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It begins the same way everything between them does: in the middle of a fight.
They’re varying degrees of seventeen, each a child between swathes of grown-up skin, a patchwork of nursery rhymes and tax-filing. They’re reverse-unraveling more every year; stitch by stitch supernova-learning what it means to create a whole from one half. There’s a dark alley and a mouth full of blood and a curled fist, but they’ve been beating and being beaten so long that they don’t quite know what belongs to whom anymore. There’s color everywhere and it’s making Bucky dizzy. There’s someone at someone else’s feet, a voice saying, "Had enough yet?" and another spitting, "Why, you got someplace to be?"
Bucky’s pretty sure that was Steve, just then, with the spitting. It feels like Steve. The words are pink and scratching at his hunched shoulders like a bad sunburn, which is definitely Steve when he’s pissed off, but only just pissed off. When he’s full-out furious, he’s just red.
"Man, you two just don’t know when to quit," someone says and, yeah, that’s the bastard they’re facing off against, bruise-purple phrases between gritted teeth. "You like gettin’ into fights?"
"Nah," Bucky rasps, pressing a thumb to his split lip and standing. "I like winning them."
It’s a pretty good one-liner, but it would’ve been better if it ended this whole thing. It doesn’t. He and Steve sort of get their asses kicked, and then the guy runs off, and neither of them can really remember why they were fighting him in the first place, but that’s alright, because they’re still mostly in one piece and at least they’ve got each other.
Steve’s nose is still bleeding as they’re walking home, and Bucky stops them in the middle of the street to dab at it carefully with the sleeve of his shirt. This one’s ruined anyway; might as well put it to use.
"Thanks," Steve says, voice cracking creamy peach, still sounding halfway to anger but too tired to touch it.
"Any time." Bucky throws crooked smiles at Steve like he throws punches at everyone else: often, and with vigor. "'S a good look for you."
Steve smiles back, bemused. "What, defeat?"
"No, contrast. Blue and red. ‘S good. I like it."
Steve tilts his head down to look at his shirt. It’s brown, loose around his thin ribs. "I’m not wearing blue. Somethin’ wrong with your eyes, Buck?"
"My eyes work just fine,” Bucky replies. He proves it by rolling them, and there it is again; the easy banter between them, traded like sugar and salt, hooks catching at their edges to pull them closer. “I meant the blood. It’s red. And you. Blue.”
There’s a moment of soft silence while Steve looks at him, eyes all crinkled up at the corners and mouth slipping into navy silk hesitance. "What do you mean, Buck?"
Bucky shifts uncomfortably. “You,” he repeats, halting. “You're blue. Your name, your voice... everything. You know? The bluest blue. It's just your thing. Mine’s red, so." He tries another smile, but it’s rust-nervous and falls short. "Sunset always follows sky."
Steve is still staring at him, but there’s a glint in his eyes and he’s chewing thoughtfully on his lower lip. Bucky shivers under his gaze, but Steve keeps looking. "You experience everything in color? Even words and sounds?"
"Yeah." Bucky frowns. You making fun of me? sits on the tip of his tongue, a barbed wire defense, but he doesn’t say it; Steve isn't cruel like that. "What, you don’t?"
"No," Steve says. "I don’t."
"But... It’s everywhere. Every time someone opens their damn mouth, there’s a color. Sometimes two. You— You don’t feel them?” Bucky waves a hand between them, as if he can push fingers into the gaps that leave Steve's world so flat.
"No," Steve says again. "I think you’re the only one who does."
Bucky sucks in a crushed breath. Orange-black and pinned like butterfly wings. Steve reaches out for him, palm warm against his arm where he’d rolled his sleeve up before the fight. That seems like years ago, now, but also like the future.
"Hey," Steve says. "We’re only a few blocks from home, and I’ve got a few pages left in my sketchbook. When we get there... I want to understand. Can you show me?" His smile is back again, as blindingly lapis lazuli as always. "Please?" he murmurs, and, well.
Bucky Barnes has always been powerless to deny Steve Rogers anything.
✰
(Steve always thought it was funny how he was the artist, but Bucky was the one who saw the world in technicolor.)
✰
They go to war. Bucky stays silent about what he is, how he sees things, the way emotions and images tangle like wires in his head, ends sparking connections no one else can make. Different. Defective. There is no use for color when everything is grey and dark and full of boys' blood.
