3.3 Winter Soldier
We open in a deserted Red Room facility, somewhere in Europe. Natasha Romanoff walks between rows of children's beds, all with cuffs attached to the headboards. As she walks, she runs her hand over the footboards of the beds, far more unsettled than we’re used to seeing her.
In Washington D.C, Sam Wilson is out jogging when he gets lapped by Steve Rogers. He tries to speed up, but gets lapped again. Eventually Steve stops being an asshole and stops to actually say hi, and they talk about what it’s like to be living in the future. Steve jokes about how much better things are now, but it doesn’t quite ring true. Sam, seeing that Steve is struggling, suggests he come down to the V.A. and sit in on Sam’s support group some time, and Steve agrees.
While they’re talking, Steve’s phone rings and when he checks the caller ID, he sees it’s Natasha. He says goodbye to Sam, makes a joke about cell phones being one of the things that’s better about the modern world, and waits until he’s out of earshot before answering.
He immediately asks her what she’s found, if she’s got a lead on Bucky Barnes, but she tells him no, she’d just needed to talk to a friend. He reminds her that she doesn’t need to do this, but she insists that she does. As long as the Red Room’s programming is in Bucky’s head, he’s her responsibility. As they talk, Natasha is continuing to pick her way through the facility, and finds an office with computers that seem to still be working. Steve begins an impassioned speech about how Natasha's not to blame for what the Red Room did to her as a child, or what they did to Bucky, when she interrupts him, saying she's found something.
Steve goes to the V.A. and watches the end of a support group session led by Sam. After the meeting is over, he tells Sam that something’s come up and he has to leave and won’t be coming to the group after all. Sam says they should get a beer together next time Steve's in town, which Steve agrees to.
Steve and Natasha meet in a village in the Swiss alps. She leads him up to a concrete installation built into the side of a mountain. She tells him that it’s a holiday home owned by a rich American. Steve, taking in the building through his binoculars, comments that holiday homes don’t usually come with armed guards.
“You’d be surprised.”
“Comings and goings?”
“No one’s come out. Three known HYDRA sympathisers, and a whole lot of mercenaries have gone in. I think they’re bedding in. Could be they’re just paranoid since S.H.I.E.L.D was shut down, or…”
“Or they’re guarding something. Or someone.”
They go in stealthily, taking out the guards from behind and carefully lowering their bodies to the ground to keep from making noise. They take access passes from the guards that when them into the main facility, which does indeed look like a rich man’s holiday retreat, albeit a rich man with the interior decorating taste of a Bond villain.
Natasha pulls Steve into a stairwell just in time to avoid being spotted by a man in a suit, and they watch as he pulls back a book, which slides part of one of the shelves aside to reveal a fingerprint scanner. He scans his hand, and the coffee table slides away to reveal a concrete staircase.
The room has floor to ceiling windows on one side, and Natasha has to time it perfectly to knock the man unconscious before the remaining guard turns and looks into the house, but she manages it, telling Steve to bring the unconscious man with them, so that he won’t be seen from outside.
At the bottom of the stairs is another door, this on with a retina scanner. Steve holds the unconscious guy’s eye open for the scan, and as the door in front of them opens, the coffee table seals back into place, trapping them momentarily in complete darkness, before lights begin to flick on in front of them, one at a time, revealing a narrow corridor with unpainted concrete walls and floor.
The corridor turns right at the end, and there’s a door to one side which turns out to be a cupboard. They stash the unconscious guy in there, and continue on into the facility.
The corridor opens onto a room with weapons racks and lockers, electric cattle prods hanging up amongst the guns. Beyond that is another corridor with doors opening off it, a store room, a cryogenics lab, a server room, all of them empty. Eventually they find another person, in a room set up as a control room, computers and a huge electronic map of the world, dry erase board with pictures and blueprints tacked to them.
They grab the guy, and Steve starts interrogating him, while Natasha tries the computers, but finds they’re in the process of being wiped, and she can’t stop the program. Instead, she turns her attention to the papers on the wall. The HYDRA agent is office staff, not a soldier, and he’s clearly terrified, but he doesn’t actually seem to know anything. He tells them the facility is being shut down, it’s served its purpose, it’s going to be blown up.
Steve asks if they’re really going to blow up their own people, and the man says that he was the last one, everyone else has left. Natasha says that no one’s come out of the facility for days, and the HYDRA agent tells them that there’s a back door, that that’s how they took “It” out.
