“Which Bucky am I talking to?” Steve asked.
“Steve?” Bucky answered weakly. He had finally started to come too after being knocked unconscious. Bucky calling his name sparked his candle of hope.
Bucky rolled his head and winced in pain but kept talking.
“Your mom’s name was Sarah.” Bucky had a faded look, the corners of his mouth pulled into a small smile. “You used to wear newspapers in your shoes.”
“Can’t read that in a museum.” Steve laughed.
“And just like that we’re supposed to be cool?” Sam asked.
“What did I do?” Bucky asked.
“Oh, God. I knew this would happen.” Bucky closed his eyes. His scent soured, the air grew thick with distressed alpha pheromones – a mixture of rusted metal and dried blood. “Everything Hydra put inside me is still there. All he had to say was the Goddamned words.”
Bucky’s emotional state pulled at Steve’s heart strings but he had to keep pushing him.
“Who was he?” Steve asked.
“I don't know.” Bucky said.
Steve's patience waned. He needed answers and needed them fast. The apartment Steve found Bucky in had more than what an Alpha on the run would need. He had nesting supplies – blankets and pillows piled onto the mattress on the floor, with light snacks and water in the fridge and cabinets.. Alphas don’t nest. Not unless it’s with an omega. Through all the mayhem and fighting, Steve saw not one sign that Bucky lived with someone else.
No second scent. Nothing.
“What were you doing in Budapest?” Steve asked.
His tongue dragged across his split lips nervously before he looked away. Seventy years wasn’t a long enough time to forget what his friends tells’ are. Steve knew all of them.
“Tell me the truth, Buck.”
Bucky’s scent flared again but mellowed down into that thick choked melancholic smoke.
“I-I’m looking for someone.”
“When we met in D.C I wasn’t alone. There was a girl..”
“A young girl. Omega.” He shook his head as if trying to chase off a memory. “She’s young. Too young.” His voice gets smaller. “They took her from me when I recognized you. Took her screaming.”
“Hydra?” Steve already knew the answer.
Bucky nodded. His scent grew angry again.
“I need to find her, Steve.” Bucky looked him in the eye for the first time. “She needs me. She’s bound to be close to flowering. If she does while they have her…”
He cuts himself off again and growls low. “I saw the way they looked at her.”
Shuffled feet pulled his attention to where Sam stood at the entrance. Sam motioned for him to follow.
“Are you sure about this?” Sam whispered low and out of Bucky’s enhanced earshot. “His brains are clearly scrambled. What if this girl isn’t even real?”
Steve glanced back at Bucky. His head hung low, rested against his restrained arm. The room was still brimming with his thick smoke scent. Beneath the fatigue, wounds and haunted expression was his friends. His one remaining link to their shared past.
And beneath his soured scent was a genuine panic for this mystery omega.
Sam sighed through his nose. He made his choice.
“If there’s a girl involved – an omega girl,” Steve continued, “and she’s with Hydra, then we find her and help her. And maybe helping her helps him.”
“And what about the doctor?” Sam asked exasperated. His jaw tightened. “Not that I’m against saving a kid, but we still have a rogue doctor to deal with.”
“Well wrap this up fast..”
Steve had so many questions. What happened to him all those years ago? Why did that doctor need Bucky? But Bucky was hell bent on finding this girl. Whether she was real or not, Bucky would not cooperate until they found her.
Whether the girl was real or not, Bucky Barnes would tear the world apart looking for her.
Steve walked back toward him slowly.
Bucky lifted his head the moment Steve stopped in front of him again.