Chapter Text
He’s been walking.
He guesses, at least. The soles of his feet feel used, and he’s far from the city. Far from the smoke. The rubble. The riverside.
Not nearly far enough.
Yesterday, he thinks. It must have been yesterday – a surge of vicious acid in his nervous system, the room turning its eyes on him as memories, images, flooded from his body. The grinding, singing of his mind. One coin left spinning amid the dull pennies. Bucky. Bucky.
I knew him. The coin goes on. Rotating in his skull, ringing against places and people he’d never seen – or maybe he had – and then hitting a switch. One moment, he's in one place: the next, he's somewhere else.
In the doctor's lab. The pale electric light shines on a head of golden hair; sunlight, maybe, or candles. No, sunlight, for certain. It’s a park: the soldier had never seen it before. But the grass had seen him, had felt him, tasted his breath and his laughter. Pencil shavings and dices. And then the floor is cold, tiles, he’s back in his heavy body. The images fleeting, nonsensical.
In a van. The soldier doesn’t know where to, didn’t ask. The van meets a bump in the road. The train swings gently. Crimson apples. Firm hand on his knee, smile. Voice soothing and familiar, the first face after feverish delirium, after realising there’s such a thing as too much whiskey, after bad and good dreams. The crack of the apple’s skin. The crack of a hand across his jaw. He’s awake, he’s asleep. He’s the soldier.
Then blood, bullets. Shards of glass. He’s trapped.
He shot the target three times, none fatal. Mission failed.
He shot a man three times, but thank god, he looks like he’s alright.
He’s in a room, low light. Watery blue eyes, the smell of disease. He feels a prayer on his lips. He feels fury. No, no, he doesn’t know this man. He wasn’t this man’s friend, no matter what he says. But the blue eyes blink in thanks when Bucky helps him drink. The blue eyes blink with the same sadness still.
He’s not sure why he dives down after him. When the soldier drags the man from the river, the man’s unconscious.
The soldier is sure he should have forgotten everything yesterday, but he has never remembered so clearly. The machine, the lock on his body, the lightning driving his brain to mush. The idea cuts into his flesh, makes him want to tear his hair out. The flashes of knowledge, of autonomy, that spinning dime: it’s scary. But he knows it’s not as terrifying as going back to base.
He forgets base. Or he wants to.
His arm hurts. He walks on.
He catches a bus. He doesn’t like trains.
He thinks about going home. Icy peaks and cages. No. Cobblestone and yellow taxis. The walk to the pharmacy, both hands fleshy and red from bitter cold. Nothing he’d rather be doing.
Now, the nameplates say Brooklyn: a word he instinctively knows to connect to hot water and floating cabbage, call it soup; bony bodies pressed together under the covers as the fire in the hearth flared out. But these taxis, these bus stops: the people must have taken the nameplate and placed it somewhere else. He recognises none of it.
The soldier wants to sink to the stones and bury himself under the streets. Instead, he keeps walking.
He finds the pharmacy on muscle memory. It’s still a pharmacy. He thinks. It looks like it is.
His legs drag him home. Not his home; home all the same. The white of the curtains and the shiny floor make his head spin, but the brickwork outside hasn’t changed. Glistening streets, hair slick in oppressive summer heat. Glass between their hands: Thomas couldn’t walk anymore, did Bucky want to do that to his friend? No, rather the hard barrier. Cheeks squished on the window.
A woman behind the window, long carmine pantaloon sweeping the floor. Frightened eyes on the soldier, holds a phone to her ear. The soldier runs, knows how to disguise himself. Sirens pass him by. He’s alone.
Before completely leaving the wreckage behind, he had gone back into the city. He knew what a museum was – he might have gone to one before. Bucky Barnes, friend to Captain America. Empty words on the recording, and yet, when he looked at the pictures and statues, he knew him. Steve Rogers. Steve. He repeated the name out loud, found it tasted familiar. A young girl looked at him a little too long. He panicked, ran.
He’s in the air. He’s on edge. He’s hijacked a military plane. He’s done it before. But this time, he had doubted his decision. His limbs are heavy, his head is about to split.
The soldier flies. For once, he isn’t flying towards a battlefield.
He remembers every battlefield he’s been on, even when they made him forget. The names and places don’t stick, but the blood does. The blood always sticks. The pleas always keep ringing in his skull, like the bells of Sunday morning church. He doesn’t remember the last time he’s heard those.
