The Pen is Mightier! (![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} penismightier) wrote in ![[info]](https://www.insanejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} chaotic_library,@ 2015-11-08 17:55:00 |
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Character/Series: Bucky Barnes, Cast; Marvel Cinematic Universe
Rating: R
Notes: In which Bucky really hates that plan.
Title: The Righteous Side Of Hell - Chapter 6: Intending To Burn
Author:
yuuo Word Count: 6424
Summary: The most tedious part of the communication chips installation was the several brain wave scans beforehand that Bruce said would let him calibrate the chips to their unique minds so they could control them.
there's a forest fire
burning bright
spreading quickly towards
our last rites
nowhere to run
pointless to hide
just lay there and scream
pretending to try
-Alkaline Trio
The most tedious part of the communication chips installation was the several brain wave scans beforehand that Bruce said would let him calibrate the chips to their unique minds so they could control them. It lasted over two days and one overnight stay with sticky electrode pads plastered all over their heads. It wasn't comfortable, but having control of the comm chip meant that they would have the ability to actually turn them off when they weren't needed. They could only be turned on consciously. Loss of consciousness turned them off automatically.
Thank god. Steve and Bucky were close, but there were just some things they'd want privacy for.
The surgeries themselves were simpler than the calibration had been, but they were Bucky's least favorite part of the process. Bruce told Bucky to go first; his anxiety was high enough as it was, putting him off until after he'd had a chance to wait on Steve to come out from under the sedation would make it harder for the Ativan to work when it came time to insert Bucky's IV.
He was given his IV in a regular exam room; he asked Bruce about it.
"Small procedures like this can be done in exam rooms," Bruce said, keeping Bucky's Ativan-slowed attention on him while his nurse worked in the IV. "I don't need to put you in a full OR." He glanced at the IV bag. "And with that, goodnight."
The only thing he remembered about the surgery was being helped onto his right side just a few seconds before he went out completely, and that he woke up in the same exam room, pillows arranged under his neck and head to keep him facing that direction.
After being given water for his cotton mouth from a night and day of not drinking anything, Bruce let Steve lead him up to their apartment to sleep off the lingering effects of the sedation. His head was wrapped with a sizable wad of gauze under his left ear. It wasn't comfortable, but at least it let him lay on his favored right side.
When he was fully alert again, despite fighting off pain from the surgery, it was Steve's turn, and unlike Bucky, Steve was set up to be laid on his left side.
"Why the two different sides?" Bucky asked, having to keep himself from watching the nurse put in Steve's IV.
Bruce looked at him. "Because you like to be Steve's right ear for him. I thought you might appreciate the extra help."
Bucky patted Bruce's shoulder. "You're a good man, Bruce."
"I try," Bruce said. "Now, waiting room. I don't need you panicking over me going at Steve with a scalpel."
"Probably not." He winced, touching his hand lightly to his bandages. "Just so you know, the painkiller works like shit."
"We'll work on a new one after this mission. Now. Waiting room. Go."
"Yes, doctor."
Fortunately, Steve was a less problematic patient than Bucky had been, not needing a mild sedation before the surgery's sedation. He still needed help sitting up and getting water before being taken upstairs to take his turn to rest on the couch, but he seemed to at least be responding to the painkillers. Bucky sent a note down to Bruce about that. At least they'd only have to try to find one for Bucky instead of both of them.
Steve's bandages looked as ridiculous as Bucky's did. Steve made a very tired joke- or attempted to -about how they could look ridiculous together like the old married couple that they were. Bucky told him to shut up and get some sleep.
Bucky spent his time while Steve slept scouring the internet for every scrap of information about the simmering pot of hatred that was the Middle East. He remembered why they never went out there.
Bruce had used medical glue to keep the incisions closed and clean while it healed, which only took a couple days with their healing factors. The hardest part for Bucky after the pain had diminished was that the glue and the healing skin itched like a bitch. And Bruce had had the foresight to put his comm piece behind his left ear, where it was hard to scratch. Damn mechanical fingers with their lack of fingernails.
By the second night, the glue had fallen off on its own, leaving behind a neat little red line just behind the ear that would turn to scar tissue soon enough.
Right, because Bucky didn't have enough scars.
