Chapter Text
CHAPTER ONE
His phone buzzes, alive.
Bucky exhales.
His blood is led and suddenly, it’s melting, and he can feel it underneath his skin. It melts like black tar, hot and sticky, and he wonders how long it’s been there. Wonders how long he’s been feeling like that, like his body was heavy and unfeeling and rooted in place.
He inhales, dissolves into awareness.
His phone buzzes, alive, begging his attention.
He flips it open. The screen is bright in the darkness, a blue and white glow that stings his eyes.
It’s telling him INCOMING CALL: SAM.
It vibrates and rattles within his vibranium palm, against his fingers, making the whole arm hum. Like Sam was right next to him, shaking his arm like a petulant child, trying to get his attention. Everything is trying to get his attention. He doesn’t know where it went to begin with.
A soft exhale, shaky and cold, and Bucky feels the flakes of ice thaw away from his brain.
He is in his apartment, and it is dark and stale and looks at him like he’s an intruder. The curtains are pulled shut, the front door behind him still slightly ajar, the keys hanging loosely from his flesh hand.
It’s then that he realizes that he can’t remember the walk back to his apartment at all. Wonders how he got here when he is only now able to feel his legs. Wonders why he keeps wondering and why he doesn’t know things.
The phone is still vibrating.
It buzzes like a bee entrapped in a glass box, head butting against the transparent walls, unable to understand why it can’t get out. It’s incessant. INCOMING CALL: SAM. Once, twice. INCOMING CALL: SAM .
Then, it stops. Silence. His metal arm is still. Bucky can hear the roaring between his ears now. It sounds more like a wail than a roar.
The screen dims, and the room is swallowed by darkness.
Then, the blue and white glow; the screen lights up again.
It tells him he now has two missed calls. The first one at ten in the evening, from Sam. Yesterday. The second one, now, at seven in the morning, from Sam.
There’s bile in the back of his throat, and it feels like it’s been there for some time, festering within his sternum, accumulating more and more bitterness. He knows this feeling. He’s lost time. Between ten in the evening and seven in the morning, the world had continued. Bucky was here, but he also wasn’t.
He closes his eyes, darkness getting darker, and tries to remember. Tries to tether himself back into place. There. The memory. Yori’s face. His own voice. The memory flickers between those two. The bitterness in his sternum turns cold.
There’s a weight in his pocket. It’s always been there, but now he’s suddenly conscious of it. Like burning coal in his pocket, heavy and sweltering. He doesn’t reach for it. He knows what it is. It’s his notebook of names.
In his mind, he sees Y.NAKAJIMA penciled into the paper with a determined hand, months and months ago. In his mind, he sees himself holding a different pen, determined to cross the name off, hours and hours ago. In his mind, he sees Yori’s face, and his eyes are—
Bucky scrambles to the bathroom and vomits.
The bitterness in his throat begins to fester anew.
He’s fine.
This happens. Happened.
Raynor had a name for it. She had a lot of names for a lot of things he thought were exclusive to him. She thought that was funny, when he told her that. Everyone feels emotions, James, she told him, and he found that funny, that she thought he didn’t know that. Like he was some goddamn robot incapable of feeling—
No, she told him. Firm. Everyone feels emotions, she repeated. And some people, when they experience too much of it, too much old or too much new, sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it burns, or makes them sick, or makes them lose track of time, or makes them forget. It happens to people. This kind of suffering, it’s not made for you. It’s not your punishment.
Then what is my punishment, he had said, even though he didn’t want to say that, so he made it sound like a sardonic joke, the type of self-deprecating ones that she discouraged. He even smiled. Raynor didn’t think it was funny. She wrote something down in her obnoxious notebook. Scribble, scribble, long curve of the pen, dramatic period. Glare.
All in all, it was a very unfunny session.
But—
This… this happens.
