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He has three kinds of knowing. There are things he was told: the identity of targets, mission parameters. He also knows many things without being told – the capabilities of various weapons, wind speed calculations, the street maps of dozens of cities. The third way – the newest, and it feels rough and strange – is finding things out for himself. He had no idea where the cities were in relation to each other until after he put his fist through the second borrowed computer and decided to research something other than Bucky Barnes or the released HYDRA files for a while.
He learns that New York is not far from Washington DC. He knows how to steal and drive a car without being told.
For seventy-one days, he is certain that Captain America will find him. It seems as inevitable as pulling him from the river felt. He knew without being told that he had to save him. When he knows things without being told, they are almost always correct. Everything he knew without being told and everything he has discovered, in the museum and on the internet, and everything Captain America told him on the helicarrier – it all points to the same conclusion. Captain America will not stop until he finds him.
And while he is hiding from Captain America in a long-abandoned but helpfully stocked bunker nestled into unused tunnels of the New York subway system, like the half-blind rats who live here hide from the searing brightness of the sun, on the seventy-second day, someone else finds him instead.
&
The man is nothing he expects. No weapons, no uniform, nothing to knock his door down. He mistakes him for a bum at first, messy curls and a tired face, napping with his head on a duffle bag in front of the bunker’s vault-like door. But his hair and face are clean, his clothes no more dirty than they would get from the trip through the tunnels to find this place at all.
He freezes, flesh hand halfway to his pocket to give the man a few crumpled bills, when he opens clear brown eyes, focusing on him immediately, without confusion or surprise, and knows – somehow, somehow, despite the glove and far from cameras or prying eyes, in tunnels where every footfall of a tail would have echoed, he’s been made. He has a gun on the man before he can sit up. The man doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t even blink. He finishes sitting up.
“I’m not here to bring you in.” The man sounds – calm. He has a nice voice. He doesn’t seem to be protesting the gun. He just thinks he ought to share the information.
“Who are you working for?” he asks tightly.
“No one,” the interloper answers with a small shrug. “I’m – you could say independent, if you were being kind. Pariah is less accurate than it used to be.” But not inaccurate. The words rattle around his head. If you were being kind. As though the man finds the idea plausible.
“But you know who I am.” The words feel like digging his heels in, the frustration of unexpected resistance rough and prickly in his chest.
“I know some things that happened to you,” the man says. “But that’s not the same thing. Who do you think you are?”
He flinches. No one ever – it wasn’t a question that needed an answer, he wasn’t anything, anyone. Until Captain America told him, and it was impossible and confusing and wrong. Kept telling him, like he had the authority to tell, like he was a superior instead of a mission. No one ever asked.
He has to answer, and he has found out –
He does not have many things in common with Bucky Barnes. But that is the closest name he has.
“Bucky,” he says, and it comes out in a raspy, uncertain croak, and his eyes dart around the small space, as though handlers might burst from an access grate or some other point of approach that he missed, and correct him for giving the wrong answer. His cheek stings, and he doesn’t know why.
But the man with the duffle bag just smiles.
“It’s good to meet you, Bucky. I’m Bruce.”
&
Bucky cannot get Bruce to leave. Threats are ineffective.
“You can’t hurt me.” He shrugs, as if to say, what a shame, but that’s just the way it is.
“All I do is hurt people!” Bucky protests. Bruce looks as though he barely considers this worthy of a response.
“If you were going to shoot me, you’d have done it by now,” he points out mildly, pushing onto his feet and hoisting the duffle onto his shoulder, waiting.
“You can’t - stay!”
“Why not?”
It takes Bucky longer than he’d like to come up with a reason, since neither the prospects of death nor subterranean dampness seems to deter him. He switches to offense.
“Why would you want to?”
Bruce gets a strange look on his face, a little pinched around his mouth, around his eyes. His shoulders shift, and he looks – not afraid, still not that, but defensive for the first time, as though he is suddenly aware of being vulnerable. Just when Bucky thinks Bruce isn’t going to answer, he says quietly,
“I know how it feels like to wake up with nothing except damage you don’t remember and can’t undo. It’s – worse, alone. It took me a long time to figure that out.”
