Chapter Text
The cold, the cold water. The cold he knows.
His mission.
A man.
A man?
Irrelevant, his mission.
He knows him.
A man he knows. He knew.
A man, a life. Irrelevant, his mission.
A man who weighs nothing, a life saved. Not taken. Saved.
Run. Not his mission. Run.
.
Destruction, lives taken, people.
Machine and Gods.
The world is not his own anymore.
Warm, too warm.
Being awake and sleeping, not reprogrammed, not blank. Not wiped.
He’s scribbled on.
.
Things are relevant.
Memories, other lives, not his own.
Towns fall out of the sky.
He struggles to remember. The fall, a man screaming, an echo.
Cold.
.
Ultron’s fall, watched from the stillness of an abandoned apartment, a safehouse, a refuge, a hideout.
Gods and machines, a soldier, not like him, a man, not an asset, only a man.
A boy in uniform, a smaller one, dusty blond hair, a brunette all curls and bright lips. The future.
Not his memories. Irrelevant. He writes them down nonetheless.
.
One day, he wakes and it’s not Monday, it’s Tuesday.
An error. He had not fallen asleep on the bed. He wakes up in it regardless.
It happens again, two months later, he doesn’t have a beard anymore.
It scares him to no end. He looks for HYDRA agents everywhere he goes, and when he finds none, he flees out of pure fear.
.
Barely a year later, in a new country altogether, the woman at the market talks to him like she knows him.
He has no recollection of ever speaking to her.
He considers fleeing once more.
«Cum sunt? Sunt ele bune? Dă-mi șase, vă mulțumesc.»
A week later his face is plastered on every screen of the world.
The Winter Soldier had struck again.
But he hadn’t. Hadn’t he?
The man in his apartment. He knows his name, he knows how much he weighs, he knows how he used to look.
Steve.
He considers killing him.
Someone inside him screams.
And while the Soldier reflects on a kind way to kill the man, he turns and sees him.
He calls him Bucky. He hates the name. But he doesn’t spit his own back.
He doesn’t know him.
The blond man brings trouble.
It always ends in violence. Futile attempts, there is no reason for preventing the soldiers’ deaths, they know what they are doing, the same as him.
War is a machine that stops for no one. The blond man doesn’t understand it.
He’s old, he’s been awake for years now, more than he has ever been; he can feel it on his shoulders.
Another man chases him, he can’t shake the panther off, there is killing intent in his gestures, something the soldier can understand, something he knows.
He hasn’t felt this comfortable in years.
He knows how to deal with death, the killing intent, the chase.
His body sings.
He’s home.
Not in a hideout, not piecing a sense of normality back. Home.
Steve interferes.
They capture him.
Back behind a glass. He waits for the cold, the pain. Electricity.
Nothing comes.
Until a man does. Frail. Breakable.
He fights the words, but something deep inside him craves them.
He’s back home, in the scarlet certainty of violence.
——————
James Buchanan Barnes is no longer his best friend. He could not be, not while the Winter Soldier stretches his skin from the inside out. Thin, so thin that of Bucky nothing remains.
He is there, spread too thinly to be recognised in the hard dips and crevices of his metal arm, but he’s still there.
Unreachable. Bent out of shape and different.
Wrong. So substantially wrong.
How many times must he disappoint him?
How many times does he have to lose him before he stops being the hero he never was?
«Your mom’s name was Sarah. You used to wear newspapers in your shoes.»
A fleeting light, a flicker of hope.
It’s small, but it’s there. Bucky is there, he can almost see him behind the cold eyes of the soldier.
Then the question had come, and his world had shattered.
«How much time has passed?»
«A couple of hours.»
«No, no, it’s— The last time I was awake, it was summer.»
Like a switch, a button being pressed, Bucky’s face had gotten blank, eyes unfocused and lost, and the Winter Soldier had reemerged.
Not quite the killing machine, surely not the man remembering his mother’s name.
«What did I do?» Calculating, almost a request for a report.
«Enough.»
Silence. That is not Bucky.
«Who was he?»
