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Bucky jumps down onto the train after Steve. It’s snowing. He pulls himself down the ladder and inside, and he’s very cold, but it’s okay. He’s here with Steve.
He covers him. He’s got the big gun, and regular clothes. Steve’s wearing bright armour, his shield slung across his back, and he’s got a little shotgun in one hand. Bucky’s got snow on him but he doesn’t wipe it off. It seeps through his clothes and his skin feels clammy; his mouth is prickly and dry.
The doors close, which for some reason Bucky wasn’t expecting, and they -- Bucky and Steve -- stand on opposite sides of the glass for a second, staring at each other, and Bucky wants to smash through it with his hands and crawl through, or he wants to smash through the glass with his whole body, or he just wants to break the door down and grab Steve and say, “I’ve got you,” but Bucky’s no super soldier and there’s no time. The air crackles behind him. He has to move. He has to come back from this. He has to make it back.
He ducks and rolls and Steve appears when he’s out of bullets, because it’s Steve, and for a second he thinks -- Steve’s not going to make it to him, and he’s going to die like this, with his back against the wall, but then there he is, and they move together like they always have -- you kick one of them down and the other one is going to come for you, to give you back what you owe in kind.
Steve throws him a gun and Bucky’s got his back again, and he thinks -- don’t you get fucking hurt on my watch, Steve, I’ll kill you if you do -- and then it all happens very fast. Steve’s on the ground and Bucky has to -- he holds the shield because he doesn’t want to die and this way they’ll shoot him and not Steve, who’s still not getting up, and wasn’t the point of all this that Steve could keep getting up no matter how many times you kicked him, what’s that about, and Bucky shoots as best he can against whatever it is they’ve got, and then -- he always did have very quick reflexes.
He holds onto the side of the train, and feels like he was blasted through, as if the shield didn’t work at all. He looks down, and wishes he hadn’t. His body is whole but nothing else is. There’s -- nothing there. Nothing beneath him but air.
He waits for Steve to appear to help him back up -- because that’s what they do --
Get up, Steve. I swear to god. I can’t come for you this time.
Snow gathers on his sleeve. He can feel the metal under him move or break, and he grabs upwards but there’s nothing else and nobody’s here to help --
Should somebody else be here? Was he waiting --
He is very cold.
He falls. It’s a very long way down.
***
Snow again. He’s on his front, and there’s a gun in his hands. He’s far back, and there’s a man opposite him that he has to shoot before he can --
He shoots the man.
He looks down, and there’s nothing there. He can’t feel the snow crunch beneath his feet as he stands up.
***
Firefight after firefight. Bucky reloads his gun, and only sometimes does he remember why he’s fighting. He sees Steve wade into battle, but by the time he’s taken out the men he’s gunning for there’s usually nobody else left. He walks between the bodies, and then night falls, and he wonders where everybody else went, but then it happens again and it happens again and he doesn’t have time to wonder about what’s happening or why he’s losing -- why he’s been losing time.
At least when he comes to he’s being useful.
He doesn’t really remember the plans if he stops to think, so he doesn’t, and he does what he does and he’s mostly fine and the guys he shoots are mostly dead.
This time he heads into the fray to get a better shot at one of the targets, who is still half-alive and trying to knife Dugan -- and he bumps into Steve, who was probably about to disarm the guy. “I thought,” Bucky says, and then he just thinks “fuck it” and kicks the mark in the head to stop him. The knife falls to the ground with some of the mark's blood. There are some guys coming up from behind, and Bucky’s not got many bullets left and he can’t see them even when he turns around, but -- he can feel something in the air. Like thunder about to hit. Buzzing in his head.
“What do you think?” Steve asks, and Bucky can’t think, but he grabs Steve’s arm because he doesn’t have time for this.
“Run!” he says, and they do, almost arm-in-arm, and they push through trees and jump over roots and frozen mud and piles of compacted snow. They’d been in a scorched clearing, but the rest of the wood is dense, and.
