Okay, so, let's just put a Hydra tracking device on the airship for, I dunno, monitoring purposes. Steve and Schmidt fight, Schmidt gets blown up, Steve crashes the ship and goes to sleep, and boom Hydra finds him and Zola is tickled pink because now he has two enhanced soldiers to play with. For the first, let's say, decade or so Hydra alternated having one or the other on ice (Colonel Philips told Dr. Zola that Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers were good friends, we can't have their affection for each other diminishing the effects of their programming), until they were both sufficiently under Hydra control. Once the Captain stopped trying to rub the new paint job off his shield, the handlers allowed the pair in the same room together.

I put zero thought into this, but I like it anyway.

It was supposed to be a simple test, see how well they could maintain their focus on their respective handlers while being within eyesight of each other. Handler A was in the middle of giving the Sergeant his latest mission when the Captain was brought in. At first, it seemed to a complete failure; the Sergeant stopped listening to his instructions, fixated as he was on the Captain, and Captain himself (always was just a tad more unruly than the Sergeant) completely ignored his own handlers altogether and plowed right over to the Sergeant on sight. They were just staring at each other, not touching, not speaking, but nothing could reclaim their attention from one another.

Just as the handlers figured they would need to wipe both Soldiers yet again, the pair seemed to break their little staring contest, and resume standard position for awaiting orders. The handlers all looked at each other wondering what to do now, and Handler A shrugged figuring they were probably going to wipe the pair anyway after this. So he continued giving the Sergeant his orders, and asked him to confirm those orders when he was done. The Sergeant recited them back perfectly, like every other time, as if there hadn't been any interruption at all. Handler A stepped back and nodded to one of the Captain's handlers to give it a shot. Handler B made a note on a clipboard, before giving the Captain his orders for a completely separate mission. A hitch appeared when, upon reciting his instructions, the Captain returned both his own mission and the Sergeant's. Wondering if hearing both sets of instructions had confused him, the handlers turned back to the Sergeant. The brunet Soldier had already recited his mission parameters, they should be set in his head, except apparently they weren't.

The Sergeant recited both his and the Captain's missions as well. Handler A was just a tad annoyed that the Captain's misbehavior was rubbing off the Sergeant (put a lot of work into making him perfect, dammit) and asked the Sergeant when exactly had he said that the brunet Soldier would be joining the Captain on his mission. The Sergeant looked at him. Not straight ahead, not at the floor, straight at him (and holy shit that is terrifying) and said, I go where the Captain goes. 'Til the end of the line.

That wasn't supposed to happen.

When the Captain answered the same way, the missions were handed off to other operatives and both Soldiers were wiped. A few years later, they tried again, only to receive the exact same results. At this point, the handlers didn't know what to do. Besides this weird fixation they had on each other, the two of them were the perfect assets; focused, destructive, and obedient.

Zola, whom had contracted a terminal illness and clearly rearranged his priorities to reflect that, told the handlers to just let them go together, it's too much hassle to constantly keep them separated.

Well, fine then.

In an attempt to figure out which was stronger, the handlers brought the pair of them out to the sparring arena and tried to make them fight. Oh, sure, they threw punches and kicks, they grappled, but they weren't really fighting. They could've been schoolboys wrestling on the playground for all the harm they would doing to each other. Recognizing a futile effort, Handler B suggested pitting the two of them against another team of operatives, testing how well they worked together instinctively.

The pair was devastating.

Handler A was a little ashamed that he didn't already figure out they would be. The two flowed seamlessly, covering each other's backs, making up for each other's flaws, switching between guard and attack. They could practically read each other's minds. When put in a field simulation with firearms and the shield, they were unstoppable.

Hydra had refined its ultimate weapon.

