toli-a:

“Bucky! Bucky? What happened? Jim, how’s Bucky?”

“Tell ‘im it’ll be fine,” Bucky gritted out, the words
shoved out of his mouth with a pained exhale and flecks of blood.

Jim would be the first to admit that he wasn’t a very good medic—you might say that Uncle Sam
wasn’t so interested in keeping his yellow troops alive, if you were the sort
of unpatriotic SOB who said things like that—but even he could diagnose the
chance for survival when Sarge had been shot in the chest and was breathing out
blood.

“I’m not gonna lie to Cap!” Jim hissed, widening his eyes at
Sarge. Hell, even in the dark and under fire from Nazi troops, Cap’s
superpowers could probably sniff out a lie, and Barnes was already going ashen
under the full moon. There was no reason for Morita to even unpack his kit.

“How is he?” Steve demanded, his voice shrill, and Jim
busied himself pulling out rolls of gauze. “Jim!”

“Tell him,” Barnes
groaned, blood spilling into his lung and up his throat, unable to bite down
the pained moan when Jim shoved a handful of gauze and all the pressure he
could manage onto Sarge’s splintered chest. “I swear to you on your father’s
grave it’s not a lie, Fresno,” he panted, speaking more clearly than Jim
thought he should be able to, but then most of Jim’s experience as a medic had
been in the camps, carrying out the dead.

“Jim! Dammit, Bucky! Answer me!”

“My father’s not dead, you asshole.” Jim wrenched his
blanket out of his pack with his left hand, tossing it clumsily over Sarge’s
legs and doing absolutely nothing to stop Barnes’s sudden shivering, spasming
limbs. “Swear on your own damn grave.”

“’m fine, punk,” Barnes croaked, and Jim could only hear him
because his ear was a foot from Sarge’s face—even then it was faint, drowned
out by the sound of Tommy guns and the dull roar of an oncoming tank.

“Don’t lie to me, you jackass,” Steve shouted back – everything enhanced, even his ears – ducking
and weaving through trees too dense for him to throw the shield, unable to turn
and catch a glimpse of his second in command without exposing Bucky and Jim to
enemy fire. “Fresno, is he okay?”

“He won’t be if you don’t get rid of that tank,” Jim
snapped, because he wasn’t going to lie to Cap and he wasn’t going to disobey
Sarge and none of it was going to fucking matter if they all got mowed down by
Nazis before Barnes gasped out his last bloody breath.

It took Jim a second to realize that Sarge wasn’t just
flailing his limbs, and another long moment to figure out that the bastard was trying to sit up. “What the hell is
wrong with you?” he grunted, shoving down harder on the field dressing and
pinning Barnes to the ground. “You want to get shot in the head, too? One
glorious death in battle isn’t enough?”

Bucky laughed, choking on his own blood. “Bullet went
through, didn’t it?” he asked, after he’d almost caught his breath. “I can’t
tell. It all feels like I got trampled by elephants.”

“Or sat on by Cap.” Jim huffed, then gave in when Barnes
rolled his bloodshot eyes. “Yeah, Sarge, through and through. Why, you were
hoping to die with the bullet that killed you?”

It was the sympathetic look on Sarge’s face that made Jim
think it might not be sweat catching in his lashes and stinging his eyes. Jim
scrubbed at his face with his sleeve—he didn’t need to be patted on the cheek
by a man seconds from his own grave.

“I’m not dying,” Barnes lied again, his voice inexplicably
stronger, the gurgle in his throat settling to a dull rasp. “Jim, swear on
Steve’s life, I’m not. But you gotta trust me, and you gotta wrap my chest
before trees start growing through it.”

“Fertilizer’s all you’re good for,” Jim sniffed, but Sarge
would never, ever swear on Cap unless
it was true, so he hauled Barnes up and propped his useless carcass against a
tree while he cut away his shirts and folded himself around his sergeant in an
awkward embrace, Jim’s hands and arms and chest and teeth all trying to hold
two field dressings in place long enough to bind them down.

Five minutes later the sounds of the fight had shifted over
the hill, leaving Jim and his patient alone in a copse of trees on a pile of
leaves tacky with gallons of Sarge’s blood. Jim had managed to shove Sarge into
his coat and wrap him in a blanket, and he was still pale but there was already
color back in his cheeks, and his hands were warmer than Jim’s when he felt at
Sarge’s wrist for a pulse.

“Don’t take this wrong,” Jim said, chafing his hands
together and debating the wisdom of starting a fire within sight of the German
border, “but you should be dead. You make a deal with the Devil for your nine
lives?”

“Don’t tell Steve.” Sarge was starting to sound like Jackie
after he’d accidentally blown up the mess, experimenting with the meatloaf and
a fuse.

Jim tucked his hands under his thighs and sighed. “Don’t
tell Steve you’re dead. Don’t tell him you’re not dead. Make up your damn mind, Sarge.”

“You’re right,” Sarge whispered, and he really ought to have
said that ten minutes ago when Jim had shouted for him to “Duck!” “I should’ve died.” He poked at a few blood-stained leaves
with a twig, then lifted his head and stared at Jim. “That’s what you can’t
tell Steve.”

