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A warm drop of blood traces its way across Bucky’s cheek and the only thing he can think about, in this second, as he stares at the ceiling, is how much he wants to wipe it away. It itches. It’s just heavy enough to be felt and just slow enough that the sensation of its progress is unbearable. His nose and knuckles hurt, his shoulder hurts, his back is in agony, but all he cares about is that fucking drop of blood.
“Nochmal?” says someone to his left, the guy with the shaved head. “Seiner Arm wird—”
“Nochmal,” Zola says, and Bucky is able to bring his head just far enough forward to see the next blow coming. It snaps his head back again in a burst of pain that makes his vision dim. Someone behind him—he didn’t know there was anyone behind him—shoves his head forward so that he’s gazing at the ground. Even as his back and neck burn in protest, the drop of blood reverses direction, still maddeningly slow.
“Das reicht,” says Zola. There are footsteps. “Mr. Barnes,” he says, much closer now, “we do not want to do this. Even with the enhancements we have given you, your body cannot endure forever.”
He really does sound sorry, Bucky thinks, trying to shake his head in order to fling off the drop of blood and watching the world spin. As if Zola’s actually upset that he’s been forced to beat the shit out of his prisoner.
“The pain will be much less if you cooperate,” Zola tells him. “This does not have to be difficult.”
He’s heard that line before, directed at Steve and, by extension, himself. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. Without exception, Steve chose the hard way. What else can I do, Buck? Let the bastards think they’re winning? Bucky gasps out a laugh. “I like a challenge,” he says.
When they pull him down from that rack and strap him to a table, again, he remembers what he always said. They are winning, Stevie. And when he starts screaming again, he hears Steve’s voice in his ringing ears: They only win if I own that’s what they’ve done.
The cell they keep him in is bare: a cot without anything on it, a bucket to piss in. There’s no window and the light doesn’t always work—or maybe they turn it off on purpose—and it’s so small that Bucky can stretch out both arms and place his palms flat against the wall, or he could if he had two working arms. He can’t get his right hand up to shoulder height with all they’ve been doing to him, and he hasn’t got the hang of the left one yet; it’s too strong and swift and it burns where it joins with his shoulder. So mostly he lies on the cot and stares upward and tries not to feel. Which goes, of course, spectacularly.
Today Bucky can hear his breath rattling in his lungs. He should sit up so he doesn’t suffocate in his own fluids, but his very skin throbs and he thinks if he tries to move he’ll just pass out. He did that a while ago—he doesn’t know how long it’s been—and when he came to he was hanging upside down. He sleeps when they want him to.
But goddamn, the breathing. It sounds very loud in this tiny space. Sit up, Bucky orders himself, and it’s barely more than an exhalation. He forces himself to move his lips. “Sit up.” A command. The kind he used to give Steve when he was delirious and didn’t know how to do anything except what he was told. Those fevers were hell on both of them, not just from worry and exhaustion but from the way Steve would thrash around with all of his wiry, desperate strength. His fingers clenching on Bucky’s shoulder, pulling at him, clinging fast.
Bucky puts his right arm beneath his body. Waits a heartbeat. Pushes himself upright.
———
Steve finds Bucky in an abandoned building in the east; he doesn’t know much more than that and he doesn’t care to. All that matters is that he finds him, and if he finds him bloody and unconscious on the floor, well, he can deal with that.
When Bucky comes to on the moth-eaten, sagging couch, he stares at Steve so quietly that Steve doesn’t notice he’s awake for at least five minutes. “Hey, Bucky,” he says, leaning forward, not knowing what to do with his hands. He doesn’t know what to say. What to ask first. He settles for, “Do you want some water?”
Bucky nods slowly.
Steve reaches into his backpack and pulls out a plastic water bottle. He made a supply run just a day or two ago, thinking it was probably overkill, but now he’s glad—the building doesn’t have running water or electricity. He kind of wishes he’d grabbed some better food, though. But that’s neither here nor there, because right now Bucky is reaching out his right hand and taking the bottle. Is it Steve’s imagination, or is he being careful not to let their fingers touch?
Bucky unscrews the cap and takes a cautious sip. He lowers the bottle, still staring at Steve. The moment hangs between them with Steve’s heartbeats coming faster and faster like an avalanche. At last, Bucky speaks, somewhere just above a whisper. “Why are you here?”
