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He wakes some time before dawn, gasping for breath and not entirely sure if he is alive or dead.
It takes several seconds before he can relax, his shoulders slumping as jaw turns slack, his mouth twisting in frustration – confusion – desperation. The nightmares still echo in his mind, flashing before his eyes and then disappearing when he blinks like smoke slipping between his fingers. They’re so vibrant they could be real, more so even than the blank, unfamiliar apartment he’s pretty sure he’s sitting in.
Tonight, they’re not the same as the usual dream-memories, he realises as he stumbles towards the bathroom. No chair, no screaming, no ice and angry hands and pulling the trigger over and over. These were memories from a different war, one so far away in his jagged and patched-over memory that it feels like ancient history, like he’s reliving someone else’s past through a fogged mirror, only half the story bleeding through.
He can’t remember if he was in a bar or a trench, if he was listening to music or gunfire or a woman whispering in his ear. Was her shirt red, or was that blood pouring from a man’s chest? The memories spin around him, disjointed and fragmented, too fast for him to catch. He’s not even sure which of the horrors was the one that woke him up; only that it had terrified him, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
The bathroom light burns at his eyes, the bright bulb in the centre of the ceiling reflecting off the polished tiles of the walls and the corner of the mirror. He blinks several times and fumbles his way to the faucet with sluggish fingers, splashing the water across his face like it might wash away the memories. The sudden cold makes him gasp, shocking his body into a state more reminiscent of consciousness, but it doesn’t help with anything else; if anything, it only drags more memories to the surface.
He remembers being cold, as much as he remembers anything else they did to him. He’d been awake sometimes when they put him in a box to store for another century, just like he’d been awake for everything else. He can remember lying there, strapped to cold metal, staring at the reflection of a man he barely recognised as the temperature dropped and the long sleep crept in…
It’s not real. It’s just the middle of the night.
It’s always harder to pull himself away from those memories in the middle of the night.
He turns his eyes upwards, to the mirror that hangs above the sink. The man from his memories stares back at him – he stares back at him, because he knows now that this is his face; hanks of long hair, eyes that seldom blink, a mouth that doesn’t remember how to twist itself into anything but pain. He hates the mirror, and the blank stare of the Asset that always waits there for him, the reminder of what he was and what he always will be.
He’d tried to get rid of it, in the darkest nights of the weeks previous. He’ll probably try again, if he stands here long enough. So far, nothing has worked.
The first night that he’d woken up in a half-drunk stupor and seen that face, he’d put a fist through the mirror, showering the bathroom with glass and wedging tiny, sharp fragments of it between his vibranium fingers. It had only scattered the reflection into a thousand more anyway (cut off one head, two more will take its place); he’d had to replace the mirror before long, if only to limit the faces to one again.
The eyes are the problem, his mind had whispered another night, and he’d scrubbed at them with fingers of black gold, hard and unfeeling, until spots danced in his vision and their clear blue was shot with blood red. He’d wanted to finish the job, to never see that reflection again, but every time he tried that horrible, broken thing in the back of his head had shouted function, function, FUNCTION until he gave up and splintered the surface of the mirror again, careful to use the other hand this time.
But you are the only thing left in your head now, the silence whispers as he trudges back to his blankets now, several new solutions swirling in his head. Aren’t you lonely, with no one to hear you scream?
In the morning, with the knife hovering over his head, he remembers.
Weak sunlight through the trees, his knees slowly sinking in the mud underfoot, cold bullets weighing down his pockets and the howl of sirens ringing from far away…or maybe from long ago. Maybe they aren’t real at all.
The bubbling laugh of someone behind him is real, as are the soft hands on his head and the schill of a knife slicing through matted hair and dirt and blood and all manner of biting things that used to try to burrow their way into his skull. “You shoulda just asked someone to do it for you,” a voice chides, and the voice is real too, though he can’t remember the face that goes with it. “Looks like the rats made a nest right on top of your head, the way you cut it.”
He puts the knife down, his shoulders slumping forwards with it. He pulls the gloves on. He steps outside, into a world painted in too-bright sunshine and too-hard earth and no soft hands at all, except the pair that clip and buzz through all seventy years of pain with only a token effort at small talk. They don’t feel the same as they used to.
The hair doesn’t feel the same anymore either. His head feels cold, on the way home, his ears exposed, his eyes far too free of the loose strands that usually hide them from the world. At least it doesn’t itch, he tells himself, for no reason at all.
