Chapter Text
“Uh, Steve?”
“Yup?”
“Did you check the mail?” Sam is in Steve's living room, apparently making himself at home. He refuses to jog with Steve again (“I never actually jogged with you in the first place”) but he will come by every few days, concerned and baldly honest about it. Steve cooks and Sam brings some movie or TV show that Steve hasn't seen yet. They're taking a break from Parks & Recreation (“You'll love it; your entire life is an ensemble comedy”) so Steve can check on his corn-and-parmesan empanadas. Sam's vegetarian.
“...Sort of?” Steve had given it the sort of cursory glance he gave everything these days that wasn't -
Data, files, intel, pain threshold of subject Winter Soldier, routine 41183
- important.
He'd resolved to go through the correspondence when he was next sleepless and maudlin and casting about for distraction, so...tonight.
They're back in D.C., now. The Winter Soldier was busy, in the immediate aftermath of his failed (final) mission: they've come across razed Hydra compounds; nebulous federal agencies exposed; red-faced and red-pinned CEOs trussed up in McMansions, awaiting authorities. But Bucky has been conspicuously silent lately and Steve is quietly terrified.
A familiar patience creeps into Sam's voice. “And did you see this take-out flyer?”
“Yeah, I get 'em all the time.”
“Sure, for places around here.” Sam plunks the ad – FIORE'S FAMOUS PIZZA! - down in front of Steve. “This is in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.”
Steve looks at the address on the flyer again. Then he looks at Sam. Then he looks at the address. “Did you know,” he says, “that Lancaster was home to the nation's fifteenth president?”
Sam does not quite roll his eyes.
Steve asks, tentatively, “Do you think...?”
Sam holds up his hands. “No idea. Not going to speculate. Officially not speculating that your amnesiac BFF left a note in the mailbox, like a twelve-year-old with a crush, suggesting his current whereabouts. No, sir.”
Steve is gripping the flyer so hard it threatens to tear. He places it carefully back down on the counter. “I need to go. Do. Something.”
Sam pauses in the middle of popping an entire empanada in his mouth. “You need backup.”
Probably. “I appreciate the offer,” because that's what it was, “but no. Not yet. If he's -”
Hurting, raving, completely off the reservation
“- still under, I'm not putting you in the line of fire again.”
“That was the deal, though.” Sam is eyeing him carefully.
“When we were chasing him. If he's reaching out – making contact - “
“You don't want to spook him,” Sam finishes. “Could still be a ruse. Some kind of bait-and-switch.”
The man he'd met on the bridge – the man who'd turned the city and Steve's soul inside-out – did not seem the type to play games, to waste time toying with his prey. No, this is someone else. (Steve hopes.)
“If he comes back with me, it'd be good to have you at full capacity. Think that's when the real hard work will start.”
“You're being dumb,” Sam says, “but I'm used to it. And you maybe have a point. Go on, then. I'll be here when you get back. So will the VA,” he adds pointedly.
“Sam? Thanks.” It's so inadequate compared to all that Sam has done and been for Steve.
“Don't mention it. And when you find Barnes, don't mention the thing about the crush, either.”
“Okay.”
***
It's a boring brick three-story walkup. Steve doesn't know what he expected.
Fiore's is, indeed, located here. It takes up the first floor and second floor. There's a bus stop across the street; Steve parks behind it and gets out. The building is flanked by a community garden and a consignment shop. The nearest police station is five blocks down; the nearest hospital, a mile.
It's an utterly unremarkable location, almost invisible in its blandness. The late afternoon heat is muggy and Steve is overdressed. DC was cooler. He wipes his hands on his pants. It's sort of like being dragged on one of Bucky's double dates again, all the bewilderment and anxiety and unattractive sweatiness.
He finds himself abruptly lightheaded – it's an unfamiliar feeling, one he doesn't recognize until he has to sink down on the scarred bench behind him. He means it to be for just a moment but the building – Bucky's building – looms ever larger, an impenetrable fortress of Steve's failure and Bucky's pain. The street is a vast chasm of loss that separates them.
