for captainsteve

[cryosoldier]

The man who had been the Winter Soldier ran. He went north, for no reason other than it was the direction in which he'd first left Washington DC. There was nowhere else for him to go. Seeing his own face on the displays in the museum had struck him and left him reeling with confused flashes of the past that he couldn't trust. Hydra had fallen, his employers and their technicians were dead or in hiding or gone; their asset had no one to report to anymore, nowhere to go. Maybe he wouldn't have even if they hadn't been brought down. And so, he ran.

Bucky Barnes. The name rang inside his head discordantly, echoing and sparking jumbled memories: dancing with a woman, a muddy trench, playing in the street, explosions and planes overhead, icy wind against his face. And him. Captain America. Always, his face. He tried to shake the thoughts free, ignore them because there was nothing more he could do. He'd saved him, the hero he'd been sent to kill, pulled him out of the water and dragged him to the shore. It disgusted him, horrified him, scared him how strong the feeling that he couldn't let him drown had been. There was no question of finding Steve Rogers now, not yet. The mission had to be over. They had trained him to run, to stay hidden and keep out of sight, they'd trained him to be a ghost.

Like a ghost, he vanished across the border; like a ghost, he disappeared into the snow.

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[captainsteve]

Steve was a super solider, but he didn’t know how to track a man who didn’t exist. It was as though Bucky was a dream, still a mere memory, now again returned to Steve’s head – and sometimes Steve wondered if he’d ever really left it? Could this be another futuristic trick, dragging your nightmares out of your mind and making them flesh and cold metal?

He was used to the enemy being front and centre. Steve planned strategies based on facts and the tattered folder in his possession provided few. As he’d said to Natasha, he liked to know who he was fighting, but this wasn’t a battle. It was a rescue mission.

It was through the goodwill of friends and colleagues, combined with Sam’s instincts and a measure of luck, that they found any traces of the Winter Solider to follow. It seemed the assassin was exceptionally trained; some days Steve doubted they were heading in the right direction. They trudged on, always further north, and Steve kept reminding himself that he knew Bucky better than the man knew himself right now. And Steve would find Bucky, because he'd always won when they played hide and seek.

[cryosoldier]

He'd been careful, mostly; he'd kept his head down, cap pulled low to shield his face, worn gloves to hide his hand. In one of the little towns, he'd broken into a hunting and camping store in the middle of the night and collected supplies while the alarm rang. By the time the town cop had arrived, he was long gone. To his estimation, he'd only been seen once: a woman, unexpectedly outside in the cold streets late at night. She'd seen his face, but it was dark. She probably hadn't seen enough to tell anyone anything that would identify him, if he was being tracked. Besides, he'd be long gone before anyone got there to ask.

The problem was he had no direction. There was no mission. He was cut off, adrift in the world with no anchor or compass. It was easy to exist, to keep himself alive and hidden, taking what he needed; the hard part was the doubts, the questions. His mind kept returning to those fragments, worrying at them, fraying their edges. That cold wind, was it falling or flying? When had it happened? Had it even happened at all? The sound of a tiny plane overhead as he walked through the forest that skirted yet another town brought him the ghost-echo of artillery and the taste of mud between his teeth.

A storm was rolling in, thick clouds graying out the sky. There would be more snow. The temperature was already plummeting. He welcomed it: anything to fix his attention to. Anything to blot out those confusing, distorted memories, even temporarily.

[captainsteve]

He didn’t like the cold, but like most things, Steve set his mind to ignoring the unease that settled between his shoulder blades and carried on. He’d lived through war and death and time travel, and he wasn’t going to let a chilly breeze stop him. They kept travelling, and Steve was grateful for Sam’s company as much as he was troubled by it. It was so blatantly obvious that Sam Wilson was a loyal solider and would follow his Captain on and on – and Steve’s mind flashed to all the horrible, familiar ways that could end, because he wasn’t an objective leader. There was no backup, no reconnaissance. There was no plan.

Eventually the dreaded cold gave Steve an excuse to leave Sam behind. He didn’t go willingly, but he followed Steve’s orders in the end. A couple of satellite images and a tweet had led them here, and they knew Bucky wasn’t in the tiny town. Clouds assembled and darkened, and Steve refused to stop before he’d searched a wider perimeter. He was nearly invincible, and what good were his attributes if he couldn’t use them to help his friends?

With his shield on his back – because they were trying to be anonymous, but shield was more than an emblem, more than a weapon and a defence, and Steve wouldn’t leave it behind, in no small part because he knew Bucky would try and punch him again – Steve began working into the snow, leaving the town and Sam’s frown behind him. He wasn’t going to let a chilly breeze stop him.