The cracks in the mirror are waiting for him when he gets home, a spiderweb of jagged edges that reflect the harsh fluorescent light of the bathroom straight into his eyes. Between them, another soldier stares back at him, his reflection cracked and broken but still achingly, painfully familiar, wrenching at his gut as he stares at it.
This is what you wanted, his mind says, his eyes narrowed in surprise, in distrust. The soldier reacts in kind; because it’s you, because you are him.
Images rise in his mind, pale and watery, dulled with time and fear and years upon years of holes being poked into them in the hopes that they would break apart and fall away forever. A ship, a trench, a pitch-black night where the moon can’t be seen for the bullets that fill the air, thick as the mud the soldiers are slogging through. 32557038. Clothes stiff from sweat, bones snapping under fists, a rifle cold in his hands, waving goodbye, goodbye, goodbye; killing and killing and killing and-
“I am James Buchanan Barnes,” he tells the mirror and the buzz of the electric light and he hopes they don’t notice the way his voice cracks in the middle. “I am not the Winter Soldier.”
The man in the mirror stares at him. He’s condescending, silent because the silence speaks volumes, because Bucky already knows what he will say. I am James Barnes. I was James first.
“I am James Buchanan Barnes,” he repeats blankly, like a mantra, or a prayer. “I am not the Winter Soldier.”
James Barnes learnt to be a killer long before the Winter Soldier was born.
James Barnes left his family to die in a war, far from home.
James Barnes is nothing. The Winter Soldier is everything.
---
“You look tired today, James.”
The woman’s voice is candid, inflected with just the barest of good humours. It pleases him no more than anything from their handful of meetings has. He has a feeling that this kind of thing isn’t her forte, and that she was picked for the job because of her impressive service record rather than her field of study.
It’s obvious in her manner, blunt, brusque, and to the point, and the way she can’t quite keep her patience when he doesn’t answer her questions. She’s always fidgeting or growing more tense as time wears on, her eyes shifting and her breath rising imperceptibly as she decides just how long she can let him linger in silence.
At some point it’s become a game he plays, or a comfort; he knows it’s petty, and he knows it doesn’t help either of them, but now that he’s learnt to tune her out he finds himself doing it all the time. Sometimes, he doesn’t even notice himself doing it. She starts off on something banal, and he falls back into the mill of his thoughts, too loud after so long being silent.
“-important to your recov – James?”
Don’t call me that, he almost snaps, but he bites his tongue because hearing her try to call him Bucky would be even worse. “What?” he grates out instead, his eyes flicking from an unspecified point on the wall to the pattern on her chair.
She frowns, both hands coming to rest on the notebook in her lap. “I’m not going to force you to participate in these sessions,” she tells him, “but I have to insist that you at least listen to what I’m saying.” She pauses, as if waiting for acknowledgement – and then, before he can properly make a show of ignoring her, she stops and narrows her eyes, head tilting like she’s just had a thought.
“Do you find it hard to concentrate when people are talking to you?” she asks, and he almost flinches, swallowing the movement along with several other unsavoury instincts.
Maybe she is kind of good at her job, even if her way of going about it needs thorough work.
“Did you hear me, James?” she prompts, picking up her pen.
“I heard you,” he replies reluctantly, before she can start scribbling in her notebook. It’s brown, hardcover and bound in leather, and the paper is cheap stock, lined and margined, a far cry from the bloodstained pages that it definitely doesn’t remind him of. He doesn’t like when she starts listing his deficiencies in it, cataloguing his weaknesses like errors in a program, things she wants to work on next time.
Her eyebrow is raised, like she doesn’t believe him. “Do you find it hard to concentrate?”
“No.”
“Hm.” She scratches out a note with her pen anyway.
“Do you have anything you’d like to talk about?” she asks when she’s done, hands resting in her lap again. Her thumb rolls back and forth along the length of the pen as she waits. He can just hear the scrape of her fingernail against the smooth plastic – barely there, inaudible to most ears, but irritating now that he’s picked it up.
“No,” he answers – snaps, a little too defensive. It’s that stupid noise, driving him insane, like the drip, drip, drip of the pipes behind HYDRA’s-
No. He turns towards the window, staring at the half-closed shutters and the white brick veneer of the building next door, and he doesn’t flinch. At all.
