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James Buchanan Barnes is born March 10th, 1917, the first child of George and Winnifred Barnes, in New York City, USA. Like every other mother since the dawn of humanity, Winnie asks the question.
“Is he marked?” she rasps out. The nurse is wiping sweat out of the new mother’s eyes while the doctor examines the newborn. They’ve already had the joyous It’s a boy!, which is one weight lifted. A boy means another generation of Barneses, and when he’s older, a strong son to work hard and help the family thrive. But does he have a soulmark? Is there an other half out there, somewhere? Or is he going to live with the stigma of being a blank?
“He has a mark,” the doctor says, and Winnie closes her eyes in relief. But the doctor is still speaking. “Strange words, though.”
He recites them aloud. Winnie lets out a laugh that’s so tired as to be almost a sigh.
“One minute old, and already giving me a headache,” she says. “Let Georgy take him.”
The doctor presents the clean and swaddled newborn to George Barnes, who’s been waiting outside endlessly drawing on the same now-empty pipe and pacing. George asks the same questions, and the doctor gives the same answers. When he sees the ink-black writing sprawled across his son’s right shoulder, George smiles.
“Well,” he says, “at least we know his soulmate will have money.”
It’s 1917. There’s war raging around the world. Who but the rich could afford to be so careless with an automobile?
* * *
James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes meets Steven Grant Rogers in the summer of 1925. The neighbor boy is small, sickly, and absolutely furious at the world. Bucky finds two older kids beating the tar out of Steve and does his best to send them packing, but both Bucky and Stevie end up bruised and black-eyed by the end of the afternoon.
The first thing Steve says to him is “I don’t need your help!”
Bucky makes a face, surprised, and Steve’s eyes darken in anger. “I don’t care if that’s your words, neither,” the younger boy spits. “I’m a blank. So shove off!”
“Not my words, kid,” Bucky says from the lofty heights of eight and one quarter years old.
“Then stop makin’ stupid faces.”
“I’m makin’ stupid faces ‘cause you’re bein’ stupid.”
“Am not!”
“You’re a real chowderhead, aintcha. I helped you!”
“I didn’t need help!”
“Yes you did!”
One additional fistfight later, and the squabbling boys are separated by a passing neighbor and forced to apologize. Neither of them will remember that first meeting in the years to come—or that a friendship that changed the course of history began with both of them rolling in a dirty gutter.
Bucky would later find a nickel stuck in his shoe, though, so that was OK.
By the end of the week, the Rogers and Barnes boys are inseparable. In a time-honored ritual of childhood friendship—much like pinky-swearing and friendship bracelets—they show off their words.
Or Bucky does, anyway.
Steve has a lot of reasons to be mad. He’s small, everything hurts, his father is gone, and his mother is working herself to the bone. He burns with a sense of raw injustice that will later coalesce into an unshakable colossus of morality. Right now, having just turned seven, the fact that he’s a blank is just one more reason to scream at the world. It’s all so unfair.
Still, Bucky is his friend. And Steve reasons like this: if it’s bad to be unfair, then it must be good to be fair. It’s only fair if Steve reassures his friend, whose words are sort of … weird.
“Maybe she’s a flapper?” Steve suggests. It’s late August, and they’re lounging on the stoop of the building where they both live. A haze lingers in the air. They’ve both sweated through their thin shirts and undershirts, and their thoughts are wandering vaguely. If they were dogs, they’d be panting. Good time to throw around stray thoughts and not actually move.
“Dunno.” Bucky plucks absentmindedly at the sleeve over his right shoulder. “They got cars. Like the pictures inna paper. But they’re old, right?”
“So get older. She don’t gotta have the car right now.”
“Yeah. She’s prolly a kid too. Somewhere bakin’ her brains out, just like us right now.”
“Wonder what her words say.” In the absence of a soulmate of his own, Steve has decided that his best friend’s soulmate is now going to be his friend too. Like a sister. Steve has always wanted a sister, and they’re both only children.
“I bet they say ’D’you know how fast y’were goin’, ma’am?’” Bucky imitates the gravelly voice of Officer McBride, the flatfoot on the corner, and Steve laughs.
“You’re not gonna be a cop, Buck.”
“I could be!”
“I’m gonna be the cop. You’re gonna be the crook.”
“Nah, we’ll both be crooks. Ma says bootleggers make piles of dough. Maybe I own the car, and she’s been runnin’ the booze for me.”
“You’re gonna be real mad she smashed up your stuff, then.”
“Well, if she’s my soulmate, she’s gotta say sorry.”
“The words already say she won’t.” Steve nudges him. “She’s gonna be just as bad as you are.”
“Yeah.” Bucky sighs a little. At eight, romance means nothing to him. But the idea of a built-in ally, someone who’s meant to always be on his side when even Ma or Dad or Steve are sore at him—that’s something special. “Kinda hope so.”
* * *
It’s the winter of 1934, and Bucky isn’t so sold on the idea of the soulmate any more. Oh, sure, he’s available. When she decides to come around.
After all, things have changed a lot in the last few years.
At seventeen, James Barnes is an unrepentant tomcat. A polite one—his ma would slap him silly if he wasn’t—and he knows how to take a No, which some fellas sure as hell don’t. If he catches one of ‘em getting rough with a girl who doesn’t want it, he teaches ‘em some manners. Already thrashes the hell outta anyone who tries to get fresh with his sisters. But a girl who thinks she’s gonna lock him down will find him in the wind pretty damn quick.
Why not? He’s handsome and bright enough to know it, and he looks sharp in his JROTC uniform … which is good, ‘cause like hell can he afford to risk his one good suit in the dancehall. But he still puts a hell of a smart crease in those uniform trousers, and when he’s got a girl on the dance floor, he can pick her up and spin her any way she wants. Sling her over his shoulders, flip her like the fellas do in the Harlem clubs. And afterwards—in the shadows behind the dancehall, or under the boardwalk at Coney, or in a dozen other places that nobody needs to know about but everyone knows about … Well, they can try some other moves together.
If he ever does meet his soulmate, he’d better know what he’s doing, right?
Lotta the girls have the same thought in mind. Mostly the soulmarked girls. They don’t go all the way—too dangerous, and they’re saving themselves for their soulmates—but they find James Barnes a very willing partner as they venture into Everything But That. It’s good to practice. Figure out what boys and girls do with each other, and how to do it best. Get a taste before the main event, as it were.
(Oh, there’s a few main events too. Careful ones, but undeniably events. The history books will pitilessly record that this war hero, this valiant soldier, this long-serving POW, this man whom Captain America toppled governments for, spent his teens and early twenties as a shameless fucking horndog.)
But while the words “bros before hos” will not enter the common American lexicon for at least another fifty years, Bucky Barnes would agree with them in substance. He never forgets his friend. Whenever he arranges double dates, he makes sure that the other girl is a blank. Steve, with a moral compass as immovable as the Statue of Liberty, wouldn’t even think of going with a girl who has someone else out there waiting for her. It wouldn’t be right.
So Bucky dates, and when he can find a girl for Steve, they double-date. Blank girls tend to be either much more picky or much more careless—knowing they have the freedom to go anywhere they like—and Steve’s got good manners, which helps. He needs the distraction, too.
No one’s sayin’ it, but Mrs. Rogers doesn’t have long.
Bucky’s already decided. He’s gonna be out of school soon, and he has a few places to go for work. One of ‘em has to hire him full-time. He’s already found a coupla rooms to live, a mile or so away from his folks, so’s Ma and Dad can put all their money towards looking after his sisters. Dad don’t make as much as he used to, after all. Stevie can move in with Bucky and take lettering and sign-painting jobs when he’s up to it, and they’ll figure out … something.
Between finishing up school and his JROTC training, keeping Steve in one piece and distracted from what’s coming, and juggling his frankly overloaded social calendar and looking for work, Bucky’s wonderings about his own soulmark have slipped away. As far as he’s concerned, now, the words sound like they belong to a nutty dame who’s stolen someone’s car and gotten in a bad way. Maybe drunk.
If she’s his other half—and all the books say she will be—then there’s gotta be some reason they go together. But nowadays when money is tight and they all have to get by however they can, he really hopes she sobers up before they get very far.
* * *
It’s the fall of 1944, and Sgt. James “Bucky” Barnes of the Howling Commandos is done with this bunch of knuckleheads.
Commandos, his aching ass. More like Keystone Kops.
All right, that’s not actually fair. He’ll feel differently once everyone’s calmed down and stopped scrapping. But there’s a fucking war on, they’re in enemy territory, and they do not have time for Dugan and Morita’s shit.
As usual, whenever you get a bunch of homesick soldiers together, the topic of soulmarks comes up. By this time, everyone in the unit knows everyone else’s words—whether they wanted to or not. No room for modesty in the delousing station. Everyone knows that Dernier’s words are on his ass, that Steve is a blank, and that of the whole bunch of ‘em, the only one who’s met their soulmate is Morita.
