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Up until this moment, Yelena never really had any thoughts or feelings about Bucky Barnes, except for maybe a prosaic sense of solidarity. Of anyone in this group of recluses, it would be the Winter Soldier that could truly understand her experiences. Both him and Yelena had been brainwashed, forced to kill innocents in the name of an organization they never willingly joined, and both were covered in red, wading through a river of it so forceful and teeming that the threat of drowning was real.
At least Yelena could find solace in the comfort that she hadn’t been operating for nearly seventy years. She could count the number of innocents she’d killed. Barnes, she assumed, couldn’t say the same.
The severity of the memories — the magnitude of the river — he must have trudged through to reach Bob and her here in the attic wasn’t lost on Yelena, and she was finally beginning to form an opinion about Barnes. A positive one, based on more than a faint acknowledgment of parallel suffering.
“You came for us.” Yelena dropped the curtain she’d ripped away from her neck and looked toward Barnes. A familiar, quasi-familial worry crept up on her. “What did you see? Are you okay?” she asked.
Barnes gave her a sarcastic smile in return. “Oh, I’m fine. I have a great past, so I’m totally fine.”
Yelena couldn’t find it in herself to laugh, so she nodded instead. Sarcastic humor, but humor. He would be fine.
She turned to Bob next, whose face was framed with guilt. An apology for forcing them to relive these memories of shame was evident in the furrow of his eyebrows. She could hear the Sorry without it ever being spoken. She could physically feel it, too, which was a little odd.
The guilt settled like a rock in her stomach, the air of this shame room coated in it, and while guilt in the gut was familiar to Yelena, this particular iteration of it felt somehow artificial. As if she’d been ripped open and stuffed full of it.
It took one look at Bob’s hunched shoulders for Yelena to categorize the reason. The emotion wasn't her own, she realized. It was a child’s, experiencing the guilt of existence and inadequacy. The guilt must have belonged to the memory of Bob’s younger self, transferred to her through the room.
“As far as I know, it’s just endless rooms,” Bob said in response to Walker’s question of escape.
Yelena met Bob’s eyes, an acknowledgement of camaraderie. It didn’t displace the guilt, but it made it bearable, less of a riptide and more of a wave. An idea sparked in her mind.
“You said this was the nicest room you found and the others were way worse, right?”
“Yeah,” Bob confirmed.
“Okay. Show us the worst.”
***
The Thunderbolts (and was the Pee Wee Soccer name really sticking?) made it through Bob’s living room with his father, where the memory of guilt and shame were replaced with fear and righteous anger. Walker delivered a slam to the side of Bob Sr.’s face that made Yelena beam.
Maybe she could grow to like these people. The real Thunderbolts had been just as raggedy as this team. The name was, she had to admit as she watched the group bust through Bob’s home, kind of fitting.
Alexei ripped a passing wardrobe open and discovered a gateway to another shame room. Yelena nodded at him before shoving past the coats and sweaters, gladly leaving the angry house behind and climbing through
— into ice. The sudden white of her environment blinded her. A whistling wind stung her face.
Yelena’s insides froze for half of a moment, assuming she was back in the forest to relive her first test. But soon the cold registered, and while she had many memories of a snow-covered Russia, she had none of snow in the ravines.
The emotion of this memory was an overwhelming fear, adulterated with desperation and panic. Her throat closed up without her permission. Her eyes dried up, fingers trembling for no real reason. Her left arm began to ache.
Trained since childhood to override these basest sensitivities, Yelena shoved the fear and pain into the back of her mind and used the comparative calm of this memory to slow down. She stood in place and turned in a circle, taking in the surroundings. They had ended up in a gorge sitting between two jagged mountainsides, surrounded by ice, streaming water, a smattering of pine trees up ahead, and black rock.
What the hell would Bob have been doing here? And where was his past self?
“Bob?” she implored, turning to face him.
Walker had already begun walking away behind her, likely to find where the memory ended and hopefully an exit with it, and Ava seemed to be contemplating climbing the mountain. The narrow strip of land between the mountainside and the right side of the river didn’t afford them many other options.
Bob shrugged, nervous. He rubbed his left arm, massaging the muscle there. “I— I don’t know. This isn’t my memory.”
Looking around again only made Yelena shiver. There didn’t seem to be anything they could punch their way through to another room. The memory extended indefinitely. An endless nightmare of snow and rock.
“I think it’s his,” Bob said, and Yelena turned to find who his eyes were pointing to.
Barnes, the Soldier, he was the only one not actively searching for something, anything. He’d stalked in the opposite direction of Walker and simply stood, staring into the distance.
The memory must have been his. This must have been one of his missions. If Yelena concentrated over the sound of the rushing water, she could hear faint-but-approaching voices. That must have been the Winter Soldier. Maybe the Soldier’s ingrained assassin awareness was why the memory extended around them so endlessly.
Yebat, she did not want to have to face the Winter Soldier.
She kept Bob near her as she approached Barnes, looking out into the crystal-white distance. “Any help here would be great, before the Soldier arrives.” Which wasn’t completely fair, but the fear in her stomach — the memory of this past Bucky Barnes, for some reason so afraid and stricken — was making her sick. And her arm.
