Chapter Text
He has this nightmare.
A nightmare about Kreischberg.
About that awful POW camp.
About the smell of the unwashed bodies, the smoke and the dead.
About running through the halls, looking for the room where they put Bucky and barely being able to find it.
A nightmare where he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.
And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.
And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.
And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.
XxX
“Can’t sleep?” Natasha asks when he enters the kitchen on the communal floor. She’s standing by the window in the dark, looking out over New York City. She doesn’t turn to face him.
“Bad dream,” he says, fetching a glass of water.
“Me too,” Natasha responds.
Steve takes a sip of water and sets his cup down. “What did you dream?”
She shrugs.
There is a beat of silence and then she says, “The Red Room sent me to kill one of my own – a Black Widow gone rogue.”
“I’m sorry,” Steve says after another moment of silence.
“I’ve killed Red Room operatives before,” she says. He can’t find a trace of emotion in her voice. She’s deliberately hiding an emotion, but he’s not sure which one. “This dream was just so vivid.”
“I dreamed I couldn’t save Bucky,” Steve says. “From that POW camp in Austria. I could smell death in the air, feel the cold wind. It’s amazing how your brain can replicate every little detail of your worst fears.”
XxX
When he wakes again, he doesn’t notice that anything is different right away. The left side of the bed is empty, but Bucky often gets up before him since neither of them are strangers to nightmares. But, unlike Steve, once Bucky is up, he’s up.
He doesn’t notice that Bucky’s towel is missing from the rack when he goes to shower. Or that Bucky’s boots aren’t stacked in the hallway, where he kicks them off every night. Or that Bucky’s weapon cache has vanished from the closet.
When he makes his way back to the communal kitchen, Tony is sitting in front of a cold cup of coffee, hunched over a tablet. His brow is furrowed and his shoulders hunched.
“Tony?” Steve asks.
Tony doesn’t respond, only flicks between two pages on the screen.
“Did something happen?” Steve asks.
No response.
“Tony!”
That gets his attention. Tony jumps slightly, realizes it’s Steve and settles back into his chair.
“There was some sort of massive energy release just outside of Earth’s atmosphere last night,” he says.
“What? Are we under attack?” Steve asks.
Tony shakes his head. “Not that we can tell. I’m… listening to official channels,” he says in a way that suggests he’s eavesdropping more than listening. “And I have JARVIS monitoring the situation. It’s like someone set off a bomb just outside of Earth’s atmosphere. Messed up some readings from space stations and reset a few satellites, but nothing was harmed.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Steve says.
“I just have this feeling in my gut,” Tony admits. “Like it was something, but I just don’t know what yet.”
XxX
With nothing to go on, Steve has no choice but to go about his day. He works out. He reads the news. Answers emails.
He runs into Natasha and Clint in the kitchen that evening. Nat is tossing breadcrumbs at Clint and stops the moment Steve walks in.
“Did Bucky train with you two today? He normally joins me,” Steve says.
Clint and Nat look at each other as an uneasy stillness falls over them both.
“Bucky?” Clint asks.
“I just wanted to know if you’d seen him. He left pretty early this morning. I think he’s been having nightmares and I haven’t heard from him all day. I mean, I try to respect when he wants space but I still worry about him, you know?”
“Steve, are you feeling okay?” Nat asks.
“Well, I didn’t sleep well, either,” Steve says. “But you already knew that.” Steve pauses. “Come to think of it, Bucky wasn’t in bed after you and I spoke last night.”
He pulls his phone out. “Maybe something happened,” he says, a hint of panic creeping into the edge of his voice.
He’s silent, staring down at his phone for a beat.
“Steve.”
“None of my texts to Bucky are here. And—it’s not even showing Bucky’s phone number.” Steve glares up at them. “This isn’t funny. Whoever messed with my phone, we are going to have a talk.”
“Steve, you need to calm down,” Nat says.
Steve shakes his head, dialing numbers on his phone. “I am calm,” Steve says, then goes quiet to listen to the line.
He hangs up after a moment, his mouth pulled tight. “The line has been disconnected,” he says. “Why is Bucky’s line disconnected?” he asks.
“Steve, who are you talking about?” Clint asks.
Steve glares at him. “Bucky. You know. The Winter Soldier. My boyfriend. Long hair, metal arm. Come on, guys, this isn’t funny.”
“No one is laughing,” Natasha replies. “There is no one called the ‘Winter Soldier,’ and if you have a boyfriend, you certainly haven’t introduced him to us.”
“JARVIS, can you tell me if Bucky is in the building?” he asks instead of responding to Nat.
There is a long pause and then JARVIS’ clear voice comes down from the ceiling. “I have no records of anyone who goes by the name ‘Bucky’ entering the building.”
XxX
“You think this is funny?” Steve yells when he bursts into Tony’s lab.
Clint and Natasha are behind him, but he’s not listening to either of them as he storms up to Tony and stands over him.
“You mess with my phone, you get JARVIS to lie to me?”
“Why, hello, Cap, good to see you again,” Tony says, not letting himself be intimidated by a towering supersoldier. “While I have been known to enjoy a prank on occasion, I haven’t really had the time to pull a prank lately. I’ve been too busy saving the world, watching to make sure the government doesn’t get infiltrated by Nazis again, inventing incredible technology, stuff like that. So you are going to have to stop and tell me what you think I did?”
