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I.
The body is a dead weight in his arms as he drags him to the shore of the river. His muscles strain, which is unusual, but, given the fall that they have just endured, is understandable. He heaves the body up onto the mud and collapses beside it, his metal hand still touching the soft skin.
He closes his eyes and ducks his head against his shoulder, his sweaty hair stuck in strands against his cheeks. He believes that he can count this day as the hardest day of his life, or at least, the most confusing day of his life.
It is one thing for someone to call him a name that is unfamiliar to him. He has heard the expression before that everyone has seven people in the world that look like them. Perhaps the man next to him mistook him for one of those seven. It was beside the point – it was his mission to end the life of this man, this patriot, this “Captain America.” He never understood the American penchant for assigning hyperbolic names to their heroes. Or, at least, the Winter Soldier never understood that concept. He does not know who he is right now, who he is anymore, and he does not know what he thinks.
This man next to him called him “Bucky.” He called him “James Buchanan Barnes.” He knows that those names should mean something to him – the way the man said them, with such conviction and emotion in every syllable. The man liked – likes – Bucky. And if he is Bucky, then this man likes him, and he has no idea what he is supposed to do about that.
The idea that someone knows him from some other life that is scarcely more than colors threaded together with fishing line in his brain is astounding. He did not even know of that other life until this man had said the name “Bucky,” and while he was not sure who Bucky was or is, the name jogged some yet-undisturbed area of his brain. And now, when he closes his eyes, he sees brown dirt and sky-blue eyes and he feels something that he has not felt in so long, for as long as he can remember – hope. And longing.
He does not know exactly what he longs for, but ever since this man spoke the name “Bucky,” he has felt as though they are connected by that same fishing line in his brain, and that even if they were to never see each other again, they would still feel each other’s’ presence. It’s a strange feeling to be so connected to another person.
He rolls over and presses his flesh hand to the man’s neck, and he draws it back when he feels the slow, but steady, pulse against his fingers. The man really should go see a medic soon. He knows a lot about a lot of things, but he does not feel equipped to heal this man. He does not know why he even feels like he should.
This man started out as his mission. He was told to point and shoot and kill, and this man was his target. Now he is considering ways to help this man live.
What a strange world this is.
He, too, is injured, and he knows that he needs medical attention too. There is blood running in rivulets from his hairline, and he is pretty sure that he has broken many bones. His metal arm is twisted and dented.
He tries initially to fight against the onslaught of unconsciousness, but even the Winter Soldier is not strong enough not to succumb to the effects of blood loss.
He closes his eyes.
II.
“Bucky?”
A hand on his shoulder, his flesh shoulder, shaking and shaking and shaking.
“Bucky, please!”
A voice, pleading and strained.
“Bucky, oh, Bucky, please!”
He opens his eyes and sees the man leaning over him, the pressure of his body hot against his own. The man is shaking his shoulders, but he stops when he notices that he is awake.
“There you are,” the man says. “I was so worried. Do you know where we are?”
He shoves the man off of him, but the man, for all his wounds, rebounds quickly and sits, composed, beside him.
“We’re on the riverbank,” he mutters, and his voice cracks. “Potomac.”
And suddenly, he’s coughing, chest heaving, and he turns over into the dirt, hands braced on either side of him.
There’s a hand on his back, then, and another hand brushing his hair back from his face as he vomits up nothing into the mud, and he knows that this is wrong, but he cannot deny the appeal of the comfort that it gives him.
He collapses against the dirt, but the man catches his head and brings it to his lap, running his fingers softly through his hair.
“Shush, Bucky,” the man says, and he had not even realized that he is sobbing.
“I don’t…don’t even know who he is,” he forces out, and the man grips his shaking shoulder.
“You will,” he hears as he feels himself slipping into unconsciousness again. “I will make sure that you remember who you are.”
III.
When he next wakes up, he is alone.
His armor has been removed, and his undershirt has been torn up and fashioned into cloth bandages wrapping around his torso and leg. He does not remember doing this, so it must have been the man.
