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There is a man on the bridge.
"Bucky?"
There is a man on the bridge that speaks to him as though he's known him for a thousand years. A man that looks at him with soft eyes, and soft lips, and speaks with a soft whisper that echoes far louder than the constant throb in his head.
The Winter Soldier does not recognize the name. But the man's face is familiar, like a pinpoint on a map whose borders are blurred, the names smudged with black ink. The thought echoes there, like the whisper, and for a moment, the Winter Soldier pauses the attack to think. It is a sign of weakness on his behalf, he knows. Soldiers do not think. They obey.
"Who the hell is Bucky?" he asks, because he cannot help it. There is a man on the bridge who looks at him as though he knows, looks at him as though the Winter Soldier is something other than a weapon, and the Winter Soldier feels a yearning in him that he has never felt before.
But the moment is short. There is a breaching pistol in his right hand, and in his left, a steel knife. He has a mission to complete.
The man does not move even as he raises the weapon. He stands there like a lost child, despondent and confused, not even registering the 61 aimed at his head. The Winter Soldier has seen many cry at gunpoint, and has ended every single one without a blink— but he does not know why he stills when this man does.
"Watch out!"
The weapon is kicked out of his hand. A man with silver wings lands before him. He should not have hesitated. He picks up the 61 and aims at Steve's head —Steve? Who is Steve? How does the Winter Soldier know this name?— but before he has the chance to fire, the thick stench of ammunition has filled his lungs and risen bile to his throat. The red woman has launched a grenade.
It is quick work to find the nearest plug to the sewers, and even quicker to reach the nearest checkpoint. The men there recoil when they see him. They are suits, tactless and clumsy, and they bark orders at him while the soldiers hose him down. One of the suits is speaking to someone on the phone. "He's a goddamn mess. TAC team's cleaning the shit off of him as we speak, but that's not the only problem. He's got a fried arm and a bad attitude. He's refusing to talk. He's missing a mask. I think he remembered something. We might have to wipe him."
The Winter Soldier wants to crush the man's skull to make him quiet, so that he can hear the name rattling about in his head.
'Bucky?'
No. That cannot be it. The Winter Soldier has no name.
—
"But I knew him."
He is twelve years old.
It is a day like any other on the school playground, and he has a brown bag of treats, freshly baked by the Sisters, that he refuses to share with the other boys. He is bigger than most there, so they do not pick on him like they do with the smaller ones.
'Hey, give it back!'
There is a scuffle by the swings. A boy made of nothing but skin and bones is crumpled on the ground, and over him, a group of fat, angry children are kicking away at his weak frame. The Winter Soldier sighs and puts his bag of treats away. He is just about to leap to the boy's rescue when one of the fat children lets out a sudden yelp of pain.
He watches in awe as the boy with the broken teeth kicks in return, finding knees and heads and weak spots that send the greedy children falling back, and for a moment, as the crowd clears, the Winter Soldier sees a brown bag, much like his own, clutched tight against the boy's thin chest. The fat children leave him be. He may be small, but he is vicious and strong and all the things a little boy like him should not be, and he fends them off like the brown bag is not a bag at all, but a satchel filled with treasure.
The Winter Soldier offers a hand to the boy. 'That was a real brave thing you did back there,' he says, in a voice that sounds too gentle to be his. 'What's your name?'
'Steve,' the boy groans as he lets himself be hoisted up. He weighs as much as a feather pillow. The Winter Soldier watches him dust off his knees and take a seat on one of the swings, and reach into that brown paper bag to pull out a piece of stale bread and half an apple. Something sickening curls at the pit of his stomach. For some reason, he feels as though he must protect this boy, protect his meager bones and his meager lunch for as long as he lives. 'What's yours?'
'Bucky.'
"Wipe him."
His pulse quickens. The mouthguard tastes bitter on his tongue. There was a man on a bridge, and a boy on the playground, and they both knew his name. The memories come rushing back, but the blue light chases them away, replaces them with things a soldier must never forget. His back arches as the current flows through. The mouthguard breaks.
—
He is the Winter Soldier. He is the Ghost of Volgograd, the Black Death. He cannot be what the man had called him.
But while in cryostasis, he hears things. They think he is unaware, his ears deaf to the world, but while his body is unconscious, his mind is alert, and he hears the things they speak of him when they think he cannot.
"Steve Rogers is a problem that needs to be eliminated. Now, our hitman has been compromised. You put him back on the mission, who's to say he's not gonna zero back and turn on us? Find someone else to do the job or you got another thing coming."
