Chapter Text
The day S.H.I.E.L.D. falls, Bucky is thinking about expired milk.
As many late night infomercials on why it’s important to throw out old food as he’s watched, and as great as dairy can be—fond memories of taking Becca for ice cream at the pier swim to mind; of a greasy cheeseburger when he’s starved after a mission, to put his mind and his stomach back on American soil—he doesn’t care that much. Not enough to be ruminating on the state of it at work, anyways.
No, he is, specifically, thinking about the expired milk that had been in the fifth floor break room this morning. And every morning this week.
He doesn’t know whose job it is to keep the fridge stocked, but he knows it was somebody’s. Somebody, who has since, quietly disappeared.
It’s probably nothing.
HR trimming the fat on non-essential employees. A caterer taking the week off for their kid’s birthday. An underpaid busybody getting fed up of going unappreciated.
But if routine is everything to a soldier, then instinct is everything to an agent, and this—this rankles, deep in the part of Bucky’s brain he has been trained to trust like his life depends on it, because, more often than not, it does.
It’s in the creases of the usually crisp med-ward linens the last time he’d stepped in to get checked out. The secretary on the second floor who used to bat her lashes at him but now won’t meet his eye. The strike teams switching out the kind of cuffs they carry, from carbon-polymer zip ties to heavy duty mag-locks.
Bucky is reminded of the time a rat bit the dust in the crawlspace above his apartment back in Brooklyn. The smell lingered for months, though his landlord insisted nothing was wrong. He has the same sensation now. Like death is in the walls.
Even if no one else will admit it.
When he makes it back to the office he shares, coffee in hand—black, because of the goddamn milk—Andersen, Pacheco, Hensley, and Best are already installed at their desks, ignoring their stacks of paperwork, for the most part. Pacheco and Hensley are dissecting last night’s game, while Andersen pitches a ball in a three-point arc, wall floor palm, boots tossed up lazily. Best gives Bucky a nod on his way in, but even she’s distracted, craning to see out the window. It’s pleasant-hot today, the streets swept clean by sunshine. Nobody wants to be stuck at work, when they could be out instead.
But despite the heat collecting in the stuffy, glass-walled room, waiting to kick high enough for the so-called state of the art AC to trigger, the windows are all shut.
Leaving the door casually ajar, he takes his seat.
It’s probably nothing.
“You catch the game, Jimmy?” Hensley calls out.
Bucky smiles. Jimmy. He hates that. “What game would that be?”
Pacheco laughs, swatting at Hensley. “Told you, he’s a baseball man, through and through. Doesn’t care for nothing else.”
“He’s a New Yorker. Ain’t all New Yorker’s baseball fans?”
“Through and through,” Bucky whistles, turning to his work, and they move on, leaving him be. He leafs through the pile. Weapons requisitions, injury statements, intel updates, weighted down by the yellowed copy of Earthsea he’s been re-reading on his thirty minute lunch breaks. At the bottom is the case file for the Bucharest mission, waiting patiently for him to add his report so that it can be rubber-stamped and sent to the archives for a tidy burial.
And that’s the problem. It shouldn’t be waiting patiently. It’s well overdue. Some higher-up or irate clerk should have been by to prod him about it by now.
When great forces are shifting from foot to foot, the details are what begin slipping through the cracks. It’s just, to Bucky’s knowing, there isn’t anything major enough being moved to explain all these little losses.
He won’t pretend like he’s in on everything. Hell, he doesn’t think even Fury has his eye on all that goes on in the wilding branches of this place, but he’s nobody’s fool either.
He taps his pen against the file, seeing it without reading it. Words float out at him. Retrieval, asset, success. Delay. Force. Retreat.
There’s a breath of sweat caught under his collar. One upside of working at S.H.I.E.L.D.—no need for shirts and ties. A downside of no shirts and ties—he’s uneasy in the heat. The others are wearing the same kind of dark tactical gear he is, but no one makes a move to do anything about it. Not prop open a window; not shuck off a layer. Pacheco and Hensley laugh. Andersen’s ball thuds, wall floor palm. Best cracks her neck. Somewhere, a gun fires.
“The hell was that?” Bucky asks, though he well knows.
He waits for another shot to ring out, but nothing comes, which is nearly worse. At the sound, the others had stilled, all of them sliding into readiness. Except, there’s a… calmness in them, that’s not in him. He goes to stand, and Andersen’s boots meet the carpet, stopping him in his tracks.
“Leave it be,” the agent grunts, bouncing his ball against the floor a handful more times.
“It was probably nothing,” Best agrees. “I’m sure it’s being taken care of.”
Bucky’s always liked Best, really, her competence is an island in a sea of swaggering dicks. But hearing his own thoughts echoed back at him is sufficiently off-putting enough to spoil the impression.
“Those are two different things,” he points out, standing slowly.
“Leave it, Barnes,” Hensley enjoins. No more Jimmy. He and Pacheco have lost the ease of their postures. Hensley’s hand spider-crawls up until it hovers just over the gun at his hip.
Now, what would he need to go and do that for?
Rather than stay and find out, Bucky bolts for the door.
Just as quickly, Andersen is on his feet, slamming a forearm into Bucky’s stomach and hooking him around the middle. Bucky contorts, dodging the hold before he can get scruffed like a goddamn cat, but Pacheco and Hensley are already lunging into the fray. Lunging for him.
“Get the cuffs—”
Magnets hum and Bucky swears, short and vicious. He knew it.
Throwing his head back blindly, he feels the thick, queasy crunch of a nose beneath his parietal. Hensley drives a knee into the meat of his back, and rather than try to kick him away, Bucky takes the blow in stride, bringing them closer. Flipping the pen in his hand over, he clicks it on before driving it down, deep into the other man’s thigh. Hot blood splashes and Hensley cries out, stumbling back. Bucky springs from the path of a heavy, inbound fist from Andersen, yanking the pen with him and wrenching another cry from Hensley. Planting his heel in Andersen’s gut, Bucky sends him cracking into one of the desks, where he remains. It wins him a second to breathe, but only that long. With Andersen’s space cleared, Pacheco steps in to fill it.
The man swipes blood from his dripping nose with the sawtooth side of his knuckles, getting it on the mag-lock in his grip. His laughing face has gone cold, shoulders set like he’s planning on breaking down a stone wall with his body alone.
“Is this the part where you make a joke about baseball?” Bucky says, and Pacheco swings for him. Bucky deflects two fast jabs at his throat, taking a third to the sternum. In the moment Pacheco is off-balance, Bucky boots him in the knee.
Pacheco thumps onto his haunches. Rather than give him the chance to get back up, Bucky grabs him by the ears and brings his face down on his knee. Another crunch sounds. Something in Bucky’s leg protests.
