Thank you for the reviews, Qweb and Savvycali! And to everyone who has favorited or followed this little drabble. And holy crap, I didn't realize this chapter got as long as it did until FF tallied the word count. Hi, 2600 word count, been a while...

#

Bucky knew that Steve had been relieved when he said 'yeah,' instead of the silence Bucky wanted to maintain. Steve's relief was why he had said it.

However, it relieved no one that he tried to assume a prisoner of war position after he sat in the car. Even unconsciously, he was worrying people. Every mission he had been expected to ride with his hands behind his head, safe and incapable of killing his handlers. He was pretty sure he had done something to deserve the reputation, but he didn't remember. Every murder was clear in his mind, yes, but the contexts weren't.

Anyway, he was one-handed right now so the position didn't work anyway. Improvisation was difficult, but he put the arm across his lap, held onto it with the other hand, and tried not to look threatening. Steve was walking a line by bringing him in; he could feel it in the rest of the van. The fear, tension, more powerful than actually holding a gun, and the feeling that most of them were glad his arm was off.

Bucky, by contrast, tried not to shiver. Sam had stayed behind and he missed the man's calming presence. Steve was his friend but Sam was… Sam was calming. Sam didn't give the impression that everything could break loose at any moment, while Steve gave the impression that if it did, Bucky would be safe. It wasn't the same.

Getting into Stark Tower in Barton's van was much easier than entering through the front door. Steve did insist on carrying the arm, for security's sake, and Barton patted him down for weapons before they let him out. Two more knives, a gun, and three daggers. He voluntarily gave up the sedation capsule and the poison capsule.

"Stark will probably want to do a scan the minute we get in anyway," Steve said. Bucky nodded. Stark probably would.

"Are you okay with this?" Steve asked. Bucky looked over at the man—the earnest, inquisitive face over the mass of leadership and muscle. Steve was in plainclothes but he never really put away the uniform of the Captain. He wanted confirmation. Bucky didn't want to tell him that he just wanted orders, at this point, not questions on how he felt about things. Everything he felt was probably wrong anyway.

Instead, he nodded.

JARVIS deemed his arm safe, as long as it was detached, so they took the long elevator ride up to Stark's lobby.

"He's a bit…" Steve began. "He's a bit of an ass."

"We've met," Bucky said.

"And he's probably going to try and get you to… well, I don't want to hypothesize, but—"

He had to ask.

"What should I do?"

Steve looked up, startled out of his thoughts. A quell of fear went through Bucky's stomach. Asking for direction was something Bucky—Steve's version of Bucky—shouldn't have asked and he had just asked it. Requested orders.

"Don't agree to join SHIELD," Steve said after a moment. "And don't join the Avengers if he asks. Not now, anyway."

"Is that all?"

"Well, I don't know what you… want…" the super soldier hedged. Bucky bit back the words 'that makes two of us,' and tried to think of anything he needed to ask Steve, the one person he could trust in all of this. Stark certainly wasn't going to explain things for him but he needed Stark to get the arm reattached. He couldn't run from here.

The elevator door opened and they stepped out into the lobby – or maybe it was Stark's living room. Hard to tell with all the windows and couches and the full bar waiting against the wall, but Bucky was guessing 'receiving area.' The iron man not-currently-in-iron was standing in front of a laptop with at least a dozen clear screens flickering in front of him. The windows had been dimmed to the perfect lighting for this task – Bucky had no idea how. Instead, JARVIS politely introduced them from invisible speakers somewhere overhead.

"Captain America, Hawkeye, and James Barnes to see you, sir."

"His arm's broken, isn't it," Stark said without turning. Steve glanced at Bucky, then back at the obnoxious prick.

"That matter?"

"Well, seeing as he gave me the brush-off last time we met and that thing's running on some rip-off ARC reactor which is bound to go kaput without a charge, I'm guessing it's the only reason you're back." He turned around. "Oh, look. I'm right."

"The arm is fully operational," JARVIS intoned.

"Oh. Well then." Stark took a measured step back. It wasn't fear though; assessment, pinpointing weapons in the room, monitoring Bucky's stance.

"I took it off," Bucky said with some pleasure. Pleasure. That was odd. Still, the situation felt more controlled here; with Steve at his side, Stark wasn't as terrifying as he had been before. As long as he could keep some thread of respect tied between him and Stark, Bucky could control this.

