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Seven weeks after going into cryostasis, Bucky Barnes wakes up.
The best doctors and experts in Wakanda can’t explain it. First his heart rate increases, then his blood pressure, and then all his vitals slowly climb on the monitor. In response, the cryostasis system initiates an emergency safeguard program that has never before been activated and immediately raises the temperature to accommodate Bucky's slowly beating heart, the sluggish pulsing of his blood. Every cryostasis system has this auxiliary protocol: in the case of spontaneous resuscitation, the system must adapt quickly so as not to harm the person in stasis and to allow them to naturally and painlessly exit cryo. It has never happened before. Bucky Barnes is the first and only person to ever wake spontaneously from cryogenically-induced deep sleep.
At first he does not remember where he is. That happens every time. And at first he thinks that the doctor approaching him, her face stern and unnerved, is going to pull out that old book and start repeating the ten words he knows by memory, by heart, and that he is too terrified and heartsick to ever say aloud. But she doesn’t, of course. Instead she checks his vitals and reaction times: shines a light into his eyes, looks in his ears, takes his temperature, feels his pulse. Her eyebrows furrow and she speaks to her assistant in Wakandan. Bucky is cold all over, but this fades slowly, and soon the doctor pronounces him medically sound. She does not ask him any questions about why he woke—in fact, she hardly speaks to him at all. Then she and her assistant are gone, and T’Challa stands in their place, his arms crossed, studying Bucky. It hurts to be looked at. Bucky looks at his hand.
T’Challa says at last: “How do you feel, Barnes?”
Bucky searches himself, trying to determine whether he feels, at the moment, much of anything at all. “All right.” His voice is a rasp.
T’Challa hands him a bottle of water. “We did not expect to wake you for quite some time.”
I know, Bucky thinks. He does not know what happened, not completely. He remembers—but you aren’t supposed to remember anything from cryostasis. He never has before. Yet somehow there are impressions and memories that he can’t explain.
“Dr. Aguda tells me that you will be fine,” T’Challa says, not questioning Bucky’s obvious disquiet. “However, she did say that you should not reenter cryostasis for at least a few days after waking so unexpectedly. So if you would like to go back under—”
“No,” Bucky says quickly. “I don’t.”
T’Challa says nothing, merely regards Bucky for a moment. It makes Bucky uncomfortable and nervous to be looked at so frankly by T’Challa. T’Challa took a great personal risk harboring Bucky here, and now Bucky is becoming more trouble than he’s worth. Again.
“Do you know why you awoke?” T’Challa asks at last.
Bucky’s right hand flexes unconsciously. “No.” He remembers a field, a shadow, and one word: stay. But that’s all.
“I see.” T’Challa pauses again. “Will you stay in Wakanda, then? You are more than welcome to remain here. I can provide accommodations for you if you wish.”
Bucky considers. It could be like it was in Bucharest: he could have a place to spend time with himself and relearn himself, and this time he would be safer than before. It’s tempting. He wants another shitty apartment, a flat hard bed, a stray cat who will come to his door and scratch for food.
It’s tempting, but he can’t stay here.
“No,” Bucky says. “Thank you for all that you’ve done. I’m sorry that I’ve—” been a pain in the ass “—imposed on you like this, and for nothing.”
T’Challa raises one hand in an easy, uncaring gesture. “I meant what I said, that I wanted to help,” he says. “There is an ally for you here in Wakanda always, Barnes.”
That’s a first. And it is humbling and baffling to have the king of a sovereign country tell Bucky that he will help him in whatever way he can. Someone who doesn’t even know Bucky—who is not beholden to him in any way, through past affiliation or past relationship. And yet, still: the offer of help.
“Shall I alert Captain Rogers of your awakening?” T’Challa asks.
“No.” Bucky glances at T’Challa. “You can reach him?” Steve had said that he was going to fall off the grid after everything that happened. Bucky does not expect him to have resurfaced after less than two months.
“At a cell number,” T’Challa says. “A burner phone, I expect. But I do have ways of finding him if necessary.”
“So do I,” Bucky says. For some reason he thinks of Sam. He shakes the thought off. “I would like to leave soon. Today, if possible.”
“Of course.” T’Challa looks momentarily conflicted, as if determining exactly how he wants to say what he says next. “I have constructed a new prosthetic arm for you, if you are interested. It is a prototype, and I did not expect to need to have it ready this soon, but it is serviceable. With your permission, I will show it to you and help you wear it.”
Bucky’s mouth goes dry. He closes the fingers of his right hand, steadfastly not thinking about his left shoulder, about Stark tearing away his arm. He nods, slowly. “Yes,” he says, and then, hesitantly: “thank you.”
T’Challa supplies Bucky with the prosthetic arm, a passport, a change of clothes, and a gun. “Just in case,” he says. “It pays to be practical.” Bucky does not particularly want to take it, but he does. He wants to ask whether he is still a wanted criminal, whether anything changed in the seven weeks he spent in cryo, but the fact that T’Challa has not mentioned it means that nothing has changed, and Bucky does not want to sound foolish by asking.
“Good luck, Barnes,” T’Challa says when he leaves. “You may return here any time, if you encounter difficulty.”
Bucky nods, unable to do more than that, and then he boards a flight from Central Wakanda to Newark. He wonders whether he will be recognized and apprehended immediately, but he isn’t. The prosthetic that T’Challa made is of equal caliber with his old arm, if not better; black metal, sleek, quiet, unobtrusive. He wears a glove and long sleeves, because showing his face in public is one thing, but showing his face and his prosthetic arm right now is just inviting trouble, and trouble is not something that he has time for or the capacity to manage.
He is not quite sure where to go. Part of him insists that he should just find Steve, but something feels wrong about that. He and Steve are always looking for each other. And Bucky knows he will do so again, and soon—but he is not quite ready to admit that yet. He has spent every moment of the past few years, of what feels like his entire life, feeling vulnerable. Looking for Steve—specifically seeking Steve out now, after everything that Steve has done for him—is a level of vulnerability that Bucky is not yet prepared for. But where else can he go?
He remembers thinking of Sam Wilson before. Bucky had looked into Sam during his time alone after Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D. collapsed; the man with the metal wings who followed Captain America. Bucky knows a fair amount about the type of people who follow Steve Rogers—but the Howling Commandos had followed Steve to war, a noble cause. Sam had followed Steve into apostasy and ruin. Far fewer people are willing to do something like that, and Sam had done it without question.
It doesn’t remind Bucky of himself—not so simplistically, not so self-consciously. Bucky doesn’t think he has ever been so selfless as Sam. But there is a familiarity there, a kinship, and they have fought alongside each other. For all that Bucky doesn’t want to be vulnerable and doesn’t want to presume that Sam cares about him at all aside from the context of Steve wanting to find him, he doesn’t have anywhere else to go. If nothing else, Sam won’t shoot Bucky on sight, and he might know where Steve is so that Bucky doesn’t actually have to find him on his own.
So that is where he goes. He remembers that Sam had an apartment in D.C., and when the plane lands he rents a car and drives. He doesn’t particularly expect Sam to still be there—he might have moved, he might be with Steve right now for all Bucky knows—but it’s what he has to go on, and he doesn’t want to rush into anything. He will take his time. Consider all options. Make a choice. That third step had been denied to him for seventy years.
Permafrost cracks underneath his boots. A reassuring sound; a comforting sound. It reminds Bucky of cold, of gunmetal, of steel doors six-inches thick and frozen shut. He has been walking for a long time. The sun slides against the blue-white rim of the flat snowy landscape, stretching shadows like rubber bands over the sloping ground. Patches of snow. Patches of earth, hard as rock and as unforgiving. Bucky imagines crawling up through it, struggling towards the cold thin sunlight that is no reward. He thinks about struggling upwards and not making it, trying your best and not making it. He breaks ice sheets with his heels and the steel toes of his boots. Keep walking. Maybe his prosthetic arm could have once clawed through solid rock. Not anymore. One jacket sleeve is tied around itself, empty at his side, swinging like a pendulum, a scythe. If you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t hate yourself for not being there yet.
