Clint Barton and Natasha Romanoff were practically ninja, Stark had said.
The word was unfamiliar to the Soldier, so while Steve went to consult with Sam regarding the new arrivals and how to best prepare for them, the Soldier slipped back to his room to gather intel. According to Wikipedia, ninja were mercenaries in feudal Japan. Either cryostasis is a much older process than the Soldier realized, or the word "ninja" in relation to Barton and Romanoff has a different meaning.
In popular culture, he reads, depictions of ninja are often fantastically exaggerated. Stylized ninja move in a stealthy fashion and wear dark masks. By that definition, he is a ninja. Has the term evolved to apply to any mercenary, or is there further context he is missing? He scans the lengthy record of films and novels pertaining to ninja, but they are likely to fall under the category of things the Soldier is not "ready for." Media about assassins is something he doubts his caretakers would like him to be exposed to.
He tries to gain context by reading about the history of Japan instead. At first the learning goes without incident, but then he reaches World War II. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is a rush of hatred tearing through his nausea, teeth grinding with his tongue caught between them. The taste of iron floods his mouth. American butchers, he cannot help but think. The words must come from HYDRA, but he cannot place the specific source. Imperialist murderers.
He navigates away from that article and discovers an entry on Unit 731. His hands will not move to close the page and there are trails of tears down his face.
JARVIS, who the Soldier believes can monitor his heart rate, shuts the browser window and plays the song by Ace of Base until his breathing levels.
The next afternoon, when Barton and Romanoff arrive at the tower, they are not wearing dark masks or moving in a stealthy fashion.
The Soldier is there with the others when they arrive. Sam had suggested it the night prior, when they were all together at the table and eating something Stark had called lo mein out of white cartons. It was mostly compromised of noodles and was eaten with a pair of pointed sticks. Steve had been teaching the Soldier how to hold them when Sam spoke and the sticks had slipped from Steve's hands.
"Are you sure?" Steve had asked. "Wouldn't it better to ease him into—"
"We'll be prepared for it and we'll know how he handles it straight off the bat. The longer we wait, the higher the chance he could run into one of them by mistake."
So he is waiting with Sam and Steve for their arrival. Barton and Romanoff will be delivered by a helicopter Stark has sent for them, so they are waiting on the same floor as the hanger. They are in the Avengers Tower. The year is 2014. It has been three weeks since he left HYDRA and he never has to go back. He is with friends. He no longer has missions. His name is Bucky Barnes. He is ninety-eight years old.
Sam had made the Soldier recite these facts. He took it for a status report, but Sam calls it a reality grounding exercise and says it is to keep the Soldier anchored in the present no matter what the sight of Romanoff may spark in him. He is to repeat it if he feels the need to terminate her. He is to repeat it if he feels confused or uneasy. Sam and Steve are to keep him in the present and lead him away if he becomes violent. Stark is to defend Romanoff and Barton.
The Soldier notes the newcomers' injuries before anything else. It would be the first thing he noticed even if he were not trained to seek out weakness, because the wounds are numerous and obvious. Barton's eyes are blackened, his face bruised, scraped, and held together with butterfly bandages. One of his wrists is splinted; the opposite arm is in a sling. He favors his left side when he walks. There is a quiver of arrows and a bow slung across his back and while the Soldier cannot see any other weapons on his person, he is sure there are more from what little he knows of the man.
Romanoff is less visibly damaged, but her lip is split and her gait is off just enough for the Soldier's gaze to drop to her ankles. The legs of her pants conceal the joints, but he is sure the right ankle is bandaged. There is bruising on her neck, mostly concealed by golden, wavy hair that just brushes her shoulders. The Soldier is staring and waiting for the spark of memory Sam and Steve are so afraid of, but nothing comes. She reminds him of nothing at all.
"What happened?" Stark asks, and Barton sinks into one of the chairs farthest from the Soldier. He breathes in a way that speaks of injury, of a moan he won't let slip out.
"Reconnaissance in Kiev," he says. "And then my cover—all my covers—were online and SHIELD wasn't answering calls, and—"
"I meant Goldilocks." Stark's hand stretches toward Romanoff's hair and she twists his wrist. She could easily snap the bones, but she does not. "What? I thought women like it when you notice new hairstyles—"
"There are about as many prices on my head in the Ukraine as there are in Russia. And since my face has been on every global news network as of late, I needed to distract from it." Her body is slim but she sinks into the chair beside Barton as if there is great heaviness to her, deep within her bones. Her eyes are tired but there is something more to them, something clever. The Soldier thinks of foxes, though he cannot bring an image of a fox to mind beyond the color red. This woman is not red, but it seems to suit her.
