Chapter 8
"But you're certain? You're absolutely certain?"
"There's no way to be absolutely certain without every single one of us in this room having seen it with our very eyes."
"Then how could we just –?"
"When have we ever needed such confirmation before, hm? When have we ever needed such holistic certainty?"
"But this is different. What you're asking is huge."
Steve listened with half an ear. The meeting in Conference Room One had endured for nearly two hours, and it had long since descended into arguments that trekked around and around in circles.
This is the information. This is what we've discovered. This is what we think we should do.
How? Pull ranks, of course. How we always do it. Yes, that means everyone.
Of course, everyone. Do you have any idea the scale of the operation we're dealing with?
Rogers is reliable. I don't care if he can't name his source – no, I said I don't care. Time is of the essence.
Why? Why? Because when have we ever questioned the intelligence before? More than that, Rogers took the pictures himself.
Again and again, around and around; the arguments never ceased. The conference room, large and wide and with enough seats to hold two dozen occupants, felt almost small for the sheer number of people it held. SHIELD, the Asgard Squad, the greater number of the NYPD officers who had been directly involved in the HYDRA case, and a handful of directors that Steve had rarely seen descend from their office thrones – all of them were seated, or standing, or leaning across the table. Almost all of them were talking, too, a mish-mash of confusion and outbursts and circles, circles, circles.
Steve hardly listened. He'd barely listened for nearly an hour when they'd first begun circling in their conversations. Instead, his eyes were fixed upon the tablet in his hand as he scrolled through the files depicted in minute print.
"What you're asking is for full-scale apprehension of potential criminals –"
"Yes."
"- an invasion of territory, the validity of its criminal nature what has only been hinted at by a single officer –"
"Yes."
"- and you want a number of attendants exceeding even that of the Red Room Operation? Fury, you can't be –"
"Yes. I can and I am. Tell me, Director March, why it is so much less believable that Rogers would have valid intelligence on HYDRA than a mole who is self-assuredly a member of HYDRA himself?"
Steve flicked his finger and the page on the tablet scrolled upwards. Words leaped out at him, names – Doctor Zola, Karpov, Schmidt, Strucker – of which less than half were familiar only because he'd read them from the files in previous pages. Most of it was still in German, their translators knuckling through the pages that had been filched with tedious slowness, and Steve couldn't understand half of it.
But there was enough. Enough for him to know it was relevant. Enough to know that the information went above and beyond what he'd expected to find of HYDRA, the criminal drug syndicate based in NYC. From what he could see, what he could understand, most of HYDRA wasn't even based in New York at all.
"Alright. Alright, let's think this through."
"We've been thinking this through for two hours, Director. Any more thinking and you'll fry what brain cells you have left."
"A little respect, Fury, wouldn't go astray –"
"I'll offer respect to those who do the same to mine. Captain Rogers has a lead, and it's a damn good lead."
"Captain? Rogers is –"
"He got the evidence himself. Took the pictures. Infiltrated the base. What more could you ask for?"
Steve barely spared Fury an acknowledging glance. Despite his position as their manager, Fury didn't have to stand by his team. He was SHIELD's director, which sat about a mile below those of the 'real' police, as had been the distinction between SHIELD and the rest of the NYPD for years. But standing up for his officers wasn't part of his job description – or at least not to such a degree. Not in the face of the Central directors when they huffed and fumed before his requests.
Steve held his tongue, staring intently at the tablet. His eyes locked on one word, a single word that he'd noticed recurringly but not enough to incite the interest of the rest of the force. Or not much, anyway.
Soldat.
Bucky.
Steve didn't know why they called him soldier. He didn't even know what the words surrounding the pseudo-title meant, but it couldn't be good. So objectified, so disregarding, that the only name he was given was 'soldier'. Steve had wanted Bucky out of HYDRA for a long time, but that longing had redoubled since their infiltration two days before.
Two days. Fuck, but the directors could drag things out. They didn't seem to understand time-sensitivity.
"If he infiltrated a HYDRA strongpoint, then what's to say that they don't already know he was there? What's to say they haven't abandoned it just as they have every other goddamn warehouse and base and – and clubhouse they damn-well own."
"Well, we won't damn-well know until we check, will we?"
"So go and check. You don't need an army, Fury –"
"I plan on wiping out HYDRA, Director Curosh, if it's all the same to you. And if the files we've retrieved and what we can make out of them are any indication, this is a pretty big head of our hydra we're lookin' at."
"Files? The files that were stolen from the location?"
"Apprehended, yes."
"You 'apprehended' files, and you honestly believe HYDRA doesn't know about it. Fury, I never believed you to be ignorant, but the digital fingerprints left all over –"
"Are non-existent, I can assure you, Director." That from Tony, who was a brave man to step into the throughs of argument. Steve had always known him to be brave, though that bravery was often mistaken – or accompanied by – pigheadedness. "Not my products. Fool proof, I guarantee."
"We're not asking for an infomercial, Stark."
"Good to hear. Can we get this show on the road, then?"
"And provide SHIELD with an army of officers? Officers that can't be spared from their responsibilities and duties?"
"Not even for a day?"
"Stark, sit down."
"Yes, ma'am."
Steve glanced towards Tony, who regarded the spread of directors at one end of the table with objectionably raised eyebrows. He glanced at the rest of his team, at Nat seated beside Clint and murmuring something that could only be heard as a buzz, at Sam shaking his head as he didn't quite glare at the directors himself. At every other officer, too, that muttered to themselves, to one another, and watching the Fury-director exchange like a tennis match spectator.
Only Vision seemed entirely oblivious, his attention trained upon his bulky laptop where he worked at decrypting and translating and dodging virtual booby traps as he'd been doing for hours. Steve had apologised for the workload, but Vision had only offered him a benevolent smile. "I enjoy the challenge, Steve," he'd said, before losing himself in the cybernetic world.
Steve drew his gaze towards the directors. Towards the suited men and women frowning in varying degrees of objection at the rest of the room and Fury in particular. He stared at them, none having seen a day in the field, in the lab or outside of their grand offices in years if ever, and he decided: he'd had enough.
"With all due respect, Directors," Steve said, speaking into the temporary lull that followed Tony's interruption, "the request for additional support was just that: a request. SHIELD will continue to initiate its operation regardless of the support of additional personal. I'm prepared to face the members of HYDRA in their own territory without such support if necessary, but if it pleases you, I would like to do so promptly. As you've already pointed out, they may not remain in such a location for much longer if they still remain at all."
The lull persisted after Steve's words, though for a decidedly different reason. Steve stared at the directors, but he heard a sound that was nearly a laugh from Tony. He felt Sam's hum of approval at his side and Nat's invisible smile. He thought he maybe even felt the similar support from the rest of his team, the slight nods of head and glances in his direction that were mimicked, at least in part, by the rest of the attendants in the room.
Fury hadn't even glanced in Steve's direction as he spoke, and he didn't when he'd finished. Leaning as he was upon the table, hands before him in a stoic clasp, he thudded the wood once briefly before nodding himself. "I believe Rogers has said it all," he said.
Then he pushed himself to his feet. "Directors. If you need me between now and the operation's initiation, you know where to find me."
It was their cue to leave. As one, Steve and the rest of SHIELD rose to their feet and followed their director from the room. There wasn't quite a communal strut to their step – or at least not from anyone but Tony – but Steve thought he felt it from them all nonetheless.
As soon as the door closed behind them, the room exploded in a riot of noise. None of them looked back even then, though Rhodie did murmur a mild, "Well, that was fun," as he strode at Fury's side towards their basement.
Fun? Steve wasn't sure he quite agreed, but at least they were finally doing something. Police-army or not, they were going to invade that base.
The abandoned parking lot looked different in the light of day. Granted, it was still abandoned, and the surrounding buildings just as much, but it looked different.
Almost as different as the entire labyrinth of the HYDRA base looked when flooded with snakes.
They didn't stand a chance. Not really. The snakes were unprepared, didn't expect an invasion, and didn't have their defences at the ready. Steve expected the guards. He'd expected them and he told Fury, SHIELD, and every other officer that joined them before entering. Though the night guards – or 'watchmen' as Bucky had called them – were scarce in number, there was still a possibility that those same watchmen would be far more multitudinous in the light of day.
