Freezer Burn post-credits scene - Domenika Marzione (domarzione) (original) (raw)

Steve greeted Hsiang as he entered her domain, gesturing with his chin toward Fury's closed office door. "Do you have any idea what this is about?"

Hsiang shook her head no. Just because she ordered around one of the most powerful men in the world like her own personal puppet didn't mean that he couldn't find ways of vexing her ascension to complete omniscience.

He'd gotten the phone call early this morning to show up at the Helicarrier, no uniform required. His first thought was that it would be something to do with Schmidt, since most of what he'd been contacted about since their return to New York had had to do with what SHIELD was getting out of Schmidt - verify this, does that make any sense, where did this happen, how did you know what this was - and this wouldn't have been the first time he'd been called in because Schmidt had confounded them to the point of immobility. Schmidt wasn't letting his physical captivity get in the way of a good time, not when he could cause so much havoc with a clever lie or a casual half-truth or, worse, with a genuine revelation.

The other alternative, that this was the prequel to another round of routing out HYDRA bases, was less likely because those tended to come through Tapper and weren't held in Fury's office.

All of which was to say that Steve had no idea what was awaiting him when he opened Fury's office door. But Fury and Natasha sitting at the conference table was not high on the list.

"What's this about?" he asked with false casualness as he stood behind a chair across from Natasha and next to Fury.

Natasha was in uniform, but her aspect was not one of impending professional business. She looked apologetic and that worried him more than being told he was going on some ridiculous and dangerous mission. Natasha was repentant about very few things, a list that did not include her back-channel work with Fury during her suspension from SHIELD, and Steve knew her well enough to appreciate what usually made the list. That meant that this was personal and there was absolutely no way that this would end well for him.

"Sit, Cap," Fury commanded.

Steve didn't want to, but he did.

"What have you two been lying to me about that you've now been forced to confess?"

Neither of them looked indignant, which was as good a confession as anything they might say. The question had been outright insubordination as far as Fury went and not getting so much as a raised eyebrow at that was the equivalent of an air raid siren.

"It's not lying by commission," Natasha began, stopping when Steve gave her a look. They'd already had this conversation once before, in Detroit, and he'd thought - hoped - that that had been the end of that. He'd never thought Natasha would be truthful and forthcoming ever more, but he'd hoped that they'd progressed enough that she'd save the real baloney for someone else. "I never lied to you about this, Steve. I didn't share my suspicions, most of which sounded crazy even to me, for what I thought were good reasons. I've been fed so much crap my eyes should be brown and if I said something every time real life overlapped with those fairy tales, I'd have been put on permanent psych eval."

Nobody leapt to fill in that joke, which spoke to how delicate this situation really was.

"Fine," Steve allowed, since the distinction between lying out of habit and lying for benevolent reasons was not one he wanted to make. "So I'll rephrase: what am I here for you to confess to?"

Fury pulled a manila folder out from the pile at his left elbow, but left it closed under his right hand and did not push it toward Steve.

"Yaakov Stepanovich Yachmenev," Fury began. "Known to the Widow as Yasha. Known to SHIELD Counterintelligence as Igor, the agent who delivered the files that burned her. Known to the rest of us as a Cold War urban legend called 'The Winter Soldier.'"

He did slide the folder over then. The tab on the side said 'Winter Soldier' and the inside contained a stack of black-and-white and color photographs, none of them obviously connected in any way. Most of them were of dead men and women, none of them violently dispatched save for three, all by bullets to the head from a great distance, and all clearly from different time periods, all during the years when Steve had been asleep. There was a single page of writing in the folder, a list of names and dates and locations stretching back sixty-plus years and ending less than five years ago. A kill list, Steve realized, and these photos must correspond.

"This is just the tip of the iceberg," Fury went on. "Many of the sniper kills were undocumented by photography and we'll never know how many kills he had that passed as accidents or death by misadventure. The ones here were just so suspicious that we included them on principle."

