older self, who was staring at him, his lips pursed in irritation.  “I’m pretty sure I know what’s going to happen,” he finished, weakly.

"The artifact that brought you here is alien,” said Bruce.  “We didn't lie to you about that.  We lied to you very little, in fact."

"You just deliberately left things out and made me fill in the gaps.”  Bucky saw his own anger reflected in the Soldier’s eyes, although he couldn’t say whether it was for the same reason.

"We did do that," acknowledged Bruce.  He didn’t sound guilty, but he didn’t sound unrepentant either.  He was simply relentlessly neutral.  "The artifact is alien, however.  The alien who was wielding it called it the time gem.  It is enormously powerful and our understanding of it is very incomplete, even now.  When we first acquired it, our understanding was virtually absent.

"We now understand that a very large component of successfully wielding it is willpower, and the reason for this is that in the process of acquiring it Steve accidentally touched it.  Very briefly, but it was enough.  Because Steve is very stubborn, and under an enormous amount of stress, and there's nothing more, nothing in the world more that he wants than to have you back safe and whole."

There was another shuffle at the end of the microphone, and Steve’s voice rang through again.  “I didn’t mean to do it, Bucky.  But suddenly you were here, and it was just….  We had to figure out what to do, and we’ve got some of the smartest guys on the planet here—”

“That means nothing,” snapped the Winter Soldier.  “Smart doesn’t mean you can fight history.”

“They’re trying…”

There was a twisted crack as the Soldier’s metal fingers dug into the arms of his chair.  “Howard Stark tried to find you.” he hissed.  “I read the file.  He was supposed to be the greatest mind of his generation, and he failed.”

“Buck—”

Bucky looked at the Soldier nervously.  “Steve, I don’t think you should—”

There was another shuffling sound, and suddenly Bruce was continuing on, mercilessly, implacably.  "Suddenly,” he said, “we were in possession of a gem that could pull people out of time and a version of James Buchanan Barnes who was free of most of the suffering used to turn him into a weapon.”

Bucky managed a choked snort.  “But not all of it.”

“Not all, no.”  This was said more softly, and a few seconds of silence echoed down the line.  Bucky was almost at the point of opening his mouth to ask…something, he wasn’t sure what, when Bruce’s voice came back.  “As I said before, our first instinct was to tell you about the fall, and send you back with the means to stop that from happening.  However, Steve might have been exaggerating a bit, but he wasn’t lying when he said we weren’t stupid.  We resisted our first instinct, and we thought about the situation.  We wondered whether a simple warning was enough, whether we would need to tell you more about the future to keep you out of Hydra's hands.  Then we started to think about cause and effect, and how small changes can ripple through to make big changes, and we wondered whether making any change at all would be too dangerous.  We didn’t know what to do or how the gem worked, and we quickly realised how dangerous the situation had the potential to be.”

“Dangerous as in…”

“As dangerous as changing the world should be.”

“Unless you’re making it better for—”

Bucky jumped slightly as Bruce ruthlessly cut through the Soldier’s protest, his voice steady and determined once more.  “Fortunately, with some experimentation and a lot of luck, we determined that, while transferring anyone or anything through time was hard, undoing an incursion just involved… call it a kind of… reset switch?  We could send you back fairly easily.  Of course, then the big question loomed, and that was, did we have to?”

“You do.” The Winter Soldier glared grimly at his younger self.  “You can’t lie about that; I heard you have a conversation in the board room.”

Bucky frowned.  “The board…oh.  The one that was bugged.”

“Yes,” said Bruce.  “And I have no intention of lying to you, although you don’t have all the information here.”

“You—”

“Ownership of the gem does afford some immunity to its effects, at least for a certain time!  If that wasn’t the case, someone might alter the past in a way that was catastrophic for them and not be able to reverse it, not even know that it needed to be reversed.  Whoever or whatever created this thing apparently didn’t want this to happen; there’s a sort of—”

“Bubble around me,” interrupted Bucky, glancing warily at his double’s stony face.  “He…I said that before.”

“It’s an apt description,” said Bruce.  “As long as it holds, the timeline is still acting like nothing’s been disturbed.  It’s as though it hasn’t…caught up to the fact that you aren’t there.  To be able to even do such a thing… the gem is incredibly powerful, perhaps infinitely so.  But our ability to control its power is not.  You can’t stay here forever, and we have to figure out what to do when we put you back.”

“Right,” said Bucky, faintly.  He felt like was in the eye of a storm, sitting in a shuttered room with the wreck of his future, listening to a man who might be a monster try to explain how helpless he was in the face of time and fate.

“You know what needs to be done.” snapped his older self, and Bucky jolted and found himself reflexively trying to push backwards before he remembered his position.  God, not the eye of the storm.

"It struck us,” said Bruce, resolutely ignoring the Soldier’s tone, “that if the gem was complex enough in its mechanisms to have a fail-safe of sorts built in to stop its changes from being immediately reflected in the timeline, then it should theoretically be possible to use the gem to provide a picture of what the timeline would look like when certain changes were made.  With help from Thor, and from some other alien technology that we had…acquired, we found a way to do this."

"Those scenarios you said you were running."  Bucky watched his older-self dig his fingers into the chair’s arm again.  The metal groaned.

"Are running.  At first we had to input manually, but we have been refining algorithms that can automatically generate a series of discrete scenarios, each one differing only by the information and instructions we give you when you’re sent back.  The gem will then extrapolate from that and show us what the timeline would look like in that scenario, and how different it would be from that of our current timeline.”

 “You’re wasting your time,” the Winter Soldier said bluntly.

Bucky felt a stab of resentment as he looked at his older self.  “There’s nothing wrong with them trying—”

“Hydra is out there!  They will always be out there.”  The Soldier lurched up from the chair, and Bucky found himself cringing back because, god, he was…he was terrifying.  He was broken, in so many ways.  “It’s too much— there’s too many of them.  There is only one way to be sure they won’t get their hands on us, and that is to make sure they can’t.  You— Bruce.  You can talk about this all day!  It won’t change anything!  The world will be better if we’re not there.”

Bucky winced and waited for Bruce to argue back.

Bruce said.  “That did cross our mind.”

Bucky blinked.  “What—?”  The Winter Soldier also looked momentarily thrown.

Steve’s voice cut through again.  “Bruce!  Bucky, that didn’t mean we wanted to kill you!  There are other ways to make someone disappear, especially in the middle of a war-zone.  You’ve gotta know that.  Change your name, cut off all ties.  Get you to run far away from all of this.”

Bruce continued implacably.  “Hydra has used the Winter Soldier to sow pain and discord for decades, so we thought that making sure Bucky wasn’t the Winter Soldier had to be good.  ”

“Hydra would find—” protested the Soldier.

“Even Hydra isn’t all-knowing.” said Steve, his voice strained. “Bruce and Tony found a way to make it happen, in one of the scenarios.”

“We took you out of it,” confirmed Bruce.

Bucky bit his lip, trying to understand.  “But if you did that…”

“It was just that—” Steve stopped, seemingly lost for words, and Bucky’s stomach dropped.

“It worked.”  Bruce’s voice continued on mercilessly.  “Without the Winter Soldier, Hydra was not able to amass power as quickly and quietly, nor influence history the way it has.  They slipped up.  The remnants were hunted down early on before they could get a foothold and the world prospered for it. Without Hydra fanning the flames of terror, there was less pain.  Less fear.  SHIELD, the worldwide peacekeeping organisation that Hydra managed to infiltrate in this timeline, wasn’t needed as much and never became as powerful.  The world wasn’t perfect by any means, but it was more peaceful.  For decades it was more peaceful.”

The Winter Soldier made a sound at the back of his throat.

Bucky watched him.  “I don’t understand what you’re trying to—”

“Then, in this other timeline, they came to a more recent event.  It happened here too.  There was an alien invasion, spearheaded by an Asgardian called Loki.  He opened up a portal that allowed the invasion force through; in our timeline it was in New York, and it was stopped by the Avengers.  With the aid of SHIELD, we managed to repel the forces and keep the damage from reaching past the city.”