“You messed with my phone. I get it, Tony, very funny, is this another old man joke?”
“I didn’t touch your phone, Steve.”
“You deleted all my texts from Bucky, and it’s telling me his line doesn’t exist, and JARVIS claims he’s never even heard of him. So, very funny. Call it off now. I think something happened to him.”
Tony stares at him for a moment and then looks over to Natasha. “Do you know anything about this?”
“He says he has a boyfriend named Bucky, who lives in the Tower with us,” Clint says. “He must be a master ninja to have gone unnoticed by all of us.”
“You go to the range with him once a week!” Steve yells. “Would you stop pretending that you don’t know who Bucky Barnes is!”
The room is very quiet when Steve stops yelling.
Tony clears his throat. “Bucky Barnes?” he says. “The Howling Commando who died in 1945? That Bucky Barnes?”
XxX
“You’re you,” Tony says, but he doesn’t sound any relieved by this fact.
Steve has calmed down a lot since Tony scanned his head and tested his blood.
“Thanks,” he says flatly.
“I mean, nothing has altered you that I can tell,” Tony continues. “You are the same Captain America I’ve been working alongside for several years now. Only, you tell me that HYDRA, the HYDRA that we helped destroy last year when we discovered they had infiltrated SHIELD, found Bucky’s body in a ravine in the Alps and made him into a supersoldier assassin known as ‘The Winter Soldier,’ and you saved him and he’s been living in my Tower, fighting alongside the Avengers, and, my favorite part, has been your boyfriend for the past year?”
“I’m not lying,” Steve says.
“I don’t think you are lying. I think you really believe that. And I think we need to find out what caused that energy burst last night because it’s starting to look like you’ve been magicked in some regard.”
“I’m not under a spell.”
“Fine, maybe you were poisoned, I don’t know, Steve, but I do know that James Buchanan Barnes died in 1945 and there was never an assassin known as the Winter Soldier.”
“Sir, if I may,” JARVIS interrupts them.
Tony sighs. “Go ahead.”
“I’ve been combing through all the files Agent Romanov uploaded to the internet when Project Insight happened.”
“Did you find something, J?” Tony asks.
“Yes, it seems that HYDRA did have an asset they called the Winter Soldier from 1947 through 1964.”
“What happened to him?” Tony asks.
“When he was not in use, HYDRA kept the asset in cryofreeze. It seems the cryo vessel they placed him in malfunctioned and the asset was killed. They dissected him to learn what they could about the supersoldier serum from his body but were unable to recreate it.”
“Well. Fuck,” Tony says.
Steve jumps to his feet. “He can’t be dead! He was right here last night!” Steve yells.
“I believe you,” Tony says, keeping his voice deliberately level and soft. “Steve, I believe you, and we will figure it out.”
“Sir,” JARVIS says. “Agent Barton is requesting medical aid in the garage.”
XxX
“I’m fine,” Natasha says for the third time. The bullet lodged in her bicep. It’s unfortunate but not deadly. “I’ve had worse,” she says, trying to wave the medic off of her. It’s probably true, but that doesn’t deter the medic whatsoever.
“JARVIS, what the hell happened to this camera,” Tony says. He’s got the playback of the incident in the garage up on the wall. Barton and Romanov pull in. Romanov gets out of the car. Barton gets out of the car. Then there is a blur of light on the left side of the screen. It moves closer to Romanov and then Romanov goes down. Barton rushes around the car, grabs Natasha and the image becomes crystal clear again.
“I detect no problems with the cameras anywhere on the premises.”
“Great,” Tony says. “Captain America is imagining things, someone is trying to kill the Black Widow and JARVIS has been hacked. This is just. Great.”
“Tell me what happened,” Steve says, ignoring Tony.
“We went to pull some of the physical files on HYDRA from SHIELD,” Natasha says. “No one followed us. We pulled into the garage, it looked clear. I exited the vehicle. And this woman approached me. She spoke to me in Russian. She said, ‘Look at me,’ and then she raised her arm and shot me,” Natasha says.
“Did you recognize her?” Steve asks.
Natasha shakes her head.
“What did she look like?” Steve asks.
“She was dressed all in black, except for this white hood that she wore. She didn’t look like HYDRA or anyone else I know of.”
“All right, JARVIS, start looking up any evil women in white hoods,” Tony says. “I’m going to listen in on Big Brother and see if anyone has any idea what that energy burst was last night, because it’s starting to look connected.”
“You had a nightmare last night,” Natasha says when Tony leaves the room.
Steve nods.
“I had a nightmare last night,” Natasha says.
“You had to kill another Black Widow, you told me,” Steve says.
Natasha nods. “But when I woke up this morning—it’s like… it wasn’t a nightmare. Steve, when I think about it now, it’s a memory. It happened. I killed her. I remember now. It was December, 1997. The Widow – they’d given her a mark to run on a long con. We used to call them Wife Jobs. You go in, convince the guy you love him, marry him, even raise his kids She was given a Wife Job and she fell for the man. She went off the map. She stopped checking in with her superiors, so they sent me to kill her.”
“Last night, you said it was a dream, and now you’re saying it’s a memory?” Steve asks.
“Steve, think about your dream last night. Does it feel like a dream to you?”
Steve wets his lips, looks away from her. Thinks back to Kreischberg. To the POW camp that had Bucky. Azzano.
