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“You ever feel like things aren’t really the way you think they are?” Clint asks. The question startles Bucky and he struggles for an answer. Nothing comes.
It’s been a while since he let himself think about stuff like that. Focusing on it just gives the disorientation strength, and even though he has all of his memories back, even though he knows who and where he is, sometimes it all kind of catches up with him and comes crashing down and then he can’t breathe for a minute. It’s not the Winter Soldier stuff; he knows what happened, but his mind shies away from it, shoving the hazy memories away whenever he gets too close.
It’s the Bucky Barnes stuff. The Captain America’s sidekick stuff. It’s the walking through occupied France, storming Nazi strongholds, taking out a battalion and realizing that some of the guys there are barely older than he is. Realizing that they’ll never get to go home and see their father or mother, brother or sister or sweetheart ever again. It only helps a little bit to tell himself that they’re Nazis. They’re bad, they’re wrong, they’re not good people, but at the end of the day they’re still people and their blood is still on his hands.
And he remembers. So vividly sometimes that he comes awake in a cold sweat and has to sit in the tub with cold water pounding down on him until it numbs the dead certainty that he’s not really here in New York City at all. There are dreams, every so often, where he is lying in a ditch watching the snow drift down to cover him while his blood slowly leaks out, collecting in a steaming puddle beneath him. And all around him he can hear people screaming, guns firing, and none of it sounds so very heroic anymore and he wishes he was back home, that he had never come to Europe just so they could ship him home to his mother in a box.
When he wakes up, the disconnect is so strong that he wonders sometimes whether this is the dream. Whether his mind, in its death throes, has created a whole world for him, a world in which he returns from the war, beaten and strange. A world in which he takes up the shield of his mentor, his best friend, the only person who would really understand but who isn’t here anymore. Steve can’t reassure him because Steve is dead, and in the middle of the night with the shower hammering into his skull, that seems like too neat a detail…
“What do you mean?” he asks. Clint looks over at him, mild surprise in his eyes.
“You know,” he says. “Like those movies, where everyone is trapped in some kind of computer program or something. You ever wonder if it’s real?”
“No,” Bucky says shortly. He stands, heads for the door.
“Hey!” Clint sounds genuinely concerned. “Where are you going?”
“For a walk,” Bucky says, and slams the door before Clint can reply. He stands in the hall for a few minutes, staring at a water stain high on the wall. Here in the daylight it all seems slightly absurd, just the vivid imagination of a traumatized soldier and a grieving friend. Still, he wonders how he’ll sleep tonight, or if he even will.