Archive of Our Own ^beta

The day they bring Bucky home– well. Steve doesn’t like to think of it like that. He thinks it makes Bucky sound like a dog, something they bought at a store, and Steve wants to get as far from that as possible.

But the day they manage to get Bucky into Natasha’s car and into Sam’s house, Bucky’s hair hangs dirty in his face but his eyes are sharp, darting from side to side over the walls and doorways. His steps falter just enough for them to be able to tell, his body is tight enough to veritably scream his discomfort, and he does not say a word, so neither do they.

They’ve moved all the most precious belongings from Sam’s spare room - anything easily breakable, all the pictures in glass frames - and have tried to make it as welcoming as possible. Natasha resents the cushioning but Steve doesn’t trust the hard edges, so they meet somewhere skewed from the middle and Natasha grins and bears it on Bucky’s behalf. 

Bucky goes through the door cautiously, letting his jacket drop on the neatly made bed. Natasha stands in the doorway, and Steve behind her, and Sam hovers in the kitchen, waiting to run damage control. Bucky runs his hand along the sharp crease of the blanket (military folds, but it could have been any of them) and presses down on the mattress. It dips under his hand, like he could just sink into it and never be able to get out again, and Bucky snaps his hand away in a flash of underlying panic that he doesn’t understand the second it passes.

But Natasha is by his side, her hand gently resting on his arm - his real arm, not that metal monstrosity, not the hand that killed so many people, but Steve says that doesn’t matter anymore – and she steers him away from the bed and toward the bedroom window, murmuring quietly under her breath. Bucky doesn’t understand what she’s saying, can’t make out enough words to string together her sentences, but Natasha’s voice is low and soothing most of the time, so he tries not to do anything to make her stop.

“You remember where you are, right Buck?” Steve asks from the doorway. 

Bucky freezes and Natasha falls silent. “We’re in the Falcon’s house,” he replies stiffly

“Sam, Bucky,” Natasha prompts. “You can call him Sam.”

“Sam.” The ’S’ sits wrong in his mouth as he says it, slipping out without his permission. “We’re in Sam’s house.”

“That’s right, Buck,” Steve says. “We’re gonna stay here for a while.”

“I know.”

“You should go look around the house,” Natasha says. “Get acquainted. Ask Sam before going into his room.”

Bucky nods and shuffles out of the room, sidling past Steve without touching him, and then disappears around a corner. Steve watches him go, then turns back to Natasha. “Why’d you send him off?”

“Because he’s going to freak out if he doesn’t have an exit strategy,” Natasha replies. 

“We can’t afford to lose him again, it took so long to track him down–“

“He won’t leave,” Natasha interrupts. “We’re not chaining him in his room, we’re showing him where he lives, and he’ll feel a lot safer knowing he can go where he needs to if he needs to.”

Steve narrows his eyes a little, still looking skeptical.

Natasha sighs. “Not all of us have that solid, stand your ground M.O., Rogers. Some of us need an emergency escape route, just in case.” She doesn’t give him time to reply, just sweeps out of the bedroom, leaving Steve still standing in the doorway, trying to allow himself to believe that Natasha is right.

*

Natasha does end up being right, or else Bucky is simply too exhausted to try to run for it, because no one sees the bedroom door open on their watch and there are still four warm bodies registering when Natasha runs a scan around three thirty in the morning. The dawn starts slowly pressing up against the window, trying to batter its way in, and Steve watches the light illuminate the cracks in the blinds over the living room walls for a long time before sitting still becomes too much and he has to desert his post. 

Sam comes out of his room about half an hour later, rubbing sleep from his eyes, and walks straight into Steve as Steve roots around in the refrigerator, trying to find milk.

“Mornin’, big guy,” Sam says tiredly. “You been up long?”

“I let Nat off her shift a couple hours ago,” Steve says. “There hasn’t been anything to see, though. If he didn’t sleep through the night, he didn’t ever come out.”

Sam nods, then ducks his head and yawns. “I’ll go check on him in a minute. What’re you making?”

“Pancakes,” Steve replies. “Felt like making some.”

“Yeah, well, good luck finding stuff to make ‘em,” Sam says. 

“You’d be surprised how many things you can use to make food when you need to.” Steve pulls out a carton of milk and a few eggs and sets them carefully down on the counter. “Go make sure Bucky’s alright, okay?”

“Sure, man,” Sam says, then turns and leaves the kitchen. He knocks on the door with two fingers and calls, “Bucky, it’s Sam. Can I come in?”

He’s met with a resounding silence, and Sam feels a burst of adrenaline spark in his stomach. “Bucky?”

Still nothing.

“I’m gonna open the door, okay?” Sam waits for a very long five seconds for an answer, then turns the handle and pushes the door open. 

Bucky sits stock still on the edge of his bed, back ramrod straight, fingers digging into the corner of the mattress. The blankets are still folded perfectly, and Sam doesn’t know if Bucky even got in bed, let alone slept in it. Bucky’s shoulders tense up when Sam comes in, so Sam leaves the door open and walks around the edge of the room. Bucky’s eyes follow him, but he doesn’t make any other movements.

“Hey, man,” Sam says softly. “Can I sit with you?” 

Bucky’s eyes flicker to the empty spot on the bed and back, and says nothing.

Sam waits for a second for any sign of disapproval, then crosses the room slowly and sits down next to him, leaving a bit of space. “Did you sleep?”

“Yes.”

“On the bed?”

Bucky hesitates for a second. “No.”

“How come?”

Bucky falls silent again.

“Was it too soft?” Sam asks. “I know that feeling. After you come back, you aren’t used to it.”

“We had barracks,” Bucky says. “When I slept. Tight ones. And I don’t think I had much better before.”

He trails off and looks down at the floor and Sam reaches over and rests his hand on Bucky’s knee. “Hey, we can fix it, okay? We can get a new mattress, or put boards under. It’ll be easy. Okay?”

“Okay,” Bucky says softly. He shifts uneasily, so Sam removes his hand. “Is there, uh. Food? Rations?”

“What? No, there’s just what we have,” Sam says. “Steve’s making something, I think, but you can help yourself to whatever you want.”

Bucky’s eyes widen, but he just looks slightly panicked now. 

“Or I can get you something,” Sam backtracks. “You can stay in here if you want.”

Bucky shakes his head. “Steve…?”

“You can see Steve if you want,” Sam says. “He’s in the kitchen. You remember where that is?”

“Yes.” Bucky stands up carefully and stretches a bit. “Thank you, uh. Sam.”

“No problem, man.” Bucky nods shortly and squares his shoulders like he’s walking into battle, and Sam supposes that walking out into the kitchen is a battle when Bucky can only remember Steve’s name half the time.

Steve senses Bucky’s presence before he actually hears his footsteps and instinct tells him to turn and drop into a defensive stance and reach for his shield (where is it? He could swear he left it in the hall, Natasha probably knows where it is) but he forces himself to relax as he whisks flour and milk and baking powder together. “Good morning, Buck.”

“Steve.” It comes out as half whisper, and it makes Steve set down the whisk and turn around, and Bucky is staring at him with that same scared, wide-eyed expression he’d had on the Helicarrier right before it fell. He looks exhausted, but Steve doesn’t know if it’s the kind of exhaustion that you can ever sleep off.

“Yeah, Bucky?”

Bucky doesn’t say anything immediately, just looks at Steve, and then the mixing bowl, and then back at Steve. “Sam says you’re making food.”

“I am, yeah.”

“He said I can have as much as I want.” Bucky sounds more suspicious than anything, and it makes Steve’s heart hurt.

“Yeah, you can. Don’t make yourself sick though.” Steve turns back to the bowl and cracks two eggs in. “You can have the first one.”

Bucky goes over to the kitchen table and drags a chair back. He sits down a couple feet from Steve and half folds in on himself, feet planted flat on the floor and arms crossed over his chest. Steve glances at him out of the corner of his eye and nods because it feels like a question, and Bucky nods back because it feels like it should be answered.

Steve whisks the rest of the ingredients together and pours some batter into a heated pan on the stove and the silence is made stifling by the sizzle when he flips the first pancake over, and Steve is grateful when it turns golden brown on both sides so that he can slip it onto a plate and put a pat of butter on top and get Bucky’s unwavering stare off of him for a second.

“Here you go, Bucky,” he says, as cheerfully as he can. “Forks are in the drawer next to the sink.”

Bucky nods and reaches over to the drawer and pulls out a fork, and then carries his pancake over to the table. Steve hears the rhythmic clink of metal against ceramic and he remembers too far back, eating pancakes on the floor of Bucky’s house, sitting on couch cushions and wrapped in sweaters as the cold permeated the sitting room under the door. It makes him feel nostalgic, and it makes him feel a little sick, to know how different the man eating behind him is.

He hears the loud clink of a fork being set down, and then a scrape of wood, and then Bucky is next to him again, cautiously setting his plate down next to the sink. “You can have some more if you want.”

Bucky looks up sharply, as if startled by the offer. “I…”

“Do you want another pancake, Buck?” Steve presses gently. 

Bucky opens his mouth, but no words come out, so he drops his gaze, shifting nervously.

“I’ll make you another one,” Steve decides. He pours another circle of batter into the frying pan.

“Steve,” Bucky mumbles. “Thank you.”

Steve smiles a little, too sadly to be reassuring, and rests his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “Anything you need, okay?”

Bucky doesn’t give an answer, just sits back down in the chair and watches as Steve checks the bottom until it’s perfect, and then he retreats again and the metal clinking starts back up and Steve’s soul hurts. 

He hears a quiet shuffle behind him and then Natasha’s leaning up against the counter next to him. “Morning, Nat.”

“Hey.” Natasha brushes a stray strand of hair off of her forehead. “I call dibs on the next one, okay?”

“Okay.” Steve flips the pancake over. “Sleep well?”

“Can’t complain,” Natasha says. “What about you? You left me off around four thirty, you been up since then?”

“I don’t need a lot of sleep,” Steve replies. 

“Me neither, but it's nice to have,” Natasha counters. “What’s Sam up to?”

“I don’t know. Last I saw, he was checking on Bucky, maybe he went back to sleep.”

“Don’t forget to feed him too. You know, since it is his food.”

Steve huffs out a breath of laughter through his nose and flips the pancake onto a plate. “Butter?”

Natasha’s reply is cut short by the sound of retching, and they both turn around to see a flash of footsteps sprinting toward the bathroom. Natasha curses and Steve rushes over, wincing at the sound, to see Bucky kneeling in front of Sam’s toilet, shaking. Steve sighs and crouches down next to him, pulls Bucky's hair away from his face and rubs Bucky’s back with the heel of his palm until the retching subsides and the shaking calms and Bucky sits down hard on the floor. 

A glass of water appears next to Steve’s head and he nods gratefully at Natasha as he takes it and gently coaxes a few sips into Bucky. They help him up off the ground and over to the couch, and he sits there silently as Steve cleans up the bathroom and Natasha clears the plate and fork and half-finished food and they both make a note to tell Sam to buy a stock of MREs, just to start with.

*

Sam meets Cassidy Goldberg at the VA two years before the world goes to hell. 

She is tall and willowy with sharp eyes and a Masters in psychology from Eugene Lang and a soft voice that only gets hard around people who don’t respect walking through the front doors into her domain. She works three halls away from Sam and sits in the back of his meeting rooms sometimes and holds back people who have a particularly rough time during group sessions so Sam can make them make appointments. She is quick witted around patients and reserved around colleagues and keeps her framed diplomas in a drawer after one patient smashed the glass of one in a panic. 

Sam meets Cassidy Goldberg on the corner of Second and Parker at eight at night with Natasha tapping her thumb against the steering wheel and they make a deal.

Cassidy walks around Sam’s house for about ten minutes, making mental notes of– something, they don’t know what, but they suppose she likes to know where she stands herself before she finds out where she stands with anyone else. And after those ten minutes, she nods and says, “Alright.”

Maybe their way wasn’t the best way, because they bring offerings to their new god and they bring Bucky out, Natasha on one side and Steve on the other, to present to Cassidy like a gift and they can feel panicked confusion rolling off of Bucky in waves, but they guide him to the couch and Cassidy sits across from him and flips open her notebook and they pause for one long beat to make sure all hell doesn’t break loose.

She runs down the usual questions and the rest of them wince a little bit, because Sam explained what he could in the car but Bucky, when he speaks at all, mumbles out answers half the time that barely make any sense and sometimes aren’t even in English, and Cassidy stops taking notes after a while and just stares as he struggles to answer. Sam leans over her shoulder and tries to read her notes, but they’re in scrawled shorthand that he couldn’t read even if he knew her code, and the question marks that multiply down the page don’t clarify anything at all. 

They give Bucky twenty minutes and then a rest, and Cassidy corners Sam outside of Bucky’s view and hisses, “What the hell is going on?”

Sam sighs. “I told you, we rescued him from–“

“I know what you said,” Cassidy interrupts. “But this isn’t it. You said you had a friend with PTSD who had been tortured and brainwashed. You didn’t say anything about SHIELD or HYDRA or cryogenics or– or a metal arm–“

“I’m doing the best I can,” Sam says. “He’s messed up, he doesn’t remember anything, far as I can tell. I’m not asking you to turn him into who he used to be, I’m just asking you to help us get started.”

