Archive of Our Own

It was months after the river, after the Helicarriers fell, after the man in red, white, and blue told him his name was James Buchanan Barnes, that the Soldier began to wonder if, possibly, he wasn’t going to die.

At least, not without the Project killing him.

When he’d first gone to ground, after pulling the man out of the Potomac, he’d told himself he was following instructions. An old set, programmed into him God-knows-when: if your handler is compromised, if the rendezvous point is taken over, disguise yourself among the local population and wait for retrieval.

He didn’t know if those had been mission-specific instructions. He couldn’t remember. And he might have almost-remembered some others, too, about alternate retrieval points, safe houses, blind drops. Those might have been more recent than disguise yourself among the local population. Maybe. But they knew his brains were scrambled. Like eggs. The orders seemed to fit the situation, and he was following them. He wasn’t doing anything wrong.

Except for pulling the man out of the river. But he didn’t think about that, not then. If he tried, he felt the pain pressing in, too all-encompassing to deserve the simple name headache. A throbbing nausea that would have sent him puking if he’d eaten anything recently.

He told himself he was following orders, waiting for retrieval, right up until the retrieval team came. He had been near the wall, the black one, the one full of names. There were other men there—younger than him, though they looked older. Some of them came in daylight, sometimes with families. They read the names, and they left letters. Others came at night with empty eyes, passed bottles of throat-burning liquor.

If he stood near enough, they’d pass the bottle to him, too. One time, one of them asked, “Where were you?”

The Soldier looked at him, blankly.

“Which war?” the man clarified. “You’re too young for this’un.”

His mouth had worked for a moment before any words came. When they did, he said, “All of them.”

The other man just nodded, like that made sense, and passed him the bottle again.

It was dangerous to keep going back there, he knew that, but he’d kept on going. The men there, they were like him, somehow, and the Wall was memory. Memory, but not his memory. Looking at it didn’t bring the pain to his head. Not like that museum display, about the man with the name that was supposedly his. That wall, he’d only been able to look for a few moments, before fleeing and hiding until the headache stopped. He knew better than to try to remember what it had said.

The retrieval team came in daytime—two men, eyes sharp and glittering. He’d moved away, on instinct, shambling into a group of tourists, then picking up the pace. He knew all about evasion. Didn’t know his own name, but he knew how to lose a tail in a crowd, how to go to ground.

It wasn’t until he’d lost them, until he was settled in an abandoned building for the night, that he’d realized he had made a decision. He wasn’t going back.

He expected that decision to kill him. It was part of the briefing, the one they gave him every time he woke up, often enough to stick. You were injured, it went. Fighting for …. The remembered voice fuzzed and slurred, like maybe that part changed, what he’d been fighting for. Near death, you agreed to an experimental procedure, to place your body in cryonic suspension, so you could remain ready to serve …the fuzz again… when needed. The Procedure affects your memory, but that is not important. We remember for you.

Then would come the mission details—who he was to kill, and how. Rarely, why. Where to return when he had finished, so they could put him back on ice for next time. You must begin immediately. There is no time for delay. Your injuries have not been healed, only suspended. Without the Procedure, you will die.

That was why, every time, he had to return as quickly as possible, so they could get him back on the ice before he died. Why they couldn’t give him a day or two to rest, why even if he was starting to remember, to pull together a few pieces of what he’d lost, he had to go under again. The headaches were a sign he’d gone too long without the Procedure. At least, he thought they were. He didn’t remember being told that, but it seemed true.

It had been over a week, when the retrieval team came for him, at the black Wall with the names. He’d learned, by then, that the headaches came if he tried to remember who the man with the name was, why the man in red, white, and blue couldn’t kill him. Why he couldn’t let the man die. He tried not to think about that, because even thinking about the headaches could bring one on.

He ought to have been grateful, to go back, to have the Procedure, to go under so he could rise again, the next time they needed him. Whoever they were, whoever it was he had given up his life to serve.

But he didn’t go back, and he kept on not going back. He left Washington, wandering through towns whose names meant nothing to him, disappearing into national parks, sometimes landing in another city. Occasionally, if an opportunity presented itself, he worked. Once he hauled cinder blocks around a construction site, and another time he picked vegetables; for four days, he was bodyguard to a drug dealer. If he had money, he rented a room, bought food. If not, he slept under bridges or in vacant buildings, lifted cans of food from shops or went hungry. He stayed on the move, walking or jumping on freight trains as they slowed. Stole a few cars, drove them for a night and slept in them for a day before abandoning them.

Sometimes, retrieval teams turned up. He didn’t know how many times. Even without the Procedure, it was hard to string memories together. Something would happen—spotting the team out of the corner of his eye, looking at the labels on the cans of beans in a store, anything—and he’d know it wasn’t the first time, but he wasn’t sure if it was the second it happened, or the twentieth.

Eventually, it dawned on him that they weren’t sending retrieval teams anymore. If they ever had been. Retrieval teams, as a rule, did not shoot at you. Not tranquilizer darts, either—one time, he took the risk of doubling back, after he’d lost them, and looked at the bullet, embedded in a wall.

He stared at it, for a long time, feeling something he couldn’t name. He was going to die anyway. Without the Procedure. He knew that. So why…?

He had to abandon the thought, and find a place to hole up, before the headache overtook him.

Toward the end of his wandering, he fetched up in a park. Buried in the woods, there was a cluster of cabins, some half fallen down, young trees growing up through the rotten floorboards. Empty light sockets hung from the rafters, rat-chewed wires stretching to them. But some of them were still more or less intact, stone fireplaces and rusty bedsprings, and there was a pump, in the middle of the clearing of cabins, that still worked. The Soldier couldn’t imagine why nobody was living in them. He’d seen people living in worse. He wasn’t sure when or where, but he knew he had.

He stayed there a few days, snaring rabbits, cooking them in the stone fireplace of the largest cabin. There was a plaque bolted to the foundation. Civilian Conservation Corps it read. 1933. He felt like that should mean something to him, but he wasn’t sure what.

It was while he was there, huddled over a smoky fire, cooking a rabbit on a stick, that he began to wonder how long it had been, since the river. Since he’d last had the Procedure. It had been spring then—warm during the day, with a bite in the air at night, leaves coming out. For most of the time since then, it had been hot in the day and warm at night. Now the leaves were falling, and last night…or some night, recently…he’d fallen asleep shivering.

It took a while for the significance to dawn on him. For him, one season didn’t follow another. He might go under in summer and rise again in winter, or spring, or a different summer in a different country. But he hadn’t had the Procedure. He’d lived the whole time, from spring through summer and into fall. And he hadn’t gone far. Hadn’t crossed any borders; he didn’t have a passport.

With an effort, fighting the headache, he worked out how long it had been. First he tried to count days or weeks in his memory, but he soon gave that up. It didn’t hurt to try to remember the time since his last Procedure, the way it did if he tried to remember anything from the time before Procedures, but there were just so many memories, and so many that he couldn’t remember how many times they had happened. Instead, he tried to remember how long it took, between spring and fall. May Day was in Spring, and the October Revolution was in fall. How many months came in between? A name floated up. July. It was important, for some reason.

Then came September, with a whiff of newly-sharpened pencils. There were a couple of others, too, he thought, but he couldn’t remember their names.

At least four months, he thought. Maybe six, or more. How long was he able to live, without the Procedure? He didn’t know if they’d ever said, exactly, but he had a definite sense it was a matter of days, weeks at most. Not months. Not the whole way from spring to fall.

He pushed that aside—thinking about the Procedure, and the reasons for it, was dangerously close to thinking about the time before—and went on with the business of surviving. He’d been here long enough. He gnawed the rabbit from the bones, heaped dirt over the coals of his fire, and left, heading north. The thought kept tickling, at the back of his mind— why wasn’t he dead?

If he didn’t drag it into the forefront of his mind, the headaches didn’t come. It was the next day, or maybe a week later, as he was standing in line at a fast-food restaurant, getting ready to buy a burger with a dollar he couldn’t remember where he got, that the answer came to him.

“They lied.”

The Soldier didn’t realized he’d spoken aloud until the woman ahead of him in line turned to stare.

“Sorry,” he said, his voice rusty from disuse. Scaring pretty ladies wasn’t something you did. Unless they were your mission. “Thinking out loud.”

Looking away quickly, she pulled the little boy who was with her closer to her side, putting herself between the Soldier and the child.

Thing was, he reflected as he ate his burger, sitting on the curb—he thought it was the same burger, and the same curb, though maybe not—if they lied about that, what else had they lied about?

Maybe some of the people they said needed killing, didn’t. But he’d already figured that one out, hadn’t he? His last mission, kill the man in red, white, and blue—he’d saved him, instead. Pulled him out of the water, where he would have died. The Soldier hadn’t quite thought about it that way before, but…he’d decided that. Not to kill him.

They sure hadn’t lied about the Procedure affecting his memory. It was a struggle to remember where he’d gotten this hamburger, that he was sitting here eating. Or where he was.

But maybe they’d lied about how it didn’t matter. We remember for you. Maybe they remembered the wrong things. The man in red, white, and blue remembered different things. Your name is James Buchanan Barnes. And With you to the end of the line.

He didn’t even have time to hide before the headache struck, coming in between his eyes and exploding inside his skull, vomit burning in his throat and spattering the pavement.

#

The next thing he was aware of, he was on a gurney, and everything smelled of antiseptic. For a confused moment, he thought he’d just woken up, from the Procedure. Or maybe was just about to have it again. But there were other people around—not just the technicians who performed the procedure, but other people on other gurneys. Women and children, too. There might be other people like him—other Soldiers—but he never saw them. And they wouldn’t be women and children, would they? The Project wouldn’t do that, no matter how much they lied.

He sat up. That was another thing that told him this wasn’t the Project. No restraints. There was a needle in his arm, attached with a tube to a bag of clear fluid, but nothing happened when he pulled it out and tossed it aside—no alarms, no one shoving him back down, no needle putting him down into darkness. Someone had taken off his sweatshirt and glove, the ones he wore to cover up his uniform and his arm, but he found them on a chair next to the gurney. He was putting them on when a woman came over, dressed in loose pants and shirt of pale pink. “Oh, you’re awake!” she said. “Please, don’t go just yet. Sit down.”

She motioned toward the gurney. He thought of half a dozen ways to incapacitate her—half a dozen more that wouldn’t even be fatal—but sat.

“How are you feeling?”

The Soldier considered the question. “My head hurts.”

“We’re not sure exactly what happened,” she went on. “You vomited and collapsed outside of McDonalds on 12th street. A passerby called an ambulance for you. Do you have any medical conditions?”

Did he? That was the question, wasn’t it? For the first time that he remembered, the Soldier laughed. It was a grating, unpleasant sound. “Lady,” he said, his voice sounding foreign in his ears. “I have no idea.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s…start with an easier one. What’s your name?”

That was supposed to be an easier one? Your names is James Buchanan Barnes. The headache started to bloom. “James,” he said. He doubled over, his guts heaving. “Buchanan.” The woman was putting a basin under his mouth, saying something he couldn’t follow, but he managed to get the last word out. “Barnes,” he finished, right before he passed out.

#

Steve hadn’t given up. Of course not. But after it had become clear that Bucky wasn’t hanging around DC, tracking HYDRA had seemed like the best way of finding them. Only now, six months on, Steve had rounded up enough strays and searched enough decommissioned hideouts to be pretty sure that HYDRA didn’t have any better idea of where Bucky was than he and Sam did.

So he was trying to come up with a new strategy when Stark called. “Hey, Cap. Remember that talk we had about privacy, that ended up with you rejecting my friendly and heartfelt offer to help you find your long-lost brainwashed pal?”

“Yes,” Steve said. That had been back at the beginning of the search, when Stark’s suggestion of using JARVIS, Stark Industries’ satellites, and facial recognition software had seemed just too much like what SHIELD’s HYDRA parasite had done to him.

“I bet you’re shocked to learn I didn’t listen. I didn’t do the facial recognition software,” he added. “But I set up some alerts in, uh…places he might turn up, if he was in trouble.”

If Stark had suggested that to begin with, Steve probably would have agreed. “You found something?”

Stark, for once in his life, didn’t give Steve any shit. “Allegheny County Hospital, in Pennsylvania, admitted a scruffy-looking Caucasian male, carrying no ID but armed to the proverbial teeth and wearing body armor, age estimated between 25 and 30, with a, and I quote ‘high-tech prosthetic arm,’ who, in between vomiting and having a seizure, identified himself as James, something that starts with a B, Burns or Barnes.”

“Where is it?” Steve asked, scrambling for the book of maps that he kept on his table.

Stark told him, then said, “Listen. JARVIS disabled a couple of other taps going into the system, and turned him back into a John Doe. But there’s no way of telling if anybody else already obtained this information beforehand.”

“I see,” Steve said, his mouth dry.

“Where are you, DC?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m in New York. So, uh, I’ll meet you there.”

Stark ended the call before Steve had a chance to respond.

#

When the Soldier woke, he was in a place he’d never seen before. It was a familiar sensation. Even recently, in the time since his last Procedure, he often woke up in a place he couldn’t quite remember having gone to sleep. But something felt off about it, this time. He was in a well-lit room, with white walls, lying on a bed with clean sheets. Not the kind of room he could afford, when he could afford a room at all. Turning his head, he saw another bed, this one with rails up on either side.

Something about the sight made his heart speed up. He pulled his arms up to his chest, only realizing when he had completed the motion that he was expecting something to stop him. Restraints. He’d been in a bed like this before, sometime, somewhere, and there had been straps going from his wrists to the railings.

But there weren’t now. He sat up. Someone had taken his clothes, and put him in a nightshirt, white with little blue dots. In the other bed, there was an old man, a mask over the lower part of his face. Something about that was familiar, too.

Was he old, too? He’d been away. Hiding. From the Project. He hadn’t had the Procedure, not for a long time. Had he been running so long that he was old now? He felt at his face. No mask, no wrinkles. He raked his hand through his hair, and managed to tug a bit of it in front of his eyes. Brown. No sign of gray.

Not old, he decided. And, given the lack of restraints, the Project hadn’t found him. He was somewhere else. Hospital, some part of his brain supplied. Why was he in a hospital? Had he started dying? He was supposed to die, without the Procedure.

A warning throb at his temples sent his mind skittering away from that thought. It bumped up against another thought—it was safe to try to remember what had happened since his last Procedure. It was only trying to go further back that was dangerous.

He remembered the Wall of names, and running from his retrieval team. Picking tomatoes in a field. The whistle of a train. Another wall, this one with a face and just one name. James Buchanan Barnes. A cluster of abandoned cabins. Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933. Saying “ They lied,” and seeing a woman pull her child close to her in fear. The sour taste of a pickle.

That seemed like a lot of memories. A pirate’s chest of treasure, overflowing. And there were more. Eating a piece of lemon pie. A song that played on the radio of a car he stole. The hiss as a bit of fat dripped from a rabbit carcass onto the fire below.

But then he remembered that he had also learned, since his last Procedure, not to get too wrapped up in the memories, in the sheer wonder of having them. He had to stay alert, aware of his surroundings. The headache had warned him off trying to remember how he’d come to be in this hospital. Was he safe here? Should he be trying to escape?

There was old memory, programming, from the time of the Procedures, about not allowing himself to be detained or examined by any authorities. He was to escape, quietly if possible, fight his way out if he had to. Complete his mission, and return to the rendezvous point to debrief and be put on ice again.

He wasn’t going to complete his mission, wasn’t going to be put on ice again. He’d decided that. But was it still important not to be detained and examined? He didn’t know.

Part of him wanted to just lie back down, on the cool, clean sheets, and let whatever was going to happen, happen. Maybe, if they examined him, they’d be able to give him some answers—about the Procedure, about what had been done to him, about whether or not he was actually dying.

But, the one thing he’d always known, throughout these months of confused wandering, was that if he stayed in one place for too long, the Project would find him. So he had to leave. Quietly, if possible.

The first thing he needed was clothing. He considered options—where the hospital laundry might be, who he could steal a uniform from, and whether he’d have to kill them to do it—before it occurred to him to look in the bureau opposite the bed. In it, he found his clothes—though not his weapons—sealed in plastic bags. He tore them open and started dressing.

He had just put his pants on, and was trying to figure out the order of the other layers. It was a problem he was fairly sure he’d never had before—memories came to him of sleeping in his clothes and of stripping to the waist just long enough to give himself a whore’s bath in a men’s room sink. He thought he just about had it figured out, when he was interrupted by the arrival of a woman in pink. “Oh,” she said. “You’re…please get back into bed.”

That, oddly, seemed kind of familiar. How long had he been here? How many times had he tried to leave? At least once, he thought. Maybe more.

She kept talking, “It’s really not a good idea for you to leave, Mr. Barnes.”

He rocked a little, in anticipation of the headache. “That…isn’t my name.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Is it Burns? The ER nurse wasn’t sure.”

“No.” He shook his head. “No. I….” Don’t have a name. He didn’t think he should say that. “I can’t stay here. They’re coming. Some bad people. Are coming for me. I have to go.”

“What bad people? Where are you going to go?”

An image flared in the soldier’s mind, of holding a woman by the throat and demanding to know, what did he tell you? Where did he go? Memory, or imagination? He wasn’t sure. “It’s better if you don’t know,” he answered. “Where are my guns? And my knives?”

“I…m not sure,” the woman said. “Why don’t you wait here, and I’ll find out?”

The Soldier might not have been able to remember much, but he wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t going to bring him his weapons; she was going to get someone to make him stay. Don’t let them detain you. Examine you. Don’t. “No. I don’t need them.” He still had his arm; they didn’t know about the weapons hidden in it.

But she must have signaled, somehow, for someone, because as soon as he stepped into the hallway, he was met by a wall of men. Four. Two dressed like imitation soldiers— security guards —and two in scrubs. Orderlies.

There was an opening to his left, a sign for a stairwell. They’d be expecting him to go that way. Better, then, fight his way through them and go right. He could feel the bones of their necks snapping in his hands—memory, or imagination?

The Soldier barely hesitated, poised on the balls of his feet, before he broke left, heading for the stairwell. He made it further than he expected—six steps, seven, eight—before they caught up to him. But the needle going into his neck, pulling him down into familiar darkness? That didn’t surprise him at all.

#

Steve’s first impulse was to jump on his motorcycle and go, but if this worked—if it really was Bucky, if he was still there when Steve got there—he was going to need something to bring him home in. So he delayed just long enough to meet up with Sam, and within the hour, they were heading north in Sam’s SUV.

“What can we expect, when we get there?” Sam asked as he drove. “If it is him.”

Steve suspected he was asking as much to find out what Steve was expecting, as for a real sit-rep. They’d talked before, about the contents of the reports Steve had gotten from Natasha and other sources. Sam felt the need to remind him, frequently, that whatever they found wasn’t going to be the Bucky Steve remembered. “He’s in pretty bad shape. He was unconscious when they brought him in, and he came around just long enough to try to tell them his name before he went under again. But he remembers his name,” Steve emphasized. “That’s gotta be a good sign. And he told them. Maybe he….” Steve couldn’t quite finish the thought.

“You’re thinking maybe he wants to be found,” Sam said, putting on his turn signal and changing lanes.

“Hoping,” Steve admitted.

“He probably remembers it from you telling him,” Sam pointed out.

“I know.” According to the files, they wiped Bucky’s memory every time he came back from a mission. That meant dozens of times, over the years. Sometime in the seventies, according to the files, he’d started having memory problems even between wipes— neurological damage resulting from repeated memory alteration and cryofreezing. “But still,” he insisted, “he held onto it. He knows it’s important.”

“Maybe,” Sam said. “But you know, the memory enhancers they gave him, before his mission briefings.”

“Yeah.” They had started doing those in the seventies, to make sure he remembered who his target was supposed to be, and how to get back to the base after he finished. Bucky’s clearest memory might be his most recent mission briefing. “If he remembers anything about me, it’s likely to be being ordered to kill me. But he didn’t. When he had the chance.” He shook his head. “I really think there’s something still in there.” He opened the files that he’d brought along. “Look at this latest thing Natasha found.” It was a set of correspondence between an outgoing head of the revival team and his successor. Sam couldn’t actually look at it now, he was driving, but he’d seen it earlier. “This Kuznetsov, he talks about how when they wake Bucky up and give him his briefing, they have to tell him he volunteered for the project. The new guy, Orloff, he doesn’t want to—he’s a HYDRA true believer; he doesn’t wanna even acknowledge Bucky ever had any free will. But Kuznetsov says they have to—otherwise, he keeps asking questions, trying to figure out who he is and what’s happening. That was in the eighties.”

“I’m…not sure I get why that’s important, Rogers.”

“Because.” Steve took a moment to sort out his reasoning before he continued, “They tell him this whole story about how he this great Soviet patriot who was wounded in the war, and he agreed to give up his memories and everything he was so that he can keep serving his country. And he believes it because that’s something Bucky would do.”

Sam started to object, but Steve went on, “And it’s not just because they have his brains so scrambled he doesn’t know which way is up—they try to tell him a different story, he doesn’t buy it. Orloff wants to tell him that they built him from the ground up for the Winter Soldier program, but Bucky wouldn’t have it. Kept arguing with them. Telling him he volunteered was the only thing that would do it. That’s Bucky. He hates being told what to do, but he wouldn’t go back on a promise. Not even if he doesn’t remember making it.”

