Chapter Text
Prelude: Moonlight Serenade
- By Glenn MIller, 1939.
It is a sunsoaked afternoon, and he is tired all the way down to his bones. He can hear the soft scritch-scratch-scritch of Steve’s pencil on paper, and faintly, distantly, someone listening to Glenn Miller.
(This is the Soldier-Asset-Bucky’s favorite memory.)
The heat of a Brooklyn summer is thick as taffy all around him. The sunlight glows orange through his eyelids. His muscles are like stretched out rubber bands. Worked hard and long but not so sore as to keep him awake.
(That is something the Soldier-Asset-Bucky understands: the gentle warm-weariness of a job well done, hard work recently finished. And god does he know what it is to be tired.)
He's right on the edge of sleep, toeing the line, drifting. Anything is possible: aliens might invade New York, or Katharine Hepburn might ask him for a light, or Steve might run his fingers through Bucky's hair and lean in and --
(Well. It's nice to think about, anyway.)
1: The Truth
I've been trying to re-learn my name
It seems like a thousand years
I've been out of frame
- by Foster the People, 2014.
The Asset is hiding in a tree. It is. Not Ideal. But at the moment, he lacks the fucking resources to do more than just stay here. In the goddamn tree.
The Asset -- Bucky? The Asset. He is just so goddamn tired. It is possible that he has been tired since the 1930s, but he lacks the intel to confirm that. No point thinking about it too much at this juncture. Especially since thinking about it too much makes--
--it feel like every single muscle in his body is aching, overworked and under-rested. He's lying in his bunk, trying to work up the energy to jerk off, but even that is beyond his reach just now. He hasn't been this tired since… ever. It's not like no one warned him about Boot Camp, but this makes--
--something else pop up in his head. He grits his teeth and rides out the waves of nausea inducing pain that roll through his temples.
The thing is, he has no idea of that memory is really his, or really real, or even a memory at all. He had no frame of reference. As far as he knows, Hydra can do pretty much whatever the fuck they want. And to the best of his knowledge, they've been using the space between his ears as their personal sandbox for… a while.
It's… not completely impossible that he's been tired since the 1930s. It just doesn't seem all that realistic.
But in a more immediate sense, he’s tired because he hasn’t slept in at least 24 hours and (he suspects) possibly longer.
He’s also tired because Captain fucking Asshole is a heavy sonuvabitch. Swimming with one arm dislocated and the other made out of goddamn metal was gonna be difficult enough without having to carry Steve’s unconscious ass to shore. On top of that, he has the headache to end all goddamn headaches, and he’s been dodging emergency services all day.
Hence the fucking tree. It’s poking him in the back, and the ass, and half the branches broke on the way up, but the foliage makes good cover. The conflicting reek of blood and smoke and dirty water and now fucking pinesap is making his stomach turn and his head throb more insistently, but it should have any sniffer dogs chasing their own tails.
OPERATION PROTOCOL: RETURN TO BASE WITHIN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS.
And yeah, that ain’t exactly helping. It’s very goddamn distracting to have that blaring like a klaxon in the back of his head. He knows he’s felt this imperative before. It’s got the taste of urgency. Of fear. The Soldier was always afraid. Bucky -- the Asset knows that, without really remembering a specific instance.
It’s been just over twenty-four hours since Maintenance, but it’s like the PROTOCOL knows that he’s got exactly no plans to return to any kind of fucking base. It had been hard enough to hold off the PARAMETERS.
He shudders a little and his head gives a particularly nausea-inducing throb, and it's--
--just one more blow, perhaps two, and then the mission will be over, and he can go back in the tank. He wants to crawl back and beg for it. He wants the oblivion. The fear will stop. The screaming will go away. But then the stupid target opens his stupid mouth again and says--
“Then finish it. Cause I’m with you till… the end of the line.”
And it isn’t TARGET: CAPTAIN AMERICA staring up at him. There’s no helmet, no white letter A over fierce blue eyes and a jaw like a slab of all-American beef, it’s--
--Just a skinny kid, and he’s got his hand on Stevie’s shoulder, and the words are coming out of his mouth. “--end of the line, pal," is on his lips, in his throat. Stevie doesn’t have a black eye (for once) but he’s more bruised, more beaten than Bucky’s ever seen him and it's breaking his heart, it's--
--Steve.
