Chapter Text
“because he’s been treated like one”
Recon wasn’t his job. He was the last step in the plan. He was the one they called in when everything else had been tried already. But nothing had been the same since the helicarriers. The man that refused to stop repeating his name. The museum that held all the answers to unasked questions out in the open for anyone to see.
Recon wasn’t his job. He could wait for hours, silent and still, for the perfect shot. But that was back when other people were expected to do his thinking for him. His mind used to be so clear. Focused. The target. The kill.
But ever since the bridge… his thoughts were a tangled, bloody mess. Things had been coming back to him in stuttering stops and starts – he could spend days desperate to name the echo of a specific sense-memory that stayed frustratingly out of reach, or he could be bowled over by a blast of visceral imagery so terrifying that he lost all sense of time and place, transported back into horror and pain. And the waiting, the watching, the planning… it left him too much time alone with his thoughts.
He was getting impatient to move. The constant internal debate had been dragging on for too long. The drop site held vital supplies that he needed to get his hands on. He couldn’t keep going as he had been – nothing but the clothes he’d managed to steal on his back and whatever he could scrounge out of dumpsters. Any IDs there had probably been compromised with the data breach, but there were other things – weapons, cash – that would be invaluable. He needed to get out of the country. The net had been steadily tightening for weeks now, and he wasn’t confident that he could evade his pursuers – on either side – for much longer. The man with the wings had nearly caught him back in Baltimore. Would have, if his enhancements hadn’t let him hold his breath for far longer than the average human.
He was reasonably sure Hydra had abandoned the place to its own cover – none of the people he saw going in and out regularly had appeared to be agents, just the civilian camouflage. He could do this – in and out before any sort of internal security could flag him and summon a response team to grab him.
It was easy enough figure out who was going to be home sick the next day as the closing shift stumbled out the bank one evening, bleary-eyed and sniffling. Following one home and stealing their security credentials while they slept had been child’s play. He was used to moving unnoticed through the shadows.
He was up all night doing recon, making sure no one else was surveying the building. He watched the morning shift stumble in – four employees out of what should have been twelve – and resolved to complete the retrieval mission he’d set for himself. He waited until late afternoon, until the bank got busy enough that all of them – two women, a young man, an old-timer with a sidearm – would be on the main floor. Then he made his move.
Bucky Barnes clipped on the backpack that held his most precious possessions in the world – the scribbled rantings of a broken mind trying desperately to pull itself back together – and moved.
John Randall resisted the urge to check his watch again. He knew what time it was, he knew what time Agent Romanoff would be there (two minutes to go) and the nervous tick would just give him away, which would be unacceptable. Enough had already gone wrong today.
It was all Brenda’s fault. She’d gotten sick just like many of the other people in the office had after he’d added that contaminant to their coffee machine. She had said yesterday that she wouldn’t be in today, meaning it would have been just him and his overworked, easily-distracted supervisor on this shift. But there Brenda was, picking up the extra hours despite her hacking and wheezing and sniffling and leaking. All because she was saving up for a vacation to the Bahamas.
John wished he was in the Bahamas. Good God, he could go for a mai tai and a nap on the beach right about now.
There was Romanoff getting into the back of the short line with Rogers. John counted the number of customers ahead of them and tried to do some quick mental math to estimate at which windows they’d end up.
Three, two, one…
“May I help the next customer?”
Rogers walked up to him, hands tucked into his pockets, his shoulders hunched as if that would somehow make him seem less ridiculously huge.
“Hi, I need to access level four,” the man said, glancing around the room in a way that was apparently meant to be surreptitious but just came off as paranoid. John watched Romanoff get called to Brenda’s window and cursed his crap luck. Rogers was caught by John’s incredulous look and had the decency to look abashed. “…it’s where my safety deposit box is.”
“Account number and identification please, sir.” Rogers rattled off a string of meaningless numbers and handed John what must have the best fake ID he’d ever seen. John couldn’t help but be impressed. Maybe this day – this mission – was going to turn out alright after all.