It’s not what Steve imagined would happen. Steve doesn’t know what that would be—probably getting his face split open again. He might have expected Bucky to be accusatory. He didn’t think he’d sound afraid. And how does he answer something like that, anyways? “I thought you were dead,” he says. “And then I find out you’re alive—did you expect me to stay away?”
Bucky shakes his head, but there’s something off about the motion, quick and sharp. It looks less like a response to Steve’s words and more like an effort to clear his head. “How’d you find me?”
Steve wants to hold him. He wants to crush Bucky to him and never let him go. The distance between them is only a few feet, but he feels every inch. “I looked,” Steve tells him. There’s nothing else to say: he looked until he thought he’d searched every corner of the earth, and then he kept on looking.
———
“Steve,” Bucky whispers, from a throat that doesn’t know how to work right anymore. He recited his serial number back in Azzano, so long ago and far away now that it feels like a different life, but he doesn’t have the strength to form the numbers. Now he chants the one true thing, the name that exists in the core of him. “Steve.” His eyes are closed. “Steve, Steve, Steve.”
The leftover electricity is still tingling in Bucky’s skin. It tastes metallic under his tongue and his hands have a faint tremor. Even to think is a Herculean effort. “Steve,” he says anyway, and he isn’t sure if it’s a wish or thanks or a prayer to who knows what.
In the dark of the night Bucky longs for closeness and a hand to hold in his own, someone to touch him gently or even to hit him, playfully, in that rough and caring way that belonged just to the two of them. Silent tears soak into the fabric of his cot. It’s something he has learned to do here, something he didn’t know could be done: crying, without movement or sound, without a change in breathing. He can’t even say that he is sad.
Because he certainly doesn’t wish for Steve to be here. God—when he thinks of it, in the moments when he can think, Bucky shudders with horror at the thought. Steve, in a place like this. No matter what the scientists told him, no matter how much of a hero Steve thinks he is, Bucky doesn’t want him here. Doesn’t want him to know this.
But when he feels the empty space beside him, inside him, he’ll be damned if there’s anything he wouldn’t give for just a heartbeat’s warmth.
———
Bucky’s hands are scarred around the knuckles, around the wrists, extending up his arms when his sleeves slide back on his skin. They’re thin, white, sometimes pink. Someone cared enough to make sure that they healed well. The thought gives Steve a bitter comfort at first, and then he thinks that maybe it was just part of the disguise, so that Bucky could walk down a street in daylight on the way to his next target.
Not only is there scarring, though, but his hands tremble, all of him trembles, like he’s about to fall apart. He sweats and shakes, sitting on that couch in his worn and stained shirt, and whenever Steve comes near him he shrinks back. “What did they give you?” Steve asks, bringing him more water.
Bucky shrugs and drinks. “No idea,” he rasps. “They never told me anything.” And his eyes stare blankly from deep inside their sockets.
Whatever food he eats comes back up and Steve is sure, for two or three terrible hours at a time, that whatever drugs HYDRA pumped him full of will actually kill him. But he’s never seen someone so strong before: not just because of the serum or the metal arm, but because Bucky reaches, blind, in a fever, and Steve takes his hand. And it’s been seventy years since he’s felt anyone hold on so tightly.
———
Steve sits against the wall of Bucky’s cell, shadowy and indistinct. He disappears in the space between blinks. Bucky stares at him, no longer feeling the ache in his lungs. It’s almost as if he summoned Steve by wanting him so bad. “You gotta go,” he says against everything he knows.
And Steve’s gone.
But he’s back later, shaking Bucky’s shoulder and rousing him to consciousness. “Wake up,” he says, soft and urgent. “They’re coming.”
Then Bucky hears the footsteps and raises his head just as the door to his cell is pulled open. Zola stands there, flanked by guards. Steve slides his hand down to hold Bucky’s. Bucky looks from him to Zola, his heart pounding, the edges of his vision thrumming along with his pulse. He holds on tight.
I’m going to die here, Bucky thinks. They have left him in the chair—the guard in his mouth, hard between his teeth, stiff against his lips like a muzzle. He can’t even raise his arms, still strapped down, to remove it. He doesn’t know how long it’s been.