Wait.
Bucky?
Who the hell--
MISSION PARAMETERS: TERMINATE CAPTAIN AMERICA.
This isn’t Captain America, this is Steve -- STEVEN GRANT ROGERS, CAPTAIN AMERICA -- it’s Stevie, little Stevie, the fuckin’ skinny punk-ass kid who can’t keep his goddamn mouth shut it’s--
The Helicarrier shifts. The ground falls away. The Arm saves him -- he feels the wrench of it all along his shoulders, down his spine, along his sides where the arm is braced, attached. He ignores the pain. He watches. He watches Captain America falling, falling, falling...
OBJECTIVE ACHIEVED: CONFIRM TERMINATION.
No. This can’t be happening, it's--
--going to make him sick if it doesn't stop, Jesus. The Asset shakes his head hard, bangs it back against the tree trunk harder. Which does nothing to help his headache but does annoy the shit out of the squirrel who’s tree he’s sharing.
Thanks for the flashback, there, Ace, the Asset thinks, hard and angry, at his own goddamn brain. I do actually fuckin’ remember what happened earlier to-goddamn-day.
Though, to be fair to his brain, that’s hardly a given.
He’s glad he shook off the flashback before it got to the part where Steve had actually been goddamn dead, for all of about thirty seconds. He hadn’t been breathing, when they reached the shore. The Asset had heard that big dumb heart stop. It had been enough to satisfy the MISSION PARAMETERS. Termination con-fucking-firmed.
The horror that had filled him at the time had been so all-consuming that he could do nothing but stare. He's dead. I killed him. He'd killed so many people, why had this one felt like cracking open his own ribcage, flaying out his insides for all the world to see?
And then whatever juice had made Stevie into Captain America did its job and that big dumb heart gave a weak stutter in his chest. He turned his head, coughed slightly, spitting dirty river water. His chest rose and fell. The Asset listened to the heartbeat, getting stronger.
Then he had bolted -- or, stumbled, at any rate -- away before the MISSION PARAMETERS could come back.
He’s still waiting, terrified that at any moment the MISSION PARAMETERS will sink teeth into his neck and drag him back into line. But the only thing in his head besides pain is --
OPERATION PROTOCOL: RETURN TO BASE WITHIN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS.
He grunts, and bangs his head back against the tree. Again. The squirrel chitters its rage at him.
He squeezes his eyes shut and tries to think around the protocol. But he keeps picturing it: staring down at Steve (Little Stevie, when in his goddamn life had that idiot said “I’m not gonna fight you” to anyone?) and hearing nothing. No rattling breath. No wheezy cough. No heartbeat. Nothing, for thirty whole seconds. He had actually killed the guy, even if it didn’t take. He remembers--
No. Fuck. Stay in the present. Come on.
Steve had started breathing again. And the the MISSION PARAMETERS haven’t come back. (Yet.)
But.
If thirty seconds had been enough to silence the MISSION PARAMETERS, then maybe there’s a way to fool the OPERATION PROTOCOL too.
He rubs his face with both hands. Far away, he can hear emergency services, sirens and orders being shouted.
OPERATION PROTOCOL: RETURN TO BASE WITHIN SEVENTY-TWO HOURS.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the Asset mutters under his breath. “I got it, alright? I fuckin’ got it. You want me to return to base? I’ll return to fuckin’ base.”
He kicks down the back door of the bank, knife in one hand, grenade in the other, and a snarl on his lips. It's after dark, and when he tears into the vault, there's just two people there: techs. One has a bow tie. The other has a beard. They were there-- they were there when--
“Spu--!”
A roundhouse kick to the temple cures Bow Tie of the urge to shout code phrases. Before Beardy Face can make the same attempt, the Asset holds up the grenade demonstrably. “I go to sleep, we both go boom,” he grates out.
Beardy Face raises his hands.
“Smart choice, dollface,” the Asset says. Beardy Face goes improbably paler.
“Oh my God,” he says. “You really are--”
“Ah ah ah,” the Asset says, raising his knife and jiggling it. Beardy Face's eyes fix on the knife and follow as it weaves a little in the air. “What did I just say?” Beardy Face shuts his mouth. “Good boy. Now come here.”
