fic: Revenant (4/?)
4 Nov 2013 08:56![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
domarzioneRevenant: Chapter Four
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
summary: Six months after being freed from the Winter Soldier conditioning, James Barnes has been presumed dead until a series of fatal accidents and outright murders makes it clear how he's been planning on spending his time. Natasha understands why she's been sent to track him down, even if she's not sure how she'll feel once he's found. Unfortunately, he's not the only one with revenge in mind.
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
Natasha froze in the open doorway, training telling her that she had enough time, if James meant to kill her, to back out, pull the door closed behind her, and run like hell because it would take him just those few seconds to follow and he couldn't fire through the wall and expect to hit her. But one look at his face assured her that he hadn't come for that, so she closed the door behind her and locked it.
She wasn't sure if she was relieved or angry or both to see him here. Months ago, before everything had gone so terribly wrong, she'd considered what might happen and what she'd do if James did make contact. Her plan had been to keep it professional but not spook him into running off again, to be the SHIELD version of the Black Widow, not the Red Room's. In practice, however, it wasn't going to be so easy. Now that she was in the same room, she knew that pretending that their history didn't matter was clearly going to be as impossible as it had been in Doomstadt. But she was also determined not to let herself get hurt again and she was angry, so angry with him, because there was a good chance Steve was hovering on the edge of death because of him. He should have known that there would be consequences to his actions and that the people he was going up against knew that he had exactly one point of vulnerability: Steve Rogers.
But then she saw how utterly broken he was, the way his eyes and expression hid nothing, and understood that he had figured that out as well, but too late in the game to matter.
"What do you want?" she asked in English, since it had once been their language of choice and neither of them were really Russian anymore. "And holster that piece if you aren't going to use it on me."
James looked at the .45 in his hand like he'd forgotten it was there, shook his head, and complied.
"I want a lot of things I can't have," he said sourly, running his now-free hand through fashionably short hair. "But I'll make do with revenge."
The Red Room had taught them both that the answer to almost everything unpleasant was violence, so she understood the rationale, but... But James Barnes was not Red Room. Or not just Red Room. Maybe. This man was a stranger to her, despite the familiar face and voice and movement. He wasn't her James, he wasn't Steve's Bucky, he wasn't the brutal Winter Soldier. Or maybe he was all of them. She didn't know how much he remembered of his life as the Winter Soldier, although he clearly remembered enough to want to punish those who were responsible for it. He remembered her, but whether he remembered everything about them or just the tawdry bits and pieces he'd thrown at her in Doomstadt, she didn't know. Wasn't sure she wanted to ask.
"Revenge is what got us here," she pointed out instead, not as sharply as she could have because she'd learned that lesson too late, too. She crossed the room to the small table and put down her backpack and took off the hooded sweatshirt she'd been wearing. She did not take off the Glock sitting snugly in its holster at the small of her back.
"I know," he agreed. "But I don't have the kind of faith to offer penance or look for forgiveness."
She wondered if he was thinking about God or man or if it mattered.
"So why are you here?" she asked, turning to face him.
James looked her straight in the eye. "Because you're the best chance at figuring out who killed Steve and I want to be the one to pull the trigger when you do."
She nodded, accepting the answer as both truth and evasion. "And what are you offering in exchange?"
He hadn't come here expecting a freebie; he had to know that there was a long list of people who'd want to put a bullet in Steve's killer and that his skill set, while unique in its proficiency, wasn't going to be required for the job.
The tiny nod he gave her confirmed it. "What do you want?"
He'd know she had the authority to offer terms.
"I want you to come in from the cold," she answered.
Before Steve had been shot, before James had even started his revenge spree, before anyone but Steve had seriously thought James could be alive, there had been discussions about what to do if they'd found him. They'd made a list of the possibilities, ranked by likelihood and difficulty and desirability, and that order had stayed in place once they knew that James had survived in some fashion. Their first option -- and Steve's only option -- had been to bring him in. Fury hadn't objected, hadn't thrown up obstacles or warnings or dire scenarios of trojan horses and double agents the way he had when Natasha had made her initial overtures to defect. Had embraced it completely, actually. And to her own surprise, she'd been deeply angered by his acquiescence. By his eagerness. Intellectually, she'd known that hers and James's situations were not all that similar, that there was far more compelling evidence that James was no longer in their enemies' service than there had been for her after she'd met Clint in Tel Aviv and asked him if the other side was really as green as it looked. Natasha had been a defector, an enemy agent looking to betray her country and her masters; James was not, was in fact the opposite. He wasn't going to be turned; he was going to be repatriated. She knew that, but it still galled her a little because she'd wanted to join Fury's side and he'd openly questioned her motives; James wanted nothing to do with his native land and yet open arms were waiting for him regardless. She'd had to prove herself over and over again -- and then over again once more when she'd been accused of betraying SHIELD (and that James had been the one to set her up didn't not matter, even if it hadn't been him). James could show up and he'd be long-lost Sergeant James Barnes, war hero and American icon, and beyond suspicion.
The look on his face was very clearly not one of a man eager to enjoy the fruits of seventy-year-old glory. "I--"
"I'm not asking you to join the Avengers," she cut him off, sharply. Cut off her own jealousies and hurt feelings as well. This wasn't about her. "I'm asking you to come home."
James gave her a short, ugly laugh. "There's no home left for me to go to. The last bit of it died three weeks ago."
"You have more there than you think," she told him, which earned her a scoffing glance. "I believe Peggy Carter wants a word, too."
His expression softened in something that might have been regret or fondness for a moment, then shuttered with a sharp grimace of pain. "She's... how is she doing?"
