Funerals aren’t meant to be a pleasant event, so Bucky doesn’t bother to put on a show.
His face could be carved in stone for all the emotion it conveys, and his muscles are tense, coiled, trembling faintly with the desire to grab his gun and pull the damn trigger.
Bucky isn’t sure if he’d stop shooting once he starts though. Not with how many tempting targets currently surround him. Not with how it would finally shut Fury the fuck up. People tend to talk a lot less after you’ve emptied a magazine or two into them -- and Bucky has always been a man who appreciates silence.
Fuck, Bucky doesn’t even know what he’s here for. He doesn’t attend mandatory events. It simply isn’t done. The few weeks of the year that Bucky spends in his own country, he wastes drinking and sleeping around, usually both. What’s to stop him from walking straight out of this impersonally sterile room filled with people he doesn’t trust, and go back to his favourite rundown bar to knock back vodka until he can’t feel the cold on his skin anymore?
Oh right. His best friend just got himself killed in action. Lucky bastard.
On a fucking nightmare of a mission in France of all places. If it had been Russia, or Iran, or North Korea or even just Sokovia (and really, it takes skill to be wanted by all four sides of the conflict), Bucky could have dealt with it.
But France? Bucky takes that as a personal offence.
Avengers don’t get killed in France. Avengers get killed the way they kill: brutal and messy, with no one left behind who’d bother to avenge them. Because justice is a fairy tale, and every act of peace is built on the actions of someone smart enough to wash the blood of their hands before they step in front of a camera.
At least the acknowledgements are short and free of false sentimentality. A whole lot of bullshit, sure, but it’s not like there is another choice. Not when the truth amounts to Steve Rogers died on a mission we weren’t authorised to give, in a country he wasn’t supposed to be in, over intel that we won’t admit exist.
Bucky doesn’t laugh. Barely huffs a a breath, but the people on both sides of him twitch tellingly.
Like all Avengers, Bucky has sought out the back of the room, where he can keep his back to the wall at all times, has clear view on all available exists and a good excuse to keep an eye on the crowd of mourners.
The thought that one of them -- multiples, possibly -- are faking it makes Bucky clench his fingers against the urge to start an interrogation right now, Avenger style.
“Don’t kill anyone you might need to sign you off on field work again,” Barton mutters to his left, the word barely audible.
Bucky forces the tense muscles in his shoulders to relax, adopts an at-ease position that won’t fool the other Avengers, but at least won’t traumatise the attending techies and lawyers. The psych department always makes such a fuss when you break the employees.
There’s no point in fooling his colleagues though -- if the Avengers can be called even that. They’re the elite of a internationally operating spy organisation for a reason, and it’s certainly not their ability to play well with others.
Just hours after having one of their own killed in a SHIELD issued safe house, all the Avengers are on edge even more than usual. That the entire op smells like foul play from seven states away does about as much to deescalate the situation as throwing a hand granate into a room filled with weaponised uranium.
Someone from inside SHIELD sold out an Avenger.
That was their first mistake. Their second was taking Steve out without killing Bucky as well.
There’s a shift in Bucky’s peripheral vision. Natasha Romanoff, codenamed Black Widow, looks as affected of recent events as she always does: not at all.
Is she the traitor? Bucky wonders as he tilts his head ever so slightly in acknowledgement. The rivalry between Black Widow and Steve is no secret. It isn’t a friendly one either, not that any of them are the sort of person that one might call “friendly” anyways. She had betrayed the Red Room at eighteen. What offer would it take for her to turn on a fellow agent? An Avenger at that? Is she tense because she expects be to do this country a favour by murdering Pierce or is she afraid to be found out?
The service lasts barely twenty minutes -- unsurprising, considering how much isn’t said, can’t be said, because living within the spectre of the highest security clearance makes for a shoddy eulogy -- but to Bucky it feels like forever.
It doesn’t help that half the people around him are waiting for him to fly off the handle in grief or blind rage. It doesn’t help that the other half must suspect him as the traitor -- who better to kill Steve Rogers than his best friend, after all? Especially when Avengers so clearly don’t have best friends -- though Bucky can’t fault them.
He’d suspect himself too. The black hole that is four years of being held as POW hasn’t left him with what one might call a solid standing within the agency. Or a stable life in general.
Bucky has just been lucky that Avengers don’t have much use for stability as it is.
He’s been lucky that he’s too useful to be killed.
That might change now -- Steve Rogers’ death happens to change a lot of things -- but Bucky will take the traitor with him, if it comes that far. Another option isn’t acceptable.
And Bucky is very, very good at getting what he wants.
But first, he needs to find someone clean -- meaning unaffiliated with SHIELD in any way -- who can take a look at the USB flash drive he’s found in one of his dead drops two days after Fury declared Steve KIA.
Fuck, but the first thing Bucky will do when he sees Steve again is punch him in his fucking face.
What do you think about a WinterIron Secret-Avenging-Agent-Bucky, Clueless-But-Scarily-Smart-Soon-Catching-On Tony thingy?
Never mind, say, what do you think about a Stuckony Secret-Avenging-Agent-Bucky, Clueless-But-Scarily-Smart-Soon-Catching-On Tony, with Steve thrown in for good measures because that boy doesn’t understand the meaning of being subtle when you’re supposed to be dead?