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HYDRAGATE REVELATIONS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED: WAS BUCKY BARNES A WOMAN?

Norah Winters, staff

Posted on May 1, 5:43 PM

687 responses

filed under: MIND BLOWN

There’s certainly been no lack of discussion of the Hydragate leak in the United States and around the world, but the sheer volume of information that was released means some details are liable to fall by the wayside. For example, who cares about the old SSR files from World War II that were dumped when we could talk about the Hydra infiltration, the Bahrain incident, the tesseract data, or a dozen other high profile controversies that have arisen in the last month? Well, the Vita-Buzz team took it upon ourselves to go through some of those more minor records, and we came upon some details that suggest that the official version of history presented to us on television and in the classroom may not be entirely accurate. For example, remember Bucky Barnes? Of course you do, we all grew up with the cartoons and the posters and the movies about the Howling Commandos. Captain America’s kid sidekick, tragically gone too soon, known for distracting generations of seventh grade girls who would rather look at his picture in the textbook than do the homework. Well, there’s now compelling evidence available to the public that suggests that he may have in fact been a she.

Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes has always been an enigmatic figure, someone historians have never quite been able to pin down. Bucky was presented in most propaganda from the period as Captain America’s teenage sidekick, but was later noted in records as being the same age as Rogers himself. Barnes and Rogers supposedly grew up together, but there’s literally no record of anyone by that name at all until the mid thirties, when a James Barnes pops up suddenly on the payroll of a Brooklyn autoshop. The famous commando left behind no family and no one ever saw or identified the body because it was never found. And get this - many researchers believe that Barnes’ enlistment records were falsified retroactively (in the past this has led to another theory that Barnes was an early candidate for Project Rebirth).

Fasten your seatbelts kids, because we’re about to answer the question that has plagued historians for 70+ years: just who was James Buchanan Barnes?

At first, when Steve saw the boy in the rain, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. It wouldn’t be the first time his bad eyesight had made him mistake some far-off shadowy object for a person. Even so, he set down his pencil and and fished in his pocket for his glasses, just to be sure. Once he had put them on and pressed his nose against the windowpane to get a good view of the alley, the boy had not become a shadow or a pile of trash. Instead, he remained resolutely a boy, holding a soaking jacket over his head to shield himself from the worst of the downpour. He was small, not any older than Steve was, and Steve didn’t need to see him clearly to know that he was shivering.

Without thinking, Steve pushed open the window and leaned out as far as he could without falling. The rain splashed down his glasses and across his nose in icy drops. He opened his mouth to call out, but was interrupted by the sound of his mother gasping behind him.

“Steven Grant Rogers, what in heaven’s name are you doing?”

Steve jumped and hit his head hard on the window frame with a loud thonk. The boy in the alley looked up. Sarah Rogers had strong arms from carrying baskets of laundry up and down stairs. She scooped up her son easily and half-pulled, half-carried him away from the window, clucking her tongue as she did so.

"Steve, sweetheart, what are you doing with the window open?” she said, “You’ll catch a cold. Let me see your head.”

“Ma, I’m not a baby!” Steve argued, but he let her pull aside his hair and examine where he had made contact with the window.

“You’ll have a bump, but you’re fine,” she said, “Now, let me close the - Stevie.” Steve had wriggled out of her grip and rushed back to the open window. He peered out into the darkness for a few seconds, cleaned his glasses on his shirt, then put them back on and scanned the alley again.

“There was a kid out there,” Steve told his mother, “He looked like he needed help.” Steve’s mother knelt beside him and looked out the window. She scanned the darkened windows of the rooms in the next building, the trash cans clustered on the wet ground.

“Well, whoever he was, he’s gone now,” she said, and pushed the window closed. Steve kept frowning at the spot where the boy had been.

“Steve, you can’t always help everybody,” Sarah continued, “You have to take care of yourself, too. And you can start by getting dried off.” Steve tore his eyes away from the window and took his mother’s hand.

Sam leans on the railing of the bridge watching the water rush underneath them, all playfulness gone from his face.

“Look, I’ll be behind you on this, you know that,” he says, “But you also gotta know that you can’t always help everybody.”

Steve sets his jaw the way he always does when he’s pretending to be very grown-up, which, he realizes numbly, isn’t actually pretend anymore. He doesn’t feel grown-up, or anything like the strapping American hero plastered all over the Smithsonian exhibit - he feels small, like he’s seventeen again and his mother is dying and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. Except then, Bucky had been there, a solid presence letting him know that not everything was lost. He has a sudden desire to share this with Sam, to sit down and tell him everything there was to know about Bucky, the kind of soldier he was, the kind of kid he had been before that, the way that the person on the bridge was both him and sickeningly not him at the same time. Either that or just hug Sam and not let go until some of this, any of this, starts to make sense.

Instead, he balls his hands up into fists inside his pockets.

“Doesn’t mean I’m not going to try,” he tells Sam, and Sam chuckles under his breath.

“Yeah, I figured that.”

Steve’s mother worked the late shift at Lenox Hill Hospital three days a week, which meant Steve spent the evening and night alone in their two-room apartment. Mrs. Murphy from next door was supposed to look in on Steve every once in a while to make sure he was alright and not having an asthma attack, but she had stopped bothering months ago. Steve liked it better that way. He could do without Mrs. Murphy’s muttering about “invalids” - and besides, she smelled of cabbage.

The drawing Steve had been working on when he saw the boy in the alley earlier that week was frustrating him. It was supposed to be of his mother, bent over her sewing at the table next to the stove, but he couldn’t get her face right. He erased her nose and redrew it over and over, but it never looked like her, and eventually the paper got too smudged to continue. Steve thought about tearing the page out of the sketchbook and throwing it away, but it would be a waste of the paper his mother had saved up so much to buy him. He settled for slamming his pencil down with all the force he could muster.