Steve shook his head; it all sounded patently ridiculous. "How is this all one guy? How could you think it was?"

Fury gave him an ironic smile, more of a smirk. "The Infinity Formula, one of the greatest bits of propaganda the Soviet Union ever produced."

That actually made sense, in a twisted way, and he nodded acceptance. "What made you stick with the idea that this was one man - Yasha - even after you realized that there was no Infinity Formula?"

Because that part he just didn't understand. Even without taking into account that Fury and Natasha were two of the most cynical people he'd ever encountered.

"It's hard to stop believing something when you've seen something with your own eyes," Natasha said with a frown. "There were photographs of the Winter Soldier going back to the Forties and he hadn't aged five years since then when we saw him in the flesh. And not only had he trained me and my cohort in the Red Room, but he had trained our trainers - and their trainers and their trainers.

"We knew he'd come out of the Monster Factory. We were ready to believe anything and everything about him. If it wasn't the Infinity Formula, it could have been anything else."

There was a note to Natasha's voice that had Steve watching her closely. "What else was it?"

Natasha and Fury were two of the most cynical people he'd ever encountered and even with such well-crafted propaganda as this, they would not have sustained their belief without something else to go on.

Natasha took a deep breath, steadying herself. "Years after I left the Red Room, after I was already working for SHIELD, I was on a mission in Russia," she began slowly. "The country was already in thrall to the bratva and the oligarchs and there was a rumor that one or both had gotten their hands on material from Minyar, which would have been bad for obvious reasons. I found the warehouse, did what I had to do, and… and among the barrels and boxes full of weapons and chemicals that nobody should have at their disposal, there was a tank. I thought it would be some gas or weapon… it was. Both. It was Yasha, frozen in some kind of stasis."

The horror in her voice was genuine and human and, for a moment Steve wondered, not for the first time, what else there was to this story that she'd never tell.

"The Soviets didn't need the Infinity Formula," Fury picked up. "Not when they had a working stasis chamber."

Steve nodded, feeling like he'd stepped into a pulp novel for a moment, before he remembered his own life and what had happened to Johann Schmidt since that day on the plane. "Okay," he agreed. "But while I admit to being fully enthralled by this story, I am not so enthralled as to miss that there are huge parts of it you are very pointedly not telling me. Yet. Because so far, this is part of the background of a mission briefing and I am very clearly not here in that capacity. Instead, I am here alone, without Tapper or Hill or the other Avengers and you are both tiptoeing very carefully around a bomb that you are quite sure is going to explode in my face. So let's get on with that part of it. Please."

Fury and Natasha looked at each other, then at him. Fury pulled a second manila folder out of the stack and handed it over without pausing.

The contents were more photos, even less directly connected than the previous bunch. They were candids, again from different eras, and it took Steve until the second time through to realize that the only thing any of them had in common was a figure, never clearly seen face-front, that could have been Yasha but could also have been any other dark-haired male of similar stature. He didn't have a clear memory of Yasha's face - the only time he'd really seen it had been when he'd been drugged and confusing him with Bucky, so he assumed that there was enough of a resemblance for his addled brain to have made that connection. Before his drugging, when they'd been tussling, Yasha had first had his hood up and then Steve really hadn't been looking at his face, since that wouldn't have helped in the fight.

"These are all meaningless to me," he said, closing the folder and pushing it back toward Fury. "I'll buy the stasis story and go with these all being of The Winter Soldier, but I don't understand why you're showing them to me. I don't remember his face well and you can't see it any of these anyway."

Natasha looked pained and apologetic and very sad. "You do remember his face, Steve. You were calling for him when we found you."

He shook his head, not following at all. "I thought you were Peggy at first. Until I saw the hair."

Fury opened up a third folder and Steve could see the top photograph. It was a color snap, from Minyar, and from the clothes he could see that it was Yasha. Fury turned the folder around and pushed it toward Steve.

"These were taken by our cameras during the assault."

