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The world was a war zone, and he was a weapon sidelined from the fight.
Bucky knew the reasons. He'd heard them, seen them on the news, had them run through his head a million times. It had becomes his mantra while he paced the boundaries of the ramshackle house Steve had found for them. The voice in his head always sounded like Steve's telling him all the ways the world wasn't safe while Bucky checked the wires and lines and mines that he'd trapped the property with. When he'd heard it in his own voice, it only told him how the world (how Steve) wasn't safe from him. Hydra was the curse on everyone's lips, and SHIELD barely a step above it. Every mission he'd had that had ever been kept record of was printed and placed into neat files for old men to read at hearings and in blocks of endless, bloodless text on the internet for anyone to quote from and make judgements about.
Hydra was a hundred buried cells no one could find, and SHIELD was buying back deals and goodwill with the bodies of their turncoats. The world was running out of scapegoats and The Winter Soldier made an easy one. He made a deserved one. They wanted an enemy who was easy to find, easy to hate. Bucky didn't have a red skull or a horned helmet, but there were hundreds of videos on YouTube from camera phones showing him trying to kill Captain America and the innocent people who stood in his way. The constant buzz of internet and TV still seemed strange to him when he had to see it as someone who stayed a person from day to day -- but Bucky remembered films. He remembered comic books and stories and how much more he'd liked them when there was a villain to hate.
He was easy to hate. It wouldn't matter if he followed Steve and watched his back, tried to make up for what he'd done. Bucky knew you couldn't reset a body count as high as his, and you didn't get to change sides. No one would ever look at him and see anything but the killer he was. Bucky didn't believe they should even try.
He didn't believe anyone would try, except for Steve. Steve never had known a lost cause when he saw one.
Bucky had taken months to really surface after the helicarriers crashed. He'd known Steve was chasing him, dogging his trail and tracking him down, but he hadn't been able to stop or let himself be found, not until there was something there for Steve to find. He'd waited for the day that Bucky felt like more than a name on the wall or a ghost in the shadows, and then he'd just stopped, turned around, and there was Steve. Sam was with him at first, but then it was just the two of them, in a house as broken down and out of place as Bucky was. Steve had a cell phone he turned on twice a day. They put an antenna on the roof and Bucky watched the news even when he knew Steve didn't want him to. The days ticked by, rolling one into another, and Bucky remembered what it meant to have Steve be part of his space, sharing his air, in his life. He remembered to miss it, even when it was right there again.
Bucky couldn't remember how to just talk. Words had been easy for him when he was young and still whole. He'd known what to say and how to smile. Now everything felt foreign and wrong in his mouth and there were so many things he knew he would have said then, but didn't know now. He never figured out how to say he was sorry. It was too big for words and he was too afraid Steve would say it wasn't his fault, because that wasn't true. Steve wanted it to be, believed it was, but it was a lie and it curled down Bucky's spine and settled heavy as lead in his center. It hadn't been his choice. That didn't make it not his fault. Words came back in bits and pieces with memories and moments -- but the big ones he never found ways to say. I missed you, somehow, or I remembered you, and they took it away, or Why can't you let me go? Sometimes he thought he remembered it wrong. Maybe he'd never known the right words when he was still the Bucky that Steve wanted him to be, or he'd just been better at pretending he didn't need to say them.
He remembered Steve's hands on his skin and didn't know if it'd been real. Bucky thought of it when he lay sleepless at night, because he couldn't remember how to sleep without ice and a box or the drip of a drug in his veins. He wondered if it was something he'd imagined, once, when he was young and had wanted what wasn't his to have. It all jumbled together in his head and he couldn't make himself ask. It sounded wrong and forced, to ask if Steve had ever loved him, or if Bucky had just wanted him to. Steve never made him ask. When Bucky reached for him, Steve just turned into him, kissed back, touched where metal met flesh and pretended it didn't change everything. Bucky wanted to feel like something whole, and he could do that with Steve beneath him, on top of him, lying awake beside him so Bucky remembered how to sleep while he held watch.
Bucky almost killed him and Steve kissed him and put him back together anyway, like he deserved it. Bucky sat sometimes and drowned himself in memories of laughing and kissing and sweat-slick skin and tried to tell if it'd ever been real before, or if it was one more thing Steve was giving him now because Steve thought Bucky needed it. He still couldn't ask. There were three entrances to their house. Bucky had boarded up two. Sometimes he stared at the third and thought about the road outside.
