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Everyone has their crosses to bear. It’s what the priest at the church Bucky's grandmother used to drag him to would say. Everyone has their crosses to bear, but a god-fearing man shouldn’t complain about his lot in life. The cross is all but a necessary evil, a spear in one’s side towards the path of righteousness. A man without a cross is one of ego uncrucified, unfit to face God. The path to righteousness is to offer oneself willingly to suffering, to humble the mind and soul, absorbing violence and hatred through forgiveness, he’d say.
Bullshit.
Steve’s body is a steady, limp weight against Bucky’s contused skin and muscles that strain to support him. The churning concrete of snow up to his knees makes each step forward a heavy slog. His nose and fingers are far past their aggravating sting, no longer warmed by the blood that clings, frozen, to skin now deadened by exposure. The mechanical joints of his left arm stutter and creak in protest, too cold to function as intended. Temptation like salt on his tongue draws his gaze behind them, but he’s met only with the barren squall and crooked trench of their path from the compound.
And still, he's selfish. Selfish for thinking only of the last body he remembers being dragged through snow, the trail of blood left in its wake (his own), and not Steve. Nausea swells and knots up, lumping in his throat as he dares himself to look at the man beside him. Steve’s hair is a splotchy mess of blond and white, clumps of snowfall too heavy to melt, sheltering the ugly plaster of red that pools past his temple to his jawline.
It spurs him into talking. “Just a bit further….”
It’s aimless, really. He has no goddamn clue how far off they are to the nearest town and they have no means of support, comms busted and channels disconnected or monitored. They’re standed.
“No one’s coming, Buck.” Bucky’s teeth beg to crack against one another, jaw clenched tight. He can’t tell if it’s the name or Steve’s relent, his voice frayed at the edges, rough and brittle. A bone about to snap. This feels like giving up. “Just get out of here.”
Bucky’s anger is corrosive, wrought from some caustic, dead thing inside of him. Something near hatred blisters inside his chest, burned-out remains of another time echoing in the struggling pump of his heartbeat, choked by smoke--
“No, I’m not going without you!”
He thinks Steve asks too much.
There would have been a response team dispatched as soon as Stark hit the emergency beacon. He wonders how long ago that was.
He wonders if they've found Stark's body by now. It feels like they've been walking for hours.
“While you can,” Steve is mumbling.
The words are hardly audible, whisked into the whiteout. They're a pathetic, last ditch effort to change Bucky’s mind, to get him to turn tail and run, duty shorn. He has no obligation to Steve, not really. Steve's never asked for anything. No obligations but it sure as hell feels like it, because loyalty demands loyalty. What kind of person would it make him, after everything Steve's done - Steve, who crossed fire for him. Steve, who burned S.H.I.E.L.D. to the ground. Steve, who destroyed his home, his family, for him - all this effort, every bullet he's taken for him and from him, to leave him lying in the snow.
Hours since the helicarriers crashed into the Potomac and he can't think straight. Like a bomb went off inside his head and the smoke and ash is clinging to membrane and synapse like tar.
So much of what they touch turns to ash. But all fires burn out eventually and he guesses it's only fitting they should meet their end in the cold.
(he thinks they're both trying to make up for an irreparable loss)
So Bucky doesn’t say shit. He’s not much for words these days as it is, and if his silence bothers Steve, well, Steve doesn't say anything. Bucky gets the distinct impression that he doesn't know how to handle this - handle him. That he wasn't aware when he dragged Bucky out of the rubble that all he'd saved was a reanimated corpse, that he'd have to live with a husk of who Bucky Barnes used to be because some things you just can't get back.
(and maybe he was stupid for thinking the same, buried somewhere beneath the rattle of shattering mission protocols as he pulled Steve out of the Potomac)
He wears clothes that don’t belong to him and don’t quite fit. He’s not sure where he got them but there’s no blood and that feels reassuring. Hours seem to skip from the second he dragged Captain America out of the water to now. But there’s no blood and that’s reassuring because--
“You’re a wanted man.”
They almost go down when his knee buckles and it takes all his strength to stop from lurching forward, holding onto Steve's ruined uniform to keep him from toppling into the snow busted-face first. A knuckle-white grip that sends pain searing through his hand. He's pretty sure there's something broken there. Somewhere beside him Steve swears. Guilt coils sour at the back of his throat.
“Do you…?” Bucky grasps at straws (what-- does he what?), struggling to find something to fill the silence, some way to form words he can’t tear from too-tired lungs. “Do you remember that mission outside of Leningrad? When we were holed up for a week?”
Steve's quiet for a second or two before he nods, grimacing. “In ‘44?”
“Yeah….” For a moment, the only sound between them is the scream of the wind. “S’one of the worst winters we had. And we were short on supplies. Short on rations. Wasn't long after you liberated that HYDRA base.” The HYDRA base I'd been held in for months. “You worried too much. About me. Drove me nuts.” He means to say he hated it. “You kept asking if I felt alright. Kept telling you, sure I was-- why wouldn't I be?”
“I don’t do that anymore.”
“I lied to you. Then.” The only indication of Steve's continued consciousness is the fading warmth of his body pressed against Bucky’s side. “Suppose you already know that now.”
