Steve was still looking at the grainy photograph when Bruce called back.
“I need you to see something else,” Bruce said without bothering with a greeting.
“What is it?”
“We flagged an unusual air traffic out of a private strip in Nevada two hours ago. A transport registered to a shell company that traces back, eventually, to a HYDRA front we identified in the Aldgate facility records.”
“Where was it headed?”
“Flight plan says Burbank. Actual heading, based on radar handoffs, puts it on a vector toward Malibu.”
Steve was already moving toward his gear bag. “Tony.”
“That’s my read,” Bruce said. “They hit Fury this morning and missed. If they traced Natasha’s intrusion back to the data she pulled, and Tony’s fingerprints are all over the analysis since last night, he’s the next loose end. Recovering from surgery, minimal security, three thousand miles from the rest of us. It’s not subtle, but it’s efficient.”
“How fast can you get me there?”
“My jet’s faster than anything commercial and most things military. I can have you airborne in eleven minutes, but Malibu is still close to five hours out even at full speed.” He paused, and Steve could hear Bruce already running calculations, his voice taking on the flat clipped rhythm it got when he was solving more than one problem at once. “I’m calling Rhodes now. He’s stationed at Edwards, forty minutes from Tony’s place. And Peggy’s already there.”
“Why is Peggy in Malibu?”
“She’s been running personal security checks on Tony since the Mandarin’s threats started. She didn’t trust SHIELD’s coverage and she didn’t tell you because she didn’t want you distracted from D.C.” Bruce’s voice did not change, but there was something underneath it, something that might have been respect. “She’s good at her job, Steve. But she’s never gone up against anything like what hit Fury this morning.”
Steve was already pulling on his jacket, his shield case in hand. “Get me in the air.”
“On it. And Steve…”
“What?”
“If this is the same asset who hit Fury, you need to know what we’re dealing with before you get there. He went through six trained agents with specialized combat experience in under a minute and walked away with not even a scratch. Whatever enhancement program built him, it’s not theoretical anymore.”
“Understood,” Steve said, and he meant it. It didn’t change anything about what he was about to do.
XXXXX
The morning was sunny, with people out and about walking their dogs or on morning jogs. Women lay sunbathing at the beach in bikini bottoms while a few men worked out at the outdoor gym and kids cycled along the paths. It was a normal day outside, and one would be hard pressed to argue that anything bad ever happened here.
Pepper Potts stood on the lower terrace with a cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago, watching the ocean and trying to remember the last time she’d had a conversation with Tony that didn’t involve the words “threat assessment.”
“You’re doing the thing,” Rhodey said, coming up beside her in civilian clothes, his uniform jacket slung over one arm because he’d come straight from Edwards and hadn’t bothered changing all the way.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you stand very still and think about how things used to be simpler.” Rhodey took the coffee out of her hand, made a face at how cold it was, and drank it anyway. “For the record, things were never simpler. You just had less information.”
“That’s annoyingly accurate.”
“I’m an annoyingly accurate guy.” He looked past her toward the house, where through the wide windows they could both see Tony at his workbench, surrounded by the usual chaos of half-finished components, gesturing at a holographic display while a second window showed Bruce Banner’s face on a delayed connection from somewhere in India. “How’s he doing? Actually doing, not the version he tells people.”
“Two weeks out from heart surgery and he hasn’t slept more than four hours a night since.” Pepper crossed her arms. “He says the suits are insurance. I think they’re a coping mechanism wearing insurance as a disguise.”
“Probably both,” Rhodey said, which was the kind of honest answer only an old friend gave. “You hear about Fury?”
Pepper’s expression sharpened. “What about Fury?”
“Dead. This morning, D.C. Some kind of street robbery gone wrong, according to the official line.” Rhodey’s tone made clear what he thought of the official line. “Wayne called me forty minutes ago. Wanted to know if I could swing by today and keep an eye on things here. Didn’t say why, exactly, but I’ve known that man long enough to read between what he doesn’t say.”
Pepper felt something cold settle in her stomach. “Does Tony know?”
“Banner’s probably telling him right now, given the look on his face through that window.”
They both looked. Tony had gone very still, one hand braced on the workbench, his expression doing the thing it did when something landed hard and he hadn’t decided yet how he was going to perform not being affected by it.
“I should go in,” Pepper said.
“Yeah.” Rhodey set the cold coffee cup down on the railing. “I’m going to go check the perimeter sensors. Wayne and Tony upgraded the property’s security grid after the Mandarin started making noise, but I want to see it with my own eyes before I feel good about it.”