Morita, who after months of radio silence has finally learned what happened to his soulmate.
Interned at Minidoka. Locked up by the US government. Her letter, the first in a long time, is so heavily censored as to be unreadable.
Dugan’s got the grayed-out mark of a dead soulmate and has since he was six years old, so he’s blasé about the whole “words” business. Bucky is grateful for his presence, never forgetting what Dugan and the others did in the Azzano hellhole. Rock-solid in a crisis. But the man does not know when to stitch his overactive yap shut, and no one is surprised when one more careless comment in the depths of a German forest ends with Morita belting the ginger numbskull right across the jaw.
That turns into a scuffle that nearly topples both of them into the campfire. Steve grabs his weapons instinctively but doesn’t drop his full mess kit first, leaving K ration stew dribbling down the inside of the shield. Jones and Falsworth are on watch, saving them from the stupidity, but Dernier falls backwards off the rotten log he was sitting on and hisses French invective at them with surprising venom.
“It was a joke! A damn joke!” Dugan yells.
Morita drives another fist into his gut. “I’m gettin’ pretty fuckin’ sick of your jokes!”
“Get off me! You’re like a damn terrier!”
“You know my mom’s locked up too, right? My dad? How’s that for a fuckin’ joke? You say one more fuckin’ word about Kimi, I swear to fuckin’ God, I’ll jam that hat so far up your ass—“
Steve groans and looks across the fire, catching Bucky’s eye. Bucky expresses his opinion of Dugan and Morita with a swift but heartfelt jerkoff motion. Steve stifles a laugh, because he’s the Captain now, and wades into the fight.
“All right, all right, break it up!” Steve manages to grab Dugan, but not before Morita gets one more shot in. Dum-Dum’s gonna have a fantastic black eye tomorrow.
And other places. Morita was definitely hitting below the belt … But hell, this is irregular warfare already, ain’t it? And soulmates are a sore point for a lot of people. If Steve held back just long enough for Morita to get that last shot in, well, Bucky’s not gonna say anything.
He still reflexively checks his own words every day. Still black. Still in that same sprawling, eccentric handwriting that clearly never saw the inside of a schoolroom.
He wonders if she’s out there somewhere, in this mess. Maybe on the other side. Wherever she is, he hopes she’s staying clear of him. After seeing everything he’s seen—after Azzano, after Zola’s table and the burn of poison in his veins—he knows he’s not fit to meet a decent girl.
Or even, if the words aren’t joking, an indecent one. It’s a lot harder to think badly of her now that he’s seen men getting their heads blown off. So she’s some careless kook. That doesn’t mean she deserves to get stuck with someone like him right now.
Later. When the war’s over, and he can tell Steve what they did to him. Things’ll be better then.
* * *
It’s day or night. The Asset doesn’t know which. The concrete leaches chill into the air, and the steel table is freezing under his back as they cut the words out of his right shoulder.
He does not know what the words are, or why they are being removed now. It is not his function to know. He remains still. As ordered.
They order him not to feel pain, but this is an order he cannot comply with. The agony of knowing he is disobeying, that they will undo and remake him for his failure, is almost as bad as the pain of his peeling skin.
Two days later, the words return, a few inches away from the freshly healed patch.
Sweat runs into the Asset’s eyes as they cut the words away again.
Week after week, they chase the words across the skin of his shoulder and chest. The murmurs of the scientists say that This should have been taken care of years ago. That It could be interfering with his conditioning. They cannot return him to cryogenic stasis until this is finally resolved, and he cannot be permitted to lose conditioning while he is out of stasis. So they cut him, and then they wipe him.
Then they cut him. Then they wipe him.
Again.
And.
Again.
And.
Again.
Sometimes they bring people in. Have them say words to him. They are words in English. Meaningless to him. He has lost the power of speech, the power of thought. The people say the words to him, and then a handler shoots them in the head.
But the words on his skin keep coming back.
At last, they chase the fleeing words all the way across his chest and into his left arm. That should be the end of it. But he emerges from one more wipe, and they recalibrate his arm to find words etched deep into the metal, silver-on-silver. They have crawled up onto his left shoulder.
To cut him is to compromise his flesh, but he heals without additional effort. To continue to cut will now compromise the arm, which requires manpower to repair.
They cease cutting him. One more session in the chair, leaving him boneless and twitching, and then the breath-stealing clutch of cryo.
When next he is activated, months or years later, he does not remember that he ever had words. Nor does he know why his left shoulder has been refinished and painted, with a red star covering many of the plates. It strikes the Asset as tactically unwise to carry a prominent identifier, but he does not question.
* * *
It’s summer. Probably.
The year is 2014. Maybe.
He thinks.
He’s curled up in his nest at the end of the alley. Summer makes the garbage stink to high heaven, but tactically, it’s a good spot. No way for anyone to get behind him. The smell is prohibitive to civilians: they won’t approach him. Even in the summer heat, the crumbling Soviet-era concrete behind him is borderline cool to the touch, bleeding through his layers of grimy clothes.
His hands shake as he fumbles with the notebook and pencil. His fingernails are black bitten-down crescents, and he leaves dirty marks on the paper. Not fingerprints. His fingerprints were seared away decades ago. He thinks he can remember it … But maybe he made it up. He’s so desperate for a thread of memory, for anything that’ll lead him out of the dark.
The arm is glitching. His left hand spasms as it grips the notebook, making the paper twitch under the pencil tip. A line of graphite slashes across the paper.
He hisses something in a language he might not speak and drops notebook and pencil. He digs his right hand into his left shoulder, trying to force the plates back into alignment.
His fingertips skate over the red star. The paint is peeling. There are grooves underneath it, strange swooping curves and stabbing lines. Shrapnel damage?
As he touches them, a sudden pain lances through his skull. His back stiffens, and his head slams back into the concrete. The memory of the Chair crackles through him.
Do not touch the words.
Do not read the words.
Forget the words exist.
His dirty nails dig into the flaking paint as another spasm of pain convulses him. He sinks into the memories and is lost again.
* * *
It’s winter 2015, and he’s in a jail cell in Stark Tower.
Tony Stark, Howard’s boy, wants him dead. Understandable.
But Steve is here. Steve talks to Tony. And there’s a woman, a strawberry blonde, who plants herself between Iron Man and the Winter Soldier. Red energy seethes under her skin, tinting the flesh until it glows like lava. Her painted lips are an opaque curve floating on the fire. She barks an order to stop, Tony, and Iron Man’s own blue-white energy glow fades from his gauntlets.
Still. There’s no forgiveness there.
“You killed my mom,” Stark says to him, low-voiced. Tendons rise in his neck as his jaw clenches. “You don’t deserve to live.”
Steve starts to push in, shout an objection, but Bucky meets Tony’s eyes.
“Yes,” he says.
There doesn’t seem to be much to talk about after that.
They keep him locked up for the first month. Send nurses in first, under heavy guard, to bring him clean clothes and help him wash. They have to remove his grimy rags with surgical scissors and sponge him down out of a bucket. It would be humiliating if he was a man instead of a lab rat.
Then the doctors begin the examinations.
They remove most of his left arm. It’s too damaged to function much, and weakening the Winter Soldier is important. Tactically unwise to maintain a fully operational enemy presence within their facility. The shoulder mount remains, but the peeling star and its hidden markings are gone, and Bucky inwardly relaxes.
Just thinking of those markings still makes him flinch in pain. HYDRA worked hard to condition him. Better to focus on anything else.
The doctors take scans. Notes. They X-ray everything he’s got available and end up with a list of diagnoses longer than his one remaining arm.
He’s on multiple IV drips for the better part of a week as they feed him desperately needed vitamins and nutrients. They also start him on a whole host of drugs. Apparently, the newer, more humane anti-psychotics have little effect on him. They have better success with the old harsh stuff, though the amount of Thorazine needed to even take the edge off the Winter Soldier would kill anyone else. Good to know.
Steve visits every day. Twice, three times if he isn’t out with his new team, Avenging. He sits outside the cell—and it is a cell, even if it’s got a soft bed and pictures on the wall—and talks with a forced lightness that makes Bucky feel sick. Steve is trying to reach out to a friend who doesn’t exist any more. It’s like seeing someone talking to a headstone.
But the thing wearing Bucky’s face now has nothing else. No other hope.
It—he—chooses to reach back.
When the Assembly alarm next sounds, Steve groans and rises from his folding chair. He scrubs a hand over his face and gives Bucky a weary grin.
“I’ll be back, pal,” he says.
“Not the end of the line yet,” Bucky says. The words come out as a strangled rasp, but Steve’s whole face lights up.
“Not yet. Not by half.” The Captain presses his hand flat to the armored glass. “You can count on me. I promise.”