Barnes looked over at her, seeming smaller than she remembered. Older, too. And tired. Unbearably tired. Had his frown lines always been so deep?
“Bucky,” she said, voice an amalgamation of desperation and somehow kindness — remnants of Natasha, dusha moya, leaking through Yelena. In an attempt to ground him, she took his elbow, a warm glove on cold skin. “Before the Soldier gets here.”
Barnes nodded, the action slow. “If I had to guess, I’d say we start with him.”
She followed his eyeline and noticed a blemish in the pure white of the snow ahead of them. Speckles of red that’d somehow escaped her notice. Maybe the Soldier had already visited. Maybe the kill had broken the Soldier’s conditioning, which would explain the fear. She squeezed Barnes’ elbow before letting go.
“It’s this way!” Yelena called to the rest of the group.
She made her way toward the red with a bit of difficulty, her boots ill-suited for the snow. The rest followed with loud footsteps and complaints about the cold, though those quickly died out on nearing the body. The speckles of red trailed to a pile of soaked-crimson snow.
“Oh, Jesus,” Bob muttered behind her, sounding sick. Yelena silently agreed.
The body lay face-up and wore a blue coat stained with blood, the chest heaving ragged and frantic. The hair clumped with snow and the face was scratched and bloodied, unable to acknowledge them. It was a baby face, still a bit round with young adulthood. The right hand gripped onto a metal handlebar.
The sheer volume of blood pooling around the body and saturating the snow made it difficult to immediately discern where it was all coming from, but finally the twisted left arm, ripped from just above the elbow and at first camouflaged by the dark blue coat against red, registered. Yelena rubbed her aching arm, and the puzzle of this memory began solving itself in the back of her head.
Yelena approached the body. It was just a memory, of course it was just a memory, but like Yelena tried to stop Anya from dying, tried to shield her younger self from the sounds of abused children, and like Walker didn’t hesitate to hook Bob’s father, she hoped to give this stranger some comfort in what must have been his final moments alive. The Winter Soldier would have never left him alone otherwise.
She came to her knees by his side and tucked her legs under her. Sticky, bloodied snow clung to her pants. She then brushed the frozen hair away from his eyes, the snow from his face.
The puzzle solved itself.
Yelena hadn’t recognized him. She hadn’t comprehended the possibility that this mangled body before her, full of fear and youth, could be the tired man walking up behind her now. It was hard to imagine Barnes ever being so naive and young, so inexperienced and scared, but here he was. No imagination necessary.
The face belonged to Bucky Barnes, but a nightmare version of him. The original Bucky Barnes, the one who knew nothing of brainwashing and cryostasis, the one with friends and four sisters and who knew how to smile, who looked at people and saw more than just ways to kill or maim. It was sick, to look down at this face now and to know all that was to come. To know how he would be methodically stripped of all his goodness. Turned hollow.
The fear of this memory made horrible sense now. The Winter Soldier hadn’t visited. The concept, much less the machine, didn’t exist yet. But it would soon, judging by the now-loud voices she could hear. This version of Bucky would never exist again after today.
“I’m up for punching some Nazis,” Ava said, startling Yelena out of her thoughts — not that she let it show, partly because of the relentless conditioning drilled into her and partly because she’d never give any of them the satisfaction — and looked up to where a few faceless German soldiers were approaching Barnes’ mutilated body, loud and raucous despite their distinctive lack of features.
Yelena nodded in agreement and stood, leaving James Bucky alone in the snow. Why was this memory a shameful one? What did he have to be ashamed by? None of this could have been avoided, and none was his fault.
Maybe the room was somehow sentient, because she got her answer right after, just as she moved to charge at the soldiers.
The Bucky of memory seemed to register the voices, struggling and failing to keep his eyes open and letting out a pained noise. Like asking to be found. The fear in her gut replaced itself with the relief Bucky had started experiencing, and it clicked. Yelena thought she might be sick.
The to-be Soldier thought he was being rescued.
He must have forgotten that they didn’t send rescue missions for dead men, never for a single dead man, not even if that man were Captain America’s sidekick, his trusty sniper. The foreign language must not have registered, either. In the haze of his injuries, in the cold and phantom pain she could feel in her left arm, all Bucky must have been able to think was that his best friend had come for him.
He wouldn’t fight the soldiers. Wouldn’t even try.
She could hear Bob’s shaky breathing behind her. They needed to get out of here. She looked behind her, giving Barnes a look of encouragement. His mouth fixed itself into a line, stoic and uncomfortable.
Well, Yelena would fight them this time. For the Bucky in the snow who couldn’t, so unrecognizable in his naïveté from what he was today. And for Barnes, too. What was that American saying, in for a nickel, in for a dime? Western currency had too many coins with stupid names. Kopecks and rubles were far easier, but she was in for them either way. Five soldiers, one for each. Convenient.
Yelena stepped forward and, like a catalyst, the others around her reacted in a flurry. They used the metal of their shields, arms, and weaponry to take their chosen soldier down in seconds. Yelena was a little more primitive and kicked a spinning hook to her soldier’s temple, knocking him unconscious into the water with a splash.
Walker yelped. “Jesus, Yelena! You got the disgusting river water all over me.”
“We don’t have time for you,” Ava snapped before Yelena could respond. “Where the hell’s the way out? I’m freezing my tits off.”
