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Asleep.
You have been asleep.
But what is it like to sleep? You have forgotten. Or you think you have forgotten. Sleep, to you, means ice, and that is not really sleep.
Everybody is gone. The bunker is empty.
What do you do?
You get away. Strip off the combat gear: kevlar vest, tac belt. Down to the regulation black undershirt, dark pants, and boots. Inconspicuous. You take a backpack; nothing else. In it you store your knives, a gun.
Pause.
Two guns, to be safe.
You leave without looking back.
Downtown there are shops: a convenience store, a clothing store. You steal food and clothes. Before you leave, you grab a notebook and a pack of pens.
Your shoulder still aches from where you had to set it. Behind your eyes your brain buzzes, static flickering. There are no shocks to shut it off, no words to switch you over. You must deal with it: and with this pain comes the first faint tendrils of memory. Like smoke, shifting aimlessly around in your head. Not quite solid yet but beginning to grow discernible features. And it scares you.
The mission had said a name. Bucky. The mission’s name was Steven Grant Rogers, so it wasn’t his. He said it was—yours? But you are not this Bucky. They call you the Asset, and the article “the” in front indicates that you are an item. You aren’t anyone. Your existence has no beginning, though you are sure it nearly had an end. Captain America was supposed to be your last. You know what happens after a weapon’s last mission.
In a dirty one-person bathroom at a truck stop you change. You stuff your other clothes into your bag and look in the mirror. You do not know who stares back, heavy-lidded and tired-looking, long matted hair and the dark shadows of a healing bruise on his cheek.
Your eyes dart around, and you take one look at the door before looking back into the grimy mirror. You tuck your hair behind your ear, try to look anything other than the empty way you feel inside. You say, “Bucky,” and it doesn't sound familiar. Doesn’t taste familiar. You say, “My name is Bucky,” and it still feels wrong, but this particular series of words in this order stirs up something. It cannot be placed, but it is new all the same.
Maybe you are Bucky. Maybe Bucky is you.
Can you be both?
You do not know.
Before you leave you break the mirror with your cybernetic hand, and the gentle tinkling of broken glass follows you as you shut the door.
——
The memorial at the exhibit bears your face.
How? You ask yourself this, hands shoved into your jacket pockets. You were supposed to have no beginning. Who are you, really?
People walk by. You stand still. They seem to not care quite as much about the man who was Captain America’s best friend. No one asks you to move or gets close to you. So you read, over and over, James Buchanan Barnes. You read his life, his story, and it all feels so achingly familiar. Like a fish hook in your gut, yanking hard and pulling. Like the far-away, sepia feeling of nostalgia. You see James Buchanan Barnes and you get flashes of city streets and a family, mother and father and sisters. You have to look away to fight down the panic clawing painfully at your heart and lungs.
And it is, as you stare, the thing that begins to turn the cogs in your head.
This man—you?—was born in 1917 in Brooklyn, New York. He—you?—was a sergeant in the US military and the right-hand man of Steven Grant Rogers—Mission: Captain America.
As you read you can feel your jaw set. Your nostrils flare. Something, and it feels like the bright impulse blaze of anger, switches on inside you. He—you?—fell from a mountain. The Russians found him—you?—and kept him—you?—alive. Took a life—family, friends—and melted it down and poured it into a mold for a weapon.
This is not on the exhibit, but you know it, somehow, as sure as you know breathing. There was a mountain. Icy, whistling wind. The feeling of your stomach dropping out from under you. Fear, overwhelming. A hand reaching out and a futile prayer to a God you weren’t sure you believed in anymore—
You had assumed back when there were routine wipes that this was something from a previous mission. Many of your earlier missions—from what you could remember—took place in snow. Now the first seed of questioning takes root and begins to sprout.
This man was a hero. You are—
You can change the course of history, Asset. You’re going to do so many great things for us.
You begin to tremble. They had told you, so many times, that you were doing good. That you were making the world a better place. And you had believed them, because you had nothing else left to believe. They had called you a hero. You had made them happy and that was all you ever wanted to do: please people. Comply.
“Я готов отвечать,” you whisper. You shake more.
You are a set of words. Your entire existence, narrowed down to that.
It is a terrible feeling. You wrap your arms around yourself to try and stave it off, but it does not work. It eats at you, making you feel hollow inside, scooped out and weak.