Bucky stared at his older self, his mouth suddenly dry.

“We were almost overwhelmed, though.  We triumphed because of the power and influence of SHIELD, because of the Avengers initiative, and because of a thousand tiny decisions that were made throughout our history, under the aegis of “security concerns”.  Those decisions were made because of fear.  They were made because of uncertainty.  They were made because of pain and discord.

“But in this world, there was less pain.  Less fear.  The world was a better, more peaceful place, full of better, more peaceful people, and when the Chitauri came, they slaughtered every last one of them.”

The silence was sickening, suffocating, but Bucky couldn’t talk, couldn’t even move.  The Winter Soldier gave a choked-out cry.  “No.”

“I’m sorry,” Bruce’s voice was distant, detached.  “I’m very sorry, but it’s true.  The problem…  Our problem, isn’t that we can’t alter the timeline so that you never become the Winter Soldier.  It’s that we haven’t figured out a way of doing it that doesn’t doom the world.”

“No!  It can’t be…  It has to be better without…without….”

“We didn’t want to believe it either.  Removing the Winter Soldier seemed like such a simple, positive change…”

“No.”  The chair went crashing over, skidding across the floor, and Bucky shoved his legs back out of the way dazedly.

“So we tried different scenarios, different instructions for Bucky to carry out when he was sent back.  Different things for him to tell people, different things for him to do.  Time is not a fixed thing, you see.  It’s like a giant Rube Goldberg machine.  It’s a set of events, that touch events, that touch events.  It’s a thousand billion cold equations that change and vary what we experience right now.  The smallest changes can make big differences, and that’s the problem because the Winter Soldier…. The Winter Soldier didn’t make small changes.  Everything that you’ve done, that you’ve been forced to do. The Winter Soldier has shaped the century—”

The Soldier made a noise that sounded like a sob.

“And taking you out alters so very, very much.  Look,” Bruce paused, emotion finally colouring his voice.  “We are trying to find a solution to this problem.”

“We are, Buck.  We swear!” Steve’s voice cracked.  He sounded like he was almost crying, which wasn’t…wasn’t right.

“We’re trying to find a series of things to get you to do that will ensure that you won’t become the Winter Soldier, and the world will not suffer for that.  Our calculations are running right now!  No, we haven’t found this solution yet.  But we do know one thing – what will happen if you, the younger you, is killed right now.  It won’t be good, and no one will be better off.  It will be a disaster.  You cannot do this.”

“You’re lying.”  The Winter Soldier’s eyes flicked around the small room like a trapped animal, one that had found that even the promise of freedom was nothing but a cruel lie.  “You’ve got to be lying—”

“It’s not fair.”  Bruce’s voice was bitter yet endlessly compassionate.  “I know it’s not fair.  Of course it’s not fair.  Time isn’t fair.  Temporal mechanics aren’t fair.  They’re just brutal and cold, and I’m so very, very sorry.”

“No.” The Winter Soldier turned to Bucky, his face filled with horror, and then something seemed to snap behind his eyes.  “No,” he said, and when Bucky opened his mouth to say something, anything, the Soldier yelled, “Shut up!  This isn’t— They’re lying!  Both of them.  Bruce and…and Steve.  They’re lying and we need to…this is the best thing to do.  The only thing!”  He lunged towards the comms jammers again.

“Wait,” said Bucky, frantically.  He struggled fruitlessly with his bonds.  God, he was going to…  He had to…

Steve sounded frantic.  “Bucky!  Don’t!  You can’t—”

And Bruce snapped out, “Ramses—”

The comms channel cut off.

Bucky held his breath, and the Soldier turned to him again.  “It isn’t true. He’s stalling!  This is the best way!”  He picked up the gun.

“No…” Bucky wasn’t sure whether there was any point in arguing, but he couldn’t stop; some deep part of himself refusing to give up.  “It made sense!  It all did.  I know you want it to be simple but it can’t be.”

“You’re not in charge here,” said the Soldier.

Bucky narrowed his eyes.  “Aren’t I?  You wanted my agreement.”

“So that Steve would—”

“No,” said Bucky.  “Not for Steve.”  He stared at the Soldier’s face, and suddenly he knew.  “This whole thing, the conversation…it was never about Steve.”

“It—”

He pressed on.  “I mean, how would Steve even hear this recording you made?  Would the bubble even last long enough, with me dead?  Or were you planning to send it back with my corpse? Do you think past Steve would be able to make head or tail of it?  Hell, would it even exist, if time was changed?”

The Soldier looked back at him, tight-lipped.

“This wasn’t about Steve.  You want my permission.  You want my permission to commit suicide, because, deep down, you don’t want to make the decision alone. You don't trust yourself to make the decision alone”  He stopped, swallowed.  “Well, I’m sorry,” he said, softly, “but you’re not going to get it.  You need to stop.”

The Winter Soldier stared at him, and just for a second Bucky thought he was going to back down.  Which would be a victory, wouldn’t it?  Then the Soldier opened his mouth.  “This is the best way,” he whispered.  “Then it will be over, and we won’t have to… to…  All the things they made me do, and the control they had.  I can’t…  And all the damage I’ve done…”

The gun wavered.  Bucky’s heart dropped, his mind spiralling, but then suddenly something threw itself loose.  Something someone had said, Bruce had said, about...damage?  Important enough to maybe prevent a lot of damage, if used in the right context.  Bruce had said that.  Back in the lab, about the words in Russian on the paper pad.  The ones he was translating, and….  I wish I had some words like that, sometimes. And then he’d just tried to say…right before the comms channel was cut off.  What was it? 

Puzzles pieces clicking together in his head, Bucky raised his eyes to his future. 

The Winter Soldier’s finger was on the trigger.  “It’s best,” he said; whispered, really.  “It has to be…  I can’t…”

Bucky looked down the barrel, a sudden sense of calm flooding over him.  “And I’m sorry,” he said, and when the Winter Soldier paused, frowning in confusion, he said, softly, “Ramses. Corner. Sputnik.”

For the briefest of moments, the Soldier’s eyes widened in surprise.  Then his eyes rolled back and he dropped to the ground, unconscious, like a puppet with its strings cut. 

Or an asset with its kill-switch activated.  Hydra had more than one way of controlling their weapon.

Bucky watched him numbly for a few seconds.  Then he carefully drew his knees up, curled his head down to rest on them and closed his eyes.  It was the same position the Avengers found him in when they finally got through the door, some half an hour later.

Chapter Text

“So I said to Henry, ‘look, I know you want what’s best for her, what father doesn’t?  So maybe you need to realise that she’s growing up, and she’s going to make her own decisions about what she wants to do with her life.  I mean, sure, leave the doctor idea open, but you don’t want to push.’  That was a reasonable thing for me to say, wasn’t it?” 

On the screen, the dark-haired man in the white lab coat leaned back from his work and crooked his head briefly to the side, obviously seeking an answer to his question from another man who stood to his right, about to hang up a plastic IV bag.  As he hesitated and looked to his companion, the image flickered slightly, turning grainy before steadying again.  The worried expression on his face was still remarkably clear.  "I guess?" he said.

The man in the lab coat shrugged his shoulders and continued on with his task, bending over once more.  His body blocked the view of whatever it was he was actually doing.  "Yeah, well I hope so.  I mean, it’s not exactly my area of expertise, is it?  Certified bachelor, I am.  Pass me the scalpel again, will you, Henderson?"

The picture blurred again as Henderson hurriedly hung the bag and turned away, coming back with the scalpel.  “Is there a problem?” he asked.

“Bit of shrapnel, I think.  It’s just under the…”  He trailed off as he leaned in closer, and then he swore and jumped back slightly.  “Jesus!  Stop that!”

Henderson, who had turned away to look at some of the monitor screens that were set around the room, swivelled back.  “What—?”

“Still with the twitching, for god’s sake,” scowled the lab-coated man.  “I nearly sliced my finger open.  Hang on, I’m going to grab the clamps.”

He walked off the screen, and for the first time it was possible to see the Winter Soldier.  He half sat, half lay in a chair that looked almost, but not quite, like a dentist’s chair.  His gaze was vague and disconnected, his breathing shallow.  Blood oozed slowly from a wound on his shoulder, dripping down his arm.

