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He has this nightmare.

A nightmare about Kreischberg.

About that awful POW camp.

About the smell of the unwashed bodies, the smoke and the dead.

About running through the halls, looking for the room where they put Bucky and barely being able to find it.

A nightmare where he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

XxX
 
“Can’t sleep?” Natasha asks when he enters the kitchen on the communal floor. She’s standing by the window in the dark, looking out over New York City. She doesn’t turn to face him.

“Bad dream,” he says, fetching a glass of water.

“Me too,” Natasha responds.

Steve takes a sip of water and sets his cup down. “What did you dream?”

She shrugs.

There is a beat of silence and then she says, “The Red Room sent me to kill one of my own – a Black Widow gone rogue.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says after another moment of silence.

“I’ve killed Red Room operatives before,” she says. He can’t find a trace of emotion in her voice. She’s deliberately hiding an emotion, but he’s not sure which one. “This dream was just so vivid.”

“I dreamed I couldn’t save Bucky,” Steve says. “From that POW camp in Austria. I could smell death in the air, feel the cold wind. It’s amazing how your brain can replicate every little detail of your worst fears.”

XxX
 
When he wakes again, he doesn’t notice that anything is different right away. The left side of the bed is empty, but Bucky often gets up before him since neither of them are strangers to nightmares. But, unlike Steve, once Bucky is up, he’s up.

He doesn’t notice that Bucky’s towel is missing from the rack when he goes to shower. Or that Bucky’s boots aren’t stacked in the hallway, where he kicks them off every night. Or that Bucky’s weapon cache has vanished from the closet.

When he makes his way back to the communal kitchen, Tony is sitting in front of a cold cup of coffee, hunched over a tablet. His brow is furrowed and his shoulders hunched.

“Tony?” Steve asks.

Tony doesn’t respond, only flicks between two pages on the screen.

“Did something happen?” Steve asks.

No response.

“Tony!”

That gets his attention. Tony jumps slightly, realizes it’s Steve and settles back into his chair.

“There was some sort of massive energy release just outside of Earth’s atmosphere last night,” he says.

“What? Are we under attack?” Steve asks.

Tony shakes his head. “Not that we can tell. I’m… listening to official channels,” he says in a way that suggests he’s eavesdropping more than listening. “And I have JARVIS monitoring the situation. It’s like someone set off a bomb just outside of Earth’s atmosphere. Messed up some readings from space stations and reset a few satellites, but nothing was harmed.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” Steve says.

“I just have this feeling in my gut,” Tony admits. “Like it was something, but I just don’t know what yet.”

XxX
 
With nothing to go on, Steve has no choice but to go about his day. He works out. He reads the news. Answers emails.

He runs into Natasha and Clint in the kitchen that evening. Nat is tossing breadcrumbs at Clint and stops the moment Steve walks in.

“Did Bucky train with you two today? He normally joins me,” Steve says.

Clint and Nat look at each other as an uneasy stillness falls over them both.

“Bucky?” Clint asks.

“I just wanted to know if you’d seen him. He left pretty early this morning. I think he’s been having nightmares and I haven’t heard from him all day. I mean, I try to respect when he wants space but I still worry about him, you know?”

“Steve, are you feeling okay?” Nat asks.

“Well, I didn’t sleep well, either,” Steve says. “But you already knew that.” Steve pauses. “Come to think of it, Bucky wasn’t in bed after you and I spoke last night.”

He pulls his phone out. “Maybe something happened,” he says, a hint of panic creeping into the edge of his voice.

He’s silent, staring down at his phone for a beat.

“Steve.”

“None of my texts to Bucky are here. And—it’s not even showing Bucky’s phone number.” Steve glares up at them. “This isn’t funny. Whoever messed with my phone, we are going to have a talk.”

“Steve, you need to calm down,” Nat says.

Steve shakes his head, dialing numbers on his phone. “I am calm,” Steve says, then goes quiet to listen to the line.

He hangs up after a moment, his mouth pulled tight. “The line has been disconnected,” he says. “Why is Bucky’s line disconnected?” he asks.

“Steve, who are you talking about?” Clint asks.

Steve glares at him. “Bucky. You know. The Winter Soldier. My boyfriend. Long hair, metal arm. Come on, guys, this isn’t funny.”

“No one is laughing,” Natasha replies. “There is no one called the ‘Winter Soldier,’ and if you have a boyfriend, you certainly haven’t introduced him to us.”

“JARVIS, can you tell me if Bucky is in the building?” he asks instead of responding to Nat.

There is a long pause and then JARVIS’ clear voice comes down from the ceiling. “I have no records of anyone who goes by the name ‘Bucky’ entering the building.”

XxX
 
“You think this is funny?” Steve yells when he bursts into Tony’s lab.

Clint and Natasha are behind him, but he’s not listening to either of them as he storms up to Tony and stands over him.

“You mess with my phone, you get JARVIS to lie to me?”

“Why, hello, Cap, good to see you again,” Tony says, not letting himself be intimidated by a towering supersoldier. “While I have been known to enjoy a prank on occasion, I haven’t really had the time to pull a prank lately. I’ve been too busy saving the world, watching to make sure the government doesn’t get infiltrated by Nazis again, inventing incredible technology, stuff like that. So you are going to have to stop and tell me what you think I did?”

“You messed with my phone. I get it, Tony, very funny, is this another old man joke?”

“I didn’t touch your phone, Steve.”

“You deleted all my texts from Bucky, and it’s telling me his line doesn’t exist, and JARVIS claims he’s never even heard of him. So, very funny. Call it off now. I think something happened to him.”

Tony stares at him for a moment and then looks over to Natasha. “Do you know anything about this?”

“He says he has a boyfriend named Bucky, who lives in the Tower with us,” Clint says. “He must be a master ninja to have gone unnoticed by all of us.”

“You go to the range with him once a week!” Steve yells. “Would you stop pretending that you don’t know who Bucky Barnes is!”

The room is very quiet when Steve stops yelling.

Tony clears his throat. “Bucky Barnes?” he says. “The Howling Commando who died in 1945? That Bucky Barnes?”

XxX
 
“You’re you,” Tony says, but he doesn’t sound any relieved by this fact.

Steve has calmed down a lot since Tony scanned his head and tested his blood.

“Thanks,” he says flatly.

“I mean, nothing has altered you that I can tell,” Tony continues. “You are the same Captain America I’ve been working alongside for several years now. Only, you tell me that HYDRA, the HYDRA that we helped destroy last year when we discovered they had infiltrated SHIELD, found Bucky’s body in a ravine in the Alps and made him into a supersoldier assassin known as ‘The Winter Soldier,’ and you saved him and he’s been living in my Tower, fighting alongside the Avengers, and, my favorite part, has been your boyfriend for the past year?”

“I’m not lying,” Steve says.

“I don’t think you are lying. I think you really believe that. And I think we need to find out what caused that energy burst last night because it’s starting to look like you’ve been magicked in some regard.”

“I’m not under a spell.”

“Fine, maybe you were poisoned, I don’t know, Steve, but I do know that James Buchanan Barnes died in 1945 and there was never an assassin known as the Winter Soldier.”

“Sir, if I may,” JARVIS interrupts them.

Tony sighs. “Go ahead.”

“I’ve been combing through all the files Agent Romanov uploaded to the internet when Project Insight happened.”

“Did you find something, J?” Tony asks.

“Yes, it seems that HYDRA did have an asset they called the Winter Soldier from 1947 through 1964.”

“What happened to him?” Tony asks.

“When he was not in use, HYDRA kept the asset in cryofreeze. It seems the cryo vessel they placed him in malfunctioned and the asset was killed. They dissected him to learn what they could about the supersoldier serum from his body but were unable to recreate it.”

“Well. Fuck,” Tony says.

Steve jumps to his feet. “He can’t be dead! He was

right here

last night!” Steve yells.

“I believe you,” Tony says, keeping his voice deliberately level and soft. “Steve, I believe you, and we will figure it out.”

“Sir,” JARVIS says. “Agent Barton is requesting medical aid in the garage.”

XxX
 
“I’m fine,” Natasha says for the third time. The bullet lodged in her bicep. It’s unfortunate but not deadly. “I’ve had worse,” she says, trying to wave the medic off of her. It’s probably true, but that doesn’t deter the medic whatsoever.

“JARVIS, what the hell happened to this camera,” Tony says. He’s got the playback of the incident in the garage up on the wall. Barton and Romanov pull in. Romanov gets out of the car. Barton gets out of the car. Then there is a blur of light on the left side of the screen. It moves closer to Romanov and then Romanov goes down. Barton rushes around the car, grabs Natasha and the image becomes crystal clear again.

“I detect no problems with the cameras anywhere on the premises.”

“Great,” Tony says. “Captain America is imagining things, someone is trying to kill the Black Widow and JARVIS has been hacked. This is just. Great.”

“Tell me what happened,” Steve says, ignoring Tony.

“We went to pull some of the physical files on HYDRA from SHIELD,” Natasha says. “No one followed us. We pulled into the garage, it looked clear. I exited the vehicle. And this woman approached me. She spoke to me in Russian. She said, ‘Look at me,’ and then she raised her arm and shot me,” Natasha says.

“Did you recognize her?” Steve asks.

Natasha shakes her head.

“What did she look like?” Steve asks.

“She was dressed all in black, except for this white hood that she wore. She didn’t look like HYDRA or anyone else I know of.”

“All right, JARVIS, start looking up any evil women in white hoods,” Tony says. “I’m going to listen in on Big Brother and see if anyone has any idea what that energy burst was last night, because it’s starting to look connected.”

“You had a nightmare last night,” Natasha says when Tony leaves the room.

Steve nods.

“I had a nightmare last night,” Natasha says.

“You had to kill another Black Widow, you told me,” Steve says.

Natasha nods. “But when I woke up this morning—it’s like… it wasn’t a nightmare. Steve, when I think about it now, it’s a memory. It happened. I killed her. I remember now. It was December, 1997. The Widow – they’d given her a mark to run on a long con. We used to call them Wife Jobs. You go in, convince the guy you love him, marry him, even raise his kids She was given a Wife Job and she fell for the man. She went off the map. She stopped checking in with her superiors, so they sent me to kill her.”

“Last night, you said it was a dream, and now you’re saying it’s a memory?” Steve asks.

“Steve, think about your dream last night. Does it feel like a dream to you?”

Steve wets his lips, looks away from her. Thinks back to Kreischberg. To the POW camp that had Bucky. Azzano.

To the pens the Commandos were kept in. The smell of dirty hair and unwashed clothes. He’d asked them where Bucky was and they told him they’d taken him. They’d taken him and Steve had searched room by room by room and—

“

Fuck!”

He says and turns to Natasha. “No. No. This is bullshit. I

saved

him in Austria. I found him. I brought him out of the camp. We went back to London together. He was in my commando unit.”

“I believe you,” Natasha says. “Because I didn’t kill that Widow in ’97 but I remember doing it.”

XxX
 
There are pictures of the Winter Soldier and Bucky Barnes on the screen. There are detailed notes of the dissection of his body. There are schematics for the metal arm HYDRA made him. There are diagrams for the cryotank they froze him in. There are grainy photographs of the failed tank.

Steve can’t look at one more image. He puts his face in his hands.

“It really happened,” Steve mumbles into his palms. “He really was here. The Winter Soldier was sent to protect Project Insight and he spared my life and then I brought him in. I brought him here.”

“Steve,” Tony says. “I was there. I would’ve remembered fighting a man with a metal arm.”

“Wait,” Natasha says before Steve can flip his lid. “Let’s pretend both things happened. We know there is technology that can drill a hole in the sky to bring an army from across the universe here. What if there is something merging two realities?”

“A reality in which Bucky died and one in which he didn’t?” Steve asks, pulling his hands off his face.

Natasha nods. “One in which I killed that other Red Room operative and one in which I didn’t.”

“Red Room operative?” Tony asks. “Are you keeping secrets from me?”

“Last night I remembered a mission. December, 1997. I was sent to a remote village in Siberia to kill a rogue Black Widow and the physicist she had fallen in love with. But the memory – it’s new, somehow.”

“So, Cap imagines that he has a boyfriend and you suddenly remember a mission you’ve repressed from your days of worshiping Stalin, and you want me to think those are somehow connected?” Tony says.

“Someone tried to kill me yesterday,” Natasha says. “I think it would be safer to assume these are related.”

“Got me there. Fine. What’s the plan then?” Tony asks.

XxX
 
Natasha’s hair is brilliant in the sunlight – red as red can be. She’s sitting on a bench in Central Park pretending to read a book.

Steve is pretending to stretch in the grass behind her and Tony is watching from a van half a block away.

Now they just have to wait.

And wait they do.

Until Natasha’s cell phone rings. The number is blocked. She answers anyway, looking over her shoulder.

“You think I don’t know a trap when I see one?” a female voice says over the line.

“Who are you?” Natasha asks.

“I want you to think hard about December 1997, because soon you won’t be able to think at all.”

The line goes dead right as Tony’s voice comes over the comms. “Guys?” he says. “JARVIS needs us back at the Tower. Like. Five minutes ago.”

XxX
 
“We knocked out power to half of Manhattan,” Tony says as he manually unlocks the stairs that lead down toward the basement in Avengers Tower.

“We?” Steve asks, following him down. The emergency lighting running off the generators is tinted blue and makes everything appear dreamlike and soft.

“Not we personally,” Tony says. “The Tower. JARVIS.”

“What happened exactly?”

Tony throws open the door from the stairwell to his lab. “Something – someone – tried to access the arc reactor. And JARVIS defended it.”

There is a beat of silence while the emergency lights in the lab kick on. The mainframe that serves as JARVIS’ brain hums quietly in the background.

“J, you there?” Tony asks, a thread of worry hanging in his voice.

There is a beat of silence and Steve can feel sweat collect on the palms of his hands.

“I am here,” JARVIS says from everywhere and nowhere at once. The AI sounds unsure of itself, somehow. Like it’s speaking from a room away.

Tony sighs. “You scared me, J.”

“My apologies, sir. I seem to only be running at partial capacity.”

Tony flicks on a monitor. “What happened?”

There is another moment of silence. “I’m not sure,” JARVIS replies. “I am missing several minutes from my recent memory banks. However, I do know there is someone in the Hulk holding cell.”

The monitor Tony turned on shows the snowfall of static for a moment before coalescing into a black and white image of the hulk-proof chamber. There is a figure inside of it. Human in form but the face is obscured, a computer glitch of white light.

“JARVIS, who is in the holding cell?” Tony asks.

“I don’t know, sir.”

XxX
 
It’s an argument, but they do decide to wait until power is fully restored. “Because we don’t know that they are actually being held by that cell or if they just want us to think that,” Natasha argued.

JARVIS had made a valiant attempt to uncover the lost data while they waited, but was unable.

“Whoever it is, they have potentially altered time, and even if they didn’t, they still made an attempt on Natasha’s life and slipped by JARVIS unseen.”

They suit up just in case, and descend into the sub-basement levels.

The door opens and the lights are bright inside the cell. Steve blinks to adjust as they step closer.

It’s a woman. She’s standing in the middle of the cell with her arms crossed. She’s wearing a white cloak that covers only her head and arms. It’s translucent as lace. The rest of her body is clad in black. She has dark hair and sharp features, a smirk across her lips.

“

Zdravstvuyte

, Natalia,” she says, her smile growing wider.

Something cold twists in Steve’s gut, a feeling like he knows they don’t have the upper hand, but he has no idea what cards are in play.

“Don’t you speak English?” Natasha asks, no nonsense.

“If that’s what you want,” the woman replies, smoothly. Not a hint of accent to her voice. “I speak many languages. Just like you, Natalia.”

“Who are you?” Natasha asks, right to the point.

“You know who I am.”

“I’ve never seen you before in my life,” Natasha says. “How did you get in here?”

“You’ve seen me before,” the woman replies. “I was six years old at the time, but you saw me. In Russia. When you killed my parents.”

“You could be anyone,” Natasha says. “I killed many parents for the Red Room.”

“But you only killed one rogue Black Widow and one physicist.”

Natasha turns to glare at Tony. “I told you,” she hisses and leaves the room with stiff, steady steps.

Tony glances at Steve and then at Natasha’s retreating form.

Steve takes another step toward the glass. “What did you do with Bucky?” he asks.

“The Winter Soldier, you mean?” she asks. “I’ll let you figure that out.”

XxX
 
“December, 1997. I was in Moscow. I was training girls in the Red Room.” Natasha falls silent, her eyes wide as she stares at nothing. “It doesn’t make any fucking sense,” she says after a moment. “Everyone else must’ve been on assignment. Because they sent me out from the Red Room. It was unusual to send an instructor out on a mission without completely reassigning her.”

“Are you sure this really happened?” Steve asks.

“No,” Natasha replies. “I’m not. The memory. It doesn’t feel right.”

“Tell us what happened anyway,” Tony says. He’s called Bruce and Clint down, also. Thor is still off world somewhere. He’s not ready to trust Fury just yet. So it’s only them, for now.

“I had sixteen hours. A pilot flew me out to the middle of nowhere, Siberia. There were these doors, cut right into the mountainside. It didn’t look like anything from the outside, but it had an enormous heat signal. Turned out it was a lab, but I didn’t know anything more than that.