/

Natasha clenched the hard drive Fury gave her in her sweater pocket as she and Maria (just a couple girlfriends out shopping, nothing to see here) walked steadily through the mall to the Apple Store. They might not figure out what the information on the drive was but they could probably figure out where it came from. Maria wasn't half bad at undercover ops, and with minimal finagling the pair of them were on their way to New Jersey to the military training facility where, according to Maria, Captain America was trained (Coulson is such a fanboy).

Maria's own military background found them the secret original SHIELD base (that's Tony's dad, Howard, and she's Agent Peggy Carter, the Original Badass) and some more hunting around found them the extra-secret Hydra base complete with Computerized Zola. Fortunately, Maria recognized stalling when she saw it, so even as Zola babbled about futility and algorithms the two women had pried up the grate in the floor and dragged some computer pieces over to the hole, which protected them for the most part from the incoming missile. They barely made it out again before the Strike team descended.

They headed back to Washington, hitting up a no name motel to clean up and eat on the way. Maria knew a place they could hide out and regroup that wasn't on any SHIELD list, but Fury told her about it. They were en route there when shit hit the fan.

The first problem was when Strike caught up to them from behind, but they could've been taken care of soon enough. Except…

Natasha only glimpsed them for a moment before impact. Two figures, dressed all in black, one blond with a shield bearing the Hydra logo, one brunet with a metal left arm, both just casually standing in the middle of a busy road.

Waiting for her and Maria.

The ensuing battle was nothing short of a hot mess. Natasha got shot, Maria drove off the bridge and into a bus, Strike caught up to them, there were civilians everywhere. On the plus side, one of the Winter Soldiers (the Captain? Blondie is the Captain, right?) got caught by Maria's wild driving, and was rammed into the bus. His body seemed to be just about cleaved in half by a piece of the vehicle's roof embedded in his abdomen, just above his left hip. The Strike member that was currently handcuffing Natasha muttered about pity the asset being so damaged. They'd have to dispose of it. Rumlow told him to keep his voice down, idiot, do you want the Sergeant to hear you?

Natasha's eyes tracked the careful way the Sergeant wrapped his arms around the Captain to lift him off the impaling metal (holy shit pain tolerance!) and gently set him down to examine his wound and figured no, you probably wouldn't want a guy like that to hear you talking about disposing of a person he cares about.

Natasha could use that to her advantage if she got the chance.

Which she did, because the Strike team is apparently full of idiots. She and Maria had been shoved into the last truck in the caravan with the Winter Soldiers (Captain unconscious in Sergeant's lap after Sergeant sewed him back together) and a single guard. Then again, Rumlow probably figured that the Sergeant was more likely to kill them than the guard, given that if the two women tried anything, they'd be more than likely to inflict further harm on the currently fragile Captain. But Natasha had no intention of harming the Captain, oh no.

She planned to save him.

The two men seemed to be an entirely different species of human, two of a kind, and Natasha could tell they genuinely cared for each other (and wasn't that a weird thought, monster assassins caring). Besides, with her shoulder steadily bleeding out, there was very little she could do against even the guard, let alone a Winter Soldier. So she murmured quietly to him in Russian.

"They plan to kill him, you know that right?" The Sergeant only looked at her, face blank, but she could see the slightest tightening of his fingers on his partner. "I heard a few members of Strike mention it when they threw us in here. An asset, damaged beyond repair, to be disposed of."

"Whatever you're trying to pull won't work with it. The asset only takes orders from the top," interrupted the guard. The smirk was clear in his voice. "Even Captain Rumlow can't just order it around." Maria's eyes were flicking around, from Natasha to the Sergeant to the guard, not knowing what the red head was trying to accomplish but willing to back her up if needed. Natasha didn't even look at the guard.

"They will kill him, but we won't."

Now she had his attention. The twitch around his eyes demanded to know what she wanted in exchange. "Help us get out of here. We'll take you to a safe place, we'll patch him up, but you have to help us out of this mess."

"They will find him."

The guard's head whipped around to stare at the Sergeant, probably slack-jawed. Natasha nodded; they'd definitely try, that's for sure.