The first couple were side views and rear-side angles, enough to show that it was Yasha but not enough to see more than a fraction of his face. The last half-dozen, however, were from the front and froze Steve completely. Rage and despair and horror flooded through him equally and he pushed the folder away in disgust.

"How long have you known?" He asked flatly. The alternative was to scream and destroy everything in his reach, a temptation growing by the heartbeat. "How long have you two known that HYDRA had cloned Bucky?"

He ruthlessly tamped down the nausea - as well as the urge to flee the table, flee the room and SHIELD and everyone associated with it because there was no way this was a revelation that had come in the last day or in the weeks since the assault on Minyar. Fury had come to him about Bucky's DNA over a year ago and Natasha had seen pictures of Bucky - Steve's own and from archives - for longer than that.

"We never knew," Fury said carefully and Steve hated him in that moment for treating him like he was a skittish colt instead of the justifiably angry man he was. "We never knew. We had no evidence whatsoever that the serum variant HYDRA was working off of was derived from James Barnes's actual samples. We had no evidence that they had any cloning capacity whatsoever, to clone you or anyone else. Which is just as well because it's not true."

Steve shook his head, not willing to listen to more lies or even caring if they weren't. "What-"

"He's not a clone, Steve," Natasha cut him off sharply. "Yasha - James - is not a clone. Think about it. There was no cloning back then."

He couldn't think about it. He couldn't think. It was all he could do to breathe. If this were true - and he wasn't prepared to accept that just yet - then he'd not only left Bucky to die alone, but he'd also sentenced his best friend to a life of unimaginable horror. Of becoming the monster Bucky had always secretly believed he'd been turned into all along.

"He could be a clone," he pointed out, since the alternative was too unbearable. A clone wouldn't be good, wouldn't be anything less than horrifying and a desecration -- in the ugliest fashion -- of the memory and honor of a good soldier and a great man. But anything other than a clone was too difficult to even contemplate. "They could have done it recently, when they had the technology. Like they did with mine."

Natasha shook her head. "It's possible, but it's not what happened."

"You don't know that," Steve insisted. Loudly. He might have shouted because Natasha leaned back in her seat like she'd been struck. "You don't know that," he repeated more quietly.

"We do," Fury replied. "Schmidt made sure we did."

Steve looked over at him sharply. "Schmidt's been feeding us an awful lot of baloney. Why are you accepting this as real when he's been trying to play us like a piano since the start?"

Fury sighed regretfully and what was left of Steve's hope that this wasn't true shattered. He remembered that look and that tone and that sigh from his earliest days awake, when Fury had personally taken on the responsibility of breaking the hardest news to him.

"Schmidt knew," Fury went on after a long silence during which Steve did not move and Fury and Natasha did not take their eyes off of him. "That's why he went to the considerable expense of subcontracting Yasha Yachmenev's services from his current employer. He wanted you to know. Wanted you to die by James Barnes's hand knowing who it was because he appreciated that as satisfying as it would be for him to kill you himself, this would hurt you more. He said he'd already enjoyed killing you once anyway.

"He knew because he'd been part of it, but he didn't have proof that would convince you until HYDRA took over Minyar," Fury went on. "The Russians cleaned it out first, but they did a half-ass job and it wasn't hard for him to get what he needed. Proof that came into our hands when we took possession of the place. We didn't want to turn this into another mindfuck he played on you, so we took care to verify it ourselves."

The last folder was opened and in it were old papers, printed out and handwritten in Cyrillic. There were translations, brand new, and while Steve could have muddled through the originals, he skimmed the English versions first. And then he had to reread because nothing had penetrated the first time. Bucky had survived the fall from the train, barely, and the theory was that it was a combination of the serum variant and that he'd landed in deep snow and effectively been frozen, just as Steve had, by a blizzard that had come through a few days later. Steve remembered the blizzard because it had made the search for Bucky's body - they'd gone back, of course they'd gone back - difficult and ultimately fruitless.

