Chapter Text
“I know the Army’s set you up with a place, but I figured Steve would want you to have this,” says Bruce Banner, and slides a big manila envelope across the cafe table.
Bucky doesn’t take the envelope. He just stares at Banner, who’s as incognito as he gets: he’s in his fully human form, just a rumpled, tired-looking guy with a smile that looked preemptively apologetic from the moment he shook Bucky’s hand in greeting a few minutes ago. The cafe in the shadow of Avengers Tower bustles around them, the other customers heedless of their proximity to the Winter Soldier and the Hulk. It’s a struggle not to fidget, and to ignore his brain’s relentless calculation of sight lines and ways to take out Banner or the Hulk, or escape them.
Everything’s fine, Bucky tells himself. He has at least three dozen exit strategies, and two-thirds of them won’t even end up with him dead.
“If he did, he never said anything to me before he left,” says Bucky, and Banner grimaces.
“Oh, uh, I thought you two—I saw you two talking by the lake, before Steve pulled his little disappearing act, so I thought—”
“He didn’t say much. Just that he couldn’t stay long, but that everything was gonna be alright, and that I should take care of myself.”
It had been about five hundred times worse than their first stilted phone and video calls after Bucky got out of cryo in Wakanda.
Bucky does not mention the other thing that older version of Steve had said: I hope like hell this will all make sense to you eventually. I wish I could tell you more, but we’re already risking a hell of a lot with the timelines.
Okay, Bucky had said, through the numbness and confusion, before he’d summoned up an apparently not-at-all convincing smile and told Steve, I’m glad you got your happy ending. Bucky had meant it; he was glad, and relieved. The way Steve had looked after the battle with Thanos, Bucky had genuinely worried that something in Steve had broken beyond repair. And the way he’d talked about returning the Infinity Stones…well, let’s just say Bucky had realized Steve probably wasn’t coming back. But the older Steve had looked at Bucky in stricken and almost desperate dismay, and then he’d disappeared back to his happily ever after in another timeline.
Which had been a relief, in a way, because it meant Bucky could start planning his exit strategies again. Maybe this time he’d actually bring himself to use one of them.
“Oh,” says Banner, before rallying with another apologetic smile. “Well, I’m sure if he’d had time, he’d have mentioned this.”
Bucky reaches for the envelope. Inside is a set of keys, and a small stack of papers.
“What is all this?”
“Keys to Steve’s place in Brooklyn, and his motorcycle. Some records about his, ah, accounts and things. He—well, he hasn’t been declared officially dead, we can’t, you know, say anything about the time travel, but—”
“He’s not coming back,” says Bucky, before Banner has to try to couch it softly, or spare Bucky’s assumed feelings. It’s a courtesy Bucky doesn’t need. His feelings have seemed very far away since Steve left. “I know.”
“Yeah. So, uh, I figured. Well, there’s no reason for you to wait seven years until he’s declared dead, or to have to fight about inheritances with the courts. God knows they’ll be backed up for years and years dealing with all the fallout of—anyway. I just figured—you should have all this.”
“I’m not homeless,” says Bucky with a frown. “And I have money.”
Bucky’s pardon might have some onerous conditions—therapy is godawful, and his surveillance detail is offensively obvious—but he hasn’t got any complaints about his official—and surprisingly, honorable—discharge from the Army. They set him up with a small apartment in Brooklyn, a bank account that’s full of an incomprehensible amount of backpay, and a modest pension. Compared to his time on the run and even his life in Brooklyn before the war, he’s living in the lap of luxury. He’s sure as hell doing better than a lot of the people who’d come back to life three months ago.
“Yeah, no, of course, do whatever you want with all of it,” stammers Banner. “I just figured all this stuff should go to you. There’s—well, there’s no one else, really.”
There’s Wilson, but then Steve passed along the most important thing to him already.
Bucky frowns. “I feel like it can’t be legal if I, I dunno, sell the place or empty the accounts or whatever.”
“Like I said, do whatever you want,” says Banner with a shrug.
Belatedly, Bucky remembers his manners. “Thank you,” he says, because this is meant to be a kindness.
It’s not Banner’s fault that it feels more like a burden.