He is almost aware that this is not real—yet it is, the cold and the truth. There is snow and dead lichen and the pretense of it all. He does not think it is a metaphor. He remembers asking to be put back into cryostasis. He should not be able to remember anything.
The voice in his head is no longer recognizable. It used to sound like his drill sergeant from boot camp before the war—keep that gun up, Barnes!—and then overseas it had sounded more like Steve. Stay alive, damn it. For the longest time, for decades, it had sounded like Zola’s voice. Even after new Hydra leaders broke him to their will, Zola’s voice had remained the loudest, the most infuriating, the most self-satisfied.
Ready to comply, Soldier?
And always, always: yes.
Sam isn’t exactly thrilled to see him. Bucky told himself on the way over that he would come up with something to say, but the moment arrives and he stands on Sam’s doorstep and stares at his feet, feeling foolish and tired and lonely. He wishes he had his backpack, or knew where it was, with his notebook inside. Without it he feels lost.
“Sleeping Beauty,” is what Sam finally says; “you’re awake.”
Bucky shrugs. Feels even more foolish. He wishes there was something he could do with his hands. The left, gloved, and the right, bare. Both vulnerable and empty. He dropped the gun T’Challa gave him in a dumpster on the way over.
“Well, come in,” Sam says. “Someone’s probably watching my doorstep and we’ll look damn suspicious just standing here like this.”
Bucky wants to ask, but doesn’t. It could be any number of people watching Sam. Hydra cells still deep undercover, the American government, the UN, the Avengers, Tony Stark. Any and many people are very concerned, at the moment, with the whereabouts of Bucky Barnes, and Sam is one of his last known conspirators.
Bucky goes into Sam’s apartment and forces himself not to map every possible escape route. He doesn’t want to live that way. Instead, he lets Sam lead him to the kitchen, where Sam pours a glass of water and takes a sip and doesn’t offer Bucky any.
Bucky says, “You’re not in jail.”
“Nope,” Sam says. “Neither are any of the rest of us. We all got pardoned on some bullshit clause that Nat brought to the UN. Something about how we were following Steve’s orders and therefore he’s the one responsible. I think it was his idea for her to do that, but.” Sam shrugs. “He’s still in the wind, and I get to be—” he pauses “—here.”
“You got your wings?”
“No. But Nat has an eye on them, and Sharon said she might pull some strings to get them back to me. We’ll see.”
When Bucky doesn’t say anything and doesn’t respond to the taunt of the glass of water, Sam seems to give up. “You thirsty?”
Bucky shakes his head.
“No? Okay.” Sam puts the glass down. He’s uncomfortable—real nervous, some sort of guilt sliding off of him like smoke. It is so contrary to the way he acted last time Bucky saw him that it throws Bucky off completely. He can’t even figure out what he came here to say. Instead he waits for Sam to act first; for Sam to speak. But Sam doesn’t seem willing to do either.
Finally, in the intemperate silence, Sam blurts out: “Look man, I’m sorry.”
It shocks Bucky out of his inaction. “What?”
“I guess this is what you came here for, and I probably deserve it—listen, I didn’t mean for Stark to do what he did. He told me he changed his mind, that he was on your side now—” your side, not Steve’s side “—and that he was gonna help you. I guess he was fucking lying or something, because next thing I knew Steve was coming to get me and you were practically unconscious with your arm off, and I’m—I’m sorry. It’s my fault he knew where you guys were.”
Bucky stares at him. “You’re serious.”
“Of course I am,” Sam says crossly. “I know I fucked up, but you gotta understand, I didn’t mean for—”
Bucky cuts him off before he can finish. “It wasn’t your fault, it had nothing to do with—Jesus,” he says, and he presses his hands to his eyes, hard. Remembers Stark coming at him and tearing away the arm that Hydra gave him and how it was a blessing and a curse, how it hurt like lightning all through his whole body and through his head and heart and how useless he felt without it but how free, how fucking free. If Stark had known that surely he would have skipped what he’d done and just gone for Bucky’s throat and torn that out instead. That arm had never been Bucky’s choice—not getting it, and not losing it either, and that hurts, a brand on the back of Bucky’s neck reminding him of all the choices that have been burned and stripped and evaporated away from him. But at least the damn thing had been gone. And the pain had faded like it always did, though never disappeared. But he knows how to live with that.
“It’s not your fault,” Bucky says again, and he feels how empty the words sound even though they are true and even though he means them. Nothing Sam has done has ever hurt Bucky—hell, Sam has done nearly as much as Steve has to help Bucky, and all for nothing in return. Bucky can’t fathom it, can’t understand it. He remembers a field under the moon and the thorns around his ankles, the larks singing in the trees behind him. A mirror and the dark dark sky. He wonders whether Sam has ever been to such a place; if he had to make such a choice, and how hard it was for him to make it.
Bucky says, “You aren’t responsible for what Stark did. You made a good call. Stark’s the one who—” lightning and blood and the cold, cold snow “—he made his own choice.”
Sam watches Bucky. A sort of analysis happens behind his eyes: a dissection. “It’s good to hear you say that,” he says. “Maybe one day you’ll believe it about yourself.”
The sincerity of Sam’s words, of his intent, of his hopes for Bucky to forgive himself, is overwhelming. Bucky cannot stare it in the face and does not want to. He looks away from it instead, turns the scope back on Sam. “Why did you do it?”
“What?”
“Help Steve. I mean,” Bucky struggles to figure out what to say and settles on a pointed half-truth; “you don’t even like me.”
“C’mon, man.” Sam’s discomfort sliding off him again in waves. The flex of his right hand. “Even if I fuckin hated you, which I don’t, that doesn’t mean I should just let you get put in prison for stuff that’s not even your fault while the real bad guys are out there getting off easy. Everything Steve said about you...I didn’t just help him because he’s Steve,” he adds quickly, as if he suddenly feels the need to clarify. “What was done to you—someone had to help you, or at least give you the chance to catch a fucking break.”
Bucky tries to puzzle sense out of this. It’s hard. His thoughts struggle and fight their way through the molasses of misunderstanding. I don’t think I’m worth all of this, Steve, he had said—but at least what Steve was doing made a sort of sense. Steve had known him. Steve probably thinks that if he fights hard enough, he can get back the person he used to know. (He can’t.) But Sam never knew Bucky at all; they owe each other nothing. And Sam is a good person. Bucky knows that much. He doesn’t feel as if good people should fight for him.
Sam seems to sense his distress. “Hey,” he says. He comes forward and touches Bucky on the arm. It feels like fire. “Let’s lighten the mood. You’re a free man, or free enough. Have you eaten? I’ll order pizza.”
His flat in Bucharest was cheap. That had been its most attractive feature. Otherwise Bucky hated it. It got hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and rain seeped in under the door and windowpanes. The ceiling fan was crooked, broken, so that it spun like a frenzied bird in a cage and hardly moved the air around the room. But it was hidden and it was cheap, and so it was perfect.
It reminded him of his apartment in Brooklyn actually. He had not realized that until his third night, when he woke in a cold sweat with the ceiling fan spinning and creaking and losing its every attempt to cool down the room. Bucky had sat upright, the breath torn out of him, remembering another ceiling fan from another apartment and another time. One room, one small bed; a cramped busted up fridge and newspaper over the windows because he could not afford curtains.