Steve watches. A family of half-a-dozen trips happily the restaurant. A deliveryman departs. Two buses come and go. Steve watches. He's going to get up soon. He is. Natasha calls. She programmed her own ringtone into his phone; it's 'Bad Reputation.' Steve likes Joan Jett. He doesn't answer. The deliveryman returns. Steve watches. The pizzeria does a brisk business; Steven can smell marinara and his stomach rumbles.
“I clocked you twenty minutes ago,” Bucky tells him, and Steve startles badly. “Then Kyla said there was 'some sad-eyed creeper at the bus stop cosplaying Captain America' and I figured I ought to head out here. What does 'cosplaying' mean?”
Steve makes a noise of strangled indignation. “I'm not even wearing the suit,“ he finally manages.
Across the street, a teenage girl glowers at Steve from a third-floor window. She's wearing a t-shirt with a picture of Angela Davis on it, and an expression of extreme distrust. Steve blinks and turns back to Bucky.
He's not surprised Bucky got the drop on him: stealth was always his way, working in the shadows of Steve's shining public war. Steve, for his part, remains blindsided and blinded by Bucky's presence, close enough to touch. Steve didn't touch enough, when he had the chance.
Bucky looks...not good.
He's clean, and apparently uninjured. His clothes are nondescript; he could be any young guy of this generation. His leather jacket is just a bit too long, sleeves that end at curled metal fingertips.
But he's gaunt. Shadows sit like bruises beneath his eyes.
And there's a fine trembling to him, minute but immediately discernible to Steve. Whether it's Bucky's anxiety, or fear, or the effort required not to emphatically murder Captain America on sight, Steve doesn't know.
The sleek, modern complexity of Bucky's left arm, and the body more heavily muscled than Bucky had ever been during the war, served at least as evidence that Hydra kept their asset in prime physical condition. They're no longer maintaining their machine, and today Bucky seems diminished.
Of course, it could also be the seventy years as a mindless, helpless, hopeless killer weighing him down. Steve abruptly needs to swipe at his eyes in what he hopes is a very nonchalant manner.
Bucky studies him, then jerks his head toward the building. “Wanna come up?”
Steve jumps up from the bench, almost trips over his own feet, and follows Bucky home.
The apartment is a little bare, but tidy. Hardwood floors with a couple of rag rugs strewn about. Fading sunlight streams in, and through an open door to the left Steve can see a single twin bed beneath a Janelle Monáe poster. Steve really likes Janelle Monáe.
The girl is on the couch, appearing to play some video game but in reality watching Steve out of the corner of her eye. Her scowl has deepened and her narrowed, surreptitious gaze follows Steve as Bucky leads him past her to the kitchen.
Bucky hands Steve a beer. “These work on you?”
“Not anymore.”
“Me, neither.” Still Bucky’s left hand closes around a bottle of his own – too delicately, like he wants nothing more than to rein in his (astounding, miraculous) strength.
“You haven't been here the whole time.” Of this Steve is almost certain. Despite their separate swaths through domestic Hydra bases, he’d never been able to properly track Bucky. Hydra’s asset had clearly been working off intel that Steve didn't possess, data that was either absent from the SHIELD infodump or that hadn’t yet been identified by the skeleton crew of analysts that remained.
“Since D.C., you mean? No. Had some half-baked idea of doing what you've been – taking Hydra down, head by head. Pretty dumb, actually. Had to scare up weapons, transport, a million other things. I was never tasked with procuring those kinds of resources; they were always provided.” A wry smile that doesn't come near his eyes. “Never too good at thinking for myself, was I?”
“That's not true,” Steve says with a ferocity that surprises only one of them. “You're sharp, creative, curious. You led missions and men. You -”
“Okay,” Bucky says. “Okay.” He gestures to the table, clears away the books littering its surface – Applied Quantum Cryptography, The Journal of International Bioethics, Nanostructured Vibranium Electrochemistry.