But Pacheco is a fighter by trade.
He rallies with a yell, throwing a punch at the underside of Bucky’s right arm—a tender, underhanded blow that has him grunting—and attempts to get Bucky pinned long enough for the mag-lock to snap into place. The magnets whir all the louder as they close in on his metal wrist.
Bucky elbows him in the face. Twisting the hand that had had him by the wrist, he slams it to the desk and drives his pen through the palm, into the fake, faintly coffee-ringed wood below. The mag-lock goes skittering.
The noise Pacheco releases is awful, an aggrieved howl, and Bucky knees him in the face once more for good measure. This time when the man slumps, arm stretched above him at an unnatural angle, he stays that way.
Bucky had lost count of the number of times he was called a troublemaker growing up. He'd lost count of the number of times he replied, it just finds me, with a charming, gap-toothed grin.
It’s both more fitting and less funny now.
He doesn’t know what flavour of power-play he’s tripped over here, just that with Pacheco out of the way, there’s a break in the bodies: a chance for him to get out of it.
But Hensley’s on the floor, trying to control the bleeding at his thigh. A gash to the femoral artery will have him pounding his blood pressure out through that hole in his leg in minutes. Seconds, if he doesn’t maintain pressure. When he sees Bucky hesitating, Hensley’s hand fumbles slickly for his gun. Seconds it is, then.
But it's not from Hensley that the danger comes.
Best’s taser presses to Bucky’s waist, a two-pronged promise of enough voltage to put a lightning strike to shame. While the rest of them were kicking the shit out of each other, she’d been lying in wait. Competence, Bucky reminds himself, is a bitch.
“Take it easy.” Her voice is soothing, just behind his ear. “It doesn’t have to go this way.”
He spends a moment catching his breath, eyeing Hensley’s face as it whitens, finger unsteady on the trigger of the gun he has trained at Bucky’s chest. He wets his lip.
“Kinda seems like it already went.” He feels Best sigh against the nape of his neck.
“Shame, I always liked you.”
Bucky tilts his head in acknowledgement. “Feeling’s mutual.”
They burst into action in the same instant, Best’s hand clamping down on his arm as the taser sparks to life; Bucky stepping a foot back between her own two so he has the leverage to throw himself spine-first against the row of windows, taking her with him. He hears glass splinter, but it’s tempered not to break—even with a pair of bodies chucked against it. If they were expecting a fight, it's no wonder they kept them closed. Their office is the perfect rabbit snare.
Best rams her taser into his side and shaking, blue pain takes a chunk out of Bucky’s insides, rattling through him from hip to rib. He convulses, hissing through his teeth, and forces himself to drive back again, crushing Best between his body and the glass once more. The taser slips from her fingers.
A gun barks—Hensley’s—and bullets dent the wall, closer and closer.
Still quaking, Bucky ducks out of their path, grabbing Best. She’s bleeding from the temple and struggling to get air, lungs mangled by the weight of him. Before she can manage it, he shoves her towards Hensley, and they knock over each other like bowling pins.
Bucky hops Andersen and is out the door, jerking it shut behind him just as a last shot jolts out, hole-punching the wood an inch from his nose.
In the long, open halls he can hear it: the sound of other scuffles. The distant, millipede squeak-thud of tactical boots. The echo of an alarm. Evidence, all in all, of how deeply fucked today has gotten.
He moves quickly, head down and eyes keen. He may not know exactly what’s happening, but he’s got his suspicions and none of them spell fantastic news. Though, how he’s supposed to know who’s side he’s on when the same agents he shared a water fountain and a communal stapler with have been turned, he has no clue.
“Halt!”
Bucky glances up only long enough to get an eyeful of black-clad bodies before breaking into a dead sprint. He bangs through the nearest stairwell door and rolls swiftly over the handrail. The free fall has his stomach flipping like the time he’d ridden The Cyclone three times in an afternoon, and then unflipping just as harshly when he grabs back onto the rail two flights below. The mechanics of his shoulder object, heated and fitful, but the pound of feet above him has Bucky ignoring it. He hooks himself onto the stairs and through a door, and then another, finding himself in an empty office.
Monitors and computer stations line the space. The blinds are drawn low and there’s a mug abandoned on one desk, half full, like its inhabitants had up and left in a hurry. Lucky them.
Bucky’s hoping the black-helmeted bastards had continued on, chasing his phantom down to ground level, but on the off-chance they’re smarter than they look, he barricades the entryway, heaping table over chair, until the door handle is wedged up at a painful slant. He digs a thumb into his shoulder, working it absent-mindedly.
Third floor, he thinks. He’d taken a girl from the third floor out dancing once, right before he lost his arm. There hadn’t been a second date. Where had she worked, again?
Statistics.
Which was code for internal surveillance.
Heading over to a computer, Bucky shakes the mouse, waiting for a restless, staticky, second as the monitor wakes up. When it does, Bucky is gifted a security feed of one of the east-side elevators.
An elevator currently heavy with bodies—Captain America at their centre.
It was bitter January when they first met. Bucky’s arm kept aching where steel met skin, and he missed Brooklyn like a kid misses a tooth.
He passed the ride up to Fury’s bird’s nest of an office smiling at a gaggle of pretty lawyers, and shooting the shit with Nieves and Lowe. His mother had told him young that he had the way of people. It’s a knack, she’d say, the same way she split eggs one-handed, or caught any old tune up perfectly. They liked him, and he liked them—for the most part. She always was exasperated when she said it.
But his way with words meant nothing when the lawyers departed, and Nieves and Lowe got off, a flight before him, leaving Bucky to rise alone.
“Fury. Sir.”
The man was at his desk, looking as needled as he ever did. Bucky stood at ease, hands clasped and eyes held on a vague stretch of wall. Fury huffed. He had little patience for spies who played at soldiering, and Bucky suppressed the upwards curl of his mouth. If Fury knew anything, he knew that Bucky was only ever playing at the opposite.
“We’re just waiting on one more,” Fury spoke, finally.
On time, the door hushed open, and Bucky felt the man before he saw him: a presence that settled in step with him before the desk. Broad-shouldered. Hands behind his back. A soldier.
The soldier.
His curiosity had been pricked by the summons, and it was not nearly sated by this arrival. Instead, it opened like a tire-slash to the bottom of a bag of sugar, spilling endlessly.
“Rogers, meet Agent Barnes, former Sergeant of the 107th Infantry.” Fury’s voice was wry as he fixed his gaze on Bucky. “Barnes, I’d hope I wouldn’t have to make introductions.”
“Sergeant,” Steve Rogers nodded, sparse and professional. Bucky could see his measure being taken in those summer blue eyes.
