Steve Rogers
"Do you see anything useful?"
Steve leans over the drafting table, the contents of the file spread out in a wide semi-circle. Tony stands next to him, hands on his hips.
"It's hard to tell," Tony says. "You might not have noticed, but everything's in Russian."
"You mean you don't speak Russian?" Steve pauses. "I thought you were a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist."
Tony gives him a sideways glance. "I never should have said that you."
Steve just shrugs, suppresses a smile.
"And to answer your question—no, not fluently. I should be able to figure something out, although don't expect it tomorrow. I need time." Tony steps away from the table and pushes one hand through his hair. Steve feels an uncharitable trickle of irritation that Tony is the only one who can help him out with this. At least Steve knows he'll do it. Eventually.
"I've got shit to do," Tony adds, although he sweeps up half of the documents into a loose pile and says, "Jarvis, start looking into anything you can find about memory erasure, Soviet-era experimentation, anything like that." Tony slides the remaining documents over to Steve. "You'll be wanting these, I'd imagine."
Steve looks down at the messy scatter of papers. Bucky's enlistment photo isn't among them—Steve has already slipped it out of the file and tucked it into his billfold, behind a credit card he never uses. But everything else is included, the whole history of Bucky's imprisonment and torture and brainwashing. Steve's got the translated files on his computer back at the hotel, but he wants to keep the originals close at hand.
Steve still hasn't read through everything. Whenever he tries, he gets a feeling in his chest like he's drowning.
"Thanks," Steve says, scooping up the papers. "And thank you for—" He gestures at the half of the file that Tony's keeping. Technical schematics. Steve can't understand them—it's a dual language barrier, not just the Russian but the diagrams for a technology beyond him. Still, he's certain that whatever it is, it will help him understand what happened to Bucky.
"I really appreciate it," Steve adds, and he thinks he doesn't sound sincere even though he is.
Tony shrugs, dismissive. "Not like you've got the power of SHEILD behind you anymore."
Steve stiffens. No, he doesn't. And neither does Tony. Steve can see that little glimmer of grief in Tony's expression, too, although he knows Tony will never admit to it.
"Yeah," he says. "Guess we really have to work together now."
Tony laughs, short and sarcastic. "Thought we'd accepted that after New York."
"I hoped so."
They fall into that awkward silence that always seems to plague them we're they're alone, just the two of them. Steve shoves his hands into his pockets.
"Thanks," he says again. "Let me know if you find anything."
"Will do." Tony gives an ironic half-salute, although he's still hunched over the schematics and not looking at Steve at all. Steve lets himself out of the workshop. The house is empty—Miss Potts is off on a business trip in Taipei—and has that echoing hollowness that reminds Steve of certain government offices. The kind he gets called to whenever he has a mission—or got called to, rather. He's set the Captain America uniform aside for the time being. SHEILD, such as it is, has fragmented, those agents not loyal to HYDRA slipping into undercover roles so that SHIELD is not an organization so much as an idea. And Steve isn't sure he wants to be Captain America right now anyway. He wants to be Steve Rogers, skinny little kid from Brooklyn.
And he has to be Bucky's friend. He's the only one Bucky's got.
Outside, the California air is balmy and warm and smells of oranges and car exhaust. Steve climbs onto the rental bike and roars down the steep road and into the canyon. The hotel isn't too far from Tony's mansion, and Steve gets there without having to deal with much of that Los Angeles traffic. The building is old for 2014 but it still looks modern to Steve, those curved art deco arches. Funny, how he can get used to glittering glass and metal in DC and think nothing of it, but he comes out here to LA and sees one hotel from the thirties and it's like he never left.
