Chapter Text
Somewhere on the end of the bed, buried under old manila folders and encrypted documents and photographs of Bucky that make him sick to his stomach, his phone is vibrating. Steve folds up the map he was pretending to study to dig around for it.
(Really he was just staring at the ceiling, imagining up increasingly worse scenarios for where Bucky might be right this moment, and not sleeping.)
In the months since DC – when all his worst nightmares came true, when he found Bucky again and lost him just as quickly – Steve has not done much sleeping without the assistance of all the drugs they pumped into him in the hospital.
This ceiling, like the majority of the cheap motel ceilings he’s become acquainted with recently, is cracked and water stained.
Really, he should try harder to sleep. Bucky needs him at his best, needs him to be well rested. But in a cemetery, over an empty grave, Steve was handed a file detailing all they did to his precious, beautiful best friend – complete with photographs – and Steve can’t sleep.
They’ve only been on the road for three weeks, moving constantly since a quick stop in Brooklyn where he had to confess to Rachel that he failed.
Nazis, it’s been Nazis the whole time.
He had to tell Rachel that its been Nazis the whole time, and he did not deserve the comfort she offered, her soothing words that dismissed all his apologizes as folly and her fingers in his hair, but he let her coddle him anyway. He ate her matzo ball soup and did not tell her about Bucky.
Steve could not find the words, and if he can’t manage to bring Bucky home, then Rachel’s better off believing that he died a century ago, when Steve let him fall from a train. He’s failed Rachel spectacularly – Nazis, all this time it’s been Nazis – but he can spare her the horror of knowing what Steve now knows. Steve failed Bucky worse, somehow, but Rachel doesn’t need to know yet.
When Rachel closes her eyes, she won’t see Bucky blue and frozen, Bucky beaten and bruised and missing an arm.
They’ve knocked over a handful of Hydra lairs, but there’s been no trace of Bucky. Not his profile caught on a grainy convenience store security camera. Not a bloody trail of dead Hydra agents to follow. Nothing.
Steve can’t sleep, can’t breathe. He can barely think of anything besides Bucky, and what he’s been through in the last seventy years, after Steve let him fall and then didn’t look for him and then put the plane down, only to be useless and frozen under the ice while Bucky was up here, withstanding more torment.
Thank God for Sam. He insists on three meals a day and taking sleep breaks. He says, “Man, that is fucked up,” whenever they uncover some new Nazi horror and he doesn’t leave Steve alone to wallow.
The buried phone continues to ring. It’s a new one, since Nazis were probably spying on his old one, and only three people have the number, one of whom is snoring face down in a pillow in the bed next to Steve’s.
That leaves Natasha and Rachel for possible callers.
He shuffles around the papers, trying to not disturb Sam’s chaotic organizational system, and he finds the phone after four rings.
"Rachel?" Steve glances at the digital clock on the bedside table, blinking 10:02 at him. It’s earlier than he expected. Sam’s getting serious about reasonable bedtimes after single-handedly taking out Hydra factories. "You all right? What's going on?"
"Where are you right now?" Rachel asks. Her words are careful. She speaks slowly, deliberately, as if she’s trying to figure out how to say whatever she has to say.
"You know I can't tell you that," Steve says. On the edge of the bed sits a procedural manual for maintaining the Winter Solider, the one they found in a Hydra safe house outside DC, and Steve’s flips it over so he won’t have to read the title one more goddamn time. “We talked about this, remember? I can’t give you the details on this mission.”
Rachel had to watch him fighting Hydra on the news, just like she had to watch him fighting the aliens, but this was much worse because it’s Nazis. This whole time, it’s been Nazis. He needs to be more patient when she struggles to remember the details of their latest conversations.
"I don't need to now where you are specifically," Rachel snaps back. "Just… how far are you from Brooklyn?"
Steve lets out a hoarse laugh, glancing out the window to where he can clearly see bright stars shinning over some tiny town in Maine that was unfortunately close to a now destroyed underground Hydra lab.
One bed over, Sam stirs and opens one eye.
"Pretty far from Brooklyn," Steve murmurs.
"Okay." Rachel takes a deep breath. "When I tell you this, you need to promise to stay out of Brooklyn."
"What?” he demands, his heart rate picking up. His sits up quickly, dislodging a stack of files as he stands, suddenly so painfully hopeful and absolutely terrified. “No. Rachel, why?"
"Steve,” Rachel murmurs, gentle and quiet. She takes a deep breath and Steve knows what she’s going to say, even before she says it. “He's here."