Cause I'm With You

by tangyi

Set on the helicarrier during the fateful confrontation of Bucky and Steve. Written in alternating POVs. They're fighting two wars- Cap versus the Winter Soldier and themselves versus the turmoil. All dialogue is from the film Captain America: The Winter Soldier; I just added the thoughts and emotions. There's a little bit of softness if you squint hard enough...

WINTER SOLDIER

I glare at the man. He stares back stonily, his fiery gaze unwavering.

Locate, process, exterminate.

Unfamiliar navy blue headpiece. Unfamiliar navy blue suit. Unfamiliar navy blue-ringed shield.

Baby blue eyes— steady, watchful.

Irrelevant to the mission at hand.

Locate, process, exterminate.

"You know me." I know him?

I bark out a short laugh— forced— and crack my knuckles. Hydra said that this was a standard mission. I must follow standard protocol. There is nothing different about this man. But then . . .

I shake my head, momentarily confused. There was something awfully grounding about his voice that stirred up a vision of an etched dog tag, rusty with blood, tears, and sweat. I remember a skinny blond kid, backed up against an alley, crouching and folding into his small frame. I remember marching on a battlefield, on scorched earth, hot with scarlet, crimson blood. I remember the cold and blinding white eating away at the raw, reduced stump of my arm. I remember pitching down, my bloody body sprawled int the snow. But that can't be. I'm still here.

I may have known him, but I don't now. Enough is enough. The past is the past. That man— the boy— is beyond me now, and all I have to do is focus. Accomplish this mission.

Still, a persistent echo of his voice shrieks into my head— you've known him, you knew him, you know him. I feel a red flash creep up behind my eyelids. I lunge and shout— at both the man and the voices in my head— "No, I don't!" I pull back my arm and allow Hydra training to take over. A fist connects with his stomach. I don't feel it, but that's because my arm is metal. I don't feel anything.

The man thuds on the ground at the edge of the helicarrier. Clanging shrapnel and brittle cement spark down around us, and I hear a pained shriek below us. Collateral damage. I adjust my creaking arm.

He pushes himself up on one elbow and grunts. I have to lean in to hear him; he's whispering what seems almost like a mantra. Well, pray, little boy in a costume armed with a frisbee, pray. Then I hear it.

"Bucky," he utters, "Bucky." Who the hell is Bucky? That's the second time he's called me that. This madness needs to stop; he must have mistaken me for someone else.

STEVE ROGERS

"You know me," I had said. There's simply nothing else I am more sure of than this.

Now, his name is a prayer on my lips. Bucky, my best friend. Forget the Winter Soldier, code name 32557,Sergeant James Barnes. You're Bucky— confidant, patriot, and all-around flirt. Please remember- please remember yourself. Please remember me.

He's quiet. Calculating. Somehow, the eerie silence hurts me more than the punch, which I'm barely registering. I could do this all day.

"You've known me your entire life!" The shout is ripped from me, and I grimace from the cutting pain of the memories.

WINTER SOLDIER

"You've known me your entire life!" His face twists— most possibly with the effort of holding himself up. That punch must have been especially effective. I absentmindedly adjust my arm again and reel it back for another blow. The punk. I rear back and continue with my fist. This static is familiar. I can work with silence.

I don't feel anything.

STEVE ROGERS

I wish I could tell what he was feeling.

WINTER SOLDIER

I'm about to throw yet another punch at him when he speaks up raggedly. "Your name," he gasps, stumbling backwards with a hand pressing protectively against his solar plexus, "is James Buchanan Barnes."

Who? That can't be me. I'm the Winter Soldier. I have no other identity. I have been sent to locate, process, and exterminate. "Shut up!" I scream. Shut up, shut up, shut up, you utter bastard. Clenching my fist— the fleshed one, trying to will in some grounding feeling— tightly, I glance at him again in an effort to analyse him.

STEVE ROGERS

He looks tired. Pale and wanting, with a certain violent hunger.

He's just like me. He's just a man. What has Hydra done to him? No. He's just a boy in a new, crisp, pressed uniform.

I can't fight a boy.

WINTER SOLDIER

He's quiet. Finally. His gaze is focused on something behind me; it's almost as if he's looking through me, but there is nothing to see. I allow myself a more thorough look at him.

His ridiculous headpiece is off, revealing a shock of wispy blond hair. His discouraged look throws me off, as does the blood on his lip. He's hurt.

I did that. I hurt him.

I'd do it again.

