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The car smells like cigarettes, which is strange because he’s almost positive that Tony doesn’t smoke. It’s possible, he realizes, that it could all be in his head. That makes his hands shake.
It’s too hot.
He rolls down the window.
The wind feels nice, but it’s too bright. The sun is harsh and he longs for when he was in the dark. His eyes had been adjusted to it.
He rolls the window back up.
"You doing alright back there, James?” Tony eyes him in the review mirror through his sunglasses.
“If I throw up while I’m on the podium, will they suspend the trial?” He groans, leaning forward to press his head against the seat in front of him.
“No idea,” Tony says. “That’s actually never happened to me, believe it or not. But if I were you, I’d try not to puke on the prosecution. That won’t help your case.”
“You’re not helping me, either.”
“Excuse me, but I am driving you there so that giant golden retriever can sit with you in the back seat. I am being very helpful.”
“What are you talking about?” Bucky asks weakly. “There’s no golden retriever back here; it’s just Steve.”
Steve has been quiet for the entire ride, only providing words of comfort when Bucky asks. There’s only so much his brain can withstand today. Too much noise corrupts, damages, makes things hurt, and there’s already so much screaming in his head as it is.
Steve has one hand on Bucky’s knee and the other is rubbing Bucky’s spine. Bucky would say he’s thankful, but his voice grates against his skull, and he’s wasted it all on his banter with Tony.
He uses this silence to count the few blessings he has; the biggest of which are the very silence he is using, and Steve. He has more, but he can’t focus on them right now.
If he lets his mind wander, he can catch flashes of red hair, lips he knows he’s kissed, and bright green eyes.
He exhales, sinking back into the memory of her soft skin and the smell of cinnamon. He doesn’t know if he feels the way he used to, or if he’ll ever be able to, but he likes to remember when he could—when he did.
The car jerks to a stop and the feeling of home evaporates.
“That’s my bad,” Tony says. “I go through yellow lights, but that one turned red on me out of nowhere. And we don’t want repeats of anyone flying out of moving vehicles. There are only so many limbs you can lose--”
“Tony,” Steve cuts him off.
He sounds angry. Bucky isn’t sure why. He thought what Tony said was kind of funny.
Tony has a talent of acting like Bucky’s colossal mental trauma isn’t a bother to him, and he doesn’t tip-toe around him the way the other Avengers do when Bucky’s having what Tony likes to call a “senior moment.” Bucky appreciates that. He’s had enough of being treated like he’s a wild animal that needed to be tamed with a few thousand bolts of electricity.
That’s not to say he isn’t wild. He is.
Dangerous, even.
Sometimes when the rest of him shuts down, being feral is all that’s left.
But it’s nice-- when everything inside him is falling apart and his carefully sewn stitches are ripping at the seams-- to have someone that acts like it’s okay.
He knows it’s because Tony has been where he is now, but he doesn’t ask about that. Tony doesn’t ask about his past, after all.
He squirms in his seat, unable to find a position that alleviates the fear-induced nausea. It’s getting hard to swallow, and he wishes he hadn’t eaten this morning. He’d be less concerned if there wasn’t anything that could be brought up.
“We can stop for a bit, if you need,” Steve tells him quietly. “You made us leave two hours earlier than necessary, so we have time.”
“Are you making fun of me? Because if you are, then fuck you.”
“I’m not making fun of you, Buck.” He’s laughing, though.
“I withdraw my ‘fuck you’ statement.” His knee is aggressively bouncing up and down under Steve’s hand and he can’t feel his toes. “Jesus, I’m losing my mind.”
“It’s all gonna be okay,” Steve promises, and presses a soft kiss to Bucky’s temple. “We have strong arguments, lots of evidence and witnesses… And it’s not like we’re denying your actions. We’re just saying that they weren’t of your own volition.”
He takes a shaky breath. Everything hurts and nothing is staying still. The world is going too fast now that he’s here for every moment. He misses those long stretches of emptiness where time ceased to exist, where he could close his eyes and let the cold take over.
There wasn’t even quiet back then. There was nothing at all.
“What happens if they find me guilty?”
“They won’t. They can’t.”
“Bullshit,” Bucky snaps weakly. “What will they do to me if they find me guilty?”
Steve looks dejected and scared, and Bucky wants to say that it’s not his head on the line if this falls through, but then he realizes it might as well be. They’re a package deal; always have been, always will be.