Bucky is there now—Bucharest, not Brooklyn. Which is impossible, because Steve had found him there, and then everyone else had found him, and he had to run, and now that apartment is useless to him and he is never going to see it again. He wonders if the stray orange tabby cat will be okay. She had been prickly and grouchy but somehow seeing her every once in a while had become familiar. Very little in his life is familiar.
Nothing is out of place. The apartment looks the way it did the past year he spent living here, not the way he had left it after Steve found him. Bucky wonders if it is over now—all of it. If he can sit peacefully now. If he can find out whether that is even possible for him anymore. He wants to say nothing, speak to no one. He wants to dig down into the black silent dirt, not up.
He goes to the bed—the thin mattress, the threadbare blankets—and lies down. He watches the ceiling fan, around and around. It wobbles on its axis, just like the earth, just like time. He closes his eyes.
When he opens them, he is somewhere else and some-when else. Not his old Brooklyn apartment, but his parents’ house, his mother’s house. He is curled on his childhood bed. Someone is stroking his hair and humming. He can hear his sisters laughing down the hall, but they are as distant as a dream. Their voices come to him across decades, and his memory is imperfect, shaped by childhood nostalgia and bittersweet grief. They had all been dead by the time he had remembered enough to think of looking for them. Even Rebecca, the youngest. They had all died while he had been on ice. He checked. Each year that one of them passed (1957, his mother; and his sisters: 1980, 1988, 1991), Hydra had kept him in cryo a little bit longer than usual, as if they were concerned that even in sleep, even frozen, even after all that had been done to him, Bucky might know, somehow, that they had died—might hear them cry out for him, their older brother who went away to war and never came back and whom they remembered every year on his birthday, on Passover, on the day he left for the eastern front and never came home, never got a single letter through to them in his entire time overseas.
An ache: in his chest, behind his eyes, in the pit of his stomach, in his hand, just the one. His mother continues to hum and stroke his hair and rock with his head resting on her lap. Bucky cannot tell if he is seven or seventeen or twenty-eight or whatever the hell age he is now, after all the times Hydra woke him up and sent him back under, whether any of that even counts as time passed rather than time lost.
“You’ve let your hair get so long, baby boy,” says his mother. She touches the long strands behind his ears. Bucky closes his eyes to ward off the wet gathering in them. Is this a dream? But no dream had ever felt so real and so painful, not even the nightmares he had in Bucharest when he began hoarding memories to himself, one by one. Stockpiling them, gnawing over them again and again, searching, longing, feeling. None of that had been like this. He thinks if he could open his eyes and see his mother’s face, she would look exactly as she did when he was seven years old with skinned knees and huge round tears sliding down his face that she brushed away with the tips of her fingers, her nails painted white, always white at the tips.
“Let me take care of you,” his mama says; her fingertips still brushing his hair back, still warm spots of gentle pressure behind his ears and at the nape of his neck. “You come home now, James. You come home.”
The urge to dissolve, to give in. Ever-present. He can’t go home. He hasn’t been able to for a long time, since before Hydra, since before living his life eked out in stolen forgotten moments on the run. He left home when he was sixteen to earn enough money to send his sisters to boarding school. And he left Brooklyn for the front in Russia ten years later, and the only piece of him that ever got sent home was his name in a letter, signed by Captain Steven Grant Rogers: I deeply regret to inform you that your son, James Buchanan Barnes, was killed in action in Austria two days ago....
Going home has never been an option; it has never even crossed his mind. In the past year and a half that he has spent alone, hiding in Leipzig, in Stockholm, in Bucharest, he has known for certain only one thing: there is no home left to him.
Yet now, here—his mother gently touching his face, telling him come home—
I would, he tells himself. I would, and I will. Someday.
But not like this.
“I can’t.” He turns over and sees his mother’s face. Enshadowed, aggrieved. She puts the tips of her fingers to his temples. “Ma, I can’t. I’m sorry.”
She leans down and kisses his forehead. “Me too,” she says softly.
Behind her, the darkness smiles.
Bucky lets Sam lead him into the other room and sit him on the couch. Sam orders pizza and they eat, talking about other things: the state of the Accords, what Sam’s been doing the past seven weeks, where the others who went to prison for Steve are, where Bucky got a new arm, what T’Challa’s been up to. It is more than an hour until Bucky starts to feel better, calmer. He had been right to come see Sam first. Things are starting, slowly, to make sense. At least a little. The edges getting clearer.
“You know, you should shave,” Sam says after a while. “Cut that hair. Be a little less recognizable. Facial recognition software will still catch you, but it’ll catch you anyway, and this way every average person on the street might not crane their necks to stare at you when you go by.”
The extent of Bucky’s ability to take care of his appearance the past few years has been limited to tying his hair back every few months and shearing the ends of it with a knife. Now he almost likes it this way. But he could use a shave, and maybe a shower.
“I don’t have any scissors or anything,” he says, and Sam waves a magnanimous hand towards his bathroom down the hall. Bucky locks himself in the tiny bathroom and looks around. Sam’s razor is on the edge of the tub, and it takes Bucky a minute to figure out how to get the shower running. He waits for the water to get hot and wonder what Sam is doing now. It feels strange and invasive to use Sam’s bathroom like this and Bucky wants to get it over with as fast as possible, but he also wants to stand under the water for a long time and let it beat against his head and stream down his face and slice lines against his sides.
He showers quickly and shaves his face and doesn’t cut himself once doing so. The soap smells clean and simple and good, and it reminds him of home a long time ago, home a long way away. Home so strange and distant it feels like another planet circling another star, raining glass, raining sulfur. He remembers a shattered mirror and does not know why. The not-knowing is a sharp terrible sudden pain in his chest. He sits for a moment in the pain of it, and then he lets it go. Lets it fall aside.
Sam is eating the last piece of pizza when Bucky returns. “You clean your hair out of the tub?”
“Yeah,” Bucky says, and smiles when Sam smiles.
“Looks good,” Sam says. “Looks organic.”
Bucky barks out a sharp, surprised laugh. It shocks him how good it feels. “What the hell does that mean?”
Sam smiles cryptically and shoves the last piece of crust into his mouth. “You’re gonna go find Steve now, aren’t you?”
For once, the topic change isn’t jarring or startling. Bucky has been thinking about Steve sideways this whole time; so has Sam. “Yeah,” he says. He feels the ends of his hair. “I just needed—a place to steady myself, first.”
“Anytime, man.” Sam’s voice drops a little, becomes serious. “I mean that.”
Bucky feels his face grow warm. He looks away, trying to decide how to leave.
“I can tell you where he is,” Sam says. “I bet you figured on that, though.” Bucky nods. “All right. I’ll get you set up then.” Sam gets to his feet, and then for a strange moment, hesitates. Finally he says: “He was real upset when you wanted to go back under, you know. But he didn’t want to affect your choice. He wanted you to decide everything on your own. Wanted you to do whatever was best for you.” Sam pauses again, then glances over at Bucky. His eyes are dark and warm and sad. “Do you know how much time he spent looking for you?”
Bucky swallows. There are thorns around his ankles. “Yeah,” he says; “I know.”
All night, the snow. This is the deepest he has ever gone into the dark. Hydra had so many compounds, yet only a handful of them were buried beneath the Siberian ice; others were hidden right alongside S.H.I.E.L.D. bases in New York, in D.C., or in hide-outs in Bangladesh and Tripoli and Sarajevo and Lima and countless other cities. Bucky remembers pieces of them all from when he was shuttled from place to place and given new orders, new missions: the smell of aged amontillado from Toledo, the bright crystalline blue of the water on the coast of Morocco, the purple and yellow flowers that grew in the cracks of the streets of Ankara. Blood on his knuckles in Cairo; the crush and crack of breaking bones in Chicago. But what Bucky remembers best is the snow: the cold. The vast empty expanse of Siberia on all sides, reminding him of the war before his fall; reminding him of being alone in the emptiness of the ravine with nothing but the sky and his gun at his side and above him the mournful grieving cry of birds waiting for him to die.