Steve’s heart fluttered, and he realized how cold it was in the bedroom. He dragged the blanket off of the bed and wrapped it around himself, going to sit in the chair by the window. Winter was coming fast, and he couldn’t afford to get sick, not now. He rocked the chair back and forth, listening to the creak of its old wooden joints as it moved. Laundry lines crisscrossed each other outside the window, and he watched them drift from side to side in the breeze. And there was someone there, a small someone, standing on tiptoe to peer into one of the trash bins at the end of the alley. Now that it wasn’t raining, Steve could him more clearly - a dirty face scrunched up in concentration underneath the brim of a hat two sizes too big.

Steve pushed open the window and leaned out. The boy jumped and whipped his head around to look at him.

“Are you who I saw the other day, when it was raining?” Steve called down to the boy.

The boy’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe. Who wants to know?”

“Wait here,” Steve found himself saying. He dragged the window closed, panting a little with the effort. It took him longer than he would have liked to make it down the four flights of stairs to the curb - past the O’Leary’s, ten people in two rooms; the Callahans, with their constantly crying twin babies; the Sullivans; the Bernsteins… By the time Steve got to the door of the building, he had to stop and rest for a moment, waiting for his breath to stop rattling though his lungs.

“Are you okay?”

Steve jumped at the sudden voice and swung out his arm, smacking the boy from the alley, who had come to meet him, hard on the side of the head. It wasn’t the strongest blow, but there was a distressing clack.

“Sorry! I didn’t mean to hit you - ” Steve began, but he saw the boy was laughing.

“Jeez,” he said, massaging his temple, “For a little guy, you’ve got an arm on you.”

Close up, Steve saw that the boy was wearing clothes even more ill-fitting than his hat, and that his dark hair was shaggy and uneven, as if he’d cut it himself. Seeing Steve was taking in his appearance, the boy stood straighter and set his jaw as if daring Steve to comment on it. Steve held out his hand.

“My name’s Steve,” he said. The boy hesitated, then took it.

“Bucky,” he replied, “Do you live up there?” Steve nodded, suddenly feeling very self-conscious.

“I saw you and I thought...maybe you’d want to come in and warm up. Or something. There aren’t any other kids my age in the building, so…”

“I could be a murderer or a loony, you know,” Bucky said, half-smiling. Steve raised his eyebrows.

“You don’t look like a murderer or a loony. I mean, I guess I could be a murderer or a loony, too.”

Bucky seemed satisfied with that answer. They climbed the stairs back up to the Rogers' two rooms, slower this time. Bucky stopped and waited for Steve to catch his breath every few steps as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and he didn’t stare, just leaned against a wall and whistled a tune, something Steve knew he had heard on the radio but couldn’t place.

“You’re good at that,” Steve said, and Bucky grinned.

Steve led Bucky through the Rogers' door, wondering for the first time what exactly he planned to give the other boy. They had one blanket, an apple Sarah had left for Steve's dinner, and a wood stove that Steve was forbidden to use without permission. Still, he got some water for Bucky to wash his face with and cut the apple in half while Bucky wrapped himself in the blanket as if he hadn't been warm in weeks. They sat on the edge of the bed, which creaked under their weight.

"At least there's no wind in here," Steve said as he handed Bucky one half of the apple. Bucky had to worm one of his arms out of the blanket to take it.

"Thanks," replied Bucky, "You're lucky to have a place." Steve nodded.

"My Ma says that people will always need nursing, so she'll always have work," he explained, "But the hospital keeps cutting down her shifts. She's worried she'll stop scraping in enough for the rent. I wanna drop out of school as soon as I'm allowed and help, but it's hard enough to find jobs nowadays even if you ain’t...you know." He left the sentence hanging and took another bite of his apple.

"Are you going to get better?" Bucky asked.

"No," Steve said, "But that don’t mean I can’t do things.”

Bucky nodded seriously. His eyes fell on Steve's sketchbook, which was still lying open on the chair beside them. The sketch of Sarah didn't have a face, but he'd captured the swing of her dress and the way she crossed her arms warningly across her chest when Steve had done something wrong.

“Hey, did you do this?”

Steve glanced at the drawing and wrinkled his nose. “Yeah, but I can’t get the face right.” Bucky picked up the sketchbook and started flipping through it, lingering on a drawing of Steve’s favorite tree in Prospect Park. He’d drawn it bigger than it actually was, towering over people and buildings like a Redwood.

“These are good,” Bucky said, “I mean, I don’t know nothing about art, but they seem good to me.”

They finished their apple halves, digging into the cores as much as they possibly could with their teeth before tossing them into the stove so they could be burned later. Then, Bucky held out one side of the blanket to Steve, and Steve crawled underneath it, tucking his legs in under Bucky's so they would both fit. At another time, Steve might have felt awkward about curling up with a stranger, but it was cold enough that the two boys could see their breath, and Bucky was surprisingly warm.

"It's Steve, right?" Bucky whispered, and Steve nodded.

"Good to know you, Steve," said Bucky, still speaking low enough that Steve, whose good ear was pressed to the mattress, had to watch his lips to understand what he was saying, "Thanks for helping me out."

It was only as Steve was drifting off to sleep that he realized that he hadn't asked Bucky where he came from, if he had family waiting for him, or even what his last name was. By then, though, he had warmed up enough to feel almost cozy, and Bucky's breathing had become soft and steady.

Natasha calls in the middle of the night during the second week of Sam and Steve’s search. Sam’s bed is less than two feet from Steve’s in the cramped motel room, so Steve ducks into the bathroom to answer the phone. He’s not sure how he knows it’s Natasha - the number isn’t one he recognizes - but he isn’t surprised to hear her voice when he presses the phone to his ear.

“Steve?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” he says, “It’s three AM, Nat. Is something wrong? Do you need back up?”

“No, nothing like that,” she replies.

Steve counts ten seconds during which he hears nothing but the bathroom fan. He eases himself into a sitting position, keeping his knees bent so he doesn’t have to drape his legs over the bathtub across from him.

“Steve, what was he like?”

“What?”

“James Barnes.”