Steve spent most of the rest of the drive reviewing the files. He already knew what they said, but reading them over again at least felt like he was doing something. After the war ended, Bucky had been handed over to the HYDRA branch that was infiltrating the KGB, much the same way another branch had infiltrated SHIELD. There was a long list of handlers, a longer list of missions. Some handlers had taken him off the ice often, as much as every couple of months, while others had used him only once in a few years. When the Soviet Union fell, the KGB version of HYDRA splintered into the smaller intelligence agencies run by each of the former Soviet nations. They shuffled Bucky amongst themselves—keeping him frozen most of the time—for almost ten years. His last stop was the Ukraine, and from there he’d been sent to SHIELD’s HYDRA branch, under Pierce.

For Bucky, coming home to America hadn’t made much difference. There were a few minor changes to the story they told him at his briefings—mostly, they dropped the “Soviet patriot” part of his made-up backstory.

One of the most recent documents in the file was a roster of the cryo-revival technicians. Of the ten names on it, six also appeared on the list of personnel who’d been involved in Steve’s own thawing and revival. Made sense, he supposed—they had experience —but it burned in his gut, knowing he’d been that close, to people who knew where Bucky was.

#

He woke again, in yet another room. How many times is that, now? There were restraints, this time. Simple leather bands around his wrists and ankles. He snapped the one on his left arm with a single tug, then used his newly-freed metal hand to unbuckle the others.

This wasn’t the Project. They knew what it took to keep him restrained, and they’d have someone watching.

And he could remember waking up in a room like this, but not this one, trying to leave and being caught. If he was back there, he wouldn’t remember anything. No, this was…a name came to him: civilian hospital. He wasn’t sure if he was remembering, or figuring it out for the first time, but that was where he was. They’d taken his clothes again, dressed him in a hospital gown.

Last time, they’d left his clothes in the room with him. Probably they weren’t dumb enough to make the same mistake twice, but he checked anyway. No.

There was an attached bathroom. He pissed, cupped his hands and drank water from the faucet. Looked in the mirror, at a face that he’d learned, over the last few months, was his. Could do with a shave, there.

He didn’t know where the thought came from—except, there was no one in his head except himself. So it must have come from him. Shaking his head, he went back to the bed. He was going to need a better extraction plan than “walk out the door.” It was an embarrassment, that they’d held onto him this long.

Embarrassment? What did that mean to him, to the Soldier? There was only duty, duty or failure. That was what it was. That they’d held onto him this long was mission failure. Except he didn’t have a mission. He’d had one, his last one, to kill the man in red, white, and blue, and he’d chosen not to.

That reminded him. He’d chosen not to escape, too. He could have, but it would have meant killing those four men, and maybe more. He didn’t remember why he’d chosen not to—if there had ever been a why—but he had. Numbly, he sat on the edge of the bed.

Maybe he shouldn’t try again, then. Maybe he had a reason to stay. He ran through his store of memories. The final mission. The man in red, white, and blue. Falling, into the river. Pulling him out. The wall of names. Burn of liquor in his throat. A museum, a face on the wall that matched the one in the mirror. There was a name on that wall, too. James Buchanan Barnes. Gasping out that name, burn of vomit in his throat.

That memory wasn’t worn smooth, like the others in his store, from being handled over and over. Was it new? Was it— here? The memory was tinged with a sense of urgency—he’d had to say the name, to get it out, before…before something else happened.

The door opened, and a woman in a white coat came in. She was looking down at a file in her hand, but when she glanced up from it, she let out a wordless sound of surprise, taking a step backward and holding the file to her chest. “Whoa. You’re not…” Abruptly, she leaned out the door. “Mike, can you come in here a minute?” The door opened further, and a man lumbered in, slow and overweight in a security guard’s uniform. “Thanks,” the woman said to him. “If you could just, um….” She smiled and gestured.

“Sure, Doc,” the guard said, taking up a position by the door.

Now this…this was familiar. A doctor in a white coat, with papers. Muscle to back her up. Not a lot of muscle, the Soldier thought, giving the guard an appraising look, but it was enough, a sort of gesture in the direction of how things were supposed to be. The guard would strap him back down again, and the doctor would give him his briefing. Tell him who he was, and who he was supposed to kill next.

But the guard stayed where he was, and the woman took a step forward, smiling. “Hi. We did not think you’d be awake yet. I’m Doctor Groslavsky. And you’re….” She looked down at the papers. “I could have sworn there was a name in your file. James, right?”

That was the name from the wall. He didn’t answer.

“Do, uh, do you go by Jim?”

“No.” The answer startled him. He didn’t know how he knew it. It wasn’t his name, either way, but he didn’t think James Buchanan Barnes was Jim, either.

“Okay,” she said. “What do they call you, then?”

“Soldier.”

“Soldier,” she repeated. “Okay. Is that a nickname, street name…?”

“It’s what they call me.” That was what she had asked, wasn’t it?

“Okay. Um, Soldier. Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital.”

“That’s right. Do you remember how you got here?”

This Dr. Groslavsky, with her file and her muscle, ought to know he didn’t remember things. They were supposed to remember for him. “I…no. I had a headache.”

She nodded. “Okay. Okay. It looks like you were brought in by ambulance. The ER sent you to medical, and they sent you to us, because….” She looked at the file again. “You said you had to go, because some bad people were coming after you?”

Bad people. The Project. But wasn’t she …? No, he realized. He’d figured that out earlier. Despite the similarities, here wasn’t there. “Yes,” he said.

“Can you tell me about the bad people?”

“No.” They would come, if they knew he was here. A retrieval team, or a termination team, they’d send something. Why hadn’t he left, before?

“Okay,” the woman said. “Is there…someone we can call for you?”

He stared at her, uncomprehending. Them, she could call them, but he didn’t want her to.

“A family member? Friend? Someone who takes care of you?”

For some reason, the words made his eyes burn. Shaking his head, he swiped at them with the fingers and thumb of his right hand. They came away wet. “No.”

“What about…is there somewhere you live? A house, an apartment?”

He shook his head again.

“Okay,” she said. “What we’d like to do is have you stay here for a few days. It’s called a seventy-two hour hold. And while you’re here, we’ll do our best to work out someplace for you to go next. How does that sound?”

“I can’t stay. They’ll come.”

“We can keep you safe. We have security guards, like Mike here.” She nodded toward the man by the door. “They’ll make sure nobody gets in who isn’t supposed to be here.”

Imagining Mike going up against a termination team, the Soldier laughed. “Lady, you have no idea.”

She watched him for a moment, like she was waiting for him to say something else, but when he didn’t, she asked, “Were you in the military?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that--” She nodded toward his left side. “How you lost your arm?”

The Soldier nodded. He didn’t really remember, but he was a soldier, and the arm he had now wasn’t the kind anybody was born with, so it seemed a fair enough guess.

“What happened?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.” He thought it might have something to do with falling, and the man in red, white, and blue, but maybe he was thinking of the last mission.

“That happens, sometimes,” she said with a smile. “Do you know—were there other injuries, too?”

“Probably.”

She asked him a few more questions—where he’d been treated, the names of his doctors. He didn’t think he’d ever known, and wouldn’t have told her if he had. She asked again about his name, and he clutched his head and whimpered, in anticipation of the pain.

For some reason, that made her back off. “I’ll let you rest. If you could just sign here, consenting to the 72-hour hold….” She put a paper in front of him, a pen in his hand.

He scrawled something on the paper—he didn’t know how to write, the Soldier always reported in verbally—and the headache took him.

#

Tony called just as they were getting off the highway. “I’m here,” he reported. “Nothing in flames and nobody’s screaming, so, good sign.”

“Great, Stark, thanks.” Steve reminded himself that nobody had forced Tony to come, and if HYDRA did show up, he and Sam would be grateful for the backup, no matter how much tactless commentary it came with. “We’re about--” He glanced at the GPS. “Ten minutes out.” He put Tony on speaker, so Sam could hear what he was saying, too.

“I haven’t gone in,” Tony went on. “I figure, if HYDRA’s paying any attention at all, Iron Man showing up will throw up all kinds of red flags. But JARVIS is in the system. Your guy tried to abscond, right after he came around from his seizure, but they caught him and transferred him to a locked psych ward.”

“Is he….” Steve wasn’t sure what to ask.

“He didn’t hurt anyone.”

Steve let out a breath.

“Yeah,” Stark said. “Going by the footage I saw of the Winter Soldier in action, there’s no way hospital rent-a-cops could have held him if he didn’t want to be held. So I don’t know what that means. Next up, one of the doctors has put out feelers to Walter Reed and the VA, trying to identify him. That could bring HYDRA down on him, but--”

“But it gives us a way in,” Sam spoke up.

It did. In the hospital parking lot, Sam rearranged a few selections from Steve’s collection of stolen, leaked, and hacked files into something that looked like a medical file, with a carefully-cropped picture of Bucky, from the fight on the bridge, on top. Flashing it and his VA employee ID got them the whole way to the psychiatric ward. Steve just lingered behind him, baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, and no one even questioned his presence up until Bucky’s doctor met them outside the doors to the locked ward.

“Maureen Groslavsky,” she said, shaking Sam’s hand. “You got here very quickly.”

“It’s a…complicated case,” Sam said. “He’s been off the radar for a good while now.”

“Well, I’m glad someone came. We’re not set up for long-term care here, and I wasn’t confident we’d make much progress before his 72-hour hold expires.” Then she glanced over at Steve. “Is this a family member?”

“Buddy he served with,” Sam said. “The patient—if he is the guy we’re after—has some memory problems; he’s not sure who to trust.”

“I see,” said Dr. Groslavsky. “I can discuss the case with you, since you’re part of his treatment team, but….”

“Confidentiality, I know,” Steve said. “I’ll just—wait over here.” He gestured, and went to a point where, without the super-soldier hearing, he wouldn’t have been able to overhear them. He wasn’t too surprised not to be recognized—civilian clothes and a baseball cap seemed to be about all it took to disguise him. Kids recognized him, sometimes, but adults saw what they expected to see, and Captain America walking around like an ordinary mortal wasn’t something they expected to see. Hell, the receptionist at his dentist’s office, seeing his face and full name, had only said that he must get a lot of jokes, and mentioned going to college with a guy named Harry Potter.

“—TBI?” the doctor was asking Sam when he listened in again.

“Something like that,” Sam said with a nod.

“He presented as very disoriented—he was just coming off a dose of Haldol when I saw him, but the nurses he spoke with earlier said he was, if anything, even worse before he was sedated. He was somewhat oriented to place—he knew he was in a hospital—but he couldn’t tell me a full name, address, next of kin, anything like that.”

“What name did he give you?” Sam asked. There was a partial list of cover identities in the file.

“He said he goes by ‘Soldier.’” The woman made an I-don’t-know sort of face, and shrugged. “His appearance suggests he’s been on the streets for a good while. He also presented with some paranoid ideation—he said he couldn’t stay, because some bad people were coming after him.”

“Yeah, there’s…a grain of truth in that. Did he give any details?”

“Not really—apparently he told the nurse on the medical floor that it was ‘better if she didn’t know.’ That’s a little unusual. I could tell the subject was upsetting him, so I decided not to push it right then. He did sign the consent form for the 72-hour hold—honestly, I’m not sure he knew what he was signing, but I didn’t want to let him slip out the door when he’s clearly in need of services.”

She sounded like she was having an ethical qualm or two about having tricked Buck into signing the form. Steve didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, in the circumstances.

“Hopefully, he’ll come back with us and consent to treatment,” Sam was saying. “Would it be all right for us both to go in and see him? I know it’s not exactly procedure, but he’s a lot likelier to recognize his battle buddy than he is me.”

The doctor glanced down the hall at him. Steve did his best to look trustworthy. “Okay,” she said. “But if the patient doesn’t want him there, he’ll have to wait outside.”

“That’s fine,” Sam said, and Steve remembered to wait until he was waved over to join them.

The doctor had to scan her badge twice to get them inside the ward—not that that would stop HYDRA, or Bucky if he really wanted to leave. As they passed the nurses’ station, the doctor said, “ Mike,” to a security guard who had been chatting with the nurse.

“Sorry, Doc,” he said, jogging over to a room. “He’s between checks, and he’s been real quiet….”

“Just keep an eye on him, okay?” she said. Swiping her badge at the room door, she knocked twice. “Soldier? Some friends of yours are here.” There was a clatter as she opened the door.

Bucky was standing up, on the far side of the bed, his whole body tense, holding a plastic spoon up like it was a knife. The clatter had been a meal tray, going all over the floor. He was even scruffier than he had been the last time Steve saw him, and gaunt in the hospital gown.

But, most importantly, he was Bucky, and he was there. “Buck,” Steve said, taking a step toward him.

Bucky shook his head. His tongue swiped out over the corner of his mouth, an oddly childlike gesture. He’d done it once during the fight on the Helicarrier, and for some reason, the image of it was frozen on Steve’s mind. Bucky dropped the spoon, flexing his metal fingers with a whir. “I remember you,” he said.

“You do?”

“You were my mission,” Bucky said, and Steve’s hopes crashed. “I tried to kill you.”

“You saved my life, too,” Steve said. “I’m choosing to focus on that part.”

Looking down at the ground, Bucky said, “I pulled you out of the river.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Yeah, you did.”

“Why?” He looked up, meeting Steve’s gaze with vacant eyes. “Why did I do that?”

“Well,” Steve said slowly. “I’m not exactly sure. But I’m glad you did.”

Bucky nodded. “Me too.”

#

“Excuse me. Dr. Groslavsky?” Maureen looked up to see two white men in suits. The one who had spoken continued, “We’re with the VA.” Both of them flashed ID. “You have a John Doe who might be one of our patients.”

Well, if that wasn’t déjà vu all over again. She’d left the other man from the VA, Soldier, and Soldier’s battle buddy to their reunion, once she could tell that they really did know each other and it didn’t look like Soldier was going to act out violently. If these two men had shown up first, she probably would have shown them right into his room, just like she had the others. But these two, as she asked them a few basic questions about their patient, just seemed…off. She couldn’t put a finger on why.

And she remembered Sam Wilson saying there’s a grain of truth in that, about Soldier’s paranoid delusions.

“I can’t let you into the ward,” she told them. “I’m sure you understand. I’ll go and check with him, if he wants to see you.”

The other man, the one who had been silent up until now, said sharply, “That’s not--”

But the other one hushed him. “That’s fine.”

Going back on the ward, she stopped to speak to Mike, who was now sticking close to Soldier’s room, as she’d asked him to do. “Keep an eye on those two,” she said to him, nodding to the men on the other side of the glass doors. “They—just keep an eye on them.”

Then she knocked, and went into Soldier’s room. He and the battle buddy were sitting on opposite ends of the bed, talking quietly, while Mr. Wilson from the VA watched from a slight distance. All three looked up sharply at her entrance. “Mr. Wilson,” she said. “Two colleagues of yours from the VA are here. Were you expecting them?”

“ Shit,” said the battle buddy, taking out a slim smartphone. After a few taps on the screen, he said, “Tony, we have company. Can you--”

“Yeah,” the phone said. “Just let me get into the security camera feed….”

At the same time, a change came over Soldier. He didn’t move a muscle, but suddenly he looked less like a mentally challenged vagrant, and more like…well, a soldier. Feral and alert. She didn’t have time to wonder what it meant, before there was a crash of breaking glass, followed by screaming and gunfire. Sam Wilson and the battle buddy sprang into action—the battle buddy produced a gun from somewhere—but Maureen was frozen with terror. There had been an in-service training, after the Newton shootings, but all she could remember from it was the facilitator’s annoying laugh, not what you were supposed to do when somebody attacked your hospital.

Soldier grabbed her, the metal fingers of his prosthesis biting into the flesh of her upper arm. “Down,” he said, shoving her into the space between the wall and the nightstand. “Stay.”

Some ironically detached part of Maureen thought Woof, but most of her was too terrified to do anything more than follow the Soldier’s orders. Curling into a ball, with her arms wrapped around her head, she huddled there until the shooting stopped.

#

Neck bones snapped beneath his fingers, and the Soldier dropped the body of the man from the retrieval team. Termination team. The man in red, white, and blue— Steve, he said his name was Steve—looked at him with wide eyes.

“Was that…wrong?” The Soldier asked, uncertainly. It had seemed like the right thing to do—they had broken through the doors, and shot Mike-the-security-guard. The lady doctor had said that Mike was supposed to keep the people here safe, and they’d shot him.

“No,” Steve said. “No, Buck, it’s fine. We just, uh—oh, shit,” he said, looking down and seeing Mike-the-security-guard. “Medic!” he yelled. “We need a medic over here!” He went down on his knees next to the body and pressed his jacket to the wound.

“We need to go,” the Soldier said. He didn’t know why he wasn’t going, himself, already.

“Just a minute, Buck,” Steve said.

“There’ll be more,” the Soldier added. “At least two more.” Four was the smallest team they’d ever sent for him.

The lady doctor came out of the room where they had been keeping the Soldier. “Someone’s hurt?” she said, looking around from one of them to the next.

“Yeah, him,” Steve said, getting up from the guard’s side. “There might be more hostiles coming,” he added, glancing over at the Soldier. “So—I don’t even know.”

Sam, the man who had come with Steve, trotted over. “There’s no one else hurt,” he reported. He had been there, too, when the Soldier fought the man in red, white, and blue, but seeing him didn’t pluck at something inside the Soldier the way seeing Steve did.

“Bucky says we should expect more,” Steve told him. “Hang on, let me see if I can get Tony on the phone.”

The Soldier stayed alert, looking for attackers, as Sam, Steve, and the one they called Tony on the phone discussed what to do next. He didn’t pay much attention to the talk—once they’d decided, they’d tell him his orders. Finally, after Tony-on-the-phone reported that local law enforcement was en route— cops are coming to bust up the party, guys —they started moving, down a stairwell.

Then an explosion rocked the building. “Guys?” said Tony-on-the-phone. “Slight change of plans—they’ve got a chopper trying to land on the roof.” Another explosion. “And there goes your car.”

They reversed course and started heading back up the stairs. There were two more explosions before they stepped out onto the roof. It was black rubber, hot under the Soldier’s bare feet. The helicopter hovered overhead, while a smaller figure harried it, darting around and firing at it with some sort of energy weapon. The chopper had a door-gunner, armed with a machine gun, but the small red-and-gold figure wasn’t taking many hits; he was too mobile for them.

The Soldier, if he’d been that door gunner, would have turned his attention to the three sitting ducks on the roof, and soon enough the gunner did so, sending a spray of bullets at them that had Steve grabbing both the Soldier and Sam and diving for cover. Steve leaned out from behind their shelter—an air conditioning unit—to fire at the chopper with his handgun. The Soldier wondered why, until it occurred to him that Steve might not know what armaments he, the Soldier, still carried. “That man,” he said. “The red one.”

“Yes?” Steve said.

“He’s on our side?”

“Yeah. Yeah. That’s Tony. He’s with us. The helicopter, that’s the…bad guys.”

“Tell him to get clear,” the Soldier said, popping back a panel on his arm.

#

If anyone had told Tony that there would come a time when he missed SHIELD’s debrief procedures, he’d have laughed in their faces. But now, when foiling a piddling six-man HYDRA squad’s attack on a Podunk hospital in Appalachia brought the FBI, the CIA, and the National Guard down on their heads—not to mention the state police, county police, and local police—and the one thing all of those agencies agreed on was that Tony Stark wasn’t going anywhere until they were done with him, well—given a choice, he’d pick giving his report to Nick Fury while anonymous SHIELD drones dealt with the peons, any day of the week.

“No, you’re right,” Tony said to Corporal Cletus, or whatever the local cop’s name was. “I just leapt to the conclusion that the helicopter firing RPGs at the hospital was probably bad guys. That was super irresponsible of me. I should have asked first.”

“Sir,” said Corporal Cletus, “sarcasm is not necessary. I’m only trying to ascertain your thought process when firing upon an aircraft in a civilian area.”

“My thought process was, if I don’t stop them, fast, people are going to die,” Tony snarled.

He was building up steam for another riposte when the door to the interview room—really a doctors’ lounge—opened, and in came a slim woman in a neat, dark suit. “Mr. Stark,” she said. “I know Ms. Potts has asked you before to wait for counsel to arrive before making statements, as has my office.”

“Sorry,” Tony said. For some reason, he tended to forget that. “Ms. Walsh, this is…cop guy, cop guy, Alicia Walsh, lead counsel for the Avengers. You guys probably have loads to talk about, so I’m gonna just….”

To his surprise, he actually succeeded in getting out of the room. The Iron Man suit, folded up into a pod, trailed at his heels like a dog, or like the Luggage from Discworld. In the hallway, he ran into a pack of Stark Industries people—some from the legal department, some non-evil SHIELD who had been brought into the SI fold. Maria Hill’s frighteningly efficient assistant gave him a rundown of what was happening, ending with, “…arranged for a rental car for Mr. Wilson, and for what’s left of his old one to be towed away.”

“You probably want to check with Cap first one that one,” Tony interjected. “I think his shield might be in there—he doesn’t have it on him, and I doubt he left it at home.” He doubted that anything else inside the car had survived, but the shield was indestructible. “Where are the others, anyway?”

“Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes are retrieving Sergeant Barnes’s effects, and Mr. Wilson is—” She looked around. “There, by the coffee machine.”

