Chapter Text
part one | well, we're all just scared of dying
Sam tosses him an envelope absently. Or maybe it isn't an absent throw and he means to hit Bucky's cheek with the pointed edge. It would not be a surprise.
The bird disappears without saying anything, before Bucky can question him about the letter, and he sighs, sitting straighter in his chair at the dining table. Picking the envelope off of his lap, he turns it over for the return address. Darcy Lewis. Williamsburg. The one in Brooklyn. Not the one in Virginia Sam dragged him to last winter. He'd taken him for Christmas. Said he knew just the place Bucky would fit in. A place in the US permanently set during the 18th century.
Why are we here? he had asked. He hadn't known Virginia could get so bitterly cold. Just like it did in New York. In Europe, during the war.
He hates the winter.
Aren't you finding yourself right at home? This is an authentic look at America from the past. It says here in the pamphlet, ''Colonial Williamsburg is the largest outdoor living museum in the country, upholding our educational mission through immersive, authentic 18th-century experiences and programming for our guests."
Asshole.
He isn't nervous when he slices open the envelope and pulls out its contents. Even after Sam mentioned something about an incident in which some guy tried to kill people by sticking a deadly powder in envelopes. Whether Sam was telling the truth or not, Bucky enjoys opening letters. It is so different from the messages people send on electronic devices. Far more personal.
Inside is a single slip of paper folded into fourths. No white powder. He's safe for another day.
Flattening the tightly creased note, Bucky starts reading its contents.
“I don't know you,” it begins, which is funny to him somehow. This is the first handwritten letter he's received since he was put back in the government's system as James Buchanan Barnes, so maybe people have simply forgotten how to write letters in the confusing age of technology.
Bucky shakes his head and frowns at the page.
He's distracting himself. He does it without meaning to, without thinking. But he knows exactly where this is going, and he doesn't want to be reminded. Not by a letter from someone who admits from the very beginning they don't know him. It's too personal and impersonal at the same time. Somewhere caught on the precipice of either being meaningful or invasive. He has thousands upon thousands of these same messages stored on the laptop Steve left him. They are longwinded and excessive and dramatic. He saved my life, they write. Then they continue, though I never met him. And in a strange way, it angers Bucky to read those notes. Who are these people to mourn him? To claim he rescued them from their monotonous lives by merely existing when Bucky would be dead in Italy or roaming the streets as the Winter Soldier without Steve Rogers.
Irritation niggles his insides, pressing against his heart, burning his throat.
No, Bucky decides he does not enjoy opening tangible messages more than electronic ones. He hates them both the same. They are both empty. Neither will bring Steve back. The Steve he knew nor the old, wrinkled man they buried next to Margaret Carter.
Bucky tosses the letter on the table. Retreating from the room, escaping his own intrusive thoughts, he joins Sam in the basement of their two-level house. The entire bottom floor is their sparring room. Set up like an Olympic training centre, Bucky spends most of his time at home in this space. Knocking the sand out of punching bags. Severing the heads off of dummies. Releasing pent up resentment towards the one person that knew him through and through and still kept by his side.
Well, until he left.
"Another sob story from a Captain America fanatic?" Sam asks, wiping beads of sweat from his lined forehead. He backs away from the post into which he has thrown the red, white, and blue shield.
"I don't know," Bucky says. He grabs the handle of a knife stored in a special wooden block and brings his arm back, his eye focused on the centre of a target against the wall opposite him. "I didn't read it." He jerks his arm forward, releasing the knife.
It pierces the bullseye.
. * .
He forgets the letter for almost two weeks before its existence in his house is unavoidable.
Returning home from an early morning run, Bucky goes directly to his room, stripping his sweat-sodden clothes off his body and throwing them on his bed. He is a foot away from his en suite where a broiling shower awaits him when he registers the two envelopes on his bedside table. One of them is already unsealed, and he knows immediately it is the unread letter from Williamsburg. He can only imagine its neighbour hails from the same hand.
Sam put these here. Entered his room without permission and carefully organised the letters in such a way Bucky would be blind not to notice them.
Sam cried at the funeral. His face spilled tears throughout the service, and he whimpered as eulogies were read and thanks were given. He's touched that part of himself, ripped it open. For all the world to see. Soldiers are different now to when Bucky signed up. Men are different. In general. They weep publicly. Express their distress and sorrow until their bodies and minds heal, and then they don't need to cry anymore. But the tears are there, waiting for the moment they are next called into action.