"Then help us take them down."

There was a moment of quiet before the Sergeant nodded once, and pulled out a silenced pistol and shot the guard through the head. Before Maria had time to question just what did you do Romanov the Sergeant was speaking again.

"Save him, and I will help you dismantle them. Attempt to use him against me, and I will decimate you and yours until there is not even ashes and dust left." With that, he gently set his partner down on the seat beside him and moved to start cutting Natasha free. The red head smiled at Maria.

"We just found one heck of an ally."

Once the two women were free and the Sergeant pretty much ripped the door off the back of the vehicle, the four of them were on their way. Maria contacted a trusted associate and got transport for two agents, one with a GSW, and two allies of questionable loyalty, one of which needed serious medical attention. The Captain woke up for a moment en route to the hideout, looked at the Sergeant, looked around the van at Natasha and Maria, looked back at the Sergeant and… well, he didn't smile exactly, but something about his blank expression softened, so that it was also affectionate. Natasha figured that this one probably resisted the dehumanization process better than the brunet; trained assassins did not express affection for each other unless they were attempting to be misleading or deceptive.

That ability to hold onto himself, to still be a person under the mask and shield (seriously what's with the shield?) indicated a strength of character that made Natasha wonder why Hydra ever chose him to be an assassin. He'd have fought them at every turn, and what's worse was that the Sergeant fed off that strength, used it to keep even a tiny piece of his own humanity. Natasha watched as the Captain returned his head to the Sergeant's shoulder and went back to sleep. That kind of implicit trust I am safe with you, and they didn't even need to speak. On his own, the Sergeant probably would have caved, while the Captain would have found some way to rebel and get himself killed. Hydra probably would have had better luck turning Captain America himse-

Natasha froze in her seat. The Sergeant's eyes shot over to her, suspicious.

The shield, the Captain, the Sergeant, Captain Rogers, Sergeant Barnes, one blond, one brunet, two presumed dead, never found the bodies. Nobody ever found the bodies of either Captain Rogers or Sergeant Barnes.

For Coulson's birthday, a few other agents including Natasha and Maria had taken him out to the new Captain America exhibit at the museum. The red head knew the faces, the names, the dates, and the math added up. The rumours of the Winter Soldiers began a decade or so after WWII ended. The Sergeant was still staring at her. She decided why not ask.

"The shield. What's it made of?"

The brunet assassin didn't relax, but he answered her; vibranium, the strongest metal in the world.

Vibranium.

"Why did Hydra give him a shield as a weapon?" The Sergeant tensed up even further, his confusion making him wary. He didn't see the point to these questions. "Calm down, we won't do anything. I only ask because I think I have an idea of where you came from." The brunet blinked.

"Brooklyn. He already had the shield." More pieces fell into place, although…

"How do you remember you're from Brooklyn?" The Sergeant nodded at his sleeping counterpart.

"He remembers a lot. It hurts him to remember, but he said it'd hurt him more to forget. We don't talk much about it though. Not tolerated." That said just as much about the Sergeant's personal rebellion against Hydra that he was telling her these things as it did the Captain's will to survive as himself. "I only remember one thing from before." Natasha prodded him gently to share that one thing, it could be the key to the door linking the two assassins in front of her to the long lost war heroes.

"His name is Steve Rogers."

Or it could, you know, just bust that door down.

Ever patient Maria glanced back and forth between the chatting assassins, waiting for Natasha to catch her up. Of course, when said red head looked like someone just slapped her in the face with a whoopie cushion, Maria had to interrupt because what the heck is going on Romanov?!

Natasha took a deep breath, still looking at the Soldiers, and said "We just bargained to save Captain America's life."

"First, that would mean he's alive somewhere and if he was he'd be at least 95 years old by now, and second how do they know where he is?" Maria's head jerked at the two men across from them. Natasha turned her head and looked Maria dead in the eyes.

