Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

She says, “Don’t you care about him at all? You’re not even going to try to fight for fifty-fifty custody?” and John watches himself open his mouth and say, “What, the child support payments you’re gonna be getting aren’t enough? You want a babysitter too? You already got everything you’re gonna get out of me, so go fuck yourself, Olivia.”

He watches himself storm out into the sunny blue morning. It’s beautiful, too beautiful, and he feels how his younger self hates it all: the jewel-feathered hummingbirds darting around the feeder Olivia hung on the porch, the peaceful thrum of the neighbor’s lawn mower, the tinkle of an ice cream truck making its way up the neighborhood. He just lost everything, and it's a beautiful summer day. The world should be weeping and tearing itself apart for him, but it's just got to be a fucking perfect, ten-outta-ten day.

His own internal reel plays out like background music, a thoughtline embedded in this memory, and he hears his own mind bubbling hotly: it’s not fair, it's not fucking fair! Olivia gets to make plenty of mistakes and he’s still expected to be Mr. Perfect, even while he’s stumbling through the worst pain of his life, grieving Lemar like a limb while his good name gets dragged through the mud in every publication in the Western Hemisphere. And everyone wants him to grovel and apologize and pretend like he deserves it and pretend it doesn’t hurt. It's a men's rights issue, is what it is. Gotta be tough and stoic all the time, and no one ever lets you hurt. Well, fuck that. Fuck all of this. And fuck you, too, Olivia.

He slams the front door loudly behind himself to feel a little tougher, but it doesn’t work. The only thing that changes is that his son upstairs begins to cry in his crib, woken from his nap by his father walking out on his family like a coward, walking out like the kind of loser deadbeat John’s reviled his whole life. And he curses himself bitterly for ever taking that fucking serum because all he wants to do right now is drink himself into a stupor, but he’s robbed himself of even that little relief.

Reality trips over itself and he's back in the kitchen, and he's looking at himself, looking at Olivia's big brown eyes shining with tears. “Don’t you care about him at all? You’re not even going to try to fight for fifty-fifty custody?”

He loves her, and he hates her so fucking much in this moment, and he watches himself open his big fat mouth: “What, the child support payments you’re gonna be getting aren’t enough? You want a babysitter too? You already got everything you’re gonna get out of me, so go fuck yourself, Olivia.”

Then he watches himself lose everything, again.

"Hey, Bob?" he calls, looking upward at the sky. Like Bob is God. Well, in this place he might well be. "Are you doing this? Because this is extremely, uh, not cool, man. Dick move."

The kitchen linoleum splits and shifts and changes, peeling up into tiles that fly away and reveal filthy concrete under his boots. Walls grow up around him: a dank empty warehouse, shafts of afternoon sunlight piercing the dusty gloom.

Sam Wilson, steady as the Earth, tells him, “You gotta give me the shield, man.”

John watches himself say, “You don’t wanna do this.”

Bucky Barnes’ grim gaze flicks up to him. “Yeah,” he says softly. “We do.”

So: John watches himself pummel the living shit out of two good men. He rips apart Sam Wilson’s beloved wings out of pure spite. He leaves Barnes bleeding and bruised. In the end, the pair of them gang up on him and snap his arm and knock him out, which is actually pretty unfair, thanks, because it’s two against one. As his consciousness circles the drain, John watches Bucky Barnes stagger to him, take the bloodied shield, and throw it at Sam’s feet like a dog bringing a trophy to its master. Sam takes it and rubs mournfully at the dead Flag-Smasher’s blood with his sleeve. Boo-hoo, a weapon was used as a weapon, isn’t that just so fucking sad.

Time skips and runs like water, and now John’s alone in the warehouse, awake again and cradling his broken arm and gingerly trying to climb to his feet. The sun’s a little lower. Barnes and Wilson are gone. Distantly, sirens are approaching.

Okay, the younger John is thinking, so maybe this looks kinda bad, he gets that. God, the mainstream media is going to have a field day. He can already see the headlines about how Captain America murdered someone, even though he was just neutralizing an enemy combatant, a fucking terrorist who damn well deserved it, which is his job, okay? Steve Rogers killed people all the time. And whatever the bleeding-heart Twitter pundits have to say about him will be a small price to pay for avenging Lemar. But no one other than him is going to get that. They’ve all been against him from the start. They made him into this, and now they’re going to string him up for it. They’ll take the opportunity to take everything from him now, give it all to Wilson, Steve Rogers’ own DEI hire. His career. His title. His medals. His honor. Good job, boys: John Walker, combat veteran hero and all-around good guy, has been defeated, and soon he’ll be stripped of every last goddamn thing he had.