Bucky made an executive decision in their planning, or rather, a few. He made the two girls give the liquid armor a few test runs in the training rooms before he made the official transaction for Steve to Hydra. He decided his new coat would hold up once he was sure their uniforms did.
He also realized just how good at combat they both were, Maria in particular. He felt a lot better about them being his back up if something went wrong, and he realized why Maria hadn't been happy at him the morning after the situation at the supper club. She was right, he really needed to trust her and her abilities.
Still did not make him fond of the plan.
He also put his foot down on when they'd contact Ashkenazi to take the job, and when he made the fake transaction on the dark web. If he was going to risk his partner's life in a dangerous idea he hated himself for, he was going to call the shots. Steve actually deferred to him. Not terribly surprising, Steve knew that when Bucky had a plan in his head, he needed room to work it out and since he was no longer capable of thinking in in words, that meant a lot of just doing and not arguing.
Sharon seemed to want to argue the whole way- Bucky didn't blame her, that was her boyfriend, and they were her job -but she ultimately stayed silent, her only arguments in body language and disapproving looks. The only time she tried to say something, Bucky pointed out that this was the first job of Steve and Bucky's that she actually had a chance to follow them on and do her job. If she didn't like it, she could stay home.
"You're not my job anymore," she said in reply, perhaps with a little bite. "Not a job from the CIA."
"What happened with that?" Bucky asked, raising an eyebrow. He assumed that his unapologetic bullying about the mission was behind her snappish reply.
"I quit," she said. "Tony said that I either quit my government job and become a proper Avenger, or move out and try to keep track of you two against Stark technology. When I reported that to my superior in the CIA, they said they'd put me on a different assignment. I turned in my resignation. I didn't want to be pulled away from you guys. I'm a full-fledged Avenger."
The part of Bucky that was currently in charge as a mission head was immediately suspicious of that. Normally he'd just be glad, but if there was any chance she was lying- she'd lied before -it could be trouble. He debated not letting her go along at all, but Maria convinced him to give her a chance. He found that odd; Maria was just as cautious as he was, and this was a change in status that was too ill-timed to not be suspicious.
But, she stood up for Sharon, so Bucky consented to giving her a shot.
Maria herself didn't show any particular reaction to the plan in front of the others. She was the former deputy director of the largest spy and security agency in the world; sticking to mission without letting it upset her was part of her job. That didn't stop her from making Bucky think carefully about all his decisions. She didn't protest, she questioned and brought up details to make sure he'd accounted for them.
How did he plan on sneaking in? The area seemed well-lit, no matter what he wore, he'd be noticeable. From the back, away from the lights. Was there an entrance back there? I can make one if I need to. Can you do that without drawing attention? There's probably a back entrance to begin with. You don't dump bodies of failed experiments on your front porch. Fair. What about finding the digital copies of the project files? The HUD in my goggles would direct me to the computers by tracing electricity use. What about how to shred them? I'll have you guys link Junior in and let her shred them. If JARVIS could do it, so could Junior. And Tony is still weird for naming the UI after his cat. Please don't change the subject.
How much of that was her job taking over, and how much of that was personal concern for her boyfriend, he couldn't tell, and it didn't matter. She remained focused on the job at hand. He had a feeling they'd work well together on this job. They both had a mission-mindset to hide behind when needed.
Bruce was the only one that seemed truly calm about it. When asked about it, he simply smiled and said "the other guy is actually happy for once. We might get to beat up Hydra agents, if things don't go according to plan."
Bucky couldn't really deny that it'd be a delicious case of schadenfreude to watch Hydra agents get smeared by the other guy, but Bucky would rather hope that it wouldn't come to that. The Hulk having to step in meant that something went very wrong. That left an uncomfortable lump in his stomach.
Having the Hulk step in in case the plan failed presented its own problem; how to get him back under control so that he wasn't joining the plane ride back home.
"If he comes out and smashes the place down, which I would find very satisfying if we end up in a position of needing it," Bucky said, "how do we get you back when it's time to leave?"
"That's probably something we'll have to leave to chance," Bruce admitted, although he sounded more confident about it than Bucky thought he should. "I don't think it'll come to that anyway. Plans would really have to go out the window if he's needed. It's something we'll deal with when we cross that bridge, if we even get to it."