Doctor Raynor falls still, at least. One less thing to send his mind tumbling off of the precipice. The pen scratches at the paper again. He wonders if she’s ever considered how many people could break into this office and steal those notes, and why she thinks he’d ever let her put all the things inside his head in there for them to see.
“You’ve cut your hair,” she tries again, one last valiant effort to get him to talk. “Can we talk about that?”
A bird lands on the windowsill outside; a grey pigeon, standard New York fare. It waddles back and forth along the thin landing, ruffling its feathers and eyeing itself in the window’s refection. What does it see? An enemy? A friend? Itself, or a stranger?
“James,” Raynor says sharply. The pigeon flies away.
Reluctantly, he blows out a breath and returns his gaze to the psych’s drab office. “It’s hair,” he bites back, trying his best to keep the irritation out of his voice. He doesn’t really succeed. “I cut it. What’s there to talk about?”
“Why did you cut it?” she asks, hovering somewhere between the patience of a saint and done with your bullshit.
“I don’t know,” he says before he thinks, and then winces, because that’s the sort of answer she loves to dig into. “Because I wanted to. Does it matter?”
“It matters a lot. Do you know why?”
His eyes cut upwards at the question, accidentally meeting her gaze. She stares back expectantly, her eyes cold and calculating, staring straight down into his skull like she can see every through that passes through it. A shiver runs down his spine, his flesh hand shaking in the grip of the metallic one and his eyes unable to turn away, even when he tries to. He’s not entirely sure which is the conditioning, and which is the trauma.
“James,” she says again, coaxing him back to reality.
Don’t call me that, someone else snaps inside his head, far away and long ago. Who is James? another voice wonders; or maybe it isn’t a voice, but just a feeling, a sharp pinprick of pain inside his-
“No,” he grounds out. She looks down at her notebook, and his eyes snap back to the speckled grey of the carpet. If he’s holding his breath, neither of them notice it.
“In one of our first sessions,” she says slowly, paging through her notes, “you told me you didn’t want anything. We talked a lot about the concept of wanting things, do you remember that?”
Reluctantly, he nods.
“If you wanted to cut your hair, and that’s why you let yourself do it, then that’s progress, James,” she finishes. In the corner of his eye, he sees her gaze land on him again. It makes his skin crawl. He doesn’t make an effort to meet it.
“So?” she prompts. “Did you cut your hair because you wanted to?”
“If I say yes, does that progress mean I can skip a few of these sessions?” he throws back.
Why didn’t you just lie, and say yes? the voice in the back of his head asks in return, but the intent makes him sick to his stomach long before the word makes it to his lips. Lying is hard; he’s a bad liar, no matter how well he thinks he’s sold it, and if she catches him in a lie, she’ll-
Do nothing, because she isn’t a handler, even if her piercing, intelligent stare is almost enough to bring him to his knees, unable to breathe unless she says that he-
Fuck.
She’s busy writing in her notebook again. His hands twist restlessly in his lap, his left squeezing his right so tightly that he thinks his bones might crack. He should probably be more worried about it than he is.
On her desk, her phone beeps softly; behind her head, the clock ticks over to two o’clock. Raynor turns towards it as if on instinct, and sighs when she sees the time. Whether it’s a breath of relief or frustration at running out of time, he’s not sure.
“See you next week, Doc,” Bucky says as he stands, pushing off the too-soft couch she makes him sit on twice a week. He feels marginally better with his feet under him, cybernetic fist clenched by his side rather than around his weaker hand.
“I’m looking forward to it,” she says as he passes by her chair, without turning to watch him go. She seems unbothered by the snark and the abrupt exit. Probably relieved at not having to deal with him anymore (god knows he would only last so long, putting up with his shit).
The street outside is bright, the sun just warming the air after a morning riddled with frost. He stuffs his gloved hands into his pockets as he exits the building and takes a deep breath of the city air, ignoring the thing in the back of his mind that automatically says are you allowed to do this. He can breathe. He’s never not been allowed to breathe (breathing smoke, breathing dust, breathing the coppery taste of blood and the sharp gasps of a collapsed lung and the cold hand of ice creeping and creeping and rattling his ribcage and suffocating-)
People give him a wide berth as he walks down the street, shoulders hunched and eyes darting back and forth, automatically checking for threats. He tells himself he doesn’t mind. He knows he’s weird now, a bit too far over onto the crazy side of the scale, not to mention the blank stare his face always seems to fall into if he’s not paying attention, or the decades of operating as an assassin that inform every little movement his body makes, telegraphing the message I am dangerous.
