dappered | (no subject)

(no subject)

[ He falls.

Not for the first or last time, but for once it is his choice to let go of the metal girder and drop, debris falling past him, the cold waters closing over his head like a nightmare. He pushes aside the things in his head that start screaming (not the water, not the cold, please no catch me stop me) and concentrates on his target, on his mission.

He pulls Rogers from the water. The man is still alive, somehow, even with the blood soaking his uniform (he knows that uniform) and he swallows hard when his hands spread automatically over the wet fabric, applying pressure (he has done this before, seen these colors underneath his fingers), and Rogers groans and curls towards him, like he knows. Like he trusts.

There is a protocol for situations like these (even though there are no situations like this, not for this target): he is to disappear, communicate his location and wait for extraction. His handlers will always come for him. He is not safe to leave at loose ends.

Hydra does not leave loose ends. Hydra does not take prisoners, though they might make an exception for a man such as this-- but his commander had asked for a confirmation of death. He has never failed to deliver one.

His left shoulder tenses and he hears the quiet screech of abused gears. He is malfunctioning. There are warm tracks of water running down his cheeks that are not from the Potomac and he can hear his own breathing, loud and wet and choked. He is crying, apparently. Or at least his body is crying, reacting to some stimuli he doesn't understand.

He closes his eyes and counts in Russian while Rogers breathes under his hands.

Twelve hours later they are in an old Hydra safehouse, a basement beneath an abandoned store front in a rough neighborhood where no one cares who walks down the street, still well stocked but hopefully overlooked in all the chaos. There are supplies enough there to treat bullet wounds and lacerations and dislocated shoulders. He is not a gifted field medic but he does not need to be, with his enhancements, and Rogers is apparently the same way, requiring only rest and time and a few IV bags to recover from injuries that would have killed an ordinary human.

He does not contact Hydra. News above ground indicates chaos and a broken chain of command, conflicting reports, and he is not at full capacity. He sits in a chair next to the only bed and works carefully on his damaged arm, patching it as best he can, listening for any change in Rogers' breathing. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Steve is silent, watching the smoke. It means more than just this, a smouldering building, a ruin. It's a letter, signed and sealed, from Bucky to Hydra. He can pass his hand over it, touch the sloping letters, but he doesn't yet know enough of this strange new language to decipher the sentiment.

He hopes he can guess at the meaning. And he hopes he's right, but he says nothing, merely adjusts his glasses and pulls his ballcap down. Walk, not run. Natasha told him that one, maybe it's a lesson Bucky hasn't learned yet.

"They'll be here in a matter of minutes," he says quietly. It was nine the last time. For their prodigal son? Less.

Yes, they will.

It's as audible as if he'd said it aloud, and he glances down at the black utilitarian watch on his wrist, watching the seconds run. But he ducks casually beneath a broken board in the nearest fence with the lifelong grace of a street punk who had grown up in the dingy back alleys of Brooklyn, the kind who looked at a narrow street clogged with trash and chain fences and broken bricks and saw an easy clear path.

How long has he followed Bucky? They lead each other, most of the time. Bucky dragged him out for a night on the town, Steve was the one who got them into fights (at least some of the time) and wherever they walked, it was shoulder to shoulder. Even in the war.

He grips the straps of his bag and follows, holding his breath. Something falls away from Bucky's posture, and Steve watches it happen. The utility of the soldier is replaced by the deftly adroit posture of the child he used to be, and for a moment he can't breathe with the weight and the pain of all their memories. It's bad enough he slips a hand beneath his shirt to check on the dressings, just in case he's twisted the wrong way and split open the healing skin.

No such luck. This feeling, for whatever it's worth, is all mental.

But he jogs a few steps to catch up with Bucky regardless, ducking his head low, hiking the pack higher on his shoulders. Old times.

The Winter Soldier doesn't glance back, apparently trusting Steve to keep up with him as he easily (eagerly, alert and focused without the flat utility of his kill missions) scales the debris of what had once been a warehouse. He compensates easily for the pack as if used to dealing with extra weight, and maybe isn't quite as light on his feet as Steve might remember from their childhood. Structures that seem incapable of supporting his weight are avoided instead of risked, even ones that hold up to Steve's not inconsiderable mass, like he's already spent enough time falling through floors, and he thoughtlessly stabilizes himself with the fingers of metal arm jammed directly into brick walls to create a hold when he needs it.

The route takes them quickly away from the safehouse and across the entire block, and when the distant squeal of tires and the sound of sirens reach them on the wind he glances down automatically to check the response time.

Nineteen minutes.

There are emergency vehicles on the streets when they finally hit a slightly more civilized end of the neighborhood and come to the end of an alley, and he automatically goes down on one knee with one fist raised to halt Steve behind him, staying in the shadows. He eyes the nearest cop car and the uniformed men standing around it with a calculating sort of look.