John scanned the teller line and saw his supervisor Deborah – the only one who could order the elevator to take them to Sub-Level Four – step out of line with another pair of customers, a middle aged man and a teenage girl, and head toward the back halls where the secure elevator could be found. “Everything is in order, sir. Unfortunately we will have to wait until my supervisor has come back up from level four. To ensure that she can see other customers while we go.”
Rogers followed John’s gaze to the retreating people and realized he must mean they needed to wait until the vault would be empty of other people. “…Right.”
He found what he was looking for easily – locks on storage containers snapping off with a twist of his cybernetic hand. Cash, guns, ammo, burner phones, even a few grenades. Bucky packed whatever he deemed useful into his backpack as quickly and efficiently as he could, unfamiliar nerves twisting in his gut. He’d never been so anxious on a mission before. He’d never felt much of anything on a mission before Steve Rogers. It was throwing him off. Bucky frowned to himself and hurried his movements. He’d been here too long. He needed to get out.
There. Mission complete. Only exfil left now. Bucky was so relieved to be done with it that he went straight out the security door without waiting around to listen beforehand.
“Sir! Sir, you can’t be back here!” Bucky froze and locked eyes with a curly-haired middle-aged woman at the far end of the hall who looked like she’d just been slapped by the unexpected presence of a stranger in her domain. Behind her stood a middle-aged man – room for concealed weapons, musculature and stance suggesting knowledge of hand to hand combat – and a teenage girl who had frozen with one brightly-painted fingernail caught between her teeth.
Bucky cursed himself. Sloppy. Too sloppy. With Hydra, something like this would have meant a bullet for all three interlopers and a severe punishment for triggering a resource-depleting cover up. Then again, this never would have happened when the Asset was back with Hydra. Sloppy.
The older woman was turning to run back the way they came – to call for security, presumably – when the man behind her pulled a gun and shot her once in the chest with the silenced pistol. The girl behind him let out a yelp before slamming her hands over her mouth, eyes wide with horror. The woman who had been shot crumpled to the floor, wheezing. Blood quickly pooled around her where she lay slumped in an awkward heap. Bucky knew the sound of a punctured lung when he heard it. She didn’t have long.
“Now…” said the man, swinging his gun arm up to take aim, looking from Bucky to the door behind him, eyes calculating. “Who the hell are you?”
The girl behind the man took a shaky breath and lowered her trembling hands from in front of her mouth. “…Hail… Hydra?” she asked tremulously, the words clearly unfamiliar to her – lacking the venomous conviction with which they were traditionally spoken. The girl looked to the man for confirmation. He nodded in approval without taking his eyes off of Bucky. Or lowering his weapon.
“What have you got there, buddy?” the man asked, gesturing to Bucky’s backpack. The faux-friendliness in his voice reminded Bucky of what little he could remember of a few his handlers – sure of their power and one wrong move away from enacting violence.
There was a hallway to Bucky’s right. He might be able to make it around the corner before the man could react to his movement by pulling the trigger. Bucky took a deep breath, trying not to telegraph the tensing of his limbs. “I’m… leaving.”
Bucky bolted for the exit. Bullets buried themselves into the wall where he had just stood milliseconds before.
“Peanut!” Bucky heard the man bark as he sprinted away, deeper into the labyrinthine building than he had ever intended to go, “go get him! Whatever he got from that vault, I want it!”