But this is the place where it all began; the center of the wheel, and everything else is simply spokes and dust. As he walks he gets ever closer to the heart of it all. The rusted core inside his chest, pretending to be a human heart.
(Soldier—?)
In a sudden instant, a flash of insight, he has arrived. The first pale cold hands of daybreak grapple with the horizon, and the snow coats his face, his hands, his eyelashes. The steel doors, frozen and stiff and sheeted with frost, watch him from their windows, their two black smiling eyes. Here is where the Hydra officers would put a leash on him if they were concerned that he had been out of cryo too long. Here is where they would shove him to his knees and press his face into the ice until there was blood in his mouth, his eyes. Here is where, when he still knew his name, he tried to get them to kill him, and instead they laughed and hooked him up to the machines and let him burn and there was nothing but emptiness, and it is the emptiness that lasts.
He walks into the heart of the compound, the heart of the snake. Nine times he has to gather his courage before he can look at it. Nine times before he reaches out and puts his hand on the red notebook’s cover, directly atop the faded silver star.
It is cold to the touch. He expected lightning, or hell-fire, a furnace pressed between the torn old pages of this forgotten book. Instead he feels the same. Instead he feels unafraid. If he opens this book, black thorns and rotten meat and dark ink and petroleum will spill out all over his hand. He does not open it.
“Bucky.”
Steve says his name as if the syllables of it knock the breath out of him. His mouth opens. A half dozen emotions—surprise, bewilderment, grief, anger, relief, uncertainty—flicker across his face and then they are gone and he is Steve Rogers again, mechanically calm. Bucky hates himself for being relieved that he doesn’t have to manage the onslaught of all of Steve at once.
Steve is lying low in a small safe house in the woods in northern New York state. Bucky is fairly certain—though not completely—that Steve has never had any safe houses of his own, and someone probably set this one up for him. Romanova, most likely. Bucky doesn’t know how the hell she convinced Steve to actually stay in it. Steve has never been one to stay in one place too long. Always on the move. Always new alleys to pick fights in; always new theaters of war to join.
This deluge of remembering—it happens, always, when Steve is around, everything falling on Bucky all at once, a downpour, a fucking typhoon of trauma and remembrance and grief and joy and this is how you used to be, this is how I was, this is what we were. Even when he was in the depths of the grip Hydra had on him, all it had taken for Steve to shake everything apart had been one word, one name, and the levees broke, the dams burst asunder, and when his whole mind flooded and flooded all he could do was stand in the middle of it and be swept away. But he is tired of this long river running, of rain pounding on his skull whenever Steve is around. He wonders if Steve feels it too. Something in his eyes tells Bucky he does.
Remembering isn’t the hard part anymore. The hard part is knowing what to do with all of the pieces, knowing how to put them together. Wondering if it is even worth it to try. Bucky remembers everything he ever did for Hydra more clearly and more sharply than he remembers leaving Sam’s house earlier that day—that’s the hard part. The look on Stark’s face when he found out what Bucky had done to his parents. To his mother. (—Come home, baby boy.) Do you even remember her? The indignation. Of course he remembers. The hard part is figuring out how to make the remembering stop.
All of this happens very quickly. Steve opens the door and says Bucky’s name and a breath passes between them and then everything slides back into vision, into reality: the sun going down over the horizon, the smell of the woods, the sound of nothing but trees and time. It is a normal day on a normal sunny afternoon and Steve and Bucky are two normal people, waiting for the other to say something first.
“Come in, then,” Steve says finally, and so Bucky does.
The thing is: Bucky doesn’t think Steve remembers what he remembers.
That is how memory works. It’s fallible. It is an interpretation of reality, not a reflection of it. Bucky remembers hot summer nights, two small boys huddled under a blanket fort telling each other stories. He remembers lying awake in Austria staring across at Steve asleep in his bedroll: the slant of his nose. The curve of his mouth. Steve sobbing after his mother’s funeral and throwing himself into Bucky’s arms and Bucky holding onto him so tight that he was afraid they would both break to pieces if he let go. A kiss that never happened. A kiss that did. Gasping, desperate, huddled in the small tent that Steve got to himself as the Howling Commandos’ captain. Their hands and mouths meeting, meeting, meeting and pushing away the dark, making light between their bodies. Steve throwing his head back. Bucky putting his mouth to Steve’s collarbone and the full body shudder that passed through the both of them.
Bucky doesn’t want to remember Steve like that. Not if Steve doesn’t remember it in the same way—as light filling every space between them even as the darkness, the war, the desperation fought to smother it out. Steve has said nothing about it—only asked Bucky what he remembers, what he knows, what he thinks. What do you think, Steve? Bucky wants to demand. He wants to take Steve by the collar and pull him close. Don’t put the whole burden of remembering on me. I can’t hold all of it alone.
It might not have felt the same way to Steve that it felt to Bucky. Even at the time, Bucky had known that. There was a war. They both thought they might die tomorrow. In a way, they both did. New beginnings and all that. Bucky is willing to let the past rest if he has to. But Steve is the one who keeps asking him to remember.
How can you ask about something like this? Bucky hadn’t known then, when he had been half in love with a bruised and reckless teenager and he hadn’t known when he had been in love with the golden fighting hero and he doesn’t know now, when he is still in love with him, with Steve, and so ashamed of it, so sorry, wondering how much of what Steve has done for him is from guilt and how much of it is from integrity and how much is from—
Not from love.
Bucky isn’t the same anymore. That much is true. If Steve had been in love seventy years ago, that has nothing to do with what he might feel now. But Bucky is so tired of trying to figure it out without any help, of pulling at all the threads and watching the tapestry fall slowly apart without revealing anything of merit. He pulled Steve out of the river, and Steve pulled him out of the river. Quid pro quo. If that is all this has ever been, then that’s what Bucky needs to know. It’s the last thing that doesn’t make sense.
Do you know how much time he spent looking for you? But it isn’t the how much: it’s the why. Sam knew why. Bucky had seen it in his face when he left Sam’s apartment. But he hadn’t known how to ask.
“Did T’Challa wake you?” Steve asks.
A reasonable question. Bucky isn’t supposed to be out of cryo at all right now. He has nearly forgotten that already. Forgetting hurts, remembering hurts, it all hurts. He just wants the ache to stop. “No.”
“Did something go wrong with the cryostasis?”
Bucky is still trying to figure that out himself. “No,” he says again.
Steve just looks at him. They are sitting in the very small kitchen. Down the hallway is a very small bedroom, a very small bathroom, and that’s it. Steve must be going crazy in here. Or maybe not. He always lived in small spaces before.
“I don’t understand,” Steve says at last, and if that isn’t the first time Bucky has ever heard him say it.
“It’s hard,” Bucky says, “to explain.” The field, the stars, a knife, a kiss. Stay, stay, stay, be. He presses his hands flat against the table. Why did he come here? But he had to come here.
“Okay.” Steve sounds small. It’s bizarre and it makes Bucky angry. Steve never sounded small before, even before the serum.
It’s not late, but somehow Bucky is tired, and furiously angry, and resentful, and he says, “Is there somewhere I can sleep?” Steve gives him the very small bed in the bedroom, and Bucky doesn’t even feel bad about taking it and not pointing out that there’s not even a couch for Steve to sleep on. He curls up under the blankets that Steve has slept under for the past handful of weeks (they smell like him) and closes his eyes and forces himself angrily and desperately into sleep.
