Bucky stared at the open pizza box, frustrated at his own indecision. All of the pieces were the same. They looked pretty good, actually, covered in some combination of sausage and vegetables that Bucky had never seen on a pizza before. It was times like these that he was sharply aware of how much had been stolen from him. How many years he'd spent traveling the world and leaving destruction in his path, or fleeing that same destruction, and he'd never actually ordered a pizza for himself. Never had the choice of which piece he wanted—the one with all the sausage or the one with the big knot in the crust? It made him freeze, as if he was waiting on orders, and he hated that. At least in Wakanda, T'Challas's chefs made everything and divided it up onto plates.
"Any day now," Stark said. He was standing behind Bucky with a plate in his hands, impatience personified. He probably thought Bucky was taking his time on purpose.
Finally he grabbed the piece with the big doughy knot and retreated from the box, his heart pumping. He hated that too.
Stark grabbed two pieces, without any apparent thought at all, and popped them into his plate. They were back to sitting beside the holographic monitor, waiting for the decryption. Stark had returned a few minutes earlier bearing the pizza, but hadn't made any mention at all of his hurried exit from the room. That was just as well. Bucky had no desire to deal with the pain of a man who had let Steve down the way Tony had.
That was what it came down to, really. It didn't bother him so much that Stark had tried to kill him. He wasn't the first, and Bucky always found it hard to argue with them. But Steve - Steve deserved better.
Bucky settled in and took a bite of the pizza. It was good.
According to Stark, it would be another forty-five minutes before his algorithm revealed where the message had originated. Bucky didn't trust him as far as…as far as Stark could throw him. Without the suit.
Stark nearly fell off his chair, pizza slice halfway to his mouth, when the monitor starting beeping. "What the—" He hastily set his food down on the plate and hovered over the hologram, the shock plain on his face.
"What is it?" Bucky asked.
"It's done," Stark said disbelievingly. "I've got an address. T'Challa was right—it's in the U.S. Virginia, specifically. That's it. We've got it!"
"That didn't take 45 minutes," Bucky felt compelled to point out.
The glare Stark gave him was only slightly tempered by his obvious relief. "Well, tell your super friends to get their asses over the Atlantic and back us up." He made a complicated looking gesture with one hand and piece of Iron Man started flying over from across the lab and attaching to him, making Bucky jump like he'd been electrocuted. (He hated that, too.) "And suit up. Do you suit up, or is it strictly casual wear, with you? Whatever. We have to move."
It might have been the first thing Stark had said that Bucky hadn't disagreed with. "Yeah," he said. "Let's move."
The address belonged to a government facility of some kind, just outside of DC. Top secret—more than that, top secret enough that Tony couldn't immediately hack into their servers to find out the floor plans or even what went on there. That meant deep, serious Hydra infiltration. It also meant that getting Rogers out was going to be a bitch. Their plan was to start with some recon, then, depending on the situation, either wait for reinforcements or handle the situation themselves. Tony was always a fan of the latter.
Tony was riding in the 'jet, his armor already on. He could have flown alongside—and considering that Bucky was his only company, would probably have been a more enjoyable ride—but something had been niggling at him that he needed both hands for. So he let Bucky pilot the 'jet and hunched over a StarkPad.
They'd been in their air maybe thirty minutes when Tony said, "Shit."
"What?" Bucky asked in his usual monotone.
"I knew there was something weird about that. I knew it," Tony said.
"What," Bucky growled again.
"My timing was off. In decrypting the file. ," Tony said. "My timing is never off. Turns out it wasn't a mistake on my part. Of course. There were layers to the deception, one location they wanted me to decode, and one they didn't. Guess which one is which."
"We're heading the wrong way," Bucky interpreted.
"Yep," Tony said, popping the p. "I'm patching the right coordinates in now. It looks like… we should be heading toward Arizona instead. Middle of nowhere desert as far as I can tell."
A few minutes of Barnes' glowering and punching in coordinates later they were heading in the right direction. They'd sent along the information to the others flying in from Wakanda, but communications between 'jets were worse than spotty over those distances. They'd have to hope for the best.