“Buck--”
“No. It’s fine.” It’s not. He imagines that on the scale of memories Steve hopes he remembers, the bad ones are somewhere bleeding at rock bottom. He thinks Steve should lower his expectations. Most of what was good in his life is a scattered haze in his head, collected scraps of information gleaned from libraries and papers and that damned Smithsonian exhibit. Genuine recollection only a lurid burst behind his eyelids at night, rousing him from sleep, a phrase or street. A double edged sword, fleeting and misremembered. Steve should lower his expectations but maybe Bucky should too. Steve's faith is blind and solid, and changing it is no less difficult than moving a mountain.
He finds a rundown motel, pays for the room with cash that doesn’t belong to him (familiar), bites into the collar of his jacket as he sets his arm. Waits until it heals right. Showers filth and debris from his skin and hair. Grates the washcloth against his body as if to scrub the ashes from his brain, red and raw. Lets the water burn until it runs too cold to withstand.
He lies in the bed. He doesn’t sleep. Listens to the tickling of the clock on the wall (familiar) until it's unbearable. Turns on the old television and listens to the drone of cable news broadcast until sunrise, when the sound of passing cars and talking people outside his window becomes overloud. He sleeps just to have silence but he gets no rest.
He goes to the Smithsonian with only a name of a man he doesn’t know. But the face that stares back at him is his own. Younger. Tired but not as tired as he feels now. He can just barely see his reflection on the screen but it’s there and it’s glaring: 1917 - 1945
His jaw clenches in tune with his fist but he doesn’t act on the impulse to destroy what’s in front of him.
By the time he leaves the museum, the sun is down. He feels undone. Off. He goes to the last place he remembers feeling this way and when he sees the technicians cleaning house, stuffing documents into briefcases, dismantling machinery, joking with one another (familiar), he doesn't know how to feel. They stand there, frozen, with something like relief and something like horror on their faces.
One of them speaks but he might as well be hearing static. None of it translates.
Or maybe it does.
He takes his time as he cleans blood off the floor. Their dress shirts soak through too easily and it paints his hands, blotches against his jacket. Iron stings his nose, roils his stomach (familiar). He thinks he should feel sicker than he does. But he doesn’t.
He feels vindicated.
Steve trusts him. Too much. Makes excuse after excuse for him - it's not your fault, it wasn’t you, you’d never do those things on your own - believes so wholeheartedly in him that whatever’s left of Sergeant Barnes makes it hurt.
He deserves none of it.
“There’s just….” Bucky swallows around the words, lodged in his throat. “Some things you don’t talk about.”
“I know.”
No you don’t, he thinks, acidic and cruel. Steve doesn’t know shit.
It goes like this:
He raids HYDRA’s weapons’ stashes. He watches the news. He reads the papers. He tracks them down. He finds answers (he takes them - the right questions, the right twist of a blade under the kneecap). They turn on each other like rats.
From there, it’s easy (too easy).
Blood flecks his face as Rollins chokes on it. His hands around the Chief of Staff’s throat feel like a reprieve, tendons strung taut and mechanical plates shifting until he feels the man’s trachea collapse beneath the pressure. He makes them beg for mercy just to withhold it. Politicians, businessmen, military leaders.
Hesitation doesn’t even cross his mind.
He thinks about his arm - gangrene and the smell of metal being soldered to flesh, of his fingernails as they dig at skin too irritated to heal, trying to pry away what doesn’t belong. Of setting broken bones in that shitty motel as Doug Kammerer talks weather. The scarred and severed neural pathways in his head, dead space and rerouted thought processes and how nothing in his head works the way it fucking used to.
(he thinks maybe something didn’t heal right)
He stares down the rifle’s spiral at a man giving a speech. His aim is steady. His aim is sure. His finger is all but a caress against the trigger and he’s a breath away from firing a .416 Barrett through the man’s skull when his field of vision becomes scorched earth. He hears the explosion from his spot on the rooftop, belly-down on concrete whose loose rubble skitters and skips with the vibration.
He doesn’t remember going to that day’s motel, just that once he’s there there’s a black box lying on the table with a shell case inside and he’s drawn to it like some bug too stupid to realize it’s about to get burnt.
He shouldn't be surprised to find the cyanide capsule inside.
He swallows past the urge to vomit. I’m tired, he wants to say.
Steve's dead weight slowly becomes even heavier. Bucky doesn’t dare talk. The only words he’d muster are questions he doesn’t want answers to, questions he’s too much of a goddamn coward to hear met with silence. If tears sting his eyes, who cares? He has so little dignity left to surrender.
He can just barely hear the soldier’s voice over the roar of the Quinjet’s engine. “Stand down!” The clack of readied weapons gets louder the closer they approach (familiar). “On the ground!” He doesn’t raise his hands but he doesn’t protest when one of the men shove him forward. The snow feels like concrete against his knees.
“--they're not planning on taking you alive.”
He should fight. He still can. He could break the soldier's extended arm, disarm him. Use the gun to take out the rest of his squadron. Rage - at the loss, at thinking his freedom was any real possibility, that he’d let himself be played so easily - is quick to run through his veins, clotting there, a snap decision away from being expelled, fists swinging. He should fight but everything worth fighting for lies dead at his feet. He doesn't have another step left in him.
They were supposed to be finished so many decades ago.
He feels the barrel of a gun press against his skull, closes his eyes, and waits.