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“Just say them, Steve. Get it over with,” Bucky snapped, clenching his metal fist. “The longer we drag it out…” He shook his head, looking to the ground. “I just need to know.”
Steve took a deep breath, shuddering and raspy, and began.
“Желание.” Longing.
“You should talk with him. We can stop by—”
“Yeah sure. Brooklyn’s on the way to Berlin, right?” Bucky asks sarcastically.
Sam rolls his eyes. “We both know that’s not why you’re avoiding him.”
“I’m not avoiding him. Are you avoiding Sarah? Because I’m sure we could make a stop by her, too.”
“Sarah’s not a super soldier, jackass. I don’t need to get her sucked up into this. Steve’s been in this since—”
“Since before you were even alive, so why don’t you butt out of it. He doesn’t need this right now.”
“You of all people know you don’t get to make that decision for him,” Sam says, and he doesn’t say it loud. He doesn’t need to. He’s right.
“Fine. Fuck it. Let’s go to Brooklyn.”
Sam leans back, victorious, and Bucky hates him for winning but he also knows what it feels like to be left behind so he murmurs, quiet but firmly, “You should still call her, though.”
“I know,” Sam sighs. And he doesn’t.
He knocks three times in short succession, followed by two long knocks. Sam doesn’t question it, and when Steve yanks open the door he knows who to expect. He smiles with his stupidly straight teeth and his hair styled like he knew he was expecting his best guy back today.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Bucky says, Brooklyn accent thick and the endearment aged enough that he can get away with it.
Steve pulls them both into their own hug before stepping back and letting them inside. “Bucky didn’t tell me you were coming back with him, Sam.”
“We’re not staying,” Bucky tells him quietly.
Steve’s face drops just a little, and he looks between them. “Mission’s not over?”
Bucky drops his eyes evasively. “Not quite. We got a few more stops on the list.”
“Germany,” Sam tells him bluntly. “Zemo.”
The room tenses. “I didn’t know it was… HYDRA-related.”
“Super soldier serum related, actually. There’s more of you guys out there. And it turns out, you weren’t even the first one.”
“Jesus,” Steve mutters.
“Your ma would wash your mouth out with soap, Rogers,” Bucky says robotically, and no one laughs because nothing in the world is funny right now.
“How long have you two got before you have to go?”
“Twenty minutes,” Bucky says at the same time Sam says, “About an hour.”
Bucky grimaces, but he knows Sam won’t back him up on any lie. Not to Steve. Which is fair, but it drives Bucky up the wall because everyone knows Captain America, and Sam even looks past that and sees Steve Rogers, but Bucky’s the only one who remembers Stevie, the punk so full of anger because his asthmatic lungs wouldn’t let him scream it out, getting his ass handed to him in every back alley in Brooklyn because he wasn’t going to let a single wrong go under the radar. Even if he lost, he let the fuckers know that someone, even his scrawny ass, was willing to fight to shut them up.
And the serum changed that. And nobody knew it but Bucky. His core is still the same, Buck’s pretty sure that if Steve had rotted in that ice the last thing standing would have been his heart, but the serum twisted him inside out and restitched him. His body could be angry now. So his mind calmed down. And Bucky is just trying to keep that righteous-borderline-naive-belief he gained from the serum burning because shield or no, Steve is Bucky’s Captain.
“They experimented on him?” Steve hisses, sitting on the couch with his hands gripping the fabric tight enough Bucky wouldn’t be surprised if it tore.
“Locked him up for years,” Sam spits, and Bucky realizes for the first time that that could have been Sam. He’s got no idea what the plans in the Raft were. “And used him like a fucking science project.”
Sam looks at Bucky and the hair on the back of his neck stands up. “You should ask Barnes here, though, because he knows more about it than me.”
Bucky thinks this is it, he really did die in the Alps in the war, and everything since has been the sick lead up to Hell, because Hell is the look on Steve’s face when he realizes Bucky’s been lying.
“I’m sorry,” he tells him while Sam paces across their kitchen. He’d said he was going for something to eat before they left, but not one of the three of them believed him. “I couldn’t… I couldn’t fucking stand to watch you find out. I know you’re pissed. I know you’re fucking heartbroken. Just tell me, alright. I shouldn’t have lied to you, I shouldn’t have kept it from you, I—”
“This ain’t about us, Buck,” Steve interrupts, his voice wet and burning. “This ain’t… I didn’t… it doesn’t matter if I lose faith. What matters is men like Isaiah never got to have that faith in the first place. Jesus Christ, this isn’t my heartbreak or yours. We gotta live with what was done for us but they gotta live with what was done to them.”
“We really do have to go now,” Sam says, and Steve nods solemnly.
“Yeah, of course. I’m glad you came to tell me.” He pulls Sam in for that weird handshake-hug that Bucky thinks gained popularity while they were both iced and he’s never gotten the hang of, even though Steve does it all the time. “It was good to see ya, Sam. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help with you and Sar—”
“Sure,” Sam interrupts, making it clear that he would not let Steve know if he could help and does not want Steve to try to offer again. He looks between Steve and Bucky and then tilts his head to the door. “I’ll head out. Wait for grandpa here downstairs.”