Somewhere along the way he’d run into the girl. She’d done… something that had thrown him bodily into a door, left him staggering and reeling like he’d just been hit by a truck, an incessant ringing in his ears that drowned out any hope of coherent thought. As he tried to stagger to his feet, he saw her approach him through the haze of darkness clouding his vision. Felt her yank the backpack off of his shoulders, pushing him away to tear it loose. She knelt down to unzip it, to see what was inside, and – no, no, no, she was Hydra, Hydra couldn’t see him all spread out on the page like that, he couldn’t let them in his head again, he couldn’t–
Bucky lunged for the girl, and was met with another ear-splitting wave of percussive force that propelled him away from her. She sat there, clutching his bag and trembling as he shook his head, tried to shake off the pain, shake his mind clear. He looked up at her and she took a deep breath – it was her screams, Bucky realized. That’s what she was doing.
Before she could let loose on him again, he turned and ran. A few seconds later, he heard her scramble to follow him, light footsteps slapping on the tile floor.
The adrenaline had flooded Bucky’s system, conjuring up sense-memories of similar moments of fight or flight, so loud and all-encompassing that it was all Bucky could do to remember that he was being chased through a bank, not fleeing an airstrike in humid woods, not chasing down a desperate woman through her cold and echoing mansion, not hopping rooftops to cut off a fleeing vehicle’s escape route during a thunderstorm that pounded him with falling rain–
Bucky was so desperate to avoid drowning in his own thoughts that stumbling out into the lobby took him completely and utterly by surprise. He came to a dead stop, skidding a few feet forward on the marble floor, eyes wide and unseeing as they flicked from person to person, around the room, frantically trying to remember what he was doing, why he was here, who was the target, what was his mission–
“Bucky?!”
The cry startled him out of his whirlwind thoughts and he honed in on the speaker – the target from the bridge, the punk, Steve–
“Help!” came the scream from behind him, a girl clutching a familiar backpack stumbling into the lobby from the hallway behind where he – where he’d just come from because… because–
“He shot someone!” the girl cried, hugging his bag even closer to her chest, like a shield or a child’s safety blanket. He’d shot a lot of people, all the memories – screams and begging and the silent view through a scope that showed a body dropping – all jumbled together into an indistinguishable mess in his pounding head, which one was she talking about–? “He’s crazy! He’s going to kill us!”
“Get down on the ground!” shouted a heavy, gray-haired man standing in front of the outer doors, a pistol gripped in white-knuckled hands. The man looked as terrified as Bucky felt. His finger was trembling on the trigger.
“No!” cried Steve, holding his hands up and moving in between Bucky and the man with the gun. “It’s alright. We can – we can handle this, just–” Steve was looking between the two men, clearly torn, before he made his decision and focused on what he believed to be the biggest potential threat in the room. “Buck, it’s okay. Do you know who I am?”
“Edgar,” came a low, firm call from up by the teller windows. “Take your finger off the trigger. You’ll shoot someone by accident.” Bucky’s eyes flicked over to the woman who had spoken – she was holding her own gun on Bucky now, tense and lithe and clearly dangerous. Her own trigger discipline was superb – trigger finger ready along the side of her firearm, poised to act but out of the way of an accidental discharge. Something itched in the back of his mind – a memory that hadn’t quite been knocked loose.
“He attacked us!” cried the girl, scurrying out from behind him and circling toward the security guard by the outer exit, giving Bucky a wide berth. The girl – the man–!
The gunman was still loose in the building, hunting him. Hydra. He would alert Hydra. They would be here soon, they would catch him, they would– ”
Bucky panicked. He turned abruptly on his heel and fled down a deserted hallway.
“Bucky, no! Wait!” Steve called after him, taking off at a dead sprint after his friend.
“Stop!” called the security guard, sounding strained. The older man did not move to follow however, unsure if he should pursue or evacuate the people in the lobby.
Natasha ran to follow Steve, calling to the security guard over her shoulder: “get everybody out of here!” Then she was gone as well.
Edgar Stokes gave a shaky sigh and lowered his gun. He was definitely going to retire. Make more time for his grandkids. Take up painting like he’d always planned. Henrietta would be so relieved.