This is what happened:
In an apartment that smelt like incense and inescapable grief, he told Yori he murdered his son. And Yori—he—it was, a lot, too much. Old and new, like Raynor said. The old emotions of horrible, horrible indifference he felt when he pulled the trigger, and the new ones of desperation, of self-pity, of shame, of despair, of guilt, of, of— there were so many. It’s like waves crashing onto the shore, except he is the shore, and the waves are all the wild emotions he can’t keep track of. He is talking to Yori, looking into his eyes, and the waves are crashing over him and tossing him over and under, over and under, drowning him, saving him, drowning him, saving him.
And then, in the end, the emotions all pool together, into one horrible ocean of mind-numbing sorrow. Like a child with a painter’s mixing palette, swirling all the bright, different colors of paint into one, the stupid kid thinking they’re about to invent some amazing new color that would make wasting all the aforementioned colors worth it, and instead coming out with something hideous. An ugly, dark color that swallows the eye, steals attention away from the rest of the canvas, and leaves the child with nothing but regret. Stupid. Stupid. You wasted all that paint. You wasted your parents’ money. Should have just let it be. Why the fuck did you bother in the first place.
He is plunged into that hideous color, an abyss. Dark, dark, dark. For hours, sometimes for days. It’s nauseating. It’s numbing. It’s soothing.
And then he resurfaces. He resurfaced. In his dark apartment, with Sam calling him and the call remaining unanswered. With blurred memories of him leaving Yori’s apartment, walking aimlessly for hours along the promenade, cognizant but not aware, before trudging back to his home, feeling soaked to the bone yet being incredibly dry.
He can still feel it, the waves. He thinks about Yori, and then over and under, the waves swallow and spit him out. He thinks about the notebook, and the waves froth as they pull away. He thinks about crossing off Yori’s name now, and the waves slam into him, and he thinks he might vomit again.
There’s a name for it, apparently. For all of it.
One name that wraps up his suffering in a pretty, red bow. Raynor had told him it, but he can’t remember. Or maybe he never bothered to remember it, because he didn’t believe her when she said that this was not his punishment.
It doesn’t matter. It happens, and now it happened again. It hasn’t happened to him in a while, but—
He’s—
Fine.
He’s fine.
This would be the part where Raynor would scribble something in her book.
He’s fine, now.
He’s back. He oriented himself. It only took two days. It usually takes longer. He considers that a win.
This is what Bucky did in those two days:
He showers, then sleeps for ten hours. He wakes up feeling like fucking shit, but he’s not surprised. He showers again, the water scalding. He orders food from the Chinese joint down the block, eats only the rice and still manages to heave it into the toilet an hour later. He sleeps again, for a few hours. Wakes up in the middle of the night, sweaty and cold and shaking. Stays up, watches TV until the sun rises again. Showers. Walks outside for a few hours, grabs a bagel from the bodega with the orange cat. Eats slow, methodically. Realizes the hallow feeling in his stomach isn’t from hunger. Walks along the promenade, staring at Downtown Manhattan. Gets lost in a few memories. Pleasant ones. Gets back to his apartment. Eats his leftover Chinese food. Doesn’t check his phone. Stares at the notebook for a long time, pencil in hand. Drops the pencil, throws the book across the room, holds his head in both hands, squeezes. Takes a cold shower. A very cold one. Sits in front of the TV for hours, watching but not seeing. He sleeps. He wakes. He’s back.
And that’s all. It’s simple. It’s easy. It usually takes longer. He wonders why it didn’t. Raynor would probably say something about how it’s because he has control of his mind now, and has control of how to process his memories, or some shit about how before he wasn’t human and now he is, so gold fuckin’ star for you, Barnes—
Ah. The self-deprecating thing again. He winces, despite it all. He really should stop. Raynor would be disappointed if she knew he was still doing that. If he was doing that again. It’s detrimental to his healing. Makes him only focus on his flaws and not his strengths, makes it seem like he is just a sack of flesh with flaws, flaws, flaws shoved in it and nothing else. There’s nothing else—
James, Raynor would say. Her eyes soft.
And Bucky would let go of his hair, sit back on that couch with a sigh, and say, yeah. His voice just as soft as her eyes. Yeah. I know.
