Chapter Text
What Valeska hears, late at night, are the steps. They are heavy, like the man is wearing big boots, and like maybe he is a bear, too. Her favorite stories are about bears – Misha, is what her papa calls him, all bears are named Misha. Her father is Misha, too, at home, but Mikhail Vladimirovich at work. She thinks about that right now, about her papa and how he tucked her into bed, kissed her on the forehead, and told her not to be scared of the monsters that hid in the dark, when he wasn’t there to protect her.
There are no monsters in the dark, he told her. Misha. Mikhail Vladimirovich. Her papa.
She realizes that she is thinking about it because the man with the heavy boots is saying his name, and she can just hear it. His voice is deep, and he speaks Polish, at first, and then Russian. She can hear her papa say something, something terrified, and she knows it is the monster in the dark that has come for her. Her papa is a big man, a big Russian who is not afraid of anything, but tonight the monster has come for her and she can hear him through the thin walls of their apartment. She looks over and sees the sliver of light under her door, barely enough to illuminate the room, and thinks about what she can do.
It is so dark, and she is so small, small enough to fit into one of the cupboards of the wardrobe. She knows because once, when her cousin came to visit, she hid there to keep him from pulling her braids and getting dirt on her shirt. She hears a noise, sharp, and then there’s silence, and she can’t, she can’t.
She undoes her blankets and runs to the wardrobe, and crams herself into it. Just before she closes the door she sees the terrible shadow of two enormous boots, and she pulls the door shut.
Her breathing is so loud that for a moment she thinks she can’t hear anything else. But as the silence settles into the room, she realizes that no, she can hear something, she can hear the telltale swing of the bedroom door opening.
She pulls her pajamas over her head.
She does not know how long she’s in the wardrobe. It must be only minutes, but it feels longer, hours maybe, like every breath that she takes is spaced apart by longer than normal. She is scared, and very little. Maybe it’s not the monster. Maybe it is her papa.
(But papa doesn’t wear boots inside the house, he doesn’t walk with that slow, heavy step, and he would have said her name already, he would have called her out, little dove, he might have said, if she were afraid.)
When the door to the wardrobe opens, she does not look up. She keeps her pajamas over her head and tries her very best not to cry. “Look up,” a man’s voice says in Polish, and when she doesn’t, he says it again, this time in Russian. “Look up, I need to see.”
She shakes her head and then he is grabbing her and she cries out. He shakes her and she wails, the sound that is coming out of her scaring her just as much as the man. He is cold, cold to touch, and she realizes he is wearing gloves – they are black and one is wet. “Please,” she says, in Polish first, and then when he hits her – across the face – she whimpers it in Russian. The blow is heavy, it hurts her, it hurts her a lot, and her mouth feels funny.
“Look up,” he tells her again, and finally she does.
His face is mostly covered by a mask, that in the darkness makes him look like he has no face at all. But then his eyes are so pale, a blue like the sky on a cold, clear day, when there is snow on the ground, and just as freezing. His hair is short and as her eyes adjust, she can see he is as blonde as Yasha, one of the boys in her class. He is enormous. Bigger than her papa.
He looks down at her and finally tosses her down on the ground. “Your father is dead,” he says, in Russian, rumbling like a train. “You are the child of spy, and no use to anyone, and it would be mercy to kill you.”
She is paralyzed. Her pajamas are wet and the room smells, but maybe the man who has no face does not notice. He doesn’t seem to, anyway. He leans back against the wall, the bulk of him making the room seem tiny, tinier than it ever was when her papa-
When papa-
When Mikhail Vladimirovich-
There is no set of words that come after that which will make it better, but she can’t get up off the floor. She curls there, and finally the man makes a shape with his body, and at the end of one gloved hand, she realizes, is a gun.
He pulls the trigger.
She does not hear the noise.
~~~~~
When he wakes up, it’s slowly.
He turns in the bed, and it’s so warm – finally warm, he thinks to himself, on that precipice just between sleep and wakefulness, when he’s only barely coherent enough to seek out that sunny patch. Napping in the sunshine, Bucky thinks, is one of life’s very greatest gifts, right up there with hot pastrami sandwiches, Fat Freddie’s knuckle-curve, and that look on Steven Grant Rogers face when something good landed in their laps. And napping in sunshine, when there’s a war effort, getting that luxury is even better.