"Someone else? Pray tell, general, who would you have me choose? Rogers took down a twenty-man team in a crammed elevator, jumped thirty stories before destroying a quinjet with his bare hands, and survived a missile strike. He even broke your favorite toy. Do you think that any other man is capable of taking him down? Barnes isn't compromised. We wiped him. He's a clean slate. We make him take the mission again, we make him take Rogers out, and we're good to go. And that's the end of it."
Barnes. Is Bucky not his name, then? The Winter Soldier wants to break out of the chamber and throttle the two men for answers. Bucky. Barnes. The names do not feel like they belong to him. He is the Winter Soldier, the Ghost of Volgograd, the Black Death—
'James Buchanan Barnes. But my friends call me Bucky. That there is Steve. He's a little shy around girls, I know, but he's a good kid, smart. He's studying art, believe it or not. He's a real sensitive fella. We were just about to go see that new Stark Expo. You ladies wanna join us?'
The Winter Soldier convulses so violently that the ice around his fingers cracks. He has never moved in cryostasis before. A sudden fear washes over him, enters his blood and wakes the frozen cells, and this is wrong, this is all wrong. The Winter Soldier does not know fear. The Winter Soldier stays pliant in his tomb, waiting, until the men in the white coats wake him up.
Someone notices.
"These readings can't be correct. His pulse shouldn't be this fast when he's on ice. There must be something wrong with the chamber."
"Forget about the chamber, it's a waste of time. Get him out of there. He has a mission to complete."
—
"What is your name, soldier?"
"I have no name."
"What is your mission?"
"Protect the motherboard. Eliminate Captain Rogers."
They give him new weapons. They give him knives and a rifle, and strap two pistols on each of his thighs, but they do not give him a mask. He does not ask why. They are sending him to kill the man on the bridge, the boy on the playground, and the mask is useless when he already knows the Winter Soldier's face.
He cannot fail this time. There is no room for error in HYDRA, no room for forgiveness. They deploy him on one of the Insight Helicarriers and order him to kill anyone on site, and so he does. Men surrender but his orders are clear. Their screams do not register. Bullet after bullet until the deck is wiped clean and he hijacks a quinjet to move on to the next target. The Winter Soldier finds it easy to destroy without the slightest provocation. He finds it easy to kill, easy to rip the wings off the Falcon's back and send him falling, but he does not find it easy to complete his final order.
"I'm with you 'til the end of the line."
The metal fist never comes down. The Winter Soldier stares at the man, stares at his sad blue eyes behind the swollen lids, stares at the deep cut on his cheek, on his lower lip, as he struggles to choke out the words.
They are familiar. He is twenty years old, wearing the suit his father gave him, and the boy is staring at him with those same sad blue eyes. His mother has died of tuberculosis. He is alone in the world, and the Winter Soldier offers him a place to stay.
'Thanks, Buck. But I can get by on my own.'
The boy is stubborn and foolish, and full of misplaced pride. He does not know what it costs the Winter Soldier to see him like this, to have him refuse his offer like it is not the first act of selfless generosity that he has ever committed in all his life. If there is a word to describe what this boy inspires, the Winter Soldier might even try to call it love.
'The thing is,' he whispers, —and how is his voice so soft?—, 'You don't have to.'
He remembers the smile on the boy's mouth as he put a hand on his shoulder. He remembers that look of pleasant resignation smoothing the lines around his eyes, unknitting the thick brows of his thin face, curling the edges of his lips. He remembers the feel of his pulse beneath the jacket, the same way he feels it now, even through the uniform, heavy and strong.
The Winter Soldier wants to reach out and brush his fingers against that pale throat. Feel his pulse jump. The Winter Soldier wants— and this is an error in itself, because the Winter Soldier has no needs or desires, no wants. He has weapons, and orders, and a metal fist poised over the man's head that refuses to come down.
The floor breaks. He hangs onto the beam by sheer reflex alone. Watches the man fall and sink and disappear. His flesh hand itches for contact.
In the end, he convinces himself that he has slipped. The metal arm has malfunctioned somehow, the hydraulics have failed, and that is why he falls into the water after him and chases him to the depths. Besides, the mission has failed. HYDRA is finished, and the Winter Soldier has no orders left to follow. Does it mean that he is free? It is the last thought that plagues him as he pulls the man to shore and nonchalantly drops him aside.
