Every movement, every shift, is noted … the man is carefully observed, with the precision of a hawk as he rummages through his bag for an old tape recorder. The symptomatic aftermath of being hunted, never fully trusting when someone so wordlessly reaches for anything. The tension set in his jaw half subsides soon thereafter, even if he’s still perched on the edge of his seat. ( 𝙷𝙴’𝚂 𝙹𝚄𝚂𝚃 𝙰 𝙻𝙰𝚆𝚈𝙴𝚁, 𝙱𝙰𝚁𝙽𝙴𝚂. )
That was the funny thing, about being paranoid. The belief that anything and everyone was out to get you, that there were so few souls that you could really trust … for most, it stemmed from nowhere. The sign of a deeper, far more internalized problem. For Bucky … it came from experience. Not even the government he had fought for ( 𝙳𝙸𝙴𝙳 𝙵𝙾𝚁 ) could be trusted, let alone the man sent to represent him who claimed to uphold the ideals of a court and country that had never cared whether he lived or died. He didn’t feel protected. He felt antagonized, stripped bare, thrown to the wolves without defenses. He felt vulnerable, sitting here. Bound in chains, one-armed, swathed in the vibrant oranges that labelled him a criminal. Sat across from a man who, evidently, still believed there was some hope that Bucky could ever really be free.
❛ What, you think I’d blow up an entire building if I didn’t have proof? ❜ Sure, he might have been a bit rough around the edges, with more than a few screws missing, but it wasn’t that bad.
ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ( 𝙽𝙾𝚃 𝚈𝙴𝚃, 𝙰𝙽𝚈𝚆𝙰𝚈. )
❛ ... Do you know what happened, after the war? They called it Operation Paperclip. The United States recruited hundreds of scientists from the Nazi party so that they could get their hands on all that fancy German tech and defeat the Soviets during the Cold War. We gave our supposed enemies jobs and positions of power instead of consequences because they wanted to share ideas. ❜
But it hadn’t ended there. It never did. This incident was not an isolated one. Men were easy to kill, this much he knew. They were human, made of flesh and blood with hearts that ceased to beat when you put a bullet through it. However, it was damn near impossible to kill an idea … to stamp out the endless greed and yearning for control that had poisoned so many since the dawn of time. The Cold War had ended, not with a bang, but with a whimper … beneath the ashes and metaphorical rubble, something else had grown. Impenetrable and sickening. He’d played his part in it, against his will or not.
❛ They funneled a hell of a lot of money into those programs to build those weapons, you think all that ended just because Gorbachev collapsed a wall? No. Even after the USSR fell, I was still getting passed around between operators who wanted to pursue their own agendas. We had contacts and allies here in America. They’re still out there, they’re spreading, and they’ve got a paper trail. ❜
He had his own list of names … fragments of things, names, half remembered. Unraveling that thread had led him down a path he couldn’t ignore, but whether or not he could share that just yet ... well, that was to be determined.
