Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Every part of him ached as Bucky slowly regained consciousness, all the way down to the curves of his bones. He wrenched his eyes open and was met with nothing but an empty void of darkness.

He felt heavy, weighed-down. He was freezing cold, but didn’t even have enough strength for his teeth to be chattering. His head was spinning, and his mouth felt bone-dry as he choked in a ragged breath of air that was so cold it seemed to burn him from the inside out. 

He squeezed his eyes shut again, drawing in a thin breath as a shudder ran through his body. He didn’t know where he was, or what was going on; he could hardly get his head to stop spinning long enough to form a single thought, let alone figure out what was happening. Faces and voices slipped through his fingers like smoke as he reached for memories he couldn’t find, and the aching throb in his body continued, a constant pulse of dull pain. 

That, at least, was something familiar.

(And familiarity could be something dangerous.)

Bucky tried to bring his hand up to rub at his pounding temples — he felt like he should be doing something, felt like he had been given a mission, if he could only stop hurting long enough to remember what it was — and that was about the time he realized that he couldn’t. 

The ache of his body was so heavy, he hadn’t even noticed until now that he was strapped down to something that was keeping him in place. Keeping him locked in the darkness, in the cold, hidden away in a corner of nothing. 

He drew in a deep breath through his nose, trying to keep calm. But then, as the darkness of his vision began to fade into faint light, whatever sense of control he had managed to muster up vanished, and he found himself staring blankly at a small, frosted-over window. 

A window that he recognized as the only sight into the Winter Soldier’s cryostasis chamber. 

(But — something felt wrong about this, something felt wrong —)

“What —,”

His lips parted as he spoke and the freezing air burned his throat, and he choked. 

He wheezed on a series of coughs, and everything hurt, and the panic was creeping back in, turned to a sick, twisting fear that was squeezing him so tightly, he couldn’t breathe. 

He couldn’t breathe, and he didn’t breathe until darkness crawled back over his eyes. 

When he blinked them back open again, the cold was gone, the pain was worse, and he was no longer in the cryostasis chamber. But there was no relief to be found in that. Instead, he was strapped just as tightly into the Chair, and that meant nothing but anguish, agony, unrelenting pain from the men at Hydra that treated him like the weapon he was —

“здравствуй, солдат.”

Hello, Soldier. 

Bucky tried to shake his head at the disembodied voice but found that he couldn’t even do that as the Chair’s metal plates locked his skull in place, forcing him to stare straight ahead even as his chest heaved with panic and he thrashed frantically, barely moving at all with how well he was secured in place. 

A handler stepped into view in front of him, and somehow, Bucky recognized him as all of them.

“сотрите его,” the handler said in cold, sharp Russian. Wipe him. 

“No,” Bucky whimpered, ragged, and he didn’t know if the words fell from his lips in Russian or English, all he knew was that he was pleading, begging, for them to stop — he didn’t know what was going on, why he was here, what was happening, but he knew what that command meant, and what came next. “No, please —,” 

His mind was scrambling frantically, working overtime, trying to make any sense out of what was going on, but everything still hurt, and it was hard to think. Still, he had to try, and quickly, because he knew that the pain was about to get a hell of a lot worse.

As his gaze darted around frantically, the only autonomy of movement he still had, he saw out of the corner of his eye that the metal arm locked into place on his left side was not vibranium, sleek with black and gold plating. It was silver, aged, with the red star of Hydra emblazoned on the shoulder, blood caking the plates of the hand into a rusty crimson. 

Because — because of course it was. Because he was the Winter Soldier. Wasn’t that right? 

(But it felt wrong.

He had thought — he could have sworn —

Hadn’t he been free?)

And then the telltale buzzing of the plates on either side of his skull started up like radio static. He clenched his teeth on instinct, a cry of anguish already building up in his throat and tensing muscles, and then all he knew was pain. Pain from the electricity crackling through his brain and making his whole body rock and shake, and pain in his throat, from how loud he was screaming.

