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They’d found the girls in a cellar.
After clearing the old house where the HYDRA rats had scuttled from, they’d been about to blow the thing to smithereens, when Barnes had gone still, and held up a hand, his black hair sticking to his forehead with sweat.
“Do you hear that?” Barnes whispered.
Yelena hadn’t. Not right away. Then…
“There it is.”
“Probably bunch of rats; American homes have rats; this is known,” Alexei said, looting the cabinets for anything of value.
Yelena waited for the sound to repeat itself, but a moment stretched on, and even her keen ears heard nothing. She knew Barnes had some mental issues from having his brain put in a blender for seventy years; maybe he was hearing things.
“It probably isn’t—”
Then it was there, loud and repeated.
Bang, bang, bang.
John turned. “I hear it too.”
“No, duh, dipshit,” Alexei rolled his eyes. “All of us heard that.”
Barnes was already moving, hurrying through the old house as the sound repeated, something hard banging against wood. Yelena’s knives were out when she entered the room and found the World War 2 vet shoving aside a table and reaching for a latch on the floor.
“Cellar,” he said, lifting the heavy door without so much as a grunt, and without checking for booby traps.
Idiot, Yelena thought, but the next moment her derision withered away, as half a dozen dirty faces stared up at them, flinching in the sunlight.
One girl—maybe fourteen or fifteen—held a broken-off broom handle, brandished like a weapon, fire sparking in her young eyes, ready to fight.
Bucky held up his hands in a show of surrender, but with the metal arm and the tac gear and the guns, he didn’t exactly paint a disarming picture.
“Woah, alright, we’re not here to hurt you,” he said.
Nothing. The girls stared, broom-handle girl might’ve snarled. She was feisty, but she was thin. Yelena ignored the sinking in her stomach.
Barnes repeated his sentence. First in Russian, then Mandarin, then Thai, then Spanish, then Swahili, then French, then—and Yelena thought this was just showing off—in Maori. None of the girls looked anywhere close to Polynesian.
Just as Barnes finished repeating the sentence in American Sign Language, the girl with the broomstick spoke up.
“Where Patrisk?”
Yelena frowned, but somehow, in two words, Barnes clocked the girl’s accent, and responded in perfect Ukranian.
“She’s asking after a big white guy, red hair,” he informs Walker and Alexei when the girl speaks.
“This guy?” Alexie points to the dining room, where said ginger santa claus was lying face down in a pool of his own blood. Yelena looks back to Barnes with a raised eyebrow.
Your move.
She just hopes this guy wasn’t the girl’s best friend.
Barnes turns back to her.
“He’s dead,” he says in Ukranian, and the girl lowers her broomstick.
Please don’t start crying, Yelena thinks, barely holding back an eye roll. It’s been a long, shitty day, and she doesn’t want to have to comfort any weepy kids.
To broomstick-girl’s credit, though, not a peep comes out of her, instead she looks to her friends, squints her eyes and says,
“Good.”
Before spitting on the dirty floor at Bucky’s feet.
Alexei lets out a booming laugh. “Good riddance!”
His voice makes several of the girls flinch, and Yelena shoots her would-be father a dirty look. The oaf never knows how to handle himself in sensitive situations.
After a few brisk words between Barnes and broomstick girl—the apparent leader of the bedraggled group, the girls climb out of the cellar, each in varying stages of cleanliness and fear. They huddle together and hold each other up, all of them with ratty hair, all sporting bruises, as Walker runs to the jeep for bottles of water and protein packets.
The packets are meant for Barnes, whose metabolism runs like a bullet train, but he makes no complaint as he passes them out to the girls, and they gulp the things down greedily. It’s clear they haven’t had a decent meal in a long time.
Yelena stands in the corner like a gargoyle watching from its perch, her anger growing with every whisper and flinch, every nervous look from the girls to their rescuers. She knows what they’re feeling. She remembers. The distrust, the nerves, the suspicion that it’s all a trick, that they’re about to have the rug pulled out from under them. That these soft hands and gentle voices will soon turn cruel. They’re right to fear it. They’re lucky it’s a group of reformed assassins who’ve found them, and not any of Hydra’s clean-up teams.
Barnes and Walker are decent in talking to the girls, in making their intimidating size shrink somehow, and Alexei actually has one of them laughing—though she doesn’t seem to speak English or Russian—but Yelena stands aloof, waiting for the medical team that Barnes called the moment he could. It pays to have friends in rich places.