Silence once more, nothing else but silence, reluctance.
«People are dead, the bombing, the doctor did all that only to get ten minutes with you. I need you to do better than silence.»
The man looks at him, full attention on him, and for a moment, Steve fears for his life, doesn’t matter there are literal tonnes on the mechanical arm. Steve fears in one way or another the Winter Soldier could break free and end his life any minute now.
Calculation runs behind his eyes, Steve can almost see them, then, «He wanted to know about Siberia, where I was kept. He wanted to know exactly where.»
It’s too early to breathe a sigh of relief, but Steve concedes himself to at least swallow the knot forming in his throat.
«Why would he need to know that?»
Another calculated silence.
«Because I’m not the only Winter Soldier.»
Not Bucky, not even The Winter Soldier.
Only something else.
Something close enough.
That version of Bucky is wrong, so deeply wrong, but that spark of old recognition had been enough.
He’ll follow him till the end of the line, but Steve is unsure who he is following.
He’s chasing a ghost. A ghost flickering in and out of existence.
.
Bucky follows him methodically, as if he’s nothing more than a means to an end.
He glides over the fact he almost killed the kid.
The journey on the Quinjet is silent, the soldier sits stiffly, eyes focused, deadly.
Steve knows he’s on a mission, still, he silences the doubts clawing at the back of his brain.
He should have listened to them.
The Winter Soldier is a killing machine willing to end yet another life. Tony does his fair share of damage, but the soldier is simply better, more well-trained, efficient, not only calculated but ready.
A loaded gun, His best friend had grotesquely morphed into a loaded gun, always glued to its target.
He fights dirty, viciously.
He leaves Tony and him for dead. Steve begs for him not to, but his words don’t even reach his ears. That must be it, Bucky would never have left him like that, but Steve is once more forced to see his best friend get away, fleeing, not even daring a glance back, and nothing of the soldier’s demeanour speaks of the Brooklyn boy.
He’s a killer. And until the Winter Soldier festers underneath Bucky’s skin, Steve can’t do anything about it.
.
But there might be a chance for him to rip the problem at its root. Quite literally.
Doctor Cho has aged badly, fine lines marring her once perfectly smooth skin.
In less than three years.
But she speaks with such passion and intensity about her creation that Steve cannot help but fall into her own words. Taken. Sold.
In early January of the new year, he tracks him down. To be precise Nat does, in a cramped apartment in southern Italy.
That is Bucky, the scared man ready to cut off the cancer growing underneath his skin.
That is Bucky.
And even if Steve is only half sure about the morality of it all, the desperation is too much to stop now.
There are no screams, but he knows something —deep inside the broken shell his best friend had amounted to be— is thrashing.
A cornered animal. Feral.
——————
You are grossly underqualified for this.
It’s not even a question of pride, of having lied a bit on your curriculum (you don’t really speak Russian that well), it’s a matter of subject.
You are a philosopher, if you can define yourself as such, not a psychologist, and there is nothing on your curriculum suggesting any of that sort.
«Sir, I— I really don’t think I am in any way, shape, or form qualified for this job. I’m not a behaviourist or a behavioural analyst or— or anything of the sort, hell, I’m not even a plain psychologist, I’m—»
«the only one who showed any form of interest.»
The words cut you off efficiently, you should have expected that from a colonel, your disjointed ramble comes to an end and somewhere in the back of your head starts the plain noise of static and silence that perfectly follows your astonishment.
«…What?» Now that must be a lie, a plain, fat lie. It cannot be true.
You are in no way fit to be called a fanatic of this sort of thing, but you own a cell phone and a TV. You have seen the rise and fall of S.H.I.E.L.D. you have heard of Captain America and his newly-found-timely-lost brother in arms.
Hell, you had even visited the Smithsonian on your first visit to Washington, D.C.
You had not expected for the “perfect subject for your thesis” to be James Buchanan Barnes; you truly hadn’t. But you had been so excited and ready to dive headfirst into your stale project with new sources and materials, that when your professor had proposed that you take on a living subject of your own theoretical hypothesis, you had not wasted a minute.
