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Writing down his good memories had sounded easy to Bucky. That was, until he had sat down with a notebook and a pen to actually do it.
It wasn’t that he didn’t have good memories - he knew they must have been in there somewhere - but rather that he couldn’t find them. Every time he tried to dive into his memories deep enough to find them, he only found himself dredging up more fuel for his nightmares. More people he’d hurt. People he’d killed. People and times he didn’t like to think about if he could help it. But of course, he couldn’t always help it.
As he often did when he tried to sit down and accomplish this task, Bucky left the notebook and its empty pages on the table, pushing his chair back as he got to his feet. He moved, as he always did, to the kitchen window, the one overlooking the street three floors below.
Watching people from a distance gave Bucky some semblance of peace. He had never been able to figure out why. Whenever he had tried to think about it, all he had been able to think was how he should have felt the opposite, how watching people should have reminded him of killing them, of his missions and his orders, and then he would stop thinking about it, because that was the exact line of thought he was trying to avoid. He never could avoid it in the end, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.
So, instead of writing, Bucky would often find himself standing at his kitchen window, the benchtop cold beneath his hand - his real hand, not the one he had been given to replace what he had lost - as he watched the people passing in the street. Often, he found himself standing there in the mornings, so he would watch people on their way to work; suits carrying briefcases, people almost crashing into one another as they stared down at their phones, starting their day’s work before they even got to work. Bucky’s own phone usually stayed on the table all day. Not because he didn’t know how to use it, but because he didn’t know what he would use it for. Aside from his therapist, he didn’t really have anyone to call.
Day after day, the notebook would sit empty, and Bucky would stand at his kitchen window instead of writing in it. The memories he wanted wouldn’t come to him, and he had learned the hard way that trying to force them only made more of the bad ones rear their heads. Trying to write down his good memories only gave him more people to write down in the list of people that he had wronged. He was starting to wonder if he even had the lifespan left to make amends with all these people. Some days, he even wondered if trying to make amends with these people was worth it, or if he would only make them more miserable than he already had.
But eventually (as his therapist had told him it would, though he wasn’t going to admit that to her face), the good memories started to show up. He woke up one morning with a sliver of one in the corner of his mind, and almost knocked over half the furniture in his apartment, stumbling to grab his notebook and write it down before it disappeared. He made it just in time, managing to scribble down two sentences before the memory drifted away from him.
Going to Coney Island with Steve before the war. Spending too much money winning a stuffed toy for a redhead, and having to let him buy me a ticket home.
After he wrote it down, that memory stayed with Bucky for the rest of the day. It didn’t grow - he remembered nothing more from that day than those two lines - but it sat in his mind, playing over and over. Bucky didn’t end up staring out his kitchen window that day. He didn’t need to, when he already had a good memory to keep the waves of bad ones at bay.
The days after that were harder again, and sometimes, Bucky would spend half the day just staring out the window, watching the people pass by on the street. But he had something in the notebook now, two lines that he could look down on. Those two lines didn’t make things much easier, but they did remind him of one thing - he existed outside of the Winter Soldier, outside of HYDRA. Outside of everything they had made him into, the role they had forced him to play.
That may not have made things easier, but it did make the hard feelings a little less painful to sit with.
Even after Bucky was finished with his mandated therapy, he kept writing in the notebook. He hated to admit it, would never do so out loud, but it helped him, having a notebook he could turn to with the good memories of his life written on its pages. Even if he had nothing to add, he would sit and read them sometimes, as a reminder that he was someone outside of what HYDRA had made him. It didn’t make the demons of his past any easier to deal with, but it did make them a little quieter, and that was enough.
Over time, he started to add more to the notebook. Memories would come to him after exercise, while cooking dinner, even while he was getting ready to go to sleep. He still wouldn’t call them frequent - he was lucky to get two in a week - but there were more of them than there had been before, and soon, they began to fill the notebook, his messy cursive handwriting covering more and more pages with happy memories, both from the past and the present.
The cookout with Sam’s family. No-one was afraid of my metal arm - not even the kids.
Going to the Stark Expo with Steve the night before my enlistment.
Most of them were short little snippets like this, a sentence or two jotted down before they slipped from Bucky’s mind and were gone just as quickly as they had come. But some of them - particularly the newer ones - had more detail to them. Written as soon as they had happened, one of the first things Bucky did after he stepped into his apartment, as if he was afraid something would come and rip them away from him. But once they were written down, they were immortalised.
Sam finally agreed with his sister not to sell the boat. The two of us took it out this afternoon. Sam said they used to take it out all the time, before the world got turned on its head and the boat fell into disrepair. He talked a lot about fishing, but we didn’t end up doing any. Instead, we sat on the deck together, looking up at the sky. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so content just sitting somewhere before. For once, I didn’t feel like I needed to be doing something to fill in the time.
Over time, as the world calmed down and Bucky’s life calmed along with it, there were more moments like that, most of them with Sam. Moments of calm, of something Bucky assumed was close to peace. The closest he would ever get to it, at least. The notebook continued to fill up, but mostly with new memories now, some of which would take up a full page. Days he didn’t want to forget, didn’t want to risk ever forgetting. Sure, Bucky knew the programming in his head was gone, but he had spent decades unable to trust his own mind. Shifting away from that mentality was going to take a long time, if it ever happened at all.
But as long as he had the notebook, he had the memories, and as long as he had the memories, he was Bucky. He was James “Bucky” Barnes, not the Winter Soldier, not anything HYDRA had ever crafted him to be. Maybe one day the notebook would fill up, overflowing with his good memories, and he would need to buy a new one. But still, he would write them down. Bucky didn’t think he would ever stop writing down the good memories. Not as long as doing so helped combat the bad ones.