Bucky has never allowed a single tear to escape when surrounded by others. Not Steve, especially not the bird. He can say that HYDRA sucked the tears from his body, but his aversion to crying in the open goes back to his childhood. To a different era in which men clung tightly to their emotions. Shoved them deep in their gut. His mother always tried to get him to talk about his feelings, but his father would step in before Bucky could say a word. He would tell the young boy that feelings were for girls. Not strong men. And that is how Bucky walked through his long life, as if he was void of anything other than rigid stoicism.
HYDRA preyed on that part of him. The full part, overflowing with unshed tears and swallowed screams. They shocked his mind until he felt nothing. Until he felt empty. Hollow. And then they filled him with anger, and now that anger is gone. And Bucky can't tell if he feels overstuffed or permanently drained.
Sam doesn't know, either. He has been trying to get Bucky to cry since Steve first vanished and approached them an old man. Subtle nudges. Careful word choice. Sam pokes Bucky every which way, urging the tin man to just feel something. Anything. These letters, though neither of them knows their contents, is undoubtedly his latest move. They could be filled with hatred for all he knows. “I don't know you, but you're the reason Captain America is dead, and I hate you.” “I don't know you, but you're responsible for the death of my father, and I wish it had been you who got sent back in time.” “I don't know you, and I'm a better person for it.”
Bucky shoves his legs into a fresh pair of boxers. Nervous, heart thrumming, sweat drying in salty flakes against his skin, he steps to his bedside table and grabs the opened envelope.
"I don't know you.
"But I feel like I do," this Darcy goes on. "I know that must sound stupid. Crazy, even. But it's the truth. And the thing that makes it even weirder is that it isn't like I have some relatable tragic past. I didn't join the army in the 1940s. I didn't get tortured by Germans. Rescued by my best friend only to be dropped into the snow from a mountainside train only to be picked up by more Nazis, but somehow even worse Nazis than the other ones. Yeah. I'm sure you know your own life story. I don't need to keep going.
What I'm trying to say is I don't know you, but there's something about you that feels like a part of myself. Like we're two people walking on opposite planes of existence, separated only by a thin wall, whose souls are calling out to each other.
Wow. Okay. See, that was creepy. I don't think you're my soulmate. I don't think anyone is anyone's soulmate.
Do you get what I mean though? I know you. And I feel the pain in your chest. It's like you've gone on a run on the coldest day of the year, right? Like your lungs have brain freeze.
You aren't alone. That's what I'm trying to say here.
Darcy."
He doesn't know what he was expecting, but it was nothing compared to the words Darcy Lewis from Williamsburg, Brooklyn wrote. Not a Captain America sob story then. Steve's name isn't mentioned once. There are several sections on the single-sided sheet scratched out. Funny, considering the lines she kept in.
The lines she kept in.
Bucky goes over the words again. And again, again, again.
You're not alone.
Something inside Bucky tenses. Or maybe it relaxes, flushing out decades of tension and sorrow in a single movement brought on by a single line written on a single page by a complete stranger. Trembling fingers place this first letter on the bed and reach, itching, for its companion. He remembers a similar sensation running through his body when he received the telegraph with his overseas assignment. Horse hoofs galloped within him, and he tore the sheet by accident, adding to the excited stress of the event.
It was a life changing moment, the second his eyes read that hastily taped together paper. Either he would die serving his country or return home having protected it. Either way, he had just stepped through a portal into a new world in which the old Bucky Barnes didn't exist, would never exist.
These letters are moving him from one path to another. They must be, otherwise he is going mad. His body understands what his brain cannot: Darcy Lewis from Williamsburg, Brooklyn is changing his life.
The second envelope is thicker than the first. Weighed down with more pages filled with more words. Bucky delicately, carefully unsticks the flap and pulls out the several sheets of paper, his mind buzzing. What more could she say? How much tighter are they bound?
“Look,” it begins, still with no trace of traditional greeting, “I know my last letter was weird. Like, really really really weird. I promise I'm not a crazy serial killer. Not that I could kill you even if I was.
It's not that I feel some random connection to you. It's deeper than that.
I was sixteen when my best friend died.”
Bucky recoils, dropping the pages. They flutter to his feet like feathers, reminding him of those days in Europe when he and his fellow soldiers had no food and they were forced to rely on the few birds still showing themselves in the dead of winter. He goes to his knees like a dramatic opera singer at the end of their climactic aria. He holds back retches as his body tries to expel the remnants of those avian creatures that left his system so many decades ago.
Oh. It all makes sense now.