No, things would go according to plan. That wasn't a bridge they'd even get to. Bucky repeated that mantra several times to keep him going instead of saying 'fuck it' and asking the military to just nuke the site from orbit. They wouldn't, but it was a thought.
It'd been just shy of a week since they were first contacted about the job when Bucky decided they were as prepared as they were going to get and surrendered himself to actually following through. He sat down at Steve's laptop, his work glove on, with the others pacing around his living room nearby. Steve hung over his shoulder as Tor was booted up and Hydra's experimentation offer was found again.
"Okay," he said, looking up at Steve. "One last chance to back out."
Steve shook his head. "No. You'll have my back, I'll be fine."
"All right," Bucky said, not feeling as confident as Steve did. He clicked on the business transaction and officially sold Steve off to Hydra. After a bit of fussing around and exchanges with Hydra's account, the deal was finalized. "Okay, done. You're going to be on El Al flight 316 at 9:00 PM our time at Boston tomorrow. You'll arrive at Ben Gurion International at approximately three in the afternoon next day local time."
"So an overnight flight."
Bucky looked back at him. "It's an eleven hour trip, but you're going back against time zones." He looked back at the screen. "You'll be picked up by a taxi and taken to the edge of East Jerusalem and dropped off at a hotel. You'll stay the night there, then get picked up by an unmarked former military jeep along with three other volunteers at five in the morning and taken to Jericho, where you will stay until sundown. After that, you'll be taken to the 'medical facility'." He looked back away from the computer. "You can probably expect to be blindfolded for part of the trip. If a volunteer gets away, they won't want that volunteer to be able to direct people to their labs."
"No, I suppose not," Steve said. "What's the fake name you gave me?"
"John Stiles," Bucky said. "That was the name of Fran Stiles's older brother."
"Why does her name sound familiar?"
Bucky rubbed at the still slightly itchy incision site behind his ear. It was an exercise in futility- still no fingernails on that hand. "Fran was my first girlfriend in high school. Lasted all of two months before she realized I had no interest in commitment and broke it off with me."
"Oh, her. Yeah, John wasn't happy with you about it."
Bucky rolled his eyes. "He didn't understand 'she broke up with me' very well. Idiot."
"So now we go down to the communications center to contact Ms. Ashkenazi?" Maria asked, pulling Bucky's thoughts away from the nice vacation they'd been attempting to have.
With his finger starting to taptatptap on the table, Bucky frowned in frustration and shook his head. "No, now we wait for Steve's tickets to be provided so I can print them. Then we go down to the comm center and call her."
It was probably only a minute wait, but it felt like forever to Bucky, especially with Steve still hanging over his shoulder and the other three practically radiating anxiety. That didn't help his own. But eventually the email for Bucky's account reloaded and Steve's ticket was waiting in the inbox. Bucky clicked print. "Your ticket's over there at the printer," he told Steve, jabbing his thumb back towards the printer in question. "Don't lose it or forget it."
"You act like I'm going to." The others probably didn't pick up on it, but to Bucky, he sounded like his nerves were almost as frayed as Bucky's.
Really, really, really hating this idea.
"This is probably the stupidest thing we've done, Steve, I'm not taking chances. Just shut up and put up with it." He sighed. "Go get into uniform. We have a conference to have with our Knesset member."
The communications center was a fairly simple room, there was a single computer station to one side with back up methods of turning on and off a teleconference call- JARVIS was supposed to handle all that, but Tony liked redundant set ups. The station also could record conversations held over the system and encode them into an unreadable format that JARVIS or another trained computer could later decipher.
The majority of the room was simply blank white walls. Against the far wall was a wide screen, big enough with the intention of being able to show off at least most of the team when needed. Across from that was a blank white wall with only the Avengers symbol in a medium grey. It was done up with the intention of preventing the person on the other side of the call from figuring out where they were based on background content.
It was about three in the afternoon in Jerusalem, according to JARVIS, and Ashkenazi should be standing by for the call. JARVIS had contacted her earlier that morning in her time zone, letting her know to expect an official answer via teleconference that afternoon. JARVIS reported that she'd seemed hesitant to confirm that, but had agreed regardless.
Bucky was already counting the different reasons she could be nervous about this call, ideas he kept to himself until he could observe Ashneknazi and her tone and body language during the call.
Time to wait and see.