It would be easy, he thinks, to leave him lying on his back and watch him choke. But it is easier said than done. He covers the man's mouth with his own and breathes life into him. When the man opens his eyes, he is already gone.
—
Bucky Barnes died on the Alpine mountains, at the base of the Mont Blanc. The ruthless landscape took his life and his arm, and HYDRA took the rest, and left behind a hollow man with limbs he cannot call his own.
He stares at the film for hours. There is a man on the screen that wears his face. But he is not the Winter Soldier. He has short brown hair and bright eyes, is relatively smaller than the Winter Soldier, and he is smiling. He is smiling like the world holds no secrets, no evils. Like the man standing tall beside him is that very world. They are both smiling. It puts a knot in the Winter Soldier's stomach.
What difference does it make that he remembers? He can no longer call himself the same man. There is no purpose to these memories, other than pain, and for the first time in his life, the Winter Soldier finds himself wishing he could forget.
Bucky Barnes died on the Alpine mountains, at the base of the Mont Blanc. And that is where the Winter Soldier was born.
—
"It's alright, Buck. I'm not here on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s orders. I just want to talk."
The man has been searching for him for a long time, and now he has found him, holed up in the last HYDRA safe house left unturned in this corner of the earth. A year has passed since his last mission. It is winter, the snow deep outside his door. They are deep in the mountains. It feels like they are picking up where they last left off, all those decades ago.
"Can I come in?" the man asks.
"American—"
"Please. Call me Steve."
The Winter Soldier lets out a breath. He studies the man's face like he studies a map, cold and calculated. Studies the dark circles around the man's eyes, the downward slope of his lips. He reminds the Winter Soldier of a time long gone, when he was just a scrawny boy in clothes too big for him. In this memory, he is denied the right to go to war for the second time, and Bucky —no, not Bucky, the Winter Soldier— takes him in his arms and shushes him.
'You're a dumb punk, Rogers,' he says. He ignores the soft sounds the boy makes. There is a tremor in the boy's shoulders, and a wet spot on the Winter Soldier's brand new cotton shirt, and the Winter Soldier tightens his arms around him. 'You really wanna get yourself killed that bad?'
'It's not like that, I—' the boy violently coughs. The tremor worsens. He has to rush the boy back home, stick a rusty thermometer in his mouth and make him eat the Winter Soldier's share of canned beef and soup until the fever subsides. Bucky eats nothing but bread for a week just for Steve's sake.
"Bucky?"
Bucky gulps —no, not Bucky, the Winter Soldier, he repeats over and over again— and growls in a rough voice, "You shouldn't have come here. There's a blizzard on its way."
He does not expect the man to fall to his knees by the door.
"American."
"Please."
The whimper sends a shiver through him. It is strange, he thinks, how the Winter Soldier was the one taken apart in Zola's lab, yet this man behaves as though he was broken instead. A super-soldier is meant to have more strength than this. The Winter Soldier does not understand. The man has the power of a hundred other men, but acts like he is small again, sans serum, and his world depends on Bucky's canned beef and soup, his thermometer, his extra set of blankets.
"Get up," he rasps. "Get up. This is pathetic. What kind of soldier are you, to fall so easily?"
The man lets out a pained laugh. There is spit shining on his lips where he has bitten into, and the Winter Soldier wants to hit him, wants to watch the blood rise to the surface and paint everything red. He does not, under any circumstance, want to kiss the frown away from the man's mouth.
"Sam says I got a really bad case of PTSD that I've ignored for too long." He lets his back meet the door, draws his knees up to his chest. He is no longer a man, but a child, curled up on the pavement in a back alley, waiting for Bucky to pick him up and dust him off after he's done fighting away the bullies. "I don't expect you to know what that is. We didn't have it during the war, and it's not like HYDRA teaches you about stuff like that."
"I know what it is."
"Then you know you have it, too."
The man is stubborn and foolish, and full of misplaced pride. Little has changed, it seems. The Winter Soldier pulls him to his feet by the lapels of his coat and slams him against the door. But he cannot go further. This is the man who gave him back his memories, and though the Winter Soldier hates him for it, he knows he has a debt to pay the man for this new freedom.
He lets go. Thankfully, the man does not fall to his knees again.
—
He leaves for Slovenia the next morning. The blizzard will come by nightfall, but if he is quick, he can make it to the nearest village before then. It is barely five. The man is asleep on the floor. In the back of his mind, a voice that doesn't quite belong to the Winter Soldier begs him to stay, to prove to Steve that Bucky isn't the jerk everyone in town thinks he is.