No one mentioned the more obvious reason of wanting to get away from the bleeding-out, round-faced Bucky Barnes heaving a few feet away.
“At least you aren’t drenched in water.”
“Oh, I barely splashed you, Walker. Quit being a baby.”
“I have a proven method for fighting frostbite if that is a fear of yours,” Alexei offered.
“Absolutely not,” Yelena cut in. “None of this can kill us. You are terrible for even—”
“The soldier’s gone.”
They all turned to Bob, who pointed apprehensively to the river. Yelena looked back. The soldier she’d kicked into the water was gone, and the memory hadn’t restarted yet. The other four soldiers were in piles around them.
“Don’t tell me the river’s a gateway.”
Barnes finally joined their bickering group, quieting down anyone else’s response. “Ice is a constant across my memories. I think you’re right, Ava. Our best bet’s the river.”
When no other options presented themselves in the silence afterward, they one-by-one drifted toward the edge of the river. Through its murky waters, Yelena could see movement shimmering in and out of focus. She took Bob’s hand and pulled him close to her side, more for her own reassurance than his.
“On three?”
“Fuck that,” Ava said, and jumped.
Yelena jumped after her, tugging Bob with her, and left the ghost being born in the snow behind.
***
The Thunderbolts plunged through the river and emerged bone-dry on solid ground. Alexei and Bob stumbled on their landing, unable to find their footing for a split second. Yelena looked down and her heart jumped before she processed the glass she was standing on. She was high in the air over a large body of water, and now it was her right arm that ached.
“What is—”
Before any of them could categorize their surroundings or Ava could finish her question, wherever-they-were rocked, as if struck by an earthquake, and all six of them were pushed to the ground with the force of the impact.
It didn’t stop. Loud gunfire was hitting their flying ship and the entire thing was beginning to crash and burn.
Barnes had to shout over the noise to be heard. “We’re in a Helicarrier!”
“I do not know this word,” Alexei shouted back, but a kind of horror spilled on Walker’s face.
“John, don’t scare me with your face!” Yelena called, shakily getting back on her feet. “What the hell is a Helicarrier?”
“In 2014, Hydra planned to use the Helicarriers to wipe out anyone who didn’t suit their agenda,” John explained, voice raised against the gunfire. “Captain America set out to stop them, and the Winter Soldier was deployed to stop the Captain. SHIELD ended up shooting these things out of the sky. What the hell are we doing here?!”
“Something that never went public,” Barnes continued the story, a pained look on his face as he tried to balance himself, “was that these things were shot out of the sky with both myself and Steve still in one. This is my memory.”
Alexei gasped and began laughing with glee. Everyone turned to give him a bewildered look. “It’s Captain America!”
Yelena and the others looked to where he was pointing, and sure enough, there stood Steve Rogers in all his star-spangled glory.
It was jarring to see him before Yelena in the flesh, or as close to flesh as they’ll ever get again. The sight of him brought a flood of confused and panicked emotions, the Winter Soldier’s memory of breaking his conditioning. Blood soaked across the red, white, and blue suit, and Rogers stumbled to a fallen beam. What was he doing?
Then she saw the Soldier, a still-brainwashed Barnes, trapped underneath the metal. Hair long and unwashed, face screwed and pale. His flesh arm was held close to his person, and he watched in disoriented anger as Rogers lifted the beam just enough for the Soldier to crawl out. His left arm, still silver, gleamed.
“You know me.”
This must have been the scene that broke the Winter Soldier.
Yelena couldn’t help how her eyes roamed Rogers, and how she maybe held back from trying to immediately escape the crashing aircraft because she had to see. She had to see what was powerful enough to break through seventy years of brainwashing — what didn’t need the chemicals she had needed to break the Red Room’s spell.
She winced as the Soldier’s metal arm came down on Rogers, punching him hard enough to topple. She could hear the Soldier’s screaming even through the burning all around them, a rasped voice escaping raw vocal cords. “No, I don’t!”
Rogers got back up. That was his legacy, wasn’t it? The man who always got back up.
“Bucky. You’ve known me your whole life.”
The Soldier recognized the voice, recognized the cut of that face, the stupid determination behind his pleading. Yelena could feel his recognition in her, the need to know, the discombobulation of not knowing but knowing you should know. It was a feeling so familiar in her that it settled in her body like muscle memory.
She watched the Soldier still for a beat before slamming his fist against the side of Rogers’ head; she watched him hurt Rogers and saw Oksana and Anya all over again, killed at Yelena’s hand. She couldn’t move.
Captain America stood up again. He raised his shield, struggling for breath. “Your name— is James— Buchanan— Barnes.”
“Shut up!” the Soldier, Barnes, screamed before punching Rogers’ shield.
The hit was hard enough to knock him down, but not to keep him there. Rogers got back up yet again, only he didn’t raise his shield this time. There was a grim sort of acceptance to his face as he defied all of Yelena’s expectations on how to break conditioning and — dropped his shield.
“Is he trying to die?” Walker asked, and it seemed like none of them could look away long enough to save themselves. This was the famed Captain Rogers in action, and it was horrifying. Even Barnes — especially Barnes — was watching with a dawning dread on his face.
