Chapter Text
When he sees Bucky standing beneath a tree on the National Mall a stone’s throw away from the Smithsonian just like he said he’d be, Steve’s very first instinct is to touch him.
He actually has to jam his hands into his pockets to keep himself from reaching out and running them all across Bucky’s body, just to make sure it’s him, that he’s real and he’s here and he’s alive.
“He’s gonna be jumpy as hell,” Sam had warned him. “Don’t touch him without asking first.”
Steve really didn’t need to be told. He’d read what they’d done to Bucky in those HYDRA files (and proceeded to vomit until he couldn’t move). He wouldn’t be surprised if Bucky never wanted to be touched again.
He suddenly thinks back to when he first met Sam, Sam leaning against a tree wheezing for breath as Steve made good-naturedly snide comments about the other man’s fitness, and while he’s not really one for signs and portents, he can’t help but to notice the parallels between then and now.
One of the most valued friendships in Steve’s life began beneath a tree on the National Mall.
Maybe it wasn’t the last.
It pains Steve to think about it that way, though. To think about whatever might come out of this encounter with Bucky as a new beginning as opposed to an inevitable continuation following a momentary lapse. To the rest of the world it’s been seventy years, but for Steve... He still remembers the last birthday he celebrated with Bucky, remembers the way Bucky smelled when he came home from a long day at the factory, how he looked when he was asleep.
He can still hear Bucky’s scream trailing after him down that snowy mountainside in the Austrian Alps.
Some nights Steve wakes in a tangle of sweat-drenched sheets with an aching pinch in his arm from stretching it farther than it will allow, grappling for a hold on some desperate impossibility that he can’t even achieve in his dreams, because once again his body is not enough.
When he got the serum, he thought his body would never fail him again.
He was wrong.
“I’m never going to be him,” Bucky mumbles, instantly bringing Steve’s attention snapping back to the present.
Steve very nearly blurts out don’t say that, but realises that he’s being put to the test right now, somehow, and that answer would most definitely mean he’d fail.
He just doesn’t want to admit that Bucky could very well be right. It’s certainly hard for Steve to come up with any viable counterpoints when the person standing before him right now is hardly a person at all, let alone the vibrant, charmingly cocksure young man that was once his closest friend.
He looks haunted and hunted and tense, so unlike any version of Bucky that Steve has ever seen.
Bucky before the war was all wry smiles and carefully-constructed aplomb that masked a slew of insecurities that he’d sometimes mumble about to Steve if he got drunk enough. Bucky after he’d been freed from Zola’s clutches in 1943 was quieter, harder, maybe even a little meaner, but still trying so very hard to be okay and still so unremittingly Bucky. Hell, even Bucky as the Winter Soldier was more familiar in some fucked-up way, because at least the Winter Soldier had retained Bucky’s sense of hunger and purpose.
But the person standing before him right now? He’s a stranger, and Steve realises with a sick start that the reason for this is because this is the very first time Steve has ever seen Bucky with all the fight sucked out of him.
He is a ghost, just like Natasha said, but not in the same way that she meant – not in the sense that he’s that lethal spectre that seems to appear and vanish within the same breath, leaving untraceable trails of death and altered history behind it. No, right now Bucky is a ghost in the way that he is not quite dead, but definitely not alive, either, and Steve has a feeling that whatever he says next will make all the difference as to which side of the veil he chooses to stay on.
Very carefully, Steve says, “That’s okay.”
Bucky just stares vacantly at him.
“It’s okay,” Steve repeats in a low, steady voice. “You... you don’t have to be... him. You don’t have to be anyone. You can just be who-... whoever you want.”
He literally holds his breath as he waits for Bucky’s response, watching Bucky’s face attentively and feeling deeply unsettled when he realises he has no idea what’s going on in Bucky’s head. It used to be that a fleeting shared glance or a soft nudge on the shoulder was all it took for them to come to some unspoken plan or agreement. They could interpret each other’s eyes like scripture, read each other’s bodies like palms.
Where their lifelines were once perfectly overlapping, they are now split and severed, diverging into separate perilous trails.
Now, as Steve scours Bucky’s blank face and bristling body for some kind of hint as to what he’s feeling, it’s like looking into a black hole.
Finally, Bucky says, “Okay.”
When they get to the apartment, Bucky will not allow Steve to enter it until he’s swept the area for threats. Steve doesn’t try to protest despite the way his heart feels like an anvil in his chest, just watches from the doorway as Bucky ducks in and out of every room, making sure they’re all clear before he finally returns to Steve and gives him a curt nod.
Steve walks in and waits for Bucky to move, too, because he’s not exactly thrilled with the idea of having his back to Bucky, but Bucky merely stands there like a wall fixture, clearly waiting for the same thing.
As subtly he can, Steve angles himself ever so slightly so that he can keep Bucky in the corner of his peripheral vision as he walks to the living room, where he sits down on the couch and finally realises just how fucking shaky he is. He doesn’t think he’d have been able to remain on his own two feet for much longer.
Bucky, on the other hand, has found a standing spot in the corner of the room that grants him a clear line of sight to both doors and the window.
