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It starts with a question: “How do you want to be called?”. Or maybe it starts later, when he really gets into it, when he lays and thinks and thinks about the things that define him. Or, maybe, it starts before, with his unconscious surprise at the face he sees in the mirror, with him reading the name in the museum. The name makes him feel empty, but it’s the emptiness that wants to be filled, waits for it. Remembers the shape of something that was there inside.
Maybe it starts with Steve desperately telling him the name (his name? Unfamiliar, unknown, alien. Resonating).
When required to answer, he decides on a compromise. It’s a usual solution, a hack, a pattern. He says: “Bucky’s fine.” He doesn’t feel like Bucky Barnes of the past, not fully; but all the other names sound worse, so he stops on that. Thus, he becomes Bucky.
The other ones are harder.
The mirror still looks like a stranger. His body is a constructor of parts, a bearer of memories (memories he doesn’t have). It feels alien. Not only the arm — most of him, scars he doesn’t remember getting, limbs moving in the ways he can’t say how he learned. He watches it. Like a demon possessing the body (not so far from the truth, God knows his body had many wills leading it). His movements are strained and slow, for he follows the process of them from the start to finish, from the thought of a movement to the vibrations in the air, subsiding after its end.
Bucky starts journaling, then. He writes down every new thing he finds. He had journals before that, of course, his mind a changing and fickle thing that needs writings to support it. All his memories are stored in paper and pen. This new writing is different, even if the form of it, the ritual is the same — it goes deeper, now. He doesn’t need to run, doesn’t need to hide, and the chunks and chunks of time are lacking anxiety, fear, waiting to be found. Bucky can see all now. He has the mirror. He can record. The darkness that lives and grows inside him is getting lighter.
His writing, unsurprisingly, is full of the same awkwardness as his movements. English doesn’t feel like a native language to him — no tongue does. He’s a man without a home, without a past, without a motherland. An endless wanderer. He’s but a mirror of a thousand masks, none of them real. Shadows, just shadows.
Bucky is, however, a stubborn bastard. He decides he wants to live.
It happens like this: he’s living within his hate of himself, his guilt, and his foreignness so long that he doesn’t notice it anymore. The baseline doesn’t change fast; it’s hard to see. But it changes. Every day that he tries to live, it changes.
It’s morning. The date is unimportant, one in a row. It’s a small thing: Bucky finds the hoodie he likes, puts it on and looks in the mirror (it always mirrors, now; they call for him, they enchant him). The hoodie is dark gray and soft, so soft, and suddenly Bucky is in the past.
They were poor, he knows it, even if he doesn’t remember. Weren’t the worst, but far from the best. The clothes, good clothes, were hard to find, but miracles happened. That day, that miracle was a hand-me-down sweater, too big and too warm and well-worn. He drowned in it, almost. He wore it all day, old enough to see it for quality, not for the size.
It was a cloth well-loved. It followed him in years to come, in horrible winters, when it migrated to Steve’s freezing body sometimes, and in summer nights, when the wind was heavy, and he was laying happily on the roof, endless in his youth and fearless. No bounds could hold him back then. He filled the space with an absolution.
Now, in the future so distant, so far, Bucky barely can fill his body, but as he stands, as he looks (the memory covering with itself the reality), he feels. The softness of the cloth is a revelation. This little thing, an insignificant sensation, makes him happy. It’s truthful, both for Bucky of the past and for what he is now. This is him.
And the thing is — it should be small, it shouldn’t matter, but this little truth makes him feel alive. Because it’s purely him, because it’s the truth, because it’s real. He’s real. He exists. He wants to live. (The light is near.)
Thus starts Bucky’s path of learning about himself.
The written word seems vital to him now. Obligatory, required. It’s solid, more trustworthy than his own mind. Bucky needs to exist, and he needs for it to be recorded, saved, written. Left. After he disappears — still there. Maybe his memory isn’t reliable, but the memory of him doesn’t have to, and that memory must be full, must be truthful. Must be enough.
