A/N: This is a Modern!Bucky, Cap!Steve AU where Bucky was born in the future, but everything else is canon.
Cut off one head, two more shall take its place.
The Avengers had been hunting Hydra ever since the Battle at the Triskelion, and it wasn't like cutting heads off the Lernaean Hydra. It was like playing motherfucking Whack-a-Mole.
The team had stopped pretending to be shocked by Steve's language after the sixth abandoned base. There was nothing that brought out Steve's inner sailor quite like finding out he had lain down his life for motherfucking bupkis.
The twelfth abandoned base was in Georgia- Russia, Georgia, not The Devil Went Down to Georgia, although Steve was starting to think that song got the wrong Georgia.
They found the charred remains of shredded documents, because NASA wasn't the only organization that valued redundancy.
They found an electric chair, and how many people had Hydra been executing that they didn't want to waste the bullets?
They found an armory, stocked with everything from siege artillery to crossbows. Clint made an O Face (Steve would forever regret the day he mistyped "modern dictionary" into Google), and Natasha said, "Keep it in your pants."
"I wanna' keep it in my pants," said Clint.
They were ready to bomb the bejesus out of the base, and maybe all of Georgia, no one would blame Steve if his hand slipped, when Tony's scans picked up a heat signature. It was several floors below ground, but the body burned bright. Ten degrees warmer than average.
Just like Steve.
Probably a fever, thought Steve. Except that a body temperature of 108 degree should have been accompanied by convulsions. This body was so still that Steve would have thought it dead if it weren't showing up Day-Glo Orange.
The Avengers trekked down to the sub-basement, past the terminals that had self-destructed before they could read more than, "Asset transported for stripping, cleaning, and recalibration. Last known malfunction occurred at 1600 hours on-"
They could have destroyed the terminals before they abandoned the base. Nazis were the biggest fucking drama queens. They were probably hoping to take someone out in the blast, but by the fourth base, the Avengers knew to hide as soon as they saw a computer (and Steve did not do that normally, fuck you very much, Tony.)
The sub-basement was full of cages.
Most of them were empty. All of them were empty of anything alive, until they got to the last one on the left.
There was a man.
Sorry, Ma, sorry God, but he was one of the most beautiful people Steve had ever seen. He couldn't help noticing, even with the matted hair, and blood, and hair matted with blood.
The man was pale, like he hadn't seen the sun in years. His skin was almost as silvery as the metal arm, and even that was beautiful. Curved plates protruding from curved scars. Surgical scars.
Steve tried to break the bars of the cage, but they were too strong, even for him. Tony had to use lasers.
"Careful," said Natasha. "He was in a reinforced cage, and those handcuffs aren't the kind with the handy little safety release they started making after Gerald's Game. Whoever he is, Hydra considered him a threat."
"Good enough for me." Steve shouldered through the broken bars. He and Tony checked the man for injuries before rolling him onto the retractable stretcher Natasha had pulled out of… somewhere.
They didn't find any injuries. Either the blood wasn't his, or he had already healed.
Even unconscious, his heart rate was a match for Steve's, whose brain skipped over the implications of that.
Steve's brain had been doing a lot of that since it was defrosted. Skipping over anything too difficult to comprehend, like a groove on a record. You've been asleep for seventy years. Skip. Everyone you know is dead. Skip. Hydra still exists. Skip. A Nazi is president. Skip. You died for nothing. Skip. Potato chips come in cappuccino flavor. Skip.
Natasha had unfolded the stretcher without being asked, so Steve left the handcuffs on without being asked. Good people could still be dangerous, especially if they were cornered, and you didn't get much more concerned than a cage. Steve had nearly punched out a nurse when he first woke up in the future (she was wearing an underwire bra, okay, it was weird.)
He spent most of the quinjet ride home flashing back to Azanno, the suicide mission he'd gone on to rescue the 107th, because if he'd really gone through Project Rebirth to become a glorified showgirl (no offense intended, because Marjorie had taught Steve half of what he knew about how to throw a punch and Stella had taught him everything he knew about contouring), then yeah, suicide seemed like a decent Plan B.
Thank god for the Howlies. They'd kept him alive long enough to die for-
Skip.
The man woke up thirteen hours after being hooked up to a saline drip in the medical wing of the Avengers Tower. As soon as he was secure, Steve had insisted on removing the handcuffs. Jarvis could shut down the medical wing if there was an emergency. Steve sent the nurses home. He could check a monitor, change a drip.
He sent the rest of the Avengers to get some sleep, knowing perfectly well they wouldn't. Sure enough, they returned to the medical room thirteen hours and three minutes later. Thor was still in full uniform, including the cape. Natasha was carrying a cup of Russian tea. Tony was in his pajamas, but he wore those to Senate hearings, so it didn't mean he'd been asleep. Clint came out the air vent, which meant he probably had been asleep.