Bucky shakes his head. Seventy years, and somehow, nothing’s changed.
“Go save the world,” he croaks out. “’m not goin’ anywhere.”
Steve gives him the USO grin and salute as he steps back. Bucky feels the strange urge to roll his eyes.
The Avengers are gone for almost a week. Stark’s prison is the nicest Bucky can remember, but six days without word from Steve is still more than enough to frighten him. Credit where credit’s due: the staff brings him books and writing material, even if it’s soft crayons instead of anything sharp, and the guards don’t shoot him with any tranq darts. But by day five, Bucky is pacing almost nonstop, and he doesn’t have to be a super-soldier to know that they’re thinking about those tranqs. A nervous assassin tends to make everyone else nervous too.
Early in the wee hours of day six—a Saturday, if his internal clock isn’t completely ruined—a chime sounds through the cell. Bucky jolts upright out of an uneasy doze.
“Mr. Barnes,” says a cool English voice. Sounds a little like Falsworth imitating his family butler. “I have a message for you.”
Bucky gropes instinctively for the side of the bedframe. He’s managed to hide a broken shard of glass down there, which makes a decent knife.
“Who are you?” he snaps. The cell is empty. “Where are you?”
“Apologies, Mr. Barnes. With your permission, I will be raising the lights in three, two, one …”
The lights come on slowly. Bucky blinks and looks around. Still no one.
“Are you invisible?” he says. He’s never known a real invisible man, but HYDRA made some attempts that he can vaguely recall. Probably weren’t the only ones, either. One poor bastard just straight-up lost his whole skin.
“No,” says the voice, sounding vaguely amused. Bucky’s sharp ears locate its source: a small black half-sphere in the ceiling. “My name is JARVIS. I am Mr. Stark’s intelligent digital assistant.”
“… A robot?”
A moment’s pause, as if the voice is thinking about something.
“While I may be described as a robot, it is not the totality of what I am,” it said. “I am a complete intelligence that happens to be computer-based in nature. Currently, I run Mr. Stark’s personal servers and maintain this Tower. Mr. Stark intended that I should handle the ‘boring stuff.’”
Against all odds, Bucky feels his mouth curling in a small, cracked smile.
“The second-in-command, huh,” he says.
“So Mr. Stark likes to believe. In point of fact, he is himself the second-in-command to Miss Potts.”
“What’s that make you?”
“I prefer to think of myself as their collective factotum. The power behind the throne.” An electronic sort of throat-clearing noise. “At the moment, I have a message for you, Mr. Barnes.”
Bucky doesn’t know what a factotum is, but he likes the robot butler. This is the kind of thing the dime novels promised him. And for the last thirty seconds, he hasn’t been worrying about Steve, which is a nice change.
“What’s the message?”
“Captain Rogers informs you that the Avengers’ current mission has chiefly concluded, and he anticipates their return within the next seven hours. Furthermore, he wishes it be known that you are a jerk.”
“Punk,” Bucky mutters.
“He hoped you would say that.” The robot butler sounds faintly amused. “I have also been instructed to inform you that your arm will be returned to you within forty-eight hours.”
That is so goddamn far from smart operational procedure that Bucky thinks he just got whiplash. A dozen questions bubble to the surface, but the only one that makes it out is “Why?”
“Ms. Potts ordered Mr. Stark to do so.”
Again, “Why?”
“She has found the evidence of its markings convincing. If proper protocol is observed, you will be re-armed and released on limited parole within the high-security residential floors of the Tower. Please be informed that I will be observing you at all times.”
That part doesn’t bother Bucky. He’s been under surveillance for the last seventy years, and the robot butler doesn’t have a cattle prod.
It’s the parole that’s bad news. Six days away from base, and suddenly they’re giving the brainwashed, malfunctioning enemy asset a cybernetic weapon and access to the residential areas. Ms. Potts seems like a sensible type, and she’s used to holding Stark’s leash. Why would she advocate for Bucky’s freedom based on markings? What markings?
The deep grooves, silver-on-silver, flash through his memory again. He groans and curls in on himself as the pain digs into his skull.
But the bite isn’t quite so deep this time. More than a year out of HYDRA’s hands, more than a month under medical care, dosed with the heaviest psych medication the doctors could find—clean and fed and safe, safe even to the point that he can sometimes almost smile—the conditioning is starting to lose its grip.
He hunches over, buries his face in his raised knees, and wraps his arms around himself as the tremors run through him.
Grooves. Letters. Words. Words that mean things. On his arm. Hidden.
HYDRA wanted them hidden. Forget the words exist.
It’s like pulling undissolved stitches out of a half-healed wound. He prods at the thought, grimacing through the pain, as he tries to remember what the words said. Tugging at each shape, turning it this way and that, until his hazy brain forces it to match a letter.
He’s four words in and sweating through his clothes, head pounding, when the door of the cell comes crashing open.
Instantly, he’s alert. He leaps to his feet and grabs a lamp off the nearest table, hurling it at the intruder.
Steve catches it. Of course.
“Buck?” Steve says carefully, still gripping the lamp. Its cord is swinging loose, looking faintly ridiculous dangling from Captain America’s fist. “Buck, are you with me?”
Bucky takes a shaky breath. He’s soaked in cold sweat. Steve doesn’t look much better: he must have run directly from the quinjet to his cell. The Captain America suit is covered in dirt and ash, and there’s a fresh cut streaking across his jaw.
It takes a few moments for Bucky to find his voice again. He runs a hand through his hair. He feels … grimy, moreso than he has since he came in.
“JARVIS said you were all curled up and having an episode,” Steve says. He takes a cautious step forward. “For three hours. The doctors tried talking to you, but you weren’t responding. They didn’t want to tranq you without knowing more … You weren’t bein’ violent or anything … Buck, can you hear me? It’s Steve. Your pal.”
“I was thinkin’,” Bucky croaks out. Steve relaxes an iota.
“Heavy thoughts, huh?”
“Steve.” Bucky wipes his only hand across his face. The salt of dried tears lingers. He hasn’t noticed it until just now. “Steve, did … did I have words?”
Steve’s shoulders relax. Slowly, he sets down the lamp.
“Yeah,” he says. “You did.”
“On my shoulder?”
“Yeah.”
“Which one?”
“The right.”
Bucky raises his right hand, managing to awkwardly skate his fingertips over his own right shoulder. The skin is mostly unmarked. Only a few raised, bumpy patches signal the presence of long-ago scar tissue, replaced by decades of super-soldier healing.
“They took ‘em,” he says. Lost. “They took my words, Stevie.”
“They tried,” Steve says. Another step forward. “Stark told me about it yesterday. The words must’ve kept coming back, so they covered ‘em up instead. Stark found them when he refurbished the arm and cleaned off the red star.”
Words. Coming back. But …
“’S not possible,” Bucky whispers. “They only come back …”
“If your soulmate’s not dead yet.”
Steve’s smile is cautious but warm. Cautious, out of his concern for Bucky. Warm, because he clearly knows—and Bucky is just beginning to remember—how much affection they both held for the idea of Bucky’s soulmate. Bucky’s other half will be family to Steve, and Steve needs family more than ever.
But.
“Tell Stark to cover ‘em up again,” Bucky rasps.
Steve’s face falls. “Buck—“
“Don’t care. Cover ‘em.” He sags backwards onto the bed, closing his eyes. “She don’t deserve this.”
Whatever the words are—and he’s only decoded a quarter of them—he doesn’t want to see them. He doesn’t want to see her. It’s been decades since he received the arm, so it could have been decades since the words last reappeared. She might’ve been alive then but long dead by now. Who could tell if words embedded in metal had grayed out?
And if she’s still alive now, she’s ancient, and she’s survived all the years between the war and now. She’s made it to the finish line. She doesn’t need him mucking it up at the very end.
Whoever she was, he hopes it was a good life for her.
* * *
It’s April 2016, and Bucky Barnes is ninety-nine years old.
Right now, he feels every one of ‘em. But that’s mostly Stark’s fault. Team training with the Avengers is fucking brutal, and though murder attempts are pretty much off the table these days, Stark makes no beans about how much he enjoys dropping Bucky from four stories up.
No, he hasn’t been cleared to Avenge. He’s less than two years out of HYDRA’s grasp, spent half that time as a crazed hobo, and still has unresolved programming knocking around inside his skull. They’ve dialed in his medication regimen and therapy is starting to untangle some of the knots in his brain, but his memories are still fucked and he’s confined to the tower for the safety of the general public. Legally, he’s on extended parole while the government reevaluates his case. Realistically, he’s marking time until he gets thrown in prison. He’s not gonna be showing up to save the world any time soon.
But the Avengers always need practice, and they appreciate having a rogue element around to keep things interesting for them. Sam Wilson is adding new blood to the mix, but Bucky is a bigger threat because he is—in Stark’s words—“evil Cap.” He’s a perfect training partner that no one has to feel bad about hitting.