The thought rattles him. It doesn't belong there. It belongs in the past, where there is no Winter Soldier, no Captain America, and the only snow is in an ice-cream cone somewhere on Coney Island.
He stuffs ten tins of spam in his duffel bag, a bag of rice, two guns and two grenades. He is running low on bullets. It's impossible, but he feels like the metal arm is rusting, like it's slowly coming apart. He hears the hydraulics whirring as he quietly shuts the door and leaves everything behind.
"Don't you dare, Buck, don't you goddamn dare—"
The man is on him before he even has the chance to let go of the handle. Was he awake all along? Rough hands twist in the fur of his jacket. It is hard work to grapple in this deep snow, but the Winter Soldier has the upper hand. He knows the landscape, it is where he was formed, and in a matter of minutes, the man is beneath him, a gun pressed to his head and a knife to his stomach.
The man's chest heaves. "Natasha said this would happen," he rasps. There is blood on his lips again. "Said that one day I'd wake up and you wouldn't be there, and I'd have to start all over again. Well, it ain't happening, pal."
"Stubborn punk," Bucky spits.
It takes a while to realize what he has said, how foreign the words sound coming from his mouth. But then the man gasps, his bright eyes wide and hopeful, his parted lips shining with blood and spit, and the Winter Soldier recoils.
There is vodka in one of the cabinets. He tosses the weapons aside and goes for the bottle, tries not to flinch as he swallows down half of it in one go. It doesn't change a thing. He can never get drunk. Steve is still sprawled out in the snow in some form of rapture, licking the blood off that swollen pink mouth, and the Winter Soldier suddenly comes to remember a secret that Bucky has tried to bury since the day he went to war.
—
'Where are we going?'
'The future.'
It is 1945. The Winter Soldier is smaller, and the boy on the playground is bigger, and the world seems far away. They are huddled in a tent north of the German border, safe for the moment, but there is a blizzard outside that sends their little world tossing and turning in the wind. The Winter Soldier is not the Winter Soldier yet, and the snow is foreign. He shivers in the dark. He does not know what cold means.
The man on the bridge, the boy on the playground, comes over to his side of the tent and offers his blanket. He says he cannot feel the cold any longer, so the Winter Soldier must not feel ashamed to take it. Beneath the jealousy, the Winter Soldier is thankful that the man finally has a body to match his heart. He smiles and takes the blanket. But the man does not stop there. He brings his body flush against the Winter Soldier's, covers them both with that scratchy blanket and falls asleep so quickly, so easily.
It is effective. The Winter Soldier heats up in seconds, and then boils, and something stirs between his legs that has him twisting away from the man in fear of discovery.
This memory hurts more than most.
"You alright there, Buck? You look a little dizzy."
It is not because of the vodka. Steve stares at him, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth, and the Winter Soldier wants to tell him how his best friend rutted at the corner of their tent that night, how his tongue bled when he bit himself to stifle the noise as he came.
He smiles painfully instead. He smiles the same way he smiled when he told Pierce he remembered, and half-expects the wiper to come down over his head and fry his brains out. Clean slate protocol.
"Go to bed, Steve," he whispers. His voice is still a little rough from disuse, a little low and inaudible. But the man is startled by the sound of his name on the Winter Soldier's lips, and he obeys, sinks back into the little cot in the corner of the room. There is a blizzard outside that sends their little world tossing and turning in the wind. It is all too familiar.
Steve pokes his head out from under the blankets. "But where are you gonna sleep?"
The Winter Soldier says nothing in return. He smiles that painful smile and rests the empty bottle on the counter, his metal hand scraping the glass. He says nothing as he sinks into the cot with Steve. He watches the man's eyes grow wide in his skull, watches that faint blush on his cheeks spread to his neck and his ears, the tips of his fingers.
"Bucky?"
"Yeah, Steve?"
Whatever question the man meant to ask is forgotten. The bright blue eyes with the tired lines stare, the brows slightly raised. There is a question there still, it seems, but the man cannot decide which one it is. Bucky spares him the trouble. "Goodnight," he says, and watches the hope fade from the man's eyes. Perhaps tomorrow. Perhaps never. Neither of them sleeps that night.
Perhaps it would have been much better if they'd left him in cryo.
