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You pull the Captain’s heavy, limp body out of the Potomac and lay him down on the bank gently, even though you did not know why you wanted to do it.
For a moment, the world overlaps with another world, an older one, where the Captain was fragile and sickly and limp like the Captain of the present. Your hand reaches out, muscle instinct, to brush his sunshine hair out of his face. The bruises you put there mock you, and you pull your hand back. You have already caused the Captain enough harm.
You turn away from the riverbank, because people like the Captain deserve better than to be tainted by people like you and the shadows that cloak you wherever you go. But you know that you are selfish, and you turn back just one last time, watches the shallow rise and fall of the Captain’s chest before you walk away.
You walk into the Smithsonian, where you find a panel about the man with your face; it says his name was James Buchanan Barnes, and he was the Captain’s best friend. Your face reflects back at you in the pale light. With your dead, glassy eyes and long, unkempt hair, you look almost nothing like Barnes, James Buchanan, 325507 Sergeant.
Yet the memories are there, pulling the Captain off the ground in shady alleyways and slinging an arm around his fragile shoulders, riding the Cyclone at Coney Island. You do not know where Coney Island is, but it must be somewhere in New York.
You leave D.C. on a train, baseball cap pulled low and limbs leaden with something you cannot quite name. You visit Coney Island but did not go onto any of the rides, simply stood in the shadows and watch the world overlap with one another again and again, wishing that you could just be Barnes, James Buchanan, and not who you are now.
When the Captain awakens, he comes to New York in a flashy Stark jet. He makes the front page of the news, and you feel something that is almost amusement; the Captain, you think, does not know the meaning of inconspicuous.
When the Captain begins to look for you, you take the first flight to Russia using money stolen from Hydra safehouses, six pieces of weaponry on your person and twelve more in your backpack. You are careful not to leave a trail, but the Captain and his friend follow anyways.
i. One look, dark room, meant just for you.
You lead the Captain on a wild goose chase all over Eastern Europe, and you keep telling yourself that it is not because you wanted to see his face again.
You are selfish, you know that when you slip into the Captain’s hotel room somewhere in northern Germany and watch him sleep. The Captain sleeps like the dead, and you vaguely remember how much it used to worry Bucky Barnes.
The blankets of the bed has been kicked off a while ago, and the Captain shivers in the cold night air. You pick the blanket up out of a force of habit and carefully drape it over the Captain.
His eyes flicker open, sleepy and trusting, and he catches your wrist in his hand. He looks at you, and there is something in his eyes that you cannot quite pinpoint.
Before he can say anything, you were gone, curtains flickering and the balcony doors wide open.
ii. Time moved too fast, you play it back.
The bright white star of the Captain’s shield glimmers in the scope of your sniper rifle, and your finger curls on the trigger, but doesn’t pull. You swing the rifle around to the figures in black around him instead, and your finger squeezes the trigger, again again again again until there’s a ring of dead agents around the Captain.
He looks up at where you lie, on the top of an abandoned building, and does a sarcastic salute. The world overlaps again, and you see the Captain of 1945 in the midst of the woods doing the very same thing. You come to yourself with the realization that you and the Captain have lost so much time.
Time should have waited for the Captain; he deserves far more than this fast-forward, than this strange, modern timeline that he doesn’t quite fit in. The Captain, you think, deserves the universe and more.
You think you will do anything on the face of Earth to wind back the Captain’s time, but you cannot even remember your own past.
iii. No proof, not much, but you saw enough.
You stay the next time the Captain catches you in his room.
He unbuttons his dark blue coat, and you think that it looks familiar, but you keep it to yourself.
“Never used to fit each other’s clothes before, huh, Buck?”
You look at him and try not to flinch.
“Before the war I was too small, and after the war I was too big.” The Captain continues, tone light-hearted, but you can detect the smallest hint of strain in his voice. You have, after all, been conditioned to do this kind of thing.
He takes out his wallet and put it down on the table, along with the car keys. You think that Bucky Barnes would have admonished him for being so careless, especially with an enemy operative, but you keep that to yourself also.
The wallet flips open slightly, and you notice a faded sepia picture of a woman you vaguely recognize as Agent Peggy Carter, and your own face. Your eyes were bright, and your mouth was curled into a smile. You do not think you know how to smile anymore.