After leaving the cafe, Bucky figures he hasn’t really got anything else to do right now, so he might as well go to the address of the apartment Steve had owned: an apartment on the top floor of a well-maintained brownstone, in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood in what’s Carroll Gardens now, and used to be Red Hook back in Steve and Bucky’s day.
There are still big swathes of the borough that are in disrepair after five years of abandonment; with half the population gone, people had abandoned some neighborhoods and clustered more closely together in neighborhoods like this one, which is much nicer than it had been back in the 30s. Gentrified, people call it now, Bucky recalls. Bucky’s own neighborhood is one of the more rundown ones that the chaos of recent years has more or less un-gentrified, and he spends a lot of his time helping out with various repair and rebuilding efforts.
Nothing like that is needed here, but Bucky finds himself wishing the neighborhood was a bit more abandoned when one of Steve’s former neighbors stops him on the staircase landing on his way up to the apartment. She’s an elderly woman who looks carved from stone: gray all over and deeply wrinkled, but with a sharp and assessing gaze.
“So is it true? Is Captain Rogers on the moon?” she asks, in a tone that suggests she knows that particular theory is totally bullshit, and a look of bitter, anticipatory grief on her face.
He can’t tell her the truth, such as it is: that Steve went on a mission to return the Infinity Stones, and took a very long detour while he was at it. That’s what he’d called it, when he’d told Bucky about the plan: Buck, I…I might take a detour, once I finish the mission. A long one, back in—well, back in the past.
“That’s classified,” Bucky tells her, and she snorts.
“Sure,” she says. “You want the spare key? I went in there to clean out the fridge and take out the trash, after I saw the press conference about, well—you know.”
Shit, Bucky hadn’t even thought of that. “Thank you,” he tells her. “And I’ve got a key already. I’m James Barnes.”
“I know who you are,” she says, a sympathetic twist to her mouth. “I’m Frankie Paoletti, I’m in the ground floor unit. You planning on staying here?”
“I don’t know,” says Bucky. “Probably not.”
Frankie hesitates, then asks, “Is Captain Rogers coming back?”
“Probably not,” he says. To his horror, his voice cracks.
It occurs to Bucky that all those emotions that have seemed so muted and distant for weeks now haven’t been far away at all: they’ve been like the seawater that rushes away from shore before a tidal wave, while dumbasses like Bucky go gawk at the newly bare sand, heedless of the inundation that’s coming.
Frankie nods, and accepts the news with a grim resignation Bucky’s seen a lot of, in the folks who lived through what people are now calling the Blip. “Well, I’ll keep an eye out, make sure no one snoops around.”
“That’s kind of you, you don’t need to go to the trouble.”
“It’s no trouble,” she insists.
“Well, uh, let me know if you need anything,” says Bucky awkwardly. “I can give you my number? If, uh, there’s any maintenance needed or problems with St—the apartment, I mean.”
Now Frankie smiles, sweetly dimpled in a way that suggests she was a heartbreaker in her youth. “That’d be great,” she says.
They exchange numbers—Bucky uses his burner phone, of course—and then Frankie says, “I’ll let you head on up now. And—I’m sorry for your loss.”
She’s the first person to say it.
Bucky doesn’t trust his voice, so he just nods and heads up the stairs.
Bucky’s first impression of the apartment is that it’s spacious and, well, normal. There’s a normal amount of furniture and a normal amount of clutter, with framed prints and photos on the wall and the odd knick-knack or decorative item, all of it just disparate enough to suggest the furnishings and decor are the result of years’ worth of accumulation rather than any staging. The light is good, with the high ceilings and big windows lending the whole place a nice airiness that makes it seem even bigger than it is.
Next, Bucky spots the easel by the wall of big windows and the other wall lined with bookshelves with something like relief, like these things are proof that Steve really had lived here, had made a proper home here.
Bucky then proceeds to very carefully and very thoroughly toss the place.
It’s partly a precaution, but it’s also pure nosiness, and maybe even a bit of very belated payback for Steve snooping around his place in Bucharest. Bucky determinedly ignores the very small part of him that’s hoping to find a clue, a reason, an explanation—anything to explain why Steve had left, or more hopeless still, anything to suggest he might be coming back after all.
There won’t be anything like that, he’s pretty sure, but if he doesn’t at least look, he’ll always wonder about it.