She pronounces each syllable of the name carefully, as if she’s trying it out. A thousand images rush into Steve’s mind: Bucky lining up a shot in a game of pool, chalk in his hair from running his fingers through it; Bucky asleep in the chair next to Steve’s bed, The Hobbit lying open in his lap; Bucky, nineteen, breaking a guy’s nose for calling him a dyke; Bucky in a safe house somewhere in France with dirt and blood on his face and a cigarette in his mouth; Bucky falling and falling until he’s a dark speck on the snow, until he’s nothing.

Steve opens his mouth but the words don’t come.

“Did he whistle?” Natasha asks. Steve frowns.

“What?”

Natasha starts to whistle softly, the sound made tinny and harsh over the phone. Steve lets her get through the whole of the familiar tune, closing his eyes and trying to ignore the sick feeling in his stomach. When she finishes, there’s more silence. Steve nods, then remembers that she can’t see him.

“Yeah,” he says.

“Jesus, Steve,” Natasha laughs, “You ever get the feeling that your life’s become so bizarre you can’t even fucking explain it?”

“All the damn time.”

Natasha hangs up before Steve can ask her where she heard the song. When Steve leaves the bathroom, Sam’s breathing isn’t steady enough for him to be asleep, but neither of them mention the phone call in the morning.

“You know, they’re making a picture out of The Invisible Man,” Bucky said, peering over Steve’s shoulder to see what he was drawing. He’d started putting the finishing touches on his sketch of the old lady in a mangy fur coat sitting a couple of benches over, feeding pigeons. She had a tired face, sad in a way that Steve couldn’t quite capture. The weather had been improving lately, and Steve and Bucky had gotten in the habit of meeting up in the park when Steve got out of school and Bucky out of work, when he had it, which wasn’t often lately. Sometimes, they would play tag or find some other boys to play baseball with, but Steve got tired quickly, so mostly they just sat and watched the people go by. On weekdays, they would do Steve’s homework together, which Steve figured wasn’t cheating because he was teaching Bucky everything he’d learned in school.

“Maybe you can be an extra,” Steve replied, smiling.

“Yeah, maybe I can be invisible, too,” Bucky laughed, “Some film debut that’d be.” He peered at Steve’s drawing and then at his subject, then back at the drawing again.

“Wow, Stevie, you really made her beautiful,” he said. Steve shrugged.

“People are beautiful when they’re thinking about things, and they don’t know anybody’s watching,” he explained. Bucky looked at the picture for another long moment.

“Even me?” he said, then made a face by sucking in his cheeks until his lips were puckered up like a fish. Steve laughed.

“Yeah, you’re a real sight, Buck.” He punched Bucky lightly on the arm. Bucky pushed him back, and Steve tackled him, and soon they were on the ground, legs tangled up in each other. Two things happened very quickly: the first was that Bucky shoved Steve off of him with a force that made Steve’s vision blur, and the second was that Steve started to cough, a violent hacking that sliced through his chest like a knife.

“Christ, Steve, I’m sorry,” Bucky said, reaching to help Steve back onto the bench. Steve closed his eyes as the coughing became rattling breaths which eventually calmed into his normal slight wheeze. Bucky held onto Steve’s sleeve just above the elbow as they waited for it to pass.

“What’d you shove me for?” Steve asked when he could speak again.

“I’m real sorry, Stevie,” Bucky said, “I didn’t mean to push too hard. Are you going to have an asthma attack?”

Steve shook his head.

“I just didn’t want - ” Bucky started to say, then stopped.

“Look, why don’t we go back to your place and make a fort?” he finished instead.

Steve rolled his eyes. “Bucky, we ain’t twelve anymore.”

Bucky gave Steve his best crooked smile, the one that had already started to make the teenage girls on their block look at him twice.

“C’mon, do it for me.”

They made their way back to Steve’s building, which was sort of Bucky’s building, too, considering how often he slept there. Whenever he turned up, Sarah would sigh, cluck her tongue, and tell him to wash his hands because "we do not eat supper with dirty hands in this house, young man."

“You know, Ma thinks you should move in with us permanently,” Steve remarked as they climbed the stairs.

“That what she said?” Bucky was climbing behind him, regulating his pace to match Steve’s.

“Nah, she said ‘A smart boy like that should be in school, not doing errands for gangsters or Lord knows what,’” Steve said, trying his best to imitate his mother’s accent.

“You sound like you’ve got marbles in your mouth,” Bucky giggled.

“Ah, shut up.”

Inside, they tucked one end of the blanket between the mattress and the wall and draped the other end over the back of the chair, making a roof for the two of them to sit underneath. Steve got out his homework and started explaining to Bucky what the problems were. After a half an hour or so, Bucky could do the whole sheet without help. He always caught onto things quickly, even with as clumsy a teacher as Steve. Eventually, Steve started to doze with his head half against the bed and half on Bucky’s shoulder, his glasses slipping down the edge of his nose.

"Steve?" Bucky whispered, reaching out to tug on the sleeve of Steve's shirt.

“Mm?”

“Can you keep a secret?”

The woman on the radio has a crisp British accent that makes Steve think of Peggy in her army uniform, matter-of-factly relaying intelligence reports to Colonel Phillips. Steve wonders, not for the first time, how Peggy is doing, whether anyone has told her about what’s happened, and whether she’d remember it if they did. In the passenger seat, Sam dozes, his brow furrowed and his arms folded tight across his chest.

“In the aftermath of the SHIELD collapse and the leak of an unprecedented amount of classified data, the question remains as to whether charges could be pressed against Captain America himself for taking extreme action against Hydra and SHIELD without government authorization,” says the voice on the radio, “Many questions remain as to exactly what occurred in the three days after SHIELD Director Nicholas Fury’s death and why Captain Rogers has refused to come forward for comment. We go now to Natasha Romanoff’s controversial statements at April 6th’s hearing - Romanoff, the SHIELD operative previously known to public only as - ”

Steve reaches out and shuts off the radio. Beside him, Sam jolts awake, his hands automatically reaching out to adjust wings he isn’t wearing. Once he registers the car and Steve in the driver’s seat, he rubs his eyes and leans his forehead against the window.