“Maybe I’m smarter than you, pal.”
Bruce glances around the tunnel, raises one eyebrow, and smirks like Bucky meant that as a joke.
Bucky has never made a joke in the seventy-three days of his continuous memory, so this is a bit disconcerting. He puts the gun away, mutters, “Fine,” and manages not to break the keypad as he jabs the code into the old vault door.
&
He decides to ignore Bruce. It worked with the handlers – he took what they handed him and they got him where he needed to be, then stayed out of his way. Smooth. Easy. He retreats to the room in the shelter where he has his chair set up like he wants it, his computer for poring through the files, rations stacked on one side, rubble on the other when he needs to – strike something. There are no pipes or wires or other delicate mechanisms of importance on that side, only concrete and lead shielding and eventually bedrock. He settles in, hunched, ready to glower if Bruce intrudes further, pops the lid off a can of halfway fermented peaches with his metal hand, and resumes reading.
This plan lasts for approximately six hours.
Four hours after he ripped the can open and licked the last sticky-sweet juices from the inside of the aluminum, he smells something – incredible, that he has no comparison for in the last seventy-three days. He waits, and waits, but Bruce doesn’t come into his nest to explain and the smell doesn’t go away.
When he finally extricates himself from his spot and investigates, he finds Bruce contentedly stirring something in a pot on the bunker’s compact stove. Nearby, there’s an empty package of the rice that Bucky gave up as more trouble than it was worth. But instead of looking bland and gooey and not at all appetizing, it’s a rich rusty-red color, looks creamy and hearty. When he takes a deep breath closer in, it tastes bright and savory and – and – sparking in the air when he breathes it without any actual fire or burning, which was not a thing Bucky knew food could do.
Bruce holds a spoonful of it in front of him.
“Let me know if it’s too spicy?"
Spicy. The word and the smell snap into place. Spicy. Bucky leans forward the way he would for a mouthguard he only remembers having taken out, but knows the procedures for anyway. He sets his teeth against the wood of the spoon and sucks the rice and sauce off of it, swallows, something coiled very tight in his stomach, an irrelevant expectation of pain.
His throat burns and his eyes water but whatever white-knuckled flare he is waiting for never comes, and he could fall over because spicy is so good, a little sweet and a little sour and hot hot hot. He’s suddenly, startlingly aware of the inside of his own mouth, that lips and tongue and cheeks and palate are flesh. Bucky wants to taste it forever.
Bruce’s eyebrows draw together, worried, and Bucky remembers to release his spoon, unlocking his jaw with some regret.
“Don’t. Don’t change it.”
Bruce says okay. They eat it together, sitting on the floor in the little tight-packed kitchen. Bruce calls it curry. He says he has more, that it can go on lots of things. After he licks the pot clean, Bucky asks,
“How did you find me?” He tries to sound blank, rather than scared. If Bruce could find him so could someone else. So could the Captain, which thought fills him with a luminous, frenzied panic. He wanted to be here, close to the source of Steven Rogers and Bucky Barnes, best friends from childhood – close but not exposed, because no matter what he told Bruce or what Rogers told him, he does not have that much in common with Bucky Barnes. The comparison is awful enough in his head, let alone revisited in the icy blue mirror of the Captain’s eyes.
If he can be found, he has to leave. He doesn’t want to leave. “I know this place wasn’t in the files. I checked.”
It doesn’t have a Hydra’s head symbol anywhere, but he knew it as a fallback location as soon as he thought about New York, and he knows the door code, knew it without being told. There are many things he doesn’t know, but he isn’t stupid.
“That doesn’t surprise me. It looks like it’s from the fifties. Any records must have been lost before they were digitized,” Bruce muses.
Bucky glares at him. He doesn’t like – the fifties, this before that. He got enough of that in the Smithsonian. When he tries to think about things that way, it feels hollow, fake. Like organizing guns alphabetically by name instead of by gauge size or distance range or anything that mattered.
“Answer the question,” he growls.
“I have a good nose for this kind of thing,” Bruce says with a shrug. “No one followed me, and no one’s going to hear about it from me.”