He writes in journals. He writes in little notes. He has a conversation with FRIDAY about digital memory and writes on screens. It’ll live, even if he may not, and that feels enough.
The writing is both motivation and aid in discovering who he is. The truth comes to him so much easier in writing than in his own head, as if his thoughts, let out, line themselves up, clear themselves up.
Bucky has likes and dislikes. He likes: the quiet, knowing of what’s to come, soft things that aren’t scratchy, big heavy blankets, shitty candies that make his mouth taste too sweet too soon, books where nothing happens, books that were someone’s else once, sun in his window, robots, jokes that have so much context they stop really needing ones, quiet music, a feeling of a light touch on the metal arm (but not too hard and only with consent), when it’s not too loud and not too quiet, Steve’s face when he realizes Bucky was fucking with him for an hour, Steve’s face when Bucky tells him he’s the dumbest shit alive, Steve’s face when he thinks that he wants Bucky to be happy, and it’s written in his eyes, dogs when they are small, cats (especially white ones), fancy new cars, cartoons about robots, sitting on the roof when it’s not too dark but not in daylight, anything that flies.
He dislikes: coffee that’s too strong, Wilson’s stupid jokes, scratchy things, when it’s too cold, when it’s too warm, food that feels weird, people refusing to listen out of selfishness, people refusing to listen because they’re idiots, crowded places, stares, salty things, big dogs, people telling him what to do, voices that sound cruel, smoke.
He’s meticulous. He writes. He learns. He hoards. The knowledge is priceless, the knowledge is — still — too small. Bucky feels greedy. (He writes it: greedy, selfish, always wanting. That’s him. He wants everything that’s him.)
He writes: I’ve listened to the music, and it was beautiful. I have a memory of a melody that resembled it. I stood and couldn’t move.
I stand and can’t move because it’s beautiful. I don’t have the ability to understand, to distinguish beauty, sound, feelings, senses. It’s a malfunction. I will be punished, I will be hurt, the moment will come when I’ll just stop. But now I listen, but now I feel. They can’t take it from me. I exist.
He writes: I was afraid. I was many things, but firstly, I was afraid. You think you’re getting used to fear, living with every day, but the night comes, and it’s here, and the day comes, and it’s here; it’s death and death and death and nothing else, and most of it is you. The fact that you’re alive means you killed more times than you were killed. Now it’s you and death and fear. It’s a mask of hope and others’ voices, but make a step to the side, and you’ll see only fear.
It’s my fear. You’ll never take it from me.
He writes: I died and died and died. I should have stayed dead. I don’t want to.
He writes: My sister’s eyes were green.
He writes: I remember sitting on a roof at Shabbat. My body was insignificant. I was endless. The death didn’t exist. It never has.
He writes: The first time I felt love, it wasn't a person but the idea of love. I loved the fingers, firm, the edges, hard. I loved in secret of the darkness. I was afraid. I loved. I lived. I was afraid.
He writes: I always wanted so much, more than I could ever get. I got the fear and death, and yet I keep wanting.
He writes: The boy who occupied my body once is dead. I have his wants and his hopes and his loneliness. That boy is dead, but he existed. He loved his mother and had an easy laugh, he believed in miracles of the human mind, and sometimes, at the darkest night, he wanted somebody’s hand to hold his own. He’s dead now. He’s never going back.
Let us mourn him.
At nighttime, at the most hopeless time, let us remember and let us mourn.
He writes and writes and writes.
The thing about the human soul, Bucky reflects, is that it, like air, consumes everything to grow. It doesn’t stop. It doesn’t have bounds or confinements.
After he learns to like, he learns to love.
That is the whole other story. A separate journal. Journals, plural. A story, the beginning, the middle, probably the end. Changing and evolving.
It starts small, of course. Almost invisible. An infatuation. Bucky notices it and writes it down, and there’s nothing more to it, a note among the others, a wave in the ocean.
He sees a beautiful face and feels desire. The other feelings, which follow immediately, are, of course, not that simple, not that happy. All that fear and horror and the guilt, and memories that bare their fangs from the mirror. He tries to deal with them.
