Chapter Text
Arlington, Virginia
Nobody misses $5,000 in unmarked bills from a Hydra stash house. There are three helicarriers in the Potomac, so everyone’s got a lot on their plates right now.
He takes out the operatives. He’s merciful about it. They die shredding papers, boxing ammo, pouring coffee. They feel a bite and then nothing.
He leaves the guns. He hasn’t seen the chair—
No. He rejects this thought.
He hasn’t been debriefed in 24 hours.
He’s learned from that man on the ship, that helicarrier at the bottom of the river: it wasn’t always this. It has been for a long time. There’s no middle, no beginning, no end. But it wasn’t always this.
After the last shot rings out, he remembers: he doesn’t want to do this. Even if it’s quick, even if it’s necessary, even if they’re filthy Nazis, even if, were their fortunes reversed, those goons would have shipped him right back to—
Let's table that, pal.
But still, he doesn’t want to do this. He remembers: he doesn’t have to.
That’s new.
He leaves the guns.
Falls Church, Virginia
The files are easy enough to navigate if you know what you’re looking for. And if you’re fluent in Russian, Ukrainian, and German. And if you have a Hydra decryption key.
He doesn’t want to see. But the SHIELD leak dominates every headline. He needs to know how long he’s got until his own face is splashed across every television in the country.
He finds thinly scattered evidence of the program’s existence. There are dates. Coordinates.
How many of the names?
There’s not enough air in the room.
You don’t have to. You don’t have to.
He shuts the laptop.
In the files, he’s little more than a shadow. Even still. There are others who will look. They won’t forget how to send him back into the dark, soundless home that stretches, stretches, infinitely inside him.
Enough.
In an abandoned, ranch-style flop house, he barricades a window with one tattered mattress and the door with the other. He sets alarms with fishing line across the paths of egress.
No one comes. But he can’t blink the edges back into the room, he can’t swallow back the taste of copper. He can’t stop the ones who visit—they are pieces, snatches, feelings, all out of order. Even still, he knows them by name.
D.C.
The exhibit is packed and buzzing. Probably related to the helicarriers in the Potomac. And the recently hospitalized Star Spangled Man—
Don’t.
Too late. The color drains from his face. He pulls his cap lower, his jacket collar higher.
Another tip for standing out at the Smithsonian: stand slack-jawed before your own immortalized likeness.
Are people really so unobservant? He compares his reflection in the glass. Or is it just that he looks like shit? He’s not sure how long it took him to get his head above water, but apparently long enough to grow the makings of a pretty grim beard.
He tries to study the features of the man on the ship. But it’s as if something heavy is pressed against his chest.
——
After dark, on a quiet street lined with brownstones, he finds an unlocked car on the sixth try.
He tries on the name from the exhibit while he drives.
James.
James.
James? Really?
Silver Spring, Maryland
“You alright, sweetheart? You don’t look so hot.”
“It’s just. It’s a lot to choose from.”
“What are you hungry for?”
“Ma’am?”
“What do you like?”
“Oh. I'm not sure. I don’t know.”
“There, now. Nothing to fret about. Here, these ones are my favorites: the #10, there, the #6 and the #4. Can’t go wrong with anything fried.”
“Okay.”
“What’s your pick? Anything you like.”
“Anything?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. I’ll have that. Please.”
“Which?”
“The #10, #6, and the #4.”
“Good choice, hon.”
Baltimore, Maryland
New York, the idea, clings to him. He lets his thoughts land there while listening to the police scanner, or setting tripwire. It’s a pull he can’t quite place.
He doesn’t remember any of the specifics—no streets, no landmarks. But he knows: New York (the idea) is knitted together with the man on the ship.
In the end, he heads south.
Camden, South Carolina
There are little things he can do to keep from losing his shit again. Driving helps. Everything’s quiet when there’s one task at hand. This he can do: focus on the dotted line. Listen to the wind whip through the open window. That’s good, stay with that. He drives for miles and miles down dark and wooded backroads.
The internet—so helpful. He can look up his place on a map. Food he doesn’t know. Indecipherable references he hears on the news. He can quiet the threatening crackle in his skull watching endless strings of every kind of video imaginable—odd animal pairings (cute), knife skills (satisfying), and news footage of the man on the ship punching his way out of an alien invasion (unsettling).
Music helps. The third car he borrows somewhere near Charlotte has thousands of radio stations. At first the sheer amount of choice distresses him. But when he hears brassy, quick horns and sentimental crooning his hand loosens on the steering wheel. He finds his mouth moving around words.
He can remember an easiness in his limbs, brushing sweat from his brow, holding a delicate wrist.
The melody changes—a little girl with dark hair presses her face close to the radio. Her fingers tap, tap on a well-worn table.
Another: woeful horns, dreamlike piano, a fluttery vibrato.
It comes on so fast he loses his breath. A version of him, the one from the Smithsonian, feels the cold in his bones, dulled hunger. Over radio static, there’s the same raspy warble,
I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I'll be looking at the moon
But I'll be seeing you
And there’s the man on the ship—far gone, wearing a wistful smile.
The old self says: “Monita come quick! Our boy’s got it bad. He needs urgent medical attention.” Each word feels jagged in his mouth. But everyone hoots and hollers all the same.
Music helps, even as he feels himself mourning each memory as an unknowable loss. Still. They all belong to him.
That’s new, too.
Port Charlotte, Florida
Maybe he should have headed west. Here, the mid-summer heat is close and thick. Less than ideal conditions for someone trying to ensure the longevity of an advanced mechanical limb.
He’s learned: if he exhausts his body until everything aches, he won’t have to think about anything he doesn’t want to. At least while he’s awake. But Hydra-enhanced stamina means he doesn’t need much sleep to work demolition or haul junk. He just has to remember his strength before he accidentally rips out a porcelain tub with one hand. (It was nice while it lasted, Key Largo). Otherwise, it’s easy work to hide behind, given the thick work gloves and the safety of long sleeves, even in the oppressive heat.
Destruction—when directed at unfeeling objects and structures—dampens the dread in his stomach.
“Damn Ruso , you know there’s some good shit from this century, too?” Angel says while adjusting the radio.
The song that plays is called Anaconda and the response it elicits from him is akin to a low growl.
Angel is fortunate to have a disarming dimple.
They tear down a flamingo-pink condo building, and before that, a battered stilt house near the water. He’s earned the name from too much muttering to himself in Russian. The rest of the crew keeps their distance for the same reason.
But Angel is not afraid. Instead he takes it upon himself to do all the talking for the both of them. It’s not so bad. There’s a soothing rhythm to the cadence of his voice.
But today, none of it is enough to keep him out of his head. He’s agitated, unsettled.
“I can’t tell if this is your dream job or some kind of punishment,” Angel says of his handiwork on what used to be a cement retaining wall.
Angel is astute.
And unexpectedly persuasive. That’s how they find themselves at a dive bar after work. It’s not loud or crowded enough to make his heart race, but he takes a corner seat at the bar so he can keep his eye on every point of entry.
