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Everything inanimate in the room is white. White walls, white floors, white chairs, white tables. White clothes against the dark skin of the man who tends to Bucky with gentle hands. White instruments all around them. A person-sized white chamber for Bucky to climb into and allow new strangers to stop his heart. Steve stands at a safe distance, safe because he’s out of the way as they work and safe because if he were any closer he might lose control and start flipping tables. He watches, helpless, as a black cloth wrap is secured over the splintered, sparking remains of Bucky’s metal arm. Watches as the doctor takes his temperature, times his heartrate, listens to his lungs, checks his other vitals.
Bucky looks upset, but doesn’t flinch away from the doctor’s touch. Steve doesn’t know whether or not to count that as a victory, however small it may be. He doesn’t know if Bucky really feels safe, here, or if he’s just been conditioned not to flinch. One gives him hope, the other fills him with icy dread.
He’s so different, not only to the boy he’d been in Brooklyn, but to the soldier Steve had lost track of two years ago when he’d refused to fight and nearly drowned and Bucky had run before Steve came to on the bank of the river. His hair long and dirty from the fight, his cheeks and jaw covered in dark stubble, his shoulders broad and his muscles bulging. Steve hates what that means, hates the idea of Bucky keeping himself in peak physical condition in his apartment in Romania, never knowing when he might be found and needing to be able to defend himself when he was. The mattress on the floor that could be easily flipped up against the wall to block the windows, the backpack ready to go and hidden under the floorboards. Possessions minimal, personal touches almost nonexistent. Prepared at any moment to flee, to fight, to accept not being taken alive. Steve’s heart breaks to remember Brooklyn, remember Bucky golden and full of sunlight. Easy smiles and glittery laughs, the softness in his eyes when he’d look at Steve, the gentleness of his touches, the fierceness of his loyalty.
But then, he was different during the war, too. Steve isn’t sure he ever quite realized how much. He’d found Bucky, delirious and strapped to an operating table in that horrible place, but the boy he’d rescued hadn’t been his Bucky. At least, not all of him. The sweetness was still there, the devotion, the hands that touched Steve on their cot, the fingers that gripped at him as if he was afraid to let go, the lips that kissed him with love and desperation burning through every press of flesh. But pieces of him were left on that table in Austria. Steve noticed it, then. But maybe was too distracted by everything else to notice just how much Bucky had been changed by capture, by torture. The light in his eyes had dimmed, and it never, ever came back the same as it had been before.
And now, the war is a distant memory. For Steve it feels closer, only a few years back. For Bucky, it’s been decades. Steve can’t think too much about what’s happened in those decades. He’ll start screaming and he might never stop. He’s slipping, falling, grasping at a ledge too smooth to hold onto, but he has to. For Bucky.
Unable to be so far away anymore, feeling the need to be closer like ants under his skin, Steve forces one foot in front of the other until he’s near enough to speak. “You sure about this?” he asks. It isn’t what he means to say, but it’s what comes out when he opens his mouth.
Bucky shakes his head sadly; not saying no, just indicating regret. “I can’t trust my own mind.”
Steve squeezes his molars together. So many emotions are tangled up inside him, conflicting, each fighting for dominance in his mind so it’s all just a confusing, noisy blur. He swallows them all down. This isn’t his choice to make. It doesn’t matter how much it hurts him, how much it aches in his bones, to imagine losing Bucky again, so soon after he’d finally gotten him back. His hurts don’t matter. This might be the first completely free choice Bucky has made since 1945. Steve couldn’t take that from him, no matter how much it hurts.
Bucky smiles sadly, and it’s those eyes, again. Those eyes that used to be bright and brilliant and sparkly, that now are dull and lifeless. Although underneath, if Steve really looks, he can see shadows of something glimmering. The potential of something that could resurface one day. “So, until they figure out how to get this stuff out of my head, I think going back under’s the best thing. For everybody.”
Steve nods.
“I know you don’t like it,” Bucky continues, he looks down at his hand, curled into a loose fist against his thigh.
“Can we have a minute?” Steve asks, looking specifically at the doctor attending to Bucky but addressing everyone in the room. The various technicians exchange glances, but then they nod and quietly exit.
