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Bucky didn’t want to go in there.
It wasn’t the darkness he feared. It was the lack of the light and the disconcerting knowledge that there was a difference.
Bucky knew darkness; he carried it inside daily. Sometimes he let it fester. Allowed himself to nurture it and feel its power grow, just to reassure himself that he could push it back down afterwards. Power. Control. Progress. It was part of him and always would be, and he was reformed enough to understand that now.
But the lack of light was a wholly different concept. It was uncanny. Repressed in ways that had nothing to do with Bucky’s therapy or past. Monsters existed in the dark and stalked through shadows, but nothing thrived without light.
Bucky knew what it was like to be nothing.
In they went, one after the other. Lemmings chasing their own demise, their doctrine based on Walker’s waking nightmare.
God, Bucky wanted to hate them. Yelena and her goddamn crying, Alexei and his bullshit hero worship and motherland delusions. Ghost and her—well, Bucky didn’t really know what her trauma was, and she honestly had amazing powers, but whatever. Trauma, trauma, trauma.
And then there was Bob, because Bucky wasn’t even going to get started on John-fucking-Walker.
Bob. Bob who Bucky hadn’t met outside of his He-Man bleached sock puppet self. This was all about Bob and his self-pitting woe-party, apparently.
But so what if people left? At least Bob hadn’t lived a century forgotten only to resurface just to be left behind again. Bucky was sure it was a curse. His own Greek tragedy, lost somewhere between Prometheus and Sisyphus. Always seeking validation through wasted repetition while being ripped apart, body and soul. Bucky was always left with the impossible choice. Follow people into places detrimental to his own well-being or be left standing on the sidelines as everything he knew fell apart.
You’re taking all the stupid with you.
Bucky shook his head, refusing to push further into that clusterfuck of a memory.
But seriously, if Bob wanted to talk about being left…
“Fuck it.”
Bucky breathed in deep, closed his eyes and stepped forward.
It wasn’t the first time he’d ceased to exist.
Bucky was confused.
There was something comforting about the darkness. The void. The silence that washed over him as the numbing nothingness took hold. It seeped into Bucky’s skin, settling like a blanket weighted just short of suffocating; warm in the way that left him feeling cold and hollow.
Maybe the experience was the same for everyone, or maybe Bucky was a special sort of fucked up because initially, the void wasn’t so bad. Even when it began to shift around him, shadows closing in, it was fine. Shadows were, after all, precursors of the light.
Eventually the space came into its own. Small and cramped, blood-streaked tiles and shoddy medical equipment.
It made sense. Really. There were very few ways this fucked up thing could have gone.
Sure, maybe he could have found himself back in Brooklyn, trying to convince Steve not to do something reckless. Or maybe to live a little more. Do something thrilling that didn’t just involve getting his face beaten red in a back alley.
Bucky couldn’t always remember those days, but he knew he’d done things he wasn’t proud of. The girls he’d flirted with, stolen kisses from only to never see again. The men he’d looked at and tried to reimagine in Steve’s image.
If Void wanted to go on a shame rant, pre-Hydra Bucky had enough to share around.
But no. Like all moody bitches, Void had to dig deep while missing the metaphorical elephant in the room.
Just like David Copperfield, it began when Bucky was born. In that time when he existed between life and death; lost to the shadows and floating in his own personal void. He’d been so confused back then. Overwhelmed by phantom pain and the never-ending feeling of falling. His back was on a gurney and it was cold and hard and yet the ground was still rushing up to meet him.
You never got over the first fall. Then again, most people didn’t live through it.
Bucky moved through the room, noting the balding scientist cutting into his flesh. The comically large syringe. The mangled limb discarded on the floor beneath it all.
He didn’t try to intervene. Why would he? The past was the past and there was no changing what had happened. What he’d eventually become. His therapist called it acceptance and lectured about personal growth. Now that Bucky was done with making amends, and he’d been doing his best not to break rule number two—unless they really fucking deserved it—and he had adjusted well to a life detached from the Winter Soldier, they’d moved onto new things. Less fun, too, if that was even possible. Now it was all about growing as a person, finding purpose and breathing through the resentment he pretended not to have.
Bucky watched as wires were forced into the socket of his arm, snaking under mangled skin, and from the darkest of the shadows, the Soldier watched him.
Muzzled, with eyes ringed in black and looking just as out of time as Bucky did in this post-war hellhole, Bucky’s past tracked his movements through their shared history.
“I see you.” It was only fair that Bucky acknowledged his presence, and the words made the Soldier flinch. There’d been a time when the Soldier—when Bucky—had prided himself on being invisible.
“Do you remember this yet?”
The Soldier didn’t blink. Bucky took that as a no and wondered what this was like for the others. Did they scream and cry? Fight against parts of themselves that they could never change?
Was that the healthy, normal thing to do?
He could imagine Yelena trying to beat the hell out of herself. That seemed on-brand—and Alexei was probably doing something so innately Soviet that Stalin himself would shed a red-star tear.