"She's heartbroken," Natasha answered honestly. "The first time was enough."
James nodded once. When he made no other move and continued to say nothing, she turned back to her pack, unloading it on to the table and starting to sort the items by whether they would travel to her next destination and how. James could take his moment to think; he'd either agree or he'd walk out of the room and if he did the latter, she wouldn't stop him. This wasn't about Steve per se; this was a test of James and his self-control. Of how badly he wanted what he'd come to ask for. Either he could curb his impulses to lash out in anger or he couldn't and if he couldn't, then she didn't want him anywhere near Steve or even the knowledge of his survival. She would work around him and not with him if she had to. Peggy would be disappointed, but not with her.
"I don't have my NCO sword to offer my parole with," James said and she turned back to face him, he was holding out his .45, grip toward her.
She gestured with her chin for him to put it away. "You have a sword?" she asked, keeping the relief out of her voice and replacing it with curiosity.
"I do -- I did," he said, holstering the gun. He gave her a crooked smile that was part wry recollection and mostly disbelief at what he'd just done. "Hell if I know what Steve did with it."
"Maybe someone knows," she said, picking up her phone. There were travel arrangements to be made. She called Fury's office -- she had Fury's direct number, but Hsiang was going to be the one making arrangements. "I need a ride for two from Cluj, Romania to the Helicarrier. I'm bringing an old friend."
At her prompting, James handed her a passport -- Michael Avery, naturalized Dutch citizen born in Simcoe, Ontario -- and she read off the data to Hsiang and then confirmed which cover she was currently traveling under. A few minutes later, Hsiang told her that two tickets on TAROM's flight to Heathrow later this morning would be waiting.
James declined her half-hearted offer of the room's other bed to crash for the few hours before they'd have to go to the airport; she didn't want to share a room with him, but she didn't want him getting cold feet, either.
"I have things to do," he said and she cocked a disbelieving eyebrow at him. He was undoubtedly the reason she was in Romania in the first place -- he'd probably burned one of Lukin's HYDRA acquisitions for Doom to draw her in -- so the odds of him multitasking weren't stratospheric, but they were unlikely. But he gave her an arching eyebrow right back. "I also need to get my stuff. I didn't come here planning on this."
She let him go because she couldn't force him to stay and they both probably needed a little time apart to absorb what they'd already done. They were going to have to travel to the airport separately anyway.
"If you're not on that flight..." she warned and he nodded, even though they both knew it was an idle threat. She hadn't been able to find him for months when she'd been trying.
Once he left, she barricaded the door and went to take a shower. She knew she wasn't going to be able to sleep, but she lay down in the dark anyway. Eventually, she gave up even that and pulled out her phone again to call Clint. He was in Tunis, she found out when he answered groggily because it was still the middle of the night there, too.
"I'm bringing the Winter Soldier in," she said.
"I think we can officially give up on you calling him that," he replied teasingly. "But good. I'm glad."
And not just for Steve, he didn't say, but she heard it anyway.
"I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be calling him," she admitted. "And I don't think he knows, either."
Clint asked how he seemed, since asking her how she was would be too direct and too obvious and he knew she'd lie. He knew the true answer, too, because she was calling him in the middle of the night.
"A mess," she answered.
"Then he'll fit right in," he chuckled. "Try to get some sleep on the plane, Natochka. You are going to have a very long day."
She didn't see James when she arrived at TACOM's desk at the airport, nor in the waiting area for the flight, which didn't worry her until it did. But on the plane he passed her seat on his way to his own, not even looking at her, and she relaxed. She slept almost the entire flight, which was still not enough to keep her from feeling sluggish and a little surly when it came to clearing customs at Heathrow. She didn't see James after they'd disembarked, but she wasn't worried anymore -- once he'd gotten on the plane in Cluj, he had committed to the entire trip. She didn't know how he'd gotten from Heathrow to Finsbury Park, but she'd taken a taxi and saw him as it pulled up in front of the address she'd given the driver. They walked together in silence for the two blocks it took to get them to the unmarked SHIELD car idling at the curb with a plainclothes agent behind the wheel, then let the silence continue on the drive to Lakenheath because Agent Dillies was not cleared for anything they had to say to each other.
The trip to the Helicarrier from RAF Lakenheath was unremarkable as far as they went, but James didn't bother to hide his curiosity. He was wearing casual civvies, jeans and a long-sleeve oxford with a pressure glove on his left hand and he was carrying a dark green backpack; he looked like any other SHIELD consultant on their first trip to the Helicarrier and the quinjet's crew didn't give him any more of a second glance than the Lakenheath staff had.
There was more curiosity from the flight deck personnel on the Helicarrier, but James had his sunglasses back on and so it was entirely because he was being accompanied by the Black Widow and must therefore be someone of interest. If they only knew.
Hsiang directed them in to Fury's office without so much as a second glance, although she undoubtedly knew exactly who James was.
"Welcome home, Sergeant Barnes," Fury greeted him as they approached his desk. He'd stood up when they entered, but didn't offer a hand to shake. "I'm sorry it took so long."
"Yeah, well," James said, tone casual but his posture was very much still fight or flight. It was probably not noticeable to anyone else, maybe not even Fury, but Natasha saw it as clearly as a telegraphed punch. "There wasn't really ever going to be a point when it wasn't too late, was there?"
"No," Fury agreed ruefully. "There wasn't."
The door opened behind them.
"Bardere's a dry ho--" Hill froze because James had turned and was reaching for whatever weapons he'd secreted on his person before she'd gotten two steps into the room. She put her hands up in a passive gesture, letting him look her over so that he could see that she was friend and not foe. When he dropped his own hands, she continued into the room. "I'm guessing Somalia wasn't what you wanted to see me about, sir," she told Fury wryly and a little pointedly.