Carrie.
Steve sits.
“A little light reading?”
“They’re hers.” From the front room the girl is still watching them, with an intensity that would rival Natasha's. Steve gives her his back though he's not happy about it.
“You took out over a dozen bases, Buck. It was –“ Amazing. Heartbreaking. “Impressive.” Bucky looks away.
“Then you dropped off the radar. Haven't seen anything that looked like your work for almost a month, now. No sign of you at all, 'til the flyer.”
“Easier to get to you than it should have been.” There's a reprimand in the statement. “You should have vacated your previous residence.”
“Why?”
“It was...” Bucky appears to search for, and reject, several responses. “Damaged. Broken.”
“It wasn't, though,” Steve says gently. “It needed some repairs, and it’s a little rougher around the edges. It’s changed, but it’s still my home. It's still where I belong.”
Bucky laughs, harsh and jarring: Steve has never been subtle.
“Do you even know what you’re asking for?”
“Whatever you can give me.”
“I'm...not well.”
There are a thousand threats contained in that statement, and Steve confronts them all. “Then be not well with me.”
“Look what they did to me, Stevie.” Bucky's expression is bleak and sharp and so, so awful.
“I see, Bucky. I do. Wish I could kill 'em a hundred, a thousand times over. Would spend the rest of my life killing them.”
“Trust me,” Bucky says, “the novelty wears off.” He sounds terribly, terribly tired. Steve doesn't know what to say. The girl is staring at him, he can tell by the way the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
“It was Peggy convinced me. To make contact.”
“You went to see Peggy? Before you came to me?” Steve can't keep the ridiculous note of betrayal out of his tone.
“I needed to talk to someone who valued your safety and well-being,” Bucky replies scathingly. “So that ruled you right out.”
Steve glares at him. Bucky glares back.
“She loved – loves – you and she's smart as a whip besides, a real no-nonsense gal. I figured she'd run me off, lecture me that it was too risky to go near you ever again.”
“And?”
“And...she didn't.” Bucky sighs. “It took a couple visits, before she was lucid. Then I didn't want to listen, after all. But she said...”
Steve leans forward.
“She said she'd give me the same orders she gave you, after…the train. That if I respected you at all, I had to respect your choice. And your choice was – me.”
“Every time.” Steve takes a deep breath. “She knows, then – about SHIELD, and Hydra, and -”
“Not from me, no. What do you take me for? I kept it vague. She was worried, that she could have prevented,” Bucky gestures to himself with disturbing unconcern, “this. She couldn't have and I promised her that. Boy, she was still on the warpath. Said she was ready to rout Hydra herself since nobody else had seen fit to.”
“Peggy liked you. Thought you were a bit of a rogue, but you always brought a smile to her face.”
Bucky preens a little. “Still do.”
“Oh my God, get over yourself.”
“Have you been hanging out with Kyla?” But Bucky sobers. “You would have made a good pair, you and her. I'm sorry, Steve.”
To Steve this grief is an old one, familiar if not faded. Bucky’s genuine regret, though, somehow acts as a salve that other people's sympathy wasn't. Bucky knew them both, Bucky knew what had slipped from Steve’s frozen grasp. It’s still just fragments, to what Bucky’s lost to the years and Steve wonders how, how he can hurt for Steve when he clearly can’t for himself.
“We would have,” Steve agrees, and is proud that his voice remains more or less steady. He doesn’t have words to explain, how he’d felt those last few days before the ice: his shock, his rage, his love for Peggy silhouetted against the scorched-earth backdrop of a future without Bucky. “If things had been different.” If I’d survived.
If you’d survived.
Bucky mutters a curse, looks away.