“Morning, sunshine,” Steve says, and Sam shoots him a look.

“I’m not superguy, okay?” he replies, “I need sleep.”

“I know. Sorry.”

It’s been three days since they really had a rest. There were reports of somebody matching Bucky’s description torching an old warehouse outside of Stakhanov, but by the time they got there everything was cleared away. He’s going after the remnants of Hydra, that much is clear, but what information he’s using or whether he’s following any sort of pattern is anybody’s guess. One red-eye Starkjet flight back to the U.S. later and Steve’s starting to feel the dull ache behind his eyes that comes with exhaustion. Things are beginning to blur together, dead end after dead end after dead end.

“How about you let me drive for a while,” Sam suggests.

“I’m fine - ” Steve argues.

“I didn’t say you weren’t fine,” Sam says, “but driving’ll wake me up.”

Steve pulls over and they switch places. Sam settles into the driver’s seat and turns the radio back on.

“The identity of the assassin is still unclear, even with the wealth of information - ”

He changes the channel.

“ - accountability - ” He changes it again. Some generic pop song crackles unsteadily from the speaker. They roll back onto the road and Steve watches the trees whip by as they drive while one song turns into another, then another.

“Steve,” Sam asks finally, “what’s your plan?”

“What do you mean?” Steve murmurs. The vibration of the car is comforting and he’s let his eyes fall closed.

“I mean, after this, after today or the next day,” Sam explains, “Say we find Bucky. Say he remembers who he is. What then?”

Steve doesn’t open his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he admits, and the words feel worn out, as if he’s said them so many times they’ve started to lose their meaning. Sam keeps driving and, eventually, Steve drifts off to sleep.

Steve was doodling aimlessly in his notebook when Bucky burst through the door without knocking, his hair sticking up in all directions and his tie loose around his neck. He walked past Steve and lay down on the bed, not saying anything and not looking at Steve, which probably meant that he wanted to cry but was trying very hard not to.

“Jesus Christ, Bucky, what happened?” Steve said, abandoning his drawing and going to sit on the edge of the bed next to Bucky. Bucky didn’t say anything, but sat up and shrugged off his coat, then removed his tie and unbuttoned his shirt. Underneath was the heavy bandaging that Bucky and Steve had stolen from the hospital where Steve’s Ma worked, which Bucky used to make his chest look flat. It looked crooked, as if Bucky had put it on in a hurry, and underneath it was a shallow gash that had stained the inside of his shirt red.

“Jesus,” Steve whispered again, and Bucky laughed weakly.

“Good thing your Ma’s not here to hear you take the Lord’s name in vain,” he said. Steve ran to the sink and wet a dishcloth, then came back and started to clean the blood off of Bucky’s stomach.

“I can do that myself,” Bucky protested.

“Tell me what happened,” Steve demanded, ignoring him. Bucky suddenly became very interested in the pattern of the quilt underneath him.

“Got in a fight, you know how it is,” he said. Steve gave him a look he hoped resembled the one his Ma gave when she knew you were lying. Bucky ran his fingers through his hair, a habit that Sarah said made a person look unkempt but which Steve liked.

“This job’s the best things I’ve had in ages,” Bucky began, “A day of loading boxes and I can eat, you know, and sometimes even help you and your Ma.” Steve waited, knowing there was a but coming. Bucky undid the bandages around his chest and let out a long sigh of relief. Sometimes they made it difficult for him to breathe or caused his ribs to ache, a problem that they hadn’t been able to figure out how to solve. He pulled his shirt back on and buttoned it before going on.

“There’s this one guy there, Micky Olsen, he always looks at me funny, right? I didn’t think much of it, figured he was just jealous ‘cause the boss gives me more shifts,” Bucky explained, “But it turns out he put two and two together with the way my voice is and how I look young and everything and he cornered me when we were alone in the back of the store and roughed me up a little and said he’d tell everybody if I didn’t, well…”

Steve stared at him.

“It’s not a big deal,” Bucky said.

“Not a big deal?” Steve interrupted.

“And anyway, I hit him in the face with a crowbar so I don’t think he’s gonna bother me again,” Bucky concluded.

Steve balked. Bucky gave him a half-hearted shrug, looking almost sheepish, as if Steve might be angry.

“I hope you broke his fucking jaw,” Steve said, and suddenly Bucky was laughing, shaking his head and reaching up to wipe his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Didn’t stick around long enough to find out,” he replied. He lay down on the bed and Steve lay down next to him so that they were facing each other, just like when they were kids and they’d stay up late into the night whispering to each other. Bucky pursed his lips in a half-wince, half-frown.

“I ain’t gonna be able to do this much longer, am I?” he said, “This whole thing. Being Bucky. I’m sixteen, I can’t pass anymore.”

“I don’t know, Buck,” Steve replied, wishing he had something better to say. He tried to imagine Bucky in a dress but the picture wouldn’t come. They lay on the bed in silence for a while. Bucky had his eyes closed, and Steve thought for a moment that he’d fallen asleep.

Slowly, Bucky started to edge his face closer to Steve’s, making it so that their noses brushed and Steve could feel Bucky’s breath on his cheek. It occurred to Steve for the very first time that he could kiss Bucky and that nobody would be able to say that it was wrong, not once they knew the truth. His heart, normally weak and irregular, pounded. Bucky leaned in to close the last inch of distance between them.

Bucky - who had just been through something horrible and might be trying to prove...something. Steve wasn't sure what. He pulled away and turned around to swing his legs over the edge of the bed.

“I’m sorry,” Bucky said, sitting up, “That was stupid.”

“No it wasn’t,” Steve replied. He reached out and picked up the book on his bedside for something to do with his hands.

“What’re you reading?” Bucky asked.

“In Dubious Battle. It’s new, it’s about a strike in California,” Steve replied. He heard Bucky laugh faintly behind him.