And then he remembers that the man is injured too, but a glance around where he had dragged him proves that he is indeed alone, and that the man is nowhere to be seen.
He stands up, struggling to right himself on the slippery riverbank. He searches for his communicator, but it is gone, so either the man took it or it was knocked off in their fight on the Helicarrier. For the man’s sake, he hopes that his comm met the second fate.
He decides to go look through the trees that border the river, but he is not sure what he is looking for. He is not hungry – he has not been hungry in so, so long – and he doubts that there are any people that would be willing to help him anywhere near here.
He would not admit it, but it is possible that he is looking for the man.
And he finds him after only a few hours of limping through the woods. He is crouched in front of a bush, picking berries from it. Poisonous berries.
He walks over to the man and knocks the berries from his cupped hands. The man looks up at him, surprised, and he turns away.
“What are you doing, trying to kill yourself?” he asks.
“Didn’t realize you cared,” the man replies, and even though he is not looking at him, he can hear the smile in his voice and it makes him want to laugh and scream and run far, far away, to find some place where ghosts do not call him by friendly nicknames and he can just kill, kill, kill.
He must have been shaking again, because the man lays a hand on his shoulder to steady him.
“Bucky, it’s okay,” the man is saying, and all he hears is concern and comfort and he finds himself wishing he had those mechanical wings he saw the man’s friend wearing.
“Why,” he turns around to look the man in those cool blue eyes, “do you keep calling me that name?” he demands.
“Because you are Bucky,” the man says. “James Buchanan Barnes, that’s your name. We grew up together; we fought the Germans together.”
“Then why do I not remember that?” he retorts.
“I don’t know,” the man says, and he can tell that he is honest in his response. “But I’m going to get you your memories back, even if it takes me the rest of my life.”
He blinks, astounded by the man’s misplaced determination. His memories, if he ever even had them in the first place, are long gone. Pierce made sure of that.
“But, uh, first…” the man says, “…can you give me a hand?” and promptly faints, falling to the ground.
He rushes forward to catch him in his arms, the metal arm squealing beneath the weight, and he winces, but the man is safe, and he does not know why he cares so much, but he does.
So he lays the man down gently on the ground, pillowing his head in a pile of autumn leaves. He tears the man’s star-spangled armor off and examines his muscled torso for wounds. The man was shot – and he remembers shooting those bullets into this flesh – and he is bleeding. He reaches for the man’s discarded undershirt and tears it into strips, fashioning them into bandages over the worst of the wounds. For all of his training, he was never taught how to heal, only how to kill, and he is out of his element here.
But he tries his best, for this man who thinks he is a friend, and when he is done he sits cross-legged at the man’s head, keeping vigil. He does not know why he is doing any of what he has done, but there seems to be a higher purpose to all of this, and he keeps that thought in mind as he gazes down at the face of the man.
He knows that the man has blue eyes that seem to hold the whole sky in their irises. He has sandy blond hair that moves with the wind. His skin is healthily tanned.
The man has no name in his mind. His commanders called him the Target, and the people call him Captain America.
He does not know what he would call the man. He wonders if he had his own name for him, back in that time when he was Bucky.
He sits there for several hours, keeping watch. Neither man nor beast disturbs them, and he feels something like content. It is an alien feeling, to have nothing to do or to think about. His mind feels blank, but it’s a happy kind of blank rather than the blank he feels after Pierce orders his memory to be wiped again, again, again.
At last, the man begins to stir, and he looks back down at him. He wonders if the man has nightmares like he does, every time he closes his eyes in sleep. Does he see black and grey imaged pierced by red, too?
The man struggles to sit up, but he doesn’t help. He knows the man is strong enough, despite his wounds, to do this on his own.
“Hey, thanks, man,” the man says, looking at him with those blue eyes. “Sorry to faint on you like that…I guess the blood loss got the better of me.”