Tony sauntered over. He hadn’t actually met Wilson yet, though he’d been quietly added to the Avengers payroll and given an expense account in support of his helping-Steve-find-Bucky activities. And his making-sure-Cap-didn’t-go-completely-off-the-rails activities.

“Mr. Stark,” Wilson said, saluting him with his coffee cup.

“It’s Tony,” he said, perusing the machine’s options. “So, does Cap have any kind of a plan for what happens next?” he asked, patting his pockets.

“Assuming we aren’t all arrested, you mean?” Wilson shook his head. “We didn’t really talk about it.” As Tony was coming to the gradual realization that he hadn’t carried change since the late nineties, Wilson reached into his own pocket, took out a handful of coins, and plunked them into the slot, making a there-you-go gesture at the panel of buttons.

“Thanks,” Tony said, making his selection—“dark roast,” which in this context probably meant “the same stuff, just slightly more” and sweetener.

Wilson continued, “I think he’s hoping to take him home, but….”

“That’s the first place HYDRA’s gonna look,” Tony said with a nod.

“Not…exactly what I was thinking, but yeah, that too.”

Well, he could give Steve a choice of bolt-holes—the Tower was well-defended, but he had some other properties that were less…obvious.

Steve and Barnes returned as Tony was sipping his coffee. “Stark,” Steve said with a nod.

“Hey,” Tony said, looking Barnes up and down. Barnes was back in full battle rattle—the black pants weren’t too bad; they had a lot of buckles and straps, and were made of tactical fabric, but at a glance they could pass for normal clothes. But the body armor, while it was a better look for him than the hospital gown, didn’t exactly fit the narrative they were trying to construct. Without discussion, they’d all elided over Barnes’s combat role in his own rescue and focused on the part where he was mentally compromised after having been a HYDRA prisoner for an amount of time that was left carefully vague. The homeless-mental-patient vibe he’d been rocking had helped sell the story—given a choice between Iron Man, Captain America, and Boy Interrupted over there, the assumption of who’d been doing the fighting was easy to make. “Yeah, is there something we can do about this? Getting out of here is gonna go more smoothly if he looks a little less…Road Warrior.”

“That’s a movie,” Steve explained helpfully to Barnes, who looked at him blankly. “About…never mind. Um, maybe you should put your sweatshirt on,” he suggested, lifting a hand that held both a blue hoodie and a clear plastic bag full of assorted knives and handguns.

“Good idea,” Tony said,” grabbing the bag from Steve’s hand. “And let’s have a minion take these…somewhere else.”

“Tony,” Steve said, giving him a sorrowful look. “He’s not dangerous. He’s Bucky.”

Tony had his doubts about both of those things—but at the same time, he supposed the fact that Barnes had been wandering around armed to the teeth—including a miniaturized missile launcher in his prosthetic arm—and hadn’t gone on a random murder spree yet was as good a proof as they were likely to get that he wasn’t planning on one. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “But the optics are…not good. Maybe ditch the body armor, too.”

Steve put up a bit of an argument, on the grounds that Bucky wanted to wear it. Tony had his doubts about that, too—Barnes didn’t look like he was in shape to want much of anything. But after some consultation with Wilson and an attempt at feeling out Bucky’s own opinions on the subject—which Tony was further convinced were nonexistent—Steve finally said, “Soldier, take off your armor.”

Well, not so much said as ordered. And looked kind of sick about it. But Barnes took it off, and a minion appeared to stuff it and the weapons into a duffle bag and spirit them away.

Under the armor, Barnes wore a weird undershirt that looked like a long-sleeved tee on the right side, and a tank top on the left. Tony wondered why HYDRA didn’t give him a uniform that covered the prosthetic; it was conspicuous as hell—but maybe the missile launcher wasn’t the only surprise it hid.

Anyway, with the hoodie over it, the undershirt was unremarkable, and left Barnes looking more or less like your standard homeless guy. Homeless vet, if you looked at his eyes.

#

The Soldier waited. That was what he did, in the aftermath of a mission. Wait for his retrieval team, report when ordered, submit to the Procedure. There were some ways that this mission, this retrieval team, were different from any before.

For one thing, he had chosen them. Both the mission and the retrieval team. And there were a lot of people asking for reports, but no one was asking him. The others, Steve and Sam, were also lying in their reports, but the Soldier didn’t concern himself with that. He just waited. Dressed, when Steve—the man in red, white and blue—brought him his clothes. They joined Tony-on-the-phone in another room. The Soldier ate and drank, when someone put a bottle of water and a sandwich in front of him.

Time passed. A woman came, and said, “You’re free to go, Mr. Stark, though you’re to remain available if they have more questions.”

Tony said sharply, “All of us?”

“Yes, all of you.”

He nodded. “We’ll take the Quinjet.”

A discussion followed, between Tony, Steve, and Sam. At one point, Steve asked, “Buck, what…where do you want to go?”

Buck was what Steve called him; he didn’t know why. He also didn’t know why Steve was asking him. He had been, in a way, deciding where he’d go for the last however-many months, though he hadn’t so much been deciding as drifting. But the retrieval team was supposed to know. “It doesn’t matter,” he said carefully.

“It--” Steve said, then stopped. “Okay. I guess the Tower’s the best place, for now at least. You’re right that my apartment is…not very secure. Sam, what about you? I’m sure Tony can arrange for you to go home, if that’s what you want.”

More discussion. Finally, some agreement was reached—the soldier didn’t notice what it was, not mission relevant—and they moved out. Back to the roof, where some technicians buzzed around the helicopter that he’d brought down. Another aircraft stood near the wreckage, this one whole. They loaded onto it. Before joining them, Tony paused, and his floating red pod unfolded itself into a suit of armor around him.

Oh. He was the red man, from the mission. The Soldier wasn’t sure if he had known that. He might have put it together before, and forgotten. They sat, the Soldier flanked by Steve and Sam, Tony opposite them. There were no restraints—the Soldier thought that maybe, sometimes, there were, after missions—but Tony was watching him like a guard.

After a short flight—the Soldier was fairly confident it was short, and he wasn’t simply forgetting a section in the middle—the aircraft landed on another rooftop. As they off-loaded, Tony said, “Steve, you’re on floor 71; Wilson, Steve has a guest room and so do I, so whatever you want.” He turned and looked hard at the Soldier. “And we’ll put him in Hulk’s room for now; it’ll hold him.”

“He isn’t a prisoner,” Steve said sharply.

“Neither is Bruce,” Tony answered, in a similar tone.

“Stark--”

“Look,” Tony interrupted. “It’s a very comfortable, very secure…area that I designed for a friend of mine who might, when he’s not feeling like himself, do things he’d otherwise regret. Do. You. Have. A. Better. Idea?”

“When you put it that way,” Steve muttered.

“Yeah. That’s why I put it that way. C’mon, let’s at least put him there for now, so we can all get some sleep before we work on a long-term plan.”

At last, Steve nodded. “Okay.”

The room they took him to was…big. Big, and windowless. The floor was thickly carpeted, scattered with oversized cushions in bright colors. “Right,” Tony said. “There’s food over there, if you get hungry.” He gestured to a set of open shelves that displayed an assortment of military rations and brightly-colored snack foods, the latter familiar to the Soldier from his recent wanderings, the former from…some other time.

“TV’s here,” he added, indicating a glass panel in the wall. “You probably don’t know what that is, but if you want any movies or music or anything, just ask JARVIS. JARVIS is, uh…say hi, JARVIS.”

“Hello,” said a voice from the ceiling. “Welcome to Avengers Tower. How would you prefer to be addressed?”

People kept asking him that. Steve, misunderstanding the Soldier’s lack of response, explained, “He means, what do you want him to call you?”

“Soldier,” the Soldier said firmly. It had worked well enough with the doctor.

“Okay,” said Tony. “Soldier, if you want or need anything, just ask JARVIS. JARVIS, keep him in here, but if he asks for anything, either arrange it or let me or Steve know.” Turning, he opened a door and gestured, “Your bathroom’s through here.” It included what the Soldier supposed had to be a small swimming pool, a normal-looking toilet, and an oversized sink and trough urinal. “And bedroom.”

In there was a bed easily six or eight times the size of the ones in the hospital, crowded with pillows and large, unrealistic models of animals. “You can, uh, move those if they’re in your way,” Tony added, tossing several of the animals into the corner before going over to another wall and tapping a panel that caused part of the wall to slide away. “And, closet. The clothes are Bruce’s, but he won’t care if you borrow something. The entry code is 42.”

That, the Soldier simply couldn’t wrap his head around—though whether the sticking point was wearing something other than his uniform, borrowing clothes from what—judging by the room—had to be a giant child, or anyone giving him the security code to anything, he was unable to decide. Fortunately, Tony didn’t seem to be waiting for any kind of response; he turned away from the closet and said, “So, yeah, that’s everything. Sleep tight. You guys coming?”

“In a minute,” Steve said. He came over to the Soldier—footsteps silent on the thick carpet—grasped the Soldier’s upper arms, the flesh and metal ones just the same. “Buck. Bucky. I…I’m glad you’re back. I know things are really…confusing right now, but it’s going to be okay. I promise.”

“Steve,” Sam said, in a warning tone.

Steve glanced over his shoulder at him, taking his eyes off the Soldier for a moment. “I do. I do, Buck. Okay. You should get some rest. We both should. And then we’ll talk. Okay?”

He seemed to be waiting for a response. “Okay,” the Soldier echoed.

#

When they left Hulk’s room—cage for a monstrous child—Stark peeled off with a quick, “Goodnight, guys,” headed, Sam supposed, for his own floor.

“Steve,” Sam said, once he’d gone. “I know it’s hard, but it’s not a good idea, to make promises, about things you can’t control. In situations like this.”

Steve looked at him, hollow-eyed. “There are no situations like this.”

“Well, no, not exactly, but there are some things we can learn from other POWs, and men with traumatic brain injuries.” Steve knew that. In the early, optimistic days of the search, he’d asked for Sam’s professional expertise, about what he could do to help Bucky, once they found him. Now, Sam repeated some of what he’d told Steve then. “For someone who’s been lied to, manipulated, knowing that their loved ones are being honest with them, even when the truth is unpleasant, is important for re-establishing trust.” And for TBI patients, telling comforting lies, as though to a child, diminished self-efficacy. While Bucky’s experience wasn’t at all typical, Sam was confident that both of those issues would be present.

“I meant it,” Steve said, a mulish set to his jaw.

“Steve--”

“Not now, all right?” he snapped. He sighed, slumped. “Just…not now.”

Abruptly, Sam recalled that he wasn’t dealing with one traumatized vet and a caregiver. Steve had his own burdens, and one of the heaviest was his guilt over what had happened to his best friend. That weight had only gotten heavier when Steve learned that he hadn’t simply failed to prevent Barnes’s death; he’d—as Steve saw it—left him in enemy hands for seventy years.

Before Sam could sort out what to say, Steve stiffened his spine, pulling on the mantle of commanding officer. “Let’s get some shut-eye,” he said. “JARVIS, you’ll tell me if anything changes, with Bucky?”

“Of course, Captain,” JARVIS said gently.

They went to floor 71. Sam wasn’t sure if Steve had ever been here before—the apartment seemed to be decorated in line with someone else’s ideas of what Steve’s tastes would be—but Steve played host anyway, saying, “Make yourself at home. I’m just gonna….” He gestured vaguely, then started off down a hallway to, Sam supposed, find a bed and fall into it.

#

To Steve’s surprise, he slept well—not any longer than usual, but he fell asleep almost as soon as he climbed into bed, and slept straight through, without any dreams that he remembered.

As soon as he sat up in bed, JARVIS said, “Good morning, Captain Rogers.”

He would have been more startled, but he’d slept over in the Tower after they’d fought the Chitauri; he’d “met” JARVIS then, though he still wasn’t sure whether he—or it—was a complicated computer program or more of a person. “Morning,” he said, erring on the side of politeness.

“It’s 4:23 AM. Mr. Wilson and Soldier are still asleep.”

“Don’t call him that,” Steve snapped, then felt bad. “Sorry. He’s, uh, he’s Sergeant Barnes.”

After a moment’s hesitation, JARVIS said, “Noted, sir.”

JARVIS went on chiming in as Steve got himself ready for the day, walking him through the shower’s bewildering options menu and providing a tutorial in how to use the unnecessarily complicated electric razor Stark had provided.

Steve was contemplating climbing back into yesterday’s clothes—which, after being fought in and slept in, were not their best—when JARVIS directed him to a closet that was stocked with clothes that were, at least, his size, if not exactly what he would have chosen himself. Recalling that Sam’s overnight case had been destroyed, along with Steve’s own and Sam’s car, he picked out a t-shirt and some exercise pants that at least had a drawstring. “Where can I put these that Sam will be able to find them when he gets up?”

“Ah,” said JARVIS. “I’ve taken the liberty of placing a clothing order, based on Mr. Wilson’s measurements. And Sergeant Barnes’s, as well.”

“Oh. Thank you,” Steve said.

“It’s a standard protocol for overnight guests who arrive without luggage.”

The kitchen also proved to be well-stocked, with both perishable and nonperishable food. Steve wondered for a moment whether Tony kept it that way all the time—which doubtless meant throwing things out as they spoiled—or if someone had made a grocery delivery while he was sleeping, but he decided that he didn’t want to know. He had started coffee and was making some toast when JARVIS said, “Captain, Sergeant Barnes has awoken.”

Steve looked up, suddenly alert. “What’s he doing?”

“If you will direct your attention to the television, I will display the feed.”

As Steve went over to the TV, it came on, displaying a clear, crisp picture of Bucky, still dressed as he had been when Steve left him, sitting on the edge of the giant Hulk bed. He was looking almost directly at the camera, his expression blank.

Among other things, Steve hoped that this level of surveillance was a special feature of the Hulk’s containment area; otherwise, someone needed to have a talk with Tony, and possibly Tony’s robot butler, about the line between “helpful” and “creepy.”

Steve watched Bucky for a long moment, during which he didn’t move so much as an eyelid. He’d been like that yesterday, when Steve and Sam were talking to the police. Just—empty. “Guess I’ll take him some breakfast.”

“Mr. Stark has suggested that it would be wise to wait until he is available to provide backup, before taking such an action.”

“Mr. Stark can shove it up his ass,” Steve said.

“Can, and probably has,” JARVIS said dryly.

After a moment’s thought, Steve decided that yes, the AI meant exactly what it sounded like he meant. Person or program, he apparently got his sense of humor from Tony. Steve went back to the kitchen and made more toast, spreading the slices with jelly as they were finished. Bucky had always liked sweet things.

#

The Soldier woke. The room he was in was strange, but—he remembered how he’d gotten here. The hospital, and his retrieval team—his new retrieval team, fighting against his old one. The man from the river, whose name was Steve. The other two—he forgot their names, right now, but there was the black man who’d been with Steve, and the red man who could fly. They’d brought him here.

This room wasn’t made for him. He could tell that by the size, and the soft, brightly-colored things— children’s things, some part of his mind supplied. That, and it wasn’t equipped for the Procedure, with the chair and the chamber.

The room must be for some other Project.

It occurred to him to wonder, for the first time, what this new retrieval team wanted with him. They weren’t from the Project; the man from the river had been his mission, the last mission the Project had sent him on. But the man— Steve—was the same one who’d said that the Soldier was…that name. The name that made him sick to his stomach even to think about.

The Project remembered for him. But Steve remembered too. Remembered different things. A name, and something that made him not want to fight the Soldier. How?

If he wasn’t from the Project, how did he remember the Soldier? Or, if he was, why had the Project sent the Soldier against him? The Project turning against itself, the snake eating its tail, was…unthinkable.

Except—the Project had lied. He remembered saying that. Tasted the words. What had they lied about?

Rabbits, Civilian Conservation Corps, May Day, the scent of pencils, newly sharpened—

About him, that was it. They’d said that he would die, without the Procedure, but it had been one-two-three-four-maybe-more months, and he still wasn’t dead.

A new thought bloomed—the snake, not eating its tail, but dividing into two, connected at the tail, two heads fighting each other. A schism within the Project? Maybe.

#

Bucky was still sitting as JARVIS had shown him when Steve joined him, his hands resting inertly on his thighs, his expression flatly neutral. It wasn’t a look Steve knew, on his face—even asleep, he’d always looked more animated than this. “Bucky,” he said. “I heard you were up, so I brought some breakfast.”

Bucky’s jaw worked slightly, like he was trying to talk. Or chewing on nothing. Steve thought of carthorses mouthing their bridle-bits to resettle them. “Let’s--” He glanced around, but there was no table or chairs in the room; the Hulk didn’t understand them. “We can eat right here,” he decided, sitting down, cross-legged on the carpet. Like a picnic, or like stopping to eat during a march, in the war.

Blank eyes fixed on Steve’s face, Bucky slowly slid off the bed and sat across from him, posture mirroring Steve’s own. Steve put one cup of coffee and half of the toast within his reach, saying, “It’s early. I figured I’ll make eggs or hotcakes or something later, but this’ll get us started. I don’t know how much you need to eat. You won’t believe how much food I can go through, now. But there’s plenty.” He took a bite of his own share of the toast to stop his babbling.

Bucky watched him for several bites before picking up the top slice from his own stack of toast, and starting to eat. He’d been the same way, yesterday, with the bottled water and sandwiches Tony had arranged to have brought to them—Steve hadn’t had to actually order him to eat, as he’d feared he might, but Bucky had waited and watched for a while. Like he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to eat, or maybe wasn’t sure how.

They ate in silence for a while. It reminded Steve of meals in camp, or even before that, in Brooklyn, when Bucky was too tired from his day’s work to feel much like talking.

He wondered if it reminded Bucky of anything at all.

When Bucky finished his first cup of coffee, Steve uncapped the Thermos he’d brought, and held it over the cup. “More?”

Bucky watched him for a moment, chewing, then finally gave the barest hint of a nod.

That was something, at least. Once they’d finished eating, Steve put the plates and cups aside, and leaned back on his hands. “How much do you remember?” He had to start somewhere, and that was as good a place as any.

Bucky glanced down at his hands. “I remember—most of yesterday. I think. The hospital was yesterday, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Steve said, willing himself not to show any disappointment on his face. “That was yesterday.”

“Other than that—bits and pieces.” Before Steve could get too hopeful about that, Bucky added, “Since my last mission, my last procedure. I can put some of that together, if I work at it.” Something sharpened in his eyes. “I remember you were my mission. You wouldn’t fight me.”

They’d been over this yesterday, right before the HYDRA team had attacked.

“You said I was…that name.”

Steve nodded. “Yeah. Ja--”

“ Don’t say it. ” Bucky sat back a little, looking confused by his own vehemence. “Hurts.” He covered his eyes with his hand—the flesh one—for a moment, before picking up the thread again. “You knew me. From before.”

He sounded uncertain, but Steve seized on this suggestion that Bucky was remembering something. “Yeah. We grew up together.”

Bucky’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “But you’re….”

Steve hoed— prayed —he was going to say, smaller. Or too big.

But instead, he said, “Young.”

“We’re the same age. More or less.” Bucky had been a little bit younger, before. He might be a little bit older, now, since he’d been awake for parts of the last 70 years.

“I was frozen. Between missions. The project kept me frozen. It’s been…I don’t know. A long time.”

“Seventy years. I was frozen too.”

That brought a real expression to Bucky’s face. Surprise. “You were…do you remember?”

“Yeah. I remember…pretty much everything.”

#

Steve—the man from the bridge; the man in red, white, and blue—was like him. The Soldier remembered wondering—was that yesterday?—if there were other Soldiers. And here was one. And he remembered. “Everything?” he echoed. “Before—and since?”

“Not when I was actually frozen, of course. But before I went on the ice, and since I woke up, yeah.”

Forgetting was an effect of the Procedure. They’d always said so. But maybe they had changed it, improved it.

Or maybe they’d botched his version of it, and gotten Steve’s right. “I can’t— since is full of holes, but I can try and remember it. Before, I can’t. It hurts, like the name.”

Steve nodded. “That—I’m sorry.”

“I guess,” the Soldier continued, thinking aloud, “if I have it again, I’ll lose everything since. Do you know? If I have to?”

“Have to…?”

“The Procedure,” the Soldier explained. Except he had a feeling he wasn’t supposed to object to the Procedure. “It’s fine,” he said. “If I do. I just wondered.”

“No,” Steve said. He cleared his throat. “No, you don’t have to have it.”

The Soldier added that one to the list of things he had Decided: not to kill the man—Steve, not to let the old retrieval team take him, and that not having the Procedure was preferable to having it. Even if…. “They said I’d die. If I went too long without it.”

“Shit,” Steve muttered, looking away. “I…I’m pretty sure that’s not true. But we’ll have…some people here look into it. Make sure.”

The Soldier nodded. That would be useful information to have. That thought— useful information —reminded him that he had been wondering why the new retrieval team had, well, retrieved him. He put the new information—this was a Project, there was another Soldier—alongside what he’d already figured out, and asked, “Do we have a mission?” This Project had kept him alive, so they must want him for missions. Even though they already had a Soldier. Answer: a mission that required two Soldiers.

“Um. No. No…mission. Um. I don’t…we don’t really do the same kinds of missions that you’re…used to. I mean, I guess finding you and bringing you home was a mission. But not…not like you’re probably thinking.”