"I just had to fight my way out of a torture chamber with nothing but a medical tray and a syringe," she adds. "So whatever blonde puns you're about to crack can wait until I won't break your jaw for saying them."
"Hey," Stark puts a hand to his heart. "First of all, my humor's much more highbrow than that."
Steve, who is holding the Soldier's hand, makes a choking noise.
"Heckling from the peanut gallery is not welcome, thank you very much. Secondly, it's a good look on you. I mean, they're all good looks. Does your hair ever stay the same for more than a month? You're like a Deluxe Stylin' Head Barbie. But it's nice. And they say gentlemen prefer blondes."
"Well then." Barton's head is leaning back against the top of the chair as if he is asleep. He is hardly audible. "In that case, Nat, you shouldn't have to worry about Stark ogling you anymore."
Romanoff and Barton are laughing together as Stark protests that he was dying, and dying men are allowed to ogle. The Soldier makes a note to look up the definition of ogle later.
Barton, Stark had said, was brainwashed, but the Soldier can see no traces of the processes that made him an asset in this battered man. It isn't the laughter that keeps him from envisioning it; the Soldier has laughed more than once in his time here. Yet he has never joked, never thought to deliberately initiate amusement in others. Even now that the concept is in his mind—the joke seems to have lifted some of the weight from Romanoff, and to do the same to Steve would be very good—he has no idea of how to do so. Whatever has been done to Barton, he seems leagues above in recovery, so far forward that the Soldier cannot even glimpse the path he took.
There are eyes on him when the laughter stops; the Soldier feels the gaze and raises his head to find Barton looking at him. The bruising around the man's eyes prevents him from reading into them as he had with Romanoff's. "Hello," Barton says. His voice is soft as Steve's had been on the night in Brooklyn when the Soldier knocked him unconscious.
"Hello," the Soldier says.
"Clint Barton."
"I'm Bucky Barnes." He isn't yet—he maybe never will be—but if he introduces himself as the Winter Soldier, he thinks Steve may panic or sigh and he'd rather avoid that. It isn't as if the Soldier was meant to introduce himself as such anyway; the asset was not designed to identify with a name.
He means to stop there, but the repetition Sam had taught him earlier is still fresh in his mind and it is so similar to the status reports his handler would demand that he cannot keep from reciting the rest. "I'm ninety-eight. I am in the Avengers Tower. I'm with friends. It is 2014. I no longer have missions. I have been away from HYDRA for three weeks and I never have to go back."
There is a rush of heat to his face as there had been yesterday when he remembered the recitation of the message that in actuality was just a song. This is not dissimilar and he braces himself for the laughter. Laughing shouldn't bother him. He prefers it when Steve laughs and HYDRA's amusement was better than their electricity.
But the heat does not leave his skin.
It takes fifteen seconds to realize there will be no laughter. Steve brushes his hair back and asks if he needs to leave the room for a while. The Soldier is about to say yes when Barton speaks.
"You never have to go back."
It is not a flat repetition. Nor is it a mockery. The Soldier can hear in the man's voice what he could not see in his eyes: Barton has been taken apart and reshuffled in a new order pleasing to whatever master he was made to serve.
He meets Barton's gaze again. Of everyone in the room, they are the most like strangers to each other, and yet there is a comforting familiarity in the newcomer and something in Barton's face that says he not only believes the words he's spoken, but that he wants the Soldier to believe them as well.
"I never have to go back," he says.
Barton nods, and if only for that instant, the Soldier thinks it true.
A/N: Unit 731 was a biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Japanese army in WWII that experimented on Chinese prisoners. There were many experiments and all of them horrible beyond words (do not look it up unless you have a strong stomach and aren't easily upset), but the ones especially likely to trigger Winter would be limb amputation and deliberately inflicting frostbite on the prisoners. There's also a terrifying and upsetting Chinese movie on the subject, called The Men Behind the Sun. When the film was made, China had no effects budget to speak of, so when they needed to show body parts maimed or frozen, they had the actors hold onto real body parts.
The All Dolled Up Deluxe Stylin' Head Barbie is basically a giant plastic Barbie head that children can then apply makeup to and style the hair. Some versions also include a hand so there can be nail-painting.