“Who’s after us?” Steve asks, because they seemed to have the upper hand, surely he thought so, and anyway their job is just to fight against everything -- and they’re catching their breath and it’s just them left, and Bucky presses Steve up against a tree, his legs touching Steve’s legs, one hand on Steve’s arm. Steve’s still wearing the helmet. Bucky can see his breath in front of his mouth, but he’s too sweaty and nervous to be cold. Steve watches his face, and then he slowly touches his cheek. They can’t hear anyone coming -- not Hydra, but not Dum Dum and the rest of their team, either. It’s very quiet. Bucky can just about hear Steve breathing. They stand there for a while, and the cold and wet starts to make Bucky shake.
“I don’t,” Bucky says, and looks around him. “I think something went wrong back there.” He can feel the knife strapped to his leg, and wonders if he should go for it. He’s dropped his gun. Steve’s got a hand on his chest, and Bucky’s breathing is sharp.
He looks down at his hands, and then up again. Something dark has set in, and -- he thought --
***
He’s a long away from Steve. He’s got a gun again and Steve is on top of a big tank. There are his crosshairs, and he’s picking people off, but -- he’s sure that there’s something else coming. Something bigger. Like the guns they’d -- like the blue lightning that’d scorched the earth and didn’t even leave behind any bones.
When Steve jumps off the tank, Bucky runs forward to meet him, instead of retreating, but Steve’s feet don’t touch the ground, and Bucky is adrift, and it’s only instinct that has him rolling and taking shelter, and he’s thrown --
***
Bucky’s at camp, and he’s meant to be training. He hits the sandbag he’s aiming at twice. He watches sand run out of the bullet holes. It’s not really dark yet, but it’s getting there, and soon it’ll be too dark for him to keep shooting things. There’s one blank left in his gun. It started to rain about half an hour ago, but he hadn’t paid much attention to it then, and now it’s thick and cold. He shakes his head and the water runs down his neck. His hair sticks to his face, gets in his eyes.
Rather than heading across camp to get more bullets, or finding Jones and Monty to practice hand-to-hand or his French and German (he needs to get down something more than just cursing, one of these days), Bucky goes straight for Steve’s tent. Steve turns towards him as he walks in, then back to his work when Bucky shakes his head again with a finger in his ear this time. He can hear the rain on the tarp, and he scrapes his boots as best he can in the corner before he walks over.
“We meant to do something this afternoon?” Bucky asks, and he coughs to clear his throat.
“No,” Steve says, and he frowns as he looks away from the map and pages of yellow paper covered in scratchy, illegible handwriting that he’s been stuck in here studying since lunch in order to look at Bucky again. Before lunch they’d been practicing non-lethal combat using guns (not loaded) and Steve’s shield, and Bucky swears he’d caught Steve hard just by his nose but there’s no bruising there. Or is there? No, nothing. He resists the urge to press one of his fingers on the spot where it could have been. He tries his hardest not to imagine Steve flinching.
“You alright, Buck?” Steve asks, finally, when Bucky doesn’t say anything.
Bucky is trying to remember something he has to tell Steve, but none of this is helping. His memory’s not been so great since -- well, since.
Bucky thinks that he needs to ask Steve to run away, or to take a walk, or to go and sort out something urgently because something’s wrong here. There was -- a thing he had to do, there was a reason he cut his target practice short. Tomorrow’s mission must -- but when he thinks about tomorrow’s mission it’s like he remembers it, or at least he remembers the gun in his hand and the fucking reek of rot in the air -- he can’t remember anything past whiplash, get out, but he doesn’t even know that because it hasn’t -- it can’t have happened yet.