“Bucky?” Steve tries.
Nothing.
Steve desperately wants to call Natasha for help, or maybe Sam, but it feels like a betrayal, somehow, to bring anyone else into the picture when Bucky is like this. The Bucky that Steve knew would’ve hated having an audience to his most vulnerable moments.
Eventually, Steve just asks, “Are you hungry?”
Bucky does not respond other than a brief flickering of his eyes in Steve’s direction.
“I can, um, make you something,” Steve says, well aware that he’s babbling. “D’you... You still like clam chowder? I have a few cans; I could make you a pot if you’d like...? Or something else? You... You really look like you could use something to eat.”
Once it becomes pretty clear that he won’t be getting an answer, Steve decides to make the soup anyway. He heads to the kitchen, walking slowly, carefully, unable to keep himself from feeling apprehensive even though Bucky has displayed no signs of aggression towards him, and he feels guilty for thinking that Bucky might hurt him.
When he hears barely-there footsteps behind him, he turns around, perhaps too quickly, because Bucky also takes a sudden step backward.
“You can wait in the living room if you’d like, maybe sit down,” Steve says softly, because, quite frankly, Bucky looks like he’s about to tip over.
“No,” is all Bucky says.
Steve eyes him a moment longer before he shrugs and continues towards the cupboard where the canned soup is. Every sound in the kitchen feels amplified by the silence between them, from the creaking of the pantry door to the groan of the can opener.
Bucky positions himself a few metres away from Steve, where he has a clear view of the door, and Steve can’t shake the odd suspicion that Bucky is doing this for him. Sure, Sam’s taught Steve about hypervigilance, and Bucky is the very picture of someone on excessively high alert, but his proximity to Steve as well as the fact that Steve is not within Bucky’s main line of vision suggests that he does not view Steve as a threat so much as something to be guarded.
Steve does not touch him.
It doesn’t take long for Steve to realise that Bucky is not a threat, but that’s mostly just because Bucky’s not much of anything, really.
He doesn’t sleep, doesn’t wash himself. Steve initially thinks he can’t even relieve himself properly, but quickly learns that Bucky wetting the bed that first night was just an unfortunate accident. He doesn’t eat unless he’s told to, and more often than not he cannot register his nausea quickly enough to get himself to the sink or toilet before his stomach stages a violent protest against its new contents. Even once his system reacclimates itself to processing different foods and Steve consequently starts to prepare him more exciting meals, Bucky consumes everything with all the pleasureless obligation of a joyless but necessary task.
Steve doesn’t know what to do.
He calls Natasha, who is overseas with Barton on a self-appointed mission that would explain a lot about the already blown-up HYDRA bases that Fury keeps texting Steve about. She promises Steve she’ll be back by the end of the month but for now, she says, just keep treating Bucky like he’s a person, because nobody’s done that in seventy years.
Steve asks Bucky if it’s all right for Sam to come over, and when Bucky just shrugs, Steve decides it’s not a no. Sam and Bucky disappear into the bedroom for at least a pretense of privacy (the door is kept open several inches while Steve waits anxiously in the other room, listening carefully for any signs of trouble), and ten minutes later only Sam comes back out, looking hopelessly overwhelmed.
He doesn’t say anything about what he’d discussed with Bucky, just talks to Steve a little about what he can come to expect. He explains what it might look like when Bucky is having a flashback and how to bring him back from it. Repeats that he shouldn’t touch Bucky without permission or approach him from behind without alerting him of it first. Advises Steve to read up as much as he can on PTSD and how it affects not only the sufferer but their loved ones.
Steve has never felt more helpless in his life, but not once does it occur to him to give up.
Bucky cycles in pinwheeling swoops between terror and blankness and rage.
Steve still does not touch him.
There are degrees to how much Bucky disappears. Often he drifts through the day in a semi-fog, able to function and communicate, but Steve often has to repeat things several times to get through to him. Occasionally, he’s completely gone, leaving just a Bucky-shaped exoskeleton sitting terrifyingly motionless and reactionless in one place for hours at a time.
Other times, Bucky gets trapped in the past. His flashbacks are not the noisy, dramatic affair that Steve had been expecting. Rather, all of a sudden Bucky will tense up and perhaps begin to tremble, his breathing becoming audible and eyes going glassy or bright with fear. The first time it happened, Steve didn’t even pick up on it until Bucky was so far gone that he ended up hiding under the bed for two hours because he thought Steve was Alexander Pierce. After that, Steve learns to always be on the lookout for the subtler warning signs, knowing that once they become obvious, it’s usually too late.
It’s the outbursts of anger that are the rarest but the worst.
It’s hard to remember that it’s the trauma talking when it’s Bucky voice, Bucky’s mouth that the words are coming from. Harder still to believe that the words are not the truth when they are already things that Steve has told himself.
That he is selfish. Foolish. That he doesn’t know when to let go.
“You should’ve killed me when you had the chance,” Bucky growls over the sound of a coffee mug shattering on the kitchen floor.
It’s the longest sentence he’s been able to string together since he’d returned.