To the pens the Commandos were kept in. The smell of dirty hair and unwashed clothes. He’d asked them where Bucky was and they told him they’d taken him. They’d taken him and Steve had searched room by room by room and—
“ Fuck!” He says and turns to Natasha. “No. No. This is bullshit. I saved him in Austria. I found him. I brought him out of the camp. We went back to London together. He was in my commando unit.”
“I believe you,” Natasha says. “Because I didn’t kill that Widow in ’97 but I remember doing it.”
XxX
There are pictures of the Winter Soldier and Bucky Barnes on the screen. There are detailed notes of the dissection of his body. There are schematics for the metal arm HYDRA made him. There are diagrams for the cryotank they froze him in. There are grainy photographs of the failed tank.
Steve can’t look at one more image. He puts his face in his hands.
“It really happened,” Steve mumbles into his palms. “He really was here. The Winter Soldier was sent to protect Project Insight and he spared my life and then I brought him in. I brought him here.”
“Steve,” Tony says. “I was there. I would’ve remembered fighting a man with a metal arm.”
“Wait,” Natasha says before Steve can flip his lid. “Let’s pretend both things happened. We know there is technology that can drill a hole in the sky to bring an army from across the universe here. What if there is something merging two realities?”
“A reality in which Bucky died and one in which he didn’t?” Steve asks, pulling his hands off his face.
Natasha nods. “One in which I killed that other Red Room operative and one in which I didn’t.”
“Red Room operative?” Tony asks. “Are you keeping secrets from me?”
“Last night I remembered a mission. December, 1997. I was sent to a remote village in Siberia to kill a rogue Black Widow and the physicist she had fallen in love with. But the memory – it’s new, somehow.”
“So, Cap imagines that he has a boyfriend and you suddenly remember a mission you’ve repressed from your days of worshiping Stalin, and you want me to think those are somehow connected?” Tony says.
“Someone tried to kill me yesterday,” Natasha says. “I think it would be safer to assume these are related.”
“Got me there. Fine. What’s the plan then?” Tony asks.
XxX
Natasha’s hair is brilliant in the sunlight – red as red can be. She’s sitting on a bench in Central Park pretending to read a book.
Steve is pretending to stretch in the grass behind her and Tony is watching from a van half a block away.
Now they just have to wait.
And wait they do.
Until Natasha’s cell phone rings. The number is blocked. She answers anyway, looking over her shoulder.
“You think I don’t know a trap when I see one?” a female voice says over the line.
“Who are you?” Natasha asks.
“I want you to think hard about December 1997, because soon you won’t be able to think at all.”
The line goes dead right as Tony’s voice comes over the comms. “Guys?” he says. “JARVIS needs us back at the Tower. Like. Five minutes ago.”
XxX
“We knocked out power to half of Manhattan,” Tony says as he manually unlocks the stairs that lead down toward the basement in Avengers Tower.
“We?” Steve asks, following him down. The emergency lighting running off the generators is tinted blue and makes everything appear dreamlike and soft.
“Not we personally,” Tony says. “The Tower. JARVIS.”
“What happened exactly?”
Tony throws open the door from the stairwell to his lab. “Something – someone – tried to access the arc reactor. And JARVIS defended it.”
There is a beat of silence while the emergency lights in the lab kick on. The mainframe that serves as JARVIS’ brain hums quietly in the background.
“J, you there?” Tony asks, a thread of worry hanging in his voice.
There is a beat of silence and Steve can feel sweat collect on the palms of his hands.
“I am here,” JARVIS says from everywhere and nowhere at once. The AI sounds unsure of itself, somehow. Like it’s speaking from a room away.
Tony sighs. “You scared me, J.”
“My apologies, sir. I seem to only be running at partial capacity.”
Tony flicks on a monitor. “What happened?”
There is another moment of silence. “I’m not sure,” JARVIS replies. “I am missing several minutes from my recent memory banks. However, I do know there is someone in the Hulk holding cell.”
The monitor Tony turned on shows the snowfall of static for a moment before coalescing into a black and white image of the hulk-proof chamber. There is a figure inside of it. Human in form but the face is obscured, a computer glitch of white light.
“JARVIS, who is in the holding cell?” Tony asks.
“I don’t know, sir.”
XxX
It’s an argument, but they do decide to wait until power is fully restored. “Because we don’t know that they are actually being held by that cell or if they just want us to think that,” Natasha argued.
JARVIS had made a valiant attempt to uncover the lost data while they waited, but was unable.
“Whoever it is, they have potentially altered time, and even if they didn’t, they still made an attempt on Natasha’s life and slipped by JARVIS unseen.”
They suit up just in case, and descend into the sub-basement levels.
The door opens and the lights are bright inside the cell. Steve blinks to adjust as they step closer.
It’s a woman. She’s standing in the middle of the cell with her arms crossed. She’s wearing a white cloak that covers only her head and arms. It’s translucent as lace. The rest of her body is clad in black. She has dark hair and sharp features, a smirk across her lips.
“ Zdravstvuyte , Natalia,” she says, her smile growing wider.
Something cold twists in Steve’s gut, a feeling like he knows they don’t have the upper hand, but he has no idea what cards are in play.
“Don’t you speak English?” Natasha asks, no nonsense.
“If that’s what you want,” the woman replies, smoothly. Not a hint of accent to her voice. “I speak many languages. Just like you, Natalia.”
“Who are you?” Natasha asks, right to the point.