There were doctors, or what appeared to be doctors. There were guards, or those that carried the arms and stance of those who would guard. There were assistants dressed in lab coats with wide eyes blown in horror as Steve and his fellow officers infiltrated through the hatch Bucky had shown him. More officers than Steve had expected, for that matter; apparently, the force wasn't quite as adhering to the sentiment of its directors in regard to SHIELD anymore. Steve would have cared more once upon a time. Once, months ago, before HYDRA and Bucky and everything else had become so much more important.
It wasn't really a fight. There were guards, but it wasn't really a fight. Steve led his team through the darkness. They flooded into every room they came across at the touch of Steve's fingers to the digital lock pads. Firearms raised, voices hefted alongside them, doctors, guards, and assistants fell before their flooding force.
None stood a chance. There was no escaping them.
Up above the labyrinth, in another parking lot just as empty as the first that was nearly three blocks away from where the real entrance to the base lay, he stood and watched the proceedings. Arms folded, squinting slightly in the mid-morning sunlight, Steve watched as officers stood watch over the hordes of HYDRA members – the dozens of them. He watched as those very members, cuffed and hunch-shouldered, were bowed into vehicles to be transported to holding. He watched as officers stood with their recording devices, their clipboards and papers and, for the more practical of the lot, their tablets and styluses, and recorded any word that slipped from a mouth of the apprehended.
He watched as Nat planted herself before the man he'd come to know in the last half an hour as Karpov and drilled him in rapid-fire Russian. It was with something very close to hatred that Steve regarded the man; unassuming as he was, with nothing outstanding about his features besides the thin pencil moustache on his upper lip, he wore objection and defiance in subtle tones that to Steve's trained eye bellowed like an outcry.
If anyone could get anything from him Nat could. She wasn't authorised for an on-the-scene interrogation, but what happened off the record stayed firmly planted their. Steve trusted Nat would get something from him. Anything.
Maybe not what he would ask, though. Steve had questions for the doctors, for the members of HYDRA, just like the rest of SHIELD and the NYPD did. Who do you work for? Who's your boss? Where is your nearest correspondent? How many workers are based at this particular location?
There were questions to be asked about the drugs as well, questions that the Asgard Squad across the other side of the parking lot would be on like fire on oil: was this the only location of production – unlikely but necessary to ask; who is the supplier of the raw materials? Who produces and redesigns the synthetic brand of heroin that was made by HYDRA? Was HYDRA the only producer of that particular strain? And, most paramount, where was the doctor who stood behind the endeavour?
Steve knew Zola wasn't there. He'd asked and it infuriated him that he wasn't. The doctor – or whatever he was, for Bucky had seemed somewhat derisive of such a title – wasn't anywhere to be seen. Given that he was one of the few names prominent enough that even SHIELD had uncovered the scent of him, it was infuriating that he was nowhere to be found.
Frustrating. Even in success, even with the satisfaction of a plan gone right, SHIELD's operations were always frustrating.
Steve wasn't thinking about Zola, however. He wasn't even thinking all that much about their operation, their infiltration, and the hours of clean up and analysis and questioning that would be undertaken over the next hours, days, weeks. He almost, almost disregarded the fierce triumph that thrummed through the apprehenders scattered across the parking lot for what would surely be a leap in their progression towards slicing HYDRA's many heads off once and for all. After the stagnation, the minimal successes over the past few weeks, it was sorely needed.
But Steve barely considered that. He stared at Karpov – Vasily Karpov, the files that Vision had decrypted named him – and his glaring wasn't solely for the brightness of the sun. It was because of what he'd read in the hours before their mission had initiated. What he'd learned of the man who was, even to the rest of SHIELD, considered a significant figure in HYDRA.
It was because of what he'd read pertaining to Bucky.
Bucky's name didn't appear in the files. There was no mention of James Barnes, nor any other derivative of his name, but he was there. He was there as simply 'the soldier', and each reference to him was so objectified, so emotionless and careless, that Steve had almost thrown his tablet with its electronic files across the room in a fit of rage.
He hadn't, and not only because Steve wasn't one for uncontrolled outbursts of violence. He hadn't because he'd wanted – needed – to read the files instead.
The soldier was an asset. Seemingly spawned from nowhere, a soldier was what he was. Karpov had apparently been the one to initiate many of his orders, and the directions were recorded in almost offhanded print alongside similar recordings of operations.
07-24: Process of bulk order, shipped to site Delta, required 07-25. Urgent payment, exchange denied without demands met (Zola, signed XXXX).
07-24: Second correspondence conducted between Hamilton and Ustine. Inconclusive findings. Hamilton required follow-up, potential for eradication should inconsistency between parties continue (Poliskey, signed XXXX).
07-25: Third denial of compliance by Jefferson. Final warning disclosed. Orders provided to the soldier for eradication of Jefferson and Co. (Karpov, signed XXXX).
Eradication. The word seemed so blasé, so disregarding of the fact that it entailed the destruction of human life. If nothing else, such simple anecdotes would have made Steve hate Karpov simply on principle. But that was nothing on the rest of it.
… how I find myself at a loose end with the majority of assets and as such have endeavoured to pursue the production of a more tailored candidate to process orders. The experiment conducted by Arnim Zola – the doctor expresses intentions of permanently joining the NYC development with his team of assistants the Monday following next – upon his specific subject is of potential significance. Subject appears malleable and ready to follow orders. Initiation for training has been discussed with the doctor and approved…
That in Russian, as translated by Vision with the assistance of Nat. A nearly ten-year-old transcript that was buried in something like memorial records in Karpov's file. That, and –
… no difficulties with the latest operation, proving once more the validity of my suggestion. The soldier successfully completed the set program of negligible targets in record time. Demonstration of further successes will result in primary use in future. The use of the soldier's skillset appears to be of significant benefit to the establishment. Specialised tests suggested by myself regarding the unnecessary eradication of Ophelia Eirhart and Co. were conducted swiftly and without protest, making the asset of particular benefit to…
Steve hated reading the notes. They were buried so deeply with Bucky mentioned so briefly in passing that not a one of SHIELD had even mentioned him. Not yet, anyway. Steve hated it. He hated that Karpov appeared to be the one who had thrust Bucky into the role of killing. He hated that he was treated as merely an asset, as 'the solider'. Perhaps the worst of all, however, was how he corresponded with Zola.
Steve had never been so close to throwing his tablet as he had been reading the barest scrap of notes Karpov had included to the effect.
… my most recent discussion with the doctor proves fruitful. The soldier was damaged nearly irreversibly and potential destruction was considered, but Dr Zola assures me that both the soldier and his limb will be in functioning order post-haste with replacement of the latter. The latest model for upper-left limb incorporates increased strength and sensitivity, with more complete involvement of the CNS to ensure maximum efficiency of movements. The doctor cautions that the process requires intrusive surgery the likes of which could result in significant neuronal degeneration of the spinal cord should surgery err. Approval has been granted to proceed with such surgery.
The assignment itself was conducted to completion, however, resulting in the capacity for progression towards further overwhelming of the aversive Fraulty party and erasure of the primary contenders for…
Vasily Karpov was a director. A coordinator. An instructor that ensured the proceedings of HYDRA were conducted to their fullest. He was, Steve had deduced, a significant figure in the New York City HYDRA threat, and to have him captured at all was a significant success on part of SHIELD and the force. He was Bad. He was Wrong. He'd ordered the deaths of countless people – or so the records represented – with little emotional investment and barely a word spared for the identity of those killed.
More than that, he was the one who ordered Bucky. Steve would hate him for that if nothing else. Perhaps even mostly for that. Yes, maybe mostly for that.
"You're glaring terribly hard."
Steve didn't glance towards Clint as he appeared at his side. It was indicative of how confidently the directors and operatives both believed their mission to have been completed that he was on the scene at all; Clint, unless directly called upon, was more likely a distant observer. It was what he was good at – just like he was good at observing his team members.
"Aren't I allowed to?" Steve said, and he felt his glare sharpen further as Nat clearly posed another question to Karpov's cuffed figure, to which he spat at her feet. He actually spat, and the curl of his lip that he turned upon Nat a moment later was full of disgust. "I think if anyone deserves to be glared at it's HYDRA."
"Mm," Clint hummed in agreement. "You'd be right on that one. I can't help but notice, though…"
Steve tried not to, but eventually he couldn't help but glance at Clint sidelong. The two of them were no closer nor more distant than anyone else in SHIELD, but Steve had always been more than aware of Clint's at times unnerving ability to simply see things he had no business seeing. "What?"
"It's nothing profound."
"Barton."
Clint's affable smile spread across his face. "We've switched from using first names now, have we?"