He remains on the floor once the dry heaves pass. Ice crystals form in his blood, stiffening his body, burning his neck as if he has just cricked it, leaving him frozen in place. Bucky does not want to continue reading. He wants to abandon this letter. This girl with a story like his own. This dead best friend of hers, lying in the earth like Steve, eroding, feeding the soil.
But his eyes betray him and scan the fallen pages like they just can't help themselves, because they can't. Because this is what it feels like to find that soul beckoning yours from the other side of the wall.
He gathers the sheets of paper, afraid he will not be able to figure out the correct order, and notices the circled numbers at the bottom of each page. As if this is an essay for a school assignment. Nevertheless, he appreciates the odd detail, easily finding the page he was reading.
“But it isn't as simple as that. Not that a dead best friend is ever simple. We were sixteen and her parents had gone away for the weekend, and my parents had said it would be okay for us to be alone at her house for the first night. It was supposed to be like a trial run a couple of years before we left for the same college where we knew we'd be roommates.
We were the good girls. No drugs or drinking or partying or anything like that. We studied and went to bed before 10 pm. I think that’s why our parents trusted us to be alone. There were no locks on the liquor cabinet. But this weekend was our chance to prove to our classmates and ourselves that we weren't boring. We could party and get straight A’s.
And it's almost funny now, because we were sixteen. Sixteen. What person is defined by their sixteenth year? Except for Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles, but that’s beside the point. Our lives were nothing like a John Hughes movie. But when you're that young it's hard to imagine that there's decades and decades ahead of you, so we went to our first party that night.
To be honest, it was boring. The drinking games were ripped right out of a teen soap opera – spin the bottle, seven minutes in heaven, stuff like that. The guys were handsy. The girls were doing their best to look like they belonged. Nobody knew us, so everybody ignored us for a while. But then there was this guy – my friend had been in love with him since middle school – and he comes up to us, to her, and takes her to the ping pong table in the backyard of this massive house. He was talking about how he needed her as his partner for beer pong because she was the smartest chick in his trig class.
Wow. This is getting long. I don’t think I’ve even told my therapist this much of the story. Funny, right, how we’re so willing to split ourselves open for complete strangers?
Look, I doubt you’re even still reading, but if you are, I’ll get to the point. In her mind, this party had inducted her into the soap opera that was our high school. This guy – Jesus, she couldn’t stop yammering on about him. He was like her meal ticket. Her way out of the boring life she was living with me and our books. On the drive home I started arguing with her, telling her the asshole was only interested in her for her math skills and that he probably didn’t even know her name. She opened her mouth to yell something back at me just as some drunk blew through a red light.
I say some drunk. I know the guy’s name. I’ll never forget it. But he’s like Beetlejuice. Just thinking his name gives him power over me. (By the way, have you ever seen Beetlejuice? You should, you know, if you haven’t.)
She was dead by morning. The doctors tried all sorts of doctor things to keep her alive, but there was no point. She was driving. She got the full impact.
I got a broken arm and a torn appendix. And a dead best friend.
It’s been almost fifteen years and it still feels like the wounds are fresh. Like my arm is still split in two and the giant scar on my side hasn’t healed. Everyone – and I mean everyone – kept saying that it would get better with time, but you and I both know that’s bullshit. Bullshit spouted by idiots who have no idea, no clue, no desire to understand. It never got better. But people got sick of hearing about my dead best friend, so I pretended that it was getting better.
It’s not better. At this point I don’t think it’s ever going to be better. It’s just easier, you know? I can go days without thinking about it – that’s almost the same thing.
Okay. Okay, I think that’s enough spilling of my metaphorical and literal (the torn appendix, remember? From earlier?) guts. If you somehow got this far, thank you for allowing me to ruin your day or afternoon or night, or whatever with my sob story. I just hope you get it – that you’re not alone.
Is it weird that I feel like I know you’re reading this?
Darcy.”
Bucky reaches the end of the final page. He holds the stack of paper as if they are made of butterfly wings. Beautiful. Delicate. Capable of tearing at the slightest provocation.
A strange sensation overtakes him. His eyes sting. His throat burns. Not as if he has just drunk scalding water – it’s different than that. Worse. Like he has swallowed fire. The flames trickle down his esophagus and he wants nothing more than to rip into his chest to free the ravenous inferno.
This is it. The big release. He knows, because he cannot see. The tears in his eyes burn like acid. Blur everything around him. They coat his cheeks, fall to the carpeted floor in a cathartic mess. He understands now why his father was so against this kind of emotional display. It hurts. He has been drawn and quartered. Tarred and feathered. Flayed. Torn open from the inside, as if his lungs and heart and ribs have all decided in unison to flee their decaying cage.
