Chapter Text
The train is alive, breathing, winding over its tracks like a long, heavy python, and Bucky stands, draped in shadows in the bowels of the serpent, light eyes catching in the moonlight like he is some sort of predator. In a way, he supposes he is, really. A predator tamed, no longer the pacing zoo tiger, but instead a circus animal, sanded down into the shape of something more acceptable, of something more human; the circus trainers always do seem to forget that in its core, the tiger will always be a tiger, snarling teeth, and rippling muscles, taut with tension and ready to spring. His hands are in his pockets. No gloves, and he rubs his metal thumb over vibranium fingers, once.
It is still, calm. The first-class car he stands in is silent, save for the soft breathing of its passengers behind closed compartment doors. Bucky can hear it if he listens carefully, and listen he does. His heart pumps, hard and heavy behind his chest, and Bucky wants to drink the adrenaline that flows through his veins like it is straight vodka, burning and grounding. Everything seems real, realer than it has felt since he’d seen the scarred man in that dining carriage the second day on board. Edges are sharper, brighter. Vivid. He rubs his metal thumb over his fingers again. A sharp pang of longing for the whirring of metal that would have accompanied the motion if he’d done it with his old arm shoots through him.
Somebody coughs, and Bucky takes his hands out his pockets and stalks the hallway, pacing all the way over to the door at the other side and back again, head cocked. He isn’t sure which compartment the scarred man is in, but he knows if he shuffles around outside, any military man would wake with a start– so he sniffs a little, scrapes his boots against the ground and stops for a moment in front of every door, listening. Three rounds of this in, and somebody slips off their bunk, and there -
Bucky’s attention snaps to the compartment. Compartment number six. He pulls out the gun he really, really isn’t supposed to have on him, holds it loose in his left hand and goes to stand in front of the compartment door. Cocks it.
Whoever is on the other side of the door does the same, and despite himself, Bucky grins with a sharp flash, before smoothing out his features. He’s still got it. He’s still good . Leaning in so that the person on the other side can hear him, he says, low:
“Unlock the door.”
“Now, why would I do that?” The Russian is accented, not with an American accent, but rather a little like Zemo’s Sokovian one. Slavic.
Bucky keeps both hands around his gun, the left wrapped around the right, his right index finger resting on the metal above the trigger. “You know I can get in either way.”
“Who are you?”
The world is sharper than it has ever been, the ground beneath his boots steady despite the swaying of the train, and Bucky says, certainty lacing his words with a hard tone, “The Winter Soldier.”
A sharp exhale is clear and then a soft murmur, and a low huff. Somebody else is in there. Presumably the woman Bucky had seen that time in the dining carriage.
The person speaks again, “I didn’t recognize you, Soldier. Fresh haircut, no mask, huh?”
“Funny how things work out,” Bucky hums, then hisses, voice still low so as not to wake the other compartments’ passengers. “Open the door, or I will open it for you.”
“I will shoot you.”
Bucky laughs, dark and gravely, the sound tearing itself out his vocal chords with a start. “You can certainly try.”
He unwraps his left fingers from the gun, and slips his metal hand into his pocket. Pulls out a small, hard wire. Swaps the gun and wire between his hands so that he is gripping the weapon with his left, and has his right free to tease the lock open. It isn’t a hard lock to pick, and Bucky can hear breathing pick up, the slipping of a knife out a sheath. They will not brace the door, this he knows. They know who he is, so they must know the Winter Soldier never backs off a target. The picking is quickly done. Bucky pulls out the wire and slips it in his pocket. Levels the gun at eye level, and pulls the door open in one swift motion.
He finds himself staring down the barrel of a Glock. The scars on the tall, broad shouldered man holding the gun coil around his face, and Bucky is oddly enough, reminded of Rumlow. The scars are the same, burn scars, white and thick, although less severe than Rumlow’s. He doesn’t remember the man, but somehow, his body knows him. Instinctual terror bubbles up in his chest, his heart trembling, screaming, pounding at the confines of his ribcage with shaking fists– but he keeps his face steady, not betraying his horror. His hands don’t tremble, but the fingers on his right hand twitch unconsciously, once. There is a woman sitting in the far corner of the left bunk, pressing herself against the wall, quiet, frightened.
They stand at an impasse for a beat, before the scarred man smiles wide, straight, bright teeth showing, almost in a snarl. “ Sputnik .”
Bucky locks his knees in an instant. Shoots a hand out to steady himself on the side of the compartment door, still keeping his gun leveled at the scarred man’s head with the other. Very purposefully doesn’t crumble the way his body wants to, muscle memory nearly taking over him. A strange feeling of unbalancedness swirls around him, but he smiles grimly. “The words don’t work on me anymore.”