Cassidy bites the inside of her cheek and looks unconvinced.

“Look, you’re one of the best therapists I’ve ever met, alright?” Sam says. “You and me, we have a good system. We find the ones who need help and we help them. Well, I found the guy who needs help.”

Cassidy looks back into the living room, where Bucky is gripping the material of Steve’s pants tightly and Steve is rubbing his back and murmuring quietly. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this.”

“Get him to tell you what happened. That’s our start,” Sam says. “We can figure it out after that, but right now we need to find out what we’re dealing with.”

Cassidy sighs and nods and rubs her face with one hand, and then she goes back out into the living room and they start again. 

In the first meeting, they find out nothing. It’s not until the third time that Sam picks Cassidy up after work and rouses Bucky from his room that they start to drag out the torture. It’s nothing new – nothing that Steve hadn’t read a dozen times over in Bucky’s file – but it’s fresh from a victim’s standpoint and Bucky sits there, miserably silent except for when he rips answers out of the very back of his brain. Cassidy scribbles her notes and Steve sits vigil by Bucky’s side, ready to intervene if Bucky starts to panic, but if Bucky does, he doesn’t let on. 

Steve makes Cassidy coffee and apologizes for the state of the house and Cassidy downs the mug and waves the apologies away. It’s their manner of closure without context, because Cassidy may have her notes and her professional opinions, but they can all see that Bucky shakes her to her core. It’s understandable - they know that Bucky is quite frankly scary, and they’ve all been wary of him (to say the least) at some point. So Steve gives Cassidy the gift of a veil of normalcy for two day periods, until Sam picks her up again.

Bucky hates Cassidy Goldberg.

Not in the way that he was trained to hate, either. In the past, he hated those he was ordered to kill, hated those who got in the way, hated the people who put themselves in between his owners and their goals. Not the blank, dry hate of someone who doesn’t know any better.

No, Bucky hates Cassidy Goldberg all on his own.

He hates her like he hates Steve, sometimes, and Sam and Natasha and all of these bullshit wood-and-plaster walls that he could punch through if he was their assailant; like he hates the way his head aches and his teeth ache and the name Bucky Barnes aches. He hates her the way forgiveness has always stung, because forgiveness always brought pain, and so does she.

Bucky thinks to himself - quietly, alone, locked in his room, wrapped in one of Natasha’s oversized cardigans with his face covered in scratches his own nails have dug out - that HYDRA could have taken a few notes from Cassidy Goldberg. Torture is fine, torture is normal and right and great because even when he was screaming for his life as electricity drowned his nerves, he knew how to deal with it. Muscle memory, perhaps, or maybe brain scarring, but Bucky knows that if Steve decided to take him outside and beat him half to death, he would be able to hang on for as long as he had to.

These days, though, Bucky barely makes it through half an hour of - not even talking, really, just mumbling in whatever language his brain latches onto and being forced to think. He doesn’t like it, doesn’t like the way his own thoughts spawn and claw their way up his throat and turn into ideas. It’s too foreign and it hurts too much.

He considers killing Cassidy Goldberg a couple of times, just to make the pain stop. But HYDRA’s addiction was pain, so his owners wouldn’t subject him to her if it wasn’t required.

He knows she’s afraid of him, and it makes him feel ill. No one worthwhile was ever afraid of him. Fear is for flesh, for stains on history that have to be smudged out. Bucky smells fear like an aphrodisiac for the worst type of bloodlust, and his guns are never where they should be.

Cassidy Goldberg is a torturer, and a liability. Bucky doesn’t understand how Sam keeps letting her walk out of the house, and then locking the door behind her so that he can’t hunt her down. He doesn’t understand why they all allow her to know things, to put his vulnerabilities on display like the exhibit in the Smithsonian, to write in her notebooks things that could bring down whole countries - if they haven’t already, if he ever managed to articulate them correctly. Bucky doesn’t understand Cassidy Goldberg, with her eyes that lack dark circles, her shirts that bare unbruised wrists and clear, scarless skin, her limbs that betray no hint of mechanized pain.

And yet, she drags confession after confession out of him, day after day, word after scrawled word, and thoughts keep forming in Bucky’s head when she tells him to remember another mission, another master, another death. He doesn’t know how she creates these things out of thin air, and he absolutely loathes her for it.

Bucky corners her in the kitchen one night while Steve is in the bathroom. He knows she doesn’t hear him come into the kitchen (why would she? He made his living in stealth) and he resents how the lines of tension in her shoulders aren’t tight enough. (He hates how lax they all look, everyone except Natasha. Why don’t they realize how much danger they’re in?)

He traps her before she ever realizes he’s out of the living room, and he steps purposefully on the floor just loudly enough to draw her attention before he has one hand over her mouth and is backing her roughly into the refrigerator. A couple magnets fall down and one grinds into pieces under Bucky’s heel.

Cassidy’s fingers scrabble at his hand but the metal is too sleek and strong to pry away. She meets his eyes, unblinkingly, and then holds her hands up to the sides. Bucky glances at them, but the fact that she’s unarmed means nothing.

“You’re a liability,” he hisses. He sees rather than feels her mouth try to move under his hand, so he presses tighter. She lets out a sharp breath through her nose and stills.

“You know too much.” That’s true, on multiple levels. Cassidy knows much more than Bucky would like, more than he would like anyone to know. HYDRA preferred the stupid, clueless masses, and so does he. But she also knows too much about him. She knows all about his programming, more than he does himself. She knows his ticks and triggers in a way no one but Pierce did for a long time. More than Natasha and Sam do. Maybe more than Steve does.

“I should kill you,” and he wants to. God, he wants to. He wants to more than he can remember ever wanting anything else. He wants to kill this thing that sets his brain on fire every other night and makes him recount every blood spatter the insides of his eyelids and reminds him how to feel things but never taught him moderation. Cassidy Goldberg reminded him of feelings, but every feeling is anger now, anger and rage and crippling anguish in between.

He wishes he were still the Winter Soldier. Things were so much simpler then.

Cassidy keeps staring at him. Bucky’s eye twitches as he holds her gaze. She’s still afraid, but boldly so. Like a challenge. Bucky suddenly feels absurd for ever feeling threatened by her. He blinks hard and slowly draws his hand away.

She licks her lips, then runs her tongue over her teeth to make sure none of them are bloody. “Are you done?”

Bucky just stares at her blankly.

“Please get off of me, James.”

Bucky releases her like her skin is burning, taking several steps back.

Cassidy rolls her shoulders forward a few times, then draws herself to her full height. She looks him dead in the face and says, “Stand down, soldier,” and Bucky feels his limbs lock into attention.

Cassidy crosses her arms. “You won’t attack me again,” she says firmly.

Bucky’s jaw clenches painfully. “I should kill you,” he repeats. “It’s not safe to let you live.”

“Safe for who?” she asks.

“Me,” Bucky says after a moment. 

Cassidy’s expression grows just a little softer. “Well then,” she says. “Looks like you were in there after all.”

Bucky’s eyebrows draw together in confusion.

“I’ll see you in a couple days, James,” Cassidy says, then scoops her notepads up off of the counter and walks around Bucky to the door. He doesn’t watch her go, but he flinches when the door clicks shut. After a long moment, he turns around and walks uncertainly to the door and slides the locks into place with shaking fingers.

Two days later, she’s back again, and Bucky doesn’t hate her any less, but it helps, maybe, that she knows.

It takes Bucky six more sessions before he can talk to Cassidy without Steve right next to him.

It takes much longer before they identify something even remotely signifying progress again.

(That progress involves a broken table and several large burns on the carpet, but every single one of them counts it as a victory anyway.)

*

It’s about five weeks since they’ve brought Bucky home when Sam hears a knock on the door. 

He mutters to himself about door to door salesmen and evangelists as he slides open the lock, but the man at the door is neither of those things. He’s about the same height as Sam, but stockier, more solidly grounded, wrapped up in a worn leather jacket and jeans and shrouded in a pair of dark, wrap-around sunglasses.

“Can I help you?” Sam asks cautiously.

“Is Natasha here?” the man asks. He sounds tired.

Sam freezes for a split second. “Uh… Who?”

“Don’t play stupid. Is Natasha here or isn’t she? This is the address she gave me.”

“Oh.” Sam looks back into the living room, where Steve is watching TV. “Not to be a jerk or anything, man, but who are you exactly?”

“Name’s Clint,” the man – Clint – says. “You’ve probably seen me in the news a little.”

“Clint?” a voice calls from inside. Clint pokes his head around Sam’s shoulder and sees Steve turned around on the couch. 

Clint grins. “Afternoon, Cap.” He brushes past Sam and lets Steve pull him into a quick hug, clapping him on the back. “How’s civilian life treating you?”

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Steve says wryly. “Still plenty to do, you know. How about you?”

“Just made it back stateside.” Clint shrugs out of his jacket, throwing to onto the couch where Steve was sitting. “Not easy to get back when all of your intel suddenly shuts down and starts trying to kill you.”

Steve rubs the back of his neck and has the decency to look sheepish. “You get out of it alright, though?”

Clint pulls off his sunglasses and gestures to one eye, which Sam can see even from the side is swollen and darkened with bruising. “Gets worse without a shirt on, but not bad, all things considered. None of my handlers have been the same since Coulson, I guess you figured out why.”

“I’m sorry, Clint,” Steve says earnestly.

Clint shrugs. “Not your fault. I had a hell of a time finding this place, though. Even when people recognize you, they aren’t exactly leaping to help.” He tosses his sunglasses on top of his coat and looks around. “Is Tasha here?”

“She went out,” Steve says. “Sam’s house, it’s not really set up to feed four people.”

Clint snorts. “Bet you ten bucks she’s not out on a food run.”

“Oh, I’m sure,” Steve replies. “But as long as we get stocked up again, it’s all the same to me.”

“Steve?” Sam cuts in. “Who’s this?” 

Steve looks up, and a slight smile spreads across his face. “Don’t suppose you’d recognize him without the bow. Sam, this is Clint Barton, also known as Hawkeye.”

Sam tilts his head to the side a little and nods. “Yeah, yeah, right. Invasion in New York, wasn’t it?”

Clint bows his head a bit and gives Sam a two-fingered salute. “Yes, sir. Not as exciting as Stark riding a bomb into space, but we can’t all be Iron Man.”

Sam laughs and shuts the door behind him. “Well, man, any friend of Steve’s and so on. I don’t know when Natasha’s getting back, but make yourself comfortable while she’s gone.”

Clint swings by the refrigerator and grabs a beer, then tosses himself on the couch next to where Steve’s settled back down. Sam retreats to the kitchen, leaning against the counter, listening to half-intelligible conversations in the living room, and hoping that Natasha gets back soon.

Soon turns into about half an hour before Natasha pushes through the front door with a duffel and three paper bags bulging with food. Steve immediately stands up to help her and carefully lifts bags onto the counter and Natasha disappears into Sam’s room for a minute, then reappears without the duffel and breaks out into a grin. “Hey there, Barton.”

“About time,” Clint calls from the couch, then stands up and vaults over it to meet her. 

She punches him in the shoulder and presses a quick kiss to his lips. “You look like hell.”

“Thanks, Nat,” Clint says cheerfully. “Belarus isn’t pretty when you’ve got no intel and your covers all blow halfway through your mission.”

“You’re a big boy, you can take it,” Natasha teases. “Now, come on, I’ve got some stuff to explain.” She grabs his elbow and drags him off – into Sam’s room, Sam doesn’t realize until after they’ve disappeared through the doorway – and the door bangs shut behind them.

“Are they…?” Sam gestures to the closed door. “They’re not–“

Steve flushes a little. “No, no, of course not.”

Sam looks skeptical. “They better not be.”

“Clint and Natasha aren’t like that,” Steve says quickly. “Well. I don’t think they are. But no, they’re not, definitely not.”

“Alright, then what’s he doing here?” Sam asks, crossing his arms. “Did you spread the word that my house is a lost superhero sanctuary?”

Steve opens his mouth to protests ‘superhero’, then closes it. “To be honest, I didn’t know Clint was going to show up. I didn’t really know anything about what was going on with him since SHIELD went down.”

“Natasha knew.”

Steve rolls his eyes. “Natasha knows everything, no matter what she says. She’s got some sort of Clint radar. Always has, far as I can tell.”

Sam’s eyebrows furrow a little. “And you’re sure they’re not–“

“Not together,” Steve confirms.

“I was going to say fucking, but that works too,” Sam says, and lets out a huff of laughter when Steve makes a soft choking noise. 

By the time the bedroom door opens again, Sam and Steve have retreated back to the couch, Sam drinking Clint’s half-finished second beer in the third quarter of a basketball game that almost overwhelms the click of the latch with its cheering. Steve turns around to look at them over his shoulder. Natasha looks as she always does, but Clint appears to have sobered considerably. “All good?”

“Where is he?” Clint asks.

