Chapter Text
Brooklyn was the kind of place that seeps into your bones. Cut him and Bucky open and they’d bleed the same.
Across the bridge from where they grew up, Steve sticks a stylized A patch onto his shoulder because Fury thinks it would be a good idea and Stark wants a brand deal.
Before he knows it, the whole lot is taking direction and calling him “Cap.”
Still, when he watches one of his teammates stroll clear across the room casually cradling an open laptop in the crook of their arm, Steve feels like he might as well be from outer space. He stinks like second hand sidewalk smoke and the cough of an exhaust pipe.
Shortly after he arrived here, Natasha had yanked his phone from his hands; he’d been picking away at a text with his index finger.
Without a word, she’d gently curved his hands into position — one pinky underneath for support, both thumbs posed and ready — and slid the phone back into his waiting hands.
“Like this,” she’d corrected.
So, Steve types out his text messages with his thumbs. He practices the art of the pinching zoom and gets access to an Instagram account made under his name. It doesn’t stop the urge to pour the unused syrup from his plate back into the container.
Just outside Tallinn, a small shopkeeper with knobbled hands uses a bent finger to point to the bottle she thinks he’s describing. Christ, his Russian is terrible and he doesn’t speak a lick of Estonian.
The young woman behind him in line jumps in. “Which one you want?” She asks, in English.
“Ah. The antiseptic. Please.”
She mutters something to the woman behind the counter, who makes a noise of understanding.
“You not from here,” his newfound savior comments as the shopkeeper sets a small, clear bottle on the counter, littered in blue font that he cannot read.
Oh, if only they knew.
Recent months have taught him how to slip under the radar a little better and still, Steve reeks of outsider. According to Natasha — and much to her annoyance — he broadcasts American. But it runs much deeper than that.
“No, Steve says, “I’m not.”
★
Their newest manilla folder is the worst kind; full of pictures.
The Winter Soldier has a scar just above his kneecap that Bucky got at nine years old.
“I was there when he got this,” Steve tells his 21st century friends, tapping the tiny, blurred white line. From across the table, Sam and Natasha both look up. “He fell out of a tree a few days before the start of 4th grade.”
Natasha sighs, evidently having sensed the rise of their impending exchange. It’s not the first time they’ve had this conversation and it won’t be the last either.
“You’ve got to stop thinking like that,” she tells him, not unkindly pressing on the only bruise he has that just won’t heal.
“He knew me, Nat,” Steve insists. “I would’ve drowned, but he pulled me out.” And he watches her face, daring her to pity him.
She doesn’t.
She worries over him and gets frustrated at the repetitive nature of their conversations these days. Sometimes they don’t see eye to eye, but she doesn’t pity him. Nat is a real good friend like that.
More than that, she’s perceptive as hell. There are times when he feels like Natasha can see straight through to his ugly core; the part that cried himself bone dry for just a few weeks in 1945 and then drove a plane straight into the Arctic ice even though he knew from catechism that it was a mortal sin.
Natasha thinks that Bucky is a string not worth pulling on, yet here she is, dropping in to help out when she has time.
“Show me the schematics,” she says, and she holds out her hand for his plans.
★
The serum doesn’t let Steve really forget anything anymore, but it didn’t bring back the old stuff that was already fading.
So, although Steve remembers meeting Bucky for the first time, it’s awfully fuzzy.
There’s an alley, his nose is bleeding hot against his upper lip, and the threadbare string ties of Bucky’s left shoe are coming undone. He can’t remember the names of the kids who’d been beating on him and he couldn’t say what started the fight.
All he knows is this: seven-year-old James Buchanan Barnes reached down and pulled him up from the ground, set him right. Steve doesn’t need the other details anyways.
His first clear memory of Bucky is from the following summer. They hadn’t even known each other a full year but when you’re seven, a school year is a lifetime.
Even as young as they were, Steve was never a big crier; but it was his first broken bone and he’d never felt pain like that before. He plopped down on the curb, one hand supporting his fractured wrist on instinct, eyes burning. He remembers wanting for his ma.
In her place, Bucky came to sit with him, still sweet and brash and unpolished.
Ninety years later, Steve returns to that crystal clear snapshot of a memory like running his tongue over an old toothache. Deep in the muggy throws of summer 1924, when Steve was in pain, Bucky leaned in close to call him a nickname that no one knows him by anymore. He made some stupid joke, and Steve forgot about the hurt.
★
About four months in, Europe is running dry on them and Steve starts to feel stretched taffy thin in a way that can’t be concealed as easily as it once was.
They haven’t heard from Natasha in a while; the last batch of documents she gave them led to a whole lot of nothing.
There is a deep, ingrown rage that swells within him and cannot be quelled. He tries not to let the fury keep him awake at night but it sometimes does anyways. It’s akin to the feeling he can get when he pays too much attention to the sensations of his body since the serum, like the air is itchy and he could compulsively scratch himself out of his over-sensitive skin.
