Work Text:
"Though part of the text is unhappily much mutilated, we yet may gather the general ideas of the poem from the disjecta membra which remain."
Ludwig Stern, introduction to "The Song of the Harper," Cuneiform Inscriptions and Hieratic Papyri
"I'll go down to the water
and come out carrying a red fish
that fits just right in the hand."
*Translator's note: "red fish here is tilapia, [but] actually his heart." (Humm)
a fragment of the Cairo Love Songs (hieratic inscription): see end note
Steve asked, "Is it James now?" and he said, "No, Bucky."
But no one else calls him that.
Steve says remember like something came first. Like he failed the first time.
Repeat. React.
"We will do this," Zola said, "as many times as it takes. Do you understand?"
He remembers.
Now: living in Queens. Close to the water. Everyone's young here. The boys have skin like flowers. The girls wear little heels he could snap. Glitter under their eyebrows, each face a filigree. So fragile. It fills him with panic.
Weekend mornings, they stutter into the diner. They are always ravenous. You're hungry when you have a lot to live for. They wield their knives inexpertly. Fumbling. Steel in their funny, careless hands.
He kills a mouse in his second-floor walk-up and weeps for a long time after that.
Something about the curl of its feet.
"You could give it a try," Steve said. "You could— I mean, Tony's made sure you'd have your own floor there. There's nowhere safer."
"I know," he said.
"You don't have to do this, Buck."
The look Steve gets when he's trying not to touch him.
Sometimes when he wakes up he doesn't wake up. He lies cold with terror, curled on his mattress, and he knows that there is something beside him. It is shaped like a man, but not a man. He can't ever turn to look at it. But he knows the crawling of skin against skin, the ghost breath that touches the back of his neck. Dread fills the ready cracks of him up like rain coming back to a dry riverbed.
Later he searches for faint depressions. The points where a body might have been. A knee, an elbow. But it's not that kind of body.
Outside the bodega, first hours of twilight, sparking a lighter in his metal hand. A car peels by, radio blaring. الساعة سبعة وسبع ليالي وسبع شهور مضيع حالي, a man sings.
The same song on a different stereo. A boy's throat under his fingers. The little bones giving up with a crack. Afterwards he walked beside the ocean. He didn't know what country he was in. The sea smelled clean and a boat was waiting somewhere. Lap of waves against the wood. The water's surface looked so flat. Like there was nothing under it. But he knew there were bodies; had put them there. Knew how easy they slipped into the depths, once you had stripped them of faces and fingers. Soft driftwood skinned by every touch. Till they were not bodies at all. There was no word.
The flame catches. He lights the cigarette.
Fury comes to the diner. At first with the Widow. Bucky watches them watch him. The Widow's tired. A little thinner. Or wants him to think this. She dips her head in to speak to Fury. The bow of her mouth painted red.
Then Fury alone, eight days later. In the corner booth, wearing sunglasses.
That ghost eye trained on him.
Afterwards, killing became re-killing. Every gunshot an echo. His knife in a technician's neck: a knife in the neck of a Chechen woman. Her small fists beating against his chest. Rainfall in Laos: a lab's emergency sprinklers. The smell of seared flesh doused by water.
Chien de guerre, the French soldiers had called him.
His hand on the throat of a Hydra doctor. The little pulse moving under the skin. Life bobbing like a fishing lure.
The man's checked shirt was made of cheap cotton. His tie had white polka dots on it. Polka dots. Another few amps can't hurt, he'd said. I don't think we'll lose anything vital. Let's give it a try.
So they did.
Stark's tracking him, he knows. You keep track of weapons. Jericho missiles. Uranium shipments. Whatever Bucky is, in the shape of a body.
Cameras move when he's carefully not looking. Appear in the lobby of his building. He ignores them.
He thinks of the snow piling bank on bank, his breath like a cloud that he carried with him. Howard had pushed at the glass of the unbroken windshield, first with his palm and then with his fist. Then later again with the flat of his palm. His skin was warm. It left an imprint.
Fury shows up at the diner again. Sits at Bucky's table.