Steve and Bucky were standing in uniform in front of the screen, ready to 'officially' commit Captain America and the Winter Soldier to a contract. Steve and Bucky had both come up with the idea; they never used anything for communication with contracts but their phone, but both agreed that it'd make Hydra nervous if Ashkenazi turned out to be an operative, or it'd make her feel more confident about the job if she wasn't.
Personally, Bucky hoped she was an operative, just so Hydra would have a good look at their former Winter Soldier geared up to go after them. Don't create a weapon you can't control, or be surprised when it turns on you.
The system for calls leaving the Tower was much more secure, and took more time to get a call through its protocols, and almost a full minute passed before a woman's face appeared on screen. She was beautiful, with dark skin that she clearly took very good care of, despite the thin layer of sweat on her forehead.
Bucky wondered what that meant. It was too early to tell.
Looking over the rest of her appearance, committing it to memory in case he had to interact with her directly, she had dark eyes were almost black, her brown hair that was pulled back into a clip that let half her hair fall out of it into a lazy ponytail that Bucky actually found unflattering, despite her otherwise attractive appearance.
Maybe, maybe, once upon a time, Bucky Barnes might've tried to charm her into revealing whatever she might accidentally give them while doing whatever she was going to do with this offer. But not only was Bucky a taken man now, he was no longer was half as charming as he used to be.
And the Winter Soldier had all the charisma of a rock.
"Captain America, Winter Soldier. Thank you for calling back." She sounded like she was trying to hide nerves. "I was beginning to wonder if we'd been forgotten."
They'd scripted this out carefully, as much as they could with half the conversation being an unknown. Bucky would remain as silent as the assassin he'd been trained by Hydra to be when sent to stalk rather than make a mess. They knew that regardless of Ashkenazi's answer and position, the Winter Soldier being silent in full uniform, weapons displayed blatantly, entire face hidden by his face mask and goggles, would disquiet her. Regardless of her affiliation, she'd be reporting that reaction to a superior, and if luck was on their side, that would spread to all of Hydra's operatives in the Knesset, and possibly the president and/or Prime Minister.
Normally, Bucky didn't think he could create that kind of disturbance on his own, but while Steve was their favorite person to hate, Bucky was their creation that was turning on them. It showed them they had failed and had weaknesses they probably didn't want. And that 'failure' was going to repay them in spades for what they did to make him.
Standing next to Captain America in his new (admittedly nice) uniform would only drive home that point.
"You weren't," Steve said. "We had a lot of information to go over." Yeah, information that hadn't come from Ashkenazi's bundle she'd sent, but she didn't need to know that.
"I did not realize we'd sent so much to warrant a week of silence," Ashkenazi said. Despite the other signs of emotional distress, she managed to sound indignant. Their silence was a political smack in the face to her and her committee in the Knesset that had offered the job.
"No, not at all," Steve said smoothly. Bucky had worked with Steve to teach him how to lie just long enough to get through this call without being obvious about lying. That comfortable tone told Bucky that the lessons were sticking. "You'd mentioned that relations between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority were sticky at the moment. We wanted to do some research into that situation. We didn't want to blunder into something and cause a war in the process."
Nobody said they wanted to. Prepared to was another matter.
That didn't seem to relax Ashkenazi, but the offended look disappeared. "I see. Thank you for that, I'm afraid I hadn't thought to send that information."
"We like to know what we're getting into," Steve said. "It's safer for everyone that way."
Ashkenazi was still acting nervous, her anxiety practically glowing like a halo around her. She wiped sweat off her face with a handkerchief. "Forgive my appearance. It's very hot here right now and our air conditioner in this office is broken."
How much of that was true and how much of that sweat was from adrenaline being pumped out in response to her nervous reaction was hard to say. Bucky was actually willing to give her the benefit of the doubt on that one. She looked overheated enough for him to buy it, and had from the start.
"No need to apologize," Steve said. "Technology sometimes breaks down."
"It does," she agreed, eyes flitting around the room they were in, then down at the bottom of her screen. She paused, and it was clear that Steve was about to speak up and prompt further conversation, but before he had a chance, she looked back up at them. She still showed the symptoms of nerves, but the way her eyes had hardened said that those nerves were no longer frayed.
Bucky worried about that.
"Would you prefer we call after the AC system is repaired?" Steve asked. "Might be more comfortable for you."
