Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s not right. Something’s not right about it. All he is is a series of loops, of wake-mission-sleep. All he is is objective-kill-return. He is a gyroscope spinning, a record needle in the tightest groove. Until, suddenly, he’s not.

When the mission goes wrong, the gyroscope wobbles, the needle jumps out of its track. He goes to the Smithsonian because he is in the field, mid-mission, and things have gone cockeyed and support has vanished and the imperative is driving him and there is intel at the Smithsonian. He needs to know where Rogers might have gone. He can't have gone far, not beaten like that. But the Asset was non-functional, and time was lost. By the time he doubled back to finish the mission, the target was gone. He could not have moved himself, not after the fight on the helicarrier. No. Someone must have moved him. The Asset must find out all he can about the target, and about his allies. It is not curiosity that takes him to the Smithsonian. No. The Asset doesn't have that in his make up. It's just that he has no support or intel. It's just that he needs to finish the mission. That's all.

This is not the first time he has hunted a high-value target; there is protocol for this. He finds cash and clothes and a place to stash his weapons in an abandoned safe house, and goes to the Smithsonian. The air smells of cordite and ash, and his hair and skin smell like the river. The damage the target did to his body is healing. He will be ready to fight again soon.

He joins the queue going to the Steve Rogers exhibit, a long line snaking beneath a huge banner image of a familiar face superimposed atop a less-familiar one. They share a bone structure. They share eye shape and mouth shape. By the time he steps into the cool, quiet exhibit, he has realized they are the same being, the lesser one improbably changed into the greater. He learns immediately that the target is likely to be in New York, that he has history there. Brooklyn, to be more precise. The life-sized statues of pre-and-post serum Steve Rogers helpfully provide his augmented statistics. He commits them to memory as he reads. No wonder brute force was insufficient. He will use a small knife to the kidney, or a bullet to the head. It must be rapid and catastrophic, this killing. He turns the corner, moving toward where a low-voiced narrator is speaking, and there he sees it.

The display might be a mirror, except the windswept face is far too large, three times life-size. His own eyes gaze over his head. His own mouth is parted slightly.

Your name is

He blinks hard, because sometimes it is like this when he wakes, after a long time in the field, after too many missions. But his own attempt at a soft-reset makes neither the face before him disappear, nor the memory of Rogers’ words fade. He hears Rogers speak the name as he reads it.

James Buchanan Barnes.

"…Is the only Howling Commando to give his life in the service of his country," the narrator intones.

Blood rushes in his ears. The narrator’s voice falls out of his hearing. There is white noise now, interrupted only sound of his own swallowing. There are two dates on the display here. One for a beginning, and one for an end.

He is aware that this is the conclusion of some interminable chapter, that some door long left open has suddenly closed.

They thought I was dead. It is an answer to a question he has never allowed himself to form to coherent thought. 

The young man in the image looks back at him. It is him, yes, certainly. Best friends… the narrator says. You're my friend, the Target had said, and had dropped the shield. He remembers. He remembers suddenly, powerfully, like a blow to the belly. He remembers a skinny kid with a big mouth who never knew when to back down. He remembers blood on the last un-stained shirt, and saying, God damn it Stevie what’re you gonna wear on Sunday? He remembers practically having to soft-shoe to get Steve to take the key to the dumpy little apartment after Steve’s ma died.

They thought I was dead. That’s why they didn’t come for me. That's why Steve didn't come for me.

He remembers Azano. He remembers hearing about Steve's harebrained race to rescue them. He remembers thinking what a pig-headed, bone-headed, trouble-stirring little pain in the ass Steve Rogers was. He remembers the conviction, strong as gravity, in the early days. They won't leave me here. They'll come for me. Steve'll come for me. He'll…

It occurs to him.

He’ll come for me.

Steve Rogers, American Icon, tool of the government, of the military. He'll come for Bucky; of course he will. And Bucky Barnes, no longer the tragic character of GI and POW, now something else. Something monstrous and terrifying. A killing machine. A monster. Rogers has allies, intel, and all the attributes given to him by the serum. And Rogers is coming for him.

Bucky runs.

Chapter Text

The man who was once called Sergeant Barnes is now standing by a river in a cold country not his own.

It is night, and the stars overhead are present but unseen. There is too much light. The city burns as if it has been bombed, but it is not a violent sort of light. It is the light of commerce and what once would have been called “progress” and “tomorrow”. Cafe lights and theatre lights and streetlights. Cars and cabs and motorbikes. Those things that seem like stars are, invariably, aircraft, non-military, commercial flights coming in for a landing at the airport far to the north of the city. The chemical scent of industrial cleaners and the rank, greasy undertone of long haul flying still clings to his hair and his clothes. It is cold, and a mist hangs over the river, and his breath hangs in the air like gun smoke.

*

In the airport, it began to fall apart. The passport he had taken from a safe house in DC identified him as Oscar Mittelman, German national with Trusted Traveller status. The security guard who let him bypass the line and go right to the Lufthansa executive lounge called him Mr Mittelman. The smiling blond who glanced at his ticket at the gate and said, Welcome aboard, Mr Mittelman. Thank you for flying with us again. He settled in first class, and accepted the offered drink. Nice to see you again, Oscar, the stewardess said as she passed it to him. 

I guess it's good to be Oscar Mittelman, he thought then, with a wry sort of pleasure, and spent the first half of the flight pleasantly making his own intel and backstory. But somewhere over the Atlantic the pleasure turned to ash. He reached for the name, the other name, and found Oscar Mittelman instead.

No, that’s not it. That’s not mine.

He fumbled in his carry-on for the leaflets grabbed by the handful from the museum. With a pen that had been chained to the guestbook, he had written the name James Bucky Barnes on one of the glossy brochures. The writing is jagged and uneven, it looks as if it was done by a child. He cannot remember the last time he wrote, for what purpose or to whom.

He looks at the name written there and relief washes over him. Bucky. It fit the young man in the museum. Perhaps if he wears it long enough, it will fit him too.

He exhales a sigh and takes out the book he bought at the museum gift shop, and it falls open, the spine already broken by hours and hours of staring. The image is of him and Steve, heads close together, a folded map held out between them. He is looking at the map, and Steve at him. He remembers the conversation.

*

“Did he really take his face off?”

“Yeah, he took his face off, Buck.”

“Christ.” A shaking exhalation. He ought to make a joke; that’s his cue. Instead, he makes a noise. Something that would have to pass for a laugh. A weight like the Sea Witch sitting on his chest. Steve knows something bad is coming. He leans in close, and Bucky looks away, stares hard at the map in his hands, as if the pale blues and greens will swallow him up. “Stevie, look, listen, I… they…” The breeze is sweet with pine sap, sighing, cold and fresh from the mountains. “Feels like a bad dream,” he whispers.

Steve puts a hand on his shoulder, warm and heavy.

Bucky knuckles his forehead. There is a dull and steady throb behind his eyes that has been there since the first injection, the one that burned and made him scream and jackknife against the restraints. After that, the cuts that healed before his eyes, the agonizing ice-water test that somehow he survived. He tries not to think about the skull-faced man. He tries not to wonder what kind of monster they were making him into. He tries not to wonder if they succeeded.

*

He lands in Berlin. The old bunkers are long gone. There is a memorial plaque at one of the old laboratories. Nothing is hidden any more. The city bears no resemblance to the map etched in his mind.

He buys a spiral-bound notebook to make a map. The book has a shiny blue cover and a pocket for loose things, which fit the pamphlets from the Smithsonian perfectly. The interior cover page says This book belongs to and in that space he writes Bucky Barnes. He murmurs the words as he writes them, like a spell.

His name had once jolted him as nothing ever had. Not pleading, not promises. All those things were nothing to him. But his own name had once been like gunshot. Now it was like another’s name. A name often read in the newspapers, perhaps. A favourite columnist’s name. And now it is coming with other things. Sometimes with a memory of a dignified man with grey hair who said, Sergeant Barnes? the moment before he died, or an image of a skinny, scowling, pugnacious brat of a boy.

Scrappy little sonofabitch

The words come out of his mouth unbidden, directed at no one, and vanish like a haint in the cold air. It is so easy for things to disappear. The grey-haired man, the scrappy kid. He writes it all down.

Chapter Text

There is nothing for him in Berlin, so he goes to Moscow, but there are no secrets there anymore, either. The labs are cafes and bookstores now, and they were giving a tour at the Moscow bunker where he spent upwards of ten years. He paid his money, joined the group of jostling tourists, heard the droning of the bored tour guide, listened while someone asked about the Lubyanka. The air still smelled like stagnant river water, like cold concrete and dust, but that was all that was the same. He did not peel away from the group to open the heavy iron door into the laboratory; there was no reason to. The door stood open, and the chair stood there, starkly lit by the buzzing overhead light. Across the lowered heads and horrified faces and over the whispered word torture, he though he saw a curl of red hair like blood and the flash of glass green eyes. The woman from DC, the one with Rogers, with the garrotte. She turns toward him again, catches his eyes and he knows he has been made.

Here in the bunker he has what might be ironically called "home team advantage". Every twist and turn of this place is etched in his mind; sometimes he walks these halls in his dreams. But when he reaches for the cold anger that powered him through so many battles, it is AWOL. There is only weariness now. He does not want to fight. He has been haunting his past, as if striving to return to his handlers. But they are gone, their evils exposed and turned into memorial plaques and interpretive centres. He does not want to fight her. Not for this. He wants to go.

But to where, he doesn’t know. That evening he finds himself looking at the map in The Howling Commandos At War, his finger tracing the outline of the Kingdom of Romania. There is something appealing about travelling to a place that is a ghost of itself. 

He buys a ticket for a sleeper on the night train to Bucharest. It uses up most of the money he took from the safe house, but that doesn’t matter. Aside from the need to avoid Steve Rogers, an endeavour he knows can only go on so long, he wants to go to Bucharest. Something is waking up in him, tugging at him. This is not the same as last time, last time when the urge to go simply overrode the mission in his head and he started walking, without supplies, without a map, not even conscious of his disobedience, drawn like a magnet to the poles.

*

They found him three days in, walking on a country road, delirious from his failure to sleep or eat or drink. Rumlow, his face a careful mask, as if to show emotion might spook the malfunctioning Asset, appeared in front of him. "What the fuck are you doing?" he asked, the question delivered at the distance of an automatic weapon.

The Asset's answer, thick and mumbling, "I don’t know."

Rumlow had bundled him into the armoured car. "Jesus Christ, somebody get ahold of Pierce. Tell him we got the Asset and we're bringing him in."

A young man, looking anxious, weapon still trained on the Soldier as they marched him to the back of the armoured car, glanced at Rumlow. "That’s it? Aren’t we gonna teach him a lesson or something?"

Rumlow laughed. "No we aren’t going to “teach him a lesson”. His brain’s basically peanut butter. Nothing in there."

While the Asset climbed up into the back of the armoured car, Rumlow nudged him with the barrel of his gun. "Asset, new mission."

He turned and blinked at them, at Rumlow, at the youngster. Something in him was telling him to get away, but it was a dull whine in the face of the new mission.

"Ready to…" he mumbled, and couldn’t remember what to say next. Only that there was something missing, and some place he wanted to go, not here.

Rumlow stuck his tongue into his cheek and sneered. Then he followed the Asset up into the back of the car, and hollered to the guys up front. "Tell Pierce the programming’s fucked. They’ll need to do a total wipe." 

*

At the platform, with his satchel on the bench beside him, and the notebook balanced on his lap he writes, Iowa? Flat land, corn, not ripe. Ukraine? Canada? Walked three nights and three days. Trying to escape? Rumlow and a kid and two in the front, driving. "total wipe". I didn’t know I had to eat and drink.

He looks up from the page. It occurs to him he hasn’t had anything to eat or drink since his last flight. That gnawing in him? It’s hunger. He gets up and spends the last of his cash to buy an overpriced tuna sandwich and a cold orange soda from a vendor. He eats the sandwich and savours the soda. Together, it is the most delicious meal he has ever tasted. 

Eating is good, he writes. Sandwiches are good. Orange soda is good. He underlines the word good three times, and then the train arrives.

* 

He boards with an unfamiliar sort of lightness in him. The sleeper, with its tidy little cot, wall-mounted light, miniature washbasin, and large, square window, intensifies the feeling. He closes the door behind him and stands staring at the neat little bed. He settles on the bed, cradling his book in his lap, and dozes. The train rocks side to side, clacking gently over the points.

And when he wakes in the night, sweating and shaking, he can grab the notebook, and see the pamphlets from the Smithsonian, trace the shape of letters with his fingers, read by the soft glow of the wall-lamp. Open the book and look at the interior cover page.

This book belongs to Bucky Barnes.

Chapter Text

He wakes, and washes, and glances at his notebook. Food is good. 

He goes to the dining car to breakfast on coffee and buttered toast, and is sitting there, savouring the last mouthful of hot black coffee, when the train slows, and the buildings on either side begin to cluster close to the tracks, and he is finally in Bucharest. He finds he can read the signs and the graffiti, that the language is as familiar to him as any other. Just beyond the glorious neoclassical façade of Gara de Nord he finds a man who has a keen interest in Oscar Mittelman’s travel documents. The man is sweating in the shade, and Bucky can see something distorting the smooth line of his cheap suit, and guesses that it’s cash. He wonders, briefly, what gangster or politician the guy has pissed off. The guy offers him a thousand Leu for the passport, and Bucky snorts. He doesn’t know what the passport is worth on its own, but he knows it’ll be a desirable item, and Trusted Traveller status is almost certainly hard to buy. Eventually, the man hands over a wad of cash that size of Bucky’s closed fist. Small bills, which he counts methodically and carefully. All together it is almost five thousand Leu.

“That’s all I have,” the guy says, sweating hard now, beads glistening on his upper lip. Bucky believes him. He smiles, leans in, slips the passport into the guy’s interior jacket pocket, and smoothes the lapels down.

“Have a nice trip, Oscar,” Bucky tells him, loving the sound of the language, and inexplicably waggish now that Oscar’s identify belongs to someone else. The guy lurches back from Bucky, and then lets out a soft laugh. He tugs down his coat.

“Yeah. Thanks. Welcome home, whoever the fuck you are.”

Then the man turns and walks into the station, and Bucky sticks his hands in his pocket and closes them on the wad of cash. Bucharest lies before him, sprawling and anonymous and bearing no resemblance to its former self. The air is filled with the scent of vehicle fumes, and the aftershave of fellow travellers, and the thyme growing through cracks in the damp concrete. If there is a place to be whoever the fuck you are he cannot imagine a better one.

*

He wanders aimless through the city, finds a restaurant with a greasy door propped open and the luscious smell of something frying wafting out from within. He lets himself into an interior probably not much changed since the end of Communism. Pale pink plastic-covered metal chairs, about ten tables with plastic tablecloths thrown over them, made shabby by long use and unattended cigarettes. A Kalashnikov is framed in glass above the cash register. There’s a TV mounted high in one corner, too. It’s silent, but still commands attention because on the screen there is a close-up of a woman’s black-clad rear end, wildly gyrating. Beneath the TV, two middle-aged women look idly up at the screen through the haze of cigarette smoke. One glances over at him, and pushes back from the table.

“Sit, sit,” she tells him.

He looks around. The door opens inward, so he selects a seat that is hidden by the door when it opens. That will have to do. The woman goes into the kitchen, too-big shoes clomping hollowly with every step. The second woman glances at him and then back at the TV where the butt is still moving in vigorous circles. She tsks, as if Bucky was the one who asked for this.

Bucky sits, and sitting drops him beneath the pal of cigarette smoke that hangs like wet weather over the jungle. He opens his book and writes, Jungle. Rain. When? Where? before the woman reappears. She comes over to his table and puts down a little plate. Thick pieces of salami, a chunk of feta, a little bread.

“There’s no menu,” she says. “He cooks what he wants.”

“Okay,” Bucky answers. She grins at him.

“Knew you were a good one.” She winks. “Chicken kebabs, with sweet peppers. Bacon, onion, mushrooms. You need a beer for all that.”

“Okay,” he says again. Her grin gets bigger. She looks at her friend.

“If he’s got money, we’re keeping him.”

Her friend looks Bucky up and down. “Get him to pay up front,” she says.

Bucky reaches into his pocket, but the woman pulls the cigarette from her mouth and waves her hand at him. “Bah. Ignore her. You pay afterward, like everybody else.”

“Thank you,” he murmurs. She gestures with the cigarette to his notebook.

“You a… reviewer or something?”

He shakes his head. “New in town. Well…” He has no cover story, no false identity. He tells the truth. “It’s been a long time since I was here. I hardly remember it.”

She nods.

“I thought I’d… see if any of the old places are still around. If I can remember them.” He taps the notebook. 

“Well, the place has changed a lot in the last ten years.” The woman draws out the second chair and sits down in it. “You don’t go down to Ferentari any more, for one thing. Not unless you’re looking for trouble.”

He shakes his head. “No. I'm not looking for trouble. But… I am looking for a…” he feels his shoulders bunching up. There is a word that he does not want to say. “A quiet place. To stay for a bit.”

She shrugs. “Well, if it's an apartment you're looking for, there’s the Garden, over in Obor.”

The other woman jerks to attention. “Maria, God almighty, don’t do that.”

“It’s quiet,” Maria snaps, then she looks kindly at Bucky. “And cheap. What do you want, Olga? The kid wants a place to stay."

"Obor," Bucky says quietly. "That's a… that a market, isn't it?"

Maria smiles. "Aha! He remembers."

He nods. Maybe he does.

She grins over the cigarette. "You should live near a market. You look like a boy who needs some feeding up.”

He glances down at himself.

“I'd hardly call it quiet, Maria."

"It's as quiet as any place you're going to get, Olga."

"It hasn’t been quiet since the damn Rosu and the Brutar started going at it like cats and dogs,” Olga shoots right back.

“Well we’ve managed to survive, haven’t we?” Maria looks back at Bucky. “It's fine. All you have to do is keep your head down. Don’t look at people, don’t ask questions, just go there, sleep, watch some TV, get on with your life.”

It sounds familiar. Don't ask questions, don't look at people, just do what you have to do. Bucky licks his lips. “I don't—”

His answer is interrupted by the ding of a bell. Maria pushes herself to her feet and goes scuffing across the worn floor, to the back where the kitchen must be. Bucky tastes a little of the salami, salty and rich, and then the cheese. He glances at Olga.

“You live there?” he asks.

She snorts. “If you can call it ‘living’.”

“And it’s a quiet place. Where nobody will bother me.”

“If you mean nobody will give a damn if you drop dead in your apartment? As long as you don't stick your neck between the Rosu and the Brutar boys, yeah, it’s quiet and nobody will bother you.”

He nods at Maria when she returns, a platter piled high with chicken kabobs, fragrant and steaming, sweet red peppers slick with oil and pungent vinegar and flecked with herbs. “This place, it… sounds perfect.”

Maria bites her cigarette and smiles.

Chapter Text

“How’s he doing?”

Sam’s heart goes right up into his throat and his blood pressure goes through the roof, but he doesn’t show it. The split second after he hears the voice, he clocks it as familiar. He looks over his copy of Entertainment at Natasha. She’s leaning against the doorframe, arms folded across her chest. She’s smiling. He guesses she’s disappointed that he didn’t jump into the foamy tiles of the ceiling, but she’s not showing it. Sam shrugs at her.

“They’re keeping him out for a bit longer,” he says. “And my heart’s just fine, by the way. Thanks for checking.”

She flashes him a grin. “Habit,” she says.

“Yeah, well,” he smiles back at her. It’s been a long, boring, lonely vigil here at Steve’s side. From the texts he’s been getting from his mom and his cousins, plus the shit he’s seeing on-line, the world could be ending. Sam knows he’s doing the right thing, and his family understand that too. But there's no substitute for knowing he’s not the only one doing it. “Maybe you should get some shoes with little bells on them,” he suggests.

“What fun would that be?”

She comes into the room, and Sam makes eye-contact with the detail posted on the door. He’s not sure who those guys are, but they haven’t given him any trouble, and they’ve kept a lot of other people out. If he was a betting man, and he’s not anymore, he’d say three-to-one they’re friendlies. He figures that if Steve were suddenly to get up and leave, they’d let him. That’s probably Sharon’s work. He nods at the guard and the guard nods back and turns eyes-front again.

Natasha pauses by the bed. She’s looking at Steve and her face is fixed, taut, all the small muscles suddenly frozen in place.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he tells her, because that mask, whatever else is might be, is definitely cover for vulnerability. And Sam’s a man who cares about people. “But it is tough seeing him like this,” he says because she won’t, even though it’s true, and dollars to doughnuts she wants to.

She nods, and then pulls the second chair from under the window over to where Sam is sitting. She perches on the edge and faces him.

“Not a social call,” he murmurs. She shakes her head.

“I don’t make those.”

Sam raises his eyebrows but doesn’t say anything.

“An identity I know about just arrived in Moscow after spending a little time in Berlin. Looking up all the old places.” She pauses. Sam waits. “I’m heading over.”

Sam nods. Neither of them say Barnes but that’s because they’re not dumb as a sack of hammers like some people he could name. He glances at Steve. Face smoothed by whatever they’re giving him to keep him sedated, skin puffed up a little with all the IV fluids he’s been getting. Eyes still bruised as a peach left to rot at the back of a fridge. “That's a shame. I was kind of hoping you were going to take baby-sitting duty."

Natasha snorts. “Are you kidding? I’ve been babysitting him longer than you’ve known him.” She glances at Steve, as if hoping he’ll have cracked an eye and be in on the joke. But he’s not. The monitors beep softly, and his breath comes regularly and that’s a God damned miracle as far as Sam is concerned. Natasha looks back at Sam. “Has he told you anything?”

“They’ve been keeping him under since they brought him in,” Sam says quietly.

"How long?"

"Till the swelling in his brain is down."

She sighs. “I’m going to Moscow,” she says then, a note of finality in her voice. “When he wakes up, I need to talk to him. I don't care if he's not coherent, or if a doctor says no. I need to talk to him.”

Sam frowns. He tilts his head a little. He gives Natasha a look. It is a look that says, You showed up on my doorstep with singed hair and a pack of goons hunting you and I took you in. Natasha inclines her head, first at Sam and then toward Steve.

“Look at him,” she says softly. “Gut-shot. Head trauma.”

Sam knows. He knows the litany of wounds, from major to minor. The number of stitches (upwards of six hundred), the hours clocked in surgery (north of twelve), the bones broken (three fingers, and the orbital bone too), the days of sedation while his brain knits itself back together again (going on four). He frowns at Natasha.

“He didn’t get himself out of that river,” she tells him.

He blinks. That hadn’t occurred to Sam before. He just imagined Steve heroically heaving himself out of the Potomac to flop unconscious on the bank so that nobody would be troubled by having to drag the river for his corpse. He’s just that kind of guy. Natasha gets this without Sam having to say a word. She shakes her head very slowly.

“I need to know why Barnes left him alive.”

Sam nods. Yes, he supposes, she does. And considering what Barnes is/was, and where Hydra wound up being (everywhere), so does he. “I’ll call you as soon as he's awake.”

She gets to her feet. "Thanks," she says, and walks silently out.

Chapter Text

Maria and Olga give him directions, and he makes a map in his notebook so he doesn't forget. Then, after the food and a glass of cold, bland beer, he writes:

Salata de piper - ok

Figarui - good 

Ciucaş - not good

He leaves the cost of the meal at the table, meets Olga’s challenging eyes when she glances at him and the cash, and slips out while Maria is in the back, presumably with whoever the cook is. He nods at her as he leaves, and she nods back. Not friendly, but that’s just fine by him. He takes himself down to the Piața Obor.

It is a sunny spring day, and the dust of winter rises off the pavement and the train tracks and from under the feet of pedestrians. The warm sun is making brilliant green new growth appear on the evergreens that line the street and shade the bus stop benches. There are people about, plenty of them, coats slung over shoulders or arms, or carried in the loops of shopping bags. He looks up from the little map he drew and takes breath to steady himself. Before him, the Halele Obor rises. He knows, suddenly, sharply, as if jolted awake, exactly where he is.

Halele Obor is an elegant, spare building, rising up as a stark, clean backdrop to the clustered food stands and hawkers’ stalls. He remembers seeing it for the first time, long, long ago when the building was still "the new market".

The memory is so clear and sharp that he drops down on an empty bench to catch his breath.

It was snowing when he saw the market last, and had been snowing all winter long. The snow hung in curlicues at the edges of the roof, and a garland of icicles hung in static cascade on the southernmost corner. He remembers two men with him, one in military uniform, and another in civilian clothes, heavily bundled, a fur cap on his head. The civilian, his handler. American, he thought. The first one.

Soldier, report, the civilian man said.

They were in Targoviste, he murmured, just saying the words, not to anyone. Those who were supposed to receive the information were present. Eye contact was not permitted.

What is their status? the civilian again.

The are both alive and in custody.

The military man burst out laughing, the sound of it cracking like a gunshot in the winter-smothered street.

Well done, he said. He slapped the civilian on his arm. Come on, lets have a drink and celebrate. The revolution is over.

He wonders who they were, the two hiding in Targoviste, the man and woman who wept so hard at the sight of him, as if he was Death himself. He wonders what became of them. He wonders who he was in the moment. He has done many things for many agencies. Were all of them bad?

You shaped the century, Pierce told once him. He said it softly, as if praising. Perhaps he had been. He has memories of Pierce, and they are the finest of his memories. Sharp and clear as images on the television, or the Smithsonian pamphlet pages; hardly wiped away at all.

He has enough memories of Pierce to have an opinion. He had been a good man, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he done his best to do what he believed was right? He had been kind to the Soldier. Had preferred correction and praise to violence and the chair. He had only used the chair when it was required; when the programming malfunctioned, when the Soldier could no longer do his share of the work. He had not been a sadist, as some of the others had.

Bucky realizes he is not breathing, here at the bus stop in the middle of Bucharest. He is holding his breath, because to breathe will bring an acute discomfort in his chest and in his throat. And his eyes sting, as if the dust and salt of wintertime roads has gotten in his eyes. Pierce would understand what is happening, and would explain it to him.

He writes:

You shaped the century.

I know I can count on you.

The Soldier never fails.

He adds I wish he was here beneath the list, and underlines it hard enough to tear the paper. Then he closes the book on the words and pushes the memories away. He takes a breath and gets to his feet. Mission: he tells himself, and it is pleasant, Find the Garden apartments.

He goes looking.

Chapter Text

For a long time, there’s nothing. He’s aware that time is passing, sometimes. Sometimes he thinks, I should open my eyes, but he’s comfortable. So comfortable. And some part of him knows that to open his eyes is to invite the flywheel of his mind to spin up, and that, if he reaches for it, there is a pain as raw as a burn that is waiting for him. Steve dozes. Doesn’t dream. Floats in and out of unawareness until he realizes someone is singing, soft and low. A familiar voice, singing a familiar song. He listens.

I’ve come up hard, but now I’m cool

I didn’t make it, baby, playing by the rules…

Sam. Sam’s okay. The relief is like a weight coming off his chest. He doesn’t know what he would have done if he’d woken up alone, if Sam had just fallen out of sight and vanished forever, one last transmission and then nothing more. Missing, supposedly dead. Thank God, Sam’s okay.

He lies still and listens while Sam sings. It turns out Sam has been concealing a soft, warm tenor, and perfect pitch. He’s singing softly, but sometimes his voice mingles with Marvin Gaye’s so that Steve can’t tell them apart.

As the song winds down, Sam sinks into humming, and then silence. Steve would like to go back into the warm, weightless place he’s been. But Sam is here, and it’d be rude not to at least tell Sam how glad Steve is that he’s alive. He cracks an eye open and takes it all in. Hospital bed, monitors, guards at the door, and Sam in the visitor’s chair, chewing on the inside of his lip. He’s in rumpled clothes, and there are bags under his eyes, and bruises on his face. The trash can between the visitor’s chair and the bed is half-filled with take-out cartons and paper coffee cups. Sam’s been waiting here, maybe waiting for days.

“On your left,” Steve croaks, by way of a joke. Sam meets his eyes and rewards him with a smile.

“Oh good. You’re still a comedian.” Sam puts down the magazine.

“And you’re secretly a professional singer?”