"Breakfast's on me," he says.
Neither of them eats. They sit in silence. Fury never takes off his sunglasses.
Bucky drinks three cups of coffee over the course of an hour.
"We should do this again sometime," he says, standing to leave.
"Might just take you up on that," Fury tells him.
Pierce's house always smelled like honey. A rich, warm, summer-golden scent. It seemed to come from the walls and the polished floorboards. The smooth dark wood of the cabinets. Sometimes there would be a vaseful of lilies sitting just where the sun would hit it. And Pierce himself, ambling through rooms, often barefoot. Life like a linen shirt on him.
"You're something of a legend," he said. "Did you know that? I bet you didn't know that."
The asset had been sent to his house on Nantucket. Pierce had showed him a conch shell the size of his head. Held it up so he'd hear the sea inside it. But not the sea. Something about resonance.
"What is it then?"
"My father always said it was the blood in your veins. But it's air trapped in the shell."
"Blood," the asset repeated.
Steve's birthday. The kids in Queens on rooftops. Laughing, at night, with bottles in their hands. The wet smell of beer and brick and tarmac; bodies in the streets, sleeveless, warm with sweat. Bucky watches the fireworks over the river. Dark swallows each gold dismembered bit. The long arcs stay in the sky for a minute, even after the lights are dead.
He kills a man in an alley: one knife to the hamstring, another through his Kevlar vest. There are mag cuffs in the man's tactical backpack. He'd hit Bucky with a stun stick, twice, high voltage. No guns: no permanent damage. Nothing to bring down the resale value.
"Stupid," Bucky says. "Stupid stupid stupid stupid—"
His voice rises. He's still shaking with it. He wants to take the knife and put it in the man's body over and over and over again. Instead he clenches his fist till his nails cut his palm. Feels the servos complain in his other fist.
"You gonna clean that up?" Fury asks from the mouth of the alley.
"Fuck you," Bucky says. Then, after a minute, "You watching my back?"
"Doesn't look to me like you need someone watching your back."
"I don't."
A long silence.
"You just gonna sit there," Fury says, "or."
"I don't need your help."
"I know," Fury says.
Together they strip the body and leave it. Trash the gear and the cuffs out at Hallets Point. The sun is rising by then.
"Bought you some time," Fury says. "But there's going to be others."
Bucky says shortly, "Fuck them."
"Yeah, I kind of thought you were going to say that."
Bucky takes out a cigarette. The weak sun rolls out over Manhattan. Buildings biting into it. There's blood on his hand. His own blood.
Fury turns to go. "Get some rest," he says, "kid."
Steve found him in Argentina, in Rosario. That was where the first ones, the Germans, had fled. The first ones, the old ones, with round cold glasses.
"This isn't the way," Steve said.
His arms pinned Bucky against the asphalt. Concrete grating against his skin. A scream grating up from the back of his throat.
Metal whining, futile. Wanting recalibration.
"You did this," Bucky ground out. "You wanted me to remember. You wanted me to remember, and I did."
Steve's voice on the phone. Steve's face in the doorway.
Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.
Morning. Sometimes, for close to thirty seconds, he can't remember who he is.
At night he prowls the apartment. Hard to fall asleep. No conscious sense of fear, but his body knows. Knows he should be afraid.
"I didn't want you to have to do that anymore."
"Do what?"
"Bucky, please."
As though murder's an insect embedded in amber.
Extinct, and imprisoned hygienically.
He reads a book about quantum mechanics. He reads a book about string theory. Eleven dimensions. Infinite universes. Anything could happen, could be happening right now. Anything. Anything.
There are streets in Chelsea, still, where flower sellers gather. Not as many as there used to be. Not as many as when—
But for blocks: the wet greenness. Armfuls of color. Buckets of branches, hyacinth stalks. Shelves of roses furled in paper. All fragile as glass. He's afraid to touch. Blackthorn, fiddleheads, artichoke flowers. Brought from hothouses by truck. It's autumn, and everything should be dying; he knows, or thinks he knows, that much. But now there's no such thing as seasons. Just science.