There's another way out of the alley, up the fire escape if one of them could pull it down (and they could, with two people, wouldn't be the first time Bucky had catapulted Steve's ninety-five pound ass up over a chainlink fence or the first time Captain America launched Sergeant Barnes across a fuckton of barbed wire), but the Winter Soldier only glances briefly at the fire escape before returning to the cops, free hand edging towards one of his knives.

Steve reaches out to stop him, fingers curling against his wrist as he skirts in front of Bucky as if to shield the officers. "Hey. They aren't our enemies. They're just people doing a job. We have another way, Bucky."

Something that might be the ghost of irritation flits over his face when Steve gets in his way, but he doesn't bother getting into an argument ten feet away from armed opposition. He glances up at the fire escape again and rises smoothly, forgetting for a moment to jerk his arm away, busy calculating logistics.

Steve holds onto him a moment longer, mostly because Bucky hasn't shaken him off yet, but he does let go when it becomes clear what he's planning. It's doubtful that Bucky would leave him here on the ground, within shouting distance of a civilian police force, so...

"Here," he says quietly, gesturing upwards. "Boost me up. I'll lower the ladder."

And this is again the part where a normal human being would narrow his eyes and go 'how am I supposed to trust your word.' The Winter Soldier does the first and skips the second and then dismisses the concern. Any option aside from cooperation, which means Steve not using this opportunity to escape, involves a bodycount, and he's gotten enough of Captain America's measure to know the lengths he'll go to in order to avoid that.

He moves into position beneath the fire escape but doesn't ready himself at all, no helpful stirrup or bent knees for Steve to use as a platform. The fingers of his left arm flex once though, the serpentine rippling of the metal plates visible briefly under his sleeve.

Steve cocks his head, and then as if he's throwing caution to the winds (he is, a little) he just takes a few steps and a running leap in Bucky's general direction, expecting their natural synergy to take over, and for Bucky to boost him upwards.

Bucky would have cupped his hands for Steve, the way they'd done as kids. Sgt. Barnes would have-- not done this at all, probably, having a brain, and would've insisted on the being the one boosted.

The Winter Soldier waits until Steve is close enough, and instead of boosting him like an ordinary human being grabs ahold of his belt (thankfully HYDRA issue) with the metal hand and tosses him upwards like a sack of potatoes. Like Steve barely weighs anything at all aside from being an unwieldy mass.

It doesn't elicit a startled noise - maybe someone else it would have - but Steve is too well used to adapting on the fly, and he just lands only a little inelegantly on the catwalk, crouched down to minimize the amount of noise.

He. Is going to have to teach Bucky a thing or two. But it's still progress, and he stands, straightens his shoulders and lowers the lever on the fire escape, easing it down with his bare hands rather than letting it fall.

And up over the rooftops they go. Fortune is in their favor, the day is coming on a little overcast and drizzly and no one is looking upwards to get a face full of rain.

But rooftop jumping is still conspicuous in its own right, so after a few buildings they find one with the stairwell door that isn't locked and go down to street level like normal people to try and blend into the crowd. Or maybe 'blend' is the wrong word. Despite the way he hunches his shoulders to seem smaller and to avoid ramming the metal one into anyone that might kick up a fuss, the Winter Soldier has a thousand yard stare and a smooth menace to his movement that makes people part around him like a shark cutting through a school of fish. People look at him and then very quickly look away, clutching their purses or their briefcases a little tighter, and he doesn't look at anything at all.

And if there's surveillance on these streets, people (correction: Hydra. Or SHIELD) will be looking for anything that stands out. Steve steps up next to him - on his left - and bumps his shoulder gently. "Relax," he says, an undertone not meant for the hearing of a normal person. But he knows Bucky will hear it. It's an odd feeling, to no longer be one of a kind. Odd, but welcome.

"Just walk like me, okay?"

He glances at Rogers out of the corner of his eye, maybe a little startled although it's hard to tell from the blank expression on his face. The question 'what does that even mean' doesn't need to even be said aloud.

"It means," he says gently, replying to the unspoken sentiment without even realizing it hadn't been audible, "that you should probably consider acting a little more casual if you don't want someone to spot us from an overhead satellite. Loosen your posture, swing your arms a bit." It's like teaching someone how to ride a bike, except that Bucky was the one who showed him how all those years ago.

Orrrrr how about he just tightens his grip defensively on the straps of his backpack, not disdainful but an almost childish rejection.

At least until a woman talking loudly on her bluetooth and staring at her tablet screen nearly does plow into him, dividing him and Steve, and her outraged squawk at the audacity of their existence brings his head down, shoulders bunched, clearly preparing to silence her.

