Chapter Text
It seems like forever and a day has passed when he finally gets the call.
Bucky chose, not so long ago, to return to cryo. And he’d been so entirely robbed of choice for such an unimaginably long time that Steve couldn’t find it in himself to put up a protest. He wished he could say it didn’t even occur to him. But walking away from a fight is still new to him, and there is no absence of drive - instead he is near overflowing with the opposite. His mouth almost always tastes bitter, these days. Adrenaline heady and constant and flavouring every breath. Contrary, he’d always been called. A punk . History didn’t remember that. History didn’t remember much of anything past what the propaganda circuit had written down. Monkey costume and all.
He had wanted, terribly, reproachfully, to head that fight.
Bucky chose to go back into cryo.
At first Steve hadn’t been able to understand it. Hell if he did, even now. If he was being honest with himself, he didn’t really want to understand it. He wanted to understand Bucky — of course he did. He wanted to relearn every aspect of him, old, new, damaged, patched over or scrubbed completely. But he also trusted him with a gut deep certainty that rebelled entirely against the thought of fridging him - just like HYDRA had done - until they could figure out how to control him better.
“I can’t trust my own mind” he’d said. And Steve had set his teeth against a barrage of protestations. As a counter-argument to over seventy years of brainwashing, physical and mental conditioning, and torture go;“You don’t have to -- trust me instead” is probably a little weak. And selfish, besides that. Bucky brought out such conflicting things in him. Such human things. And besides that, however stalwart it sounded in his head, he’s pretty sure it’d come out plaintive. That’s not the kinda case he wanted to make. That’s not fair. So, he smiled tightly and forced his hands down and loose into his lap and tries not to give it all away with a hangdog look — I trust you. I trust you. To the end of the line. To the bottom of the Potomac. Clasp your hands around my throat and I’ll welcome your touch.
He cleared his throat. Bucky sat across from him, dressed in white. He doesn’t look calm so much as resolute. He is looking at his hand. At the empty space parallel to it.
“Until they figure out how to get this stuff out of my head,” Bucky had said carefully, “I think going under is the best thing.” His eyes cut up to Steve. “For everyone. ”
Like this is the clear solution. Steve inclined his head so he has an momentary reprieve to blink away the burning in his eyes and actively tries to coach his jaw into loosening, clenched as it is, he can hear his teeth creaking. It’s futile, and he feels the give of a few, stress fractures splintering through them like pine limbs snapping in winter. Shotgun cracks amplified by air so still as to be frozen. They knit together again, damage undone, and he swiped his tongue absently along the bottom row. Bucky levelled him with a last discerning look. Long, and with the awful same tilt to his head, and then he leaned back. We’ll be having words, you and I. Steve gathered from those shrewd eyes. And he shot back, You bet we will. You better fucking believe we’ll be having words.
Bucky hadn't quite smiled, but the line of his mouth pulled into something easier, something Steve recognised.
He hated the hiss of the machine as Bucky settled into it. He hated the shadows the cold overhead lights cast across his features, hated the minute twitching of his eyes behind his closed eyelids. He wasn't tense, but he certainly couldn't be called relaxed. He held himself in check. His muscles spasmed, just slightly, against the gentle restraints. And then the door slid closed.
The flash-freeze pallor cloaked him, colour leached away in a instant, the glass frosting till he’s a wavy edged impression beneath it and clearing just as quick, leaving a gaunt and lifeless thing, uglier for its familiarity.
Is it anything like being in the ice? The thought is an intriguing, if disquieting one. Steve doesn’t remember much past the first shocking impression of cold. Shadows maybe, just faint. No colour. The cold doesn’t allow for colour. The thought of the ice leaves him, no surprise, cold. A clammy sweat gathers at the nape of his neck. He looks hard at the cryo pod and doesn’t understand.
Obviously it was more complex than just, locking Bucky away until HYDRA is razed unto the corrupt dirt from which it grew, and salting the earth behind it. He wants Bucky have as much autonomy as possible, and removing latent HYDRA triggers is essential to that, but fuck . Did he have to go into cryo, while Shuri dug through the shambles of his head and rooted out all of HYDRA's final, insidious, tendrils?
