Chapter Text
The scars of my knowledge and regret are rising off my flesh as yours are.
I know you’re out there in my night as I am out there in yours.
Doesn’t matter if you’ve seen war or not.
There are many ways to see too much.
—Henry Rollins
The soldier had memories for the first time that he was aware of. He didn’t know what to do with them when they didn’t go away. No one came to find him, there was no one to debrief him, no one to wipe him, reset him, give him directions, no commands, no mission; nothing. He had a memory of a man who had a name for him that wasn’t “the asset” or the more dramatic, strike-fear-into-the-hearts-of-men title “Winter Soldier”, but the name meant nothing to him. Nothing beyond the way Captain America—Steve—looked when he said it.
Like his heart was breaking.
Heartbroken: there was an interesting concept. The soldier couldn’t remember experiencing it himself, though he must have at some point or Steve couldn’t have looked at him like that, thrown down his shield and offered himself to him.
For the first time to his knowledge, the soldier had his freedom and he had a name. He didn’t know what to do with either of them.
In New Jersey, a homeless man gave him a can of pork & beans and the soldier realized he was hungry, so he pried the can open with his metal fingers and ate. A woman gave him a ratty, stained blanket and he crawled into a doorway down a dark alley and listened to the strays fighting and fucking until he lost consciousness in exhaustion. He supposed most people would call it sleep.
On a TV mounted to a wall in a bar, the soldier watched news footage of Steve and Natasha Romanov and Steve and Sam Wilson and Steve and Nick Fury and Steve and Alexander Pierce and Steve… and his mind felt like it had been hijacked. He couldn’t shake the idea that Steve was much too tall, too big, too healthy in all of the pictures of him that he saw everywhere. There was no reason why he should think so, either. Steve Rogers hit really hard and he fought like the devil. If he were any smaller, the soldier wouldn’t have had such a hard time dragging his deadweight to shore.
It was getting cold outside. The soldier didn’t know what time of the year it was and he barely felt the cold anymore after so much of his life spent frozen in stasis, but the people he passed wore thicker and thicker coats and some nights it snowed. He woke in alleyways behind dumpsters with frost in his hair and on the tips of his eyelashes. The chilled metal of his shoulder where it met flesh burned until he could get somewhere to warm it up.
He dreamed when he slept, which was something he had never done. His mind had never been full enough for dreaming. There had never been enough subconscious information backed up in his brain to need the cleansing of dreams. They always wiped him before that happened, reset him back to zero, ready for a new mission.
No one came for him. No one, except for Steve it seemed, was looking for him, and Steve wouldn’t find him because he didn’t know where to look.
The soldier sometimes dreamed about Steve, but he was almost always too skinny. A stubborn, angry kid who didn’t weigh an even hundred pounds, but never had let it stop him. He never won the fights, but the gamey little shit didn’t back down. In Steve’s mind, perhaps that made every little battle a draw.
It was noble and brave, but stupid. Except he thought he remembered that Steve had been smart. Perhaps he had just lacked the necessary survival instincts that usually came in such small packages; had the same instinct for self-preservation as a rat terrier.
Sometimes what the soldier thought he remembered felt like a story he was telling himself.
He replayed that day on the carrier in his head sometimes. He couldn’t help it.
You’re my friend.
You’re my mission.
You… are… my… mission.
It was easy to get stuck in a loop. When the vague, painful peeks of memories long ago wiped away wouldn’t form into anything more substantial, he wished that he could reach inside and rip them out. They were maddening and meaningless, sitting there like ghouls with their fingers in his brainstem.
One night a cop roused him from a park bench and demanded his name. The soldier very deliberately did not kill the man, though he invaded his space more than he was comfortable with and postured like an angry dog. The soldier growled in the back of his throat in response, but he didn’t kill him. He didn’t know why either.
Then he told the cop that his name was Bucky, and after that he knew that he was going to let Steve find him.
His mind was like a computer, everything that happened to him like files in the hard drive. His files were supposed to be safe; they were encrypted and protected by passwords. Only a few people could access them, delete them, overwrite them or upload new ones. He was operating with a faulty system now. There was no admin, no one to keep order for him, delete the unnecessary rubbish and replace all that empty space with commands. He had no mission, no purpose, no direction.
Steve—the Captain—had hacked the system. He would have to be the one to fix it.
The system wasn’t perfect, but the soldier was used to it.
He wouldn’t allow the cop to arrest him for vagrancy, but after he knocked him out, he left him unconscious on the park bench under his blanket.
~~*~~
He would have liked to be able to blame the trail going cold on those little missions that dragged him away from searching, but the truth was the trail had always been cold. It had only gotten colder and colder, and it hadn’t started in a great place.
