Chapter One: Goodbyes
A/N: I originally published this story on AO3 last June as a look at what might have happened between the final battle in "Captain America: Civil War" and Bucky going back into cryo. If you see dialogue in italics surrounded by brackets, that means they're speaking Russian. Enjoy!
It didn't hurt. Well, that was sort of a lie-it did hurt, but not in the way Bucky expected it to. He didn't feel the sharp pain of a limb suddenly severed like he had falling from the train; he didn't feel the slow agony of flesh and muscle and bone being sawed off the way he had when Hydra removed what was left. No, the pain wasn't like any of that.
Losing his metal arm was like losing his mind, and for an immeasurable moment he lost track of all time and space.
It was pure engineering, really. The arm came off, the wires and artificial nerves severed into an incomplete circuit. With nowhere for the signals from his brain to go, the remains sparked and sizzled uselessly into the cold Siberian air. The incoming signals, though-that's where the trouble was. The sensors were still operational, damaged though they were, and they were pulling in stimuli regardless of the fact that the other part of his limb was God knew where. It caught the cold and the wind and the pressure of concrete against what was left of his shoulder, but everything was a chaotic haze. Without the outer casing and sensitive nerve endings to filter the stimuli, the sensations were all around him with no distinct origin. The feedback looped through his head in a throbbing, wordless litany of pain as his mind fought to distinguish between the unexpected interference.
Meanwhile, the fight continued somewhere around him. He knew he wasn't dead; the pain and confusion would conceivably have ended if he were. That could only mean Steve was keeping Stark at bay, although there was no telling how long that might last. Bucky needed to move, to pull himself together, to do something!
But all he could do was lie on his back and wait for the end, his eyes blinking rapidly until he finally closed them against the vertigo.
It wasn't as bad as the chair. That was all he could think, an irrational notion but the best he could do given what he was working with. It wasn't as bad as the device that scrambled his brains and made him forget his own name all for the good of someone else's war. That was pain like he'd never felt before, not when he was a kid and broke his arm fighting one of Steve's battles for him ("I had 'im on the ropes, Buck!", "Sure ya did, Stevie.") and not when he'd fallen to his apparent death in a ravine. The chair was its own brand of pain separate from anything ordinary men must suffer. This was nothing by comparison.
He knew his name: Bucky.
He knew where he was: Siberia.
He knew what had happened: his world had gone to shit.
Did he remember them—that's what Stark had asked. Did he remember killing a man who was his friend and his wife. Did he remember following orders to retrieve the target and eliminate any witnesses with extreme prejudice. Did he remember being set loose like an attack dog and then put back in the kennel when his services were no longer required.
'I remember all of them.'
They haunted his dreams, his nightmares, even his waking moments. They left him with guilt so deep and all encompassing he feared it would never be assuaged, no matter how much good he tried to do in penance. They glared at him with judgment and damnation in their eyes, weighing his exile, his atonement, and finding it wanting. So many times he wondered if the ghosts would only be appeased by his death, and why shouldn't they? He'd lived his life as a ghost, and it was only fitting that he join them and share the same fate. He'd been close, so close to just pulling the trigger and welcoming the end the way he should have been allowed to seventy years ago.
And then Sokovia happened.
He'd been in Bucharest at the time. It was still new to him then, living on his own and being in charge of his own life for the first time in his admittedly unreliable memory. He'd fled the States when the memories began trickling into place, knowing what would happen if the government decided to come for him after Washington D.C. He'd fled from Steve, too. The Winter Soldier couldn't be Captain America's best friend the way Bucky Barnes had been, and he could hardly call himself Bucky Barnes at that point. He had known they would all come looking eventually, so he'd gone somewhere they wouldn't expect to find Hydra's tired old ghost.
For the longest time, he couldn't relax. He had been positive that it was only a matter of time before someone came to take him away-the government for his crimes, Hydra to be their toy soldier again, Steve to be the best friend he'd lost. He stayed off the grid and kept his head down, thinking he could stave off the inevitable if he just kept moving forward in the shadows.
Instead he'd moved forward right to an electronics store and watched as Captain America and the Avengers demolished an already failing country. What he could have accomplished via stealth they managed through pure physical annihilation because Stark had been foolish enough to mess with things he didn't understand. The reputation the Avengers had worked so hard to build was thrown into a shredder as news anchors and politicians worldwide tore them down off their pedestal with more venom than any army of robots could ever muster.
And there was Steve, right in the middle of things as always. His pal, his buddy, his Steve. Bucky had known that by then, although it didn't convince him into contact. For the briefest moment, he considered it-finding Steve, telling him not to listen to the naysayers. If it hadn't been for the Avengers, far more people would have died in Sokovia. As it happened, those who did were blood on Stark's hands and Stark's alone, not that the rest of the world cared to differentiate. But in the end he decided against reaching out and went about his mundane daily life. What right did the Winter Soldier have to comfort anyone?