Sam snorts. “You’re supposed to be out still, you know?” he says, scooting the chair a little closer. “Doc wanted you to get a full week before they took you off the sedatives.”

Steve forces himself to smile. “Since I started disobeying orders I just can’t seem to stop,” he says. He clears his throat and tastes a metallic mucus. He swallows and winces. Sam watches.

“They intubated you,” Sam says. “Somebody almost squeezed your neck hard enough to pop your head off.”

Steve clears his throat. “You know? I was there.”

Sam’s expression doesn’t ease up. “Somebody also left you like Sleeping Beauty in the sand.”

Steve’s heart leaps and aches at the same time. After all that, after the despair, the horror, after the surge of hope that maybe Bucky would come back, after that final effort, after deciding it would be better to die, that maybe it was what he deserved. After all of that, maybe…

If it worked.

If Bucky understood.

Steve feels it with his whole body. Somebody left him on the shore. And he only knows one person who was with him, who could possibly drag his unconscious bulk out of that river. Bucky always had Steve’s back, for as long as Steve can remember. And now… now maybe it's Steve turn to give him cover.

“C’mon, Sam,” Steve says, shifting where he’s lying, semi-upright. “I can swim, you know.”

“Yeah I know,” Sam says. “So I wouldn’t have thought about it if Nat hadn’t mentioned it.” Steve’s heart sinks. “She wants to know why he left you alive,” Sam says quietly. “So do I.”

“I don’t know,” Steve says. It’s a lie. Steve's got a pretty good god damned idea about why Bucky left him alive, and it doesn’t matter to Steve if the memory is of their childhood or Steve's halting, stuttering declaration after Azano, or that first, fumbling kiss that knocked their teeth together, or the whispered promises and plans, After all this, when we go home…, that shared daydream of a sun-filled apartment, and long, slow, Sunday mornings. He doesn't know which it is, and it doesn't matter. Not at all. Whatever else is happening in the world, Steve can live in it if Bucky remembers anything, anything at all.

Sam sits back in his chair. “Seriously, man?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” Steve says again, and this time he makes it convincing, because there are some things nobody, not even Sam, can know about him, some things that are his own business, and not the kind of thing you read about at the Smithsonian. “Maybe he remembered me. God knows I tried to tell him who he was." He pauses, and schools his scrambling, exultant mind to thinking, because it bears thinking about. "Maybe he was ordered to keep me alive," he says tentatively. "Maybe he doesn’t remember a damn thing. Bucky… he did what he had to do in the war, but he wasn't a monster.”

Sam grunts. He doesn’t look very happy about any of this.

“Where is he now?” Steve asks. He is afraid of the answer.

“We were hoping you would know.”

Steve does not sigh with relief. But he would if he was alone. It could be worse. So much worse. 

“You’d tell us if you knew, right?” Sam asks. “You know we’re not the only ones who’re going to be looking for him.”

Steve hadn’t had time to think that far ahead, but of course it’s true. The government will be looking for Bucky to bring him to justice for what happened to the Triskelion, and what remains of Hydra will be looking to recover their asset, and any fringe group of supers with an interest in a rogue will be very interested in Bucky. Steve can’t just cover Bucky’s retreat; he’s got to keep him safe. If he was going to pick who he’d want by his side, it’d be Sam and Natasha.

“I honestly don’t know," Steve answers, and then he concedes, because he'll need to trust somebody, and he knows Sam and Natasha, along with Peggy and maybe Sharon, they might be the only people in the world worth trusting just now. "But… I’ll tell you if I find anything out.”

"Promise," Sam says, because he's no dummy.

Steve laughs softly. "Okay, I promise."

Chapter Text

The Garden is no good. It’s lovely, painted a brilliant, cobalt blue, with white trim that gleams in the sun, and big windows that overlook the market. It has an elevator with chipped plastic buttons that light up when pressed, and hallways that smell of meat and onions frying. He can imagine what it would be like to live here. An apartment with the sun slanting through the windows, making warm patches on the floor. The smell of wet paint and asthma cigarettes. Damp laundry drying on the radiator. Feet up on the window sill and a cold beer sweating in his hand, and listening to the score of the big game over the water, wondering how far the Germans are gonna get before the Brits get their noses out of joint, and figuring it’s not going to be much farther.

But the stairwells are enclosed; he could be cornered there. And the fire doors are thick and heavy. They swing shut, and mute the sounds of voices conspiring on the other side. No, The Garden is no good, and he leaves as quickly and silently as he arrived.

Behind The Garden, though. Behind it is a shit-shack of an apartment building. According to the sign mounted above the door it’s called The Rose. Somebody’s idea of a joke. It’s tall and ugly. Concrete slapped on concrete, with concrete balconies jutting like warts from the facade, and windows that are small, and widely spaced, as if someone resented having to perforate that concrete surface. He crosses toward it. It overlooks The Garden, the marketplace, and there’s a parking garage on the other side.

The interior is damp and smells like mould. There is no elevator. The stairs at either end of the hall spiral up to form a well, and the rails are low, and made of twisted metal. The place is silent. He makes his way to the top floor, lets himself through the flimsy wood stairwell door, and out into the hallway. Distant TV chatter, and the sound of someone rattling around in the kitchen, and not much else. The door nearest to him is a half-light door, with a window, covered by a yellowed lace curtain, in the top half. It’s standing just slightly open. He nudges it with his foot and looks inside.

One window, and another half-light door that leads to the fire escape. He tests the light switch and a fluorescent overhead light clicks and flickers, and then hums on. The place has a humming, rattling fridge and a tiny electric stove, the walls around the it covered with old newspaper and streaked with soot. A broken floor lamp sags against one corner like a boxer that’s just been gut-punched. He glances through a narrow door into the bathroom, a cubicle of broken mint-green tiles, a short bathtub with a sink that overhangs it, and a toilet squashed behind the door.

Somewhere in the hallway, a door opens. Bucky goes still and listens. A woman, making soft, encouraging noises. He looks into the hallway, expecting to find a woman and her dog. Instead, a round-faced, round-eyed toddler looks up at him and gives him a wide, toothy grin. “Eee heee,” the toddler says. The woman laughs apologetically.

“I didn’t know anyone else was up here.”

“It’s fine. It… reminds me of my sister,” he says, and startles himself. Rebecca. He remembers her all at once. Freckle-faced, with two brown braids that hung over her shoulders, her favourite toy a doll stuffed with dried beans. He’d called her Rebsy. She’d hated it. “How old?”

“Just turned one. She’s very excited about learning to walk,” she adds. She scoops the baby up in her arms. “Marta, say hello.”

Marta does not say hello. She stares at Bucky. Like she knows about him. Like Rebsy warned her that James Barnes makes up nasty songs and puts boogers in girls’ hair.

The woman shrugs. She starts toward the stairs.

“Wait,” Bucky says. “I want this apartment. Who’s the landlord here?”

The woman pauses at the door and shoots him a bewildered look. Then she shrugs. “Nobody lives there. It’s yours. And they collect on Fridays,” she adds, and goes.

*

He spends the rest of the day in the market, acquiring new things. It’s like setting up last time, only then he and Steve were broke, and Steve brought most of the household stuff, since his ma had passed. He can still remember the green ivy-leaf pattern on the china, and joshing Stevie about the two of them bringing his trousseau up all those stairs. And Steve blushing hard, all the way up to the tips of his ears. And Bucky's guts feeling hot and twisted up, and wondering if it was better or worse, to be living like this. 

He gets a phone and a tablet from a hawker in the market. They're used, cheap, probably stolen, which suits his needs. Then he finds a stationers in the market, with a rack of newspapers and magazines, and notebooks and…

and writing paper.

He buys two newspapers and a roll of packing tape, a new notebook, and a little box of plain writing paper, the type that comes with envelopes. The guy sells him enough postage for one regular-sized letter and even tells him where the post box is. That night, Bucky covers the windows with newspaper and tape, and then uses the phone to read up on DC, on himself, the manhunt taking place in the United States right now, the president roaring about terrorism, and Steve Rogers, recently discharged from hospital and on his way home. There is a picture of him waving uneasily from the steps of a townhouse, the number plainly visible. Bucky sits cross-legged on the cold concrete floor. He finds a blank page in his notebook and writes until dawn.

Chapter Text

In the hours before dawn, he reaches the end of his notebook. His hand has grown tired, the writing unsteady, fingers cramping from such fine work.

Wall paper - green and grey

Dresser

Marlene Dietrich cut out from a glossy, up at eye level

Wingback chair (3 legs) and a brick

Ivy-pattern dishes

Sanka

Bathroom shared, down the hall

Tub in the kitchen

Hot water

View of trash cans

Door leaked when it was rainy, curtains moved when the wind blew

Arturo on the left side - not much English, bad leg, confirmed bachelor, nodded when Stevie and I moved in, made nice in the hall. I think he knew before we did.

Edie on the other side - “widowed” but probably not, little girl (Ruby?), typist. Old Lady June used to come up to the apartment and watch Ruby when Edie was at work.

Sarah’s old sewing box

Tub under the table

Table stained by Steve’s paints

Somewhere, a baby starts to cry. He chuckles softly. “Sounds like Ruby’s teething again,” he says and when there’s no answering grunt he looks up. There is no wallpaper, no worn-smooth floorboards, no cut-out of Marlene Dietrich pouting at him. There are blank walls, newspapered windows. A humming fridge. It occurs to him that Edie and Arturo and June are all long dead, and maybe Ruby too. The only one who’s still alive is Steve. Probably.

“There’s nothing you can do about that,” he whispers into the dark. “You just gotta get on with it.”

He sits still, until Marta’s crying fades away. It doesn’t take long. When it’s been quiet for a few moments, he closes his old blue notebook and takes out the box of cheap writing paper. He smoothes a page out on the floor and writes:

Stevie

Steve

Captain S G Rogers, US

Steven,

I hope this letter finds you

Steve,

I hope you're okay after what I did.

I've been thinking about how things were. See, I remember you, and how you were before, and Red Hook and Carmichael's Garage and you and me and that night after Azano when I couldn't sleep. I remember all of it except I don't remember how I got here now. But  I know I killed people. I 

I remember

It's like I had a bad dream or got the battle fatigue bad. Can't shake it.

I know I owe debts. I'll pay them my own way.

Get better. Don't be so stupid any more. Don't come after me.

He makes a clean copy on a new sheet of paper and slides it into an envelope. But it would be stupid to post it from here. He needs to keep his head down and stay off the grid until he’s sure about… anything at all. That guy in the market, the one who sold him the stolen phone and tablet. He'd be someone who'd know how to get a message to Steve without giving himself away. He tucks the letter into the satchel, unaddressed and unstamped, for later. 

Next, he takes his new notebook out of its wrapper. This one has a matte-black cover, with a red star emblazoned in the middle. This one is not for James Barnes, who remembers everything, from the day his ma and dad brought Rebsy home in the Moses basket, to the taste of Steve's mouth, warm and hesitant against his. Everything, right up to looking at his arm and seeing only blood and tissue and understanding the dull horror in his body, and passing out again. This one is for the ghost inside him. The one that shaped the future. The creature that remembers moments and places as if he is an album full of photographs with no names for the faces and no dates on the pictures.  

Inside the cover are the words: “This book belongs to” and there he writes, Soldat.

Chapter Text

Names:

Palme

Laporte

Guzhenko

Stark

Rogers

Places:

France or Quebec (?)

Sweden and/or Russia

Viet Nam (?)

England

Central America (Bolivia?)

US

OTHERS

Renard

Bors

Chernov

Whitehead

Moller

Other

They volunteered.

Mission: Rogers

Orders: (1) Eliminate high value target. (2) Eliminate high value target.

Handler: Alexander Pierce

EVERYTHING WENT BALLS-UP

WHY SEND ME?

Mission: Stark

Orders: Retrieve briefcase from car, eliminate expected witnesses (three).

Handler: Karpov

Only two witnesses on scene, third absent. Case retrieved. Returned to base. Empty. Wait. Nobody. Cold. Silence. Wait. Wait. Wait.

Note: I probably got back on Dec 25 ^th and the Republic fell on the 26 ^th . How long did I stand there waiting for Karpov to come back?

Later: Mission report, people, uniforms, and the Others. Volunteers. Looking around like recruits on the first day of Basic. Six of them. They sat in the infirmary in shirt sleeves. Bags out of the case. Something bright blue. One of the volunteers seized, foamed at the mouth like a rabid dog, and died on the floor. Five lived. “Guess he was sick." "What's that?" "They say it amplifies everything.” “What, like cocaine?” “Ha ha ha.”

Note: I trained them to fight.

“Do not beat them all the time - teach them.”

“Let them win, soldier.”

“You're weak. We’re going to be done with you soon.”

“Don’t bother, he’s going into the ice for good."

"Ice is too much trouble. A bullet will do.”

“They will be perfect. No more of these wipes.”

Note: The volunteers turned on each other. Stun batons. Tranquilizers. Cryo. Ordered to protect Karpov. Got him to safety. Into the ice. 

Note on Rogers : It wasn’t supposed to be me. I was supposed to be dead. It was supposed to be one of them.

Chapter Text

Morning wakes him and he hadn’t realized he’d been asleep. He lay down with his head on the bag full of notebooks, just to think for a while. He thought about the volunteers, and about how things might have been. He thought about the endless, parched, disorienting trek down the long country road. He wondered how many times he had walked away from bases, from missions, from handlers. Just walked. The way he had just walked away from the river, just walked from the Smithsonian, just walked because something was pulling him, some need to go and just keep going.

He can remember a long walk in snow, and a long walk on a soft May morning. He can remember walking through a graveyard of tanks. He must have fallen asleep then, because after that it seemed he had been walking forever, but Steve was beside him, in battle-dress. His tattered clothes were all mud-splattered, the chinstrap of Steve's helmet swinging. And then Steve was looking right at him, like he wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of what to say, and Bucky dreamed a lump as hard as a fist was in his throat. There were others around them, suddenly, and he knew, just knew, that if he didn’t distract Steve then Steve would see the storm breaking in him, so he opened his mouth and through his aching throat he said, Let’s hear it for Captain America. It was a strange dream, but not a bad one. It must have been the last dream before he woke; it feels brilliant and polished, almost like a memory. 

Now traffic noise infiltrates the little apartment. He can hear the distant sirens every now and again, and the steady drone of cars, the metallic crash of rigs unloading produce and bread and clothes and flowers and anything a being could possibly want down there in the market. Then it is like his body moves on its own. He turns onto his belly and does push ups and then turns onto his back and does sit ups. He stretches his flesh arm behind him, and then in front, twists the wrist to limber it, bends the fingers to their maximum. He examines the metal arm, clenches and unclenches the fist, tests the tactile response of the finger tips, rotates the wrist. “Functional,” he says without thinking, and to no one.

A swell of irritation rises up from his belly and tightens the muscles of his jaw and neck. He hisses a breath through his teeth and gets to his feet. It is morning, and there are things he needs to do.

It is early, not all of the stalls are set up, and the market is sparsely populated. It is a good time to have a thorough look through the place, get a feel for what is here, to mark areas of risk, blind corners and bottlenecks into which he mustn’t go, and note the open spaces that offer too little cover. As it happens there is an area of good cover with a number of escape routes not too far from the door to the Rose. The stationer who sold him his new notebook is there, along with a newsstand, a costermonger, and a few others. The sketchy fellow selling the stolen electronics is toward a bottleneck; Bucky will have to talk with him again, but not just now. Instead, he goes to the newsstand. The old guy minding the stall has a heavy waxed country coat and a thick scarf on. He keeps sniffling while Bucky looks from glossy to glossy, from newspaper to newspaper. He glances at the sunglasses and ballcaps hanging in a garland around the cash register. The newsagent watches him idly, and sips something from a paper cup. It smells like lemon and honey, bright and sweet in the cold morning air. Bucky takes two newspapers to the guy and sets down his money.

The newsagent grunts. He takes Bucky’s money and makes change, and Bucky tucks the newspapers under his arm and looks around. The costermonger’s stand looks more or less put together, and there aren’t many people in that direction. He goes over. The guy behind the folding table smiles at him and gestures at his wares. “New crop potatoes in, ‘small potatoes’ ha ha, and we have some very nice onions, just over here. But if it’s for breakfast there are late season pears—“

Bucky lets him go on, bemused. Finally, he murmurs, “Actually, I’m just looking,” and the man politely turns his attention to another customer. An old lady, heavily bundled in a pale blue coat, and briskly going from one heap of fruit or vegetables to another, dragging a little metal shopping cart behind her. “These green beans are like rubber, Constan,” she snaps. 

“You liked them last week.”

“Are they the same ones as last week? No wonder they’re so floppy. Where are your melons coming from? They smell about as fruity as a rock. I bet they don’t taste of anything.”

“It’s February, Olga. It’s not the season for melons.”

Olga? He looks. Sure enough, it’s the same one. She’s frowning at the brilliant pile of lemons now, hefting one in a gloved hand, and frowning at Constan while she does.

“Well. These are nice,” she says at last. Constan lets out a breath.

“How can you tell?” Bucky asks softly.

Olga and Constan both turn to look at him. Olga’s scowl lifts in recognition. “Oh, you,” she says. “Did you find an apartment?”

He nods.

“I’ll tell Maria and Chekov. As for the lemons, it’s easy. If they feel heavy, they’re full of juice.”

Bucky uses his right hand. He tests one, and then another.

“Give it a squeeze,” Olga says, coming over and crowding him. She takes a lemon from the pile. “If it feels firm, it’s in good shape. If it’s soft, like this one, it’s garbage.”

Constan groans. “Olga, please. I can’t have people coming here and fondling all my produce. Everything will end up bruised.”

“Oh, give it a rest,” Olga says, but there’s no venom in her voice. She’s still looking at Bucky. “Don’t buy the melons, they’ll be terrible. Get the carrots, Constan always has good garden carrots.”

Constan looks both surprised and gratified to hear this.

“And get an onion. You can’t make a thing without onions.”

Bucky nods and takes a bunch of carrots, brilliant orange, with the green tops hanging limp, and dirt still sticking to the roots, and a papery brown onion. He chooses a lemon, too, weighing it carefully in his right hand and then his left, the metal arm detecting the difference in heft from lemon to lemon now that he’s looking for it. While he fondles the produce, Olga directs Constan to load her little shopping cart with lemons, carrots, beans, potatoes, and half a dozen oranges, a braid of garlic and a bag of onions. Her shopping cart is full, and one of the little metal wheels is tipped off center, and squeaks in protest when she tries to tug the cart behind her.

He pays Constan and then hurries to catch up with Olga. “Excuse me. Can I…?”

She shoots him an irritated look. “I don’t know,” she snaps, heaving at the cart, which kicks out sideways and gets wedged against a wooden crate. “I don’t know what you can do if you…” she hauls on it, punctuating her words with the smashing of the cart, “Can’t. Even. Tell. A good lemon. From. A. Bad one.” Now she has the cart wedged. She glares at him, panting. “Look what you made me do.”

He laughs. He laughs hard. People turn and look at them and Olga stares. “Lady,” he tells her, bending down and freeing the cart with his left hand. “You are a piece of work. Let me.” He carries it to the door of the Garden and then sets it down. The wheel is easy to fix. He rights it and turns the cart so Olga can take the handle. "There," he says.

Olga looks him in the eyes. Her expression is unreadable, but her eyes are very clear and grey and Bucky finds himself unable to hold it. He finds himself looking just to her left, where Constan is leaning toward a pair of young men who’ve gotten behind his little table. Constan's mouth is contorted in a snarl, Bucky would expect him to be yelling from his body language and his expression, but the argument that is going on is completely silent. One of the toughs opens Constan’s cash box and takes out the bills. He closes it and sets it back down. Bucky stares. Olga lays one delicate, gloved hand on his arm.

“What’s going on?” Bucky asks quietly.

“They usually collect from the marketers on Saturday, but I suppose there wasn’t enough from Constan.”

He nods. “Extortion.”

The toughs leave. Constan thumps his cash box with his fist. Everyone around studiously ignores it all. Olga tugs on his arm until he turns to face her.

“Maria was right," she says softly. "You have a good heart. But listen to me, because I’m right too. If you want to stay here, you’re going need bad eyes.”

Bucky closes his mouth. You have enough problems to deal with, he reminds himself. He nods at her. She smiles rather sadly, pats his arm, and then pulls her squeaking cart into the apartment lobby.

Chapter Text

He purchases a few more things at the market, and then returns to his apartment. The building is cool and damp and he can hear the Marta making baby-noises against the backdrop of the sound of the TV. The rest of the floor is silent, and he suspects no one else can be bothered to hike up all those flights of stairs. There is something to be said about having a nest, a perch high up.

Bucky lets himself into his apartment, sets down his bags, and pulls out the new lock and key set. He spends a few moments changing the locks with a skill he didn't know he possessed and doesn't know where he picked up. Then he closes the door and begins to unpack his purchases: A loaf of bread, a carton of milk, eggs, some butter, the vegetables and fruit from Costan's stall, the newspapers, a travel toiletry set. He takes the toiletries into the bathroom and pulls the string for the light. It flickers and then stays on. Bucky examines his face. Then he goes back out to the main room and opens The Howling Commandos at War. There, among the photos in the central section of the book, is a picture of him. Not his enlistment photo, where he is young and clear-eyed and looks stupid as a cow heading into a slaughterhouse. In this one his hair has gone a long time uncut, and his chin is rough with stubble. His olive-green sweater is tattered and torn, and his clothes are covered in mud.

He tears both the enlistment photo and the later one from the book and takes them both into the bathroom. He tucks them into the frame of the mirror, the enlistment photo just below the photo taken on the march out of Austria. He looks from one to the other, and then at himself in the mirror. 

"Christ, you're a mess," he murmurs. "You look worse than Austria." He leaves the razor on the sink and turns on the shower instead.

The water is warm, raises goosebumps on his skin. He closes his eyes. It is like that little hotel. The one that had been sequestered for the war effort, where they were taken after. Full medical check. Cooked meals. Hot water. They were given time to recover their strength. Two beautiful days in the hills. Walls and a roof. Beds with mattresses. Running water and hot chow. And Steve sticking like a burr to his side.

He remembers it. The prison camp, the work, the pneumonia that drove him into the infirmary, the sadistic doctor's eager eyes and sweating brow, the needles and questions and still more needles, and the pain that made him strain against the restraints to curl around his guts. After Steve had hauled him off the table in the lab, when the world had upended itself and men were tearing their faces off, and every time he closed his eyes he saw the eager little man with his keen eyes and saw the needle coming nearer. But after that…

The dream of last night slots in and he realizes he remembers the long march. The agony of indecision. Knowing that there was no way to protect Steve from the war, that it was too late. Unable to disentangle the frantic pounding in his chest from fury of what was done to him, from worry that the Allies had done the same agonizing procedures to Steve, from fear that this sick feeling in his chest was neither of those things, that the sickness in his guts and the pounding of his heart was love.

The water runs down him. He scrubs himself with the soap, washes his hair. He remembers it all with perfect clarity, and his body responds to the memory, pulse rising, breath changing. He did not forget this, only locked it away.

*

Same room, two separate beds. Clean sheets that smelled of lavender. The light from a sentry post arrowing across the room. Bucky's blood hammering in his ears, heart thudding in his chest, unable to stop thinking, unable to stop remembering. Knowing they'd be going back soon, and trying to work out how, if it happened again, how he could kill himself before it got like that again.

A sigh in the dark. Steve turning on his side. Bucky's blood surging, roaring up at the sight of those broad shoulders, the unfamiliar size of him. He said it only hurt a little, he reminded himself. He said he volunteered and that it only hurt a little. 

Mmph. You still awake, Buck?

Yeah.

What's going on?

It's nothing. Just can't sleep.

Again?

Mind your own business Rogers.

I am minding my own business. Bucky, you’re in my company, and you're fatigued. 

Don’t tell me I ain’t right in the head, Steve.

Considering what happened— 

With all due respect, sir, I’m trying to get some shut eye and there's a loudmouth keeping me up.

C’mon Buck.  

I told you I’m fine. I’m fucking fine.

Yeah, you sound great. You wanna tell me what's going on in that concrete melon of yours?

…No. Look, I'm just real tired. Just roll over and go back to sleep. Hey, what are you…? 

Shove over.

Christ, you’re huge. 

You sure know how to make a guy feel at home. 

You sure know how to take over a bed.

You're freezing. No wonder you couldn't sleep.

Yeah. It's cold. Thanks.

…

…

…

Stevie? You still awake?

Hmm?

I can’t stop thinking.

About the lab?

No. About going home. Maybe… we're not going home.

Hey, don’t talk like that.

No, listen. You know it’s true. We’ve both been through enough to know it.

Alright.

I don't wanna regret... Not doing some things.

Yeah?

Um. So uh. Did you ever, uh… I mean…

H-help a guy out? I would. If it was you.

No that’s not what - wait, huh? 

Oh.

Christ, really? No, come back here. Really?

Oh God. Yes, really, you jerk. Why do you think I put up with you in close quarters for so long?

Steve… Stevie…  Ow.

Sorry.

Try again.

I, uh.

Is this okay?

Y-yeah.

I, huh, I...

Oh god. Oh no.

Lemme...

Okay. Oh no.

Oh god in heaven, Stevie, I'm gonna--

Shhh. Oh no. Oh-- mmmph

Heh.

Heh. Oh Christ almighty I hope nobody heard that.

I've heard worse on watch. 

Buck?

Hm?

I... I-I love you. I always loved you.

Shhh. Don't--

Don't run away from me again.  

I... I didn't run. They drafted me.

What? I thought--?

I was scared shitless, Stevie. 

You never said anything.

What was I gonna say?

...

...

...

We're going home together, Buck.

Sure.

Together. We'll be bachelors. We'll get a place in the old neighbourhood. With a big balcony and a couple sweet old lady neighbours.

Sure.

A big place. With an ice box and a proper bathtub.

And… enough space for you to paint.

Yeah. Lots of good light.

We'll get you a proper easel.

Have hot water all the time.

Eat steak.

Drink real coffee.

Sounds good.

It'll be good. We'll get there. 

He washes the mess from his hands and thighs, rinses the soap from his skin, and sighs.

They didn't get back to Brooklyn, of course. But that didn't stop Bucky from building the apartment in his mind. Brick by brick, floorboard by floorboard, window by window. He can call it up now, exactly as he imagined it all those endless days and nights. A sun-filled apartment, warm, smelling of fresh bread, or frying meat, or ripening fruit, or Steve's paints, or dust, or anything but a dank cell, a bucket for his bowels, gurneys and tables, the blood and pus of the infected suture of his arm. And that little fragment, that bookend, that's new. It's fragmentary, blurry, like a photograph taken through a smeared lens. But it is his. And he knows, approximately, where it belongs in time. 

He uses the little towel from the kit and then steps back into his clothes. They smell of sweat and grease and travel. He goes to back to the main room and opens a notebook. He writes, Buy new clothes, get a hair cut, and then turns to the stove and realizes that he's never cooked a thing in his life.

"You can kill a man a mile away, but you don't know how to cook." He scowls, unearths the tablet, and looks up how to cook eggs.

Chapter Text

His reservation is at a charming little bed and breakfast in Sloan Square. The black doors and polished white stone are framed by glossy black iron fences. There are a few urns of boxwood or planters of geraniums dotting the townhouses that line the street, but everything is tastefully subdued. The bed and breakfast is called Cat’s Meow, and the sign is a hand-written chalkboard propped beside the door.

The man who calls himself Oscar Mittleman lets himself into the place. He takes his room key, signs the guest register, declines an offer of refreshments, and makes his way up the carpeted stairs to the second floor. The place is clean and silent. The air smells like spice cake and laundry detergent. The muffled sounds of another city, another country, another life wrap around him. His shoulders relax. His chin rises. It is all going to be okay.

He opens the door to room number 3. It is small and carpeted, and just like the rest of the place, charming with its framed landscape pictures and potted plants and floral-patterned pillows, and deep pile blue carpet, and the two blue velour-upholstered chairs that sit facing one another and…

There is a woman in one of the chairs.

The man who calls himself Oscar Mittleman freezes. Terror takes him with a hand around his heart and squeezes. She is sitting in the chair with her legs crossed, her eyes calm, looking at him. She is dressed in jeans, a leather coat, and elegant boots. Fashionable. Red-haired. There is a gun in her lap where a book might otherwise be.

