A Bolt from the Blue

Prologue

When Steve Rogers woke up, the very first thought his sluggish brain crafted was about Bucky. A unique, obsessive thought he couldn't – and refused – to shake off.

The freshly-painted pale walls, the smell of the disinfectant and the new mattress he was lying on all seemed strangely unfamiliar to him as he opened his heavy lids. The sound of applause and the voice of a cheering man coming from inside the room caught his attention. He rose and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to shut off the sound from the radio to focus on figuring out where Bucky was.

He was alive, he had survived the crash God knows how, but all that mattered at this moment was to find his best friend.

'I see you're awake, captain Rogers,' a woman's voice pulled him out of his thinking.

He turned to her with a confused frown on his face, looking her up and down, his brain registering every familiar detail of her perfectly-pressed uniform, perfectly-combed hair and makeup style, and yet finding them all remarkably foreign to him. He had seen this military uniform a hundred times, knew it very well, and yet, the more he looked at it, the more curious it looked.

'Where is Bucky?' he voiced out softly, not out of physical weakness but in fear of the kind of answer he could get.

'You should have some rest first,' the agent replied. The wrong kind of answer.

'Where am I?' he asked. This could be useful information in case he'd have to resort to finding Bucky by his own means.

'You're in a recovery room in New York,' the lady recited.

'Tell me where my friend is,' he said, putting more energy and determination in his tone.

'The Dodgers take the lead, 8-4. Oh Dodgers, everyone is on their feet!' the sports announcer shouted on the radio.

Steve allowed his brain to drift its attention away for a few seconds as he listened carefully to the commentator's unexpectedly familiar words.

'What a game we have here today, folks.'

'Where am I really?' he asked again, suspicious and, should he confess, slightly afraid. He felt a lump in his stomach and his first internal cry out was for Bucky. Hydra had taken him once for experiments. They could have taken him again for the exact same purpose.

'I'm afraid I don't understand,' the impostor tried to answer as calmly as possible after a barely visible gasp. The woman sounded every bit of American but he trusted Hydra had infiltrated agents everywhere.

'The game,' he spoke more hardly, not liking this whole sham in the slightest, expecting soldiers to barge in the room any second. He stood up to put himself in a defensive position then walked slowly up to her, daring the agent standing in front of him to break character. 'It's from May 1941.I know cause I was there. Now I'm going to ask you again: where am I?'

'Captain Rogers,' armed soldiers dressed in the strangest stealth outfits shouted warningly, stepping in the room at once. At this point, it wasn't really a surprise although the agent who had just spoken had the accent and the look of a fellow American, just like him.

'Who are you?' he asked astonished, looking at the unfamiliar rifles pointed in his direction that didn't look anything like the German models he had seen before. He didn't ask for their identities, he asked for their backgrounds.

Listening to his survival instinct (certainly the little guy in him), he attacked first. He bounced at his opponents and threw them against the wall which literally burst open with more easiness than he had expected. He jumped through the hole the impact had made and was hit with the striking surprise of a spacious, dark room used as a mere decorum, a stage for the masquerade in which he was the main protagonist.