XXXXX
Peggy had spent the morning doing a slow circuit of the property’s exterior, the way she did every morning to keep sharp. She had learned a long time ago not to trust feeling sharp without the discipline behind it.
The estate, sat on a bluff above the Pacific, was an absolute headache from a security standpoint. Too much glass. Too many sightlines from the water. A single road in that was easy to monitor but also easy to seal, which cut both ways. She’d told Tony about this twice. He’d told her, both times, that he appreciated the feedback and then changed nothing, because Tony Stark’s relationship with architecture was the same as his relationship to most things, that he liked it dramatic and he’d deal with the consequences later.
She finished her circuit at the lower garage, where Rhodey’s heli, parked on the helipad above, cast a long shadow across the drive. She found him there, scanning a tablet linked to the perimeter sensors, frowning at something.
“Problem?” she asked.
“Nothing concrete. One of the cliffside motion sensors has been throwing intermittent faults since about four this morning. Could be salt corrosion on the housing, could be a deer, could be nothing,” Rhodey said without looking up from the tablet.
Peggy’s nodded, before her jaw tightened slightly. “I don’t believe the official account, for what it’s worth. About Nick Fury.”
“Neither do I.” Rhodey finally looked up. “Wayne thinks it’s connected to Pierce. To the algorithm Tony and Banner have been picking apart since last night.”
“Then we should assume the people responsible for Fury know exactly what Tony’s been doing, and exactly where he is.”
“That’s the working theory, yeah.”
“Then I’d like to take another look at that sensor,” Peggy said, “because I don’t believe in convenient coincidences, and morning is exactly the kind of hour someone would choose to test a perimeter before deciding whether it’s worth breaching.”
XXXXX
The sensor, it turned out, hadn’t faulted because of salt corrosion. Rhodey found that out the hard way when he climbed down to the housing on the cliff face and discovered the casing had been opened, cleanly, by something that knew exactly which two wires to bridge to make the unit report false negatives instead of going fully dark, which would have triggered an alarm.
“Peggy,” he said into his comm, keeping his voice level with a bit of effort thanks to his decade of training. “We have a problem.”
She was beside him in under a minute. She looked at the opened housing, at the precision of the tamper, and her expression went very still.
“Someone’s already inside the perimeter,” she said.
“How long?”
“Long enough to map the grounds, identify the cameras, and find the blind spots.” She was already moving back up the path, faster now, comm in hand. “Tony. Pepper. This is not a drill. I need you in the panic room immediately.”
There was a pause on the line that lasted half a second too long, which on a clean channel meant something had already gone wrong.
“Tony,” Peggy said again, her voice sharper.
The response that came back wasn’t Tony’s voice. It was static, and then nothing at all.
She and Rhodey exchanged a look before she rushed inside, where the static on the comm had coincided exactly with every external camera feed on Tony’s primary display going dark in sequence, north to south, like something was moving through the property and erasing its own trail as it went.
“JARVIS,” Tony said, already pushing back from the workbench, “talk to me.”
“Sir, I am detecting an unidentified individual on the property. Exterior cameras seven through fourteen have lost signal in the last ninety seconds. I am unable to reacquire.”
Pepper, who had gone very pale, was standing near the window, breathing heavily. “Tony.”
“I see it.” Tony’s heart was beating too fast in a way that, two weeks post-surgery, he was acutely and unpleasantly aware of. He pulled up the Mark 42’s diagnostic display with hands that weren’t quite steady. The suit was still scattered in pieces around the workshop, with not even eighty percent success rate on simulation, and the calibration on its autonomous flight modules stood unfinished from the simulation runs three nights ago. It was not ready. But it was the best shot he had.
“JARVIS, initiate Clean Slate protocol. Bring me whatever’s flight-capable.”
“Sir, the assembly sequence has a documented seventy-eight percent success rate in simulation. I must advise against relying on it under live conditions.”
“Noted. Do it anyway.”
The workshop lights dimmed slightly as the suit components powered up, gauntlets and boots and chest plate stirring on their racks, preparing to fly to him the way they’d been designed to. It would take three minutes, JARVIS had told him once, for the first full assembly under ideal conditions. Tony had a bad feeling these were not going to be ideal conditions.
He was unfortunately proven right when the window behind Pepper shattered.
It wasn’t an explosion. It was controlled, a single precise impact that took out the glass in a wide radius without scattering it dangerously, and through the opening came a figure that moved like he’d done this exact thing a hundred times before and found none of it difficult.