"Because that's him, bleeding all over the interior; Captain Steve Rogers." Maria's head whipped around to stare at the unconscious blond (he's starting to get really pale now, need to move fast).

"Don't tell Coulson I ran over his hero."

"I'm totally telling Coulson you ran over his hero."

The Sergeant's eyes flickered between the two women, his face taking on a distinctly unamused expression.

The van finally rolled into what was essentially an abandoned subway tunnel, and stopped. Maria helped Natasha and the Sergeant (Barnes?) carried the Captain (Rogers? Can we talk about names please?) whose face was starting to become just the littlest bit strained from his injury, even unconscious. Agents with medical training came out to collect Natasha and more with a gurney for the Captain. The Sergeant laid his partner down and Natasha called over that those two were not to be separated under any circumstances, before they were wheeled off somewhere else. Medics steered Natasha and Maria into another room where-

Holy. Shit.

Fury blinked up at her from his hospital bed, a small quirk to his lips the only thing to indicate his relief at seeing her alive. She wanted to hug him and punch him, and instead turned to Maria, demanding to know if she knew about this. She shrugged.

"I suspected. I didn't want to get your hopes up though." Natasha snorted.

As she was being patched up, the three filled each other in. After faking his death, Fury kept his ear to the ground and discovered the schedule for Project Insight had been moved up. Natasha and Maria explained about the Winter Soldiers and Captain America, and that Natasha was confident that the Sergeant would help them. From there, the trio set about trying to plan a way back into SHIELD HQ. The three of them weren't totally sure how the algorithm selected targets, but it was pretty damn clear how Project Insight was going to work. They had a theoretical plan to take out the heli-carriers, but until they could confirm the Sergeant's aid, it was hard to figure out who would do what. Fury mentioned that he hoped to salvage something of SHIELD when they were interrupted.

"No."

Heads turned to see the Sergeant himself leaning against the doorway. Just as Natasha went to translate, the brunet abruptly switched languages. "No, not salvaging anything." Maria seemed rather irritated that the man could speak English this whole time. "SHIELD, Hydra, all the same thing. All has to go." Fury tried to argue, but it was no good. "Hydra was part of SHIELD since its inception. There is nothing left to save." Natasha agreed with him. Maria didn't have an opinion one way or the other, so Fury was outnumbered two to one and even he had to see their point. He conceded.

The Sergeant nodded and explained that the algorithm used data collected on individuals, everything from SAT scores to property taxes, to determine if that individual is or has the potential to become a threat the Hydra. Targets ranged from everyone in this room to some high school kid in Queens. The heli-carriers would eliminate those threats, millions at a time.

The orchestrator of this little scheme? Alexander Pierce.

"He is the top. We've taken all orders from him. Also murdered his maid." Natasha rolled her eyes at the afterthought way he mentioned the death of an innocent.

They split up the roles: the Sergeant would bust a way clear to the main security room for Maria, who would then play a recording of a message from Fury throughout the facility. They were willing to bet that at least half the agents were genuinely SHIELD, and would try to stall the heli-carriers' taking off. Meanwhile, Natasha would be infiltrating Pierce's office under the guise of the Madam Chairman.

After getting Maria into the security room, the Sergeant would make his way down to the hangar to the heli-carriers. He would install the software chips Fury gave him on each carrier's main processing unit, forcing the carriers to target each other and giving Maria full control of their weapon systems. They'd blow each other out of the air.

Just as they were rounding out the finer details, a medic wearing bloody scrubs and peeling off similarly dirtied plastic gloves walked through the door. He looked around the room to make sure he had everyone's attention. "He's stabilized, and expected to recover fully. He won't be in peak condition for at least a year, and it's not recommended that he moves around too much for the first month or so, but he'll be fine over all." Maria commented that a year didn't seem like such a bad recovery rate considering the damage done and the medic just shrugged. "His recovery rate is unlike anything I've ever seen. On the miraculous chance a normal person survived what he's been through, they'd be paralyzed for life. When we opened him up for surgery, his organs were already trying to knit themselves back together," he turned to the Sergeant. "He's awake if you want to see him."