Henderson, gave a brief, anxious look to the camera, and then back to the man in the chair.  “Should I…?  Daniels?  He’s still bleeding.”

“It’s not going to kill him.”  Daniels came back on screen.  It was hard to see what he held in his hands, but there was a flash of something heavy and metallic before he turned back to the Soldier, his back once more blocking most of the view.  There was a heavy clanking noise from the chair as he leaned in once more, then he and the chair rotated slightly, enough that the Soldier’s flesh arm was visible.  There was solid metal cuff holding it down.  Blood still trickled from the wound.

“Now,” said Daniels, “while I finish digging these out, you wanna prep the T5?  They want him back out in half an hour, remember.”

Henderson dutifully finished setting up the drip.  “Sorry.  I’m not used to…are you sure this will make him ready?”

“Trust me, it’s effective.  I’ve seen it before.” 

For a few minutes there was silence, as both men went about their duties.  Then: “Okay, start it going.  I’m almost done here.”

Henderson hastily did so and then stood back again, looking carefully over the monitors.  A few seconds later, so did Daniels.  The Winter Soldier’s wound now had a neat dressing over it, but this didn’t seem to have reduced his twitchiness.  If anything, he appeared to be trembling, almost shaking.

Henderson had clearly noticed this.  “Uh.  What.   Do you know what’s in that stuff?”

Daniels smiled grimly.  “Androstenedione.  Bromantan.  Epinephrine.  A few types of amphetamines…”

Now Henderson looked alarmed.  “That’s not going to—  That doesn’t sound—”

“Healthy?” Daniels sounded faintly amused.  “Wouldn’t be for us.  But he’s not like us, Henderson.  He’s wounded and dopey and he hasn’t slept, but they need him out again in half an hour, so we need him ready to kill in half an hour.  This’s what will do it.”

Henderson looked at Daniels, his eyes wide.  “You’re sure?”

Daniels grinned.  “Trust me,” He nodded to the drip, and to the Soldier who was now visibly shaking, his teeth gritted, and his brow furrowed.  “A bag of this will put him in fine fighting form.”

There was a creak as the Soldier pulled against the cuffs.

“Of course, it’s also going to make that wound hurt like a thousand hot pokers, but that’s another one of the things he can deal with.  Told you.  He’s not like us.”

Sweat dribbled down the Soldier’s face, and the picture blurred again on him and the two workers, as they watched him make a sound like a truncated whimper—

 “Oh my god.”

Clint and Natasha turned quickly as Steve walked into the room and stared in horror at the blurred video of the Winter Soldier’s face, twisted in agony, that was playing full screen on Tony’s High Definition television.  Bucky didn’t move, his eyes glued to the picture, until Natasha lifted a slim device and the screen blacked out with a click.

When he finally turned, Steve was staring mutely at Clint and Natasha, his expression rapidly moving from shock to anger.  “Clint?  Natasha?  What are you doing?  You said you were going to look after him while I— Why the hell would you show him that?”

Clint winced, leaning back and rubbing his injured leg, looking hopefully at Natasha.

“It’s bad enough that he just had to go through….” 

“Steve,” said Natasha.

“You specifically went into the files we got from Hydra just to put that on?  Why—”

“Steve.”  Natasha’s voice was firm, but her face was sympathetic.  “He asked.”

Steve blinked.  Slowly.

Clint stretched his arm over to hook the crutch that was lying against the coffee table.  “He has the right, Cap,” he said, risking a glance.

And then finally, Steve turned to look at Bucky.  His expression was a mixture of horrified and confused, and Bucky bristled, feeling a stab of resentment.  God, it wasn’t as though Steve was the one who had to deal with this whole horrendous mire of…

Except that of course it was, and he was being a dick even thinking that this wasn’t absolute agony on Steve as well.  Abruptly, he deflated.  “They’re telling the truth,” he said, tiredly.  “I asked.  I wanted to see, I….”  He trailed off.  He wanted to see what?  More proof?  More horror?

Steve still looked appalled.  “Buck,” he said softly, heart-wrenchingly.  “You…you don’t wanna…”

“No.” Bucky shook his head.  Maybe he was just a masochist.  “I probably don’t.”

Steve hovered, looking like he genuinely didn’t know what to do.  Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Clint and Natasha looking like they were weighing up whether it would be worse to stay or go.  It was probably, Bucky reflected, a good thing that Tony walked in at that point, because if there hadn’t been some kind of distraction, he thought he would probably have either started crying or screaming.

“Tower’s tech’s no longer compromised, and JARVIS is wiping all of the bugs.”  Tony looked depressed.  Bucky suspected that it took a lot for him to show it, which would be discouraging if it were at all possible for him to get more discouraged.

Steve obviously seized on this as a way to change the subject.  He looked at Bucky again, hesitatingly.  “He’s still unconscious.  The doctor’s looked over him – he doesn’t think that there’s any permanent damage.”

Bucky gazed at Steve glumly.  “Well, I guess that means everything’s fine then.”

Steve looked pained.  “We’ve put him in a cell for…for safety’s sake.  There’s toughed glass along one wall; no bars at least.  Everything’s monitored.”

“Right.”  Bucky sighed.  “Okay.  I just….” He turned back to Clint and Natasha.  “I think I’m done with…that.  Anyway.”

Natasha nodded silently and touched the device in her hands again.  “Would you like me to delete it?” she said.

Bucky hesitated.  He hadn’t even thought about it, and was oddly grateful that she offered.  “You said you’d kept it because you thought you might learn something.  About how they did it.  How to undo it, even.”

Natasha nodded. “We did.  But if you want it gone...”

“You have the right,” repeated Clint, from the chair in the corner.  His expression was sympathetic.

Bucky watched them both, thinking.  “It’ll be locked up?”

“It already is,” Natasha replied.  “No one can access it but us.”

He sighed again.  “Then keep it.  It might be…you might need it.”  He turned to Tony, who had pulled out a tablet and was tapping on its surface.  “Look, Tony.”

Tony jumped slightly.  “Yes?”

“In the…in the room.  Back there.  Everyone was talking about the…bubble around me.  That’s what’s keeping me here without the timeline changing, so you can try to figure out how to—”

“Change things neatly, so everyone’s happy,” said Tony.  “We’re still working on it right now, don’t worry.  JARVIS is supervising, it’s all running automatically.  I should probably get back to it, though—”

Bucky interrupted him.  “How long is it going to last?”

“I’m sure it’ll be—” said Steve, but Bucky looked at him impatiently, then back to Tony.

“Bruce said I couldn’t stay here indefinitely,” he said.  “Which means what?  Are those weird light cracks going to keep coming more frequently until the whole thing falls apart?”

“No….” said Tony, just in time for a winding crack of light to appear in the air not two feet away from Clint’s chair.  Clint jolted, and Natasha darted forward and dragged him bodily out of the chair, injured leg and all, as he gave a startled gasp.  Then, just as quickly, it was gone. 

Bucky turned back to Tony with a raised eyebrow.

Tony grimaced.  “Maybe?  We should still have a while, though.”

“What’s going to happen?  If the bubble pops instead of just disappearing when you send me back?  Is it going to do any damage?”

Tony fidgeted with the tablet.  “Well, it seems probable that….”

“Probable?  You don’t know?”

Tony rolled his eyes.  “We were trying to get the gem to show us, but I dunno, maybe it’s too meta or something.  Look, it won’t come to that.  We’ll figure things out.”

“And just how sure are you about that?”

Tony hesitated, for just a fraction of a second, but it was enough. 

“Right.” Bucky smiled grimly.  “I’m going to go talk to Bruce.”

“Now hang on,” said Tony.  “I think he’s looking for a little alone time right now.”

“Natasha?”

Natasha didn’t look up from where she was checking the bandage on Clint’s leg.  “He’s in his lab.”

“Hey!” protested Tony.

Bucky swept past him and marched out of the room.

***

Steve caught up to him just before he got to the elevator.  “Buck, wait.  Please.”