It’s like remembering a dream. And he feels unmoored in time, because what he can’t remember is the day before today. Or the day before that. It’s like he’s going backwards through time. He flashes back to being on a gurney. He closes his eyes. He opens his eyes. Did that even happen. Is that still to come? He feels like he cracked his nose or his cheek on something, because he’s sick and shaky through his head, in his cheeks and his sinuses and when he swallows, and. “Steve,” he says, and it’s the middle of the day and there’s nobody around, and he takes Steve’s hand in both of his. “Steve,” he says, “I think I’m going fucking insane.”
Steve looks at him, really looks at him, but this isn’t how it goes. How it goes is, Bucky walks into the tent and tells Steve about an idea he’s had about the position he’ll play sniper from, and what Bucky does is he says “wanna practice your jumping?” and they go across camp to the climbing wall and they climb up it then jump as far away from it as they can, because Steve’s strong and his bones don’t crack and Bucky’s kind of fucked and cracked already but he can just about hold it together, and sometimes Steve helps break his fall (because every jump is a fall from that high).
How it goes is, Bucky crawls into Steve’s tent later that night because Steve’s got his lamp on and Bucky says “Can’t sleep if you’re not sleeping,” and Bucky can’t sleep anyway but then Steve isn’t trying, doesn’t need to.
How it goes is Bucky falls asleep on Steve’s blankets and Steve falls asleep on Bucky, and they wake up early enough that it’s like they never slept at all and Bucky feels like he got kicked but he didn’t, he’s just always kicking.
Bucky is kind of sick of how it goes.
This time Bucky walks into the tent and puts his hands around Steve’s hand and says “I think I’m going fucking insane,” and Steve looks at him and it’s like nothing else is there. The gun stuck in Bucky’s waistband might as well be on the fucking moon. This time Bucky rubs his hands on Steve’s hand, and when Steve opens his mouth to say something he puts his hand over his mouth. “I’m not an idiot, Steve,” he says, and maybe Steve bites his hand or maybe he kisses it, but this time Steve doesn’t do anything.
“I know this isn’t real,” Bucky says.
“Feels pretty unreal to me too, Buck,” Steve says, pushing Bucky’s hand away, and isn’t that just like him? Bucky is sure that if you’d asked him to write down what Steve would say in response to that then he’d have written that exact line.
Which is kind of the point.
Bucky remembers that there’s a bullet left in the gun. He never finished his practice.
Bucky puts his hands on either side of Steve’s face and kisses him. Steve kisses back.
How it goes now is that Bucky’s done everything wrong and the rest of the camp has gone because the memory was supposed to be just him shooting the fuck out of some sandbags and drawing up part of a mission strategy that he can’t look at without wanting to throw up. If they leave the tent it’s just scorched earth again. This didn’t really happen. It might feel like it’s real, but it’s not.
How it goes is that Bucky kisses Steve and when he leaves the tent every man in the camp has their gun pulled on him, and he’s pushed to the ground, his mouth full of tarp and mud.
How it goes is that Bucky kisses Steve and Steve says “James, are you crazy,” and pushes Bucky to the other side of the tent.
How it goes is that Bucky kisses Steve and Dugan walks in to bum a match and kicks him until he’s down and says “must have fucked him up more’n we thought.”
How it goes is that Bucky kisses Steve and the rain outside is much louder now and it’s dark and they forgot to turn Steve’s lantern on, so it’s dark and they keep kissing.
How it goes is that nobody gives a shit, and Bucky can feel a little bump on the back of Steve’s head where he caught him earlier. How it goes is that they all suspected that it was going on anyway, and they love them, and they’re glad they have each other.
How it goes is that Bucky kisses Steve and then says, into his mouth, “I thought,”
How it goes is that Bucky kisses Steve, and Steve kisses him back.
***
Bucky’s dreams are brief and dark, and his bed is uncomfortable. It's war. When he wakes up, there’s no light anywhere. He can’t see his hand in front of his face.
***
Bucky’s pulling a guy off Steve. It’s an alleyway, not war, and they’re practically kids. The guy thrashes and catches Bucky on the back of his knee, and he swears and slaps him around the head. He doesn't have time for this.
