A/N: Oh dear. It's been a LONG time since I've updated this story. Apologies to anyone who may have been waiting… I feel bad but I'm also trying to keep up with another story I'm writing and school and real life, so you know how it goes, things just get tough. But I know where I'm taking this story and I'm going to see it out till the end, if anyone's still even reading it by then!


The wait until night came was agonizing. Bucky almost began to suspect that Agent Dogar's clock had been tampered with and was ticking extra slowly. He was tempted to get up and inspect the clock, perhaps fidget with it a little bit, but he knew this wouldn't bode well for peoples' opinions on his sanity so he decided to stay put. He knew he was being paranoid but he couldn't help it. The longer they sat there, the more time he had to think and stew and worry. Life had been, in some ways, so much easier when he'd been HYDRA's agent. He'd never had to worry about anything because he knew he was almost invincible and no one could match his skill and strength (until he'd met a certain star-spangled super-soldier)…and he had never cared about the fate of his fellow agents as well. They were beneath him and in fact, it pleased his masters (he recoiled internally now at the word) that he didn't care. The less other lives mattered to him, the more efficient he was.

Being human was difficult. So many people to keep track of, so many things to worry about. Bucky had to admit, he didn't think he cared enough—not like normal people—because he definitely prioritized people like Ari, Sam, Steve, and…perhaps Natasha over others. But the longer he was himself, the more he was starting to care about the fate of others. Perhaps to a lesser extent, but still. He was even concerned about Agent Dogar's fate now. The woman had done her time as an agent honorably—and now they might upset her life.

Darkness fell in the city around them and Agent Dogar gave them the go ahead to move out. She handed Kaplan her car keys and when Kaplan tried to refuse, she shook her head and said, "Don't patronize me, Brett. You know we either do the mission all the way or we don't do it all. No half-assing it."

"It might get destroyed," Kaplan said critically, taking the keys anyway. "Fair warning."

"I'm prepared for that," she said mildly. "My bank account can take the hit, we're pretty comfortable right now. But try to bring it back, alright? Or at least leave it somewhere and then let me know where you've left it. It's going to be hard to explain to my husband if it goes completely missing."

"Okay, are you sure?" Kaplan asked, looking uncertain for the first time in the year that Bucky had known the serious, silent man.

"Perfectly," she said. She waved them off and then watched them go, arms crossed, like a slightly strict, somewhat concerned mother sending her children off to a schoolyard fight. Not that mothers did things like that, Bucky was pretty sure.

Kaplan drove, knowing best out of any of them how to get to their location. As they went, Kaplan briefed them off of a small slip of paper he pulled from his pocket. "Alright, Fetch slipped me this before we left. Details. The dead millionaire in question is Quentin Wentworth. Works in business, a regular on Wall Street—you know the type of guy, a dime a dozen. Well on his way to becoming a billionaire, actually, because he was collaborating in some Silicon Valley start-up, something about a new method of public transportation controlled via smart phones."

Bucky understood only about half of this sentence but Ari and Sam were nodding. Steve also looked thoughtful, as if he understood it all. Bucky felt a quick flash of guilt for not paying more attention to the real world when he was at home. He needed to do better, if he was going to really live in this world.

"Where does he live?" he asked.

"Lenox Hill," Kaplan said critically and Sam whistled.

"Expensive, I take it," Steve said.

"Take it," Kaplan said grimly, nodding. "We're going to stick out. Lot of guards in this area, doormen, prying eyes—especially since the murder, I'm guessing. Police presence and security cameras."

"Good thing we have America's sweetheart with us, then," Sam said.

Bucky looked at Ari, bewildered, and then he realized Sam was talking about Steve and bit back a laugh at Steve's obviously embarrassment.