Bucky checks the apartment for bugs or traps first, and thankfully doesn’t find any. He checks the expected places for go-bags and safes, and finds them, and is pleased to note the safe holds a decent amount of cash and fake IDs along with the expected guns. He hadn’t needed to crack the safe to open it; the safe’s code is his own birthday, Bucky’s second guess after trying Sarah Rogers’ birthday. He tries not to read into that.
Other than the guns, there are a few knives hidden around the place, which isn’t really the kind of thing Bucky thought Steve would do, and suspects that’s Romanoff’s influence. There’s also what he’s pretty sure is a panic button, and the windows are wired with perimeter alarms, so all in all, Bucky grudgingly approves of Steve’s security measures.
His first quick pass through the apartment takes him through the living room, which adjoins the kitchen, separated only by a breakfast bar and a small dining nook, and down a hallway to the sparingly but comfortably furnished guest bedroom, a bathroom, Steve’s bedroom and en suite bathroom, and a hall closet.
When the apartment passes this quick security check, Bucky moves onto taking a closer look at the kitchen. The fridge has been cleared out of anything urgently perishable—thank you, Frankie—and the cabinets are full of the expected pantry staples, though a couple cabinets are full to the brim with MREs, which makes Bucky grimace. Military rations? When basically all the cuisines of the world are within the delivery radius of any given address in Brooklyn? But then maybe Bucky’s underestimating the chaos following the Blip; these could be emergency rations. He’ll probably have to clear out the cabinets at some point, before rats or roaches get at the food. For now, he leaves them alone.
Bucky does a thorough search of the living room, which unearths a lot of dust bunnies and not much else of interest, other than the easel that still has Steve’s last painting in progress on it. Bucky approaches that with all the caution of a wild animal, and he almost wants to avoid looking at it head-on. He doesn’t even know what he does or doesn’t want to see on the canvas. He’s more than familiar with Steve’s art, and most of it was of people and places if it was for himself or for class; otherwise he did illustrations and signage for ads, and on a few notable occasions when they were especially strapped for cash, Tijuana bibles. Either way, none of it’s anything Bucky should feel weird about looking at.
And yet, when he looks at this painting in progress, he does feel weird about looking at it.
He recognizes the view that’s depicted there, and it’s a recognition that’s almost violent with the force of its painful nostalgia: it’s the view from the fire escape of their tenement apartment in Brooklyn. The view is rendered in Steve’s usual exquisite detail, but the figure in front of that view is only sketched in. Is it supposed to be Steve…? No. The shoulders are too broad to be Steve before the serum, and the profile, even lightly sketched as it is, clearly isn’t Steve’s beak of a nose. It’s Bucky himself.
He stumbles away from the unfinished painting as if he’s happened on something too private by far, and turns his attention to the bookshelves. Loving to read is something Bucky and Steve have always had in common, though their taste in books has very little overlap, and that doesn’t seem to have changed. Steve’s shelves are full of nonfiction: history, mostly, and biographies and memoirs, some art books, though there are some comic books too, much nicer than the cheap ones they used to read as kids. Bucky takes a few books out at random and rifles through the pages, not particularly expecting to find anything; all he turns up are a few scraps of paper and receipts, clearly used as bookmarks.
On the rightmost bookshelf, the top row of books catches Bucky’s attention when he spots a familiar title: The Hobbit. An old copy, even—a familiar one. Could it actually be—? Bucky takes the book out carefully, and opens it. There, on the inside cover, in his own neat cursive that he doesn’t bother with anymore: James Buchanan Barnes. He almost drops the book. His own copy, the one he’d left—where had he left it? Their old apartment? His parents’ house?
Where the hell had Steve even gotten this? Why had he never given it back to Bucky? None of the other books on the top shelf are Bucky’s, but they are the kinds of books Bucky loves: more Tolkien, science fiction classics, a few newer books. For a vertiginous moment, Bucky wonders if they’re all his own books, if he’d lived here with Steve and just doesn’t remember, if—
But no, of course not. Other than the old copy of The Hobbit, none of the books are Bucky’s. Bucky doesn’t keep physical books anymore, just gets them from the library, or loads them onto a Kindle, which isn’t the same as a physical book, but it has the benefit of being less awkward to hold and turn the pages with one hand, and it can hold thousands of books to boot. And anyway, some of these books are really nice leather bound editions with gilded titles on the spines and an attached ribbon for a bookmark. He pulls out The Fellowship of the Ring, bound in a rich green leather, and gasps when he sees that the edges of the pages are painted to show a beautiful landscape of Rivendell.