Steve tries to ask him when “It” is, whether he means Bucky, but the guy turns out to have a poison capsule in one of his teeth and bites it. Steve despairs that they’ll now never know where Bucky is, and Natasha says she has a pretty good idea, pointing to a picture on the wall of the Palais des Nations.
Steve asks the dying man why the hell HYDRA wants to attack the U.N, and the HYDRA agent’s dying words are, “In times of fear, the world looks to the strong to lead.”
Suddenly, the ground beneath their feet begins to shake, as above them the mercenaries hired to clean up the site begin to detonate the explosives. Steve and Natasha race through the facility to the back door, which opens onto an underground parking lot. They steal a car and make for the exit tunnel, only barely managing to escape before it collapses completely.
At the Palais des Nations in Geneva, King T'Chaka of Wakanda is preparing to give a speech. Before he steps up to speak, he asks his son T'Challa to wish him luck, but T’Challa tells him he doesn’t need it.
As he begins his speech, discussing new laws regarding the trading of Vibranium, we cut to the Winter Soldier as he kills two security guards at a security checkpoint, dragging their bodies behind a hedge. He kills another guard close to the Palais, and tears an electronic lock out of the wall with his metal hand in order to get into the basement of the building.
Inside, he begins setting plastic explosive and detonators on the walls below the council chambers.
Out on the street leading up to the building, Steve and Natasha are racing to get close enough to warn people, but are also stopped by a security checkpoint. Steve tries to explain what’s happening, even pulls a ‘don’t you know who I am’, but they refuse to believe the uniform isn’t a costume. Eventually Natasha knocks the two of them out with her Widow's Bite, apologising to them as she does so, and they race up the promenade towards the Palais.
As his father speaks, T’Challa looks out of the windows and sees Steve and Natasha racing towards the building, yelling something he’s too far away to hear, but he guesses it means danger. As he jumps up to warn everyone, the first bomb goes off. He fights his way through the smoke, and the rubble, and the screaming people, to get to his father, but he’s too late, and his father dies in his arms.
Steve and Natasha shield their faces against the smoke and debris, and then as the smoke begins to clear, they see a dark shape, a man dressed in black leather and chrome, leaving the building. Steve yells Bucky’s name, and the Soldier realises he’s been seen and makes a break for it.
Steve looks back at the ruins behind them, clearly torn, and then someone screams for help and he tells Natasha to follow Bucky, while he runs to the ruins of the building and begins lifting rubble off the survivors.
Natasha runs after Bucky, just in time to see him jump into the back of a moving black van. She steals a bike from of the cops who are converging on the scene and gives chase through the streets of Geneva.
Traffic is at a standstill, people getting out of their cars to look at the cloud of dust rising from the Palais, but the van isn’t stopping or slowing down, ploughing into cars and forcing screaming civilians to dive out of the way, creating a gauntlet of obstacles Natasha has to navigate.
Up ahead there’s a crossroads and the van is forced to slow a little, but then the back doors open to reveal the Soldier kneeling there, holding a rocket launcher. When he sees Natasha his eyes widen, he whispers “Natalia” almost too quiet for the audience to hear, but then someone inside the van yells something in German, and he pulls the trigger.
Natasha skids the bike to the side and lets go, yelling out in pain as she hits the tarmac, rolling away just before the rocket hits the bike and it explodes.
Back at the Palais, emergency responders have arrived, ambulances taking away the dead and injured while fire fighters put out the last of the flames.
Steve, his uniform filthy and torn, approaches T’Challa. He introduces himself, and offers his condolences for his loss.
T’Challa points out that there was no reason for an American superhero to be at the UN for a meeting about mining regulations, and asks if Steve knows who did it. Steve admits that he does, that the perpetrator was once his best friend, and swears that he will find him and bring him in.
“Then it would seem it is my turn to offer you condolences, Captain. Because when I find this friend of yours, I will kill him for what he did here today.”
The Soldier is taken back to a HYDRA facility and marched into a concrete room, with a single chair in the centre. Richard Fisk, a small man who looks more like an accountant than a mass murderer, asks for his report, but the Soldier doesn’t respond.
When it’s clear he’s not going to speak, one of the soldiers who brought him in, gives the report instead, saying that the attack had been successful, but the Soldier had hesitated to kill the hero who tried to follow them, allowing her to get away.
Fisk orders the Soldier strapped into the chair, and then asks him why he hadn’t fired, to which the Soldier says he doesn’t know.
“The woman, who was she?”
“Natalia.”
“And who is Natalia?”
“I… don’t know. I don’t know her.”
“There are reports that Captain America was present for the attack, sir. I believe the woman who persued us may have been the one they call the Black Widow.”
