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“You know, the future’s really here. Man, just the other day I saw a self driving car,” Mr. Henries said, making wide eyes at the thought.
Sam smiled slightly, a smile he shared with Bucky. Despite all the complaints Sam liked to make to Sarah about Bucky being like a brother-in-law who shows up to crash on your couch for a weekend and ends up staying for a week, it was nice to have the guy around. Kind of. Just as someone to train with. Someone to support his obsessive timeliness. Someone who understood Sam’s crazy work life. Someone to help fix the broken valve on the boat’s toilet. Not as a family friend, of course.
And it was good to see Bucky like this; see who he was when he wasn’t working to stay not dead. Nice to see him sitting in the sun on the Wilson’s little private dock, munching on a handful of chips courtesy of the Henries, socializing with the neighbors like the normal human being that Sam was starting to realize Bucky was.“How’d you figure out it was self driving, Mr. Henries?” Sam asked.
“Well the man was reading! In the driver’s seat! It was crazy, I tell you Sam. We were up in New Orleans. Still, getting closer,”
Mr. Henries shook his head, taking a sip of ice tea.
“We’re living in the future,” Bucky agreed. “Thanks,” he flashed that new, incandescent smile of his at Sarah as she handed him a slice of pie.
“Sure,” she replied, smiling right back.
Sam took the opportunity to pointedly grind his teeth. Unfortunately Sarah’s back was already turned, asking Mrs. Henries if she’d be interested in joining her and the boys to make the right number for some lawn games. Bucky saw though. He gave Sam a look of most deeply aggravating innocence. Mr. Henries watched this exchange pass oblivious. His thoughts were clearly still on his car story.
“You know what they’re saying,” he went on.
“All our jobs to robots someday soon, unless you wanna be the one sitting at some desk all day, typing ones an’ zeros. And you know what? Between that Vision and all the rest of the Stark crap, I’m of half a mind to think it’s true!”
Mr. Henries shoveled a spoonful of pie into his mouth.
“And you know what,” he said, talking around the sugar and butter and pecans in his draw-string bag wrinkled mouth, “you know what the scariest thing is, I think?” He pointed vaguely with his spoon. “How do they feel, huh? How do you make a computer program feel guilt? Or, or enjoy a nice reward? Do you crank up the power? Zzzt!” he miming a little shutter, laughing at the thought.
“Sure,” Bucky replied easily.
He was not laughing.
“Associate that with positive, that, or anything could be a reward, really. Hit it over the head with a hammer, call that necessary, say it’s being good when it lets that happen, Hell,” Bucky nonchalantly took a bite of his own slice of pie, “Set up the right base imperatives, build everything off that, even if it got free, whent rouge, started the machine apocalipse, it would still be following some corrupted version of your protocols. I mean, look at Ultron and his ‘Peace in Our Time’. He followed in daddy’s footsteps right to the end, I hear. You can stop that Sam, I’m OK.”
“What, I’m not, I’m not doing anything.”
“Yeah you are, you’re giving me that look, that one.”
Mr. Henries was also giving him That Look.
“Jeez, both of you, I’m not sayin’ I’m Hydra.”
“What are you saying?” Sam prompted.
“Well,” Bucky took a particularly big bite of pie to give himself a moment to think. He chewed. He swallowed. He frowned.
“They, what they say about the serum. It, brings out, like, Steve, Captain America, it, well they say it brings out the, the key aspects of who you are--” Bucky showed a little trade with a pass of his gloved left hand “--Schmidt, Red Skull. I met him once, actually. In Azzano. He pulled off this mask and, well, he really was red.”
“Little name dropping there, Bucky?” Sam filled in.
“Mm, but what did it do to me? What, what base imperative did it build up in me? That’s what I’m sayin’.”
“You’re one of ‘em super soldiers?” Mr. Henries asked, astonished.
“Bootleg serum, but, yeah.”
“That’s why he’s strong,” Sam said.
“Boy! I thought you were just strong!”
“Well I am generally fantastic, yes,” Bucky said dryly.
“Yeah? Generally fantastic? Oh you should see him on our morning runs, Mr. Henries. Buck goes strong for about five minutes then he gets bored an’ wanders off on me.”
“That’s a mean exaggeration, Samuel. At least fifteen. And do you see anyone else willing to get up with you before the crack of dawn to slog through the bushes?”
“Fifteen,” Sam repeated.
“Because I have a life!” Bucky defended.
“What life?” Sam shot back.
“I’m already faster than you, Sam, and all other normal people, isn’t that good enough?”
“You’d be even faster if you put some effort into training.”
“You’d be able to speak Russian if you put some effort into studying,” Bucky shot back.
“You could both learn to catch crabs if you came to visit me and the Mrs. more often,” Mr. Henries told them.
“We’d teach you patience, too. You know, my daughter Nancy just doesn’t seem to get that. She keeps going on about this retirement home, wants to put us away in geezer babysitting, but you know we can’t leave this place. Friendliest people in the world down here.”
And then Mr. Henries was off about the art of crab trapping and Nancy’s insistence that the Henries move out of their old home.