Anyway—
He’s fine, now. He’s back.
On the floor, with a blanket crumbled over him, and his eyes mussed with sleep and mouth dry with thirst, he feels like himself again. The hole in his stomach that couldn’t be filled with food is still there, a dull cavity that aches with phantom pain. He knows why that’s there. He looks at the notebook. He knows why that’s there.
Then his phone starts ringing.
He almost doesn’t hear it, the phone lost underneath a pile of dirty clothes. The vibration an angry bee, trying to escape again.
He lumbers over to the pile, fishes the little flip phone out.
INCOMING CALL: SAM
Bucky licks his lips. He hesitates, because he doesn’t know what he has to say to Sam, what he wants to hear from the other man, but his hand is already flipping the phone open, because Raynor’s voice is also there, telling him you’ve got to nurture friendships.
Sure. Whatever. He can do that.
He’s fine, now, after all.
He clicks the call button. “Hey, Sam.”
“Oh. Oh, okay. So now you answer. But before, when I could have been having a stroke or dying on the street, you just straight up ignore me, huh?”
Sam’s voice is playful. Something about it, from just hearing it, makes Bucky’s vision brighter and sharper.
He tries to match the tone. “You sound pretty alive to me, so I’m guessing you figured it out in the end.”
“Of course I figured it out. I’m Captain America, dude. You know how embarrassing it’ll look if I needed some hundred-year-old geezer helping me out?”
Bucky chuckles. “Going straight for the age, huh? Low blow, Wilson.”
“I can go lower if you keep ignoring me.”
“I’m not ignoring you,” Bucky says, earnestly. He kicks the pile of clothes away, sits on the ground with his legs crossed. Swaps the phone from his left hand to his right hand.
“Psh. I know ya’ll weren’t big on phones back in the heyday, but when someone calls you and you never return the call, we call that ‘ignoring’. Or ‘ghosting’, if no one brought you up to speed on modern lingo yet.”
A smile quirks on Bucky’s face. He knows all about modern lingo. He had to, if he ever wanted to understand what the hell Shuri was talking about half the time.
“Alright, alright. Sorry, okay? I’ve been busy.” A lie, and he glosses over it quickly. “So what’s going on? Did you need my help with something?”
“Nah. Nothing like that.” He sounds like he’s outside. Bucky can hear the low howl of the wind slither into the speakers, the sound of muffled conversations passing and coming. Sam’s voice is crisp, no walls caging it in. “When I first called, I was about to head to D.C— wanted to see if you’d wanna meet up down there. But, you know, you ignored me, and I don’t make it a habit to wait up on people who leave me on read—“
“You can just call me an asshole, Sam. I can take it.”
Sam snorts, continues, “But since I’m still here, figured I’d let you know that the invite still stands, asshole. Didn’t buy my return flight yet, and I might be sticking around for a few more days.”
Bucky frowns. “What’s in D.C?”
Sam tells him. He tells him this:
He’d been calling the Smithsonian, speaking with a few curators on the feasibility of expanding the Captain America exhibition to accommodate a section for Isaiah Bradley. Who’s Isaiah Bradley, all of the curators he’d been passed over to had asked, not unkindly, because he’s Captain America now, so of course Sam wouldn’t be jerking them around with some stupid lie. But still, a lot of swirling conversations were had over the phone, a lot of whys and hows and whos being thrown, and finally a meeting was set up between Sam and the director of the museum. The director seemed open to having this discussion, and so Sam will be sitting down with him and a few other key folks (scholars, architects, designers) to lay the framework for an exhibit dedicated to Bradley’s history, as well as the dozen African-American soldiers who were recruited against their will and without their consent for participating in human testing in pursuit of the Super Soldier Serum. That part is important, Sam said.
“Wow.” Bucky says at length, after Sam has finished.
He wishes he had something more articulate to say, but that seems to be the only thing he can respond with. He’s staring at a blank wall across from him, trying to form the words. “That’s…”
“You don’t think it’s a good idea?”
