Chapter Text
Bucky didn’t join them for the check-in with Steve. He wasn’t exactly told not to go, but something in his gut told him to stay away. He had the kitchen to himself and helped himself to a glass of water that he refilled twice before grabbing some of the food that was set out.
He sat at the breakfast bar and inhaled half his plate in a few minutes. When the edge of his hunger dulled he finally slowed down. As he breathed in, he noticed a smell coming from a machine with a glass carafe full of brown liquid on the counter.
Coffee.
Images flicked through his head. Sitting around a campfire in a half destroyed building, the Howling Commandos around him, laughing and ribbing at each other with tin cans of hot instant coffee in their hands. Steve had given Bucky his packets sometimes. He didn’t need the caffeine, it didn’t do anything for him anymore and he’d never cared for the taste. But Bucky would need it after all his sleepless nights. At least, he thought he did.
“Bucky’s got an extra cup of George!” Dum Dum said when Bucky poured more hot water into his empty cup and pulled out the packet Steve had slipped to him.
“And I ain’t sharing.” Bucky drawled, inhaling the cup before he’d even bothered trying to stir it. He kinda liked when there would be dregs of instant coffee on the bottom. Extra strong and bitter on his tongue.
“You want a cup?”
Bucky had been so lost in the memories that he hadn’t noticed Clint watching him from the side of the room. Clint started moving towards the coffee pot once Bucky looked at him. He’d changed his clothes and was wearing a pair of long purple sweatpants and a grey t-shirt. He looked moderately better rested than the last time Bucky had seen him, but there were still shadows under his eyes.
The smell coming from the machine now was different. It didn’t have the bitter heaviness he remembered from the trenches. He wondered if it would taste the same.
“I don’t know.” Bucky answered honestly.
“I’d drink it straight from the pot if I didn’t know Nat would come smack me for it.” Clint said lightly. He pulled two white mugs from a cabinet, reaching up to grab them from the high shelf, his shirt riding up to reveal the skin of his lower back.
Bucky looked away and down at his plate as more memories slid through his head. Warm skin under both of his hands. A shirtless man in front of him bent forward at the waist, Bucky’s hand running over the small of his back, little hairs under his fingers. Pushing .
One of the mugs was set in front of him to the right of his plate. “Try it, if you don’t like it I’ll drink it. Do you want cream? Or sugar?”
“However you want it.” Bucky said, shaking his head once to try and clear the images from his head. He couldn’t stop the phantom feeling of holding someone to him with both hands. He rolled his shoulder to feel it twinge with pain. A reminder that he didn’t have a left hand anymore. That stopped the thoughts cold.
“Black is good for me.” Clint said. “But I’ll take it however I can get it.”
Bucky picked up the mug and inhaled the stream. Familiar, but not quite the same. He took a tentative sip. It was hot, and far richer than the instant packets he remembered. Hints of almost chocolate, and warm spice hit his tongue. It was very good. He downed half the cup.
“You like it then.”
Bucky hummed, hugging the cup to his chest and letting it rest there. Clint laughed, a short snicker escaping his mouth like he couldn’t help it.
“What?” Bucky asked.
“Nothing.” Bucky raised an eyebrow and Clint ducked his head before continuing. “It’s just that I think that’s exactly the way I hold my first cup after a long mission.” Clint grinned for a moment, but it faded quickly. “Held.”
Before Bucky could question the change in tense, everyone else started filing into the room and Clint backed away to refill his cup after downing it in one long pull.
“Did Clint take all the coffee?” Wanda asked, going straight to the pot.
“I did not. There’s plenty in there.” Clint said, turning his attention to Wanda. “And someone must have told them about how much you love pumpkin spice, there’s a bottle of that frou frou creamer in the fridge.”
“That’s mine.” Shuri said with a bright grin. “But I am happy to share. Okoye likes it too, but she pretends she does not.”
Okoye didn’t say anything, but Bucky did see a slight twitch in her face that suggested Shuri was telling the truth. Shuri didn’t seem to be afraid that Okoye wouldn’t like her revealing the secret. Personally Bucky would be doing anything he could not to piss her off.
Clint came around the corner and sat next to Bucky, still cradling his coffee cup. The people around them went about their business, apparently they all drank coffee. Though Shuri put so much creamer from a brightly coloured bottle into her drink, Bucky wasn’t sure it actually qualified as coffee anymore.
