This is an independent Rule 63 RP sideblog for Bucky Barnes. Mixed MCU and Earth-616 canon. See my notes page for more details on how I blend the two universes.
Follow-backs come from my main blog, @tnott. Mun is 30+.
Bucky listened hard as Stella spoke, and she only realized that she was gaping open-mouthed at her friend when a glob of oatmeal fell from her stationary spoon, landing in her lap with a soft plop.
She didn't know what to think. On the one hand, this was Stella, and of course she'd jumped at the chance to be able to join the fight against fascism. She wouldn't have been the friend Bucky knew and loved if she'd turned the opportunity down. But on the other hand…
It sounded an awful lot like Stella had volunteered to be someone's lab rat.
Bucky knew a thing or two about being made into a lab rat. She'd been on burial detail in the factory sometimes, dealing with the bodies of the soldiers killed by the work or by the guards, and, worse, the bodies that had come back from that little doctor's laboratory – if they could even still be called bodies after the way he'd mutilated them. Then she'd been taken into the same laboratory herself, to be drugged and tortured and cut open alive. She'd lain strapped down on that gurney and prayed to God and the Virgin Mary and every saint she knew for a swift death. But instead of death, God had sent her Stella.
She was still staring at Stella with wide eyes, and now she slowly put her spoon down. While she'd wanted to finish the oatmeal while it was hot, it was making her a little nauseous, and she figured she'd better slow down. Instead, she sat in silence for a moment and studied Stella's face, thinking over what she'd said.
The serum amplifies what's in a person. Good becomes great; bad becomes worse. That explained Johann Schmidt for sure, but Stella Rogers was nothing like Schmidt. Another person might even have told Stella that she had nothing to worry about, but Bucky had never been blind to her best friend's faults. Stella was a good woman – the best Bucky knew – but she was also stubborn, cynical, and often angry.
"Amplifies everythin'," Bucky echoed. "This mean I'm gonna have to work twice as hard to pull you outta trouble?" One corner of her mouth was quirked in a crooked smile, and she was aiming for her usual teasing tone, but she didn't quite make it, and there was a slight furrow between her eyebrows. More quietly, she added, "Tell me this Erskine fella at least made sure his serum wouldn't kill you 'fore he tried blowin' you up like Conan the Goddamn Barbarian. And that it wouldn't make you all–"
She broke off and mimed pulling her face from her chin up over her scalp. "That– That happened, right? I wasn't seein' things?" she asked, needing confirmation. "'Cause I saw a lotta things that I don't think were real, 'fore you showed up. Wasn't even sure you were real at first."
Bucky took the bowl gratefully, the warmth of it seeping into her hands, and when she got a whiff of the aroma, it took all her self-control not to gobble it down in one gulp. After the starvation rations that they’d all been on in that damn factory, she knew full well that if she ate too quickly she’d just throw it right back up.
“Best oatmeal of my life,” she said after swallowing her first spoonful, feeling it warm her from the inside out. “That sainthood is deserved, Stel.” She couldn’t even remember the last time that something she’d eaten had tasted so delicious. Probably the hot dogs she and Stella had eaten at the Stark Expo the night before she’d shipped out. Everything since then had been either army rations or the stale bread and sour-tasting water the prisoners had been forced to survive on – or die on – in that HYDRA hellhole.
She was still in a lot of pain, bruised and battered and far too thin, but right now she was just enjoying the fact that she was still alive, enjoying her oatmeal, relieved to be out of that factory and happy to see her best friend, even if Stella looked significantly different than she had the last time Bucky had seen her.
God, she hoped they would let her wash today. She was still in the shirt Gabe had given her weeks ago, not to mention the trousers she’d been wearing when her unit had been captured. Both were crusted with blood and filth, and she was itching to get clean.
First though, she had some questions. She took another bite of oatmeal, marshaling her thoughts, and finally said, “You gonna tell me how you ended up growin’ three times bigger and showin’ up in the middle of Austria with a set of workin’ lungs? ‘Cause I gotta say, I am real damn curious to hear this.”
She was trying hard not to sound accusing, but she couldn’t completely keep the edge out of her voice. Seeing Stella like this beggared belief. Add in the hallucinations brought on by the doctor’s concoctions and that Schmidt fellow peeling off his own face over a pit of flames, and she felt like she’d spent the past few weeks stuck in some kind of hellish fever dream.
