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I won't be afraid
Of all the things I've wanted
It's the fear, and not the ghost
That leaves me haunted, haunted
-- Not the Ghost by The Crane Wives
Looking back, maybe Bucky had been reckless. But honestly, could you blame him? They’d been tracking Zemo for months on end with nothing to show for it, and then suddenly a lead cropped up just when they’d been on the edge of giving up. Agent Carter -- Sharon, Bucky remembers, she wanted him to call her Sharon -- traced the lead back to an old Hydra safehouse before it went cold. That should have been a red flag, the first of many; but then again, Bucky supposes that when your vision is tinted red with vengeance, all the flags look the same.
-
Four hours earlier, Bucky stands at the edge of the roof, staring at the warehouse below under the night sky.
“That’s it?” Sam asks from beside him. “I thought it would look more… evil, or something.”
“That’s it,” Bucky confirms shortly. Something in his voice must give away his inner turmoil, because Sam looks up at him sharply.
“Have you been here before?”
“Yeah.” He stares down at the building, painted in innocuous shades of gray. It looks exactly like the other three warehouses in the yard; nothing distinguishes it except for the blinking red dot on the tablet in Sam’s hands. Zemo. That’s why they’re here, Bucky reminds himself.
“Let’s end this,” he says, turning to Sam. The other man nods once, handing the tablet off to Agent -- Sharon.
“We’ll be right here if things go sideways,” Sharon tells them, her jaw set. “There will be an extraction team waiting if you need it.”
Sam nods once and cracks his neck, rolling it from side to side as mechanical wings unfold from his back like an avenging angel. He holds his arms out to Bucky with a little smirk, and Bucky grimaces before relaxing and letting Sam wrap his arms around him from behind. He shivers slightly at the contact, and he can’t see Sam but he just knows that his smirk gets wider.
“Ready?” Sam murmurs into his ear. Bucky forces back another shiver and nods, gritting his teeth as the ground falls out from under him. They glide in silence, cloaked in the shadows that cling to the sides of the warehouses. The landing is perfectly executed; Sam sets Bucky down gently before circling back to touch down himself.
“In position,” Sam says into his earpiece.
“Good,” comes the crackling reply from Sharon. “Zemo’s in the lowest level. Be careful, we don’t know what he’s doing or how many agents he has protecting him.”
“Copy that.” He glances over at Bucky. “Ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” he says, which really means not at all, but they’re already running out of time so it doesn’t matter. Sam gives him a look that means he picked up on it, but the mission is underway, so they start moving. Bucky winces internally, thinking of the talk they’re going to have about this later.
Mission now, think later, he reminds himself. Bucky breaks the padlock on the side door with his metal fist, and they slip into the warehouse undetected. (Later, he’ll realize that the lack of an alarm was another red flag, but for now it just passes as good luck.) The hallways near the outside of the building are thinly guarded, and it’s easy enough to subdue these agents without a big fuss; it’s as they get further in that they get more trouble. Both of them suffer a few minor wounds -- a series of dark scratches on Sam’s arm, a graze on Bucky’s cheek that slowly oozes blood down the side of his face -- but overall, they remain largely unharmed. Bucky begins to get suspicious, and as he trades a look with Sam, he can tell that he has the same idea.
“Something isn’t right about this,” Bucky mutters into his earpiece. “Where’s Zemo now?”
“Still in the same place, just pacing back and forth. It’s almost like he’s… waiting for something.”
He and Sam look at each other again before continuing, more on edge than before. They make it down a few more floors with relative ease. Finally, Bucky knocks out the last Hydra agent with a well-placed punch and the two of them turn to look at the pair of heavy black doors he’d been guarding.
Bucky looks at Sam. Sam nods. Bucky kicks in the door.
...Oh. He knows this place. Zemo turns to him with a cruel smile.
“Welcome home, Soldat.”
-
The bench hangs from the wall by its chains, the dingy metal rusted and warped with age. His eyes rove over the faded gray-brown bricks, narrowing as they catch on the long, pale gouges along them, knowing that his fingers would fit the grooves perfectly if he were to trace them. He flexes his metal hand unconsciously, and Sam takes a sudden, sharp breath beside him.
“Barnes,” he says lowly, not taking his gaze away from Zemo. “You good?”
Right. The mission. Bucky nods once, not sure his voice will work if he tries to speak. His eyes are stuck on the bench, and for a second he swears he can see Soldat looking back at him through strands of dark hair, a ghost with blank eyes above a muzzle like that of an animal. He blinks and the vision is gone.
Zemo chuckles. “He has spent a lot of time here, Captain. Perhaps the memories are overwhelming.”
Sam growls and steps forward, ready to attack. Bucky’s vision blurs, comes back into focus, blurs again. Soldat. Barnes, Sam called him Barnes. Sergeant James Barnes 32557038.
“I suggest you focus on your friend, Captain,” Zemo calls, breaking briefly through the haze. “He may not be himself for much longer.”
