Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The Soldier runs.

He can only haunt the bridges overlooking the Potomac for so long before the East Coast sky starts to strangle the air in his lungs.

It’s a place looking to know the man he was. A name that once was his sits emblazoned on a wall next to an image of his face. That is his still, at least, if a thing like that could be his simply for existing together with the rest of his body.

But that doesn’t feel his either. Everything is too tight.

He runs for a long time. Sometimes he does so by pumping his legs as hard and as fast as he can. When circumstances demand it, he stops and takes a few hours of the less accommodating daylight to rest. Biology demands that he procures sustenance and maintains hygiene, and both are tedious in their own very different ways.

His feet take him North towards the coast under the aegis of nightfall, and he can taste it when he gets close enough to the East River that the temperature in the air pinches with humidity.

It was a hot day. The sweat soaks his hair and has gathered under his arms when he stops at an iron gate with English letters naming the grounds in its keep: “Brooklyn Botanic Garden”. The Soldier sighs and weaves his fingers through the spaces in the R, the D, and the E. His forehead fits squarely against the L and the Y of “Brooklyn”. The K presses against his skin when he turns his head from side to side.

He’s tired again. Keeping late hours has allowed him to take the quickest route from D.C. into Brooklyn largely unnoticed, but constant motion has depleted his resources. Sleep sounds like it would solve all of his problems. But he knows better.

Brooklyn exists like a ship out over calm waters. He waits for trouble to come, but there’s nothing. Another hour on his feet carries him to the Brooklyn Bridge, and he stands slouched over the railing staring down at the river until the sun rises. The polished wood has the sheen of rain and reflects the overhead lights from the bridge. Atop the structure waves an illuminated American flag, silently stern and judgmental.

The Soldier finds himself sneering before he returns his gaze to the water. He imagines falling over the safety rail to the metronome of wind and currents. His knees ache around the lateral collateral and patellar ligaments when he straightens out but the ache in his shoulders and back lifts with just a few steps.

He still smells of sweat and vaguely like rust where the rain has mixed with the dirt in his hair, but the wind off the water refreshes him to the fullest capacity that it can. The first hair gelled man in a suit to cross his path generously, unwittingly offers up his wallet. Wonder of wonders, there’s a gym membership card inside it. The Soldier gets himself a shower at Hair Gel’s gym of choice, tools around some on the weights, and takes another shower for the hell of it before leaving the wallet relatively untouched at the front desk.

The sun sets early and finds him in the Garment District devouring scorched swordfish and chunks of bell pepper and lemon on a stick he bought from a bright blue truck on Park Avenue. Street food smells and automobile exhaust waft up all around him, the sights and sounds of people mulling about purposefully. A tall woman passes him on the sidewalk with a shaggy dog leading the way on a leash. It sniffs at his leg as they go by and the Soldier watches while he is watched by the animal in turn.

He hears her say, “Come on, Cindy.”

Sundown in Hell’s Kitchen is another world. At first it could be any place in the continental U.S. after dark, but the cover of night summons all manner of filth from the city. There’s a freeness to it that he’s almost inclined to allow, right up until he can’t.

It happens almost too fast for him to understand, like a knee-jerk reaction to pain or heat.

A wraith-thin boy reminding him of someone shouts down a pack of men cat-calling a woman across the street. The woman hurries away and the men pursue the boy, follow him behind a deserted tenement building in an unlit part of the district. There’s nothing for the black eye the Soldier’s too late to prevent. Certainly no reason to care about the odds stacked against this kid with panic and courageous anger in his heart. Good deeds go punished all the time.

Except he knows as his metal fist lands another blow on one guy’s face. Knows he’s seen photographs of Rogers before he was Captain America, knows the story of the boy who fought the bullies.

Knows that scrawny kid from Brooklyn got a pounding more often than he could count. Knows that kid kept count anyway as a force of habit. Doesn’t know how he could know that, but he’s sure of it, somehow. People like that remember. Rogers remembers everything, unlike him.

“Whoa,” the kid in the here-and-now says, somewhere behind him, vaguely.

He lets the last of the four go and watches the other three, not satisfied really but something that isn’t apathetic. Two of them are out cold. One of them writhes pitifully. He considers knocking him out, too, but doesn’t.

“Wait,” he hears at his back when he’s making his exit. He doesn’t stop, but he hears, because he’s listening for it, “Thank you.”

His flesh hand is warm in the cool breeze. Metal fingers uncurl in the safety of his pocket. Storm clouds overhead look poised for a downpour. He likes the rain—doesn’t like wet socks all that much but supposes there’s a price to pay for all life’s small pleasures and luxuries. Nothing quite like a soak from the sky to remind him that good deeds go punished all the time.

Play the hero, reap the penalty of wet socks. He flexes his toes in his boots and wonders how much ground he can cover before the sun comes up.

There’s nothing for him in New York. It was childish of him to think coming here might answer some question he has about himself that he can’t bear to ask yet. The museum in D.C. gave him some easy ones, some hard ones.

“Bucky Barnes” fell from a train, was never recovered.

He was found, but that person was never recovered. He won’t ever be. The Soldier scuffs the asphalt with one heel and tells himself that’s okay, that it has to be. But it feels hollow just like everything else.

The last human part of him is frozen and buried in a ravine somewhere. Probably that’s where the rest of him belongs, entombed in all that snow with only a dream of warmth to send him into permanent, gnawing sleep.

It’s not in his limited arsenal of memories whether or not he’s had that thought before, but it cuts deeply like it just might be the first time. And because he’s free to do it, he wonders if Rogers ever thought something similar: that sleeping forever might have been a great alternative to the sucking pain of living. But their “lives” have been so utterly different. Their periods of “rest” have been so different.

He wishes he could remember, but he’s grateful, often, that he doesn’t.

If he could, he might know one more time what it was like to be Bucky Barnes, to have the mindset and the wealth of information about that life that may as well not even exist but so impossibly, irreversibly does, even now. He might remember the shape and tone of his thoughts as he was and not recognize the mass of flesh and bone he’s become.

Not that there’s ever been anything to compare to now, for reference. But having the missing footage, the years he lost when his life was his…

He hazards a guess and decides Bucky Barnes could never have imagined the Winter Soldier. Life has either become much crueler, or he led a charmed existence before. Likely another puzzle from the past he’ll never solve. Not by himself.

At the docks on the river, he stands idly looking out at the water and listening. A ways East he can hear two people talking business of a sort. It doesn’t sound entirely legal and when he gets eyes on the exchange, he can see that it really obviously isn’t. Given the nature of the meeting, he figures it’s best to keep himself hidden behind a shipping crate and watches with his cheek pressed to its aluminum siding.

It’s a drug deal in all likelihood. The players involved don’t have any distinguishing features from his vantage point. But he also doesn’t care all that much what they’re up to. He starts to go and stops on instinct when the casual hum of negotiation takes a turn.

Bullets ring out in bursts and he plasters his back flat against the crate. He counts three rounds in between pauses. Several weapons firing at once, trained southwards: an assault coming at them, cornering them with the water at their backs and an unreachable city in front of them. He hears a dense weight crash into the river and then another.

They resurface. He hears them fighting the currents where they’ve fallen. Injured, but alive.

Once the firefight has ceased, he slinks out of his defensive posture and gets another look. He sees a guy in red stood over a motionless attacker dismantling one of the firearms that was just used against him. It might be a variant of the Kalashnikov, but that ID does little to give him any insight into who those people are or what ties they have on the East Coast in general.

He drops his hand from the side of the crate, metal fingers dragging just for a moment on the edge. The tip of his finger catches on a dent in the aluminum and makes the faintest screeching sound.

When he looks up again at the man in red, he’s already staring in his direction. Even with the mask covering half his face, it’s clear he’s looking at him.

He’s not carrying a gun on him. Stupid.

He does have a folded pocket knife tucked in his boot, which seems to be something of an advantage, considering the man in red leaves the guns behind before deliberately making his way across the docks. The Soldier buries his metal hand deep in his jacket pocket and fists the material there to remind himself not to free it unless he absolutely must. It’s not the most inconspicuous of things to have: a metal arm.

There’s no way to really know what the hell the guy in red is even doing here or what he thinks the Soldier is doing here. All he knows is things could escalate, and if they do, the red-masked guy can clearly handle his own in a fight.

But he’s proven countless times that he can handle himself when the chips are down, too.

His head snaps up at the whisper of sound above him—more a reshuffling of atoms than a proper slide of friction and weight.

“You’re the Winter Soldier,” a calm, breathless voice says from atop the crate he’s kept at his back.

They stare at each other.

“What gave it away?” he drawls in English. He’s discovered he’s good at that drawl so many Americans have as a result of their language that’s so historically prone to leveling.

“I recognized you.”

He jumps down easily with a peaceful air about him like all he wants to do is talk. However authentically that demeanor matches his intent, all the Soldier knows when the costumed man’s feet hit the planks is that he’s backed into a wall.

His instinct is to throw himself forward, fists and gravity and inertia and will, but he settles for shifting his feet and squaring his shoulders. The man standing and straightening out before him takes a cautious step back, similarly squaring his shoulders and angling his head slightly to one side.

The Soldier watches him think through what to do and what to say before he settles on: “Why are you in my city?”

“Way I hear it, it was my city first,” he answers coyly with the smallest shrug.

The man watching him cracks a small smile at that. Comfortable as he looks in this interaction, the Soldier can’t make himself blindly trust this person who’s a vigilante or mercenary-for-hire. Neither of those things really bodes well for him, but at least if the guy’s a sell sword he won’t have any reason to abscond with the Soldier’s head tonight.

Unless of course he’s in this part of town at all because someone put out a kill order on a certain rogue Hydra agent.

Red Mask could be working for Hydra.

“No one sent me after you,” he says like he can read the Soldier’s mind. He holds his hands up briefly, gloved palms exposed in a companionable show of harmlessness. The Soldier doesn’t trust those hands at rest either—would entertain the idea of security if he saw them in combat, would have a more fluid approach on how to handle them if they were aimed as weapons at his body. “That’s not why we’re talking.”

“Take a few steps back then.”

They’re at a safe distance, but Red Mask’s subtle, strategically casual shuffling closer has not gone by unobserved. Although he doesn’t regret not having a gun on his person now that he’s taken a minute to size the guy up, their proximity to each other is making him more and more aware of the possibility for hand-to-hand combat. The Soldier’s got seven ways to sneak the knife out of his boot undetected if they come to a close quarters brawl.

“Sure,” Red Mask cedes, raising his shoulders as he carefully backtracks, facing the Soldier all the while. He adds, conversationally, “You never answered my question.”

“Sightseeing,” he replies brusquely. “And yourself?”

Smiling wryly at something he’s heard, Red Mask tells him, “I’m on patrol.”

“You don’t look like police.”

“I’m not.” His expression tightens somewhat—maybe he’s squinting underneath his mask. “The papers call me Daredevil.”

The Soldier’s expression flickers, shutters lifting for a moment to reflect the realization of who Red Mask apparently is. He makes his face indiscernible once he’s caught himself staring and says, “That they do.”

He’d seen the headlines on all the papers at all the newsstands. Probably he should have pieced it together before now. It seems so obvious in hindsight.

Daredevil.

The name sounds like a sideshow attraction. Most outliers in society do. He squeezes the lining of his pocket with his metal hand and bites the inside of his cheek.

“There are a lot of bad people looking for you. Do you know that?”

The Soldier grunts, uninterested in those so-called bad people. He just keeps his eyes on ‘Daredevil’.

“What, are you here to protect me?”

The words seethe and drip with sarcasm. He’s a warrior scraped off the battlefield and pieced together with shrapnel and congealed blood. No one on this earth can protect him. He’ll destroy anyone who condescends to try, now. Now that it’s too late. Now that there’s nothing in him left to be saved or redeemed.

“It’s not like that,” Daredevil assures him with something like sincerity in his voice. Who can really say, though, since the guy leads a double life and probably lies habitually to those closest to him? “But I should really take you in, just to be safe. If anyone makes a move to pick you up…”

He stops listening momentarily.

Should really take you in.

Bring him in.

Just to be safe-house on the water, a clear exit from the coast to the interstate.

If anyone makes a move—move in, we’re onsite.

