AN: warnings for a mention of suicide and implied torture, otherwise it's just the usual canon-typical violence.

AN2: I haven't watched the last few episodes of season 1 of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, let alone the season 2, and I haven't even started watching Agent Carter yet so if I am Jossed on certain things then I'm Jossed.


He answers his phone with a clipped: "Rogers."

"Having trouble finding the answer button, gramps? It took you so long to answer I almost gave up."

"Tony."

"Steve."

"What do you want?"

"Why so grumpy, Cap? Did I interrupt your evening nap? Or-"

"I don't have time for this."

"Still haven't caught up with your war buddy?"

"…What do you want?"

"Wow, I can feel your hostility all the way here."

"Stark!"

"Fine… spoilsport. JARVIS caught someone spying on you. They cloned your phone."

"What?"

"They cloned your phone. That's when they-"

"I know what it means. I thought you said that no one can do that to the Stark phones," the barb hit home, Steve thinks gleefully as he enjoys the silence on the other end.

Tony clears his throat, "Hydra has good tech," he admits grudgingly.

"Hydra?"

"I suggest you ask Margaret for details. JARVIS traced the signal back to her house."

He forgets sometimes that Tony has known her since he was a child. "Why would Hydra be at Peggy's house?"

"Why wouldn't Hydra be at Carter's house? She is one of the founders of S.H.I.E.L.D. She has guards for a reason."

"Is she- "

"She's fine. She's not hurt. When I talked to her she didn't even know that there was anything wrong. She was surprised to hear that her guards were knocked out. You know what her memory is like. We'll just have to ask her again later."

"Why would they leave her alive? Why not kill the guards? Hydra is not known for their mercy."

"A phone was found crushed in front of her room," Tony says, like it answers all his questions.

It doesn't. "Crushed?"

"With a metal hand, perhaps? I'm just guessing, of course, but I am very good at guessing. Don't you have a buddy with a metal arm? I think I remember you having a buddy with a metal arm."

"Tony."

"You definitely have a buddy with a metal arm. I would like to take a look at that metal arm."

Steve hangs up.

"What happened?" Sam asks.

The phone rings and Tony's name flashes on the screen. Steve doesn't pick up.

"We need to go see Peggy. Bucky was there. He must have found out about her from the exhibit."

"He didn't hurt her?"

Steve glares.

"It is a valid question," Sam says, unrepentant.

Steve folds in on himself, defeated, "Yeah, it is," he admits, reluctantly.


"Barnes was here," Peggy tells him when Sam leaves the room. "I didn't want to tell Howard when he called."

Steve doesn't correct her but she catches the look on his face, "I remember it was Anthony, now," she says ruefully.

"What happened?"

"I woke up and he was here."

"Did he hurt you?" Steve asks and the words sound fragile, like they barely survived being uttered.

"No."

Steve slumps down as all the tension leaves his body. "What did he want?"

She thinks back to the way Barnes watched her, "To remember."

She shakes her head when Steve looks at her hopefully. His eyes dim. "It is not surprising. We didn't know each other well," she reminds him gently.

He sighs, disappointed.

"He looked well," she says "healthy," and more hesitantly, "he didn't look all that different than I remember him."

Steve looks at her questioningly.

"You are used to him treating you like a friend."

"I don't understand."

"He and I were never friends."

"But-"

"We were courteous to each other."

"He was a good man." Steve says, defensively.

"He was," she agrees, "and perhaps given more time we would have become friends. The point is, people don't treat everyone the same. You are not used to him treating you as anything other than a friend. You haven't seen that side of him. I have. And he may be a bit colder now, a bit more distant, and the arm may be a bit jarring but I still recognize him."

"Yeah?"

"Yes. Not all is lost, but he was brainwashed and mindwiped. It is not going to be easy and you need to be careful."

"I know."

"Look at it from the bright side, Steve. He didn't kill me or any of my guards."

Steve's laughter is a bit hysterical, "I'm supposed to be happy that he didn't kill a bunch of people? It is supposed to be normal not to go around killing people."

"Not for assassins it's not."


There are two Hydra agents in the room next to Bucky's, three on the street and six in the building across from the hotel. They think he doesn't know that they are there.

They don't see him stroke the handle of his knife (they can't feel the swallowed bile as it burns his throat).

They plan to attack him soon and the horrible truth is that he is going to kill them all.

He's not sorry.

He's not sorry.

The blood gets between the plates of his arm and he hates cleaning it. That's all.

He's not sorry.

He's not.


He is systematic and fast, and before they even realize what is going on, it is over.

They should have sent a sniper, he thinks as he rummages through their things. He finds drugs, the ones that actually work on him and knows why there was no sniper. They are still trying to bring him in alive.

He wonders how many more he needs to murder before they go in for the kill.