“No—” Bucky blurts out quickly. He fumbles, “No, that’s—I think it’s a great idea, a really— good one.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, It’s—it’s such an incredible thing.” He settles a bit, allowing himself a moment to digest what was said. He smiles again, a genuine smile, one he would have shown Sam if he were in front of him, to reassure him. “I think Isaiah would really appreciate it.”
“ Yeah .” He can hear Sam swallow thickly. A shaky breath leaves him. Then, more assured. “Yeah, I think so, too.” A pause. “It doesn’t—it doesn’t erase what happened to him, you know?”
“Of course.”
“But at least now people will know. They’ll know exactly how much Isaiah sacrificed for this country. And Isaiah will at least know that… that his pain wasn’t overlooked.”
Bucky nods, agreeing wholeheartedly. “You’re a good guy, for doing this for him. Real Captain America-like.”
Sam barks a short laugh, the sound like a rock skipping over a pond. “Damn right.”
Then, a quiet sigh, a short silence between them. Bucky can hear pigeons flapping over the phone, cars accelerating past, Sam’s feet clicking against pavement. He wonders what Sam hears on his end, within Bucky’s silence.
Then : “You should come down. To D.C, I mean.”
Bucky winces. “Not sure how much I can contribute. Wasn’t really in the know on what they were doing—”
“No man, not for the museum stuff. Just, like, a little vacation.”
Bucky purses his lips, doesn’t answer.
“You know, get out of New York. Stretch your legs.”
His brow furrows.
“Come on, man. Don’t make me say it.”
Bucky makes him say it.
“God, you’re the worst.” Sam sighs roughly. Bucky can hear the eye roll when he says, as if he were reading it off a card, “ Come to D.C. so we can hang out, grab a beer or something. I’m trying to make it so we don’t only see each other when the world goes to shit, alright?”
You’ve got to nurture friendships.
“No.”
Bucky says it too quickly, and winces.
“I mean, thanks. But, I’m…” Bucky stares at the wall, but it doesn’t provide him with an excuse. He has to figure one out for himself. “I’m alright, here. I’ve had my fill of traveling.”
You’ve got to nurture friendships.
A lengthy pause from Sam, then:
“…What’s going on, Bucky?”
Bucky pinches the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes. “What do you mean? Nothing’s going on.”
The sound of the wind cuts off. Sam must have arrived somewhere. His voice seems louder, making his tone more discernible. “You sound… off.”
Bucky finds that funny, considering Sam was doing most of the talking. “I’m just tired. Didn’t sleep too well last night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Cause you sound more than just tired.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “I’m fine.”
That comes out too forceful. Shit. Sam doesn’t miss it.
“Bucky.”
Hard. Reprimanding. Bucky feels cornered, no fault of Sam’s. He can’t find it in himself to lie again. It’s exhausting, keeping up with all of them, so—
“I made amends, a couple days ago.”
A beat of silence.
He hears something click on the other line, a door. Sam just entered another room, closing the door behind him. His footsteps aren’t loud anymore. The floor must be carpeted. A hotel room, most likely.
Casually, like Bucky had just told him it was going to rain tomorrow, Sam says, “Oh yeah?”
Raynor would have set aside the notebook, crossed her legs, and raised her brows. Wordless. Letting the silence beckon him to continue.
There isn’t silence here. Bucky hears the roaring in his ears again. Waves. Crashing and pulling away, frothing and hissing. He turns his head, looking at the notebook, crumbled on the floor beside him like a victim of a hit and run.
Bucky licks his lips. “Yeah.” He inhales through his nose. “Amends, not… avenge.”
“That why you never called me back?”
Sam’s follow up questions are always quick, whereas Raynor would always slowly let whatever he says marinate between them before digging deeper. He prefers the latter. The quick responses always throw Bucky off. Makes coming up with a deflection that much harder.
“No. Well, yeah. Kind of. I was just…”
“Processing?”