He waits for the inevitable order to enter, or to kneel. Instead, her lips twist up into a half smile, one that is almost warm. She laughs softly.

“Bucharest,” she says. Even if he knew what was expected of him, even if he knew what to say, his mouth is as dry as dust. It would be impossible to make a sound other than the thin, near-silent scream one sometimes makes in a nightmare. She seems to know it. “Just nod if I’m right.”

He nods.

She laughs again and rises, catlike, from the chair, slips the gun into her leather jacket where it seems to disappear, and strides past him and into the hall. Then she pauses and turns back to him. “You should be more careful about where you buy your papers, Oscar.” She says it in the way one might tell a stranger to pick the salmon over the chicken at a bistro. And then she is gone, down the stairs and out of sight.

Oscar Mittleman sags to his knees and for the first time in his life, gives thanks that he is not, in fact, someone else.

*

“He’s in Bucharest,” she tells Sam when she hits the street. The air is thick and cool, so heavy with moisture she could almost drink it. She takes a left and heads toward Victoria Station. Under her feet, the trains make the pavement rattle.

“I thought you said he was in London.” Sam's voice is calm and relax, but unusually quiet. She imagines him in his kitchen, perhaps with Steve in one of the guest bedrooms upstairs. 

“He sold his papers in Bucharest.”

“So he did see you in Moscow.”

“Well, it's not like I was hiding.” She frowns at the cars that pass by, and then crosses with the traffic as the light changes. “Did you get anything out of Steve?”

“No. He’s on side, though.”

Well, that's an unexpected bonus. “How’d you manage that?”

“I was honest with him. You might want to try it sometime.”

Natasha can hear the smile in Sam's voice. She rolls her eyes.

“How’s he doing?” she asks.

“The dude heals fast." There's a note of admiration mingled with exasperation in his voice.

“Is he driving you crazy?”

“He wants to go running. Says all this sitting around is driving him nuts. He's antsy. Wants to get looking for that old friend of his.”

Ah. She smiles wryly at nobody. “Did you expect anything else?”

“A little sense maybe?”

“Sam, this is Steve.”

A pause. “Look, is there a reason he shouldn’t go?”

“Aside from being gut-shot?”

“He’s better.”

“You’re kidding.”

Sam doesn’t respond.

“Tell him no. Tell him I’m on it. Tell him…” she pauses. Soft, near-invisible raindrops are starting to fall, dampening her face and shading the pavement a darker grey. She quickens her pace. “Tell him I’ve got a lead on his friend, and we don’t want to scare him off. If Cap suddenly shows up, his old friend might think it’s a fight we’re looking for.”

“I’ll tell him. But seriously. Between you and me. Is there a reason he shouldn’t go looking? I mean…” a pause. “In his shoes, I know what I'd do.” Sam says this quietly, seriously, as if he’s given it a great deal of thought. She thinks of the photographs in his house, his para-rescue squadron, his dead flight partner. She stops in the middle of the sidewalk.

“This isn't like Riley," she says. There's silence on the line. “This is seventy years. Twenty-five kills. Who knows how many missions. Torture. Brainwashing. Drugs.”

“I read the dossier," Sam says at last. "I notice you’re not talking about his habit of going for long walks.”

“Sam,” she starts, irritated. Then she takes a breath and reminds herself, smart though they are, Sam and Steve are soldiers, not spies. She starts walking again. “If you wanted to get Captain America to come to you, anywhere in the world, any time you liked, what would you do?”

Sam says nothing, which is enough for her to know he understands.

“And if you had the ability to brainwash somebody so completely that he would murder friends, and you had the chance to get your hooks into Cap, what would you do?”

“Okay,” Sam says quietly.

“We need to know why he left Steve alive.”

“Okay,” Sam says again. “I’ll stall him.”

Chapter Text

In the morning, Bucky wakes, stretches, exercises, says, “functional,” to no one, and then wakes fully and is angry about it. He makes scrambled eggs just like last night, and eats them, alternating the eggs with slices of cold, raw tomato. He looks at the lemons sitting on his counter as he eats. He is not sure what to do with them. 

After breakfast, he showers, and relishes the hot water, the soap. He combs his hair and looks critically at the photographs jammed into the mirror frame. He has short hair in both those pictures, and perhaps it would be good to have short hair again. Clean and tidy. He couldn’t do it himself, but he could find a barber. It might be nice. A hot towel wrapped around his face. Reclining in a chair. Chatter. In German, in Russian, in English, just lean back, just submit. They give IV anticonvulsants now,

he won’t thrash like he used to

 it won’t hurt like

it’ll just taste like blood

it’ll take away

Why did you abandon the mission? Where were you going?

I don’t know.

We’ll just reset him, no problem.

It is a problem. This keeps happening. We need a more reliable soldier.

Recruit some, then.

Where is Rogers?

Who?

Shut up. He’s right behind us, don’t worry, Soldier.

Huh. Funny. He shouldn’t be afraid of it.

Unless he remembers—

Shit.

Shit shit shit.

Turn it way up.

Wipe him.

His stomach lurches. The world lurches. He grabs the chipped sink as the memories come rushing up. His breakfast comes up too, for good measure.

A while later, he finds himself sitting on the bathroom floor. The tile is uncomfortable and cold, the sink has a drip that’s not quite steady. He’s not sure how long he’s been staring at the constellation of little black mould patches beside the toilet, but it’s been long enough. He gets to his feet. A haggard face looks back at him.

“The hair stays,” he tells his reflection.

*

He finishes dressing, and finds the Soldat notebook, and writes what he remembers. It's not much. To an outside observer, it would be incomprehensible. But when he looks at the fragments, they are like train cars, hitched to other train cars, now coming into view. He folds the book closed and smooths the cover. It is pleasant to just sit quietly, in a little space that is his own, and hear not much more than the sound of distant traffic and human commerce and his own breathing. He opens the Bucky notebook and writes,

Dear Steve,

I hope you got that apartment we talked about. The one with the good light and the hot water. I wanted to be there to see your face when we got in and it was ours. I even sometimes thought I would get to. I spent a lot of time building that place in my head. I hope the place you got is half as nice as the one I made up all through 44 into 45. Maybe longer. I don't know.

I'm getting some of it back but

Time is a mess in my head. It's like there are two guys in here. One of them got drafted, did what he was told to do, wound up a POW and the other guy ain't talking. I do things I don't expect to do. I say things and I don't know why I said them. I don't know how I know things. I know this other guy is bad news. I'm trying real hard to be good.

Do you ever

I remember the hotel 

B

He makes a clean copy, folds it, and puts it in an envelope. He's got to find a way to send these soon.

Chapter Text

He is sitting in his apartment reading when he hears voices in the hall. Sometimes he hears Marta, and sometimes he hears Marta’s mother hushing her, that’s normal in the course of a day. But these voices are men’s voices. A number of them, aggressively loud, as if volume was some kind of battering ram and armour. He closes his notebook and listens. Someone hammers on an apartment door, not his. Someone yells, C’mon, baby, open up. Someone says, I think that’s how the bitch got pregnant and somebody laughs. Bucky’s muscles tighten up like piano strings. He sits. He listens.

“What the hell?” That voice belongs to Marta’s mother. To him she was uneasily friendly, perhaps shy. Certainly anxious about the proximity of her child to an unkempt stranger. A good mother, he figures, just based on that. “What the hell are you guys doing here? Get lost.”

“You still owe some money.”

“I’m paid up. Ask Serge.”

“Not for the apartment, for getting here.”

“I don’t owe a goddamned thing. I’m paid up.”

“That’s not what Braco says.”

“Fuck off, you guys, get lost. I’ve got a baby, I’m out.”

“You’re coming back.”

“I’m out and Braco can kiss my ass.”

There’s a sudden, sharp, wet sound.

“Fuck you, you can’t make me go back, you can’t—“

Marta makes a noise. A yelp. And then she shrieks.

Marta’s mother is suddenly screaming, “No, No! Leave her alone!”

And Bucky? He is on his feet, right hand on the cool metal doorknob. Then he is in the hall and there are four men out there, two of them he recognizes from the market and two he has not seen before. Marta’s mother has a bright red welt colouring up on her face, swelling her mouth. One of the toughs is pulling Marta by the arm, dragging her across the dirty, chipped linoleum, as if she is a sack of garbage he can’t be bothered to lift.

And Bucky? He breaks the hand that is dragging Marta, and the arm attached to it.

And then it is a fight, of sorts. He can’t believe how slow these guys are. He could knit a pair of socks while he waits for that haymaker to land. He blocks the punch, spins the guy around, kicks him in the ass, and sends him sprawling into his pals. They fall like bowling pins. They do recover, but it takes forever for them to do it. When they’re finally back on their feet, they come at him like a herd of cattle. If he was the man he had been, maybe it would be too much and bowl him over, but he isn’t and it doesn’t. He knocks each one down in turn, and every one of them gets a broken arm for good measure. They scramble. They disappear down the stairs. Took them long enough.

He turns. Marta’s mother is staring at him with huge eyes, her arms wrapped tight around her daughter. Marta is screaming and clinging to her mother. He is surplus to requirements. He returns to the apartment and closes the door.

*

He stands for a moment at the door. There is no mission report to give. He is shaking. He goes to his knapsack, pulls out the Bucky notebook and writes,

Jesus H Christ, Barnes. What is wrong with you?

Then,

Well that’s the goddamned question, ain’t it?

*

Some time later, how long he isn’t sure, there is a soft knock on the door. He sits, notebook open on his lap.

Open it? Leave it? he writes.

The knock comes again. His mother raised her boy to have manners. He gets to his feet and opens the door.

It’s the guy from the market, the one who sold him the stolen electronics. His long black hair is knotted in a way Bucky’s never seen before, and tied with a thong at the nape of his neck. His brown eyes are serious, his face is grave. Like he’s about to tell Bucky that his mother’s died.

Which is something that occurs to Bucky, for the first time, and… NO. Not now.

“Hey,” the guy says. “Elena told me what you did.”

“Um,” he answers, and clears his throat.

“Look. I appreciate it. And as a favour to you, I’m telling you, you should get out of here before Braco sends somebody out for your ass.”

“Who are you?” Bucky asks quietly.

“Josh,” the guy says. He gives fleeting half-smile. “Elena and me, we’re…” he shrugs.

Bucky glances down the hall, to the other occupied apartment. It is very quiet in the hall. He asks, “Is Ruby alright?” but doesn’t get an answer. He looks at Josh, and Josh is staring at him.

Bucky blinks. Shakes his head. He was somewhere else a second ago and can’t remember where. “Who’s this Braco guy?” he asks.

“Braco Brutar. He runs this place,” Josh says. “This building and the market are his little empire.”

He remembers seeing two of the four toughs at Constan’s stall, shaking him down for more than the extortion they had already taken from him.

“What about the Garden?” he asks.

Josh’s eyebrows go up. “That’s Rosu,” he says. He frowns. “You, uh… involved in this? Is this, like, a move? Because if it is, I won't tell anybody. It's just, Elena and Marta—"

“No,” he says quietly. “It’s not. I… just want to know the score. I’m…” he pauses and smiles then. “I’m my own man.”

“Okay,” Josh says, nodding again. “Okay, but, look. You’re gonna get hurt if you stay here. Elena used to turn tricks for Braco, till she had Marta. She owed him for getting her out of Kazakhstan. But she paid him what she owed. She’s starting over.”

“With you,” he says.

Josh exhales and looks at his feet. “Maybe. If I’m real lucky.” He smiles a soft, hopeful smile. Then he gets serious again. “If you stay here, you might get killed.”

Bucky laughs softly. “I don’t think so,” he says. He flashes a smile at Josh and then closes the door.

Chapter Text

They come for him a few hours later. He’s just stepping into the hallway when they arrive. There are about a dozen of them, and they’re loud and clumsy. The echoing stairwell gives him ample time to decide if he’s going to beat it out a window, or stay. He decides to stand in the hall and wait. He doesn’t know much about the people he’s about to meet, but he’s pretty sure these are not people who can take him away against his will, and when it comes right down to it, that might be the only thing he’s afraid of now.

When the thugs make the top of the stairs, they’re all brandishing weapons. They hold their guys like they’re pretty sure what end the bullet comes out of, so he’ll give them that. There’s a great deal about himself that he no longer knows, including the degrees of his own mortality, and he’s not interested in testing those limits today. So he shows his empty, gloved hands to the men who have swarmed up the stairs to fill the place.

“Form an orderly line,” he says quietly, “and I’ll break an arm for each and every one of you.”

A laugh. It comes from a silver-haired man. He’s well dressed, and age has creased his face and imparted a gravity upon it. He meets Bucky’s eyes and opens his mouth to speak.

Do you know who I am?                               I suppose you know who I am.

His voice is steady and quiet, as loud as it needs to be, but it tangles in Bucky’s mind with another voice that is inside rather than outside his head.

I’m going to be your new handler.               But since you’re new here, I’ll tell you.

My name’s Alexander Pierce.                        I’m Braco. I’m in charge.

I know you’re tired, you want to rest.           You took out four of my boys. They practically pissed themselves.

But we can’t do this without you.                 Nice work.

We need you.                                               I can use a man like you.

“You need me,” he murmurs.

Braco smiles faintly and nods. “What’s your name?”

Bucky’s eyes ache, as if something is pushing against the back of them. He rubs his palm against one and then the other. “Soldat,” he answers, then he thinks no, that’s not right, and is about to correct himself when terror seizes his chest. Never, ever let them know. He clamps his jaw shut hard, like he’s gripping the other name in his teeth. They will take it from you. They'll take everything from you. "My name is Soldat."

Braco's face is not his own now, for a fraction of an instant, it is another's. "Soldier," Braco says softly, and finally, his is the only voice in Bucky's head, and finally his face is his own. "You looking for work?"

"I might be," Bucky answers. It's not untrue.

"How do you take your pay?" Braco is holding Bucky’s gaze, but he raises his head, and glances past Bucky, to Elena and Marta’s apartment door. The glance is deliberate, dispassionate. A man asking another man if he’s interested in purchasing something that is not his to sell. Bucky’s guts fill with bile and fire. Suddenly he knows exactly what he wants, and how to get it.

“Cash,” he says. The word comes from his mouth like a curse. 

Braco's shoulders rise and fall in a small shrug. “I think we can come to an arrangement. Can we talk? In private.” 

Bucky pushes open the apartment door and steps inside. Braco follows, without his entourage. Suddenly the musty old apartment is filled with the fragrance of expensive aftershave. Bucky's back muscles bunch up. The hairs rise on his neck and arm. He faces Braco, and watches while Braco looks around the place.

"Cozy," he says at last. "Listen, Soldier. I have a project I could use a contractor like yourself for. You're aware of the situation vis a vis the Rosu family?"

"I only know they run The Garden," Bucky says. 

Braco nods. "They've been trying to get into the marketplace, but the marketplace is mine. And now the old man's away. Left his good-for-nothing son in charge. The boy is young. Stupid. Likely to take risks. Always surrounded by friends and guards."

Bucky waits.

"How would you approach it?"

The short answer is with a bullet from a distance, but that won't get him what he needs. "Depends on who you're sending a message to," he says at last.

Braco's mouth lifts in a faint smile. “Yes,” he says. "It does, doesn't it? To the stallholders. And to the rest of the Rosu."

"Ugly and in public, then," Bucky says. He can see it, if he closes his eyes. "Give me a half dozen of your best, armed. Not kids like the ones that came hassling Elena. They were useless."

Braco comes toward him, but not too close. He’s thick-set, probably all muscle in his youth, going soft with comfort and age. "Tomorrow night. You can have them."

"And pay," Bucky says. He's going to need at least some of that money.

"Half tomorrow, half when I have my results," Braco says, which seems reasonable, so Bucky nods. Braco does not offer a hand to shake. Neither did Pierce. Not ever. This is not a deal, and they are not equals. Bucky opens the apartment door again, and Braco takes his fine suit and his aftershave smell back out into the hall.

The hall which, Bucky realizes, is utterly silent. It is as if the dozen men waiting there are imaginary, or ghosts. None of them move or speak. He has to listen to hear them breathing. 

"I'll send a car," Braco tells him. Bucky nods and closes the door again.

***

In the evening, someone else knocks on his door. The knock is soft, hesitant maybe, or timid. He hears low voices on the other side of the door and when he opens it, Elena is there. She is holding a cardboard produce box with a blanket over it, and Marta is standing beside her, hanging onto her mother's pant leg. Elena’s mouth is lopsided with swelling and berry-stain purple. Marta has a greenish bruise is colouring up on her chubby arm.

“Hey, kid,” he says to Marta. Marta looks up at him and doesn’t answer.

“I can’t believe you’re still here,” Elena says softly, as if she has to whisper so as not to give him away. “I thought they were going to kill you, or break your legs and throw you out. How come they let you stay?”

Bucky shrugs.

Elena hesitates. She licks her lips. “It’s dinnertime, and we, Marta and me…” she stops and gives him a small, helpless smile. “I came to say thank you earlier, but I didn't actually knock. I listened. I didn't hear any cooking going on.”

Bucky glances at his counter, his stove. The hardened remains of the last pan of scrambled eggs he made. Half a tomato lying abandoned on the counter top. “I don’t really cook.”

“That’s what I thought.” She pushes the produce box into his arms. Then she scoops Marta up and says, “Say bye-bye.” Marta raises one hand and flaps it at Bucky. "Keep whatever you like," she says. Then the two return to their apartment, and Bucky is left with the box, the blanket, and whatever is underneath. 

He toes the door shut and sets the box in the middle of the floor. He moves the blanket that's covering the whole thing and warm, savoury steam curls up. Bucky salivates so hard it stings.

Box contents turn out to be a little strange. There's an old, battered juice-jug that's been repurposed to hold a ladle and a half a dozen spoons, and there's food. So much food. A pot of soup, steaming, beef-scented, with potatoes bobbing in the thick mass, and what is almost certainly sour cream on top. There are also six slices from a loaf of dense brown bread, each piece thickly buttered. He stuffs a piece into his mouth as he paws through the box. Chewy and moist, a little sweet, the butter rich and salted. Nearly buried by a giant wad of napkins, he finds a bottle of beer, cold to touch and already beading with condensation so that the napkins stick to it. There is even a slice of cake, white with pink icing.

He eats three more slices of the bread and starts in on the soup, shovelling it right from the pot into his mouth. He has to make himself stop eating, to force himself to put half the soup and the single slice of bread that survived the onslaught aside for tomorrow. He agonizes, and then puts the beer aside too. For later, he tells himself as he plops the juice-jug-implement-holder on top of the fridge. For later is a nice thought. There are empty places in his past, and now is a mess, and tomorrow no one knows what will happen, but one thing is certain: There will be a bottle of beer waiting for him at the end of everything. He grins, and then he eats the cake with eyes half-closed in bliss, sucking icing from his fingers. 

After that, he looks at the blanket and finds it’s actually an elderly and hard-used sleeping bag. But it’s clean, and even if the colours are faded and there are tears in the fabric, the zipper still works. And it’s warm. He unzips it completely and drags it around him; goosebumps of pleasure rise up and he sinks down a little where he sits, like getting into a tub.

Full, drowsing, he digs out his notebooks and sits for a while in a cocoon with both books on his lap. In the end he makes a few notes in each, then flips to a fresh page in Bucky and writes,

Steve,

Your pal’s a jackass. Supposed to be lying low, but he hasn’t got the sense of a louse. God almighty, wasn’t it you who was always biting off more than you could chew? 

I guess they fried that guy's common sense when they fried the rest of him.

B

He doesn't bother to make a clean copy, just tears it out and folds it and stuffs it into an envelope.

Chapter Text

The man who calls himself Oscar Mittleman checks his bags at the airport, and smiles when the security agent waves him through the airport scanner. He says, “Of course,” when the agent on the x-ray machine asks him if he’ll open his carry-on. He has an excellent German accent and speaks English with casual ease. He unzips the bag. “Would you like me to unpack it?”

The agent nods. He rolls a plastic tray across the counter. “Just put everything in here,” he says.

Oscar Mittleman unpacks a newspaper and a phone charger and a change purse and wallet and the notebook and an old paperback he got second hand, so that it looks like an old favourite. The security agent paws gently through the things in the tray. His gloved fingers pause on the spine of the notebook. “Huh,” he says softly. “I’d like to swab this. May I?”

“Of course,” Oscar Mittleman says.

The agent swabs the book with a long, thin object and then places the object into a tube and frowns. “Could you open this for me?”

“Yes, of course,” Oscar Mittleman answers, and does. Inside, Cyrillic written in thin ink and a spidery hand seems to crawl across the pages. He flips a few pages for the benefit of the agent.

“I’d like to ask you where you got this,” the agent says.

“I ordered it online,” Oscar Mittleman answers. “From a place that sells out of Moscow. It’s vintage World War Two, that star is hand-painted. It’s great, isn’t it? Too bad I don’t read Russian.”

The agent makes a noncommittal noise. “Well. It’s slightly radioactive.”

“I bet it’s the star on the cover,” says Oscar Mittleman. “Back in the 40s they used all kinds of stuff to make things glow in the dark. Most of it was a little bit radioactive. Is it… is it going to be a problem? Should I mail it back home?”

The agent frowns. He shakes his head. “No, no, I don’t think so. Go ahead. You can repack everything.”

“Sure. Thanks,” Oscar Mittleman says.

“No problem. Have a nice flight.”

Oscar Mittleman slides the notebook back into his bag, collects the rest of his props and junk, and boards a flight to the US.

*

Chapter Text

The car that comes for him is actually a bread van. It is one of a number of innocuous vehicles parked in the place where Josh usually sells his wares this morning, and Josh himself is nowhere to be seen. Instead there are six large men, dressed in jeans and heavy canvas jackets. Bucky guesses their ages range from early twenties to mid-thirties, and all of them are quietly, subtly armed. There are no weapons on display here, just a heavier-than-necessary belt that certainly supports a holster, or a bump in the line of a canvas jacket. Bucky nods at the sight of them. One of them takes off a pair of sunglasses, revealing a slim scar that passes like an accent through his right eyebrow. It’s a clean, white line. Bucky figures it for shrapnel damage, or a near miss with a very sharp knife. These ones feel comfortable, correct, not slapdash like the thugs he's encountered so far. Some of the tension in his shoulders eases. He nods.

“Serge,” sunglasses-and-scar guy says by way of introduction. “Soldier?”

Bucky feels a frisson pass through him. He looks at the others, who are watching him. Cagey and assessing, uncertain. There are not the sort of men who are afraid of someone who broke a few arms, but they’re not getting any closer to him than they need to. He knows this sensation, knows it of old, and has always liked it. To be alone in the midst of noise, the eye of a storm. “Mission?” he says, before he is even aware he’s speaking.

“Stefan and his Rosu buddies are fucking around at the south end of the market.” Serge gives Bucky a glance. “Boss says you take point.”

Bucky smiles. It bares his teeth. “Always,” he says.

Serge exhales a tiny laugh. “All right, killer,” he says, as if the name is a joke, as if it’s not apt. “What do you want?” He gestures, and the youngest-looking guy in the group reaches up to the rear door of the bread van and pulls it open. There is an armoury inside.

Bucky is not aware of moving, but it is cold in the shade. The weapons are good, cared for, loaded and ready. He selects a SIG-Sauer from the rack, checks it over, and misses when he goes to slide a sidearm into his tac vest. He looks down at himself. No vest. No gear. No bindings or armour or restraints. Only a t-shirt, a hoodie, jeans. Right. He blinks and swallows. He is standing in the back of van and has no memory of getting into it. He looks back at the men standing outside the van, the sunlight that illuminates the world behind them simultaneously makes them faceless. But he has worked with them all. He knows them all. Rumlow, Rollins, Rogers. No. He does not see that particular shape, and he would know it anywhere. 

“Where’s Rogers?” he asks.

“Huh?” A voice that is not familiar. Murmuring. Men shifting where they stand. One of the men climbs up into the van, and Bucky has to blink hard to make the face make sense to him. His head hurts. He rubs his forehead with his metal knuckles. The guy's name is Serge. The guy with the scar across his eyebrow. He shakes his head and the world is firm and steady around him again.

“What did you say?” Serge asks.

“I said I thought we were getting more men.”

“It’s just us.” Serge looks at him for a long moment, then shakes his head. “You’re fucking crazy aren’t you?”

Bucky laughs. It is not how he expected to respond, but he does it anyhow. “Yeah.”

Serge nods. “You run point, I call the shots.”

“Good,” Bucky says. He always did work better with a handler.

When he’s armed, he climbs up into the cab of the van. There’s a middle-aged guy in there, hunched over the wheel, looking thin and pale and unhappy. He doesn’t look at Bucky when Bucky climbs up, and he doesn’t ask where they’re going. He just starts the engine and pilots the van out into traffic. Bucky knuckles his aching eyes and then looks at the guy again. Civilian. He’s sure of it.

“You’re not a part of this,” he says.

The guy scowls. “I pay my share to Braco just like everybody else,” he says. He reaches for the crumpled pack of cigarettes on the dash and shakes one out, puts it between his lips, and punches in the truck’s cigarette lighter. When the cigarette lighter pops, he grabs it and lights up. He pretends not to pay any more attention to Bucky, but his eyes wander.

“You've got a question,” Bucky says. The guy makes a pissed-off sort of ach sound.

“I heard you’re friendly with Olga Ionescu,” he says at last.

Bucky laughs softly. “Don’t think Olga is friendly with anybody.”

The driver is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “Constan, the greengrocer, he’s my brother-in-law. He said you took the poison right out of that old viper.”

Bucky gives the guy another look. He’s worn and grey, like the years of smoking alone in the cab of his truck have left a thin film of ash all over him, but his eyes are bright. “Constan handles her just fine all on his own.”

“She drives him crazy. But she shops on Sunday,” he adds in a conciliatory way. Bucky picks it up. He nods thoughtfully.

“Didn’t help this week.”

“No it didn’t.” The driver glances at him again. “Word’s gotten around about what you did.”

“I don’t like bullies,” Bucky says, realizing as he does that he’s echoing another pain-in-the-ass troublemaker of long ago. Look what you’ve become he tells himself and feels a wave of exasperation and despair that used to only ever be associated with life alongside Steve Rogers.

“Me neither,” the driver says. He reaches over. “Simon,” he says.

Bucky shakes his hand. “Nice to meet you.” 

“What, no name?”

“Not just now,” he answers. Simon signals and pulls the van to the side of the road. There’s a good view of the market, and a small knot of people passing through the early morning sunshine toward a vendor selling pastries and hot drinks. Stefan, the son of the Rosu boss. “Where’s that kid’s dad these days?” he asks, nodding in Stefan’s direction. Simon raises his eyebrows.

“Looking for somebody who stole something from him. War memorabilia or something. He left the stupid kid in charge.”

“Is he better than Braco, or worse?” Bucky asks.

“Bullies are bullies,” Simon says quietly. Bucky nods. The others are piling out of their vehicles, weapon are coming out, the warm morning sunlight glints like broken glass.

“Do me a favour, Simon,” Bucky says quietly. “Keep your head down.”

*

He is out of the van. Feet on the pavement. The air unusually warm for so early in the morning, so early in the year. He draws the SIG and fires into the air above the crowd. People duck. The sound shatters the morning and leaves silence in its wake. Serge turns to stare at him and Bucky grabs the solid weight of an M4A1 out of Serge’s hand. And then, people are screaming. And the smell of gun grease and powder is in the air. First birds, then people scatter. He takes aim. Hears Serge holler. Sees the Rosu thugs finally figure out where the gunshots are coming from.

It is uncomfortably like the mission that went wrong. Like and unlike that mission that went wrong. Except.

I am my own man.

He grips that like a talisman. He takes aim but never fires. Around him, Braco’s men do the work for him. The men around Stefan drop dead and Stefan drags a corpse in front of him, as if that will be some kind of shelter. Bucky reaches him first. He throws aside his weapon, hauls the kid up to his feet and says, “Trust me,” very precisely and very clearly into Stefan’s ear. Stefan meets his eyes, then looks at Serge, who is coming toward them both.

“What the fuck?” Serge roars.

“For Braco,” Bucky says, and shoves the kid past Serge, past the others, toward Simon and the bread van.

