Work Text:
It's a photograph of a man, larger than life and smiling back at him like a trick mirror. The soldier doesn't know his name.
No, that's a lie. He can see his name printed right there. James Buchanan Barnes. The letters are clear as day but the words are white noise, buzzing in the back of his mind like a live wire. Maybe if he were brave enough to touch it it’d shock him and everything would be back to the way it was before, just like every other time they pumped electricity through his brain. He’d welcome to the pain now, if only to wipe away the uncertainty and bring himself back into focus. There are cracked bricks throughout the city where he’s beaten his knuckles bloody and raw in search of the same effect. Given enough time he could turn the whole city to dust.
Bucky. It doesn't even sound like a real name.
Then why won’t it stop ringing in his ears?
The soldier looks away, hands buried deep on the pockets of his jacket. It's ratty and stolen but it serves a purpose. He's too recognizable without the benefit of the hood's shadow across his face. Every major news outlet has played the footage over and over again. Burning metal crashing into the Potomac. Shattered glass and dusty rubble of buildings destroyed. A creature with cold eyes and a metal arm. The soldier flexes it now, feeling the metal ripple distantly, like a phantom limb. They don't know what they can't see - the scar tissue and history that stitches the metal to the creature’s skin. All they know is that that arm, those eyes-
They could tear apart the world.
The speculated civilian casualties changes with the wind, but they never a misses opportunity to compare it to Manhattan. They play the footage again and again and even when it ceases to be anything new the soldier watches anyways, if only for a flash of red, white, and blue.
Captain America. The target. They're all here to see him, milling about the museum exhibit as if the photographs could live up to the real thing, and the soldier is no exception. A film plays in a loop around the corner, a neutral voice narrating over old footage tells the tail of the good captain. He's inescapable here. Yet the soldier remains.
Steve. The name makes the soldier's hand twitch reflexively, barely contained violence warring with something deeper. Steve Rogers. A scrawny kid from Brooklyn who couldn’t keep himself out of trouble to save his life. Who doesn't know how to run away. Bucky Barnes would do anything to keep him safe.
And the soldier doesn’t know why.
The captain’s looking for him, but he won’t find him. The soldier won’t let him. If there’s one thing a ghost excels at it’s learning not to exist and the soldier has been a ghost for an awfully long time. He’ll lurk in the periphery of reality, like a figure made of mist. He already has. Every time the captain gets too close he slips between his fingers, as intangibly as only a man without a name can truly be. The captain will never catch him because he can’t. The soldier doesn’t know what he’ll do if he does. Kill him, maybe.
And Bucky can’t let that happen.
Maybe he was a man once and not too long ago he was a soldier, but now he’s just an attack dog with a broken leash. His masters trained him too well, beat him down and forged him into something new and sharp and deadly. They have so many names for him. He’s a ghost, a soldier, a machine. He’s the Russian winter, brutal but predictable, and now that spring has come there’s nowhere left for him to go. It’s too late for him to be reprogrammed. Even Bucky knows that.
Sometimes the only cure for an attack dog is a bullet between the eyes.