For some reason, the Soldier wanted to argue. They might have used him for retrievals sometimes, too. He didn’t remember, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t. “I can do other kinds of missions.”

“I know you can. Just…not right now. You’ve had a rough…time. We’ll talk about missions once you’re feeling better.”

No mission, and no Procedure. “Are they going to freeze you again, now?” Steve had only said that they weren’t going to make him have the Procedure. And Steve had just finished a mission. If Steve’s Procedure was different, better—

Before the Soldier could sort out why he hoped the other Soldier wouldn’t be frozen, Steve was saying, “What? No. No. Nobody’s freezing anybody, Buck.” He winced. “Sorry—does that name bother you , too?”

He shook his head. Was that really a name? He thought it was like Soldier or The Asset. “No. It’s fine.” If there were two Soldiers, they had to call them each something. Steve and Buck, apparently. “What do we do, then? Until there’s a mission.”

“Whatever we want. You’re not a prisoner here, Bucky. I mean—the others kinda think you should stay in this apartment until…until we’re sure everything’s okay. But other than that.”

The Soldier considered that. Just staying in these rooms wouldn’t be so bad—he was used, after all, the chair and the cryo-chamber. Whatever we want was a disturbingly vague idea.

“And you don’t have to do missions, if you don’t want to,” Steve went on. “I…I’ll probably have some. The people who had you before, some of them are still around. And I’m sure there’ll be other threats, too. But we decide what the missions are, and if we wanna do ‘em.”

That was—the Soldier shook his head. It didn’t make sense. But-- “The mission about finding me. You…wanted to do that one?”

“More than anything.”

Why? The Soldier had never—as far as he knew—given much thought to how his missions were chosen. He couldn’t begin to imagine how he’d choose them himself. Unless these last few months counted. Choosing not to do his mission—to save Steve instead of terminating him—was a little like choosing a mission.

He didn’t know why he’d chosen that, only that he had. But the other Soldier remembered more things than he did. He decided to ask. “Why?”

“Because you’re my friend, Buck. You always have been.”

Friend. He knew what the word meant. An associate, with additional connotations of loyalty and affection. A target’s friends could be a source of information about their whereabouts or movements. Threatening a friend was one method for drawing a target into the open. Friends could be a target’s vulnerable point, but they could also be a strength. They could defend the target, or slow pursuit through any number of means, or even sacrifice themselves in the target’s stead. On balance, the Soldier thought that a friend might be a good thing to have.

“I know you don’t remember,” Steve added.

“You can remember it for me,” the Soldier said.

#

“Hey, Steve, you up yet?” Sam asked as he left the guest room, one towel wrapped around his hips and another drying his hair. He promptly tripped over a quartet of Macy’s shopping bags that were lined up just outside his door. “What the….”

The bags turned out to hold a couple changes of clothes, all in Sam’s sizes. Picking them up, he retreated back into the bedroom to get dressed. One reason he’d been looking for Steve was to ask if he kept any clothes here, that Sam could borrow.

But it wasn’t the only reason, so after dressing, he tried again. Now that it was morning and the curtains were open, Sam saw that one entire wall of the living room was made of windows, showing a million-dollar view of the city. Sam wondered what Steve was doing in his dinky little one-bedroom in DC when he had this much prime Manhattan real estate with his name on it.

Steve wasn’t in the living room, but there were signs he’d been in the kitchen—a film of coffee in the bottom of the pot, a jelly-smeared knife in the sink. Don’t tell me he went down to see Barnes on his own, Sam thought, followed immediately by, Who am I kidding? Of course he did.

Shaking his head, he went to the elevator. That Jarvis fella—whoever he was—was supposed to be watching Barnes, but it wasn’t like Sam could just sit down and eat breakfast without checking to make sure Steve hadn’t gotten his fool self killed.

They’d left Barnes upstairs, but Sam didn’t quite remember which floor—it had been the end of a long day. With a mental shrug, he pressed the button for the next floor up. That one didn’t look at all familiar, so he tried the next one, and the next.

On his fourth try, the elevator took him up several floors, not just the one he had asked for, and the doors opened onto a living room, not a hallway. “New guy!” Tony Stark called out. “Come meet Bruce.”

Following Stark’s voice, Sam ended up in what he thought was probably a breakfast nook. There was a table in it, anyway, and coffee and pastries on the table. Stark was sitting there with another man Sam recognized from Avengers publicity photos. “Dr. Banner,” he said. “Nice to meet you. I’m Sam Wilson.”

“Hi,” said Banner.

“Want some coffee?” Stark asked, getting up and going into the nearby kitchen.

“Uh, I was actually looking for Steve.”

“He’s with Bucky,” Banner said.

“I figured. Is…?”

“He’s fine,” Stark said, coming back and shoving a cup of coffee in Sam’s direction. “Jarvis is keeping an eye on them. They’re—gossiping and braiding each other’s hair. Meanwhile, we’re trying to figure out what to do with Barnes now that we’ve got him. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Star Spangled Man has a plan.”

“Not much of one,” Sam admitted, taking a seat at the table. “He understands that Barnes’s recovery is a process, and it isn’t going to end with him being exactly like he was before. But I don’t know what he’s gonna need, besides time. Some kind of therapy, obviously, but I don’t know where to start.” The HYDRA files gave them an idea of what Barnes had been through, what he’d done and what had been done to him, but what it was like inside his head, Sam had no idea. Did he even have a sense of self?

“Jarvis took some scans of the arm, while he was sleeping,” Stark said. He waved his hand over a panel on the table, and a hologram sprang up. “The good news is, he was telling the truth when he said he was out of anti-aircraft missiles.”

“That’s the good news, huh?”

“Yeah. We also found out that what they were using was a very lightly modified Stark Industries product. No idea how Nazis got their hands on my tech—but hey, we can reload him any time we want.”

“Focus, Tony,” Banner said.

“Right.” Stark rotated the hologram in front of him. “The arm’s equipped to send a strong electric shock through the fingers. That’s about it for add-on weapons, but of course the arm itself is a lethal weapon. And it’s wired directly into his central nervous system, so removing it would be…non-trivial.”

Sam shook his head. “You can’t do that, anyway. Removing someone’s prosthesis against their will, it’s a terrible violation. Almost like cutting off a natural body part. And he won’t be the first guy I worked with who has the skills to kill with his bare hands.”

“He isn’t even the only one in this house,” Banner observed. “And—I think he’s more in control of than Hulk was, at first.” He nodded at Sam. “Tony was telling me about the fight yesterday. His target identification was...good. The other guy, Hulk, he still…has a hard time with….bystanders. He can tell friends from enemies, but the space in between is….” He gestured vaguely.

Sam nodded. “I won’t say I didn’t just about shit my pants when he started snapping necks, but he picked the right ones. And the doctor who was in the room with us, he got her into cover first thing, when the shooting started.”

“He did?” Banner said, looking interested. “That’s…I’m a little surprised by that.”

Sam nodded. “Wasn’t exactly polite about it, but he did it.”

“Anyway,” Stark went on, “I don’t think we > can get the arm off without running a real risk of paralyzing him, so we don’t really need to have the debate about whether or not we should. The next thing I’m worried about is sleeper programming.”

Clearing his throat, Banner waved his hand over another panel in the table, bringing up what Sam recognized as one of the HYDRA files. “Based on the records we have, it looks like they laid down a foundation of…basic behavioral programming, with mission-specific orders layered over top of it. Everything down to the foundational programming was supposed to be wiped after each mission, but they had some problems with bleed-through—behaviors or memories from earlier missions, or even from his old life as James Barnes would crop up sometimes. They got more aggressive with the memory wipes in the 70’s, which affected his ability to encode new memories, trying to eliminate the bleed-through effect. So…I don’t think they ever intended him as a sleeper agent, but that doesn’t mean that old orders couldn’t be…randomly activated. HYDRA found that the longer he went without a wipe, the more difficult it became to predict his behavior.”

Stark spoke up, “Which explains both why they switched from trying to retrieve him to trying to terminate him, and why they weren’t successful. And now it’s our problem.” He paused. “Both of those things are our problem.”

#

There was absolutely nothing in the world that Steve would have rather been doing than talking to Bucky again…but it was kind of a relief when they got hungry again—or, at least, Steve got hungry, and Bucky agreed when asked that he was, too—and Steve went back to the other apartment to make some pancakes. Talking to Bucky, this Bucky, was like slogging uphill through mud, the kind that clung to your boots so that each step required hauling forty or fifty pounds of wet ground along with you.

It wasn’t just that he didn’t remember Steve. Or that he forgot what they were talking about in the middle of the conversation. The really exhausting part, the saddest part, was the gaps in his knowledge. Bucky wanted to know what they could do, when they weren’t going on missions—he was very hung up on the idea of missions. “Whatever we want,” hadn’t satisfied him for long; he wanted examples.

Among other things, that question made Steve realize that he hadn’t exactly been living life to the fullest, either. Before embarking on his mission to find Bucky, he’d spent most of his time preparing for SHIELD missions, going on mission, and debriefing from missions. When he wasn’t doing that, he exercised or worked on his list of things to catch up on.

Bucky had understood about working out all right. But when Steve mentioned watching movies, he quickly found out that Bucky had forgotten what they were. Once Steve had explained the concept, he suggested that they might be a good way to learn about a target. Steve had admitted that yes, video could be used that way, but he meant movies that told a story.

Bucky, it turned out, did not understand what a story was. Or the entire concept of entertainment. Steve hadn’t done a very good job of explaining it, either. So now they were going to watch one, when Steve came back with breakfast.

And while Steve was making breakfast, Bucky was apparently just going to sit and stare blankly at nothing.

As Steve was getting out pancake ingredients, he wondered if it would be impolite to get Sam up and drag him down to Pancake and Movie Breakfast. Or—just possibly—might it be rude not to?

But as he whisked together the milk and the eggs, the door opened in and in trooped Sam—followed by Tony and Bruce. “Cappicola! Are you--” He leaned in to peer at Steve. “Making pancakes?”

“Yes.”

“Captain America is making pancakes in my house,” Tony announced to everyone present in a tone of mock awe. “I’ve had this exact fantasy.”

“Tony,” Bruce said disapprovingly.

“It wasn’t a sex fantasy,” Tony defended himself. “I was like eight. Okay, there may have been something vaguely homoerotic about the pillow fight, now that I mention it.”

Steve mentally filed that away to never, ever think about.

Bruce caught Steve’s eye. “Sorry. I’ll explain to him about…boundaries. Again.”

“I’m making pancakes for Bucky,” Steve said. “We’re gonna eat pancakes and watch a movie.” Steve knew enough about how people saw him to know how that plan would sound—wholesome, naïve, adorable. So he slammed into his next subject with a deliberate lack of finesse. “Can you guys help me arrange to get him checked out by a doctor? They told him if he went too long without being frozen, he’d die. Tony, maybe you can look at the arm, too?”

“Uh—sure,” Tony said. “I’ve done some scans on the arm already, but I wasn’t looking for a kill switch. I might need a closer look at it. And doctors, yeah, there are some people I can call.”

“Great,” said Steve. “It’s probably not true—there’s nothing in the files about it, and it’s been six months and he’s still alive, so—” He shrugged. “But we’d better check into it.”

“Yeah. Totally on board with that,” Tony agreed.

While Steve cooked the pancakes, the others filled him in on their meeting. He wasn’t surprised to figure out that they’d been talking partially at cross-purposes, with Sam thinking about Bucky’s treatment needs, and Tony focusing on two-way threat analysis. What Bruce’s take was, Steve wasn’t sure—he didn’t say much. But they did all seem to agree that, both for Bucky’s safety and everyone else’s, he needed to be in a controlled, supervised environment. Tony offered the Tower, and Sam was willing to stick around for a while—his leave of absence from the VA had a couple months left to go.

And Bruce added, “I’ll be around. I’m still not that kind of doctor,” he added with a significant look at Tony, “but we maybe have one or two things in…common.”

“Thanks, guys,” Steve said. “I appreciate it.” They all looked at him expectantly. “What?”

“We’re waiting for the ‘but,’” Tony explained.

Steve shook his head. “There is no but. It’s not like I want HYDRA showing up at my apartment—I have neighbors. And Bucky…I think he understands that he needs help.” He flipped a pancake. “I asked him about what he’s been doing since the Helicarrier. His memory is…patchy, at best, but he doesn’t seem to have had any kind of plan, apart from staying one step ahead of the teams HYDRA sent after him. He can’t have been getting enough to eat.”

“Yeah, his BMI is, like, three,” Tony put in.

Steve wasn’t sure what that was, but decided he didn’t care. “He believes me that I knew him before,” he went on, “but he says it hurts if he tries to remember that far back. Or if he hears his name. I don’t know what could cause that.”

“Possibly some kind of behavioral conditioning,” Bruce offered. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

#

Steve came back. The Soldier didn’t realize, until it happened, that he had been a little worried that he wouldn’t. He brought more food, and also Sam. They went into the other room, with the wall screen and the cushions on the floor, to eat.

Pancakes were soft, fluffy bread, round and golden-brown, with sticky liquid poured over to make them sweet. They came with sticks of spicy meat. Steve demonstrated how you could sop up the sticky liquid—syrup—with them, if you wanted to.

“Good?” Steve asked after the Soldier had tried it.

He nodded. “I think…I may have had this before.”

“You have,” Steve said. “We couldn’t always afford sausage, but we ate a lotta pancakes back in the day.”

The Soldier shook his head. He didn’t mean before; he couldn’t remember before. “After—after the river. Some of the men from the Wall, they showed me a place where you can go and get food. They had these. I think.”

“What wall?” Steve asked.

“The memory wall.”

“The museum, you mean? Where they had pictures of us?”

The Soldier shook his head. “No—don’t.” He thought he knew what wall Steve meant, but it hurt to think about that one.

“A black wall?” Sam asked. “Outside, with names on it?”

He nodded. “That one.”

Sam explained, to Steve, “The Vietnam memorial. Homeless vets sometimes congregate there. Probably took him to a soup kitchen.”

It had been pancakes, not soup. Maybe there was soup, too, and he forgot it.

“Well,” Steve said, his mouth curving up in the shape of a smile. “I’m glad somebody helped you, Buck.” He cleared his throat. “Should we start the movie?”

#

One thing was for certain—Sam was never going to look at The Wizard of Oz the same way again. Steve had picked it because he and Bucky had both seen it before. Sam wasn’t entirely sure that was a good idea—if remembering his old life was painful for Bucky, it might be better to hold off a little on attempting to intentionally trigger memories, at least until Bucky was functioning well enough to understand what they were doing and why, and to object if he didn’t feel up to it—but it turned out not to matter, since the movie didn’t spark anything.

At the beginning, Bucky asked a lot of questions about what was happening and why, and each time Steve paused the movie to answer him in depth. His questions tailed off as the movie progressed—Sam wasn’t sure if that was because Bucky was understanding it on his own, or if he just had enough to process.

When the movie ended, and Steve turned to Bucky and said, “What do you think?”, it turned out that neither of those things was quite the case.

Bucky treated them to a cogent tactical analysis of the reasons for the Wicked Witch’s “mission failure.” On the plus side, Sam could tell that he was able to remember key scenes from the movie, and to reason logically about them. Those were genuinely good signs.

“What about Dorothy?” Sam asked, when he wound down. “The girl. Most people see her as the main character of the movie.”

Bucky frowned; Sam could practically see gears shifting inside his head. “She completed her mission. Getting home. Right?” At Steve’s encouraging nod, he continued, “Mission success was delayed because of faulty intelligence—going to the Emerald City was inefficient, but she didn’t know that. And terminating the witch wasn’t her objective, so that was…sloppy. But the witch was trying to stop her from completing her mission, so that’s all right.”

His answer confirmed, for Sam, that Bucky had been asking so many questions at the beginning because the early scenes of the movie, the ones that happened on normal human scale, were something he had no frame of reference for. The quest and combat parts…well, he thought he understood them. Sam decided to ask a question that would have no place in a mission report, to see how Bucky handled it. “How do you think she felt, when she woke up and she was at home?” There were some thematic parallels to Bucky’s own situation; he might surprise Sam by picking up on them.

Bucky was pretty obviously confused by the question, but he tried. “She completed her mission,” he said slowly. “So I guess…good?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “I think she was glad to be home. But she probably missed her friends from Oz, too.”

As a model of an emotional response, that was a pretty good one. And, if he was looking for parallels, Sam thought that might mean Steve was realizing that he had emotional ties to both his new, 21st-century life and his old one. He might still wish he could go back, but doing so—if he could—would bring a sense of loss.

Bucky had a sort of lost, inward look that Sam was starting to recognize as him thinking hard. “But she didn’t—she didn’t know the Tin Man and the Scarecrow and the Lion before the mission, did she?”

“No,” Steve said. “Well, they’re supposed to be—never mind, let’s go with no.”

“You can get to be friends with someone by doing missions with them?” Bucky asked.

“Yeah,” Steve said.

Not wanting to further entrench Bucky’s mission-centric worldview, Sam added, “That’s not the only way to make friends.”

Steve nodded, but said, “When you have the kind of life we do, though, you get pretty close to the…people you work with. The Howling Commandoes—well, you won’t remember them. You know Tony, from yesterday?”

Bucky nodded. “The red one, who flew.”

“We were on a team together. There was…this guy named Loki was trying to take over the world, and we fought him together. That was not too long after I came off the ice. He came to help us get you out because…well, for a couple of different reasons, but one of them is that we’re friends. And you’ll meet Bruce soon. He didn’t come yesterday, but he was on the team with me and Tony, and I guess he’s living here now. This is…kind of his room. And Natasha. You’ve met her, but you might not remember. She’s a woman, red hair--” Steve started to gesture in the direction of his chest, but stopped.

JARVIS—Stark said it was an artificial intelligence; Sam would have thought he was shitting him, but considering the flying suit, he wasn’t so sure—said, “I can display a picture if you’d like, Captain Rogers.”

“That would be great. Thanks, JARVIS.

A picture of her came up on the TV screen. Bucky stood up to study it carefully. “I know her?”

“You’ve…met,” Steve said. “It was a day or so before the river.” He was using Bucky’s own reference points, good. “I was there.”

Bucky shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

“Maybe just as well,” Steve said. “Anyway, she’s not here in the Tower right now, but she’ll probably turn up sometime. JARVIS, can you show us one of Barton?”

#

There was something familiar about this, being shown pictures and told about the people in them. The Soldier didn’t remember any of the specifics, but he was nearly sure that he’d had such a briefing before his mission to terminate the man in—to terminate Steve.

This was a briefing about allies— friends —but he thought he’d had some like that before, too. The next picture was a man with a bow, Clint Barton, codename Hawkeye. The Soldier didn’t know why he was being told both names.

“He’s not around right now, either, but you’ll probably see him sometime,” Steve explained. “He works with Natasha a lot. I’ve done some missions with both of them since the Loki thing. JARVIS, can we see a picture of Bruce, too? That way you’ll know him when you see him.”

The screen showed a picture of a stoop-shouldered man. He didn’t look like a soldier—maybe a technician. But hadn’t Steve said this was his room?

He was trying to sort it out when Sam said, “It’s okay if you don’t remember everything he’s telling you. We can remind you who everyone is when you meet them.”

“I can remember,” the Soldier said. It was important to remember briefings, and he didn’t want them to think he was useless and stupid. He studied the picture again. “Is he…big?” he guessed. There was nothing in the picture to give a sense of scale

“That’s actually kind of complicated,” Steve said. “JARVIS, can you put up a picture of Hulk, too?”

A new picture appeared on the screen, side-by-side with the rumpled man. It showed a green man, very muscular, dressed only in short pants. As Bucky watched, the other picture shrank so that the rumpled man was perhaps a quarter the size of the green one.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Thanks, JARVIS. That gives you an idea of the scale. Bruce was…I don’t really know where to start. Do you know about the Super Soldier Serum?”

The Soldier didn’t. He shook his head.

“We each had a version of it,” Steve went on. “It made us bigger, stronger, faster.”

Now the Soldier knew what he meant. “The Project.” There had been a Procedure, at the beginning, that did that, and made it so he could survive the other Procedures.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “The lead scientist on my Project, Dr. Erskine, he was killed, and nobody else knew exactly how to do it. Bruce was, while I was frozen he was involved with a project to re-create the serum. His version didn’t go exactly right. I don’t really understand how it worked—I don’t think he does, either—but it made it so that if he gets angry, he turns into--” He pointed at the picture of the green man. “That. He’s pretty fast, really strong, and can’t be hurt or killed. But he also…doesn’t understand things very well. He can talk a little bit, but not a lot. Bruce had to learn to make sure he doesn’t transform accidentally.”

Now he understood. Hadn’t he thought, sometime earlier, that this room must be for some other Project? And he was right. “He…goes back and forth?

The voice from the ceiling said, “I have some video that may help in understanding Dr. Banner’s condition, if you’d like to see it.”

“Sure,” Steve said. “Thanks.”

The screen showed some moving pictures. They were much more exciting than the movie about the girl and the witch. The big green man battled large and small flying creatures. He could move quickly and jump much higher and further than the Soldier would have guessed, from his size. The Soldier could see what Steve meant about him—he could take down the human-sized enemies with a single swipe of his hand, and was fairly effective against the enormous ones. But he tended to knock holes in the buildings, either by bouncing off of them or by throwing targets into them. He was clumsy, and he was not doing a very good job of minimizing collateral damage. They would only want to deploy him in a target-rich environment.

