[ He crams his hands into his pockets and tries not to feel like admitting that is a big deal, even though it sort of is. He has to imagine Steve's probably figured it out, but he hasn't asked Bucky what's missing. No one else really asks, either. ]
[ Huh. He's heard a fair bit about how he supposed to be from Brooklyn, where he did live for a while, but only in the twenty-first century. ]
Uh-huh. The most underpaid private in the whole operation, by my reckoning. [ Not that he's complained in about seventy years. He probably did enough complaining back in the day to make up for it. It's— something, remembering the kid he was then. ] What happens when most of your work is off the books, I guess.
[ Bucky nods. It's interesting information. It seems like they've got pretty different stories where it counts. Guy's not even from Brooklyn and the differences don't stop there. ]
Mine wasn't. I was just a regular Sergeant until after I was taken prisoner.
HYDRA had me for a little while before Steve busted in to save the day. After that, I was fighting with him and the Howlies.
[ They're getting into the territory of things he Doesn't Talk About. Even during the rest of the war, he'd clamped down on it and buried it and never really told Steve much about what had happened, but it seems necessary to compare notes now, so he pushes on. ]
They did something to me, though. Trying to replicate Steve's serum or something. It's probably how I survived everything.
[ His eyes narrow. HYDRA as he understood it didn't exist during the war, though there were tendrils that went way back. And, well, it'd probably be easier to compare notes on the Howling Commandos— is there a Dum Dum in this Bucky's world?— but the stuff about the serum distractions. ]
They've tried that a couple times. During the Cold War. [ He remembers the psycho fifties Cap he fought off a few times. He'd tried to duplicate the formula on himself. ] There were the prison experiments— [ the disgust in his tone is evident ] and then SHIELD ran a couple trials, but the Russians did too. None of it ever turned out good.
[ And he might as well admit this: ]
And none of it ever applied to me. [ There's no good reason for him to have survived everything. ]
I mean— [ He reaches his arm backward and above, like he's got an awkward itch, or a crick in his neck. ] Not everyone knew that. The serum was just a rumor, back then, even to our allies. And I was with the Invaders, Captain America's partner, so… [ The rest of the Invaders definitely had powers, obvious, showy powers. ] They made some assumptions.
[ He doesn't clarify who the "they" is he's talking about, but it's not a deliberate obfuscation, just the normal confusion of turning memories into words. ]
Okay. 'Bout what? 'Cause so far it sounds like all we got in common is a name and Steve.
[ And Bucky isn't sure why, because a few differences had set him at ease, like the other many couldn't get into his head, but now he really is starting to feel like he's spilling his guts to a stranger here and it's making his skin itch. ]
Maybe this.
[ He tries to poke at the other man's left arm to test it. ]
[ Poking his arm doesn't do much. It's an arm— it feels like a real arm, even. ]
The Russians recovered my body, after the explosion where I lost my arm.
[ This is another beginning, maybe. And he takes his arm back and holds it up, twisting some unknown internal mechanism that makes the fake skin fade away and the metal shown through. ]
They thought they might be able to get the serum from my blood.
[ He touches the arm again. It's definitely more advanced than what he has and that's saying something, because Bucky has a fully functioning metal arm. At least things are lining up again. ]
They found me after I fell from a train. Steve thought I was dead, so no one from our side ever came back for my body. No one should've survived it. Pretty sure that's how I lost my arm, but my memories are pretty fuzzy, uh, in general. My arm doesn't do that, though. Would've been really useful if it did.
I don't remember losing my arm, either. [ Though, he does remember the rest of it. And is a little concerned by all this fuzzy-memory talk. But it isn't like him to press— he's had enough of interrogation for one lifetime. ]
This one's a couple upgrades in. The Warsaw pact tech was a bit less impressive.
[ Bucky glances down at his own metal hand. He thinks he might remember getting it, but it's not a pleasant bit of memory and it's not something he wants to dwell on. ]
If mine's been upgraded, no one bothered to tell me about it. Last couple of years, I didn't have access to much and HYDRA had me before that, so...
[ He shrugs. ]
I should probably warn you that there's someone from HYDRA here who tried baiting me. They know what I am. Can't promise they won't come after you.
[ Which is true. He has no idea who sent him those messages, but they put him on an edge he hasn't come down from. If they know how to activate his programming, it's only a matter of time before Bucky's forced to do something he doesn't want to do. ]
Most people think I'm in my 30s. I let them keep thinking that. You tell people you served in the army, they don't probe you for your history too much.