“I’m not gonna fight you.”
The shield fell through a broken panel of glass and disappeared into the cloud of smoke.
The Soldier lunged for Rogers’ midriff and held him against the ground. “You’re my mission,” he choked out, using the full-force of his metal fist to punch a passive Captain America square in the face. “You’re—” punch “my—” punch “mission—” punch.
“Christ, Steve, do something!” Barnes shouted, and Yelena agreed. He was going to die. He was going to kill himself for a friend that hadn’t existed since 1944.
The Soldier pulled his arm back one final time. Memories flooded Yelena’s head, this terrible recognition of familiarity regarding the blood and cuts on Rogers’ face: a face beat to all hell and back, all the time. That was Steve for you.
“Then finish it. Cause I’m with you ‘till the end of the line.”
There was a man that looked so much like the Captain suddenly in Yelena’s head, only he was skinny and small and he was fighting back. He was always fighting back. He was fighting back before he was anything else, and he wasn’t now. Bucky gripped his shoulder and told him about the end of the line.
The Soldier couldn't deliver the final punch, the one that likely would have broken Rogers’ face. Machinery from somewhere above was lodged loose and crashed all around them, breaking through the glass panels, and Rogers fell. The Soldier let him. He watched his Captain fall and then let go right after, falling after him.
Their absence seemed to wake everyone else back up. Specifically, to the fact that they were in a careening aircraft carrier with tonnes of dangerous debris falling all around them, but Yelena couldn’t get the image of the Soldier and Captain out of her head. She could hardly reconcile the image of anger and animal fear with this resigned Barnes she’d teamed up with.
“That man helped us win the second World War?” Ava asked, still staring in confounded alarm down at the body of water, now obscured by smoke.
Barnes glared at her half-heartedly, though that might have also been his signature state of irritation. “He’s stupid like that. But it worked, didn’t it?” No doubt eager to change the subject, he continued, “Listen, I don't know what it is with my memories and water, but I say we follow them down. I think the way out is through the Potomac.”
Alexei needed no further encouragement. With a yell they couldn’t quite catch the words of, he jumped through a pane of broken glass. Anything for Captain America, Yelena supposed.
All five of them stared after him, carefully balancing themselves around the falling debris. Yelena watched him disappear into the smoke. There was no way of knowing if it worked.
“Holy shit,” Bob said, pale and uncertain.
“Holy shit for the execution, yes, but he has the right idea. Quickly, before the memory restarts and we lose Alexei to another room.”
Ava sighed, clicking her helmet over her head and phasing down. Wasn’t that neat. Yelena smiled despite herself, despite the breaking all around them and the confusion soaking her mind, and looked to Bob with intention.
“Ready?”
“I guess I have to be.”
“Bucky?”
“What’s another fall?”
“Please, no more water, frozen or otherwise, and no more blood,” Walker — John, wasn’t he now? — muttered under his breath, just before the beam gave way from under him and he slipped into the air with a shout, falling into the smoke and disappearing through.
Bob blinked. Barnes shrugged.
“Relax your bodies,” Yelena instructed those left, reaching for Bob.
The three of them jumped together, leaving behind the sound of the creaking and crashing. Wind whipped past her face, and Yelena remembered why she had put herself through a similar ordeal what seemed so long ago now in Malaysia. She gripped Bob’s hand and couldn’t help the laugh bubbling out of her as she fell.
They hit water fast, cold seeping through every article of clothing, and then it was quiet.
***
Yelena emerged from the other side dry, landing on machinery and hitting her back before falling ungracefully on top of a hard body. Bob followed right after and landed beside her with a grunt. Suppressing a groan of pain, Yelena rolled herself off and sat up.
“Izvini,” she muttered in apology, noting with a little embarrassment that it’d been Barnes’ back she’d fallen on.
Barnes pulled himself up to his knees and pushed the hair away from his face with a dry smile. “Happy to cushion your fall.”
He stood up afterward and Yelena followed, rolling her shoulders and offering a hand to Bob, who took it with a sad sort of smile.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” Yelena looked around, experiencing from this memory only a faint sense of confusion. “Where are the rest?”
The three of them had arrived in a bunker, populated by busy-looking men in white coats and uniforms and occupied by clunky, dated machinery Yelena couldn’t categorize. Wide double-doors were the only way in or out.
“They must’ve been lost to another room,” Bob said.
Barnes frowned. “The water was strong.”
“They will converge on Bob again. I have faith in them.” She hoped she did, anyway. “Let’s try to leave here and get to a memory of Bob’s.”
“Please,” Barnes agreed.
“Do you recognize this place?”
Before Barnes could respond, two soldiers walked by them, dragging what appeared to be a half-unconscious — or maybe drugged — man between them. Dirty, stringy hair fell over the man’s face, one arm looped over each of the adjacent soldiers’ necks. His left arm glinted.
The Winter Soldier.
The two soldiers shoved him at a pair of scientists, conversing in Russian comfortable and easy. Like handling a ragdoll, the white coats pushed the Soldier onto a metal chair that sat in the middle of all the dated machinery.
“Mouth,” one of the scientists ordered in Russian.