Edgar took a few deep breaths and tried to gather himself. It was his responsibility to make sure everyone got out safe now. “Alright folks,” he called, trying to sound authoritative, “everybody outside–”
A shriek sliced through the air and a wave of force knocked Edgar back into the wall. He dropped his gun on impact before slumping down the wall, ears ringing as his vision went dark.
“Yeah,” said the teenage girl, picking up his fallen weapon and turning it toward the shocked crowd of onlookers, “we’re not doing that.”
Natasha and Steve lost Bucky in the twists and turns of the building’s hallways, designed deliberately to confuse anyone who didn’t know exactly where they were going. They came upon the secure elevator that led down to the building’s sub-levels just as its doors opened.
“Bucky?” Steve cried just as an unfamiliar man stepped out into view.
The man started, clearly not expecting company. “Who the hell is Bucky?” the man cried, reaching into his jacket–
“Steve, drop!” yelled Natasha from behind him, and Steve threw himself to the floor unquestioningly. Two gunshots cracked above his head – one from behind, one from in front. Then Natasha was running past him, tackling the unfamiliar man to the ground and kicking his previously-concealed gun back towards Steve. Steve grabbed it and sprang to his feet, taking aim at the downed man to cover Natasha, who already had him on the ground and had produced a pair of zip ties from somewhere on her person.
“You okay?” Steve asked as Natasha wrenched the man’s arms behind his back. He gave a strangled yell as she jostled his bleeding shoulder.
“Fine. He flinched when I hit him. Bullet went into the wall,” Natasha reported with a sharp jerk of her chin, and Steve followed her movement to neat little hole a bit to the left of where she must have been standing.
“Who is he? What was he doing down here?”
“No idea,” Natasha replied, voice clipped as she patted the man down for any more weapons. “But this elevator leads down to the secure database… There’s no telling how long he had time to mess around down there.”
Steve knelt on the ground to look the man in the eye. “Who are you? What were you doing here?” he demanded.
The man only grinned at him, eyes shining with a manic energy Steve didn’t understand. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll be gone soon enough.”
Natasha reached around to the inside chest pocket of the man’s jacket then, brushing past his bullet wound more roughly than strictly necessary. The man cried out in pain before steeling himself, glaring at her as he hissed panting breaths through his teeth. Natasha’s hand came back out gripping a high-tech flash drive. She looked down at the man imperiously, totally unbothered by the look of hatred he was throwing at her. “And what do you mean by that?” she asked him, voice neutral in a way that Steve had learned to associate with danger. The man began to laugh heartily, refusing to say another word.
“Bucky’s still out there. Can you–?” Steve gestured to the man on the ground.
Natasha nodded. “He won’t be a problem. Security should have called the police by now – I’ll go turn him in.”
Steve nodded sharply and took off further into the halls.
Bucky turned a corner – how many had it been now? He was going in circles. Had to be. He was having trouble keeping track of where – when – he was. He needed his notes. His books. His backpack. Needed it like air. When he got worked up it was the only thing that kept him from drowning in the memories – pouring all his screaming thoughts out onto the page, recorded and categorized, turned from raging thoughts to silent letters. It was the only way he could finally find a modicum of peace.
Where was his backpack?
An image flashed into the forefront of his mind – actually relevant for once in his nightmare of a life. The skinny teenage girl with the colorful fingernails. She’d had it, back in the lobby. He needed to go back for it. There was a chance he could take it from her, even with her power. That’s what he had to believe. It was the only way to calm his racing heart, slow his panicked breathing. He could do this. He should be able to do this. If he was smart enough, if he was lucky enough.
He was certainly desperate enough to try.
He couldn’t – wouldn’t – fight her but… But he’d recognized the uncertainty in her eyes. Remembered her orders. Her handler wanted what Bucky had taken from the vault. That was her mission. He could sacrifice his supplies for his notebooks. She could let him have his things without having to disobey. He could make her see.
The thought of having his backpack within reach again gave him a tenuous calm – enough to find his way back to the lobby in a fraction of the time it had taken him to flee to the place where he’d had his brief breakdown.