“…a lot of innocent people could get hurt.”

To himself the Soldier murmurs, “Innocent,” like the word itself might exorcise the flurry of jumbled thoughts and voices from his mind. Some of those spirits haunt him with voices not his own in languages from farther reaches of the world than New York.

Daredevil takes a step closer and the Soldier gets the hilt of his knife cradled in his palm, metal arm pulled studiously back. He isn’t at full throttle yet, but his heart skips a beat all the same. His chest tightens and he listens to the wind for a slower tempo to mimic. A shaky breath catches in his throat. The blade springs out from the protective handle like an extension of his arm.

“Stay. Back.”

“Okay,” he answers gently, arms up and out as he retreats one step and then another. His footwork is practiced and slow like that of a gymnast or a dancer: or a trained martial artist, which makes the most sense. The Soldier keeps the edge of the blade horizontal and in line with Daredevil’s throat in case he comes close again. “Barnes, I need you to hear me.”

“Don’t.”

“I…it’s not safe for you out in public like this. People will come for you.” Daredevil pauses and the corners around his mouth pinch uncertainly. He doesn’t like that he has to say what comes next. “They’ll come for the Winter Soldier.

“And I’d rather not have to fight you and them.”

The Soldier blinks. “Why would you fight them?”

Tripped up and visibly affronted at the question, Daredevil says, “That clandestine Neo-Nazi organization comes anywhere near Hell’s Kitchen I’ll put their operatives in a cell. I can promise you that.”

He squints. It’s an anti-climactic threat in the face of everything Hydra is and does. But, considering Hydra’s mantra, arresting known affiliates might be better than putting them in the ground.

Cut off one head, sure, two more spring out.

Subject one of them to the justice system? The essence of the motto just doesn’t apply. Hydra agents go into the field looking to die before they let themselves be captured, turned, or God forbid, rescued.

Morior invictus.

I die unconquered.

“You seem confident,” the Soldier croons, fingers tightening over the texturized handle of the knife, “that they’d let you arrest them.”

“I don’t think they’d let me do anything,” he answers with a strange, young smile on his mouth. “But the fact is I’d do it.”

They watch each other, and for all his pessimistic realism, the Soldier believes him. Even in spite of the inherent deception his concealed identity perpetuates, Daredevil strikes him as forthcoming to the point of being too honest.

So he flips the knife in his hand into a less lethal position, holds it at his hip without bending to sheath it in his boot, and says, “Be that as it may.”

“You won’t let me take you into custody.”

He sounds disappointed. The Soldier doesn’t blame him. There’s enough of that to go around—enough blame and disappointment to could swallow the city whole. It’s perhaps the deadliest weapon anyone could use against him: the blame for Hydra’s agenda, the disappointment of the U.S. government, the blame for the genocidal apocalypse Pierce sent him to fulfill, the disappointment of America’s mascot and model super soldier.

It shouldn’t have been difficult to bear between his lost memories and the phantom pains and the nightmare flashbacks he primarily ignores. He tells himself it’s not. The empty feeling persists.

“I won’t keep you if you don’t want to be kept. Just, humor me. One more question.”

The Soldier waits. Courtesy is one of a few things he can spare for someone more inclined to release him than he is to force his hand.

“Why save that kid back in Lenox Hill? I was on my way there to break it up, but there was no need.” He gives the Soldier a few seconds to respond. When he doesn’t reply, Daredevil says, “You sure you’re just here for the view?”

Defensive but passing it off as dismissive he says, “I was just passing by.”

The truth of this encounter hits him one fact at a time: the Soldier interfered in civilian affairs, exposed himself to the scrutiny of a masked vigilante in the process, and was tailed here by said vigilante after the fact. His defenses hadn’t even been tripped.

Daredevil will probably continue to keep him under surveillance as long as he’s anywhere in the vicinity of Manhattan, but whether that’s a horrible thing or a reasonable thing, the Soldier has no idea. He bristles at the notion of being monitored by anyone, but rationally he’s aware that he was, at one time, very, very good at working under constant supervision.

Can something like that be soldered into a person’s DNA? If it could for anyone, it would have for him, after everything.

“You gonna keep an eye on me from now on?” He asks disdainfully, needing to put it into words—needing to resist. Part of him snaps viciously at the corrupted section of his DNA trying to accept Daredevil’s implied but fixed terms. “That how it works with the bad guys you don’t feel like arresting?”

“I already told you I’m not police,” Daredevil tells him, voice soft and lined with something that sounds like compassion. “I’m not gonna watch every move you make, but if there’s trouble anywhere in Manhattan I’m there. If you happen to be at the center of it you’re gonna see me again. That’s how this works.”

The Soldier nods, folds the pocket knife, and slips it back into his boot. He can agree to that arrangement. Moreover, it looks like it’s one he’s being asked to accept.

“Then I’ll see you when I see you.”

Daredevil ducks his head and steps away, letting the Soldier pass before jumping up onto the crate and sinking into a crouch. He doesn’t look in the Soldier’s direction when he says, “I hope you’ll let me help you when that time comes, Barnes.”

He’s gone before the Soldier can snarl at him not to get his hopes up. It’s probably for the best.

The night is dark and he walks through it, stopping every now and then for a climbable tree or a building with minimal or no security to scale. He likes being high up, in a roundabout way. It inspires a faint, feeble fear in him that feels too soft to be his most days. It’s easy to sleep like that—a long way above the ground safely cocooned in a vulnerable, animal phobia that he can’t explain.

At some obscure hour of the night he ends up back on the Brooklyn Bridge looking down at the water. It’s tranquil and black in the dark. The night isn’t a cold one but there’s a breeze every now and then that makes him glad he has a jacket on. He watches the sunrise for the second time in as many days and crushes the strangled sensation of pain in his chest that accompanies the sight of the billowing flag.

When the doors open to the public at 8 sharp, he walks into the botanical garden through the Washington Avenue entrance and pays the $12.00 fee for adults in cash (he did return Hair Gel’s wallet relatively untouched, aside from a few stray bills).

He tentatively follows signs that lead him to the Cherry Esplanade which is luminous in the bleak morning with glossy pink. Halfway down the path he has to stop and look up at the gossamer canopy capturing the gray-white sunrays, letting only chinks of light through. Some of the more impressive boughs have streams of flowers that droop like the leaves of a Weeping Willow.

Two women pass by, one of them carrying a sketchpad in one arm and sketching with her free hand. Her hair is deep brown and falls down her back in tight, orderly ringlets. She’s a few inches taller than the woman walking at her side with her hands clasped behind her back and her black hair woven into a messy bun atop her head.

The one not carrying anything says, in a smooth, rich voice he didn’t expect, “I read in the pamphlet that the blossoms will fall soon. They do that after they bloom.”

“Don’t most things?” her companion says offhandedly in a voice that’s more like bells.

She directs her gaze out at the trees as her pencil hovers over the gray-and-dark-gray lines on her sketchpad. He can see the straight line of her nose when she tilts her head back to look up at the trees.

“Well, yeah, of course, but that’s the thing about cherry blossoms. They’re here for a little while and then right when they’re the most beautiful, they have to go. It’s like Nature’s way of reminding us how short life is.”

“Okay, it’s sort of pretty when you say it like that,” the sketching woman allows, turning to look at her friend.

The Soldier sees the profile of her smile and wonders distantly why he’s still looking at them.

The woman who read the pamphlet makes a humming sound through closed lips and kisses the other chastely, playfully on the mouth. He tears his eyes away and makes his feet move. Near the end of the trail where the path diverges into two he sidesteps a young child in overalls veering around the corner with arms spread wide mimicking the sound of a propeller with their lips. A winded man runs after the now maniacally laughing child.

“André!”

He looks over his shoulder at the pair of them, marveling at the child’s ability to elude the adult. It would be entertaining if it wasn’t also quite a spectacle—one that he really can’t be a part of.

The end of the Cherry Esplanade takes him to the Bluebell Wood where he’s struck by the inversion of colors and their placement in his sightline. In contrast to the weightless pink dappling the sky like crushed pastels, the bluebells are a vivid blue and manage to still hang down even as their stalks push them toward the sky. As he’s watching them, the clouds edge across the blocked sun and the light filtering through the birch and beech leaves warms from silver to gold.

He walks through the wood and silently takes in the trees and amorphous shadows pierced through by light. Once, he has to stop to watch a bee patiently explore a seemingly wilted blue flower. Its tiny body shifts and expands in its intricate search and process of pollination. The bee is as old as the birch trees: ancient creations dancing the same few steps ingrained in them from the very beginning of their lines, from the dawn of time.

The bee probably came first.

It also leaves first. The Soldier stares after it and walks aimlessly down the path toward Daffodil Hill, imagining a time far removed from the present when the earth was green with constantly renewed life and multitudinous bounty.

He must have been studying the bee in the Bluebell Wood for a while because the couple from earlier—the female couple—passes him again. The brunette is sketching what looks to be a leafless tree with many branches. Her shorter companion has an arm draped along the small of her back and her other hand buried deep in her pocket, not unlike the Soldier’s. The picture on the sign for Daffodil Hill advertises stout yellow flowers that aren’t presently in bloom.

The brunette artist says, nonchalantly, with her attention split between the sketchpad and the sloping mounds of grass that are still lovely for all that they are commonplace, “So the cherry blossoms are to show us that life is beautiful and temporary and the bluebells are for humility and gratitude. What does the pamphlet say about daffodils?”

He keeps his eyes trained on the green grass and imagines the even spread of awkwardly two-toned yellow flower petals that they missed by a month. Behind him he can hear the quiet rustling of waxy paper.

“Says they represent the coming of spring, bad hair days, cheesy pop songs on the radio…”

The Soldier wrinkles his nose. The voice more like bells retorts, laughing, “That’s not what it says.”

“Just wanted to see if you were paying attention.”

The brunette artist with the voice like bells makes a ‘tsk’ noise. The Soldier has to agree.

“So what do they actually mean then?”

“Basically what all the others mean: winter ends, spring makes a comeback.”

“Aaliyah, what does the pamphlet say?”

“Okay, fine. They’re supposed to stand for truth and honesty, which probably comes from the snow melting and everything underneath finally being revealed again in the springtime. And when they bloom it’s like we’re supposed to remember that even the coldest winter can be a precursor to really beautiful things.”

“Hmm, sucky winters and melting snow. See? I listened.”

The Soldier glances in the direction of that voice when it passes him up. The deeper-voiced woman with the darker hair, the one called Aaliyah, mumbles, “Yeah, pigs are gonna fly.”

But their hands are connected at the seams of their fingers, soft padded tips draped over knuckles and palms cupped in alignment. The sketchpad is cradled between the taller woman’s arm and chest, the drawing forgone in favor of allowing this exchange—which he should not be watching—to happen without a hitch.

Out of a desire to give them the privacy they’ve probably thought they had all along, he breaks away from their path and goes left when they go right down a fork in the trail. His road takes him to the Magnolia Plaza which is a sensory overload if any of the gardens have been. The white flowers look sheer and frosted from a distance. As he draws nearer he can see that there are variations along the red side of the color spectrum: pinks and yellows and violets. Some of them are genuinely white, even up close.

His walk is quiet but does perk up slightly when he hears faintly from the way he just came, “André!”

The Soldier bites back a smile, wondering about children and whether he was like this child with such an affinity for pantomiming airplanes. Surely he was a boy, once. He didn’t erupt out of the earth like those soldiers gesticulated from dragon teeth sewn into the soil.

What kind of child was he? A noisy one? An ill-tempered one? Had he been prone to colds? Did he like to be held? Would he cry if he skinned his knee? Was he difficult to feed?

And as a teenager, what was he like then? Did he speak his mind often? Was he more likely to storm out of a room in order to avoid a difficult conversation? Would he seek to help others or himself first? Was it more to his taste to suffer in silence or to explode in an argument?

When the war came, did he feel brave to join the fight for his country? Was he afraid when he was taken the first time, or the second time, by the enemy? Had he pushed the hardest for the sake of his duty, or were his priorities elsewhere? What did his family think of his disappearance? Would they have rejoiced to know he was alive all along?

He can answer that final question. No.