After he steps out, Bucky opens his arms immediately, pretending he’s offering a hug and not begging for it. Steve complies, burying Bucky’s head in his neck as they cling to each other like they’re the only thing keeping each other from falling into the ice.
“Steve, you gotta say it,” Bucky murmurs quietly, and if it were the 1940s maybe they could have been a regular couple, albeit secret and on the verge of violent deaths any time they looked at each other too long, and Steve would have thought he meant “I love you.” But he doesn’t.
Steve tenses.
Bucky pulls away, his hands cradling Steve’s face, and he begs without saying the word please. “Zemo knows ‘em. I can’t… I can’t risk it.”
The silence stretches on for a long time. It grates against Bucky’s ears. His life hasn’t been quiet since the war.
And then Steve reaches up to wrap his hands around Bucky’s, and it’s not a sentimental gesture. His grip is tight enough that Bucky thinks it might dent his mental palm, but he doesn’t care. They don’t take risks with this.
“Желание. Ржавый. Печь. Рассвет. Семнадцать. добросердечный. Девять. Возвращение домой. Один. Грузовой вагон.”
And then Bucky leaves, still Bucky, and he even lets his hand linger on Steve’s a little too long before he opens the door.
It dawns on Bucky mid-flight that two people only need time alone to say goodbye if they’re going steady. He turns to Sam, trying not to be accusatory and failing.
“When’d Steve tell ya?”
Sam studies him for a moment. “Before we took down Project Insight. In the safe house while we were planning. I told him we might have to kill you and he told me he’d die if he fought you because he’d refuse to throw a punch. He told me about you two back during the war.”
Bucky nods, a little sick. It’s not fair to Steve and hell, it might not even be fair to himself, but the first words out of his mouth are, “You can’t tell anyone.”
“I know,” Sam says. “Steve told me you’re not… whatever, none of my business.”
“Steve still… talks to you? About us?”
“Yeah. The poor guy needs it. Jesus, Bucky, you’re dragging him along like—”
“You don’t get to say that, Sam,” Bucky snaps, but Sam keeps talking over him.
“Can’t you just trust him to know if it’s safe or not? At least give him a break and stop going on dates—”
“He’s not a great judge of these things. He doesn’t get what could happen, he’s too good-hearted, too happy-go lucky—”
“Happy-go-lucky? Steve Rogers? Are we talking about the same man?”
“Oh come on, Sam. He believes in America. How much more happy-go-lucky can you get?”
Okay, maybe it’s a terrible idea to break Zemo out of prison. That’s why he consults Natasha instead of Sam, even though it’s a dick move not to tell the people you’re working with what’s going on.
Maybe Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes who fought like the Howling Commandos were his brothers would have known that, but the angry Soviet spy who was tortured and killed anyone who knew too much didn’t. His arm hisses as he leads Zemo away from the prison and he thinks maybe his therapy was cut a little short, or maybe there was a part of him the Soviets froze that he just couldn’t melt, no matter what he tried.
“You didn’t tell Sam?” Natasha demands over the phone and hey, she was a goddamn Black Widow so he doesn’t think she’s got any right to lecture him on this.
“No. He wouldn’t have been comfortable with it. No reason to bother him before I needed to.”
“It’s about trust, Barnes,” and that’s rich coming from her.
“Who’s the last person you trusted?” he counters.
“You’re not a spy anymore.”
He hangs up the phone.
Bucky hates planes. He’s crawling out of his metal skin watching the sky dip below him, and it’s bitter cold despite Zemo’s expensive heating system. Sam watches him get stiffer and stiffer but doesn’t say anything, focusing on Zemo and the mission. Bucky’s too distracted to really pay attention to what’s being discussed, his eyes locked on the window, until he hears the name “Nakajima” and it’s just instinct to wrap his metal hand around the throat that had the goddamn audacity to say it.
“I’ve seen that book,” Sam says, surprised. “It was Steve’s when he came out of the ice. I told him about Trouble Man, he wrote it in there.”
Bucky knows. He’s read the whole thing cover-to-cover more times than he can count and did his own research on every list. Trouble Man was actually one of the few good records in the book, but every time he listened to it he remembered that music from 1972 was somehow forty years old when it should have been thirty years in the future, and listening to music from before everything was just simpler.
“I like 40s music, so…”
“You didn’t like it?” Sam demands.
“I liked it.”
“It is a masterpiece, James,” Zemo says and Bucky has half a mind to choke him again for using his name like he had any right to it. “Complete. Comprehensive. It captures the African-American experience.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “He’s outta line, but he’s right. It’s great. Everybody loves Marvin Gaye.”
“I like Marvin Gaye,” Bucky insists.
“Steve adores Marvin Gaye.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Zemo looks between the two of them. “You must really look up to Steve. But I realized something when I met him. The danger with people like him, America's super soldiers, is that we put them on pedestals.”
“Watch your step, Zemo,” Sam growls.
He ignores him. “They become symbols. Icons. And then we start to forget about their flaws.” Zemo looks at Bucky for emphasis, and his metal fist clenched. “From there, cities fly, innocent people die. Movements are formed, wars are fought.”
