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Bucky is alive.

Steve remembered the words as he woke back up. At first he dismissed them as lies from Loki; something said to give him the upper hand, unaware of the cruelty in them. As Steve started with the clean-up effort, he quietly seethed over them. It had been decades for everyone here. Enough time that even the monument in the Smithsonian dedicated in his best friend's honor had worn marks where hands had rubbed off paint and plastic. But for Steve it felt like months. Even now, sometimes he would wake up, wondering where the snoring body next to him had gone. Songs on the radio would remind him of an off-key voice belting out of an open window. There was so much here to remind him of the brother he'd lost. And Loki had thrown it at him like so much gravel in the eyes. Somehow knowing that it would hurt him worse than anything else.

And that thought, right there, was where the questions began for him.

How had Loki known, he wondered? He was a god, yes. And the museums spoke of their friendship. But how would Loki have known that those three words would stop him cold? How could anyone have possibly known what the possibility of his best being alive could have done to him. And, more than that, why choose that as the deceit? Loki could have done anything. So many things. Could have turned into Bucky. But he didn't. He said, instead, that Bucky was alive.

He needed to prove that was as impossible as he thought or he would likely never sleep again.

It wasn't as easy as he thought. People were reluctant to open the files he needed and no one except him seemed quite as bothered at the lack of a search for the body. He'd had more important things going on at the time and of course no one should have been able to survive that fall. But what if...

What if. That was the doubt plaguing him every day and every night. What if he'd survived. What if a miracle happened? Why would someone say he was alive if he wasn't? Why would Loki choose that lie instead of any other? There were no good answers and more questions piling up by the day. Until, out of desperation, he vented to Natasha. And suddenly this wild goose chase found its first feather.

It wasn't much. Something out of Russia and connected to Hydra that just so happened to be in the right place and the right time to be suspicious. That lead to another file. Another story. An assassination. A ghost story. An impossible, insane idea. One that Steve couldn't shake because it answered those 'what ifs' so well. Even if he'd prefer death for his friend, instead. Even if this was worse, so much worse, than he could ever have imagined.

He promised he wouldn't pursue it. There would be a plan, Natasha said. She showed him her scar and swore that she would figure out where and when to make an approach. He'd agreed over the phone so Nat couldn't read the lies all over his face, hung up the phone, and booked a ticket for France.

The file in his hand was the details of a hit. A diplomat from a small, penniless country in Africa that Steve couldn't see the risk in. He was flanked by women and guards, though, so clearly the idea that the diplomat was a target hadn't escaped Wakanda. Steve dressed in a suit, trying to look every piece a guest as he scanned the crowd of the gala for a face. A specific face. One he hoped to see as much as he hoped not to.

This was insane, he told himself. But then again, he was a ninety-year old man that got thawed out to fight aliens. So what really was the standard for sanity, anymore?

Wakanda, as it turns out, isn't quite as penniless as the UN likes to assume. Because they don't participate in discussions around natural resources and because they don't participate in many trade agreements, their net worth is considered quite low. A few people know better, and there's high interest in seeing Wakanda either crumble or become overrun with people who would exploit its metals.

One man stands in the way, but every attempt at assassination to date has been a failure.

They thaw him out.

The soldier is inconspicuous. He dresses in dark, drab clothes. He allows his hair to frame his face, subtly obscuring it from closed circuit television and unlucky camera phone snapshots. He carries a briefcase that looks ordinary, but close attention to detail would see that the knuckles wrapped around it glint when the light hits them. His strength disguises how heavy the case is, and by extension, its contents. Inside it is a Barrett M82, which he plans on using to put a bullet through the senator's skull.

The mission objective is simple: kill him, by any means necessary. Use stealth if at all possible, engage publically only in a worst case scenario.

His plan is to weave through the crowd toward a set of apartment buildings on the opposite end of the rally, ascend the fire escape, assemble his gun, and pull the trigger. He plans to be gone before they can track the trajectory of the bullet. He just has to get there first.

The crowd is full of nondescript suits. Unlike the women who are able to walk around in fine, colorful dresses, men seemingly have the option of navy or black. It makes them all mesh into a sea of brunet, bored males whenever Steve turns to inspect one a little more closely. A trained assassin like the ones in his reports is in his element, here. The only advantage Steve hopes to have is instant recognition and even that is in question. Who knew what Hydra could have done to Bucky? Who knew what the years could have done? Steve trails the periphery of the crowd like a lost child searching for a parent. Any one of these people could be Bucky. Or none of them at all.