“Treason is a federal crime,” Steve begins unsteadily. “And it’s, um… It’s punishable by death.”
His blood runs cold and it’s suddenly hard to breathe because he’s basically being sent straight to the gallows. It’s not that he doesn’t have faith in the lawyers and the witnesses and Steve, because he does. He has more faith in Steve than anybody. But he also knows the multitude of his crimes and how much truly weighs on his shoulders, and he’s afraid that nothing will be enough to wipe that all clean.
“How do they do it?” He asks, trying to keep his voice even.
“Bucky, I don’t think—“
“Tell me how they’re gonna kill me,” His metal hand grips the seat in front of him hard enough that the leather begins to tear.
“You don’t need to know—“
“I deserve to know how I’m gonna die, Steve!”
“Okay, okay… If they find you guilty, which they won’t, it’ll mostly likely be a—a lethal injection, but they might—they might—“
“What?”
Steve looks like he’s going to cry. “It’s possible that… they’d send you to the chair.”
“… The electric chair.”
“Yeah.”
He’s had many experiences with electric chairs. The cold metal wrapping around his head so tight that he feared it might crush his skull, and then the searing, white-hot pain that vaporized the memories HYDRA didn’t want, the memories Bucky held most dear.
This chair would be different. There would be no confusion afterwards, no strange feeling that something was wrong, something was missing and why didn’t anybody tell him what he was missing? There would be nothing at all. It would be just like being put in cryo, except with this, there was no defrost. He’d finally be fucking dead.
After a long time of picturing what it would feel like to have his brain melted completely and to die in front of a country he’d fought so hard for, he swallows hard and says, “I’m gonna be sick.”
“Tony, pull over,” Steve demands.
“There’s no shoulder lane on the freeway,” Tony protests. “There might be some plastic bags in the glove compartment, I don’t know, just please get him to puke in something that isn’t my car.”
Steve unbuckles his seat belt and throws himself into shotgun, opening the glove compartment and beginning to frantically rummage through it. “How much time do I have, Buck?”
“How should I know?” Bucky manages.
Steve continues to look for a solid ten seconds while Tony mutters “oh my god, oh my god, oh my god” and clutches the steering wheel like he’s ready to rip it off.
Bucky’s removed a steering wheel before. He doesn’t think it can be done with basic human strength.
Steve passes him something—a bag? It’s a plastic bag, thank god—and then maneuvers his way back into the second row.
Bucky fumbles with the bag but succeeds in getting it open and presses it against his mouth.
Steve’s hand is on his back.
He thinks Tony is blasting cold air from the vents up front.
The plastic smells stale, which makes no sense because it’s plastic.
He tries to swallow and can’t. He tries again and gags.
He doesn’t want to die. He doesn’t want to die because even though he’s over ninety years old he’s barely had any life at all, and he doesn’t want to die because he’s already hurt Steve like that once before and he can’t do it to him again.
He lurches forward and retches into the bag.
He’s afraid he’s going to suffocate. There’s not enough air in this car, not enough air in the whole world for him to be able to breathe right. And even if there was, he doesn’t think he remembers how.
Nothing is coming up and he’s angry about it. He’s lost so much of his humanity that he can’t even puke. Does lack of humanity mean his death won’t hurt? He doesn’t think it works like that, but he really hopes that’s what happens anyways. There’s been too much pain over the past seven decades of his life for him to leave it screaming.
He lowers the bag from his mouth and clutches it with a trembling hand. He isn’t sure if he’s crying or not; his eyes are stinging but there’s no wetness on his face.
“Do you want me to hold you or do you need space?”
He’s not in shape to be making any sort of decision for himself. “I dunno,” he mumbles. “You can try it out, I guess.”
Steve pulls him into his arms and it doesn’t make Bucky’s skin crawl. That’s always nice, when gentle touch doesn’t feel like being pricked by needles.
He doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand how Steve can love him, and say he loves all of him, when Bucky doesn’t even have all the pieces back.
There are a lot of things Steve can do, he supposes, that he doesn’t understand.
Loving him was only one of them.
Breaking through seventy years of brainwashing was another.
°°°°°
When he actually cries, it’s in the men’s bathroom of the courthouse. He hesitated for a moment before going in, because whether he was a man was still a question floating around in his head. He doesn’t think he’s a man, not yet. Maybe not even a person.
People aren’t feral. People don’t beat their friends half to death. People who kill are supposed to know who they’re killing and why. And they’re supposed to feel bad when they do it.
