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 doesn't need to read the plaques, doesn't need to glance over the memorabilia. He's always had a good memory. Not great, but good enough. Some things stand out more clearly in his mind than others. He can still see Bucky fall, if he closes his eyes. Is it a betrayal, not to have suspected even for a moment that he might have survived? He should have looked for him-- should have done something.

He's quiet, as Bucky moves through the gallery. He keeps step with him easily, waiting and hopeful. It wanes, as they get progress, and there's no flicker of recognition in his expression. Damn. He was so sure--

But it's not the end of the line. They can still make it happen. And he's not going to give up. "It feels a little weird," he says softly. "Being a museum exhibit. Agent Romanov called me a fossil, well. She's half right."

He glances at Steve at the mention of Black Widow and a coldness that ought to be becoming familiar steals back into his eyes. He shoves both hands into his pockets and stares unblinkingly at the girl who'd taken the picture until the giggles start to turn to anxious whispers.

"She will be looking for you," he says finally, still glaring at the girls.

He sees no point in denying it, so he doesn't. He does, however, offer a smile to those girls to counter Bucky's cold stare. Of the two of them, Steve never was the one that had the charm to assuage a crowd.

"Yeah, Buck. She will."

He turns on his heel abruptly, either offended by Steve's response to the teenagers or his answer about Widow-- or perhaps just bored of the current plaque they're standing in front of.

Then he jerks to a halt like a dog hitting the end of his leash at the tinny, echoing sound of archive footage being played in one of the other rooms. The sound of marching and buzzing electricity and voices in German underneath the narrator giving brief and extremely edited facts about the 'rogue Nazi science division,' and then the muted roar of a hundred voices saluting Hydra.

The world around him starts to tunnel. His fingers flex, his breathing picks up.

Steve is at his side instantly, one hand just above the elbow of his good arm. He knows that posture, and what it means for someone who's seen hell. Damnit, Rogers, you didn't think this one through as much as you should have, huh? "Bucky--"

"No," he says calmly, distantly, and all the tension falls out of his posture as he slips out the active cell phone he'd been holding in the pocket of his hoodie. There are coordinates glowing on the screen.

"It's time."

"Time for--" But something stops him. He glances at the cellphone, and then back up to Bucky's face. "What did you do?" It's not accusatory. It's quiet, a little pleading.

He watches Steve watch him, the expression on his face discomfiting but not enough to derail the cold satisfaction of having returned to protocol. The longer he stays out on his own, he's been told, the more things will begin to get muddled inside his head, the more he'll come into contact with variables that will compromise his mission. His priority is not always simply to deliver kill results, but to maintain his own effectiveness as an asset while doing so.

"I'm supposed to come in," he explains simply, like a child reciting something he's been told numerous times by his mother. "When I go out into the cold, I have to come back."

Nevermind that there's every possibility SHIELD will answer instead of Hydra. He's not concerned about getting caught. To date, no organization or enemy or authority has ever been able to hold him when he didn't wish to be detained, or find him when he didn't wish to be found.

Steve shifts, reaches a hand out and grips the back of Bucky's neck. He does it slowly - they're still surrounded by people - and he doesn't care who's staring or why. "We've dealt with the cold before, Buck. Remember Belgium? Worst winter in thirty years."

He should duck away-- should pull back, put distance between them, the response to his signal could come at any moment, and violently-- but there's something familiar about the touch. Something that makes him want to hold still for it and close his eyes.

(Something familiar.)

"I've never been deployed in Belgium," come out too quickly, defensive, but with a split-second glance at the wall panel to the side about James Buchanan Barnes, as if he wasn't sure of the statement.

Steve flexes his fingers, and for a moment it's all he can do just to breathe the same air. "Yes you were. We spent six weeks there. You complained about digging foxholes in--" and here he drops his voice, mimicking Bucky's accent, "'the goddamn permafrost'. I broke our only shovel because they were cheap scrap metal. I swear, we would've used grenades if we'd had the damn things, but we'd run out of just about everything but those damn K ration crackers. Everyone hated those things."

He flinches at the accent, sudden and violent, eyes flying wide as he jerks away and stares at Steve like his touch had suddenly burned.

In stammered Russian: "That's not-- I'm not--"

His gaze unsticks itself from Steve's face and pulls to the man on the glass (the man who looks just like him), and he shudders again, trying to remember the protocol (you will encounter variables in the field, you will maintain your distance, you will not allow external factors to affect you) and he swallows hard, trying to sound sure and instead sounding lost.

"I'm not."

"How long do we have?" he asks. He puts himself right back into Bucky's personal space, not quite touching but close enough, because he's already got it in his mind to fight for this man. He wants to. Bucky wouldn't give up on him, not ever. The least he can do is return the favour.

He's not going to answer that question. He's not going to give information like that to an enemy, to a SHIELD pawn--

"Six minutes."

Goddammit.

Steve drops his hand down against Bucky's wrist, the metal one, and after a moment's hesitation he laces their fingers together. Nat was the one who said that public displays of affection make people uncomfortable. It worked last time.

He tugs Bucky away from the displays, towards one of the emergency exits. The layout of this building is fairly easy to remember, he had to in order to steal the uniform. "No one I don't trust is taking you anywhere," he says firmly. The idea that it could be a compromise of his personal safety as well isn't even on the radar. But they do need to get away from all the innocents browsing the exhibits.

