Captain America Bucky Barnes Winter Soldier Steve Rogers Fan Fic - The Constant

Chapter Seventy: The Constant, Steve Rogers & The Winter Soldier - Alive

The Constant, Steve Rogers & The Winter Soldier - Alive

The Constant

You have about fifteen minutes until the Winter Soldier will appear. You are still reeling from what you saw on the way to the agreed rendezvous point and you cannot get it out of your mind. As you sit there, your attention is focused a million miles away and when the phone goes it makes you jump out of your skin.

It rarely ever rings.

You fumble to pick it up and almost cut the call off in your haste to find the correct button.

"Hello?"

It's Felix, and your heart nearly stops. He has new instructions for you. The pick up has changed and he tells you that you are to stand down until later in the day. In the meantime they will text you with new co-ordinates.

"Is he all right?" you ask. You know you shouldn't, and there is silence and then he answers.

"Everything is fine," and the phone goes dead.

Can they just not tell you the name of the new place you have to meet them? They know you hate new technology; if they send the co-ordinates it means you have to type them into the bloody Sat Nav and you and the Sat Nav never get on. You have a love hate relationship with it – it loves to make you hate it.

You wonder what has gone wrong.

You now have over four hours to kill; not enough time to head back to base but too long to just sit here or at the new meeting place but deep down you know immediately where you are going to go.

You drive back along the road you came in on and see the notice again. You thought you may have dreamt it but no it is still here. You turn down the slip road and follow it to the car park, purchase a ticket, and lock the car. You have plenty of time, but if Hydra find out what you are doing you will be in serious trouble. No excuses. It could even mean your death.

But you need to know.

You follow the pavement. There are plenty of signposts to ensure that you don't get lost and it is difficult for you not to stop and gaze at the long banners on the way, at the advertisements for what you are going to see, but you don't have time. You cannot be late: you must be where you should be in just under four hours.

There are crowds of people, families, and you nearly bottle out: you hate to be so exposed. You rarely encounter crowds in your life, and you are just not used to a lot of people all in the same area. At the entrance you take a deep breath and enter and in front of you is a huge hall with aircraft, of all things, hanging from the ceiling. You fumble to pay the entrance fee; they give you your change and a leaflet and then you are through the turnstile. To your left is the exhibition you saw advertised, the exhibition that so shocked you, the one you have come to visit. A copy of the original poster you saw is now in front of you by the entrance to the hall you are about to enter: Steve Rogers is alive. Still alive. You thought he had died a long time ago, until the sign you saw on the way to the rendezvous shattered that reality.

A larger banner welcomes visitors in.

Welcome Back, Cap!

You pass through the exhibits showing his journey to becoming Captain America. Parts are vaguely familiar; you saw some of this a long time ago, but the one thing you can see straight away is that the serum given to Steve Rogers was a lot more stable than that given to James Barnes.

You read the history and you know that as much as you would like to hate this man you couldn't ever do so because you can see why James fell in love with him. There is a morality to him: an innocence, the one James used to talk about. And you also learn something else – the film you had seen all those years ago with James was incorrect.