Well. Steve felt bad for a while. But then Bucky socked him in the breadbasket and kicked him through a wall.
“What the hell!” Steve had managed to say, crawling out of the rubble.
“They’re not gonna go light on you, punk,” Bucky had told him. “You better not go light on me.”
(He overheard a conversation between Barton and the Widow later: “Is this a religious thing? He’s doing penance or something?” “He has red in his ledger, golubchik. Just like me.” “Yeah, well, it’s still weird.”)
(And no, Natalia, it isn’t his ledger. He has no illusions about that ever being cleared. But Steve and his friends weren’t prepared to fight him last time, and there’s worse things than the Winter Soldier out there in the cracks of the world. He’ll never atone, so he doesn’t try, but he can at least prepare them.)
They hit the showers after training. Bucky carefully wraps his shoulder in plastic to protect the new blue-and-white star before stripping down. He still prefers not to think about The Words when he can help it and doesn’t want to risk damaging the paint.
There’s no group showers, at least: he may have gotten used to being watched during his decades of slavery, but these days, Bucky has rediscovered the joys of privacy and having your own damn stall. Sure, JARVIS is probably watching, but he doesn’t care about that. Computer or not, JARVIS is a fellow non-com at heart and won’t cause any trouble.
He can still hear the others over the water, though. Steve is whistling, of all fucking things, “The Caissons Go Rolling Along.”
“Seriously?” Bucky says, grabbing the two-in-one shampoo and conditioner. “That one was old when we were kids.”
“So? Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s bad.”
“You’re not beating those ‘fossil’ allegations any time, pal.”
“Hey, fossils are neat. We used to gawk at fossils in the museum.”
“Are you callin’ us dinosaurs?”
“Well,” a voice pipes up from further down the line of stalls, “y’all do cause a lot of damage.”
“Private conversation, Wilson!” Bucky calls out.
“You wish!” Barton hollers from the other side. “Cap, was that the Army song you were whistling?”
“The artillery march. You know, ‘And the caissons go rolling along.’”
“No, it’s ‘The Army Goes Rolling Along,’” Barton says.
“Huh, really? They must’ve changed it since the war.”
“Yeah. There was a whole campaign in the ‘50s to pick an official US Army song. But all of the entries sucked, so the Army stole the caisson song from the artillery corps and changed the words.”
Wilson laughs. “You mean the ground-pounders couldn’t come up with their own tricks and just relied on someone else? Never heard that one before!”
“Shut up, Wilson!” Barton, Steve, and Bucky all holler.
“Yep, there’s that famous Army independent thinking,” Wilson chuckles. A hollow plastic bonk echoes off the tiles. “Hey! What the hell? Who threw that?”
“Not me,” Barton says. And it wasn’t Bucky, either.
“Come on, let’s behave like grown men,” Steve says calmly, as if he didn’t just bean the Falcon with a blind throw of a shampoo bottle. “I’m heading up to debriefing. Be there in twenty.”
Debrief isn’t too much of a hassle. It boils down a recap of the training session and all the various ways they fucked up. Steve and Tony deliver their assessments: Steve as team leader, Tony as second-in-command and equipment specialist.
“We don’t stink quite as much as we used to,” is the sum of Steve’s assessment.
“Most of the improvement is because of me,” is the sum of Tony’s assessment.
“Stark, behave yourself. Everyone else, nice work,” is the sum of Maria Hill’s response to the above.
Stark adjourns to the bar. One of them, anyway. There’s a dozen or so scattered throughout the tower and even Bucky hasn’t pinpointed them all yet.
(For tactical purposes only. He can’t get drunk. A couple of evenings making free with various bottom-shelf liquors—especially something new since his day, called Everclear—have made that pretty plain.)
“That didn’t go too bad,” Wilson says. Bucky shrugs and ambles his way out of the meeting room. Wilson follows him.
He doesn’t mind Wilson, really, prior enmity and jokes about service rivalries notwithstanding. The guy is level-headed and sane, which makes him pretty rare around here. Plus, Wilson’s been introducing him to modern TV. They’ve already figured out that yelling at baseball is just as fun as it was in the 1940s.
He’s just gotten comfortable on one of the couches in the main lounge, and Wilson is calling up an Astros game that just started, when Thor comes marching in.
“Ah! My friends!” he proclaims, as if he didn’t just see them half an hour ago. “I bear joyous news. My dearest destined soulmate and her loyal assistant have arrived! I would have you meet them, and join me in assisting the ladies with their tools of science!”
Thor talks like a book, but he’s a good egg. And Bucky doesn’t have strong feelings about the Astros one way or the other, so he picks himself up off the couch.
“Not me, man,” Wilson says. He’s burying himself in a recliner with ice packs on both shoulders and the remote in easy reach. “I’ll make nice, but if you want my help movin’ shit, don’t ask on training day. I’m not gettin’ up for anything.”
“That is understandable, for you are mortal and frail,” Thor agrees easily. Bucky resists the urge to laugh. Thor doesn’t actually mean any harm when he says stuff like that: it’s like commenting on someone’s shirt color to him.
“Damn right,” Wilson says easily and pops the top off his beer. Wilson’s got no need to prove himself.
Bucky follows Thor into the elevator. It takes them up, towards the labs with roof access. Makes sense: Thor’s girl is supposed to be an astronomer of some kind. Thor is chatting away about their training session, occasionally clapping Bucky on the shoulder or making some hearty statement about brotherhood or bravery, but Bucky mostly lets it run in one ear and out the other.
The new lab space is chaos. Half a dozen Hulk-sized machines have been hauled in and pretty much just dropped anywhere, still partially wrapped in acres of plastic sheeting. Several crates are open on the floor, revealing handheld machines and instrumentation swathed in bubble wrap. In the center of it all is Dr. Jane Foster, who’s a pretty little thing in oversized flannel and has a slight case of the crazy eyes as she argues with the movers handling her stuff. Her sleeves are rolled up, revealing the words “You! What realm is this?” in gold wrapped around her left forearm.
“Jane, my love!” Thor booms. The doc flaps a hand at him distractedly and stays focused on her argument with the mover. Apparently, the exact layout of the power cables is a matter of life and death.
Eventually, Thor manages to pry his girl away from the poor sap and figure out exactly where some of the stuff needs to go. Bucky gets put to work carrying the crates this way and that, stacking up several of them where Foster points and joining Thor to move what looks like a bank of monitors from a NASA control room.
“Thor!” Foster calls out. The thunder god straightens up, brow furrowing: his soulmate sounds properly distressed. “Thor, they’ve lost the arc-assisted spectrophotometric sequence converter!”
“Grievous indeed,” Thor says. He sounds like he knows what that is, too, which Bucky definitely doesn’t. “Is there a record of where it was last seen?”
“Loading Bay D. That’s all they’re giving me. But Loading Bay D is open to all members of staff! Thor—“
“Fear not, I shall fetch it for you. No stranger shall lay hands upon your machines.” Thor plants a kiss on the scientist’s head. “Sergeant Barnes, will you accompany me? The device is not too heavy for me, but it is large and unwieldy.”
Bucky shrugs. “No problem.”
Once back in the elevator, though, he casts a sideways look at Thor. The big guy is still chipper, for all his soulmate’s been ignoring him.
“Didn’t think princes would stand being ordered around,” he says.
Thor chuckles. “Once, indeed, I would have bristled at it. Such labor is not suitable for the heir to Asgard. But it pleases me to assist my Jane, and it is no hardship.”
“She seemed pretty tuned out there. The soulmate thing go both ways?” It’s rare for there to be a one-way soulmatch, but Asgardians aren’t human, after all.
“It does indeed.” Thor seems unfazed by the questioning. “’Tis true my lady becomes absorbed in her work, but such is often the way of scholars and wisefolk. Indeed, Stark and the Lady Pepper are
a suited match, even though he is oft distracted with his tinkering. My Jane always returns from her studies to my side, and so I have no fear when she roams.”
The god sounds so calm and comfortable that Bucky feels a stab of envy. The farsighted visionary type was never his kind of girl, but it’s clear that those two are a damn good match. And the idea of an other half—the kind who knows and trusts you, and always knows you’ll come back—sounds like everything he wanted once.
He knew a lot of guys who left sweethearts behind. Mail call was a goddamn lifeline for them.
Morita grabs the envelope and almost rips it in half. His gaze flicks to the signature at the bottom of the paper, and he lets out a gusty groan of relief. “She’s alive!” he chokes out, and the commandos cheer and clap their shaking brother on the shoulder—
The corner of Bucky’s mouth twitches at the memory. That had been a good moment, a warm moment. Then Morita actually read the letter and found out what was happening to his soulmate, and Dugan had to open his yap, and things ended up with a fistfight and beef stew in Steve’s shield.
