Chapter Text
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“how strange it is, that after all that we are strangers again”
- Lang Leav -
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Someone is in his apartment, and Steve doesn’t even realize it until he’s already wandered into the living room. The intruder stands in a corner, not so much hiding in the shadows as lounging there. Comfortable with the shroud of darkness, clearly unafraid of being found.
Steve figures that they’d be fighting by now if this man wanted to hurt him. “Can I help you?”
“So polite.” His voice is muffled, expressionless, free of any accent that Steve can discern.
When he steps in front of the window, moonlight bathes his masked face, and Steve reacts on instinct: he rushes the Winter Soldier and shoves him against the wall. Because this is the monster who murdered loyal SHIELD agents and almost killed him, who shot Natasha and nearly assassinated Fury. Even Johann Schmidt had nothing on the Soldier’s sheer, efficient brutality, and the last time they met, he fought like his sole purpose was to eliminate his target.
So what’s he doing here, in the middle of the night? The Soldier has been alone in Steve’s apartment, waiting to be noticed instead of attacking. It doesn’t make sense.
Steve shakes him and asks, “Who sent you?”
“No one,” he says.
Until tonight, Steve had never actually heard the Soldier speak. He was silent throughout their confrontations in the capital, mute and single-minded. It’s disconcerting to find that the specter of his dreams is more human than he expected.
“So you’re not Hydra anymore?” Steve asks.
“I was never Hydra,” the Soldier says.
There’s something in the pitch of his voice, even so quiet and carefully colorless, that reminds Steve of Bucky. Longing hits him in the gut, knocks the breath out of him like a suckerpunch. His grip tightens on the Soldier’s arms, one unforgiving metal, the other thick with hard muscle.
He should step away before he does something stupid—like rip that black muzzle off the Soldier, just to assure himself that his dead friend’s face isn’t hiding underneath it. (He should, but he doesn’t.)
“Then what are you doing here? Planning to finish the job?” Steve asks.
The Soldier makes a rough noise, and it takes Steve a moment to realize that it’s a laugh. “If I’d wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.”
Steve grabs the front of his shirt—long-sleeved, plain, much less conspicuous than his tactical gear—and yanks him closer. “Funny. You tried to kill me in D.C., but here I am, still alive.”
The Soldier stands almost as tall as Steve, but when he ducks his head, he suddenly seems much smaller. “That wasn’t personal,” he says. “You were my mission.”
Some halting, barely-checked emotion slips through his flat affect this time. Regret, Steve thinks. Maybe even shame.
That’s not enough, though, because their fight on the helicarrier had been the most vicious of Steve’s life. Even with his healing factor, it took a week to recover from the injuries that the Soldier dealt him—three gunshots, two stab wounds, four broken bones in his face, and a necklace of purple bruises.
That battle has joined the ranks of Steve’s worst memories: Peggy’s cries across the radio as he plummets into the ice, promising to teach him to dance; Bucky falling from the train, hand outstretched, reaching for help, but Steve is too slow to save him. For the first time since he woke up in this strange century, he has a new figure haunting his dreams. The Winter Soldier, metal fingers clenched around his throat, stealing his breath until the world goes black.
So one moment of remorse doesn’t go too far toward earning Steve’s good will.
“You nearly killed my closest friends, and you murdered more innocent people than you’ve probably bothered to count,” Steve says. “Excuse me if I take that personally.”
The Soldier tilts his chin up, pale eyes suddenly sharp, focused. There’s something achingly familiar about the way he’s looking at Steve, and he’s reminded again of Bucky.
It’s stupid, because there might be a passing resemblance between this man and his friend (as well as Steve can tell with the Soldier masked), but not enough to justify this reaction. Bucky was much slimmer, if built along the same lines, and he had far too much pride in his appearance to let his hair grow so long and ragged. It’s the eyes where Steve sees the most similarity—and the least. Same shape and color, more grey than blue, but the Winter Soldier’s gaze has none of Bucky’s spark, holds nothing playful or protective.
“Why are you here?” Steve asks, slowly and forcefully.
“You’re hunting down Hydra,” the Soldier says. “I want to help.”
“You expect me to buy that? We almost lost in D.C. because of you!” Steve steps away, takes a deep breath, and says, “Give me one good reason to believe you.”
