Lies of Silver, Heart of Gold ~§~ Bucky Barnes

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Ding. The elevator opens and Clint, Natasha, and Steve step out.

"Director," Steve calls. "Cutting my catch-up trip short had better be worth it."

Fury scoffs. "I wouldn't have interrupted you if it wasn't. You are more familiar with HYDRA than any of us."

Steve shrugs and leans his back against the edge of the kitchen counter. "I mean, it's been a long time since the forties. What do you need to know?"

"Were there any hideouts that weren't destroyed in the second World War, that you know of?" Fury asks. "We think that Rumlow has Agent Lewis and that... Soldier of hers at a formerly abandoned location."

Steve pushes himself off the counter and steps toward Natasha. "You skipped a few chapters on the drive here, Romanoff. I thought Carina had a thing for Loki."

"You might want to sit down, Rogers," Clint interjects, gesturing his bow to the couch next to Goose.

Steve arches an eyebrow at Clint, but he obliges and Goose almost immediately moves herself into Steve's lap.

"Steve," Natasha starts, hesitating with nearly every sound, "after you left New York, a lot went down. Carina found out that HYDRA had eyes on her and wanted to take her, and that Loki had been lying with nearly every word he uttered to her. HYDRA sent their strongest weapon they had to get her: the Winter Soldier."

Steve shifts his gaze between everyone quickly, then back to Natasha. "I thought the Winter Soldier was a myth."

"Pull up the desk, Tony," Clint asks over his shoulder, not daring to break his gaze from Steve.

Tony pulls up his holodesk and Natasha locates and opens the encrypted file almost immediately, then turns around and looks back to Steve.

"First off, the Winter Soldier is definitely real. I've had more than a few run-ins with him myself, even before S.H.I.E.L.D.." She lifts her t-shirt slightly to reveal the scar she showed Carina when they had first had this conversation. "He sniped a slug through me to kill a guy I was tasked with protecting." She drops her shirt and continues. "The Winter Soldier did try to come after her, but she managed to pull him out of whatever mind fuck that HYDRA had put him through and we managed to figure out his real name."

Clint steps forward and sighs. "The Winter Soldier is James Barnes, but I think you knew him as—"

"—Bucky," Steve gasps. "He- He's alive? How?"

Natasha moves Maria's laptop and sits on the other side of the couch. "When hundreds of Allied soldiers were being held captive by HYDRA, they had started to experiment on a few hostages, Bucky being one of the more extreme cases. They had given him a serum almost identical to what had made you. We don't know those details, but to skip ahead, they hadn't realized the serum worked until he was found in the woods a few hundred feet below some railroad tracks, alive, but without most of his left arm."

Steve wipes away the few tears that he had let form and lets out a shaky breath. "How is he still alive now?"

"Same way you are," Fury cuts in. "If he wasn't on a mission, he was frozen in time. Suspended animation. That's also how we think our—well, HYDRA's scientists knew how to de-ice you so easily."

"Skipping forward to last year," Natasha continues, "After Carina was able to deactivate his assassin side, he had basically no memory of any aspect of his life before. However, it was clear even to me that there was an instant spark between them."

"Unfortunately, both of them, plus Natasha, had to go off the grid into hiding when they realized how dangerous it would be if HYDRA got ahold of them both, especially with all of Carina's abilities," Clint explains. "I went and visited them once a month to bring supplies and check in on them as best as I could. Rogers, they fell in love with each other."

"They got engaged in April, on Carina's birthday, but that same day HYDRA found us," Natasha recalls. "I was almost killed in the attack, and they were both taken to God knows where."

Steve gently moves Goose aside and gets up to start pacing in the kitchen while he tries to process everything he was just told.

"Does he know about me?" Steve asks, his voice breaking. "That I'm still alive?"

Natasha moves to a barstool at the kitchen counter. "We were going to tell him since he was getting his memory back. He started asking if Carina knew about anyone in his memories that she'd seen, then everything happened and we never got the chance." She takes a deep breath and fiddles with her ring out of nervousness. "I'm not a romance person, but if they ever get the chance to be actually married, I'm sure they'd both want you standing up there with them."

"Which is part of why we need to do everything we can to get them back safely and take HYDRA down," Clint adds. "But we can't do that without a HYDRA expert. That's why we're telling you all this. The fewer people that know, the better our chances."

"Okay, then, JARVIS, delete any audio recording you have regarding this conversation," Tony calls out, startling just about everyone else. He swipes down the holodesk and clasps his hands together. "If you'll excuse me, friends and acquaintances, I have some passcodes to test and I'd like to do that in the quiet of my home for a bit."

Fury scoffs in amusement. "You heard richie-rich. Let's get to work." He starts to shoo his agents and Steve towards the elevator as he pulls Goose off the couch. Just at that moment, she gags and her mouth opens wider than her jaws should allow and ejects some saliva-covered keys into Fury's free hand. Everyone looks back at Fury in concern and he shrugs.

"Did I forget to mention Goose isn't a normal cat?"

"Yeah," Tony blurts out, staring at the soaked keys dripping onto the rug below. "Yeah, you definitely didn't mention that." He shakes his head rapidly as if to erase the memory like an Etch-A-Sketch. "Barton, can you actually stay for a minute? I have something to show you."

Clint raises an eyebrow, but nods at everyone else to go ahead. "I'll meet you back at headquarters," he says passively.

The elevator dings and the other agents and Steve quickly disappear from sight and thought.

"What's so important you needed me alone, Stark?" Clint asks.

Tony glances at the delicate bracelet around Clint's wrist and pulls his holodesk back up. "You remember the Chitauri invasion, of course," he begins. "Well, when I first got Carina to the medical wing, we didn't know who she was, so we tested her blood sample against the entire S.H.I.E.L.D. database."

"Okay, what does this have to do with me?"

Tony clicks around in his personal files for a moment and quickly pulls up Carina's medical records. "It has something to do with you because the database came up with her complete match, as well as a... half match."

Clint's eyes go wide as he realizes what Tony is trying to explain to him. "Are you sure this is accurate?"

"I ran the test four times, Barton. She's your daughter."