“Where are you from?” Angel asks, and when he doesn’t answer (he’s too busy watching the door over Angel’s shoulder) says, “ Relajate, Ruso . We’ve been on site a few weeks now. I’m just being friendly. And I’m curious if you can speak in more than one-word sentences.”
Fine. “Not Russia,” he says.
“Alright, alright. I see how it is.” Angel rolls his eyes. “What brought you here, then?”
He ran out of road. He found himself on a channel lined with mangroves. He watched the stillness of the water until he stopped feeling everything all at once. How else do brainwashed amnesiacs decide where to go, or what the hell to do, when they can’t remember where they’ve been?
“It’s nice. Quiet.”
“And before that?”
“I’ve been away.”
He’s learned this response carries several unsaid implications, none of them untrue, exactly. So he’s not surprised when Angel nods slowly, expectantly. “I could tell, you know. I was in Afghanistan. Before. EOD unit. You?”
Anticipating the question doesn’t make it easier. He gestures to the Glenlivet and the bartender pours one neat.
“Iraq,” he knows to say.
“I thought I could tell from the way you—well, you know how you can just tell.”
Angel has been home for two years, he learns. He now has a boxer-mix named Domino and a house with a blue door.
“This is Clara,” Angel holds up his phone to show a picture of a little girl with an especially round face. She has a dimple in the same cheek. “I missed a lot. I put her mom through a lot, too.”
Angel frowns, then makes the screen go black. “It’s hard coming back.”
There’s a lot he wants to understand. That he’s been trying to reason since that first moment on the helicarrier, when he started to return to himself. A version of himself.
He takes a long sip of whiskey and draws his brows together. “How did you.”
“ Talking for starters,” Angel says, giving him a sidelong glance over his beer. “Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m just giving you a hard time. I did the work. Group and shit. But first I fucked up a lot. Friends, my family, they just didn’t know how to treat me. I was back, and they expected me to be back , back, you know?”
He nods, but really, wants to hide under the bar. Not just from Angel, but from the man memorialized in the Smithsonian. Who was he, what did he want from this life? What would he have thought, if he could look back out at this self from behind the glass?
To come back to himself—to that self. As if it’s as simple as slipping into a name shared solemnly, between blows, while everything came crashing down around him.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable, man. I talk too fucking much. You just seemed like. I don’t know. Maybe you needed somebody to talk to.”
The crinkle has gone from Angel’s eyes. This seriousness is surprising, having spent the last week hearing only about Angel’s favorite villains from an unrealistic-sounding spy movie franchise.
“Do you? Have people to talk to, Ruso ?”
He shakes his head.
“Family?”
He thinks of the dark-haired girl tapping her fingers to the radio. There are other clues. Being bone-tired, as he is now, but slinging shipping crates anyways. Lying about his hunger so he can fill everyone’s plate but his, while a slight kid stares daggers with blue eyes that swallow up his face.
“Yes,” he guesses.
“Parents?”
He can’t remember. But in the other fragments he had been so vigilant and watchful. And so weary. He shakes his head.
“Sorry to hear that, man. Your people, though, you seen them yet?”
Why hasn’t the whiskey softened the ringing in his head yet? When he can’t answer, Angel kindly fills the silence. He peels the label from his beer bottle with long, lovely fingers while explaining the ways he was too explosive, too uneasy. The ways he frightened Clara’s mother.
It’s hard to hear about Angel’s tours. He’s been to Afghanistan, probably before Angel was born, and doesn’t want to talk about it. The ceiling tilts and wavers.
“Oh shit. I’m sorry, man. Me and my fucking mouth. You alright?”
He nods but Angel watches him closely.
Why share these things? A shadow seems to have passed over Angel’s face. Maybe he doesn’t like talking about it either.
It’s a generous offering then, he decides, to know the ways that Angel has been put back together. To know he understands: the pieces don’t fit the same way.
A question nags at him. “Your daughter. Her mother,” he tries to ask.
“We’re okay, yeah. It’s hard sometimes. And it’s different now,” Angel smiles at the bar top. “But they’re still my family. They love me on bad days, too.”
He thinks on this for a while. “That’s good,” he says quietly.
“Alright enough depressing shit,” Angel says, because he’s perceptive. “There’s something I still gotta know.”
Angel leans in, narrows his eyes. “You listen to ancient-ass music. You’ve never seen a single James Bond movie. You settled down in fucking Florida. You sure you’re not, like, a hundred years old?”
Is Angel too perceptive?
Oh . He’s smiling playfully, dimple and all.
A useful memory comes to him. He lifts his highball glass and delivers a swift tap to the top of Angel’s drink.
“ Shit!” Angel shakes beer from his hand and quickly brings the foaming bottle to his mouth. “Fuck you, old man!”
He smiles wickedly over the top of his glass. As the whiskey blooms hot down his throat there's something new—an echo underneath that burn. It’s just a sensation. A night tilted a little off kilter, but feeling steady anyways. So certain. He’s tethered in place.
Stay , he tries, stay with that .
But the feeling slips through his fingers.
“I have to go,” he tells Angel, whose sounds of protest drift further and further away until he’s out the door and into the night.
In his trailer, he sits on the floor of the kitchen drinking long pulls from a newly procured bottle, willing the rest of that night to come back to him.
The taste of whiskey on his tongue is the same, but in the memory he’s pleasantly drunk. There’s a fleeting hopefulness stretching out before him. He can see the man on the ship—blonde lashes, the flecks of green in his eyes.
But it comes in pieces, too disorganized. He paces until restlessness drives him to widen his stride, to wander further down the long dirt road he’s been living on, through woods bleached white with paperbark trees, until he reaches the quiet waterway.
Black water laps against the tangle of mangrove roots. He takes a long swig from the bottle. The crackle in his head goes quiet enough for him to see it.
It’s like this:
A rowdy bar. A celebratory mood.
The man he saw on the ship, sitting elbow to elbow. Drinking enough to forget the table—
Don’t.
Drinking enough to forget himself, too. Just a little. Something about a spangly costume, something teasing. Smiling wickedly into a glass of Glenlivet. Wanting to watch the flush creep up the other’s neck.
This joke he leaned in close to say—it’s his answer to a question: “Are you ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?”
He’d been that way already. Stumbling through death and dirt and blood and ash. Strapped to the table. Lost.
And yet. Here, the way ahead is brightly lit. Even as the night wavers, as his vision swims, as something unknowable and frightening changes inside him. There, next to him, elbow to elbow: a fixed point around which everything turns.
He is steady. He knows himself. He knows the way.
That’s good. Focus. Stay.
He can’t. That’s not how it works. Something else always intrudes, unwelcome—he’s back on the black waterway, he’s back on the table, he’s back on helicarrier—
Focus. Focus. Breathe.
Here, his hand against a distant ache in his chest. The sway of the red and green channel markers. A whippoorwill's song as it rises and falls, rises and falls.
He searches the sky, but it’s overcast and starless. There’s nothing else to help him find his way.
Tallahassee, Florida
It’s like a riddle. In many of these dislocated memories, the person he knows is smaller.
