Sam was having the strangest week of his life. He'd come to Europe in hopes of assisting his buddy at Interpol in arresting the Winter Soldier and ended up in a Siberian prison with said man. By now, he might even consider him a colleague. Not a friend, but definitely someone he spent enough time with to know.

The week had been full of firsts for Sam and, apparently, that was not about to change.

Almost as soon as the door latched behind the Bishop and Tony Stark, Barnes stepped away from the pillar and rubbed his wrists.

"What the hell, man?" Sam groaned, still firmly tied to the pillar. "How long have you been free?"

"How long have I been awake?"

Sam scowled. "Untie me."

Fortunately for Sam, Barnes did.

"You and I are gonna have a long talk when we get out of here," Sam muttered, eyeing the door the Bishop and Stark had disappeared through.

"Yeah, well." Barnes shrugged, glancing around the empty space. "Organize your questions alphabetically and we'll see."

The door wasn't locked. A quick tug on it was all Sam needed to do for it to open and while Barnes continued to look for some secret escape route, Sam stood impatiently in the doorway. They could say whatever they wanted about the Bishop, but if she had expected them to stay tied to that dusty pillar while she was gone, she was about to be surprised.

"You wanna join me?" Sam asked when it became clear Barnes wasn't going through the door. "Or do you wanna stay here for when Miss Shock-Happy comes back?"

Barnes's eyes narrowed at him, but he crossed the room and led the way out the door without a word. Sam pulled it closed behind them and fell into step beside him.

"She'll have all the logical exits covered," Barnes told him. He stopped in the middle of the corridor and with a look Sam would later decide he didn't like, Barnes said, "We'll have to use an illogical one."

"What do you―"

Barnes pointed up and Sam's gaze followed. A hatch sat above them and was unlocked as far as Sam could tell, but that did not mean it was a good exit plan.

"You want us to go up?"

Barnes nodded and since Sam didn't have a better idea, that's what they did.

It took a bit of searching around, but eventually, they found something to act as a temporary step stool. Fortunately, they weren't far below the hatch and it wasn't too difficult to pull themselves up.

Barnes was the first one through the hatch and Sam hurried up after him. Just as he poked his head out, he came face to face with a bull.

Right. Bullfighting arena.

"I thought she was kidding," Sam hissed. Barnes wasn't moving beside him.

"Don't move," he instructed. Sam turned to raise an eyebrow at him. "I saw it in a movie somewhere. They can't see you if you don't move."

In front of them, the bull huffed and pawed at the ground. There were still two or three meters between them and it, but Sam had never been one to put his life in the hands of an angry, hooved animal.

"That's Jurassic Park ," he growled. The bull shook its head at them and Sam had half a mind to pull Barnes back down into the hatch. "The bull is not a dinosaur."

"No, it was a bull," Barnes assured him. "Just don't―"

Below them, someone kicked out their step stool and Sam flailed. He didn't have to look to know the Bishop was the one below them because she shouted something at him in a language that Sam was pretty sure he didn't speak.

"God, now you made it angry," Barnes exclaimed.

Sam blinked because somehow the bastard was already out of the hatch while he was still dangling. Without having to be asked, Barnes reached down and pulled him into the arena as the bull stomped one last time. Barnes glanced down the hatch, shouted something down at the Bishop in that unfamiliar language, and slammed the hatch closed.

"Great, you've trapped us."

"Run."

Barnes shoved him towards the nearest wall before Sam could bother to remind him that it had been Barnes who told them not to move in the first place.

In the stands, the crowd hadn't stopped cheering. While Sam appreciated the encouragement, he was pretty sure they had to realize he hadn't signed up for this like the others. The bull didn't seem to care, though, and the cheering was all the same to him. He charged straight at Sam and with the least amount of grace possible, Sam threw himself over the wall to hide from the beast.

Barnes tumbled in after him and nearly landed on his face. As soon as he was steady on his feet, he grabbed Sam's collar and they were on the move yet again, this time through a crowd of angry Spanish men instead of away from an angry Spanish bull.

* * * * *

He wasn't sure how and he wasn't sure he wanted to know why, but he found himself on a train with Barnes a few hours after escaping the city. He had no idea where they were going and Barnes hadn't said anything, but he was starting to get the feeling that he really wasn't going back to the States until after Barnes beat the Bishop to that third egg.

In an effort to determine exactly how long it would be before he got to go home again, Sam glanced up at Barnes and said, "So, the third egg."

Barnes nodded and continued staring out the train car door. In some strange display of confidence, he'd pulled it open and never bothered to close it. Even when the train went careening around a corner a bit too fast for Sam's liking.

"You know where it's at?"

"What do you think?" Barnes replied, glancing at him before looking back out over the passing fields.