It takes them almost an hour to track down the missing machine in Loading Bay D. In retrospect, Bucky isn’t sure how they missed it—damn thing’s the size of a minivan—but the loading bay is a maze of twenty-foot-high racks and pallets of everything Stark Tower requires, which is everything in the known universe. Eventually they find the whatever-it-is machine buried under a fresh delivery of toilet paper, and the pair of them haul it into the building’s biggest service elevator.
The movers are mostly gone when they return to the lab. Bucky’s mostly focused on helping Thor tilt the machine sideways to scrape it through the double doors, and he only vaguely registers that there’s music playing somewhere in the area now.
“Left—left a bit—Jesus Christ, Thor, your other left—“
“I am attempting to go left, but Stark objects if we break his walls—“
“Never mind Stark, it’s a lab floor, the fixtures are already fucked. Up a bit—up a bit—“
“Aha! I see it now!”
The machine heaves, and Bucky is abruptly reminded that when it comes to sheer strength, even he can’t outmatch Thor. The huge whatever-it-is surges forward and Bucky has to scramble to avoid being flattened.
“This ain’t football!” he pants as he manages to get his end of the burden under control again. “Fucking hell, you gotta try and run a guy over?”
But Thor just laughs in that the-mortals-are-being-silly-again kind of way that’s sometimes endearing and sometimes fucking annoying. Bucky props up his end of the machine on his left shoulder and roughly swipes his face with his right hand, mopping off some of the sweat.
For the first time, he properly notices the music coming from the main lab floor. Not a tune he recognizes. It’s that electronic kind of modern music, the kind with a fast beat and squealy sound effects like a power station coming online. Not at all his taste, but on the scale of Shit Bucky Barnes Hates About the Modern Day, it’s pretty low. Around the level of “Bananas taste weird now.”
But Thor chuckles. “Ah! She has returned from her errands!”
Bucky grunts and rebalances his end of the machine. Slowly, he backs into the lab, Thor pushing with annoying eagerness. He seems real keen to spend time with his soulmate and whoever this gal is. The doc’s assistant? Anyway, Bucky can’t fault him for that. Friends keep you sane.
They set down the machine in a corner specially prepared for it. Foster grabs Thor and gives him an enthusiastic kiss, then turns to Bucky and immediately loses all of her social skills.
“Um,” she says.
Bucky holds up one hand. “You don’t gotta kiss me.”
Thor laughs, and the scientist turns bright red.
“I wasn’t going to!” she says indignantly. “I didn’t—I mean—um, thank you, Sergeant Barnes. I appreciate the help.”
“No problem, ma’am.”
The background music changes again, something even faster and pulsing. Foster groans and turns around, arms crossed. Bucky wipes his face again and wonders if he has time for a nap before dinner.
“Darcy!” Foster shouts.
Another woman emerges from the stacks of crates and piles of discarded plastic wrapping. Suddenly, Bucky is alert.
Back in the day, he had a type. He’s pretty sure he did, anyway. He can recall being genuinely disappointed when Agent Carter turned him down: a curvy, leggy dame with a gun sure was something special. Whatever type he did have for certain, though, the girl emerging from the chaos of the half-assembled astrophysics lab is it.
She’s a red-lipped brunette in jeans and a slouchy green t-shirt. Glasses. Long curls. Round ass, hips curving in to a nicely shaped waist—and then he gets to her chest and the few unfried parts of Bucky’s brain start shutting down, because he sure as hell doesn’t remember seeing breasts like that at any time in his life.
(The Widows getting their surgeries. Trimmed and tucked and having pieces cut out. Anything that disrupts balance or hinders her efficiency must go.)
The dark memory barely has a chance to flash across his mind before Bucky hastily shoves it back into a corner. There’s nothing Widow about the girl: no calculated sway of the hips, no armor-piercing gaze, no mathematically balanced frame. She has chunky glasses on, and she’s holding a Sharpie marker like a microphone and dancing with a total lack of grace or rhythm.
Then she starts to sing along with the music.
“I got this feeling on the summer day when you were gone!” she sings. Yells, more like. Not musically gifted. She points to Foster and begins singing to her. “I crashed my car into the bridge! I watched, I let it burn!”
Bucky’s blood freezes.
The girl points to Thor. “I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs!” she hollers, and Thor laughs again. Thor is standing next to Foster, and Bucky is standing next to Thor—
She’s pointing at him. She’s pointing at him.
“I crashed my car into the bridge!” the girl sings straight to him. “I don’t care! I love it!”
Pain lances through Bucky. First his right shoulder, tingling with a phantom ache. Then, sudden and sharp, the freezing stab of an electrical shock arrows through his body from his left arm. He grunts and drops to one knee, clutching his spasming shoulder.
Fuck. No. NO.
The girl stops singing when she sees Bucky drop. Foster jumps a mile, and Thor instinctively pushes her further behind him. The loud electronic music carries on unabated, singing more of the stupid, stupid song that’s marked him for seventy years.
You're on a different road, I'm in the Milky Way
You want me down on Earth, but I am up in space
Bucky lets out a strangled laugh. It’s more like a grunt.
You're so damn hard to please, we gotta kill this switch
You're from the '70s, but I'm a '90s bitch
“Sergeant Barnes,” Thor says. “Sergeant Barnes, can you hear me?”
“I didn’t think my singing was that bad,” the girl says.
The girl. His soulmate. His fucking soulmate, now, after seventy fucking years—when he’s not supposed to be alive, when he’s still got the Winter fucking Soldier scarring his psyche and his soul—the girl, already approaching with a total lack of caution like the complete fucking civilian that she clearly is—
It takes a miracle of self-control not to warn her to back off. He can’t say a word. Can’t let her know. Can’t be her match.
“Arm’s acting up,” he manages to say to Thor.
“Ah.” Thor nods in sympathy. “I shall alert Stark to expect you for repairs.”
Bucky doesn’t say anything else. He staggers to his feet and bolts for the elevator. Behind him, he can hear the red-lipped girl saying something to Foster and Thor, but he wills himself not to listen to her words.
His soulmate is alive. Bucky feels sick.
* * *
It’s August 2016. Bucky has successfully avoided his soulmate for four months.
Surprisingly, it’s been pretty easy. Some masochistic part of Bucky had been convinced that the second they saw each other, she would never leave him alone. That she’d be drawn to follow him. That she’d have, God forbid, the dreams.
But soulmate dreams are incredibly rare, even today, and a sharp modern girl doesn’t seem like the type to ignore that kind of thing. Instead, Bucky hasn’t seen her since that day in the lab.
He’s fine with that.
He throws himself into his work. He’s still confined to the Tower under legal restrictions (no word on that pardon), but he trains and practices furiously until he can imitate just about any type of opponent the team needs him to be. When Steve wants to run an antiterrorism simulation in the residential areas, Bucky recruits a bunch of the security guards into his faux terrorist cell and teaches them to build fake bombs from the contents of the cleaning cupboard and the pantry.
They “explode” with a puff of flour. He’s actually pretty proud of that.
Turns out only three of the six team members actually manage to disarm the bombs. Thor, Bruce, and Stark all end up with flour on their faces. (Stark could’ve done it, but he got impatient with “amateur hour” and blasted the bomb instead.) Sam manages to pull it off too, but he’s still hemming and hawing about joining the roster full-time, so he only gets partial credit.
The security guards are probably the best part of the whole thing, honestly. They’re all from the lower floors, so they don’t know their way around the residential areas, and Bucky vets them thoroughly before recruiting them. But there’s a couple of video gamers and an MMA enthusiast in the group, and they absolutely love the chance to be bad guys against the Avengers. They come up with a fake manifesto and refer to Bucky as “Glorious Leader of the Cause.” Bucky wonders if he’s accidentally started a cult.
But the scenario goes well. Afterwards, Steve claps Bucky on the shoulder and says he did a great job. “I’m proud of you, buddy.”
Bucky nods. “What’re you planning next?”
That isn’t the response Steve was hoping for. But Bucky needs another task, quickly, or he’ll start thinking again.
Thor doesn’t seem to have a problem with him. The thunder god has simply accepted Bucky’s excuse about the arm malfunctioning. When he asks Bucky to help move more equipment, Bucky lies that being in the labs is giving him flashbacks. Thor simply nods and makes another hearty statement about brotherhood healing the wounds of past wars.
Sam’s definitely suspicious. Not about the soulmate thing, but he can tell that Bucky’s gone squirrelly. Bucky has overheard him talking to Steve and Barton, saying something about recovery not being a straight line and how they can’t pressure him to talk about it or they’ll make it worse.
Small favors.
He feels stuck. Bitter. Like it’s all a big joke at his expense.