“I went right in through the front door. They had been lazy, clumsy, there was nothing to stop me. No traps. No alarms. They must’ve thought no one on Earth could find their lab. I shot them in their bed. Linus Tarasov and Alenka Sergeyevna. They never even woke up.”

“And their daughter?” Steve prompts.

“I don’t remember,” Natasha says. Then furrows her brow. “No. Wait. There was a girl.” She groans, rubs at her temples like it hurts. “She was very young and the pilot took her and I never heard about it again.”

“So it’s revenge,” Tony says.

“That doesn’t explain what happened to Bucky,” Steve says.

XxX
 
It’s Bruce who figures it out.

“I went back and looked at the properties of that energy release, and something about it seemed oddly familiar to me,” Bruce says.

“You know what it is?” Tony asks.

“It’s the Tesseract,” he says.

“The Tesseract? The one that we handed over to Thor for safekeeping? The one that almost destroyed the world? That one?” Tony asks, mildly hysterical.

Bruce shrugs. “I think so. Or something like it. Maybe there is more than one?”

“Great. Great. Someone. Get ahold of Thor. We need to – J,” Tony says. “Did you scan this woman?”

There is a beat of silence. “I am unable to get a proper scan of her,” JARVIS replies.

“What’s the problem?” Steve asks. “Why can’t JARVIS scan her?”

“There’s something interfering with my equipment,” JARVIS says. “An energy signal of some sort.”

“Wonderful,” Tony says. “We need to search her. For all we know, she’s sitting in there with the Tesseract

right now

.”

XxX
 “The good news is: she’s human,” Tony says. “And I knew I wouldn’t regret giving JARVIS knock-out gas.”
She’s unconscious and stretched out on an exam table, strapped down with bonds engineered to hold a supersoldier.  She looks much smaller unconscious and laid out defenseless. She’s about Natasha’s height. Pretty, but not distractingly so. Thin, but clearly made of compact muscle. She has scars on her arms, calluses on her hands like she’s no stranger to manual labor.

“Now that we can scan her – she’s got no obvious modifications. Female, human, bad haircut, mid-twenties. Facial recognition comes back with nothing. DNA, nothing. Fingerprints, nothing. No identification, of course. She has a cellphone, a knife, and a Tesseract, naturally,” Tony says.

“Why didn’t you do this to begin with?” Natasha asks.

“I wasn’t expecting her to have the fucking Tesseract on her person. And I wasn’t entirely sure she

was

a person,” Tony says.

Steve turns to Natasha. “Is this the Black Widow’s daughter?” he asks.
Natasha’s usually impassive face twists a little around the corner of her mouth. She nods. “I can’t imagine she’s anyone else.”
XxX
 
“It’s just a shard of the Tesseract,” Bruce says. He’s got the thing under glass in the center of his lab. It’s glowing blue, small, triangular like a knife-tip. Sharp as all get-out and looking threatening in spite of its size.

“Has anyone managed to contact Thor?” Steve asks.

“Not yet,” Tony replies. “Still trying.”

“How did she break a piece off the Tesseract?” Bruce asks.

“That is the million dollar question,” Tony says.

“So, she used this shard to alter reality?” Steve asks.

“That’s what it looks like,” Bruce says.

“Then we can use it to alter reality back,” Steve says.

“I don’t know how it works,” Bruce says. “And you are the only one who remembers reality

changing.

For all we know, she’s altered nothing about reality but instead given you a false memory.”

Steve grits his teeth. “What purpose would that serve?”

“I don’t know,” Bruce admits. “But it’s just as likely as her altering reality. We have to consider all choices. She wants something, Steve. Let’s figure that out first.”

XxX
 
Steve watches and waits.

They sat her up in a chair, hands cuffed and legs cuffed, and let the effects of the drugs wear off.

She comes to slowly, with a flutter of eyelashes, dragging her chin up off her chest, tipping her head back and blinking up at the lights above them. She then rocks her head to the side, blinking again and settling her gaze on Steve.

Steve sits across from her, leaned over with his elbows on his knees and his fingers laced together. He’s put on the whole Captain America get up – the stealth suit. He figures he might as well look official while he interrogates her.

“Tell me your name,” he says, dipping his voice deep into the Commander Rogers range, the way he gives orders. It typically compels people to do his will.

But he’s not exactly surprised when it doesn’t work.

Their prisoner simply smirks at him. “I’m shocked you haven’t figured it out yet.”

“How did you get the Tesseract?” Steve presses on.

“It’s a long story,” she says. “I wouldn’t want to bore you.”

“Please. Bore me,” Steve says.

She glances off to the side, nonchalant to a level that seems almost forced and shrugs. “Naw.”

“You do understand that you are at our mercy,” Steve says.

She levels her unblinking gaze back on him. “I don’t think Captain America is really known for torturing people. The Black Widow, maybe. But, you may have noticed, I’m not exactly scared of her.”

“There is a history there.”

“As much of a history as I had with the Winter Soldier. HYDRA runs dark and deep, but you don’t need me to tell you that.”

“You’re HYDRA then,” Steve says, and settles back in his chair, crossing his arms over his chest.

“You sure about that?” she asks.

“Why else would you be here trying to kill Avengers?”

“It’s a personal grudge,” Natasha says from behind him. “She’s not here to kill Avengers – she’s here to kill me.”

“Ding ding ding,” their prisoner says with too much glee in her voice for Steve to be completely comfortable.

Natasha stands next to him, her back straight and stiff and he can sense the way she is poised for a fight.

“Tarasova,” Natasha says.

The woman’s smirk slips into a full grin. But it’s not a happy smile, it’s a threat, a promise of violence, and Steve has this feeling like he’s not in control of the situation, even though he’s not the one in chains.

“Clever girl,” Tarasova says. “I wasn’t sure if the memory would be immediate or not. It’s always hard to tell exactly what will happen when you’re altering a timeline.”
She’s staring at Natasha like she’s starving, like she’s forgotten Steve exists, like she’s unaware of the fact that she’s chained and captured.
“It’s not possible,” Natasha says. “All the Widows were sterilized. It was part of the Red Room graduation ceremony,” she says. Her voice is hard as ice but Steve can still hear something like hurt inside of her – but, he realizes, only because he knows her cadence, finally, after all this time.

Tarasova just grins – her smile like a crack in her face. She makes Steve think of the Cheshire cat – she’s half mad, half delighted at the telling of this tale. “Are you so sure of that?” she asks, rocking her shoulders side to side, ever so slightly. It makes her look like a snake.

“I spent every day of 1996, 1997 and 1998 in the Red Room, training new Widows. I did not have a mission in Siberia in ’97 and I escorted multiple girls to the medical wing of the Red Room for surgery.”

“I know you believe that,” Tarasova says. “Because the mind is a funny thing. It can hold multiple realities at once. You remember training Widows, but you also remember a cabin in Siberia where you killed Sergeyevna in her bed while she slept next to the man she loved more than Mother Russia.”

“Steve,” Natasha says, her voice like an order and he has no choice but to follow her when she leaves the room.

XxX

“You’re an idiot,”

Bucky had said when they were first alone after Kreischberg, after the POW camp. They were in his tent and it was raining, night time, the grounds were quiet and he felt like he was going to die if he didn’t get his hands on Bucky

right now.

He said it again in a hospital bed in D.C. after Steve had hunted him down and begged him to come in. He was shaking, hanging on to the edge of his sheet. He had a broken cheekbone and couldn’t keep any food down and all Steve wanted to do was curl up at his feet and never let him out of his sight again.

The memory has a tint around the edge of it, like it’s not quite real. Like he saw it on a silver screen – everything about it too hazy and too perfect all at once. Bucky is smiling in the memory but he didn’t smile at the time. Steve

knows

that, down in his gut. Knows that Bucky was shaking mad, shaking with fear, shaking with things he didn’t yet know how to express.

It’s hard to hold onto. All his memories of Bucky after the war are hard to hold onto. Bucky laughing in the summer light on his birthday just last year. Bucky throwing popcorn at the television when a movie gets dumb. Bucky at his back in battle. Bucky rolling over in bed to put his cold metal hand on Steve’s back just a morning ago—

“The more time passes, the clearer the memory becomes,” Natasha says. She’s more agitated than Steve has ever seen her, but that’s not saying much for the Black Widow. She has her hands on her hips and rocks her weight just once from her front foot to her back foot. “They sent me to kill Sergeyevna because she fell in love with her mark and they couldn’t have that. She was no longer faithful to the Red Room or HYDRA. But I was being punished in ’97. I wasn’t allowed out of the Red Room because I had to earn back their trust.”

“Wouldn’t killing one of your own earn back their trust?” Steve asks.

Natasha nods. “That’s why they sent the Winter Soldier to kill her. He was earning back their trust for the same reason as me – he had begun to act too human.”

“What are you not telling me?”

“The Winter Soldier trained Red Room operatives,” Natasha says. “We became… friends,” she says. “They did not like us acting human, so they sent him to another base and I was forced to stay right there and train new Widows. And they sent Bucky to kill a girl he had trained to teach him not to act so human again in the future.”

Steve stares at her for a moment. “Why didn’t he tell me he knew you before?”

Natasha shrugs. He’s so used to her body language being fake that it takes him half a heartbeat to realize she’s not bluffing him. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t remember him ever being here but I imagine it had to do with his recovery, Steve. When I was deprogramming, there were lots of things I wanted to pretend never had happened. I’m sure he felt the same.”

“Okay, okay,” Steve says. “So. The Winter Soldier kills Tarasova’s mother and father. And… She alters reality so that the Winter Soldier dies in 1964.”

He pauses for a moment, staring at nothing.

“To save them?” he guesses. “She thinks: no Winter Soldier, no dead parents?”

“HYDRA must have really wanted them dead, because they contacted the Red Room and sent out me,” Natasha says.

“Right. Okay. So you kill Tarasova’s parents in ’97 and then she waits two decades and tries to shoot you in the parking lot under the Avengers’ building? This does not add up,” Steve says.

XxX
 
“I think…,” Tony says and then shuts up.

It’s never a good sign when Tony fucking Stark shuts up.

Steve and Natasha let the quiet drag on for a moment while Stark stares at something Steve doesn’t understand on the screen in front of him.

“Was there an end to that sentence?” Steve prompts after a moment.

“I think we are in the original timeline,” Tony finally says.

“What the fuck does that mean?” Steve asks, his patience finally waning.

“Well, there is a theory that there are infinite realities based on infinite possibilities, so there are infinite realities. Then there is a mostly discounted subtheory that there is one ‘true’ reality that all subsequent realities are variants upon. Tarasova altered reality – she did not time travel. She did not go back in time and kill the Winter Soldier personally. She used a shard of the Tesseract to create a reality in which the Winter Soldier died in ’64. But it didn’t give her the outcome she desired. Which, presumably, was a reality in which one or both of her parents survived. Upon realizing her plan didn’t work, she lashed out.”

“At Natasha?” Steve says.

Tony nods. “She learned that Natasha killed her parents the same time Natasha learned that she had killed Tarasova’s parents the other night. We are in a reality that never existed before.”

“So, there is an original timeline in which Bucky is still alive and Natasha didn’t kill Tarasova’s parents?”

“I don’t think so,” Tony says and grimaces. “Not anymore, at least. The Tesseract is a very powerful thing. I think she’s altered the original timeline.”

“Are you suggesting that Tarasova

broke

reality itself?” Natasha asks, her voice laced with disbelief.

“Stranger things have happened. And it explains why you and Cap can both remember things that never happened. You were both close to the aspect of reality that was altered, so the change doesn’t mesh perfectly into your memories. And even I,” Tony stops talking for a moment, shakes his head. “If I

think

about it, I can feel where something is different. It’s like having a popcorn kernel stuck in your teeth at a weird angle – you may not notice it but once you find it, you can’t stop picking at it. If I think about it, I get this feeling of something not right, even if I can’t bring a concrete memory of Bucky to mind.”

“How do we fix it?” Steve asks, frustration mounting inside of him, overwhelming and unavoidable.

Tony gives an out-of-character shrug. “I don’t know,” Tony admits. “But if anyone would know – it’s Tarasova.”

XxX
 
Bucky loved their apartment in the Tower.

He was a less of a fan of Tony and he rarely spent time in the common spaces of the Tower (being around people who weren’t Steve for extended periods of time still stressed him out). But he loved being in New York City. He loved the view from their bedroom. He loved the huge, plush couch Steve bought for the living room. He loved the bookshelves they put up in the guest room and filled with novels and memoirs. He loved the ridiculous jacuzzi tub in their bathroom. He loved making messes in the kitchen and cleaning up after. They had a dishwasher but he still liked to wash dishes by hand. Said it settled him, the repetition, the familiar task.

He made Steve feel like he was present in the future for the first time since he woke up from the ice. Like the world had no longer ended and decided to kick the shit out of him a little more for fun.

But Steve stands in the quiet of his living room now and wants to rip his own skin off. The apartment isn’t the same without Bucky.

And part of it is simply because the little touches of Bucky are missing. The vintage Captain America poster he proudly hung on the living room wall, the ever-present pile of dirty socks beside the couch, his leather coat on the back of a chair, the gingerbread candle that had been sitting on the counter since last Christmas—

When he would come home from a mission, Bucky would kiss him and lead him to their bed and he would rub the palms of his hands and the space between his shoulder blades – those sore spots where he carried all his tensions and worries.

Steve’s teeth ache, he misses Bucky so hard. He can’t sleep, not here, not alone like this, not now, not again, not after everything.

He makes his way back down to the security room where the feed for the holding cell is. Without the shard of Tesseract on her, Tarasova is clear to the camera’s unblinking eye. She’s motionless, lying on the floor with her hands behind her head like she doesn’t have a care in the fucking world.

Like she didn’t just destroy everything Steve’s spent building the past few years.

XxX
 
“Tell me you remember me,” Steve says when Sam answers the phone. It’s late. He knows it’s late, but he can’t go back to those empty rooms, and even Tony told him to go get some rest because there was nothing any of them could do right then.

“Of course I remember you,” Sam says and Steve lets out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “What is going on?”

“I need you to remind me that torture is wrong,” Steve says.

“Steve,” Sam says. His voice is short, and the tone lands somewhere between therapist and best friend. “Who are you torturing?”

“Do you remember Bucky?” Steve asks.

“Yeah – the Howling Commando, your best friend. You’ve told me about him a million times.”

“That’s it?” Steve asks, his voice strangled.

“I mean. I know he was your partner, lover, whatever the term you want to use.”

“This is really fucking bad.”

XxX
 
It’s a restless night.

Steve can’t even bear the sight of his apartment. He manages a few hours of shitty sleep on the couch in the common room before making a pot of coffee that he takes directly to Bruce and Tony in their lab.

“I… have no idea how this thing works,” Bruce admits. “We know from HYDRA’s records that Linus Tarasova did extensive research on

a

tesseract but his research was lost around the time he was killed. Only, I’m starting to think it wasn’t really lost so much as, well, hidden.”

“You think his daughter got her hands on it?” Steve asks.

“I can’t think of any other possibilities.”

XxX
 
“I assume you read the Winter Soldier file,” Steve says when he stands in front of the cell again.

Tarasova looks up from where she’s lying on the floor but otherwise makes no movement. “I may have,” she says in a way that implies she definitely did.

“So you knew that he was a prisoner of war,” Steve says flatly.

“James B. Barnes. Sharpshooter. Sergeant. 107
th
. Born March 10, 1917 in Brooklyn, New York. Best friend of the famous Captain America.” She waves one hand patronizingly, resting her head down again to stare at the light above them. “Captured by HYDRA in 1944 and turned into the Winter Soldier. The Fist of HYDRA. Their ghost story. I read all about it.”

“Then you knew he was innocent.”

“I think even you will find, Captain Rogers, that innocence is rather flexible when it’s your own family on the line.”

“You couldn’t find a way to save your family that didn’t result in Bucky’s death?”

“Barnes’ death was the easiest solution. If you’re not a god, wielding a power like the Tesseract is a bit challenging. They are very powerful but they take a lot of power.” She sits up to flash him a grin. She looks like a cat playing with a mouse and Steve hates the realization that he’s the mouse in this scenario.

“I’ve read your file, too, Rogers,” she continues. “You remember Kreischberg? Remember how you couldn’t save them all? I know Barnes did nothing wrong, but you can’t save everyone and even the best of us play favorites.”

XxX
 
Bucky was better at coping with the notion that not everyone could be saved.

When missions didn’t go off perfectly or innocent people died, he was good at getting Steve alone and kissing his hands and promising him that Steve had done everything he could have done. That it wasn’t his fault.

But when he thinks about Kreischberg, he doesn’t think about the men he couldn’t save. He doesn’t think about the mass grave behind the facility. He doesn’t think about the men who died on the walk back, or the ones who died in the med tent after they arrived back in Allied territory.

He understood, then, that it wasn’t his fault. Or maybe he blamed General Philips or the Red Skull or just… someone other than himself.

But when he sits alone after talking to Tarasova, he lets himself face a truth he has never let himself face before – he didn’t think about those other soldiers that died there because he was too worried about Bucky.

About the cuts on Bucky’s body and the haunted look in his eyes and the fact that he was real and alive and Steve had almost lost him.

The way he hovered over Bucky the days after he got him back and promised himself again and again that he would never be separated from Bucky again.

(It was the same promise he made quietly to himself and to Bucky when Bucky came in from the cold and asked to be decommissioned as HYDRA’s greatest weapon.

