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Consciousness is a length of rope that hangs over a precipice, swaying gently in the breeze.
He’s the fool that looks down at the rocks below and holds on, and holds on, and holds on.
And then someone cuts the rope. And then his fingers slip. And then his left hand disappears, and then the cold creeps in, and then-
He looks up, and he sees death’s pale face in the way of the sun, and he understands. And he lets go.
---
He wakes up to a hazy, warm afternoon and a throbbing headache that’s settled just behind his temples.
The house is silent around him, the buzz of flies and the lap of water against the lakeshore outside the only sounds to remind him where he is. His skin is hot and his limbs hang from his torso like lead weights, and the moment he’s aware enough to remember who he is and why he’s here, he regrets clawing his way back to consciousness at all.
Nothing moves inside. A clock ticks somewhere in an adjacent room, loud enough to be heard from any room on the first floor in the silence of an empty house. Loud enough to remind him of all the time he has lost. Is losing. Sleep tugs at his eyelids, this incessant heaviness he can’t escape, even when just awoken. His tongue rests heavy against his teeth, his mouth dry and his jaw fixed closed around his shallow breath.
His heart is beating too fast, his breath too rapid. Horrors swell in the back of his mind, begging to be set free. Only the tick of the clock keeps him grounded, the buzz of the flies, the sweat dripping down the back of his neck.
Delacroix, he thinks, and forces his eyes open to stare at the flaking plaster on the ceiling above him. Not Russia, Siberia, London, Austria-
Not HYDRA, he definitely doesn’t think, in case that spirals him right back down into the nightmares again. Not that he’s scared of that. He’s better than that, now.
Delacroix.
His memory of the last few days is fractured and confused – like most of his mind, in this fourth life he’s been given. He knows he’s been in Delacroix for three days, maybe four, depending on what day it is now (time is slipping past him too fast, consciousness is too slippery for him to grab hold of for very long, his body says sleep and rest and we can’t do this anymore oh god when will it get easier). Beyond that…
There had been a hospital, before that, he thinks. He knows. He remembers the white walls, the antiseptic smell and the room with no windows; or he is confusing one room with several others from the depths of the crippled mess he calls a brain. Or he is dead, and death is just a series of painful, confusing awakenings where people tell him to eat, drink, take a walk around the room before you go back to sleep.
Death could be like that, he supposes. He wouldn’t know what death is supposed to be like, considering he can never seem to actually fucking die, no matter how many times he tries it.
Have you ever thought about killing yourself? Raynor’s voice says in his mind. She’d asked him that once, early on. He’d tried to laugh her off, but the laugh hadn’t made it to his mouth.
Stupid question. He’s fought in every war in the last hundred years. His brain’s been deep-fried so many times he can’t always remember what order those wars go in. He can only admit that to himself half of the time.
The Winter Soldier was just too stupid to think of shooting himself in the head as a viable way out.
(Bucky Barnes is too much of a coward to do it even when he knows it’s an option.)
But no, that’s a stupid thought anyway. That’s not what this is. This is…well, he doesn’t really remember. Probably won’t ever remember, unless he goes all the way back to Wakanda and asks Shuri to piece the memory back together for him, which seems like a waste of time when he already has a dozen others just like it stuck in the back of his head. He hasn’t had a chance to ask Sam yet either, in between being dragged across the country in various states of near-death and being unconscious, and the hospital-
Stop going on about the hospital, Sam had said to him last night. Two days ago. This morning. Sometime recently. I already said I’m sorry. Drink some water.
His throat is very dry right now.
Getting up off the couch is a lengthy process, even without considering the fracture in his one real arm. Even with another arm that doesn’t pull at stitches or carry broken bones around with it like they’re going to heal stronger for all that trouble. Internal injuries are fine, really, no matter what Sam says. Those, you can work around, can push through until they either fix themselves or kill you, and none of them have chosen the second option yet.
No, the real problem is the external wounds. And the tight stitches, stretched to breaking point as they try to convince errant skin to knit back together. And the small infection that eats at that skin, red and hot and irritating.
The real problem is sharp, bladed things that try to slice you in half, and illegal genetic experiments that fight back against a quick death like that.