(For a moment, he could have sworn someone called his name.

But they couldn’t have. After all, he was only a Soldier.)

He was still screaming when the static sound stopped, and then he was back with that dull, constant ache, pain throbbing through every inch of him and sending little shivers up his spine. His teeth were chattering, each inhale and exhale shaky and uncertain, and when he opened his burning eyes to see the handler staring back at him with the Red Book in his hands, he closed them again in weary resignation.

(The Soldier, he knew — how could he have forgotten, how could he have hoped? — would never be free.) 

“Желание.” 

He could hear, in the handler’s voice, sadistic glee as he began to read out the words. He supposed that, to them, it must be an honor. A pleasure. Which, he thought bleakly, made sense. They always did get their pleasure out of him, through pain and otherwise.

“Ржавый. Печь . . .” 

His mind blanked out, and he welcomed the darkness enveloping his thoughts, making him numb to everything but the pain. He endured it, even if he got tired of screaming, after a while; it was what he was used to, after all. They could have been tormenting him for seconds, or hours, or years, and it all would have felt the same to him.

If he had been able to think, he would have thought that the worst had always been when they hadn’t been hurting him. When he was just sitting there, waiting silently like a good soldier. Wherever he was now, it was some sort of mercy that they did not stop to let him think for a single moment.

Until they did, all at once.

They stopped hurting him — and he started hurting people.

Each time he blinked, he saw another face, another moment, another memory. The deaths replayed in front of him, over and over, until he felt himself beginning to go mad. He had dropped to his knees at some point, burying his head in his hands and squeezing his eyes shut as the voices — hundreds, thousands of them — screamed at him until his ears popped, sobbing and howling and asking him why. 

He knelt, his head in his hands, and begged for forgiveness into his palms, his own screams and cries becoming one with theirs, and then he was falling — falling from a train as Steve screamed his name, falling and falling until he crashed, hard, into the freezing cold ground.

And then: silence.

This time, there was no pain. He lay there, stunned but unhurt, his head pounding and his ears ringing. Gingerly, he moved his hands up; found one flesh hand, one vibranium. 

He lay there in the snow, and he took a moment to breathe. 

There was no pain, no screams, no torment. There was just the wind whistling over the silent treetops, and the cold seeping into him, reminding him through the burn of ice on his skin that he was still alive.

And through remembering that he was alive, he remembered that he was James Bucky Barnes, and that he was no longer the Winter Soldier, and he closed his eyes and let himself breathe. 

He didn’t know how long he lay there, remembering. But the pocket of peace he had found himself in, in whatever hell this was (was this Hell? He had never believed in it, because he had thought nothing could be worse than the personal hell he had already lived through) was broken by a sound of pain he recognized as his own — but that hadn’t come from him.

Bucky stood, heaving himself up with effort, limbs frozen from the cold. His gaze fell on a prone figure, lying a little ways away from him in a pool of blood that was staining the snow around him crimson. 

The man was young, clean-shaven and soft-faced, but his gaze was haunted and distant, his expression blank. His left arm was mutilated beyond repair to just above the elbow, the wound fresh and steadily oozing blood. The only motion that showed he was alive at all was the slow rise and fall of his chest, and the quiet, pained whimpers that cut across the peace of the silently-falling snow.

Bucky came and stood over him. He looked down at the man, and his own face stared back up at him.

Bucky didn’t flinch. He just stared. There was no surprise left in him — just dread, and a resigned sort of acceptance.

“You should have died here,” the man said, with Bucky’s own face, own mouth, own voice. His words were dark and bitter, even as his expression remained blank despite how each breath was hitched with a whimper of pain. “It would have been easier. For you. For them.” He blinked up at him, almost sadly. 

“You should have died here.”

“I know,” Bucky whispered. Around him, the snow fell in silence. Even the wind had gone still, as if holding its breath.

“I should have.”