The brunet assassin was out the door before he finished his sentence.

The medic turned back to the others in the room. "I'm guessing they have a lot of shared history?" Natasha giggled and asked how he figured that out. "The way they talk without talking. Blondie woke up just as we were about to start, struggled a bit, you know, and Mr. Metal Arm just put his hand on his shoulder for a second and that was it. Blondie calmed right down, laid there and let us do whatever. They had an entire conversation with nothing but facial expressions."

Natasha smirked a little. "Those two have been working together for longer than you'd probably believe." She got up and dusted off her pants. "I'm going to go see them. Had a nice little chat with Sergeant Metal Arm, but didn't really get to introduce myself to Captain Blondie." With that she waltzed out the door.

She found them easily enough. The Sergeant was sitting on the edge of the Captain's bed, their fingers touching. The red head didn't know what it was about that scene that seemed so intimate, but she felt a little sorry for interrupting it when they noticed her. It seemed Blondie wanted to sit up, but the metal hand on his chest said no, you idiot, stay down. So he addressed her from where he lay.

"You saved us." It wasn't a question. Natasha figured their programming made them instinctively more comfortable with Russian than English, so she switched languages to match.

"Yes. It's nice to properly meet you, Captain. My name is Natasha Romanov, I am an agent at SHIELD," she paused, then amended her statement. "Or at least, I was." He nodded.

"It's a pleasure, ma'am," he and the Sergeant looked at each other for a moment, before he refocused back on her. "My name is… Steve." The way the syllable sounded unfamiliar in his mouth led Natasha to believe that he didn't actually remember his name, and was taking the Sergeant's word for it. He sounded very sure about what he said next though as he gestured to his partner. "This is Bucky."

The Sergeant's head whipped around to stare at the Cap- at Steve his eyes widened with shock. There was a little quirk to Steve's lips that spoke of amusement. "James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky. My best friend."

He really did remember things.

"Watch his back for me on this mission? It's been a while since either us of ran solo, so he's a little rusty." That amused quirk had grown a little, and the Serg- and Bucky let out a gust of air through his nose to acknowledge that he was being teased. In response, he moved his metal hand from Steve's chest to brush the hair back from his partner's forehead and ran his fingers gently down his face. The blond nodded and closed his eyes, evidently settling back into sleep. Bucky stood up and moved toward the door, gesturing to Natasha to follow, flicking off the light and snagging the shield on the way out.

Natasha raised a questioning eyebrow at the shield. "He said I would need it more than he would for this mission. He never liked it anyway." Given that that was out of character for the Captain America of legend, the red head asked what was wrong with it. Bucky's shoulder twitched in what could have been a shrug. "Always said it was the wrong colour."

Natasha nodded, thinking about the Hydra logo. "He probably remembers just enough about his old shield to know the new one is wrong somehow." She wanted to encourage the Winter Soldiers to use English again, a little bit at a time. "Actually, I think I might have something to fix that." Bucky looked at her curiously and she led him to a vehicle clean up garage. Working for a secret government operation meant you had to be able to get bloodstains out of anything and on short notice at that. There was also paint in various colours for covering scratches, or giving a recognizable vehicle a new look.

Natasha might not be able to perfectly recreate the original design on Captain America's shield, but she could at least take Hydra's mark off it.

As the pair of them started scrubbing away, she realized she wouldn't have to recreate the original design. As more and more of the Hydra logo came off the metal, the iconic star and stripes steadily appeared, like the sun from behind a cloud. It almost seemed to glow when they were finished with it.

"Better." She looked at Bucky's approving gaze, hearing the invisible smile in his voice. "He'll definitely like this better."