Bucky stopped, and gritted his teeth, and turned around.  “I’m not under ‘observation’ any more now, Steve.  There’s no point.”

Steve frowned miserably, and Bucky felt himself thawing a little without even consciously thinking about it.  “Steve,” he said, again, softer this time.

“I’m so sorry.”  His best friend in the world looked at him as though his heart was breaking, and Bucky felt any anger he had melt away.

He sighed.  “It’s okay, Steve.”

“No, it’s not.  Look, I know you must hate me for keeping all this from you.  For not just telling you when you woke up.  Just please realise that there was a reason.  All of the issues we were having, with the time zone.  With us knowing that whatever you knew would change things…”

“You were just being cautious.”

“No.”  said Steve.  “Well yes, but it wasn’t just that.  We didn’t want to give you much information until we knew the right information to give you because if it turned out that it really made a difference then we…I couldn’t take that information away from you.  That was what they did, Buck.  They strapped you down and wiped your mind and I wouldn’t…god, I couldn’t do that to you.”  He looked upset, more that Bucky had ever seen him before.  “I don’t care about the timeline.  I won’t.  And I won’t send—”

“Steve.”  Bucky stepped forward and grabbed his shoulders.  “Steve, it’s okay.”

“But…”

Bucky squeezed the broad shoulders gently, pulling back to look at his friend in the eyes.  “No seriously.  I mean it.  I’m not angry with you, Steve.  I understand why you did what you did. And okay, sure, I know too much now. We can work around it. I can follow instructions, if I need to.”

Steve deflated, staring at him mournfully.  “We can still figure this out.  Bruce and Tony are the brightest guys around.”

“I know they are.  Only the best for your team.”  He managed a weak smile as he stood back.  “And right now I need to have a talk to Bruce.”

“I can come with—”

“No.”  He grimaced when Steve’s face fell.  “I’m not trying to get rid of you!  It’s…” He paused.  “It’s him.”  Steve looked at him with more comprehension as Bucky took a deep breath.  “You said he’s still unconscious, but he’s going to wake up soon and he’s going to be scared.  And confused, and god knows whatever…he needs someone there, Steve.  He needs a friend.  I need a….”  He trailed off, unable to find the words.

Steve nodded understandingly.   “Then I’ll…I’ll be there if you need to find me.  JARVIS can direct you.”

Bucky managed a grateful smile.  “Thank you.”

***

There was another set of footage showing on the screens in the lab when Bucky slipped in.  In contrast to the Hydra film, the camera in this one was far from stationary and it was clearly filmed outside by someone who was trying to capture the action while simultaneously staying as far back as they could.  The main star of the footage was green, muscle-bound, and had to be at least nine feet tall.  His actions consisted mostly of roaring menacingly at the soldiers who were trying to surround him while throwing everything from park benches to tanks at them.  It was… awe-inspiring, in every sense of the word.  Both fascinated and alarmed, Bucky carefully walked up to join the unassuming man who stood watching.

Bruce was silent for another minute, letting the footage play.  Then he sighed, froze the screens, and turned to Bucky, head cocked and a wry look on his face.

Bucky raised an eyebrow.  “Okay,” he said.  “I take your meaning about the whole anger issue.”

Bruce snorted mildly.  “It can be…problematic.”

“But you’re okay now.”  Bucky looked at him cautiously. 

“Not…really, no.  But I’m not going to….”  He stopped, fidgeting with his glasses.  “I think after this,” he announced, “I’m going to take a flight out to a desert somewhere and just… let off some steam.”

“Does that help?” asked Bucky, curiously.

Bruce shrugged.  “It…doesn’t hurt.”  He looked rueful.  “It certainly does more than standing down here picking at scabs.  It’s not something I’ve tried a lot before but I’ve been testing…management techniques.  Now that I have some sort of stable place to live.”

“That must be a relief, at least.”

“It’s different.  There are challenges.  ” Bruce looked at him speculatively.  “You didn’t come down here to talk about me, though.”

“No,” he conceded.  “Although it does kinda put things in perspective.”

Bruce smiled weakly.  “Anything to help.  So?”

Bucky made a face and leaned back against a lab bench.  “Okay.  Firstly… thank you.”

“For giving you terrible news and a way to knock yourself out?”  

Bucky winced.  “Well, when you put it like that…”

Bruce’s expression was pained.  “I’m sorry.  People sometimes say I can be a bit of a downer.”

“Can’t imagine why,” said Bucky wryly.  “I also want…need to ask you something.  Because Tony…the others….  They either don’t know or don’t want to admit it, while you.  You’ve been honest.  No matter how much it hurts.”

“Well,” Bruce said, softly, regretfully.  “As I said.  Were I in your position, I have my own views on how I would want things to go.”

“Yeah.  I can…I can imagine.”  He sighed.  “Look, I need to know.  I know you want to be optimistic.  I know that the last thing that Steve wants is for that to happen to me.  But… You need to find this…this perfect scenario, right?  The perfect things for me to do and say to the right people in the right places so that all the dominoes line up and both the world and me are okay.  But you said yourself that you can’t keep me here forever.  Those cracks of light keep appearing more and more, and I’m pretty sure neither of you really know what will happen if the bubble holding me gives out.  I know you and Tony are smart, smarter than anyone.  But that just means that you’ve gotta know… what are our chances here?  Really?  How likely is it that this…programme you’re running with the gem will find this magical set of ingredients before it… before you risk doing some real damage to everything? ” He watched Bruce’s face, carefully.  “Or are you already risking it?  Just hoping that you’ve got the time?”

Bruce hesitated.  “I….” He stopped.  “There’s something about Steve.”

Bucky blinked.  “What?”

He sighed.  “Sorry.  I mean, Steve is a…dynamic leader.  And he’s brave, and good, and never puts in anything other than his best effort, and there’s something about him that makes you, makes everyone want to do their best for him.”

“Yeah.”  Bucky nodded.  “I do know that.”

“Having him as a leader…it makes us think, sometimes, that anything is possible.  He’s made me optimistic, and I’m not…you may have noticed that isn’t exactly my normal state.”

“Really?  Never.”

Bruce threw him half a smirk.  “Tony’s the same.  He doesn’t want to admit that he doesn’t want to let Steve down, but it’s true.  The problem is,” he looked sober, now, “that everything isn’t possible.  Some things aren’t up to us.  Sometimes, you can put in your best effort, and it’ll all come to nothing.  Or maybe it’ll all work out okay, but it wasn’t your input that made the difference anyway.”

Bucky watched him numbly.

“We don’t want to talk about it.  We don’t want to let Steve down.  But most of all, we don’t want to admit that it’s not really about skill at all.  That at this point, whether or not we find the right scenario, the right set of things to do, has very little to do with how smart we are.”  Bruce stopped, looking at him sadly with eyes that were far older than they should be.  “It’s the butterfly effect, in the end.”

“I don’t know what that is.  You mean it might be possible, but it’s just luck?”

“Sorry.  They haven’t started using the term in your time yet.  It’s not exactly luck, it’s…. Think of it as like trying to use the weather today in America to predict what the weather will be like in 50 years in Australia.  Technically it might be possible, but the variables are huge.”  He took off his glasses and started to polish them.  “They’re not nearly as huge as the variables we’re trying to sift through using the gem, however.  We can try and narrow the field somewhat, but really, in the end, there’s very little we can do except let the programme run.  Let it try each scenario, sifting through until it finds what we need.”  He put his glasses back, peering at Bucky earnestly.  “And the thing is? What we need undoubtedly exists.  There are probably millions of scenarios that will change history to what we want it to be, but that’s millions out of an infinite number.  We could find the solution tomorrow.  In two minutes time!  Or it could run for five thousand years and we could never find it.  In a way, I suppose you’re right.  It’s…trying to find a needle in a field of haystacks.  It does depend on how lucky we are.”

Bucky closed his eyes, his mouth dry.  Then he swallowed and opened them again.  “So,” he said.  “How lucky are you?”

“Well,” said Bruce, meeting his gaze gloomily. “The last time I thought I was going to create something that would justify my whole career and help make the world a better place, I ended up turning myself into a huge green anger monster.”