Bucky didn't have the right to resent the door he couldn't follow Steve out of. There was something new and dangerous brewing in the world and Steve was leaving to wade into it. Stay was the only thing Steve had asked him. Stay and be safe. He'd run from Steve and pulled apart Hydra bases as he remembered them. Bucky could find more. He could move and disappear and destroy until he stopped functioning and shut down and was gone. He never walked through it, but he couldn't forget the door was there.
Bucky had learned the flavor of Steve's skin under his lips. He'd discovered the difference between loofahs and a bath mesh and why he didn't need either of them because there were washcloths. He knew that when he woke up seeing blood and death and hearing Pierce's voice, he could break through a bed frame before he remembered he had a name -- but he would come back for Steve's voice. He knew the exact time it took to do a perimeter of the house and where they'd buried the wire and the mines Bucky had put in the overgrown garden's blind spot. He'd killed more people than he would ever remember. He'd been a killer before he'd ever been Hydra's, and he'd spent decades doing nothing but being calibrated into the most precise of murderers.
He could help. He could shoot and he could kill and when someone who was meant to be on Steve's side turned and saw the killer at Steve's back and turned on Bucky, he could kill them too. Then he'd have made the choice to kill and been the weapon. Or he could let them fire, and he could let it end, and somewhere there'd be a memorial or a grave with his name on it that would tell the whole truth.
But Steve asked him to stay.
Bucky sat on a bed that still smelled like the two of them and and watched Steve pack a bag. The mattress and box spring sat on the bare floor, cracked frame and broken headboard tucked downstairs in the study they didn't use except for Bucky to pace through on the nights when not even Steve could help him remember that when he closed his eyes he wouldn't wake up as no one at all. "I'll be back, Buck," Steve said.
Words were still too hard and came out too wrong. I know, and you shouldn't have to and let me help you wanted to come, but couldn't. There were no promises. Bucky still woke up screaming, sometimes. He still sometimes looked at Steve and remembered that he'd been a mission. Maybe you put the bullet back in the gun and it would fire at whatever was in front of it. Maybe without Steve's voice in his ear and his mouth on Bucky's skin, that's all he was. Maybe deep down, somewhere, Steve knew that too.
Bucky didn't say anything, just stood and touched Steve's hair, silver against gold, then slipped away. Bucky went to the kitchen, pulled out some of the excessive store of food Steve had gotten to keep him and methodically made sandwiches, stored them in foil and bags and then pushed them at Steve when he followed Bucky in on quiet feet. Steve laughed, soft and surprised, and Bucky forced a smile in answer. "I'll be back," Steve repeated.
Bucky knew. Unless he died, Steve would always come back. He was stubborn that way, even when Bucky wished he hadn't been. Bucky didn't know what he wished now.
Maybe without Steve there to anchor him, when he came back it would be to nothing at all, just a shell of a person. Just a bullet, waiting for a gun.
Steve kissed him, slow and deep, leaning into him, tugging at the knot of his hair Bucky had twisted up at his nape. "Sam will come, if you need anything. You've got my cell, he'll always answer if you call ... say you'll stay, Bucky," Steve pushed, quiet and hoarse.
"I'll stay," Bucky said. It felt like lead. It felt wrong, like not your fault was wrong. He wasn't supposed to stay. Bucky was supposed to tear apart whatever tried to tear through Steve. He was supposed to always stand where he would be hit first. "If ... I could be there. If you needed me." He could be the weapon and Steve could aim. Walk through the door. If it was over, it was over. He didn't quite believe, but it would be better than this.
Steve threw him a smile, and Bucky could almost trust that Steve believed enough for both of them. "I know you could."
Bucky watched him walk out, but couldn't watch the bike roar into the distance. He slipped upstairs instead, out the window and onto the roof, waiting until Steve was gone to start the watch for him to come back. In his head, he started a countdown. 42 hours. If Steve didn't call, then he would find Sam. They would find Steve.
Bucky was a weapon. But if Steve needed him, he would fire the right way before anyone took him down. He was built for the war zone. If he died there, he'd die for Steve. But he'd stay for Steve, if he could, first.