All the answers are questions

by Grin

Summary:

The Winter Soldier tipped water out of his boots and stripped the socks off his pruning feet as he waited to be collected. Engaging on an aircraft while it nosedived into a river hadn't been ideal, but the mission had been accomplished, if messy. He had exceeded parameters--there were several secondary targets left alive, and they could identify him--but Captain America was dead. HYDRA would consider it a conditional success and rendezvous with him here within the next few hours.

Except Captain America wasn't dead. The Soldier had pulled him out of the water onto the shore and had made sure he would live before he had walked away.

His thoughts bottlenecked, stuck behind that one crimp in the plan, and his world tilted like it had on the Helicarrier.

He hadn't killed Captain America. He rebuilt what he knew around that.

The Winter Soldier tipped water out of his boots and stripped the socks off his pruning feet as he waited to be collected. Engaging on an aircraft while it nosedived into a river hadn't been ideal, but the mission had been accomplished, if messy. He had exceeded parameters--there were several secondary targets left alive, and they could identify him--but Captain America was dead. HYDRA would consider it a conditional success and rendezvous with him here within the next few hours.

Except Captain America wasn't dead. The Soldier had pulled him out of the water onto the shore and had made sure he would live before he had walked away.

His thoughts bottlenecked, stuck behind that one crimp in the plan, and his world tilted like it had on the Helicarrier.

He hadn't killed Captain America. He rebuilt what he knew around that. If the Soldier couldn't follow through on the kill order, then the Captain had priority in the chain of command. He must be at the top of the hierarchy, over the men who had given him orders. That was corroborated by what he had said to him on the Helicarrier: "Bucky". It had affected the Soldier like a trigger, except he remembered it, couldn't forget it. The information he had been fed about the Captain had been false. The Soldier had been shanghaied into an attempted coup, or infiltration, or any number of possibilities he couldn't predict. HYDRA was compromised, and so was he.

He needed better information. Questions weren't usually his to ask, but he had one burning a hole in his head. And he repeated it to himself while he checked the derringer he hadn't emptied in the skirmish and stood slowly on bare feet. He wouldn't let himself forget it.

When a pair of HYDRA agents dressed in suits walked through the door, he heard, "Where are we going to relocate? My lease isn't up 'til next year, for Christssake--" and he shot one in the head and the other in the gut while they stared at his empty boots with their hands on their guns. They had made it easy on his broken arm by standing close. He slid back in through the window, the way he had entered, and dislodged his metal fingers from his improvised handhold in the brick. That had been less of a fight than he had expected. The Soldier wasn't HYDRA's current priority.

But they were his. He knelt next to the one still breathing and put the gun to his head.

"Zhelaniye--" the agent hissed. The Soldier tensed involuntarily and pulled the trigger.

Staring down at the black spill, he revised his approach. He wasn't an interrogator, but he could learn, he could adapt. And he didn't need a living mark to practice.

"Why?" he croaked, but it sounded awkward. It wasn't assertive enough. The dead face smirked at him.

"Why?" He shoved the gun against the agent's head, and his pale, slack mouth opened like he was begging to answer.

Satisfied, he holstered his derringer and replaced the guns he had discarded on the Helicarrier with their barettas. He pulled on his cold socks and boots and stood in his soaked gear, wriggling his toes in the wet cloth. He felt like he hadn't finished thawing. Through the door, he heard someone come up the connecting hallway from the stairwell at a full run, and he vaulted out of the window, hit the ground two stories below and headed south.

 

 

"Why? Why what?" the old man asked in Spanish. The Soldier looked away from the large collection of snakes slithering against the wall, staring with their beady eyes out of stacked glass cages. He considered the man. None of the other four had asked him that, and he hadn't thought he'd needed to narrow it down.

"Who's asking the questions?" The Soldier asked, and he was improving. Like he had been swung at, the man shrank back as much as he could with his wrists tied to his ankles. "Why--" he decided, "--did HYDRA send me after Captain America?"

"'Cause you're fucking Bucky Barnes," the snake collector yelled. The Soldier froze, but the words didn't mean anything, coming from him. "They thought they were being funny, but I knew they were idiots, all of them. That's why I left HYDRA, please, I'm sorry. I'm sorry!"

"Who?"

"Oh my God, please."

"Who is--Bucky Barnes?" He said it carefully. The old man only cried and babbled in response, so the Soldier browsed through the glass vials of venoms, ranked and filed in a case on the table. He couldn't remember being injected, which one had hurt the most. It had been a few dozen resets, decades, according to the dates on the photos he'd found, labeled in tidy Latin. A swollen thigh rendered in black and white, a chest covered in massive bruising, of a corpse, he'd thought, before he'd barely recognized his right arm, almost rotted through, necrotic. He picked up the vial with the most familiar name and rolled the cold glass between his fingers.

"Then how about--Crotalus basiliscus?" That name rolled off his tongue, unlike the other. The ex-agent let out a wail, and the Soldier knew he had a winner.

 

 

Once he made the connection, he accepted how ineffectual he had been at gathering intelligence. The Winter Soldier, however far back he pried into HYDRA's past, had no name. He hadn't even found the designation he answered to put down anywhere in print; he was always the asset, the stock, the product. But Bucky Barnes had been a living man with a history. And now that he knew what to look for, wherever Captain America was, Barnes was right on his heels. With a few more questions, the Soldier found him in the Captain's exhibit at the Smithsonian.

It was strange to read the information. When he looked away from the words, they slipped from his memory. He focused again: "James Buchanan Barnes". It wasn't a name he'd heard before. The picture beside it wasn't a face he'd ever seen.

In the mirror surface of the unlit glass, the Soldier registered only a nondescript pale smear. He knew there were creatures that didn't cast a reflection, too vile for even light to touch. He had read a book about it, but he didn't know the name.

A docent walked into the exhibit room with a group of fifty, fifty-four people, which grew as visitors, aimless and bored, were swept up in the tour. The Soldier positioned himself a few deep inside the crowd, an obese local woman and two tourists from Hong Kong, mother and daughter, between him and his exit. He settled in to observe.

"--that he wore in combat, and his Johnson rifle. More recently, we've added to our collection several of the letters that he sent home to his mother and sisters. And if you look, you can see that some of them are illustrated--this one here is a great example. Captain Rogers would often do quick sketches like this for his friends. We have a few of his other works here in the exhibit, but I think that these are really the most expressive."

The items were staged like the owner would return soon to pick them up from where he left them. The Soldier didn't need a wool uniform, but the rifle might be serviceable.

"The final letter that Sergeant Barnes sent, here, is dated January 26th, 1944, not even a week before his death on February 1st. And as you can see over here..."

"How?" The crowd shifted and muttered, trying to pinpoint the speaker, but the Soldier was a trained ventriloquist. The docent looked his way, and her searching glance skipped over his painstakingly bored expression.

"How did he die?" she asked them. "Well, while Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers were in Germany on a mission to intercept HYDRA's plans for the war, they were attacked by HYDRA's chief scientist, Arnim Zola, and his men. Sergeant Barnes was thrown from the moving train into the freezing Danube River, over three hundred feet below. That's higher than the Capitol building. Any more questions?"

The rest of the tour was about Rogers, who led troops and plotted strategies like a general--apparently not for HYDRA, but in direct opposition to it. The names didn't matter much to the Soldier. He recognized authority when he saw it.

He let the group move into the next hall without him and returned to Bucky Barnes. Barnes had followed his Captain's orders to his death in the ice. The Soldier respected that. He took one of the pairs of headphones from the front of the case, which the docent had explained how to use. A voice was speaking in a low, insistent monotone.

"Soldier, come in," said his handler.

But he had heard him scream through the comms when the Falcon dropped him off the side of the first Helicarrier, and he had none of the Soldier's enhancements. He wouldn't be giving any more orders.

The left headphone had snapped off in his hand, but the wires were still intact. He held it to his ear while the man, a smoker with a newscaster's practiced non-accent, continued the record. It was about the soldier, Barnes, not the Winter Soldier. The words were easier to hold when he wasn't reading them, but the narrative was bland, with an emphasis on Barnes' bravery and loyalty. It was an official government line for sanctioned killers. Barnes had been good at his job, another quality he and the Soldier had in common. If Bucky was a name he had to take up again, it wouldn't be the worst that he had answered to.

At noon he joined the exodus of people abandoning their stroll through the museum for the real reason they had come. The Soldier had followed him here to Bucky, and there he was, standing at the sculpture in front of the entrance in a plain blue button-down and khakis, and no shield: Captain America. His position was too exposed, and he was too trusting, if setting up his protection detail on the fringe of the crowd had been his idea, but the Soldier kept pace with a group as they passed the reporters and he didn't stop until he was almost in the street. Some people had already spilled over onto it, pushed back by the hundreds more packed in front of them. The crowd was good cover, the plaza was open and the visibility was high even at ground level, but he was restless. He checked and double-checked the loose circle of people around Rogers, the windows, and the roof, until he could report what he was seeing down to the number of crows and where they were perched.

"Hello, everyone." Rogers' words barely carried to where the Soldier stood, but the backdrop of conversation cut off and fell away. "I know that the attacks that happened in January are still weighing heavily on all of us, and I'm sure that everyone here has questions that they feel aren't being answered. I'm here to clear the air, and to, hopefully, give you some of the answers you're looking for."

It was a decent speech: direct, but not over-rehearsed. Rogers was at ease in the spotlight, if not as comfortable as he was in a firefight. The crowd looked ready to follow any call he made. The Soldier felt that pull. As Bucky had, on that train in Germany.

HYDRA should have sent him to one of these appearances, if they had wanted Rogers dead. One shot from a nearby roof, and he wouldn't have known him from any other corpse. Bucky Barnes would have stayed buried. He doubted HYDRA usually allowed that level of ineptitude in their ranks, but the Soldier decided that so far the outcome wasn't a bad one. He took his eyes off Rogers and scanned the roof again.

The itch he felt wasn't coming from up there. There was a break in the pattern of people around him, but he had missed who or what had made it. He pulled out a phone; it had come with the hoodie. He'd removed the battery, but he tilted the black screen towards him and tapped it while he searched his periphery.

A plainclothes cop was observing the crowd from the inside, twenty feet to his left. He was getting sloppy with his rounds this far from the Captain. He hadn't seen the Soldier.

The Soldier pocketed the phone and looked around like he was expecting somebody. Then he waved at no one and headed diagonally through the crowd, leaving the cop behind.

"I want all of you to know that I'm here with you. 'Til the end of the line," Rogers finished.

The Soldier stopped dead and stared.

Everyone around him broke into applause. The media reps shouted questions, but Rogers' attention wasn't on them. He was looking right at him. The Soldier could see him clearly, but even Rogers couldn't pick him from a sea of faces at this distance. 

Rogers launched into a sprint, and the crowd parted. He was heading for him. A hundred feet suddenly felt like ten. The Soldier had given himself away. 

Sometimes his orders clashed with self-preservation, and he would fight them, knowing he couldn't override them--but hearing those words, he hadn't even tried, hadn't thought of trying. He had almost killed Rogers. Now Rogers was coming for him, and he hadn't moved. He couldn't leave him.