“You’re gonna be all right,” Steve says in a voice that Bucky recognizes from back alleys, one that goes with black eyes and bloody knuckles. It’s full of fight.
Bucky can’t turn his head to see Steve, but he can feel the comforting warmth of him just to his left. More of an impression, hardly there at all. Bucky doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that Steve is wrong, either; there’s less blood in his body every day, and whatever they’re trying to do to him is taking much too long to work out. He wonders if they’ll stop before they kill him, or if he’s just collateral.
Steve leans in close. “I promise,” he says, “you’re gonna make it out of here.”
With what little freedom he has, Bucky shakes his head.
“I won’t leave you,” Steve says. He’s quieter now, but his tone is just as firm. “Not till you’re free.”
———
The first nightmare, or the first real one, wakes Steve up a week later. He sees in the gloom a shape twisting, flailing, and hears groans that border on screams. When he moves forward and tries to pin Bucky down, he receives a metal arm to the jaw. Reeling, Steve all but throws himself on Bucky. “Wake up,” he says over the moans, “wake up, Bucky, it’s just a dream!”
He sees Bucky’s eyes open, but they’re crazed, foreign. He says something in Russian and throws Steve off of him, following him to the floor and holding him down. Cold, smooth fingers wrap around Steve’s throat and Bucky squeezes.
“No,” Steve chokes, aware that this is overdue and straining against the metal without success. He can see in Bucky’s twisted expression something more—even as his eyes refuse to focus in their panic—and it’s not the blank, focused look of the Winter Soldier, but a wild and overwhelming fear. Bucky is terrified. “Buck,” Steve grinds out, “it’s me. It’s not—real—”
And to his surprise, the grip around his throat loosens. Bucky sags and lists to one side, and Steve just lies there for a minute or two, filling his lungs with air and waiting for the searing pain in his lungs to subside. He watches Bucky out of the corner of his eyes, ready to react if he needs to, but all the fight seems to have gone out of him. “You okay?” Steve asks, still flat on the floor, not even lifting his head.
“Why are you here?” Bucky asks. His voice is low and hoarse, as if he were the one who was strangled. He turns his head to look at Steve and his eyes glint dull in the moonlight from the window. “Why?”
Steve blinks at him, levering himself up with one arm. “I told you,” he says. “I—”
Bucky shakes his head. “You left,” he says. “You—then. I didn’t realize until I woke up. But you were gone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Before.” Bucky waves his hand vaguely, and Steve sees a tremor in its motion. “After they—after I fell.” He shakes his head again, convulsively. The shudder moves through the rest of his body. “I saw you there.”
“I wasn’t there,” Steve says. He’s staring, trying to comprehend, but all that he can feel is a gulf of horror yawning wide inside his chest.
———
One moment his body is on fire, full and burning, his head splitting apart, and the next he is in a chair. “—ание,” the man in front of him finishes saying. He waits a moment, then motions to someone standing in the back, who shines a light in Bucky’s eyes and calls out something unintelligible.
“Steve,” Bucky says, stupid with pain. He feels drunk and his tongue tastes like iron in his mouth, thick and heavy. He twists his head away from the man holding his chin and sees without surprise that his arms are secured. He also sees, faintly, Steve watching him from the side of whatever room this is. He doesn’t look hurt. He doesn’t look scared.
“Why are you here?” Bucky asks. “You can’t be here. Tell me,” he says, and his voice breaks, “tell me they don’t have you, too.”
“I’m here because of you,” Steve says. “The stuff they’re doing—”
“They’re gonna take you away from me,” Bucky tells him. “If they know you’re here.”
“They’re taking me anyway.” Steve smiles at him, sadly. He seems faint around the edges somehow. “But I swear—”
“You won't leave me,” Bucky finishes. He holds onto the thought like a lifeline, like it's everything. With Steve, that's the only way he knows how. “You won't leave me,” he repeats, a prayer now, his salvation. He looks over at Steve and smiles back, his lips stinging as the scabs break open. “You remember that time we nearly got thrown out of church?” he asks. “When your ma swore she'd skin us both alive if we ever made such a ruckus again?” He laughs. “I don't even remember what we did.”
“I kicked Jimmy Parker and you dropped a spider down his shirt,” Steve reminds him.
“Oh,” Bucky says, “right.” He still can't see it, it's all gone dim, but he remembers the feeling of it. “Because he said some shit about not drinkin’ from the same communion cup as you.”