And the heart of it — I just got you back , he’d wanted to say. Quiet enough that Bucky’d have to lean his head close to Steve’s just to hear him. Soft, like he could gentle that awful, cornered thing that lived behind Bucky’s eyes with his voice, with a look. Please don’t leave me behind again.
He’s gotta shake himself out of it. He pushes down on the thoughts. That’s not fair, he knows, it’s not fair on either of them. So he didn’t say it. He thinks Bucky probably read it in his face anyway.
Bucky had chosen cryo. And all the fight in Steve just, stuttered. There was a battle here. If he'd asked, if he'd said, “God, Buck, I can’t do this alone please don’t leave me alone-“
Well. He’s pretty sure he’d’ve won it. But what would he have lost in the long run?
A long dormant thread in Steve is, jarringly, plucked. A scab peeled off. He’s left raw.
Steve isn’t a soft man. Kind, yes. Empathetic, and fair-minded? Certainly. But the world that shaped him had left very little room for softness .
Even so. Even when every day was a fresh battlefield, when being sick and disabled and 90 pounds soaking wet with a chip the size of Brooklyn on his shoulder had equaled, in the mind of his government, his society, his neighbors and the fists he met in back-alleys, a state of lesser personhood — something in him had retained a degree of elasticity. That elasticity had been claimed, and charmed like a junkyard mongrel into showing its belly by a boy just as scrappy and twice as charming as Steve himself. By James “Bucky” Barnes and the shine he took to Steve when he was still just a slip of a thing, all cowlicks and burning eyes and shoulder blades that poked through his shirt like vestigial wings.
He’d seen that fire, and some part of him had known it for what it could be. He stoked it, revelled in it, nursed the asthmatic flicker of it. He’s trouble, that Rogers boy, had been the neighbourhood consensus. And Bucky’d been more than happy to meet that challenge, head-first and howling. Offer that first hand up with a cocked and gap-toothed smile.
There’s nothing forgiving about walking through fire, but nonetheless Bucky had stripped off his boots and walked across live coals, matched Steve step for step. Leave me here. I can get by on my own . Steve’d said, snarled, hacked out and shouted, he’d shrugged Bucky’s hand off his shoulder, he’d stormed away again and again and the response - translation always the same, whatever form it took — Not without you. I know you can get by alone, but you don’t have to.
So — Any softness Steve had was spoken for. When Bucky fell, Steve Rogers faltered, and it was the Captain who picked his body up and marched it on. It was no wonder that nobody remembered Steve, here, in the 21st century. All that was left of him was a stalwart paragon wearing his face. Cap, they called him. Reduced him to. He came swinging out of the ice and he didn’t recognise the world he found himself in. The world didn’t recognise him either.
He was distant, this version of Bucky. Guarded. And Steve couldn't help but resent that just a touch. There hasn't been a single moment when he is not actively restraining himself from reaching out, to reassure himself that Bucky is real is here is in-the-flesh , is warm under his hands, all the while, Bucky can slip his eyes right over Steve, to a neutral point just past his shoulder, all easy like that. Like Steve hadn’t taken on the world and won just for him. And -- there it is. The dregs of WW2 still lurking in him. Bitter like coffee grounds. Post-Azzano wells up from some ugly place in him, one buried far, far, down. He’d caught the difference in Bucky even back then. The new coolness, the shedding of some afore fundamental layer. He’d looked into the middle distance over Steve’s new shoulder back then, too. Maybe he'd just never gotten a chance to get used to Steve's new body. God knows Steve never really did. Even now, he sometimes wakes up and the first thing he does is scrabble for his inhaler. Back then, when Steve said his name, his eyes first snapped to a point around about his breastbone. Around about as tall as he’d once stood, heels dug in against a stiff breeze. Steve is sick with how easy it was to ignore that. To take the reassurance that Bucky was fine, had his six, at face value. Hindsight is 20/20, and eidetic memory is cruel.