Better a corpse here, at home, then a warm body in a faraway place never quite far enough. Disease and violence are similar in that respect, and he supposes that he was both as the Winter Soldier—a dangerous thing to be quarantined when not in active use: a bioweapon.

He haunts the Magnolia Plaza, staring up at the flowers quivering in the breeze as the child André saunters past him and ambitiously attempts to scale a hedge. It’s at least as tall as the kid is, but he makes astonishingly quick work of it. The Soldier tries not to react but he does turn away when the kid rolls over the top of the hedge and lands in the grass on the other side.

“André, you’re killing me, boy.”

The Soldier keeps his hands held steadily in his pockets as the boy’s father (his father?) reaches over the hedge to scoop up the squirming child, who squeals in delighted laughter to be caught. His father just huffs a sigh and shakes his head. The Soldier hears how his sigh tapers at the end in the semblance of a laugh.

“Дети,” he murmurs under his breath, sliding his gaze back to the beaux art Administrative Building.

He takes his time moving from the ancient presence of the magnolias to the water lilies, encountering an ornate fountain, a dome-shaped greenhouse, and flowering eastern redbud trees but no water lilies. Most of the rest of his walk is quiet.

At the Lily Pool Terrace he doesn’t see the people he crossed paths with before, but he overhears conversations from new groups and couples and running, yelling children. He keeps his head down and his collar pulled up to hide the bottom edges of his face. It’s worked to mask his identity this long with the one exception of Daredevil, but he figures that was an extenuating circumstance.

An outlier in society is always likelier to produce statistically improbable outcomes than a run-of-the-mill civilian. He’d seen the guy fight, though, and he definitely isn’t run-of-the-mill or a civilian.

The visitors to the garden shuffle in and out. They come and go while he shifts his attention from garden to garden, soaking in all the colors and smells associated with keeping up a place like this with so much dirt and such a thriving population of bees and all the subtly aggressive pollen sailing on the breeze.

He watches the bluebells until he memorizes the mesmerizing sway of the bloom in the wind, he studies the bricks in the lily pool until he can map out the lay of each sandstone block by heart, and he retraces his steps through the rock garden enough times to remember the distribution and intensity of every purple, orange, and blue pigment in the flowers that grow in wild bunches like sea anemone.

It’s goodbye.

When the gardens close and he has to leave, he heads northwest toward the Brooklyn Bridge to watch the night approach in the company of tourists, locals, and the American flag. He spends the hour after dusk lifting his face to the cool rush of night and remembering the Brooklyn Botanic Garden with his eyes recklessly closed.

The East River coos a hushed melody of nonsense beneath him: slow, solemn chords that could be anguished or could be blissful. It’s difficult to say with the hokum surrounding running water. To him it just sounds like psalms uttered from the depths of Nature’s subconscious mind—the voiced, disquiet hum of centuries and millennia of noise and void and chaos.

He hears someone breathe behind him and turns to see six men and a woman in body armor that could pass for street clothes—armor that could pass if not for the outlines of holsters at their sides. The harness crisscrossing over the woman’s chest clearly supports a long blade mounted on her back.

Between the seven of them he counts twelve firearms on the men, eight blades including the woman’s ostensible cutlery, and a pair of cuffs on every one of them designed to withstand his metal arm. He’s not certain at a first cursory glance, but any of the twelve guns he clocked might actually be Tasers.

Any of those potential Tasers might be a scrambler specifically engineered to de-power his arm. With the influx of information released in the leak, anyone could have whipped up a counter-agent to what is now his most identifiable and contested weapon. He braces himself and waits for the din to kick up and the dust to scatter.

One of the men with a stun grenade peeking out from the flap of his unzipped jacket muses, “You’re a long way from home, Zimny.”

He sneers the fabricated nickname, butchering the pronunciation entirely.

Another man with a Standard USMC-issued Ka-Bar on his hip says, “We’ve got orders to take you in.”

The others stand stark still. He matches them, barely expanding his ribs to breathe.

“I don’t like your odds in a 7-to-1 melee, soldier,” the woman croons, all stern clout and authority that her male counterparts boast but clearly lack. “Do you?”

“In a bottleneck like this,” he says, flicking his head to one side but keeping his eyes on the mass of people taking up most of the walkway, “Sure.”

“So he does speak,” a tall man with two blades and a gun- or Taser-shaped mass at his hip remarks condescendingly. He eases one of those blades out of its sheath and the Soldier gets a look at it while its holder carelessly waves the point in his direction. It’s a goddamn Leuku. “I was told you didn’t speak.”

“You know how to use Finnish steel, мудила?” he growls, pronouncing the Russian smoothly, threateningly. “Need me to show you?”

“What’d he call me?” the man with the Leuku mutters to another agent who snickers without offering a translation.

“Enough.” They fall dead silent at the woman’s command. “Come with us quietly, now.”

He considers it. Really, truly he does.

“Not on your life.”

“Then you leave us no choice.”

With that she unsheathes a katana—a katana—from over her shoulder, and the men flanking her go for their guns. He gets there first and disarms one before he can get the Soldier in his sights. The weapon at that agent’s side is a standard CEW that the Soldier uses to incapacitate the man who understood his Russian taunt.

He empties a full clip of the gun he lifted at the wall of attackers closing in on him. At a break in the gunfire he goes hand-to-hand with the agent who’s clipped himself to a stun grenade. He’s yanked in close and uses that opportunity to detach the grenade from the man’s jacket. Holding it close to his body so it remains unseen, he covertly separates it from the safety pin.

An EMP burst seizes all the way down his metal arm, a spasm coursing down those fingers that causes him to drop the grenade. A proper bullet stings his leg in time with the grenade’s activation. His attackers are briefly, but thoroughly subdued by the unexpected flash. The force of the bullet took him off his feet, but they aren’t in a position to bombard him while he’s down.

Having managed to shield his eyes from the blast, it’s just the disrupted fluid in his ears that gives him problems. The deafening explosion so close to him leaves his balance wanting.

He falls sideways into the bridge railing and unsteadily lifts a Beretta off an agent’s belt. That agent is struggling to his feet when the Soldier pistol whips him. He grabs the CEW off the man’s side before he crumples to the floor and uses it to take down another disoriented Hydra agent.

Two more throw themselves at him while his metal arm is in the process of recalibrating from the EMP. One has a knife aimed for his heart and the other a 9MM. He grabs the hand with the gun when it comes for him, breaks the wrist in his grip, and deflects the knife with the man’s borrowed forearm.

He head butts the man now robbed of his knife—the Leuku. With that threat neutralized, he slams his fist into the stabbed man’s solar plexus hard enough to drop him right there, even in spite of his malfunctioning metal arm.

The Soldier stands straight and flings the Leuku unceremoniously beside its owner. He looks up to find the last agent standing—the woman—calmly pointing a gun at him. She must have taken it from one of her fallen compatriots because he checked her for a holster when they first walked up on him.

The plates in his metal arm shift and emit a mechanical whirring sound as he quietly catches his breath. He drops the gun in his hand, removes the one he tucked in between his back and the waistband of his jeans, and drops that one, too. It kills him a little bit, but he even parts with the lovely Ka-Bar, tossing it near a motionless heap of a man at his feet.

She studies him critically for a moment and makes an inexplicable looping motion over the ground with one foot. Her knee kicks up to toss a katana into the air that she catches expertly by the hilt. It flies forcefully in his direction and he angles his body away from the blade to catch it with his metal hand.

She tosses the gun she’s holding over the railing and reaches calmly over her shoulder for a second katana.

He thinks to himself, Блядь.

Before he can contemplate an escape plan she charges him, all hard, heavy attacks that he parries for the most part because they’re slow and easy to predict. The second he categorizes her style as brute-force offensive, her attacks get lighter, faster, and deadlier. She plays with him and eventually knocks the katana out of his hand before pulling her arm back, all geared up to run him through with the blade.

Pushed to desperate evasive tactics, he catches the katana in his metal hand, tugs it toward him, and rams the butt of its hilt into the side of her head. She’s stunned by the blow but doesn’t go down, which is awkward, and then disastrous.

Her close proximity gives her the opportunity but not quite the angle to drag the katana back down and perforate the muscle along his clavicle, dangerously close to his neck. Immediately there’s blood everywhere and icy panic spiking through his system. He evades the thrust of the blade and gets her in a standing arm lock. She loses the katana but worms her way out of his hold.

She’s about to come for him again, relentless in her pursuit, when a shade drops down from the overhead arch behind her. The Soldier staggers back toward the railing for support and watches a pair of red-sleeved arms close around her neck and efficiently wrestle her to the ground where she joins her team of seven, body thrashing as if with electricity.

The Soldier slides down into a sitting position with his back against the railing. He holds his flesh hand to his profusely bleeding wound as he watches.

“Persistent, aren’t we Chaplain?” a cheery voice says moments before releasing her. A tall man decked out in a red suit approaches the Soldier where he’s slumped over with his legs splayed out and his hand clutching blood and the shredded fibers of his jacket. “Whoa, not doing so hot, are we, Barnes?”

He crouches a respectable distance from the Soldier, who still flinches into the railing at his unannounced intention. The man roots around in a compartment on his belt, paying no heed to the Soldier’s clear distrust.

“The one and the same, judging by that fine piece of machinery,” the unnamed man says matter-of-factly before removing a thick roll of white gauze that doesn’t look proportional to the compartment it came from. “Sorry to barge in on your party uninvited, Sarge. Well, technically, I was invited—by this merry band of cutthroats, to be exact.”

The stranger angles his head at the many unconscious bodies littering the otherwise deserted bridge. The Soldier’s head spins.

“What?” the masked man squawks. “Of course it was always the plan to go AWOL.”

Exploding, the Soldier yells, “Who the hell are you?”

There’s a brief sigh of silence between them and the other man grins through his mask. It’s visible. Through the mask. His grin.

“Name’s Wade Wilson, Sir. I also go by Deadpool. And D Pooly, if the mood calls for it. I’d shake your hand, but then I’d have to drop this cushy First-Aid stuff. That would be bad. Think you can manage it?”

Wilson daintily offers the wad of gauze, a sensible gesture that the Soldier pushes through the most singed of his nerves to accept. His metal hand is fairly untouched by the blood so he unwraps the gauze with those fingers and his teeth.

He manages to do a fairly decent job of patching up the deep slash through his shoulder, but now both his hands are coated with blood. The dressing helps to staunch the bleeding and that’s about it, but that’s all he needs it to do.

“Ooh, soldier, you look like the ghost of Sebastian Stan. You should sit this next part out.”

“What?”

But Wilson is already standing to his feet and running toward the other side of the bridge singing, “When I’m alone with only my dreams of you that won’t come true, what’ll I do?” at the top of his lungs.

The Soldier closes his eyes and tries to visualize bees pollinating flowers, trees swaying in the wind, the tranquil babbling of a manmade fountain, or the whisper of the sky crossing over the water. It doesn’t work. Wilson sings louder than he thinks.

Gunfire startles him out of his reverie and he retrieves the first weapon he can get off one of the unconscious Hydra agents. He pockets a Taser, manages to reacquaint himself with that stunning Ka-Bar from earlier, and resettles with an empty Beretta he doesn’t have time to swap out for a loaded one.

The four agents Wilson is fighting on the other side of the bridge are accompanied by three more on the Soldier’s side. He claws his way to his feet, realizing that he hurts at all right now because of the bullet in his thigh that’s sending shooting pains up to his sacrum and down to his aching knee.

He shoots the agent closest to him in the kneecap and the two remaining agents attempt to flank him. One of them pulls a sawed off pump shotgun and the other arms himself with a Ka-Bar like the one the Soldier has. As the two of them face off with their respective steel blades, he sees the shotgun list down in the direction of their legs, which sounds about right: take out his legs, but leave the arm intact.

There’s a strong chance a shot at this range with the two of them so close would take out both their legs, especially if it’s buckshot. Best case scenario would be a .410 bore, and even then they’re too close. They’re moving too much.

Precision is an impossible outcome, and it’s not what they’re aiming for anyway. Hydra would do it. Hydra would shoot through a field agent to get him.

In spite of his concerns, the man engaging him is good with the knife. He prevents him from doing anything about the shotgun outside of merely being frightfully aware of it. The Soldier does what he can to keep the knife-wielder in between himself and the shotgun, but his hands are tied.