Kaplan anticipated running into trouble so he parked a block away, near a park, and they all piled out and began walking towards Quentin Wentworth's house, keeping their heads down but their pace casual and unaffected. People who walked quickly attracted attention. Luckily it was dark and they didn't meet anyone on the streets. Bucky understood; the people who lived in this area were all wealthy. They didn't walk places—they got driven places. The evening air was warm as they walked and he couldn't help but gaze with interest at the beautiful homes they passed: tall, skinny, and pressed together like wafers but so fancy. Beautiful brownstone, smooth white, handsome red brick, all with proper wrought iron lampposts and door knockers and fences, blooming flowers on their stoops and proper landscaping in the small yards, neutral-colored drapes hanging in every window. Places like this had of course existed in the '30s and '40s but Bucky had never taken much notice of them. He'd wanted to live comfortably (as most people had, having just experienced the Great Depression a decade earlier) but he didn't care about being a rich man, a stock market man, a Wall Street man. Most of the boys he'd known had aspired to those heights, spurred on by their broken (and sometimes embittered) fathers who wanted their sons to succeed and restore good family names. Times were hard. Bucky's father had never pushed Bucky in that direction because he knew Bucky would never have done it.

Remembering all this made Bucky vaguely sick. Thinking about old memories of Steve was one thing—Steve was here now, so it was alright. But his parents…his other family…other friends he'd had…those were out of his reach now. Long dead or close to. An ocean of regret surged inside him, though it obviously wasn't his fault he'd never gotten to meet them again. It was HYDRA's. Still…

There was nothing like thinking about people he should have gotten the chance to meet, to see, again and realizing it was all unfairly torn away from him. A thousand crimes HYDRA had committed against him.

You might have died in war anyway, he tried to remind himself. There's no guarantee you would have lived and made it home.

But he knew that was a lie, deep down. He didn't know how he knew it, but he just did: he, Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, was a fighter. A survivor. He would have survived the war and come home. And if he'd survived, then Steve would never have gone after him, would never have met the Red Skull, would never have engaged in battle with him, would never have gotten himself frozen. He'd have made it home, too.

In retrospect, it looked like the course of their entire lives had been changed by Bucky's weakness—by him being captured by HYDRA. This was all really his fault.

"You okay?" Ari quietly asked next to him. "You've got your brooding face on."

Before he could respond, Kaplan stopped and quietly said, "There. Third house on the row." He surreptitiously pointed. The house was a handsome, tall brownstone like many others in the row, a slightly curved front that jutted out around the front door to form a slight porch and awning. The only difference was that all the lights on the house were off, the windows dark, and the flowers by the door and in the hanging baskets looked wilted and neglected. Oh, and there was the slight matter of the conspicuous and eerie yellow tape threading all the way around the house and across the yard. Some of it was torn and in tatters now, flapping in the slight breeze, giving the house the look of an abandoned house, teeming with ghosts. The scene of a terrible crime.

Bucky gave himself a shake and sternly told himself, Stop being an idiot. The crime was committed only a day or two ago. It's hardly abandoned. Besides, you're not afraid of ghosts—you are the ghost.

Feeling slightly satisfied with himself now, he led the way and no one protested. Clambering over the fence was easy and they did it so quickly no one would even have seen them—he hoped, anyway. Steve had to hoist Ari up slightly and Bucky had to pull her down. The fence was far too tall for her. Kaplan, to his great chagrin, needed a bit of a hoist as well, being a shorter man.

They silently wove through the fluttering yellow tapes criss-crossing the lawn and crowded onto the front stoop. Checking to make sure no one had seen them, Ari said, "Okay, so how are we going to break in?"

"We're not going to break in," Kaplan said, glancing around the street. "That would alert the police that someone else has been in here."

"Why would we care about that?" Ari asked, puzzled.

"Because it would alert whoever did this that someone else broke in too," Bucky told her. She still didn't fully think like an agent but it wasn't her fault—she hadn't been raised (or groomed…) to think like one.

"So how are we going to get in?" Ari demanded. "Just find a way in? I say we just break a window and go for it. We don't really have time to waste."

"We're not breaking in," Steve said firmly. Ari looked like she was going to argue but then Steve reached out and tapped the door and it swung open. "The door's already unlocked," he said mildly.

Ari looked abashed. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry," Steve said as they entered. "Your instincts were right—but you have to remember to look at the whole picture. We're following a trail but we need to be careful not to leave a trail ourselves."