He doesn’t.
He tries.
He doesn’t.
Does he?
The guilt stays, always stays, but guilt doesn’t block anything, doesn’t stand on the doorstep. The horror goes, leaving the confusion.
The confusion grows from the new knowledge of his that Tony — Bucky, shamefully and without consent, chooses to call him by the first name in the secrecy of his own mind, too off-putted by the layers of tension and distrust that he usually hears in his last name — that Tony is indecipherable. A paradox. A problem without a solution.
So Bucky — led by the wish to learn, to know, to see the truth — tries to find the answer. He’s stubborn. He looks and looks for it and tries and tries and drowns at the end. Because there is no clarity. There is no answer.
There’s Tony, who lets Bucky inside his home. Fights for his amnesty, for his freedom, and his health. Gets him home, gets him safety. Who watches him and listens. Who is the magic force behind the clothes in his closet, which look the same as Wilson’s, but so much softer. Behind his therapy appointment, the journals that showed up as if by themselves, leather-bound and heavy and thick, with textures pleasant to touch, calming. Who never looks at him and speaks in harsh words, who touches lightly and puts away the pain. Whose mouth is smiling while the eyes drown in sadness.
Who is impossible. Who is kind. Who is beautiful.
Is it so surprising that Bucky longs?
He wishes he could draw like Steve to have this: what he sees when he looks at Tony. It’s his, in part, that image — he feels it’s not that bad for him to own it, to save, to hide, to memorize on paper. The way he sees, the way he loves.
His feelings never go further than his mind, his pen, his thoughts. Of course, they don’t. But they are his, they are enormous, bursting, endless — and they are his. His own. Bucky is greedy, of course. He’s selfish. He hoards every fantasy and every wish, every sigh and every glance. They are his own.
He writes: In all of my long, long life I never had anything that pure. Anything that clear, that truthful. I never had the opportunity to love. The freedom. The right of it.
He writes: He is a story in contradictions. The bite of words, the gentle touch. Is it possible for someone so deeply hurt to be so kind? Is he a feverish dream of mine?
He writes: I don’t want anything from him. I want him to be happy. Is it bad — selfish — undeserving — to want that? To need that?
He writes: My love is mine. They didn’t want me to exist; I do. They never wanted me to love; I do. I do, I do, I do.
He writes: Every darkness has its dawn. Every emptiness has ways to fill it.
I’ll live through this night. I’ll live till dawn. You thought you could erase me, but you didn’t.
Bucky looks for the emptiness inside and doesn’t find it.
Bucky is on the roof. The ground is so far down it seems like an illusion. The sunrise is starting, and the first warm light lays softly down. Bucky feels endless. Full.
Time comes. There are quiet steps behind him. He stays unmoving: his senses are sharp enough. The steps are falling somewhere in between nervousness and deliberation. An even gait of someone too deep in thoughts. Bucky feels aflame. Fire burns inside him, his body much too mindful of the presence behind him.
He closes his eyes. He wants to turn around. To see, to touch, to feel. He doesn’t dare to.
Sun rises slowly. Bucky hears the rustle of the paper. Everything in the world feels multiplied, suddenly more living, solid by tenfold.
“Hey,” the voice comes, uncertain.
Bucky looks.
There’s barely more than three feet between them. Tony’s eyes are on him.
It’s everything.
The look is new, however — Bucky knows, he hoards them as he hoards all, obsessively — this look is different. This look, one may dare to think, is devoid of masks.
The rustling sound reveals a paper between the lively fingers, with the familiar handwriting on it. Bucky’s. Words and words and words, the memory of his existence, of his reality, of his daring. Of his awe, of gratitude, of tenderness.
Bucky freezes. He isn’t brave enough to move. (To touch, to feel.) He doesn’t allow himself to it.
Sun finds all the corners of the roof by now. Its rays, it seems, cover anything inside or out. It ends all emptiness, lights the darkest corners of his soul.
Bucky looks. Silent.
One last step.
He lets himself be touched.