He buys a dozen calla lilies. Takes them home and arranges them in the sun. Each flower's a cup he could drink from, enticing. Filled with nothing. With nothingness.
The point was never destroying the labs, though he knew their value strategically.
At each one he ransacked the freezers and cupboards. The storerooms, the closets.
The sense of something missing.
"I'm trusting you, you know," Pierce said. No: Volkov. No: Strucker. No: Zola. No: Zola said, "Note the remains of the musculocutaneous nerve. There is still some sensory artifact; if we could stimulate it here? And here, as it approaches the coracobrachialis. You see; the response is acute and severe."
"I'm trusting you, you know. You should feel honored." Pierce's hand under his chin. Fingers digging into the malleable flesh there. "Look at me. I said, you should feel honored."
"Full nerve function is irrelevant for our purpose. I suggest, therefore, cauterizing above the current site of termination, to prevent excess sensation from confusing the prosthetic."
"When you behave like this, it's disappointing to me. I don't want to have to hurt you; you're a valuable asset."
"Sergeant Barnes, if you would oblige us by biting down quite hard... ? I shall now apply the cautery."
The wind in the oak trees outside Pierce's kitchen. The sound of rain falling over the sea.
Strucker listened to opera: Parsifal at Bayreuth. 1951. The hiss before the record began.
The asset hadn't known humans made those sounds, that humans could make sounds like that.
"Please, Bucky. I just want to talk to you.
"I know you're there. I can hear your heartbeat.
"I'm sorry; that probably sounded... pretty creepy. But I guess you know what I mean.
"Right. Uh. I'm sitting down now. In your doorway. You can climb out the window if you want to leave.
"I'm assuming you have a window. I hope you have a window. I don't know for sure. I mean, it is Queens.
"You couldn't even move to Brooklyn, huh.
"Sorry.
"I just. Uh. To be honest, I haven't been sleeping that well.
"I'm so tired, I'm really, just really tired.
"This thing with Tony.
"I need you, buddy.
"Please. Please talk to me."
There were no graves in Argentina, in Chile. Nothing that he could visit.
In Chechnya: a house he remembered burning. Now rebuilt with sweet wood from the Caucasus mountains. And the bones that had burned with it? Ash gone to fleck the evergreen trees. Tilled in the soil. Blood in rain and well-water; in foggy mornings; in the wet riverbeds.
An Iranian girl served him tea in Dallas. "I don't really remember my father," she said. She had a child of her own, scarcely a toddler. Curls and black eyes; chubby, joyful hands.
So often he had not known the names. Or when he asked now, no one remembered; so many years, sometimes decades had passed. An entire village on the shores of the Vrbas River was gone. Black ground where fires had been. The spent cartridges of bullets like seashells. He found a woman's filigree earring, shaped like a bird.
All that's left of them.
"There is none I can't kill, of the flying kind," Parsifal boasts.
But he's not Parsifal then; he doesn't have a name yet.
Im Fluge treff' ich was fliegt.
More than once he blacked out on the table, with forceps still in his body.
So he doesn't know what else they took from him. If they took anything.
Would there be a scar? He studies his body in the mirror: the scar he knows, like a permanent sleeve. A shirt that he can't ever strip off. There aren't any others that he can see. But he feels it; he feels like something is gone. An organ that he might once have had use for. Something non-vital, something he can live without.
But it was mine. It was mine, he thinks.
He dreams that Pierce bathes him in honey and water. Slow hands in his hair. Hands on shoulders, hips, knees. Smoothing the raised white lines of his scars. The seam and the join, the metal scale-work.
Just a few more minutes, Pierce says, and we'll have you all clean.
The asset's always dirty after missions. The sweat gets in his eyes and stings. The blood turns brown on his hands and wrists. It clots in his hair, and his mouth tastes like copper. Sometimes there's hair or bone in his wounds. Shrapnel made by the human body. But when he looks down now, the water is clear. He turns his white hands in confusion, searching for the stain he can't see.