Chapter Text

“Explain,” Braco says quietly. He is standing in the living room of a nice little townhouse. A newer place, the living room tastefully decorated with a leather couch, two chairs, and a television mounted above a fireplace. No shitty, musty, broken-down apartment building for him. No thugs banging on the doors in the middle of the night. No shake-down Friday night rent collection. A petty king in his little castle.

Braco is looking at Bucky and Stefan. "Why did you bring him here?"

“Ransom,” Bucky answers. "You end up with the same amount of money you started with, and nobody tries to kill me before I get paid."

Braco looks steadily at him and then, very slowly, shakes his head and smiles. “You have a profound lack of tact, Soldier. It’s refreshing.” Braco glances over Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky doesn’t have to turn his head to know that behind him, Serge has got a hand on gun, just in case things suddenly get weirder.

“Serge, show our guest to a bedroom and see that he is comfortable.”

Serge grunts. Bucky releases Stefan's arm. Stefan is sweating hard enough that it’s beading on the tips of buzzed-short hair, but he isn’t gibbering or shaking, which says something about the guy’s mettle. He meets Bucky’s eyes as Serge comes up to take charge of him but doesn’t say or do anything stupid. So far, so good. Bucky turns his attention back to Braco.

“Now, my pay.”

Braco nods. He slides open a coffee table drawer, extracts an envelope, and hands it over. Bucky glances inside and sees what looks like small bills. That'll do. The quantity isn't really important.

“I hope we can do business again,” Braco says.

Bucky nods. He turns and sees himself out.

*

It is a thirty minute walk back to the market and to his apartment. There are still police vehicles on the south side of the market, but he wasn’t headed that direction anyway. He skirts the edge, and ducks into the shade where the trucks were this morning. It's the bad spot, the bottleneck. Any sniper worth his salt would make this a killing ground.

There is a noise just behind him before a soft, light, cloth drops onto his head. In the moment that follows he is gone, and when he returns a man has both hands up and he’s on his knees and he’s saying Seriously, I - fucking shit dude - I didn’t mean anything—

Bucky still has the SIG Sauer, and now it’s in his hand. A plain black ball cap lies at his feet. The man on his knees is familiar. Friendly. “Josh?” he tries and the guy lets out a small, wet noise.

“They’re looking for you, man, I just thought, a hat, you know? Like, just, you’re a nice guy and—”

Bucky puts the gun away. “I’m sorry,” he whispers. He doesn’t know what happened in the space between the sensation of unexpected touch and now. “Sorry. I didn’t. Guess I’m.” He stops trying to make it make sense. It doesn’t; it never will. Instead, he asks, “Are you okay?”

“Aside from shitting myself?”

Bucky offers him a hand and Josh takes it. He climbs to his feet, breathing heavily and clutching at his heart as if he's going to keel over.

“Man, I heard a rumour you were in the army, but nobody should have reflexes like that.” Josh scoops the hat from the ground and dusts it off. “Listen, old man Rosu and the police chief did some kind of creepy crazy shit after the war, back in the Soviet days. They’re real close. And after what happened, those cops are all looking for you.” He offers the hat to Bucky. Bucky takes it and pulls it on. Snug, with a long brim. It shades his eyes and will cover his face if he keeps his head down.

"Thanks," he murmurs.

Josh nods back. “Godspeed on your weird mission, you crazy son of a bitch.”

Bucky laughs, and heads into the market.

*

He finds Constan at his stall, trying very hard to sell some egg-shaped greenish things to an uninterested looking woman. She leaves and Constan turns to him. “Mangoes?” he asks. “Fresh this morning. I - oh.”

Constan closes his mouth. His eyebrows have a teeny, tiny fencing match above his nose.

“It’s okay,” Bucky says. “I’m just shopping.”

Constan exhales.

Bucky selects a number of things he’s seen other people buy. They are things he knows go into food, but has no idea how to get them from this format to the sort that’s floating in gravy and tastes like beef. That's what the internet is for, he tells himself. He grabs a braid of garlic. Why not? “What’s a mango?” he asks.

Constan blinks. “Tropical fruit. Come on, you never had a mango?”

Bucky shakes his head. Constan pulls out a small pocket knife and grabs a mango from the little heap. He carves away the green peel to reveal vivid orange-yellow flesh, then cuts a piece free, and passes it to Bucky. Bucky eats it and it is good it is so good it is glorious it is like candy it is how he always dreamed an orange would taste when he was a kid.

“It’s good, isn’t it?”

Bucky nods. “Two of those. I want two of those,” he says. Constan picks two of the largest for him and then tallies up the purchases and tells Bucky the total. Bucky slides the envelope of cash over. Constan freezes.

“It’s out of Braco’s pocket,” Bucky says quietly. “I saw what happened the other day. I figure he owes you.”

Constan seems to drag his head up to look at Bucky again. “I don’t want anything he’s going to come after,” he whispers.

Bucky shakes his head. “I wouldn't do that."

Constan takes the envelope and slides it into his jacket pocket. “Listen to me,” he says very softly. “Don’t get in over your head. These guys, they have histories. They’re bad people.”

“I know. Me too.” Bucky takes his bag of groceries from the table. “Thanks for the mangoes.”

*

The next morning there’s a lot of noise in the stairwell and then in the hall. And then there’s a knock at Bucky’s door.

Bucky slurps mango juice from his fingers as he listens for a moment. He hears, Should have brought a dolly, and then Hell, should have brought a football team. It’s Constan grousing about something, he realizes, and Simon grousing back. He opens the door. Constan and Simon are red-faced and sweating, and Simon is panting with his teeth clenched around an extinguished cigarette. Between the two of them sits a fat little two-cushion sofa that they have somehow managed to muscle up the stairs.

“Olga said you were new in town,” Constan says, since he’s the first one to get his breath. “Figured you could use a housewarming present. It's not new, but it's not covered in piss either. Where do you want it?”

Bucky glances into his apartment. The broken lamp, the upturned box that serves as a table. “Anywhere,” he says.

Chapter Text

He is aware that he is dreaming, for all the good it does him.

He is aware that there is no way the doctor can really be standing here, standing over him, looming. Bucky knows, objectively, that the doctor must be long dead. And it would be impossible for such a little man to rear up like a mountain, but he does. In his shadow, Bucky shrinks, diminishes. He would collapse into nothing, fall in on himself like a shell-hole subsiding into a battlefield. He would vanish if he could. But he cannot, and the little man looms, and bad is coming like the promise of a bombing raid, a firefight, a sniper in the trees. 

The little man says, “Come with me,” and Bucky, 32557038, soldier, Soldier, whatever he is, he does as he is told. He cannot do otherwise. He follows orders. He is a machine built on a scaffold that had always wanted to protect, loved the thrill of a fight, sought out the clarity of a mission. These things the little man had saved of him, and pared away all the rest.

He gets up from the chair with the leather straps dangling, with the arm not his, something they put on him, something they did to him, not his, never his hanging like a sledgehammer at his side. “Come with me.” The little man’s voice is gentle, soothing, soft, and the words always seem to repeat. This is meant to calm him, as if he was a stray dog that had wandered into this lab and become aggressive. As if he was an animal in need of help. “This way. This way.”

Through the door, into the hall, sixteen steps down to the floor below. A door, keys rattle against the metal, the hinges groan softly. A chamber, lit only by the hall lights. A white garland of frost hanging from coils of piping, the air almost brittle. A coffin standing on its end against one wall. No, not a coffin, a torpedo tube, or the casing of a massive shell. It has been split, and a part of it cut and riveted into a door with a tiny window set inside it.

“Step inside,” says the little man. 

He does not want to. He remembers: tiny cell, darkness, the crack of light beneath the door by which he lived a half-life, daydreamed the sun-washed Brooklyn apartment, Steve’s soft hair. He remembers: a metal box sunk into a trench, a vent the size of his hand, how his sweat changed from tasting of salt to no taste at all, how he contemplated drinking the piss he held so long, how he lay panting like a dog in the heat until they decided he had suffered enough. He remembers: transport, a metal crate streaked with tears of rust, too cold and hot by turns, endless standing, and the stink of diesel leaking through the sun-bright cracks. There have been too many boxes.

“Step inside, Soldier,” the little man whispers. That voice can no longer pass for gentle, kind, or soothing, no matter how many lies Bucky hears or tells himself. That voice is the hiss of his sweat on hot metal, the scrape of a tray of pills and liquids slid beneath a door. “Soldier,” the little man says. Bucky is aware of himself remembering. He is aware, in that layered way that sometimes happens with dreams, that he is remembering remembering. He knows what comes after this. He would stop himself, if he could. He would stop his stupid big mouth, punch himself in the teeth to shut himself up. But he is already saying it. Voice timid, like a child who does not understand, he is already saying, “But I did what you said.”

The little man goes still for a moment. The strange tank exhales. The air is razor edged and stinging. “Sputnik,” the little man says.

Like being startled by sudden gunfire, like the crack of electricity through the body. It passes through him like a bullet, lances what remains of the arm, lights up the nerves so that they are screaming as he screamed when they took it off.  

And then

nothing

Then he is standing inside the box, the tube, the coffin, the thing, and the door is closing. Cold, stinging, biting, vicious cold is rising up. Cold that takes the breath from lungs, freezes marrow, blackens flesh. Only the arm works. He raises his hand. He would push the door, if he could. But he can’t. He has been told to stay. He cannot do otherwise.

*

Someone is screaming. He drags himself out of the coils of the dream because someone is screaming, and someone is hammering and yelling what the hell is going on?

He opens eyes, realizes the screaming is coming from him. His mouth is open, his throat is raw. There's the taste of blood in his mouth. How long have I been screaming?

The hammering sound, that’s someone pounding on his apartment door.

He lurches out up from the nest of his sleeping bag and grabs the backpack of notebooks, then staggers to the door and hauls it open.

It's Josh standing there in the hall. He's angry-eyed, mouth hard edged. Down the hall, Elena is standing in her pyjamas at the door of her place, holding little Marta in her arms.

“You okay, man?" Josh asks. He cranes to look around Bucky, into the apartment. "You okay, what’s going on in there?”

Now Bucky is awake, really awake, he can feel the chill in his body, the slow cold that infiltrated his limbs in spite of the old sleeping bag. He should have slept with his hoodie on. He’s shivering, and he’s not sure if it’s the adrenaline dump of the dream, or some deep-programmed response to the memory of such vicious cold. Josh looks back at Bucky. He looks at Bucky and keeps looking. And Bucky looks down, to see what he’s looking at, and realizes.

His hoodie is on the floor, where it had been serving as a makeshift pillow. His gloves lie there with it. Bucky is only in his faded blue t-shirt. The arm is exposed, glinting dully in the ambient light. He is aware of the sensation of horror as he looks at it, an old feeling, but this time it is not because he has seen it, but because someone else has.

“Is he okay?” Elena calls.

Josh looks at Bucky, really looks at him. Please don’t, Bucky thinks as hard as he can, just in case they gave him telepathy when they put the arm in. Josh glances back at Elena. “Yeah, yeah, he’s okay.”

“What happened?” she asks.

“Nightmare,” Bucky blurts. “I'm sorry. Did I wake Ruby up?"

"Hey," Josh says softly, "Hey, it's Josh, you're okay. You're in Bucharest." He flashes a quick, wry smile. "Speak Romanian this time."

Bucky thumps his forehead with his hand a few times. Pierce sometimes gave the Asset a hard reset, and usually it worked.

Josh's warm fingers close on Bucky's wrist. "Hey," he says. "It's okay. Try again."

"Did…" he has to call it up, Romanian. "Did I wake Marta up?" Josh lets his wrist go. There was never any pressure in the touch, no attempt to restrain, only to remind.

“Yeah, but she's okay now, isn't she?” Josh looks over at Marta and Elena.

“What happened?” Elena asks.

"I had a nightmare," Bucky tells her. A shiver passes through him like an earthquake. "I'm sorry. I think I got too cold."

Josh looks back into Bucky’s apartment. “Cold, huh?” he asks. Bucky nods. He’s not sure what else to do. “Hang on.”

Josh goes back to Elena’s apartment. Elena turns to follow him in, and Marta looks over Elena’s shoulder and waves at Bucky. He waves helplessly back. A few minutes later, Josh returns. He’s got a red shirt in one hand, and a hot water bottle in the other.

“We’ll work on getting you a bed tomorrow,” Josh says. He doesn’t say anything about the arm. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t stare. What do you know? Bucky wants to ask. What do you know about this? His mouth feels like it's full of glue. He pulls the shirt over his head. It’s warmer than his skin, long-sleeved, thick and soft. Josh passes him the flopping, lusciously warm hot water bottle.

“Thank you,” Bucky whispers. 

Josh nods. He swallows noisily in the quiet, opens his mouth, and closes it again. He breathes in through his nose and finally says, "You know I've got bad eyes, right?"

Gratitude unfurls in him. "Yeah. I know," he says.

Chapter Text

A few days after Steve gets out of the hospital, he makes one stop before he goes to see Peggy. She is in a pale blue nightgown and matching housecoat, sitting semi-reclined in her bed. The hifi is on, and she’s part way through Willow weep for me. For not the first time, and probably not the last, something clutches at Steve’s heart. It’s the force of what might have been, a future that never was. Peggy always understood. She understood him better than he did himself. He remembers.

*

“It’s very simple. You marry me and then go about your business.”

He stared at her, certain he was flushing red, but unwilling to admit it. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Do you really think it’s perfectly average for a man to storm halfway across a continent after another man?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

He was silent then. The flush that had started became uncomfortably hot. He still remembered, vividly, viscerally, Bucky’s mouth on his, his hand in Bucky's shorts, their mingled breaths. Peggy was looking at him like she could pluck the memory right out of his head.

“Do you really think that when all this is over, assuming, of course, we win, that you and Barnes will simple settle back into a quiet life?” She had sounded slightly disappointed in him. “If we win, you return to America a war hero - aided and abetted by Howard Stark. Do you really think you’ll be permitted to just fade into New York and live quietly as bachelors? Well, I suppose Barnes could probably just about get away with it. But you? 'Captain America'?”

“No,” he whispered. There was, after all, no point in arguing. She knew, and that wasn’t the point. She was also right.

“Steven,” she said this gently. “You and Barnes will never know moment’s peace unless you marry.”

“What about you?” he asked, voice rough with the tension in him. He cleared his throat so he could speak more softly. “Peggy, I-I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that kind of thing to you.”

She laughed then, just a little. “Oh, you’d be doing me a favour.” Her wry smile returned. “The moment the war is over, I become unemployed and go back on the marriage market. I’d rather not endure either, frankly.” She grinned at him. "I always rather fancied a May wedding, but I'd consider June. How does a venue in New York sound to you?"

He laughed.

*

She lifts her head when he comes in. She’s pale now, all over. The shock of seeing her with grey hair is what does it every time. It should be nut-brown, falling in silky curls, not wispy and white like this.

“Hi, Peggy,” he whispers. She gasps softly, bringing a thin hand up to cover her mouth. Her mind is sharp as it ever was, but the memories stop sometime in the late 90s. He doesn’t visit as often as he should. There are tears every time.

He settles in the visitor's chair and tells her the story of coming out of the ice. By now he’s practiced and quick and the story is efficiently abridged. He smiles when she marvels at it and whispers how she wishes Howard could have known. After this, she settles back into her bed to catch her breath, then looks at him again. “You have a look about you." She gestures around her mouth. “I haven’t seen you like this since Captain Philips told you the news.”

He scoots the uncomfortable wooden chair a little closer. “It’s not just me, Peg. It's…"He’s been thinking about this, about how best to say this. "It's Bucky too. He survived the fall. He’s alive.”

She frowns at him. “No, no Howard never…” she pauses, and old though she is, and torn up though her memories are, she still has mind like a knife. “He survived? You have to find him.” She looks shrewdly at him. “But you would anyway, if you were able. Instead you’re here.” She folds her hands on the soft, blue blanket and looks at him with one eyebrow raised. “Steven. This is out of character.”

“I need your help. Do you remember… do you remember how you promised to cover us?”

She smiles at him then, slow and pleased. "I believe marriage was a condition of that agreement, but yes."

"Could you do it now?"

"What?"

He grins. "Marry me. I need to place an announcement in a newspaper."

"Well, Steven, let's start with an engagement, shall we?" she asked, chuckling. "What newspaper, and what shall I write?"

*

On March 10, 1917, Ms Margaret Carter engaged to Mr Steven Rogers. Congratulations may be sent to PO Box 959, NY NY, 11207.

*

Chapter Text

Milo, the grumpy newspaper seller, is not sitting this morning. He is standing in an effort to tower over Simon, who is chomping on an unlit cigarette. “I’m telling you," Milo says in a voice loud with indignation, "it’s a typo in an advertisement. When I worked the desk at The Standard we would have dropped dead from something like that. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Simon sighs as if this is taking up his time, his day, maybe his whole life. “Come on, Milo. You were a reporter for how long? They don’t edit those, people write them themselves.”

“Look, right there.” Milo pokes the paper with one gnarled finger. “March 10, okay, fine, but then this: 1917.”

Simon squints at it. “Bah,” he says at last. “So it is.”

“What did I tell you? Garbage. This paper has been garbage since the old editor left.”

Bucky stands for a moment, watching the two men bickering even as they agree. Finally Milo notices him. “Oh, the hipster,” he says. Simon looks at Bucky and then glances sideways at Milo.

“I don’t think that means what you think it does,” he says.

Milo either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care what Simon has to say. Instead, fishes down two of the local newspapers, a copy of the Independent, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, Le Monde, and a few of Bucky’s other usuals. Milo isn’t friendly, but Bucky spends a lot of money here in the mornings, so the guy has taken to customer service. Simon steps back and leans on the counter, still chewing the filter of his cigarette.

“Don’t know why you bother with this one,” Milo says, tapping his finger on the newspaper on the top of the stack. “Look at this. In a classified ad. Somebody paid good money for that, and they screwed it up when they printed it.” He shows Bucky the paper.

It’s as if someone has opened a drain somewhere and all the blood has rushed out of him. He feels faint and weak.

On March 10, 1917, Ms Margaret Carter engaged to Mr Steven Rogers. Congratulations may be sent to PO Box 959, NY NY, 11207.

“Hey,” Simon is saying when the blood stops roaring in Bucky’s ears. “Hey, you feeling all right?”

Bucky blinks a few times. Soft reset. “Yes,” he says roughly, then remembers who he is, where he is, when he is, and clears his throat. “Yeah, sorry. Just. Bad night. No breakfast yet.”

Milo shakes his head. “You hipster kids and your fad diets,” he mutters.

Simon looks from Milo to Bucky. He grabs a chocolate bar from the assortment out in front of the till and slaps it on top of the newspapers. “Get your blood sugar up,” he advises, and pays Milo for it. 

“Thanks,” Bucky says. He takes a breath and makes a choice. He gestures. “I need postage, too.”

Milo rolls his eyes. “Postage, postage, for what? A big parcel? A post card?”

“Letters. Standard size. Eight or nine of them.”

“There are ten stamps in the pack,” Milo says, taking one off the rack. “Write another letter.”

Simon elbows Bucky in the ribs. “Send the happy a couple a congratulations,” he suggests with a waggish grin. Bucky finds himself grinning back.

“I might just,” he says.

Chapter Text

Bucky stops at Constan’s stall and gets a basket of early strawberries, another bunch of carrots (in his notebook he has written Carrots - good, crunchy. What’s up doc?), and is just looking at a small pyramid of pears that are a soft yellow-green when Olga’s cart rattles to a stop. Bucky looks over at her and she nods at him. “Good morning,” she says, and then looks at Constan. “Maria needs twenty pounds of tomatoes. Chekov is making shakshouka. Don’t get those pears,” she adds to Bucky, “they’re out of season, they’ll be mealy.”

“Olga,” Constan chides, but he doesn’t correct her.

“What’s shakshouka?” Bucky asks.

“Eggs poached in tomato sauce. Chekov says you have to roast the tomatoes before you make the dish.” She rolls her eyes. “Perfectionist. He and Maria are a pair.”

Bucky catches Constan’s eye. “I’ll get some tomatoes too.”

Olga laughs. “Maybe you and Chekov can compare dishes some time.”

“I’d like that,” he says, and is surprised to find that he means it. Olga may be a crusty old bat, but he can’t help feeling affectionate toward her, and he suspects the same of her. After all, if she really disliked him, she would have let him buy the pears. Something occurs to him then. “You’re going to the restaurant,” he says. She looks at him. “Could you post something for me? From near the train station?”

Her eyes narrow. She steps aside while Constan loads her cart with the tomatoes. When he’s done, she frowns at Bucky and nods. Bucky sets down his purchases. “Just a minute,” he says. He slides the knapsack off his shoulder and retrieves the Bucky notebook with the letters in it. It’ll take forever to stamp and address each one of the letters, so he grabs the letters by the handful, maybe tears a page or two, but Steve'll forgive that. He crams them all into a single envelope - it’s not like any of them are very long anyway - and though the envelope bulges, it closes.

“Here,” Constan says, offering him packing tape. Bucky thanks him and tapes the envelope shut, then puts on two, then three, then all of the stamps.

“Thanks,” he tells her, and sets it on top of the tomatoes in the shopping basket.

*

Olga is not a dummy. She lived through communism and the revolution, she saw one son go off to war and another son go off to school, and in the end she buried both of them. When her husband died, Maria and Chekov, whose daughter had just left for school, told her they were lonely in their empty apartment and asked her to come be part of the family. This was to be a favour to them, that’s what they said. But Olga is no dummy. She knows good people. Maria and Chekov are good people, and so she does errands for them. Cleans their apartment when they're out, gets the groceries for the restaurant, posts their mail.

This new fellow who came in on a train one day? This man who sometimes speaks English when he gets confused, who is playing some sort of long game with the Rosu family and Braco Butar, Olga does not think he is good people. But she thinks that, perhaps, he is trying to be. So she doesn’t open the letter, or throw it in the gutter. She takes her little cart down to the train station, and then, with her sleeve over her fingers, she slips the envelope into the post box.

Olga is not a dummy. That young man is up to something, and whoever gets that envelope will not find her fingerprints on it.

*

It’s well after noon when Natasha steps into the little restaurant. She’s missed the lunch rush, if there was a lunch rush, and the place is empty. Everything is rather old, rather shabby, and has a thin veneer of grease on it. And there’s a Kalashnikov in a frame above the till. She grins at the sight.

“You like it?” asks a middle-aged lady, one of two, sitting at a table under a silent TV.

“I don’t think anybody’s going to try to rob you,” Natasha answers, and the ladies laugh.

The woman gets to her feet and gestures at an empty table. “Sit anywhere,” she says. Natasha hesitates. The place could use a serious deep clean, but the air smells good, a little spicy, a lot tomato-y. She seats herself at a table with pink, powder-coated chairs and a wipe-down tablecloth. “He’s making shakshouka,” the woman says. “Take it or leave it.”

It’s been a long time since breakfast, and Natasha is tired and footsore. Bucharest is full of people who don’t want to impress a pretty girl with stories about a dangerous stranger who’s moved to the area. It’s maddening. She could use some food, some rest, and maybe some caustic humour from the two women here. “I’ll take it," She says. "And if anybody can tell me where to find my ex boyfriend, I’ll take that too.” She adds that last bit, because you never know when you might get lucky. She sighs. “Mom always told me not to get involved with an American.”

The woman who seated her looks sharply at her and Natasha feels a thrill. “Do we know any Americans, Olga?” the woman asks.

The woman still at the table, Olga, regards Natasha shrewdly for a moment. “Only one, Maria,” she answers. “And him only a little.”

Natasha sits forward. All morning she’s been chasing men around, trying to see if someone violent had appeared on their radar. But these two matrons, it seems, are exactly the people she’s been looking for, and it’s not going to be stories of violence that’ll get them to talk. It’ll be sorority. “No chance he’s a big, tall guy with brown hair, is there?”

Olga shrugs. “Isn’t that all of them?”

“No, they’re blond,” says Maria. “And wear pipe-cleaner pants.”

“Skinny jeans,” says Olga.

Maria shrugs. “Same thing.” She looks at Natasha. “What are you going to have to drink? Beer?”

“Water,” Natasha says.

Maria tsks. “The city water is no good here. You should get a beer.”

It’s an easy in. A lifetime of training in the Red Room has made lying as simple as breathing. “I can’t,” she says, and doesn't miss a beat. She rubs at her belly. “It’s not allowed.”

At the table, Olga sucks in a breath. Maria glances at Olga, then at Natasha. She doesn’t say anything either for a moment. “I’ll tell Chekov he needs to hard-cook the eggs,” she says. She heads through a doorway that leads, presumably, to the kitchen.

“Our American is very good with children,” Olga says quietly.

Natasha smiles and shakes her head. “That doesn’t sound like my American.”

“He gets confused.”

She can feel the smile on her face hardening. “That does sound like my American.”

Olga sits forward. She’s looking right at Natasha’s eyes. “What will you do when you find him?”

“Probably kill him,” she answers. She's not sure if she's lying or not.

To her surprise, Olga laughs softly. “You might have to hurry," she says with a grin. "I think there’s going to be a line.”

Chapter Text

The clerk at the hotel has been in this job for a long time, and he's gotten good at it. He is short, a little on the soft side, what with all the time he spends behind the desk, and he reads a lot when it’s quiet. He knows he isn’t the hero of the story, and that’s just fine by him. Because the story, it seems, is actually really screwy, and getting weirder by the minute.

First there was the guy who called himself Oscar Mittleman who, according to his documents, was a native-born German, but aparently didn’t know what an eszet was. He stayed for two weeks, getting more red-eyed and strung-out looking by the day. By Friday, Angus, the night clerk, had taken to calling him “Shaky” when the two of them were shooting the shit in the back, and even though it was super unprofessional, that was how he thought of Oscar Mittleman now. Oscar “Shaky” Mittleman. Drugs, that was what the clerk thought. The guy had gotten into drugs and gotten in over his head, and had started getting high on his own supply. Bad news.

Mind you, the clerk would probably have wanted something to take the edge off, too, if he had a, er, ‘friend’ like Shaky did. The guy was the opposite of Shaky. Cold and dead-eyed and lean, with a military-short haircut and the sort of posture you could use to drill holes, plus a Russian accent. Obviously ex Russian military, and probably also a psychopathic killer too. They called him Kasparov, and the clerk wasn’t really sure why, except it sounded great when you whispered it. “Shit, it’s him. Kasparov is here.” The guy signed in as Garry, so it kind of fit. The last time he came, he had a briefcase that was, no shit, handcuffed to him. He arrived with it, and he left with it. The clerk pretended not to notice. Seemed prudent.

And now there was this guy. This guy was neither Shaky nor Kasparov. This guy was large, and quiet, in the way a mountain is quiet, right up till it lets you know it is, actually, totally, and for real, a volcano. He had wanted to see Oscar Mittleman. The clerk asked him to sign. He went in, stayed about an hour, and came back out. Now the guy was on the phone. He was speaking softly, and the volcano-ness he exuded from every tense angle of his person seemed to be increasing exponentially. The clerk is no linguist; he didn’t know what the guy was saying, but the guy was clearly upset and getting madder by the minute. Maybe his kid had crashed his car. Maybe his company was failing. Maybe the big drug deal Shaky and Kasparov and this guy had all been trying to organize in the hotel room had gone sour because Shaky snorted all the dope.

The clerk eavesdrops, because his job is boring, and he left his book at home. He covertly writes down what he hears in tiny letters on the corner of a scrap of paper. When the guy puts his phone away, the clerk folds the paper over as casually as he can. This is not the kind of guy who would find it amusing that you were going to google-translate any part of his phone conversation.

“I require a taxi to the airport,” the man says. “I must go home. I am surrounded by idiots.”

“Oh. Ok, sure. Uh, can’t help with the idiots, but that phone over there.” He gestures to the white phone mounted on the wall. “That’ll connect you to a taxi company.” After all, he’s a clerk, not a concierge. This isn’t that kind of hotel.

When the large, angry volcano man is gone, the clerk fires up google translate. Assuming they are in fact Romanian, and something hasn’t gone horribly wrong with the translator, the words go Kidnapped? Did you pay the ransom? I will come home and I will strangle everyone when I arrive. The clerk looks at the words on the scrap of paper, and then at the translation. He closes the browser window and then, after a moment of heart-pounding uncertainty, he wipes the history. Then he tears off the corner of the page and eats it. 