He was dressed in tactical black, a mask covering the lower half of his face, with goggles over his eyes. What drew the eye, what made Pepper’s breath catch and Tony’s hand freeze halfway through a gesture, was the arm. Where his left arm should have been was something else entirely, metal plating that caught the light in segmented bands, moving with a fluid mechanical precision that had nothing soft or human about it.
“Pepper, move,” Tony said, and she did, backing toward the reinforced door at the rear of the workshop that led, eventually, to the panic room, except the intruder was already between her and that door, having crossed the room in the time it took Tony to say her name.
“Stark,” the figure said. His voice was flat, and Tony couldn’t place the accent. “You have information that doesn’t belong to you.”
“I’ve got a lot of information,” Tony said, backing toward his bench, buying seconds, watching the suit components on his peripheral display crawl toward the three minutes of assembly time he did not currently have. “Most of it’s not even classified. Some of it’s just really good gossip.”
The man didn’t respond to that. He simply moved, and Tony understood in the half second before impact that he was not going to be fast enough, post-surgery body and unfinished suit both betraying him at the worst possible moment. To his massive fortune though, the hand stopped and the figure turned right before the workshop door blew inward and Rhodey came through it in full War Machine armor with both shoulder cannons already spinning up.
“Get away from him,” Rhodey said, and the shoulder cannons fired.
XXXXX
What followed was the fastest, most one-sided fight Rhodey had ever been part of, and he had been part of some genuinely bad ones.
He’d expected, going in, that the armor gave him an advantage against an unaugmented human, even a very good one. The man in tactical black was not unaugmented, and the discovery of exactly how far that gap closed happened over the course of about four seconds.
The cannon fire missed because the target was no longer where it had been a half second after firing, already moving low and fast across the workshop floor, using Tony’s scattered equipment as cover with the kind of spatial awareness that showed he’d assessed the entire room in the time it took most people to register that shots had been fired at all. He came up inside Rhodey’s reach before the armor’s targeting system could reacquire, and the metal arm closed around the cannon housing on Rhodey’s right shoulder and simply tore it free.
The sound was awful, metal shrieking against metal, and Rhodey staggered as the armor’s systems screamed alerts about a compromised power conduit. He swung with his left arm, full servo-assisted force behind it, and connected with what should have been a devastating blow.
The man absorbed it, rolled with the impact instead of fighting it, and used the momentum to put himself behind Rhodey’s guard. The second hit came to the back of the knee joint, a precise strike that buckled the armor’s leg actuator, and Rhodey went down hard onto the workshop floor with the weight of the suit driving the air out of his lungs.
“Rhodey!” Tony shouted, and that was the moment Peggy came through what was left of the broken window, her sword already drawn.
She was fast. Faster than the man expected, Tony could tell, because for the first time since he’d come through the window, there was a half-second hesitation in his movement. Peggy’s blade came in at an angle designed to take the metal arm out of the fight entirely, a clean disabling cut rather than a killing one, because even now, even with everything she knew about who this might be, some part of her training insisted on restraint until restraint was no longer survivable.
The arm met the blade and held. Sparks scattered across the workshop floor as the blade met whatever alloy made up that prosthetic, and the force of the parry sent a shock up through Peggy’s arms that she felt in her shoulders. She recovered fast, pivoting into a follow-up strike, and for three exchanges she held her own, her blade work precise and merciless, testing him for weaknesses.
She found one, or thought she had, an opening on his unshielded right side, and committed to the strike.
He wasn’t where the opening suggested he’d be. He’d baited it. The metal hand caught her wrist mid-swing, the grip closing with enough force that she heard something in her own wrist snap with a barely audible crack that would become very loud later. Barely a second later, the sword was wrenched from her grip and sent skittering across the floor.
“Peggy!” Tony shouted, and that was the moment the Mark 42’s assembly hit its hundred and eightieth second, the chest plate and one gauntlet snapping into place around him with a mechanical clatter that wasn’t fast enough, that was barely partial, that left him standing in the middle of his own workshop in half a suit while the man who had just disarmed two of the most capable fighters Tony knew turned, unhurried, and looked directly at him.
“You should have stayed out of it,” the man said, and it took Tony a half second to realize he was talking to Peggy and Rhodey both, a statement of fact rather than a threat, the kind of thing you said about people who had made a tactical error rather than people you hated.
He started walking toward Tony.
Tony’s gauntlet hand came up, the repulsor charging as the whine of it built. “JARVIS, how much longer on the rest of the suit?”