Pierce hums under his breath. Something dark and familiar.
Dies alles, hab' ich nun geträumt?— All of these things, have I only dreamt them?
Riefest du mich Namenlosen? — Did you call me, nameless me?
Trailing his hands down the asset's chest. His touch first soft, something to arch into. Then harder, rough and scouring. Nails turn sharp, digging at rib-bones. Blood ruptures the surface in perfect beads. More blood. The skin sloughs off in ribbons. Exposing the red wet animal muscle. We all look like this underneath. He knows; he has seen it a thousand times.
Stay very still. I don't want to have to hurt you.
When Pierce is done, there'll be nothing to stain. When his skin is gone, he'll be clean.
He takes a train to Boston. A bus out to the ferry. It's October and the sea is full of whitecaps.
Seagulls haunt the harbor. The island's almost empty. The grass is gold and grows like weeds. He walks for a long time, away from the town. Past heaps of sand, marsh rosemary, silent houses with silver-black shingles. A hawk here and there floats over the moorland. Everywhere he goes he hears the ocean: waves twitching, crashing unevenly.
Pierce's summer house: with its crushed shell drive. The door, now locked. Windows dusty. Inside, there are sheets draped over the chairs. Whole rooms full of ghost furnishings. He moves noiselessly up the still gray staircase. To a room that overlooks the sea. The shell is still there, in a spill of sunlight. The walls are white. A framed picture of a whale. An oil lamp. A single dead moth on the windowsill. He stands there for a while. Outside, the sea keeps writhing. Someone should put it out of its misery.
He leaves.
Fury is sitting on the doorstep. Black boots touching salt grass.
Bucky says, "Stop following me."
"I was surprised to find out you knew this place existed."
Bucky says nothing.
"I was here once, you know. More than once."
"I," Bucky starts. Then: "He."
Fury picks up a shell from the driveway. Studies it for a minute. "I was never one for taking vacations. Hated dragging him away from his family. So I'd come over for three, four hours; head back to the mainland. This was—" he waves a hand— "years ago, I guess."
"Ancient history," Bucky says.
"Ancient history," Fury agrees.
Bucky stares out to where rain clouds are drooping over an edge of low-lying trees. "I," he says, "thought. I wanted." His voice dies out. Silence.
"Son," Fury says after a while, "I don't think you know what you want. Do you."
Bucky hunches his shoulders defensively. "F—
"I know, I know: fuck me. You're getting pretty repetitious." He pauses. "You got Rogers all worried. Wants me to talk you down, for your own good. Bring you in."
"Yeah?"
"I told him that's not my job any more— to my everlasting relief."
"So why not just fuck off," Bucky says. "Why are you here."
No answer from Fury.
On the ferry, he sees a whale in the water. Not much of it: a crescent shape. Coasting the top of the rain-dark harbor.
"I saw a whale," he says, "when I was a kid. I remember. Washed up on the beach near Coney Island."
"Still happens," Fury says. "Whales, dolphins. More these days."
"It was still alive. You could see it breathing. Ribs kinda jutting out of its skin. An animal no one had ever seen. At least none of us kids, city kids. We didn't know what to do. Didn't know what it was supposed to be. Stevie dumping water on it, trying to... Still. It died slow."
Fury say, "That supposed to be sad? Things die. They don't go on forever."
Bucky doesn't say anything.
"Or are you trying to make some other point here?"
"It's just a fucking whale," Bucky says tersely.
Rain falls. Salt smell. The whale dives under. Never, in his sight, resurfacing. Gone off to some maybe gentler realm. Still he can't help watching for it.
"I get it, you know," Fury says. "I get it. Hell, I've got a grave out there too. Sometimes you don't die and you don't not die."
"You know nothing about it." His voice raw in his throat.
Fury looks at him through those dark dark glasses. He says, unreadable, "Not like you."
He carries the conch shell home with him. Presses it to his ear, tries to listen to it.
The sound the air makes without any effort.
The noisiness in his veins.
Kills two more mercs the first week of November. A gunshot wound in his shoulder bleeds, then doesn't bleed.