The tape runs to the end. Reality skips a beat. The sun is higher again.

“You gotta give me the shield, man,” says Sam Wilson.

“You don’t wanna do this.”

“Yeah,” Bucky says. “We do.”

So he watches it all roll out once more. The memory is stained deep with a miserable feeling so strong, he can smell it in the air like blood. Can almost hear it, like faint sour music, like his own nasty little soundtrack. He doesn’t want to look it in the eye. He has a horrible sense that this feeling got mixed into the cracked foundation of him. It goes all the way down, and is it ever ugly.

“Why the fuck are you showing me this?” John yells into the echoing rafters. “This just some kind of joke? Come on, Bobby, don’t be a dick.”

He strides forward and falls into a long black hole in the floor that definitely wasn’t there a moment ago, and—when he lands, he’s in the driver’s seat of his SUV with his foot on the gas pedal. Olivia is in the front seat beside him with a towel between her legs. The towel is red. It used to be white.

“It’s probably nothing, okay?” he’s saying. “I’m sure the baby’s fine. Hey, Liv, he’s gonna be fine, okay?”

“Please hurry,” she sobs. “Please, Johnny, I can’t lose this one too.”

“I’m going as fast as I can. We’ll be at the hospital in like five more minutes.”

“Please, it hurts!”

“Well, it’s not making it easier to drive when you’re screaming in my ear!”

“Feels like I’m dying,” she gasps, and for fuck’s sake, yeah, that bleeding doesn’t look fun, but does she have to be so goddamn dramatic about every single thing?

“Okay, no, come on,” he says. “You can get through this. Get shot a few times and then tell me how bad it hurts. Women go through this all the time, okay?”

“Jesus Christ, John!” she screams, clutching the towel closer between her legs. Mascara running down her swollen face. “Can you have just a tiny bit of sympathy for someone besides yourself, for once in your life? Don’t you care at all that we might lose—” And then she collapses into harsh sucking sobs, and he can’t even put his hand on her back to comfort her because he knows that in this moment, she wants to kill him.

He kind of does, too.

“Well,” the here-and-now John says out loud, “if you wanted me to feel like a pathetic piece of shit, Bob, mission accomplished. But guess what? Liam was fine, and I apologized, okay?”

Yes, Liam was premature but fine, and he caught up to a decent weight percentile damn fast. Walker men are always big and strong. And it’s true, he apologized, and Olivia said it was fine, and they didn’t talk about it anymore.

But, see, he also knows they won’t be fine, him and Olivia. And it’s exactly because of this. The things he always says. The way he’s always gotta throw his dick around, make it about himself, puff himself up to sound just a little bit better than he is.

Because God help him, he knows no one else will.

The SUV swerves, but suddenly John does not move with it: the backseat flies through his stationary body and leaves him behind in space, and he falls deep down into the darkness and reaches out, scrabbling, and there: a hole in the darkness, a light. His hands sink into dry earth and grass and he clambers out, gripping his way up into the world.

A soccer field. Late afternoon. The air smells of September. The game is over, the last few players drifting away with their parents, and a little golden-haired boy in a green jersey is tagging along at his father’s heels toward the parking lot.

“And then I kicked the ball right in Ryan Anders’ face! Bam, got him right in the mouth! And the ball went in the net and no one else saw but it did!”

“Johnny,” his father says without looking back, “you’re not ever gonna make anything of yourself if you keep bragging and lying.”

“But I did it!” says the little tow-haired boy. “I kicked Ryan’s butt!”

“John, for Christ’s sakes, I was watching! You didn’t. You didn’t score a single goal.”

Little Johnny falls silent and trots after his father to the car. John looks up and suddenly, dizzyingly, he’s sitting in the backseat. It’s his dad’s old 1986 station wagon, with the cigarette burn on the backseat upholstery that he liked to stick his fingers into.

“Can we get ice cream?” his little self asks hopefully, looking up at his dad.

“No,” Dad says brusquely. “Your mom’s making dinner, you’ll ruin your appetite.”

“But you said we could get ice cream if I won.”

“Well, you didn’t.”

“But we won,” says John, bewildered. “We won, you said you saw it.”

“No,” Dad snaps, “your team won! Not you, John! You—you didn’t do a damn thing, you just ran around out there like an idiot. Jimmy Garcia and Kyle Waters and the rest of the kids on your team, they won. You… were just there. So no, we’re not getting any goddamn ice cream.”