“Forty seconds, sir, and that estimate assumes the assembly sequence does not encounter further—“
“I don’t have forty seconds.”
He fired anyway. The repulsor blast caught the man center mass and staggered him, the first real reaction Tony had gotten out of him since he’d come through the window, and for one bright stupid hopeful second Tony thought that might actually be enough.
It wasn’t. The man absorbed the hit, recovered his footing in under a second, and kept walking, faster now, and Tony understood with the kind of clarity that comes right before something very bad is about to happen that he had run out of options, half a suit and a damaged left ventricle being what stood between him and whatever came next.
The metal hand closed around the front of his chest plate and lifted him off the ground like he weighed nothing at all.
XXXXX
The quinjet’s engines were still spinning down when Steve hit the ground, his shield already up, having jumped from the open ramp before the jet had fully landed because five hours had felt like five years and the last two minutes of the approach, watching the house’s exterior cameras feed chaos through Bruce’s tactical display, had felt like the longest stretch of time in Steve’s life.
He came through the broken window the same way the Winter Soldier had, except louder, his shield leading.
The first thing he registered was Rhodey on the floor, his armor sparking, trying to get an arm under himself and not quite managing it. The second was Peggy, favoring one wrist, already moving to drag herself back into the fight despite every instinct in her body screaming that the wrist needed attention first. The third was Tony, half-suited, off the ground, a hand the size of a small wrecking ball wrapped around the front of his chest plate.
Steve didn’t think. He threw the shield.
It caught the Winter Soldier across the shoulder of the metal arm, not enough force to break the grip but enough to disrupt the angle, and Tony dropped the last foot to the floor hard, gasping, scrambling backward on the half-assembled suit’s unresponsive legs.
The Winter Soldier turned.
For one moment, the two of them simply looked at each other across the wreckage of Tony’s workshop, and Steve had the strange disorienting sense of looking at something that moved like him, that had the same compact density of muscle and the same controlled economy of motion that Steve recognized in his own body, and the unmistakable essence of the enhancement that didn’t come from a gym.
“Get back,” Steve said to the room generally, to Rhodey and Peggy and Tony, none of whom were inclined to listen and all of whom were in no condition to argue effectively.
The Winter Soldier came at him without wasting a moment, and the fight that followed was unlike anything Steve had been in for a long time, because for the first time in years he was facing someone who didn’t have to compensate for a gap between his ability and Steve’s. Every strike Steve threw was met with something that matched it, blow for blow, speed for speed, in a way that should have been impossible for an unmodified human and clearly wasn’t, because whatever was inside this man’s blood was operating at the same level as the serum running through Steve’s.
He caught Steve’s shield arm and used it as leverage to drive a knee up that connected hard enough to lift Steve off his feet for a half second, and Steve hit the floor and rolled with it. He came up fast, his shield raised in time to deflect a strike from the metal fist that would have caved in his ribs otherwise, the impact ringing through the vibranium with a force that traveled up his arm and into his shoulder.
“Who sent you?” Steve asked between exchanges, looking for anything, any crack in the absolute professional calm with which this man was trying to kill him.
No answer, as expected.
The Winter Soldier fought the way a machine would fight if a machine could also throw a punch, methodical and relentless, no wasted motion, no tells, and Steve was starting to understand, with a cold creeping clarity, that he was facing someone who might actually be capable of beating him.
They traded blows across the wreckage of the workshop, knocking aside half-finished suit components and scattering tools, and somewhere in the chaos Steve’s shield came up to block a strike from the metal arm and the force of the impact, full strength against full strength, drove the goggles from the other man’s face and sent his mask sliding half off in the same motion, exposing his face for the first time since he’d come through the window.
The moment he saw that face, Steve’s whole body went still. On the floor, Peggy gasped.
Steve’s brain was struggling to process the instructions his eyes were sending it. The face in front of him was older than he remembered, harder around the eyes, marked with a thin scar near the jaw that hadn’t been there before. But it was a face Steve had known since he was a scrawny kid in Brooklyn getting his teeth knocked out behind a deli, a face that had pulled him out of more alleys than Steve could count, a face that had been laughing at him across a table the night before he shipped out for Europe and had told him, with absolute conviction, that he’d be fine, that they’d both be fine, that nothing was going to take either of them down for good.
“Bucky…”
The word came out of him without his permission, quiet and full of disbelief.
The Winter Soldier’s fist, already swinging toward Steve’s exposed side, stopped three inches short of its target.