He’d wanted a soulmate. Wanted the friend, the flapper, the careless kook. Even after Azzano, when he knew he was too knotted up inside to be a good man for any kind of halfway decent girl, he’d still wanted. Envied Steve and Peggy their blank skins and ability to choose, but also daydreamed about coming home and getting right in the head and finally meeting the girl whose words were on him since birth.
But when he emerged from cryo and brainwashing and the hell of seventy years of HYDRA, he was glad she was out of his reach. It’s easier to be at peace about something you never have a chance of reaching.
When it’s right in front of him now, taunting him, it feels like an insult and a stab in the back. Everything he wanted—and him in no condition to take it.
He doesn’t have access to Tower personnel files, and JARVIS is no help. He can’t even tell JARVIS why he wants them. Much as he likes the robot butler, JARVIS is on Stark’s side first and foremost. Any intel he gets is gonna be roundabout and indirect.
Thankfully, Thor’s a talker. Drop a dime in him, and he’ll tell you anything about his lady and her lab manager.
It only takes a few days for Bucky to learn about his soulmate. Darcy J. Lewis is 27 and from “Trailer Park, USA,” which Thor doesn’t seem to realize isn’t a real place. She was there when Thor first fell to earth and has helped see off at least one alien invasion. She apparently gained Thor’s fondness by hitting him with a taser and then introducing him to coffee and junk food. Parents unmarried and long separated. One half-sister twenty-seven years older—Diane, living in Indiana. Little contact. She likes chunky sweaters, strong coffee, and tacky novelty desk ornaments.
She survived the fall of SHIELD, which means she’s probably not HYDRA. Stark certainly chooses his personnel carefully.
No one can tell him if she has a soulmark or not. Back in the day, he’d have said that that easy, breezy attitude would be the sign of a blank—someone who knew they were unbound and could go anywhere and try anything. He knew a couple of blank girls who did it like that. But these days, who can tell?
Thor definitely considers her a friend. When Bucky casually asks whether she’s soulmarked—wrapping it up in some excuse about how in his day, people used to think blanks had some kind of special destiny for them, and wouldn’t that match what she’s done for Thor and the Avengers?—Thor gives him a sharp look.
“I do not know whether she bears a mark,” he says, “and it is not Asgardian custom to ask, nor to seek to subvert the marks by asking what words they bear. Were you Aesir, Sergeant Barnes, this would be truly dishonorable.”
Bucky forces a chuckle. “Good thing I’m not, then. Sorry, pal—didn’t mean to step on any toes. I was just curious.”
“You seek knowledge for the protection of others, do you not? Have no fear. I know not what form of mark she bears, but well I can assure you that Darcy is no harm to you or yours.”
Thor considers fighting the Hulk a fun afternoon, so Bucky’s not gonna trust his threat assessment. But he can’t ask much more without looking suspicious, so he shuts his trap.
Slowly, he collects bits of secondhand information. His soulmate is currently unattached: her last relationship apparently ended with an acrimonious breakup after the guy cheated. She’s not actually a drunk or a kook, though she does spend a lot of time listening to weird modern music.
(Once, when she’s passing by the gym, Bucky overhears her singing/yelling some lyrics. When he Googles them, he discovers a group called Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Red right hand—the universe has a fucking weird sense of humor, and he’s not laughing.)
She looks after the scientists, but she isn’t technically one of them. Yet. She’s studying for a doctorate in astrophysics while managing Foster’s lab.
Because that’s what red-lipped girls who sing loud songs badly in public do nowadays, it seems. Along with palling around with space Vikings.
Sure, the rest of the picture sort of adds up. In his day she’d be the girl at the party laughing loud, dancing with everyone, maybe sneaking out with the boys for a smoke. Brash, his ma would say. A fast gal. Pro’lly not the kind with a really rough reputation, but maybe the kind who liked to fool around with a fellow Marked, just so’s they’d both know what they were doing when they met their other halves … A little Everything But That, and all. And hell, in his day he’d have been damn happy to try it on with her.
But knocking down a god? Astrophysics? He doesn’t know what to do with that kind of person. He’s got a high school diploma, for fucksake, and even that was a struggle at times. Math, sure—he’s good with math, ‘cause snipers damn well have to be. But not the kind of math that’s longer than a page and tells you how much energy is in a star light-years away. Meathead like him, a draftee, never would’ve had a chance at college. Sure didn’t live long enough for the G.I. Bill to kick in. His smarts stop dead at calculating wind resistance and knowing how to dismember a body.
He avoids her, but the mere fact of her is filling his thoughts and ruining his sleep. Knowing that he has a soulmate out there, that she’s a smart, hard-working civilian with a body like that … Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this ought to be a dream come true. Instead, it’s a cosmic mismatch.
Steve doesn’t like to hear him mention what a mess he is. Sam calls it “negative self-talk” and says it just reinforces itself. Well, fuck them. Bucky knows the score.
It’s only this year that he’s begun to really think of himself as Bucky again, instead of the Asset wearing Bucky’s face. He’ll never recover all of his memories or be the kind of man Steve knew back in the day. God only knows how much of the Winter Soldier programming still lives in his head.
And he’s a prisoner. Even Tony Stark’s lawyers and Captain America’s influence can’t make the government fast-track the legal process. They swear that some Congressmen are still working to get him a pardon, but the government could change its mind at any time and decide he’s too dangerous to be loose. Some guy he’d be, starting something with a woman at a time like this.
And the cherry on top of it all, the stupidest damn thing of this whole mess—he likes the words now.
After everything he’s been through, as the sergeant and the Soldier, his soulmate’s words turn out to be lyrics from a random song. Not a plea from a victim or an order from a handler. Not a command or a curse or an act of defiance or even the insane ramblings of a fellow brain-damaged lab rat. A song that she was singing because she liked it, even if she couldn’t hit a tune with a howitzer. It’s the most normal thing he can think of.
Those were words for Bucky from Brooklyn. Not the Winter Soldier.
* * *
It’s September 2016, and he’s been rumbled.
Goddamn it.
Sam’s the first one to twig. They’re in the kitchenette on 80, grabbing beers from the fridge, when a clatter of footsteps makes them both snap alert.
Darcy Lewis dashes into the kitchen, dragging Jane Foster behind her. Both women are red-faced and out of breath.
“Ohthankfuck, someone with security clearance,” Darcy pants. “Tell JARVIS to call off the dogs!”
“What?” Sam says. Bucky just stares.
It’s been a hot summer, and things have only just begin cooling down in September. Both women are wearing tank tops and jean shorts, with extra layers slung on top to be comfortable in the air-conditioned Tower. Jane Foster has an oversized flannel shirt that hangs like a tent on her—must be Thor’s—but Darcy Lewis has a hoodie that’s now tied around her waist. Her tank top has a scoop neck.
Eyes up, you damn hound. His life was a lot simpler before his libido came back.
“You have that super-special Avenger clearance,” Darcy explains in a rush. “You can tell JARVIS not to tattle on where we are. Mr. Stark’s on thirty-eight hours of no sleep and he wants to argue about physics with Jane, and if he comes at her about dark matter one more time someone’s gonna get shanked with a protractor. Tell JARVIS to call off the dogs!”
Bucky’s paralyzed. His soulmate is here, she needs help, and if he says a word to her she’ll know what he is and what they are to each other. And she’ll know she’s linked to a murderer on house arrest.
Sam shoots a glance at him, then shrugs. “You got it,” he says, and looks up at the ceiling. “Hey, JARVIS.”
“Yes, Lieutenant Wilson?”
“Avengers override Archimedes-7. Location of Personnel: Jane Foster and Personnel: Darcy Lewis restricted under Condition 22.”
Condition 22, Bucky knows, is “critical operations.” It’ll take a multi-Avenger authorization to break that command, and no one else will help Stark break it just to hunt scientists—not when he’s been on a binge and is probably crazier than usual.
“Acknowledged, Lieutenant Wilson,” says the cool voice of the robot butler. “May I assist you with anything else?”
“Nah, we’re cool,” Darcy says before Sam can get another word in edgeways. “Thanks, flyboy. You’re saving our sanity.”
“That’s what I do,” Sam says, giving her a meaningful grin. It’s the kind of light, casual flirting that Bucky used to understand. “Always happy to help out anyway I can.”
“Oh, I bet you are,” Darcy volleys back. “Ready to lend a hand, huh?”
“You know it.” Sam arches an eyebrow. “Two, in fact. Are you asking?”
“Nah. I’m pretty good with my own hands, thanks.” Darcy gives him a dirty grin and turns, pulling on Foster’s arm.
And almost walks right into Bucky.
She looks right up at him. Her eyes widen.
Then she gives him a blatant up-and-down. Bucky is still paralyzed. He stands there like a dope as Darcy finishes her head-to-toe sweep and turns to Foster.
“Niiiiice,” she says to the other woman. She sounds appreciative.
“Darcy!”
