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Becca was three blocks away. The doors were open. He could get off, right now, see her for the first time in a lifetime.
Of course, then he’d be going home at rush hour. He’d be underground, pressed together with 8.8 million other strangers fighting to crush onto already packed trains. He’d get home late and he’d eat dinner late and he was hungry now and tired and maybe they wouldn’t even let him see her without making an appointment. He should check the visiting hours if he wanted to-
The doors closed.
He wanted to see Becca. He really did. He just - couldn’t. Every time he got to the station, he thought about it. Once he even got off the train, halfway up the stairs to the street, but there was always a reason to just go home instead. His excuses were good. His schedule was busy. He was just making reasonable scheduling decisions, was all. They weren’t really excuses.
His heart didn’t agree.
“I couldn’t,” he told Dr. Raynor the next day.
“Why do you think that is?”
“I had a busy week,”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I did. I was helping Sam rescue Romanian prisoners from the Battalion of Death. I-”
“-Battalion of Death? Really.”
“Yes, Doc, the Battalion of Death.”
“Ok,”
Dr. Raynor kneaded her eye sockets for a long moment.
“Ok, sure,”
She folded her arms on the desk in front of her.
“James, I want to try an experiment,”
“Those have always been fun for me,”
She ignored him.
“I want you to think of connecting with your family as a mission,”
“No,”
“You are a goal-driven person, and there’s nothing wrong with that,”
“The missions weren’t goals,”
“I know that,”
“No, you don’t. Doc, just-”
“-You set your own missions. You decide what’s important, and-”
“-no,”
“We can build different language to talk about this. What if I told you that I wanted you to make visiting your sister this week a goal?”
“I don’t-”
“-Do you want to see your sister?”
“Of course I do,”
“Then make a plan and make it happen,”
So Bucky made a plan.
Next time the train pulled in, he made it happen.
The nursing home was in a kind of ritzy, residential part of town by Prospect Park, where the sidewalks were wide and the row houses all had shiny black wrought iron gates and perfectly manicured postage-stamp gardens out front, which didn’t make a lot of sense for a government-funded care home, but, as Becca herself used to say, there you go.
The home itself was an architectural glory of the Cold War era. It sat squatly on a little hill, a fenced-in bushy scrub area and a parking lot taking up the rest of the lot. It wasn’t well set up for visitors.
Bucky read a series of complicated instructions taped on the glass front door and decoded that he should ring the buzzer.
Just do it, Barnes.
He did it. He waited.
And waited.
And waited.
He watched a tank of tropical fish in the lobby.
Finally, an older lady in purple scrubs opened the door for him, clipboard in hand and mask on her face.
“You’re here to see someone?”
“Yes,”
“A’ight. Come in,”
The smell didn’t hit him as bad as he’d expected. It was more of a fusty old people in diapers odor than anything clinical. It settled his nerves a little.
“Who are you here for?” the nurse - Miriam, according to her name tag - asked.
She pulled out a big green binder and a pen.
“Rebecca Barnes Proctor,”
His voice didn’t sound like him.
“Relation?”
“Hm?”
“What is your relation to Mrs. Proctor?” Miriam said, slowly and clearly, frustration very barely masked.
“Uh, brother,”
Miriam looked at him.
“Yeah?”
“I have ID, just,”
“Sir.”
“Here,”
He pulled out his wallet.
“Here, I’m her brother. I’m James Barnes. Here’s my driver’s license,”
She took it, eyebrows raised.
“You have the wrong Rebecca Barnes. Mrs. Proctor is ninety-eight years old, Sir,”
“Look at my date of birth,”
Miriam put on a pair of reading glasses. She frowned at his card. Then she frowned at him. Then she frowned at his card. Then she typed something into her computer, frowned some more, and, without changing expression, opened the green binder and gave him the pen and his driver’s license.
“Name, last, first, date, phone number, address,”
“Yes Ma’am,” he smiled.
Her scowl deepened.
When he was signed in she gave him a mask, a squirt of hand sanitizer and asked him a rapid-fire list of symptom questions, without really waiting for his answer.
“Ok, Mrs. Proctor’s probably at the nursing station, up the stairs, down the hall, you have to put the mask on,”
“I’m not sick,”
“You still have to put the mask on,”
“I’m allergic,”
“Really.”
“I can’t breathe in them. They bother my heart.”
