The stolen Quinjet burst into smoke and alarms, spiraling out of the cold gray Siberian sky. It was a precision hit. Steve routed all remaining power to the good turbofan, buckled himself in, and tumbled into a crude and furious emergency landing. Before the slightly squashed cockpit even stopped swaying, he was up, jerking open the doors that held the survival kits. He grabbed two, left the guns.
Stark hovered in the air in the distance, wobbling closer on one foot repulsor. Briefly, Steve regretted stopping his blows when he had.
"CAP," Stark's speakers blared. "COME BACK TO THE BUNKER, GET IN THE CHOPPER, AND LET'S SORT THIS OUT LIKE ADULTS."
Steve gave a hollow bark of laughter. He turned his back deliberately and raised his middle finger, holding his fist high overhead, and jogged away until he heard the whine of the Iron Man suit retreating behind him.
He'd held Stark back long enough for Bucky to escape out the top of the silo, hammered the Iron Man suit until Stark could barely walk, never mind hunt—or so he'd thought. He'd tossed the shield away, thrown it in Stark's face. At ground level, he'd found the Quinjet, undisturbed, and a snowmobile, saddlepacks open and ransacked, and no other vehicles. Bucky was gone, apparently on foot. Steve took off in the Quinjet to work a spiral search pattern, and had covered a radius of thirty miles from the Hydra bunker when Stark reappeared and shot him down.
Stark was gone now. Steve ran to keep his blood flowing in the biting wind. Wherever Bucky was, he wasn't leaving tracks, which meant he was picking his way among the rocks and ridgelines. By his previous searching, Steve knew there were only so many routes Bucky could have taken to disappear.
He ran through the night. He had a flashlight, but did not risk turning it on. Shamefully, he knew Bucky did not want to be found.
At dawn, he ate snow and energy shots. He was beginning to starve, a slow slide he had entered many times during the war, where his calves would wither inside his boots over the course of a day. It would reverse if he got food. He did not know where food might be coming from in this wasteland, but he assumed Bucky knew a way.
He grid-searched the rocks and mountains, smelling the air. Bucky smelled like fear-sweat now, and since their brief stay in a hotel on the way out of Austria, like cheap lemon-verbena body wash. This, too, he knew from the war—the way scents hung on the air, flowing with the faint air currents: deceptive, but invaluable if you knew where the air had come from.
He ran through another night. He contemplated turning on his own emergency beacon, but who would answer? No one who would not stop him.
The next morning, he cut through a great snowfield to reach a different, parallel ridge of exposed rock, and ran its length up and down. He could feel his body consuming itself, reshaping itself. He tightened his belt and his shoelaces, and sprang lightly, ceaselessly over the rock. His nostrils and eyelashes crusted with ice. Sometimes he could barely breathe past it, and had to rip it free while he gasped painfully on the sharp air.
The next night was clear. The stars burned down bright enough to light his way, and he understood that the last few days had been warm for this place. The last heat he hadn't even known the land had, radiated away into black space.
Dawn was brilliant. The glare of the sun on the snow blinded him in every direction. He had no food.
It was madness that drove him, he realized. He was already dead, and didn't know it. Bucky was already dead, somewhere, and when Steve found him, then he could lie down and stop, then his madness would have an answer, a conclusion. He ran.
He found Bucky wedged between two boulders sheared apart by ice, a dark, private spot protected from sun and meltwater. Steve put a red, chapped hand to his face, and it was cold and stiff. There were no wounds. He was still dressed in the heavy coat he'd worn to fight, with the sleeve torn off. No glove on his right hand. His boots were laced. A map, doubtless taken from the snowmobile, was scrawled all over, not with a route, but with writing in Cyrillic. Bucky had pinned the map to the front of his jacket. A backpack, which still held a few energy bars and five hundred Euros, was wedged under his boots.
Bucky was cold and stiff and had no heartbeat and was not breathing. Steve slid one of Bucky's knives from his thigh holster and held it under his nose. It did not fog.
This meant nothing.
Steve ate an energy bar, and gently lifted Bucky from his crevice. He shook out the two mylar blankets in the survival kit, used one to hide Bucky's eyes from the sun, put the other around the back of them. He stripped out of his uniform, cut Bucky's pants off at the sides, sliced open the back of Bucky's coat, down to the skin, and peeled him like a lobster. He pressed himself close around his ice-cold corpse, and wrapped them both in the mylar.
He had fire-starters, but there was nothing to burn. It would have to be body heat. That was probably safer, anyway. In an hour, Steve would wake up and eat another of Bucky's energy bars, keep living, bring him back by the warmth of his skin. In the mean time, Steve would sleep.