He wakes once around midnight. The air conditioning is humming. Outside, the trees rustle and whisper and invite introspection, dare him to fathom the fathomless. Bucky closes his eyes instead. His head aches and leaks like a sieve, painful and sharp-edged rocks catching at the edges and rattling inside as all the quiet, the water, slides out and he is left with nothing but his hands.
He can sense Steve in the room, seated in a small chair beside the bed, watching him. Bucky wonders if Steve knew that Bucky would be able to recognize the painful stilt in his voice or if Steve thought he was doing a good job at hiding it. Most likely the latter. Steve had never learned to lie, or to master his own body language so that he could project exactly what he wanted to be seen and nothing more. Bucky had learned to do both a long time ago. Before the war. Even then the way his heart would pound when Steve drew too close had been a matter of life and death. That doesn’t happen anymore, and Bucky cannot tell, even now, whether it is because he has mastered himself so well or if so much truly has changed, if he can’t feel that way anymore, if it is gone from him forever.
He remembers Steve on the quinjet on the way to Siberia. The quinjet had been on autopilot, but Steve had still sat in the cockpit the whole time, fiddling with the controls, calibrating and recalibrating. It made Bucky so tired. Just let them go, he thought. Just let them meet their own fate in their own time.
He must slip back into sleep, because he wakes again a little while later. Steve is sitting on the edge of the bed now, his back to Bucky. His shoulders are hunched, and his hands grip the edge of the mattress. Bucky does not move, but Steve must know that he is awake: his breathing has changed, his body has shifted. Bucky doesn’t know what to say. There is too much that he wants to ask and too few words with which to say any of it. What Steve did for him is indescribable. What Bucky has done is unspeakable. It makes his heart ache when he thinks of it, the contrast, all the interminable space left between them.
In the dim light, Bucky can see Steve’s face in profile. The rise and fall of his chest, the angled tilt of his neck. Bucky can read other people’s body language better than he can read his own thoughts, and Steve’s breathing is labored, catching in his throat; he is flushed, pink showing underneath his skin, whole dark spots of it. His mouth is parted, like he might gasp for air if it would not break the humming silence were he to do so, and his hands, clutching the bench, are trembling—just slightly. So slightly that Steve might not even notice, but Bucky does.
Bucky recognizes this. He fears this. Don’t, he begs, softly, silently; don’t, Steve, please.
As if in response—as if summoned—Steve turns; just slightly. Just enough so that his face is in three-quarters profile, and Bucky can see the faraway blue glint of his eyes. Please, Bucky thinks, and does not know, anymore, what he means.
Steve reaches out one hand—it does not shake. It is an aching, painful silence. Bucky feels his entire body catch fire, and he closes his eyes. Please. Steve reaches farther, closer. So that he might touch Bucky, just softly, just barely, at the curve of his neck, or beneath his chin.
Then he pulls his hand away.
Relief and agony drain through Bucky’s chest and throat and heart in turn. “Why did you do it?” he asks, a rasp, a shattering of the uneasy but safe silence. Why did you help me.
Steve, motionless. Steve, holding his breath. He doesn’t ask what Bucky means. He says: “You’re my friend.”
This strikes Bucky like a hammerblow to the diaphragm, to the base of his skull. Anger rises hot and sharp inside him. “You’re lying.”
Steve turns away. He grips the edge of the bed again, once, tightly, and lets it go. “I guess that makes two of us, then,” he says, and when he stands, emptiness takes his place in the dark and fills it to bursting.
Bucky, his hands full of groceries, fumbles with the lock of his Brooklyn apartment door and shoves it open with one hip without looking up. The subway home had been crowded, asphyxiating, and taken longer than it should have, and Bucky just wants to put the groceries down and put his feet up and close his eyes.
“Hey.” The unexpected sound of Steve’s voice almost makes Bucky drop everything he is holding. “You’re back early.”
Steve is sitting at the table by the fridge. His knees are curled up on his chair, tucked beneath him, and he scratches away at a sketchpad with an old, crooked piece of charcoal. His fingernails are clipped short, his shoulders hunched, his head bowed. A few strands of golden hair fall into his eyes.
“Didn’t know you’d be here.” Bucky doesn’t drop the groceries. “Wanna help me with these?”
“Mm.” Steve does not rise from the table, remains fixated on his sketch. The scrape of the charcoal. Bucky huffs, fond and exasperated, and sets everything in his arms on the countertop and begins to sort through it.
“Aren’t you gonna give me a hug?” Bucky asks. Steve makes two more strokes with the charcoal, studies his work, and then he stands. When he faces Bucky his eyes are bluer than they have ever been, as blue as dusk when the sun can’t hold on any longer. He steps into Bucky’s space, his open arms, tilts his head up to meet Bucky’s gaze, and Bucky has to lean down and in to put his arms around Steve’s shoulders, to pull him close.
(I thought you were taller)
Steve’s hands at the base of Bucky’s neck, touching the soft short strands of hair there. Bucky can feel every breath that Steve takes: slow and assured and steady. He smells like bar soap and cologne, but not enough of either to mask Steve’s scent underneath both those things, close and familiar and sweet. Bucky closes his eyes and presses the pads of his palms against Steve’s shoulders, holding on.
“Are you all right?” The question is enough to stop Bucky in his tracks. “You seem—sad today.”
Bucky clings to Steve more tightly. “I’m fine,” he says against Steve’s hair. “Just fine.”
“Mm.” Steve hums against Bucky’s neck, just once. Then, suddenly, his fingertips dig in, press hard on Bucky’s shoulders, and Steve is pulling Bucky down, down, tilting his head upwards, and his mouth—
The scratch of the ceiling fan, the distant caw and cry of birds. The faded cover of the old red book. Bucky pulls a blanket of snow up over his shoulders and rolls on his side and falls off the edge of the world.
He jerks away before his lips touch Steve’s. He breathes hard, electrified; Steve is a forest without wind, an ocean without storm. His arms are still clasped around Bucky’s shoulders.
But it was never like this.
Bucky pushes Steve away roughly, with his right hand—and realizes that his left is gone, his left arm amputated at the shoulder once more. The groceries on the countertop have evaporated. His hair, which had been short when Steve touched it, is long again, and he can feel it brushing his jaw. But Steve is still as Bucky remembers him best—before the war and the serum, young and small and bright and his hair all in his eyes and the defiant set of his shoulders, even now, even bony and slender as they are.
Bucky is trembling. Steve takes Bucky’s hand and his fingertips trace circles into his palm, trace in code. His eyes are lidded. His front teeth set in his bottom lip, a question and an invitation.
This never happened. But it is happening now. Bucky feels so dizzy with the weight of decades, the weight of things lost and found and salvaged and all that isn’t and can’t be. Steve is going to kiss him, going to pull Bucky in with one hand pressed against the back of his head and one bunched in the front of Bucky’s jacket, gripping him, and Bucky is going to kiss him back and he will be lost; he would stay here forever, choose this, this nightmare or daydream or both in one. Bucky misses this boy more than he misses his own self. He is recovering himself in pieces, refamiliarizing. But he still feels as far away from Steve as if they are both still on ice: both still frozen and skipping through time like stones over still water that never reach the shore.
“You know me,” Steve says: a cruel blow that nearly upends Bucky entirely. “You want me. Just like this.” His mouth again, the slow slide of his teeth over skin. He steps closer to Bucky again, and Bucky cannot push him away a second time.
“Not like this,” Bucky whispers.