Knuckles whiten as the scarred man tightens his grip around his pistol, and he says, voice low, husky, “You think you’re a free man.”
“I am a free man,” and Bucky takes a step closer, moving fully into the compartment, sliding the door shut with one arm as he does so.
The scarred man’s eyebrows furrow in amusement, and he scoffs, stepping backwards as Bucky crowds his space. “You will never be free, Soldier. No matter what names you might have gone by. Morozov, Konstantinov. Lebedin. They don’t belong to you.”
“My name is James Barnes.”
“ Oh. No,” the scarred man murmurs, and a chill runs down Bucky’s spine at the sound. It is dark, drippingly condescending. Arrogant and knowing. “No, the man you were is long dead, crow .”
Bucky’s mouth goes dry, and he swallows over and over, licking his teeth, trying to get any semblance of moisture back into it. A terrible, rotten taste settles in his throat and his heart beats its frantic rhythm, fluttering butterfly wings against his chest, light and frightened. Desperate. Whatever sharpness the world had held just a moment ago has fallen away, leaving him almost trance-like, hypnotized by the movements of the train, the swaying of the beast beneath him.
Chug-chug-chug. The train huffs and clatters, and Bucky is drowning, drowning, drowning, so he turns to the only thing he knows as well as the lines on his right hand, the only thing that comes so natural to him as breathing. The only thing that has stayed constant through the decades. Violence.
Whipping his pistol up and onto the scarred man’s wrist, he ignores the startled squeak of the woman, and wrangles the gun out of the man’s hand, at the loss of his own. The exchange of guns happens in the moment between an inhale and exhale and just as they were before, they stand at an impasse, both holding the other’s gun level.
The scarred man is speaking. Bucky cannot hear him over the shushing of blood in his ears. Crow . Nobody ever called him crow, nobody. Except-
“Drop the gun,” the scarred man snaps, the order breaking through the haze. “Drop the damn gun, Soldier.”
And he almost does it. Almost complies, the order washing over him. The fact sends howling terror crashing down upon him, and just like that, the world is real again in a flash of startling color, sharp and unkind. “No,” he spits. “No, you drop the gun or I will kill you."
“I will shoot you.”
“We both know you won’t.”
To shoot is to draw attention. On a train like this, careening over the countryside at over a hundred twenty kilometers per hour with no place to hide, really, to shoot would bring hell down on them. Both men know better. Neither lowers their gun. The woman on the bunk has on hand over her mouth, her eyes brimming with tears, the other hand-
Bucky whips his left arm up, and metal clicks on metal. Clattering to the floor, the knife he’d deflected shines in the moonlight from outside, and belatedly, Bucky realizes that they hadn’t closed the window nor pulled the small blinds over. The woman’s eyes flash.
Gone is the frightened, helpless wife; in her place sits a confident, trained operative, mouth set in a hard line, sharp and dangerous. Something clicks into place, and Bucky goes very, very still.
“I know you,” he says, unnaturally monotone.
Hollowness bites at his chest; he has been carved out, and has been eaten from the inside. Somebody has sucked his soul out nose and mouth; he rather thinks it might have been one of the medical masks he’d been fitted with over the decades– whether they’d been infused with drugs or with sedatives, something has reached into his body and snipped his soul apart at the seams.
He knows the woman. Knows her in the cold touch of hands over his face, over his chest, over his shoulders. Knows her in the cold gel of medical wire stickers, connected to monitoring screens. Knows her in her hissed ‘stay down, soldier, or things will be much worse than this, you understand?’.
“I don’t want this,” the Soldier says, low, desperation scratching at his voice. Restraints hold him down, buckled over his chest and legs, and his arms are strapped down to the sides of the medical bed. He arches his back, then tries to kick out.
“Stop it,” the woman, Ekaterina, snaps, annoyed. “Stay still.”
Whining low in his chest, the Soldier stills against his will, and Ekaterina spins around on her stool towards a mobile med-table, boots squeaking against the tiles. There are dim lights in the ceiling, above the Soldier, and he stares at them until he sees spots when he blinks. Terror squeals and writhes against the inside of his chest, scraping against his sternum. Ekaterina turns back to the soldier, a needle in her hand. She stands up, her small frame imposing, frightening, and the Soldier’s breath quickens as he tries to toss his head to the side, away from her. He cannot. Across his forehead is a buckled strap, holding his head down, and he arches his back again, trying to get traction beneath his boots, but he is stuck, he is so stuck, he is held down and he cannot, he cannot-
The needle pierces his skin. A cool, reaching sensation seeps into his shoulder, and the Soldier finds himself, all of a sudden, unable to move, unable to do anything but blink, his muscles relaxed and lax with whatever drug had just been administered. Fright overtakes him, but he has no voice and cannot scream.