The Smithsonian said the Captain loved Peggy Carter. You do not quite understand what it means that he keeps your picture right next to the picture of the women he loved.
You will not admit that you hope the Captain still has a little bit of love to spare for a ghost of a shadow like you.
The Captain reclines back onto the bed, turns onto his side, and closes his eyes as exhaustion takes him in its welcoming arms.
You think it is foolish that he is willing to sleep in the presence of an enemy operative, but you are too selfish to say so. You tighten your grip on the rifle in your hands, hear the gears in your metal arm whir, and keep watch over the Captain.
You think: nothing will harm the Captain in his sleep for as long as you breathe.
You watch the Captain’s hair flutter gently in the breeze, the furrowing of his eyebrows, the stiffness of his limbs.
You think: even you cannot keep the Captain safe from the terrors that wander his dreams.
The Captain opens his eyes abruptly, and all of his muscles tense up as his lips part around half a name that you know so well; a name that is supposed to be your own.
You know this: the Asset does not speak unless spoken to.
You say: “I’m here, it’s alright.”
“I’ll keep you safe this time, Buck, I swear.” The Captain gasps, and his face is wet.
You know this: you are selfish, but not so selfish that you would wipe away the Captain’s tears.
Beings like you do not deserve to touch people like the Captain.
“Come home, Buck.” He says.
You know this: the Asset has no free will of its own and does not make decisions.
You say: “Yes.”
iv. Small talk, he drives. Coffee at midnight.
The Falcon sits in the backseat, trying to keep watch on you but failing. He is far too gone in the throes of sleep to be an effective watcher.
You do not particularly mind; you can watch enough for both the Captain and the Falcon. You know that you do not require sleep.
The Captain drives the car, and you sit in the shotgun seat with a shotgun in your lap.
The scenery passes by you, and you keep a sharp eye out for any disturbances. The Captain glances at you from time to time, but you do not turn and meet his eyes. You remind yourself that he deserves better than you and the shadows that you hide in.
You cannot answer why you are sitting in his car, and you do not attempt to.
“Buck,” He says, and you look up. “Why don’t you go to sleep?”
“Keeping watch,” You answer, and your voice is creaky and rusty from disuse.
“I can handle this,” The Captain insists, and his face is pained.
You do not reply; something in your chest twists at the expression on his face.
The late evening melts into the night as you stare out at the landscape, hoping to find something-- anything -- although you do not know what you are looking for. Your fingers clench on your gun; you squeeze your eyes shut.
The car slows to a stop; the Captain leaves and comes back with three styrofoam cups. You are left alone with the sleeping Falcon, but you leave him unharmed and accept the styrofoam cup from the Captain. The red digital numbers on the dashboard tells you that it is midnight.
You clutch the cup in both of your hands, trying desperately to absorb warmth from its flimsy material. It has been decades since you have felt true warmth; your teeth knock together and you shiver once, violently, in the cold air that seeps in through the car door.
“Buck,” The Captain says, and his voice is tight. You flinch, waiting for the blow even though you knew deep, deep down that the Captain would never hit you. The Captain recoils from your flinch, and his face is drawn together tightly.
You look back down at the cup in your hand; you cause pain and misery wherever you go, and the Captain, you think, does not deserve pain and misery.
You draw back from the Captain as far away as you can in the light of your revelation. His lips twist, and he goes back to driving without another word.
If you didn’t know better, you would think that he was about to cry.
The Falcon watches both of you, his face steeped with sympathy and tinged with sleepiness.
You do not quite understand, but that is alright. You have spent nearly a century without understanding, you reason, and what is a day more to go without?
You look out of the window, and the world blurs by, like the seventy years that you will never get back but remember in a sleepy haze of crippling terror and blood and screams.
v. No proof, one touch. You felt enough.
You wake up, with lips still shaped into his name and open on a silent scream.
He looks at you from the driver’s seat, concern in his big blue eyes that are full of so much light that you marvel at it. You nod tightly and lean back against the stiff car seat and try not to be reminded of the hard leather of the chair where you lost everything.
He reaches out a hand and settles it on your knee, his eyes still on the dark road, and squeezes gently. You are surprised to find that you don’t want to recoil. He radiates comfort and security and you want to bask in it like a cat in the sun but you are not worthy.