Someone saw the Winter Soldier in New York, in Brooklyn, in New Jersey, in Boston, in Miami, New Orleans. Someone even claimed to have seen him in Nebraska and, though Steve knew it couldn’t be true, he went to Nebraska and looked just to be sure.
HYDRA might have been looking for their Winter Soldier, too, but Fury—with some occasional help from Steve and the others—was keeping them much too busy to spend resources on a thorough search.
Sam would sometimes remind Steve that what he was doing was hubris. He couldn’t know what he would find when (if) he found Bucky, or if there was anything of Bucky in the Winter Soldier. Bucky might be gone. In fact, it seemed likely. The body was a shell that now housed the Winter Soldier, who might have given Captain America a pass once, but probably wouldn’t do it a second time.
Steve would remind him in turn that the Winter Soldier could have killed him easily, but had chosen not to. That choice proved to him that there was hope, that it wasn’t just his imagination or a pipedream, because if Bucky could make one choice like that, he could make another and another, and pretty soon it could become habit-forming. He told Sam that Bucky had recognized him. Maybe not completely, but enough, which was something and meant that he couldn’t just give up on him.
Secretly, he wasn’t so sure that Bucky had recognized him at all.
He had looked so afraid in that moment before Steve fell into the water. Steve was scared to think that he might never know why.
He remembered another fall; Bucky falling backward into the snow, toward the rocks, Steve watching him grow horribly smaller until he just disappeared. He had screamed and that scream had echoed in the chambers of Steve’s heart until it had felt like it would burst in his throat. He had never felt such terror and loss.
He would let Bucky give him two black eyes every day for the rest of his life just to know for sure that it hadn’t, in fact, ended that way.
Steve bought a bottle of water from a machine on his way home after his run and poured most of it over his head before he entered the building. He took the stairs—he didn’t trust elevators anymore—and noticed someone sitting in the hallway as he walked toward his door. Sometimes homeless people found their way inside where it was warm, but they usually didn’t make it much farther than the lobby. Still, he wasn’t surprised until he got close enough to see that whoever it was, they were sitting with their back against his door.
Waiting for him?
“Hello?” Steve said as he approached.
It was a man, sleeping from the looks of it, with his head down on his updrawn knees, long, greasy hair hiding his face. There was something viscerally familiar about him; the shape of him, the color of his hair, the way he sat there like a child who had fallen asleep on timeout.
A soldier asleep at his post.
“Bucky,” Steve said. He said it softly, but the man tensed.
Slowly, Bucky lifted his head and stared at him with the Winter Soldier’s cold, calculating eyes. They were the same color as Bucky’s eyes, dark greyish blue with flecks like gold at the bottom of a pond, the same shape with his same long, dark eyelashes making him look almost like he had been playing with his latest girlfriend’s eyeliner. Steve couldn’t imagine the Winter Soldier had had many girlfriends in the past seventy years. His eyes were ice cold now, and unwelcoming under a strange combination of confusion and wonder.
There was no recognition in that unflinching stare and Steve felt that like he was inside a plummeting elevator.
“Hey, Bucky,” he said, voice soft and cautious. It was how he would have spoken to a frightened dog that was known to bite or an insane person. He supposed Bucky was a little bit of both these days. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you,” Bucky said. His voice was hoarse and ragged, like he hadn’t used it in a very long time. He licked his lips and swallowed. “I’m not going to kill you,” he said.
It didn’t sound like he was trying to reassure Steve of this fact, just making it known.
“Okay,” Steve said. “That’s good.”
Steve followed Bucky’s line of sight to the nearly empty water bottle he was holding. He offered it to him and Bucky snatched it, drank it quickly, not taking his eyes off Steve.
There were so many things Steve wanted to say to him, so many questions he wanted to ask. He tried to land on just one, but he couldn’t, his mind racing. He was trying desperately to patch his memories of Bucky Barnes, his friend whom he had loved his entire life, into the figure of the man before him and he couldn’t quite do it. The pieces wouldn’t fit together without some ugly overlapping.
“What do you want, Bucky?”
“I don’t want anything,” Bucky said. “It’s not part of my programming.”
He slowly pushed himself up from the floor, using the door to Steve’s apartment to brace himself. It wasn’t a particularly aggressive action—he didn’t actually look like he was in good fighting form—but Steve still took a step back and kept an eye on his hands, especially the left one. Bucky saw him watching him, noted his caution, but didn’t comment on it.
“You knew me,” Steve said, all of his coalescing thoughts crashing to a halt, settling on that one. “That day on the carrier. Project Insight. You knew me. That’s why… why you stopped. Why you looked so scared. Because you knew me.”