Bucky stared at him for a few seconds.  Then, almost despite himself, he started to laugh, small chuckles at first that developed into awful, hysterical guffaws.  Bruce watched him in bewilderment for a few seconds before, gradually, he joined in, leaning against Bucky and almost knocking over a screen that still held a frozen image of a huge green figure holding a tank.

It was minutes before either of them could pull themselves together, and by then they had both slid to the floor, backs propped up against the lab benches.  Bucky shook his head, wiping his eyes.  “Sorry,” he said.  “I’m sorry, I…this whole thing is just—”

Bruce had taken his glasses off again and was massaging the bridge of his nose.  “It’s fine,” He said.  “I…see your point.”

“Yeah.”  He sighed, and Bruce watched him sympathetically.

“So,” he said.  “What are you going to do now?”

Bucky straightened himself up.  “Firstly?”  He looked wearily across to Bruce. “I think I need to go and talk to myself.”

Chapter Text

The cell was a simple room divided by a transparent panel through the middle that looked like ordinary glass but was probably some kind of ultra-special futuristic reinforced type.   On one side was a station of monitors and tablets, with a desk and several office chairs and one door.  There was probably a door on the other side too, but it fit so seamlessly into the wall it was impossible to tell where it was.  The only furniture on that side was a sink, a lavatory, and a bed, all bolted to the floor.

In the adjoining room there was another monitor, one that showed a constant view of both halves of the cell, and before he entered Bucky stood for a few minutes, watching it.

The Winter Soldier was awake.  Someone had removed the body armour and dressed him in a loose top and running pants, which made him look somehow smaller, despite the heavily muscled physique and metal arm.  Bucky had been worried that he’d still be irrational, vicious, angry, but there was no fight left in the figure who sat on the bed, looking dazed, as Steve talked to him softly from the other side of the glass.  He sat with his hands digging into his thighs, his gaze focusing on Steve and then tuning out to stare at the wall next to him before focusing back with a startle.  When Bucky could see any expression at all, it vacillated between hopeless resignation and potent terror.  Which didn’t mean that the anger wasn’t there, he supposed.  Just that he couldn’t summon the will to bring it to the fore.

It was hard to hear exactly what Steve was saying; it was low and gentle and full of reassurances about blame and encouragements about the future.  Like he was talking to a frightened animal, really, but Bucky felt no resentment for that.  It was pretty clear that Steve knew what was needed, and indeed, he could see his future self slowly, fractionally, relaxing his stance as Steve continued to talk.

He tensed up again when Bucky entered Steve’s side of the room and turned to face him, but that wasn’t exactly surprising.  Bucky took a deep breath.  “Hey,” he said in greeting.

The Winter Soldier’s eyes were wide, and they skittered anxiously over to Steve, who looked encouraging. 

“Hello?”  His voice was low and hesitant when he replied, as if he wasn’t sure whether he was allowed to do so, and god, didn’t that just bring up all sorts of unpleasant implications? 

Bucky swallowed and managed a tight smile.  “I…don’t exactly know what to call you, sorry.  Future-Bucky? Present-Bucky?  Me?”

The Soldier frowned apprehensively.  “They called me the asset.”

Bucky heard Steve’s breath hitch and he tried not to grimace.  “Okay, I don’t think that’s—”

“Your name is Bucky,” said Steve, firmly.  “If it gets confusing we can just clarify things.  It’s not like it would be the first time someone had to deal with talking to two people with the same name.”

Bucky gave a faint snort.  “Probably the first time they were the same person, though,” he said.  When Steve looked up at him, as if worried that he’d overstepped, Bucky smiled briefly, reassuringly.  “It’s okay.  It’s only right.  Look, Steve, I want to… can I speak to him?  Alone?  Just for a little bit.”

He’d been worried that Steve would be offended, but there was only support and understanding in his eyes.  “It’s probably better that the cameras stay on,” he said.  “But JARVIS can monitor them without anyone else needing to see.  I’ll get some food.”  He turned back to the Soldier.  “You must be hungry.  You always liked pumpkin soup; will that do?”

His future self looked uncomfortable.  “I…think?”

“Then I’ll get that.  If you tell JARVIS when you’re done?”  He looked at Bucky.

He smiled weakly.  “That’s fine.  I…thanks.”  Steve nodded and exited, leaving him alone with a glass wall and his future.  There was promptly a silence that escaped being as awkward as the ones in the panic room only because there wasn’t rope and weapons involved.

This time, surprisingly, it was the Winter Soldier who broke it.  “You’re angry at me.”  He said it as a statement, not a question.

Bucky furrowed his brow.  “No.” 

The Soldier’s face creased into an expression of disbelief.

“I’m not.”  Bucky sighed and grabbed one of the chairs, sitting down so that he could look himself in the eyes.  “What’s the point?  Why would I be angry?  Because you gave into them after god knows how many years of torture?  It’s not like I can say that I wouldn’t do the same, because guess what?  I did.  Or I will, or however the hell else you say it.  Now, if you want to ask you whether I was angry at Hydra…”

“I tried to kill you.”

“No.” Bucky gave him a bleak smile.  “You tried to kill you.  I was a means to an ends.  I hope that now that I’m out of reach you won’t try a more direct approach, though.”

The Soldier frowned.  “No.  There wouldn’t be any…I had to make it better.  I could still help to—”

Bucky let out a breath.  “Okay.  We can work with that.”

The Winter Soldier stared at him.  “I didn’t stop.  When I knew it wouldn’t work.  I knew it would hurt the world… I didn’t stop.”

“So it appears that seventy years of torment and brainwashing can make you a tiny bit irrational.”  Bucky gave a bark of laughter that didn’t quite succeed in being casual.   “I guess I’ve got that to look forward to.”

The Soldier narrowed his eyes.  “They…Steve’s scientists said they were looking for a way to stop that.”

Bucky shrugged.  “They are.  They’re looking for the needle of hope in the haystack of possibilities.  But who knows?  We might get lucky in the next few hours.”

The Soldier closed his eyes briefly, and Bucky knew that he didn’t have to explain further.  When his future self opened them again, the deep and terrible resignation was back.  But all he did was give a small nod and say, “Okay.”

Bucky took a deep breath.  “When I asked you what you remembered,” he said.  “You mentioned a piano in a bar, and singing.”

The Winter Soldier looked a little confused.  “Yes,” he said.  When Bucky just waited, he opened his mouth again hesitantly.  “There were men around a table.  They were singing.  In…English and French?  And you…  I…”  He stopped.  “We didn’t join in, at first, but later?  After the…there was a lady?”

“Peggy.  She was in red?”

“Yes.”  The Soldier looked at him questioningly.

“That was Peggy Carter.  She was Steve’s girl, or at least I guess she would have been if…”  He sighed.  “She was real sweet on him.  And he barely knew what to do about it but he was sweet on her too.”  Bucky felt his lips curl into a fond smile.  “That was the day Steve put together the Commandos.  It was the first down time we had after… after Steve rescued us all from Schmidt’s camp.  I was still trying to get my head together, or my head around all the changes.  I mean,” he raised his eyebrows at the Soldier.  “You’ve seen pictures of him before the serum, even if you don’t remember at all—”

“I… I do.  Some,” he replied.

“Right,” Bucky grinned ruefully.  “He was the skinniest thing you’d ever see, and suddenly he was this… six-foot Adonis who could take down a platoon of soldiers with one arm tied behind his back.  I didn’t know what to think – I was wondering whether it was all some kind of hallucination at first.  Anyway, he came in and talked to me, wanted to make sure I was in on his insane idea to track down Hydra’s forces, and after Peggy came to talk to him, and he blushed like a high schooler with a crush, we just sat and chatted at the bar.  Like we were back in Brooklyn, and that was when I really knew it was him.  He’d changed so much, and he hadn’t changed at all.  Then later he pulled me over to the others, who were singing this awful song about…”

“What.”  The Soldier stopped.  Blinked.  He was craning forward ever so slightly.  “What did you talk…”

“Talk about?”  Bucky frowned in thought.  “Anything and everything, really.  Steve gave me some stories from the films he was in.”  He gathered momentum as it came back to him.  “Like- this one time, he and his ‘battling allies’ were supposed to be walking in front of this fake background, and they were using a treadmill so the walking looked real.  Except Steve hadn’t really walked on a treadmill much and he got out of step.  The next thing you know, he tripped and this poor guy behind him was bowled over by six foot of solid muscle.  The thing was, the camera was rolling and film was expensive, and they all knew that, so all the other actors kinda froze, trying to figure out how to save the scene, and then one guy turns to the camera, all gung-ho, and says—”

“‘Captain!  You found the spy in our midst!’” said the Soldier.  Then he snapped his mouth shut, looking startled.

