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And Bucky wakes up. He wakes up and his mouth is dry and his shoulder aches and there's the half faded image of doctors and needles on the underside of his eye lids.
He wakes up and the window is open, breeze blowing in cool and wet with the beginnings of fall.
Steve is gone - but he's gone most mornings now. The U.S. government needs Captain America and Steve has never been one to shirk from duty.
He sits up, balancing to compensate for his missing arm. Steve has been making noises about a fancy new prosthetic - says he has connections with Stark and it'll be like Bucky never lost the arm. Good as new. Better even. Bucky smiles and nods because that's what he's supposed to do - it's what makes Steve's face soften into a smile like the sun is coming up all over again. He doesn't tell Steve about the sick rolling in his gut whenever he thinks about strapping an arm to his stump.
"Good morning, Mr. Barnes." Maggie comes through the bedroom door and she smiles warmly like every morning. She lives in the small quarters in the back of the house.
Steve had explained that she was a widow from the war - needed steady employ to keep her and her young daughter off of the streets. Steve had bought this big house and had all this money rolling in from the government and the like and hiring her on made sense. Neither one of them had ever been that good at keeping house or cooking. She kept the house clean and helped Bucky out during the day and kept them fed and didn't bat an eye that they shared a bed.
"How are you feeling?" she asks and she pours coffee from tray, hands him the heavy white mug and the smaller white pills. Something about her tone is odd but the thought is burned away by the coffee.
"Better with the coffee." Bucky grins in the way he knows is charming. "Steve left already?"
She turns so her back's to him as she straightens out Bucky's clothes for the day. "That one left when the sun came up. He'll be back for dinner though."
After he's dressed, Bucky leaves the house for his daily walk.
It's Wednesday (or Friday?) and the shopkeepers are setting out their wares and the housewives are gossiping on the stoops. It's different than Brooklyn. Quieter.
Steve tells Bucky that this is what they need - a quiet town on the Virginia coast where no one cares if two men share a bed and one of them is Captain America. It's an hour by train to DC and Steve says he doesn't mind the journey.
"We need quiet, Buck," he says, all earnest and stubborn. "We need peace. I almost," he hesitates and covers his face with his hand. "I almost lost you and I need to keep you safe." And he's so desperate and his hands shake when Bucky talks about moving back or getting a job, so Bucky keeps it quiet. Steve does need the peace. Even if Bucky's gut sometimes burns with the quiet.
This is what Bucky does.
He walks down the narrow street from their house. It's quiet but the shops are open and people move around in the glass windows. They set up their goods the same as every day.
There are apples and loaves of bread and deli meat in glass cases. All of it looks fresh and glossy, from the pages of a magazine. There’s an ice cream parlor, counters the same mint green as the one around the corner from Steve’s apartment growing up. Sometimes Bucky will buy something but often he won't. Their house is always stocked. Maggie must do the shopping even if Bucky has never seen her loaded with bags.
There is a newspaper boy at the corner, several papers stuffed under his arm and one ready for Bucky. "Paper, mister?" he says. He stands on the wooden sidewalk, hat tipped to the side and cotton pants torn at the knee. He looks like he belongs in Brooklyn, fresh from scrapping on the streets with his friends. Bucky remembers being him.
Bucky takes one and hands over a nickel. August 3rd, 1947. The war has been over for almost two years.
There's a diner on the next corner, just before the pier and the beach and the ocean that extended endlessly toward Europe. He sits in the back corner and reads his paper while the girl who works the tables brings him coffee and pancakes. She sometimes talks to him - but she's quiet today, red mouth tight like there's a secret. The diner is blue benches and silver bar chairs with a shiny counter. Bucky remembers a place just like this back in Brooklyn, the same smell of sausage and biscuits and burning coffee.
He watches the regulars finish their breakfast and depart for work, tipping their hats to the girl and disappearing down the street, around the corner toward the train stop and the road that runs toward DC.
He watches one man, cap pulled low over his face, cross the street and walk purposely between two buildings - watches the shadow of his shoulders until he vanishes in the gloom of the alley, fading like mist.
"You okay, Bucky?" the girl is standing at his table, tray in her hands. "Can I get you any coffee?"
Bucky runs his hand over the table, the same knots and rubs in the wood there were when he first started coming here. The girl has been here from the beginning too. "I'm okay," he says.
After the diner, Bucky walks to the pier and watches the fisherman pull their nets and the dockworkers load their boats. They all seem blurry, their forms lost under the brightness of the midday sun reflecting off the white sand and the glassy ocean. Their voices ring true across the beach though and Bucky listens to their songs and calls and remembers when he worked in Brooklyn, worked in the Navy yard with two hands and two arms and a clear mind.
Bucky knows he fell. Steve has told him at night, mouth pushed against his skin, breathing the words like a prayer. He fell from the train and landed on a ledge not 30 feet down. He fell and his arm shattered and he hit his head. He fell and Steve screamed and it took hours to get back to him.
