Chapter Text
"What’s that you got?" Steve asks, as gently as he can. His back aches from holding what he hopes is an The Winter Soldier hunches up further in the far corner of the alleyway, curling round the Something to protect it. "You can bring it with you, no one’s going to take it away…"
Bucky looks at him, his eyes frightened and doleful, smudged with ink now there are no more handlers to give him his make-up. It should’ve taken longer to track him down, Steve thinks. He should’ve routed every HYDRA safehouse in the Northern Hemisphere looking for answers, or maybe just run away. But here he is, four days into the search, behind a take-out restaurant in DC, having broken into one HYDRA operation in a bank and apparently taken nothing.
"I’m coming closer," Steve warns.
"You mustnfffh…"The Winter Soldier mutters something unintelligible, face screwed in concentration or pain.
"What’s that?"
Bucky must think he’s still asking about the Something he has cradled to his chest, because what he says next is definitely not a repetition of what he said before.
“It’s Bucky Bear.” His voice is rough, as though it's been severely underused. He proffers forth a ragged stuffed toy with not enough stuff. It takes Steve almost a minute to realise that it isn’t some kind of dead animal; it hangs limp from his hand, old and superficially loved, but unpatched and unrepaired. It is a Bucky Bear, although its blue coat has faded to an uneven grey, only one button remains stitched to its front, and its red nose has been rubbed or abraded until all that remains is a mesh of red thread and a window to the off-white clumps of stuffing within.
Steve stops dead halfway down the alleyway as the magnitude of somebody’s sick joke hits him. He feels an intense need to sit down, and he does, because even though the ground is covered in stale piss and crushed glass, it seems to be rolling beneath him. “You went to get Bu- the- the bear? A bear?”
Bucky doesn’t seem to understand his distress, but he doesn’t seem surprised that Steve is there, either. As though he’s been waiting for someone to pick him up, and any face he recognises will do. “You said you wouldn’t take him away. The Secretary said I could keep him.”
The Secretary. Pierce. Steve swallows convulsively, his mouth full of saliva as though he’s about to throw up. “Of course not, Bucky. It’s me, I won’t take anything away from you.”
Bucky doesn't respond. He looks down at the toy, like he's conferring, like he thinks Steve is talking to the bear.