What the hell. Steve never even liked The Hobbit, why would he—
He puts the book back carefully, checks the others in the trilogy, and they all have lovely paintings along the edges too. There’s even a copy of The Silmarillion, and there’s no timeline where Steve would ever have the patience to get through that book. Bucky’s already read it five times, each time lamenting his own lack of a physical copy to make notes in, but he knows Steve would find it impenetrable and boring.
Maybe these books belong to someone else. Maybe Steve had had a girlfriend or boyfriend or something, at least for a little while.
But when Bucky heads into the bedroom, there’s no sign of anyone else ever having lived here, or even any frequent guests. The bedroom looks as if Steve might come back any moment: the bed is made, but the bedspread is slightly wrinkled, as if someone’s just sat on it, and there’s still a water glass on the nightstand, along with a short stack of books, Steve’s usual nonfiction. It’s only the air’s stale stuffiness, and the slight coating of dust, that says no one’s been in this room for months.
Bucky’s search is slower and more careful here as he lingers over every little thing, the last parts of Steve he’ll ever really have. In the nightstand drawer, there’s Steve’s small notebook, full of notes to himself and terms to look up. Bucky pockets that on impulse. On the nightstand and dresser are photos of Wilson and Maximoff, of Romanoff and Barton, of the Howlies and Carter, of Bucky.
To Bucky’s surprise, the photo of him isn’t a photo from the 40s: it’s from Wakanda, a candid shot, and Bucky doesn’t even recognize when Steve could have taken it—until he realizes it’s not a photo, it’s a screenshot from one of their video calls. Steve had managed to catch a snapshot of him laughing. Bucky must have been regaling him with the kids’, both human and goat, antics, the only reliably light-hearted topics of conversation they’d had during those video calls.
Those emotions that had felt so distant before begin to loom large, a rising and inexorable tide.
They’d had exactly five video calls, between the time Bucky got out of cryo and the fight against Thanos. The first one had been short, mostly just to reassure Steve that he was out of cryo and doing alright. The others had all been varying degrees of awkward. It had been good, seeing Steve, but they hadn’t really talked. By the fifth video call, and the eleventh voice call, all of them varying degrees of stilted when one of them didn’t have a funny or reassuring anecdote handy, Bucky had assumed Steve was making them out of a kind of obligation.
But here’s this photo, a screenshot of one of their calls. So maybe Steve had wanted to see Bucky, to talk to him, if he’d saved this—
It doesn’t matter.
Bucky moves on to the closet, which is full of boring clothes that smell of nothing but clean laundry, and a stack of significantly less boring finished paintings: a couple detailed cityscapes, a couple attempts at some abstract arrangement of icy looking shapes, and a landscape of the Wakandan jungle that somehow so deeply unsettling that Bucky can’t look at it for too long.
In the dresser, he finds a sock drawer in absolute chaos with no socks paired together at all—Sarah Rogers must be rolling in her grave—an underwear drawer in only slightly less disarray, and a drawer full of a jumble of rolled up workout clothes, all of which make the bottom drawer’s careful neatness stand out. In the bottom drawer, a few items of clothing are folded carefully, and in tissue paper no less. Bucky lifts away some of the tissue paper and stares in surprise at the familiar shade of red. It’s the shuka he used to cover the stump and port of his left shoulder in Wakanda. He lifts it and sets it aside, and under it is a bright blue fabric: another shuka. And under that, Bucky finds—what the fuck. His own dirty clothes?
He recognizes the grimy shirt and worn pants and scarf, his usual hard-wearing clothes for when he’d put in hours working on the farm to quiet his mind, the ones he’d been wearing when T’Challa had come to fetch him for the fight against Thanos. He’d changed in a hurry and tossed his clothes in the hamper, and Steve must have—what, gone back to his hut? Brought the dirty clothes back with him? Why would he—
A memory returns to Bucky: his mother, giving him briskly devastating instructions on how to help Steve pack away Sarah Rogers’ things after her death, after Steve had to move out of the apartment he could no longer afford without her.