"Geeze, I am so sorry," Steve interjects, putting himself immediately between them, with his back to Bucky. He throws one hand out behind him, contacting with Bucky's chest to keep him back. "Are you all right, ma'am?" The woman's indignation at being called ma'am seems paramount now over her outrage at being bumped into, and she gives the two of them a look that verges into knowing as she storms off. But she does keep her tablet at her side, he notes with some amusement.

It's only the hand on his chest that keeps him from going for his knives, and for a second he frowns down at it, and then up at the man in front of him with his back totally exposed-- covering for him, and some long-buried human instinct prompts him to step in closer to Rogers, to take himself out of the line of sight and allow his... partner to distract the target.

The red leeches from the edges of his vision slowly. He forces himself to breath out, counting, and for whatever reason doesn't push on ahead alone but waits for Rogers to give him some cue, let him know that it's alright to proceed.

In answer, Steve's fingers spasm closed on Bucky's shirt, and when he turns finally to face him he spares a brief glance to his hand as if he's not entirely sure what he's just done. After a slow, careful moment he lets him go, and pats the shirt awkwardly smooth.

"We're almost there. If we're lucky, we'll beat the lunch rush. Come on."

(When are we ever lucky?)

He hears it in his ear as clearly as if someone was standing next to him, and for a second there is. The voice that doesn't belong to him. The ghost at his shoulder, solid and real and terrifying.

Rogers' hand retreats and he grabs it without looking in a nearly crushing iron grip, staring fixedly straight ahead, breathing too elevated for calm.

"Wait."

He goes stock still, as asked. What he does do is meet Bucky's eyes, searching for something. Some hint of that old ghost.

The Winter Soldier doesn't look at him. If anything he's looking right through Rogers at something only he can see, lips slightly parted, fight or flight instinct running high while people pass by around them on the crowded sidewalk. His grip continues to tighten painfully.

Cities all sound the same. People walking, chattering, cars rushing past. The wind and the smell of exhaust. Heels clopping, papers rustling, fabric brushing past him.

"When..."

His voice sounds raw in his ears, scratched and abused, and he finally lets himself meet Steve's gaze, helplessly unwilling, like the sentence is being torn loose from inside him.

"...have we ever been lucky?" he asks, uncertainly, as if he's not sure he's saying a line correctly.

Bucky could have crushed bones with that grip. It hurts, but Steve doesn't feel it. Merely looks at him, a faint line between his brows that's all the indication he's willing to surrender in public to show how close he is to just breaking down. Bucky said that to him once when they were under fire, and for some reason their firearms kept jamming. It turned out later that the ammunition was faulty, and they were lucky they hadn't blown themselves up in the process. We're lucky the Germans are lousy shots, Steve had said at the time, and not a second after he said it he took a bullet to the thigh. A ricochet, just a fragment, but he remembers Bucky's hands pressed down over the wound as he said, when have we ever been lucky? with the wry gallows humour so many people adopted in that War.

The air feels heavy in his lungs. "We were lucky that day," he says, very quietly. "The Germans always were lousy shots."

They were, and it's on the tip of his tongue to say so, but everything in him is frozen cold with fear and uncertainty over what he's doing, why he's saying these things and he can feel himself slipping, all the threads of self-discipline and control unraveling in his hands, unanchored...

Falling.

He looks down out of sheer cowardice, letting his hair hide his eyes, physically unable to keep holding Rogers' gaze. He remembers what drowning feels like and this, this is it, even with his feet firmly on the ground.

Of course it's only a moment after he's looked away that he notices the way they're drawing glances, the way suspicion is creeping into expressions and people are holding cell phones, typing, and he shakes his head, almost visibly rebooting, and blinks back anything human out of his expression. A bus is pulling up to the curb and he tugs Rogers towards it, loosening his death grip.

"Eyes on the streets," he mutters unnecessarily in Russian, and then coarsely in English, like it's suddenly a second language. "Eyes, heads."

HYDRA.

"Come."

But for a moment, he had his friend back. Not just physically, but in all matters of the soul as well. He lets Bucky tug him for the bus, and skirts around in front of him to pay the fare with the few coins in his pocket. He doesn't sit, instead choosing to hold onto one of the overhead bars so he can half-hide his face. He's too well-known. At least on the streets, you pass people. On a bus, you may be stuck with the same person staring at you for minutes too long.

He doesn't care. He just positions himself to hide Bucky's face as well as he can, and watches him quietly. He sees the struggle, knows it - not well, but enough that he's aware of it happening. And he doesn't know how to help, except to be there to pull him out of the worst of it.

His shield is suddenly heavy on his back, and he sags a little, letting the bar take his weight. Some of.

"I'm sorry," he whispers, not even certain as to why he says it. Just that it matters, in that moment.