The sloppy cop was making up for his earlier gaffe. He had eyes on the Soldier and was relaying as much to the mic in his collar. It was too neat a net they were closing around him. They had known he'd be here, or suspected. He didn't have the advantage. That refocused him enough to retake control of himself. He left off watching the Captain wade through the crowd and continued at a brisk walk in the direction he had originally been going.

He ducked through a tight group of people, dropped his cap on a kid's head, and pulled his hood up without straightening or slowing his stride. That would lose the cop, for now, but maneuvering through a mass of people wasn't fast. Rogers' security detail was managing the crowd, diverting bystanders, as they pushed towards his last known location. They weren't acting aggressively. That was about to change. He needed the press of bodies to work in his favor.

He pulled a beanie off a bald woman's head. She turned to shout at him, and he took out his derringer and shot into the air. 

She ran from him and he kept moving.

While the mob built momentum, he holstered his gun and shoved the beanie over his head to cover the length of his hair. 

An armed man stepped in his path and the Soldier braced for the hit without slowing. A bullet punched into his shoulder, but the Kevlar vest that he hadn't taken off under the hoodie absorbed the brunt of the impact.

The man's wrist broke when he grabbed it to yank away the gun. He raised it to his head, but held his finger away from the trigger. He was late middle-aged, like the woman standing nearby, both with matching wedding bands and Midwestern accents. A veteran, but not an agent. He'd picked the wrong place and time to take a stand. The Soldier left him hunched on the ground as his wife knelt beside him.

He stashed the gun in his hoodie. He couldn't discard a weapon if it could be useful, and he could find a use.

Rogers was reinstating calm off to his left. He appreciated the heads-up of where not to go. The crowd around him had thinned out, but his pursuers were cut off by the wall of panicked people pushing outwards. That made an opening back around towards the museum that he could use. Most of the real estate around the museum was thousands of square feet of landscaped tree parks, but he could disappear in the streets behind it. He did a short sprint at full speed to catch up to the others escaping and then slowed to a jog.

His cover steadily broke off a few people at a time until he made his way down 12th alone. No one had looked twice at him. It was unlikely that Rogers' security would come this far to find him, but they were still alive, so it was possible. There had been so few of them, they couldn't have taken him in even if they had managed to fight through the crowd to get to him. They wouldn't take him, now, if they somehow found him. He had caught them unprepared.

But everything he'd learned about Rogers had said that he was a strategist, and he had expected the Soldier to show.

Looking around, he sped up. It was early afternoon in the heart of the capital, and the street was empty.

He didn't know what approached from the sky before he was shooting it.

"Hey, put it down, twitchy. I just repainted."

It was a--flying robot. The word was nonsense, but it fit. Rogers had a robot. The metal skin deflected the bullets, but if he could get close, he could test how strong it really was. He had no idea how it could be hanging in the air, but the hands were pointed towards the ground. Both of the palms and the soles of the feet glowed like targets. Naturally, he took aim.

"Son of a bitch!" The robot listed sideways, its left foot sputtering, but it stayed afloat. He aimed again. "That's enough of that."

A light flashed in front of him, and rubble from the new hole in the sidewalk bounced off him. The Soldier blinked to clear his vision, and darted into the nearest door. The robot shouted after him.

He checked his stride crossing the hotel lobby. It was an upscale joint. The clientele openly scrutinized his clothing, but blending in wasn't necessary. He needed to close the distance between him and the machine. It was trying not to engage him, and it could stay out of his range indefinitely if he didn't approach it from a different direction.

Because it could fly. And that was a complication that he didn't know how to manage, but it excited him. He thought of being able to take off right there, to just leave and get away, and to go...

But he was where he was supposed to be. And here on the ground, he wouldn't get far with the robot watching him from the sky.

He couldn't hear any commotion behind him. It hadn't followed him in, so he doubted it would. He estimated how high it had been off the street, and ran up the stairs to the sixth floor.

He snapped the knob off a door and rammed it open, startling a couple in bed. He ignored them, crossed the room and flicked the curtains open. The metal man had landed on the street in front of the hotel. It was pacing, and its movements on the ground were slow and stilted. So, it was smart enough to know it couldn't overtake him on foot, indoors.

The Soldier could hear its reverberating voice through the window and over the man behind him shouting from what he thought was a safe distance. It was talking, apparently to itself. 

"What's your ETA? Because this is looking more and more like SWAT's kind of thing. Yeah, no, I get that. But as someone with a conscience, however shriveled it might be, I think letting a HYDRA assassin--what?"

The Soldier levered the window open. 

"Ex-assassin, maybe. I guess we'll see about that, because letting him run around in the general population is a pretty high-risk trust exercise, even for you."

The couple's screaming alerted the machine. It looked up.

"Okay, right now he's glaring at me. Then maybe you should get your ass in gear. Yeah, bye. Kisses."

The Soldier climbed onto the ledge, which was wide enough to use as a platform to jump to the story above. The facade was decorative and wherever he put his hands he found a hold. He scaled the building like a ladder.

"Alright, Quasimodo, stop scaring the townsfolk. I've got someone who wants to talk to you, supersoldier to supersoldier."

The robot left the ground and rose to meet him. The Soldier stopped on a ledge and put his back to the brick.

"Did you climb too high and now you can't get down?" it asked in a flat voice. "Here, I'll give you a hand."

The Soldier waited, with his hand by his knife, until the robot closed with him.

He leapt.

"Aw, fuck," it said.

They spun dizzyingly while the Soldier clung to the robot and wedged his knife into every crack he could find. It wasn't human, but that didn't mean that it had no brain. They ricocheted off the building across the street and the robot climbed, compensating for the Soldier's weight. It was using its arms to steer, so the Soldier didn't waste effort defending.

"Listen, I don't want to hurt you--" the robot said. Their position steadied for a moment, and the Soldier switched the knife to his stronger arm and drove the point against the eye-slits. "Don't--do that. You're going to bring us both down--" He found a panel in the neck that gave when he pried at it. He jimmied the blade under it and slammed the heel of his palm against the grip. The robot shouted obscenities. It pulled at the Soldier's arm and without the extra stabilizer, they went into another tailspin.

The Soldier slammed head-first through a brick wall and shattered the window below it. 

"--apartment, but no one's home. I'm never cracking another joke about people who work nine to five. They are the real heroes. What? That wasn't a joke. Well, I will tell you that your friend has got one hell of a grip. Even after he was out cold I had to pry his fingers out of my suit, and not just the metal ones--No, I didn't knock him out. It was probably the brick wall we crashed through."

The Soldier opened his eyes and checked the corners of the room from where he was laid out flat on his back. The pain in his head was manageable, but he had lost time. It was a little longer before he could focus on his captor. He sounded like a man, but it wasn't. It was a--robot.

No, he knew that. It had flown them here. The chatty robot was standing a few feet away near the gaping hole in the wall. It had secured the Soldier's arms to his torso and tied his legs together with some kind of cable. It hadn't killed him, so maybe it wasn't as smart as he'd thought.

"He's fine. I'm sure his skull's just as tough and resilient as yours. I'm not calling you thickheaded. That's not what I said. Fine. Hey, Terminator, you still with us? Blink twice."

The Soldier snapped the cable around his middle and yanked the other free with his left hand.

"Damn," the robot said with a note of grudging admiration. "Uh, Cap, I don't think he wants to talk to me. You want to give it a try?"

The robot powered the weapons in its hands with a mechanical whine. The Soldier gained his feet, and widened his stance when he started to sway. His knife hadn't been effective, but that wasn't a problem if the robot was going to pull its punches. The Soldier wouldn't.

"Here's a message from your sponsor, asshole."

The Soldier advanced.

"Bucky."

That was Rogers' voice, coming from the robot. He stopped.

"Bucky, can you hear me?"

"Yes," the Soldier said, though his throat felt tight. The robot gave a shaky, relieved sigh.

"I shouldn't have charged after you like that, back there. I wasn't trying to spook you. I just...I wanted to talk to you." His heart was beating like he was fighting. He could put his fist through the metal face, but Rogers' voice alone might be enough to stop him. "Buck?"

"What," he said before he'd thought of a reply.

"What?" Steve asked tentatively.

"What--do you want with me," he decided.

"I just want to talk. Tony's there, he can bring you to where I'm at. Or--or, you can wait there, and I'll come to you."

"You won't kill me."

"No. No. I'm not going to do that. No one is." The Soldier's heartbeat picked up. Yes was an answer he understood; no only meant he didn't know what they would do to him. He couldn't prepare for that. He stepped back, and the robot matched his step. "But, Bucky, I can't keep that promise if I'm not with you."

"I--tried to kill you," the Soldier said. He'd almost said that he had killed him. He didn't talk to the target, and especially not after the mission was complete. And they wouldn't be talking now, if he'd been successful. But he'd failed.

"But you didn't," Rogers said warmly, like the Soldier not killing him was everything he could have asked for.

No, he hadn't failed. The mission continued. He just didn't know what it was.

His head throbbed. He was tired, suddenly. He could sink to the bottom of that exhaustion if he let himself, like a stone in a river. 

He should put himself back in the hands of his betters. There would be consequences for taking unsupervised action, but when he could be handled, they would move him where they needed him without any of the input Rogers expected from him. What was supposed to have been days that had turned into weeks without rest would finally be over.

Every time he considered it, it was less likely he would do it.

He could surrender to Rogers, he realized. He could let him take his retribution. The Soldier doubted that he'd ever faced the fallout of his past missions. Necessary evils had to be safeguarded, he'd been told.

He had no doubt that Rogers could make use of him, like HYDRA had. But if he wasn't willing to cripple the Soldier to take him in, then he didn't have the stomach to torture him. Maybe he would treat him like Bucky Barnes, whatever that would mean. Submitting himself to Rogers without knowing what came next had a grisly appeal, like digging shrapnel out of a wound. It might be what he had to do.

But he took his own option. He ran out of the apartment and into the hallway.

"We've got a runner," the robot said in its own voice.

The Soldier wasn't sure it would chase him, but it did. The hallway was empty. Everyone on this floor had evacuated after their explosive entrance. He had planned on there being people. They would have slowed the metal man down. The Soldier put on more speed, but his pursuer flew down the straightaway and slammed him against the wall.

"HYDRA's still here in D.C. looking for you, Barnes. You said it yourself, we're not going to kill you. We are not your enemy. And we're the best chance you've got," the robot said.

HYDRA hadn't killed him either. He thought he had begged for it, more than once.

He hooked his leg behind the robot's knee and put his full force into his left hook. The machine bowed backwards far enough for him to slip its hold and reach the window at the end of the hall.

A blast shattered the glass, and he was grabbed from behind before he was rocketing out of the gap in the wall and through the air. He lapsed into stillness as they cleared the buildings and soared above them. The world fell away, like he'd shrugged off a weight. He was flying.

"That's it." A metal hand patted him. "Just enjoy the ride, big guy."

The Soldier tensed his arms, trying to break the robot's grip. Metal creaked under the strain.

"I know you're not dumb, so don't do it."

The Soldier smashed the back of his head into the faceplate, and did it again after the brief, blinding pain subsided.

"What is this? Are you self-destructing?" the robot asked, sounding panicked.

It tried to adjust its hold on him, and he twisted his arm free. He scrabbled at the machine's head and dug into the edges until his nails started to rip from his fingers. But the metal gave first, and he flung the gold mask away to whip past them in the wind.