And then he lowered himself down to kneel beside himself (himself that he knew wasn’t really him, his mind having begun to come back as he had lain in the snow — but he found that he didn’t care whether it was or not, or whether this was Hell or something else entirely, he just cared that the other was right). 

He wrapped his fingers slowly around his own neck, and squeezed until he felt the bone snap. 

It did nothing. 

He had sort of figured it wouldn’t. 

Sergeant James Barnes, circa 1943, stared up at him and blinked, face still impassive despite the fingers wrapped around his throat. Blood was still pouring from the stump of his arm, enough that he should have been long bled out even before Bucky had snapped his neck. Bucky could feel it seeping into his pants and coating his knees, the iron scent heavy, making him choke as he tasted it on the air. 

Barnes stared up at him, and all there was in his expression was a look of faint sadness in his eyes. 

“You should have died here,” he murmured. “You would have died a good soldier.”

His words were somehow gentler than, yet crueler than, everything Bucky had ever endured. 

Bucky bowed his head. He closed his eyes. And he cried, because he had lived.

Chapter Text

Yelena exhaled a breath harsh with relief as the other members of their ragtag team stumbled, one by one, into the small pocket of the Void where she had found Bob. She hadn’t expected that they would follow, when she had stepped into the shadows. It felt like trust that she had never been given.

“You came back for me.”

But they had followed her — had trusted her enough to do so. 

She just hoped that they could keep that trust in her long enough for them to save everything. 

“The source is buried in Bob’s memories,” she told them. “If we can find it, we can stop this.” She scanned their faces for any apprehension; she found none, save for Walker’s, which she didn’t much care about. 

But, she realized suddenly, there was a notable absence. 

“Where the hell is Bucky?” Yelena demanded. “He did not come with you?” It wouldn’t have been surprising if he had been anyone else — hell, it was surprising that any of them were here at all — but given what she knew about him, he didn’t seem like the type to stay behind while everyone else charged into a fight.

Ava, Walker, and Alexei glanced between themselves. 

“He may have stayed behind,” Alexei suggested with a shrug, and then a smirk. “Perhaps he is not great super-soldier as they say, and fears the bravery of the Red Guardian.”

“No, he was right behind me,” Walker corrected.

“I watched him turn to shadow right before I did,” Ava confirmed, ignoring Alexei’s put-out look. “He’s here somewhere.” 

They all went quiet (even Alexei, by some miracle), processing what that meant. Yelena shared a sharp look with Ava before speaking what they were all thinking. “He . . . he must not have been able to break through his memories.” She didn't even want to imagine what he could be seeing, but she had a feeling that they were all about to have to — not just imagine it, but see it firsthand.

Yelena looked over at Bob, who was rocking slightly back and forth on the balls of his feet with an anxious expression. She tilted her head towards him in a silent question, and he nodded jerkily. 

“I — I can find him,” he told her quietly. 

She gave him a reassuring look (or at least she hoped it was reassuring; she was out of practice), and watched as he closed his eyes, brow furrowing. Around them, the furniture began to tremble threateningly, but didn’t start flying at them again. 

After only a few moments, Bob opened his eyes. The fear in them was gone, replaced with a sharp certainty that Yelena hadn’t seen before — not in him. 

So when he said, “Follow me”, they all did without hesitation — taking care to keep close together, because they couldn’t risk splitting up and having someone else get lost in their own mind. 

They passed through memory after memory. They were mostly Bob’s — fragments of abuse and trauma that made Yelena’s stomach turn over uncomfortably. But there were glimpses of others — Walker’s, Ava’s, Alexei’s, even and a brief flash of her own, somewhere in the Red Room that they thankfully passed through quickly. 

Eventually, Bob brought them to a halt in the middle of a cold, dark lab. There was a large, coffin-looking machine in the far corner, its presence giving the room an ominous, heavy feeling.

“He — he should be here,” Bob said quietly, glancing around in sudden uncertainty.

