2012
Afterward, the Soldier stood there, looking down at the target. There wasn't much to see. This target was like so many of his others: Average height and weight, stopped with a single shot to the back of the head. Sometimes, he was supposed to make a production of it, draw it out, but they'd wanted this one done the usual way: quick, without any fuss.
He'd finished hours before his pick-up was scheduled—the target had been alone on an evening when he hadn't been supposed to be—so he had extra time. He was using it to stand there, and look at the target, and wonder about things he wasn't supposed to think about. Who the target had been. Why he'd had to be eliminated. Why, the longer the Soldier wondered about him, the harsher and faster his own breathing came, his right hand alternating between trembling and closing into a fist, while his left hand remained as still as ever.
He wasn't supposed to wonder, wasn't supposed to question. When he returned to base, he'd have to report this. He'd receive his treatment, the one that would fix it. Then he'd be able to do his work without any more wondering, without any danger of hesitation.
Behind him, there was a sound. The Soldier forgot his questions, and grabbed his gun, and turned around. Collateral damage. They hadn't wanted any. He'd be punished. Couldn't be helped.
There, in the doorway to the target's living room, stood a tall, pale man with greasy hair. He was in chains, and was wearing something over his mouth. A muzzle. Not exactly like the one the Soldier had, but close enough. In his hands was a blue cube, which was glowing.
The Soldier had never run into a secondary target in the field before. He'd only been briefed on this one a few hours ago. Shifting between directives—from elimination to capture-and-return—took a couple seconds longer than it should have. By the time he was moving, it was almost too late; in the end, he grabbed the target just as the portal opened. They fell through it together—
And landed somewhere weird. Somewhere really weird. There were six moons in the sky there. They were standing in ankle-high purple grass that went on as far as he could see. In some places, the grass undulated; when the Soldier squinted at the closest patch that was doing it, which was at least half a mile off, he thought it might be due to...tentacles.
"Mmph!" the target said.
The Soldier had been told in no uncertain terms: He was not to exchange words with this target, no matter how innocuous they might seem. He was supposed to knock him out as soon as he got the chance—and if he had to choose between bringing back the man or bringing back the cube, he was to eliminate the man and return with the cube.
He had his orders, but this was a case where the mission parameters didn't match anything that was happening. They weren't even on Earth anymore, and of the two of them, the man with the muzzle was the one who might know how to get them back.
The Soldier yanked the muzzle off, ignored every instinct that said not to wonder, not to question, that he'd be punished that he'd be wiped that he'd be— "Where are we?"
"I hardly know," the target said. He squinted at the cube and gave it a little shake. When nothing happened, he disappeared it somehow, and there went what was left of the mission parameters. He squint at the Soldier. "Who are you, again?"
"I." The Soldier faltered. He knew what he was. The Soldier. The Asset. But who wasn't something he'd ever thought to ask, or to wonder.
The target peered at him some more, then pressed his hand to the Soldier's temple. The Soldier tensed, but allowed it; to eliminate the target now would mean little to no chance of being able to bring back the cube, or even get back to report his failure in the first place.
"Crude," the target murmured. "And less than useful to me."
Even later, the Soldier would never be clear on what, exactly, the target did to him. One second, he was still the Soldier, even if he questioned from time to time. He was still on his mission. The next second, he was someone else. Someone the Soldier was only a part of. He still didn't remember his name, if he had one; he couldn't have found it if he'd been looking. There was too much else mixed up inside his head, everything that had come flooding in at once, the answers to all his questions and then some, everything wondered and unthought of washing over him in the same place at the same time.
"Better," the target said.
But he seemed to be saying it from really far away. The Soldier cried out, and sank to the ground, clutching the sides of his head with both hands.
How long he sat there was another thing he'd never be sure of. By the time he'd more or less sorted out what had happened before from what was happening now, the six moons were all in different places in the sky. As for the target, he was still there, lying on his back in the grass with his ankles crossed and his hands pillowing his head, like he had nothing better to do in this weird place than lay back and watch the show.
When the Soldier moved, the target glanced at him, a nasty smile quirking the corner of his mouth. "Ah. It emerges."
"...Don't call me that."
"Call you what?"
"'It.' I don't like that."
"Midgardians." The target rolled his eyes. "What would you prefer I call you, then?"
"Uh." That was the question, wasn't it? He wasn't the Asset anymore. Wasn't the Soldier, either. He was someone, but who— "Barnes, maybe? Or—Jim? No, wait. Maybe it's James. Or—there's a better one, I think. I can't remember what it is right now, though."
"And which do you prefer, of the above?"
"I." Another thing not questioned or wondered until now, but a preference came out of his mouth before he could even really give it any thought. "Barnes, for sure. And what did you say your name was?"
"Loki," Loki said. "Though I'll be taking my leave shortly."
The Soldier—he couldn't quite think of himself as Barnes, at least not yet, even if that was the name he was giving out to other people—couldn't help but notice the sidelong look Loki gave him at this statement. It was the kind of look people had when what they were saying was actually related to some kind of test.
On the one hand, he was tired of tests, especially the kind where part of the test was that no one was going to tell him what he had to do to pass. On the other hand, it was something familiar. Something recently familiar, even, so that it would be easier to go with it than to try to figure out how to navigate something completely new.
His position on tests where the win conditions were unknown was the same as it always was: He'd do what he was made to do anyway, and let his handler sort it out later. Even if he was suddenly sure he had no intention of doing what he'd been made to do anytime soon, well, he'd just do whatever seemed like the best thing right now, and Loki (no telling who he was yet, but the one thing the Soldier was fairly certain of was that he wasn't a handler) could deal with it.
"Where are you headed next?" the Soldier asked.
"I haven't decided."
"I can come with you, right?" Being on some planet somewhere had been weird before; now it was actually kind of thrilling, except the part where being stranded here wouldn't be.
"If you wish to," Loki said, smooth and smug as anything.
"Uh, yeah. That's why I asked."
"Very well."