/

Brock was navigating his way up to the top floor to take out Natasha when he stopped short. The open office space was abandoned except for him and one other individual. The man was sitting on one of the desks, legs swinging slightly like a kid waiting for his mother. He wore a grey hoodie with a pair of aviators hanging from the neck, loose pants with running shoes, and a Toronto Blue Jays baseball cap on his head.

Seeing him like this, Brock could almost believe the Captain was an actual person once.

The Captain looked over at him and shifted so that he was leaning against the desk rather than sitting on it, his hands tucked comfortably in the kangaroo pouch of his hoodie his face pointed straight ahead rather than face the Strike leader. Brock could tell that his injury from the previous day was seriously affecting him, and wondered what he was doing here.

"Natalia Romanova and Maria Hill, fugitive SHIELD agents, to be captured and killed. Mission failure. Failure to report. Significant damage sustained to asset 'The Captain'," recited the Captain. "Captain Brock Rumlow, Strike team. Field handler and commanding officer to asset team 'The Winter Soldiers' to deliver corresponding punishment." For one wild second, Brock thought the Captain came all this way to give his mission report, but then the blond turned to look him dead in the eyes. "You really liked delivering punishments, didn't you? I could see it in your face. You'd ask Bucky to do something you knew he couldn't do, just so you could punish him for it." Brock had half a mind to ask who the fuck 'Bucky' was, but the Captain continued talking, turning to stare off into space. "Bucky doesn't know I'm here. He wanted me to stay put, rest up, y'know? I said I would, 'cause I didn't want him to worry about me, even gave him the shield to use." There was something akin to a smile on the Captain's face as he talked, and Brock started wondering how he could muffle the click of the safety on his gun. He needed to shoot this bastard and move on. "He even washed all the bad colours off so it's right again."

Brock's memory flashed to the sight of the renegade Sergeant running around with a different-coloured shield and abruptly blurted out "Its name is Bucky?"

Wrong thing to say.

The Captain's head whipped around to pin him with his gaze. Sweat dripped down the back of Brock's neck as he remembered that injury or no injury, the Captain was still one of two the deadliest killers on the planet. And he seemed to be breaking his programming.

"His name is Bucky. He's a person and he's mine. Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky." The Captain's entire body turned to face Brock. "And you liked to hurt him."

In the time it took for Brock to point his gun and pull back the hammer, the Captain pulled the hand gun from his pouch, clicked the safety and fired. The bullet found a home between Brock's eyes.

Steve put the gun down on the desk and left the building, chucking the rubber gloves he wore in the trash as he went. It was time to go back to base to wait for Bucky.

/

Upon entering the room, Bucky could immediately tell that Steve had not stayed put like he was told. The sheets were ruffled, like they'd been shifted around recently, the medic looked a mix between pissed off and resigned, and Steve was obviously exhausted by something. As Bucky approached, he could begin to smell gunpowder and sweat coming off Steve, sure signs that he gallivanted off and shot somebody.

The medic left to give them some privacy and Bucky sat down on the edge of the mattress, letting the fingers of his flesh hand touch Steve's to feel his pulse through his fingers, and let Steve feel his. Steve's lips twitched into a tiny smile. He was getting better at smiling. Bucky sighed lightly through his nose.

"Who?"

Steve's eyes flickered away guiltily, before coming back to Bucky's. "Rumlow."

Bucky had heard that they pulled his corpse from the rubble of HQ, a mess from having a building dropped on it. Coroners determined though that the single bullet wound found in his skull killed him a while before the cave in. Bucky was not at all surprised that Steve pulled the trigger; the blond never liked Rumlow.

The brunet rolled his eyes and ruffled Steve's hair. Punk.

The blond shook his head and batted at Bucky's hand to dislodge it. Jerk.

Natasha smiled from where she was peeking outside the door. Once everything calmed down, the remnants of SHIELD would create new identities for the both of them, integrate them back into society, and find them a place to live.

Maybe somewhere in Brooklyn.