“What? Some of us don’t have Norse gods knocking our boots, Janey. Gotta get my eye candy somewhere.”
“I apologize for my assistant,” Dr. Foster says hurriedly. “We’re going now!”
The two women hurry out into the hallway. Sam chuckles and turns back to the fridge, digging for the beers, but Bucky’s enhanced hearing carries the women’s voices from down the hall.
“Is it a universal law that all Avengers have to be stone-cold hotties or what?”
“I don’t think anyone’s done any work on that subject, no.”
“Har har. This place is messing with my hormones.”
“Please don’t sexually harass the superheroes.”
“I’m not harassing anyone! I just never see that guy around, so the hotness was a shock. I’d totally thank him for his service, if you know what I mean.”
The voices fade. Another one takes their place.
“So how long has that been going on?”
Bucky jumps. Sam is standing next to him, holding out a beer, a bemused look on his face.
“Dunno what you mean,” Bucky rasps. He takes the beer.
“Sure. Darcy Lewis and Jane Foster run into the room, and you make a face like a stunned catfish and freeze. I gotta say, if this is the legendary ladies’ man Steve told me about …”
“Cram it up your ass,” Bucky snaps. He tries to twist the cap off his beer, but he grips too hard and the glass shatters in his hands. “Goddammit.”
Sam flinches a little, but he just grabs a dish towel and helps Bucky mop up the mess. “Yeah, sure, you dunno what I mean,” he says pointedly.
“Shut up.”
“Just tell me it’s not Foster. I don’t want to have to scrape you off the floor after Thor makes mincemeat out of you.”
“It’s not Foster,” Bucky growls.
“So it’s Lewis?”
Fuck this whole fucking conversation. Bucky drops the last of the glass in the garbage and stalks out of the kitchen. He has to think.
* * *
Two days later, he comes to a painful decision.
He’s spent a lot of time alone, just trying to sort his mind out. Is he being stupid? Yes. Is he being cautious? Also yes. Is he being selfish? Possibly.
The facts in evidence say that it’s a mess. He’d be happy to let the match go unacknowledged and save both himself and his soulmate from a connection that can only cause pain. Sure, she can flirt with superheroes in the kitchen, but linking herself to the Winter Soldier would make her a target—for his enemies, for the government, and for the Soldier himself when the programming inevitably kicks in.
But now Sam knows something. Not the soulmate connection, but something. And what Sam knows, Steve knows.
Steve. Fuck. The thought makes Bucky’s chest ache.
Steve always wanted more family. It was just him and his mother and the ghost of a father who died before he was born. When Bucky came along, Steve latched onto him as a brother—and Bucky had reciprocated. After all, he was the only son in a house full of daughters, and he’d wanted a brother too.
"Well, if she’s my soulmate, she’s gotta say sorry.”
“The words already say she won’t. She’s gonna be just as bad as you are.”
And they’d laughed. Damn, they couldn’t wait to meet her.
Broken as he is, Bucky is all Steve has left of their old world. The only family. Even if Bucky can’t act on his soulmate connection—even if he dies tomorrow—that soulmate is still someone that Steve wanted to meet.
And if Bucky dies … Steve can take care of her.
That thought eases the ache in his chest a little. Yeah. That feels right. His girl’s got spunk, that’s for damn sure, but they’re still in a world of gods and monsters. She deserves to have someone watching her back on days when Thor can’t be there. And when Bucky dies or gets locked up, there’ll be no one better to protect her than his best friend and brother.
So he decides to tell Steve. Before Sam can.
Steve’s easy to track down. Two or three hours in the gym every morning, then a run around the indoor track or a few blocks of New York (takes longer than it ought to because he has to respond to everyone who says hi to him), back to the Tower for coffee and the world’s biggest sandwich (the super-soldier appetite is no joke, Bucky knows), and then a variety of activities depending on the day. He’s even taking an art class by internet, which gives him a chance to do what he loves while being anonymous. Dinner in the Tower cafeteria or on the Avengers’ common level: he’s trying to get weekly team dinners going. Success has been mixed.
It’s three o’clock on a Tuesday, so Steve is doing his art class. Bucky is privately grateful for that: stay of execution for two more brief hours. He sends Steve a text saying he has to ask him about something—not urgent, punk, don’t drop the brush—and goes down to the weight room to work off some nervous energy.
Steve finds him there. The punk’s hands are scrubbed raw: he must’ve given himself a quick scouring to get the charcoal off his fingers before racing down to meet Bucky. At least he was able to make himself stop to wash. Six months ago, he would’ve dropped everything.
“Hey, Buck.” He crosses his arms as Bucky reracks the weight bar and sits up, wiping his face. “What’s up?”
“Hey. Gotta tell you something.”
Bucky's human hand is shaking a little. Leftie, of course, is steady as a rock.
“Steve … I met her. My soulmate’s alive.”
Steve’s breath catches. Bucky looks over to see his best friend’s eyes wide, a smile growing on his face.
“You did?” he exclaims. “Stop the presses! Bucky, that’s amazing!”
Yeah, it’s a big smile all right. Too big. He’s got those big innocent eyes and is practically clapping his hands in glee. Right now, butter would not melt in his mouth.
“You knew,” Bucky says flatly.
“Hey, wait a minute—“
“Can it. You always stank at lying. How’d you know?”
Steve deflates a little.
“Tony told me,” he admits. “We were trying to help you.”
Bucky frowns. His mind is racing. How the hell did Stark know about this? Of course—the words. Stark found them on his arm during the refurbishing. Told Steve about ‘em. But that’s just the fact that the words were there, not that his soulmate was actually alive now.
“What d’you mean?” he says. The words come out harsh. Steve flinches.
“Stark … He damaged the words while he was fixing your arm. Melted them. And one of ‘em came back.” Steve shifts guiltily, trying to meet his eye. It’s not quite working. “That’s how we knew. Miss Potts said we should tell you the lady was alive … On account of how you’d want to know … But when you wanted the words covered up, we knew you weren’t ready for it.” His eyes lit up. “But you’ve already met her! Who is she?”
Bucky’s head aches. “You knew she was alive and didn’t tell me?”
“Buck, you didn’t want to hear about it. You were—you tried to scrape them off a few times.”
“I did?” He doesn’t remember that.
“Yeah. I can show you the security footage. You were walking in your sleep. I called your name, but you were clawing at the star, trying to get at the words. It was the night after we did that antiterror simulation …”
“I believe you. Fuck.” Bucky groans and wipes his good hand across his face. He does recall the star needing a touch-up, but his memory is spotty on the best of days. For all he knew, he’d damaged it during the exercise and didn’t realize it until the next morning.
“Hey. Hey.” Steve puts a hand on his shoulder. The left one. He’s never stopped trying to make Bucky feel better about the damn arm. “Buck. You met her. You met your soulmate.”
“ … Yeah.” Bucky lets out a breath. “I met her.”
“Who is it?” Steve prods.
Bucky considers not telling him, just to be an asshole. He kinda feels like Steve deserves it for keeping the whole “soulmate still alive” business from him. But that won’t solve the actual problem: his soulmate is vulnerable, and she needs Captain America on her side.
“It’s that girl from the lab. Thor’s girl’s assistant. Darcy Lewis.”
Steve’s jaw drops. “The brunette with the … um …?”
“Yeah, the brunette with the ‘um.’” Bucky’s head sags. “She’s really smart, Stevie. She’s gonna have multiple degrees when she’s done. But she’s already been in the middle of two alien invasions—woulda been a third if SHIELD hadn’t sent her and the doc to fuckin’ Norway. And she’s not enhanced. I need you to look out for her.”
Steve frowns at that. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t play dumb, Stevie. That ain’t worked since 1945.”
“I think you mean ‘43?”
“Naw, you were still doing it in ‘45. Trust me.” Bucky groans. “Look. We all know this—“ he waves at the room around them, the luxurious security of Avengers Tower “—isn’t gonna last. Sooner or later, I’m gone. I die, or HYDRA gets me, or the government locks me up … There’s no statute of limitations on murder, Stevie!”
“Bucky—“
“And when I’m gone, if anyone so much as dreams that she’s the Winter Soldier’s soulmate, she’s dead. She’s worse’n dead. They might try to cut her up, find out what makes her linked to me.”
“Come on, Bucky. Even today, they don’t know what makes the soulmate matches.”
“You think that’s gonna stop HYDRA?” Bucky shoots back. He clenches his metal fist. “Sure didn’t stop the Nazis. I guarantee you there’s some new Zola out there, picking at DNA, thinkin’ he can find the soul under a microscope.”
Steve looks grim as he nods. He knows Bucky’s right. Still, he’s squeezing Bucky’s shoulder, trying to reassure him. “We won’t let that happen.”