He saw the man's face behind it, white, mid-forties. It was as surprised as he was, and the arms around him let go.

The Soldier was left fighting air. He couldn't think, except that he was falling. He struggled to catch himself on nothing, because his body knew what came next. How he would jerk with the force of it, and taste his blood in his mouth.

He would live. When he could breathe, he would open his eyes. And he would be back in the chair, ready to fall again. 

Fear lurched through him, and it was almost enough to make him reach out to the machine when it dove to catch him. It--He was saying something, but the Soldier only heard howling.

But he couldn't be caught. He had never been caught. He deftly pulled the gun from his hoodie and emptied it.

The robot-man pulled up. The shots went wide, and instead of hitting flesh, a few pinged off the chestplate and the rest hit the sky.

The Soldier tossed the gun away from him and rolled when he hit the roof, but he lost control of his landing and wrenched his right shoulder with a stifled grunt. If he didn't keep moving, the machine would see where he was. He gave himself a second to brace against the short roof wall, and when he didn't black out, he dropped over the side of the building. Catching hold of the edge with both hands, he swung in towards a platform hidden by the overhang. A gap between the ledge and the wall above it formed a man-made cave that was invisible from every vantage except the tenth floor offices across the street. This city had a lot of bizarre architectural nooks that were more useful than they looked. The Soldier crawled in.

He closed his eyes, put his head against the wall, and breathed.

"You're alive," he told himself. His voice was hushed like someone might overhear, but there was no one to stop him.

He stuck his hand inside the neck of his hoodie, under the vest, and gently prodded. Left collarbone had broken from the impact of the bullet earlier, but the skeletal reinforcements for the arm would brace it. Right shoulder was sprained but not dislocated. He'd feel the bruising across his back and arm for a day, but no other fractures. He pulled off his beanie. His head--he winced and pulled his fingers away. Nothing he could do about it but wait.

"You'll live," he said. But he had known he would. What he didn't know was for what purpose he was surviving, or for who. He leaned forward between his knees to keep the nausea at bay.

He rarely stayed long in one place. This kind of stillness made him wary. It had snuck up on him a few times while travelling cross-country, and however he'd tried to lose himself in kicking in the sleeping heads of HYDRA, it had remained close behind, prickling across his back.

He didn't fight it. He'd been doing that a lot lately, not fighting as hard as he could have.

And knowing the threat that was out there waiting for him made staying in here sound like an even better idea, when he should be planning his next steps in dealing with it. He hadn't cut off enough of HYDRA to keep what was left from tracking him; he had known the futility of that. But here, in the trenches--he wasn't safe, but he could pretend, for a while.

He hugged his arms around his legs and held himself close without shame. A soldier found his rest where he could. No one could know if he was sleeping, or crying, or praying to God, and no one would ask. No one would beat his answer out of him. His gun rested against his stomach, and its presence was as comforting as a friend. He thought that had meant anything, once upon a time.

The greedy wind roared and snatched at him in his cubby, like when it pried him loose it would swallow him whole and shit him out. He shivered and tucked his head in tighter to his body. It was superstition, but he didn't want to see. As soon as he opened his eyes and looked down, he would be gone.

"Bucky," Steve called, sounding unbearably sad. His voice was miles away, and inches, but the Soldier's groping hands didn't encounter anyone. 

"Bucky." It echoed down the ravine and battered itself against the cliffs. 

"I can't reach you, pal. You have to find me," the Soldier slurred. His thoughts were slow with cold. It would send him off to sleep whether he wanted to or not.

Steve wouldn't find him. The Soldier couldn't have found him, however hard he looked. But he would be found. It was a matter of time. He thought naively that maybe Steve would pick up some lead or trace--but he wouldn't know where to start. He hadn't been hunted down and punished for his failures until he'd learned to disappear. He hadn't been taught to track so he could be set on his hunters. They didn't teach that in the Army, not how he had learned.

HYDRA had instructed the Soldier. It had drilled into him locations of boltholes and safehouses that he could find blind and backwards. It had given him the network he had used to drop off every radar. That maze HYDRA had built, each turn and twist to its specifications, was the same one he was still running. He wasn't sure how to stop.

The Soldier didn't remember much, but he knew this: HYDRA would find him first.

When he raised his head, four hours had passed. The concussion hadn't finished the fall's botched job. He was tender behind the eyes, but his vision didn't swim when he turned to look out at the darkening city. That meant he had to decide what to do about HYDRA's continuing presence in D.C.

It was a problem he should have already solved. He would pay for the delay in one way or another, and the anticipation made him tense. He climbed stiffly to his feet.

His toes inched out over the drop. The skies were empty, so were the offices across from him, and the streets had filled with evening traffic. No one was looking up. He had the urge to close his eyes, so he kept them open when he stepped off.

He caught the ledge before it shot out of reach. Shimmying down the narrow pier between two columns of windows, he found an empty room and broke inside.

 

 

It was two weeks before HYDRA found him.

The Soldier was sure that they had been dicking around, because he hadn't been lying that low. But Homeland Security, the feds, and local enforcement were all on high alert, and it wasn't as easy to be a bunch of shifty bastards in the capital as it was before HYDRA's plans sunk in the Potomac.

Though he had gotten along just fine.

He smirked as he poured lye into another water bottle. Guns were more practical, but he'd found the materials and wanted to see if he remembered how they went together. Now that HYDRA was knocking at the door, the agitation of being pursued had cooled into focus. He knew the procedures for capture. They wouldn't be easy to carry out in such close quarters. He was optimistic of success.

And maybe a bit excited.

A soldier with a mission was a happy soldier.

A small armory was assembled here behind the couch he was crouched against--what was left of the little combination weapons depot and rest stop that had been set up in this storage unit. It was the sixth he had hit. HYDRA had spared no expense stocking all their caches with everything from Sig Sauers to grenade launchers to cases of water, snacks. Really swank couches.

Sabotaging them had been the hardest choice he could remember making, but he couldn't take it all with him. He'd wanted to, with the intensity of need. But he'd snapped apart stocks and bent barrels and made quick work of it.

Then HYDRA had made a lucky guess that he'd be here. They sure as shit hadn't tailed him.

And now they were right outside the door, cutting a hole through the metal, because he'd bent the tracks.

They breached. Light flooded in. The first agent entered and opened fire. 

"Fuck," he said and lay flat with the unfinished bomb held steady in his right hand. Bullets ripped through the back of the couch. He could survive a headshot, but this was a tad overzealous.

The bottle bombs needed some time to warm up. He groped for one of the unopened bags of lye and flung it towards the ingress, into the line of fire. A shot pinged off his arm. He heard the soft sound of a bullet going through a pillow as the bag popped. The agent started hacking. She must have inhaled a lungful. That couldn't feel good.

The Soldier balled up some tinfoil to drop in the bottle, screwed on the lid, and shook it.

Under the sawing coughs and the wrenching sound of the opening being peeled wider, the Soldier counted the steps of agent number two stalking closer to get eyes on him. He detoured around his now unconscious comrade.

When he rounded the couch, the Soldier didn't bother getting up before he threw the bottle in his face.

It exploded a foot short, but the contents splashed across his exposed skin. Welts thickened on his cheeks and swelled his eyes shut. Blood poured like sweat where the plastic shrapnel cut him. The bombs worked as expected. When he opened his mouth to scream, the Soldier shot him between the teeth.

He reholstered his borrowed Sig Sauer. Except he wasn't giving it back. Or, he was, but only a bullet at a time.

He quickly finished the three other bombs and shook them all, two in one hand and one in the other, while he crouch-walked behind the couch to the body. The bottles swelled. He tossed them towards the front, grabbed the body, and pulled the sling of its semiautomatic across his back. They were working to roll the entryway wider, and given a chance, he could bull through it. With the bombs as distraction, they wouldn't immediately see him coming. And when they did, he would use their buddy to catch the flak.

But someone stepped inside to throw something of their own. The Soldier clipped them with a spray of bullets, but the grenade arced perfectly and stuck to the wall behind him. 

They shored up the entry point with the metal they had cut away, effectively sealing him in.

That wasn't capture protocol.

The Soldier grabbed the dead man and scrabbled away from the grenade and out into the open, across the concrete and past gun racks, until he had a hold of the other casualty. He could try to push through, but it would detonate any second, and he wouldn't get far enough.

The agents outside stuck their muzzles in the cracks for a few potshots. One skimmed his skull and another glanced off his side and the vest before he brought the first agent up as a shield. Her head jerked. Her labored breathing stuttered for a few seconds and cut off. They didn't care about her, or themselves.

It was good as suicide, tossing a grenade in here. The ordnance crammed in this space would level the storage units around them, and the custodians would have to chip them from the concrete. None of them would walk away from this.

But the Soldier doubted HYDRA could reconstruct him from ashes. It wasn't the worst that could happen.

He propped the bodies up against his own, one between him and the opening and the other pointed towards the grenade. Blood dribbled from the guy's lax mouth onto his vest.

"If you get me out of this, we're even," said the Soldier. If he was alive, he would have laughed, he's sure.

The grenade went off. And it didn't melt him to the floor. It was mostly noise. Dust and bits of concrete drizzled down on him. In the unsettled darkness, on the other side of the room, light slithered from a hole in the ceiling. It was his way out.

He hauled up the body in his left hand for his last charge.

Or, he tried. His arm was dead.

"Double fuck," the Soldier said.

The agents didn't waste the opportunity to rip the metal barricade open and rush in.

He abandoned the semi, it wouldn't fit through the hole, and swung the body on his right, his new lucky charm, to carry across his exposed side as he darted past them.

But with one working hand, he had to drop his shield to get out. He crouched and leapt the five feet to grab the lip of the roof. He jockeyed his head and shoulders through the gap. The fit was tight.

A bullet hit his thigh. He made note of it.

Where the grenade had blown the hole, it had also taken chunks from the walls. He butted his boot against the pitted concrete for purchase, and with a kick he slid out onto the roof.

With a moment to spare, he multitasked, prodding at his thigh while he mourned the weapons he'd set aside that he was now forced to leave behind. Someone had collected antique rifles.

The bullet had gone through-and-through the meat to the left of the bone. It hadn't nicked any arteries, which was fortunate, because he needed two hands to dress it--and bandages. Neither of which he had.

He climbed to his feet. If he didn't move, the agents might start using the actual grenades. They seemed green enough to do it. And he had other plans for the ammo.

He ran across the rooftops of the row of units that backed the one he'd escaped, keeping low. His leg held, but his arm's deadweight nearly threw him off balance. Hair whipped in his face, and he struggled to scrape it out of his eyes one-handed and spit it out of his mouth, and he added hair ties to his list, under bandages.

This wasn't how he had wanted it to go, but he had rigged another contingency for the STRIKE team before they had barged in. When he was far enough away, he dropped into a crouch and turned back.

His right pocket was empty, and so was his left. He patted himself down, exasperated. It was somewhere, he knew he'd brought it.

He retrieved the detonator from inside his vest and looked it over to check it was the right one. Then he pressed it.

Kaboom. 

The sound was so loud he could almost see it, and the inextricable warmth and searing brightness rolled over him a moment later. It forced back the chilly air, and he absently raised his arm to shade his eyes, then lowered it. Seeing worse hadn't struck him blind. He watched the conflagration scatter into smaller flames and dip out of view.