The internet turns out to be unhelpful in this case. There’s too much of it. And much of it is embarrassing. He gives up after finding himself on yet another article written wholly as a list. And that list is of too-small technical shirts on a ranked order scale.
But the librarian can’t find anything about the man on the ship that fits together with the pieces he’s got.
They got down all the brawn, sure, but forgot about the smarts. (Hadn’t he once recited whole chapters from memory—something about dragons and wizards and dwarves—in the dark before they fell asleep?)
They paint the grit and perseverance in broad strokes, but the reality of it is glossed over. (Captain America once swiped a ration card! He wore newspapers in his too-big shoes!)
It should be in the public consciousness that this man spent much of his childhood getting knocked on his ass. (After every blow, that fierce look remained unwavering.)
He reconciles two memories with his arm slung across the other’s shoulders. In the second they were eye to eye. He recognizes that fierce look—it’s the same across these fragments and artifacts, the same one he saw on the helicarrier, through blood and bruises.
It’s Steve. Come on. You know his name is Steve.
The librarian startles him by setting a book down on the table—six ragged men stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the cover. From across time and space, a sepia version of him smiles with a cigarette dangling from his lips.
He doesn’t realize that he’s mirroring the expression, testing the muscle memory. He looks up to say, “Thank you,” and sees that the librarian looks a little pale and nods a little too quickly as she backs away. He ducks back under his cap to look over the pages.
It’s a flicker of warmth to see these grimy faces as they were, not painted as 24-foot-tall patrioteers. Though he doesn’t remember the moments, he feels a little less lost to see himself anchored so firmly in place. Here, hovered over tactical plans in Lys. Here, looking through his sight outside of Calais. His fingers seem to know the feel and weight of the rifle. It was a good rifle.
This one tugs at him. All of them seated at a long table, staring dead ahead. A grim older man commanding the room. The man he remembers, Steve. The Howlies. Himself. A stoic woman wearing a shade of lipstick he can see in his mind, deeply red, though the picture is in black and white.
In the foreground, a slight man with a pencil mustache, brows arched curiously. He remembers: fingers curling eagerly around a new rifle. Quieting the restless fear in him with manual, repetitive tinkering. Hearing the enticing swish of a skirt against skin and sharing a wicked glance.
Stop.
Why do the edges of the room bleed away? His vision narrows to a point.
Focus.
He studies the multicolored fibers of the carpeted floor until he can catch his breath.
Better take another tack, pal.
Right. He flips the page to a newspaper clipping from 1945 only to be met with a different kind of startle. There’s no reason for the outrage that locks his jaw. But it is familiar. A rush of muddled memories surface—he drags a skinny punk by the suspenders away from a fistfight. He yells across a chasm filled with fire though smoke strangles his voice.
So when he reads the headline commending Captain America’s tremendous sacrifice he can’t help but hiss, to the confusion of several senior citizens:
“He. Did. What .”
Shelbyville, Indiana
When he was on a mission, hunting a mark, this was the type of place they’d have him lay in wait, watching patiently, until the doomed bastard came around. That’s how he knows it’s a terrible idea. But he does it anyway.
After a week of surveillance he knows the nursing shift changes. He notes which security guard spends the most time staring into his mobile phone. (It’s Jerry.) He knows the linens are delivered through a backdoor that bypasses the administrator and the security camera at the front desk. He knows how to watch the remote feed from his laptop, plus the past few months of footage.
Each timestamp, he’s certain, will contain the sum of his fears—a face, a hairline, an item of clothing, anything that signals one his handlers. Is one glimpse enough to send him back into the hole he can’t crawl out of?
He doesn’t have to find out. It’s only families on fast forward moving in and out of the automatic doors.
Until. Even in the grainy footage, you can’t miss him. Not just because he’s, well, huge.
He pauses on the frame before Steve walks through the entrance. He’s suspended with a hand raked wearily over his neck, eyes downcast.
How strange, the ways he knows the familiarity of it. Studying Steve obliquely. The crease between his brows when pouring over intelligence briefings. The delicate curl of his fingers over the fire escape, obscured by shadow and light under a fireworks show. The way longing softened the shape of his shoulders, lost in that inescapable song that left every soldier missing their girl.
In the security footage, Steve moves through the door, rearranging his features when the staff recognize him as a celebrity—he straightens his slumped posture and smiles with all his teeth.
This was four months ago. Weeks, maybe, after he woke up. It's merciful then, that half-healed bruises, broken bones, and bullet wounds don’t translate in this resolution.
Easy.
Those injuries, though, are the least he has to answer for. If Captain America is searching for him here, it’s not just Hydra on his tail.
But after three more days of watching, he does it anyway—he walks through the backdoor, ducks his head out of view at each security camera, and steps slowly into her room.
He’d prepared, he’d braced himself to see only fear reflected back. But she greets him as if no time has passed. She doesn’t even ask why he’s wearing scrubs.
“Oh, James, look at you! They’re going to withhold your pay if you don’t cut that hair.”
He doesn’t remember any of it, just a glimpse of a dark-haired girl moving through a tenement apartment, tapping her fingers to the radio, laying on her stomach over—was it a doll? A book?
It doesn’t matter. A surge of fondness grips him anyway. He swallows against the ache in his throat.
“First thing, Becks. Promise,” he says to her. He makes a cross over his chest because, standing before his sister, it feels like a well-worn gesture.
“Sit. Come here where I can see you,” she says. When he does, she takes him in with bright, icy-blue eyes.
“I was so young when you left. I started to forget your face,” she admits. “But you look just like your picture. I still carry it in my pocketbook, there.”
She gestures at the purse on her nightstand, though it’s hard to say when she last needed it. He knows from casing the assisted living facility that she has mid-stage dementia. At times she’s clear, and others she’s someplace else.
When he passes Becca the purse, she handles his officer’s photo with trembling hands, then gives it to him. “The other girls always thought you were so smart in that uniform. Very handsome,” she says proudly.
After searching the photo for some time, he lifts his gaze to examine her serene expression. Her hair, gray streaked with white, falls neatly down her shoulders.
“Becca, you aren’t—you don’t seem surprised to see me.”
“Well, I wasn’t sure you’d make it, but he told me you’d try your best.”
He tilts his head, uncertain of when or where she is.
“Steve told me they gave you some leave,” she reminds him gently, as if speaking to a child. “That you might come see me. If you could.”
“Right,” he says distantly. He pictures Steve, fresh off nursing the wounds the Soldier gave him, tending to Becca as well. Hoping, even then, that he might come to know himself.
“You know I wouldn’t go before saying goodbye. Not without checking on my favorite knucklehead.”
She wrinkles her nose at him, then lets her face fall.
“You have to ship out soon, then?” Becca says in a small voice. “It’s going to be awfully lonely while you’re away.”
“It’ll go by like that kid, I swear.” The words are too thick in his mouth. Is it his fault that all of them—Steve, now Becca—have come unstuck in time at that terrible juncture?
“It’s good you two had each other,” she says. “That always made me feel better, thinking of you over there. Somewhere awful.”
The rest he knows of her is from what he’s read. Her tireless advocacy for POWs in Vietnam. The funds she raised for his memorial at the Smithsonian, the speech she gave in its commemoration.