"No, no, this is fine," she said, and Bucky heard no sign of nervousness anymore. "I apologize, I should've called you this morning, but time zones made it seem rude. My committee came to the decision to hire you. However, we have to withdraw that offer. News of the idea reached the prime minister. Her opinion was that Israel did not want to be the one to get Captain America and the Winter Soldier killed. We're already trying to prevent war as it is, she was afraid that war would be unavoidable if such a thing happened. I apologize. If we find no other recourse, we will appeal to Prime Minister Bar-Lev to offer the job again. I hope we would be able to do that?"
"We won't turn down a chance to go after Hydra," Steve said, and if Ashkenazi had doubted anything he'd said before, she wouldn't find any lies in that statement.
A congenial smile crossed her lips. "Excellent. I apologize again for wasting so much of your time. If you'll excuse me, I'm afraid I have other duties to tend to, now."
Yeah, so do we.
Steve extended his own pleasantry, then the screen went dark. He looked at Bucky. "So what's the verdict? Is she Hydra or not?"
Bucky took off his goggles and face mask before answering. "If she isn't, she's a damn good actress. I usually recognize operatives by their stench."
"So at least one member of her subcommittee is Hydra," Bruce said from the computers on the far side of the room. "I wonder how this idea made its way to the prime minister without all of the government knowing about it. I know heads of state can be involved in under the table deals like this, but unless the idea followed a gossip train, someone went right to her with the idea."
Bucky couldn't formulate an answer to that, something niggling at the back of his mind. Something about the woman's body language had given something away, but Bucky couldn't quite pin down what beyond a Very Bad Feeling.
Steve noticed. "You have a thought?"
"Yeah. Gimme a minute."
Nobody said anything when he sat down against the wall, his goggles and face mask abandoned next to him. It only meant that whatever thought he was having, it wasn't quite taking the form of words yet.
The others went on with the conversation, Bucky half-listening in.
"That someone might've been not Hydra, but part of the same subcommittee as Ashkenazi and took the idea to her, not liking it," Sharon suggested. "If she's not Hydra, she's going to agree that you two dying under her watch would be a terrible idea."
"Your World War III prediction," Bruce said.
Sharon nodded. "Yeah. But that's assuming someone in that government was sane enough to be the stool pigeon."
"It's also assuming that the line about going to the prime minister wasn't a blatant lie," Maria pointed out. "Her whole body language changed when she said that."
Steve looked down at Bucky. "Still working on that thought?"
Bucky hit his head back against the wall. Maria's statement had solidified what was going on in his brain. "They know."
Steve sat down next to Bucky, shield and helmet set aside. "That doesn't sound like the right level of bad for your tone. What's going on?"
Deep breath. Ignore the way the left arm suddenly feels heavier than normal. Breathe. "Nobody ever went to the prime minister, she has no idea what's going on. She was a lie grabbed out of thin air because Hydra knows we're coming, contract or no contract."
"If they didn't know that, they wouldn't pose much of a threat," Maria said. "You still sound like there's more."
Bucky lifted his head. "They know how we're getting in. They know to be watching for us and where Steve's gonna be."
"How?" she asked. "You made that transaction less than an hour ago."
His finger went taptaptap on the thick material of his knee pad. He was trying to pin down what in that woman's body language had tripped his instincts. "I don't-" Try again. "I know how they operate. Something tipped them off. They don't need to make a contract with us when we're handing ourselves over on a silver platter."
For a moment, nobody said anything. Steve was the first to break the silence, putting his hand on Bucky's shoulder with a light touch. "You sure about that, Buck?"
Another deep breath. He rubbed his temples with his fingers. "Everything I learned from them is telling me they know. I didn't think anyone would recognize that login I stole, but someone did, and someone alerted her as soon as they found out."
For a moment, Bucky wasn't sure if the others were going to try to assure him it was impossible, or if someone was going to swear when they realized he was right.
"Damn."
Thank you, Maria.
Sharon heaved a deep sigh. "He's right. She stopped being so nervous right around the time she complained about the AC. She was looking somewhere else on the screen. She must've gotten an email or something from whoever tracks those transactions."
There. Thank you, Sharon. That's exactly what had gotten under his skin and into his brain.
