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The Asset woke in some sort of dank shed, trussed like a turkey, except with thick metal chains instead of soft white string. His head throbbed, his bladder begged for release, his right arm had been dislocated, and overall, he trembled with a fearsome combination of confused and angry as hell.
"There you are," a serious but non-aggressive voice said in between munches of something.
The Asset growled, but only for a moment, because the pain in his head was too bad to handle any unnecessary noises. He looked up, into the light that was too bright, and saw a young man sitting in front of him, eating buttered toast off a little blue china plate.
“How are you feeling?”
No one had ever asked the Asset this, not as far as he could remember. And definitely not with such a tone of concern. Did the question refer to the pain, the constant pain, of which today was merely a slight increase over the usual? Or was he being asked about his mental state, about the disappointment of having failed at his mission? Was this new handler replacing the psychologist Zola had had killed?
The Asset didn’t know how to answer, and therefore he didn’t. Instead, he studied his interrogator, his jailer, the man rudely eating in front of him while the Asset’s stomach churned and bubbled in hunger. Blond, round-faced, between twenty and twenty-three years old. Well-bred English accent. Nice, neat, but not expensive clothes. Strong, but not of military build. Callouses on hands, possibly from handling weapons, but most likely for sport. Placid brow. Difficult to read. Difficult to phase. Secrets. Secrets bigger than any spy’s. A smile that was… was…
It took a minute for the word to form in his head, but in the end, he settled on ‘kind’.
"You're safe here," the young man said after a while, once the silence had pushed past awkward and settled into something almost companionable in its blankness.
"My mission..."
“Never mind about your mission. It was a rotten one. So were the people who gave it to you.”
Handlers didn’t speak like this. To handlers, missions were almost religious pilgrimages, the Asset’s sole purpose. He panicked, but his attack was nascently cut off by a complete inability to move. He had rarely had trouble escaping bonds before, and pulled futilely, twice, before realizing something was wrong. He'd looked down at his arm, which had been tied very neatly down with a double helping of chains.
"My brother is very good with automobiles,” the man said. “That arm of yours is about as strong as an engine. This is more than enough force to stop a truck. Or so my brother tells me."
"What are you?" the Asset asked, meaning to inquire about the man’s allegiances, rank, profession.
"That's a rather rude question," came the reply. "But since you ask, I suppose you could call me a son of Adam."
No one had mentioned an Adam in any of the mission briefings. There had been some Jones’s, occupants of the house the Asset had been set to plunder. But instead he’d found only some imposter plumbers. One of which had been this young man, he suddenly remembered.
"Is that your name, too?" the Asset asked, trying to make sense of anything at all, including the man’s odd answer. “Are you called Adam, after your father?”
"No, but I'll tell you my name if you tell me yours."
The Asset was silent, because he could not answer.
The young man sighed and stood up. "Sleep well. I’ll try again in the morning.”
The man tipped water from a flask into the Asset’s open mouth. Except that it wasn’t quite water. It tasted of rose petals and lemons. It was nice.
The man exited the shed, leaving the Asset in darkness until the throbbing in his head put him to sleep again.
He dreamed of chairs and underground bunkers and screaming against the bonds that held him. He screamed the name that they tried so hard to rip from him. Bucky Bucky Bucky.
When he woke again, the name was still ringing, throbbing through his head. It throbbed along with everything else—with the enhanced blood in his veins, with the pain in his shoulder where the joins to this inhuman arm were attached, with his heartbeat.
The young man was there again, watching just as placidly as before, and just as kindly.
The chains hadn’t been loosened. Whoever he was, this man liked to sit and eat beside danger, but he wasn’t an idiot.
"Bucky. My name is Bucky. Bucky Barnes."
"Nice to meet you, Bucky. I’m Edmund. How are you feeling?” he asked again.
This time, Bucky could answer. “Like hell.”
Edmund laughed. “I can believe it. So, you remember your name. And you know that you feel terrible. Excellent. What else?”
