Steve still had that black eye when he met Bucky in front of the apartment at night to catch Fury’s trademark mysterious car to his undisclosed location. Bucky stood in the darkness behind a streetlight, shrugging his jacket up closer around his neck because it was beginning to grow cold while he waited. Steve stepped into the light of the streetlamp a few minutes later and Bucky spoke up from behind him.
“Hey,” he said scoldingly. “You think you’re in a spotlight?”
“Huh?” Steve said, turning. Bucky could almost see his breath in the air now.
“Step back here,” Bucky said from the darkness, nodding his head to gesture Steve beside him. “Have a little discretion.” Steve frowned and ducked out of the light, joining Bucky. Bucky stepped aside and let him, cupping his right hand over his mouth and blowing before shoving it back into his pocket. “Your face looks great, by the way. Black and blue’s a good color on you.” Bucky wasn’t looking, but he could hear Steve snort and he smiled a little.
“Yeah, good to see I put a real dent in you, too,” Steve replied and Bucky smirked.
“You did some serious damage here, Rogers,” he replied teasingly. “Took nearly a whole day for the bruises to go away. Bet you’re jealous.”
“Oh yeah, what’s not to be jealous of,” Steve replied and the thought was so ridiculous and the light-heartedness was so relieving that they both laughed out loud. Bucky smiled over at Steve and Steve was grinning back and Bucky was thinking about how nice it was to have such a relationship where understanding was an apology enough and about how nice it was to even be understood, if only for a little while and if only in portions. It was hopeful and happy and it was better still because sometimes, when you can’t love yourself, you’re endlessly grateful to have friends who can do it for you. But then, Bucky saw the bullet.
Bucky grabbed Steve’s shoulders and shoved him out of the way, pulling his own arms back just in time for his right jacket sleeve to be torn. He drew his handgun from his pocket inside his jacket rapidly and suddenly, he was all focus, ruthlessness in his eyes. He knew this game well. It was dark, but Bucky followed where he had seen the bullet from and caught a glimpse of something gleaming and that very second, without hesitation, he shot. There was the sound of someone muffling a cry, but Bucky wasn’t done. He was angry now, and although looking back on it, he would realize that his emotions felt muted with the adrenaline and familiarness of the moment, he, and especially Steve, absolutely would not be shot at.
The Winter Soldier found the sniper on the ground across the street with his bullet in his chest, but he was still trying to point a gun. The Winter Soldier kicked it away from him and then dug his heel into the man’s bullet-wound. His face was blank as the man groaned and he did not feel much.
The Winter Soldier switched his gun hand, since his left was too weak to do much lifting right now, and used his right to haul the man up to face him.
“Hydra?” He asked darkly, although, who else would it be? The man spat blood at him and the Winter Soldier frowned deeply. “That’s what I thought.” Another two bullets went through the man’s brain, the barrel pushed up against his temple, and the Winter Soldier flung his body aside. He surveyed the area quickly, scanning and poking around. He found one more sniper and shot him as well, and then he returned his gun to his jacket.
Steve, standing confused in the dark, heard only the gunshots and muttered words and he thought maybe it would have been prudent to bring his shield. He had no idea what Bucky could be doing out there in the dark.
When the Winter Soldier rejoined Steve minutes later, hating what he was and feeling sick as the shame began to sink in around the hollowness inside him, fitting itself into the cracks and the slivers, it was difficult now for him to believe that moments earlier, he had been happy.
“We’re safe for now,” he said quietly and stared at the ground, keeping a good few feet away from Steve. He wouldn’t have blamed Steve if he felt ill watching him. The Winter Soldier felt ill being him.
“We’ll have to tell Fury they knew we’d be here,” Steve said and Bucky nodded. They stood there a while in silence, both deep in thought. “You’ve gotten way better at that,” Steve added, moving now closer to the Winter Soldier like he hadn’t noticed the purposeful distance. “I mean, you were good during the war, but you’re great now.” Steve was trying to be nice, trying to make things normal, the Winter Soldier thought. He really didn’t know how to respond. He wanted to be lighthearted, but he found he just couldn’t.
“They were, uh, they were targeting you,” he said with a frown. “Again.” He pointed in front of them, where the first sniper had fallen. “That one was for you.” Then he pointed again, to the left, where the second sniper lay. “And that one was for me.” There was a long silence.
“You ever, uh,” Steve said after the pause and cleared his throat. “Ever feel like the war never ended?” Bucky shifted his feet.
“Sometimes,” he admitted quietly. “I think the real war just began.”
Then, the car pulled up and they both climbed in and made the journey to Fury’s meeting place in a brooding quiet, both of them considering death and war and the sick feeling they each felt in their stomachs.