He knows before it happens that the man is going to pull the trigger. It’s just inevitable.

When the shotgun goes off he grits his teeth against the noise and prepares himself for a world of old, but incomprehensibly new pain that never comes.

His legs and feet remain solid beneath him. The man he’s fighting turns to investigate the sound and while he’s distracted, the Soldier cracks him over the temple, hard, with his metal fist.

“Wilson,” he tests the name.

He tries again upon really seeing the telltale red of the suit accompanying one of the prone, unmoving bodies on the ground. The Soldier nudges a red-clad hip with his foot, notices the blood, and holds his ground against the slow wave of nausea creeping up on him.

He’d hoped there wouldn’t be any bodies for him to have to throw into the river. It would be a damn shame for the only casualty to have been a tentative ally: bad luck, not economically viable, and the opposite of inconspicuous.

“Ow.”

“…Wilson?”

“Ow, and fuck. Oh, wait. Owwww—’s a good thing ‘s not a movie,” he whines. “I already said it at the compound before. Ohhh, ow.” Disconsolate, he adds, “As if swearing’s the worst a kid could see in a theater today.”

The Soldier closes his eyes and after a moment, helps roll Wilson over. He’s curious about all the blood, wonders if he might have shot the gunman.

—Except there’s a crater in Wilson’s side right about where one of his kidneys should be. The edges of the hole smoke and the haphazardly oozing blood looks as unconcerned by the damage as Wilson does. Even as slippery ropes of intestine sluggishly topple over the opening in his guts, Wilson pays the carnage no mind.

“He does look shocked, doesn’t he?” Wilson mumbles, slurring his words around gasping breaths. “Guess we’re the only ones who read our comics anymore.”

The Soldier blinks.

“You’re talking,” still he only barely refrains from saying. Abruptly it makes sense. “You’ve got an accelerated healing factor.”

“All the cool kids have ‘em nowadays.”

His instincts tell him to leave. A sense of propriety he doesn’t possess, but perhaps once did, suggests that he wait.

In a controlled fall, he sits a few feet away from Wilson who is still laid out on his back. His arms fall out at his sides, wrists at level with his shoulders. Very faintly, he’s humming the same song from earlier under his breath, cutting himself off every now and then to grunt something unintelligible before slipping back into song.

At least the Soldier doesn’t have to touch him to know he’s still breathing.

“Why turn on them?” the Soldier asks when he can’t stand the droning, off-key humming any longer. “They’re Hydra. They’ll report back to their base of operations and bar you from further participation within the organization.”

“Uh, slow your roll there, Winter.” His voice sounds dauntingly unaffected by the destruction of his midsection, but the tremble at the end suggests he is in some kind of pain. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Why else would you have come out with them on this mission if you didn’t want to join their ranks?”

“To stop them. Seriously? Captain Devastating-Face would never let me be an Avenger if I captured you for those jerks.”

“Captain…”

“Captain America,” Wilson grunts, pushing himself to sit up and scooping uselessly at the soupy innards that eke out of him. “I’m sure his opinions about that face aren’t what they would have been seventy years ago. Oh, shut it.”

The Soldier expels a heavy sigh and blearily focuses his attention on digging bullet fragments out of his thigh with the Ka-Bar. Not the most sanitary method since he has to reopen closed gashes to get at the mess of flesh beneath, but he’s gone through worse.

Wilson doesn’t seem all that surprised, but why would he? Clearly he’s got issues of his own to work through, not the least of which is a busted gut.

“Wait.” He looks at Wilson and narrows his eyes. “Are you working for him?”

“Which him? This universe is of a sausage fest in case you didn’t notice. Well, with the exception of Chaplain, and isn’t she exceptional.”

The Soldier grits his teeth and flicks a larger shard of metal out of his leg. A steady trickle of gore flows from the wound. Through an impatient hiss he says, “Captain America. Are you working for him?”

“Hell, I wish. It’s just me. A lonely merc on the run, a candle in the wind—”

“I got it,” the Soldier cuts him off, nostrils flaring around an especially deep fragment he scrapes out with the Ka-Bar. “You said you’re a cutthroat. I got it the first time.”

“Man, there’s nothing for a guy’s self-esteem like being remembered by a hunky super soldier. If only Captain America would hop on the bandwagon,” Wilson says, trailing off briefly before saying, in a hushed voice, “Not as a villain, as one of the good guys!”

The Soldier stands, really at his limit with this one-sided dialogue—and especially done with Wilson’s obvious adoration of Steve Rogers.

“You’re not leaving, are you? But we were just starting to bond!”

“I can’t stay here. We’re exposed on this bridge as it is, and we’ve got limited exits. You can make like I shot you as long as these agents stay down long enough for you to get clear. Way I see it you can still make it out of this with your life.”

He turns his back on Wilson but has to stop walking when he hears the sickening squelch of something wet. He spins around and Wilson is on his feet wiping a huge Bowie knife off on his leg.

The Soldier’s gaze drops unwillingly to the mercenary’s feet. A good portion of his intestines sits on the polished wood, cleanly severed from his body.

Flippantly, as if he hasn’t just been eviscerated, Wilson announces, “Special Assignment: TAC-team, fifteen agents on the bridge and at least double that back in Brooklyn. Our odds are better in Manhattan, and I know where all the rendezvous points are. You’re better with me, Sir.”

He can’t make himself believe in the final statement. Wilson’s conviction is alarming.

“I’ll be tiptop pretty soon,” Wilson says through a laugh that is equal parts disturbing and reassuring. He starts to fumble with another roll of gauze he produces from behind his back and mumbles, “Just gotta keep it in until my skin grows back, yep. Ain’t no thang.”

The Soldier doesn’t wait up but he does look over his shoulder to check the state of his hanger-on. Wilson walks and bandages the hole in his abdomen at the same time.

They make it off the bridge without incident and take an obscure detour through Columbus Park. The routes they take are empty this time of night, and Wilson redirects their course as needed, seemingly at random.

He offers mundane information about the units frequenting various stations like, “They’ve got Moreno. She’s not a bad shot. She’s also in a bowling league. You can’t trust someone who rolls balls in borrowed shoes for fun.”

Or, “I met Huong in the Galapagos last spring and he never called me back. I didn’t call him back either, but it’s the principle of the thing. Rejection gives me hives.”

“You don’t have those already?” the Soldier mumbles from Wilson’s left.

He’s gotten an eyeful of Wilson’s marred flesh by now. The lesions from the shotgun blast have healed over into scar tissue, and that’s only the part of him that’s visible from under the bloody gauze and his tattered uniform. He can’t imagine what the GSW itself must look like.

Wilson hesitates but says, jovial as ever, “Hives are what you get from an allergic reaction. I don’t get those, unless you could call regeneration an allergic reaction to bullets. I’d roll with that.”

The Soldier looks down instinctively at Wilson’s hand when he reaches for his side, but he just works it under the bandage and scratches his stomach.

He scans the quiet buildings around them and mutters, “Probably don’t get stage fright either.”

Wilson laughs at that and says, “Oh tin man you do have a sense of humor. I worried those Hydra douches sucked it all out of you.”

“Shut your mouth, Wilson,” he snaps, irritated. His shoulder aches bitterly where he’s been cut open. He rolls it carefully and presses his lips together around the sound of protest that dies in his throat. Pain simmers under his throat, trying to be felt. Instead of shouting himself hoarse until he’s got nothing left, he says, “Or we’ll see how long it takes your tongue to grow back.”

He shouldn’t encourage him. It was stupid to say anything in the first place.

“Dude, harsh,” Wilson replies, tone too flat. “Forty minutes. Been there, done that.”

The Soldier closes his eyes and takes a breath, the words, “Если мы выживем – я тебя сам прикончу, ей-богу,” riding the train of his exhale.

“Gosh, should that be as dreamy as it is?”

It doesn’t sound like Wilson really meant for him to hear that, but there’s no way to know without asking. The Soldier resolutely does not ask.

So he goes with a safer question: “Where are we even going, Wilson? I’m bleeding out here.”

“Still? Jeez, not much of a healing factor, is it?”

It’s spoken playfully. Wilson’s teasing him. He’s definitely going to test out the ‘forty minutes’ thing if they get a chance to stop somewhere. As it is, Wilson keeps them on the move, which is wise, considering the heat they keep narrowly avoiding. The Soldier’s started to take notice of the plain-clothes agents milling about on street corners, some of them posing as homeless.

“That’s disgraceful,” he hears himself grumbling on yet another rooftop. To Wilson, “Where have they left the civilians in all this?”

“The civilians? They’re just part of the scenery, my metal-licious friend.”

He bristles at the casual use of the word—and less at the made-up adjective. Maybe he deserves some ridicule for the hives comment earlier.

“Anyway, you asked about our destination. Penn Station’s at the end of our magical quest.”

They clear the gap between two rooftops. The Soldier dives into a roll and white hot pain burns in his shoulder where he’s torn the gash open. He messily catches himself on his metal hand and sits back on his heels. The sensation of fire under his skin begins just over his heartbeat, radiating upward and outward. His metal fingers screech against the concrete, balling up into a fist.

“What’s in Penn Station?” the Soldier grits out.

“Trains,” Wilson answers innocently, even looking a little wide-eyed from behind the mask when the Soldier glances at him. “Uh, you need a minute?”

To the ground he says, “We don’t have a minute.”

“Bullshit, we’ve got ten if you need ‘em. I’ll keep watch.”

“Wilson.” The Soldier sighs. “What’s at Penn Station?”

“I told you: trains. And a rail yard.”

“What good are those going to do us?” he asks through his teeth. “If I find out you’re taking me to them…”

“I’m not! I’ve killed and I’ve stolen for money, sure, who hasn’t? But I don’t touch what people like that would do if they got their hands on you again.”

Pushing forward to sit on his knees, the Soldier seethes, “And what’s that, Wilson? Since you seem to think you have any idea.”

Wilson fumbles at the soaked dressing around his midsection and drops it to the ground at his feet. It looks and sounds like his fallen intestines did, saturated as it is with his blood. The patch of healed skin unmistakably solid and flesh-colored, smeared amply with flecks of dried blood. His skin where the shotgun got him is raised in some places and dimpled in others. Even in the dark the puckered tissue has a glossy sheen to it. Wilson calmly lifts the mask up over his head.

His face isn’t what the Soldier expected. He imagined a manic grin or wild eyes, but Wilson just looks like his scars. He looks like trauma compressed and sealed over, compressed and sealed over.

He wonders if that’s what he looks like, minus the keloids.

“Not that I strip down for just anyone with an impressive service record, but I’ve dealt with my share of secret government sectors doing sanctioned and unsanctioned work on the Build-an-Übermensch Initiative. I’ve been that ill-gotten Übermensch.”

Wilson waves a hand at his scantly-clothed middle and then at his face. The devil-may-care, singsong tone of his voice makes less sense than usual paired with the stoic, glazed expression on his face. His smile is horrible and ironic when his lips part to show his teeth. He holds up a finger and wags it to indicate negation.

“They’re scum and I’ll die and come back twice before I hand you over to them.”

The deep furrow in his brow does look right in conjunction with his solemn rumbled promise—and it is a promise. As much as the Soldier might not fully trust in the practice, he can see it for what it is: an oath.

Wilson pulls his mask back on and says, “We good, Grumpy Cat?”

“Whatever, Wilson,” he answers, uncomfortable for several reasons but finally more in the ballpark of feeling like a human being, at least. “And if you die a third time, guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Wilson guffaws. “See, it’s funny because we already crossed a bridge today!”

The Soldier groans and gets to his feet.

“As much as you talk, you still haven’t said why we’re going to Penn Station.”

“Didn’t anybody ever tell you, Sarge? Location, location, location!”

Wilson dives off the ledge of the building and the Soldier follows him. What else is he going to do?

That they’re nearing Hell’s Kitchen doesn’t go unnoticed to him, but Wilson doesn’t mention Daredevil or if he’s part of the plan for extraction—if there even is an extraction designated to go down at Penn Station. He doesn’t expect there to be one, but that’s all he can think of in association with trains and the rail yard.