James was still so tightly wound even after he'd registered Hill as not a threat. Natasha hoped that Fury didn't turn this into a show before getting down to business. James couldn't easily run from here, but he could shut down and if he did, getting him to listen again would be a much harder battle.
"Why am I here?" he asked Natasha, tension in his voice. "Why did you bring me here?"
He was asking her why the Helicarrier, but Fury misinterpreted, possibly intentionally.
"Because there is a bigger game afoot than your death-by-a-thousand-cuts payback," Fury answered before she could. "Because we both want the same things. Because it's time to take revenge the right way."
James started to retort, then stopped himself.
"Finding out who shot Captain America won't take that long," Fury went on. "Coming up with a proper response, that's going to need work. We aren't going to invade Latveria or Russia--"
"Again," Hill piped up, earning a glare from Fury. Natasha bit her lip to keep from smiling.
"We are going to need something targeted and painful, precise enough to avoid World War Three and damaging enough to be decisive because we can't have this escalating any further," Fury continued, looking straight at James. "I intend to have the last word in this conversation and you are going to be my punctuation."
James seemed almost pleased at the realization that he'd be just a weapon again, the tension bleeding out of him with what almost looked like relief, and Natasha hated that look, in no small part because she recognized it. After she'd come to SHIELD, being put to work, even ugly work, had been a relief because it kept her mind occupied, kept her too busy to think about what she'd done by defecting, the magnitude of it. It had slowed down her recovery, she'd recognized in hindsight, letting her hide behind the Black Widow. It had kept her from figuring out who Natasha was and how to live with her, how to make her better. Clint had realized it before she had and had called her on it a few times, but they hadn't had the kind of rapport back then where he could do more than that and she hadn't been interested in listening.
James had her to tell him now, she supposed, if he'd let her and if she could keep their past from dragging them both down. But who he really needed was Steve, who'd have been perfect for this because Steve, above all others, had the capacity to accept people's flaws and move past them, to see the bad and acknowledge it and file it away as unimportant right now. Who'd have done everything, anything, to show James what he had to gain by giving up the crutch of the Winter Soldier.
"We should go to Wyoming," she said and everyone looked at her.
"So soon?" Hill asked, not sounding like she was ready to say yes or no, just waiting for a good reason to pick one.
Fury, however, understood that she'd already given one. By mentioning Wyoming in the first place, she was saying that she thought James could handle the news.
"You can't seriously think we're going to stay here for a lengthy debrief, do you?" she asked.
The choice of the first person plural was not emphasized when she'd spoken it, but she knew they'd all heard it very clearly. It had been for both Fury and Hill's benefit and for James's. She didn't want James shutting down because he thought she'd dragged him back to her masters as a prize to be dropped off and she didn't want them thinking that she was not going to watch his back here. He was her responsibility right now, whether he wanted her protection or not.
"I think we have to figure out who and where and what first," Fury said calmly, recognizing the challenge, acknowledging it, and setting it aside all at once. "And I think Sergeant Barnes would like to figure out the same."
"Don't call me that," James said sharply. "That's not who I am."
Fury frowned at him. "That's exactly who you are, you just aren't used to it yet."
James glared right back at him, but two eyes weren't enough to win a staring contest against Fury's one and he looked away first. "What's in Wyoming?"
"Your past, present, and possibly your future," Fury replied, not quite smirking at James's growl at what must have seemed like a uselessly vague answer. But Fury hadn't been answering James, he'd been answering Natasha.
"Peggy Carter, to start with," Hill, not completely oblivious to the silent conversation, added.
James nodded, although Natasha could see him wondering why Peggy wasn't in Philadelphia.
"I want to go to DC first," James said. "I want to see the sniper's nest and I want to pay my respects."
Natasha looked to Fury because while they would, she thought, get cooperation out of James even without the truth about Steve, if they didn't tell him right now, the repercussions for him finding out later, even later today, would be immense and would leave them at a point from which there was no recovery or return.
Fury's nod was so tiny as to be almost imagined.
"You're welcome to visit the shooter's site," Fury told James. "You may see something our people have missed, although Agent Barton's been through. But you can skip the visit to the Commandos Memorial unless you'd like to visit Morita and Dugan. Steve Rogers's coffin is as empty as yours is." He waited a beat. "And for the same reason."
James's reaction was to take a step back. "What the fuck?"
He looked over at Natasha accusingly, eyes blazing. "What the fuck, Natalia?" he repeated. "You couldn't have said something?"
"I needed to know how you'd react first," she told him unapologetically, then switched over to Russian, which Fury understood but Hill did not. "You came to me because you wanted help making the world burn. I wanted to know what you'd do with more gasoline before I handed it over. I want Steve to be safe and I would have lied to you forever to keep him so."
The flare of anger at her died in his eyes, replaced by the anger at himself. He turned away from the three of them, took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then turned back. "He's in Wyoming with Peggy Carter?"
"He's alive," she said with a nod. "But that's as good as the news gets right now."
Fury gave James a short, dispassionate summary of Steve's condition, which James took like a boxer bracing for blows he couldn't duck, then suggested that they go down to DC if James wanted and then to Wyoming to see Steve.
"We'll speak after you've seen him," Fury told them. "Give both sides a chance to think things through."
Hill told James that they'd taken the liberty of making him a SHIELD consultant so that he could have security clearance to do things like visit the shoot site and see the reports, plus it would give him access to materiel and resources should he choose to act on their behalf at some point in the future.