Captain? Who is that does he know a Captain is this who he answers to Sergeant James Barnes 3255
“Oh, shit,” someone (the Captain?) says, rushing to his side. “Bucky?” He stares forward blankly. Is he Soldat? Is he Barnes? He is no one at all. He is ready to comply.
“Damn. We need to get you out of here.”
He straightens slightly. “Is that an order?”
The Captain looks at him with an expression that he can’t quite identify. “Yes,” he says finally. “That’s an order, Sergeant.”
An order. He can do that. The man on the other side of the room cackles. The Captain holds up his shield in a silent warning, and the laughter stops. He watches as the man slips out of the room unheeded, a tap on his shoulder from the Captain drawing his attention.
“Let’s get out of here,” the Captain says. Bucky complies.
-
It isn’t until a while later that Bucky comes back to himself. He slowly takes stock of his surroundings; he’s laying on a couch with a pillow behind his head, and he recognizes the room as belonging to Sam’s apartment. Sam himself is sitting in an armchair next to him, and Bucky realizes that he’s talking, reading from a book cradled in his hands. His injuries are all covered with clean bandages, and so are Bucky’s.
“How long?” Bucky croaks. Sam looks up, his words trailing off.
“You lost a few hours,” he says. Bucky scowls darkly. “It wasn’t your fault,” Sam adds, and that just pisses Bucky off.
“He didn’t even say the trigger words and I still lost myself, Sam. What the hell am I supposed to think?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
“You weren’t the Winter Soldier, Bucky,” Sam explains. “You were pretty out of it, but you didn’t follow Zemo. You were listening to me.”
He frowns. “Then what the hell…?”
“You were probably dissociating as a trauma response. You said you knew that place, right?”
“Yeah. It… it took them a while to get the cryo right, and when it would stop working they’d keep me there between missions instead.”
Silence, and then:
“It was a trap,” Bucky says quietly.
“Yeah.”
“Zemo knew it would make me -- like that --” His breathing goes sharper, harsh and wrong-sounding, “it was just a fucking power play the entire time --”
“Hey, hey, stay with me,” Sam says, moving to sit on the couch with Bucky. “Breathe with me?”
Bucky matches his breathing with Sam’s, a trick they’ve practiced more times than Bucky cares to think about. Eventually the panic recedes, and he rubs his hand over his eyes.
“I’m tired, Sam,” he says.
“We’ll get Zemo. He can’t evade us forever.”
He shakes his head. “Not just Zemo. Cut off one head and two more take its place, remember? They’ll keep coming. I can’t do this forever.”
“Then we burn the stumps. S.H.I.E.L.D. is working with us, we can --”
“You’d have to put me down too,” Bucky interrupts. Sam stares at him.
“What the hell?”
“If you want to get rid of Hydra for real. I’m -- Sam, I’m not safe. All someone has to do is say the trigger words and I’m their weapon again.”
“We don’t know that, there’s got to be some way to erase the triggers,” Sam says firmly, rising from the couch to pace at the edge of the room.
“And what if they don’t find it fast enough?” Bucky presses. “Sam, you have to promise me that if the worst happens, you’ll be able to make that call.”
“I’m not going to put you down, Bucky,” he shouts, and something in Bucky snaps.
“You can’t fucking protect me from this!”
“And why the hell not?”
Bucky shakes his head sharply from side to side, left, right, left, “Because you won’t always be there, you can’t --”
“I can damn well try --”
“Yeah, well, that’s what Steve said!”
Silence falls. Bucky tears his gaze from the floor to look Sam in the eye. “That’s what Steve said,” he repeats hoarsely. “And then he fucking left. So don’t make promises you can’t keep, Captain.”
“I’m not going to leave you,” Sam says, his voice softer now, gentler. Bucky hates it.
“What if you have to? The job comes first, doesn’t it?”
Sam shakes his head. “I’m not as good a man as you think.”
“How so?”
“I’m selfish,” Sam says, and Bucky huffs out a dry laugh. “I’d do anything to keep you safe.”
“Anything,” he says flatly. Sam nods. “Even if it meant letting the world burn?” The question is sarcastic, but Sam’s response couldn’t be more serious.
“Hell, baby, I’d be the one throwing fuel on the fire,” he says. Bucky makes a low sound like he’s just been punched, and Sam crosses the room to pull him into a searing kiss. It’s hot and messy and fucking perfect, because for a brief, golden moment Bucky is able to forget everything except for the way Sam’s lips feel on his.
-
Later, they lie in bed, Sam’s head resting on the pillow and Bucky’s on Sam’s shoulder. He traces idle shapes on Sam’s bare chest with his flesh hand, watching the way it moves up and down with his even breaths. Sam cards one hand gently through his hair, and Bucky leans into the contact with a tiny sigh.
“You know I’ll have to face him again eventually,” Bucky murmurs, breaking the silence. Sam’s breath catches, chest going still.
“Yeah, I know.”
“You can’t keep him away from me forever.”
“I can damn well try,” Sam replies sharply. “And when I can’t, I’ll be there watching your six.”
Bucky’s lips curl up at the corners. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Sam says, and Bucky believes him.