Sam shut the door and then they stood in the foyer for a moment, looking around silently. The place definitely looked like the home of a wealthy person and it had a distinct masculine feel to it, dark hardwood floors, dark oil portraits hanging on the navy walls, and a noticeable lack of any crystal vases or flowers or anything feminine. In fact, the decorations were minimal and where there were decorations, they were dark wood and leather and gleaming silver.

"Preppy," Sam said under his breath.

There were no signs of a fight and yet the whole place had an air of…struggle? Of sadness? It was dark and cool, the air stale, and Bucky thought he could almost taste danger on his tongue.

Then he told himself he was being a poetic idiot. He'd read too many of Dan Brown's novels. Next he'd be ruminating on the possibility of a hidden lair filled with lost Byzantium treasures underneath the house…

"He was killed in the master bedroom on the second floor," Kaplan said, referencing the sheet Fetch had given him. "Let's go."

"How is the wife dealing with his death?" Sam asked as they silently climbed the staircase, turning jutting right angles and passing landings with strange ceremonial-looking black cat statues sitting on the corners. Bucky didn't like their eyes, painted golden with green jewels glued in the middle. It looked like they were watching him, smirking.

"There is no wife," Ari said.

"How do you know?" Kaplan asked in surprise. "Do you know him?"

The look Ari gave Kaplan was slightly pitying and mostly amused. "I'm a girl. I can recognize a bachelor pad when I see one—trust me, no woman lives here."

"Let's move on," Bucky said impatiently, pushing past both of them to the second floor. They didn't have the house's floor plan but there were only four rooms on the second floor. Finding the master bedroom was easy: the door was wide open and the room had white tape blocking off an area of the floor. However, no one noticed the tape because they were all staring at the wall at the far end of the room. Five enormous black marks were painted onto the wall, crudely, as if someone had slopped them on in a hurry…or perhaps in a rage. Thin black trickles of paint had dripped from the marks and made skinny rivulets of black pooling to the ornate white base molding that bordered the wall on the floor. A small piece of blue sticky tape was stuck onto the wall next to the slashes, wholly unnecessary but part of police protocol nonetheless. They couldn't leave any but of evidence untagged.

No one spoke for a moment and then Sam said, "What…the…hell?" sounding amazed.

"The new director did say the case was weird," Ari mumbled.

"Anyone know what this—uh, symbol means?" Kaplan asked. He instinctively glanced at Bucky, as if depending on the former Winter Soldier to be able to recognize what was clearly a sinister sign. Bucky had a feeling he should have been offended but he was too busy staring hard at the sign and rapidly flipping through frantic, half-formed memories in his head to see if the slashes matched anything he'd ever come across before. That was the problem with his Winter Soldier memories—they weren't properly formed. His memories as the old Bucky Barnes were clear because they'd been properly formed at the time and had merely been buried deep inside his mind, waiting for HYDRA's terrible machine to dig them back out for him. But the memories he'd made as the Winter Soldier… They were wild, flickering, focused on the most strange things.

He came up with nothing.

Kaplan took his silence as his answer and sighed. "Well…let's look around and see what else we find." He pulled out a slim black camera from his pocket and carefully took a picture of the marks.

And look they did—but find anything they did not. Aside from the black marks on the wall and the taped off section on the ground, which was covered in a fine white powdery substance, nothing looked remiss. There were absolutely no signs of struggle. This made Bucky uneasy. How had a man been murdered in a "strange manner" without any struggle or blood spilled? What made it strange…except for the obvious? And what in God's name was that white powdery substance in the ground? He knelt down slowly and reached out to touch it, knowing he shouldn't tamper with the crime scene but not really caring much right now—

"Soldier, don't!" Ari appeared at his side in a flash, grabbing his hand and yanking him backward. He was so startled that he let her yank him aside.

"What?" he asked defensively, pulling his hand away, feeling embarrassed for some reason. Had it been her tone? She'd sounded as if she were pulling a small child away from a poisonous chemical.

"Soldier, we have no idea what that powder is!" she said, sounding shocked. "Anthrax or—well, actually, it's probably not Anthrax because they wouldn't leave it here, but still, we have no idea what it is and in that case, we definitely shouldn't touch it. Chemicals can be absorbed through the skin in even the briefest contact."