You leave the museum in a rush, falling to your knees on a dirty bathroom floor in front of a toilet as sour bile rises up your throat. In your head you can hear longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak—
——
The red star on your arm.
You hate it.
——
You think you might hate yourself more.
——
You steal food. You steal shelter.
You think about Captain America.
In your notebook is a pamphlet you had stolen from the exhibit. You open to this page enough that you have inserted a bookmark, a small red ribbon. The exhibit had told you everything you needed to know about him, but it did not give you the details running through your mind as you flip open the book:
The chalky coolness of his hand in yours.
The cool press of a damp cloth in your hands. The bright red of blood on pale skin. The dark splotches of bruises.
Knowing that he fights dirty, sharp elbows and spitfire temper. Your nose swollen, blood dripping from it, tears in your eyes not from the pain but from the ache. The anger dissipating from his face, smoothed over with shock and concern as he asked if you were all right, geez, I’m so stupid, Buck, I’m sorry—
The heated anticipation of lying reposed, nude, as those quick hands scratched charcoal over paper.
Wondering if love felt like this—
You think about Steve Rogers.
In the book you write down everything you remembered besides what rose to the surface when you looked at the pamphlet. By now the shadows in the room are stretching long and your stomach is hollow.
You carefully smooth the bookmark into its place and close the book. You stand and hide it high up on the refrigerator, under chocolate bars. Even though your stomach growls you do not take one. Instead, you crawl into your sleeping bag. You do not change.
It is still light outside when you fall into a fitful rest.
——
You wake, drenched in cold sweat, in the dark. You think you have been screaming. If you hadn't been, you would be surprised: your dreams were filled with blood. Each and every one of them. You remember them all, and you wish you hadn’t.
You sit up, drawing your knees up to your chest. Your fingers, metal and flesh alike, find purchase in your hair and pull. The pain grounds you. Order through pain, Soldat.
Breath stutters in and out through your nose, harsh. Uneven. Your heart beats fast, like a rabbit’s. Like the hearts of those you killed.
You yearn for the quiet darkness of cryosleep; there you did not dream.
——
Funny thing is, at least you like Starbucks.
——
You drift through the world like a ghost: fitting, for the person whose face you’re wearing, whose name you can’t give yourself yet. Jacket on, glove on. Hat pulled low. Just another New Yorker, lost in the crowds.
Things are different. Different from then, from the time you ran away and came here even though you didn’t know why, just that this place had a pull you couldn’t resist. Calling you home–though you did not know what home meant, then.
Do you know what home means now? You are a nomad. Nameless, wandering from borough to borough, aimlessly traversing the concrete. You know that then there weren’t as many shops. The roads weren’t as nice. Neither were the neighborhoods. In the summer the stink from the trash rose, simmering, from the alleyways. Kids played stickball in the street. Now cars honk. People yell. There are CVS and Walgreens on every corner instead of Mr. McDonough’s pharmacy down the block, where you would stand at the counter and beg when Steve–
Your gloved hand presses to your temple, where an ache has begun to build. You don’t notice the light turn green and people push past you, just another New Yorker lost in the crowd. The touch startles you; you do not touch, have not been touched, since you ran away. Could you say that you ran away this time, when there wasn’t anything to run away from? You do not know.
There are so many people in this world. Six billion. Seven billion. Too many to count. And you have killed so many of them. Cut off their lives in the middle of the page, the chapter, the sentence. And yet your story is still writing itself. You still have chapters left and they do not and you wonder why.
You stumble upon an empty bottle of spray paint in an alley, hastily left after half-finished graffiti. After looking at it for a long moment, breath puffing up around you, you stoop to pick it up. Its weight shifts in your hand.
When you leave, underneath don’t compromise yourself—you are all that you have is now I don’t deserve to be alive.
——
As the leaves change and the weather grows colder you begin your hunt for abandoned HYDRA bunkers. You go to Ljubljana and Bratislava and Tallinn. Come away covered in soot and rubble and with a grim sort of satisfaction purring like a cat in your chest.
You end up in Bucharest. It is quiet, quaint. The citizens are nice and do not question you. Their language is beautiful; you like how it feels on your tongue, how it sounds in your ears.
You find a small apartment and paper the windows with old newspaper to block out the light. You barter with the local vendors for fruit and milk and eggs. They smile at you. After a few months, you begin to smile back. Exchange pleasantries: Cum te simţi azi? and Vreme frumoasă.