He’s failed Bucky twice now. He won’t do it again.)

XxX

“Well, clearly we need to get to her space station,” Tony says. He’s waving around a screwdriver even though he doesn’t seem to have been screwing anything recently.

Steve puts his elbows on his knees and drops his head forward into his hands. He’s working on a massive headache that wants to crawl down the back of his neck. Bucky always used to rub his shoulders for him and tell him to calm down when he got this worked up. It never worked, but it was nice.

“Because I’m sure there is some key information there, to unlock the rest of this nonsense.”

“I don’t have a spaceship in my pocket,” Steve mutters without looking up, and instantly regrets it.

He looks up when Tony doesn’t make an obvious sex joke.

“I called Hill,” Tony says.

That has Steve on his feet. “You’re dragging SHIELD into this?”

“I know it’s not your favorite group of people,” Tony sugarcoats it. “But unless you want to wait the several months it would take me to pull a spaceship out of my ass, they are our best bet.”
Steve throws his hands up. “Bucky’s already been dead for fifty years at this point!”
“Steve,” Tony’s voice cuts through, unusually level. “She’s torn up reality. We don’t know she hasn’t done damage that we can’t see. The sooner we fix this, the sooner we have your boyfriend back, the sooner we can be assured that reality as we know it isn’t unraveling like a sweater with a loose thread.”

“Is that what you think is happening?” Steve asks.

“I can’t be sure,” Tony says. “But it could be.”

Steve was about to call up Hill and demand to know what her exact plan was when the Tower fell into darkness for the second time that week.

XxX
 
The Hulk cell is no longer occupied.

Which is particularly disconcerting when the emergency lights don’t come on.

Steve can hear Tony cussing over the comms as he makes his way by foot to the heart of the Tower, having to manually unlock doors along the way.

JARVIS is still accessible on a laptop Tony plugged into their comms, “But he doesn’t have access to the Tower mainframe and he’s only as good as the battery,” he explained before taking off.

Upon examination, Steve feels like an idiot – Tarasova didn’t do anything particularly special; she was somehow able to pick the physical lock on the cell.
“I hate to be a mood killer,” Tony says over the comms, “But things are--.”
Steve takes the stairs toward the heart of the Tower two at a time. The doors locked automatically after Tony. He’s able to break the first one but the second one is reinforced against even

him

and he’s about to scream with frustration when the Black Widow shows up and pulls a little tool out of a pouch on her belt, rolls her eyes at Steve and picks the lock with a grace he didn’t know was possible.

They make their way through the next three doors like that and to the final basement level.
The room is huge, bathed in the bluish light from the reactor thrumming silently before them.
Steve moves quietly, adjusting the grip on his shield silently.

“So. This is less than ideal,” Tony says from the chair he’s been tied to directly in front of the reactor.

To the left of them, at the console, is Tarasova with her head bent over the controls. She doesn’t even look up when she picks up a gun (where did she even get that?) and points it at Tony’s head.

Steve stops a good fifteen feet out from Tony and Tarasova. “Look, I get it, everyone wants their family safe,” Steve says. “But I’m not sure murder and terrorism is the best way to get what you want.”

“I’m not terribly interested in a speech from America’s walking propaganda machine, thanks,” Tarasova replies.

“How about a conversation?” Steve asks.

“Tell the widow that I can see her and I will kill this man,” she says and Steve looks around to where Natasha has her hand on a tiny gun on her hip.

She glares at Steve for a moment before pointedly removing her hand from the weapon.
“So, Cap, I am going to travel back in time and prevent HYDRA from killing my parents.” She looks up then, pins Steve with her steely blue eyes. “Do you care to join me?”
“Time travel?”

“See? You don’t

really

want a conversation. You

want

me to go back to that cell and shut up and then maybe you will keep me there forever, or kill me. It doesn’t matter what my motivation is, who I am, where I came from.

“Because, you see, my parents were fighting HYDRA. My mother smuggled multiple girls out of the Red Room. My father was manipulated into creating weapons for HYDRA and the Red Room, using the Tesseract, until my mother saved him also. HYDRA wanted them dead for a reason – they were destabilizing the institution from the inside. In another world, you would’ve been friends. If you let me do this, HYDRA goes down decades ago. You wake up in the future and the fruits of your labor back in 1944 have paid off.”
“You don’t get to just undo reality and force it back to your liking,” Steve says.
“See? That’s where you are wrong,” Tarasova replies and then pulls up the object she’s been working on and lays it where Steve can see it – the Tesseract.

It’s clearly been shattered – fracture lines spider web through it, it’s still got a corner missing and it’s wrapped up in copper wire and, when Steve follows the lines with his eyes, he sees that it’s plugged into the arc reactor.

“I didn’t know she had the rest of it; I mean, why would I?” Tony says, unusually self-deprecating but still seeming to try to shrug it off. “She let it charge off the Tower – I guess a shattered Tesseract doesn’t have the same sort of

oomph

as an intact one – and then when it was ready, it shorted the arc, cut all the power in the building and she took that as her chance to escape. It’s really rather impressive, and I’m going to choke her with my bare hands when I get the chance.”

Tarasova snorts. “In a moment, you won’t remember that I was ever even here at all,” she says and brandishes the final shard of the Tesseract – the one that Tony had had up in his lab earlier that very day.
Steve figures she’s as distracted as she’ll ever be and bursts into a run, slamming into her before she can slip the final sliver of the Tesseract into place.
XxX
 
He’s still holding the shard of the Tesseract and not listening to a word Tony is saying.

Tony has been talking a mile a minute since they released him from his bonds – muttering about coming up with a better way to protect the Tower and JARVIS and the reactor – and Steve just doesn’t care.

“How,” Steve says, cutting Tony off. “Do we get reality back?”

“You and Natasha are the only ones who remember reality being different,” Tony says.

Steve bites back something rude. “We know she changed reality.”

“Changing it more could make it fragment more,” Bruce says, his tone much gentler than Tony’s.

“I’m not living without him,” Steve says, his voice shockingly loud.

XxX
 
He’s asleep on the couch in the common room when the television clicks on, startling him to alertness.

The rest of the day had been spent with Tony and Bruce tossing ideas back and forth over what would happen if they put the last shard into the Tesseract without ever actually agreeing on anything.

Sam finally arrived from DC, took one look at Steve, and ordered him to go lay down. Clint and Natasha decided it would be best to take turns sitting with the arc reactor, just in case Tarasova managed to spring the cell

again.

He feels around the cushions under him for a moment, thinking he must’ve rolled on a remote without realizing it, when the image finally settles on the screen and it’s – it’s

him.

He’s standing in the common room, the elevator doors clearly visible behind him. He looks serious but composed.

“Listen to me,” he says in the Captain America voice. “Everything is going to be fine. You are going to get Bucky back. But I need you to listen to me.”

Steve looks carefully around the room.

“JARVIS,” he says, “Where is this video coming from?”

There is an ominous pause from the AI.

“I cannot say,” JARVIS finally responds. “The file has been in my system for five years.”

“Why are you showing it to me now?” Steve asks.

“I have been programed to. I cannot override the code,” JARVIS says.

“How is that possible?”

“It seems that I am the one who wrote the code.”

“Listen,” the Steve on the television says, as though he had anticipated Steve’s conversation with JARVIS. “The first time you were alone with Bucky after SHIELD released him, you brought him home and sat on his bedside. He kissed the palm of your hand and fell asleep with his head on your thigh, and you stroked your hand through his hair and promised you would protect him no matter what. You’ve never told a soul about that moment,” the recording says. “So you are going to listen to me because I’m going to tell you how to get Bucky back.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

Listening to a recording that seemed to be from the future was the sort of idiot idea Bucky would probably discourage him from. But Bucky’s not here to call him an idiot, so Steve sneaks into Bruce’s lab and steals the final shard of the Tesseract.

It’s such a dumb idea.

“JARVIS,” Steve says, adjusting the gloves on his uniform before picking up his shield. “Are you going to help me?”

JARVIS doesn’t sigh, because he’s an AI, but there’s something about his voice that implies a long-suffering sigh. “I seem to be programmed to aid you in this particular suicide mission.”

“We both know I’ll be fine,” Steve says.

“Or you will further fracture reality,” JARVIS replies and, not for the first time, Steve wonders why Tony created such a sarcastic AI.

“Well, lets hope I don’t.”

The arc reactor hums louder and the light off it intensifies.

“Try not to run into your past self,” JARVIS says.

“I won’t,” Steve says. “I remember how it all happened.”

There is a circle of copper wire on the floor, connected to the Tesseract and the arc reactor on either side. It’s begun to glow red-hot but video-Steve had assured him this was all part of the plan.

“Are you ready, Captain?” JARVIS asks.

Steve feels the weight of the shard in the palm of his hand. Thinks about Bucky strapped to a table, repeating his ID number. Thinks about finding that room empty and the way it broke his heart—

“Yes,” Steve says.

“Place the shard into the Tesseract and step into the circle,” JARVIS says.

XxX
 
It’s dark but not quiet.

Steve can hear the HYDRA base off in the trees. He looks down and the circle of copper wire is fading fast, vanishing right out existence around his feet, and then he’s alone.

He’s frozen to the spot for a moment with the realization that he did it, it’s 1942 and he’s back in Italy, and the 107
th
is being held captive just beyond the trees in front of him.

He takes a steadying breath, nervous in a way he wasn’t when he was here the first time. When he was just a big, dumb idiot making sure the man he loved was still alive.

There’s so much on the line this time. He’s not saving Bucky the once, he’s saving him the heartache of the Winter Soldier and all those years he was in HYDRA’s hands, abused and alone and unloved, and Steve still gets too overwhelmed to think about those seventy years for longer than a moment at a time.

He shakes his head and pushes all those thoughts away. That doesn’t matter now. Right now, he is going to find Bucky. He knows exactly where he is, and he knows his past self will find the other POWs first.

So he has time; not a lot of it, but there is a window to get Bucky before the Steve of 1942 finds him first.

He leaves his supplies in the underbrush of a large tree and takes stock of the place to remember the exact location, so he can be certain he’s in the right spot when JARVIS calls them home. It’s not much – a blanket, a few protein bars, water, bandages. He remembers the state he found Bucky in all those years ago. He’ll have to take care of him.

Steve’s careful to be silent as he makes his way toward the base – he’s approaching from the opposite side he did in ’42. It’ll minimize the chances he’ll run into himself; besides, his past self will be organizing an uprising in the cells that will help distract HYDRA guards from his current self.

He’s not ready for the smell, though. When he pauses to take stock of the building from behind an empty truck, he can smell the smoke stacks, the grime and dirt, and the distinct scent of human death underneath it all. This is a horrible place, and he had pulled Bucky out of it and then tried to never think of it again. But the smell takes him back so quickly, to that state of fear and distress and desperate, stupid hope.

He takes ownership of the feeling after a heartbeat. Lets it center him. The way he felt all those years ago will help him now because the purpose is the same – get Bucky out alive. There is no time to waste.

He skirts along the outside of the buildings, sticking to shadow and avoiding guards until he finds a broken window he can climb into. He knocks the rest of the glass out of the way with the gloved palm of his hand, cringing at the tinkling sound it makes, before he pulls himself inside.

Steve lands silently on the balls of his feet, rising slowly to his full height and looking around. He’s in a hallway. It’s as dimly lit as he remembers, wide and damp and thankfully empty.

He went over the blueprints before traveling back – JARVIS had managed to find them somewhere, possibly in old SHIELD archives – and Steve had pored over them for a moment, remembering those moments all those years ago and preparing again.

He’s not sure where his former self is. He’s not sure what time, exactly, he dropped from Howard’s plane all those years ago. How long it took him to find the pens where the POWs were being kept. How long it took him to find Bucky.

There’s no time to waste.

Steve creeps down the hall, silently and quickly until he finds the corridor he’s looking for. He freezes at the corner, peeking around to see if there’s anyone there.

There’s a noise somewhere outside and he sees Zola take off down the hall. He has to steady himself for a moment, stop the urge to run after the man and beat him to death with his own bare hands – that’s not the reason he’s here.

He can see the door to the lab from here. It’s ajar and he knows Bucky is in there. Bucky is strapped to a table with his eyes glassy and his clothes torn and dirty. Bucky is repeating his ID number and trying to survive.

Bucky is waiting for him.

He swallows hard and rushes down the hall, pushes the door open and—

There he is. Just like he remembered. Staring up at nothing, strapped to the table, his voice weak, nearly silent, but there, he’s there, he’s really fucking

there

and Steve almost falls over himself getting to him.

He rips the straps off him like muscle memory, and he’s forgotten (how could he have forgotten??) the way that Bucky didn’t look at him at first. The way that Bucky didn’t even

register

that Steve had come into the room. That Bucky had been treated like an object by his captors, that they had looked over him and looked past him and looked

at

him without ever seeing him, so he had stopped seeing them. Had forgotten that somewhere, somehow, humanity still existed outside of this place and he could get back to it, would get back to it, that Steve would bring him back to it.

“Buck,” Steve says, putting his hand on Bucky’s shoulder, and he’s aching, it’s only been a few days since he’s touched Bucky but it feels like a lifetime, and he missed him like something vital, like he was dying without him.

Bucky pauses in his muttered listing of numbers but doesn’t blink, not just yet. Steve has thought this moment through too many times in the past five years since he emerged from the ice. Thought about how close – how close he was to losing Bucky here, in Kreischberg, and how everything would have been different if that had been the case.

“Bucky,” he says again and shakes him harder this time but still gentle, gentle. He’s treated Bucky with an almost fragile reverence since he got him back from HYDRA and pulled him out of the Winter Soldier. It’s just that since getting him back, Steve’s found himself overwhelmed with all the good things he wants to give Bucky. An inexorable need to tend to Bucky with trust and love and soft beds and kisses, and that need bleeds into this moment, in 1942, with a version of Bucky who doesn’t know what is going to happen. Steve finds himself secretly thrilled that Bucky will never have to deal with HYDRA’s dehumanizing shit again. Never know the Winter Soldier or cryo or a century of being treated like an object.

He’s not just saving Bucky from Kreischberg and the Red Skull, but the fall and that metal arm and that fucking electric chair and years and years of blood and murder and abuse. Concrete floors and shackles and sharp knives. All those awful things, off their plate forever. Just this one hard moment and then they never have to think about this wretched place again.

“Steve,” Bucky says, his tongue sounding thick in his mouth and his eyes unable to focus on him.
“Buck, we have to go,” Steve says, knowing he should be more gentle, and he will be – he will be once he gets Bucky out of here.
He helps Bucky up and Bucky sways dangerously on his feet, steadying himself on Steve’s shoulders before finally really looking at him.

“I thought you were smaller,” Bucky says, staring at Steve finally, his eyes sweeping down over the stealth suit. “What are you wearing?” Bucky asks and it’s so absurd, so distinctly

Bucky

that Steve almost laughs. He can’t stop himself from pulling Bucky against his chest though. He doesn’t miss the way Bucky’s hands slide up to his sides and cling there, Bucky’s nose tucked into the crook of his neck.

“We have to get out of here,” Steve says after a heartbeat. They have to stay ahead of his past self, and Red Skull, and get out unseen. He keeps Bucky close this time. He can feel how unsteady Bucky is on his feet. It’s worrying, but he’ll have him back to the Tower soon enough, where there are medics and JARVIS to look him over.

“Is it permanent?” Bucky asks when they stumble out into the hallway. Steve looks over his shoulder – looks for his former self and sees nothing but the dark. He can hear the uprising though; they are barely ahead of the past.

“So far,” he says absentmindedly. It’s what he said at the time. It feels strange to slip back into a moment that’s long passed, but Bucky is saying the same lines. Bucky’s been in the war this whole time, and while Steve remembers what it felt like, he knows he’s had time to heal and Bucky hasn’t yet. But he will. He

will.

Steve will make sure of it.

He knows now to avoid the path they took before, avoid Red Skull and Zola. They have a small tussle with two low-level HYDRA guards near a side door, but Steve doesn’t even have to pull the shield off his back to take them out. Then they are out in the night, but not out of the woods yet.

In fact, they have to go deeper

into

the woods.

The outside of the compound is full of smoke and men fighting – his old self has set the Howling Commandos and all those other POWs free and should be discovering an empty cell any moment now. (Steve is mournful for his former self but not exactly sorry. He’ll take the Valkyrie into the ice with or without Bucky, he’s sure of it.)

“Where are we going?” Bucky asks, leaning his weight on Steve.

“I got us a ride out of here, but we have to get to the pick up site,” Steve says, sparing one last glance at the compound before pulling Bucky into the trees.

“What about the rest of them?” Bucky asks, looking over his shoulder.

“I have a plan, but I can’t explain it now.”

Steve leads them back to the clearing, away from the fighting and the noise. Bucky stumbles the whole way, looking over his shoulder to the battle they’re leaving behind and back to Steve. He’s still staring at him in disbelief, and Steve has to remind himself that this Bucky hasn’t seen his new body yet, hasn’t heard the whole story of the serum and Erskine and Red Skull. Let alone HYDRA and the Winter Soldier and all the things that happened to him, to them, over the course of a lifetime.

Steve stops beside the grove of trees where he hid his bag.

“Here, we wait here,” he tells Bucky, and helps him to sit before going back to his bag and opening it up, rifling through it.