"Didn't realize you were into chemistry," Steve said absentmindedly, slowly opening a chest of drawers and peering inside each drawer carefully.

Ari made a face. "I'm not. I almost failed orgo. But we had to wear gloves when giving certain medications—lidocaine patches, pills specifically for men, chemo—not that I ever gave chemo," she added as an aside, looking thoughtful, "but you get my point. Chemicals can be absorbed into our system even with brief contact and this includes powder. At the very least, you might inhale a little bit."

"Point taken," Bucky said. His irritation had faded. She was right, he'd been an idiot, touching a powder of unknown origin without protection first. He was a super soldier but he wasn't immune to death.

"There's nothing else here," Steve announced, finishing with the last drawer. "Let's check out the body."

Ari, Kaplan, and Sam left the room. Steve and Bucky followed. Bucky held his arm out, motioning silently for Steve to slow down, and he did, both of them falling a few paces behind the rest. "Why are you doing this?" Bucky asked quietly.

Steve looked surprised and confused. "Why am I doing what?"

"This. Finding this millionaire guy's murderer—isn't this…juvenile?" Bucky asked. He felt frustrated. He checked to make sure Ari couldn't hear and then he said, his voice even lower, "Doesn't this feel…beneath our talents? We're super soldiers. You've taken on HYDRA. You're an"—he worked hard not to roll his eyes at the ridiculous name—"Avenger. You've saved the world. And I…am capable of a lot," he said grimly, aware that he didn't have any great accomplishments except getting his own memories back. "So why are we chasing some rich guy's killer?"

Steve didn't respond for a moment, his eyes unreadable, and Bucky worried that he might have disgusted Steve with his…well, callousness. Or arrogance. Whichever it was. Kaplan would definitely have been offended, thinking that Bucky believed Kaplan to be beneath him. The thing was, Bucky did think that. He valued Kaplan, yes, and Kaplan was a great agent—but Kaplan was also a foot soldier. He wasn't a sergeant or a captain or a commander. His skills weren't top-of-the-line. And Bucky Barnes, in both of his lives—as both old Bucky and the Winter Soldier—had grown accustomed to the idea of rank and importance. As Sergeant Barnes, he had outranked certain men in the army and had gone on more dangerous missions than other men. As the Winter Soldier, he had definitely outranked any HYDRA agent he'd ever met and he only concerned himself (on order, of course) with the most dangerous, crucial missions.

And here he was now—the so-called Sergeant, doing good old-fashioned teamwork and solving a mystery-of-the-week style crime. He knew he was being arrogant and selfish and petty, but he couldn't help feeling bitter. He didn't want to be the Winter Soldier but his muscles ached to utilize his skills and be of some use in an important way, in a good way, in a…heroic way.

He wanted to save the world.

Or something like that, anyway. To start fresh. Atone for his crimes. It made sense, after all. His crimes had been large-scale, why were his heroics not?

"Because I'm not above it," Steve said finally. "I didn't sign up to be a hero, Buck. I signed up to defend people—and that's what we're doing. Did those black marks look normal to you? Do you think the new director of SHIELD would have asked us to investigate if this was just a regular murder?"

Bucky was silent.

"Thought so," Steve said. He clapped him once on the shoulder as they exited the house, leaving no trace that they had been there. "Don't worry, I'm sure things will get crazy soon. They always did when we were together, didn't they?" There was a laugh in Steve's eyes as he walked backwards across the lawn and Bucky suddenly felt a rush of affection for the man—he was like an enormous, loyal, good-hearted golden retriever. And he was right, of course. Bucky was feeling restless but at the end of the day…he didn't get to decide how to atone for his crimes. He didn't really deserve that right. Whatever the good guys told him to do, he'd have to do it, even if it meant mopping floors and wiping tables.

It was funny that that the freedom of choice was denied to him still—first by others, and now by himself. Would he ever truly be free, his own man, unbound by burdens and guilt and bad feelings?