It wasn’t an intentional stop. Steve could see that immediately, the way the arm trembled as the momentum canceled abrupt, the way the man’s whole body seemed to hitch, like a machine that had hit an instruction it couldn’t process. His eyes, which had been flat and focused this entire fight, flickered with something that hadn’t been there a second before. Confusion. Pain. The look of a man trying to remember a word that was sitting just out of reach.
“Who,” the Winter Soldier said, and his voice had changed, having lost some of its flatness and gained something ragged underneath it, “who is Bucky?”
“It’s me,” Steve said, lowering the shield slightly, every tactical instinct screaming at him not to and every other instinct in his body overriding it completely. “Buck, it’s Steve. It’s me.”
The Winter Soldier took a step back. Then another. His hand, the human one, came up to press against his own temple, his fingers digging in like he was trying to physically hold something together that was coming apart.
“Steve,” he said, and the way he said it wasn’t recognition exactly, it was closer to a man testing whether a word fit in his mouth, turning it over, finding it both familiar and impossible at the same time. His eyes, when they found Steve’s again, were full of something that looked very much like fear, the fear of a man who had just had the floor of his entire reality shift underneath him without warning.
“Asset,” said a voice through an earpiece Steve could just barely hear, tinny and distant, “report your status. Asset, respond.”
The Winter Soldier flinched at the sound like it had struck him physically.
“I don’t,” he said, and stopped, his jaw working, like the sentence had simply run out of road. He looked at Steve, and then at the shield, and something in his face that had been trying to surface retreated, sealed itself back behind the flat professional mask Steve had been fighting for the last several minutes.
“Asset,” the voice repeated, sharper now. “Extract immediately.”
The Winter Soldier took one more step back, his eyes never leaving Steve’s face, and for just a moment, just before he turned, Steve saw something there that he would spend the rest of the night trying not to think about and would fail completely.
Then he was moving, fast, back through the shattered window and out into the dark. By the time Steve made it to the opening, he was already gone, vanished into the night with a level of expertise that could only come from training or terrain analysis. Steve didn’t have time to assess it properly or track him, because behind him, in the wreckage of the workshop, three people who mattered to him very much were hurt, and the immediate crisis was not actually over just because the threat had run.
XXXXX
Tony was sitting against an overturned workbench, the half-assembled suit pieces inert around him, his hand pressed against his chest in a way that worried Steve immediately.
“You good?” Steve asked, dropping to a crouch in front of him.
“Define good.”
Tony’s breathing was shallow, too fast, and his face had gone a shade of gray that Steve recognized from his own pre-serum days, the look of a body running on adrenaline and very little else.
“Two weeks post heart surgery and somebody tried to crush my chest plate while I was wearing it. I’m going to go ahead and call this a moderately bad day.”
“JARVIS,” Steve said, looking up, “how is he?”
“Mr. Stark’s vital signs indicate significant cardiac strain consistent with the trauma sustained. I would strongly recommend immediate medical evaluation. I have already alerted Ms. Potts, who is en route from the panic room, and dispatched a priority call to Dr. Cho’s clinic.”
Peggy was on her feet near the broken window, her wrist held carefully against her body, her eyes scanning the dark outside with focus. She hadn’t fully accepted that the threat was gone. “He’s not coming back tonight,” she said, more to herself than anyone else. “Not after that.”
“You’re sure?” Steve asked.
“I’m not sure of anything right now,” Peggy admitted, and there was something raw in her voice that Steve rarely heard from her. “Steve…”
Steve didn’t answer immediately. He was looking out through the broken window into the dark where the man who used to be his best friend had disappeared. The words felt too large and too fragile to say out loud. It felt like saying them might make them more true or might make them less, and he genuinely didn’t know which possibility scared him more.
“Bucky,” he finally said. “James Buchanan Barnes. He died in 1945. I watched him fall from a train in the Alps and I never found a body because there wasn’t anything left to find.” He swallowed. “That was him. I don’t know how, I don’t know what they did to him, but that was Bucky.”
“It could be an impostor…”
“It was Bucky. I know it,” Steve said firmly, and Peggy looked down with a sigh.
The workshop went very quiet. Rhodey, propped against a damaged section of his own armor with one leg still not cooperating, looked between them like he had walked into a much bigger conversation than the one he’d been expecting.
“Are you sure, though? Not hopeful. Sure.”
“I’d know his face anywhere,” Steve said. “Seventy years wouldn’t change that. And he didn’t recognize me, not really, not the way you’d recognize an old friend. But something in him reacted when I said his name. Something fought back against whatever’s running him.”
