"What's this, Grandpa?" Trip asks, his voice going shrill with excitement as he pulls a dusty old photograph out of a box. He is eight years old. He's supposed to be helping his grandfather clean his attic, but "helping" has quickly devolved into "exploring". He hears the attic's rickety floorboards creak as his grandfather moves to see what he he's found. He smiles sadly when he sees the photograph, the crow's feet around his eyes crinkling up.
"I'd forgotten I had this," he says quietly, a soft chuckle escaping his lips along with the words. "Let's see now." He reaches around Trip to take the photograph gently from his hand, and he is close enough for Trip to smell the mixture of aftershave and tobacco smoke that hangs around him like a shroud.
"That's Jim, and Frenchie," he says, indicating each man in turn, laughing in spite of himself when he gets to Frenchie, "and that's Dum Dum, and Monty, and there's me on the end." Trip notices that he skips over one of them, a man standing between him and Monty.
"Who's that, Grandpa?" he asks, pointing to him. He watches his grandfather's smile vanish, his face crumpling into an expression of such incredible pain and sorrow that Trip feels a flutter of panic, worried that he's done something wrong.
"Grandpa?" he asks, an anxious trill in his voice.
"That's...that's Bucky," his grandfather finally, hesitantly answers, after a long pause. His voice is heavy with pain and sorrow, a mirror of his face. Trip throws his arms around his legs and hugs him tightly.
"I'm sorry Grandpa," he whispers, his head resting against his hip.
"Me too, kiddo," his grandfather replies, patting him on the shoulder. "Me too."
Trip wakes with a tense, excited feeling in the pit of his stomach. He is eighteen, and it's his last day of high school. On his way out the door, he stops and salutes the photograph hanging on the wall of the apartment he lives in with his mother. It's a habit that he's formed over the years, a gesture to show, in his own small way, respect for the men in the photo, most of whom have only recently passed on. His eyes flick across the row of familiar faces, from Jim on the left to his grandfather on the far right. They linger for half a second longer on two faces- his grandfather's and Bucky's.
"Antoine" Trip hears his name spoken with the particular rhythm unique to his mother. He turns.
"Maman," he says, the French word rolling off his tongue with an easy familiarity. His mother smiles the way she always does when he calls her that, evidently pleased that her son has not forgotten his lessons in his grandmother's native language.
"Shouldn't you be heading to school?" she asks.
"I was on my way out," Trip replies. "I was just.." Instead of finishing his sentence, he gestures toward the picture on the wall behind him. His mother doesn't answer. She knows what he was doing. He's done it before leaving their home every day since the picture was hung up. She doesn't exactly approve-she finds it to be rather pointless- but she allows him his symbolic gesture.
"Well," she finally says, "you have a good day at school, and when you get home we can talk." Trip knows all too well what she wants to talk about- his future. She's been insisting that he go to medical school, but he's seriously considering following in his grandfather's footsteps and joining the Army.
"Of course Maman," he says, forcing a smile and leaning down to give his mother a hug. "See you later!" As he leaves the apartment behind and heads to school for the last time, he wonders there's a way for both him and his mother to get what they want.
Trip blinks against the brilliant sunlight dazzling his eyes. He is twenty, and attending both the Science and Operations SHIELD Academies at once- the Science Academy for his medical training, the Operations Academy for everything else. It's difficult, but Trip is smart and he is determined, and besides, his grandfather taught him how to be a SHIELD agent long before he even knew what one was.
No, that's not quite right, Trip thinks, heading to class. Grandpa didn't teach me how to be a SHIELD agent. He taught me how to be a Howling Commando. He passes the Wall of Valor and pauses to brush his fingers across two names written on the wall, two names out hundreds, maybe even thousands- Bucky Barnes, and then, a moment later, Steve Rogers. He feels a tingling sensation in his fingertips, crackling like a static charge. As a kid, he'd looked up to the men in his grandfather's stories, and though he hadn't been a kid for many years now, he still felt a connection to them. In his mind, they embodied the principles upon which SHIELD was founded- Loyalty, compassion, bravery, duty, sacrifice.
"Did you grow up with stories about them too?" a familiar voice asks.
"Yeah," Trip replies, "but I would think that you of all people would know that, Sharon." He doesn't bother turning his head to look at her, instead keeping his gaze fixed on the wall in front of him. Sharon laughs quietly.
"Yeah, well," she says, "it's been awhile since we last saw each other, so I'd kind of forgotten."
"How long has it been?" Trip asks. "Since we last saw each other, I mean."
"The last time we were at gathering together I was thirteen," Sharon says matter-of-factly. Trip jerks in surprise. Sharon is usually so serious and mature that sometimes he forgets that she's two years younger than him, and had only started attending the Operations Academy a few months ago, though she would be there much longer than Trip would, even with his medical training- she planned on joining the SHIELD Special Service, simply because she'd heard that it was one of the hardest units to get into, and she had long ago decided that she would never do anything half-heartedly.