"You do," Sam said. Barnes's lips twitched up and Sam knew he'd guessed right. Barnes may have a damn good poker face, but Sam knew the Winter Soldier wasn't stupid. Plus, he'd said something strange in Siberia before they broke out. "You wouldn't have chased down the first egg if you weren't sure where all three were."

Again, Barnes turned to look at him. This time, his gaze didn't return to the countryside.

"If you want to finish a puzzle," Barnes said, "you have to have all the pieces first."

"Great, so you're a poet now too, huh?" Sam rolled his eyes. "How long is this gonna take? I gotta get home, you know?"

Barnes smirked and returned to looking out of the train.

Sam almost cursed because fuck if he was going to go on a wild goose chase without more information. Sure, he'd come this far, but it had resulted in him escaping a Siberian prison, breaking and entering an international criminal's house, being kidnapped by another international criminal, and nearly getting stampeded by a bull. It was about time he started asking questions.

"If I'm gonna come with you," Sam said sharply, "you gotta talk to me, man."

"Are you finished alphabetizing your questions, then?"

It was such a stupid goddamn question and Sam told him as much. Between getting chased by a bull and avoiding Spanish authorities, he hadn't had much time to sit and list out his questions yet. Barnes had the audacity to laugh at that.

"Five questions, then," he bargained. Sam reached for the nearest thing―which happened to be part of a crate―and threw it at Barnes's head. Again, the bastard merely laughed.

If he was going to play it this way, though, Sam would have to beat him at his own game.

"Where are we going?" Sam asked first. It was easy enough and Barnes seemed at least slightly willing to respond.

"Argentina."

"How are we getting there?" Sam asked. And because he didn't want there to be any surprises, he clarified, "All the way there. How are you getting from here―on this train―to where the egg is?"

"Two questions."

Barnes smirked and Sam glowered at him.

"I've got a buddy in aviation," Barnes told him. "He's got a little plane that'll take us all the way to the edge of the forest. From there, we'll be going in the old-fashioned way: by foot."

It was not ideal, but at least it was fast. If Barnes had been planning on taking a goddamn boat from Spain to Argentina, Sam would have killed him before they arrived.

"Tell me about the Bishop." It wasn't a question and Sam wasn't surprised when Barnes pointed it out. "What do you know about the Bishop? Everything."

"Oh, that's not my story," Barnes said with a grimace. "It still counts as a question, though."

Surprisingly, Sam wasn't as annoyed with that response as he had expected to be. Barnes had been a bit ridiculous about the Bishop from the very beginning and Sam had been a bit too confident to ask such a broad question. That didn't stop him from getting to his next question, though.

"What in the everloving name of god is happening between you two?" he demanded. Barnes's eyes narrowed. "I'm not the only one that sees it, either. Stark noticed too, so don't you go about making up some bullshit story. I won't believe it."

"It's complicated."

Sam gave him a look. "Humor me."

"We were partners once upon a time," Barnes said. He smirked when Sam inevitably did a poor job at hiding his surprise. "Not officially, but we worked together when we were both starting out. I even started to humor the idea that we'd make it official."

"What? Like official partner thieves?" Sam asked with a laugh.

"Sure." Barnes shrugged, but not in a way that made Sam think that was actually what he had meant. "I took the wrong job, though," Barnes told him, a bit softer this time. "She left."

"What happened?" Sam asked.

He was genuinely curious, but Barnes also had this sad puppy look that Sam had never expected to see on him. He had about a hundred questions, but he was pretty certain that Barnes wouldn't humor all of them. If he was lucky, though, he'd at least get an answer to this.

"She'd been eyeing this job in Odessa," Barnes told him. He didn't look at Sam as he spoke. "I got an offer on it too. Didn't tell her. Thought she was doing something in Kyiv instead, so imagine my surprise when I showed up and she was already there."

Sam doubted Barnes would tell him what the job in Odessa had been, but he also knew it was probably best if he didn't know. Ukraine wasn't particularly stable at the moment and sticking his American nose in to solve the Winter Soldier's past crimes didn't seem wisest at the moment. Especially since the Winter Soldier apparently hailed from the United States and not the middle of Russia or some otherwise un-American place.

"She was pretty upset." Barnes snorted, but the laugh lacked any real humor. "I think I made it worse when I shot her, though."

"You―Damn, Barnes." Sam whistled lowly. "You sure know how to treat a girl."

"Fuck off, Wilson," Barnes said, rolling his eyes. "We parted after that. Didn't see her again for a year and by then, I figured it was a little late for an 'I'm sorry' card."

"And now you're both on some self-validation path to be better than the other," Sam guessed. At that, Barnes did laugh.

"Stick to your day job, Wilson," he chuckled. "You wouldn't make a great detective."

Sam decided not to remind him that his day job was being a detective, for lack of a better term.