No one says anything for a moment.

“I want to talk to Bucky Barnes,” Clint clarifies.

Steve sits up a little straighter, eyes widening, and he nods.

“Wait, no, what?” Sam asks. “Man, I barely even know who you are. What do you want with Bucky?”

Clint looks from him to Natasha to Steve and then back. “You didn’t tell them.” It’s not a question, just a statement.

“I know how you are about it–“

Clint waves a hand. “Go for it. Just tell me where he is.”

Steve points to the guest room. “In there. If he’s asleep, don’t wake him up. He’s a bit rough when he wakes up.”

Clint nods. “He won’t be.”

He turns and walks out of the living room, rapping gently on Bucky’s door before disappearing inside with a quiet click. Sam watches him go for a moment and, when he doesn’t hear the sound of yelling or anything breaking, turns back to Natasha and raises an eyebrow.

Natasha sighs. “Alright, go ahead.”

“So what the hell was that?” Sam asks.

“He’s ex-SHIELD, so much as any of us are ex-SHIELD,” Natasha says. “I worked with him before it went down, we were a strike team. He’s a good man.”

“Right, then what’s he doing here? Do you keep all your SHIELD lackeys on tap?”

“Clint’s not a lackey,” Natasha says, and Sam could swear he sees her eyes flash dark for a split second. “But that doesn’t matter. He’s the best I can find who knows what Bucky’s dealing with.”

“So he’s a therapist? Or what?”

Natasha leans her hip against the couch, half sitting on the edge. “When Loki came for the Tesseract, right before the invasion, he took a few of SHIELD’s officers. Some grunts, some scientists, you know, but he also took Clint. Got in their minds. Made them do things. Made them kill their own. I found Clint and I… brought him out of it, but he knows what he did under Loki’s control.”

Steve shifts uncomfortably next to Sam and Natasha gently touches his shoulder. “He knows what it’s like, Sam, better than you or me or Rogers or anyone you could bring in. He knows what it’s like to have people digging around in your brain, shoving things in there that don’t belong. So let him talk.”

Sam chews his bottom lip, then nods. “He staying for long?”

“Not likely,” Natasha says. “He’s on a mission, running recon for whoever’s left. He’ll be here a few days, tops. You won’t even notice him.”

Sam waves a hand. “I don’t care if he’s in the house, just… Warning next time, yeah?”

“Alright,” Natasha says, and then she turns and disappears back into Sam’s room. 

Steve waits until he hears the door close, then lets out a small sigh of relief.

“You know that?” Sam asks.

Steve nods. “After the invasion there were debriefings, and those of us with SHIELD stayed in the barracks at the Triskelion for a couple weeks while press and paperwork and all that got sorted out. A lot of it came out then. It was, uh… Pretty ugly sometimes.”

“I bet.” Sam eyes Bucky’s door. “What was it like?”

“He was angry a lot,” Steve says. “Granted, I didn’t see that much of it, Natasha probably had to deal with the most of it, but he was angry.”

Sam nods. “Scared?”

“Yeah.” Steve rubs at his face with one hand. “Clint’s strong, he’s a strong guy, but he let it show sometimes, just by accident. It didn’t break him, you know, but it…” He shrugs helplessly. “I don’t know Clint so well, but I think maybe it came close.”

Sam is quiet for a moment. “Did it hurt?”

“Did what hurt?”

“When Loki… took him, or whatever Nat said. Did it hurt him?”

Steve shrugs one shoulder. “Might have. He never said.”

Sam presses his lips together, then pushes himself off of the couch. “I’m gonna go check on them.”

“You sure?” Steve asks.

“If you’re right about what happened in New York, this might be almost as hard for Clint as it is for Bucky,” Sam says. 

Steve slumps a little in his seat and nods and Sam shuffles over to Bucky’s bedroom. He pushes the door open quietly and peers in.

Bucky is sitting on the bed, head bowed and hands folded in his lap. Clint faces him, straddling a chair facing the wrong way, arms settled on the back rest, murmuring quietly. He breaks off mid-sentence and looks up sharply as Sam pops his head through the door. “Need something?”

Sam shakes his head. “Nope. Just checkin’ in.”

“Alright,” Clint says. “If you’re not staying, close the door.”

“Is that alright? Me staying?” Sam asks cautiously.

Clint shrugs. “Up to him.”

“Fine,” Bucky says faintly.

“You sure?” It’s directed at Clint now. “I know this is probably hard on you too.”

He doesn’t miss the way Clint’s shoulders tense. “Either get in or get out, man.”

Sam slips through the door and closes it with a soft click, then sits down against the wall. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

Clint stares at the floor for a moment, then murmurs something unintelligible to Bucky.

Bucky nods minutely. “Yes,” he whispers back. “Constantly.”

Clint nods back. “Me too.” He glances sidelong at Sam. “What about Black Widow? The Falcon?”

“Yes,” Bucky breathes. The fingers of his metal hand twitch.

“Everyone in the house, right? Everyone in your way?”

“Yes.”

“I know,” Clint says. “I know. What about Pierce?”

Bucky falters and flinches away as if Clint had struck him. “No. No, no no no, nyet nyet nyet–“

“Bucky.” Clint reaches forward and grips Bucky’s shoulder. Bucky freezes at the touch. “He’s not here.”

Bucky lets out a shuddering breath. “No.”

“No,” Clint agrees. “He’s not.”

“Yes.” It’s barely audible.

“Yes what?” Clint prompts.

“I want to kill him.” 

Clint squeezes Bucky’s shoulder a little tighter. “Good. Hang onto that.”

“He’s still here.”

“Fury shot–“ Sam starts quietly.

Clint cuts him off immediately. “I know he is. In every part of your head, right? In every part of your body. Telling you–“

“My missions,” Bucky finishes. “Always, always… Need to finish…” His fingers scrabble against Clint’s arm, looking for purchase, and in the next second, something shifts in Bucky’s eyes and he lunges forward, slamming Clint out of the chair and onto the ground. 

Sam’s on his feet in a second but Clint doesn’t seem to be fighting back. Bucky hovers on top of him, metal arm pulled back and fingers curled into a fist, and he stares down at Clint, as if waiting for an order.

“You can if you want,” Clint says hoarsely. “With your other hand. Make that your mission.”

Bucky blinks a few times, then slowly lowers his metal arm and raises his flesh and blood one.

“Good,” Clint says. “And he didn’t tell you to do that. You decided to do it.”

Bucky shakes a little.

“You can hit me,” Clint repeats. “Once, open handed. That’s it.”

“You’re in the way,” Bucky whispers. “I want to kill you.”

“Tough.” Clint’s stare is hard. “Killing me isn’t your mission, never was. You’ve got your terms.”

Sam holds his breath for a very, very long moment, and then Bucky lets his other arm drop, inch by inch, and sits hard on the ground next to Clint’s hips.

“Good.” Clint pushes himself up and rests a hand on Bucky’s lower back. “Thanks.”

Sam could swear he sees Bucky crack a bit of a smile.

*

Steve is responsible for the first time Bucky laughs.

They’re all making Chicken Kiev for dinner together - well, Sam and Natasha are. Steve is watching and Bucky is sitting at the counter, staring blankly at the opposite wall. But they’re all present, and Bucky seems to marginally prefer being around for food preparation these days rather than just waiting for food to be rationed out for him. (Natasha says it’s so he knows that nothing has been poisoned and Steve doesn’t ask how she knows that.)

Quiet conversation flows easily between Sam and Natasha. Steve is content to just listen to them trade good-natured barbs back and forth between lines of the recipe, occasionally piping up himself if something particularly witty comes to mind. At one point he makes a pun so bad that Sam throws a serving spoon at him, but Bucky snatches it out of midair, crushes it, and throws it back so fast that Sam barely has time to duck out of the way, and the conversation dies down a little after that.

Sam and Natasha are pressed together, cutting strips of breast meat off of the same chicken and Sam’s knife misses the section he was trying to remove and skips straight into Natasha’s hand.

“Говно! Fuck!” She yanks her hand away before too much red can seep into the meat, grabbing one of the dish towels and pressing it into her palm.

“Shit, Nat, I’m sorry.” Sam drops his knife in the sink and runs over to the bathroom to grab some antiseptic and a bandage. 

Natasha allows him to clean the cut, hissing at the sharp sting of an alcohol wipe, and flexes her hand once the bandage is in place. “You know, Sam, just because we’re making Russian food, that doesn’t mean you have to cook me in with it.”

“Oh, I don’t think that anyone in here would have a problem eating you, Natasha,” Steve says, arching one eyebrow.

Natasha turns to him, mouth open for a rebuttal, but nothing comes out. There’s a beat of silence, and then she breaks out into a grin. Sam lets out a whoop of laughter and reaches across the kitchen to punch Steve in the shoulder.

And Steve hears another rough noise behind him, a sharp, scratchy sort of breath. He turns around to see Bucky staring at the table, chuckling behind one hand. He looks up when Steve moves and Steve winks. Bucky starts laughing again, which sets Sam off, and Natasha covers her face with one hand as Steve smiles apologetically. 

It’s not until Sam’s wiping a tear from his cheek that she elbows Steve in the side and says, “Careful, Rogers, or I might take you up on that.”

Sam cackles delightedly. 

Steve flushes a little, but his smirk doesn’t fade. Sam leans his back against the counter as Natasha goes back to cutting up the chicken - alone - and murmurs, “Man, how’d you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Proposition the Black Widow? Get Barnes to smile? Talk about Nat’s business and not get your balls ripped off?”

Steve buries a laugh and deliberately glances down toward Sam’s hip. “Something you need to tell me about your balls, Sam?”

Bucky snickers quietly as Sam throws his hands in the air. “Look who’s Captain fuckin’ Comedian today.”

“I guess cannibalism transcends all times and cultures,” Steve shrugs.

“More like men have been pigs since the dawn of time,” Natasha says without looking up. “You’d better watch it or your balls are next.” 

Steve presses his legs together instinctually and glances at Bucky. Bucky still has the fading hint of a smile on his face, and it makes him look so much lighter than usual. Steve grins at him and Bucky tries to arrange his face to match.

It doesn’t look quite right, not yet, but if Steve has to take a couple of fists to the genitals to teach Bucky to smile again….

Well, he’ll consider it.

*

A tall, blond man is stabbed to death over by the Mall.

Steve and Sam sit on either side of the couch, watching the news, making quiet comments about what a shame it is and how they hope the police will catch the killer soon.

Bucky sits quietly between them and stares at his hands. He knows he’s been on lockdown for months, but he wonders.

He wonders.

*

Sam is responsible for the first time Bucky cries.

Bucky has nightmares near constantly, it’s nothing new. It’s better than him not sleeping at all and they’re all used to it, to waking up to yelling and screaming, or the ragged pounding of holes getting punched in Sam’s walls, or - most recently - Bucky coming to one of them, just so he isn’t the only one awake. He always bears the same terrified look that he’s been slowly fading away from in daylight, chest heaving in the unmistakeable signs of repressed panic attacks, shaking hard enough that his left hand clinks against the doorknob as he goes into Sam’s room for the third time in a week to hate himself for asking for help. 

Sam sleeps on the floor of Bucky’s room one night - precautionary measures, and Bucky’s come to him anyway the last few nights he’s woken up in a panic, so Sam decides to cut out the middle man and tosses a pillow and a couple of blankets of the floor and waves off Bucky’s quiet protests. It turns out to be a good idea, because Sam wakes up before Bucky can wake himself up from his thrashing to make it four nights in four. He kneels at the edge of Bucky’s bed and catches one of his wrists - the left one, and it always feels cold for some reason - before it can smash into his face and that wakes Bucky up immediately in the midst of what must have been a particularly brutal nightmare.

“Hey, man, Bucky, it’s okay–“ Sam starts to say, and then the wrist he was holding is leading fingers wrapped around his throat. Sam’s survival instinct fights with his protective instinct, but neither of them need to win because Bucky’s eyes clear and he drops Sam almost immediately. Sam gasps out his first few breaths, rubbing his neck, as Bucky scrambles to the opposite side of the bed, pressing back against the wall with a look of absolute horror on his face. 

Sam swallows hard and nothing seems to feel out of place. “Are you okay?”

Bucky lets out a little breath. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Sam says. “You didn’t mean to. Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry,” Bucky breathes again. “Don’t– I’m sorry, I didn’t…” He glances around rapidly, arms folding against his chest, and he shrinks back when Sam sits down on the bed. 

“Breathe, Bucky,” Sam prompts. “You’re okay, you’re awake. You know where you are, you’re gonna be okay, just breathe.”

Bucky bows his head and does as he’s told.

“Good. That’s good,” Sam praises. “Keep doing that, it helps.”

Bucky’s chest rises and falls, slower and slower, and then it shakes a little and he reaches over and grabs the leg of Sam’s pajama pants tightly. Sam puts his hand on Bucky’s and leans in a little. “What’s up? What’re you thinking?”

Bucky shakes again, a full body shake that starts from his chest and forces its way out, and shakes his head hard.

Sam squeezes Bucky’s hand. “I’m here, okay? Do what you need to do, I’m still here.”