He’s grieving, so he’s not thinking straight, and if I know Steven, he’ll want to do some practical, self-sacrificing nonsense like donating all of his mother’s clothes and selling her jewelry for the money, Bucky’s mother had said as she chopped vegetables for Sunday dinner. So you’ll have to do the thinking for him. Make sure he keeps at least one thing she wore, and a bottle of her perfume, and any recipe books she had. Because in the years that come, he’ll want to hold a scarf or sweater, or smell her perfume, and take a deep breath and it will be as close as he can get to another hug from his ma. The scents will fade in time, of course, and hopefully his grief will have eased too. And then he’ll still have the recipe book of her food to nourish him.
That’s really wise, Ma, Bucky had said, so impressed he’d almost been in awe of all his mother’s sharpness and kindness.
He wishes so much that he still had her wisdom to guide him, her way of taking one long look at a person or situation and figuring them out, getting to the heart of them. She had never once steered Bucky wrong when he’d brought a problem to her or asked her for advice.
So Bucky had followed her advice. He’d kept and hidden away Sarah Rogers’ favorite scarf, the old sweater she’d worn at home, and the small bottle of her perfume, and despite his reservations about Mrs. Rogers’ ambivalent cooking skills, the recipe book, and packed them all away in a corner of one of Steve’s drawers when they’d moved in together. Steve had never said anything about it, but seeing this drawer now, Bucky knows Steve had taken the lesson to heart.
Because he’d kept Bucky’s clothes. He’d packed them carefully away, he hadn’t even washed them, probably the better to preserve the scent, even though it’s not exactly a good scent: sweat and goats and hay, the baked heat of Wakanda and the spices he’d cooked with—
And their dozen or so hugs, maybe, during Steve’s three visits to Bucky.
They hadn’t talked much, not about anything important, but Bucky hadn’t minded that much, not really, because he’d understood so much of what Steve wasn’t saying in those hugs, in their desperate clinginess, in the way neither of them had wanted to let go.
But Steve had let go, in the end. Bucky should’ve known he would, after that last too-quick, too-casual hug before he left to return the Stones.
Bucky shoves everything back in and slams the drawer closed.
He stands up, and tries to calm his suddenly rapid breathing, blinks away the blurring of his eyes. His right hand is shaking, and he clenches it into a fist until it stops, but his knees are shaky too so he stumbles back until he’s sitting on the bed.
He breathes, or tries to. Finds he’s gasping, and oh, maybe that tidal wave has finally reached him, that inundation of feeling, but he can’t even put a name to what he’s feeling right now, only that it’s too much, that it’s drowning him, and he can’t breathe.
He lets himself tip to the side and curls up there on the bed, and sucks in air, and finds his nose filling with an improbable, faint scent: Steve. He inhales, deep and long, and when he exhales, it comes out in a long and terrible keening and he can’t he can’t he can’t. He flings the pillow across the room and scrambles off the bed, landing on his ass with a thump.
On the bed, where the pillow had been, something glints.
Bucky thinks it’s the glint of a knife at first, or maybe a gun. But no, it’s…a necklace? He reaches out to take it—with his left hand, which never shakes—and finds that it’s a set of dog tags.
His own dog tags.
The swell of feeling that came before wasn’t the tidal wave. This is, and it washes him away.
When Bucky surfaces, he has one thought, one question: if Steve mourned me this much, why the fuck did he leave me here with nothing?
It’s mostly dark in the apartment when Bucky peels himself off the bedroom floor. His bones ache in a way that’s easy to ignore; the shakiness of his limbs, not so much. He needs to eat something. He loops his dog tags around his neck, and stumbles to the bathroom, splashes some water on his face.
He hasn’t bothered to turn the lights on, which is a mistake, because in the dimness, his reflection looks shadowy and ghostly, the faint gleam of his eyes eerie and almost inhuman.
That’s all he is here in Steve’s home, Bucky realizes: a ghost. And maybe Steve had preferred that, compared to the revenant who’d come back, this wreckage of the Winter Soldier and whatever’s left of Bucky Barnes. Steve must have preferred the ghost, given that he’d left. Or hell, he went to the past; maybe Steve got the real Bucky back, the less broken one, the one he’d missed and mourned the most.