*

"You seem unsurprised," the handsome young cop says to him after it all comes out. 

The clerk shrugs and watches the paramedics wheel a sheet-draped gurney through the foyer and out to the ambulance. "I've been in this job a long time," he says.

Chapter Text

Bucky watches Olga go, then pays Constan for the green grocery. He’s just going to the nearest coffee stall when Josh appears out of the crowd. “Hey,” he says. He’s holding a phone to his shoulder, face against his black canvas jacket. “Elena can get a mattress from a friend of hers. No bugs. You want it?”

It takes Bucky a second to figure out what Josh is asking, and then he nods.

Josh flashes a grin and then puts the phone to his ear again. “Yeah, he’ll take it,” Josh says. He meets Bucky’s eyes. “He’s excited. I can tell.”

Bucky laughs a little. He leans around Josh and nods at Anca, the twenty-something who runs the little cart. “Usual?” she asks.

Bucky nods, and gestures at Josh. “And whatever he’s having.”

Josh covers the phone with one hand. He glances at the chalkboard behind Anca. “What’s the most expensive thing you’ve got?”

She laughs. “Peppermint mocha.”

“Yeah, that sounds good.”

Bucky opens his mouth to say something caustic but stops. Across the market, there’s someone looking at him. She is making no effort to hide. She didn’t try to hide in Moscow, either. The red-haired woman. He’s had time, and memories have come back, and puzzle pieces are starting to fit together. He is sure she is familiar. Not just from Moscow, but from some other place, some other time. He has a sudden flash of the sight of her through a rifle scope, just before the impossibly delicate pull of his finger on the trigger. She had been shielding the target with her body. She had not realized it would make no difference to the Winter Soldier. But that was years ago. Even if she had lived, she would look different now. No, this is no living being. The woman watching him, cool and unexpressive, across the bustle of the market? That woman is a ghost. 

“Hey,” Josh says, and his voice brings Bucky back to the moment.

Bucky realizes Anca has put two coffees down in front of them. He smacks his lips; his mouth is dry and pasty. He puts down some money and makes eye contact with Anca. “Thanks.”

“Sure,” she answers. Her eyes flick from him to the direction he’s looking. But she’s gone, the red haired woman. After all, she’s a ghost, and ghosts can do that sort of thing.

He’s just putting his wallet back into his knapsack when someone calls out to him, “Hey, Soldier.”

Bucky turns. It’s Stefan, the kid from the Rosu family. His face is haggard, eyes blackened by sleeplessness and stress, skin greasy in the soft spring morning light.

"That's what they call you, right?"

Bucky nods. Around him, everything changes. People who were walking from stall to stall in the market simply disappear. Vendors turn away, or busy themselves with their wares, emphatically not looking. Josh peels away from Bucky and vanishes. Anca shrinks down behind her espresso machine. Stefan comes over to him, as if he hasn’t noticed any of this. Behind him trail two cronies, but Bucky hardly glances at them. Stefan has come right up to him, touched his shoulder, the metal one, and pulled him into a conspiratorial embrace, with one arm looped around Bucky’s neck.

“Braco’s not paying you enough,” he says. He steers Bucky southward, guiding him out of Brutar territory, toward the Rosu’s part of the market. “But my family? We pay well. Especially for someone like you.”

“Not in it for the money,” Bucky tells him.

“No, you’re not." Stefan agrees. "I heard how you spent your earnings. You’re smart. You make people like you. You make people look out for you." He gives Bucky an impressed look. "I hear they’re decorating your place for you, that’s what I hear.”

Bucky doesn’t say anything.

“But a squat is still a squat,” Stefan says. “My family’s got money, and power. My granddad was head of Intelligence in Bucharest before the counter-revolution. My dad is just like him.”

Bucky remembers that evening in Bucharest, the one that came back to him with such force the day he saw the market. He remembers the conversation about the two high-value targets he had located. Not a kill order, just a capture order. He remembers the empty street, the crunch of ice underfoot, the scent of snow in the air. It occurs to him that he may have known Stefan’s grandfather. He may even have been a handler, once. His skin crawls under Stefan’s arm.

“My dad heard about what Braco and his boys did," Stefan is saying. "But he didn’t hear that you kept me alive, just that the family had to pay a fucking ransom. He’s pissed about it. He’s coming home. Between somebody stealing and fucking selling granddad’s war journal, and the fucking ransom my mother paid, Braco’ll be lucky if he ends up dead.”

Bucky looks at Stefan. He’s about the age Bucky was when Bucky went to war. It’s the right age for things like that. He is clear-eyed, full of righteous purpose. Bucky knows how that feels, and where it can get you. “Why are you telling me this?”

Stefan smiles at Bucky. “You did me a solid.”

Bucky does not answer. He does not say one man, in the right place at the right time, can be better than an army. He does not say that all his life all he wanted to do was protect, and it was twisted and torn and perverted into something else. He does not say the market is under his protection; that would be stupid. He does not say this little war between the two gangs will undo them, and Bucky will see to it. Instead he shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I don’t work for anybody but myself any more.”

Stefan steps back from Bucky. He looks around, pointedly, at the market, at the stalls. At Anca, and Constan, and Milo’s little livelihoods. A threat, implied, but a threat all the same. And then he sees it again, her again. T he red haired woman, the ghost, is standing just behind Milo's newspaper stand. She is watching, silent, expressionless, and unmoving. 

Bucky tears his eyes from the apparition. What was her name? He wonders, maybe whispers it. It mattered; they once took it from him with the chair. He tried to hang on to it. It had been a long time since he had fought them like that, and he paid for it. What was her fucking name? It was an N name, he's sure of it. Namia, Nadya, Na…

Stefan shoves Bucky. "Hey," he says, "I'm talking to you, Robin Hood."

"What?" Bucky snarls, because the name was there, just there, almost on his lips, and now it's gone. "What do you want?" 

Stefan steps back. He looks in the direction Bucky keeps looking, but there's no one standing there any more. “Man, you really are as fucked up as they say you are,” he murmurs.

He turns, his goons follow him into the market.  

Chapter Text

It is a very strange situation. Natasha isn't exactly sure what she expected, but whatever it was, it wasn't this.

She has seen him with civilians, bantering with one, smiling at the girl who have him the coffee. And she has seen him with a young man who is clearly trouble, in a situation that she would have expected to trip some sort of switch in him, but didn't. She has taken a good, long look at him. And she has noticed him noticing her.  

He doesn't appear to be afraid of her, not like in Moscow when he ran. He is calmer, dressed more appropriately to his surroundings in a brown hoodie and red Henley, with a ball cap and backpack. Has cleaned himself up, shaved recently, and that lean hunter’s frame she remembers from DC is broadening out to something much more like how she remembers him from the Red Room. That was 80s, before the Iron Curtain fell, and Natasha first saw the Winter Soldier, and learned that he was imperfect.

She remembers discovering that a few steps of an American dance, or the right accent, could shatter that blank-faced exterior, cause a laugh, coax a smile. She had done it by accident the first time, and then, because she had always needed to know the uttermost boundaries of a thing, she had done it until, late at night, listening to a makeshift record etched into an old x-ray sheet, she had gone too far. She had woken him up.

“Where the hell am I?” And then he seemed to see her for the first time. “Oh, pardon my French, miss, uh…?”

She’d been staring at him, smiling at this sudden transformation. “Natali…” She stopped, and then tried out her New York accent. “Natalie.”

He’d given her a big, lopsided, almost predatory smile. “Natalie.” A purr. “That’s nice. I, uh, I must have had a bit too much to drink. Don’t remember winding up here. It’s a barn isn’t it?” He looked up to the rafters and then around at the vast and empty training hall. The music warbled, thin and weak in the huge space. He laughed. “That record’s been played to death, but at least it’s still trying.” He held out his hand to her. “C’mon, somebody’s got to be the first on the dance floor.”

No wonder Vasily Karpov had come looking for a volunteer to join the Winter Soldier program. No wonder they had planned to decommission him. They had chosen poorly. They had picked a man who could survive the procedure, that was all. They had paid no attention to how urge to protect was so deep it might as well have been etched inside his bones. They hadn’t cared about the stubborn streak in him, or the fierce loyalty he held to a cause that was not their own. When they gave him the serum, they had amplified those traits. It was no wonder they could not keep him compliant, and needed the cryofreeze tanks, and the chair, and the drugs. The trigger words worked for a while, but even they eventually faded. He was a failed experiment, then and now. She smiles, looking across the market at him, watching as turns to help the coffee vendor to her feet and reassure her. Natasha’s heart twists. She feels a little stab of regret in her chest.

Back then, she woke him when she could, and he saw to it that she failed against Dasha and Tatiana. In the end, Dasha killed Tatiana and went off with Vasily to be part of the new Winter Soldier program. Natasha had been better than both of them; it should have been her. But he’d broken her knee the day before, and it was taking time to heal. So she makes a call. 

"Nat," Clint’s voice is warm and soft and he sounds genuinely pleased. "That was quick. I’ll tell Laura you’re going to make it. What flight you coming in on?" 

"There's been a complication.”

"Uh oh.”

She cranes to see around vendors and shoppers. Barnes is talking to a guy he helped up earlier, the one wearing a man-bun and holding a phone in one hand. She sees Barnes smile at him. "I don't really know how to say this, but it looks like we've got a moderately well-adjusted human on our hands."

"I'm sorry, what?"

"I know," she murmurs. “I’m as shocked as you are."

There’s a moment of silence on the line, then, ”Lucky, get out of that.” And then, to her this time, “Sorry. So I guess that means, what? Recon?”

She makes a little noise.

“What do you want me to tell the others? Sam’s been asking. He says Steve’s been acting shifty.”

“Great,” Natasha mutters. The last thing she needs is Captain god damned America to come sailing into whatever the hell is going on here like a giant, blond iceberg into a major shipping lane. “Tell Steve I know where he is, and he’s okay. Tell him I’ll keep an eye out for him."

“Recon,” Clint says again. “So you’re not going to make it to the farm.”

“Sorry.” She smiles wistfully.

“It’s fine. I’m gonna tell the kids you’re hiding somewhere on the property and you’ll give whoever finds them fifty bucks.”

She laughs. “That’ll keep them out of your hair.”

“For ten minutes, till they figure it out. And I’ll tell Laura and Barney you said hi.”

“Sure.”

She hears Clint swallow. “Nat,” he says quietly. “You know this guy better than any of us. Whatever you decide to do is going to be the right thing.”

She says nothing.

“I’ll come out there if you want,” he adds quietly. And she is temped. She is so temped. It not just that there’s no one better at a distance than Barton, and it’s not just that looking at the ex-Winter Soldier has brought back memories of the Red Room, of being shot through to hit a target, of taking a bullet in the shoulder in DC. It’s not just that he has probably saved her life as often as he has tried to kill her. She misses the security of someone at her back, and the warmth of someone in her bed. 

“No,” she says at last. “Go see your brother and sister-in-law and the kids. Enjoy your…” she hesitates.

“Stay-cation,” Clint finishes for her.

“I hate that word.”

She can practically hear him grin. “Snob,” he accuses. Then, quietly, “Keep your head down.”

“Always,” she answers, and hangs up.

Chapter Text

Steve has been to visit Peggy three times this week. It’s the same conversation every time, first about him, then about them, and then he tells her about Bucky. He shows her the ad. Sometimes, when she knows her mind is not as it once was, he explains to her that she already knew this, that they placed the ad together, and that Peggy paid for it to avoid attracting attention to Steve. She always asks if he’s heard anything yet, and he has to admit that he hasn’t, that they have renewed the ad once already, and that he is starting to think this was stupid, and dangerous. She always reassures him he hasn't lost his tendency toward the dramatic, and he always laughs.

But the fact is, that balm has stopped soothing the worry in him. Steve is starting to wonder if that ad, so carefully worded, would mean anything to Bucky, assuming he even saw it. He is starting to worry that the man he fought on the helicarrier might have been so long a captive, been so dismantled by what was done to him - and Steve knows (insofar as anyone can know) what was done to him - that there is nothing of Bucky left inside that shell. The sensation of wild hope that leapt up even when Bucky saw him, really saw him, on the helicarrier, and the potent frustration of not being able to go after Bucky, these things are transmuting into a hollowness in his stomach and a gnawing worry that won’t let him sleep.

On his way home from visiting Peggy, Steve ducks into the office supply place where he rented the postoffice box. He waves at the two kids behind the counter and they wave back. One of them straightens up when she sees him. “Hey, um, Steve?” she calls. He has asked them to call him Steve, but they always say “um” before they say his name, as if they have to remind themselves every time. “It’s my baby sister’s birthday next week. I, um, hey. She's a big fan. Do you think you could sign the action figure I got for her?”

This has been a part of his life for a good long time now, what with the USO shows and PR stunts he did. There are plenty of things he's not good at, but he's good at this. He puts on a big smile and goes on over to the counter. And there it is: A tiny, plastic replica of him in the suit, with the shield taped in place beside him. He signs the whole works - To Amelia, happy 10th birthday! Your pal, Steve Rogers and leaves the girls grinning at each other. “Oh, hey,” the second girl says, “I think you’re in luck today. I think the postie put something in your box this morning.”

Steve’s heart lurches. “Oh,” he says and tries really hard not to show how his blood pressure just spiked, and how he can’t really breathe right just now and how, if nobody was around, he might run over and tear the box open with his bare hands. Instead, he’ll walk over and use the tiny little key. “Thanks,” he says, heading over.

He doesn't bother to look around him, just unlocks the box and looks inside. His heart stutters in his chest. There’s an envelope in there. He grasps it, glances at it. It is large and pale blue, the sort of thing an oversized card might come in. The address is a smudged scrawl; the words are hardly legible, the ink smeared all over. The envelope itself bulges. It has been wrapped round with packing tape two or three times, and the tape is twisted and uneven, as if the work was done frantically. There is no return address.

He wants to tear it open. He wants to pull out everything that is in this envelope and examine it, minutely, here on the floor. He swallows. He takes a big breath and puts it into the interior pocket of his coat. He locks the box door and forces his mouth to smile at the girls behind the desk.

“See ya!” one calls.

They’re nice. Steve is aware he should say something back. He is aware he should be more friendly. But right now he feels like something is pushing at his chest, like his head is going to burst, like he is going to break down here in the middle of the street. He feels like he is going lose the strength of his legs and collapse, weeping.

Relief and terror and helplessness. He feels exactly like he did when he found Bucky delirious and mumbling on the table in the lab. It's Azzano all over again. Only this time, he's not here, and Steve can't reach him. 

*

He doesn’t remember getting home, only finding an Exacto-knife among his painting supplies and carefully, ever so gently, razoring the top of the envelope open at the kitchen table. The minute he splits the tape, the envelope bursts apart and spills its contents onto the table.

There scraps of paper, coloured, white, lined, unlined. There are a couple leaves, maybe from an apple or a pear tree, he's not sure. They're dried and wrinkled, not pressed flat. There are a couple newish newspaper clippings - Steve's own face looks grimly out at the camera in a couple of them. There is a glossy piece of paper from the Smithsonian exhibit with JAMES BUCKY BARNES overwritten again and again, as if by a child tracing unfamiliar letters with blue ballpoint pen.

Steve sits down, then stands back up again. He needs to see it all from above to make sense of it. He takes a look at the scrap from the Smithsonian exhibit first. It has a picture of the Bucky Barnes plaque on the one side, and the name written over and over on the other. He holds it gently in one hand. The paper wobbles so much the writing is impossible to read. He is shaking. He realizes it as if from a distance. He is shaking as if all his muscles are finally giving up, too utterly exhausted to hold themselves in position any more. He sets the paper down, swallows loudly in the silence of his apartment, and looks at the rest.

There are more envelopes. These are not sealed, just folded closed. Some of them have a letter inside and some don’t. He takes out all the letters and sets them together to his left, then all the envelopes and things he doesn’t understand - scraps of paper, the leaves, a faded receipt in a language he doesn’t know, the newspaper cuttings - to the right. He looks at the letters first and he finds himself holding his breath. He finds his throat closed tight. He hears himself making small noises every times he swallows. The letters…

Some are in Cyrillic - he doesn’t read it but he recognizes the alphabet. Some are in a crude and spidery handwriting, hardly legible. And some… some are in Bucky’s familiar, perfect, copperplate. He separates these, too. The Cyrillic on the far right, the frenetic, twisted handwriting in the middle, the copperplate to the left. He starts reading. The first is short, simple. It reads:

Steve,

I hope you're okay

It's like I had a bad dream or got the battle fatigue bad. Can't shake it.

I know I owe debts. I'll pay them my own way.

Don't come after me.

The second is longer, the text more densely packed and the writing more precise, as if this is not the first draft, as if great care went into this one.

Dear Steve,

I hope you got that apartment we talked about. The one with the good light and the hot water. I spent a lot of time building that place in my head. I hope the place you got is half as nice as the one I made up all through 44 into 45. Maybe longer. I don't know.

Time is a mess in my head. It's like there are two guys in here. One of them got drafted, did what he was told to do, wound up a POW and the other guy ain't talking. I do things I don't expect to do. I say things and I don't know why I said them. I don't know how I know things. 

B

He gasps in a breath, and then another, and if he sobs, no one is there to overhear it.

He sets these aside, and takes the next stack. These are in English, mostly, though the nouns sometimes slip into German or French. They're the spidery, unevenly written ones. The first one is two-sided, not a letter at all, just notes. It reads:  Scrappy little sonofabitch on one side, and then 

You shaped the century.

I know I can count on you.

The Soldier never fails.

I wish he was here

on the other. Steve turns it over and over in his hands, but he doesn't know what it means. The next is easier. It reads:

Steve,

Your pal’s a jackass. Supposed to be lying low, but he hasn’t got the sense of a louse. God almighty, wasn’t it you who was always biting off more than you could chew? 

I guess they fried that guy's common sense when they fried the rest of him.

B

Then, there is an unfinished letter:

Steve,

I keep waking up Ruby. Turns out I scream in the night. Pretty nice neighbour I make. Guess I should try to 

That's all. He looks among the scraps of paper but nothing fits. He takes the last two letters from the table, then. They're written in Cyrillic. He knows some of the letters, and knows the odd word or two, and Sam once showed him Google Translate. He digs up a pen and paper and works for a moment in silence, as if he was a codebreaker with a new cypher. One of the letters is only a single line of text repeated over and over again. He can do that one in a minute. It reads:

Ready to comply. 

Ready to comply.

Ready to comply.

Ready to comply.

He sits very still and think, think Rogers, because the only native Russian speaker he knows is Natasha and he can't show her this, he can't. He can't do it himself right now, not with his head pounding so hard. He stares at the chaos spread out on the table before him. He thinks about Peggy, about how her memories are all fragments, about how her history is lost to her. He thinks about what it would be to have someone flip through the photo album of your mind and tear every single memory to pieces. And if he weeps for a while, thinking of these things, there's no one there to see it. 

Chapter Text

He opens his eyes because some part of him knows she’s there. And she is. She is perched on one of the chairs that flanks the folding table Constan gave him. Constan said he had no more use for the table, and, personally, Bucky can’t see what’s wrong with it. It looks brand new. Perhaps it was too small for Constan’s needs. It fits Bucky’s apartment exactly.

So when he wakes, she is there, seated on a chair turned out from the table, and watching him. He knows she’s a ghost, but he’s still filled with warmth at the sight of her. He remembers soft skin, hard muscle, a warmth like sunshine in spring, the taste of her mouth, her skin, her body. It is a good memory.

“Natasha,” he whispers.

She keeps gazing at him, as if he hasn’t spoken, or she somehow hasn’t heard him. It is so hard, sometimes, to tell the difference between sleep and wakefulness. It must be a dream.

“You’re still beautiful,” he tells her, sitting up in the nest of the sleeping bag, on the warm, soft mattress. “I’m sorry about Odessa. If I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t have shot you.” He reaches for his backpack and the ghost, she watches him, but still she doesn’t move. He finds the Soldat notebook and opens it to the Odessa mission. The paper is winked and worn from the passage of his hands, over and over again, on the page. The lines on the paper are crammed full, first of the memory as it returned to him, in normal-sized writing, then in squeezed-in notes, in errata and corrections. Sometimes in English, mostly in Cyrillic. He slides a finger over the words, running it down down down the length of the page until he finds it. “Orders: shoot to kill on sight,” he reads. He looks back at her. “I thought your enhancements would keep you alive, but…” Something comes swimming back to him. It is a memory of that final mission, of too many targets, too wily, and a shot just off the midline. “You were there. You were in DC, too, weren’t you?” He leans forward. “I remember. Is that when you died?”

Outside, in the hall, there is a noise. A thump and a crunch, and a couple scuffing footsteps. Elena coming home, weary, and carrying a sleeping Marta, maybe. Or Josh dragging himself up the last of the stairs after a long day in the market. The ghost shifts where she perches on the chair, and perhaps in response to the noise outside, she draws the small slab of a phone from one pocket. She taps it, twice, and music, softly played and brassy with trumpets, warm with clarinets, starts up. She smiles at him, and gets to her feet, holding out one hand. “Somebody has to be the first one on the floor,” she says, and her accent is pitch-perfect Brooklyn.

He shakes his head. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “I don’t dance any more.”

Her expression changes, eyebrows rising and mouth opening just a fraction at the same time. Then her eyes narrow and her lips, red as blood even in the darkness of the room, they curve like a knife. “Are you awake? I mean, really awake?”

“I don’t know,” he answers.

He has a creeping sense that maybe this isn’t a dream. His dreams are not pleasant, and if he is aware in them, it’s like how he was aware before; dimly, watching himself from a distance. Those dreams, thinks of them privately as the screamers, have been coming thick and fast lately. He bought Elena and Josh a box of earplugs. They are nice people, and he can’t stop himself. But this is different, strange and pleasant. Almost certainly not a dream.

She’s watching him like a bird of prey. “Are you the Soldier? Or are you the American boy?”

He shakes his head as the music swells toward crescendo and finally dies. “Both,” he says. “Maybe neither one. I’m not really sure.”

“No,” she answers, rising then. She tucks the now-silent phone away. “Neither am I.”

“You’re real,” he says, as she pads to the door. “Here, now.”

She opens the door and steps out into the dark hallway. “Yes,” she answers.

“On whose orders?”

She tilts her head just slightly. “No orders. A favour. For a mutual friend.”

Steve, he thinks, heart lurching so hard he half-rises from his bed. But she’s already closed the door behind her. The pointless, useless, stupid little lock goes click as she re-locks it from the outside.

Chapter Text

After that, there is no point trying to sleep. Bucky sits up, and by the light of the gooseneck lamp that Josh repaired for him, he writes all that has happened and all that he remembers in the Soldat notebook. He writes about the Red Room, and Vasily Karpov, and Natasha, and when those memories run out, he sets the book aside and sits very still for a moment. The skein of thought leads naturally to the last time he saw Natasha, which was also the first time he saw Steve, though he doesn’t really remember it. The whole event has the quality of uncertainty more appropriate to a dream half-remembered than to an event that was lived, but that’s the effect of the chair. Plenty of his memories are scrubbed or disjointed or spotted with blanks. He reaches for the Bucky notebook, but it’s not the right place to write this memory. It occurs to him that perhaps there is no right place to write this memory. Perhaps the only right place for it is where it already resides.

He calls the memory up. It’s effortless, actually. Steve’s face, as if he had been gut-punched. Bucky remembers speaking, worse, asking a fucking question. He remembers the wave of panic crashing over him not because someone had identified him or because he knew that name and knew he answered to it, but because he had asked a question and his handlers were everywhere, and always watching, and they would tear it out of him as surely as bone, or shrapnel, or his self.

In his own little room, here in Bucharest, the memory is clear and bright as an image on a TV screen, and just as distant. It has no power over him, the way the other, lost memories do. He isn’t confused about where and when he is. He knows it is a memory. Maybe he didn’t trust his own mind before, when he was running. Maybe he feared being captured and having those memories taken from him again. He couldn’t say which is more true. But those fears are distant now, and anyway, no human life is known with cinematic precision from start to finish. There will always be gaps, errors, misrememberings, things forgotten; he figures that’s probably natural. He can’t recall what Steve was wearing when he said Bucky’s name, only the expression on Steve’s face. And that’s just fine, that’s correct, that’s as it should be.

He smiles a little, holding the memory, and visiting it again and again, start to finish, like a favourite passage in a book. He told Natasha he wasn’t sure who he was any more, and he meant it. Bucky Barnes died in the Alps, and all that he was died too. The Winter Soldier was a weapon, a tool that never really lived. He can’t go back to a time before he knew what he knows and had done the things he did, but he’s not the monster they always wished he would be, either.

So he has changed, and so the world has changed, and the causes he bled and died for have risen and fallen and risen again, but so what? There are still good things in the world. Orange soda and meat kebabs, mangoes, and grumpy middle-aged ladies, and babies who wave hello. And…

He leans back against the wall, thinking of this.

And Steve is still alive. He placed the ad, Bucky’s sure of it. No one else on God’s green earth knew about Peggy’s suggestion. And now the appearance of Natasha. If not a friendly, then neutral. He would certainly have known if she was hostile. A favour for a mutual friend.

Steve.

He can remember him exactly. He can remember the impossible softness of that flyaway blond hair, the scent of him, sometimes hidden under menthol and sometimes hidden under gun-grease and sweat, but always there. He would like to see him again. He would like to apologize.

But he can’t blame Steve for keeping his distance. Bucky knows, thanks to breathless accounts in the papers, exactly what he did to Captain America, and none of it was nice. That Steve has reached out to him at all is mercy beyond measure. That Steve might forgive him is too much to hope for. And what they had, so briefly? He has no doubt that died with him in the Alps.

So this will be his life: He’s not the kid who left Brooklyn in a new wool uniform, and he’s not the guy who choked out his pleasure against his best friend’s shoulder that night in France. He’s not the Bucky who waited for rescue until he had nothing, not even a thought, to call his own. Nor is he the Soldier, with handlers to obey and orders to follow. He is someone else, maybe a mixture of the two. He can live with that. And even if there was nothing left in this world but sulphur and ash and Steven Grant Rogers, he could live with that, too.

He puts the Soldat notebook into the backpack with the Bucky notebook, and zips it closed. Tomorrow, he’ll buy a third one from Milo, a new one, for him. He’ll pick a name that’s neither Soldier nor Bucky. Sebastian is a decent moniker. The guy who sells used books is called Sebastian. So is the little kid who mugs for change sometimes on the corner. And there is Saint Sebastian, too. Patron Saint of soldiers. He’ll start again. He has been trying to start again for so long.

*

Bucky dozes in his bed a little, until outside the light comes creeping and the birdsong infiltrates, and the traffic noises start up. Someone knocks on his door, softly at first, and then a little louder. He wakes, checks his gun, gets to his feet, and opens the door.

It’s Elena, eyes narrowed to slits, her mouth a thin white line. Beside her, Josh, grim-faced. “You work for hire, right?” Josh asks him in a very low, very serious voice.

“You worked for Braco just because he paid you,” Elena says, and she says it like an accusation.

Bucky nods and shrugs.

“We wanna hire—“ Josh starts but Elena pushes a small handbag into the centre of Bucky’s chest. He glances down at it. There are a number of rolled-up bundles of cash in there. The bag is crammed full of them.

“I’ll pay you,” she says. “All of that. More. I can get more. Tell me what it will cost. Anything.” Her voice is rising. Josh puts an arm around her shoulder and squeezes just a little.

Bucky looks from face to face. “What’s going on?”

“It’s Marta, man,” Josh whispers. He looks like he might be sick.

Elena covers her face with her hands and speaks into her palms. “They came in the night. They took her out of her crib.”

“Whatever it costs,” Josh says. “Anything.”

Bucky goes very cold and very still. He wanted the gangs to destroy each other. He wanted the marketers to be left in peace. He wanted to be a new person, to start over. But it never goes quite how you hope it will.

One last mission.

Chapter Text

“Who did it?” Bucky asks, because for all the height and breath of Bucharest, this town is really small. Elena does not disappoint.

“Braco. He did it. I’m sure.”