"And you can't get it back on," Stark said. Steve took umbrage at this and Bucky looked over at him, puzzled. He hadn't read anything in Stark's tone, but Steve had and changed the subject, abruptly, to something Bucky had little memory of.

"Did you learn anything about the man in the mall?" Steve asked.

"Funny you should ask, because that ties into the man with the metal arm. The man in the mall was Dr. Johann Fennhoff, otherwise known as Dr. Faustus. Austrian, psychiatrist with a private office in Chesapeake Bay, and despite looking like this—" A picture came up on one of the screens, featuring the red-bearded large man from the mall. "He can speak and get just about anyone to do what he says. Part-magician, part-psychoterrorist, which is a hell of a term for something I just made up."

"Who did he work for?" Steve asked, looking at the image.

"'Did' isn't the right word. His body vanished from the morgue. NYPD searched his apartment and, under SHIELD instructions, gave his files to me for review. I'm Hill's top guy right now. JARVIS?"

"Sir?"

"Remind me to tell Hill I'm her top guy."

"Yes, sir."

"Anyway, I found lists. Faustus has been collaborating with Computer-Zola for years and they did not get along. Still, Faustus programmed some newer data into…" And here even Stark got quiet. It hung over the room, Stark's silence, because it didn't seem like something that happened often. This was not a man who often felt the pressure of awkward, or let it sit like this.

"Bucky," Steve said, very quietly. "But if he worked on it, why would he say a trigger that would get him killed?"

"No idea. It's possible he didn't think it would work. It was a subset of another order because…" Stark checked the sheet. "They wanted him to be able to kill Steve on sight, that was basic training mission-type stuff, but Faustus wanted this particular order to be that the Winter Soldier would shoot any messenger who delivered the trigger word, managed all the programming on that himself."

The training missions rang all kinds of bells. When he knew the context, Bucky could go back into his mind and find some of the memories relating to it. He remembered the training missions. Completing the training missions and executing the targets. Targets which invariably looked like… Steve. Sudden nausea turned his stomach. He would complete a training mission and then he would kill someone who looked like Steve. He had killed people who looked exactly like Steve dozens of times, training himself to kill Steve –

And yet in the helicarrier he hadn't.

Actual Steve was the only person who deserved to live then? What about all the men doing as they were ordered, playing 'Steve'? What kind of screwed morality lets you kill dozens and not kill one?

"I didn't…" he murmured, trying to keep as quiet as possible. "I didn't know, I didn't, I… didn't…"

Stark hadn't noticed, but Steve was glancing at him with concern as Stark went on.

"On the lists I found, the messenger trigger had 12 red stars next to it. I'm assuming they tested it 12 times. But stuff like this one—it has 48—has been more thoroughly tested."

"Which one—"

Stark said 'the centerpiece can be recycled' and everything… blacked. It was muscle-memory from the second he went into motion, metal in hand. Flipping switches, cables, locks—fifteen seconds later Bucky found himself with the arm reattached, pointing a gun at Stark and he didn't even know where the gun had come from.

"Buck—" Steve put his hand on top of the metal arm and pushed it down, gently. Bucky let the gun come down. His hand shook. He visually followed the path of his arm to the ground, staring at the tile below them until it came into focus, something to stare at past the arm. The arm was reattached and he had no memory of how he had even learned to do it, much less the process he had followed in the last 15 seconds to attach it.

"Problem solved?" Stark asked—quietly. Everything was gentle right now, everything touched with delicacy like a piece of lace dragged over a rooftop that should tear it to bits. Using his other hand, Bucky touched the arm. It fit seamlessly at the shoulder, no buckles or cords hanging off. He know how to do it and do it well.

"The entire list is triggers. Banner translated most of it before he went incommunicado, so I knew what that one would do."

And he hadn't felt like saying? Stark had made him an experiment, conducted an experiment, in front of Cap, Barton, and whatever else was surveying him here, and hadn't felt like telling him. It was against his will. It didn't matter if it was something that needed doing, something he wanted done anyway; he hadn't wanted to attach his own arm, not like that.

"Get them out," Bucky said, looking up.