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut tight, and Sam can see a couple of tear tracks streak down his cheeks and get lost in his stubble. His grip on Sam’s pajama pants gets even tighter, and Sam squeezes his hand tighter, and then Bucky buries his face in his free hand and fails to keep in the great, shuddering breath that Sam recognizes as the beginning to any good sobbing fit. 

And he’s not disappointed. Bucky’s got seventy years to pour out of him, and the sobs that finally force their way out shake the bed a little and Bucky doesn’t look scared like he usually does after nightmares. He just looks miserable, with red rimmed eyes and dark circles and wet spots on his sleeve from wiping tears off of his cheeks and lips cut up from biting them, trying to keep that much of an emotional outburst from bursting out.

Sam considers it a success.

When the crying peters out and Bucky stops shaking and starts sniffling the way all people who have to blow their nose but have nothing to do it with do, Sam pries himself free and grabs a roll of toilet paper from the bathroom. Bucky cleans himself up as fast as he can and brushes balled up wads into the trash bin by his bed, and he can’t seem to meet Sam’s eye as he quietly slips back under the covers.

“Hey, move over a bit,” Sam says. 

“What?”

“Move over. I wanna crash with you tonight.”

Bucky looks confused. “Why?”

“I’m gonna make sure you’re okay after that,” Sam says. “So move over a bit.”

Bucky blinks, then slides over to the left side of the bed. Sam climbs in and pulls the covers up to his shoulders and holds up an arm. “You want close or you want space?”

“Space,” Bucky says quietly. 

“Alright. I’m here, though,” Sam says, then he rolls over and adjusts his pillow and listens to Bucky’s breathing slowly even out before he goes back to sleep himself.

*

“Thank you for calling me, James.”

She hears heavy breathing on the other end for a few seconds, and then the line goes dead. Cassidy sighs and sets her phone back on its charging base.

Thirty-five miles away, Bucky lets the handle of a kitchen knife slip out of his hand and land with a quiet thump on the end of Steve’s makeshift bed. He drops Steve’s cell phone on the ground as he turns and walks unsteadily back to his own room.

The next morning, the knife is sheathed back in the block on Sam’s counter with all the others and Steve doesn’t say a word.

*

It’s their habit of now of eating breakfast together, since Sam’s back at the VA full-time and Natasha disappears to God knows where without telling them when she’ll be back. Steve doesn’t have anywhere to be and Bucky doesn’t have anything to do at all, so Steve wakes up and fries up bread and eggs for french toast, or sticks waffles in the toaster, and Bucky comes out a few minutes later, tired-eyed and hair tousled, and drops himself into one of the chairs at the kitchen table and dutifully eats whatever Steve puts in front of him until he wakes up enough to get more himself.

(It took a good few weeks before Bucky could eat more than a bit of ‘civilian’ food without immediately vomiting it all up, but once his body got used to it, his old appetite came back with a vengeance and now Bucky can eat two or three servings of whatever Sam’s house has to supply if he’s afforded the luxury.)

Bucky pours a cup of coffee - strong, black, just like home, or so Steve says - and pushes it toward Steve’s chair, then makes a second cup for himself. He inhales deeply and feels the phantoms of wooden floors creaking until his feet, but it makes his head hurt, so he just takes a long sip and hums in pleasure.

“Good?” Steve asks from the kitchen counter. He’s making omelets today, since Sam picked up two dozen eggs at the store the day before. 

“Mmm.” Bucky takes another sip. “'S nice.”

“The girl at the store tried to give it to me free,” Steve says. “But I didn’t think it would be fair.”

“It smells good,” Bucky says, and breathes in the scent again. Now it smells like damp and cold and a little bit of mildew and a little bit of fire crackling. “Where’s it from?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Steve replies. “It’s called Manhattan Special, but who knows where the coffee itself actually comes from.”

“It smells like New York,” Bucky murmurs.

“Oh yeah?” Steve asks. Bucky doesn’t notice the way his shoulders get a little tighter. “How so?”

“Like…” Bucky takes a sip of the coffee. “Like cold? And fire, like those bin fires on TV in the films, and like wood floors.”

Steve nods slowly. “Like the floors creak when you walk on them, right?”

Bucky looks up. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“That’s my apartment, Buck. My floors. They were always cold and the loose floorboards squeaked when you walked on them.”

Steve’s watching him now, and it makes Bucky nervous. “Oh.”

“Anything else?” Steve presses.

Bucky shakes his head. “Just coffee.”

“Are you sure?”

Bucky looks up and Steve is watching him intently. “Yes. I’m sure.”

“Okay.” Steve turns back to the stove and flips the egg over. “This one’s a little burnt. Don’t worry, I’ll take it.”

“Mhm,” Bucky hums. He looks into the pool of dark, rich brown in his cup, then pushes it away. 

Steve flips the omelet out of the pan and cracks and whisks the eggs for the next one, and he doesn’t say anything else, so neither does Bucky. 

It’s not until they’re both sitting at the table, cutting up omelets with the side of their forks, that Bucky asks, “What was it like?”

“What?” Steve asks around a mouthful of egg and cheese.

“Your place. Besides cold with creaky floorboards.”

“Oh. Um…” Steve chews thoughtfully for a moment, then swallows. “It wasn’t too big. Good view out the windows. Kind of empty. Big couches, though, ones you could take the cushions off of. We used to take them off, put ‘em on the floor–“

“Because your bed was too small,” Bucky says. “Even for you.”

Steve shrugs. “For the two of us, sure. I never had a problem fitting in it.”

Bucky cocks his head to the side. “You used to be smaller, right?”

Steve nods. “A whole lot smaller.”

“But you still couldn’t stop getting into fights.” If Steve didn’t know better, he’d say Bucky sounded fond.

“Is that something you remember?” Steve asks.

Bucky shakes his head. “Read it at the Smithsonian.”

Steve curses quietly under his breath and stabs at another piece of omelet.

“Sorry,” Bucky says quietly.

Steve sighs. “No, Bucky, it’s not your fault.” He sets his fork down and takes another sip of coffee. “Just wishful thinking.” 

They eat in silence for a while, until Bucky pushes his plate away and says, “Let’s go back.”

“I’m sorry?” Steve asks, fork halfway to his mouth.

“To New York. Manhattan. Where you lived.”

“Brooklyn.” Steve corrects. “Where we lived.”

“Oh. Okay, Brooklyn,” Bucky says. “Let’s go.

“What, right now? It’s a long trip.”

Bucky shrugs. “I don’t have anything to do today. Do you?”

“No. I don’t,” Steve says slowly.

Bucky licks his lips. “Is that okay?” he asks. “To go back?”

“No, yeah, of course,” Steve says quickly. “I just haven’t been there very much, not since I moved to DC for SHIELD.” He doesn’t miss the instinctive little snarl Bucky tries to hide.

“Well, we can go back now,” Bucky says with an air of finality. “And I can see for myself.”

Steve just looks at him for a long time, then nods. “Alright then. Sam’s got the car so we’ll have to take the bike.”

Bucky nods and starts shoveling down the rest of his omelet.

Having plans is nice. Having structure is nice. Steve appreciates having something concrete to do, even if that something is just making sure that Bucky showers and puts on clean clothes and that there aren’t any dishes left in the sink for Sam to come home to. He likes riding his bike too, likes the feeling of Bucky’s arms tightening around his waist and the heavy plastic of his spare helmet nudging against his shoulder at stoplights. Steve remembers right after he came back, when he’d taken his first SHIELD paychecks and blown it all on a proper motorcycle, then spent the next two weeks riding all over the east coast, visiting the cities he’d read about in old newspapers and pretended to be from. Everything was so drastically different then, but after an hour and a half, everything about the I-95 looks exactly the same.

They stop at a Starbucks as soon as they get into Brooklyn. Steve grins to himself as he checks a text from Natasha and Bucky hunches over the table, staring at the paper cup like he regrets ever suggesting they go anywhere outside of DC. It’s just after two in the afternoon and the lunch rush is starting to thin out, but Bucky still looks on edge, drumming his fingers against his thigh where Steve knows muscle memory says a gun holster should be. 

“Never used to be this many coffee shops,” Bucky grumbles as they head out. “And coffee was way cheaper.”

“It’s just inflation, Buck,” Steve replies, tucking his phone back into his jacket. “That’s what I thought too, at first, but then I saw what they paid at SHIELD and it made more sense.”

“You used to be able to get coffee for less’n a quarter,” Bucky complains. 

“A quarter’s about four dollars now,” Steve says. “But I was never good at economics.”

They climb back on Steve’s bike and take off again, slower this time. Bucky leans heavily against Steve, arms tightening as they ride along Camden. He tries to look down an alley that isn’t there and feels a phantom throbbing in his hands. Bucky shakes his head a little and if Steve notices, he doesn’t say anything. 

Steve parks around a corner on Front and flips out the kickstand of his bike. Bucky climbs off carefully, shoving sweat-dampened hair out of his face, and looks up. And up. And up.

“Didn’t it use to be…  Shorter?” he asks uncertainly. He’s not sure, but it feels a lot like the buildings are way too tall.

“Yeah, only a couple stories,” Steve says. “They stuck a pizza joint in the bottom, too, down where Ms. Gibson used to live. I bet she’d be mad about that.” He grins at Bucky, who just stares at him blankly. Steve shakes his head. “Never mind.”

Bucky points at an iron balcony on the second floor. “Did you used to have that?”

“Nope. Given the state this building was in in the thirties, it probably would have fallen off anyway.”

“You were small,” Bucky says, almost accusingly.

“Even so,” Steve says. “God knows I got hurt enough as it was, didn’t need to tempt fate anymore than I already did.”

“You got beat up in that alley,” Bucky says, pointing at a gap between buildings.

Steve laughs gently. “Honestly, Buck, you’d be hard pressed to find an alley I didn’t get beat up in.”

“No, but I…” Bucky takes off toward the alley, side-stepping cars that come inches from hitting him. He ignores the horns and the shouting and stands at the entry point, completely still.

He barely feels it when Steve catches up to him and grabs his shoulder. “Bucky, what the hell?”

“You got beat up in here,” Bucky repeats.

“I know,” Steve says dryly. “I was there.”

“Me too,” Bucky breathes.

Steve pauses. “Yeah, you were,” he agrees. “You usually were.”

“I remember.”

Steve’s hand on his shoulder tightens. “Yeah? What do you remember?”

“Remember you gettin’ the shit kicked out of you,” Bucky murmurs. He takes a couple of hesitant steps forward, and can almost see Steve’s small body lying on the ground, blood dripping steadily from his nose. 

Steve hums. “Yup. I remember that.”

“Two of ‘em, too, and their dame.” Bucky closes his eyes. “You didn’t like how they talked to her.”

Steve nods. “That was it.”

“I whacked one of them on top of the head with a garbage can lid,” Bucky says softly, and Steve bursts out laughing. “What?”

“I’d forgotten about that,” Steve wheezes. “Was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen, back then.”

“I’m glad it was good for you,” Bucky deadpans.

Steve nudges Bucky’s shoulder with his. “It turned out alright, though, didn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Bucky says. 

“Oh.” Steve kicks a rock along the pavement. “Well, it did. You patched me up, same as you always did, and lectured me about being stupid, like you always did.”

“And then you got in another fight,” Bucky finishes. “Just like you always did.”

“You remember the next one too?”

Bucky shakes his head. “But I’m not stupid. I know what happened next, whether or not I was there.”

Steve coughs lightly. “You were. There, I mean. If it makes a difference.”

“It doesn’t.” Bucky turns around, stepping over a trash bag, and starts walking down Washington.

Steve licks his lower lip, like he can still taste the split there, then takes off and follows him.

*

Thud thud. Thud thud. Thud thud. 

Steve bows his head and lets his body flow through to his fists. His fingers make slight sticking noises as they pull away from the sweat-dampened cheap gym vinyl, drowned out by the sound of breathing coming heavier and–

Thud thud. Thud thud. Thud thud.

“Haven’t seen you here in a while,” a voice says behind him. Steve whirls around to see Natasha standing in the doorway, leaning against the frame.

“What are you doing here?” Steve asks.

“I’ll hold the bag for you.” Natasha sheds her jacket, drops it on the floor, and rolls her shoulders a few times, then positions herself behind the punching bag. 

“You sure? I hit hard.”

“I’ve been hit harder,” Natasha says evenly.

Steve studies the half of her face that he can see for a moment, then delivers a few blows to the middle of the bag. Natasha rides them fine, so Steve shrugs and starts up his rhythm again.

Thud thud. Thud thud. Thud thud.

“What’re you thinking about?” Natasha asks.

Steve glances up for a second and doesn’t answer.

“He’ll be fine, you know,” Natasha says. “Won’t get Stark’s sense of humor, probably, but at least his fingers will stop malfunctioning and dropping things everywhere.”

“I know,” Steve says.

Thud thud. Thud thud. Thud thud.

“Then what are you here for?” Natasha presses.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Steve grunts.

“Alright.” Natasha digs her fingers into the vinyl of the bag and leans her body weight against it.