The Soldier shoves Steve, pushing hard enough that he stumbles. “Hydra took everything from me,” he says, and even though his voice remains calm, for the first time he doesn’t sound so cold and unaffected. “Carved up my body and wiped my mind until there was nothing left.”
“Are you saying—Hydra forced you to fight for them?” Steve’s stomach falls as he asks the question, like he missed a step on ground that should have been familiar.
The Soldier doesn’t answer for a long moment. Then he nods. “I don’t even know what I am underneath their programming. Except for angry.”
His silver fingers flex, and the shifting plates make a grating sound. Unsettling, mechanical, it reminds Steve of their last fight. That same metallic noise, magnified and too-close, as the Soldier’s cybernetic hand choked the life from him.
“You need my reasons for wanting to help you? Strucker. List. Malick. Rumlow,” says the Soldier, and his soft words gain more power with each name he volunteers. “Every Hydra agent from the doctors to the politicians, the gunmen to the paper-pushers. I want them to pay. All of them.”
His eyes shine with a fury too righteous to be feigned, and Steve can’t help it. Maybe he’s every bit the fool that Tony says he is, but he thinks the Soldier is telling the truth.
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“No goddamn way,” Sam says. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Possibly.”
Steve looks around the table, at this strange collection of people that he calls comrades. Tony smiles, Bruce frowns in his gently disapproving way, Clint yawns, and Natasha makes no expression at all.
He wonders how Thor would react, but there’s no use speculating. He can’t afford to set aside his responsibilities on Asgard until they get a solid lead on Loki’s scepter.
“Steve. This guy was trying to kill us three months ago.” Sam opens his hands, like he’s inviting anyone to start speaking sense. “What the hell makes you think we can trust him?”
“I didn’t say we should trust him. If he’s lying, he’s a Hydra mole, and if he’s being honest…” Steve hesitates, because there’s no kind way to call someone damaged. “If Hydra really did use the Soldier the way he says, he’s an unstable ally at best.”
“Then why are we having this conversation?” Clint takes a healthy swig from his thermos—which probably contains something stronger than coffee.
“Because Cap has a thing for brunettes?” Tony asks, without looking up from his tablet.
He’s wearing such a confident, shit-eating grin that Steve thinks Tony might know. Then he remembers that Tony always smiles like that, and he steadies himself enough to say, “Because he’s an unparalleled fighter, and without the full power of SHIELD to back us, we could use someone with his skills.”
“If his goals really do align with ours, the Winter Soldier isn’t an ally we can afford to turn away,” Natasha says.
She might be speaking in favor of Steve’s suggestion, but not because she wants to, and he appreciates her all the more for that.
“Exactly,” Steve says.
Bruce fidgets with his sleeve and hums, just barely shaking his head. “Seems like more trouble than he’s worth. What if he can’t be contained? We could have another D.C. on our hands.”
“People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” Tony sing-songs.
He’s still tapping away furiously on his tablet. Probably playing the stock market and designing a new suit and hacking something. Tony’s mind works on about ten different levels at once, and Steve’s too used to his brilliance to even by awed by it anymore.
“In this case, my glass house makes me the best suited to throw stones,” Bruce says. “We don’t know anything about the Soldier. Who he is, where he’s from, how extensive his enhancements are. Without more information, this is too risky.”
“Then we get more information,” Tony says, right as he taps his tablet.
Digital images and documents are projected to the space above the conference table. Photos from the destruction at D.C. Medical records that Steve recognizes as his own, from his seven-day hospitalization this spring. A series of reports in Russian, German, and English, rushing by too quickly to keep up with.
“What’s all this?” Sam asks, but he’s frowning like he already knows.
“Cap’s medical files, detailing exactly how badly the Winter Soldier kicked his ass,” Tony says. “Footage from the killing spree in Washington—speaking of which, next time a mass-murdering Nazi organization tries to take over the world, maybe call me in? Just a thought.”
He glares at Steve and Natasha, then looks around at everyone else. “Anyway, it’s mostly SHIELD and Hydra files that I’ve spent the last twenty minutes analyzing. Because Bruce is right: the Avengers don’t contract ex-assassins for help without digging up all the dirt we can find first.”
Bruce takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. “That’s not quite what I meant, but okay. And I thought you already scoured the Hydra files for details on the Winter Soldier? Why didn’t you turn up anything in May?”
“Because in May I was looking for the wrong things in the wrong places,” Tony says, like this should be obvious. “Nothing in Hydra’s files names the Winter Soldier, and none of their reports describe an agent with his capabilities and track record.”