“Really?” Walker interjected from behind them, sounding very uppity and making Yelena want to punch him in his stupid face. “‘Cause I don’t see —,”

And then the darkness of the room shifted, and then there was a voice.

“здравствуй, солдат,” a disembodied voice said, and Yelena tensed, every internal alarm she had shrieking frantically at her. Hello, Soldier. 

“Bob, are you —,” She began, and then someone began to scream.

The darkness cleared just enough for them all to catch sight of a man strapped to a giant metal chair, huge plates drilling into either side of his head as he howled in anguish. The sound was guttural, ragged, like something human being torn apart.

Men in white lab coats milled about him, paying him no mind, nor even sparing a glimpse at the five people standing there, watching. They adjusted dials, scribbled notes, and conducted their work with detached precision, as if they had long ago erased any shred of empathy for the man in the chair.

The man in the chair, Yelena realized belatedly, was Bucky.

Bucky’s face was twisted into a mask of despairing anguish. His hair clung in damp, tangled strands to his sweat-soaked forehead, and his eyes were squeezed shut in agony, the veins around them strained and bulging. Even as he screamed and howled and cried, his body remained unnervingly still — as if his mind had gone somewhere far beyond the pain.

“Oh, fuck this,” Yelena snarled. 

She snatched one of her batons from her back and stalked forward, but as she moved, the darkness seeped back into the room. She called out his name, just once — some sort of desperate attempt for him to hear her and break free — but then the darkness had swallowed everything up, nearly taking her with it if Alexei hadn’t been there all at once, pulling her back into the group of the five of them, huddling together as the memory (because that’s what this all was — Bucky’s memories) faded.

But they could still hear in the darkness, and the darkness was filled with what felt like endless screams, and broken cries, and, punctuated in between the agony, someone speaking Russian — a series of disconnected words, longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak — until it broke to the silence of a forest covered in snow.

Panic seized Yelena for a brief moment with the terror that this was her memory. But, no, this was not the darkness of her test of loyalty and strength to the Red Room, her first betrayal of a friend and certainly not the last. The sun was shining in the sky over this forest, and the snow was falling softer than it had the night Anya had died. Snow always was a deceptive peace.

Yelena turned to Bob, and he looked disoriented, distant. She snapped her fingers in front of his face, seeking out his gaze with the intensity of her own.

“Is this still his?” She asked him. 

“I — I think so, I —,” Bob hesitated, then nodded, furrowing his brow in a steeled resolve. “Yes. It is.”

“Those were . . . all his? His memories?” Walker’s voice was strung with disbelief.

“What, you didn’t know about the Winter Soldier?” Ava sounded surprised, and just a little sardonically amused as she gave him a critical eye. “Damn, you really aren’t Captain America.”

“What Hydra did to him . . .” Alexei’s voice was growling, and he shook his head. “It is no way to treat a super-soldier.”

“It is no way to treat anyone,” Yelena murmured.

Her head snapped up suddenly as, somewhere close by, there was a wounded noise. A low whimper, like a hurt dog, carrying thin and sharp across the silence of the snow.

“All of you shut up, and stay here. I’ve got this,” she said quietly to the others, leaving no room for argument before turning and following the sound. 

As she crept closer, she realized it wasn’t an animal’s cry at all — it was a human sob, ragged and raw.

Bucky was kneeling in the snow. His back was to her, and she could see the shudders wracking his shoulders, the unsteadiness of his breathing. 

Beneath him was a different version of him. A memory. He looked young — painfully young — and very small where he lay in the snow, which was stained around him with blood that was seeping from his mutilated left arm, or at least what was left of it. 

This, Yelena realized, must have been when he had fallen and lost his arm; surviving, only to get found by the wrong people. 

Death, she thought darkly, may have been more merciful than the things they had just witnessed.

Bucky — the Bucky she had been looking for, with his long hair falling over his face and his black tactical pants soaked through with bloodied snow — had his vibranium hand wrapped around the other’s throat. He was kneeling over him, and he was crying.