“You know who I am.”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” Natasha says. “How did you get in here?”
“You’ve seen me before,” the woman replies. “I was six years old at the time, but you saw me. In Russia. When you killed my parents.”
“You could be anyone,” Natasha says. “I killed many parents for the Red Room.”
“But you only killed one rogue Black Widow and one physicist.”
Natasha turns to glare at Tony. “I told you,” she hisses and leaves the room with stiff, steady steps.
Tony glances at Steve and then at Natasha’s retreating form.
Steve takes another step toward the glass. “What did you do with Bucky?” he asks.
“The Winter Soldier, you mean?” she asks. “I’ll let you figure that out.”
XxX
“December, 1997. I was in Moscow. I was training girls in the Red Room.” Natasha falls silent, her eyes wide as she stares at nothing. “It doesn’t make any fucking sense,” she says after a moment. “Everyone else must’ve been on assignment. Because they sent me out from the Red Room. It was unusual to send an instructor out on a mission without completely reassigning her.”
“Are you sure this really happened?” Steve asks.
“No,” Natasha replies. “I’m not. The memory. It doesn’t feel right.”
“Tell us what happened anyway,” Tony says. He’s called Bruce and Clint down, also. Thor is still off world somewhere. He’s not ready to trust Fury just yet. So it’s only them, for now.
“I had sixteen hours. A pilot flew me out to the middle of nowhere, Siberia. There were these doors, cut right into the mountainside. It didn’t look like anything from the outside, but it had an enormous heat signal. Turned out it was a lab, but I didn’t know anything more than that.
“I went right in through the front door. They had been lazy, clumsy, there was nothing to stop me. No traps. No alarms. They must’ve thought no one on Earth could find their lab. I shot them in their bed. Linus Tarasov and Alenka Sergeyevna. They never even woke up.”
“And their daughter?” Steve prompts.
“I don’t remember,” Natasha says. Then furrows her brow. “No. Wait. There was a girl.” She groans, rubs at her temples like it hurts. “She was very young and the pilot took her and I never heard about it again.”
“So it’s revenge,” Tony says.
“That doesn’t explain what happened to Bucky,” Steve says.
XxX
It’s Bruce who figures it out.
“I went back and looked at the properties of that energy release, and something about it seemed oddly familiar to me,” Bruce says.
“You know what it is?” Tony asks.
“It’s the Tesseract,” he says.
“The Tesseract? The one that we handed over to Thor for safekeeping? The one that almost destroyed the world? That one?” Tony asks, mildly hysterical.
Bruce shrugs. “I think so. Or something like it. Maybe there is more than one?”
“Great. Great. Someone. Get ahold of Thor. We need to – J,” Tony says. “Did you scan this woman?”
There is a beat of silence. “I am unable to get a proper scan of her,” JARVIS replies.
“What’s the problem?” Steve asks. “Why can’t JARVIS scan her?”
“There’s something interfering with my equipment,” JARVIS says. “An energy signal of some sort.”
“Wonderful,” Tony says. “We need to search her. For all we know, she’s sitting in there with the Tesseract right now .”
XxX
“The good news is: she’s human,” Tony says. “And I knew I wouldn’t regret giving JARVIS knock-out gas.”
She’s unconscious and stretched out on an exam table, strapped down with bonds engineered to hold a supersoldier. She looks much smaller unconscious and laid out defenseless. She’s about Natasha’s height. Pretty, but not distractingly so. Thin, but clearly made of compact muscle. She has scars on her arms, calluses on her hands like she’s no stranger to manual labor.
“Now that we can scan her – she’s got no obvious modifications. Female, human, bad haircut, mid-twenties. Facial recognition comes back with nothing. DNA, nothing. Fingerprints, nothing. No identification, of course. She has a cellphone, a knife, and a Tesseract, naturally,” Tony says.
“Why didn’t you do this to begin with?” Natasha asks.
“I wasn’t expecting her to have the fucking Tesseract on her person. And I wasn’t entirely sure she was a person,” Tony says.
Steve turns to Natasha. “Is this the Black Widow’s daughter?” he asks.
Natasha’s usually impassive face twists a little around the corner of her mouth. She nods. “I can’t imagine she’s anyone else.”
XxX
“It’s just a shard of the Tesseract,” Bruce says. He’s got the thing under glass in the center of his lab. It’s glowing blue, small, triangular like a knife-tip. Sharp as all get-out and looking threatening in spite of its size.
“Has anyone managed to contact Thor?” Steve asks.
“Not yet,” Tony replies. “Still trying.”
“How did she break a piece off the Tesseract?” Bruce asks.
“That is the million dollar question,” Tony says.
“So, she used this shard to alter reality?” Steve asks.
“That’s what it looks like,” Bruce says.
“Then we can use it to alter reality back,” Steve says.
“I don’t know how it works,” Bruce says. “And you are the only one who remembers reality changing. For all we know, she’s altered nothing about reality but instead given you a false memory.”
Steve grits his teeth. “What purpose would that serve?”
“I don’t know,” Bruce admits. “But it’s just as likely as her altering reality. We have to consider all choices. She wants something, Steve. Let’s figure that out first.”
XxX
Steve watches and waits.
They sat her up in a chair, hands cuffed and legs cuffed, and let the effects of the drugs wear off.