In the worst of it, Steve starts to fixate on the pure numbers of people required to prop up something like the Winter Soldier project. The technicians, the secretaries, the paper pushers who slipped into the easy appeal of apathy. All the people who could administer a shot or send an email, and then commute home to their families every night, buy concert tickets and grasp at exclusive dinner reservations.
Steve cannot stand still in a world that’s done such harm to Bucky. He can’t go about his normal life when this kind of unforgivable cruelty has happened, is happening, will continue to happen until he does something.
He’s with Sam, deep underground in yet another cookie cutter base that was cleared out before they got here. Hydra was more about brute efficiency than creative design and it shows in their layouts; there aren’t that many variations.
In the years that Steve was working for SHIELD, half-asleep, he’d almost forgotten how dull fascism can be.
The truth of that wiggles around under his skin. They couldn’t be bothered to come up with any strategic alternatives for their bases. They spent so much money and brainpower to develop ways to break Bucky — it’s all over the files, all they cared about — and they couldn’t even design a unique goddamn floor plan.
Something snaps inside him like a solid bone breaking. When he was real little, he went to Bucky’s bubbe’s for Hanukkah and she taught them the wishbone game; they’d each held one side of a chicken bone and pulled until it snapped, sharp and definite between their fingers. He can’t even remember who won.
Steve turns off his comm and then he picks up an empty file cabinet and hurls it at the blank concrete slab of a wall. Another, he slams into one of the useless fucking computers that have been collecting dust down here.
The room is trashed when Sam finds him bloody knuckled and raw, hands shaking with an anger so consuming that it spills into crazed laughter.
Steve sits on the floor with his elbows on his knees, back against the cold wall, focusing on breathing. Breathing and thinking about getting up soon. Although he’s feeling sorry for himself, he does have to get up; it’s the only way forward.
Carefully, Sam steps over a piece of metal equipment that’s twisted like a wraparound car wreck.
Steve watches him, but he seems far away. “You ever notice how all these bases are laid out the same?” He asks.
“Yeah,” Sam says, “Creativity isn't Nazis' strong suit, huh?”
No, it sure isn’t. Not until there’s somebody to hurt.
“You okay, man?” Sam asks.
Steve presses the heels of his palms into his eye sockets until he sees primary colors. “I’m alright,” he says. It feels like he’s been staring into the sun.
When he stops seeing spots, Sam is standing over him with an offer of a hand.
Steve reaches up.
★
Natasha meets them in Kalkan just as a storm is rolling in. She’s a brunette now, her hair tied up and still it rebels, frizzing into tiny curls at her temples. It reminds Steve of Becca Barnes.
He sat right in-between Bucky and Becca in age — the three of them were born in back to back to back years — and Becca wasn’t his sister, but she sure felt like it sometimes.
Somewhere between the ages of eight and ten, Steve and Becca both came down with scarlet fever and their mas stuck them together in a single twin bed. It must’ve been at the Barnes’ place because he remembers Bucky making a fuss at the doorway to the bedroom, wanting to be let in. Steve woke to Buck’s whining, Becca’s sweaty palm pressed against his. Kid logic dictated that he was too old to be seen holding hands with anyone, least of all Bucky’s younger sister. But that time, he allowed it; secretly enjoyed it even. His throat was burning like he’d swallowed little blades and there was baby fat still in Becca’s mottled, cherry red cheeks.
Steve and Becca almost died together that winter while Bucky pouted and grumbled outside the closed bedroom door. With the hindsight of adulthood, Steve thinks he might’ve felt left out in a strange way.
“Let me in before I get rained on,” Natasha tells him.
Steve moves aside and she walks under his arm, heading straight for the fan unit in the corner of their motel room.
On her way, she reaches into the back pocket of her jeans and pulls out a small, folded piece of white paper, hands it to Steve. “Where’s Sam?” She asks.
“Getting us some dinner.” Steve starts unfolding the paper. “What’s this?”
Natasha has her t-shirt pulled away from her stomach, billowing up, taking all the cool air for herself.
“It’s a receipt.”
The paper is small, square with typed lines of Cyrillic and spotted with black redactions. Near the bottom edge, there are two scrawled, looping signatures dated December 22, 2001. A Soviet title under one, and an American under the other.
“What kind of receipt?”
Apparently recovered from the humidity, Natasha walks over to the bed and sits cross-legged, texting someone. “You know what a receipt is, Steve. It’s proof of purchase.”
“Of what?”
She looks at him, flat. “Are you going to make it say it?” The fleshy side of her palm is blackened with ink.
No, he’s not. He doesn’t need to, anyways; he’s become intimately familiar with exactly how long the phrase “the Winter Soldier” looks when it’s been redacted.
The roiling fury that lives inside him now starts to bubble up. Bucky’s been right under their noses, buried in the country he died for since Sam was in middle school. The Director of Central Intelligence signed for him like a goddamn package.
Steve is not hungry for whatever Sam is picking up. He needs to go for a run, or— Suddenly, fiercely, he misses the days where he could go looking for fights that wouldn’t put someone into an early grave.
“Please tell me you’ve got something,” he says to her.
Natasha has been watching him, taking in whatever it is that he must be giving away. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. But we’re gonna need plane tickets.”