You had packed your already-packed life in London and embarked on the first flight to the United States.
Then James’ name had surfaced, and it had been such an innocuous name, such a common one, so common you had not suspected anything at all, still giddy at the idea of being able to assist a psychiatrist (or perhaps even an équipe) on such a delicate and rare case.
Then the first red flag had shown its ugly head in the form of the metal detectors, then the countless controls had come, until the whole situation had escalated to finding out there was no psychiatrist.
None at all, it was just you, your half-assed thesis and a serial killer.
No. An Assassin, one raised to be deadly.
The more you think of it, the more you can’t wrap your head around the whole situation, the more you can’t, the more it’s painfully plain he is the perfect subject, but… but not like this! Not in the most unsafe conditions ever.
«Well, of course except some very bold HYDRA agent not-so-well under cover.» The colonel’s voice snaps you back to reality.
«Come again?» Now that was dumb.
«Listen, I understand this is a lot,» A lot? This is a whole mess, one you can’t really grip your fingers onto.
He had been the most wanted man alive, the whole world had had their eyes on him, looking for him in every corner, nations had looked for his face in every man with icy eyes and yet here you stand, the only one that had shown interest in him after his capture.
Impossible, something is deeply wrong here, and you have no idea how to address such a thing to the very stern, very tall man in uniform.
«but the facts are these. You can either accept the job or leave, I’m not wasting any more time with this.»
With what, the safety of a civilian? The containment of a rogue agent, a terrorist?
Are you even there to assist? Are you supposed to help him? Rehabilitate him?
It’s clear you are not there only to observe as you had originally intended; the colonel must want you to do something, but what?
What should you be doing with a man reclused behind a glass cage with walls as thick as forearms?
Red flags, so many red flags.
«Listen, kid, you said you were studying the root of evil or something something, the congress just wants him condemned and behind bars permanently, hell, if it were for me, he should be shot in the head but I don’t make the rules, do you want to do it or not?»
What?
No, actually: what. the. fuck.
«I am no judge, sir.»
«Well, colour me shocked, I would have pegged you for one. No shit, kid, but he will be in front of one soon enough, do you think you can bring an evaluation with him in court or should I sent him with none at all.
I’m fine with both.»
So that’s what he wants.
There is no way in hell people who care about him know about this, you must tell Mr Rogers, he had gutted his whole career from the inside out for the man in that cage, he must be unaware of all this.
Perhaps if you accepted, if you could contact him before the audience, you could save a broken man from a terrible destiny.
Your thesis be fucked, in here you are discussing a human being.
You know shit will go south if you go and snitch to Captain America but the man is not easily dismissible, still being the national hero and all that jazz, even after the whole fugitive debacle, perhaps he could protect you, if worst would come to worst you could ask him for help protecting you.
What if he was dead, though?
God, maybe he was, and you would end up stuck with a killing machine and a whole country, if not multiples, after you.
For what? A life you are not so sure is definable as such?
No, hell, what would your Ethics professor think of you if she could hear you now? You cannot go down that rabbit hole in this situation. Barnes is a man, a living, breathing man. You cannot let him rot in a cage without any help at all.
Alone in the world.
God, is this how you find out about Captain America’s death?
Is he dead? Is that why he’s not here fending for his best friend’s life instead of you?
«He’s growing restless.»
What?
Your dumb face must have spoken louder about your own thoughts than your lodged words still stuck in your throat.
«He knows someone is coming, they told him, he hasn’t peeled his eyes from your spot since we entered.»
That’s true, horrifyingly true.
And perhaps more abhorrent than the knowledge is the fact you hadn’t even noticed.
«Aren’t we behind a one-way mirror?»
The colonel laughs dryly, he must be a heavy smoker, nothing else could replicate the gruff quality of his tone.
«Hell, the freak could see through walls for all I know.»
This is so fishy.
You can feel it deep in your bones.
And yet you find yourself nodding.
«I— I’ll think about this.»
«Don’t think too hard, I’m giving you fifteen minutes. Then you either enter there or you get out.»