He nods. “I bandaged your wounds, but you’ll need a medic.”
The man looks down at the bandages, which are already beginning to turn red with his blood. “Thank you,” he says.
He nods again, perfunctory.
“You don’t happen to know anything around here, do you?” the man asks. “We should probably try to get to civilization.”
“I know we’re near the Potomac, but I don’t know where exactly we fell,” he answers.
“Well, I guess we could just try walking along the river until we get to people,” the man suggests, and he extends a hand to help the man stand up. The man’s hand enclosed in his feels oddly familiar, and right.
IV.
They start off through the woods, their shoulders bumping every so often as they walk through the trees and brush. He wonders how there could be so much green in such a silver city.
As they walk, the man starts to talk to him. He doesn’t pay the man’s words much mind at first, thinking them simply the mutterings of someone who has lost too much blood and is a little woozy because of it. But then he keeps hearing that name – Bucky – that the man kept calling him, and he listens.
“You and I, Bucky, we’re best friends,” the man says. “We grew up together, two orphans in a lonely city. But you always had so many friends, so many people who loved you. I wasn’t so lucky, but I think you made up for that. I was never really jealous; I sort of just accepted that I’d never leave a party with a girl fawning over me, like you did every night.”
He almost cracks a wan smile at that. He can’t imagine girls paying him any attention like that. He doesn’t look in the mirror much, but he doubts that his dead eyes would be attractive to a girl.
“But you always told me how to treat a girl right – you were so intent on me finding a girl who’d love me, and you wanted me to know how to love her back. So we’d stay up ‘til the morning’s light, you in your bed and me in mine, whispering across the space between us,” the man continues. “And you always loved to see my art, my sketches, and one time, you told me I ought to apply to art school, and that if they didn’t take me then they weren’t worth me anyways.” He thinks he hears the man’s voice break, but he chalks that up to the blood loss. Surely this man is not getting so emotional over him, over the Winter Soldier.
“And then you enlisted, and you had to leave me behind, and it was tough, Bucky, it was really tough,” the man says. His leg catches on a branch and he nearly falls, but he reaches to support him, metal fingers against muscled flesh. “I did what I could, but I never really got used to an empty bed next to mine, with no one to share the darkness with me. So I got myself enlisted, sort of, and then I saw you again, and it was all rosy for a while. ‘Til that train, and the snow, and I let you fall.” The man runs a hand over his face, and he wonders if he is crying because he misses Bucky or if he is angry at the man who now wears Bucky’s face, or if maybe it is both of those rolled into one.
But there is something in his words that makes him think, that makes him feel like he is at the edge of remembering more than just colors and faint noises. He gets a picture of a small apartment, two twin beds, one on either side of the room, and a red carpet in between. He winces and presses his flesh hand to his forehead, and the man looks at him with concern.
“You need to see a doctor, too, Bucky,” the man says.
He turns on him, the two of them stopped in the middle of the woods. “Why do you care so much about me? I may share a face with your Bucky, but I am not him,” he retorts.
“You are Bucky,” the man replies. “And I know that you will remember that, one day. We grew up together; we fought together. You are Bucky, even if all you are right now is the Winter Soldier.”
Somehow, the name “Bucky” feels more right in the man’s voice than the name “Winter Soldier,” and he feels like he is on the verge of sliding the last few puzzle pieces together to make the picture. He just doesn’t know if he wants to see what that picture looks like yet.
It has been a long time since he has been scared; he barely remembers what that feels like anymore.
“I know it’s difficult right now, Bucky,” the man continues. “But I remember everything, and for now, I remember enough for the both of us.”
It is comforting to be told who he is, but it is a strange comfort that has been misused on him so often in the past, and he still isn’t sure if he can trust the man who was previously – or maybe still is – his Mission.
He starts walking again, and he can hear the crunch of the leaves under his boots mirrored by the man next to him. It feels right to walk side by side with this man.