Barnes steps away from broomstick-girl, and sidles up to Yelena, staring through the screen door past her, not looking at her.
“We should have hunted them down,” Yelena mutters, regretting the rats that they’d let scuttle away as they approached the decrepit farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
“The girls take priority,” Barnes says, but though Yelena doesn’t know him all that well, she can tell he’s feeling the same. He’d like to run them down too.
“Listen, I think you should go with them when the medical team gets here.”
Yelena’s head snaps to him with a snarl.
“And let Alexei and Walker fuck up the hunt for those Hydra fucks again? No way.”
“Just for a bit, to make sure they’re secure with social service—”
“I’m not a nanny.”
Yelena notices Barnes’ metal hand clench. He’s always so reserved, The Winter Soldier, like he’s keeping a snarling beast on a leash. Yelena wants to see the beast, just once, when he lets it loose. But only from a distance. She remembers the stories they told at the Red Room—the stories Natasha whispered to her under the covers. But perhaps that was The Soldier, and this is only a Man.
“Her name is Byelcha, she’s from Lviv,” Barnes says, glancing over his shoulder at broomstick girl. “She came here with her grandmother, and slipped through the cracks of the child welfare system after the old woman died. She’s been captive with Hydra for a year and a h—”
“Your point, Barnes. Or I’ll be as old as you by the time we get out of here.”
Barnes shoots Yelena a flat look. Then he glances back to the girls, who whisper and eat and look warily out the windows.
“They abused them,” he murmurs, barely a sound. “And I think they could use with a familiar face right now.”
Yelena scoffs. “As if I’m any mor—”
“A female face,” Barnes corrects, and his legendary blue eyes give Yelena a significant look.
That’s when it sinks in—the nervous way they hold to each other, the fragility in their too-young eyes, and the varying stages of undress. Bile curdles in Yelena’s mouth, and she curses in Russian.
The bastards.
She draws a knife, and shoves out the door.
“Yelena, wait,” Bucky says in Russian, hurrying after her. “Wait, you can’t leave th—”
“You and Walker get them to the medical team. I’m going after those rats.” They shouldn’t have let them get away in the first place. They should’ve hunted all of them down until they’d ended up like Patrisk. She should’ve known. Hydra will always do the worst thing you expect of them. And then some.
“They’re in the wind by now, it’s been an hour, you’re better served—”
“I can find them.” She reaches the jeep and Bucky’s bike, choosing the latter, and swinging her leg over it.
“I don’t doubt that, Yelena, but right now our priority is keeping those girls safe.”
“Which you and Walker are more than capable of doing,” Yelena spits. “I’m going to hunt some rats.”
She kicks on the bike, but Bucky steps in front of it and places two hands on the handlebars.
“I’m asking you to stay.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Move.”
She revs the engine in threat, but the supersoldier doesn’t flinch.
“You think those girls feel safe with us? With me and Walker and Alexei? Three large men in tac gear with weapons? You think I don’t know what that looks like?”
“I don’t care!”
“You do, Yelena, or you wouldn’t be hell bent on gutting these bastards. Believe me, I understand the—”
“You don’t!” Yelena shrieks, letting her control slip, just a moment, just a fraction of the fury that is always bubbling below the surface of her calm. “You don’t fucking understand. Men who hurt people like that deserve to be skinned alive.”
“You think I don’t know men who hurt people like that?” Barnes demands, eyes flaring. “You think I don’t understand?”
Yelena’s wave of fury draws up short, the gaze of The Winter Soldier like shards of ice into her steaming rage. An inkling crawls up her spine.
“What I understand, ” Bucky continues calmly, “is that those girls in there are terrified, and you’re the only person here who can make them feel better, if you would get your head out of your ass.” He stands, releasing the handlebars and leaving a dent in them. “You wanna run off and kill some Nazis? I’ll fill up your gas tank myself. But not until those kids are in good hands.”
Shame replaces the fury in Yelena’s gut. Of course the self-righteous bastard would pull the Nazi card. Oh look at me, I’m legendary American hero, I sacrificed myself to save the world, I fought Thanos, blah blah blah. Just like an American, to guilt her with nobility and honor.
But he’s right. Like it or not, Yelena is the person those girls need right now. At least until some pathetic little social worker just out of grad school who weighs a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet and dresses in a pencil skirt and heels gets her ass over here and starts doing her job.