You start to relax into your skin. You think, maybe it will be okay. Maybe you can find a new beginning here. Humans always want new beginnings. And you are human: you tell yourself that every morning in the mirror.
With your metal hand you pry up the floorboards. Underneath, in the dusty darkness, you stash your backpack, filled with extra guns and knives, food and notebooks. You do not have much. You do not need much. But you need this.
You put the floorboards back, hoping you don’t have to use it.
——
Steve’s hands are in yours. He is small, sickly, but his hands have always been big. Somehow, without even looking down, you know that you are nude and that he is, too. The scene has the skewed, sloping quality of unreality; it is probably not real. Somewhere in the back of your mind you know it is, instead, a memory.
Steve is crying. You do not like it when he cries, and you say so: “Aw, doll, don't cry. You know I hate it when you cry.”
“You can’t leave me, Buck,” Steve says. Where his hands clutch yours they tremble. “You can’t—what am I gonna do without you?”
“Be the most eligible bachelor in the state of New York?” you joke. It falls flat because you know Steve is just as hung up on you as you are on him. “Hey,” you add, letting go of Steve’s hands to frame his face. He looks at you, and you notice how his eyes shine. How blue they are. How long his lashes are and how they sweep his cheekbones when he blinks. God, but he is beautiful. You say, “I’m coming back home, you hear? Ain’t nothin’ gonna happen to me over there that I can’t shake off.”
But before Steve can reply the scene shifts, shimmers, and suddenly there is distance between you two and Steve is bigger. He is crying again and he is saying, “You left me, Bucky,” over and over. You want to scream. You cover your ears with your hands to try and block it out but it doesn't stop.
You left me, Bucky.
You lied to me.
How could you do that?
You reach out and Steve reaches out. Then it is cold and wind is whistling around you. You feel the sting of it on your skin, all the way down to your bones. Steve is still repeating himself: you lied you lied you lied you lied you—
——
—wake.
You are cold.
Outside snow begins to paper the streets. It shines gold in the yellow of the streetlamps. Dawn is still hours away, but you cannot fall back asleep, not with that fresh in your mind. Your sleeping bag rustles as you slip out of it and pad quietly across your tiny apartment.
You still have your refrigerator with its cache of candy bars on top. Under them still is your book, though it is more worn now, weathered from your curious fingertips. There are small dents from your metal hand, from when you get frustrated. There are very few blank pages left.
You take it down, write the dream in it. Sitting at your table you stare a long time at the pamphlet of Captain America, until the words and the picture blur and a headache begins to build behind your eyes.
You did so much bad, but you do not do that anymore. That is not you. You can’t change the arm, or your past, but you can learn from it. Steve would be proud, you think.
——
It is not a conscious decision to leave for the States again. It just happens. Instinctive. Like birds migrating for the season. Drawn from a deep-rooted biological urge.
You wonder if Steve is your biological urge. Where he goes, you must follow. It is in your bones, your blood. You feel it there.
So why, then, did he not fall, too?
——
In Bucharest, underneath warped floorboards, lies a dusty backpack.
——
Steve still lives in D.C., but in a different building from before. A little brownstone away from the noise of politics and the ghosts of old SHIELD members. You are almost certain that very few people know of its location. Or if they do, they know better than to show up unannounced.
Every morning he leaves his apartment at six dressed in exercise clothes. He comes back two hours later. There is little defection from this routine, though often you will see the dark-skinned man from before, the man with the wings, tagging along behind Steve.
You watch. Most days, you are there from dawn until dusk, when Steve closes the curtains. Why? You are not sure. Maybe it is because you miss him. But can you miss what you have not had? Can you ache from it?
Maybe you just ache for normalcy. If Steve hadn’t wanted to be on the front lines, if HYDRA hadn't gotten a hold of you, maybe you would be in a retirement home in Brooklyn. Maybe you would be dead. Either way, you both would have lived normal lives.
You wouldn't be on a rooftop and you wouldn’t watch Steve’s face fall, smile disappearing every time he turns his back after saying goodbye.
And you wouldn’t know that this, all of this, is because of you.
Two falls have passed. You want to believe that you aren't the Soviet ghost from before, but the truth is that you don't know how to be anyone else.
——
Jesus’s blood, ruby red and almost glistening, on towering statues. The contortion of his stone-carved face, pain and anguish and, faint, resignation and forgiveness. You fight the urge to cross yourself when the heavy doors close behind you.