His social cues are gone too. He’s figured out by now that he’s too literal – he can’t bring himself to lie, not even to smooth over relations, not even the tiniest little fib to someone he’ll never speak to again. He doesn’t always catch humour, his memory is shot to hell, and the mention of any number of topics is enough to render him silent for weeks, in case the whole ugly truth comes pouring out of his mouth.
The only thing he seems to have, other than the hot flash of fear that always waits in the pit of his stomach, is this off-putting, dry and self-deprecating humour. It’s lost him more friends than it’s made, so far. Even Steve wouldn’t have liked it – but he can’t think about that, or he’ll start wondering what else Steve didn’t like about this Bucky. It’s bad enough already, knowing that the list was long enough to make him leave.
He’s not good at people. That’s simple enough. He doesn’t need to get any deeper into it than that.
Bucky Barnes was good with people.
He doesn’t want the memories that flutter by like scraps of paper, no matter how he clutches at them with both hands anyway, like he’s too terrified to let them go and lose them. Faces smiling, crowds roaring around him, a bar in a country as far away as the war that had blown out all of its windows and half a wall. Dancing, singing, slinging his arm around a girl whose name is stuck somewhere deep in the broken clockwork of his brain.
He’d kissed her in the dark, messed up her lipstick and her pretty curls. She hadn’t let him mess up anything else, but she had asked him to walk her home. He hadn’t been the type to say no to a pretty girl like that.
He’d killed a girl like her in 1987. Pretty, with curls, always did the right thing. He hadn’t given her the chance to scream when she’d seen the other bodies lying on the floor.
He’s going to lose his mind, letting it wander like this.
The sharp scent of coffee in the air yanks him back, blinking, into the real world. The café he’s passing is crowded, the air buzzing with too many conversations at once, but there’s one a block further that is in a lull of activity. It’s wasteful, but he goes in and orders, comes out with a straight black coffee in a cup that wishes it were watertight.
The bitter taste of it sliding down his throat is grounding, bringing the ambient noise and bright colours of the city into sharp focus. He’s pretty sure he likes it better with sugar to dull the taste – or did, once, or maybe he hates it with sugar and his broken fucking brain is connecting the wrong dots. He’s too scared to try it any other way now. It’s something of a miracle that he can order coffee at all – he’d just stood in front of a board one day, unsure where to start, until the woman serving him had made the decision for him.
You should make your own choices, Doctor Raynor would tell him, if she ever managed to wheedle the truth out of him.
Get out of my head, he tells her in response, but it’s not as easy as that; she’s always there, lurking in a corner with her notebook and her blunt expectant gaze, grabbing at every errant thought that whips through his mind.
You shouldn’t think of her like that, she says insistently, and he squashes the urge to scratch her out of his brain.
The coffee disappears before he reaches home, as does the flimsy, decorative cup it came in, tossed into a trash can without a second glance (if he looks as he throws, his brain will say take it home, don’t waste it! The only battle he is winning is the ancient desire to be a hoarder). He takes a different route today, pushed off course by a large crowd on one street that sets him on edge even from a distance. The street he chooses instead is unfamiliar, but far less crowded. It’s almost nice to walk down, except for the suspicious looks several tenants of nearby buildings give him as he passes.
Most of the buildings are residential, he notes, his eyes flicking back and forth to catalogue threats automatically. The narrow alleys between them are all dead ends, but dark and easy to duck into and disappear, roofs are blank and empty, and the street only filled with a trickle of traffic, easy enough to slip through. The building veneers are brick, the windows indented, easy to climb, and even if they weren’t there are fire escapes-
Nakajima.
His feet stop abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk, ignorant of the people walking around him. His eyes are fixed on the building that towers above him – brown brick, weathered by age, sagging windows and rusted pipes. Old, like him, cheap for New York…and familiar in a way that most of the world isn’t.
He hadn’t realised that it was this street he had turned down (an unsettling thought in itself; how many other things has he missed, while he was stuck in his own head). He’s come here several weeks ago, when it had seemed logical to work down the list from top to bottom, or closest to furthest away, but he hadn’t gotten further than the front door (he’d turned and run away, run for his life, like HYDRA were shouting the words from the hallway, like the old man could kill him with a single look, like a coward, like a broken, shattered, empty, echo of-)
“What are you looking for?” someone asks behind him, each word stilted in a foreign accent that has long accustomed itself to English
He jumps, visibly, turns faster than a normal human ever could at the sound of the voice. His hand is halfway to the knife that’s hidden in the lining of his jacket before he realises that it is the man he was looking for, that Nakajima has found him before he could face Nakajima.