She comes to slowly, with a flutter of eyelashes, dragging her chin up off her chest, tipping her head back and blinking up at the lights above them. She then rocks her head to the side, blinking again and settling her gaze on Steve.
Steve sits across from her, leaned over with his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced together. He’s put on the whole Captain America get up – the stealth suit. He figures he might as well look official while he interrogates her.
“Tell me your name,” he says, dipping his voice deep into the Commander Rogers range, the way he gives orders. It typically compels people to do his will.
But he’s not exactly surprised when it doesn’t work.
Their prisoner simply smirks at him. “I’m shocked you haven’t figured it out yet.”
“How did you get the Tesseract?” Steve presses on.
“It’s a long story,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to bore you.”
“Please. Bore me,” Steve says.
She glances off to the side, nonchalant to a level that seems almost forced and shrugs. “Naw.”
“You do understand that you are at our mercy,” Steve says.
She levels her unblinking gaze back on him. “I don’t think Captain America is really known for torturing people. The Black Widow, maybe. But, you may have noticed, I’m not exactly scared of her.”
“There is a history there.”
“As much of a history as I had with the Winter Soldier. HYDRA runs dark and deep, but you don’t need me to tell you that.”
“You’re HYDRA then,” Steve says, and settles back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.
“You sure about that?” she asks.
“Why else would you be here trying to kill Avengers?”
“It’s a personal grudge,” Natasha says from behind him. “She’s not here to kill Avengers – she’s here to kill me.”
“Ding ding ding,” their prisoner says with too much glee in her voice for Steve to be completely comfortable.
Natasha stands next to him, her back straight and stiff and he can sense the way she is poised for a fight.
“Tarasova,” Natasha says.
The woman’s smirk slips into a full grin. But it’s not a happy smile, it’s a threat, a promise of violence, and Steve has this feeling like he’s not in control of the situation, even though he’s not the one in chains.
“Clever girl,” Tarasova says. “I wasn’t sure if the memory would be immediate or not. It’s always hard to tell exactly what will happen when you’re altering a timeline.”
She’s staring at Natasha like she’s starving, like she’s forgotten Steve exists, like she’s unaware of the fact that she’s chained and captured.
“It’s not possible,” Natasha says. “All the Widows were sterilized. It was part of the Red Room graduation ceremony,” she says. Her voice is hard as ice but Steve can still hear something like hurt inside of her – but, he realizes, only because he knows her cadence, finally, after all this time.
Tarasova just grins – her smile like a crack in her face. She makes Steve think of the Cheshire cat – she’s half mad, half delighted at the telling of this tale. “Are you so sure of that?” she asks, rocking her shoulders side to side, ever so slightly. It makes her look like a snake.
“I spent every day of 1996, 1997 and 1998 in the Red Room, training new Widows. I did not have a mission in Siberia in ’97 and I escorted multiple girls to the medical wing of the Red Room for surgery.”
“I know you believe that,” Tarasova says. “Because the mind is a funny thing. It can hold multiple realities at once. You remember training Widows, but you also remember a cabin in Siberia where you killed Sergeyevna in her bed while she slept next to the man she loved more than Mother Russia.”
“Steve,” Natasha says, her voice like an order and he has no choice but to follow her when she leaves the room.
XxX
“You’re an idiot,” Bucky had said when they were first alone after Kreischberg, after the POW camp. They were in his tent and it was raining, night time, the grounds were quiet and he felt like he was going to die if he didn’t get his hands on Bucky right now.
He said it again in a hospital bed in D.C. after Steve had hunted him down and begged him to come in. He was shaking, hanging on to the edge of his sheet. He had a broken cheekbone and couldn’t keep any food down and all Steve wanted to do was curl up at his feet and never let him out of his sight again.
The memory has a tint around the edge of it, like it’s not quite real. Like he saw it on a silver screen – everything about it too hazy and too perfect all at once. Bucky is smiling in the memory but he didn’t smile at the time. Steve knows that, down in his gut. Knows that Bucky was shaking mad, shaking with fear, shaking with things he didn’t yet know how to express.
It’s hard to hold onto. All his memories of Bucky after the war are hard to hold onto. Bucky laughing in the summer light on his birthday just last year. Bucky throwing popcorn at the television when a movie gets dumb. Bucky at his back in battle. Bucky rolling over in bed to put his cold metal hand on Steve’s back just a morning ago—
“The more time passes, the clearer the memory becomes,” Natasha says. She’s more agitated than Steve has ever seen her, but that’s not saying much for the Black Widow. She has her hands on her hips and rocks her weight just once from her front foot to her back foot. “They sent me to kill Sergeyevna because she fell in love with her mark and they couldn’t have that. She was no longer faithful to the Red Room or HYDRA. But I was being punished in ’97. I wasn’t allowed out of the Red Room because I had to earn back their trust.”
“Wouldn’t killing one of your own earn back their trust?” Steve asks.
Natasha nods. “That’s why they sent the Winter Soldier to kill her. He was earning back their trust for the same reason as me – he had begun to act too human.”
“What are you not telling me?”
“The Winter Soldier trained Red Room operatives,” Natasha says. “We became… friends,” she says. “They did not like us acting human, so they sent him to another base and I was forced to stay right there and train new Widows. And they sent Bucky to kill a girl he had trained to teach him not to act so human again in the future.”
Steve stares at her for a moment. “Why didn’t he tell me he knew you before?”