Steve parks his bike in the garage and rides the elevator up to the suite he's sharing with Sam. It's empty, too, and there's no note or, for that matter, message on his phone (he still can't shake the habit of checking for notes first). Sam must not have finished up with Allie Veselov yet. It was a weak lead, even Steve knew that—the daughter of one of the laboratory assistants listed in the files Natasha had given him. She'd emigrated to the US as a child after the Berlin Wall fell and in all likelihood didn't know what her father had been up to before she was born, but aside from Tony reverse engineering that machine in the file, it was the only lead they had.
"We're pretty lucky, really," Sam had said when they were waiting for security in Dulles. "Tony Stark won't fly out here, but we've got to fly out to LA anyway."
He was right, but Steve still feels overwhelmed by the whole thing. Not hopeless—never hopeless. He's not going to give up. And he never, not once, thought it was going to be easy. Because if something's worth doing, it's probably not going to be easy.
But that doesn't mean he isn't left wondering what the hell they're going to do next, especially if Sam's conversation with Miss Veselov doesn't give them anything new.
Steve glances at the backpack he'd tossed onto the floor when he came into the room. His chest tightens. There's still the rest of the file, the part that's not names and dates and bland military euphemisms like asset or target. He know he needs to look at those documents more closely. Needs, specifically, to look at the ones that hurt.
If something's worth doing, it's probably not going to be easy.
Steve pours himself a glass of water, gulps it down. The laptop is sitting on the desk in the common room, innocuous-looking. Steve still feels like the files it contains are going to leap out at him somehow and attack.
But he still sits down in front of it. Flips it open. There's a picture of the Washington Memorial in the background and Steve stares at it for a moment, gathering up his courage. God, fighting Bucky on the Helicarrier had been easier than this. But Steve is trained to fight. He's a soldier. And at least when he was facing down Bucky, he knew it was Bucky, and he knew there was still a fragment of goodness inside him. The men that corrupted and tortured him—Steve doesn't think he's going to find any goodness there.
He runs his finger over the trackpad and double-clicks the icon to open up the translation. He ought to bring the originals in here, since there are pictures that didn't make it to the digital copy, but he's not sure he wants to think about pictures yet.
Well. Maybe one. Steve pulls out his billfold and slips the picture of Bucky out from its hiding place. Steve stares down at it. Bucky peers out at him through the smoky haze of the damage of time. Hair neat, cropped short, not hanging long and lank in his face. It's the Bucky Steve remembers, even if he looks flat and faded in that photograph.
Steve props the photograph up next to the laptop, takes a deep breath, and starts to read.
He begins with the parts he's looked at a couple of times before—the capture of Americans at Azzano, a brief outline of the procedure told in the dull language of scientists. The procedure itself doesn't sound so different from what happened to Steve—inject the subject with an experimental serum and it should improve his strength, dexterity, stamina, recovery speed. Bucky was chosen because he fought back against his guards one too many times; he showed "spirit," as the report put it, "and a tendency toward violence that Doctors Gersten and Zola felt could be exploited for maximum benefit."
A tendency toward violence. Bullshit. Bucky fought those guards to protect his men. He'd told Steve about it afterwards, sitting up in their tent one night swapping a cigarette back and forth. The guards would taunt them, torture them. Bucky was sick of it, wanted to put a stop to it.
Steve forces himself to keep reading. This is all from the time Bucky and the rest of the POWs were imprisoned; it's mild stuff compared to what comes later. Steve pours over it, looking for something he missed the first time, the second time, the third time.
And then he comes to the fall.
Not the fall itself, of course: there's nothing about that in the file, nothing about the horror of watching Bucky pitch backwards toward the snow and that terrible sense of something stretching out from Steve's chest, as if Bucky's plummet had ripped Steve's soul out his body.
Instead, the file discusses finding Bucky lying at the bottom of the ravine, his left arm shattered and crushed. It discusses the elation of HYDRA when they realized that this fallen American was the same Subject 38 they thought they had lost during the Allied raids, that the serum must be a success if the soldier was frozen but still alive, that they could use his ruined arm as a chance to test a new engineering process—
Steve closes his eyes. This is when it starts to hurt. Bucky had already begun to transform when he and Steve fought together. He hadn't been the Winter Soldier, not even close, but there had been hints there, and Steve only saw them in hindsight. If he'd seen them in the present, the present-past, during the war—maybe he could have helped him. Somehow.