It was a good day in the end. Pie was eaten. Ice tea was made and drunk. Mrs. Henries pushed her homemade whiskey and was politely turned down by all parties except Bucky, who automatically became her dearest friend for the remainder of the afternoon. It was a good day.
It was only once the Henries had left, the dishes washed, the boys put to bed, and Bucky and Sam searching for Sarah’s lost serrated bread knife down at the dock in the sticky darkness of a summer Louisiana night that Sam asked.
“So what’s your ‘base imperative’, you think?”
“What’s yours?” Bucky shot back, leaning down to check under the mossy little picnic table.
“Well I think I’m a--you read Divergent?”
“Yeah.”
“Really?”
“Well, I watched the movie. In Romanian. Everything’s more dramatic with voice dubbing.”
“Should still read the book.”
Sam sat down at the table, crossed his ankles.
“What, making me do all the work?” Bucky grumbled. “C’mon, squeeters are eating me alive here Sam. Get your boogie on.”
“Can’t see squat.”
“Feel around.”
“For a serrated blade?”
“Yes,” Bucky said stubbornly, but he didn’t say anything more.
“Well, I think I’m a complex person with more than one defining quality,” Sam said, “and I think you are too.”
“I think I’m genetically modified, --oo, here’s a sweater! Look at all the neat stuff you find in the dark, Sam.”
Bucky held up a grey mass that Sam assumed was said sweater.
“Because you wouldn’t have been able to find that in the day,” Sam said, unimpressed by Bucky’s Pooh Bear logic.
“Exactly.”
“So what do you think?” Sam asked.
“You’re Amity forever to the core?”
“They said it was ‘protective’.”
“Who?”
“The usual suspects; Zola, Karpov, Peirce, Shuri, Dr. Raynor, others I don’t remember.”
“What do you think?” Sam said.
“I think they’re right.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah.”
“Protective, hadn’t occurred to me. Explains your Catan strategy, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your resource hoarding? How you just sit there collecting cards?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my strategy.”
“The resource cards are not points, Buck, you use them to get points. On their own they’re worth nothing. Which is why Cassidy always beats you.”
“He always beats you too.”
“Because he’s not a card hoarder.”
“Look, that’s, that’s not really, that’s a Depression thing. That’s a my-parents-taught-me-the-safest-pace-for-money-is-under-the-matress thing.”
“You mean spice shelf?”
“What?”
“You keep your cash in your spice shelf,” Sam said.
“How-- what--”
“Your money smells like curry, Buck, not a huge leap.”
“Crap.”
Sam laughed at him. Bucky made a grumpy sound and gave up his knife search to give Sam a withering glare.
“Protective,” Sam repeated. He shook his head. “Wouldn’t have thought of that.”
“Yeah, well.”
Bucky looked away across the velvety dark water, his smile slipping.
“Took a while occurring to Hydra too. But once they did, well. . .”
“Of all the things to be ‘corrupted’ by--”
“--I’m protective of myself, Sam. Kind of.”
Oh.
Sam swung off the table to join Bucky where he’d stopped moving by the water.
“Well.”
Sam sighed.
“From where I’m standing, you could use all the self preservation you can rile up, Buck.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Course it it. Brains are like that.” Sam agreed.
“It wasn’t, it was like, you know. . .” Bucky squirmed. Sam waited.
“You know how, how I talk about myself, the Winter Soldier, in, in the third person sometimes? Like I’m crazy? Because I am crazy?”
“I don’t think you’re crazy. I mean, Elmo refers to himself in the third person and he’s not crazy,” Sam justified, smiling a little at himself.
“I hope I’m crazy,” Bucky shot back.
Sam’s smile wilted.
“Either Hydra made me crazy or I’m a monster, Sam. Rather be crazy.”
“You’re not a monster either. I know that.”
“Yeah? You don’t know. I haven’t told you everything. You don’t know what he did, Sam, you don’t know what I did, what I see myself doing every night when I close my eyes, Sam, it’s, it’s awful. It makes me sick, God, I,--”
Bucky rubbed at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger.
“You’re a good person.” Sam said.
Bucky just laughed at that. Just laughed. He shook his head, refusing to meet Sam’s eyes.
“Look at me,” Sam said. “Look at me.”
Bucky turned back to him, jaw set, tears shining in the dark. He worked his lips to stop them from quivering. For half a second Sam was taken aback. He hadn’t realized Bucky was so close to tears. He fiercely resisted the urge to hug the guy. A hug would be end of conversation. A hug would shut him up. A hug would make Sam feel better. Instead, he put a hand on Bucky’s arm. On his cold, vibranium arm.
“I trust you. You’re a good person. What Hydra did was never your fault.”
Bucky silently shook his head.
“It was never your fault,” Sam repeated.
“You don’t know me.”
“Then you tell me who you are, Buck, because I want to know you.”
Bucky laughed wettly, something hard in his eyes.
“How? I don’t know myself!”
“You’ve got the rest of your life to figure that out. Just like everyone else. But know that I know you well enough to say you’re a good person.”
“Sam, he did it because of me. Because he didn’t want to lose me.”