“Everyone has to wear a mask.”
“I’m sorry, I can’t. What if I meet her outside? Could she come out to that bushy bit in the back-”
“-the garden.”
“The garden, can I see her in the garden? I promised her I’d come home, Miriam. I-”
“-Ok. Go wait around the back door and I’ll get someone to wheel her out. Ok?”
“Thank you,”
“Sure,”
Bucky walked around the building to the “garden”, feeling very far away from his body. He sat down on a little bench by the back door and waited some more, under a little porch crowded with abandoned hospital beds in various stages of disassembly. He wondered what his face was doing. He wondered whether this was derealization or depersonalization or some other flavour of de word and wondered if it really mattered what flavour of de word it was.
He did the square breathing thing the Doc was always pushing and thought about the tropical fish in the lobby.
He waited.
He waited a while.
Finally, a nurse came out, pushing a reclining wheelchair. In it, there was a body that, in Bucky’s professional opinion as an assassin, should have been dead by now.
“Here’s Mrs. Proctor,” the nurse told him, putting the break on the wheelchair, then left him alone.
Bucky couldn’t remember ever seeing anything so frail. Becca made Yori look downright spritely. Her skin was near see-through, blemished in places by strange, scabby sores. Her knuckles were swollen with arthritis, red and painful. Her hair was completely white and thinning on her head, thickening on her upper lip and chin. Yellow-white gunk stuck her eyes closed. She lay under a pile of blankets and sweaters, mouth slightly open, showing gaps where teeth used to be, completely unmoving except for the slow rise and fall of her chest. She was like a tiny, naked newborn bird. Except this wasn’t the start of a life.
Looking at her, seeing his baby sister like that, something stirred in Bucky that had been left to rot a long time ago. He hurt with her.
“Becca Boo,”
He took off his right glove and reached for her hand. He was scared of moving her hand too much, scared it would snap right off, but with a start, he realized she was moving to grab him too. She found his hand and held on with surprising strength.
“Hey Becca, I’m home,”
He leaned in and hugged her, gently squeezed her, held on to her for a long moment before pulling back.
One gunked-up eye cracked open, then the other, giving him a sliver of grey blue.
“Hold on,”
He pulled out a clean hanky and carefully wiped at the gunk. Then he whipped at his own eye liquids. She blinked at him.
“Beautiful, beautiful, day,” she whispered.
“Yeah, it is,”
After that first visit, Bucky started coming a few times a week to see Becca. He got used to her frailty, became fluent in Becca’s muddled whispers, familiar with the nurses. He even managed to get on Miriam’s good side with the help of a steady stream of coffee.
They always met outside in the garden. Sometimes Bucky would take her for a walk, wheeling her out of the home, through the neighborhood. She liked going to the park, that perked her up. Sometimes they’d find a dog and walker patient enough to sit quietly beside her chair so she could pet it.
Bucky found things to do with her that she could still enjoy. Some days he would brush out her hair and rub her head and french braid it back up again. He held her hands. He fed her muffins. He put birdseed on her head and took pictures of the wildlife that came to sit on her. They got a squirrel once. That had been an exciting day. Almost always they listened to music.
Music woke Becca up; helped her remember. It woke Bucky up, too. Once, he’d called Sam after a particularly musical visit with her. A few sentences in, Sam had broken down laughing at him, saying Bucky was speaking the best Brooklynese Sam had ever heard. It was. . .good. It made that time before Hydra feel less and less like a dream of someone else's life.
Some days he would paint their nails. It was nice helping Becca feel pretty. Painting his nails made him feel good too. With every little sparkly flower decal he stuck on his metal hand he could feel Alexander Pierce and Arnim Zola and Vasily Karpov and Brock Rumlow and a dozen others turning in their graves. This little rebellion, shared with his sister, gave him endless glee. He was James “Bucky” Barnes and freedom was sweet.
One spring afternoon Bucky met Erin, who was sitting with her hundred and five year old mother in the garden when Bucky came for his visit. Erin also regularly brought geriatric teeth-friendly baked goods and the four of them spent many pleasant hours picnicking in a sunny spot in the garden.
Erin’s mother also liked music, but she didn’t talk anymore. Sometimes Becca would peel an eye open and sing along, or reassure Bucky that the food was good and the nurses were nice, or tell him that Brooklyn was the best place to live, but aside from Erin and the nurses, conversation was scarce.