That loyalty makes him feel duty-bound to be honest. “Not this time,” he tells her. “Going this one alone.”
“Why would you do something like that?”
“Safer this way.”
“I think that’ll break his heart.”
He frowns at the ground because he can’t meet the warmth in her gaze. “I hurt him, Becca,” he says quietly.
“On purpose?”
He shakes his head gravely.
“He’ll forgive you, silly thing. Of course he will.”
That doesn’t mean he won’t do it again. It doesn’t mean he can stay in control. The depth of his dread, in truth: if Steve really knew all of it, he’d never—
“James, it doesn’t seem like he’s going without you.”
He narrows his eyes at Becca. “You going to snitch on me, then?”
She makes an indignant face.
“Thought so,” he says. He places his gloved hand on hers.
Becca starts to speak, but something has already shifted. Her mouth hangs open, frozen around whatever word she was searching for. Her eyes, so bright before, unfocus. Then, horribly, they go wide and watery with terror.
He withdraws hand quickly. His heart thrums in his chest.
“How—?” Becca rasps, barely above a whisper. “How is this possible?”
“It’s okay, hey, it’s alright,” he says gently, even though it isn’t. It’s all gone wrong. He didn’t mean to.
“Oh, James. They sent me your tags.”
“Becks, I—”
“I stood over an empty grave. How can it be that you still look just the same?”
Oh. Oh, no. How could he be here, he shouldn’t be here, he doesn’t deserve to be here.
Breathe.
He tries to ground his sister in a truth he hopes will comfort her.
“I’m not him, Becca,” he confesses. “I’m not.”
She lifts her trembling fingers to brush the hair away from his eyes. He hasn’t felt a gentle hand on his face in a very, very long time.
“There now, hush,” Becca murmurs, wiping his cheeks with her thumbs. “It’s just. You look so much like him.”
What’s a little more selfishness in a long line of selfish acts that brought him here?
It’s hard to say, so the question sounds strangled.
“What was he like?”
Becca doesn’t know all of it either. She was so young. The things remembered blur together with the lore, with the legends, with the comic books featuring this famous brother whose short life still shaped the course of hers.
But she remembers cunning and cleverness. A sharp wit. Wisecracking that drove their Ma up the wall. Too many girls. The careful way he chewed his lip when rolling cigarettes.
There were small kindnesses bestowed on her when he thought she wasn’t looking.
Unflinching loyalty, even at a personal cost. There was protectiveness. Possibly too much punching.
He was self-reliant. Self-assured.
She speaks haltingly at times, reaching for the right words or feeling for the shape of a memory. Bucky listens patiently and lets himself feel it.
Greenwood, Indiana
When he sees the sirens in his rearview, he slips into an easy posture. There’s no room for panic in this body. Maybe, if he got really fancy, he could beat them in this borrowed ‘06 Charger. Or maybe he'd attract the attention of somebody worse.
Instead he draws on deeper, less lethal knowledge.
“Hello, ma’am,” Bucky says. He smiles wide. “Am I in some sort of trouble?’
The officer looks him over skeptically, but didn’t her mouth curl up in the corners, just a little? Her eyes land on the small white box in the passenger seat—lemon squares he’s bringing back to his sister.
Bucky has a fake but convincing license. He’s not an amateur. But he was careless nonetheless in passing it with his gloved left hand, in wearing sleeves that slipped ever-so-slightly down his wrist.
The officer’s face stayed neutral all the way back to the squad car, where her partner, a tall, wiry man with a pinched mouth, waited patiently. Only when another car pulled up behind theirs, and then another, did he realize that his long lucky streak had made him sloppy.
There’s an APB out for him, then. Who called it in? It’s a short and uncomfortable list: those who know what he is. And where he’d be.
The tall one gets out first. The other five flank him. Bucky forms a plan that gets all of them out alive (even if nursing some serious head, kneecap, and wrist injuries). There’s a stolen patrol car involved.
All six have a hand on their gun. That’s alright. He can work with that.
Wait.
That isn’t what’s holstered at the tall cop’s right hip.
No. Wait.
There’s no guard to bite down on. Just his tongue. The taste of copper fills his mouth.
A metal arm can swing a car door open with surprising velocity. It cracks the officer’s face while his fingers reach for the cattle prod, while his mouth still shapes the words.
There’s no room for panic.
They can be anything, can’t they? They can be cops. That complicates things, but doesn’t change it. They always come back.
He’s not going back.
The ever-present sound of static grows into a roar—loud, like the sound of crashing surf.
Hey now, hadn't he once stretched out on the hot sand, closed his eyes, and felt the rumble of the waves hitting the shore? Tilted his face to the sun. Let sand trickle from his fist into Steve’s skinny chest when he wasn’t looking.
The edges of his vision bleed away.
He could keep it back. This thing that’s still inside him.
The arm they gave him buzzes and whirs.
He tastes metal.
Everything goes white.
He won’t go back.
Souris, North Dakota
He remembers what he couldn’t put into words before, after the stash house. The cost. It is to give up something you can’t have back. It is to be whittled away in small pieces.
He thinks again of the person he saw in the museum.
It makes sense, doesn’t it? Why there’s so little of him left.
Regina, Saskatchewan
Maybe it was the tall pines at the unpatrolled stretch of border he crossed on foot. Maybe it was the toll of all the dead Hydra cops he’d scattered across the Midwest.
But here’s something he hadn’t remembered before:
They were camped somewhere in southern France, a few days out from base. Another Hydra plot successfully sabotaged. Dum Dum snapped branches for a fire while bragging about a right hook that knocked a goon dead. (So he says, anyway.)
Steve held up a fist, Hold. Stop . Raised a hand to his ear. The rest of them didn’t hear like he did, so Bucky followed the point of his finger, east. Climbed high into a pine, sniper rifle slung over his shoulder.
It was a black and moonless night, but he caught the shine of a knife in the dark. The contrast between a helmet and the trees. The whites of frightened eyes.
Three shots. Three muffled thuds against the forest floor.
They weren’t the first. They would be far from the last. But this time, Bucky was laid low, sick on his hands and knees no sooner had he landed on solid ground.
It was easy to hide behind conceit and cleverness. Maybe to everyone but Steve, who watched him warily with sharp eyes.
They didn’t light a fire in case there were more. So he and Steve shared a tent, as they’d always done against the cold.
“Buck?” Steve whispered.
“I’m sleeping,” he lied.
“You sure you’re alright?”
“Save your super strength, pal. You worry too much.”
Steve turned over to face him. For a moment, Bucky could only hear his heartbeat between his ears.
“I know you don’t want to talk about it. What happened there. And you don’t have to right now. Or ever.” He takes a deep breath. “But you can. If you want to.”
Bucky chewed the inside of his lip. Wouldn't it have been better to share the burden, to reach across this small distance between them? He didn’t. Not that night.
“Yeah, I wanted to tell you,” he says, “You’re welcome for saving our asses.”
Can you hear an eye roll? Steve sighs and turns away. “Goodnight, you stubborn dope.”