Thud thud. Thud thud. Thud thud.

“Why do you think he asked Sam to do it?”

Natasha looks up. “Sorry?”

“To take him to Stark Tower. Why?”

“He probably didn’t want to ride on your disaster of a bike again,” Natasha says lightly. “You never even wear a helmet.”

“I’m serious, Nat,” Steve says. He rests one hand against the gently swaying bag.

“Sam’s a comforting guy and you hate Stark,” Natasha replies.

“I don’t hate him, I just think he’s– that’s not the point, though.” Steve shakes his head. “Why Sam? Why–“

“Why not you,” Natasha finishes.

Steve winces. “Does that sound awful?”

“It sounds like you’re jealous,” Natasha says. “It sounds like you don’t really know what you’re doing.”

Steve starts punching the bag again. Natasha braces her hands against it. “Do any of us?”

“Well, mostly, yeah.”

“Oh, so it’s just me who’s incompetent?” Steve bites out.

“I didn’t say that–“

“It sure sounds like you said it.”

Natasha throws up one hand and jams a knee into the bag as it swings back toward her. “Look, Rogers, you can’t deny that you are the least qualified of any of us when it comes to dealing with Bucky.”

The thuds falter for a moment, then pick up again, harder this time. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you have to let it go, Steve,” Natasha says gently.

“He’s my best friend, how am I supposed to let that go?”

“Because he’s not your best friend anymore.”

The follow-through slams the bag into Natasha’s chest and she stumbles back with a grunt and nothing comes after that.

“Steve–“

“Don’t.” Steve reaches up and unhooks the bag, letting it drop between them. “Just don’t.”

“Do you still think he’s all in there, though?” Natasha says. She steps over the bag and he steps back the same distance. “His memories, his mannerisms, all of that? You read the file, you know what they did.”

“He remembered me. He remembered home.”

“Yes, and that bought us time. But do you really think that’s enough? That one time he knew your face?”

Steve’s stare is hard. “I don’t know what else would be.”

Natasha’s expression softens, just a little. “Look. Steve. You knew Bucky when he was Sergeant Barnes of the 107th, when he was James Buchanan Barnes from Brooklyn. You knew him when he was like you. I knew Bucky when he shot through my hip and killed my client under Soviet control.”

“When he was like you,” Steve says quietly.

Natasha’s nostrils flare and opens her mouth, but then seems to think better of it and closes it and nods. “Yeah. And Sam has just met him now, as a war victim, as a veteran, as someone with PTSD and a whole host of other shit. Someone who’s been messed up by the war. And that’s what Sam was, Steve, before he got better. That’s what he’s best at, trying to help fix it.”

Steve doesn’t say anything.

“Let Sam do what he does,” Natasha says softly. She reaches over and touches Steve’s arm, and strokes her thumb along his skin when he doesn’t pull away. “And Cassidy. Let them try to help Bucky get out of the Winter Soldier first. Then we can think of helping him be Bucky again.”

Steve lets out a shaky breath and nods. Natasha grips his arm tighter.

“You have to know it might not happen,” she says. “Maybe it will, maybe we can get that part of him back. Maybe he can remember being Bucky, back when he knew what that meant. But maybe–“

“Maybe we can’t,” Steve whispers. “I know.”

“I’m not sure you do,” Natasha says. She looks genuinely sorry when Steve brings himself to catch her eye.

“Yeah,” he says. “Me neither.”

They stand together for a little while, then Natasha pulls Steve’s elbow down and he wraps his arms around her and she rubs his back in long strokes, up and down, until he can face going back home.

*

“I think I’m turning into a person.”

“That’s good,” Cassidy says. She sounds pleased. “That’s good progress, James, I’m glad to hear it.”

“But it’s not the right person.”

“How do you know?”

Bucky scrubs one hand over his face. “They don’t– it’s not. I’m not. I’m trying.”

Cassidy’s voice is soft. “Are you trying for them? Or for you?”

She doesn’t need his answer.

*

The first time Bucky remembers something completely from World War II is terrifying.

They’ve pulled a lot of the Winter Soldier out of his scarred brain. Having case files and some HYDRA intel helps, and if Bucky studies a file long enough, he can feel himself pulling a trigger, feel the crack of snapped vertebrae reverberating in his skin, see the blood pooling on Sam’s floor and breathe out confessions as Cassidy scribbles in her notebook. He’s apologetic, in a detached sort of way, and Steve keeps telling him that he doesn’t have to be, but Bucky knows that some part of him isn’t really sorry and doesn’t really care and that knowledge is more upsetting than being faced with his body counts. 

Targets. Missions. Nothing important in the grand scheme of things, when ‘things’ consisted of ice and needles and gunpowder in a loop and little else.

The Winter Soldier comes back easy enough, but the war takes a lot longer. They’ve pulled a bit out of him over the course of months, but nothing too descript. Images, maybe; feelings, faces, names, people, flashes of events that come and go in the blink of an eye. Bits of Brooklyn. Bits of Steve. Bucky knows Natasha has lists of things he remembers, sees her tapping at her phone every time he admits to knowing one more thing about being James Buchanan Barnes.

The first thing Bucky remembers perhaps makes sense, if his brain was working chronologically. He can’t tell if it is and he doesn’t have time to ask. Working back through the years until the Winter Soldier chemically dissolves into an actual person, maybe, or that might be the very last time he was actually Bucky, or maybe it was halfway to the Winter Soldier, or maybe he was always Bucky and this wasn’t the end of anything, but suddenly the shirt he’s wearing feels too tight around the arms and then his arms can’t move.

Sergeant.

Bucky pulls at the hem of his sleeves, but he just feels more constricted. Sam would know what to do, but Sam is out having drinks with Natasha and Clint and Bucky has no idea when he’ll be back.

Three two five five seven oh three eight.

Adrenaline is pounding in his ears and he feels powerless to do anything about it. His arms won’t move, his body feels frozen, and he can barely even blink anymore. He should say something, should yell something, but the idea of words gets stuck in his throat.

Barnes.

Sergeant Barnes three two five five sev– cut off by straps around his chest tightening, his head on fire and pumped full of drugs that have no business existing, he can’t even strain up and why would he want to?

Steve.

“Steve,” Bucky says slowly, the word slurred and falling out of his mouth, but if Steve actually hears him, Bucky doesn’t know. Everything is dark laboratory ceilings and everything is straps and everything is…

HYDRA. Everything is HYDRA and then it comes flooding back all at once, all of the torture and the experiments and the cages full of prisoners, and Bucky doesn’t even feel the impact of his knees as they slam into the ground because he’s reaching up, clutching his head. Probably screaming. He knows in a detached sort of way that his mouth is open, and experience says that that’s usually accompanied by screams.

You screamed so much you screamed so loudly, every time they injected you…

He remembers Steve crashing into his consciousness looking like Bucky had never seen him and he knows Steve’s talking, Steve’s talking in his head and he doesn’t know where Steve is right now, except he must be right in front of him, in nineteen forty-three. That’s what this is, and the Winter Soldier isn’t real yet.

This is the beginning.

This is the beginning and Bucky feels like his skull is cracking in half and his vision is whited out completely, doubled over on his knees and tasting bile and screaming his lungs out.

It doesn’t stop for a long, long time.

When Bucky comes to, he’s lying on his side, something draped over him, and it’s still dark. The split feels healed, a little. He knows where it is, but things are now just black instead of pure white. He knows it’s a good sign, somehow.

Something shifts behind him and Bucky flinches away immediately, and then something immediately stills. “Sorry Buck.”

“Steve.” Barely a whisper. Good enough.

“Yeah.” Bucky hears Steve sigh a little in relief. “I’m right here. Sam and Nat aren’t here, they’re giving you space, but I can get them if you want.”

“No.”

“Okay.” Steve rests one hand on Bucky’s ribs and Bucky allows it.

The pounding in his head recedes, bit by bit, until it’s just a dull ache. Bucky’s used to dull aches. Being Bucky Barnes aches and being the Winter Soldier ached, ached like cold and beatings, every time. He can deal with ache.

“Steve,” Bucky mumbles.

“Yeah?”

“Need to ask you somethin’.”

“Yeah, of course,” Steve says gently.

“My number. In the military. My service number. Did you ever know it?”

He feels Steve’s body tense up a little bit, then become too forcibly relaxed. “I did, after you– uh. I did after. Yes.”

“Was it three two five five–“

“–Seven zero three eight. Yeah,” Steve finishes. “Yeah, it was.”

“Okay.” Bucky swallows down the taste of bile in his mouth a few times, then curls up a little more. Steve’s hand doesn’t follow him.

“Did you remember?”

“I remembered.”

“Can you tell me?”

“I don’t want to remember again.”

“Okay, for now, alright?” Steve says. “We gotta know sometime, Buck. If you remembered something, we need to know how it happened. It’s good.”

“Nothing happened,” Bucky says petulantly. “I just remembered.”

“Fair. Okay.” Steve doesn’t say anything else and Bucky is grateful for it up until the point he remembers remembering.

“HYDRA.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It was HYDRA. Me. At HYDRA. With the straps. And you.”

“Oh,” Steve says, very very softly.

“Sergeant, three two five five seven…” Bucky recites, trailing off. “Barnes.”

“I know, Buck,” Steve says.

“It hurts,” Bucky says. “To remember.”

“I know.” Bucky feels Steve’s head press against his shoulder.  “I wouldn’t want to remember that either.”

*

Sometime in the last few years, Steve learned how to do his own stitches.

He has his own needles and surgical thread, and he dumps half of his little bottle of rubbing alcohol over his stomach as he knits his skin together again.

Bucky wipes blood off of his hands and desperately wishes he didn’t know this.

*

Once Bucky starts remembering Bucky, things get bad.

It turns out that he was wrong after the first time - things don’t come back chronologically. They don’t come back in anything that Bucky could consider order, and half the time they aren’t triggered by anything. Sometimes Steve can provoke him into remembering something, when Bucky begs for some sort of link to the past so that he can know something besides Sam’s house between bolts of electricity in his temples and endless streams of blackened blood. Sometimes little things will drag memories out, like the way Sam makes his bed or the way Steve bites on the ends of his pencils while he studies his subjects over the wire binding of his sketchpad. Sometimes he’ll just be sitting on the couch, reading news articles on Steve’s tablet, and then he’ll be on the ground, clutching at his head like he thinks it’s going to shatter and panting through his teeth. However they come, they come, and the headaches burn slowly, slipping down his spine and pounding at the inside of his skull, and he relegates himself to bed until they become too frequent to stay.

Bucky can deal with the pain. He can grit his teeth against the headaches and try to take the edge off with migraine pills that Natasha picked up for him at the CVS a few blocks away. He can put hot compresses and ice packs on his head and drag a bucket around the house with him in case he vomits from the pain. He can fantasize about crawling into the oven or cracking open Steve’s industrial first aid kit and jamming syringes of painkillers into his legs. That’s fine.

What he can’t deal with is James Buchanan Barnes.

Steve has told him - keeps telling him - that he’s making improvements, that he’s shedding the Winter Soldier like a snake sheds skin, coming out bigger and better for it. That he’s getting better. That he’s going back to Bucky. Bucky doesn’t know who Steve thinks Bucky is, but from what he remembers, he sure as hell isn’t James Buchanan Barnes. 

He spits out memories during interrogations like poison. They leave a bad taste in his mouth, make him feel weak and on edge. Natasha stands off to the side, tapping on her phone, marking down everything he says - for future reference? Bucky doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know what she gains by knowing that one time he and Steve went to a diner for lunch and some stranger paid for their coffee.

He wonders how he repaid that stranger, in sex or blood or charcoal sketches. 

Sam and Natasha look worried now, most of the time. Natasha spends more time at Sam’s house, popping in and out and sometimes even staying the night, curled up with Steve on his makeshift bed in the living room or back-to-back, soldier style, with Sam. Natasha keeps watch and Sam keeps checking in, as unobtrusively as he can, to make sure that the new memories aren’t holding Bucky down. 

Steve, of course, is elated. 

Bucky could swear Steve almost started crying the first time he remembered their shitty apartments and his job on the docks. Steve hugs him, too tight and too long, and Bucky doesn’t have the energy to push him away, so he allows Steve to celebrate like a hurricane around him.

The nightmares that Bucky worked so hard to get rid of come back with a vengeance, but instead of living them, he feels like a spectator now. He watches a man with his eyes and his hands throw bullets and snap necks like a piece of modern cinema, watches blood spatter on the floor in patterns that he can remember during the day if he tries hard enough. He watches the man become a thing, and the thing become a man, shifting back and forth between something broken and something grotesque and deformed. He feels phantom pains in his left arm, where no feelings besides pressure exist anymore, shooting through bone and carefully reconstructed muscle. He sees flesh and blood if his dreams take him back far enough, but flesh looks just as out of place as metal.

Steve buys him gloves and long-sleeved shirts and Sam stands with him in the mirror, touching the grooves of the plating and gently reminding him that it’s all Bucky now. They’ve rubbed out the red star and there’s nothing on his shoulder except scratches. He has no labels or claims stamped on him anymore. Not by the enemy, anyway.