The Soldier stared at him, face contorting into what might have been a glare. He looked like a beat dog with his wet hair and dirty clothes, and he was beginning to snarl like one, too. Yelena could feel the Soldier’s confusion flaring in her chest. Why would he listen to this man? Why did fear clog his throat, ordering him to listen or else?
The scientist cursed in annoyance and grabbed the Soldier’s jaw, maneuvering a piece of plastic into the mouth he’d forced open. A tongue guard.
The purpose of the machinery clicked. Natasha had told Yelena about this. How the Winter Soldier had been built.
The scientists walked away and played around with their panel of buttons and switches. Mechanisms came down to secure the impassive Soldier’s body in place. This dead-eyed Soldier was Barnes only in appearance, and Yelena couldn’t look away.
How could this be the infamous Winter Soldier, the horrific secret of the past decades? The ghost of the Red Room girls’ nightmares, used sometimes to terrify them into obedience? Pushed and shoved by low-level scientists and soldiers, held in place by plastic and metal.
He wasn’t built to be a machine. He wasn’t what they had told her, what she had always assumed a brainwashed Bucky had been. He had not been created from blood and metal. He’d been broken into it. Torn into little bits and scrapped for parts.
The mechanism secured itself over and around his head next. Yelena rushed forward to stop it, but she was held back by Barnes grabbing her wrist. She turned to look at his tensed, pained face blinking out of a trance.
“Unless you’re willing to fight him, don’t approach. We need to find a way out.”
“I have to try.”
“Yelena, it’s not real,” Barnes’ voice was softer than she was accustomed to. “What happened, happened. We need to save New York now. That’s real.”
“You don’t deserve to relive this.”
His brow furrowed, but it wasn’t in confusion. Yelena didn’t really understand it. She searched his eyes.
“Okay,” he said after a beat, letting go of her wrist. “We can try.”
“Bob, see if you can get those doors open,” Yelena said. “They could be our way out.”
Bob nodded and rushed to his job, and Bucky and Yelena hurriedly approached the Soldier.
Despite Barnes’ initial protests, being here, close enough to the Soldier to touch, seemed to vitalize him. While Yelena pushed the scientists aside to figure out how to undo the locks, Barnes brought his metal arm down on the chair and its cuffs, its headwear, its machinery, beating down on them with a face that only got angrier the more it became obvious he wasn’t doing any damage.
Yelena had assumed that the Soldier’s snarling at the scientists earlier would make this part easier, that maybe he’d help, but he only stared at them blankly in response. It was a dead man’s stare.
“Fight back!” Barnes shouted at the Soldier, who gave no reaction. The anger on Barnes’ face was being overtaken by panic. Yelena saw remnants of the boy in the snow.
The memory continued even without the white coats standing by the switchboard. The Soldier leaned back into the chair. The machine whirred to life. Nothing Yelena pressed stopped what came next.
There was a split-second lapse between the machine turning on and the Soldier’s reaction to the pain, when Yelena could hear the zap of electricity firing between metal and flesh. Then the screaming started and drowned everything else out.
Yelena stumbled away from the switchboard from the shock of the noise. A phantom headache pulsed through her head. She’d been so little when she’d grown accustomed to the sounds of torture, and hearing the Soldier cry out deep and loud enough to tear his cords brought her back to the Red Room, to her handlers and their whips.
Barnes was looking down at himself writhing and screaming in poorly concealed horror. Fuck, Yelena was stupid. Naive. This had been a terrible idea. She gave up on the switchboard and ran to him, grabbing his frozen body. She pulled him to where Bob, who’d been pressing every switch he could find on this side of the room, was hunched with his hands over his ears.
Yelena’s headache worsened, and she let herself sit against the wall, placing her head in between her knees. Just until the screaming and the pain in her head would stop. The sounds were guttural; they were scraped out of him. All she could remember were the little girls. Her headache became a pulsing migraine before the screams abruptly ended.
Yelena picked her head up, breathing heavy. She couldn’t afford this, to fall down as if she weren’t a Widow, as if they weren’t on a mission. Bob appeared before her, face scrunched in his own pain but brown eyes still worried and sincere. He handed her his hand and she took it gratefully. Warmth collected between their palms before she let go. She wasn’t doing this alone. Neither was Barnes. She had to let him know this, somehow.
One of the men in uniform approached the Soldier, faceless and carrying a red notebook. “Zhelaniye. Rzhavyy.”
Barnes spoke over the man’s continued collection of words, and neither of them commented on how his voice scratched. “This would be the first time the Soviets would succeed with the trigger words.”
The man spoke the final word — freight car — and shut the book, looking expectantly toward the Soldier.
“Gotov sluzhit,” the Soldier said, head tilted forward, sweat collected on his skin. Ready to comply.
The man’s eyes gleamed. He handed the Winter Soldier a simple Makarov pistol.
From a corner, two soldiers pushed forward a prisoner Yelena could’ve sworn wasn’t there before. A woman, no older than thirty. Her clothes were barely rags, her hair just as dirty as the Soldier’s, kneeling on the ground before the Soldier.
“Kill her,” the faceless man ordered.
Before, the Soldier had been Bucky only in appearance, but that wasn’t the case anymore. Yelena could recognize her teammate in him now. She recognized Bucky’s covered fear and confusion and Barnes' hard-set eyes, the concentrated pull of his mouth. The calculated stance he took while he pointed the gun. A blend of James Bucky, Barnes, and the Winter Soldier.