Not that everything hadn't gone to shit a year later anyway, but still, Bucky had tried to do right by Steve. It was the one thing he could honestly say at the time that he knew he'd been doing his whole life. He wasn't worth Steve's help or his friendship after all he'd done, yet he'd gotten it anyway-of all the things he'd lost, that much was still intact. So doing right by Steve was the least he could do in return.
That ancient self-appointed mission solidified itself in his head, giving him something to focus on besides the pain in his skull, and he heard a blast followed by a familiar grunt not far away. He tried to turn his head in that direction, but the muscles in his neck were still twitching and his eyelids were even more uncooperative. The scuffle continued as he gained his bearings and gradually managed to roll toward the sound.
"Stay down." Stark. "Final warning."
Bucky blinked his eyes open, squinting at the blinding white light reflecting off snow beyond the concrete barriers. Steve was a silhouette against the backdrop of the mountains, Stark's back to Bucky as Captain America stubbornly, relentlessly rose to his feet. All of a sudden, Bucky felt himself transported back almost seventy-three years to the mouth of an alley in Brooklyn, two versions of the same image swimming before his eyes.
'You just don't know when to give up, do ya?'
A scrawny runt of a guy. A big bully. A uniform that never fit quite right.
Adjusting the shoulders, picking himself up, raising his fists...
"I could do this all day."
The piece of shit in a back alley swung at the little guy as the man in an iron suit raised his hand to do the same. Reaching out with his remaining arm, Bucky managed to grab Stark's foot just steadily enough to draw his attention and a swift kick to the face for his trouble. (Sergeant James Barnes had been far more successful in that alley.) Blood spilled out of his nose and ran down the side of his face as Bucky rolled onto his back, but there was no follow-up attack. All he could hear were grunts of exertion and then metal on metal as Steve presumably entered the fray again. Bucky tried to look, he really did, but his body refused to cooperate with this endeavor, almost as if saying it had seen enough.
Maybe he should have stayed still and let Stark have his vengeance. Perhaps it would have been justice served.
Bucky drifted again and then, when he settled back into himself, it was over. All he heard was heavy breathing and a deep, significant silence. A moment passed where he wondered if Steve was alive, if in Stark's rage he had killed a real hero instead of the worthless remnants of the once legendary assassin bleeding on the floor. But something moved and it didn't make the noisy, mechanical sounds of the Iron Man suit. Opening his eyes (when had he closed them?), Bucky blinked and managed to turn his head enough to see Steve limping toward him, shield in one hand and the other outstretched to help Bucky to his feet.
It wasn't until he was up, more of his weight than he cared to admit dragging Steve down, that Bucky realized it was the second time his best friend had carried him out of enemy territory like this. Was history really so damned eager to repeat itself? Poetic irony. Disgusting.
"That shield doesn't belong to you."
Well. It appeared that Stark, suit defunct and all but defeated, wasn't quite through.
"You don't deserve it! My father made that shield!"
Steve tensed up, but they only paused a moment. Bucky knew the words were more of a gut punch than anything else Stark had thrown today, though. Howard had loved Steve. He saw Steve as his greatest creation, and Bucky had never seen the two of them on the outs. (Well, except the one time Steve was convinced he was coming on to Agent Carter.) If anyone, alive or dead, would believe that that shield could never belong to anyone other than Steve Rogers, it was Howard Stark. Bucky Barnes thought the same.
Their opinions, however, appeared to mean very little. Steve's weight shifted and there was a loud clang where his shield hit the floor by their feet, abandoned as Steve nudged him forward toward the only remaining exit after the destruction they'd brought on the bunker.
It took a few seconds before Bucky could regain control of himself enough to speak, but he only managed a quiet, "Steve," before the captain cut him off.
"Don't." It was the Captain America voice. They fell silent for a minute and when Steve spoke again, it was the softer tone of his best friend once more. "You are worth it, Buck. Even if you think you're not."
Bucky swallowed down a million things he could say in response to that, settling for shaking his head as they made their way out of the bunker and into the frigid air outside. There was so much going on in his head that he felt it might burst. They had come here hoping to stop assassins he knew even he was no match against; he never would have been had it not been for the fact that Howard had apparently still not perfected the serum and it left his fellow winter soldiers unstable and volatile. Instead they had found a crypt and two men seeking revenge. Instead they had walked out without Captain America. Instead they had left something broken, perhaps irreparably, behind.
Stumbling to a stop and forcing Steve to do the same alongside him, Bucky turned to look back at the shattered remains of the bunker. Much as he hated to admit it, Zemo had been right in Berlin: it almost felt like home, horribly enough. But then, he had been housed here longer than he'd lived in Romania or Brooklyn combined. He vaguely remembered thinking he needed to return here when Zemo had triggered the Winter Soldier, reasoning that he needed to report to superiors long dead or hidden and then go back to sleep. Now he was leaving a free man-or pieces of one anyway-and he would never see this place again.
It was sickening that he actually felt a pang of sadness at the thought.