He hasn’t looked at the wound since it happened, his chest covered in blood and his lungs running ragged against a battered ribcage. Even now, only the first few stitches poke past the collar of his shirt, all but one covered by a white dressing. Sam is the only one that looks at it, because Sam needs it there in front of him to be able to swear at Bucky with the right ardour while he ensures Bucky’s not going to die on him, now that he’s had a week to mull it over.
Also, just the memory of the fresh wound fills him with the sort of horror that twists his gut and makes his head spin, even worse than the concussion. Which is weird, for someone who’s caused hundreds of horrific injuries and carries them all in his head. Especially weird for someone with a metal arm literally welded into their shoulder. He’d thought he was beyond body horror, but apparently no pain was small enough to pass by unnoticed, even now.
His legs feel unsteady as he finally stands, his chest crying out at even little movement. His limbs are stiff and tired, weak from the long period of little use. He doesn’t dare try to stretch or work out the kinks in his joints, just swallows the discomfort and shuffles towards the kitchen, his left hand tracing the wall and the tops of furniture in a well-rehearsed path.
The kitchen is tidy and well-kept, one window left ajar to admit the sun and a warm afternoon breeze. A glass has been left by the sink for him, a bowl of fruit placed pointedly beside it. He ignores the fruit and picks up the glass, metal fingers clinking against the faucet of the sink as he turns it on.
Behind him, the door slams.
Sarah’s boys run past his field of vision before he can look up, school bags swinging from their arms, sneakers scuffing against the floorboards as they hurriedly toe them off. AJ’s chattering about something Bucky doesn’t have a reference point for. Video games, maybe? They like video games, that’s about all he knows about what they do in their spare time. He hasn’t really had the time to observe them during his stay here – mostly, he’s been on the couch, lost in various states of unconsciousness.
“Hi, Bucky,” they say in unison, their conversation dying as they notice he is there.
“Hi,” he answers; neutral. Polite. He fills his glass.
They fall silent behind him, the sound of the running faucet covering the uncertain shuffle of their feet and the looks they toss back and forth between them.
When he turns around, only Cass remains.
“Bucky…” he begins hesitantly, when he realises he has his attention, his hands wringing together nervously in front of him. “Can I ask you something?”
He drinks the water before he answers, washing the taste of blood from the back of his throat and wetting down his cracked lips. “Yeah?” he prompts when he is ready, and leans back against the kitchen bench.
“I was just wondering – I have a school project…about World War Two-” He stutters to a stop just as Bucky’s heart lodges itself in his throat like a stone, glances back at the stairs his brother has already disappeared up. Swallows down his fear.
“Do you think you could help me with it?”
Bucky bites his tongue, and resists the urge to wince, or to say something dry and terrible. This is why he stays away from kids – because now he’s got to walk a line his unsocialised ass can’t even see, and if he says the wrong thing then Sarah will be after him, and really, he’s just so tired right now.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he answers abruptly, his voice rasping at the back of his throat, and turns to put down his glass so that he doesn’t have to look Cass in the eye.
“Oh…” the kid mumbles. A floorboard groans under the weight of his heel as he steps back. “That’s okay. Sorry for bothering you.”
“’S okay,” Bucky says, but too late – the kid’s feet are loud on the stairs, hammering upstairs to the safety of his room, where there are no rude intruders to scare him off for asking innocent questions.
Bucky hangs his head over the sink and wonders if he should start packing his bags. Sarah will put up with a lot of things, but a threat to her kids is not one of them.
He turns the conversation over again in his head on his slow shuffle back to the couch, tries to figure out what he was supposed to do differently. Say yes, he tells himself as he sits carefully, wincing at the grind of bone and pull of stitches, and throws the thought away just as vehemently as it comes.
Agreeing to help wasn’t an option. He couldn’t even say no without alienating the kid, let alone trying to actually talk about the things in his head without letting slip-
Well, take your pick of the horrors hiding in all their dark little corners. He can’t even open all the doors in his mind – and if he was talking to a kid-
He’d thought he was doing okay here, with the people. With the kids. Apart from the whole dying slowly on their couch thing, they’d been pretty friendly. They liked the arm, for some reason, and he always tried to pay attention to the things they came to show him. But then, the way Cass had hesitated to ask, and then run away…
---
“Hey, sleeping beauty. You still alive in there?”
