Chapter Text
It’s Tony who finds him first.
Steve is elsewhere, on a mission. He’s there as an Avenger, but he’s there by himself. The others are chasing something on the other side of the planet. Later, Steve will thank God that Natasha was with Tony when they found him, because Tony wouldn’t necessarily have recognised the significance of the metal arm, and Iron Man would have blown him to bits. Not that he saved his ammo at all, but he didn’t kill him.
Days after that, Steve will wonder what would have happened if he had been the one to find him, just him. Whether he would have brought him in at all.
But Nat sees the arm, knows exactly which Hydra agent they have in front of them, and orders Tony to bring him in. He could be too useful for SHIELD not to interrogate him.
It’s a hard fight, but they take him down, and wrap him for transport. Steve is unaware of all of this, of course, until he gets the call.
He’s in the middle of something himself, so he answers the little pipping ringtone in his ear with “I’m kind of busy here.”
But Nat says “You need to come in” in a tone of voice he has heard her use less than a handful of times, and every time will be forever carved in his memory. So he replies “On my way,” then he cuts the chitchat and throws his shield at the sniper perch, runs into open fire, and ties up the loose ends.
Less than ten hours later, he is landing at Headquarters, and Banner is actually there to meet him. Steve ignores the jangled mess of Bruce’s spirit, so unstable from the experiment that gave him the Hulk. He’s never been able to get a read on exactly who is what - whether the Hulk is an Alpha or just a monster, whether Bruce even had a spirit-read before the accident. It would be rude to ask, especially since the American government turned Steve from an Omega to an Alpha, so everyone thinks he has won the spirit lottery.
He didn’t know Bruce was involved. Had everyone been called in? His expectations move from some personal shit sandwich Natasha is dealing with to a weapon of mass destruction.
“What’s the brief?” he asks Bruce.
“We’ve been waiting on you,” he tells him, and they’re already walking.
Bruce wastes no time leading him down past the floors with the command centres and meeting rooms and rec rooms, past the canteens and the dorms and the armoury and labs. Steve ticks off the possibilities as the floors flip past in the elevator, and comes to the conclusion that unless their goal is to fall out the bottom of this lift shaft, they’re going to see someone in the holding cells.
They call them holding cells because they can’t legally imprison people in this building, they can only hold them. They’re not prisoners because they haven’t been tried and found guilty and sentenced. SHIELD is just holding onto them. But they’re cells because they have guest accommodation twelve floors up for the people they like.
In his mind, Steve is trying to match the reaction of his team with hostiles he knows. Loki? He reaches further, but he’s coming up blank. He doesn’t have any outstanding threats like some of the others do. All the enemies he made are dead now.
The lift doors ping open and he matches Banner’s stride. He wants to run, even though he’s starting to feel sick with worry, but he doesn’t know where he’s going. These cells aren’t for detainees they are holding with prejudice, but they’re not for normal people either. Rows of brightly-lit windows pop past, each one revealing an identical white and clear plastic room beyond, each one empty.
Ahead of them, his teammates come into view. They’re standing in front of one of the windows, and Steve swallows, squares his shoulders. He’s worried, but he can’t let it show. He drapes himself in his Alpha spirit, but not too much. He doesn’t want to look defensive or aggressive.
Natasha’s there, still in her black body suit. She doesn’t have a spirit-read, but Steve knows better than to count her as anything other than an Alpha.
Tony’s Alpha spirit isn’t giving him anything to work with, his usual level of bravado masking whether he is calm or coiled to spring. He is still wearing what Steve can’t help but think of as his long johns. He knows better than to tell his friend that’s what he calls them - if only because he knows it’s a thought from a time before Tony was born - but he always forgets what Tony calls them. They’re soft and form-fitting clothes that he puts on when he knows he’s going to be wearing his armour. The fact that he hasn’t changed out of them speaks volumes, and metal glints at his wrists and temples and neck, so he hasn’t disarmed yet. Fury is there, another who is solidly in the camp of spiritless Alphas.
So not the whole team, unless the others haven’t arrived yet. Something about this set up says need to know basis to Steve.
They look up when they hear him coming, and Tony’s spirit reacts to his, so Steve knows this is serious. Natasha takes a step forward, her face soft and hard at the same time, her hands coming out as if she wants to stop him before he gets to them. Fury scowls, but his eye is watchful.
“What do we have?” he says, trying to sound in control, since they’re all acting like he’s going to do something they don’t want him to.