“Why not?” Morita wondered, keeping his voice low because Cap
had ears like a bat and the squad was already on their way back over the rise,
safe and well and in control of the woods if their loud mockery was any sign. “Rogers
seems like the kind of fella to believe in miracles. Sort of looks like one, if
you’re looking at him like Carter does.”

“Sure,” Bucky smirked, the gaps between his teeth still dark
with blood. “Stevie’s singing down angels and joining the holy choir.” The
smile flickered and vanished, and Bucky stabbed his twig hard into the ground. “But
I think you might be right, Fresno, about where I picked up my nine lives.”

It took Jim a moment to catch on, but no matter how many
stories Gabe told about fiddlin’ and a cloven-hoofed jig there was only one
Devil that they had all seen smiling at them through the bars, wire-rimmed glasses on a porcine face. “Damn,” he
breathed, because there was nothing else to say.

Bucky snorted, and no air whistled through the hole that
should have been in his lung. “Sure I am,” he agreed. “But there’s no reason to
tell Steve that, not ‘til I’ve used up a few more lives.”

Jim didn’t want to lie to Cap. “Guess I just worry,” he
said, when Rogers asked why Morita was still shaking if Sarge was fine. It wasn’t a lie: he worried about them all, now, because even a good medic wouldn’t know how to barter with the Devil for something good in the last life.

---

“Could you have survived the fall?” Jim demanded, grabbing
Captain America by his lapels and hauling himself up the man’s chest to look
him in the eye. “Could you? Could you still be alive if it had been you?”

Steve shoved him away, ran for the silence of the bar, and
went to his own fall believing that Morita had blamed him for not diving after
Barnes—but Steve had never answered, and Jim had kept his trap shut because
what was the point in reliving Sarge’s nine lives if he was dead?

(The first year Stark tried to take apart the Arctic, Jim
dragged the other Commandos back to the Alps, but neither team found anything
under snow and ice. Jim hadn’t expected a miracle—but he’d maybe hoped for a
deal, now that the SSR had flung open the doors to its lab and let the Devil in
its bed.)

spitandvinegar:

I like to imagine that the Winter Soldier would have been programmed with basically every language that he would need for missions, and, for the sake of versimillitude, his handlers would make sure that he had the appropriate accent/diction and backstory to flawlessly pass as a native of a decently sized city in the country he was working in. So he speaks French like he’s from Toulouse, German like he’s from Cologne etc., allowing him to seamlessly blend in with the locals when he’s out raining destruction across Europe.

Unfortunately, the Red Room – not being known for its commitment to multiculturalism – didn’t think this system through very carefully when it came time to send the Winter Soldier off to do his first ever long mission for their comrades in China. They just program him to speak Mandarin like a statistically unremarkable proletarian from Zhangjiakou and send him on his merry way.

So he arrives in China with his Soviet handler and the following circumstances align to make the entire mission, from the perspective of the Red Room, a disaster from start to finish.

1. It’s 1971, and China is not open to the outside world. Most of the men on the Soldier’s strike team have never met a foreigner in their lives.

2. Those who have met a foreigner have never met one who speaks completely fluent Mandarin with a paint-peeling Hebei accent.

3. This is ENORMOUSLY INTERESTING AND ENTERTAINING to everyone he encounters.

4. Instead of being unremarkable and blending in with the locals he gets mobbed by curious spectators everywhere he goes. His strike team, despite being a little scared of him at first, are so excited to talk to a foreigner who they can actually communicate with that they constantly come up with excuses to hang out and chat.

5. China’s relative lack of development in the early seventies means that there aren’t the facilities to wipe him or put him in the freezer, so the main weapons that Handler Dima has at his disposal to keep the Soldier in line are 1. it’ll be hard for him to run away because he tends to attract crowds, and 2. He sometimes looks very ashamed of himself if you give him a sternly worded talking-to.

6. The Soldier is having the time of his life. Look at me, look at all of my friends, I have so many friends, EVERYONE LIKES ME.

The Winter Soldier, doing shots of baijiu and toasting to the health of Chairman Mao. The Winter Soldier, chain smoking and eating millions of sunflower seeds while playing Fight the Landlord with his new pals on a cross-country sleeper train. The Winter Soldier, doing morning tai chi and calisthenics along with his team. The Winter Soldier, preening every time someone tells him that he looks like a movie star (his handler says “They’re just saying that because they only ever see Europeans in films,” to which the Soldier replies, “But Dima, why don’t they say that you look like a movie star?”). The Winter Soldier, showboating shamelessly for his strike team, who have started calling him Lao Da and looking to him for orders while ignoring Handler Dima, who can’t speak Chinese and definitely can’t shoot two people at the same time while doing a backflip. The Winter Soldier, making elaborate Chinese puns and teaching his guys useful English phrases that he can’t remember learning (Did you come here alone, doll?). The Winter Soldier, harassing his buddies until they show him pictures of their wives and kids and then sincerely complimenting them on their beautiful families. The Winter Soldier, suspecting that he has experienced this kind of camaraderie before but unable to remember when and how.  

His next mission, in Vietnam, is the first time that they muzzle him.