“You know I won’t let them do anything to you ever again, Buck.” He says, his voice hollow and ragged. “I promise.”
You look out the window again; the sun is just beginning to rise on the edge of the far horizon. You think that the Captain is like the sun, warm and real but not tangible. You think you will spend your entire life running after the Sun even though you know you can never reach it, just for the vague, faraway promise of a few seconds of warmth.
vi. You keep his shirt, he keeps his word.
Living with the Captain feels like soaking a knife wound into a tub of acid. His radiance is greater than the sun, and you ache to feel his warmth and reassurance, but you know you deserve nothing. You are not human, just a tragic tapestry of skin stretched over bones that can walk and breathe but not talk or love or cry or laugh. You try to learn how to be human again, but you do not think you know how. The ability, like your mother and your sisters and the cramped apartment in Brooklyn and James Buchanan Barnes and his charming, crooked smile, had been burned out of you just shy of 1971 in a cold, dark cell that smells like desperation and pain and blood.
On bad days, you cannot even try to be grateful that you are alive. The knife is under the pillow, the pistol is in your bedside drawer, the rifle is under the floorboard, and you can just imagine how much better it would feel to have your life slip through your scarred fingertips. You unload your pistol and line up the bullet shells neatly on the table and count them under your breath and remember the pain of being shot and stabbed and shocked and decide that it feels better than this hollow hole in your chest.
The look on the Captain’s face when he will find out stops you from pulling the trigger. You may not know who you are or deserve anything, but the Captain is good and he deserves everything and you will not disappoint him.
You wait for the men in black to come and take you away.
They never do. Natalia Romanova, red hair and eyes full of pain and lies and scarred Soviet-made body, tells you that the Captain keeps them away.
“I understand,” She curls her fingers and uncurls them. Her red hair is straight and sleek today, but it was curly and short last week. She never looks the same way every time you see her, always changing, blending, hiding. You can recognize the scars the Red Room leaves behind better than you can recognize your name, can see it in the quiet footsteps and knives in her boots and calluses on her battle-stained fingertips. “But you know Steve always keeps his word.”
You look at her and see cracks and webs and a silent lethality and an arrow necklace.
“Da,” You reply, and watch her reaction to your use of Russian. She barely flinches, her cold pained eyes stay the same, and you think that maybe she is healed after all.
You are not sure that you can be healed the way Natalia Romanova is, but you know the Captain will try.
He always keeps his words, and you do not know if that is good or bad.
Bucky Barnes thought it was both.
vii. And for once you let go of your fears and your ghosts.
The Captain sits with you during the bad days, sometimes, and he tells you stories of Bucky Barnes before and during the war.
You can recall vague recollections of his stories, a fleeting feeling or two, a brief flash of a scenery, the thrill of picking up his shield before you fell down down down into the abyss. You do not tell him that you remember the fall the most vividly out of everything; you think it will break his heart.
Bucky Barnes was a good man, and the fact made you the slightest bit ashamed and the slightest bit hopeful; if Bucky Barnes was good, perhaps you can be redeemed after all. If you are redeemed, perhaps you will no longer have to chase the sun for the memory of warmth.
But you also remember the blood and the screams that splatter your illustrious career with Hydra, all the lives and hopes and dreams that you’d cut short, the cold bullets you put into countless heads. You look out the window of the Captain’s apartment in New York City, and you see a church. You do not know if there is a God, but if there is, you know he will never forgive you for your sins.
Steve Rogers would. A traitorous voice inside you says. You think it is the ghost of Bucky Barnes. Steve will always forgive you.
And perhaps you deserve at least some forgiveness after all, because you were once Bucky Barnes, and you were once a good man.
viii. One night, he wakes, strange look on his face.
The medical wing in Avengers Tower makes you think of the vault.
Steve Rogers lies unmoving on the hospital bed, and new terror mixes with the old. You recall, vaguely, limp blonde hair and a wracking cough and blood splatters and crippling fear and kneeling down in the pews of a church. You recall being willing to give your life for his.
There is a gun in your lap, glossy and shiny and black, and Natalia Romanova at your back. She puts her hand on your hunched shoulders, feather-light and reassurance and sympathy, and you feel like choking on the cold air in your lungs.