“It only gets worse from here, pal.” Bucky said. “But you already know that, don’t you?”
The Soldier blinked.
Bucky ignored the scene, shut out the screams of pain pushing through his unstable unconsciousness, and walked away. When he got to the door, Bucky unlocked it with a key he’d never had, and when he pushed it open, the world twisted around him. Up was down and night was day and the grey cold turned frozen white.
The Soldier followed him through.
They stood shoulder to shoulder in front of it. Bucky knew the Soldier’s jaw clenched under his mask because they were the same and always would be.
But the chair didn’t scare him anymore.
It was a thing. An object without personality or intent. The chair hadn’t hurt Bucky. Its armrests hadn’t ripped him apart and forced him back together in incomplete fragments. It was just a means to an end. An oddly comfortable way to be torn down and remade, time and again.
Bucky and the Soldier had been broken in worse places than this chair. They’d seen it together in the room just past. Back when he’d been in transit, lost to the politics of the Cold War. Who owned the Winter Soldier? Was Hydra Soviet or American? It had been a messy time, filled with backwash diplomacy and mind-wipes on the bathroom floor. Blood in his eyes and a different voice every time he’d been defrosted.
Even through all his therapy and bullshit meditation, those decades were the hardest for Bucky to piece back together, and now that he was armed with the power of hindsight, they were worse than this room. This chair. These memories.
At least when he had memories, they were his own. Parts of himself that he’d reclaimed from that place without light before painstakingly slotting them back into place as part of his quest to be a real boy.
It had always been the spacey, empty years that terrified Bucky.
Which left him with the million-dollar question.
“Why the chair, Void?” Bucky wasn’t sure if Void could hear him or not, but it was worth a try. After all, this was just pathetic. Empty room, empty chair. No first-hand, front-row torture porn here; no Alexander Piece telling Bucky that was he was gift. No weedy little guy hiding behind his lab coat and glasses, like his intelligence was worth anything other than justified mass murder.
“You can do better than this. I’ve got some real fucked up shit in my past.”
When Bucky heard footsteps immediately after, he half hoped it was the peroxided rent-a-hero coming for a second try. Sure, he’d put Bucky on his armless ass the first time, but that wouldn’t happen again. Bucky had been rash and stupid (Steve had left him some of that, at least) and annoyed that Walker had saved his ass from Matrix-bullets, so he hadn’t been thinking straight. After all, punching things with his arm usually did the trick.
And, if Bucky was being really honest, he also blamed the politics. Suits and American bullshit had numbed his skills and taken his mind too far out of the fight-for-survival game.
The Soldier nodded, and Bucky tried not to think too hard on what that meant as the footsteps came closer.
It didn’t take long for Bucky to realise two things; the Void probably didn’t like walking, and those steps were familiar.
Conformation came when the Soldier recoiled. Shied away; used Bucky as a shield and Bucky sighed, knowing what he’d turn to see.
Rumlow.
There was a time when that man haunted Bucky’s dreams. When Bucky went days without sleeping just to be free of him and his shit-eating grin. It was cruel that Bucky’s returning memories so often centred around Brock Rumlow.
Yet…
Rumlow was a lot of things, most of them bad, but he was also an anchor. A solid pillar that Bucky could forcibly use to divide the conflicts within his own mind. There was pre-Rumlow and post-Rumlow, just like how everyday people had pre-graduation and post. Or before marriage and after divorce. Rumlow was a constant in time. A sundial that Bucky used to track the progress of the light he’d never quite felt.
Rumlow marked the lowest of midnight lows, but he also heralded the dawn.
“Oh Bucky.” It was weird hearing words that were his own yet not. Bucky could taste them, as if he’d said them himself, yet it was Rumlow’s lips that moved. Rumlow’s voice that flooded his ears and echoed through the empty room. “Look at you. You’ve become weak. And you both know what we do to weak things here.”
The Soldier’s silver arm whirred and Bucky knew that sound better than his own heartbeat. Titanium plates shifted and Bucky felt it tingling in his vibranium fingertips.
Was it possible to feel phantom pain for the loss of a limb that was never his own?
Bucky didn’t miss the red star, and he didn’t miss the feeling of blood and skin grinding under the rudimentary joints, but he did miss the comfort of that limb. It had been with him so long. Gotten him through fights he hardly remembered. Korea. Romania. That time his lips had turned to bloody shreds and flooded his mask as the Saharan heat forced him to seek any liquid.
That arm had been so much a part of him, defining both his history and his possible future, that he couldn’t help but be envious of the Soldier still having it.
But now Bucky had something the Soldier rarely had.
A voice.
The Winter Soldier was violence best served voiceless; Bucky had been learning to use his words instead of his knives.
Apparently, it was better for his public image.
“And you became dead, so…”
Rumlow laughed; the Soldier huffed.