Worse, what would have been a quick, forty minute hop from New York to northern Virginia in the 'jet would now be about two hours. Still better than flying commercial, or even flying his own private jet, but not damn well fast enough. They hadn't received any new communications from Hydra but Tony would bet his garage Cap wasn't being treated well.
Tony tried not to reflect too much on the irony that the last he'd seen Steve, he'd been the one trying to do the damage. It seemed like ages ago and at the same time he could still feel the reverberation of the shield against his armor. It was surreal, really. The whole thing had been a clusterfuck from the beginning. Usually Tony was good at picking out the exact point things had started going wrong because of him, but in this case… he just didn't know. It hadn't been wrong to support the accords. And each step he'd taken had been absolutely necessary, at the time, as the situation had spun further and further out of control. Well, up until the end. It might not've been the first mental breakdown he'd had, but it was certainly the most violent.
"We would have attacked a government facility," Bucky said.
"Wha?" Tony said dumbly, blinking to return his focus to the here and now.
"If we'd gone to the original coordinates. They wanted us to attack the government," Bucky said. "Wouldn't have gone well for any of us."
It was, possibly, the longest string of words he'd said to Tony yet.
"Smart," Tony commented, thinking it through. "You and the rest of the team are already fugitives, you'd have your asses stuffed back in prison the second you set foot there, with no Cap to bail you out this time. And me, well, what better way to discredit me than have me helping you do it? If they're gunning for the Avengers, well, it might've worked."
"It's a good thing you noticed," Bucky said.
Tony stared at him, a smirk growing on his face. "A good thing? You thought I did a good thing? Wow. I think we're bonding. I'm choking up a little."
"Shut up," Bucky said.
Tony did.
They lapsed back into silence, Tony alternating between triple-checking his work on the StarkPad and watching Bucky, who was staring out the front windshield with a mournful expression. He'd tied his sleeve under the stump of his metal arm, and Tony had a strange urge to ask him about it—did it hurt? Did it feel like anything at all? How had he controlled the prosthesis before and did it feel like there was something missing now?
He didn't. He turned back to the StarkPad and checked the time. They'd been in the air for an hour now, which meant…one more to go. His nerves were jittering. At least when he flew the suit to a location his pre-fight adrenaline had something better to do that make him tap his fingers incessantly on the armrest.
Barnes shot him a glare and he stilled. To his surprise, however, Bucky didn't admonish him for the noise.
"Can I ask you a question?" Bucky asked instead.
As with any other time he spoke, it came out sounding abrupt and almost unplanned. Like he'd had no intention to speak to Tony but against his better judgment it had happened anyway.
"Uh, yeah, sure," Tony said, still anxious. He wondered for a brief, irrational moment if Bucky was going to ask him about the arm.
"What was your... relationship... with Steve?"
Tony blinked. "My relationship."
"Yes," Bucky said stiffly. "Were you. Together. Before the accords."
Tony stared at him, aware that his mouth was slightly open but too shocked to do anything about it. He laughed. "Together…together?"
"Yes," Bucky said, looking at the floor. There was almost—almost—a flush to his cheeks. "I saw it in a magazine while I was on the run. It said that the two of you—that you—you know."
He sounded so flustered that Tony couldn't suppress the nervous giggle that climbed up his throat. "Uh, no," he said. "That was a tabloid. I remember that, actually, the paparazzi caught a picture of us standing close together at a gala and splashed it all over. But, ah, no. Ha! Not at all. Never. Anyway, Thor's obviously the better catch." He couldn't stop laughing.
Until he realized that utter relief had washed over Bucky's face.
"Oh no," Tony said. "You?" It would make a little sense, anyway, why Cap had been so gung ho about going after Bucky even if that meant flouting the law. And why he'd always gotten that sad, faraway look in his eyes anytime the lost Winter Soldier had been mentioned.
Bucky's eyes widened slightly, though the rest of his face didn't change. "No. Not like that. He's my friend. Since we were kids."
"Well, he's my friend too," Tony said, then amended, "was my friend. Well. Maybe we'll get there again. He sent me a letter, you know."