“Romanoff brought me this,” Fury said to Steve and Bucky once they met him, the sky still dark and the cold still sinking into their bones. He waved a flashdrive in the air. “It took a while to decrypt all the encoded information, but now we’re mostly certain of what it all means.
“What is it, sir?” Steve asked.
“Information stolen from Hydra while you two waited outside,” Fury replied. “It gives us leads on Hydra locations.”
“Where are they?” Bucky asked.
“We’ve got three primary locations right now,” Fury replied. “I’ll let you know as I assign you to them. But I’m adding more people onto this since we have such solid information now and I think we can really wipe out at least significant portion of Hydra.” Bucky frowned.
“I don’t want to wipe out a significant portion,” he said. “I want to take it all.”
“If it were that easy, Barnes,” Fury said. “They’d already be gone. But I’d think that you of all people would have figured out by now that they can be a bit difficult.” Bucky ground his teeth and glared at the ground. Fury looked to Steve and Bucky and back again. “This is our plan,” he said. “Like it or not.
“So where are we going?” Steve asked.
“Well, that depends,” Fury replied, turning to Bucky once more. “What all do you remember from Russia?” Bucky shook his head.
“They’ve got something in Russia, of course they do. I knew that bastard was lying to me,” he growled.
“We can probably assume that any Hydra agent you grilled was lying to you,” Fury responded. “But how much do you know about Hydra’s places in Russia?”
“Very little,” Bucky admitted. “Nothing necessarily cohesive. But I could try. And I am fluent in Russian. I’d be willing to go, Fury.” In fact, he thought, he’d probably be more willing to go. He had an opportunity to face his monsters head-on and although the concept did scare him, more than he would like to admit, he knew he couldn’t back down or he would always regret it. And besides, he couldn’t help but feel confident if Steve was with him. Things had gone wrong before, but he knew nothing was ever bound to go right and if he was going to go down any way, it had better be with Hydra in his strangling grasp and, ideally, with Steve nearby.
“I’ll think about it,” Fury said and Bucky pushed aside the way he felt like insisting.
The thing is, all Bucky was beginning to be able to feel was the frustration, buzzing in his bloodstream and backing up his patience. Not that he’d ever been one with much patience to begin with, but even he was a little surprised at his own short fuse. Between the realization of his repression and the strains on his relationships with his best and only friends and the fact that his replacement arm made him feel weaker and more fragile than he’d felt in years, Bucky was bursting with pent up anger and hate. Like the frustration that had drove him to sling fists at Steve earlier, the anger lit a fire inside him that he hadn’t seen in years. At first, he had embraced it, but now, he resented it. It was a fire, after all, and like hate tends to do, Bucky could feel it burning away at anything good inside of him.
And he felt even more so now that it was all his fault, a feeling which drove the nails of his anger deeper inside of him. He’d always had the sinking feeling, as he was bound to have, that his torment was not random. In a world of order, where things made sense, he must have done something, been something so terribly wrong and his 70 years of abuse at Hydra had been penance for it. But he hadn’t known himself, he couldn’t remember what he must have done to deserve it all. Now, though, he knew it was all him. There was no mind-wiping, brainwashing machine keeping him from remembering; now it was just Bucky and his towering dam, holding back the floods and keeping him at a steady flat-line of cowardly misery. It was his fault and everything was so, so complicated.
He was also beginning to feel as though he was on some sort of timer. His life had become an emotional rollercoaster. He didn’t know if he’d wake up in the morning to push his face back into his pillow and feel hollow and dead all day or if he would wake up grinding his teeth as fire seared his insides and he bruised his knuckles on the walls of his apartment. The only thing he knew for sure was that waking up happy was never an option.
Steve and Bucky finished up with Fury and walked back out to the car together quietly.
“Russia could be really dangerous,” Steve mentioned.
“Don’t care,” Bucky replied. Steve rubbed his face.
“Are you going to do this every time some really dangerous opportunity comes up?” He asked, opening his car door and beginning to sit down. “Cause I can’t watch you get wiped again.” Bucky crossed the car to the opposite side and opened the door, glaring.
“Well it’s your lucky day,” he said as he sat down. “Because I’m not getting wiped again. And you have no room to talk about danger, Steve, you’ve done worse.”
“I have absolutely not done worse,” Steve replied hotly. “We can have this conversation a hundred times and I’ll still tell you that you have a lot to lose and putting your neck on the chopping block isn’t going to make Hydra put down the knife.”
“And I’ll tell you that I’m not expecting Hydra to put down the knife,” Bucky said. “I’m expecting to pry it from their cold, dead hands. I’m not going down without a fight.” Steve sighed.
“So Russia it is then?” He said.
“Russia it is,” Bucky replied determinedly.
And neither of them noticed as in the front, the driver injected something into the heaters and put a gas mask over himself as he drove.