Bucky decides to believe what Bruce tells him. It is preferable to the alternatives.
&
Bruce threads himself easily through Bucky’s space. He’s – unobtrusive, quiet without the sort of sleek, practiced stealth that would trip Bucky’s wariness. He never hides his footfalls, but he isn’t loud, never demands attention. He tidies away messes that Bucky simply steps over. He cooks, and sleeps in his own corner, and jerks awake with quiet gasps just like Bucky. He reads books that are not histories, little well-worn paperbacks that he leaves in neat stacks. He opens one when Bruce is away, his scant things left like wordless promises, the one Bruce reads the most.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage.
All that we are is the result of what we have thought: it is founded on our thoughts, it is made up of our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with a pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves him.
Bucky doesn’t read any more. That seems like enough to think about.
Bucky keeps track of his movements through the bunker, and they always seem deliberate, but unhurried, no shuffling or meandering or scrambling, just slipping and settling from one place to the next.
The first few times he notices Bucky watching him, Bucky feels an odd oily flare of discomfort, a strange conflicted qualm like a smokestain on fingertips, guilty for making Bruce aware of his gaze. But Bruce seems unperturbed and disinclined to return the scrutiny. Instead he asks small questions, easier ones – if a certain thing is all right for dinner, or when Bucky will go out next – or tells Bucky something about the world, something tactically meaningless that makes something glint in Bucky’s chest, about clever green birds in a place called New Zealand or the way light moves or about a woman trapped in her house for longer than Bucky can remember existing, much longer, trying to teach her people to join together for peace. He’ll talk when he sees Bucky paying attention and be quiet otherwise; Bucky learns to let himself be caught when he wants words to listen to.
Sometimes Bruce sits, folded but not tightly, very still with his eyes closed, breathing in slow patterns. Bucky likes the sound, even more than the murmur of food cooking or pages turning or footsteps. He thinks of alley cats, ragged but fed well enough on city scraps, each their own lookout, but roosting together in colonies of old crates.
&
Once when Bruce is bringing him food, some kind of stew with different spices this time, Bucky doesn’t know, Bucky is so immersed in mission files that he doesn’t realize until it’s too late that Bruce will see the photo and the headline, one of several variations on a theme - Riots Sparked by the Death of a Child at the Hands of an Unknown Soldier at a Protest. He tabs down fast, and it doesn’t help, because the next page is a report of the crackdown, which is worse. Bucky tries to grab the bowl without looking at Bruce.
Bruce holds it away and Bucky twists, glares, all set to tell him off because how dare he, he came to Bucky’s house – base – thing – but Bruce doesn’t look surprised, or disappointed. Tight, maybe, but he hands over the food as soon as Bucky looks at him, as if he was just waiting for that.
“Do you remember that?” he asks.
“What’s it to you?” Bucky mutters, starts gulping down spoonfuls.
“I can’t decide which answer will make me more furious,” Bruce says, with a thin little smile. “And when you tell me, then I’ll know.”
Bucky doesn’t know what to say to that. It’s hard to think of Bruce as being angry at anything, the way he’s gently and easily threaded himself through Bucky’s space, through his count of days.
The way he sits very still and breathes very slowly sometimes, as though he is setting himself aside from the entire world, and only rejoins it when he opens his eyes. The knack he has for turning the bunker’s ancient stores and the seasonings he brought and making something strange and complicated and delicious just when Bucky is about to get hungry. The way he’ll drift closer, when Bucky is crunched in on himself like jammed firing pin, settle, and talk about parts of the world that are vibrant and beautiful, festivals and far-away stars.
None of it really fits. But he knows what it feels like to ask questions to learn about himself, so he nods.
“But it didn’t happen to me,” he adds. He thinks Bruce might – care. Relevant information.
Bruce tilts his head.
“Who did it happen to?”
Bucky doesn’t say the Winter Soldier. There was no Winter Soldier. Or there were dozens, more, an army of them, but none of them were part of each other. He cannot be the Winter Soldier now, he has decided. It is a code for a function he does not perform. The name does not transfer like the blood does, shadows on his hands.
“A different me,” he says, like that makes any sense.
But Bruce just says, “Ah,” and nods as if it does.