There’s a soft, ragged sound from the front seat, and John leans his head back against the headrest. Breathes out. How does it hurt so bad, all these years later? Where was this ache hiding, to come creeping back into his heart so easily?

Dad sighs through his nose. “And now you’re crying. Nice. Real man-of-the-house material here. Johnny, you gotta pull it together. What’s your mom gonna think?”

“He’s eight goddamn years old,” says John to his father, who doesn’t hear him at all. Who never really heard him in the first place, even when he was alive.

Little John sniffles, and swallows hard. “I’m not crying,” he says crossly. His voice is thick.

“Uh-huh, sure,” his dad mutters.

From the backseat, John watches his own child-self’s hair turn white-gold in the setting sun as he turns his head away, facing out the passenger window. They’ll ride home in silence now. They’ll eat dinner in silence, too, and live in silence, and someday John Walker will be the first person in American history to be awarded three Medals of Honor, all in a kind of silence.

Someday, too, he’ll be the man who walks out on his child one summer morning after telling the person he loves most in the world to go fuck herself. Hey, he’ll think to himself bitterly as he drives away that day, he might be a decorated Ranger and a war hero but it's clear now that he's never going to be good enough. So why try anymore?

And then he’ll start killing for money.

Self-pity, he thinks bitterly. That’s the name of the feeling, the ugly stain, the song that won’t stop playing behind his thoughts.

He’s like this because he feels so fucking sorry for himself. Always has. So what if he sticks his chest out a bit. So what if he talks himself up. It’s not bragging if it’s true, right? And no one else ever talked him up, no matter how well he did or how hard he worked. Sure, that smarts just a little. But it hasn’t been all bad. He’s a very successful man—or he was—because he knew he’d never accomplish anything, so he had to try harder than anyone else.

What a load of bullshit, he thinks to himself, staring at the car’s stained ceiling. What a load of steaming, toxic bullshit he’s been believing.

He sticks his finger into the cigarette burn one more time, just because his dad always told him not to. His fingers aren’t a child’s anymore, and the fabric rips.

“Would just one fucking word of kindness hurt you?” he says out loud to the ghost of his father. “Would it have been so bad to say something good about your goddamn kid? Were you afraid someone else being successful would make you look bad? Did you have any idea what a prick you’d turn me into? Was that what you wanted? Was that your idea of making me strong?”

The car door is now a piece of fabric. It rolls up like a theatre curtain and opens silently into a square of endless darkness. A draft of cold air breezes up over him. He thinks there are faint voices down below.

He doesn’t want to stay in this car a goddamn second longer. He lets himself fall in.

Chapter Text

Dark. The faint sound of dripping. Bucky breathes in and the deep bitter cold strikes him like a sledgehammer to the gut. Christ, he doesn’t even like going into the freezer section at the grocery store, and this is worse, so much worse. This cold gets under his skin and into his bones and goes right through his soul. It’s intolerable. But it can’t be intolerable, because he has to tolerate it. Bob and Yelena need him. Need them.

Also, hey, he’s not dead. That’s nice. Where the fuck is he, anyway?

After a moment, his eyes adjust to the dim light. A stained concrete floor. The clink of chains. And there, in the darkness at the back of the cell: a figure slumping forward on his knees.

Well, shit.

He knew it was going to be bad from what Walker said. He knew before he walked into the deep flat shadows of the Void: it would show him the Winter Soldier, the worst of it, and he told himself he was ready to see Howard and Maria die yet again, to see Steve’s face break under his fist, or a hundred other cruelties he inflicted with the cold mercilessness they programmed into him. But this—

This man kneeling on the ground isn’t the Winter Soldier. Not yet.

He’s been with the Russians for a while, though; his filthy hair has grown long enough to fall over his face, and under his ragged prison uniform he is thin, dangerously thin. His right wrist is cuffed in a long chain that tethers him to the wall. They have not yet given him the arm, and his other arm ends at the elbow in a badly sewn stump. Uneven black stitches peek through the swollen red flesh.

“What is this?” Ava asks, breathless at Bucky’s shoulder, and he nearly jumps out of his skin.

“How’d you get here?” he asks sharply.

“I was touching your arm,” she says, “when we… what is this place?”

He doesn’t reply. He twists around to examine the heavy door, the dripping concrete walls, seeking a crack he could shatter, a weak point in a door hinge, a hint of light, anything. Anything. Any kind of way out. If they are here, something very bad is going to happen, and he was pretty sure he was prepared to stomach it on his own but it absolutely cannot happen with someone else watching.

