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The elevator ride down to the lower levels is awkward. As Fury rambles on about his grandfather and his elevator tips, Steve listens quietly, figuring he’s probably got a point to make.
Then he sees the helicarriers and hears Fury’s parting shot: “Yeah, I know. They’re a little bigger than a twenty-two.”
Steve’s not often speechless, but he is right now. The gargantuan size of the ships, the dozens of quinjets in neat rows on their decks, the sheer number of guns hanging off them like porcupine quills. He thought he’d gotten used to people and governments using technology as massive killing machines — he fought Hydra for 18 months during the war and brought down the Valkyrie, after all — but obviously he hasn’t.
He comes out of his stunned silence to catch Fury’s latest comment.
“These new long-range precision guns can eliminate a thousand hostiles a minute,” Nick says proudly, like he’s showing the new kid his beautiful new house or his recently acquired Picasso. “The satellites can read a terrorist’s DNA before he steps outside his spider hole. We’re gonna neutralize a lot of threats before they even happen.”
“I thought the punishment usually came after the crime,” says Steve, trying to keep his temper in check.
“We can’t afford to wait that long.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” Steve spits. He heard a lot of this kind of talk from the brass in London in late 1944, happy to send others out to do their dirty work on the European front while they sat in the relative safety of Whitehall.
“After New York, I convinced the World Security Council we needed a quantum surge in threat analysis,” Fury replies confidently. “For once we’re way ahead of the curve.”
Steve rages inwardly. “Quantum surge in threat analysis” sounds to him a whole lot like “kill people who look suspicious just because we can.”
“By holding a gun at everyone on Earth and calling it protection,” he says, in a voice that sounds a lot calmer than he feels.
Nick turns and looks at him pointedly. “You know, I read those SSR files,” he says. “Greatest generation? You guys did some nasty stuff.”
A flood of memories washes over Steve, from late 1943 to when he disappeared into the ice. He manages to keep it together, though, as he responds.
“Yeah, we compromised,” he says. “Sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well.” He pauses for a moment. “But we did it so that people could be free.” He looks around, takes in the whole of the three enormous, sleek, shiny weapons of mass destruction in his glance. “This isn’t freedom, this is fear.”
His expression is just as pointed as Fury’s.
But Fury isn’t having it. “SHIELD takes the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be,” he replies, his voice rough. “And it’s damn near time for you to get with that program, Cap.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Steve retorts, and he turns on his heel and walks away. This is as close as he’s going to get to opening up a can on his boss, but he wishes he could really lose it right now, tell Fury where to get off.
Because he’s really furious right now. For almost two years, since the Chitauri invasion, he’s been working for SHIELD, thinking he was doing the right thing, taking down bad guys and protecting people. And now it turns out they’re building giant death machines, like the Valkyrie only bigger, with just as many mass casualties only maybe more “targeted,” with SHIELD deciding who’s worthy of judgement.
As Steve rides up the elevator by himself to the above-ground floors in the Triskelion, the conversation with Fury repeats over and over in his mind. There’s one sentence that stands out.
Greatest generation? You guys did some nasty stuff.
Immediately Steve’s eidetic memory surfaces that whole host of images from the war that he put aside to pursue the argument. All of them include Bucky.
Bucky.
Even thinking that name sends a jolt through Steve’s chest. It’s been almost 70 years since they jumped that train in the Alps, but in Steve’s world the loss is still fresh. And before that soul-crushing tragedy, there were so many missions, over a year of forays behind enemy lines with the Howlies to destroy Nazi and Hydra installations…and Nazi and Hydra leaders.
There was that one time they took out that secret Hydra base right on the border near Saarbrucken…and that Nazi weapons depot between Nancy and Vittel that turned out to be holding a cache of Hydra weapons and some priceless artifacts stolen from Norway…he and Bucky had gotten separated from the Howlies on that little venture and spent the night in the hayloft of a barn, and they kept warm by…
Steve hastily turns his mind away from that line of thinking. Back to the Howlies’ missions. And Fury. So OK, yes, they’d done some “nasty stuff” to the enemy soldiers they’d managed to capture, although most Hydra goons took the cyanide tooth option rather than submit to their…interrogations.