Prone, he belly crawled back towards the lane between the rows of storage. With his gun drawn, he raised his head to peer over. Two agents were sprinting in his direction. They at least had enough training that one of them was scouting the rooftops for him, though the volley he fired was a little wild. The Soldier didn't bother to duck before killing them.

The last agent was still lying in the blast zone. He moved for his pistol when the Soldier approached dragging the other two behind him, but he also only had one working arm, and it wasn't his dominant. The state he was in, he wouldn't be any trouble.

"Hail HYDRA!" he screamed. The Soldier bit back an answering hail. 

This would be easier with a free hand, and now he was wondering why he had brought the bodies. The half-formed idea had been to pack them in a few barrels of lye, if the supply was still intact, but this wasn't the mission. HYDRA wouldn't follow up on how well he had covered his tracks.

He dropped the bodies and left them where they lay.

The man, or boy, really, kept up his mantra.

"Why aren't you dead?" the Soldier asked after disarming him and holstering his gun.

"Hail--"

He slapped him, lightly. Questioning went better when he didn't use his full strength.

"Fuck you! You're ours, we're going to--" 

The Soldier grabbed his jaw, and gripped his cheeks when he clenched until he forced his mouth open. All his teeth were original. He wasn't worth the dental work for the cyanide.

"Where's the body?" The boy didn't answer. He looked miserable enough that the Soldier gave him the benefit of a second chance. "Where's Hydra?"

"Everywhere," he spat. The Soldier planted a knee on his charred arm and he shrieked like he'd set him on fire again. His pained gasps started him hyperventilating. "Stop. Stop!"

The Soldier did, and the agent let out a sob and curled in on himself. He was young, but next to the Soldier, he was a child: HYDRA youth. It made him feel old, and that made him hesitate.

He almost asked, "Are you even eighteen?" He wanted to say, "Take it easy. Just breathe in, breathe out..."

"Where are they?" the Soldier asked. Kid or not, it didn't make a difference. Children could be good soldiers; they were malleable, and they weren't expected to be capable of killing. But this one was old enough to choose, and HYDRA didn't have the resources for an army of captives.

"Doesn't matter. They'll find you," he said. "And I'll be with them when they do. And I'll laugh when they put you in the chair, you disloyal piece of shit."

If the agent was this undisciplined, the Soldier doubted that his team was told who was giving the commands or from where. It was highly likely they hadn't known the Soldier's whereabouts until now. And the chair--don't picture it--wasn't common knowledge. Giving that level of clearance to the kind of agents they had scraped from the bottom of the barrel, they must have spread themselves thin sending teams to any cache they'd thought he would hit, on the chance he would show. They had got lucky finding him here, like he'd thought. He wouldn't have time to dismantle the HYDRA safehouse he had been squatting in, but he needed to set up somewhere else, to be safe.

"They'll kill you, if your injuries don't first," the Soldier said. The kid didn't know HYDRA like he did. Giving him advice wasn't useful, but he'd been doing more of that now, things that he did just because. "They can find two more just like you."

The boy threw a fist at him that didn't connect and collapsed back against the ground. Tears dripped down his face, but it was screwed up in a snarl like he would try to hit him again if it wasn't agony. He had blue eyes and blond hair.

One glance had told the Soldier that he wouldn't make it. His right arm was unsalvageable, and metal arms were more expensive than false teeth. The material of his pants had fused to his legs. The tac vest was black, but it couldn't cover the blood pooling on the concrete.

He should put a bullet in him. He didn't know if it would be a mercy. He had already killed him, but he had changed his mind. He didn't want to finish it. He didn't want to be merciful. He didn't know if the two were the same.

The Soldier stood to leave.

"Give me my gun," the agent said. He didn't look angry anymore, just desperate. The gun wasn't for the Soldier.

He walked away.

"Don't leave me like this, you bastard!" His voice hitched. "It fucking hurts." When he looked back, the kid was watching him.

"Finish it," he said. "'Cause I'm with you 'til the--"

Terrified, the Soldier shot him in the head.

The dead man screamed. 

Five bullets, six bullets, seven didn't stop the noise. His finger didn't pause on the trigger after the gun emptied. Those weren't his words to say; he couldn't know them. HYDRA didn't know them. Only the Captain knew. Only Steve Rogers could say those words to him.

The Soldier faced away and pressed his hands to his ears to stifle the wailing. The gun was still in his hand. He was full of echoes: gunfire, dying cries with no source, that he couldn't block out. The war went on because he kept it going. He was given bullets, and he put them in bodies, like a gun was supposed to.

He turned back and stilled when he saw the body, its face inside out. The screaming hadn't been real; it died off too quickly. But the kid was still dead. 

Steve wasn't dead, he thought. Steve was alive. And the relief he felt was unrepentant and went down to his bones.

He was in enough trouble with HYDRA without worrying about the Captain's comrades. Vengeance wasn't something he wanted to be on the other side of.

The body's ear was intact, and so was the comm. The Soldier stuck it in his own and listened, but HYDRA had cut contact, knowing the team was a loss. He clicked it over to transmit anyway.

"Winter Soldier is on the move. Go home and kiss your families," the Soldier said hoarsely, playing out a scrap of memory. It was as close to pity as his handlers had come. Those sorry bastards, they would say, and some of them had meant him.

He flicked the comm away, looking again at the mess he'd made of the agent: the sorry bastard. He probably didn't have any family to speak of, or someone would have given a damn that he was working for a cult. HYDRA would punish the Soldier for taking out the STRIKE team, but to correct his disobedience, not to avenge their own.

The Soldier put the agent's empty gun in his hand and curled his fingers around it. He didn't have ammo for it, so he would leave it behind. His hands arranged the gun against the body's chest in repose. It served no purpose. A corpse couldn't feel comfortable, so it wouldn't prefer to lie one way or another.

And he'd be killing a lot of other soldiers before this was over. He couldn't say otherwise.

The Soldier detoured by a culvert where his pack was being sniffed by a mutt, who gave up the bounty in exchange for a scratch behind the ears. He realized with a jolt that his left arm was working and couldn't remember when it had come back online. He dug a cloth out of his supplies that he used to clean his guns and tied it around the hole in his leg.

He'd go to the next safehouse directly. The trailer park wasn't on any of his internal lists, and the renters were mostly retirees, several who had lived there for years, and a few transient small-time criminals, which is how the Soldier had come by the vacancy.

But going now felt like he was leaving a job undone. He knew the kinds of things he could do to people, and they'd be done to him for signing this job in fireworks. If he cleaned up his trail, killed the man who ran this place, also its sole employee, disposed of the agents' bodies and stripped them of any affiliation to HYDRA, and returned to the fold, they might settle for wiping him.

Let them come to him. Let everybody, the world, see exactly what he was, and let HYDRA realize what they had made him into.

There was a camera on the gate that he had bypassed on the way in by hopping the fence. He looked straight at it and smiled when he walked out.

 

 

"That's a dollar."

The Soldier stopped flipping through the newspaper and looked at the man in the booth, South Jersey accent, built like a brawler, who cocked his brows back at him.

He put the paper down. Skimming what he could of it had already told him that if his detour into property damage the past few weeks had made the news, it wasn't widespread enough to put in print. But tomorrow's paper could be different. His recklessness this morning might not be the same great idea that he had thought it was, when everyone knew his face.

The skin between his shoulders burned, and he felt magnified. The vendor glared on while he browsed the ballcaps. He needed a replacement.

There was a man in a business suit standing on the corner obsessively checking his watch while people crossed around him.

A woman reapplying lipstick in the reflection of a car window met his eyes, tapped against the glass, and had a hushed conversation through the scant inch of space.

Two teenagers took a picture of themselves, posing together a few feet away. They were barely younger than the kid he'd killed.

The Soldier pulled a cap low over his face to try the fit, but a second later he hung it back up. He was past hiding. HYDRA was too close for him to lose them again, and they'd be waiting for him to make an attempt. He'd chosen to confront them, so he wasn't going to disappear. He was an expert at follow-through.

A blue cap caught his eye and he pulled it off the rack. He swiped his fingertips over the "Dodgers" emblazoned on the front. The corner of his mouth lifted. It was a statement, though he didn't entirely get what about. No one was wearing one. He would stand out, a transplant from another place and time.

He waved it at the vendor, who didn't comment except to rattle off his total. The Soldier forked over a fifty and donned his cap. How the man could rob his customers and still stay in business was a mystery, but he was shopping on HYDRA's dime.

A guy wearing headphones and dense layers of salvaged clothing walked past blathering about angels. He turned his head nearly one-eighty when he caught sight of the Soldier.

The Soldier ducked into the collar of his jacket, shoved his hands in his pockets like the other cold pedestrians and went the other way.

"Hey, Dodgers!"

His finger tapped against the trigger guard of his gun as he looked back. The vendor was just brandishing his change, not bothering to chase after him.

The Soldier raised his hand from the gun and waved him off.

"Keep it."

Two blocks away, he straightened, pushed up the bill of his cap, and pulled his ponytail through the back. 

It'd take some time to break the habit of running: more time than he had. And he didn't even remember making it. He'd just have to bend it a little, until HYDRA found him where and when he wanted them to.

That wasn't here or now.

The edge wore off completely when the passengers on the metro paid him no mind, like he was another commuter heading home. That assumption was to his advantage, but as the stops passed, and he watched people go on their way, it wouldn't let him go.

His stop was coming up. But when he stepped off maybe it wouldn't be at the bus station in Fairfax, but from the subway at 9th and from there to an apartment building with rows of sky-blue glass breaking up the brick. The fire escape would groan and threaten to pull free and plummet into the alley, but it hadn't yet and wouldn't today, and he'd walk up to the third floor landing and tap a rhythm on the leftmost window. It'd open before he finished. He'd glance up with a smile.

He didn't know what home looked like.

He shut his eyes, trying to drag his focus from the bus full of people. 

The smell of sun-warmed wood and laundry soap itched the back of his throat. Someone laughed in a low voice that he strained to put a face to. But the room itself was so bright that there were no shadows to give anything shape.

He'd seen that room before, from the chair, when the wipe detached his retinas. Ten minutes, and the tech who pulled the bit from his mouth would come into focus, and then the armed guards, the stained concrete floor and the whitewashed walls: the lingering current warming his skin, and the scent of powerful antiseptic scraping through his nose and down into his raw lungs.

There was a bitter taste on his tongue, like he still had the rubber guard between his teeth. That building had been a home, he'd thought. Disappointment didn't change that the chair where he woke and the cryotank where he rested were the only constants that he had always returned to.

And now that was gone. He hadn't appreciated it when he'd had it. A home was wasted on the Soldier.

Five hours of hiking and hitchhiking southwest, and he made a slow pass around the overgrown fringes of the trailer park before circling around to his lot and crunching up the gravel drive. It would be a workable cover. A few of the residents were wary of him, but not like they knew what he was capable of. He was just another potential pusher who they didn't need to be convinced to avoid. The trailer itself was squat, single-wide, with aluminum siding thin as a sardine can. It was indefensible, and the Soldier wouldn't normally accept that flaw in a hideout, but neither would HYDRA suspect him of it. The nearest cache they would be sitting on was a state over, and these parks were proliferative. These were sufficient preemptive measures.