“Are we waiting on a plane?” Bucky asks.

Steve pulls out a spool of copper wire. “Not exactly,” he says, uncoiling a long length of it and forming a circle on the ground.

Bucky leans his back against the tree and Steve can see him shivering out of the corner of his eye. He doesn’t remember being cold when they did this the first time, and he’s not cold now, but Bucky is still clearly cold and in pain, his face haunted and dirty, and Steve just wants to take him home and dump him into a warm bath.

But that will come. Soon.

He looks at his watch, a high-tech device he only brought along because of JARVIS’s insistence. They have nearly three hours until JARVIS opens the portal again.

He sighs. He can still hear the fight in the distance, but it seems to be winding down already, the freed POWs taking out HYDRA like he remembers. He doesn’t think Allied or HYDRA soldiers will come this way after the fallout.

Bucky tugs on his sweater sleeves, like he’s trying to pull them down over his hands, and Steve can’t just watch.

He goes back to his pack and pulls out a blanket – the red flannel one he normally keeps on the back of the couch because it’s big enough for both him and Buck to curl up under while they binge watch Netflix. He unfolds it carefully and hands it to Bucky, who takes it with shaking hands.

“You came prepared,” he jokes, his teeth chattering a little as he lays the blanket over his lap and tucks his feet into the folds.

“I had an idea that you would be in rough shape,” Steve says.

Bucky looks up at him, his eyes wide and fearful in the dark, and Steve wonders for a moment if he should’ve gone back even further and nabbed Bucky at an earlier point in history (but he didn’t, selfishly, because he knew that this was the moment that truly made him Captain America, and this is the place that turned Bucky into a supersoldier, even if they didn’t discover that ‘til decades after the fact).

“Do the Allied forces know what’s going on in there?” Bucky asks.

Steve pauses before he answers; he doesn’t want to lie to Bucky, but he’s not ready to get into all the nitty-gritty truth until he has Bucky safe and sound in the future, where he can give him the whole story. So for the moment he just says, “Yes. We know.”

“They killed so many of our men, Steve. So many.”

Steve sits next to him, but Bucky holds himself ramrod straight – he doesn’t lean into Steve’s side or offer him a corner of the blanket. He’d forgotten this – Bucky had shied away from his touch for several months after. They had never talked about it. (Steve kicks himself for this fact.) But Bucky had startled anytime Steve reached for him so he just… stopped reaching for him. And then, when he least expected it, Bucky had started touching him again, just grazes at first, until one cold night Bucky had climbed into his sleeping roll with him and pulled them flush together to stop his own shivering.

After that, things went back to almost normal until the day Bucky died and Steve had to learn to live without his touch again. (Of course, when the Winter Soldier finally came in from the cold, he was ready for Bucky to struggle with touch again. And he did, while SHIELD had him, pulling triggers out of his brain and keeping him in a tiny, concrete cell that they only let Steve visit once a day. But as soon as he got him home, Bucky became his tactile self again.)

“I know. But things are going to look up,” Steve replies to Bucky.

“You sound so sure,” Bucky says.

“I’ll explain, but not here.”

Bucky nods and then rubs his hands together and breathes on them.

It might not be the best idea, but Steve stands up, gathers some branches from the underbrush and tosses them into a pile in front of Bucky, then pulls a pack of matches out of his bag.

“Aren’t you worried someone will see the smoke?” Bucky asks as Steve lights a fire.

“Let me worry; you just get warm,” Steve says, fanning the fire into something bigger, brighter.

Bucky stares at him for a moment, then leans forward to warm his hands by the fire. He starts to get some color back into his face and Steve feels like an idiot for not offering him water, going back to his pack and pulling out a canteen.

He holds it out to Bucky, who takes it graciously and drinks deeply. “What all have you got in there?” Bucky asks, wiping his mouth on his sleeve.

“Just the blanket, canteen, a couple of maps, emergency rations.”

“And copper wire,” Bucky says.

“And copper wire,” Steve agrees.

“Did you come just for me?”

Steve’s not sure he should answer that one honestly. But what is the point in lying; Bucky will find out soon enough. “They weren’t letting me fight. I went AWOL to find you.”

“You only cared about getting me out? When they had all those other prisoners?”

“I got them out also.”

“And left them to fend for themselves?”

“No,” Steve says. “They have a leader. And they’re strong people, you know that. I promise you, I will explain, just not here.”

Bucky nods and passes the canteen back. “How much longer?”

“Two hours,” Steve says.

“Are you going to sit next to me? Or you waiting for us to get jumped?” There’s something cagey in the way he says it, the way he shifts, the way his shoulders are hunched together. He hasn’t slept in days, Steve remembers. Remembers the way Bucky crashed when they made it back to camp. He wouldn’t go to the medical wing and Steve — Steve didn’t have the heart to push the issue, just let Bucky use his cot and he slept for a good nineteen hours. (Steve came back to check his pulse twice, so afraid that maybe, maybe they’d missed something and Bucky would slip away in the night.)

Steve sits next to him and Bucky surprises him by pushing in close, leaning his head on Steve’s shoulder. Steve lifts his hand up, stringing his arm over Bucky’s back and pulling him in close.

Bucky sighs, and Steve can feel that he’s still trembling all over. He barely has any meat on his bones and he feels so fragile in this moment.

“I’m not sure you’re real,” Bucky admits. “I saw a lot of things back in there. They hurt me in some creative ways. But of all the ghosts that have visited me yet, you’re my favorite.”

Steve leans down to kiss his temple, keeps his lips pressed there a moment longer and says, “I swear to you that I’m real.”

“Maybe I’ll believe you tomorrow,” Bucky replies.

They sit in silence beside the fire for several more minutes. Bucky is still shivering, leaning against Steve, and all Steve can do is rub his back.

“How much longer?” Bucky asks.

Steve closes his eyes before he speaks, “I have to tell you something.”

“What?” Bucky asks.

“We’re not waiting on a plane,” Steve says.

“A truck?” Bucky asks.

Steve shakes his head. “I’m not… I’m not the man you left behind in Brooklyn.”

Bucky looks him up and down. “I can see that,” he says flatly.

“I mean… you’re not going to fucking believe this,” Steve sighs. “I’m from the future. I’ll explain everything once we get home, but I just don’t want you to be alarmed.”

“There is a guy walking around inside that base who doesn’t have any flesh on his skull,” Bucky says. “I’m not sure anything will alarm me.”

“I’m taking you to the year 2017,” Steve says.

Bucky gives him a dry look of disbelief. “What are you doing in 2017?”

“It’s a long story. But we’ll have time.”

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

JARVIS pulled them out just fine.

Bucky collapsed upon reaching the future. As soon as they stepped out of the copper wires that melted damn near through the floor before JARVIS cut all the power and Bucky crumpled to his knees. JARVIS managed to bring the power back in three seconds though.

Tony was waiting for them on the other side, screaming about what idiots they were, but Steve wasn’t listening as his hands were cupping Bucky’s throat gently, feeling for a pulse.

It was there. Steady and strong, although he was pale as a ghost, sweating through his clothes.

Now Steve is sitting in the med bay with him. It’s quiet, nighttime still. There is a lone doctor and two nurses – a skeleton crew that Tony always has on hand because who knows when an Avenger will need medical attention.

“He’s stable,” the doctor tells him. She’s young but level headed and never blinks an eye at whatever nonsense they throw at her. It’s why Tony hired her and why Steve likes her so much. “I’ve never treated a time travel victim before,” she says, stumbling over the word ‘victim’ like she couldn’t think of a more appropriate descriptor. “But his heartbeat is fine, breathing is okay now. He’s malnourished and dehydrated, but that’s probably a product of being a prisoner of war and we’re giving him fluids now. I want to scan his brain, if you’ll let us, to make sure that’s normal, but as far as I can tell, he’s having a shock reaction that, for all we know, may be perfectly normal for someone ripped out of their own timeline.” The words feel like an indictment of Steve’s decision but her tone of voice is pragmatic and non-judgmental.

She’s gentle with Buck in a way that Steve appreciates. She smoothes the sheets over his chest, makes sure his hand are lying free of the covers and brushes his hair off his forehead before turning back to Steve. “At this point, I think we should just wait for him to wake up. There’s nothing more I can do for him except give him nutrients and fluid. He’s probably just had a shock and will come out of it on his own.”

“Thank you, doctor,” Steve says.

She leaves him alone with Bucky lying flat on the white sheets, his dark hair contrasting it so starkly. He’s still got dirt on his face and Steve wants to clean him up, doesn’t want him coming to still smelling like the prison and war and blood and torture. But Steve doesn’t want to disturb him just yet. Bucky doesn’t need more people fussing over him while he’s unconscious.

Of course, that’s when Tony comes to the medical bay with Natasha in tow.

“First things first, that was stupid,” Tony says to him, glancing over Bucky’s body without ever really looking at the man. “What were you thinking?”

“You weren’t listening to me, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.”

“By ripping your boyfriend out of time?”

“Now HYDRA will never torture him again,” Steve says, matter of factly. “You don’t know what they did to him.”

“I read the files, I know exactly what they did to him,” Tony says. “You can’t go fucking around with time like that. You have no idea what you could have altered.”

“JARVIS ran a simulation. He doesn’t think we’ve ruined anything.”

“Because simulations are always correct,” Tony says and then sighs.

“Tarasova is missing, again,” Nat cuts to the chase. “She probably escaped when you and Bucky travelled back and JARVIS lost power for a moment. Because I’m mad and not entirely sure you are trustworthy in this state, you and Sergeant Barnes will be confined to the medbay or your quarters, at minimum until we find Tarasova.”

“Fine,” Steve says and leans back in his chair, getting comfortable. “I’m not leaving him. And I’m not letting you send him back, either.”

“Not sure we could if we wanted to,” Tony says. “The Tesseract is even more shattered than before. It’s extremely unstable and I’m not sure what it will do to us, or to reality, if it shatters completely.”

Steve at least has the dignity to look a little sheepish at that.

“SHIELD is sending a shuttle out to Tarasova’s station to gather her research on the Tesseract and possibly help us locate her again. I can’t believe you did something so reckless, Cap,” Tony says and leaves.

Natasha follows him out with one last lingering look.

Steve pulls his chair closer to Bucky’s bedside, curls his right hand up with Bucky’s and closes his eyes. He can’t fix anything right now, he might as well get some sleep.XxX Bucky sleeps for three days.

His vitals are fine. He gets hydrated and nourished. The color starts to come back to his face. Steve gives him a sponge bath after the first night. He’s reverent about it, cleaning away layers of dirt and washing the smell of smoke from his hair.

Steve is tempted to ask them to test him for the serum, but… he doesn’t. Not yet. He doesn’t want anyone else prodding Bucky any more than necessary.

There are no obvious breaks in reality. But that doesn’t stop Nat, Tony and Bruce from avoiding him.

Sam calls him to tell him he’s an idiot. But then he asks, “How’s your boy?” Because Sam Wilson never stops being a good friend, even when Steve has ostracized everyone else.

“He’s asleep,” Steve says. “The doctor says his system has been shocked but she’s optimistic.”

“Well, that’s good. How are you?” Sam asks.

“I’ll be fine once Buck wakes up.”

Sam doesn’t ask him what he’ll do if Bucky doesn’t wake up.XxX

Steve has a crick in his neck when he comes to. He’s been sleeping in the chair by Bucky’s bedside for three days, his feet propped up on the mattress by Bucky’s hip.

Bucky is staring at him when he blinks awake. Bucky’s eyes are as clear blue as Steve remembers them. His lips are muddled together and his eyebrows creased.

“Buck!” Steve says, sitting up so quickly his neck protests the movement.

Bucky swallows thickly – Steve can hear how dry his mouth is, so he reaches over for the water pitcher left on the bedside table.

“Where are we?” Bucky asks as Steve helps him sit up and hands him the water cup. Bucky’s hands are shaking and Steve has to help steady him.

“Do you remember Howard Stark?” Steve asks.

Bucky swallows water greedily and nods.

“His son built a tower in Manhattan. We’re in the medical wing on the twentieth floor of Stark Tower.”

Bucky stares at him.

“It’s 2017. I brought you here and I can explain, but everything is fine.”

Bucky is quiet for another moment. “Did we win the war?” he asks.

Steve nods. “Yeah, Buck, we won the war.”XxX

It does take a while to explain the whole story – Erskine and the serum, HYDRA and the Red Skull, the Valkyrie’s crash and being frozen for seventy years, the Avengers and the Tesseract and Tarasova.

Steve might skim over some of the grittier details. Maybe doesn’t mention the Winter Soldier, or Buck killing Tarasova’s parents. Those details seem unnecessary in the current moment. Or possibly ever. Why does Bucky need to know about a horrible timeline, an awful past that now never has to be true again?

He is up and about within a day. They keep him for one more night in the medbay before letting Steve move him back to his apartment. They’re still in lockdown on Tony’s orders, but that’s fine.

Steve just wants to make his transition to the future smooth. Wants to be there for Bucky the way no one was there for him when he was ripped out of time. Wants to show him everything he loves about the future and answer all his questions.

Steve wouldn’t have chosen this, exactly. He was finally happy when Tarasova crashed into his life and destroyed reality. But he’s finding the bright side and isn’t too proud to quietly admit to himself that he likes that Buck will never have to be abused by HYDRA, that no one will call him a murderer in the street, that he gets to keep both his arms.

It’s good to Steve. And if Bucky looks a bit haunted, if he can’t sleep through the night, well, Steve knows Kreischberg was traumatizing and he doesn’t blame him. They all have their demons.XxX

“So they don’t care?” Bucky asks for the third time, and Steve could just kiss him.

“I mean, some people still care, but for the most part, it’s pretty acceptable to love someone of the same sex these days.”

Bucky stares at him, his eyes narrowed and lips tight. He looks beautiful in the morning light – he has his back to the window and the light is streaming down through his hair, already longer than he kept it during the war but not as long as the Winter Soldier would let it get. He’s sporting the beginnings of a beard as well. Steve is still getting used to this version of Bucky – injured by the war but not the Winter Soldier. Not the boy he lived with in a cold water flat in Brooklyn but not the haunted man he brought home after Project Insight. Something between those two, but Steve loves him all the same. Will love any version of Bucky he can find.

“Some things about the future are just a little too good to be true,” Bucky says. “Does the world know you like fellas?”

“Only the Avengers.”

“And they… remember us?”

Steve frowns, shakes his head.

“So you were just this idiot traveling through time to save some man they’d never heard of?”

“Well, they’d heard of you. Everyone’s heard of you. Captain America’s best friend from childhood.”

“But they didn’t know about us.”Steve shakes his head. “No, they didn’t know we were together. And they didn’t remember you. I don’t know why I could remember you and they couldn’t.”

“That’s because you’re nothing without me,” Bucky jokes. “If you forgot me, who would you be?”“Exactly,” Steve says but sounds a bit too sincere.

“Are you sure you didn’t destroy reality? I mean, I’m supposed to be dead, right?”

Steve shrugs a little. “I think it’s more complicated than that.”XxX

The bed is too soft for Bucky, and Steve remembers what that’s like.

He also doesn’t like the windows at night – the blanket of New York City makes him nervous for some reason he can’t express.

JARVIS frightens him and so does the television. Steve takes it off the wall and shoves it into the closet by the front door.

Steve makes them a spot on the floor of the living room – none of the windows are visible when they face forward. He spreads fleece blankets over the carpet and brings out two worn-flat pillows.

Bucky appreciates the thick cotton sheets and the heavy down comforter. Rubs his face on the corner of it with a smile. He likes Steve’s gray sweatpants and his dark blue hoodie. He looks cozy wrapped up in all those layers.

Steve cooks him tomato soup – nothing complicated, just from the can. Bucky is still a little unsettled after his time in the camp.

Steve asks JARVIS not to speak to them unless it’s an emergency.

They drink from steaming cups on the floor with their backs to the couch, like children. Like they used to have sleepovers when they were kids.

Tarasova is on the loose and Tony and the rest are still not speaking to him, but it’s all right. He has Bucky and he’ll figure out the rest.XxX He comes to suddenly. That sudden alertness that was trained into him on the frontlines. It brings him right from slumber and into the dark of night.

He’s confused for a second. In part, because he’s not in his own bed and in part because he’s not sure what’s woken him.

Then Bucky makes a sound, a hurt sound, in the back of his throat and thrashes in his sleep. He’s on his side with his back to Steve, the covers knocked off his shoulder.

Steve leans over and carefully lays a hand on Bucky.

Bucky jerks awake and twists away from Steve all at once. He’s panting, sweating all over.

“Buck, Bucky, it’s okay, it’s just me,” Steve says in the darkness.

Bucky gasps, scrambling across the floor till he can put his back to the wall. He’s shaking still, his right arm rubbing his left.

“My arm,” he says. “It’s not—it’s—.” He can’t get a complete thought out.

“JARVIS, lights,” Steve says, even though he promised he wouldn’t use JARIVS.

The lights come on, not all the way, but enough to brighten the room.

Bucky flinches, closing his eyes and whispering, “No, no, no, no no…”

Steve approaches him slowly, staying low. “Bucky, you’re safe now,” he says.

Bucky keeps his eyes closed and shakes his head. “I knew it wasn’t real,” he says. “I knew it, I knew it. You’re always playing tricks like this.”

