The metal arm slammed Steve into the door opposite him, the long hall stretching either way with windows next to the stairs on either end. Steve leapt back up and looked at the man – He was wearing some kind of bulletproof vest with one sleeve over his right arm, a mask that covered his nose and mouth, and he had dark hair down to his shoulders. His eyes were painted with some kind of black make-up in a straight line, probably to make him less recognizable. The man started to bolt toward the end of the hall and Steve matched pace with him and then out paced him, knocking him to the ground when he caught up. The guy rolled and shoved off the ground with a super-soldier's grace – One of the Fireflies, maybe? But that didn't make sense. He had a metal arm, that wouldn't be viable with regular Extremis dosage.
Steve started up again, seeing the mask on the man's face mask shaking. He must've knocked it loose. They exchanged blows for a few seconds before the man got the upper hand and grabbed Steve's suitcoat, slamming him into the wall. The move put a hole into the wall and Steve yanked himself free of it to see the man running down the hall toward the west window and staircase. They were four stories up and the neighboring buildings weren't that close, but the assailant was still moving toward it. Steve bolted after him.
He was faster than this guy, but not as much faster than he should've been of a basic human. He was closing but not fast enough – He thought the guy was going to go down the staircase, but that proved to have been naive. The assailant leapt out of the window and Steve didn't have much choice, he followed suit, tucking into a roll as they clattered to the ground. The roll scraped off his suit and shirt arm, but he managed to come up intact. The other guy wasn't looking much better. His mask had fallen off onto the ground and his arm had scraping lines on it. He looked over at Steve in the dim of the parking lot and Steve saw the impossible.
It was Bucky. He had a cut on his forehead from the glass, but it was Bucky.
That was impossible, totally impossible.
But Steve could see him underneath the light, fiddling with something in his sleeve.
"Bucky?" Steve said, looking at the man.
The man smirked at him and, gave him a jesting salute just like Bucky had before he'd left for the war.
"Bucky, what are you doing?" Steve asked.
Then a nanonswarm started to swallow the metal arm and the head.
"Bucky, wait!" Steve said, lunging out to grab his hand before he could use the device. But Bucky dodged easily and his skin and metal vanished beneath the assembler swarm and then there was a quantum distortion and he was gone.
----
Natasha was sitting on the stoop of Steve's apartment building when he got there. "Nat," Steve said, a little surprised to see her. "Good to see you."
"There's this great used clothes spot nearby, come on," Natasha said, nodding her head toward the street. Steve fell in line. "Heard you and Daisy had a nice dinner."
Steve felt his face heat up, "Yeah, you win this one." He wasn't sure what this was about, but it definitely wasn't about his date with Daisy. She would've just called, not Quantum tunneled across the ocean and camped out at his house.
"You win this time," Natasha said, looking over at him. "She's… Daisy's good real deep, Steve. Your people more than mine."
"Natasha," Steve said as they kept walking toward the used clothes store or wherever they were actually going. "Anybody who can come back from where you came from, they're good real deep too. That's not easy."
"I was pretty bad when Clint found me," Natasha rounded the corner and picked up her pace and Steve matched it. "Daisy was already good when we found her."
Steve shook his head, this argument was well worn. "Well, I don't intend anything untoward with Daisy."
"Oh?" Natasha raised her eyebrows. "I'm sure she'll be disappointed."
Steve laughed and they kept walking, observing the movements of New York. Then they came up to an… actual used clothes store. "Let's go," Natasha said. "Got to get you dressed for your next date."
"Now hold on a second," Steve protested.
"No, no, Daisy said you brought flowers and wore a suit, come on, you need to be able to dress for social occasions." They started ticking through clothes until they found a pair of pants and a shirt. "Go put them on." Natasha drifted over toward the dresses and Steve went to the changing stalls they had in the middle of the room and got into one of them. He was about to put on pants when someone threw a dress over the top of the door.
"Ma'am there's somebody," and then the door opened and Natasha came in, walking right in on him and closing the door behind her. Steve blinked, pulled on the new pair of pants over his underwear for his own decency, and leaned against the back of the stall as Natasha rifled through his pockets and found his phone and took the thing apart. She took her phone apart too, laid out the parts, and then looked over at Steve.
"That should do," Natasha straightened up and looked over at Steve. "Heard you're looking for a guy, mask, metal arm, soviet star."
"Yeah," Steve said. He didn't mention that it was Bucky. "Do you know anything about him?"
"I used to have a scar he gave me," Natasha said, "Right in my abdomen. Shot through me to his target. He's called the Winter Soldier. Lots of people think he's a myth, been active for decades. Vicious. Killed a lot of honorable people on both sides of the Cold War."
Steve frowned. He didn't understand why Bucky would've done that. Siding with the Soviets, well, that would've been weird but Steve would've understood. He'd had communist friends in art school and he'd thought they were dumb but it wasn't unimaginable. Better than the wannabe Nazis of the America First movement. But not siding with either side? Vicious? What had scarred him so badly?
"Steve, why are you looking for the guy and not whoever sent him?"
"Natasha," Steve said, looking off into the distance.
"Steve, I need to know."
"It was Bucky."
Natasha blinked and processed. "You're sure?"
"He knew me. He gave me this joke salute, the one he gave me when he left for the war."
"Steve…" Natasha said, "I know he was your best friend. But he could be anywhere in the world. Anywhere in the universe, really, with a Quantum Tunneler."
"So what, I stay here, do nothing?"
