Chapter 4: Boys from Brooklyn

Steve is still Steve even if he doesn't look like Steve. He's taller now, even taller than Bucky, and far bulkier. He runs faster and hits harder than he ever could before. Bucky remembers thinking it would take a miracle to make Steve… well, not Steve, and it's still disconcerting to see his best friend in this jacked-up body.

Steve tells him the story as they march across Austria and back toward Italy, pausing every night to rest. It's still grueling and unpleasant, but nothing like the forced march Bucky endured when he was last in Italy. "And you let him pump you full of experimental shit?" Bucky asks Steve incredulously. He still hasn't told Steve what happened to him in the days… weeks… however long before he found him. He's not sure he wants to; his skin crawls whenever he thinks about Zola pawing him and jabbing needles into him.

"It was my chance to get here," Steve says with an offhand shrug.

Bucky glances at the torn up countryside around him, and the huge Hydra tank rolling slowly behind them, stolen during their mad escape from the factory. There are dozens of guys that Steve single-handedly rescued; most of them carry stolen Hydra weaponry, Bucky included. He'd love to get a shot against Zola, or Lohmer, or any Hydra asshole. "Well I hope it's everything you dreamed of. And more," Bucky tells him with a grin.

"All I ever wanted was to serve my country," Steve says, dead serious. "So yeah, it's what I hoped for." Suddenly he stops and flashes a cheeky grin at Bucky. "And I told you not to win the war without me."

"And I told you not to do anything stupid until I got back." But Bucky's smiling and feeling good, really good, for the first time in a long time. "Then you go and show up here."

"And save your backside," Steve points out. In spite of the light bantering tone, they're both serious. Bucky knows his odds of being rescued were low, and the odds of being rescued by Steve are next to nothing. If there's a God, He's the one at work here. If there's fate, this is it. Or maybe the universe just has a wild sense of the ironic.

Either way, Bucky can't deny that having Steve fighting with him feels right, and he realizes just how wrong it felt leaving Brooklyn that morning without Steve by his side. Of course, it does help that now Steve can hold his own in a fight.

"That asshole Lohmer?" Dum Dum tells him one night while they're eating what they could scrounge. "Yeah, he didn't bother anyone after he kicked your ass. I made sure of that," he says with a grin as he puffs on a cigarette from a pack left in the tank. "Couple of the other guys helped. Turns out those machines don't just crunch metal."

"Glad I'm on your good side then," Bucky says with a mock salute.

They march into the Allied camp two days later. Steve leads them and the closer they get to the center of camp, the straighter his spine gets and the stiffer his gait becomes. Bucky can't help but smile and feel a surge of pride. After all those back alley fights in Brooklyn, all those failed attempts to sneak through the system, Steve's finally doing what he was made to do. It's taken Bucky years to see it. All those times he thought he needed to protect Steve, maybe he just wasn't giving Steve the credit he deserved.

Steve stops in front of craggy-faced Colonel Phillips. "I'd like to surrender myself for disciplinary action," he says, staring straight ahead through Phillips. His jaw is tense and his posture rigid, and Bucky recognizes Steve gearing up for a fight that he can't win. It's gotta be habit at this point, even.

"That won't be necessary," Phillips says almost dismissively, like it was ever a question. Steve stays standing still and tall, though Bucky can see the slight twitch in his jaw proving he's trying not to smile.

Everyone else is smiling though, and a slight blush is creeping up Steve's neck. "Let's hear it for Captain America!" Bucky suddenly shouts, clapping Steve hard on the shoulder, and this time he's not afraid that he's going to knock the guy over. Steve's face breaks into an embarrassed smile and he stares at the ground even though everyone else is cheering for him.

There will be time to catch up later. Now, knowing he's safe leaves Bucky feeling his exhaustion. He slips away through the crowds of people trying to get close to Steve to shake his hand, give him a hug, or God knows what else. This is Steve's moment. And it won't be the last. Somehow that fills Bucky with immense pride.

They head to London a couple days later. Steve has meetings with the SSR people. Bucky meets with an SSR shrink.

"You must be pretty busy debriefing all the guys Hydra held," he tells the guy. He smiles, his crooked side smile that he uses to throw people off guard. "This is just a formality, right?"

"For the most part, yes," the man says, glancing down at his file. All Bucky can think of is the way Zola's pencil scratched on his files, the way he wanted to know what Zola was writing down, but couldn't ever see. "Though your experience was a bit different than most of the others. I was hoping-"

Bucky shakes his head, still smiling. "I got into a fight on the floor, guy kicked my ass and they put me in some kind of infirmary. That's all."

The man raises his eyebrow. "Is it?"

Bucky shrugs. "Yeah, what else would it be?"

"Your fellow POWs suggested that no one ever came back from the isolation ward. And that often, men were worked to death on the floor. Or if they were injured in the line of work, Hydra simply put them down on the spot."

That's the truth. They both know it, the other guys wouldn't lie, nor would they have reason to. "Guess I was lucky for once," Bucky says with another offhand shrug. He grabs his coat and stands before the guy can ask him any more questions. He's just doing his job, so Bucky can't get mad at him. "I'm fine, really," he tells the guy. "Few bruises, nothing a little time couldn't fix. Really." He punctuates this with a nod and then strides out of the office before the shrink can say anything else.

Most of the 107th has gone to the barracks outside of the city, but Bucky and a few of the other guys have been asked to stay nearby. The SSR sets them up in a couple of small flats above a bar. Bucky's got a tiny room to himself. This is fine, because he doesn't want to wake anyone up in the middle of the night when he himself wakes, shaking and breathing hard and looking around in the darkness for needles and vials and straps and buckles. When he shakes his arms out to make certain he's free. When he bites his lip to keep from screaming.

He closes his door and sits on the edge of the bed. He breathes deeply. Everything just needs to slow the fuck down. Ever since the mad fiery escape from the Hydra base everything's moved too fast. He sees too much. Hears too much. Feels too jittery. At first he told himself it was the adrenalin, but the more time passes and the more this becomes his new normal, the more he wonders what was in Zola's endless syringes.

He splashes some cold water on his face and rinses out his mouth. He practices his cheeky, "all's well that ends well" grin in the mirror, trying not to flick his eyes at every movement he sees in the reflection. Then he flops into the narrow bed and buries himself under a rough blanket and makes himself keep his eyes closed until he dozes off.