Out came the blue cube again, and off they went.
2013
"If this is indeed Midgard, it's far more dire than I recall," Loki said, sneering at the stained tile floor, graffiti-covered walls, and also-stained urinals that reeked of piss.
"You only think that because we landed in a bathroom."
"There's clearly nothing for us here," Loki went on, like he hadn't heard a word of it. "Let's depart."
"Or how about you could give it a chance. I don't remember making any other big decisions based on the bathroom."
"Well, perhaps we should start."
"Nah."
Bucky headed out of the bathroom. Loki followed him, radiating annoyance all the way. But he'd put the Tesseract up again—he always did, when they were about to be around other people—and it wasn't like being annoyed was anything new for him, anyway.
*
Over the next few weeks, they did what they always did when they landed someplace new: They found a way to make some money, and they found a place to stay. Loki usually took point for this part, but then again, he usually knew a lot more about wherever they were, or at least could bullshit his way through space better than Bucky could. But even if Detroit wasn't Bucky's turf, Earth was. So this time he was the one who decided how they were going to get their money (theft at first, followed by various gigs that paid under the table), and where they were going to stay (the kind of cheap motel that took cash and didn't ask for ID).
It was weird how little interest Loki seemed to have in leaving the motel room, once they had it. His usual method was to talk his way into being friends with all sorts of people, apparently so he could torch every single one of the friendships on their way out. There was a reason they hadn't stayed on a single planet for more than two months yet. But this time, Loki spent most of his time flipping through channels on the television and sighing whenever he thought Bucky might be paying attention.
Bucky could have asked what the deal was, but a big part of their whole thing was that he ignored whatever Loki had going on, until and unless he decided to actually bring it up. So for the first couple weeks, he didn't ask. He probably wouldn't have then, either, if he hadn't been around when the news started talking about the anniversary of aliens attacking New York. That was enough to make him put his toothbrush back down, and go over to see what was happening on the television.
Yep. Those were aliens, all right, though not any of the species he'd come across when he was out there. And there were a handful of people jumping and flying around, fighting them. But before Bucky could get a good look at any of them, or figure out when this had even been, the screen panned to someone who looked a lot like...
"Uh," Bucky said, as the marquee said something about how Loki was still at large. "What exactly were you trying to do there?"
"Would you believe me if I said I hardly remember?"
"That'd depend on how much you were bullshitting when you said it."
Now that Bucky was thinking about it, though, it made sense. He'd known Loki was a secondary target, the day they'd met. He'd known it had to be because of something big. Because of something to do with the Tesseract, probably. He'd never asked, because it didn't matter. It didn't really matter that much now, either, at least not in a way that meant anything was going to change for them. He knew what he needed to know about Loki's background, the same as Loki knew what he needed to know about Bucky's. He wasn't going to quibble about whatever stunt Loki had pulled, any more than Loki was going to quibble about all the past murder.
But before Bucky could say anything on the subject of moving on, something else in the news report caught his eye. None of the superheroes—the Avengers, apparently—had been all that clear in the earlier footage. But on this footage, the camera had moved in closer. Close enough for him to see the suit the one guy was wearing.
"What the hell," he said, a strange heat uncurling in his stomach. Took him a moment to realize it was anger. A moment longer to realize his hands were balled into fists, and that the right was clenched so hard it hurt. "Who's that guy?"
"Which one?"
"The tall blond one."
"...And again."
Bucky glance at Loki to see if that was supposed to be some sort of snide comment. But Loki looked tense, not smug. "What?"
"Which tall blond one?"
Oh. There really were two of them. Okay. "The one with the shield."
"Ah." Bucky hadn't realized how tight Loki's voice had sounded until now, when he'd relaxed. He wouldn't realize who the tall blond guy with the hammer must have been until later, when he had room to think about anything else. "That is Captain Rogers."
Whatever heat had been in Bucky's stomach was now behind his eyes. He'd felt it before, so many times, in so many back alleyways. He'd felt it when they'd told him about what had happened to Steve, without Bucky there with him; it wasn't the clearest memory he had from his time as the Soldier, but he was still bone-deep certain Hydra had lost at least ten people before they'd gotten him contained again.
"No, it's not," he said. "That shield belongs to a buddy of mine. One who's been dead a long time. This other guy must have stolen it, or made one like it, or...something. Must have stolen his name, too." He walked closer to the television, trying to get a better look, but the reception was still shit and the figure on the screen was still too small. "Just wish I could get a better look at him. If I ever pass him on the street, I want to recognize him."
He wasn't paying that much active attention to what Loki was doing. He was too intent on squinting at the TV. But he always saw what was going on in the corner of his eye, so he couldn't help but notice Loki squinting—at Bucky—and then perking up, for whatever reason, around the time Bucky was trying to figure out what he'd do to this guy who thought he was good enough to impersonate Steve, if he ever got the chance.
"I can grant you that much," Loki said.
"Huh?"
"A better look," Loki said, and there was a rippling of color in the corner of Bucky's eye, and when he turned, Steve was there, looking exactly the way he had when he'd followed Bucky to war. He was saying something, in a sarcastic lilt that didn't sound like Steve when he was being sarcastic at all. Bucky didn't even try to catch what it was. He couldn't. "—Barnes? Are you all right?"
For a second, Bucky didn't say anything. He was too busy staring at Steve to remember how to do anything else. Then he couldn't bear to see him anymore, not without knowing what was going on. "Don't—change back. Please."
Loki did, not looking pleased with himself like he usually did whenever he was playing a joke that involved turning into another person. "What troubles you?"
"That's—that's—you're saying that's the guy, from the news? The one you met, when you were doing...whatever you were doing. In New York. That's what you're trying to—right?"
Loki looked at him for a long moment, clearly thinking. "That's the Captain Rogers I met," he said. "Yes. Why? Do you know him?"
"You could say that."