“They knew me,” the Soldier says, although he’s more Bucky than Soldier in this moment. “They knew me.”
“He’s been defrosted too long,” one of the scientists says. “I’m concerned the conditioning…”
“Wipe him. Make sure you get everything this time.”
Fisk leaves, and the scientists push a metal plate between Bucky’s teeth. Restraints appear out of the arms of the chair, clicking into place around Bucky’s arms, and two metal arms descend to press against the sides of Bucky’s head as they turn on the machine. As electricity shoots through his brain, Bucky screams, the sound muffled by the plate in his mouth.
Steve and Natasha are still in Geneva, staying at a small nondescript hotel on the edge of the city. While Steve goes to take a shower, Natasha opens her laptop and begins working on something. In the background, a TV report plays, showing blurry footage of the Winter Soldier leaving the Palais.
When Steve returns, she explains that while she hadn’t been able to put a tracer on the van, she had at least got the number plate. Steve points out that the doesn’t help them, when there’s no way HYDRA would be stupid enough to have one of their people register the van.
“No. It’ll be owned by some perfectly normal, innocent person, who got the money from another perfectly ordinary person, who works for a perfectly normal company, which is owned by another perfectly normal company, which is owned by a mostly normal person, and so on and so on, getting less normal and less innocent every time. You just have to follow the money.”
“Tasha, that could take hours. Days, even!”
“That’s the difference between a soldier and a spy, you know. Patience.”
We cut to several hours later. The sky outside the window is just staring to lighten as dawn approaches, and Steve is dressed and sitting up against the headboard of one of the beds, asleep, while Natasha continues to work.
Suddenly she yells excitedly, and Steve jerks away, asking her if she’s found a lead.
She turns the laptop screen towards him, and says it’s better than that. She’s got an address.
It’s morning when Steve and Natasha enter an unvarnished wood and metal decorated vegan coffee shop, the kind of place that sells homemade kombucha and puts vegetables in all its smoothies. They make for the staff only door at the back of the shop, and when a barista tries to stop them, Natasha twitches her jacket aside to show her gun and a badge, telling him it’s CIA business. Terrified, the barista unlocks the door for them, but as soon as it closes behind them, he produces a walkie-talkie, telling someone on the other end that they’ve got incoming.
“CIA, really?”
“I left my FIS badge in my other jacket. Anyway, thanks to Hollywood everyone knows the CIA now.”
They walk down a corridor to a steel reinforced door with a keypad lock. Natasha says that it’s top of the line and produces a device that will try different combinations, but Steve reaches past her and just pulls the whole door out of the wall.
“Everyone remembers to reinforce the doors. No one ever remembers to reinforce the wall.”
“You really don’t have any patience, do you?”
They follow a corridor into a kind of staff breakroom, full of HYDRA operatives sitting around eating sandwiches and watching TV. Just as the HYDRA soldiers notice them, an alarm starts to flare and more soldiers rush in, these ones armed to the teeth.
Steve and Tasha fight them, but it becomes clear that there’s a seemingly never ending supply, so Tasha tells Steve to go find Bucky while she buys him some time. As Steve leaves the room, Tasha loads a new clip into her gun and smiles at the HYDRA agents, making them take a step back in fear.
Steve continues on into the facility, fighting off guards when he meets them. Alarms are going off, and there are people everywhere, a stark contrast to the previous HYDRA base, but Steve refuses to be slowed down by them.
Finally he reaches the heart of the facility, steps into the room we saw earlier, the chair still sitting alone in the center of the room. Steve sees the died blood on the restraints and the floor and freezes in horror, just as a figure steps up behind him.
Steve spins just in time to catch the Soldier's knife, and the they fight. Steve keeps pleading with Bucky to remember him, but it's having no effect. Steve's fighting defensively, trying not to hurt Bucky, but Bucky has no such qualms, and Steve is loosing.
Just as Bucky raises the knife, about to finish Steve, something hits Bucky on the back of his head. Blinking, disorientated, he asks "Steve?" before collapsing. Behind him stands Natasha, holding a steel pipe. When Steve stares at her, he shrugs and says "cognitive recalibration".
As they head for the airport, Natasha driving, Bucky unconscious and cuffed on the back seat, there's a thump from the roof of the car, and then five claws punch down through the metal, ripping a hole in it and revealing T'Challa, dressed in the Panther Habit.