He can’t tell if that’s a joke. “Sure.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
Bucky startles. “No—you, I don’t want to hold you up. You don’t have—”
Sam cuts him off easily. He can imagine him shrugging nonchalantly as he says, “Hey, man. I’ve got nothing coming up. I’m all by my lonesome here. Could use a good chat with a friend.”
You’ve got to nurture friendships.
“It’s not exactly a pleasant topic.”
“Doesn’t mean it won’t be a good chat.”
He doesn’t realize he’s holding the notebook until the words Y.NAKAJIMA are staring back at him, undisturbed. There’s a dot next to the Y, where his pencil had pressed down, waiting to be dragged across the rest of the letters, before Bucky snapped it in half.
“So. Tell me what happened.”
Bucky tells him what happened. Bucky tells him this:
In an apartment that smelled like incense and inescapable grief, he told Yori he murdered his son. And Yori didn’t understand, at first. He said What? He said Why? He said How? Bucky’s answers had wavered throughout, the words balancing on a thin thread, threatening to fall into a ravine. Then silence. Yori’s son staring at them with a frozen smile. The room suffocating. Yori still didn’t understand. Bucky needed him to understand. He told Yori, again, harder and steadier, that he was the Winter Soldier. He told Yori that he was—is?—was?—is?– he settled on was—that he was dangerous, a cold-blooded killer, an assassin that’s killed and killed and killed and killed for nearly a century. He told Yori that his son wasn’t his target, but he was a witness to something that demanded there be no witnesses. Yori’s mouth trembled, but his expression wasn’t—it wasn’t what Bucky deserved, so he told Yori that he shot his son between the eyes, without a second’s hesitation, deaf to his pleas and last words, watched his body when it crumbled to the ground, watched the blood slide down the hotel room’s door. Tone harsh. Clipped. Fast. There were tears in Yori’s eyes, cheeks, jawline. Bucky needed him to understand. Silence. Tears. Silence. A dead man smiling at them. Finally: Yori understood. A shadow over his face. He stood up, opened the door for Bucky without a word. Bucky left the apartment just as silent, a ghost.
Bucky says, “He took it pretty well.”
Which is a pretty shit and oversimplified way of describing it, but fuck. He doesn’t know how else to explain it. He’s replayed that moment over and over again in his mind, trying to figure out where he went wrong. Did he not explain it to Yori properly? Did he make it sound like he was making excuses? Was he not clear enough that he killed the man’s fucking son in cold-blood?
If Sam is bothered by his apathetic statement, he doesn’t let it show. He hums, thoughtful.
Then: “That’s good.”
Bucky stares at the wall. “It is?”
Something about the way Bucky’s tone slides into affronted bewilderment makes Sam take longer than usual to respond.
“You don’t think so?”
Yori’s son’s face flashes in his mind. He sees the frozen smile, teeth flashing, eyes twinkling with joy. Then— slack jawed with a hole in his forehead, unseeing eyes, blood outlining his nose, slipping through the corners of his mouth, down his chin. They flicker back and forth. Frozen smile. Bloody face. Frozen smile. Bloody face. Frozen smile.
Bucky’s hand tightens around the notebook. The paper crinkles.
“I feel like he should have reacted… more.”
“More how?”
“I don’t know.”
Sam hums. The lie doesn’t work. “You expected him to be mad at you.”
It’s not a question. Bucky grits his teeth. “I mean. I killed his son. So.”
“ Not everyone processes this kind of thing the same way. Hell, there’s hardly a precedent to compare it to.”
Bucky thinks of Stark’s metal fist smashing against his face, once, twice, three times, four—
Sam keeps talking, thank god— “Processing grief is not a one and done thing. How Yori processes it is his own battle, and we can’t hold it against him if he reacts differently than how we expect. He could have just been stunned when you told him, just needed more time to let it sink in. Maybe he gets it—that it wasn’t your fault. That you didn’t have a choice.”