"From where?" Now something flashed in Loki's eyes, familiar from various talks they'd had about what had happened to Bucky, here on Earth; what HYDRA had done to him, and everything he'd been convinced they might do to him again, until he'd finally believed Loki when he said there wasn't any of their programming left inside his head. "Was he involved in what happened to—"
"No," Bucky said, an instant denial, before he could even think about it. He didn't have to think about it. "He's not—if that's really the guy you met, that's just Steve."
Loki looked at him blankly.
"Steve," Bucky said. "My old friend I told you about? He's—he's supposed to be dead, but he's...here, somehow. He's alive, and he's here. Or at least, he was a year ago. When these videos were taken." The videos in question were gone from the news now, and now the weather report was on. It was almost like he'd imagined it, except the part where he didn't have hallucinations.
"...Ah." Loki squinted at him. "I thought Steve was—" he made a 'this big' with his hand to indicate how tall Steve had been in most of Bucky's stories.
Bucky hadn't realized how much of the war years he'd left out when telling Loki about his life before he was the Soldier. Now, he couldn't remember a single thing he'd said about the time between when he'd shipped off to war and when he'd fallen in the Alps. He hadn't ever realized before that he'd shied away from all that, the in-between times where, if things had gone just a little differently, he never would have become the Soldier to begin with."
"He was. He—the same thing that happened to me, happened to him. With the serum. Except it happened in a different way, and HYDRA never—oh, god. What if they did? What if he was—"
"Barnes."
"Maybe it's not even him. I think—they tried to clone me a few times. Never succeeded—but maybe they did, just not with me. Maybe that's not—maybe that's not actually him—"
"Barnes."
"—What? You got some smart-ass contribution you just can't wait to make?"
"Not presently. I think you should sit down."
Now that he mentioned it, that sounded like a good idea. Bucky sat down heavily on the bed. He would only later realize someone must have guided him over there, since he'd have landed on the floor if he'd tried to sit in the same place where he'd started out at. That was for later, though, because what he realized in the moment was that he was breathing in sharp, short breaths, and in front of his eyes had even more static than the television had before, and what he really needed was to put his head between his knees. So he did that, and didn't register the tentative hand on his shoulder until much later, either.
When he was done hyperventilating, Bucky put his head in his hands. "I don't know what to do. Or even—where to find him. Or if I even want to. I mean, if it's really Steve, I definitely do. That's not even a question. But if it's not, if it's something else, I don't think I—I don't know."
"Perhaps you should start by telling me more about your friend," Loki said. "I've encountered Captain Rogers, after all. Perhaps I can provide some insight."
"That's—all right. That's a good idea. Okay. So, me and Steve met when we were just kids, and he was..."
There wasn't really any way to get into what had happened to Steve when he'd decided to join the army without going back over everything else. Bucky repeated a lot of stories Loki probably already knew, some that probably weren't even important...but even though his head was still spinning, he figured Loki needed all the most Steve-ish stories to help him compare.
Then, after all those stories, came the ones he hadn't gotten to. The way he'd been captured, experimented on; the way Steve had shown up, bigger and stronger and even more himself than he'd been before, to save him. The battles they'd fought together, the raids they'd gone on, Bucky always guarding Steve's back, and Steve always forging forward, never even once seeming to waver, so that Bucky had never felt like he could admit to how much he was wavering. Then had come the train, and the fall, and everything else, and they'd—they'd told him Steve had died. Even once Loki had given him his mind back, Bucky had known it was true, that it had to be true, because a Steve who'd been alive never would have left him where he was. Not if he'd known, at least.
"And that's what I've got," Bucky finished. He felt strangely calm now. Emptied.
Loki was peering at him. Had been looking at him in a certain way ever since Bucky had gone into the differences between what Steve had signed up for and what Bucky never had.
"So he's the golden child, while you've been forgotten," he mused, sounding weirdly satisfied about it.
"Uh, what?" Bucky said. "I don't know where you got that. Me and Steve, we're real good friends. Best friends. There for each other, whenever we need to be. Or at least we were. Like me and you."
"Like you and I," Loki said, kind of flatly, and wearing the kind of expression that meant he was trying to be inscrutable. He usually wasn't, when Bucky took the time to try to read him...but he was a little distracted right now, and whatever Loki had going on was going to have to take a back seat.
"What do you think? Does the guy I'm talking about sound at all like the one you met?"
Loki made a face. "If your friend is half as tedious as he sounds, I can't see how he and Captain Rogers could possibly be different people. Surely the universe would implode in protest, if there were more than one."
"You think so?"
"Yes." Loki made a face. "I suppose you'll want to go see him."
"...I don't know."
"Perhaps you shouldn't, if your reaction is so strong," Loki said, in a somewhat lackluster way—like he didn't think Bucky was going to go for his suggestion, but couldn't help making it anyway. "It couldn't possibly be good for you."
"I don't know," Bucky said again. "Maybe it's not. But I think I have to. Go see him, I mean. Just to make sure he's okay."
But even as he said it, he started to feel more sure about it. Really sure, all of a sudden. Steve was alive. Now that he was thinking about it, he should have thought to question this before. They'd told him a few different things over the years. Steve had died in battle. He'd died coming for Bucky, and it had been the Winter Soldier who'd killed him. He'd been in a plane crash, on his way back home. If Bucky had ever been able to stand to look at those memories, he'd have realized they contradicted each other. He'd have realized they must have lied to him. But even if he'd gotten that far, he'd still have guessed that Steve must have died a long time ago. That even if nothing had killed him first, he'd have gotten too sick to get better, the way he'd always been going to get too sick to get better. Only that was wrong, too, because the Steve Bucky had fought with in the war hadn't been the type to get really sick.
Steve was alive. Steve was alive, and it was because of Loki that Bucky even knew about it. Loki was why he was back on Earth to have caught the news program in the first place; Loki was why he'd known why Steve seemed familiar, instead of it having to be another thing for him to wonder about vaguely until he got around to confessing his confusion to his handlers and got wiped again for his trouble.
