Disclaimer: obviously, I own nothing. Really.
Idea: 'Can I turn this road trip into a starting gate for Civil War' or 'How Cap 3 could go.'
Note: I've seen both new movies and read Winter Soldier through Captain America Lives! all of Brubaker's run in comic continuity. If Bucky seems out of movie character, that's why. Comic!Bucky is a pottymouth and a fighter. I'm still trying to properly merge them. Don't know yet what the plot will look like on this either. If there is any background ships, it'll be Sharon/Steve and Wintalia but it won't be a central driving force. This story is getting written because the comics haven't didn't give me a Steve and Bucky post-WS conversation yet. Enjoy!
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The Winter Soldier approached Bruce Banner in a coffeeshop in New York, sat down, and stared at the man for a good five minutes. Both of them were used to assessing threats and five minutes wasn't long in Winter Soldier time. Finally, Banner took a breath and leaned forward, setting down the smartphone he'd been fiddling with.
His masters hadn't bothered to teach the Winter Soldier brands, but they had been clear that shiny, oblong 'smart'phones could communicate verbally or with written messages, with no need for cords, landlines, or even sound. This smartphone was one of the most indestructible-looking Bucky had ever seen. Check mark - he had the right person.
"I know some people who can help with PTSD," Banner said.
The acronym wasn't one the Winter Soldier recognized, but he didn't frown. His handlers had left out anything they didn't think he needed to know and, apparently, 'PTSD' wasn't a threat to him. It could be an Avengers onboarding program.
Ignore PTSD. He needed to ask this correctly.
"The punk."
Banner blinked. "Excuse me?"
"You know where the punk is."
Banner stared. Staring made all the Italian in his features stand out; this man was European and the last alliances Bucky could remember with what had filtered back into his mind was… muddied. Italians had been good in the war when he died, but good for Axis, and that was bad, and bad in the Cold War, but was that bad for the Soviet or bad for the States, and no one seemed to care now, not in the way they had before during the war. All the alliances kept changing and no one was paying attention in the streets of America. So what did it matter if Banner was Italian?
Everybody was something in America. Bucky was something. Some thing.
"Do you know what punk is?" Banner was asking, carefully.
"Captain. Cap," the Winter Soldier clarified.
"Ah geez." Banner's posture became tighter; he ran a hand through his hair, shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
"What is it?" Responding to Banner's discomfort, Bucky shifted his posture to make the knife on his thigh more accessible, metal shoulder braced into the window – he could break it in seconds if necessary and be halfway down the street before anyone had a bead on him.
But Banner was staring at him, hand in mid-hair-ruffle.
"Whoa, so, I missed something," Banner said. "Why are you all… battle-ready?"
Oh. He relaxed some of the tension in his shoulder. Fidgeting was probably a social cue for discomfort. Damn, he used to be good at those. Didn't he? Natalia had been good at them. She taught him some he didn't know and he had taught her how to use them to kill. Kill over and over and... don't lose focus. The Hulk knows where Cap is.
"I… misread," he replied, because Banner still looked like a man who thought he was handling a time bomb. "Where is Captain America."
"Okay, it's— I'm just kinda… hiding from Stark right now," Banner said, grinning. Tight grin, nervous grin. Okay. Fearful grin? A little. And yet that wasn't alarm.
"I don't need to see the iron man. I need to see the captain." Thank God they were in a world of codenames and monikers. If he had to tell this man he needed to see 'Steve' over and over, it was going to turn into a litany of names: 'Steve,' 'Peggy,' 'Fury,' 'Dugan,' and everyone he had ever known.
"Yeah, I'd have to go to Stark, to find out where Cap is, and I don't want to do that. Memo on me is I'm not the best guy to go to for Avengers calls. Especially when I'm hiding. Besides, I heard Steve was out in the Midwest doing something for a couple months."
"What state?"
Banner was about to tell him, then thought better of it. "Airports have changed since you were—"
Bucky remembered then, one of the jogged pieces of memory coming to the surface. There had been several missions, recent ones, where he had to get through American security. It got so bad they took off his arm and transported it in a separate agent's carry-on once, choosing the notoriety of a one-armed man over a metal-armed man. Still.
"What state?" he repeated.
"…look, you'd be picked up as soon as you got into an airport. You go to Stark Tower, he'd tell Steve you were around."