Steve rolls his eyes. “And you just had to—”
“Well, of course I had to.” Bucky remembers the hot anger in his chest, the pain as if it were him that'd been insulted. It's only a memory of the emotions, but it's the most alive he's felt in weeks. Months. He remembers, deeper than that, the wish to prove something. Desperation. And a horrible fear.
“That's what you always said,” Steve sighs, and leans closer, but his warmth is barely palpable. “My knight in shining armor, busted nose and all.”
“No,” Bucky says, “that was you with the nose.” When Steve grins, he feels that old fear again, pounding along to the beat of his heart.
———
Bucky thrashes around so much in his sleep, heaves so desperately with dry, silent sobs, night after night, that he opens barely-healed wounds that Steve didn’t even know he had. He only notices when blood starts soaking through Bucky’s shirt. And when he convinces Bucky to take the shirt off so maybe Steve can do something about it, he’s nearly sick himself.
But after Steve’s able to tear his eyes away from the scars, knotted and livid, that rope around his shoulder like clutching vines, he surprises himself by knowing what to do. Bandages, dressing, some kind of antiseptic. It’s almost like the war. He thinks of what Morita would say if he saw Steve using vodka to clean the wound, and has to bite down on a hysterical laugh. “Sorry,” he says, “sorry, sorry,” as Bucky clenches his teeth and lets out a high noise of pain.
Steve washes away the blood when it’s done and they’re sitting on the floor. He’s just trying to make it all look less horrific. While he works, the damp cloth slowly darkening, he says, “You know I wasn’t there with you.”
Bucky stiffens ever so slightly under his hands. “I know.”
Surprised, Steve hesitates. “And—and you know that I really am here now?”
“That’s what you always say,” Bucky says, more of an exhalation than words. “Fuckin’ haunted by Steve Rogers. Guess it makes sense.” He chuckles, then winces.
“Hold still.” Steve waits until he’s relaxed before he moves the cloth again. It’s like a meditation, the slow removal of dirt and blood and sweat, finding skin underneath. More even than the war it reminds him of Brooklyn, seventy years ago, the sound of the radiator and cats yowling in the street below. “You think I’m haunting you?” he asks carefully.
“I know you’re not dead,” Bucky says. There’s an iron conviction in his voice that’s unexpected. “But you don’t seem to go anywhere, even when I want you to.” He sighs, leaning back a little, letting his head rest against the front of the couch.
Steve lets his hand drop.
“God, I wanted you gone,” Bucky murmurs. It’s like he doesn’t even realize that Steve’s still listening—that, or he doesn’t care. If that’s the case and he thinks Steve’s a figment of his imagination, then Steve isn’t sure which possibility is worse. “I wanted you to be—anywhere else. But I didn’t want to be alone.” His eyes are half closed, his breathing slow. “Selfish of me,” he says.
“Don’t you believe that.” Steve’s mouth is dry. “Not in a million years, Buck.”
“Then could you just go?” Bucky rolls his head around so he’s facing Steve at an angle. “I’m tryin’ to ask, and I’m tryin’ not to, so can you please just go like you did then?”
Steve stares at him, taking in the heavy motion of his chest, the sheen of sweat still on his face. “You need to sleep,” he says firmly. It’s all he can bear to say; as it is, his voice trembles ever so slightly. “And in the morning we’ll talk about this.”
But they don’t talk about it, because in the morning Bucky is gone. He lies on the couch and stares at the ceiling, and his eyes track Steve around the room with a horrible blankness like radio static, like snow, like the rushing sound of the wind.
———
This is worse than the chair. It’s not that he can’t breathe with the mask on, it’s that he has to breathe—he doesn’t have a choice. Whatever they’re pumping into it is cold and numbing and makes his lungs feel like ice. With the monitor hooked up to his head, too, Bucky has the feeling that pretty soon he’ll be a machine himself. Metal through and through.
“You’ll be okay,” Steve whispers. His touch is light, almost nothing at all. “I know—”
“How do you know?” Bucky’s voice sounds strange inside the mask and it doesn’t really feel like it’s coming out of his own throat. Around Steve, the whole room flickers. And he’s doubted for a while now, but he wants to hear Steve say it. “You gonna save me, Stevie?”