Really, that wasn't what he wanted to say. He had an elite set of skills and right now he wanted to practice all of them on Stark's smug, intelligent face. Not so smug now though—Stark looked surprised. Surprise was bad; it meant that the man would be asking for clarification in a minute, trying to tell him that he had been weaponized and taking trigger words out of his brain wasn't going to be as simple as defusing a bomb.

Preemptively, he felt himself shutting down. Parts of his mind that had been active deciding that now was a good time for a holiday and turning out the lights of memory as they went.

"Get them out," he repeated, because it was the most recent thing he had said, it was important, and they weren't arguing with it.

"We need the guy you killed to get them out," Stark said, gesturing at the red-haired psychiatrist's picture. "I'm not just going to start mucking about in there."

A mission. It was a mission then.

"Briefing." The word used for requesting more intel. They would hand him a packet from time to time, because he wasn't a child; they could trust him to follow the mission plan. That was a briefing. The iron man hadn't prepared a briefing.

"Under Maria Hill's orders, you can't leave this building until SHIELD clears you," Stark said, collapsing all the screens into one laptop with a wave of the hand.

"He can't get SHIELD clearance until we get this guy," Steve interjected.

"I have a meeting with Hill in five minutes, I'm getting clearance. Get him set up somewhere secure and don't let him watch the news. JARVIS knows better too." He handed off the list to Steve and, thank God, said nothing else that Bucky could hear.

He hadn't watched the news in years anyway, not unless he was undercover and didn't have a choice. But if he couldn't watch the news, he was probably on the news. The man at the mall was probably on the news.

"The name," he said quietly, glancing up from the floor, but Steve had gotten pulled into conversation with Stark. Barton was looking at him, but said: "Dr. Faustus" with a guarded air. Dr. Faustus. Armin Zola. Trace it, think back through it, ignore everything around the memories, just find Dr. Faustus. Figure out who he might be, where he might be. Blank walls. Blank memories everywhere he looked

He could do better.

"Bucky."

It sounded like the name had been said several times and someone was getting impatient. He came to himself when he felt Steve grip his human shoulder. He glanced up.

"Stark's sending a nurse and he wants to do a full eval later. Do you think you can handle a nurse?"

Agree. That's what he was supposed to do in this situation. What Steve wanted. Instead, he shrugged with one shoulder, which dislodged Steve's hand. He wanted to ask about the man from the mall again. The red-haired man from the mall. The… the doctor? The red-haired doctor from the mall that he had…

Steve had the list in one hand. It was crumpled up in his fist, right now, but he had the list in hand.

"Don't."

He didn't want to look at the super soldier. His friend. Super soldier. Man on the—damn it, he needed more sleep.

"It's so I don't say them," Steve said, quietly. "It's a copy."

Copy. There were more of the lists. How many people knew the words? Had memorized the words? How many of his former handlers were running around with this knowledge in their heads, people just waiting for him to try and address his dozens of assassinations so they could set him up for another one?

"Don't," he repeated.

"Stark's an ass," Steve said, reaffirming what he had said earlier. "Come on, we'll talk about someone else… you remember Namor?"

No. He didn't. He wished he did though, so he nodded and watched the floor as Steve started talking about an Atlantean prince from the war. The sound of Steve talking quickly became white noise; still strange to hear English as a predominate language.

Their shoes were different. Steve wasn't in uniform, so the sneakers he wore were running shoes. White (or they had once been white before saving-the-day got at them) and with sad-looking laces. In contrast, Bucky's boots were scuffed, marked with water damage, mud, and several tears in the fabric from the tower. He had meant to switch them out, but it was harder to obtain new shoes than it was to get hat, shirt, pants, and coat. People were weird about shoes and underwear and socks. There were some things you were only supposed to buy if you had a home to take them back to.

Steve hugged him by the shoulder. In the pressure of his fingertips was a life of courage and confidence. Even if he hadn't always done the best thing, Steve did the Right Thing. Steve would lay down his life for the American people and as far as he was concerned, Bucky still was one of them.

"It's gonna be okay," Steve told him.

No, it wasn't. Not until they finished the mission, got the trigger words out of his head, not until they dealt with this enormous problem he was making for Steve just by existing, just by refusing to die when he should have.

He nodded anyway.

#

I feel like I should apologize for the meandering of this story (it's one of my rare didn't-plot-this-out-fully-in-advance ones and I don't have beta) but, as is, I'm just grateful for reviews and anyone who wants to read it. Thank you.