It was a struggle, more to overcome his own reluctance to examine his mind than any actual impediment, but Bucky persevered. An object extraction mission. Dig up some colored rings in a plebeian backyard. Why rings had been buried in a backyard, he hadn’t bothered to ask, though it had sounded strange, even to a mind as blank as his. But one thing he’d known was that it didn’t sound like a job for the Winter Soldier. They’d never sent him on a simple theft before, especially not to steal from civilians. Civilians never had anything Hydra wanted. But orders were orders. He’d been told very strictly to touch the rings only with his metal hand.
But then the rings had been gone by the time he got there, stolen by the recently departed plumbers. There had been a chase. A train. By that point, the plumbers had changed their clothes and joined up with a happy-faced girl and an older couple who looked like their grandparents. Bucky—the Asset—had followed the plumbers onto the train and attacked, ripping the rings from their pockets. Ripping the whole damn pocket off a jacket. There had been a fight, a scuffle. In the end, the whole lot of them had chased after him, outraged, and been joined by a couple of kids who had been… waiting on the platform? All of them—but especially the two plumbers and the happy-faced girl—were a whole lot more organized in their counter-attack than any civilians had any right to be. They’d actually managed to overpower him.
They were still rolling and fighting on the platform when there had been a horrible screech and explosion. And screaming. So much screaming. A hundred times more than when the Asset had actually succeeded in a mission.
Then waking in this shed, or whatever it was.
Bucky didn’t hear his own words when telling the story—the story that this man half knew, given that he’d been there. It came out in a disjointed jumble, to match the swirling images in his head, but Edmund nodded along.
“You saved us, it turned out, not that you meant to,” Edmund said. “If not for making us chase, we would all have died in that train crash.”
“I died in a train crash,” Bucky blurted out, the memory chasing the words. He collected himself—his actual self, he realized with a sense of wonder—and told what little he could remember of the story. It was mostly sensation. Cold, rushing, fear, falling, finishing with, “I died.”
“No, you didn’t,” Edmund said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t be here. Well, I suppose it is possible to die and come back, but I’m not quite sure you’re the type. Would you like something to eat? I’m sure you’re starving. I have some kippers and eggs and toast and bacon. I wasn’t sure what you liked.”
Bucky didn’t know what kippers were, but all the rest of it sounded good. Like food. He nodded. “Please.”
Edmund sat a perfectly measured arm’s length away from the maximum give of Bucky’s chains, just out of reach of any possible attack. He held himself like a general. He held himself like a king (Bucky would know, because he could vaguely remember having shot a few, perhaps recently, perhaps a year ago; it was hazy). He held himself like Peggy Carter used to.
“Lots of lemon juice,” Edmund said when they’d finished. “It’ll help your mind recover.”
“How do you know?”
“Cousin of mine and his friend told me. They once knew someone who’d been brainwashed, you see. They recognized it about you. That’s why you’re here. All the rest of us were ready to give you up to Scotland Yard, but Eustace and Jill saw something in your eyes that reminded them of a friend of theirs. Said you needed to be saved, not arrested. They said to give you lots of lemon juice. That’s what the dwar… What the people in whose care they left their friend swore did the trick in these kinds of situations.”
Bucky wondered how many situations like his were out there. He hoped not many.
“Was their friend okay in the end?”
“They only stayed a couple of days after getting him away, and then never saw him again, but we all assume he was fine. He’s most likely dead now.”
“That’s reassuring,” Bucky replied, and marveled at his own sarcasm. It felt like a tangible thing, like him, a forgotten core. “You shouldn’t have done it. You shouldn’t have saved me. I don’t deserve saving. Not after what I’ve done. It would have been best if you’d…”
Edmund smiled, but his eyes might as well have been crying. “It wasn’t your fault. At least it wasn’t your idea. None of it, if my instincts serve me right. And they usually do. In any fair and just court, you would be absolved of all wrong-doing. Especially with the waves of remorse coming off you the way they are. Trust me, less deserving—much less deserving—people than you have been saved. Liars, blood traitors, little swine.”
