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Bucky doesn’t weep at Steve’s funeral. He owes Steve a dignified goodbye, he thinks. The last thing Steve saw was his wet face, pressed over Steve’s forehead, tears falling to gleam on his cadaverous complexion. The used gauntlet lay innocuously immobile a foot away as its casualty thickened the air with the sickening scent of burnt skin. Lay a deafening silence shy of Steve's horrible little gasps — incredibly, the eyes clouded in agony still met Bucky's. Buck. A barely audible whisper of air, straining past Steve's maimed vocal cords. Shut up, don't talk. You're a goddamn hero, Steve.
He feels Sam’s hand on his shoulder, and watches as the coffin draped in stars and stripes is lowered into the ground.
-
The crowd dissipates shortly after the ceremony. Sam pulls him into a tight hug with a You, take care, before leaving the grounds. There are but a few bystanders around the raw soil now, murmuring and gazing. Bucky stands, hands in his pockets. He’s not waiting for tears that won’t come. The soldier is well accustomed to grief, to agony, but what he feels now is a peculiar desolation. His chest is drugged with a forlorn hollowness, as if it were bluntly severed from the tendons connecting it to the heart.
Steve died a hero. Bucky is left with a wonted sense of remoteness.
“Barnes.” A recognizable voice calls out from a distance. Bucky jerks.
A slim figure sharply dressed in a three-piece, all-black suit. He unfolds a pair of sunglasses from his pockets and puts them over his eyes as he walks towards Bucky, his gaze still undeviating from Bucky’s face.
“I owe you an apology,” says Tony Stark.
-
Stark’s workshop is a pandemonium of glassy monitors and exposed wires. Electricity buzzes in the air, the atmosphere thick with the faint caustic singe of metal and the warm muskiness of wooden floors. Bucky follows Stark as he guilefully guides him through half a dozen metallic tables, strewn with half-finished prototypes for products that virtually look indiscernible in his untrained eyes. His area, in a way, resembles that of his father. The younger Stark would undoubtedly scoff at the anachronistic gear, but the gleaming aggregation of intellect built up to envisage the future seemed to be oddly paralleled.
“So,” Stark gestures, “When you’re done with that ice pop Morgan has been so kind to gift you, — mind you, it’s her favorite flavor — the bin’s right here. No need to wrench open the lid. It detects movement.”
Stark is noticeably still dressed in his mourning attire, complete with the exorbitant black jacket he hasn’t bothered to take off.
“Just…” He flails his hand gracelessly, widely gesturing at a chair, “Sit down. If that’s what you do.”
-
“I’m sorry, Stark.”
Stark raises an eyebrow, looking up from a particularly sticky spot in Bucky’s exposed arm. Inner exposure of the metal arm still feels grudgingly alien, after all those years — machinery clipping at the delicately intertwined wires and transmitters feel like hands digging into his sanguine veins and muscles, if he closes his eyes.
Stark’s dress shirt is neatly rolled up, clipped back to expose his forearms. His hair’s now half gray, Bucky notices. Age has worn down his features to nearly reiterate that of his father.
“I'm a bit of a give-and-take guy. Down to earth, practical,” Stark shrugs, eyes again fixated in Bucky’s arm. “Consider this compensation for the damage I did in Siberia.”
Before Bucky can open his mouth, Stark quickly adds: “Your old man and I, we made amends.”
“Really.” Bucky quietly says. Stark nods.
“He did what he thought was right at the time, I did the same, and we’re both horribly recalcitrant in the worst places. And I kept thinking, I never got to say goodbye to my mom as the life was choked out of her. But I also thought, You didn’t get to say goodbye to your family, or even Cap, before being brainwashed into something inhuman… And you can’t even forget it all. It’s imprinted on your memory. It’s all kinds of fucked up, but I had time to think it through. We had time, plenty of it, while you and three billion people were pulverized along with the status of our team.
“And I thought, as I was about to throw myself out into a mission that could have well been my last, I can’t let vengeance corrode me anymore. It all seemed to matter frighteningly little. A dying man’s introspections, all that.”
Stark carefully pinches one last truncated fuse together, connecting the raw ends with a heatless welder. The arm lets out a soft mechanical groan as it shivers itself back into operation, adhering itself back to Bucky’s nerves and bones. He testingly clenches and unclenches his fists.
“You didn’t have to do this.”
Stark runs his fingers over the length of the metal sleeve one more time as a finishing touch. Nimble fingers. Long and calloused, ones of a mechanic. “It’s the least I can do for Rogers,” Steve. “God knows how much he cared for you.”
“I’ve lost parents before,” Bucky softly says, “It doesn’t go away. Not when you saw their last moments with your own eyes. Who’s going to avenge your parents, Stark?”
At that, Stark meets his eyes for the first time in their encounter. They hold no malice, only a vestige of enervation.
“What are you going to atone for, not thinking to put on a parachute while operating on the top of the Alps?” Stark sighs, “Just to be reasonable here, there was not an ounce of your psyche behind what you did under the influence. I’ve read the lab reports. They took especial care in not entirely eradicating your original memories in the hippocampus, as they feared that it might irrevocably damage your cerebral functions. What they did to you instead was a maximal form of memory repression to the point where it would be retrievable only through consistent exposure to stimuli, which was ensured not to occur.
“I was angry at the wrong man. I don’t blame myself for what I did, but it’s unimpeachable now.”
It’s an incredible olive branch Stark is holding out. Steve had uttered the same speech nearly verbatim before, he remembers; What you did all those years, it wasn't you. You didn't have a choice.
I know. But I did it.
The dispatches of the Winter Soldier might not have involved his psyche, but it employed his body all the same. His eyes saw the prey, his legs facilitated the walk towards it, his arm crushed the breath out of a writhing windpipe. He remembers the slick grip of the pistol that shot Howard straight between the eyes. The delicate skin of Maria’s neck that soon gave way to the crackling of bone and rupture of muscle. He remembers. There is not a single one of the slaughters that possessed enough benevolence to fade away from the indentations on his consciousness.
Reiterating the slaughter with Hydra operatives does nothing to nullify the fact that it was his hands that took the lives of two dozen people. Men, women, children. Atonement cannot be imputed. As long he still possesses the flesh meddled with the blood of his victims, he must atone.
The process has only just begun.
So he reaches out his metal hand for Stark’s human one into a tentative grasp. Stark offers a half-smile, shaking it lightly before letting go.
"Thank you, Stark." Bucky quietly says.
"Not to claim that I knew him better than you do," Stark smiles, "But it's what Rogers would have wanted."