“What, something wrong with Agatha Christie?” Bucky scoffed, “You’re so goddamn serious all the time.” Steve opened the book to where he’d left off, then remembered he wasn’t wearing his glasses and closed it.

“Steve?” Bucky said suddenly, “Would you like me better if I were a real girl?”

Steve turned around. “What? No.”

Bucky's mouth opened slightly, as if he’d just realized a possibility.

“Would you like me better if I were a real boy?”

Steve threw his book at Bucky.

“You’re such an asshole,” Steve said.

“You’re the asshole, asshole.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Gosh, Bucky, you’re a regular Dorothy Parker.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious. Your wit wounds me.”

Bucky threw the book back at Steve’s head, and he had to duck to avoid being hit in the eye. He ran to get it from the floor, and Bucky laughed at him, and Steve thought that maybe everything was alright again.

They meet up with Maria and Sharon in New York, at Maria’s new apartment on the Upper West Side. The whole thing feels awkward and out of context. Maria, in jeans instead of a SHIELD uniform, leans on the counter and offers him a beer, which he declines. Sharon has shed all remnants of Kate the nurse and stands with her feet squared beside Maria, the outline of a sidearm just visible underneath her blazer.

“I heard what you did at the Triskelion,” Steve tells her, “and I want you to know you went above and beyond.”

“You must have done good,” Sam interrupts, taking a swig of his beer, “He’s using his captain voice.”

Sharon’s laugh reminds Steve of Peggy’s in a way he can’t quite place.

“I do not do a voice,” Steve argues.

“Yes, you do, Steve,” Maria says. Steve raises his hands in a mock gesture of defeat.

Sharon is still smiling as she takes a beer from Maria, but her voice is serious.

“I can’t give much of an update as to the situation at Langley right now,” she explains, “I’m still not done with the vetting process, which I guess I understand. Former SHIELD agents aren’t exactly considered the most trustworthy of employees right now.”

Maria makes a face.

“Should’ve come to the private sector, agent,” she says, with a tone that suggests they’ve had this conversation before.

Sharon shakes her head. “Wouldn’t feel right. Besides, I think my aunt would have a heart attack if I started working for Stark Industries, which I know is where you’re going with that.”

Maria shrugs.

“Speaking of Stark, is he actually going to make a statement about all this, or is he just going to keep throwing money at us under the table and hope that counts as support?” Sam asks.

“He’s hedging his bets,” Maria explains, “It’s the smart choice.”

They go on like this for a while, going over the situation with the collapse, mapping out options for next steps until Steve’s head spins with possibilities. There’s the question of the Avengers and whether Tony’s idea that they could function as an independent organization is viable, there are the continuing DC hearings, and the rumors that Nick Fury wants to rebuild SHIELD extra-governmentally. It’s so much that Steve can almost get lost in it, and he lets himself, for a moment, forget about how he and Sam are back to square one. When Bucky does come up, at first it doesn’t quite sink it in that it’s him they’re talking about.

“We’re lucky that Hydra only kept records of the Winter Soldier Project non-digitally,” Maria says, “because that’s a scandal that I don’t think we can deal with right now.”

“Who else has been told?” Sharon asks.

“Us, Fury, and Agent Romanoff are the only ones who know,” Maria replies.

Steve hears the words “winter soldier” and thinks first of Natasha’s unreadable face in the hospital as she pulled up her shirt to show him her scar. Then he remembers a masked figure striding towards him with a knife - fast, strong, had a metal arm - and the feeling of somebody reaching out to him in the water, and it’s only then that he can make himself think, That was Bucky. Bucky is alive, and that was him.

“I always figured that the Winter Soldier was a codename that got passed around,” Sharon continues, “And that might still be true. I mean, there are plenty of reports through the years identifying the Soldier as a woman.”

“Trust me,” Steve interrupts her, more forcefully than he means to, “It was always Bucky.”

Sharon cocks her head at him but doesn’t press.

“I used to hear stories about Bucky Barnes as a kid,” she says instead, “My great-uncle always said he, oh man, how did he put it? ‘Smoked like a chimney and sang like a Manhattan chorus girl.’ Said he’d never served with anybody braver, and that included you. Sorry, Cap.” She winks at him, and Steve starts to think that maybe the straightlaced Agent 13 is just as much a persona as Kate the nurse was. He really needs to stop hanging out with spies, he muses, then frowns.

Sharon starts to ask something else about Bucky, but Steve gets his question out first.

“Wait, was your great-uncle Gabe Jones?”

Sharon grins and extends her hand to him.

“Sharon Carter,” she says, “It’s good to meet you, Captain.”

“Jesus Christ,” Steve replies without thinking.

He hears Maria and Sam burst into laughter next to him.

“Do you ever wonder how people are going to remember you after you die?”

Bucky passed Steve the bottle of whiskey and Steve took a drink, trying to ignore the sting of it as it slid into his throat. Normally, Steve tried to avoid alcohol - he got drunk easily and something in it made the acid in his stomach churn and slide upwards to sit burning in his chest. Today, though, he wanted to be drunk.

“I don’t know,” Steve said, “I guess - I want to have accomplished something. Made the world better than when I got here.” Bucky nodded.

“Your Ma, she made things better,” he said. Steve smiled.

“Yeah,” he mumbled, “Nobody’s gonna remember her, though.” He leaned forward so that he could see his own legs dangling over the edge of the fire escape. It wasn’t much of a view, just the dirty windows of the next building and, below, an alleyway filled with early autumn leaves and one stray cat cleaning itself on a bed of old newspapers. He passed the bottle to Bucky, who took another swig.

“I just wanna be remembered as myself,” Bucky said.

Steve looked at Bucky and had a wild desire to draw him, sitting on this fire escape drinking cheap whiskey in his best suit. The guilt hit him immediately after - his mother was dead, and the grief was still raging in his gut more than any alcohol ever could, and he wanted to draw Bucky. It was stupid; he knew that he couldn’t think about her every second, but there the feeling was.

“Alice says the world is full of girls like me,” Bucky told him.