“What?” he stammers, amidst the clamour of his brain shouting he knows who you are and he knows what you did and threat, threat, threat, threat.
“Why are you staring at my building?” Nakajima asks again. Bucky’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out – what would he say, why would he be here, if not to- “Are you looking for someone?”
It takes a concerted effort to clear his throat and answer, “No.” He can remember a time somewhere in the past when words weren’t so hard to spit out, even when caught by surprise. It feels unbelievable now, with his tongue hanging heavy and awkward in his mouth, that he was once so good at talking.
“Hm,” the old man grumps, his eyes searching Bucky from top to bottom. For weapons, the unreasonable, deep-fried side of his mind says.
That’s stupid, he tells it in return and shoves it away.
“You shouldn’t stand here and stare at windows,” Nakajima tells him, like he’s scolding a small child. “People will think you’re up to no good. Are you up to no good?”
He waits, the silence stretching out like a length of fraying cord. Nothing comes out of Bucky’s mouth. “Well?” the old man presses, poking at his shoulder with one hard finger. “Are you?”
“N-no,” Bucky forces out, and stumbles back out of reach of the man’s hands. “I was just…lost. I’m sorry. “I’ll go, I-”
“Wait, wait boy.” Nakajima reaches after him as he backs away, gesturing for him to stop. “Young people,” he scoffs when Bucky skids to a halt, his jaw clenched in anticipation of…something. “Where are you going, boy? You will walk away to get lost somewhere else?”
Bucky stares at him in confusion, trying to find the trick in the question – but his mind moves too slowly, and the man is waiting with impatience burning in his eyes. “I’m going…home?” he tries warily, the truth the only answer he can choke out.
“No,” Nakajima says before he can even finish speaking. “You’re going to lunch. With me. Come on.”
“Um,” Bucky says as the man grabs a handful of his sleeve, following him helplessly down the street. Is this a nightmare? It feels real, except that he is supposed to make amends to this man, not – take him to lunch. Be taken to lunch by him. “Why are you-?”
“I want someone to sit with who won’t talk so much,” Nakajima says. “And you are lost and too skinny. You need to eat better food, obviously.”
“But I-”
“No.” Nakajima’s voice is as firm as his grip. Bucky doesn’t have the heart to pull away from him.
---
“You call me Yori,” he says later as they walk out of Izzy’s. Bucky only nods in agreement, his edges frayed from the crowd in the restaurant and his stomach stuffed with the most filling meal he can remember eating in months. “You come back tomorrow too, lost boy. I will need you help.”
He nods again, his brain numb, and turns towards home. Not the same direction as Yori. Or Raynor. Not the same direction as anybody; just him, alone, walking home in a daze that doesn’t notice the thousands of people that buzz through the streets around him.
His apartment is a sanctuary compared to the streets, silent and empty of life and dark, the blinds drawn against the afternoon sun. He hates it, but he doesn’t know what to do to make it better; go outside and play, his ma would have said (no, that’s not right; maybe not even real).
Steve would say that he needed some art on the walls or something, some random paraphernalia to fill the spaces. Raynor would sit in her soft chair and ask him why he thinks it’s missing something, like making him deep-dive into his scrambled psyche will recover his ability to know which stuff to buy, and where to put it, and what to do with it after that.
Sam would probably tell him to buy more than one mug. And then he’d go out and buy the ugliest one he could find, just to prove his point. And then he’d buy fifty more, for Christmases and birthdays stretching out into forever.
Except he wouldn’t, because they aren’t friends and he’d never get close enough to Bucky’s kitchen to find out there’s only one mug.
As if summoned by the very thought, his phone goes off in his pocket, a soft, neutral chime that doesn’t worm its way too aggressively into his consciousness when it needs to make itself known. Bucky ignores it, because Sam is the only one who texts him and he has no intention of trying to formulate a response to one of Sam’s innocuous messages right now, when he’s already so tired of people.