“Felipe says you haven’t finished washing up,” Bucky says, and jerks his head towards the restaurant. The back door is blowing half-open. The guy tries to move away and Bucky lets him. Steve scowls and scratches at his forearm. He gets hives from the soap suds, and everyone knows it, but Bucky’s not stupid enough to go on about it anymore.
“Was taking care of something,” Steve says.
Or maybe it goes like this: Steve is big, and he beats the guy before Bucky even gets there.
No, that’s wrong. Go back to the first story. Or how about this: Steve’s walking home from the restaurant, apron slung over his shoulder, when the guy tries to take his wages. Steve struggles and then Bucky’s there to save him. Or maybe Bucky’s not there, and Steve loses the money, which is a pain in the ass because then Bucky has to lend him some to cover half his rent and Steve is the worst person to lend money to because it means so much to him and he resents it. “You don’t understand,” Steve says, and probably Bucky doesn’t.
Bucky blinks, twice, very slowly. He’s frying eggs. Steve is at the table, reading the paper. “It’s only a matter of time before we join,” he says. He sounds like he’s far away. It feels like Bucky’s wading through choppy water, but he makes it over to him and carefully scrapes the eggs onto his plate. Steve is very small. Could use a big breakfast.
“Don’t you want any?” Steve says. Bucky shrugs but then he uses his fork to steal a bite from Steve’s plate. His breathing is shallow. It’s a hot day, and Steve is very close to him like this.
Bucky doesn’t know if it’s just the talk of impending war, or what, but he feels -- a sense of loss. A sense that loss is coming. It tastes like burnt eggs.
***
Bucky wakes up. The sun is beating down on him through the window -- it’s high school English class, and it’s the first period after lunch. There’s a battered copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets on the desk in front of him, and there are scabs on his knuckles. Steve is three desks in front of him, head down, and Bucky can’t see his face but he bets he’s frowning.
Bucky wakes up, because he suddenly knows what’s happening. He thinks he does. He stands up, and the teacher yells at him to sit back down, but he doesn’t listen. He walks to Steve, and he wrenches him out of his chair. “I’ll pick you up if I have to,” he says, and his voice is strained.
“Bucky?” Steve says. And they run again. Bucky pushes against the walls and they fall over. They don’t need doors, not where they're going, not where they're from. They run and they run and Steve’s breathing is fine and Bucky doesn’t dare look at him until they’re clear of the school. They’re in some park, it’s probably not even a real park, and there’s nobody else around. Bucky feels the hairs on the back of his neck prickle, and he takes Steve’s hands.
“They’re trying to take you away from me,” he says.
“Mr Cohen?” Steve says, like he still thinks this is about English class. There’s ink on his hands. “He only moved us apart because you kept making me laugh,” he adds, apologetically.
Bucky shakes his head. He tries his hardest not to blink. He grips Steve tighter. “Do you remember what you said to me, that time I told you to just keep your head down?”
Steve scratches his cheek. “I said that if it wasn’t me, they’d just be beating some other kid.”
Bucky smiles. It hurts. “That’s why I end up winning all those fights for you.”
“You don’t have to,” Steve says. But he’s squeezing Bucky’s hands back.
Bucky shakes his head. The motion makes him woozy, which it shouldn’t. But it’s like. Time’s collapsing. “Don’t think it’ll be this way forever,” he says. He looks around him. The world is turning dark rapidly, although it’s May, and not that much time has passed. It feels like only seconds since they were in class. It should be bright and hot. “Come on,” he says, and he pulls Steve along with him again. “Don’t let go.”
They’re in a drugstore in Queens. Steve has never been here. Bucky’s dad managed it until around Bucky's fifth birthday. Before they moved a block away from Steve. Bucky breathes in deeply. He does his best to remember how it smells. “I don’t think they’ll know to look here,” he says. When they started running, Steve was a tiny fifteen year-old, but now he’s taller than Bucky. He's a grown man. His hands are still covered in ink. So are Bucky's. It gets everywhere.
