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There’s always a moment after each mission, when the gun smoke starts to dissipate or the pool of blood spreads past the point of no return, when Steve thinks about running.
Hank Pym isn’t the first SHIELD agent he’s helped kill, but he’s the first scientist in years. The injustice of it--killing a noncombatant in a war he never signed up for--chokes him, and every time he so much as blinks, he sees Abraham Erskine behind his eyelids. The sniper kills are always the worst. Any other mission--and it’s most of them, when Steve is the one who plans them--Steve is the one behind the pistol, the knife, the garotte. Bucky is the bystander. The lookout. The back up. For this one though, the Widows were in charge, and all Steve could do was watch Bucky shoot an innocent man.
One thing stops him from running now, the same thing that stops him every time: even if he had somewhere to run, Bucky would be the one they sent to hunt him down.
He climbs into the Ansat with a greater sense of weariness than he’s known in years. It’s not fatigue. He doesn’t feel fatigue. He’s not supposed to feel anything. He aches to close his eyes, lean his head back against the seat, or better, rest his head on Bucky’s shoulder. That would be too human, so he keeps his face schooled in neutral lines and stares straight ahead.
The pilot must be able to see the bruise on his neck, and he must know how Steve got it. What do their handlers make of that? Vestiges of muscle memory? A strain of madness runs through each of the Red Room’s four children, do they think that’s what it is--madness that makes them take out the last of their aggression on each other after a kill? The cut he helped Bucky make on his chest has nearly healed, but he clings to the memory of the sting of it.
The first time it happened, that he remembers, they’d finished a mission somewhere oppressively hot--Steve didn’t know where, and didn’t know what year it was, only that the cars seemed a mile long and had fins on the back, like fish. It was back when he was still trying to contact the SSR, to let them know that he and Bucky were alive, that they were prisoners. He hadn’t been awake for very long at all, just long enough to realize that he had to keep it hidden. Bucky still bears the scars of the one and only time Steve tried to escape.
Walking into the safe house then was like walking into a circle of hell, and sweat started pouring down the back of Steve’s neck before they even had the door closed. He shucked his armor and his shirt without even thinking about it, and turned around to see a strange look on Bucky’s face, a curiosity that he might call childlike, except for the predator that looked out through Bucky’s eyes.
Before the war and even during the war, they were what they were. Maybe some guys would’ve called them sissies. Men like Colonel Phillips would have. But Peggy knew. Howard Stark knew. “Rogers, if it helps us win the war, you can put a sheep in your bed for all I care,” was Stark’s official statement. Bucky used to threaten to put that to the test.
So when Bucky grabbed him by the back of the neck and started to kiss him, Steve thought, Maybe. Something of Bucky was in there. That’s what he told himself.
It wasn’t the same. Bucky had never been so forceful. His way had been to cajole, to look at Steve through heavy-lidded eyes and bat his damn lashes like a girl until Steve couldn’t resist. This was something else entirely. This was starvation. This was nothing Steve had ever even heard whispers of from even the dirtiest of back room stories. Something in Bucky, in whatever he was now, wanted to hurt Steve as much as love him.
Steve let him. It was his fault they had fallen. It was his fault they’d stayed trapped. Anything Bucky wanted to do was nothing more than what he deserved. The first time Bucky cut him with his knife Steve thought Bucky might actually try to kill him. It was the blood. Bucky--this Bucky--was fascinated by it, and Steve found himself fascinated as well. They had gone at each other like mindless animals that time, both of them walking away covered in bites and scratches and cuts, Steve sore from where he’d begged Bucky to fuck him.
And that became the routine. Sometimes Steve thinks he can almost see Bucky in those eyes, especially afterwards. This time--he would’ve sworn Buck was about to say his name, and then nothing.
Even without anywhere to run, if it was the two of them running together, Steve would be gone.
He can’t close his eyes as they fly over the half-ruined city, but he’s learned how to dream with his eyes open. It’s spring of 1941, and him and Bucky are at one of the first Dodgers games of the season. They’re throwing popcorn at each other and forgetting to pay attention to the game…
At the rendezvous point, Vdova and Deva climb on board. They’re filthy, covered in the blood of god only knows how many men and women. They smell like a battlefield. Steve schools his face and doesn’t acknowledge their presence.
The Ansat lifts once more, but it doesn’t head for the secret airfield as he expects, to the plane that will take them back to the waiting arms of Mother Russia. Instead they head west, away from Manhattan. The chopper puts them down in the middle of nowhere, outside a rundown farmhouse. No one speaks, or questions. If anyone knows what’s happening, it will be Vdova, and she’ll tell them when she’s ready, not before.
The sound of helicopter blades has scarcely faded before the two women are gone into the depths of the house. As she leaves, Vdova says, “Krasny, Siniy. Stand guard.”
‘Red’ and ‘Blue’, the names she’s given Bucky and him, as if they were her pets. He doesn’t always daydream of days spent in the Brooklyn summer sun. Sometimes he daydreams about tearing out her throat before she can ever say those names again. Without a word, Bucky stands and unshoulders his rifle, and heads outside. Steve follows, hearing the sound of water running elsewhere in the house.
She calls them back, her faithful hounds, when she and Deva are clean and in new uniforms.
Vdova has a small laptop, and pulls it open, motioning them over. “We have a second objective. According to new intel, several critical targets will soon gather in one location. We will be there to deliver a crippling blow to Russia’s enemies.” She pulls up a building schematic and walks them through the plan. Four pylons, one for each of them, pylons that they have to place and guard until a satellite overhead comes into alignment. She says something about subatomic particles, science jargon that he doesn’t quite follow, but the demonstration on the screen is clear enough. The building on the screen doesn’t so much explode as vaporize, it and everything in it reduced to molecular components.
“How do we get inside, Vdova?” Deva’s voice is bright and hateful, like an overeager teacher’s pet.
“We don’t. The Baxter Building is too well-guarded. We’ll be placing the pylons in these locations.” Four bright spots appear on screen, each near a corner of the building. She touches the keyboard and an array of photos comes up. “Our targets. Memorize their faces and if they manage to escape the building, you know what to do.” Steve looks at their names as well: Reed Richards, Susan Richards, Nicholas Fury, Tony Stark.
With that face, he couldn’t be anyone but Howard Stark’s son.
“Are there any questions?”
Steve looks up to find Vdova’s sharp green eyes pinning him in place. “No, Vdova,” he murmurs obediently, along with the other two. Her gaze crawls over him like the spider she’s named for, and his pulse throbs in his temple. After an eternity, she looks away.
“Three hours to rest, then we return to the city.”
Steve finds a battered sofa and lies down on it, closing his eyes and feigning sleep. His gut roils and he feels like twitching out of his skin. She saw something on his face. She saw him flinch at killing Stark’s son. She’s no more asleep than he is, and she caught him with his eyes open.
If she knows, she can’t make it back to Russia alive. He has to make sure.