You were not born Catholic, but Steve was, and you would go with him and Sarah every once in awhile when you were kids, just to experience Mass. There was always something heavenly, almost unearthly, about Steve kneeling with his hands folded in prayer. Head bowed, voice hushed. You did not know the prayers, but you often mouthed along anyway, to feel included.
You are not sure why you are here. The confessional looms ahead of you, and you want to turn back but you do not. It draws you in, unstoppable.
You enter the booth. Afternoon light filters in, alighting the motes of dust in the air. You watch them until the partition slides up and a wavering, strong old voice says, “What do you need, my child?”
Anxiety balls in an angry pit in your stomach. You do not know how to confess. There is so much to confess. So much you have done. Would God forgive you? You quake under this question.
“Have you come to seek God’s forgiveness?” the priest asks.
Your metal hand catches the light, reflecting it on the dark brown of the wood. The ball in your stomach grows. Why have you come here? It was a lapse in judgment. You are not a thing to be forgiven. You are weather and Old Testament righteousness. Unmoving and unyielding, remorseless in your actions.
Your moment of bravery is over. You stand, unsteady, say, “You wouldn’t believe me.” Rush out onto the street, hat pulled low, thinking, furnace, nine, benign—
——
It is an early fall morning, dew glittering on the grass, your breath white wisps in front of you. The sun has not yet climbed the hill, shining gold fire across the lawn. It highlights the grave markers in stark relief, casting their shadows long along the grass.
You do not know what you are doing here. You are not sure why. But you are surrounded with headstones and the one in front of you, damp from the rain the night before, bears your name. BARNES.
Chiseled in granite, it is there. JAMES B. “BUCKY” BARNES. 107th INFANTRY. WWII. 1917-1944.
That’s it. Simple. According to this stone, you are dead. You died in those mountains. But yet, you are here. Why? you ask yourself. Like every day, you ask yourself why you are alive. What did you do? Why do you deserve this?
No one ever found your body because there wasn't a body to be found. Underneath the ground is an empty casket. You wonder what if would be like if you could climb inside it, close your eyes.
——
Steve listens to old records. They’re always playing as he makes dinner, putters around his little living room. Reads the newspaper. You remember these records. You remember how it felt, Sunday evenings, to put one on and gather Steve in your arms. You remember thinking, this is okay. If this is all we get, records and dancing in our living room with the blinds closed, I’ll take it. As long as it’s with Steve. A little slice of heaven three minutes long.
When Steve puts on those old records, you huddle in your roost and pray, Lord Almighty, Jesus our Savior. The image of Steve, silhouetted in golden sunlight, head bent in supplication and long fingers twined together flashing across your mind, you pray, Just let me go back.
——
Honestly, you are not sure when you began to think of yourself as him again. It just happened.
Home, though. You know what you’ve always thought of as home.
——
Steve strings Christmas lights up in his windows when the sun is still warm, though you are almost certain that it is the man with the wings’s doing, because one morning he showed up at Steve’s doorstep with a brown cardboard box.
It doesn’t matter. For the first time since you began watching, Steve’s smile does not fade when he turns his back, and you watch until long after night has taken hold of the city and Steve has shut the curtains. The lights glow, red-green-blue-yellow, edges haloed out against the night.
You are so lost in thought that the footsteps don’t register—or maybe, probably, she’s just that good.
“Barnes.”
You turn. It is instinct more than a conscious decision to; your body knows the name better than your mind does.
Silhouetted against the orange glow of the city, at the corner of the rooftop, is a woman. You cannot see her face but you know the husk of her voice.
“Seriously, Barnes?” she says. She doesn’t step forward. Your fingers itch by your side, wanting the handle of your knife. Her presence cannot be anything good.
“I shot you,” you say, after a stretch, when she says nothing else. Because you did; you remember that. A bullet right through her side for the target behind her. She hadn't flinched.
“Gave me one hell of a scar,” she says.
You don’t say anything. You can still see it, like it happened yesterday. The bullet entering her side, just above her kidney, exiting through her back in a spray of blood. The target behind her falling in another spray of blood. Blood. So much of it. You feel drowned in it, these days, remembering how much you have shed.
You keep quiet. Your eyes dart to the closed curtains across the street, then back to where she is still standing–the Widow, here, long red hair billowing in the wind.