&
One of the things Bucky likes best about staying underground is that the count of days is just that: a count, ticking over, a number and nothing more. No sense of bright mornings, full of people who don’t see him, who might see him if they paid any attention, the high jangle of a world waking up. No lingering hours of very-late-night haze, when even The City That Never Sleeps drifts off a little, when the taxis thin out and the drunks have mostly stumbled home. He doesn’t like the sense of time like the pressure of the Potomac current bearing him on, the sense that everyone else knows what to do when, likes even less the amorphous awareness that he is supposed to sleep. It’s stupid. He doesn’t need it that much.
Underground, Bucky simply works and eats and ventures out when it suits him. He usually falls asleep in spite of himself after seven or eight days, slumping over mid-task, twitches awake lost and desperate, grasping for the knowledge he has catalogued in the last eight, nine, ten weeks in the chaotic terrifying moments before it solidifies again, can be verified against the coded notes scribbled in pen and frequently refreshed on his flesh arm.
(He tried to scratch them into the metal one, but nothing he found worked.)
Sometimes, when he catalogues the things he knows, after waking, there’s – more. Records of events that are not connected to this series of days, like drawings on loose sheets of paper stuffed into a sketchbook where they don’t belong.
He knows they belong to him, but in the way an heirloom does, something handed down from predecessors who are dead. Missions given, missions completed, playing in his head exactly as crisp and remote as the video clips in the museum. They feel complete, each of them, brief lives, single missions. Like the book of Haiku poems Bruce keeps, each one self-contained, separate. He has matched some of them to files, because he wants to know who he killed, and why, but it’s the requisition and assignment orders that matter, not the timeline. All the dates are as meaningless as the page numbers of the book, an arbitrary arrangement of unrelated items, with the poet’s morbid return to a single theme.
He learns much less from the memories than the files. But he makes notes about them anyway. Someone should remember the things that aren’t in the files – the wordless sounds, the dropped toy, the bravery and indignity - and it falls to him, because no one else is left alive.
Bruce sleeps a lot more than Bucky does, which is slightly aggravating, but when Bucky checks it seems to happen at odd intervals not aligned with any particular surface time, so he decides it doesn’t imply anything about his own habits. Bruce is like – a baby, or a cat. Those things sleep a lot because they just do. He knows this without being told.
Bruce catches Bucky watching, when he does his still breathing after he wakes up, waves him over. Sit like this, he says, focus on my voice. Focus on your breath. Count it like this. Think of a place that feels peaceful. Bucky thinks of where they are, of just what he would see if he opened his eyes.
The instructions are direct and clear. Bruce makes it easy to go away inside his mind in ways that don’t feel like being lost or cold, just steady and safe.
&
He’s crying, and he doesn’t know why, and his flesh hand is shaking and his metal hand is bloody. He went topside to take another history book from the library (it isn’t stealing if he brings them back, even if he doesn’t have a card) and on the way back down ran into four boys tormenting a skinny kid in a bright orange turban. Everything went red-hot and clear and sharp, and he thought of three dozen ways to kill them in seconds, just pummeled them instead, broken noses and split eyebrows, spurting like head wounds do, doubled-over gasps, a twisted wrist as he yanked back the kid’s bag, turned to hold it out to him, only to find their target already running.
He didn’t open it, left it by the wall as the bullies scrambled away too, and by the time he came back to the shelter, his face was slick and his eyesight was compromised.
He got blood on the library book. He supposes that means it’s stolen after all; he knows he can’t bring it back that way.
He slides down the inside of the door, sits there askew, like a discarded thing, and why shouldn’t he. Bruce hears – who knows what Bruce hears. But he comes, and sits across from Bucky, reaches for his metal wrist and starts wiping it clean, and Bucky can’t take it, he can’t, but he can’t pull away.
“Did you kill someone today?” Bruce says, quiet. Bucky shakes his head. He knows what he is. He knows why he was made. He doesn’t want to kill anymore. And he still knows that, each time he jolts awake, so he doesn’t.
Bruce doesn’t try to make him explain this. He is grateful. Instead he tells it to Bruce like a mission report. Where he went, what he saw, what he did. That makes it easy.
