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It is the darkest point of the night when you step out onto the pavement. You pull your coat collar a little higher, shove gloved hands in pockets. The neighborhood is nearly silent, the residents all dreaming, windows shut tight against the January cold. There hasn’t been any snow yet this winter. Christmas had been mild and wet and relentlessly gray. The new year had at last brought some sun but with it a slicing, bitter cold.
You do not mind. You have been much colder.
You have been renting a basement apartment from a young guy who was willing to not ask any questions as long as you paid in cash. So the world has changed, you thought wryly, but not as much as they think it has. Cash under the table still gets you places.
The apartment is small and sparse; you do not require many luxuries, having lived so long (so very long) without them. You find yourself both awed by and deeply suspicious of modern appliances. The microwave is a wonder, but you cannot quite bring yourself to use the dishwasher yet. Once while doing laundry you found yourself wishing that your mother had owned a washing machine. Laundry had been so time consuming then, it was a real shame she hadn’t had one. Then you realized–hell, maybe she had. She’d lived another 35 years after you fell.
You had to sit down for a bit after that, and think about other things.
You pass under streetlight after streetlight as you walk, and the sound of your boots on the pavement is oddly soothing. Sleep is a struggle, most nights. You remember being young and collapsing into bed after a long day, the feeling of well-earned exhaustion, the blissful oblivion as you slipped beyond consciousness, and then waking with a sense of renewal. This has not been your experience with sleep for many (many) years now, and you have resigned yourself to the fact that those days may be permanently behind you. Sleep, when it comes now, is full of unknown hazards.
Will you wake up in the same place you fell asleep?
Will you wake up screaming?
Sleep means relinquishing control. Sleep means you could be caught unaware. Sleep means nightmares, usually. So in lieu of sleep, you walk (and walk and walk and walk).
Your therapist asks you about your sleep. It’s a work in progress, you tell her. She asks about the walking.
“Where do you go?”
You shrug. You walk the neighborhood, mostly. Sometimes you head to Prospect Park and walk the paths there. It is not so well lit in places, but you can see very well in the dark now, and you are not afraid of the kinds of things that might lurk in the shadows in a park. You are not afraid of most things and yet some days you feel afraid of everything.
Your therapist asks why you are compelled to walk. Not why do you do it but why must you do it? You have learned that this is an important distinction. You do it so that you don’t have to sleep. But you could do anything to avoid sleep. You have a phone now, and you know that this is a common way to avoid sleep–perhaps the most common, in this century. You could read or watch films–you have 70-odd years of culture to catch up on. Instead you find that you must walk. You are compelled to walk.
********
I am James Buchannan Barnes. I am no longer the Winter Soldier. You have practiced saying this. Sometimes you say it to yourself like a mantra. You are still not sure you believe it. The programming has been broken; the words no longer control you. You are ostensibly a free man with a reclaimed name. You are still wrestling with how to reclaim a personhood.
James Buchannan Barnes was born on March 10, 1917. He fell a long way from a moving train in January of 1945. He was badly injured and taken as a prisoner of war, and while the next bit is hazy, you are confident that sometime in the years after his capture, James Buchannan Barnes died and the Winter Soldier was born. This person, the you that walks and walks in the darkest hours of the night–you are the battered vessel holding the splintered memories of two men, two soldiers, diametrically opposed (foes). Some days the dissonance feels like it will kill you.
You have tried to explain this to your therapist. You are not the James Buchannan Barnes who fell from the train. You know him, but you are not him. They killed him, and replaced him with a monster.
“Are you sure?” she asks.
You are sure.
“So when you saw Steve on the bridge,” she says, “who recognized him?”
You are silent. You look down at your hands, the left one gloved. She says you don’t have to wear it; she isn’t afraid of your arm. You wear it anyway, because you still worry that maybe she should be.
I did, you say finally. I recognized him.
“And who are you?”
When you do not answer, she presses on, gently. “Is it possible,” she says, “that James Buchannan Barnes didn’t die in 1945? Is it possible that you had to bury him deep inside to prevent that from happening?”
You are silent, shaking.
“Because it seems to me that he saw Steve Rogers and he fought like hell to dig himself out.”