There’s no response. Only the barely-there fingertips, the palms on his cheeks. He closes his eyes, the better to endure, but that’s never changed anything before. With the frost spreading in his chest and his breathing slowing, he thinks that maybe he knew all along. It's too late. There’s nothing that Steve can do about this—about any of it—because he exists in the part of Bucky that is frozen over. He can’t save Bucky. And Bucky can’t even save himself.
Steve keeps trying to tell Bucky things, but these days—whatever a day is, he hasn't seen the sun in what feels like years—these days it just goes in one ear and out the other. Stuff about their families, about Brooklyn, about the life they used to have. Bucky remembers it like a faded photograph but not much more than that.
He knows he's forgetting things. He holds Steve's hands in the dark and worries that he will forget him, too, that the next time they put him in the chair there will be no one left when he's released. That's what keeps him from sleeping, more than the pain which is so constant now that it can hardly be called pain. He doesn't want to forget. He doesn't want to lose him.
———
“You keep saving me,” Bucky says. He’s not on the couch today; sometimes he likes to sit in the corner beside the window, below the cut of the clear winter light. He’s not looking at Steve, though. His eyes are fixed on the trapezoid of blue-gray sky visible from the floor.
Steve watches, not sure he heard right, or if Bucky even said anything at all.
Then Bucky speaks again. “Again and again. Over and over. Why?”
Across the room, Steve decides not to get up, but he swings his legs around so that he’s facing Bucky. “Why did I save you?”
“Why so many times?” Bucky clarifies.
“Well—” Steve searches for the words. “They were—experimenting on you. I hadn’t seen you in months, what else—”
“No.” Bucky looks at him, his eyes the same color as the sky but clouded, hazy. “I mean after. Why’d you—?” His fingers flutter as if to indicate something bigger.
“I wasn’t even there,” Steve says. It must be the dozenth time. Probably more. “I wasn’t—no, Buck.” And dammit, now he does want to go to him, but he stays where he is. If he moves too close, sometimes Bucky gets spooked, stops talking, starts shaking.
Bucky just watches him, silent.
“You saved yourself,” Steve tells him. Even if they were sitting side by side, he thinks, he wouldn’t be able to reach him, and that’s what’s killing him. He can see that Bucky can’t see—not him, at any rate. And there’s nothing Steve can do to wake him up from this. “You did that,” he says. His voice sounds pleading to his own ears.
There’s no response. His face unreadable, Bucky turns his head, his gaze upturned to the sky.
It’s the worst feeling Steve knows, cold and strange, to be so helpless. If he had his way he’d walk over, hold Bucky, tell him all the things he knows: how strong he is, how brave he’s been. But if Bucky won’t hear him now, then Steve will repeat it until he learns it. He can’t heal him—only Bucky can do that.
———
“Why are you here?” Bucky asks again, or at least he thinks it's again. He's never sure now.
Steve shrugs. “Why do you want me to be here?” he says. “I'm yours, Buck.”
“Don't say shit like that,” Bucky rasps, the words grating too harsh against his throat even though he means them to be soft. “Don't, Steve, you—you don't know what it does to me.” What it's always done to him, since they were twelve years old and sharing one bed by candlelight. And it's killing him to have Steve here on the darkest corner of Earth, to—he can't even say it to himself—to feel this way about him when all it's ever brought him is more pain.
———
“You remember that club on Water Street?” Bucky will say sometimes, or, “I keep thinkin' about the time you nearly burnt down Mrs. O'Reilly's apartment,” or even, like now, “It wasn't this cold in goddamn Austria.” Whenever he mentions these memories, Steve looks over at him, the hope so strong that it hurts, but there's always a peculiar look in his eyes. It gets so that Steve can recognize it even before he talks: the faintly confused expression that means he won't believe anything Steve says. When that expression isn't there, it's worse—then, Bucky doesn't even listen. Doesn't turn his head. He just stares, as if there’s some glass or veil separating them, and whatever he’s seeing is miles away, years ago. If he’s seeing anything at all.
“Can't have been much warmer,” Steve reasons. He keeps his voice light but his chest feels heavy. “Why, are you cold?”
