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It was a fine Sunday afternoon, right after a late lunch with the Avengers Team, when Steve and Natasha found themselves doing the dishes together. While Rogers washed everything, Romanov dried the plates, glasses, and cutlery with a kitchen towel. They were doing that despite having a state-of-the-art dishwasher because the Captain, being “old school” and all, preferred to do the dishes the manual way.
The Russian decided to join him on since not only she was on clean-up duty as well but because she had noticed earlier something weighing on his mind. Still, she didn’t want to pry, feeling that whatever it was could be a delicate matter. Instead, she just patiently waited in silence until the man felt ready to talk.
Whatever Steve couldn’t talk about with Bucky or Sam, he would always turn to Natasha.
“Hey, Nat, do you remember what you told about the Winter Soldier back when we found out that Hydra was pulling the strings inside S.H.I.E.L.D.?”
“Yeah, why?” She asked as nonchalantly as possible, side-eyeing him for a second before staring at the plate in her hands once more.
“You said that he had more than two dozen confirmed kills in over fifty years,” Steve recalled, a faraway look taking over his expression.
“Yes,” she replied more firmly, before raising an eyebrow at him. “So?”
Back then, when he had encountered the Winter Soldier for the first time but still didn’t know who he really was, the Widow had told him as much as she knew about the assassin.
Nat had mentioned that, as far as was known by the intelligence community (or rather those in it that believe the “ghost story” to be true), the Soldier had been deployed in more than two dozen missions over the last 50 years at that time. And despite not being exactly sure what it was, he was aware that something about it always bothered him, especially after finding out the truth.
Up to that point (when their kitchen conversation took place), Bucky’s memory was still a mess and it was hard to recover anything from his time as “The Fist of Hydra”. So even with all the documentation they were able to retrieve, when it came to personal recounts of events, they had next to nothing.
Nevertheless, it was just then that Steve started to slowly put the puzzle pieces back together and figured out what he was missing right from the beginning. Natasha said that the Winter Soldier missions spanned a period of 50 years, yet Bucky’s second capture by Hydra took place years before that period.
“Bucky fell from the train 70 years ago.”
“What are you implying?”
“There are 20 years unaccounted for, he explained, getting slightly distressed. What the hell happened to him then?”
“I…don’t know. There are no records of that time.”
Natasha stated the obvious yet shared the same look of dawning realization as Steve had plastered on his face.
What Rogers was trying to get at was that the gap in records could mean that it took Hydra 20 years not only to train but to break and manipulate Barnes in order to “mold” him into the perfect asset. Twenty years of torture, pain, and brain-scrambling memory wiping. Two decades was a lot of time, even back then, which could only mean that the reason that it took them so long was that Bucky fought back against everything.
His best friend, who was dead to the world; the man who was alone, afraid, and helpless. The young man who could have been hoping to be rescued by Steve until he gave up. That man fought for twenty years against unsurmountable suffering and memory loss; against being made into a living weapon and a puppet whose only purpose was to kill.
He fought until they broke him.
Upon realizing that, and by the time he managed to drag himself back to the present, Steve noticed the tears streaming down his face in copious amounts. He failed his friend back then, and in consequence, the other man paid greatly. The realization was as horrifying as painful.
But that was exactly why he was ready to give up everything in order to save Bucky from Stark back when the Sokovia Accords were first presented, as well as lay down his life in the Helicarrier just so he wouldn’t hurt him even more. Because he refused to fail him yet again. And he would do all of that all over again without a doubt, as long as he gets to keep Barnes safe.
If it came down to it, he would rather be taken in place of Bucky instead.