Bucky stared at him, and then slowly grinned.  “Yeah,” he said.  “That’s what he said.”

The Soldier looked back, expression torn in a thousand different directions.   “I remembered…just that line.  Not the rest but that story, I…”  He bit his lip, and then leaned forward, fingers grazing the glass barrier that divided them and his expression coalesced into something that was almost…hungry.  “What…what happened next?”

“After we chatted?  Then we went around to the other Commandoes.”  Bucky watched himself carefully, and then pulled the chair closer.  “Let me… let me tell you all about them.”

***

When Bucky walked into the kitchen a while later, Steve was concentrating on pulverising vegetables in a rectangular plastic device that was making a god-awful noise.  He jumped when Bucky walked up behind him and tapped his shoulder, and then quickly reached out and turned the machine off.

Bucky grimaced.  “That thing sounds like you were murdering a cat.”

Steve looked slightly embarrassed.  “I was gonna just heat up a tin of soup, but I didn’t know how long you were going to be, and these blenders can do anything in no time flat – I figured I’d cook up the vegetables and make the soup fresh.”

“That’s where all the technological research went?  Blenders?  I think the flying cars would have been a better investment.”

Steve smiled slightly.  “They are really powerful blenders.  There’s a show on the internet where the salesman blends up everything from ice to phones.”

Bucky raised an eyebrow.  “Why would anyone want to blend a phone?”

“I don’t think he thought that people really would, so much as he thought it might be something that people would watch.  Seemed like a waste, though,” he added.

“You’re telling me.”

“Being less wasteful is one thing we had over folks nowadays, I think,” said Steve.  He looked back at the blender.  “It’s pretty much ready now.  I guess I’ll go serve it out?”

“No,” said Bucky, and when Steve looked confused he hurriedly continued, “I mean yes!  Obviously don’t throw the food out; I just wanted to talk.”

“Should we leave him – you - alone?  I don’t know whether—”

“He’s okay,” said Bucky.  “JARVIS is looking after him and we need to….  Steve.”  He paused, suddenly unable to go. 

Steve gazed at him, a tense expression starting to spread over his face.  “Bucky.”

He swallowed, and looked at his friend determinedly.  “Steve, I think we need to look at the reality of the situation here.”

Steve’s jaw clenched.  “The reality of the situation is that I have two experts who are working on this—”

“Two experts who have been working on this since the moment I got here, and who are no closer to finding a solution.  Meanwhile—”

“That’s not—”

“Meanwhile, these…cracks in the bubble that’s keeping me here are happening more and more!  I saw one of them while I was talking to him.  Two when I was coming back to talk to you!  You don’t know, no one knows, whether these are dangerous or not, and you don’t know whether it’ll do the world damage if you wait until the whole bubble collapses.  You can’t afford to find out, Steve.  You can’t afford to take that risk, and you don’t know how to change the world to safely take the Winter Soldier out.”

“Bucky, we are not—  Tony and Bruce are looking for a solution!”

“They won’t find one, Steve!  They’ll keep trying, because they want more than anything not to let you down, but there just isn’t any practical way—”

“Then we’ll find an impractical way!”  Steve’s eyes were blazing, and god, when he saw him like this, with that determined, set look on his face, all he could see was the skinny, stubborn little punk who never backed down from a fight.  He wondered whether he’d still see that, when he was the Soldier.  Was that one of the things he’d remember, a sudden flash of those eyes that stood out amongst the sifting fragments of memory?

“There is no way, Steve.  I need to go back now.  We need to let history take its proper path.  I know how it’s supposed to go.  I read—”

“That is not its proper path!  I refuse to believe that we need to let this happen to you.  You know what they… Bucky, no.”  And now the expression in those eyes was changing, from determination to a heartbreaking devastation that Bucky had never wanted to see.

He looked, anyway.  He needed to do this, needed to make Steve understand. “Steve.”  He stepped forward, clasped his shoulder.  Like he used to do when they were kids, to comfort his best friend and to calm him down.  He felt calm; disconnected, in contrast to Steve’s obvious despair.  This was Bucky’s job, after all.  Still looking after Steve, even in the next century. 

“We can still fix this,” said Steve, softer, now, but no less upset.

Bucky squeezed his shoulder affectionately.  “History needs the Winter Soldier.  God knows, that’s screwed up, but it turns out that history doesn’t really care.”  When Steve went to open his mouth again, Bucky added, “And don’t try to say anything about letting someone else take my place.  You wouldn’t do that, Steve.  You couldn’t.  You couldn’t give yourself over to them to save me either, so stop even considering it.  You think I did damage under their thumb?  God only knows what they could do with you.”

Steve shut his mouth with a snap.  Then he said, miserably, “If we could just fix—”

“You keep using that word, Steve.  ‘Fix.’  Thing is though, that’s not what you’re trying to do.  You fix something that’s wrecked, but really, you want this to never be broken at all.  You’re trying to unbreak the situation and Steve, you can’t.  It’s already broken.”  He tried to smile, tried to ignore the stinging in his eyes and the tears in Steve’s.  “You’re standing here talking to me, but you’re really just talking to a ghost.  If you want, if you really want to fix the situation, you need to go help me.  You know where I am.”

“I know that he’s….”  Steve’s voice was lost, despairing.  “But the thought of my best friend having to go through all of that, when there’s something I could have done—”

“Steve, stop.  No.” Bucky shook his head, exasperated.  “You can’t change things right now, and there was no way you could have changed things before, either.  You played your part in history!  You did everything you could.  You took down Schmidt, like you said you would, and there’s no way you could have known what would happen after that.  You have nothing to feel guilty about!”

“What about what I did recently?  I lied to you about all of this.  If I’d just told, maybe it wouldn’t have been so—”

Bucky sighed and pulled Steve closer, curled his arm around his back.  “You know, I was actually mad about that to start with.  Then I thought about it, and I realised that firstly, you were just trying to protect me, and secondly, I was being hypocritical, because if I were in your place I would probably do that exact same thing.  I’d try to protect you, ‘cause Steve, that’s what I’ve always tried to do.” 

Steve’s smile was watery, “Yeah.  You always have.”

Bucky smiled back sadly.  “So here’s the thing now.”  He looked steadily into the eyes of the man that he’d followed into death and back.  “Now?  It’s your turn to protect me.  I want you to promise me—”  He swallowed painfully.  “I want you to promise you will never give up on me.  I want you to promise that you’ll be my friend when I need one the most.  That you’ll tell me all about all the things I need to know.  That you’ll bring me back.”

“You know I will, Buck.”  Steve looked back at him, and though tears spilled down his face, his expression was determined.  “I promise.”

“I might…I might not be the same person anymore.  I’ve forgotten so much.  But Steve?  Underneath it all, you know there’ll be one thing that I could never forget.”

Steve enfolded him in his arms, and Bucky went gratefully, hugging him tightly, eyes closed as he tried to fight back a sob.  When they finally broke apart and stepped back, Bucky looked at his best friend and forced himself to smile.  "Now go back to him," he said, and Steve laid a final hand on his cheek, and left.

***

Bruce was talking to Tony when he walked back to him.  Tony had clearly been arguing; he was flushed and looked nowhere near like the casual, cocky man that Bucky had first met.  When he turned around and saw Bucky’s face, his expression dropped into pinched mask of unhappiness, and he stormed out the door before Bucky could say a thing.