He touches down when he sees opportunity, across the ocean. He’s been awake for about four days. He’s scared to sleep. He crunches through grass, yellowing, almost taller than he is. He’s nauseous and dizzy, gloved hand cold and sweaty. He burrows in the field. He lets himself rest where he can hear the voles and weasels struggle for survival.
He didn’t learn French in Siberia. He hadn’t needed to: he already knew it. He remembers khaki uniforms, the smell of beer. Vulgar songs, though the words escape him. He speaks French to the farmer who finds him, lets the language battle the inside of his cheeks, senses an echo of laughter at his pronunciation.
“Excusez-moi,” he finds himself saying. “I must have passed out. I’ll be on my way.”
“You look tired,” the man responds, wary tension ebbing away. “Maybe you’d care for some bread?”
The soldier realises the man thinks him homeless. And isn’t he? “S’il-vous-plaît.” He hasn’t eaten in days.
When the man sits him down on a chair outside his house, hands him a heel of bread and some soft, yellow butter, the questions come. Where is he from? Where is he going?
He’s going to bury himself, he thinks. No. He’s going to bury the soldier. He doesn’t care where. “Je ne sais pas,” he says instead. I don’t know.
Worry sketches itself onto the man’s face, and the wariness returns with it. “You’re not from here,” he remarks. “Where did you come from?”
The soldier has been taught to lie. The soldier is only untraceable if no one knows about him. His origin, his desires, his missions. “New Jersey.”
Bucky wouldn’t lie. Bucky is a friend. Bucky doesn’t smell like blood, doesn’t sound like panicked prayers. He’s everything the soldier is not.
He realises now that when he dreams of the bed, the thin and uneven mattress, where skinny stilts of legs would kick until warm, he’s gathering a memory. The memory isn’t always fun, but it’s always better than war. He remembers drawings, pencil and charcoal. Not his: Bucky was never patient enough to learn. He thinks of laughter dying as it devolves into coughing, of rain crashing into rattling window panes. He thinks of rabbits, and tearing every crumb of food in half. Of arguing about it.
He thinks he’ll burst if he strains any harder to remember what all those things mean to him.
It’s 17:23. The nightmare is seeping out from under his scalp, but he doesn’t know where he is. The panic returns: he forgot the mission, lost the asset. His skin is shifting, wants to vibrate off his flesh. His throat feels tight. He coughs, hoping to relieve the feeling.
He listens to his friend cough, feels the sound grating in his bones. He’s terrified. He offers a quip, because his friend could use one. It falls flat. The wind whistles outside.
No mission to forget; no asset to lose. He’s the friend. Not the soldier.
He’s not the soldier. He repeats it a few times before he knows what he’s saying.
Berlin was on the road signs from the minute he entered Germany. Bucky doesn’t like Berlin. The soldier doesn’t like Berlin. There’s no need for him to go there.
He stays in a village named Frankenstein for some good time. It’s close to the French border, and the town’s name feels familiar, although he can’t remember if he has ever seen the place. He learns about himself as he goes. He decides he doesn’t like to hurt anyone. He wants to be good. He thinks that Bucky was a good man, and he wants to be like him. Wants to make up for the shame, the hurt. Even if he feels he can’t make up, not really. He can do his best.
Because it seems familiar, he goes to Sunday mass at the local church. It’s not quite right, as the sermon is in German, and he’s missing a presence by his side. By the end, he doesn’t feel closer to any kind of god, and he’s unsure if Bucky is religious. But he’s a bit more relaxed.
A woman talks to him on the square as the churchgoers flood out. She has a thin ponytail of silver hair, a huge smile and blockish shoulders. She runs the café on the other side of the square. When mass ends, the men cross the plaza and sink into her chairs for a few rounds of coffee – and then a few rounds of beer.
She asks his name. He hesitates. Sergeant Barnes, he wants to say, because that’s what they’ve been calling him. Bucky, he wants to say, because it’s who he wants to be. “James,” he says. It’s a compromise.
He doesn’t talk to the men, but he talks to her. She was born in Germany, 1943. She saw her country divided, East and West, this particular chunk sat on by the French. “Not as bad as East-Germany,” she admits. James nods. He knows. She thinks he doesn’t understand and explains. He doesn’t argue.
A man shakes the shoulders of a younger man, lifeless on the floor. His son, perhaps. The soldier is sharp enough to smell the grief in the room. He should: the soldier should know everything and react to nothing. If he doesn’t respond, he’s good.
