Chapter Text
Tony almost stabbed himself in the hand with a screwdriver when the phone rang—a loud, clanging old-timey alarm that echoed through the workshop and cut through the dulcet tones of Black Sabbath.
“Incoming call, sir, the lobby emergency line,” JARVIS intoned flatly.
Tony sighed. The lobby emergency line was for just that—an emergency; an Iron Man level emergency—but the half-dozen times the kids at the front desk had used it had been decidedly less than that. A naked lady screaming at them while swinging a clump of seaweed. A drunk guy jumping the curb and hitting the fire hydrant just outside, setting off a Buckingham Fountain in front of Avengers Tower. An environmental protest (they’d gotten the wrong tower).
But Tony had read The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and he didn’t want anyone getting eaten on his watch, so he said,
“Patch it through, JARVIS.”
A breathy high-pitched voice crackled on the line. “Uh, M–Mr. Stark?” The kid croaked—a twenty-something son of one of Stark’s most diligent cleaning ladies. Good kid. Good personality. Still seemingly in puberty.
“Yes, this is the Iron Genuis. What’s the emergency?”
He prepared himself to not snort at whatever supposed crisis was going on down there.
“Um, it’s–ah–it’s a guy. There’s a guy in here, he’s acting pretty weird—pretty out of it. He might be on drugs.”
“Is he attacking somebody?”
“N–no, sir. Just standing—just standing there. But he’s muttering and kinda twitching, and he’s scaring off the visitors.”
Tony rolled his eyes loud enough for twenty-something to hear, and said,
“There’s a Stark Philanthropy Shelter down the street if he needs food and help a place to detox. Or else there’s a number for emergency social services—I have them on retainer, it’ll be free of charge. If he can’t put a sentence together, go with the latter.”
“S–sir, I–I don’t think he’s homeless and… I don’t know if social services can handle him.
“They’re pretty tough, kid,” Tony sniped.
“Yeah, but, it’s just… he’s got a metal arm.”
That made Tony stop, mid-circuit.
“JARVIS—”
“On it, sir.”
Already a live feed of the downstairs lobby was appearing on Tony’s holoscreen. And there, in the center of the polished marble, was a quivering mess of a man who looked like Tony’s childhood pet—a rat terrier named Edison who’d gotten lost for a week in the woods in upstate New York and returned to them soaking wet with matted fur and a crazed look in his eyes.
And there, hanging heavy off the man’s too-thin frame, was a shining silver metal arm. With a bright red Ruski star on it.
Tony dropped his screwdriver.
“Shit.”
***
Steve had just left the library with a Russian-English dictionary tucked under his arm. He knew you could find that sort of thing on the internet these days—hell, you could probably type what you wanted to say into The Google and it’d spit it right out. But he needed to go analog for this. It was too important.
One month after the Triskelion Disaster, after Bucky beat him to hell and then jumped in a river to save him, after he’d discovered that everything he knew was a lie, he was still on the hunt. The worst part of the hunt. The waiting.
After a week or two of searching, Sam and he had burnt through all their leads, so they were back to base—which was currently New York City—to hunt through the thousands of HYDRA files for any indication of where The Winter Soldier might scurry off to, or where the stragglers of the HYDRA regime might hold him if—God forbid—they’d recaptured Bucky.
Every night Steve went to sleep with the image of Bucky’s wide, confused eyes in his mind, and every morning he woke up to the sounds of his best friend’s screams. This was one mission he would not fail.
He was just about to duck into the subway when a buzzing sound sent his hair on edge and he reached instinctually for the knife that he always carried now. One of two actually; a consequence of his recent revelations.
What he found was a red hovering machine with a Stark logo and the approximation of a smile, that beeped and blinked at him for a few disconcerting seconds before Tony Starks voice emitted from it.
“Hey, Ice Baby, we’ve got a problem. Avengers Tower, asap.”
Steve looked up and down the street, but he was already moving in the direction of the tower. “What is it?’ He asked as he ran along the speedy little hovercraft.
“Unexpected visitor. Goes by a lot of names, but one of them is frosty and violent.”
It took Steve’s mind a few seconds to catch up with the words, with Tony’s oblique way of speaking, but the moment it clicked, his heart stuttered to a stop.