It’s so good, actually, that it takes his brain a good full five minutes to catch up to what’s going on, for his brain to say wait, no, wait a minute. This isn’t right. Last he remembers he was on a train, and Steve-
Steve- he suddenly thinks, his mind going into sharp relief, his brain waking up all the way, and he sits up in bed, suddenly, alarm bells going off. There’s a baseball game on the radio, and there’s suddenly a nurse in his room. Her hair is loose and it’s briefly distracting, and kind of intimate, in way that makes him feel like looking away, like she’s immodest. He resists the urge to say something, and Bucky isn’t sure what he’s paying attention to, the door or-
And then he hears it.
“What’s going on?” he says, his fingers gripping the bed, but something’s wrong, something upsets his balance because he’s suddenly back on the bed, his entire left side off and-
“Sergeant Barnes,” the nurse says, moving to help him, and he suddenly finds he doesn’t care that the radio is playing a baseball game from years ago or that the nurse’s hands have the same kinds of calluses that someone who holds a gun might, or even that she smells strange, different, not like a nurse at all. “Sergeant Barnes, you-“
“My arm-“ he says, gripping her uniform with his right hand, because it’s the only one he has left. Later, he’ll apologize for that, his mother raised him better than to get handsy with a woman he’s never met, and so did Steve, for that matter, but for now he’s too busy focusing on-
Focusing on-
Her dress is starched and stiff, but somehow the shape is wrong, she doesn’t look like a girl from back home, her accent is as flat as he imagines Kansas to be, and he can feel his breathing increase, suddenly. He realizes that maybe, maybe this is what it’s like to have asthma, this terror that he can’t breathe, that there is not enough oxygen in the room for him to suck through his lungs, that somehow when he lost his arm he lost his ability to breathe, too-
“Sergeant Barnes!” she says, sharply, and finally he looks up at her. She gives him a look that is as much concern as pity. “Please,” she repeats, and he takes a gulp of a breath. “Better?”
“Why is there a game from 1941 on the radio?” he asks, because he remembers this game. He and Steve went together, Steve managed not to pick a single fight, and Bucky bought a bag of peanuts that they shared. It was a good afternoon.
Something passes over the nurse’s face, and suddenly Bucky is up on his feet, trying to push past her, but he doesn’t seem to realize how to balance, and he topples again.
This time she pulls him back up. “Sergeant,” she says, and there’s real kindness in her expression. “Please, calm down-“
“Where’s Steve,” he says, feeling like he’s vomiting words now, “where am I, what’s going on-“ he asks, and her hands move, and he feels a prick, like a jab, and the panic sets in in earnest. He’s not going to be an experiment again. He won’t, he won’t, he won’t-
But the sedative is more powerful than his adrenaline, and he feels it kick in. His eyes flutter closed, even as he feels his stomach dropping, and he thinks he sees a black man in a trenchcoat sweep in the room and demand something, but then it’s blackness.
They play this game again when Bucky awakes, and finally they tell him, straight out – he had fallen (he remembers Steve’s face when it happened, shocked, and then nothing) and later, there was an avalanche, there were a series of strange geological events. Bucky’s body (he sits there and listens to this, unbelieving, like he’s divorced from his body somehow when they explain it) was caught in an ice floe, preserved there. A couple of ice-climbers found it that summer while climbing the summit, had called it in, and everyone thought-
Well, when he took a breath, after they chipped him out, everyone was surprised, but somehow Bucky isn’t. He hears something about how his arm had been crushed, and the doctors removed it at the shoulder because there was no saving it. He listens to the explanation from Nick Fury, who is frankly one of the most impressive men Bucky has ever met; it’s like meeting a walking force of nature, like a thunderstorm or a blizzard, impossibly contained in the shape of a human being, and he remembers what Zola did to him. It was only a few months ago. It was seventy years ago.
Bucky’s going to have a hell of a time wrapping his head around that.
~~~~~~
The technician hates her job, some days. Some days, she deals with it, like anyone else would deal with a terrible job that paid the bills, or even a half-decent job that occasionally mentally stimulated a person. She’s good at it, that’s for sure, and it’s not even like she can say it’s better than the lunch counter at Woolworths, because Woolworths was never an option. She has a PhD in bioengineering and cryogenic engineering, but her breasts still gave her a surprisingly limited range of job options.