"We'll need you to take a picture," she added, like it was a minor afterthought. "We probably could have used your old Army photo, but we didn't know that at the time."
James gave her a dark smile, recognizing this as a transparent ploy to get him out of the office and under supervision while Fury talked to Natasha. "Fine."
He followed Hill out, giving Natasha a look that she would have been able to interpret easily once upon a time, but in this new context wasn't quite sure what it meant.
When it was just her and Fury, he gestured for her to sit down and she did.
"What's your assessment?" Fury asked. "And how much of it is based on your history together?"
She didn't bother to hide her indignation at his suggestion that her judgment could be so impaired when so much was at stake.
"I meant what I told him," she replied. "I wanted to see what he'd do between when he found me and here. I'm satisfied that he's in control of himself."
"I want you to keep an eye on him," Fury began and Natasha bridled and he held up a hand to ask her to wait. "He is, to be blunt, completely fucked in the head. He doesn't know who he is, he doesn't like whoever that is, and that makes him reckless."
She couldn't argue with that statement, so she didn't.
"We owe it to Steve to do what he can't for James Barnes, which is to save him from himself," Fury continued after a pause. "And that may be a bigger job than any of us are capable of. Some people don't want to be saved."
"That wouldn't stop Steve," Natasha pointed out. "That didn't stop him."
"It didn't get him anywhere, either, until he proved just as reckless as Barnes," Fury retorted sourly. "It nearly got him killed, along with you and Barton, and it put an entire Direct Action Team at risk. I would like to think that we have all learned from that particular lesson and won't be repeating it. Which means that when I say that I want you to keep an eye on him, that does not translate into you riding shotgun when he hares off to do something spectacularly stupid."
Natasha smiled despite herself and that made Fury frown deeper.
"Take him to DC, see if he'll be up for a few days of storytelling in Wyoming, after he's seen Steve and Peggy Carter's had her say. We're hoping to have enough intel by then to start working for real."
It was a dismissal and so Natasha nodded and stood up to leave. She gave Fury a beat and a half to add anything else, but when he didn't, she departed.
In the outer office, Hsiang told her that Hill had said to pick up her 'friend' from the Avengers team room. Natasha raised an eyebrow at that because of all of the places on the Helicarrier to leave him, that was probably the cruelest.
"It's quiet, it's out of the way, and it's disproportionately comfortable compared to its rate of use," Hsiang pointed out. "And Commander Hill did not think he should be left wandering around the Helicarrier."
Which was all true and Natasha shrugged to indicate as much before thanking Hsiang and wishing her a good day.
James was sitting on one of the couches when she opened the door, a locking folder open on the cushion next to him and papers in his hands. He looked up at the sound of the door sliding open and she smiled because he looked bewildered and amused and showed none of the hard anger -- or profound self-loathing -- she had perhaps been expecting.
"They want to give me back pay," he said, making it clear how ludicrous he found the idea. "I came here to get intel so I could kill as many people as I could get my hands on and they want to give me back pay."
The door closed behind her as she crossed to the couch and took the seat on the other side of the folder. "Steve's doing, mostly," she told him and she pretended not to notice as he looked over to the far wall, where Steve's locker sat, before returning his attention to the paper in his hand. "He insisted that you should be given POW status and Fury agreed. They did some fancy math to figure out what you'd have been paid, adjusted it for time and inflation--"
"And promotion," James added wryly, holding up the page he'd been looking at. "As if I'd have ever made it to sergeant major. What the hell was he thinking?"
Natasha's grin was genuine. "He thought it was pretty funny, actually," she assured him, because she remembered the conversation between Steve and Clint when Steve had first broached the idea and then when they'd done the back-of-the-envelope calculations over dinner one night. "He thought you'd find it ridiculous, too. But it's US policy for captive soldiers to be paid and promoted as if they weren't, apparently, and so you were. The calculations were all theoretical until you came in, but you're here, so the Department of Defense is now going to write a very large check."
He looked over at her, sober. "Am I here? What if I take this money and disappear?"
"It's your money, James," she told him gently. "This isn't a bribe to stay or a downpayment on your services. This is yours. This is the US Government's way of trying to apologize for sending you to war and you winding up with far more than anyone bargained for. They can't give you your life back, but they can give you enough money to try to build a new one."
"As who?" he asked quietly, a brittle note to his words. "I have a shiny new ID that says I'm James Buchanan Barnes, but I'm not him anymore."
"You could be," she told him. "Not the same one, a different one. You're not the Winter Soldier anymore and you were never really Yasha. But you were really Bucky Barnes -- although don't expect me to you call you that. It sounds like a dog's name."
James laughed, almost unwillingly but genuinely nonetheless. "I don't know that I can take being James in English to anyone but you," he said once he stopped, a look on his face that she'd almost describe as shy if she could ever imagine applying that word to him. "It's what I got called in school and by people who didn't like me."
"I know," she admitted and he looked over and she shrugged slightly, an admission that yes, she knew that from Steve. She paused before asking what has been on her mind for months. "How much do you remember?"
He didn't answer and she wasn't sure whether she should elaborate or let it go entirely or apologize because she no longer had the right to ask. But then he put the papers in his hand down on top of the others in the folder and rubbed at his face. "Everything. From waking up in Schmidt's lab after I fell off the train to Steve using the damned Tesseract on me." He looked over at her and gave her a ghost of a smile that was both hopeful and miserable. "And you're the only good thing in all of it."
She smiled at him, unable to say anything that wouldn't be too much or embarrass herself. She took a deep breath to compose herself instead and stood up. "Come on," she exhorted, holding out a hand. "It's time to go to work."