Ava is staring at the prisoner, squinting through the dim light. “Who is that?” she murmurs, taking a step forward.

Bucky grasps her arm, shakes his head. “No one you can help. Come on, we have to get to Bob and Yelena.”

She yanks her arm back and starts to speak, but there’s movement in the corner of his eye and—

“Fuuuuck!” yells John, tumbling sideways into the room from a door that doesn’t exist. “Okay, fuck, fuck this place. Oh, thank God, it’s you guys.”

“Walker,” says Ava. “You all right?”

“Oh, yeah. Never better. Hey, how come you guys got to go together? I just had to—how come I had to do mine alone?”

“Fuck if I know,” Ava says. “Is this like a test? A puzzle we’re supposed to solve?”

“I don’t know, it seems like it’s just trying to make us miserable. Nothing we can’t handle,” John says, but his voice shakes a little. He dusts himself off and glances around; his gaze catches on the silent prisoner. “Jesus, Bucky, is that you?”

“I don’t think anything here is real,” Bucky says through gritted teeth. “Keep going, find the way out. We have to get to the others.”

“How the hell are we supposed to do that?”

There’s movement in the distance outside this cell. Heavy boots. The jangle of keys.

Oh, no. No. He knows what comes next—

“Just get us the fuck out of here!” Bucky shouts, shoving John’s chest. “Come on, go!”

“I don’t know how!”

“You just got in here, so get us out! You can’t be here for this!”

John and Ava exchange a look, confused—Christ, they have no idea what they’re about to see, and his world is shaking, shaking, inside and out. No, no, no time for panic, he has to focus. John got in, so there has to be a way to get out. Someone has to know how to get out. And he has an idea who does.

He storms to the prisoner and drops to his knees before him. Grasps his jaw and lifts his young face up to the dim light. There are burn marks on his temples, red and raw. They’ve been working on him. They’ve been testing the chair. But it hasn’t quite worked yet, because there’s still a little light in his eyes. Not much. But a little light.

“Tell us how to get out of here,” Bucky orders Sergeant James Barnes, formerly of the 107th and now of nothing at all. “They’re coming, now, and you know what they’re going to do to you. Come on, tell us what we have to do to stop this.”

The kid blinks at him, hazy. His breath rises in steam, though no one else’s does. This place is not real, not real—

“Come on!” Bucky hisses. “What do you want from us? Huh? What does this place want from us? Do we need to help you escape, or what? Come on, talk to me.”

“Bucky,” says John, uncertainly, but Bucky waves him away. There has to be something. There—Sergeant Barnes’ wrist is chained to the wall. Bucky grabs the long chain in both hands, and pulls, grunting, until it snaps.

“See, you’re free,” he says, panting a little. “Hey! Come on, the chain’s broken, you’re free! Say something, God damn you!”

“You can’t stop what’s coming,” slurs Sergeant Barnes from under his dirty hair. He doesn’t look up. His voice is weak and flat, and its softness rouses a kind of hot red hatred in Bucky he scarcely knew he was capable of. “They’re going to do it anyway. It’s better if you don’t fight.”

It rises up like a geyser inside him, that hatred for this pathetic fucking wretch who won’t even try to stop them from doing whatever they want with him—because he knows, he knows what this is, this moment in his life—

“Fuck you!” Bucky shouts, and he hauls back and slams his hand across that too-young face, sending him reeling and falling to the side. “Fuck you, you fight back! You fight the fuck back!”

“Bucky,” says John, shaken, but Bucky’s attention is elsewhere. He struck Sergeant Barnes with his metal hand hard enough to make him bleed, maybe even lose a tooth, but there’s no mark. No blood. He remains limp on his knees with his head hanging down, shoulders listing weakly to one side, just the way they found him.

The long chain glints on the floor, unbroken again. Oh, no.

“Get up,” Bucky orders, pointing at the ground beside him. One last try. “On your feet. Come on. That’s an order. Get on your fucking feet, soldier.”

The boots are louder, coming down the corridor. Nearly here.

“He’s gone,” says Sergeant Barnes in that awful soft dead voice. “They showed me. So I reckon I’m finished too. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Fuck that! Come on, you piece of shit, get up!”

“Too late,” says Sergeant Barnes, and it is.

The keys jangle outside. The lock clicks and turns.

“Good morning, Soldier,” says Commander Lukin.

