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i.
Sometimes there is a world.
Sometimes there isn't.
Bucky's memories and the Asset's. A memory, an identity, a self, versus a creature with none at all. Steve helps, sorta. He's an anchor, to a time and a place that the Asset knows nothing about, but that calls Bucky to the fore like moths to a flame.
Bucky doesn't think there'd be a Bucky if there wasn't a Steve.
ii.
He was lost. Now he's found.
(It's because of Steve, both times.)
Steve found Bucky, lost within the Asset's skull, and Steve found Bucky, wandering and lost.
He also brought a war with him, but well, it's Steve. Bucky doesn't think Steve knows how to live any other way. He's a creature of the fight, of what is right, and it's always been the most Bucky can do to follow him and try to keep him from trouble.
(Usually getting himself into trouble as a result.)
Steve has people (Steve always has people). Loyal people, good people (like Steve would agree with any other kind). People who will fight alongside him (it makes Bucky think achingly of the Commandos). People who will help.
iii.
Bucky flinches the first time Sam sits down next to him. He doesn't mean to but, well. When you've torn someone's wing off and left them to die you don't expect them to sit down beside you and sing Kumbaya.
Clint doesn't get the same reaction, but he doesn't really know how to talk to the man. Sharon is... Bucky doesn't mind her, she reminds him of Peggy in a way, but he recognises the eyes of someone used to undercover work. He doesn't want to deal with undercover right now.
Scott is... Scott. He gets on fine with Sam and Clint, which he supposes is a decent endorsement of the man, but he's too loud, too brash, too confident.
(Bucky remembers being the last and doesn't quite understand how.)
Wanda though. Wanda looks at him with eyes like embers and he doesn't have to understand what her powers are to realise that she knows. Knows loss, knows confusion, knows Hydra and the pain they can cause. Wanda Maximoff looks into the ruin of his mind and simply nods.
iv.
Sometimes Bucky isn't Bucky. Sometimes he slips, his memories escape him and he's the Asset again. Usually Steve pulls him out of it, helps him find the date and his name and realise that he's not the Asset, that he's Bucky Barnes.
(Sometimes, when he's the Asset, he remembers enough to try to stay away from Steve. Even as Bucky the Asset's purpose is calming.)
He doesn't do anything as the Asset - he has no orders, after all - so he patrols the apartment, checks it for bugs, checks the entrances (yes, even the windows, Steve, they count), cleans his weapons.
(He has a lot of weapons. He still usually has time to do everyone else's.)
It's nice, to slip into the Asset, to smell gun oil, to hear the soft clear clicks that mean a weapon well-maintained.
Come the morning Steve will find him in the living room and snap him out of it, but in the dark small hours of the morning it's a better option than nightmares.
v.
Sharon's usually the one to go for groceries ("I've lived undercover more than any of you, I'm least likely to fuck it up."), but sometimes Wanda goes instead ("My scarlet, remember? I can wipe myself from their memories, direct cameras away. No problem."). Sharon usually gets newspapers on her runs, glossy magazines and copies of the Times or the Gazette. Wanda gets alcohol and small candies and cheap plastic toys.
(She usually throws the toys to him, to give nervous fingers something to play with.)
(He doesn't know what half of them are, but neither does she, and they've spent afternoons coming up with backstories for the spiky blue one they later learned was supposed to be a hedgehog.)
vi.
Technically the matter with the Accords and his arrest is over now, resolved, but Bucky still doesn't trust half the other people. Something, something in the back of his mind, where he keeps the records of the Asset, recognises Natasha (Natalya, whispers his mind), and he doesn't think he can trust anyone the Asset recognises so readily, even if they did defect.
(At least, he thinks, not yet. Natasha and Steve seemed to get along, after all.)
Stark is... Stark is a Stark. Bucky would recognise that grin and that confidence anywhere, and the only thing that baffles him about it is the idea that Howard Stark settled down and had a kid.
Rhodey is like most of the airforce people he's known, albeit modern and less of a dickhead. Spidey is... is a kid really, and Steve had words with Stark as soon as there was peace enough to do so.
(Steve might run head-first into danger, but he doesn't approve of adults letting kids do the same thing.)