Steve pushes away from the table, pours himself another glass of water. He's been through this before. Even talked about it with Sam. The guilt can't change anything. It's not going to go away, Sam had told him, but Steve can't let it overpower him. It's a part of him now, and always will be, but he can only let it be a small part of him. And Steve knows that's true.
He takes a deep breath. He knows what happens next in the file: the engineering procedure was a failure, but HYDRA froze Bucky rather than let their experiment go to waste. They woke him up during the Cold War (a war Steve still has trouble conceiving of, even after reading page after page of histories on the Internet) and, with space-age technology, rebuilt his arm. And trained him.
And used him.
This is where Steve always has to stop. The reports discuss the methods they employed to control Bucky, to shape him into the assassin they wanted him to be. The machine is involved somehow—they call it rehabilitation, but to Steve it just seems like a form of punishment. "Rehabilitation at regular intervals is proving necessary to control the asset," the translation reads, flat black text against a white screen, utterly normal-looking. "Without rehabilitation, the asset grows volatile and erratic. He is difficult to control. One laboratory assistant has already been hospitalized."
Steve forces himself back in front of the computer, fingers gripped tight around the water glass. His heart is racing. It gets worse as he goes down, but he knows he has to read this, knows he has to find something.
"23 October 1965. The asset has refused a mission for the first time." Good on you, Bucky, Steve thinks. "It has been 24 days since rehabilitation, 78 days since activation. This is a cause of concern for Doctor Zharkov and myself, as it brings into question the project's success. However, we remain convinced there is a solution.
"25 October 1965. Corporal punishment is proving effective when combined with rehabilitation. The asset responds well to pain and physical threat. This has the added benefit of shaping him for his purpose—these extreme times call for an extreme weapon, as Commander Gribov has said many times. We find that a weapon is best forged of violence, and the asset has begun undergoing rigorous training. It is not necessary for him to remember who he is. Indeed, it is better that our training sessions form the framework for his identity. We will shape him with bloodshed."
Steve takes a deep breath. His fingers are damp with condensation from the glass. He looks over at the Bucky in the photograph, handsome in his uniform, gazing up at Steve from out of the past.
"It's still there, pal," he whispers. "Who you are."
The Bucky in the photograph doesn't reply.
Steve turns back to the report, tries to put the pieces together. The "training" involved sparring to the death, as far as Steve can tell, but also other things—something to do with doctors rooting around in Bucky's brain, giving him ideas. The reports claim the ideas were there to begin with, that his "natural tendency toward violence" made the process easier, that it was only a matter of changing Bucky's ideas about right and wrong, but Steve knows they're lying. They didn't know Bucky as a kid, defending Steve against the bullies who tormented him in back alleys and parking lots.
"2 June 1971. It's proving effective to put the asset under ice when his work isn't required. Such a finely-tuned but specialized weapon is not to be wasted on issues of minor concern, and freezing eliminates the need for regular rehabilitation as well."
Steve feels a jolt of satisfaction. Six years later and he still wasn't doing what they wanted. That's the Bucky that Steve knows. Still hanging in there.
It takes a long time, but Steve manages to read through the rest of the reports. He has to stop, drink water, pace around the hotel suite—but he finishes. Sam's still not back, but when Steve remembers to check his phone he finds a message waiting for him. Interview a bust. Caught in traffic. Fill you in when I get home.
Steve sighs, glances over at his open laptop. The reports are minimized so he doesn't have to look at them. He realizes he's shaking. Not because of Sam's message, but because of everything he's read, everything about Bucky and the Winter Soldier—everything about the asset. God, he hates that word.
All that horror and he didn't find anything useful.
He has no idea what they're going to do next.