PG-13-ish ; Black Widow/The Avengers/Captain America
summary: Six months after being freed from the Winter Soldier conditioning, James Barnes has been presumed dead until a series of fatal accidents and outright murders makes it clear how he's been planning on spending his time. Natasha understands why she's been sent to track him down, even if she's not sure how she'll feel once he's found. Unfortunately, he's not the only one with revenge in mind.
Part of the Freezer Burn series. Prior reading not required.
Natasha froze in the open doorway, training telling her that she had enough time, if James meant to kill her, to back out, pull the door closed behind her, and run like hell because it would take him just those few seconds to follow and he couldn't fire through the wall and expect to hit her. But one look at his face assured her that he hadn't come for that, so she closed the door behind her and locked it.
She wasn't sure if she was relieved or angry or both to see him here. Months ago, before everything had gone so terribly wrong, she'd considered what might happen and what she'd do if James did make contact. Her plan had been to keep it professional but not spook him into running off again, to be the SHIELD version of the Black Widow, not the Red Room's. In practice, however, it wasn't going to be so easy. Now that she was in the same room, she knew that pretending that their history didn't matter was clearly going to be as impossible as it had been in Doomstadt. But she was also determined not to let herself get hurt again and she was angry, so angry with him, because there was a good chance Steve was hovering on the edge of death because of him. He should have known that there would be consequences to his actions and that the people he was going up against knew that he had exactly one point of vulnerability: Steve Rogers.
But then she saw how utterly broken he was, the way his eyes and expression hid nothing, and understood that he had figured that out as well, but too late in the game to matter.
"What do you want?" she asked in English, since it had once been their language of choice and neither of them were really Russian anymore. "And holster that piece if you aren't going to use it on me."
James looked at the .45 in his hand like he'd forgotten it was there, shook his head, and complied.
"I want a lot of things I can't have," he said sourly, running his now-free hand through fashionably short hair. "But I'll make do with revenge."
The Red Room had taught them both that the answer to almost everything unpleasant was violence, so she understood the rationale, but... But James Barnes was not Red Room. Or not just Red Room. Maybe. This man was a stranger to her, despite the familiar face and voice and movement. He wasn't her James, he wasn't Steve's Bucky, he wasn't the brutal Winter Soldier. Or maybe he was all of them. She didn't know how much he remembered of his life as the Winter Soldier, although he clearly remembered enough to want to punish those who were responsible for it. He remembered her, but whether he remembered everything about them or just the tawdry bits and pieces he'd thrown at her in Doomstadt, she didn't know. Wasn't sure she wanted to ask.
"Revenge is what got us here," she pointed out instead, not as sharply as she could have because she'd learned that lesson too late, too. She crossed the room to the small table and put down her backpack and took off the hooded sweatshirt she'd been wearing. She did not take off the Glock sitting snugly in its holster at the small of her back.
"I know," he agreed. "But I don't have the kind of faith to offer penance or look for forgiveness."
She wondered if he was thinking about God or man or if it mattered.
"So why are you here?" she asked, turning to face him.
James looked her straight in the eye. "Because you're the best chance at figuring out who killed Steve and I want to be the one to pull the trigger when you do."
She nodded, accepting the answer as both truth and evasion. "And what are you offering in exchange?"
He hadn't come here expecting a freebie; he had to know that there was a long list of people who'd want to put a bullet in Steve's killer and that his skill set, while unique in its proficiency, wasn't going to be required for the job.
The tiny nod he gave her confirmed it. "What do you want?"
He'd know she had the authority to offer terms.
"I want you to come in from the cold," she answered.
Before Steve had been shot, before James had even started his revenge spree, before anyone but Steve had seriously thought James could be alive, there had been discussions about what to do if they'd found him. They'd made a list of the possibilities, ranked by likelihood and difficulty and desirability, and that order had stayed in place once they knew that James had survived in some fashion. Their first option -- and Steve's only option -- had been to bring him in. Fury hadn't objected, hadn't thrown up obstacles or warnings or dire scenarios of trojan horses and double agents the way he had when Natasha had made her initial overtures to defect. Had embraced it completely, actually. And to her own surprise, she'd been deeply angered by his acquiescence. By his eagerness. Intellectually, she'd known that hers and James's situations were not all that similar, that there was far more compelling evidence that James was no longer in their enemies' service than there had been for her after she'd met Clint in Tel Aviv and asked him if the other side was really as green as it looked. Natasha had been a defector, an enemy agent looking to betray her country and her masters; James was not, was in fact the opposite. He wasn't going to be turned; he was going to be repatriated. She knew that, but it still galled her a little because she'd wanted to join Fury's side and he'd openly questioned her motives; James wanted nothing to do with his native land and yet open arms were waiting for him regardless. She'd had to prove herself over and over again -- and then over again once more when she'd been accused of betraying SHIELD (and that James had been the one to set her up didn't not matter, even if it hadn't been him). James could show up and he'd be long-lost Sergeant James Barnes, war hero and American icon, and beyond suspicion.
The look on his face was very clearly not one of a man eager to enjoy the fruits of seventy-year-old glory. "I--"
"I'm not asking you to join the Avengers," she cut him off, sharply. Cut off her own jealousies and hurt feelings as well. This wasn't about her. "I'm asking you to come home."
James gave her a short, ugly laugh. "There's no home left for me to go to. The last bit of it died three weeks ago."
"You have more there than you think," she told him, which earned her a scoffing glance. "I believe Peggy Carter wants a word, too."
His expression softened in something that might have been regret or fondness for a moment, then shuttered with a sharp grimace of pain. "She's... how is she doing?"