Steve's hand squeezing his shoulder brought Bucky back to the present, and he nodded as they moved forward once again. The sound of the wind was nearly deafening in what was otherwise silence, even the remains of Bucky's arm no longer making its malfunctioning electronic sounds where the wires swayed uselessly by his side. As though hearing his thoughts, Steve glanced over to his left side and frowned.
"Did it hurt?"
It was almost tentative the way he asked, as if the arm wasn't a subject Bucky would want to talk about. Hydra or not, though, that arm was just as much his as the flesh one had been all those years ago.
Smirking slightly, Bucky tried for some levity and hoarsely replied, "A little."
It took a moment, but then there it was: a tiny half smile as Steve caught the reference. Bucky was positive his answer was about as truthful as Steve's had been that day, too.
"Guess Zola's version of the serum didn't work well enough to grow back limbs," Bucky continued, smiling when Steve chuckled under his breath.
"Don't think Erskine's does either."
"You ever try?"
"Can't say I've been too eager to."
"Guess you didn't take all the stupid, then," grunted Bucky as they reached the entrance to the quinjet and Steve hit the button to lower the hatch.
"Kinda hard when you took it all with you," was Steve's nonchalant reply as he helped Bucky inside.
"Punk."
"Jerk."
"Gentlemen."
Steve nearly dropped him in his haste to spin around, putting himself between Bucky and the intruder. Bucky reached for his gun holster only to find, unsurprisingly, that he didn't have a hand to reach with on that side. Shit.
How hadn't they noticed the Wakandan prince (King, Bucky corrected himself) standing just inside the quinjet? Not that he would have had any difficulty sneaking inside—he was in some ways stealthier and more deadly than Bucky had been in his Winter Soldier heyday. Still, two super soldiers should have noticed, even injured as they were. It was an unforgivable mistake, one that would have had severe consequences years ago in this place.
"I do not come meaning you harm," T'Challa began with a slight step forward, raising his hands with palms facing out when he saw that neither Steve nor Bucky planned on lowering their defenses anytime soon. "It would seem I have made a terrible mistake in my grief. It blinded me to the truth, and I owe you an apology, Sergeant Barnes."
Narrowing his eyes, Bucky surveyed the king skeptically. This wasn't exactly a conversation he had been expecting to have today. "How'd you know?"
"I followed Mister Stark here and heard what this Zemo had to say." T'Challa shook his head somberly. "Grief turns men into shells of themselves, but vengeance can make them monsters. I have decided that shall not be my fate. You did not kill my father. You tried to tell me and I did not listen. For that I am sorry. But," he added, his expression growing impossibly harder, "I have seen to it that the man responsible for so much suffering will be brought to justice."
Steve's brow furrowed and he asked tentatively, "Is he dead?"
"No," the prince answered with a grim smile. "Death would be too kind. He is waiting on the other quinjet for Mister Stark to take him to the U.N."
"And you're not going with them," Steve deduced carefully. T'Challa shook his head.
"I have had enough of politics to last me some time. I must see to my own country...as king. Besides, I think I can be of more help to you in Wakanda than Berlin."
Steve shook his head. "What do you mean?"
T'Challa's smile turned into something more friendly than remorseful now. "You are both wanted men, Captain. After the fight at the airport, your friends were taken to a maximum security prison known as the Raft, and Secretary Ross would like nothing more than to see you join them. My country, however, is secluded. The U.N. has little interest in what is happening in Wakanda for now."
"Not to mention the fact that they'll probably think you're the last person who would be willing to harbor the Winter Soldier," added Steve pensively, glancing to Bucky and back again.
"Precisely," T'Challa agreed with a nod. "You will be safe under my protection. Wakanda is also ahead of the rest of the world technologically. Perhaps with some information we could do something to repair that arm," he added with a gesture towards Bucky's absent appendage.
Bucky blinked, unable to reconcile this gracious man with the vengeful guy in the cat suit who had been stalking him since Romania. "You'd do that?"
"It is the least I can do." T'Challa nodded once again, his regret clear in the lines of his face. "But if we are to go, we had best do so now. Mister Stark did not know I followed him here, and it would be in all of our interests to keep it that way."
Steve and Bucky exchanged a quick glance, and Bucky could read the hesitation in his eyes. After all that had happened, he didn't blame Steve for being wary of the Black Panther. Hell, he was having trouble seeing this as being anything other than too good to be true as well. Regardless, Bucky almost imperceptibly lifted his shoulder in a slight shrug and silently communicated his assent. They were wanted men-T'Challa hadn't been lying about that. Wakanda was a strategic boon. It would be foolish to pass up the offer. If it was a trap, they could deal with it as they always had: together.
One nod to T'Challa had him moving past them to place himself in the pilot's seat. The engines roared to life as Steve deposited Bucky onto one of the benches in the rear of the quinjet, making sure he was settled before moving to the chair Bucky had occupied on the journey here behind the pilot's seat. Just before they took off, the front of the quinjet lifting off the ground and disturbing the snow surrounding them, Bucky looked out of the still open doors at the bunker one last time.
Прощай.
Translation: Прощай means goodbye in Russian.