"I know."
They looked at each other for several moments, something almost like understanding passing between them for the first time. It was funny, really, but there was something else there—a depth of feeling, maybe you could call it—that made it plausible enough. Bucky obviously loved Steve, whatever form it took. And so did he. Tony let his chin tilt toward his chest and shook his head. "God. We gotta get him back, don't we."
"Yeah," Bucky said. "We do."
The coordinates Stark had pulled from the video led them to a remote stretch of Arizona desert, rocky and ridged in the distance by low mountains. There was nothing immediately obvious from the surface, but the 'jet's scanners—supplemented by Iron Man's—told them that there was a vast facility underground.
They touched down about half a mile out to minimize their chances of being detected by the base. Bucky checked his arsenal (more necessary to carry now than it had been before the fight with Stark) and prepared himself the mission. With the others still en route, possibly to the wrong location, he didn't expect it to take long before they were fully on the offensive.
At least, Bucky reflected, that was one more thing that he and Stark agreed on. Neither of them wanted to wait around.
The entrance to the base was a set of doors encased in concrete and half-hidden by a rock formation. Iron Man fried the locking mechanism with a beam from his wrist in a second and disappeared into the staircase. Bucky jumped after him. For a brief moment, he flashed back to the Howling Commando days, and a dozen missions that had begun this way, sneaking together into dingy enemy installments...except it had always been Steve in the lead, Steve he'd followed. He forced the memory away. There was no point in thinking of the past.
They were in a small, cramped staircase, the dry Arizona heat dissipating quickly as they moved underground. Iron Man moved forward, hovering just above the staircase. Bucky followed, silent as a cat, ready to shoot anything that moved. It was dark and stuffy and the concrete stairs were chipped, like they were old.
Something wasn't right.
Something wasn't right.
He didn't know what, but Bucky's senses were well enough tuned to anger that he didn't have to.
"Stark," he said.
Stark, already several yards ahead of him, turned around—
And then everything went to hell. It started as a spark of brightness from down below, which quickly burgeoned into a fireball and Bucky had a millisecond to think—BOMB!—before the heat and force enveloped them on all sides and then the force and brilliance disappeared into pain and darkness and nothing.
Steve felt the foundation shake. However deep in the compound it he was, it was subtle, but it dislodged dust from the ceiling above. It rained down on him for a few seconds before his sluggish, pained mind realized what had happened.
Something had exploded nearby.
He twisted in his chains, uncaring that the metal bit into his skin, or that his chest was a mess of bone shards and pain that seized every time he shifted an inch. It didn't matter. His captor's words echoed in his mind.
Or maybe we're just going to blow them all up.
His friends had must have come for him, and gotten caught in the blast. They could be dead or injured and in need of help. He had to do something. He wrapped his fingers around the chains and pulled.
"Gaaahhhh!"
The noise tore out of him like it had a mind of its own. The chains creaked against the moorings in the concrete ceiling, shaking loose more dust. Blood burbled up in his throat as he gasped against the pain, coating his mouth with a metallic tang. He kept pulling. His arms were shaking, pain radiating from a dozen stab wounds and cracked bones and God knew what else. It didn't matter. He had to get free. He had to help his friends. He hadn't had the strength before but now—he had to do it—he had to—
The first chain came free with a mighty jerk, breaking free from its housing in a shower of dust and concrete chunks. Steve cried out as all of his weight transferred to his other arm, pulling abruptly on his torn and battered joints. He wrapped his freed hand (no longer so numb as fiery pins and needles slammed through it) around the chain holding his other arm and used all of his weight to heave on it.
The second chain snapped free of its mooring in the concrete ceiling and Steve collapsed to the floor, scuffing his knees and palms on the concrete. The chains and manacles were still attached to his wrists but he was free, at least. He forced himself to stagger up, ignoring the shards of agony pulsing through his chest and his badly-healed ankle. He wrapped the chains around his hands, leaving the long ends free like twin whips—they were the best weapons he had for the moment—and limped forward. His bad ankle shook and shot agony through his leg but it didn't matter. None of it mattered.
Steve was going to save his friends.
