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The lynx is keen of sight
The bat is on the wing
I say we step outside
And sing to the stars
The Choir - After All
James snapped into wakefulness in darkness, swallowing against the familiar ache, feeling the chill of sweat-sodden clothes. He’d strained his vocal cords screaming.The voice in the ceiling – JARVIS - speaks as soon as his eyes open, the routine already established only several days into the nightmares returning. “Sir. There is a glass of water and some Advil on the bedside table. It will help with your sore throat.”
“Thanks,” James said, and winced at the rasp in his voice. He reached for the pills, downed them with a gulp of water.
There were bright lights floating across his vision. He knew they were nothing but fragments, miniscule particles that cast shadows on his retina, but he remembered watching these ethereal transparent floating creatures when he woke from the ice, before the world sharpened into lethal precision. They were shadows of his bodily being, nothing more, yet in the new beginning of himself, not yet inured to violent reds, to clinical white and bleak grey, he saw them as specks of celestial dust, a soft-lit galaxy.
The hyena was a darker shadow than the darkness of the room, lumbering upright on the bed, stretching to his full size. In the dreams, the hyena was always a beaten cringing creature, crouching, making himself small and harmless. “Why couldn’t you be strong then?” James murmured. “Why couldn’t you bite the hand that fed you?”The hand that mutilated you, that punished you, that made you into the instrument of death, the hand that struck you, that caressed you.
Lobo came closer to snuffle at him, then gave his soft whoop call, low, questioning. Alright?
“Alright,” James said. He felt the rightness of his daemon’s call deep in his bones, knew it with the same instant recognition that had sparked something in his broken mind when Steve had first spoken his name. Who the hell is Bucky? he’d retorted, but he’d known already that everything had changed forever.
The guards are standing outside the open cell door – he can see their looming shadows. The soldier waits to be made new. He is mute, wearing the blood of tonight’s kills. He has just returned from the mission, blank-eyed, obedient but useless. A marionette. Something has snapped in him. Happens sometimes. He needs to be reset, fine-tuned. The man with the golden hair reassures him that they will make him whole again. When the soldier is made new, his master’s daemon wolf howls along with his screams.
James slipped out of the bed, heading for the kitchen, because he knew by now that the violent intrusions of memory would not be pushed down by anything but taking his mind away from what had been, and having Steve lie to him, tell him everything would work out, that all this needed was time. How many decades would he need to undo the ravages of decades? How many decades did he have now he was a mere man?
James had almost reached the kitchen when Lobo stopped in his tracks, ears pricking up alertly. Wait. Stop. James glanced at him, and then stopped, listening.
“How’s he doing?” Natasha. “Other than the nightmares?” James positioned himself so he could see her, standing with arms folded, leaning back against the kitchen cabinets. The lynx was sitting alert at her feet, tufts shifting with each ear swivel.
Steve let out a soft sigh and shrugged, raking fingers through unkempt hair. Arden pecked at his fingers from her perch on his shoulder. “I don’t know, Nat. I just don’t know.”
“You spend all your time with him,” Natasha said, probing, wanting answers. “What’s he said?”
“He doesn’t talk much,” Steve muttered. Arden gave a cry and flew off his shoulder, seemingly disgruntled by his lack of attention to her.
Natasha frowned. She was about to say something when her lynx daemon growled and she looked out into the corridor. Her brows rose. “You can stop lurking anytime now.”
Steve looked round. “James? Come on in.” He tried to smile at James, to cover over the awkwardness, but the strain was there around his eyes. He looked tired. James didn’t like him looking tired.
“Hi,” James offered, tentative. He was rewarded when those weary blue eyes brightened, just a little bit, and Arden fluttered her wings, gave her piping cry.
“Hey,” Steve said, smiling, falsely cheery.
James gave Natasha a wide berth as he entered the kitchen, skirting the lounging lynx that followed his movements with sharp keen eyes. Natasha petted her daemon, ran her fingers down the face ruff that made the lynx look like it was growing side whiskers, calming her. “Shh, Cleo.” Cleo settled, but the hyena still scuttled past her with lowered head, unthreatening and afraid, broadcasting James’ insecurity. James kept his head down as he fixed himself the tea that Steve always made him after the nightmares, letting his long untied hair hide him from her gaze. When he looked back up, he found Natasha studying him. “I’m trying to be tactful here, but you really could use a shower, James. And a shave.”