Natasha shrugs. He’s so used to her body language being fake that it takes him half a heartbeat to realize she’s not bluffing him. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember him ever being here but I imagine it had to do with his recovery, Steve. When I was deprogramming, there were lots of things I wanted to pretend never had happened. I’m sure he felt the same.”
“Okay, okay,” Steve says. “So. The Winter Soldier kills Tarasova’s mother and father. And… She alters reality so that the Winter Soldier dies in 1964.”
He pauses for a moment, staring at nothing.
“To save them?” he guesses. “She thinks: no Winter Soldier, no dead parents?”
“HYDRA must have really wanted them dead, because they contacted the Red Room and sent out me,” Natasha says.
“Right. Okay. So you kill Tarasova’s parents in ’97 and then she waits two decades and tries to shoot you in the parking lot under the Avengers’ building? This does not add up,” Steve says.
XxX
“I think…,” Tony says and then shuts up.
It’s never a good sign when Tony fucking Stark shuts up.
Steve and Natasha let the quiet drag on for a moment while Stark stares at something Steve doesn’t understand on the screen in front of him.
“Was there an end to that sentence?” Steve prompts after a moment.
“I think we are in the original timeline,” Tony finally says.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Steve asks, his patience finally waning.
“Well, there is a theory that there are infinite realities based on infinite possibilities, so there are infinite realities. Then there is a mostly discounted subtheory that there is one ‘true’ reality that all subsequent realities are variants upon. Tarasova altered reality – she did not time travel. She did not go back in time and kill the Winter Soldier personally. She used a shard of the Tesseract to create a reality in which the Winter Soldier died in ’64. But it didn’t give her the outcome she desired. Which, presumably, was a reality in which one or both of her parents survived. Upon realizing her plan didn’t work, she lashed out.”
“At Natasha?” Steve says.
Tony nods. “She learned that Natasha killed her parents the same time Natasha learned that she had killed Tarasova’s parents the other night. We are in a reality that never existed before.”
“So, there is an original timeline in which Bucky is still alive and Natasha didn’t kill Tarasova’s parents?”
“I don’t think so,” Tony says and grimaces. “Not anymore, at least. The Tesseract is a very powerful thing. I think she’s altered the original timeline.”
“Are you suggesting that Tarasova broke reality itself?” Natasha asks, her voice laced with disbelief.
“Stranger things have happened. And it explains why you and Cap can both remember things that never happened. You were both close to the aspect of reality that was altered, so the change doesn’t mesh perfectly into your memories. And even I,” Tony stops talking for a moment, shakes his head. “If I think about it, I can feel where something is different. It’s like having a popcorn kernel stuck in your teeth at a weird angle – you may not notice it but once you find it, you can’t stop picking at it. If I think about it, I get this feeling of something not right, even if I can’t bring a concrete memory of Bucky to mind.”
“How do we fix it?” Steve asks, frustration mounting inside of him, overwhelming and unavoidable.
Tony gives an out-of-character shrug. “I don’t know,” Tony admits. “But if anyone would know – it’s Tarasova.”
XxX
Bucky loved their apartment in the Tower.
He was a less of a fan of Tony and he rarely spent time in the common spaces of the Tower (being around people who weren’t Steve for extended periods of time still stressed him out). But he loved being in New York City. He loved the view from their bedroom. He loved the huge, plush couch Steve bought for the living room. He loved the bookshelves they put up in the guest room and filled with novels and memoirs. He loved the ridiculous jacuzzi tub in their bathroom. He loved making messes in the kitchen and cleaning up after. They had a dishwasher but he still liked to wash dishes by hand. Said it settled him, the repetition, the familiar task.
He made Steve feel like he was present in the future for the first time since he woke up from the ice. Like the world had no longer ended and decided to kick the shit out of him a little more for fun.
But Steve stands in the quiet of his living room now and wants to rip his own skin off. The apartment isn’t the same without Bucky.
And part of it is simply because the little touches of Bucky are missing. The vintage Captain America poster he proudly hung on the living room wall, the ever-present pile of dirty socks beside the couch, his leather coat on the back of a chair, the gingerbread candle that had been sitting on the counter since last Christmas—
When he would come home from a mission, Bucky would kiss him and lead him to their bed and he would rub the palms of his hands and the space between his shoulder blades – those sore spots where he carried all his tensions and worries.
Steve’s teeth ache, he misses Bucky so hard. He can’t sleep, not here, not alone like this, not now, not again, not after everything.
He makes his way back down to the security room where the feed for the holding cell is. Without the shard of Tesseract on her, Tarasova is clear to the camera’s unblinking eye. She’s motionless, lying on the floor with her hands behind her head like she doesn’t have a care in the fucking world.
Like she didn’t just destroy everything Steve’s spent building the past few years.
XxX
“Tell me you remember me,” Steve says when Sam answers the phone. It’s late. He knows it’s late, but he can’t go back to those empty rooms, and even Tony told him to go get some rest because there was nothing any of them could do right then.
“Of course I remember you,” Sam says and Steve lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “What is going on?”
“I need you to remind me that torture is wrong,” Steve says.
“Steve,” Sam says. His voice is short, and the tone lands somewhere between therapist and best friend. “Who are you torturing?”
“Do you remember Bucky?” Steve asks.
“Yeah – the Howling Commando, your best friend. You’ve told me about him a million times.”
“That’s it?” Steve asks, his voice strangled.