—
They are eating the last tin of beef when the wind outside suddenly stops howling. It has been two days since the storm began to rage. The ice has fully boxed them in, and there is no hope for them getting out any time soon unless a nearby volcano erupts and melts it all away.
The Winter Soldier hates his newfound sentimentality. Had it not been for his feelings for the man —the man who silently begged him with sad eyes and tugged at heartstrings the Winter Soldier never knew he possessed—, he would be far away from here. He would be settled in Slovenia, somewhere between Maribor and Graz, and then further east until the snow was no more. He would not be here still, hungry and cold.
"I'm calling Natasha," the man says. The cold must be getting to him, too, because he shivers as he pulls the device from his coat. The Winter Soldier will not have it. He reaches for the man's wrist and feels it crack in his metal grasp. The man doesn't seem to notice, nor does he seem to care for the warning look the Winter Soldier gives him. "Buck, in this snow, we're only two hours away from hypothermia. We'll be buried here before sundown. I gotta make that call."
Hypothermia? The Winter Soldier does not know the meaning of the word. He has lived in ice his whole life, has breathed and slept and died in it over and over again.
"Maybe this is where we belong."
"Bucky."
He watches the man jolt to his feet. Watches the bitter rage war on his face, the sadness, the confusion, the disappointment. He watches the man turn his back, like he wants to hide himself, and watches him dial with shaky hands and tense shoulders. The bile rises to his throat. For some strange reason, the Winter Soldier wishes he could take back the words.
"Natasha? Does S.H.I.E.L.D. have any agents stationed in Austria? Well, call in and tell them we need an EC145 and some power shovels ASAP. They're gonna have to dig us out."
—
The red woman is waiting for them at the airport.
They are back on American soil, Slovenia is a fading thought, and the woman gives the man a bag of sweets to share with the Winter Soldier. He knows her face. Is she the one he left for dead by a cliff in Iran? It could not have been her, or she would not be here smiling at him, giving him food, giving her back like he would not put a knife in it at the chance.
"You boys feel like having pizza? There's leftover cake from Sam's birthday, too. If you can call that pile of frosting a cake."
In another world, the Winter Soldier is nineteen. The boy on the playground has spent all his money to buy an apple pie with Bucky's name on it, and Bucky tries his best not to cry as he watches the boy place a single candle at the center of it. 'Stevie, buddy, you shouldn't have...' But the boy smiles and lights the candle, and starts to sing. The Winter Soldier finds that he cannot refuse him, but he makes the boy eat half of the pie with him nonetheless.
The feelings it stirs are the same as they were then, even if it is not his own birthday. The concept is now nominally foreign. There are no anniversaries in HYDRA, no birthdays, and the only sign of celebration comes in the form of an extra portion of beans. He has been eating nothing but freeze-dried rations for as long as he remembers, nutritious but tasteless, and on a good day, there is rubbery steak. The blue frosting feels heavy on his tongue.
"Bucky? What's wrong?"
Everything is wrong. He is nineteen. He is a hundred. The little boy he cherished has now become a big, strong man, who looks at him as though he is not part machine, and has brought him to his home for cake. A year ago, the Winter Soldier had put a bullet near his spine.
He rushes for the exit. The red woman and the man with the silver wings must think he is trying to escape, because they run out and follow him to the back alley where he retches. From the corner of his eye, he sees them lower their weapons. "You alright there, Barnes?" The man with the silver wings winces as he laughs and spits out the remaining bile. He is no longer Bucky Barnes. He is no longer the Winter Soldier. He is no one.
They take him to the Triskelion. There is an emergency ward in the lower levels for cases like him, far from the public, and he is strangely pliant through it all. Until they put him in a white room full of men in white coats. One of them is holding a syringe.
"No," he says. He has a knife in his hand. How did it get there? "You can't make me. Never again."
He is screaming in Russian. He is screaming for the man on the bridge. Where is he? Perhaps he is still standing outside. The men look surprised before he kills them. He stains the white floor with red, and then the rotating light on the ceiling starts spinning and spinning and spinning, and everything is red, his hands red and the walls red, bright red like apples—
—
"He experienced a severe panic-induced seizure."
"Is he gonna be okay?"
There is no answer. The Winter Soldier is strapped to a hospital bed, and there is a magnet cuff keeping his left arm immobile. An IV is attached to his flesh one. He groans.
"Bucky. Hey," a sigh of relief. Steve rushes to his side and looks at him with sympathetic eyes. "You feeling any better? Don't worry about anything, alright? You're gonna be okay."