“Howard was financing a search for your body,” Steve went on. “I knew if you were there, he'd find you. He and Peggy would take care of your things, your - family. I knew you were in good hands. I never thought -” The steadiness is gone. “Damn it, Buck. You should have told me what he did to you! I should have known, I should have -”
“Steve. Steve, enough.” There's no anger, no spirited defense even though Steve can admit, dimly, that this is his own anguish and impotence talking. He knows, of course, what Bucky will not say:
that James Barnes was traumatized and terrified; that the changes so cruelly wrought in him by Zola, fucking Zola, were insidious betrayals of his own humanity; that the only recourse of a scared young soldier determined to stay by his best friend's side was to ignore them and pray, every night to a God he no longer believed in, that they would disappear come morning.
The anger and spirited defense comes from another direction. “Don't you yell at him,” a voice hisses, and Steve turns to see the girl, standing ramrod-straight and determined next to Bucky with her hands fisted at her sides.
Steve wasn’t yelling, not really, but - “Sorry,” he tells her. His shame – for himself in 1943, for himself at this moment – blooms like a bloodstain.
“Kyla.” Bucky, incredibly, smiles. It's sad and soft but a smile nonetheless and Steve sort of wants to curl up under the table and cry, and sort of wants to throw himself to his knees before Bucky. “This is my friend, Steve.”
She surveys Steve for a full, excruciating minute before turning on her heel and marching away. Down the hall, the bedroom door shuts with excessive finality. Steve scrubs a hand over his face.
“She doesn't like me.”
“Don't take it personal. She doesn't like me, either.” This seems patently false but it stands to reason, Steve guesses, that Bucky is unsure of his welcome and his place among others.
Steve tries for coaxing, rather than plaintive and desperate, when he speaks next. “You went to the house, to my door – you should have – why didn't you -” Come inside, so that I could make you soup and wrap you up in warm blankets and stare at you while you shave, which might be weird but all things considered, not that weird and I don’t really care, anyway.
He musters up his best You Have Disappointed Captain America face. “I would have liked to see you.”
After seventy years, Bucky remains immune to The Face. “Would you?”
“Yes,” Steve replies, firm.
“We hardly parted as friends.” There’s that strange formality again, Bucky’s wariness resurging within him.
“Didn't we?” And he has the satisfaction of seeing Bucky's eyes widen a fraction of a fraction. “Somebody hauled me out of the Potomac. For weeks afterwards Sam sent me YouTube videos of fishermen saving dogs from drowning. There were three of golden retrievers alone.”
“Ha,” Bucky says, completely stonefaced. “I like Sam.”
“Yeah, you would. Bucky, I've spent the last two months burning Hydra bases to the ground looking for you. How could you think -”
“Lots of reasons to burn down Hydra bases,” Bucky interrupts evenly. “I don't have to be one of them.”
“Well, you are.” Steve sounds peevish even to his own ears.
Bucky seems to deflate, suddenly. “I just – I wasn't sure. And I like to be – sure of things – these days. Didn't have much of that, you know. After.”
After you saved me, Steve thinks. At the expense of everything else you knew. And here Steve's nagging him for not doing more.
“I know, Buck.” His voice gives out about halfway through. “Thanks. Thanks for letting me know where you were. I just worried, is all.”
Bucky cocks his head slightly, studies him for long moments. Steve wonders if this is the Winter Soldier, cataloging his target's weaknesses. If so, he just needs to look in a mirror.
“I like your place,” Steve tells him, wanting to ground Bucky in the moment, in the sun-filled room, in the company of a friend.
“Airbnb,” Bucky says. “Kid found it.”
“Right,” Steve says. “About her.”
“She's Hydra,” Bucky tells him. Steve blinks and risks a glance to the girl's closed door. She does seem a little...hostile, but... “I mean – she was. Theirs. They had her.” Bucky breaks off, looking frustrated with himself. Closes his eyes briefly, opens them and starts again, neutral and contained.