Bucky waited until he could hear Steve’s deepened breaths to feel under his coat, his shirt, and then the gauze wrapped around a week-old bullet wound at his gut. He searched frantically, blindly in the dark around a smooth ridge where sharp pain should’ve been.
Coal River, British Columbia
Driving straight through like this, already on too-little sleep, makes it hard to keep his attention on the dotted line, or the music, or the wind through the windows. When was the last time he slept?
Bucky’s mind wanders to the words that broke through.
How far can a promise like that stretch when you’re both—he does the math—really fucking old?
He’s plagued by a worse thought, but there’s no shaking it:
Is it fragile? Can it fray, can it snap under the weight of too much destruction?
Anchorage, Alaska
He expected swaths of darkness and the bite of bitter cold. It was almost a disappointment then, to be met with January's wide blue skies, the snowy peaks of Denali shining on the horizon. It’s not so easy to keep punishing himself.
He works maintenance at a year-round RV campground in exchange for lodging. With the off-season solitude and manual, repetitive labor, it feels like an anchor has been dropped against the crush of rolling waves. He can stop rowing madly to keep from drifting away.
To the thing inside him, reeling since Indiana, he says, no more . The metallic wail between his ears goes quiet. That night, no one visits in his dreams.
—
If only he could unscramble everything he remembers, like dumping a jigsaw puzzle from its box onto a long, even table. He could linger over each one. Find the right sequence. Make sense of the way it’s all supposed to fit together.
That was the idea anyways, with the notebooks. But when he reads it back, it’s like recounting a surreal dream jotted down in the night.
Still, he lingers over these messy, hard-won memories. His for now. But there are no guarantees, are there?
When Bucky cajoles his way onto a Ukrainian freighter, he packs the notebook delicately, wrapped in his clothes, at the bottom of his sea bag.
Wherever he is, maybe he won’t have to start again from nothing.
North Pacific Ocean
He does the grunt work without complaint, at first in the pantry, which is terrible and claustrophobic, but eventually on the deck cleaning oil, greasing cables, scraping rust, or securing cargo. The air is clear and open. The sea stretches endlessly. There’s no one who can find him or hurt him.
He’s sorry for the Bucky who hoped to see beyond his Brooklyn fire escape and spent his adventures mostly in a trench, or shivering cold in some no man’s land. That person would have liked this view, he hopes—the sun dipped below the calm water, painting the horizon line a molten orange. It’s a nice thought.
His solitude doesn’t last long, once the crew learns how well he can handle his liquor. A small consolation for never getting buzzed again: drinking 13 hardened, hard-to impress seafarers under the table.
This too, makes his heart surge—to remember ribbing, and learning someone’s favorite drinking song, and the chorus of laughter after saying something pretty damn clever, if he says so himself.
They talk of home in the same way Bucky thinks of his, with a hollow ache felt under his ribs. They are from Salingrad and Kyiv, Krakow and Budapest. Miko, the youngest, is from Novi Grad—he speaks of his home on a hill, backed by gentle mountains, with such fondness and longing that they all go a little quiet. He hates Americans, but comes around after Bucky demonstrates his knowledge of Sokivian curse words. After that, the rest of them get to calling Miko тінь, shadow, for his proximity to Bucky.
They don’t press him to speak of home. He doesn’t have it all yet—what little he does is too tender to face the open air. He holds this one closely, protectively, like shielding just-sparked kindling from the wind:
There was a rowdy bar in London. A celebratory, joyous mood in the air. It won’t last long, he knows that now. But that night they were warm enough, they were fed enough. He drank enough.
Bucky leveled his eyes at Steve over a glass of Glenlivet. He said something teasing about the spangly tour costume so he could see the flush creep up Steve’s neck. That was before Bucky met Carter, so beautiful he lost his breath.
What was it he’d said on the walk back to base? He can’t remember, but Steve laughed, head thrown back. Bucky let himself admire the long line of his throat like a starved animal. He wishes he could remember what he’d said.
To steady the tilting of the cobblestone streets he slung an arm across Steve’s shoulders—broad now, how strange that was—and pulled him close.
He wanted so badly to say: you aren’t supposed to be here. But that longing was rooted in his own selfishness. When he thought of Steve, here in this terrible place, he wanted to feel the dry warmth of the too-hot radiator, the woody-sweet tobacco smell that lingered in the hallway. He wanted to remember home.
Instead he told him, “I told you not to do anything stupid and Jesus Christ, you’ve really outdone yourself, Rogers.”
Steve’s expression was deadly serious. “Had to. Couldn’t trust you not to do anything stupid out on your own.”
They were close enough for Bucky to see that Steve's long lashes were still blonde, he still had flecks of green in his eyes. It was a relief.
South China Sea
They might be mistaken for the same age, Bucky thinks, studying the way Miko’s brow furrows when he’s making repairs on the bridge, deep in concentration.
Miko punctuates his careful speech with his hands, but works quietly when a mood passes over Bucky. He describes each one of his brothers by their most outrageous misdeeds but can’t find the right words for his mother in English. Bucky doesn’t know enough Sokovian, aside from the swears, but he can register the softness in Miko’s features.
Curious, how Miko catches him looking and holds his gaze. But then again, Bucky thinks of the petulant way he flings his cards with a losing hand. He's just a kid. Better not.
It wasn’t until the first night he found Miko against his door, when Bucky traced a thumb over the tensed line of his jaw, that he recognized a familiar weariness. A mirrored lonesomeness in dark, deep-set eyes.
He had forgotten: the heat through his stomach lit by gentle hands against his neck. That there could be enough gentleness left in his own fingertips to make someone arch against him. It’s good to remember, though Bucky always stops those patient hands from drifting too low. Miko understands carnage and loss, knowledge that passes unsaid between them. Bucky doesn't have to tell him that he’s afraid to be overwhelmed. He is afraid of himself. It is too difficult, still, to believe that a hand on his body can be tender.
He doesn’t want the memories that contradict this just yet, though he can still feel around the outlines of them. Burying his head in long dark hair that smelled like rosewater. Baby, whispered down a woman’s thigh. Reaching further than he should have when camped in the dark, but feeling a shiver under his fingers that echoes, even now, over his whole body.
Singapore
When the fight flashes briefly across the television, no one else in the bar lowers their drink or hushes a conversation. Sokovia is another war-torn country most can’t find on a map. Only Miko and Bucky rush out into the street to find another screen, in another window, to try and make sense of it.
For a whole city, for all those people, to be carved from the earth. It is unfathomable. Miko’s eyes dart across the imploded buildings, the hoards of people caked in dust. He takes off running.
Bucky walks half the night searching, only to find Miko back in his cabin, hugging himself tightly, as if to keep himself from breaking into small pieces.
He does what little he can: lets Miko shove him away, lets his blows land harder and harder against his chest.
After finding an English newspaper, Bucky learns that the future continues to be baffling, and that Steve, it seems, has been busy reckoning with it. Steve and this century’s merry band of lunatics, the ones he vaguely recognizes from the alien invasion.