That movie stopped before the Soldier could tell how the mission ended. Now the big green man was standing in this room, his big green head nearly reaching the ceiling, even though his shoulders were hunched like the rumpled man’s in the picture. Moving more carefully than he had been on the mission, he lumbered over to the shelves with the brightly-colored food packages. He selected one, tore it open, and poured the contents into his mouth.

The picture changed again, to show the other room. The big green man lay down on the bed, hugging one of the soft toy animals to his chest. Then he rippled and shrunk back down into the rumpled man, and the screen went back to the still pictures of the rumpled man and the green man.

“So, that’s Bruce,” Steve said. “We usually call the big green guy Hulk, but sometimes Bruce calls him ‘the other guy.’ You’ll probably meet Bruce soon, but he only turns into Hulk for missions and training.”

“They don’t freeze him, either?” the Soldier asked. It seemed like freezing him would be practical, as big and clumsy and stupid as he was.

“No,” Steve said. “Nobody gets frozen here. Tony made this place for him, so he can stay safe while he’s waiting to turn back into Bruce.”

Tony, he supposed, must be Bruce’s handler. “Where does he go when he’s Bruce?”

“I think he has an apartment somewhere else in the building,” Steve answered. “I have one, too. Uh, Tony and Sam think it’s a good idea for you to stay here for right now, but later you can move to my apartment too, if you want. In the meantime, if there’s anything you want, to make it more comfortable, let me know.”

The Soldier wasn’t sure what he might want—he had food, he had a warm place to sleep—but he told Steve that he would.

#

After the movie, they spent the next part of the day on the practicalities of getting Bucky settled. Steve was relieved to find out that Bucky remembered how to take a shower, shave, and brush his teeth, though the razor confused him—he’d apparently been using a knife to shave, when he remembered to, for the last six months.

After cleaning up, Bucky dressed in some of the clothes JARVIS had ordered for him. It was a relief to Steve to see him in something other than the HYDRA uniform, but JARVIS had only gotten a few things for him—jeans, pullover shirts—so they had to order more. Steve tried to involve him in the process of picking things out, but Bucky didn’t really seem to understand why Steve kept showing him pictures of shirts and asking which one he liked better. He settled for getting a variety of things; maybe Bucky would discover he had an opinion when the actual clothes were in front of him.

Tony was true to his word—and astonishingly fast—about getting a doctor in to see Bucky. A Dr. Moore, who Steve recognized from the SHIELD medical bay, came that afternoon. She examined Bucky in Tony’s workshop—apparently, he needed a lot of medical imaging equipment to work on inventions that interfaced directly with the body, like the Iron Man suit did. Dr. Moore and Tony took a lot of scans, especially of his brain, the prosthetic arm, and its connection with his torso.

He came out of it with clean bill of health, pretty much—malnourished, the doctor said, but that wasn’t exactly a surprise. “So they were lying,” Steve told Bucky. “About you dying if you weren’t frozen.”

The doctor added, “There’s no sign that you have—or ever had—any life-threatening disease or condition.” She smiled. “Now, the injury to your arm, not to mention the radical surgery, would have been very risky at the time, but of course it’s stable now.”

“There are a couple of things I want to check, with the arm,” added Tony. He’d been hanging around for the whole exam, ostensibly to help operate the equipment, but Steve would bet he also had a plan for taking Bucky down if he was a threat. “So don’t go anywhere,” he said, before going to show Dr. Moore out.

“You doing okay, Buck?” Steve asked when they were alone. Bucky had been…compliant, but blank, during the exam, moving when Tony or Dr. Moore told him to, but not asking questions or otherwise responding to anything they said. Steve worried that maybe sitting here, surrounded by machines, being worked on by strangers was bringing up bad memories for him. But maybe he was just tired; the day was probably busier than Bucky was used to.

Bucky nodded. “That doctor. She’s—good?”

Steve wasn’t sure if he meant morally ¸ or skilled, or what, but he supposed the answer was the same either way. “I don’t really know her.” Her SHIELD affiliation wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, in the circumstances, but…. “If Tony trusts her, she should be okay.”

Bucky seemed about to say something else, but stopped when Tony came back, rubbing his hands together. “Okay, arm time. I’m going to have to wire you up to my tablet, so I can have a look at the code. That okay?”

Steve was glad he asked, instead of just diving in, even though Bucky didn’t seem to notice.

#

There was something familiar about sitting in a chair, his arm’s panels open and a chattering technician at his elbow. The Soldier didn’t exactly remember any specific times it had happened before, but he felt like it probably had, the same way getting an allies briefing or giving a tactical report felt familiar.

After connecting some wires to his arm, Tony frowned down at the screen he was holding. “Seriously?” he squawked. “This is the kludgiest code I’ve ever seen. Jay, am I right or am I right?”

“Some parts of DUM-E’s base code may be worse, sir,” said the voice in the ceiling.

“Fuck you, I was drunk when I wrote that. Drunk and seventeen. And he’s a learning system, so I can’t replace the parts drunk, stupid, kid-me wrote. There’s no excuse for this. Seriously, fuck HYDRA—oh.” Tony had been sprawled back in his chair, but now he sat up straight, planting his feet on the floor. “Well, that’s not very nice. Cap?”

“What?” Steve said.

“There is a kill switch in here—a command that’ll send the electric current from his palm-Taser back up through the arm into his chest cavity. I don’t think it’s a threat—his arm doesn’t get wireless, or even radio, so the only way they could execute the command is if they had him plugged in to something. Which explains why they haven’t used it. But not why they put it in there in the first place. Idiots.”

“Can you take it out?” Steve asked.

“Should be able to—snipping out one command shouldn’t affect the rest of the code. But I want to run a simulation first. A mess like this, cut one thread and you never know what’s going to happen.”

An image bloomed in the Soldier’s mind—a sweater, with a hole in it. Tugging at the string, the hole getting bigger and bigger.

Was that a memory? It felt like one. But he couldn’t connect it up with any other ones—wearing the sweater, or stealing it, or what he’d done with it after the hole got bigger. Usually, when something came to him, it made a trail he could follow to something else. Like this morning, when the taste of pancakes reminded him of the men from the Wall.

Or like right now, when the way it felt to remember something reminded him of remembering about the pancakes.

Steve and Tony had been talking while he thought, but he wasn’t really listening until Steve said, “You’re doing good, Buck.”

Then he realized that Tony had moved away, and was doing something else in front of a big screen. “Analysis complete,” said the voice from the ceiling. “Removing the section of code should have no detrimental effect.”

“Great,” said Tony. “I want you to know, it pains me to the depths of my soul to upload this shitty, shitty code back in…but writing a clean version isn’t going to be a quick job, and the old stuff is working —talk about spit and bailing wire, oh my God.” He came back over and started detaching the wires from the Soldier’s arms.

“Do you need to—do something?” Steve asked.

“I just did. You can close that back up,” he added. Once the Soldier had closed the panels, he said, “All right, you’re good to go.”

The Soldier felt strangely off-balance as he got up from the chair. His mouth tasted sour and metallic, and his stomach spasmed, like he’d eaten something bad, or thought about the Name.

Steve put a hand under his elbow, the flesh one. “You okay?”

The Soldier nodded, but Steve kept his hand on him as they left the lab. “I think…maybe after they worked on my arm, was when they usually did the Procedure.” He didn’t remember exactly what the Procedure involved, but he knew he didn’t like it.

“Nobody’s going to do that to you again, Buck.”

The Soldier knew he’d said that before, but somehow, he liked hearing it again.

#

By the evening of the second day, Sam knew it was time for an intervention. Not for Bucky—he was still settling in, and Sam wasn’t confident doing much more than observing, and occasionally nudging a conversation in a therapeutic direction, until he had a better picture of what had been done to the guy, mentally.

But Steve, he had as clear a picture of Steve as he needed. Steve was spending every waking hour with Bucky, just about. When he wasn’t with Bucky, he was making food to take down to him, or talking with the others about Bucky. Or both at once.

In fact, the only time Sam could find to talk to him was when he was at the stove, frying hamburgers. “What’s up, Steve?” Sam asked.

“Just making dinner. You want a burger? I’m gonna take mine down and eat with Bucky.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “About that. This is gonna be a long haul, you know. You’ve gotta start thinking about…pacing yourself.”

Steve asked, “What do you mean?” But Sam could tell from the way his back stiffened up that he had a pretty good idea already.

“Take some time for yourself. Do something you want to do.”

“There’s nothing I want to do more than help Bucky.”

“I know. You love Bucky. But it isn’t easy, being around him.” He was careful not to make it a question.

“It’s not easy for him, either,” Steve pointed out. “Look, I can’t—when I’m not there, he just sits. And stares. I can’t leave him like that.”

“Okay,” Sam said. This was about Steve’s feeling that he had abandoned Bucky. Not a surprise. “Would you feel all right about taking some time for yourself if somebody else stays with Bucky? Me, or Tony, or Dr. Banner?”

“I guess that might be all right,” Steve said slowly. “But I don’t—he’s my friend. I don’t wanna drag you guys…and he always took care of me, when we were kids.”

Sam decided to focus on the part of that that wasn’t about Steve’s guilt. “Nobody’s dragging anybody; I’m offering. Why don’t I take his dinner down to him, and you can—read a book, or go for a run, or…” He searched for another example of something Steve liked to do, and came up empty. “Take a bubble bath.”

“A bubble bath?”

“Might be an experience,” Sam said with a shrug.

Steve shook his head. “I can’t tonight, anyway. I told him I was coming back. I can’t lie to him.”

“No, you’re right about that.” He could tell Steve wasn’t going to bend—and anyway, he was right. “It’s important to follow through. Tell you what, let’s pick a time tomorrow.” That would give Sam a chance come up with some productive way to use the time, too. “Then you can tell him about it at dinner, so he knows what to expect.”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t know you that well yet.”

“I do this for a living, you know,” he pointed out, using the I’m joking but I’m not really jokin g tone that worked with a lot of his clients.

“We both know he’s different from the guys you usually see at the VA.”

“Everybody’s different from everybody else,” Sam said. “We’re like snowflakes that way.”

“You’re not going to let this go, are you?” Steve asked with a sigh.

“Nope.”

They settled on two hours tomorrow morning, after breakfast.

#

“So,” Steve said when they finished dinner. “Tomorrow morning, after we have breakfast together, Sam’s going to come and hang out—spend time with you—for a while, while I take care of some things.”

Bucky went still for a moment. Then—“Do you have a mission?”

Steve felt like a first-class heel. A mission, that would be a good reason for abandoning Bucky. He didn’t even know what he was going to do while Sam was with Bucky. Maybe errands—he didn’t like the brand of toothpaste Tony stocked in the Tower—but he was pretty sure that, if the toothpaste was really important, he could just ask JARVIS to order something different. “No mission,” he said. “It won’t be that long. Couple of hours.” He wondered if he should try to explain Sam’s reasoning, about pacing himself. But he couldn’t tell Bucky that it was hard to be around him. “I just wanted to tell you the plan. In case you might…worry about why I wasn’t here.”

Bucky nodded slowly. “All right. I understand.”

“Good,” Steve said. “Okay. Um—do you want to watch another movie?”

#

By the next morning, Sam had decided that he’d try introducing Bucky to some recreational activities that he could do on his own. He’d done that kind of work with clients before—sometimes with clients working to replace negative behaviors like drinking with more positive pastimes, other times with individuals rehabilitating from a disabling injury that made the activities they used to enjoy inaccessible. Usually, the process started with getting the client talking about what he or she liked to do, or wished he could do, then coming up with some activities to try and report back on at the next session. But for the most impaired—clients with severe brain injuries, for instance—you sometimes had to get more hands on. Start doing an activity with them, so they’d see that they could do it, and go from there.

One room of Steve’s apartment was set up as an art studio, so Sam started there, collecting an assortment of supplies that didn’t look too expensive or specialized. He wasn’t sure what Bucky would draw—maybe weapons schematics?—but it was worth a shot, and if Bucky turned out to enjoy it, later they could work on using art as a means of self-expression.

He paused in front of a bookshelf in the living room. Did Bucky even know how to read? Even if he could decode, how much could he comprehend, given his very limited frame of reference? The shelf was mostly stocked with history—the war and the decades since—and works of classic literature. The former didn’t seem like a good idea at this stage, and the latter were probably too dense. He decided to give reading a miss for now.

Next to the TV was a cabinet full of video games. It was very unlikely that Bucky was familiar with any of those, but his manual dexterity and cognition were unimpaired, so he could probably pick them up pretty easily. A first-person shooter game organized around missions would be easy for him to understand—but would he enjoy it?

Maybe they could start with something like Angry Birds, and work up. He’d ask Tony about a tablet, he decided—it seemed like he’d probably have some old ones lying around. But he kind of wanted to keep things hands-on for now.

“JARVIS?” he asked. Tony had said that he could ask JARVIS anything, so he might as well give it a shot.

“Yes, Mr. Wilson?” the computerized voice said.

“I’m looking for—recreational equipment. Games, puzzles…maybe craft supplies? You got anything like that around?”

There was a pause. “There is a games cabinet on the Avengers’ common floor. You might find something there. And, of course, I can order anything that you’d like.”

“I’ll check out the cabinet first. Where?”

JARVIS directed him down a couple of floors, where there was a big living room full of comfy couches and chairs, facing a TV hooked up to what Sam thought was probably every video game system known to man. There was a kitchen, and a table for board games or meals. It looked like what the rec room at the VA would be if it was better funded.

It also looked like nobody had ever used it. When Sam found the games cabinet, most of the contents were still sealed in plastic. Sam thought about Steve’s apartment, what it meant that Tony had fixed it up for him and left it sitting empty all this time. What had Tony been expecting—or hoping for—when he set all this up?

Whatever it was, he hadn’t gotten it. Sam turned his attention to making some selections from the cabinet. Jigsaw puzzles might be good, and Jenga. That one was good for manual dexterity—not really an issue for Bucky—but you could play it by yourself, or be creative and build things with the blocks. He added a couple decks of cards to the pile. The idea of Bucky playing solitaire made him think Manchurian Candidate —the original, not the crappy remake—but he was pretty confident that Bucky’s brainwashing hadn’t involved the Queen of Diamonds.

He was trying to decide whether to add any two-player games—and if so, should he pick ones that Bucky might have played before, like checkers or backgammon?—when the elevator doors slid open and Tony Stark came in. “Hey. What are you doing?”

Oops. It would have been polite to ask his host before he started raiding his house for therapy supplies, Sam realized. “Looking for some things for Bucky. JARVIS said I should look here. Sorry, maybe I should have checked in with you first.”

“No, it’s fine. This is all—nobody was using it anyway.” Wandering over, he touched the deck of cards on the top of the pile of things Sam had picked out. “Gonna tell him to pass the time by playing a little solitaire? Seems risky.”

“I thought of that, too,” Sam admitted. “But I think it’ll be okay.”

He went on to explain how Steve was concerned about Bucky’s sitting and staring—“Yeah, that’s creepy,” Tony agreed—and how Sam was trying to get him to take some downtime. “So I’m going to hang out with him after breakfast—hopefully we can make it a regular thing.”

“One question,” Tony said.

“Yeah?”

“Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“What?” Sam asked.

“You realize that guy could literally rip you in half without breaking a sweat, right?”

Sam had…kind of forgotten about that detail, actually. A couple of mornings ago, he’d been worried about Steve going in there on his own. “Well, JARVIS is watching, right?”

“Yeah. So the rest of us may be able to get there before you finish bleeding out.”

Sam considered. Bucky had been quiet so far—and he’d dealt with other clients at risk of violent outbursts—but never anyone quite as lethal as the Winter Soldier. “You’re right, but Steve needs the downtime, and he won’t take it if it means leaving Bucky on his own. And I do need to start working with him sometime.”

“Bruce or I’ll go with you,” Tony decided. “Hopefully Bruce. Therapy gives me hives. Yeah. The Hulk can take Bucky, if he needs to, and it’s his room, so Bruce should be okay with it. Yeah. Tell JARVIS when you’re going down, and one of us will be there.” He waved vaguely and left.

#

Bruce met Sam outside the door to the Hulk’s cage. “Um. Hi.” He felt a little strange—no, a lot strange—about being here essentially as Sam’s bodyguard. He was nearly certain that Sam had more combat training than Bruce did, and was more athletic besides. And the Hulk didn’t protect people—he was something people had to be protected from.

He wasn’t even sure why he’d agreed to do this, except that Tony thought he could.

“Hi,” Sam said. “So I was thinking. Probably the best way to handle this is if you participate—make it like a small-group session. How does that sound?”

“Okay, I guess.” Bruce couldn’t really picture himself standing by the door like a bodyguard in a movie.

“Today, unless Bucky has other ideas, we’re just going to do some occupational therapy, trying to find something Bucky can do and enjoys. Nothing too heavy.”

Bruce nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

“Be a person,” Sam said with a shrug. “He doesn’t know what that looks like. Engage with the activities. I’m gonna try to get him talking about whether he likes them and why, so if you can model that, that’d be great. Just—be real.”

That was a taller order than Sam maybe thought it was—part of controlling the Hulk was keeping himself at arm’s length, mediating his own reactions. “Okay.”

They went in. Steve and Bucky were sitting on those big, stupid throw pillows Tony put in there because the Hulk couldn’t use furniture without breaking it. Steve said, “Hi, guys,” and gave them a fake smile as he got up, gathering the dishes from their breakfast as he did so. “Bucky, I’ll be back in a couple hours, okay?”

“Okay,” Bucky said. He was cleaned up from how he’d been when he first came, and dressed in normal clothes. It didn’t make as much of a difference as you’d think.

Steve left, and they sat down. “How’re you feeling today, Bucky?” Sam asked.

“Fine.”

“Good. This is Bruce—Steve showed you pictures of him the other day.”

“Yes—I remember.”

Sam nodded easily. “And you remember me?”

Bucky nodded. “You’re Sam.”

“Right. I don’t think we’ve talked about my job yet. I’m a counselor with the Veteran’s Administration. I focus on helping vets readjust to civilian life. I’d like to help you, if that’s okay.”

Bucky said, “Okay,” but Bruce would have bet anything he didn’t have the slightest idea what Sam was talking about.

“Great. So, the first thing I wanna say is, Thank you for your service.”

He must say that to everyone. Bruce might have thought he just hadn’t thought through the implications of saying that to Bucky, but—somehow, Bruce had the impression that, in his professional mode at least, Sam didn’t say anything without thinking it through.

“I’m a vet myself, too.” He gave a few details—which branch, the unit he’d served with, which country he’d fought in. “On our last mission, my buddy and me got shot down. I came home wounded. He didn’t make it. He died,” Sam corrected himself. “The VA helped me, so once I was back on my feet I went to college, got some training, and came back to help other vets.” He looked over at Bruce. “Bruce, do you wanna tell us a little about yourself?”

Not really, no. “Uh. My name’s Bruce.” And I turn into a giant green rage monster and kill people. “I guess Steve told you about the Hulk. When I’m not…that, I work in the labs with Tony. Research and development. I…when I change back from being the Hulk, I don’t really remember what he did. So that’s, um, something we have in common.”

“Thanks, Bruce,” Sam said. “Bucky, is there anything you’d like to tell us about yourself?”

In the circumstances, it struck Bruce as maybe a cruel question to ask. Bucky looked pretty cowed when he finally said, “No.”

But Sam just smiled and said, “That’s fine,” and Bruce figured he’d been making a point, that Bucky didn’t have to be afraid of not being able to do something Sam asked him to. Sam went on to ask if Bucky had any questions for him or Bruce—he didn’t—and about his goals for therapy. Unsurprisingly, Bucky didn’t have any of those, either. Finally, Sam went over the concept of confidentiality. “Steve wants to be involved in your care, and it’ll help him help you if I can tell him about what we’re working on. But it’s up to you if you want me to tell him a lot, a little, or nothing at all.”

“Okay,” Bucky said.

“Okay which?”

“You can tell him anything.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “If there’s anything in particular that we talk about, that you don’t want him to know about, just let me know, okay?”

“Okay.”

That interaction struck Bruce as particularly pointless—it was obvious that Bucky didn’t have the slightest clue what he’d just agreed to. Did going through the motions of informed consent do anything other than make Sam feel better?

Formalities dispensed with, they played games. Bucky applied himself to each one, without any apparent enjoyment. He proved to be very good at Jenga. Bruce was unsurprised that he himself lost—since the Hulk, even his real fingers felt oversized and clumsy to him. When the tower toppled, Bucky glanced back and forth between Sam and Bruce with something that might have been anxiety—wondering if there would be some unpleasant consequence for failure, maybe?

“Looks like Bucky’s the winner,” Sam said. “House rule, winner gets to pick the next game. Do you want to do this one again, or try something else?”

On Sam’s invitation, Bucky looked through the pile of things that Sam had brought. He lingered longest over a jigsaw puzzle featuring a publicity picture of Iron Man, so that was what they did next. Sam carefully narrated, one step at a time, how to spread out the pieces so they were all face-up, sort the edge pieces from the middle, and so on. When the picture was complete—it didn’t take too long; it was a kid’s puzzle—Bucky touched the picture with his metal hand. “Tony,” he said. “Right?”

“Yep, that’s Tony,” Sam confirmed. “He’s called Iron Man, when he’s in the suit. Like Bruce is Hulk when he’s green.”