James knew that his hair was lank, that his beard was scruffy, that he stank - he woke up everyday to find his clothes plastered to his body with cold sweat. He curled his flesh hand around the mug of hot tea.
“Was I screaming again?” he asked, slowly, swallowing around the ache of strained vocal cords. “Did I wake you?” He felt foolish even as he asked: why else would they be having this impromptu pre-dawn meeting? Why else would his throat feel like he’d eaten glass?
Steve’s face could not lie. James found his answer there, in the anxious crinkle between the brows, the corners of the tight mouth. He wanted to smooth the tense lines away.
“I don’t care if you wake me. I need you to wake me,” Steve said, with so much intensity it hurt. “I need to there for you. You’ve suffered alone long enough.”
James stared at him. He still had difficulty absorbing the depth of compassion that his once-target could muster for a broken killing machine. Steve did not know all there was to know. He had not seen what the soldier had done.
“Could you tell us what the nightmares are about?” Natasha asked. James flicked a dark look at her and saw her register its threat and gaze back, unperturbed. She wanted to dig out his secrets, to turn Steve against him.
“No,” James said. Not that he couldn’t, but that he wouldn’t. He did not have to spell it out. She inclined her head. “Fair enough,” she murmured, backing down - at least for now. He knew better than to believe this was over. The lynx was gazing at him with calculating cold eyes. The Black Widow was planning something.
James drank the last dregs of his tea, set the mug in the sink, washed it, and then left to take a shower. He heard their murmurs start again as he turned the water on. Leaving his sweat soaked clothes on the floor, he stepped beneath the cold fall.
Jarvis spoke again. “Sir, the water is not adequately…”
“I know,” James said.
“As you wish, sir.”
James closed his eyes, letting the thunder of the water numb his body and calm his mind. The cold water falling on his body like ice needles faded away.
The soldier is kneeling. There is a crackling open fire, and its roaring heat licks at his bare skin. His daemon is locked up in his dank small cage far away, and the soldier’s chest feels tight, his breath comes heavy, and the distance between him and his daemon would make him keen if he were not muzzled.
He cannot remember his daemon’s name.
The man in the chair above him reaches out to stroke the soldier’s head gently. The man’s wolf daemon has light amber eyes, and those eyes are on the soldier, enigmatic and watchful. “My two wolves,” the voice says, fondly. “One on either side.” The soldier is glad his master is in his content mood. The hand reaches out again to the soldier, descends to stroke over his hair, soothing, tucking long strands back behind his ear.
James snapped back into now when he heard the knocking at the door. How long had Steve been knocking? He shook his head and turned off the icy water.
He toweled himself dry and dragged on sweatpants and a t-shirt.
When he opened the bathroom door, Natasha - not Steve - walked into the bathroom, with her lynx close behind. She stared at him for a second, and then muttered a harsh sounding word. Блядь. He knew that word. Had repeated it like a mantra, washing away the drying blood of his kills from unevenly steady hands. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“You miss the cryo-chamber, soldier?” Natasha whispered. She was angry. She picked up his hoodie from where it hung behind the door. “Put it on.”
James had only just started shaking now; the bite of cold just registering. She tried to help him but he flinched, nerves strung tight, knowing anger meant pain. She stopped and backed away with her hands lifted. “I won’t touch you, just put it on.”
He regarded her warily as he shrugged into the warmth of the hoodie, only momentarily distracted by the shift as he slipped his metal arm into it, the cloth making him soft and warm and human and whole. I knew her, I loved her, I shot her, the soldier stuttered in a mechanical loop, focusing on her green wide worried eyes.
“Shh, it’s okay,” she said, moving slowly now. He stared at her but did not move when she raised her hands to his face, placing her palms in a cradling hold. He was tense and still under her touch. “Your lips are blue,” she said, quietly, close enough that he could feel her breath warm him there. He did not dare move.
She reached up, touched her soft lips to his in a closed mouth kiss. It lasted barely more than a second before she pulled away, a strange, almost self-mocking smile twisting her lips. Over her shoulder James saw the lynx trying to come closer to the hyena, then pulling away when the hyena snarled.
He masked his confusion with what he hoped was an impassive expression. What was she doing? Natalia, this will not work.
She looked up at him and tried to smile, her thumbs stroking down over his unkempt beard. “You didn’t have this when you were the soldier. Or when you were Bucky.”