A hand presses gently against the seam of his shoulder where metal meets flesh, shaking him gently. “Don’t kiss me,” he grumbles, batting the hand away, and opens his eyes to find Sam leaning over him, amusement glittering in his eyes.
“Look at you,” the other man says, a hand unfelt on his shoulder as he hauls him into a sitting position. “Getting’ references and everything. Shoulda hit you over the head six months ago.”
“Ha ha.” Bucky doesn’t smile, just rubs at his head and tries to will his way back to a state that’s more like alive and functional than this haze he’s currently caught in. “You know we had fairy tales back in the day, right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sam’s hand slips from his elbow, soft skin ghosting over gleaming black and gold. His smirk fades into a thin line of concentration, his brows furrowing. Bucky’s skin crawls under his scrutiny; he shoves the feeling away with both hands. People can look at him if they want to.
“You good, man?” Sam asks. “Need anything?”
“I’m fine,” Bucky insists, not for the first time. “I told you, I’ve had worse.”
“Yeah, and like I told you, I’ve seen most of your ribs, so unless you want me to dump your ass back in that hospital, you just keep answering my questions.”
Bucky glares at him. Sam waits patiently until he gives up whatever game he’s trying to play (even Bucky doesn’t know what his end goal is here) and rolls his eyes, and then he offers him a hand.
“Time to eat,” Sam says in way of explanation, and jerks his head towards the kitchen. “Unless your stomach popped out your stitches while I was gone.”
“Not funny,” Bucky says and then, because he’s an asshole, ignores Sam’s hand and hauls himself up onto his feet, only swaying slightly when he’s fully upright.
Sam’s hand hovers near his arm again, just in the corner of his eye. Just in case he collapses without warning or something. Bucky hates that he has to bite his tongue and accept that as a legitimate probability (they’ve already had the argument, and a demonstration. He’d lost every fight that day).
He hates that the arm designed to be a terrible weapon is now the only part of his body he can rely on not to cause pain. And he hates that he missed the point where Sam shifted from dragging him into a hospital and vowing to leave him there to intolerable mother hen, and now it’s too late to do anything but sit here and let him do it.
His real mother would smack him upside the head for that. Well, he thinks she would. Sometimes his memories still feel like he’s looking through a glass window, and nothing about the people or places will connect properly. But he’s pretty sure he had the flu once, and she hung over him day and night until he was well, and he feels confident in saying that she was the kind of woman who would berate him day and night if she knew the wonders of a modern hospital, and that he’d refused to stay there.
“Dizzy, still?” Sam asks, puncturing his thoughts with a snap that leaves his ears ringing.
Bucky grunts. “What’d you let them shoot me with at that hospital?”
“Nothing, you paranoid old man, they were worried you’d go and have a heart attack, remember? If you don’t want to feel dizzy for a week, maybe don’t fracture your skull.”
“Hm.”
“Come on.”
Sam’s hand steers him towards the kitchen, a suggestion more than anything else, but Bucky doesn’t have the will to fight it. The house is quiet again, though he can tell Sarah has been and gone in the interim, the curtains pulled back to admit the evening light and the kitchen filled with the warm aroma of food left to keep warm in the stove.
“Just us tonight,” Sam says, letting Bucky lower himself into a seat at the table. “The boys have got something on at school. Told Sarah you wouldn’t mind.”
“Great,” Bucky replies dryly, his hand spread flat against the table as if that will settle the loud thump of his heart, or the vertigo that spins in the centre of his chest. “A whole evening with you? I miss her already.”
“You miss her spoiling you like some poor orphan off the street, you mean,” Sam snorts in response. The sting is taken out of the words by the two plates he is preparing as he speaks.
Bucky thinks it’s wiser not to point this out, at the threat of having to walk across the kitchen to retrieve his dinner himself. Sam wouldn’t hesitate to follow through on that threat; technically, he is capable of doing it, even if his legs aren’t entirely stable beneath him and his vision is kind of blurred and his head is a foggy mess that oscillates frequently between the urges to throw up and pass out.
Pathetic.
He swallows the frustration that rises as he catalogues his aches and pains, stomps down on the embers of humiliation that he’s been ignoring since Sam dragged him half-dead out of that building. He’s promised not to disappear the moment he can manage a step out of the house, and he’s trying to be less of an asshole, which means keeping that promise – even if he’d made that vow while mostly out of his mind in a hospital room with no windows (and really, Sam, this was not a concussion, just tell him, did they drug him or did he have permanent brain damage, those are obviously the only two options-)
“I hear you told Cass you wouldn’t help with his project,” Sam says, his voice deceptively neutral, and places a plate heaped with food in front of him.