On a bridge overlooking the rail yards, he lets Wilson take a few steps ahead of him toward the safety rail. He lifts the firearm from Wilson’s thigh holster and presses the muzzle to the small of his back. Wilson instinctively raises both hands.

It’s a heavy piece but with nice balance: a Browning Hi-Power Practical.

“I gotta say that’s not how I hoped you’d touch my thigh if you were ever gonna touch my thigh.”

The Soldier ignores him to ask, “These hollow points, Wilson?”

“Only the best, Sarge.”

“Point-blank, .40 caliber Smith & Wesson. That take forty minutes to heal up, too?”

“Eh, twenty five.” He shrugs minutely on the other end of the Practical’s barrel. “You’re not gonna waste my ammo now that we’re here, are ya, Barnes? That’d be a bummer. And here I thought I’d won you over with my charms and feminine wiles.”

“Tell me why we’re at the Hudson Rail Yards and you get your gun back. If this is as far as your knowledge of Hydra’s plants in Manhattan goes, then this is where we part ways.”

Wilson says nothing. The Soldier frowns and takes a step back, lowering the gun as he does.

“You don’t know where they are beyond the rail yard.”

“They’re positive they’ve got you boxed in between the dozens of kill-zones they’ve got set up all around New York,” Wilson answers quickly, nervously. He gains some confidence in his position and adds, “That’s just Brooklyn and Manhattan—Queens is a deathtrap. Forget Staten Island and the Bronx. New York is sealed up tight.”

The Soldier closes his eyes around the sound of blood roaring in his ears. Wilson’s looking at him over his shoulder with his arms at his side when he opens his eyes. A few hours ago he felt prepared for events to lead him to this moment.

Now that it’s here his chest isn’t big enough to contain his fear.

Wilson makes a stammered noise in the back of his throat and jerks around to face him.

“We’re not finished yet, okay? We can put you on one of those trains, shoot anyone who comes sniffing around, and with some luck you get out of their range, at least until morning.”

The Soldier shakes his head. The Rail Yards might be a blind spot, but the surrounding five boroughs of New York are under surveillance. It’s a foxhole.

“This is the kill-zone,” he says, stomach flipping nervously as he looks out at the many parallel train tracks before them.

“What? No, it—I told you I’m not with them.”

He shakes the gun and Wilson raises his hands again. Trapped, both of them.

There’s a flurry of movement from a neighboring street. A handful of voices call out, words lost to the wind but intention very clear when they open fire. Wilson crosses in front of him and takes the shots meant for him without so much as flinching. He removes a gun from his other thigh holster.

The Soldier takes cover behind a bend in the railing where he’s likely to get the most coverage in spite of the slot-shaped holes in the iron.

“Get down, you idiot!”

“Nah, they’ll run out before I do.”

He coolly reloads his gun with a clip from a shoulder strap on his harness. The Soldier sees him catch a bullet in the neck and mounts the Browning Practical over the railing to open fire on their assailants. He can see them now: something like ten of them, in street clothes. No way to tell if they’re Hydra or if they’re locals who got roped into it.

Wilson’s right, though. They do run out of ammo.

A train far down on the tracks lights up the Rail Yards, and the Soldier yells, “Wilson!”

They clear the railing and run for the tracks. As if needing the clarification, Wilson shouts, “You want to thin them out! The readers are probably having a fit, Sarge!”

He doesn’t know what the hell Wilson’s going on about. All he knows is they need to clear the tracks to have a fighting chance. His wounded arm is weaker than it was and as one of their assailants proves in the chase, some of them do still have firepower at their disposal. But handguns aren’t the beginning and the end of what they’ve got in their arsenal. It becomes clear straight away that they’ve made a mistake when Wilson goes down.

“Sniper!” he shouts, already rolled over on his back and returning fire with his one handgun.

The Soldier rounds back for him and gets eyes on the shooter perched on a rooftop. He hands Wilson his gun back so he can shoot for both of them and drags Wilson behind a stationary train car. Wilson slumps against the it with his legs in a jumbled unnatural mess and reloads his guns.

“Huh,” Wilson states in an odd, high voice. He pokes forcefully at his leg and then stabs it curiously with his Bowie knife. Out of nowhere in a dramatic voice, Wilson bellows, “‘Us turning on each other—it’s what they want. I tried to warn you, Charles!’”

Was that supposed to be a German accent?

“Wilson.”

The Soldier shakes him. He peers around the side of the train car.

“They’re coming.” They are, in swarms. The sniper is still laid out belly-flat on a rooftop. His heart races and he swears, “Нам пиздец.”

“Go. I’ll hold them off.” Wilson squirms pathetically against the train car to scope out the yard and shrieks, “Remember the Alamo!” as he shoots.

His feet start to move, directionless. The train they meant to use as a defensive strategy whirs by at the Soldier’s back and something happens. He imagines himself where the sniper is, sights focused on a target he can’t see anymore.

Several men run up on them. A few are trained in hand-to-hand, but they aren’t fast enough to take him. They must be of the local criminal variety. He’s able to judge that much before his vision cuts out and his head fills with the train’s hollow whistle. The sounds of fighting are peripheral, far away, removed from him. A face swims in the dark waters of his mind.

Dark brown eyes, wide and glistening, young, stare back at him. Hair a shade lighter than those eyes frames the temples, dusts across the fair eyebrows. A small round mouth smiles and shapes the word, Bucky…

“Barnes!”

He screams and struggles against the arms holding him down. A bullet whizzes past his ear, weakening the grip of the hands pinning his neck to the ground. Someone sticks a gun in his face and he turns it back on them, shooting them in the shoulder. Wilson calls out, “Flashbang!”

The Soldier covers his face and grits his teeth against the cacophonous explosion. His heart feels displaced behind his ribs, like it’s floating disconnected after having finally been knocked loose.

Torn out of that place where his heart should be he hears himself sob the name, “Rebecca.”

He sucks in a panicked breath. It hiccups in his chest. Everything piles there, stacking and stacking and stacking.

More hands grab him.

Distantly he’s aware of a colorful blur moving on the rooftop behind the sniper. But the hands touching him are here, and he must break them. He must.

“—rnes, drop him!” a hoarse voice commands. “I said drop him!”

Daredevil. And Wilson on his feet.

He opens his hands before he sees what’s in them and a person-shaped mass hits the ground at his feet. The rush of the train is audible still in his ears, but the train itself is long gone.

Wilson holsters his gun. He hadn’t been pointing it at anything.

“I’m not even going to ask how you knew to bring him here, Wilson.”

Bring him in.

“Why does everyone expect the worst of me all the time?”

Bring him in.

He’s been out of cryo-freeze too long.

Bring him in.

Then wipe him, and start over.

Bucky.

Bucky?

Who the hell is Bucky?

He holds his head with one hand, alerting to the pain in his right arm. The utter lack of sensation in the other flowers into shooting sparks of liquid agony: tearing pain, the rending of flesh.

It isn’t real.

But the fall was real. And the pain was real.

His sister. Real.

Of course she existed—maybe still does, but to remember her. To see her face in a memory and to imagine himself as a brother, once…

“Yo, we cleaned house!”

“Is he wounded?”

It is real. All the pain, real. Now.

“Tin man? Maybe a scratch. No more firefights tonight, he should be good by morning. Say, you wouldn’t happen to privately own a train, would you?”

“Wilson, what the hell are you up to now?”

“Nothing, I swear! I was only with those Hydra dicks so I could get him out of Brooklyn.”

“There are Hydra agents in Brooklyn,” Daredevil says smoothly with quiet rage.

“Buddy, New York’s crawling with them. They know he’s here.”

The Soldier releases a breath he’s held for too long and reaches mechanically for a discarded handgun. He checks the chamber and racks the slide, silencing the conversation happening several feet away from him. His eyes scrunch closed around the pounding in his head and the ringing in his ears.

There’s nowhere to run. His body hurts and his mind is racing. They brought him here—Wilson and Daredevil; delivered him straight into an ambush.

Wilson admitted to having been part of the unit on the bridge.

“Hey, Barnes? Earth to Barnes!”

His mouth falls open around a ragged breath in and his arm moves, trigger depresses, bullet flies. He needs to see what they do when he doesn’t cooperate. He needs to see what they really intend to do with him.

Almost in tandem with the gunshot, he sees and hears Daredevil’s choked protest.

The Soldier stares openly at his gaping mouth. Wilson drops, the Soldier probably hallucinating his plaintive cry of, “Oh, the plight of secondary characters.”

Daredevil shudders and breathes a shaky, “Jesus.”

The Soldier narrows his eyes at the tilt of Daredevil’s head, vaguely in the direction of Wilson’s limp body but too high. He rotates slowly at the waist to get the remaining target in his sights. It’s curious that Daredevil doesn’t plead with him, that he makes no move to raise his hands.

Daredevil’s head snaps up at the twitch of the trigger pulling back and he leaps out of the way of the bullet. The Soldier pulls the trigger again and again, emptying the clip in no time at all. Daredevil evades the onslaught of bullets, but he can’t undo what the Soldier has deduced about him.

He crouches to take Wilson’s Practical and throws his head back into Daredevil’s when he looms behind him. It’s clear his goal is to keep the gun out of his hand, which is fine. He plucks the Ka-Bar from his belt and swings as if he intends a punch.

Daredevil blocks him with an arm. The steel catches and drags against the armor reinforcing his suit.

They scramble to their feet and circle each other, the Soldier’s eyes scanning their surroundings for opportunities. Predictably, Daredevil listens for him.

The Soldier tests his theory by throwing the Ka-Bar down hard in between them with his left hand. At the same time as all that metal reorganizes itself, he uses his right to remove the pocket knife from his boot.

“Barnes, you don’t have to fight.”

The Soldier takes a step forward with the blade still folded into a safe position. Daredevil holds his ground, hands fisted at his sides.

Daredevil licks his lips and asks, sounding helpless, “Why did you shoot him?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead he lunges forward and leads with his knife hand, carefully estimating the blade’s length and detracting at the last possible second. His fist misses Daredevil’s chin by about an inch, but the point of his knife grazes the soft patch of skin beneath.

Got you.

Daredevil staggers back, surprised, and the Soldier follows him with less caution. He flips the knife in his flesh hand, tossing it between his hands when his strikes are sidestepped or deflected.

It flies out of his grip and over his shoulder after a brutal body kick. He takes advantage of the brief lapse in Daredevil’s defenses to get him into a clinch hold. Daredevil breaks it, only for the Soldier to use their same-direction inertia as a means of taking him down.

“You can stop! Barnes! Listen to me!”

It’s messy and he only lands a few solid hits before he’s lifted and dragged off. He thought he had more time than that. But no matter.

Wilson goes in for a sleeper hold from behind. The Soldier presses his chin down, raises his shoulders up, and gnashes his teeth against the arm trying to suffocate him.

His feet lift off the ground as Wilson straightens, screaming profanities all the while. Vision blurring and mouth flooding with blood, he reaches behind his head and breaks the fingers holding his head in place.

The ground comes up hard and fast under his knees as Wilson drops him, still shrieking, “Mother of—goddamn—Russia!”

He gags, sucks air into his lungs, and vomits. Wilson’s suit tastes…

Foul doesn’t cover it.

“Aw, come on, I do wash it.”

His head is still hanging low between his shoulders when something collides hard with the back of his skull.

They’re moving him when he comes to.

He waits until he’s sure he has a general schematic of the room in his mind and breaks a table and a window trying to get away from them. They manage to secure him to a metal support beam in the center of the room for all his struggling, but it’s still just the two of them. After the hell he raised at the Rail Yards they didn’t call for an extraction team.

And he did raise enough hell to warrant the extra help.

Wilson’s mask has a bullet-shaped hole where one shiny moon-colored eye shows through. Daredevil’s calf bleeds through his suit where the Soldier cut him with a sliver of broken glass.

“What the hell happened out there? Has he been like this all night?” he hears Daredevil whisper at the door to the room.

They’re in an abandoned warehouse from the looks of it.

“No way! Sarge when I met him wouldn’t have shot me in the face for no reason. It’s like we were in a buddy movie right up until, well. Ka-blooey.”

“You’re saying something triggered him.”

“Hey can you blame him for lashing out at anything with a pulse after the night he’s had? I wish I’d known they were gonna have locals on their payroll. That was my bad.”