“Captain,” he returned, a moment late.
Fury shoved a file across his desk towards them.
“I’ll keep this brief. There’s a mission on the move up from the strategic division. A site in Siberia, potentially housing information we don't need anyone else getting their hands on.” He considered them both, tapping his index finger on the papers, right over the red ink proclaiming them classified. “Hydra.”
The name passed through the room like a shadow over the sun, cooling Bucky by degrees.
His arm ached. He didn’t stir.
Neither did the man at his side.
“There’s a good chance it’ll get shot down before it reaches you. Reliable intel gets tricky that far out. But if it doesn’t, given your requisite experience, you’ll be taking the lead together.” Fury leaned back in his chair and motioned between them. “Figured I’d…break the ice, as it were, now, rather than leave the two of you to it. That hasn't gone so well in the past.”
From the corner of his eye, Bucky saw the captain’s head tilt down slightly, like he was concealing a smile, and got the sudden, clear-cut impression that Steve Rogers might just be trouble.
Goddamn it.
With another nod, Fury pulled the file back towards himself and tucked it out of sight. “That’s all for now. Barnes, get back down to fifth before your guys start chewing on the furniture. Rogers, you stay put.”
“Sir,” they said as one, with no small amount of irony shared between them. Fury only sighed.
On his way out, Bucky didn’t stop himself from stealing a glance.
Like any kid from Brooklyn, he’d grown fat-bellied and brave on stories of Captain America before he’d even hit four foot, but that was especially true for kids from Bucky’s block.
Steve Roger’s block.
‘Course, the tenements where the hero lived had been torn down years before Bucky drew breath, but Our Lady’s still stood, and trolley lines still cut steel rivulets through the borough’s forgotten ends. Bucky and Becca had been raised on those church steps, for all their blended faith; had run ragged down those tracks. Squinting against the sun as he played in the street, Bucky used to imagine he could see the outline of those fond, old piles of brick, as though an architect’s draft was rolled out against the sky.
With a mother and sister to take care of, he’d followed the shadow of that Brooklyn boy to war and lost his ability to sleep through the night for it. Having the other man within spitting distance now both loosened and sharpened the hooks of his homesickness. He gets it, Bucky thought. He knows.
Maybe the captain was thinking the same of him.
“107th?”
The question caught Bucky before he could reach the door. Rogers had turned his back on Fury to call after him.
He was handsome, obviously, and a little taller than Bucky, even. Not a lick of it was a lie, or an exaggeration. He was as calmly, gallingly commanding as all the history books made him out to be. But up close, Bucky could see details that the documentaries had never managed to capture on the flicker of film.
A pair of moles on his throat. The scratch of blond scruff missed by the pass of a razor. A slight, left-handed crease between his brows that even super-serum hadn’t managed to iron out—from years of squinting without a prescription, probably.
For an unforgivably childlike moment Bucky wanted to press the pad of his thumb to it.
“That’s right.”
“You’re from New York?”
Bucky twitched a self-aware smirk. “Brooklyn.”
Rogers nodded, almost to himself. “My father was in the 107th,” he offered, and then, bridging the gap between them with a few steps, he stretched out a hand. “Call me Steve, if we’re gonna be working together.” The words hid the breath of an accent: the deep streets of New York that they’d tried to bleed out of him in propaganda reels and the freeze of the frontlines. His hands were broad and strong.
Warm.
It's nice, knowing you aren’t the only city rat in a town of coolly-bred snakes.
“Bucky,” he responded in kind. “If you wanna discuss that mission any time—”
“I’ll find you,” Steve said, with a welcome smile. “Fifth floor, right?”
“With the rest of the mutts.”
Steve huffed a laugh.
“If you’re done,” Fury cut in, and when Steve’s eyes left him, Bucky drew away, chewing on a smile that he carried with him back to his office. He had nineteen-forties standards stuck in his head for the rest of the day, the kind his mother used to sing, and he came dangerously close to whistling just for the hell of it.
He put out feelers on Siberia before leaving for the day, and worked his shoulder loose on the sparring mats after it jammed up at the thought of the cold. At home, he speared a takeout menu from the sea overflowing out of his kitchen drawer—Vietnamese that night—and after placing his order, called Becca, just to hear her talk for a little about the ‘51 Delahaye she was fixing up.
But the mission never came.
Tony Stark and his suits were dispatched to hit targets in the region, Captain America was unavailable, indefinitely, and the fifth floor remained distinctly in the realm of DC—Brooklyn, a drowsy August dream, where Bucky was always scabby-kneed and his sister never grew out of the crook of his arm.
A season later, from the shadows of a control room, Bucky watches the brawl that uncoils through elevator 13C.
It’s tight and terrible: tension thick amid the agents shoved in, sardine-like, even before Rollins comes at Steve with a shock baton. In the explosion of movement that follows, Bucky catches face after recognisable face. Hardy, Cho, Rumlow, Proust. He counts ten, to Steve’s one. A betting man’s odds.
It takes half of them just to keep him in place. Another to pare the shield from his back. Two more to produce the mag-locks, and punch the emergency brake. It’s a plainly choreographed dance. How long has this been in the works? Hardy gets a meaty arm hooked around Steve’s throat, and Rollins drives the crackling baton against his chest. Even so, it’s a fight to get just one cuff around his wrist.
In answer to their success, Steve kicks out a guy’s kneecap and punches another flat with a blow to the jaw, faster than they can fathom. These agents are the best of the best, but next to him, they appear lumbering and stupid-slow. Rumlow gets in a lucky shot, sending Steve’s cuffed hand up to the elevator’s metal cross-bar, where it becomes fixed.
Another shock from the baton—this time across Steve's back. He bears it like Jesus, and Bucky feels the nauseous, spasming echo of electricity in his own stomach. Stronger than it, though, and growing with every moment, is the need for Steve to knock Rumlow’s fucking lights out.
He gets thrown into a wall, which is almost as good; rapidly followed by Cho, who’s launched at the corner in which the camera sits, splintering Bucky’s view.
Two men are left standing, Proust and another he doesn’t know. Behind them, two more struggle to their feet. Steve makes light work of them:
A stolen baton to the sternum.
A shattered forearm.
A boot to the throat and balls, respectively.
With them out of the way, he jumps, using his significant weight to lever the mag-lock from the bar, flipping from it in time to slam the few who had made it up swiftly back down.
Then it’s just Rumlow; the smug, wiry prick having crawled to his feet while Steve heaved himself free. He stands against the captain, a pair of shock batons in hand to deliver a barrage of aching hits. Bucky can see the white of Steve’s teeth as pain pulses through him, and he shifts, blood pounding uneasily, knocking into the rolling desk chair at his hip.