“Well, I reckon we've had worse after all.” But Bucky's shivering slightly. It's not the drugs anymore—at least, Steve hopes it isn’t—but whatever HYDRA did to him, it's like they turned him inside out. Bucky's the size of a house but his body doesn't seem to be able to heat itself anymore.
“Here,” Steve says. He takes off his third sweater and holds it out to Bucky. Then, when Bucky makes no move to take it, he drapes it over him. “You need any water or anything?”
His jaw set, Bucky shakes his head.
Unable to help himself, Steve rests his hand against Bucky's forehead. His anxiety eases by a fraction: there's no fever. He pulls his hand away. In the split second of motion he sees the way that Bucky shifts, almost imperceptibly, as if he wants to keep the contact but doesn't quite dare.
It's the first sign of life, of something deeper than skin, that Steve's seen in days. He doesn't know if it's because Bucky hasn't allowed him to see anything more than that, but he seizes the opportunity. “Budge over,” he says, “I'm freezing too.”
Bucky scoots over with a gingerness that's alarming. Watching it, Steve almost regrets his trick, but it's too late. He sits down next to Bucky, sandwiching him between his own body and the arm of the couch. He looks to his side. Bucky's sitting stiff, upright. It’s not a very big couch. “Thanks,” Steve tells him.
“It was my couch first,” Bucky shoots back, automatic. But he can't stay tense forever. Ever so slightly, he bends.
Steve can feel it because they’re pressed together—the infinitesimal loosening of his limbs, a give that wasn’t there before. “You’re gonna be all right,” he says softly, letting his arm come up and pull Bucky to him. “I promise, Buck, we’re gonna make it through this.” He hardly knows what he’s talking about, because it’s been a good day on the whole, with less horror and heartbreak than usual, but it doesn’t matter. The words exist in the small space just between the two of them.
Bucky doesn’t answer. But slowly, slowly, he melts into Steve, his head coming down to rest on his shoulder, the tremor in his body stilling. He barely seems to be aware that he’s doing it, but it’s natural enough, though usually their positions were reversed. Years ago, when it was Steve who shivered with cold. Steve wonders if Bucky remembers that, or if he’s still somewhere else in his head, and then he wonders if it even matters when Bucky is so close, leaning on him like he is, not an inch between them.
“You were gone for so long,” Bucky sighs, almost inaudible. “I shouldn’t want you here. But it was so long.”
———
Bucky cries now every time as if it will be his last, still silently, with sobs that wrack his chest like waves beating the hull of a ship. “You gotta get out of here,” he whispers to Steve, reaching out to him and watching his own hands, metal and flesh alike, pass through nothing. “They’re gonna turn you into something you’re not.”
Steve doesn’t respond, but reaches back, and his fingers are barely more than a breath of wind, impossible in this place where the wind cuts sharp.
“You gotta go,” Bucky says. He knows now he’s talking to air; that doesn’t make it all right, somehow. Doesn’t remove the bars from his already-iron heart. “Please just go.” He can’t put his voice to the horror of it. Don’t make me watch you twist into something like me.
“I can’t,” Steve sighs back. “Not until you make me.”
And maybe this makes Bucky selfish and cruel and as bad as the monster he’s becoming—but he’ll never drive Steve out, not if it breaks every bone in his body to see him stay. And it does. But he’s so cold, so full of winter here in the dark, and he says the simple truth: “I don’t know how to let you go.”
“Why not?” Steve asks. “What are you holding onto, Buck?” His blue eyes burn in the gloom.
Bucky wipes his cheeks. “I don’t know,” he says. The words echo a little, a cacophony of whispers. “I don’t want you to leave. But I don’t want you here.” He swallows convulsively. “It doesn’t make sense, nothing makes sense anymore. But I love you.” He says it despite how it hurts him, and searches Steve’s face for something, anything. “Stevie?”
Steve gazes back. Bucky can see the wall behind him, through him, and if Steve’s saying anything, it’s too faint to hear.
———
“I wished you into reality before,” Bucky says, his voice brittle but not quite breaking. “I don’t want to do it again. I don’t want you here in hell with me.” He shakes his head. “I just want you to go away.”
It isn’t even the first time he’s said it, but Steve still feels the words like a punch in the gut. “I can’t, Buck,” he says. “Maybe I should—maybe you really would be happier—but I don’t know how to leave you.”
Something shifts in Bucky’s eyes and he looks up. “You did before.”