Steve slept.
He burned.
He burned in his skin and his joints and his bones and his lungs, cold fire, endless, that pulsed through him in relentless waves, and in the dim thought left to him in the dark, he wished Bucky was far from where he was, because he was a suicide in Hell.
He woke and he was alive. The air was stifling hot, dry, his tongue was stiff in his mouth, every limb ached, and there was a body in his arms, blessedly cool and—he breathed—stinking of fear and lemon-verbena and mildew. The breath hurt, like his lungs were full of knives, and the sensation disturbed him. He decided not to breathe again for a while.
Gradually he realized there was the sound of water dripping. Once the body in his arms shifted, breathed, tensed. Held the breath for eternity. He would do the same, the next time he needed to breathe.
His heart beat, now and then. Every time it did, a rush of pain hammered through his skull, and he wished it would stop. But it persisted, the intervals shorter and shorter, as the dripping water flowed steadily, and he found himself breathing more and more often, the pain in his lungs rising, the scent of blood on his breath. He opened his eyes to darkness, and saw a devil.
No. A red face, with yellow eyes. The Vision, hovering, staring down at him. Them. In Steve's arms, breathing under his chin: Bucky, alive.
Vision's eyes flickered, alert, in the soft light that crept through a steel doorjam. Beside him sat a massive chunk of sea ice, sitting on a rusted steel chair, melting softly onto concrete. Steve tried to shape a word and the hinge of his jaw flared with pain. In his arms, Bucky grunted in warning.
"Be patient," Vision said, rising. "You are reviving. You are safe. I have told no one where you are."
There was very little light in the small dark room, but even that hurt to look at. It took Steve a very long time to close his eyes.
When Steve next woke, he felt much more conventionally alive, but now he was fucking freezing. His whole body was wracked with shivers, so was Bucky's, and they were wrapped neatly in something clammy and slick. He recognized the feel of a mylar space blanket. Every part of his body still hurt, like when he'd used to drink himself sick with Bucky before the serum, and, oddly, his heart was racing like he'd just fallen off a building. He squinted at their surroundings: a small dark concrete cell with empty shelves lining the walls, paint peeling off every surface in thick sheets. No one had been here in decades.
His head throbbed, and every limb was pins and needles, and his front itched where it was pressed against Bucky's skin, but he felt collected enough to explore. He shifted his hand to pry himself upright.
"Don't move," Bucky stopped him.
His voice was almost unrecognizable, so soft as though afraid to be heard, in that faceless twenty-first century accent Steve found himself using now also.
A soft footfall beside their heads, and Vision knelt down. "Good afternoon. I had thought you would become conscious earlier. Do you recognize me?"
"You're Vision," Steve rasped.
"One of Stark's robots," Bucky said, and Steve twitched.
"I prefer the term 'android,' and Mister Stark does not own me," Vision corrected him, his gleaming face betraying no emotion.
Bucky sighed. "Of course. I don't like that word, either."
Vision smiled. "Do you remember the date when you left Mister Stark?"
'Left.' Steve couldn't answer that, and neither could Bucky. They'd had bigger concerns.
Vision made the tip of his finger glow and shined it in their eyes, asked them vintage and modern historical questions, had them count backwards from twenty, and name the members of the European Union and the states of the United States in alphabetical order. Steve forgot about Alaska. Bucky couldn't decide between ordering names by the latin or the cyrillic alphabets.
"I can tentatively say that you have sustained no additional neurologic injury from your torpor," Vision pronounced. "Captain, don't try to stand."
"I didn't earn that rank," Steve retorted. He levered himself up from the ground, and his chest hurt and Bucky grunted. He flopped back down and Bucky cursed. "Buck?"
"Not now, Steve," he gritted.
"Are you hurt?" Steve pushed, feeling over Bucky's chest. Bucky slapped him away after the most cursory exploration. There were no wounds. Steve's right arm by the shoulder itched where it was bound up somehow, and his leg itched, and the whole of his chest down to his drawers. Bucky's left arm was ice cold—Steve thought of the block of ice that had been in here the first time he'd woken. He felt around where he could, pried them into a sitting position—the exact position they'd been in when he'd wrapped himself around Bucky's still body out on the ridge. With his left arm he felt Bucky's chest for injury, a bandage, and found nothing. He dug into the itching area where their skin was pressed together, and felt a seam.
There was no other word for it. He slid his hand between their chests, and it went so far until it stopped. The skin itched and itched and grew swollen and corded as his hand probed deeper, then it turned right around and flowed into Bucky. "Mother of Christ," he swore.