Once they’re alone, Steve looks at Bucky. At the chestnut strands of hair falling into his eyes, at the bruises on his body, marring his tanned skin with blue and purple. He wants to touch, to run light fingertips over those marks, to brush Bucky’s hair back like he used to even when it was far shorter than it is now. He resists, but feels the strain in every muscle in his body.
“You’re not gonna talk me out of this, Steve.”
Steve exhales heavily. He rubs his hands over his face, feels such a heavy weight settle on his shoulders. Almost too heavy to bear, almost enough to send him tumbling onto the floor. “No, I’m … I’m not.”
Bucky looks up at him. That makes it harder to continue, but Steve does.
“I don’t like it, I won’t lie to you about that. But after Hydra … I’m not gonna be another person making you do something you don’t want to do.”
Bucky regards him carefully, a frown creasing his forehead and cautious apprehension written all over his face, but he nods slowly. “Thank you.”
Unconsciously, Steve’s left hand reaches out, before he catches himself and forces it back down to his side. Bile burns in the back of his throat. Bucky’s isn’t his to touch anymore. Steve grinds his teeth again and hates himself for applying pressure, even if he hadn’t meant to.
Bucky’s eyes follow Steve’s hand, eyebrows still bunched in a frown but one corner of his mouth twitching up. Only slightly, minutely, not anything close to a real smile, but Steve sees it. “I remember, you know?”
“Remember what?”
“Everything.” Bucky blinks, and his gaze drifts back up, catching Steve’s eyes. “Not everything from when I was … lots of that is still fuzzy. I don’t remember killing Stark’s parents. I lied. Tell him I’m sorry, would you? If you see him again?”
Steve nods. “Yeah, of course.”
“But everything from before. I remember Brooklyn. I remember my parents, and Becca. I remember our apartment, I remember … you and me.”
A nervous rush of saliva he has to quickly swallow, heat bursting over his skin, yet another clench of his jaw to keep his bottom lip from quivering like it desperately wants to.
“You do?” Steve asks, his voice weak, raspy, foolish hope and joy and heartbreak rolling through him all at once, terrified of daring to believe it could be true but needing it so badly it consumes him.
“I wonder if maybe I got the better deal, between us.” Bucky’s eyes settle somewhere in the center of Steve’s chest, unfocused, like he’s remembering. “You had to watch me die. Had to live all this time thinking you’d never see me again. I don’t think I could’ve lived with that. But I always did need you more than you needed me.”
“That’s not true.” Steve’s voice cracks, and he fights to keep tears at bay. “I needed you. Still did all these years, even when you were gone.”
“You can touch me,” Bucky tells him.
“I don’t want …”
“You’re not.” Bucky shakes his head and makes eye contact again. The wistful look is gone, replaced by something Steve can only describe as nervous determination. “I know what it means to have my own thoughts, again. To make decisions. I’m telling you that you can touch me.”
Like water bursting through a dam, Steve stumbles forward until his thighs hit the edge of the table and collapses against him. He wraps his arms around Bucky’s back, gripping him tightly, and Bucky’s arm goes around Steve’s shoulders and squeezes back.
“I missed you so damn much,” Steve rasps, pushing his face into Bucky’s damp hair, greedily breathing him in. Trying to find him again, get Bucky back in his lungs and on his skin like he used to be, so Steve can belong to someone again. He’s been alone, all this time. New friends and new teammates and a new life, and through it all, in the ways that matter, he’s still alone. And he’s so selfish, feeling sorry for himself while Bucky’s the one who was taken, and tortured, and erased.
“I missed you, too,” Bucky says back, in a harsh whisper. “I remembered you, Steve. I wasn’t ever supposed to. But I did.”
Steve breathes heavily, dragging his nose along Bucky’s cheek, yearning to kiss him but not wanting to cross that line, to push too far. Bucky takes the decision from him, pressing their lips together in just the barest of touch, but it lights Steve up inside, shines dazzling sunlight into all his corners that have been dark for so long.
“I went to the museum,” Steve tells him, leaving his forehead resting against Bucky’s when their lips fall apart. He stays close, sharing air, Bucky’s fingertips stroking through the hair at the nape of his neck. “The same one you did, the exhibit about me. And you.”
“Messed with my head so much, at first,” Bucky admits. “I didn’t remember myself, right away. Just remembered you.”