Opposing forces strain, and strain, and break—Steve getting the upper hand and using it to fling Rumlow squarely into the ceiling.
The whole mess took less than three minutes, by Bucky’s estimation. Steve stands tall in the aftermath, breathing hard and even, a near-dozen men broken at his feet. Picked out by the bit-by-bit rendering of pixels, he kicks his shield up into place on his arm.
I wish that were me, Bucky thinks, on the blade of a hot, awful stab of attraction. He's then reminded of his much bigger problems.
The chair had lurched into the next desk over, nudging the computer there to life. It’s clearly the command station: a wall of camera feeds suddenly on show, and with them, the revelation of the shit S.H.I.E.L.D. is in. Bucky takes in the stand-offs unfolding across a dozen floors and divisions.
Worse, he sees every surviving strike team convening on a single target.
Elevator 13C.
His mother would call the number an omen. Lacking salt to throw over his shoulder and hands too heavy to cross himself, Bucky settles for swearing. He returns to Steve’s feed to watch as he fractures the mag-lock from his wrist.
And then he presses the emergency brake release.
“Stupid, fuck—!” Bucky swears again.
In the face of the squad that stares him down through the opening doors, Steve doesn’t hesitate. He whirls away and severs the elevator’s cables, sending it screeching loose.
And there, on Cho’s hip. A radio.
Bucky’s eyes race over the office until they land on one of its siblings, charging quietly across the room. Yanking it free, he stalks to the screens, twisting between channels and sending bursts of static down each until he sees a small red light wink from Cho’s radio. Got ya.
“Hey, moron. Remember me?”
The elevator grinds to a broken, sparking stop.
Steve is not having the greatest day.
First, the milk in the break room had gone sour, then the institution Peggy built from the ground up unmasked itself to be a bed of the exact sort of snakes he’d died to stop seventy years ago, and now he’s being insulted by a ghost.
He frowns sharply when he spots the blinking radio, but stoops to pick it up all the same.
“Hello?”
With his free hand, Steve pries open the next set of doors, before immediately prying them shut again at the bristling wall of weapons he finds. The man on the other end of the line crackles out what sounds like a whistle, impressed by his poor luck.
“Anyone would think you like getting shot at.”
His voice is rough and tumble; dry wit slipped past a classic smile. He’d need keen charcoal, or ink, to get the long, slightly crooked line of it right.
Yeah, Steve remembers.
“Bucky?”
“There you go. Now, listen up before you get yourself killed. There are strike teams on every floor of this place, and they’re all gunning for you. If you hadn’t guessed, the elevator doors are a no-go.”
“And why should I trust you?” Steve asks, as companionably as he thinks the question deserves, given the circumstances. He eyes the hatch on the elevator car’s ceiling; the lower pair of doors it’d stopped against; the bodies around him. The view beyond. “No offence, but I just got jumped by men I’ve known a hell of a lot longer.”
There’s a scratching at the doors, and orders to get them opened, as the agents on the other side try to join him.
“I mean, you probably shouldn’t. But you’re shit out of options, so.”
Steve’s lip quirks a little. “Well. I appreciate the honesty.” It’s the only dose of it he’s had in a while, apparently.
The window it is. He has two options: left or right. Both will land him in the thick of an atrium busy with people.
“You said the strike teams are on every floor. You know that for sure?”
“I’m looking at ‘em.” Bucky’s voice tightens. “Including the ones after you right now. Get a move on trusting me, Rogers, I’m not kidding.”
“Working on it,” Steve tightens his shield to his arm. “Where are you?”
“Barricaded myself in a surveillance command room after my team turned Axis Sally and tried cuffing me to a desk.”
The scratching grows stronger and Steve punches the seam of the doors, bending the metal along the shape of his knuckles. Bone splits skin. It’ll buy him a few moments more.
“I know the feeling. You have eyes on the atrium?”
“Yeah? What are you—ah, God.”
This time, Steve’s smile is momentary but full. “Which side has the least amount of civilians on the ground?”
There’s a pause, the distant sound of clicks, then: “Left.”
Steve stalks a pace from the glass, gearing up. The doors behind him shriek.
“So,” Bucky asks. “You with me?”
Steve’s still flexing from the fight, heart still rushing with deep indignation at S.H.I.E.L.D. of all places—Peggy’s S.H.I.E.L.D.—being so fundamentally broken. He puts it into his heels, his shoulders, his tongue. Bucky’s Brooklyn accent curls around him. He sounds like home.
Steve could still go at this by himself.
But Fury trusted Bucky to lead a mission against Hydra, and Fury, for his faults, always had his reasons.
“I’m with you.”
With that, Steve launches himself through the glass and into the fall.
Steve was a lonely kid.
He was a sickly kid, he was a scrappy kid, he was a stubborn kid—but beneath it all, he was lonely.
My one-man army, his Ma would chide. Outnumbered as he was on schoolyards and in alleyways, he found himself perpetually bloodied and hiding the fact before she saw, though she always would.
She treated him with a smoothed-on smile, and a nurse’s carbolic-cracked hands. The kitchen window was cheaper than candle flame or electrics, and weak sunshine caught in her hair as she tugged his chin towards the light, dabbing antiseptic against cut flesh. He wished he had the money for paints to capture it correctly. The same scratched-down pencil lead could only do so much.
Over the years, Steve watched that smile turn brittle. Being a single mother was hard enough luck—having a son who could barely work was as good as an act of violence. Still, all she would worry about within shot of his poor hearing was who would look out for him when she was gone.
And then she was, and Steve stood alone, just about.
There were girls in his building he’d grown up with and stood up for when guys got handsy—even if he only ever got his ribs cracked for it—who liked him well enough to bring him a hot meal and a few socked-away pennies to ask, shyly or slyly, if he would draw a pulse-raising picture of them to gift to their beaus. It kept him alive, but made him feel like one of the street strays, secretly fed scraps from their skirt pockets. He appreciated their kindness but hated their pity.
God, did he hate the pity.
Maybe that's why he wanted the military: to prove himself, to do something in the face of suffering, to live up to the soldier’s portrait on the mantle. But below those impulses, crouched beneath like a shadow at noon, was the want for being shoulder to shoulder with someone.
Watching the young dockhands crowd into pubs after a hard day’s shift, shirt sleeves rolled to the swell of their upper arms, and the gangly, teenaged best friends daring each other onto the tallest roller-coasters they could find, Steve wanted to know what it was like to split a joke like a lip. To laugh so hard it pulled at his ribs like the cough that took hold of him each winter. He wanted to feel companionship the way he felt bruises, or the pain in his joints, or hunger.
He figured it might be a jot better than all that, though.
