Life has a way of taking everything you think you know and turning it upside down.
Sometimes it's cruel, devastatingly, unfairly cruel to people who don't deserve it. But sometimes, in the quiet moments between the chaos, it offers something unexpected. A chance meeting. A moment of grace.
Unfortunately for the man who'd recently been using his own blood to scrawl a message on a bunker wall, life had been dealing him the crueler hand for far too long.
James Buchanan Barnes had volunteered for a war he knew might kill him. For a while, he'd even accepted that fate. Then Steve Rogers came crashing through enemy lines to save him, and suddenly he had hope again.
He'd fought alongside his best friend and the finest soldiers he'd ever known. For a brief time, despite the horrors of war, he'd found something like peace.
Then everything went to hell.
After surviving a fall that should have killed him, the last clear memory he had was waking up to find that seventy years had passed. And then, slowly, agonizingly, the rest came flooding back.
The chair. The electricity. The words that turned him into a weapon.
All those years, all those missions, he'd been a ghost story, a legend whispered in intelligence circles. The Winter Soldier. A man who existed only to kill.
He'd spent the last year hunting down every Hydra facility he could find, determined to burn out every trace of the programming that had turned him into a monster. The Red Book had given him names, locations, codes, everything he needed to systematically dismantle the network that had stolen his life.
Most of the bases had been empty. Some hadn't.
The bodies he'd left behind would probably take years to clean up.
But this latest facility, buried deep in the Siberian tundra, had yielded something unexpected. Not more weapons or files or Hydra scientists, but a woman, frozen in what she'd called a "sarcophagus," though it looked like an advanced cryogenic chamber to him.
She'd been mumbling about Sith Lords and clutching a strange necklace when she first woke up. Definitely not your average Hydra prisoner.
James Buchanan Barnes, Bucky to anyone who'd earned the right, figured they both needed to get the hell out of that nightmare base before having any kind of real conversation.
She'd been hesitant about leaving at first, until she spotted the bloody message he'd written on the wall. After that, she'd been more than ready to go.
Her name was Celeste Morn, she'd said. When he'd asked if she needed to grab anything before they left, she'd just patted her belt and breathed a sigh of relief when her fingers found some kind of metal cylinder hanging there.
The trek out of the base had been rough on her. The 1940s gentleman in him felt like a heel for not noticing sooner, spending months in cryo-sleep could make anyone sensitive to the cold. He'd found her a thick winter coat from the facility's supply room, making sure to rip off the Hydra insignia before handing it over.
Now they sat across from each other in a small tavern in the nearest Russian village, steam rising from their coffee cups in the dim light.
"What is this drink?" Celeste asked, taking her fourth sip with a look of fascination. "It tastes terrible, but I can't seem to stop drinking it."
Bucky couldn't help but chuckle at her reaction to something so mundane.
"Coffee," he said, raising his cup slightly. "It'll keep you going when you need it most."
"I see," she murmured, taking an even larger sip. "May I have more?"
"You can drink the whole pot if you want," Bucky replied. "Sounds like we're both gonna need it."
"Please," Celeste said with genuine enthusiasm, which made the old soldier smile despite everything.
After the server brought them a fresh pot and the simple meal Bucky had ordered, they ate in companionable silence for a while. Eventually, though, the questions couldn't wait any longer.
"How did you find me?" Celeste asked quietly. "And where exactly am I?"
"That's... complicated," Bucky said, leaning back and crossing his arms. "I've been on what you might call a personal crusade. Finding you wasn't part of the plan."
She tilted her head, studying him with sharp blue eyes.
"But I'm glad I did," Bucky continued, rubbing his stubbly jaw. "Thing is, I don't know who you are. Hydra barely had any records of your existence, and even the files I found where they were keeping you didn't tell me much."
"Hydra?" Celeste repeated, clearly confused.
"Yeah, Hydra," Bucky said grimly. "Let's just say they're evil with a capital E. Nazi science division that never got the memo that the war ended."
"Evil?" She looked genuinely puzzled.
Bucky realized she had no frame of reference for any of this.
"Okay, look," he said, leaning forward and resting his arms on the table. "How about we both start from the beginning? Tell each other our stories, figure out how we ended up in that frozen hellhole."
Celeste nodded slowly, taking another bite of her sandwich.
"Ladies first?" Bucky suggested with old-fashioned courtesy.
The woman across from him smiled at his manners and took a moment to gather her thoughts.
"My name is Celeste Morn," she began formally. "I am, was, a Shadow of the Jedi Order, serving the Galactic Republic."
Bucky blinked slowly, processing that.
"Right... the Jedi Order," he repeated carefully. "The Galactic Republic. So you're... from outer space?"
Celeste's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "I... suppose you could put it that way. Wait, do you know of the Jedi Order?"
Bucky shook his head.
She tried a few more names and terms, watching his face for any sign of recognition. The Sith. The Galactic Republic. Mandalorians. Names like Zayne Carrick, Revan, Malak.
Each one was met with the same blank stare.
"What planet am I on?" she finally asked, a note of concern creeping into her voice.
"Earth."
Celeste looked confused. "Earth? As in... dirt?"
Bucky couldn't help but laugh at that. "Honestly? No idea why they called it that. You'd have to ask whoever named it, not me."
She smiled at his response, shaking her head.
"So," she said, "from the beginning?"
"Fire away."
Celeste did her best to explain her life in simple terms, the Mandalorian Wars, her training as a Jedi Shadow, the Sith, something called the Force that sounded like it came straight out of a science fiction movie. She tried to tie it all together into something that made sense.
Bucky followed as best he could. It all sounded fantastic, yet strangely familiar. War was something he understood all too well, and he was grimly unsurprised to learn that conflict seemed to be universal.
Then again, the alien invasion of New York three years ago should have prepared him for the idea that there was a whole lot more out there than just Earth.
"So these Jedi," Bucky said when she finished, "they sound like some kind of mystical warrior monks."
Celeste nearly put her head down on the table. "We're not a cult."
"You sure about that?" Bucky asked with mock seriousness. "Mysterious all-powerful energy field with a will of its own? Sounds pretty cult-ish to me."
"The Jedi Order has been the guardian of peace for thousands of years," Celeste said, though there was something distant in her expression. "We serve the Republic, but our duty is to the galaxy and the Force above all else."
"Guardians of peace," Bucky repeated quietly, turning to look out the frosted window. His voice carried the weight of someone who'd seen too much. "Yeah, I used to believe in that too."