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“Everything OK?”
Steve leans in to whisper in Bucky’s ear, his voice only audible to Bucky as the applause dies down. Anyone else getting this close would get a swift karate chop to the throat, but it’s Steve.
And they’re both all dressed up and sitting in the balcony at Carnegie Hall in a large crowd of similarly well-dressed people, so he’s trying very hard to behave.
Bucky nods. “Yeah,” he whispers back.
He really liked the Beethoven sonata; it sounded like a cool clear mountain stream flowing down over some sparkling rocks, like laughter among friends on a sunny day.
He stares down at the stage as the soloists return for the second piece in the program. The woman, a beautiful Georgian in a red dress with dark eyes and perfect hair (seriously, how is it so shiny and how does she get it to move like that? Bucky will need to improve his conditioner game), smiles widely as she and the pianist, a tall gangly guy with a mop of curly hair, bow in unison in acknowledgement of the applause.
Obediently Bucky claps along. He can do this. He wear a suit and go to fancy concerts that Natalia recommends and sit in a mildly uncomfortable chair and enjoy the music and clap in all the right places.
And, OK, he’s sitting on the end of the row in the closest seat to the emergency exit, and the two seats on the other side of Steve are empty because Steve is a considerate partner who bought four tickets so his brain-damaged, traumatized boyfriend could have some space around him and a quick escape route.
But whatever. He can do this. Especially now that Steve is smiling proudly at him and reaches over to give him a quick knee squeeze.
Again, if anyone else tried this, he’d break their arm, but it’s Steve.
After a quick tuning session, there’s a moment of silence. And then the pianist starts playing, a series of dark bass notes, joined shortly thereafter by some ominous fluttering by the violin. Discomfited, Bucky covertly checks his program.
Prokofiev’s first violin sonata, in F minor. First movement: andante assai.
Bucky didn’t know Prokofiev — he died on the same day as Comrade Stalin, when the Soldier was first put in cryo — but Bucky knows Italian. Hydra kidnapped and murdered Aldo Moro in 1978 and successfully blamed it on the Red Brigades; the Soldier was the operative, acting under the pseudonym Giuseppe Branzini, who killed Moro’s bodyguards and delivered him to Hydra handlers. Andante assai means “very moderately slow,” and that’s what this is, only it’s also profoundly unsettling.
Taking a deep breath, Bucky stares at the stage and grips the seat arms. He can do this. He can do this.
The movement is about seven minutes long, and interspersed with the ominous plonking are some ethereally beautiful runs on the violin, the woman moving the bow up and down on the strings with dexterous facility.
Bucky is impressed, as he always is with extreme competence in any field. He focuses on her technique — and her hair, good Christ, it’s amazing — and how she and the pianist communicate as they play.
The movement finishes. Steve lifts his hands off his knees as if to clap, but Bucky quickly grabs his right arm and shakes his head.
You don’t clap until the end of the piece, he thinks in Steve’s direction. He was very attentive when Widow gave them instructions on How To Attend To A Concert At Carnegie Hall Like A Cultured Person in an effort to override their default behavior, AKA Two Hundred-Year-Old Mooks From Brooklyn.
Steve goes pink and gives him a little embarrassed grimace. It’s adorable. Bucky wants to eat it up.
Later.
But then the second movement — allegro brusco, Bucky notes, brisk and fast — starts, with spiky, discordant piano chords and answering heavy strokes from the violin, and Bucky’s hair stands on end on the back of his neck under his little bun. He knows this music.
How does he know this music?
He…
It’s nighttime and it’s cooler now, but the rooftop of the concrete apartment building still almost pulses with the heat from the day. The warmth of the cement radiates up and pervades the suit; he can feel his armpits start to sweat under the leather.
Carefully the Soldier peers over the edge to the building across the street. It, too, is the stained beige-grey of every Eastern bloc city he’s ever been sent to, but it’s a few floors shorter and a little less weather-worn than the one he’s lying on right now. Many of its windows are alight, including the one he’s particularly focused on, on the fifth floor.
That window is closed, but the one just above it on six is open and the Soldier sees a young woman enter the room carrying a long, dark case. At first he thinks it’s for a rifle or some other long-range gun, but then he looks more closely and realizes it holds an instrument.
Violin, he thinks. Or viola.
A vague image of a sweep of blond hair and deep blue eyes intently watching a fiddler on a dirty street corner flashes through his mind. He dismisses it immediately as non-mission relevant.
The girl’s face is illuminated in the warm light of the room. She disappears for a moment and reappears, bending over something on the near wall.
Then comes the music — spiky, discordant piano chords and answering strokes from the violin. The Soldier is enthralled; it’s so beautiful and yet so harsh and off-putting at the same time. It reminds him a little of Ste—
Suddenly a figure appears below in the fifth-floor window. The Soldier dismisses intrusive thoughts of a past he’s not sure is really his and refocuses his attention downward. He smoothly pulls the Dragunov with its custom scope and its special silencer up in front of his face.