“Besides,” he says, “there isn’t a hospital in the world that would take me. I know you think I’m Bucky, but the rest of the world still knows me as the Winter Soldier, and I’ve killed a lot of people.”
“When we get back to civilization,” the man says, “I know a few people I can contact. I can get you patched up, and then we can work on restoring your memories.”
And it all sounds so grand – a soft bed, proper bandages, food, and some nice therapy with Captain America. But it also sounds implausible.
“I’ll take care of myself,” he says. “Always have.”
“But you don’t have to, Bucky,” the man replies. “I’m offering you free medical care. I’m offering you your identity. All you have to do is agree to come with me.”
“I can’t do that,” he says.
They are silent for another hour.
“At least tell me where you’re going,” the man implores. “I’ll let you take care of yourself, like you said. But I can’t lose you again, just when I’ve gotten you back.”
And there are unspoken words there, words that he wants to say, like “I am not your Bucky – I was never lost to you.” But he feels like he would sound like a broken record, and this man seems so convinced that he is Bucky…
“Okay,” he promises.
It’s a promise he doesn’t intend to keep.
V.
So when he finds himself, three days later, standing in front of a hospital, he doesn’t know what to think.
He knows that the man is there, in a secure ward in that hospital, with guards posted outside his room.
Guards don’t mean anything to him, though, and he silently moves past them, using the cover of nurses and doctors bustling through the hallway to hide his movements. It is easy; it is something he has done countless times before. And those times feel like they belong to another life, now. He feels as though he has lived three lives – the first as Bucky, the man’s friend; the second as the Winter Soldier, an assassin with no memories except red blood on his hands; and the third as a nameless man, who is lost and yet found.
He slips into the man’s room, shutting the door quietly behind him.
The man is asleep, his life indicated by the rise and fall of his chest and the bleeping monitors that flank his bed.
He drops into a chair next to the man’s bed and watches him sleep, watches his eyes dart back and forth beneath closed eyelids.
He reaches into one of the pockets of his leather jacket (conveniently the perfect size to hide his metal arm; with the leather gloves on his hands and his new, shorter haircut, no one would suspect him for who he is – who he was) and draws out a carefully-folded letter.
Carefully, he places the letter in the man’s hand closest to where he sits, so that only the man will see it, and not some curious nurse, or God forbid, a SHIELD agent. No one needs to know about this.
He sits there for a few more moments, his eyes never leaving the prone body in front of him. It’s strange to see such force so static; he wonders if he looks like this when they have finished wiping his mind with their technology, when he collapses in the chair, sweating, silent.
He stands up, casts one last long look at the man, and leaves the room, letting the door close softly behind him.
As he walks down the sidewalk, keeping to the edges of the crowd, he recollects what he wrote in his letter to the man.
You told me to promise you that I’d let you know how I’m doing, where I am. I’m fine – you threw some good punches, but I’ll live. I’ve seen worse days. I can’t tell you where I am yet because I’m not sure where I’m going – but I won’t be going far. Maybe one day I’ll send you another letter once I’ve figured things out.
And by “things,” he means, of course, who the hell Bucky is.
He hadn’t been sure how to sign it, so he had just written the only initials he knows he has, that he knows belong to him – W.S. He was sure that the man would get the gist.
Three weeks later, he finds himself perched on a roof a block away from the apartment building where he knows the man lives. He didn’t stalk him; he just used the skills he has to find him. It sounds better to himself when he says it like that.
He leaves a note for the man in the mailbox with his room number plastered on it.
Hello again. Don’t worry – I’m not scouting out your apartment or anything. This isn’t a threat. Just wanted to let you know that I’ve found myself somewhere to stay at night. Don’t bother trying to find me – I’m off the grid.
He doesn’t sign this one. He doesn’t know who he is at all, and those letters that he signed with last time feel alien to him now.
VI.
Every night, it seems that the colors become clearer, like he went from 240p to 1080p on a YouTube video, and it’s startling how much he’s starting to remember now. He always wakes up with a name on his lips, and that name is enough to make him want to never fall asleep again. The man has a name, and that name will haunt him until he dies. It always has, it seems.
