Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Bucky had never wanted Steve to join the war. He'd wanted him to stay home and safe and goddamnit Steve, when will you unclog your jerk ears and listen.
Steve didn't. Steve found another way in and worked with the intelligence community rather than on the front lines. It wasn't what he wanted, Bucky knew, but it was something.
Something awful, it turned out, when Steve was captured.
Bucky wished Steve had been the one to meet Doctor Erskine and receive the super-soldier serum instead. Steve, with his unshakable moral compass and magnetic-North sense of justice. Bucky wasn't bad himself; at least, he was good enough for Erskine, but he knew, just knew Steve was the guy Erskine had spent his career looking for.
None of it mattered, now. Steve had been captured, and Bucky was a super-solider. No one had – or would- tell him much, but he suspected that Steve'd been captured by the same bastards that'd devastated the 107th. HYDRA.
Phillips wouldn't touch them. Too risky.
For regular troops, maybe, Bucky thought.
He wasted no time and found himself sneaking away with Peggy Carter and Howard Stark in the dead of night to rescue his oldest and best friend.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, Wrong.
Steve wasn't there. He was nowhere. He managed to rescue the men of the 107th. He was being called a hero. Captain America. Without the sarcasm now.
He kept looking for Steve. He never found him. All he found was a way to stop Schmidt and an icy, watery death. He held his breath just before impact, and thought of the friend he hadn't been able to save.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, Wrong.
For a national hero, Bucky did far more screwing up than he suspected he ought.
He hadn't died. The serum put him into some sort of stasis and he'd been asleep for seventy years. If Steve hadn't been dead before the ice, he was now.
Fury was understanding and firm and S.H.I.E.L.D. was what he needed to ease back into the world. He took comfort in the military regularity of the organization.
It wasn't meant to last.
He found Peggy again, though she was well into her nineties and had Alzheimer's: a cruel fate for anyone, but especially a woman as vivacious as Peggy had been. She didn't live too much longer, after his visit.
And then HYDRA came out of the woodwork and dismantled S.H.I.E.L.D. Bucky was under no illusion that even in her aged and disabled state, that they waited until she had passed to stage a coup.
They killed Fury.
They had taken Steve, corrupted him –through torture, through brainwashing, Bucky didn't know- and turned him into a monster, into the perfect assassin. Into the Winter Solider.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Fury wasn't dead after all, which was a relief. The S.H.I.E.L.D. operatives that remained had flooded the private sector and the HYDRA agents still alive had gone to ground.
Steve was still alive, Bucky knew. He just didn't know where Steve'd gone. He had Sam and Natasha helping him, rather quietly, look for his old friend.
It took months. It took too long. And yet, sooner than he could have imagined, Bucky found himself in Russia.
The favor Natasha had called in lead here. She never talked about the Red Room, but he knew well enough what it was. And he knew HYDRA and Steve had some sort of connection to it. Whether as business partners or something else, he didn't know. All he knew was that it was a place Steve might go.
He was right.
Bucky had kept his guard up. Though the grounds were abandoned, he held no illusions that they weren't still dangerous. That Steve might be there and might engage him.
"I know you're there." There was no inflection in the words, though Bucky knew the voice all too well.
Bucky stepped out of the shadows cautiously, shield on his back but able to grab for it in half a moment's notice.
"Steve."
"How do you know who I am?" Steve kept his back to Bucky.
"We grew up together."
"I look nothing like him." The words were quiet, but savage. Raw.
"You're taller and stronger, but you're Steve all right."
"Why are you here?" Steve clenched and relaxed a fist.
"To help. I thought my best friend was killed in action seventy-something years ago. But now I kno—"
"—He was."
Bucky didn't know if it was all in his head, but he could have sworn there was sadness in Steve's words.
"I'm not giving up on you. You're still you. You just need –"
"Why?" That time, Steve's voice was sad. Unsure. And though it'd been seventy-something years, Bucky still knew what Steve was asking.
He smirked despite himself. "I've told you before. I'm with you. 'Til the end of the line."
Steve tensed and, finally, turned to face Bucky, wide-eyed and something resembling the shining light of memory in his eyes.
Right. Right, right, right, right. Bucky could make this right.