Once back in Agent Dogar's SUV, Kaplan sighed again, heavily. He seemed frustrated and disappointed by what they had found—or hadn't found, as it was. Bucky had worked with Kaplan a few times by now and he'd never known the man to be so expressive. Normally he got the job done silently and impassively, with a great sense of duty and adherence to the proper rules. He wondered if it had been seeing an old friend which had loosened some constraints within the man. Humans were so strange, all walking around with back stories and histories tied to their hearts and souls like secret packages, waiting for someone to pull the ribbons and let things unfold.

They headed back downtown to the coroner where Wentworth's body was being kept. However, it was far too early to break into the place so they parked in an alleyway a few blocks away and waited there, engine off, sitting in silence and darkness, watching people walk past the alley.

"Why is Wentworth still being kept here?" Ari asked suddenly. "Shouldn't he have been buried? Rich guy like him, you'd think his family or friends would be wanting to have a fancy funeral for him."

Kaplan shrugged. "It didn't say exactly why on Fetch's note, just that the body was being preserved for now because this is being considered an open murder investigation and the body is important to the case for now."

What the hell happened to this man? Bucky wondered. He wracked his brains, sorting through the various tortures and horrors he had witnessed glimpses of during his decades with HYDRA, but he couldn't think of anything that would affect the body even after death. Unless someone chopped the man up into little pieces? Or carved something into the body? He knew cults and other weirdos sometimes did things like that. And a cult might explain the strange black markings…

He voiced his theory.

"A cult…" Sam mused. Then he shrugged. "Could be. I don't know anything about cults. Do they usually have symbols? I thought that was gangs. Or no, wait, maybe it's the other way around."

"I think cults have symbols," Ari said. "Gangs have signs and colors."

"Got a lot of gangs in North Carolina, did you?" Sam asked, eyebrows raised, clearly joking.

"No, but I did a clinical rotation at a hospital that had a gang in the area, so I got some experience in that area," she said, calm as always. Nothing ever seemed to ruffle Ari, except for senseless violence. Bucky still thought it was strange that she'd chosen to become a new agent of SHIELD, due to her extreme dislike of violence, but he was glad she'd done so. He didn't know what he would have done if she'd gone back to North Carolina and left him behind in Washington D.C. He would have had Steve, of course, and even Sam and perhaps Natasha—but Ari was one of his best friends.

New York City was the city that never slept but luckily for them, the body was in a coroner office that wasn't in the heart of the city where the hustle, bustle, and nightclubs were. In fact, the area seemed positively tame in regards to certain parts of New York City. Bucky had no idea what neighborhood they were in—the geography of the city had changed a lot since he'd lived here—but it seemed almost…suburban. Upper-class but in a quieter, more elderly way, not the rich living of the young, wild, and carefree.

They waited for a few hours until the wee hours of the morning and then the entered the coroner's office. They had a key, thanks to Agent Dogar, so it was easy and soundless and they found no one inside. The bodies were kept in the basement (such a horror movie phrase) so they quickly made their way down there, scanning to see if they were going to run into anyone—and they didn't.

"Thank God there's no one here," Ari muttered, looking around. "That would be my worst nightmare, running into someone—because you just know that no one who's at a coroner's office at two a.m. is up to any good."

"We're here at two a.m.," Sam pointed out.

"Exactly my point," said Ari.

The basement was lit with a few flickering fluorescent tube lights, giving the room a horrid blue, washed out look. The floor a dull, off-white linoleum, the walls covered with large metal drawers that had pull-out handles and labels on the front. A few empty steel gurneys, swept completely clean, sat in the middle of the room. It was chilly and the room smelled faintly of antiseptic solutions. Bucky thought he could detect the smell of decay but he wasn't sure if he was just being morbid or not. Looking around the cold, unfriendly, inhuman room, he felt a roiling wave of nausea in the pit of his stomach. This room reminded him too much of the rooms he'd spent numerous time in with HYDRA, being conditioned and programmed and having his identity stripped away.

His vision blurred at the edges, a cold sheen of sweat broke out over his body, and he had to press his trembling hand down onto the gurney next to him to steady his suddenly-shaky legs. He shook his head, fiercely commanding himself to get a grip. Not here, Barnes—you can't have one of your blackout episodes here. Not the time!