The doctor said no such thing, but he cannot find the heart to deny him the lie. This is not the first time the Winter Soldier has experienced a seizure of some kind. Electrocution has its side effects. "Get me out of here, Steve," he drawls. Have they sedated him? There is no other need for the IV. He thrashes in his bed. "Get me— Get me out."
"Buck, you know I can't." The man's voice is sad. "You killed those agents."
But the words do not register. It is 1982, and there is another man where Steve now stands, and he is speaking to the Winter Soldier in a foreign tongue. 'We have installed a fail-safe in your brain. A flight mode. If you are captured, you will automatically become compelled to flee. Cut off your arm if you must. It can be replaced. But if you cannot fight, if your cyanide is taken, you must run. Repeat order.'
"Wenn sie einen Kopf abschneiden, wachsen zwei andere nach."
"Bucky?"
Cutting the arm is unnecessary. The magnet is too weak, or he is too strong, and the man on the bridge has little time to react. The Winter Soldier does not pause to think. He is rushing to his feet, the blood rushing to his head. He is ripping out the IV and breaking down the steel doors, breaking through the flood of agents, breaking the windows and falling, falling, falling.
Something else breaks when he lands. He screams but rushes to his feet again and keeps on running until there is nothing but soft grass beneath him, and the Triskelion is only a white dot on the Potomac.
It takes him some time to notice that he is not alone.
"Stop following me."
"You're hurt, Buck, you gotta let me help— "
"Fuck off."
He walks for half an hour. His lungs ache. Broken rib, then. It will take a little longer to heal if he keeps on walking, but there is no way he can stop now. There are helicopters overhead. The man is still tailing him like a loyal dog, like an overgrown pup that has yet to learn to listen when he tells it to stay, and the Winter Soldier almost wishes he had the strength to put him down.
They are in an alley when he turns around to face him.
"Stop following me," he says again.
The man frowns and looks down at the filthy ground. His long, dark lashes are heavy with tears. "I can't, Buck," he whimpers. Stupid loyal dog. It makes the Winter Soldier sick with guilt.
He hits him then. Presses him up against the red brick wall and pelts him with fists, metal and flesh, until the man will hit him back. But he doesn't. He barely makes a sound as the blood wells. He must be hurting, Bucky thinks, so why isn't he making any noise? For the second time in his life, the Winter Soldier pauses the attack to think. It is a sign of weakness on his behalf, he knows. Soldiers do not think. They obey. The story is repeating itself.
"B-Bucky..." Steve groans. His mouth is red again. The metal hand is wrapped around his throat and he is having trouble breathing. "You're... You're n-not a bully."
It hits him then.
It is 1944. They are in an alley. There is a man who looks at him with soft eyes, and soft lips, and knows his name. Bucky is helping him up. There is a bruise on his face, but it is not from Bucky's hand.
"Steve?" —oh, God, oh, God, what has he done— "Is that really you?"
—
Spring comes. The Winter Soldier is a memory, tucked safely away with all the others, and Bucky Barnes breathes in the morning air.
"You want bacon or sausage?"
He wants both. He wants bacon and sausage and ham, and eggs, and buttered toast. He wants black coffee and white tea and all three kinds of juice that Steve has crammed in his fridge next to the peanut butter, and he wants because he can, because he's free to do so.
"Isn't it silly?" he says.
Steve drops the pan on the stove and turns to him, his brows raised. "What is?"
Bucky doesn't answer. He's not sure he even knows. But HYDRA is gone, the Red Room program is a thing of fables, and S.H.I.E.L.D. has offered him a fresh new start under Captain America. He has friends now. Allies. People who love him and care and risk their lives for him, and Bucky has no reason not to smile, no reason to keep crying and crying and crying...
The nightmares are ruthless. Steve tells him he whispers in his sleep sometimes, lists off different names. Victims. Targets. When Bucky sleeps, the Winter Soldier wakes, and in his dreams, he watches the metal hand wrap around Steve's throat and squeeze. He wakes up soaked and screaming, finds himself already wrapped in Steve's arms. Even with Steve pressed warm and solid against him, it takes a little while to calm down. The neighbors must hate him by now.
It's like 1939 all over again. That was the year Bucky got sick, and for once, Steve was the one who had to look after both of them. He burned the soup every damn time. Bucky didn't know why because, usually, Steve was a damn good cook, but now he thinks that Steve was probably too busy trying to keep him from throwing up all over the floor to keep an eye on the stove.