Nah, I mean, everything— the whole story. [ It was national news. The "trial of Captain America." ] You're right, though, not many people here from my world, and the ones that are... I trust them. [ Kate and Natasha are people he's worked with before. ]
But my head's fine. Probably hit it a few too many times, but other than that.
[ He raises an eyebrow. Is this a question he oughta be asking? ]
I'm not worried. [ He hopes this is a show of trust, or some strange kind of self-belief.
Not that he's had much of that in the past few years. ]
And… [ He turns his head, eyes following a few cracks in the wall. ] I got all of that taken care of, a while back. [ And he'd sort of assumed the same, because obviously the man sitting in front of him remembered some parts of who he was, really. Knew Steve, knew what he stood for. ] I wish I could tell you I could do it again. [ He exhales like he's pulling off a scab. ] Or that it was worth the price.
[ But he'll tell the story, if that's what Bucky wants. ]
[ Bucky's really only capable of conditional trust with most people these days and this is no different, but the conditions aren't bad and Bucky's more comfortable sharing with this odd version of himself than he'd be with many others. His association to Steve really doesn't hurt, either. ]
Wouldn't mind a lead on how to get that shit out of my head. If the wrong guy gets control of me, there's not much I can do about it.
[ Not that Bucky isn't stoppable, but they can't know what sort of kill orders he might carry out before he is stopped. ]
The last mission I had [ and the way he says this makes it clear that he means the last mission he had as the Winter Soldier, not the most recent thing that happened to him ] I was delivering the Cosmic Cube to an underground bunker.
That thing— [ the Tesseract in universe 199999, but Bucky doesn't know that ] it lets you rewrite reality, but it's cursed, it always takes a price. A lotta people had to die just to put it together.
[ He shifts uncomfortably. He doesn't say, "I had to kill a lot of people just to put it together," but maybe he should've. ]
Anyway, Steve [ his Steve ] got his hands on the Cube and used it to try and bring his friend back. He held it, and looked at me, and said, "Remember who you are." So I did. All of it.
[ That was the price. He couldn't look at Steve for months after, and then… Well. Steve didn't get his friend back. ]
I got SHIELD to fish out the old codewords when I figured out they were there.
You sure about that? Where I'm from, HYDRA was practically running SHIELD from the inside. It's gone now. SHIELD.
[ Not that Bucky's paranoid or anything, but he doesn't trust what's left of SHIELD any more than anyone else who's been that closely tied with HYDRA, whether they'd been aware of it or not.
The rest of the story, though? It's such a Steve fucking Rogers thing to do. He can picture his own Steve doing the exact same thing if given half the chance. ]
About this? Yeah, I am. I used to be a SHIELD agent.
[ But the way he says that makes it clear that he doesn't trust SHIELD blindly or completely. He's not surprised that it went that far off the rails in his counterpart's world. It's been pretty touch and go in his. ]
[ He wants to ask about how the trigger words were removed, but it won't help if they don't have the same resources here. At this point, all Bucky can do is hope that no one here has ever had access to those words. It's not ideal. ]
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[ He crams his hands into his pockets and tries not to feel like admitting that is a big deal, even though it sort of is. He has to imagine Steve's probably figured it out, but he hasn't asked Bucky what's missing. No one else really asks, either. ]
Start with the big stuff. You serve in the War?
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Uh-huh. The most underpaid private in the whole operation, by my reckoning. [ Not that he's complained in about seventy years. He probably did enough complaining back in the day to make up for it. It's— something, remembering the kid he was then. ] What happens when most of your work is off the books, I guess.
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Mine wasn't. I was just a regular Sergeant until after I was taken prisoner.
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Taken prisoner?
[ Now, during the war, he'd been captured a time or two, like all the Invaders. But that sounded like something bigger. ]
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[ They're getting into the territory of things he Doesn't Talk About. Even during the rest of the war, he'd clamped down on it and buried it and never really told Steve much about what had happened, but it seems necessary to compare notes now, so he pushes on. ]
They did something to me, though. Trying to replicate Steve's serum or something. It's probably how I survived everything.
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They've tried that a couple times. During the Cold War. [ He remembers the psycho fifties Cap he fought off a few times. He'd tried to duplicate the formula on himself. ] There were the prison experiments— [ the disgust in his tone is evident ] and then SHIELD ran a couple trials, but the Russians did too. None of it ever turned out good.
[ And he might as well admit this: ]
And none of it ever applied to me. [ There's no good reason for him to have survived everything. ]
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[ It seems like a fair question. If Bucky's going to dig up his dirty laundry, he doesn't want to be alone with it. ]
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[ He doesn't clarify who the "they" is he's talking about, but it's not a deliberate obfuscation, just the normal confusion of turning memories into words. ]
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[ And Bucky isn't sure why, because a few differences had set him at ease, like the other many couldn't get into his head, but now he really is starting to feel like he's spilling his guts to a stranger here and it's making his skin itch. ]
Maybe this.