He put his hands over his face, willing his brain to work past the fear; he'd just put Steve in danger. There was no way Steve was going to get out of there without a lot of luck on his side. Bucky could've shot himself in the damn head for it.
"One last chance to back out," he said, sliding his hands up to push back his hair so he could stare in frustration at the floor in front of him.
"I have a question," Bruce said, "before we commit. Why would she be nervous about this before getting that notice? Did Hydra really have no plan in place to deal with you two before they got lucky?"
Bucky dropped one hand onto his lap. "We took a week to answer. That means one," he lifted one finger, "we were more prepared that they wanted." Two fingers. "Two, there was a possibility that we'd recruited other Avengers." Three fingers. "Or third, we were already in Palestine, right under their noses. All of which was true, except the last one. And now none of that matters. Even with you guys along, they'll have Steve held hostage." He flashed a dirty look at Steve. "And don't act like they won't have ways of knocking you out. Project Rebirth didn't make you an all-seeing god."
"I know it didn't," Steve said a tone Bucky was sure was meant to be reassuring, but it failed. "But I've won against worse odds."
"Steve?" Bucky felt he couldn't stress what he was about to say enough, not just because Steve sometimes had rocks in his head for how stubborn he was, but because if Bucky didn't say it, it'd stay as a nightmare living in his head that nobody else would know to share. For once, something in his head really needed to be shared. "They've been working on replicating the chemicals they used on me. Those chemicals busted my DNA. I doubt they've had any successes without Zola's notes from '43, but those are still chemicals that are going to mess with your DNA. They're going to alter the stability of your mutation. All they'd need is five minutes of sedation to get that shit into you and then what?"
Steve opened his mouth to protest, but Bucky walked right over him. "I may be safer coming in the back way, but we're both risking landing on Hydra's experiment tables with drugs pumping into us that'll essentially kill us. This isn't a time for your 'I've won against worse odds' because no, you haven't. You've taken on Hydra as much as I have, but you've never belonged to them. You don't know how they operate in their underground areas. I do."
Nobody said anything, Bucky's harsh words hanging over them like a miasma. Every one of them knew Bucky was right, he was certain of that, but it left a silence that made him feel like he should blend back into the wall to escape the attention. His right hand was shaking a bit, not from anxiety but from exhaustion, like the attack he didn't know he'd had had already passed.
But it'd been something that was needed to be said. Bucky would be surprised if none of them agreed. Even Steve was looking down at his hands. The others, it seemed, were either intent on the floor or on a distant wall. Bucky's words had struck a chord.
Good.
The heavy silence was interrupted by Maria. "So what's our play now?"
Before Bucky could even come up with a new plan, Steve spoke up with the stupidest words Bucky had ever heard. "We continue with this one."
"Steve." There was warning rattle in Bucky's voice when he said his partner's name.
Steve ignored it. "It's still our best bet for getting in. We'll just have to rearrange your timing with when I get there."
Bucky covered his face, fighting back the growing terror of the plan going wrong and something happening to Steve, and fighting back the threat of tears that went with it. "Maria, how close to the top of the base can you get me without getting spotted?"
"As long as we remained hidden, perhaps two hundred feet."
Bucky looked at Steve. "That's about a twenty story building. Even for me, that's a bit much." He switched his gaze to Maria. "Does the jet have any way of lowering me? A cable I can ride halfway down? I can make that."
"She's not currently equipped with one, no," Maria said. "But that would be an easy addition. We'll leave when Steve does tomorrow, then take a trip to the testing grounds to have it installed. With our speed compared to a passenger plane and his overnight stay in East Jerusalem, we'll still make it to Jericho before him."
"And then have a day to case the area," Sharon said. "He's going to be stuck in Jericho until sundown." She looked at Maria. "Or would that be pushing our invisibility trick?"
"It shouldn't," Maria said. "But to err on the side of caution, we're going to want to fly over the base as little as possible. We'll do a fly-by, look for signs of a back entrance, then find a place to land where we'll be safe until sundown and drop Bucky in."
Bucky, one hand on his forehead, elbow on his thigh, and his metal finger still tapping on his knee pad, looked over at Steve, only half-heartedly listening to the women. "Steve, this is a terrible idea. Please say we're not actually doing this."