"As I recall," Sharon continues, "you've missed the annual gathering for the past five years because your grandfather has ended up being too ill to travel."
"Yeah," Trip agrees, "and Mom didn't want to go without him. She insisted that it's more for his benefit than ours anyway."
"Your grandfather and my aunt are the last ones," Sharon says quietly. Trip notices that she is careful not to refer to them by name- they had no way of knowing who might overhear, and they had come to a mutual agreement when they'd decided to join SHIELD that they wouldn't tell anyone who they were related to. If they were going to have people's respect, they were going to earn it, not have it handed to them.
Trip doesn't respond to her statement, because he is thinking about the truth of it- Dugan, the last Howling Commando besides his grandfather and Sharon's great aunt, had died just last year- and its impact on them, both present and future.
"I wonder what he was really like," Sharon says after a long silence. This time Trip does turn to look at her, and sees that she has her eyes raised to stare at Steve Rogers' name on the Wall. He hums in agreement but doesn't answer, because he is thinking along the same lines, wondering what is was like to have been his grandfather back in the day, and to have witnessed firsthand the friendship between Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes.
"I should get to class," Trip finally says. "I'll see you later." Sharon nods. Trip reaches out and touches the names on the Wall one last time, and then he is off.
Trip and the rest of the Garrett's team return to the Triskelion from a field mission to whispers that some higher ups in SHIELD have found Steve Rogers in the Arctic, frozen solid but, miraculously, alive. Trip is thirty.
"Well!" Garrett exclaims, clapping Trip on the shoulder, not because he knows about his personal connection to Steve Rogers but simply because he happens to be the closest person to him. "This calls for a celebration!" Turning to the rest of his team, he adds "Drinks are on me boys!" A raucous cheer goes up from the group, except for Trip, who remains silent. If Garrett notices this, he doesn't say anything. Moments later, Trip finds himself in the Triskelion's cafeteria, nursing a drink, which is no mean feat- they serve alcohol there, but only in almost pointlessly small amounts, as keeping the agents that visited as clear headed as possible was their top- and some might say only- priority.
"Hey Agent Triplett, what's got you so down?" Agent Rumlow calls from across the cafeteria. "You should be celebrating! We found Captain fucking America!" A cheer goes up from the assembled crowd at that. Triplett refrains from pointing out that neither Rumlow nor the rest of the STRIKE team had anything to do with that. He doesn't like Rumlow. He doesn't know why. Something about him just rubs him the wrong way. Despite Rumlow's attempts to get it out of him, Trip knows that he can't say what's got him down, because to do so would be to reveal that his grandfather was a Howling Commando, something he swore he would never do. So, to make sure that he doesn't give anything away, he plasters a smile on his face, raises his glass to Rumlow in mock salute, and tries to pretend that he's as happy about the news of SHIELD'S find as everyone else seems to be, when in reality it's tearing him up inside that his grandfather had only missed a possible reunion with the friend he'd so long thought lost by a mere two months.
Trip freezes, his hands stilling in middle of sorting through medical supplies, his eyes glued to the news broadcast playing on the TV mounted to the wall in the corner of the room. He is thirty-two, and working in the Triskelion's infirmary, as he always does between field missions. On the news, a fight has broken out on the highway. There is chaos-gunfire, explosions, people running and screaming- but Trip-and the news broadcast-has eyes for only one thing- Steve Rogers, locked in heated hand-to-hand combat with a man in a mask, a mask that looks eerily like a muzzle. Trip watches, mesmerized, as Rogers grabs his opponent by the front of his mask and flips him over his shoulder, sending him crashing to the pavement, his mask getting knocked off by his impact with the ground. The now maskless man rolls and comes up standing, seemingly not affected by the impact in the least. There is a moment of eerie calm as he stands stock still with his back to Rogers. Then he turns around, and Trip feels as though the world is collapsing around him. Any semblance of rational thought is driven from his head. There's no audio from the fight on the news broadcast, but the footage zooms in on Rogers' face, and Trip sees his mouth form the word "Bucky?", his own shock reflected on his face. All Trip can think is This can't be right. That can't be the man from his grandfather's stories, can it? The person in those stories would never have done something like this, would never have caused so much rampant chaos or killed so many people, much have less have tried to kill Steve Rogers. To hear his grandfather tell it, he would have cut off his own hands before he even considered laying so much as a finger on him. Not to mention that despite that very clearly being Bucky's face, Trip couldn't imagine it would ever look so blank and empty, with nothing behind it but some kind of nameless, relentless drive to eliminate anything placed in front of him. For all of that, however, Trip cannot deny the evidence of his eyes, and he feels the legacy he's built his life on coming undone, shattering like glass in his hands while he still tries to cling desperately to all its broken pieces. It seems that his grandfather's stories were wrong, that he never really knew Bucky at all, and in that moment, watching Captain America get arrested on national television, Trip is forced to come to grips with the fact that his entire life may have been built on a lie.