“Bucky, listen to me. It’s Steve. You’re in Manhattan. I brought you here. You’re safe.”

Bucky shakes his head. He mutters something under his breath in Russian and Steve wishes he had studied the language, and not for the first time.

“Bucky,” Steve says, calmer and steadier than he feels. He wants to touch him but is afraid to. “Open your eyes, look at me.”

Bucky takes a few more wavering breaths.

“Please,” Steve adds.

He finally, slowly, opens his eyes and pins Steve with a terrified glare. He’s pulled his knees up to his chin and is practically hiding behind them.

“You’re okay. You’re here with me and I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” Steve promises.

“I’m not sure you’re real,” Bucky says after a moment of just looking at him.

“I can promise you, I’m real.”

“You said that before,” Bucky says.

“When?” Steve asks.

“When they took my arm and I thought you came for me. You pulled me out of the camp in Austria. I was waiting for you. And then I fell from the train and they took me-- the Russians. They took me to a bunker in the mountains and you came and pulled me out of there, but when I woke again, I was on the table and they were running me full of wires.”Steve stares at him, speechless.

“The next time you came, you didn’t speak to me,” Bucky continues. “They took me out to the mountains and left me there to find my way back. Survival training, they called it. I thought I was going to die – I was so cold. But you came and you lead me down the mountain. I remember following your shield through a snowstorm. But when I got to the bottom, you were gone.

“Anytime I’m out of cryo long enough, you show up. Sometimes I remember your name, sometimes I don’t, but it always ends the same. They erase you and I get empty inside again.”

Bucky rubs at his face. He’s crying, just a little, the way he used to cry when he was a kid and didn’t want anyone to notice.

The same way he cried when he’d have nightmares after Steve brought him home from SHIELD.

“I like it when you’re here,” he admits. “But don’t lie to me, Steve. You can’t save me and you won’t protect me because you’re not real.”“You shouldn’t remember... any of that,” Steve says after a moment.

Bucky rests his forehead on top of his knees, his face vanishing completely from sight. “I know,” his muffled voice comes out. “I know, I’m not supposed to remember, but my brain heals quicker than they realize and I do remember.”

“No, no, Buck. Bucky,” Steve says. “HYDRA never had you. Look, your arm, it’s yours. It’s real, it’s flesh and blood.”

Bucky peaks up to smile at him. “I’ve had that fantasy before, too. It’s a nice one,” he says and extends his left arm out. He holds it palm up, flexes his fingers. “I like remembering what it felt like to be whole, but it never lasts.”Steve doesn’t know what to say. He stares at him a moment long before asking, “Can I hold you?”

Bucky nods and lets Steve gather him up. Steve pulls him against his chest, rests his hand on the back of Bucky’s head. Bucky’s shaking arms wrap around Steve’s torso after a moment and he clings there.

“I know you died,” Bucky says after a moment. “They told me when you did. I think they’d thought it would break me but,” his voice drops to barely a whisper, “I was already broken by then.”

“Buck,” Steve soothes, and rocks him slightly side to side.

“This is all I ever get of you now,” Bucky says into his shirt.XxX

“SHIELD has recovered Tarasova’s father’s writings from her ship,” Tony says, matter-of-fact. He’s not even looking at Steve as he speaks.

“That’s good, right?”

“Well, yes, but he wrote in some sort of code that I haven’t been able to crack yet. Neither has JARVIS.”

“Oh,” Steve replies.

“I’m not thrilled to learn there was someone possibly smarter than me, at least in regards to cryptology,” Tony admits. “And I’m still not sure you didn’t break reality.”

“About that,” Steve says, cringing.

“What?” Tony asks.

“Bucky… is remembering things that didn’t happen to him. Well, things that did happen to him, but not this him.”

“What are you saying?” Tony asks.

“You know how I told you about the Winter Soldier and how HYDRA had Bucky for seventy years?”

“Yeah, yeah, the metal arm and the mind wipes, who could forget a story like that?” Tony replies.

“He remembers that,” Steve says.

“But that hasn’t happened in his timeline yet,” Tony says.

“Exactly. How can he be remembering something that didn’t happen?”

“But according to you, it did happen,” Tony says.

“Well, yeah, it did happen. But not until he fell off the train. In 1944. I brought him back from 1942.”Tony stares at him for a moment, unblinking. “That shouldn’t be possible.”“That’s what I thought.”XxX
Bucky is curled into the space between the bed and the wall with a blanket draped over him when Steve makes his way back to their quarters.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says, kneeling down in front of him.

When Bucky looks at him, it’s the same haunted look he had when he first turned himself into SHIELD. It’s the Winter Soldier. It’s a face he thought he’d never have to see again.

“Hey, you,” Bucky says back. He’s got a ghost of a smile on his face but Steve can see how forced it is.

“How are you feeling?” Steve asks for lack of something better to say.

Bucky shrugs. He looks so little and lost. “I’m just waiting for the reset,” he says. “You know how this goes.”

Steve sighs and shakes his head. He fidgets a little, unable to think of something soothing to say.

But it ends up being a moot point because Bucky surges up and kisses him so hard on the mouth that he knocks them both back. Steve catches them with a hand behind him before they crash to the floor.

Bucky is trying to climb on top of him, straddling Steve’s thighs and cupping Steve’s chin with both his hands. He kisses him hard, pushing his tongue into Steve’s mouth, muffling his protests.

Steve pushes back at him gently, just enough to get him to stop kissing him but not enough to knock him off his lap. “Buck, Bucky, what are you doing?” Steve asks.

Bucky leans in again, nuzzling his nose across Steve’s chin. “I missed you,” Bucky says. He kisses Steve right below his ear. “And they always take you away.” He leans back to look Steve in the eye. “So even if it is a fantasy, it’s one I want to have while I can.”

“Buck,” Steve sighs, can’t hide the edge of frustration from his voice.

Bucky slips off his lap. “Normally, you just come visit me in my cell, but this time, there is this really elaborate reality and you don’t even want me.”

“Of course I want you, Bucky,” Steve says. “But you think I’m not real.”

“I know you’re not real,” Bucky replies. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want the fantasy.”

“Where do you think you are right now?” Steve asks, very careful to keep his voice level.

Bucky clenches his teeth, looks out the window. “You know I don’t know the exact coordinates. They don’t let me know that. But we’re in my cell, Basement Level 3, Alpha Bunker, Siberia.”

“Okay,” Steve says.

“Okay?” Bucky echoes.

Steve gets up off the floor. Sits on the bed. “If I can’t convince you otherwise.”

Bucky sits beside him. They are quiet for a moment. Like a nervous young couple, unsure where the boundaries are.

Bucky finally gets the nerve to reach over and take Steve’s hand. Steve lets him. They both stare down at their fingers intertwined.

Bucky leans his head against Steve’s shoulder. “They gave me hallucinogens back in ’65,” Bucky says. “I spent three days sweating and vomiting and seeing demons.”

Steve runs his thumb along the soft skin of Bucky’s hand. So many things happened to Buck that he could never tell Steve about all the horrors – too many, too loud, too painful, or some he just never remembered.

This particular horror is one Bucky never mentioned before.

“This is so vivid,” Bucky says. “Whatever they gave me this time must be so much better than the shit they had back in ’65.”

It’s Steve who cracks then. Can’t listen to Bucky convinced he’s still with HYDRA one more minute. He leans in and kisses Bucky gently, on the lips. Soft and slow and tries to fill it with all the good things he has inside him – hope and wonder and a love so big and wide he can’t believe it fits inside his body.

Perhaps it’s a bad idea, but he lays Bucky back on the bed and spends ages removing their clothes and kissing every inch of Bucky. Head to toe and back again.

Bucky sighs and groans and lies back in the sheets and lets himself be loved.

They fall asleep tangled up together, skin to skin and sharing breaths.XxX

Steve has a nightmare.

A nightmare about Kreischberg.

About that awful POW camp. About the smell of the unwashed bodies, the smoke and the dead.

About running through the halls, looking for the room where they put Bucky and barely being able to find it.

A nightmare where he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there—XxX He sits up in the dark soaked in sweat and gasping for breath. His lungs burn and his heart hammers against his ribcage like he’s ninety pounds of asthma again.

The memory is still clean and crisp in his mind’s eye. It’s like something that’s always been there inside of him but also something that’s never existed before. Its existence is a paradox he can’t untangle and bile bites into the back of his throat as he remembers – he remembers – how it felt to open the door and find an empty table and know down in his bones that Bucky had been there but wasn’t anymore.

He remembers running out the back door of the compound and into the night and seeing the smoke stacks and realizing what he already knew but wouldn’t let himself think about – that was a crematorium, and the dead were rising in wispy streaks of smoke into the sky.

He thought he would die right then and there with the sickening realization that Bucky – Bucky – was in that smoke and ash and never, never coming back again.

He remembers that he set his heart and mind on killing Red Skull, not just because the Nazis were monsters that were bulldozing their way across Europe, but because he had personally taken Bucky’s life and Steve couldn’t stand the idea of ever going back to Brooklyn without him.

For a moment, he understood why Bucky had been so relieved that Steve had been 4F’d right out of the service. But that feeling was quickly trampled with a hot anger at Bucky for wanting him to be the one left behind. It didn’t matter – if Steve had stayed home, Bucky would’ve died and Steve probably would’ve died alone in a coldwater flat from his weak heart and weaker lungs. He figured, at least this way, he would get to go out with some meaning.In the present moment, though, Bucky is asleep next to him, curled on his side facing Steve. His hair is a tangled mess, one hand beside his face and the other extended toward Steve’s body.

Steve slides back down, jostling the bed and accidentally waking Bucky in the process. Bucky blinks his eyes until the dark of the room comes into focus.

“Steve?” he says.

Steve takes his hand in one of his and pulls up the blankets with the other. “I’m here,” he says.

“Why are you up?” Bucky asks.

“Bad dream,” Steve says.

Bucky pulls Steve closer to him and runs his hand up Steve’s spine.

He falls back asleep like that with Bucky’s hand rubbing his back.XxX He wakes when Bucky rolls over and puts his hand on Steve’s chest.

Bucky snuggles up close and kisses Steve’s jaw. “I had the worst dream,” he whispers.

Steve opens his eyes, still feeling sleep-heavy and tired. He winds his hand over Bucky’s. “What did you dream?”

“That HYDRA captured me and cut off my arm,” Bucky says. “They turned me into this… monster. Part machine, all empty inside and I just… let them.”

“Oh, Buck,” Steve says, his voice cracking. “They won’t hurt you anymore,” he promises.

Bucky pushes closer, tucks his head under Steve’s chin, the scruff of his beard coming in rough on Steve’s naked chest.

It feels like Bucky is about to say something else when JARVIS interrupts them.XxX Steve bursts through the doors and comes to a stop in front of a tired-looking Tony.

“I can only assume this is your fault,” Tony says, stepping aside so Steve can see the gurney behind him.

Nat is laid out, unconscious, hooked up to every monitor the doctors can get their hands on, it seems. Her red hair reflects the lights above them. She’s pale, white as a ghost, as a heart monitor is beeping steadily beside her.

“What happened?” Steve asks, his voice so quiet in the room as he approaches her.

“They don’t know,” Tony says. “Her vitals are normal. There’s nothing wrong with her. She just won’t wake up.”

Steve swallows, staring down at Natasha. She looks small and fragile on the table. It feels like it’s the first time he’s seen her, really seen her - how slight her frame is, how delicate her features.

“You found her like this?”

“Clint did,” Tony says. “Dropped in on her and she didn’t wake up.”

“Where’s Clint now?” Steve asks after glancing around the room.

“Looking for Tarasova,” Tony says, biting the words off.

“Are there any leads on her?” Steve asks.

Tony shrugs. “We are no closer to decoding her father’s book than before,” he admits. He stares down at the floor for a moment before looking up at Steve. He looks resigned. Tired. But unwavering. “I think we need to talk about putting your boy back.”

Steve’s throat goes cold. “What?” he says.

“Come on, Steve. We don’t know what’s going on with Natasha. We don’t know what’s going on with the world. There could be changes happening that we don’t know about. It could get worse. But if we just… put your boy back where we found him, maybe things will just go back to the way they were.”

“I’m not just putting him back. I’m not having this conversation,” Steve says.

“Natasha could be dying,” Tony fires back. “I know you believe Barnes was here just a few days ago but I assure you he wasn’t. Natasha has been with us for years. She could be dying and the only change that we know happened was that you went back in time and removed Barnes from the timeline. Don’t you think that could’ve caused ripples? Hell, other people could be similarly affected and we don’t even know yet.”

“We don’t know anything yet,” Steve retorts. “Bucky was here. I’m not-- I’m not lying to you. So don’t,” he pauses, takes a deep breath and pushes down the wave of anger and terror that rages through him before he speaks again. “Tarasova killed Bucky and you were fine with that, but I’m not.”

“So you want to trade Nat’s life for Barnes?” Tony replies. His voice is curt and his eyes sharp.“No,” Steve shakes his head, deflating slightly. “I don’t want to trade anyone’s life. I’m saying we don’t know what’s going on. Let’s wait and see what Clint finds.”XxX “What’s going on?” Bucky asks when Steve returns to their floor.

“Natasha is in a coma,” Steve says. “And they think it’s because I pulled you out of time.”

Bucky stares past Steve at nothing for a moment then says, “Romanoff? Natalia?”

“You remember her?” Steve asks.

“She kept me human,” he says. “When I didn’t know what it meant to be human, she reminded me.”

It’s probably a bad idea, but Steve asks it anyway. “Do you remember a mission where they sent you to kill a scientist? Linus Tarasov?”

Bucky shifts a little, his back going straight. “Tarasov,” he says. “I know that name.” He leans forward, putting his face in his hands. “I know that name, I know that name, I know that name,” he says again.

He finally looks up at Steve. “I don’t remember the year,” he says. “I had been stationed with the Red Room for… a while. Long enough that they got uncomfortable and pulled me out. They wiped me. Sent me out to kill a Black Widow. The whole time, I was sick to my stomach. I thought—I thought they were sending me to kill Natalia.” He smiles then. A fleeting thing. “I couldn’t remember her. I just had this feeling in my gut that I didn’t want to do the mission and I didn’t have a choice.”

“What happened?” Steve asks. “Can you remember?”

“They dropped me at this bunker, way off the grid in Siberia. I went inside. And there was a Black Widow. I—I knew her face, but it wasn’t Natalia. And a man. Tarasov. They were asleep. In bed. I shot them both. So quickly neither even woke up. It was one of the easiest missions I’d ever been given because of that. I didn’t have to see their faces as they died,” he says. “I hated seeing their faces.”

He goes quiet but Steve knows he’s not done talking. It’s just the way Buck is now – needs time to find the words, compose his thoughts.

“I didn’t see their girl at first. She was in another room and she came out when she heard me. She was just this… little thing. I couldn’t leave her there. She didn’t do anything wrong. And it was so cold. Siberia in December. I was afraid she would freeze and I couldn’t stand the idea of her being there, alone with her parents’ bodies in the cold.”

“So what did you do?” Steve asks, hanging on every word.

“I… I took her to the Orphanage. It was an operation similar to the Red Room but operated out of Cuba. It was established during the Cold War to create elite soldiers and spies by raising them into those positions from childhood. They could dispatch them into the U.S. in a matter of hours if the Soviet Union deemed it necessary. Then the Soviet Union dissolved and it became a school for creating mercenaries. They started selling them off to other regimes. Oppressive governments who needed elite people to do their dirty work. It was a cash cow.“I couldn’t think of anywhere else I could take her. My knowledge of the world was so limited. And, for some reason, I thought the Orphanage wasn’t as bad as the Red Room… I was wrong.”

“That explains a lot about Tarasova,” Steve says.

“I didn’t know what else to do with her,” Bucky says. “The Red Room would’ve killed her.”

Steve kisses the side of his head. “You did the best you could,” he whispers and tries hard not to think about the Winter Soldier carrying a little girl away from her dead parents and into the Siberian snow.XxX
“Tell your boy he did good,” is all Tony has to say on the matter a few hours later.

After telling Steve about his choice regarding young Tarasova, Bucky became so distressed he was physically ill, and Steve spent the better part of the afternoon trying to coax ginger ale into him while reassuring him it wasn’t his fault.

He’s currently got Bucky on the floor in front of the couch again, wrapped up in a blanket and tucked into his side.

“What happened?” Steve asks Tony over the video feed on the wall.

“Hill sent a team to the Orphanage. Looks like Tarasova returned there as an adult. It’s been shut down for years now, but it looks like she was using it as some sort of Super Villain Lair. I mean, it wasn’t terribly recent that she was there, but she still left notes behind. Apparently, she knew her father’s code, because some of those notes exist in both the code and Russian. JARVIS thinks he can create a key using the duplicated notes and then begin translating the notes SHIELD recovered from Tarasova’s space station into Russian, and then, of course, into English. Being JARVIS, he works pretty quickly, and we should have those notes available to us by tomorrow, I imagine,” Tony says.

“Then we can track down Tarasova,” Steve says.

“Should be able to,” Tony replies.

“How’s Natalia?” Bucky asks suddenly, shifting slightly to look at the screen.

“No change,” Tony says. “She also doesn’t seem to have any brain activity.”

“What?” Steve asks.