He swipes through the projected items, types something, and English translations of the Russian and German documents overlay the originals. “But he’s not their agent, so of course they didn’t write about him that way. There’s a series of files spanning the last fifty years that refer to ‘the asset.’ They’re all about his—well, they’re called maintenance reports, actually.”
Steve doesn’t say anything, but he’s rarely been so disgusted. Whatever else the Winter Soldier is, he’s a human being, not a thing to be maintained.
“The reports are full of torture strategies to keep him in line, mostly,” Tony says, “but there’s enough information about his arm buried in there to know it’s about the Winter Soldier and not some other victim.”
They fall silent as they skim through the files. The earliest information dates back to 1962, but it’s unclear whether the doctor who wrote this report had created the Soldier or inherited him. His true origins remain an enigma, but at least one mystery is solved: he appears to be in his prime because Hydra kept him in cryostasis between missions.
So he slept through most of the century on ice, just like Steve. It’s strange, to have something like that in common with a man he considered an enemy not long ago.
He doesn’t know the Winter Soldier from Adam, but these reports are still the most grueling things Steve has ever read. Clinical descriptions of torture and brainwashing, written with all the compassion and interest of a bored cook listing out the ingredients of a recipe.
The asset became violent toward handlers. Non-compliance corrected with electroshock. 1000 V for twenty minutes sufficient to restore submission…
Annual stress test results confirm that the serum’s regenerative effects remain fully intact. Compared to the average recovery time for humans, the asset’s body heals faster from: subdermal hematomas by 95%; ulnar, femoral, and patella fractures by 85%; third-degree burns by 70%; incisions, lacerations, and abrasions by 90%...
Due to advanced healing factor and conditioned pain tolerance, the asset is no longer responsive to traditional disciplinary strategies. Sleep deprivation and isolation in the cryo chamber at -5 degrees Celsius are recommended to regain compliance, as he fears the cold…
The asset is only cleared for assignments with projected time frame of 48 hours or less. His superior cellular regeneration offsets the benefits of mental recalibration beyond this timeframe…
Typical preparatory methods have lost efficacy as the asset’s behavior grows more erratic. Euthanasia will be scheduled upon completion of Project Insight…
Steve wonders if the Soldier knew his time was running out. That Hydra had planned to put him down like a dog once he carried out one last mission.
There’s more, each document somehow worse than the last, and Tony grows pale when they reach a description of the Soldier being waterboarded.
“This is enough,” Steve says. “Turn it off.”
He demands this for his own sake as much as for Tony’s. Bucky was captured by Hydra and held for weeks at the munitions factory Steve helped the 107th liberate, and although he never would talk about his time as a prisoner, it was obvious that he’d been tortured. Hurt in some of the same ways as the Winter Soldier, maybe (drowned, burned, beaten, and worse), and Steve can’t afford to think about that right now.
Silence in the conference room deepens after the projection disappears.
Sam is the first to break it. “Well shit,” he says. “Dude threw me off a helicarrier with only one working wing, and now I can’t even hate him.”
“He deserves justice for what Hydra did to him,” Bruce says. “But that doesn’t mean we should accept his help.”
“So Bruce votes no, and I vote yes,” Tony says. “Who else?”
Clint takes another drink of his probably-not-coffee, then says, “You just want to get your hands on that robot arm.”
Tony shrugs, but he still looks a little shook up. “You’re not wrong. Care to wager on what it’s made of? I’m guessing a titanium-alloy of some kind.”
Steve cuts through their conversation before they can start a betting pool on the makeup of the Soldier’s arm. “Natasha?” he asks. “What are you thinking?”
She smiles tightly. “That in twenty years in the field, I’ve been shot exactly twice, both times by the Winter Soldier. So when I say that I’d like to side with Bruce on this one, I really mean it.”
“But?” Bruce asks.
Natasha’s expression softens into something more genuine when she looks at him. “But we need skilled fighters if we want to take down Hydra. No risk, no reward.”
Three, Steve thinks. “Clint?”
“Poor bastard got brainwashed. God knows I can relate,” he says, smirking. “I say give him a chance.”
Four. That’s it, that’s the majority Steve needed to approve their alliance with the Winter Soldier, but he looks to Sam anyway.
He shakes his head. “For the record, I think we should’ve listened to Bruce, but we’re outvoted. So when do we start?”
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