Steve chose to take that as a victory. He needed the win.
He had spent those three minutes reminding the man to breathe. The man had gone from unresponsive to alert in less than a second. His already-fast heart rate sped up so much that the monitor's beeps sounded more like a flat-line. His eyes darted from Natasha's Russian tea glass (which she took with jam, which was almost as bad as cappuccino potato chips) to the lightning bolt insignia on Thor's cape-pin-things (which used to be a triquetra, which had quietly disappeared after the Battle at the Triskelion).
Steve wondered what it was about tea and cape-pin-things that sent the man tailspinning into a panic attack, but he just said, "Breathe."
As soon as the man's heart rate slowed back down to still-really-fucking-fast, Tony said, "Hydra's going to come after you."
The man's heart rate sped up again. Steve may have sent Tony some strongly-worded thoughts about not breathing, but no one in the future could read his body language, like it had changed along with slang. Fuck Twitter, and fuck Skype, and fuck the entirety of modern technologically mediated-communication. There was a reason Steve was still fighting the good fight, and it wasn't just because he was still sort of on Plan B. He needed a whole fucking mission brief before people could understand him.
"Anything else would be- I think the technical term is 'too easy,' and that would go against the fundamental rules of the universe," said Tony.
There are still rules? thought Steve, but he just said, "Breathe."
"So we need to know exactly what they're coming after." When the man didn't answer, Tony said, "That's my polite way of asking what you are, because I have a guess, but Steve here is already kind of seethey, and I don't want to poke the bear. See? I'm not even making that into a gay joke."
There was still no answer, unless you counted the frown of anyone who had been in the same room as Tony for more than a minute. Steve didn't. He had seen that frown on Dum-E, who didn't even have a face.
"Can you talk?"
Clint signed along with Steve, but the man's hands stayed in his lap. Metal and flesh.
After a moment, he nodded jerkily, like a bobblehead with a broken spring.
"Is it hard to talk?" asked Steve.
Another one of those nods.
"Is there anything I can do to make it easier?"
The man met Steve's eyes, and he started to understand why people in the future thought Twitter was a valid form of communication. He didn't need a hundred and forty characters to know what the man was saying.
He sent back a look that said, Just me?
The man gave a one-shouldered shrug, like the metal arm was too heavy to lift. "It's not- I don't know them."
Steve could actually see Tony bite off the have-you-been-living-under-a-rock joke because the answer was: yes.
"Everyone knows you," said the man, "So I know- I know you're not them."
Steve's brain skipped over the whole not-knowing-the-Avengers thing. That meant the man had been living under a rock for at least three years. Three years with Hydra. Steve could barely stand three minutes in a room with Schmidt, which was only sort of because the room had been burning down around them.
Three years must have felt like thirty.
Steve wanted to say something comforting, but he was from 1940. His idea of comfort was a slug to the shoulder.
"We'll still be recording you," said Tony.
"You don't have to," said Steve. "I have an eidetic memory."
"It's okay," said the man, and there was a hint of Brooklyn drawl under the rough disuse in his voice. A hint of home.
The Avengers filed out, leaving Steve alone with the man. They didn't look happy (except for Thor, who always looked happy), but they didn't argue (except for Tony, who always argued).
"What's your name?" asked Steve.
"I may have some useful intel," said the man. "Sometimes I overheard them talking. You don't watch what you say in front of the toaster. There were-"
Skip.
"-and I have an eidetic memory," the man was saying.
Steve had to remind himself to breathe. "You have-"
"They gave me a version of it," said the man, and he didn't have to say what it was. "I don't have the same strength, but body heat, metabolism, sleep cycles, and regenerative powers are comparable. They wanted a test subject that would imitate the primary variable."
The man sounded like he was reciting from that eidetic memory.
Steve wasn't sure he wanted to know, but he was sure he had to. This was too big for his brain to skip. This was the whole damn record.
So he asked, "To test what?"
"The chair." The man said the word like Steve used to curse. "It was- It was just a chair. With straps. But there was an attachment that delivered 500mA of direct current of electricity to the nervous system. Aggressive electroshock treatment. Other methods of conditioning included negative reinforcement and aversion therapy."
The man sounded like he was reciting from that eidetic memory again, mostly because the things he was saying were motherfucking euphemisms for electricity, and torture, and more electricity.