They were attached at at least five points: right shoulder, left thigh, and large irregular unions between Steve's chest and belly and Bucky's back.
"Don't get work yourself up, you're not the worst thing I ever woke up attached to me," Bucky muttered, sounding more like himself.
"What?" Steve sputtered. This was the serum, it had to be—unless someone had done this to them? Where had Vision found them?
"You tell me," Bucky said, deliberately level. Steve could feel every muscle tense, and both their hearts were still racing. "I know how I bedded down."
Steve worked to swallow. His mouth was so dry. "You were cold," he said lamely.
Vision waited them out a minute, but no more answers came. "You have been missing for eight months," he announced. "I am confident your friends will be pleased to see you alive, though I imagine they might feel guilt over the circumstances. I, currently, feel guilt. We had been operating on the assumption that the two of you had gone underground. Figuratively. But as neither I nor Ms. Romanov had found a trace of you, despite recent events, I went discreetly to the last place you were seen, to recover your bodies. When I found you, your bodies appeared to be undamaged and your position appeared deliberate. I followed the instructions on the Winter Soldier's note and you revived naturally over the course of the last hundred and twenty-two hours. The fact that you have survived is extraordinary, though perhaps expected given historical facts."
"What recent events?" Steve demanded.
Bucky shrugged violently, tugging at Steve's shoulder and midsection. "Later. I need to eat before we cut ourselves apart."
Vision managed to locate for them a twenty-pound box of potato flakes, half of which was not visibly moldy, and a can of beef hash that had been wedged into the ceiling elsewhere in the complex. He did not find a pot to cook in, but did find a glass bottle and two enamel-and-tin mugs, and their gear had canteens. He built a fire and melted snow for them in a pan made from part of a steel door, and Bucky ate potato flakes by the handful, washing them down with meltwater. Steve had no appetite. He sat awkwardly, trying to yield and move and generally get out of Bucky's way, as Bucky swallowed the tasteless and bone-dry powder.
"According to your physiologic data, this ration contains enough calories to sustain the two of you for twenty hours of consciousness at this temperature," Vision remarked, "but that is not accounting for any toxins the mold may be producing. I will procure food and blankets. You should tend the fire until I return."
"Eat the stew," Steve told Bucky.
"I'm saving it."
The Vision drifted out the door and shut it carefully, leaving them alone with themselves and their smoky fire and a small pile of dead pine twigs. Steve fussed with the mylar blanket. Bucky choked back a stomach heave and sipped water.
Bucky's hair tickled Steve's nose, and Steve turned his head so as not to breathe directly into his ear. Bucky's stomach churned, violently at first, then steadily, and Steve's headache began to fade. His heart settled down, though he still shivered and his skin was covered in goosepimples.
"Where were you running to?" Steve asked at last, into the oppressive silence.
Bucky hunched forward, dragging Steve with him, then straightened again. He pointed at the stack of clothing Vision had left them in a corner of the shed. "My knife's over there. I think we can crawl on our side."
"Right or left?"
"Left."
Their left side had two arms free, but their thighs were welded together. Steve supposed that made sense as it would be easier to right themselves with two arms than one if they fell over. They leaned to the left on the count of three and wormed toward Bucky's kit, grunting and wincing when they moved out of sync and the seams tugged. Steve's thigh was fixed high on Bucky's so that if they tried to stand, Steve would have to raise his left leg, and the welded area was wide, at least eight inches. It didn't seem to stretch or twist well.
Bucky pawed through what remained of his belongings and retrieved the knife Steve had used to cut him out of his clothes. After two painful attempts, they sat back up. He passed Steve the knife sheath. "Bite this."
It was nylon, with a rigid plastic insert. Tasted like honing oil. Steve flexed his jaw experimentally and nudged Bucky's shoulder with his chin, and then Bucky twisted them to the right, and motioned for Steve to lift his right arm as far away as he could. The seam ached and stung, and Bucky took a few sharp breaths then sliced neatly into it.
The pain was manageable, but closer to what Steve expected for cutting out a bullet than for peeling off a burn. There was also a tremendous hot gush of blood. Bucky was only half through the join; Steve kept stretching his arm away and Bucky coolly flipped the knife around and finished the cut in the other direction. Steve pulled his arm back and sharp jets of blood sprayed everywhere. Bucky dropped the knife and clamped his left hand over his shoulder, blood all over the plates and seeping between the joins. Steve awkwardly gripped his own wound by crossing his arms behind his head.