The older man sinks to his knees. The room reeks of sour sweat, coppery blood. The soldier feels his own breath shift when the man lifts a gun and shoots, swift and accurate enough. Reacts late, feels his skin split. No sound passes over his lips. The man grunts, the soldier wrenches the weapon from his hands.
Tracks of salt shimmer in the low yellow light. The soldier stares, points, hesitates.
His son, perhaps.
Shoots.
They shock him into oblivion afterwards.
Bucky could never draw, but he was not completely helpless in the kitchen. James realises this when he hangs out near the back door of the church café. Between drags of her cigarette, Helena sighs about there being too much to do for an old woman. He offers to help.
James is fast and accurate with a knife. He’s ashamed of it, struggling to make himself look clumsier, more human, further away from the image of the soldier. But Helena praises him, brags about it even, and he gives in. According to her, he’s the fastest potato-chopper she’s ever seen. Maybe she should call the World Record guys, she says. When James doesn’t know what that is, it throws her off, but she explains it to him in a gentle manner. He quietly asks her not to call them.
Helena has to explain a lot of things, and finds she doesn’t have to explain certain others. James is a phenomenon to her. She graciously offers her shed for him to live in for a while – it’s all she has. She never asks what he doesn’t want to tell. She doesn’t mention his gloves. He grows on her, as she grows on him.
But the tension of being in the country creeps up on him. He begins to dream in German, and feels the needles in his arms, the voltage going through his flesh. Planes roar and rifles fire. East-Berlin, 1961, the Wall going up. The families divided by stone or bullets, skin torn as desperate bodies scale the Iron Curtain.
With Helena, he feels more relaxed than he’s been in over seventy years, but he can’t stay. He knows he can’t.
He leaves her a note. Thank you, for treating me like a friend. James.
When he remembers, the park keeps coming up. He’s never alone, always with his friend, Steve. Almost every memory is lit by watery spring or autumn sunlight.
They’re small, maybe seven, and Bucky pushes at Steve’s narrow thighs to help him onto a fat branch. The blonde clings to the wood once he gets up there, breathing heavy, smiling through it. He’s alright. He’s happy. When James thinks about it, he knows that Bucky was happy, too.
Bus to Prague. Hair damp under his cap, too risky to take it off. His chin buried in the crook of his elbow, eyes on the blur of grey asphalt. Fighting sleep, but tense enough to know that he won’t. Not here.
When he sleeps, he hurts. During the day he tries to forget, forget who he was trained to be, forget what he did. The pain he caused, the grief. He sleeps on the floor in desolate places, wakes up in tears, panic gripping his throat, hating himself. He hates himself.
The bus drops him in a crowd. The city swelters, the people sweat. The sounds of loud conversation and trains hissing dominate the station. It’s like the last time he was here, but without the tanks. Without the crying.
James remembers Pražské jaro, August 1968. The soldier worked for the KGB, sinking his teeth into the Czech revolution. Panic on the streets, innocent eyes staring down long barrels. Not innocent to the soldier. Deafening screams, bullets fired. Not a great many, but the fear was enough to paint Bucky in shame. As soon as someone greets James in Czech, he knows he cannot stay here.
Sometimes, Bucky wasn’t happy. Groups of boys crowd Steve, pulling at him, yelling at him. Laughing, but not with joy. James remembers anger. He remembers pain and satisfaction, Steve’s gentle fingers dabbing at Bucky’s bleeding eyebrow. Remembers catching eyes with Steve, craving something, restraining himself. Pain, satisfaction and frustration.
James lets his fingers go over a scar near his temple. He knows it’s real.
Blood pulsates in the skin under his temples. His eardrums shake off the sound of the rifle firing, buzzing frantically in their deep shell. He starts away, through strips of light in the dim hangar, stepping over limbs, attached or otherwise. The soldier hardly sees the blood. The doctor can turn people into corpses with ten simple words.
James feels sick. He remembers being there, remembers knowing, with every fibre of his being, that what he was doing was right, good. Mission completed. It was the closest to satisfaction he could experience, a puff of relief in his ribcage: if he did good things, they wouldn’t wipe him. They wouldn’t curse him, beat him, hurt him in every way he could and couldn’t think of. They would pay him in praise – отлично, солдат – and in peace: safely back into the ice machine.
His head feels as though it should crack. He wants to stop thinking, forget about it: knows it’s unfair to forget, because the families of those corpses would not forget their grief. It’s his burden, and he should bear it, all the time.
How does he live with himself if he does?