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In the end, the first person who finds him isn’t Captain America. It isn’t the Widow either—she’d been his first bet. It isn’t even the Falcon. No, in the end, the first person who finds the Winter Soldier is a dead man. Well, he’s supposed to be dead. The Winter Soldier should know; after all, he’s the one who shot him.
Nicholas J. Fury stops typing and stares coolly over the computer screen at the Winter Soldier, when he walks into the Hydra command center. After a second, Fury looks back down and resumes typing. “Damn German always gives me trouble,” he mutters, shaking his head.
There’s a lot of blood on the ground. Five Hydra agents riddled with various bullet holes lie in dark red puddles. The room is quiet but for the clacking of keys. The entire base seems quiet, which isn’t all that surprising. The Winter Soldier had taken out a good number of Hydra agents on his way in, and it’s likely that Fury had done the same. It’s possible that there’s no one left.
Fury pays no attention to the Winter Soldier, and so the Winter Solder thinks. Friend or Foe, that’s the question of the hour. Fury, Nicholas J. had been his mission, once. Most of the Winter Soldier’s memory is piecemeal, but one thing he does remember is that: ambushing Fury, shooting at him repeatedly, blowing up his car, and so on, and so forth. Stuff like that will make someone hold a grudge. Yet Fury’s reaction tells the Winter Soldier that revenge is not high up on his list of priorities at the moment. Point for Friend.
And then there are the dead Hydra agents, scattered throughout the room. Fury’s work, most likely. And the Winter Soldier so does enjoy a dead Hydra agent. Anyone who kills Hydra agents is probably a decent person, in his book. Another point for Friend.
Two points for Friend, zero for Foe, and so after a minute of watching Fury try and fail to do what he wants with the computer, the Winter Soldier, voice a little gravelly from disuse, opens his mouth and says, “Ich spreche Deutsch.”
Fury looks up at the Winter Soldier again, narrows his good eye. “I’m gonna assume that was German for ‘I speak German.’”
The Winter Soldier crosses the room in a few quick strides, Fury watching him warily as he goes. Fury’s hand twitches toward his pistol, but he holds back. The Winter Soldier bends over the console, his fingers hovering over the keyboard. “What’re you trying to do?” he asks.
Fury is silent. He frowns deeply, and his hand keeps twitching. He glares at the Winter Soldier so intensely that the Winter Soldier worries the man’s gonna get an ulcer. The Winter Soldier just waits. Eventually, Fury says, “I’m trying to download all the local files to that USB drive.”
The Winter Soldier taps a few keys, and the screen is replaced with a loading bar and the words, “der Download dauert 15 Minuten.”
“The download’s gonna take 15 minutes—”
“Yeah, I got that, thanks,” Fury grunts.
The loading bar is black with red stripes, and it inches forward at a snail’s pace.
“I figure you’re gonna want me around afterwards to initiate the self-destruct sequence?” the Winter Soldier asks.
“Yes.” Fury purses his lips. “Please.”
Leaning against the edge of the table, the Winter Soldier goes quiet. Fury crosses his arms and does the same on the other end of the table. Fifteen minutes of awkward silence it is.
The Winter Soldier is unconcerned. As an assassin, he’d spent the vast majority of his time in silence: waiting behind a sniper rifle on a rooftop for the perfect shot, trailing a mark through busy streets, crouching behind a large rock and not responding to the obnoxious junior agent assigned to him who keeps talking, threatening to give away their position. Silence was his domain; it was where he thrived and what he coveted.
The Winter Soldier taps his fingers, fidgets with his leg. He glances over at Fury, only to catch Fury glancing back, and they make eye contact for a gloriously awkward moment until they both quickly avert their eyes to opposite ends of the room. Only five seconds in, and the Winter Soldier is already uncomfortable. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go.
Here’s the thing: Bucky Barnes is dead. People like Captain America might think that the Winter Soldier is Bucky Barnes based on the fact that they share a few things. Like the same DNA. The same face. Approximately 85% of the same body. The same no-good blond kid following them around everywhere. They’re wrong. Bucky Barnes died 70 years ago, falling off a train into an icy gorge. It’s one of the few things the history books ever got right.
But. Maybe. If the Winter Soldier had to say it. If he really had to say it. It could be that a little piece of Bucky Barnes survived in the Winter Soldier.
Bucky Barnes hadn’t hated all silences. He’d been fine with companionable silences, mournful silences, contemplative silences, angry silences. But, for him, awkward silences were best broken up by a friendly joke, a flirty smile, or an idle observation. Bucky Barnes had always been skilled at charming away those awkward pauses.
And so, with the ghost of a dead man lingering in his brain, the Winter Soldier looks at the dead Hydra agents, all with bullet holes in their chests or legs, he breathes in, out, and he says to Fury, “Your aim could use some work.”
It’s not his best opener, but, to be fair, he’s out of practice. He can’t remember the last time he’d engaged in small talk—actually he can’t remember much at all, but he assumes it wasn’t very recent.
Fury’s expression is unreadable. “Well, it’s a little hard to aim when you’re taking on an entire Hydra base by yourself,” he retorts dryly.
“Feel free to go back and look at all the bodies I left behind,” the Winter Soldier replies, nodding towards the door from which he entered. “Headshots, mostly.”
Fury looks more amused than annoyed, but it’s hard to tell. The corner of his eye is curved upwards, slightly. His hand has stopped twitching.
“I didn’t exactly see any of your bullets in my skull, Barnes,” Fury counters. “Two in my chest that hurt like Hell, but none in my head.”