And he goes along when tugged, for reasons completely unknown to him. Combat instinct tells him to dig his heels in, yank back out of Steve's grasp and use the crowds to buy himself cover and distance, but the thought of Steve panicked amidst all these bystanders, standing out like a sore thumb and easy pickings for anyone with eyes, makes something in his gut twist.

He can't feel the warmth of the hand wrapped around his, although he can feel the pressure. The only people that willingly touch the arm are the scientists in charge of repairing or testing it. Everyone else knows better to put themselves in range of his grasp, when all it takes is the twitch of a nerve or a spark between wires for him to put someone through a wall.

It's that more than anything that makes him protest, back in English. The longer he goes without contact with his handlers, the greater the chance of an Incident. "But I have to come in."

"That's your training talking," Steve fires back, tugging him along as he ducks through the crowd. When they get to one of the doors that leads in behind the exhibits, he glances around and then tugs Bucky in closer so he can act as a screen while Steve breaks the lock on the door. It'll set off alarms, but he doesn't care. Maybe it'll be enough to get people out of the building.

"Bucky-- I don't know what they did to you, but I'm going to find out. And we're going to fix it. Together, you and me, okay? Just like old times." Steve shoulders the door open, and eases it shut behind both of them. "I need you to trust me."

The automatic protest dies on his tongue, mostly because there's a shadow where there shouldn't be one (sniper, rooftop) and he's got a knife in his free hand before he can even think about it, recognizing the redheaded woman watching them both coolly. SHIELD, codename Black Widow. Waiting for them, apparently. Either she'd anticipated Steve's movements, or she'd responded to his own signal faster than he'd thought possible-- or Steve had signaled her first.

He tenses in preparation for a lunge, but her eyes go to their linked hands (why hasn't he let go of Steve's hand) and something in him falters, hesitating, and she doesn't miss that, either.

"Boys."

"Natasha." Steve's voice is cautious, neutral. "I need you to stand aside."

Natasha keeps her stone-face for about .5 seconds before rolling her eyes and tossing something small and shiny at Steve's head-- which 32557 promptly snatches out of the air, automatically presuming an explosive or one of her little electric shock toys.

It's neither, in fact. It's a set of car keys, and Natasha raises an eyebrow at his puzzled expression.

"It's equipped--" aka full of weapons and spy supplies, in Widow-speak. "I'll get your gear, I'm sure you've got the shield stashed nearby. Call who you need to, but drive and don't stop driving. SHIELD's about two minutes away from swarming this place."

There's plenty more she's not saying, of course, but her gaze is steady on Steve's, giving him permission to go on and do this incredibly dumb and heroic thing he's set on doing, and Steve doesn't have to feel like he's leaving her alone in the lurch because there's only one sniper in SHIELD right now that would have the Winter Soldier in his sights and stay his hand because Natasha had told him to.

Steve nods to her sharply, once, and pulls Bucky past her. There'll be time for proper thank-yous later, right now he has two minutes to get as far away from this place as possible. He opens the car, throws his backpack in the seat behind the driver. "Keys," he says, and it's damn near an order.

Natasha doesn't stick around behind them, either, moving forward through the exit into the building. He glances after her, bewildered, still letting Steve tug him along in his wake until they're at the curb.

The getaway vehicle is as nondescript and ordinary as anyone could ask for in an escape car, precisely the kind he would have stolen himself. He hesitates, though, clearly fighting down the impulse to turn around and run, gaze flicking nervously between Steve and the car and everywhere else.

There are no sirens in the distance, but the unmistakable noise of an approaching chopper is slowly getting louder. He scrubs at his temple with the heel of his hand, the motion jerky and graceless in distress.

"I have to come in. Things happen when I don't." He looks up at Steve with leashed desperation, clutching the keys pathetically. "They won't leave me. They will always, always come for me."

"And when they do," Steve says with quiet certainty, "They'll have to go through me first. Do you understand?" He's never been naive enough to think it won't happen. Bucky is a weapon, an asset. They'd want him back. But they'll be sorry if they try. Damn sorry.

No, he wants to protest, he doesn't understand at all, he doesn't understand why someone he'd tried to kill is-- doing whatever it is Steve's doing, helping him, cooperating with him, even while still wearing the Hydra handcuffs. And the Black Widow is letting them both go, aiding and abetting their escape, even though she's--

(Why is Natasha Romanoff not dead?)

Even though she's--

(Wipe him. Make it hurt. Make it last.)

"No," he says finally, sincerely. He doesn't understand. He's a patchwork of blank spaces and corpses, languages he doesn't remember learning and war crimes he doesn't remember committing. For a man like Steve Rogers to rebel against SHIELD over something like him...

But he holds out the keys anyway. Trusting, and meeting Steve's eyes with that same helpless curiosity, knowing full well that he's deviating from the logical course and allowing it to happen anyway.

Steve takes them slowly, careful, and then he opens the door for the passenger side. He spares one sharply intense look for Bucky, the rest of the time his attention is split looking over their shoulders, and his fingers are tight and bloodless on the edge of the doorframe. "I'll explain it later. For now, we need to disappear."