"Well, when I feel like I'm being played with, I find myself distinctly less fond of my colleagues," Steve said, regarding Clint pointedly.
Clint raised a hand. "It's nothing particularly bad, I swear. It just seems to me like you're less objectively hating HYDRA right now and more personally invested. This operation hit you hard, Cap?"
Steve pressed his lips together to stifle the urge to snap at Clint. He wasn't one to crack in anger. He wasn't one to lash out, either, or to act with fury – or at least he wasn't when outside an operation. Out in the field was a little different, but the need to rely upon instinct overwhelmed that to retrain himself. Sometimes lashing out was necessary when in a fight. Oftentimes, in fact.
Steve wasn't in a fight, but the instinct still rose within him. He smothered it with an iron fist. "I think the threat of HYDRA has become personal to all of us, wouldn't you agree, Clint?"
Clint cocked his head slightly, then glanced over his shoulder for a second, momentarily distracted by a sharp outcry of protest. The crier subsided into grumbles as the officer standing behind him folded him into the back seat of a police car. "You could say that," Clint murmured. "I guess it just seemed like something had changed a bit for you."
"Maybe it has," Steve found himself saying before his good sense bit back the words.
Clint turned back towards him, head tipping again slightly as he regarded Steve shrewdly. "Just out of curiosity, Steve – this intel."
Steve felt his jaw lock. "What about it?" he ground out. He truly wasn't in the mood to be drilled and questioned like one of the apprehended HYDRA members.
Clint shrugged. "Just wondering. Where did you meet this person? Are they something to you?" As Steve simply stared at him, his smile became knowing. "Let me guess. Classified?"
"You could say that."
"By circumstance, or by yourself?"
"That's classified too."
Clint's smile widened. "Alright, then. I'll hold my tongue."
"Please do," Steve said with a curt nod. "My correspondent would definitely be unhappy to hear that their name's been dropped, even in a roundabout manner."
Clint chuckled. "I'll bare that in mind." Then he was starting off across the lot towards Nat, weaving through the officers that scurried in their endless, slightly crazed dance. He did call over his shoulder as he went, however, the knowing hint returned to his expression. "Useful stuff they've given you, though. Might want to keep tabs on them, yeah? We could use someone like that in the near future, I think."
Steve stared after him, and all he could think was, Use? I don't want to use Bucky. He's had enough of being used. For Steve might not know everything, might know precious little, even, but that Bucky had been ordered through compulsion by Karpov, tied by his commitment to HYDRA as tightly as Steve was to SHIELD, he was growing more and more certain of.
Bucky might be far, far removed from the boy he'd been when Steve had first met him. So far as to be unrecognisable at times, even. But Steve didn't believe he was so far gone as to want to kill. As to revel in it. The Bucky that could feel so much for the death of his little friend Michael, who could hold Steve in a crushing embrace when he admitted his mom's death… it wasn't in him. Steve didn't believe Bucky could change that much. Even if he hadn't seen the evidence of otherwise, heard it in his voice as he spoke in that one and only instance of those he'd killed, Steve would have believed it.
Personal? Clint was exactly right. This was personal on a whole knew level to what Steve had experienced in the past. He'd thought it was personal before, when his morals were on the line. But this… this was far closer to his heart.
The clean up would take hours. It would take days, even; possibly weeks. Retreating back to Central, into the SHIELD basement, Steve was bogged down by paperwork for the rest of the afternoon and well into the night. The high of that morning, of what they'd successfully managed, wasn't quite lost beneath the weight of reports, but it was a near thing. Not even the nods of approval from Steve's team could quite erase the disappointment of drudgery.
Fury's recognition came close, though.
"Cap," he called from across the basement, standing at the doors to the elevator where he was in the process of retreating for a follow-up meeting. Steve raised his head and drew his gaze towards him. He would never understand why Fury took to using the names Tony had allocated to everyone; he didn't seem the type, but then Fury had always been a mystery to Steve.
"Sir?"
Fury regarded him from his single eye, his frown split by the eye patch that crossed his face. He nodded his head slowly as though in agreement to his own thoughts. "Good effort today. We owe the success of this operation to you."
Steve was aware of the eyes of his team around him, approving or perhaps, in the case of Tony, smirking at the sheer awkwardness of Fury's unexpected compliment. Steve didn't glance towards any of them. "I can hardly take the credit, sir."
"Suck it up for once, Rogers," Fury said. "Doesn't this righteous act grow tired sometimes?"
"It can't grow tired if it's not an act," Rhodie said from behind Steve, his words surprisingly heartfelt. Tony snorted at his side.
Fury's regard shifted briefly to Rhodie before settling back on Steve. "Regardless, that's solid work, officer. Not every man can pull as much from a mole as that. Keep it up." Then he turned and strode into the elevator, the ping of its closing a signal for his departure.
"That was so awkward," Sam said into the momentary silence that followed.
"Director Fury isn't incapable of handing out compliments, it would seem," Wanda said.
"Doesn't make it any less awkward."
Wanda shrugged before shifting her attention towards Steve. "He is right, though, Steve. Good job."
"I know I'm impressed," Clint said from his perch, regarding Steve with his slightly knowing smile. Nat nodded her agreement from where she leant on the edge of his desk.
"You managed all of that without telling me?" Sam said, leaning back in his seat. "Not that I can't appreciate a job well done, but aren't partners supposed to tell each other that kind of thing?"
"Sorry, Sam," Steve said, bowing his head a little. It was less in apology and more from a touch of guilt; Steve knew Sam was right as much as he knew that he wouldn't be telling him anything to the effect in future, either. Not concerning Bucky.
Sam shrugged. "I'm not complaining. I told you, I appreciate a job well done. It just surprised me that you managed without me noticing."
"I never saw you as the espionage type, Cap," Tony said, and as Steve glanced over his shoulder towards him, it was to see him not even sparing Steve a glance in return. His focus was entirely upon his computer, his fingers darting across the keyboard at an impressive speed. Sometimes, Tony was the hardest worker of them all. When he chose to be, that was.
"I'm not," Steve said.
"And yet you managed to coerce an insider into leaking you intel?" Tony shook his head before frowning at his computer screen and deliberately tapping in another command. "Or at least I'm assuming it was an insider. Is it?"
Steve didn't reply, turning back to his own work and the half page template of report he had yet to complete. Clint spoke for him. "It's classified, I believe."
"Classified?"
"Very."
"According to who? If Fury knew I'd –"
"According to Captain Rogers over there."
This time Steve could feel Tony's gaze rest upon him. He didn't glance up as he spoke. "Newbie, don't you know I know everything around here?"
"Mostly everything," Rhodie said.
"No, everything. I make it my job to know. Rogers. Hey, Rogers, you listening to me? I'll get it out of you yet."
"Yeah, I don't think so, Tony," Sam said, approval woven into amusement in his tone. "Good luck trying. Steve's as stubborn as a mule when he wants to be."
"You clearly haven't seen me at my best. I'm a master interrogator."
"Pipe down, would you, everyone?" Rhodie, ever the mediator, spoke over them. "If anyone has intentions of going home tonight, we need to knuckle down."
Tony still poked and prodded, Sam still deflected, and conversation was still exchanged, but knuckle down they did. Steve was left to wade through the piles of his work and keep his 'classified' intelligence just that.
Despite Rhodie's words, when ten o'clock drew near and Steve made to leave, it raised more than a few surprised eyebrows. Not because he was leaving –SHIELD had accepted that Steve did that, now – and not because no one else was either, because Bruce had already left, Wanda was halfway out the door, and Vision had retreated for the night into a cat-like curl at his desk; Rhodie had already draped him in his customary blanket. It was because, when situations arose in the past of such significance, Steve was rarely found to leave before the last of them if he left at all.
"It's not a bad thing," Sam said as he rose from his own seat, arms stretching overhead. "Just surprising."
"Are you alright, Steve?" Nat asked, a deeper question to her words that Steve chose to ignore.
"I'm fine," Steve said. "Just beat."
"'Just beat', he says," Tony echoed from his own seat. He'd pulled a significant weight that day and demonstrated to anyone who even had an inkling of suspicion that he was a loose end in SHIELD just why he wasn't. Tony was a paradox like that; at times he worked as hard as everyone else combined, as though to make up for his days where he did absolutely nothing. "You're beat? When has that ever stopped you, Rogers?"
Steve shrugged. He wasn't going to get into an argument with Tony. Not with anyone, for that matter. "It's been a long couple of days."