“That’s not fair. I had to shoot you through a wall.”
“Then maybe you should have waited until I wasn’t behind a wall,” Fury suggests, tone sardonic. “Then we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and I wouldn’t have to listen to you running your mouth about my aim.”
“You’re a hard man to kill, Colonel,” the Winter Soldier admits.
Fury smiles. He actually smiles. Nicholas J. Fury smiles, and the Winter Soldier feels encouraged. This small talk thing isn’t all that hard.
The Winter Soldier shifts his weight, crosses his arms. Ten minutes. “Hey,” he starts again, “is Pierce really dead? The papers all say he is, but I can’t trust ‘em.”
“You can trust me,” Fury says, earnestly. “I shot the motherfucker myself.”
The Winter Soldier whistles. It feels lighter now, having that knowledge. World feels a little less suffocating. Maybe there’ll be something for him out there, after all, now that Hydra’s largest, heaviest, most evil head has been chopped off. Or maybe two more will just grow in its place.
“Jealous?” teases Fury, smirking.
“You have no idea. What I wouldn’t give to just be able to take his neck in my hands and sq—” And he cuts himself off there. Another fragment of Bucky Barnes that seems to have survived. Polite conversation does not include vividly describing how you wish to murder another human being. “Well, you know what I mean.”
Fury, to his credit, is unfazed.
“I do. That man,” he says, shaking his head, “that motherfucker.” He starts clenching and unclenching one of his hands. “I thought—He turned down a Nobel Peace Prize! And I trusted him, and I signed off on those goddamn helicarriers. No, I fought for them! And Rogers took one look at them, and he knew, but I fucking—” Breathing out loudly through his nose, he stares at the floor. Voice quieter now, “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to trust a single person again for the rest of my life.”
The Winter Soldier frowns, as a thought occurs to him. “You trusted me, just now,” he says.
“No, I didn’t,” Fury responds, knee-jerk.
“Then, how come you didn’t shoot me on sight when I showed up? As far as you know, I’m Hydra, too.”
“I read your file. I knew you were brainwashed.”
“I could have still been brainwashed.”
“Yeah, well your pal Rogers kept going on and on about how you remembered him, and how you saved him from the river, and how your childhood friendship was such a strong bond that it overcame all the brainwashing they tried to do and on and on and on,” Fury says, sounding tired.
The Winter Soldier shakes his head. “No, that doesn’t sound right either. You wouldn’t make a decision like that because of what Steve told you to do.”
“You think I’m lying? I’m not, that boy would not shut up about you—”
“You’re fulla shit,” the Winter Soldier says, and Fury’s face moves not a fraction of an inch. “You didn’t try to kill me for the same reason that Hydra doesn’t try to kill me,” the Winter Soldier guesses. “I’m an asset.”
After a moment, Fury shrugs. “Okay. I heard through the grapevine that you were making your way across Europe, taking out every trace of Hydra as you went,” he explains, more truthfully this time, “and I thought, it’d be a damn shame to put an end to that.” Then Fury reaches out a hand, one eyebrow raised. “So what do you say? Not enemies?”
The Winter Soldier snorts. “Not enemies” actually sounds pretty good.
He shakes Fury’s hand. “Hey, as long as there’s no electroshock or cryofreeze,” he says casually, “I’m on your side.”
For the first time since Bucky’s met him, Fury actually looks sad, a little downturn on the side of his eye. He shakes his head.
“Do me a favor, Barnes, now that we’re not enemies and all,” he says, apropos of nothing.
“I’m listening,” the Winter Soldier says.
“Let Rogers catch up to you sometime soon.”
Automatically, instinctively, the Winter Soldier looks away. “I’m not who he thinks I am.”
“I get it, Barnes,” Fury says, voice a little softer. “Look, I’m not asking you to go home with him or hug him or cry in each other’s arms. Tell him to fuck off for all I care.” The Winter Soldier laughs lowly. “But he’s been breaking his back for the last six months trying to stay on your trail. And with SHIELD disbanded and resources low, there are a lot more important things I’d like him to be focusing on. Eliminating Hydra, for example.”
Well, when you put it that way…
“And you say you’re not who they think you are?” Fury raises an eyebrow. “Well, I’ll say this: who ever is?”
The Winter Soldier opens his mouth but says nothing, his mind stuck somewhere between the responses of “Yeah, I guess so,” and “That makes absolutely no fucking sense.” Ultimately, he doesn’t end up deciding because he spies movement out of the corner of his eye, and he jerks his metal arm upwards just in time to prevent two bullets from embedding themselves in his and Fury’s skulls.
As they take cover behind the console, the Winter Soldier peeks out the door from which Fury had entered to see a heavily injured Hydra agent with a machine gun slung over his shoulder slowly making his way down the hallway by leaning on a rolling cart, dragging his useless bullet-riddled leg behind him. “Hail Hydra!” he screams.
The Winter Soldier scowls and reloads his pistol, as the Hydra agent fills the air above them with suppressive fire. “I told you you had to work on your aim,” he hisses at Fury over the sound of gunshots.
Fury frowns deeply, mumbling something under his breath, and then rears up over the console and lets off one shot and one shot only. The Winter Soldier watches as the last Hydra agent falls to the ground with a red dot in the center of his forehead.
“You were saying?” Fury asks. He stands up and offers a hand.
The Winter Soldier lets himself be pulled to his feet. “Nice shot,” he says, somewhat happily.