“He’ll be fine,” She says and leaves the room, steps nearly distinguishable. You recognize the fear in her light steps and slim curled fingers. A man waits for her outside, Clint Barton, codename Hawkeye. She slips into his embrace and rests her head on his chest.
Your eyes burn, you look away.
A bruise blossoms on Steve Rogers’ cheekbones, tepid black and creeping over his jaw. You study your knuckles, one flesh, one cold titanium, and feel relief that it does not match the bruise on his face. Yet you know that once, he was in a hospital in Washington D.C., with steel bullets from your gun in his body and cracks in his cheekbone from your unforgiving metal fist. You swallow and feel crushed glass and bitterness and salt in the back of your throat.
The day melts into the night, your grip on the gun does not ease.
Someone is at the door. Tony Stark, codename Iron Man. Threat level is high, but unlikely to harm Steve Rogers.
“Hey, Terminator.” He says. “Mind letting me take a look at that arm? I can’t stand it that Hydra got it right before me. Y’know, big ego and all.”
You look at him. The metal plates in your arms recalibrate.
“Oh my, how I swoon like a maiden fair.” Tony Stark fans himself. “Look at that marvel, Terminator. Does it calibrate automatically?”
“I don’t know,” You reply, voice grating like shattered china.
“Alright, touchy.” Tony Stark mutters under his breath, but you hear it anyways. “How’s Capsicle there?”
“Stupid as always,” Your voice comes out as a drawl that your overworked brain supplies is a Brooklyn accent. You jolt.
Tony Stark hides his surprise very well. If he was not so flashy and inconspicuous and loud you might think that he would be a good spy.
You clench your metal fist and the plates calibrate again and you think about the echo of Bucky Barnes. When you look up, Tony Stark is gone.
Steve Rogers stirs, and you move, muscle memory, before you can stop yourself. Your metal hand closes over his tapered artist’s fingers, and he opens his eyes.
He looks at you, something strange on his face.
“I’m here,” You murmur, your eyes hot and the taste on your tongue bitter.
( Pauses, then says, you’re my best friend.)
“Bucky,” He smiles and winces. His fingers move under your cold hand. “What are you doing here?”
You want to answer but you find that you don’t know how.
The lights are on in Manhattan, like a million twinkling stars, and you are somewhere in between the dead and the living. The weary ghost of Bucky Barnes echoes inside you and your chest aches and your eyes burn and you can feel the blood running through your veins carrying mistakes and regrets and terror and hollowness and the horror of the past seventy years.
You swallow.
“I’m your… friend.” You say, your tongue curling around the unfamiliar word. The ghost in your mind echoes its approval as Steve Rogers smiles. It was not a pleasant smile, not as happy as your dim memory tells you it should be, but it is there, tinged with sadness but laced through with determination and a million other emotions you have not been conditioned to recognize.
“You are,” He whispers, his voice hoarse and his eyes tender, full of warmth and light. His hand shakes as it reaches up and rests on your hollow cheeks. You close your eyes, and the sun is in front of you now, and for the first time in centuries you are warm and the cold in your bones settle and the hollow hole in your chest knits itself back together one cell at a time.
( And you knew what it was: he is in love.)
ix. And you understand now why they lost their minds and fought the wars.
You haven’t seen Steve in weeks.
You stay with Natalia Romanova and Clint Barton and try to remember more of your life and learn to be whole again. You try to remember that Natalia likes being called Natasha, that the Red Room is gone and will never be back for you again.
The memories come back, in tidal waves and sputters and trickling streams. You sit on the floor of your dark room some days, piecing together the gaps in your memories from the contents of your file spreaded across the dark wood floor. You learn how to be more than a ghost without Steve by your side.
Natasha tells you that Steve is on a warpath in East Europe, and that Sam Wilson, codename Falcon, is with him. A two-man crusade against Hydra. You are not surprised to find that you missed him like you used to miss the sun in the cryo chamber, when you do remember that brilliance and warmth exists outside of the endless frost and cold and blue.
You learn that you trained Natasha as a little girl in the Red Room, and indeed you do remember glimpses of hair like flame and eyes filled with cold loneliness. Natasha is not a little girl anymore, and it has been more than a decade since she had defected. It gives you hope that one day, you will have healed like she did.