If Steve were to try to respond, to process the idea that Bucky remembered him before he remembered himself, he’d burst into tears. So he doesn’t. He continues the point he’d been making, and the words tumble out of his mouth in a free-fall. “There’s so many details of our lives up on the walls, where we lived, the things we did, the people we knew. But not everything. We were so careful, we never left any evidence. I went to that damn exhibit thinking it would make me feel more connected to who I used to be, but I left feeling more alone than ever. They have all their facts, and their photographs, and people leave that exhibit thinking they know who I am. And they don’t. Loving you is such a massive part of who I am, and nobody knows.”
Bucky shakes his head, confused. “That’s what we wanted, Steve. We couldn’t have left a paper-trail. Not back then. It wasn’t safe.”
“I know. I know it’s what we wanted then. But now … I’ve been so scared that maybe it all didn’t really happen.” It feels so precarious to admit it, even to the person who knows him best in the world. The person he’s loved since before he understood what love was. “If I’m the only person alive in the whole world who knows it happened … maybe it didn’t. And even if it did, it dies with me. When my time is up, it goes too, and …”
“And what?” Bucky prods, gently. Comforting Steve, when he should be the one in need of comfort.
“It doesn’t matter,” Steve mutters.
“It matters to me.”
“There’ll be obituaries in all the big papers. Tributes to me on the news, books written about my life. Updated panels at the museum. But they won’t be complete. Millions of people will think they know who I was, without ever knowing someone loved me, once. The most important thing in the world to me will be missing from my story.”
Bucky’s hand cups his cheek, and he kisses Steve again. It’s over so quickly. He’s so selfish, making the moment all about himself when God only knows the horrors Bucky has seen in the last 70 years. It makes Steve sick to his stomach to even imagine. And tragically, they don’t have the time to get into it just now.
He aches to beg Bucky not to do this, please don’t leave me again is heavy on his tongue, but he swallows it down with everything else. It wouldn’t be fair. What he says instead is, “come back soon.”
“Not really up to me,” Bucky says, his voice kind but sad.
“I know.”
“It’ll be okay,” Bucky promises.
He’s always done that. For their whole lives, Steve’s always been the one less in touch with his emotions but more easily paralyzed by them, and Bucky’s always known how to put on a brave face even when he’s struggling and promise, at times through clenched teeth, that everything will be alright. It was hardly ever something he knew for sure. He was just practiced in the art of talking Steve down off whatever righteous, indignant ledge he’d climbed up onto any given day. He’s so ashamed, suddenly, of all the weight he always put on Bucky’s shoulders. So much weight and responsibility that he carried it with him decades into the future, and sits, now, small and broken and about to submit again to the care of strangers after everything he’s been put through, and even still, he’s putting on that pained smile and reassuring Steve.
And Steve will be okay, because he doesn’t have any other option. It’s only a million tiny cuts all over his body, his heart, his soul, slowly bleeding him dry. How could be not be okay, when Bucky’s been through so much worse.
“I know,” he repeats.
Steve watches as Bucky steps into the chamber and leans back, strapped in by hands that belong to people he’s never met but is forcing himself to trust. The glass door raises slowly and seals, locking him in. Bucky doesn’t look at him. Instead he closes his eyes, relaxes. The frozen air comes up, within seconds he’s gone. Taken from Steve again. The only thing that keeps Steve from breaking down right there in the lab, is a tiny, fraying thread of hope that maybe this time, he’ll get Bucky back.
The king stands by a large window in the hallway, looking out over the lush forest below them. Steve joins him, no longer able to look at Bucky’s motionless body as the technicians prepare the chamber for transport.
“You really think your sister can fix him?” Steve asks.
T’Challa glances at him sideways, a knowing smile on his lips. “This stays between us, her ego is swollen enough as it is. But I think perhaps there is nothing she cannot fix.”
Steve nods, and clings to that hope.
“You are welcome here any time, Captain. If you need a place to take refuge. Your friends, as well. I can’t imagine it will be smooth sailing for any of you, for the foreseeable future.”
“That’s generous, thank you.”
“And Sergeant Barnes can stay as long as he needs. He will be safe, here.”
“Thank you for this.”
“Your friend and my father, they were both victims. If I can help one of them find peace …” he trails off, but Steve doesn’t need him to finish the thought.
“You know, if they find out he’s here, they’ll come for him.”
T’Challa grins again. “Let them try.”