How Bucky had turned up in HYDRA custody - it was they who had provided him with his first prosthetic arm - was unknown by the Soviets, but he'd been fighting for the Nazis when he'd been captured by the Red Army on the Eastern Front. And then quickly turned over to the Red Room once they'd realized who he was - and who he did not remember being. From there, the story was more straightforward and no less horrifying: he'd been sent to Minyar, to the Monster Factory, when he did not respond well to "traditional methods of reprogramming," with the end result being the Winter Soldier.

The stasis tank had originally been necessary for both biological as well as psychological reasons - the serum was degrading and causing illnesses that threatened the prosthetic and generally rendered him unfit for duty and there were signs that the brainwashing hadn't taken completely. "The Winter Soldier does not show any sign of recovered memories, but instead grows less obedient and less pliant the longer he remains outside of stasis." By the 1970's, however, Soviet science and psychiatry had progressed enough to stabilize Bucky's physical well-being and tighten the mental reprogramming so that compliance and obedience were no longer an issue. Instead, he was returned to stasis between missions - except for the occasional stint as a trainer for the Red Room - entirely because he was deemed too valuable a resource to waste on minor operations. That he was a human being with the right to a life at all was never a factor. The Winter Soldier was a tool, one that was wiped clean and put carefully away between uses.

Steve closed his eyes and took a deep breath, but none of that would make this go away.

The end of the Cold War had meant an end of the Winter Soldier's primary function and the end of the Russian government's part of the story. The rest of the folder contained photographs that stole whatever breath and control Steve had managed to retain. He knew he was crying as he looked at them, felt the tears slide down his face, but didn't care.

Bucky as a Soviet prisoner in his HYDRA uniform, the insignia of Schmidt's personal guard on his uniform shoulder - and then on his metal shoulder in the next photograph. (Schmidt's guard had kept the distinctive marking on their uniforms after his death as a show of their elite status, even when they went to work for the surviving commanders.) Bucky in a mugshot from the Red Room, then another picture of him naked to the waist with the HYDRA insignia on his shoulder replaced by a red star. A couple of other photographs, but they were all the same. Bucky, dead-eyed and emotionless and both utterly familiar and completely not.

"My mission - the one where I found him in stasis - was a bust. By the time we got back there to clean it out, it was already empty," Natasha said quietly and Steve opened eyes he hadn't realized he'd closed again. "I've since found out that he was part of the spoils divvied up by the KGB commanders. Tank and all. General Karpov defrosted him and put him to work as Yasha Yachmenev, which was the name he'd been given by the Red Room, although almost nobody knew it or used it."

Natasha's tone made it clear that she'd been one of them. Steve filed that away for later.

"He was the one who shot me in Cleveland," Natasha went on. "As a warning, I think. A courtesy. One that I did not recognize at the time, but you already know that story."

Natasha was going to say more, but Steve held up his hand. "Why didn't you tell me? If he didn't know-" he gestured toward Fury, "-then you did. You suspected at least."

Natasha gave him a complicated, helpless look. "What did you want me to tell you? That the most brutal and effective killer I'd ever met was wearing your best friend's face? I didn't know it was really him. Even if he'd been around since the Forties, he could have been done up to look like James Barnes. It's what they did, Steve. It's how they messed with everyone. They could have taken some Ukrainian farm boy, changed his face, and hoped to fuck with your head simply by showing him in a movie clip that ended up in Allied hands. He wouldn't have been the first dead man they brought back to life for propaganda purposes."

Steve rubbed his face with his hands, like this was a bad dream he could wake up from. "What are we doing to bring him in?"

Fury took a beat before answering. "Do you understand that there is a very good chance -- a very strong likelihood -- that James Barnes died when he fell from that train? That there is nothing left of your friend, of the man you knew?"

Steve shook his head angrily. "Bucky--"

"Bucky stopped existing seventy-four years ago," Fury cut him off. "All that's left is the Winter Soldier. Neither HYDRA nor the Soviets ever reported any returning memories and you can be damned sure they were watching very closely. James Barnes is dead in every way that counts. Are you prepared to deal with that?"