Bucky’s cheeks were slick with tears. His mouth contorted into a jagged smile.
“It’s like, I have these memories, these nightmares, and, and feelings and it doesn’t feel like me. You’ve seen that. You fought me in Berlin, and afterwards I remember, but it’s, it’s like it wasn’t real. Like watching what happened through a submarine window. It’s, I’m not me. But, but looking the other way through it, I think it’s the same.”
“The Winter Soldier was aware of. . .you?”
“Think so.”
Bucky gave a very manly sniffle.
“You think he was looking after you? Or trying to? That’s--”
“--it’s awful. It’s my fault. I--”
“--I was gonna say that’s kinda sweet,” Sam cut in. “And how is it your fault?”
“I--”
“No, look--”
“--I should have--”
“--Bucky, just--”
“--If I hadn’t, hadn’t--”
“--What, Bucky? What could you have done? It wasn’t your fault.”
“OK?” Sam said, a little more gently.
“Would you have done those things if Hydra hadn’t been messing with your brain? Your feelings? Your Goddamn memory? No! No, were you out there murdering those people for kicks? For Hydra?”
“Of course not,” Bucky said, a sharp look of reproach in his eyes. Sam was getting very close to the line.
“Of course not.” Sam agreed.
“That’s not you. I know you. That’s not any part of you, Bucky. OK? From where I’m standing, God, it’s, it’s blackmail. What they did to him. What they did to you.”
“The Winter Soldier? The Asset? The guy who ripped the steering wheel out of your car? Threw you out of the helicarrier? Hurt ever--”
“-he must have been lonely.”
Bucky scoffed.
“Did you remember before Hydra? Did you remember being a kid? Your family? Your friends?”
“Of course not.” Bucky said shortly.
“Birthday parties? Christmases? You celebrate Christmas?”
“Yeah, yeah we did.”
“You remembered that when you were with Hydra? The good times? That people loved you? That you hadn’t always been alone?”
“Dreams.” Bucky said. “Pieces. When they let me be for long enough. They told him they would take it out. Permanently. If it got in the way.”
“See, and there’s the blackmail I’m seeing. Bucky, you think it’s fair to say that the Winter Soldier had an exceptionally miserable existence?”
“That’s not the point.”
“That’s exactly the point. As a wise man once said, ‘A minimum of comfort is necessary for the practice of virtue’--”
“--Guessing that wasn’t Jesus?” Bucky said darkly, wiping his eyes some more.
“No, it was a guy more of your time. Hell, I’d bet good money you killed him.“
“Great pep talk, Sam,” Bucky said, that sardonic smile twisting back across his face. And Sam knew that little smile was standing between them and a darkness deep as a lifetime.
“I don’t believe in perfect people, Buck.”
“That doesn’t make what I did any better.”
“No,” Sam shook his head. “I guess the question is, what now? You’re free now--”
“--So I’ve been told. Didn’t get rid of the serum though, did they? Or the arm. Or the memories.”
“You want to lose your memories?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“You want to be a different person?”
“Course I do. Have you met me?”
“Yeah, and do you see me trying to recruit a replacement wingman?”
That made Bucky look down.
“Bucky, you talk about ‘base imperatives’, and sure. You’re protective. Explains that time I found you cuddling a warm loaf of bread. But what do you do with that protectiveness? Those imperatives? Your metal arm, that serum, those memories, how you act on that? How you use what you have? That’s up to you. You’re not free, huh? Well tell me who’s holding the key, Buck. I’d beat them up for you if I could.”
There was something soft in Bucky’s eyes now. His smile too.
“What?” Sam demanded.
“Nothing. Just observing your base imperatives.”
“Soaking in my genius?”
“Something like that.”
His smile only grew, but it wasn’t for himself. It wasn’t for the irony of his situation either.
“Thanks. Sam. I think.”
Bucky swallowed.
“I think I needed to hear that.”
“I’m doing something right then, that’s good,” Sam replied.
“Yeah,” Bucky laughed.
“I’m going to hug you now, if that’s OK,” Sam said bluntly, “‘cause, frankly, that conversation put me through the emotional wringer,”
“You’re telling me-oph!”
Sam hugged him. Bucky stood there awkwardly.
“You call this a hug?” Sam demanded after a second. “This is a crap hug. Get your arms up.”
Bucky put his arms around Sam.
“There you go. Now apply pressure. Optional humming, back rubbing, rocking, there! Look at you! It’s like you’ve done this before! Crazy!”
“Shut up.” Bucky grunted. He rested his chin on Sam’s shoulder and closed his eyes. A long, warm moment later Bucky shifted.
“I see the knife,” he said.
Sam pulled back. Bucky reached behind him and drew a huge serrated blade out of the darkness.
“OK,” Sam said.
“Are we done here?” Bucky asked, emotion drained away, back to his crusty old man attitude.
“No more Wilson Wisdom to impart? No more tough love to give? Cause I think I’ve lost a good pint of blood to the bugs.”
“We’re done.” Sam agreed.
“Let’s head in.”
“Thanks, Sam,”
“You’re welcome, man.”