"She's heartbroken," Natasha answered honestly. "The first time was enough."
James nodded once. When he made no other move and continued to say nothing, she turned back to her pack, unloading it on to the table and starting to sort the items by whether they would travel to her next destination and how. James could take his moment to think; he'd either agree or he'd walk out of the room and if he did the latter, she wouldn't stop him. This wasn't about Steve per se; this was a test of James and his self-control. Of how badly he wanted what he'd come to ask for. Either he could curb his impulses to lash out in anger or he couldn't and if he couldn't, then she didn't want him anywhere near Steve or even the knowledge of his survival. She would work around him and not with him if she had to. Peggy would be disappointed, but not with her.
"I don't have my NCO sword to offer my parole with," James said and she turned back to face him, he was holding out his .45, grip toward her.
She gestured with her chin for him to put it away. "You have a sword?" she asked, keeping the relief out of her voice and replacing it with curiosity.
"I do -- I did," he said, holstering the gun. He gave her a crooked smile that was part wry recollection and mostly disbelief at what he'd just done. "Hell if I know what Steve did with it."
"Maybe someone knows," she said, picking up her phone. There were travel arrangements to be made. She called Fury's office -- she had Fury's direct number, but Hsiang was going to be the one making arrangements. "I need a ride for two from Cluj, Romania to the Helicarrier. I'm bringing an old friend."
At her prompting, James handed her a passport -- Michael Avery, naturalized Dutch citizen born in Simcoe, Ontario -- and she read off the data to Hsiang and then confirmed which cover she was currently traveling under. A few minutes later, Hsiang told her that two tickets on TAROM's flight to Heathrow later this morning would be waiting.
James declined her half-hearted offer of the room's other bed to crash for the few hours before they'd have to go to the airport; she didn't want to share a room with him, but she didn't want him getting cold feet, either.
"I have things to do," he said and she cocked a disbelieving eyebrow at him. He was undoubtedly the reason she was in Romania in the first place -- he'd probably burned one of Lukin's HYDRA acquisitions for Doom to draw her in -- so the odds of him multitasking weren't stratospheric, but they were unlikely. But he gave her an arching eyebrow right back. "I also need to get my stuff. I didn't come here planning on this."
She let him go because she couldn't force him to stay and they both probably needed a little time apart to absorb what they'd already done. They were going to have to travel to the airport separately anyway.
"If you're not on that flight..." she warned and he nodded, even though they both knew it was an idle threat. She hadn't been able to find him for months when she'd been trying.
Once he left, she barricaded the door and went to take a shower. She knew she wasn't going to be able to sleep, but she lay down in the dark anyway. Eventually, she gave up even that and pulled out her phone again to call Clint. He was in Tunis, she found out when he answered groggily because it was still the middle of the night there, too.
"I'm bringing the Winter Soldier in," she said.
"I think we can officially give up on you calling him that," he replied teasingly. "But good. I'm glad."
And not just for Steve, he didn't say, but she heard it anyway.
"I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be calling him," she admitted. "And I don't think he knows, either."
Clint asked how he seemed, since asking her how she was would be too direct and too obvious and he knew she'd lie. He knew the true answer, too, because she was calling him in the middle of the night.
"A mess," she answered.
"Then he'll fit right in," he chuckled. "Try to get some sleep on the plane, Natochka. You are going to have a very long day."
She didn't see James when she arrived at TACOM's desk at the airport, nor in the waiting area for the flight, which didn't worry her until it did. But on the plane he passed her seat on his way to his own, not even looking at her, and she relaxed. She slept almost the entire flight, which was still not enough to keep her from feeling sluggish and a little surly when it came to clearing customs at Heathrow. She didn't see James after they'd disembarked, but she wasn't worried anymore -- once he'd gotten on the plane in Cluj, he had committed to the entire trip. She didn't know how he'd gotten from Heathrow to Finsbury Park, but she'd taken a taxi and saw him as it pulled up in front of the address she'd given the driver. They walked together in silence for the two blocks it took to get them to the unmarked SHIELD car idling at the curb with a plainclothes agent behind the wheel, then let the silence continue on the drive to Lakenheath because Agent Dillies was not cleared for anything they had to say to each other.
The trip to the Helicarrier from RAF Lakenheath was unremarkable as far as they went, but James didn't bother to hide his curiosity. He was wearing casual civvies, jeans and a long-sleeve oxford with a pressure glove on his left hand and he was carrying a dark green backpack; he looked like any other SHIELD consultant on their first trip to the Helicarrier and the quinjet's crew didn't give him any more of a second glance than the Lakenheath staff had.
There was more curiosity from the flight deck personnel on the Helicarrier, but James had his sunglasses back on and so it was entirely because he was being accompanied by the Black Widow and must therefore be someone of interest. If they only knew.
Hsiang directed them in to Fury's office without so much as a second glance, although she undoubtedly knew exactly who James was.
"Welcome home, Sergeant Barnes," Fury greeted him as they approached his desk. He'd stood up when they entered, but didn't offer a hand to shake. "I'm sorry it took so long."
"Yeah, well," James said, tone casual but his posture was very much still fight or flight. It was probably not noticeable to anyone else, maybe not even Fury, but Natasha saw it as clearly as a telegraphed punch. "There wasn't really ever going to be a point when it wasn't too late, was there?"
"No," Fury agreed ruefully. "There wasn't."
The door opened behind them.
"Bardere's a dry ho--" Hill froze because James had turned and was reaching for whatever weapons he'd secreted on his person before she'd gotten two steps into the room. She put her hands up in a passive gesture, letting him look her over so that he could see that she was friend and not foe. When he dropped his own hands, she continued into the room. "I'm guessing Somalia wasn't what you wanted to see me about, sir," she told Fury wryly and a little pointedly.