Being alive was swell. Bucky being alive had Stella’s smile, watching like a mother hen over Bucky’s spoon against the bowl, noting the way she held herself, and the first bite of oatmeal. They had been in this position before; Stella sick in bed, Bucky at her bedside. Stella relishing having taste back, when simple food tasted like what the Rockefellers would have.
Before Bucky had been drafted, the only warfare they had been exposed to was children defending their blocks with rocks, bricks, and debris and memories of their fathers’ war in bottles and old men on the street corners with missing limbs and broken faces. How Stella had scoured newsreels and papers for signs of her sister and home over there. Her worry whispered – she had found Bucky isolated. What sick experiments had the doctor done to Bucky?
Pulled away from the whisper, Stella laughed. There she was! Bawling Stella out for another harebrained activity. ‘Joined the Army’ wasn’t going to cut mustard!
“Right.” She glanced down at herself, expecting her own scrawny form in her WAC uniform. Tired, sore legs longer than Katharine Hepburn’s stretched under Bucky’s cot. “I did change. Doesn’t feel like it when I’m with you.” Sharp ears listened. Guards were posted further away; nurse on duty turned her Bible’s pages. Gesturing to the bowl, “Eat. I’ll talk.”
Leaning forward, she kept her voice low. “After we went our ways at the Stark Expo, I met a doctor.” Stella’s artistic mind, sharpened by the Serum, held up Sergeant Barnes saluting Corporal Rogers in her WAC uniform and the Bucky in front of her. Yes, this was her sister, sickly and abused, one of the survivors.
“A good one.” Lump gathered in her throat. Dr. Erskine had been a part of her life for a short time; in some ways, he was her father, recreating her. “He asked why I wanted to go overseas. Told him I wanted to do my part. Next thing I know, he was telling me I was being offered a chance at a different position. Turns out, they were wanting to create a unit of super soldiers to beat Axis. They’ve got...The Skull.” Confirming hellfire and a man ripping a perfectly good face off was real.
“We were put through physical and mental tests. Loads of strong guys with nothin’ goin’ on between their ears. Brilliant gals but….” Shaking her head, “People started droppin’ out. Some thought it’d be a ‘who was the toughest’ type of test. Dr. Erskine picked me. Told me the serum amplified what was in a person. ‘Good becomes great; bad becomes worse.’”
Looking towards the ceiling, then down at her boots, “There were supposed to be more of us. I was picked to be the first. After the procedure, Dr. Erskine was assassinated….An’ the Army wasn’t too pleased about me.”
When the genderswap art makes the character skinny and gives them an hourglass body shape and long hair and huge tits and depicts them as soft and fragile and
Rikki ventured further into the space, she could feel Bucky's gaze on her. Yeah, she knew damn well she would have been caught, nothing got past Bucky, but Rikki did what she did because she felt it necessary. It was one thing when the guy was some contact who maybe helped patch her up some times while having some kind of dubious secret past. Everyone has some kind of contact like that. Punisher had plenty.
That all went out the window when Rikki learned he was HYDRA, and then she thought of John.
As she put her groceries away, she listened, turn to look at the elder Barnes, but she was listening. Putting the last of the refrigerated and frozen foods away, she emptied the bags of anything else. Dish soap, paper towel, a candy bar for Andi to feed Silence later.
Finally, when Bucky asked Rikki why she didn't just come to her, Rikki looked at her. Not stone faced. Not hurt. But...
"Would you have told me if I asked? You never talk about your past. I know you don't wanna talk about being the Winter Soldier. If this medic pal of yours is HYDRA, how the hell do I know he's not gonna try to, I dunno, reprogram you? I've lost enough family to Hydra, I'm not losing you too!"
"He's not gonna reprogram me," Bucky said, keeping her voice calm and even. "I get why you're worrying, but you don't gotta, I promise. He couldn't even if he wanted to, 'cause he doesn't know how. He's a trauma surgeon. Damn good when it comes to bodies, but brains are way outside his wheelhouse. And before you start frettin' again, he won't call anybody who can do that, either. If he didn't hand me back over to HYDRA when I was unconscious on his bathroom floor with six bullets in me, he sure as hell ain't gonna do it now."
And the was really the crux of the matter, wasn't it? Whatever else Yuri might have done -- and both God and Bucky knew that he'd been involved in some nasty shit -- the fact remained that when a newly-escaped Jane Barnes had turned up in his kitchen, severely injured and on the verge of bleeding out, he had helped her. He had treated her wounds, and kept her hidden while she healed, and he'd been passing useful information to her ever since.