“At least I went out on my own terms.” Rumlow paced them and Bucky watched as his face blistered and sagged. A dark, twisted thing worthy of this B-grade Gothic hell.
“Yeah. I hear you made quite a bang.”
There was something wrong here. Something off with this whole void thing that Bucky couldn’t quite shake. The way Walker talked suggested it should be a haunting struggle down memory lane. A horrific glimpse into every low moment he’d ever tried to stuff down and forget about.
But this wasn’t Bucky’s history. Sure, the locations were the same, but this particular scene never happened. Bucky had never been out of the chair and lucid, and he’d certainly never walked around the room while making friends with the fractured parts of his inner self.
Either Void was like a first year undergrad student discovering Freud for the first time, or he’d lost himself in Bucky’s personal reckoning and didn’t know how to handle it.
Or maybe Bucky was broken beyond repair, but that sounded like a real mid-2010s mindset.
He’d moved on from that. He had checks in eval boxes to prove it.
Unfortunately for Bucky, knowing something was wrong didn’t instantly solve his problem or dismantle the void. Nor did it shut Rumlow up.
“Always the funny one, weren’t ya, Asset?”
Rumlow had that look that Bucky would always remember. The narrowed eyes, the twisted lips. It was hatred embodied and somehow, even in the haze of all his brainwashing, Bucky had wondered what had made Rumlow that way. What had pushed that little boy into becoming the type of man who thrived on hurting people?
At least Bucky had an excuse for his history of mass murder. And the arms and legs he’d broken since.
Rumlow, though? He was a special sort. Always had been. The way he’d hold Bucky down, press him into the chair and then pat him on the head afterwards. There was something not quite right in Rumlow’s head.
Not darkness, but that lack of light.
“It’s why we wasted that pretty mouth and gagged you.”
Bucky raised an eyebrow, ignored the bait and mirrored Rumlow’s steps. Two predators now, no prey.
Rumlow couldn’t help but run his mouth, like usual.
“Why don’t you get in the chair? I’d take you back. Make you my pet Asset again. Just like old times.”
Bucky smirked.
Put in the work.
“I’m James Buchanan Barnes.”
Rule number three. I am not the Winter Soldier.
Poor Rumlow looked confused for the briefest of moments. It was too late when the ball finally dropped.
“He is the Asset.”
Rule number two. No one gets hurt. Unless they really deserve it, and of all people who deserved some retribution-pain, Rumlow was at the top of the list.
Rumlow’s feet lifted from the ground as the Soldier’s arm purred that seductive whisper of power.
God, Bucky missed that.
The shock on Rumlow’s face was enough to make Bucky smile as he stepped in close.
Rumlow’s obsession with breaking people down—dragging them to his lowly level—had left him exposed. He’d overlooked the already broken plaything skulking in the shadows and fixated on the challenge of the ‘new and improved’ Bucky.
Foolish.
“Always so full of yourself. Couldn’t see the world past your own dick.”
At least Void—or Bucky’s Void-muddled brain, or whatever this all was—got that right about Rumlow.
The silver plates in the Soldier’s arm flexed as Rumlow’s heels kicked; his body spasmed, his face turned red as he struggled against the stranglehold.
The Soldier’s eyes met Bucky’s over Rumlow’s shoulder, and Bucky remembered what it was like to be so pliant. To breathe through that mask and wait for orders; for justification and absolution of action.
It was cruel to be left waiting.
And so Bucky nodded; the Soldier’s arm tensed and Rumlow’s head snapped to the side.
The Soldier dropped Rumlow’s corpse to the floor, next to that old damn chair, and looked to Bucky silently. There was no remorse in those eyes, so similar to his own and yet so hollow and cold. The Soldier had merely completed another mission. Bucky couldn’t fault that. Couldn’t judge it. He’d vindicated it, after all and honestly, he would have done the same thing.
But now it was time to move on. To put all this behind him and, as his therapist would say, take positive steps towards the future he wanted.
Manifest that shit.
Behind him, the Soldier rotated his left arm again, the sound the only thing left alive in the room.
“Fuck, I miss that arm,” Bucky sighed as he walked towards door number three.
At least that one didn’t fall off all the time.
Bob’s room was a mess and someone was screaming and Bucky took something heavy to the side that he hardly felt. It wasn’t like there was much pain in the void anyway, though judging by the faces of the others, they’d stand to disagree.
Bucky kept that strange hollowness to himself.
Yelena looked at him in the way haunted people tended to do. They’d all done shit. Seen shit that should leave no one sane. But Bucky’s story was public. Splashed all over the front pages of old newspapers and scrolling bulletin boards. Speculated over on social media like there wasn’t a living, breathing thing behind all their clickbait attention seeking.
Everyone knew what he should have seen.
“Are you alright?”
The question felt pointedly aimed at him.
“Oh I’m fine. I have a great past, so I’m totally fine.”
Beside Bucky, the Soldier nodded.