There was a substantial puddle of blood on the floor. Steve could feel arteries trying to jet under his fingers.
"I don't think we should do the rest unless we can get transfusions," Bucky said. He craned his neck over, let up with his left hand, and let the wound spray all over the wall, all over his face, all over Steve's face. One by one, he pinched the spurting vessels with his finger and thumb and spun his wrist around in an unnatural motion, twisting them until they broke deep within his flesh. When he was finished, the wound was still all oozing muscle, but the blood stopped hitting the wall, except for a couple very small vessels close around the skin edges that he could not get a grip on. Steve squeezed his own wound steadily. Bucky's face was a red mask. Steve sighed heavily and spat the knife sheath out.
"Why don't you wrap it with something," Steve suggested. They were both shuddering again. Bucky reached for what was left of his undershirt and tied it around his body, over the shoulder wound and around under his left arm. He passed Steve a wide strip from his trousers. Steve got himself bandaged, and they slumped, exhausted, in their pool of blood.
"I wasn't really running to anything," Bucky said softly. Steve had to backtrack to make sense of what he was talking about. "I do remember you, some. I remember how I couldn't quite say no to you. Some of what it was, you and me. Me, Bucky Barnes, I got this . . . scene, in my head, early on, like a vision. I was walking a woman home after dark, can't remember her goddamn name, but she was somebody important, she had connections. It must've made sense at the time. I got my hand in hers, this gorgeous dame, escorting her home, and I remember I was so anxious she was gonna want to ask me in for a nightcap because if she got my tie off she might see how I cut out the back of my tie and replaced it with muslin so I could use the silk to make a matching pocket square. I was worried she might tell all her friends, and I'd never get in. Wherever in was. They say people change, but that Bucky Barnes might as well be a fucking Martian.
"So I figure, if that's what being a person is, I ain't it. First I was afraid if I turned myself in to you I'd get decommissioned, or, or psychologically evaluated, or whatever they'd call it. But you sounded sincere on TV, and I started to remember how you could never lie without making this face like you were chewing glass. But you were out every week with your team engaging hostiles, and I can't do that for you. Just after I got out, I took out my maintenance team. I wanted to kill 'em. I like killing. I can't help it, they trained me like a dog and I got the taste for it. Hell, Sergeant Barnes probably had the taste for it, too, or he wouldna been such a decorated sharpshooter.
"If I went to you, you'd ask me along on your missions, and I wouldn't say no, and sooner or later I'd be killing people on your watch, because HYDRA gave me the taste for it. You're a better man than that, you don't need my kind of help.
"So I went to Europe to get away from the news cycle and took odd jobs until you tracked me down."
Steve digested this. "I'm not that good," he said. "I'm starting to like killing HYDRA agents."
"That means you should stop," said Bucky hollowly.
"But where were you trying to go when you left the bunker?"
Bucky shrugged. "Here. But I misread the landmarks. Best option was to lie low for a bit."
"Lie low," Steve parroted.
"I'm starving, let's go back to that fucking stew," Bucky said.
With his left hand, Bucky pinched the rim of the can of hash and wiggled it until it tore, then he squeezed in at the walls until the top folded up slightly. He ripped the top off the can and licked spilled stew off his bloody wrist, then ate quickly and neatly, using the torn lid as a crude spoon. Steve watched over his shoulder.
"You want any?"
"Not hungry."
Bucky shrugged and finished the hash, then swirled some water from his canteen in the bottom of the can, drank the residue. It smelled gamy and overcooked, like dog food.
"Remember Maureen Forth's baby?" Steve asked. Bucky shrugged, and he continued. "She had this little stump of a finger on the side of her hand when she was born. The doctors put a cord around the base of it, real tight, and it withered away after a few weeks and it fell off. The Forths used to live in your mom's building, off the same hallway."
"Cried all day and night for months," Bucky said, as though to himself. "Guess that's why. You want to try that? Pinch me off like a mole?"
"Be less bloody."
"I had fifty feet of paracord in my pants. On three. One. Two."
They flopped over again, still on their left side so as not to disturb the bandages. Bucky got out his parachute cord, and Steve, having the best view, snaked a length around the join of their left thighs and a longer section clear around all the joins that fused Steve's front to Bucky's back. Steve tightened them until the seams burned with stretching, and they wrapped themselves back in the mylar blankets and waited for Vision to return.
"Where are we, anyway?" Steve asked.
"Old logging camp. Prison."