Pepper appeared in the doorway, breathless, having clearly run the entire way from the panic room, and the rest of the conversation took a backseat as they rushed to get Tony help, to get Rhodey’s armor off enough to check the damage underneath, and to get Peggy’s wrist stabilized.
Steve helped where he could, lifted what needed lifting, and through all of it some part of his mind stayed fixed on the dark outside the broken window and on the last look on Bucky’s face before he’d vanished into it. Confusion. Fear. And underneath both of those, something that had looked, for just a second, like a man drowning and reaching for a hand he couldn’t quite remember how to grab.
XXXXX
Three hours later, the workshop had been swept for further threats, Tony had been stabilized by Dr. Cho’s emergency team and was under observation in a room two floors up, Rhodey’s armor was in pieces on a diagnostic bench, and Peggy’s wrist was in a brace that she kept testing against doctor’s orders because her accelerated healing was already at work.
Bruce Wayne had arrived an hour after the dust settled, having flown out the moment Steve confirmed the situation, and he stood still in the wreckage of the workshop, processing the information that had genuinely surprised him.
“You’re sure?” He asked for what felt like the fifth time that night.
“I’m sure,” Steve said.
Bruce looked at the broken window, at the dried blood on the floor where Peggy’s wrist had bled briefly before treatment, and then at the scattered ruin of weeks of Tony’s work. “James Barnes,” he said slowly. “Your unit’s sergeant. KIA, 1945, in the Alps. I read the file when I was building your background profile years ago.”
“That’s the official record.”
“The official record is wrong.” Bruce’s expression was unreadable. In his mind, he was rapidly recalculating a problem he’d thought he understood. “If HYDRA has had him for seventy years, conditioning him, using him as their personal weapon, that changes the entire calculus of what we’re dealing with. It’s not just an algorithm and three flying weapons platforms anymore. It’s a program that successfully turned a man into an asset and kept him functional and lethal for seven decades.”
“It’s not just that,” Steve said quietly. “It’s Bucky. It’s my friend, still alive, still in there somewhere, being used like a tool by the same people who are about to wipe out everyone on that algorithm’s list.” He looked at Bruce directly. “I’m not walking away from this. Not the part where we stop Insight, and not the part where we get him back. Both. I don’t care how impossible that sounds.”
“I didn’t say it was impossible,” Bruce said. “I said it changes the calculus. Those aren’t the same thing.” He paused, looking thoughtful. “If they’re willing to use their most valuable asset on a target like Tony, two weeks post-surgery, in a location they clearly believed had minimal defense, that tells us something important. They’re not operating from a position of confidence right now. They’re cleaning up loose ends in a hurry, which means Natasha’s intrusion rattled them more than we realized, and the timeline we were working with may already be obsolete.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I don’t think we have six weeks anymore,” Bruce said. “I’m not sure we have six days.”
Across the room, Pepper had gone quiet, sitting beside Tony’s empty workbench with her arms wrapped around herself, staring at nothing in particular. Rhodey watched her for a moment, then looked at Steve.
“What happens now?” he asked. “With Barnes. If he’s out there somewhere, still working for them, and they know we’ve seen his face…”
Steve didn’t have a good answer for that. He thought about the look in Bucky’s eyes in the last second before he’d disappeared into the dark, the way his voice had cracked around Steve’s name like it was a foreign word he was relearning in real time. He thought about the cold businesslike approach of the fighter who’d come through that window before all of that, and he understood clearly that those were both the same man, and that whichever one Bucky was right now depended entirely on which set of orders was currently winning the fight inside his head.
“I don’t know what happens now,” Steve admitted. “But I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to find him. Wherever HYDRA’s keeping him, however they’re controlling him, I’m going to find a way to bring him back. And I’m going to make sure Project Insight never launches, because if it does, none of us are going to be alive long enough to finish what we started tonight.”
Bruce’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, and whatever was on the screen made his expression shift, the careful neutrality cracking just slightly.
“What is it?” Steve asked.
“A message from an encrypted account I don’t recognize.” Bruce turned the screen so Steve could see. “No header, no signature.”
The message was short and to the point.
He’s not the only one.
Steve read it twice before looking at Bruce who stared back impassively.
Outside the broken window, the Pacific moved in the dark, vast and indifferent, and somewhere beyond the edge of what either of them could see, the man who had once been Bucky Barnes was either running, or being recovered, or being reset. There was no way to know which, no way to know what those four words meant, no way to know who had sent them, and no way to know whether they were a warning, a threat, or something else entirely.
To be continued…