From here he could draw up his own plans on his own timeline, and scare up whatever contacts and leverage he could use to pry HYDRA from wherever they were taking root. And if they chased him then, they would find he wouldn't balk from waging what would be a very public guerilla war across the continent, or several, if it came to it.

As far as he could get from Rogers.

He was surprised that he was looking forward to it. This was the most he had committed himself to a mission; there hadn't been much of him to give a shit until now.

The Soldier checked the trailer over again from the outside, ducking the windows before he lifted the one on the short side facing the woods, drew his gun, and pulled himself in.

He was in a bedroom, and through the open door he could see down the hall to the rest of the house. It was still empty, to tell by the stale, musty smell of the place. He went towards the hall, his steps kicking up dust into the failing sunlight, but he paused in the doorway when he heard a siren, far off but approaching fast.

He was hit from behind.

The Soldier fired out of the open window, but the gunman was gone. A second man came down the hall. A tranquilizer round plinked off his upraised arm, and he shot him dead while escaping the way he'd come in.

His leg collapsed under him when he landed outside. The local anesthetic had worn off an hour past, and the pain in his leg was answering the fresh wound in his chest. The bullet hadn't exited. It had bounced off the kevlar and back inside of him. He could feel it.

The man who had shot him hadn't reappeared, but the door of the trailer a few over was wide open. It had belonged to a retired veteran living with his granddaughter.

Two police cars pulled into the drive, and unmarked vehicles cordoned off the street as the Soldier ran into the woods.

The copse was too small to hide in, but he would follow it away from the park until he could--a line of armored agents with no insignia advanced on him, weaving through the trees. The Soldier pressed his back against a trunk. Behind him, the agents who had arrived by car were just reaching the treeline. HYDRA had flushed him into a roundup.

The Soldier sagged against his support, dragging painful breaths into his resisting lungs, and felt something catch against his back. A possible collapsed lung meant he didn't have the air to shout when he strained his wound reaching behind him. He ran his fingers along the long body of the tranquilizer dart and dropped it without looking. The man in the hall had been a quicker draw than he'd realized.

He followed the trunk down until he was crouching with his right heel against it and his left leg propped in front of him. They were converging on him, but he was still thinking it wasn't possible. They couldn't have found him. The Soldier leaned his head against the bark without taking his finger off the trigger.

"Is this really happening?" he asked. His wounds were real, and he reeked of blood and days of unwashed sweat, but that didn't speak for the rest. The tree looked too sharp above him, like his eyes were turning corners until he could almost see the back of it. He would welcome a hallucination.

"Is that him?" The leaves weren't answering, but the Soldier picked up hushed chatter from the agents. "He walked right into it. He had no fucking idea."

"They really fucked with his brain."

"Crazy's still dangerous."

The Soldier closed his eyes; he wasn't getting out of this.

When he looked up, a woman and a man in suits were standing twenty feet away with a line of agents behind them.

"Soldier, diagnostic," the woman said.

"Two gunshot wounds. Left lateral thigh, 9mm from ten feet, front-to-back, through-and-through, seven hours. Right caudal thorax, partial lung collapse, 9mm from five feet, back-to-front, in situ, fifteen minutes," he grunted between breaths. He couldn't make the effort to resist the order.

"How long until the sedative takes effect?" she addressed her partner without looking away.

"We don't know how many times they dosed--it. Shouldn't be more than five minutes," the suit said. He must be the head tech, and fresh, too, if he was struggling with the depersonalization training.

They talked shop, discussing his injuries. They had gotten what they needed from him until he could be safely collected. The situation was secure. The asset would not engage. The Soldier awaited medical attention, drifting into a post-mission stupor and a numbness that pain and sensation couldn't puncture.

His gaze roamed automatically along the perimeter of agents, until he made eye contact with one over the woman's shoulder. The guy jumped like he'd barked at him, his rifle twitching as he tried to bring it even more to bear on his target.

He had blond hair and blue eyes. 

His face had grown back.

No--Rogers. Rogers had told the Soldier that no one would kill him. The Captain wanted him alive, and the Soldier had heard the order in it. As full of holes as he was, HYDRA's plans for him might no longer hinge on his viability.

He jerked his gun up to point at the lead handler's head. She frowned, but the soldiers around her bristled and swore. They were scared. The Soldier's the one who should be afraid, fucking terrified, but he couldn't feel anything.

He needed that fear. Whatever would prevent him from going placidly to the chair when they snapped their fingers.

"I don't want to go with you." His gun stayed on the woman, but he spoke to her partner, the newbie. For all the Soldier's practice since that first interrogation, the words came out reluctant and quiet. "Let me go."

"You are in our custody. There's no--" he started, but the woman stepped between them, cutting off the line of sight. The asset was given orders, not explanations.

"It's pleading," she said dismissively. The Soldier glanced down. He couldn't meet her eyes. 

The gun jerked, re-aiming when she walked towards him.

"Letting go of an asset is a bad deal. There's no gain. It can't offer us anything that isn't already ours. And we've made sure it has no value to anyone else," she said, even though the asset wasn't given explanations. "That said, we don't throw away assets needlessly. Disarm, Soldier."

She wouldn't kill the Soldier. She was a handler. Self preservation could be deprioritized. She took the gun, the Sig Sauer from the cache, and swiftly turned away.

"Winter Soldier on the move from depot EB912," she said after tapping the comm in her ear.

EB912: the Soldier knew that code. A rusty memory creaked into place.

The code meant homecoming.

This was the first protocol that HYDRA had taught the Soldier, and the one that they had buried deepest: the existence and necessity of these depots, their coordinates unknown even now that it remembered, but always prepared for the inevitable, for when the Soldier failed. They were the final rendezvous on the list that had been drilled into it, too deep for the Soldier to see or the chair to erase. The end of the line.

It hadn't come here to find safety. It had returned itself, like a knife to its sheath.

Its burgeoning fear smoothed away into compliance and any residual thoughts were forgotten. They would retire this iteration of the Soldier. Any line of thought was pointless: except.

Except, Rogers wasn't here. And thank Christ for that; he didn't need to see this. But the mission wasn't over until Cap said it was over. The end wasn't here yet. The words looped in its head.

"Get to the transport to supervise. We need the chair running before we can secure the asset," the head tech said to one of the several guards standing by.

It was surrounded by hostiles. It needed a weapon.

"And how do you want me to--" the guard started.

"You can start by walking," he snapped. The guard looked to the woman.

It had surrendered its gun to her. It was disarmed.

"Go," she told the guard, and the tech looked briefly mutinous. 

"Soldier," she continued.

It was going to get its stupid ass killed. 

"Follow him to the transport and wait for me outside."

There was a gun right fucking there, in his shoulder holster, under his jacket. He could grab it.

"He--it's going to be unconscious in a minute," her partner said, but she cut him off with a look.

Grab it just fucking grab it.

"Soldier, comply," she said sharply.

He ripped the gun from its holster and fired twice. 

He'd aimed for the handlers, but the tech just flinched, and the two closest guards went down. So if he emptied the gun, he still wouldn't hit them. That would have been nice to know. But the guard he'd been assigned to was dead. Minor problem solved.

The rest of the guards swarming him was a larger problem.

A stun baton bashed into his arm. His hand seized, flinging away the gun before he could break contact.

He pivoted, and stabbed the guy with the knife in his left hand. He yanked it from his jaw with his right and put his weight on his heel against the tree for a lunge.

Pain rebounded through his skull like feedback.

The shock and disorientation faded, and he was lying on his back with his arm extended. Standing over him, another agent was holding a stun baton in one hand and the gash in her throat with the other. She took two steps back and dropped.

He folded his legs to get his feet under him, but his chest constricted like the air had turned to dirt. All he could do was tip over before curling up on his side.

Steve had made a collapsed lung look like nothing. It was agony.

He was eye level with twenty pairs of combat boots and his gun, an arm's length away. He couldn't leave it. He pulled his hand forward by his fingertips, and it was slow going, like it had also been replaced with metal and the joints welded together.

She picked it up before he could reach it.

"That was unproductive," she told him.

The Soldier wheezed up at her; his eyes didn't leave her face.

"Get it to the transport. We're heading out." Her lips twitched, like they'd shared a private joke. She turned, handed his gun off to a guard, and walked out of his field of vision to conduct the clean up.

He closed his eyes.

The kid had had the right idea. He should have shot himself.

The sedative went to work.

 

 

The Soldier came to in the back of a transport van, at the slide of a needle into his arm. Four people were watching him. Two guards sat on opposite bench seats with their pistols held ready. The tech on his right depressed the plunger on the syringe while the other avoided his eyes to monitor his vitals.

He was shackled at the wrists and ankles to a chair facing the tailgates. He let his heavy head do what it had been trying to and drop to his chest. They had stripped him nude to neutralize him as much as possible without going through the hassle of dismantling the arm. Bandages swaddled his ribs and thigh. His breathing was easier. They must have aspirated the air around his lungs after they'd removed the bullet. When the needle was retracted, he fisted his hand to squeeze the numbness from his fingers while he obliquely tested his bonds. He'd always done that, he realized, even when he'd had no impulse to run.

"Can't you keep him sedated?" the guard on the left asked and sneered when the Soldier glanced up.

"They've tried it, doesn't work. He has to be awake," the tech who had injected him said and reached above his head to adjust something.

The Soldier moved as much as he dared, straining to follow what the tech was doing. He knew the shape of the machine like he would know a snake slithering by. They would have to kill him to erase it.

This was not a chair, but the chair. They had mobilized it. And the fear hadn't left him after all.

"Looks like that got his attention," the tech said as he tinkered with the visor. The Soldier faced forward and let inconsequential details flood his mind, focusing on what was usually background noise. The tech was male, white, 5'8, 5'9, middle-aged, slight build. He was conscientious enough to starch his slacks and to iron his white button-down shirt, or to pay someone else to do it; his beard was in need of a trim.

"You don't want them to hear you referring to the asset like that," the other tech said quietly, male, Asian-American, 5'6, 5'7, late thirties. He glanced between the guards and ran his hands twice over his gut, trying to smooth the wrinkles from his tucked-in shirt. His lab jacket had blood dabbed across it, bright enough to have barely dried.

"He, she, they, it. It doesn't have a preference," the first said. He moved like he was comfortable around the chair and the asset, even brushing against it when the van swayed. He must be a usual member of the team that serviced it, but it didn't recognize him, of course, it--

No, he, not it. He'd been out of the chair for nearly three months; they couldn't call him it.

The old tech, it grunted and sat back on its heels. It jabbed a few keys on a laptop. When the Soldier shifted and the chair creaked, the second tech pressed at the walls of the enclosure with its eyes. It was rank with sweat. The guard prodded the air threateningly in front of it with its gun, the other clutched its closer. He wasn't the only animal here.

"Don't worry, they'll hold," the old tech said. A final key was pressed and when the Soldier saw what was next and was reminded of what was coming, his little silent rebellion didn't count for anything.

"Say 'ah'."

The rubber mouthguard touched his lips, and his gorge rose, but his jaw still opened to accept it. The taste was stronger than emotion; he wanted to scream and cry, but if he vomited, he'd choke before he could get anything past his teeth.

"Vitals?" the old tech asked with a look across the van at the flickering screen and back to the laptop as he ran his fingers over his beard.