"Or what?" Steve asked sharply. "If I don't believe that - and I won't - then what happens? Does he get hunted down like a rabid dog behind my back? What difference does it make whether he remembers who he is? This--"

He had to stop talking or else he'd get choked up. Again. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "That man is my best friend, my brother. I don't care who he thinks he is; I know. And I won't let him stay a moment longer in this prison HYDRA's put him in, no more than I did the last one."

He couldn't explain to them what kind of true horror this would be to Bucky, how this was every private nightmare come to pass. Bucky had known what his fate had been when he'd been strapped onto Zola's table and a painful death as a lab rat had been the best possible outcome until Steve had shown up. And even after that, Bucky had always feared that the damage had been done, that Zola had turned him into something other than what he'd been. They'd never talked about it, not even obliquely, not when there was no real need because Bucky had never been able to completely hide his fear. And Steve had been afraid, too, that he'd been too late. But there'd never been any signs, no super-strength, no growing wings or a tail, and Steve had stopped worrying so much. If Bucky sometimes had nightmares where he woke up feeling for his face, if Steve had understood without a word that Bucky'd been dreaming of the Red Skull and Zola's lab, well, they'd all had crazy nightmares of that place. Shell shock didn't wait for you to get home.

But this? Being turned into an enemy agent, a cold-hearted killer, to know that he'd fought for the Nazis, for HYDRA... Bucky hadn't been that kind of idealistic patriotic anymore, not by the time he'd earned his sergeant's stripes. He'd loved his country, hated the enemy, but like almost everyone else on the front lines, he'd fought for his comrades. For his friends. To be turned against them like this, to be turned against Steve like this...

"You might not be able to save him this time, Cap," Fury said with a terribly gentle warning. "He's not going to want to be rescued. He doesn't think he needs it."

Bucky's one defining trait, if Steve had ever had to pick just one, would have been loyalty. Loyalty to the Dodgers when there were two other better teams in town. Loyalty to his country. Loyalty to the men he fought with and for. Loyalty to the skinny sickling he'd befriended even after that sickling had lost the ability to keep pace and instead picked up art supplies when he could no longer work a baseball glove.

This betrayal would destroy him. And if Steve had the power to stop it, then he had to. Without question. Without assistance if necessary.

"I'm going to save him," Steve said firmly. "I owe it to him. Even if he never understands why."

There was a note of challenge in his tone and Fury picked up on it.

"I'm not going to stop you," he told Steve. "I'm even going to help you because even if he weren't James Barnes, getting the Winter Soldier off the playing field is cause enough."

Steve looked at him sharply. "You're not going to hold Bucky accountable for the Winter Soldier's crimes, are you?"

Fury sighed. "Bucky Barnes? No. Yaakov Yachmenev, however, is another story." He held up his hand before Steve could get a word in. "We'll cross that bridge when - if - we come to it. Bring the Winter Soldier in and then we'll see what happens."

Steve looked over at Natasha, who'd been suspiciously quiet, but she was lost in thought, not even paying attention to them. It was extremely unlike her, especially considering her personal ties to the matter. But maybe that was it all along.

"Is there a plan of action for this yet?" Steve asked Fury. "Or was this just the part where you break this to me gently?"

Fury frowned at him. "We don't have actionable intelligence yet. We're still working on what happened to the Winter Soldier after Minyar."

Natasha shifted, as if she were physically bringing herself back into the conversation. "Give me a couple of days," she said. "I know who to ask."

There wasn't much more to say. Fury had analysts poring over data looking for leads on where Bucky - the Winter Soldier - might be and where his bosses currently were and also researching HYDRA and Soviet brainwashing techniques for clues to unraveling them. This last might have been to humor Steve, but he didn't think so. He understood that Fury was not an optimist by nature, but that did not mean that he did not believe that they had a fundamental debt to Bucky and needed to honor it by doing their best to save him. They had to catch him - alive - to try, though, and that's where Steve came in.