“It’s not…exactly the same thing,” Bruce pointed out.

Sam glanced over at him, then back at Bucky. “Steve’s code name is Cap, or Captain America. The—They called you Soldier when you were doing missions. We call you Bucky when you’re not.”

Bucky nodded. “I didn’t need another name before, because they froze me between missions.”

“Yeah,” Sam agreed.

“Nobody gets frozen here,” Bucky continued.

“That’s right.”

“Not even Hulk,” Bruce said. He wondered if General Ross would have, if he’d managed to capture Hulk.

Sam got out the cards next. As he unwrapped them, he said, “A deck of cards is a great thing to have, because you can play all kinds of games with them. There’s some you can play by yourself, and some to play with other people. When I was in the Force, I always made sure I had a deck of cards in my pack, because I knew as long as I had that, I’d never be bored.”

He handed the unwrapped deck to Bucky, who studied them, sliding them between his metal hand and his real one, turning them over to look at the faces. Then he took one card from the stack, flexed it delicately in his metal hand, and tossed it halfway across the room. Then he threw another, landing it neatly on top of the first, the edges lined up perfectly. Then another, and another, until the whole deck was re-stacked on the other side of the room.

Sam applauded. “Wow. That’s a great trick, man. Can you do any others?”

Bucky touched the carpet with a thoughtful expression, then nodded. Getting up, he retrieved the deck from the other side of the room. This time he tossed the cards back in their direction. He dropped the first few on edge, sinking them into the carpet, at angles to one another. It wasn’t until he started throwing cards so that they landed horizontally, on top of the others, that Bruce realized he was making a house of cards by throwing them. “Jesus Christ,” Bruce swore.

“Brother, you are a wizard with those cards,” Sam said.

Bucky’s mouth curved up into something that Bruce, for one, was willing to believe might actually be a smile.

#

When Steve came back, Sam had the Soldier repeat what he’d done with the cards, throwing them into the shape of a building. He was…glad? Yes. Glad, to do it. The other trainings Sam had him and Bruce do, the Soldier was fairly sure he hadn’t done before, or at least not often. Sam had seemed satisfied with his performance, but with the cards, he’d been more than just satisfied. The Soldier knew he’d done better than Sam expected him to.

The way he saw it, even if Steve really wasn’t on a mission today, chances were there would be one soon. And they wouldn’t send him on missions unless they knew he was good at things.

Something about the idea of Steve going on missions without him felt wrong. The Soldier was careful not to think about why, since it probably had to do with Before.

Not only that, but he knew that Hulk had to stay in this room because he was clumsy and stupid, and couldn’t be allowed to do whatever he wanted between missions, like Steve and—he guessed—Bruce did. Were they keeping him here because they thought he might be clumsy and stupid, too?

Maybe. He wasn’t sure what there might be about other places that would make them better than here. But the Soldier knew he wasn’t clumsy. And probably not stupid, either. Did not being able to remember make him stupid? Bruce had said that he didn’t remember what he did when he was Hulk, but he was allowed out when he was Bruce. Did he remember his Before?

The Soldier didn’t know. But maybe being able to remember things now, when he was being Bucky, would be enough to make him count as not-stupid. Being not-stupid seemed important, even if he didn’t care much about getting out of this room or not.

So he threw the cards, and Steve was pleased with him. “That’s great, Buck. I wonder if I can do that? Can you do it slower, so I can see how?”

Doing it slower was harder, but the Soldier tried. After a few throws, Steve picked up another stack of cards and started throwing them. He wasn’t as good at it as the Soldier was. Thinking about how Sam had shown him what to do with the blocks and the broken-up picture, he said, “Try this,” and did the easier one, throwing the cards into a stack. He didn’t remember learning to do either one of them—it just came to him, when he had the cards in his hands—but it made sense that he would have learned the easier one first.

Steve tried, and after a few throws managed to get the cards at least on top of each other, even if they weren’t lined up exactly right. Once he got good at that, the Soldier showed him how to land them on edge again. “You have to do it hard, so it goes into the rug. Like you’re trying to get through somebody’s skull,” he said helpfully.

“…okay,” Steve said.

“I don’t think you really could,” he added, so Steve wouldn’t misunderstand. “But you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I…actually kind of do.”

#

A small and unworthy part of Steve resented that Bucky had made this step forward—doing something on his own initiative, and apparently enjoying it—the one time Steve wasn’t with him. And it rankled a little, that it had been Sam’s idea, to try playing games with him. Steve should have been the one to think of that—sure, they’d watched movies sometimes in the old days, when they could afford it or sneak in, but Bucky had always liked more physical pursuits. Or anything that gave him a chance to show off.

Steve kept up with taking his couple hours a day of “time for himself,” but the main thing that made it easier was having more options for things to do—some of them introduced by Sam, others by Steve. They kept up with the cards—Steve was getting better at it, but so was Bucky, and tagging after Bucky trying to keep up was so damn familiar, he loved it. Sam got Bucky into video games, too. People had tried to get Steve to play them, before, and they tended to think that Steve was having trouble with the technology, but really he just hadn’t seen the point. But if he was playing with Bucky, it was fun.

He also arranged with Tony to take Bucky to the gym, nearly every day—Tony wanted to be there, suited up, or at least send Bruce, since the gym was full of potential weapons, and Steve found it hard to argue with him. He preferred running outdoors, but the treadmill was all right, too, with Bucky there, and he introduced Bucky to basketball. The game hadn’t been very popular in their day, but it took up a lot less space than stickball, so he could see why so many city kids played it today. And you could play it just fine with only two people, which was good since none of the rest of the group could keep up with him and Bucky.

A week in, they all—minus Bucky—met in Tony’s apartment for what Sam called a “care team meeting.”

“Usually,” Sam explained, “the client would have a seat at the table too, but I’m not sure he’s ready for it.”

Bruce spoke up, “I found out…kind of a lot, about what might be happening with his memories. Talking to him about it could be…delicate. So.” He shrugged.

The first step turned out to be check-ins, the same as the group meetings Sam led at the VA, except instead of each of them checking in about how their week had been, it was about how Bucky’s week had been. “Usually we start with the client, then the family members, then the professionals,” Sam explained. “So I think that’s you, Steve.”

Steve thought so, too. “Okay. I…think he’s doing well. He doesn’t remember anything from before HYDRA—or even before his last mission. But he’s tracking really well from day to day now, and more of the last six months seems to be coming back to him. And he’s—” He shrugged. “He’s not acting like the old Bucky, but he’s coming out of his shell some.”

Sam nodded. “Good. I think he’s doing well, too.” He referred to a checklist in front of him. “ADLs—that’s activities of daily living, like eating, hygiene, and so on—are all fine. He’s developing a daily routine of recreational and therapeutic activities, and establishing rapport with me, Steve, and Bruce. He seems a little…subdued around Tony, but Tony doesn’t spend that much time with him. No signs that he’s a danger to himself or others, no unhealthy coping strategies. Appetite and sleep patterns, we don’t really know what’s normal for him, but they seem to be shaping up to be similar to Steve’s. Both of you could probably stand to sleep a little more. The only place he’s really striking out is articulating goals—he hasn’t identified any goals for therapy, for reintegration into civilian life, or for anything else. But since his main issues are with identity and autonomy, that’s not surprising. Tony?”

Tony looked up from his tablet. “Well, HYDRA hasn’t physically attacked the Tower yet, so that’s a plus. There have been a couple of attempts as systems infiltration that could be them trying figure out where he’s being held and what kind of security we have on him, or it could be a random uptick in the usual corporate espionage stats; hard to say. Either way, JARVIS drove them out before they got anything, but wasn’t able to trace them to a source. No threats or escape attempts from Barnes himself. I’m ordering him some harder jigsaw puzzles.”

Bruce went next. “He’s getting more…animated, in his sessions with Sam, at least when I’m there. Like he’s getting the idea that it’s okay for him to try new things. Um. Should I talk about my research now?”

“Sure,” Sam said.

Bruce did something to a panel set into the table in front of him, and a three-dimensional image of two brains popped up—because this was Tony Stark’s kitchen table, and of course it had holograms. Why not? “This shows the scans we took of Bucky’s brain earlier in the week.” He pointed at one of the brains with his fingers pinched together, then spread them. That brain grew, while the other one shrank. “All of these dark spots are areas of damage—places where the brain tissue was destroyed or killed via electric shock, drugs, or the freezing/thawing process.”

The picture of Bucky’s brain was speckled with black spots—some tiny, some bigger. Steve guessed that the hologram was just about life size, and some of the spots were the size of a dime.

Bruce pinched down that brain-image and brought up the other one. That one had a lot more black—there was one spot almost the size of Steve’s hand, with only a few little dots of normal, undamaged tissue. “This one is a 3-D rendering of the most recent scans in the HYDRA files. There are likely to be some inaccuracies, because JARVIS compiled it out of 2-D scans, but it’s accurate enough to give you the picture that there’s been significant improvement. We can tell from this that Bucky has a greatly enhanced capacity for neurological regeneration, comparable to other recipients of the super-soldier serum and its derivatives. As Sam can probably tell you, non-enhanced human brains do have some ability to self-repair after injury, but it’s not this dramatic.”

Sam nodded. “Usually it’s a slow process—and, correct me if I’m wrong, Doc, but I think it’s usually a matter of the brain constructing new pathways to link together the undamaged areas. Memories are stored in different places all over the brain. Some memories or abilities might be permanently lost because the part of the brain where they were stored is gone, but others might just be inaccessible because the pathways that lead to them are severed. People can sometimes get those memories back, in time, by making a new pathway to them.”

“You’re not wrong,” Bruce said. “That is how it usually works.”

Steve looked at the “before” image of Bucky’s brain. “So does that…is most of Bucky gone?”

“I think he might be,” Sam said apologetically. “I don’t know if we can say for sure—normal people can’t grow back this much of their brain. But just going by common sense, I’d think no—the new cells have grown in the same place where the damaged ones were, but they’re different cells.”

Bruce cleared his throat. “Uh. There, you are wrong. Uh, Bucky’s brain has been damaged more extensively than any other living subject—if you go back and compare the older HYDRA scans to the most recent ones, you see similar amounts of damage, but in different places. I’d say close to 75% of his cerebrum—the part of the brain responsible for higher functions—is not tissue that he had when he fell of that train the 1940’s. That is…unprecedented, as far as I know. But the two…available models…for how serum-affected brains recover from extensive damage suggests that the new growth does retain memory, skills, etcetera that was stored in the old tissue. At least—you don’t have any memory problems, do you, Steve?”

“No,” Steve said. “But I never had a brain injury.”

Bruce froze.

“Awk-ward,” Tony caroled. “I guess SHIELD didn’t tell you, Cap—your brain was about thirty percent freezer-burned when you came off the ice.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said. “Sorry, I thought you knew that. The—when you went through the wall, is that the first time you remember waking up?”

“I thought it was the first time I woke up.”

“You weren’t really…lucid, the other times. Um. So that shows us that freezing/thawing damage is completely reversible. We don’t have any evidence about electrical or pharmaceutical damage, but the other available model shows us that traumatic damage heals with no apparent deficits in memory or cognition.”

For a second, Steve thought he was talking about the Red Skull—maybe he’d come back from the dead at some point, and nobody mentioned that to Steve, either. But then Tony said, “You said the Other Guy spit out the bullet.”

“He did,” Bruce said. “Along with several ounces of gray matter. It was disgusting. And I remember putting it through my skull perfectly.”

He occupied himself with playing around with the holographic images while everyone else exchanged horrified looks. Sam was the first one to recover, even though as far as Steve knew this was the first time he’d heard about Bruce’s suicide attempt. “Thanks for sharing that with us, Doc. I’m sure it wasn’t easy to talk about, but it could be useful information.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Uh. Thanks.”

Tony went over to the bar and got himself a drink.

Bruce collected himself and went on, “So we’re two for two on serum-affected brains retaining memory after substantial trauma. Bucky’s trauma was more extensive, cumulative rather than a one-time insult, and appears to have been specifically intended to damage his memory, so it would be a mistake to over-generalize from the other two models. But I’d say, all other things aside, he’s probably capable of eventually recovering some of his original memories. I would expect there to be gaps, but I’m not willing to speculate about how big or small they might be. Which explains the behavioral conditioning. Given the amazing resilience of his brain, the only way to ensure that he didn’t regain some memories was to make sure he didn’t want to.”

Bruce made the brain holograms disappear with a flat-palmed gesture, and brought up new images of a scientific report. “The HYDRA files only have a few stray references to behavioral conditioning—there must have been more at one time, but it wasn’t included in what Natasha recovered for us. But I found this in the SHIELD files that she liberated. It’s been stripped of all identifying information—names, places, dates—but it’s a…procedure manual for behavioral conditioning to suppress memory, and it makes reference to a subject with enhanced capacity for neurological regeneration. It isn’t about you, and I’ve never given anyone the chance to experiment on me, so I’m fairly sure the subject is Bucky.”

“What did they do to him?” Steve asked.

“Part of it’s basic operant conditioning—linking a usually-involuntary physiological response to an external stimulus. You know, um, Pavlov’s dogs, with the bell, and the salivating?”

“Sure,” Steve said.

“It’s kind of like that. One of the first things they did was pair the physiological response of nausea to his name—speaking it or hearing it. I don’t think you really want to know how. Nausea is particularly effective as a deterrent in behavioral conditioning because it takes advantage of an adaptive response…you know how if you eat something and then throw up, you feel sick when you taste that food again? Kept early humans from poisoning themselves. Anyway. They did that, and then there was something involving triggering memories and following them up with a strong electric shock to the brain, which both caused additional brain damage and left him with a conditioned response of migraine-like headaches when he tried to remember anything.”

Tony had apparently read the report too, because he said, “They didn’t stop until it got to the point where his ability to form new memories was impaired.” His hand went to his chest, where the arc reactor had been. “He must have fought like hell.”

“He would’ve,” Steve said, dry-mouthed and slightly nauseous himself.

“The fact that he’s forming new memories now, and can recall them without apparent discomfort, is a good sign,” Bruce added.

Steve nodded. “He says, uh, that it doesn’t hurt to try to remember things since the river—since we fell into the Potomac after the fight on the Helicarrier. He has a lot of gaps, but he’s okay if he tries to remember.”

“That he figured that out shows psychological as well as neurological resilience,” Bruce said. “He probably got into the habit of not trying to remember anything, since it usually…hurt. That makes me…hopeful, about his chances for breaking through the behavioral conditioning.”

“How would we do that?”

“Systematic desensitization, like treating a phobia,” Bruce said, glancing over at Sam.

Sam nodded. “That makes sense—a phobia is basically a conditioned response of extreme fear to a stimulus that isn’t really—or isn’t usually—genuinely dangerous. Like the cliché about vets diving for cover when a car backfires, or a helicopter flies overhead. In reality, the stimuli are a lot more varied than that—I had one client who had panic attacks every time she came to a tollbooth, because checkpoints are a popular spot to plant IEDs. Or crowds, debris in the roadway, those are common ones.”

Abruptly, Tony got up from the table and went to the bar again, this time coming back with a bottle.

“I have a lot of experience with treating those,” Sam said, keeping one eye on Tony. “The basic idea is, you expose the person to the thing they’re afraid of gradually, a little at a time. Some people try to do it all at once—they’re afraid of water, so they jump in the ocean. That doesn’t work, usually, because all it does is create more traumatic associations with the stimulus. Instead, you start with maybe dipping your toes in a creek. Or a bathtub. If that’s too scary, back off and try again later, or try maybe a picture of water—you want something that’s close enough to the trigger to give you some discomfort, but it’s manageable. Sometimes just talking about the trigger is the first step.”

“Yeah, I’m totally over the water thing,” Tony said. “Can we focus on the guy who can’t say his own name without puking, please?”

“Nobody said anything about you, Tony,” Bruce pointed out.

“I’m feeling judged,” Tony announced. “And like this is not a safe space.”

Steve recognized the term “safe space” from Sam’s VA groups. Tony said it in a mocking way, but Steve wondered if he kinda meant it.

“I’m sorry you felt singled out, Tony,” Sam said. “Although I’m not sure why you did.”

“Yeah. Well. Read my Wikipedia entry.”

“I will,” Sam said. “That does bring up another point. Systematic desensitization is very difficult. It’s important for the client to feel safe and in control of the process. It’s definitely not something that we can start until Bucky feels ready for it—and until we can be sure that if he isn’t ready, or wants a break, he’ll say so.”

Bruce, with a sidelong glance at Tony, said, “I wonder if it’s even possible to explain to him that it might be possible to recover his ‘before’ memories, without triggering the migraines. Or the vomiting.”

“I guess we’ll have to come up with a way to find out,” Steve said.

Sam broke the long silence that stretched after that by clearing his throat and suggesting they “table that for now, and talk about short-term goals.”

They settled on encouraging Bucky to make more choices. They’d been asking his opinion on things—what he wanted to do, what he wanted to eat—all along, but he usually just agreed to whatever Steve or anyone else suggested. Sometimes they guessed at his preferences based on what he looked at or asked questions about the most, but Steve couldn’t think of a time when Bucky had made his own choice, clear and unambiguous. So that seemed like a good thing to work on. Sam reminded them not to force it, if Bucky seemed uncomfortable.

And when Steve mentioned that he felt bad about keeping Bucky indoors all the time, like HYDRA had probably done, Tony said he could make some security improvements to the big terrace on his floor, the one he used as a launching and landing pad. It wasn’t exactly what Steve had in mind—he wanted to take Bucky somewhere he could feel real sidewalks under his feet, see real people walking by. But it was what he could get, so he said, “Thanks, Tony. That’d be great. At least he could get a little fresh air.”

“Just don’t go taking him out there without warning me in advance,” Tony said. “I don’t want to be stumbling drunk to the can and bump into an assassin. Last thing I need.”

#

After the care team meeting, Sam had a lot of things on his plate, but he did make time to read Tony Stark’s Wikipedia entry, and find out what he’d done. And once he did….

Well, the really interesting part, as far as he was concerned, was that Tony had gone for the bar—clearly his coping mechanism of choice— before anybody had mentioned water. Something else had triggered him. Going back over the conversation, Sam considered and rejected tollbooths, cars backfiring, and Vietnam movies.

Panic attacks. They’d been talking about panic attacks, trauma phobias, and systematic desensitization. Yeah. He was willing to buy that Tony was, if not “totally over” the water thing, at least mostly over the water thing. Would he have really allowed it to stay on his Wikipedia page if he wasn’t? But there was something else he wasn’t over—and it just might be the abstract concept of panic attacks.

Still, it was the water thing Tony had called him on, and there was only one way Sam knew to act after he’d put his foot in it like that. The next time he and Tony were alone—it happened to be when they were checking over the terrace for anything that might pose a hazard to Bucky—he said, “I read your Wikipedia entry.”

“Congratulations,” Tony said.

“I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have used water as an example if I’d known. I’m sorry.”

Tony turned his head, slowly, to look at Sam. For a moment, his expression was inscrutable, a thousand-yard stare. Then he huffed and said, “Yeah, whatever. Do you think we need to Bucky-proof these planters?”

#

They started the session with a tactical simulation, on the movie screen. This one was about driving, which seemed like a useful skill, but the Soldier wasn’t sure why the cars had to be so brightly colored. He was also fairly sure that banana peels didn’t really do that. But that was what Sam said to do, so they did it. “Bruce, your pick,” Sam said next.

“Okay,” Bruce said, twisting his hands a little in his lap. “Uh, maybe something…quieter. How about a puzzle?”

Puzzles were the broken-up pictures. The Soldier really didn’t see the point of those, but Sam just went and got one out.

The puzzle was a new one. They’d done the flying man— Iron Man, the Soldier reminded himself—some cats, and a mountain. Maybe some others. This one was a city street, with buildings, people walking down it, a stand selling flowers. The pieces were smaller, too. At first, they seemed like meaningless spots of color—mostly gray. But as they started putting the edge pieces together, the Soldier began recognizing things: part of someone’s hand here, a corner of a window there.

It was kind of like the glimpses you got through a sniper scope. That must be the point of the activity—target recognition, visual patterns, different landscapes. Didn’t quite explain the basket of cats, and wasn’t Iron Man supposed to be an ally? It also wasn’t something he needed. But—it startled him to realize this— Hulk did. That must be why Bruce had picked it, and why Sam approved.

Now that he understood the point, the Soldier wasn’t sure why Sam had instructed them to start with the edges of the picture—they were tactically insignificant. But those were the orders, so the Soldier helped the others put together the edges first. Then he moved on to the people, assembling fragments of faces and hands and coats, making sure he could find a kill shot on each one.

Bruce…Bruce was doing the flower stand. He really was hopeless, wasn’t he? The Soldier risked a glance at Sam, out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t seem to have noticed that Bruce wasn’t doing it right. Unobtrusively, and without really thinking about why he was doing it, the Soldier found some pieces of the flower seller and nudged them toward Bruce. A few moments later, Bruce picked up the pieces and slotted them into place. Then went back to the flowers.

There was just no helping some people.

Still, Sam didn’t say anything. Or do anything. At least, not until they finished the puzzle, and then what he said was, “Bucky? What do you want to do next?”

He asked, that sometimes. The Soldier wasn’t sure why. Was he supposed to know, somehow, which training came next? It didn’t matter, though. If he waited, Sam would tell him.