He wonders if Steve is still guided by that unflappable compass. Not the one he rubs his thumb over, the one with Carter’s face, but the one that’s always been there.
Bucky tilts his head to take in all the destruction. There are so many photos of rubble, and ruin, and tear-streaked faces. Why do the plates in his arm shift like that?
Easy now.
But he’s already on the floor—how did he get there?—dust in his lungs, ears ringing, hands clenched around a rocket launcher burning hot against his shoulder.
Stop. Breathe.
Breathe.
Okay.
You're okay.
He's not there. He’s still on the freighter. His hands are empty.
Bucky pushes himself up and lets a less distressing picture hold his focus: Captain America pulling children from a bombed out building. By the time Bucky’s heart rate slows and his hands stop shaking there’s ink on his fingers.
Didn’t Steve always know the right path, even when he was too weak and winded to walk it? Because if he didn’t, if Steve was wrong—
He squeezes his eyes shut, tight, but still sees the shield drop, clattering against the helicarrier bridge before it falls into oblivion.
It’s a short-lived doubt. It has to be. To think otherwise is to be rudderless. To be well and truly lost.
When they clear customs a few days later, Miko stays on. What else could he do? Home is still too far away. He doesn’t have enough money to get there. There’s a hallowed pit where home should be.
Miko won’t share the load with any of them, choosing instead to work in silence despite the sleepless circles under his eyes, the way his youthful face grows lean. Is that empathy Bucky feels? Or is it the guilt of putting as many miles as he can, more and more each day, from his own home?
If Steve was wrong about him—it’s safer this way. It’s safer not to know.
Here’s the way it is, the way it’s been, and the way it always will be: Bucky bears the cost of having Steve’s six. He always saw the bodies dropped behind them. Steve only has to see the way ahead.
To the Steve he saw searching for him in Indiana, rubbing his neck in a way that looked so weary, he sends a pleading thought across the ocean:
Don’t look back. Please. You can’t see what I’ve left behind.
Gulf of Aden
Bucky’s hearing is sharper than that of non-Hydra-enhanced people, so he was already taking long strides to the bridge before the first warning shot alerted the rest of the crew.
Five of them boarded from a skiff while they were refueling. Bucky’s heart rate slows—right away, it’s clear that they aren’t here for him. They’re lean, wide-eyed, and desperate. Three of them look very young, too young to know how steady to hold those AK-47s.
One barks an order at him, and though he doesn’t understand, he holds up a hand, easy. Bucky doesn’t care about the cargo. And he really doesn’t care to fight.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of their captain, who barges onto the scene cocking a shotgun and shouting a stream of Ukrainian threats. From the way Serge from Krakow and Andrei of Kyiv are waving knives, Bucky knows they won’t be nearly efficient enough to do anyone but the pirates any good. Miko is holding onto nothing at all, save for all his rage and sorrow that’s got nowhere else to go.
Bucky closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Idiots.
The one in charge fires another shot into the sky. The captain fires at the one in charge. He misses wide.
And then, obviously, everything goes to shit.
The youngest gets off 10 rounds in quick succession—Bucky steps into the gunfire with his left arm crooked in front of his face. Bullets ricochet, a pirate’s leg buckles.
“Give it to me,” Bucky growls at Andrei’s knife. Too slow—so Bucky grabs his wrist and squeezes tighter and tighter until Andrei yelps. Idiots. The knife drops into Bucky’s hand, and then he lets it fly.
The machine gun clatters on the ground and the young pirate howls—he can’t pull the trigger with the blade through his palm.
There’s a part of him that stirs. The part that only knows the fight. His vision narrows. No , he decides. No.
Miko makes a run for the dropped gun as a pirate raises another and takes aim. Idiots, idiots . Bucky grabs Miko by the shirt collar mid-stride and his legs go out from under him. “Don’t try that shit again,” Bucky hisses, before hurling him halfway across the deck, where he slides to a stop against a shipping container.
The pirate, hands shaking now, points his gun at Bucky, who takes his time walking toward the barrel until he can reach out and crush it in his metal fist.
By then, everyone on the deck has to pick their jaw up off the ground.
The engineers have already radioed the Yemeni Coast Guard, so the captain lets Bucky hide himself away—after all, he was the one who let him on with those forged papers.
By the time they’re off again, the Captain is plying him with all the money and promises under the sun to work security.
But the rest of the crew is lost to him. They scatter, they avert their eyes. All save Miko, who watches him still. But those dark eyes hold only fury.
That night Bucky waits in his cabin with the same warning he had in the firefight. Only now his voice is gentle.
He knows how it can be. Hasn’t he, too, sat with too much loss and wondered if someone could put a stop to it—if someone could put a stop to him?
“Don’t try that shit again,” Bucky says, and shuts the door behind him.
Strait of Istanbul
Bucky still weighs the offer to stay on. He’s certainly cheaper and far more terrifying than any of those hired mercenary hacks. He could keep moving, he could keep busy. But to keep dancing around the edges of the thing inside of him—it’s probably why he wakes up falling, or biting back a scream. Or feeling a phantom hand on his chest. He knows that gentle shake as a visceral signpost: here, you are right here .
Did he mean to—did Steve know, during that long march back from Azzano, that he slept the whole night with a hand through the open neckline of Bucky’s shirt? Each time Bucky woke, heart racing, he felt that heavy, certain weight against his chest and remembered who he was, and where he was supposed to be.
It was merciful, back then, that he didn’t remember his dreams. But not long after those German scouts, the ones he shouldn’t have seen, he fell asleep in the tent and woke up on the table. Lost himself in that haze punctuated only by the clarity of pain. What was real? What was in his mind? What did he see because they put it there?
Steve had given him that same gentle nudge. But even wide awake, Bucky was still in Azzano, looking into Steve’s changed face and wondering, as he had wondered then, are you real? Is that why Bucky reached out—unsure of where he would land? Maybe he was only looking for purchase. He reached out and found certainty against the shallow ridge of Steve’s collarbone. But knowing this truth didn’t stop his fingertips from searching.
He thought he felt Steve shiver. Maybe against the cold that drifted and settled through the tarp. But Bucky was flushed by their closeness anyway, the warmth that filled the space between their faces. In the press of darkness, possibilities seemed to stretch wide. Steve was both a breath and an ocean away. It was perilous ground; it was as familiar as any place he knew.
He braved the distance anyway, tenuously, until he rested his forehead against Steve’s. He stopped there, where there was enough distance to be told no. Still enough space for one of them to shove, or laugh, or throw an elbow.
He’d braced for only that. But three shallow breaths passed between them and he was still there, hanging onto an uncertain edge.
It was too dark to read Steve. After all this time tied together by an invisible string, how was there no way to know what he was thinking?
Bucky was disoriented, then, when he felt the brush of Steve’s lips without seeing the movement’s origins. So careful, so gentle. Would he still find Bucky fragile if he’d known—if he slipped a hand over his stomach and felt new skin where a bullet wound should be?
Bucky moved his palm across Steve’s now-broad chest, as if examining his own distorted reflection, and wondered if he ever felt afraid and dangerous inside his new self.