Clint likes to watch ‘shitty cop dramas’ on the television all the time, and you know that Natasha secretly finds it endearing despite her repeated protests. Uncannily, she has the same tells as you, one of the few things the Red Room has left you both that are not scars or pain or distrust or misery.
You think you understand now what it means to be alive and not just breathing. You learn to be amused and to talk and to smile, however tentatively the word may be used, and to not walk like ‘you’re off to slit the throats of children in that orphanage down 33rd street, or something’, as Clint Barton had put it.
Some days, Pepper Potts visits you and you sit in companionable silence with her. You do not like the pity in her eyes but she makes you ‘hot chocolate’ and you decide that it can be forgiven after all.
Steve has taught you the meaning of being alive and making decisions for yourself, but living with Natasha and Clint has taught you how to be a person made of flesh and blood who can exist outside the light of Steve Rogers.
One day, in the quiet of the twilight, Tony Stark kisses Pepper Potts and tells her he loves her, quiet and not meant for anyone else. You pretend that you have not heard anything and look at how the evening sun bounces off your metal arm.
That evening, you watch as Natasha kisses Clint, sweet and chaste, and something in your chest aches.
You ask her what it means to love somebody.
When you raise your eyes and look at her, something in her eyes hinted at pain and her lip curled down. Your fists clench and you square your jaw; you will not accept pity from a daughter of the Red Room.
She tells you this: love is waking up at midnight to dissipate the shadows of nightmares, is crippling terror and all your greatest nightmares coming true. One thing more you have to lose.
She tells you this: love is not pulling the trigger, is jumping in the path of a steel bullet, is laying down your mask at somebody’s feet and bowing your head for the fall of the guillotine, giving your life away to a cause unworthy.
She tells you love is for children, that it will do nothing good.
Under the light of a waning moon when the red digital numbers on the clock flicker midnight, she confesses to the sacred song and scent of cold vodka that she loves Clint Barton.
You look at her and recognize the privilege for what is is: a black widow baring her hour-glass tattooed belly and neck, a show of trust, an expectation to return it, a promise to flood your veins with venom if you are careless enough to fall through the cracks of her web.
You wince as you have an epiphany that strikes you faster than a steel rod that Hydra drove into you during your conditioning to encourage compliance when the Red Room methods failed to work. You recall blue eyes, bluer than the all the oceans and rivers of the world, pure and good and earnest, and fair sunshine hair that gleams like gold and the thin artist’s fingers that pulled you back from the dark. You think of how you knelt at his feet and bowed your head without knowing if a benediction or a guillotine awaited, of emptying the barrel of your gun for fear of breaking his heart, of crippling terror and haunting night terrors and a chorus of you don’t deserve him you don’t deserve him you don’t deserve him.
And you know.
Even if you might never be whole again, every broken shard of you loves Steve Rogers. Even if Bucky Barnes will never be anything more than a world-weary ghost drifting in the churning sea of your damaged psyche, his love for Steve Rogers still remains in you, a gift and a curse all in itself.
Natalia Romanova looks at you, and you look down to the floor as the world spun on and on regardless of what you had realized. The soft vibration of a phone draw both of your attentions and Natasha pales.
Your disrupted stream of thought suddenly thinks of how she reminds you of a vague figure that exists only in your memories and in a stone grave down in Brooklyn. You are not too sure, but you think her name was Rebecca Barnes.
“Steve’s in intensive care,” She whispers in the dark. “He’s being flown in right now for a lot of cracked ribs and severe blood loss.”
Something inside you shatters, and you think that you cannot lose him. You have learned how to be a person without him, but you do not know if you can when he is gone from this world and not just a continent away. . Your hands shake, and your hair falls in your face when you shudder.
You have earned back the ability to learn things in the past six months since you stepped into a car somewhere in East Europe with a shattered mind and a pile of guns, but you do not think you have the ability or the will to learn how to live if Steve Rogers is dead.
x. You can hear it in the silence.
The Medical Wing in Avengers Tower makes you think of the vault.
Steve Rogers lies unmoving on the hospital bed, and new terror mixes with the old. You recall, vaguely, limp blonde hair and a wracking cough and blood splatters and crippling fear and kneeling down in the pews of a church. You recall being willing to give your life for his.