He is exactly as Bucky remembers him in his nightmares: tall and broad enough to fill the doorway, with a thick jaw and a thicker moustache. The yellow hallway light pours in over his shoulders, casting black shadows in the hollows of Sergeant Barnes’ empty, emaciated face.

“Stand up,” he orders, and this, the soldier listens to at last. He shuffles to his feet; it takes him more effort than it should.

“I know he’s speaking in Russian,” Bucky hears Ava murmur, “but I can understand it, I don’t speak Russian, how—?”

“Like he said, none of this is real,” John replies. But he doesn’t sound certain.

“Who do you belong to?” Lukin asks.

The man who is still mostly Bucky Barnes stares at the floor and mumbles, “HYDRA.”

“Good boy,” says Lukin, and takes a small piece of torn dark bread from his pocket. Barnes opens his mouth obediently. Lets Lukin put it on his tongue, like a dog taking a treat. “Very good boy. And who within HYDRA, specifically, do you answer to?”

He chews and swallows and says, “Commander Lukin. You.”

“Very good. More cooperative today, yes? No more fighting like a yappy little dog? Very, very good.” Another piece of bread. “Dimitri, give him some water.”

The other man behind Lukin steps forward and lifts a metal cup of water to Barnes’ mouth, and he drinks in desperate gulps. It dribbles down his throat, wetting his ragged shirt.

Bucky is vaguely aware of John and Ava hovering on the shadowy edges of this horror. They must not be here for what happens next, but there is no way out that he can see. He grips both hands in his hair and tugs at it, tries to think, but the fear is in him like fog; he knows with utmost certainty what Lukin will do to him now; the chair was never merciful enough to take memories like this one. He has to get out, get the others away from seeing this, he knows what’s about to happen—

“Now you say ‘thank you, Commander Lukin, sir’.”

“Thank you, Commander Lukin, sir,” says Sergeant Barnes dully.

“Say it properly,” says Lukin, with a wide ugly smile, and pushes Barnes back down to his knees on the concrete. He goes easily. The little light behind his eyes has gone out.

Lukin reaches for his zipper.

“Oh, Jesus,” whispers one of them, Ava or John, and Bucky truly doesn’t care which one. It’s over. It’s too late to hide this shame; now they both know. His eyes burn.

He turns away, faces the wall, covers his mouth with his hand. He doesn’t need to see this part. Not again. Not again. He doesn’t need to hear the noises that are coming from behind him, because he knows this soundtrack by heart from a hundred other rapes: the wet sounds, the slap of flesh on his face, the gagging gasps for breath—worse, the long dizzy seconds of silence where a cock is too far down his throat to take a breath at all, punctuated by a wheezing desperate gasp when he’s finally allowed to come up for air. He can taste it in his own mouth as though he and this shadow of Sergeant Barnes are both on that concrete floor as one being, the foul saltiness of unwashed flesh, the taste of his own tears as they run onto his lips, the churning threat of vomit that he must not permit to rise up, because they hate that, except for the ones who like it—

A hand grasps his elbow and he reacts without thought, flinging his arm out and shoving, but thank God it’s John, big and solid and made even more so by the serum, and he barely even staggers back.

“Bucky,” he says, gripping his shoulder. John is a combat veteran. John knows how to hold his shit together in a crisis. John has steady eyes. “Hey. Buck. Come on, this is your room, so you have to get us out of here. We need to find Bob and Yelena. Come on, soldier. Snap out of it.”

Then Ava’s at his other side. Her slim hand slips into his, the metal one, like she’s not afraid of it at all.

“Barnes. Bucky.” She squeezes his hand tightly. “Look at me. Look at me. Come on, love, that’s right. We’re here. You’re all right. You survived this, you got out. You can face this one more time.”

“I can’t,” he chokes.

“Yes, you can. Come on. Let’s just get through this, yeah? Then we can go get the others. The others need us.”

Now John’s big callused hand is gripping his other hand, their fingers weaving together. One of them on each side, Ava and John. Both his hands are held. He is held by them.

“Not bad,” Lukin muses. “But your mouth is not enough to thank me properly. After all, every day I don’t feed you to the dogs is another day of my generosity, so you have racked up quite the bill. What else do you have for me? Come, let me see.”

The chain clinks and clatters on the floor. Clothing rustles. Behind them, Sergeant Barnes gives a little miserable sob, and then he cries out sharply in pain, just once. Lukin grunts a sigh, a satisfied sound.