Bucky didn't realize he was going to lay one on Loki until it happened. Until he had to move, to do something before he imploded, and this seemed like just the thing. For a second, Loki stiffened, and Bucky thought maybe this had been a bad idea; then he relaxed, and kissed Bucky back, and he decided it was the best idea he'd had since...probably since he'd asked Loki to bring him along in the first place.
A minute into the kiss, Loki pulled away, though his hand stayed on the back of Bucky's neck, stroking lightly. "Do we really have time for this?" he asked. "Your friend..."
It was another one of his stupid tests, of course. He still pulled this shit constantly. Whenever Bucky called him on it, though, he always claimed he was just seeing what Bucky would do, like Bucky was too dumb to notice the way he moped around whenever he got it wrong.
"Yeah," Bucky said, because even if it was a test, it was also a good point. Now that he knew Steve was alive—alive and within reach, not more than a day's train ride away—he couldn't let himself get too distracted. Not even by this, which had probably been coming for a long time, and was definitely going to change his and Loki's friendship in a big way. "We should get going. Or at least, you know. Call the train station, see how much time we have."
"Very well," Loki said stiffly. He looked pretty sour, which was how Bucky could tell he'd definitely failed this one. Oh, well.
Bucky sat down on the bed to make the call from the motel room phone. He kind of expected Loki to take off on a walk, because that was the kind of thing Loki did to make life easier when Bucky needed him to stick around for a minute. But when he hung up, Loki was still there, hovering a couple feet away.
"The next train leaves in an hour," Bucky said. "It's about twenty minutes to the station. We should leave now. In case of traffic, or, you know. Lines."
Loki wasn't the easiest person to read. He could also get really petulant when things didn't go the way he wanted. That was why the last thing Bucky expected was for him to sit down on the bed next to Bucky, say, "Yes, all right," in a distracted tone, and then reach out with his chilly fingers to turn Bucky's face around, and kiss him again. It was a more focused kiss than the last one, probably because the things Loki gave a little thought to beforehand usually seemed to go better than the decisions he made on the fly (which seemed to be most of them, no matter how much he acted like everything that happened was part of his grand plan).
"—We really do need to get going," Bucky said, breaking away again.
"I suppose," Loki said, and kissed him again.
His hand came to rest against Bucky's stomach. His fingers were cool even through the cloth. It was...really distracting. At any other time, it would have been distracting enough.
Right now, though, he really couldn't. Bucky broke off from Loki for a third time.
"We have to go," he said, and got up, and started throwing things into a suitcase.
After a minute, Loki sighed heavily, got up, and started helping.
Forty minutes later, they were at the train station, all set. Tickets bought, bags dropped off, sitting together on a bench waiting for the train to come in. At some point, Loki had magicked himself out of his usual outfit, and into an all-black suit.
"Well? Did I pass?" Loki muttered.
It took Bucky a second to get what he was asking.
"Yeah, sure," he said, though he could have pointed out that between the two of them, Loki was the one who was always waiting to be disappointed. "I guess you did."
*
"I was sure he'd be here. Why was I so sure he'd be here?"
"He was here before."
"Yeah, and that was a whole year ago."
"You used to reside here, didn't you? Perhaps that's why."
"I mean, we lived in Brooklyn. Not anywhere like this. But I guess you could be right."
Steve hadn't been in Brooklyn, either, which was where they'd gone first. At least, he hadn't seemed to be on their old street, nevermind their old building, which had been gone for who knew how long.
Bucky and Loki were standing across the street from the Avengers tower, which Bucky had just gotten himself kicked out of. (Loki had stayed outside, which had probably been a good idea, based on what Bucky had gotten out of him during the twenty-hour train ride.) The receptionist had been really clear about Captain America not being there. Then Bucky had made a scene, on the theory that if Steve was there, he would definitely come out if there was a big enough commotion. By the time security had come to escort him out like another crazy fan, he'd figured Steve really wasn't there. No way wasn't there all sorts of security footage, and no way would he not have come down if he'd seen Bucky's face on it.
"Perhaps we should be going," Loki said, in a low, weirdly urgent voice. He grabbed Bucky's elbow and made a reaching-into-his-pocket motion in a place where he didn't have a pocket (or at least, not one that was visible to the naked eye).
"I already told you I don't want to end up in some other part of the galaxy—"
"Look around," Loki said in the same low voice, and so Bucky did.
For the first couple seconds, what he saw was that the sky was suddenly darker, like it was about to start storming even though it had been clear when they got here. That kind of thing always made Loki edgy, even though it was always just weather instead of his adopted brother's wrath.
Bucky didn't have the patience for it, though. "So what if it's going to storm? That doesn't change what we're trying to—"
"Look around."
So Bucky looked around. This time, he saw it. There were at least five people in dark suits within fifty feet of them. They were all headed their way, while trying to look like they weren't. There were ten more just like them within two hundred feet. Maybe they were the rest of Stark's security team, come to tell them to beat it. Somehow, Bucky didn't think so. A security team wouldn't be trying to be subtle. They wouldn't be giving him a sinking feeling, either. No way would an ordinary, unsuspicious security team make him feel this instantly trapped.
"Do it," he said.
Out came the Tesseract. The people in suits stopped pretending, started sprinting. Then they were gone. So was New York, and so were the storm clouds. So was everything except the sun, the sand, and a bunch of scraggly little plant. In the distance there were mountains, and underfoot was a faded asphalt road, stretching out toward them.
"It didn't work," Loki said, frowning down at the Tesseract.
"Sure it did," Bucky said. "We're still on Earth."
That was better than he'd thought Loki was going to do. A lot better. Sure, he was usually pretty okay at staying on the planet they were already on if he wanted to. The thing was that it couldn't be clearer that he wasn't exactly all-in when it came to finding Steve.
"Yes, I know."
"Well, thanks," Bucky said. He didn't recognize the exact spot where they were standing or anything, but he had an idea that if he'd been looking at those mountains from a different angle—like from the other side, maybe—he'd know exactly where they were. There'd been more than one mission out in New Mexico or Arizona or Texas where the landscape had looked pretty much like this. "I really appreciate it."