Of course, when she started tumbling down this rabbithole, it wasn’t about the bad job – it was about the incredible science, and the sheer magnitude of opportunity. They wooed her with lab equipment and funds, seduced her with out-of-this-world research, won her over by pointing out that she would never have to sell her scientific soul to anyone with the last name Stark.
But like any abusive relationship, the cracks came out quickly. It’s not SHIELD. She understands that. There is something sinister here, even under the guise of for the good of man. She wants to be rational about it, but she doesn’t believe it, it’s a crock of garbage.
But the worst isn’t the big picture. It’s the little things. The small cruelties. The spying and the lying, sure, that’s bad. But the worst is the asset.
The asset is a big man. She knows that she was hired for this eventuality, groomed for his eventual transport, but it still bothers her. She was the only female engineer in her class. She’s a commodity. She knows that. She understands it in the core of her.
She looks over, nervously, at the chamber. It is a state of the art piece of equipment, beautiful, inside and out. It is everything that she wanted when she was working her ass off, twice as hard as any of the men in her graduating class to prove she was worth it, trying to be everything any professor would kill for. It’s a beautiful, high-tech piece of equipment, and even the red soviet star on it doesn’t mar that beauty, but she feels like it holds an undetonated atom bomb. Like maybe they shouldn’t have been looking at Khrushchev, but instead looking at the snake coiled up inside the workings of the Defense Agency. Maybe that was the point.
They’re waking him up today, and she’s sitting at her desk, quiet. She is always there when they wake him up, because she is part of the team that handles the recalibration of the chamber, in slow increments, to get him off the ice the best way possible.
“Is everything ready?” her team leader asks, and she nods. She sees, out of the corner of her eye, a familiar looking man. She can’t place exactly where she’s seen him – he looks like someone’s soft son, but with a particular charisma to him. She would expect to see someone like him at a baseball game, or at a homecoming event. Not here. Not watching as they wake up the bomb that will blow up this nation.
Well, that’s dramatic.
“Wake him up, then,” she’s told, and even as the blood drains from her fingers, she thinks that all it’s doing it making her hands steadier, so when she keys the machine, it goes as smoothly as silk. God, she needs a better job. The nerves are going to undo her.
Everyone watches as the heat (calibrated, of course) seeps into the chamber. “You know the Soviets didn’t want to hand him over? Said he didn’t do well, stateside. They sent him here in ’52 and he lost it. Went AWOL for a week. They found him in Maryland. He’d killed a whole family. It was a mess,” someone behind her says. “But what are they going to keep him for? Everyone knows that he’s probably more likely to be destroyed if they keep him in Moscow.”
“I heard the KGB made a fuss. He’s strictly on loan, fellas,” the young man says, and she can hear the fond smile in his tone. “Don’t get too attached,” he says, and a sudden push at her shoulder makes her realize he’s talking to her. She’s the only woman in the room; the implication is-
Well, the door opens, and she’s embarrassed to say that she understands the implication all the better. The asset is shirtless, asleep. He looks like an angel, perfectly sculpted, his blonde hair long. “We’ll have to give him a haircut, he looks like a hippie,” someone laughs, and that’s when the asset’s eyes open, and she can’t believe how blue they are.
Two of the soldiers on either side of him go to help him move, and he looks at them, inspects them, and she thinks that this must be the way he looks at people before he-
She can’t bring herself to finish the thought, she thinks she’s going to be sick. She doesn’t want to be party to this anymore. She doesn’t want to do this. The asset is disoriented, his face still muddled with a sleepy look, trying to paw his way pasts the soldiers helping him. They’re crooning at him in a sick kind of babytalk, telling him it’s all right, and second by second he gets sharper, more aware of his surroundings. It’s like taking a toy out of packaging, she thinks roughly, when all the plastic is discarded away on the floor to reveal the shiny edges. It makes this entire affair more sickening.
She looks up and the young man – oh, Alexander Pierce, she realizes, putting the name to the face of one of the up and coming young diplomats she reads about in the papers – looks at her, concerned. “Are you all right?” he asks, and she swallows, and shakes her head. “Do you need a glass of water?”