“I was still stateside but making my way northwest, planning to enter Russia at Provideniya. It's an old Soviet military port in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug.” Jesus, he's briefing Steve. “She was being held in a compound outside Redding. Whoever was stationed there had fled; maybe planning to return, maybe not. She'd been alone for weeks when I found her. Hadn't eaten for sixty hours.” His lips thin and Steve is struck by dread, a small, selfish part of him not wanting to hear Bucky's next words. “There were...marks on her. I know their work, I know what it looks like when they're...experimenting.”
And Steve feels that same old mixture of horror and heartache unfurl within him, the alloy that has steeled his spine for months, the mongrel of emotions that's been his constant companion since that day on the bridge.
Bucky's expression is opaque, his thoughts hidden. He could be facing off against Steve on the helicarrier gangway again. It's a while before Steve can find words. “So your plans changed.”
Bucky nods. “Doubled back across the country, where I'd cleared the way. Washington was a no-go, for obvious reasons, so we set up as close as we could. Been here ever since.” He seems braced for censure, waiting to hear how he's made a mess of things. God, he must have been utterly perplexed – barely knowing how to care for himself, and suddenly responsible for a child.
Steve takes in the apartment again – the faint smell of lemon; fashion magazine cutouts taped to the walls, where there could have been rantings in blood or newsprint detailing the Winter Soldier's crimes; the open door to the well-stocked pantry. “You did good, Buck. You did real good.”
Something in Bucky’s face crumples, just a bit. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m fucked up, Steve. I don’t want her to be fucked up.”
“I know. She won’t be.”
“She’s special, you know. That’s why they took her. That’s why they’ll want her back.”
The Winter Soldier, Steve discovered during one of his many evenings of research and self-recrimination, had once escaped his handlers. He was soon found, wandering the streets of New York aimlessly. He was retrieved, with extreme prejudice. After that he hadn't been active in the U.S. until this year - according to the files he'd been running around for about a month before the first attempt on Fury's life. Probably the types of missions he wouldn't once have been tasked to, but it was clear from their notes that the Soldier was rapidly approaching his expiration date. Who cared, if he recovered a few meaningless memories along the way?
“It's why they'll want you both back. I'm not going to let that happen. They won't have you again, Buck.”
“I - thanks. 'Cause I can't, Steve. No matter what...”
“No matter what.” Bucky nods shortly.
“There's gonna be trouble, and we should be hunkered down when it comes.”
“You’re right,” Steve says, and again Bucky seems taken aback. It will crush Steve if he thinks about it too long. “Does she have parents?”
Something of the Winter Soldier returns to Bucky's face. That slow blink, that flat stare. “She did.”
“Buck -”
“It’s just us, now.”
“It’s not, though. I’m here. You sent for me and I’m here.” Steve opens his hands, palms up. “So what can I do?”
Bucky looks at him for a very long time. Then he smiles.
“Wasn't sure, 'til just now, whether you'd really help. Hard to imagine, after everything.”
“Hard for you, maybe.”
The smile fades; Bucky nods toward Kyla’s bedroom. “She needs protection,” Bucky tells him bluntly. “Real protection, more than I can provide. We've managed so far, with Hydra licking its wounds. But that won't last forever. And she can't stay with me. I'm no good for her. For anybody, but definitely not a little girl.”
He’s not wrong, is the thing. But Steve will defend Bucky until the end, even against Bucky himself. “You’ve done pretty well so far.”
Bucky shakes his head, lips pursed. “We look fine. But we're not. I could injure her. I could kill her; sheer luck I haven't already. Scared to let her out of my sight, but it's driving her crazy and what if I'm the one Hydra's really after?”
“Then we'll face 'em together.”
Bucky's wry smile returns. “Know a place we can do that with bulletproof glass and motion detectors? Wouldn't mind a stocked armory, either.”
“Yes,” Steve says, and wonders, a little hysterically, if Bucky will ever understand how much Steve will sacrifice for him. Today it’s Steve’s pride (which, truth be told, requires modulation on a pretty regular basis). “I know a place exactly like that.”