“She’s braindead,” Tony says. His voice is decidedly level. “There is speculation that the only reason you or Bucky aren’t in the same state is due to the serum. We can’t know for certain, though. You, him, and Nat were the closest to the places reality shifted. We don’t know what is going to happen to you moving forward. We need to find Tarasova, fix the Tesseract, and see if we can repair reality. I’ll keep you posted,” Tony says, and the screen goes dark.

They are quiet for a moment. “This is because you came for me?” Bucky’s voice is quiet, and he stares down at the floor while he speaks, shoulders hunched in around his ears.

“I don’t know,” Steve admits. “It could be. But,” he finds himself pulling Bucky closer, like he needs to prove again that Bucky is real, “I can’t-- I didn’t know it would happen, and I don’t know how to be without you anymore.” Steve picks absentmindedly at a thread on his sweatpants as he speaks.

Bucky makes a little noise in the back of his throat, a soft sound that Steve can’t make out the meaning of, then he leans his head over to rest on Steve’s shoulder. The blanket slides off him and Steve reaches over to pick it back up.

“Do you remember?” Steve asks. “Tarasova created a second timeline, where you died in 1964. Can you remember that timeline?”

“I. Uh. Yeah,” Bucky says. “It’s hard to untangle from the other timeline – because they follow each other so closely. But I remember getting into the cryo tank for a final time. I can’t explain it, Stevie, I shouldn’t remember any of this. I feel like there is glass shattering inside my head and the Soldier is just on the other side of it. It’s like having an imposter inside of me. I’m not him but I am him.”

“It’s okay, Buck, you got through this before. You can do it again.”

Bucky shakes his head. “It’s different,” he says. “I don’t want to be him. I’m afraid of him.”

Steve hushes him and holds him closer.XxX

XxXIt’s a bad night.

Bucky has nightmares and nightmares and nightmares.

And each time, it takes Steve a long time to calm him down.

Steve has barely fallen asleep when JARVIS wakes him, patches him directly through to a tired-sounding Tony who requests his presence in his lab.

Buck is curled in the center of their bed, looking haggard and tiny under the blankets.

“’M okay,” he says when Steve gives him a concerned look and runs a hand through his hair. “Go. I’ll be here. JARVIS can call you if I need you,” Bucky says.

Steve smiles at him weakly before leaning in to kiss him. “Okay,” he says. “Okay,” and heads down to Tony’s lab.XxX “Nat’s condition may not be entirely your fault,” Tony says.

“That’s… good?” Steve replies, confused.

“JARVIS managed to break the code, so I’ve finally been able to go over Linus’s notes. And he… well. He was kind of a genius,” Tony says, looking rather unamused. “And, unfortunately for us, so was his daughter.”

“What were they doing?”

“He was trying to copy the energy signature of the Tesseract,” Tony says. “Basically, clone the Tesseract.”

“Is that possible?”

“I wouldn’t have assumed it was. But here we are.”

“What are you saying?”

“The Tesseract that Tarasova showed up here with isn’t the original. It was a clone. Which is probably why it was shattered and needed to be charged. It can manipulate reality like the real thing, but it doesn’t have the juice to do it on its own like the real thing. She was using the sun to power it before, which is how she manipulated reality the first time, on her station. Then the Tesseract broke and, when it did, it looks like it reversed the flow of electricity momentarily but just long enough to fry her solar panels. So she turned up here to use the arc reactor. JARVIS’ failsafes kept the arc reactor from frying like her solar panels by cutting off all power instead.” Tony huffs out his nose, annoyed. “This Tarasov guy is smarter than I expected, and his daughter is no slouch, either.”

“How does this relate back to Natasha?” Steve asks, bewildered.

“I think she’s built a second one. Or maybe she had a backup all along. JARVIS may have overheard, from official channels, that there was another large energy discharge last night. One similar to when Tarasova changed reality the first time, and when you traveled through time.”

“She’s changed reality again,” Steve says.

“This girl just won’t stop. It’s starting to really get on my nerves.”

“Do we know what she changed?”

“Probably something to do with her parents. It’s like she thinks she’s the only orphan on the planet. Get in line lady, we all have daddy issues.”

“Tony, we need to find her.”

“I have an idea about that, actually,” Tony says.XxX Steve has never hated a plan more in his life. It’s not even that dangerous, it’s just – Bucky.

He doesn’t want Bucky to go back into the field. After Bucky came in from the cold, after SHIELD debriefed him and released him, they had agreed – Bucky would stay home. He was done fighting. He had done his time. It was over.

And, well, a fight isn’t certain, but as they load up into the Quinjet, Steve feels as though a fight is probable. Rarely has he been called out to handle a situation that wasn’t a fight.

He doesn’t want Bucky to get hurt. He is still fragile. Still rediscovering the Winter Soldier inside of him.

“It’s just recon,” Bucky says once he’s buckled in next to Steve. “It’ll be fine.”

Steve nods, but he doesn’t agree. Anything could be waiting for them - Tarasova with the Tesseract, or a boobie trap he’s never seen before. HYDRA or Department X. His stomach twists going through the possibilities.

But then they are off, headed back to the scene of the crime, all those years ago.XxX It’s really off the map. Up north, buried in the snow. It’s hard to tell if anyone has been through recently – the bunker’s doors are caked in ice.

“It hasn’t changed at all,” Bucky says when they stand before the doors.

Steve sets a small bomb (courtesy of Tony) at the doors and they hide behind an outcrop of rock in the snow while it blows, hoping it’ll set off any booby-traps Tarasova might have left for them. When the snow and dust settles, the entrance to the bunker is a gaping hole rimmed in twisted metal. The darkness beyond gives away nothing and Bucky shrugs at Steve before heading toward it, his gun cradled carefully in his arms. The way he slips back into the Winter Soldier is disquieting to Steve, but it’s not a feeling he can linger on in the moment. He follows Bucky into the black.

The light on the scope of Bucky’s rifle illuminates the room before them. There is a bank of computers, a few screens, blank and silent. Bucky moves to the far wall and flips a switch that powers the lights on. They hum as they blink to life and it’s clear everything in the room is dated, dusty with disuse. The space reminds Steve too much of his interaction with Zola at Camp Lehigh and he adjusts his grip on the shield.

It’s clear someone has been there recently – papers are strewn across the room like someone threw them in frustration. They are written in a mixture of English, Russian and Tarasov’s private code.

“She was here,” Bucky says with certainty. “Recently. Hard to say when.” He crouches down and scoops up a few pages from the scattered notes.

Steve bugs the place while Bucky gathers as much of the paperwork as he can. They try booting up the computers, but to Steve’s relief, nothing comes up.XxX Tony hands the notes off to JARVIS to translate. “Shouldn’t take him too long,” he says as he rubs his face.

“She’s not going to stop,” Steve says, resigned.

“No, she’s probably not,” Tony says. “If we can find her, we will have to make a very difficult decision on what to do with her.”

“We already know the Hulk cell doesn’t hold her.”

“Are you suggesting what I think you are?”

“I’m saying it’s on the table,” Steve replies.

Tony is quiet for a moment. “You know, at the end of the day, she wants what we all want. Love. Belonging. Family.” He says this quietly. “I would give anything to have my family back. I’m not saying she’s right, but I understand why she’s doing this. And I don’t…” He trails off. “Maybe if we could speak to her, we could talk her down?”“I don’t think she really wants help. She wants things her way or people die,” Steve says.“You can’t really blame her for trying to get her family back. I mean, we are stumbling into a bit of a pot, kettle situation here, Cap.”

“I didn’t kill anyone to get Bucky back,” Steve replies defensively.

“We don’t know what the ramifications were. It had a ripple effect, believe me. I had Tarasova locked down before you brought Bucky back. Clearly, your altered timeline did something.”

Steve huffs, looking off at nothing. “If we can set back to the original timeline, fine, do it. But I’m not losing him again. I’m not.”XxX Bucky isn’t in their quarters when Steve returns.

He’s down in the infirmary, hovering over Nat. His hair is getting shaggy, not as long as he wore it as the Winter Soldier, but still hanging down into his eyes, and he needs a shave. His arms are folded over his chest and his lips are drawn tight together as he watches her sleep.

Steve slips up behind him quietly and asks gently, “How is she doing?”

“No change,” Bucky says. “The doctors still don’t know why she’s in a coma.”

“We’ll fix it,” Steve says.

“I remember her,” Bucky replies. “When they sent me to train the Widows. She was fierce. Smart. And human. It’s easy to forget that you are human when you live like that – as a weapon. It’s what made her so dangerous. She knew how to make friends and her superior officers, trainers, captors, whatever you want to call them, they thought she was faking it, that friendship was another skill she had learned like how to use a gun. When they realized it wasn’t, when they realized she actually cared, they realized they had to put a stop to it. She was making me human again and they couldn’t have that. They made her run some of the other girls so ragged they died.” Bucky shrugs. “Lots of the Widows died before they graduated from the Red Room, that wasn’t abnormal, but Natalia had just never been the one to cause it before. And I was never allowed to work that closely with anyone ever again,” he whispers.XxX That night Steve wakes up to Bucky vomiting. The light is on the bathroom and Bucky is trembling over the bowl when Steve makes his way in.

He fills the cup on the sink with water and hands it to Bucky to rinse his mouth out once he leans back, pushing his sweaty hair off his face.

“Nightmare?” Steve asks.

“I don’t know. More like… memories altering,” he says. “Shit.” He leans his back into the tub and his hands are shaking when he wipes his fingers down his chin. “I think I know what she did.”

“Tarasova?” Steve asks.

Bucky nods. “I think she—fuck. I think she took Natalia from the Red Room.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asks.

“They were orphans, those girls,” Bucky says. “I remember training Natasha, but now I remember--,” he shakes his head. “Sofia. It’s a new memory but, fuck it, it’s not, ya know? It’s like it’s always there. I remember both of them.”

“She altered the past again,” Steve says, his voice flat with resignation.

“She must’ve made them pick another girl and I don’t—Steve, when they took her, she was a year, two years old? I don’t know. She would’ve just erased Natalia’s entire past. Her brain probably couldn’t take it. I mean, whose brain could take it? Their whole life being wiped away like that?” he says in a way that sounds too much like he knows exactly what that feels like. “I can barely handle this,” he says, rubbing a hand across his stomach. He looks three sheets to the wind, pale and shaking.

“She’s not enhanced,” Steve says, more to himself than anything.“We’ll have to go back and protect her,” Bucky says. “Like you did to me. We’ll have to go back and—and make sure she’s the one they choose,” he says, and then balls his hands into fists and presses his face against them.

“Buck?” Steve says softly, crouching beside him to and rubbing his shoulder.

Bucky is quietly crying. His shoulders tremble under Steve’s hands.

“I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” he says after he manages to collect himself. “The Red Room. Department X. HYDRA. None of it. But she shouldn’t be braindead because she wasn’t abused her entire fucking life.”

“None of it is fair,” Steve agrees.

Bucky shifts so he can press his face against Steve’s chest, a quiet request to be held. Steve puts his arms over Bucky’s back and brings him in close.

“Let’s go back to sleep; we’ll figure it out in the morning.”

Bucky sniffles once and then nods and lets Steve lead him back to bed.XxX “I know where she’s been,” Clint says. He looks worse for wear, holding a cup of coffee in the common room when Steve and Bucky make their way down in the morning.

Bucky stays close to Steve, practically sits in his lap when they sit down, tipping his head over to rest it on Steve’s shoulder and holding his hand under the table.

“Where was she?” Tony asks.

“Aside from the space station and the orphanage, she needed a crystal to channel the energy, something solid and stable. I called up some old friends, asked them what they would want for a charge like that. They told me about Croitac – a light blue crystal that’s only been found in Nepal. Rare, expensive, hard as balls, from what I understand. I think she went there, got her hands on enough to create the Tesseract we have in our possession.”

“So she went to get more,” Tony says. He looks like he’s about to fall asleep in his own coffee. “Another Tesseract that’s not a real Tesseract and then bam, altered reality, god knows what, and Nat is disabled.”

“We think we know what she altered,” Steve interrupts.

They all blink over at him and Bucky shrinks a little. Steve gives his hand a small squeeze before telling them about Bucky’s nightmares and how they think Tarasova changed the orphan girl who went into the Red Room from Natasha to Sofia.

“Well, fuck,” Tony says when Steve finishes speaking. “Anyone got any bright ideas to stop this chick? Cause I’m not exactly thrilled at the idea of using a shattered Tesseract to go back in time to Soviet Russia and make a bunch of monsters choose a different little girl to abuse.”

“What if we just give her what she wants?” Bucky asks. “I mean, she was just a girl who wanted her mother. Why can’t we use the Tesseract to give her that?”

There is a silence over the table for a moment.“She’s been trying to find a way to do that,” Bruce says.

Tony rolls his eyes. “Yes, we know, Professor Obvious.”

“No, listen to me. Cap was able to pull Bucky out of time and Bucky is here,” Bruce says.

“Yeah…?” Tony replies.

“There are some theories that suggest certain moments are fixed points in time, that reality rests on important events like a house has load-bearing walls. Some of them are inconsequential, like what you had for breakfast, but some are more serious – like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Tarasova may not be able to bring her mother back because reality may rest on the death of her mother. It was a turning point in history, even though only a few people ever knew who she was. That’s why Tarasova can’t create a reality in which her mother is alive. Reality would crumble.”

They are silent for a moment before Tony says, “That’s such a dumb idea, but I think you might be right.”

“Then I guess we have to kill Tarasova,” Clint says bluntly. “And fix Nat. Cap can keep his boyfriend and we can all move on from this bullshit.”No one looks exactly comfortable with this declaration and silence descends upon the group. When it becomes clear no one is going to offer an alternative solution, Tony speaks again.“She’ll need a large energy source,” he says. “That’s why she was here – to use the arc reactor. She’s altered the timeline again, which means she found another energy source. I’ll call up some friends, see if anyone has any ideas as to where she is now to get that charge.”XxX “I don’t like it,” Bucky says when they return to Steve’s apartment.

Steve’s moved them into the kitchen to make dinner – nothing complicated, just soup – and he puts a pot on the stove asking, “Don’t like what?”

Bucky shrugs, resting his hands on the counter. “I don’t think we should kill her.”

Steve opens several cans of soup, pouring them into the pot and turns back to Bucky. “She’s altering reality, Buck.”

“She just wants her family,” Bucky says. “Her mother was a black widow. They were victims.”

“I don’t think she’s going to let us talk sense into her,” Steve says.

“Shouldn’t we try?” Bucky asks. “You came for me. When HYDRA had brainwashed me. You thought I was worth it.”

Steve sighs. “She grew up like this. You were a person before HYDRA got their hands on you.”

“It’s my fault,” Bucky says. “I took her to the Orphanage, and they raised her to be this.”

“Bucky, what else could you have done?” Steve asks.

Bucky looks down at where his hand is gripping the edge of the counter so hard it’s starting to crack. “She just wants her mother,” Bucky says, almost inaudibly.

Steve crosses the space between them, circling his hand around Bucky’s wrist until Bucky lets go of the counter. He lets Steve pull him in, rests his face against Steve’s chest. “You were doing the best you could with what you had,” Steve says.

----- CHAPTER BREAK -----

He waits until Steve’s asleep to slip out of their bed and heads down to Tony’s lab. The Tower is dark and quiet with the night and he doesn’t want to disturb the peace, but there’s something he has to do.

Tony’s space is a mess, his tools lying on every surface, tablets haphazardly strewn about with their screens dark, cups of half finished coffee. Howard was meticulous with his space, Bucky remembers. It’s like Tony is messy in rebellion of his father and Bucky has to stop that train of thought before it takes him to the places in his mind he’d rather not be.

He stands in the middle of the room looking through the clutter before he finds it – the Tesseract, set aside in a glass box that he’s fairly certain isn’t actually glass. It’s glowing gently in the low light, still clearly full of cracks but somehow all in one piece. He makes his way over to it, standing above it for a moment trying to figure out if there is an easy way to remove it from the box or if he’s just going to have to smash the glass.

“Sergeant Barnes, if I may,” JARVIS says gently in the dim room.

“Are you going to tattle on me?” Bucky asks.

“Not at all,” JARVIS says and he hears a click. When he puts his hands on the glass, it’s loose and he can pick it up with no problem.

“That was easy,” Bucky says, picking up the Tesseract.

“I’m under orders,” JARVIS explains.

“Whose orders?”

“Mr. Stark’s.”

Bucky blinks. “Stark is just going to let me… whatever?”

“Not exactly,” JARVIS says. “But you are to have access to the Tesseract. I also have a recording for you.”

“A recording?”

“It’s been archived for this date.”

“By who?”

“Mr. Stark.”

Bucky shrugs. “Show me, I guess.”

XxX
 
When Steve wakes up alone, he immediately panics. Bucky is not in the bed or the bedroom or the bathroom or the kitchen—

“JARVIS,” Steve asks, standing in the living room and trying not to hyperventilate. “Is Bucky in the Tower?”

“Sergeant Barnes is not currently in the Tower,” JARVIS replies, the AI’s voice steady as ever. “I do have a message from him for you though.”

“What?” Steve asks.

The TV in his living room comes up. It’s Bucky, standing in front of one of the cameras by the quinjet bay. “Hey Stevie,” he says. “I know you’re going to come looking for me, but could you at least give me a head start? I think I can handle this. Just trust me,” he says and grins before the screen goes dark again.

“Is that all?” Steve asks, standing in the middle of the living room with his mouth agape.