“Bucky, what are you doing?” Yelena said, voice soft but still carrying sharply across the snow. 

Bucky jerked up with a pained noise, twisting around to stare at her. His face was pale and streaked with tears. His expression and gaze were haunted. He did not move his hand. He stared at her like he didn’t know her, but after a long, aching moment, recognition broke across the distant haze in his eyes.

“Why are you here?” His voice was rasping and uncertain. He sounded young, as young as the man beside him. “I don’t understand.” The words were pained and spilled from him in a single breath, as if he had been needing to say them for a while now. Yelena’s stomach twisted. 

Of course he hadn’t found her with the others. He hadn’t even remembered what was going on. 

He had suffered through those memories, without even knowing why it was all happening to him again.

“I was looking for you,” she told him, when she could speak without fearing a shake in her voice. “We need to stop Sentry, remember? We fought him. Only a few minutes ago, Bucky, we fought him. Got our asses handed to us.” She studied his expression closely. “Do you remember?”

“A few minutes ago . . .?” Bucky shook his head slowly, blinking hard. He looked torn, tormented. “I — I don’t . . .” 

“This isn’t real,” Yelena said softly. She took a couple of steps closer; he didn’t flinch. He was leaning towards her, listening with a desperate look in his eyes. “We are in the Void — the darkness that Sentry unleashed. These are only your memories.”

“No — no,” Bucky snarled, suddenly angry, suddenly furious as realization began to slowly overtake the confusion on his face. He shook his head, squeezing his vibranium hand tighter around the neck of his younger self; Yelena tensed at the sound it made, squelching flesh and crunching bone. 

“It has to be real. This has to be real.”

“Bucky —,”

“I have to — I have to stop this from happening, I —,”

“You can’t change anything.” 

The words didn’t come from Yelena. They came from the other Bucky. His voice was steady, almost serene, despite the hand still at his throat mangling it beyond recognition. Even as he spoke, his gaze remained staring straight up at the sky, his eyelashes fluttering as snowflakes glimmered along them.

“You will always be the Soldier," the man continued, just as serene. "Nothing will change what you’ve done, or what they did to you. Nothing.” And then, echoing what Anya had said to Yelena, making her shiver: “It’s too late.”

Bucky recoiled as though he had been burned. He yanked his hand back, scrambling away from the prone, near-lifeless figure. His gaze jerked to meet Yelena’s, and there was desperation in his eyes.

“I should have died here,” he whispered, voice soaked in despair. He lifted his flesh hand, fingers trembling as bloodstained snow melted through them. “I should have died here.”

“You’re not the only one with blood on your hands,” Yelena said to him, keeping her face impassive, even as the devastation in his words made her chest ache. “You do not think that I wish, all of the time, I had not done the things I have done? But they happened. I did them. You said it yourself to us, do you remember? ‘The past does not go away. You can either live with it forever, or do something about it.’  You have done everything to amend the wrongs that were not even your fault. Tormenting yourself, in the same way that they did to you — that will not change anything, Bucky. It only hurts you more.”

“Maybe I deserve that,” Bucky muttered, leaning back against a tree and closing his eyes. He dragged his flesh hand through the white snow around him, smearing it with red.

“Maybe we all do,” Yelena countered, “but you, the least of any of us. You did not choose to do the bad things you did.” She gestured to the young soldier lying between the two of them. “Look at him,” she said. “It is not his fault, the things that they did to him, the things that they made him do. And it is not yours.”

Bucky’s gaze dropped towards the memory of his younger self who was lying there silent, staring upward as though he could still see the freight train he’d fallen from. Yelena knew the story; everyone did. But she found herself wondering, now — how long he had lain there, before Hydra had found him. 

She wondered how long Bucky would have sat motionless in this memory. Waiting, all over again.

But evidently — he was done waiting.

