Chapter Text
Steve’s gaze flickered across the blinding light of the screen, always searching, always alert, despite the way his eyelids were feeling heavy in a way they hadn’t since before the serum. Maybe even Captain America couldn’t handle 4 days without sleep. Steve’s head began to droop - no. He had to stay awake. Had to find Bucky.
Files, names, agents, all open on the screen - records of a cold-blooded killer - but all Steve could see was his friend. His friend who had been through hell. Who he had thought was dead for the better part of a century. Steve blinked hard, forcing the words on the screen back into focus. Every line had blurred into the next, a big mess of places and mission reports that didn’t belong to Bucky - not really. They belonged to the thing Hydra had sculpted him into.
A soft hum from the monitor filled the silence of the safehouse. It was too still - too empty. It was the kind of quiet that made a shiver run down Steve’s spine, because Bucky was never quiet. Not before the fall. Not before the world had decided to give them this fate; torn apart.
His hand hovered, trembling with exhaustion he didn’t acknowledge. He clicked on another file. Another mission. Another ghost wearing Bucky’s face.
“Where are you, Buck…”
The words slipped past his lips before he could stop them, barely audible. A map flickered onto the screen - coordinates, timestamps, grainy surveillance footage. Steve leaned forward, heart rate spiking when he spotted a familiar silhouette in one of the images. Broad shoulders. Metal arm glinting beneath a torn jacket. Head tilted down, as if trying to disappear into the pavement.
Steve’s pulse hammered.
“That’s you,” he whispered, like Bucky could hear him.
“I know that’s you.”
He reached for the radio on the desk, his thumb moving over the worn-down edge of the dial. Natasha had told him to wait. But Steve had never been good at waiting, not when it came to Bucky Barnes.
He pushed back from the desk, his chair scraping across the floor. The room tilted for a moment - probably sleep deprivation catching up with him - but he held onto the table to steady himself. He grabbed his jacket, as well as his shield.
The coordinates were ingrained into his mind like a beam of light in a dark room. If Bucky was out there - alone, hunted, and hurting - then Steve wasn’t wasting any more time behind a screen. He was going to find him. Even if it meant running himself into the ground. Even if it meant facing the Winter Soldier instead of the friend he remembered.
Because somewhere beneath all that conditioning and pain, Bucky was still there. And Steve wasn’t losing him again. He wouldn’t allow it.
Steve stepped out of the building with the footage replaying on an endless loop through his head, and the world around him barely registered. He couldn’t escape was the weight in his chest. It pressed down harder than the exhaustion, harder than the cold, harder than the shield on his back.
Every step forward felt like wading through a sea of memories he was slowly drowning in - sinking in the past. He just kept seeing Bucky like he used to be: laughing just a touch too loudly, nudging Steve’s shoulder in that playful way he always did when life got too serious, filling every room with some kind of warmth.
Now the silence around him felt like a reminder. A reminder of everything that had changed - everything that had gone so very wrong.
His stomach twisted violently. The streets blurred at the edges, not because of the mist but because Steve’s eyes burned with fatigue and something too close to grief. He wasn’t sure when searching for Bucky had stopped being a mission and became a lifestyle. Maybe he’d just stopped pretending that he could carry on without his friend.
The surveillance images looped round and round in his mind. That was a particular brand of torture - the guarded way Bucky held himself, the metal arm, the way Bucky seemed to be folding in on himself. It hurt in a way Steve couldn’t explain with words. That wasn’t the guy he remembered. But it wasn’t quite who HYDRA wanted him to believe it was either. It was someone lost; someone hurting. Someone who needed him.
Steve’s breath hitched as he walked, the cold air stinging his lungs. He wasn’t afraid of facing the Winter Soldier. He was afraid of what he might see in Bucky’s eyes when he found him - or if. No, he would find him. Would it be fear, that he saw reflected in those familiar eyes? Confusion? Nothing at all? He didn’t know which option scared him the most.
He paused at the mouth of an alleyway, leaning heavily against a wall as a wave of dizziness washed over him. Four days without sleep. Even his enhanced body was begging him to stop. But the thought of stopping, when every second was Bucky getting further away, was unbearable. Sleep could wait. Food could wait. Everything could wait. Everything except Bucky.
Steve closed his eyes for a moment, letting the cold settle into his bones. As Steve pushed himself off the wall with a heavy sigh and forced his legs to move again, something shifted in the air - unmistakable. A shudder down Steve’s spine. A presence. The kind of prickle at the back of his neck he had always kept since the war. The one that always meant someone was watching him.
He turned.
His breath clouded before him - puffs visible in the air.
At first, there was nothing but the empty street and flickering streetlamp. But then he noticed it: a shadow. A figure perched on the rooftop across from him, nothing more than a silhouette against the night sky. A familiar tilt of a head. A glint of metal.
For a heartbeat, Steve forgot how to breathe.
Before he could even take a step, the figure moved. Not away. Not toward him. Just… shifted. Like he was undecided between running and staying. Like he was waiting to see what Steve would do.
Steve’s vision swum, the exhaustion finally hitting him like a punch. His knees buckled, and he caught himself on the wall, breathing hard. Ragged. The edges of his vision began to darken as he slid down the wall, legs buckling under his weight. The wall scraped his back in a way that was absolutely going to rip the back of his shirt. The figure on the rooftop froze.
For the first time, he leant forward, as if he was torn between what he had been taught and what was so natural for him.