“Bucky?”
“That’s your man. Or at least, an approximation; he looks more like something I pull out of the sink where Pepper washes her hair. Tracking mud on my lobby floor.”
“Get everybody out of that lobby, Tony,” Steve ordered, putting on his speed and practically vaulting over a hot dog cart in his haste to close the distance between himself and his best friend.
“What do I look like, Cap? I evacked the minute my guys clocked the metal arm. It’s just him and me.”
“You’re in there with him??”
“Correction: him and me and the suit.”
Steve’s legs pumped, his feet pounding the pavement as the little machine zoomed and swerved to keep up with him.
In minutes, he was jogging up to the front of Avengers Tower, where a gaggle of spectators had gathered behind some hastily-constructed barriers, distracted by two suits that seemed to stand guard of their own accord.
“Are those things gonna let me through?” Steve asked, wary.
“They’re Sentinels, and yeah, just distracting the peasants.”
Steve didn’t have time to sort through his feelings on that statement when he caught a glimpse of the lobby through the tinted glass. Caught a glimpse of the man in black tac gear whose arm stuck out at a bad angle and whose back was to him.
Not covering his exits. Bad form.
The thought crossed Steves mind as he slipped past the onlookers and the robots, and pushed through the wide double doors.
His hand was still clenched around the Russian dictionary, and he swallowed tightly, taking in the sight of Bucky—it was Bucky, no doubt about it—for the first time since the Triskelion.
What he saw made his stomach sink. For one, Bucky was wearing the same exact clothes he’d last been in—black tac gear with a ludicrous amount of buckles and straps, almost like it was intentionally difficult to remove. All of it was stained and ripped, but it hung loosely on Bucky’s frame, because he was at least thirty pounds lighter than when they’d fought over DC.
Steve shuddered, and tried to remain still, as he spotted Tony standing guard, suit on. He was kind enough to leave his face uncovered, probably trying not to frighten Barnes.
“What’s… what’s going on?” Steve asked, very quietly, because Bucky hadn’t noticed him. He was just standing in the center of the room, twitching and muttering.
“Not much since he walked in,” Tony said, just as quiet, as Steve came to his side and finally saw Bucky from the front. The greasy hair and sunken cheeks, the thousand yard stare and the twitching and muttering, none of it could hide the man Steve knew underneath. His brother. His Bucky.
“I looked over the footage; seems like your boy was pacing out front for a while, spooking the tourists, seemed unsure about what he was trying to do, then he follows a gaggle of private school kids through the doors and wanders around the lobby for a bit. My security guy Phil asked him if he could help him, and the guy just froze, starting muttering—well, you can listen.”
Steve did, listen in, focus his enhanced hearing to see what Bucky was saying. The sound almost broke him. From a cracked voice came the muttered phrase, over and over again:
“Barnes, J-James Buchanan, three-two-five-five-seven-zero-three-eight.”
Steve dug his nails into the palm of his hands to keep from crumbling.
“Anything else?” He murmured.
“He seems to be going in a cycle. He’ll repeat his own identification five times in a row, and then…” Tony gestured, and Steve heard it; his own name on Bucky’s lips.
“Captain R-Rogers, Steven Grant, superior officer, reporting-g for dis-ciplinary action.”
Then it was back to the name and serial, interrupted by stutters and twitches, like Bucky couldn’t control his muscles.
“What’s causing all this?”
“Besides the fact that your guy had his brain pan-fried for seventy years?” Tony asked. “Withdrawal. He’s showing all the symptoms.”
Steve could’ve brought down the tower with his rage. Of course. He’d started on the files Natasha had released. He’d read about the drug cocktail they kept Bucky hopped up on for “compliance” and “endurance”. Quitting all that cold turkey? It was a miracle his heart was still beating.
“Okay…” Steve breaths, trying to stop himself shaking, to stop himself from rushing up to Bucky and squeezing him in his arms, to stop himself from collapsing onto the floor and sobbing. “What–what do we–what should we do?”
“I don’t know, capsicle, he’s your old war buddy,” Tony says. “As long as he doesn’t seem inclined to start destroying my property or bashing in heads, he’s welcome to stand there and shiver, but there are bright young minds waiting to get into the Avengers museum.”