Bucky misses the Winter Soldier. 

He begs with Sam to let him go back - Steve would say no, but Sam understands, Sam has to understand - and Sam tries to make him talk instead. He doesn’t refuse Bucky but he never says yes and Bucky doesn’t know what to do with things that aren’t no or yes. He wants the quiet sureness of being pointed in a direction and told to destroy. He wants to know what he’s doing, even if it’s just the will of someone else. He wants Barnes in his head to stop screaming at him about all the lives he took, like their blood meant anything to him. It still doesn’t, not really, but Bucky’s always had more trouble with the fact that he should care than the fact that he doesn’t.

Sam says things are always sweeter than you remember them. Bucky can’t imagine how anything could be sweeter than blessed silence in his head. 

He fades out anyway, every now and then. 

He stops asking Sam to let him be the Winter Soldier again once Sam finally says “no” and leaves no room to argue. Barnes is sickeningly pleased about it inside his head, while the vestiges of the Winter Soldier curl up like a chastened animal, whining and whimpering like he had just been wiped again. 

Quiet sneaks up on him some days, when he feels his joints lock mechanically and his back straighten without telling them to. In his head, he screams and screams and screams, but Bucky says nothing because the Winter Soldier still fits like the jacket he wore. He’s cold and stiff and probably more uncomfortable than he realizes, but it’s a pleasure and relief to curl up in the dark caverns of his own mind, where his own anguished yelling can’t reach him.

This has problems, of course. Whatever happens in his mind, Bucky doesn’t remember anything that happens outside of it. More than once, he’s come to to yelling in voices that aren’t his, being pinned down to the floor with his metal arm held by the only person who’s strong enough to hold it. Once he found himself sitting on the bathroom floor, a screwdriver in his flesh and blood hand and a few pieces of metal plating scattered around his feet. Bucky carefully lifted his left arm, examining the exposed wires and circuits, and then was relegated to another stay in New York while Stark put them all back on. 

But it’s worth it. It’s so worth it, sometimes. Bucky hates the Winter Soldier, but he also loves him, because the Winter Soldier isn’t so far gone that he can’t put him back on like a second skin and silence his own horror.

They go back to Brooklyn again, all three of them, on a long weekend where Sam doesn’t have to work at the VA. They take the car and it takes longer, so Bucky swallows too many pain pills and dozes in the back seat while Sam and Steve argue over radio stations. He spends so long counting and recounting his death toll these days that he only really gets to sleep in the daytime when exhaustion wins out.

They stop at the same Starbucks just inside Brooklyn and Sam drinks more coffee than Bucky would have suspected possible of a regular human. Steve delightedly orders a piece of apple crunch cake and Bucky almost slaps it out of his hand before he remembers that it won’t hurt Steve anymore.

The apartments look completely different when they park around Front again. Bucky doesn’t know why, since they’re in the same building and it’s only been a couple months, but everything feels browner and dustier and shorter than it is. He thinks there should be a clothesline on the second floor, stretching out of a window to a pole that’s no longer there. He thinks there should be an old man sitting on the corner, wood block in one hand and knife in the other. Bucky licks his lip and realizes that the man is definitely dead now. 

Steve’s hand sneaks up to Bucky’s shoulder and Bucky starts violently. Steve squeezes and Bucky settles, leaning into Steve’s side. Steve wraps one arm around his shoulders (can do it, now that he’s not just upwards of five feet tall) and bumps the side of his head against Bucky’s. Bucky smiles a little.

Steve steers Bucky off down Front, pointing out to Sam where there used to be bars where Bucky pulled dames on the weekends, where Steve used to sell sketches for a quarter each if people would stop long enough, past the bar where Bucky had brought Steve for his first legal drink, and again not two months later when Germany marched into Poland. All the alleys Steve used to get beat up in, and the edge of the docks where Bucky worked. The theater where Bucky saw his first films and Steve kissed his first girl and they snuck in, late at night, to drink down war propaganda and Charlie Chaplin’s comedy.

Sam laughs at Steve’s stories, bumping his shoulder against Bucky’s at the particularly good ones, and asks just enough questions to keep Steve talking almost relentlessly. By one alley - one where Bucky didn’t show up, one where Steve sat with two broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder for almost two hours and Bucky didn’t find out until someone quite literally picked Steve up and carried him back to their apartment building - Bucky goes stiff and Sam reaches out, tucking his hand in the crook of Bucky’s elbow. Bucky presses his arm to his side, keeping Sam’s hand in place. Sam nods in the corner of Bucky’s vision and he doesn’t leave Bucky’s side until Steve’s making jokes about soldiers at the naval yards.

They get a hotel that night, just outside of the old naval yard, because neither Steve nor Sam really wants to drive the five hours back to DC that night and Bucky couldn’t get a license even if he wanted to. Sam sprawls over one bed, asleep in seconds, and Bucky crawls into the other bed with Steve. He lets Steve throw an arm around him and presses back against Steve’s solid chest.

“You used to be cold,” Bucky murmurs into the pillow.

“That’s true,” Steve replies. “Now I’m warm. Better circulation.”

“We did this,” Bucky says. “In the winters. I remember.”

Steve nods. “Your radiator didn’t work. You never fixed it. You just climbed into bed with me.”

“Didn’t want you to freeze your ass off,” Bucky says. “Not that there was much there to begin with.”

Steve laughs and Bucky feels the rush of breath against the back of his neck. “You’re cold, Buck.”

A dozen retorts rise up on Bucky’s tongue and then die away. “Yeah,” he says eventually. “Good thing I got a human space heater.”

Steve drives his knee into the back of Bucky’s leg, but he wraps around Bucky tighter. Bucky shifts his arm under his pillow and forces himself to settle down enough to sleep.

In the early morning, before light can start filtering through the blinds properly, he wakes up on the floor, the corner of a sheet draped over him and his pillow flopped over his face. Bucky groans, and then a blanket comes sailing over the edge of Sam’s bed and lands on his chest. 

“Don’t freeze, man,” Sam says sleepily.

Bucky wraps the blanket around him and punches the pillow into a more comfortable shape, then flops back down on it. “Used to it.”

“Not here, you’re not,” Sam says, then rolls over and starts snoring again almost immediately.

Bucky considers that for a moment, then curls up and lets himself drift back into an uneasy sleep.

Steve’s ribs are loud as they snap.

When they get back from Brooklyn, Bucky stops sleeping. 

Images of Brooklyn haunt his mind during the day, and suddenly Bucky can’t reconcile them with the burnt red and curling black at the front of his head. Bucky Barnes went dancing with dames and drank too much and wrapped bandages around Steve Rogers’s thin arms when they split open and seeped red through the cotton. Bucky Barnes had rough, calloused hands from hammers and ropes and was entirely flesh and blood and bone and brought home a few dollars a day to pay for rent and dinner and buy Steve cough syrup for his winter colds.

Bucky Barnes was also a bit of a coward, Bucky decides, as he recounts his conscription letter, and that’s the only thing he feels like he still has in common with himself. Bucky is scared, now that he finally remembers what that means. He remembers the cold creep in his stomach when he couldn’t afford rent in January, when he visited the cemetery when the dirt was still fresh, when he tried and failed to fall asleep to the rattly, ragged sound of Steve’s lungs working too hard. But now that cold creep is everywhere, in his head and chest and phantom ice down to the tips of his metal fingers.

Steve seems to be happy about it, but Steve would never befriend a coward, and Steve would never let anyone hold him back. Bucky Barnes jeers in his head, all the time, constantly, and Bucky wonders every day why he’s still there.

Bucky steals Steve’s tablet and reads leaked HYDRA intel at night until he passes out on the screen. He finds his way onto Twitter by accident, once, and it only tells him everything he already inferred - the world knows the Winter Soldier existed, and there are more people calling for his blood than there ever were in Nazi Germany. Bucky scrolls through hashtags with dead eyes. His chest hurts. His head hurts. He knows they’re all right. He could kill every one of them and they would never see it coming and he knows they’re all right.

James Buchanan Barnes is perversely pleased about it. Bucky hates it, but Barnes in his head urges him to keep reading, to see and understand how short he falls of who he’s supposed to be. James Buchanan Barnes believed in things, even if those things were only Steve, and fought for things, even if those things were only Steve, and remembered the faces of the men he killed and he knew exactly why each of them fell. James Buchanan Barnes traversed Europe with a rifle strapped to his back and five men trailing behind him and he tried to save the world. 

The Winter Soldier never did that, no matter what Pierce whispered to him. Bucky can’t do that now, no matter how much Steve tries to push it into him. And James Buchanan Barnes wants to make sure that he remembers that.

“James Buchanan Barnes is an asshole,” Bucky declares one night over dinner.

Sam looks confused, but Steve chuckles a little bit. “You know, sometimes he was.”

* 

Steve’s sitting on the couch, flipping through cable news streams with a look of mild discontent, when Bucky shuffles out of his room. Steve glances up and smiles, then shifts his legs up closer to his chest. Bucky accepts the unspoken invitation and plops down on the other side of the couch and Steve tucks his feet under the curve of Bucky’s knee.

“What are you watching?”

“Trying to find a good news channel,” Steve replies. “One that just has news. Everyone does opinion pieces and stuff, but no one just reports what’s going on.”

“Not much different than in our day, I s’pose,” Bucky says. “Propaganda and that.”

“Well they’re not asking us to buy war bonds yet, so I’m alright with it,” Steve says easily. “They dress better, at least.”

The corner of Bucky’s mouth quirks up in a smile. Steve flips the channel again. The TV yells at them about the typical carnage. Steve sighs.

“They seem a lot less concerned about our boys overseas these days.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Bucky blurts out.

Steve raises an eyebrow and smirks. “Didn’t know you had it in you, Barnes. Usually rubbing two brain cells together makes steam come out your ears.” Bucky looks confused and slightly hurt at the accusation, so Steve softens his expression and clears his throat. “What’s up?”

Bucky’s expression flickers dark for a second and he averts his eyes. “Never mind.”

Steve frowns and sits up straighter. “Now c’mon, Buck. I’m sorry. I was just teasing.” He reaches out to touch Bucky’s knee and Bucky - however uncomfortable he looks - allows it. “What were you thinking about?”

Bucky bows his head a little and chews his lip. “I feel like I don’t remember who I’m supposed to be some days.”

“Bucky,” Steve replies immediately. “James. You’re James Buchanan Barnes.”

“You keep saying that,” Bucky says softly.

“Because it’s true,” Steve says. He sounds so earnest, it makes Bucky’s stomach hurt. 

“Sam says I’m not…” Bucky rubs his neck. “He said I’m not supposed to be anything. Said I don’t have to forget the Winter Soldier to be Bucky, said I don’t even have to be Bucky at all–“

“But you are Bucky,” Steve interrupts. “That’s who you are, even if you don’t remember it.”

“Sam said–“

“Sam and I have our disagreements,” Steve says fiercely. “But he didn’t… He doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know Bucky Barnes. I know Bucky Barnes and I know that it’s you.”

Bucky looks pained, and it makes Steve’s throat tighten uncomfortably. “What are we doing, Steve?”

“I’m sorry?”

“What are we doing here?” Bucky repeats. “What are you doing here?”

Steve blinks a few times.

“I don’t understand.”

Bucky sighs and Steve can see his fists clenching and unclenching. “I want to know what you think that you’re doing here with me.”

“We’re trying to make you better, Bucky,” Steve says softly.

“What’s ‘better’?” Bucky presses. “What do you think better is?”

Steve opens his mouth, but he looks lost for words. “Just… You, Buck. From before the Winter Soldier. We can get past that, you can be you again. You can be Bucky Barnes, you don’t have to let what they did to you define you.”

“You want me to be Bucky,” Bucky says, almost inaudibly. “You’re happy when you think I am.”

“When you remember things? Of course I’m happy.” Steve looks confused. “It’s good that you’re making progress, I want you to get better.”

“And then what?”

Steve shrugs one shoulder. “I don’t rightly know, Buck. Start training again? Fight with us? I know you and Stark don’t get along all the time but he can do all sorts of crazy things with your arm. He can work you up armor, anything you need.”

“Is that the plan, then?” Bucky asks coldly. Steve’s eyebrows draw together. “Fix me up and send me off to Stark Tower for repairs and then out to the field?”

“Hey, now–“

“Is that why you’re trying to ‘fix’ me? Because Bucky was a good little soldier?”

“Bucky, come on, that’s not–“

“You’re like them, you know.”

Steve freezes mid-rebuttal, and silence falls around them like glass shattering on the floor. He stares and Bucky and Bucky stares back, refusing to look down even though every instinct in his body is screaming at him to submit, to fall silent, to take everything back and bare his neck and beg for forgiveness and accept pain and punishment.

And finally, finally, Steve clears his throat and says, “Excuse me?”

“You are.” Bucky insists quietly. “You don’t even know what I want to be, you just want me to be Bucky from 1944, you want me to be your best friend again and you want me to be able to go back to being a soldier like you so that I can fight your battles with you when I don’t even know what I’m supposed to be fighting.”

