Chapter Text
“-ucky!”
He caught the tail-end of it, shouted loud enough to hear it over the ringing in his ears. His name. Someone was shouting his name.
Why were they shouting his name?
Why were his ears ringing?
So loud.
Everything was so damn loud.
“-y th- -ck di- - do that?”
“-ecause he ca- -lp himse-. He’s -ucky -cking Bar-.”
“-etal -rm not go- stop -uch wh- -uilding -king -xplod-. He shoul- -ow -etter!”
Explosion.
There’d been an explosion. A building exploded. And he’d stepped in front of Yelena, pushed her behind him and flung up his metal arm in a futile attempt to save himself from... well, from everything that came out of having a building explode way too close to you.
“-e -aved my li-!”
So he’d done that bit then. Bucky relaxed slightly as he realised one of the voices he’d been hearing was Yelena.
Still. Building exploded. That probably explained why his leg felt so wet. And things under his kevlar and vibranium vest felt… squelchy. Black uniform. Wouldn’t show blood. He wondered, suddenly light-headed, whether the others realised exactly how much blood was leaking out of him. Though leaking might not be the right word. Pouring might be the right word.
“-e’ll be alri-, won- he?” Yelena’s voice was suddenly almost frantic. “-e got - -erum. It’ll -eal -im.”
“Not if i- kee- runni- -ut of hi- so -cking -ast!” A hand was suddenly grabbing Bucky’s leg. Walker, if the hand was connected to the voice. “Shi-! It’s -aturated!” Walker’s hand moved then, beneath the edge of his vest, felt the bit that squelched. “He’s -leeding out!”
Bleeding out. Not really surprising, thought Bucky. There was a lot of him that felt wet and he could feel the cold creeping up from his extremities to his core, the shivering that was starting in his limbs. And he couldn’t seem to want to open his eyes, increasingly drowsy. So, that’d be him going into shock. But hey, the ringing in his ears was lessening. That was something, right?
“-ut the serum!”
“It’s not go- t- heal him if -t’s all over the -loor!” Definitely Walker. “-t needs to be -nside -m!”
“Can’t you -o -mething?” That sounded like Ava. “You’re the arm- -oy! Aren’- -ou -ield medic?”
“I can’- -titch him up fas- enou-! Shi-!” Walker’s fingers pressed hard into Bucky’s thigh then. Femoral artery then, thought Bucky. Those things were like a firehose when you tore a hole in them. No wonder he was losing feeling in his arms and legs, really.
“We need to -top it!” Bucky frowned, or at least thought he did (he wasn’t sure if his face was still working). He wasn’t used to Ava sounding quite so panicked. Probably serious, then. He just wished he could concentrate but his thoughts were slipping out of his head before he could grip hold of anything but the tail end of them.
“If I could -titch it up in time, the serum -ould sort it out, but I can’t sew that fast,” grunted Walker, pressing his fingers hard into Bucky’s thigh. “We just need to keep him ali- long -nough for the serum to wor-, but I don’- think we can.”
“You can’- die in the Void.” Yelena’s tone was suddenly calm. Unnaturally so.
“Wha-?” That was Bob, even though it wasn’t quite his usual ‘aw, shucks’ kind of tone.
“You said,” replied Yelena, “tha- there’s no death here. Only pain. If we go into the Void, can we kee- -ucky alive long enough for Walker t- sew him up?”
“I…” Bob stopped for a moment and Bucky could picture the confused look on his face (which, let’s be frank, was there most of the time; life, generally, seemed to exist to confuse Bob). “I mean… I’d need to bring back… the other guy. Nobody wants the other guy.”
“But would it work?” Yelena was relentless. “We’ve got out of there before. We can do it again. Will it work?”
“I…” The words seemed prised out of Bob eventually. “Probably.”
“Bob,” said Yelena, kindly, gently, remorselessly. “It’s Bucky. Please.”
Bucky shivered harder as the cold settled into his bones, dragging him towards sleep or something that he hoped would feel like sleep. For a moment everything darkened and Bucky would have given a wry smile if his face still worked. Of course he wasn’t going to go into the light.
Then he heard it. “-talia, you have to go.”
Not here, thought Bucky. Not this room. Not this room.
“Natasha?” Yelena and Alexei spoke the name simultaneously. “What’s Natalia doing here?” asked Alexei.