But when he waited, Sam just said, “Bucky?”

Was he supposed to know, by now, what came next? Bruce seemed to. But he was only stupid when he was the Hulk. If there was some pattern to what trainings they did, the Soldier hadn’t noticed.

“Give it some thought,” Sam said, calmly.

Fine, if that was how he wanted it. Cards, maybe? But the Soldier was good at that one; Bruce had picked something he was terrible at. Maybe that was what he was supposed to do. But before he could think of something he wasn’t good at, the Soldier noticed that Bruce was twitching.

More than usual, that is. He was looking back and forth between Sam and the Soldier, hunching in on himself, like he was expecting something bad to happen. “Think about, um, the things we do. There’s cards, and Jenga—that’s the one with the blocks—and drawing, maybe that’ll go better this time—”

“Bruce,” Sam said. “Let the man think.”

Bruce curled in on himself a little more.

Keeping an eye on him, the Soldier decided maybe he ought to think fast. He didn’t remember Sam ever doing anything when the Soldier didn’t know the answers to questions, but Bruce had more memories than he did. “Uh—drawing?” he guessed. He didn’t see what the point of that was, either, so maybe it was something Sam thought he needed to practice.

“Okay,” Sam said. He sounded surprised. Not angry, though.

The Soldier relaxed, until he realized that now he had to think of something to draw.

#

Sam had thought, at first, that maybe Bucky’s choice of activity meant that he wanted to try expressing himself—probably an unrealistic expectation, given that last time they’d tried it, Bucky had done some kind of tactical map of their “last mission,” meaning the hospital.

He might have gotten the message that that wasn’t quite what was expected, because this time he stuck to sketches of whatever inanimate objects happened to be in his line of sight. Steve came home while they were still at it—Bucky trying to draw a throw pillow, and scowling at the paper with increasing dissatisfaction. He’d already broken two crayons.

Steve got down on the floor and started burbling about shading, and Sam took the opportunity to say, “Looks like you’ve got this, Cap.”

“Yeah, bye,” Steve said, nodding absently, so Sam and Bruce slipped out.

Bruce left at the same time he did. “That’s always…more tiring than it seems like it should be,” he noted as they boarded the elevator.

“Drawing, or Barnes?”

“Barnes,” Bruce said. “I mean, I’m not complaining. Steve needs the break, and I don’t think Tony would…yeah. But there’s a reason I’m not that kind of doctor.”

“You’re doing great,” Sam encouraged him. “But listen, while we’re on the subject….”

“Yeah?”

“Next, time, maybe don’t jump in to rescue him quite so fast. We’re working on getting him to make his own choices, remember?”

“We also said we weren’t going to push it if he was uncomfortable,” Bruce reminded him.

Sam hadn’t gotten the sense that Bucky was uncomfortable—not then, at least. But he could have missed something. He made a small, interrogative sound.

“He was afraid he was going to get it wrong.” Bruce sounded more confident than Sam had ever heard him. “He didn’t understand what you were asking, and he didn’t know what he could say that he wouldn’t get in trouble.” By the end of that statement, Bruce’s tone had gone from confident to insistent. But suddenly, he took a step back, hunching his shoulders and twisting his hands.

Sam had a moment of déjà vu, thinking of the moment, when they’d first arrived at the Tower, when he’d realized Steve wasn’t exactly a caregiver, he was also a traumatized vet. Bruce wasn’t a vet—not in any conventional sense—but…. “That a problem the Hulk has?”

Bruce huffed. “The other guy? No. He’s the proverbial eight-hundred-pound gorilla. He sits anywhere he wants. No,” Bruce repeated.

Not a problem the Hulk had, Sam realized. A problem he solved. After unintentionally triggering Tony, Sam had sought out information on each of his housemates, and it was pretty obvious that the Hulk was a defense mechanism written in screaming neon-green capitals. And Sam was sure Bruce had just described what he was defending against —not exactly what had happened, but how it felt: not knowing what was expected of you, but knowing that something terrible would happen if you got it wrong.

And the guess was more or less confirmed when the next thing Bruce said was, “Sorry, I…next time I won’t….”

“No, it’s fine,” Sam said. “I thought he was okay, but you know, he’s pretty hard to read. I’m pretty much flying by the seat of my pants, here.”

Bruce ducked his head and muttered something about Sam being the expert.

“Nobody’s an expert in this,” Sam pointed out.

#
They were always asking him things. What did he want to do? Did he want to eat this, or that? Did he like this picture of a shirt, or that one? Sometimes, the Soldier thought it was a test—maybe not the kind of test you could fail, but to see what he’d do or say. Handlers did that sometimes. Maybe. Not that he remembered any particular time that had happened, in the old Project, but it seemed like something that probably had.

But Steve did it too, and even Bruce, sometimes. He still wasn’t sure whose handler Sam was, and what Tony was supposed to be, but Steve was another soldier, so he couldn’t be anybody’s handler. And Bruce was…apparently, sometimes a green soldier-thing and sometimes a tech. That wass strange and hard to categorize, but he couldn’t be that and a handler either. Probably.

So when Steve said things like, “What do you want to do today?,” it had to be something other than a test, and the only thing the Soldier could think of for it to be was an actual question. As though he thought the Soldier might want to do something, and, more than that, that it mattered what it was.

And that? That’s just weird. It wasn’t that the Soldier didn’t know what want meant. He wanted not to kill Steve, even before he knew who Steve was. He wanted to keep ahead of the retrieval-or-termination teams. When he’d been in that hospital, he’d wanted to get out without killing anybody. When it had become clear that he was leaving either with the team from his old Project or this new one, he’d wanted this one. He didn’t want to have his new memories—the little hoard of them he had—burned out of his head again.

Frankly, that seemed like a lot of things to want. He wasn’t sure he had room to want anything else, and even if he did, he wasn’t sure why he’d waste it on shirts or taking a bath rather than a shower, or any of the other stupid shit Steve was always asking him about.

Okay, maybe if you were really going to press him, he wanted Steve to stay, or to take the Soldier with him when he went somewhere. He didn’t really know why, except that Steve was always better than not-Steve.

But that? That was pretty much going to happen anyway. So he didn’t see much point in answering, even when Steve started doing that thing where he listed things they could do, like he thought maybe the Soldier forgot. “We could watch another movie, if you want. Or play cards. Um…go out on the deck. Go to the gym. Play Mario Kart. Or there’s other computer games we can try; Tony has pretty much all of them. He says we’d either love or hate something called Call of Duty. Given it’s Tony, I’m thinking probably hate—the last game he tried to get me to play had to do with zombies—but you never know, and…I’m babbling. I’m going to shut up now.”

Steve did, in fact, shut up, but he sat there looking at the Soldier in a hopeful, expectant way. After a minute or so he folded his hands in his lap, which some part of the Soldier’s brain assured him was hilarious, even though he didn’t know why.

#

A week into the Bucky-making-choices goal, and Steve was pretty sure he hated it. Not the goal itself—he was one-hundred-percent on board with Bucky making choices—but actually working on it? That he hated. When they were actually doing something—whether it was basketball or cards or anything—Bucky seemed almost normal.

Well, no. Normal was too much of a stretch. But he was there, engaged with whatever was happening. Alive. When you asked him something like, “What do you want to do today?,” he just went blank. Especially when it was Steve asking—oddly, he responded a little better to Sam, and maybe even Bruce. Sam had some theories about that, like that it mattered less to Bucky what Sam thought of him.

Steve wasn’t sure he bought it, but he was pretty sure that it wasn’t that Bucky was afraid to answer. It was more like he didn’t understand the question, or couldn’t quite believe concepts like want had anything to do with him.

Steve almost— almost —wanted to just skip the whole thing. He knew that if he said something like, let’s go to the gym, okay? , Bucky would agree. He’d agree to anything, but once they started playing basketball or whatever it was, he would seem sort of like Bucky, and not what Tony had once, when he thought Steve couldn’t hear, called “Hydra’s murder-puppet.” But he did fundamentally agree that Bucky had a right to make his own choices, and the only way to get him to see that was to keep giving him space to make them. He wasn’t selfish enough to take that away from Bucky just because he didn’t like it.

He tried to handle it like Sam did, just patiently waiting for an answer, projecting how he had all the time in the world, but he wasn’t very good at it. ““We could watch another movie, if you want.” He still didn’t know if Bucky liked, or even understood, movies. “Or play cards. Um…go out on the deck.” Sometimes, he thought Bucky enjoyed seeing the sky, feeling the sun on his face—but it might just be that Steve wanted him to enjoy it. “Go to the gym.”

That one, he was pretty sure Bucky did like, or at least felt better when he was doing it. Need for physical activity seemed to be part of the super-soldier package. But Bucky didn’t so much as twitch at the suggestion.

“Play Mario Kart. Or there’s other computer games we can try; Tony has pretty much all of them. He says we’d either love or hate something called Call of Duty.” When he’d floated that one to Sam, Sam had said “ No. Way,” and talked about the psychological effects of simulated violence for a while, before shrugging and saying, “Actually, he might like it. Is it a good idea? I honestly have no idea.”

Here, now, Steve went on, “Given it’s Tony, I’m thinking probably hate—the last game he tried to get me to play had to do with zombies—but you never know, and…I’m babbling. I’m going to shut up now.”

He did manage to actually shut up, so that was something. When he started wanting to start talking again, to fill the silence and maybe get some kind of a reaction out of Bucky, he folded his hands in his lap—like the nuns used to make them do, in grade school, when they were poking each other with pencils too much.

Not that Bucky would remember that. He just sat there, looking at Steve—or looking in the direction where Steve happened to be; it was hard to tell.

Steve sat there and looked back at him for as long as he could stand it. Then he sat there and looked back at him some more. He could do this all day.

At least, he damn well ought to be able to do this all day. What did it say about him, he wondered, that getting beat up in an alley by some mook twice his size had been easier than this? That he’d trade this for that, in a heartbeat, even without factoring in how, if it was then instead of now, Bucky wouldn’t have suffered decades of torture at Hydra’s hands?

Bucky was here, and with him, and alive, and safe, Steve reminded himself. He ought to be happy with that. He ought to be fucking ecstatic.

Finally, when Steve thought he might actually start screaming if something didn’t happen soon, Bucky shifted his weight, leaning back on his hands. “Are we just gonna sit here all day?” he asked.

“I hope not,” Steve was startled into admitting. “What--”

He was going to ask, what do you want to do instead, but Bucky interrupted him. “You pick.”

That, Steve decided, counted as Bucky making a choice. “Gym?”

Bucky was on his feet before Steve had even finished saying it.

#

The Soldier remembered things, now. Since the hospital, one day followed another in his memory. He rarely found himself in any of the several places he was allowed to be—the gym, the outside place—without being able to piece together how he’d gotten there. He tested himself, sometimes—sitting down to a meal, he would try to remember what the last one had been, and review the territory in between for gaps. Most of what he remembered was of negligible tactical value—riding on the elevator, sitting in his room, eating, talking to Steve. This, he gathered, was what it was like in people’s heads: a mass of irrelevant data.

He’d barely begun to get used to that, when other things started coming back to him. Not much, at first—brief, contextless flashes. But sometimes, by focusing on them, he could get more. Not a lot, but more.

Standing on the mats in the gym, while Bruce talked about stretching and breathing, he remembered another gym, mats rougher beneath his bare feet, smelling of stale sweat rather than filtered air. In the memory, he threw up his arm to block a blow.

Tugging on the thread got him a few more seconds of combat, a disabling blow. “Next,” a bored voice said, and another opponent came at him, even as the first dragged himself away. The memory felt…thick, like it was probably something that had happened a lot. A training exercise.

He mostly remembered training exercises—armed, unarmed, various kinds. Those, and missions. Going outside, with Steve, looking down on the street, sometimes gave him memories of sniper’s nests. The Soldier knew that most of the time he spent in sniper’s nests was spent waiting, but if he tried, he sometimes got the kill shot, the body falling in the street, the screams of passersby.

He usually didn’t try.

The Soldier was supposed to report when he started remembering things. It meant that he needed the Procedure. They didn’t do the Procedure here; Steve had told him that, more than once.

And really, even if they did, most of the memories he was getting back weren’t anything he particularly wanted to keep. It wouldn’t matter, if they wanted to take them.

He was just about ready to tell them—to tell Steve, at least; Steve would know what to do—when, for the first time, he tugged on a thread that led to something he wanted to keep.

They’d left him alone for a while, longer than usual, the Soldier thought, and he’d wandered over to the shelf of food, taking down a bag of something and a can of drink. The something in the bag might have been something they’d have given him in the Project—it tasted like calories and chemicals—but the drink was sweet and sour, and also slightly metallic, and he remembered a burst of flavor on his tongue, a similar taste but purer and richer, without the metallic part.

Tracing it back, he remembered someplace hot, sun setting toward dusk, the ground gritty under his feet. He and—someone, a handler, probably—walked down a narrow street crowded with stalls selling all manner of things: carpets, clothes, small electronics, spices, cooked meat. They spoke in a language he didn’t understand, or perhaps he just hadn’t bothered remembering any of the words. He wore tactical gear, a Kalashnikov hanging from his shoulder. So the memory was after a mission, probably. Maybe before, but he thought after.

The handler stopped and spoke to one of the stall-holders. Two, please, pointing. An exchange of coins. As they walked on, the handler gave the Soldier one of the things he had bought, a small fruit, orange, warm from the sun. The Soldier had turned it over in his hands; he remembered wondering what it was for. The handler had showed him how to remove the bitter peel and separate the fruit into segments. He’d put one into his mouth, and that had been the flavor, the one that was like what he was drinking now.

Rationally, the Soldier knew it wasn’t much. They gave him nice things to eat all the time, here. Probably, the old Project had too, and he just didn’t remember. Especially if the memory really was from after a mission—that seemed like something that would happen.

He didn’t really need that memory. But it was his, and he liked going back to it.

#

They had been out on Tony’s deck for a while, not really talking much—Steve didn’t know what to say, apart from pointing out landmarks from before the war, that Bucky might recognize if he was able to recognize anything. That, he was pretty sure, would be a spectacularly bad idea, so they just sat, or stood. Bucky wandered around some. Scoping out sight-lines, maybe.

“I’m starting to remember things,” he said suddenly.

Steve’s head snapped up like it had been pulled on a string. “You are? From—before?” He almost didn’t dare hope.

And it turned out he might as well not have. “No. Since. Missions, training, that kind of thing. Not a lot.”

Missions and training were the last things Steve would have wished for Bucky to remember—but it did mean his brain was healing. “Do you…want to talk about it?”

Bucky looked out over the skyline for a moment. “Most of it’s not very nice.”

No kidding. “I can handle hearing about things that aren’t nice, if you need to talk about them.”

He shook his head. After a long moment, he said, “They usually did the Procedure, when I started to remember things.”

“Nobody’s doing that here,” Steve said firmly.

Bucky nodded. “You said. I remember you saying that.”

Steve forced a smile. “Good.”

They sat. Steve wanted—no, he didn’t want, but part of him felt like he should—press Bucky to say more, so Steve could know what kind of horrors he had in his head now. But Sam had been pretty clear that talking about bad things helped only if the person actually wanted to talk, and he didn’t know if Bucky would be able to say so, if he didn’t.

Sometimes, you just need to be, was one of Sam’s sayings, and Steve tried to do that. Just be with Bucky.

After a while, Bucky said, “Do they ever….”

“Hm?” Steve prompted him.

“Do you ever get things after missions?”

“What kind of things?” Steve asked cautiously. It was hard to tell, whether the question had anything to do with what Bucky had said, about starting to remember missions. A lot of the time, the things he said came out of nowhere.

“I don’t know. Food, maybe.”

“Yeah. Why, you hungry?” Bucky didn’t ask for things, as a rule.

“No. Didn’t we just eat? No, I just wondered. If that was a thing that happens.”

“Sure. Um, the first time I fought with the Avengers, after I came out of the ice, we went out for schwarma after. Tony’s idea. That’s, uh, meat in flatbread. Spicy. It’s good. And it was nice to be with a team again.” They’d all been dead tired and beat up; nobody had talked much. It had reminded him, a little, of the Howling Commando days, after a fight, but with better food.

Bucky nodded, like that was somehow important information, and lapsed into silence again.

#

“So, Steve mentioned you were starting to remember a little bit,” Sam commented, when he and Bruce had been in Bucky’s room for a little while.

Bucky shifted his weight slightly. “Not before.”

“Right, he said that,” Sam agreed. “He said you were remembering missions and training, from when you were….”

Bucky nodded. “Not a lot.” He squared himself up, like he was bracing for something. “What do you want to know?”

Sam wasn’t sure how to answer that. He wanted Bucky to understand that he could talk about his experiences with Sam, but that he didn’t have to, if he didn’t want. But that was kind of a tall order for a guy who struggled with questions like whether he wanted mayo or mustard on his ham sandwich. “Nothing in particular,” he finally said. “Just wanted to put it on the table as a topic.”

After doing that thing where he worked his mouth like he was chewing for a while, Bucky said, “They aren’t…I’m not getting it back in order. I don’t know when any of it happened.”

“It happens that way sometimes,” Sam answered. Not that anyone’s experience was like Bucky’s—but with more ordinary memory problems, it happened that way.

Bucky just kept looking at him, in the dead-eyed way that left you wondering where he’d gone, inside his head. Or if there was anywhere in there to go.

“When I,” Bruce said, then paused. “When I come back from being the other guy, I don’t remember much. I mean, basically nothing.”

Bucky turned his head, slowly, to look at Bruce.

“But sometimes I get…flashes. Sense memory. Not any kind of a…narrative. I don’t think the other guy…thinks. But I get a sound, or an image. A feeling, sometimes.”

Now Bucky nodded. “Yeah.”

“If there’s video of what happened, or if the others on the team were there and can tell me about it, sometimes I can put things together a little. Once in a while, it’s not even as bad as I thought it was. This one time, I remembered…being in a park. A kid screamed, and I stepped in something squishy.”

Bucky’s jaw worked again.

“Yeah. You know what I thought it was. Finally, I talked to Tony about it. It was a birthday party. I stepped in the cake.” Bruce smiled bleakly. “The kid was fine.”

Bucky looked down at his hands for a while. The metal one whirred. Sam wondered if he had sense memories like that, screaming and something squishy.

Finally, Bucky raised his head and asked, “What’s a birthday party?”

#

“I thought we’d try something a little different today, if that’s okay with you,” Sam said, at the beginning of his session with Bucky. Bruce, who Sam had briefed beforehand, curled his shoulders and leaned away, like he was trying to pretend he wasn’t here.

Bucky’s eyes flicked up to Sam’s face, sharper and more alert than Sam usually saw him. “Mission?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” Sam said slowly, wondering if it would be useful to frame the idea of recovery as a mission, using his existing mental framework as a starting point, since the idea of therapy would be completely outside his experience, either as the Winter Soldier or from before. “I mean, no, not really.” Maybe later, he decided, but since it was pretty clear that to Bucky, “mission” meant “killing people,” it was more important to avoid ambiguity at this point.

Bucky settled back. The relaxation of his body was almost imperceptible, but the sharpness going out of his eyes was obvious. “Okay.”

“Do you remember what I said about my job?”

Bucky went blank for a moment—blanker than usual—and Sam wondered if “do you remember” was a spectacularly bad way to frame that question. But after a moment, Bucky said, “You’re a counselor with the Veteran’s Administration. You focus on helping vets readjust to civilian life.” He sounded like he was reciting, and Sam wondered if those had, in fact, been his exact words. “I don’t know what that means.”

Sam could work with that. “A lot of guys, when they come home from war, don’t really…know how to be a civilian anymore. I mean, they usually remember what their lives were like before they were soldiers. Nearly always.” Really terrible TBI cases excepted. “But a lot of the time, it’s hard to just…pick up where you left off. Maybe the kind of life you wanted before the war—family, job, kids, whatever it is—isn’t what you want anymore, or maybe you still want it, but you don’t see how the person you’ve become can fit in with the life you had planned. So my job is to help those guys figure out what they want now, and how to make it happen.” Sam had worked hard on that summary, but he still wasn’t sure Bucky would understand it—he just hoped he’d get some kind of hint about what part Bucky was having the most trouble with.

Unsurprisingly, Bucky just sat there for a while, staring at the carpet. But Sam was good at waiting, and finally, Bucky looked up at him. “The war’s over?”

Shit. Sam should have expected that—there had been a firefight at the hospital, just a couple of weeks ago. Hydra wasn’t gone, and Bucky would know Sam was lying if he said otherwise. He thought for a moment and explained, “Not quite. There’s still a little bit of fighting going on. But it can be over for you. I know—back when you and Steve joined up, it was for the duration, but we usually don’t do it that way anymore. Soldiers serve a few years, then once you’ve put your time in, you’re done. It’s somebody else’s turn.” That was how it was supposed to work, anyway; Sam didn’t figure it was necessary to get into how people could be re-upped against their will.

After some more carpet-staring, Bucky said, “What about Steve?”

Again, not what Sam had been expecting—but may it should have been. “What about him?”

“Is the war over for him?”