Yelena curses, and swings her leg back over the bike, stomping back towards the house.
“Those keys are mine,” Bucky calls after her, but she just flips him the bird, and shoves them into her pocket.
***
As it happens, the social worker isn’t a pathetic little brunette, and she doesn’t wear heels. Her name is Martha, and she’s at least fifty, and she looks every minute of it.
But the girls love her, that’s apparent right away. Somehow, within half an hour of entering the decrepit old house, the woman has learned all of their names—the real ones, not the American versions—and she has them smiling. She must be good at her job. Which is to say she cares. And that’s more than Yelena can muster.
Before they are loaded into a van to head for the city and a warm place to sleep, broomstick girl hugs Yelena—actually hugs her—around the waist like a child, and says something in Ukranian that Yelena doesn’t bother to translate. She’s never going to see this girl again. It’s no use being sentimental.
When the house is empty and Alexei has washed the paint out of his beard that he’d used to help entertain the girls while they waited, the four of them move on, Yelena on the motorbike while the the three blind mice follow behind in the jeep. They know where the rats will be gathering, after abandoning this particular ship. And their job isn’t done.
They sleep that night in an abandoned general store that probably belonged to an American family for generations, before being shoved out by the Walmart moving in a mile away. Hooray for capitalism.
The boarded-up structure on a dead main street provides a perfect shelter for four vigilantes. Yelena would’ve preferred a motel—hell, if she were alone she might’ve sprung for a hotel after the shitty day she’s had. But Barnes and Walker are too recognizable, and Alexei attracts trouble like a flower attracts bees, so they shuffle around the dilapidated building and pick out what comfortable niches they can find.
Barnes sleeps in a separate room from the rest of them—a practice he’s maintained during the past few weeks of their Hydra-chasing escapade. Yelena doesn’t know why, and normally she doesn’t care to ask—content to build a barricade of old crates and decrepit pieces of furniture and catch what sleep she can—but today she follows him up the narrow staircase to what once must have been a family’s home.
Barnes is rolling out a sleeping pad beneath the front windows, moonlight cutting a square on the floor, and glinting off his metal arm. The Wakandans might’ve made it a little less reflective while they were crafting a multi-billion dollar prosthetic for him.
“Something the matter?” Barnes asks flatly, not stopping his set up. That’s another thing Yelena’s learned about him during this whole mess—he values his sleep. Alexei and Walker will stay up chatting into the night, swapping stories, sharing drinks. But Barnes is eyes-closed by 10pm unless aliens are attacking.
Maybe he’s just old, Yelena thinks with a snort, as she leans on the doorframe, arms crossed.
“You were right, today,” she says matter-of-factly.
“Oh?” Barnes peels off his tactical gear until he’s only in a white tank. Then he grabs a round tin from his backpack and starts applying ointment to the angry red skin near his prosthetic. A supersoldier applying ointment. It might be amusing, if the grisly scars weren’t so sickening. How deep must they go to scar even him?
“About the girls,” Yelena repeats. “You were right.”
“Somebody call the Kremlin, we’ve got a traitor in our midst,” Barnes jokes with a cracked smile. Everybody thinks the former POW is a stoic, but Yelena can spot the grinning boy from Brooklyn beneath all those scars. She imagines he must have been very charming, in his day. A ladies’ man, so the Americans would say.
“What you said. That you understand ,” Yelena says, getting to her point. “What did you mean by that?”
She knows—or she thinks she knows—but it matters to her.
She can see the answer in his body, in the way his movements suddenly become practiced and careful, as he tucks his ointment away and sits on his bed roll, unlacing his boots. That’s another strange thing about Barnes—no matter where they sleep, or how dangerous it is, he always removes his shoes.
“I don’t know what you’re asking me, Yelena,” Barnes answers, his voice a practiced calm. If it were anyone but Yelena, they might’ve been fooled by it.
“Did Hydra rape you?” She asks bluntly.
Bucky stops. He looks up at her. For a moment there’s silence. Then:
“A group of sadists with a power fetish had total control over me for seventy years. You fill in the blanks.”
Yelena tastes the bitter bile in her mouth, and bites down on her cheek until salty blood replaces it. She shouldn’t have been surprised. Hydra will always do the worst thing you expect of them. And then some.