You tell her you think you are out of time for the day, and you leave before you fall apart. You walk back to the basement apartment and stand under the hot water (there is so much hot water in this century) and sob. When it passes, you slide down to the floor and sit back against the cool tiles. You feel wrung out, but there is something else–a flare of satisfaction in your chest. That first soldier, the one who fell, is triumphant.
When you return to your therapist the next week (your appointments are court-mandated and you have little interest in going to jail) she doesn’t ask about you leaving so abruptly the last time. Instead she asks about Steve. Have you two spoken?
You have not. Your last conversation went…poorly. He left on an assignment the next day and you moved out while he was away. You left a note. You needed space. Please don’t come looking.
Stark knows where you are; you are aware that you are always being tracked, and for now you don’t have any strong objections to it. There’s a microchip somewhere in the arm.
If Steve wanted to find you, he could. You’re still in Brooklyn, for Pete’s sake.
“But he hasn’t?”
No.
“How do you feel about that?”
You feel surprised, mostly. Steve is hard-headed and you know how relentlessly he searched for you after the helicarrier. The first weeks after you left, you kept expecting to find him waiting for you in the basement apartment. When the weeks turned into months, you wondered if what you had said had been unforgivable. You aren’t ready to talk about how you feel about that.
You’ve seen Steve on TV; he looks okay.
Well. Captain America looks okay, anyway. Steve Rogers could be an entirely different story. In this century, the superhero persona is its own shield.
“It sounds like he is showing remarkable restraint and respect for your boundaries,” your therapist says. You blink at her. Or he’s just really pissed off, you say. She laughs, and you feel a jolt of pleasure–you know that James Buchannan Barnes was quite funny, but you haven’t had much luck reclaiming that piece of him yet. (Of myself, you think.)
Maybe I did bury him, you say to her. But I still don’t think I can be him again.
“Oh gosh, James, no,” she says. “Of course you can’t. None of us can go back to being the people we were before life changed us. And you have had a lot more life–deeply traumatic life–than most people. No one, including you, should have that expectation of you.” She cocks her head. “Did you feel that Steve had that expectation? Is that why you left?”
That’s not why I left, you say.
You left because he was grieving, and you were the reason, and you couldn’t take it anymore. You left because he was trying so hard, and you remembered that things had once been so easy. You left because he had such hope in his eyes sometimes, and you would say the exact wrong thing, and watch it snuff out. You left because you were hurting the one person who loved you unconditionally and you weren’t even sure if you deserved your own reclaimed name. You left because you couldn’t stay.
I couldn’t stay, you say. It was…complicated.
“Can you tell me more about that?” And you realize that you can.
Steve is good, you say. I know that’s in your history books, that he was chosen by Erskine because he was a good man, but I don’t think people understand what that means. Steve is solid. He’s steady. He’s unshakably, unquestionably good. It gave me a complex when we were kids sometimes. He went down with the ship to save the world, and he came out of the ice 70 years later and he’s still good.
You can hear the frustration in your own voice here. You hope she doesn’t mistake it for bitterness.
“You think you don’t deserve him?”
You laugh, and there’s the bitterness. I think someone like Steve doesn’t deserve to be saddled with someone like me, you say.
******************
You turn this over in your head some more as you walk, your exhales forming frosty plumes. It is so cold that your eyes water a bit and your nose hairs feel frozen. The park is empty–even the homeless have found sheltered places to hunker down tonight.
You wonder if Steve is asleep; if he has slept a whole night through since you left. He is also something of an insomniac but he reads to keep the nightmares away. Sam made him a list of all of the things he needs to catch up on, and Steve works through it diligently.
Why are you compelled to walk?
Your steps stay steady but you feel your heart rate pick up slightly. You remember coming home from a late night walk to find Steve in his chair, book in hand, tired smile just for you. You remember shucking your jacket at the door and pulling your boots off and sinking onto the couch, arm over your face, not saying a word and not needing to. You remember drifting in and out of a light sleep, the sound of Steve’s breathing and pages turning anchoring you. You remember the smell of him in his pajamas, his rumpled hair, the long stretch of his legs on the ottoman.