"We could talk about it. If it makes you feel better," Steve offers one night. They are lying face to face. In this light, Steve looks like he's been cast in gold. Bucky frowns behind his curtain of hair. "Or you could talk to someone else."
Once a week, he talks to a S.H.I.E.L.D. specialist. Bucky likes to talk. The Winter Soldier wore a mask that hid his mouth, muffled his words, kept him quiet, and whatever the mask could not hush, HYDRA would make him swallow. But S.H.I.E.L.D. likes to listen. S.H.I.E.L.D. likes to know secrets.
He wonders how long it will take them to realize that he's been in love with Steve since 1939.
—
Too long.
They are on a mission in the Caspian Sea, on a freighter transporting nuclear weapons to Tehran. Someone is shouting for support from the ship's intercom. By the time they realize it's an A.I.M. carrier, half the TAC team is gone, and Steve is sprawled out on the deck with green shrapnel sticking out of his chest. Poison.
The Winter Soldier wakes. Like always, he leaves his signature in red, in mangled bodies, in black grenade shells.
It's over in a minute. When Bucky is himself again, he drops to his knees by Steve's side. He's barely conscious. Those pink lips are now white as a sheet. Bucky feels sick.
"Steve. Steve, buddy, I— I gotta tell you something." He's a coward. Always has been. Wouldn't even have gone to the war if it wasn't for the draft. "I'm sorry I couldn't tell you sooner, but I... I..."
Bucky pours his heart out as Steve pours his blood all over the deck. He watches the man's eyes widen before they close, and then someone is pushing him aside to get to the Captain.
—
The stubborn punk survives.
His lungs are cut to shit but somehow he's still breathing, and two weeks later, he's out of the ward with nothing to show for his troubles but a couple of holes at the front of his uniform and an ugly red stain on the white star, acting like a thing hasn't changed.
Bucky moves out before then. Hill doesn't ask when he comes asking for his own apartment. They'd all heard his confession over the coms, and Bucky doesn't want to stick around and see the disgust in Steve's eyes, see the friendship they've had for over a hundred years fall apart in seconds. A voice in the back of his mind tells him he should have kept his mouth shut, kept Steve away, kept to the Slovenia plan and the bottom of the Potomac and the bottom of the Mont Blanc.
He requests solo spec ops. It's dangerous, he's still in recovery and the Winter Soldier has a tendency to rouse when he's cornered. The cleanup crew is having field day after field day.
After one particularly grisly mission and an unpleasant debriefing, the S.H.I.E.L.D. specialist tells him he's developed a dissociative identity disorder. Not like it's news. He's been compromised ever since Pierce set him loose on Nick Fury.
But they take him off spec ops and put him back in training. Just in case the Winter Soldier stops being able to tell the difference between ally and foe. He spends most of his days beating the sand out of punching bags at the gym below his apartment. He's there so often the manager gives him keys and lets him lock up the place after he's done. It's always past midnight when he does.
"You should use the leather bags. Last longer than vinyl. At least, that's what I've found out."
Bucky sighs. After all these years, the kid's still too dumb not to run away from trouble. "I know," he grins, "I'm the one who trained you, remember? Goldie thought I was in over my head trying to teach an eighty pound kid how to box." Bucky doesn't tell him how he uses the vinyl bags because he likes to watch them rip apart. He watches Steve come out of the shadows, looking childlike and shy, like Bucky hasn't seen him choke a man with nothing but those thick arms.
"Natasha said you'd be here," he says. There's a guilty look in his eyes and Bucky doesn't get why it's there. The bag feels a little too soft against his fist when he hits it. "Why'd you run off?"
It's gonna be a long night. He delivers one last punch and watches grains spill over the floor before he turns around.
"Go home, Steve. It's late." But Steve just rolls his eyes like he was expecting it. Bucky hates that. He hates it. Bucky isn't predictable. The Winter Soldier wasn't predictable, he came out of nowhere when no one would expect it. Steve doesn't have the right to look at him like that. "What, you wanna fight me? Is that it?"
"Bucky..." he sighs. In another lifetime, Steve would have called him a jerk. "You know I don't wanna fight you. I just want to talk."
Bucky scoffs. He picks up a towel from the floor and wipes his face, his bare chest. His heart is beating a little too fast. When this is over, he's gonna have a word with the red woman about sharing information like this. Maybe Hill set her up to it. The specialists aren't quite cutting it as much as Steve, and time is running out. S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't like spending money on irreparable assets.