*
He got to appreciate it for about an hour before he had second thoughts.
Initially, he'd thought they'd hitch a ride. But they had yet to see a single vehicle come down that road. Meanwhile, it hadn't been noon yet when they landed, and the closer it came to it, the hotter it got. Bucky was feeling all right so far even without any water, but Loki was starting to droop. He didn't exactly do well in hot weather. Their actual shortest visit to another planet had been when they'd landed someplace with deserts about twice as bad as anything on Earth, and Loki had responded by immediately getting heat stroke. (Then he'd overcompensated, so that the next planet they landed on was one big blizzard. By the time Loki had recovered, Bucky had started worrying he was going to lose another extremity, if not two. Loki hadn't even noticed anything was up until Bucky complained, at which point he'd also had to explain that 'Winter Soldier' had absolutely nothing to do with the temperature, because 'Midgardian titles' weren't anywhere near as literal as Asgardian ones. So their shortest and second-shortest visit to any planet had combined to make one really, really bad day.)
"Maybe we should go ahead and get out of here," Bucky said. "We're out in the middle of nowhere. It's going to take us forever to get anywhere we want to be anyway."
"Very well," Loki said, and brought out the Tesseract yet again.
Neither of them seemed to notice the stormclouds at their backs, rushing toward them.
*
He didn't even get the chance to put it away, the next time.
"No," Bucky shouted. He had to shout, considering how loud the wind was as it blew by his ears. Which were already getting numb, thanks. "We talked about this the last time!"
"Yes, yes." A flash of blue, and off they went again.
*
Who knew where they were, this time. Someplace dark, where condensation dripped down the concrete walls to either side. There was nothing to do other than walk down the hall until they came to something. At least the temperature wasn't extreme down here. It was cool, in a way that seemed to indicate 'somewhere underground,' but that was all.
Bucky didn't recognize this hall. He didn't start sweating or having issues with his breathing, either, the way he did sometimes when he was remembering something without looking at it directly. So when he came to the doorway at the end of the hall, with Loki trailing a step behind, and flicked on the light switch, it took him a minute to realize where they were, and what he was seeing in the glow of the fluorescent light.
In the middle of the room there was a chair. It was bolted to the floor. Beyond that, Bucky tried not to see the details. He didn't need to. He knew exactly where he was now, even if he'd never been in this particular facility, or been strapped into this particular chair.
The room was getting colder, all of a sudden. No reason it should have been; this place had the quietness of somewhere that had been abandoned for a long time. There was no sound of air moving, no hum of electricity. There was just Bucky, standing here breathing, and Loki, doing the same thing next to him.
Bucky looked away from the chair. That was a mistake, because what his eyes rested on next was the cryo unit in the corner. It was empty, not prepped for him or anyone, but it didn't matter. The one Bucky was seeing, he was seeing from another angle. Was seeing from the inside. Soon, it would slide closed, and the cold would fill it, fill him, and—
From far away, there came the sound of something shattering. Then there was a blue glow, and then they were somewhere else. On the walkway of a bridge, Bucky realized after a minute, in a city that definitely wasn't New York. People were staring at them, whispering to each other. Right after he realized that, Bucky felt the pain in his shoulder, and in his cheek, and looked down to see the piece of glass that was stuck in him. He pulled it out, but it took a little extra effort, because of how it was covered in ice. The shard he removed from his cheek was smaller, but no less cold.
"What the hell happened?" he asked Loki, who was ignoring him in favor of looking down at the water. But he thought he remembered. The chamber had frozen from the outside, then exploded, right as Loki had whisked him away.
"Perhaps it malfunctioned."
"It wasn't even turned on."
Loki didn't seem to have anything to say to this. After a minute of working it over, Bucky decided not to hassle him about it. Mostly, he just didn't want to talk about it. He didn't want to have say thanks, either, which was what the conversation would eventually come around to, if they went there. Anyway, there were better topics of conversation, like:
"So what exactly the hell are you trying to do, anyway?" he asked. "Did you have a destination in mind, or are you telling it to take us wherever the fuck it wants?"
"A destination," Loki said, and then turned his head sharply. Bucky followed his glance, and saw the police car with its lights on, coming to stop maybe twenty feet from them.
Great. Just, great.
"Try somewhere better this time," he said, as the cop got out and shouted something about putting their hands up. "A fancy hotel, maybe. One with room service and a hot tub."
They could get cleaned up, relax. Screw each other's brains out, maybe. Furtive handjobs on the train were all well and good (actually, everything about that had been pretty incredible, at least as much because he'd wanted to do that with Loki for a long time as because it had been at least seventy years since anyone else had touched Bucky's dick), but nothing beat getting to be naked with the person you really, really wanted to get to be naked with. Then in the morning, they could recoup, figure out where to go to next. Bucky still wanted to find Steve, but the day and then some since he'd seen that news program had really taken it out of him. When it came to these longer missions, you had to know when to keep driving toward the goal, and when to take a break so you'd be fresh the next day.
"Maybe later," Loki said, and then looked down at the Tesseract, which he was shaking like a magic 8-ball. "Do. As. I. Bid. You."
The first thought Bucky had, as they fell through, was that that couldn't be good. The more worked up Loki got about his portals not working right, the weirder things tended to go.
The next thing he thought, when the portal whooshed away again, was that this had the potential to not be too bad. They'd arrived in the kitchen of someone's apartment. A one-bedroom they could see all the corners and crannies of without moving, and which was currently empty of anybody but them.
Not for long, though. They'd been there for about five seconds when the front doorknob started to turn.
"Okay, let's go," Bucky said.
"One moment. I want to be sure of something."
"Like?"
But before Loki could answer, the door opened, and in walked the guy whose apartment this presumably was. Bucky had just a second to hope he wasn't armed—that was the last thing they needed, to have to take down a civilian who'd made the mistake of coming home at the wrong moment in time—before he got a good look at him.