“Damn right. But when I’m gone—“
“Bucky—“
“Dammit, Steve, let me fuckin’ say it! When I’m gone,” and the words feel like bile in his mouth, “you gotta look out for her. She needs Captain America in her corner. You always said my soulmate was gonna be your sister … She’s gonna need her brother, Stevie.”
There’s silence for a moment. Steve lets the words hang there. Bucky’s breath is coming fast, his heart rabbiting.
Then.
“She’s gonna need her soulmate too,” Steve says.
“She’s not gonna need this mess.”
“You don’t know that.” Steve shakes his shoulder, hard, like he’s resisting the urge to sock Bucky in the jaw. “I remember you daydreaming about who she’d be, hoping to find her. How do you think she’d like it if her soulmate chose to pass her by?”
“But I’m—“
“Yeah. You don’t think she deserves this. But don’t you think she should get to choose?”
Bucky squeezes his eyes shut. “I can’t do that to her.”
“Don’t take her choice away, Bucky.” Steve’s voice is soft. “Tell her. If she doesn’t want it, if she doesn’t want you, we can still protect her. We've got the smartest, most powerful soldiers in the world here. And if she does want you …” He manages a crooked smile. “Well, we’ll know she ain’t as smart as she seems.”
“Fuck you, punk.” The words come out in a choked laugh.
Steve snickers. “Sorry, pal, I’ve got standards.”
They sit on the weight bench together for a while, side-by-side. Bucky is thinking, and Steve is keeping him company. Images flicker through Bucky’s mind: all the things he thought his words meant, and all the girls he thought she’d be. The flapper, the careless kook, the drunk, the enemy civilian, the dying woman, the dead woman.
Mentally, he balls up those old pictures and throws them away. There’s no telling who or what his soulmate really is. Secondhand gossip and speculation can only get him so far. But she is real, and that might be a place to start.
And if she doesn’t want him … She’ll still have Steve in her corner. That part’s a guarantee. When the inevitable happens and Bucky goes, Steve will be there, and the other half of Bucky’s soul will be protected forever.
He doesn’t trust himself. But he trusts Steve Rogers.
He takes a deep breath. He’s got someone to go say hi to.
* * *
Darcy Lewis is born December 23rd, 1987, the first child of a depressed mother and the second child of an alcoholic father who doesn’t bother to show up at the hospital. It’s a rough labor, and Aimee Malden is sobbing when her baby is finally placed in her arms. She forgets to ask about the soulmark for several hours.
When she finally sees her daughter’s mark, Aimee sighs. It’s a sweet, beautiful thing. Exactly the kind of mark she always hoped for. Aimee is a Blank, and the knowledge has eaten at her for her entire life. Knowing that her daughter has someone out there for her, someone who will love her, makes it almost worth it.
So Darcy Lewis grows up in her mother’s trailer knowing she is loved, but also knowing she can’t depend on anyone. Frank Lewis turns up every six months or so to beg for money and break Aimee’s heart all over again. Darcy saves every penny she can from her after-school jobs and wins all the scholarships she can get and is prepared to shank a bitch if it means getting her ass to college and away from the trailer park.
Frank is hit by a car during her freshman year. Aimee is heartbroken. Darcy comforts her mother while inwardly singing Nananana, nananana, hey hey, goodbye!
Because there’s another secret she’s carrying. Sure, her soulmark is great. Beautiful, even.
When it’s there.
Soulmarks gray out when the soulmate dies. Darcy’s never quite reaches that point. But it fades in and out, and has been for as long as she can remember. There are so many months and years where it’s faded, insubstantial, only black around the very edges like someone’s been dripping water into wet ink. The person fate itself decrees will be hers is likely to vanish before she ever meets them.
Just after the Convergence, it turns black and stays that way. But by that time, Darcy is over it. She’s nearly gotten killed by aliens twice now, and everything she knows has been turned upside-down and inside-out. Space bridges. Norse myths. Now terrorists are blowing up DC? Must be a day that ends in Y. She can’t plan for a soulmate when she doesn’t even know if the world is gonna be here in a couple of years, for the love of Myuh-myuh!
So she works hard and supports Jane and dives into astrophysics because it’s confusing as hell but she’s already got a pretty good grounding (heh. Electricity joke) in the topic after helping Jane and Erik analyze all those waveforms. And when they move to Avengers Tower, she’s thrilled as hell to hang with Thor and occasionally ogle the eye candy. She’s human, OK?
She doesn’t wonder about her soulmate much. She can't. Her soulmate has always been a question mark, a black hole in the universe of her future. Something unknown and possibly undetectable until you’re close to it. If she thinks too much about it, she’ll break her own heart. And she’s got enough nightmares already, thanks.
One morning in early October, Darcy is alphabetizing another heap of files in the chaos of the lab, listening to the Muppet Treasure Island soundtrack and silently cursing Erik’s janky-ass handwriting. Filing days are always a horrible mess of dust and paper cuts, so she’s wearing her oldest, holiest jeans and a Land of Enchantment t-shirt that still has an uneven hem from where she cut away the burned spot.
Then the double doors swing open to reveal the hottest piece of assassin (heh. Also, sorry, Natasha) in the Tower. He’s wearing clean clothes and his hair has been combed and tied back, which reveals some seriously unfair cheekbone structure. He looks pale—paler than usual—and seems spooked. Captain America is right behind him, giving him an encouraging little shove.
Well, the last time he was in here, he had an arm malfunction and dropped like a housing-based retirement portfolio. He’s probably got lab trauma. Darcy plants one hand on her hip and gives him a big smile, because he’s hot and a little broken and she’s always got time for good people who’ve gone through hell.
Captain America gives him another shove. It looks for all the world like a bro hyping up his best friend at a junior high dance. Darcy stifles a giggle as Bucky Barnes gingerly moves towards her.
“Well, hey there,” she says, grinning up at him. “You looking for me, soldier?”
Barnes manages to open his mouth. His voice is low and raspy, sending a flicker of warmth over her skin.
“Sweetheart,” he says, “I’ve been looking for you all my life.”
The warmth turns to a tingling burn. Darcy gasps and yanks on the collar of her shirt. Barnes flinches back as she pulls down the loose fabric, exposing the black words inked on her right shoulder. Words slowly turning golden.
“Oh my Thor,” she says faintly. “You’re alive.”
Barnes looks alarmed. “Um … Yes.”
“You’re alive!”
Barnes barely has a chance to flinch before Darcy is on him. She wraps her arms around his waist, squeezing hard. “You’re alive!” she repeats. “Holy shit, I thought you were a cancer patient or an Asgardian deadbeat or something! I totally gave up on ever seeing you! Hey! Jane!”
On the other side of the lab, Jane’s head pops up. “What is it?” she calls. Her eyes widen a little when she sees Bucky. “Darce, what—“
“Soulmate!” Darcy hollers, pointing one hand at Bucky. “Soulmate! Janey, I’ve got my own super-strong badass! Thor’s not gonna have to babysit me in the field any more!”
Behind the shellshocked Bucky, Captain America is—to put it delicately—laughing his ass off. Darcy abruptly remembers that she’s hugging a hundred-year-old super-soldier and that consent is a thing, and she quickly lets go of him.
“Sorry about that,” she says. “I, uh, I wasn’t planning on this today. And I’m wearing my fugliest clothes. Hi. I’m Darcy Lewis.”
“I know,” he says. Mmm, that voice. “I’m Bucky Barnes.”
“I know.” She grins up at him. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
“I can’t believe you’re … you.” He gently touches the hand that’s still resting on his ribs. “Are you all right with … with this? With me?”
“Well … I mean, there’s some stuff we’re gonna have to figure out. Like how OK you are with touch. And the fact that I have a super-protective thunder god bro who thinks I have honor to protect. But you’re alive and you’re here.” She flexes the hand under his, and he tightens his fingers on hers. “I didn’t expect you to ever show up. This is winning the soulmate lottery for sure.”
“You mean that?” His voice is soft.
“Hell yeah. After nearly getting blown up by aliens, I don’t have any energy for lying about shit. Are you gonna be OK with me? I’m sorta, uh, not traditional.”
He huffs out a laugh. His free hand, the metal hand, reaches up to gently push her skewed glasses back up her nose. The touch of titanium is somehow feather-light.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” he says. “Spent my whole life wondering who you were gonna be. Wouldn’t change a thing now.”
In the background, Darcy can hear Jane introducing herself to Captain America. (“Hi. It looks like your best friend is my best friend’s soulmate, so you’ll probably be spending a lot of time here. How are you at setting up telescopes?”) Cap is saying something, but Darcy is looking at her soulmate, and the rest of the world doesn’t matter right now.
Sure, there’s gonna be shit to figure out. He’s kinda broken in the head, and she’s carrying a taser that’s extremely illegal in this state. But neither of them figured they’d actually find their other halves. Neither of them thought they’d have a chance to make a life together.
They can worry about the details later.