"Fair enough," Sam said. Wandering to Steve's side, he clapped a hand to his shoulder. "Did you actually get any sleep over the last few days?"
"Not really."
"Then let's head out. Leave the workload to Tony when he's on his caffeine high."
"I object to your suggestion, Wilson. I can work when not under the influence of caffeine."
"How many cups have you had today, Tony?"
"That's irrelevant."
"Not so irrelevant when you try to sleep, though," Rhodie said, taking a sip from his own mug that Steve knew held a blast of his ridiculously strong brand of caffeine.
Tony brushed his words aside, still typing with his other hand as he did so. "Sleep is for the weak. Run along, weaklings. I'll pull your weight for you in your absence."
Shaking his head, Steve strode to the elevator with Sam at his side. He left, returning to his apartment, because he had to. Because even though the mission and SHIELD's workload was important, and despite the world of possibilities that had opened with each decryption Vision conducted, Steve had to return. To peer into the darkness of his bedroom. To wait on the off chance that Bucky might come.
Steve went home. Then he went to work. Then he returned home again and barely slept, despite Tony's prodding suggestions. For three whole days, Steve wound in a cycle of endless work and waiting. Three days he returned home and Bucky wasn't there.
Steve didn't let himself grow concerned. He couldn't, for otherwise he would tear himself apart in worry. Still, it was with a knee-knocking, almost overwhelming wave of relief that he returned home on the fourth day to find Bucky waiting for him.
He stood in the dark, as silent and watching and still as he always was. Steve felt him as soon as he glanced into the room, felt him as he always did, and it was with a slightly shaky exhalation that he paused in the doorway, closed his eyes briefly, before striding inside.
Steve had been scared.
He'd been scared of what could have happened in Bucky's absence. He'd been scared because there was surely no way that Bucky could have escaped without some sort of reprimand, not when he'd been recognised in the labyrinth of HYDRA's holdings. More than that, surely Steve had been seen with him. Had he been compromised because of it? What had happened? Where had he been?
Steve didn't ask. He didn't ask any of that as he crossed the room and, without pause, wrapped his arms around Bucky's waist. It was a sign of the times, of how they had both changed and regressed, that Bucky let it happen. Steve's embrace, his squeezing hold that almost convinced himself that he could hold on tight enough that Bucky would never get away, that he would never leave, that he would be okay, was different from their impassioned holds. It was different from the heated touches, the lustful kisses, and the sometimes nearly aggressive tumble onto Steve's bed, clothing torn askew to bare any hint of skin to hungry fingers. In many ways, Steve was just as if not more satisfied with the simple touch. Just holding Bucky… just having him here…
"Are you alright?" Steve asked, his head bowed into Bucky's shoulder.
For a moment, Bucky didn't reply. His hands rested, barely touching, upon Steve's arms, more to simply hold that in any kind of demand. Steve could feel the soft warmth of his breath on his own shoulder and it was calming. Soothing. That Bucky held onto him in return, seeming to not only allow but to almost want the simple contact, was even more precious.
After a long pause, Bucky spoke. "Is that your opening question for the night?"
Steve turned his head slightly, if not enough to glance at Bucky's profile. "It's always going to be."
"You're a sap, Steve."
"I am. And?"
Bucky didn't let go of Steve. If anything, for a moment Steve thought he even held him back little tighter. "I'm alright," he said.
He wasn't. Something in his reply told Steve that he wasn't. Drawing away from Bucky's shoulder slightly, just enough to peer instead at his face, Steve knew it. For more than just the barest hint in his voice, it lay in the barest hint of a bruise that faded into the shadow of stubble upon his cheeks.
Steve bit back the urge to speak. He withheld the rush of feeling that welled within him for the sight of that bruise, the hatred for Karpov, and Zola, and anyone else who was involved. Steve smothered the questions that longed to spill forth and demand answers for who and why and was it punishment or for what reason exactly so that I can know to avoid it in future. Instead, he leant into Bucky and captured his lips in the familiar warmth of a kiss, deliberately ignoring what they couldn't discuss.
Bucky let him. Steve thought he might have even heard something that almost, almost sounded like murmured gratitude voiced before they lost themselves in one another.
Thing were going to change. Steve could feel it. Just as they had with Loki, with his intelligence that provided an insight and a crack into HYDRA's impenetrable walls, things were going to change for SHIELD. But for Bucky, with Bucky, Steve could hope that some things wouldn't. He hoped that, in this regard at least, it could stay just the same.
It was a feeble hope, Steve knew, flimsy even in the shrouds of his own mind, but he wished it anyway.
Things did change. Just as Steve had expected, they changed quickly, with rapidly evolving speed. That change was assisted in part by the intel gained from the infiltration and Vision's decryptions, partially because Loki humoured them and picked up his game, and partially because of Bucky.
Steve had never been more admiring of Vision. He'd known he was a master of programming, could infiltrate almost any system even more efficiently than Tony and his gadgets could, and was so deeply embedded in the computing world that he practically spoke like a machine most of the time. What Steve hadn't fully appreciated, however, was just how good Vision was.
It was expected that the files filched from the HYDRA base would be encrypted. It was expected that they might even wipe themselves clean if touched by unfamiliar fingers. It might even be expected that, for an organisation such as they, it would be impossible for SHIELD to break through their firewalls.
Not for Vision. Vision was a master of the technological world, and he proved just that mastery with his speed and proficiency of decryption. Central NYPD had a wealth of specialists on hand, but even they stepped aside to make way for Vision's superior skills.
He was the one who got the names. He was the one that hashed out a sketching of coordinates that SHIELD as a team poured over. Vision was the one who dressed down the complexities and, alongside Nat with her own particular skillset, picked apart the confusion of codes to reveal the knowledge beneath the surface.
It was a goldmine – of chemical combinations, a history of orders, and Karpov's records of enactments conducted. A goldmine for the police. What was more was that Steve knew it only scratched the surface of the intel HYDRA kept hidden in their closeted midst. It was a well of possibility that Steve felt himself thirst for like a dying man.
Loki's dangling titbits seemed to pick up pace just as Vision himself unearthed more and more. It was almost as though the faceless figure of their double agent felt the need to provide equal amounts of information that they managed to procure for themselves. Steve found himself growing more and more curious about Loki, and even more so for the pride that Thor spoke with whenever he relayed his latest leads.
"I told you he could be trusted," Thor said, his booming voice resounding throughout the conference room as though he wished everyone in Central to hear him. "Did I not tell you his words were valid?"
"Yeah, you did, Your Highness," Tony said with such blatant sarcasm that more than a few eyes rolled.
Thor didn't hear it. Or he pretended not to; Steve wasn't entirely sure which. "Perhaps you will be less inclined to disbelieve such leads in future?"
They were. SHIELD and the Asgard Squad and the NYPD officers that were growing more and more involved as necessity dictated did heed Thor's and thus Loki's words. As understanding of just how deeply HYDRA's tentacles threaded through New York City's underbelly were unveiled, Loki's leads became that much more important.
Missions abounded. Steve saw more sites of clandestine chemistry, more tubs and vats, and was assaulted by the familiar, faint aroma of heroin than he'd ever wanted to see.
The paperwork piled up, an endless stack in hard and soft copy. The interrogators were constantly on their toes with battling the wills of the apprehended criminals. Every day in the office was manic – at times, Steve simply had to extract himself for the briefest reprieve to let loose in the gym. It was the only way he could retain his sanity.
Steve had always preferred fieldwork to desk work, and despite the latter swamping him in a never-ending stream, everything changed after Karpov and his team were apprehended. Everything. Steve felt as though he was stretching his wings, that he was actually doing something, that they were getting somewhere.
Steve didn't want to hurt people; he wanted to protect them. If it came to contained violence against those who were in turn hurting others, he wouldn't hold himself back from the necessity of attack, or threatening with force. There was something fiercely satisfying about working the muscles he trained every day in doing what was Right. What Steve knew was Right, what he felt in his bones, even as he fought against those who professed their innocence with lying tongues and preached that "I had no idea that was what I was being ordered to do, I swear!"
It was an exhausting time. Exhilarating with success, but exhausting. Days stacked atop one another, with the threat of danger from potential fights that always accompanied fieldwork pitted against the tantalising offer of success. There was still so far to go, still so many to apprehend, and with each base uncovered, each pit of snakes bared to the light, that reality was made only more apparent. None were quite so revealing as the first Bucky had shown Steve, none quite so beneficial in the information and facts they scrounged from Karpov's computer, but it was something. They were getting somewhere.