Steve sets his teeth in the angle of Bucky’s neck. “Liar,” he says, and he changes. Now he is Steve as Bucky remembers him in Austria, in Schmidt’s base when Steve dragged him out of the fire. He smells like gunpowder and smoke and death. “But I’ll play along. Like this?” The press of his tongue against a pressure point in Bucky’s neck. Steve was never this cruel, not even by accident. He changes again: Captain America of the twenty-first century, tall and heroic and stoic and inching his fingers past the belt around Bucky’s waist. “Or this?”
“No.” An exhalation. Bucky presses his hand against the flat of Steve’s chest. He doesn’t feel anything—not an intake of breath, not a single heartbeat. Nothing but a hollow wound. He hears the hum-scream-roar of a train in the Austrian Alps, the freight car rattling on its tracks and rattling Bucky right out of that life.
“You loved me,” Steve says. “Enough to die for it.” He cannot be pushed away. “That’s all I’m asking you to do.”
And he is not Steve anymore, but the Winter Soldier—Bucky’s own self but unrecognizable, unbearable to witness, and his hands are wrapped around Bucky’s throat, crushing him.
“Just one more time,” the Winter Soldier says.
“I have your backpack,” Steve says early the next morning. Bucky remembers now that he had left his backpack with Steve before going into cryo. It annoys him that he didn’t remember this and that Steve can tell he didn’t. He takes the backpack when Steve passes it to him across the kitchen table, and he doesn’t ask whether Steve looked at any of the contents, at the notebook. Of course he did.
“Thanks,” Bucky says. He feels awkward and tired and old. He wishes he had stayed at Sam’s another night.
Steve is watching him. “Can I ask a stupid question?”
They used to stay up all night together, asking each other stupid questions. “Yeah.”
“Are you all right?”
Bucky’s breath catches in a laugh in his throat, and he feels himself smile more than he realizes he’s doing it. It’s impossible to hold it back. Something in Steve’s expression catches. “Yeah,” Bucky says. Bites back on the smile again. “I’m all right, Steve.”
The dark of Steve’s eyes. He worries at his lower lip a moment. “Okay,” he says. “Will you—tell me why you’re out of cryo, then?”
Bucky looks down at his hands. It is a strange and disturbing story. Exactly like the ones they used to make up in the dark for each other. He doesn’t yet know all of it. “All right,” he says, and he tells Steve what he knows.
When he is finished: “And so you woke up? Just—like that?”
“Yeah,” Bucky says. “Just like that.”
“Huh,” Steve says. His hands are both lying empty on the table. Bucky thinks about what it would be like to kiss them: the knuckles, the palms. He still doesn’t know what Steve remembers.
“Will you tell me something?” Bucky asks, finally.
“Anything.”
Do you know how much time he spent looking for you? “What happened to you?” Bucky asks. “Please. After I—I mean, I looked it up. But you’ve never said anything about it. You’ve never talked about any of it at all.”
“Haven’t really had the chance.”
Bucky thinks of Steve’s shield, deflecting bullets. He punches through. “We have a chance now, though.”
Steve looks down at the table. Buries his teeth into his bottom lip. He never was much of a talker. “Yeah,” he says; “I guess you’re right.”
Bucky lies alone in a field of brambles. The vines curl and clasp their thorns around his wrist and ankles. If he stays still long enough, these vines will be all that remains when he is gone. The moon hangs low and slender above the horizon’s rim, close enough to touch, close enough to swallow. If there are stars, Bucky cannot see them. The sky is flat and black and it bears down on him, presses him against the dirt. A stone’s throw away, there is a mirror: seven feet tall, a simple pane of glass suspended above the field of thorns. Bucky knows he must stand and look into it. But he wants to spread roots and lie on the warm dark earth, the sky pressing him down, down.
When he stands, field mice scatter in the grass and sparrows chitter in dark low-hanging trees. The mirror shines in the light of the moon. When Bucky looks into its smooth surface, dark as still water, he sees himself: the Winter Soldier staring back at him from inside the mirror’s depths. Dark eyes; dark mouth. Soot and motor oil. He tilts his head. His reflection does the same; and then smiles at him.
The benign voice of his mother as she cradles his face in her hands, presses a kiss against his forehead. The sound of his sisters laughing down the hall. Stay, stay, stay.
Stay, the Winter Soldier says: a command, (a homecoming), a death knell, and Bucky’s mother slides the point of a knife between Bucky’s ribs.
Across realities—or inside them, outside them, around them—Bucky feels the Winter Soldier pressing his hands around his throat, pushing the tip of a knife against his lung. And here, in the field with the moon and just one word, his eyes and the set of his mouth are more deadly than either of those, his determination, his helplessness turned weapon.
“If you stay,” the Winter Soldier says from inside the silver mirror, “you can have them. Your family, your past, yourself, your Steve. It’s just as good as the real thing. Even better. And it’s better than anything else you’ll get back if you leave this place.”
The agony as the knife pierces a lung and blood rushes in. Choking for air in one reality, pushing oxygen into his chest cavity and pink foam from his throat in another.
(Ready to—)
The warm press of Steve’s mouth on Bucky’s. Sweet, slow, gentle. The sound of Bucky’s sisters laughing and laughing, warm and alive, just down the hall. Just a few rooms away.
“You don’t deserve anything more than this,” the Soldier says. “Isn’t that what you meant when you told him to put you in cryo until there was a way to fix you? You know that will never happen. There is no fixing what was done to us. We are what we are now. Come on.” He reaches up his hand, his right hand, and presses his fingertips against the pane of the mirror, leaves fingerprints. “Give in, Bucky.” His name is the slide of the knife in his chest. “Isn’t that what you’ve been waiting for someone to say?”
Maybe he has. Has any of this been worth it, he thinks. The running; the fighting; the journal with old newspaper articles and photos and short scrawled handwritten notes inside. My mother’s eyes looked like this. My father smelled like soap and cigarettes, hand-rolled. In school the teachers all called me Jim and I hated it. What does any of this even matter? Just let it stay in the past where I belong.
So he survived. So what? he thinks. It doesn’t feel like an achievement. It feels more like an accident: the whole cosmic universe laughing at him. And when we take it all away, the universe says, we’ll give you one small piece of it back. Enough to make the loss of the rest hurt beyond comprehension, beyond understanding, beyond words.
Steve, on the bridge. Steve saying his name, and Bucky not even knowing the syllables. Give in, Bucky. Stay. He could have the moon and the earth and the thorns and his sisters tugging each other’s braids, Steve grasping for his hand, holding it tight in his.
(—comply?)
Here is what Steve tells him.
When he crashed into the ice, there was nothing but light. Enough light to blind him, and he lay stunned and cold and blind until the water rose over him and froze and he felt every cell in his body slowing down until there was nothing left and there was darkness.
When he woke up he was ninety-five. Or twenty-seven. Or neither. When he woke up there was no one left but Peggy, and half the time she didn’t recognize him. He didn’t recognize himself. He could still fight. That felt like all that he knew. He could still be Captain America, even if he had already died doing so once. What is a second time, after the first?
“And you were still—” Steve stops. “Gone.” His hands close on themselves. He would wake up thinking he was in 1944 and that when he got out of bed, Bucky would still be there. That’s what he says.
When he worked for S.H.I.E.L.D., he felt like he knew what he was doing. Natasha helped him figure it out, and Fury. That didn’t last long. And then he didn’t know anymore. Was he even helping people? New York, D.C., Sokovia. A half a dozen other cities and no way to measure the difference any of them were making against the current of it all. The current of time. The current of change. The current of disaster and heartbreak and grief. Maybe they were even part of it.
Sam made it easier. And then finding out what had happened to Bucky made it harder again. Steve talks about hunting down some of the remaining Hydra cells, how impossible it was to stamp them all out. He talks about crashing at Sam’s place when everything got to be too much, which was more often than not. What it felt like to be alone, the last man standing even when there were people all around him. Steve talks about waiting and waiting. And looking and looking.