The crowd thins as people move inside. The senator is moving and Steve uses that pinpoint to radiate out into what could be sight-lines. The Winter Soldier prefers distance. He wouldn't get close if he could help it. Which means Steve, adjusts, that he needs to focus more on the nearby area and less on the crowd. Minimizes the chance of recognition but at least easier to identify suspicious activity.

And there one was, now.

Steve locks onto the gait; the man in the dark clothes walking away is favoring his left. Either his briefcase is heavy or... Or. Both options make him someone to hone in on. Especially as Steve follows trajectory and, with some easy assumptions, can put the Wakandan senator in a cross hair within a handful of minutes. If he's right, that is. If he's not and pursues, someone likely dies.

It's a risk he is taking before he even makes the conscious decision.

Steve breaks away and follows a few feet behind. The area is still populated so he pulls out his phone and pretends to be absorbed. Just a normal guy walking behind another normal guy.

Nothing to see, here.

He makes it nearly to the building before he realizes he's got a tail. It's the movement of the crowd, the way they part for him and stay parted. The way they seem to recognize a flow of traffic and adjust for it differently than they might for just one man. The reflection in pairs of sunglasses that he spots. He tests the theory by pivoting, course-correcting by suddenly veering left and splitting through a group of teenagers excitedly chattering about a picture on one of their phones.

He'll go around the next building over. Loop back if he loses his tail. If he doesn't, well, the mouth of an alley looms before them populated by trash cans and palettes. Plenty of room to dispose of a private security staff agent without arousing suspicion until it's too late. He just needs fifteen minutes and it'll be like he was never even here.

He dips into the alley and seems to disappear among the clutter.

He's been made.

The man's movements make it clear with the small dip that he's trying to lose Steve. This has to be the Soldier, he realizes with a burst of adrenaline. No one else would have spotted a tail so fast. And no one else would have so effortlessly found the perfect place to dispose of one in a foreign city. Steve drops the pretense and pockets his phone. There's no shield, here. Nothing but his own wits and strength. And the hope that, somehow, the man he faces will decide against a fight. He's not sure how he's meant to battle against his best friend, if this is him. He had a hard enough time with just himself.

The teenagers are already parted and grumbling at being bumped into when Steve slips through the opening. He ditches the restrictive coat he's got on. Either way, it's not needed anymore. Still, he holds it in his hand, ready to throw it out to give himself cover in a sudden attack.

The alley might look empty but he knows better.

Steve pauses at the entrance, wondering if he should just announce himself. Call Bucky's name and take the gamble that it will do something. Instead, he just walks slow, whistling 'We Ought to Do This More Often'.

If it was Bucky, he might not know his name after all this time, given what he read. But if Steve knew him at all, he knew music was his best chance.

It's an unusual tactic. They both know he's been made, they both know he's aware of his mark but he's followed anyway — not with gun, knife, or even phone. There's nothing in his hands but a jacket, no sign of fear anywhere in his posture or on his face. There's no announcement, no order, no put your hands up or any of the other things he's been greeted with in previous encounters of the same sort.

There's just whistling. An old song he's never heard before, but for some reason after each note he knows the next. From his place above Steve's head, the soldier's mind searches absently through archives and files it keeps from missions past. They're spotty, bits and pieces have been wiped from him over the years and they come back in drifting waves as his mind heals itself between time in the chair.

The song is not from a mission.

You're getting off target, Soldat.

He drops down from the air conditioning unit eight or ten feet above, boots thudding softly on the pavement behind Steve and a knife unfurling from a holster at his belt, spun through his fingers like a familiar tool. Be quick, be quiet, and this may not be a failure after all. Cause a scene, flood the place with guards and he'll lose his window.

If he misses his target he will be corrected.

He will do everything in his power to avoid a correction.

He doesn't speak, just levels a dark and emotionless look at the man before him. Maskless, but with as stony and lacking in recognition his skin may as well be a mask in and of itself. He doesn't recognize you, not yet.

The soldier is good. Steve hears the boots hit and hadn't even thought to look up before that point. He hadn't thought he'd have enough time to climb up anywhere. Hide, maybe. But climb? Steve underestimated his target and that is the sort of mistake that he'll likely only be able to make once.

Bucky or no Bucky, this man has an accredited kill list long enough to strangle two more people. Steve has to remember that. No matter what, he has to remember that this is an assassin first. But then Steve turns and the wind is drained out of his lungs.