(And they are boys, still; dressed up in their grandfather’s camouflage, terrified and lonely and trying to be men. Children, thought they lost their innocence long ago. War never lets anyone stay innocent for long.)
After he saves Bucky from the Austrian prison, Steve remembers what a rainbow is. After Bucky falls from the train car, he forgets again.
He puts the HYDRA plane in the water, and all at once he's awake again, and New York is nothing like he remembered it. It hurts to look at the sky; he thinks of Bucky falling from a blue mountain in a blue jacket, screaming a blue name.
Neither of them saw the end of the war, but if they had, it might’ve looked like dawn.
✰
The Russians unmake James Barnes.
They hook fingers into the spaces between his seams and tug upwards until he unravels, until he splits open from rib to navel and all the things that once made him whole spill out onto the tile like the stuffing in a child’s toy. They decide which parts of himself he’s allowed to keep and which they strip out of him, to lay open and exposed on the operating table. They take the memory of his mother’s face and the Cyclone at Coney Island and the tongue-pink trembling of his voice as he said, "I’m following him." All of it sits there on their metal tray, being picked apart like you’d dissect a cadaver, and he wants to scream, wants to break all the bones in their wrists, wants to shove them into this chair and show them how horribly wrong it is to have someone else in your head, but he doesn’t. He can’t.
They unmake him and remake him; they pull him apart and stitch him back up with metal and frost and yes sir and no sir. At first, he wants to tell them that they left something out, ruck up his shirt and point out the ragged hole in his chest where they stole his heart away and forgot to replace it with anything.
After a month, he stops wanting to tell them. He stops wanting anything at all.
He stops wanting but he doesn’t stop noticing. There’s color in every breath, every movement, every simple curl of his lip as he speaks. There’s color in the silver scrape of metal melding with skin, in the lilac please of his target’s last words; something like sky behind his ribs every time he closes his eyes. It’s the only thing that stays, wipe after wipe. Yes sir and no sir and the way the world is so bright and full that it hurts to be empty: this is all he has left.
They take everything else but they can’t take the color from his fingertips, his head, what used to be his heart. They can’t take that. They couldn’t even try.
And then the man on the bridge says, "Bucky," and it’s not snow or steel or the careful, calculated fluorescents of the room where they keep his heart in a cracked glass jar, collecting dust and longing for the place where it used to fit into him. The man on the bridge says, "Bucky," and it’s vibrant and gorgeous, a streak of crimson, and there’s a sixteen year old with thin wrists and wheezing breath and bloody knuckles, in a dark alley, saying, "Nice to meet you, James," and another boy, who holds himself taller and wears a younger, softer version of the Winter Soldier’s face, saying, "No one calls me 'James' but my old man."
The man on the bridge says, "Bucky," and it’s red like a sunrise, but all he can see is the sky that comes after it.
✰
He says, “The man on the bridge— I knew him,” and the man in the suit says, “Start over.”
The mouth guard snaps underneath his teeth and the left arm of the chair wears the imprint of his fingertips. His screams are as red as the name that no longer belongs to him. There’s a moment of clarity, just as they pour him back into himself only to wrench him out even more thoroughly than before, when he wonders if it ever will again.
The moment passes. He is a soldier. He is a weapon. Where is his assignment?
The red and the blue cling to the white of his bones.
✰
It's called synesthesia— mixing the senses, taste and touch and sight crossed in his head like bone forearms in their graves. It sits in his mouth like a gunmetal prayer, a word created just for him, by people like him.
He Googled it.
The twenty-first century is nothing like the books of his childhood promised, but it has its merits nonetheless. These people— they don't have flying cars, but they do have clean-cut labels for everything. At least now he has one less reason to call himself an outcast.
It takes him a while to be able to use the word; a lot because he's uncomfortable calling himself anything so close to special, and a little because he can never pronounce it correctly on the first try.
Steve still asks him, sometimes, to do what they did so many years ago, in a different age, in a different life; to sit by him and try to explain while Steve paints it all in the right colors but the wrong shades. Nothing is ever as bright as it is in his head, though nothing is ever as dark, either. His long year of recovery taught him that in more ways than one.
Sometimes a heavy blood drive no edges its way past his teeth, but most of the time he bites down on it before it leaves him. He's never quite been able to refuse anything Steve asks of him.
(Sunset and daybreak are different people, but they've always been part of each other.)