That was Ok. Bucky liked their routine.
Of course, all good things must come to an end, and Bucky’s private grab for family would eventually be compromised. Becca had more family than just one unusually young older brother.
James Proctor felt guilty.
Not that he had any real reason to feel guilty, he kept telling himself on the train ride in from Poughkeepsie. He’d been busy. Transportation was expensive. Things were so crazy after the blip. What mattered was that he was making the time now.
He had to wait a while after buzzing, but a young nurse let him into the home. He seemed flustered.
“Hi, sorry, I’m new. Who are you here for? What’s your name?”
“I’m James, I’m here to see my mom, Rebecca Barnes Proctor?”
The nurse hauled out a big green binder, ran his finger down a list.
“What a lucky lady. I hope my kids visit me this much when I’m old,” the nurse said.
James bristled. The nurse didn’t even look up. He turned a page.
“Can we still reach you at this number?”
He pushed the binder over.
“No,” James said shortly, “I've never had that number,”
“Oh, huh,”
A sharpie materialized in the nurse’s hand.
“Let me cross that out,”
The sharpie squeaked.
“Can you write your new info, just at the bottom there, I guess,”
He flipped the page back and there was a neat column of entries for one James Barnes, brother, going back months.
“This isn’t me,”
“Oh,”
The nurse flipped the page.
“Wait, what was that phone number?”
“I can’t give away other visitors’ personal information,”
“He’s, I’m his nephew,”
Becca liked chocolate. Bucky liked chocolate too. For her birthday he bought them a nice chocolate cake and a bag of chips. The chips were for him, Becca couldn’t eat them, but it felt more festive to tell Miriam they were for the party.
It was a windy June day and he sat with his coat buttoned up in the garden under the sun. Miriam brought Becca out for him.
“Hey Becca,”
“Happy birthday Mrs. Proctor," Miriam said, wrapping another blanket around her before heading back inside.
Bucky parked her in the lee of a lilac bush a little way down the path. The air was thick with its perfume and the buzz of drunk pollinators. He picked a sprig for her and put it in her hair. He picked his own sprig for the lapel of his coat. He smiled.
“Are you warm enough, B?”
“Mm?”
“You’re not too cold?”
“No, no, I'm not cold,” Becca said.
“Would you like some cake? Since it’s your birthday, you know. You’re ninety-nine, now B. That’s pretty fine,”
Bucky turned on Paul Whiteman’s orchestra, opened the chips, and cut them both fair-sized chocolatey slices. He broke off chunks and put them in Becca’s hand and she brought them to her mouth.
Becca chewed very slowly. Bucky barely chewed at all. Neither of them spoke.
Bucky was on his third slice, Becca half finished her first when the back door opened. Bucky looked up and an older man looked back. Biologically older.
The man was coming right for them, eyes still stuck on Bucky. Desperately, Bucky floundered around in his brain for something like social skills and came up with a forced “Hello,”
He came and sat beside Bucky under the lilac bush. He was older and taller too, no military background, significant pot belly, watery blue eyes, smelt like baked beans, and low blood sugar.
“Have some cake,” Bucky said.
“Are you James?”
Bucky’s (regularly cleaned) combat knife paused, already an inch below the icing.
“I’m, that’s my mom,”
Bucky had thought about what he’d do if he ever met Becca’s family. His script was all planned out. His script was nowhere to be found. An awkward moment passed as he desperately scrambled through his memory for the right words.
What had Sam done, coming home to his nephews after being dead for five years? That was the sort of Uncle Bucky wanted to be, was going to be, so Bucky put the cake on Becca’s lap and leaned over and hugged his sister’s baby for the first time.
“I’m Bucky,” he said.
Younger James froze, then caved. It should have been uncomfortable. It should have been strange. They were, after all, complete strangers. But they were family, too. James caved and hugged him tight back.
When Bucky pulled back, James was crying a little bit. Bucky gave him a moment and finished cutting him a slice.
“But that’s Uncle Bucky to you, boy,” Bucky grinned.
“Ok,” James snuffled, accepting his cake.
“No, I’m kidding, call me Bucky,” Bucky said quickly, “Welcome to the party,”
“Welcome to the family,” James replied.
He wiped at his eyes.
“A beautiful, beautiful day,” Becca whispered, too soft for either of them to hear.
She smiled.