But it’s not like there are bathrooms made for machines.
°°°°°
He’s locked himself in one of the stalls. He put the toilet seat down so he could sit on top of it and he’s crying, he’s finally crying and he feels a little relieved about it. Bursting into tears in front of a judge and a bunch of people who hated him (he had that in common with those people, which is why he didn’t hate them back) hadn’t been a possibility he’d been looking forward to.
He feels sick. He curls in on himself tighter. The collar of his shirt feels tight around his neck like a noose and he wonders briefly if Steve was wrong, and that he’ll be hanged instead. He could deal with that, he thinks. He’s used to not being able to breathe.
“James?” Sam’s voice is just outside the stall door.
He rests his chin on his knees. “Yeah, I’m here.”
Not all of him. His mind is everywhere.
“Are you okay?”
It’s a yes or no question. He should be able to answer it without this much difficulty. “I… I don’t think so.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Yes, I fucking know where I am,” Bucky snaps, his anger triggering him to come back to himself a little. He’s tired of that question, tired of having to convince people he’s alert (too alert) and aware (hyperaware) of his surroundings, and he’s tired of the moments when he can’t answer because he doesn’t know.
The other side of the door is quiet, but he knows Sam hasn’t left because he can still see his feet.
“I’m sorry,” Sam says. “You know I have to ask that question.”
He’s learned not to say “you didn’t do anything” because Sam never accepts that answer, so he decides “it’s okay” is a good replacement.
“Do you need to be alone?”
“No.”
“Do you wanna maybe come out of the stall?”
He wants to see Steve, and he tells Sam that.
“We can make that happen, but you gotta come out.”
He pulls his hair out of its messy bun and fidgets with the hair tie. The strands that are still tangled in it catch in the grooves of his metal fingers, and that makes him feel sad, so he stops.
“I don’t want to go out there.”
“Hey, I know it’s scary, but we’re all here for you. You got a lot of people on your side, you know that?”
He nods, and when he remembers that Sam can’t see him, he says, “I know. It’s… it’s the people not on my side who I’m worried about.”
“Don't think about them. We’re gonna hand them their asses.”
Bucky smiles. “I wouldn’t say that during the trial.”
He gets up and shakes the numbness from his legs. He fumbles with the latch and gets the door open, feeling relief that Sam is there and shame that Sam is seeing him like this.
But Sam’s been through the wringer too, and Sam still has bad days just like the rest of them, so maybe this is okay.
°°°°°
“I think Steve was talking to one of the attorneys last time I saw him. He couldn’t have gone very far,” Sam tells him as they leave the bathroom.
“Wilson!”
The voice from behind them startles Bucky enough to make him flinch, but Sam’s hand is on his shoulder and his ears aren’t ringing.
“I gotta talk to her for a second, James. I’ll be right over there, a few feet away.”
“Okay.” And it is okay. It is.
But if there was one thing that HYDRA didn’t totally destroy in his brain, it was his ability to recognize voices. She looks different; she’s wearing a pantsuit and her hair is short and straight and she’s older, but he recognizes her.
She’d been so young when he first met her, barely sixteen. He remembers being worried about scaring her. She was so small and her eyes were so wide. He hadn’t minded people’s fear, but he minded when it was her fear, and he hadn’t known why.
On a mission in Denmark, he’d broken a daisy from its roots as gently as he could and tucked it behind her ear. His handlers hadn’t liked that, but he hadn’t cared.
She grew up in flickers and flashes in between his periods in cryo, and one day she was twenty and beautiful and he’d told her so. He’d told her how proud he was of her. She had kissed his cheek and he had kissed her lips.
“Natalia,” he breathes. She’s changed so much and he hasn’t changed at all.
She looks a little surprised at first, and then she smiles and he doesn’t realize how badly he’s missed it until now. “James.”
He should apologize for shooting her, but he can’t get the words out. He’s been speechless before, but this time it’s for all the right reasons.
She walks up to him, puts his hand on his cheek. Her hands are still soft and he can’t fathom how that’s possible.
Her lips are on his cheek again, but he doesn’t kiss her like he’d done all those years ago. He wraps his arms around her—as gentle as he can, he doesn’t want to break her, he knows she isn’t fragile but he almost broke Steve and he doesn’t trust himself not to break anyone else—and buries his head in her shoulder.