"Within acceptable levels," the other said. He pushed the monitor to angle it towards his partner and his eyes quivered with the strain of not looking at the Soldier.

"Just making sure. It's looking rough," he said and gave the Soldier a frank glance. The Soldier watched the guards instead. They were crouched like they were waiting for whatever would be left of him.

"Good to go," the nervous tech reiterated, and the other chuckled meanly. His head eclipsed the light so that it streaked around him like a mane. Fingers descended and pried open his lids to briefly expose the eye. The Soldier's legs twitched violently but didn't get him far.

"Before the drugs wear off then, let's go. Countdown: 3, 2, 1."

He took it all in like the memory of it could shield him. He would talk to the chair, beg it if he could open his mouth: take this, take them. Leave the rest.

The machine whirred to life: his life, that it had stolen from him. The visor lowered and the parasite clamped its jaws around his skull, and the sound it made was like the crackle of air rushing past.

He was screaming through his locked teeth before the current crashed into him. It chased him down to his nerve endings and rendered him apart and dissolved him into that moment like salt into blood. Time flooded over him like it had been dammed up and sucked him under. The past pressed claustrophobically close like he no longer fit inside of it, or he was scraped too thinly across it, because one eye was on a Brooklyn summer. The other was on an old, black forest. He could smell London burning. He tasted snow and blood and smoke as he arched up, body suspended in the chair. It was nothing like memory, but omniscience. The universe had a narrative, and it told him every word and showed it all in full living color, all at once, and as he heard it, in its simplest form, it went like this: a man ran down a street and turned back to smile. It continued. Captain America grimaced as the Soldier chased him through DC. Rogers smirked when Barnes fell into step beside him. Steve grinned while Bucky raced him through Red Hook. And he knew where they were going, because he'd seen where they'd started. It was clear. They were close. They would get there again, together. But now the world was gripping him by the shoulders, pulling him back, saying enough was enough, and he stumbled. He fell behind. The man turned a corner, out of sight, and he stretched his fingers towards him.

Cloth, barely there, brushed his left hand, and he grabbed hold.

His vision on that side was obstructed, but the fabric was being tugged frantically in his grip. He reeled it in between his fingers, and when a hand came into view, close enough to reach, he grabbed it.

The tech seized as electricity discharged from the metal arm.

The hum died. The lights swelled. A heartbeat drummed. Not from the body clutched in his hand. Which was there for a reason. Just because he couldn't recall it didn't mean that there wasn't.

A pinprick called his attention to the other arm, where a syringe was being inserted. He was being prepared for the chair. The mission was over.

But he had not been debriefed.

The Soldier studied the body again: labcoat, overweight, male, East Asian, Chinese, probably, a tech--and not the objective. His hand opened to let the body slump to the floor.

The floor was in a van's cargo hold. This was not a designated reclamation facility. The three who stared back at him were agitated and also not authorized handlers: only Faroe, Colby, Johannson--no, he had taken a dive off the Helicarrier--Pierce--also dead?--Rumlow, Karpov, Lukin, Phillips, Carter, Rogers, Barnes, James Buchanan, 32557038...The names went on, but no faces went with them. These didn't look like the right faces, but his head was splitting, and his gut feelings were shot, so they could be. Caution was advisable, moving forward.

The remaining tech was speaking, but there wasn't any sound. Reading his lips gave him gibberish: a string of unrelated words, Russian. Nothing about the mission.

The Soldier clenched his jaws reflexively, but his ears didn't pop. Deafness wouldn't incapacitate him. But he'd been deafened recently, or it would have passed. 

The restraints on the chair had been reinforced, although the asset did not struggle.

He had also been shot, twice. Likely sustained during the mission: except when he tried to recall the mission again, he couldn't, again. And he was being prepped for the chair and cold storage with open wounds. They were in a hurry.

And then there was the dead tech.

The men's fear was obvious, but it wasn't wariness. They were hysterical, and the guns were pointing at him. He must not have come quietly when they brought him here, which he had not thought he could do. HYDRA had his allegiance.

But HYDRA had been compromised, he remembered.

Watching the tech more closely, his face definitely looked subversive.

One of the new cuffs around his ankle had come loose. In the chair, the Soldier was vulnerable. He could be made to forget and then believe any lies they told him.

A kick broke the other cuff and from there it didn't take much leverage to wrench the chair from its slipshod anchors and brace it against the wall to snap the armrests from the frame.

The tech was thrown into one guard. The other guard unloaded a few rounds into the Soldier's hand before he yanked the gun free by the muzzle and brought the butt down on the bridge of his nose.

The tailgates opened. The other guard tucked and rolled out of the moving van and across the pavement. When he staggered to his feet, he looked back, but he'd left his gun, and the one at the Soldier's side stayed where it was. He ran down a cross street and out of sight. The Soldier didn't follow.

A hand grabbed his ankle. The tech was fumbling for the discarded weapon. A heel to the throat, and it was over.

The Soldier stood naked in the doorway, snapping the cuffs from his arms as the van slowed. The town was squat, dark buildings gathered close to the road, huddled for warmth still in spring. They had transported him to Siberia while he slept.

But "Paul's Automotive Body Shop" wasn't Cyrillic. He hung his head. Fuck, he hurt. But not enough to stay still.

He stripped the guard's gear before he opened the storage space under the seats and found his vest by smell alone. He immediately tossed the one he was holding and put his on over the guard's pilfered undershirt. He was dressed, mission-ready; he was on the verge of blacking out. Whatever the tech had given him was helping him along in that direction.

He checked that the tech was still where he had been, and so were the rest. He'd been right, then: no handlers. He knew he couldn't kill handlers.

But he thought he couldn't kill HYDRA agents, either. He didn't know what else he was wrong about. This might have been a huge blunder, and maybe not the first one he'd made, considering how he'd been brought in.

The van had been stopped for a minute now, but no one had left the cab to investigate. They didn't need to, because there was a car approaching deliberately from behind. The soft burr of the wheels was the first and only sound he heard.

He was supposed to be chasing someone. The escaped guard, maybe. Whoever it was, they were likely long gone, lost. Other than that, he had no mission, no idea of what he was supposed to do.

But someone had arrived who could tell him. He stepped off the back of the van and went to meet them with a question.

 

 

He opened his eyes and saw frost on glass. 

No, not cryo, don't let him be awake in cryo, Jesus Christ.

He wasn't. He wasn't; it was a cracked windshield. The cab was warm, and noisier than the tank, and he could breathe. So he took in a long, slow breath and slumped back bonelessly in the driver's seat.

He was at the wheel of a car, and it was idling, braked at a stop sign. It jumped when he pressed the gas like it could sense his nervousness, so he eased off while he searched the rearview mirrors. He was alone.

His memory between the chair and now was an oil slick of sensory input melted together. But those were bulletholes in the window, the seats were wet, and the smell left no doubt about what they were wet with. The working theory was that he was on the run. Like he had ever walked.

There was no telling where he was headed, but he couldn't trust himself to pick a destination. He'd as good as put himself in the chair; that hadn't been touched by the wipe.

And he had no idea how the hell he was here, how he had made it through that. They'd fastened the crown around his head. Maybe it hadn't been calibrated right; he could smell singed hair and skin.

And he couldn't think about it any more than that, now, or ever.

He had to get off the road. It was winding towards midnight and if HYDRA was close they wouldn't overlook the only car on it.

He parked the totalled vehicle in a junkyard and located another one that he could start, and drove it to a parking garage. He pulled the front seats forward, carefully wedged himself into the backseat well, and resituated his gear and knives, laying a gun in his lap. He reached to adjust his cap.

They'd stolen his fucking hat.

Take his past and his fucking future, but they couldn't leave him his goddamned hat.

He thumbed his gun's safety on and off. He recognized the anger, because of how it pushed him to act. But shooting the cars in the garage wouldn't help him get anything back. So he stowed the urge to use later.

When he couldn't shoot, he had to wait until he could shoot: the theme of his life.

He shifted his head left and right against the door's handle and then accepted the crick forming in his neck. A few hours of waiting now would get him further from HYDRA than driving. A still target was easier to hit, but only if he moved first where they could see him.

He listened to the silence for several minutes.

This would have been an even better plan if he could remember how to sleep.

 

 

God, he hated the cold.

The air invaded his lungs and bit the inside of his chest, and he swore it whistled through the hole in him, but the hounds chasing him really would tear him apart if they caught him, so he kept running.

The river was his best course. It would hide his scent, and carry him away too quickly to follow, if he could survive it. Shock from the cold that pulled him under or beaten to death on the rocks: the Danube wasn't exactly the East River.

He hared to the right when he reached another corridor of trees, and the dogs were right behind. Their unblinking yellow eyes didn't waver. Their teeth flashed white in the dark. Other than that, he couldn't see them, and they made no sound.

He fired backwards again into their midst. The lights scattered. Then, slowly, but losing no ground, they reformed, eye reconnecting to eye to teeth, like the pack was one creature with innumerable eyes and mouths. Another experiment set loose in the world.

No, they were German shepherds. They were just dogs.

He wouldn't be captured again, and not because he was going to outrun them for even a minute longer, but because he could hear the rush of the river calling his name. He'd been separated from the Howlies by the chase, but he had oriented himself enough to know that the rendezvous was a mile downstream. Even if he didn't lose pursuit in the river, the boys would rain holy hell; nothing would get near him. Jones and Dernier would drag him ashore, cursing a blue streak between them. Morita would pat him down, ignoring his complaints, while Dugan congratulated him for being a fuckup who couldn't tell his ass from his elbow, and Falsworth would be standing guard for anything less friendly that might drag itself up out of the scenery. And Steve, crouched over him, shielding him, would smile open and easy like it was just another day in Brooklyn.

God, he wanted to be there.

He was almost to the river, but a ridge blocked it from view.

"Stand down, soldier," a voice barked. The path was flat and even, but his feet twisted under him. He barreled into a tree and shoved off of it before his injured leg could fold.

"He'll reach the river," another growled.

Bullets whizzed and popped around him, chipping bark from the trees. The walls of foliage on either side were too dense for him to take cover, so he ducked his head under his hands and prayed and kept running.

"Hold fire," came a shout.

He risked a glance when the barrage ended.

A dog leaped at him. Its teeth snapped at where his heel had been. Undeterred, it snapped again, and he kicked out blindly. It yelped and fell back.

But he hadn't seen any SS with guns.

They could be further behind the dogs than he'd thought. They had sounded close.

Or it had been the dogs all along, trained to speak and shoot: the Nazisprechenhunde, one of the unending horde of tall tales that marched in with the men from the front. The idea had been worth a laugh when he'd heard it, but it wasn't funny anymore; he'd met Zola.

He'd been changed.

He was stronger and faster, and he had saved his Commandos ten times over because of it. He hated it. 

But his mind was also weaker. He was constantly afraid, until he'd become a coward, flinching at his own voice or his passing reflection. It was his natural state now, and any moment, these dogs might quit playing with their food and take him down with jaws strong enough to snap his ribs with a bite. Or maybe he escaped, and they followed him downriver, ten miles, a hundred, across the whole of Europe. He had left enough of himself behind in that lab for a noseblind bloodhound to catch his scent.

And maybe he could understand them, and it was because they were no longer any kind of dog and he was no kind of man.