“Are you in love with her?” Steve asked. The question fell out of his mouth before he could stop it.

“She loves me,” Bucky replied, “and - and she’s real sweet.”

Steve wasn’t sure what to say to that. The whiskey was making his head buzz and his chin droop into his collar. He watched the sun start to set over the top of the neighboring building, and wondered how it looked to Bucky, who could see so many more colors than he could.

“It’s pink today,” Bucky said, seeing where Steve was looking, “Like, um, like a pretty dame’s cheeks or a flower.” Steve let his eyes drift shut and tried to imagine a sunset like a rose.

“I’m gonna make her proud of me,” he mumbled. He felt Bucky’s hand on his shoulder, firm and warm.

After a while, Bucky started whistling, then singing faintly, his mouth pressed close to Steve’s good ear so that Steve could make out the words.

“Pack up all my cares and woe,
Here I go, singing low,
Bye, bye, blackbird.”

“You know, you’re a good singer,” Steve said, “I’m serious. I wanna make fun of you but I can’t.” Bucky flicked him lightly on the forehead.

“Where somebody waits for me,
Sugar’s sweet, so is she.
Bye, bye, blackbird.

No one here can love and understand me,
Oh, what hard luck stories they all hand me.

Make my bed and light the light,
I’ll arrive late tonight.
Blackbird, bye bye.”

They sat on the fire escape until the sun dipped below the horizon and the air got cold enough that they shivered in their good jackets.

American History Daily @amerhistory
The Boy Sidekick Who Never Was: Bucky Barnes and obscure WAC¹ officer Rebecca Buchanan were the same person - and she was a badass

Kate Bishop @notthehawkguy
tons of AMAZING women served in WWII but I don't think James Barnes was one of them

Kate Bishop @notthehawkguy
Clearly Barnes wanted 2 live & B remembered as male. Cap still refers 2 him that way long after his death. Think I'll take my cue from that.

Eli Bradley @elibradley
Still don’t want to let trans people in the military? http://tinyurl.com/pm67w

Huffington Post @HuffingtonPost
How The SSR Made A Man Out Of Rebecca Buchanan huff.to/1xP05

Tara Bernstein @TaraBernstein
People in history were whole people with whole lives. We only see the echoes they leave behind.

Miles Lydon @lydddddddd
so were rebecca/bucky & steve rogers banging or what #askingtherealquestions

“There are so many important jobs, Steve.”

“What, you want me to collect scrap metal in my little red wagon - ”

“Yes - ”

“Bucky - Bucky, you could have stayed in the WAC - ”

“Keep your voice down.”

“You could have stayed there but you didn’t because you knew you were supposed to be on the front lines - ”

“That isn’t why, do you seriously think that’s why - ”

“Look, if that doctor gave you a chance, maybe he’ll give me one, too - ”

“Steve - ”

“Bucky, there are men - there are people laying down their lives. I’ve got no right to do any less than them. This isn’t about me.”

“Right, ‘cause you’ve got nothing to prove.”

“Christ. That’s rich coming from you, you know that?”

It’s Sam who finds Bucky first. Or, more accurately, Bucky finds him. Steve’s holed up in their hotel room going over the Winter Soldier file for the tenth time when he gets a text from Sam: being followed

Steve texts back: ID?

The dots that indicate Sam is typing go for five seconds, six, ten. Stop. Start again. Finally, his text appears: think it’s your friend.

Steve stares at the screen.

where are you, he sends to Sam, trying to ignore the way his hands shake against the keyboard.

brooklyn heights near montague st, Sam replies, but idk if you should come now, seems easily spooked.

Steve almost laughs at the text.

I used to live around there, he tells Sam.

Every instinct in Steve is screaming at him to get down to where Bucky is immediately, but Sam is probably right.

lead him here, Steve types. make sure he knows where we r

A half an hour later, Sam lets himself into the room, noisily kicking the door shut behind him.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” he announces, “It’s way too early in the season for this heat, man. I almost fainted after a half a mile.”

Steve raises his eyebrows at Sam, who nods silently as he pulls off his sweatshirt. As Sam disappears into the bathroom, Steve pulls out his notebook and starts to sketch the outlines of buildings in long lines, tenements and tattoo parlors and bars that exist now only in his memory or in greying photographs preserved behind glass. He did try to go back to Brooklyn sometime in 2012, but it had felt foreign, as if he’d fallen asleep on the train and woken up to find he’d been carried ten stops too far. Even his drawing looks wrong, like a cheap copy of what he remembers rather than the real thing. When he tries to add Bucky leaning against a lamppost on the corner, the face comes out looking like a stranger’s.

He tears the page out and crumples it in his fist. The next page in the notebook is taken up by two items Natasha had insisted he add to his list (reality television and Gorbachev) and a doodle of Peggy that Steve doesn’t remember drawing. It’s her from the shoulders up, her curls framing her face in broad pencil strokes as she looks upward, mid-eyeroll as if someone’s just told her a terrible joke. Steve takes his pencil and deepens the mark of her dimple where the edge of her mouth curves upward in a smile.

Only one photograph of Steve, Peggy, and Bucky standing together exists. Steve saw it at the Smithsonian - in it, the three of them cluster around a map in a briefing room somewhere Steve can’t remember, probably London. Smoke escapes from Bucky’s mouth in a cloud as he reaches out to hand Peggy his cigarette. Peggy is moving to take it with one hand while pointing out something on the map with the other, and Steve is opening his mouth to argue with her. In the background, Jim, Dernier, and Gabe are in the middle of a card game, and Gabe has his head thrown back in laughter. Steve wonders if he could recreate the photograph, only adding in the colors the way he recalls them: Peggy’s red lipstick, the blue of Bucky’s jacket, Jim’s dog tags glinting silver in the yellow electric light.

He’d call the drawing “The Fuck You Battalion,” Bucky’s name for Steve, the Commandos, and Peggy.