He lost his arm and slept for months, slept through the last assault on Hydra, slept through the Nazi surrender and bombs in Japan. He slept and woke up in this little town in Virginia, Steve red-eyed and exhausted beside him. He fell from a train and he woke up in the tiny hospital in this tiny town with Steve. Steve. That was all that mattered.
He lost his arm and he gets confused now. But Steve is here. He is here. And there is peace.
The sun curves down the sky. And the dockworkers melt away and the fisherman grow quiet. A seagull caws and is answered, a steady beat. And Bucky watches the place where the water meets the sky.
Something is tugging at the edges of his consciousness, pushing against the peaceful haze and the warmth of Steve coming soon.
"James?"
Bucky looks up at the man standing next to the bench now, just a dark shape against bright blue sky and sun.
Doctor Smith. From the hospital. Bucky goes twice a week and sits in a cold exam room until he comes. He checks Bucky's arm and head and has cool hands and glasses that remind Bucky of Steve drawing Erskine. His glasses reflect the ocean.
"Are you doing okay, James?"
Bucky looks back at the horizon and the faded fisherman and the bright yellow ball of the sun. "Ever feel like nothing is real, Doc?"
Bucky wakes up. He wakes up and the sun is dimmed through the window like it's already dusk. Steve is sitting at the desk by the bed, pen scratching against paper. He wakes up and his mouth is dry and his eyes feel heavy.
"Hey," he whispers.
Steve looks up with a smile. "Hi." He drops his pen and comes to sit on the bed. "Maggie says you had an episode."
An episode.
Bucky had been sitting on the dock. The dockworkers had blurred and faded and the water had lapped against the sky and the doctor had said his name. And then he had woken up and Steve was here.
"I don't remember," he says around the thickness in his throat. "I must have.” He has episodes. He knows this because Steve tells him he does. He never remembers them. He remembers a moment - and then he wakes up with a sore throat and all is well. He sits up, his limbs feeling heavy with sleep. “I’m sorry.”
Steve brushes a hand over his forehead. “You’re here now. That’s all that matters.” He smiles. There are tiny lines on his forehead.
Bucky reaches up and smoothes his thumb across them, letting his hand stroke back across his hair, blond as ever. “How old are you now?” he asks, wondering.
The muscle at Steve’s jaw tightens. “You should rest more, Bucky. Just sleep. And when you wake up, we’ll have dinner on the back porch and listen to the radio and watch the sun set. Bucky.”
Maggie’s in the doorway, over Steve’s shoulder. Her hand is pressed to her mouth.
There are four walls in this room. There is the sound of seagulls and shop workers and a motor car outside. The motor car backfires, just like it does every hour. Every day. Like a record on repeat. And Steve. Steve with his eyes that are tired and his mouth that never eases and his tiny little wrinkles that march onward.
“You’re real, right?” Bucky sways, leans into Steve’s solid chest. “Sometimes. Sometimes everything seems fake and off - like we’re in a movie. But you. You’re always real.”
“I’m always real,” Steve says. He gentles Bucky to the bed, hands smoothing over his chest. “I will always be real.” He holds two pills to Bucky’s lips, a glass of water. “Shh, just rest now.”
Bucky drinks the water, takes the pills, blinks up at Steve. “Am I having an episode?”
Steve holds his hand. “Yes, love. But it’ll be better soon.”
The doctor purses his lips, pauses the footage. “Commander. We can try increasing the medication again. Maybe try some hypnotherapy again. But the patient is quick becoming immune to our methods - his consciousness is fighting back. We’re seeing a sharp decrease in the periods between resets. I don’t know how much longer this scenario will be viable. The episode two days ago was especially violent - he injured two medics and destroyed two of the holograms before we were able to subdue him. This can't go on. With all due respect.”
Commander Rogers stands against the bay windows, silhouetted and imposing. “That is unacceptable.”
“We can try…” the doctor swallows. “We can try more invasive psychic driving techniques.” His words cut off when Commander Rogers lifts him by his throat.
“Never. Never. I will not do to him what Hydra did. I am helping him. I am not…” The Commander drops the doctor and turns back to the bank of screens.
A small seaside village in 1947 Virginia flickers across them: a pale diner, a quiet bedroom, an ice cream shop on the corner. Bucky is at the diner, as he alway is. He’s reading the newspaper, mouth twisting in a little in a smile at the comics. His hair is trimmed to short and his shoulders are loose, like he is happy. Like he didn’t spend 70 years being tortured and brainwashed and torn apart.
A dozen men sit at computers. “Cue high tide,” one man says softly into his headset. “We need to get these fisherman off the docks before Barnes arrives."
“Commander Rogers?” an aide comes in from the side door. “The president of Russia is on the line. He insists it is urgent. He is concerned about the South Korean fleet.”
“I’m on my way.” Rogers looks back at the screens, at the doctor still on the floor. “Do better,” he commands and strides out.
On the screen, Bucky eats his pancakes, slowly, methodically, like he does every morning.