The role reversal aches, back then and still, because Bucky never gives him the option to pick up any slack. You got me , Steve desperately wants to tell him. You got me from the dust we came from, the dust you brushed from my flank when you picked me up off the ground, you got me to the dust unto which we all return. The memories play behind his eyes like projector reels. You don’t gotta get by on your own.
But all he can really do, as Peggy had put it, is allow Bucky the dignity of his choice. All he can hope is that one day, when that wash of red inside Bucky eases, he’ll accept that it’s Steve’s turn. It’s a pipe dream, but Steve thinks, sometimes, it’s okay to be greedy like that. Greedy with hope, hoarding possibility. It’s easy, with Bucky a bare few metres away from him. Please, he thinks. Don’t you see all the places we’re grown together? Again and again he thinks, Please, losing track of what it is he’s even begging for.
He couldn’t hide anything from Bucky, before. Not that subtlety had ever really been his strong suit, but even past that. Bucky could take one long look at him and the truth’d be spilling out of him before he even knew his mouth was open. Sometimes he didn’t even need to speak. It was enough to look, to be known, in ways no-one before or since -- bar his mother, and maybe Peggy, if they’d had more time -- had grasped.
But before was a long, long time ago. You can love someone without really knowing them, you have to - because people change. They evolve in ways that, sometimes, are hard to recognise. You have to look hard past that, past the static and distraction of new foliage and into the little grain at the core of them, the one that deep reaching roots and fickle new growths alike sprout from. Once you know the look of a person that deep you never forget them. Not truly. Because that seed is grafted to yours, now, too. You grow with and into one another, in the way of trees, if you twine their green branches together.
It had been hard at first, pressing through that thorny new growth. Thickets razed and seeded anew by first the Soviets, and then HYDRA as it pleased them. Groves upon groves of parasitic grafts sprung up wild and choking around the barest and hardiest dregs of Bucky. Of Barnes, James Buchanan, Sergeant, 32557038. Of the man on the bridge -- “ S-Steve? ”, “ I knew him- ” “ I thought you were smaller- ” “ You used to wear newspaper, in your shoes- ” “My name is Bucky-- ”
Steve can feel those woody thorns in his throat when he thinks about it too long. He’s always been one to pull the thread, once it’s been worked loose. Usually he’s the one to work it loose. This isn’t freedom , he thinks, back in the Triskelion, eye to eye with Nick Fury and finding he doesn’t know who he’s looking at. This is fear.
He’s afraid too. He was then, but the anger had overtaken that and it had been in a rush of red and blurred movement and gunshot upon gunshot upon gunshot and all of a sudden the world was quiet again. Quiet in the way of a storm’s eye. Deadened, and a hairsbreadth from a riptide edge of chaos. Steve is eye to eye with the Winter Soldier, - a ghost, you’ll never find him, I need the casualty list from Azzano, Please tell me if he’s alive, a scream that echoes and echoes off the sides of the gorge, into and around Steve’s head for far longer than it should - and he finds he knows who he’s looking at.
Oh. He thinks. I know you. I knew you. I knew him.
And the fragile imitation of life Steve’d begun to build was in ruins around him. The thread was red, and leading him through the labyrinth. Only he was the one chasing the monster, in this case. A turned around Theseus with a ball of bloody yarn tracking around blind corners, over-through-and-under dead ends. The only genius at the center of this maze was a mad one, and long dead at that. It was the walls themselves Steve was concerned with. The walls, the echo, and his own bare hands. They would crumble just as surely as they were built, until there was no shadows for any hideous last tendril to grasp, and be cloaked in. Until he could bring Bucky home. No matter that he hadn’t built one yet. Easier with shared life experience, he reckoned. With a strength equal to his own. With someone he could hold and not need to worry about checking his grip.
The Winter Soldier pulls him from the river, and all of a sudden Steve is shaking down the whole damn world. As though Bucky might fall from a hidden pocket like so much spare change. He took the hint, eventually. It wasn’t that you couldn’t find someone who didn’t want to be found, it was that Bucky didn’t want to be found. He didn’t want to be found, and hell if Steve was letting anyone override even his smallest, or most wrenching, or pig-fucking-headed, choices. Either he’d come back to Steve, or he’d let Steve come across him. The thread was there, and it was red, but it wasn’t the arterial shade of the last. It was old blood, from deep, and near black with all that was packed into it. The kinda blood you hope to god you don’t see on your hands, cos it means something deep and vital has been pierced. Something you can’t live without. Of course, in the way of these things, the plan promptly derailed itself and Steve found himself halfway up shit creek and scrabbling for a paddle.