But the other soldiers dismissed him. First at Lehigh, as a destined-to-be washout, and then, still, after the serum, when he was paraded around on his star-spangled leash. Rare were the eyes that looked at him and saw something worth believing in.
Erskine.
Peggy.
The Howling Commandos, eventually.
Even then, it took storming enemy lines by himself to earn a glance from them as anything more than a wartime ornament. Jim, Dugan, Gabe, Monty, Jacques—they were good men. They were his men. They trusted him, they followed him, and when they looked at him, they didn't see that lonely, Brooklyn kid. He was gone—a shadow left behind in the street between tenements.
Captain America wasn’t alone any more, but he wasn’t so sure about Steve Rogers.
He hits the ground like a bomb.
The bones in Steve’s arm pop, sending cold needles through the limb, and glass rains onto the floor. There are gasps and screams, but they’re fuelled by surprise, not pain. Rocking to his feet, Steve hears the thundering of his pursuers breaking into the broad space. He can’t fault their persistence.
“Where am I going?” Steve asks, already running.
“—a staff corridor behind—stupid, overpriced coffee shop dead ahead—you.” The radio gives an ominous whine and Steve spares it a glance as he throws his body through a pair of inconspicuous white doors, shield-first. The antenna is bent, and the plastic casing on one side has flaked away under the force of his fist. “You’re aim—for the garage on—nd sub-basement.”
“Shit,” Steve mutters. He shoves through another set of doors. All the corridors look the same, and he dodges a startled worker, sending the boxes in her arms tumbling. “Can you get on comms?”
He’s breathing heavily, and the static feedback is ratcheting higher, but he still hears the way Bucky huffs, half amused.
“—’ll figure it out. Ta—the next left. What chan—are you on?”
Steve veers left. “Thirteen.”
There was Fury’s sense of humour for you.
“Christ, of course.” Bucky comes through with acerbic clarity, and then it’s gone, just as quickly. “Anyone ev—tell you, you’re—unlucky son of a—tch, Rogers?”
Steve grunts out a laugh. It’d be a lie to say he isn’t enjoying the rough, easy teasing—so different to being treated like the spit-shined relic of a golden age that never was. Like a weapon. He barrels around a corner, nearly taking out a mail cart, and up ahead, the loading bay elevator comes into sight.
“Once or twice. How’re the comms coming? This radio isn’t gonna last.”
“Impatient, too—” he hears, and then: “On your right!”
Steve dodges back, just in time to miss the boot that shoots out from the T of the hall. He hits the agent with his shield, three times in hard succession, until they stumble down unconscious. Another rounds the corner, gun raised, and bullets ping off of the star at his shield’s centre. Steve hurls the only other thing he has; battery stock slamming the agent between the eyes. They go down like a sack of potatoes, the radio splintered into pieces at their side.
Jogging over to the elevator, Steve jams the button, remembering Peggy’s look of put-upon, red-lipped relief the time he’d returned with a regiment of missing men and his radio shot through. Somehow, he doesn’t think it's a move that’ll work for him twice.
The comm in his ear crackles, infinitesimally, to life.
“Can you hear me?”
Bucky’s voice is so much closer than before. Steve can hear each nick and score—like that of a vinyl record in the days before everything was made perfect. He feels his own flare of relief.
“I got you.” The sound of more agents pricks his ears, and he jams the button harder. “Come on.”
The doors ding open with almost comical banality. Ducking in, Steve knuckles the correct arrow, and it flashes reassuringly as he is carried down.
“You wanna get off on the first sub-basement level, and get into the garages from there,” Bucky tells him. Closing his eyes for a second, Steve draws to mind the other man. The heavy lines of tactical gear. The shadow of his brow. “You falling asleep on me now? This all not enough excitement for you?”
Steve smiles, and opening his eyes, meets the inky iris of the camera mounted in the corner. “There could always be a bomb to disarm. Keep me on my toes.”
“Ha,” Bucky intones.
Sobering, Steve squares his shoulders. He’s getting close now, the arrow on the panel tells him. But getting out himself means little if it means leaving others behind. “You got an exit strategy?” he asks.
“Worry about yourself, I’m all good here.”
Steve’s chin dips and he adjusts the gauntlets on his wrist, the straps of his shield. If he trusts Bucky, that means trusting him to stay alive, too. He accepts the answer with a nod, though he isn’t happy about it. “Maybe when this is over, I’ll buy you a beer.”
It feels like Bucky’s low laugh is echoing right into the skin below his earlobe.
“You think I’m that easy? You'll have to do more than be the one good man left to get in my pants, Rogers.”
Steve barks a laugh of his own. It scrapes his throat, warm and unexpected. He’s still shaking his head when the elevator touches down and the doors open to reveal the expansive garages. Gasoline and concrete scent the air.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Steve says. “Anything I need to know?”
“There’s a squad trying a stealth approach up through the lower levels who you should run into, but if you stay low and use the cars as cover, you’ll make it most of the way without drawing fire. You got a ride down there, or something? If not, you’re stealing one.”
“I’ve got or something.” The floor he can see is empty, so Steve heads out, softening his voice. “Should I find a way around?”
“Eh, you can take ‘em.”
Steve feels another lick of ill-timed humour. “You sound like you’ve got money on me.”
“Two whole bucks. I’ll split it with you if you make it out.”
Steve makes an approving noise as he descends the ramp to the second level. Every faint rustle and distant drip has his head on a swivel. “Coney Island, here I come.”
“Gunner, your three o’clock.”
He drops behind the body of a silver car just as gunfire punctures the air, ripping through the frame and setting alarms blaring. From here, it’s a straight shot across the floor to where he left his motorcycle when he was called in by Pierce.
“Stay where you are!” an agent warns, harsh and toneless as a drill sergeant. In the side-view mirror, Steve can see him edging closer. The nose of his weapon splits the glass with a line of black. “We have orders for your detainment—”
Steve whirls from his knees and grabs the agent by the back of the neck, slamming him face-down against the roof of the car. The agent’s gun goes off, automatic rounds chipping the concrete below them with explosive thuds as he scabbles to land a meaningful blow, until Steve kicks it aside.
He can hear the other agents nearby. The creak of their equipment. The unison of their footfalls. He can hear Bucky, watchful in his ear. Steve slots his hand to the agent’s throat, and in one decisive crumple of metal sheeting, dents the agent into the car’s hood, buckling the chassis with the force of it.
“Two more teams heading your way,” Bucky lets him know.
Steve shoots a glance out towards the others. This team is thirty feet away and still maintaining their defensive formation. They may well have been ordered not to engage up close and personal, which is where Steve prefers his fights. S.H.I.E.L.D. knows that. They know almost everything about him. He can imagine the briefing led by Rumlow, or Pierce.