James Buchannan Barnes loved Steve Rogers so much that he fought through six decades of brainwashing to get to him. The man who fell off the train never doubted for one moment that he was worthy to be loved back by someone solid, and steady, and good. And the Winter Soldier had no concept of love–perhaps that’s why he had been so easy to defeat, in the end. Once awakened, James Barnes' love for Steve Rogers became a battering ram, and the Soldier had no defenses against it.
******
Even if you are James Buchannan Barnes, your hands are still soaked in blood. You’ve killed at least three children that you know of. You’ve left many more than that orphaned or ripped their families apart. Some of the people you killed had certainly committed crimes, some were simply collateral damage in Hydra’s war. You still remember the crush of Maria Stark’s windpipe under your hand. Some days you don’t know how her son can stand to look at you. Some days, you know he can’t.
How could you know this about yourself and still believe you are worthy of love?
What you did all those years, it wasn’t you. You didn’t have a choice.
But I did it, you say again.
You walk to the edge of the park and cross Parkside Avenue, heading south down Ocean. You know where you are headed, now, but you tell yourself it doesn’t mean anything yet. You can just walk by. If the lights are off, then no harm done. You don’t even know if there’s anyone there; you aren’t in the loop anymore on mission assignments.
Your therapist asked you if you have any hopes for your future.
You hope you never have to kill a man again in cold blood. You hope someday you sleep through the night. You hope you can learn how to mold the shards of the men inside of you into a coherent self, to tame the discordant clanging of fractured memory and pull it into tune. You hope that your life ends up being worth something, in the end. As it stands now, the metal in your arm has more value than your beating heart.
It takes another 30 minutes, and by now you cannot feel your ears, but you stop in front of the brownstone and stare up at the light in the living room window.
You unlatch the gate, and it occurs to you that if James Buchannan Barnes died in 1945, then he never killed anyone. He was simply an unwilling passenger in his own body. He didn’t have a choice.
Your late-night searches for wisdom on the internet have taught you that we accept the love we think we deserve and even if you aren’t so sure what you deserve yet, Barnes sure is.
You fish your key out of your coat pocket, and unlock the door, and think, it’s not really fair to punish him for something he didn’t do. It wasn’t him. He didn’t have a choice.
Steve is in his chair with a book in his lap, his long legs stretched out over the ottoman. His hair is rumpled and he looks up at you, and he is solid. He is steady. He is good.
“Hey, Buck,” he says. “Cold night for such a long walk.”
Why do you think I do it? you say. Why do you think I walk, when I can’t sleep?
Steve picks up an envelope from the coffee table and marks his place; tonight he is reading a book called Gilead. He sits forward and looks thoughtful.
“You’ve always done that,” he says. “As long as I’ve known you. You do your best thinking when you’re moving.”
You blink at him. You don’t remember this.
He smiles, small and fond. “The week after I told you I loved you for the very first time, I thought you were going to wear out your brand new shoes. I don’t think you sat down for seven days. You walked and walked and walked. And then you came home, and you told me you loved me back. And that was that. You just needed to work it out.”
The clanging discord, again; warmth at this story and bitterness that you have no memory of it, that Steve Rogers knows more about you, in some ways, than you do about yourself.
You tell him this, because you walked all the way here, and he deserves to hear it. He nods. He feels some of that too, he says. His memory is eidetic; he cannot forget, and you cannot remember, and he does not always know how to bridge that gap gracefully.
Come here, you say to him, and he does. His hands cup your face (“Bucky, you’re freezing, Jesus”) and you soak up the warmth. You can feel the heat radiating off of him, and you lean in, your forehead on his shoulder. His hands move to your back, he is all around you, and you are breathing in his pajama smell.
You are so, so tired. You can feel yourself sway.
“Buck,” he says gently, “let’s get you to bed.”
You wrap an arm around his waist; you are not ready to pull away yet.
Lead the way, you say.
Steve huffs a breath, asks if you are sure. You followed this man into battle in a world war. You followed him into the Potomac River. You followed your love for him out of decades of emptiness and despair. You have spent the last five months walking all over Brooklyn just to find your way back home. You are sure, you say.
I’ll go anywhere you want me, you tell him, and he squeezes your hand and leads you to bed.
For the first time in 70 years, you wake up feeling renewed.