What really made the difference, however, was Bucky. Not overtly, and not to anyone else's eyes, but Steve knew. What Bucky offered wasn't in the leads he dropped like those that slipped from Loki's teasing tongue, or in blatant discoveries of intelligence that would patch the gaps in SHIELD's knowledge. Instead, he worked the flip side. What he offered – Steve knew it wasn't for SHIELD's benefit. Bucky offered for Steve himself.
It began barely two weeks after the Ground Base One operation. The operation was so named only in later weeks, when it was discovered that HYDRA quite literally dwelled underground in a number of their pits. Since the operation, since Bucky had been absent for nearly half a week, he'd made a point of visiting Steve's apartment almost every night. He never said he did, never mentioned that he came more often for a particular reason, but Steve knew. Like so many things that Steve hadn't even noticed but somehow simply seemed to arise, he just knew.
Like the fact that, after those two weeks, he knew Bucky was agitated.
It wouldn't have required one who knew Bucky well to realise, Steve acknowledged. In the darkness of night, from where he sat on the end of his bed in nothing but jeans and watched Bucky, he could see that much. Bucky was… Agitated didn't even begin to cover it.
The play of hallway light made Bucky's bare skin paler than it was, darkening his hair to black and his eyes just as much. His head was bowed as he stepped four slow steps towards the window, then turned and walked another four back towards the doorway.
At any other time, Steve might have simply hung suspended in the opportunity to watch him, to admire the very sight of him; Steve had seen more than his fair share of impressively built bodies, had sparred with more than a few in SHIELD and otherwise, but Bucky was different. The spread of muscles across his back drew Steve's eyes and held them, the tapering of his waist, the curve of his arms as he reached his real hand up and grazed a hand distractedly through his hair. Bucky had changed from how he'd been as a boy and a teenager. Of course he had, but that reality was made no less astounding, no less captivating, than it was when Steve watched him. He was bigger, more noticeable, simply more. That change was made no less so for Steve's own growth.
"Bucky," Steve said quietly, long yet all too short minutes after he'd settled taken to staring at him. Steve wanted to simply stare, but something was clearly amiss. "Tell me what's wrong."
Steve wouldn't ask it as a question. Oftentimes, he was beginning to understand, it was easier to drawn an explanation from Bucky without asking at all. Sometimes, as he never would have months before when they'd first met, Bucky would just tell him.
That night was not one of those nights.
Bucky paused in step. He didn't quite glance towards Steve, keeping his head bowed and turned away in the manner that Steve had noticed he adopted often of late. It was for HYDRA-related instances that he did so, he'd realised. For times when he was torn between his bone-deep commitment to HYDRA, to what he owed them, and Steve.
Because Bucky cared about Steve. That understanding was one that Steve had always known, even if he'd forgotten or believed otherwise in Bucky's absence. Now, though, it was something more. It was something greater. Bucky cared about him and it was splitting him in two. Steve felt as torn on the matter as Bucky seemed; he shouldn't be heartened that Bucky would stand by him, but he was. Just as he was heartbroken that it had to happen at all.
After a moment of standing still, frozen and staring at the ground with hand still raised to the side of his head, Bucky spoke. "That's not a question, Steve."
"No. It's not."
"It would make things easier if it was."
I know it would, Steve thought, and it saddened him to realise. How much he longed for the easy exchanges of a long-ago past. Oftentimes Steve didn't think it would ever return. "If we keep this up at the rate we are, I'll end up doubling my tally."
Bucky exhaled in a huff of what wasn't quite a laugh. "Well, you've already done that enough times."
"Remember when we were kids and it was always you who asked me the questions?" Steve said. "I could hardly get you to stop to get my own say in sometimes. Surely all those times count for something."
Bucky flicked him a sidelong stare. Brief. Somehow a little saddened. "I remember," was all he said.
Steve sighed. Reaching a hand across the distance between them, he took a hold of Bucky's metal wrist and tugged slightly, gently, towards himself. Bucky resisted his coaxing for barely a moment before allowing himself to be drawn. Their knees bumped together and the contact was somehow reassuring.
"Tell me, Bucky," Steve murmured, raising his other hand to grasp Bucky's raised arm, if only to hold it just as he did his other wrist. "Please."
Bucky shook his head just slightly. "Don't do the puppy dog face thing, Stevie."
"Do the what?"
"You know what I'm talking about."
Steve did. The thing was that he did. He bit back the urge to smile, if a little sadly, and shrugged. "I'll use any ammunition in my arsenal."
Bucky huffed in that not-quite laugh again. "Brutal."
"Maybe."
Another pause and then Bucky sighed. He leant forwards slightly, enough that his forehead actually dropped to rest against Steve's. Once upon a time, such a gesture wouldn't have seemed possible. Once, any kind of contact that wasn't heated and lustful would have been awkward and resistant. But not now. Now it felt just… Right.
How could anyone believe him to be just an object? Steve thought. Just a soldier? Just a murderer? Not him. Never him.
If only such an argument could be used in Bucky's defence. Steve thought that, somehow, his testimony wouldn't stand up to the mark.
The feel of Bucky's breath upon Steve's lips stuttered slightly before he spoke. Definitely not just a murderer. "You're going down south tomorrow," he said quietly.
Steve blinked up at his, his distraction abruptly ceased. "What?"
Bucky's eyes, so close to Steve's own, were closed. "You are. Down Staten Island way, on the edge of the bay. You've found Keller's hideout."
Steve swallowed. Isla Keller was just one more addition to the rapidly growing list of known HYDRA representatives. She was a big one, too. "How do you know that?"
Bucky didn't reply. Not to that, at least. His head shifted slightly against Steve's as he blinked his eyes open. His eyelashes grazed briefly against Steve's cheeks. "They know. They know you've got plans to head down there."
"They're clearing out? They already have?"
"No." Bucky shook his head. "Not that. Not yet. They're waiting for you."
Steve felt a cold chill straighten his spine. He'd expected it. Really, he had. After that first time months ago when he'd been briefly threatened at gunpoint, he'd come to expect the turnabout of retaliation rather than just flight. There were only so many times a snake could be struck before it decided to spit back. Steve had expected it, but he didn't like it.
Still, he didn't question Bucky's words. He wouldn't, because Bucky hadn't led him astray yet. He wouldn't – because he cared. "We shouldn't go."
"No. You shouldn't."
"Our mole didn't tell us."
"Your mole probably doesn't know."
"But you do."
Bucky paused. Steve saw a muscle tick just slightly in his cheek. Then he nodded curtly. "I do."
The spread of possibilities, of what that simple confession meant, opened up before Steve, but almost at the same moment he heard Clint's words ring in his mind. Use him. Steve wouldn't do that. Instead, he nodded himself and slipped his arms around Bucky to hold him instead. Bucky let him.
"Alright. I get it."
"You won't go. You won't be that stupid."
"We won't be stupid."
Steve shouldn't have been as surprised as he was that Fury immediately agreed with his suggestion. After Steve explained, after he told SHIELD in a briefing the next morning while pointedly avoiding making direct eye-contact with everyone – with Nat, mostly – they agreed. Apparently, the fact that Steve's inside man had led them straight before meant something.
"It couldn't have been so easy as all that," Fury said from the doorway of his partition wall. "We're not stupid enough to think that it would be that easy every time." Then he nodded his head with immediate decisiveness. "Alright, then. Change of plans, Princesses. Cap, keep up your feed. Let us know if anything else arises."
It didn't mean that they didn't make the trip to Staten Island. Not immediately, that was, because they did go eventually. It was simply that, with Bucky's additional supply of knowledge, they approached it from a different angle. With more back up. With more delay.
Smarter. And they won.
It became almost routine between Steve and Bucky after that. Steve grew attuned to the times Bucky would itch to tell him without telling that something was wrong, that HYDRA knew about their plans, and he would ask without asking.
"They've cleared the place. Don't bother."
"Don't make the mistake of heading over to Marton Lot. I trust you'd like to keep your casualties to none? Don't fucking go, Steve."
"They're bringing in the armament. You might want to wear an extra vest and actually use that pistol of yours you wave around all over the place."
The mood grew sombre whenever they conversed, but never more so when Bucky told him not to return home the next night. It was a message he sent almost wordlessly to each and every one of the members of SHIELD through Steve, and through Steve regretted the necessity, he obliged.