The figure in the scope looks like any other middle-aged man from the Eastern Bloc — dark, shabby raincoat, heavy jowls, bad haircut — but looks are deceiving. In reality he’s a millionaire arms dealer and the Soldier’s mission.
A hulking bodyguard appears behind the man, but the Soldier pays him no mind. This is supposed to be a clean hit, something that can be blamed on the CIA if needed, so it’s one shot and get out.
Easy.
The music from the sixth floor is quieter now, faster and sweeter, but building in a crescendo. It floods the Soldier’s ears as he lines up the shot.
He’s about to hit the trigger when from out the sixth floor window the music slows and the scraping of the violin fights with the heavy piano chords. Startled, the Soldier takes a breath before taking the shot.
The shot goes wide through the window, grazing the target’s temple and lodging the wall behind him. Quickly the Soldier takes another shot, this one perfect through the middle of the forehead, but the alarm has been raised. Voices sound and two bodyguards rush to the window, raising their SKS’s and shooting indiscriminately at the wall of the Soldier’s building.
He slithers down behind it, but not before catching sight of the girl’s face on the floor above, mouth open, terrified, as the music continues its screech. Now he has to extract and evade, which will be harder under fire and the building under increased surveillance. He has to…
“Buck?”
The voice is very quiet in his ear as the music screeches to a halt. He comes back to himself and realizes that he’s slumped in his seat, staring fixedly at the stage, his hands clutching the armrests almost to the point of damaging the wood.
Steve’s expression is worried, a slight frown pulling down that luscious mouth. The tension in the hall is almost palpable, everyone waiting for what comes next.
It’s an andante, very sweet and plaintive with just the faintest memory of the unease and dissonance of the allegro.
“You wanna leave?” Steve’s voice is inaudible to everyone but him.
Bucky jerks his head right and left, his eyes still glued to the stage. He eases his death grip on the chair and sits up a little straighter. He wants…no, he needs to stay and hear this whole thing.
The andante finishes several minutes later, and the duo sweep into the final movement, titled allegrissimo in the program.
And wow, is it ever. The music is propulsive from the start, the violin and piano almost daring each other to go through long runs that end in high-pitched notes. At about the four-minute mark, it slows a bit, but the violinist continues long runs up and down the scale while the pianists almost pounds on the keys.
This quiets and slows into something pensive, almost celestial. What was fast and almost skittishly playful has become a plaintive melody pitched among the stars.
Bucky is entranced. It reminds him of the night sky in Siberia, dark with multiple pinpricks of light shining across the blanket of midnight blue. The celestial melody turns into languorous bow strokes, minor and strained and suffering; it sounds quintessentially Russian in a way he could never explain to Steve.
Maybe to Widow, though. She’d understand.
The movement ends quietly, fading out into nothingness. There are several seconds of quiet where Bucky thinks he might be the only one who can hear the violinist finishing the note.
The only one except for Steve.
The violinist separates bow from bridge and there’s a moment of silence as the audience digests that the piece is over. Then the crowd bursts out in deafening applause, with a roar of cheering and “Brava”s and “Bravo”s. Half the hall rises up in a standing ovation.
Bucky and Steve dutifully join in, clapping and standing with the other patrons. But Bucky grows antsy almost immediately, his ears rejecting the noise, especially after the high emotion of the music.
Always sensitive to changes in Bucky’s mood and behavior, Steve leans in.
“Time to leave?”
He flicks his eyebrows at the exit to their right. Bucky nods. They’re out the door and down the stairs before the applause dies down.
Out on the street, it’s a beautiful spring evening, a light breeze blowing down 56th Street. No one else is around, and the two man amble along, enjoying the quiet.
“Wanna go back for the second half?” Steve inquires. “It’s a Georgian piece and the violin sonata by César Franck, which Nat says is amazing.”
Bucky shakes his head. His brain is still reeling with the flashback and the plaintive, celestial notes.
“OK,” says Steve. And then after a beat, “Remember something back there, Buck?” His voice is studiedly casual. Bucky smiles to himself.
“Yeah.”
“Wanna talk about it?”
Bucky considers. “Later,” he pronounces.
Steve chuckles softly. “Got it,” he says. Bucky is filled with love and gratitude for his boyfriend, and reaches out to link their fingers together.
“Want a burger…” Steve indicates the burger joint they’re passing, “…or just go home?”
“Home,” answers Bucky definitively. He’s already thinking about listening to that sonata again, maybe making a…
Another chuckle from Steve. “You’re already making a whole Prokofiev playlist in your head, aren’t you,” he comments.
Bucky smiles. Leans in to kiss him adoringly on the cheek.
“Yeah,” he says.