“You saw someone?” Bucky asks.

Elena shakes her head. “No, but she’s his.” And that? That is what Bucky needed to know.

“Marta’s Braco’s daughter?” Elena nods. Bucky nods back. “Then it wasn’t him.” He is certain, the way he is certain the sun will come up tomorrow, that Braco had no hand in this. But Stefan? Stefan who made an offer he shouldn’t have, and who was embarrassed by Bucky’s refusal? Who murmured threats in public? Who is a child bumbling around in the midst of a game played by his betters? This has his sticky fingerprints all over it.

Mission: Marta

Orders: Obtain from Stefan, return her alive and unharmed to Elena

Handler:

Handler:

Handler:

He can’t fill that blank. He always works better with a handler and he hasn’t got one this time.

“Hey,” Elena’s voice jerks him back into Bucharest. He’s not sure where he was an instant ago, but wherever it was, it wasn’t here. He blinks and her face comes back into focus, taut and grim in the low light. She has a small pistol in her hand, the grip toward him. Handler.

His left hand twitches, but he holds himself back. They armed him on missions. Of course they did. And when those weapons were insufficient, they carried weapons for him, left caches, offered them to him as he passed. There was protocol for handlers. In the presence of a handler, all weapons are to be relinquished unless in active operation. He remembers setting the gun on the table and waiting waiting waiting in the dark while the housekeeper gathered her things and took them to the door. He remembers the sound of the fridge opening, Pierce asking him something, sitting across from him, the gun in the middle of the table as if it was a ghastly game of spin-the-bottle. He remembers her name, Renata.

He looks at Elena, the pistol held toward him. Handler.

“No,” he says quietly.

Her brow furrows. Josh says, "What?" Bucky shakes his head at both of them.

“I don’t need it.”

He goes to his bed, heaves up his mattress, hauls the gun from its nest in the stuffing and the springs, and grabs fistfuls of the ammunition he lifted from Serge’s useless crew. He loads the gun, tucks it into his coat. It is comfort only, really. It is traditional. For luck, perhaps. He feels a little naked without it. But he doesn’t need it. Not for someone like Stefan. He grabs his backpack with the notebooks in it - damned if he’s going to leave these lying where someone might get them - and pulls it on, then does up the chest strap for good measure.

He flexes his left hand into a fist; the servos in his arm whir up in response.

“How much?” Elena asks in a voice suddenly small and soft. Bucky turns his head and feels his lips curling up, like leaves dying on the ground.

“No charge,” he tells her.

Chapter Text

Elena doesn’t know where the Rosu live, but Josh does. Bucky gets directions and goes as the sun is rising above the low-rise buildings and arrowing down onto the streets. He goes on foot. It’s not far. Like Braco, the Rosu like to keep an eye on their turf.

Braco kept a townhouse with a modern exterior, and all the comforts paid for by his life of crime were understated and elegant. The Rosu house is nothing like Braco's house. The Rosu house is ancient, sheathed in white stone, surrounded with a glossy, black iron fence, and there is a guard, a white guy wearing black fatigues, at the gate. It is a palace, a fortress, a place where old power sunk roots deep into the earth and sucked the marrow out of it.

Bucky frowns at the prospect before him. This would be so much easier in the night time. He would just go over the spearpoints of the fence and it would take no more than a heartbeat. But in the city in the daytime, speed and stealth count for less than cunning. Cunning is deception, and deception could never be permitted in the Winter Soldier. So he is used to speed and stealth, but cunning was taken from him, along with his memories, his will, his moral compass. He could not deceive his masters any more than he could bluff his way out of a laboratory or a bank vault. All the times he went walking, he simply left. Left the scene of a rendezvous, a kill, or failed to return to the handler. Maybe that was why they let him live as long as they did. Brain’s basically peanut butter, Rumlow had said.

Yeah it was, he thinks, bitterly, as he sizes up the guard slouching by the gate. Thanks to you and yours, asshole.

Bucky watches and he can tell that the guard at the gate isn't as lazy or as bored as he appears. Bucky can see his eyes tracking the ebb and flow of foot traffic on the pavement, so he goes past the guard, a little further up the street, and turns the corner. There he finds two more guards, standing watch over a gated drive. A little further on, he finds the service entrance. The door is heavy, wooden, but maybe reenforced. It, like the fence that ends at the corner, is painted a glossy black, and a brass plaque set into the white stonework next to the door reads Deliveries will be accepted from 10 am to 5 pm. He knocks. There’s a beat of silence and then the sound of a lock turning. The door opens, and, surprise, it’s a guard in black, just like before. But this one is standing inside, rather than on the street, and there’s a fair bit of distance between this door and the driveway, and it’s easy for Bucky reach up, catch the guy by the throat, shove him backward, then step inside and close the door behind him. He does not do bluffing and guile. He has no training in it. But that’s not a problem.

He puts the guard down with a punch, just a little one. A tap, really. It puts him to sleep. Not permanently. Probably.

He takes a quick glance around. He’s in a little hallway, badly lit, with chipped orange tile on the floor and cream-coloured walls, badly dinged and scuffed. Somewhere, he can hear people talking, or maybe the radio, but the hallway itself is quiet. The guard in black lies crumpled at his feet. He’s too short and stocky for Bucky to entertain the notion of stealing his gear to sneak around the place, but he does have a nice gun. Bucky takes the weapon, a spiffy little automatic, ties the guy’s bootlaces together, and then drags him into the nearest closet, then closes the door. He pauses for a moment, listening. The talking, or radio, or whatever, continues at the same rate and the same volume. If anyone heard anything, he can’t tell. He has no idea where he is in the house, but that’s fine. This is not a mission, and there are no timetables. There’s a kid somewhere, all he has to do is find her.

Chapter Text

A large, quiet man sits in first class on the flight back from America. He is elegantly dressed. He is perfectly polite. But where some travellers radiate exhaustion, or worry, this guy? He radiates malice. He gives the stewardess the shivers, and she doesn’t interact with him any more than she absolutely has to. She passes him his meal (fish), and smiles. She passes him his drink (vodka), and smiles. He smiles back, like a reptile. There’s something about him that is unnervingly familiar. She avoids thinking about it. She avoids him. Until, “Miss,” he says, just minutes outside of Bucharest.

She turns to him, and smiles. “Yes, sir?”

“I will be disembarking the aircraft first.” 

She has a mouthful of the things she usually says to requests like these, but they don’t come out, and that’s because she recognizes him. She’s Romanian herself. She’s closer to forty than thirty, and she remembers communism, and the counterrevolution. She knows his face, maybe from her school days, maybe from TV, maybe from something else, she couldn’t say. But she knows he is Cezar Rosu, son of the infamous Anton Rosu who ran the secret police, who was said to have command of a creature not entirely human, a monstrous assassin, who even the military went to when they were searching for Ceaușescu.

He nods at her. She forces a smile one more time. “I’m sure we can arrange that.”

*

Cezar Rosu is the first off the plane. He passes through customs with a nod, and steps out into the Arrivals area five minutes after his feet touched the tarmac.

His driver is waiting for him. Nicolae worked for his father, and now for him. He knows his job, he knows his place, and if Cezar Rosu is ever pleased to see anyone, perhaps he is pleased to see Nicolae.

“Welcome home, sir,” Nicolae says.  

“Where is that damn boy now?” Cezar asks, loading Nicolae with his coat, his bag, and starting toward the automatic doors, smoggy air, and the waiting, black Bentley.

“At home, recovering from his ordeal.”

Cezar snorts. If Nicolae had meant Stefan had been hurt in captivity, he would have said his name.

“Get me home,” Cezar says. “I’ll deal with him, and then I’ll deal with this Robin Hood that’s screwing things up.” He passes through the doors and Nicolae speeds up his pace to get to the Bentley before Cezar does, and open the door. “And tell me what else he’s been doing since I’ve been gone.” Cezar drops into the back seat and waits while Nicolae goes around to the driver’s side. “What else has he done?”

He sees Nicolae’s eyes flick in the rear-view mirror. If Stefan had done anything good, Nicolae, loyal old retainer that he is, would have said it. No, Stefan has been busy, and his work has been something Nicolae knows Cezar will not want to hear about.

“I’ll murder him with my own hands,” he mutters.

Chapter Text

Ten minutes from home, Cezar makes a call. "Helmut, old friend."

He can hear the springtime sounds of birds singing, and child asking questions in the background. "How's the boy?"

"Almost as big as me," Zemo answers. "Go find your mother, Carl, and let papa talk." There's a pause, and then, "This is irregular, Cezar."

"Something irregular has occurred. How is your research?"

Zemo laughs bitterly.

"Strucker goes through funding like my father goes through cigarettes and I am always the one who must go cap-in-hand to our masters. Money is not so plentiful these days as it once was."

"I have a solution."

"I'm listening."

"Vasily Karpov, does that name ring a bell?"

"An old and dusty one, but yes."

"He hired someone to steal something from me. I want it back."

"Karpov must be sixty if he's a day."

"I am too busy."

There's a pause. Cezar waits.

"Karpov is old and may be confused. Could it be that he thinks the item is rightfully his?" The suggestion, worded so delicately. Cezar always did appreciate Zemo. It's a shame there is so little call for their specializations these days.

"It is likely. The book is in his hand."

"Ah," Zemo says. "You are referring to the, uh, let us call it the 'owners manual'."

"Yes."

"Well, I could certainly look into recovering that item for you. Are you in a hurry for it?"

To answer yes would be to betray the fear that the Winter Soldier, now allegedly loose in the world, may come looking for answers, or revenge, or both. In Cezar's business, it does not do to be afraid.

"When can you start work?"

"two weeks. Hello, Carl. No papa is still talking to his friend. Two weeks. Will that do?"

"Excellent. He's in Cleveland in the USA. I will send you the details."

"And my usual retainer."

"Of course. Goodbye."

Nicolae pilots the car to a stop just inside the gate. Cezar takes a moment to enjoy the prospect of Karpov meeting Zemo. Karpov is a soldier, strong and dangerous. But Zemo is like Cezar, ex-secret police, cunning, vicious.

Cesar is smiling just a little when he gets out of the car.

Chapter Text

Bucky finds his way through the house. On the lowest floor there are utilities: kitchen, cleaners' closets, laundry and airing, storage. Also a room with no windows, a heavily reenforced door and doorframe, an earth floor, and walls of scored and filthy stone. Maybe it used to be cold storage. Maybe they used to keep ice and sawdust here in the days before refrigeration. That's not what it is any more, though. Bucky doesn't need to wonder. He knows a holding cell when he sees one.

He's half relieved and half frustrated that Marta isn't in it. It would have been much easier to find her and spirit her back to her mother than fight his way through the whole house. Still, there is something pleasant about moving like this, about stepping softly, going unnoticed until it is too late, about knowing that of all the dangerous bastards in this place, he is the most dangerous of them all. Like stretching long-unused muscles. Like drinking cold water after a bad dream. This is easy. He is good at this. Perhaps he always was.

He can't help but wonder what Steve would think of that. He can't help wonder what Steve might tell him about his past, about the war. He has a vague memory of lying on his belly in the leaves, the thick wool of his coat growing damp, the scent of earth in his nose, crosshairs filling up his field of vision. It is a memory that could be from any part of his life, except Brooklyn. But the gun he was holding was antique, the crosshairs have the bumpy imperfection of actual hairs, and his coat, he remembers, was blue. Steve would know about that. Maybe he'll send another letter. Maybe he'll ask. Maybe it's time.

He dispatches two more guards near the stairwell, and starts up to the next floor. The voices he heard earlier, distantly, are getting louder, the words are starting to coalesce. Men, talking and laughing. He recognizes Stefan's voice.

*

He finds them in a sun-washed breakfast book where the air is fragrant with pizza and there are two cardboard boxes standing open on a table and Stefan is sitting at the table with his legs up on the chair opposite him, and a pair of his goons are sitting too, stuffing pizza into their faces. It's almost too easy. Bucky goes on in.

"Got one without mushrooms?" he asks. "Turns out I hate 'em."

The goons snap to attention, one draws a gun and the other fumbles around, looking for the piece that's half-hidden by one of the pizza box lids. Careless. Bucky feels a twinge of professional disgust.

"Hey, hey. Calm down," Stefan tells the guy with the gun trained on Bucky. He nods at his goons, then grins at Bucky. "So, you came." He reaches for another slice. His eyebrows have gone up but that's the only indication of surprise. Bucky's not sure if that's brass or stupidity, but he marvels just the same. "Changed your mind about my offer, huh? Figured you would." He devours the slice and licks pizza sauce off one finger, then, he frowns. "Hey, who brought you up here anyway?"

Bucky grins. "I did," he says.

The first goon has good instincts: he fires his weapon. Good instincts don't help against all those years of training and enhancements. Besides, he couldn't possibly know that Bucky's arm is vibranium, and Bucky is superhuman, and the bullet would ricochet off the arm and return, more or less, where it started. The guy staggers back into the wall, clutching the hole in his chest.

The second goon is slower than the first. It takes him a moment to fumble the gun out from under the boxes and by then Bucky's vaulted over the table and put two boots in the middle of his chest. He goes down hard, beside his the gunshot guy. And then there's just Stefan.

Stefan hasn't moved. He's still sitting, gaping at Bucky, and the two on the floor. Bucky stalks the two paces over to him, fists his shirt and hauls Stefan up out of his chair.

"Where's Marta?"

Stefan stares. Bucky shakes him. The collar of Stefan's shirt gives way with a rip, and Bucky lets Stefan fall. He lands on his ass on the tile floor, one white sock smearing through the spreading pool of blood from gunshot guy.

"Christ, Jesus Christ you crazy asshole--"

Bucky reaches for him. Stefan cowers.

"What do I know about your fucking girlfriend?"

Bucky stops. Again, he can't tell if this is bald-faced fakery or if Stefan is the dumbest human being on the planet.

"Marta," Bucky says, holding out one hand to pluck off the glove, "Is not my girlfriend."

He flexes his metal fingers, then unzips his hoodie and begins to pull that off.

"Marta is a the baby you took from Elena's apartment this morning. She is one year old. She had cake with pink icing for her birthday." He doesn't say, Her mother fed me and got me a bed. Her step-father helped me hide. He doesn't say, She waves at me when I go by.

He sets his coat down on the table and turns so Stefan has a good view of the arm. Stefan stares at Bucky, mouth slack, white even to his lips.
Then his eyes flick from Bucky to the door. So. Reinforcements have arrived. Well that's just fine. Sometimes an audience is exactly what you want.

"Do you know who I am?" Bucky asks, and his voice is very soft.

"I do," says a voice just behind him. Bucky turns, ready for guns, ready for knives. But it's just an old man. Heavy-set, dark-eyed, a cruel twist to his thin mouth. "Sputnik," the man says.

And that's it. Like the power going out, like a punch to the back of the head, like a cell door slamming shut. That's it. Bucky falls.

Chapter Text

He can see, and he can hear. He can smell the scents of blood and shit that mean the goon with the gunshot wound is either dying or dead. He can feel the cool, smooth floor. His mind works, his senses work. For all the good it does him.

At least when he fell, he fell on his side. His head throbs where it struck the tiles, and feels warm. Maybe bruising, maybe even bleeding a little. It’s not the worst thing that’s happened to his head.

The old man’s shoes are leather, with slightly uneven stitching, perhaps they are hand made. They are polished to a military shine. Those shoes step over Bucky, and cross to Stefan.

“You’ve pissed yourself.”

Stefan gets to his feet, one sock white, one bloody, his trousers dark at the crotch. He hauls back and kicks Bucky in the stomach. The air comes out of him. He wheezes and gasps. He’d contract around the pain if he could. Another kick to his stomach, and then one to his face. Pain explodes in his nose once, and then again. His ears roar. Blood fills his mouth. Stefan goes to kick again and it’s bad, getting hit in the head like this, bad, Bucky knows it, he wants to cover his head, shield his face. He can’t hear what’s said over the roaring and ringing in his ears, but Stefan pulls back, doesn’t deliver that next kick, and Bucky could sob with relief. When his hearing comes swimming back, the old man is talking.

Hands on Bucky. Patting him down, finding the gun he brought. Finding the little knife he keeps in his pocket. Unclipping the backpack and jerking it free of his useless limbs.

“…bring that here, Nicolae. Let’s see it.”

A much older man, thin and lanky, carries Bucky’s backpack to the table, where the old man has seated himself. “Cezar,” the lanky man says, “sir.”

“Thank you, Nicolae. Now, Stefan, what’s this business about the little girl?”

“She’s Braco’s, dad,” Stefan says, eyes still fixed on Bucky. “Didn’t expect you home yet. I was gonna get the money back.”

Cezar looks at Stefan for a long moment. He blinks, slowly. He pushes aside the pizza boxes to make room for Bucky’s backpack, now delivered to him. “I thought Braco’s girls were in England, and nearly twenty now.”

“This one’s from one of the bitches he brought in a few years ago.”

That long, slow blink again. “You thought you would ransom a bastard whelped on a whore to Braco Bosu, for the same ransom paid for you.”

Stefan flushes an ugly, splotchy red. Cezar nods.

“Pissing yourself is the only sensible thing you’ve done since I left.” Cezar’s eyes meet Bucky’s, and where Stefan is all hurt pride and powder keg, Cezar is the calm that veils an anger like a force of nature. “You are the Winter Soldier,” he says. “I saw my father activate you, on more than one occasion.” He looks up, at the lean man. "Nicolae, I want you to call Zemo and tell him the matter has become timely. A week at most. Then check that cold storage can accommodate this one.” Nicolae nods and disappears from Bucky’s view. 

Bucky’s heart is pounding, his head booming with blood, his ears roaring. I’m not going into a box again. I’m never going into a box again. He could panic, he wants to panic, but he knows panic will only exhaust him, and he hasn't even had a chance to fight.

Cezar reaches for the backpack before him on the table, and unzips it. He looks inside and pauses to take in what he sees. Don’t touch it, Bucky thinks. Don’t touch that. But he does. Of course he does.

The first notebook Cezar pulls out is matte black, with a red star emblazoned on the cover.

“What’s that?” Stefan asks.

Don’t touch that. It’s mine .

Cezar opens the notebook and sits for a moment, reading. Then turns the page. Then licks his thumb and pages through.

“What is it, dad?”

Cezar ignores his son. He pulls the shiny blue notebook out of the backpack and opens it too. And, Soldat? Okay, fine. But not this one, not this. Not his whole life, not the precious scraps of memory, not Steve, not France, not Brooklyn, not the apartment, not this.

Stop. Stop it. Stop reading it. His breath is sawing in and out between his teeth. He wants to scream.

Cezar pages through and then peers into the little pocket inside the back cover and withdraws the receipt from the Smithsonian exhibition. When he meets Bucky's eyes again, his expression is the same, but something in his eyes has changed. There’s an eagerness in his eyes that Bucky hasn’t seen since he was lying on a table, and a little man was leaning over him, and the procedure had already started. 

"Pathetic," he says quietly. Bucky holds his breath so that he can hear. "All that you are, and this? This is what you want?" He waves the blue notebook. 

Yes. Yes.

"Then have it. Sorokonozhka."

And that is how he remembers.

Chapter Text

And so he remembers.

Coney island, summertime haze hanging over the water, Steve’s skinny shoulders, the sunburn on his neck

and

The broken down dancehall in the Bowery where the band played so hard they went through the stage floor

and

The impossible softness of a silk slip, the warmth of a thigh under his hand, the drugstore smell of her lipstick

and

Steve’s date scowling into her almost empty drink and Steve too busy talking to Bucky to notice she needs another one

and

“You gotta look after ‘em, pal. Jeez. Anybody’d think you didn’t want to be there.”

“C’mon, Buck, she’s not a houseplant. She can get her own drink if she wants one.”

“Stevie, Stevie, Stevie. You are hopeless.”

and

“Yep. Got my orders. Shipping out tomorrow.”

All that hurt and the betrayal in Steve’s eyes, and the relief and anger knotted in Bucky’s chest. He doesn’t say “Thank your lucky stars they don’t want you, pal. Ain’t you seen the numbers in the papers?” and

Thompson screaming for help in the darkness for hours and hours, but the guy’s in a shell hole between Bucky’s line and Fritz’s line, and there’s no getting to him. Morita covers his head with his arms and presses his forehead to his knees. Gabe sits still, taut as a wire. Falsworth sinks down low to light a cigarette and takes a long, long, long drag. His hands shake hard.

Bucky takes his rifle. He moves away from the others, grabs an empty ammunition box and makes a platform out of it. He slides the gun up over the soaked, crumbling trench wall, and slithers up after it, half-burrowed like a worm in the mud. He can see the shell hole. He can see the guy, what’s left of him. He takes a breath and then another. He did real well in training, and maybe he’s killed some people, but not like this. Not deliberately. Not intimately. He knows it’s mercy, but that doesn’t make it better. But he does it all the same. It only takes one shot.

When he goes back into the trench, the others nod at him. Nobody says anything, but Falsworth offers him the last cigarette in his pack. Bucky takes it.

and

“You got a girl at home, Sergeant?”

“Sure, sure I do.”

“Well? C’mon then.”

“Sweetest, daintiest little blond thing you ever saw.”

All eyes on him in the flickering firelight, and he knows he shouldn’t but he’s been avoiding thinking of Steve because it hurts, this longing. Only, now he wants to feel that ache. “Blue eyes. Clever little hands.” There’s a laugh that runs round the circle of them and Bucky wishes it was exactly like he makes it sound.

“What’s her name?” Gabe asks.

“Nonea Your,” Bucky says.

Gabe frowns. “Huh?”

“None a Your Business,” Bucky says, and the guys all laugh.

and

“Up, Sarge. You gotta get up.” Morita hauling on his arm in the cold, damp, darkness.

“Pinch his cheeks,” Dum Dum says. “Get some colour in them.”

Gabe does it. Bucky pulls back, shaking his head. His skin aches. His body aches. Everything aches, and the coughing is getting worse.

“C’mon, Sarge,” Morita whispers. “Just stay on your feet.”

He can’t. His legs won’t hold him. The pneumonia is getting worse. He topples over. So the goddamn Nazis take him. Gabe watches him as they drag him out of the cell, like he’s trying to memorize Bucky’s face.

They’re not doctors. He doesn’t know what they are, but they’re not doctors. He chants his name, his rank, his serial number. He doesn’t want to tell them anything, except this. He needn’t have worried. They don’t ask any questions.

and

Steve. Steve in the body of a fucking Greek god. He must be dreaming.

and

Lavender-scented sheets and Steve’s big shoulder under his mouth

and

Knowing this is a bad idea, a terrible idea, and he doesn’t want to get on this train but damned if he’s going to let Steve get himself into more trouble than he can handle

and

Falling

Falling falling falling

and

Blood in the snow, the whole thing remembered in stills, as if he’s paging through a photo album. He keeps losing consciousness, he keeps trying to die. He sees the pines, feels the softness of fur, agony that would make him scream and vomit, if only he could muster the air and the strength, but he can’t get either. He thinks it might be that wolves are eating him. He thinks perhaps it is a bear. He wonders why he didn’t die when he hit the hillside. He tries to remember Brooklyn. Summertime. Thin shoulders and a sunburned neck. A dancehall in the Bowery. Cajoling Steve onto the rollercoaster. Fire escapes and undershirts. He goes somewhere, and the pain seems trapped, unable to get him. It’s all right. He’s not afraid for the first time in a long time. He’s at peace. He wants to tell Steve it’s not so bad, this dying thing. And isn’t it hilarious? Steve was so sick for so long, and it’s Bucky who’s dying first.

and

Cream-coloured tiles and green paint. Aluminum and steel. A light that blinds. A face that looms. A saw that passes back and forth like a magician’s trick right through his arm only it’s not a trick, it’s not a trick and he’s screaming

and

A hallway. Bucky limping beside a guard. His weight is all wrong, too light on one side. His head is full of drugs. He remembers a door of honey-coloured wood opening. Beyond it, an office: a rug thrown down over stone floors, two tall bookshelves stuffed with books. A world map on one wall. A large, heavy desk with a lamp to one side. A man who wears a uniform, but has no rank that Bucky can discern. He gestures to Bucky. “Please, sit. You shouldn’t walk too much yet.” The man gestures to himself.  “Johann Schmitt,” he says. “And you are Sergeant James Barnes.” He smiles at Bucky. “We have met before.”

Bucky doesn’t answer.

“You’re looking better than the last time I saw you,” he says. He nods at Bucky’s arm, or, where Bucky’s arm used to be. “And about ten pounds lighter, I would say.”

Bucky can’t follow this. He doesn’t understand. It’s not just the drugs, or the pain. There’s something crazy happening. But he can’t stay standing. He drops into the chair.

“Tea?” Schmitt asks. Then he laughs softly. “Ah, but you’re an American. Coffee is what you drink. Am I right?”

Bucky nods. “Yeah,” he whispers.

“Then let’s have coffee.” Schmitt gestures to one of the guards. Bucky hears the man move to obey, the door to the office opening and closing. They are alone. Schmitt reaches into his desk and withdraws a little box, purple, about the size of Bucky’s hand. He pulls it open and inside a bed of shredded paper is studded with tiny, perfect sweets. He presents the contents to Bucky. “German chocolate,” Schmitt tells him. “The best in the world.”

Bucky is shaking. Someone sets a teacup of coffee down on the desk in front of him, and one in front of Schmitt, and then, impossibly, a little pitcher of cream, and a jar of sugar too. And Schmitt is still holding out the chocolates.

“Go on,” Schmitt says, and when Bucky does not move, he selects one of the tiny, perfect chocolates himself. He places it on the saucer, right beside the spoon. Then he pours a little cream into his own cup of coffee, and offers some to Bucky. Bucky can hear himself breathing hard, like he’s been running. Schmitt smiles.

“Just black, then?”

Bucky can’t respond. He can’t find his feet. Two hours ago it was a gurney in a tiled room and bandages and gentian violet and hands prodding. Two days ago it was a bone saw and horror and screaming. And before that the train, the snow, wolves, maybe, or bears, or men in fur-lined coats, perhaps. And before that it was Steve, and the Commandos and he can’t, he can’t let himself touch those thoughts. He’ll break. He’ll sob. He was supposed to die. He was ready to die. He’s not ready for this, whatever the hell this is.

“You’ve been too long away from the comforts of home, if you ask me,” Schmitt says, taking his own cup of coffee and giving it a stir. “You’re from New York, is that right?”

“Yeah,” he says again. After all, what harm is there in answering? It’s innocuous, this question. This is not interrogation. He doesn’t know what this is. They have demonstrated their willingness to cause pain, their ability to haul him back from death. If they wanted him to speak, he has no doubt they could force information out of him.

“I have always wanted to visit New York.” Schmitt glances at the map on the wall. “I suppose, after the war, there will be time.” He smiles at Bucky. “You must miss it.”

Bucky can feel his throat closing up. “Yeah.”

“One day perhaps we will go together. As friends.”

Bucky laughs faintly, bitterly. It’s not a sob. Schmitt makes a small noise of concern. “You are tired, and you are wounded. Go on,” Schmitt says, nodding at the coffee and the slowly melting chocolate. “We are not in combat here. Just two men talking about a better future.”

He eats the chocolate. He drinks the coffee. He tells Schmitt about Brooklyn. About Howard Stark’s floating car, about peanuts on the boardwalk, about growing up poor, about Steve.

Afterward, he realizes what he’s done.

*

He gets wise, and then they get wise. He stops seeing Schmitt, and starts seeing Zola.

and

There are injections.

There are tests. Baths of ice water again, just like Asano. He starts shaking when he sees the tank. He knows what to expect. For all the good it does him.

and

He agrees to everything at one point or another. He just has to stay alive until Steve can get to him.

and

He begs. He bargains. He offers. He will do anything to have a reprieve, even to die, whatever it takes to make the pain stop. But there is no way to make the pain stop, and he goes through what he knew it was possible to endure, into something grinding and interminable and

and

And then there is a way to make the pain stop: Obey.

and

They’re not coming for him. He's forgotten, or presumed dead. And now he’s just doing what his masters say. And now he’s just staying alive because it’s a habit, because he’s a fucking coward and

and

He hates himself for what he’s doing.

and

He has a belt, and there are bars in the small window, and he tries to get it done but his body is a traitor, his body is as much a prison as the walls around him and it will. Not. Fucking. Die. He chokes for hours and hours and hours.

and

They’re angry about it.

and

There’s an icepick poised at the tear duct on the left hand side. “There’s a Doctor Freeman in America who has done it to thousands of patients. It makes them docile.”