Thankfully, his body seemed in the mood to cooperate because his heartbeat slowed down after he took a few slow, deep breaths and his legs stopped shaking. Ignoring the ringing that was fading away in his ears, he focused on what everyone else was doing: looking for Wentworth's body.

"None of these, uh, drawers have names," Steve said. "Just labels. Is there a records book or some files?"

"I'll check," Ari said. She darted up the stairs as light as a hummingbird, vanishing out of sight. They waited for a few moments and then she was racing back down the stairs, cheeks flushed. "Found it! This guy's old school, he still uses a paper book!"

Steve looked amused. "Paper is old school?"

"Well, we use computer charting at hospitals," Ari said defensively. "You'd think they would too. It keeps information more secure." She dropped a thick, heavy notebook with yellowing pages and coffee stains on the pages on a gurney and began flipping to the pages at the end, where the most recent entries were. "Let me see…the dates…Quentin Wentworth…aha! He's number 24893."

They all began searching for that number and Bucky found it first. "Over here," he called. They all crowded around him and he slowly pulled the drawer in the wall open, surprised there was no lock of any kind. Didn't grave robbers and other such weirdos still exist these days? The drawer trundled out of the wall, no more then a steel sheet, really. An outline of a body was covered in a black body bag.

"Unzip it," Sam said, looking morbidly curious. Bucky reached out and slowly pulled the zip all the way down to the figure's feet, small puffs of white powder escaping from the bag as he did so. Ari's eyes squinted in confusion. Bucky pried the sides of the bag apart to reveal Wentworth and all hell broke loose.

Steve let out a strangled noise, Ari let out a shriek and leaped backwards, Sam yelled, "MAN, WHAT THE HELL?!" and Kaplan staggered back a step, looking horrorstruck and disgusted, whispering, "Jesus Christ!" Bucky, for his part, stood frozen, unable to tear his gaze away from what he was seeing but wanting to back away nonetheless. He had seen death. He had seen blood. He had caused both of them. He wasn't uncomfortable with killing or seeing people die. But what he was seeing now—

"I'm going to be sick," Sam said and he turned around and walked a few paces, hands clasped behind his head and reciting some sort of silent supplication to God, probably. Steve couldn't stop staring at the body and Ari had come a little closer, eyes transfixed with horrified fascination. He supposed her medical background made it so that she couldn't help but be a little fascinated.

Quentin Wentworth looked like an ancient Egyptian mummy. There was really no other way to say it. There was nothing left of him but his skeleton and dry-as-parchment skin tightly stretched and molded onto his face. His skin wasn't the yellow-gray of an ancient mummy but rather more white, as if he were a freshly made mummy…who was also somehow a thousand years old. He looked so ancient, dry, and withered out that Bucky felt like his entire body would collapse into fine dust if he so much as poked the body. Which would explain all the dust they found in the bag and on Wentworth's carpet.

"I don't understand," Steve said. "How could this happen to someone who was murdered only a few days ago? Wouldn't it take hundreds of years for someone to look like this?"

"Thousands, even," Ari murmured, her careful blue eyes taking everything in. And the smell… Bucky felt another wave of nausea as the rotting smell of a corpse hit him. It didn't smell fresh but rather…stale and dry, as if the smell of death had been left out in the sun to dry. It crackled in the stifling air around them and Bucky suddenly staggered backward, his hands flying to his head in panic, feeling one of his day terrors coming on. It had been a long time since he'd had one in public, but he could feel it, it was coming. His legs felt like jelly and his vision was blurring, darkening—white, glowing images of Wentworth's gaping jaw and hollow eye sockets dancing in front of his vision—he heard voices calling his name but it felt like he was underwater—

Just before he went down, he saw a strange, blinking red dot at the far end of the room and he had just enough time to think, What the hell is that? before he blacked out completely.


He came to five minutes later. He always did—the day terrors never lasted long. They were just humiliating and incapacitating. He opened his eyes groggily, blinking, and he let out a small groan. He was laying on the cold, hard floor. He heard a scuffle of movement and then Ari's face appeared right in front of his, hovering, anxiety in her blue eyes. "Soldier! He's awake!" she called out. Her long hair hung over him and tickled his face and neck. He tried to swipe it away but his arms and hands felt oddly numb and weak. This was normal, too—he always felt like he'd been wrung through the grinder after an episode.