Bucky stares down at the plate, and the cutlery that follows, and wonders how Sam thinks he’s supposed to eat all of that. “Yeah,” he says, hands on the table, cutlery untouched. “What about it?”
He can feel his hackles rise when Sam looks up at him, the slow creep of dread sliding down his neck and pulling at the strings of his shoulders, curling him into his collar. Here is the part he was afraid of; the part where Sam snaps at him for scaring the boys, and where Sarah comes home and gives him the cold shoulder for an extended length of time…
Sam’s mouth twists into an unhappy line, his face unreadable. Bucky’s head aches.
“Nothin’.” Sam shrugs, and sits down across from him, a fork already clutched in his hand.
Bucky stares at him, eyes narrowed. “Doesn’t look like nothing,” he says, because he doesn’t want to be told off, but he wants to sit here and pretend Sam isn’t holding the words back even less.
“No, it’s nothing,” Sam insists, his fork halfway to his mouth. “If you don’t want to talk about it, then that’s fine, man. I get it. Really.”
“But?”
Sam’s fork clinks softly against his plate, glinting in the corner of Bucky’s eye as it catches the light. Sam’s eyes seem to be trying to dig in under his skin, looking for a way into his brain as if that will help him understand anything at all. Bucky works very hard not to flinch under such scrutiny – which is stupid, because back when he didn’t know Sam very well, he never would have faltered.
It’s the concussion. That’s what it is. Or whatever the hospital did while he was there. Which definitely is not just him being paranoid.
Sam sighs. “No but. I thought you might wanna tell the kid some of those stories you’ve been tellin’ me, but if you don’t wanna talk about it, you don’t have to. That’s all.”
“What-” Bucky frowns at him. “What stories? I didn’t tell you any stories.”
“Yes you did! You were talking about Steve getting beat up in an alley like, three days ago!”
“What does Steve have to do with World War Two?”
“What? What about World War Two?”
They stare at each other, uncomprehending.
“Cass,” Bucky says slowly, dumbfounded. Wondering where exactly he’d lost Sam, when he’d thought the conversation was flowing so easily. “The project. About the war.” Is he jumbling his words now? Is he imagining things that have never happened?
“What?” Sam says one last time, just for good measure. “Wait, that’s what he told you? That it’s about the war?”
“Yes?” Bucky’s defensive again, as a wry grin slips across Sam’s lips, small but definitely amused. “A school project. About the war.”
“No,” Sam interrupts, shaking his head. “No, it’s not about the war. He’s gotta write a project on you, and the Howling Commandoes.”
Bucky’s jaw hangs half open, and then snaps shut, his eyes sliding downward towards his plate, like the potatoes will know how to reply. Inexplicably, it is not anger, or grief, or any kind of confusion that curls in his gut, but fear.
He shoves it away like he does everything that stems from the black gaps in his brain. He’s had enough of fear, just as he has pain.
He’s only realised recently that fear has been there all his life. He’s not ready to say that out loud yet.
“Bucky, if you don’t want to, then it’s fine, man,” Sam says in the absence of his voice. “I told the kid you’d say no anyway, so if that’s what you’re making that face about-”
Bucky’s gaze snaps sharply upward. “I’m not making a face,” he says, which surprises him, because anything else he has to say is stuck in his throat.
Sam’s mouth twitches. “You are,” he insists. “You’re staring at those peas like they’re going to bite you. Just eat, man, forget Cass even said anything.”
Bucky knows he pulls a face now, but relents anyway and shoves a forkful of the first thing the cutlery touches into his mouth. It tastes like ash on his tongue, like mud and over-salted slop after a week out in the cold (except it doesn’t feel like that because his chest is currently on fire, in a casual sort of way).
“What am I even supposed to tell him about the war?” The words come out his mouth before he even knows he’s speaking, his fork slamming down against his plate. The ringing echoes way too loud in his ears. “All the people we killed? The crazy Nazis? Fucking Azzano?”