The Winter Soldier in him began to get annoyed. "I don't care and I'm not going to the iron man. If you won't tell me, $%* ing take me."
-And sometimes other memories got jarred loose. He remembered parts of how he used to talk in the trenches, maybe how people had spoken around him. His mind felt like a jigsaw built on a sea of lava.
The expletive didn't seem to bother Banner.
"Can't. The big guy has a no-fly radius so wide I had to take a slow boat to Singapore with Enya and Celtic music on full blast." The moment the words left his mouth, Banner rolled his eyes heavenward. "I've been away from the man six months, put me in the same city, and I'm poking myself."
"The big guy," Bucky echoed, the name odd.
Banner looked at him somewhat skeptically. "The other guy? The reason my name even showed up on your 'visit' list?"
The scientist was stalling; this was all stalling, and it was working. Bucky was beginning to lose focus on the mission with the way Banner kept dancing around the issue. Sliver of paranoia began to pinch at the back of his mind. If this was stalling, Banner knew what he needed to do and wasn't doing it. Banner understood what that meant when you were facing the Winter Soldier. But the man wasn't angry or he would be uncontrollable and green. The phone. Banner had contacted someone. And it wasn't going to be anyone Bucky wanted to see.
So he stood, so abruptly several people from other tables looked over at them.
"What state is the captain in?" the Winter Soldier asked. Demanded. Asked. It was asking when no one was being slammed into a car door, or shot, or at knife point, or garroted, or sniped, or – there were more ways. If only the ways he had rescued people didn't come back and intermingle with the ways he had murdered people. Not all of them were even the Winter Soldier; some were acts during war. Steve's right-hand man with both his hands dripping with gore.
Banner had stood on the other side of the table and just finished quietly assuring the people around them that Bucky had just gotten back from deployment a few weeks ago; he was still pretty shook up. People were moving away. Not in a panic, but moving away.
"Barnes," Banner said quietly. "There are people around here, innocent people. You're not on a mission and I'm not trying to hurt you. I called Stark, okay? Avengers ID cards will call Stark Tower when activated."
He hadn't known that. Well, hadn't known technology could do that, which made sense because Hydra worked in basements and bank vaults and in the bottom of snowy ravines and why would they have access to advanced technology?
"Not interested in talking to SHIELD," he said. Not interested in being repossessed by Hydra or their many affiliates, either.
"After three months ago, who is anymore?" Banner said. "Anyway, he'll be able to get you to Steve, one way or another."
Which reminded Bucky of something important.
"You knew my name."
"Hard not to. Even in Singapore, Stark's having Pepper send me messages. 'If you see anyone with a metal arm,' 'who the hell is named Bucky,' 'please dial 999 for traumatized assassin sightings…' and they were worse than that on occasion. So yeah, I know who you are."
Traumatized. Well, that probably wasn't Steve's word for it, it didn't mean it was what Steve thought, even if Bucky wanted to crawl into the hole of the word and die there. His last sighting of his friend had been dragging him out of the wreckage of the helicarrier, having just done to him everything the helicarrier couldn't, and then almost drowning him. Memory loss was no excuse. It didn't feel like he could start moving again until he saw Steve and instead he was sitting here with Banner.
"So you're the Winter Soldier!" came a smarmy voice from behind him and Bucky knew, even before turning, that he didn't like Tony Stark. When he didn't get up, Stark circled the table, nudged Banner as he kept one eye on Bucky. This was an expressive man, professional enough to make wearing a black 'Metallica' shirt and jeans look like a suit.
"Thought he'd be taller," Stark said.
"You thought I'd be taller," Banner said moodily.
"If you asked me out to coffee more often, maybe I wouldn't bring the quinjet when you activate your ID card. But not everything's about you so HEY, pretty and traumatized, what are you looking for with the big, green, not-Thor's-brother machine?"
That had been a very quick sentence – Stark talked like the talk show hosts he had heard from time to time on assignment. A million miles an hour, jumping from topic to topic like trains, always laughing. The question demanded a quick comeback and Bucky replied: "I'm looking for the captain" almost before he had processed the request.
The pair glanced at each other. Banner made a 'what can you do' face at Tony.
"He spoke English a moment ago. Barnes?" This was in Russian. "You switched, can you speak English for the Stark?"
"The Stark is obnoxious. If you don't tell me I am going to the airport."