“I would never,” Steve says harshly, “Never force you to do anything. I would never put you through what they did, Bucky. I would never hurt you like that.”

He’s sitting up straighter, pressing into Bucky’s space. Bucky swallows hard, metal fingers scratching at the fabric of his pants as he shrinks away. “It feels like you are.”

“Bucky–“

“Stop.” Bucky says. His voice cracks and he can feel panic welling in his chest. “You need to stop.”

“How am I supposed to stop trying to help you?”

“You’re not helping me. You’re trying to use me to make a person you knew. And it hurts,” Bucky chokes out. “Because I don’t think I want to do it. And you need to stop.”

Steve is silent for a long time. Bucky swears he can feel his pulse in his metal arm, his heart’s beating so hard. He can’t meet Steve’s gaze, knows the man is looking straight at him - maybe through him. Bucky doesn’t know what Steve sees anymore. 

Finally, Steve sighs and says, “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Bucky doesn’t dare look up, but his eyes flicker toward Steve’s knees. 

“I didn’t know.”

Bucky’s shoulders shake a little.

“I’m so sorry, Bucky.”

He tastes blood inside his mouth where his teeth have sunken through the skin of his cheek.

“I never meant to hurt you like this.”

His head hurts too much to sit straight up and he can feel himself curling in again, back to that ragged center of cold and blood and metal. It’s quiet. Comforting.

“What can I do?”

“I think you should leave for a while,” Bucky says through clenched teeth. 

“Okay,” Steve says. “I can do that. Do you want me to call Sam? Or Natasha?”

“Don’t care. Just go.”

Steve doesn’t say another word to Bucky, just pulls out his phone and calls them both. Bucky curls his arms around his legs, jamming his knees into his eyes and digs bruises into his arm as Steve murmurs quiet requests for Sam and Natasha to come home. Bucky doesn’t know when he hangs up, only when Steve’s hands are on his arms and Steve is whispering, “Come on, let’s get you up.”

Bucky slowly unfolds, lets himself be pulled up from the couch and leans into Steve’s side as he tries to steady himself. “Where’re we goin’?” he slurs.

“You’re going to bed,” Steve says gently. “And I’m going… I don’t know where. New York, maybe. Out of the way.”

“Don’t tell me where.”

Steve looks confused for a second, and then slightly sickened. “Okay.”

He nudges the door to Bucky’s room open with his foot and Bucky stumbles the last few feet to his bed on his own before falling onto it. “When are you coming back?”

“Tomorrow, probably,” Steve replies. “We can talk more tomorrow, okay? And you can tell me what you want me to do.”

“‘Kay.” Bucky closes his eyes and feels a slight warmth cover his body as Steve drapes a blanket over him.

“I am sorry, Bucky,” Steve says quietly. “I didn’t think…”

Bucky holds up one hand under the blanket. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Steve repeats. “Alright.”

The door closes with a soft click, and Bucky feels shuddering sobs battering themselves against his throat. So he finally lets them out.

*

Steve moves into Stark Tower for a week.

Tony doesn’t say much when Steve shows up in his lobby at eight at night, once most of his employees and all of his clients have gone home. Steve thanks him by not saying much back when Tony punches in a code and the elevator stops at a floor that is almost absurdly patriotic and then a whole apartment lays itself out for him. Tony doesn’t really offer anything by way of explanation, just points out the bedrooms and bathrooms and the kitchen and the gym and says, “You need anything, JARVIS can help,” before slipping out again.

Steve wanders around the floor for a while, taking note of where everything is. The apartment is quiet - quieter than he’s used to Sam’s house being, even with the stifling presence that is Bucky on a bad day. But Sam’s house is pleasantly homey and all the furniture is set up in such a way that Steve feels like he can close his eyes without having one hand on his shield, and there aren’t any huge American flags hanging all over the walls, none of which Stark Tower has to offer.

He carefully takes down each of the flags in turn, folding them neatly and placing them on the living room table. Some of the flags fall away to reveal scorch marks or dents or drywall with puttied-over cracks and no fresh paint. Steve wonders if Tony never had time to fix the rest of the building or if he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.

He shoves the bed against the wall of the big bedroom, across from the windows and opposite the door, then sits down heavily. The sheets are - thankfully - not covered in the same red, white, and blue motif; they’re just soft, white cotton with a higher thread count than Steve has ever seen on a bed before. He runs his hand over the fold of the top sheet and it feels like water in the most unpleasant of ways.

There’s nothing on TV, so the sheets end up in a messy pile under the foot of the bed and Steve curls up on the bare mattress with his jacket draped over his shoulders. He sleeps restlessly and dreams of himself with a burned red skull.

Sam gives Bucky a couple of days to cool off, then sits him down in the living room and asks what’s going on.

Bucky just looks at him, face schooled into careful blankness.

“I just wanna know why Steve’s gone,” Sam says. “I’m not gonna go out and get him. I know where he is, I just don’t know why.”

“I told him to,” Bucky says quietly. “I said to go and he went.”

“You told him to go to St– to New York?” Sam asks, eyebrows raised. 

“No. I just told him to leave. And he did.” Bucky sounds a little awed.

“Alright. Why?”

Bucky doesn’t say anything.

Sam waits for an answer, but he still nods when he doesn’t get one. “I’d like it if you told me before he comes back, but you don’t have to.”

Bucky nods jerkily.

“Wanna help me make dinner?” Sam asks.

Bucky shrugs, pulling back into himself a little.

“Alright, well, I’ll be in the kitchen if you do,” Sam says. “Wouldn’t mind at all if you wanted to come hang out.”

He claps Bucky on the knee as he stands up. Bucky doesn’t even flinch, so Sam counts it as a victory.

Fifteen minutes later, Bucky shuffles into the kitchen and Sam hands him a spatula. 

Hill comes to visit three days in.

Steve meets her in the lobby of Stark Tower with two cups of coffee, and they watch people in suits that neither one of them would ever feel comfortable in walk past.

“Was it hard on Mr. Hogan?” Steve asks.

Hill chuckles a little. “Nah. He hasn’t really been the same since Malibu. I think he was a little grateful, to be honest.”

“And Stark’s treating you good?”

“You know I wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t. Stark, for what a child he can be, is a very good ‘boss’,” Hill says, making air quotes with her fingers. “Pepper likes to let him think he has the final say in things.”

Steve laughs. “Ms. Potts is a force to be reckoned with, sure.”

“You have no idea,” Hill agrees.

They sip their coffee in silence for a while, until the silence becomes for awkward than any question she might have.

“So. Barnes.”

Steve sighs and shoots her a long-suffering smile. “Mm?”

“How, uh… How is he?”

“Better,” Steve says. “A lot better.”

“Is Wilson still with you?”

“Yeah, he is. Don’t know that I could get rid of him,” Steve says, a little ruefully. Then, after a beat: “Don’t know that I would ever want to.”

“I’d keep him if I were you,” Hill says.

“Yeah, no, I know,” Steve replies. “He’s good for us. Good for Bucky.” He looks down into his lap and swirls his coffee cup around. “Way better than I am, anyway.”

Hill studies his face for a moment. “That why you’re here?”

Steve makes a noise of agreement.

Hill nudges her shoulder against his. “That’s what Wilson’s trained for.”

“I know,” Steve sighs. “I just wonder sometimes, you know? How I can go so wrong when I’m supposed to be fixing everything.”

“You’re not supposed to be fixing everything,” Hill says. “You’re supposed to be doing what’s right. And sometimes that means backing off when you’re not the right man for the job.”

Steve smiles wryly. “I don’t really remember how to do that.”

“Then you better learn.”  Hill drains the rest of her coffee, then tosses the cup into the trash bin next to them. “Because as I see it, running off to New York when you can’t handle it isn’t going to help anyone.”

“I’m not running off,” Steve shoots back. “It wasn’t my idea.”

Hill considers that, and Steve ducks his head away because he hates trying to read her when she looks at him like she can see through him. “Better get yourself together fast, then,” she says eventually. “If Barnes of all people kicked you to the curb, listen to what he says.”

“Yes ma’am,” Steve mutters under his breath.

Hill elbows him gently in the side. “Hey. Take care of yourself, okay? Use the time you have here.”

“I will.”

She smiles at him, then stands up, brushing wrinkles that don’t exist out of her blazer. “I should get back. It’s nice to see you again, Steve.”

“You too, Ms. Hill.”

Her nose crinkles a little as she laughs. “Maria’s fine. I’m not your CO anymore, Rogers.”

“Fair enough.” He gives her a little salute anyway as she walks back up the stairs, then tugs on his jacket. He needs a walk.

“I told him he was like HYDRA,” Bucky blurts out, covered in soap bubbles.

Sam starts, then carefully sets the plate and dish towel he was holding down on the counter. “What?”

“Rogers. Steve. I told him.” Bucky swallows hard. “I told him he was like HYDRA and I told him to leave.”

Sam licks his lower lip and nods slowly. “I can see why you wanted him out for a while.”

“He’s not HYDRA, though,” Bucky says. He reaches into the sink and pulls out a couple of soapy forks. Bucky frowns at them, then picks his sponge back up and starts carefully cleaning between the tines.

“He’s not,” Sam agrees. “How come you thought he was?”

“I didn’t think he was.” Bucky rinses off the forks and inspects them, then throws them back in the soapy water. “I said he was like them.”

“Why was he like them?”

“He…” Bucky pauses. Sam leans against the lip of the counter patiently. “He wanted… things from me.”

“What?” Sam asks again. “What kind of things?”

Bucky looks startled by how sharp Sam’s voice sounds. “Things,” he repeats in a small voice.

Sam runs a hand over his head. “No, Bucky, sorry, I didn’t mean to be so aggressive. I just want to know. If you want to tell me.”

Bucky shakes his head and goes back to washing plates.

Sam sighs and picks up his towel again, drying dishes as Bucky hands them to him and quietly slotting them away.

“He wants me to be an Avenger,” Bucky says eventually. “Or SHIELD. And Bucky.”

“SHIELD went down,” Sam reminds him gently. “Doesn’t exist anymore. HYDRA and SHIELD went down together.”

“But he wants me to,” Bucky says, more urgently. “Or Avengers. He said Stark would help…”

“Stark can help you fix your arm if it gets broken,” Sam says. “Or if you need it to be recalibrated again, or, hell, if you want a new one. Stark’s the tech guy, he does things like that.”

“I don’t want a new one,” Bucky says flatly.

Sam holds up his hands. “Fine with me, man. But that’s all Steve means by it. Stark can help you with your tech if you need it.”

Bucky shakes his head hard. “He wants armor. He wants armor for me, and a better arm, and he wants me to be that again–“

He cuts off abruptly and drops the serving spoon he’s holding into the sink. A bit of soapy water sloshes out onto the floor. 

Sam bows his head a little, then slowly reaches his hand over to Bucky’s arm. Bucky allows the touch for a moment, then jerks away nervously. Sam pulls his hand back immediately, but he doesn’t retreat.

“You don’t have to be an Avenger,” he says, after a while. “Or SHIELD, or anything.”

“Not even Bucky?” Bucky asks, so quietly that Sam barely hears it.

“Not even Bucky,” Sam confirms. “Not if you don’t want to be.”

“What if I want to be?” Bucky stares down into the foam in the sink. “And can’t?”

Sam shrugs. “If you can’t, you can’t, man. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Steve really wants me to be Bucky again,” Bucky whispers.

“You don’t have to do anything just ‘cause Steve wants it,” Sam says. 

Bucky makes a small choking noise. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Sam’s throat tightens a little. “Yeah,” he says, a little hoarsely. “I know.”

Bucky reaches into the sink and pulls the drain stop out. Soapy water swirls down the drain, revealing a handful of cutlery that didn’t make it to the sponge. “I’m done,” Bucky announces, though he doesn’t look up to do it.

“Okay." 

“I want to go outside.”

“Okay,” Sam repeats. “You want me to come with you?”

“No.” Bucky shakes stray drops from his hands and carefully dries around the metal plating with the corner of a dish towel, then turns on his heel and slips out the back door. Sam watches him until he sees Bucky sit down - or duck out of sight - through the glass, then picks up Bucky’s discarded sponge and finishes the dishes on his own.

Later, Natasha is around for dinner for once and Bucky decides what they make. It’s barely edible, but he seems pleased with it.

Sam is nervous when Steve comes back. 

Natasha is on guard duty. Sam is on restraining duty. Neither of them know what this entails, but Natasha has things that Sam would rather not think about stuffed up her sleeves and into the pockets of her jeans, and Sam just hovers around Bucky, laying a hand on his shoulder of squeezing his leg whenever Bucky looks like he’s getting panicked. 

Around half past three, there’s a knock on the door that Sam would almost call timid. He glances down at Bucky and Bucky’s eyes unfocus a little, then come back and he nods. Sam licks his lips and touches Bucky’s arm as he walks around the couch and unlocks the locks.

Steve looks exhausted, standing on his doorstep, but he doesn’t look miserable. Not like he had eight days before when Sam had passed him in the hall, carrying a duffel bag and shoving past with a murmured “I’m going to New York”.