“They told all of us we either couldn’t fight at all or couldn’t fight here together,” Bucky would say when he was on a rush after a mission or he’d had a little too much to drink, “and we all said ‘fuck you.’ Except you, Dum Dum. You don’t count. The only thing abnormal about you is that godawful mustache.”

When Sam comes out of the shower, Steve is still staring at the drawing of Peggy, spinning his pencil forward and backward in his fingers.

“Everything cool?” says Sam as he pulls a shirt on over his sweatpants.

“How old were you when you enlisted?” Steve asks, surprising himself. Sam has to think for a second.

“Nineteen,” he says, “My mom was pissed. I’m an only child and she was afraid of losing me. Didn’t get that then, but I do now.”

Steve nods.

“Did you ever feel like you were too young to be there?” he asks, and Sam chuckles.

“Yeah, definitely, more than once,” he replies, “you?”

Steve drags his left hand down the stubble on his face. “We were just a bunch of kids really, you know? And I had a fucking chip on my shoulder the size of Jersey. We all did. The fact that we were in charge of anything is kind of scary, looking back.”

Sam sits down on the edge of one of the beds and glances at the drawing of Peggy, young and bright-eyed and laughing at a joke told by someone in another century.

“That’s who’s always out there,” Sam says, “I don’t care if it’s the trenches or the jungle or the desert or whatever. It’s always kids.”

Steve looks out the window, almost expecting to see Bucky there, dressed smartly in the uniform he was so proud of, waving and complaining that Steve is late, that they’ll never get there in time to see Howard Stark now. Instead, he sees an unfamiliar street, and if Bucky is there, Steve can’t see him.

60 Minutes @60Minutes
The House Margaret Carter Built: SHIELD’s honorable beginnings cbsn.ws/1NMr6h

Kamala K @skadoosher
Peggy Carter has dedicated her life to protecting ppl and if anybody even whispers that she let Hydra in I will go into punch mode

Kate Bishop retweeted
Kamala K @skadoosher
Peggy Carter has dedicated her life to protecting ppl and if anybody even whispers that she let Hydra in I will go into punch mode

Michelle Anderson @anderfem
#RebeccaBuchanan was a woman, end of fucking story. Coopting of her life by the modern transgender movement is shameful.

Skye @hacknsnack
@anderfem did u personally know buchanan/barnes & how they identified? no? then shut up

Miles Lydon @lydddddddd
yeah but nobody’s answered my question yet

The most pain Steve had ever been in was in the winter of 1934, when he’d caught pneumonia during a hospital visit and had spent a week shivering and raving in a strange bed. Pain had screamed in every muscle of his body, his lungs had been on fire, he’d hallucinated that someone was cutting his chest over and over again with a knife and he couldn’t get up the strength to push them away. On the third day, the doctors had told his mother to call a priest, and Steve remembered the prayers turning to static and wind in his ears.

This was the second most pain Steve had ever been in. The bullet had lodged itself under his collarbone, making blood blossom into an angry red patch on the arm and chest of his uniform. It had been the blood he’d noticed first; adrenaline or the serum or a combination of the two had kept the pain away until they could make it to the safe house the SSR had prepared for them after the mission. Now, however, it hit him all at once, like he was being emptied out of his own body and there was nothing he could do to stop it. It didn’t help that Jim's usually method of anesthetic - namely, get the guy too blind drunk to feel a thing - wasn’t workable in Steve’s case.

“You’re lucky you’re you,” Jim said, “You shouldn’t be conscious, the amount of blood you’ve lost. Bite down on this.”

Steve resisted the urge to ask why exactly he wanted to be conscious right now and bit down on the leather belt Jim offered him. He actually did pass out once before Jim was done cutting out the bullet and cleaning to wound, but he came to only a second later. The pain and the strange sickening feeling of his enhanced body trying to stitch itself back together took up most of his concentration, but he was vaguely aware of Bucky beside him, grasping his unwounded shoulder like a vice.

There was no static, no hazy images of men with knives, just Jim’s work and Bucky’s voice and the sound of footsteps as the other Commandos came in and out of the room, all punctuated by raw pain and the slick red of blood. Before the serum, he realized, he wouldn’t have been able to see that color at all, or make out the way it sank into the creases of Jim’s hands like little rivers. It struck Steve, nonsensically, as beautiful.

Eventually, Jim declared that Steve would probably be ready to travel by the next day (“And I mean probably,” he said. “As far as you and your healing goes, I’m fucking guessing.”) and left to get more bandages, leaving Steve with Bucky next to him and a nearly-irresistible urge to vomit.

“You’re not gonna grow an extra arm or something, are you?” Bucky said. Steve turned to look at Bucky properly for the first time since he’d been shot. He was filthy with ash and dirt from the skirmish they’d just been in, and Steve realized that he was probably just as bad. There was no real furniture in the room - the house appeared to have been abandoned - besides a lopsided bed frame with no mattress and one old rocking chair, so Steve and Bucky were on the floor leaning up against the wall. Steve laughed, trying his best not to jostle his shoulder.

“I’m not going to grow an extra arm, jerk,” Steve replied. Bucky shrugged.

“I’m just sayin’ nobody knows what they dosed you up with,” he said.

“You’re hilarious,” Steve retorted. They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the faint sounds of Dum Dum and Gabe arguing about baseball in the next room.

“It’s weird to think that stuff like baseball is still happening, you know?” Steve remarked, more to distract himself from the pain in his shoulder than anything else, “I mean, everything we used to get so hung up about - baseball, pictures, whether or not the heat was on - it doesn’t really seem important anymore.” He focused on Bucky’s face and tried to keep his voice steady. “Everything that was scary before is laughable.”

To Steve’s surprise, Bucky shook his head.

“No, no way,” Bucky said, “I’d take you getting shot over you being sick any day of the week.”

“Seriously?”

Bucky glanced at where his rifle was propped up against the wall a few feet from them.

“You can’t fight pneumonia, not with your hands or a weapon,” he explained, “or anemia or ulcers or asthma or any of the shit that was always almost doing you in. That ain’t fair. If something’s going to try to kill you or me, I’d like to be able to blow its brains out.”