Natasha answers. “Steve, this is going to be a shock and I need you to brace yourself and not-”
He pushes past her and looks through the window. Inside, a man prowls like a panther, his face hidden by long dark hair. Steve’s first thought is operative. It’s in the roll of his shoulders as he walks, the black combat pants tightening over muscular thighs, the empty holsters strapped over his body. The man is all black in the white room and it’s shocking. His hands are tight fists, opening for a second before curling up again like paper in a fire. One arm is shining metal. He turns with his back to them and paces the other way.
Steve’s second thought is that this man is not just angry at having been caught. There is a jagged discomfort to him, like the different parts of his body don’t belong to him and he has to fight to keep them working together. It’s like he’s at war with his own brain. It doesn’t make sense, but after thinking dangerous and angry, Steve thinks hurt, and that word sticks to him in a way he doesn’t like.
The Alpha part of him yearns. Omega.
He looks at the man again, a faint frown bending his brow. This man has the body of an Alpha, and certainly the attitude of one. Every inch of him is screaming for a fight, begging for an opponent. Spirit reading doesn’t work as well through barriers, like windows, but then Steve shouldn’t be able to read him at all, not get it wrong. He can’t think why, but his Alpha spirit is telling him that this man is an Omega.
He realises the others haven’t said anything, haven’t filled him in, and Natasha is holding her breath. He tears his eyes away from the man in the cell to look at them. They’re staring at him as if they expect him to react to this man. Is it just because they’re an Alpha and an Omega? Steve knows what’s supposed to happen, but he’s always resisted every Omega he’s come across before. He was an Omega himself, he knows what it’s like. And it’s not like his friends to corral a mate for him – or at least, not using SHIELD resources.
“Where did you find him?” he asks, hoping for a clue.
“Bern,” Natasha tells him.
Fine. He knows where that is, but it doesn’t tell him anything, so he nods for the moment and looks back at the prisoner.
He jumps, because the man is now standing a foot away from the glass on the other side. More than half the man’s face is covered by a black mask and that long hair, but his eyes are Cadillac blue, and though the expression is foreign, Steve knows the setting of those eyes, the curve of those brows.
It’s not that Steve gasps, or stops breathing, it’s more that now Steve is breathing in a street in Brooklyn, looking at his best friend Bucky Barnes as they sit on the stoop of Steve’s building. He really shouldn’t be outside with that cough that could turn mean, but he hated being cooped up and Bucky will look after him, and spend all day sitting on a stone slab to keep him from feeling blue, only leaving his side for twenty minutes so he can buy them fries for lunch while Steve waits just inside the door.
Steve hears the pop of a holster clip, the lightest tap of fingers on metal from behind him.
The man in front of him draws back his metal arm, and launches it at the window, the whole thing wobbling and rippling but not breaking.
Now Steve hears a gun being pulled and a clicking of metalwork with a faint arc reactor hum, but all he can think is that Bucky was a Beta. And Bucky is dead.
The man in the cell punches the window again, and there might be a scratch this time. That arm is clearly more than ordinary metal. Steve doesn’t want to let him keep trying to get out, or get at them, because he thinks he’ll do it.
Before anyone can stop him, Steve is unlocking the door and pulling it open. Even the man in the cell looks surprised, dropping back from the window and into a defensive position, but Steve doesn’t have his fists up. He’s totally open, arms hanging numbly at his side as he pants, because now he can see the operative’s spirit in full. The image he gets is Omega-charcoal, grey and black, with the raw white edges of a huge lightning bolt crack down the middle, and it vibrates with the effort of holding it all together so that it doesn’t just peel into two halves. Looking at it makes Steve want to put his arms around the bundle of spirit and man and hold them both together so that it can finally rest.
He must just be in so much pain. It’s a mess. And on the edges, the faintest hints of Beta-blue that’s been coloured over, and over, and over, until the page is thin and torn under a thick slab of slate grey. But Steve knows that blue. Exactly two shades darker than the colour of his eyes, it’s Brooklyn blue, the colour of the Statue of Liberty on a postcard, the colour of the Hudson river in old paintings, the colour of the Mets.
“Bucky?” he croaks.
The man – Bucky - doesn’t move. Doesn’t reply. Doesn’t fight. Steve suddenly becomes aware of his own Alpha spirit pulsing in him. He wears it like an ill-fitting coat, it makes his shoulders broader, makes him seem taller than he is. It’s too big for him, lying outside his skin rather than within it. It makes Steve want to cringe to have Bucky look at him like this. Maybe it’s the part of him that’s still Omega, buried deep. Maybe it’s just the thought that Bucky won’t recognise him.
The experiment was a success, the serum turned him from an Omega to an Alpha. It changed his body and made him the strongest Alpha in the United States, probably the world. They used his picture on posters telling people to enlist with the caption ‘Be All You Can Be’. It was a powerful image. Uncle Sam loved it, and Steve could finally relax as it shut the door on the risk of an Alpha trying to claim him, something he had spent almost ten years running from.