James was still so tightly wound even after he'd registered Hill as not a threat. Natasha hoped that Fury didn't turn this into a show before getting down to business. James couldn't easily run from here, but he could shut down and if he did, getting him to listen again would be a much harder battle.
"Why am I here?" he asked Natasha, tension in his voice. "Why did you bring me here?"
He was asking her why the Helicarrier, but Fury misinterpreted, possibly intentionally.
"Because there is a bigger game afoot than your death-by-a-thousand-cuts payback," Fury answered before she could. "Because we both want the same things. Because it's time to take revenge the right way."
James started to retort, then stopped himself.
"Finding out who shot Captain America won't take that long," Fury went on. "Coming up with a proper response, that's going to need work. We aren't going to invade Latveria or Russia--"
"Again," Hill piped up, earning a glare from Fury. Natasha bit her lip to keep from smiling.
"We are going to need something targeted and painful, precise enough to avoid World War Three and damaging enough to be decisive because we can't have this escalating any further," Fury continued, looking straight at James. "I intend to have the last word in this conversation and you are going to be my punctuation."
James seemed almost pleased at the realization that he'd be just a weapon again, the tension bleeding out of him with what almost looked like relief, and Natasha hated that look, in no small part because she recognized it. After she'd come to SHIELD, being put to work, even ugly work, had been a relief because it kept her mind occupied, kept her too busy to think about what she'd done by defecting, the magnitude of it. It had slowed down her recovery, she'd recognized in hindsight, letting her hide behind the Black Widow. It had kept her from figuring out who Natasha was and how to live with her, how to make her better. Clint had realized it before she had and had called her on it a few times, but they hadn't had the kind of rapport back then where he could do more than that and she hadn't been interested in listening.
James had her to tell him now, she supposed, if he'd let her and if she could keep their past from dragging them both down. But who he really needed was Steve, who'd have been perfect for this because Steve, above all others, had the capacity to accept people's flaws and move past them, to see the bad and acknowledge it and file it away as unimportant right now. Who'd have done everything, anything, to show James what he had to gain by giving up the crutch of the Winter Soldier.
"We should go to Wyoming," she said and everyone looked at her.
"So soon?" Hill asked, not sounding like she was ready to say yes or no, just waiting for a good reason to pick one.
Fury, however, understood that she'd already given one. By mentioning Wyoming in the first place, she was saying that she thought James could handle the news.
"You can't seriously think we're going to stay here for a lengthy debrief, do you?" she asked.
The choice of the first person plural was not emphasized when she'd spoken it, but she knew they'd all heard it very clearly. It had been for both Fury and Hill's benefit and for James's. She didn't want James shutting down because he thought she'd dragged him back to her masters as a prize to be dropped off and she didn't want them thinking that she was not going to watch his back here. He was her responsibility right now, whether he wanted her protection or not.
"I think we have to figure out who and where and what first," Fury said calmly, recognizing the challenge, acknowledging it, and setting it aside all at once. "And I think Sergeant Barnes would like to figure out the same."
"Don't call me that," James said sharply. "That's not who I am."
Fury frowned at him. "That's exactly who you are, you just aren't used to it yet."
James glared right back at him, but two eyes weren't enough to win a staring contest against Fury's one and he looked away first. "What's in Wyoming?"
"Your past, present, and possibly your future," Fury replied, not quite smirking at James's growl at what must have seemed like a uselessly vague answer. But Fury hadn't been answering James, he'd been answering Natasha.
"Peggy Carter, to start with," Hill, not completely oblivious to the silent conversation, added.
James nodded, although Natasha could see him wondering why Peggy wasn't in Philadelphia.
"I want to go to DC first," James said. "I want to see the sniper's nest and I want to pay my respects."
Natasha looked to Fury because while they would, she thought, get cooperation out of James even without the truth about Steve, if they didn't tell him right now, the repercussions for him finding out later, even later today, would be immense and would leave them at a point from which there was no recovery or return.
Fury's nod was so tiny as to be almost imagined.
"You're welcome to visit the shooter's site," Fury told James. "You may see something our people have missed, although Agent Barton's been through. But you can skip the visit to the Commandos Memorial unless you'd like to visit Morita and Dugan. Steve Rogers's coffin is as empty as yours is." He waited a beat. "And for the same reason."
James's reaction was to take a step back. "What the fuck?"
He looked over at Natasha accusingly, eyes blazing. "What the fuck, Natalia?" he repeated. "You couldn't have said something?"
"I needed to know how you'd react first," she told him unapologetically, then switched over to Russian, which Fury understood but Hill did not. "You came to me because you wanted help making the world burn. I wanted to know what you'd do with more gasoline before I handed it over. I want Steve to be safe and I would have lied to you forever to keep him so."
The flare of anger at her died in his eyes, replaced by the anger at himself. He turned away from the three of them, took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then turned back. "He's in Wyoming with Peggy Carter?"
"He's alive," she said with a nod. "But that's as good as the news gets right now."
Fury gave James a short, dispassionate summary of Steve's condition, which James took like a boxer bracing for blows he couldn't duck, then suggested that they go down to DC if James wanted and then to Wyoming to see Steve.
"We'll speak after you've seen him," Fury told them. "Give both sides a chance to think things through."
Hill told James that they'd taken the liberty of making him a SHIELD consultant so that he could have security clearance to do things like visit the shoot site and see the reports, plus it would give him access to materiel and resources should he choose to act on their behalf at some point in the future.