Bucky is alive, he'd been told. But that's not what he sees.

"Bucky..."

The word falls out of him the way 'No' should have. There is no recognition in those blue eyes. No easy smile that Steve could draw even now from memory. It's Bucky drained of everything that made him Bucky. Steve had read about what had been done to the Soldier and understood it was a possibility. Knowing and seeing, it seems, were two different beasts.

Steve's palms face forward. The world spins around the ghost's face before him. There's a knife and Steve sees it but doesn't register it more than a flash of silver. Just like the flash of a metal hand.

"Bucky. It's...It's me." He's back in Azzano and how is it that he's lived through this moment twice? "It's Steve..."

The flash of upright palms is a gesture of surrender. He's seen it before, he recognizes it as a victim's survival tactic. Occasionally it's genuine, a plea to be spared. Occasionally it's a trick, meant to lull an attacker until the victim can create an attack of opportunity themselves. He's been on the receiving end of it both ways, and each time ended the same: the victim dead, and him slipping away from the scene without a fingerprint or a trace left behind.

The words that come out aren't please, though. There is no spare me nor any equivalent; it's the second thing that doesn't track with his experience, the second thing that tugs at a thread in his mind unrelated to any mission he's attended or any training he's been put through.

Bucky, he says, and something visceral in his core lights up at the name. His brow knits automatically, maybe the first expression he's worn on his face other than pain or concentration in a decade. Confusion may be the first emotion he's experienced that he wasn't programmed to in twice as long. More than that, maybe.

I know this face.

This is a test. It must be. There are tests often, reinforcements of behavior meant to make sure he isn't slipping or losing his grasp. He ran away once back in the seventies, they got too complacent and he went too long without being reset. Bolted, they tracked him down, and now periodically he's given tests to pass or be corrected.

Burning fear, anger, the desire to lash out — all of it's directed at Steve.

"I don't know who that is," he snaps, and that's all the warning Steve gets before he's launching forward like a great cat, aiming for lethal knife points in Steve's abdomen.

Shit.

Steve thought for a second that he saw something on Bucky's face. Something that poked out from behind the mask and hinted a living soul behind it. He'd even managed to take a half step closer, bolstered by the lack of instant aggression. That put him a half a step closer into the knife's path and gave Steve even less time to divert out of its path.

The knife's path is true and Steve's shirt slashes with a burst of red behind it. He hisses at he sting but it's nothing. It will heal within minutes if he can get away. And that's the priority now: get away.

Steve jumps back, holding up his jacket like a shield to mask where his torso is.

"Please. I don't want to fight you."

They fought on the same side. Bucky and he. They were always on the same side. This was wrong in ways he couldn't begin to even appreciate.

"You know me. It's Steve!"

He dodges quick, but not quickly enough. There's a little shred in his shirt now, but it doesn't seem to be slowing him down. Unfortunate, but at least he isn't screaming. Yelling would draw bystanders, maybe police, maybe a security force. He needs to go faster, be better.

They will strap him down to the chair and strip him of his clothes, they will soak him to the bone with icy water. Do better, soldier. There is no room for failure in Hydra.

Please, I don't want to fight you, and yes, he's heard that before. Never in this tone, though, never in this context. Steve, he knows that name. You know me.

This is a test.

This is a test.

"I don't know you," he mutters, voice a little raspy from disuse, a desperate sort of conviction like he's trying to convince some onlooker — or perhaps himself. As though to reinforce the point, he drives forward again in a quick onslaught. Thrusts the knife at anything that seems vulnerable; stomach, shoulder, neck. If he can just land one surely this will be over. His window of opportunity on the target is narrow.

Do not fail us.

Steve's focus is the only thing keeping him in one piece. Bucky is trying to hurt him. Trying to kill him. He can't give into that reality without risking his life, the senator's, and Bucky's into the bargain.

The next attack has a force behind it that's more emotion than strategy. The coat is able to take the hit and Steve throws it at Bucky's face to obscure his vision long enough to retreat out of an easy strike zone. Steve doesn't want to fight but he will. If he's pushed to it, he will. But his back isn't against the wall yet.

"You do." Bucky's tone is more forceful than it likely would be if Steve's wrong. He's still betting his entire pot on a pair of sixes with bluffing as his only real option. Maybe, if he says and believes it hard enough, he can even make the bluff true.

"You know me. I'm Steven Grant Rogers. You are James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky, please. Look at me. You've known me your whole life."

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