“I looked everywhere,” Steve says. He is earnest and heartfelt and so, so desperate for Bucky to understand. Bucky doesn’t know how to tell Steve that he already does; that he’s known ever since Steve dropped his shield from the helicarrier and wouldn’t raise another hand against him, wouldn’t do anything but bare his neck for the final blow, trusting that Bucky would not make it. The water coming up around the both of them; swimming through the dark. “I swear to you that I looked for you everywhere.”
I know you did, Bucky thinks. That’s why I hid. And then he says it.
Steve looks up at him, but as if he does not want to. The slow movement of his eyes, and his hands. “Yeah,” he says, and his mouth almost twitches into a smile, a self-degradation. “I figured as much. But I couldn’t stop looking.”
And there it is: the heart of it. Why? All Bucky has to do is to ask. But he doesn’t.
“Let’s go outside,” he says instead.
And Steve, after a long moment, gets up and follows him.
Bucky puts his hand up to the mirror and touches his fingertips to the Soldier’s. The phantom smiles. “See?”
His trachea breaking as the Winter Soldier’s hands squeeze the life out of him by the throat. His mother humming as she rocks him to sleep. Not like this.
Bucky thinks of his mother—his real mother, whose grave he has not yet even had the time to visit, and his sisters’ alongside hers. He thinks of Steve right before Bucky went back into cryo, the grief he kept hidden but that Bucky knew how to identify anyway. The set of his hands, the set of his jaw, the set of the despair in his eyes. He thinks of all the things he still has to learn, and to do, and to be. All the things he cannot have and will not have so long as he stays here.
Not like this.
The Winter Soldier looks back at him. Bucky presses his hand flat to the glass. “Yes,” he says, and his voice is steady; does not break. “I see.”
And he pulls the mirror down with his intact hand.
The glass shatters in a spray of starlight that cascades up, up, up, around Bucky’s face, his hand, and past him to shoot towards the sky and the moon and the dark. For a moment, for an instant, he is suspended among them, stars spewing plasma and ultraviolet light and chasing away the dark, and then they race past him. The knife slides out of Bucky’s chest, the hands fall away from his throat; he gasps a breath. The kiss pressed upon his lips fades. And as the stars take their place in the sky above, sparkling and shining, Bucky thinks, desperately, not stay, but be.
And then, deep in cryostasis, Bucky Barnes starts to wake up.
They walk through the trees. It is midsummer, and hot, and the trees whisper secrets to each other among their branches. Steve and Bucky walk in silence and everything feels all right: everything feels the way it did when they were two boys in the summer in Brooklyn and had the whole world ahead of them. They don’t talk much; they enjoy the woods, and the quiet. The sound of birds. Bucky remembers the field in the dark and the sparrows in the shadow-trees behind him. Shards of glass and light. He is still standing in the middle of it—but he is here, Steve at his side, close enough sometimes that their shoulders brush and then Steve pulls away and turns his face away from the path and towards the woods instead.
Like remembering a dream all at once, Bucky remembers what he saw in cryostasis. The choice he made. At first he had not been certain—as when you wake from a deep sleep, and know that you dreamed, dreamed deeply, but you don’t know of what. And slowly, slowly, if you are lucky—or unlucky—the dream comes back to you during the day. Sometimes changed by the sunlight; sometimes not. This dream comes back to him with the fullness of truth. The field, the mirror, and something bigger than love and faith and shame inside of his chest.
He remembers his mother, stroking his hair. The small, falling-apart notebook in the backpack he kept in his Bucharest apartment. Pictures of Steve pressed between the pages. A hundred years ago, a thousand: waking up in the trenches but with Steve at his side and thinking, hoping, praying that they would both get out of it alive. Not like this, he thinks.
And then he thinks of Steve: the longing heartbroken look on his face just before they stepped into the Siberian safe house. The touch of his hand on the back of Bucky’s wrist.
Like that, Bucky thinks, and then he doesn’t know how to feel anymore. He is a compass hurled out into space, past the earth’s magnetic field, no longer with purpose or sense, its needle spinning towards whichever sun is the closest. Give it long enough and the competing pulls of gravity and force will rip him apart.
But he has done enough remembering. Remembering doesn’t move him forward; doesn’t answer all his questions. He has to dig up through the earth, now; up towards the sunlight.
Bucky looks at Steve now and thinks: come home, and doesn’t know who he means. In Siberia, in the cold, Steve had stood in the same place where Hydra had held Bucky for so many years. It had been unbearable to stand beside Steve then. And it is unbearable now, too—for different reasons. Blood and shame and lying on concrete, Stark trying to kill Steve and Bucky not being able to stop it, hardly even able to think, everything running together, time and shame and memory and love and silence. And then Steve, helping Bucky to his feet. Steve dropping the shield. Steve walking away. Steve murmuring to Bucky, and Bucky is not even sure whether Steve knew what he was saying: I’ve got you, come on, stay with me sweetheart, stay with me. And so Bucky did.
Steve has always been hard to understand. Even before the war he had been moody, distemperate, but gentle too, so wholehearted. It is hard to see him like this: pent up here, trapped in one place. He was always meant for great things. Bucky has always been afraid of holding him back.
He knows how it feels to strike Steve, to hurt him, to nearly kill him. This is not anything he ever wanted to know, but he does. There are other things he wants to know instead. What Steve is like in the mornings just after he wakes; he never used to be much of a morning person, but now he’s up and running before Bucky is out of bed. Whether his laugh sounds as Bucky remembers it. It has been a long time since he heard it. He wants to know again, intimately, deeply, fully, without the barrier of time and memory and pain between them, how it feels to pull Steve close, to bury his face in Steve’s neck, to be held by him, to be close again, so close that nothing can come between them.
I have time, Bucky tells himself. He has time now to learn these things, time now that he is not trapped by Hydra or trapped by the CIA or trapped in cryo. They have time, they do, but Bucky wants everything all at once, wants it desperately, wants it feverishly, wants nothing else. He doesn’t know how to be discriminate about this. That’s what frightens him.
When Bucky cannot stand it any longer, he reaches towards Steve. Their hands meet. Steve almost stops walking, almost turns to look at him. Then he just closes his fingers around Bucky’s, and they keep going.
After a long time in the woods and the sky, Steve says, “It’s getting late. We should go back.”
And he squeezes Bucky’s hand in his.
(You loved him, the phantom had said. Enough to die for him.
And what is there left to do after that?)
That night, Steve sits outside the small house on the porch. Bucky follows him. The crickets and frogs are loud in the dark, and fireflies glitter in the trees. Steve is sitting on the porch swing, looking outwards into the woods, away from Bucky. Bucky doesn’t know whether to sit or stand. He lingers for a moment and just watches Steve. He doesn’t feel pursued right now, or alone, or even empty. He feels full. He feels content, and maybe even happy.
Steve looks over at him. “Come on.” He gestures beside himself. “Sit?”
And so Bucky does, careful not to upset the swing. Steve seems satisfied to sit next to him in silence, but something in Bucky’s chest yearns for something else: for an answer, for certainty. Even just a piece of it. Just something to hold onto: something to pin all the memories against, the center of the wheel, so that the rest would spin around it smoothly and finally start to make sense.
“Steve,” Bucky says. “Can I ask you something?”
Steve’s eyes, searching his. “Anything.”
Anything? That’s too big, too vast. Bucky can only start small. “Do you remember that night outside of Kiev? Early winter, in ’44.”