Beardy Face swallows, then shuffles closer.
“Closer,” the Asset whispers.
Beardy Face looks about ready to wet himself, but obligingly shuffles within reach.
“Sleep tight, Asshole,” the Asset tells him, and then lays him out with a swift knock to the temple.
For a moment, he stares down at them. They're here, they're helpless. And they--
--are talking all around him. “He's been out of cryofreeze too long,” the man with the bow tie is saying.
The Asset stares into space, not making eye contact with any of the techs or the STRIKE team. That much is compliance, even if nothing else is. There is a moment replaying in his mind.
The man on the bridge, the Target, saying -- something. A name, a blank space, a mute void where a name should be. And the look on his face, recognition, but (for once) not fear. Hope, instead, and all the pain that comes with it.
And the Asset had been on a bridge. A different bridge. A bridge with a train. Before he had been the Asset. The Target had been there, too. Back when he had been… who, exactly?
The man on the bridge. The Asset. The Target. Who was he? He used to know this. He used to know--
“Then wipe him. Start over,” says the Handler.
And the body knows what comes next. Hands push him back into the Chair. The bite guard. Taste of rubber on his tongue, squeaking between his teeth as he bites down hard. The machinery starting up all around him. He must stay still. The restraints. His chest heaves, his heart races. He must stay still -- and then -- and then they--
--deserve to die.
These techs. They were there. How many times? How many wipes?
He could do it. Lord knows he's got the skillset. They made sure of that, didn't they? Burned out every part of him that wasn't weaponizable.
He could kill them. They deserve to die.
The Arm is up, and he doesn't remember raising it. It's ready to fall, to crush their skulls and leave them bleeding and--
No, says something inside. Not the PARAMETERS, something else. Him. That's him giving the orders now. Something inside giving directives. As much as he wants them all dead, he doesn’t want to actually do it himself. He doesn't want more blood on his hands.
He turns, from them to the Chair. The computer banks.
He tears the place apart.
He puts his metal fist through the glass screens. He tears wires out and like so many loose threads. He cracks the metal casings and breaks the motherboards into powder. He whirls on the Chair.
The Chair--
For a split second he balks at the smell of it: metal and electricity. Burned hair and piss. For a second, he is frozen.
Then he surges forward, savage. He rips the cables out of the wall, tears the arms off and twists them. Digs his fingers into the restraints and bends them open. It's just metal and leather, rubber and wires. It's nothing supernatural, just a machine. Machines can be broken. He pulls it all apart and when there's nothing left to rend, he batters with his metal arm over--
The procedure has already started.
And over--
Put him on ice.
And over--
Wipe him.
And then. Then he turns on the crumpled techs, Arm raised, ready once more. His blood is up, primed to fight, full of fury. This time, maybe--
But suddenly, he is just
so
tired.
The anger drains away.
Enough, he thinks. It's enough.
He lets the Arm fall to his side. It purrs out a calibration loop; shoulder to fingertip to shoulder.
He locks the two scientists in the closet and goes rummaging through their files. Everything on him is hardcopy only: too sensitive to risk some industrious hacker getting their hands on it. He figures he has an hour until Hydra comes to check on this outpost. That's standard procedure, and they're going to have more important things to stress about just now.
This means he has an hour to get the trackers out of his goddamn Arm.
He finds the relevant files -- a dog eared, often photocopied user manual, Jesus Christ. He turns it over in his hands -- metal and flesh. He drags his metal thumb across the dirty, dog eared edges. He scratches his fingernail along the plastic spiral binding.
He keeps thinking it should be red leather. Black star. Hand written. Cyrillic. He keeps thinking... this isn't the right book.
He shakes his head. It's the book he's fucking got, so he starts flipping through. He needs intel.
And yes, there are trackers in the Arm, and a timed sedative, a remotely activated adrenaline shot, and an explosive because holy shit why the fuck not, he guesses? Not to mention the Sputnik off-button, which is hardwired in. Thank God they never sent him to a science museum or an astronomy class, Christ. But even there, deactivating that will be a simple matter of cutting a wire. He’s not going to have to do any self-surgery, it seems, because “any foreign object placed beneath the skin without extensive anchoring will be rejected by the body.”