Daredevil sighs and says, “I wish you’d given me some warning that this was going to happen.”

“It’s not like I knew ahead of time! They put the teams together yesterday morning! I’ve seen more organization in an improvised comedy sketch.”

There’s a pause and then Wilson adds, “That is a good point—yeah, I’m…I will, jeez. The only thing different about the Rail Yards was the train. You catch what I’m saying, DD?”

There’s a moment of wordless void the Soldier can’t interpret. They’re stationed behind him, expressions unseen and so, unreadable.

“Think you might be able to convince him to stick around?”

“That’s the plan.”

“All righty,” Wilson concedes. “He’s gonna need a change of clothes if you want him to be out and about tomorrow. I’ll stop by around noon?”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“I gotta blow this Popsicle stand while it’s still only him Hydra’s looking for. You need reinforcements? He packs a lot of bang for his buck.”

Wilson sputters and then howls.

“Bang for his buck,” he squeaks. “Oh.”

“I’m good here, Wilson,” Daredevil sighs. The Soldier can hear the air of longsuffering familiarity in his resigned tone. “You’re all set.”

“Thanks, kiddo. Here, give him this when he’s more himself?”

When, not if.

“Really,” Daredevil drawls, voice warm and amused.

The Soldier leans his head into the metal at his back, wincing at the sensitive welt that hasn’t healed yet. He squints, straining his ears and searching for a reflective surface that will let him see what they’re doing. No such luck.

Not economically viable and the opposite of inconspicuous.

He can’t see what they’re doing without turning around.

“I didn’t think you were the sentimental type.”

“Just don’t forget. If this whole thing goes sideways…”

“It won’t.” There’s a shuffling of fabric and weight. “I’ll see that he gets it, Wade.”

“All right.”

Wilson mutters something else and promptly leaves without another word, to Daredevil.

A few beats pass in silence, and then Wilson is singing as he leaves: “What’ll I do when you are far away and I am blue? What’ll I do?”

The sound lessens, drawn off into the distance in time with Wilson’s retreat. As the warehouse pulses in the newfound silence, the Soldier drops his gaze from the higher point it had idled on. Daredevil walks around in front of him with an understated but present limp on his bloody side where the Soldier got him with the glass. The cut must be deep. He pressed as hard as he could.

As if he’s speaking to a friend, Daredevil says, “He can be a handful.”

The Soldier stares at the far wall.

“But he’s also spent most of the night dragging you around New York and I’m inclined to believe him when he says something happened at Hudson Yards.”

He crouches gingerly across from the Soldier and does nothing to hide that his leg hurts him.

In a clear, even voice, Daredevil asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“Which part?” the Soldier asks wearily. “The part where I shot him in the face or the part where I realized that you’re blind?”

Daredevil’s skin shifts where his jaw tightens.

“Is that what you think you realized out there?”

The Soldier laughs mirthlessly and says, sardonically, “You think I’m confused.”

“You’re not confused.” The edges of Daredevil’s frown could carve glass. “But you’re not answering my question either.”

“Which one? You asked two.”

“You answered the first one,” Daredevil retorts with a small smile. It’s still tight at the corners, but it retains its ability to render his features boyish and well-meaning. “We’re talking.”

Daredevil folds his arms over one bended knee. The other he keeps straight.

“You knew Wilson would bounce back. He always does. Bullet in the spine, bowels falling out; doesn’t matter.

“And if anything, you pushed harder to take me down once we both knew what your game was. Question is: why let me catch on? Why not just kill me?”

The Soldier looks at the wounded calf on display. He can even make out the line he drew in Daredevil’s chin. Fragility is the essence of it.

It asks without the needless barrier of words: Why fight at all if you weren’t going to do it?

He averts his eyes and shuffles so he can sit up straighter with less pressure near the tender spot on the back of his head. They cuffed both his hands separately to the support beam, giving him more mobility but also twice the security to bypass.

“I know why you didn’t do it. Do you?”

He swallows, not sure if it’s safe to reveal his suspicion now while he’s still detained.

Biding his time he says, “Don’t suppose I’d spare you because you’re blind and Wilson because he’s crazy?”

“Not your style. And I’ll remind you,” he says in that crisp, confident tone that leaves no room for arguments, “that you’re down an arm, if you’re determined to bring my sight and Wilson’s psychological wellbeing into it.”

“Point,” he says blandly.

“You’re welcome to try again,” Daredevil tells him with a looser, calmer smile on his face. “I’ll just tell you now: if you lie to me, I’ll know.”

“What does it matter to you? Wilson did it for the hero points with Captain America,” he says, lip curling around the name, or maybe around the deliberate lie. “You’re keeping your city safe. Is that it?”

But Daredevil doesn’t react to the sneering taunts meant to get a rise out of him.

“On a day-to-day basis,” he says. “This is bigger than that. Hydra’s bigger than New York. They’re bigger than you, too.”

The Soldier scoffs. “Tell them that.”

“I know you didn’t ask for this. I know. The world knows. And Hydra, they’re not gonna get away with it. They can’t.”

“You’re gonna stop ‘em,” he deadpans, skepticism heavy in his voice, “you and Wilson and the rest of the freak outcasts with something wrong in their DNA.”

Daredevil sits still and at ease across from him.

“Oh, right, not just you.” The Soldier nods his head and says, “The police. You think you’re gonna slap a pair of cuffs on Hydra.”

“The group from the Brooklyn Bridge is already in custody. They should be processed come morning.”

The Soldier leans his head back, breath catching in his throat when he bangs his bruise for the seventh or eighth time. It already feels less tender to the touch.

“Barnes, look.” Daredevil sighs and bends his head momentarily. “It’s bad. It’s really bad for you right now. The few choices you have left, things get worse for you before they get even a little bit better. But there’s a way they can get better.”

“That’s assuming a lot about what I want.”

“You’d rather let them take you?” It’s not even a question the way Daredevil says it. He doesn’t buy it for a second and has no intention of acting like he does. “You’d rather die?”

The Soldier clenches his jaw angrily. He hears his breathing quicken before he can stifle the reaction.

“This is bigger than you,” Daredevil says again, voice low and earnest, lined with compassion. “It’s bigger than you and you can’t fight it by yourself.”

He hears Daredevil’s hard swallow.

“You don’t have to fight it by yourself.”

The Soldier relaxes his hands and breathes.

With the air of finality to suggest that this is the last time he’ll ask, Daredevil says, “Why did you fight us?”

He keeps his mouth shut and Daredevil bows his head forward for a three-count, shaking it morosely as he pushes onto his feet. The Soldier watches him approach the support beam on his right side and tenses up at the brush of knuckles on his wrist. Daredevil undoes both manacles chaining him to the metal beam and leaves both cuffs attached to the pillar.

“I can’t force you to accept my help,” he says somberly. “And I can’t hold you here against your will.”

The Soldier stands to his feet and looks at Daredevil who starts to walk away. He closes his eyes, hoping—and doesn’t that feel like a mistake—that he’s making the right call.

“You’re right. There was nowhere to go. I thought if I made you, you’d call for backup.”

“You still think we’re Hydra,” Daredevil says, stunned disbelief evident in the slack line of his mouth.

“You said things are bad. They are.” He rubs his flesh fingers over his forehead and scrubs more purposefully at the tacky blood and dirt there. “You ID me on the docks and the next day Hydra’s on my trail. I let Wilson take me to the Rail Yards and we get jumped where he says we won’t be.”

Daredevil appears to consider this and says, “He mentioned the train may have had something to do with it.”

“Just reminded me of something,” he hedges. “It’s nothing.”

“Okay. Then I believe you.”

The Soldier sighs, “What now?”

“We’ve got a few hours until dawn. Our guy at the 27th is working on rounding up the remaining agents with Wilson’s aid.”

“Wilson? I heard him say he was clearing out.”

“Hell’s Kitchen, not New York. He needed to get to the precinct before word got out about our connection to you. Assuming he got to Sergeant Mahoney in time, his information as to the whereabouts of the other agents involved will be invaluable.”

“And after they’re processed in the morning, however many of them you get…what happens after that?”

“We take them to trial.”

“You’d need Wilson’s and my testimonies to make anything stick against them, and even then, a court’s more likely to convict us.”

Wincing, Daredevil says, “I did say things had to get worse before they could get better.”

Nerves flutter in the Soldier’s stomach.

“You want to take me to trial?”

“As long as you run from this, they will always find a way to make your life hell because of it.”

He can think of a million reasons not to willingly walk into a courthouse, the least of those being that they’d take his arm. It’s not really his, fair enough, but it’s attached to him—has been part of him long enough to feel as natural to him as any other part of his body.

“It’s a lot to ask, I know it is. But the only way you can get out ahead of them is if you’re cleared.”

“If I’m cleared,” the Soldier repeats dourly. “If I’m cleared.”

“You will be,” Daredevil enunciates.

“Here? At an international trial? What if Russia decides they’d like a piece of me? Hell, Hydra goes back to Schmidt, Zola, the Nazis—maybe Germany will want a taste.”

“I can get an attorney to represent you.”

An ambulance siren whines outside, something like a block away. It passes them up.

“You don’t have to decide now,” Daredevil tells him, reassures him. “It could take months, a year, for their case to hit the courts.”

The Soldier looks down and crosses his arms over his chest. He sucks in a breath at the tearing pain in his shoulder. It’s less now than what it was, but stitches would help the wound to stay closed.

“I can bring someone to look at that for you, too, if you want. In the morning.”

“You expect me to hole up in this warehouse for months, a year?”

“It’s not home,” Daredevil concedes with a shrug. “But it’s off the map—a holdover from the Russians back when they were still in Hell’s Kitchen.”

The Soldier doesn’t ask what happened to the Russians.

“What are you going to do?”

“I need to be out there. Wilson’s going to need backup if Hydra’s not already onto him. You should rest. I’ll send my friend to look at your shoulder when she can and the coast is clear.”

“How’m I gonna know when it’s her?” he asks uncertainly.

The thought lingers in his head that he’s also been examined by countless, nameless faces in the past without complaint. It’s different now. Now he has a choice.

“I’ll tell her to knock twice, then once, then twice. Her name’s Claire.”

The Soldier taps out that pattern on his thigh with his thumb, remembering it.

“When you’re fixed up you’re gonna wanna talk to Foggy Nelson at Nelson & Murdock. There’ll be a woman there at the desk. Her name’s Karen Page. She’ll get him for you if he’s not in, but he should be in.”

He blinks. Daredevil detects his hesitation, which seems bizarre now that he can’t tell how he’s being monitored if it’s not by sight.

“That is, if you decide to come in. I hope you will.”

“You sure this place is secure?” he asks instead of pledging his word one way or the other.

“I can’t guarantee it’s the safest place in Hell’s Kitchen, but if you do get cornered, guerilla tactics work to the advantage of the one over the many. The fourth window from the backdoor is the cleanest way in and out if you need to run. Circuit breaker’s on the southeast wall. You get unfriendlies in here, yank the main line. It’s on the bottom of the breaker box.”

The Soldier looks in that direction and locates the metal box protecting the switchboard. He flicks his eyes up toward the ceiling and slowly brings his gaze back to Daredevil.

“The lights aren’t on now.”

“Oh.” Daredevil presses his lips together. “Oh, that’s right. They wouldn’t be.” Self-consciously he asks, “Do you want them on?”

“No.” He shrugs, wondering if Daredevil can sense the gesture—if he hears it, or how. “They’d just draw attention.”

“Your call. Oh, and I’m…” He turns and walks toward a table near the exit door. “—supposed to give you this.”

He turns and holds the Ka-Bar taken from the fight on the bridge, tipping it sideways until it’s laid out horizontally between his hands.

“Wilson,” the Soldier says without moving to accept it.

“He thought you’d want to have it. And,” Daredevil adds, not reluctantly but realistically, “in case you do run into trouble you should have a weapon. A knife’s quieter than a gun and doesn’t run out of bullets.”

When he still doesn’t move forward to accept it, Daredevil says, “You can take it.”

“Just leave it on the table.”

Daredevil doesn’t argue with his request. He doesn’t react to it at all except to do exactly what’s been asked of him.