They huddled and shivered silently, not sleeping. Steve periodically tightened the cords whenever the pain started to ease. After a few hours, the Vision barged back in, uncharacteristically noisy, burdened by a heavy wool blanket bulging with small objects. He set it on the floor and at least a hundred pounds of cans spilled out. Bucky jerked upright and said something delighted and incomprehensible. Vision replied in the same language, probably Russian, with a shy smile. He handed Bucky a can and Bucky got to work again wiggling it open.
"Did you bring a can opener?" Steve asked.
Vision frowned. "Oh."
Bucky tucked in and said something else.
"What's he saying?" Steve asked. Bucky's mouth was full.
"First he called me Father Frost, as a joke," Vision said. "Then he said the tinned beef is fucking good shit because it doesn't taste like it was stewed in rat urine."
That sounded like Bucky, when he was sixteen. Ate like him, too.
While Bucky stuffed himself, Steve and Vision tucked them into the scratchy wool blankets Vision had brought, and Vision stuffed their feet into socks and insulated boots. Steve thought he might start feeling warm after another day or so. He looked at Vision.
"Is anyone else coming?"
Vision looked especially placid. Steve knew it was the android's way of looking shifty. "No. I will contact no one without your approval. Though I have hijacked a communications satellite, if you wish me to use it."
"I thought you worked for Stark's son," Bucky said.
Vision looked very, very placid. You could skip stones across his serenity. "I do. I always have, and I suspect I always will. But my loyalty to Mister Stark has cost me the trust of a dear friend and my only surviving peer. It was a hard lesson. I am no longer Just A Rather Very Intelligent System, and I need not, must not, obey blindly."
"Where are Steve's friends now?" Bucky asked.
"You and I are here," Vision replied. "The Falcon is active, based out of New York on probation. The Black Widow is officially in Tanzania. Hawkeye is at large after evading house arrest. Spiderman has been very concerned that no one has heard from you, and I suspect he would be pleased to be considered your friend; he is in New York City. Ant Man is on probation. Mister Stark considers himself Steve's friend on some days; Colonel Rhodes has stated in private that he would assist you, Bucky, in evading capture if necessary; however his stance toward Steve is unfavorable. Miss Potts is in Madripoor—"
"Where's Wanda?" Steve interrupted.
"The Raft," Vision said, without changing expression one flicker. "It is a submersible prison intended to contain—"
"Shit," Steve said softly.
"—unconventional threats. Stark Industries' lawyers have been able to secure minor concessions for her comfort. But the Oversight Committee is unwilling to consider release. I do have questions of my own."
Bucky set aside his can and straightened in his seat, dragging Steve with him.
"How did you learn the seawater revival technique? All technical records of the Winter Soldier program refer to various antifreeze solutions injected prior to cryostasis, and a very precise incubation temperature for revival."
Bucky relaxed slightly. "That was an accident. I ran off in the seventies. I was on an op with my team. By the time they found me, I was like that. They panicked, who wouldn't, I was valuable, and it'd be their heads. One of the men went to college in Moscow for a few years, and he had the idea of using salted ice to bring my temperature up evenly before starting the real thaw. It worked. I should've figured they left that part out when they made their report. I still got disciplined, though. Say, any of those antifreeze solutions work in human trials?"
"No," Vision said. "Nor in fruit-fly trials. Perhaps they had value as a placebo."
Bucky grinned, his stubble scraping Steve's ear. "You're all right, Mr. Android."
"Who else is working on getting Wanda out?" Steve interrupted.
"Her lawyers assure me that any extralegal action would be catastrophic for her future. I saw that you did not activate your emergency beacon, this is why I have kept silent about your survival."
"You dumb fuck!" Bucky shouted. "You had a fucking beacon!?"
Vision had mastered the art of "changing the subject."
"I was gonna get you out," Steve said. "I wasn't planning to sleep for eight months."
"It was forty below, the fuck you think was gonna happen? You gave me freezerburn and frostbit yourself, weeping Christ, you are the dumbest fuck who ever run headfirst into a post, the shit you get me into, Steve. The shit you do. Maybe I was gonna sleep till the second coming, huh? What's the fucking problem? But no, you gotta follow me inta hell and then you say, Buck! Pal! Fresher hell over yonder, even more hellish, what a fucking delight! Let's go!"
Steve swallowed hard, his throat rubbing Bucky's shoulder.
"Did I go too far," Bucky asked softly.
"I can't argue," Steve said.
Bucky sighed, and passed him what was left of his hash. "Eat. Tushonka's real good, better than Spam."
Steve wrapped his arms awkwardly over Bucky's shoulders so he could maneuver the improvised spoon. The food sat like lead in his gut.