He cannot breathe. He cannot hear anything above the rushing of blood in his ears as his pulse quickens. It’s as if a switch has been flipped—that self-destruct command HYDRA surely implanted in his flesh has been initiated.
Soon there will be nothing left of him.
. * .
“Come on, Westworld. You gotta get out of bed sometime.”
Bucky hears Sam’s voice through the door, emerging out of his daze for a brief moment. Long enough to roll away from the concern oozing unpleasantly from his crime fighting buddy. He faces the blank wall against which his bed is pressed and stares. His aching eyes remain open until black dots crowd his vision.
There is a tiredness within him. Ever since he opened that letter. Those apocalyptic pieces of paper that have brought about the end of the world. Maybe not the whole world. Just his.
It isn’t only tiredness that seeps out of his bones, dousing his blood in this strange stupor he can’t seem to pull himself out of. It’s anger too. Heaps of the stuff. And all of it is directed at Steve. Damn Steve for rescuing him time and time again only to abandon him when they needed each other the most. The old world didn’t deserve him. It didn’t want him. So, why did he choose it? Over this new world with its advanced super villains and technology. Over his precious Avengers.
Over Sam and him.
The bird knocks on the door again. His fist pounds against the wood so hard Bucky’s bed shakes.
“You’ll punch a hole through that thing if you don’t stop,” Bucky says, imagining this is what he sounded like when the Winter Soldier took over his body. Void of conviction. Unfeeling. “And if you do that, I’ll punch a hole through you.”
The pounding stops. “Aha! He lives. Honestly, man, I was getting worried that you’d found a way to bypass that weird stuff in your body that makes it impossible for you to die. Glad I was wrong!” Sam is smiling smugly—Bucky can hear the smugness in his words.
“Seriously, though,” Sam continues, “you gotta get out of this room. I’m no psychologist, but I don’t think isolating yourself is good for the healing process.”
“The healing process?” Bucky muses, finding enough energy to roll his eyes. If only Sam could see how greatly he has just exerted himself.
“You got a hundred years of backlogged fucked-up-ness,” Sam says bluntly. “I’m just assuming this whole being glued to your bed thing is a part of it. Am I right? You can say I’m wrong, but we both know that I’m right.”
“Right.”
“Look, man, if you don’t get out of this room on your own, I’m going to come in there and force you up,” Sam warns. “We don’t have to talk or anything. We can just throw knives at things. How does that sound?”
Bucky rolls over to his other side and watches Sam’s shadow beneath his door. Resting beside the door against the wall is his prosthetic arm. He touches the base of what remains of his left arm and shivers as the nerves crackle painfully.
“Can I throw knives at you?” Bucky asks, sitting up. The room spins. Closing his eyes, he steadies himself. This is not what he wants to do. He wants to stay here, lying on this bed, staring into nothingness. But the prospect of holding a weighted death stick in his hand, watching as it slips delicately, fatally, into whatever he aims it at relieves some of the pressure pressing against his brain.
He throws his legs over the side of the bed and stands, walking to his prosthetic and quickly attaching it. Sam’s shadow moves, indicating the bird has stepped away from the door. Taking the door handle, Bucky turns the knob and pulls.
Sam takes in Bucky’s appearance. His face warps the longer he looks at the mechanical man, his nose pinching in what Bucky can only assume is disappointment. Or pity.
“I know, I know,” Bucky says, holding up a hand before Sam can speak, “I need a shower.”
“You got that right. I need a shower just from looking at you.”
Bucky’s exhausted mind scrambles for a comeback. Any comeback. But his desperate thoughts are interrupted by the doorbell ringing. Chimes fill the duo’s home. With each note, Bucky instinctively moves further into combat mode. Sam does the same. Each of them is tense as they creep in unison towards the front door.
Through the frosted glass windows either side of the door Bucky sees a shadowy figure. He jerks his head and Sam nods. Bucky will open the door. Sam will prepare for a potential attack.
The doorbell goes off again. Then come the knocks.
Bucky grips the doorknob and cracks the door enough to catch a glimpse of the person standing on the porch. A woman. Arms clasped behind her back. Hiding something.
“What do you want?” Bucky asks stiffly.
The woman, short and wearing a deep shade of red, smiles so wide her glasses look as though they may snap against her forehead.
“Hi, I’m Darcy,” she introduces, flashing her bright teeth, and Bucky falls away from the door, stepping haphazardly backwards, pulling the door open with him.
Darcy from Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Darcy with the dead best friend.
That soul on the other side of the wall has come knocking.