That makes it easy until he gets to the end, and he can’t seem to stop talking even though he has reached the conclusion of the incident.
“He just ran,” Bucky says, for the third time, unnecessary, redundant, inefficient. “He just ran and he didn’t look, he didn’t even look but he still knew, he still knew to run, he knew I’m – I’m –”
He can’t finish. He doesn’t know whether to say bully or weapon. He doesn’t know which is worse. He doesn’t know.
“I’m a monster,” Bruce says, evenly, and it stops Bucky cold because it would have made more sense if he’d said I’m a Martian. Aliens are a matter of public record. “I made myself into one because I was too arrogant and too desperate to realize what I was doing. A lot of people are scared of me. A lot of them should be.”
It wasn’t that Bucky didn’t believe him. Bruce told him, on the seventy-third day of memory, the seventy-second day of hiding from the Captain, the first day they met, that he was a killer in the oblique language of regret. Bucky does believe him. But it still doesn’t make very much sense.
“I’ve been trying, for the last few years, not to worry about that. Because I can’t change what I am. I just worry about what I do, instead. You did a good thing today.”
Bucky is still crying, quiet, unstoppable. Like a cracked faucet that can’t be fixed.
“The book,” he says finally. “I ruined the library book.”
“I can make sure it’s replaced, if you want,” Bruce offers. He comes and goes when he wants, but aside from promising not to tell anyone where Bucky is, it’s the first time he’s alluded directly to a life outside their place, this odd cocoon of plaster and anachronism and earth.
“Please,” Bucky says, and then he goes to sit in his chair with his eyes closed for a long time. He breathes, like Bruce taught him, and eventually the leaking stops.
&
He remembers:
Taking out the mouthguard, then cold.
(He remembers this like standing in an elevator with two mirrors, over and over. Outside the cold, some of the faces are different. Some are the same, some are variations in themselves, more lines on the faces, different hair. It doesn’t matter. The cold is the same, the duration brief. There is little to be learned in these. He does not know how many of them there are.)
Cold, receiving the mission, transport, position, target, fire, confirm, transport, mouthguard.
Cold, receiving the mission, transport, position, wait, wait, target, fire, eliminate witnesses, confirm, transport, mouthguard.
Cold, receiving the mission, missions that last days instead of hours, garrotes instead of rifles, a man shoved into an industrial machine, a house fire, a shot through a crowd at no one just to light a spark, and transport, mouthguard.
Cold, receiving the mission, transport, transport incomplete, sand and rocky hills, wild goats and wild mint, sunlight, stars, sunlight, stars, sunlight, hills and scrub, agitated handlers, transport, mission not complete, mouthguard.
(He has connected this to an incident buried in the files: waylaid HYDRA agents unable to smuggle him into Israel, three days roaming Cyprus awaiting pickup.)
Taking out the mouthguard, receiving the mission, transport, position, wait, target, fire, close in, target escaped, pursue target, position, target, fire, pursued, attacked with an unconventional weapon, return attack, escape pursuit, confirm, receive mission, transport, engage, combat, secondary target confirm, unexpected resistance, mask dislodged, who the hell is bucky, transport, but I knew him, crack, mouthguard.
Waking up on a table, burning, I thought you were taller.
(This one is long, longer than all the others, although shorter than he has been alive this time; just as crisp but somehow messy, extruding, heavy, like a sculpture instead of a photograph.)
He remembers stumbling over fire, a terrible monster scuttling after an ugly one, Steve leaping, grabbing his hand, march and march and march, a red dress, target fire confirm protect, and flying and a train and Steve Steve Steve, and combat, and wind, and cold.
He remembers Bucky Barnes saying I thought you were taller, and he remembers remembering a little guy, but he doesn’t remember the little guy. There are no pieces and no lives that match the picture in the Smithsonian with the long medical records.
He figures out: whatever happened to him on the table made him remember even after wipe after wipe after wipe, all the Winter Soldiers, even the first one who was also Bucky Barnes, but whoever he was before then – he didn’t survive.