The girl was standing out in the open, holding a gun on a group of huddled civilians with one hand and chewing on the nails of the other. His backpack was on the ground a few feet away from where she stood – too close to grab without her interfering. Bucky made no effort to conceal the sound of his approaching footsteps, and she whirled to face him as he entered the cavernous lobby.
“You again!” She looked pale and shocked. The gun was in both hands now, pointed at him. Bucky was experienced enough to know from a glance that if she fired it would be a gut shot, not a quick kill. She clearly didn’t know what she was doing. If not for that voice of hers, he could kill her in half a heartbeat.
He felt a little sick at the realization, and blinked in surprise. He never felt anything at the thought of killing anyone. No one except Steve, back before Bucky had even known his name.
Bucky raised his gloved hands slowly and took a gentle step toward her. “You can have what I took out of the vault.”
The girl blinked and reared back, gun dropping to point at his feet. “I – what?” she asked, clearly out of her depth. Bucky took another step forward. The girl gulped and the gun came back up – a shot to the chest this time. “I can’t let you leave,” she said, voice trembling. “He said you weren’t allowed to leave. Don’t!”
Bucky paused in his approach and they eyed each other, two beaten dogs meeting in an alley, both willing – but neither wanting – to fight.
“That’s not what he said,” Bucky contradicted the girl softly. “Your orders were to retrieve what I took from the vault. You can have it.”
The girl bit her lip, her eyes searching the room, clearly lost without her handler – clearly wanting, but unable, to make the call for herself. Bucky knew the feeling. The gun she held was pointed at the floor now, as she drooped in uncertainty. He took another slow step forward.
The girl’s eyes snapped up and she actually stumbled back a step as if struck. “I’ll hurt you! I can hurt you!” she cried, but the gun did not come back up.
Bucky paused, looking her dead in the eye. “I know.”
The girl chewed on her lip again – worrying it so much that it turned a harsh, angry red. “Ugh!” she finally snapped. “What is in there that’s so freaking important?!” She skittered toward the backpack, staring at Bucky the whole time, gun back in one hand, which hung limply at her side. Bucky didn’t advance any further – he knew she didn’t need the gun.
The girl crouched down by the backpack and unzipped it with her free hand. Bucky winced as the harsh sound echoed through the cavernous room, grinding against the marble floors. Cautiously, as if she were afraid something inside might bite her, the girl reached in and shuffled some things around, eyes going wide at the weapons and cash.
Throwing Bucky a suspicious look, the girl carefully placed the gun down on the ground next to her, within easy reach. She had both hands inside the bag now, shuffling things around without quite pulling them out, eyes flicking erratically between what she was examining, the man in front of her asking for it back, and the hostages she’d taken on her handler’s orders.
Bucky heard papers rustling, but he knew the moment that she found his things – her eyes widened and began jumping back and forth to skim the pages. When she looked back up at him, they were full of tears.
“Peanut!”
Bucky and the girl whirled around to face one of the hallway entrances, where the Black Widow had just emerged, half-dragging the girl’s bleeding handler. The woman dropped him immediately to free her hands and draw her weapon, pointing it squarely at Bucky.
“Dad?! Dad!” the girl cried, and then she let out an unholy screech – producing a visible shockwave of displaced air that slammed into Steve’s partner, who was thrown backwards. The girl’s handler – her father? – kicked the fallen woman’s gun away from her and rushed toward the girl. He dropped to his knees beside her, shouldering her out of the way so that he could turn to the side awkwardly and reach into the backpack – no doubt wanting to use one of the many knives Bucky had stashed to cut through his bonds.
The teenager stood shakily, eyes locked on Bucky, who made no move to interfere.
“It’s just… it’s just you. Why did you need to have this so bad?! Why did you make me fight you? Why did you make me hurt you?” the girl’s voice was choked.
“I’m not the one who made you do it.”