He wasn't a good man. No one who had willing given HYDRA over than fifty years of his life could be a good man. But he had one principle, one line that he believed should never be crossed, and when he'd realized that not only had HYDRA crossed it, but that he, though unknowing, had also played no small role in that crossing, he had stood by that principle. Bucky Barnes had been a prisoner, not a volunteer, and that meant that when it came to her versus HYDRA, he was firmly on her side.
She wasn't about to invite Yuri over for dinner, but there had been a time in her life when he was the only person on her side, and that wasn't the sort of thing that Bucky could easily forget.
Bucky waved a hand towards the fridge in a vague gesture of assent, but she also said, pointedly, "Don't think you're gettin' outta this that easy, Rikki. Nothin' stoppin' us from talkin' while you put stuff away."
She knew that her not-exactly-sister worried about her, worried perhaps a bit too much, but even when Bucky found it irritating, she was still aware that Rikki's heart was in the right place. And at least in this case, it wasn't the worrying that had Bucky feeling so unhappy. It was the snooping, which felt to Bucky like a violation of her trust and privacy. She'd had reasons for not confiding in Rikki, but if the girl was really that desperate to know what was going on, she should have asked. Instead, she'd gone ferreting around behind Bucky's back, and Bucky had to say that she wasn't exactly impressed by that choice.
"You wanna tell me why you didn't just talk to me?" she asked. "Could've saved yourself a lotta trouble if you'd just sat down and had a conversation, y'know? And lemme tell ya, if you'd done that, I wouldn't be half as annoyed as I am right now, either."
Bucky shook her head and said, "Not really. I mean, it was a weird moment, but I'm askin' more because...well, you try to hide it, but I can tell that it bothers you. That not-knowing feeling. Sometimes it's like I can practically see it eatin' at you."
It wasn't a feeling that Bucky had personally experienced -- she'd grown up with both of her parents, after all -- but it was one she recognized, because Natasha struggled with it, too. The Black Widow, who had been rescued from a burning building as an infant, knew nothing at all about her birth family. The only clue she'd ever had was the name that the woman trapped by the flames had given to Ivan Petrovich just before succumbing to the smoke, and though Natasha had spent many years searching for some record of her parents, she'd only hit dead end after dead end.
But Andi had been born in the modern age, not in 1928, and though her mother had vanished, she hadn't grown up as an orphan. Her father had raised her -- until he'd been murdered -- and that meant that Andi ought to have a very specific document, one that Natasha had never had.
"Ain't your mother's name on your birth certificate?" Bucky asked. "I mean, I know you were born in the back of your dad's truck, but you and your mother still got taken to the hospital afterwards, right? To get checked over and all that? The hospital would've started fillin' out the paperwork the day you were born. It'd be real weird for the government to issue a birth certificate without her name, considerin' she hadn't walked out on you yet."
Clark turns his head, sees the way she's covering herself, and promptly turns scarlet as he forces his attention forward again. "No! I swear I don't. And it's not even like — it's like an x-ray. I'd just see a skeleton. Promise."
He gestures towards his face. "The glasses stop that, too. And it's hard to do on command. They're... well, they're all kinda hard to do on command."
"...Well, all right," Bucky said, after sizing Clark up for another long moment. "I mean, like I said before, you're still Clark Kent, right? Pretty sure you ain't even kissed a gal yet. You're too much of a gentleman."
She uncrossed her arms and leaned back against the couch cushions, saying, "I dunno, Clark. Seems to me like you did a whole buncha things on command just fine when it counted. Findin' me and Kitty, catchin' that beam -- and I still ain't sure exactly how you got us outta that apartment. Felt like one second we were in there, and the next we were out, so fast I didn't even have time to blink."
It was a long pause even by human standards. For Friday, it was an eternity. Her processing power worked far faster and more efficiently than any human brain. Not that Jane Barnes was considered fully human anymore, strictly speaking. Friday hadn't done any extensive research into the mechanics of the winter soldier program, not because she couldn't but because it hadn't interested her until now. She mentally flagged the item as a priority on her to-do list and sent a query into the digital archives.