Bruce winced and looked at Bucky apologetically.  “I’m sorry about that.  Tony…Tony doesn’t take these kinds of things well.”

Bucky looked back at the door.  “Not having things go the way he wants?”

“He sees it as a failure, and of course, any failure in his presence must be a failure of himself.”

“Not that much different than Steve, then,” said Bucky.  It made sense.  Steve always did attract the self-sacrificing types.  “He’s still going to help, though?”

Bruce nodded.  “He’s going to check the gem.  I can do a last check through the calculations from here.  I’ve called Thor, too, like you asked.”

“Right,” Bucky smiled tightly.

Bruce’s expression was full of sympathy.  “It shouldn’t take long.  If there’s anything else you want to do….”

“No,” said Bucky.  Then: “Or…maybe.  I…”

“Yes?”

Bucky took a deep breath.   “What does it…what does it feel like?  I mean…to not be yourself.  To not be in control.”

Bruce hesitated, mild surprise in his eyes.  “It’s—”  He stopped; seemed to think about it for a second.  “It’s like…being in the ocean.  Miles from anywhere.  Sometimes you’ve got your head above the water and you can see what’s happening, just in fits and spurts.  And then you get pulled down again, into the darkness.”

“Sometimes you struggle—” said a soft voice, and Bucky started and turned.

Clint was at the doorway, Bucky’s original clothes over one arm and a crutch in the other.  He looked…haunted, and Bucky knew without asking that something had happened to him too.  Something that made him all too empathetic.

Bruce looked over at Clint knowingly, “But sometimes it’s almost peaceful.  Detached from all of your everyday problems.” 

Clint nodded regretfully.  “Until you’re pulled out, back on dry land, and then… all you can do is count the damage.” 

Bucky watched them both morosely.  "I..."

"Yeah."  Clint smiled at him tightly.

Then Bruce added softly, "But remember where you are now."

"With you guys?" Bucky said.

"With friends," said Bruce.

Clint nodded and added, “We'll have to do a rematch on the shooting range one day, after all.  Not that the result's in any doubt..."

This time Bucky managed a small grin.  "You might have some competition this time around."

 "Looking forward to it."  Clint nodded and passed the bundle of clothes to him.  "Be seeing you," he added, almost casually, but the expression in his eyes was anything but.  Bucky nodded back and then...

Then Tony walked in and said, “Okay, it’s set,” and the moment was disturbed.  They broke eye contact, and went to work. 

***

A few minutes later, Bucky sat numbly on the floor, doing up his jacket and trying to remember whether the top button had been fastened when he arrived.  Bruce and Tony had said that it was better that he didn’t have anything around him when they sent him back, so they left him sitting cross-legged in an empty room while they organised moving the time gem.  At least it was carpeted, he thought, semi-hysterically.  He wouldn’t want to be uncomfortable before they sent him back to be mutilated and tortured, after all.  God knows he should eke out every small crumb of comfort he could get before—

“Sergeant Barnes!  You asked for me?”  Thor swept through the door and into the room, looking confused, and Bucky nearly jumped out of his skin.  He looked up at the broad-shouldered alien, momentarily nonplussed, and Thor, to his credit, modulated his vocal tone to be less bombastic.  “I apologise.  I have heard of the decision that you have made, but I’m not sure how I can assist.”

“I wanted…I wanted to ask.  If you could—”  Bucky stopped, barely suppressing a strangled sob.  Thor stilled, concerned.  “Sergeant Barnes?”

Bucky stared up at him.  “I can’t,” he whispered.

Thor waited patiently for him to talk.

“I can’t do this.” Bucky closed his eyes.  It made it easier to say.  “I can’t…I can’t go back knowing what’s going to happen to me and trust myself to just let it!  I’ve been trying to keep a brave face for Steve and for everyone.  I don’t want them to feel even worse about this but god, do you what they’re going to do to me?  How little will be left of everything I worked for, everything I am?”  He opened his eyes up, staring desperately up.  “I’m a coward.  I know I’m a coward.  Steve would be able to do this without even— ”  He stopped abruptly.  Swallowed.  “You said you had a way to…to take memories away.  To make it so that when I go back, I won’t know—”

“Sergeant Barnes.  Be calm.”  Thor’s voice rung with authority, and suddenly Bucky knew why people had once called him a god.  When he continued, his voice was softer, almost gentle. “A coward,” he said, “would never make a decision such as this.”

Bucky stared at him, wordless.

“There is no shame in fear.  Even the greatest of warriors fears, and the trials you freely submit yourself to would test even those of Asgard.  And yet, you are willing to do this, for the good of your world.  I respect your sacrifice, and it will be remembered.”  He gazed down at Bucky, solemn and unjudging.  “I have the means to clear your mind in my possessions.  I will fetch it, and return soon.”

Bucky watched him mutely as he walked away, still unable to speak but endlessly grateful.  Then he closed his eyes again, and sat listening to the noise around him.   The hum of the building’s “climate control”, as they’d called it, the murmur of conversation as Tony and Bruce brought the gem in and set it up, the muted tapping of fingers on those odd, futuristic tablets.  An amazing place, the future was.  He would be around to see it all, and maybe, if he was lucky, there would be enough left of himself to appreciate it.  He hoped.  So very much, he hoped.

When the background murmurs stopped, he finally opened his eyes again.  Thor had stepped through the doorway, and Bruce and Tony stood off to the side, silent and gloomy.  Tony fiddled with a tablet, refusing to meet his eyes, but Bruce.  Bruce watched him, and nodded reassuringly.  Bucky nodded back, managing the faintest smile of appreciation, and then Thor stepped forward. 

He wore a pair of fine, gold-embroidered gloves, and he held in his hand….  It looked like a rock.  It was smooth and grey, with a simple symbol scratched on one side.  Thor knelt directly before him and reached an enormous arm around to support the back of his head.  Then he pressed the stone into Bucky’s own hand and it…

The world turned hazy, the walls melting away like butter.  For a second, just a second, he felt a sharp spike of panic and then...  Then he breathed deeply, and let himself sink beneath the waves.

***

Bucky yelped as something jabbed into his ribs and he snapped upright, blinking rapidly.  “Oww.”

Jim Morita, fellow Howling Commando and comrade in arms, smirked at him.  “Sorry I disturbed your rest, but I’m supposed to be taking over on guard duty.  Don’t know whether I’m going to be able to do as good a job though; you’re setting a high standard.”

Bucky gave him a look, and then glanced around while rubbing his side.  He was propped against the wall of the hut they were using a base, neck cricked and covered with a dust of snow.  Jesus Christ, had he fallen asleep?  Outside?  On guard duty?  Okay, that was just embarrassing.  “I, uh…”  He fished, trying desperately to come up with an acceptable explanation.

Morita cocked his head and looked at him speculatively.  “You okay, Bucky?  I thought for sure you’d broken something when you got knocked out of your sniper nest last night but you said you were okay.  If you banged yourself on the head....”

Bucky groaned and shook his head.  “I’m okay, I swear.  Just behind on sleep, and there really wasn’t anything happening out here.”

“Cap would be able to…”

“Don’t tell Steve!”  When Morita raised an eyebrow he made a face.  “I swear I’m fine; just had an off night.”  He shook his head again, trying to shake out the odd, unsettling feeling behind his eyes, and then shivered as the cold abruptly caught up to him.

Morita frowned thoughtfully.  “Well, try not to make me regret not making an issue of it.”

“I will!  Honest!  I’m real sorry.”  He shivered again.  “Is it just me, or have the nights suddenly gotten a lot more chilly the last week or so?”

Morita sighed and shrugged, apparently deciding that the matter was settled.  “It’s getting more uncomfortable, for sure,” he said.  And Morita was smiling at Bucky as he helped him up, so Bucky couldn’t explain the sudden shudder that went down his spine when he added, “But, you know how it is.  Winter’s here.”

Chapter Text

It was considered too early to let the Winter Soldier roam free, but Steve said he’d be damned if he’d leave him alone in the cell for any longer, especially at night, when all of the multitudes of nightmares  the Soldier had, came screaming to the fore. 