A tall fellow burst into the shed. Big, blond, barrel-chested and even more regally imposing than the compact, contained Edmund, this new arrival had the same nose as Bucky’s new friend. He also shared a shape with an old friend. A friend that Bucky could remember, with increasing clarity, haze solidifying the more he stared and tried to remember.
“He’s awake,” the new man said. “Is he lucid?”
“This is my brother, Peter,” Edmund said, nodding. “And this is Bucky Barnes. He’s an American.” Turning to Bucky he asked, “You are American, aren’t you? I was judging by the accent.”
Bucky nodded.
Peter squinched his face, but somehow managed to still look kingly. “Bucky Barnes? You know it does look like… But it can’t be. Bucky Barnes is dead.”
“We just finished having this conversation, in fact, and we came to the conclusion that he isn’t, given that he’s right here and all.”
“I mean, I read about it. Bucky Barnes was an American soldier in the war. Captain America’s great chum. Don’t you remember? We used to listen to the radio shows about them after the war.”
“You mean you and Lucy used to listen to them. I always hated that sort of thing,” Edmund scoffed, but Bucky interrupted them.
“Steve,” he breathed, because of course. That was why Peter seemed so familiar. Someone larger than life trapped in something too mundane, too everyday. Someone who ought to have always been Captain America. “Did he make it? Did he…”
Peter shook his head. “I’m sorry. He… he was a true hero, though. His efforts at the end were instrumental in winning the war. I’m… I’m very sorry.”
Bucky hung his head and let this fresh pain wash over him. Edmund and Peter fell silent, letting him take the time he needed.
Eventually, something in their conversation struck him. “‘When you were kids’, you said. How long has it been?”
“Since the end of the war? About eight years,” Edmund said.
“It doesn’t feel that long. They kept me asleep, frozen, you see.”
Peter and Edmund exchanged a look.
“It’s like going back to Narnia,” Peter whispered, softly, but not softly enough for Bucky’s enhanced hearing to miss.
“To where?” Bucky asked.
“It doesn’t matter any more,” Peter said sadly. “It's nowhere we can get back to.”
“Sorry,” Bucky said, going just by the sadness on the brothers’ faces, not from actually understanding.
“It's all right,” Edmund said, clapping Peter on the back. “As I've been trying to tell everyone, not being able to go back to Narnia doesn't mean our adventures have to stop.”
The next time Bucky woke, he was in a comfortable living room, hung with green curtains, and propped up on a worn leather sofa.
Edmund was in an armchair nearby, eating, as usual, but this time also reading a large book.
Bucky looked down the length of himself. He’d been freed. Completely untied.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
Edmund looked up. “A generalized thesis on families of flora, their shared traits, and various uses.”
“What for?”
“I’ve found that flowers tend to be similar from world to world. And you never know when you’ll need an herbal remedy or to avoid a poisonous weed.”
Bucky shook his head. ‘World to world’ didn’t make any sense. But there were more pressing issues at hand than Edmund’s choice of light reading.
“Look, I can’t stay here. They’ll be looking for me. I don’t wanna put you and your brother in any more danger than I already—”
“Do you think we didn’t think of that? Unlike my cousin’s friend, we didn’t know who had hurt you. We couldn’t avenge you, kill them, do anything. But we did set it up to look like you’d died in the train crash, in order to keep them from coming after you.”
“What?”
Edmund laughed to himself. “I suppose I was wrong to insist so strongly yesterday that you didn’t die in a train crash. Because, as far as everyone else is concerned, you did. Twice, even.”
“But… they’ll know. They’ll…”
“So, I’ll take you somewhere they can never follow. We were planning on going anyway. We tried using the rings to get back to Narnia, but the pond is shut. However, there are plenty more we can explore. More company never hurt, and something tells me you’d be reliable and useful in a pinch. Especially if you’re the chap they based those radio shows on.”
Bucky shook his head, not understanding the details of what Edmund said, but fearing the larger picture. “It won’t work. There’s nowhere I can run. There’s nowhere on Earth where they can’t find—”
Edmund rose from his armchair pulled out a bit of cloth from his pocket. He unfolded it to show two rings. “Who said I was taking you anywhere on Earth?”