"...Steve?" he said.
"I told you this would be quicker than the train," Loki said.
Steve stopped in his tracks. Stared. Paled. Said, "...Bucky?"
"Yeah," Bucky said, waving, and feeling kind of stupid for waving. "Hi."
Steve's jaw clenched. So did his fists. "Loki."
"Uh," Bucky said, because there was clearly no love lost there—
But before he could try to explain, Steve had rushed forward and socked him in the face. Not Loki's face. Bucky's.
Bucky staggered back, because the other option was to go on the offensive, but he still hadn't figured out a way to do that without going into kill mode. "What the fuck, Steve."
Steve socked him in the face again. "What are you doing here?"
"First of all, I'm not Loki. He's—" When he looked around for Loki, he didn't see anyone. So he'd gone invisible or something. Fantastic. What a good friend (or whatever they were now).
Steve tried to sock him a third time. This time, Bucky blocked the blow, and Steve was the one who ended up staggering back.
"Will you stop hitting me?" Bucky said to Steve, and then, to Loki: "Where did you go?"
"I'm here," said someone else, from behind Bucky. It was Steve's voice, but with someone else's inflection. It stopped the Steve in front of Bucky in his tracks, so that Bucky wasn't at all surprised to turn around and see a second Steve, looking pleased with himself in a Loki type of way. It was just as weird as it had been in their motel room, if not anywhere near as gutting.
"Really?" he said, as the two Steves started circling each other, with him in the middle. "This is how you want to defuse the situation?"
"You can't confuse me that easily," said one Steve.
"You can't confuse me that easily," said the other Steve.
Then they lunged at each other, tussled for a second. Bucky grabbed each of them by a shoulder and shoved them apart. "Stop it," he said. "Just stop."
One Steve now had a crooked nose. The other one had a knife sticking out of his side. From the angle, it hadn't hit anything vital, but—
"What the fuck," Bucky said, glaring at crooked-nose Steve. "What part of 'this is a really good friend of mine we're looking for here' made you think stabbing him would be okay with me?"
"The part where he attacked you, and then me," Loki said, turning back into himself. "It seemed like the swiftest way to slow him down."
Looking at Steve, it looked like Loki might have been right about that (though even if he was, he was on Bucky's shit list forever. Not that that was anything new). Steve had gone pale again, and was staring at Bucky with his mouth open. In shock, maybe. Except his eyes were moving, from Bucky to Loki and back again, like maybe he was doing the math. The kind where, if he'd been able to sock Bucky, and then sock Loki, that meant neither of them was an illusion. So maybe it was the other kind of shock.
"...Bucky?" he said. "But you—you're dead."
"Nope."
"You fell."
"Yeah, pal. I did."
"I was there. I saw you."
"Yeah," Bucky said. "I was there, too."
*
A little while later, Loki had healed his own nose plus Bucky's wounds from he'd had glass sticking in him before, and Steve had patched himself up (he was skeptical of Loki's magic, and hadn't let Bucky help him, either. Because he was nothing if not still a completely stubborn asshole about this kind of thing).
Steve had had a lot of questions about how Bucky had survived. Bucky had dodged them as much as he could for now, and had the idea Steve knew exactly what he was doing...but either he'd gone soft, or he was letting it go for the time being, because he hadn't pushed it half as hard as he could have.
Or maybe he just wanted to tell his side of things, because as soon as Bucky asked about how things had happened for him, Steve gave a perfunctory couple of sentences about how he'd been in the ice for seventy years (which was in and of itself a huge sigh of relief for Bucky, because at least Steve had never had to go through the things he'd had to go through. He'd gotten here a better way, even if it sounded like it hadn't exactly been thrilling for him). Then, he said something about Loki escaping from the Avenger's tower after the Battle of New York, and how Steve had fought with him when he was shapeshifted as Steve—
"That was not me," Loki, who'd taken a seat on the far side of the kitchen table from Steve, interjected. "Circumstantial evidence aside."
"And then he distracted me by saying you were alive, and used the sceptre to knock me out," Steve said.
"And when you woke back up, you figured it was bullshit, huh."
Steve winced. Probably not because of the stab wound in his side. "I would have looked into it more, only then something really weird happened."
Really? Weirder than that?"
"Well, some guy came up to me and said, 'hail Hydra.'"
From there, Steve had apparently put the guy—who'd later claimed it was just a joke—in the hospital, due to his habit of hitting first and asking questions later (not that Bucky could fault him, at least not for that much). Then, he'd gone after answers. The trouble was that he hadn't found any...but even though he couldn't find any actual evidence that HYDRA still existed, he'd been completely, one hundred percent sure something was going on. And, since the guy he'd put in the hospital had worked for S.H.I.E.L.D., he hadn't trusted them enough to go work for them when they'd asked.
"Good," Bucky said. "S.H.I.E.L.D.'s just another way of spelling HYDRA, anyway."
Maybe S.H.I.E.L.D. did some good sometimes. Maybe it didn't. But if there was any good, he'd never seen it, and suspected that any good was only there to cover the stink of what was underneath it.
Steve was looking at him now, a searching look that said Bucky was about to get interrogated about what he knew, and how he knew it. It was a look that meant he was going to have to talk about everything he'd tried to gloss over before; it meant he was going to have to see the look on Steve's face when he found out what Bucky had been, and all the things he'd done. There was nothing he wanted to face less, except maybe a world that didn't have Steve in it. He guessed this would be a compromise he could live with, once the worst parts were over.
Except then, before Steve could ask, and before Bucky could form anything like an answer, there came a blast of thunder, somewhere really close. When he glanced out the window, the sky was gray, almost black, although the sun had been shining through the window in a cloudless sky when they'd sat down.
The thunder clapped again, and this time Bucky was looking to see the lightning when it forked down and hit just a block or two away.
Loki's lips had thinned, but Steve looked satisfied.