If it was any other client, Sam would redirect by saying this session was for Bucky, not Steve, but at this point he didn’t want to shut down anything Bucky was willing to ask about. “That’s…tricky,” he admitted. “Steve…could be done. God knows the man’s done enough for this country. But he’s…the last few months, we’ve been focusing on finding you, and if we come across any Hydra—any enemy troops—while we’re at it, he takes care of that, too. And he’s part of a team, with Tony and Bruce and a few other people, that….” He wasn’t sure how to explain the Avengers, really.

“We’re not soldiers,” Bruce said. “And we’re not at war. But we’re…ready…to fight if we have to. If there’s some big…danger, where we’re the best ones to fight it. It isn’t a full-time job.”

Bucky nodded, once. Sam did some more waiting, but this time it seemed like Bucky really didn’t have anything else to say, so after a while, he went on, “I think Steve’s having some trouble figuring out what to do with himself, now that he doesn’t have a war to fight, too. That’s maybe something you and he could talk about.” Was that crossing a line, ethically? Because if anything was going to get Steven Grant Rogers to really work on finding a person he could be after he’d laid down his arms, Do it for Bucky was that thing.

After a short period of carpet-staring, Bucky said, “Okay.”

Now that wasn’t much to work with. Sam decided to move on to the next part of his usual spiel, the part that came after you aren’t the only one having trouble with this, and said, “So, we usually start by thinking about short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals. Short-term goals are the things you want to start doing soon, like in the next few weeks.” Most of his usual examples were not relevant in this situation, but he rolled on anyway, “For some guys, that might be they want to get some kind of a job, or it might be picking up a hobby again—one guy I worked with, it was he wanted to be able to go to his kid’s baseball game without having flashbacks. Another guy, it was getting out of bed before noon every day.”

Bucky glanced over at the other room, where he slept, but didn’t say anything.

“Long term goals are more about the big picture—career, family, that kind of thing. And medium-term goals are usually the bridge between the two—things you can start doing pretty soon, that tie in to your long-term goals. Like if your long-term goal was a certain career, going back to school might be a medium-term goal. Some people find it easier to start with short-term goals; some start with long-term goals and work backwards.”

Some more carpet-staring, then Bucky looked at him. Sam decided to take that as a sign that Bucky didn’t have anything to say, but was ready for Sam to say something else—not because he was entirely sure that was the case, but he had to make some assumptions if they were going to get anywhere.

“So, in a way, it’s a little bit like planning a mission—you ever do that?”

Bucky worked his jaw a little bit. “I think so. Maybe.”

“Only the mission is the rest of your life,” Sam added.

“Mission objective?”

“You have to decide what that is.”

Sounding sure of himself, for the first time Sam could recall—apart from when he’d been getting ready to blow a Hydra helicopter out of the sky--Bucky said, “I’ve never done that.”

#

They didn’t want him to fight.

After that confusing briefing, they moved on to the usual…activities. Not trainings, like he’d thought, if they didn’t want him to fight.

Or maybe trainings for the strange mission-that-wasn’t-a-mission Sam had talked about. Either way, he couldn’t really concentrate on them. He tried to push what Sam had said out of his mind, focus on what was in front of him, but his mind kept coming back to it. The war’s over…for you.

But not for Steve, not entirely. That seemed wrong, somehow. Part of it—a small part—was wondering why this Project still wanted Steve, if they didn’t want him. Okay, Steve could remember things better, but the Soldier wasn’t damaged. He could still fight.

But that wasn’t the biggest reason it seemed wrong. Mostly, it just did.

He didn’t know why. It wasn’t like he remembered doing missions with Steve—he was starting to remember some, not whole missions, but bits and pieces, and Steve wasn’t in any of them. Except for the last one, when it had been his mission to eliminate Steve.

Which also seemed wrong. But he’d figured that one out, he remembered figuring that out: a schism in the Project, one side had had Steve, and the other side had him. There must have been a time before that, when the Project was whole, and he and Steve had been on the same side. That must have been why it seemed wrong, fighting him.

Didn’t explain why it seemed wrong, Steve fighting without him. The original Project would have sent them on separate missions sometimes—some missions only needed one Soldier. (All the ones he could remember, even in bits and pieces, only needed one Soldier. But Steve had said his side of the Project did other kinds of missions.)

“You fight with Steve sometimes.” The words came out, directed at Bruce, before he’d known he was going to say them.

Bruce froze, a wooden block in his hand—they were doing the one with the tower of blocks, where you had to try not to knock it over. He glanced over at Sam.

A warning, maybe, but Sam didn’t look angry. And this was important. The Soldier pressed on, “When you’re--” He made a gesture indicating bigger.

“Yeah,” Bruce said. “Sometimes.”

And bigger-Bruce was stupid. He could barely even talk. If he could fight with Steve, it couldn’t matter that the Soldier didn’t remember things. Not that much, anyway. “I could do that, too.” He glanced over at Sam, warily. That you weren’t supposed to argue with handlers was one of those things he knew without remembering how he’d learned it.

But it wasn’t Sam who answered; it was Bruce. “You could,” he said.

“Bruce--” Sam said.

“It’s up to Steve who’s on the team,” Bruce interrupted. “Do you honestly think there’s one single chance in hell that he’d say no, if it was what Bucky wanted?”

“…No,” Sam admitted. “But,” he added, putting his hand on the Soldier’s knee, “only if you really want to.”

That didn’t make sense. None of it did. How could Steve be the one who decided who he fought with? Wasn’t Sam his handler?

No. No, he wasn’t—Sam had already told him, twice. His job was helping soldiers not be soldiers anymore. The Soldier hadn’t really grasped it, because his Project hadn’t had anything like that. Hadn’t needed it—if they didn’t need him, they froze him until they did. Probably did the same for any other soldiers they had. This Project didn’t freeze anybody—they’d told him that, every time he asked.

Steve had a different handler, then, because he was still a soldier. And—well, Sam had asked if the Soldier ever planned his own missions, and he was pretty sure he had. Maybe earlier, when he hadn’t had quite as many Procedures and could remember better. So that was what Steve did, and picking personnel was part of planning missions. There would be somebody else who told him what the missions were. Maybe Tony, or somebody they hadn’t told him about yet. Or somebody they’d told him about but he didn’t remember.

“Are we still playing?” Bruce wondered aloud. “If we are, it’s your turn, Bucky.”

So he’d sorted out the part about Steve deciding. What was the other thing that didn’t make sense? Only if you really want to. That was it. What did wanting have to do with missions?

He’d failed his last mission because he hadn’t wanted to do it. Hadn’t wanted to kill Steve. That was probably it—they wouldn’t want him in the field if he was going to be erratic. He thought, maybe, he’d been erratic before that, and that was why he had so many Procedures, but they didn’t do Procedures here.

Okay, then. He just had to show them he’d do what he was told. As long as it wasn’t killing Steve.

He pulled another block out of the stack.

#

Steve had been carefully—so carefully—avoiding the subject of his and Bucky’s shared past. He had no way of knowing what might trigger the Hydra conditioning in Bucky’s head, apart from his real name, and, okay, Steve might be known for rushing in where angels feared to tread, but he could be careful when it mattered.

So he was thrown for a loop when Bucky said, “We used to fight together, didn’t we?” Misreading his hesitation, Bucky went on, “I don’t mean—like at the river. On the same side. Before. Right?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Yeah, we did. You—remember?”

Bucky shook his head. “No. Not really. I just…sometimes I know things without knowing how I know them.”

“You’re right, we did.” He wondered if it was okay to give some details. “We fought in the war together, with a team called the Howling Commandos. And before that—before this--” Steve gestured at his body, “—I used to get in a lot of scraps, in the neighborhood. You used to have to pull guys twice my size off me in alleys, couple times a week.”

Bucky narrowed his eyes. “Like—Bruce, when he’s that green thing?”

“Huh?” It took Steve a moment to realize what he meant—Bucky didn’t remember him, the old him.

He could be sad about that later. Focus. “No, I—before I got the Super Soldier serum, I was a lot smaller. Can I show you a picture? Jarvis can probably bring one up.”

Bucky nodded, slightly.

“Okay. Um, if it makes your head hurt or anything, just say, and we’ll stop. Jarvis, can you find a picture of me before the serum? I think there are some from the Smithsonian exhibit on their website.”

The TV came on, showing a picture of Steve at Basic, standing between two other recruits for scale. Bucky went up to the screen, staring at it. After looking back and forth between the picture and Steve a few times, he said, “Was I--?”

“No—no. You…you put on some muscle, from the serum, but not as…dramatic. You didn’t get any taller.”

“I have pictures of the Sergeant available as well, if you would like to see them,” Jarvis put in.

“You think that’ll be okay?” Steve asked. He got another little nod from Bucky, and Jarvis changed the picture on the screen—a candid of Steve and Bucky with their arms around each other’s shoulders, a couple of the other Commandos in the background.

“That’s me before?”

Not exactly was the real answer—they were pretty sure Bucky had had some kind of serum derivative the first time he was captured, before Steve had rescued him and the rest of the 107th. But Steve didn’t think they needed to get into that. “Yeah.”

“You had your procedure first.”

“Yeah. You were—you were pretty mad, that I let them experiment on me. But they wouldn’t let me join the Army, the way I was before. I wasn’t just little; I got sick all the time, too. And I wanted to fight, especially after you joined up.”

Bucky looked at the picture for a while, occasionally reaching out to touch the screen. He looked down at himself, flexing the fingers of the metal arm. “Was it—they did the Procedure on me, after something happened to my arm. Right? Is that…they picked us because we couldn’t fight otherwise?”

“I…I’m not really sure why they picked us,” Steve said slowly. Well, he knew a little about why Dr. Erskine had picked him—had known some of it then, and had read more after he’d been unfrozen. But—“Bucky, I volunteered.”

Bucky turned away from the TV. “Didn’t I?”

Oh, Christ. Jesus Christ in fucking heaven. “No, Buck. You--” Steve had to stop, before he screamed, or cried.

Bucky was shaking his head. “I did, though. I was hurt, and I wouldn’t live without the Procedure, so I—” He stopped short. “But they lied. When they said I’d die without the Procedure. They lied.”

“They lied to you a lot.” With dawning horror, Steve realized that wasn’t the worst that they’d lied about. He’d read in the files, had even talked to Sam about, how the KGB arm of Hydra had told Bucky he was a Soviet patriot, who’d agreed to be frozen and have his memories taken away so he could keep serving his country.

Somehow, it had never occurred to him that Bucky might still think that was true.

For a second, he considered not telling him. Excuses bloomed in his mind. Bucky was fragile. He was confused. He didn’t need to know that he’d been a prisoner of war for 70 years.

But Hydra had lied to Bucky. Steve wasn’t going to. “Bucky, it was Hydra who did your procedure. They captured you and—and that’s when it started.”

Bucky looked down for a moment, then back up at him. “Somebody else did yours?”

#

The soldier had been—wrong, in some of his conclusions. It felt like—like receiving bad mission intel. Or like realizing that the Project had lied, the first time. Or like seeing Steve fall into the river.

No. Not quite as bad as that. But bad enough.

Steve explained things, though, and it didn’t occur to the Soldier to doubt him. The Project might have lied, but Steve wouldn’t. It took a while—Steve left once, and came back with food and Sam—but eventually he got the facts laid out.

First, he and Steve had grown up together, not far from here, in the United States of America. That was a huge, terrifying blank in the Before, and the Soldier had to stop Steve from giving him too many details, when the headache started pressing behind his eyes.

The United States had gone to war against Germany, and the Soldier had gone to fight, not as the Soldier, but as a soldier. Hydra had been in Germany then, but they hadn’t known that. Steve hadn’t gone, because he was small and sick. He had volunteered for his Project—different in some vague but important way from the Soldier’s Project—and had been chosen.

He’d come over and joined the war, doing missions alongside the man who was the name it hurt to remember, against the part of Germany that was Hydra.

Then, on one mission, the man who had been the name fell from a train. That made sense; the Soldier didn’t like fighting in high, narrow places. It was one of the things he knew without knowing why. Steve explained—spent a lot of time explaining—that no one had thought he could survive the fall. They hadn’t come looking for him because they thought he was dead. (“We would have,” Steve said. “If we’d thought there was any chance at all…and normally, we would have for the body, too. I wanted to. But it was heavily occupied territory, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t ask the other guys to risk their lives to bring back a body. Even yours.” The Soldier didn’t know why he would have wanted the body. Except—he remembered a few missions, where he’d been told to do things to the body after he’d eliminated the target. Cut it up, or hang it up where people would see. Maybe it was like that, only different.)

But he hadn’t died, and the Project had found him. Hydra. They’d done the Procedure, put his new arm on. Froze him. The war had ended, and Germany lost, but Hydra kept going, embedding itself in other countries—not like the snake the Soldier had envisioned, but like a creeping mold or rust. They had kept him for seventy years—a stretch of time the Soldier couldn’t imagine—freezing him, trading him between one country’s Hydra infestation and another, sending him on missions. Until the river, and Steve.

The new data swirled around inside the empty cavern of his skull until it hardened into a lump of truth. He voiced it this time, in case he was wrong again. “They took away my memories on purpose, so I wouldn’t know. That I was supposed to be fighting against them.”

“Yeah, Buck, they did,” Steve said softly.

“They told me it was just part of the Procedure. That’s why—you and Bruce can remember things. You didn’t have to have that part, because you volunteered.”

“Right.” Steve swallowed hard. “Buck, I’m so, so sorry.” He took a deep breath. “They did it on purpose, and whenever it seemed like you might be starting to remember, they did it more.” Pressing his lips tightly together, he looked over at Sam.

“There’s something else you have a right to know,” Sam said. “About those headaches you get. We, uh, we’ve been holding off on talking about it, because we thought talking about it might trigger one. It’s up to you if you want to hear it now, or hear it later, or not at all.”

Want again. But this time, the Soldier had an answer. “Tell me.”

#

It turned out, to Sam’s immense relief, that the situation wasn’t quite as bad as Steve had made it sound when Sam found him in the kitchen, hyperventilating and swearing, and, when Sam asked what was wrong, said, “Bucky thinks we’re Hydra.”

Sam got Steve to recount their conversation, as they made lunch. In Sam’s somewhat more detached perspective, it seemed like it wasn’t so much that Bucky thought they were Hydra, as that he didn’t realize what Hydra was. He seemed to know the name, but he usually called it The Project instead, and Sam didn’t think he knew anything of what it was all about. He reminded Steve of that. “I think the best thing is just to lay it all out—who the players are, what happened. If we run into any of his conditioning triggers, we’ll have to work around them.”

They went back down, and Sam mostly listened, providing moral support, as Steve explained the course of Bucky’s life up to now, with some detours into recent world history. Bucky spoke up like a champ when they were getting near one of his triggers. They seemed to be mostly specific facts—names, dates, places, that kind of thing. As long as Steve kept to broad strokes, he was okay.

Bucky didn’t talk much, and spent a lot of time staring at the carpet, but when he did speak, he asked cogent, relevant questions. He figured out that Hydra had wiped his memories deliberately—something Sam hadn’t thought to tell him, because he’d assumed he knew.

At that point, Sam figured it was time to put cards on the table about Bucky’s “headaches.” Or at least let him know that there were cards, and he could see them when he was ready.

It wasn’t a hell of a surprise that he wanted to see them.

“We’re pretty sure,” Sam began, watching Bucky closely, “that they caused those on purpose too. Conditioned you to feel pain when you tried to remember anything before you were captured. Or when you were reminded, like with your name. You—the super-soldier serum doesn’t damage your brain. It’s the opposite, it makes it heal faster. They couldn’t keep damaging it fast enough to stop memories from coming back, so they made it so if you did start to remember, you’d fight not to.”

“You’re really strong, Buck,” Steve put in. “And you fought them as hard as you could, for as long as you could.”

“Okay,” Bucky said.

“There’s more,” Sam said, when it seemed like Bucky wasn’t going to say anything else.

Bucky looked up. “What?”

“We think that if you want to—try and break down the conditioning, you’ll get some of your memories back. From, uh, before. If that’s something you want. It won’t be easy.” Weasel words. No. “It’s going to hurt. A lot. And we’re not sure how to do it, so it’ll take a while. But that’s a choice you can make. If you want to do that, we’ll help you.” He glanced over at Steve. “If you don’t want to do that, you don’t have to.”

“Right,” Steve said. “You don’t have to.”

Bucky stared at the carpet for a while, then looked straight at Steve. “But you want me to.”

Steve opened his mouth, then closed it again. “I—I don’t want to push you, Buck. You—I want you to have your memories back, but I don’t want to see you hurt. I don’t think there’s a way for us to have both of those things. And what you want is more important than what I want, when it comes to this.”

“It’s not something you have to decide now,” Sam added. “Actually, I don’t think you should decide now. You’ve just learned a lot of new stuff, and some of it’s pretty tough to hear. Give it some time to sink in. And if there’s anything you want to know, ask, any time. Okay?”

“Okay.” Bucky’s mouth twisted in something that might have been a grimace, or a horrible attempt at a smile. “I don’t think they liked it when I asked questions.”

“No,” Sam said. “I’m guessing they probably didn’t.”

#

[And that’s basically it. The next part of the story would have had to do with Bucky deciding he did want to try to recover his memories, and then doing that thing. Various threads established in the first part about ways that the other Avengers traumas overlap with Bucky’s would be followed up on. Eventually, the others would be clued in to the fact that Bucky has been making important choices all along, inside his own head, and also Bucky would come to understand that making choices about shirts and sandwiches is important, too.

I also have this scene hanging out at the end of the file—I’m not sure if it would go somewhere in the part that’s already written, or if it would be somewhere in the second part. But it would have to be early in the second part if so, because the reason it’s funny is that the first choice they actually see Bucky make is that he wants to punch Steve in the face.]

#

“No, Tony,” Steve heard Bruce say. They were all in the gym—Steve and Bucky were playing basketball, and Bruce had been leading Tony and Sam in yoga, with Tony remarking every few minutes that he was only doing this because he’d heard it was possible to be flexible enough to suck your own dick.

Steve had just been glad they were relaxed enough to do something other than stand around waiting for Bucky to snap. But now Tony was bouncing around, shadowboxing at Bruce, and saying, “I’ll go easy on you, I swear.”

“No,” said Bruce.

“C’mon. Ever since Happy got a real job, I haven’t had anybody to spar with. One little boxing lesson. You’ll love it.”

Bruce was looking distinctly uncomfortable. Steve sank the ball one more time and said, “Time out, Buck.” Bucky nodded and fell back, keeping his eyes fixed on Steve. “Stark, he doesn’t want to. Lay off, and I’ll spar with you sometime.” Not right now; now was Bucky’s time. But sometime.

“Yeah, I don’t actually want to get my spine broken in four places, thanks,” Tony said.

“In that case, Steve’s a better bet,” Bruce said gloomily.

“Nah, the big guy loves me. Anyway, you have him under control.” Tony made another jab in the general direction of Bruce’s ribs.

Bruce caught Tony’s hand. “Not that well. And he doesn’t—it doesn’t work that way.”

Stark pouted, until Sam said, “I’ll spar with you, Tony. I wasn’t Golden Gloves or anything, but I boxed a little in the Force.”

“There,” Bruce said, his shoulders hunched. “That’s—that’ll work. I’ll…watch.”

Steve kept an eye on him for another moment, as Sam and Tony went off to get gloves and such; Bruce still looked tense and unhappy, but not actually green, so Steve turned back to Bucky.

Who immediately, the split second Steve’s attention was back on him, lunged for the ball. “Punk,” Steve said.

Bucky faltered for just a second, then smiled—just a little—and went for the basket.

He made it, which got him to ten points—their usual stopping place. By that time, Sam and Tony had come back from the locker room and were touching gloves. When the bout started, Bucky prowled over to the ring. Steve watched him closely. A small part of him hoped that Bucky was remembering the prize fights they’d gone to, back in the day. A larger part of him worried that the mock fighting would remind him of something uglier, and more recent.

But Bucky just watched, and after a few moments, Steve decided he could spare some attention for the pair in the ring. Stark was fast and agile, but didn’t bounce around and chatter quite as much as Steve would have expected him to.

But that still left room for a lot of bouncing and chattering. Sam stayed patient, shaking off the occasional blow that Stark managed to land, letting him wear himself out. It didn’t take too long for Tony to get bored and distracted. When he did, Sam moved in for the kill, landing a couple solid punches before Tony got himself organized enough to respond. Even now that things were getting serious, Sam blocked more punches than he landed—but still, he managed to drive Tony into a corner. Even with his back up against the wall, Tony kept fighting, and managed to land a couple more punches, but with nowhere for him to go, Sam landed more. “We done?” he asked after one that left Tony shaking his head and looking dazed.

“Yeah,” Tony grunted. “Your bout.” He allowed Sam to help him to his feet.

Steve glanced over at Bucky, wondering what he was making of this.

As soon as their eyes met, Bucky punched him in the face.

#

The first thing Tony did was think Oh, fuck, we’re all going to die.

The second was to take a closer look at Murder-Puppet. After the first punch, he backed off a step or two, balancing on the balls of his feet, waiting to see which way Steve was going to bounce.

The third was to check in on Brucey-bear, whose eyes were flashing green. “Take it easy, Big Guy,” he said, then called, “Hey Cap, you all right?”

“Peachy!” Steve called back, trying a leg sweep that Bucky dodged easily, and grinning like a loon.

The fourth thing he did was call the suit, because even though everything was OK right now, didn’t necessarily mean it was going to stay that way. Hey, look at him, getting all safety-minded in his old age.