He is disposing of the bodies when he notices that one of them has a mustache and it reminds him of Dernier and-

Steve looks at him and there is guilt in his eyes and an apology. No regret.

There is blood caked under Bucky's fingernails and he thinks he can hear his knife croon a lament but it is only Dernier, singing softly in French.

"It's about scantily clad women," Jones responds when asked but everyone knows it isn't true. Those songs never sound that sad.


He hasn't been wiped since the day the helicarriers fell. He knows, somehow, that this is the longest he's ever been awake and without regular wipes. His handlers always avoided this. It never takes him long to start remembering, to start to want and think and question, to realize he is not quite right.

brokenmendedwrong

The serum in his blood always tries to heal the damage they make, but it can only do so much. It can't help him deal with what he remembers.

Sometimes his head hurts, like someone has taken a hammer to it, and the memory blooms and he sees it as if it were happening right now. Sometimes it is gentle, like when he orders a coffee and knows he wants it black. There is no pain, just certainty, like it was something he has always known. Only, he remembers he didn't. Just two days ago he passed a coffee shop and the smell made him curious. He remembers not knowing what it was.


He sees a billboard advertising a travel agency, all blue oceans and green palm leaves and remembers sand burning his feet and the metal of his arm heating up. He remembers standing in the water, letting the waves wash off the blood, the red getting lost in all that blue.

His handler had approached him cautiously, his weapon drawn and his arm shaking slightly. He had waited for the Soldier to turn to him. Bucky remembers being grateful.

He remembers Anton fondly.

He thinks it as Антон, he realizes suddenly, realizes that he has been thinking in Russian for awhile now. His thoughts switch from English to Russian, and sometimes they are a mix of both. Sometimes he swears in German and it bothers him that he cannot remember where he learned it, whether it was while he was strapped to a table in Austria or in Berlin, decades later, for a mission.

Maybe it was when Steve closed the door behind him and the bound German soldier spat in his face. He sang his secrets in the end, through tears, snot and blood.

He relieves that day in his dreams. It always starts with him already in the room; Hans's scared eyes following his every move. Before, German language has always sounded harsh to Barnes-

James Buchanan, Sergeant, 3-2-5-5-7-0-3-8

-but Hans makes it sound soft. Near the end he pleads in whispers, gently, with his eyes closed.

When Bucky is done, he exits the room and finds Steve waiting, expectant. Once he reports, Steve leaves, hurriedly, without a backward glance. The information is time sensitive. Bucky understands. He really does.

(Steve never once looks inside the room.)

Bucky slides down to the floor. Indefinite amount of time later Morita drags him away. And the world around Bucky may be tilting but Morita's hold on his upper arm is firm and his voice is steady when he says "Let's go, Sarge."

Behind the wall, Hans's body cools.

Later, just in time for dinner, Falsworth and Dum Dum return shivering and dirty, with shovels in their hands and Bucky freezes for a second and then his brain restarts and thinks Hans, and he runs, runs, runs, away from sight and falls to his knees and pukes his guts out. He hears footsteps behind him but by the time he turns around there is no one there. But-

there is roaring in his ears, like lions woken up, angry

-he recognizes the footprints in the snow and something horrible rises in his chest. It's heavy and it burns and he doesn't think it is hate.

(He thinks it is hate.)

Steve comes to him later, long after Dernier has stopped singing and everyone is asleep. "I'm sorry," he chokes out like it means a thing (anything).

You asked me to cross a line, Steve, and I did, he wants to say, I wish you had asked somebody else, but he knows Steve couldn't have asked anyone else. You could have done it yourself,he thinks.

"You're the one who wanted to go to war," he accuses instead and there is frost in his voice, winter creeping, and Steve looks at him with big eyes, lost and young. "On your terms," Bucky scrubs a hand over his face, trying to chase away the viciousness he knows is there, "but there are no terms here," he says, sadly.

"I know." I know that now

Steve sounds despondent, but it doesn't take him long to strengthen his shoulders and for the glint in his eyes to become determined. Bucky wants to cry.

He thinks, bleakly, the higher you fly, Steve, the further I have to fall.

He doesn't say anything because he knows that he is sometimes too harsh on Steve. He chose to follow him, after all, wherever he led. It is not Steve's fault that the path they walk is not clean.

It is not Steve's fault that they will all be filthy in the end.

The next time he fires his rifle, the shot echoes inside his chest, following the beat of his heart, spreading the cold inside of him. Once you get frozen inside you can never get warm again, his mother told him when he had asked her why his uncle jumped into the river and didn't swim.

He fires again and remembers his uncle's smiling eyes the day before he let the water swallow him whole.

He falls, days later.

*/*

They drag him through the snow; his stump leaves a bloody trail no one will follow.


He wakes up with a whimper, always-

always

-smelling winter.

*/*

(it smells clean)