“He’ll regenerate. It’s pointless.”

“Let me try.”

It calms him, for a few hours. But it doesn’t last. He knows what they’re doing to him. He knows what they’re making him into. He knows he can’t stop it. He knows helplessness like an old friend. He is falling again. Always falling.

*

Then there is the first mission. A man in Florence. Bucky's mismatched hands around his throat. Crushing.

and then

Palme

and

Laporte

and

Guzhenko

and

Stark

He remembers all of them.

Chapter Text

He doesn’t remember getting into the cell. He doesn’t remember being moved. 

He hasn’t been unconscious exactly. It’s just that the memories are a landslide, and it’s all he can do to keep breathing, to not be swallowed by them and dragged down. He wanted them. He was looking for them. Looking out for the shoots of memory and heaving on them until they came uprooted. He never imagined someone would come along and tear the whole earth up. He never imagined he would ever have these answers.

He never imagined what a pathetic, venal coward he was in those last days before he became the Soldier.

He gave Schmitt everything he could have wanted to know. He gave up every street in Brooklyn, every landmark in New York city, every piece of precious memory. He betrayed his country, himself, each one of the Commandos, Steve, all in the course of an afternoon. And, Christ, what if Steve had come for him? And what if he’d found out what Bucky had done? Sold out for a cup of coffee and a chocolate. His face burns against the cold floor. Of all the things he’s done, and there are some awful fucking things, this might be the worst, because it wasn’t after everything, the injections and the enhancements. It was before, when his will was still his own. And no one made him do it. No one even asked him to do it. He gave it up to the enemy, knowing full well who it was. Shame is a hot weight in his belly.

He wants to move. To get to his feet, get moving, fix this. The shutdown code is temporary, in spite of the best efforts of an awful lot of eggheads. Just one more problem in the long list of things that are wrong with him. His fingers flex now, and his toes, but he’s in no position to even get to his knees. Not yet.

There’s a noise, he realizes. Distant, but rising. Coming from somewhere behind him.

He’s facing a wall, but he can tell, from the hard chill of the packed-earth floor and the scored whitewash that he’s in the holding cell he found earlier. He half expects the noise to be a distant siren, but it's not. It is surprisingly siren-like, but it doesn’t rise and fall in a predictable pattern; it’s random. And loud. And then he gets it. The noise is a baby hollering at the top of her lungs. Marta, he thinks in a detached sort of way. It's Marta, screaming her head off.

“Yeah. Me too, kid,” he whispers.

Marta’s howling stops for just a second. Then, “Hey, ow!” Someone outside the door roars. “She bit me. Again.”

There’s the muffled sound of a response.

“No, I’ve had enough of this bullshit. I didn’t sign on to be a God damned babysitter.”

There’s a heavy clang and Marta’s hollering bursts through the cold silence of the cell. Horror fills Bucky. He realizes they’re going to put her into this little room. They’re going to leave her in here with him. Knowing what he is and what he's done. 

“See how you like this, you nasty little bitch,” the voice hisses. “You better hope the bogeyman doesn't wake up and rip your face off.”

The door closes with a boom. Marta’s crying changes. Now she’s not screaming like she was before, but crying a disconsolate, heavy-sobbing cry. She's not afraid of the boogeyman; she's too little to understand, even Bucky knows that. She's crying for her mother now. Bucky’s heard that cry before, late at night. He’s heard Elena answer it. He lift his head up as far as he can, which isn't much. 

“It’s okay, little one,” he croaks.

Marta’s crying stutters and stops. She says, “Buh?”

“It’s okay,” he says again, grasping for something, anything. All those memories have returned to him and not one seems to be about how to cope with babies. “Your mama sent me to come get you.”

“Mama,” Marta says.

“That’s right. Your mama.”

For a moment, there’s silence. Then Marta’s little feet go tap tap tap across the hard-packed floor, she says, “Ooh,” and slaps him on the head with both hands. Then she flops down onto the floor beside him, looks into his face, and grins.

“Hey, kid.” He grins back.

Chapter Text

There’s nothing to do while he waits for his limbs to come back under his control, but at least Marta is entertained by the giant, floppy guy lying on the floor. She climbs all over him, takes a head-dive over his shoulder and has a little cry, but gets herself up and starts playing again. She is particularly interested in the shiny metal of his left hand. She folds his fingers closed one by one, then opens them again. She turns his palm this way and that. She high-fives him. She boops his index finger with her nose.

And while she plays, bit by bit, Bucky’s body comes back to life. Fingers that could only twitch become hands that make fists, arms that could just bend are finally able to bear weight. By the time Marta has grown tired of playing with his limbs, Bucky has pushed himself up into a sitting position, cross-legged on the floor. Marta, apparently taking this as an invitation, climbs up onto his lap, turns around, and sits with her back against his chest. “Nap,” she says with finality. A few minutes later she’s snoring.

He will kill anyone who tries to hurt this kid.

*

He sits still, waiting for the shutdown to wear away to nothing, letting Marta sleep. There’s nothing to do, so he might as well think. It's nice not to think through a haze of uncertainty, wonder Do I like that? Is this done here? Do I seem normal? and nicer still not wonder so desperately and pathetically about the past.

Instead, he thinks about Natasha’s appearance in his apartment and what it could mean to have a Red Room agent running with, or maybe working for, Captain America. No wonder his last mission went balls-up. They should have told him what he was up against. Maybe if they’d let him have a fragment of his former self he could have told them, Look, boys, if Natasha’s involved, things are going to get a lot more complicated than you think. 

And that, invariably, leads him to thinking of Steve. He thinks about running, being afraid of being caught before he knew his own mind. He thinks about the letters he sent and how he wanted, desperately, to talk to Steve. He wanted to explain, to ask Who was I? What was I to you? And now, he wants to ask Do you know what I've done? And he wants to apologize. He knows what they had is gone forever. Friendship, too. Forgiveness is out of the question. He doesn't even know if it's possible to make amends for what he's done. But it would be good, perhaps, to try. 

Of course, to do any of that, he'll have to get out of this.

He reassesses his situation. He came to get Marta, and he’s got her now. Theoretically, he should take her and run back to the Rose, and his apartment, and lie low, or even get out of town. But that nasty old bastard with the shutdown codes has his notebooks, and Bucky doesn’t have much worth fighting over, but his notebooks are one of those things. Nobody should be able to look at the notes he made when he was clawing his way out of what Hydra had done to him, and all the horror of the last seventy years. Not unless he lets them. He wants those books back. And those two gangs and their turf war? Someone has to deal with that, and if there ever was an unlucky son of a bitch with less to lose than Bucky, well, Bucky's never met the guy, so it might as well be him. 

Marta shifts a little, still snoozing, a warm little bundle cuddled up against his chest. He looks down at her; it’s dark in here, but a little light seeps under the door. He can see the contours of her face and her Daisy Duck pyjamas. He finds that he’s tempted to think of Marta as Mission because it’s comfortable and easy. Everything of importance has been Mission for so long that it’s hard to move his mind around that. But she’s not Mission, she’s a little person that he likes, and who, much to his surprise, seems to like him. Which is saying something, because Bucky hasn’t got all that many friends any more. He intends to keep the ones he's got. So when voices trickle into the little cell, he figures it’s probably the goons returning to collect the baby they stuffed into a cold, dark cell with a murderer, and he figures it's time to get going.

“Marta,” he whispers. “Marta, it’s time to wake up.”

She wakes up frowning and begins to cry. It’s not ideal, but he can hear someone yell, Oh for Christ’s Sake she’s still going, outside and the noise Marta is making will definitely cover any sound of him moving. He gets to his feet. “Hang on, kid,” he says, shifting her from his left to his right hip. Marta sniffles her crying to a stop and puts her pudgy arms around Bucky’s neck. “Good,” he whispers. “Hang on real tight.”

The door opens a fraction, and light spills in.

“You like surprises?” Bucky whispers to Marta. 

She looks at him and says, “Boo!”

"Damn right," he tells her, and rams his shoulder into the door.

Chapter Text

He shoulders through the door, and the guy on the other side goes sprawling against the wall. Bucky kicks him once, in the head. It’s not nice, but the guy wasn’t exactly a shining example of humanity either. Besides, he needs to contain the alarm for as long as he can. If he comes face to face with the old guy, or, hell, even Stefan, he’s likely to get shut down again. He needs to do something about that. And he needs his books. And he needs to do something rather permanent to this organization. And he needs to get Marta out of here. So keeping things quiet is imperative.

The guy is like the others, dressed in the uniform of black shirt, black fatigues, black boots, and it would be nice to be able to get into those clothes, but it’s not a possibility. Again. Bucky never used to be an unusually big guy. Back in the day he was what people used to call “strapping” and the pictures he has seen of himself as the Winter Soldier he is lean, whip-thin. But being fed a regimen of liquid calories in exactly the right quantity for optimal functioning will do that to you. Now, though, his frame has bulked up. All the cooking he’s been doing. The indulgences - sweets and coffees and fruit juices, Milo’s selection of candy bars (he’s tasted nearly all of them now), Olga’s cooking tips, street vendor fare, leftover birthday cake, orange soda and kebabs - they’re putting weight on his frame. His compulsion to exercise and the serum are keeping him fit, but he’s gotten big, even for these days and among professional toughs. A part of him is stunned that, for all the goons he’s bonked on the head, he has yet to find a shirt that fits.

So the clothes are a bust, but there are probably some goodies in the pockets. He drops down into a squat, still holding Marta, and rifles one-handed through the guy’s pockets. He finds a wallet, a phone, a pair of headphones bundled up like a garrotte, and a little gun. He takes the works. The headphones are of the earbud type, and might function well enough to keep him from being triggered again if he gets them into his ears in time. Maybe. He grabs everything, makes sure the safety is on the gun, and then puts it all into his pockets.

Then it’s back up the hall, past the closets he stuffed other goons into. He wonders briefly if they’re still there, but doesn’t check. Instead, he moves as fast and as quietly as he can. It’s not just the goons, it’s Marta, too. He doesn’t know how long she’ll be captivated by what he’s doing, and when she’ll start to get restive.

“Still good, kid?” he asks. She looks at him, all serious-eyed, and he realizes that this is a child, a baby. He might want his books back, but this is criminally stupid. He can’t take a baby into something that could wind up an active combat area. He breaks, right at the top of the stairs, just before the breakfast room and the place he last saw Stefan, and spins around. And sees them. It’s as if God had turned his back on Bucky Barnes for so long that he felt like he ought to finally throw him a bone.

The books are right there. Sitting in a little heap in an office that stands opposite the breakfast room. Both of them, lying open, on a desk. And he knows it’s too good to be true, and the fact is when God turned his back on Bucky Barnes, he turned it good and hard. But they’re right there, ten feet from him. So holds Marta tight against his chest and steps into the room.

“Longing,” Stefan says, in Russian. He is standing just within the room, changed into clean, dry clothes, and very clearly waiting. His accent is terrible, but it doesn’t matter. Bucky’s blood goes cold. His arms tighten on Marta. He’s losing everything. It’s rushing away from him like the tide going out. “Rusted.” Something is squeezing the air out of his lungs. Marta is squirming in his arms, squirming and starting to cry, and he is starting to make an animal noise. There's something building in him, huge and unstoppable. Stefan is reading off a scrap of paper. Grinning now. “Seventeen," he says.  "Dawn.”

Nope.

Like ice breaking underfoot. Like rope giving way. The massive compulsion building in him suddenly vanishes.

Bucky is across the room, Marta clinging to his right side, and his left hand closing around Stefan’s throat. He lifts. It's not as hard as it would be if he wasn't so very angry and so fucking terrified that Stefan will correct himself.

"No," Stefan is gasping and choking, "You have to do what I say!"

“Wrong word, asshole,” Bucky whispers. He knocks Stefan hard against the wall once to rattle his brains a bit and then again, to knock him out. Then he drops him into a heap on the floor. He has to set Marta down to grab the books from the desk and stuff them back into his ransacked backpack. When he goes to grab Marta again, she holds something up to him. The scrap of paper.

“Good work,” he tells her. She grins, waves the scrap of paper at him, and then eats it.

Chapter Text

In the end he knows he can’t do it alone. He can’t sleep with the letters sitting like a bomb on his table. He can’t function knowing Bucky is alive in the world, and trying to communicate with him, and he’s not doing his share to understand what he’s trying to say. And his head pounds and his eyes ache and he can't even figure out what some of these letters are because Bucky's handwriting is so shaky sometimes, so the internet isn't really helping. Natasha is out of the country, but Peggy worked in counter-intelligence her entire life, and he’s not crystal clear on everything that happened in the 20^th century, but he’s brushed up on the Cold War in the last little while. He's pretty damn sure Peggy will have a smattering of Russian, if not more. So he gathers up the letters and the scraps and the leaves and detritus that Bucky sent him, and goes to Mount Saint Mary, to see the onetime head of SHIELD.

*

Sister Mary Anita, the petite, round-faced nun who runs Peggy’s floor, is doing a turn at the front desk. “Oh,” she says, climbing to her feet when she sees him. “Captain Rogers. I’m terribly sorry but she’s not very well today.”

“Peggy?” he asks, feeling stupid the minute it comes out of his mouth. After all, who else does he come to Mount Saint Mary to see?

Sister Mary Anita doesn’t hold it against him. “Yes. We’re not admitting any guests right now, I’m afraid.” She doesn't add, Besides, your visits always upset her. But she doesn't have to. Steve knows. He nods, and pushes away the irrational anger that comes bubbling up. It wasn’t the Sister’s fault that Peggy was old and frail, and that dementia had taken her recent memories, or that Steve’s appearance at her bedside always resulted in tears, half joyful, half bitter. It wasn’t the Sister’s fault that he had a pocket full of fragmented correspondence he couldn’t decipher and didn’t know who else to turn to.

Steve finds himself rubbing at the spot where his shoulders meet his neck. Tense from too many nights sitting hunched like a vulture over the letters, and tightening up again. “Uh, can I ask what’s wrong?”

“I’m afraid it’s shaping up to be pneumonia.”

“Oh God,” Steve whispers. Yes, pneumonia is different now. Now there are treatments, things like antibiotics, IV fluids and the like. But Peggy is still old, frail. Paper skin over bird bones. Gossamer white hair. “How bad is it?”

That round face softens kindly. “Well, these things are never good in the elderly,” the Sister says. She pushes open the little gate and comes out from behind the desk. “But she’s comfortable. She’s resting just now.”

He nods. “Good. I guess. Can I, uh, leave these for her?” He holds up the flowers he brought. He had always found her room small and a little on the dark side. The flowers brightened the place up. He like to pick something big and blowsy - scarlet peonies once, huge Imperial chrysanthemums in bright green another time. He always picked something that would make her laugh about how dramatic he was. Today it was sunflowers, brilliantly yellow and as big as his head.

Sister Mary Anita takes the bouquet off him. “I’ll put them in water for her,” she promises.

“Thank you.” He supposes he ought to leave, but he can't seem to make himself move. “Uh, Sister?”

She smiles at him.

“Would it be too much to be kept up to date on her condition? I might have to leave town. I can give you my contact information.”

Sister Mary Anita opens and closes her mouth, and Steve understands. He feels as if someone has tilted up the floor under his feet. “It’s not just pneumonia, is it?” 

The Sister smiles a little, sadly. She draws in a big breath. “At her age, pneumonia is quite enough.”

She sets the flowers down on the desk and then plucks at his sleeve. "Sit with me," she says. He follows her, feeling about five feet tall and twelve years old again, trailing behind her to the waiting area. It's nestled near the windows, where a grey drizzle is sifting down on a verdant springtime garden. There's nobody else there, just them. It's usually quiet in this place.

“Captain Rogers there are… certain signs that indicate to me that God will soon be calling Peggy home.”

It's a good thing there are chairs right there. He sags down into the nearest one. “What signs?”

“Well,” Sister Mary Anita sits across from him and folds her hands in her lap. “We’ve noticed a reduction in pulse at her extremities. And she is having fewer and shorter moments of lucidity. These are common indicators that things are coming to a close.”

Steve nods a creaky little nod. His neck can hardly bend. Something has its hand right inside his chest, gripping on his heart. “How long does she have?”

“That’s impossible to say, I'm afraid.” She looks out at the garden and then back at Steve. "Her niece is on the way from Geneva. I am trying to keep her calm and comfortable until she arrives. But it's all in God's hands." 

He swallows, nods. Peggy is frail, ill, dying. Steve's presence upsets her. Sharon is on the way. This is the end. He remembers this feeling too well. He remembers the sensation of having been cut free, rootless. Only last time… Last time the Barnes family took him in like the stray he was, and the war was like a rumble of distant thunder off to the west - somebody else's storm. But now the Commandos are all gone, all but Peggy, and now she's going too. All the Barnes family are in Greenwood. New York looks nothing like it used to. The war is a black and white memory. Only he remains.

Him, and Bucky.

He tears his mind away from that, and focuses on the task at hand. “When does Sharon's plane land?"

"In a few hours."

"Do you think she'll be on time?"

Sister Mary Anita shrugs. "We can hope."

He nods, hands twisting on the arms of the chair. "Is there anything I can do?"

He wants her to say yes. He wants her to tell him to fetch a magic wand from a mountain or something. He wants to be able to act. But she smiles sadly, reaches out, lays her small, warm hand on his, and gives it a squeeze. “Prayer never goes amiss, Captain."

He nods again, numb to his lips. 

“I think we have your contact information on file, still. I'll keep you up to date on her condition. Do you…”  Sister Mary Anita pauses and catches her lip between her teeth. “I am so sorry, Captain. I can't let you in to see her. I do hope you don't have unfinished business.”

And this? It makes him smile, just a little. It makes some of the weight lift off him, though the ache in his chest twists even harder now. “There’s not,” he whispers, voice catching. He clears his throat and musters a smile for the Sister. “We always knew we were on borrowed time." It was true, they did. Ever since the war. "She knows the truth. About everything.”

Sister Mary Anita nods and pats his hand.

Chapter Text

Olga comes out of The Garden with intent. It is Sunday, shopping day, and last week the pears she bought from Constan looked pristine on the outside, but were mealy and flavourless. This will not stand.

Across the road, there is Josh. Funny that he is not in his usual position, in the hazy ground between the Rosu and the Brutar territory, where he can sell his electronics in peace and not get shaken down once a week. Someone once told her that Josh’s electronics were stolen, and she made a point of giving him hell about it. But they’re not stolen, exactly. Josh scavenges them from dumpsters and recycling bins and then fixes them. He even offered to show Olga his work bench, but Olga can’t walk all the way across the market to some distant apartment building to see a squat. Besides, shortly after that, he started seeing Elena, and looking after little Marta as if he was her daddy. She knows a good man when she stumbles over one.

She drags her rattling shopping trolley across the road. It is too early in the morning for there to be very many cars, so she hardly has to glare at anyone as she gets across the road. And Josh, standing in the early morning sunshine at the utmost edge of the market, hardly even seems to notice the cars that swerve around her, or the cacophony of the trolly, though that’s not so bad as it used to be since Soldier fixed it. She drags it right on over to him.

“What’s going on with you?”

He blinks and looks down at her. He’s absurdly tall. All young people are tall these days. And there are more and more of them. He sighs down at her.

“Did Elena throw you out? What did you do?”

Josh licks his lips. “Someone took Marta.”

It hits her as if she stuck a pin into a socket, like that one time when she was a girl. “What?”

He nods, and blinks again, slow, like an owl. She’s seen that before, in watchmen who’ve been up too long.

“Who? Why?”

Josh nods toward the street and she looks. Ah. He’s looking in the direction of the great, sprawling pile of the Rosu family home. “Why?” she asks. It doesn’t matter, does it? But she asked last time, too, when she heard the news about her eldest son.

“I don’t know. I don’t understand.”

“Where is Elena?” She asks, because a mother should know, should be the first to know.

“At home. Resting.”

Across the street, Chekov and Maria appear at the apartment door, Maria in her pretty floral dress, and Chekov in the suit he married her in, all those years ago. It’s so dated that the style has come back into fashion and she thinks it suits him now. Maria meets her eyes, and she frowns a question: What are you doing? Olga scowls back There's trouble. If there was such a thing as telepathy, she and Maria would be good candidates. Maria plucks at Chekov’s arm, and the two of them make their way to the crosswalk, opposite the direction to church, and wait for the signal to change. Olga looks back at Josh, and slaps at his arm. “What are you doing here? Standing here staring like a fool?”

Josh shakes his head. “Elena hired Soldier. He’s gone to get her. He told me, both of us, to wait.”

Olga scowls. She folds her arms across her chest and squeezes her biceps. She knew he would get into trouble. She knew the moment she met him. “How long have you been waiting, young man?”

“Hours,” he answers, sounding rather numb. “I’m starting to think they’re not coming back.”

“What’s going on?” Maria calls when they’re in shouting distance. It’s not too noisy in the market area yet. Constan’s still unloading his wares, but Milo’s newspaper stand is all set up, and with the metal shutters, that’s usually the loudest one. Simon’s bread van is at a rattling idle nearby, poisoning the planet with its fetid exhaust that smells, Olga thinks, like the thing is illegally running farm diesel in a city truck. But all in all, it’s not so loud. Still, Olga bellows.

“Someone stole Marta last night.”

Maria’s eyes open wide, her mouth too. She comes bustling up and grabs hold of Josh’s arms, says, “Oh, I'm so sorry,” and then hugs him. “And where is Elena?”

“At home, Maria, where she belongs,” Olga snaps.

Chekov gives Josh a sympathetic look. He has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, but he reaches into his pocket to get the pack, almost puts a second one between his lips before he realizes he’s already got one there. He offers the pack to Josh, who shakes his head.

“Thanks,” he says. “I can’t. The baby.”

Chekov pockets the cigarettes.

“What’s going over there?” Constan asks, from behind a heap of green beans the size of a German shepherd. The beans look decent, and the spinach has been a wilted, sagging nightmare. She might trade out spinach for green beans this week. If the beans are as good as they look.

“Josh says Marta’s been stolen,” Maria calls back.

Constan yells, “What?!” Then he turns and gestures to Simon, up there in his bread van. “Get down here.”

Simon slithers out of his truck, but leaves the motor running. Old habits die hard.

Beyond the truck, there’s Milo, watching what’s going on. The man used to be a professional busybody. Olga doesn’t need to invite him over, he’ll invite himself. She turns her back on him and hears, a moment later, the rattle of his shutter coming down.

“They came last night," Josh is telling the others. "Elena and I were on the balcony. Marta was asleep in her bed. I thought I heard something but… I guess I did hear something.”

“Jesus Christ,” Constan whispers.

“Well, what are you doing about it?” Milo demands, bellying up to the lot of them.

“Soldier,” Josh says again, for the benefit of all present. “He went after her. Early this morning. But.”

There’s a silence that Olga knows well. The silence of nothing more to be done. And hearing that sort of silence twice in her life is more than enough, she does not need this third time. She knows Elena, and likes the girl. Tough as iron. Got into trouble selling herself to get out of Kazakstan and into Romania, but managed to get herself back out of trouble again. Olga used to dream about paying someone to smuggle her over the line to the west, but never worked up the courage. She likes Elena, damn it. And little Marta. And Josh is all right too. And Soldier is out of his mind, but has a good heart. She was just getting fond of him.

She is tired of burying the people she cares about.

“It’s his own fault,” Olga snaps. “I told him he would get into trouble but did he listen?”

“Hush, Olga,” Maria hisses, “He’s trying to save little Marta.”

Constan clears his throat. “We can’t leave him there alone,” he says quietly. “God knows what they’ll do to him.”

“He’s clever,” Simon murmurs, sliding the cigarette from one to the other corner of his mouth. “He’ll manage.”

“Cezar’s a monster,” Josh says. “We should never have asked Soldier to go.”

“No, you were right,” Maria says fiercely. “He’s the only one you can go to, with the Rosu and the Brutar picking our bones every chance they get. Imagine, asking Braco for help? After everything he did to Elena.”

Milo harrumphs. “Listen to us,” he says in a low, growling voice. “Like mice. Can’t go to the police, run ragged by the gangs. Paying for protection every Saturday, babies getting snatched out of their beds. Is this what we fought the revolution for?”

There's another silence, this one full of shame, and Olga can’t help acknowledging, Milo’s not wrong. Big old blowhard that he is.

“No we did not,” she says. She points at Constan. “I want five pounds of green beans, only the good ones. If you give me a floppy one, so help me God you will hear about it to the end of your days. And I need ten pounds of new potatoes and a half a dozen lemons. And don’t think I won’t be telling you off for selling me those mealy pears.” She shoves her trolley at him and he, blinking like a dunderhead, takes it from her. She starts off, into the road.

“Olga,” Maria shouts, “Where are you going?”

“I am the local old bat,” Olga hollers back, “And I’ve buried two boys all ready; I’m not interested in losing this one. He was just learning how to dicker with Constan. I like him.”

She sees the lot of them, gawping mouths, startled eyes. All except Chekov. She meets his gaze and he nods, once, just a little. Good.

Chapter Text

She doesn’t trust Barnes, that would be insane, but she is no longer concerned that someone else is in the driver’s seat. After all, who would risk allowing an asset like the Winter Soldier to rescue a nobody’s child from a gangster’s house? Worse, from the Rosu family home. Natasha knows more about the Rosu than she imagines most people do, and she's not exactly delighted that Barnes has gone in. If Cezar is anything like his father was, he has the potential to be what Natasha thinks of as very troublesome indeed. She needs to find a way to get in there, or get him out.

And while she thinks about this, Natasha has been watching the house. It's been a few hours now. At first she was waiting to catch Barnes when he came out, but he hasn't and she's starting to get antsy about it. And not just because it's harder to lurk unnoticed in the street now that the sun is up. It's no challenge, really. She’s standing at a bus stop, sipping coffee from a paper cup, and wearing a blowsy white tunic top that covers her tac vest and guns nicely. 

From afar, she should look convincingly like someone who missed her bus, what with the coffee and her phone out, her earphones in. She’s pulled up google maps on her phone to get a bird's-eye view of the footprint of the house Barnes. That’s helpful, insofar as it goes, but she hasn’t got eyes inside, and that could be a problem. So she twists her left earphone just a little until it goes click, and then types out her passcode, and that allows her to tap into the Avengers comm-line. If there’s a friendly satellite overhead, or if the house’s floor plan is in the Bucharest planning office archives, Jarvis will be able to help her out. There’s silence, and then the soft static of the connection, and then:

“Hi!”

That’s not Jarvis.

“Tony?” she asks.

“Thanks for calling 1-800-0-JARVIS. Jarvis is actually at the spa for the next forty-eight. Call back later, or punch 9 to talk to me.”

Well. That’s unhelpful. Tony would absolutely be able to get her what she needs, but he has a curiosity he did not program into his AI. She would have to explain what she’s doing, and that adds a layer of complication between what she’s doing, what Tony knows about the Winter Soldier, and what he might or might not tell Cap. It's far better, in her experience, to keep things simple. Still, she scowls at her phone. Then she scowls at the building across the street, where a number of large men in black outfits are standing around looking stupid and burly. She could bluff her way in, sure. It would be easy. But the aim isn’t to leave a smouldering crater when she leaves. The aim is never to alert them to the fact that the Winter Soldier is back at an old handlers' HQ.

You’re a spider, she reminds herself. Spin a web.

She does. It doesn’t take her long to get across the still-quiet market, avoiding the knot of people who might identify and interrupt her - Olga and Marta and Chekov and the others who have somehow collected around Barnes. It's funny. Barnes always did have charisma, she thinks, slipping behind Milo’s locked-down stall and heading into Brutar territory. Even when he was the Soldier, there was something magnetic about him. She always thought it was the way he fought, and perhaps it was. Whatever he did, he did it with all of him. Protect, kill, it didn't matter what it was, or for whom. The way he did it made you want to do the same. It made you believe what he was doing was right. When she first saw him, as the Soldier in the Red Room, she fell in love, not with him per se, but with the force of him, the magnetic pull of him. That this creature could be the fist of Mother Russia had filled her with a soaring kind of pride. It was only when she started to unravel him that she started to unravel other things as well.