"Gee, that one was really close. I wonder what could have brought on that kind of weather."
"Don't, Steve. Just, don't," Bucky said, and then, to Loki: "You going to be okay?"
"...Fine," Loki said, though his fingers were flexing around the place in front of him that he usually took the Tesseract out of, and he was starting to breathe a little harder.
Now Steve was looking between them. A kind of intense, searching look, like he was trying to put something together. Then he looked at Bucky, and said, "Him? Really?"
Bucky felt his face heating up, even as some part of him was relieved that they were talking about this instead of anything else. "You know what—"
"You used to have better taste, that's what I know," Steve went on, steamrolling over him the way he'd always done once he got going. "You remember that one girl, Shelly—"
"No. No. You do not get to start on my old girlfriends."
"Actually, I would like to hear this," Loki said.
And that was when the door banged open. In it stood someone tall, blond, and dripping, with a big battle hammer swung over his shoulder. So this was Thor, the brother Loki was always so worried about whenever it started raining.
Except then he stepped inside, where they could see his features, and...
"Uh. That's not your brother, is it," Bucky said.
"No," said Steve and Loki.
"Ow," said Loki, rubbing his arm where Bucky had pinched him, just to make sure.
"Hi, guys," Steve said. Not the Steve sitting at the table with them, but the one who'd just walked through the door. "I'm going to need Loki. Or the Tesseract. Doesn't really matter which."
"Nope," Bucky said, at the same time Steve said, "The what?"
Loki rose to his feet, stiff and straight, and said, in a colder voice than Bucky had ever heard him use, "How did you come by that hammer?"
"Hand over your toy, maybe I'll tell you where I got mine," hammer Steve said.
"I don't think so."
"Then neither do I." Hammer Steve shrugged. "I was hoping to do this the easy way. Hope you're not too attached to your place, Steve."
"I don't know who you are, but you're out of line here," Steve said, and his posture was what it always was when he was about to go to bat for someone, no matter who he was standing up to or how much he was about to get the shit beat out of him. The surprising thing wasn't so much that he was going to go to bat against another Steve, as that as he was apparently going to do it for Loki.
The other Steve stared at him for a second. Then he grinned. "Okay. How about we talk, instead, this time."
He went back out into the hallway, gesturing for Steve to follow. Steve hesitated for a second, then did.
"Uh," Bucky said, when the door had closed behind both Steves. "Do you know what's happening right now?"
"I haven't the faintest idea."
"Me, neither."
"Perhaps we should go," Loki said, but he pretty obviously didn't mean it, considering he had one of his ears cupped in his hand, and had his 'thinking up a spell to use' face on.
"Sure. Let's get out of here. No reason to wait around to see how this plays out."
Loki rolled his eyes, put his other hand up to his lips in a shushing motion. Bucky shushed.
Loki muttered in a language Bucky didn't know for a few minutes, then said, "He's blocking me, somehow. I'm not picking up on anything."
"Huh." Bucky was about to engage in the age-old art of putting his ear to the door when the door opened, and the Steves came back in. Even standing side-by-side, it was easy to tell them apart; hammer Steve had more lines on his face, looked more worn. Looked tired, to an extent Steve Steve didn't, even though he hadn't been out of the war for all that long, and it showed. "You get it all worked out?"
"...You could say that," said both Steves.
*
A few minutes later, all four of them were sitting around Steve's kitchen table. Bucky and Loki on one side, the two Steves on the other.
"He says he's from the future," Steve said.
"My reality's future," hammer Steve said, and then spent about half an hour explaining how that worked, in a way that eventually twisted around to mostly making sense, at least as long as Bucky didn't poke at the logic behind it too much. "Long story short, I came back to return some things to the timelines we borrowed them from. Decided I'd come here and correct something else, while I'm at it."
"Me," Loki said, with the confidence of a guy who always suspected he was the problem, and was right about that at least three-fourths of the time.
"Uh-huh. You're not supposed to have the Tesseract. Believe me, you wouldn't want it if you knew what it was going to cost you."
"...Which is?"
Hammer Steve smiled grimly. "I'll get to that." Then he turned to Bucky, and the smile changed. Got softer, more careful. Steve had never looked at Bucky quite like that before. Suddenly, he was sure that this Steve knew everything he'd ever done, and didn't hold any of it against him. As much as he'd been worried about the other Steve's reaction to it, it was still incredibly unnerving. "Hey, Buck. How you feeling?"
"Uh. Fine?"
"Great. That's great." He seemed to think for a couple seconds, then breathed out heavily, not exactly a sigh. "Look, Bucky. Maybe things seem okay right now, but there are these code words—"
"Nope," Bucky said.
"Huh?"
"Yeah, those are long gone." He gestured at Loki. "He got rid of them at the same time he got me my memories back."
"—He did."
"Yeah."
Hammer Steve looked at Loki, then back at Bucky. "It's 2013. It's 2013, and you're okay, and you're telling me it's because of him."
"Yeah."
Hammer Steve leaned back in his chair, where he'd been leaned forward before, and relaxed the arm that had been not-so-subtly within reach of the hammer, which was sitting by his chair. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"You can keep it," hammer Steve said, looking straight at Loki this time. "If you still want it by the time I'm done, anyway."
"I'm so gratified to have your permission," Loki said, kind of snottily, at the same time Steve said, "Wait, what?" and Bucky said, "Wait. If you're so surprised I'm okay now, does that mean I'm not okay where you came from?"
"By the time I left, you were doing all right," Steve said. "It was a longer process in my reality, though."
From the way he said it, it was obvious there was a hell of a story there. Bucky wasn't sure whether he wanted to ask. But he did have to know one thing, at least. "How long?"
"You get out a little over a year from now. In 2014."
Bucky didn't know what to say to that. He didn't even know how to figure out what to say to that. What could there possibly be to say, when you found out some other you had had two more years of killing? That if you were him, you'd have had a year left, and who knew what beyond that? Instead, he found himself looking at the reason he hadn't had to, the person Steve had decided to let off the hook the second he'd found that out.
