Chapter 1: Years Go By

Summary: When Steve fell into the ice, he slept for seventy years. James is not so lucky.

1943

Peggy couldn't stop going over it in her mind, how James had looked her over in the bar, had sat across a table and told her, "The one good thing about being an orphan is you get used to sharing, to never getting exactly what you want," how James had planned Steve's future and told lies with his camera. Peggy's photo was in Steve's compass and history would make her his widow. It's not the story James had planned, but it might be enough to protect Steve's memory.

There wasn't any time to waste. Peggy wasn't sure exactly what was in Steve's sketch book or tucked into James' cheap dime store novels, but it all had to go before Steve was officially declared dead and the Colonel came to pack up their things. She opened the door to Steve's room, already thinking about how she was going to get two footlockers down the stairs before someone came looking for her, when she saw them. "Dum Dum. Gabe."

They were standing at the foot of the bed, hefting Steve's footlocker, and they both look incredibly guilty. "Ma'am." Dum Dum looked like he was about to make an excuse, but she held up a hand.

"There's no time for this. Howard is starting a fire. Where is Barnes' locker?"

Gabe let out a breath and relaxed a little, but he didn't set down the trunk. "Morita and Dernier are hauling it out the back."

"Howard is in the clearing behind the barn. Go find Falsworth, make sure he's there." She watched them go, and only once they were well down the stairs did she jerk open the drawer to the small desk in the corner. The only thing in the drawer was a manila envelope, full of Barnes' negatives. For a moment, she was tempted to open the envelope and see the carefully staged lies the three of them were creating, but that would just be salting her wounds. She tucked the envelope under her arm and walked across the yard and into the woods.

The Howling Commandos were standing in a circle around a barrel, burning Steve's drawings and the letters he and James had written to each other. "Gentlemen." She threw the envelope into the fire. All their plans literally turned to ashes.

It was cold, but no one was enjoying the fire. Howard stopped tearing pages out of a sketch book long enough to spare her a glance. "I will find him, you know."

"I know, Howard." She watched the envelope burn away and the film blister. "But when you find him, I want him to get full honors."

They didn't speak again, about what they'd done. The Commandos were back in the war in two weeks later, fighting Nazis instead of Hydra forces.

1963, NYC

The woman in the mirror was getting older, there was no denying it. Peggy put on a coat of lipstick and tried not to think about the date too much. Maria leaned in the doorway. "Are you ready to go?"

All of them were getting older, even Maria, although she didn't know it yet. "Of course." It had been a dark year, the war in Vietnam heating up, and their president dead. It was just a reminder that their best and truest hero died twenty years ago tonight.

She didn't like Howard's mansion, wasn't fond of Howard's young wife, how perceptive she was. If Howard had to marry a beautiful young woman, couldn't he have picked a stupid one? Maria hooked her arm and lead her towards the study where Howard was drinking himself numb before the ceremony. "Do you wish you'd taken him for yourself, Agent Carter?"

"No, I don't think Howard and I would have been happy together." He had asked, of course, when the war in Europe had ended. If she'd known what he was doing, if she'd know about the bomb, she might have said yes. They would have had each other, at least. Instead, all they had was SHIELD.

"I don't think anyone could make Howard happy." Maria pasted on a smile and pushed open the door to the study. "Dear, are you-"

There was a man wearing black and all that was visible was the back of his head. He had Howard pressed against a wall, one hand around his throat, the other holding a knife to his ear. Howard didn't seem to have noticed the women enter. "Please, don't do this. Don't you remember me? It's Howard. Whatever they did to you, I can fix it. You don't have to do this."

The man in black said, "You're about to die, Mr. Stark. Do you really want to go out babbling?"

Peggy had her gun out of her thigh holster and she was halfway across the room before she really knew what she was doing. She knew that voice. She'd spent hours sitting around, drinking bad coffee, making plans with that voice. She pressed the gun to the back of the man's head. "Turn around, slowly. Or I will splatter your brains across Howard's very nice painting."

The man turned, and her mind wasn't playing tricks on her. The face was the same, but the eyes... James Barnes' body was there, but when you looked into his eyes, the soul was missing. Howard slumped against the wall, his eyes very wide.

Peggy shoot James in the neck when he went for the gun strapped to his hip.

SHIELD sent over a doctor, who pumped a few pints of blood into James and stiched the wound on his neck closed. All Peggy could do was watch as Howard took x-rays, many many x-rays. "Look." He put one up on a light box. "There's something in his head."