He slumps on the floor instead, metal hand easing him down onto the hardwood, his back against the sofa. It’s too early for the TV to be playing anything good, despite the endless array of broadcasts, but he flips through them anyway, staring blankly at the list of programs until the sports channel appears.
He always ends up on the sports channel, in the end. There’s something familiar about the soft mumble of the commentators turned half down and the occasional noise from the crowd. Something warm and kind, the echo of a memory not quite returned, no matter how much he picks at that particular wound. Often, he thinks he should try something different, like Doctor Raynor would suggest; but by this time of the day, familiar feels far better than the unknown of the assorted documentary channels, or modern music that only grates at his senses, or news that dribbles on and on and on. Or reality TV, whatever that is.
He’s not sure how much time passes while he stares blankly at the TV, unsure what sport he is even watching. His mind wanders away, somewhere between free kicks and the stadium cheering, back to the busy restaurant and lunch and Nakajima, who had ordered him three plates and then told him to pay, because by the end of lunch they were friends, apparently, and friends bought each other lunch.
Yori.
He’s still trying to figure out if the old man knows who he is or not. Is this, the lunch and the request for help with something tomorrow, the old man’s way of punishing him. Is it reparations, for the boy he’d taken away? Is it the old man waiting for his apology, so that the rejection is twice as cutting? But there is no way the man could know, unless he is HUDRA – but he can’t be HYDRA, because Bucky already made sure he wasn’t.
Unless. Unless, unless, unless. Unless he’s just paranoid, which is probably the most likely answer.
More intel needed, he thinks automatically, and then pushes the thought away before it can sink any deeper into his brain. I am not that anymore.
A car alarm wails on the street outside, drawing his eyes to the window. It’s dark now, no light trying to filter in from the sides of the blinds. The sport he’d been ignoring before has finished, replaced with a baseball rerun that he’s already seen. It’s not as exciting when you already know who’s going to win, he muses as he stands and stretches, trying to ease the ache out of his left shoulder.
His evenings are always the same; shower (hot enough to chase the cold from his bones, loud enough to drown out his thoughts), eat (stare at a plate of leftovers, flick through pages of options he can’t choose between, tell himself he’s not hungry anyway), ignore the chime of Sam messaging him again (know anyone who can help with a school project about World War 2? and his finger hovers over the keyboard, but when he tries to remember, only fear comes to mind; fear and mud and dry biscuits and the melody of a song he can’t hear).
His bedroom sits off to one side, the door ajar and the mattress pushed into one corner, the sheets still unmade like someone will return to it by nightfall. It draws his eye through the crack in the door, but it can’t draw him into its soft grip. He can’t remember the last time he slept in a bed like that, feather-soft and piled in sheets and blankets and pillows.
He’d only spent one night in that dark room and he hadn’t slept at all, not until he’d retreated to the living room, with its floor that feel like hard rock and the soft glow of the TV, reminiscent of things he should want to forget (but if he forgets one more thing, then he might forget everything, so he holds on to all of it, even the nightmares).
The blankets in the corner invite him in, cold and scratchy and devoid of most comfort, and yet far more appealing than the mattress or even the couch. He tries not to dwell on why; he’s wandered down that line of thought before, lying here and staring at the ceiling, and for every memory of a muddy trench or a mountain in France or the ruins of a once-grand building, there is a warzone raging around him, or four walls of concrete too thick to crack, or the cold hell of a metal chamber turning his veins into ice.
Those ones are always a bit fuzzy, but the sensation is just as sharp as the day it happened.
Sleeping seems pointless sometimes. Almost as pointless as wandering the streets until he feels like he’s going to collapse or picking names off the list of amends. Sleep only leads to nightmares ad waking up with panic in his throat and his hand reaching for a gun, night after torturous night – and yet there’s nothing else to do but lie here and pretend to be a human until the sun returns. He desperately wants to be human. He’s starting to wonder if it’s possible anymore.
You need a hobby, Doctor Raynor says in the darkness. Her voice is too loud; louder than Steve’s, even, saying, you shouldn’t think like that, Buck. He hates when she does that, but then maybe it is inevitable. She is here, and Steve is gone, after all.
Don’t think about Steve.
Don’t think about anything. He pins his focus on the sound of the TV instead, listening to the commentators muttering about nothing with his eyes fixed on the ceiling until sleep tugs at all of his jagged edges, dragging him down into the black dreams that await him.
---
He wakes some time before dawn, gasping for breath and not entirely sure if he is alive or dead.