Bucky thinks of Stark blasting his arm off, moments after he said I don’t care, he killed my mom—
“ This is how the man heals. But know that he’s gonna heal a hell of a lot better now that he knows the full picture. So. All in all. It’s good. You did good.”
His head is shaking. He doesn’t agree. He doesn’t want to tell Sam that, though, because Sam sounds so sure. But Bucky can’t find a way to agree.
The next statement slips out of his mouth involuntarily: “I couldn’t cross his name off.”
“Off your notebook?”
Bucky nods. He speaks through his teeth. “It just—felt wrong. Like I was cheating. I just—” He sighs with his whole body, tossing the notebook aside. He cradles his head. His hand runs over his hair, under his skull, clutches his neck.
He nods again. He doesn’t lie: “I feel like I got off easy.”
“It’s not cheating ,” Sam says quickly. So sure. So positive. Like a game show host that already knows the answer before the contestant blurts it out. He knows what he’s talking about. “You did the work. You gave him closure.”
“Closure,” Bucky repeats. It sounds like a slur coming out of his mouth.
“You gave that to him. You did the work.”
He doesn’t say anything. Sam doesn’t say anything either. Silence behind both of them.
Sam says, “Cross the name off, Buck.”
Bucky grimaces, like Sam had just asked him to pick out his own coffin.
“Okay.”
He stands up, phone in one hand, notebook in the other. Walks over to his backpack. Pulls out a pen. Opens the book, finds Yori’s name. The point of the pen presses against its predecessor’s dot.
Then:
Y.NAKAJIMA
“Okay,” he says again. He feels sick again. He feels those fucking waves again. He sits down before they throw him under. He rubs his forehead. He squeezes it. Okay. Great. He did it. One more name crossed. Even though Yori didn’t understand. But. Yeah. Okay. Sure.
Sam says, “You did good. The hard part is over.”
Sure. Fine. Yeah. Whatever. It’s over. It’s done.
“Bucky?”
He throws the notebook across the room again. Breaks the pen.
To Sam, he’s casual. “Yeah.”
A beat of silence. Like Sam could detect his bullshit nonchalance without even seeing him.
When he speaks again, his voice is soft, almost pleading, like how Raynor would get when he would go five sessions in a row without saying a word because he suddenly realized he couldn’t remember what his parents’ goddamn voices sounded like.
Soft, pleading: “Come to D.C.”
“I’ll think about it,” he lies, easily, like he wasn’t choking on his own fucking bullshit.
After the call, Bucky does this:
Nothing, for four hours. Stares at the wall. Replays Yori’s face in his mind, categorizing each change of emotion. Grief, grief, grief, confusion, confusion, sadness, sadness, grief, horror, horror—there, the last one: quiet acceptance. It doesn’t make sense. Bitterness festers anew in his sternum. It doesn’t make sense. He opens the notebook. Y.NAKAJIMA. He shouldn’t have done that. He doesn’t deserve that. Y.NAKAJIMA. He can’t erase it. The ink is permanent. Y.NAKAJIMA. Maybe Sam was right. No. Maybe Sam was wrong. No. He should go to D.C. No. He should get out of his head. No. He doesn’t deserve that. What does he deserve? Then What Is My Punishment: a joke, at first, but a gallon of truth behind it. Raynor would bring it up every other session. They never did find an answer. Y.NAKAJIMA. Other names underneath it, uncrossed and crossed. HYDRA, HYDRA, HYDRA, crossed, crossed, crossed avenged, avenged, avenged. Then the uncrossed names—
He knows what to do.
Five hours later, a plane touches down on a damp runway with a bump and a rattle. The seatbelt sign dings, and all the passengers unclick their respective belts and start standing, unloading their bags from the overhead stowage. On the loudspeakers, the pilot welcomes them to Detroit, Michigan, tells them the weather, the time, and wishes them a pleasant stay, and hopes they all fly with him again soon.
Bucky is the last to leave the plane. He smiles at the stewardess when she tells him to have a great day, and he says thank you, you too.
Inside his bag, he can feel the corner of the notebook digging into the small of his back.