"What is it?"

"I have no idea. I've never seen anything like it." He put up another. "This is his left arm."

She hadn't noticed under his shirtsleeve, but it was made of metal. "Howard, if you've never seen anything like this, who built it?"

"I don't know anyone able to work with this level of sophisticated robotics. Give me a couple decades, I could probably get pretty close. First I'd have to start a technological revolution, figure out how to miniaturize electronic components."

She hadn't seen Howard this alive in years. "The thing in his head, can you take it out?"

"Not without killing him. But I might be able to turn it off, for a while."

James woke up tied to a bed. For a long moment, he was absolutely certain he was back in that HYDRA prison, that his imagination had run completely wild and he'd only dreamed Steve had rescued him and everything that came after but Peggy was sitting next to his bed, so he couldn't have imagined all of it. "Where am I?"

She'd been reading from a paperback novel and she startled when he spoke. She was older, much older. "You're in the basement of Howard Stark's mansion."

The train. He'd fallen off the train. "How long have I been here?"

"Three days. You lost a lot of blood." She set her book aside and dragged her chair closer to the bedside. "Barnes, what do you remember?"

"I was on the train." Peggy bowed her head and he wondered how much he'd lost. There was a bandage on his neck. "Did I take a bad hit to the head?"

"No. I shot you." She lifted the corner of the bandage. "It looks much better, actually. I was afraid I'd killed you at first."

She pressed a button and the bed pushed him into a sitting position. There was a large device in one corner that looked like it had been put together out of a scrap bin. It was obviously Howard's handiwork. "Why did you shoot me?"

"You were trying to kill Howard. You really don't remember anything?"

"No." His hair itched, he wasn't sure when he'd last showered, but when he tried to reach up to scratch it he found out both his arms were strapped down. The right one he could at least jerk against the straps but the left one... He couldn't feel it, couldn't move it. It wasn't the worst way he'd ever woken up but it was pretty high up the list. "Where's Steve?"

"James." Another woman might have avoided his gaze but this was Peggy Carter, she was braver than that. She untied his right hand and held it in her own. "You fell off the train. You've been gone for twenty years and what showed up here three days ago wasn't you."

Steve had always come for him before, even when it had seemed impossible. That he wasn't here was worse than the arm James couldn't feel. "Did I hurt him? Is that what you're saying?"

Her hand tightened around his. It probably would have hurt, if he'd still been normal. "James, we lost Steve during the war."

"He died?" James couldn't picture that, Steve dead on the battlefield. Not Captain America, nearly bulletproof and indestructible.

The door to the room opened and closed as Howard slipped in. "No, she means we lost him. His plane went down in the Artic. Sooner or later, I'll find him, and bring him home."

Howard looked like he'd aged more than twenty years but he still had that manic gleam in his eyes. "There's something wrong with my arm."

"I had to turn it off." Howard sat down in one of the metal chairs at his bedside, like that was a completly reasonable sentence.

"Off?" How the hell did you turn an arm off?

"We weren't sure who was going to be waking up." Peggy had that tight lipped expression she'd always given Howard when he'd said something rude. "We think it was injured in the fall. It's been replaced."

James pulled his hand out of Peggy's. At first glance, the arm was fine, just numb. His hand was in a glove though and when he looked under the shirtsleeve all he saw was metal. "Shit."

"We have no idea where the technology came from, or who you're working for." Peggy straightened his shirt cuff, hiding the metal.

"Thank you." It was easier to not have to see it.

Howard was a little more tactful when he spoke again. "What we did, to get you back, it's not permanent."

James knew what he meant, that sooner or later, he would be that someone else again, the man who had tried to kill Howard. The room was silent except for the humming of the machine. "Are you going to kill me?"

"No." Howard shook his head. "I have something else in mind. The world's changed, James. If you're on the other side now, it's an opportunity we can't let go."

It would have been different, if Steve was sitting there with them, but he wasn't. Steve was dead and James was alone again. If all that was left was the fight, fighting was what he'd do. "I can't remember anything the other guy did. I don't even know his name."

"I've called in a favor. Some friends are coming to visit."

Howard's friends were from Westchester. They were a few years older than James had been, when he'd fallen off the train and it was strange to think they must have been children during the war. Howard brought one of them into James' room and gave the kind of introduction only he thought was appropriate. "This is Erik. Erik, this is James. He has a cybernetic arm and a control device in his brain. Have fun."