Hammer Steve saw him look, then did a double-take, looking back and forth between Bucky and Loki until he came to a conclusion: "Him? Really?"
"That's what I thought about it," said Steve. "And, by the way, you can't let him keep that thing, considering what he already tried to do with it."
"You used to have better taste," hammer Steve said, totally ignoring the other Steve. "Do you remember that one girl of yours, Mary—"
"Oh, my god. There really are two of you," Bucky said, and put his head into his hands.
Loki patted him awkwardly on the shoulder, which would probably have helped, except that while he was doing it, he was also saying, "I would like to hear more on this particular subject, if you don't mind."
There weren't any convenient interruptions this time, and so Loki got the run-down on more old girlfriends than Bucky could remember having (which seemed to be more of a run-down on the kind of stunts Bucky had used to pull than it was on the girls themselves). He'd just about decided he hated all of them—Steve, and the other Steve, and Loki, too—when he realized something. Whatever else was going on here, they all seemed to be getting along. This situation had been a powder keg from the second he and Loki had shown up, but now it seemed...better. The most intensely weird thing that had ever happened to him—and he'd been the Winter Soldier, so that was saying something—but better. By the time they'd been on the subject for twenty minutes, the Steve whose apartment it was actually got up and went to the fridge, and came back with an armful of cold ones.
So they drank up, even though there wasn't a single one of them who was going to get drunk off anything that had been brewed on Earth. Eventually, the Steves got off the subject of Bucky's dating life, and Bucky got to join in with telling Loki a bunch of stories of the things he and Steve had gotten up to before the war. Then, Bucky and Loki got into what they'd spent the past year doing, a lot of which was either harrowing or really funny, depending on how close Loki's brand-new enemies had been to knocking them off. Then Steve re-told the story of how someone had hail-Hydra'd him, which led to hammer Steve saying, "...Yeah, that one's on me, too. Sorry about that."
The mood around the table changed instantly. It couldn't have been more obvious that Steve had come here with an agenda more than just getting Loki to give up the Tesseract. It was time to get back down to business, and they all knew it.
"There's a lot coming in the next ten years or so. I'm going to get into as much of it as I can while I'm here." Hammer Steve reached into his jacket, brought out two notebooks. "I wrote it all down for you, too. In case I forget anything."
He handed one to Steve and the other to Bucky. Bucky flipped through his. Every page was filled with Steve's handwriting. He'd run out of room to write; there were about ten extra pieces of paper stapled to the back.
"Thanos and the infinity stones are the biggest thing you're going to have to deal with. If you wait, it'll probably still be a few years until he shows up here. You might want to get a team together to go after him before that...but first, you've got things to take of here at home."
"HYDRA," Bucky guessed.
"Yeah. You ever hear of Project Insight?"
None of them had.
"Well, you're going to. There's more about it on page five, but what you really need to know is..."
*
They were up all night and into the next afternoon, trying to take in everything Steve was telling them. By then, Bucky wasn't really thinking about him as hammer Steve anymore. He was just Steve, or Future Steve when he and the original Steve were trying to talk over each other.
Finally, when they were all too tired to take in any more new facts about the future, or the strategies they might want to use to prevent various things from happening, Steve said, "I'd suggest you all get some rest. We can reconvene in twelve hours or so."
"How about six," present Steve said.
"Thirty-six," Loki suggested.
"Tomorrow, anyway," Bucky said. He needed a shower, and sleep, and to get laid. All of which was going to happen in a nice, quiet hotel room with just one other person in it, because his head was going to explode if he didn't get a break from all this for a while. "Definitely tomorrow."
"There's no rush," future Steve said, over present Steve's objections. "It's a lot to try to take in, but you've got time."
*
"How long were you planning on staying?" Bucky asked, before he and Loki headed out.
Steve smiled. He still looked tired, but also content, underneath the determination to get it done. It was the way he'd looked during the war, when they were busy righting all those earlier wrongs. It was enough to make Bucky wonder how big this mission of his really was. "As long as you need me to. I've got all the time in the world."
"Good to know," Bucky said, which it was.
*
"We could still leave," Loki said, an hour later.
"Why? Don't you like the hot tub?"
They were in the much nicer hotel room Bucky had been thinking of. He'd let Loki choose it, and so of course it was even more ridiculous than he'd had in mind. It did come with a hot tub, which he'd planned to soak in until his toes wrinkled, then see if he could talk Loki into doing something else in until they curled. Sure, there was a lot to talk about, especially why Loki had stopped making snide remarks and turned extra pale around the time Steve had started talking about a guy called Thanos, but it seemed like the kind of thing Bucky was better off ignoring until Loki decided to talk about it. Anyway, they both really needed to unwind.
"It's the odds I don't care for," Loki said, which was fair.
"I think we should at least go back in the morning," Bucky said. "Finish getting briefed. And I think I want to stay for the first phase of the plan." The part that was all about taking down HYDRA. Cutting off every head and salting the Earth. It wasn't that Bucky had any desire for revenge; the whole idea made him feel really tired. But he'd been responsible for so much of what they'd done. He had a responsibility to put it to right, now that he'd been handed the chance. Outside of that, though...it didn't sound like Steve thought either of them was instrumental to all the saving the universe he'd hinted about (that there was no way he wasn't telling present Steve about right now, because no Steve from anywhere had anything like a sense of balance). "But we can talk about it, for sure. And if you really don't want to be involved with the rest of it, I guess we could probably go."
One nice, long session in the hot tub later, Loki said, "If we stay, and succeed, we'll be hailed as heroes."
"And if we die, we'll be dead," Bucky said, pretty sure this was a test from the way Loki was looking at him all sideways. "But sure, I guess. Whatever you want to do."
Loki muttered something that sounded like, "If I knew, I wouldn't have to ask you."
Bucky would never be sure if he'd heard that right or not. Either way, it was a pretty weird thought to end a pretty weird day on. Seemed about right.