“You do know me, don’t you, Soldier,” Ekaterina smiles, and stands up. There isn’t much space in the compartment, so she has to shuffle a little, but even that movement is made with grace. Bucky keeps his gun trained on the scarred man, his eyes on Ekaterina, and he doesn’t breathe once. “You were so quiet when I had you weren’t you? So frightened. Fear is pretty on you; it makes your cheeks flush.” She stops for a moment, cocking her head slightly. “Just like they flush now-” and she leans in close to breath against Bucky’s ear. “Are you afraid , Soldier?”
Bucky can’t breathe. He can’t breathe and he is choking, but he swallows his heart which is threatening to climb out of his mouth and murmurs:
“Are you?”
Wind whistles through the slit in the window, and Bucky kicks his leg out, sweeping Ekaterina down so that her back knocks against the bunk; the impact makes her grunt. Something cracks against the side of his head, and he crumples, stars exploding and popping around him, his teeth clicking together so hard that he can feel it in his forehead.
“Fuck,” he gasps and his fingers fumble for the knife in his boot.
The scarred man looms over him, and Bucky scoots to the side, his head screaming, knife clutched in his hand, getting away from the gun that whizzes down, inches away from smashing into his head. Ekaterina clambers over him, not unlike Natalia, thighs around his neck, and Bucky whips his knife hand up, kicking out at the scarred man’s knee as he does so. Ekaterina knocks the knife away, and the scarred man’s legs buckle.
Bucky throws himself forward, so that he is straddling the scarred man, and raises his arms to pry Ekaterina off him. Her legs press on his throat and the world is rushing in at the edges. It takes a moment, but he manages to toss her forwards so that her body collides with the wall. Somebody yells out on the other side– but Bucky ignores it, snatches one of the two guns that have been strewn in the compartment, and whips Ekaterina round the head. She slumps on the bunk, out cold.
Snapping his eyes back to the scarred man, Bucky kicks a leg out, getting away from the ankle trying to hook around his own. Pressing his metal arm over the scarred man’s collarbones, he hisses, eyes a bit too wide, a bit too frightened, “Who the hell are you?”
The scarred man laughs. “They really did a number on you, didn’t they? You don’t recognize me?” His face twists into an ugly expression, sneer plastering itself over his face, bitterly. “Funny that, crow. You left me to die, after all.”
Bucky doesn’t remember leaving the man to die, but his mind rears in recognition. He did leave him to die. Fire and flame, orange licking the dark heavens. Alexei in his arms. Screams. He doesn’t remember the scarred man, but he knows he left him to die in that fire. He doesn’t know why. He would leave him to die again– that is what he knows.
“The fire,” Bucky murmurs, almost to himself, then shoots his metal arm out to block the blow aimed at his head. “Stop it. Stay still ,” he grits out.
The scarred man lets out a sharp breath through his nose, then careens upward, the front of his torso jerking forward, his forehead cracking against Bucky’s.
Sickening, white pain pours down his head and into his shoulder, and Bucky rears backwards, pressing his metal hand against his head. It is enough of a slip that the scarred man is able to wriggle forwards, hook a leg around Bucky’s ankle and toss them both sideways, so that they lay in front of each other, on their side, backs pressed flush against the bunks.
Bucky grips the scarred man’s collar and tugs him forward with a jerk so that his knee slams into his diaphragm. Unable to catch his breath, the scarred man fumbles for one of the guns, but Bucky slams his boot over his hand, pinning it down. The door clicks, and a shadow falls over them.
“Lie down, front first, hands over your heads. I will not hesitate to shoot.” Panarin’s voice is hard, firm, and Bucky wants to laugh.
Panarin is a regular officer, a military officer. To take him out would be no trouble to both Bucky and the scarred man, but they both know Panarin isn’t afraid of authority, and why should he be? He will shoot, and he will bring unwanted attention down on them, so both Bucky and the scarred man untangle themselves from each other, lowering themselves to the floor, and cross their hands over their heads.
Cheek pressed into the floor, Bucky gives in and lets his body tremble all over, as if the cold that licks at him from the slit in the window has seeped into his bones. He trembles and trembles and trembles, wants to cry, wants to sob with overwhelming emotion, but he bites his cheek so hard iron blossoms in his mouth and doesn’t let out a single breath of sound.