The man finally sawed through the zip ties on his wrists, which fell away with a twang. His face turned to a mask of horror as he continued to examine the contents of Bucky’s backpack. Bucky took a halting step forward – somehow it was different than when the girl had done it – but didn’t want to antagonize her after the fresh reminder of what she could do. “Peanut,” the man said, voice full of manic terror. “That’s the Winter Soldier! Do you know what he could do to us?! Kill him! End this!”
The girl looked like she was about to throw up, looking between her handler and Bucky. “I…”
“Melanie! Do it! Now, Peanut! Listen to your father!” the man said, struggling to his feet and clutching at his bleeding shoulder with the opposite hand.
Something lit up inside Bucky’s chest. “Your name’s Melanie?”
“Yeah,” the girl – Melanie, Melanie, Melanie – responded, voice quavering.
“Do! As! I! Say!” the man shouted at her, pale and swaying on his feet. The blood loss was clearly getting to him, driving him to the kind of out-of-control desperation that came with fearing for one’s life.
Melanie looked back at him, eyes wide and full of tears.
“Is this what you want?”
“What?” Melanie gasped, turning back to Bucky at his quiet question.
“What do you want?” Bucky asked her, searching her eyes for that same spark of… of the same something that he’d felt when he pulled Steve from the water. He was sure it was there. He felt it.
Melanie smiled at him, tremulously, the motion causing the tears pooled in her eyes to trickle down her cheeks. “What did you do?” she asked him, focused on his face – intense and desperate and hopeful.
Bucky shook his head, the unfamiliar sensation of a half-smile – bitter and subdued, but there – pulling at his lips. “Not what they wanted me to.”
Melanie took a step toward him.
“Get back here you little bitch!” snarled her handler, who took a staggering step toward her. The man’s knees buckled underneath him, and he sprawled to the floor.
Melanie took another hesitant step toward Bucky. “I’m going to be in so much trouble.”
Bucky shrugged. “Only if you stay.”
“No!” yelled Melanie’s handler, suddenly so furious he was practically frothing at the mouth, pale and volatile from blood loss. “You don’t leave! You don’t leave me! You need me!” the man stumbled backward on his knees, toward Bucky’s backpack. Bucky’s heart stuttered.
“You hear me you little freak?!” the man screamed. He reached into the backpack and came back out with one of the handful of grenades that had been in the weapons cache. “You bitch!” He activated it and hurled it toward where Melanie and Bucky were standing.
Melanie screamed.
The aftermath of the explosion had been chaos – smoke and ash and the building’s sprinkler system raging to life, soaking everything as the fire alarm blared. Bucky had regained his senses quickly, used to dealing with pain and disorientation.
Melanie’s sonic scream had sent the grenade flying back toward her father – away from where she and Bucky had been standing, the same side of the room where Steve’s friend had been struggling to get back to her feet unnoticed. It had detonated somewhere between the murderous man and where the hostages had been huddled, doing their best not to draw any attention to themselves while the armed and unstable individuals had had their showdown.
For most of them it hadn’t been enough to save their lives.
But there was nothing anyone could do about that now.
Bucky had turned to see Melanie fleeing for the exits, apparently unharmed. He hoped she made it somewhere safe. He had just enough time to glimpse Steve running in through the smoke and falling water, crouching by his partner to help her to her feet, before Bucky bolted for his backpack and fled in the confusion.
Bucky ran until he couldn’t run anymore. Considering his enhancements, he had left the bank several miles behind. He ducked into an alley to catch his breath. He hadn’t seen anyone following him – not even Steve. Steve the hero. Probably stayed behind the save the ones who could be saved.
Bucky thought of the girl’s smile as she had ignored her father’s orders.
He didn’t know if James Buchanan Barnes would have thought it was worth it – that girl’s freedom for those people’s lives. But he wasn’t quite that man anymore.
And Bucky wanted her to be okay.