Bucky had always protected him. Growing up in Brooklyn, Bucky had fought off anyone who came after Steve, or hid them both from the Alphas he couldn’t fight. In those days, they were a Beta and an Omega. There wasn’t the pull that existed between an Alpha and an Omega. They were best friends and brothers in every way but blood.
Now they are an Alpha and an Omega, and it’s like the universe has realised its mistake and bent them into the roles they were meant to have, but it’s all wrong, all wrong. Bucky is hurt. Neither of them are moving.
Steve swallows, ready to try again. “Bucky? It’s me,” he implores. “Steve.” Adding his name on the end feels like betting on a loss, but he does it anyway, because no lights come on in Bucky’s blue eyes. “Come on, Buck. It’s me,” he says again, uselessly.
But he doesn’t quite get to finish because Bucky rushes him, swinging. Steve staggers back rather than meet the charge, dodging, each punch whistling past his head with enough force to tell him that Bucky is absolutely trying to kill him.
The cell is small, and Steve’s back is against the wall now, and a low punch to the gut hits him like a shotgun shell, doubling him up so that the next strike goes over his head, hitting the wall and making it reverberate like a gong. Almost faster than Steve can track, Bucky shoves Steve’s shoulders down while rocketing his knee up to kick him in the chest, pressing his advantage. Steve is amazed by the speed and efficient cruelty of it. Bucky is definitely not normal anymore. This must be how his enemies feel when fighting Captain America, he thinks. But he can’t let Bucky win, so he blocks the kick and spins out of Bucky’s hands, making it to the other side of the room.
Bucky is now between him and the door. Steve holds up his hands. “Stop,” he says. “Stop.”
Bucky turns back to face him, and there is nothing peaceful about the move.
“Steve, get out of there.” It’s Natasha’s voice on the intercom. “We’ll gas the room, put him out.”
Steve holds one hand out to the mercuried surface of the two-way mirror, keeping the other one between him and Bucky. “No,” he says.
Bucky shifts and comes for him again, throwing punches from martial arts and an alley brawl. Steve blocks as best he can, but he takes one to the face and has to kick Bucky to the other side of the room while his ears ring. He looks at Bucky, who looks ready to come for him again. His face stings and he’s fighting vertigo. He’s got size on Bucky, and strength, he thinks. They are both hindered by the small space. But Steve isn’t fighting back, and unless he does, he’s going to lose this fight.
“I don’t want to fight you, Buck,” he says.
“Steve, get out of there,” Nat again, sounding tense.
“I’m staying right here,” he tells her. He looks back at Bucky. “No one’s going to hurt you,” he says. “I don’t want to fight.”
“Goddamn it, Steve, he doesn’t remember you! They cooked his brain, there’s nothing left!” Natasha says.
Steve stops arguing with her. There’s plenty he could say to her. First to his mind is Then why did you bring me here? The second thing as he continues to hold Bucky’s eyes is That’s not true. He doesn’t want it to be true and it isn’t true. There’s still some Bucky fraying the edges of this man’s spirit, like a loose thread hanging from a hem. Bucky’s fighting him, but he’s spent more time not fighting him.
He wants to focus on Bucky because he is the first person in seventy years that he hasn’t had to learn to care about. Because with Bucky here, it’s like everyone else isn’t. Because he wants to know how his friend was turned into an Omega, and who did it, and who hurt him.
He relocates his mind into the cell and that’s all. Nothing outside it gets in. He lowers his hands, so he doesn’t look like he’s bracing to stop an oncoming train, and more like he’s catching the bumper of a speeding car.
“Whoever had you before, they don’t have you anymore,” he whispers, watching his spirit pulse. “I’m your best friend. We go way back. We grew up together.”
Bucky’s spirit is doing… something now, but his expression is glassy, unmoving. He’s watching him so Steve continues.
“I was an Omega then. You were a Beta. I was shorter than you, and a real scrawny kid. You were always looking out for me, fighting my battles, though I always tried to stop you.” Steve would be almost smiling, laughing at his old self, but Bucky’s spirit is sparking with pain, a big glowing white ache heating up in the middle of it, until it flashes suddenly into anger.
Bucky growls something Steve doesn’t understand but thinks is Russian and launches himself at him again. He leaps and grips Steve around the ribs with his knees, bearing him to the ground. There isn’t enough room for Steve to go down cleanly, so they hit the wall and slide, and Bucky is already volleying punches that Steve does his best to block. That metal arm, every time it hits, Steve thinks his arm breaks a little bit.
He thinks Bucky is going to tear his head off. Everything goes black.