"We'll need you to take a picture," she added, like it was a minor afterthought. "We probably could have used your old Army photo, but we didn't know that at the time."
James gave her a dark smile, recognizing this as a transparent ploy to get him out of the office and under supervision while Fury talked to Natasha. "Fine."
He followed Hill out, giving Natasha a look that she would have been able to interpret easily once upon a time, but in this new context wasn't quite sure what it meant.
When it was just her and Fury, he gestured for her to sit down and she did.
"What's your assessment?" Fury asked. "And how much of it is based on your history together?"
She didn't bother to hide her indignation at his suggestion that her judgment could be so impaired when so much was at stake.
"I meant what I told him," she replied. "I wanted to see what he'd do between when he found me and here. I'm satisfied that he's in control of himself."
"I want you to keep an eye on him," Fury began and Natasha bridled and he held up a hand to ask her to wait. "He is, to be blunt, completely fucked in the head. He doesn't know who he is, he doesn't like whoever that is, and that makes him reckless."
She couldn't argue with that statement, so she didn't.
"We owe it to Steve to do what he can't for James Barnes, which is to save him from himself," Fury continued after a pause. "And that may be a bigger job than any of us are capable of. Some people don't want to be saved."
"That wouldn't stop Steve," Natasha pointed out. "That didn't stop him."
"It didn't get him anywhere, either, until he proved just as reckless as Barnes," Fury retorted sourly. "It nearly got him killed, along with you and Barton, and it put an entire Direct Action Team at risk. I would like to think that we have all learned from that particular lesson and won't be repeating it. Which means that when I say that I want you to keep an eye on him, that does not translate into you riding shotgun when he hares off to do something spectacularly stupid."
Natasha smiled despite herself and that made Fury frown deeper.
"Take him to DC, see if he'll be up for a few days of storytelling in Wyoming, after he's seen Steve and Peggy Carter's had her say. We're hoping to have enough intel by then to start working for real."
It was a dismissal and so Natasha nodded and stood up to leave. She gave Fury a beat and a half to add anything else, but when he didn't, she departed.
In the outer office, Hsiang told her that Hill had said to pick up her 'friend' from the Avengers team room. Natasha raised an eyebrow at that because of all of the places on the Helicarrier to leave him, that was probably the cruelest.
"It's quiet, it's out of the way, and it's disproportionately comfortable compared to its rate of use," Hsiang pointed out. "And Commander Hill did not think he should be left wandering around the Helicarrier."
Which was all true and Natasha shrugged to indicate as much before thanking Hsiang and wishing her a good day.
James was sitting on one of the couches when she opened the door, a locking folder open on the cushion next to him and papers in his hands. He looked up at the sound of the door sliding open and she smiled because he looked bewildered and amused and showed none of the hard anger -- or profound self-loathing -- she had perhaps been expecting.
"They want to give me back pay," he said, making it clear how ludicrous he found the idea. "I came here to get intel so I could kill as many people as I could get my hands on and they want to give me back pay."
The door closed behind her as she crossed to the couch and took the seat on the other side of the folder. "Steve's doing, mostly," she told him and she pretended not to notice as he looked over to the far wall, where Steve's locker sat, before returning his attention to the paper in his hand. "He insisted that you should be given POW status and Fury agreed. They did some fancy math to figure out what you'd have been paid, adjusted it for time and inflation--"
"And promotion," James added wryly, holding up the page he'd been looking at. "As if I'd have ever made it to sergeant major. What the hell was he thinking?"
Natasha's grin was genuine. "He thought it was pretty funny, actually," she assured him, because she remembered the conversation between Steve and Clint when Steve had first broached the idea and then when they'd done the back-of-the-envelope calculations over dinner one night. "He thought you'd find it ridiculous, too. But it's US policy for captive soldiers to be paid and promoted as if they weren't, apparently, and so you were. The calculations were all theoretical until you came in, but you're here, so the Department of Defense is now going to write a very large check."
He looked over at her, sober. "Am I here? What if I take this money and disappear?"
"It's your money, James," she told him gently. "This isn't a bribe to stay or a downpayment on your services. This is yours. This is the US Government's way of trying to apologize for sending you to war and you winding up with far more than anyone bargained for. They can't give you your life back, but they can give you enough money to try to build a new one."
"As who?" he asked quietly, a brittle note to his words. "I have a shiny new ID that says I'm James Buchanan Barnes, but I'm not him anymore."
"You could be," she told him. "Not the same one, a different one. You're not the Winter Soldier anymore and you were never really Yasha. But you were really Bucky Barnes -- although don't expect me to you call you that. It sounds like a dog's name."
James laughed, almost unwillingly but genuinely nonetheless. "I don't know that I can take being James in English to anyone but you," he said once he stopped, a look on his face that she'd almost describe as shy if she could ever imagine applying that word to him. "It's what I got called in school and by people who didn't like me."
"I know," she admitted and he looked over and she shrugged slightly, an admission that yes, she knew that from Steve. She paused before asking what has been on her mind for months. "How much do you remember?"
He didn't answer and she wasn't sure whether she should elaborate or let it go entirely or apologize because she no longer had the right to ask. But then he put the papers in his hand down on top of the others in the folder and rubbed at his face. "Everything. From waking up in Schmidt's lab after I fell off the train to Steve using the damned Tesseract on me." He looked over at her and gave her a ghost of a smile that was both hopeful and miserable. "And you're the only good thing in all of it."
She smiled at him, unable to say anything that wouldn't be too much or embarrass herself. She took a deep breath to compose herself instead and stood up. "Come on," she exhorted, holding out a hand. "It's time to go to work."