[cryosoldier]

The snow was thick, thicker than he'd worked in for some time. The wet brush of flakes across his face as he pushed on through the white-covered forest set his teeth on edge (flashes of rocks, trees, snow, the roar of whipping wind, a ghost of pain radiating down his arm). It was only going to get worse. Finally, with a growl under his breath, he admitted he couldn't move on in this blizzard, not with these distractions, not operating at this impaired level. It was time to dig in and wait it out.

The cold was beginning to seep into his bones; the metal grafted to his skin was icy and his shoulder ached. Frustration was growing thick and heavy inside him, clouding his mind and choking his heart in his chest. He was tired, sick of thoughts he couldn't control, sick of this purposeless trek. When he first heard something, he'd only been scouting for a good place to set up a camp for ten minutes, the snow coming down thicker, blanketing everything and damping noise.

He froze, training taking over as he put aside his body's complaints without thought. The noise was rhythmic, subtly out of place but hard to discern. It could be nothing. But it could be trouble. Sinking down into the snow behind the cover of a bushy tree, he shifted into a crouch and tensed, waiting. He watched the trees, metal fingers digging into the ground, other hand wrapping the hilt of his combat knife.

[captainsteve]

The weather didn’t ease, it kept throwing more snow and ice and eerie, phantom howls, until even Steve was beginning to feel his muscles locking in protest with every step. His boots were frozen, along with his socks, and the shield felt like a chunk of ice attached to his back. While his sense of direction was unfaltering, any other visual clues to his location were obscured. It was getting dark, and Steve shielded his eyes from the swirling snow in an attempt to see… anything.

He wouldn’t be able to find Bucky in the dark. He could barely find locate the tree that was four feet to his left. His skin was too cold to form a facial expression, but in his mind, Steve was frowning as he began to head towards the only landmark that wasn’t completely hidden by the storm and the fading light – a very large mountain. Hopefully there would be some cover there, a space that wasn’t rawly exposed to the barbaric weather.

Steve didn’t know much about operating in this sort of environment. Europe had cold and snow, but this level was blistering blizzard was reserved for more northern climates. It occurred to him that if Bucky had really been trained in Russia, he would have a vast advantage here. Steve trudged on, eventually having to pull his shield off his back and hold it in front of his face, and the first fleeting wave of anxiety pinched his heart. He could easily get buried out here.

[cryosoldier]

Full dark was coming quickly; he couldn't afford to wait much longer if he wanted to take out his tail and find a place to hole up for the night. He curled his fingers tighter around his knife, holding his position despite his impatience and the freezing cold. Snow formed tiny drifts around his metal fingers, covering them up to the first knuckles as he waited. The sound had resolved itself into footsteps in his ears now, someone moving heavily through the snow. A mantra of come on, come on, come on ran through his head as he held and held, breath making white clouds from his mouth. Come on, come on, come--

And finally, there he was; a shape appearing through the snow, closer than he'd expected, a matter of feet instead of yards.

The man who might have once been Bucky Barnes - who had been the Winter Soldier until not so long ago - was pushing up and moving even as he registered the blue and red of the shield. He had his human arm raised, knife unsheathed and driving down before he was hit by the same wave of recognition he'd had on the bridge, on the street, on the heli-carrier. The memories crashed into his mind and he raged against them even as he recognised the man's face as more than just (Steve) Captain America, more than his last mission. He was clumsier and slower than normal, the cold had sapped his agility, but he threw his weight into the attack with a ferocity born of frustration and fear.

[captainsteve]

Steve felt the attack before he could truly process the black shadow against the dark sky. Since his shield was already raised, it required only a small effort to slot it into a defensive position, and Steve’s muscles completed the movement even as his legs bent into a more stable stance to absorb the impact of the knife driving towards his face. The blade hit icy metal instead of skin and any sound made by the contact was swept away by the constant roar of the storm.

Blocking the first, messy attack was simple enough. Steve could barely see more than an outline, a black shape, but he trusted his gut. Keeping the shield raised, he crouched lower in the snow, ignoring the stinging of his muscles.

“Bucky,” he yelled into the storm. After all his plans and all his determined searching, Steve didn’t have anything else to say. His brain still refused to believe that Bucky Barnes wouldn’t know him; even the multiple facial fractures hadn’t convinced it. “Bucky, it’s me,” Steve called again, and he wasn’t sure the other man would hear him over the wailing of the wind.

This wasn’t the territory he would have picked for a reunion, or a confrontation. They could barely see each other and a decent wound from the knife in Bucky’s hand would put Steve out of action in these conditions. They were miles from anywhere, with noise hammering their ears and their bodies steadily becoming more frozen than not.