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. ]

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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."

He nods once, brisk, accepting the mission, and then gives Steve a flat sort of look before opening the SUV's backdoor instead and climbing in, going straight for the equipment, weapons and reconnaissance, stashed there like he knows what kind of super spy gadgets come standard in a SHIELD vehicle. If Steve is driving, someone needs to be watching out the rear window with a machine gun.

Deep breath. He shuts the door, circles to the driver's side. Part of him wants to redline the vehicle until he blows the transmission, but the other part hears walk, don't run over and over like a mantra. He obeys all the traffic laws, stops at cross-walks, signals for 2.5 seconds before he pulls into other lanes. Gradually, the urban streets fade to warehouses and shops, and then they become intermittent. Sparse.

He has it in his mind to drive to the next big city, but they need to lie low. He'll contact Stark in a few days and beg a favour (there's no one else he'd do it for but Bucky) and maybe they can disappear to-- somewhere, anywhere else. But in the immediate future, they need a nondescript hotel off the grid, a room paid full in cash, and time. God, they need seventy years of it.

The hotel, they get, in a middling size town not on the way to anywhere in particular. The room, they get, small and quiet but clean, and the desk clerk doesn't even look up from his newspaper when they check in with the money Natasha had stashed in the car-- which Steve optimistically (and laughably) hopes is not stolen. They both wear sunglasses and hats and hoodies like disreputable twenty-somethings, hiding behind unfolding maps and cellphones, Big Gulp drinks from the gas stations and anything else that comes easily to hand.

The Winter Soldier doesn't blend naturally with other people but he succeeds by effort rather than natural inclination, treating it like any mission, wearing headphones that aren't actually plugged into anything to minimize unwanted social contact, hair tied back in a ponytail and hands shoved into his pockets. He's quiet during the car rides and quiet when they stop, although Steve's getting disconcertingly good at translating his silences.

After the first twenty-four hours it's clear neither SHIELD nor Hydra are overtly pursuing them, and he spends a little less time checking their six and a little more time watching Steve, brow faintly furrowed like Steve is a puzzle he needs to solve. There's no pretense of anyone being anyone's prisoner anymore. Steve is leading and he's following, though he's well aware of every opportunity to escape that he doesn't use. Every time Steve's gaze moves off him, every time he's left by himself, every time they stop for the night. A thousand exit routes present themselves to him and he ignores them, one by one. Steve allows him a thousand vulnerabilities, a thousand blind spots and he ignores them all, clenches his jaw until the impulse to finish what he'd started passes.

He's more free with his own vulnerabilities than he can ever remember being, as well, although that doesn't really mean much. Steve's seen where he keeps all his knives by now, seen which guns he gravitates to, watches him watch exits and always seems to know, every single time, how and when to do that awful thing where he'll rest a hand on the back of his neck and squeeze gently, and it makes him seize up every time like Steve is pulling some string in his body. It feels good. It feels right, and it shouldn't, and whenever Steve asks him if it's too much, if he'd rather not be touched he can never figure out how he wants to answer.

He asks Steve halting, non-sequitur questions about Natasha Romanoff (Natalia Romanova) sometimes, most of which Steve doesn't even know the answers to and seems surprised that he'd ask in the first place, and he shrugs his shoulders jerkily when Steve apologizes for not having any of the answers. He's not sure he doesn't already know the answers. There's just something inside him that wants to hear the questions asked aloud, knowing that he can.

They're stopped for the day on account of it being too goddamned hot and bright to drive any further in a heat-soaking tin can, mirage shimmers on the pavement and all sane people squirreled away in any place that has air conditioning. His hair is still damp from a cold shower when he slips back out into the main part of their room, all his layers gone except for a black tank and sweatpants, his metal arm for the very first time detached and laid out in several pieces on the table to be worked on. He's never taken it off in Steve's presence yet so far, forever paranoid, but it and the ports at his shoulder need maintenance just like any of his weapons.

He'd waited until Steve left the room to grab some supplies, at least, although part of him knows very well that there's no chance of him being finished before Steve returns.

He still wears the cuffs. Bucky would take them off if he asked, he knows that now, but he leaves them. It's a gesture of trust, one of many he extends and hopes is enough to bring him back to who he was and who he used to be. He still wears them, and calls them a fashion sense in some ironic part of his mind, although he wears long-sleeved shirts so they don't show unless he's around Bucky, and rolls the edges of his sleeves up.

Supplies are the easy part. He stops at gas stations that double as mini-marts and buys everything in cash, spreading his purchases out over several different ones in a radius around their newest hotel. Recon.

Old habits, and all.

He tries to think about having his friend back, about the moments when Bucky looks at him like he remembers an old joke, and not about the way his lips felt once upon a time.

He tries.

He buys popsicles that he wraps and puts carefully in a flimsy styrofoam cooler under twenty pounds of ice that he plans on dumping in the bathtub later to cool the room down, and he drives back slowly in an effort to avoid undue attention. They've been off the grid so far, but that doesn't mean they'll stay that way. But eventually he's back at their room, and he hauls their supplies inside, locks the door behind him (swingbolt first, deadbolt second) and he stocks their small fridge, dumps out the ice as planned, and holds out one of the popsicles to Bucky. If seeing the arm in pieces on the table startles him, it doesn't show. "I remember when these things had flavour," he says with an amused shake of his head. "Now I think the only thing you can taste is the colour."

This would be yet again one of those situations that the Winter Soldier has no frame of reference for, tensed at the prospect of scrutiny and then looking comically blank as he tries to parse Steve's Steve-ness.

He blinks at the popsicle, glances up at Steve almost too quickly to catch (for permission, always permission before he remembers that he doesn't need any, and certainly not from someone who'd been a target), and then looks back at the popsicle before reaching out gingerly to take it with his remaining hand like it might be explosive, and everything in his silence screams the obvious questions: why are you doing this, what made you think a super assassin would want one of these, did you really have to get the Captain American red-white-and-blue kind, really.

"They were a luxury once upon a time, you know," he says as he leans against the edge of the table. "And there's ice in the bathtub." You know, in case he missed the cascading rattle as Steve dumped twenty solid pounds into it. "It'll keep the temperature down in here."

Yes he did notice that, in point of fact, and in response sticks the red tip of the popsicle in his mouth, dismissing Captain Obvious as clearly as if he'd rolled his eyes.

It's hard to imagine these as a luxury (not the way he knows deep in his gut about things like hot water, butter, fresh meat) but he mouths at it obligingly anyway, turning his tongue and lips red before he figures out he can hold it in his teeth for moments at a time while he goes back to work on the cybernetic arm.

"Do you need--" a hand. He bites down on it, as unintentional a quip as it might have been, it's not warranted here. He clears his throat. "Help?"

A day or two ago, he'd have given Steve a flat stare for asking. A week ago-- well, a week ago they'd been trying to kill each other.

He delicately takes the popsicle between his teeth and slowly, possibly even grudgingly picks up a small bottle of chemical solution that looks like an uncomfortable cross between blood and motor oil, which is more or less what it is. The arm is easy enough to deal with when it's detached, but even the Winter Soldier can't accurately see all the machinery in his shoulder port without a mirror. He gestures wordlessly with the tip of the squeeze bottle at the two dozen places on the port that need to be done before holding it up for Steve.