[ He tries to poke at the other man's left arm to test it. ]
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The Russians recovered my body, after the explosion where I lost my arm.
[ This is another beginning, maybe. And he takes his arm back and holds it up, twisting some unknown internal mechanism that makes the fake skin fade away and the metal shown through. ]
They thought they might be able to get the serum from my blood.
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[ He touches the arm again. It's definitely more advanced than what he has and that's saying something, because Bucky has a fully functioning metal arm. At least things are lining up again. ]
They found me after I fell from a train. Steve thought I was dead, so no one from our side ever came back for my body. No one should've survived it. Pretty sure that's how I lost my arm, but my memories are pretty fuzzy, uh, in general. My arm doesn't do that, though. Would've been really useful if it did.
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This one's a couple upgrades in. The Warsaw pact tech was a bit less impressive.
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If mine's been upgraded, no one bothered to tell me about it. Last couple of years, I didn't have access to much and HYDRA had me before that, so...
[ He shrugs. ]
I should probably warn you that there's someone from HYDRA here who tried baiting me. They know what I am. Can't promise they won't come after you.
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[ Maybe it's a name he'll recognize. And if it's not— well, that'll be helpful too. ]
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[ Which is true. He has no idea who sent him those messages, but they put him on an edge he hasn't come down from. If they know how to activate his programming, it's only a matter of time before Bucky's forced to do something he doesn't want to do. ]
Most people think I'm in my 30s. I let them keep thinking that. You tell people you served in the army, they don't probe you for your history too much.
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You should know, I guess, that I blew my cover back home. All my covers.
[ He doesn't think that would come back here, but you never know. ]
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[ His "cover" as a drifter might have been more that he was living like a drifter, though. It didn't exactly have a quality paper trail. ]
Not a lot of people here from my version of Earth from what I can tell. Probably not a whole lot from yours, either, so it might not matter.
How's your head?
[ The blunt question might be necessary. If there's anyone he's not going to bullshit, it's some bizarro version of himself. ]
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But my head's fine. Probably hit it a few too many times, but other than that.
[ He raises an eyebrow. Is this a question he oughta be asking? ]
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Much as he'd like to ignore that eyebrow, though, he really can't get around it. ]
I've got some programming issues.
[ He tips his head to indicate it. ]
I might not be the safest guy to be around, strictly speaking, but I have a feeling you can handle yourself just fine.
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Not that he's had much of that in the past few years. ]
And… [ He turns his head, eyes following a few cracks in the wall. ] I got all of that taken care of, a while back. [ And he'd sort of assumed the same, because obviously the man sitting in front of him remembered some parts of who he was, really. Knew Steve, knew what he stood for. ] I wish I could tell you I could do it again. [ He exhales like he's pulling off a scab. ] Or that it was worth the price.
[ But he'll tell the story, if that's what Bucky wants. ]
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Wouldn't mind a lead on how to get that shit out of my head. If the wrong guy gets control of me, there's not much I can do about it.
[ Not that Bucky isn't stoppable, but they can't know what sort of kill orders he might carry out before he is stopped. ]
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That thing— [ the Tesseract in universe 199999, but Bucky doesn't know that ] it lets you rewrite reality, but it's cursed, it always takes a price. A lotta people had to die just to put it together.
[ He shifts uncomfortably. He doesn't say, "I had to kill a lot of people just to put it together," but maybe he should've. ]
Anyway, Steve [ his Steve ] got his hands on the Cube and used it to try and bring his friend back. He held it, and looked at me, and said, "Remember who you are." So I did. All of it.
[ That was the price. He couldn't look at Steve for months after, and then… Well. Steve didn't get his friend back. ]
I got SHIELD to fish out the old codewords when I figured out they were there.
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[ Not that Bucky's paranoid or anything, but he doesn't trust what's left of SHIELD any more than anyone else who's been that closely tied with HYDRA, whether they'd been aware of it or not.
The rest of the story, though? It's such a Steve fucking Rogers thing to do. He can picture his own Steve doing the exact same thing if given half the chance. ]
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[ But the way he says that makes it clear that he doesn't trust SHIELD blindly or completely. He's not surprised that it went that far off the rails in his counterpart's world. It's been pretty touch and go in his. ]
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[ He wants to ask about how the trigger words were removed, but it won't help if they don't have the same resources here. At this point, all Bucky can do is hope that no one here has ever had access to those words. It's not ideal. ]
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