When they were done, Shuri turned to Bucky. “I would like to examine your shoulder in my lab.”
Bucky instinctively turned his left side away from Shuri. “Why?”
“I need to see what connections are still active for a replacement. It will be far superior to what you used to have I assure you. I believe I can have a prototype for you within a few days-”
“No.” Bucky shook his head.
“What?” Shuri blinked, confused.
“No. I don’t want it.” Bucky said. And the warmth he had felt spreading across him from the morning turned to ice.
“Why would you not want it? The connections are there and I have the ability to give you your former strength back. More even. The material they used was far too heavy, it’s a wonder you aren’t lopsided.” Shuri said, smiling as she tried to make a joke.
It had been heavy. So heavy. Bucky had been lopsided at first. He’d fallen over from the weight and the pain of the arm for weeks at first. They’d shocked him until he stood again, pushed him until his could stand straight, even as the tremendous weight of the arm pulled at his spine. He rolled his shoulder a bit now, weightless. And most importantly, harmless.
Everyone was staring at him. Shuri was confused, Okoye had a face of stone. Natasha’s head was cocked to the side slightly as she considered him, assessing him in a way that reminded him too much of others. Wanda looked similarly confused.
But Clint wasn’t watching him. Clint was looking into his coffee cup until Bucky looked over at him. He raised his eyes and nodded once, mostly to himself. Understanding.
“Guy said no Shuri. Leave him be. Now, if you wanna make me some trick arrows.”
“I have already made you a custom bow.” Shuri said.
“And it is very very pretty. But hear me out here. Boomerang arrow.”
“What would be the point of that?”
“Comes back to you.” Clint said, finishing his cup of coffee and stood to go back to the carafe.
“That makes no sense.” Shuri turned away from Bucky, distracted with the conversation with Clint.
While Shuri and Clint began to argue over the semantics of how exactly a boomerang arrow would work, Bucky slipped outside and found a chair to collapse into.
He didn’t need his strength back. He needed his mind back. And as the memories of those first few months started to play through his mind like the B movies he used to go see with Steve. Except they were in color, and they made no sense. Images would shift and change, doctors in white coats turning to soldiers in uniform. Russian and German words whispered and screamed at him.
Minutes, or more likely hours later, Clint came out with a tablet in his hand. His bootsteps clunked on the wood floor. Not heavy, the noise seemed intentional. As if he could be silent as a cat if he wanted to. He grabbed a chair that was a few feet away and dragged it into place directly in front of Bucky before plopping into it.
“Do you know how to use one of these?”
He held up the electronic tablet.
“More or less.” Bucky said. “Why?”
“I figured you need something to do. You can’t spar with Nat all day, Wanda says you need time between, uh, sessions? This is going to take a while. Steve said you like sci-fi. And I thought paper books would be hard with one hand. But there’re these things called ebooks now. So I loaded up the tablet for you with anything I heard people rant about. I’m not a huge reader, the selection might be terrible. But it’ll give you something to do.”
Clint held it out and Bucky carefully took the tablet. He set it on his lap and looked at it, the screen lit up with an image of a purple sky forked by lightning. He tapped at the screen and it opened immediately to a selection of applications.
“You gotta pick the one that says books.”
“Really Barton, I had no idea.” Bucky said sarcastically.
“Alright alright. I’ll shut up.” Clint said with a small smile. Bucky opened the application and flicked through the selection of titles. The majority of them meant nothing to him, but he did see an author he recognized.
“Tolkien? He wrote more books?” Bucky said, tapping on the title. Lord of the Rings.
“That’s the books about the ring right?” Clint asked.
“It’s about a hobbit and dwarves.”
“I only remember one dwarf from the movies. And mostly I remember the elf guy with the bow. Oh man I gotta show you those movies.”
Clint started rambling about an elf dislocating his shoulder and how there was no way it was physically possible to get on a horse that way. Bucky let his voice fade into background noise as he started to read. When he looked up a while later Clint had fallen asleep in the chair, head back and mouth open. It was more endearing than it ought to be.
That night, Bucky sat on the couch in the recreational room across from Clint and Natasha. A massive television dominated a wall and Clint said that nearly everything you could think of was available to watch on it.