“Please, please, don—”
She was dead before she could finish pleading. The gunshot rang in Yelena’s ears. Both the Winter Soldier and his first brainwashed kill bled away. The memory restarted.
“I’m not watching that again,” Bob said, giving up on finding the switch and grabbing a random soldier’s gun instead.
“Hey, hey, what the hell are you doing?” Barnes asked, voice shaking on the first hey as he put himself back together, but Bob just gave the gun to Yelena and pointed at the right door’s hinges.
“Good idea,” she said, aiming for the top hinges and pulling the trigger four times down the axis. The noise wasn’t as terrible as it should’ve been. “Bucky?”
He nodded, using the strength of his super-soldiered body and metal arm to push the door down. It fell forward with a creak and then a thud.
Sunbeams spilled into the room.
The gateway opened up to a bright forest with dappling sunshine and the sounds of birds flitting past. Yelena stepped over the 15-inch-thick door and into the greenery.
***
The forest was entirely unassuming. It was pretty beautiful, truth be told. Yelena would’ve liked to go full tourist and maybe bring a hammock out here, lie beneath the shade of the leaves catching light and shifting with the wind.
“This isn’t mine, so can we assume it’s Bucky’s again?” Bob asked, and they both naturally turned to face Barnes.
Gone was Barnes’ discomfort of the ravine, panic of the Helicarrier, and horror of the bunker. His face was entirely shuttered.
“Yeah,” he said. His voice was laced with traces of — not exactly bitterness, but maybe sorrow disguised as bitterness, or maybe curdled resignation. “It’s mine.”
An unfamiliar voice suddenly drifted through the trees, accompanied by two pairs of footsteps. “How could you have—?”
Yelena turned to the sound and saw two people through the trees, walking toward the clearing the three of them had fallen into.
“You get a look,” a second voice interrupted with. Yelena recognized that voice and saw his face soon after. Bucky Barnes.
The former Captain America, Steve Rogers, walked out from the density of the trees and into the clearing, Bucky at his side. He laughed lightly, stopping to cross his arms and examine the memory of Barnes.
“A look?” he asked.
Yelena hadn’t been privy to much information about Rogers, and she’d never seen him so up-close — barring a few minutes ago, when he’d been beat to all of hell. Here and now, across this quiet sunny day, Yelena couldn’t help but note that he was handsome, actually, in a way the few photos of him she had seen couldn’t quite capture.
It wasn’t his physical features as much as it was his presence. He stood certain and comfortable in his body, the shield a target on his back. Yelena couldn’t qualify the levels of emotions she suddenly felt for this random costumed man, and didn’t quite understand how she suddenly knew with so much certainty that there was no fight Rogers would back down from. How she recognized this in him and felt so much fondness for the fact.
It hit a moment later, when she felt so much love in her chest she was worried it might spill over, to mortify her in front of everyone, in front of Steve: she was feeling what this memory of Bucky Barnes was. The love he felt for his friend, his Captain.
“Yeah, a look. Sarah recognized it, too, you know,” the memory of Barnes said with a smirk of his own, and Christ, the sheer abundance of love and adoration in his eyes.
He still looked tired, but the tire looked bearable. Like something that could be washed away with enough care. Something that could be molded like malleable clay only as long as the hands shaping it belonged to Steve Rogers.
Yelena hadn’t known that Barnes could look so warm, so unguarded and open. Not entirely happy, but still. Content. He resembled so much the kid in the snow that it ached. Had Barnes — Bucky, so clearly Bucky here, perhaps had always been Bucky — walked around staring at Rogers this way all the time? Had Rogers done the same? It seemed almost invasive to look at the two of them. She made a mental note to search up some photos of them if she survived the Void. She had to know.
“Be that as it may, I guess that makes this easier, if you know I’ve already decided to return the Stones. Bypasses the argument.”
“Like hell it does,” Bucky said, and the conversation slipped away from playful.
“It wouldn’t be fair of me to ask anyone else. I’m the leader, and I was part of the original heist. It’s my responsibility.”
“And that’s just how it always is, isn’t it?”
Yelena knew she should be taking advantage of the calm memory to find a way out. But try as she might, like every time before, she couldn’t get herself to walk away. The love this memory had for Steve Rogers, brought unto her, kept her glued to the image of Bucky and Rogers — Steve, she had this ridiculous urge to call the erstwhile Captain America Steve, like they were old buddies. She’d always been susceptible to outside influence, Yelena supposed.
The real Bucky, a lifelong veteran to this feeling, stalked past them with a strong glower, avoiding looking at Rogers and snapping, “I have an idea for a way out, if anyone at all is interested in stopping the Void,” before he disappeared into the trees.
Yelena wanted to grab the real Bucky by his shoulders and shake him, tell him to get one last good look in. What Yelena would give to find Natasha once more in these rooms and have a final moment with her. How she would hold Natashka close and cry into her hair.
But no, it wouldn’t be a moment at all. These rooms, the Void, were no place for Natasha. Whatever was going to happen here was a memory of regret. It was already building a home in Yelena.
“It’ll be fine, Buck. Five seconds, Banner said. In and out.”