He turns his back on Steve and walks away. It's a mistake. They're both on edge, Steve is balancing somewhere between anger and depression, and the Xanax Bucky took an hour ago might as well have been a placebo. Steve's hand feels heavy on his shoulder.
They fight. It's more of a spar, really, they're not doing any damage, but every now and then a heavy blow lands that sends one or the other sprawled out on the mat. After a while, they stay on the floor. Steve keeps trying to put him in a figure four headlock that Bucky keeps reversing, trapping Steve's arms with his thighs and making him tap out to breathe. "C'mon, Cap, where's that skill of yours? You haven't even pinned me once."
And Steve does just that. Bucky makes a low noise when he straddles him, settles in his lap like he belongs there and pins his arms over his head. Steve looks angry, and tired, and afraid. He looks like he's about to do something stupid, like he's about to board the Schnellzug EB912 all over again just to watch Bucky fall and disappear.
"Steve?" his voice sounds weak. He's just about to say he's sorry when Steve leans down and kisses him.
It's awkward. Bucky's wet hair is plastered to his face and Steve eats half of it in the process, has to pull away to smooth it back so he can kiss him properly. He's flushed already, his cheeks scratched raw by Bucky's stubble. Bucky's hips stutter at the sight of him. It's hard to think this was the scrawny little kid from Brooklyn that couldn't even hold a girl's hand. His shirt is soaked through and outlining everything. God, everything.
He cups Steve through his sweatpants and watches the blush creep to his ears. "Bucky, we can't, not here..." he moans. The Winter Soldier wants to part his slick pink lips with his fingers, wants to push inside and still his tongue. Bucky fights the urge and pushes them to their feet, remembers to lock up the place before they're running out the door and up the stairs and into Bucky's bed.
There is a memory tucked somewhere in his mind, or rather, a memory of a fantasy. The year is never, the sky is a soft red, like a sunset, and they are lying on the sands of Coney Island. The sea looks more like a lake than a sea. There is no one around except the man on the bridge, the boy on the playground, Steve, and they are smiling. In this fantasy, it is the skinny boy of twenty-one that pushes the Howling Commando on his back and strips him of his uniform.
"Bucky..."
But the age of fantasy is gone. They've been broken and reformed, and it's been so long, —a hundred years, a thousand, what difference does it make?—, and now there's nothing left in dreams but gunfire and smoke.
"Bucky..."
He arches as Steve rides his cock. He's holding onto him so tight that Bucky worries he might break him, might clutch a little too hard and hurt the man who saved him from himself. But Steve won't stop moaning his name. Bucky can do nothing else but stare at him. He stares at his parted mouth, his raised brows. His kind blue eyes. He stares at Steve's cock, thick and heavy between his legs, before he takes it in his left hand and brushes the thumb against the tip.
Steve clenches around him before he comes. Bucky's name is a plea on his lips and it's silly, how all this started with a name. Something tight coils at the base of Bucky's gut, and then it breaks loose. The world blurs.
The next moment, Bucky finds the sheets wrapped over them, and Steve is placing kisses on his metal fingertips.
—
When Bucky sleeps, the Winter Soldier wakes.
He studies the man beside him before slipping out of his embrace. He is the man on the bridge. His mission. Somewhere in his mind, there is an order he must follow, buried with all the things the Winter Soldier knows.
Behind the cabinet to the left, the Winter Soldier has hidden a wooden crate filled with his belongings. A mask. A knife. Two grenades. For some strange reason, his flesh hand itches for the 61 Skorpion. He makes his way back to the man's side. There is a breaching pistol in his right hand, and in his left, a steel knife. He has a mission to complete, and he must complete it before Bucky Barnes wakes.
The man groans in his sleep. What is he saying? It matters not. He pulls the trigger.
"Bucky. Bucky. It's okay. It's okay, Buck, you're okay, just breathe. Breathe. There you go. Keep breathing. You're fine. Everything's fine."
"I— I killed you. I killed you. Fuck, Steve, I killed you—"
"It was a dream, Buck. Just a dream. I'm alive, see? We're both alive."
Bucky wants to tell him that maybe they shouldn't be. But he holds it in. Steve is handing him a glass of water and a blue pill that they both know won't make a difference, but there's a hopeful look in his eyes —that same stubborn, foolish, hopeful look he'd get every time he tried to enlist—, and for a moment, Bucky lets himself believe it's gonna be okay.