"Come on," Steve said to Natasha as they left Fury's suite. "The ferry leaves in ten."

Natasha cocked an eyebrow. "Where are we going?"

"You and I are going to have a talk, away from here, about James."

Steve was somewhere between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh when the phone rang in his helmet. The tiny little illuminated screen on his windshield told him that it was Peggy, which was the only reason he answered.

"I got a phone call oh, about six hours ago, warning me that you might be en route and arriving in ill humor," Peggy began as soon as he said hello. "I asked why and was given a regretful sigh and the assurance that it would be better if I heard it from you first. I know the traffic on the Jersey Turnpike can be ugly, but I also know you."

Steve confessed that he'd realized before he'd gotten off Staten Island that he needed a little time to think and not come barreling in to her house angry and confused and so he'd gotten off the Turnpike and headed west, which is why he now found himself driving through south-central Pennsylvania in the dark of night.

"So you're sulking in the middle of Pennsyltucky," Peggy summarized. "You'll be in a great frame of mind to write sad country ballads about the dogs and trucks and women you've left behind. Are you ready to turn around yet? It'll be breakfast time by the time you get here. I can make us a fry-up."

Steve smiled. Peggy had told him that right around ninety, she'd decided that the list of things that could and probably would kill her was long enough that the odd extra rasher of bacon or fried breakfast wasn't going to crack the top ten. She'd never really learned to cook anything beyond breakfast, she'd freely confess, but what she did, she did well.

"I'm not ready to be so easily found," he admitted. By whom went unstated. "Or so easily recalled."

"They've probably got either your person or your bike tagged," Peggy reminded him, not hurt at the refusal because she'd understood what else he hadn't said.

"Probably," he agreed. "But dragging me back now involves admitting that they've got me tagged and then sending a jet and that's just not worth the effort unless it's really important."

The road was pretty deserted at this hour save for transport truckers and the odd bus. There was nothing to see, even by daylight, and while he'd probably stop in Pittsburgh to eat and stretch, if not sleep, the quiet and the relatively little attention that needed to be paid to the surroundings was soothing.

"Do you want to call me back when you're ready?"

He laughed, a little wildly to his own ears. "I don't think I'm ever going to be ready."

"Steve," Peggy prompted when he didn't elaborate.

He waited until he'd powered past a UPS trailer before saying anything. "Have you ever heard of the Winter Soldier?"

"The Cold War myth?" Peggy sounded genuinely perplexed. "Of course. He was the boogeyman it was easiest to blame all of our most embarrassing failures on. Why?"

And so he answered, a monologue that took him past the next toll and further away from the Helicarrier and the secrets it held.

Peggy was quiet when he finished.

"I'm trying to think of something, anything we could have done to at least realize what had happened," she said finally. "Because that has to be the first thing you were wondering, too."

"I don't think there was anything," Steve said, surprising himself a little by honestly believing it. "I'm not sure yet about the modern era, but back then, in our time? What could we have done? We looked for his body - even when we weren't supposed to be - because we never had any reason to think he'd survived the fall. Schmidt never got to turn him against me, not like he'd planned, at least. We'd both 'died' before that could happen. And then..."

And then Bucky had gone from being HYDRA's cruel joke to the Soviets' and any chance they'd have had to find him and bring him back disappeared. Steve still hadn't read all of the Winter Soldier material - it would be waiting for him, it had been assured - but he'd spent the afternoon talking with Natasha and gotten the overview beyond what Fury had tried to show him.

He'd also come away reminded of how he'd never really understand what the Cold War had really been like, what it had driven governments to do, how it had shaped the mindsets of the entire world, even after it ended, and it would be why he would always remain a stranger in this time no matter how good he got with technology. He'd been born in the ashes of the Great War and then reborn for the second go-round, but those had been hot wars with bombers and infantry platoons and rationing and perhaps, in some ways, it had been easier to know where the bullets were and that they were coming than to grow up waiting for a bomb that might or might not ever arrive.