He hadn't followed the thread, but he always came back to it. Reassured himself that it was still there. It was a strange grey area that he occupied for a time. It was preferable to the purgatorial half-life he'd found himself going through the motions of, in the period after the ice and before Shield had come up dirty. But infinitely more frustrating, because now he knew what else there was. What else he might have. All that was missing, and that could be found. That limbo, and all its yearning, had been the status quo for a time. Natasha could make as many jokes as she liked about setting lighted candles in his window, the wry little twist to her mouth told him she was as good as serious. She, like the truth, might not be all things to all people all the time, but she gave a good impression of it. He was beginning to see the deeper, more permanent roots of her. They were elusive, with mis-leads planted in increments among those he managed to glimpse, but that tiny seed held fast. A jealous copse ringed around it, but whatever rare sliver he managed to catch through her own cultivated and wary thornbrush, it was kindred. They were both, he decided, in the wrong business.
All he had was candles in the window. All he could do was keep on. That’s all he’s ever really known to do. That was the foundation of it all. You always stand up, and once you’re on your feet? You keep on. This time, though, it wasn’t the soldier in Steve that pushed him up and walked it off. It was the kid from Brooklyn, the one who was too dumb to run away from a fight. It was Sarah Roger’s voice in his head, and the phantom touch of her hands - gentle through his hair, slow circles on his back.
It was Bucky, walking through fire every damn day of his life, just to keep Steve company.
So he clamped down on all that. Bucky goes into Cryo, and Steve smiles, thanks T’Challa like he ain’t leaving something of himself frozen solid with Bucky in there. Like part of him isn’t waiting, still, since 1945, to thaw.
And then life goes on. He lives and dies with each new update. Until finally, the Call comes in.
T’Challa is at the other end, like he doesnt have more important things to do than personally cater to Steve’s neurotic bullshit. His voice is layered in understanding, though. And Steve recognises, as with Sam, and Natasha, a kindred root anchored firm and robust in his core.
There’s something appealing about the cadence of T’Challa’s voice, a rightful assurance, tempered and warm, coiled through with strength. When he speaks, you want to listen.
Sometimes Steve doesn’t recognise the voice that comes out of his own mouth. The brassy articulation springs out like he’s still hot under stage lights, pace to pace with the USO showgirls. It’s Captain America’s voice, on beat through the tongue twister, every bond you buy is a bullet in the barrel of your best guys gun! Fist cocked to clock Hitler for the 107th time. Bucky’d looked at him askance when that voice made its first appearance. Startled a little, when he tracked the source of the polished, newscaster sounding fuck to Steve . He didn’t say anything though. It was Bucky . He didn’t need to. Steve’d flushed a little, all of a sudden self-conscious. He dialled back the voice around Bucky, but more than once he caught the tail-end of some indeterminate expression sliding from his face, just as Steve cast an eye at him. Sometimes he was almost sure it was a smirk. More often, though, he thought it was probably a frown.
Steve was pure Brooklyn when it was just him and the Howlies. As soon as he stepped away from the command tents his accent thickened up like the New York smog’d taken up residence in his lungs and the words were coming out coated over. It was more often than not Cap’s voice that came out when he spoke, nowadays. He has to try for his smoggy twang now. Has to rifle through his tamped down guts to find it.
He snaps back into the present when the phone rings, his heart jolting in his chest at the caller ID. He answers.
"It is time, Captain,” T’Challa's voice comes in smooth over the line. “Would you like to be here, when he wakes?”
Steve takes in a breath that reaches a fresh depth of lung he hadn’t realised he possessed. He holds it, and the adrenaline that floods through him could almost be sweet.
He clears his throat, and Brooklyn colours the words: “I’m on my way.”