I regain my composure, repeatedly socking him in the stomach, brushing my leg through the air to crush him down against the fragile glass of the helicarrier's belly. I stand and hold my ground, and he raises his arms in defeat. I raise my eyebrows.

STEVE ROGERS

"I'm not going to fight you." I can't. He was my best friend.

He is still my best friend, somewhere deep down in him.

I let go of my shield. It rains down along with the wreckage, and joins the growing pile of crude metal at the Potomac River down below. It's over. He's my friend, and he'll always be.

I look at him and almost smile. "You're my friend."

WINTER SOLDIER

Friend? Friends don't exist in this world. Not in this realm.

I launch myself at him seconds after he abandoned his only weapon, and he collapses. His body goes slack and he stops struggling, but his eyes— why so blue, blue, blue?— glare into mine.

And so I continue. And so he endures hit after hit after blow. Who knew how much time had passed before I became aware of our surroundings? The helicarrier is shuddering now, and smoke spews dreadfully out of its engines. It's going to crash any time now.

"You're my mission." I grit my teeth and glower down at his peaceful face, that smug punk. It hurts, my head does, but the arm that keeps up the rhythm of pummelled punches does not feel anything. "You're. My. Mission." Why doesn't he hit me back? "You're! My! Mission!" I let loose a guttural scream. Nothing makes sense, but this does. He's my mission.

STEVE ROGERS

He's my friend. I can't. I can't.

WINTER SOLDIER

I've gone wild, hitting randomly and with no clean purpose. I never do that. Finish the mission.

"You're my mission." This time, it comes out torn. Desperate. Weak.

"Then finish it," he rasps with painful effort, his chin wobbling and tears apparent in his blue, blue blue eyes, "'cause I'm with you 'till the end of the line."

STEVE ROGERS

I hope that this is enough for him. I hope that this is enough for the both of us.

JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES

His wavering voice is barely a whisper, but it still thickens and cracks with emotion— emotion that defines decades of fear, pain, and torment. Of love, understanding, and companionship. Of friendship.

I stop with a sudden halt as the visions fly back to me, so fast I can barely register each and every one of them. Memories eat at me. "I'm with you 'till the end of the line, pal," my own voice, except softer, worn, and faithful— the voice of a good man— echoes back faintly at me. A broken promise broken between two broken people sharing a broken past.

I remember. He's my partner, the piece of me that has been missing for seventy years. Seventy years.

Somehow, we were destined to meet one another again. Here we are, in the face of death, in the midst of chaos, in the rise of war.

I knew him.

I know him. You're my best friend, I want to say.

STEVE ROGERS

We've always been thick as thieves, the two of us. Too bad that one thing we've never been good at was timing.

JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES

A monster of a boulder smashes through the deck and tear a hole through the main engine, which begins to sputter. The helicarrier veers off dangerously.

STEVE ROGERS

The world is tilting. Everything is upside down, but he's holding me right side up.

JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES

This poor excuse of a helicarrier spirals and pitches us downwards. We fall at an alarming speed, and dust and shrapnel blind us from each other. I try to grab the man and hold him up— Steve, my best friend— but my metal arm fails. It never fails. I should have known that Hydra memorabilia would be good for nothing.

Helplessly, I watch him slide over the edge of the aircraft.

STEVE ROGERS

How fitting that this time it's me who is robbed of a proper goodbye. I slip and fall, and pray that the water takes me quick, faster than the snow and Hydra had for Bucky, my confidant, my right-hand man, my best friend.

JAMES BUCHANAN BARNES

No, he can't be gone. What now? Is the universe so cruel to abandon me He's counting on me, of course he is.

I'm about to leap in after him just as my step falters. I have a choice to make. Do I want to be Bucky? Do I want the past that's been handed back to me? Do I want to be the best friend of a scrawny boy from Brooklyn? I can have it all back, but I do not know anymore.

I do not feel anything.

I jump down the side and tuck my legs up to my chest, hitting the cold water where the ripples curl up and embrace me. The impact comes as a shock, and I gasp with feeling. I straighten out and begin to swim for him.

Do I want what has been offered to me— a broken past? I can be mended. We all can be.

Perhaps one day we'll be together again, the way we were back at the dark alleyway with haphazardly stacked garbage cans. There's a certain something beautiful about the impossible. I tell myself that I do not feel, but I choose to believe in this daydream.

Give me a second chance, pal.

'Cause I'm with you 'till the end of the line.