Tony gestures to the glass windows, where a crowd of confused patrons wait to see if they will be admitted to the museum that takes up the main floor of the tower.
“Can you—any way to…” Steve doesn’t even finish his sentence before Tony is pressing a few buttons and the windows are going dark blocking the lobby—and Bucky from peering eyes. Steve takes a steeling breath.
“Before you go in you should know I contacted Madame Russia, she’s on her way. Eta… 5 minutes.”
“Nat? I didn’t know she was in the city.” She’d left after the Triskelion debacle to establish new identities.
“Going by Alice Freeman right now, I believe; I called her right after I called you.”
Steve swallowed, trying to still his shaking as he watched his childhood best friend twitch and mutter in front of him, looking for all the world like a walking corpse dragged from the pit of a lagoon.
“Okay, I’ll—I’ll wait to approach. She might know how…” Steve gestured vaguely to Bucky’s black-clad frame. Him and Tony stared in disturbed silence.
“B-Barnes, James Buchanan, three-two-f–five-five-seven-zero-three-eight, Barnes, J–James Buchanan, three-two-five-five-seven-z-zero-three-eight.”
“Well… at least he knows his name,” Tony offered flatly, but Steve couldn’t speak; he was too busy re-living one of the worst and best days of his life: when he’d found Bucky in that godforsaken factory in Azzano, and unstrapped him from a torture table as he muttered the only thing he’d been able to cling to during whatever horrors they’d subjected him to:
Barnes, James Buchanan, three-two-five-five-seven-zero-three-eight.
Steve had thought he’d saved his best friend that day. Then he thought he’d lost him. Now he knew both were true.
“B–Barnes, James Buchanan, three-two-five-five-seven-zero-three-eight,” Bucky rasped, twitching. “Captain Rogers, Steven Grant, superior off-off-officer, reporting for disciplinary action.”
Steve winced at his name, coming out of Bucky in that deadened tone, flat and meaningless, like an answering machine listing off a rolodex of names.
“How did he know he could find me here?” Steve murmurs, watching every shake and twitch of Bucky’s battered body, and wondering how his life—both their lives—had come to this. “The last time he saw me was in DC.”
“My guess?” Tony offers. “Your Bionic Boy has been watching the news.”
He gestures to a TV in the upper corner of the lobby, which shows Avengers highlight reels, positive news broadcasts, awards they’ve been given, best moments of their defense in the Battle of New York.
And one of them: a bio of Steve Rogers, sometime resident of Avengers Tower.
Steve’s chest caves in, thinking of how confused and scared Bucky must have been—must be now—wandering around with hazy half-memories, utterly out of his own world. Steve remembers how hard it was to be acclimated to the twenty-first century when he first woke up; hell, he still gets confused and forgets where he is sometimes. But for Bucky? To go through it alone and confused, and coming down off Hydra-knows-what drugs while on the run from invisible enemies?
Steve finds himself shaking almost as badly as Bucky.
“Natasha needs to hurry up,” he murmurs, as Tony glances at his wrist—some sort of phone or something.
“I can see if sh—”
Tony’s is interrupted by a beeping, hissing noise, as a jaunty tune plays out of a speaker in the wall, and a hatch opens for a boxy little robot to roll out.
“Shit—JARVIS—”
But Tony is too late; the robot rolls right up to Bucky and the mud-streaks he’s tracked onto the lobby floor, and in a second there’s a gun in his hand, pointed at the robot as he screams in Russian something Steve can’t understand.
“Woah! Hold it, just a cleaning bot! It’s a cleaning bot!” Tony tries to shout over Bucky’s panicked commands. He brandishes a sig-sauer at the beeping little robot, who obliviously tries to scrub up the mud tracks behind him.
“Bucky wa—”
Three quick shots ring out from the pistol, and the robot gives a sad little whine, sparking and stuttering to a stop as Bucky continues to shout. Tony and Steve are both frozen with their mouths hanging open.
“Bucky…” Steve tries, his voice a croak. “Bucky stop, it’s okay.”
But Bucky continues to rant in Russian, jabbing the weapon at the twitching robot, his eyes wild with fear.