The sick wet slapping sounds continue, but they sound different now.

He can’t look. He can’t.

“Oh, this is so fucked up,” John says. He’s not looking either, but his face is screwed up in anguish. “You didn’t deserve this. No one deserves this.”

Bucky squeezes their hands, and bows his head, and maybe he lets a few soft wet broken sounds heave their way out of him before he can swallow them down.

And then he breathes deep, heart pounding, sick to his stomach, but there are firm friendly grips on both his hands. Someone’s thumb is kindly rubbing the backs of his fingers. John and Ava are both touching him, choosing to touch him, even though they can see now how defiled he is. Holding him through this humiliation, standing with him in his shame, as though this disgusting brutal act was not something he permitted to happen in his weakness.

Maybe it wasn’t.

Maybe—

Maybe, if they keep hanging onto him, he can—

He turns his head, and he looks behind him.

He sees.

Sergeant Barnes is prone on the floor, weeping silently. His eyes stare into nothing. Tears are dripping all the way down his cheeks, through his stubble, wetting the concrete in little dark drops. There’s a man on top of him and another one slowly rubbing himself, waiting his turn. This might be the first time, but now that he’s let them do it once, he knows they’ll fuck him again later and again tomorrow and the next day and the next day, and from now on it will be part of his treatment, his conditioning, to teach him to submit to them. To teach him that saying ”no” doesn’t stop anything, that “no” only makes it worse. That his body is a tool he no longer owns; that his new owners possess it fully, to use and wield and give away any time and any way they please. There will be more men, two or three of them taking him at the same time, and they’ll do it to him as they strip his mind of everything that used to be gentle, funny, kind-hearted Bucky Barnes, and they’ll laugh at him as they do it. They’ll fuck him every way they can think of, literally and figuratively, and it will go on and on for long blind decades, and in the end he will never know the names of most of the people who have been inside him. In the end, he will wake in terrified nauseated panic after perfectly normal wet dreams and spend an hour sobbing and scrubbing himself to bleeding in a cold shower, because his body may be safe in his clean little Brooklyn brownstone, but a part of his spirit will die here and haunt this cell forever. In the end, he’ll resign himself to the knowledge that he will never be able to be with another person ever again, man or woman, and it will break his heart, because Christ does he ever miss sex; does he ever miss being close, skin-to-skin with someone who loves him, who lets him in, who lets him give pleasure, who holds him and wants him. But there is nothing left of him now that anyone would want.

That’s in the end. In the now, there is a terrified, broken young man who has barely set foot on the long ugly path that inevitably lies ahead of him. There is no changing his fate, because it has already happened. And Bucky still hates that empty-eyed stare and pathetic inertia, hates how little fight is left in the kid, but all of a sudden that hate twists to sorrow, because—

Because this was him.

He was this. He was here. He was this young man. Once, he too realized that he did not care to try stopping them anymore; that Steve was gone, and he would be soon too, and what was the point in fighting, anyway, if fighting only made them laugh harder and starve him longer and hurt him more viciously.

In Sergeant Barnes’ wet eyes he can see that immense, sucking sadness, and he remembers the American newspaper headline they shoved in front of his nose the night before.

Steve “Captain America” Rogers declared killed in action.

This is the day he stopped caring what happened to him. There’s nothing left for that poor bastard on the floor to live for anymore.

So he simply survives.

“I didn’t give in for no reason,” Bucky says shakily out loud, to no one and everyone. “I didn’t. I just missed Steve so goddamn much, I didn’t care what came next.”

He turns around and takes a step forward. Lets John and Ava’s hands go, with one last little squeeze. Another step forward. Another.

“They’re not real," Ava says, "and they can’t hurt you anymore," and John is murmuring encouragement too: "That's it, Bucky, come on. Keep going."

Lukin is still relentlessly taking his pleasure, his hands gripping Sergeant Barnes’ hips, but there is not the slightest acknowledgement of Bucky’s presence as he approaches them. Ava is right. They are all ghosts in this place. He kneels down beside himself, though the proximity of Lukin’s thrusting body makes him shudder.

He reaches out and cups his own jaw tenderly, tucks his younger self’s too-long hair behind his ear. Sergeant Barnes’ bloodshot eyes roll to him, wide and brimming, spilling over. Now he sees they are not empty at all; they are deep with sorrow and something beyond shame.

“I’m so goddamn sorry,” Bucky whispers in his own ear, and he leans down close, and he presses his lips to his own temple.

The room shifts.

They fall.