“I’m not them,” James said. “Not Bucky. Not the soldier. Not anymore.” The flatness of the words did not disguise their hollowness - his water-weak denials might as well have been confessions. He knew she could hear the pathetic plea buried beneath the lies. Asking her to believe you could make a new person out of broken pieces. Who could believe that? He was not a person anymore than he had been a person when he believed he was weapon-not-human.
Natasha’s hands dropped away. She regarded him with surprising patience. “Do you want to keep this?” Again, she stroked over the rough hair. “Does it help you to be not him? Not them?”
James curled the fingers of his metal hand, felt its steadiness as his flesh hand trembled. He glanced at himself in the mirror, remembering a pudding-soft gloating voice calling him Sergeant Barnes. The man in the mirror looked like no soldier he had ever seen. He looked like the alcohol-ruined, bleary-eyed ex-soldiers who came home from the horrors of unending war to sleep fitfully on cold streets, dreaming of the dead, railing at embarrassed passersby who averted their eyes. Stumbling over what was behind them, over the past they could not change.
“No,” James said. “It doesn’t help.”
Natasha nodded, still patient with him. “Want to get rid of it? I’d like to help.”
James did not need help, but the thought of saying no terrified him. Perhaps they did not trust him with a razor? He inclined his head in silent acceptance, and she smiled briefly, then turned to the cabinet under the sink and brought out shaving supplies.
Of course Steve would use a straight razor. And of course they would not - should not - trust the man who was the soldier with that sharpness. The man who was still the soldier, for the soldier edged into James’ mind as he gazed over Natasha’s shoulder at the blade, checking escape routes, calculating angles of attack. She stroked the straight razor across the strop with rhythmic strokes. James couldn’t take his eyes off the stropping, watching her confidently sharpening the blade that would stroke down his throat.
“Sit down,” she said and the order immediately relaxed his frantic thoughts. All he had to do was obey. When he sat down, she studied him with a small notch of a frown between her brows, and then glanced at the hyena, which had settled down on the tiles, for once not cringing and cowering. “You’re not afraid.”
He shook his head mutely, because though it hadn’t been a question she seemed to be waiting for his reply. What was the worst that could happen? For the blade to slice across his throat? Then there would be nothing, and nothing would be welcome.
“That’s good,” she murmured, and the lynx gave a raspy bark of approval, its harsh sound incongruous, more like a demon dog than a cat.
Natasha touched his face, signaling her movement in advance, checking the way his beard grew, stroking her thumb gently against the grain, then picked the brush out of the scuttle and began lathering his face. One firm hand moved his head around, tilting his jaw as she needed it to be. Her guiding hand meant James did not have to focus on her murmured commands, just go with the light pressure. He relaxed further, some of the tension leaving his shoulders.
She stopped before angling the blade, looking at James, checking for something. Whatever she saw satisfied her and she started expert downward strokes, revealing the skin beneath three weeks’ growth. “Look up for me,” she murmured, then gave him the added push of her hand at his jaw, indicating how far he should tilt his head back. “Good, that’s good.” The blade moved smoothly.
She was just about done when she nicked him. He felt the sting of pain, just before she swiped her thumb across his jaw and applied pressure, looking at him again, too carefully. She’d nicked him on purpose, James realized. She’d wanted to see if blood, if sudden hurt, even slight, would make him what he had been.
He shrugged away from her touch and washed away the bright beading blood, seeking the young man in the museum in the mirror, finding only a smooth-faced shadow of himself, haunted and weary, with more lines scored into his skin.
Bucky, he thought, testing it out.
“What would it take?” she asked softly, behind him. “To bring him out?”
James shook his head, the words trapped within him: Don’t. Please don’t.
“Ты нужен мне,” she whispered. I need you.
James felt a sickening lurch within himself as the soldier swept him aside, responding with alacrity to her whispered words. Natasha looked at him with dark eyes – resentment, desire, anger – and it was all too much to untangle.
She looked younger to the soldier, her face softer, rounder, wide hero-worshipping eyes, hungry for affection and praise. Natalia. She would grow into the woman she would need to be to survive, because she would do anything to survive, and survival would hone her into what she was now.
He shook his head, seeing her twice, as she had been and as she was now. The soldier wanted her, his desire sharp and urgent. He turned and drew her close, hungry, searching for the memory of their passion. She tensed momentarily, and then kissed him back, fiercely, capturing his mouth, hard and challenging and still angry.