That fear pushed him harder than he knew he could go, and that terrified him more. It spurred him up a fallen tree leaning out towards the river and over the ridge, and before the first hound could set foot after him, fear threw him off of it.

It was a long ways down before he hit the river.

And as he fell, he stood on the bridge and watched himself tumble away towards the seething current and all of the fear and pain went with him.

And as he fell, he fought and clawed the air to look back, and saw the animals sink their teeth into his unresisting body and drag him back into the woods.

And he couldn't scream before the frigid water closed over his head and carried him away.

 

 

The Commandos weren't waiting for him when he pulled himself out.

He wasn't in any state to greet them, anyway.

He collapsed into the bushes lining this stretch of the Potomac; they were barely bigger than he was, but he couldn't be choosy about cover when his head was about to pop loose. Those drugs were something. The withdrawal was something else. Cryo usually took care of it, he guessed, because he didn't think that parts of his arm were supposed to peel off like that. It was metal.

Or, the brain damage: he couldn't rule that out.

He needed to stay on the move, but the bushes weren't easy to crawl through. The twigs caught in his hair, and he didn't have a hair tie, or a hat. He did still have a knife, but it didn't help. It couldn't even spook the wildlife; a bird hopped and shrilled at him with tiny rage from a foot away. He watched it with rapt intrigue until it was quickly fed up with him, and he had to fend it off and nearly gave himself another lobotomy.

The bushes gradated to a stretch of open ground. After several minutes that felt like one minute looping over, he acknowledged that he had misjudged the distance. This was his lot, then, to crawl across grass sharp as razorwire and plains of concrete wider than a desert until the winter came again to lay him back down into cryostasis. Then he wouldn't have to smell himself.

He rolled over a pile of trash, doing himself no favors, and hunched against a brick wall. The smell was stronger here. And it might be radiating from the dumpster beside him. He did not like it. There were noises that he failed to realize were coming from him until he was vomiting.

And he still had the rubber bit in his mouth, oh, fuck.

It was a couple of tries before he could force his mouth open to yank the guard out, and his nose was already streaming. The build up splattered on the ground in a thin puddle. It had been a while since he'd eaten, thankfully, so when he coughed the rest out of his lungs and sinuses, it was only intensely painful. He reached to retrieve the bit, eyed it consideringly for a long time, and then flicked it so that it skidded underneath the dumpster.

Someone was there, watching him. They had been standing at one end of an alley--the one he was in, he was in an alley--and they weren't coming any closer.

"Steve," he said dumbly before his brain ordered him to move, grab a weapon, do something. He writhed across the concrete in vicinity to the dumpster, and gagged. Nothing else came up, and he stayed where he was.

The guy wasn't the right size, but the Soldier was receiving conflicting information about what size he should be. He opened his mouth again, but the name, what was the name--Steve. Steve fled, and the Soldier pressed his face against the pavement. 

He had to go after him: not whoever that man was who had just seen a wet nutjob with a metal arm rolling around in an alley. The Soldier was officially declassifying his own identity, so let him tell what he'd seen to who he wanted.

He had to find Steve Rogers. The Soldier didn't know his whereabouts, but it was time to hand himself over.

Sunlight creeped down the alley. It drifted over his right arm, and when he didn't burst into flames or disintegrate into a pile of ash, he decided he'd better get a move on.

"Alright, get up," he said. His body didn't respond.

"You want the chair?" he asked, and it startled him that he could even say it. No, no he did not want the chair. He hadn't questioned the necessity of it, but he had no doubt that not once in a hundred years had he wanted it.

"Then get the fuck up," he ordered. Even the metal arm groaned as he lifted himself to his knees.

There were more people in the alley. He threw himself backwards and his back smacked audibly against the wall as his hand went to the knife in his boot. His socks were still soaked. He suddenly missed his derringer; he'd left it in the safehouse that hadn't turned into a trap.

The other end of the alley was open, but he wasn't positive he could clear it without falling on his face.

"We can leave it here," a man said. Leave him where?

"He's got enough people avoiding him already or he wouldn't be here," a woman replied, and the Soldier was lost.

"Maybe they know something we don't," another man said, voice deeper than the first. He paused. "I'm just saying, he isn't one of your usuals."

"And I've got my mace. But I'm not going to need it," she said.

"Mace is not going to scare that dude--maybe bear spray," the first guy said.

"We're here, he's here, and we didn't bring that all the way down here not to give it to him," she said.

"I carried it," the first said like a smart-ass.

"Then give it here," she ordered. Whatever it was rustled as it changed hands. "Step back, Jer. I love you, baby, but you are not the secret service."

The woman walked towards the Soldier; she had a heavy tread and a hip injury.

"Sir?" She was taking care to announce her presence, so he stayed where he was.

"My friend Mike back there said he saw you here, and that you might need help," she said as she rounded the dumpster. She was black, obese, in her thirties, hair cropped close, and she smiled at him with a look at the metal arm. He held it stiffly against his body. He couldn't hide its appearance, but he didn't need to reveal every way that it was more advanced, and lethal, than contemporary prostheses.

"And I know I need all the help I can manage most days, so I came down here to see what you might need," she continued and hefted a large backpack in her hand. It was heavy and she was struggling with it. She didn't look like she expected his help, but someone should take it for her; it just wasn't going to be him.

"So, first thing, do you need emergency medical attention? And that's a no. Okay, we don't have to call anybody." She hadn't even seen the knife. He quickly pushed it back into its sheath.

"It can be just you and me, and Mike and Jeremy back there, but Mike just does the heavy lifting, and Jer's here for this trooper's morale, if you get me." He didn't, but she laughed anyway. She had an objectively nice laugh. She looked at him and smiled.

"Yeah, a cutie like you, you get it. I've packed enough in here for you to take to them, too." The Soldier studied her. She couldn't know about Rogers, but there was no one else she could mean.

"Do you mind if I bring this over there?"

He had clocked her as ex-military, but even if she knew about Rogers, she wasn't HYDRA. The contents of the bag were probably harmless.

"Alright, no problem. I'll set it down over here," she said, taking the choice out of his hands. Relieved, he nodded, and she laid the bag by her feet and lowered herself laboriously to kneel beside it. She moved her hand like she was shooing him off, apparently catching another signal he hadn't known he was broadcasting.

"Now that the wait is over," she said through her grin when she was settled. She opened a zipper and brought out a bag of beef jerky.

"We've got the essentials: non-perishables, water bottles, a blanket, jacket, two sets of clothes, top to toes. I had to guess the size, but you look like you'll fit into these, if you wanted to change into something more comfortable." She eyed his combat vest critically. He looked down at his clothes, which weren't much more than another layer of filth, and back at her and shook his head, and her smile widened.

"No problem. But please tell me you're going to at least wear the jacket, because looking at you is making me cold." He nodded; he would have acquired one for camouflage without her prompting.

"That arm has got to be freezing. But, I won't ask you about it--except, okay, yeah, I do want to know, is it working for you? It's not waterlogged?" She would probably keep smiling if he didn't answer, but he lifted his left hand to open and close the fingers. He didn't think of how it looked until she was waving back with her widest, dimpled grin and a squeaky chuckle.

"Okay, sweetie, that's great. You've got this, and I'm going to go ahead and let you get on with it." She shoved to her feet with a huff.

"But if you do need me, I'll be here," she said, pointing at the wall behind him.

"I live in these apartments, so just ask for Chantal, and someone will find me. It might take me and these legs a little longer to get to you, but we will." She patted her hip with another laugh and looked him over again like she was taking inventory. Her hands clapped together.

"Oh, and there's a little cash in the front pocket, enough for a bus ticket and a few hot meals, and there's also a map. There's a YMCA across the river on Fillmore, and one on 16th. They're not open today, but they're marked on there, and so is the VA. They helped me through a lot, and they can help you, more than I can.

"And I'm sure you can figure this out on your own, you don't want to hear me go on and on. Just tell me to get out of here," she said cheerily.

The Soldier hadn't known words were required, but he couldn't say what she wanted him to say to her. She stepped away while he scrabbled for an appropriate acknowledgement.

"Take care of yourself," she said as she looked back. She was still smiling, but it was tempered.

He nodded. She waved and after a moment, he waved back.

"Yes," he blurted, but she was gone, out of his range of hearing.

"Smooth," he said, and didn't bother figuring out what it meant.

He sidled over to the backpack; it was solid, real. Then, so was she--Chantal--the woman who had turned her back to him and walked away on two legs, and who he'd left fully intact. He had been convinced that half of the interaction had been a product of the drugs, at a minimum.

He stared down the alley like he might catch another glimpse of her, but she was still gone. He hoped he never saw her again.

The hoodie did fit, and he dragged it on over his vest. He relocated five knives and swapped his pants with the dry pair of sweats. He tipped river water and a toenail out of his boots, pulled a few pairs of socks over his pale, wrinkled feet, and stuffed them back in.

He dug out the cash and the map and left the rest. Chantal wasn't HYDRA by any stretch, and even then, HYDRA was done dropping supplies for him, so she'd mistaken him for someone else. And none of the contents were so vital that he would take the time to comb them for bugs, so whoever they had been meant for was welcome to them.

Then he saw a misshapen lump of yarn at the bottom of the bag. It was neon orange and green stripes. He deliberated, checked the seams, and shoved it on his head.

While he waited for his unsteady legs to keep him upright, he skimmed the map; he was back in DC. Maybe Rogers was no longer in the city, but the Soldier's body had brought him here to the last place he'd seen him. On orders, maybe, or a trigger, but making his own choices had turned out poorly; he'd see where this led him.

More than clothes, what he could have used was a point of contact. The map didn't have dead drop locations or target movements, and any intel the Soldier had been given on Steve Rogers was outdated. But Captain America was a public figure. The Soldier had found him before at an appearance, he could do it again. He would visit the closest university library, which was helpfully labeled, and retrieve the when and where from the internet.

But there was also a payphone a few blocks northeast. He tapped the paper. It couldn't be that simple. But, then again, it was Steve.

"What the hell does that mean?" he hissed at himself. Rogers wouldn't list his number; he wasn't stupid. And the punk didn't need trouble to give him a ring, anyway. If the Soldier could track down people the way Rogers could sniff out a fight, then mission accomplished and that's a wrap, boys; drinks on him. He could punch the next guy he saw and Steve, the bastard, would pop right along, pissed that he'd started without him. Steve could.

Steve could be out there right now hunting down HYDRA.

And there was the chair, the chair, the chair, and in it

The Soldier shook his head roughly, until he went reeling into the wall. He'd been thinking--that he needed to find Rogers, and soon. Waiting for him to appear in public wasn't feasible.

He pushed himself down the alley using the wall to balance, and he turned left when he reached the end. So, payphone it was; he struck out into the city.

The payphone booths in the metro station were all empty, so he used the one furthest from the door and leaned against it with his back to the closest security camera. He wasn't hiding, but he didn't have to hold up a sign, either.

He dialed the operator and jangled the change in his pocket.

"Are you calling collect?" she asked.

"I'm calling Steven Grant Rogers, last known address on 29th street, DC," he said.

"There is no listing for a Steven Rogers who lived on 29th."