Enhanced healing factor. Subdue by any means. Lethal options viable.
He would catch a glint sometimes, in the eyes of the scientists and division heads who hovered around in the months after the ice, whilst Steve was poked and prodded. As though he were S.H.I.E.L.D. property. He’d been government issue in the army, but there was a more predatory relish to this look than had ever been in the eyes of his commanding officers—more akin to the grease-easy businessmen of his war-bond days. Now it has shown its colours:
This skull-headed S.H.I.E.L.D. wants a show dog; a mascot; a mouthpiece for a new America.
Steve had lost count of the number of times he’d been made to keep a sliver of soap under his tongue after letting loose the language of the Brooklyn gutter in the schoolroom—knuckles too swollen to draw after being rapped for the sin of calling some fuck-ass prick kid by name. He’d swallowed his pride and played the part before, for a cause he believed in. One he stood for. Not for an institution with its boot on the world’s neck.
And if they can’t have him on side, they’ll take him dead on a laboratory slab, shredded by their own bullets.
As soon as Steve clears the silver car and the agent embedded in it, the rest of the team fall into firing formation, letting loose bullets between barks of the same orders he’s been growing sick of all day. Windscreens shatter in succession, following his path across the garage, but he’s faster than they can fire.
A pillar blocks their line of sight for a second, and there is his motorcycle.
Jabbing his key into its neck, the bike thrums to life, and Steve swings out into the open, hunching behind his shield until the angles line up for him to throw it. The metal cuts through the agents, hitting three with rupturing strength and sending the rest sprawling into one another: no better a scene than the bower of bodies he'd left hanging between the fifteenth and sixteenth floors, but without the dirty honour of a fistfight, this time. His shield rebounds off the wall, but is still an arm’s length away when Steve feels a round pierce his upper chest in the moment of exposure.
The sensation is well-worn, but the first burning, wet drag of breath into his lungs is still uncomfortable, and Steve grimaces as he catches the shield on his shot side, veering up the ramp.
His frown deepens when he realises how long it's been since he heard anything in his ear.
“Barnes, report.”
Nothing.
He presses the comm deeper.
“Bucky?”
There’s a sputter of static, audible now that gunfire isn’t filling the air, and a guttural grunt makes Steve’s hair stand on end.
"Be with you in a second, doll. Just dealing with something here.”
The answer is gritted, punctuated by the sound of someone being thrown into a computer station: all thumping limbs and crashing plastic. Concern and relief wash together, spreading like the red on his chest. Steve is speeding through the first sub-basement now. Another level and he’ll be breaking into the garage reserved for visitors and non-combative staff, above ground again.
He keeps his tone light. “Doll?”
Rubber screeches as he takes a corner. The teams Bucky had mentioned come into view at the top of the next ramp, lined up in firing squad formation. Steve faces them down, idling for a drawn-out moment. He slips on the kevlar cowl of his suit.
“Would you prefer action figure? They make those of you, you know.”
“I’d prefer knowing what’s going on up there. Thought you said you were barricaded in.”
“Apparently, a couple unfriendlies learned a thing or two from you about unorthodox window use.” Bucky hits someone, or someone hits him. He’s breathing hard. “I’ll still get you out.”
Steve sets his shield into place against his handlebars. The teams begin to advance down the slope.
“Focus on keeping yourself alive for a minute. I only need a heading.”
“East gate,” Bucky gets out, between blows. “They’ve implemented total lockdown, but there’s an error—” a crack, close at hand “—the defences are coming up slower there than at the other exits. They’re overriding it now.”
Something splinters and electricity fizzes briefly.
“You meeting me on the other side?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Bucky says, sounding exasperated around the wet thump of a punch. “Just move your ass.”
Smile biting at his cheek, Steve guns his engine towards the strike teams.
Bucky had scored highly on the multi-tasking portion of his army assessment battery.
He could load and unload the magazine of an M16 in twenty-eight seconds flat while running through the checklist for packing his kit. Complete an assault course while being drilled on the proper order for CQ duty. Kiss a date giddy in his kitchen while making them coffee with his other hand, though that hadn’t exactly come up on the exam.
And now:
“Bastard—piece of—shit—” Mathers chokes.
Bucky yanks tighter. Without circulation in his left arm, the mouse wire wrapped around his hand doesn’t pose a threat of constriction. The same can’t be said of Mathers’ throat, where the other end is ribboned. Spittle flies from his lip to freckle the computer screen before them, where Steve can be seen bowling through agents, between grainy, multi-coloured glitches. On the next intact monitor over, the concrete maw of the portcullis hinges closer to closed.
“You’ve got forty seconds to make it through that gate,” Bucky lets Steve know.
“Keep your shirt on, I’m getting there.”
“Old man,” Bucky mutters, and Steve chuckles.
At his back, Mathers’ partner is stirring, just as Mathers himself goes dull. These guys really don’t know when to take a hint.
Dropping Mathers to the desk, Bucky unwinds his fist from the cabling and adjusts the comm he’d stolen from a desk drawer, settling Steve more securely in his ear. He turns to see Carney clambering to his feet, hands just slightly raised.
The control screen behind the agent captures Steve as he takes the leap, and Bucky watches him scrape free, into the sunlight, wheels bouncing hard onto the bridge. In three other squares, a sudden shimmer of movement draws his eye. The location tags in the corners mark them as feeds from the hangar.
“Damn it. They’re scrambling a Quinjet.”
There’s no unbidden humour in Steve’s tone this time, just battle-readiness. “On it.”
That’s all.
Bucky will have to loosen his grip on Steve’s survival—at least long enough to make fists of his own.
His eyes slide back to Carney as the man spits, darkening the scrubby, industrial-grey carpet a spot. “Hell,” Carney says, affably, as he wipes at his chin and tips it to the side with a sigh. “Still got a solid swing, don’t you?”
Bucky’d worked with Mathers and Carney on a mission in Johannesburg last year. While Mathers was a former jarhead around Bucky’s age, Carney was a S.H.I.E.L.D. old-timer. The reconnaissance had been tedious, and they’d broken up the boredom by playing hands of poker until dawn shone and Bucky was nine-hundred rand richer. He’d learned that Mathers’ dog was named Rocky after Rocky Balboa. That Carney’s wife was a preschool teacher. When shit hit the fan, they’d had each other’s backs.
Now, Carney’s bleeding from the mouth, red globs of spit running from a mess of jagged, white bone where Bucky smashed out four of his bottom teeth. Bucky himself is wearing a smattering of glass cuts and a boot bruise from cheekbone to jaw from the agents’ dramatic entrance. With the blinds drawn down, he hadn’t seen them coming; too focused on plotting Steve a path through the bullets.