The difference is: Bucky Barnes was a fool who never realized what he had.
And now you do.
There is a gun in your lap, glossy and shiny and black, and Natalia Romanova at your back. She puts her hand on your hunched shoulders, feather-light and reassurance and sympathy, and you choke on the cold air that dries out your tired lungs.
The weight of the decades press down upon you and you learn to forgive your own sins by the side of the narrow hospital bed, amidst beepings of the heart monitor and the trickle of the saline drip.
When you turn your face and see Natasha stepping into Clint’s open arms, your eyes no longer burn.
A bruise blossoms on Steve Rogers’ cheekbones, tepid black and creeping over his jaw. You study your knuckles, one flesh, one cold titanium, and feel relief that it does not match the bruise on his face. Yet you know that once, he was in a hospital in Washington D.C., with steel bullets from your gun in his body and cracks in his cheekbone from your unforgiving metal fist. You swallow and feel crushed glass and bitterness and salt in the back of your throat.
You also know that these hands, the hands of the sniper, the war hero, the prisoner of war, the killer, will never hurt him again.
Tony Stark is at the door. You think Clint will call this ‘deja vu’.
“How’re you holding up?” He jerks his chin flippantly. “Not looking too hot over there, BB-8.”
The reference registers.
“I don’t roll when I walk,” You answer, and your voice might be a little bit scratchy but you think you did a good job for a half-existing ghost.
“I’ll admit that was not one of my more creative moments,” Tony concurred. “I’m running on negative-12 hours of sleep and caffeine sludge at the moment.”
The metal plates in your arms recalibrate.
Tony Stark’s eyes gleam.
“Mind letting me take a look at that arm someday soon?”
“Maybe,” You say, looking at the silent form of Steve for reassurance.
Stark’s gaze follows you to rest on Steve, and almost thoughtfully, he commented:
“He’s going to be fine, you know. If he can be a giant popsicle for 70 years then he sure as hell can take a little beating.”
“Huh, popsicle.” He tapped his chin. “You two are both sad, grumpy popsicle grandpas.”
You do not reply.
“Oh, I know. I’ll start calling you Elsa. But you don’t even know what that is supposed to mean because you’re a sad grumpy highly traumatized grandpa.”
You look at him in slight disbelief, and then you start to laugh.
For a second, you think that you are being poisoned.
And you remember Clint saying ‘’s called laughing, ain’t no need to bust out the poison tester kit, James’.
Tony Stark hid his surprise at your sudden grating laugh very well, like he was witness to hoarse assassin laughter every day. You think privately that he would have made a good spy.
When you stop laughing, you find that he is gone.
When you look down, you see that Steve has opened his eyes. Your metal hand reaches for his across the bed.
He blinks at you, something strange on his face.
“I’m here,” You murmur, and your lips curve up into a tentative echo of Sergeant Barnes’ smile from 1943.
( You can see it with the lights out.)
“Bucky,” He smiles, and the dark room lights up like he is the sun. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”
You want to answer and you know exactly what you will say.
The lights are on in Manhattan, like a million twinkling stars, and you are somewhere in between the dead and the living. The weary ghost of Bucky Barnes echoes inside you and your chest aches and your eyes burn and you can feel the blood running through your veins carrying mistakes and regrets and terror and hollowness and the horror of the past seventy years.
You swallow.
“I love you,” You squeeze his hand, and Natasha’s words echo in your mind; you bow your head and wait for the fall of the guillotine or the fragile touch of a saint’s benediction. “I’m sorry.”
Steve Rogers smiles, and it is just as you remember, honest and beautiful and blinding in a way that photographs and museum exhibits have never been able to capture. His lips are brutally split and his cheekbone is fractured, but you think that he is beautiful as ever, warm as the sun and soothing as the ocean.
His hand shakes as it comes up to rest against your cheekbones. He raises his head and your lips touch. You close your eyes and let yourself be pulled above the icy surface and for the first time in centuries, you take a deep breath and the cold retreats from the bloody battleground that is your scarred body and the ice thaws out of your weary bones. There were no stars or fireworks or grandeur, but you felt like you have just returned home.
The hollow in your chest begins to scab over; you know you are on your way to becoming healed.
( You are in love, true love.)