“I mean. I know he was your partner, lover, whatever the term you want to use.”
“This is really fucking bad.”
XxX
It’s a restless night.
Steve can’t even bear the sight of his apartment. He manages a few hours of shitty sleep on the couch in the common room before making a pot of coffee that he takes directly to Bruce and Tony in their lab.
“I… have no idea how this thing works,” Bruce admits. “We know from HYDRA’s records that Linus Tarasova did extensive research on a tesseract but his research was lost around the time he was killed. Only, I’m starting to think it wasn’t really lost so much as, well, hidden.”
“You think his daughter got her hands on it?” Steve asks.
“I can’t think of any other possibilities.”
XxX
“I assume you read the Winter Soldier file,” Steve says when he stands in front of the cell again.
Tarasova looks up from where she’s lying on the floor but otherwise makes no movement. “I may have,” she says in a way that implies she definitely did.
“So you knew that he was a prisoner of war,” Steve says flatly.
“James B. Barnes. Sharpshooter. Sergeant. 107 th . Born March 10, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York. Best friend of the famous Captain America.” She waves one hand patronizingly, resting her head down again to stare at the light above them. “Captured by HYDRA in 1944 and turned into the Winter Soldier. The Fist of HYDRA. Their ghost story. I read all about it.”
“Then you knew he was innocent.”
“I think even you will find, Captain Rogers, that innocence is rather flexible when it’s your own family on the line.”
“You couldn’t find a way to save your family that didn’t result in Bucky’s death?”
“Barnes’ death was the easiest solution. If you’re not a god, wielding a power like the Tesseract is a bit challenging. They are very powerful but they take a lot of power.” She sits up to flash him a grin. She looks like a cat playing with a mouse and Steve hates the realization that he’s the mouse in this scenario.
“I’ve read your file, too, Rogers,” she continues. “You remember Kreischberg? Remember how you couldn’t save them all? I know Barnes did nothing wrong, but you can’t save everyone and even the best of us play favorites.”
XxX
Bucky was better at coping with the notion that not everyone could be saved.
When missions didn’t go off perfectly or innocent people died, he was good at getting Steve alone and kissing his hands and promising him that Steve had done everything he could have done. That it wasn’t his fault.
But when he thinks about Kreischberg, he doesn’t think about the men he couldn’t save. He doesn’t think about the mass grave behind the facility. He doesn’t think about the men who died on the walk back, or the ones who died in the med tent after they arrived back in Allied territory.
He understood, then, that it wasn’t his fault. Or maybe he blamed General Philips or the Red Skull or just… someone other than himself.
But when he sits alone after talking to Tarasova, he lets himself face a truth he has never let himself face before – he didn’t think about those other soldiers that died there because he was too worried about Bucky.
About the cuts on Bucky’s body and the haunted look in his eyes and the fact that he was real and alive and Steve had almost lost him.
The way he hovered over Bucky the days after he got him back and promised himself again and again that he would never be separated from Bucky again.
(It was the same promise he made quietly to himself and to Bucky when Bucky came in from the cold and asked to be decommissioned as HYDRA’s greatest weapon.
He’s failed Bucky twice now. He won’t do it again.)
XxX
“Well, clearly we need to get to her space station,” Tony says. He’s waving around a screwdriver even though he doesn’t seem to have been screwing anything recently.
Steve puts his elbows on his knees and drops his head forward into his hands. He’s working on a massive headache that wants to crawl down the back of his neck. Bucky always used to rub his shoulders for him and tell him to calm down when he got this worked up. It never worked, but it was nice.
“Because I’m sure there is some key information there, to unlock the rest of this nonsense.”
“I don’t have a spaceship in my pocket,” Steve mutters without looking up, and instantly regrets it.
He looks up when Tony doesn’t make an obvious sex joke.
“I called Hill,” Tony says.
That has Steve on his feet. “You’re dragging SHIELD into this?”
“I know it’s not your favorite group of people,” Tony sugarcoats it. “But unless you want to wait the several months it would take me to pull a spaceship out of my ass, they are our best bet.”
Steve throws his hands up. “Bucky’s already been dead for fifty years at this point!”
“Steve,” Tony’s voice cuts through, unusually level. “She’s torn up reality. We don’t know she hasn’t done damage that we can’t see. The sooner we fix this, the sooner we have your boyfriend back, the sooner we can be assured that reality as we know it isn’t unraveling like a sweater with a loose thread.”
“Is that what you think is happening?” Steve asks.
“I can’t be sure,” Tony says. “But it could be.”
Steve was about to call up Hill and demand to know what her exact plan was when the Tower fell into darkness for the second time that week.
XxX
The Hulk cell is no longer occupied.
Which is particularly disconcerting when the emergency lights don’t come on.
Steve can hear Tony cussing over the comms as he makes his way by foot to the heart of the Tower, having to manually unlock doors along the way.
JARVIS is still accessible on a laptop Tony plugged into their comms, “But he doesn’t have access to the Tower mainframe and he’s only as good as the battery,” he explained before taking off.
Upon examination, Steve feels like an idiot – Tarasova didn’t do anything particularly special; she was somehow able to pick the physical lock on the cell.
“I hate to be a mood killer,” Tony says over the comms, “But things are--.”
