Chapter Text
The drip from the espresso machine was steady. Too steady. Each drop landed with a soft tap that threatened to pull Bucky under.
He stared at the counter, counting the seconds between drops. One, two, three: Drip. One, two, three: Drip. The sound folded itself into memory: water dripping in an unseen pipe as he stared unfocused at the black tile floor, the cold bite of metal cuffs against raw skin. That familiar shame snaking its way back into his stomach—
His pulse spiked before he caught himself. Deep breath in through his nose, longer breath out through his mouth, just like Dr. Roen, his psychiatrist, had taught him. Not here. Not now.
He’d been out of the hospital for three months. Really, he hadn’t needed it for any kind of physical ailment other than the head wound from the explosive rescue Sam led to free him and Yelena from the Architect. It took weeks for Sam and Dr. Roen to convince him he was really back. That Sentry had really killed the Architect.
Part of his stay at the hospital included deprogramming him from the single word the Architect used to turn him into the Winter Soldier. That had been…arduous, but necessary.
After that, he’d mostly holed up at the Avengers headquarters, leaving his room only occasionally in the middle of the night when he thought no one would be up moving around. He’d finally been forced to leave the building a few weeks ago when Dr. Roen made it part of his treatment plan. Sam had doubled down on that, saying that if he couldn’t leave the building, how was he going to rejoin the Avengers?
He hadn’t had the heart to tell Sam he didn’t plan to rejoin the team.
The truth was, his invisible scars felt too big and too deep to ever mend. His hands still shook when he wasn’t paying attention. How could he shoot straight with shaky hands? But the worst thing was the flashbacks. He still had them several times a day. They weren’t as all-consuming as they’d once been, and he could usually breathe through them without dropping to his knees or bursting into tears, but at least once a week the flashbacks triggered panic attacks that felt like he was dying.
So yeah, not really team material anymore.
At the moment, he was just working on finding some new baseline of normal. And this, being able to sit in a coffee shop without fleeing, was progress. The kind of progress he could measure in the way strangers didn’t stare.
When his phone rang, the sound cut through everything. When he looked at the readout, his breathing hitched.
Yelena.
Breathe in…breathe out.
He hadn’t expected to hear her voice so soon. They’d seen each other once, in a hallway at headquarters. He’d finally gotten sick of pacing his room and forced himself to wander the building. It had been well past midnight, and he hadn’t thought it likely he’d run into anyone, then he rounded a corner and there she was.
She’d looked at him, looked through him, and walked away.
He couldn’t blame her, but he immediately retreated to his room to have a full-blown panic attack. All his memories of being tortured together were overshadowed by the worst one that haunted his waking nightmares.
Flash: “Bucky! Bucky! Sto—ah!” Her hips lifting as she begged him to stop. Him repeatedly thrusting inside her even after she came.
“Not you,” he murmured almost soundlessly to himself. It wasn’t quite a plea, but close. “The Winter Soldier.”
Breathe in. Breathe out.
He hesitated, but knew he owed it to her to answer.
“Yelena.”
“Hey, Bucky.” Her voice. Familiar in a way that hurt. “You alive?”
He tried for a smile she couldn’t see. “More or less.”
She sighed in agreement. “Same.”
“Listen,” he started, not really knowing where he was going with this. “I’m really sorry—”
“Stop.” The command in her voice halted him. “We all do things we’re not proud of when we’re prisoners. You know that.”
There’s a moment of silence in which Bucky wonders what she might have seen or done in her little sliver of the Architect’s experimentation paradise that he doesn’t know about. He’d been so wrapped up in how much she might hate him for what he did that he never stopped to think that his actions might have been a drop in the bucket compared to the other shit she might have experienced. He should have been the one to call her first. To make sure she was okay.
Some leader he turned out to be.
Before guilt could swamp him, she spoke again, voice brusque. “I’m not calling so we can cry in each other’s arms. Something’s up at the Avengers Tower.” A pause, like she was measuring how much to tell him. “It’s about her.”
The drip from the espresso machine became too loud again. His chest tightened. He strained to keep his voice under control. “She’s dead.”
“Yeah, that body’s dead. But apparently it wasn’t hers to begin with. The Architect hijacked it from some poor woman. You should come in. Sam and Sylvie can explain better.”
He stared at the cup in his hands. The world blurred at the edges.
Flash: Yelena with her hands restrained, hips in the air. His head between her legs, sucking on her. “Oh God. Bucky stop. Stop!”
Flash: Fake-Steve panting in his ear as he forced himself into Bucky from behind. “You’ve always wanted this.”
Flash: His hand over a real Steve’s mouth to cover his screams of pain as Bucky raped him.
“Bucky?”
He swallowed and lied. “Yeah. I’m here.”
“I need your help with this. We can’t let her—” Yelena’s breath caught with emotion. For a moment, she said nothing. When she spoke again, her voice was smaller. “We can’t let that thing do that to anyone else.” A silence. “Please. Will you come?”
He didn’t know if he could handle anything connected to the Architect without shaking apart. He was slowly getting better, but he could barely manage going out for a cup of coffee. He certainly wasn’t ready for this.
But this was Yelena. She never asked for anything. She just gave and gave. And he’d taken more than anyone should ever have to give.
“I’ll be there,” he heard himself say.
The moment he hung up, he fled the coffee shop. With any luck, he could find a quiet back alley where he could ride out this panic attack, throw up, and still make it to the meeting on time.