“Don’t care!” Walker said. “We don’t have time for that. Ava, left cheek, inner pocket, small med kit. Get it out. Thread the needle. I need about fifteen inches to suture this one.”
It must be serious, thought Bucky, his thoughts drifting slowly. If Ava wasn’t snarking at Walker, it had to be serious.
“Thanks,” said Walker and then Bucky felt the relentless pressure on his thigh lessen slightly. “I need you to make a fist, Ghost. Put it here. Right where my fingers are.” For a moment the pressure vanished completely and then reappeared. “Right, good work, Ava. This is going to be fucking messy. I don’t need it to be neat, just need to keep enough blood in him. Bob, what did you say about pain?”
“There’s no death here,” said Bob. “The pain only gets worse.”
There’s no death here, thought Bucky. The pain only gets worse. Well, wasn’t that the story of his whole fucking life?
“Remember me!”
The scene re-set.
“Natalia, you have to go.”
That pain got worse.
“I’m going to have to tack him up. He’s going to feel all of it and even in this state, he’s going to be strong.” Walker was really quite good at being in charge, Bucky thought. Good authoritative tone in his voice. Firm. Believable. “Yelena, Bob, Alexei, you need to hold him down. Sit on him, if you have to. Ava, I need you to hold the wound closed as I tack it up. Ready?”
Hands, holding him down against the floor, a knee in his chest. He remembered this, over and over, remembered this. Restrained, held down, suffocating, dying, drowning, beneath pain and horror and the terrible weight of the words inside his mind.
Then pain ripped through his thigh and Bucky tried to buck his body upwards, get them off him, screaming at the pain and the weight on his chest and his legs.
“Remember me!”
He couldn’t get free and he fell into the pain, dived into it, into the white light behind his eyes and the sound of someone screaming and he wished it would stop, he wished it would stop but his life was pain, defined by pain, limited by pain, filled with pain.
“Remember me!”
It had been this, Bucky thought, a fleeting moment of clarity in the wash of pain. Pain like this, pain beyond enduring. That pain had washed the memory of Natalia, of what they had, out of his mind, left him only with the tiny scraps the Void had given back to him.
Then a new pain ripped through him, from his stomach, and he tried to jack-knife into it, but he was held down and he remembered this pain and Zola and Azzanno and Siberia and the taste of rubber and the white light behind his eyes and the sound of someone screaming.
“Remember me!”
There was no death here.
The pain only got worse.
“Remember me!”
The pain.
Only.
Got worse.
The pain.
Only.
The pain.
*****
“That looked like it sucked. Sorry.” John actually looked a bit contrite, gave a small shrug of his shoulders, as he gazed at Bucky.
Bucky made a non-committal noise. “Wasn’t one of my best days.”
“The screaming kind of gave that away,” John replied and Bucky wondered exactly how bad it had gotten in there, when his world had narrowed down only to a white pinpoint of agony, and they had had to watch. Old agonies and new, he thought. Natalia and whatever you called it when a building exploded into you.
“We got you out of there as soon as Walker thought you’d stay alive outside the Void,” said Ava, from where she stood at John’s shoulder.
“You had about two-fifths of five-tenths of fuck-all blood left in you by the time I finished stitching you up,” added Walker. “We just had to wait until your body made enough that your serum could start closing you up.”
“That must have been fun,” said Bucky, dryly.
“You heal fast.” Yelena was at the side of the medical bay bed, watching him closely but Bucky hadn’t really let himself look at her yet. Not since she’d seen what was in the room.
“Even for someone with the serum, you heal fast,” Walker added, thoughfully.
Bucky shrugged. “I was always the healthy one. Never got sick when I was a kid. Guess maybe it was one of the things the serum turned up to eleven.”
“Lucky,” said Ava. “We think your body was trying to die and the Void wouldn’t let it.” Distress flitted across her face for a moment, was wiped clean a second later. “It wasn’t… I remember what that feels…” She stopped, looked at him more squarely. “Don’t stand in front of an exploding building next time, okay, Barnes?”
“Okay, Ghost,” said Bucky, giving her a faint smile. If there was anyone who could understand that sort of pain, it was Ava.
“So are we going to talk about the other thing?” Alexei said, a bit too loudly. “Natasha? Bob! Why was Natasha there? In your rooms? With the Winter Soldier?”