Steve is one kind of home. He was Bucky’s home in Brooklyn and during the war, when his head hurt from all the screams and explosions and his hands were tired of holding a sniper rifle. It had still been war, had still been almost unbearable even when Steve got there, but something changed. Something about Steve being with him made him sleep better at night, and being without Steve for so long (even when he didn't remember who Steve was) had been worse than war. And that day on the hellicarrier, when the scattered puzzle pieces in his head started putting themselves together, was like coming home.
But Natalia—Natasha—is different. She was his home when everything else was gone, when he didn’t know his name and when he thought nothing would be warm again. She gave him a purpose in the whirlwind of slaughter and electric currents. Each time they wiped him, he still remembered her. She was a constant, even if she aged when he didn't. Going to sleep in the ice wasn't as bad because he could always hope that he'd see her when he got out. She made the cold more bearable. She was hope, and he needs to come home to her, too.
He finally finds it in himself to say, “I’m sorry I shot you,” and then he’s sobbing because he’d promised he’d keep her safe, promised he’d be gentle, and he’d broken that promise. Just like he’d almost broken her, almost broken Steve. Why did he have to destroy the people he loved most?
“James, I’m fine, really—James, look at me.” She takes his face in her hands and wipes away the tears with her thumbs. She's looking right at him, and her eyes are still as green as they were when he first met her. “I don’t want an apology. You don’t need to give me one. And I shot you too, so we’re even. And I am okay.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
She’s enunciating her words, and he appreciates that because everything is a blur of gunshots and blood and red hair and Denmark in the spring and the way that daisy looked in her hair and cinnamon cinnamon cinnamon--
“Let’s get you to Steve now, yeah?” Sam’s hand is on his shoulder again. “Nat will be here afterwards.” He knows why he needs to leave—she’s messing up his head (not her fault, not her fault at all, it’s entirely his)—but he doesn’t want to. He does anyway.
He’s used to doing things he doesn’t want to do.
°°°°°
He’s sitting on the floor next to a water dispenser. Sam’s making him take sips of water from the cone-shaped paper cup. He looks up when he sees someone running down the hall out of the corner of his eye. It’s Steve. Of course it’s Steve.
“What’s going on? What’s wrong?” He’s panting when he stops in front of Sam and Bucky, but Bucky thinks that’s just because he’s nervous. He’s pretty sure that Steve could run an entire marathon and not be winded.
“He wanted to see you, that’s all,” Sam says. “Got a little freaked out when he saw Nat, but we got that under control.”
Steve nods. “Thank you, Sam.”
“I’m gonna go round up Nat and get settled in the courtroom. Trial starts in a half hour.”
Bucky’s stomach is in his throat. “Th-thirty minutes?”
Sam looks like he wants to stay, but Steve waves him off. “We’re good.”
When Sam is out of earshot, Bucky shows his panic.
“I’m not ready.”
“Bucky—“
“I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can.”
Steve sounds firm but not angry, and he doesn’t sound like he’s lying. Bucky knows when people are lying to him.
He’s dizzy, but he can still feel his toes. “I don’t want them to take me away from you again. I don't want to forget you.”
“They’re not going to, and you won't. They won't make you forget me.”
“You can’t say that. You don’t know for sure.” He’s crying again. He’s really had enough of crying for today.
Steve is silent for a while, and Bucky knows it’s so he can cry and cry until he can’t, and he’s grateful for that. He’s grateful that Steve doesn’t tell him to stop, because he doesn’t think he could if he wanted to. All Steve does is tuck Bucky's hair behind his ears and hold his hand. Bucky likes it when Steve holds his hand, because Steve never hesitates to decide which hand to take. If the metal arm scares him or makes him sad, he doesn't show it.
Eventually the flow of tears starts to taper off, and he’s able to speak.
“Steve,” he whispers. He hates how uncertain he sounds.
“Yeah?”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Steve’s shoulders slump. “You’re not gonna die, Buck.”
“But you don’t know that.”
Steve takes a deep breath. “You’re right. Honestly, I don’t. I know as much as you do. But all I can do at this point is have faith that they’ll make the right choice.”
“You think they will?”
Steve smiles, but it’s sad. Steve tends to smile when he’s sad, and it does weird things to Bucky’s chest. It makes things hurt. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
“Why?”
Steve kisses his cheek, and for a wonderful instant, everything feels okay. “Because I have faith in you. I always have.”
He doesn’t know how Steve can do that.
There are a lot of things Steve does that Bucky doesn’t understand.