Over her shoulder he saw the hyena lay down before the keen-eyed lynx to let her to rub her ruffed cheek against him, and the image troubled him just as he realized there was someone in the doorway, just as Natalia (Natasha) pulled away from him. For a disorienting moment, he was Bucky, and he was the soldier, and he was here, now.
“I’m sorry,” Steve said from the doorway, his voice sounding strange and wrong. “I’ll be in…I’ll just…” He trailed off, backing away, closing the door gently behind him.
James stared at the woman he had been kissing, snapped out of his desperate desire.
Natasha wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, eyes momentarily closing in regret. James felt the sickening swooping of emotion from the insistent desire of the soldier to the green boy’s confused guilt. He tried to gather himself, sought the words to ask. “Why would you…? He tried to kill you.”
“You tried to kill me,” Natasha retorted, eyes flashing, stressing the you. “Stop pretending he is not the same as you. You don’t get rid of him – of them – that easily. I should know.”
Just like that she ripped apart the lies he had tried to believe, because they were the lies Steve wanted him to believe. “I’m trying,” James muttered, after a moment of tense silence, aware of the hyena slinking back, away, wary, hackles raised. “I’m doing the best I can.” Not good enough. Never good enough.
She pressed her lips together. “You spoke Russian in your sleep. You called Steve your target. Do you understand?” She was frightened beneath the bristling anger. If this indomitable woman could feel fear, what was James to feel, when he seemed to have lived in terror every day of his new-old existence?
“You were fighting him,” Natasha said, slower now, on a sharp exhale. “You hurt him. He was holding you down, but you would not stop. He had to ask Jarvis to send for help because he can’t defend himself when he can’t – won’t - hurt you.”
James felt cold. He’d hurt Steve? Why had he not said? How badly had he hurt him?
Natasha saw that he was beginning to understand. “The soldier is part of what you are now. What they made you. You’re like me. We’re killers.”
James saw the tension radiating from her, conveying her readiness to fight, her lynx standing by her side, tail twitching, and he saw what she meant to say, what had motivated her to do this. “Steve. He’s not like that,” he said, understanding. “You’re trying to protect him. That’s why you wanted him to see us. To see this.”
Natasha did not have to say anything for him to know he was right. “You’re not, and never will be, the man he knew,” she said, softly. “Steve has to accept that you’re not Bucky anymore.”
James had known this but to hear the force of her uncompromising words somehow hurt more than he expected. She stepped closer to him, and her eyes softened, as though she could see that she had hurt him, more perhaps than she had intended. “You are what they made you, Barnes. Like me. But we are more than that too. We’ve lived after them. You’ve lived before them. You’re more than what you were.”
James let her give him this comfort after her excoriating words, but when she stopped he knew he needed more. He wanted to know that she would be there, to make sure his brokenness didn’t betray him again. “Don’t let me,” he whispered. “If you need to…”
Natasha didn’t need him to spell his request out. She inclined her chin slightly. “I’ll break your neck before I let you seriously hurt him,” she said immediately, levelly, as solemnly as though she was taking an oath.
James smiled, a twisted smile, but a smile nonetheless. Somehow, she understood. He wished she could make them all understand. He hesitated. “Steve…”
“I’ll explain,” she promised. “I’ll let him know how it is.”
Steve was waiting for them outside, outwardly calm, but James did not have to look at Arden’s agitation to know there was nothing calm about him. The eagle let out an anxious fluting cry when she saw them, wings spreading, one talon raised, ready to claw. James recognized this pose, calculated to make her look big and invincible. She did not need that threat now, with the skinny blonde boy long gone, except for the glimpses every now and then, caught in the uncertain crinkle of his brow, the wariness of watchful blue eyes. It hurt James to see him hurting, and he did not want to think about how he wanted to soothe that hurt, how he wanted to press his lips against the downturned mouth and make it tilt upwards.
Natasha got to the point without preamble: “It’s not what you think.” Steve gave her an incredulous look, and she tried a disarming smile. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”
Steve frowned. “Nat, if you…”
Natasha squared her shoulders, shook her head. “You know we have history. I spoke to him in Russian. I wanted him to come back so you could both see the danger that is still there. I need you to believe me when I tell you he’s still dangerous.”
Steve stilled. “You deliberately triggered him. Is that what you’re telling me?” His voice was quiet. Not a good kind of quiet.
“Yes,” Natasha said, evenly, but James could see her tense.
Steve’s gaze turned forbidding. “Why?”
Natasha folded her arms, slightly defensive. “I told you what he said when he was sleeping. He hurt you. The soldier still believes you are his mission.”