A sleepover at work? It would have sounded far more fun if Steve hadn't slept there countless times before. Even more fun if it wasn't for the purpose of keeping everyone alive. If the mood was sombre between Steve and Bucky when they conversed, it was doubly so in the basement that night.
Steve was happy to leave. Maybe it was foolish of him to return to his apartment, but he couldn't stay away. Not with the potential for Bucky visiting and him not being there.
Steve returned to his home after four days at the basement – four long, long days, in which Vision had retreated into an unspeaking cocoon, Bruce and Tony had nearly come to blows, Nat regarded everyone with cool disapproval for their discord, and Rhodie looked ready to pluck his eyes out for how often he'd scrubbed his hands across his face in exasperation. Steve wasn't the only one happy to leave; even Sam admitted that he "Wouldn't mind not seeing yours or anyone else's face for a couple of hours, Steve."
Bucky was there when he returned. Of course he was, because something in Steve told him that he would be.
"You're an idiot for coming back. They're looking to take out a lesson on the lot of you."
"Then I guess you'll just have to keep us posted," Steve said. Bucky hummed his disapproval, but he didn't seem disinclined to return the kiss Steve hungrily drew him into. He didn't think it was his imagination that Bucky seemed just as starved.
There was danger. There was threat. There was success and the ever-present frustration, but more than that, for the first time, even more so than had been earlier that year and at the tail end of the previous one, Steve felt like they were doing something. And it felt good. On an instinctive level, as so much of fieldwork was, Steve felt them getting closer. To what, he couldn't be sure.
Vasily Karpov was apprehended. He was facing his trial.
Stigan Mastiff had admitted to his crimes with more ease than Steve could have hoped for.
Isla Keller was putting up a fight, but her primary interrogator would crack her eventually, Steve knew. She would crack.
One after the other, the number of apprehended grew. The whispers diminished or changed their words. SHIELD were getting somewhere. Between Vision's decryption, Loki's persistence, and Bucky's backhanded cautioning, they were actually pinning HYDRA against the wall. Slowly, surely, yet somehow also with incredible speed.
Of course it wouldn't remain at such an unstable medium for so long. It couldn't, and Steve should have guessed the balance would be tipped when they tracked Zola.
He and Bucky were sitting on the floor, just the two of them. Bucky had his back against the wall, legs stretched before him and one ankle hooked beneath Steve's knee while the other leg rested atop Steve's thigh. Steve sat across from him, leaning against the end of his bed and head rocked backwards. The simple contact, the weight of Bucky's leg against his own, was a casual comfort that bolstered him for the words he knew he had to say.
"Bucky," he began, and even that single word sounded strained to his ears. He didn't need to glance in Bucky's direction to know that he held his attention.
Steve drew a breath, closed his eyes briefly, then rocked his head forwards. Bucky met him stare for stare, his own head resting against the wall behind him. He raised an eyebrow, a question the likes of which he rarely took the liberty of asking.
"We know where he is," Steve said.
Bucky blinked. He frowned slightly, almost confusedly. Then understanding dawned. "Ah."
"Yeah," Steve said, ignoring the tightness in his throat. He shouldn't be telling Bucky, shouldn't be giving him a heads up, but he had to. He had to, because… "You guard him, don't you?"
Bucky didn't even attempt to feign ignorance. He nodded.
"Always?" Steve asked a little desperately.
"Is that a -?"
"It's a question."
Bucky pursed his lips slightly. "Most of the time. Especially recently. When I'm not on a hit or… elsewhere. Yes."
Elsewhere. With Steve? When he came to his apartment almost every night? Steve focused on that vagueness rather than the mention of the hits and the potential for supportive guardsman work that he'd come to understand the soldat – the soldier – possessed as a duty.
Steve drew a slightly shaky breath before edging forwards slightly, scooting across the distance between them. Closer. It was enough just to be a little closer. "You need to get away from him, Bucky. Just while we're there."
"I can't do that, Steve."
"Just for –"
"Steve. I can't do that."
Steve reached a hand to grasp Bucky's just because he could. Because he had to. "I know your dedication. I can't blame you for that," even if I wish it was otherwise, "but just for once, Bucky. Just this once. I can't see you caught."
It was Bucky's turn to lean into Steve, and there was something very nearly soft in his expression. It could have been a trick of the light, could have simply been a projection of what Steve wanted to see, but he didn't think so. "Don't go on the operation, Steve," Bucky said in barely a whisper.
Steve stared at him. "Bucky, I –"
"Don't go. If you don't want to see it, then don't look."
Steve's hand tightened on Bucky's fingers even as he felt Bucky's squeeze his own. God, but he didn't want to see Bucky caught. He didn't want to see Bucky apprehended, to be labelled the murderer that he was but also wasn't. But by the same token, Steve couldn't stay away when he knew what was happening. When he knew there was a possibility for Bucky to be caught, or worse, caught in the crossfire doing what he was ordered to do. The thought was intolerable.
"I can't do that," Steve said, and heard the hypocrisy of his own words. So much for Right and Wrong. Steve thought he didn't know all that much of such things at all anymore.
Bucky raised his free hand to Steve's chin, metal fingers that were so sensitive, so gentle, so dextrous as to be almost supernatural in make, tipping his head just slightly. Steve hated that arm and all it stood for as much as he loved it because it was Bucky's. "I know, Stevie. I know you can't." Then he leaned forwards and pressed a brief kiss to Steve's lips, to his cheek, to his lips again. Steve let him.
That was Wrong. If Steve knew nothing else of what was Right, he would understand that such a thing was utterly Wrong. It would never be fair that Bucky was involved, even if he did think himself Bad, that he'd walked into it, that he owed HYDRA something. That Bucky might be caught and deemed a criminal with the rest of the apprehended HYDRA members was a Wrong so horrendous it sickened Steve.
But it could happen. It could, because SHIELD was going after HYDRA and Zola, and Bucky could be there. Steve just had to make it his priority to stop what shouldn't be allowed to happen.
"I've got my eyes on the door. No movement."
"Hold fast. We move on my mark."
"Whenever you're ready."
"I said hold."
"That might not be an option."
"Alri – alright! Fuck it, just go!"
Steve barely heard the words. He barely heard the order before necessity, his field officer instinct, kicked in and he was running. Sprinting, Glock in hand, eyes trained upon the four tiered building that stood before him.
A warehouse. Why was it always a warehouse? Steve didn't know. He didn't care, and it wasn't of consequence. That it was Zola's newest retreat, another pit of snakes that stretched below ground nearly as extensively as Ground Base One, if Loki was to be believed. The site itself was sparse, unremarkable, lined by identical warehouses conspicuously empty for their size. How, in the whole of New York City, had they not been noticed?
Steve wasn't sure. He didn't rightly care. He had his weapon raised, his gaze trained, attention focused. The heavy steel doors might have been locked – Steve wasn't sure – but it didn't matter as he ploughed into them. It didn't matter as he charged inside to the sound of his team, of the Asgard Squad, of an army of general officers, on his heels. At his sides. Around the other side of the building. They had the snake pit cornered.
It erupted in a flurry. Plans were followed but were just as often disregarded as circumstances dictated. The warehouse wasn't empty, even if the front room was. Like a spreading river bursting through a punctured dam, the NYPD and its special forces invaded.
Teams split. Squads descended through the distant doors, disappearing beyond – to stairwells, to hatches that led underground, to chase what sounded like the snakes themselves, the doctors and assistants and guards and operators. Steve saw them leave. He heard them go, heard their echoing shouts of "On the ground!" and "Hands in the air!" that bellowed out as much as they resounded through his earpiece.
For any faults of the force that had once shunned SHIELD, Steve knew they had it handled.
He saw Thor lead Volstagg through one door, Sif with Fandral and Hogen through another. They sought the vats and chemical storage rooms like hounds on a scent. He saw Tony and Rhodie lead a charge in the opposite direction, heard Rhodie's cry to attention, and knew they headed underground.
Steve didn't follow. Steve looked to the nearest upward stairwell. Steve took the stairs two at a time, Sam on his heels, the footsteps of their back-up chasing his tail. Somewhere, Steve knew, Nat was demolishing her own opponents – likely not too far away, for they three were always close.
They'd expected a fight. It was half the reason they held their pistols aloft at all. Steve had expected it, and that was exactly what he got. Almost before he'd entered the hall on the second floor – high ceiling, work benches spread with mechanics half draped in sheets, figures dotted throughout – the first shot sounded. It didn't come from him.