Clint started to turn on Lord of the Rings, but Bucky cut in quickly. “I haven’t finished the book yet.”
“Oh, you’re one of those people. Okay, lemme find something else.” Clint said, fumbling for the remote.
Natasha flicked him on the nose. “Rude.”
“I’m the rude one?” Clint grumbled, rubbing at his face with one hand.
“Most of us with taste prefer to read the book first and you know it Clint.”
“Yeesh. Alright.” He said, but he still leaned into her side and she affectionately carded her fingers through his hair once. “Star Wars?”
“Only if you start with A New Hope.” Natasha said.
“There at least we are the same.” Clint clicked the movie on. Within a few seconds of the blaring opening song, Shuri and Wanda came scrambling into the room.
“Which one?” Shuri said before looking at the screen.
“First one.” Clint said.
“Which first one?”
“The real first one.” Clint shook the remote at her. “Now sit down. Bucky’s never seen it.”
“My first one was Phantom Menace.” Wanda said, but she sat on the couch by Bucky while Shuri sat cross legged on the floor.
“And that was a crime against humanity.” Clint said.
“What is going on?” Bucky finally asked, utterly lost.
“All of you hush and watch.” Natasha said. “Leia’s coming.”
Over the course of the week, they all fell into a routine. In the morning Bucky and Natasha would go for a walk that was definitely not a patrol. They would spar before coming in for breakfast, where the majority of their group would gather and discuss their plans for the day before dispersing.
Okoye followed Shuri wherever she went for the most part. And Shuri went everywhere. She spent some afternoons with Wanda watching old sitcoms. She ran experiments in her lab, occasionally grabbing one of them and pulling them in for one reason or another. But not Bucky. She seemed to have gotten the message and left him be when it came to his arm.
Natasha ran the morning patrol with Bucky, disappeared around lunchtime and would reappear in the late afternoon just long enough to bully Clint into doing yoga with her in the yard, which Bucky would watch from his position on the porch. He ignored the way his mouth would go dry at times when Clint pulled his shirt off or contorted himself into a position Bucky would not have thought physically possible. Bucky spent a lot of time reading and watching. He discovered a journaling app on the tablet and considered writing down some of his memories for all of ten seconds before realizing he would have to type one handed, and that would just take way too long.
Before dinner Wanda and Bucky would sit in the room in the basement and she would carefully go through his mind. Testing the area she had pulled the anchor out of and mapping the others in his mind. At least that’s what she said she was doing. Mostly he just sat there and let his mind go blank. He could feel a slight presence in his mind, but it was gentle rather than piercing like the chair had been.
Each night Wanda said not yet for the next anchor. They would go upstairs and eat. Afterwords they would disperse again. Okoye would go on patrol alone. Clint would turn on some kind of movie and Bucky found himself joining him more often than not.
Until just under a week later Wanda said he was ready for the next one.
“This will be similar to the first time.”
“Pain and pass out. Got it.” Bucky nodded, his jaw tight. They were sitting across from each other. Clint stood in the corner with his bow.
“It may be more intense. You may see… more. Each anchor is tied to memories, as you may have noticed already. They become more prevalent as I draw the word out.”
“I got it. I’m ready.” Bucky said. “Do it.”
Wanda again reached out, magic flowing from her palms into Bucky’s head. Within a few minutes they were both sweating again, and Bucky’s jaw went tighter, his jaw clenching. This wasn’t like when she checked over his head. He could feel her digging, feel her magic curling around the anchor in his head and drawing it out. He closed his eyes.
Bucky was crawling in trash yards with Steve when he was small. They were both small boys, looking for metal they could sell for food money. Never enough food to go around. Steve cut his knee once on a crumbling bit of metal, and the cut had been infected within a day. He didn’t eat for days, just kept trying to find a way to get the money to pay for the medicine Stevie needed.
The memories evolved into another time and place. Other pieces of metal covered in a reddish-brown layer. A metal pipe covered in it in his perfectly polished metal hand. He swung the piece of metal at a nameless man’s face.
Bucky screamed just like the man’s wife had screamed from across the room. High, long, and wordless with horror as Wanda’s magic gave a huge yank and the anchor gave way.
He fell forward and couldn’t stop the nausea from forcing his lunch up past his mouth onto the floor. Wanda jumped out of reach of the vomit, but it splattered across her shoes.
“Rusted.”