His side and shoulder aches, where the Arm has been… extensively anchored. He rolls his shoulder and hopes to god there aren’t any memories of that surgery lurking under the sick roiling turmoil of his long-forgotten past.
His head hurts in a way that feels like storm clouds on the horizon.
He rubs at his temple. Still. That does explain a few things. The manual says his body can get over just about anything within three days. Well. Anything short of amputation, he guesses.
He looks down at the Arm. “Alright Sweetheart,” he says to it. “We got shit to do.”
It takes forty-five minutes to get all the trackers, as well as the explosive, the sedative, and the adrenaline, which are all buried deep in the shoulder socket. He cuts the wire for the Sputnik off switch and pulls out the tiny receiver it was attached to. He puts the trackers in his pocket, then locks the sedative, the adrenaline, and the explosive in one of the safety deposit boxes.
He raids the equipment storage box behind the Tank for civvie clothes, a good backpack, some rations, and a canteen of water. He leaves the tac gear behind. He takes his user manual, rolled up deep in the bottom of his backpack. He takes no weapons.
Fifty minutes.
He spends sixty seconds of his remaining ten minutes staring longingly at the Tank.
He is very goddamn tired and he would very much like to sleep.
He turns his back on the Tank and flees the scene of destruction. The Hydra scientists are awake now, banging feebly on the closet door. He doesn’t let them out, but as he’s leaving, an armored car comes around the corner a little too fast. He turns, and pulls a baseball cap on, tucks his gloved hands into his pockets, and keeps walking.
First, he goes to Union Station. He slips one tracker into the duffel bag of a kid heading out to Atlanta on a greyhound bus. He slips another into the briefcase of a man heading to the airport and, eventually, Tokyo. He slips a third into the pocket of a woman going home to California, and the last into a suitcase belonging to an African dignitary of some kind.
He could have just destroyed the trackers, but this feels more satisfying. He imagines Hydra scrambling to recover their precious Asset, wasting resources sending teams to every corner of the goddamn globe. Because--
--Steve may have been the Man With a Plan but James Buchanan Barnes was no slouch, especially when it came to pranks. Once, when a CO had nearly gotten Stevie and a whole platoon killed, Bucky and the Howlies had 1) taken the officer’s desk out to his parking space, 2) taken his Jeep completely apart, and then 3) assembled said Jeep in the office, where his desk had been. That bastard spent a week trying to figure out how they'd gotten the Jeep in through the door. No one felt much inclined to help him, because--
--that's tactically sound.
Fuck. Ow. The Asset rubs his temples. He might have smiled at that memory, but remembering it felt like twirling a fork in his brain stem.
And he can't afford to be out of commission right now. He needs a plan. He needs to fucking think, but his head aches. The pain is building, reminds him of being in the Chair all over again, but this time the pain is coming from the inside, and he--
--is standing in a bare apartment. He's staring at a place where the wall has been ripped out, revealing the wiring and support beams behind the drywall. There's a single hammer discarded on the floor. A can of beer. All of it covered in dust. Clearly someone was partway through renovations this and gave up for some reason. But he can hear water gurgling somewhere, so the place hasn’t been cut off or anything.
A good place to lie low for a while.
But how the ever living fuck did he get here?
He has a vague, uncertain memory of ducking his head, moving fast but not too fast, finding the seediest part of town (not far from the train yard) and systematically scanning the buildings for a good place to squat that wasn't already occupied.
He was trained for this. To hide in plain sight, lie low and wait for extraction. There won’t be an extraction this time, but this skillset -- assess, adapt, improvise-- this is something he's been good at for a long--
--while to find the best spot, with clear sightlines down onto the town and now Steve's gone and fucked that sweet spot but royally. A salute. Jesus. What the hell was he thinking? He's going to kick Steve's ass for this, never mind that he's the captain, because he's an idiot and has been for a long-ass--
--time.
Christ.
The Asset clutches his head and breathes through the pain. He is built to endure, but this is. This is a lot.
Fuck it. He's here now. And if he wasn't really -- present -- for the finding of this space, doesn't change the fact that it's a good squat and he needs a place to call base for now.
He will lie low for a few days. This is an order that he gives to himself. Mission Objective, he thinks. Lie low for a few days. There’s a kind of satisfaction in giving himself orders. It’s like a job well done, but with less blood.