The memory of Bucky frowned. “You just did the look again. The mission is as simple as in and out, right?”
Rogers’ ever-familiar (but it wasn’t familiar to Yelena, was it?) tick of guilt gave him away, the slightest furrowing of his eyebrows. “In theory, yes.”
“Theory.”
“I wasn’t sure how to broach the topic.”
Oh. A chasm began forming in Yelena’s chest. A fissure in the solid ground of her flesh.
She knew — Bucky knew — immediately what Rogers meant. Yelena had always thought Captain America died in the war and it’d been covered up by the government with ridiculous conspiracies about living on the moon, but that wasn’t it.
He’d left.
“You're choosing to make it more complicated than in and out, aren't you? You’re not planning on coming back.”
“I have to try,” Steve said. The chasm gaped. It loomed, sore and wretched.
“Not alone. I could come with you.”
Yelena winced.
It was a desperate bid. Bucky would never fit in the past. Bucky would never be okay with fitting in the past. It’d be too much like running away from all those he’d hurt as the Winter Soldier. Rogers seemed to understand this.
“Bucky.”
“I just—” Bucky faltered, uncharacteristic in how he suddenly turned away from Rogers’ face, looking towards the trees. So much love in his chest he was worried it might spill over. “I wish you’d stay. That you’d want to stay.”
A confession in as little words. Yelena’s heart twisted. She already knew what Rogers’ response would be, and she hated him for it. Bucky had been so happy.
“I do want to, Buck. I do. But—”
“Not enough.” Not how Bucky wanted.
Rogers didn’t deny it. He seemed to hear the confession and the silence was his answer. It didn’t diminish the clear love on his features when he met Bucky’s eyes again.
“I’m sorry.” Rogers let out a breath. “I have faith in you, Bucky, and I… I’m tired. Of all of it.”
Yelena, Bucky, never thought he’d ever live to see the day Rogers admitted it.
Bucky couldn’t compete. He didn’t want to compete, not after Steve’s own confession of resignation. Bucky would give Steve this. He’d have given him so much more if he’d asked. And even if he hadn’t. Even if he hadn’t. Bucky would have offered. He would have burned the skin off his body to keep Steve warm, cooked the flesh off his bones to keep him fed.
Yelena could feel the need right now, nesting itself deep in her chest, settling over her heart, a transference of love through the Void. The Bucky of memory pulled Rogers in close, a tight, suffocating hug. A final goodbye. Or, a penultimate goodbye. Still, regret of not fighting threatened to choke her even while she still had the means to protest Steve’s leaving.
He. Even while he still had the means to protest Rogers’ leaving. She physically shook her head, a slight panic at the intermingling of memories. She wanted no one else, ever, to be in her head. She had to get moving and going again.
The Bucky of now came back into the clearing, startling Yelena out of her trance enough to get to moving.
“Free show’s over. I found the machine.”
“Machine?” Yelena’s voice was rough when she spoke. The memory of Rogers and Bucky faded and looped. Distantly, she heard, How could you have—?
“The time machine used to put the Infinity Stones back in place. I think it’s our way out. Bob’s already there.”
Had Bob left? He must have, Yelena supposed, though she hadn’t been aware of it. She wanted to sit here and watch the memory again, as sick as that sounded. So much of it had been foreign to her, so much of the pain new.
Yelena nodded and walked past Bucky, who was finally looking back, gazing at where Rogers had come into the clearing again and drinking him in. The team had already seen so much of Bucky unwillingly, so Yelena looked away, giving him this small moment of privacy, of regret and shame and the ache of missing. She walked ahead and heard his footsteps behind her a few seconds later.
Leaves crunched beneath boots. Birds tweeted. It really was beautiful here, even through the lingering pain of the memory. She slowed her pace, bringing herself to walk beside Bucky. A beat of silence passed.
“He loved you, too.”
She doubted Bucky wanted to talk about this, much less with her, a perpetual stranger who’d just been witness to some of his most intimate and horrifying memories.
“Maybe not the way you wanted him to, but the way you needed.” Then, because she felt it needed repeating, “He loved you, too.” Even after everything. After all she’d seen.
Bucky surprised her by smiling at her. It was nothing like the soft thing he gave Rogers, but it wasn’t the sarcastic one he’d given her in the snow. “I know,” he said.
“I miss Natasha every day.” It seemed relevant.
“She was your sister?”
“Not by blood. But yes.”
“You know as well as I do that blood doesn’t matter with our type,” Bucky replied.
Yelena couldn’t help the smile on her face, small but genuine and a little lopsided. “Yes, I know.”
“I fought by her side. She was always reliable. Strong.”
“She was a spy, not a soldier. That never stopped her.”
Bucky’s smile grew. “I know something about people like that. I wasn’t well-acquainted with her, but Steve was. He’d always praise her heart and I never got it. She was the Black Widow, I would think. But I finally see what he means, because I see it in you, too. You have it, her heart, or maybe she had yours.”
Yelena’s breath tightened, and she let the words linger. It was silent as Bucky led her through the mess of winding trees and finally toward the machine, this odd contraption of a platform. Bob was standing on it already, face tilted to the sky.