Bucky has the sudden urge to smash the mirror, to wreck the bed, burn the books and paintings and photos, to tear this place apart. To erase himself from this place and be a ghost in truth, and an unquiet one at that, to destroy things, because that’s what he’s made for, isn’t it—
The thought of Frankie downstairs is the only thing that stops him. It would scare her, and she’d probably end up cleaning up after him. She shouldn’t have to deal with the results of Bucky’s tantrum.
So he puts the bed back to rights, and leaves, stopping only to raid the kitchen for a couple of protein bars that he wolfs down quickly along with some water from the tap.
When Bucky’s at the door, he hesitates for a second, and looks back at the bookshelf, where his own copy of The Hobbit sits, along with those other books that could have been his. He could take them with him. He thinks of his own apartment, bare and mostly empty. He leaves the books.
He does take Steve’s motorcycle though.
When he leaves Steve’s apartment, he can’t stop thinking about his exit strategies.
His last ones hadn’t really worked out, thanks to Steve and Zemo. Mostly thanks to Steve. Because Steve had taken one look at him with those challenging, pleading baby blues of his, and all of Bucky’s careful exit strategies had gone to shit. Bucky can concede that it’s not fair of him to put all or even most of it on Steve; once the other Winter Soldiers were on the table, Bucky had to stick it out, had to help.
He’d still tried to salvage an exit strategy, once it was clear the Winter Soldiers were out of the picture: he’d tried to draw Stark’s fire away from Steve, tried to keep Stark focused on Bucky, because maybe if Bucky was safely dead, the whole situation would cool off. Dumb of him; Steve would’ve lost it and killed Stark or something, probably. So that hadn’t been the best-considered exit strategy.
He admittedly hadn’t been at his best in figuring out the most effective exit strategy in light of the triggers, mostly on account of feeling about as desperate and trapped as an animal caught in a snare, ready and willing to chew or tear off another limb to get away; useless, when the limb stuck in the trap wasn’t a limb at all, but his mind. He’d made what he thought was a very good case for just mercy killing him to T’Challa and Okoye, who’d gotten weird looks on their faces, and T’Challa had said, very gently, that he thought they could find a better option than that, one that didn’t involve Bucky dying.
They’d clearly been trying to be kind. Bucky had felt too awkward about it to tell them that he just didn’t trust anybody who wanted to keep him alive, other than Steve; prior experiences had proven it never went well for him, or anyone else. But he’d accepted cryostasis as a second-best exit strategy, figuring it’d let Steve down easy, that surely as the months and years dragged on with no fix for the trigger words, someone would sit Steve down and tell him that he had to let Bucky go.
But then they had fixed the trigger words, and things were…okay, for a while, peaceful and calm, and maybe he and Steve didn’t talk much but they did spend some time together, and Bucky had started thinking that maybe he could ease off on the exit strategies.
Yeah, no. He’d told Steve it always ended in a fight, and he’d been fucking right, except for the part where it doesn’t actually fucking end.
Bucky has since learned his lesson, and anyway, Steve has let him go now. Left him here. Same difference. So Bucky has a lot of exit strategies, and their degrees of difficulty and permanence vary. A dozen of them are ways to go to ground in New York, another dozen are untraceable routes out of New York entirely. He has half a dozen ways out of the country, and an offer of sanctuary at any Wakandan consulate or outreach center, not that he ever intends on imposing on the Wakandans any more than he already has. He even has a couple tentative and admittedly slightly insane options for getting off the planet entirely.
These aren’t the exit strategies Bucky finds himself thinking of as he gets on Steve’s motorcycle, uncertain of where he intends to go. Bucky is thinking of the permanent exit strategies, the ones he’s planned most thoroughly, the ones he’d considered a last resort, before, thanks to Steve. He is thinking of the guns in the safe in Steve’s apartment; not his preferred method, given the mess they’d leave behind, and the possibility of failure. He is thinking of driving to the Brooklyn Bridge and then off it. Which is dumb and overdramatic. He is thinking of his most foolproof, clean, and tidy exit strategy, the one whose details he contemplates the most when he needs to calm down.
Tonight, just thinking of it isn’t quite working. He needs to be sure. He needs to know it’s still ready to go, just in case—
He’s not planning on doing it, not now, not while he still has things to set right as best he can, loose ends to tie up, but he needs to know it’s still an option, that it’s all ready to go.