Natasha slams on the brakes, jerking the car to the side and dislodging him, but they're coming up to a bridge and traffic is slowing, allowing T'Challa to catch up with them. A fight ensues, with Steve taking T'Challa while Natasha tries to get Bucky away. Steve and T'Challa appear to be evenly matched, and the fight is only broken up when the police arrive. When T'Challa removes his hood. One of the officers recognises him as one of the dignitaries who are here for the UN summit, and while they're arguing about whether they can arrest a foreign head of state Steve takes a running jump off the edge of the bridge into the Rhone.
He clambers out on the bank of the river, and just as he's realising that his phone hadn't survived the dunking, he looks up to find Natasha waiting for him.
In Washington, Sam Wilson is eating breakfast when there's a knock on his door.
“Steve? Little early for a beer, don’t you think?"
“I’m sorry, Sam, I didn’t know where else to go.”
“It’s fine, I just… Wait. I didn’t give you my address.”
“No,” Natasha says, stepping into frame for the first time. She’s pushing Bucky, apparently still unconscious, in a wheelchair. “I did.”
Despite being sure it's a terrible idea, especially since Natasha is just straight up admitting to spying on him, Sam lets them in. He even gets Natasha a roll of duct-tape when she asks for it.
While Natasha duct-tapes Bucky to a chair, Steve explains the situation. Sam is understandably wary having a wanted terrorist agent in his house, but Steve compares Bucky to Sam's lost wingman (to which Sam demurs, "you know me and Riley weren't...?") and Sam eventually gives in.
When he asks what's wrong with Bucky, Natasha explains HYDRA's brainwashing methods. Steve mentions the chair he'd seen, and Natasha confirms that she'd heard rumours of electric shocks being used to wipe memories, although she'd never seen evidence of it before.
Once Natasha is satisfied Bucky isn't getting out in a hurry, and they're all armed, she orders him in Russian to stop pretending to be asleep.
Bucky's first word upon opening his eyes is "Steve", although they quickly find his memory hasn't really returned. He remembers the name Steve, but he doesn't seem to know how or why he knows it, or who he is. When Natasha questions him in Russian, he knows the language, but it doesn't do anything further to trigger his memory.
Sam suggests that sense memories are stronger than word ones, which is why he's trained to use sensory input to help PTSD suffers come out of flashbacks. He asks if there's any smells or tastes that might remind Bucky who he used to be, and Steve asks if he's got any leeks.
Sam and Natasha help Steve to make leek and potato soup, and he tells them how Bucky used to make it for him when he was sick, because he could load it up with cream and butter to get some calories into Steve's body. As he's tasting it, Bucky stirs in his chair, seeming more awake than he had a moment ago, and says that it needs pepper, Steve always forgets the pepper.
Steve drops the ladle and runs to him, asking him if he remembers who he is. Bucky says "Stevie, you're Stevie" and Steve immediately begins pulling the duct-tape off the chair. Bucky tells him he's an idiot and just rips his arms free, tearing the tape, and pulling Steve into a hug.
We cut to the four of them finishing their soup while Steve fills Bucky in on some of the details. While he still seems to remember who Steve is, it's clear that he's not as recovered as Steve thinks he is, flinching at noises and leaving deliberate gaps that Steve fills in without noticing, but Natasha is paying attention.
That night, Steve and Bucky are asleep, Bucky stretched out on the sofa, Steve sitting up in an armchair. The bedroom door opens a crack, and Sam emerges. He starts quietly fetching a drink, and then nearly drops it when he realises Natasha is awake, watching the sleepers.
When Sam asks what's wrong, she says she thought someone ought to keep an eye on Bucky. She doesn't think he'd remembered as much as he was pretending, and brainwashing isn't undone that quickly. Sam observes that it sounds like she's talking from experience, which she admits. Sam suggests that maybe she's just projecting. He's never dealt with anything quite like what Bucky's been through, but he doesn't think Bucky bears them any ill will. Natasha comments darkly that it's not his will she's worried about, but she allows Sam to persuade her to go to bed.
As she leaves, Bucky opens his eyes. He's been awake the whole time, listening to them. Moving as silently as a ghost, he pulls on his boots and opens the front door. He pauses there, looking back at Steve almost longingly, before he leaves.
As he walks down the street, an unmarked van pulls up, men with guns piling out. As they take him, Bucky begs them "just don't hurt him. Please don't make me hurt him."
Bucky is taken to a HYDRA base and dragged into a room containing the chair. As they strap him in, the HYDRA agents notice that he's mouthing something over and over to himself. When one asks what it is, the guy who'd strapped him in says in a confused voice, "Potato soup."