He works out a kink in his arm, which whirs as it calibrates. From the comm, he can hear orders to halt, and a buzzing engine. Steve’s steady breathing.
“Should I even bother asking why you’re doing this?” Bucky says.
“Hydra,” Carney begins, and the knowledge rolls down Bucky’s spine like a bead of cold sweat, “ain’t any better or any worse than what we were already working with. Come on, Barnes, you’re a smart guy. This…they are the smart move. You don’t have to like ‘em, but you can go along with them, can’t you?”
Disbelief flattens on Bucky’s tongue. “They’re Nazis, Bill.”
Carney gives a hapless shrug. “I’m not saying it’s pretty. But d’you think S.H.I.E.L.D. was any different? They’re all the same where it matters. We’re just fingers on triggers to ‘em. At least this way, I keep my pension.”
Anger builds, bursts, and boils down into the old need to get out in the space of seconds. Bucky had been propelled into the army at eighteen; S.H.I.E.L.D. at twenty-four. He knew, and always had, that neither occupation was gonna keep his soul a clean linen white, but they’d seemed like sturdy enough ways forward at the time. He was good at being a finger on a trigger, whatever that said about him, and he never had found the bolt-hole he was looking for. He could run now. Find a place with green grass to lay in, and a baseball game to watch, and decency.
Behind Carney, explosions white out the frame as Steve places a bevy of blows to the jet, dismantling it arm by arm. Steve, unswerving, taking a stand—taking the thankless path. Bucky’s conviction solidifies into a lump in his stomach. He’s made it this far into the fight, he may as well wade out on its far shore.
At least he’ll know he’s on the right side if Steve Rogers is there with him.
“Well,” he sighs, tugging Mathers’ rifle from his slumped form. The familiar weight of the stock settles something in him that had been on edge since this started. “As long as you get your pension.”
The punch-clack of a cartridge loading below the bolt has barely rung out before Carney is charging him, good-nature dissolving at the sight of Bucky with a gun in his hands.
He’s too close to wing, so Bucky grabs a keyboard and smashes it over his head instead, sending keys clattering, H, 6, and Q . It opens a gash on Carney’s brow that slows but does not stop him, and he fights for a handhold on Bucky—gripping his titanium shoulder, his bruised jaw—nails sinking lines into his skin. Falling back on the desk, Bucky gets both boots on Carney’s chest and launches him off.
The agent’s spine collides with the light switch across the office, throwing them into sudden, violent illumination as Carney crumples. Bucky keeps him in the rifle’s front sight as he heads towards him, but Carney puts a hand up again: surrender, this time, not supplication. Bucky stands over him as he heaves a rubbery, broken-ribbed cough.
“Alright, alright,” Carney gets out after a second. “I know when I’m beat. But this doesn’t end with me, or Mathers, or anyone else trying to survive Hydra the right way. Project Insight will make any kinda resistance redundant.”
Bucky frowns. “The hell is Project Insight?”
A strange look flickers over Carney’s face, but Bucky is distracted by the crackle of Steve’s voice.
“Barnes, are you out?”
Bucky glances at a monitor, where the wreckage of the Quinjet is pouring onto the bridge. “I will be, just gimme a—”
Sensing something from the corner of his eye, he looks back just as Carney brings a radio from his hip to his blood-thickened lips. “Mayday, third floor—”
Bucky’s bullet slices through his wrist, forcing his grip slack, but it’s too late. The radio is already buzzing with responsive chatter as it falls. Carney meets Bucky’s eyes through his dry, shocked sob of pain.
Goddamn motherfucking Nazis.
Chewing on his sheer, spiking annoyance, Bucky reloads the rifle and strides to the bank of desks below the fluttering blinds, leaving Carney behind. Stepping up into the glass-barbed frame, he takes in the roof a story below. Out, his heart chants, and Bucky drops, landing in a crouch he feels in his knees and the taser-lashed muscles of his stomach.
The sun warms his neck, cheerfully at odds with the kind of day he’s having.
“Barnes, I swear—”
Coming up to an edge, the great drop to the river flows from his boot tips. Down the line of the roof, he can see the east bridge, burning. It’ll be a run in full sight of any snipers nesting in the windows at his back, but he’s hoping they’re all kind of busy right now. Besides, none of them are him.
“I’ll see you on the far-end of the bridge,” Bucky says, slinging the rifle across his shoulder and marking his path.
“And here I thought you were standing me up.”
The relief that colours Steve’s voice makes Bucky grin for a hidden, foolish moment; an adrenaline-coated happiness kept between him and the Potomac.
“Nah, just keeping you on your toes. I heard you liked that kind of thing.”
Bucky doesn’t wait for a rebuttal. On a distant stretch of tarmac, he can see the faint, insectile movement of a vehicle.
A motorcycle.
Taking it as his finish line, he starts to sprint.
When Steve swings his bike around at the point where bridge meets land, he’s met by a landscape of cobalt waters, tire-smudged concrete, and the smoke that swells, dense and acrid, from the carcass of the Quinjet.
No Bucky.
His bike thrums. His sharpened eyes catch on the rustle of leaves across the river; his ears on the agents fanning out from the wreck. The skin on his chest itches as it mends, trying its damndest to enclose the bullet he’s carrying inside. His split knuckles have already tugged themselves into fleshy, white scabs, and whatever he did to his shoulder during the fall has all but righted itself.
Still no Bucky.
The other man hadn’t called him impatient for nothing. Steve knows he’s busy making his own escape—and with no one there to guide him—but he’s still tempted to ask Bucky what’s taking so long. His lips part, tactless, wanting to hear whatever wry response Bucky has for him, when there's a sudden volley of shots. Muzzle flash illuminates the smokescreen, and a silhouette shades itself onto the blank page.
Keeping him on his toes, Steve’s ass.
Barnes just wanted to show off.
Moving with deft footfalls that keep his shoulders steady, Bucky runs; twists; fires off rounds with pinpoint precision. While the other agents shoot blind, Bucky waits for his moment and finds it. Steve can’t see where every one of his bullets make their landing, but he can hear the bodiless cries they draw—one for each casing that plinks from Bucky’s gun.
What’s more, the agents go on groaning after he strikes them. Barking, curse-wet, alive groans. It’s clear in just the way Bucky cradles the rifle’s barrel that if he wanted them dead they would be.
Natasha had called the man an ace, once. Steve believed her, but it's a world apart to see with his own eyes. Some ace, he thinks dimly. This skill is unsmiling, spiteful of the sly laughter and fought-for goodness that have been tickling his ear since the elevator. Steve feels the knowledge of it enter him like live ammunition—a concussive shell of nostalgia going off deep in his chest.