He sits on the bare floor of his squat. It is a partially-renovated apartment. There is water in the taps. There is glass in the windows, on the other side of the shades. There is no electricity, but he does not require electricity. Yeah, his head hurts, but he can handle it. He grabs his backpack, pulls out a ration pack. He munches on a field ration and feels pretty darn good about himself.
Twenty-four hours later, the Asset is kind of wishing that he’d just crawled back in the Tank, or maybe just turned the gun on himself. The persistent headache has blossomed into a supernova of agony. He’s remembering things, but it’s too much too much too much. He's got twenty-seven years of memory crowding into a brain that not used to having more than seventy-two hours. And anyway--
--Steve's not going anywhere when he can't move without puking. He says it's just a headache, a real bad one. A migraine, his ma called ‘em. He gets ‘em sometimes when the weather is changing, just needs to call in sick and wait it out. Given that Steve didn't call in sick when he had fucking pneumonia, Buck can't quite imagine what the pain must be like. But it ain’t like he can get himself into trouble if he can't move, so Bucky can safely leave him here, right?
It's just that he doesn't want to.
“Ahhh,” he says, “I can take a day, not like the professor knows when I'm there, and anyway--”
--it's a little hard to process the sudden influx of memories when your body is trying to turn itself inside out.
Distantly, the Asset realizes that, because the Americans never had access to Karpov and Lukin’s book, they had never really been able to use his brainwashing as it was intended to be used.
Instead, they'd used drugs.
Drugs to keep him obedient, to keep him focused, to keep him awake and not distracted by things like hunger. “Parts of the brain are just completely dark, but the amygdala, parts of the hippocampus, the nucleus accumbens, they’re all working overtime.” “What are you telling me, doctor?” “I’m telling you that you need to add some serious anti-anxiety meds to his cocktail.” They used chemicals to cut off some parts of his brain and wake up other parts. And now, all the chemicals his body has relied on for the last decade are gone.
Distantly, a part of him understands this. The main part of him, however, is rather absorbed in the business of shaking violently, sweating aggressively, losing fluids from every orifice, and feeling like--
--shit. And Christ, what a place to feel like shit. He's in the corner of their cage, and he must have kept the whole block awake with his coughing. He reeks, the cage reeks, his fellow prisoners reek, and he can’t stop fucking shivering. It’s like the cold is inside him, coming out from his bones to meet the cold digging into his skin. He can’t get warm. He can’t get comfortable. Dugan is watching him with worry on his big stupid face. Worry and pity and fear and Christ, this must be what it's like for Steve when he feels like--
--absolute death.
Christ. That was a bad one. The memory makes him feel sick, on top of the sick he already feels. Fuck.
He locks himself in the bathroom and doesn't bother wasting rations by eating. He scratches at the bugs crawling on his skin (he knows they aren't really there but that Does Not Help) and grits his teeth to keep from screaming (and knows that he has lots of practice with that, which also Does Not Help.) The Arm does calibration loops so fast and so constantly that the plates seem to never stop rippling, up and down and--
--up and down, over and over, the soothing, repetitive motion something to focus on that isn’t pain, isn’t the halo coming down. The loop starts again as the paddles press and instead of the fear, he thinks about the up and down and--
“Thanks for trying, Sweetheart,” he tells it.
Scritch, scratch, scritch, he remembers. Glenn Miller. Moonlight Serenade, he remembers. And being warm. Warm all the way through.
Just the memory is enough to get him through the worst of it.
It has been a whole week since his last wipe. One hundred and sixty eight hours of freedom, oh yeah. And yes, he has spent most of that time in pain; either puking his guts up or shitting his brains out because, wow. Detox sucks the big one. And yes, he has spent most of that time in an unfurnished, half-renovated apartment with no electricity. And yes, he has spent all but the last twelve hours or so with the kind of headache that feels like tiny gremlins trying to burrow out of his brain with pickaxes and dynamite. So, in his experience, freedom also sucks the big one. But hey. Freedom may be a real turd sandwich, but it’s his goddamn turd sandwich.
Right now, he’s lying spread eagled on the floor, trying to organize his thoughts.
It is…
Hard.