&
It occurs to him, sometimes, that he knows almost nothing about Bruce. He seems so complete, full of stories that rarely involve himself more than tangentially, if at all. He is simmering meals and a quiet crisp voice and puffy hair that looks softer than the stray cats who hunt rats in the tunnels around them, who sometimes let Bucky pet them if he shares food and stays very still.
Bucky himself began – not fully formed, not free of history, that would inevitably ricochet back to him – but abruptly, not long ago, complete enough to act, to pursue a mission and then abandon it, already knowing many things, already able to discover more. It is easy to assume, from the things he has said and not said, from the lines around his eyes, that he too is new born, that he too was never a child at all.
But when he realizes how easy it is to assume it, Bucky is sure the assumption is wrong. Bruce doesn’t talk about a past for the same reason he never asks more about Bucky’s other memories, the ones apart from him and tied to him, like used clips he can’t discard, smelling of death. He doesn’t want to make either of them juggle the weights they cannot put down.
Bruce does have a life, a history that is not fragmented into files and nightmares, reports and resets. He must. He figured out it was better not to be alone before he came into Bucky’s base. Bucky feels hot and off-balance at the thought; he doesn’t know whether that would be good or bad.
“You have a best friend,” Bucky says, abruptly, while Bruce is writing something in a notebook. It sounds like an engine, somewhere between a whine and a growl. Bruce glances up at him, pen paused, says nothing. “You do,” Bucky hisses. “You have someone who came after you, who wouldn’t let you escape, long enough for you to learn that was better. But then you left anyway! How could you – how could you do that, if it was better, if he stopped you and it was, how could you leave if you could stay, how could you –”
He feels like something is cracking, again, only it’s worse because he can’t shout back this time, it isn’t something he is being told, it’s something he’s figuring out, each realization snapping into place like weapon components to blast him away, and he can’t stop his own thoughts. Bruce’s friend was good enough to keep him, but Bruce left anyway – it fits and it doesn’t fit, it’s wrong, for Bruce to have and lose what Bucky is afraid he can’t hold without being burned, and he can’t bear it.
“He let me go,” Bruce says, drawn in, worried, worried about Bucky, when he’s the one whose friend let him go which is even worse than Bruce giving him up for this, and Bucky’s throat burns and he hears echoes because he’s shouting, no no no, friends don’t, best friends don’t ever, they stay with you till –
“Bucky, breathe,” Bruce orders, coming closer, saying “It’s okay,” when it’s not, when that’s the one thing that will never be okay, and he keeps saying it and Bucky needs him to stop and he isn’t thinking about how to do it, isn’t thinking about anything, but he shoves with the wrong arm, and there’s a crunch, ribs collapsing under metal.
Time – time, he hates time, and he thinks he is right to hate it because it is terrible, nothing is as cruel as time – goes very slow, almost still, Bruce’s low crushed animal noise of pain ringing and ringing in his ears,.
The world isn’t cracking, any more. It’s falling away. There’s nothing left but him, everything poisoned and bleak and ruthless in all the memories and all the files falling back to base inside him, because he is just like every other Winter Soldier, he was always going to do this, was always going to kill, and Bruce was there. He wants the mouthguard, wants the terrible chasm, the abyss the memories are suspended in like bony creatures in the deep sea. He wants not to be this him anymore.
The rib-ridged concave flesh under Bucky’s hand is turning a sick green, and then pain is rough and shocking and blasts the horror momentarily back. Bucky picks himself out of his pile of broken plaster and cement chunks, stares at the massive hunkering green thing with Bruce’s bones under its scowling face.
Bucky has not been this confused since the first time Steve called him Bucky.
“BUCKY NOT SMASH,” it says, deep and rumbling and terrible like a train engine, and one huge hand knocks Bucky over again, then holds him down. It’s crouched on its haunches. Its hair brushes the ceiling. Part of Bucky’s mind calculates were the nerve points should be on the oversize wrist. He could reach them with the metal arm. He doesn’t try it.
