New York (Nico and the Avengers)

18. Winter soldier

Steve's POV

"How are you?" I ask like I have every time I've come to see Bucky. I'm not entirely sure if he's warming up to me, but I really believe he is. Or he's just getting over his anger at the fact that I didn't notice the soundproofing.

"Bored," he responds which is a lot more than he would have said at the beginning. It's not nothing, or even something neutral like fine. Of course it's also completely to be expected and gives away nothing. Nat and Clint also said it could be some sort of guilt tripping, but that isn't what Bucky would do. Of course, as I have to remind myself often, this isn't the Bucky I knew, and I have to respect the new boundaries of our relationship.

"Do you want to talk with me?" I ask because either way I'm going to talk to him, but sometimes he refuses to talk to me so I'm just babbling on until I have to go.

"What about?" he asks with what might be a spark of curiosity.

"Whatever you want, that I can tell you," I add because Clint and Nat would be furious if I didn't.

He seems to be weighing his options before asking, "why are you so stubborn in your belief that you know me?"

"The evidence suggests you could have been alive then, so it's scientifically possible in theory, and HYDRA has always been good at doing the theoretical or even the impossible. Also you look so familiar that at first I thought nostalgia and longing were blinding me because you'd barely aged, just like me. Also when I thought about it everything made sense. You fell and we never managed to get your body back, and I knew HYDRA had experimented on you."

"How did you lose a body?"

"You fell off a train and I had to take care of the rest of the team. By the time that was done I ended up getting frozen, remember when I told you about that?"

"Yeah, but why didn't anyone else look?"

"You fell so far it would be impossible for you to have survived. Besides even if you had lived there was no way to get a proper rescue team there with any real chance of saving you. If you hadn't died on impact someone would've eaten you, and if you hadn't been eaten there'd have been no way to find you without getting caught I think. I'm not entirely sure what the situation would have been at that point but everyone including me thought you were dead."

"If what you say is true I was already working with HYDRA at that point, so why would you care if I died?"

I just stare at him. How could he think the real him would ever work with HYDRA? Of course he doesn't remember the old him, and the new him might be more ruthless and practical. Besides considering he was working with them and he knows they experimented on him I guess it does make sense to assume he was okay with it. "You got captured during the war, and the experimentation happened while you were their prisoner. I'm not sure what happened, but I found you and we ended up breaking you and a bunch of other people out. After that we formed our own group, the howling commandos and did a lot. We were at war and didn't have time to question what had changed about you, and the physical changes were so little they could be attributed to natural changes so we thought whatever they tried was a dud. Think of what the serum did to me!" I say pointing at my muscles with a smile. I'd shown him a picture from before, the two of us smiling like nothing could ever go wrong.

"Why did you start lying today?" he asks, drawing me out of the past.

"What do you mean?"

"What you said is extremely complicated, and it doesn't make sense. The simpler solution is that you guys took me away against my will, like you did recently."