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“That’s my jacket,” says Bucky abruptly.
“What?” says Sam.
They’ve been given the weekend off to do whatever they want, following a gruelling mission taking down an AIM splinter cell in Singapore. (It had been… an interesting experience, if only because the supersoldier serum makes one particularly attractive to mosquitoes. That had been fun. For Sam, anyway.) So Bucky had suggested visiting the travelling Captain America exhibit at the local museum, if only to make fun of the historians’ wildly inaccurate guesswork.
Bucky gestures at the display before them. There’s a wax mannequin of Steve up front, decked out in the Captain America uniform he’d worn back in the 40s. On its left is a Bucky mannequin in a dark blue coat and – of all things – a domino mask.
“Well, yeah,” says Sam slowly. Is Bucky having another episode? He can’t be sure; owing to the fact that he has absolutely no frame of reference, he’s never quite as good at picking up on Bucky’s symptoms as Steve is. “That’s supposed to be you, right? Did you really wear a domino mask, by the way?”
“You don’t understand – that’s literally my jacket. I was wearing that when I fell –” Bucky falls silent; Sam can almost see the gears in his head whirring to life. “Shit, where’s Steve?”
The blond in question has wandered off in search of his old sketchbooks. They’d been donated to the museum by some rich old collector fart who’d laid claim to them in an auction years before Steve had defrosted, and no amount of legal firepower (courtesy of the Stark estate) had gotten them back.
“You sure it’s not a replica? It could just be a really good replica, right?” Sam asks, trailing behind him as Bucky weaves through the crowd. There had been, after all, plenty of propaganda reels – the entrance hall to the exhibit was proof enough.
“I know my jackets, Wilson!” he snaps back. “There’s a bit of the hem on the left that looks like it’s been mended a few times; it kept getting caught in Steve’s sidecar and ripping, so I had to keep patching it up between missions. And the entire left sleeve is made from different fabric from the rest of the coat – this exhibit isn’t all that new. Who the fuck has the resources to retrieve my old jacket? Who knows that Bucky Barnes is the Winter Soldier?”
“Well, sorry for not realising the super-serum gave you super-sight,” Sam mutters. Then, as the rest of Bucky’s tirade filters through his brain, he pales. “Oh, fuck – where’s Steve?”
*
“So,” Steve says, grim-faced and pallid, “it turns out HYDRA isn’t as dead as we hoped it was.”
Sam has no idea what Natasha told him over the phone, but he has a feeling that it involves an exponential increase of fighting squid Nazis in his future.
“So you’re saying this exhibition is funded by Nazis?” he asks.
“Not just the exhibit,” Steve corrects him, still sickened. “The whole museum.”
Sam has to close his eyes to fight down the sudden surge of nausea rising from his stomach.
“Shit,” he whispers, mostly to himself, and he’s pretty sure it’s some form of ancient defence mechanism kicking in to keep him from losing it right there and then, but all he can think about is how they had actually spent money on their day passes. They gave their hard-earned money to a Nazi museum. “Fuck.”
“Fuck this shit,” Bucky hisses. “Just – fuck it. I’m taking it back.”
“You are aware that’s stealing, right?” Sam points out. (Who is he kidding? Of course Bucky knows.)
“I don’t care,” says Bucky, “I’m taking it back. I’m – I’m sick of HYDRA profiting off my life, even after I’ve already left – fuck –”
“I’ll come with you,” Steve says soberly.
When they turn to him in tandem, Sam shrugs helplessly. “I’m sorry, man, I wish I could say I have your back, but I’m not coming in with you. Breaking and entering on an unsanctioned mission? I’m already in deep shit with Fury. I’d get in way more trouble than the two of you would, and you know it.”
“That’s fine,” Bucky replies. “Be our alibi – Steve is all I need.”
Just like that, the two of them have their heads put together, discussing tactics and points-of-entry. Sam sometimes thinks he’s the only sane person at the Academy. “How many cameras did you count in the exhibit hall?"