Steve snickered. “That’s sweet, Buck. Real poetic.”

Bucky bumped Steve’s arm with his own.

“I’m just saying that I’d rather go up against an enemy with a face,” he said.

Steve tried to shrug and his shoulder protested with another wave of pain. “I guess I know what you - ow. Fuck.”

Bucky rolled his eyes at him, but reached out and put his hand on Steve’s arm before he went on. “Nah, what gets me out here is just the waiting. Drives me fucking crazy, you know? Sometimes I want to scream just for something to do.”

It struck Steve that this was the first time he’d been alone with Bucky since Austria. It was almost easy to pretend that Bucky had never spent any time on that table at all - he was just as amiable, just as capable, he laughed and sang just as loudly if not louder than he had before. Sometimes, Steve thought that maybe Bucky talked too much and too loudly now, as if he were trying to drown out some other sound that only he could hear.

“Bucky,” he said, but Bucky interrupted him.

“Don’t ask me about that, okay?”

Steve frowned. “You don’t even know what I was going to ask.”

“Yes, I do, and I don’t want to talk about it.”

Bucky reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a cigarette and his lighter, then flattened the empty carton in his hand. He cupped the flame with his palm and the hollows of his cheeks were briefly illuminated gold. He’d lost weight. Steve knew that it was probably convenient for him because it made the curve of his hips easier to hide under baggy clothes, but to Steve he just looked gaunt and tired, like he’d been weeks without properly sleeping.

“It’s just...I dragged you back out here,” Steve insisted, “and if there’s anything else that you remember or want to -”

Bucky interrupted him by pulling him forward by the collar and kissing him once on the forehead, then once on the lips, the taste of smoke from his cigarette filling Steve’s mouth.

“Shut up, will ya,” he whispered, his face still so close to Steve’s that their noses were touching. Then he stood up and walked out of the room just as Jim entered again, a bag slung over his shoulder.

“Sorry, Cap,” Jim was saying, “couldn’t find the damn things.”

“Goddamnit,” Steve muttered.

“Well, you don't need to be a jerk about it,” said Jim.

“We’re all starting over,” Sharon says.

“People keep telling me that,” Steve replies, “but I don’t really know what it means.”

Sam is uptown meeting with Maria and Sharon again when Steve finds Bucky sitting at the table in the hotel room, Steve’s notebook open in his lap. His hair is up in a ponytail pulled through the back of a baseball cap, and he’s traded in the baggy vest he had been wearing when Steve had seen him last for a long-sleeved gray sweatshirt. From the back, Steve might easily have mistaken him for a jogger, except that he sees the glint of silver fingers as Bucky traces over something on the paper with his left hand. Steve freezes with his fingers on the lightswitch, worrying almost that he’s imagining things, that if he turns on the light, Bucky will disappear.

“Who’s this?” Bucky asks, pointing at something on the page in front of him. Tentatively, Steve takes one step forward, then another, until he’s so close to Bucky he could almost reach out and touch him. He sees that Bucky is indicating the sketch of Peggy, which is darker now from Steve tracing it over so many times without thinking.

“That’s Peggy,” Steve tells him, trying to focus on the drawing and not the blankness on Bucky’s face, “She’s - we knew her during the war.”

“The war,” Bucky repeats, as if Steve could be referring to any one of a dozen. Steve isn’t sure what to do with himself, so he sits down opposite Bucky at the cramped table. He’s thought about little else but finding Bucky for weeks, and now here Bucky is sitting in front of him, and Steve’s mind is blank. He wants to touch him, to lean in and bury his face in Bucky’s shoulder and breathe in the scent of him, to know that he’s solid and real. Instead, he grips the side of the table so hard his knuckles turn white.

“Margaret Carter, SSR, favored a Walther PPK² concealed under her jacket on the left side,” Bucky recites suddenly. “Western in technique, untrained in more complex styles of close combat, but significant force and ingenuity noted. Will make use of miscellaneous objects as weapons in order to gain advantage.”

“She also liked to dance,” Steve offers.

Bucky closes the notebook and places it on the table in front of him.

“I shot you,” he states, as if he worries that Steve might have forgotten.

“I know,” Steve says, “I’m okay now.”

Bucky’s face contorts into a close-mouthed wince, and Steve almost smiles at how familiar it is, the way his brow furrows and his mouth tightens when he isn’t sure what to say.

“I went to the museum,” he says slowly, “that exhibit about you. I was in it.”

Steve nods.

Bucky looks down at his hands, one metal and one flesh. “I didn’t think - they told me that when they found me, I was already empty. That I was already a lie. The man in the suit said that he made me into something honest. I remember that.”

“Pierce?” Steve says, “Well, Pierce is dead, he’s gone.”

“I thought that if they weren’t there then I would just disappear,” Bucky keeps talking without stopping.

“Bucky, did you hear me?” Steve reaches out and lets his hand hover about six inches from Bucky’s arm. “Pierce is dead. Nick Fury shot him in the chest. Hydra is in pieces. And you’re still here because you don’t belong to them.”

“I remember things but I can’t make them stick together,” Bucky says.

Steve can’t help it. He takes Bucky’s hand - the metal one, he realizes as he feels smooth cool fingers curl around his own. Bucky looks at him and narrows his eyes, as if he’s considering something.

“I remember you being smaller,” Bucky mutters seriously, and Steve finds himself laughing. He can feel it in his stomach, bubbling up like it hasn’t in months, and he has to put his forehead against the glass tabletop to calm down.

“Oh,” Bucky says, “I said that already, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, kinda,” Steve sighs.

Bucky smiles, a gentle twitch to his mouth that’s gone in an instant.

“I went on the computer to look for who I was,” he says, “but nobody agrees, and they left out all the important parts. I can tell.” Steve tightens his grip on Bucky’s hand.

“Nobody decides who you and me are except you and me,” Steve tells him.

“But where do I start?” Bucky asks.

Steve pauses.

“Back at the beginning, I guess.”

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