Sam’s staring at him. He reels backwards, chair tipping onto two legs (don’t fall, don’t fall) and then righting itself. His breath catches on the end of the words and drags itself out of his ragged chest, into the open air where he can’t catch it again. Why did he say that? Of all the things, of all the lives he’s lived-
“No,” Sam says firmly. He puts his fork down, rests both of his elbows on the table, and watches Bucky with both eyes. His gaze is inescapable. Unforgiving.
“You don’t tell my nephew about being a prisoner of war,” he continues. “Or some crazy guy’s experiment, or whatever. You tell him about your friends, and the good things you did. There’s gotta be something funny stuffed into that cyborg brain of yours. Tell him, I don’t know, what it was like to live in a trench. You don’t have to go into details.”
“Tell him something funny,” Bucky repeats, and grits his teeth. “And then what, pretend that going to war was fun? That we – that I never did anything – that we didn’t live in fucking holes in the ground like rats?”
“That’s not what I said,” Sam answers, unrelenting.
Bucky rips his gaze away, deeply unsettled. Shoves his chair back and pulls himself up onto shaking legs. Bites the shame off his tongue.
Sam lets him go without rising to help, smart enough to know when to pick his battles. For that, Bucky takes his plate with him, so that Sam won’t have to come chasing him with it later.
“You come and tell me about that shit, if you want to talk about it,” Sam says to his retreating back, his voice loud enough to fill the entire room. “You know you can do that, right? I’m not some hundred-year-old, super strong guy like you and Steve, but I’ve seen a few wars. I know how to listen.”
Bucky pretends his feet don’t stutter in their path, that his chest doesn’t squeeze tight at the thought of all the atrocities that could spill out if he stops and opens his mouth. That he doesn’t hear the voice of another man, long ago, saying the exact same thing.
---
It takes a few days.
For time to come back to him. For the fog in his mind to clear. For his limbs to recover the strength to drag his body upstairs, or out the front door.
The sun is slowly setting outside, sinking towards the horizon and filling the lake with golden light. The ground is soft with moisture beneath his shuffling feet, the air full of the scent of pine needles and lake water, and the ever-present stench of fish from the old nets that hang by the water.
Sam looks up at the creak of the wooden dock under his feet, puts his drink down and stands to turn a box over to make another seat. Bucky doesn’t bother telling him he can get his own box; just sits and takes the beer offered to him.
They linger in silence for a long time, only the water lapping against the underside of the dock and the birds flying overhead to fill the space left in the absence of their voices. The air sits over them like a blanket, thick and warm, and yet a sort of comfort too, far from anything Bucky’s ever known before.
“I remember it, you know,” he says when he feels like he can speak, the words welling up him his chest, pressing out against his fractured ribs. Sam turns towards him, and then stops halfway – listening without listening, attentive without being suffocating. He appreciates that.
“The war?” Sam asks, quiet enough that even the birds nearby don’t startle at the sound of his voice.
Bucky shakes his head. “Not the war,” he replies. “The train. And the snow. It was fucking cold in Austria – only reason I didn’t get torn to pieces on the rocks is because they were covered in six feet of snow. And I remember they-”
He stops as easily as he started, his mouth hanging open as he struggles to find the right words. Swallows hard. Listens to the water rippling underneath them, feels the sweat drip down his neck. Remembers that fear is just fear, and Delacroix is a long way from a raving in Austria eighty years ago.
“They dragged me through the snow. And then I woke up on a table thinking Steve was dead instead of me, just like…”
His voice fades into the open air, dying with the light of the sun as it dips below the horizon. His body aches with the memory of it and with the injuries it’s currently trying to heal; even his arm, thick-plated metal and complex machinery and no flesh or bone at all (half of it was left after he fell. Every time he wakes, HYDRA takes a little more), feels the sharp stab of phantom pain.
His right hand runs down his arm, from shoulder to wrist, just in case. Cool vibranium still meets his fingers, hard, plated surface that doesn’t feel the touch at all. It’s not fair that something false can feel real pain.
Sam turns towards him, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands preoccupied with his drink. “Tell me,” he requests, and Bucky knows if he closes his eyes, he will see Steve on the other side, asking the same question, standing in the same golden light.
He keeps his eyes open. Grips his beer bottle tight.
Lets the words spill out of his mouth and into the oncoming night, the way another man like him couldn’t, long ago.
Somehow, it feels like coming home.