The man’s name has a color too, and he starts to wear bits of it in the clothing that he picks for himself. A sky blue t-shirt one day, a sky blue baseball cap the next. He’s used to wearing black and silver, but it’s a comfort, albeit a strange one, to carry the color of the man’s name on his person when he goes out to face the world.
He starts to see ghosts everywhere he looks – in the face of a girl walking down the street, in the square set of a veteran’s jaw as he sits on the subway. He always noticed everything before, but instead of putting everything he saw into little compartments labeled “Important to the Mission” and “Not Important to the Mission,” he now lets them float around in his brain, occasionally coming to the surface when he daydreams.
He has nightmares, more often than he has dreams. Those are all in black-and-white, and all he feels is cold snow and rough hands and pain, so much pain. Sometimes he feels the pain, and sometimes he causes the pain, but either way it leaves him waking up screaming, tearing his hair out.
He cuts his hair with a stolen pair of scissors soon after that. He doesn’t do a very good job of it, but it makes him feel a little better.
He’s seen pictures of what Bucky is supposed to look like, in the Smithsonian exhibit dedicated to that man. Bucky looks like him, and he looks like Bucky. Bucky has short brown hair and a wide smile. He’s got the hair now, but he’s still working on the smile.
After much deliberation, he goes to a library and uses one of the computers to look up everything he can on James Buchanan Barnes. Nearly every article mentions that man, in one way or another, and he wonders just how deep his bond with that man was – is.
There is a time, after much researching and attempts at remembering, when he wakes up to see that the moon is still visible in the sky above him, and suddenly, everything is clear. He remembers.
He has found the name that belongs to him.
So he does the only thing that he can think of doing right now. He knocks on the man’s apartment door.
And the man opens the door, blinking sleep from his eyes.
“Bucky?” he asks, suddenly alert.
“Hey, Steve,” Bucky replies with a grin, and everything feels right.
He lets the man – Steve – pull him inside the apartment and into an embrace. He lets himself be held, and he holds Steve back, and he is loath to but eventually he pulls away because the door is still open and he is trying to keep a low profile and he is certain that this apartment building is bugged, even if SHIELD is now defunct.
“How much do you remember?” Steve asks, closing the door with a kick of his heel. He leads the way into a small living room, a couch on one wall and a television on the other.
“Enough to know that I am Bucky,” he replies. He follows Steve to sit on the couch, and they leave several inches between themselves. “There’re parts that are still hazy, but it’s coming back to me a little more every day,” he says.
“Well, now that you’re here, we can work on getting you to remember everything,” Steve says, smiling openly at him, and it’s been so long since someone has cared so much.
“Thanks,” Bucky says, and tries to smile back. He thinks it looks more like a grimace, but it must have been on the right track because Steve’s smile grows wider.
There is silence, then, but it doesn’t feel so awkward. It feels almost natural to him now. He does not move, and he feels like he should, but there is something holding him back.
Steve leans forward for the television remote and hits some buttons. The room is filled with voices and it makes Bucky close his eyes, but only for a moment.
Steve, of course, notices, and he reaches to turn the television off again, but Bucky stops him with a light touch on his shoulder with his metal fingers, and he is about to move, move farther away, because his artificial metal against Steve’s perfect flesh is just wrong, but Steve, for some godforsaken reason, grasps his hand at the wrist, holding it in his hands.
“You’re okay,” Steve says, soothingly, and Bucky hadn’t noticed the tears on his cheeks until now. He goes to brush them away but Steve beats him to it, and it’s strange for someone to touch him and not mean to hurt him. He wants to flinch away, but he doesn’t, because there is that fishing line again, holding him close to this man.
“It’s all okay,” Steve continues. “All of it, all of you.”
And Bucky is shaking his head, trying to pull his hand away from where Steve is holding it against his chest, but Steve doesn’t let go.