Steve’s jaw clenched. James wanted to stop this confrontation, wanted one of them to take it out on him, so he did not have to watch this ugliness build into more. He placed himself between them, tension thrumming through him. “Please…listen,” James said. He was not used to making requests.
Steve frowned, wanting to make him understand, when it was he who didn’t understand. “I don’t need to be protected from you. I trust you.”
“You can’t trust me,” James snapped. “I don’t trust me.” His metal hand tightened, its evil gleam making him weapon-not-human. “I don’t trust this.” I have ripped out the innards of men with this hand. How can you bear its touch?
Steve stared at him, looking troubled, before he nodded. “Alright, Buck. James. Anything you need.” It hurt to hear defeat in his voice. “Just…tell me what you need me to do to help.”
“Promise not to take risks,” Natasha interjected. “Get him to talk to someone. Know what to do when the soldier returns.”
Steve frowned, getting that ready to argue look, before James interrupted, daring fuelled by frustration. “I need this Steve. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to hurt you, and you won’t even defend yourself, you dumbass punk.”
James only realized what he has said, the insult that came from that green boy he had been, when he saw Steve’s face change, saw that he was looking at him as though he’d been given him something unbelievably precious.
James was only vaguely aware that Natasha had slipped quietly out of the room, the lynx padding softly behind her. His attention was all on the man before him, every part of his being focused on the hand that was rising towards his face. He remembered caresses before pain, so he tensed even though he sees that the fingers were open, not threatening. He had to focus hard not to flinch away when the hand descended lightly, ghosting through air before the fingertips stroked feather light over his cheek, over the smoothness there.
"You look..."
"Not like I used to," James said, because it was the truth. The man he was now could never be that innocent, never wear that quick confident smile.
"No, not like you used to," Steve conceded. He removed his hand from where it had stroked down to the side of James’ neck. James just managed to stop himself from reaching for that hand, from looking disappointed. Now was not the time.
He remembered, back when they were both young and stupid, believing they would one day be fearless grown men, before they realized that fear would be a lifelong shadow and that no one ever grows up, not really. They’d stood together in that small dark room, grey dawn outside the small thick-glassed window, looking at their faces in the cracked mirror with rust eating away at its frame. He remembered laughing with Steve about his barely there fuzz, remembered how Steve would run his artist’s hands curiously over Bucky’s stubble and call him sandpaper face, while Bucky kept very still to disguise how much he thrilled at the touch. Steve hadn’t understood. He hadn’t understood himself. He still didn’t.
“Were you angry?” James asked. He knew the answer. He meant why were you angry, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask that. “About what happened between me and Natasha?”
Steve didn’t try to lie. “I had no right to be,” he said.
James bit back the why and the how. “Natasha had to show you that I’m still the soldier,” he said instead. “I’m still what they made me, we can’t pretend that away.”
Steve looked momentarily angry. “You were the soldier, through no fault of your own. You had no choice.”
“How bad?” James asked. “How bad did he…did I hurt you?” Steve made a dismissive gesture. “Show me,” James insisted, his own vehemence surprising him.
Steve released a slow breath, and then pulled up his t-shirt. James stood there, examining his handiwork.
“I heal,” Steve said, shrugging. “Faster than you could imagine. It will be gone in a couple of hours.”
“You should restrain me,” James said, roughly. “When I sleep.” He did not want to be restrained. He didn’t ever want to feel anything holding him down ever again. But to keep from hurting Steve…
“That’s not going to happen,” Steve said, simple as that.
James frowned. He knew that if he seriously hurt anyone else, anyone but the man before him, this discussion might be different. But Steve was wearing a familiar implacable look (he'd always been so stubborn), and James knew that the discussion might as well end here.
“You're getting better,” Steve said, trying to be convincing, putting on what Bucky recognised as his persuasive voice. “We’ll find you someone to help you, get you meds to help you sleep, have plans in place in case. But nothing more. We’re not there, not at this point.”
James was silent for moment, and then nodded, subdued. At least Steve understood that they might need to be “there” at some point. He turned, fumbling for the door to the balcony, and slipping outside.