Then everything exploded in manic violence.
To say it was a brawl would be an over-estimation. SHIELD did not brawl. And yet a fight it was. Steve didn't shoot unless he had to – he didn't want to – but within seconds of leaping into the fray, he thought he might. He might just have to.
A figure charged out of nowhere, ploughing into him. Steve wrestled his attacker to the ground, pistol-whipped him when he tried to rise, and dropped to the ground himself when a shot resounded overhead. Another figure sprung upon him, and he dodged, drove a shoulder into their gut, slammed them on their backs. A twist, a duck, springing away from another shot that sounded. Then a brief pause and, in a burst of sharp-eyed attentiveness, Steve cast an assessment of the room.
Cluttered. Furniture, tables, chairs of impediment. Figures – four, eight, seventeen in total. At least half of them appeared to be guards, bodyguards or 'watchmen' or whatever they were, and those that didn't hold firearms joined the fight anyway. Steve had learned this; HYDRA seemed to attract a particular type of person – that was, those who didn't care if they got their hands dirty. For all the preaching in the aftermath that "I didn't know" and "It's just a job, just a job!" they fought back. Too many of them fought back.
Another shot fired. Steve spun to his feet as his team flooded throughout the room. Pistol raised, pointed, he bellowed the same words as the rest of the officers.
"Hands up, put your hands up!"
"On your knees!"
"Drop your weapons!"
Suffice it to say, no command slowed the violent response. It was as though they didn't hear them at all.
Steve fell to the fight. He didn't want to fight; he'd practiced too much, dedicated too much time to it, to consider they would overwhelm HYDRA without, but he didn't like it. Sam always said Steve was good at fighting but still – he didn't like it.
But he did it.
When the guards-watchmen-attackers leaped to the assault, Steve fought back. Blocks rose, punches flew in retaliation. A warning to "Stop, down, drop your weapons!" only incited further attack, induced the urge to abuse the moment of instruction. As soon as Steve opened his mouth, he could see his allowance was going to be taken advantage of.
A man with a blank stare. A woman who twisted far too nimbly. Another that wore goggles across her face fired a shot – actually fired – and Steve only had a moment to thrust the officer to his right out of the way before he was dropping to the ground himself. Alone or in pairs, with Sam at his back then away, Steve fought and threatened, ordered and all but pleaded, because that was the right thing to do.
HYDRA just didn't know it. They writhed and resisted as though their freedom depended on it – which it very well did for those so clearly guilty.
It was strange how, in the midst of a fight, time skewed. How one instant the world could be a dizzying mess of well-honed reflexes and stinging knuckles, and the next it could snap into sharp relief. As Steve danced back from a baton-wielding assailant, felled him to the ground and managed to snap him in zip ties, he saw him. He saw Bucky in that moment of focus, and the detached numbness, the sobriety of the fight, shattered.
Bucky shouldn't be here. Bucky shouldn't be fighting. And yet…
And yet. Steve was there to see it. He'd known it was going to happen, and then it did. Of course it did.
He was across the length of the room. From the flurry of activity, of punches and brutal strikes of his metal hand that, even gloved as it was, Steve could identify it for the ferocity it smacked his fellow officers to the ground. Bucky was a whirlwind of attack-defence-kick-punch-block and then there were the knives. How could Steve have forgotten the knives?
Everything was happening at once. Too fast, and yet too slow. Steve pushed himself from his knees, away from the felled snake panting at his feet, and lurched across the room. He saw Bucky. He saw a huddled figure just behind him – white lab coat, bowed head, half hidden beneath a table. He saw Officer Carson sent flying by a kick and he saw Bucky. He saw an assailant appear in front of him, felled him, and abandoned the need to lock him down, and then Bucky again. He saw the huddled figure that could only be the doctor retreat – saw Bucky – saw the doctor cower once more as a shot resounded off the walls alongside a cry that was more surprise than pain. He saw… he saw…
Steve saw Bucky. He saw him fell officers like wheat stalks before a scythe, deadly and dangerous. He saw Bucky and - and he saw when Sam raised his pistol and took aim.
Steve didn't think. For once, he didn't consider right and wrong. He didn't think of blacks or whites or greys, of consequences and reprimands. Of what it could mean for SHIELD because the cowering doctor making for the stairwell had to be Zola and he couldn't be allowed to get away.
There was no thought to the action. Steve bellowed instinctively. "Sam, get down!"
Sam was a good partner. A great partner. He responded to Steve's warning in an instant and, without the click of a trigger, fell to the hard second-storey floor of the warehouse. Steve ducked an attack from a bodyguard that leaped at him, cracked the man with an elbow upside their chin, and he spun towards Bucky once more.
He saw him. He saw him see Sam, see Steve. He saw the split second of hesitation, of something that could almost have been regret in one who dared to show expression. Then Bucky was turning – knocking Officer Wales to the ground as he did – and grabbing Zola to drag him up the stairwell. They disappeared in a second.
Steve couldn't let them get away. Not Zola and not… not Bucky. He couldn't let anyone else chase them either, because right or wrong, Steve couldn't let Bucky be locked up. He wouldn't. Couldn't.
As the snap of someone – was that Nat? – barked an order of, "Two hostiles escaping, making for the third floor," Steve replied with an equally curt, "I've got them."
And he did. He had them. Would have them. Diving through the fight – how was it still a fight? How were they still fighting? – and stepping over the downed apprehended, the officers that pinned them to the ground at their sides, he dodged any stumbling figure that appeared in his path, ignored a shot fired, and started up the stairs.
Why Steve took his microphone off his collar he couldn't say. Or he could, but he didn't want to admit it. Hypocrite that he knew he was becoming, Steve wouldn't admit it to anyone who asked, but he knew. He knew he would speak to Bucky, and he knew that he could let no one hear him. He knew it as soon as he lurched through the doorway at the top stairwell and burst into the room beyond.
He knew it as soon as his mouth opened and the command, the plea, tore forth. "Stop!"
Bucky was across the room. A wide room, less cluttered than the one below, with tables draped in more sheets. Bucky and the doctor were halfway to a window, Zola whimpering and stuttering something that could have been French or German or English, but Steve didn't care to listen. Bucky clearly didn't either. His hand grasped Zola's collar and he didn't spare him a hint of notice as he strode towards the only exit left in the room.
He did pause, however, when Steve spoke. He shouldn't have done that.
"… cannot be done, soldat, it cannot. I will not be leaping through a window, and you will take me –"
"Shut the hell up," Bucky snapped at Zola's squawking demands. He didn't glance at him even for that. Instead, he stared at Steve across the distance between them with such blank-faced expressionlessness that it had to be feigned. It had to be a mask. Steve could tell now. Maybe he'd always been able to tell.
Zola wore a strange combination of terror and glaring anger as he struggled to twist and peer up at Bucky. He was a small man, balding, round spectacles askew atop his short nose. It was an almost disappointing sight after so much chasing, so much pinning the blame; Zola should be larger than life but instead he was… this. Simply a man.
A man who ordered Bucky like a thing rather than the person he was.
"Bucky, please," Steve said, stepping slowly into the room. The sounds of shouts, objections and distress and demands, echoed from the floor below. "I know you won't let yourself, but I'm begging you. Just give him up and –"
"Bucky?" Zola snapped, swinging his gaze to Steve. His glare was somewhat less impressive than he'd likely intended given that his feet weren't quite touching the ground. "Who the hell is -?"
"I can't do that. He's my…" Bucky spared Zola a glance, and if venom could possibly pervade utter blankness it did for the briefest of moments. "My mission."
"Soldat, what are you -?" Zola spluttered, an understandable response to the visible tightening of Bucky's gloved fingers in his collar. "Get me – hol mich hier raus!"
Steve ignored him. He couldn't look away from Bucky. Even as a hitman, as a bodyguard of a HYDRA doctor, biochemist and illegal drug producer, he was Bucky. A small, irrational part of Steve could only stare in adoration, because standing alongside the window was the first time Steve had truly seen him in the light in months. He looked far more like the boy he'd been in that light, even with the weight of what his was starkly visible alongside it. Steve ached just a little.
But he raised his pistol. "I'm not going to hurt you. Either of you. But you need to get on your knees." It hurt to say, because Steve knew he wouldn't apprehend Bucky. It was all empty words. Zola, however… "Bucky, you leave. Go now, and I'll –"
"Do you not hear me, soldat?" Zola demanded. He sounded more hysterical than demanding, wriggling in Bucky's grasp. "We're going – take me – just vernichte ihn!"