He remembers, with more or less equal clarity: wearing a suit and dancing with a woman in a blue dress that swirled around her calves; dragging a knife across a Nazi’s throat; using a high-tech rocket launcher to bring down a stealth jet that would have been invisible to the naked eye, like something out of a goddamn Wonder Woman comic. He remembers targets in suits with padded shoulders, in three-piece tailoring with high waists and suspenders, in skinny jeans, in fatigues. He remembers a man with Captain America’s head sitting on skinny shoulders; a stubborn set to his jaw and blond hair flopping across his forehead. He has a lot of memories of a city full of old cars, women with their hair curled, going to school, but without any phones or computers or calculators.
It is. Confusing.
But he can think now, in a way he couldn’t before. He can allow himself to think about things.
He knows that Hydra can take away memories, because he can remember them doing that, now. (There are still blank spaces in his recollections, but they feel different -- trying to think about them feels like looking at the sun directly, while some instinctive part of your brain hisses don’t .)
He knows that Hydra can take away memories, but he has to wonder if they can do the opposite, because none of this makes any fucking sense unless the memories are implanted. And if Captain (Stevie) America recognized him…
Captain America’s voice and appearance was enough to rattle his programming, enough to make him slither out of Hydra, slither past the protocols and crawl free. To the Asset’s knowledge, the only people who have that kind of power are Handlers.
The thought makes him break out in a cold sweat. Wanting and Not Wanting things still makes him feel a little queasy, but… He doesn’t want any more goddamn Handlers.
He needs more intel on this man. Rogers. Stevie. Captain America. Whoever the fuck he is.
That is what brings him to the exhibit.
His mission briefing on Rogers included intelligence on strengths (speed, agility, the shield), weaknesses (aim for the legs), but had failed to mention that he was born in nineteen-goddamn-eighteen, and had spent most of the last century frozen like a popsicle. Jesus Christ, the Asset was working with morons.
At first, when he sees a man called James Buchanan Barnes wearing his face, he figures there are three possibilities. Most probably, he is an assassin who has been made to look like Bucky Barnes for the express purpose of throwing Captain America off his game. Slightly less probable is that he is actually a clone, programmed and enhanced by Hydra -- he’d never heard of them cloning someone successfully, but if Barnes was captured, they could hypothetically have his genetic material on file or whatever.
By far the least probable explanation is that James Buchanan Barnes, born 1917, fell into a frozen ravine seventy goddamn years ago and somehow fucking survived.
And yet. He’s remembers things. He remembers an alley. Many alleys. He remembers the skinny version of Rogers. He remembers, something, maybe--
“--she’s got a friend,” Steve says like the little fucking shit he is, and claps him on the shoulder before turning back to the bar. Bucky turns too, and sinks onto the stool, reaches for his drink. He’s not any more drunk than he was when he started.
He doesn’t like to think about that. Doesn’t like to think about the way everything feels different now, the way he’s hungry all the goddamn time, the way he could smell Carter coming before he saw her. The way everything feels like it’s hanging on his last nerve, like he’s about to fucking snap at any goddamn minute.
“--Oh dig my grave both wide and deep, wide and deep!” the guys are singing.
Steve is watching him. And Bucky realizes that he should have said something to that remark. Steve was being a little shit, and Bucky Before The War would have had something to say about that.
Far too late, he says: “You’re an asshole, Steven Grant.”
“Put tombstones at my head and feet, head and feet!”
“You okay, Buck?” Steve asks, all concerned and shit.
“Who me?” Bucky says, all innocence.
“And on my breast just carve a turtle dove!”
Steve isn’t buying what Bucky’s selling here, Bucky can tell.
“To signify I died of love!”
Bucky finishes his drink. “Just tired pal. You think maybe--”
--no. Not maybe. Definitely. Quit dancing around it, Barnes.
Christ.
He rubs his face with his flesh hand. He is just so fucking tired. The -- Bucky. He's has been tired as hell since nineteen-goddamn-thirty, when he saw three big kids ganging up on some scrawny idiot who wouldn’t stay the fuck down, and he thought: ‘Aw hell. I should probably kick their asses.’
None of that is in the exhibit, but he knows it’s true. And in the end, that’s what convinces him. It's doesn't make sense, but it's true. It's not realistic, but...
James Buchanan Barnes, this is your life. Realistic went out the fucking window the day you met Steven Grant Rogers.