Steve understood that he needed to get away. He was allowed enough time to pull himself together but not enough to throw himself over to the street below, before Steve joined him. He stood next to James, looking out onto the still dark horizon, the shadows of buildings, the faint stars still shining through the pollution of humanity, tacking up the navy dark. That wind that came when it was darkest sent its chill across their skin. After a moment, Steve put his hand on James’ shoulder, just where the metal met flesh, and James had to fight the contradictory desire to shrug off and turn into the touch. He wanted this reassuring squeeze of the shoulder to turn back into a caress, to move a little upward to touch the side of his neck, skin on skin. He wanted Steve to draw him against his body, to touch him as Natasha had touched him, and that desire confused him. Was he remembering, or was all of this new?
“It’s going to be okay. I promise,” Steve said, as though he controlled the outcome, as though he could vanquish destiny, and James wanted to scoff, but the touch on his shoulder warmed him, even though he understood that it was meant to be about soothing, offering comfort, nothing more.
Like a counterpoint to the ice that seemed to have sunk deep into his bones, James’ chest filled with the radiating warmth of Steve’s promise. How could such meaningless words mean so much? He did not deserve the comfort he was offered, not now, not with Steve wearing the bruises he had made. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, punk,” James murmured, just to see the wondering glow return to his blue eyes, and that small upward tilt touch his lips. Steve wore his look of resolute nobility too easily, as though he had not had occasion to change expression much these past few years.
“But I intend to keep them, James,” Steve replied, looking at him head on, unfairly serious. “I intend to keep every promise I make to you from now on.”
James’ breath caught. He felt strangely warm. Because he had nothing to say to that, he said nothing. Steve had this little secret smile on his face, and he could tell – the part of him that was Bucky could tell – that the idiot was pleased to have embarrassed him.
The moon was visible through the cloud cover, lighting up the dark masses with faint purple and blues like bruises.
"A gibbous moon," Steve said.
"A what?"
"Gibbous. It's what you call the moon when it is between crescent and full." James was probably staring, because Steve added, entirely straight-faced, "the word comes from the Latin for hunchback," and James could not help himself, he started laughing, the chuckles starting out rusty, stifled, turning to helpless laughter. Steve laughed with him, recognising the humour of his lesson in etymology, remembering when these "did you know" moments were an every day part of their lives, when a keenly intelligent physically weak boy sought ways of impressing his rambunctious friend.
When the laughter died down, neither of them mentioned the fact that Hunchback had been one of the taunts they used for Bucky. He had been hurt by the taunts, had looked away from his daemon's strange gait, his longer front legs and the bristly hair that was the same as a wild boar's ruff. "And hyena, the word, it comes from the feminine form of swine," Steve's young voice floated back through the decades. "Are you calling my daemon a pig or a sow?" Bucky had thrown back and Steve had stammered in flustered protestation until he released Bucky was teasing.
James - Bucky - smiled. And at that moment he realised he wanted Steve to make his promise again, and this time, to call him by the other name. The realization scared him, threw him off the soft comforting warmth that had settled around him. He could not allow himself to forget Natasha’s warning about what he was capable of doing.
“You know I’ll never be fixed, don’t you?” James said, too abruptly, ruthlessly pushing past the moment. “I can’t be him again. I can’t pretend to be him. I can’t be funny like him or laugh like him, or tell the stories he told or fight like him or…be your friend like he was. I’m only like him on the outside. I'm getting his memories as though another person lived them.”
Steve looked at him steadily, let him rush through this combative litany of what he could not be and could not do. “I don’t want you to pretend to be anything you’re not,” he said, into the lengthening silence after the outburst. “I’m not who I used to be either. But I would like to get to know you. And I’d like you to get to know me.”
“What if I don’t know who I am now?” James said, after a beat, because that was too easy.
Steve smiled at that. “Most people don’t really know who they are, Buck.” He winced slightly. “Sorry. James.”
James hated the apology. He wanted the naturalness of that word back, wanted Steve to be able to speak it without backtracking. “Would you call me Bucky? All the time, I mean, not just when you forget?” he asked, slowly. Because Natalia – Natasha – was right, he was the soldier, but he was more than the soldier. And she had allowed herself another name. He should be allowed to take back what Steve had called him. That much, at least, he could take back.
Steve didn’t move for a minute, then he cleared his throat, and his voice sounded deliberately casual when he spoke, desperately trying to be nonchalant. “Sure, Bucky. And if you change your mind…”
“I’ll tell you,” James said. He thought about it, imagined himself in control of his his body, his name, his being. He nodded. “I can do that.” And he could. Because Natasha was right. He was still the soldier, he was everything he had ever been. Bucky, the soldier, James. And he could begin to learn to live with this story.