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It is a long, long time since Bucky Barnes has been James Buchanan Barnes. It is longer than seventy years, even with a little give and take. It is longer than eighty years.
It is eighty-seven years.
It is eighty-seven years since James Buchanan Barnes stood outside a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, while his mother carried the baby and his father said that this was their home.
Bucky doesn’t remember much, not really. He thinks he remembers the smell, of decaying food and a distant hint of mown grass, pungent in the heavy and close summer evening. He thinks he remembers cracks in the sidewalk and a sudden certainty that they ran deeper than rivers and oceans, than chasms, than canyons.
.
This is what Bucky Barnes does not remember:
His father was an undertaker and they moved to Brooklyn, from South Bend, Indiana, in 1927. Bucky was nine, going on ten, and he didn’t know why they left. South Bend was thriving and his mother was an east coast girl at heart. Brooklyn Heights was not thriving but Bucky didn’t know why they came.
The shock came when he realised that the whole house wasn’t theirs. His father would run the business out of the basement and the ground floor and they would live on the first floor. The second floor housed two other families. He would have to share a room with his baby sister, who cried a lot and didn’t do much else.
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This is what Bucky Barnes does not remember:
He expected to be mocked. He expected to go to school and to be bullied for being a country boy but that didn’t happen.
Rich boy, they called him. Where are your servants? they asked him. What kinda car does your daddy drive?
And he didn’t think to tell them that his daddy drove hearses and gave homes to dead men and dead women.
They asked what his name was and he didn’t tell them that he was James Buchanan Barnes. No, he introduced himself as Bucky Barnes because that’s what his granddaddy called him when he was still little enough to sit on his granddaddy’s knee when he drove his hearse (and it was one of the first petrol-driven hearses in Indiana).
Bucky Barnes wasn’t a rich boy’s name.
It wasn’t a bully’s name, either, and he hauled some kids off a smaller boy, who had hair the colour of Indiana corn, kinda sickly yellow (gold, if he squinted a bit and the sunlight was right).
“You can call me Bucky,” he said, sitting down next to the kid and pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket. A gentleman always carries a handkerchief, his grandfather said, and so should snotty-nosed little boys.
It was a long time before the kid managed to find the breath to speak. It was a long time before he stopped dabbing at his mouth and Bucky couldn’t look away from the bright red smears on the white cotton of his handkerchief, that trailed to pale pink at the edges.
“Steve,” said the kid. “My name’s Steve.”
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This is what Bucky Barnes does not remember:
“I think I made a friend today,” he said to his mother. He was going to be ten in a month and he had made a friend, perhaps. He had friends in Indiana, cousins mostly, but Brooklyn is different.
“Good for you, honey,” his mother said and she was smiling widely, like there’d never been any doubt. “What do his parents do?”
Bucky frowned because he hadn’t thought to ask.
The next day, he ate his lunch with Steve, at the end of a long, cracked table, with long benches. The schoolyard was grey, with a single patch of grass that was more brown than green. It looked nothing like the schoolyard in Indiana, that was sometimes more brown than green in the early May heat, but there was room to run without sharp, jagged corners of concrete and iron.
He turned to Steve and thought about what his mother had said.
“What do your parents do?” he asked.
“My da’s dead,” said Steve.
“Oh,” said Bucky.
“But he was a soldier,” said Steve.
“Oh!” said Bucky. “So was my dad. A soldier. He was away at war when I was born.”
“So was mine,” said Steve, picking at a thumbnail. “He never came back.”
“Oh,” said Bucky. He frowned. “What does your mom do?” It seemed a safer subject because a mother was a mother. Sometimes, his mother helped his father with the accounts but, if anyone asked, Bucky thought he would say this: she is my mother.
“She’s a nurse,” said Steve.
“Oh,” said Bucky. And in a rush: “But she’s your mom, too, right? She cooks your dinner and reads you bedtime stories?”
“Sometimes,” said Steve. “Sometimes, Mrs Vasquez from 3D gives me dinner. And I read my own bedtime stories.”
“Oh,” said Bucky. “Oh, so do I. It’s just that Becca is only a baby and there’s another on the way.”
Bucky wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Where another baby would go. He hoped it was a brother, though.
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This is what Bucky Barnes does not remember:
It was 1930 and Steve Rogers was his best friend in the whole world. They swore it with a promise of spit and bleeding palms.
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This is what Bucky Barnes does not remember:
He had three younger sisters. Every summer day was long and sunny. Maybe grown-ups spoke of the gathering storm but Bucky did not hear or did not listen. He was sixteen years old and he hated the taste of bourbon but that did not stop him. Steve, who was still his best friend in the whole world, didn’t drink. He didn’t dance because he was too shy even though, with the hateful taste on his lips, Bucky would gladly have told Steve that he outshone every girl in this dark and dingy place.