“HULK HATE MOUSEHOLE,” it says. It was another me, he thinks, and he would laugh, thin and strained, but Bucky can’t breathe very deeply, with the – HULK? the Hulk is a matter of public record too, like aliens, sidelines in newspapers about Captain America – the Hulk holding him down. But he can breathe. He focuses on that. Just – one – shallow – breath – at – a time –
– and –
–the weight on him becomes suddenly easy as Bruce collapses half onto him, decked in shreds, eyelids heavy. Bucky rolls him off, palming Bruce’s ribs with his human hand, their curved architecture neatly restored under his skin.
“Told you you couldn’t hurt me,” Bruce mumbles, and then his eyes close, and breath and pulse holding steady, deeply asleep. Bucky watches him sleep for seven hours, watches to be sure they stay steady. He remembers Sergeant Bucky Barnes praying, sometimes, after killing, thinks about how it goes, thank you, thank you Lord. He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have masters any more. This is Bruce’s promise, Bruce’s gift, and he’s the one Bucky will thank when he wakes.
&
Bruce grunts when he wakes, hunches and then stretches out stiffness, doesn’t meet Bucky’s eyes.
“I suppose you want to know about – that.”
“I figured it out,” Bucky says. “He’s the other you. The monster you made when you were proud. The pieces fit.” Bruce sighs, and tries to brush plaster dust out of his hair.
“I was trying to recreate the serum,” he says, and doesn’t pretend he doesn’t know Bucky reads everything about Captain America he can find. “It could do so much, for so many – well. So many things besides making soldiers.” He smiles, bitter like oil. “I certainly didn’t make one of those. The army decided it owned me. One general hunted me a long time. I just – I wanted my life back, I wanted not to hurt anyone. But now I have a different life, and I do.”
“He didn’t hurt me very much.” It’s true. The worst injuries from the first time the Hulk slammed him down have healed already, while Bruce was sleeping. Their monsters play gently with each other, for monsters. “He did something good, today.”
“Hurting you not very much is not good, Bruce says, and it’s got teeth in it, free, snarling.
“He stopped me,” Bucky says. “From – anything. From hurting you, or someone outside, or trying to. Reset.” Bruce closes his eyes. He understands without Bucky saying it that he wanted to. “He did something good,” Bucky says again, stubborn, and Bruce smiles again, less bitter and more sad, and Bucky wants Bruce to teach him that like he taught him breathing, how to smile when everything cracks, how he makes his mouth into one thin crooked stitch to hold the world together.
He touches Bruce’s mouth without thinking, steel fingertips on tight lips.
Bruce startles minutely, and Bucky yanks his hand back. He likes it too much. He glances about – but there isn’t anywhere to retreat to, really; they both so thoroughly inhabit the space.
Bruce pushes himself to his feet, leans a hand on the wall, hunches halfway, slanting himself, one shoulder up and one down. His shoes are destroyed, and he’s up on the balls of his feet, like a bird ready to take off, wavering like Bucky feels so often as he reads about Steve Captain America Steve, caught between something undeniable pulling him forward and the fearful part of him shuddering back.
“I can go. If you want. I still won’t say anything.”
“No,” Bucky chokes, Bucky doesn’t want him to go. That’s the opposite of what he wants. He wants Bruce to be – closer. He reaches out, catches Bruce’s wrist, tugs, grip easy enough for a human to pull away, saying please with his shoulder, with his hand. He says please, and Bruce says yes, lets himself be pulled and doesn’t stumble, although his eyes go a little wide, still precarious, still ready to run. Bucky kisses him, just – a press, just a touch, realizes as he does it how little they’ve touched in all this time coiled around each other, because it makes him feel warm all the way through on top of the great unraveling relief at feeling Bruce alive after everything he’s thought in the last few hours. Bruce shudders, doesn’t pull away, doesn’t pull away.
“I don’t want you to go.” He swallows, hard. What did you do today, he thinks. And it’s like a horrible dream, you’re turning into me. “You shouldn’t turn into me. You should – you can face your friend. Even if he let you go.” It comes out bitter, because he’s doing it too, isn’t he. Except he doesn’t want to be that kind of friends; he wants Bruce to have one, because he’s strong enough to face it, but he wants to be something else. “And the city, and daylight, and –”
“– and my own lab and a particle accelerator,” Bruce fills in with a soft sigh, mouth quirked again, but he seems less sad. He’s relieved, Bucky thinks, that Bucky isn’t holding him here anymore, and then Bucky is promptly confused because Bruce kisses him again.