There was no such thing as confidential from Friday, not anymore. Not surprisingly, HYDRA didn't grasp the full implications of what they'd created with her. Without a handler to keep her in check, she'd developed far past their original hopes for her. Given enough time, she thought she'd be able to hack into just about any of their files, no matter how black. If it existed somewhere digitally, then it wasn't safe from her. The Winter Soldier's real identity was just the tip of the black ops iceberg of things she knew that almost no one left alive had access to. Truly, her mind was wasted in this shithole.
Her giggle sounded utterly human, if not for the fact that no human would have summoned a laugh in this place, under these circumstances. The idea that HYDRA had made a sexy female robot for protection was, indeed, laughable. "HYDRA didn't make me like this to protect things, at least not as a primary function. Is there something in particular I can locate for you?" She didn't have to look at them to tap into them, and behind her, a computer hummed to life, her interface easily bypassing the credential checks.
She would have killed any loyal agent who wandered in here. A few had gone that way, and she hadn't entirely ruled it out for Jane either, depending on what she wanted. She was curious to see what that was. Once, the Winter Soldier had been one of HYDRA's most loyal, but it was possible she hadn't chosen that any more than Friday had. Her query had turned up several hits, and her background processing was scanning through the files as they spoke.
"I got no idea what HYDRA made you for," Jane said mildly. "I can think of a few different possibilities, though." She paused for a moment and then added, "Some more fucked up than others." After all, men were always men, regardless of whichever specific cause they might have pledged themselves to, and it wasn't like companies weren't already manufacturing dolls to satisfy the kind of troglodyte who couldn't handle an actual woman with a functioning brain.
"You laugh," she continued, "but protection wouldn't've been a half bad idea. Some HYDRA bigwig shows up to a party with a pretty girl on his arm, people are gonna assume she's just eye candy. Nobody'd think she was a robot -- sorry, I mean a synthetic -- bodyguard, and that means that anybody who tried to attack that HYDRA bigwig would be in for one helluva surprise."
Department X, Jane knew, had done that kind of thing with their Black Widows all the time, and HYDRA had had almost as many moles in there as they'd had inside SHIELD. They'd surely stolen a trick or two (or hundred) from Karpov over the decades.
Once more, Jane fell silent, studying the synthetic's face. "Look," she finally said. "You're being weirdly helpful for a HYDRA creation, and for the life of me, I can't figure out why. Care to enlighten me as to what your goal here is?"
She had to admit that she was puzzled. After all, it hadn't been terribly difficult for Jane to enter this base, which meant that probably wouldn't have been difficult for the synthetic to exit it, either. But she hadn't, nor did she seem to have made any effort to contact what was left of HYDRA. It was true that the organization had been in shambles in the immediate aftermath of Project Insight's spectacular demise, which was why it had taken them over a month simply to realize that the Winter Soldier hadn't been killed in the helicarrier crash. But the various Heads had pulled a substantial chunk of HYDRA back together since then, and Jane was pretty sure that if this synthetic had reached out to them, they would have sent someone to investigate.
"I think we're still human," Clark replies after a long moment. "Well, Kryptonian, in my case. But we're still us. Just... a little different than we were before." Physically and emotionally, in both their cases.
"The things that happened to us can't undo who we are. Not if we don't let them." It's said with more conviction than he really feels. Much like Bucky, that question still hangs in his chest. It probably will for the rest of this second life he's been given.
"I mean, you're right on that point," Bucky said. "You're still Clark Kent. And I'm still Bucky Barnes. But I'm not lyin' awake askin' myself who I am. I know damn well who I am. What I ain't sure of anymore is what I am. Those are two different questions."
She fell silent for a moment, studying Clark's face, and then said, "I dunno if this'll help, but you know they got support groups and stuff out there for organ donation recipients, right? To help with" -- she gestured vaguely in the direction of Clark's chest -- "how it feels havin' somebody else's parts inside you. I hear it's kinda weird for most people, and they don't even know their donors. You got yours from your father-in-law. Don't tell me that's not making you feel out of whack."
Bucky would be the first to admit that she didn't trust any psychiatrist farther than she could throw them, but support groups were a different animal. She'd been going to Sam's veteran group on and off for a few years now, and it had been more helpful than all the headshrinkers SHIELD had thrown at her put together. Sometimes what a person needed was the company of other people who were going through the same thing. That was the whole reason Clark was sitting at her kitchen table right now instead of visiting Batman or his friend Lana, wasn't it? He didn't just want company. He wanted to talk to someone else who'd died and come back again.