As it happens, she likes ravelling and unravelling. She goes by the name Black Widow, but really, she is closer to Arachne. She can't help challenging the gods sometimes. 

*

She scraps her tunic and goes to Braco Brutar's door in her tac vest. Seems the right approach to take when dealing with someone who runs a new criminal enterprise that’s encroaching on old corruption and old power.

She is on the freshly mopped white front step of the lovely pied-à-terre about fifteen minutes after she started out, and by then she is ready. She knocks on the high gloss black paint of the front door and waits. There’s a moment and a heavyset youngish man with a scar on his face opens the door to her.

“Yes?”

“I’m here to see Braco Brutar,” she says, all business.

He looks her up and down, slowly, deliberately. Maybe he notes the tac vest, but he doesn't show it. He's too busy leering. He wants to make her squirm, make her uncomfortable. She waits, till it’s been going on for long enough that he must notice it’s pointless. A couple little spots of colour light up his cheeks. That’s right, she thinks, be embarrassed by your own disgusting personality.

“Boss isn't seeing anyone this morning," he says.

She was ready for this. “He'll see me."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yes. Tell him the Rosu are about to acquire a weapon that’s the equivalent of a nuke in his line of work." She pauses for effect. "I can help him prevent that. For a price.”

“Serge,” calls a low voice from inside, “Let the lady in.”

Chapter Text

Bucky is creeping down the stairs with Marta in his arms when he hears the old man’s voice.

“Useless,” he says. “Useless. What is the point of paying these people?”

“Considering who we are dealing with, it is to be expected, Cezar,” someone says quietly, and about as politely as it is possible to correct someone.

There’s a stony silence and then someone groans softly, so he guesses that means the closets full of goons have been found. He holds Marta close against his chest and whispers, “Shhh,” in her ear. She looks at him solemnly and nods.

If the closets full of goons have been found, that means getting out the way he came in is no longer possible. That leaves the front door, and the driveway. Based on the exterior of the building as seen from the street, he’d guess the door to the driveway lies in exactly the opposite direction as the street-side service entrance. That will mean coming down the last of the stairs, and crossing the open space of the foyer to get to the hallway on the other side. And the foyer is where the voices are coming from, which also means the front door is not an option. Well, he's been in tight spots before. Maybe not while holding a baby, but still.

“Call Strucker." Cezar says. "I know he’s got something to control those two kids. Have him send me one of whatever he's using.”

Kids? Bucky goes cold. Jesus, he thinks, Are they trying to build more Winter Soldiers using children?

He stands as silent as he is able, but the servos in his arm whir softly, what with him carrying a twenty-pound load. And Marta shifts in his arms, bored, looking around. She points down the stairs and says, “Dat!” in a high, loud voice, and Bucky’s heart lurches.

“What was that? Nicolae—“

But there’s a knock on the door at that exact moment, a rapid-fire rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat with a short pause and then another burst, as if it’s machine gun fire.

“Get that,” Cezar says, and Bucky knows he’ll never have another opportunity. He slips down the last of the stairs, silent, and looks into the foyer. Cezar, shirt sleeves rolled up, is standing with the thinner, grey haired guy from before. That guy is going to the door. And, weirdly, on the floor of the foyer is a black-clad goon with a goose egg swelling up, purple, on his forehead. Bucky is pretty sure that guy isn’t one of his. But now's not the time to wonder. The foyer is dead ahead of him, the street-side service corridor to the left, and what he thinks is probably the way to the driveway to the right. He needs to get moving.

“Psst!”

The sound, urgent, soft, from his left. He glances. Stares.

Josh?

He mouths the name. Josh reaches out both hands and makes an urgent gesture. It might mean, Get over here or it might mean Give me Marta. Maybe both.

What the hell? Bucky mouths. He points at the downed goon in the foyer. You?

Josh flashes a champion-sized grin. “Yep. Wanted to rescue Marta and you,” he explains in a whisper that carries alarmingly.

Bucky darts left, bundling Marta toward Josh, and Josh receives her into his coat, which is good, because Marta is delighted, and if her face wasn’t buried in Josh’s coat, her cheerful squealing would be loud. As it is, it’s too noisy already. His heart is up in his throat. But if Josh has been thumping baddies, it's probably clear down the service corridor and all the way to the street.

“Go,” he whispers, spinning Josh around and shoving him down the corridor. “I’ll follow.”

He means to, he does. But then he hears the Nicolae say, “Yes?” and he hears a voice he knows answer.

“Is that Cezar Rosu hiding behind you? Nicolae, you step out of the way. I haven’t got a bad thing to say about you; loyalty is a virtue. It’s your boss whose hide needs tanning.”

Olga.

He looks at Josh, furious, accusing, and Josh’s eyes are wide, mouth hanging open. He looks at Bucky and Bucky knows Josh is thinking the same thing.

Shit.

“She said she'd distract them,” Josh whispers. He sounds horrified. And Bucky feels the same way. He doesn’t have a lot of friends anymore, and the ones he has? They’re worth looking after. Even the weird ones. Especially the weird ones. Besides, now that he has a full suite of memories again, he knows all about stuff like this. Turns out he has a lot of practice getting little, feisty people out of the trouble they get themselves into.

Chapter Text

He goes back. Olga is standing there on the doorstep, like a skinny, iron-haired avenging angel. Aside from the first time he met her, Bucky doesn’t think he’s ever seen her without her shopping cart. She looks curiously diminished without it. But what she lacks in physical presence she’s making up in words.

“Cezar Rosu you’ve spent your whole life keeping the people in this district down because we were all scared of your father. Well your father’s been dead so long I’ve been dusting him off my lamps for two decades and I’m tired of it.”

Bucky manages to hold in a snort, but it’s a near thing. He creeps into the foyer. There’s the goon, but he’s down. There’s Nicolae, but he's standing at the door, and there's Cezar. The sight of him makes Bucky's skin crawl. Cezar is standing in the middle of the space, almost equidistant between Bucky and Nicolae. If Bucky can get him down, if Bucky can neutralize him, he can prevent him from using any more of his horrible codes, and then he can bully Nicolae down, and get Olga to safety. He steps carefully, quietly. He has plenty of experience sneaking up on targets. After all, he killed Olof Palme in the street, and no one saw him.

That’s not something to be proud of, he reminds himself.

He moves a little closer.

“Madam, Mister Rosu is—“

“Don’t you Madam me, Nicolae. You think I don’t have enough for two?”

“Olga, really.” Nicolae sounds somewhere between shocked and exasperated.

Cezar chuckles, soft and low, like a bear waking up, or a mountain rumbling. “Why don’t you let her say her piece, Nicolae?”

Nicolae looks stricken. He looks from Cezar to the Olga, and when Cezar nods, he opens the door a little wider. And that’s when Olga sees Bucky. Her eyes go wide, just for an instant, but it’s enough. Cezar turns, already uttering, Sputnik!

It hits him hard, but not as hard as the first time. Something closer to being smashed with framing timbers, or taking a punch from Captain America right to the philtrum. He staggers back a step, but doesn’t fall. “Doesn’t work so good, back to back like that,” Bucky tells him. He hauls in a lungful of air, drags the weight of his body forward.

Cezar’s eyes go wide, then narrow. “Longing,” he snarls. “Rusted.” And his accent is good. It gets hard to move. Moving is the first thing those words take from him. Movement, and then his mind. They wanted to be able to use it in exactly this situation. He wasn’t always confined to cryo, he wasn’t always strapped into the chair. Sometimes he was upright, furious, clutching the fragments of his memory and screaming at them.

“Seventeen.”

It hits like blows, like fists and feet. The thing that lives inside of him, huge and awesome and terrible, is waking up. It throws itself at its cage. But he remembers Stefan, the wrong word. He curls his lip up in a snarling grin.

“Keep talking, wise guy.”

“Daybreak,” Cezar says, unmistakably smug. It's like a door slamming shut. And the thing inside him huge, horrible, is building. And Olga, right there, staring at him. And his arm visible; she must know what he is. And Josh somewhere near by. And Marta. And nowhere will be far enough away once the words have all been said.

Oh God, no.

“Furnace,” Cezar says, inexorable as an avalanche. “Nine.”

That noise, like the sound of a train with its breaks on hard, screaming to a stop, it’s in his head, but it might be coming out of his mouth, too. He wants to tell Olga to get away. He wants to tear Cezar apart. It is coming, whatever it is that lives inside him. It is coming and soon it will have him and he’ll be in there, sure, yeah, great. He’ll have a front row seat to all the blood he spills, the friends he murders, the horror and the violence. Again.

He hears Josh shouting. “What the fuck are you doing to him?”

And Marta, too. Shrieking.

I told you to go, he thinks, knowing who he will be used against first, feeling it crushing him. Why didn’t you go?

“That’s enough,” Olga shouts. “Cezar, there is a baby in this room!” She lurches into the foyer. Nicolae grabs at her and she socks him hard in the jaw, sends him pinwheeling down to the floor. In another situation Bucky would laugh, delighted. But. Olga glares at Cezar, and gestures over her shoulder at someone unseen. And then behind Olga, behind her, taking the steps from the road two at a time, half-dead cigarette hanging from his mouth…

“Chekov,” Olga says.

And so it is. He has a gun. The Kalashnikov from the restaurant.

“Took you long enough. Did you go to church first?” Olga snipes.

He gives her a withering look and then raises the gun to his shoulder. Cezar looks right back at him.

“Benign,” he says.

Chekov shoots his knees.

The noise Cezar makes dissolves the urge building in Bucky. It sends the animal-like thing, the overwhelming urge, the bloodlust and the monster in him, it sends that back into whatever dark place it came out of. And then Bucky’s panting, sweat has soaked him. It’s running down his temples, between his shoulder blades, unpleasantly down his butt crack. His clothes stick to him. His mouth is gummy and gluey and the corners of his mouth are wet with spittle.

“Chekov,” he croaks, because that’s the thing, the one thing he can’t understand.

Chekov looks him dead in the eye. “You think I sat on my hands during the revolution?”

Bucky would like to answer but all he can do is laugh softly. He feels brittle, pulled at all points. The slightest thing might cause him to shatter. “No,” he answers. “No I don’t.”

There’s the crackle of gunfire out in the street. Everyone ducks.

“This way,” Josh yells, clutching Marta to him, gesturing and then diving toward the service exit. Chekov grabs Olga, Olga grabs Bucky, and they scramble after Josh, through the narrow hallway, past closets stuffed with goons, and, blinking, out into the harsh light of the afternoon.

Natasha is waiting. She’s in her tac vest and combat pants. She meets his eyes, and gives him a long-suffering look. "We'll talk about this later," she says, and he has the vague sense that he's in some kind of trouble. Then she turns her attention to the others. “The Brutar are looking to settle a score,” she tells them. “It’s better if you’re all a long way from here by the time they sweep the house.”

Bucky stares at her, and then grins, huge and stupid and amazed. “You, uh…”

“The term you’re looking for is "playing sides-to-middle", and the answer is yes. Now get lost, Barnes.”

She doesn’t have to tell him twice.

Chapter Text

Elena pays him, in spite of his protests. There are pots of soup and tender stew, there are cupcakes and cookies and ice cream. There are drawings from Marta, which he keeps tucked safe in a new notebook he bought. It’s small and navy blue, and where it says This book belongs to he has written JB Barnes. It’ll do, for now.

Simon and Milo bicker and snipe and they take turns buying him candy bars and cigarettes. He has no taste for the cigarettes, but he’s mad about the candy bars. He keeps them up on top of the fridge, beside the old pitcher of cooking utensils that Maria and Chekov gave him. He uses them whenever he cooks, and he mostly cooks from the recipe cards that Olga wrote out from him, in firm, steady handwriting after he asked her, Do you know who I am? and she said, Don’t be stupid. Of course I do. Now scrub the eyes off those potatoes and peel them.

Between Olga and Constan, he is getting a handle on this cooking thing.

He is making shakshuka, it being sunny and warm. It’s tomato season, according to Constan (but too early for eating tomatoes raw, according to Olga, so he cooks them, in deference to her). The air in his little apartment is scented with dust and mould and the smell of diesel from the vans that unload goods for the market, but also with frying onion, and paprika, and toast turning golden under the broiler. He’s humming something, over and over again, the best part of an old tune, the rest of it forgotten.

“And here we see the Winter Soldier in his natural habitat,” a soft voice says from the door. “Standing in his underwear, cooking his breakfast.” He doesn’t have to turn to know Natasha is there.

He laughs softly in the direction of the pan. You have to watch the eggs, Olga told him, or the yolks get overcooked.

“They’re pyjamas.”

“Are they?”

He glances at her. She comes into the apartment, takes a speculative look at him, and frowns. “So they are. What a shame,” she murmurs.

“Hungry?” he asks, prodding a yolk with the tip of the spatula.

“No. Maria and Olga and Chekov have been feeding me.”

She comes over to the big chair Simon and Constan wrestled up the stairs what feels like forever ago.

“You got in over your head, Barnes,” she tells him, leaning against the back of the chair and crossing her arms.

“I noticed. But,” he adds. "No more extortion. No more gangs. Thanks to you."

“Flattery."

"Nothing wrong with laying it on thick once in a while."

There’s a companionable silence while Bucky turns the gas down so the shakshuka can simmer a bit.

“He wants to see you,” Natasha says then. Bucky feels all his sinews stiffen. He doesn’t have to ask who she means.

“I know,” he answers softly.

“When I came looking for you, it was to see if you were bait in a Cap-trap. As far as I’m concerned, you’re clear. I’ll arrange it if you want. Keep it quiet. Away from official channels.”

He feels breathless. He knows what he wants. His skin feels too small for him, his heart beating too fast. But there’s something dark and terrible in him, and it only takes a few words to make it come out.

“I… don’t think so,” he says very softly. And because it’s Natasha, she doesn’t ask. He raises his head and meets her eyes.

“Okay,” she says. “That’s going to upset Steve,” she adds, “but, for what it’s worth, I think that’s smart.”

He nods at her. It is. It’s awful, but it’s smart. If he can be activated by the right person in the right place, then he needs to stay as far away from Steve as possible, until he learns to overcome the programming, or break it all together. Besides, he's not sure he's ready to see Steve, who must, by now, know all the evil Bucky has done.

“I’m going back to the States,” she says quietly. “Do you want to send a message?”

He shakes his head, then remembers something, something he learned when he was in the Rosu house. “Cezar Rosu said there are kids being controlled by someone named Strucker. Do you know anything about that?”

She frowns and shakes her head. He looks at her again. “I can’t let that go,” he tells her, and she knows what that means. She nods.

“No, I can see how that would bother you. But you’re not really in a position to go crashing around after some kids, are you?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Let me look after it,” she says quietly. “It’s what the Avengers are for. Nobody needs to know where I got the information, and the press will report when it’s done.”

He nods once, and then again. “Okay,” he agrees. Then he adds, quite softly, “Don’t leave them in there.”

She smiles at him, a quirk of the lips. “Softie.”

He grins and nods. When she goes, he butters the toast. He’s way overcooked the shakshuka, but it’s still flavourful and rich. He eats it all, and writes Good in pencil on the recipe card.

Chapter Text

Steve knows he shouldn’t bother with the flowers, but it seems to matter more now that Peggy’s so ill. So he rises earlier than usual on Monday morning, and dresses warm against weather. The air is so thick you could wash with it, but the rain hasn’t started yet.

He stops at the little florists shop and takes his time selecting two blowsy hybrid tea roses, and a shock of baby's breath and goldenrod to set them off. She'll roll her eyes when she sees them, he thinks.

He takes the bouquet to Mount Saint Mary and the sister on duty, not Mary Anita this morning, greets him. She takes the flowers and promises to put them where Peggy will see them if she wakes. He doesn't linger, just says a quiet Thank you and sees himself out.

*

As he goes down the steps to the sidewalk, a cab pulls up and Sharon gets out. Steve’s heart gives a little lurch. They haven’t seen each other since DC, and while he’s not angry any more - after all, he heard what she did for him at SHEILD headquarters - he’s not sure how to feel. Once upon a time, back when she was the cute nurse with the elderly aunt, he was trying to feel in love with her. Now that he knows who she is, and who her aunt is, he can't help cringing just a little thinking about that. 

She looks up and sees him. Her mouth opens just a little but she doesn’t say anything, and he realizes, with a pinch of sympathy, that his is the last face she would have wanted to see here and now.

“She's holding steady,” Steve says, and the relief on Sharon’s face is obvious.

“Good,” Sharon answers, meeting him halfway on the steps. “The way they were talking, I thought it was going to be too late when I arrived yesterday.”

Steve forces a smile, but he can’t meet Sharon’s eyes. He looks over her shoulder instead, at the traffic passing through the damp street. “Yeah, well, she’s tough. Don’t give up on her yet.” He makes himself look at her. Her face is lined with worry, her eyes are dark-circled, the whites a little red. He is aware that he should say something more. “You, um, are you staying near by?”

“Halfway across the city in a hotel,” Sharon answers, and she gives him a wry little smile. “This is an expensive town.”

He laughs and bites back a comment about inflation. Nobody wants to hear his old man stories.

Sharon looks at her feet and then at him. “Did you talk to her? Is… she lucid?”

Steve shakes his head. “No, they don’t let me in.”

“What?”

“It’s…” He shrugs. “I just drop off flowers. It’s upsetting for her, when she sees me alive.”

Sharon frowns, but she nods again. “I guess it would be.”

The conversation runs out, and there’s silence for a moment. Steve clears his throat. “Well, you’d better—“

“Yeah, I’m gonna—“

He moves out of her way, and she goes up the last few steps. “Steve,” she calls from the door. He looks up at her. “If she’s having a good day, I’ll tell her the flowers are from you.”

He smiles and waves his thanks, then changes his mind. Sharon is alone, someone she loves is dying. He knows what that’s like. 

“Hey, uh, listen. I have a guest room, and I’m just a couple blocks that way. You're welcome to stay." 

Sharon shifts her weight and tilts her head and Steve knows it’s too weird after everything that happened, that she’s going to say no.

"No funny business. Just… cheaper than a hotel.”

She takes a big breath. “Thanks," she says. "I’ll text you after.”

“You still have my number?”

She snorts and looks at him like yes, dummy. “Of course I do. You’re Captain America.”

He laughs. It’s the first real laugh in more days than he can recall.

Chapter Text

Steve swallows the last gulp of beer. As if she was waiting for the cue, Sharon pushes her chair back from the table and heads over to the fridge.

“Going in for round two?” Steve asks.

She looks at him over the top of the fridge. “Heck yes. What about you?”

He shrugs. “Sun’s over the yardarm somewhere,” he says.

She grins and ducks into the fridge again. He hears her say, “That’s a weirdly nautical saying from somebody who was a ground-pounder.”

“Is that what they call it now?” he asks, sitting forward. He hears the clink of two more bottles.

“What’d they call it back then?”

“Cornplaster commando,” Steve answers, a little wistfully. Sharon laughs, and then shuts the fridge with her knee and comes over to Steve’s kitchen table with the beers.  “Opener’s on the counter,” he tells her.

Her grin gets cocky. She locks eyes with him and twists the cap off in her hand. He laughs. “Okay.”

She slides his over to him. “They’re twist offs.” She winks. He salutes with his beer.

“Something new every day.”

“Especially for you,” she agrees. She takes a sip and sets the beer down on be-ringed tabletop. Steve reaches over and swipes the tea towel off the stove and then passes it across the damp table top. “Thanks barkeep,” Sharon says and sets her beer down again. She leans back into her chair. “Why didn’t we do this before?” she asks.

Steve shrugs. “You were on duty?”

“And you were looking for a girlfriend.”

Steve grimaces. “Sorry about that.”

Sharon shrugs. “You didn’t know. That was the point.” She takes another sip and sets the beer down again, toying with a corner of the label. “I feel a little bad about that,” she says at last.

“Me too, for what it’s worth.”

Her eyebrows go up and Steve shrugs. “I was… I wasn’t exactly the most understanding of guys there for a bit. And,” he adds, because he hasn’t said it yet, and he knows about not saying things when you have the chance, “I’ve been meaning to say thank you. For having my back at SHEILD.”

She shifts in her seat a little and sticks out her bottom lip. “Bah,” she says finally.

He laughs through his nose. The longer Sharon stays in the guest room, the more he likes her. At first he thought all they had in common was Peggy, and SHEILD, but now he sees how much other stuff they share. They want a better world than this. They are both congenitally unable to follow shitty orders. They believe that people are mostly good most of the time, and all you have to do is give that goodness an avenue to come out. All that, and Peggy too.

“I heard from Sister Mary Anita,” Sharon says then, like she’s reading his thoughts.

“Mmh?” Steve asks through a swig of the beer.

“She says Aunt Peg’s doing better. She might beat the pneumonia.”

Steve doesn’t say it, and that’s fine, Sharon does it for him.

“I’m trying not to get my hopes up.”

Steve nods. “The dry weather probably helps.” He knows about rattling lungs and the damp. This last week has been dry and hot. A gift right from God, as far as Steve’s concerned.

“She also said Aunt Peggy liked the last bouquet. Incidentally, what the hell is scabiosa? It sounds like a skin condition.”

“They’re really pretty, actually. Flowers. But you’re right, it’s a terrible name. I figured Peg would get a kick out of them.”

“Well she did.” Sharon peels the label half off and then tries to stick it back on.

“I don’t that that’s going to work.”

She flicks it from her fingers onto the table and then sits back and fixes him with a look. “You know,” she starts, her voice a little higher than it really ought to be. “This is weird.”

“Huh?”

“Sitting here, drinking a couple beer with you. This is…” she leans forward and points at him. “You do know who you are, right?”

Steve has to stop himself from rolling his eyes, because that’s just rude. But he does groan. “Oh, come on. Not you too.”

“No, not that,” Sharon waves her hand like she’s shooing a fly. “Not the Cap stuff, I mean Aunt Peg used to let me go through her photo albums, and there you were. And I kinda grew up on stories about you. Which, if you’re wondering, is part of why I always said no. Not just because of work. But also because of work. Did you wonder?”

Steve laughs. “I know you’re not going to believe this, but I have a lot of practice getting turned down.”

She grins. “You take it well. You should give lessons.” And then, suddenly, her grin turns impish. “You know, I never believed her. Aunt Peg, I mean. About you. The stories all seemed too…” she gestures in big circles with her free hand.

Steve looks down at himself, huge thighs squeezed into khakis and a t-shirt that is trying to escape before the seams suffer catastrophic failure. He really needs to get over his dislike of change rooms and start trying stuff on. He’s an awful judge of his own body size. “I can see how,” he tells her. “Sometimes I can’t believe it either.”

She nods, eyes a little shrewd. “I… had a doll,” she says then. “An action figure, I guess. Of you. Aunt Peg got it for me after I had a tantrum in Maitland’s and refused to leave until she bought it.”

“Oh?” he asks. He can’t imagine Peg ever bowing to a tantruming child. It must have been a hell of a storm.

“So in a way, you were the first boy I ever kissed.”

He laughs. Sharon shakes her head. “God, I had such a crush on you.” She turns thoughtful then. “Everybody around me was into you. It was the cold war.” Her voice had gone a little soft. “I guess all the adults were scared. They probably just wanted someone to make everything seem less crazy.”

“And the kids?”

“Well, me?” She takes a drink, as if she needs to get ready for this. “My ten year old self wanted a boyfriend and I figured it would either be you or Carl Sagan.” She adds. And Steve knows about that guy, Sam loves that space show. Steve has to admit, it’s pretty incredible.

“Sagan?” he asks. “The Cosmos guy?”

“Those turtlenecks,” Sharon says, and gives him a conspiratorial wink. “Mmm-mmm-mmm.”

He laughs helplessly.

They share a companionable silence and in that moment, Steve’s phone buzzes. It won’t be the Sister; she’d call Sharon if anything urgent happened. Maybe it’s Natasha or Sam, though. “Excuse me,” he murmurs and checks his phone. A text from Clint. Nat’s coming into JFK at 11. All the warm fizz of laughter and talk vanishes and the old, leaden self is back. Nat’s coming home, and that means more information about Bucky. He thinks about those letters, those scrambled, crazy, messed up letters, and something tightens in his throat like a fist. Sharon clocks it.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

“I, uh.” He puts the phone face-down on the table. “I have to go soon.”

“Avenging?” She quirks an eyebrow.

He shakes his head. He can’t match her levity any more. It’s like somebody’s let it all drain out of him. “No, not… but.” He stops and tries to sort out his mind. In the last week, he’s grown to like Sharon the way he had only ever liked Sam and Natasha. And Sharon has the benefit of standing outside that circle, and looking in. She’s not a super, and she doesn’t run with them. And he knows he can trust her, which is saying something these days. “I… I want to go to Europe,” he ventures quietly. “See an old friend. I’m on the fence about the trip.”

She’s looking at him, silent, assessing. She’s so like Peggy when she does this. Other people jump in, finish his sentences, give his thoughts direction. But Peggy always waited. And Sharon does too.

“I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do,” he says at last. “I don’t know what the right thing is.”

She presses her lips together. It’s not disapproval, it’s consideration. “You think it might be hard for your friend, like it’s hard for Aunt Peg?”

“Yeah.” He can hear the way his breath shudders in and out of him. “I think it’ll be real hard for him.”

“And you.”

“And me,” he agrees. She looks down at her beer and then at him again.

“You should go,” she says. No pity, no hesitation. She shrugs at him. “Say you decided not to bother a nice old lady with dementia when you came back, and then you found out she too sick to see anybody, and might die. How would you feel?”

“Bad,” he says. It doesn’t begin to cover how he would feel, but it’ll do.

“Right?” she asks. “I mean, who knows how much time anybody has?”

He nods again, looking down into his beer. It’s the tip of an iceberg, that question. In his darkest, most awful moments, he wonders how much time he has. He wonders if the serum will keep him young forever, if all this might just be a fleeting moment in some interminable lifetime. He fears he may be immortal, and that Peggy is the first in an endless parade of loved ones who will pass away before his eyes. He doesn’t know if Bucky is like him, or if it’s just that he was frozen for so many days of his life that he has hardly aged at all. He doesn’t think even Peggy can teach him what he’ll need to know if he has to sit at Bucky’s bedside and hear his last few breaths.

And there are other issues, too. Not just mortality. Every two-bit semi-super, every kid out to prove herself, every bereaved loved one with a grudge, every politician looking to score quick points, every cop and gumshoe who wants their name in the paper, they’re all looking for Bucky. Anyone with any sense would be watching Steve with a keen eye. He doesn’t want to be the one who leads the trouble to him.

“Steve,” Sharon says, commanding but quiet. “You should go. Before it’s too late. ‘You don’t have to complete the work, but neither are you at free to stop working’ right? Don’t worry about getting it done. Just get to it. ”

He nods. She’s right, of course. “Yeah,” he agrees. He sets his beer down on the table. His heart aches as if someone had been trying to pull it out of his chest, or as if it has been trying to go all on its own, to hell with the big, stupid body that cages it. He knows that ache of old. “Will you keep me up to date? I mean, on Peggy’s condition?”

Sharon sits back, looking almost offended. “Of course.”

He nods. This, getting up, getting moving. It feels good. It feels right. This is a thing he has needed to do since he woke up in the hospital, since he knew that Bucky was alive and free in the world. He can’t recapture the levity of earlier, but he feels the fondness for Sharon again. Good advice, good company. “I owe you another one,” he tells her.

She tilts her head up to look at him and narrows her eyes. “You keep racking up debt, and eventually I’m going to collect, you know.”

He can’t help but laugh. “What could I possibly give you?”

“I’d take a kiss,” she says, and her eyes are wicked and bright. “That would be the fulfilment of a childhood dream. Bucket list item. Definitely. Next time I do you a solid, I’m collecting.”

He laughs. “Sure. Yeah. Okay.”

“Bring me back something nice from Europe, too,” she adds as he starts toward his room. He glances over his shoulder at her.

“Like a… silver spoon or something?”

“Alternative possibility: No bullshit and good news.”

Steve opens his mouth and then shuts it. He points at her. Finally he says, “No promises.”

“At least you’re honest,” she answers, and salutes with her beer.