She needs to get out of here, that’s what she needs. She doesn’t know why the asset is in the United States, but suddenly she feels that split of a crisis of conscience. Science isn’t enough. There isn’t anything that is enough. They brought in this terrible weapon – she’s working for the bad guys. She needs to get out of this room. “I just need to run to the restroom. Women issues,” she says, giving him her best wan smile. Men, they don’t want to know about women’s issues, she thinks. It’s a guaranteed out. In fact, one of the older men in the room makes a noise, scoffing, asking if it was really necessary to say.
But Alexander Pierce just smiles at her. “Of course,” he says, and he puts his hand on her arm.
But he doesn’t help her. Instead he says something in a thick foreign language, and she realizes too late it’s Russian. The asset’s hands are on either side of her head, and the last thing she sees are his beautiful eyes, dead, looking through her.
~~~~~
Getting used to the modern day is easier than Bucky thought it might be. He has a whole team that hovers around him, and sure, that’s annoying, but it’s less annoying than his fake arm that they try and get him to wear for the first week. That thing is itchy and it doesn’t do anything, and Bucky feels unwieldy with it, crotchety, telling Nick Fury that he’d rather not have it, and plus, he wants to go home to Brooklyn now, thanks.
They don’t let him go.
He’s bored and antsy, but none of what they show him is shocking, just surprising, on the rare trips out of the facility. Times Square is too loud and too bright, a trip of neon and electricity that never featured even in Bucky’s dreams. The agent who takes him, a sweet-faced blonde who wears her hair in a bun and her lips tipped in a maddeningly familiar smile, shows him Manhattan, points out new buildings, and doesn’t tell him off for insisting on walking on the street side of the sidewalk. He keeps his hand to himself. No one stares at him, but then, this is New York.
He meets an agent named Barton who shows up three weeks in and is a frowning, scowling mess, until Bucky gives him a look and a grin. He doesn’t open up, not really, though, until Bucky asks to go back to Brooklyn and Barton takes him up the same winding streets he grew up in, the bare bones of that old tired lady looking freshly painted. Brooklyn is a brand new girl, but Bucky still loves her.
Apparently, so does everyone else, though, because Bucky asks Barton how hard it would be to get his old digs back, and Barton laughs – it’s not possible, and Bucky chokes at the price that Barton quotes for rent. It’s just as well, though. He goes by the old building where his parents lived, and he stands there for a long time. It must have destroyed his mother, he thinks. It must have killed her that her little boy didn’t come home from the war. A teenaged girl comes out of the building and he looks at her, and she looks at him, and then gets on her phone (tiny and pocketed and independent of a landline, and maybe Bucky still thinks that’s amazing even though he has one of his own in his pocket) and mutters something about weirdos before she walks away.
He goes to the apartment that he shared with Steve and it’s a straight stab right into the heart. If anyone should have survived, it was Steve, but maybe it’s better. Bucky had been preparing his whole life for Steve to die before him. He just didn’t think it would happen this way. A fever, a flu, pneumonia, he thinks that Steve might have been taken that way, snatched away. People like Steve, they’re not meant to be kept.
A month goes and Bucky is still being kept by SHIELD, trained about the real world by SHIELD, when there’s a commotion outside the training room that a patient agent is teaching Bucky about the internet in. “What-“ the agent says, and then the door opens.
On the other side is Howard Stark.
No.
Bucky thinks it’s Howard, at first, because he has that same manic energy, that same wild-eyed expression. His eyes are the same shape, his mustache, for crying out loud, is so similar it’s maddening, everything about his face. But this man is a little bit slimmer, maybe, less composed, his face just a little different. Older. But the stamp of Howard Stark is unmistakable.
“Wow I thought you would be. I don’t know. Taller. Seven feet tall or something,” the Stark says, looking at Bucky. “Maybe handsomer? Well, not that you’re not handsome. You have a face for pictures I guess, if they’re in black and white,” he keeps saying, and Bucky isn’t exactly sure what he should be feeling.
“Mr. Stark, I don’t think you’re supposed to-“ the agent begins, but Stark holds up one hand as if to make him stop talking.
But actually, the most impressive thing is that Stark never stops. Bucky stands and he can’t quite keep from smiling, because if anything this must have made Howard crazy. “You definitely look like you have had enough of being trapped down here, is that true? It’s true. Don’t answer me. Here, I brought you something, courtesy of – well, me, it’s a favor, a favor for the government which makes me feel filthy but-“
That’s when Bucky sees the man behind Stark, who is taller and bigger than Stark in every way but is somehow harder to look at, as if Stark demands all the attention in the room. “You brought me a bodyguard?” he asks, doubtfully.