(At some point, Bucky says, “Hell, Stevie, we oughta take your sketchbooks back while we’re at it, fuck that old guy anyway –”
“They’re locked away under glass, Buck, it’s gonna be a lot harder to get those without triggering an alarm –”
“We’ll go for ‘em last, just smash the glass and book it –”
“Bucky, no –”
Sam sidles out of the room, just so he can attempt to claim plausible deniability.)
*
Long after the sun has set, and the last meandering patron has left the halls of the Captain America exhibition, a shadow lingers in the men’s toilet. Well, two shadows, and hiding in the toilet isn’t exactly the most revolutionary infiltration method, but hey. If it works, right?
Steve stills as Bucky raises a hand, listening intently; the footsteps of what appears to be a night watchman recede into the distance.
“Think the coast is clear?” he whispers.
“Should be,” Bucky whispers back.
Carefully, he cracks open the door, peering out into the empty corridor.
They’ve already identified and covered all the cameras and their sight angles; it had felt a little overkill to apply their infiltration training to a museum, of all things, but between the two of them they have plans for just about every possible contingency.
As the first camera comes into view, Bucky throws up a fist and they come to a stop.
File formation, he signs, taking the lead; Steve follows after, stifling his urge to snort. As if he’d never been on infiltration missions before.
Bucky watches, silent and deadly still, as the camera slowly moves from side to side. Abruptly he gestures move with a sharp jab forward and darts through the hall, Steve in tow; it doesn’t take much time for them to reach the exhibition hall. This presents their first problem; the mannequins, in pride of place in the centre of the room, are way too exposed; no amount of ducking and dodging is going to keep them out of sight of the many cameras dotted around the hall.
Luckily, the solution to this is simple. Steve tugs out the portable signal jammer that Tony had built for them, for a previous mission breaking into HYDRA School, and turns it on.
They just… walk up to the mannequins and strip off the jacket. All things considered, it’s really quite anti-climatic.
Objective accomplished, Bucky signs with a rakish smirk, folding the blue woollen jacket over his arm.
Together, they turn to retrace their steps, creeping back down the corridor to the toilet where they’ve left a window open, when—
Footsteps echo down the hall.
Someone’s whistling.
Predictably, Steve freezes.
They exchange panicked glances as the voice humming Tiptoe Through The Tulips grows louder and louder. Is it worth it to run for the door now? Do they wait? Maybe if they’re lucky the guy won’t notice the naked mannequin?
The whistling comes to an abrupt stop.
Puzzled silence, then –
“What in tarnation?”
Bucky signs enemy and door and RUN before grabbing Steve’s hand and making a break for it.
*
As promised, Sam is waiting in the 24-hours Starbucks two blocks down from the museum. Steve jogs back to the crosswalk to keep an eye on the museum entrance, leaving Bucky to make faces at Sam through the glass window until he finally takes notice and rushes outside.
“I have bought so many Americanos waiting for y’all to get out,” Sam stresses. “So many.”
“Thanks, Sam.”
“They weren’t even good Americanos, man, they were watered down as fuck. And the barista started giving me weird looks after the third one.”
“We appreciate your sacrifice,” Bucky deadpans.
“I think he was gonna kick me out. What kind of superhero gets kicked out of a Starbucks?”
“You, apparently,” Bucky is about to say, but then he catches sight of Steve jogging back from the corner of the street.
“All clear,” he says. “Even if they saw our faces, I don’t think anyone would believe them.”
At this, a weight lifts from his shoulders. Bucky looks down at the worn jacket in his hands, and laughs; later, he’ll find the words to make it symbolic, to make the theft about reclaiming his past. But for now, none of that matters.
“Here, keep it, pal,” he says, tucking it around Steve’s broad shoulders. It looks ridiculously tiny on his strapping frame, but Steve had been small once, and Bucky has always loved seeing Steve in his things. “It suits ya.”
Steve laughs and reaches down to twine their fingers together; Sam pretends to gag.
“Come on,” says Steve. “Let’s go home.”
*
The dressing-down they get from Fury and Pepper over the unauthorised ‘mission’ is almost worth it. Almost.