“Yes,” JARVIS replies.

“Do you know when he left? Where did he go?”

“I believe he has gone to find Tarasova,” JARVIS replies.

It is that moment that Tony appears on the screen of his living room TV.

“Cap,” he says. “You want to explain why your boyfriend stole the Tesseract around three a.m.?”

XxX
 
“He thinks she’s redeemable,” Steve says. He’s leaning against a counter in Tony’s lab, barefoot and still in his pajamas.

“Clint is going to kill him,” Tony says flatly. “He left for the Ukraine this morning. Bruce and I made a lot of calls yesterday and our guess is that Tarasova hooked into the power plant in Zaporizhia. It’s one of the biggest power plants in the world and she could charge a tesseract without shutting down the plant, like she did the arc reactor and her own space station. She probably didn’t do it earlier ‘cause the arc reactor and her solar panels were safer and easier to access, but she’s getting desperate.”

“You think Buck is headed there?” Steve asks.

“He disabled the tracker in the quinjet he stole. And JARVIS is being suspiciously vague about his interactions with Barnes last night,” Tony says, shooting a glare up to the ceiling.
“He asked us to give him a head start,” Steve says.
“Well, he’s already got a head start,” Tony says. “But we have to stop them from messing with reality more than they already have.”

XxX
 
Clint is unconscious and tied up when they find him. He is otherwise fine. They are in a maintenance building near the power lines leaving the plant.

Tony wakes him up by lightly smacking his cheek.

“Fuck,” Clint says. “She’s a better fighter than she looks,” he grunts, rubbing his newly freed hand over the bruise on his forehead.

“Where is she?” Steve asks.

“I don’t know now,” Clint replies. “She was here charging the Tesseract when I found her. I assume she’s altered the timeline again by now."

There is some jerry-rigged device Tarasova put together to charge the Tesseract, but there is a distinct lack of the woman herself.

“Fuck!” Steve hisses. “She could be anywhere by now. Did you see Bucky?” he asks.

Clint shakes his head. “Just me,” he says. “And Tarasova.”

“Wonderful,” Tony says. “We are back at stage one,” he grunts just as his phone rings. “It’s JARVIS,” he says before answering it.

“Sir,” JARVIS is loud enough to be heard by all. “Sergeant Barnes and Tarasova are at the Tower.”

XxX
 
“I had a feeling you would be back,” Bucky says when Tarasova materializes beside the arc reactor.

She looks worse for wear, bags under her eyes and her hair greasy. She sighs when she sees him. “I’ve already fought an Avenger today, do we have to do this?” she asks.

Bucky holds up the Tesseract, the shattered one glowing, wrapped in copper wire that leads to a circle on the floor. “I’m afraid we do. I know that what happened to you was wrong.”

“You’re about twenty years too late, Barnes. You think I don’t remember your face? There’s a reason I went after you.”

“I don’t blame you,” he says as the wires begin to glow with heat. “You wanted what we all wanted - acceptance, love, family. I didn’t do right by you then. But I want to do right by you now.”

He’s standing now at the edge of the copper circle.

“What is your plan, Barnes?” Tarasova asks. Her voice has a slight waiver in it, and she’s holding her own Tesseract in her hand at her side.

“I’m going to give you what you want,” he says, and then looks at the first Tesseract, glowing bright blue, the cracks in it brighter than the rest of it. “I don’t trust it,” he says. “I’m pretty sure it’s going to shatter once I use it. Hell, I may get stuck in the past. In fact, I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to get back. But I think it’s worth it,” he says, turning his gaze back to Tarasova, looking her dead in the eyes. “I think I can save you.”

“I don’t want to be saved, I just want my mother alive, you asshole,” Tarasova hisses, charging forward as Bucky steps into the ring of light and vanishes.

XxX
 
It’s cold in Siberia when Bucky lands in the snow. It’s dark. It’s December. 1997.

There is a light ahead of him, spilling from the open door of the bunker, and there is a shadow cast long over the landscape – the Winter Soldier standing in the doorway.

He remembers it with such clarity. The way it felt to stand there and look at that girl, crying while her parents lay dead behind her.

He’s so cold. He should’ve brought his coat but it’s too late now – he’s leaning into the wind to stay upright as he crosses to the bunker and comes face to face with himself, dressed all in black with his long hair curling over his shoulders, frost collecting on the grooves of his metal arm.

The Winter Soldier stares at him, eyes sharp and inhuman over the edge of the mask, clever and uncomprehending all at once. Recognizes himself in Bucky’s face.

“I know you don’t want to kill her,” Bucky says to the Soldier.

XxX
 
The Tower is silent and empty when they return. There is a quietness that feels strangely right as Tony, Clint, and Steve take the elevator as far as they can and then head to the stairwell that will lead them to the sub-basement where the arc reactor resides.

Steve takes the stairs two at a time, his heart thundering as he slams the last doors open and peers into the reactor’s room. It’s awash with the blue light from the arc but there is no one immediately present.

He steps forward with his shield clutched carefully to his side.

The control panel is empty. There are copper wires strewn about in a familiar pattern and in the middle of it all is the Tesseract.

It’s completely shattered, a collection of crystal fragments. Its brilliant light has dimmed to nothing and the pieces are many, tiny and jagged.

“No,” Steve hisses. “Buck?” he yells and runs around the curve of the reactor to check behind it, coming up empty when he circles all the way around to the far side of the control panel. The room is empty and the Tesseract is destroyed.

“JARVIS,” Steve says, one hand hovering over the mess of broken crystal. “What happened here?”

There is an ominous silence. Then JARIVS answers, “I’m not sure. Some of my files are corrupted. I cannot access the data.”

“Is Bucky in the building?” Steve asks.

“Sergeant Barnes is not in the building,” JARVIS replies. “He left around three a.m. this morning.”

Steve looks up, wishing for not the first time that JARVIS had a face. “So you do remember Bucky leaving?”

“I log everyone’s coming and going to the best of my ability,” JARVIS replies.

“The jet was here, though,” Tony says. “Barnes came back to the Tower.”

“Or someone brought the jet back to the Tower,” Clint replies, unhelpfully.

“I’m going to manually pull up the corrupt files and see what I can find,” Tony says.

“JARVIS spoke with him this morning,” Steve says. “He might have--,” Steve cuts himself off with a strangled breath.

“Cap?” Tony asks.

“JARVIS showed me a video of myself talking through how to rig the Tesseract to time travel. That’s how I saved Bucky,” Steve says. “What if JARVIS showed him the same video? He could be—he could be

anywhere

. Anywhere on earth and anywhere

in time

.

”

Steve’s voice is high and thin, trembling with fear as he reaches forward and rakes his hand through the shards of crystal. “JARVIS brought me back,” he says. “JARVIS doesn’t even know

where

he is and even if he did, we wouldn’t be able to.”

Steve slaps his hand into the destroyed tesseract, sending shards flying across the room and snapping the copper wire into pieces. “Fuck!” he screams before sinking to the floor by the wall, his hands coming up to rest on his head, pulling through his hair. His shoulders tremble as he holds off tears.

“I can’t—I can’t keep him safe,” he gasps. “I keep losing him. And now I don’t even know where he is.”

Tony is silent for a moment before crossing the room and kneeling beside him. “Cap, we’ll fix this. Tarasova built a Tesseract, and I doubt she’s smarter than me. I’m sure I can whip one up. We’ll figure out where he went, and we’ll bring him back.”

Steve rubs his face, ridding it of moisture before sniffing once and collecting himself. “He probably went to Siberia. 1997. He wanted to save her.”

“Nothing has changed that we know of,” Tony says. “So he probably hasn’t altered anything yet.”

“Yet,” Steve says.

“Pardon the interruption,” JARVIS says. “But Agent Barton is requesting your presence on the common floor.”

XxX
 
Clint is talking to someone when they enter the room.

Tony and Steve have to cross the room before they can see who’s seated in the armchair that faces away from the elevator.

“Good evening, boys,” Natasha says. Her voice is typical dry Natasha-sarcasm in spite of the fact that she still looks pretty rough. She’s deathly pale, dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that Steve is pretty sure belongs to Clint, but she’s conscious.

“Well, I guess the timeline has been altered again,” Tony says in resignation.

“Are you okay?” Steve asks.

Natasha shrugs. “The doctors said there was nothing wrong with me to begin with. I don’t

feel

any different.”

“Do you remember killing a Widow in ’97?” Steve asks.

Natasha shrugs. “I do remember. But I also remember not killing a Widow in ’97. In my gut, I feel like I didn’t kill a Widow in ‘97. But I don’t know for certain,” she admits.

“Okay,” Steve says, like he’s trying to calm himself down. He takes a breath, lets it out slowly. “Okay. Bucky changed something in the timeline. Probably something in December of ’97. We need to go back there.”

“We’re not getting another jump out of that Tesseract, Steve,” Tony says.

“You think you can build another?” Steve asks.

Tony nods, then shrugs. “I think so. I mean, we have all her notes, and my ego won’t let me believe she’s actually smarter than me. But I have to be honest, I can’t believe she built one to begin with. It’s not something I could create overnight.”

“Pardon the interruption,” JARVIS says before Steve can reply, and the whole room goes quiet to listen. “Director Fury has requested access to the communal floor.”

“Fury?” Tony says in disbelief. “What is Fury doing here?”

There is a paused before JARVIS responds. “He says he has insight to the current situation. He has brought his daughter along.”

“Fury has a daughter?” Steve says looking at Nat who shakes his her head in equal confusion.

Tony lifts his hands up and lets them fall in a

what the hell

manner. “Grant them access, I guess,” he tells JARVIS.

Nat situates herself to face the door completely and there are several moments of silence until the elevator opens and out steps Fury and a thin, blonde woman with sharp facial features and piercing blue eyes.

Steve stares at her for nearly ten seconds of solid silence before charging at her.

He almost breaks Fury’s collarbone when Fury steps between them, barely stopping himself from barreling the other man down.

“You want to let us explain?” Fury asks rhetorically while Steve straightens himself out.

“Not really,” Steve admits, but behind him, Natasha says his name with a tone of warning. He glances back at her.

“Let’s hear this out,” she says when Steve makes eye contact.

Which is how they end up all sitting in the common room of Avengers’ Tower like the love of his life isn’t lost somewhere in time.

“In December of ’97, a strange man showed up at my doorstep with this little girl. I was in deep cover at the time, still just an Agent. He blew my whole operation. I wanted to kill him. But I heard him out instead. He didn’t know who he was, but he had all this information on the Soviets and their Black Widow program, and he had this girl. All he wanted in return was for someone to look after her. Then he disappeared into the night. No easy feat, since we had him in lockdown in the Triskelion, but he got out and left no trace.”

“It was the Winter Soldier,” the woman says. She has an American accent. She’s sharp-eyed and composed but still – it’s her. It’s Tarasova. “He killed my parents before realizing they had a kid and then couldn’t bring himself to kill me.”

Steve stares at her for a moment. “He’s not here if you’ve come to kill him.”

“I haven’t come to kill him,” she replies. “I was mad for most of my life. I always thought I would kill him someday. But then HYDRA and the Winter Soldier fiasco surfaced back in ’14 and,” she pauses, looking for the words, “I’m not mad anymore. I read the files. What they did to Barnes was unspeakable. I can’t believe he didn’t kill me.”

“You realize everything you are saying wasn’t true yesterday,” Tony says, sharply.

Tarasova shrugs. “I know the timeline has been altered. But it’s been altered for the better, wouldn’t you agree?”

“No,” Steve says. “Bucky was still abused, still turned into the Winter Soldier.”

“He had to be,” Tarasova answers. “The Winter Soldier shaped the century. Everything would be different if HYDRA never had him.”

“It’s not fair,” Steve says, getting to his feet. “It’s not fair.”

“Steve,” Natasha says, her voice gentle.

Steve takes a breath, closing his eyes. “Okay. So say I believe this. Bucky brought Tarasova to Fury as a child and you just—raised her as your own?”

“She took a liking to me,” Fury says. “She’s not exactly a princess. She needed a certain parenting style growing up.”

“Why do I have a feeling that was shooting lessons, hacking and hand to hand combat?” Clint asks rhetorically.

Fury doesn’t dispute it.

“So then what? SHIELD locked Bucky up and he escaped? And then what happened?”

“He had help,” Fury says.

“Help?”

“He had help from himself,” Fury says.

Steve tips his head back to stare at the ceiling for a moment and thinks about Bucky rescuing the Winter Soldier. He would. The idiot.
“How could he have known that wouldn’t destroy reality?” Tony asks. “It seems like a bad idea to interact with your past self.”
“I’m not sure he did know,” Fury says. “But it doesn’t matter, because it worked, regardless.”

“So Bucky is in Washington in ’97?” Steve asks.

“’98,” Fury says. “We held him for a couple of weeks. Here,” Fury reaches into his coat and pulls out a flash drive. “The file on the incident. I have a feeling that’ll give you all the info you need to find your boy.”

Tony takes the drive and clears his throat. “Hopefully. Although that doesn’t solve the major problem – we don’t have a Tesseract anymore. It sort of. Shattered.”

“How do you think we knew to show up today?” Tarasova asks. She stands up and rummages around in her purse before pulling out a perfect, blue square crystal like some sort of ridiculous Christmas present.

Steve stares at her. “It can’t be that easy.”

“Why not?” she asks.

“You were here trying to kill Natasha and Bucky just a few days ago.”

“I believe you, Captain. And I can assure you, I am the same girl, but I am also not the same girl. I miss my mother, but she’s not the only instance of love I’ve ever known. The Soldier – he told Nick what happened to me, in your timeline, your reality. The Orphanage. That’s a lot of pain for one soul to carry alone. But I didn’t have to carry it alone this time.

“I picked up my father’s research. It’s why I wasn’t in DC when the Soldier came for Nick again.  I was learning to create this. And then—well, then we started getting the Messages.”

“Messages?” Tony asks.

“I seem to have used to the Tesseract to skip back in time and leave myself notes – where to find the crystal it was made out of. How to carve it. How to power it. It was cryptic, I sure didn’t make it easy on myself, but I led myself here. This morning, I got another message – that Barnes was in trouble and the only way to help him was to bring this to you.”

With that, she leans forward and sets the Tesseract on the coffee table between them. It glows gently in the afternoon light and Steve can’t believe it.

“I don’t trust you,” Steve says after a moment of staring at the object.

“I wouldn’t trust me either,” Tarasova says. “And if you want to hold me, I guess I can’t really stop you.”

“Now hold on,” Fury says. “She’s done nothing wrong.”

“

To you

,” Natasha replies. “You can’t just waltz her in here and have her act like everything about this is rational. You just gave us a Tesseract like we didn’t already know she had the capability of making more than one and then expect us to trust her because you said we should.”

“Alright,” Fury says levelly. “You let JARVIS analyze that,” he motions toward the drive. “And you go get your boy,” he says looking at Steve. “And decide if you trust her then.”

Steve glances at Nat and Tony. Neither object, so he says, “Deal.”

XxX
 
Given the old SHIELD files, JARVIS says he believes he can pinpoint where and when Bucky will be.

Steve sighs. “I’m not sure I can trust this. I’m not sure I trust Tarasova. How can we be sure this isn’t a trap? Or that we aren’t messing up reality more?”

“I’m going to take the fact that Nat is back in the land of the living as a good sign that we may be on the right track,” Tony says. “I will admit it could be a clever ruse, but the girl is rather convincing. She certainly doesn’t seem like the lady we were dealing with a few days ago.”

Steve takes a breath. “I’ll believe her when I have Bucky here,” he says.

Tony nods and takes the Tesseract down into the basement and Steve follows.

XxX
 
It’s cold.

January 28
th
, 1998.

Washington DC.

It’s just past ten at night and the city is winding down, slipping into a winter sleep as Steve finds his way through the streets, toward the bus station, heart in his throat.

The clouds overhead are heavy with unfallen snow, and the air is sharp with frost, but there is no wind. It feels dreamlike, unearthly as he moves under the streetlights and comes to a stop at the edge of a vast parking lot where the buses sit in neat rows, dormant and waiting their turn.

There is one figure in the distance, on the corner, wearing a jacket with the collar turned up and their breath curling up like smoke from their lips.

Steve doesn’t recognize him for a moment because his hair is long, curling around his shoulders. But the way he stands is so familiar that Steve begins walking toward him before he can even stop himself.

It begins to snow then, the first flakes light and lace-like, landing in the other man’s dark hair and clinging to the collar of his jacket.

He turns as Steve approaches and stares at him until Steve gets closer, then he smiles.

It’s Bucky.

It’s

Bucky.

His nose is rosy in the night air, sharp cheekbones also dusted pink.

“I was afraid I would have to stand here all night,” Bucky says when Steve comes to a stop in front of him.
“Bucky.”
“Hey you,” he says and smiles.

“You’re an idiot,” Steve says, all at once.

“I learned from the best.”

Steve falls forward, throwing his arms around Bucky’s shoulders and tucking his face into the curve of Bucky’s neck.

“You’re okay,” Bucky says, wrapping his arms around Steve’s back.

“I thought I lost you, you

asshole.”

Bucky chuckles, low and light, and rubs the palm of his hand down Steve’s spine. “You know I’m harder than that to get rid of.”