In fact, that was what he was going to do. He stood up and swayed, like a ship at sea, caught between high winds and great rolling waves.
“Where are you going, Bucky?” asked Annie.
“Yeah, Barnes, where are you going?” asked Garrett, who wasn’t Bucky’s best friend in all the world.
“Where are you going, Bucky?” asked Steve, in a hissing half-whisper. He was dressed in a night-shirt that came down to his mid-calf. It was a threadbare thing with a button dangling loosely at his collarbone.
“Came to see you,” said Bucky because that much was surely evident. “You don’t come out.”
“I can’t-”
“No,” said Bucky. “But you can.” And he took Steve into his arms and waltzed him around the tiny living room, where Steve slept on a bed in the corner. “See?” Bucky asked, breathless and pleased.
Steve smiled, just a little.
“You’re incorrigible,” he said, his chin raised high, lofty as you like.
“Yes I am,” said Bucky. “Is your ma-?”
“Asleep,” said Steve. “The doctor gave her a tonic. For the pain.”
“Oh,” said Bucky. Now all that was left was the hateful taste.
“Come on,” said Steve. “Sleep on the couch. She’ll be happy to see you when she wakes up.”
.
This is what Bucky Barnes does not remember:
A funeral on an absurdly sunny day, though Steve looked so very cold. He was shivering with it, and shivered right out of Bucky’s sight and to the cemetery, all alone. Steve’s mother was buried with his dad. Steve’s dad came home from the war, after all. Bucky’s dad knew all about the repatriation of American heroes and it was best to think of Joseph Rogers as an American hero because what was the damn point, otherwise?
A week after the funeral and Bucky was still dogging Steve’s footsteps. It was like when they were younger, skipping and hopping over the cracks in the sidewalks; the ones that Steve said went right down to the centre of the earth. It made no sense to Bucky, not when the centre of his earth was skipping and hopping away.
For a small fella, Steve was mighty fast, even if it never occurred to him to run away.
“It’s okay,” said Bucky. He said it often. Maybe Steve would listen. “It’s okay to need-”
“You?” asked Steve, whirling around, his tie draped over his shoulder. There was a light in his eyes, the likes of which Bucky had never seen and now he knew what dynamite must feel like, in the face of a naked flame.
“Well,” said Bucky, uncomfortable and unable to look away. “I need you so, y’know, it’d be nice if it was mutual.”
It was not meant as a gut shot and yet Steve crumpled, a little.
“I need you, Buck,” he said, quietly. “But you’re all I got. What if I lose you too?”
It was absurd. It was perverse. Steve was the one who was a fistfight away from being smeared across the walls of some back alley. He was the one whose lungs rebelled every winter time.
“Steve,” said Bucky, putting his hand on Steve’s shoulder. “You’re never gonna lose me. How many languages do you need it in? I only got the one but maybe if I ask around the docks-”
“No,” said Steve, his hand wrapping tightly around Bucky’s wrist. No one would ever think his bones were brittle if they could feel their strength. “You just gotta say it a few more times, Buck. Sometimes, I forget.”
.
This is what Bucky Barnes does not remember:
Steve held a couch cushion like a shield when Bucky kissed him. He dropped it promptly, finding better purchase in bunching up the cotton of Bucky’s undershirt and in kissing back so fiercely that Bucky had to take a step back.
Bucky’s hands slid under Steve’s thighs as Steve clung to him and climbed him, bony knees clamping against Bucky’s sides. They kissed and kissed until Steve looked dazed, breathing hard through his kiss-bruised mouth.
“I- I think I got it,” he said, his smile all mischief.
To think of all the cracks they avoided, only to tumble into this abyss.
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This is what Bucky Barnes does not remember:
His hat was at a deliberately jaunty angle and all the girls admired him. Sarge, they said, and Howard Stark promised that there would be a future. So, see, Steve would not lose him; there would be a future.
.
This is what Bucky Barnes does remember:
Examination table, hard and metal. Unbreakable restraints. Just a little pinch, they said, as they mined his veins for blood and replaced it with something incendiary.
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This is what Bucky Barnes does remember:
A museum exhibit that knows how to smile. A faceless mannequin wearing military blue. A memorial to a man who is not dead, but sleeping.
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This is what Bucky Barnes does:
He knocks on a door, with dawning horror that he has used his metal knuckles and now there are scores and splinters in the wood. He tears his eyes away from them as they are replaced by a familiar face.
There’s a lump in his throat because he does not know how to ask, do you still need me? and he does not know how to say, I still need you.
There is purchase in bunching up the fabric of Steve’s blue t-shirt, though, and in the steady heartbeat against Bucky’s ear.