“What-no, Happy, can you just-“ he moves, and Happy (Bucky is in no place to judge what wackos in the 70s named their kids, he supposes) moves and they do this strange dance for a few minutes, until finally Stark takes a huge bundle from Happy’s arms and puts it on the table. It’s wrapped in cloth, but Bucky suspects-
“Open it. Isn’t that what you do with gifts? Do people from the 1940s not take them? God just open it-“ Stark says.
“Hold your horses,” Bucky snaps, and Stark gives a brief grin, like that snap was really what he was waiting for the entire time. Bucky rolls his eyes, and pulls the material away, and underneath is a massive framework for an arm.
It’s made of metal, but that doesn’t make a difference. “I won’t wear a prosthetic,” Bucky says, “but thanks anyway,” he adds, because he’s trying to be polite.
“I heard about your little refusal to wear a prosthetic and I thought, hey, sure, why not, his choice, but this isn’t a prosthetic, this is an arm, I built it myself and once you go under the knife-“ he doesn’t stop even when Bucky makes a really annoyed noise, because he doesn’t know what that means, “-it’ll be like a regular arm, except better.”
“No surgery,” Bucky says, calmly, although inside his heart is pounding a storm in his chest. Just the idea of being strapped to a table again, it’s claustrophobic, he doesn’t remember what happened entirely, but no, no surgery, he can’t do it-
“-don’t just say no, think about it, an arm like a real arm-“ Stark continues, over him, and Bucky gets the impression Stark isn’t actually paying attention to him, that this isn’t about Bucky, this is about the arm.
Bucky just stares at it and tries to smile. “Look,” he says, but Stark is already saying something else, talking about something else entirely, and not to Bucky anymore. It’s a confusing moment, even after Stark leaves and Bucky and his agent babysitter are left alone with the arm and the internet. Bucky just shakes his head. “I’m not getting surgery done,” he says again, like the agent has any say in the matter.
The agent shrugs.
It takes another month, mostly one of Sharon (Sharon, the sweet blonde, Sharon who Bucky flirts with and kisses and it’s nothing like kissing any girl from back in the day, it’s strange because she’s assertive and she shrugs and moves away, and laughs, and Bucky is alright with it) telling him that it wouldn’t be a bad thing, that the surgery would be clean and the best doctors in the world would be doing it, but the idea of someone inside his brain makes Bucky panic a bit inside.
It’s finally Barton – Clint – who convinces him. “You’re a sniper, aren’t you? I grew up on stories about you. You could go back to doing that,” he says, at a quiet conversation while sitting up on the top of the SHIELD building. They like it up there – odd sniper habits, watching the people go on with their lives in the streets below. It’s a different New York, but the people are so much the same. Even up here, Bucky can see them walk around arm in arm, he can see people come together in sweet short kisses, holding hands.
It’s an odd kind of reassuring, but it makes Bucky realize exactly how lonely he feels. “I wasn’t ever into being a soldier for the sake of being a soldier,” he admits. “I don’t think it’s for me. I went with the Howling Commandos because of St-because of Captain America,” he clarifies, careful to say it that way, as if it separated them. He’s found out that Steve is an odd topic, not because he can’t talk about him without feeling like he’s been shot in the heart, but because everyone in 2012 thinks he was spun out of gold. It’s only strange because part of Bucky wants to insist that he loved him first, at the same time that he thinks, finally, everyone else can see what he saw was there all along. It burns him, though, that Steve never got to see it, the way it was supposed to be. That his fame was for being a hero, not for being a dancing monkey. “Maybe I’ll open a cap store,” he says, referring to hats. He can’t get over how no one wears one anymore.
“People like him,” Clint replies, and Bucky realizes he thinks that he’s talking about Steve, and he doesn’t correct him. It’s funny to be able to talk about it with someone. Clint, and some of the other high-level agents, they know who he is, sure, but most people? The official story is that he’s James Barnes, the grandson of James Buchanan Barnes, that there was a girl he got knocked up and she had a kid and, well. It’s not that far-fetched a story.
