Chapter Text
It should’ve been a perfectly routine mission.
Steve, Natasha, Sam, Clint, and Bucky were dropped in a field a few miles from an old Hydra base. This was, unfortunately for Bucky’s sake, relatively par for the course. After the disbanding of the organization, there was a lot of information that needed to be rounded up and sorted, and for the most part he was more than happy to do it. To destroy the weapon that he spent so long helping to fortify. But something about the environment dug into the base of his skull, and he’d found himself dealing with the beginnings of a tension headache before they’d even made it to the entrance.
It was cold. That was most of the problem. It was cold and his right hand was stiff and his feet hurt where the snow had seeped through his boots. The rest of the Avengers around him were complaining, teeth chattering as they forged ahead, but he couldn’t find the urge to bitch. He was uncomfortable, of course, but no part of him wanted to tell anybody about that. The longer they spent outside, the further into his head he retreated, and he kept jumping at the sound of the voices around him. He allowed himself to fall behind the group a bit, reveling in the distance before Natasha slowed her walk as well.
“You alright, Barnes?” She asked. He forced himself to nod, noticing immediately that she was possibly the only person there aside from him who was not actively complaining about the temperature.
“Feels familiar, right?” She asked next, and he nodded once again. Because it did. That was the worst part, the fact that it was familiar. He could deal with frostbite and discomfort but he could not deal with the memories. The Commandos and Hydra and a mangled limb.
“You gonna be okay on this one?” She asked, her voice slightly more tentative on this question. Everybody was so hyper-aware of the fact that he had only recently escaped Hydra’s captivity. They treated him like a broken doll, like he wasn’t a perfectly trained soldier designed for killing and not much else.
“I am fine, Natalia,” He said, finally forcing words out of his throat. They felt like sand between his teeth, and he found that speaking brought more anxiety than he expected it to. He was scrambling to hold onto himself, to be Bucky, to not lose his grip on who he was once again. He wanted to be able to do this; he was supposed to be able to do this.
“Okay,” She said, but Bucky knew she didn’t really believe him. And she was completely justified not to. She could tell he was lying; she was a Widow. The Winter Soldier program might’ve been relatively separate from the Red Room, but that didn’t mean he’d never interacted with the girls. Never been privy to what they’d been trained to do.
Yet somehow, Natasha remained a force of calm. A gentle hand wrapped around his arm, stopping him for a second so he was forced to look at her. “Because if you’re not, nobody would be upset with you. You can sit this out. You’ve got nothing to prove, Bucky.”
He did. He did, and she knew that he did. He had never failed a mission before, and he was not about to start now. “I will be fine,” He repeated.
“I’m going to take you at your word here,” She said. “But if at any point that changes, you come to me or Steve first. Alright? One of us can get you out before you endanger yourself.”
“Or the rest of us” hung unspoken on the end of her sentence, and he knew that she was right. Not being able to trust his own brain was fucking exhausting, and there were days when he just wanted to snap at every single person that spoke to him because they didn’t understand. But they were trying, and he wasn’t going to allow himself to hurt the only people who had been kind to him in a long time.
Besides, if anyone could come close to understanding, it was former Red Room assassin Natasha Romanoff.
Bucky nodded, trying not to make it sharp, like he was processing an order. Her expression pinched slightly, so he was pretty sure that he hadn’t succeeded. But she let the conversation lie.
He had expected her to jog up to the rest of the group, but she remained walking by his side. Snow started to fall in front of them as they got closer to the base, and while the conversation in front of them had quieted, he did hear a chorus of groans when the wind picked up. He glanced over at Natasha, and she was grinning slightly at him, amusement dancing behind her eyes.
“Слабый,” She joked, and he was surprised to find the ghost of a smile on his face as well. “Weak.”
“Я знаю,” He replied, and she laughed out loud. “I know.”
Given that he hadn’t said anything funny, just agreed with her, he was confused for a second before realizing that the laughter wasn’t really of amusement. It was of relief.
It was of community.
And so the two assassins trudged through the snow towards their next mission.