"You won't be able to get through without documents," Banner said, back in English. "You ditched Hydra. If what Steve's said is true, they don't give you a severance package for that."
"We'd have to run a full physical just to prove that you are Bucky Barnes," Stark jumped in. "You could be any… traumatized defecting mercenary, it's not outside possibility with the way things are now."
"I'm a veteran," Bucky muttered. It felt clever to say it, even as the words bit back in his throat. He was a veteran of all wars, on all sides, and a prisoner of war and guilty of the greatest war crimes. This conversation with Banner was the longest he had spoken with a civilian not encountered on a mission in… in decades. Or was it just years? Decades? The world felt very unsafe to be talking to people and he was getting no closer to finding Steve. He had an apartment and he should go back there. All right, not an apartment, he had been sleeping on the roof of an apartment complex for the past week and it was time he got back there.
Maybe steal some brandy and painkillers, if he could find them. The leg was still bothering him from the disaster in the helicarrier. Leaving his masters meant leaving cyro, which meant leaving medical care. His only real concern was what would happen when the arm ran out of charge and it was going to run out of charge. It had been whirring, overheating (which for the arm, meant freezing internally to compensate for the heat), and even exhibited false start-ups a few times. While he wasn't sure what everything in him looked like internally, he didn't have a lot of upper body mass that wasn't involved with the arm. When it overheated, the sensation spread into his chest almost immediately. It would run out of charge eventually, and he couldn't go back to his masters to charge it.
"Losing ya, Barnes?" Stark asked and Bucky realized, with some surprise, that he had sat down at some point in thinking about his leg and cough and arm. He stood again quickly, forcing Stark to take a step back in alarm. The man recovered quickly.
"Come back to the tower," Stark said. "Cap'll come running back if he hears you're here."
"And I suppose you'll be wanting me to come along for that," Banner said, defeated before the question was even asked.
"What, you think I'm going to have trouble with My Chemical Romance? Nat's there, she knows him. It should be fine. Jarvis already put in a call to Steve to let him know."
Jarvis. The Winter Soldier's masters had thought about taking out Stark once, so at least Bucky knew about the A.I. Still. It would be nice if someone used a real phone once in a while; it would be nice if everything happened… slower. 'As fast as possible' in 1945 had been a lot slower than this. He had assumed that being the Winter Soldier was most of the speed; that he was moving faster than everyone because of his training but no, he was moving faster because he only had one stream of thought to run along. Everyone else was texting and jumping tracks and grabbing data and Bucky was point and shoot. He was still the best at his job. Other people were just good at lots of jobs.
He was drifting again, he realized with a start. Stark was on the phone now; Banner was looking anxious. This wasn't going to plan. What the hell was he going to do, ride back to Stark Tower? Wait for Steve and hope that worked out? No. Forget them and forget hoping.
Amid Tony's protests, began to leave. He heard the man's tone change as he spoke into his communicator and almost smiled. Like he wouldn't plan an escape route before ever approaching Banner? It wasn't his first time getting in and out of a situation. The only difference was that no one was dead. Everything broke down nicely into thought bites – actionable thought bites that required completion and nothing else.
Walk round the corner.
Step into the alley.
Hand-over-hand up a fire escape.
Climb through the open apartment window.
Peaceably exit the occupied home before anyone sees.
Step into the hallway.
Stairs to the basement.
Retrieve and change clothes from the laundry.
Ditch the hat.
Leave the apartment complex through the front door.
Go 'home' on foot.
He walked until he reached the apartment complex and easily scaled the height. Another eight hours here and he would move. Steve was somewhere in the Midwest and would come back soon. There was always the bird man Steve had been with. Ah. Memory slid in another piece. But he had tried to kill that man, very vehemently, and going to him for help probably wasn't going to result in anything good.
The arm whirred and whined as he settled into a clandestine corner of the apartment complex rooftop. The sound of cooling. Within four hours, it would be absurdly cold; enough to trigger the cough. He had tried to take it off once, it got so cold being an amputee sounded better, but he had become too afraid he wouldn't be able to get it on again and stopped. If the arm was off, he was vulnerable. The chill might get into his heart and finish what cyro hadn't. Besides, he probably needed a sterile environment or he risked getting dirt, bugs, or who knew what into his bloodstream.
It got cold, which was always familiar, and he slept.
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…if it entertains, tell me, and I'll try to think of how to move it onwards.