Barnes had been right about the girls—because he understood. What it was to be so hurt you don’t even feel safe in your own skin. Could it see it Yelena too? That hurt.
“I assumed… the Red Room was only girls. I assumed they had other training tactics for men.”
Bucky sighs, and pulls out a protein pack from his backpack, as if they’re discussing the weather over dinner.
“The Soviets called it a ‘Breeding Program’,” he quips. “They were polite like that. Wanted to see if they could make more little Winter Soldiers without the inconvenience of a serum.”
“And the Americans?”
Yelena doesn’t know why she asks. Doesn’t know why she’s sticking her hand in this boiling pot of pain.
Barnes gives her a humorless smirk. “They just liked to have fun.”
She curses in Russian, and Barnes nods. He takes his socks off and bundles them up.
“Is that all? Or would you like me to go into detail about all the torture they did to me for seventy years? Because if so, we’re going to be here a while.”
He’s deflecting with humor, Yelena knows. She knows because it’s her tactic too. Be disagreeable, and no one will ask you too many questions. Nobody’s dared touch her without her consent for almost twenty years, but she still feels it—that part of her that’s broken. She just didn’t think a man—a man like Barnes… but that’s naive thinking. Anyone can be broken. And Hydra had decades to break him.
She’s silent for a minute. For too long. But eventually she forces out the words—a truth for a truth. A fair trade, so she’s not in debt to him.
“In the Red Room, it was part of our graduation. Before the sterilization. We had to endure… whatever tactics the enemy might employ, without spilling our secrets.” They said it was necessary. So they would be iron. So they would be unbreakable. But Yelena knew they enjoyed it. She’d made sure to personally hunt down and behead the man who had partaken in her graduation.
“I know.”
Barnes’ voice brings her back from that bloody backroom somewhere in Bucharest. She meets those ice-blue eyes, undimmed despite a century of pain.
“They took me to the Red Room, in the nineties,” Barnes says flatly. “Used me a test dummy, for whatever… inventive fighting techniques you girls could come up with. Your sister—”
“—don’t talk about Natasha.”
Bucky pauses, only his eyes moving.
“...your sister was the cleverest of them. The game was to get information from an important piece of paper in my jacket pocket. A piece of paper that I’d be ordered to protect.” He smiles—actually smiles at the memory—and Yelena can’t find it in herself to scream at him and tell him to shut up. Because here’s a memory of Natasha that is new to her; it’s like finding a piece of gold in the ashes of a burned home.
“And instead of tricking or fighting or seducing… she just asked me for it. Politely. She said she wanted to look at it. That she’d read it, and give it right back to me.” He shrugs, smiling. “The only order I’d been given was to protect it, and by all accounts she seemed sincere. So I did. And she read it, and gave it back.”
He runs a finger under his nose, his head dropping.
“They put me in the chair for that,” he croaks, forearms resting on his knees. “And I think they beat her. But… it was worth it. Just a moment of… kindness. When she could’ve chosen violence.”
When Barnes looks back up, Yelena knows there are tears pooling in her eyes. Vicious, traitorous things.
“That’s one of the first memories I got back, after the helicarriers. One of the first things I recalled—a scrawny red-head in a black jumpsuit, smiling at me.”
Yelena swallows through a tightness in her throat.
“I didn’t know,” she says, not sure exactly what she means.
Bucky nods. “I know.”
“I didn’t ask,” she corrects. And he nods again.
“Neither did I.”
They watch each other across the dusty room; a room full of someone else’s memories, of lives that were actually lived, instead of stolen.
“Will they be alright? Those girls?” Yelena says. Because she needs to hear someone say it. To hear that there’s hope. That they don’t all have to end up as broken as her. And if anyone’s word on hope can be trusted, it’s this man.
“I don’t know,” Barnes says, unwilling to lie and spare her feelings. “But because of you, they’ve got a chance.”
Yelena nods, and she turns, to go back to her little corner behind her boxes and furniture, and hide from vulnerable feelings.
At the doorway, though, she stops.
“Why do you do that?” She juts her chin out. “With the shoes?”
Barnes has finished tucking his socks into his boots. He looks at them—worn but well-cared for. What a luxury, Yelena supposes, to be able to lace your own shoes, after so many years without a will of your own.
Bucky places a palm on the molded leather.
“...to remind myself that I’m not running anymore.”