“Steve, that gun’s gotta go,” Tony warns, the Iron Man mask now guarding his face. “And you owe me a new cleaning bot.”
“Bucky, please,” Steve pleads, but his friend doesn’t hear. Steve is grasping for something—anything to stop whatever’s happening in Bucky’s mind right now, but he’s falling short, and Bucky is now brandishing the gun wildly, swinging it near the windows where Steve knows kids are waiting on the other side.
“JARVIS, get ready to enact Code Green protocol,” Tony orders the AI, and Steve doesn’t have to ask to guess what that means; some sort of control, strong enough to hold Bruce.
Bucky’s muttering starts up again, but he’s still swinging the gun.
“B–Barnes, James Buch–chanan, three-two-five-five-seven-zero-three-eight.” There’s a frantic pitch to the words now.
“Please, Tony d—”
“ Vnimaniye soldat!” A voice calmly commands, and Natasha comes astride with Steve, as Bucky suddenly freezes, and snaps forward.
“Brosit' pistolet, soldat.”
Immediately the gun drops from Bucky’s hand. Steve is breathing hard and Tony’s repulsor is still raised, as Natasha flatly says,
“You called.”
Bucky stands just as before, rigid, but shaking and twitching, his eyes moving without any direction.
“B–Barnes, James Buchanan…”
“I didn’t want to approach him,” Steve murmurs when he finds his voice. “Didn’t know what would… set him off…”
He gestures feebly to the destroyed robot.
“Hm,” Natasha says shortly.
“What do we do?”
“What do you do, Rogers,” she says. “He’s asking for you.”
“But I—”
“Just say exactly what I tell you.”
Steve swallows, looking at his shaking friend, at the hollows of his eyes and the dark, crusted stain that he’s certain is blood.
“Okay.”
***
Steve steps forward with slow, confident steps, his heart feeling like it used to before the serum, when he’d have palpitations that made him sweat and shiver, just like Bucky was doing now.
Bucky doesn’t move or reach for the gun when Steve stands before him, a few feet separating him from the man who’s been his brother since as far back as he could remember.
“Barnes, James Buchanan, three-two-five-five—”
“Attention, Soldier,” Steve croaks, and Bucky goes still. Or rather, he goes silent, the uncontrolled twitching doesn’t stop, like leaves getting battered in a rainstorm.
“...s–status report,” Steve asks, swallowing the discomfort of the command, and following Natasha’s instructions.
Bucky straightens, seemingly as much as he’s able, but his eyes are still listed to the side. “Status Report: Functionality diminished: forty percent. Prosthesis functionality diminished: seventy percent. Caloric intake reaching severe low. Estimated time until expiration: one hundred and twenty hours. Combat not recommended.”
Steve blinks, each word sending him into a more and more confused spiral.
“Wh–what does—what does that mean, ‘expiration’?” He looks to Natasha for an explanation, but she just gives him a somber look.
You know what it means.
Steve’s knees almost buckle, as Natasha steps up.
“Solder, Mission Report,” she says.
“Current M–mission: Unknown. Current Handler: Unknown. Current Pr-protocols: Unknown. Revert to base program—Barnes, James Buchanan, three-two-five-five-seven-zero-three-eight-t. Captain Rogers, Steven Grant, superior officer, reporting for disciplinary a-action.”
“Shit on a stick,” Tony mutters.
Steve can’t quite breathe.
“Well, he’s not here to kill you,” Natasha murmurs. “Best get him inside the tower before one of the witnesses puts two and two together.”
“How?” Steve croaks, feeling a deep cracking inside him, something breaking that had been clinging on by a thread these last few weeks as he hunted for the very man who was now trembling before him.
“Soldier,” Natasha commands. “Current Handler: Captain Rogers, Steven Grant. Current Mission: Recover functionality. Current Protocols: Non-violent.”
Steve could swear that something like relief crosses Bucky’s distressed face, his crooked shoulders dipping just a bit. He still looking hazily into the middle distance, but he says,
“Gotov podchinit'sya.”
And Steve doesn’t need to ask for a translation. He’s read that one in the files, over and over and over again: Ready to comply.