Bucky is still a kid, but he feels ancient. He knows he must have lived before now, but he can’t remember it. How did he get here? He looks around the drugstore. It’s empty.
He wipes a hand on his thigh. It’s sweaty. It’s warm in here. He feels stiff fabric, and when he looks down, he sees that he’s wearing his combat best. Steve looks at the thick glass jars of candy and puts his hand in one for cough drops. “These always make me think of my dad,” he says, and Bucky feels a rush of affection when Steve puts a candy in his mouth. He doesn’t even point out that Steve’s dad died before Steve could know him, and that Steve is taking on Bucky’s memory, Bucky’s father.
He holds that thought for a second, and then it starts to dissolve. “Your dad,” Bucky tries. “Tell me about him.” Steve gives him a cough drop. Bucky curls his fingers around it. It’s sticky, and cool to the touch. He holds it to his face, but he breathes it in instead of putting it in his mouth. Memories don’t come to him, but a feeling floods his body. He reaches for Steve with his other hand.
“You know, now that I think about it,” Steve says, around the candy. It clacks against his teeth. “I don’t remember him much.”
***
Bucky wakes up in the dark and wildly searches for Steve. Wasn’t he -- wasn’t he just here? Or was that a dream? The ground is hard beneath him. “Steve?” He says. His voice cracks with -- tiredness? Or an emotion that he can’t name, can barely feel.
***
Z,
The process is taking longer than we thought.
Please see the attached folder for detailed notes. You will see that, as suspected, the subject’s memories begin to reemerge if he is conscious for too long. But they are jumbled, and weaker than before. They cause him some confusion and distress, but we believe they should not fatally disrupt our work.
When you next visit, we can discuss solutions to this in more detail.
K
***
Bucky is lying next to Steve. If he touches Steve and closes his eyes then Steve doesn’t vanish, he’s still there. Like how Bucky doesn’t need to look down at his body to know that it’s intact. That his fingers still exist. It's a sense. The real sixth sense. The ability to make a whole out of parts. He breathes on Steve and feels him move.
If he closes his eyes, he doesn’t have to pick one particular moment in time. Steve is just -- himself. Unmoored. The smell of his hair, which doesn’t have much to do with anything else -- soap, or the pencils he draws with, or talcum powder, or... burnt pancakes, whisky, gunshot. All of the different smells and tastes that Bucky has associated with Steve, or will associate with him. But at the base, this. Something he can’t name. “You still smell like you,” he says.
“Who else,” Steve says. Bucky shifts closer. They’re in a tent in the middle of nowhere. Literally -- if Bucky stepped outside he thinks he might fall off the world. And he also knows that this Steve isn’t real. He thinks he knows that. But he’s real to -- him. And that’s what. That’s what they are trying to take away, he thinks. He spreads his thoughts out in the blank darkness of the world, of the inside of the tent, his closed eyelids, like loose pages from a journal. They can’t kill Steve, but they can take him away from Bucky. Sometimes he wakes up alone and feels himself strapped down, with wet hair, and cold air on his skin. He can barely speak. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of a memory that’s dissolving and he runs with Steve for as long as they can, until they find him. Sometimes he thinks -- was somebody else in here with me?
Often he’s just alone.
He presses his knees to Steve’s thighs. Steve’s on his back, and Bucky’s lying on his side, beside him. It’s how they sleep, how they always slept. Steve’s lungs whirring, calling out to something that they can't reach. Bucky wanting to screw himself up like a sheet of paper. Bucky’s head is clear, so clear that it’s almost impossible to believe. It’s like he’s up above, and can see everything happening. But that’s not what he wants. He opens his eyes and he looks at Steve through the dim dark. There’s a bruise on his cheek, where it joins his nose. He runs his thumb over it, gently, as gently as he can manage, and Steve doesn’t wince, but he blinks. Bucky thinks: I can’t understand how we’re this far apart. Bucky thinks: I want to smash my body through the glass door, I want to tear my own face off, I want to crawl into you until I don’t exist. I can’t believe we’re still so far away. I want to be closer.