“Even the parts you hate are part of you. And for the record, I don’t hate a single part of you.”
“You’ve seen my file by now,” Bucky mutters. “You know what I’ve done. I’m not anyone worth loving. I’d be okay with you hating me.”
“That wasn’t you,” Steve says. “That was the Winter Soldier. And sure, he had your face and your body, but he wasn’t you.”
Bucky isn’t quite sure what to do with those words; he can’t process them, and so he ducks his head down against his chest, wishing for the first time that he still had his long hair to cover his eyes when he doesn’t want to be seen.
There’s an arm at his back then, pulling him forward, and he goes with the motion, and he’s right up against Steve’s chest then.
He sees more colors, a grey sky and brown floorboards, and the morning was too cold, and he had woken up like this, safe in Steve’s embrace even though Steve was too small to protect him against anything, even the cold.
He’s crying again, and he hates this. Even though he doesn’t have to be strong anymore – after all, Steve has said that he is no longer the Winter Soldier, and it was the Winter Soldier who had to be strong – he still wants to be. He’s always been the strong one.
But Steve is bigger than he is now, and the cold can’t touch him, curled as he is in Steve’s arms.
VII.
And so days pass, and he learns a little more and remembers a little more with each sunrise and sunset. He discovers exactly how to survive in this world that moves too fast around him, and he recalls a time when it was he who dragged Steve off to see “the future,” not the other way around.
Together, they watch every movie that they found on some list on the Internet, and Bucky doesn’t feel enlightened by any of them, but Steve claims that these are “important” movies, that they hold secrets and puzzles, and Bucky doesn’t really mind that he doesn’t understand, because Steve can talk a mile a minute about the color of the paint on the walls of a hotel room in a movie and what that means. He thinks that Steve might’ve been a good teacher, if everything hadn’t turned out the way it did.
They eat in lots of restaurants, and Bucky tries whatever food Steve tells him is good. There are many items on the menus that are unfamiliar to him, so he trusts Steve’s judgment, just as he knows he always has. They made a good team, back before all of the bad stuff that came in the way of their friendship.
One day, Steve tells Bucky to make sure to clean up good, and Bucky does. He borrows Steve’s razor, just as he always does, and smooths his hair with water on his fingers so that it lays flat. Bucky lets Steve lead him through the city until they arrive at a hospice care center, and Steve doesn’t let Bucky ask any questions even though they are burning on his tongue. Steve signs them both in, writing fake names for each of them, and they walk down a long hallway until they reach the door that Steve is searching for. Steve pushes it open and Bucky follows him, and he recognizes her instantly.
“Peggy?” he asks, his voice gone hoarse all of a sudden. Because it really is her, it really is Peggy, and Steve is probably breaking all sorts of rules right now by letting him see her.
She looks up at him, and she smiles. “Bucky,” she sighs, and he walks over to her to grasp her hand in his, being careful not to let the metal (carefully hidden by the sleeve of his leather jacket) chafe her soft skin.
And he sits by the side of her bed and they talk, and Steve stands at the door, arms crossed but face kind, and this feels right too.
He tells her that her name is a lovely pastel pink, dashed with sparkling silver, and she seems to understand what he means.
They leave her, a smile on each of their faces.
Gradually, Steve helps Bucky to rebuild his life into a life that he is content, if not happy, to live. They share the apartment, just as they did before the war, all those years ago. Bucky thinks that, for all the time that has passed, he looks younger every day.
On the days when all he sees is red blood on his hands and smells grey smoke over his body, Steve is there, grounding him to a reality where the only color he sees is the sky blue of Steve’s name, and everything is okay again.
Eventually, he feels more like Bucky and less like who he was before – he will not even speak the man’s name – and he is not ashamed to walk through the city anymore. He no longer sees targets on the faces of every person he passes.
Steve is there, beside him, bumping shoulders with him as they amble down the street.
And nothing has felt more right in the world than this.