Kicking from the concrete, Steve spurs his engine on. Bucky turns when the rumble of the motor reaches him, winter blue eyes meeting Steve’s across the distance.
“The hell are you doing, Rogers?”
“Coming to get you.”
Bucky’s mouth pulls taut. Firing a final round into the smog, he starts running again, clearing the bridge between them. “Don’t you dare slow down,” he pushes out between breaths. “I didn’t do all this just for you to get shot at the last second.”
Steve could mention that it's a little late for that, but his mind is busy sliding to their other option, frown twitching as he pictures hauling the other man onto his bike still in motion.
“And I don’t want to break your arm.”
It’s not his favourite fact to admit—how easily the small bones of a wrist can give way beneath his hold, joints unfastening from long bones in the rush of the moment. He’d given Jim a nasty dislocation that way, in late ‘44, throwing the man over his shoulder to get them out of a firefight fast. Hell, he’d sprained a dancer’s shoulder lifting her during one of the early shows.
Steve can be as careful as he cares to and still crush.
“You won’t,” is all Bucky says, something in his own tone that Steve doesn't have the time to parse. “Not easily, anyway.”
He’s close enough now for Steve to make out the pulse beating in his throat, beneath the sweat and silver line of his dog tags.
Ever the soldier, he thinks with an odd-placed pang of pride. It’s that, more than anything, that has Steve believing in him not to break.
Bringing the bike around heavy to the left, he lists, arm extended, grit spitting from the turn of the tires. For a suspended moment, against every stubborn-sure bone in Steve’s body, it seems like they’ll miss each other—the timing off by a matter of degrees or decades, neither of them able to reach hard enough—but then a hand is clasping his.
The strength in it is steely, disguised beneath warm leather, and between the two of them Bucky is wrenched onto the back of the bike.
“Hold on,” Steve says as he sets them towards Washington.
“Oh, really?”
His voice is even more of a whiskey shot in person—sarcasm doubled back through Steve’s comm. Arm banded around his waist, and broad thighs settling along his own, Steve pushes the speedometer higher and higher. Cars begin to appear as they join the regular, mid-day traffic, and he weaves around them, not breathing a sigh of relief until they duck under the cover of a tunnel.
The feeling lasts approximately four seconds.
“You hear that?” Bucky yells, and Steve does. They aren’t exactly inconspicuous—his shield on display and Bucky’s rifle between them—so the black throb of helicopter blades are hardly a surprise, though they are inconvenient. The light at the end of the tunnel is growing, and with it the chance that their strategy will consist solely of gun it and hope.
That’s always been what Steve was best at, anyways.
They hit out into the sunshine again, and the helicopter swoops into view ahead, an ugly blot against the blue sky. Steve risks a glance up at it but has to tear his eyes back to the road when a car blares its horn.
“Police, news, or S.H.I.E.L.D.?” Steve asks. He can’t call them Hydra just yet. The name is sour on his tongue.
There’s a line of trees on the tarmac’s far side, and he steers them towards the thin shade. Bucky uses it to their advantage—hand leaving Steve’s ribs to grasp at the straps of his shoulder holster for leverage as he leans, squinting through the April-green leaves. Then:
“S.H.I.E.L.D.,” he bites out.
“How can you be sure?”
“It’s one of Stark’s models.” Steve is only able to catch a glimpse of dark hair and strong shoulders from the corner of his eye, but the sound of a gun’s bolt-catch being drawn is distinct. “‘Sides, the police or news would have their logo plastered all over it.”
The tree-cover peters out too fast, and they break into open air at a hundred miles an hour. It seems just as fast that the bullets break from above.
“Shit,” they swear together.
Slugs punch the road, following them in paintbrush strokes of mechanised violence as Steve veers the bike sharply towards an embankment, then into the street’s centre. Cars lay on their breaks, and he can hear the shocked cries from within. Fenders crunch and headlights smash. It’s better than what awaits them ahead.
“That enough proof for you?” Bucky calls, returning fire, and Steve grunts in acknowledgment.
A sniper can only do so much against this kind of heavy artillery, but Bucky still makes his shots count, sketching spider-webs onto the windshields and aiming for where the gunners are mounted—the only slightly weak spots in one of Tony’s flying tanks.
In retaliation, bullets soar an inch from the tip of Steve’s nose. The momentum of the bike is carrying them straight into their flight path, and time is unforgiving. There isn’t a second of it to get out of the way.
Then, Bucky’s arm is curving in front of Steve’s head, shelter and shroud at once.
He hears the hollow, ragged tear of metal and a bowled-out breath from the man behind him.
“Are you hit?” Steve demands, though he knows he must be, he knows—
The clack of the bolt-catch is his answer.
“Barnes, are you hit?”
Still, Bucky holds the moment. Steve can’t turn around to check on him—their bodies are shoved too tightly together.
“Bucky.”
“I’m just fine,” he grits at last.
Above, the helicopter dips, gearing up for another round, and Bucky squeezes his trigger.
The bullet lodges in the juncture of the rotor mast and the blades of the helicopter slip suddenly, sickeningly sideways, hanging like a badly-decapitated head over the aircraft’s body.
It’s an impossible shot. Beautiful, really.
As much as war ever is.
Careening towards the Potomac, the helicopter drops from sight. Its final round goes wide, peppering the concrete retaining wall to their right, and then the interstate parts and Steve is taking them into another tunnel. It’s peaceful in the aftermath. Just them and the rush of the road.
“Fuck me,” Bucky says to himself, and Steve couldn’t hold in the laugh it plucks from him if he tried. Bucky’s arm—miraculously unbleeding, somehow, somehow fine—wraps around his stomach again, and Steve’s palms tighten upon the motorcycle handles. “Any clue where we’re going now?”
We.
Steve breathes out. Stretches his neck a little. “I’ve got one idea.”
He’s not sure what Sam is expecting when he opens the door to them, worse for the wear and trying to blend into the shade of his porch, but he knows what his answer will be. He knows who Sam is.
“We could use your help,” Steve says simply.
Sam’s eyes flit from him to Bucky and back again, brow raised. Somewhere in the recesses of the house, a newscaster recounts the events of the day: “—kind of explosion. We have been told that the fugitives who fled the scene are armed and dangerous. If you see them, do not approach—”
At his side, Bucky pastes on a smile too sarcastic to be charming and too charming to be sarcastic.
Yeah, Steve knows who Bucky is too.
Sam sighs, and pulling the door open wider, he ushers them inside. “This is what I get for trying to make friends,” he jokes, firm and amiable in the face of the fire they’re bringing to his door.
Steve takes the lead, giving Sam a grateful nod as he steps past him.
Bucky is more sceptical, hanging on the threshold, but with an asking glance from Steve, he follows them in.