Bucky staggered to his feet, bracing his hand against the tree he’d been leaning on. He was still shaking a little, his eyes red-rimmed and his breath shuddering against the cold air as he dragged his gaze away from the memory of his younger self. But when he looked at her, it was with a hardened resolve in his eyes.

“Please,” he said. “Get me out of here.”

“That is what we’re here for,” Yelena said, and something like surprise contorted over Bucky’s face.

“We?”

“Well, me and the others,” she confirmed. “Alexei, Ava, Bob . . .” She sighed a little, resigned. “Walker. All of us were looking for you.” She glanced around them both, gaze lingering on the body in the snow. “We are going to stop this.”

Bucky nodded, a sharp jerk of his head. He hesitated for a moment before speaking.

“Thanks.” His voice was stiff, but his words were genuine. “For coming to find me.”

Yelena shrugged, arching a brow. “Teams have each others' backs, and apparently, we are a team,” she said dryly. 

“Apparently,” Bucky echoed. His worn gaze dropped for a moment, back down to the young soldier lying in the bloodied snow. He sighed, breath billowing against the cold.

“He’s not real?” He asked quietly, and Yelena thought that he needed to hear that he wasn't. Needed to know that he wasn't leaving some broken, unfinished version of himself to suffer in this place, alone, in pain, in silence, for only he knew how long.

“No,” Yelena told him. “He’s not. He is only a version of your memories. I promise you, Bucky.”

Bucky stared for a moment longer, jaw tight as the other stared back. He clenched his vibranium hand into a fist, letting out a long exhale through his nose as his gaze lingered on the soldier’s neck, which had healed from Bucky’s desperation, leaving only the blood behind to seep into the snow with the rest of it. 

Bucky hesitated. His lips parted, then shut again. He stared down at the young soldier he had once been, and he spoke.

“I’m sorry.” 

And then he loosened his fist, and turned his back on the memory.

Yelena didn't know exactly why he was apologizing to the memory of himself. She supposed that it was for the same reasons she had taken her younger self into her arms, in her memory of the Red Room; why she had hidden the other girls' punishment out of sight, cradling her own face in her hands and holding her close. Offering comfort to herself, because she knew she had never been given it, as Bucky offered his memory an apology that he would never accept for himself.

Sometimes, that was the only thing they had — a moment of imagined kindness. Offered too late, but still given.

There was something poetic about it, and Yelena smiled at him.

"You are a good man, Bucky Barnes," she told him, because it was another thing he needed to hear. "A good man."

Bucky looked at her with a gaze that carried the weight of unimaginable pain and suffering, and he, too, smiled. It was small, and uncertain, but it was there in spite of it all, and it stayed for just long enough to mean something.

They left his memory behind after that, Bucky following Yelena back through the trees to where the rest of the group was waiting (being placated from going after her by Bob, who was surprisingly good at being the voice of reason). The second the two of them came into view, the arguing group went quiet, eyeing Bucky with expressions of shared apprehension.

Surprisingly, Walker was the first to speak — and more surprisingly, it wasn’t something assholish that came out of his mouth.

“You good?” It was aimed towards Bucky, and sounded awkward and stiff, but strangely genuine, especially coming from him. Bucky gave him a sardonic twist of his mouth that nearly passed as a smile, tilting his head and speaking dryly.

“I have a great past, actually, so I’m totally fine.”

Walker winced. Beside him, Alexei looked like he was about to say something very insensitive (Yelena didn’t put it past him to make a quip about the Winter Soldier in the winter, or something), so she interrupted him before she could (and subsequently interrupted Walker, who really didn’t need to be shoving his foot any further into his mouth). 

“We gonna do this, or what?” She challenged, skimming her gaze around them all and letting it linger on Bucky, who was looking at Bob with something akin to wary curiosity. As she spoke, he turned back to her and nodded. He looked exhausted, and he looked pained, but his blue eyes burned with conviction as he spoke.

“Let’s get the hell out of here.”