("I'm not a kid!" Peter had shouted at that, and his voice had cracked. Yeah, Bucky thought. How much more of puberty you got left?)
T'Challa is, despite his ferocity in a fight, a genuinely nice guy, good for a drink and apparently readily willing to forgive Bucky for the arm bolted to his shoulder, even if it is made of a large chunk of his country's most precious and most stolen metal.
("Politics," he'd said, when Bucky had asked why. "My father is King, and I have been his diplomat since I was twenty-six. Training since I was twelve. You learn to forgive." He'd clinked his beer glass against Bucky's. "You also learn not to forget.")
Vision is...
Bucky doesn't think he could believe Vision was real if it wasn't for the fact he was created by a creation of Stark's.("Of course it was Stark," he mutters when Steve tells him. "Who else is crazy enough but a Stark!")
He knows Wanda likes Vision. Sometimes he sees them sitting together, playing chess or draughts or backgammon.
("Learning backgammon," Wanda says. "Vision downloads the rules and teaches me.")
It's hard not to resent Vision slightly, for taking Wanda away from spending time with him, making up silly stories about pieces of this world which makes no sense to either of them. Wanda might not be a man out of time, but she is from a warzone, not America, and half of it is as alien to her as it is to him.
Steve, he knows, has a head start on understanding why on earth there is a bright blue hedgehog called Sonic in the world.
vii.
Sometimes he slips into being the Asset again. Sometimes he means to, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he doesn't care. Now they're here, in this bigger base, Steve can't always snap him out of it. Sometimes it's an agent, tapping his shoulder, calling him Barnes, sometimes it's F.R.I.D.A.Y. warning him when he gets to close to some space he shouldn't be.
Sometimes it's Wanda, eyes glowing, scarlet around an outstretched hand, softly asking, "James?"
viii.
It's here he learns that Wanda has nightmares as bad as his own. That sometimes she dissociates, not just out of time or emotions but her own skull, her scarlet taking her to other minds or sometimes just to watch.
Walking him back to his room that first time, her arm looped gently through his metal one, she explains the drive of a conflict, how purpose keeps her from nightmares.
"I don't have a purpose now,"she says. "Saving the world but waiting is not the same. And I have no Pietro to help me when I wake, so I wander."
He doesn't have to say anything for them to both know the conclusion of her statement. Sometimes doing anything, being anyone, is better than nothing.
ix.
They'e moving in synchrony. The Asset and the Not-Quite-Asset beside him. The Asset doesn't know who this new person is, but they move with the same weaponised smoothness as he's been trained to, the same silence. Her eyes watch his in a perfect mirror, observing, filing away the gathered information.
She paces with him, around the building, checking the entrances, checking for bugs, sitting down in the armoury to clean weapon after weapon after weapon.
Then a voice from the doorway calls, "Wanda?" and the Not-Quite-Asset changes. Blinks. Hands lift from the pieces of the gun she'd been cleaning, a breath drawn in like she'd been startled. "Oh," she goes, and then, stretching out a hand to him where he's paused his cleaning, "James?"
And Bucky is there.
x.
"What was that?" Clint asks from the door. His arms are crossed. Bucky's only seen Clint cross his arms and wear this expression when he's serious.
Wanda blinks again. "I... am not sure. I do not think I was there, in my mind. I was in Bucky's, except he was not Bucky."
"Asset," Bucky murmurs. "Usually Steve gets me out."
xi.
"Does that happen often?" Wanda asks later. Clint had half-glared at them both for several minutes and then joined them to clean up the guns and get them all away. Now, it's just them, Wanda teaching him backgammon as Vision had taught her.
"Asset?" Bucky asks, and shrugs. "Sometimes. Sometimes it's nice, to slip into him. He's got... he's got purpose. He's calm. Sometimes that's better than being Bucky."
Wanda nods, rubs her arms slightly. "Pietro," she says. "He always had purpose. I always had calm. Together we... we balanced out. When our minds were connected we were like that, that synchrony, that... surety?" She pauses, checking the word is right. Bucky nods. Wanda's head dips slightly. "It is harder to be calm now."
Bucky understands.