"And then he did," Peggy finished. "Seventy-five years later."

"Yeah," Steve agreed.

"Don't you drive all night," Peggy said after a few moments. "And you had better come through Philly on the way back."

"Yes, ma'am."

He passed the split that would have taken him into Pittsburgh and thought about pushing through to Wheeling, but after nearly wiping out trying to avoid a distracted driver in a Kia (that might not have survived the experience of colliding with a supersoldier on a Harley), he took the next exit and wound up in a clean but dreary motel that did not have hourly rates. He'd asked the clerk if there was anywhere to eat at this hour and was told there was a 24-diner a few blocks away. The walk did his muscles good - he was sore now from all those hours in the saddle, but he'd be fine by the time he went to bed - and the pancakes and sausages did him better. He resisted the urge to pull out his tablet and start reading the Winter Soldier files, instead forcing himself to make sure the curtains were drawn tightly closed, the 'do not disturb' sign was on the door, his phone was off (and buried in his gear, because Tony was ever unwilling to take a hint) and got into bed without so much as checking his email.

He slept until 0830, showered and changed, checked out, and did not turn on either his tablet or his phone until he was back at the diner, this time for scrambled eggs and hash browns and more sausages and a stack of white bread toast slathered in salty butter and coffee that could strip paint. And strawberries that tasted like tartness and water because he'd gotten a little spoiled on greenmarket produce. He sent a note to Tapper saying that he was taking personal time and then dutifully caught up on his work emails until Tapper emailed back a confirmation, which came so quickly that there had to have been a prior discussion and Tapper hadn't had to run it up the food chain when Steve's email had arrived.

Over more coffee and a second stack of buttered toast, Steve pulled out his map - a paper one, since if he had his druthers, he'd prefer to see everything at once without having to finger-flick and resize - and plotted his course. Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, Birmingham and then over to the coast and back up. (He did use the tablet to look up places to stop and eat in Cincinnati and then to stay in Nashville, where he'd probably spend the night.)

His phone started ringing when he was still in Ohio, but Steve ignored it. He knew the callers meant well - except for SHIELD HR - but he wasn't ready to talk about this yet to anyone not Peggy. And he wasn't sure he was even ready to confess all he thought and felt to her, although he had unfailing faith in her ability to see it anyway, which had been another reason to stay away.

Bucky was alive. This should have been the answer to his prayers - his best friend, his brother, alive and well and young in this time. And yet it was anything but.

"Are you prepared to fight him to the death?" Natasha had asked him as they'd walked through Prospect Park. "Because if you go after him, eventually you'll find him. Or he'll find you. And he's not just going to smile, nod, and agree to come back to the Helicarrier with you so SHIELD can mess with his head just because you say that he used to be someone else."

He'd pointed out that there were many possible outcomes to the two of them meeting, but Natasha hadn't been either swayed or distracted. "This is one of them. It's not even the worst one, but it's a possible one. Even a likely one. Certainly more likely than him suddenly remembering who he is or greeting you like the lost brother you are - you two have already met and he showed you no mercy.

"Which is why I am asking you now: are you prepared to fight him to the death? Because it may come to that, Steve. And you need to have that answer before it does."

He hadn't had that answer for Natasha and she'd had the grace to let it drop, although they'd both known that that had been a temporary reprieve. Because Natasha was right and he would have to know what he would do if Bucky tried to kill him for real, just as he'd have to know what he wanted to do if Bucky could not be rescued or, if they somehow brought him in, if he could not be saved. If Fury was right and Bucky had died in that fall and the Winter Soldier, Yasha Yachmenev, was just a stranger wearing Bucky's face, then there were a whole lot of hard decisions to be made. And as hard as they were, Steve wanted to be the one making them - or at least in the room when they were getting made - because he owed it to Bucky. And because he would have to live with the consequences.

As I-71 flowed into Kentucky, Steve wasn't sure if he was running toward an answer or from the question.