The Soldier leaves the circuit breaker untouched and sits in the rafters with the Ka-Bar cradled in his right hand. It’d be a waste of resources to cut the power prematurely, and doing it at all would alert the enemy to his position. It’s better if they do come in and light the place up. Let them search with the full aid of artificial light while he slips out. He’s already found the broken window Daredevil designated as well as a weak spot in the roof he can use as a last resort.

Of course, they could come in through the window Daredevil mentioned. If they do that at least he has the Ka-Bar. He stays up a good few hours studying the ridges of the handle, the contoured grooves in the steel, and the serrated teeth near the base of the blade.

He can only speak for his experience, but the potential conflict in the city doesn’t bleed into the warehouse. It’s all quiet.

At dawn he closes his eyes to chase sleep and wakes an unchecked amount of time later at the sound of two knocks followed by one and then two. He sits up against the wall he’d slept against, his body a few steps ahead of his mind but overall, conscious. A woman walks through the entrance Wilson and Daredevil had carried him in through. She’s wearing scrubs under a leather jacket and has a sizeable case of medical supplies, he supposes, in one hand.

“Hello?”

He jumps down, stumbling briefly at the few aches and pains that his sleep didn’t cure. She jumps, turning toward rather than away from the sound of his feet on the concrete.

“Damn it,” she mutters. “Do you know who I am?”

“Claire,” he says.

That he answers correctly does nothing to soothe her nerves. She nods once jerkily and gestures to the chairs next to the table he broke last night.

“Come on. I gotta get back to work after this.”

He goes obediently. After resisting everything and everyone in the past twenty four hours, it doesn’t register in his brain as failure to give, here. He shrugs out of one jacket sleeve and hesitates on the remaining sleeve that hides his metal arm.

“He told me about it.” Her voice is soft but curt, notes of compassion riding alongside the current of smooth professionalism. She watches her tools as she sanitizes them instead of his face. “It’s okay if you leave it on, but you don’t have to.”

In the interest of downplaying his discomfort, he does take them off. He folds the shirt and jacket, setting them on the ground in between his feet once they’re neatly piled on top of one another.

There’s flaky blood decorating his wrist and knuckles, a fresh oozing supply of it at his shoulder, and an angry abrasion up the inside of his forearm. He hadn’t taken stock of his injuries outside of just knowing what hurt and why. The bullet hole in his jeans is tattered and red. He probes two fingers through it to test the severity of the wound. Claire sees him checking it and locks eyes with him.

“Knife wound or GSW?”

“The latter.”

She nods and asks, “Through and through?”

He shakes his head. She makes a face that’s the opposite of thrilled.

Perhaps to remedy the emotion behind that expression (not that he cares at all what kind of face she makes) he tells her, “I already dug the fragments out.”

Claire gives him a blank look, hands stilling. She blinks.

“Wow you’re just like him.”

He doesn’t engage her beyond that, grateful for her preference of dutiful silence. Every once in a while if he winces at the tug of sutures in his skin she’ll mumble or hiss back a “sorry”, depending on how bad the sting is.

She can always tell when it’s a bad one. Even if he sits statue-still and it’s just a twitch in his jaw, she’s attuned to what hurts him and what won’t.

“It looks better now than it must have last night,” she says.

He looks up from his lap to her face. He can’t tell if she’s trying to start a conversation or if she’s just the type of person who talks to herself while she works. She keeps her gaze fixed on the jagged, angry streak of red bisecting his shoulder.

“Is your leg okay? If you’re in pain, I can give you something.”

“I’m fine.”

She flicks her gaze to meet his eyes, fingers slowing and then stopping. He averts his eyes.

“I don’t need anything.”

Not believing him but doing nothing to push she says, “Okay.”

Her stitches are nice—evenly spaced and holding him together. She wraps a bandage around her neat, completed handiwork and points to his leg. He takes off his boots, stands to his feet, and starts to undo the button at his jeans.

“Uh,” she starts to say before shaking her head and waving her hand. “Yeah, sure, fine. That’s fine.”

He resumes disrobing, hearing her mutter under her breath, “What’s another one for the collection?”

The Soldier sits with his injured leg facing her. He leans toward his clothes and slowly positions the Ka-Bar on top of the pile for easy access. His gaze roves from the doors to the windows to the rafters before refocusing on Claire. She’s watching him with her eyes widened around mild alarm.

“We should be safe here.” She shrugs a bit ruefully. “As safe as anyone could be in a warehouse in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen.”

Something about her tone is stretched tight with tension. He looks around at their surroundings again and studies the stern concentration in her face and hands. Even when her attention isn’t split between her medical kit and the red tears in his body, she doesn’t glance around at the room they’re in.

“Are you afraid of me?” he asks before he can think better of it.

He’s embarrassed as soon as the question’s past his lips. The clear amusement in the softened line of her mouth calms him.

It’s foolish to look at a person and feel that, something integral and wrong inside him clamors. She’s just a mark who hasn’t played you yet.

She saves him from having to dignify his senseless paranoia with a reply.

“You haven’t given me a reason to be.”

There’s nothing in him that wants to challenge that statement.

“You know who I am?” he asks with his voice at half its normal speaking volume.

Claire tapes a clean square of gauze to his thigh and nods her head. She says, “He told me.”

He nods his head.

“Can you tell me about him?”

She smiles, thrown by his curiosity and whatever it reveals about him. Her eyebrows lift into symmetrical, disbelieving arches.

With a faint chord of conspiracy in her tone she muses, “Like what?”

He bends to retrieve his clothes and chooses a low-risk question that she’s most likely to answer: “How’d you meet?”

“I found him in a dumpster,” she answers pleasantly. She focuses on cleaning her instruments even as he pauses with one foot in his jeans. “Half-dead, I might add.”

“You patch him up?”

He stands to get his jeans up around his hips and works his shirt on carefully around the fresh dressing on his shoulder. She waits until he’s slipping the jacket back on to tell him, “On a pretty regular basis.”

“That’s…”

Badass, amazing, impressive?

“…nice,” he finishes lamely, cringing at himself.

Nice.

Claire, because she’s a doctor, clearly, and knows how to be merciful and blunt at the same time, just quirks a tiny smile at him and says, “He’s not ordinary, but he’s just a guy.”

He lets that sink in and slowly laces up his boots before sheathing the Ka-Bar in his boot. The blade is cold against his skin.

“Well, so am I. Thanks,” he thinks about not adding, “Claire.”

She hums noncommittally and closes the medical kit before also standing to her feet.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I don’t see you again.”

It takes him a few seconds too long to figure out which way is the wrong way.

“You know, all banged up and covered in blood that doesn’t look like it all came from you,” she clarifies.

He nods and says, “Oh.”

What if I wasn’t a mess? he thinks blearily, hating himself the second that thought clears from his mind.

She sighs and starts to go, saying over her shoulder, “I’ve only met Foggy the one time, but he seems nice, if you were wondering.”

A doctor, kind and gorgeous. Claire.

He paces through his agitation in her absence watching the shadows change. At about 1300 hours the garage door slinks open. In walks a tall man in a gray hoodie with fragrant Mexican food cradled delicately in both arms.

“Honeyyyy, I’m hooooome.” Wilson’s voice rings out. He sets the cargo down and pulls the door shut with a metallic bang. “Tin man, you around?”

He steps out from behind a dented cabinet without replying verbally. His stomach growls at the suggestion of food. Wilson notices him as he’s straightening out with the food in one hand and a pile of clothes in the other.

“Hey, buddy. Hungry?”

The Soldier crosses his arms over his chest, not saying anything.

“Right, right, clean clothes first. I hear ya. Who can focus on food when you’re covered in blood and guts? I mean, I can do it, but only when I need to, you know?”

“Wilson, the clothes.”

“Yep!” He tosses the bundled pile in a high arc through the air so it’s easy to catch. “Do you like tacos? I can always go back out for something else, but they give out these little hand wipes when you order stuff you eat with your hands, so I figured…”

The Soldier starts to tune him out and shrugs out of his jacket again, letting it drop into a heap on the floor. He pulls his shirt off over his head and peruses the choices at his disposal. The black shirt looks nice, sleeves and all.

A roll of tube socks falls out from between the one pair of jeans and three shirt choices. He holds it up and looks down at his feet, setting that and the shirt aside to pluck the Ka-Bar from his boot and the boots off his feet. He shucks his flimsy, worn socks and dons the new ones, flexing his toes with nothing shy of pure relief.

“Um, so in lieu of a real shower, you know—not that I’m saying you’re funky or anything.”

“What?”

Wilson waves a few squares of disinfectant hand towels in explanation.

“Oh. I guess.”

Wilson tosses those over, too. His distance is also appreciated, though that fact goes unsaid.

He opens a packet and scrubs his face first then down his neck, tearing into a second for his armpits. Wilson ignores him to set the food down against the wall. It’s a strategically sound location that he chooses, out of view from the windows and near a low-hanging pipe that feeds up into the rafters.

The Soldier pulls the black shirt on over his head and pokes his arms one at a time through the rolled up sleeves. He pushes his unbuttoned jeans down his legs and looks up at Wilson’s muffled squawk. The Soldier looks down at the pool his jeans make around his ankles and rolls his eyes at Wilson’s back, kicking them off his feet.

“Um, so I’ll see you around, Sarge. Hopefully when all this is over and you’re not running for your life anymore.”

He looks at the bag of food on the floor and steps into the jeans. They’re crisp and new against his legs. And they hug him in a few choice areas that he’s deeply suspicious of.

“You got all this for me.”

“Well yeah.” Wilson ambiguously waves a hand. He half turns to look over his shoulder before facing the Soldier. “I don’t know when the last meal you had was. You’ve gotta have fuel to power the machine, right?”

The Soldier studies what he can see of Wilson’s face under the hoodie. He looks cheerful in general but bewildered to be watched so closely. Wilson’s mouth opens, closes, then compresses into a thin line.

“What do you really get out of helping me?”

“Aw not this again. You don’t still think I’ll flip on you, do you? I got you tacos and a sponge bath. We had like, thirteen pages of interaction. Granted, a lot of that was continuous action sequences.” He weighs his hands. “If we’re not bros by now…”

“Wilson,” he sighs. “Cut the inner monologue and just tell me.”

Wilson looks shocked at something he’s said, but the surprised wrinkles in his forehead smooth out. He glances away and then back, one hand gripping indecisively at the top of his hoodie like he can’t decide whether to keep his face hidden or to show it. Ultimately he does keep it hidden. His hand’s retreat into the hoodie’s front pocket is almost bashful.

“When they offered me the job I was gonna do it,” he says.

He had owned that much in previous conversations, but to hear it spoken independently of separate terms and circumstances changes its sound. Wilson sounds…ashamed.

“They only told us who the target was after we’d agreed to do it. Tried to turn some of the folks on the unit with me—I could get away with it. They thought I was messing with them: talking ‘nonsense’,” he says around a pair of air quotes, “just to get on their nerves.”

He sighs and points at the bag of food.

“You should eat before it gets cold.”

The Soldier kneels in front of the bag, takes a wrapped object from the top, and sits with his back against the wall. He tears the foil from it and eats, flicking his eyebrows at Wilson.

“Oh man this is one of those make-it-or-break-it moments, isn’t it?” Wilson laughs, but the tightness in his mouth is evident without the veil of his mask. “Where you decide if I’m one of the good guys or not. Right?”

He gets distracted devouring the shredded beef taco in his hands but shrugs eventually at Wilson’s expectant glance.

“I just prefer to know now rather than later if you’re going to be calling in to collect a debt.”

“Ah.” Wilson deflates and flashes a smile. “None of that from me, Sarge. No favors.”

The Soldier balls up the empty foil and reaches for another taco. He holds it up as an offering, but Wilson waves him off.

“You didn’t say why you changed your mind about the mission.”

His mouth twists unhappily at the memory of the last mission he had. He hides his frown by taking another bite.

“I just…” Wilson kicks at the ground with one foot. “I need to be better than the things I’ve done.”

He looks everywhere but at the Soldier. Not ironically, he adds, “Not that saving a life here and there makes me a hero.” He holds up his hand, the first two fingers crossed and on display. “One day, though. Holdin’ hope till then.”

“That explains why you didn’t kill anyone last night.”