"I can't do that," Bucky said and Steve didn't know if he was talking to himself or Zola. Maybe both. What had Zola said? Something about… had he told Bucky to kill him? "Policemen should stick to desk duties. You should have stayed at the office, Steve."
Zola was flushed, cheeks reddening, though from breathlessness or objection Steve wasn't sure. He took another step forwards, his Glock raised, and it was likely that his hands knew he wouldn't fire, for he couldn't even urge them onto the trigger. "Bucky –"
Too many things happened at once, then. As often happened in fights, one second of clarity snapped into a dozen of confusion. Zola moved. He twitched and Bucky moved too, as if in response. Steve flinched mid-step across the room and Zola extracted a gun. A pistol. Tiny and black, a Baikal, make unknown – Steve registered it in a split second.
Zola swung his arm wildly –
Bucky jerked the man at the collar, took a step towards the window, produced a combat knife from nowhere –
Steve trained his Glock on Zola –
A shot sounded.
The room froze again in a heartbeat.
Steve didn't even know where the shot had come from. It was too close to his ear, too proximate to locate immediately. In front, behind, from his own hands – until the ringing lessened and it registered. Behind. Definitely behind. Steve was glancing sharply, briefly, over his shoulder as Zola uttered a delayed cry of – objection? Surprise? The beginnings of pain?
Nat stood in the doorway, feet planted and as deadly as her Black Widow namesake. Her own Glock was raised, her expression as flat as Bucky could manage, and her focus was trained on Zola. Or it was for a second before it switched. Not to Steve, she didn't even seem to see Steve, but to –
"Don't."
Steve was stepping into her path without thought, because she couldn't shoot Bucky. Steve couldn't let that happen, not when he was watching and not when he wasn't. That understanding went above and beyond simple right and wrong, because right and wrong could never be something so encompassing, so complex and desperate.
Steve spread his arms, ignoring Zola's groan behind him, ignoring the shuffle that would be Bucky's step. In retreat? Into an attacking stance? He didn't know. He didn't care if Bucky was escaping or about to attack him from behind. All that mattered was that Steve stood between Nat and the focus of her pistol.
Nat's eyes flickered. Darkening, as flat as her expression, they flickered towards Steve and a touch of humanity returned to them. Nat was a terrifying person, and even diminutive in stature as she was, Steve was eternally grateful she'd decided he was worth her good regard.
Now, though? After that day, he wasn't sure he still held it.
Nat was smart. The smartest in SHIELD, Steve had always thought. She absorbed the situation in a second, and though she didn't fully lower her pistol, her fingers clasped with a decidedly less threatening grasp. More than that, though, one rose to her microphone and muffled it beneath a glove.
Steve would go against protocol. He hadn't realised until that day that he would do such so instinctively, but he would. He had. He certainly hadn't expected Nat to do the same with such promptness, however, but she did. She didn't even hesitate.
"Rogers," she said shortly. "What's going on?"
They didn't have time for a lengthy discussion. Zola was babbling across the room in rapid French or German or perhaps Swiss; it was hard to tell for his hysterical tone. But more than that, Bucky held a knife. A knife that he could very easily send fling towards Nat, Steve knew.
Nat or Bucky. Bucky or Nat. It didn't really even matter for whose protection he stood between them. Steve planted himself and he wasn't moving.
"I can't let you do this," he said.
"This?" Nat echoed.
"You can't take him."
Nat's eyes flickered over Steve's shoulder. In the briefest second of that glance, Steve heard only his heartbeat thundering in his ears, drowning out even Zola's whimpering. Fuck, Nat really had actually shot the man. Steve almost hadn't expected it of her, but when he truly considered it, if anyone would do what needed to be done it was she.
"Zola needs to be –"
"I'm not talking about Zola," Steve interrupted. His heartbeat thundered even louder, and he was almost surprised that he could hear Nat's words at all. Concern, unshakeable fear that someone, one of them, would end up shot or knifed and on the floor, was unbearable. Not Bucky. Not Nat. "I don't care about Zola," he said, because he didn't. Not really. Not compared to Bucky and Nat.
Nat's gaze flickered again. The hand holding her pistol readjusted slightly. "Rogers, I have to –"
"Don't," Steve said desperately, hands rising higher in placation. "Nat, you can't –"
"Rogers, we're on a mission and HYDRA needs to be apprehended –"
"You can't –"
"Steve, he's a –"
"Nat, please, you can't –"
"Soldat! Was machst du gerade?"
Steve didn't know what Zola barked, couldn't translate it for himself, but he could guess. As he jerked his gaze over his shoulder, his eyes fell upon Zola but were immediately drawn to Bucky. To the window, barely a step behind them. To where Zola clutched at his shoulder, a wide blossom of red staining his white coat. Bucky was staring past him to Nat, combat knife still in hand, his other still holding Zola's collar as though he'd forgotten he was even there.
They still waited. Why did Bucky still wait?
A sound echoed from the stairwell. A cry, a shout, an order, and Steve didn't think it was his imagination that it seemed closer. That they were coming closer. Breath hitching, he spared a glance to Nat, to the stairwell and the officers that would follow, then back to Bucky.
"Please," Steve said, and he didn't even care in that moment that Nat or Zola would hear. "You have to leave."
There was a war going on. Beneath the blankness of Bucky's expression, Steve could see it. How had he ever thought he was expressionless, even for a second? Bucky flickered a glance down to Zola, then to Steve, then distinctly to Nat. His lips parted just slightly before –
"Go," Steve ordered.
Bucky went.
Zola dropped to the ground with a grunt as Bucky's hand released him. He'd barely crumpled to his knees before Bucky, so fast, impossibly fast, spun and leaped towards the window. Steve had known it was going to happen – there was no other way out after all – but he still raised a hand. He still uttered a wordless cry of fear.
Then the glass shattered. Bucky disappeared in a burst of diamond-like shards. Silence tore almost viciously through the room, punctured by the sound of approaching officers as they climbed the stairs. Steve could hear Sam's voice – in his earpiece or down the stairs he couldn't tell. He registered the orders that commanded, the words that requested back-up, that took status of the underground procedure.
"Hostiles are apprehended. We have the western corridors under control."
"I need a hand down here. C-Squad, there's too many of them to haul up ourselves. Get your asses into gear."
"Perimeter is locked and – wait is that – is that someone -?"
Steve grit his teeth. He closed his eyes. He prayed that Bucky would get out because it was all he could do. Breath only became possible again when Clint's voice continued with, "Nothing. It was nothing."
Then Steve was turning. He strode across the room, skirted around Zola with boots crunching on shattered glass, and twisted the man's arms behind him. Zola protested, cursed in a splutter. "I am injured, you fool!"
Steve ignored him. The zip ties buzzed as he pulled them tight.
"Rogers."
Steve didn't glance towards Nat as she spoke. He couldn't. Hauling Zola to his feet, he clasped him in a firm hold, steading him on his wavering feet.
"Rogers."
He couldn't help it. Steve had to glance out the window. Over the jagged tears of glass, he peered at the spread of openness below. He could still feel his heartbeat, still feel his breath struggle for release, and it was only when he glanced downwards that it eased.
Water. Water drifted below, the slow-moving passage of the river running alongside the warehouse. There wasn't a hint of disturbance, but there wasn't a hint of Bucky either.
It was a good thing, Steve told himself. That was a good thing.
"Steve."
Steve turned. Nat stood as still and wary as she had been, pistol still ready in one hand as the other covered her microphone. Her gaze drew deliberately towards the shattered window before turning back on Steve. "We need to talk about this."
Steve knew that. He had to because, regardless of his intentions, Nat was involved. She was compromised. She'd shot Zola, which was wrong by police standards, but not unnecessary. Not when under duress as Steve had arguably been.
But Steve had let a criminal escape. More than that, he'd urged that criminal to flee. And Nat had witnessed it.
"I know," he said simply, because he did. But not then. They wouldn't talk then. It would come, but not yet, and for the moment Steve found he couldn't care. He didn't care because Bucky…
Bucky had run. He'd left Zola and he'd run. Steve didn't believe that would be the end of it, not for Bucky, but just this once. Just for now, he'd…
Officers flooded the room. Sam appeared at his side, muttering words like "Finishing up" and "Good job". Zola was shunted, writhing and objecting, into the hands of the apprehending.
And across the room, Nat stared at him. They would talk. Not now, but they would talk.