Bucky stopped in his tracks and turned to Yelena. He laid a hand on her shoulder. “How you’re helping Bob, New York? Helping yourself? Even helping all my phantoms. She would have been so proud of you, Yelena.”
Yelena swallowed through the pain in her throat. “I know,” she said.
They stepped on to the machine that’d taken Steve and Natasha away, and it knew what to do without outside prompting. It brought them to a lab with a slumped figure sitting atop a bench. Yelena recognized the place.
“Now this is mine,” Bob said, grim-faced, just as the rest of the Thunderbolts, with various degrees of yelling or shouting, climbed in from other rooms. Yelena took his hand and interlocked their fingers together.
At the two-month mark after the Void plunged New York into darkness, the world had finally calmed down enough for Yelena to have a quiet day of nothing scheduled. She settled in the Watchtower’s living room with her laptop and a beer, sinking beside Bob on the couch.
The team had given him as many details as they’d deemed necessary about the incident in the Void’s shame rooms, which didn’t include much specificity about Bucky’s rooms. Those final two were now only Bucky and Yelena’s.
Bob didn’t pause his reading, but he did instinctively prop his book up with one hand, wrapping his other arm around Yelena’s shoulders and running his fingers through her hair.
Yelena smiled, fond. It’d been rough, the first month. It was still rough, all six of them in this Tower, but it was getting better. They all were.
She opened up a new window on her laptop, deeming Bob sufficiently occupied by his book. Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes. She navigated to images.
The photos she found were all modern, and Bucky’s face was guarded in each. Rogers, on the other hand, could be found more often than not drawn to Bucky, gaze always landing proud and defensive. The sight was practically obscene.
It was only when she managed to find the black-and-white mini-clips of the two of them did she recognize how Bucky had looked at Rogers in the privacy of the forest. Here Bucky was, before the blood in the snow. He smiled so effortlessly, gave it out so easily, but especially to Rogers.
Rogers was looking somewhere off-camera, talking and smiling, and Bucky was leaning as he laughed, head tipped toward Rogers like he was the sun and Bucky was defenseless against being pulled in.
“Is that Bucky?” Bob asked from beside her, untangling his hand from her hair and placing his book on the coffee table. She nodded. “I don’t think he’d like you looking at his old photos.”
“It’s on the Internet for everyone to see,” Yelena said, but she knew it was a poor defense. She’d seen memories she was never supposed to.
“Right. Well, I won’t get in the middle of this,” Bob responded, mostly lighthearted, and stood up. “I’m gonna go see what your dad’s up to. I didn’t like how gleeful he sounded over the phone earlier.”
Yelena waved him away. “Have fun.”
Bob’s footsteps receded and Yelena was distracted by another clip, but evidently she shouldn’t have banked on being alone for any period of time, no matter how short, in the common room.
“By American standards, it’s kinda rude to dig through a guy’s heartbreak without asking.”
Yelena did not startle at Bucky’s voice. She was just agitated. And maybe a little embarrassed. She froze with her mouse hovering over a black-and-white mini-clip, and the gif replayed over, and over, and over.
“I wasn’t—” But she was. She started over. “I was just curious.”
“You could’ve asked.”
“I was raised a spy. Snooping is in my nature.”
That at least got a huff of laughter from Bucky. Yelena relaxed. It didn’t seem he was actually upset.
“If you’re gonna snoop, you could at least find some better photos. Maybe one where he’s laughing at my jokes. Now those are rare.”
“That’s because your jokes suck. They’re not even jokes.”
“I got some good jokes.”
“Yeah, maybe in 1940.”
It got quiet after that. Yelena remembered the woman killed mid-begging.
“Yeah, probably,” Bucky said.
Yelena took a breath. He said she could ask, didn’t he?
“How are you not—” Yelena faltered, trying to find the right words. “After everything you’ve been through, alone and together, for him to leave. How do you not hate him? I would hate him so much.”
Bucky seemed to be expecting this. “I tried. I couldn’t. He’d given everything he had to the military. His life. His body. Then I died and he died soon after, sometimes I think on purpose. Careless.” But Bucky was smiling, small and reminiscent. The war seemed so far away to Yelena. And it was, for her, so far away. Maybe for Bucky, too, now.
“Only, suddenly he wasn’t dead, and suddenly he was giving everything he had to the government again, and then to me, and then to all of space. He told me he was tired and I couldn’t— I can’t...”
Bucky couldn’t find the words, but Yelena had felt what he was trying to articulate, when Rogers had told Bucky he was tired. How he wouldn’t compete, not if it meant Rogers finally got to rest. She hadn’t ever felt love like she’d felt for Steve in that forest, hadn’t known it existed outside of movies. Burning desire and desperation. So much endearment for all his little facial tics. Was residual love possible? Sometimes she still felt it, like a dying pulse, when she looked at a particularly warm photo of Rogers.
She could see it on Bucky’s face in these old reels, back when he’d been unguarded in front of the cameras. It was a wonder he ever got away with it in the thirties and forties.
“All I’ve ever wanted was for him to be happy. Wherever he is now, if he’s happy, I’m okay. And I think he is. Was. He was right to have faith in me. I have my own people these days, don’t I?”
Yelena smiled a half-smile. Try pulling those words out of him two months ago. She closed the window and shut her laptop.
“Yeah, you do. We all do.”