But then their mouths opened under each other and he forgot the rest. There was only the warmth of Steve’s breath down his throat, burning hot through his stomach. Only wanting, wanting.
He tried to move his hands under the endless straps on Steve’s stupid uniform—where did Stark put the zipper on this thing? Steve fumbled at the buttons on Bucky’s coat but it was too dark, his fingers too numbed by the cold, there were too many goddamn buttons. It was all so surreal that Bucky laughed, full throated.
Is this real?
Even Steve snorted—a sound Bucky knew from schoolrooms, from family dinners, having whispered something smart enough to make him stifle a laugh. Always so serious, even then.
Did that make him serious now, in this? Steve rolled to pin Bucky under him, muffling Bucky’s laugh under his mouth.
Bucky wasn’t as strong as him then, not yet, but with his fingers dug into Steve’s sides he was strong enough to pull him down; with teeth on Steve’s bottom lip, he was strong enough to coax a low groan from his throat. The way his own body responded, it was as if his hips were tethered to that sound.
To feel all of Steve against him, in the tangle of their legs, through their clothes—the weight of wanting built so quickly in him there was no room for anything else. No room for the table, no room to dread the frightening changes they put inside of him.
Was this what Steve wanted, or this, or this? Bucky could only listen to what made Steve’s breath catch, what made all the muscles in his back go tight. It was so good, each small, wordless affirmation—Bucky told him so in a breathless voice against his mouth, down and back up the line of his throat. A long list of sweet things, whispered—he can’t remember what, exactly.
Why did he keep Steves’s name locked away for so long behind a false smile?
It was too much, it wasn’t enough. He teetered on the brink of a vast cliff.
Then Steve was clutching him closer, closer—tenderly, even still. He couldn’t fear his changed self, Bucky knew. He was always so measured, so restrained. Bucky savored the force of his shudder, that brief loss of control, all the more.
It was his own name, murmured with awe against his neck, that sent him over that perilous edge, swallowing him up. Distantly, outside the depth of this fall, he remembered the others were camped nearby. When he couldn’t hold back the sound in the back of his throat, he softened it with Steve’s mouth, against the sweetness of his tongue.
He trembled and went still. Matched his breath to the rise and fall of Steve’s chest, pressed heavy against his.
Are you real? Everything was dizzy and dreamlike.
As he came down, faced with the silence and peril at that juncture, Bucky fought the overwhelming urge to make it all light.
It would’ve been easier to dig a finger into Steve’s armpit. Or make a joke about the sticky mess they’ve left themselves with, as if he were young and new in this—still a kid under the pier with his first girl, when last urgency and eagerness was enough to set him off like that.
Easier than saying the truth: that he’d shouldered this devotion alone, for so long, expecting to feed it with nothing more than the blush up Steve’s neck, or a hungry glance at the long line of his throat.
But now. How could he unlearn what it was to have more?
In the end he didn’t say any of it. He fell asleep, lulled by the warmth of Steve’s breath against the back of his neck. When Bucky woke next, blinking against the first light, Steve was already gone. There was only the sound of his voice, lamenting the morning’s rations to Jones.
—-
On another sleepless night, another Bucky tosses restlessly, still adrift between his dreams and reality. Still lost to himself, and where he’s supposed to be.
He remembers a story Steve told him once about the serum. It didn’t make him something else—only more of what he already was.
This part of him, the fight. He can’t remember his mother’s voice or her face. He can’t remember what’s real or what they put in him. But this place inside him—it’s the truest thing he knows.
If it’s always been there. If they only amplified what he already was…
What else is there for him to be?
He presses his own hand, warm, against his chest. As he drifts away on the rock and sway of the ocean, that quiet voice reminds him, as it has since that first day:
You don’t have to.
When they make port next in Constanta, he slips through customs in the trunk of an imported car.
Bucharest
Have the people of the future never learned the value of a dollar? (Well, a Leu in this case.) Why would anyone spend money on a bookcase when you can build one yourself? What dope throws away a perfectly good sofa? He haggled the price of his radio so low he feels a surge of pride every time he looks at it. He owns four mismatched plates and bowls. There’s sugar cereal in the cabinet and a bowl of candy on the kitchen table.
All his. When was the last time that was so? Maybe never.
He does odd jobs to make rent. He fixes the ancient fridge at the corner store at least three times. He works security at a nightclub that is definitely unlicensed. This doesn’t require that he make use of any of his skills. It’s mostly just standing around and looking intimidating, which comes naturally, given his discomfort at the crowds and the constant base. Although, didn’t Bucky once move easily like that, sweat at his temples, pressed close to someone new and tempting and sweet? (Maybe not just like that. He had loved dancing to actual music.)
He fixed the radiator in the apartment below his, but only because it was an easy thing to do for Elena and her grandson Luca. Though she insisted on trades—cheese pie or meatball soup, and once a haircut, but only because she was so intimidating. Just a trim, despite her insistence that he’d look best with short hair. (Debatable.) But he’s still in hiding, and looking like that might make Bucky recognizable to everyone but himself.
Elena must be as clever as she is frightening—how else can Bucky account for how often he ends up watching Luca for nothing in return? The little boy was so demure and well-mannered for her, so sure, Bucky had said, he wouldn’t mind watching him once or twice when she had to run out.
Have kids always been so loud? And so many questions. After Bucky has a bad day—agitated, unsettled, all the words locked up in his throat—he and Luca work out a system. Three knocks on the floor if he can come up after school. One means it’s not a good idea.
Three knocks on the floor, and there’s Luca at his door wearing a red and gold mask. There are a lot of whooshing noises involved.
“What are you supposed to be?” Bucky asks, looking up from his notebook.
“I. Am. Iron man!” Luca bellows in English.
“Which one is that again? Hey—no jumping off my couch.”
“He’s smart and rich and a playboy.”
“Do you even know what a playboy is?”
“He can play whenever he wants!”
“Eh, close enough.”
“Jakov. Jakov. Jakov! Hi. You really don’t know who he is? Tony Stark?”
Stark. Stark. Well sure, he knows Stark, doesn’t he? Pencil mustache, seated at a long table with him and Steve and the Howlers and Carter. Tinkering in a workshop. Exchanging a furtive glance when a pretty girl walked by.
Here’s something new:
Stark fitting him for a new rifle. Back at base.
“Look into the sight,” Stark told him proudly, “feel the speed on that trigger.”
But all the words were lodged in Bucky’s throat. His fingers were already faster than they should’ve been. His eyes were too sharp. A few days back, perched in a tree high above their camp, Bucky found three German soldiers in the dark.
The night before, he took his knife and sliced deep into his own palm. But standing in Stark’s workshop that next morning, there was only a thin pink line underneath his clenched fingers.
And before that. The bullet he had no business coming back from. But he woke up brand new all the same.
He wasn’t a god fearing man, not anymore. Not since those first weeks on the front. But wasn’t he damned all the same?
“Barnes. Anybody home?” Stark snapped an actual finger in his face. “I think the words you’re looking for are ‘gee, Howard, thanks for this swell tech. I can’t wait to maim a whole mess of Nazis with it’.”