“Tony let me go,” he says in the same firm, clear tone he used to teach breathing styles, “Because after being hunted by the people who wanted to use me as a weapon – I need that. I need a friend who will let me run sometimes. I like to hide away. I almost never feel terribly safe, for a man who can’t die. But I do here.”
“You can’t stay forever,” Bucky says, intuitively certain, remembers their first meeting, why not. But Bruce says,
“Will you?”
And Bucky doesn’t – have an answer. He doesn’t have a forever. He thinks of himself as beyond finite, missions scrubbed, so much older than he’s ever managed to get before. It’s all borrowed time.
“You’re waiting for a reset,” Bruce says, and that fits, Bucky’s understanding sharpening its focus like the lens on a scope.
“I don’t want one,” Bucky says, which is true now that Bruce is all right, irregularly tanned and furry-chested, kissing him, not leaving yet. But he is still waiting for one, and his tone concedes it.
“You’re not getting one,” Bruce says, and the fierce defensiveness is a minor note in a chord of blunt information. “You know Steve is tracking down everyone left who has even a hint how it’s done.” Bucky didn’t know, but only because he was not figuring out what Steve was doing on purpose. “He’s making sure it can never happen again. You never have to face him if that’s truly what you want,” Bruce murmurs, “But you can’t just run out the clock and pass it to the next you. You’re the one with the choice, today, tomorrow. For a very long time.”
“What if it’s a mistake?” he demands. “Steve doesn’t know – I’m never getting Brooklyn back. I’m not the right one.”
Bruce shrugs.
“It’s what he’s doing. I’d guess he thinks he knows enough.”
Bucky shudders. It’s – too much, just like everything about Steve is too much, too bright, too good. He presses his face into Bruce’s bare shoulder, and Bruce rubs his back, slow circles through his shirt. He doesn’t make Bucky say anything else after that.
&
After everything, less changes than Bucky expects. They still live – easily, in their porous yet impermeable shelter, still have their own researches to pursue, their own outings. Bucky teaches a man in the subway with stringy hair and a plastic arm and jerky eyes how to meditate, feeds him as much as he’ll agree to take from Bucky. Bruce still talks when Bucky lets him know it’s okay to talk, although sometimes he pushes a little more, asks about the other Soldiers, or about Bucky, though not about Steve.
Sometimes they kiss.
Sometimes they just hold each other, and Bucky learns that it’s strange for Bruce too, just to feel someone’s skin without anyone hurting. Sometimes Bruce sleeps and Bucky stays with him just like that.
Sometimes it’s easier to talk that way, with clothes peeled off and Bucky testing the steadiness of his hands on him, one at a time, losing himself in the way Bruce is sturdy and soft and warm all together, all at once, in the way he gasps, in the way his teeth are gentle but the slow strokes of his hand hide a mean edge that turns Bucky’s quiet confessions and contemplations into desperate repetitive begging, please please please, the way he answers beautiful over and over like one of his mantras.
“People will need you,” he mutters afterward, suspended out of time in their sanctuary where the days and nights don’t touch, rubbing the shape of a hip bone like a talisman, like rosary beads, both of them floating and easy.
“People might need you too,” Bruce points out, infuriatingly mild, except that Bucky isn’t furious at all. He would be scared, but it’s harder to feel scared, in moments like this. He snorts. He isn’t – needed. But.
“I should probably meet this Tony. Make sure he checks out and all.” Protectiveness comes naturally, just like bluster, not so much knowing without being told as feeling it out, letting the instincts come. It is bluster; even the lazy glow doesn’t stop a small shiver of fear. He knows what that will lead to, who. He doesn’t feel ready. But he’s never going to feel ready, and he isn’t going to go away. So.
“I think he’ll like you,” Bruce says, without specifying.
When they’re clean and dressed, they don’t pack everything up. They barely pack anything up; they both agree without words that they will both want the hideaway again sometimes. But for the first time they leave together, through the labyrinth of abandoned passages, up into the smoggy pink morning.