“That wasn’t me,” Steve says, again. He loses track of how many times they’ve said this; with Bucky, the days blur together. “I’m here. I’m not gonna leave. Bucky—” He wants to touch Bucky, to hold him, and he places one hand against the wall instead. “I don’t know what I can say to convince you.”
“Tell me something only I would know?” Bucky suggests with the flicker of a smile at the corner of his mouth.
Steve sees the way he’s staring up and thinks that maybe the problem is he’s too big. He bends his knees and kneels on the dirty, cold floor. Below the line of the window, it’s all shadows. “I’ll tell you something only I know,” he counters. It’s a long shot. He breathes in. “I love you.”
Bucky is frozen, watching, like a photograph. The look in his eyes is far away.
“I never told you,” Steve says, and there’s some kind of dam breaking inside of him, a flood of all the years. “I mean, I couldn’t, could I? But I loved you then and I love you now. And you never knew because I did everything I could to keep it hidden, but—”
“You never said.” For a second Steve thinks Bucky’s simply repeating what he’s just said, but then he frowns. “You never gave me an answer, before. You just went away.”
It hurts, physically, like something twisting in Steve’s gut, to hear Bucky’s voice so ancient and lonely, and to hear him say these words, as if Steve would ever abandon him. It takes a moment before he can speak. “An answer to what?” he asks, as gently as he can.
“I asked,” Bucky says. He rubs a hand over his face. “Or maybe I didn’t. I said I—” He stops and shakes his head again. “You don’t know, Steve, you don’t know what it’s like. Can’t even tell which way’s up these days.”
Steve reaches out, he can’t help it any longer. He places a hand on Bucky’s cheek, desperate to ground him somehow, to bring him out of whatever nightmare he’s trapped in. He tries to soften his hands, but his heart is pounding too fiercely. “Bucky.” His gaze snaps to Steve. “I’m here,” Steve says again. “I’m here and so are you. And if you never believe me then that’s all right. But you gotta know that I’ve been just as lost as you.” He can hardly breathe through the tightness in his chest. “From when I woke up until I found you again, it was—” He stops. He doesn’t know what else to say, there are no words left.
Bucky hasn’t moved out from under his hand. His jaw is clenched; Steve can feel the hard sharpness of the bone against his skin. “I don’t know how,” he says, as if every word causes him pain, “to let you go.” His gaze burns. “I still can’t do it.”
“I know,” Steve says, and reaches out his other hand, too, cupping Bucky’s face between his palms. “But you don’t have to.” He leans forward so he’s looking into Bucky’s eyes, barely an inch between them, their foreheads touching.
He can feel Bucky trembling, or maybe it’s just Steve’s own pulse. Bucky takes a breath and lets it out. His eyes, smoke-and-sea, stare through the years and lock on Steve. “If you’re here.” His lips tremble. “If you’re really here.”
I am, Steve wants to tell him, I have been, I always will be. But his voice is dried up.
Between his hands, Bucky swallows. “I didn’t know,” Bucky says, “I couldn’t tell.” There are tears on his cheeks. “But you finally answered me.” He gasps out something that sounds like a laugh, the first real thing Steve’s heard from him since nineteen forty-four. “You—”
“Yeah,” Steve croaks. “Of course.”
And then Bucky smiles, his eyes crinkling, his whole face alight. “You’re here,” he says, slowly, tasting it.
“I’m here,” Steve agrees, smiling back and trying to say more than he knows how—I love you, I will always love you, I would love you if you didn’t even remember my name. And he sees in Bucky’s eyes that he hears it, and says it back.
———
“Steve,” Bucky sighs. He is losing the knowledge of what the name means. All he knows now is the hard beginning sharp against his teeth, the long stretch of the word, the soft v, and the feeling of a question unanswered.
———
“Steve,” Bucky will say sometimes, in early mornings before the sun rises, when the world is soft and quiet, “you’re here.” And there will be doubt on his face.
Steve traces his knuckles over warm skin, brushes his lips along the same line. “You’re here, too.”
Bucky sighs. Whether it’s relief or simple contentment Steve can never quite tell. “All right.” It’s less than a whisper, and Bucky’s not smiling. But his hand comes up to cover Steve’s, to twine their fingers together, to hold him there tender in the half-dark.