“Wars and movements aren’t exactly exclusive to super soldiers,” Sam says.
“No, but they’re certainly spurred by them. Look at the past century. Ever since Steve Rogers became Captain America, we’ve been in constant turmoil globally.”
He turns to Bucky with a heavy look and the smirk of someone who’s won an argument because he never intended on listening. “You remember your war, don’t you James? You were a young soldier sent to Germany to stop a mad icon, and look what you became. Do we want to live in a world full of people like the Red Skull? Like the Winter Soldier?”
I am no longer the Winter Soldier. I’m James Bucky Barnes, Bucky hisses in his head.
“That is why we're going to Madripoor.”
“What's up with Madripoor?” Sam asks, interrupting the chant in Bucky’s head. “You guys talk about it like it's Skull Island.”
Bucky’s explanation is numb. “It's an island nation in the Indonesian archipelago. It was a pirate sanctuary back in the 1800s. It's kept its lawless ways.”
And because Zemo knows every button to push, he says, “But we cannot exactly walk in as ourselves. James, you will have to become someone you claim is gone.”
Desperately, Bucky tries to scrounge up the sound of Steve assuring him. You are no longer the Winter Soldier. You are James Bucky Barnes.
It rings hollow.
“Sam,” Bucky murmurs when Zemo leaves the plane. “Do you speak Russian?”
Sam shakes his head.
“Okay, I didn’t think so.” Bucky pulls the notebook out of his jacket, flipping to the page he’d worked on during the flight. “I wrote the pronunciations of these words. I need you to say them to me.”
“Aren’t these your murder words?” Sam demands.
“They don’t work anymore.” He tries to make his voice aggressive, but it just comes out desperate. “Listen, I make Steve read them to me sometimes. Just to test. And I have to go be the Winter Soldier again and I’ve got no doubt that Zemo will pull these out just to prove he can.”
“So you want me to test you on your ability not to snap.”
Bucky rolls his eyes and starts to close the notebook, “Fuck off. Never mind.”
“No, wait. I can…” Sam holds his hand out for the book, and Bucky hesitates before handing it over. Sam doesn’t flip through to any pages he hasn’t been told to.
“Zhe-lan-ay,” Sam starts, butchering the pronunciation, but close enough that it makes Bucky’s muscles lock. “Rez-hav-iy.”
As soon as they’re done the notebook is out of his hands and both their mouths are sealed.
The only thought Bucky has time for before he’s blank faced and tearing people apart again is, Maybe I should have put more effort into therapy.
They may call him the Soldier, but he fights like a spy and he knows it. Turns out 70 years of brainwashing is all that’s needed to overcome military training. Even mid-fight and surrounded by choked grunts that barely make it past his metal fingers, he hears Zemo comment to Sam, “It didn’t take much for him to fall back into form.”
Солдат. Солдат. Солдат. The Winter Soldier. Sam asks him if he’s good and the soldier has no reply, the soldier has never been asked that, the soldier—
— is dead, Bucky reminds himself. He gives Sam a sharp nod.
He doesn’t even think “piece of meat” would describe what he feels like when Zemo grabs his chin and offers him for sale. He’s less than that. He’s not the meatware, he’s the hardware. He’s a Soviet slug with no rifling. He’s a goddamn weapon, and when’s the last time he wasn’t?
And then it doesn’t matter because Sam’s family is at risk and Bucky doesn’t care what he has to be to keep everyone safe.
“Sharon?”
“You cost me everything,” she says, low and deadly, and maybe she’s talking to Zemo but really she could be talking to any of them. Bucky can’t believe she’s got the decency to offer them somewhere to stay and he looks around the apartment and thinks yea, this is what Captain America does. Fuck John Walker and the way he carries the shield like he owns it. Steve Rogers is the reason the four of them can be in the room together and not blow each other’s brains out, and that’s not something you can do just by putting on blue spandex.
“You believe in all this stars and stripes bullshit,” Sharon says, and he grips his drink a little tighter. He's never believed in it. He's never believed in anything, not God or queen or country. Nothing but the man behind the shield, and now even that's gone.
Bucky's almost forgotten what fighting in the field without Steve was like. There’s a hell of a lot more death. Soldiers, they kill people, and he’s no stranger to blood on his hands. But Steve had never picked up a gun when he could have used his shield, and this “take no prisoners” fight makes him think that maybe the monster they made him might have just been any other soldier.
They get to the safe house and Bucky thinks they’re all going to explode. Sam’s got Sarah written all over his face and Zemo’s still high from getting away with at least a dozen murders and lecturing about the Sokovian memorial that he and Sam have both been to and mourned at and Bucky, Bucky can barely even call himself Bucky because he keeps slipping Russian into his Brooklyn accent and for the first time in his life he wishes he was on Dr. Raynor’s couch. Or even better, in his and Steve’s apartment. Maybe he can risk a call to him, find a burner phone and just hear his voice. Just hear his Captain America say his name, maybe it’ll be enough to make him an idealistic New Yorker for the rest of the night at least.
He’s got politics and war surgically attached to his spine, though, and he sees Shuri’s tech and knows that no one gets to be idealistic tonight.