Bucky in particular had been a very effective interrogator. He was never anywhere near as physically imposing as Steve, but something in his manner when encouraging the enemy to spill was much more terrifying.
There was a darkness, a recklessness in Bucky during those days, Steve thinks as he exits the elevator on his floor of the Triskelion. He thinks it came from what happened during Bucky’s captivity at Kreischberg before Steve had rescued him and the 107th and gotten them back to Azzano.
Bucky would never talk about his time as a prisoner, but Steve knows some really bad shit went down, as people say nowadays. He’d almost gotten Bucky to talk about it that night in that hayloft outside of Vittel, but they’d gotten distracted by…other things. Given all that, Steve never blamed Bucky for his…creative techniques with the Nazis and Hydra, given what he’d suffered under Zola’s ministrations.
As Steve approaches his office with its big glass door and dividing wall, a picture flashes into his mind, so clear and bright and present he might as well be looking at it right now.
Bucky lying across his bed in a once-grand London hotel room, posed artfully in a satin lace peach girdle, silk stockings pulled over his long legs, a coy smile decorating his already-perfect face…
Steve stops just short of the door and feels that jolt in his chest again, only about a hundred times harder. That Bucky had been good enough to eat…and Steve had partaken of that banquet heavily that night.
Even though his lover and his lingerie had been soaked in the dried blood of a dead Nazi informant, from whom he’d taken the pretty things after he’d stabbed her.
Leaning one huge hand against the wall, Steve can’t deny that the blood wasn’t a turn-on. Well, honestly, he’d always take Bucky in any and all forms in which he presented himself, but that iteration was…something else. Something beyond.
Sure, Bucky was full of darkness and recklessness during those days, something inside him off kilter, but he also seemed increasingly insubstantial, like he’d just disappear if he got caught by a good puff of wind. It was like part of him was gone already. Steve had fucked him thoroughly that night as much in an effort to keep hold of him, to keep him solid, as to get them both off. The blood and the lingerie had been just so much gravy.
Steve drops his elbow against the wall and his head against his forearm. Yes, he and Bucky had done some nasty stuff, but, unlike Fury’s current “quantum surge in threat analysis,” their actions were justified. They had been at war against a pair of ruthless, intertwined enemies, one set on blanketing Europe with fear and bigotry and death, the other intent on taking over the world.
Fucking Hydra.
The image in Steve’s head switches quickly from Bucky in London in lingerie to Bucky in a blue quilted coat, holding onto the side of that train — the train that’s as sleek and shiny as those huge death machines here in the basement of the Triskelion, if nowhere near as huge — and reaching for Steve’s hand. Calling Steve’s name. His face set in a rictus of fear and agony as it falls away into the distance, subsumed by those beautiful, snow-capped peaks. Gone without a trace.
This is the scene his thoughts always return to, the one that sours his days and haunts his dreams. He chokes back a sob.
“Captain Rogers, are you OK?” An uncertain voice pipes up in front of him, and Steve jerks upright. It’s Maddie, the sweet new analyst whose cube is just down the hall. She’s 26, Steve knows, with a freshly minted masters degree, but she looks about 17.
Steve gets himself together and clears his throat.
“Yeah, Maddie, thanks,” he says, trying to keep the harshness out of his response. “Just… need some air. I’ll see you later.”
Maddie looks doubtful but dutifully says goodbye as Steve turns and strides back down the hallway. He gets on the elevator, his brain and gut churning hard. His eyes are damp and he wipes them on the sleeve of his tactical suit.
Bucky. My love. I’m so sorry I didn’t catch you. I miss you so much.
When Steve gets like this, infuriated about the present and flamingly guilt-ridden about the past, there’s only one thing for him do. The elevator takes him to the garage. His bike roars to life and takes him out of the huge building on the Potomac toward his apartment, where he’ll change into civilian clothes before walking to the Smithsonian.