Steve’s reaction is enormous in how hard he tries not to react at all. But Bucky sees his spine stiffen (just a little), hears his exhale, quiet and stunned. Watches him swallow and take a breath to give himself time before he must actually answer. It is an unfair question, maybe; a loaded question. But Bucky has to know what Steve remembers, and how he remembers it.
“It snowed,” Steve says as if that is an answer at all.
“It always snowed.”
Steve’s smile is flushed and nervous. He doesn’t look at Bucky. Bucky wants to reach out and put his fingertips beneath Steve’s chin and turn him to face him, but not yet, he thinks. Not yet. Stay. Be.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “Sure was cold.” He’s stalling. But Bucky lets him, lets Steve take whatever time he needs. Just so long as he gives Bucky an answer, one way or another. It had been so cold; Steve is right. Steve had his own small tent, as the Commandos’ captain and leader. Bucky had snuck out of his. Not for want of warmth, but for want of companionship. Want of closeness. Want of—
“I could hardly sleep,” Steve says. “The wind kept howling. I could hear Gabe fiddling with his radio even under all that.” A sad smile. They had spent only a few nights outside of Kiev before moving on, moving west; the front was moving elsewhere. The war was moving elsewhere. The Howling Commandos did not always go where the heart of the fighting was; they were tasked with following Hydra, trying to root Schmidt out. But sometimes there was nothing else to do except follow the path that the war wrought.
“We’d been walking all day,” Steve says. “Our tires wouldn’t go through the snow and we had to leave the cars behind. When we got out of the country there would be new supplies waiting for us. It felt so far away. I thought the group would fall apart then, that people would start defecting.”
Defection had never been something that any of the Commandos had ever considered. Bucky knows this for a fact.
“I couldn’t stop thinking,” Steve says. “That was something that—it happened to me a lot, then. I would think and think and it would drive me crazy, and I would do it because there was so much that I didn’t want to think about. And then you—”
Bucky’s heart thuds, and Bucky wonders whether it is audible, the racing of his pulse. Steve’s face is flushed now completely, and his eyes are bright when he looks at Bucky now: looks directly at him, and does not look away. Around them, the woods sigh and draw close.
“You unzipped my tent and came in. I didn’t know what you were doing, but I knew right away that it was you. I would know you anywhere.” He almost smiles, then stops. He seems afraid, more afraid than Bucky can ever remember him being. It had been such an unfair question. “You stopped beside my bedroll,” Steve says. “You—”
Bucky had undone that zipper, too, and—helplessly, sure that he might die tomorrow, certain that he could not leave this earth without doing this one thing—had slipped beneath the blankets beside Steve, into the warmth and the darkness, and faced him, holding his breath, the whole world standing still between them, and nothing visible but the faint outline of Steve’s face, the dim glimmer of his eyes as he watched him, too.
“I kissed you,” Steve says. He sounds as if he does not know how to feel about it, about saying it, about remembering it. He sounds almost embarrassed. As if the next thing he might say is sorry.
“Yeah,” Bucky says before Steve can do so. He remembers this in flashes, in pieces. The sudden warm press of Steve’s mouth, the desperate tangle of their hands together, the arch of Steve’s back as he pulled himself close to Bucky, as close as he could get. All alone with the whole universe spread out above them, a war all around them, and something unspoken caught between their two mouths.
“Is that what you remember?” Steve asks. He keeps almost ducking his head, then stopping himself. It is such a familiar gesture, one Bucky recognizes from when they were kids, and it makes his chest ache. He can’t quite speak, so instead he nods.
Steve remembers; and Bucky remembers. Now all that’s left to do with the broken bone is to set it.
“I didn’t know,” Steve says. He sounds like he is apologizing again. “I didn’t know.”
“Neither did I,” says Bucky.
The expression on Steve’s face has shifted into something pained, something beautiful, something sad. Bucky wants to put his fingertips to the corners of Steve’s mouth.
“You might have to be the one,” Steve says. His voice sad but steady. “This time.”
Bucky can manage that.
“If there is a this time,” Steve adds. “I want there to be. But I want you to do what you want.”
He sounds so helpless and Bucky can’t bear it a moment longer. He leans towards Steve. Puts his hands on Steve’s shoulders, gently. Feels muscle and sinew and thinks, I know you. Steve takes a breath and looks at Bucky’s mouth. This small movement lights Bucky up from the inside, and he smiles, and closes his eyes, and kisses him.
It is slow, and sweet, and so long overdue—so deserved. Steve lets out his withheld breath shakily and then his hands are on either side of Bucky’s face, touching him gently, one thumb rubbing over Bucky’s cheekbone. He tilts into the kiss desperately and helplessly and Bucky follows him, puts his arms around Steve’s shoulders so that there is nothing between them but light. It’s enough and it’s not enough.
When he pulls away, Steve leans in. His hands fall on Bucky’s shoulders, twist in the fabric of his shirt, and he exhales against Bucky’s neck, his collarbones. He holds very still for a long time. Bucky is happy to sit there with him, to have his arms around him, to close his eyes and rest his chin on the top of Steve’s head and feel beneath his fingertips the pulse of Steve’s heart.
Steve draws a shuddering breath. Bucky, in comparison, feels strangely calm. “Bucky—” Steve starts to say, and then he grips him more tightly.
“I’m here,” Bucky says. Steve shivers. Bucky pulls him tighter. He remembers the phantom telling him to stay in the dreamscape, to stay with the phantom illusion of Steve forever—that he would never have anything better than that if he left that place.
Finally, Steve pulls away. He looks at Bucky, his face shining in the dim light from the old bulb hanging above the front door. “Hey,” Bucky says.
Steve smiles. “Hi.”
It has been a long time. Bucky doesn’t know whether to think of it of time lost or time regained. Either way, the life they thought they might live is never going to happen now. Bucky hadn’t ever particularly hoped to be happy before. It feels almost possible now. Not likely, not certain—but nothing is.
“In cryo,” Bucky says, “I dreamed.”
Steve blinks at him, an immense gesture. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
“It’s not supposed to be,” Bucky says. He thinks: I chose to wake up. I woke up for you. I woke up for myself.
“Bucky?” Steve looks as if at any minute he will apologize for something that Bucky cannot bear to hear him apologize for. As if he hadn’t told Bucky, you have to do this, and then let Bucky make his own choice: every time.
“Come with me, Steve.”
“What?”
“You’re bored here. Let’s go somewhere else.”
“Nat said—”
“None of you could find me for two years,” Bucky interrupts. So fuck what Nat said. Steve turns his head as if struck, which is not what Bucky meant to happen. “I’m pretty good at hiding, Steve. And I can—I can hide you, too.”
Steve is silent. Bucky feels immense and insignificant all at once, as if—were someone to measure it at this exact moment—his heart were now the axis around which the entirety of the earth spun.
“You don’t want to go back into cryo?” Steve finally asks.
“I don’t want to go back under ever again.” The sincere affirmation that saying this provides. He spent too long having his life put on hold by others. Not anymore.
“But—” Steve is floundering “—where would we go?”
“Anywhere.”
Steve looks at him. Soft in the dim light. Bucky wants to kiss him again. Just a minute longer, he tells himself. Just a moment. Inside him, the mirror is still shattering. I love you, Bucky thinks. Enough to live for it.
He wants to tell him. But he can’t, yet.
Steve almost starts to smile. “You know,” he says, and he sounds sad, sounds happy; “I’ve been, now, though it hardly feels like it—but before the war, I used to always want to go to Europe.”
Time lost; time regained. Steve is smiling in earnest now, and his hands inch along Bucky’s waist. Warm and steady and sure, and the happiness in Steve’s eyes, his voice, his hands, is unbearable, inescapable. Bucky doesn’t ever want to try to break free of it.
Now, Bucky tells himself: tell him now. “I know you did.”