So Steve had dragged a camp bed into the cell with him.  This caused fights, mostly because he refused to listen when several of his teammates argued strongly that he should have put it on the other side of the glass.  Most of the fighting was not conducted in front of the Soldier, but Steve was not discreet about his disagreement on the issue.  It did not seem likely that Steve would appreciate the Soldier saying that he mostly agreed with them, that he couldn’t be trusted, so the Winter Soldier said nothing.  Steve was in charge now, after all, and it was difficult to…there was still the voice in his head (“you don’t express opinions, you don’t have desires”).  Allowing Steve to sleep in the cell quieted the voice.

But also, it was comforting in ways that reached down further than Hydra’s programming.  It didn’t necessary stop him from startling awake almost every hour at night, heart pounding and the taste of blood at the back of his throat.  But then he could look over and there was…there was Steve.  He couldn’t quite figure out why this was better than what he had before, but it undoubtedly was.

Right now, however, the camp bed was empty.  Steve had left to shower and acquire food, but he had promised to come back soon and so the Soldier sat silently waiting, letting his mind drift through the maelstrom of his shattered memories.  He found that sometimes that helped; sometimes something new drifted up so he could see it.  Sometimes it was even something pleasant.

The Soldier jumped when he heard the tapping on the panel of wall that was the cell’s door, senses instantly on high alert.  Steve did not tap on the door; he merely called out.  Who was on the other side?  He held still, holding his breath. There was a pause, and then a voice, “Sergeant Barnes?” and the Soldier frowned.

The voice belonged to the Asgardian, Thor.  They had talked briefly before, but the Soldier knew little about him that he hadn’t memorised from his SHIELD file.  Why had he come here, of all places, and when it was almost night?

“Sergeant Barnes, I would have words with you, if I may.”  The voice was low and sincere.  “There is an issue I must address.”

The Soldier looked over at the empty camp bed.  Should he wait for Steve to return?

“The issue is in regards to you, only,” said Thor.  “May I enter?”

He was asking permission to enter the Soldier’s cell?  That was strange in itself.  Hesitantly, softly, he answered, “okay?”

There was a soft whir, part of the wall slid open and Thor silently stepped into the cell.  The Soldier frowned up at him from where he sat, half-crouched, on the bed.  Should he say something else?  Was that expected?  “Yes?” he asked.

“Sergeant Barnes,” said Thor, his voice still hushed.  “I hope that I have not alarmed you by coming at this time.  This is a personal issue and I felt it best to wait until the Captain was absent.”

The Winter Soldier looked over at the camp bed again.  The blankets were still rumpled, although more from him sitting on them than lying down.  He didn’t think that Steve had been sleeping a lot and he had rarely left the Soldier’s side for more than a few minutes in the last two days.   Idiot, a voice deep within his head whispered affectionately.  “Okay?” said again.  He couldn’t imagine what kind of personal issue the Asgardian could have with him, but he didn’t seem angry about anything, so at least it probably wasn’t that the Soldier had killed anyone he was close to.

“Before your younger self left this era,” said Thor, tilting his head to catch the Soldier’s gaze, “you requested that I take from you the memories of your trip to the future.” 

What?  The Soldier looked up at him sharply, his attention suddenly sharpening to a keen point.  A fragment of memory came loose (“wipe him”) and suddenly, without consciously thinking on it, he was lunging forward, metal arm pulled up—

—And stopped.  He twisted and pulled, but the Asgardian’s grip was utterly unyielding.  Panic bubbled up… “No!”

“Calm!”  Thor’s voice rung with a weight that made him instinctively obey.  He froze, staring frantically at his opponent.  Thor stared back, his gaze sure.  “Be calm.  It is not as you believe, I swear to you.”  The Soldier blinked uncertainly, and Thor continued quickly.  “It was painless and fast, and you specifically asked me to do it.  You feared, knowing what you knew of the future, that you would not be able to stop yourself from changing it.”

The Winter Soldier searched Thor’s face, but there was no sign that he was lying.  That didn’t mean that he wasn’t, of course, but a cold, logical part of his mind pointed out that nothing in his file indicated that he was capable of such guile.  He forced himself to relax, fractionally, and Thor released his arms.  “You erased the memories of the last few days,” he said.  He stumbled back, forcing himself to breath evenly.  It…was not malicious.  It was understandable, even, and probably his own fault….

“No,” said Thor.

The Soldier crinkled his forehead.  “You just said—”

“Human methods of memory alteration in this time period are crude at best,” said Thor.  “They are debilitating and far too permanent.  Asgardian technology is not like that.”  He lifted his hand and opened it.  In it was a grey stone inscribed with a runic character, and the Soldier found himself catching his breath. 

“What…what is that?”

“A storage device, from my people’s technology.”  He looked steadily at the Soldier.  “It contains all of the memories I took from the younger Bucky Barnes, preserved perfectly.  Every thought, emotion and reminiscence from his time in the future.”  He nodded at the Soldier, solemn and serious.  “It belongs to you.”

The Winter Soldier stared at him, suddenly frozen again.

“What you choose to do with this is entirely your own decision,” continued the Asgardian.  “If you wish to retrieve your memories, you need only destroy the stone to have them back.  A good hit with a hard object will do it.  If you wish to hold it for later, you may take it.  And if you do not wish to deal with it, you may leave it with me.  I will store it away safely, and you never need see it again.”

The Soldier’s eyes dropped to the stone.  It was small and looked entirely unremarkable.  Far too unremarkable to contain a whole slice of humanity, full of excitement, and fear, and despair, and…memories.  Of experiences, but also thoughts about the past.  About the Howling Commandoes, and the war, and Steve.  His breath hitched.  The very idea was too much to hope for.

Thor held out his hand patiently, and waited.

A minute later, when the Soldier hadn’t moved, he withdrew it carefully.  “I will store it away,” he said.  “It will be safe.”

It was only when he turned to go that the Soldier said, “Wait.”

Thor turned, and when the Soldier held out a trembling hand, he carefully dropped the stone onto his palm.  Then he nodded to the Soldier.  “I wish you well,” he said, and then slipped out of the cell.

The Soldier sat back on the bed, the stone in his hand.  Memories.  Thoughts.  Clear and whole and real.  The thought was breathtaking.  He wanted…he wanted them.  But he hesitated.  The thought was overwhelming.  He had been…his other self had been horrified, with the things he’d done, and he’d remember that.  All those feelings as well, and how much would it give?  What had his younger self thought about?  How much had he thought about?  He swallowed, and stared, letting the maelstrom roar up around him.  Fractures of pictures and places and could this make that whole?  Could anything?            

“Bucky!”

He gasped and started, staring wildly at Steve.  Wait, what?  When had Steve come in?

“Bucky, geez!  You were giving me a heart attack.  What’s wrong?  Are you alright?”

The Soldier blinked.  He was sitting on his bed, muscles locked, his hands tightly gripped in fists.  He could feel the stone in his right hand, small and inoffensive and terrifying.

“Buck?”  Steve’s voice was softer now.  His hand slowly reached forward to grasp the Soldier’s shoulder, and he felt himself relaxing, inch but inch.

“I….”  He frowned.  “I’m okay, I….”

“Yeah?”

He looked at Steve, who was smiling at him comfortingly, and he squeezed the stone in his hand.  “I have to…”  He stopped.  Started again.  “There’s something I have to do.”

“Something good?”  Steve watched him carefully.

The Soldier took a deep breath.  “Yes.  Good.  Just…big.  Overwhelming.”

Relief flickered across Steve’s face.  “Buck, you just got back.  You don’t need to figure everything out right now if you don’t want to.  You’ve got the time.”

The Soldier looked at him, startled.  “I…have?”

“Of course you have.”  Steve squeezed his shoulder again.  “People always say it’s easier to figure things out if you’ve had the chance to go over it.”

“Right,” the Soldier said, wonderingly.  Steve smiled again, and pulled back, going over to a basket and pulling out various foodstuffs, and the Soldier….

Coming to a decision, he fished out a handkerchief and put the stone in it, wrapping it up carefully and tucking it under his pillow.  It would be safe here.  Things were…things were safe here. 

And he had time.