"How do you feel?" she asked, helping him to a sitting position. Steve made as if to help but Ari brushed him away distractedly.

"Fine," he said, rubbing his head and feeling woozy. Anger courses through his veins. How could he have a day terror after seeing a dead body? Such a childish, weak thing to do. Granted, the body was horrifying and mystifying…but still. Even Ari hadn't passed out and weren't girls supposed to be more delicate to these sorts of things?

Actually, no. Ari was a nurse. These sorts of things didn't bother her.

"What's your name?" she asked.

He rolled his eyes, knowing exactly what she was doing, but he complied anyway because he knew it was her instinct. "Bucky Barnes." The taste of his name still felt strange on his tongue, even a year later.

"Where are we right now?"

"New York City."

"What year is it?"

He actually paused at this one, wracking his brains. Damn. What year was it? All the years he'd lived had started to blur together at some point and it didn't even seem to matter now. He admitted it: sometimes he had no idea what year it was. Of course, that didn't mean he thought it was 1945 or something…just that the distinction between two years back-to-back didn't seem important.

"Okay, forget that one," Ari said, picking up on his hesitance. It was eerie, the way she sometimes seemed to read his mind. "When was—"

"I'm Bucky Barnes, I used to be the Winter Soldier, I used to work for HYDRA, Steve Rogers and you are my best friends and Sam Wilson's not so bad, I work for SHIELD now, we're trying to figure out what happened to Wentworth. I'm fine," he said, irritated. "Are we done now?"

"One last thing. Follow my finger." She held up a finger and slowly moved it left, right, and then on both diagonals. He tracked it obediently with his fingers, partly to appease her but also because it was instinct. Tests had been done on him after every mission at HYDRA. The tests all seemed to run and blur into each other now but he knew that they wanted to make sure he was in prime condition after every mission.

"Satisfied?" he asked, throwing Ari a sweet smile, determined to disarm her. It certainly seemed to startle Steve, whose eyebrows flew up, but Ari's eyebrows quirked and she smiled even more sweetly at him. "Satisfied," she said. Bucky frowned and her smile turned more into a smirk. Steve watched this exchange silently with contemplative eyes. Bucky noticed this. He noticed everything now. He even noticed Sam checking Ari out from across the room and his fingers twitched in irritation. He knew Ari was pretty. And he knew Sam was naturally flirty—it meant nothing. Probably.

Bucky didn't want to admit that he was feeling jealous but he wasn't stupid enough to deny it to himself deep down inside. He just figured he could ignore it and the feelings would go away. They were just too…complicated.

Some things couldn't be considered right now.

"What now?" he asked, getting to his feet and wanting to punch something to direct his irritation at both Sam and himself. He wanted to suddenly work out. He'd been channeling his anger into working out a lot lately.

"We go back to 24 Pryde," spoke up Kaplan, emerging from the shadows near the back, arms crossed, expression empty. "This was a waste."

"How was this a waste?" Sam demanded. "Did you see what was done to Wentworth?"

"Yeah, and we're in way over our heads," Kaplan said tiredly, suddenly looking ten years older. "Sorry, Cap and Sergeant, but I don't think our team is qualified to deal with this right now. The guy was literally mummified. This isn't just aliens from outer space—this is something completely against all logic and reality."

Well, when he put it that way…

Back to 24 Pryde they went.

As they filed out of the basement, a noticeable slump to all of their shoulders, Bucky suddenly remembered the tiny blinking red light he'd seen before he blacked out. He paused on the stairs and looked behind him, eyes narrowed and carefully scanning the darkness. Nothing. He stared into the darkness for another minute and then Ari poked her head through the door at the top of the stairs. "Soldier? What are you looking at?"

"Nothing," Bucky said truthfully.

"Then let's go." Her head vanished.

Bucky didn't believe in coincidences anymore. Nothing was never just nothing. He filed the instance away in his chaotic mind and climbed upstairs to the light.