“Look, it’s your arm,” Clint points out, finally, “but why not just take it? A free Starktech arm. It’s bound to be good.”
Bucky goes quiet for a long, long time. He thinks about Steve. Steve went through all that procedure, sure, but even before, Steve dealt with doctors poking and prodding him his whole life long, and he never complained about it. Bucky has tried so hard not to think about his best friend, tried so hard to keep it at bay because all he wants, really, is Steve to be there, to advise him, to tell him what to do.
But the thing is, that Steve’s voice is clear in his head. You’re not afraid of a little surgery, are you?
And Bucky is.
But it’s not a good enough answer for Steve in his head, so finally he nods, and Clint just turns his head a bit, and nods. “Come on,” he says. “I’ll hold your hand the whole time.”
“Oh, go to hell, Barton,” Bucky replies, but there’s nothing but a smile in it.
~~~~~
“Holy shit-“ he says, twisting, slamming into someone on his way out of the office.
It’s been that kind of day, and really, he has to keep telling himself that the leak of all that information, its not known yet, no one can possibly know. He’s a good enough hacker, god, he’s good enough, to keep people guessing for another few hours. Enough time for him to get to the airport.
He needs to get to the airport.
He has contacts in – no, not Russia, it needs to be somewhere quiet and tech-free, somewhere he can disappear. He hears that Namibia has beautiful countryside and very clean cities. Or Mauritius. Remote sections of remote places where he can just-
Just what?
It’s not like he’s got any luck going for him.
He’s driving, trying to get on the freeway, but traffic is terrible. What the hell would he do without a computer, anyway? Take up marijuana farming? He has a black thumb and only about 20k to his name in liquid funds, anyway. That might go far in a place like Sierra Leone, but fuck, he heard they’re having an ebola outbreak-
The car slams into his and he stammers “Fuck,” because he does not need this right now, god knows he’s stressed enough already.
He doesn’t even get a chance to think more than that before it slams into his car again, and he realizes, no, shit, no-
He looks around and no one else seems to think this is strange, no one else seems to see, shit, he can’t call for help-
He doesn’t see the gun.
He doesn’t see anything.
~~~~~~
In the end, really, what else was he supposed to do? It’s not like he has any marketable skills outside of hauling heavy things – made easier by the arm and the revelation of the modified super soldier serum that apparently he was injected with during that hazy, heavy torture session with Zola.
And the arm, too.
He’s still fuzzy on the details, but he knows more than they think he does. He knows, for instance, that Stark and the neurosurgeon who did the operation replaced a whole portion of his spine with Starktech metal, as well as his entire shoulder. It’s a strange thing, when he wakes up and he sees it, when he lifts his hands and there are two of them but one is shiny and plated and cold.
It’s even weirder when he spends hours - hours that he should be sainted for – with Stark, with Stark poking and prodding at him. He spends hours, too, with a doctor (physical therapist) who spends all her time making Bucky do things like close his hand into a fist, like this is a great feat. She thinks that he’s a special ops who lost an arm in Iraq. He doesn’t correct her.
The thing is, it is. It’s painful, the arm, in a way he didn’t expect. It’s not heavy, but it’s constant, a thing he’s not used to, it doesn’t feel like his arm at first. The feedback it gives him is a headache. Holding onto things is either too slippery because his grip isn’t strong enough, or he’s crushing rocks.
The first time he did that, he demanded they take it off, they take the damn thing off him, and for the first time he thought no, this isn’t what he thought it was going to be, they turned him into a lab rat just like Zola. Fury had to talk him down, to calm him down, and Fury is terrible at that sort of thing.
But he gets used to the weight of it, the feel of it, the pressure sensors and the cleaning. He gets to remember the delicate movement of fingers, the way his hands could move.
(There is a part of him that will miss the ability to hold the hand of another person. Steve, he thinks, Steve could have handled this better, Steve was always a little more prickly, but Bucky loved the warmth of another person’s skin against his. He still has one, but he won’t be able to run both hands over someone else’s skin ever again.)
(Not that he’s really in the mood to hold anyone, almost ever. Even kissing Sharon has lost the magic.)
So what else was he supposed to do? He dresses in black, and Clint and Sharon teach him what they do – and eventually he meets Natasha, who gives him smirky smiles and runs him ragged, but who he surprises one day when she’s doing her usual series of acrobatics, twisting around him, he catches her with his metal arm and holds her close. “You all right there,” he asks, and she tries to throw him.
