Work Text:
Steve is dead.
He died feeling the blood in his veins crystallizing like water. It's good, he thinks. Dying like this. If he can't follow Bucky into his icy grave, he will find his own.
They will meet again.
---
Curtis opens his eyes and thinks of snow; water freezing in his lungs and expanding the tissue until it rips and cracks and is rendered useless.
The Guard is breaking up a fight when Curtis shakes off the images of white burning into his eyes and under his nails. The Guard is efficient, with pragmatic grace, and dead eyes that hide too much life.
Curtis has heard the whispers and rumors and legends. The Winter Soldier. He thought the name fitting when the metal hand broke his wrist shoving him against the wall of the train, cold from an outside world that has ceased to feel real and has turned into a dream.
His eyes find the Guard, gaze traveling to a blank face. He thinks of snow and trains and names.
He thinks of Bucky.
And… oh. Oh.
---
It... it takes time.
Time Curtis doesn't have, and couldn't spare even if he did. But the onslaught of impressions as soon as he closes his eyes won't let themselves be ignored.
It's not bad and therein lies the problem. He doesn't know what it is he sees exactly… Only, that’s not true. He knows what it is — as incredible as it seems — and there's comfort in the knowledge that there was a Before and it was relatively good to him.
That's the crux of it, though. He's not allowed comfort like this. He can't dream of a life that may have happened with the Guard before he'd forgotten how to smile.
He can't.
He dreamed and didn't want to wake up.
You're going crazy. The thought had crossed his mind. He had wiped it away. He's already crazy. Being sure, deep down in what's left of his meagre soul, that Before was something that once was his, is a balm. Even if it confuses him when he thinks about the how.
He fucked up. He cared, stood up, and fucked up, and the Guard's knee is smashing his kidney into a pulp. He doesn't know what will happen and he doesn't know if he cares that much. Hope is a thing with feathers and the quills long since crucified him.
"Bucky."
It's out of his mouth and he wants to take it back so desperately. That name belongs to him, along with a million sun starched images, and he's so stupid.
The Guard stills. Just for a moment, the look of a startled animal flitting though his gaze, before he presses Curtis' face into the floor, spitting threats—
"You woke up." Growled but quiet, hissing, a show for the onlookers that won't catch the meaning… Curtis' mind is reeling from the words and the— the almost-happiness in them. "For once in your life, stay down and wait for me."
---
It goes like this:
The world falls apart while the Soldier sleeps. He wakes up and there's no difference between the cryo chamber and the outside.
He wants to go back under. The feeling is a novelty.
They found him and they have use of him. But they don't have the chair. They have a file on the people he killed — oh god, there is no end to the number of corpses he left behind and the weight of the blood on his hands makes him weak — and they think the outside matches what's within.
They're right. For a while.
His new designation is Guard because no one in this shut down and left-to-rot world needs an assassin. He gets his own bunk and is left alone and he sweats through threadbare sheets and something like recovery.
He goes by Guard because that's what's expected, that's what he hides behind when he's told to—
He can't use the name he remembers. Shame and what comes after the last breath of dread are clogging his throat, the ghosts of what he used to be turning away.
---
One day he sees him and his skull cracks from the pressure of memories and no and you are dead and I couldn't protect you and why did you follow me, I'm the one who—
"Steve." It doesn't leave his lips and he's thankful for small mercies. No recognition in bruised blue eyes and he's grateful.
He's Guard. And something else. And he plans.
He sees and watches and wants to throw up. He plans instead. He spots the cracks in the puzzle, wants to take advantage of them, prying them open to slip inside before he rips this world apart from within until it makes sense again and isn't this.
"Bucky."
God fucking damn it. He had hoped. Hoped his fucked up head had played tricks on him. Hoped genetics were just out to get him where it never stopped hurting. He thought Steve's ghost was at peace, far far away from yet another train. But hope is a thing with feathers and he's seen what happens to birds here.
"You woke up." Elation, first breath of dread, sorrow. Shameful, helpless relief that he isn't alone. I never wanted this for you, he thinks. But you're here and I watched you and I know you. "For once in your life, stay down," he also knows that bears emphasis, "and wait for me."
Bucky could do it on his own — by far not the first regime he's toppled — but, his own voice rings in his head, thing is, you don't have to. Bucky always worked best with Steve and vice versa after all.
And maybe… maybe…
---
"Curtis," Steve mumbles between kisses because Bucky slipped up again.
Dark corner, darkest corner they could find amidst knowing looks, disgust and leering. Privacy is an unaffordable luxury. Bucky's bulk hides them in plain sight, makes the others think they're doing all the things Bucky has nightmares about: Bucky forcing Curtis into the dark, Curtis desperate enough to fuck a guard for goods that never appear. It attracts less attention than stolen whispers and glances.
Let them think what they want. It doesn’t… doesn't matter.
Fucked up world, Bucky thinks, suppressing a shiver when Steve's Curtis' hands find a strip of skin under the armor, fingers colder than Bucky's goddamn metal arm.
"Missed this. Missed you," whispered against his lips in an achingly familiar voice with an achingly familiar cadence, and Bucky wants to sink to his knees and cry.
---
Exchanging information and working out a plan took a turn Curtis isn't sure what to think of.
Bucky sees a ghost when he looks at him. Curtis sees the ghost of a memory of a life he re-lives in dreams but never led.
It's nice. An unexpected softness in this hell. A charade clad in some kind of twisted honesty. The choked off moans come easy when gentle touches are so foreign to the both of them. Jacking movements in pretense are easy, silly and they smile into picked up breaths and pulses. The revulsion of his friends he can handle until they know the truth. The sneer Bucky throws him when he shoves Curtis away hurts Bucky more than him.
He fucks up sometimes, Bucky does. Calls him Steve and Curtis drowns in the shallow end. It was simpler when they only interacted with bent too far arms and punches. Less confusing. Identities secreted away in the corners of their minds.
Curtis was sure, then, of who he was. It takes time. Time they don't have. Every day is a risk of being found out.
He pushes it away, doesn't answer Bucky's halting questions about his life in the small moments they spare for themselves out of stupidity. It will have to wait until later. Later when they're either dead or still alive by some dubious miracle.
Curtis is selfish, wants that gentle sweetness in Bucky to shine on him longer before it dims and Bucky turns away from him, too sickened by reality to be entranced by memories.
---
The smoke is ignored and the blood boils over. The fight is a caricature of nightmares and death, skin pebbling and tongue sticking to the roof of his dry mouth. Too many bodies. That's life. In the end it's just another thing haunting them but against all odds they make it out alive.
---
They stand in the snow and of course it would continue where their story left off.
What now claws at his ribs. He swallows against the despair and sticks his hand out. "I'm Curtis," he says.
Bucky looks at him for a long moment, long enough to make his fingers twitch in burgeoning embarrassment.
The smile is unexpected. Bright, getting brighter, wet from tears clinging to eyelashes, and Curtis buries his face in dark hair when Bucky steps around his outstretched hand and clings to him instead.
"I'm Bucky."
Curtis laughs, startled and blooming, and maybe… maybe