Steve put a hand on Bucky's metal hand, stopping the tapping. "Bucky, it's a good idea-"
"-before they found out about it-"
"-and we're going through with it. If I didn't have the best soldier watching my back, I'd come up with something new. They're not going to do anything until we're at the facility, not if they want to replicate Project Rebirth. That gives you plenty of time to get into position to watch my back. But I have my partner there to get me out when it's time to go."
Bucky stared at him, torn between pure anger and an equal part fear. "Don't you put that on my shoulders," he said. "You know damn well what would happen if I didn't get there in time. You want me carrying that cross?"
He noticed the others had gone silent. It was rare that anyone got to witness an argument between them, and even Natasha had had the good sense to not get between them. The other three seemed to share that good sense.
"No, I don't," Steve said. "I'd been carrying that one myself for a damn long time when I couldn't catch you."
"So what's this?" Bucky demanded, doing his damndest to keep his eyes dry and not tearing up in frustration and fear. He wasn't succeeding. "We share the misery together?"
Steve sighed, sounding like the was tired of Bucky arguing with him. Tough shit. "No. You've caught me before, I know you can again. I'm not putting anything of the sorts on you, precisely because I have been in that situation and I'm not going to let you have to be."
"You're putting too much faith in me."
Ignoring the presence of other people, Steve put an arm around Bucky's shoulders, all but pulling him into a hug. "It's not faith," he said. "It has nothing to do with faith. Faith can't be proven. Trust can. You're the scientist, you should know the difference. I know you'll get me out because you have before. You're the only one of us who could be in the position you'll be in. I'm the distraction. You're right, you're the only one that knows how their underground operations work. So the distraction is the best role for me so you can get through. This one's your job."
Bucky pulled away. "If it's my job, why aren't you listening to me when I say this is a bad idea?"
"Because we both know that this is the best one." Steve lowered his head a bit, giving Bucky a stare that defied Bucky to argue. "And you hate yourself for it."
Having failed to keep his eyes dry, Bucky rubbed his index finger and thumb over them, squeezing in on the bridge of his nose to make the wetness go away without giving away that it'd even been there in the first place. "Fine. We'll take you to Boston tomorrow. We'll meet you at the facility. You just be goddamn careful."
"I will." He patted Bucky's metal shoulder. "Come on, let's go get out of uniform and spend the rest of the day not thinking about this." He finally acknowledged the other three in the room, all of whom were desperate to not look like they'd been listening in. Good luck, guys, there was no way to not hear that. "We can't go to DC again, but we can find other things to do."
"We'll be splitting up," Bruce said. "I have one more thing I need to finish working on for Bucky, or none of this is gonna be worth the bother."
Before Bucky could start to think to ask what it was, Sharon interrupted. "Mind if I come with you?" she asked, to Bucky's surprise. Since when did Sharon spend time in the lab? She wasn't a scientist or engineer to Bucky's knowledge.
But Bruce didn't seem surprised that she'd asked. "Not at all. The company would be nice."
Maria pushed away from resting against the computers. "I have one last thing to finish too," she said. Again, before any protests could be made, Maria forced direct eye contact with Bucky. "I've told you, it's not my place to come between you. You two should worry about each other today. We're not the ones who will be in danger. We can get along fine entertaining ourselves. Our jobs aren't done yet."
Steve looked at Bucky. "Your girlfriend just laid down the law."
"She's good at that," Bucky said. He stayed quiet, watching the others disperse with the hint, then looked at Steve. "Now what?" He hoped Steve had an idea, or otherwise he might go ask Bruce for an Ativan to knock him out. He felt like crying and he wasn't interested in actually doing it. He needed a distraction.
Steve looked thoughtful for a moment, and Bucky could see the little hamster wheel in his head running at full speed. "You know, I never did get to see Snow White in color," he said.
That got a very confused stare out of Bucky. "We're going to die in the next couple days and you want to watch Snow White?"
"Yeah, why not?" Steve said, giving Bucky a smile that was a bit weak, but the attempt behind it was something.
Bucky didn't answer at first, the absurdity of the suggestion standing in the way of him and a protest. It wasn't a protest that ultimately formed, but a very boggled question. "All this time, and you haven't seen Snow White in color?"
Steve shook his head. "Didn't seem right to watch it without you. So I never did."
Bucky gave him a tired look. "You know, this is why we get called an old married couple. All right, let's go get out of the uniforms and watch Snow White."