postscript: primus

.

We drank and talked until late, dawn only a few hours away when we headed our separate ways. I cleaned up and grabbed a glass a water, staring out the window at the incredible view that had come with the place and knew I would miss it. No, it hadn't been home, but it had provided a needed respite from the war that had happened between Tony and I. From the Accords had broken the Avengers.

I had lost one connection to the past only to find another. That said, I was beginning to believe the past might just need to stay there. This world we lived in now too different to ever feel right to me. But that could change if I just learned to adapt a bit better. I hadn't watched the world grow and change, hadn't experienced the leaps and bounds technology had taken while I slept the decades away. Had woken up to a brand new world that had no clue what to do with me and my outdated perspective of right and wrong.

I tried to fit in, but could not, not really. I clung to a past and set of morals that were long dead and turned to dust.

And yet... and yet there were those who looked up to me, who relied on me to make the right call in any given situation simply because of those very same morals.

Standing my ground, doing what I believed deep down in my soul must be right, had broken the Avengers and made I and my friends fugitives, probably for the rest of our lives.

Maybe I needed to learn to compromise a little?

But if I compromised here and there, eventually it would become all I did and then what would I have left?

Yes, the world had been a messy place back in the forties, but there were clear lines between right and wrong. Good and evil. Here and now they had become blurred, fuzzed out and smudged to the point where, to some, the only logical route involved doing things that they did not truly believe in.

I could not do that.

More, I would not.

With a heavy sigh I pushed the deep thoughts aside and changed for bed, hoping I would be able to sleep for more than a few hours; the dreams only abating slightly with time and distance from the actual events they recalled.

I turned off the lights, my eyes taking a moment to adjust to the darkened room, when I noticed a faint light blinking on the desk across from me. My phone lay on the nightstand, so it couldn't be that and the computer had been shut down, unneeded for the time being.

Confused, I walked over to the desk, not wanting to deal with the tiny blue light blinking on and off all night long. The light came from the flip phone I always kept on and charged - just in case. The pair to the one I had sent Tony months ago as a peace offering

I never really expected to use it. Tony's hurt far too deep to be easily excised. And once he realized, which he would by now with certainty, that I had stayed with Bucky, the chances of him ever speaking to me again dropped precipitously.

Yet, the little blue LED blinked at me in the darkened room. A bright beacon calling to me, waiting for me to act upon it.

I picked the flip phone up, fumbling it open to see a text waiting for me.

Good work.

That's all. Just two words, but more than I had ever hoped to receive.

For an instant I debated doing nothing. To not respond and leave him wondering and waiting as I had been for long months. Of course, this could also be a ploy, a move to ascertain my location with certainty, but if T'Challa were correct, then the world already knew and were turning a blind eye for the time being simply because it's hard to arrest a hero. Putting us in chains after Prague would make them look like idiots and a fair portion of the world's population might just very well cry foul.

Hell, maybe we were needed after all.

So, I took the middle road and sent a single word back: thanks

That night, for the first time in months, I did not dream about that look of terror in Tony's eyes.

postscript: secundus

.

"When was this place last used?" Sam asked swiping his fingers through the thick dust atop a piece of severely outdated equipment.

"Mid-eighties," Bucky answered, leading us deeper into the facility.

While not the largest Hydra base I had seen, it still would leave us rattling about like marbles in a coffee can, which I realized, with no little dismay, was as an outdated an idea as me and Buck.

"It'll need some serious updating before we'll be effective, but the foundation is solid and we're completely off the grid," Buck pointed out as we stepped into a huge open area. He pointed upwards. "Roof opens to allow helos in. Quinjet should fit... just. We'll need to clear the outside of debris, but that should only take a few days."

"This is... impressive," Wanda finally said, her eyes roving everywhere and missing little. We'd trained her well. "There's power here."

Bucky nodded. "Off for now, but it works." He glanced over at me. "I checked when I scouted the place."

I nodded. Not certain what to say. When he'd said he might have a place for us to go, and showed me the layout and location, I hadn't thought about what that would really mean. Of course, he would know about other Hydra facilities, and while the Avengers had been cleaning them up after D.C. and the release of all the Hydra/SHIELD files, there was little chance those were the only bases to have been created over the years.

He hadn't given me any details, and I hadn't asked, trusting him to have a reasonable grasp of what we needed to move forward with our insane plan to form our own group of heroes. "What was this place?" I asked, wondering what horrors had been committed here over the years.

"Admin, mostly. Some R&D. Bigwigs would gather here for demos of assets and new weapons."

And that explained how Bucky knew about it. He'd probably been shown off here a time or two. A preview of the deadly skills of the Winter Soldier before being sent off to assassinate his next target. "Weapons cache?"

He shrugged. "Probably. I didn't explore in detail."

He'd checked out a couple dozen locations on his solo trips. Every time he left I'd worried he might not return, might just disappear and try to start over again. I would have hated him for it, but also understood. He stayed with us in Wakanda mostly because he had no easy way to hide any longer. The whole world knew the face of the Winter Soldier and many would turn him in without batting an eye. Others would try to use him, take advantage of that weakness in him and turn him back into the monster he believed himself to be.

Prague had been a turning point of sorts for him, him showing his face to the world, revealing that Bucky Barnes still lived and could still be a good man seemed to loosen something in him. His memories, both good and bad, not quite the burden they had been before that day.

"This is going to take a lot of work," Sam complained, and I agreed.

Dust and dirt lay over everything, old equipment, older secrets and who knew what else buried within this mountain, and all of it would need to be gone through in detail. "What, you too good for some old fashioned house cleaning?" I snarked, hiding the grin I felt.

Sam complaining felt like a good thing to me. He could see the possibilities here.

"Spoiled," he argued. "The compound didn't exactly require much help from us."

I couldn't disagree with that. We had been spoiled, but this would be good for us. We'd learn to work together in ways that didn't require risk to life and limb. We'd rebuild this place together and be all the stronger for it.

"Well, I didn't want us somewhere we could be found easily," Bucky reminded, heading for a pair of double doors on the far side of the landing area. "And this one had the least damage done to it. Some of them had already been found by SHIELD or the Avengers and had been stripped. Looks like this one got forgotten. Besides, " he opened the doors with a decided flourish, "you can't beat the view."

A huge conference room lay on the other side, walls to the right and left covered in ancient video screens, a dust covered oval table in the center, but directly across were windows, huge floor to fifteen foot ceiling windows, that leaned out into the open air.

We all made our way over to discover the windows had been carved into a sheer cliff face overlooking a tumbling river far below us. To the right a couple hundred yards away, a waterfall roared, clearly the source of energy for the power plant. Across from us the tree covered mountainside held a layer of snow, softening the sharp near vertical face of the landscape. The clouds overhead shifted just then, allowing a bright beam of sunlight to strike the far side, lighting up the entire valley in a golden glow.

Sam whistled, impressed. "Okay, yeah, I can get with this."

I looked over at Wanda, who had placed her hands on the glass to lean forward against it, looking straight down. She glanced at me and simply nodded.

I clapped a hand on Bucky's shoulder. "Looks like we're home."

He gave me a smile, and in that instant Bucky, that kid I grew up with back in Brooklyn so many years ago, returned, and he grinned.

.

.

.

finis