He thinks that probably she would have managed, expect that with the metal arm and the anchor he probably weighs closer to three hundred pounds than he does to one-sixty, and she can’t get the right leverage. He spins her ‘round, like she’s not a sparring partner but a dance one, and she turns with a balletic grace, and he grins. “Want to go to a dance hall with me?”
“No more dance halls,” she tells him, but then she’s grabbing his hands and they’re doing a regular foxtrot, and for the first time his smile feels like it’s 1940 all over again. It’s almost a shock to the system when they stop and he looks and his hand is metal. “Your cover is slipping,” she tells him, after, and he realizes that she didn’t know, she wasn’t supposed to know. But now she does.
It’s a nice thing, really.
And the rest of it, well.
If he keeps drowning himself in training, keeps taking missions, accepts the designation of Agent Barnes, accepts every dirty job he’s handed and doesn’t complain. In return he gets a paycheck, a monthly prodding from the doctor to make sure his arm is taking, and the ability to not think about the past.
(That last one is a killer, but Bucky is nothing if not practical.)
~~~~~~
When he joined Hydra, almost three years ago, he definitely did not think that this was going to be a side – benefit? Perk? Strange, almost hallucinatory occurrence? – whatever it is, he didn’t think it would be happening. This morning, Rumlow called him and told him to get dressed and get moving, because he would be on escort duty for some special weapon.
Matthew Denisof is not a weapons specialist, he’s a handler, so it was a strange phone call, and after getting dressed and coming in and reporting, his SHIELD badge sliding him into the building without a blip (it’s so – covert, he thinks, it’s strange still) he’s led down, down into a side of the building he didn’t know was there.
They walk for a long time, and then finally they get to place where Rumlow is waiting. “Denisof,” he says, turning, looking away. “we sent the weapon alone, last mission, but then the weapon went AWOL and we had to spend a full week hunting it down.” Rumlow says this casually, as if this makes total and absolute sense. “We were warned, and it shouldn’t happen again – there was a mistake made with one of the technicians,” he adds, with a hitch in his tone that says one that won’t even have the opportunity to be repeated, “and we’ve adjusted protocol, but it needs a handler.”
“Sir,” Denisof says, as if any of that made any sense at all. What the hell is this weapon? What kind of weapon goes AWOL?
Rumlow just gives a very brief nod of his head and turns, and opens a door. Inside is a team of technicians who are moving like bees, totally unaware and uncaring of the two agents in their midst. In the middle of all that action is a man strapped to a chair. The first thing that Denisof thinks is that the man is enormous, with wide shoulders and the look of someone who could do some serious damage, but then, that’s everyone who is an active agent, really. “Here it is,” Rumlow says. “have you heard of the Winter Soldier?”
There’s a pause, and Denisof almost has to catch himself from laughing. “That’s a myth, isn’t it?” he asks, and the most impressive part of it is that he manages to sound like he is actually wondering, and not that he’s laughing at the mere idea of the Winter Soldier being real. He takes another look at the man strapped down. The man is watching him, his eyes brilliant blue, but he’s muzzled like a dog.
No.
It’s more elaborate than that. It’s headgear that covers his mouth and nose and down his neck, almost like armor. Denisof can see that it covers most of his head, too, like a helmet, but there’s a portion that’s uncovered, where he can see that the man is shockingly blonde. The armor of the muzzle matches the armor he’s wearing, and it all looks heavy, unwieldy in a way that make Denisof shift just thinking about it.
“It’s not a myth,” Rumlow says. “But it is a pain in the ass,” he adds, nodding to the techs, who start unstrapping the man. “It’s good, let me be clear: it’s volatile. Don’t think of it as a person,” he says, as the Soldier moves down from where he’s kept. The Soldier reaches his - its - arms out, and guns are handed over, grenades, and it begins to equip itself. Denisof is already not comfortable with calling it a thing, but he’ll get used to it, he guesses. “You have to think of it as a weapon. One that’ll go off. Be clear when you speak to it. Only speak Russian,” Rumlow says, and Denisof knows why, then, they chose him, his mother was Russian and his is flawless, “and don’t ever hit it. Not in the face, not in the arm, don’t hit it. Don’t yell. Clear, crisp orders only.”