Bucky remembered how to smile wide and clapped Stark hard on the back. “Gee, thanks Howard.”
“This last op was rough, then?”
“You know me. Good as butter. It won’t stick.”
“Doesn’t look that way.”
Bucky stuffed his unsteady hands in his pockets. “Trying to tell me something?”
“You look like you could use a strong drink. Some company, too.”
“Jesus, Stark.”
It’s not that he wasn’t itching to feel booze-warm again. Like the first night out of Azzano, in that bar. But recently, he’d learned there are no number of swigs from any known bottle that would do him any good.
But the other thing, well. That’s tricky.
“I’m looking for Rogers.”
It had been a day since he thought he could handle more, all of it spent in agony. He couldn’t even look at Steve for fear of seeing regret reflected in his gaze.
“Our Cap?” Stark’s brows went up. “He’s ocupado, my friend.”
“How’s that,” Bucky said. Why did he do that, make him say it?
“Carter. Tactical plans. After more’n two months in the field. You dummy.”
That he was. Is. And a coward, besides.
Maybe it’s the poison they put in him that made him feel so venomous.
“Spose he’s got the right idea.”
“Attaboy.” Stark guided him out of the shop. “Redheads, yeah? I know some gals.”
There’s a smaller hand on his arm. His whole body startles.
“Should I go home now?” Luca holds the helmet in his hands.
“I’m sorry,” Bucky says. “I was just remembering something. Did I scare you?”
Luca makes an indignant face. “No!”
“Alright, Iron Man.”
“Are you going to write it down?”
“What? Oh. Yes. Sure.”
“Does it help?”
“Sometimes. It can be hard to remember sometimes.”
“Then why do you do it?”
Bucky shrugs. “Beats the alternative."
——
One knock on the floor.
Peggy Carter’s face in today’s paper is different than he remembers. For Bucky, she’s frozen when they were, forever in a pin curl, a deep red lip, a pressed uniform. In the coverage of her death, she has more wrinkles around the eyes, more medals. She’s a woman alone, shoulder-to-shoulder amongst lesser men.
He’s sorry for Steve. But really, he’s sorry for all three of them. Their overlapping lifetimes passed each other by in ways that were neither kind nor fair. He feels a twinge of loss in seeing that poised expression again, that unyielding stare.
Memory—when it works—works backwards and forwards, all at the same time.
The rowdy bar in London. He forgot himself; he was reminded. One moment he leaned in too close, he looked too long. The next he was at his feet. The room went airless. Hard not to lose your breath seeing Carter walk through the door in a dress like that. With a red, beautiful mouth like that.
Back at base in southern France. A day after reaching across a small distance in the dark. Carter’s mouth had moved into a rare smile to thank him for the Germans. The scouts who came for them in the dead of night. Who felt a bite and then nothing—so sharp were Bucky’s movements, like that of some terrible predator. Really, it’s Steve, standing at Bucky’s right, she’s thankful for. Alive another day to root out more Hydra nests. Here now, in between.
One last mission, though he didn’t know it yet. Miserably cold in the Alps, which suited his raw mood. Bucky knew enough French to understand that Dernier and Jones were ribbing Steve about Carter. They wanted details about their still-fresh reunion. They knew better than to expect that kind of talk out of their mannerly captain. But Steve’s face flushed red all the same.
That song came over the radio, the one that’d been following them around this whole goddamn time. Even through the static, Bucky could make out that mournful sound.
I’ll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places…
If the serum enhanced Steve’s humility, did it magnify Bucky’s penchant for self-inflicted suffering?
It's the only way to explain why he would watch Steve’s mooning expression, the easy shape of his shoulders.
“Monita, come quick,” Bucky said. Behind that teasing smile, he might as well have been chewing glass. “Our boy’s got it bad. He needs urgent medical attention.”
His old self. Another tent, another Steve propped up on an elbow, trying to read the long line of Bucky’s back. Steve whispered his name in a wounded, searching voice. Bucky left it there, hanging over them.
In that horrible silence, Bucky curled into himself. He clung tightly to his misery and called it love.
What else was there to do? He was hanging on by his fingernails. He was becoming lost to himself.
But Steve. If he could have seen how he was with her. It’s the same backward and forward, in every place Bucky looks. With Carter, Steve was found—he knew the way.
Bucky saw enough for the both of them. Didn’t he always? Of course he curled into himself and away from Steve that night. Of course he made the sacrifice play. He loved the best way he knew how.
——
It’s a busy week for news. And a busy week for having his legs cut out from under him. It’s not that his past isn’t deserving of global outrage. But is it too much to ask that he atone for any of the violent acts he actually perpetrated?
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Everything comes around one way or another. He just wishes the implications weren’t so insulting. As if he’d spend 70 years as a ghost just to show his face to every security camera in Vienna at the scene of an alleged crime.
It doesn’t matter. Here’s what does: getting his bag. Getting the hell underground.
It was one thing to lay low when he was still a shadow. Where is he supposed to go when everyone on the planet knows what he is? Under his jacket, his arm clicks and whirs. But there’s no room for panic here.
From outside his building he can see movement in his window. Bucky crouches low to size up the situation.
He should run now. He needs to run now. But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.
Bucky’s practiced, silent steps get him all the way up the stairs and into his apartment without notice. Possibly because Steve is still terrible at watching his six.
He remembers: getting caught in Captain America’s orbit was a strange thing. He hadn’t realized all the ways Steve’s gravity had changed the shape of him. Didn’t that happen to all of them—the Howlies, Stark, even this new acolyte Bucky can hear in Steve’s earpiece? Everyone who stood with him could only hope to live up to it. Even now, watching Steve’s deft fingers move over his things, Bucky still feels that same pull.
Just when Bucky thinks he might have to watch Steve read every one of his notebooks, he turns around.
Hey, pal.
Where could he possibly start? His former self always knew what to say, but the person he is now can’t find the right words.
For starters, it’s too difficult to look at him straight on. Maybe it’s the helmet, which isn’t the same as the one from the helicarrier. That one he knew from another lifetime, from scanning a field of chaos and smoke and fire for a familiar guidepost.
That helmet is at the bottom of the Potomac though isn’t it?
Steve moves carefully, as if approaching a feral animal—no sudden moves. That’s good. He asks all the wrong questions with a sharp edge of anger to his voice. That’s good, too. Steve should be angry. He should be afraid.
Do I know you? See, that’s a stupid question, Steve.
It’s the same backwards and forwards.
Casting the shield aside. Dropping his hands when he knows Bucky can’t.
Whispering Bucky’s name in the dark when he’s got something good, steady, and strong to lose.
Here, now, in this apartment, ready to shoulder the weight of Bucky’s past.
Yes, he knows Steve: self-sacrificing, eternally stubborn, self-abnegating—and that was long before the serum. He’ll just keep throwing it all away.
Because he’s unworthy of it, because he can’t live up to it, Bucky has to be the one who keeps running.
There are boots on the roof. A battering ram at the door. Stun grenades through his window.
His body knows what to do. Fighting by Steve is in his muscle memory.
He fights.
And then he runs.