"Between my shoulder blades," was the only explanation he offered, and Bucky stepped forward, his metal fingertips ghosting over the pale blue words as he muttered them under his breath.
"Next time you consider threatening someone with deportation – don't!" Jack's skin jumped at the cool touch of metal, and Bucky withdrew his hand as he muttered, "Anna says a lot of unusual things, doesn't she?"
"Anna gets nervous meeting new people and interesting things come out of her mouth," Jack explained.
"So what does," Bucky tapped Jack's words carefully. "This have to do with anything?"
"Self-hatred," Jack answered, turning around to face Bucky. "I said and did things to get to the top of SHIELD that I am not proud of. One of those things was that the day Daniel and I met Eddie, we took him into SHIELD and I interrogated him, trying to get information on Stark. Loyal as Eddie is, he didn't give in. So I got mean, played dirty, even though by that point I was pretty sure that we were soulmates, and that Anna was my soulmate too. I used Anna against him, threatened to deport them both. He would've been sent back to England, she to Hungary, and everything the six of us had the first time around would've been totally different – because we wouldn't have had them there. But when we met, as I was interrogating, I had a job to do, Eddie was the means to an end, Anna was the means to his end, and that was just… the way I thought. I don't like myself for it now – heck, I didn't even like myself for it then – but I get what you're saying. Here's what I'm saying: that's who I was at the time." He eyed Bucky pointedly, adding, "But it's not who I am now. Do you understand what I mean?"
"I get what you're trying to say, yeah, but, ahh," Bucky slammed his eyes closed, running both hands through his hair in anguish. "I can still hear it! I can see him bleeding to death! He drowned in a pool of his own blood because of something I did! He talked right to me, Jack!"
Bucky wilted to the floor, hands over his ears, eyes tightly closed, trying to block it all out, but Jack knew from experience that all that would do was keep it all in. So he went down to his knees beside Bucky, murmuring, "Then you talk to me; tell me moment by moment what happened. That helps me, and you know it helps you. Come on; don't keep this in."
Bucky whimpered, dragging in a deep breath before he physically made himself uncoil. Jack sat down on the floor and let his soulmate lean into him as Bucky uncovered his ears but kept his eyes lightly closed, thinking back as he spoke. "Pierce. Pierce was already involved in… the Asset program, and he's the one who gave the order to me, or the Asset, that day." When he took another deep breath, Jack reached for his flesh hand, gently smoothing away the fist he'd balled it into before his nails could begin to bruise his palm "They didn't want it to be a big show from the start – it was going to become that anyway – so it was just me and one other HYDRA agent – some newbie at the time, Rumlow – who went to the highway and waited. Stark and his wife had gone to a gala that night, and when Rumlow spotted him coming down the highway on the return trip, I planted a bomb on the car just around the curb, so Stark wouldn't see me and realize what was going on. The car with the bomb and a couple around it caused a pileup. Stark came around the corner without even having a chance, but he didn't get a slow death like the others. Maria lurched out of her seat on impact, half went through the windshield, and probably never even felt a thing. Then vehicles started to hit Stark's from behind and the car became twisted like a pretzel. Stark got pinned by his legs and an arm, something fell across his chest or side and broke ribs. He had a badly punctured lung by the time I got down there to make sure my mission was completed, and was literally starting to drown in his own blood. But he looked at me – he looked right at me – and said, 'I knew it would be you. Just please tell me you're not going after Peggy too; the others are all gone.' My coding broke, Jack! He broke through to me for a second, just a second, and I remembered that I knew him, that I knew a 'Peggy', but nothing else! Not enough to know to try to save him! He'd dead because of me!"
"He's dead because of HYDRA," Jack said firmly, wrapping an arm around Bucky's shoulders and squeezing, letting the other man cry himself dry of the sobs that had started while he'd told the story. "And don't you ever forget it."
They may have sat like that for another hour, Jack wasn't sure, and he certainly didn't care. Bucky still needed moments like this sometimes and Jack was more than happy to be here for this one.
When Bucky was eventually cried out, he took a deep breath and sat up, looking at Jack and looking marginally better in general. "Thanks for listening."
"That's what soulmates are for," Jack answered easily. "I'm glad to do it."
Bucky searched his eyes steadily for a minute before he declared, "You have another story, Jack, something that haunts you as much as any interrogation, and whenever you're ready to talk about it, I'll listen." Jack nodded but kept silent, wondering if somehow Bucky had seen the visions floating behind his eyes of dead Japs and a white flag streaked with dirt as it was being buried out of sight. So Bucky took another deep breath and steered the conversation in an entirely different direction with the beginnings of a smile on his face. "Didn't you say something about Danny when you first came in here?" Jack nodded, wondering if he needed to repeat what exactly, but then Bucky said happily, "Look at you passing tests and not taking the chance to back out! Are you sure about what you said?"