“Enough with the flighty look,” she says, exasperated. “I won’t tell him you’re here.” Him. Steve. She knows. “Unless you plan on running,” she continues, taking a step forward. “Then I might have to stop you.”
“Why do you care?” you say.
“He’s been a wreck,” the Widow replies. She’s still in the shadows but she steps closer, takes a seat on the ground and crosses her legs smoothly. You edge away slightly, wary. “Ever since D.C.,” she adds, “because of you.”
“I don’t—”
“You were dead,” she says like you didn’t even speak. “He buried you. I don’t think you know what it did to him, to see the face of someone he thought was gone.”
I have, you almost say. In Azzano. On a table in a HYDRA bunker. You don't say anything, though, because you don't think it merits a response. Of course you know.
What comes out comes out fast, a waterfall of words: “They used him to break me. Told me he was dead. That I was alone.”
The Widow flinches, minute. Then she is all composure again. “The Russians did a lot of things. You aren’t alone, James. You don't need to hide on the rooftops anymore. You have us.”
The use of the word “us” has you bristling. There is no us. There never has been. You say this, and the Widow is unfazed.
“Maybe that’s true,” she says. “There have been a whole lot of lies told to everyone. But I wouldn’t lie to you. Not after what we…” And she stops. You hear the thickness of her words. The emotion behind it.
“You really don't remember, do you?” she finally asks, after you listen to a car alarm shrill in the distance. She sounds sad. But all you remember, for now, is the mission.
“I don’t,” you reply. It’s clear that she expected—wanted?—more, but you do not know what else to give her. Your mind is a sieve: little trickles from it. What you can get comes from a lot of exertion.
“Maybe it’s better,” she says quietly, standing up and taking a few steps backward. The wind blows, bringing a nipping chill. You look back over at Steve’s place.
She is gone before you can whisper, “Maybe it is.”
——
Ignorance is so much better than remembering. It is a fact.
Time wears on. You want to tell Steve so much. But even though you know more languages than you ever thought you would, the right words aren’t in any of them. So you settle for the way you know best.
——
Snow has begun to fall before you can gather up what’s left of your courage. The air is thin, the way it gets in the winter, and the trees are bare. You aren’t wearing much more than a jacket, but you aren’t cold.
It is mid afternoon. There aren’t many people on the streets. The sidewalk is filled with footprints in the fine dusting of snow. Yours join them as you stop outside a quaint brownstone, taking each step, one by one.
The door is heavy wood, stained dark brown. Your heart rate increases exponentially, and you take a deep breath.
You raise your flesh hand, slowly, and knock.
It takes a few minutes, each second feeling like an eternity, each second full of you wondering if you should run. Muscles tensed, ready.
It takes a few minutes, a faint scuffle at the door, and then finally he is there, Steve, he is pulling the door open and his eyes are widening and you are saying, small and timid, “Steve?”
And Steve is blinking, eyes misting, and he’s saying, “Oh, Bucky,” like no time at all has passed. Like he’s spent every second of every day expecting this, planning it and waiting. And perhaps he has. “Bucky,” he says again, like he has to make sure it is true.
Steve steps forward, unsure, and you take one step back. An uncertain dance. You keep your left hand in your pocket, clenched into a fist. “Yeah,” you say, and you are surprised at the roughness of your voice.
Artificial warmth floats out from the interior of the house. It smells like coffee. Faint, in the background, is the scratch of a record. Steve is only in a thin tee shirt, but he shows no signs of being affected by the cold. Instead, all of his attention is focused on you. His breathing is labored, uneven. You glance at him. When he blinks, a single tear tracks down his cheek.
You inhale, and it’s shaky. Your eyes sting; you feel them grow wet. Your shoulders slump. Silence stretches on. No one moves.
“Bucky,” Steve repeats, and it shatters the delicate tension thrumming between you.
A single tear falls down your cheek as well, and you say, “I missed you.”
——
You marvel at how kisses can still taste the same, feel the same, seventy years apart.
——
Steve Rogers is your past, present, and future. Who you are starts and ends with him. Who you were died in the Alps; who Steve was died there, too. There he learned that some lessons must be paid in blood. That not all bullies would run, tails between their legs, after a few good punches. There he learned the driving power of revenge.
You were wrong, before. Your existence does have a beginning. It began in 1917, in Brooklyn, New York. But you never really started living until you met Steve Rogers on a hot September day in 1926.