“No,” Bucky said.
He was leaning against the door and looked like he was barely remaining upright. Steve wondered if he was wounded, though he didn’t look like he was. He had no visible injuries. He wasn’t bleeding. He closed his eyes, blinking, and they remained closed a little too long.
“No, you knew me,” Bucky said softly. “Then. I know you now. A little. Not much. But I shouldn’t know you at all.” He glared at Steve through the lank strands of his long hair. “Why? Why do I know you? Why do I know you? They erased it all. Everything. You shouldn’t be in there anymore, but you’re still there. Why? Why can’t I get rid of you? Why won’t you go away?”
Bucky was shaking but he still tried instinctively to lash out when Steve reached for him to keep him from sliding down the door back onto the floor. Steve caught his arm, blocked the blow so easily that a more fully functioning Winter Soldier would have been disgusted with his own weakness, and propped him up against the wall while he dug his keys out of the pocket of his sweats. When he had the door open, he hauled Bucky inside, kicked it closed and took him to the couch.
“I could kill you,” Bucky muttered in his ear as Steve was lowering him to the couch. “You should be more careful.”
“You said you wouldn’t,” Steve said.
“Maybe I lied,” Bucky said. He was slumped against the armrest. His eyes were blazing fever bright. “You were my last mission. I failed.”
“It’s okay,” Steve said.
Bucky scowled at him, but he relaxed like Steve’s acceptance had given him permission. He watched Steve leave the room and come back with a glass of water. When he took it, he watched Steve while he drank it.
Steve sat in the chair at the end of the couch. “I think you’re dehydrated,” he said. “Probably hungry. You look like you’ve lost a lot of weight. When was the last time you ate anything?”
“Tuesday,” Bucky said. He didn’t seem very surprised by Steve’s unprofessional diagnosis, but he tried to think about it. “I remember hearing someone say it was Tuesday. A woman gave me a sandwich. I don’t know why.”
Probably because you look like you really need one, Steve thought, but did not say.
It was Friday. Bucky hadn’t eaten in three days.
Steve got up again, took Bucky’s empty glass and went back into the kitchen. “I’ll make you a sandwich, then. You still like ham and cheese with mustard?”
“I… don’t know,” Bucky said.
Which Steve translated to mean I don’t care because that was what he made it sound like.
“I’ll make you ham and cheese,” Steve said. “We’ll order up some real food later.”
Steve got bread out, got the cheese, the ham, the mustard, and he was assembling the sandwich when he glanced up at some movement in his peripheral vision to find Bucky standing there. No, leaning there. He was leaning in the doorway, watching him, his expression one of such lost perplexity that Steve wanted to go to him, put an arm around him, comfort him in some way, but he didn’t.
He knew better. Bucky—or whoever he was now—would not welcome him as he had before. Steve had been pulled from the ice and awakened to a new world, but he was basically still the same person he had been when he had gone into the freezing water in 1945. The world had changed, but he was the same. Bucky wasn’t. In the seventy years between falling from the train and showing up malnourished and half-conscious on Steve’s doorstep, Bucky had been turned into someone else. This guy didn’t hug, didn’t talk much, didn’t smile or laugh or joke or tease or flirt, he certainly wouldn’t want to cuddle.
Because Steve didn’t feel like being punched in the face today, he went back to making the sandwich and didn’t touch him. When he finished, he gave the sandwich to Bucky and put everything away while Bucky looked at it and didn’t eat it.
“Why?” Bucky finally said.
Steve closed the refrigerator door and looked at him, raising an eyebrow. “Why what?”
Bucky just stared at him.
It didn’t matter. Why any of it? “Because…”
Because I thought I had lost you and that was the worst moment of my life. Because you’re not dead and I still can’t believe it. Because I want to help you remember. I want you to know me again. Because I love you more than I can ever say…
Steve cleared his throat, ignored the heat of his flushing face and did not say anything that he was thinking, because he knew he would just sound like a sap to himself and Bucky would think he was weak, possibly pathetic, definitely barking up the wrong tree.
“Because you need help,” Steve said. He shrugged. “We’re both out of time. Out of our element. Besides, you’re not going to kill me, right?”
Bucky didn’t look like he believed his answer, but he took a bite of his sandwich and staggered back into the living room to sit down again. Steve followed him and sat in the chair, watching Bucky eat and watch him back, neither of them saying anything. When he finished eating, Bucky lay down on the couch and stared at Steve sitting there as his eyes got heavier and heavier. He watched him until he couldn’t keep them open any longer.
He slept without dreaming.