***
Sometimes it’s just a sudden absence. Usually, in fact. He’ll lose a thought halfway through a sentence. He’ll be left with one word... like he’s playing hopscotch and the playground all fell away and he’s balanced on one leg, on the only stone left.
If he’s fierce enough, prepared enough, he can fight it. It always comes, one way or another. It’s hundreds of soldiers, dressed in black. He is one man with a thumping heart and one rifle that isn’t top of the line because it’s all they were willing to give his crew for their suicide missions. Each bullet is heavy, conscious.
He pushes Steve behind him. “No matter what you do,” he says. “Don’t let them get you. Just stay down, okay? For once in your life...”
He lines up shot after shot. But it’s never enough. Steve is always gone when he turns around.
Once, he asks Steve to hold his waist. “I’m shaking,” he says. “Calm me. Don’t let go.”
Steve steadies him. They last a long time. Longer than Bucky thought they would. The air is thick with salt, like they’re by the sea. “Remember going to Coney Island?” he asks, but he doesn’t really remember it himself. It just seems like something he’d say. He doesn’t turn around because he knows Steve won’t be there, but the longer he can hold the soldiers off the longer he can feel him there, a ghost at his shoulder.
***
He doesn’t cry.
When he first shipped out, he’d use all the moments of freedom he got expansively, desperately. He’d smoke, dance, read, write letters, talk to his pals. But if he couldn’t sleep, he let himself do nothing but lie there. It was an obscure gift, and it was almost worth being tired the next day. He’d always had a good visual imagination and memory, and here it really came into its own -- he’d play his favourite memories over and over in his head, like a familiar record. Steve burning some eggs, but only lightly, and Bucky eating the worst bits on toast. A jar of cress his mother kept by the kitchen window that Steve refused to let him spoil one boring Sunday afternoon when they were ten, and the sandwiches she made them with that same cress and some thin slices of pastrami a week later. Whisky burning his throat as he looked at Steve and felt his sick heart and stomach lurch.
No, that was much, much later. But he remembers... remembering it. It wasn’t as pleasant as some memories are. Can be. But it stuck. Got under his skin. He’d thought -- what if I just lean forward and kiss him here. Or he’d thought -- nothing, but he’d looked at Steve anyway.
***
"I thought you were dead." Steve said that, once. Bucky barely took it in at the time -- he wasn't in any fit state to. But now he rolls it around in his head. Often he can't think of who said it. Captain America? Who's that. But he mouths the words. He's not dead; not yet.
Sometimes his mind is totally empty, but then something will burst through. Like flowers growing through gravel. Crocuses waving at the sun. A good dream, when normally you don't remember anything at all.
***
There was a memory he kept coming back to. It hurt a lot. He felt like it was probably wrong. Every time he thought of it. He thought -- this isn’t how it happened. But he doesn’t know. What it was. Originally. Maybe it’s not an original. He’s sick, he must be. Maybe it’s fever.
In the memory, he was holding on tightly to a broken wall... something that had cracked, and was about to tear apart. And somebody that he loved was nearby. He was crying. It can’t be real, he never cried. Never cries. He looked at the person he loved, who was taller than he -- taller than he could have been in real life, nobody is that big. He said, “I don’t want to go. I want to stay.” He was sobbing. Everything was very stark and bright. He could smell smoke. “I want to stay with you,” he said, but whatever else was true? He hadn’t been able to stay. He feels tired and his legs are shaky. He’s been running for hours. He thinks he’s holding his best friend’s hand, but he’s afraid to look. He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want either of them to go. “I want to stay,” he says, maybe just to himself, and so they keep on running.