Sam pulls the door open wide and says, “Hey, man,” because he can’t think of anything else to say.

Steve nods. “Hey.”

“Want me to take that?” Sam asks, gesturing to Steve’s bag, which is still slung over his shoulder.

Steve opens his mouth to wave the request away, then decides against it. “Thanks, Sam.”

Sam lifts the bag onto his shoulder and steps aside. Steve edges around him, clearly still nervous, and looks around the living room like he thinks it will explode.

Natasha turns a page in the book that she’s clearly not reading. Sam tucks the duffel bag out of the way, under a table. Steve fidgets. Bucky sits stock still, not turning to look at him.

“Hey, Buck,” Steve says softly. “I’m back.”

Bucky inclines his head a fraction of an inch in acknowledgement. Steve walks carefully around the arm of the couch and leans his knee against it. Bucky’s eyes flicker up to his face, then down to the floor. 

Steve rubs a hand over his face. “Is that okay? That I’m here?”

Bucky nods a little, then leans over so that his head is resting against Steve’s hipbone. Steve runs a hand through his hair, settling in between his shoulder blades.

“Don’t leave again,” Bucky says thickly. “Don’t have to leave again.”

Steve swallows hard and nods. “I don’t intend to.”

“Don’t,” Bucky says again, more forcefully.

“Okay, Bucky,” Steve says. “I won’t.”

Bucky nods against Steve’s hip and doesn’t say anything else. Steve just stands there for a while, petting Bucky’s hair and rubbing the edges out of knots in his back, until Bucky acquiesces to letting Steve sit down next to him. 

Natasha sets her book down and sweeps over to Sam, hefting the strap of Steve’s duffel bag onto her shoulder. “That went better than I thought,” she murmurs.

Sam shrugs. “Bucky knows that Steve’s good.” 

“Sometimes knowing something doesn’t mean that much,” Natasha reminds him.

Sam glances back to the couch. Steve is gently scratching Bucky’s back through the thin cotton of his shirt, and Bucky’s head droops forward a little, eyes half closed and humming quietly. 

“Yeah. Sometimes,” he says. Natasha flashes him a little smile, then saunters off toward the bedroom. Sam takes her place at the table, flipping at the corners of the pages, and feels more at ease than he has in weeks.

*

The next few weeks are brutally silent. 

Sam watches Steve and Bucky awkwardly dance around each other and he wants to throw something.

Steve disappears to the gym again for hours a day. Sam trails after him and holds the bag while Steve rips holes in the vinyl with his knuckles, hoping that Steve will break down and say something, but he doesn’t. He brushes off all of Sam’s comments about working out too much with excuses about slacking at Stark Tower, as if a week in New York could have any impact on his superhuman physique. 

Sam suggests that Bucky come and work out with him, and Steve masks the obvious horror on his face by pointing out that last time Bucky tried to punch a punching bag, he punched clean through it and got sand in the grooves of his arm and it took half an hour to clean out.

Bucky always looks confused when they get back and Steve doesn’t even look at him as he disappears into the bathroom for a shower. Sam sighs and drops down on the couch next to Bucky, wrapping an arm around his shoulders or throwing a leg over Bucky’s lap. Bucky never seems to mind the contact and usually presses back into Sam as Sam flips through shitty daytime sitcoms, but that’s the most relaxed he gets. The second Steve comes out of the shower, Bucky’s back on edge, following Steve around the house with sharp eyes while he pretends to watch reruns of Friends. 

Bucky draws more and more into himself as the days go on and Steve looks more and more nervous. Sam gets more and more tired of watching them fall over themselves to avoid each other.

“We should ask Stark to call Thor,” Sam says one day over dinner. Steve is slumped across from him, slowly demolishing half of the roast chicken Sam picked up from Safeway. (Bucky disappeared with the other half about twenty minutes ago and neither of them have heard a sound from his room since.) “Ask him about bringing down a keg of whatever they drink in Asgard.”

“Ale, I think,” Steve says. “Or mead.”

“Of course. Yeah, just tell Thor to bring down a six pack or whatever of ale for you.”

“You know I can’t get drunk, Sam.” Steve frowns at his chicken, like it’s the bird’s fault that his metabolism is so efficient.

“I don’t know, Asgard seems pretty hardcore with their partying,” Sam replies. “At least from what Stark’s told me. I bet it would work.”

“Maybe.” Steve sets down his fork and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Aren’t you supposed to tell me what a bad idea it is to drink when you’re down?”

Sam shrugs. “Yeah. I never said it was a smart idea.”

“You’re not being a very good therapist.”

“I’m not your therapist at all,” Sam says. “I mean, it’s kind of hard to resist when I live with you two idiots, but…”

Steve sticks his tongue out a little and Sam laughs. “You actually think I should call Stark?”

“Nah.” Sam reaches over and tears off a little piece of chicken with his fingers and pops it into his mouth. Steve smacks at his hand and picks up the fork again. “Even if it worked, imagine Stark being in the same room as a drunk you.”

Steve considers it for a moment, then recoils a little in horror. “God no. I’ve spent enough time sober with Stark lately, I don’t need to spend time with him drunk.”

“Might loosen you up a bit, though,” Sam says. “Get you to talk about whatever’s been going on in your head.” 

Steve pauses with his fork halfway to his mouth and his face goes stony. “That what this is about?”

Sam considers denying it, but eventually decides it’s not worth it. “Yeah, basically. In a roundabout way.”

Steve looks back down at the chicken and starts eating again. “Not like you to edge around things like that.”

“You two have been doin’ it all week, figured I’d join in.”

Steve’s expression darkens a little and his face flushes.

Sam bites the inside of his cheek. “Sorry, that was a dick thing to say.”

“Kinda, yeah.”

“It’s just frustrating, you know? He wants you back and you’re just tip-toeing around him and it scares him. You barely speak to him anymore, you never touch him, you spend the absolute bare minimum amount of time in his presence–”

“Maybe I’m trying to make things safer for him,” Steve interrupts. “Think about that?”

Sam stares at the blond hair obscuring Steve’s face. “You’re doing a piss-poor job of it, then.”

Steve laughs humorlessly. “You been taking lessons from Hill?”

“I’m just saying, Steve. This isn’t working. It’s not doing either of you any good.”

“I don’t need it to do me good.”

Sam drops his face into his hands. “You masochistic ass.”

“Sam, you don’t understand–”

“Like hell I don’t,” Sam cuts him off. He sounds almost properly angry now. Steve’s not sure he’s ever heard Sam properly angry. “I know what you’re doing. I’ve done it myself. But don’t you dare think it’s the right thing to do.”

Steve deflates a little. “Maria said the same thing, more or less.”

“Maybe you should start listening to one of us, then,” Sam says. He pushes his chair back and leaves the table without another word. Steve hears the click of a door being closed - he doesn’t know which door it is. Maybe Sam’s having the same conversation with Bucky. Maybe he’s sitting in his room seething. Maybe he’s escaped through the back door. Maybe they’re too messed up for him.

Steve cleans up his plate and fork and the plastic chicken container, then shrugs to himself and does the rest of the day’s dishes. Then he sits down in the corner the couch, pad and pencils in hand, tucked in the corner, and stares at the opposite end. Steve imagines Bucky sitting there, legs curled under him, metal arm resting above a throw blanket, watching a movie and smiling a little at Sam’s jokes. He imagines Bucky’s hair drawn back, curling along the back of his neck and dancing a little along his jawline when he laughs. He imagines the straight line of Bucky’s nose and the jut of his jawline, and the way it shades down his neck just right for Steve to use the blending sticks he picked up at the dollar store a few weeks ago.

He imagines Bucky sitting in the opposite corner of the couch and staring at him, bare feet planted flat on the floor and arms crossed over his chest, hair unkempt and expression dark.

“Steve.”

Steve starts and blinks a few times. Bucky swims back into view and– oh. He wasn’t imagining it. Bucky is there, not really glaring at him, but more staring through him, like he’s trying to see into Steve’s head.

“Steve?”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry, I just… I spaced out for a second, sorry.” Steve holds his sketch pad to his chest and moves to get up. Bucky’s arm darts out and his hand closes around Steve’s wrist and Steve feels a very small tendril of fear curl in his stomach.

“Steve?” Bucky asks again, but his voice sounds smaller.

“I’ll just get out of your way,” Steve says. “If you wanna watch a movie or something. Or read. Or just… I’ll go.”

Bucky’s grip around his wrist tightens and Steve flinches at the unforgiving metal. “Why?”

Steve blinks. “Why what?”

“Why would you go?”
“I don’t…” Steve’s eyebrows draw together. “I don’t want to bother you, I’m just getting out of your way.”

“You keep leaving,” Bucky says quietly.

“Sam and I work out in the mornings, you know that.”

“No, I mean. Here.” Bucky jerks his head in the general direction of the house. “You’re never here.”

“I’m always here, Buck.”

“You promised.”

Steve’s heart feels like it falters for a second. “I don’t understand.”

“You said you wouldn’t go again,” Bucky says. He sounds hurt. Steve’s throat burns. “I told you not to go again and you said you wouldn’t.”

Steve gently pulls his wrist free of Bucky’s grasp, then lowers himself back down onto the couch. Bucky tucks his feet up under himself again, leaning against the back of the couch, and he waits.

Steve turns words over and over in his head, and eventually settles on, “I don’t want to hurt you again.”

“Then don’t,” Bucky says. 

“But what if I do? Accidentally?”

“Then Sam will smack you with a rolled up newspaper like I used to.” The corner of Bucky’s mouth tugs up a little.

Steve shakes his head. “How can you be so– so cavalier about it?”

Bucky tilts his head to the side, eyebrows raised.

“Uncaring,” Steve clarifies. “Why don’t you care if I hurt you again?”

“I do. But I told you not to, so you won’t.”

Steve sighs and rubs his eyes with the back of his hand. “You’re awful trusting, Buck.”

“You said you wouldn’t,” Bucky says simply. “You said you’d stop and you said you wouldn’t leave again. So stop it.”

He sounds far too sincere for everything Steve has done to him, but Steve pushes his trepidation aside for the moment. “Okay,” he says quietly. “‘m sorry, Buck. Didn’t mean to make things worse.”

“You never do,” Bucky says wryly. He gestures at the TV. “You want to watch a movie?”

“Alright.” Bucky pushes himself off of the couch and puts in a DVD. Steve sets his pad and pencils off to the side and wraps one arm around Bucky’s chest when Bucky leans back against him. 

“Did Sam put you up to that?” he asks later, chin resting on the top of Bucky’s head. 

Bucky makes a noncommittal sound and Steve thanks God or Thor’s father or whoever else is listening for Sam Wilson.

*

On a good day, Bucky wakes up on his own around nine in the morning. He stumbles out of his room, hair in disarray, and drinks the coffee Steve brews and eats the breakfast Sam makes and joins in the conversation a couple times. He puts on clothes that actually fit him now, pulls jacket hoods over his face, and goes for a walk by the Mall, or goes with Sam to the VA to sit in on group meetings, or sits in the living room and talks to Natasha in soft, lilting Russian, if she’s around, or relearns poker with Clint, if he’s with her. He learns something new about the world, or catches up on something he missed – he’s working through Steve’s list as well as making his own, and Sam has a lot of opinions about how both of their modern world education should play out. He helps with dinner sometimes and eats quietly, and spends the evenings with Steve - sometimes just in companionable silence, sometimes swapping stories that Bucky comes to know are his, sometimes watching TV, sometimes with Sam and Natasha. He gets tired easily these days, and retreats to his room before the night gets too late and reads for a little while (newspapers, biographies, modern fiction, whatever he can find) and more often than not passes out with pages stuck to his face. They happen more often now.

On a bad day, Bucky wakes up screaming with one or more sets of hands ready to hold him down if he needs. He doesn’t eat, and if he does, he vomits it up almost immediately. The worried glances from the other three - hell, just their presence - sets him so on edge that he locks the door of his room so forcefully that the lock almost snaps off (and has, more than once) and lies in bed, staring at the wall as the Winter Soldier slams against the inside of his forehead, just above his eyes, and he closes the curtains to shut out all the light. He doesn’t sleep, or eat, or emerge, not unless he’s sure no one else is around. On these days Bucky feels like he thinks the Winter Soldier should feel, right at the beginning. He loses these days, loses hours to the crawling pattern of light against the window slats, and sometimes comes back to himself in the middle of night the next day, more exhausted than if he’d gone out. But they pass.

On a very, very bad day, Bucky lowers the brim of his cap over his eyes and keeps his hands tucked in his pockets as he sits in the waiting room of the hospital and regrets the sirens that he know are his fault and he waits for Steve or Sam or Natasha to come walking out of the emergency room, a couple of pints of blood down and yet somehow still forgiving. These days rarely happen, but they still happen. All four of them have the scars to prove it.

Most days are okay.

*

Bucky bumps his elbow against Steve’s as they sit on a park bench by the mall, watching Sam jog by again. Steve grins a little bit and nudges back, and it feels okay. 

Today is a good day.