So he heads for the port district, and makes his way to a shipping container that’s owned by a series of shell corporations, unnoticed and unseen. The riskiest part of this particular exit strategy is that the shipping container might be moved or loaded onto a ship, but Bucky has redundancies in place for that. He’s relieved not to need them now: the shipping container is exactly where it’s supposed to be. He opens it to check on the supplies inside, and finds them exactly where they should be too.
Bucky has already ended in ice, again and again and again. It might be nice to end in fire. Most importantly, it’ll be permanent and safe, quiet and somewhat tidy. The serum won’t fix it, and neither will the marvels of Wakandan medicine, or even a magic space rock. Bucky still has a way out. He takes a few deep breaths, already feeling better.
The feeling doesn’t last. That’s fine. The numbness is easier to live with anyway.
Dr. Raynor is kind of an overachiever, Bucky has come to realize.
All she’s really tasked to do is to make sure Bucky’s not about to go on a Winter Soldier rampage, and to make sure he’s a reasonably functional member of society. And yet, every session, she presses Bucky on becoming less isolated, on making friends, on connecting to people. She’s pushing especially hard today, and Bucky hasn’t really got it in him to do his usual evasive maneuvers. He’s finding it hard to focus on her words at all today.
“James. James,” she says, like she’s been saying it for a while. “James, are you alright?”
“Hmm? I’m fine,” he says automatically.
“You’re looking pretty tired, are you sure you’re feeling okay?”
He’s always tired. “Yes,” he says, and she narrows her eyes at him.
“You honestly looked like you’d just fallen asleep with your eyes open, a minute ago. Like, you weren’t even blinking.”
He blinks, deliberately. Raynor is not amused. “How about this: if you promise to do some homework for me, we can wrap up early today, and you can go home and rest.”
“I need to know what the homework is, first,” he says.
“I want you to think about what your best possible future looks like. Not what you think is most likely, not what you’ll settle for, not what anyone else thinks: just what would make you happiest.”
He stares at her. “Best and happiest are two different things,” he says.
“Come up with options for both of them, then.”
“What does it matter? Why do you care?”
“Because I’m your therapist,” she says, raising an eyebrow.
“My court-mandated therapist who’s supposed to make sure I don’t go off the deep end, or go on a killing spree.”
“I’m not worried about any of that, you’re not at risk of any of that,” she says with a dismissive wave of her pen. “What I care about is that you have the tools and opportunity to build yourself a reasonably happy and fulfilling life. What I’m worried about is that you won’t fight for that. That you’ve given up on that.”
Bucky laughs, gets up, and leaves.
He does think about it though, his best possible future. All he can come up with is that shipping container, and the end it represents. Telling Raynor that would be a one-way ticket to the loony bin though, and not answering her at all is a fight he hasn’t got the energy for, so at their next session, he gives her part of the answer that was once true: he’s free and safe, and he’s righted every HYDRA wrong he can. He has a garden, maybe a pet or two, because it had been nice, tending the plants and animals on that farm in Wakanda. And that’s it. That’s all he’s got.
“Alright,” says Dr. Raynor softly. “That’s somewhere to start.”
That’s the thing though: Bucky’s long past wanting somewhere to start. He wants somewhere to end.
As he walks back home from therapy—it’s a four-mile walk, but what does he care, he hasn’t got anything else to do—he realizes that he understands better now, why Steve had stayed in the past. When any possible future seems opaque and impossible, the known and knowable past must seem like a much better option.
Bucky goes to therapy. He has lunch with Yori a couple times a week and tries and fails to figure out how to tell him about his son. He gets texts from Wilson and doesn’t answer them, because it’s probably best not to encourage the guy’s idea that he’s obligated to check on Bucky or whatever. He makes what amends he can, and even mostly follows the rules Raynor set for them.
He does not go back to Steve’s apartment. He does take long drives on Steve’s motorcycle though, and derives some amusement from how annoyed his tails look about the meandering routes he takes.
The weeks pass, and a muffled numbness settles deep in his bones and his heart, and it’s almost the kind of relief cryo had once been.
And then he sees John Walker with the shield, and all that numbness burns away in one white hot searing flash of rage.