"Steve, he tried to kill you!" Steve was more taken aback that she allowed her voice to rise more than she should've let it.
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"I don't think Bucky was trying to kill me," Steve said, leaning in and whispering. "My room was trashed but if he'd wanted me dead, he would've gone for a weapon."
"Steve, whoever the Winter Soldier is, he's not the guy you lost in the war."
Steve looked at Natasha. She didn't get it. No, that wasn't fair. She got it, she hadn't yet thought of the connection. "If it was Clint, you wouldn't let that stop you."
"Look, you're right, I wouldn't. I'm not saying you have to stop, I'm saying you should think about your priorities."
"What should come first, giving speeches?" Steve said, "I've given one speech."
"And it mattered! People sat up and listened. It's the primary talk of the country. It tanked your popularity some to have an opinion, but it mattered."
"Bucky matters. What's the point of fighting if we're not fighting for every single person?"
Natasha and Steve locked eyes for a moment in a brief glaring contest. Natasha broke first, "Look, you've got to start thinking about how you're seen if you want to succeed at this. People need to know they're not being asked to sacrifice by some absentee stepdad."
"Kind of a weird analogy," Steve said. The implied father of the nation language bothered him more than it deserved to. He was clearly angry with Natasha, which wasn't fair either. "Look, I'm going to keep looking for Bucky. But that doesn't mean that I can't show up to some Cry for Liberty events, at least."
Natasha sighed and shook her head, "People need a leader, Steve, not a figurehead."
"I'm a terrible choice, then!" Steve said, lifting his hand to his mouth realizing he'd let his volume get out of control this time. "They should have someone who knows what they're doing. They should be listening to the organizers of Cry for Liberty, I barely understand what's going on."
"They should and it would be great if they did, if they had some magical person with perfect experience and perfect expertise but they don't, they have you."
Steve couldn't help but feel that wasn't even a little bit fair. It wasn't even the tiniest bit fair, but he also felt like Natasha wasn't wrong. People needed to know that the person asking wasn't unwilling to answer. It was really important.
---
The lights of the debate stage were sharp – There were just three canddiates left, Heartwood and I splitting the SWORD/Hawk vote, and Maurice Milton, the dove. I was leading in the polls, a fairly narrow lead though, and I could have used the lead from her. I was standing behind a glass podium and doing my best to look friendly towards Heartwood in spite of it.
The moderator looked at me, "Mr. Trent, Steve Rogers, formerly Captain America, has recently come out in support of a major overhaul of U.S. foreign policy in light of the authoritarian wave in other countries."
People had taken to using me as foil for Steve. Steve's approval rating had plummeted after he expressed actual political beliefs, but his approval rating was still quite high. Frustrating. Fortunately, a bunch of anti-imperialists' had their brains so broken by anti-Americanism that they couldn't hear that what he was suggesting was the end of the American empire because he said it in a CAPTAIN AMERICAvoice. Unfortunately, neither had a bunch of normal Americans. So I was going to be making the case for the selfsame empire.
"I understand Cry for Liberty's case, obviously we're all concerned with the difficulties of our allies" I said. "But I think we've seen the consequences of their style of social engineering by the United States. I understand why someone whose last foreign policy experience was the Second World War might be primarily concerned with being too conflict avoidant. However, like most of my generation, I am acutely aware of the limits of American power. Boycotting half the human race isn't a plan for anything except autarky and a new cold war." Cry for Liberty actually did have a priority list that was sensibly organized around a weighted combination of regime origin, longevity (newer regimes were higher), history of military government, and human rights violations but if you were to boycott them all at once, it would be about half the global population. Hydra's countries, but also (hilariously) China. It wasn't like Cry for Liberty could tell who was with us in Hydra. But right now Cry for Liberty was only actively targeting India for sanction as the biggest 'bang for the buck.' I'm not here to be fair. "Of course, I support closer relationships with NATO nations and our East Asian allies. I just don't think that's what is best for America is to be shut out of the international order because other countries run differently than we do. Senator Heartwood has been a leader in our political system.." Democratic debates are big group hugs, nobody says anything too mean about anyone else lest all our college educated voters punish us for the dishonorable conduct.
The debate went on from there, with questions flitting amongst the three of us. I did my best to be as openly flattering to the other two without sounding like I was too serious about it. Finally, the debate came to an end and the three of us stood to wave when the shots started to ring out from the balcony.
I had planned for the shots, but I remained standing for a few seconds, frozen stiff, long enough to take the bullet to the arm and shoulder that were part of the plan. I went down screaming in pain. Getting shot fucking hurts, I'm not going to lie to you, so it was easy to act frightened. And I couldn't get Extremis. Oh, the things we do.
The Winter Soldier was at the back of the auditorium, his red-star sigiled metal arm on full display. If we had any interest in being discrete, it would have been unbearably embarrassing. But the spectacle was the point. The next bullet got Maurice in the leg, per the plan, and then another bullet ripped through Heartwood's head. Blood spattered everywhere, her brains splattered everywhere, there was screaming and pandemonium. I glanced up to the Winter Soldier who was waiting for his nanoswarm suit to cover him and then he vanished into a quantum tunnel.
I didn't smile and allow myself the moment of external victory, but I cried out in fury, "Noooo!" I thought I did a good job, immediately started crawling towards Maurice even as our security came and pulled us both off the stage.
That should distract Steve Rogers long enough for us to get away.
And if not, there was always the footage of Tony's parents being murdered.