Steve takes the stairs toward the heart of the Tower two at a time. The doors locked automatically after Tony. He’s able to break the first one but the second one is reinforced against even him and he’s about to scream with frustration when the Black Widow shows up and pulls a little tool out of a pouch on her belt, rolls her eyes at Steve and picks the lock with a grace he didn’t know was possible.
They make their way through the next three doors like that and to the final basement level.
The room is huge, bathed in the bluish light from the reactor thrumming silently before them.
Steve moves quietly, adjusting the grip on his shield silently.
“So. This is less than ideal,” Tony says from the chair he’s been tied to directly in front of the reactor.
To the left of them, at the console, is Tarasova with her head bent over the controls. She doesn’t even look up when she picks up a gun (where did she even get that?) and points it at Tony’s head.
Steve stops a good fifteen feet out from Tony and Tarasova. “Look, I get it, everyone wants their family safe,” Steve says. “But I’m not sure murder and terrorism is the best way to get what you want.”
“I’m not terribly interested in a speech from America’s walking propaganda machine, thanks,” Tarasova replies.
“How about a conversation?” Steve asks.
“Tell the widow that I can see her and I will kill this man,” she says and Steve looks around to where Natasha has her hand on a tiny gun on her hip.
She glares at Steve for a moment before pointedly removing her hand from the weapon.
“So, Cap, I am going to travel back in time and prevent HYDRA from killing my parents.” She looks up then, pins Steve with her steely blue eyes. “Do you care to join me?”
“Time travel?”
“See? You don’t really want a conversation. You want me to go back to that cell and shut up and then maybe you will keep me there forever, or kill me. It doesn’t matter what my motivation is, who I am, where I came from.
“Because, you see, my parents were fighting HYDRA. My mother smuggled multiple girls out of the Red Room. My father was manipulated into creating weapons for HYDRA and the Red Room, using the Tesseract, until my mother saved him also. HYDRA wanted them dead for a reason – they were destabilizing the institution from the inside. In another world, you would’ve been friends. If you let me do this, HYDRA goes down decades ago. You wake up in the future and the fruits of your labor back in 1944 have paid off.”
“You don’t get to just undo reality and force it back to your liking,” Steve says.
“See? That’s where you are wrong,” Tarasova replies and then pulls up the object she’s been working on and lays it where Steve can see it – the Tesseract.
It’s clearly been shattered – fracture lines spider web through it, it’s still got a corner missing and it’s wrapped up in copper wire and, when Steve follows the lines with his eyes, he sees that it’s plugged into the arc reactor.
“I didn’t know she had the rest of it; I mean, why would I?” Tony says, unusually self-deprecating but still seeming to try to shrug it off. “She let it charge off the Tower – I guess a shattered Tesseract doesn’t have the same sort of oomph as an intact one – and then when it was ready, it shorted the arc, cut all the power in the building and she took that as her chance to escape. It’s really rather impressive, and I’m going to choke her with my bare hands when I get the chance.”
Tarasova snorts. “In a moment, you won’t remember that I was ever even here at all,” she says and brandishes the final shard of the Tesseract – the one that Tony had had up in his lab earlier that very day.
Steve figures she’s as distracted as she’ll ever be and bursts into a run, slamming into her before she can slip the final sliver of the Tesseract into place.
XxX
He’s still holding the shard of the Tesseract and not listening to a word Tony is saying.
Tony has been talking a mile a minute since they released him from his bonds – muttering about coming up with a better way to protect the Tower and JARVIS and the reactor – and Steve just doesn’t care.
“How,” Steve says, cutting Tony off. “Do we get reality back?”
“You and Natasha are the only ones who remember reality being different,” Tony says.
Steve bites back something rude. “We know she changed reality.”
“Changing it more could make it fragment more,” Bruce says, his tone much gentler than Tony’s.
“I’m not living without him,” Steve says, his voice shockingly loud.
XxX
He’s asleep on the couch in the common room when the television clicks on, startling him to alertness.
The rest of the day had been spent with Tony and Bruce tossing ideas back and forth over what would happen if they put the last shard into the Tesseract without ever actually agreeing on anything.
Sam finally arrived from DC, took one look at Steve, and ordered him to go lay down. Clint and Natasha decided it would be best to take turns sitting with the arc reactor, just in case Tarasova managed to spring the cell again.
He feels around the cushions under him for a moment, thinking he must’ve rolled on a remote without realizing it, when the image finally settles on the screen and it’s – it’s him.
He’s standing in the common room, the elevator doors clearly visible behind him. He looks serious but composed.
“Listen to me,” he says in the Captain America voice. “Everything is going to be fine. You are going to get Bucky back. But I need you to listen to me.”
Steve looks carefully around the room.
“JARVIS,” he says, “Where is this video coming from?”
There is an ominous pause from the AI.
“I cannot say,” JARVIS finally responds. “The file has been in my system for five years.”
“Why are you showing it to me now?” Steve asks.
“I have been programed to. I cannot override the code,” JARVIS says.
“How is that possible?”
“It seems that I am the one who wrote the code.”
“Listen,” the Steve on the television says, as though he had anticipated Steve’s conversation with JARVIS. “The first time you were alone with Bucky after SHIELD released him, you brought him home and sat on his bedside. He kissed the palm of your hand and fell asleep with his head on your thigh, and you stroked your hand through his hair and promised you would protect him no matter what. You’ve never told a soul about that moment,” the recording says. “So you are going to listen to me because I’m going to tell you how to get Bucky back.”