“Aww, tin man, you noticed?” Wilson holds his hands to his chest like his heart might jump out otherwise. “You went out of your way not to, so I thought I should make an effort. And well, I’m getting help from this really cool superhero spider-dude who gets kind of peeved if I take a life. He’s like a sober companion, but for killing. With an ass that just won’t quit.”

The Soldier chokes.

“Well if that’s all,” Wilson sings.

He starts to move toward the garage door and the Soldier jumps to his feet, sealing the remains of his second taco up in the foil and throwing it back in the bag.

“Wait.”

Wilson stutters to a stop. The Soldier walks around to stand in front of him. He gets nervous and says, instead of what he initially intended, “I’m sorry I shot you. It wasn’t personal.”

“DD read me in last night after we got the rest of those assholes off the street.” Wilson nods. “He told me what you told him. It’s all good, tin man. B-t-dubbs, no civilians were hurt. The homeless you asked about got stashed somewhere out of the way. I made ‘em say where.”

The Soldier feels himself smirk.

“I wanna know how?”

“With my words,” Wilson answers innocently with an incongruously wicked smile. “Nah, I’m kidding. I used my fists. They’re alive, though, so it’s kosher. Spidey can’t fault me a few broken teeth, right?”

“I wouldn’t,” he says with a small shrug. “Look, I wanted to apologize.”

“What? Why?” Wilson sounds genuinely perplexed.

“I made a crack about your skin looking like hives last night. It was lousy of me.”

“Buddy, you don’t have to—”

“I’m sorry.”

His mouth flaps, eyes wide and surprised. He says, “Oh.”

The Soldier slips his hands in his back pockets. Wilson’s expression closes off and then opens to reveal a beaming smile.

“Did we just become best friends?”

At his bristling response, Wilson just barks a laugh and raises his hands.

“Jest, I jest. How cool would that be? Hash tag: my otp is canon.”

The Soldier grumbles under his breath and walks back around to the bag of Mexican food.

“You’re welcome to stay and eat.”

“It’s like I fell asleep and woke up in a fluff piece.”

Wilson measures his intake against the Soldier’s appetite and between them they finish the bag. It was a lot. He probably could have eaten it by himself.

“You don’t know where Nelson & Murdock is, do you?”

Wilson gives him a solemn look that brightens by degrees.

“Sure I do.”

“Our mutual acquaintance told me to go there.”

“Hmmm.”

The Soldier waits and tilts his head, raising his eyebrows at Wilson after a spell.

“Can you take me?”

Wilson’s faint smile drops. He asks, “Did you really just ask me that question?”

He slaps his own face with his flesh hand and growls, “Wilson.”

“Sorry, sorry, my brain went mushy for a second there. Nelson & Murdock, yes, I can escort you…I…we’ll go there. To Nelson & Murdock. Oh, before we do that, maybe you ought to ditch the jacket. Because bloodstains. Yeah. Those pockets should be deep enough to hide your hand.”

After a quick test of that theory, he parts with the jacket he lifted from a Laundromat way back in D.C.

He half expects some disastrous event to derail their quest, but they take straightforward streets and pass multiple security and traffic cameras. Wilson must be confident they got most if not all the Hydra agents last night. It’s almost casual how they walk side by side, each of them in attire that somehow swallows the parts of them that others would thoughtlessly describe as deformity.

The building they stop at is simple, sturdy: a law office fashioned out of tan- and red-colored bricks not unlike the tan stones of the lily pool in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden. He looks up at the deep red of the pillars on either side of the door and reads the sign affixed on the left.

NELSON and MURDOCK | Attorneys at Law

“Don’t be a stranger, tin man.”

“Thank you, Wilson,” he says reflexively.

A slow smile stretches across Wilson’s face. He salutes and continues on down the sidewalk, finally disappearing around a corner. The Soldier sucks in a deep breath and faces the door to the practice.

He follows the entryway into a corridor that leads to an office and lets himself in. The doors are unlocked and there doesn’t seem to be a functioning lobby.

A woman sitting at a desk looks up at him. The laptop in front of her casts a bluish glow on her face that fades when she stands.

“Can I help you, Sir?”

His mind blanks temporarily. She tilts her head at him. Blonde hair falls over her shoulder.

“Nelson,” he blurts out. “Foggy Nelson, I’m…have an appointment.”

“Oh, Mr. Barnes, isn’t it?” She smiles kindly at him. It’s a lot for his brain to process. “I’m Karen, hi. Foggy’s expecting you. I’ll take you to him.”

He goes with her, fingers twitching restlessly in his pockets.

“Foggy, he’s here.”

This can’t actually be happening to him.

But it is, apparently, because Karen waves to Nelson as she’s pulling the door shut behind her, and the Soldier is being offered a seat that he doesn’t take.

He bounces slightly on his heels. Nelson stands across from him and perches his knuckles on the desk. He looks composed, like he’s been working.

“I…”

Nelson gives him a few moments to come up with something and offers a glass of water when nothing comes.

“Sure, please.”

He sits once Nelson’s ducked out of the office. The door stays open behind him when he returns. It helps to have a quick exit available.

“Matt said you had information about the seventy people the cops picked up last night all over New York. Was he right?”

“Who’s Matt?” he asks slowly.

“He’s my partner—Nelson and Murdock. I’m Nelson. He’s Murdock.”

The Soldier says, “Huh,” and downs the water.

“Some more?” Nelson asks, sounding more concerned than he looks.

He considers asking him to bring the whole water cooler. That’s how dry his mouth is.

“I was on the bridge last night. They were there for me. All of them were there for me.”

Nelson keeps his expression neutral.

“Can you say why?”

“Depends.”

“On?”

“A guy I talked to last night said he could find me a lawyer.” The Soldier flicks his gaze to Nelson’s. “And then he dropped your name.”

Nelson’s jaw drops open. He says, with a funny little vein showing on his forehead, “That guy wasn’t by any chance wearing a ridiculous maroon-colored costume, was he?”

His eyebrows furrow at Nelson’s oddly accurate question. Nelson strides out of the room in a flustered whirlwind, muttering to himself. The Soldier follows at a distance and hangs back in the doorway to Nelson’s office.

“Did he say when he was coming back?” he hears Nelson ask Karen in the next room.

The door to the offices swings open. He sees the white cane before he hears an unmistakably familiar voice ring out: “Oh hell, Foggy, I was going to tell you.”

“Sometimes I just hate you,” Nelson grits out through his teeth.

Karen snorts from her desk. Both Nelson and Murdock, apparently, turn their heads in her direction. She holds her hands up in a vague ‘well?’ gesture.

“She threw her hands up. Because you’re frustrating and disappear all the time when you’re needed.”

“Foggy, let’s just…take this to your office, okay?”

Nelson gives Murdock a dark look, turns a softer glance on the Soldier, and waves for him to go with them back into the office. The Soldier crosses his arms, his metal arm passing over the flesh one, and waits leaned up against the doorframe.

“After you, Murdock.”

He smiles, chagrined, and leads the way with his cane held straight and close to his body. Nelson closes the door behind the three of them and turns to the Soldier.

“First of all, I apologize for my outburst. That was not directed at you. It was directed at you, for being a genius and not telling me how you met our client.”

“Client?” the Soldier interrupts him to ask.

“Of course client,” Murdock tells him. “If you’ll have us. It just seems appropriate.” Turning to Nelson he says, “I was going to tell you just now when I walked in. You know I’ve been down at the precinct all morning. I’ve just come from the courthouse. I couldn’t really explain the situation over the phone.”

“What were you doing at the courthouse?” Nelson inquires, anger forgotten briefly.

“Securing a judge for the trial.”

“Who’d you get?”

“Judge Ayers.”

The Soldier looks between them, failing to grasp the reason behind Nelson’s apparent relief.

“Mahoney’s uncle, nice. Good. Good work—I…I’m still irked at you, but good work.” He nods at the Soldier and repeats, for his benefit, “This is good news.”

“With any luck he’ll take your case, too.”

Now Nelson looks between them.

“Uh, why would Judge Ayers take…that is, why would we be representing him in…you said,” he remarks dully in the Soldier’s direction. His eyes close around a realization he clearly dislikes having had. “Oh, Barnes. Barnes. That’s why your name looked so familiar. Oh God Matt you didn’t tell me any of this last night.”

“It was four in the morning, Foggy. I told you I was bringing in a big case.”

“I can go,” the Soldier murmurs.

Nelson and Murdock turn toward him, the former with hardening resolve and the latter with quiet confidence in their chances. Nelson sighs heavily, knocks one hand on his desk, and straightens out.

With a strained smile he muses, “Can we start over? Foggy Nelson. My partner, Matt Murdock.”

The Soldier swallows a mouthful of air. Several muscles in his face twitch at the same time. He pushes the strangled sensation in his throat down.

Bucky?

Bucky.

Who the hell is—

“Bucky Barnes.”

Murdock expels a breath. The Soldier—Bucky, in another life if not in this one—raises an eyebrow at him before turning it to Nelson.

“Is it just him, or do you have an alter ego, too?”

Nelson huffs a laugh and shakes his head, says, “What you see is what you get.”

“Does Karen know you’re…?” Daredevil goes unspoken.

“No,” Murdock answers with some measure of reluctance. “Not yet.”

“I won’t tell her.”

He hesitates but says, bowing his head slightly, “Thank you.”

“Speaking of telling,” Nelson says a bit grimly. “If we’re doing this, you’ve got to be totally one hundred percent honest with us. Can you do that?”

“Anything I forget to say’s probably been leaked in a document to the whole world by now anyway.”

Nelson opens his mouth. Murdock tucks his chin into his chest.

“Right,” the former mumbles. “That’s a yes then. Good. We can start.”

Murdock gestures to one of the two empty seats in front of the desk.

“Please sit, Mr. Barnes.”

“Start from the beginning.”

“…Which one?”

“The Brooklyn Bridge,” Murdock provides when Nelson flounders for a way to rephrase. “If you like, you can start with Manhattan.”

It’s eerie that Murdock can’t see him with how pinned and exposed that sightless gaze makes him feel.

“I have a question, before I do.”

Murdock nods agreeably and replies with, “Sure.”

“That first night with the kid in Lenox Hill and the drug deal by the river, you said you recognized me. How?”

“I heard the plates shifting in your arm.”

He looks down at his arm and curls his metal fingers into a fist. Murdock lays his hand out on his knee and mimics the action. The Soldier deftly uncurls one finger after the other beginning with his pinky and working outward to his thumb. Murdock fans his fingers out in an identical fashion and stalls over the thumb that stays stationary against his palm.

Fascinated, the Soldier turns his palm over and flutters his fingers rhythmically. Murdock grins and shakes his head. Nelson mumbles, “Show off.”

“In Lenox Hill?” he asks.

“That was where I picked up on it.” Murdock nods. “You left Manhattan that night, didn’t you? I kept an ear out for you and didn’t hear you anywhere.”

“I went back to the bridge and crossed into Brooklyn for the day.”

“You spent the night on the bridge?” Nelson asks, sounding affronted for him.

As if it’s some consolation he adds, “I didn’t sleep.”

Nelson looks at Murdock, who lifts his head in acknowledgement. The former returns his gaze to the Soldier’s and his face is sincere.

“No client of ours is going to not-sleep on a bridge.”

“Foggy,” Murdock starts to protest.

“We can find you suitable accommodations if you’re amenable to us moving you around.”

He thinks about the dull ache in his lower back and the warehouse with its broken windows and reliably destructible circuit breaker.

“I don’t really have anything,” he answers in a small voice. He flexes his metal hand again. “Just this, and the Ka-Bar Wilson left me.”

“Ka-Bar? Did he say Ka-Bar? Who’s Wilson?”

“It’s fine, Foggy.”

“It’s in my boot,” he tells Nelson, cool as can be.

“Oh-kay, well. We’re going to need rules about that, probably. Just for future reference.”

“Wilson’s an ally,” Murdock supplies helpfully.

And because a part of his mind can’t help but think of Wilson’s bemoaning the ‘plight of secondary characters’, the Soldier adds, “He’s good.”

“Right, okay. Please just, start from the fight on the bridge.”

The Soldier takes a steadying breath.

“It was night by then. There were seven of them, that I could see…”