The old woman who sold pirozhki on Brighton Beach Avenue, below the clamoring train tracks. Her face when he pushed his hair behind his ears. Her face when she met his eyes. Her face when she saw his face.
Some days even a fork seems fatal. He knows where to slide it: just under the pharynx.
"Could use your help in Latveria," Steve tries.
Sets the phone face-down on the table. Steve's voice like static. Like the sea.
In December: wakes up to Fury in his bedroom.
"You're fucking kidding me," he says.
Fury says, "We got problems."
He rolls over. Frustration. "I'm dealing with it."
"You're not, but that's your problem. I'm saying we've got problems."
"Steve." On his feet without conscious thought. His body, as ever, like a puppet.
"He's fine," Fury says. "He's just not going to like this. We got a sleeper cell in Westchester."
"Sounds like Steve's kind of thing."
"Not men with guns, Barnes. I mean, I'm sure they've got guns. But: nice suburban mommies and daddies."
"But Hydra."
"Yeah."
"So put your agents on it."
"You think I've got agents? I've got no agents," Fury says. "All I've got right now is friends."
"So why come to me?"
"Because I know I can trust you."
"You don't know shit about me."
Fury looks at him. He feels the weight of that gaze, through the sunglasses, through the gray light of dawn breaking.
"I'm not—" Bucky says. "I'm not a hero."
"I know who you are," Fury says.
The Widow's hair like a stained-glass window, a saint's-blood color, vitreous red. She is small and efficient with her knives.
"Does it bother you," Bucky says.
She wipes a blade on the water-blue carpet. "Killing Hydra agents?"
"When they're not holding guns on you. Killing them in their beds."
She looks at him, calm-eyed and very thoughtful. "I'm not scared of guns," she says. "You should know by now: there are so many scarier things than guns."
They don't wake the children up, in the house where there are children.
They take the man and the woman out to the garden. There's snow on the ground.
The man is panting, has blood in his teeth. He grins at Bucky like a wolf. "I remember you," he says. "Winter Soldier. I was younger then, but you look the same. You were pretty when you screamed."
Bucky wants to—
Fury's hand on his arm. "You'll regret it," he says.
The Widow puts a bullet in each of their brains. Back of the neck. Very clean.
The fourth house has a false wall in the basement.
"Don't," the Widow says. "You don't want to go down there."
It's nothing he hasn't seen.
He soaks his hands till the blood comes off.
"You okay?" Fury asks.
"Why wouldn't I be?"
"There's some people that don't need to be doing this."
"But you already know." He shuts his eyes. "You know that's not me."
December 16th.
Howard's grave.
"You're coming for Christmas though, right?" Steve asks. "At Sam's?"
"Yeah, sure," Bucky lies to him.
There were places in Patagonia, still, when he was on the hunt, where he could go for three days and not speak to another human. No one at all that he could hurt. No one who could hurt him.
Every star he could spot in the long nights there, so far that the light was a relic. Impossible to see the star as it was. You'd have to travel so many thousand miles across space. Time was a distance. Time was moving.
A Christmas card from the Widow. Maybe a joke.
Peace on Earth to all Mankind, it says. His name in cursive Cyrillic. Love from Natalia.
On the front: a picture of a lion and lamb. They curl around each other, apparently asleep. The kingdom of God. But animals are not at all like men. Men, the shapeshifters, who eat lion hearts, but go about in lambskin— Men, who string Christmas lights on their rooftops, and tuck their children into bed, and tie silver ribbons around packages, while all the time behind the walls of their basement—
The kingdom of God is for the animals. Maybe that's the message.
He's not being careful. Doesn't want to be careful.
He realizes too late, past the turnstile of the station, that there's almost no one else on the platform within. He can hear rats scurrying down on the tracks. The silence is wrong. He drops down to a crouch, his breath coming in pants, going for his boot-knife.
It's not the blow to his head that takes him out, but the thunderbolt after. Takes him out of his body, behind his eyes. To a bright space he knows. A tropopause. An airless realm that is full of light.