Steve wakes up to find Bucky gone. Sam is resigned, saying that Natasha must have been right about him not being as recovered as he seemed. But Natasha is more cheerful, saying that she'd underestimated Bucky. When Steve asks what the hell she's talking about, she holds up her phone, where a red dot shows on a map. "He knew I'd put trackers on him. And he knew he wouldn't be safe until we took down the nest."
They make plans to go and fetch Bucky. Sam says that they need to get something first, and Steve says that there's someone he needs to call.
We cut to the Washington monument. Sam is wearing his wings, and there's a figure waiting for them at the bottom of the monument. Steve approaches T'Challa and asks him if he's serious about taking down the people who had killed his father. When T'Challa says yes, he explains that the person who pressed the detonator hadn't had any choice in his actions, but Steve can give him the people who gave the order. T'Challa swears vengeance on them, and then Natasha adds that they're going to need a helicopter, which T'Challa says shouldn't be a problem.
We cut to the four of them in a helicopter, which is being piloted by Okoye. Natasha is sitting up front, using Bucky’s tracker to guide Okoye out over the ocean, until they finally see something up ahead - a ship. Natasha recognises it as the Lemurian Starr, a mobile base that vanished during the dissolution of SHIELD.
Okoye brings the helicopter over the ship, and Steve and T’Challa immediately both jump out. Sam follows them, and Okoye and Natasha share a moment of amused resignation before Sam remembers to come back for her.
As she jumps into his arms, HYDRA begin firing on the chopper, forcing Okoye to pull away from the ship, telling the others over their comms that she’ll circle back once they confirm it’s safe for her to land.
Sam drops Natasha on the deck, and the four of them begin fighting their way through the HYDRA soldiers. Just as they’re nearly at the door to the lower levels, it opens to reveal Brock Rumlow, armoured like a tank and wearing force-enhancing gauntlets that allow him to punch like a supersoldier.
He calls Natasha out specifically, for her role in the fall of SHIELD, and she prepares to fight off against him, but Sam stops her. He points out that the wings are so much dead weight in the close confines of the ship, but up here, he can keep things interesting, and make sure there’s a clear path for them when they’ve found Barnes.
Inside the ship, they split up, Steve going to search for Bucky while T’Challa and Tasha go in search of HYDRA command.
Steve finds Bucky, but he’s been wiped again and attacks him. Now Steve knows for certain that his Bucky is still in there, he refuses to hurt him, even when it becomes clear that Bucky’s conscious mind isn’t fully in control of his body any more as he begs Steve to leave him, but Steve just keeps repeating that he’s with him to the end of the line, as Bucky’s metal arm slams into his face over and over.
Up on deck, Rumlow manages to grab one of Sam’s wings, but Sam manages to break his gauntlet at the same time, bringing the fight down to a fist fight between them.
Back in the ship, Bucky suddenly yells and grabs the metal arm with his flesh one, tearing it off his body and flinging it away, collapsing to his knees at Steve’s side.
T’Challa and Tasha have found Fisk’s office. They kick open the door and take out the guards, and then Tasha drags a cowering Fisk out from behind his desk. Just as she levels her gun at him, Steve and Bucky arrive, leaning on one another and limping, Bucky carrying his disembodied arm in his free hand.
They take in the scene, and then Steve lets go of Bucky, leaning up against the wall as Bucky steps up to Fisk. Natasha gives him her gun without comment, and there’s a moment of tension as Bucky stands there, gun aimed unwaveringly at Fisk’s head, the others watching him with baited breath.
After a moment, he lowers it and turns away, giving the gun back to Natasha and going back to Steve. As he passes him, T’Challa lays a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, fully accepting for the first time that Bucky genuinely isn’t to blame for the things HYDRA forced him to do.
As Steve and Bucky limp away, T’Challa steps up to Fisk and cuts his throat with the claws of his suit.
The four of them make it back up to the deck, where Sam is zip-tying an unconscious Rumlow, and T’Challa calls for Okoye to collect them.
We cut to a day later. Steve is showing a one-armed Bucky around his Brooklyn apartment when there’s a knock on the door. Bucky opens it to reveal Sam and Natasha. Sam’s brought Bucky a pot plant as a ‘welcome home’ present, which Bucky accepts somewhat awkwardly. Natasha reveals her own gift - a bottle of Russian vodka, which Bucky declares “a bit more like it”.
Steve finds glasses, and Natasha pours the drinks, and the four of them toast Bucky’s recovery.
In the post-credits, we see T'Challa and Okoye on their way back to Wakanda. T'Challa tells her that before they go back to Birnin Zana, there's someone they need to collect first.
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