Bob shrugged, looking helpless. “I don’t… I don’t know what’s in the rooms,” he said. “That’s… you know. The other guy.”
“Why was Natasha there?” Yelena asked, quietly. “Did you know her, Bucky?”
Walker snorted. “I mean it’s pretty obvious he knew her. If you know what I mean.”
Yelena turned and frowned at him. “What do you mean, Walker?”
“Well, like, knew her,” said John. “Like, you know, Biblically.”
Yelena’s frown deepened. “Grew up in the Red Room,” she said. “What do you mean, Biblically?”
Walker sighed and suddenly made a circle with one hand and pointed at it with the other. “You know, knew her,” he repeated and Bucky closed his eyes, wincing, before he could watch Walker’s frankly obscene hand gestures.
“Oh, good god, Walker!” he heard Ava say and opened his eyes to see her grabbing John’s arm. “That’s disgusting. You are not allowed in this conversation,” and she turned him, started pushing him out of the room.
“My Natalia? My little Natalia? And the Winter Soldier? My daughter and the Winter Soldier?” Alexei put his hand on his heart, blinked back happy tears. “Oh, I’m so proud of my Natalia!”
There was a flickering at the now closed door to the room as Ava reappeared through it. “That is, frankly, borderline inappropriate,” she said, and grabbed Alexei’s arm, started dragging him towards the door. “You’re not allowed in this conversation either.”
“But the Winter Soldier,” Alexei protested, even as he allowed Ava to drag him away. “He is so cool. And my Natalia! They looked so happy together. Before, you know, the guards and the beatings…”
“No, Alexei,” scolded Ava. “Bad Alexei! Let Yelena handle this.”
Bucky waited until Ava had dragged Alexei out of the door, closing it again behind them, before he turned back to look at Yelena. “You don’t need to handle me,” he said. “Or this. It’s not… we can’t change anything.”
“You’ve never mentioned knowing Natasha,” said Yelena, her eyes narrowing in suspicion.
Bucky looked down at his mismatched hands. “I didn’t mention it because I didn’t know that I knew her. Not until the first time in the Void.” He looked up at Yelena then. “It was as much a surprise to me then as it was to you now.”
“You saw that before? And didn’t remember it?” Bob asked softly, and Bucky nodded. “Wow,” said Bob, thoughtfully. “I didn’t know that the Void could do that.”
“I think they wiped me,” said Bucky, and his voice shook, just a little. “Really wiped me. After they found us together. Today, that pain… I remembered pain like that and it… feels like Natalia… like they made her watch. While they wiped every single memory of her out of my head. I think…” he looked at the bare wall then. “I think they were worse after that. Wiped me more often, used the words more. I feel like there was… more… before that. More Bucky. More Soldier, even. But they didn’t want to risk me doing something like that again, so they put me through the blender more often.”
“Something like that?” Yelena asked.
“Falling in love,” Bucky said, without hesitation. “I loved Natalia.” He held up a hand, stopped Yelena’s words. “I don’t… don’t remember much. Nothing I can really tell you. But after the room, the first time… little bits have come back. Not memories really. Impressions. Feelings. Glimpses. Just… a moment here or there.” He closed his eyes. “But I know I loved her. Love her. And she loved me.”
“She didn’t say anything? When you were in Wakanda?” Yelena asked.
“I didn’t know her. At all,” said Bucky, softly. “I mean, I thought she was beautiful and brave and clever and if I’d met her at a dance hall in the thirties, I’d have given it my best shot… but I was barely… functional in Wakanda. Maybe she wanted to give it time, see if I remembered anything. Or maybe she was just waiting till after we saved the world. But then I was dusted and…” Bucky looked down at his hands again, then closed his eyes. His voice was hoarse, raw, as he said, “She was right there. And then we ran out of time and I lost her all over again.” He was silent for a moment and then his voice trembled as he whispered, “I lost my Natalia forever.”
Bob opened his mouth, glanced at Yelena, closed it again. The room ticked with silence for long moments, until Yelena finally broke it.
“Well, then,” she said, suddenly determined. “There’s only one thing we can do.”
Bucky looked up at her sharply. “What are you talking about, Yelena? What are we going to do?”
“We,” said Yelena, briskly, “are going to go and get my sister back.”