There was a number he would usually call and a recon unit that would give him the information he needed. His defection might be old news, or HYDRA's body might be keeping the heads in the dark; it could go either way. He debated if they didn't know and he called in, how long it would take HYDRA to zero in on his location. He kneaded his thumb between his brows and tried to think of another number. The apartment building he and Rogers had lived in had gotten a phone a few years after they had moved in together, and Rogers was sentimental. It was a long shot, but he was breathing free, seventy years almost to the day that he'd died; he could win the fucking lottery without playing.

"Sir, are you still there?" she asked.

"Try--try 917-431--"

"Hello, Sergeant Barnes," said a voice over the phone, male, English.

The Soldier leaned on the wall between the booths, keeping the phone to his ear and scanning the station. The camera was staring at him.

"Who are you?" the Soldier asked, staring back.

"I can connect you with Captain Rogers. Will you stay on the line?" he asked.

He would go to the library. If there weren't any appearances in the next week, the VA would open tomorrow, and he could practice his interrogation skills, see if anyone had any contact with Rogers. Though, the idea of Steve letting anyone bully him into getting help: his therapist would need a therapist.

"I am not HYDRA," the man said, which was obvious. The few officials in the positions to know the asset as Barnes wouldn't use the name.

"My name is Jarvis, and I work for Tony Stark and recently with Captain Rogers, monitoring surveillance in the area."

"You've been watching me," the Soldier said. He was paranoid, but not about that, at least.

"We have been watching for you, without success, until we intercepted footage three days ago, which showed you exiting a storage facility. Since then, your whereabouts have been unknown. It is good to see that you are alive and uncompromised."

"I bet," he said, his tongue slipping. It hadn't taken him long to adjust to not having handlers; he'd have to mind his speech around Rogers.

And he had to go in. He had to convince himself of that.

"HYDRA will not reach you here. After attacking you and revealing the extent of their presence in the city, we were able to track down all remaining agents active in the area," the man--Jarvis--said.

"They're dead," the Soldier said for clarification.

"We have commended them to SHIELD custody."

"They'll come back. They should have been killed." But that had been the Soldier's self-assigned mission. He couldn't split hairs about how they had salvaged what he had fucked up. It wasn't his place.

"Wouldn't we then be exponentially overrun?" Jarvis asked, and he was joking. The Soldier knew the intonation, but he barely recognized it when it was directed at him.

"They grow, anyway," he answered seriously. "One goes down, two come up, but they never stop growing. They have to be cut down."

"Many of them took the matter into their own hands, but for the rest, lethal force was unnecessary."

The Soldier tried to wrap his head around that. He thought about that kid crying on the ground, scared and, there at the end, about as far from his Aryan ideals as he was from Nazi Germany, and then he thought about ten of him, twenty. He thought about letting them live, and not because they would die soon anyway: and all this, after they had done their level best to kill him. Whatever language he thought it in, the idea didn't translate.

But if Rogers wouldn't kill the Soldier either, then he had somewhere to put him. That could have always been the plan. And, speak of the devil.

"Captain Rogers is now available to take your call. He will be on the line shortly. It has been a pleasure, Sergeant Barnes." The English: he couldn't tell if he'd been insulted.

The line clicked. His hand was still in his pocket, turning a nickel over and over.

"Bucky?" Steve asked, sounding winded and trying to hide it.

His voice was so clear. He could have been standing in the booth next to him, hunched over like he did when he fretted, like maybe his worries would overlook him and pass him by; but there hadn't been as much of him to miss back then. 

He had to know if he was right about Rogers. He needed to see him up close, to give these bizarre, useless thoughts some reason for existing besides that his blender of a brain was inventing whatever it could slap together to keep him functioning.

"Sure," Bucky said. "I'm ready to come in."

He would find a service he could provide or information he could give to show Rogers that he was more useful in his hands than dead or sealed away in a cell. HYDRA had used him for decades; it couldn't all be a waste.

"Where can I meet you?" Rogers asked. Bucky rattled off an address that should be safe if HYDRA had actually been cleared out. Rogers paused a little longer before he spoke again. 

"Have you been in DC this entire time?" he asked.

"Yes."

"You bastard," he said, like he was either wheezing or laughing. Bucky had been called worse. Steve had called him worse. "God, Buck--give me an hour. And I'll be there."

"Okay."

"And, please--don't run away again." 

Before Bucky could acknowledge, Rogers hung up.

 

 

Bucky paid the fare for the metro and stood in the aisle for the morning rush. Passengers were minding themselves, except for the man sitting across from him. Their eyes met, and the guy shut his eyes, but Bucky was still there when he opened them. He was pale and sweating profusely until he lost whatever game of intimidation he thought this was and got off at the next stop.

Bucky looked down at himself a little apprehensively. It was too late to think about first impressions. He wadded up his hat and stuck it in his jacket pocket, smoothing his fingers through his lank hair. It's not like he could reschedule.

 

 

When Captain America walked into the warehouse, Bucky watched from his perch in the rafters. It had been a bitch getting up here, but he liked the vantage. At least he wouldn't be the first one spotted.

The Captain paused ten feet away and thirty feet below and his blond head turned slowly to look at the stacked boxes. Bucky hadn't had a chance to demolish this storehouse; it was stocked mostly with rice, sugar, beans, salt, pharmaceuticals, illicit substances, contraband, to use or offload over a longer period of time than he could comprehend. Weapons had been more immediately useful.

Seemed like Rogers didn't agree. There was no shield, no suit; he wasn't even wearing a jacket. And Bucky couldn't detect any sign that he had backup waiting outside. No doubt he could hold his own against him one-on-one, hand-to-hand, especially with Bucky in the condition he was, but Rogers had to know he was armed, and still he lacked the minimum amount of caution that Bucky had seen in every agent who had been briefed on the Soldier. None of them had gone up against him and come back for round two, either.

Good thing he had Bucky on his side, then. Otherwise, he'd be hopeless.

He started to call out, and then he didn't. Not alerting him to his position was insubordinate at best, at worst he was sighting his CO from a sniper's nest.

Rogers didn't check any of the likely hiding spots at ground level; his eyes jumped to a stack of cartons, searching for elevation. He had figured it out, though it was nothing to figure out. They were both where they were supposed to be. He scanned the tops of the piles, tracing paths and angles, and then he looked higher.

Steve smiled. He had found him.

"Hey, Bucky. All clear," he said quietly, like he was speaking to a memory. Bucky thought the drugs' aftereffects were gone, but he was dizzy again, fastening his left hand around the beam before he could fall.

But he still had to get down. It was harder than going up. The stack of boxes saved him from making the full drop, but regardless, the impact of the landing nearly sent him tumbling the rest of the way to the floor. But Rogers wasn't impatient. He looked like he had all day to wait around, so Bucky took his time descending the pile.

"You're hurt?" Rogers asked and stepped closer when he stumbled on the last dismount. Maybe he had some training as a technician. The sooner Bucky could be treated, the sooner he could prove his utility.

"Shot. Twice," he abbreviated the report, pointing to the wounds, because the order had been vague enough. Rogers' face wrinkled, so maybe his answer was too short.

"Stable," he added, and Rogers rolled his eyes but smiled briefly.

"Let's get to the jet," he said. He raised his hand, and Bucky would comply, but first he opened his jacket and removed a knife. Rogers' hand dropped to his side, not even in a defensive position, and it was easier then to let the knife clatter to the concrete.

"You don't have to."

Bucky waited to be told what he did have to do, but Rogers didn't continue. So he stripped his armory piece by piece until it lay on the floor all around him. It would have been less painful to break his fingers.

But that dashboard, the insides of HYDRA agents smeared across it, came repeatedly to mind. Rogers didn't have his shield, and if he had, he wouldn't use it. Bucky couldn't kill him, but he had shot him, had nearly cracked his skull wide open. He couldn't expect the usual handler safeguards to apply. Until Rogers learned how to handle him, he would have to blunt his edges.

HYDRA would swallow Bucky whole if they found him again, and he couldn't trust himself, especially not with Rogers. He was all Bucky had left.

Bucky stepped out of the circle of weapons and halted obediently in front of Rogers, zipping up his jacket. Steve's hair was windswept and his nose was red. Bucky pulled the knit hat out of his pocket and offered it to him.

"What's that?" Steve asked like he'd discovered a new type of poisonous animal squirming in Bucky's hand.

"A hat," Bucky said flatly. He wasn't going to explain its purpose.

"It's not cold," he complained, and when Bucky lifted it towards his own head too slowly, "I'm not taking your hat, so why don't you put it on already."

Bucky did, and Rogers reached for his face. Bucky caught his arm, interpreting the peeved tone as a warning. But Rogers didn't get violent, he just tugged on the brim of the hat, and when his arm wasn't released, he laid his hand on Bucky's shoulder.

Every inch of his skin prickled with gooseflesh at the contact. It felt like something that had been cut off a long time ago was just now growing back. He leaned forward, feeling lost and then finding his balance by steadying himself on Steve's shoulder. He had him in both hands, warm and soft and unflinching. The fine, golden hairs on his arms were standing on end. There were appropriate distances that Bucky wasn't respecting, but before he could back away, Steve wrapped himself around him and held him closer.

Bucky didn't think he'd ever touched so much of another person, but he didn't try to let go; because it hadn't been important enough for him to question before, but he wasn't entirely sure that he'd been real. Maybe solid enough to kill and to be harmed, but too insubstantial for gentleness. But right here, he was alive. Right now, Bucky pressed his hands against Steve's back and breathed him in: clean laundry and cooling sun-warmed skin.

"What do we do now?" Bucky breathed out.

"We live," he said and pulled back without letting go. "We've made it this long. We keep going."

Bucky nodded. He could do that. He was good at it.

"Together, Buck. Okay?" Steve's hands shook on his shoulders.

"I'm with you," he said quickly, with the conviction that came from having a clear choice. Whatever he had felt for HYDRA and his place in it, it hadn't been this; it hadn't been loyalty.

The stubborn set of Roger's jaw slipped, and Bucky moved closer, to cover his weakness until he shored it up with a faltering smile. He gripped Bucky's shoulders and dropped his hands, and Bucky reluctantly pulled away.

"Just like that?" Rogers asked, crossing his arms with his face tilted down.

Steve had also been a skinny little tow-headed kid sketching his ratty shoe through the dirt, telling Bucky how kind his family was, how happy they all were. "Why bother with me?" Steve had meant but hadn't asked.

And what Bucky remembered made more sense, seeing Steve and Rogers together.

"I'm here. I want to be here," he answered them both. He'd been wrong to stay away, but he'd had his reasons. He couldn't have gotten close without the Soldier leading HYDRA straight to Rogers. But he wasn't their asset anymore; even the chair had rejected him. This moment was Bucky's, and he wouldn't let them take it from him, or any of the ones after it.

"Okay," Steve said as he stuck his hands in his pockets and walked backwards without taking his eyes off Bucky. "Let's get going."

"You mentioned--" Bucky licked his lips and continued haltingly, "a jet."

"Yeah, I just need to get a few things off of it before we head home." Bucky's heart pounded, and he could see home now, wooden floors and brick walls and sunshine, and Steve smack dab in the middle of it. It's so close.

Steve was still half-facing him, but he turned back to get a better look.

"But, I don't think Tony would mind us taking it for a spin. If you're up for it."

"Yes," Bucky said before he'd finished. Steve grinned and faced front.

"Then, come on, Bucky. Time's a-wastin'."

Bucky smirked, shook his head, and caught up.