After that he's awake but he has no body.
He remembers this part.
The past makes itself his body.
Remembering works like this.
A shell of himself.
Hands pick him up.
He waits for Pierce, that halo of gold.
He waits for the pain to begin.
Time is not linear. It's just a mass. There is not place where it ends or begins. He read this in a book. Everything that can happen is happening all around us. Everything you wish for. Everything you imagine. Everything you remember. Everything you forget. In a maybe gentler realm they walk up out of the ocean, all the bodies of the murdered, all the dead men. In a maybe gentler realm, in the Caucasus mountains, he puts his hands against the soil and women climb from it. The shells of bullets unempty themselves. He douses the flames and takes Howard's hand. Lightning travels backwards through circuits. He is climbing a ladder, towards where Steve waits. In a maybe gentler realm he lives and lives and lives and—
"Barnes! Barnes!"
Stars over Brooklyn. Stevie's birthday. Explosions against the sky of eyelids.
"Motherf—"
A pain in the heart.
"Goddammit, kid—"
Not a halo.
A skeletal eye, peering down at him.
He moves his toes. He moves his metal fingers. He move his other fingers. He draws a shallow breath.
"You're fucking killing me with this, Barnes," Fury says. "Are you in there or not?"
He doesn't want to speak, but with a little work, he can just about manage it. "Yeah," he says.
"How about walking?"
He's lying on a sidewalk. His head hurts a lot. Evening has turned the nearby buildings red. "Are we in Brooklyn?" he asks. Something about the skyline.
"We're getting the hell out of here," Fury says.
They get the hell out of there.
He blacks out on the subway.
Wakes up in his bed.
It's night. The heater bangs in the kitchen. He listens for cars, for sirens, for the whispers of neighboring humans moving in rooms that are unimaginable to him. Someone's sitting very nearby. "Why are you here," he says.
"Didn't think you'd want Rogers," Fury says. "Yet. But someone's got to look after your sorry ass."
He turns his face away. He feels nauseated. "I fucked up."
"Maybe you did. But no one else has to not fuck up as much as you do. So I'm willing to give you a pass for it."
Bucky stares at the cracks in the plaster wall. They're like hash marks. He says, "I hate this. I hate this."
"I've noticed." Fury hands him a glass of water. "You want to hear a story?"
"No."
Fury ignores him. "It's a story about a lot of people who fucked up. I happen to be one of them. I went to the man's summer house, for God's sake. Half of Hydra's techs were S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. I fucked up when it mattered. When it mattered to you. Seems to me like an awful lot of people did."
He sips at the glass of lukewarm water, to hide the fact that he's biting tears in. "Whatever. Ancient history," he says.
"Nothing I can do about it," Fury tells him. "Except make that the last time it happens."
"You can't promise that."
"Somebody has to. Guessing Cap already tried. Also guessing you wouldn't let him."
"I," Bucky says. His throat hurts. "I don't deserve that. He doesn't know—"
"And there're some things you might never tell him. I get that. Doesn't mean that you do what you're doing."
"Seems like I can't not fuck up these days."
"I don't believe that's true," Fury says. He slides his sunglasses back on his face. Vanishing into his own shadow. "Don't think I can afford to believe that's true. I got too much riding on the other thing."
He pauses at the apartment door. "Call Rogers," he says. "And get some sleep. You look like shit."
Going into the tank, at the end of the mission. No one ever explained his failure to him. He watched the strange masks that their mouths were for signs, as they stripped him down, stuck the needles in him. He knew every time that he would die, a divination his body made. He was a prophet on the inside. But by then he could not move his tongue. The cold began. The brain lasted longest of all. He watched them. He wanted to know how he'd failed.
We will do this as many times as it takes. Remember.
Till he gets it right. Being alive.
In a maybe gentler realm someone finds him cut open. Nothing is missing from him, not yet. With tender and with careful hands they sew him back together. The needles they use are painless. The longer they work, the more he remembers. He remembers so much about himself. When he opens his eyes he smiles and he's ready, and when they ask what his name is he says "My name is