He took the other man away somesomewhere less underground bunker-like, leaving James alone with a man who was eyeing his arm the way some men looked at attractive women. "Let me see your arm."

"Aren't you going to buy me a drink first?" The joke fell flat. "Never mind. Are you going to remove it?"

Erik looked revolted about the idea. "No. It's a part of you." He lifted the arm delicatley, like it weighed nothing to him.

"Then what are you going to do to it?" Howard had said the men were special, that they had unique abilities. Logan had been like that, he'd healed quickly. "Do you have X-ray vision?"

"No." Erik peered very closely at James' shoulder, then at his head which made James pretty sure he was lying about the x-ray vision thing. "There's no way we're getting that thing out, not without killing you."

"You could do it anyway." It didn't sound so bad, dying. Not after a week in this basement, listening to Peggy's stories about how the world was ruining itself, while Steve long gone.

"No, I can't." Erik was manipulating the hand now. The fingers flexed, the wrist rotated. Howard had called it beautiful. To James, it was ugly and nightmarish.

"You don't know me. They have me chained in a basement. I could be a monster." James knew this was probably his last shot. After this, Peggy and Howard wouldn't give him another chance.

"I can't. I owe Howard a debt, from the war." Erik rubbed a finger against his forearm, but whatever he was touching was hidden by his shirt. James wasn't sure how a child could owe a debt, but he seemed very serious about it. "I honor my debts, but I'm not a believer. Charles believes in heroes, in the human potential. He grew up on stories of Captain America fighting Nazis with the Howling Commandos. I met them, they saved my life, but that doesn't change the truth."

"What?"

"That men are monsters, and our greatest heroes are all dead." Erik raised his hand, and a magnifying glass came flying out of his bag straight into his hand. "Your friends want Charles to implant a trigger, a command that will temporarily override the device in your brain. Together, the two of us could do this."

That wasn't exactly what James had in mind when he'd thought about getting back in the fight. The man touched a seemingly random place on his arm and an access panel sprang open. He hadn't used a tool, it just opened for him and James was certain he was telling the truth, that this man and his friend could turn him into a double agent and his other half would never know.

The door opened and Howard came back in, with the man who must be Charles trailing behind him. "Erik, can it be done?"

Erik was looking at Charles and James got the sudden feeling that they were having a whole conversation no one else could hear. Not just communicating in looks, but an actual conversation. Erik set down his screwdriver. "We believe so."

Charles was psychic, and that almost made James throw in the towel right then and there. "There are some things in there that are private." And illegal. His head was full of stolen moments with Steve, a serious enough problem before he'd gotten himself turned into an American icon.

"I won't pry."

There was no other way out of this room, no hope to ever be himself again for good. The only thing here for him was Steve's ghost and he couldn't stay locked up with it much longer. "Alright."

Erik, who had been quietly drawing diagrams of the thing in James' head, actually laughed. "He's just saying that to make you feel better. We'll be prying, quite a bit."

Charles touched his temple and it didn't hurt, at least on James' end. He didn't feel anything or notice time passing but eventually Charles drew his hand back. It was shaking. "It's done."

Was it exertion, or what he'd seen? James forced himself to look Charles straight in the eyes. "Steve Rogers was a hero."

"Of course he was." Charles tried to stand and almost fell over. Erik caught him by the elbow. "I'm alright. The conditioning was stronger than I expected. The other personality is called the Winter Soldier. He won't remember any of this, but when we wake you up again, you'll be able to tell us what he's seen."

"You're not alright. Give me the keys, I'm driving home." Erik was giving Charles a look, and James could imagine the internal commentary, about how some people refused to take care of themselves. James got it, he'd felt like that a lot, every time he'd seen Steve doing something heroic.

"Peggy, what did you do, with the photos?" Before they shut him off, before the Soldier took control again, he had to know.

Her hands were resting on the machine that was keeping James himself and she looked at it rather than him. "I burned them. I burned everything."

"Good." He didn't know how long he would be asleep or what his body would do while he was out of control. "Will you be here, when I wake up?"

"For as long as I can." She flipped the switch and James faded away. Two days later, SHIELD dumped the Winter Soldier out of the back of a van in Germany. The Red Room debriefed him for a week, then sent him back to work.

Notes: For my random ramblings, reblogs, and ficlets please find me on tumblr as roguewrld