Denisof is handed a mission file; inside is a description, something about a political assassination, Denisof won’t be physically present at the job itself, but instead he’ll be handling the Soldier, which will be on its own. It looks cut-and-dry, nothing complicated. He looks back at the Soldier, which is looking out into the distance with that hundred-yard soldier stare, perfectly armed. “Anything else?”
“Don’t take the muzzle off except to feed it,” Rumlow says. “Doggie bites.”
He says it casually but then the Soldier turns and looks at Rumlow, and in its eyes is a cold, pitiless expression, like he’s sizing Rumlow up. And then it looks away, and blinks slowly, and Denisof realizes no, it’s not like a dog, it’s like a massive cat, a tiger or a lion, the kind of cat that can take a man’s arm off without any effort at all, but has found Rumlow not worth the trouble. At least not worth the trouble today.
The coldness of it sends a shiver up Denisof’s spine, something he hasn’t felt since he was a trainee, waiting for his higher ups to decide if he was worth Hydra’s time.
And the thing is that really, it is the easiest handling that Denisof has ever done. The weapon doesn’t speak expect to let Denisof know its needs, like food, and never asks for clarification. The mission is programmed into its head. Denisof has camera and audio connection to the weapon, and when it goes off, it’s like-
It’s strange how smooth and how seamless it goes. The weapon moves with an economy of motion that Denisof didn’t actually think was possible – every movement is carefully planned, and only the necessary motion is carried out. It is silent, despite being so heavy, and it knows how to use fear, which is probably the only thing that hangs heavy in Denisof’s gut. It’s in the mission outline, that the target needs to know it’s coming, before the target is taken out, but that doesn’t mean that Denisof thinks that the Soldier would be so effective, that it would be able to make just the right amount of noise, be able to create just the right atmosphere, to be able to slowly and meticulously wait until the target was babbling for mercy-
Actually, Denisof is pleased – no, that’s not right, relieved when the target it dead and they’re back in transport. “Do you need to drink something?” Denisof asks in soft, clear Russian, and the weapon pauses as if it’s doing a system analysis – no, that’s isn’t right, really. It’s not a robot, no matter what Rumlow thinks or how he wants him to treat the weapon. A robot wouldn’t need a handler, a robot wouldn’t need to be escorted like this. A robot wouldn’t have a notion of fear, or how to use it, or have an opinion on it, which the weapon clearly does. Denisof can tell, with just the way that the weapon has decidedly shut off after, how it closes its eyes like it’s tired, quiet, exhausted.
Finally the weapon nods, and Denisof hands it a bottle of water. The muzzle has to come off, and it’s a strange thing – the last time Denisof did this, took the muzzle off, he immediately turned away as if he was looking at a naked man and not just a man’s face.
This time he looks.
When Denisof was a little boy, back when he was tucked into a corner of the foster system because his mother was too drunk to take care of him, he was in a foster home where the mom would let the kids watch television, but she thought that modern cartoons were all immoral and terrible. She had old VHS copies of the Captain America movies from the 40s, and Denisof used to watch them, one after the other. Captain America was his very favorite, and he had forgotten about them until right now.
The man (a man now, not a weapon, he should have known, he should have listened) under the muzzle drinking water and watching Denisof with a look that knows more than it doesn’t is, without a doubt, Captain America. There is no ambiguity. There isn’t a single chance that Denisof is wrong. “Cap?” he says, and he feels like a little boy again. Like someone who knew that right and wrong were black and white, someone different from who he is now, living between worlds in acrid shades of smoke.
There is a flicker, suddenly, and Cap drops the bottle, his hand going right to Denisof’s throat. It’s training, training and quick thinking that makes Denisof manage to yelp “Hold!” in Russian, and for a moment that overrides whatever it was, whatever the trigger did, long enough for Denisof to bark out – not yell, but clearly speak – a series of Russian orders, for him to sit, to stay, to obey, and Cap moves away, sits, stays, obeys, but there’s a war going on behind those blue eyes.
Denisof muzzles him again, quickly, like leashing a dog, and he settles back into his seat.
He doesn’t tell anyone what happened. He doesn’t want to admit it, and he doesn’t want to face up to the shame of it, the shame of having done what he did to Captain America, or the shame that even now, in Hydra, it means something to him.