"I take it back," Steve could hear Tony whisper through his headset. He'd forgotten to take it off after the mission. He realized he was still wearing his uniform too. They'd cleaned up the man, but some of his blood was still on Steve's gloves, because now there was no doubt the blood was his, and he had already healed. At least at Azzano, they had to take breaks so the men wouldn't die.
"I take it back," Tony whispered again. "There are no rules. Man, how is the hospital room not freaking you out?"
The man shrugged. "Hydra didn't put me in beds. Well, not hospital beds."
Even Natasha flinched.
"They were trying to create a weapon," said the man.
"The arm?" Steve focused on the obvious because he couldn't quite wrap it around the idea of turning a man into a weapon. There were those who said he had been turned into a weapon, but what the man was describing sounded nothing like Project Rebirth.
He shook his head. "I think I lost the arm before they got me. Maybe when they got me. But they talked about replacing all my limbs. They wanted to wait until they could control me. I kept- They called it a malfunction."
That triggered something in Steve's memory, which for a moment he wished wasn't so good, and if he wished that, then how much this man feel?
"Asset transported for stripping, cleaning, and recalibration. Last known malfunction occurred at 1600 hours on-"
"The Asset?"
Bucky gave him a wry look, as if to say pleased-ta-meet-ya. "You read the reports."
"They destroyed most of- I thought they were talking about a weapon."
"They were."
It was like Steve's brain tried to skip, but got stuck in a groove instead.
They were. They were. They were.
Then he realized it wasn't in his head. "They were- They were- close. If you hadn't-"
When the man's voice broke, Steve reached out to grab his hand.
The man stilled, like he was waiting to see what the touch would turn into. Something in Steve broke, but it wasn't his voice. He couldn't even find his voice.
Then the man squeezed his hand (Steve was kind of glad he'd grabbed the flesh one).
"I wasn't the weapon they wanted. You were. Technology these days- It's easier to make an Iron Man than a Captain America. The strength didn't matter. The symbol mattered. Captain America, fighting for Hydra. If it worked, they were going to use the chair on you and terminate me. Well, one of 'em wanted to make me your sidekick."
"What's your name?" Steve asked again, and this time, the man answered.
"I think it's Bucky."
Steve felt his face screw up.
"Yeah, I know it's weird."
"That's not- You think?"
This wasn't a cute little knowledge gap, like when Steve attacked the Gamecube because he thought it was a Tesseract. This was Bucky's identity. Steve had thought everyone he knew was dead, but even when no one else knew Steve Rogers, at least he did.
"Sometimes the handlers would call me that. Like they were fucking with me. But it made the scientists mad. They were trying to make me forget."
"Forget what?"
"Everything." Bucky gave that little shrug again, like it was no big deal, even though it was… everything. "They wiped my mind. Like a hard drive." He looked up. "Do you know what that is?"
Even after all that Bucky had been through, he still thought to ask...
"I don't know much about hard drives," said Steve, "but I know it's hard to delete anything for good. It just gets overwritten. The information's still there."
The smile that Bucky gave him was small, but nothing less than blinding.
"I know you're not Hydra," Bucky said softly, maybe to himself, maybe to Steve, because only someone with supersoldier hearing could have heard him, "because they spent seven years trying to find a way to make you Hydra."
Seven years…
They had taken Bucky before Steve was even out of the ice. That either spoke to Hydra's dedication or their intel. Either way, it meant Bucky had spent seven years being electrocuted, and tortured, and electrocuted more.
Seven years must have felt like seventy.
Bucky leaned forward and rested his forehead against Steve's shoulder.
"Sorry," he said. "It's just- It's- If you're here, I know it didn't work."
Steve placed a hand on the back of Bucky's head, not holding it in place, but letting him know that it was okay if he wanted to.
"You can stay here. I mean, not here as in the hospital wing. My floor has a guest room. Or Tony has guest floors. I think he has a guest tower somewhere in Queens."
"Don't be ridiculous, Cap." Tony said. "It's in Dumbo."
"Tony?" asked Bucky, seemingly content for the moment to stay, not only here as in the hospital wing, but here as in Steve's shoulder.
Shield had subjected Steve half a dozen seminars on appropriate workplace contact, like they thought just because he was from 1940, he would go around goosing agents. If he'd tried that on Stella or Marjorie, they would have stabbed him with a high heel, serum or no serum, and he would have had it coming. Sarah Rogers had raised him better than that.
Steve wrapped his other arm around Bucky's waist.
Sorry, Ma, sorry Shield, but Steve needed a hug, and if he needed one, then how the fuck must Bucky feel?
"Tony Stark," he explained.
Bucky frowned a little. Steve could feel it. "The weapons manufacturer?"
"A lot has changed in the last seven years," said Steve. "I never thought I'd be saying this, but... I'll catch you up."