He carelessly takes another corner and plants a foot on a fallen scrap of paper. It slides beneath him, sending him pitching forward. Steve tries to twist so he lands properly, on his back, but firm hands catch his shoulders before he hits the ground. Breathless, Steve looks at the face across from his.

"Bucky," he breathes.

"Steve," Bucky responds, voice cracking.

Steve reaches a hand to Bucky's face, drawing back slightly at the resulting flinch, then stroking a cheek. The skin under his hand is cool and rough, with a few patches of smooth scar tissue, and the prickles of Bucky's stubble. His hand ghosts toward an ear, carefully tucking back a small lock of dark hair. Steve gazes into starless eyes and steps a little closer. Something warm blossoms in his chest. Bucky remains perfectly still, eyes following Steve's movements. Steve finds his vision blurring as he leans in, hands searching...

An indistinct voice comes from behind him, making Bucky's gaze snap to whatever is behind Steve's shoulder. There's less than a heartbeat before Bucky disappears from beneath Steve's touch, running through a doorway and into another featureless hallway. Steve stares after him, entire body numb, fingers still curled like he's touching Bucky's face. He doesn't know whether to smile or cry.

"Jesus Christ, I didn't know you'd go to bat for the guy who killed my parents because he used to be your boyfriend!"

In that moment, Tony Stark realizes he has made a mistake. He does not realize that the mistake he thinks he made is the same mistake he actually made.

Raised on the same glorified version of Steve Rogers, Captain America, the presentation with all of those rough edges sanded out.

He feels as though he's underwater, under ice, buried underneath the weight of his own bones and sins. He can neither breathe nor move. His body is like a machine built around him, breathing on its own, utterly still.

Thoughts are... slow and distant, memories even more so. All there is to feel is the cold.

Endless miles of untouched snow, a perfectly flat layer of white reflecting a distant sun.

He's in the cryo chamber, he concludes, he must be. But— no, he can't feel the walls around him. Besides, surfacing in cryo would be an anomaly. Those long, dreamless sleeps held nothing for him over the decades.

Shadows gather and cling to a figure sitting on a bare mattress, hunched over a notebook they hurriedly scribble in. A pile of similar spiral-bound notebooks exists to their left. Broken pens litter the floor. Their hand shakes as they write in dense, dark text that reads like a very intricate code. This pen snaps and they toss it away, reaching to grab a new one from the box to their side and coming up empty.

"Oh, come on," they say, voice echoing in the vacant room.

They stand up and leave their notebook on the mattress, walking away from it while twisting a lock of hair around their finger, over and over again. They walk from vacant room to vacant room, through busted doorframes and past shattered windows. The rust on the metal is so pervasive it appears as though every surface is rusty. The only light comes from a red emergency light in the hallway just past their makeshift room. It occasionally glints against a visible shred of metal plating polished by wear. They end up pacing in circles through a few connected rooms.

They begin to chew at the nails on their shaking right hand. Shadows cling to them—or, more specifically, it's almost as though light *avoids* them, their scars in particular giving off a faint anti-glow. It's hard to tell what's real and what's not. What's ghosts and what's dust, what *they* told them and what *they* had tried to take away. This repeats until exactly twenty-two hundred hours, at which point they all but fall on the old mattress. Just like they were taught, they fall into a dreamless sleep.

"You look like you've seen a ghost."

Steve stops in his tracks and blinks. "What." He looks pointedly past the shadow-clung figure because he can't look at that face without...

"You," says the person/weapon/*thing* that may or may not be Bucky says, "look like you've seen a ghost."

"Seventy years." Steve's voice cracks as he says it. "People thought you've been dead for seventy years and that's the first thing you say to me?"

He shakes his head. "I thought the first thing I said to you was something along the lines of 'fuck you,' only in Russian." And with more steel and blood in his voice, Steve silently adds.

"N-no, that wasn't you."

He shrugs. "My memory isn't really the best," he says, pointing toward stacks of spiral-bound notebooks piled in the corner, as though that were a completely normal thing.

"Do... do you remember that night?" Tony asks, uncharacteristically reserved.

"I remember them all," says Bucky gravely.

"Tell me." It's a firm statement, not a question, delivered in a voice only shaking a little.

Bucky looks at him-- actually looks at Tony, for the first time, instead of through him—with an almost-funny expression on his face. It's slightly reminiscent of his patented "Steve, what the fuck" look. "You want to know?"

"Humor me," says Tony.

"It was a warm night." Thinking about it takes him back to the drop-off point: the all-encompassing black sky, the crunch of dirt under his boots, the weight of his arm at his side. It wasn't hot—not like Dallas, where Bucky can still feel the sweat drip down his neck from his rooftop post—but it was unseasonably warm. "They were coming back from, from a gala, I think."

"The Coleman Charity Auction," Tony mutters under his breath.

"Yeah. They were coming back from the auction, their car was— it was a black sedan. License plate New York 17NCXB— no, it was 17NXCB." Bucky breathes in the humid night air. "I followed them by motorcycle for three-eighths of a mile before I shot the right sideview mirror."

"From the motorcycle," Tony clarifies.

"Sure," Bucky says with a shrug. "Wasn't the hardest target they made me shoot." That would be Steve. "They pulled over by the dirt, on the left side of the road. I followed them. The driver didn't even stand a chance." He isn't unaware of the cold, hard edge to his voice. "Shot him in the head. Then I pulled Stark— your father— out of the left hand back seat. He recognized me." Bucky can't help but see Howard in Tony's face, now, wearing the same look of confusion and despair that Howard died with. "I didn't— it wasn't like with Steve. I remembered him later, and they... hurt me for that." He winces.

"And my mom?"

"I knocked Stark out cold with my gun before I shot him," Bucky says very softly. "Left him there. His wife— your mother was still in the car. She was— she was terrified." He can still see the moonlight reflect off the messy tears streaking down what was usually a pretty face, the running mascara and the red eyes. "She called me a monster," he adds. She'd screwed up her eyes and waited. "She told me to hurry up with it while I pulled out my knife. Then, I—"

"You slit her throat," Tony fills in.

"Yeah," Bucky admits, shoulders falling. "Low enough to sever her vocal chords, so she couldn't scream." The expression on her face, eyes closed and twitching and mouth open in a silent scream, covers his vision. Bucky has to close his eyes. He pinches the bridge of his nose. The scar tissue under his left arm throbs. "And then I left."

Tony coughs and Bucky finally looks at him again. Even he can see the red, wet edges of Tony's eyes. Bucky's face is empty and pale as a ghost. He's almost entirely checked out of reality.

"Later," Bucky eventually adds, "later, I said, 'that man knew me.' And they said, 'yes.' I asked them how and they said, 'because he was on the side of our enemies.' I said that I think I knew him and he hit me across the face." His voice is placid and flat still. "Hit me again on the other side. Almost gave me a black eye. I don't remember much after that."

"Yeah, well—"

"They iced me. Next time they woke me up, my arm was different. Lighter." Bucky looks everywhere but at Tony. "They'd made a shell company to contract with Stark Industries, commissioned custom weapons, explosives— mainly for me."