Steve breathes him in, the smell of him like home. Something sweet and almost forgotten. He leans back after a moment and stares at Bucky’s face before reaching up and curling his fingers gently through Bucky’s hair.

“It’s long again,” he says, puzzled.

“Yeah,” Bucky says and then shifts a little, looking away. “And this.” He holds his left hand up – the metal glints under the streetlight, cold and unforgiving.

“Buck,” Steve gasps, reaching out and taking Bucky’s metal hand in both of his. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky admits. “I watched from a distance as he –

I

– handed Tarasova over, and then I felt like I’d been struck by lightning. I couldn’t breathe or see and when the pain finally passed, I was like this again.”

Steve doesn’t know what to say, so he just pulls Bucky back against him, holds him there in the snow under the streetlight and thinks about nothing for a moment.

“How’d you know?” he asks as he guides Bucky back toward the drop site.

Bucky shrugs. “I figured she just wanted what we all want – love, belonging. It didn’t have to be her mother, it just had to be someone who meant it.”

“You’re smarter than you look,” Steve jokes.

Bucky bumps him with his shoulder.

“How did you pick

Fury?

”

“She needs someone who’s not going to bullshit her, not sugarcoat things. When you’ve been through shit like that, you just want people to be real with you. It’s what the girls in the Red Room wanted when I worked with them,” he says, and Steve gets that swoop of guilt and sadness he gets when he thinks about all those years Bucky spent as the Soldier. “I figured if anyone could teach her to be good, love her and not take her crap and not lie to her, it would be Fury.”

“You saved her.”

Bucky stops and looks up at the snowfall, lets it land on his face before closing his eyes. “It only took me twenty years.”

“Better late than never,” Steve says. “It took me seventy to get back to you.”

Bucky opens his eyes again and smiles. “This time it didn’t.”

“I’m getting better at rescuing you. But please, stop doing shit I need to rescue you from.”

“Big talk coming from you,” Bucky says.

Steve just shakes his head. “Come on, JARVIS will be waiting for us.”

XxX

XxX
 
They have to stand close in the copper circle. Steve takes Bucky’s hands, metal and flesh, and there is a beat of silence before Bucky leans forward, tucking his head into Steve’s neck and the metal begins to glow.

Steve closes his eyes and they breathe together like that. It takes him a second to realize they’re back to the present, in the basement of the Tower.

Tony is staring at them, wide-eyed, from behind the control panel for the arc reactor.  His mouth is slightly agape and he’s awash in the blue light of the arc.

For a moment, a stab of worry runs though Steve and he pulls Bucky closer to his body.

“I really didn’t think that would work,” Tony says.

Bucky gazes up at Steve. “You should learn to trust me.”

“Fuck, it’s you,” Tony says and they both look at him then, Steve still holding Bucky’s hands in his. “I remember him. He cheats at cards.”

“And pool,” Bucky replies with a smirk.

“This is so weird,” Tony replies, now looking at Steve. “I swear, I didn’t remember him till just now.”

“You think we got the timeline back?” Steve asks.

“I guess we did,” Tony replies.

XxX
 
Tarasova isn’t in lockdown, exactly. They knew better than to try to lock her up with Fury defending her.

She has, however, been kept under Natasha and Clint’s watchful eyes in the conference room on the communal floor of the Tower. She’s sitting at the table looking half worried when Steve, Tony and Bucky pile in.

Steve is holding Bucky’s hand, and his grip tightens when Tarasova’s gaze falls on them. There is a tense beat of silence and then she smiles at him, a wide, face-splitting grin. None of the smirking she did when Steve had her tied to a chair. She looks young and elated.

“I wasn’t lying,” she says. “I knew it would work.”

When Steve looks over at Bucky, he’s smiling at her. It’s a gentle grin and his eyes look a little wet.

“Hey you,” Bucky says, his voice rough.

“Hey,” Tarasova replies.

“I’m sorry about your mom,” Bucky says.

“Me, too,” Tarasova replies. “But I don’t blame you. Not anymore. I know… what happened to you,” she says, and she’s not smiling now, looking at Bucky instead with a sympathetic gaze. “I’m sorry about your… everything. What they did to you.”

Bucky’s smile turns into a smirk. “I’m all right now,” he says. “But I would appreciate it if you stopped trying to kill me. You are going to give Steve an ulcer.”

“I’ll never hurt another innocent soul,” she promises and Steve somehow finds that he believes her. “But I would like to apologize for what I’ve put you all through,” she says, addressing the room at large.

There is another moment of quiet before Steve clears his throat. “I do realize that if that worked, if that really worked, then this isn’t your fault. Not,

you

, exactly,” he says, waving his hand at her, to indicate this incarnation of Tesla Tarasova.

Tesla shrugs. “Yes and no. I remember it all happening, now that you have sorted it all out. I remember that feeling – I remember the anger. I remember the Orphanage and the abuse I was put through there. I remember wanting my mother more than anything else. I remember wanting Barnes and Romanov dead. I am the person who wanted those things. I am also a person who never wanted those things—

“I remember being brought to Fury and I remember him calming me down and I remember him accepting me and caring for me and helping me get to that place where I was no longer consumed by the need to get my mother back. I miss her. It would be nice if she was here, but I’m not going to destroy reality for it.

“You see,” she explains. “Time isn’t like a tree where every branch goes off in a different direction and never reconnects; it’s more like a river, where the streams can split to move around rocks and deltas, but then find their way back. All of those things happened. Those timelines that I created when my life was different really existed. That all really happened, and they all happened at once. But now the timelines are reconnecting, coming back to one line, to our real history. Everything should be stable now.”

“Do we believe her?” Nat asks after they take a moment to digest this.

Tony runs a hand back through his hair, making it stick up, and blows his breath out harshly through his lips. “At this point, fuck it. Yeah, I believe her. But don’t ever create another Tesseract, and I am destroying the one we have now.”

“That is a decent compromise for not arresting me or killing me. But we still have some loose ends.”

“And what would those be?” Tony asks.

“The videos. The notes I sent myself. JARVIS’s programing. Everything that led us here.”

XxX
 
Tony begrudgingly lets Tesla into his lab to work with JARVIS and send information back through time to lead them to the place they are now.

At some point, Steve will have to film that stupid video explaining how to get back to Bucky. He doesn’t want to worry about it right now. He has a bit of a headache building behind his eyes – the remnants of all the stress and emotional turns he’s been driven through the past few weeks.

He takes Bucky back to their apartment because all he wants is to tuck up against Bucky. When the door closes behind him, he breathes a sigh of relief because things are the way they should be – Bucky’s pile of shoes is back beside the door, the artwork they picked out together is hung on the far wall, and one of Bucky’s jackets is strewn across the arm of the couch.

Steve doesn’t even get further than that, he just leans against the door and pulls Bucky against him, and Bucky goes willingly, one hand curling around Steve’s waist and the metal one cupping the back of his head.

“I never want to lose you again,” Steve says.

Bucky kisses him gently, on the neck where his face is tucked. “You always find me, though,” he says.

“I’m always worried – I won’t this time. I thought you were gone.”

Bucky pulls back a little. “You traveled through time to get me back.”

Steve reaches up and laces his hand through Bucky’s metal fingers, pulling them in front of him to look at the digits. “I thought I could spare you all this pain.”

“It was scary when I didn’t know what I was remembering,” he says. “This I know. And, sometimes, I think it brought me back to you.”

Steve doesn’t have a response to that, so he just kisses the metal digits.

Bucky watches him closely before leaning in to nuzzle his nose across Steve’s face, then slides into a kiss that Steve readily accepts. Their lips glide together, slow and tender, and Steve closes his eyes and lets himself just feel this – Bucky warm against his body, his stubble scraping at Steve’s chin and his tongue flicking into his mouth.

Bucky breaks the kiss but doesn’t pull away, just whispers, “I missed you,” into the gap between their bodies, and the words go straight through his heart and he feels like he hasn’t seen Bucky in

years.

“I missed you, too,” he admits, tugging Bucky even closer.

Bucky makes a small sound and grinds his hips into Steve’s before going back in for another kiss and another and another.

Steve reaches up with both hands to cup Bucky’s face and hold him where he wants him, right there, firm and real and alive in the here and now.

“Steve,” he gasps after a moment. “Let’s... come on,” he leans back and pulls Steve by the hand toward their bedroom.

Steve’s stomach flits with butterflies like it’s his first time when the door shuts behind them and Bucky stands before him, in front of the bed. He’s smiling, looking almost as rosy-faced as he did the night before in the snow.

Steve has to stop for a moment and just drink him in like an oasis in the desert.

“What?” he says with a self-conscious chuckle when Steve doesn’t move toward him for a couple of heartbeats.

“I just. I really thought I lost you for good again,” Steve says, suddenly choked up.

Bucky crosses back over to him and wraps his arms around Steve. “I’m okay. I’m here. I’m here,” he whispers.

Steve nods, takes a breath and settles his nerves with a shuttering exhale. “I killed the mood,” he says after a second.

Bucky mouths at his neck. “No, you didn’t,” he says, and smiles.

Steve finds himself fidgeting with the bottom of Bucky’s shirt and looking at him through his eyelashes. “Can I?” he asks, pulling slightly at the fabric.

Bucky bites his lip and nods, and then Steve slowly, carefully, pulls the shirt up over Buck’s head and lets it fall to the floor.

He feels a bit like he’s looking at Bucky’s body for the first time. No, not for the first time ever, but for the first time since Bucky was

changed.

The scars around the metal arm are raised and red and harsh, and he knows them. He’s kissed them. He’s washed them. He’s stayed up with Bucky all night while Bucky vomited and cried and told him – in vivid detail – what it felt like when Zola strapped him to a table and bolted a metal arm directly to his bones.

Bucky must notice something on his face because he takes Steve’s hand and places the palm on the scar tissue. “I’m okay,” he says. “It hurt when it happened, but it doesn’t hurt now.”

Steve lets his fingers play over the tissue, feels the bumps and ridges before leaning in to kiss Bucky again.

Bucky doesn’t waste time then; his hands scramble at the front of Steve’s pants, undoing the belt, button and zipper before shucking them.

Steve laughs then, reaching out to return the favor. “Eager?” he says.

Bucky steps back and raises an eyebrow while he kicks off his boxers and bounces back on the bed. “The timelines are so twisted in my head, I can’t remember the last time you fucked me, so you better rectify that, Rogers.”

Steve shakes his head with a smirk, tugs his shirt over his head and pulls off his boxers. “I was trying to make love to you,” he says. “But if you’d rather get fucked...” He starts to crawl onto the bed. Bucky rolls his eyes, shakes his head and reaches over to Steve’s bedside table to pull out a tacky bottle of lube from the bottom drawer.

Bucky stretches out on his back, luxuriating in their sheets like a cat. He closes his eyes and reaches down to stroke his own cock to full hardness with his metal arm. Steve watches the digits glide smoothly over the skin with a perverse sense of fascination so intense his ears turn pink in embarrassment.

“I always felt,” Bucky says with a gasp as his toes curl where they lie next to Steve’s knees, “that our fucking and lovemaking were one and the same.”

He opens his eyes then and smiles at Steve like the sun, and Steve’s heart stutters in his chest with the disbelief that he gets to have

this

– Bucky real and alive and naked in his bed.

Bucky’s flesh hand makes a

come hither

motion at Steve. “Sweetheart,” he says. “I need you. I remember how cold the forests in Austria were and how you held me close.” His thumb pushes up the head of his cock and slides along the slit.

Steve swallows hard and then surges forward, taking Bucky’s cock in his own hand and kissing his lips, his chin, his neck, down his chest, sucking on his nipples and scars with equal abandon.

“Yeah, Steve, like that,” Bucky croons his pleasure and pushes the bottle of lube toward him with minimal subtlety.

Steve sits back on his heels between Bucky’s spread thighs and pops open the bottle, applying it carefully to his own fingers before leaning forward again to kiss Bucky’s lips while his wet fingers search out the puckered opening of Bucky’s ass. He rubs firmly at the furled muscle before pushing inside.

Bucky gasps and arches his back off the bed. His hands scramble for purchase across Steve’s back before landing on the curve of Steve’s ass and hanging on for dear life.

“Yes,” he gasps. “Like that,” he says as Steve sets up a rhythm, pushing his fingers in and out of Bucky. “Like that, like that,” he keeps whispering, rocking his hips to match Steve’s motions.

“Doing good, baby,” Steve whispers, picking up the pace, scissoring his fingers and adding a third. He rubs hard at Bucky’s prostate and Bucky gasps loudly, clinging to Steve like he’s afraid he’ll drift away if he doesn’t. His chest is slicked with sweat and his dark hair fans out across the pillow, and Steve thinks he’s never seen such a pretty sight.

“I’m ready,” Bucky says, digging his heels into the comforter, bending his knees. “I’m ready, Steve, I’m ready. Don’t make me wait.”

Steve laughs. “So needy,” he says, pulling his fingers out and reaching for the lube again.

Bucky sits up on his elbows to watch Steve slick himself up. “It’s been a while,” he says, and bites his lip.

“Hasn’t been that long,” Steve says, leaning forward to encourage Bucky to wrap his legs around Steve’s waist.

Bucky does him one better and wraps his legs around his waist and his arms over Steve’s back. “The last time we did this, I had both arms.”

Steve stills with his cock pressed against Bucky’s entrance, flagging slightly. “Buck,” he says, quietly, concern flitting across his features.

“Sorry,” Bucky says. “I know—I know it hasn’t actually been that long.”

Steve hushes him with a kiss. “I know it has been in some of the timelines,” he says, soothingly.

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees quietly. “Yeah. I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” Steve says, and sinks home.

Bucky is quieter than normal – gasping breaths and gentle moans. He keeps his metal hand on Steve’s hip the whole time, helping guide his pace while Steve searches for the perfect angle.

They come together with muffled gasps, Bucky pulling Steve in close and holding him there while they tremble through the aftershocks.

Steve slides over so he can kiss the star on Bucky’s shoulder. “You better not leave me again,” he says.

Bucky runs his hand down Steve’s spine. “Not if I can help it,” he says.
They fall asleep like that, skin-to-skin, the sheets tangled around their feet. Bucky tucked up against him, hip-to-hip, and his breath ghosting over Steve’s face.
It’s quiet and dark in their room and, for a moment, all is right with the world.
XxX

Steve has a nightmare.

He has a nightmare about Kreischberg.

About that awful POW camp. About the smell of the unwashed bodies, the smoke and the dead.

About running through the halls, looking for the room where they put Bucky and barely being able to find it.

A nightmare where he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

And he opens the door and the table is empty and Bucky is not there.

Bucky wakes him up with a cold metal palm between his shoulder blades.

Steve comes out of the dream instantly and finds his pillow wet. He doesn’t think he cried the last time he had this nightmare. This memory.

Bucky tugs at his shoulder, rolls him over in the dark, and Steve goes easily, faces Bucky in the low light of their bedroom.

Bucky strokes his cheek and says, “Hey there. Bad dream?”

“Yeah,” Steve says before creeping closer, putting his hand on Bucky’s rib and clinging. “Yeah.”

“You wanna talk about it?” Bucky asks.

He doesn’t for a moment.

But then he does.

“I keep dreaming that I didn’t find you. In the POW camp. That I was too late. And I never got you back.”

Bucky kisses the side of his head, listens patiently.

“It’s a memory,” he says after a moment. “You stole me from that camp and brought me here. There is a version of you that didn’t find me.”

Steve sniffles a little bit, pressing closer to Bucky. “I feel like I’m being haunted. Like I have an unfinished task.”

Bucky hushes him. “He’s you and he’ll figure it out. You saved me. He’ll know soon enough.”

“I hope so,” Steve says. He traces his fingertips over Bucky’s skin as they fall into silence. He sniffles a few times and falls asleep like that, in Bucky’s arms.

He dreams again.
About the day the Winter Soldier came in from the cold and kissed the palm of his hand.
XxX

“It’s kind of cool,” Tony says while he focuses the camera and Steve looks over the script. “It’s like no one actually wrote these words. You are saying them because they were on the video and they were on the video because you said them.”

Steve gives him a dry look. “Is the time travel thing growing on you, Tony?” he asks.

“Not at all. I can’t wait to destroy that hunk of magic mineral,” Tony fires back. “But it is… interesting how she interfaced the Tesseract

into

JARVIS. She walked him through programming his past self. It shouldn’t have even been possible. She made my AI

transcend time.

”

“I think Tesla is growing on you,” Steve says with a smirk.

Tony forces a sneer. “Not at all,” he says. “She’s a teenager, practically a baby, and we just spent the last few weeks trying to stop her from destroying reality. I have never liked anyone

less.

”

“Sure,” Steve replies with a smirk.

“Are you ready?” Tony asks, not responding to Steve’s remarks. “You need this to save your boy.”

“Good to go,” Steve replies and looks into the camera.

“Action,” Tony says.

Steve looks into the camera and thinks hard about that feeling of not knowing what happened to Bucky, and if he was going to get him back. The fear, the uncertainty, the frustration. “Listen to me,” he says in the Captain America voice. “Everything is going to be fine. You are going to get Bucky back. But I need you to listen to me.”

He pauses, briefly, remembers the way he had questioned JARVIS while he watched this.
“Listen,” he says again. “The first time you were alone with Bucky after SHIELD released him, you brought him home and sat on his bedside. He kissed the palm of your hand and fell asleep with his head on your thigh…”